BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 in French Literature 
 
 a selection 
 
 Translated by 
 
 D.Nichol Smith.
 
 Brunetiere's Essays in French Literature
 
 i * 
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 IN 
 
 FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 A SELECTION 
 TRANSLATED BY D. NICHOL SMITH 
 
 WITH A PREFACE BY THE AUTHOR 
 
 Specially Written for this, the Authorised Englhh Translation 
 
 T. FISHER UNWIN 
 
 PATERNOSTER SQUARE 
 
 1898
 
 reserved.1
 
 PREFACE 
 
 THE few essays, selected from many others to 
 form the present volume, have this in common, 
 that all aim more or less at the determina- 
 tion of the 'essential character' of French 
 literature. I use this word in the sense it 
 bears in natural history, and the ' essential 
 character ' of a literature is that which 
 separates it or distinguishes it from all 
 other literatures. 
 
 In truth, a great literature, such as the 
 French or the English, so old, so rich, so 
 diverse, and with each successive epoch show- 
 ing such differences, cannot well accept a single 
 formula and allow itself to be imprisoned, as 
 it were, within its narrow bounds. We must 
 always beware of formulas, and perhaps nowhere 
 
 Vll
 
 PREFACE 
 
 more so than in history or in literature, in 
 which we usually preserve the recollection only 
 of what is the exception. The world knows 
 only one Dante and one Shakespeare, and this is 
 the very reason why they are Shakespeare and 
 Dante. In the same way if certain traits 
 suggest a definition of the genius of Bossuet, 
 for example, this is the reason why they cannot 
 express the genius of Moliere. And so at first 
 sight nothing seems more futile than to try to 
 include Moliere and Bossuet in a common 
 definition. 
 
 But when, instead of comparing them only 
 among themselves, we compare them with 
 others, and especially with foreigners, the 
 author of the Ecole des Femmes with that of 
 the Merry Wives of Windsor, and Bossuet 
 with the learned Tillotson, the family like- 
 ness which had escaped us becomes evident. 
 
 Facies non omnibus una 
 Nee diversa tamen. 
 
 Vlll
 
 PREFACE 
 
 It is therefore in no wise futile to aim at 
 detecting, at grasping, at fixing this family 
 likeness. It becomes more definite, when, 
 not content with having fixed it, we analyse 
 it. And it is at last determined if we widen 
 the field of comparison, and, instead of con- 
 fining ourselves to the work of a few writers, 
 apply ourselves to a whole epoch, a whole 
 century, or the entire history of a whole 
 literature. However much they differ, French 
 writers resemble each other much more than 
 they resemble English writers. 
 
 This is what I have endeavoured to show 
 in the following Essays. 
 
 My object has been to point out that, of 
 all the great modern literatures, French litera- 
 ture, which is much nearer the Latin than 
 the Greek, has had as its * essential character ' 
 a constant tendency, an original aptitude, for 
 sociability. Few Frenchmen have written for 
 themselves, for themselves alone, to assume
 
 PREFACE 
 
 the position of opposition, as the philosophers 
 say ; but their ambition has been to please, 
 in the noblest sense of the word, to contribute 
 by their writing to the improvement or to the 
 comfort of civil life, or to displease, when 
 they have dared to do so, in a manner yet 
 pleasant. Or, in other words, if literature 
 has anywhere been the expression of society, 
 it is in France ; and this is the reason of the 
 fecundity, renewed from age to age by the 
 very changes of society ; of the universality, 
 the acknowledged clearness, since authors have 
 endeavoured to make themselves accessible to 
 everybody ; of some of the weaknesses too, 
 on which in this Preface I may be allowed 
 not to insist. 
 
 No more need I insist on the interest of this 
 investigation. Criticism and literary history 
 are not sciences, nor even * scientific,' but they 
 may yet avail themselves of scientific methods, 
 and in a certain measure they can, like science,
 
 PREFACE 
 
 aim at discovering or formulating laws. If it 
 is quite clear that they can succeed in this only 
 by disengaging from the profound study of 
 works the common elements which are always 
 found in those of the most particular or indi- 
 vidual nature, the determination of the ' essen- 
 tial character ' of schools, of epochs, of a whole 
 literature, is one of the methods which are 
 naturally suggested. This I hope will appear 
 sufficiently clear in these Essays. And if, in 
 addition, by reason of this sociability which 
 seems to me to be the characteristic of French 
 literature, I have provided English readers with 
 new themes of interest, I hope they will not 
 be disappointed, and I shall be exceedingly 
 
 pleased. 
 
 F. B. 
 
 XI
 
 NOTE BY THE TRANSLATOR 
 
 THE following essays are selected from three 
 of the series of M. Brunetiere's collected works 
 Etudes critiques sur fhistoire de la litterature 
 fran$aise (Volumes III., IV., and V.), Questions 
 de critique, and Essais sur la literature contem- 
 poraine. As M. Brunetiere has kindly given 
 his assistance in the selection of them, the 
 volume may reasonably be considered the 
 author's epitome of a portion of his best 
 work. 
 
 It is sometimes said that M. Brunetiere's 
 work cannot be translated ; and, indeed, it 
 is of so individual a nature, and derives so 
 much of its value from its qualities of style, 
 that it must lose considerably by being 
 rendered in another language. Rhetorical 
 
 Xlll
 
 NOTE BY THE TRANSLATOR 
 
 writing, and French rhetoric in particular, 
 always runs the risk of losing its personal 
 note in translation, and leaves the translator 
 in the sorry dilemma of re-fashioning the 
 original past recognition, or of alienating those 
 readers who justly expect good English. It 
 is the old problem ; only in the present case 
 it is aggravated by special circumstances. The 
 extreme importance of the Essays, however, and 
 particularly their suggestiveness, have prompted 
 the attempt to give them an English dress. 
 And, if I am not mistaken, M. Brunetiere's 
 translator will always succeed best by inclining 
 to as close a rendering as idiom will permit. 
 
 D. N. S. 
 
 XIV
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 THE ESSENTIAL CHARACTER OF FRENCH LITERATURE I 
 
 THE INFLUENCE OF WOMEN IN FRENCH LITERATURE 28 
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MOLIERE .... 66 
 VOLTAIRE AND JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU . . .134 
 THE CLASSIC AND ROMANTIC . ' . . . 168 
 
 IMPRESSIONIST CRITICISM 207 
 
 AN APOLOGY FOR RHETORIC . . . . .235
 
 Brunetiere's Essays in French Literature 
 
 <V 
 
 THE ESSENTIAL CHARACTER OF 
 FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 ONE is certainly open to the charge of rashness, if 
 not of useless endeavour, in proposing to describe or 
 sum up in a word the essential character of a literature 
 so great, so rich, above all so varied, as the French. 
 What connection, indeed, can be found between a 
 story of the Round. Table, as Le Chevalier au Lion by 
 Crestien de Troyes, for example, and Le Maitre de 
 Forges^ or Dolt-on le dire? or some other vaudeville, 
 by Eugene Labiche or by Edmond Gondinet ? They 
 differ in every respect, even in the language ; and 
 there is a still greater difference between the authors 
 themselves, to say nothing of the times and places. 
 But if, on the plea of defining the essential character of 
 a literature, we began by omitting all its eccentricities, 
 what would be left as the insignificant remainder ? 
 What would we have of literary or even of historic
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 value ? And would we not, by analysis on analysis, 
 have but reduced the very material of our observa- 
 tions, till we lost it, as it were, by evaporation ? 
 
 This objection can be easily answered. If it is 
 not absolutely true, a constant and mathematical 
 truth which may be verified on every occasion, that 
 a great literature is the adequate expression of the 
 genius of a race, and its history the faithful abridg- 
 ment of that of a whole civilisation, the contrary is 
 undoubtedly even less true ; and though an interval 
 of six or seven hundred years may have made a 
 difference between a trouvere of the twelfth century 
 and a vaudevillist of the Third Republic of our days, 
 there is bound to be, all the same, some connection 
 between them. May we not add that in a 
 Europe, in which, during the last thousand years 
 alone, so many races have mingled and blended, and 
 so many treaties have been made and unmade 
 it is rather in their literatures than within their 
 frontiers that the great nations of history have 
 awakened to a sense of their individuality ? There 
 would be no Italy were there not something com- 
 mon to Dante and Alfieri, no more than there would 
 be a Germany, were there not innate in every Ger- 
 man something, even at this day, of Luther. But 
 what decides the question and justifies the search 
 after the essential character of a literature, is the 
 consequences which seem to result from it, the light 
 which this character, once it is defined, throws in
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 some way or other on the inmost history of a litera- 
 ture, and the knowledge which it gives of the gradual 
 development of the national spirit. 
 
 Let us suppose, by way of example, that the es- 
 sential character of Italian literature is that of being 
 what may be called an artistic literature. This 
 characteristic alone distinguishes it and separates it at 
 once from all the great modern literatures, from the 
 French as well as the German, from the English as 
 well as the Spanish. Works of art are certainly in 
 abundance in these literatures, but there are few 
 which are artistic in motive and by design, few in 
 which their author, like Ariosto or Tasso, aimed 
 only at following poetic caprice or realising a dream 
 of beauty. In this same characteristic, too, are in- 
 cluded the secret affinities which Italian literature 
 has always had, as is well known, with the other 
 arts, and notably with painting and music : there 
 is something of Orcagna in the poem of Dante, 
 and when we read the 'Jerusalem or the Aminta do 
 we not really feel that we are present at the 
 transformation of the epic into a grand opera? 
 This likewise explains the spell which the same 
 literature wrought on the imaginations of the time 
 of the Renaissance. It was from the Italians that 
 Frenchmen living under Francis I and Henry II, 
 and Englishmen of the time of Henry VIII and 
 Elizabeth, obtained their first feeling for art ; and 
 if the appreciation of the personal and intrinsic value 
 
 3
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 of form is not the whole Renaissance, is it not at 
 least its most important part ? Who can fail to 
 see also the bearing of this idea of a purely artistic 
 literature on what the Italians once called by the 
 name of virtu which is not virtue^ which may even 
 be its opposite, but which in any case is, as a natur- 
 alist or a logician would say, the genus of which 
 virtuosity is only a particular species? And who 
 consequently can fail to see in what manner, and 
 how quickly, the definition of the essential character 
 of the literature leads us insensibly to the knowledge 
 of the Italian character itself ? 
 
 Let us take another example and say that the 
 essential character of Spanish literature is that of 
 being a literature of chivalry. Is it not true that 
 its whole history is illuminated by it as by a ray of 
 light ? The epic songs of the Romancero, stories of 
 adventure in the style of the Amadis or of the Diana 
 of Montemayor, the dramas of Calderon or Lope 
 de Vega, the Physician of His Honour or Mudarra the 
 Bastard^ mystic treatises and picaresque novels, the 
 Castle of the Soul or Lazarillo de Tormes^ we recognise 
 the bond of connection between all these diverse 
 works, their family characteristic, the hereditary trait 
 which testifies their common origin, this Castilian 
 pundonor^ whose exaggeration, now sublime and now 
 grotesque, moves with almost pleasing unconcern, as 
 in the story of the Knight of the Sorrowful Coun- 
 tenance^ to the extremes of devotion and folly. If 
 
 4
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 in our modern Europe, political and industrial, utili- 
 tarian and positivist, we have not yet entirely lost 
 the sense of chivalry, we are for this indebted to 
 Spanish literature : and it would not be difficult to 
 prove that it is this literature which has preserved for 
 us all that deserved to survive of the spirit of the 
 Middle Ages. I cannot believe that this remark 
 would be useless to a closer knowledge and fuller 
 understanding of Spanish literature, of its historic 
 role, and of the genius of Spain itself. 
 
 The essential character of French literature is 
 more difficult to determine. Not that in itself our 
 literature is more original than any other, nor richer 
 in great works or in great men. Nothing more im- 
 pertinent could be asserted ; and if the Spaniards have 
 no Moliere and the English no Voltaire, we, in our 
 turn, have no Cervantes and no Shakespeare. But 
 French literature is undoubtedly the most abundant 
 and the most voluminous, not to say the most fertile, 
 of all modern literatures. It is the oldest of them, 
 and we can recall, without vanity, that neither Dante 
 in Italy nor Chaucer in England concealed what they 
 owed, the one to our troubadours and the other to the 
 anonymous authors of our old fabliaux. Is it not also 
 the most industrious, the most receptive, one might 
 say the literature which has always been, no matter 
 what may be said, the most inquisitive about foreign 
 literatures, the most largely inspired by them, the least 
 scrupulous in " turning them into blood and nourish- 
 
 5
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 ment " ? Ronsard is almost an Italian poet ; and 
 Corneille, with the nature of a Norman, is almost 
 a Spanish tragedian, for when it is neither Calderon 
 nor Lope de Vega that he follows, it is Seneca or 
 Lucan, and both of these were from Cordova. We 
 have also prose writers, such as Diderot, who have 
 been discussed for the last hundred years and more, 
 as " the most German " or " the most English " of our 
 countrymen. And in a short time, if we are not 
 careful, we, in Paris, will be reading only Russian 
 novelists, like Goncharoff or Chedrine, as we shall 
 be going to see only absurdly Scandinavian melo- 
 dramas, like The Wild Duck or The Lady from the Sea. 
 Let us add that whether international or cosmopolitan 
 in such a sense, French literature is also so in this, 
 that no other has had the honour of attracting more 
 strangers : Italians, from Brunette Latini, the master 
 of Dante, to Galiani, the friend of our encyclo- 
 paedists ; Englishmen, such as Hamilton and Chester- 
 field; Germans above all, such as Leibnitz and the 
 great Frederick. It is all this that makes French 
 literature so diverse ; but it is all this too that 
 makes it so difficult to characterise in a single word.
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 II 
 
 IF, however, rather than defining our literature by its 
 qualities of order and clearness, of logic and precision, 
 of elegance and good breeding, the enumeration of 
 which is now almost a commonplace, we were to say 
 that it is essentially sociable or social, we would not 
 perhaps express the whole truth, but, if I am not 
 mistaken, we would not be far from it. Prose writers, 
 and even poets, from Crestien de Troyes, whom we 
 have just mentioned, to the author of Les Humbles 
 and Les Intimites, M. Francois Coppee ; from 
 Froissart or Commynes to the author of the Esprit 
 des Lois or of the Essai sur les Matters, scarcely 
 one in France has written but under the eye of 
 society, and without distinguishing the expression 
 of his thought from a consideration of the public 
 to whom he appeals, and, consequently, the art of 
 writing from that of pleasing, persuading, and con- 
 vincing. " Even the poets of Greece," said Bossuet, 
 somewhere, "who were in the hands of the whole 
 people, instructed rather than diverted. The most 
 renowned of heroes looked on Homer as a master 
 who taught him how to reign well. This great 
 poet taught no less how to obey well and to be a good 
 citizen. He and so many other poets, whose works 
 are no less grave than pleasing, celebrated only the arts 
 that are useful to human life, and proclaimed only the 
 public good, fatherland, society, and that admirable 
 
 7
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 civility which we have just explained" May we not 
 think that in so defining the essential character of 
 Greek literature though he viewed it from too 
 high a standpoint, and without adequate regard of 
 the comedies of Aristophanes and the epigrams of the 
 Anthology Bossuet unconsciously defined at the same 
 time his own literary ideal ? In any case, what he 
 says of ./Eschylus and Sophocles is no less true of 
 Corneille and Voltaire Voltaire, who may be justly 
 said to have spoiled the drama by this very desire to 
 " celebrate the arts that are useful to human life " ; 
 and if I had any doubts that this desire was the soul 
 of our literature, the number and diversity of the facts 
 explained thereby would suffice to convince me. 
 
 In this way, then, the qualities above mentioned 
 order and clearness, logic and precision, severity in 
 composition and good-breeding in style are all 
 connected with it, or rather depend on it, as so many 
 effects of one and the same cause. If what is not 
 clear is not French, the reason for it is not to be 
 sought in the native character of the language or in 
 any other secret virtue. Our vocabulary and syntax, 
 reduced to their essential elements and considered in 
 themselves, do not differ so much from the syntax and 
 vocabulary of Spanish and Italian. They have the 
 same origin, and, in more than one respect, the 
 same evolution. But while in Spain and Italy, 
 writers, and poets above all, have endeavoured to make 
 their language more voluptuous and tender, or more
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 sounding and beautiful, not even shrinking from the 
 extremes of Gongorism or Marinism, but rather 
 throwing themselves into these with all their soul, in 
 France, on the other hand, our writers in general, and 
 our prose writers in particular, have aimed only at 
 making themselves the more easily understood, and at 
 becoming accordingly, with each successive work, more 
 simple, clear, and lucid. 
 
 On this point, Rivarol, in his celebrated Discours 
 sur Funiversalite de la langue franfaise makes an 
 ingenious and profound remark. "Study the trans- 
 lation of the ancient authors into modern tongues. 
 Thanks to the facility which almost all the other 
 languages have of modelling or moulding themselves 
 on Latin or Greek, they give a faithful rendering, 
 even of the obscurities of their original, and the 
 meaning is at last fully recovered, but at the outset 
 it was lost with the original. On the contrary, a 
 French translation is always an explanation" This 
 could not be better said, and the only criticism that 
 I here pass on Rivarol is that he tries to find in the 
 character of our language a reason which seems to 
 me rather to be implied in our authors' conception 
 of their art. It is out of regard to the reader, and, as 
 Bossuet said, from "civility," if it is from' a desire to 
 render themselves accessible to all, and not merely to 
 compatriots, but even to foreigners, that our writers 
 of the seventeenth century disencumbered French 
 phraseology of the learned Greek and Latin mannerisms, 
 
 9
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 by which it was embarrassed, burdened, and fettered. 
 Similarly, in the following century, if the quicker and 
 smarter and simpler phrase of Voltaire is generally 
 substituted for the fuller and richer and more organic 
 phrase of Pascal and Bossuet, it is still by way of 
 " civility," in order to reach, as could easily be shown, 
 new and less educated classes of readers and to instruct 
 them. And similarly still, in our day, if romanticists 
 have vindicated the right of using, in prose as in verse, 
 a vocabulary less "noble " and "select," and accordingly 
 more popular, than that of the classicists, where is the 
 reason to be found but in this " civility," which they 
 sometimes seem to have violated only to appeal in 
 their turn to a public less " select " and " noble," and 
 consequently more numerous, than that of Voltaire 
 and Pascal. 
 
 The first and principal object, then, of our great 
 writers, in all times, has been to make themselves be 
 read. It is not the universality of the French language 
 that has brought about, or merely prepared, the uni- 
 versality of the literature, but, on the contrary, it is 
 the universality of the literature that has caused the 
 universality of the French language. Civilised Europe 
 has not read Rabelais and Montaigne, Voltaire and 
 Rousseau because they were French ; it has rather 
 studied French to be able to read Montaigne's Essays 
 and Rousseau's Contrat social. The consequence is 
 plain enough. If the French language has become 
 
 clearer and more logical, preciser and more polished 
 
 10
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 than any other, it was not so originally, and had no 
 innate reason for becoming so. All honour in this 
 belongs to our great writers. It is they who have 
 made it such, and they have done so only to make it 
 more fitting to the social role or function which they 
 have from all time assigned to literature. 
 
 In this manner likewise is to be explained the 
 superiority of our literature in the forms which may 
 be called common. I speak of those which can exist 
 only with the participation of the public, and with what 
 may be called the favour of its collaboration. There 
 can be no orator without an audience ; no theatre 
 without a pit ; two, at least, are necessary for letter- 
 writing ; and the moralist must have his salon. 
 
 Let us consider in this connection the eloquence 
 of the pulpit. If there has never been, in any lan- 
 guage, a preacher more eloquent than Bossuet or more 
 solid than Bourdaloue, the reason of it is that, inde- 
 pendent of their personal qualities, none have better 
 understood or developed in their sermons the political 
 and social virtue of Christianity. In quite another 
 department of thought, among our dramatic authors, 
 I can think of only Racine and Regnard who did 
 not pique themselves on correcting or directing 
 manners ; but all the rest, on the other hand, made 
 that their whole aim Corneille and Moliere, Voltaire 
 and Destouches, Marivaux and Beaumarchais, Diderot 
 and Mercier, Dumas and Hugo, the author of the Lionnes 
 
 pauvres and the author of the Demi-Monde. Consider, 
 
 ii
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 also, the masterpieces of the French novel, from 
 Honore d'Urfe's Astree, to go no further back, to 
 M. Zola's Germinal, to descend no further. There 
 are no analyses of states of mind, as in the novels 
 of Richardson or George Eliot. What is depicted 
 is the manners of the society of the time. The good 
 French novels with the exception of Adolphe or Rene^ 
 which are not novels are all social pictures. And 
 what shall I say in turn of our great letter-writers, 
 Madame de Sevigne, Madame de Maintenon, Madame 
 du Deffand and Voltaire ? How preoccupied they are 
 with society and, as a result, with their neighbours ! 
 How they strain to amuse, to instruct, and to please ! 
 So far is this carried that a truly private correspond- 
 ence like that of Mdlle. de Lespinasse, where the, 
 writer thinks only of the interests of her own 
 enthusiasm surprises us and jars in the history of 
 our epistolary literature. And without their society, 
 without their continual curiosity, without the unmis- 
 takeable pleasure they have always had in noting the 
 smallest customs, what would our moralists be La 
 Rochefoucauld and La Bruyere, Vauvenargues and 
 Duclos, Chamfort and Rivarol, Stendhal and Joubert ? 
 If ever writers could say that they only " give back to 
 the public what they had borrowed from it," it is they ; 
 and this, too, is the reason of their superiority over all 
 those who, in other literatures, have vainly endeavoured 
 to compete with them. Take Addison or Shaftesbury 
 as an illustration. 
 
 12
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 From this method of understanding and treating 
 literature, it has also come about that the purely 
 literary qualities have insensibly widened, so as to 
 include those subjects which from their nature seem 
 the least suitable. From the very fact that our great 
 writers have never separated the idea of their art from 
 that of the interest, the real profit, and the pleasure of 
 the reader, it has happened that everything which may 
 amuse or instruct lies with us within the domain of 
 literature. Thus questions the most abstract, and, by 
 definition, the most remote from common experience, 
 have become, in French, the occasion of masterpieces 
 which may be equalled, in their kind, to the tragedies 
 of Racine or the fables of La Fontaine. 
 
 Need any examples be given ? The Provinciates 
 are only a collection of theological pamphlets. The 
 Histoire des Variations des Eglises protestantes is only 
 controversial. The Entretiens sur la Pluralite des 
 Mondes is only a treatise on Cartesian astronomy. 
 The Esprit des Lois is only a compilation of universal 
 and comparative jurisprudence. Emile is only a novel 
 on education. I say nothing of the Histoire naturelle 
 or the Contrat social. Yet what tragedies, by Cor- 
 neille even, or Hugo, what novels, by Le Sage or 
 Prevost, Gil Bias or Manon Lescaut, what odes or 
 what elegies have done more, or as much, for the 
 diffusion of French literature and the glory of its 
 name ? No, indeed, Buffon said nothing so ridicul- 
 ous, as some would seem to think, when he advised 
 
 '3
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 the writer to " name things only in the most general 
 terms"} and those who still laugh at the precept and the 
 master understand neither. Buffon meant to say that 
 as long as geometricians and physicians, theologians 
 and lawyers, scholars and philologers, in one word, all 
 the specialists, employed only the technical language 
 of their science or their art, so long would they lack 
 that intelligent curiosity, that interest, and that general 
 sympathy which to them are none the less necessary. 
 In other words, he advised them to be men rather 
 than embryologists or Hebraists, and though the 
 advice may cause some inconvenience, who can 
 deny that it is good ? 
 
 Let us here also touch on the great reasons of the 
 universality of the French language and literature. 
 Twice, at least, in their long history French litera- 
 ture and language have exercised on the whole of 
 Europe a universality of influence which other lan- 
 guages, more harmonious perhaps, like the Italian, 
 and other literatures, more original in certain respects, 
 like the English, have all the same never possessed. It 
 was under a purely French form that our Chansons de 
 Geste, our Stories of the Round Table^ our very fabliaux 
 whatever be their origin, German or Tuscan, English 
 or Breton, Eastern or Greek conquered and fas- 
 cinated and charmed, from one end of Europe to the 
 other, the imaginations of the Middle Ages. The 
 amorous languor and subtlety of our love poetry 
 breathe no less in the madrigals of Shakespeare him-
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 self than in the sonnets of Petrarch ; and after the 
 lapse of so long a time, we still recognise something 
 of ourselves even in the Wagnerian drama, as in 
 Parsifal or Tristan and Isolde. Much later, in an 
 entirely classical Europe, from the beginning of the 
 seventeenth to the end of the eighteenth century, 
 right on for a hundred and fifty years or even more, 
 French literature held sovereign sway in Italy, Spain, 
 England, and Germany. Are not Algarotti, Betti- 
 nelli, Beccaria, Filangieri almost French names ? 
 What of the famous Gottsched? If Lessing triumphed 
 over Voltaire, was it not with the aid of Diderot ? 
 And can Rivarol be accused of national vanity in 
 writing his Discours sur I'universalite de la langue 
 franfaise, considering that he was half Italian, and that 
 the subject was proposed by the Academy of Berlin ? 
 
 All sorts of reasons have been urged for this uni- 
 versality of P'rench literature : we have had statistics, 
 if I may say so, geographical, political, and linguistic. 
 But the true and real reason lies elsewhere : 
 and it is to be found in the eminently social 
 character of the literature. If our great writers are 
 understood and admired by everybody, it is because 
 they address themselves to everybody, or rather 
 because they speak to everybody about everybody's 
 interests. They pay no attention to exceptions or 
 particularities : they wish to treat only of man in 
 general, or, as is still said, of the universal man, held 
 in the bonds of the society of the human being : and 
 
 15
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 their very success is a proof that beneath all that dis- 
 tinguishes an Italian from a German, this universal 
 man, whose reality has been so often doubted, con- 
 tinues to be and to live, and, despite modifications, 
 to remain the same. 
 
 Need any proofs be given ? How is it that the 
 Cid of Guillen de Castro, although it is a fine drama, 
 and it would not be a difficult matter to praise it for 
 certain qualities which are not to be found in the drama 
 of Corneille, has not met with the same European 
 success. The reason is that Guillen de Castro, like 
 a true Spaniard, saw in his subject only its purely 
 heroic side. He did not see what Corneille, on the 
 contrary, brought into such fine prominence the 
 struggle of Rodrigue's passion with the social law ; 
 he exhausted its picturesque interest, but its purely 
 human interest escaped him. How again, in his 
 Phedre y did Racine change the material of the Greek 
 Hippolytus? And what is it that Voltaire endea- 
 voured to add in his Zaire by his ill-advised treat- 
 ment of Shakespeare's Othello ? As with Corneille, it 
 is a social conflict the conflict of love and religion, 
 the eminently human drama of Zaire's hesitations, 
 perplexities, and tortures between what on the one 
 hand she owes to her birth, and what on the other 
 she cannot refrain from giving to her passion. 
 
 Therein lies the reason of their world-wide wel- 
 come. In the questions they discuss, it is the essential 
 interests of " civility " or of humanity itself which are 
 
 16
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 at stake. As they consider the social institution 
 perhaps the most admirable thing in the world, all 
 their thoughts bear on it, and thus their expression 
 of these thoughts cannot be a matter of indifference 
 to anybody. Who would not be curious to know the 
 extent of a country's duty to its citizens, or a father's 
 to his children, or a husband's to his wife ; how the 
 many conflicts that arise every day between our 
 different duties are decided ; what bias reconciles, or 
 what superior principle unites and blends, instead of 
 opposing or contradicting, the needs of the individual 
 and the rights of society ? It is from being not forced, 
 but consecrated in its entirety, to the examination of 
 these questions that French literature has won univers- 
 ality. It is well to recall this fact to certain Frenchmen 
 who forget it, and to remind them that while there may 
 even be other reasons, this remains the chief. 
 
 For I do not deny, let it be understood, that the 
 character of the language may also partly conduce to it, 
 and I have already said so in definite terms. It may 
 reasonably be held that neither the number of a popula- 
 tion, which in the seventeenth century was a fifth 
 of the total population of civilised Europe ; nor the 
 privileged situation of France in the centre of the 
 Europe of that time and at the confluence, as it were, 
 of the literatures of the North and South ; nor, in 
 short, its good luck under Louis XIV, and even under 
 Louis XV, to be the model in everything to the court 
 of Charles II of England and to that of Catherine of
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 Russia, failed to favour the diffusion of French ideas 
 and French literature. But these are secondary or 
 rather derived reasons, which would not have acted 
 of themselves, and none of which would have assured 
 the universality of French literature, since none of 
 them at other times assured the universality of Spanish 
 or German literature. Though the Germans now 
 number almost fifty millions, is their literature thereby 
 more widely diffused ? Are German novels more 
 read ? Are German dramas more acted ? Is it not 
 always French novels that are shown in the book- 
 sellers' windows of Vienna and Berlin, of Rome and 
 Naples ? One might as well seek the reasons of the 
 universality of French literature in the political action 
 of France, as the reasons of Voltaire's popularity in 
 his incredulity, or of Hugo's glory in his political 
 opinions. And again, even this would still lead us 
 back to the same conclusion, for it would still lead us 
 back to the eminently practical or pragmatical^ and 
 consequently social character of their prose and verse. 
 And may not that very character, which explains 
 the rarest qualities of French literature, be held like- 
 wise to account for its faults or its defects ? The 
 long inferiority of our lyric poetry is undoubtedly 
 an eloquent example. If the Pleiade failed in its 
 generous enterprise ; if Ronsard and his friends left 
 behind them only a reputation which, from a literary 
 point of view, is dubious and always contested ; if for 
 
 two hundred and fifty or three hundred vears there 
 
 18
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 was nothing more inane than a French ode or elegy, 
 nothing more meagre under the false brilliance of its 
 mythological adornment, and nothing more cold, it 
 is not Boileau or Malherbe who is to be blamed for 
 it, but only the force of events : and the truth is that 
 in obliging literature to fulfil, so to speak, a social 
 function, in requiring the poet to conform his manner 
 of thinking and feeling to the ordinary manner, in 
 refusing him the right to put himself into his work, 
 or merely to let himself appear in it, the living springs 
 of lyricism had been dried up or shut off. French 
 literature has thus paid by its too manifest inferiority 
 in the forms which may be called " personal " for its 
 superiority in the forms which are "common." To 
 make itself accessible to everybody, it had to submit 
 to the principle of depriving itself of the expression of 
 sentiments, not merely too rare, but only too particular. 
 It likewise denied itself all that local detail or special 
 accent could give to the expression of the general 
 sentiments of the most private and individual being, 
 for fear of including in its descriptions or analyses 
 some elements which were not the same in all time 
 and in every place. The predominance of the social 
 character, and the subordination to it of all the others, 
 reduced the personal manifestation to what could be 
 contained in the proprie communla dlcere of the Latin 
 poet : and we have had our ^Eschylus and Sophocles, 
 our Demosthenes and Cicero, but no Pindar, nor 
 even a Petrarch or a Tasso. It would be more diffi- 
 
 19
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 cult to say why, too, we have not had a Homer or 
 a Dante, an Ariosto, or a Milton. 
 
 Is it for this that French literature has sometimes 
 been accused of lacking depth and originality ? I 
 do not intend to examine if, in this accusation, 
 depth is confounded with obscurity. I only believe 
 that our great writers affect somewhat the men of 
 the world, or of the court, to cloak, or rather to 
 disguise this depth, while certain Germans, on 
 the other hand of the school of Hegel or of the 
 famous Jean-Paul readily inform us what they have 
 endeavoured to put into their works. The French- 
 man piques himself on speaking clearly about matters 
 which are sometimes profound, but the German seems 
 to glorify himself too often on stating obscurely 
 matters which are clear. Is Kant really more profound 
 than Pascal, and Fichte than Rousseau ? Fichte and 
 Kant, absorbed as they are in slow elaboration, in the 
 consideration and, if I may say so, the proud satis- 
 faction of their own thought, leave their readers the 
 trouble of finding it out, while Pascal and Rousseau 
 spare them such trouble. This is still, evidently, 
 the effect of the same cause. The German is satis- 
 fied if he understands himself, and in proportion to 
 the difficulty which others have in understanding him, 
 does he find proof of the depth of his thought. The 
 Frenchman would think that he had failed in his aim 
 if the reader could understand him only with effort, and 
 
 he prefers to pass for superficial rather than for obscure. 
 
 20
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 Should it not be added that, in a literature 
 eminently social like the French, where the interests 
 which are discussed are by definition the interests 
 of humanity itself, the opportunities of being pro- 
 found, in the philosophic sense of the word, are 
 naturally less frequent than in a literature like the 
 German, where the great pretension of the writer 
 is to attain to the noumena of everything. For 
 a useful discussion of the question of toleration, or 
 that of the sovereignty of the people, there is need 
 of less equipment if, for that matter, there is need 
 of as much penetration and consequently there are 
 fewer chances of astonishing and surprising than in 
 the treatment of the question " how the Ego and the 
 Non-ego, placed in the Ego by the Ego, are limited 
 reciprocally." A Frenchman would have put it in 
 a simpler manner, but, as is evident, he would have 
 appeared less profound. Would he have merely put 
 the question ? And since we can very well separate 
 ourselves from our environment, would he not rather 
 have left the problem to the universities as one of 
 no practical utility ? What more is to be said 
 but that, according as French literature merits the 
 reproach of lacking depth, it is reproached, as it were, 
 for not being German literature ? A very German 
 reproach this ! 
 
 I should have to say almost the same of its so-called 
 want of originality, which I do not combat either, 
 
 but explain by further reference to this same social 
 
 21
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 character. A man may well live, if he wishes, 
 outside of and on the margin, as it were, of the 
 society of other men, although for that matter it may 
 be rather difficult. He may withdraw, in some way 
 or other, from the circle of his fellow creatures, like 
 Byron or Shelley. And he may, if he wishes, act in 
 bold opposition to customs and received opinions. But 
 if, on the other hand, he wishes to live in society, and 
 for society which is undoubtedly permitted and really 
 even ordered he must begin by submitting himself 
 to its customs and opinions, since this is really the 
 only way to modify them. Men are not to be 
 persuaded against their prejudices. And just as we 
 begin, so as to make ourselves masters of nature, by 
 obeying its laws, the knowledge of which gives us the 
 means of escaping from them, so, and with stronger 
 reason, we can triumph over prejudices only as we 
 begin by sharing them. In this way an eminently 
 social literature would be always less original than 
 a literature whose ideal would tend, like Italian 
 literature of old, only to the realisation of pure beauty, 
 or, like English literature still to this day, to the free 
 manifestation of individual energy. This, if you will, 
 is the weakness or the want of classical French liter- 
 ature. It would be so certainly, if this weakness was 
 not, on the other hand, as I have endeavoured to 
 show, one of the conditions of its strength. We 
 cannot have everything ; human affairs are always 
 mixed ; and as for deciding, if, among so many con- 
 
 22
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 ceptions of literature, there is one which should be 
 absolutely preferred to others, or to all the others 
 this would be a very interesting problem, but it does 
 not concern us at present. 
 
 Ill 
 
 SHALL I now show the strong light which is thrown 
 by this definition of the essential character of French 
 literature on the obscure parts of its history ? The 
 discredit and final neglect into which the " victims of 
 Boileau," for example, have fallen, to whom may be 
 joined the majority of those of Voltaire : the contra- 
 dictory judgments that have been so often passed, and 
 are passed still, on the " Societe precieuse " : the quarrel 
 of the ancients and moderns, the importance of which 
 has for so long been strangely neglected : the nature 
 of the revolution wrought on the literature of his time 
 by the author of the Nouvelle Heldise and the Confes- 
 sions : the true point of debate in the first years of this 
 century between the classicists and romanticists : all 
 these become clearer and more connected, and order 
 and adjust themselves, when they are referred to the 
 essential character of French literature. If the names 
 of the Theophiles and Saint-Amants are almost un- 
 known, it is because they wished to indulge in " personal 
 literature " at a time when the tendency of writers was 
 
 2 3
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 eminently social^ and when, accordingly, there was 
 not that public opinion, without which nobody in 
 France has ever been able to do anything. In like 
 manner what the romanticists claimed was the right of 
 being themselves, of breaking away from the restraints 
 which the recollection of masterpieces of a " purely im- 
 personal literature" imposed on them ; and, what is very 
 curious, but very significant, they no sooner obtained this 
 right than they renounced it. In like manner the Pro- 
 testants, when they won from Rome liberty of thought 
 and belief, hastened to surrender it in the making of 
 separate churches for themselves. But all these 
 questions are only for the literary historian, and this 
 is why I prefer, now that I have alluded to them, to 
 contrast the essential character of French literature 
 so as to succeed in making it evident of itself 
 with the essential characters of the German and 
 English. 
 
 In comparison with French literature, defined and 
 characterised by its spirit of sociability, English 
 literature is an individualistic literature. With the 
 obvious exception of the generation of Congreve and 
 Wycherley, and perhaps also of that of Pope and 
 Addison, to which it must not be forgotten Swift too 
 belonged, the English seem to write only to give 
 themselves the exterior sensation of their individuality. 
 Hence that humour^ which may be defined as the expres- 
 sion of the pleasure which they feel in thinking only 
 
 after their own way. Hence the abundance, the richness, 
 
 24
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 the amplitude of the lyric vein, if individualism is pre- 
 cisely its source, and if an ode or an elegy is as the in- 
 voluntary flow and overflow of what is most hidden 
 and secret and personal in the soul of the poet. 
 Hence also the eccentricity of their great writers in 
 comparison with the rest of the nation, as if in truth 
 they recognised their own personality only in opposing 
 themselves to those who seem most like them. Can 
 we not name other characteristics of English litera- 
 ture ? This I shall not venture to answer : all I say 
 here is that I do not know how to express better the 
 differences which separate it from ours. 
 
 This, also, is all that I intend to do in saying that 
 the essential character of German literature is that of 
 being philosophic. Their philosophers are poets, and 
 their poets philosophers. Goethe is to be seen no 
 more, and no less, in his Theory of Colours or his Meta- 
 morphoses of Plants than in his Divan or his Faust ; and 
 lyricism, if I may here use this proverbial expression, 
 "floods its banks" in the theology of Schleiermacher 
 and the philosophy of Schelling. Perhaps this may be 
 one at least of the reasons of the mediocrity of the Ger- 
 man drama ? It is evidently the reason of the depth 
 and reach of Germanic poetry. Even in the master- 
 pieces of German literature there may be said to be 
 something confused, or rather mysterious, suggestive 
 in the highest degree, something which leads to the 
 thought by the intermediary of the dream. Who 
 has not been struck, despite the barbarous termin- 
 
 25
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 ology, with the fascinating and eminently poetical 
 qualities, at once realistic and ideal, in the great 
 systems of Kant and Fichte, Hegel and Schopen- 
 hauer ? Assuredly there is nothing more widely 
 separated from the character of our French literature. 
 We come to understand what the Germans reproach 
 us with, when they reproach us with lacking depth. 
 Let them pardon us in our turn if we do not reproach 
 their literature with not being ours ! 
 
 For it is well that it should be so, and for five or 
 six hundred years it is this that has brought about the 
 greatness, not merely of European literature, but even 
 of western civilisation itself. I refer to what all the 
 great peoples, after slow elaboration in national isola- 
 tion, have paid back to the common treasury of the 
 human mind. We owe, then, to this last nation the 
 sense of the mysterious, and, so to speak, the revela- 
 tion of the beauties of the obscure and intangible. 
 To another we owe the sense of art, and what may 
 be called the knowledge of the power of form. A 
 third has transmitted to us what is most heroic in the 
 conception of chivalric honour. And to another, 
 lastly, we owe the knowledge of what is at once 
 fiercest and noblest in human pride, what is most 
 salutary and dreadful. But for us Frenchmen, our 
 role has been to connect, to blend, and to unify, as 
 it were, under the idea of the general society of 
 the human race, all these contradictory or hostile 
 
 elements. All Europe has borrowed our inventions 
 
 26
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 and ideas to appropriate them to the genius of its 
 different races, whether Latin or Romance in origin, 
 Celtic or Gallic, or even Germanic. In reborrowing 
 them, in our turn, and in adopting them when thus 
 transformed, we have asked only to be able to assist 
 in the progress of reason and humanity. We have 
 cleared up their confusion, we have cured their 
 canker, we have generalised their particularities, we 
 have humanised their excess. Have we not also 
 sometimes lessened the greatness or alloyed the 
 purity ? If Corneille has made the still somewhat 
 barbarous heroes of Guillen de Castro liker ourselves, 
 has not La Fontaine, in imitating the author of the 
 Decameron, made him grosser than he is in his own 
 tongue ; and if the Italians cannot accuse Moliere 
 for what he has borrowed from them, the English 
 have the right to complain that Voltaire little under- 
 stood Shakespeare. But it is no less true that by 
 distinguishing from the individual man of the North 
 or of the South that idea of a universal man, for 
 which we have been so much blamed if any modern 
 literature has uniformly proclaimed " the public good 
 and civility," it is French literature. And this ideal 
 cannot be so futile as has been too often supposed, 
 since, as I have endeavoured to show, from Lisbon to 
 Stockholm, from Archangel to Naples, it is this which 
 foreigners have been pleased to find manifest in the 
 masterpieces, or rather in the entire range of the 
 
 history of our literature. 
 
 27
 
 THE INFLUENCE OF WOMEN IN 
 FRENCH LITERATURE* 
 
 ALTHOUGH the books whose titles we give below are 
 very unequal in merit, and do not address themselves 
 to the same public, they have, at least, this point in 
 common, that they deal with the history of polite 
 society, and bring up once again the question of the 
 influence of women in the vicissitudes of French 
 literature. From "la tres sage Heloi's" and Marie 
 de France, who lived in the thirteenth century, to 
 Madame de Stae'l and George Sand, how many 
 women authors have written without effect I mean 
 to say without becoming models for the women, 
 and even for the men, who have come after them, 
 and without, consequently, inoculating the French 
 spirit with some of the bad as well as the good qualities 
 of their sex ? Even those who did not write, and 
 
 * I. Let Maeurs folies et la Litter -attire de cour sous Henri II, par M. 
 Edouard Bourciez. Paris, 1886 ; Hachette. II. Histoire des femmcs 
 e'crlvalns de la France, par M. Henri Carton. Paris, 1886 ; Dupret. 
 III. Choix de lettres de femmes celebres, depuls le xvi e siecle jusySa not 
 jours, par un professeur de 1'Universite. Paris, 1886 5 Delalain. IV. 
 Lei femmes de France prosateurs et foetes, morceaux choisis par M. P. 
 Jacquinet. Paris, 1886 ; Belin. 
 
 28
 
 ESSAYS IN FRENCH LITERATURE . 
 
 have left only a name, or at the very most a debris 
 of correspondence, but who have none the less been 
 vaunted for their wit and grace, and whose power 
 was none the less real, how did they exercise 
 this power, and for whose benefit or disadvantage ? 
 This is what we ask ourselves on reading this Choix 
 de lettres de femmes calibres and this Recueil de morceaux 
 choisisj in which M. Jacquinet and a " university pro- 
 fessor," by a gallant innovation, and as happy as gallant, 
 have made only women figure. It is this question 
 which M. Henri Carton's book on Les femmes ecrivains de 
 la France should answer, and would answer, did it not 
 absolutely fail to fulfil the promise of its title. It is this, 
 too, which we in our turn should now like to examine. 
 To be treated with the fulness it deserves, this 
 subject would demand a whole volume, or more, for 
 it is nothing less than the history of French literature 
 treated with a certain bias and viewed in a certain 
 perspective. Although we know nothing of the 
 ruelles and salons of the time of the Crusades, and 
 though the French court, for women as for men, was, 
 till the time of Louis XII and Francis I, just the 
 personal retinue of the king, yet the Middle Ages had 
 their women historians and poets ; nor is there, from 
 the first, any interruption in their line of succession. 
 In proof of this, nothing would be easier than to name 
 offhand twenty, thirty, or even a hundred authoresses, 
 whom M. Jacquinet, in his Collection^ and M. Carton, 
 in his History^ have not even mentioned. Such, for 
 
 29
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 example, are Madame du Noyer, Madame Nouvellon, 
 Madame Patin, Madame Pringy, Madame de Louven- 
 court, Madame Moussart, Madame Durand, Madame 
 Vatry, Madame de Gomez, Mademoiselle Masquiere, 
 Madame du Hallay, Mademoiselle de La Force, Madame 
 de Murat, and Madame d'Aulnoy, who all lived from 
 1680 to about 1725, a short but very obscure period of 
 our literary history, and many of whom, I am sure, 
 would not be unworthy of having "Extracts" made 
 from their works. And as for those who did print, 
 whether or not we add those who, without being authors, 
 aimed at protecting or influencing literature, we could 
 easily lengthen the already long list which Somaize has 
 given in his Dictionnaire des Precieuses for a single half 
 of the seventeenth century. If other literatures have 
 not wanted women authors, the succession has not 
 been so regular, nor the tradition so constant, as with 
 us ; and a literary history of the women of France 
 would trace, almost year by year, the very history of 
 our national literature. Though we cannot here 
 make any pretence to write, or even to sketch it, we 
 can still try to show how we understand it, and to 
 indicate roughly in what way the influence of women 
 has affected our literature. 
 
 We do not need to go further back than the six- 
 teenth century. We have not a sufficient knowledge, 
 either of the literature or of the habits of the Middle 
 Ages. On the one hand we can find nothing in any 
 literature more gross, more brutal, and less refined 
 
 3
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 than our old fabliaux, while on the other hand we 
 are unable to explain, without the influence, the 
 example, and the authority of women, the prodigious 
 success of the poetic and even mystic stories of the 
 Round Table ; but what we are unable to understand, 
 what, at least, I humbly admit I cannot, is the con- 
 nection, or relation of so much ribaldry with so 
 much delicacy, of the first part of the Roman de la 
 Rose with the second. No doubt chronology, ethno- 
 graphy, and philology will explain it to us some day ; 
 they will distinguish with perfect precision what we 
 mix up and confuse : but, in the meantime, neither 
 can we distinguish it with sufficient certainty, nor 
 can they explain it with sufficient assurance. Our 
 scholars have done much for the literature of the 
 Middle Ages, but in the histories which they have given 
 us they have as yet forgotten to advance any theories, 
 and have made catalogues rather than histories. I 
 shall add, no matter how little it be their opinion, 
 that if they have established anything, it is that there 
 are two histories of French literature, just as there are 
 two French literatures, the one beginning with the 
 tenth century and ending with the fourteenth, and 
 the other being reborn, or born, in the sixteenth and 
 continuing to our day. The first has its own value, 
 and the study of it is interesting, but it is useless to a 
 knowledge of the second ; the interval between them 
 was too long, the separation too profound, the very 
 revolution of the language too complete and radical. 
 
 3'
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 If we are wrong in judging the Chansons de Geste and 
 the Fabliaux with a taste which has been formed by 
 familiarity with the classics of the seventeenth cen- 
 tury, we commit no less an error, nor one less danger- 
 ous, in attempting to judge a tragedy of Racine or a 
 comedy of Moliere from the point of view of the 
 Middle Ages. And this is why, even though we 
 regret it, we need not go back to the Middle Ages 
 in search of the origins of the modern politeness of 
 manners, language, and style. 
 
 It would be more useful, and even indispensable 
 so at least it has long been held to go back to the 
 sixteenth century. This is what M. Edouard Bourciez 
 has recently done in a very interesting book : Les 
 Maeurs polies et la Litter a ture de cour sous Henri II. I 
 am not going to criticise this book here, and pro- 
 visionally I shall adopt its conclusions. Whatever 
 the influence then which women undoubtedly had 
 at the court of the princes of the house of Valois 
 and though some of them, too, are plainly more 
 than emancipated from the old servitude still it 
 does not appear that they had the power to direct the 
 current of public opinion or even to go against it ; 
 and, generally, they followed it. Neither Rabelais, 
 nor Calvin, nor Montaigne, nor so many others, and 
 these are precisely the greatest, seems to have under- 
 gone the influence of the women of the time, nor to 
 have revolted against it, which, of course, is just 
 another way of undergoing it. Perhaps they think 
 
 32
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 with Erasmus " that woman is an absurd and ridiculous 
 animal, though entertaining and pleasant ; . . . that 
 Plato was right in asking if she should be classed 
 as a reasonable creature, or left among the species 
 of brutes ; . . . and that as an ape is always an 
 ape, so a woman, no matter what part she plays, 
 remains always a woman, that is to say silly and 
 foolish." I am quite willing to believe them capable 
 of it. But, whatever they think, it never comes into 
 their head that if woman is a creature she can have 
 a character, that she can claim her share in the occu- 
 pations of men, and much less, consequently, that she 
 can conceive the idea of leading, directing, or ruling 
 them. Our French literature of the sixteenth century 
 is still quite virile, without any alloy of feminine 
 qualities, not only devoid of modesty and taste, but, it 
 must be said, of shame, and as such it is hardly French, 
 but, on the other hand, at once truly Gallic and Latin. 
 This fact may lead us to ask the question if the 
 troubles which filled the second half of the sixteenth 
 century, the civil wars and the foreign wars, had 
 not, by imposing on the women themselves other 
 virtues than those of their sex, stifled, as it were, 
 the awakening spirit of society, and, consequently, 
 politeness of manners and elegance of speech. Even 
 at the court of her brother, the first Margaret, the 
 sister of Francis I, would have liked (according 
 to the later phrase) to direct the affairs of taste. 
 So too Mary Stuart, had fortune permitted it,
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 and had she not been forced too soon to leave the 
 court of France for her misty Scotland. It has been 
 truly said that this dynasty of the house of Valois 
 "which the political historian has the right to reproach 
 severely, created the brilliant side of French civilisa- 
 tion, and powerfully contributed to found our su- 
 premacy in point of elegance and taste " ; and what is 
 true of its first princes is perhaps still more true of its 
 last. Francis I did not usurp his title of " Father of 
 Letters " ; everybody knows Charles IX's verses to 
 Ronsard ; even Henry III prided himself on being a 
 judge in matters of art and taste. Yet, all the same, 
 neither kings nor queens, nor ladies outside their con- 
 nection, succeeded in the sixteenth century in fixing 
 in a truly stable if not final form what may be called 
 the ideal of the French spirit. And whatever ex- 
 planations may be given and these are liberal, as they 
 always are, and innumerable, when the question is 
 why something has not come to pass the fact is that 
 not till the first year of the seventeenth century do 
 we see the rise of the influence of women and the 
 beginning of the history of polite society. 
 
 The judgments of posterity are sometimes odd. 
 As long as the Precieuses ridicules shall be acted that 
 is to say as long as the French language shall endure 
 so long shall we mock the Precieuses, whether 
 true or false, ridiculous or not, of the Hotel de Ram- 
 bouillet, and the incomparable Arthenice and Made- 
 leine de Scudery. Yet it must be recognised that 
 
 34
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 it is to them that the French spirit owes some 
 of the best lessons which it has ever received, 
 and our literature itself, by a consequence which I 
 shall point out, an unmistakeable part of its glory. 
 Moliere in mocking them, and, to mock them the 
 better, in exaggerating their absurdities, was attend- 
 ing to his business of dramatic author j but as for us, 
 it is time now to attend to ours, and not accept a 
 satire as the lasting expression of the judgment of 
 history. In reality, had the Precieuses taught us only 
 propriety of language, and not to name on every occa- 
 sion and before everybody everything by its name, 
 that alone would have been much ; and Moliere him- 
 self, yes, Moliere, without imperilling his glory, would 
 not have done badly, on more than one occasion, to have 
 put himself to their school. Art cannot and must not 
 express what forms, no matter how, the material of 
 everyday occurrence, the vulgar and gross stuff of life, 
 or at least can do so only by transforming it ; and 
 this formula, which is now that of the conversation of 
 respectable people, is at the same time the beginning 
 of the art of writing. All that is done cannot be 
 spoken, all that is spoken in the liberty of private con- 
 versation cannot be written ; we must not, like Buffon, 
 put on lace ruffles to appear before the public, but no 
 more must we, like Diderot, choose just this time to put 
 on our dressing gown, much less to take it off ; and 
 this is the first lesson which the habitues of the chambre 
 bleue received of old from the Marquise de Rambouillet. 
 
 35
 
 BRUNETIERFS ESSAYS 
 
 How far this lesson was useful is known by all 
 readers, not of Brantome or Tallemant des Reaux, 
 who are suspicious anecdotists, collectors of scandal- 
 ous and often calumnious tales, though men of wit for 
 that matter, but by readers of the Moyen de parvenir^ 
 for example, or, at the height of the seventeenth 
 century, of Saint- Amant, Theophile, or Scarron. 
 In Balzac even there are traits which we would 
 not dare to cite. Ronsard and the Pleiade had 
 endeavoured to draw us out of the rut, but to 
 no purpose : the Gallic element returned, and still 
 kept on appearing, and, mounting to the surface, 
 spread itself in the fulness of its complacent 
 ribaldry. The delicate and subtle allegory of Astree^ 
 too long, but so charming in its very roguishness and 
 sentimentality, was answered by the Hhtoire comique 
 de Francion, just as at another time, and in another 
 country, Fielding was to reply by his Joseph Andrews 
 and Tom Jones to the long novels of Richardson. 
 Another was surprised that Madame de Rambouillet 
 would not allow the words of Rabelais's vocabulary 
 to be spoken in her hearing. " This is too much," 
 he said ; " we have no more liberty." And once again 
 we would have obeyed our natural tendencies had 
 the Precieuses not come to warn and save us from 
 them. They did not meet with immediate success ; it 
 was not they who could have made French literature 
 break entirely, at the beginning of the seventeenth 
 century, with the Gallic tradition ; and, undoubtedly, 
 
 3 6
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 this would have been a pity even had it been possible : 
 but all the same they taught us to moderate the 
 flights of a gross fancy, and to make everything 
 pass, as La Fontaine said, with the help of a word, 
 for in France everything must pass. Even those 
 who are Gallic by nature should be thankful to 
 them for all the piquancy that is given by a clever 
 and ingenious disguise to the ideas of certain things. 
 At the same time that they refined the old Gallic 
 spirit, the Precieuses were no less averse to pedantry 
 and bookishness. Smitten with the ancients, intoxi- 
 cated with Greek and Latin, even our greatest writers 
 of the sixteenth century are pedants, and pedants of 
 the first degree. Rabelais mocks at pedants, and 
 we know with what verve ; but who will deny that 
 he is one of them himself, and that this Gargantua of 
 letters, with the continual display of his encyclopaedic 
 knowledge, is as often unendurable as extraordinary ? 
 And what of Ronsard and his disciples, with their 
 pindaric odes, their learned allusions, and their myth- 
 ology ? And what shall we say of so many others 
 who sweat their classics, so to speak, through every 
 pore with whom, like Sorbonne recluses, two verses 
 of Martial or an aphorism of Plutarch take the place 
 of arguments ? They are scholars, and they had to 
 be followed, but they lack a well-bred bearing and the 
 art of pleasing. Again it is women who will give them 
 this, and it is the Precieuses. They will teach them 
 that their learning which is only erudition has no 
 
 37
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 importance in itself; that the ancients were natural 
 people and that the best means of resembling them 
 is to imitate them exactly in this ; in short, that 
 we must learn to live and not live to learn. It is 
 good to know what Plato thought, but the thoughts 
 of Plato can no longer be ours ; " the ancients are 
 the ancients, and we are the people of to-day," or 
 even, to put it forcibly, "it is in us that is to be 
 found that antiquity which we revere in others " ; and 
 we must endeavour to think in our turn like them, 
 that is to say freely and naturally, but not accord- 
 ing to them. Let us know Latin if we will, and 
 Greek if we can, but let us first be sensible men ; and 
 to this end let us bring learning out of its cave, and 
 remove its sordid, pedantic, and repulsive appearance, 
 and bring it into the world amongst courtiers and 
 ladies, and make it intelligible, accessible, and hence 
 profitable to those whose profession it neither is nor 
 ever will be. And, when we write, let us re- 
 member that it is not for those few persons who 
 know as well as and sometimes better than we do 
 the subject we are treating, but, on the contrary, 
 for those who know it not so well, who have the 
 right to know it not so well, but who wish to 
 know it all the same. 
 
 The import of this lesson, which was given with- 
 out any pedantry, and urged and insinuated rather 
 than given, will be better understood by consider- 
 ing some of its consequences in the history of our 
 
 38
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 literature. By imposing on the writer the qualities of 
 order and clearness qualities which they themselves 
 do not always show in their writing, though they have 
 a lively appreciation of their value women assured 
 the perfection of French prose and its universal 
 domination. One of the outstanding merits of the 
 Discours de la Methode y and that which still gives it life, 
 is to have brought philosophy out of the darkness of 
 the schools and the closets of the abstractors of quint- 
 essences, to make it appear, as it were, in the broad 
 daylight of the public thoroughfare, and to introduce 
 it accordingly into the conversation of polite society. 
 Pascal did the same in writing his Lettres provinciates : 
 he laicised, if I may say so, the theological controversy ; 
 he gave to the gentlemen of the court, and not only to 
 the gentlemen, but to the ladies too, the means of dis- 
 puting on "efficacious grace" and "proximate power." 
 And Bossuet, too, did the same, and later on the Vol- 
 taires, the Montesquieus, the Rousseaus, the Buffons ; 
 the last in making history for the first time readable, 
 for up to then it had been buried in the heavy folios 
 of a Dupleix or a Mezeray ; the first in translating, 
 for the use of Madame de Tencin or Madame du 
 Deffand, the learned lucubrations of a Grotius or a 
 Puffendorff; and all of them, in fact, one after the 
 other, in opening up new roads, by making literary 
 what was not so before, and what is not so necessarily 
 a metaphysical dissertation, a theological discussion, 
 the history of a great heresy or of a diplomatic negotia- 
 
 39
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 tion, and even a chapter of physical astronomy or com- 
 parative physiology. Of all the services that women 
 have been able to render French literature, surely no 
 one will think that this is the least. For it is 
 undoubtedly they, by their demands still more than 
 by their example, though there has been no lack of 
 examples, who have given French prose the qualities 
 which are the last to be denied it elegance in precision, 
 perfection in measure, and, in the very great writers, 
 lucidity in depth. 
 
 What though women have passed all measure in 
 their demands : they would not be women had 
 it been otherwise. In endeavouring to purify a lan- 
 guage, we always run the risk of impoverishing it, 
 and, in regulating its style, it is no uncommon thing 
 to blunt that vivacity of expression which is its soul, 
 so to speak. In the same way, if we are willing to 
 admit that art should not represent everything, nor 
 the writer speak of everything, it is very difficult, and 
 indeed very rash, to try to mark exactly where the 
 privilege of both ends and their freedom begins. The 
 Precieuses who were in society, and generally in 
 the best of society, and, after the Precieuses,* the 
 women who succeeded them for more than a century 
 and a half in the direction of literary taste, were 
 too ready to believe that the liberty of art and of the 
 writer was bounded by their caprice, and that the 
 world was neither wider nor more varied than what 
 
 could be contained, in women and men, in their ruelles 
 
 40
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 and salons. Hence followed several consequences, of 
 which they must bear the blame, and which I shall 
 now endeavour to point out cursorily. 
 
 I cannot consider so very criminal their ways 
 of talking, which are often odd, but sometimes happy, 
 and always amusing. There has been much stupid 
 talk on this matter. They perhaps impoverished 
 the language of some pithy words and simple turns, 
 but, when everything is taken into account, they 
 enriched it with almost as many new words or 
 expressions. And it is not they who invented these 
 metaphors of which Moliere makes fun : " I am going 
 to fish in the lake of my memory with the fish-hook 
 of my thought " ; or again : " In the public square 
 of your attention I shall lead in dance the bear of 
 my eloquence " ; these, in particular, belong to the 
 greater time of the Italian Renaissance. Who does 
 not know, too, that there are at least as many con- 
 ceits in a drama of Shakespeare as antitheses in a 
 letter of our Balzac ? And, like the seicentismo of the 
 Italians and the euphuism of the English, did not 
 the cultism of Antonio Perez and Gongora precede 
 in European literature that of the Marquis de Mas- 
 carille and the Vicomte de Jodelet ? Euphuism, or 
 cultism, or whatever name it is called, is a malady of 
 language, which can sometimes extend to the thought, 
 but does not always do so ; which, moreover, to be 
 well discussed, would perhaps need to be studied 
 more seriously than has been done so far, and more 
 
 41
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 scientifically too ; for its effects often resemble 
 closely enough those of the natural expansion of 
 the creative power of languages. That it is ridi- 
 culous to ask me, to make me sit down, " to satisfy 
 the desire which an arm-chair has to embrace me," I 
 shall certainly not deny ; but, since an arm-chair is 
 usually said to have arms, I ask, when is the precise 
 moment in its evolution that a metaphor ceases to be 
 clever and becomes ridiculous ? There has not been 
 enough interest taken in the solution, or even the 
 examination, of this question. 
 
 What the Precieuses must be accused of is, of 
 having aggravated, by establishing the language of 
 good society, and in order to establish it, the 
 difference that everywhere separates the language 
 of literature from the language of the people. We, 
 in France, have no literature of the people ; the 
 finest efforts of our eloquence, the most of our 
 finest verses somehow expire before they reach 
 the million ; and every writer worthy of his 
 name is really with us an aristocrat. How often 
 has this been pointed out ? All Spain understands 
 Don )uixote, and in Italy they sing the octaves of 
 the ^Jerusalem , Burns, to the Scots, is a people's 
 poet, and Dickens, to the English, is a novelist of the 
 masses ; we, in France, have our novels of Paul de 
 Kock and our songs of the "cafes-concerts," La 
 Lait'iere de Montfermeil and the Bi du bout du bane. 
 
 The Precieuses are partly responsible for this. It 
 
 42
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 is not that they aimed at or wished this, it is not 
 even, in a certain sense, that they did anything for 
 it. But they ignored the existence of too many 
 things round about them ; they had not a sufficient 
 knowledge of the world or of life, but only of the 
 salons and of the court, and of a few men of letters ; 
 their experience was lacking in breadth and variety. 
 Envious of the suffrage of the salons, the men of 
 letters in their turn, wishing to have, as is said, 
 the women on their side, insensibly limited the field 
 of their observation, diminished their means of expres- 
 sion, and naturally refined on the small number that 
 was left them. Thus, in no literature, perhaps, is the 
 written style more different from the spoken style 
 than in ours ; in none is it more difficult to reach 
 the crowd and to satisfy at the same time the select 
 few ; and in none, in short, have the best writers 
 themselves I mean prose writers fewer appreciative 
 readers at home, but, by compensation, more admirers 
 abroad. 
 
 According as authors, under the influence of the 
 salons and the ladies, thus gave up the ordinary use 
 of language and the observation of life, they gave up 
 also the natural and the true. This is anew grievance, 
 and perhaps the most grave, though luckily the native 
 independence of some great men could not fail to 
 considerably weaken its consequences. The majority 
 of women will always prefer an elegant falsehood to 
 an unpleasant or even indifferent truth ; and there 
 
 43
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 would be no salons if we were all of us quite natural. 
 To tell the truth, we disguise ourselves to go into the 
 world, and the disguise consists in first throwing off 
 all the preoccupations, the cares, and the habits which 
 are in some way or other the substance of our life, to 
 put on a character whose first merit is not to differ 
 perceptibly from others. This is well if literature is 
 only an amusement ; the material is still rich enough 
 for the observer, since it could suffice for La Roche- 
 foucauld or Madame de Sevigne. But it is otherwise 
 if the writer is entitled to aim at something more, 
 as, for example, to see the true face under the mask, 
 and the real man, living, acting, and feeling under the 
 correction and the order of the man of society ; he 
 needs a liberty which the manners of the court and 
 the salon will never give him. This is the crisis 
 through which the literary influence of women passed 
 in the seventeenth century, and over which it just 
 succeeded in triumphing. 
 
 Indeed all the writers of the second class yielded to 
 them, and even one or two of the first. If we except 
 some of the debris of the sixteenth century, belated 
 into the seventeenth, the jesters and the writers of 
 grotesque - - born enemies of salons, from many 
 motives, and especially because there there is no 
 drinking all the others are with them : Balzac 
 and Voiture, Menage and Chapelain, Conrart and 
 Vaugelas, Benserade and Quinault, Pellisson and 
 Patru, Mascaron and Flechier, Corneille even and 
 
 44
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 La Fontaine. The envious rail at them, but the 
 women applaud themselves, and they are right, and 
 public favour encourages them. I have endeavoured 
 to point out the motives, and I have done justice to 
 the usefulness of their work. They had spirit and 
 courage, good sense and taste, the taste of the ex- 
 quisite and of the grand, or rather the grandiose, the 
 art of understanding everything and speaking about 
 everything, except just what the Pascals and Bos- 
 suets, the Molieres and Racines, the Boileaus and 
 La Bruyeres were to need to speak to them about 
 and to make them understand. Great lords and 
 charming ladies, salons of the Place Royale or the 
 Faubourg Saint Germain, there was no decorum that 
 could hinder the author of the Pensees or of the 
 Sermon sur la Mart from displaying before their eyes 
 the littleness and the nothingness of man, the un- 
 bounded vanity of his enjoyments, and that inexorable 
 weariness which is the substance of human existence. 
 There was none that could restrain the author of 
 Tartufe or of Phedre from piercing to the bottom of 
 worldly hypocrisy, or of leaving behind vain gallantries 
 to paint in all their reality the passions of love. And 
 there were no considerations that could lead the 
 author of the Satires to moderate his anger at the 
 verses of Chapelain, or the author of the Caracteres 
 to spare us the bitterness of his experience of the 
 world and of life. 
 
 This is why we see them all, each in his own 
 45
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 way, without plot or plan, rising against the domina- 
 tion of the rhetoricians and the Precieuses. La 
 Bruyere attacks them with his biting and subtle 
 irony, which inflicts but a deeper wound ; Boileau 
 was careful not to forget them in his Satire sur Ics 
 Femmes : 
 
 'Tis theirs to pet at whom the wits poke fun, 
 And grant an audience if the world gives none. 
 
 Racine riddles them with his epigrams ; Moliere 
 writes the Precieuses ridicules and the Femmes 
 savantes ; Bossuet pitilessly upbraids those worldlings 
 who wish to know how the preacher spoke, "who 
 compare him with himself and with others, and the 
 first discourse with the following, . . as if the pulpit 
 were a place of contest for the prize of eloquence " ; 
 and it was on his scorn, in short, of all rhetoric 
 and all eloquence that Pascal dared to found his 
 own. 
 
 This is why we will also find if we examine the 
 Memoirs and the Correspondence of the time 
 that not one of them frequented the fashionable salons. 
 And how could they, if it is there they have their 
 adversaries and their enemies, if it is in the salons that 
 Moliere is reproached with the crudity of his pictures, 
 and Racine with the truth of his ? Even the worthy 
 marquise, Madame de Sevigne herself, is she not 
 suspected of preferring Nicole to Pascal ? She 
 
 undoubtedly admires the eloquence of Bossuet, but 
 
 46
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 how much more that of Mascaron or of Flechier ! 
 And despite the court, despite Louis XIV and his 
 declared protection, the battle continues until, Pascal 
 and Moliere being dead, Bossuet having ceased to 
 preach and Racine to write, and Boileau having 
 retired into a morose and sullen solitude, the women 
 and the salons regain their empire. It is for them, 
 and thanks to them, that the Pradons and Boyers are 
 reborn, the Perrins and the Corases ; for them that 
 the Pavilions and the Sainte-Aulaires turn their 
 madrigals, which for that matter are as lively as they 
 are elegant ; for them that Fontenelle writes his Plur- 
 alite des Mondes ; for them that Massillon preaches. 
 The Marquise de Lambert revives the traditions of 
 the Hotel de Rambouillet. The Duchesse du Maine 
 exaggerates them, with her characteristic taste for 
 the excessive ; others follow, a new age begins, and 
 the movement, checked for a short time, resumes its 
 course now stronger than ever. 
 
 For never was the power of women greater than in 
 the eighteenth century, and on to the approach of 
 the Revolution. It is then that they are veritable 
 queens, mistresses and judges of taste and opinion. 
 Their courtiers, or rather their subjects, are now 
 called Chaulieu, Lamotte, Sacy, Mairan, Moncrif, 
 Marivaux, Trublet, even Montesquieu ; and, as at 
 the height of the influence of the Pre'cieuses, they 
 filled the French Academy. Why is it that history 
 and criticism here change their tone ? What has 
 
 47
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 not been said of the salons of the eighteenth century ! 
 In what method have they not been celebrated ! 
 What place have they not been given in the history 
 of French literature ! 
 
 But, from one end of the century to the other, 
 has it been noted what writers frequented the salons, 
 and how the truly great men, or rather the only great 
 men, were seldom there ? Voltaire may be said to 
 have lingered in them, though for that matter I have 
 never found him at Madame de Lambert's or Madame 
 de Tencin's ; but after once having breathed their 
 atmosphere with delight, circumstances turned him 
 from them, and it is from that time, and the point 
 is well worth the trouble of being noted, that dates 
 his true influence on his contemporaries. Montesquieu 
 also is to be met at Madame du Deffand's, and caught 
 sight of at Madame Geoffrin's, but he is only on a 
 passing visit, so to speak, when he chances to come 
 to Paris, and for eight or ten months of the year it 
 is at La Brede, while making his wine, that he 
 thinks out his Esprit des Lois. It is the same, 
 too, with Buffbn ; when he leaves Montbard, if he 
 thinks of calling on Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, he 
 is said to astound this eternally enamoured creature 
 with the familiarity of his manners and the vulgarity 
 of his conversation. I say nothing of Rousseau : the 
 part he sets himself to play is to fly from salons and 
 society, where, moreover, he feels ill at ease, as if he 
 
 feared that their flatteries, by softening the violence 
 
 48
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 or his hatreds, would deprive his eloquence of the 
 food which was its nourishment. 
 
 And, in truth, not one of them had need of the 
 salons, nor the salons of them. Let the salons 
 applaud the pastorals of Fontenelle and the tales of 
 Moncrif ! The value of the Esprit des Lois or of the 
 Di scours sur FInegalite does not depend on the ap- 
 probation of Madame du Deffand or the opinion of 
 Madame d'Epinay. They are badly prepared, and 
 above all in a bad position, to judge and even to 
 understand these works. The meaning is beyond 
 them, as also is that of the Histoire naturelle^ and 
 even of Candide and the Homme aux quarante Ecus. 
 But they made up for it by gathering around them, 
 and so completing the picture, if not Voltaire or 
 Buffon, at least Saint-Lambert and Marmontel, Duclos 
 and Voisenon, Bernis and BoufHers, Laharpe and 
 Thomas, Grimm, Galiani, Chamfort and Rivarol, 
 Delille and Morellet. These are the men who are 
 wanted, men whose merit I do not deny, who are 
 far from being worthless, who can speak, can write, 
 can turn a madrigal or give point to an epigram, draw 
 up a speech or rhyme a tragedy, but men, in short, 
 whose work has perished almost entirely with them- 
 selves, and who could be cut out of the history of the 
 century and almost not be missed. 
 
 I am wrong and must correct myself : they suc- 
 ceeded at least in reducing the material of observa- 
 tion, and, by force of perfecting the language, they
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 succeeded in weakening it. I have said that they 
 could write : this is not sufficient. Never was writing 
 more clear, for never was style more abstract : it is 
 the limpidity of pure water, and it is also, and above 
 all, the insipidity. Why are the little verses of the 
 Chevalier de Boufflers not by the Abbe de Bernis, 
 just as a tragedy of Marmontel might be by 
 La Harpe, or a saying of Rivarol by Chamfort ? 
 Differences in spirit vanish one after the other in the 
 lack of distinction in the style ; a man must speak like 
 everybody to be sure to be understood by everybody ; 
 and good taste ceases at the precise point where 
 originality begins. At this period of the century 
 the coincidence had become perfect : the proprieties 
 of society are the very laws of the art of writ- 
 ing. Words are now but signs of a conventional 
 algebra, and the laws of hard logic regulate their uni- 
 form arrangement. But it is not Buffbn or Voltaire 
 who is to be blamed for this, as they have often been, 
 and still less is it Rousseau ; it is the salons ; and it 
 is the writers who aimed, like those I have just men- 
 tioned, only at the approbation of the salons, if indeed 
 they did not write solely to be admitted into them. 
 
 It is told that, at Madame Geoffrin's, every time the 
 conversation threatened to break loose " on authority, 
 religion, politics, morality, people in office or men in 
 power," the hostess hastened to check the offenders 
 with an " Oh, isn't this good ! " and to send them, as 
 she said herself, to make their noisy gossip elsewhere. 
 
 50
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 This is the last reproach which can be brought against 
 the salons. At no time, perhaps, and certainly not 
 under the old regime, was it possible to discuss the 
 great questions, and still less to plunge deep into them, 
 for there was really nothing in the world, according 
 to the circumstances, more pedantic or fantastic. 
 Everything might be touched upon, but nothing was 
 to be examined deeply ; everything might be spoken 
 about, but without being considered in its essentials. 
 Besides that it is polite to share the opinion of every- 
 body else, we do not meet together to weary, but on 
 the contrary to amuse ourselves. If, then, we have any 
 crotchets, no matter their nature, or should they be 
 metaphysical, nothing would be more out of place 
 than to make them public and thereby disturb those 
 who take no interest in them. This is the rule of the 
 game, and the rule is good. It is only regrettable 
 when the habits of conversation in society are carried 
 into the art of writing, and this is what happened in the 
 history of our literature. All the questions that can 
 naturally interest worthy people we have treated, under 
 the influence of the salons, as they would be treated 
 there, and only as they could possibly be treated there, 
 that is to say, pleasantly and superficially. " To speak 
 always nobly of mean things, and simply enough of 
 lofty things " has thus become the law of our writers, as 
 it was of conversation. Out of deference to women, 
 or, perhaps, without thinking of it, and by the mere 
 contagion of example, some very great writers, such as
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 Montesquieu, aimed at dealing in a grave manner with 
 the most futile objects, and made a mannerism of so 
 doing ; and others, such as Voltaire, at deciding by an 
 epigram, often enough of very doubtful taste, the most 
 grave questions. Thus it follows that the salons are 
 in this way responsible, to say nothing about other 
 matters, for all the artificiality and superficiality of the 
 Esprit des Lois and of the Essai sur les Moeurs. 
 
 There are, too, certain questions of the most serious 
 and lofty nature, which the salons excluded from the 
 range of our authors and our literature, just as they 
 had always excluded them from conversation. "Al- 
 though conversation ought always to be equally natural and 
 reasonable" wrote, in 1680, Mademoiselle de Scudery, 
 44 / admit for all that that there are occasions when 
 even the sciences can enter into it with a good grace " ; 
 and this could not have been said better, nor could it 
 at the same time be more entirely just. The salons 
 were not made for discussions, for example, on Semitic 
 inscriptions or comparative anatomy. Not only the 
 pure sciences, but what are called the applied sciences, 
 and politics, and social economy could not "enter with 
 a good grace " into polite conversation, and still less, 
 undoubtedly, history, philosophy, and religion. Con- 
 sequently they have not entered into it, nor into our 
 literature. It is an astonishing thing for foreigners, 
 especially for Germans and Englishmen, perhaps also 
 for Russians, and generally for men of the North, to 
 note the indifference of our writers to the problems 
 
 52
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 which torment the soul of Faust or Hamlet. And, 
 indeed, these questions are hardly ever treated in the 
 salons, in spite of the strange way in which they often 
 trouble women. Their attention is directed to quite 
 other objects. The present life, and only its outmost 
 part, the social life and its relations, occupies and 
 absorbs them entirely ; and our writers, to be on good 
 terms with them, confine and absorb themselves in it, 
 and are absorbed in it with them. One is sorry for 
 the French genius to see the air of unconcern, and the 
 tone of elegant badinage with which even a Voltaire, 
 in his pamphlets, his Conies, and his Dlctionnaire 
 philosophique^ ridicules or scouts, despite all his genius, 
 whatever he does not understand. If we had not had 
 our Protestants ; if we had not had our Jansenists, 
 those of the early times, and Pascal above all ; if we 
 had not had our great preachers, Bossuet, Bourdaloue, 
 and even Massillon ; if we had not had Rousseau, the 
 Profession de fol du Vicaire Savoyard and the Lettres 
 de la Montagne^ it would be terrible to think of the 
 number of questions to which our classic literature 
 remains almost entirely a stranger. What does 
 Racine think of free-will, and Moliere of destiny ? 
 The salons have lightened, as it were, our literature 
 of its philosophic ballast. And if, towards the end of 
 the eighteenth century, in the foreboding of a uni- 
 versal catastrophe, and in that slightly feverish state of 
 agitation which precedes great crises, some of them 
 broach for the first time the discussion of the public 
 
 53
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 interest, and the political and social questions of the 
 immediate future, these other questions of which we 
 are speaking, and which are vital in another way, since 
 the conduct and direction of life depend on them, are 
 still refused admittance. They have not yet forced 
 the door. 
 
 Let us hasten to admit not to expose ourselves 
 to the reproach of pedantry, to exaggerate no- 
 thing, to place the good side by side with the 
 bad that the salons were able to compensate in 
 some measure for what they deprived us of, and 
 that the losses which we enumerate have been bal- 
 anced by real gains. True, we have neither Milton 
 nor Shakespeare, neither a Paradise Lost nor a Hamlet ; 
 we have neither Goethe nor Kant ; but in no litera- 
 ture, since Letters have been written, are there any 
 that can be compared with the Correspondence of Vol- 
 taire or Madame de Sevigne, or even with that of 
 Madame du Deffand or Mademoiselle de Lespinasse ; 
 and this is already something. Likewise, in what 
 other literature can be found that succession of pene- 
 trating moralists who, from Montaigne to Rivarol, 
 one after the other, with as much steadiness as delicacy 
 of hand, have anatomised the social and moral man 
 even to his imperceptible fibres ? And with what- 
 ever brilliance the English novel may have shone, 
 in the present century still more than in the last, 
 I am not sure if, on making the necessary ex- 
 ceptions, I do not still prefer the vein of the 
 
 54
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 French novel. I could say much more, if I chose, 
 about the theatre, which for the last two hundred 
 years or more has become our privilege and mono- 
 poly. And it must be admitted that it is to the 
 influence of women, to the life of the salons and the 
 court, to the perfection of the spirit of sociability, 
 that this is really due. 
 
 "It is only women who can express in a single 
 word a whole emotion and render delicately a delicate 
 thought " ; and when La Bruyere, before even the 
 letters of Madame de Sevigne were known, thus 
 praised the superiority of women in letter-writing, 
 he found the explanation of it in their very effort 
 towards preciosity. And in truth this anxiety to 
 speak well so far as it consists in enhancing, by 
 the expression or the sentiment, by the vivacity of 
 a turn or the unexpectedness of a touch, things that 
 are ordinary or common, in giving to good sense 
 even and to banality the charm and piquancy of 
 paradox, in passing over in silence precisely that 
 which is wished to be heard, or in diminishing, with- 
 out appearing to do so, the importance or gravity 
 of what is said is not this anxiety to speak well 
 preciosity itself, understood as it should be, and is 
 it not the basis of epistolary style ? Have you 
 ever asked yourself why it is that the letters of 
 so many great writers the few we have of this 
 same La Bruyere, those of Boileau, those of 
 Racine, or also, in the eighteenth century, those 
 
 55
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 of Montesquieu, of Rousseau often, and Buffon 
 always give such a bad and far-away like- 
 ness of their authors, correspond so little to their 
 works, and rather contradict the idea we had 
 formed of them ? It is because they do not 
 write them for the pleasure of writing them, but 
 from particular reasons, to fulfil their obligations, 
 from duty rather than from inclination. Women, 
 on the contrary, put their whole soul into them, 
 their invincible desire of pleasing, all the abundance 
 and vivacity of their conversation. They are not 
 content with mentioning things, they mention them 
 again, and in twenty ways, each way adding some- 
 thing unexpected to the elegance of the others. 
 Their simple manner does not come naturally ; it is 
 acquired. They owe it to their experience in society, 
 or, rather, it is their nature not to be natural, and to 
 do with ease, good humour, and simplicity what men 
 do only with difficulty, bungling, and clumsiness. As 
 society is their element and the salons their universe, 
 they are only truly and absolutely women in enter- 
 ing into society and reigning in the salons. In 
 their letters, therefore, are to be found that art of 
 " perverting facts " which is the basis of modern con- 
 versation, these unusual metaphors and periphrases 
 which serve to disguise what they cannot say crudely, 
 that " spirit of politeness " which warns them on every 
 occasion to stop in time, that playfulness which in- 
 spires "a disposition to make use of everything and 
 
 56
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 be wearied with nothing." In emancipating women, 
 the spirit of society permitted them to be them- 
 selves, but undoubtedly they are themselves only in 
 so far as they differ from men, and it is in letter- 
 writing, which is most in their line, that they have 
 shown these differences and shown their originality. 
 Some men of wit, ready and quick like them, have 
 now and then succeeded in robbing them of some- 
 thing Voltaire, for example, and if only he had 
 not had such a strong hankering after the gross, to 
 say nothing more the author of the Lettres a 
 Mademoiselle Voland. 
 
 No more need we doubt that the penetration of 
 our moralists has been sharpened by contact with 
 women in the subtle atmosphere of the salons. 
 Under the uniformity of appearance and outward 
 correctness of bearing, it soon became a malicious 
 occupation to endeavour to discover and recognise 
 shades of difference. La Rochefoucauld and La 
 Bruyere in the seventeenth century particularly ex- 
 celled in this ; Rivarol and Chamfort a little later, 
 towards the end of the eighteenth. How often 
 " gravity is a mysterious carriage of the body in- 
 vented to cover the defects of the mind " we might 
 not know but for La Rochefoucauld ; and he himself 
 recognised this only by being struck, in the salon 
 of Madame de Sable or of Madame de La Fayette, 
 with the stupidity of a magistrate or the majestic 
 nullity of a bishop. That a man without position 
 
 57
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 "cannot be benevolent, but only good-natured," as 
 Chamfort remarked, is another of these fine distinc- 
 tions which can be hardly recognised in everyday 
 experience : they are too imperceptible ; opportunity 
 and leisure are necessary to observe them. Thanks 
 to the life of the salons and of the court, our 
 moralists, if they have too often lost sight of the 
 individual man, have at least understood and described 
 the essential character of the universal man, or better 
 still of the social man. They have advanced the 
 dissection of him, as I said, to the last degree of 
 delicacy and precision. And, perfecting the language 
 at the same time as their powers of observation, 
 their means of expression, if I may say so, at the 
 same time as their eyes, while inimitable in the art 
 of discovering shades of distinction, they are equally 
 so in the almost infinite resources they have found 
 in the use of the poorest vocabulary and the severest 
 syntax. 
 
 This is not yet all, and I consider it would be 
 an inexcusable omission not to credit the influence 
 of the salons and women with one part at least in 
 the rise of the modern drama and novel. In 
 purifying love, in spiritualising it, in mingling senti- 
 ment with it yet without letting the devil lose his 
 share, as the saying goes in making it a topic of 
 conversation, women have made it, in France, the 
 great question of the nation. If we omit those whose 
 profession forbids them to speak of the passions of 
 
 58
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 love otherwise than to deplore them and condemn 
 their errors, our modern literature is taken up entirely 
 with this topic, as was the talk in the salon of Madame 
 de Lambert or of Madame de Rambouillet. And for 
 the last two hundred and fifty years, that is to say 
 since the birth or the formation of polite society, 
 I do not think that there is any literature, not even 
 the Italian, which is richer in tales of gallantry and 
 emotion, and generally of love. D'Urfe was the first ; 
 Racine followed him too clever, though shrinking 
 from the salons and fleeing the Precieuses, not to 
 avail himself of whatever he found in them to suit 
 the nature of his genius ; then came Marivaux, then 
 Prevost, then Rousseau, all adding to it the flame 
 of passion ; and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, and the 
 author of Atala ; and the author of Delphlne ; and the 
 author of Indiana^ of Valentine^ of Jacques^ of Mau- 
 praty and Balzac ; and after them so many others ! 
 Need we add the poets, Lamartine at least, and 
 Musset, if not Hugo ? If the salons really did not 
 do everything, it is they, at the first at any rate, 
 by directing manners towards gallantry, to say 
 the least, as much as towards politeness who drew 
 the mass of writers after them. It is they who, in 
 a literature which had been rational so far, or at 
 least intellectual, made sentiment play the part it 
 had been so long denied. It is they who began by 
 distinguishing, noting, and classifying for us the 
 changing shades of the same sentiment or the same 
 
 59
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 passion ; they who planned, and then enriched, that 
 Carte de Tendre which is a laughing-stock, but which, 
 after all, novelists are only eternally running over 
 in the search of new countries and an unexplored 
 corner. And it is they, though they have im- 
 poverished the language of description, who have 
 supplied the language of observation and psycho- 
 logical analysis ; and perhaps also that of the dialogue 
 for our dramatic authors. And since I can here 
 only indicate what would require too much space 
 to show clearly, it is this, in short, that can be 
 verified by a mere glance at the history of foreign 
 literatures, in which the drama and the novel have 
 been at all times, as with us, exactly what the spirit 
 of sociability has made them. 
 
 These are undoubtedly many services so many 
 services that I really hesitate while on the point of 
 concluding, and ask myself if the best conclusion 
 would not be to give up the search for one. For, 
 do you not care for the salons and do you happen 
 to hold the same ideas on women as the Arnolphe 
 of the Ecole des Femmes or the Chrysale of the Fernmes 
 savantes, that is to say, the same as Moliere ? Then 
 I have spoken of the evil which the salons have done 
 us, and some of even our greatest writers. But, 
 on the contrary, do you care for the salons and 
 hold the same ideas on them as Madame de Lambert 
 or Madame de Rambouillet ? This can be done 
 
 without literary scruple, and I have endeavoured 
 
 60
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 to show the reasons why. What everybody must 
 at least admit is that this is a sign by which great 
 and durable influences are to be recognised, the 
 difficulty of deciding definitely for or against them. 
 I may add that this has been more than once over- 
 looked, by the one party in their too violent attacks 
 on the Precieuses, by the other in their immoderate 
 praise of the eighteenth century salons, and by the 
 one as by the other precisely from not having ap- 
 preciated this influence at its true value ; and this is 
 certainly one conclusion. 
 
 But if now we seek to characterise in one word 
 the nature of this influence, we may say that women 
 have given the French genius its form. While in 
 other literatures, generally, the great writers create 
 in a way at once the matter and the form of their 
 work, and are masters, at the very least, of one 
 as well as the other, it is to be remarked that in 
 our literature they must, to be received, accom- 
 modate their matter to a form which is given or agreed 
 upon beforehand. In French there are rules of the 
 art of writing as of that of composing, or rather 
 they are the same, which we call formal, that is to 
 say pre-existent to the ideas which are to be expressed. 
 So the women have decided. What they wished 
 was that the writer should not be allowed to re- 
 make the language in his own image, and, were 
 he to try to, that he should incur their disgrace 
 
 and be considered a barbarian. They wished like- 
 
 61
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 wise that if a person wrote, it should be with the 
 intention of being read and consequently under- 
 stood, and that he should not be contented with 
 being understood by himself, and still less by him- 
 self alone. They wished, also, that there should 
 be no sentiment, no matter how subtle, and no 
 thought, no matter how profound, that could not 
 be expressed by the words and grammar of modern 
 usage. They wished, in short, that elegance should 
 be given to those matters which least allow of it, 
 and that there should never be any escape, under 
 any pretext whatever, from the laws of the art of 
 pleasing. This is why all revolutions in taste have 
 begun, in France, by being revolutions in language : 
 an attempt to introduce into literary usage habits 
 of language which everyday usage had expelled 
 from it, or, inversely, to cleanse the good usage 
 of the mud which the revolutionaries had been 
 able to deposit. But, throughout these revolu- 
 tions, most of which succeeded only in so far as 
 they had their support, the women always pursued 
 the design they had formed to subject sooner or 
 later the innovators themselves to the need of clear- 
 ness, justness, and order. Whatever subject one 
 treats in French, if he wishes to treat it as an author, 
 he must circumscribe and limit it, transpose it from 
 its special and technical language into the language 
 of everybody, spare the reader the fatigue of atten- 
 tion, and lead him, in short, to believe that our 
 
 62
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 thoughts have for long been his, and were his even 
 before they were ours. This is the secret, for the 
 last two hundred years, of the diffusion of the 
 French language : French books explain each other. 
 But perhaps this is also the secret of the often 
 strange mistakes which the Germans or English 
 make about our writers. We alone, indeed, under 
 this uniformity of manner, and after much study, 
 are capable of distinguishing in our books the 
 mediocre from the excellent, the commonplace 
 from the original, and a clever rhetorician from a 
 very great writer. I have so many appropriate 
 names at the end of my pen, and so many titles, 
 that I prefer not to give any. 
 
 As to the utility of this discipline, I consider it 
 good, if we write solely to please ; less good, as I have 
 said, if we aim at something higher, but yet still good. 
 " We warn those who read these writings," said Bossuet 
 once, in a preface, " that they must expect to find in 
 many places very subtle matters which may give them 
 trouble to read^ but which I cannot convey to the 
 minds of men without their attention, nor without 
 that attention being troublesome." And it is certain 
 that there are some matters which can receive only 
 a certain degree of clearness, which cannot be treated 
 cursorily, which are not to be skimmed, which 
 must be fathomed ; but perhaps also we need to be 
 Bossuet to dare to touch them. Most of our great 
 writers have shaken off the yoke of this discipline, 
 
 63
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 and it is clear that they have been right, but it will 
 always be furiously delicate, as our Precieuses used to 
 say, to try to imitate them in this point. Voltaire 
 even, who dared so much, had not this audacity, or 
 at least he had it only on the example of Rousseau. 
 The fact is that to revolt against conventions we 
 must be sure of having genius, or at least of having 
 very new truths to proclaim, of speaking in a very 
 great cause, of acting in the name of very great in- 
 terests. And since it is evident that the one is as rare 
 as the other, the best course is to follow traditions 
 when they have been fixed, as is here the case, by 
 the most worthy people who have preceded us, when 
 these are, moreover, conformable to the genius of the 
 race, and have, in short, assured in the world the 
 empire of the national spirit. 
 
 For all these reasons let us hope, in conclusion, 
 with M. Jacquinet in his interesting Introduction to 
 his Rec ueil de morceaux choisis that his collection, and 
 the pleasure which everybody will undoubtedly take in 
 perusing it, will inspire someone with the ambition 
 of writing this History of Polite Society of which 
 a woman, who unfortunately lacked the ability, 
 would seem to have had the first idea ; of which 
 Roederer, in a curious book, and Victor Cousin, in a 
 well known one, have sketched only the first chapters ; 
 and from which we may draw quite different conclu- 
 sions, and many more too, than they have. Let us 
 
 only advise this future historian not to believe for a 
 
 64
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 moment this melancholy Thomas and this terrible 
 Diderot, nor, when discussing women, to think of 
 " dipping his pen in the rainbow " or of shaking over 
 his writing " the dust of the wings of butterflies." 
 Despite appearances, false brilliance would be no- 
 where more unsuitable. There is need of taste rather 
 than of show ; of acuteness, but not of eloquence ; 
 of as much discretion in praise as moderation in 
 criticism ; of a simple and quite uniform style. And 
 let us beg of him to hasten with this book, if he has 
 no special reason for delay, for at the rate at which 
 things are going, we may soon lose entirely the sense 
 and appreciation of those manners which have quite 
 passed away.
 
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MOLIERE 
 
 I KNOW it is difficult to make oneself understood, and 
 I willingly admit that whoever does not succeed in 
 doing so has himself to blame. But really, with 
 every allowance for my own incompetence, I would 
 never have believed it would have been so hard to 
 convince certain Frenchmen dramatic authors, pro- 
 fessors, journalists, and lecturers that Moliere would 
 not be Moliere had he not thought sometimes ; 
 that there is something more in him than a classic 
 Labiche ; and that after seeing the Ecole des Femmes 
 or the Malade imaglnalre^ and laughing heartily at 
 Arnolphe or the worthy Argan, we still carry away 
 with us something to think over for a long time. 
 For having dared to say so, indeed, I find that I am 
 reminded on all hands of the false modesty which is 
 expected of the commentator, and I would have re- 
 quired to treat Moliere as a merry-andrew or buffoon, 
 in order not to cause alarm among those who will on 
 no account allow their notion of him to be disturbed ; 
 or rather, according to their view, it is in this way 
 that he will now have to be treated. 
 
 " Come away, Baptiste, make us laugh," said Moliere 
 66
 
 ESSAYS IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 to Lulli, when he felt the need of laughing at other 
 fooling than his own which, moreover, is not always 
 clever, and the story goes that the Florentine did 
 his best. So too it seems that we do not nowadays 
 ask more of him whom his century called " the con- 
 templator " than amusement. Jester he was, and jester 
 let him remain ! His whole business is to amuse 
 us, and if we haven't paid for it, our fathers have ! 
 Only we forget that he would be dead, like so many 
 others who none the less did not fail to amuse the 
 good folk of their time, had there been nothing more 
 in his work than in theirs ; and that, since we must 
 possess for the understanding of the Ecole des Femmes 
 or Tartufe what is ironically called " enlightenment " 
 and "intellect," which are quite unnecessary for the 
 appreciation of La Cagnotte, this is just the reason 
 why he is Moliere. 
 
 I shall lay stress at the outset on this remark. 
 Nobody now is unaware that the subject of the Ecole 
 des Femmes, which was borrowed by Moliere from 
 Scarron, is essentially the same as that of the Folies 
 amoureuses and the Barbier de Seville. There is the 
 same situation, the same intrigue, the same denoue- 
 ment. There are the same characters too ; Bartholo, 
 Albert, or Arnolphe, it is still the same guardian who 
 is duped ; Rosine, Agathe, or Agnes, it is still the same 
 artless girl who makes game of him ; Almaviva, Eraste, 
 or Horace, it is still the same lover who lends his aid, 
 
 young, resourceful, and triumphant. Yet, in whatever 
 
 67
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 esteem we hold Beaumarchais or Regnard, they are 
 not Moliere, neither in build nor in class, nor perhaps 
 in species, and though it is possible to prefer them to 
 him, we never venture a comparison. Why is this ? 
 For the fact of being the first of the three could not 
 be considered so great a merit in the author of the 
 Ecole des Femmes. And even if this were a merit, it 
 could not belong to him but to Scarron, as we have 
 just said, and not even to Scarron, but to Donna Maria 
 de Zayas y Sotomayor, the Spanish novelist from whom 
 Scarron himself imitated his Precaution inutile. In 
 another respect, good judges, delicate and subtle judges, 
 have been able to hold, and not without reason, that 
 the verses of Moliere have not in general the elegance 
 and ease, the grace and facility of those of Regnard : 
 that his style, though more podded perhaps, to use 
 Sainte-Beuve's happy expression, is yet not so lively, 
 smart, or clever, nor its air so free and sprightly. And 
 who will refuse to admit that, if the plot of the 
 Earbier de Seville is not better than that of the Ecole 
 des FemmeSj it is at least in a way more implex^ as used 
 to be said, more ingenious, richer in surprises, above 
 all nearer our modern taste ? From Moliere to Beau- 
 marchais, during the insensible decadence of all the 
 other parts of the dramatic art, one alone has been 
 perfected, and this is precisely the intrigue ; and the 
 comedy of Beaumarchais marks the principal epoch in 
 this progress. 
 
 Since, then, it is neither by the complexity nor the 
 68
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 ingeniousness of the intrigue, nor by quality of style, 
 nor novelty of invention, that Moliere is as superior 
 to his first model as to his imitators, what is there 
 left, and what conclusion is to be drawn ? There is 
 left this, that it is by the depth of the penetration 
 with which he has drawn his characters ; by the 
 truth of an imitation of life which could not suc- 
 ceed but from a certain manner, at once personal 
 and original, of seeing, understanding, and judging 
 life itself; in one word, by the reach, or, in another, 
 by the philosophy of his work. 
 
 It is this philosophy which, in the following pages, 
 I shall try to define and characterise. Not that I 
 wish, as may be suspected, to ascribe to the author of 
 the Fourberies de Scapin what is called a connected 
 system. I shall not forget that I am speaking of a 
 dramatic author, and that Tartufe, the Ecole des 
 Femmes^ and the Malade imaginaire are primarily 
 comedies. But what I shall not forget also is that 
 Moliere thinks ; and since he makes me think, I 
 wish to know on what ? Since he forces me to 
 reflect on certain questions, I wish to know what 
 precisely these questions are. Since he has put them, 
 I wish to know how he has decided them. And if 
 these questions do still concern us, and are still of 
 living interest, I wish to know, in short, how far I 
 am myself for or against Moliere. His comedies are 
 not exactly theses^ but they are not very far from 
 
 being so. They have more connection with the 
 
 69
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 Fils nature! than with Adrienne Lecouvreur^ or with 
 the Ami des Femmes than with Mademoiselle de Belle- 
 Lie. Nothing could be more unlike anecdotes 
 stretched over five acts. In this sense, the phil- 
 osophy of Moliere may be said to be Moliere himself, 
 and I shall endeavour to show that, properly under- 
 stood, it is Moliere in his entirety. 
 
 I 
 
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE 
 
 IT does not appear that he took any trouble to dis- 
 guise his philosophy, nor consequently is it difficult 
 to recognise or to name. Naturalistic or realistic^ 
 what the comedy of Moliere always preaches, by its 
 faults as much as by its merits, is the imitation of 
 nature ; and its great lesson in aesthetics and in 
 morality, is that we must submit, and, if we can, 
 conform to nature. By this, by the endeavour after 
 a faithful imitation of nature, is to be explained the 
 subordination, in his plays, of the situations to the 
 characters ; the simplicity of the intrigues, the most of 
 which are only "scenes of private life" ; the unsatis- 
 factoriness of the denouements, which, from the very 
 fact that they are not denouements, bear a closer 
 resemblance to life, where nothing begins or ends. 
 
 70
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 By this also is to be explained the quality and the 
 depth of the comic art of Moliere. For if, among 
 the many ways of provoking laughter, Moliere knew 
 too well his triple business of author, actor, and 
 manager to despise or overlook any of them, not 
 excepting the easiest and commonest, there is yet one 
 which he prefers, and this way consists in making 
 merry over habits or prejudices which are conquered 
 by the all-powerfulness of nature. And by this still, 
 by his confidence in nature, is to be explained also, and 
 above all, the character of his satire, since he directed 
 it only against those whose fault or absurdity lay in 
 disguising, falsifying, corrupting, restraining, or en- 
 deavouring to coerce nature. 
 
 In the same way he never inveighed against licen- 
 tiousness or debauchery ; he never inveighed against 
 ambition : he never seems even to have had the 
 intention of attacking them. These are vices which 
 are instinctive and conformable to nature : they are 
 self-confessed, and sometimes even vaunted. What 
 more natural in a man than to wish to raise himself 
 above his fellows, unless it be to play with the pleasures 
 of life ? But, on the other hand, " precieuses " of 
 every sort and absurd marquises, ageing prudes and 
 grey-haired gallants, bourgeois people who would be 
 gentlemen and matrons who dabble in philosophy, 
 sextons or great lords who cover " their fierce resent- 
 ment under the cloak of heaven's interest," the Don 
 Juans and Tartufes, the Philamintes and Jourdains, 
 
 7 1
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 the Arnolphes and Arsinoes, the Acastes and Made- 
 Ions, the Diafoiruses and Purgons these are his 
 victims. They are all those who disguise nature, 
 who, to distinguish themselves from her, begin by 
 leaving her, and who, flattering themselves on being 
 stronger or cleverer than she is, have had the preten- 
 sions to govern her and reduce her to their sway. 
 
 On the other hand all those who follow nature, 
 true nature, the Martines and Nicoles, his Chry- 
 sale and Madame Jourdain, Agnes, Alceste, and 
 Henriette, with what sympathy have they not always 
 been treated ? " Such are his people, such is the way 
 to act." They show themselves just as they really 
 are ; and by nothing but showing themselves they 
 bring into prominence the universal and somewhat 
 mean complacency of Philinte, the fierce egoism of 
 Arnolphe, the stupidity of M. Jourdain, the pretenti- 
 ous simpering of Armande, or the solemn affectedness 
 of her mother Philaminte. Is the lesson not clear 
 enough ? On the side of those who follow nature, 
 on the side of the former, are also truth, good sense, 
 honesty, and virtue ; on the other side are absurdity, 
 pretension, stupidity, hypocrisy that is to say, on the 
 side of those who defy nature, who treat her as an 
 enemy, and whose doctrine is to fight and triumph 
 over her. 
 
 But the critics are unwilling to yield, and carp and 
 quibble over the words nature and natural. Nature 
 
 is one thing, they say, and the natural is another, and 
 
 72
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 that makes two ; and, if they have not gone the length 
 of saying they are the opposites of each other, I rather 
 fear they think so. Here is a distinction which 
 Moliere would have laughed at heartily ! The " old 
 fellow " of the Lettres provinciates has few more amus- 
 ing, and so I shall not name the discoverer thereof. 
 Others hold that this kind of religion or philosophy 
 of nature was able to mislead a Rousseau, but not a 
 Moliere, a comic author, the man who has left us 
 "so rich a gallery of vicious and absurd creatures." 
 They have not considered what is habitually the char- 
 acter of these " absurd " and " vicious " creatures ; and 
 that if their vice or absurdity is to contradict nature, 
 that is exactly what we have just been saying. But 
 those seem to come nearer the point who remark that 
 the word nature, which is vague, changeable, and 
 badly defined, may perhaps have several meanings ; 
 that, if there is one which can be agreed upon to-day, 
 it must differ from that in vogue in the seventeenth 
 century ; and that, before knowing how far it differs, 
 it would be imprudent to inscribe Moliere in the 
 number of the philosophers of nature. We must then 
 investigate what was understood at that time by the 
 word nature if it was only a mysterious name cover- 
 ing a great mass of philosophical indifference and love 
 of easy pleasures, or on the contrary, as we hold, 
 containing two or three ideas, very precise, very bold, 
 and much more akin than we might suspect to those 
 which it expresses nowadays. 
 
 73
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 If I am forced to go rather far back, I must lay the 
 blame on the historians of our literature. To read 
 them, one would really think that the Molieres and 
 Racines fell from the clouds one day, and if, in speak- 
 ing of them, they do sometimes consider the milieu 
 for the milieu is the history of the love of Racine 
 for Mdlle. du Pare or the relations of Moliere with 
 Madeleine and Armande Bejart they have, on the 
 other hand, a strange heedlessness and unconcern of 
 the moment; chronology for them is non-existent. 
 No doubt, to explain the comedy of Moliere, they 
 are capable of going back to that of Scarron, and, 
 if necessary, even to the Menteur or to the Italians, 
 but they are usually satisfied with that. The com- 
 mentators go much further back, to the fabliaux of 
 the Middle Ages or the Latin comedy. But what 
 neither the one nor the other seems to know is the 
 sixteenth century ; they reduce it to three or four 
 names, and are apparently ignorant that the seven- 
 teenth century is sprung from it entirely. This was 
 quite clear when, at my suggestion that the philosophy 
 of Moliere was what we now call a " philosophy 
 of nature," they triumphantly upbraided me with 
 crediting Moliere with ideas younger than him by 
 some hundred years, and accused me of confusing, 
 with utter senselessness, the true physiognomy of the 
 seventeenth century by mixing up with it certain 
 features of the eighteenth. 
 
 Now I used to think that the story of Rabelais 
 74
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 belonged to the sixteenth century, and the language 
 seemed significant and eloquent enough. 
 
 " All the life of the Thelemites was spent not in 
 laws, statutes, or rules, but according to their own free 
 wi// and pleasure. They rose out of their beds when 
 they thought good ; they did eat, drink, labour, sleep, 
 when they had a mind to it and were disposed for it. 
 ... In all their rule and strictest tie of their order 
 there was but this one clause to be observed, DO 
 WHAT THOU WILT ; because men that are free, well- 
 born, well-bred, and conversant in honest companies, 
 have naturally an instinct and spur that prompteth them 
 unto virtuous actions, and withdraws them from vice, 
 which is called honour. Those same men, when by 
 base subjection and constraint they are brought under 
 and kept down, turn aside from that noble disposition 
 by which they formerly were inclined to virtue^ to shake 
 off and break that bond of servitude wherein they are 
 so tyrannously enslaved ; for it is agreeable with the 
 nature of man to long after things forbidden and to 
 desire what is denied us." (Gargantua, Ivii.)* 
 
 I thought I found there, in this bold vindication 
 of the excellence of nature, all the philosophy of the 
 Ecole des Fem?nes. And I also thought that I found 
 that of Tartufe in the famous allegory which we all 
 know : 
 
 " Physis that is to say, Nature at her first burthen 
 begat Beauty and Harmony. . . . Antiphysis, who 
 
 * Urquhart's translation. 
 
 75
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 ever was the counterpart of Nature, immediately, out 
 of a malicious spite against her for her beautiful and 
 honourable productions, in opposition begat Amodunt 
 and Dissonance. . . . Yet as you know that apes 
 esteem their young the handsomest thing in the world 
 Antiphysis extolled her offspring, and strove to 
 prove that their shape was handsomer and neater than 
 that of the children of Physis. . . . Since that, she 
 begot the hypocritical tribes of eavesdropping dis- 
 semblers, superstitious pope-mongers, and priest-ridden 
 bigots, the frantic Pistolets, the demoniacal Calvins, 
 impostors of Geneva, the scrapers of benefices, 
 apparitors with the devil in them, and other grinders 
 and squeezers of livings, herb-stinking hermits, gulli- 
 gutted dunces of the cowl, church vermin, false zealots, 
 devourers of the substance of men, and many more 
 other deformed and ill-favoured monsters, made in 
 spite of nature." (Pantagruel^ iv. 32.) * 
 
 This is the purest substance of pantagruelism ; and 
 if perchance the remark were to be made that the 
 allegory is not Rabelais's own, then its signification 
 would only be clearer, for in this case, instead of 
 being a mere freak, it would be nothing less than 
 the figure or symbol of the very philosophy of the 
 Renaissance. 
 
 This may be shown in a few words, the justness of 
 which could be verified as well in the history of 
 European philosophy as in that of Italian art or 
 
 * Motteux's translation. 
 76
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 French literature. The Renaissance was in every 
 respect only a reaction, or rather an ardent and pas- 
 sionate revolt of the flesh against the spirit, of nature 
 against discipline j and, generally, what it set itself to 
 do by the means of this return to paganism, was to 
 emancipate nature and the flesh from their old servi- 
 tude, in the hopes of deifying them. If there is 
 one meaning in the droll epic of Rabelais, one that 
 is neither hidden nor secret but its soul, I make bold 
 to say that it is none other than this. To use the 
 master's own words, this is its "horrid mystery," its 
 " absconse doctrine," its "substantific marrow." Let 
 us conform to nature. Do not ask her works or actions 
 to be other than her own. And above all, never let 
 us doubt that we fulfil all our duty by following her, 
 since we thus fulfil all her aim. For long, and too 
 long, under the pretext of " imitating the creator of 
 the universe," have men, obeying "some derangement 
 or other of good judgment and common sense " walked 
 " with their feet in the air and their head on the 
 ground," and lived a life opposed to nature and truth. 
 Now the time is come for them to understand that if 
 they form part of nature, it is not for the purpose of 
 distinguishing themselves from her, that where there is 
 pleasure there is no sin, and that Physis, the teacher or 
 mother of all beauty and all harmony, is consequently 
 the teacher and mother of all honour and virtue. This 
 is the teaching of Rabelais ; this is the " holy gospel " 
 he came to preach, " although people scoffed " ; and 
 
 77
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 this is why his work, in which filth rudely blends to 
 the pollution of almost everything which he touches, 
 is the completest expression we have from the very 
 reason that it is the most confused of the spirit of the 
 Renaissance. We must not forget that the obscene 
 works of Jules Romain issued from the school of 
 Raphael himself. 
 
 The Protestants made no mistake about it, neither 
 Luther, nor especially Calvin ; and in this respect no 
 greater error could be committed than to endeavour 
 to reconcile, or rather join them, in a kind of sym- 
 pathetic indifference, with those who were their worst 
 enemies. As if to this very day the hatred of the 
 Renaissance was not plainly written on the bare 
 and melancholy walls of the Protestant church ! If 
 Luther had not seen with his eyes the much vaunted 
 splendour of the age of Leo X, which he called 
 the epoch of Roman infamy, and Paganism seated 
 on the pontifical throne, perhaps the Reformation, 
 which had begun with a " quarrel of monks," would 
 have ended obscurely in the in pace of a German or 
 Italian convent. And who does not know, too, that 
 what Calvin endeavoured to found at Geneva was a 
 republic of the just, where civil and political law, the 
 expression of Christian morality, was founded, like that 
 morality, on the dogma of original sin and predestina- 
 tion ? But what happened neither the one nor the 
 other had foreseen : I mean to say that, by arming 
 one half of Christianity against the other, they threw 
 
 78
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 suspicion on the use of liberty, morality, and religion 
 for temporal ends, they compromised the cause they 
 had defended in deplorable and bloody quarrels, and, 
 thanks to their disputes with Catholicism, it was not 
 morality that righted itself, but it was indifference, 
 scepticism, and epicureanism that gained. 
 
 At the end of the century, indeed, the language 
 of Montaigne is identical with that of Rabelais : 
 
 "I have taken," he said, "for my regard this 
 ancient precept, very rawly and simply, that "We 
 cannot err in following Nature " : and that the 
 sovereign document is, for a man to conform him- 
 self to her. / have not, as Socrates, by the power 
 and virtue of reason, corrected my natural complexions, 
 nor by art hindered mine inclination. Look how I 
 came into the world, so I go on ; I strive with 
 nothing. . . . Shall I say thus much by the way ? 
 That I see a certain image of bookish or scholastical 
 ' prudhomiej only which is in a manner in use amongst 
 us, held and reputed in greater esteem than it deserveth, 
 and which is but a servant unto precepts, brought under 
 by hope and constrained by fear? I love it such as 
 laws and religions make not, but over -make and 
 authorise ; that they may be perceived to have where- 
 with to uphold herself without other aid: sprung up 
 in us of her own proper roots, by and from the seed 
 of universal reason, imprinted in every man that is 
 not unnatural." (Essays, in. 12.)* 
 
 * Florio's translation. 
 
 79
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 In a short time these will be the words of the 
 Cleantes, Philintes, and Aristes of our Moliere. 
 Moreover, we may now note that they will not 
 go so far as Montaigne, and that none of them 
 will dare to say as boldly as the author of the 
 Essays : 
 
 " Nature hath like a kind mother observed this, 
 that such actions as she for our necessities hath 
 enjoined unto us, should also be voluptuous unto 
 us. And doth not only by reason but also by 
 appetite invite us unto them : it were injustice to 
 corrupt her rules. When I behold Caesar and 
 Alexander in the thickest of their wondrous great 
 labours, so absolutely to enjoy human and corporal 
 pleasures, / say not, that they release thereby their 
 mind, but rather strengthen the same , submitting by 
 vigour of courage their violent occupation and 
 laborious thoughts to the customary use of ordinary 
 life." (Essays, in. 13.)* 
 
 It is a hundred and fifty years before this cynical 
 language is spoken again, not before Helvetius, 
 Diderot, and the Baron d'Holbach. 
 
 For the seventeenth century clearly saw the danger; 
 and indeed all the characteristics of its earliest years can- 
 not be understood or reduced to unity but by this by 
 the concern which it felt at the spread of these doctrines, 
 by the horror of the consequences which it saw were sure 
 to follow, and by the effort which it made to stop them. 
 
 * Florio's translation. 
 80
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 What did the early Precieuses these Precieuses 
 whom Moliere was to mock so cruelly, and whose very 
 virtues he was to ridicule an Arthenice and Sapho, a 
 Cathos and Madelon, what did they do, in purifying 
 the language, but try to make it again respect itself 
 and its readers ? Against this dissoluteness of manners 
 which is to be seen everywhere, in the Moyen de Par- 
 venir or the Parnasse satyrlque and of which we must 
 frankly admit that Henry IV himself from his throne 
 set an example as scandalous, though in a very different 
 way, as Louis XIV, the cultured folk of the Hotel 
 de Rambouillet endeavoured to raise their opposition. 
 Men like Francois de Sales and Berulle come to their 
 aid from every quarter. Against libertines of the 
 type of Theophile or Des Barreaux there is formed 
 a coalition of all those who do not believe that virtue 
 can, as Montaigne said, " uphold herself without other 
 aid," or, as Rabelais said, that " men that are free . . 
 are naturally goaded to virtuous actions." Priests of the 
 Oratory and Nuns of the Visitation, Carmelites, Friars 
 of Saint John, Franciscan Sisters, it was then, between 
 1610 and 1625, that all these orders are founded or 
 established in France. It was then also that Mother 
 Angelique reforms Port-Royal, that Saint-Cyran and 
 Jansen begin to spread and preach the doctrines of 
 Saint Augustine, that the very ethics of the Jesuits, 
 still too worldly, too accommodating, or too political, 
 are forced to return to the source of Christianity and 
 become, if I may say so, more rigid and extreme.
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 The battle is now fought all along the line, and, from this 
 time onwards, the history of ideas in the seventeenth 
 century is no more than the history of the long com- 
 bat of Jansenism against Cartesian rationalism on the 
 one hand, and against " libertinism " on the other 
 for this is what the philosophy of nature was then 
 called. 
 
 But what is this philosophy of nature ? And can 
 it be really called a philosophy ? And who are the 
 " libertines " ? And when Mersenne, for example, in 
 an oft-cited fragment, gives the number of atheists at 
 not less than fifty thousand for Paris alone, is he not 
 to be suspected of a little imagination, to begin with, 
 for how did he count them ? and of a good deal 
 of exaggeration ? Is a man an "atheist " for gambling 
 or running after women, or for not keeping Lent, or 
 for burning " a piece of the true Cross " ? Who 
 knows the secrets of conscience ? And, even in the 
 soul of a Theophile or a Des Barreaux, who knows, 
 or ever can know, the latent faith which still mingles 
 with the outer blusterings of impiety ? 
 
 Nobody, assuredly. But, instead of the secrets of 
 their hearts, we know at least the principles which 
 they openly confess, and here are some of them. 
 " Men of wit," they say, " believe in God only from 
 convenience, and as a maxim of State." They say 
 also that " all things are led and governed by Destiny, 
 which is irrevocable, infallible, necessary, and inevit- 
 able for all men, no matter what they do." And they 
 
 82
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 say too that " there is no other divinity or sovereign 
 power in the world than nature, which must be satisfied 
 in everything, without refusing to our body or our 
 minds what they desire of us in the exercise of their 
 power or natural faculties." 
 
 No matter what name they be known by, if our 
 " libertines " of the seventeenth century rally round 
 these principles, their doctrines, we may say, were 
 already those of our modern determinists, naturalists, 
 or materalists. They aimed at something more than 
 gaining the liberty of a life of pleasure. And though 
 our ideas on God, Destiny, or Nature are now 
 more precise, and are enriched by all the scientific 
 discoveries of almost three hundred years, they are no 
 more deeply or securely fixed in our minds. The 
 formulae alone have varied and that is something 
 but not the substance or the essentials. 
 
 II 
 MOLIERE'S EARLY WORK 
 
 To have escaped from the influence of the ideas of his 
 time and to have adhered neither to one party nor the 
 other, in a century which was much more contentious 
 than ours and had more readily the courage of its 
 opinions, Moliere would have to have been born in 
 
 83
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 different circumstances, to have received from his 
 family and surroundings a different education, and to 
 have served a different apprenticeship in the work of 
 real life. But he was a bourgeois of Paris, like 
 Boileau and Voltaire and a bourgeois in a small 
 way, the son of Jean Poquelin, upholsterer and if 
 ever Moliere heard the names of a Saint-Cyran or 
 an Arnauld mentioned in his father's house, we may 
 doubt if it was with the accent of respect, or even 
 of sympathy. 
 
 They asked of mortal men too great perfection. 
 
 I mean to say that they preached virtues which 
 the Parisian bourgeois, the friend of easy pleasures, 
 did not relish any more then than now. And, though 
 bourgeois themselves, they were still too much of 
 gentlemen for all these little upholsterers, linen- 
 drapers, feather-dressers, or men of odd jobs : Jansenism 
 in the seventeenth century was always somewhat 
 aristocratic. I may be allowed to refer the reader, on 
 the question of Moliere's early education his secular, 
 as well as his home education and his indebtedness 
 to Gassendi, to the recent works, so conscientious and 
 learned, of M. Louis Moland, M. Gustave Larroumet, 
 and M. Paul Mesnard. 
 
 In truth, whatever tradition may say, it cannot be 
 proved that Moliere ever heard Gassendi or knew 
 him well. But it may suffice that on leaving the 
 College de Clermont the young Poquelin, we know
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 not why, formed a friendship with the young Chapelle, 
 and that he was thus enabled to visit the house of 
 Lhuillier, the natural father of Chapelle, much more 
 ribald still and dissolute than his drunken son. " I 
 saw somewhere a print of Rabelais," says Tallemant 
 des Reaux, " which was as like Lhuillier as two peas, 
 for he had the mean and scoffing face of Lhuillier." 
 A mere likeness to Rabelais does not necessarily imply 
 anything. Unfortunately some other details which 
 Tallemant adds give or would give, if only we 
 could transcribe them a much worse idea of his 
 character. And if we were to dare yet to add what 
 his friend Nicolas Bouchard has said of him, in his 
 Confessions d'un Bourgeois de Paris, we would then be 
 able to judge in what school, in his twentieth year, 
 Moliere learned the life of the young man. " These 
 confessions of a very wretched man," said Paulin Paris 
 in his excellent edition of the Historiettes, " show up 
 in a very unfavourable light the little meetings of 
 Lhuillier, Du Puys, Gassendi, and other famous people. 
 Excepting the passion and the frenzy, so to speak, of 
 proselytism, these men were not so much behind the 
 philosophical ideas of the following century" It is 
 not we who make him say so, and it is almost forty 
 years since those lines were written ! If Moliere 
 learned any lessons in philosophy in the company of 
 these debauchees and libertines, they must have been 
 singularly like those which the " petit Arouet " was 
 to receive in his turn from old Ninon de Lenclos 
 
 85
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 and the frequenters of the society of the Temple. Is 
 it astonishing that they bore the same fruits ? Or, 
 if this is overstating the case, what more natural than 
 that the examples of indifference or unconcern which 
 Moliere had seen while still a child in the house of the 
 upholsterer Poquelin may have prepared him to profit 
 from the lessons of "libertinism" which he received 
 in the house of councillor Lhuillier ? 
 
 The lessons which he gave himself could not, of 
 course, but confirm the former. Our comedians 
 nowadays are the " notaries of art," as has been so well 
 said ; and, no matter how little taste they may show, 
 nothing prevents them joining to the exercise of 
 their profession all the bourgeois virtues, and being 
 good sons, good husbands, good fathers, and all the 
 rest. It was otherwise at the time of Moliere. The 
 comedian lived on the margin of society, and claimed 
 the benefits of an irregularity whose annoyances and 
 humiliations he felt daily : and if his ways were not 
 altogether those of a rebel, they were at least those of 
 an independent man, who hardly reckoned with the 
 prejudices of "the wife of the bailie or the wife of the 
 assessor." 
 
 The life of a bohemian, the adventurous existence 
 of the travelling comedian, for so he was called, meet- 
 ing with adventures all along his lengthy route, play- 
 ing kings in a barn, at Pezenas or Fontenay-le-Comte, 
 travelling in a waggon, when not on foot, in the 
 
 costume of his character, now dressed as a tyrant 
 
 86
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 and now as a nurse, let us remember that it was this 
 life which Moliere led for more than twelve years. 
 Let us call to mind the Roman comlque. Picture 
 the arrival in a town, at Narbonne or Toulouse, 
 on a hot summer afternoon, the youngsters running 
 to see the " showmen " pass, the curious and distrust- 
 ful glance of the artisan at the door of his shop or of 
 the housewife at her window ; and in the evening, the 
 nights at the inn, the mixed collection of people, the 
 loud mirth of the company at their table feasting on 
 a big day's drawing ; or even on the following day, 
 if they have been pelted with potatoes, as some- 
 times happened, their flight at early morning, with 
 violent rage in their hearts, showing itself in re- 
 ciprocal recriminations ; and often, too, the uncer- 
 tainty as to where they were to sleep and on what 
 to make their supper. Thus passed the youth of 
 Moliere ; too fortunate when the disdain of these 
 country folk, whom he amused for half-a-crown, did 
 not go the length of outrage, and worthy of respect, 
 it must be said, for not having borne them any further 
 grudge, if certain inoffensive witticisms on Limoges 
 in his Monsieur de Pourceaugnac and the caricatures of 
 the Comtesse d' Escarbagnas are, as they seem to be, his 
 almost unique vengeance. 
 
 But if he believed in few things, and if, on leaving 
 Paris, he carried away with him few illusions, he 
 would surely not have brought them back with him 
 from his wanderings through the country ! If, in 
 
 87
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 his twentieth year, he had yielded unawares to the 
 simple attractions of pleasure, he had the time, during 
 these twelve years, to see, to compare, and to reflect. 
 And the comedian who returned to Paris, in 1658, 
 never to leave it again, was not then an ordinary 
 " libertine " or a vulgar " epicurean." He had his ideas, 
 he had his philosophy, he had his plans in reserve ; and 
 all those whom he, like Rabelais before him, would 
 have readily treated as "eavesdropping dissemblers, 
 church vermin, and false zealots," were not slow to 
 recognise it. 
 
 I shall pass rapidly over his first pieces : UEtourdi, 
 Le Depit amoureux, Les Precieuses ridicules^ Sganaret/e, 
 UEcole des Mans. Not that, if we look at them 
 closely, we can fail to see the thought of Moliere and 
 the liberty of his banter already giving promise of 
 greater boldness. If the Depit amour eux and the Etourdi 
 are only canvases in the Italian manner, on which 
 Moliere is content to trick out the arabesques of his 
 fancy more brilliant, more lively, more witty too 
 perhaps, at that time while youth had not yet left him, 
 than in the ceremony of the Bourgeois Gentilhomme 
 or the Malade imaginaire the Precieuses ridicules and 
 the Ecole des Maris are already a spirited and a well- 
 ordered attack on all those who designed, as we 
 have said, to disguise or deck out nature. Their 
 very succession seems to me instructive. Instead of 
 asking M. de Mascarille simply to sit down, perhaps 
 you say to him, with the Misses Gorgibus, " Satisfy the
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 desire which this chair has to embrace you " ? Then 
 you are quite ridiculous, as you are not at all natural. 
 You are, however, only ridiculous. But, instead of 
 overstraining nature and making her, if possible, as 
 ridiculous as we are, perhaps we aim at forcing, 
 cramping, and regulating her ? Let us be on our 
 guard. We meet the fate of the Sganarelle of the 
 Ecole des Marls and his Isabelle, and we are not 
 only ridiculous, but begin to be dull, harsh, and 
 offensive. First proof or first sketch of Arnolphe, 
 this Sganarelle differs from him only in being treated 
 less seriously, in the style of Scarron, if I may say so, 
 rather than in the great style of Moliere. Now let 
 us come to Arnolphe, and speak of the Ecole des 
 Femmes. It is the first in date of the great comedies 
 of Moliere, that which first placed him in the position 
 he still continues to occupy alone, and, because its 
 intrigue is more amusing, its language more frank, 
 and its philosophy more optimistic, I know several 
 of his devotees who will even now have it to be 
 his masterpiece. 
 
 Recently we have heard the amusing proposal that 
 we should talk of the Ecole des Femmes as if Moliere 
 had entitled it the Suite de l^Ecole des Marls. It is 
 equally probable that if the Misanthrope was entitled 
 the Manage fait et defait we would not see in it what 
 we do see, and what we have at least the right to wish 
 to see, no more than in Tartufe which should rather 
 
 have been called the Imposteur if Moliere had entitled 
 
 89
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 it, for example, Une Famille au temps de Louis XIV. 
 This is a curious way of reasoning. To justify Bos- 
 suet from the reproaches made against his Discours 
 sur FHistoire universelle, may we not also propose to 
 speak of it as if he had entitled it Observations sommaires 
 sur r Histoire de quelques Peuples anciem ! But titles 
 which have no value when the authors have not cared 
 to give them, as for example Monsieur de Pourceaugnac, 
 have a value when, like the Ecole des Femmes^ they 
 signify something of themselves ; and I am no doubt 
 very naive to say so, but it is worth saying since 
 there are some who hold an opposite opinion. 
 
 What then is the " school for wives " according to 
 Moliere, and what is the lesson to be derived from 
 his comedy ? There is nothing more evident. The 
 " school for wives " is love, or rather it is nature ; 
 and the lesson, which is plain enough, is that nature 
 alone will be always stronger than all we can do to 
 thwart its wish. Brought up " in a small convent, far 
 from all experience," Agnes has nothing for her but to 
 be youth, love, and nature. It even seems that there 
 is a certain element of unfeelingness in her, not to 
 say of simple perverseness, which I should mistrust 
 if only I was Horace ! More natural and less learned, 
 less lively, too, than the Isabella of the Ecole des Marh, 
 she has not and never will have the playful grace of the 
 Henriette of the Femmes savantes. As for Arnolphe, 
 Moliere himself has been careful to inform us, in 
 
 speaking of him, " that it is not incompatible for a 
 
 90
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 person to be ridiculous in certain things and an honest 
 man in others." He is not, moreover, an old man, as 
 he seems generally to be imagined, and many people 
 believe themselves young at his age. What he has 
 against him is, then, merely his wish to force nature, and 
 he is foolish, ridiculous, and contemptible only in this 
 point. I say nothing of Horace : among the lovers of 
 Moliere's repertoire, there is none more insignificant, 
 whose merit more strictly reduces itself to that of his 
 " flaxen peruke," who is, moreover, more worthy of 
 Agnes. He is young like her, as he is simple, and like 
 her he is nature itself. What could be clearer ? And 
 without passing the limits of his art, without preach- 
 ing on the stage, how could Moliere have told us that 
 we do not change nature in her essence j that who- 
 ever tries to pays for it dearly ; and that conse- 
 quently the beginning of all our evils is the desire to 
 make the attempt. 
 
 For, as to those who refuse this interpretation of the 
 Ecole des Femmes, I should be curious to know how 
 they explain the effect it produced and the outburst 
 of resentment which followed. Would the very in- 
 decent double meaning of the ribbon scene and the 
 joking about "hell's caldrons" have been sufficient? 
 Yes, if you will, and on the condition that they signify 
 something else and more than they really do. But, in 
 reality, what contemporaries thought was that comedy, 
 which had, till then, with the Corneilles, Scarron, 
 and Quinault, confined itself to providing amusement 
 
 91
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 by devices in turn ludicrous and romantic, had now, 
 with Moliere, puffed itself up, if I may say so, with 
 quite another ambition, and had, for the first time, in 
 the Ecole des Femmes^ touched indirectly on the great 
 question which then divided men's minds. They re- 
 cognised in the Ecole des Femmes an aim which went 
 further. It seemed to them in short that this poet 
 was overstepping his limits, that he was extending the 
 sphere of his art even to those objects to which it 
 should remain a stranger, and that he was haughtily 
 leaving behind his role of "public entertainer." They 
 endeavoured to silence him. Moliere replied to them 
 one after the other with the Critique de I'Ecole des 
 Sj the Impromptu de Versailles, and Tartufe. 
 
 Ill 
 
 THE QUESTION OF TARTUFE 
 
 As he had written the Critique de F Ecole des Femmes 
 in answer to the pedants and prudes and people like 
 his Lysidas and Climene who "censured his finest 
 work," as he had written the Impromptu de Versailles 
 to avenge himself on the comedians of the Hotel de 
 Bourgogne, who did not scruple to attack even his 
 
 private life, so Moliere seems at first to have thought 
 
 92
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 of Tartufe only to reply to those, and at the same 
 time to carry fire and sword into their camp, who 
 accused him of indecency and, above all, of impiety 
 in his Ecole des Femmes. 
 
 This is what chronology proves. But since Tartufe 
 took possession of the stage only in 1669, and since, 
 even now, it is separated, in many editions of Moliere, 
 from the Ecole des Femmes by Don Juan, which is of 
 the year 1665, by the Misanthrope, which is of 1666, 
 by the Medecin malgre lui and Melicerte, the con- 
 tinuity of inspiration which connects the two master- 
 pieces of the work of Moliere escapes our view at 
 first, and we do not see, or we forget, that, in the 
 history of the public life of Moliere, Tartufe is first 
 and foremost a reply and an attack. To make no 
 mistake about it, it is sufficient to remember that, 
 before appearing for the first time in the month of 
 May 1664, Tartufe was separated from the Ecole des 
 Femmes, which was represented for the first time in 
 the winter of 1662, really by an interval of only 
 fifteen or sixteen months the time necessary to 
 write it ! and by two or three pieces, which are 
 precisely the Critique de VEcole des Femmes, the Im- 
 promptu de Versailles, and the Manage force. If the 
 first two are sufficiently well known, we must say 
 of the third that Moliere doubtless saw in it as 
 it was expressly written for the king, and in haste 
 a means of paying his court and of ranging on his 
 side the all-powerful master on whom his adversaries 
 
 93
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 depended as well as he. A clever courtier indeed 
 was Moliere ; this is a point we must remember ; 
 and poor Corneille himself has no humbler dedica- 
 tion than that of the Ecole des Marls to the king's 
 brother : " There is nothing so superb as the name 
 I put at the head of this book, and nothing meaner 
 than that which it contains." 
 
 This preliminary remark may already throw some 
 light on the true meaning of Tartufe and Moliere's 
 intentions. It shows at least that Tartufe very 
 different in this respect from Amphitryon^ for example, 
 is an act as much as a work : a work of combat, 
 as we would now say, and an act of declared hostility. 
 But against whom ? This is the point. For it is no 
 use repeating that Moliere himself declared that it 
 was only against " false coiners of devotion " : I shall 
 first reply that, being himself a party in the case, 
 his evidence cannot be received ; and, should it be re- 
 ceived, I would add that there would still be excellent 
 reasons, if not for disbelieving it, yet for acting as 
 if we did disbelieve it. I may be permitted to 
 give only one, that, without running the almost 
 inevitable risk of losing the good graces of the 
 king, of seeing his company broken up and his 
 theatre closed, of compromising, in short, his peace 
 and his liberty, Moliere could not have spoken 
 otherwise. Do you see him glorying in having 
 openly attacked religion ? Voltaire even, in the 
 following century, could hardly dare to do this : and 
 
 94
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 I know some people even in our days who attack it, 
 and do not wish it to be known. And yet they have 
 no Bastille to fear ! So we need not pay much 
 attention to such statements : for if Moliere, when 
 he professed his esteem and his respect for the truly 
 pious, said one thing "while he thought another," 
 and if " that is called lying " let us have no fear of 
 the word he lied. Perhaps, too, he did not tell the 
 truth when, in the preface to his Precieuses, he said 
 he had attacked only the false Precieuses, when, like- 
 wise, in the Critique de FEcole des Femmes, he imputed 
 the double meaning of the ribbon scene to the defiling 
 imagination of those who had pretended to be shocked 
 by it ? No more let us pay any attention to the 
 arguments which are drawn from a certain theory 
 of Moliere's intentions ; let us remember rather that 
 what is to be cleared up is precisely the nature of 
 these intentions ; and, taking Tartufe in its place in 
 history, let us see where, between 1650 and 1664, 
 were these hypocrites and false religionists, what 
 were the great dangers with which they threatened 
 society, and what were their names ? 
 
 One always reasons as if there was only one 
 seventeenth century, identical with itself in all the 
 duration of the hundred years of its course, and as if 
 Tartufe was contemporary with the reign of Madame 
 de Maintenon, and not with the time when the La 
 Vallieres and Montespans were in favour ! But in this 
 court where Louis XIV, barely emancipated from the 
 
 95
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 tutelage of his mother, turned his caprice from sultana 
 to sultana, and let his covetousness wander even to his 
 brother's wife ; where around him every man and 
 woman, young and ardent like him, on his example 
 thought only of gallantry, love, and sensuality ; where 
 the severe Colbert even made himself the minister as 
 much of the pleasures as of the business of his master, 
 there were not, there could not be, any hypocrites 
 or false religionists, from the simple reason that 
 devotion there led nobody to anything ; that it would 
 have been not only useless, but imprudent and danger- 
 ous, to feign devotion ; and that, unless under the 
 obligation of his business of confessor or preacher, a 
 man would have been suspected, if he did not imitate 
 the conduct of his prince, of censuring it. Let us 
 remember, in this connection, the fate of Madame 
 de Navailles, who was driven from the court and 
 whose husband was deprived of all his offices for 
 having walled up the door which put the apartment 
 of Louis XIV in communication with the chamber of 
 the lady's-maids. This is all the profit that a man of 
 hypocritical or sincere piety could hope to gain from 
 devotion, and I leave it to the reader to think if there 
 were many who were eager for it. Hypocrisy is not one 
 of those vices which are self-originated, and certainly 
 not one of those which bring their own gratification, as 
 avarice, ambition, or debauchery. It does not live for 
 its wry mouth, like Harpagon by the sight of his gold. 
 
 And it has no reason or cause for existence, but in so 
 
 96
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 far as it leads to certain solid satisfactions to fortune, 
 honour, and reputation. 
 
 But if there were no people of false piety at the 
 court of the young Louis XIV, there were others of 
 true piety, who saddened at the sight of this other 
 kind of " libertinism " ; and I do not suppose that we 
 dispute them the right to have been sincerely sad and 
 more than sad, to have been scandalised since, after 
 a lapse of two hundred years, we still allow it, in their 
 Histories of France, to the grave Henri Martin and the 
 lyrical Michelet. And these truly pious people were 
 not called the Abbe de Pons, or the Abbe Roquette, 
 or the Sieur Charpy de Sainte-Croix, as the annotators 
 or commentators of Tartufe repeat ad nauseam; they 
 were of higher origin, of another class, and more 
 troublesome and irksome to the king himself and to 
 Moliere. First, there was the queen mother, Anne 
 of Austria, the secret witness of the tears of the young 
 queen Marie-Therese, who feared to see Louis XIV 
 endanger, by the hasards of his easy love affairs, his 
 health especially, the glory of his reign in this world, 
 and his safety in the next. There was the Prince 
 de Conti from whom Moliere is usually said to have 
 taken the model and the measure of his Don Juan 
 and there was his sister, the Duchesse de Longueville, 
 both now converted, and whose entire sincerity 
 cannot, for any reason that I know, be doubted. 
 There was also that eloquent abbe who began to 
 preach, or rather to thunder, in the pulpits of Paris,
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 against The love of worldly pleasures the future 
 Bishop of Condom and of Meaux, the future teacher 
 of the Dauphin till the time came for him to write his 
 Maxlmes sur la Comedie. And, in the town as at the 
 court, there were the Jansenists, a Desmares and a 
 Singlin, the people of Port-Royal, those of the "party," 
 as was then said ; there was the honest and gentle 
 Nicole, there was Arnauld, there was this austere and 
 passionate Christian who used what strength was left 
 him to scrawl the fragments of his book of Pensees 
 there was Pascal ; and I have named only the most 
 important. 
 
 Those were the enemies or the adversaries of 
 Moliere, the people of true and not of false piety, 
 those whom the brilliancy of the success of the Ecole 
 des Femmes had made to murmur, and those above 
 all whose indignation and credit threatened or could 
 threaten the liberty of his art. From every sort of 
 motive Moliere feared that the pious " the good and 
 truly pious, whom we ought to follow " might some 
 day restrain the vivacity of this satire, if even they did 
 not go the length of quenching it. 
 
 "I await respectfully the judgment which your 
 Majesty will deign to pronounce on this matter"-- so 
 may be read in the second Placet relating to Tartufe, 
 that of 1667, "but certain it is that I must no longer 
 think of making comedies if the Tartufes gain the 
 day, for they will claim the right thereby of persecut- 
 ing me more than ever, and will try to find something
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 to cavil at even in the most innocent things that 
 will come from my pen." We read likewise in the 
 triumphant preface of 1669: "Either the comedy 
 of Tartufe must be approved, or all comedies in 
 general must be condemned. . . . This is what 
 people have insisted on so furiously of late, and 
 never were they more incensed against the theatre." 
 
 Therein lay the danger for Moliere. He doubted, 
 instinctively, that Jansenism might do for the drama 
 what Puritanism had done in England. And as 
 for us, we must undoubtedly congratulate ourselves 
 that Jansenism did not succeed, but we must not 
 deny that Moliere, in writing Tartufe^ attacked 
 Jansenism, and in Jansenism, as we shall now see, 
 religion itself. 
 
 This would never be doubted but for the accepted 
 custom of considering in Tartufe only Tartufe him- 
 self; and when Tartufe only is considered there is 
 no trouble in showing that he really is Tartufe 
 and a hypocrite. "The traitor is to be plainly 
 seen through his mask ; he is recognised at once 
 in his true colours ; and the rolling of his eyes 
 and his honeyed tones impose" only on Madame 
 Pernelle, an old fool, and her son Orgon. Tartufe 
 sweats hypocrisy : all the meaner lusts are con- 
 centrated in him as it were to make him a monster 
 of moral deformity ; however comic he be, he in- 
 spires fear, and disgust perhaps even more than 
 fear ; to touch him we would wish a pair of tongs ; 
 
 99
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 and on meeting him on our way we would take 
 care not to run up against him, for fear of 
 befouling ourselves. The intention here is manifest 
 beyond doubt. Tartufe is the satire or caricature 
 of hypocrisy ; the expressions he uses could not 
 for a moment deceive anybody ; and if one were 
 to dare to offer any criticism on Moliere, it 
 would be, with La Bruyere, that he has painted 
 him in too crude colours. But what is to be made 
 of the other characters, and of Orgon in particular, 
 who is undoubtedly of distinct importance, for we 
 must remember that it was not the character of 
 Tartufe, but of Orgon, which Moliere interpreted 
 in his piece, just as he acted Arnolphe in the Ecole 
 des Femmes, Alceste in the Misanthrope^ and Harpagon 
 in the Avare? And it is really on Orgon, as much 
 as on Tartufe, that the whole piece turns ; it is he 
 who keeps the stage from the first act to the last, 
 while Tartufe appears only at the third ; and for a 
 clear understanding of affairs, it is from him con- 
 sequently, as much as from Tartufe, that we must 
 ask Moliere's secret. 
 
 Now Orgon was by no means a simpleton, and 
 Dorine, from the first act, took great care to tell us 
 so. " During our troubles he acted like a man of sense 
 and displayed some courage in the service of his 
 prince." His house was free and hospitable, and the 
 presence of a mother-in-law had brought neither dis- 
 order nor trouble. A good husband, a good father, a 
 
 100
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 good master was Orgon : he was also a good citizen. 
 A faithful and sure friend, he was chosen from among 
 twenty others to be entrusted with a matter on which 
 depended a friend's honour, liberty, and life. "But 
 since he has taken so strongly to Tartufe, he has 
 become a perfect dolt." That is to say, since he met 
 him, all his former good qualities had turned into as 
 many faults. Instead of being the indulgent husband 
 of a young wife, he had become indifferent and 
 crotchety ; the tender father had changed into a 
 domestic tyrant ; the man of honour into an unfaith- 
 ful guardian. What is this to say for Orgon is 
 sincere, his devotion is true, and not for a moment is 
 he made to appear as a dishonest man, and still less as 
 a hypocrite what is this to say but that as much as 
 he advances in devotion, so much does he advance 
 towards inhumanity ? Now, " he could see brother, 
 children, mother, and wife die, without troubling him- 
 self one whit," as he said while hitting his nail on 
 his teeth ; and Tartufe alone accomplished this work, 
 not the Tartufe, let it be understood, who covets his 
 wife while marrying his daughter, but the Tartufe 
 who can barely be seen, he whose lessons teach only, 
 according to the language of Christianity, no heed 
 of the things of this world, self-denial, and the pure 
 love of God. 
 
 These words put us on the track of what Moliere 
 attacks in religion ; the point is delicate enough, but 
 it is important to mark it. Is it dogma ? Cer- 
 
 101
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 tainly not, although for that matter he thinks, with 
 the " libertines " of his time, men like Des Barreaux or 
 Saint Pavin, that " to oblige a man of sense to believe 
 in all that is in the Bible, even to the tail of Tobias's 
 dog, is absolutely absurd." Perhaps it is the evils which 
 fanaticism has caused in history ? No again, although 
 this idea, which passes for Voltaire's, is already in 
 Lucretius, one of Moliere's favourite authors, under 
 whose shelter he could have hidden himself. 
 
 Tantum relligio potuit suadere malorum. 
 
 Or is it then morality, I mean to say the common 
 morality, the morality in vogue, the morality of honest 
 folk, that which is usually said to be sufficient for the 
 affairs of life ? No, not even that ! Moliere is an 
 honest fellow too, and much more an honest fellow 
 than his friend La Fontaine ; and if he never taught 
 anything very lofty or noble and this after all is 
 not the business of comedy he at least taught 
 nothing which, in appearance, is not wise and 
 reasonable. 
 
 But what he does not like in religion is that which 
 is opposed to his philosophy, the principle on which 
 all religion worthy of its name reposes, the constraint, 
 in short, which it places on us. While all around 
 him, not only the Jansenists, but the Jesuits also, are 
 teaching that human nature is corrupted in its sub- 
 stance ; that we carry in ourselves our most dangerous 
 
 enemies, and that these are our instincts ; that in 
 
 1 02
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 following their impulse we run of our own accord to 
 eternal damnation ; that there is no hope of safety but 
 in keeping a tight rein on them ; that the life of this 
 world has been given us not to be used, and that nature 
 is a perpetual source of combat, struggle, and victory 
 over herself, Moliere believes, as we have shown, 
 precisely the reverse. He believes " that we must 
 refuse our body or our senses nothing which they 
 desire of us in the exercise of their powers or natural 
 faculties " ; he believes that in following our instincts 
 we obey the wish of nature ; and, since we ourselves 
 form part of nature, he believes that one cannot tell 
 if there is more insolence and pride, or stupidity and 
 folly, in wishing to live not merely apart from her, 
 but in opposition to her. 
 
 Is the contrast not evident or even glaring ? Will 
 it not be granted that it is the moral constraint which 
 is the foundation of religion and had alone been so 
 since the appearance of Calvinism and Jansenism 
 which Moliere attacked in his Tartufe under the name 
 of hypocrisy ? Did he not wish to show us that in 
 teaching us to "set our hearts on nothing," religion 
 taught us to neglect, not so much ourselves as these 
 " human sentiments " which give life its value ? 
 Did he not wish to show, in short, that pious 
 people, whether sincere or hypocritical, are always 
 dangerous ; that in proposing for the efforts of men 
 an end which is unattainable, they dissuade them 
 
 from their true duties ; and that in preaching, as 
 
 103
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 they do, the contempt and dread of this world, 
 they turn us from the object of life, which is 
 first of all to live ? 
 
 Here it is, I know, that the sayings of Cleante are 
 appealed to : " There is false devotion as there is false 
 bravery : and as we never find that the truly brave 
 are those who make much noise where honour leads 
 them, so the good and truly pious, in whose footsteps 
 we should follow, are not those who pull so many 
 long faces." But, to appeal to these lines, it would 
 first be necessary to show that they, and the speeches 
 of Cleante generally, are the expression of the true 
 thought of Moliere. Now this cannot be, no more 
 than Moliere can be held answerable for the Alceste or 
 the Philinte of his Misanthrope ; and when, too, the 
 Chrysalde of the Ecole des Femmes is mentioned in this 
 connection, we forget, if this good fellow really spoke 
 in the name of Moliere, what is the strange advice 
 which Moliere would thus have given us, and that it 
 would justify the most violent passages of the Maximes 
 sur la Comkdie. 
 
 Indeed the " raisonneurs " of his plays do not act 
 the part of the chorus of the ancient comedy ; they 
 express a part of his thought only, that which he 
 believes most in accordance with the prejudices of 
 his public ; and their speeches are but a bait for the 
 pit. And so what is the distinction Cleante en- 
 deavours to establish between the sincere and the 
 
 hypocritical in religion ? The hypocritical, to him, 
 
 104
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 are all those who make a show, if I may say so, who 
 act openly in some way or other, who do not conceal 
 their devoutness as a weakness or a crime. But the 
 sign of the sincere is to show no devoutness, to be 
 content to be devout in themselves, and, provided 
 they live a good life, to let others live as they 
 wish. In other terms still, the mark of true piety, 
 for Cleante, is to be concerned only with piety. 
 As soon as religion aims at raising itself into a guide 
 for life, he begins to suspect it, as he also says, of 
 ostentation and insincerity. And this is why, were 
 a new demonstration needed of Moliere's intentions, 
 it would be found in the speeches and role of that 
 character whom we are told to consider his interpreter. 
 So had he really wished to shelter his Tartufe from 
 malevolent interpretations, I shall not have the im- 
 pertinence to say how he ought to have set about it, 
 but it is not Cleante whom he would have chosen 
 to speak in his name ; it is Elmire, the wife of Orgon, 
 whose tractable and sincere devotion he would have 
 opposed to the devotion, sincere too, but extravagant, 
 of her booby of a husband. It is she, since he has 
 entrusted her with unmasking Tartufe, whom he 
 would likewise have entrusted with expressing his 
 respect, for these sentiments of which the language 
 of Tartufe is only a sacrilegious parody, she, and 
 not Cleante, who takes no part in the action, who 
 speaks only behind the scenes, and who could easily 
 be taken out of the piece without being missed. 
 
 105
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 So at least has he done in the Misanthrope^ where 
 the sincere Eliante decides between Alceste and 
 Philinte, and fills, between the coquettishness of 
 Celimene and the prudery of Arsinoe, the part of 
 nature and truth. So also has he done in the 
 Bourgeois Gentilhomme, and so in the Femmes savantes, 
 where it is not the old fellow Chrysale, nor his 
 brother-in-law Ariste, nor even perhaps Clitandre, 
 but Henriette in especial, who incarnates his true 
 thought. 
 
 But the Elmire of Tartufe is only a pleasant 
 woman, to whom every religious idea may be said 
 to appear a stranger, who cannot find any of the 
 necessary words to reply to the gross declaration of 
 Tartufe. " Others would perhaps take it in a differ- 
 ent fashion ; but she wishes to show her discretion " ; 
 and since, moreover, her virtue is not the less unim- 
 peachable for it, what is this to say but that by 
 nature "men that are free have an instinct and spur 
 that prompteth them unto virtuous actions, and with- 
 draws them from vice"? In her difficult situation 
 as the young wife of an old husband, as the mother- 
 in-law of a grown-up girl and a grown-up man, to 
 avoid giving any handle to slander and to remain 
 thoroughly honest, Elmire had only to follow her 
 nature, and had not the least need of correcting 
 or conquering it, or even of trying to bring it to 
 perfection. 
 
 Contemporaries and their impressions must be 
 106
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 trusted made no mistake about it ; and five days 
 after the first performance of Tartufe, the Gazette de 
 France, in the issue of iyth May 1664, declared the 
 piece " absolutely injurious to religion, and capable 
 of producing very dangerous effects." Moliere, now 
 that he had the support of the king, showed his bold- 
 ness by replying with his Don yuan. He did better 
 still j he profited by the quarrels of his adversaries ; he 
 had the tact to persuade the Jesuits that his Tartufe 
 was a retort to the Lettres provinciales, and to per- 
 suade the Jansenists that it was the continuation 
 or redoubling of these Lettres. It is Racine who 
 tells us, in the oft - cited sentence, that " the 
 Jansenists said that the Jesuits were represented 
 in that comedy, but the Jesuks flattered themselves 
 that it was aimed at the Jansenists." And, indeed, 
 when Tartufe comes upon the stage, speaking the 
 verse : 
 
 Laurent, put by my hair-shirt and my scourge ; 
 
 as also when he says, in offering his handkerchief to 
 Dorine : 
 
 Go hide thy bosom, for I hate the sight, 
 
 it seems as if it were a Jansenist who spoke. On the 
 other hand, was it not the Jesuit who was represented 
 in his turn when Tartufe ardently explained to Elmire 
 " the art of rectifying the evil of the act by the purity 
 
 of the intention " ? 
 
 107
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 But the truth, which accords better with all we 
 have just seen, was that Moliere had made no distinc- 
 tion ; and the fact is that he mixed up every pious 
 person, every enemy of the theatre, every foe to 
 nature, one and all Jansenists and Jesuits, Escobar 
 and Arnauld, Pascal and Bourdaloue in his bold 
 derision of devotion, or rather of religion itself. If 
 there could ever have been any mistake, this was 
 recognised by all, when, in 1669, after many difficulties, 
 Tartufe at last appeared publicly on the stage. The 
 test of the representation decided the meaning of the 
 piece. Jesuits or Jansenists, each alike felt the attack ; 
 and this is forgotten by those who, even at this day, 
 can see in Tartufe only a machine directed against 
 Port-Royal : they forget that nobody was more in- 
 dignant at it, nor expressed more eloquently the 
 painful indignation of every truly pious person, than 
 Bourdaloue, in his Sermon sur FHypocrisie. 
 
 As to the question of discovering now if Moliere 
 deceived Louis XIV, and if the king, throughout the 
 whole affair, was the dupe of his valet-de-chambre 
 it may be pretty, but it is stupid ; and, to ask 
 it in these terms, is to be oneself the dupe of mere 
 words. For why should Moliere have deceived Louis 
 XIV, or why should Louis XIV have been want- 
 ing in discernment ? But we know, all the same, 
 that if the king did not see the danger, he suspected 
 it, since he hesitated for five years to allow the repre- 
 sentation of Tartufe; and Moliere, on his side, had 
 
 1 08
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 no occasion to deceive his master : he was uneasy 
 only about his own pleasures, and in the enemies 
 of the theatre he could see only the silent censors 
 of his own failings. 
 
 But, in this connection, has it not even been held 
 that Louis XIV commanded Tartufe of Moliere ? 
 Rapin says so in his curious Memoirs. What at least 
 is certain, is that religion, at all times, before being a 
 rule for the inner life, was for Louis XIV an affair 
 of State. Long after Tartufe, in the question of the 
 liberties of the Gallican Church, he was to have no 
 fear in threatening to drive it even to schism, if need 
 be, in order to bring about the triumph of his 
 religious policy. A power apart, he never let any 
 opportunity pass of making the representatives of 
 religion feel that his wish should remain always above 
 it. And if, from many reasons, we do not believe 
 that he occasioned Tartufe, everything allows us to 
 hold that, when Moliere gave him the opportunity, 
 he availed himself of it as a tool of government. 
 
 Whether they were sincere or hypocritical, Louis 
 always suspected these pious people of wishing to 
 impose on him a will other than his own, perhaps 
 even of aiming, like the Protestants hitherto, at form- 
 ing a party, a state within a state. After long hesita- 
 tion which he conceded chiefly on the entreaties of 
 his mother, or perhaps on those of the Archbishop 
 of Paris, M. de Perefixe, his old tutor, and M. de 
 
 Lamoignon he let Tartufe be acted. And knowing 
 
 109
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 that the piece was "likely to produce very strange 
 effects," he doubtless believed himself strong enough 
 to prevent things going further than he wished, but 
 he was the dupe of nobody ; or rather it is precisely 
 because he had measured the probable consequences 
 of the comedy that he ended by authorising its 
 representation. 
 
 Is this, moreover, not what is understood when he 
 is praised for " having gained on that day one of the 
 most glorious victories of his reign " ? For, other- 
 wise, what could be said, and for what could he be 
 praised ? Yet he is praised for having better under- 
 stood, in spite of fanatics, if there were any at his court, 
 the true interests of religion than all the people of 
 sincere and deep religion who were about him. It 
 was they who made the mistake in thinking them- 
 selves attacked and wounded by Tartufe. They did 
 not understand Moliere. In distinguishing false devo- 
 tion from the true, " the mask from the person," and 
 " the false money from the good," they did not see 
 the service which that " reforming comedy " rendered 
 to the cause of religion. But Louis XIV saw it, 
 since he was, as it were, outside of and above the 
 dispute ; he is praised for having had the courage to 
 join in it ; and we, to-day, pretend to see even better 
 what he saw so well. 
 
 Need I show the absurdity of this position, and that 
 of itself it could be an adequate interpretation to us of 
 
 the true intention of Moliere ? To c acquit " Tartttfe, 
 
 HO
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 it supposes, indeed, that where the Bossuets and Bour- 
 daloues saw nothing, it is we, dramatic critics and 
 lecturers in the Odeon, sons of Voltaire and of the 
 eighteenth century who make use of religion, when 
 we do make use of it, only on the day of our 
 marriage or burial, with the accompaniment of bari- 
 tones and sopranos it is we who know, who see 
 clearly, who can say exactly where religion ends and 
 hyprocrisy begins ! But if we were sincere, or rather 
 if we only took the trouble to think, we would realise 
 that what pleases us in Tartufe is just Moliere's effort 
 to separate morality from religion. We have no need 
 of a rule of good life, and certainly not of a rule outside 
 of and above nature : this is what Tartufe teaches clearly 
 enough, and this is what we like in the usual inter- 
 pretation. We are very pleased to see all those who 
 labour to correct their nature fall, like Orgon and 
 his mother, into absurdity and folly ; and, on the 
 other hand, we admire, in the honesty of Elmire and 
 the good sense of Dorine, the beauty of our indiffer- 
 ence. But it would be time also to recognise that 
 this is the opposite of religion. It would be time 
 above all to acknowledge that, if it is the opposite, the 
 truly pious people have the right to feel hurt by 
 Tartufe; that if the wound has not closed for two 
 hundred and fifty years, there is no doubt that it was 
 deep ; that the hand which made it meant to make 
 it ; that therefore it was not only false devotion, 
 
 but also true, which Moliere meant to attack ; and 
 HI
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 that it was for the gain of nature that he meant to 
 destroy the religion of effort and moral constraint. 
 
 IV 
 
 THE APOLOGY OF NATURE 
 
 THE last comedies of Moliere, far from belying this 
 definition of his philosophy, confirm it, and in the 
 author of George Dandm, the Bourgeois Gentilhommr, 
 or the Malade imaginaire, with all his genius, there 
 is still to be found the thought of the author of the 
 Ecole des Femmes. Consider only the place and role 
 not of the lady's-maids but the servants, which is not 
 at all the same thing of Nicole in the Bourgeois 
 Gentjlhomme^ or Martine, too, in the Femmes savantes, 
 true daughters of nature if there ever were, who do 
 not try to be witty, like Nerine in Monsieur de 
 Pourceaugnac or Dorine in Tartufe^ but whose artless 
 good sense escapes in proverbial sallies, and who make 
 us laugh, and are comic or droll, only by force of 
 being true. Does it not seem that they are there to 
 tell us that all that is known as instruction or educa- 
 tion is useless where nature is wanting, and cannot, 
 wherever she does exist, but thwart and falsify her ? 
 A single word from them is sufficient to disconcert 
 
 the novel science of M. Jourdain, or close the mouth 
 
 112
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 of the majestic Philaminte ; and this word they did 
 not search for ; it was suggested to them by 
 nature, that nature which their masters, in their 
 attempts at improvement, have, as we see, only 
 changed, disfigured, and corrupted. Or again, while 
 their masters sink, at each step, deeper in absurdities, 
 they attract us by, if I may say so, their simplicity, 
 their ignorance, and their naturalness. 
 
 Consider also the nature of the subjects and the 
 lesson to be drawn from them. In this respect, the 
 last of Moliere's comedies this Malade imaginaire 
 which has sometimes been wrongly placed, with Pour- 
 ceaugnac and Scapin, among his farces is perhaps the 
 most instructive. The cause has often been asked 
 of Moliere's strange animosity against medicine and 
 doctors. Were the Purgons and Diafoiruses then 
 also "one of the scourges of the century," and, 
 in ridiculing them on the stage with unmeasured 
 liberty of which there is not a single blow that does 
 not strike their successors did Moliere believe that 
 he was doing public health the same service as he did 
 morality in attacking the Tartufes ? Or shall we say 
 that, having himself proved the uselessness of their 
 prescriptions and the vanity of their art, he only re- 
 lieved himself at their expense from his Don yuan 
 to his Malade imaginaire of a valetudinarian's ran- 
 cour ! No ; but the truth is that in his eyes the 
 pretensions of doctors are no less absurd in their own 
 
 way than those of bigots. They also, like bigots, 
 
 H
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 believe themselves stronger and cleverer than nature, 
 and pride themselves, likewise, on restoring and rectify- 
 ing her, and, when necessary, on improving her. With 
 their remedies, like the others with their long faces, 
 they believe themselves clever enough to thwart her 
 workings ; they promise us, if we will only listen, to 
 give us back, with their bleedings, purgings, and bath- 
 ings, the powers which we have lost ; and this matter, 
 which, according to the expression of Lucretius, nature 
 incessantly demands for other uses, they flatter them- 
 selves on fixing, so to speak, and eternising in us. 
 Is this not actually what Beralde says so well in a 
 long scene of the Malade imaginaire, which is very 
 carefully abridged when acted, and from which, for 
 this reason, I take the liberty of reproducing a few 
 lines. 
 
 " If we leave nature alone," he says, " she recovers 
 gently of herself from the disorder into which she 
 has fallen " ; and as Argan replies that one may still 
 "assist this nature by certain things," he answers with 
 an insistence and harshness which are new : " Good 
 heavens, brother, these are mere ideas, with which we 
 love to beguile ourselves. When a doctor speaks to 
 you of aiding, assisting, and comforting nature, of 
 taking away from her what annoys her and giving 
 her what she lacks, of re-establishing her and putting 
 her in the full command of her functions ; when he 
 speaks to you of purifying the blood, of regulating 
 
 the bowels and the brain, of reducing the spleen, 
 
 114
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 of putting the chest in order, of strengthening the 
 heart, and of having secrets for prolonging life to an 
 advanced age, he is just telling you the romance of 
 medicine." 
 
 These words seem characteristic enough, and while 
 they throw light on the folly of Argan which is to 
 wish to be ill in spite of nature there is no doubt as 
 to where they lead us. If Moliere was no less bitter 
 and passionate against doctors than against pedants 
 and hypocrites, his reasons are the same, or rather 
 they are identical. He inveighs against all, no matter 
 what they be, a Purgon or a Trissotin, a Vadius or 
 a Tartufe, who do not follow nature, even when 
 their pretensions are not so extravagant as to aim 
 at combatting her. It is they who will fall ; and it 
 will be enough for Sganarelle or Toinette to don the 
 robe or wear the pointed bonnet to know as much 
 as all the Diafoiruses in the world, as the natural 
 honesty of Elmire was enough to outplay the plans 
 of Tartufe, as it was enough for Agnes to be in- 
 structed by nature to be able to outplay the politics 
 of Arnolphe. For, once again, they are not fools, 
 or, if we prefer Moliere's expression, they are not 
 "betes," these Arnolphes, Tartufes, and Purgons. 
 The last in particular "have, for the most part, a 
 good deal of classical learning, can speak in fine 
 Latin, can name all the diseases in Greek, and can 
 define and classify them." But, "as for curing them, 
 they know nothing about that," and never will know, 
 
 "5
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 and nature, cleverer than all their tricks, will of her- 
 self triumph in the long run. 
 
 This is the more surprising, considering that life 
 was not always pleasant for Moliere, and that he 
 lacked neither annoyances, nor humiliations, nor 
 troubles too of every sort. If his irregular and rov- 
 ing youth had been little more to him than a long 
 apprenticeship in the contempt which was then meted 
 out to the comedian, the favour even of Louis XIV 
 was unable to protect him, in his maturity, from the 
 usually refined but sometimes brutal insolence of the 
 people of the court, and still less from the grossness 
 of the pit. I say nothing of the difficulties or 
 quarrels he had, in his position of company manager, 
 with his rival comedians, with his actors, with his 
 authors, or, as author himself, with his adversaries 
 and detractors. Moliere's enemies did not injure 
 him : and after all, to fight as he did, in returning 
 blow for blow in replying to the Portrait du Pelntre 
 by the Impromptu de Versailles^ or to the prohibition 
 of Tartufe by the writing of Don yuan is a way to 
 feel the pleasure of living. 
 
 But, on the other hand, we know the worries of his 
 domestic life, and, without troubling to defend or 
 attack once more the virtue of Armande Bejart, we 
 know, and cannot doubt, what Moliere suffered by 
 having married her. Younger than him by twenty 
 years, coquettish, light-headed, fast perhaps, and 
 
 dragging after her a train of admirers whose " fair 
 
 116
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 hair, long nail, and falsetto voice had been able to 
 find the secret of charming her," Mdlle. Moliere taught 
 her husband the reality of these tortures of jealousy 
 and this humiliation of loving what is despised, which 
 he has himself so often expressed : 
 
 "Strange thing it is to love, and that men should 
 be subject to such weakness for these traitresses. . . . 
 Their mind is wicked, and their soul is weak ; there 
 is nothing more feeble, more stupid, more faithless ; 
 yet, despite all that, everything in the world is done 
 for these creatures ! " 
 
 How many times must Moliere have repeated to 
 himself these lines of his ILcole des Femmes ! Things 
 went so far as to lead to a separation, and, from 1666 
 to 1671, Moliere and his wife saw each other only at 
 the theatre. 
 
 Further, his illness began to add to all the causes for 
 his being discontented with others and with himself, 
 and, if it cannot be said that from this very year 1666 
 he began to die slowly, it is at least true that from 
 this time he lost, never to recover it again, the cheer- 
 ful good humour of his earlier years. Life, which up 
 to then had been " equally mingled with sweetness and 
 pleasure," had no longer for him " any moment of satis- 
 faction or sweetness " ; and, when he had to quit it, so 
 well was he prepared, that death doubtless came to him 
 as a deliverance. 
 
 This explains the characteristics of his last pieces 
 
 of some of them at least of this Malade imaginalre 
 
 117
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 of which we were speaking, of the Bourgeois Gentil- 
 homme^ and George Dandin. The satire is plainly 
 more harsh, the mirth more bitter, and, if I may 
 say so, the laughter more conclusive. Even the 
 import is different. 
 
 No doubt the question was to be treated differently 
 later, but has Rousseau himself shown up more 
 eloquently the iniquity in the differences of men's 
 circumstances than the author of George Dandin ? 
 For what would be more immoral than George 
 Dandin, if in this did not lie its true meaning and 
 its true lesson ? And has the author of Candide ever 
 treated "this beggarly life" more outrageously than 
 the author of the Malade Imaginaire? What do I 
 say, the author of Candide? It is the author of 
 Gulliver I should say ; it is of Swift that I think 
 every time I see the Malade Imaginaire acted, it is 
 of the bold, cynical, and violent character of his jest- 
 ing. Read and re-read the Malade imaginaire from 
 any point of view ; take all its characters one after 
 the other ; Argan himself, and Beline, and Angelique, 
 and M. Bonnefoi, and Toinette, and the Purgons, 
 and the Diafoiruses, even the little Louison, never did 
 Moliere, unless perhaps in his Avare, place together 
 on the stage a like collection of imbeciles or rogues ; 
 and never really still excepting his Avare did he 
 mark with stronger touch the stupidity and rascality 
 which is often hidden under the apparent regularity and 
 
 respectability of bourgeois virtue. As he was by birth 
 
 118
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 naturally melancholy, as has been remarked, we are 
 almost tempted to believe that his naturalism would 
 have ended, had he lived longer, by turning, as with 
 some of our contemporaries, to a sort of pessimism. 
 It is a curious mirth that shows itself in George 
 Dandin and the Malade imaginalre^ a scornful and un- 
 kind mirth, the mirth of those who force themselves 
 to laugh, from fear of being obliged to weep. 
 
 If however, amongst all this, the philosophy of 
 Moliere is, as we have seen, still present, and still the 
 same ; if he cannot keep from returning, between two 
 domestic scenes or two tiffs, to the vindication of 
 nature ; if he continues to scoff at those who wish to 
 encroach on the rights of this mother of all health, of 
 all wisdom, of all virtue, how must this philosophy 
 have been at his heart, and must he not have been 
 much more deeply imbued with it than he himself 
 believed ! Listen rather to the Angelique of George 
 Dandin : " With your permission, I would play with 
 the happy days which youth offers me, and take the 
 sweet liberties which age permits." This is still the 
 language of the Ecole des Femmes. Neither the ex- 
 periences of life nor the sorrows of his last years had 
 any effect on that. 
 
 How shall we best pursue what makes for pleasure ? 
 
 This is the cry of nature ; and when one knows 
 men, when one has judged them, when one has himself 
 
 experienced the vanity of things, how shall we cling 
 
 119
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 yet more closely to his principle ? Is it not then, 
 above all, that life seems good, and then, before she 
 escapes us, that we hasten to enjoy her ? So let 
 us follow nature. This is Moliere's rule of rules I 
 mean that which determines the others, and on which 
 they all necessarily hinge : and the end of this work 
 thus joins on to the beginning. I have only to show 
 that, as soon as he was dead, it was in this way that 
 he was understood, and, as his work still lives, it only 
 remains for me to state the place it gives Moliere in 
 the history of ideas. 
 
 V 
 
 THE COMEDY OF MOLIERE IN THE HISTORY OF IDEAS 
 
 "M. MOLIERE," says the learned Baillet in his Jugements 
 des Savants, " is one of the most dangerous enemies that 
 the age or the world has raised up against the church, 
 and he is the more formidable as he still makes after 
 his death the same havoc in the heart of his readers as 
 he made in his lifetime in that of his spectators. . . . 
 Gallantry is not the only science to be learned in the 
 school of Moliere, but also the most ordinary maxims 
 of licentiousness against the true sentiments of re- 
 ligion, whatever the enemies of bigotry may say, and 
 
 we can assert that his Tartufe is one of the least 
 
 1 2O
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 dangerous to lead us to irrdlglon " it is Baillet who 
 underlines " the seeds of which are scattered in so 
 cunning and hidden a way in most of his other pieces, 
 that we may affirm that it is infinitely more difficult 
 to resist its influence there than where he openly 
 and indiscriminately ridicules the bigoted and the 
 devout." 
 
 When these lines appeared, in 1686, twelve or 
 thirteen years after Moliere's death, no voice was 
 raised, as far as I know, to protest against Baillet's 
 judgment. If there was a party of libertinism or 
 irreligion, nobody then doubted that the author of 
 Tartufe had belonged to it ; none of his contemporaries 
 made any mistake about the character of his work ; 
 and nobody, in short, would then have dared to pre- 
 tend that the blows he had aimed at the bigots had 
 not struck, at the same time, the pious and religion 
 itself. One question alone remains : what had become, 
 during the last sixty years, of the doctrine bequeathed 
 to Moliere by his masters, and transmitted to them, 
 as we have seen, from Montaigne and Rabelais ? 
 
 There is no lack of information ; and, if it was not 
 against libertines, I should like to know against whom 
 it was that Pascal had thought of writing, even before 
 the appearance of Moliere, that Apologie de la Religion 
 chretienne of which the Pensees are the fragments. Since 
 for more than a hundred years the editors of the Pensees 
 have arranged them in an order which is the more 
 
 arbitrary the more it differs from that of the edition of 
 
 121
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 1670, published by Port-Royal, it has been and is still 
 too often believed that Pascal wrote for himself, with- 
 out other intention than to resolve his own doubts and 
 to be assured on the foundations of his belief. But 
 it is sufficient to go back to the edition of 1670, and 
 to re-read in it the celebrated fragment Contre /'/- 
 difference des Athees to be assured that, if death had 
 not come to interrupt it, the Apologie de la Religion 
 chretienne was to have been, like the Provinciates, 
 primarily a polemic, and that, after " easy-going 
 piety," it was libertinism that Pascal proposed to 
 combat. 
 
 " I know not who has sent me into the world," he 
 makes the free-thinker say, " nor what is the world, 
 nor what I am myself. . . . As I know not whence 
 I come, so I know not whither I go, and I only know 
 that on leaving this world I fall for ever into nothing- 
 ness, or into the hands of an angry God. . . . And 
 from all that I conclude that I ought therefore to pass 
 all the days of my life without thinking of what must 
 happen to me, and that I have only to follow my inclina- 
 tions without thought or anxiety, . . . and in treating 
 with scorn those who would be troubled with another 
 care, I will proceed without foresight and without 
 fear, . . . and let myself be gently led to death, 
 uncertain of the eternity of my future condition." 
 (Pensees. Edition of 1670. Contre P Indifference des 
 Athees, 1-8.) 
 
 Here we recognise the language of Montaigne. I 
 
 122
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 cannot say that it was also that of Descartes ; I have 
 endeavoured to show, however, in another essay,* that 
 with his tendency to treat as science the truths of 
 religion and the rules of morality, Descartes did not 
 fail to assist the progress of indifference and liber- 
 tinism. Or rather what was, before his time, merely 
 a way of living just as it was a fashion of thought, 
 he founded, if I may say so, on reason, and conse- 
 quently on right ; and though the libertines did not 
 fall in exactly with Cartesianism, they found in it 
 the excuse and justification of their usual rules of 
 conduct. 
 
 This is proved by a passage in Spinoza, in that Ethic^ 
 where I can see, on the whole, only a doctrine of 
 liberation, and, as in the De Natura Rerum of Lucre- 
 tius, an endeavour to emancipate human life from 
 the terrors with which it is oppressed by the vain 
 phantoms of superstition. In the name of Cartesianism 
 and epicureanism, then banded together against re- 
 ligion, is it not really to Pascal, is it not to the Pensees, 
 which had appeared five or six years earlier, is it not 
 to the Christian moralists Protestants or Jansenists 
 that Spinoza replies in the following lines ? 
 
 " Most of those who have hitherto treated of human 
 passion and morality seem to have spoken of them, not 
 at all as things which are natural and regulated accord- 
 ingly by the laws of nature^ but as things which are outside 
 
 * " Jansenistes et Cartesians," in the fourth series of the Etudes critiques 
 sur r/iistoire de la litteraturefratifaise. Translator. 
 
 123
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 of nature. Or rather, they represent man in nature as 
 one empire within another. . . . This is why, far 
 from attributing the inconstancy or feebleness of man 
 to the laws of nature, they impute them to some vice 
 or other of human nature, which accordingly some 
 bemoan and others deride or despise, or end by hating" 
 (Ethics in., Preamble.) 
 
 This was the case of the Protestants in whose midst 
 lived the author of the Ethics^ the case of the Jansenists, 
 and the case also of the author of the Penstes. But 
 this is also the explicit and authentic evidence of the 
 progress which the philosophy of nature had made in 
 the first half of the seventeenth century, and this 
 we must know, if we wish to know exactly what was, 
 between 1660 and 1680, the substance of the thought 
 of our " libertines." 
 
 They did not exactly believe that nature was good, 
 in the sense that the author of the Nouvelle Helo'he 
 and of Emile was to understand it, but no more did 
 they believe that she was bad. They held only that 
 she was nature, that her inspirations or counsels could 
 not differ in general from those of wisdom : 
 
 Nunquam aliud natura, aliud sapientia dicit ; 
 
 and they said in particular it is the expression of La 
 Mothe Le Vayer, one of Moliere's intimate friends 
 that to try to resist her is to attempt to row against 
 the current. Not that we should always follow her, 
 
 or always obey her impulses : 
 
 124
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 What once a Greek to great Augustus spake, 
 
 We may for counsel just and useful take : 
 
 That when to angry noise your words would tend, 
 
 Run o'er your alphabet from end to end ; 
 
 The while to gentler mood your thoughts will move, 
 
 And 'scape the follies which your shame would prove. 
 
 The counsels of nature are not always happy, and 
 they are not always clear. But, in refusing to follow 
 her, we must at least be careful not to thwart her, and 
 to identify nothing with her movements that is not 
 taken or deduced from her herself, if I may say so, and 
 derived from her essentials. We should therefore not 
 tell a man to separate himself from nature, but rather 
 to conform to her, to use her as the members do the 
 stomach, to remember that, being of her, he lives 
 only by her, and, in short, never to treat her as a 
 hostile power. But is it this that every religion 
 teaches, and, like religion, every discipline which does 
 not place in life itself, and in the pleasure of living, the 
 object and end of life ? The consequence is evident, 
 and there is no need for me here to state it at length. 
 
 It was of this philosophy, so clearly defined and so 
 precise, that Moliere was the interpreter, and these 
 are the "cunning and hidden seeds of irreligion" which 
 Baillet discovered in almost all his comedies. The 
 partisans of this philosophy were more numerous in the 
 seventeenth century than is generally believed, and 
 to take but one example the Contes and Fables even of 
 
 his friend La Fontaine insinuate it no less subtly than 
 
 125
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 do the masterpieces of Moliere. One and all, with a 
 
 consciousness more or less clear of their own work, 
 
 whether indifferents or sceptics, libertines or atheists, 
 
 for those were the names they were then given, they 
 
 continued the pagan tradition of the Renaissance, and, 
 
 by an effort opposed to that of the Pascals, Bossuets, 
 
 and Bourdaloues, worked at unchristianising the spirit 
 
 of the seventeenth century, or, if I may use the 
 
 word, at laicising its thought. Are they to be praised 
 
 or blamed for it ? This is a question I shall not 
 
 examine, and I shall confine myself to saying that, in 
 
 preaching the liberty of thought, the two greatest of 
 
 them, La Fontaine and Moliere, are suspected with 
 
 good reason of having preached the liberty of morals. 
 
 If they themselves are not what was called in the 
 
 language of the time "passionate unbelievers" and 
 
 for that matter are they not this ? their doctrine has 
 
 yet always this against it, that it gave the passions 
 
 full play. But I am now treating the question only 
 
 historically j and, whatever may be thought of their 
 
 influence, we are concerned for the moment only with 
 
 determining its nature. Now the naturalism they 
 
 represent is of such importance in the history of ideas 
 
 in the seventeenth century, since it balanced the 
 
 power of Jansenism, and did not work in the same 
 
 direction as Cartesianism, that it is to be considered as 
 
 a third current which must be carefully distinguished 
 
 from the other two. 
 
 If we have seen above how the spirit of the six- 
 126
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 teenth century became that of the seventeenth, we 
 now see how the spirit of the seventeenth became in 
 its turn that of the eighteenth. This I shall endeavour 
 to show some day with more precision and clearness. 
 But in the meantime it is sufficient to remember that 
 it is there that Voltaire and Diderot, for example, 
 have their true origin. I do not speak of Rousseau ; 
 Rousseau comes from elsewhere ; but Voltaire and 
 Diderot are there in their entirety. Though I have 
 already pointed this out, there will be no harm in re- 
 peating it : it is Pascal that Voltaire, with a singular 
 clearness of view, attacked first of all, from 1728, 
 and it is first of all against the Pensees, or against 
 Jansenism, that he renewed the combat of Tartufe and 
 the Ecole des Femmes. The Jesuits made the remark- 
 able blunder of encouraging him, as Louis XIV had 
 formerly encouraged Moliere. It was really in .the 
 name of respectability, that he also, Voltaire, wrote 
 in his Remarque s sur les Pensees de Pascal: 
 
 " Man is no enigma, as you make him, in order 
 that you may have the pleasure of solving it : man 
 seems to be in his place in nature. Superior to the 
 animals, whom he resembles only in his organs, 
 inferior to other beings, whom he probably resembles 
 in thought, he is, like everything we see, a mixture 
 of good and evil, of pleasure and pain : he is pro- 
 vided with passions to act, and reason to govern his 
 actions. . . . And these so-called contrarieties which 
 
 you call 'contradictions' are the necessary ingredients 
 
 127
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 for the composition of man, who is, like the rest of 
 nature, what he ought to be" (Ed. Beuchot, xxxvu, 
 
 P- 3 6 -) 
 
 Moliere had not said anything else by the mouth 
 of the reasonable Philinte of the Misanthrope: "I 
 take men calmly just as they are ; I accustom myself 
 to bear with what they do ; and I believe that at the 
 court, as well as in the city, my phlegm is as philo- 
 sophical as your bile." 
 
 This is only the excuse for nature, so to speak ; 
 it is not the apotheosis, nor the religion of nature. 
 Voltaire in many respects still belongs to the seven- 
 teenth century, and, brought up as he was in Jansenism, 
 he believes no more than Moliere in the goodness of 
 nature. He believes only, first in the uselessness, and 
 then in the cruelty of the means which men have 
 thought upon to combat nature, and which end only 
 in being defeated. But Diderot goes further j he 
 gives a prominence to this religion of nature, 
 which, with Voltaire and Moliere, was as yet 
 only a far away consequence of its first principle ; 
 and he does so much more openly and boldly than 
 Rousseau. 
 
 " Dost thou wish to know on every occasion " says 
 Orou to the chaplain, in the Supplement au Voyage de 
 Bougainville " dost thou wish to know what is good 
 and what is bad ? Consider the nature of things and 
 actions, thy connections with thy fellow-creatures, the 
 
 influence of thy conduct on thy personal usefulness 
 
 128
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 and on the public good. Thou art mad If thou dost 
 believe that there is anything above, below, or in the 
 universe, which can add to or take away from the laws 
 of nature. Her eternal wish is that the good be pre- 
 ferred to the evil, and the public good to the private 
 good. Thou shalt order the contrary, but thou shalt 
 not be obeyed. Thou shalt multiply the evil-doers 
 and the unfortunate by fear, punishment, and remorse ; 
 thou shall deprave the consciences, thou shall corrupt the 
 minds. Troubled in their state of innocence, tranquil 
 in their crime, they will have lost the pole-star on their 
 way. Answer me sincerely : despite the express 
 orders of thy three legislators God, the priest, and 
 the magistrate does a young man in thy country 
 never have his girl without their permission?" (Ed. 
 Assezat & Tourneux, n., p. 198.) 
 
 I ask pardon for this last line. Obliged as we believe 
 ourselves to be, when ,we cite Diderot, to cite always 
 only the half of what he says, we have as a result 
 an insufficient knowledge of his personality ; and 
 here, in particular, I rather fear the true bearing of 
 the quotation would not have been gathered, had I 
 not given it entirely. 
 
 Characteristic as this is of the usual form of 
 Diderot's tendencies when he moralises, it seems to 
 me to be no less characteristic of the consequences 
 to which the superstition of nature, sooner or later, 
 must inevitably lead. Diderot here joins Rabelais, 
 and his dream of Otaiti leads us, if I may say so,
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 back to the Abbey of Theleme. Shaken in its 
 foundations by the paganism of the Renaissance, 
 of which Luther, and Calvin above all, in vain en- 
 deavoured to stay the progress ; compromised and 
 discredited by the very bitterness of the theological 
 quarrels of the seventeenth century ; restored for 
 barely fifty years by the Pascals, Bossuets, and 
 Bourdaloues to its early dignity ; attacked on all 
 points, simultaneously or successively, by the liber- 
 tines, by the philosophers of the eighteenth century, 
 and by the encyclopaedists, Christianity lost the 
 battle. There will surely be no cause for wonder 
 if the single combat of Moliere against the Pascals, 
 Bossuets, and Bourdaloues is not its least interesting 
 episode that we have been anxious to throw light on 
 it, and that we have dwelt on it at length. 
 
 I would not dare to say, and it matters little, 
 whether Moliere foresaw all the consequences which 
 were yet to arise from his doctrines. Neither 
 Voltaire nor Diderot foresaw, or even wished, all 
 that has been done since their time under the 
 authority of their name. In the ardour of the 
 fight, enveloped and blinded as it were by the smoke 
 of the battle-field, we can hardly measure our 
 blows, much less judge of their effects. Perhaps, 
 however, it is the peculiarity of genius to insinuate 
 something more into its work than is imagined. 
 Talent, which knows everything it does, and can 
 
 account for it, can do so only from being incapable 
 
 130
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 of stretching its view beyond the horizon of its time 
 and the actual bounds of its experience. But genius 
 is really the power of anticipating the future ; and, 
 from age to age, its creations do not change on 
 that account, as is sometimes said, in nature or in 
 meaning, but they must be compared with those 
 laws whose fruitful formulae include even unforeseen 
 phenomena. Nobody will dispute me the right of 
 inscribing Moliere in the rank and number of men 
 of genius. 
 
 In any case, whether or not he was conscious 
 of the entire bearing of his work, what cannot be 
 doubted is that, son of Montaigne and Rabelais, 
 friend of Chapelle and La Fontaine, lover of Made- 
 leine Bejart and husband of Armande, nobody was 
 freer in thought than Moliere, more untied in every 
 belief, more indifferent in matters of religion or, 
 from that very reason, more aggressive, at a time 
 when religion left nobody the liberty of indifference. 
 This might well have been granted him, since, as I 
 have endeavoured to show above, he would probably 
 have continued to attack everything in religion which 
 tends to fetter the development or expansion of the 
 natural and of nature. 
 
 His work thus enters into history, and takes its 
 rightful place in the history of ideas. The general 
 aspect of the seventeenth century is perceptibly 
 modified. The false unity which is ascribed to it 
 is merely apparent and superficial. Epochs are
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 to be distinguished in it, and parties in each 
 of these epochs. The Cartesians are one and the 
 Jansenists another. But the libertines are a third, 
 and Moliere is their most illustrious representa- 
 tive. What would be whispered, so to speak, 
 only within closed doors, amongst accomplices, 
 and in the coteries of wits, he said publicly, with 
 open doors. What was only a secret or reserved 
 doctrine, of which the common people were not 
 yet considered capable, he taught on the stage 
 and instilled into the agents, the soldiers, and the 
 lackeys who filled the pit. So what was only a 
 theory, to which one did not always dare to con- 
 form his conduct, he made a doctrine of morality : 
 a doctrine of morality, that is to say a practice, a 
 rule for life. 
 
 And the battle was warm, the fray was confused, 
 with now a loss, and now a gain. The Jansenists 
 seemed to triumph at one time, and the Cartesians, 
 at one time, seemed to unite with the Jansenists. The 
 same Baillet who saw so clearly in Moliere " one of 
 the most dangerous enemies of the Church " is the 
 biographer of Descartes. But it was Moliere who won ; 
 his Tartufe changed the future of the battle j and 
 neither piety, nor eloquence, nor even genius has been 
 able to re-establish a reputation or prosperity. In 
 this respect he may be said to herald the doctrine of the 
 eighteenth century, or even to prepare it. He broke 
 
 to some extent the restraints on free-thought. And 
 
 132
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 as we pass from Rabelais and Montaigne to him with- 
 out a hitch, so we pass quite smoothly from him to 
 Voltaire and Diderot. He belongs to the family; and, 
 not to trouble with a comparison, it is undoubtedly he 
 who did the most of all, were it only by the superiority 
 of the dramatic form for spreading the ideas of which 
 it makes itself the interpreter. 
 
 Shall I say that he is the greater for it ? No, since 
 it has been kindly pointed out to me that it is in 
 nobody's power to c lessen ' or * magnify ' Moliere 
 which means nothing, let me say, unless the nega- 
 tion of all criticism. But I do not think it can be 
 a matter of indifference to his glory, to have been, 
 instead of a simple entertainer or a clever merry-andrew, 
 a thinker. The JSco/e des Femmes^ or Tartufe^ or the 
 Malade imaglnaire are not works which can be emptied 
 of their contents, to be considered only in their form : 
 we cannot neglect their substance and attend only to 
 their style. This is too often forgotten, and I do not 
 wish to give the reasons now I shall give them only 
 if I am forced to but all the same this is too often 
 forgotten. This is what I have endeavoured to show. 
 If, in addition, I have been able to point out, by a 
 notable example, how disastrous for every writer 
 is this verbal criticism, which attends only to the 
 manner in which a thing is said, and never to the 
 thing itself, I should not think that I had lost either 
 my time or trouble ; and I hope the reader will agree 
 with me. 
 
 '33
 
 VOLTAIRE AND JEAN-JACQUES 
 ROUSSEAU * 
 
 IT seems an advisable and even a humane act to 
 begin by relieving M. Gaston Maugras of a certain 
 uneasiness : " Although researches, crowned with 
 success," says he in his preface, " and the extreme 
 kindness of the collectors to whom we have applied, 
 have put us in a position to give a considerable amount 
 of unpublished material, the documents which appear 
 in this volume are for the most part extracted from 
 the letters and works which have appeared from the last 
 century to the present day " ; and he fears the reproach 
 of having added little to the three thousand odd letters 
 which we should have of Rousseau, if there was a good 
 edition of his correspondence, and to the ten thousand 
 which we do have of Voltaire. Apparently M. Maugras 
 thinks that everybody has read, not only all the letters, 
 but also all the works of Voltaire and Rousseau ; not 
 only all their works, but also all those of their contem- 
 poraries ; and has not only read them, but has them 
 all in vivid recollection. Let him be undeceived 
 and reassured. In our time the real unpublished 
 
 * >uerelles de philosophes : Voltaire et J.-J. Rousseau, par M. Gaston 
 Maugras. Paris, 1886 ; Calmann Levy.
 
 ESSAYS IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 document, according to the famous saying, which is 
 even more true than witty, is precisely what is printed. 
 Only those then will find fault with M. Gaston 
 Maugras for not having given a more " considerable 
 amount of unpublished material " who are themselves 
 ignorant of the bibliography of the subject he has 
 treated. Others know that the difficulty in dealing 
 with Voltaire and Rousseau is not to give or find 
 unpublished material, but not to go astray or lose one- 
 self altogether among the printed material, for even 
 M. Gaston Maugras himself neither knows nor dis- 
 cusses it all. And this is why the best service that 
 can be done us, and the most urgent, is to put a little 
 order into these printed works, to read them for the 
 instruction of those who have not the time to read them 
 themselves, to assort and judge and criticise them, and 
 to use them for the composition of the work of which 
 they are only the material. The use and end of 
 rubble is not to block up the public way, but to serve 
 sooner or later for building houses, if not monuments. 
 The reader would be surprised were I here to 
 draw up a list of the works we have on the history 
 of the life and writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. 
 The Genevans in particular for Rousseau to them 
 is not merely what he is to us, but something more, 
 a compatriot, the great man, their most illustrious 
 author never tire of editing his work, and of 
 clearing and preparing the way for the historian of 
 his life. The people of Neuchatel, who are the
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 trustees of his papers, are no less arduous in the same 
 task. And in France, during his lifetime and even 
 after his death, Rousseau played too great a part, 
 attracted too much of the attention of the public, 
 and exercised too great an influence in every way 
 for us not to be passionately curious of all that con- 
 cerns him. No doubt we are as curious, and for 
 the same reasons, of all that concerns Voltaire, nor 
 is there a lack of works on the history of his life 
 and writings ; but, if I may not say that they are 
 less numerous, still they are not so scattered, and, 
 though not final, of a character not so provisional. 
 Further, there is an excellent edition and good 
 biographies of Voltaire, but there are none yet of 
 Rousseau. The best edition we have is of no value 
 the edition of Musset-Pathay ; and, as for bio- 
 graphies, neither the two volumes of Saint-Marc 
 Girardin (1853), nor tne neav y compilation of M. 
 Brokerhoff (1863), nor the brilliant sketch of Mr. 
 John Morley (1873) is all that is to be desired. 
 Who can say that it is not the very abundance of 
 materials which discourages the historian from work- 
 ing them up ? But who can fail to see, consequently, 
 that, the more they accumulate, the greater the need 
 of haste, even at the expense of being obscure or 
 incomplete in certain points, to turn them to account 
 as far as possible ? Granted that the time is not 
 yet come to build, must we not always before build- 
 ing make our plans, and why not begin ? 
 
 136
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 Let us congratulate M. Maugras on having had 
 this courage, for in his volume on Voltaire et "Jean- 
 Jacques Rousseau, though he does not altogether 
 fulfil the promise of the title, he has really given 
 us a sketch of a history of Rousseau's life, or, to be 
 quite exact, of the second half of his life from 1755 
 to 1778. So I shall not examine if, as I have just 
 been urging, and as would need to be insisted upon in 
 other circumstances, any brochures or newspaper or 
 review articles have escaped the attention of M. 
 Maugras, if, in the long voyage in search of the 
 unpublished, he has been diligent enough in his in- 
 vestigation of the printed matter, if he should not 
 sometimes have followed more closely and discussed 
 more carefully the sayings of his predecessors : it 
 is sufficient for my purpose that he has written his 
 book, and that the book is interesting. But, in case 
 he should return to his sketch to correct and complete 
 it, and thus give us the book we wish, I shall con- 
 tent myself at present with pointing out its two great 
 faults as it now stands it is not sufficiently impartial, 
 and the composition lacks breadth of treatment. 
 
 With the exception of Buffbn and Montesquieu, 
 our great men of the eighteenth century were rather 
 unamiabl-e characters, such as d'Alembert, Grimm, 
 Diderot ; and above them all, undoubtedly the two 
 greatest, stood Voltaire and Jean - Jacques, two 
 " puissant gods," two shabby fellows. When I think 
 of the one I always prefer the other. Voltaire was 
 
 137
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 more perverse, Jean- Jacques was more suspicious ; 
 the former was more irritable, the latter more dan- 
 gerous ; scurrility was at the bottom of the character 
 of the one, and even was one part of his genius, the 
 other was never better inspired than by defiance, 
 envy, or hatred : and though nobody could safely 
 be the enemy of Voltaire, that was almost better 
 than being the friend of Rousseau. And so, if I 
 must compare them, I cannot incline more to the 
 one than the other, and much less can I join with 
 M. Maugras in placing all right and moderation 
 and generosity on the side of Voltaire, and all 
 the faults on the side of Rousseau. M. Maugras 
 is too forgetful that on every occasion, and without 
 any provocation, only because the success of their 
 works made them rivals of his glory and popularity, 
 Voltaire attacked, one after the other, the least 
 and the greatest of his contemporaries : Piron and 
 Freron, Crebillon and Maupertuis, Buffbn and 
 Montesquieu. " He seems to have laid the scheme 
 of burying all his contemporaries during his life- 
 time," said Buffbn ; " he has a grudge against 
 every pedestal," said also Diderot ; and I would 
 willingly add that, aristocrat in everything, he was 
 truly democratic only in his jealousy of all that 
 was above him. After the success of the Nouvelle 
 Htlo'ise and the notoriety of Emi/e y in vain had 
 Rousseau been the friend of Voltaire, and Voltaire, 
 under the pseudonym of M. de la Roupilliere or 
 
 '38
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 Le R. P. 1'Escarbotier, would have jeered at it no less 
 cruelly. 
 
 So partial is M. Maugras to Voltaire, that not 
 only does he overlook all this, but even goes to 
 the other extreme of holding that Voltaire had the 
 right to see a direct and personal attack in Rousseau's 
 famous Discourses^ as in his Lettre sur les Spectacles. 
 For, he argues, had not Voltaire been for the last 
 thirty years the support of those theatres which 
 Rousseau attacked, just as he was " the most sur- 
 prising incarnation of the civilisation, the arts, and 
 the sciences " in which Rousseau could see only the 
 ever renewed nourishment of human corruption ? 
 M. Maugras is surely unwilling to grant the right 
 of having other ideas on the theatre than those 
 held by the author of Zaire. And because Vol- 
 taire wished to establish a theatre at Geneva, no 
 Genevan had the right to think it bad ! It is the 
 same, too, when M. Maugras deals with Rousseau's 
 well-known letter which contains his challenge to 
 Voltaire : " I do not like you at all, sir ; you have done 
 me the most painful injuries possible, me your disciple 
 and enthusiast " ; and when he finds it, as indeed it 
 is, I may say impertinent, the most impertinent, to 
 use Voltaire's word, which fanatic ever scrawled. But 
 M. Maugras forgets that if Rousseau, throughout 
 this long quarrel, was impertinent in his letters and 
 fanatical in his proceedings, he at least knew, in 
 his public writings, how to keep from descending 
 
 '39
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 to the low insults which Voltaire heaped upon him, 
 and which this irritable patriarch did not cease to 
 spew upon him even to the last. When M. Maugras 
 retouches his book, he will be able to keep his 
 sympathies for Voltaire, and even let them be plainly 
 evident ; but he will do well merely to ground them 
 better, if I may say so, and to strengthen his own 
 case by being more just to Rousseau, though still 
 preferring Voltaire. 
 
 I should also have liked if M. Maugras, without 
 any essential change in the plan of the book, had 
 not put out of court, as he says, the talent and 
 the genius of Voltaire and Rousseau, so as to 
 study only their character. Speaking generally, I 
 really do not understand how anyone can dis- 
 tinguish, separate, and in fact dissociate what 
 nature has meant to be so closely united the 
 talent, the genius, and the character of a great 
 writer. But when we are concerned with a man 
 who, like Voltaire, paints himself so true to life, 
 unintentionally and unwittingly, in ten lines, or of 
 a man who, like Rousseau, passed the one half of 
 his life only in telling us about the other, I admit 
 I cannot understand it at all. This is the gravest 
 fault in M. Maugras's book. His study of the 
 mere character of Voltaire and Rousseau tempted 
 me while I read it to repeat the saying which is 
 attributed to M. de Castries, at the very time of 
 
 the great quarrel of Rousseau and Diderot. " This 
 
 140
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 is absurd," he said ; " why, these people are the 
 only thing spoken about, people of no position, who 
 have no house, and are lodged in a garret : we 
 can't put up with this." And indeed, if Voltaire 
 and Rousseau were not known otherwise, we neither 
 do nor may see any reasons why we should interest 
 ourselves in their quarrel, nor for M. Maugras 
 himself to take such a great interest in it. Who 
 are these people ? What have they to do with us ? 
 What does it matter whether they agree or pitch 
 into each other ? And since it is evident that they 
 did quarrel, what business of ours is it to examine 
 so carefully who was the first to begin ? M. Mau- 
 gras assuredly knows why. He could tell us. 
 Perhaps he thinks he has reasons for not telling 
 us. But all the same he has not done so. And 
 I am sorry for it, for had he tried to tell us, he 
 would have seen that there was something more 
 than the meeting or collision of two adverse vanities. 
 Not that in my turn I wish to abstract Voltaire 
 and Rousseau, of all people, from their human char- 
 acteristics, to make them pure spirits that can be 
 separated only by their way of understanding liberty, 
 progress, and justice. God forbid ! this would be 
 erring in the other extreme. Many paltry reasons 
 helped on their quarrel, these vulgar and lamentable 
 reasons which could as well provoke two door-porters. 
 For example, if Rousseau was not exactly jealous of 
 
 Voltaire's fortune, his estates and his income, he cer- 
 
 141
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 tainly was jealous of the show and security of his 
 social position, and if not of his money, at least of 
 the consideration Voltaire owed to his money. And 
 what Voltaire, on his part, could not put up with, was 
 to be compared, he, the gentleman in ordinary of the 
 chamber, the table-companion of kings, the friend of 
 the mistresses and empresses, with this little Genevan, 
 this " clockmaker's boy," as he calls him, without 
 money, position, and society. We know the tone 
 in which he reproached the other Rousseau, Jean- 
 Baptiste, with being the son of a bootmaker. 
 
 Adroitly and maliciously M. Maugras shows up 
 these paltry reasons. Thus, on the side of Jean- 
 Jacques, one of these was the installation of Voltaire 
 at the gates of Geneva. This intriguer had taken 
 his place from him. In this town, to which the 
 " citizen " counted on returning in triumph, a 
 master of witticisms irrecoverably filched from him 
 all hopes of popularity. "You have alienated my 
 fellow -citizens from me," he wrote, "you will 
 make me die in a foreign land, while all the honours 
 that a man can expect will accompany you into my 
 country." There is the arrow, and there the wound ! 
 Reciprocally, on the side of Voltaire is the influence 
 which Rousseau continues to exercise on the preachers 
 of Protestantism. He is worried in his pleasures : he 
 is not allowed to recruit actors for his theatre among 
 the youth of Geneva : " The priests of Geneva are 
 
 joined in horrible faction against comedy. I shall have 
 
 142
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 the first socinian priest who passes on my territory 
 shot. Jean-Jacques is a 'jean f. . .' who writes every 
 fortnight to these priests to enflame them against 
 plays." His letters to d'Argental, d'Alembert, and 
 Damilaville are full of this sort of complaint. But 
 these are not the only reasons, either on one side 
 or the other, and certainly not the truest ones, as 
 M. Maugras seems to think. And if Rousseau's 
 persuasion that the burning of Emile at Geneva was 
 due only to Voltaire, and Voltaire's indignation on 
 hearing of the underhand methods of which Rousseau 
 accused him, are stronger reasons, I should like still 
 stronger and deeper reasons, and these there are. 
 
 When there appeared, one after the other, in less 
 than ten years, from 1755 to 1764, the Discours 
 sur rinegalite^ the Lettre a cT Alembert^ the Nouvelle 
 Heloise, the Contrat social^ Emile, the Lettre a Chris- 
 tophe de Beaumont, the Lettres de la Montagne, it was 
 impossible for Voltaire, in the first place, not to see 
 that this newcomer was robbing him of a portion of 
 the empire of opinion. And if for that matter he 
 could have made any mistake about it, circumstances 
 would not have been long in opening his eyes. We 
 must, indeed, remember that, before Emile and the 
 Nouvelle Heloise, there had not been a case for a very 
 long time of a success so sudden, universal, and con- 
 tagious as that of Rousseau. Other works, like his, 
 had been raised above the clouds, according to the 
 expression of the time, but none yet had gone so far
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 or sunk so deep ; neither the Siecle de Louis XIV, nor 
 the Esprit des Lois, nor the Lettres philosophiques, nor 
 the Lettres persanes. Even at the theatre this fever 
 of enthusiasm and delirium of admiration was hardly 
 known. It seemed as if the eloquence of this orator 
 had struck at the bottom of their hearts a chord which 
 nobody before had ever been able to touch, while 
 among the crowd it awoke passions which were still 
 unknown. The very nature of their success, and 
 this has not been sufficiently dwelt upon, was not 
 the least new thing in Emile and the Nouvelle Helo'ise. 
 In vain did Voltaire, in his letter to the Marquis de 
 Ximenes, endeavour to turn the novel to ridicule, its 
 Saint-Preux and Julie d'Etange, Wolmar and Lord 
 Bomston. In vain, though from a determination not 
 to be surpassed, as Condorcet tells us, did he oppose 
 his Sermon des Cinquante to the Profession de foi du 
 Vicaire Savoyard. It came to nothing ; he lost all 
 the trouble of his witticisms and impiety. Popular 
 opinion was escaping him, and just at the very 
 moment when he thought he was master of it, when 
 the encyclopaedists in body affected to follow at his 
 heels, when he had just seen the death of Fontenelle 
 and Montesquieu : and he had passed his sixty-fifth 
 year ! I have sometimes asked myself what would 
 have become of Voltaire's kingship, had it not been 
 for a Galas and a Sirven ; and I cannot think he was 
 so simple, when he saw the success of Rousseau, as 
 
 not to have asked the same question himself. 
 
 144
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 The causes of this success have been sought for 
 everywhere more or less, and literary causes have 
 usually been urged the novelty of Rousseau's lan- 
 guage, the character of his eloquence, sensibility, 
 passion, and nature all making their way at last 
 through or over the debris of old convention. All 
 the forms of literature were exhausted : tragedy, 
 comedy, eloquence, and even history languished in 
 the imitation of the classic models ; the novel of 
 Prevost and the drama of Diderot had just appeared ; 
 lyric poetry was not yet in existence ; the century 
 was growing weary, in spite of the Encyclopedia^ with 
 the epigrams of Piron, the little verses of Bernis, and 
 the nasty wit of the younger Crebillon. Rousseau 
 came and changed all. Free from the prejudices 
 which weighed on the majority of men of letters, 
 he dared to be himself; and, as he was Rousseau, 
 this meant a revolution. Now this revolution began 
 by overturning all that Voltaire had, for almost 
 half a century, believed, said, and taught j if it 
 should chance to succeed, it would convince him of 
 the error of his criticism and the sterility even of 
 its aim. Conservative in everything, as has been so 
 well said, except in religion, not only had Voltaire 
 submitted with docility to the fetters of tradition, 
 but he had glorified them, and, in a certain sense, he 
 had written his Siecle de Louts XIV only to raise 
 the respect for them to the height of a dogma. 
 According to him the only forms which should be
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 cultivated were those practised by the seventeenth 
 century, and since neither Corneille nor Moliere had 
 written novels, but only people like Courtilz de Sandras 
 and the Comtesse d'Aulnoy, the novel was fit only for 
 the amusement of children and women. " If some 
 novels still appear, true men of letters despise them." 
 He was of opinion that certain subjects were unworthy 
 of being treated by art, and as Racine had never put on 
 the stage the love of a tutor for his pupil, the Nouvelle 
 Helo'ise for that one reason could be only a rhapsody. 
 And believing further that there were rules, or rather 
 fixed formulas, for the art of writing, at once invari- 
 able and rigid, he held that whoever did not write 
 according to the rigour of these rules wrote badly, 
 in a style less French than Swiss, or rather Iroquois. 
 " Elegance of style is so necessary that without it the 
 beauty of the sentiments is lost." 
 
 Such being his ideas, Voltaire could no more 
 approve the form than the substance of those of 
 Rousseau, nor his novels, nor his Discourses^ and still 
 less could he like them : and if these two men were 
 in accord in every other point, would their views on 
 the art of writing alone have been sufficient to divide 
 them ? The elder Corneille in the preceding century 
 was no more astonished or scandalised at the success 
 of the tragedies of Racine, than was Voltaire at 
 the success of the writings of the citizen of Geneva. 
 It really seemed to the author of "Laire and the Siecle 
 
 de Louis XIV that a barbarian was entering as a 
 
 146
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 conquerer into the domain which it had taken him 
 fifty years to win, was disputing the territory over 
 which Freron and even Desfontaines had recently 
 recognised his empire, and was devastating the heritage 
 he believed he had received directly from the men of 
 the great century. And it must to his honour be 
 said, that, if the success of Rousseau had perhaps 
 wounded him at first in his vanity of fashionable 
 author, what he defended, what he wished to defend, 
 what he thought he did defend, against the author 
 of Emile and the Helo'ise^ was the cause of letters 
 and taste, of science and art, the cause of culture 
 and good-breeding the cause of progress even and 
 civilisation. 
 
 I have purposely endeavoured to enlarge on this, 
 for indeed there were other matters of dispute between 
 Voltaire and Rousseau than belles-lettres and good taste. 
 In 1760 the century had not yet shown its bias, 
 and the question was to know which of the two 
 would determine it the citizen of Geneva or the lord 
 of Tournay. How can it have happened that M. 
 Maugras, and so many others, have failed to note this 
 simple point ? Though statistics and chronology 
 are often useless, they are not so always. In the 
 edition of Beuchot, the Melanges of Voltaire, which 
 contain all his stray tracts, fill no less than fourteen 
 volumes, of which only four are made up of pieces 
 anterior to 1760. Add to these the seven volumes 
 of the Dictionnaire philosophique, of which the first 
 
 H7
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 edition appeared only in 1764, and we have seventeen 
 volumes, or a little more, which contain the polemical 
 work of the patriarch almost in its entirety. Voltaire 
 was not a " philosopher " to begin with, but for a very 
 long time a wit, and nothing but a wit. For Mon- 
 tesquieu, for example, who died in 1755, he was still 
 only that. It was in the last twenty years of his 
 long life that he became the man of his century, the 
 apostle of tolerance and the trumpet of incredulity. 
 And if we remember in this connection Condorcet's 
 note to the Sermon des Cinquante^ which tells us that 
 Voltaire, " a little jealous of the courage of Rousseau," 
 composed this work only in reply to the Profession 
 de foi du Vicaire Savoyard, we can conclude from all 
 these circumstances that Rousseau, without knowing 
 it, was the instrument, or even the worker of the 
 last transformation of Voltaire. In the measure that 
 Rousseau developed his principles, Voltaire opposed to 
 them his so different and so contradictory, that to 
 reconcile these two doctrines and these two men, as has 
 sometimes been attempted, in a common apotheosis, 
 needs nothing less, in fact, than a ridiculous ignorance 
 on our part of their doctrines and of themselves, of 
 their works and of their life, of the eighteenth century 
 and of ourselves. This is what is now called liberalism, 
 width and breadth of mind : I call it indifference, 
 when it is not stupidity. When we have mated the 
 grand Turk to the republic of Venice, we shall then 
 
 be able to reconcile Voltaire and Rousseau. 
 
 148
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 Never, indeed, was there a clearer opposition or a 
 more formal contradiction. Remove the priesthood 
 and establish liberty of speech, but let there be, none 
 the less, for the rabble, who otherwise would be too 
 prone to dishonesty, a "rewarding and revengeful" 
 God : this is all the social philosophy of Voltaire, 
 and his ideal is never higher. Of a nature indifferent, 
 or rather a stranger to the notion of moral good or 
 evil, he held that honesty consists only in the observa- 
 tion of social usages, just as virtue even consists only 
 in obedience to certain universal and necessary " pre- 
 judices." Or farther, to make the largest allowance 
 possible for what is just and salutary in his concep- 
 tion, the social plan is such a fine thing in his eyes, 
 that man cannot have other obligation or law than to 
 work to maintain and perfect it. Everything is praise- 
 worthy which tends to this end, nothing is dangerous 
 but that which deviates from it. And if it is true, 
 as certain philosophers, and Helvetius among others, 
 have held, that public prosperity sometimes results 
 from the concourse of the vices of individuals, we 
 must change the name and call these vices virtues. 
 Rousseau is not so easily satisfied. Uncertain and 
 wavering, his doctrine of morality is of his time ; but 
 he has a doctrine of morality, and it is a morality, a rule 
 we may say, which is founded on a certain idea of a 
 justice anterior, exterior, and superior to the social plan. 
 Even when he perverts its principles, when, with his 
 
 unfortunate sophistry^ instead of submitting his passions 
 
 149
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 to the rule, he endeavours to bend the rule to his 
 passions, Rousseau does not for all that cease to be 
 moral, since he is ever trying to realise the agreement of 
 his conduct with his principles. And, before admiring 
 the social plan in the refinements of civilisation and 
 luxury, he asks himself what has it done, what is it 
 doing, to establish among men the reign of justice 
 and right. This is the true sign of an eminently 
 moral nature. 
 
 Though he deceived himself in the search of this 
 very rule, though in founding it on sentiment he 
 betrayed it to the mercy of individual caprice, though 
 he committed a dangerous error in endeavouring to 
 lead man back to nature as the source of all justice, 
 and though, in attacking immoderately the civilisation 
 of his time, he, in his turn, despised the grandeur of 
 its accomplished work, all this may be true, all 
 this is true, yet this does not concern us here, 
 for the question is not the value but only the nature 
 of the ideal of Rousseau. I ask if there is another 
 more radically different from that of Voltaire ? As 
 much as Voltaire's is tightly bound to the main- 
 tenance of civilisation, so much is Rousseau's bound 
 to the overthrow of this very civilisation. According 
 to Voltaire, man becomes more and more perfect in 
 proportion as he gets further away from the state 
 of nature ; according to Rousseau, on the other hand, 
 as he comes nearer it. The same epochs which for 
 
 the one mark the progress of humanity are for the 
 
 150
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 other epochs of the aggravation of injustice and 
 inequality. So let us be surprised that Voltaire and 
 Rousseau did not agree, and agreed even less the 
 better they were capable of understanding each other. 
 These observations may help to solve a question 
 which has been too often discussed. If we are to 
 believe that hypocritical old fellow Marmontel, when 
 the Academy of Dijon in 1749 propounded the well- 
 known subject " Have the arts and sciences contri- 
 buted to purify morals ? " Rousseau was going to treat 
 it in the affirmative, had not Diderot observed that it 
 was the pans asinorum y to which all the mediocre talents 
 were taking the road. Rousseau has given another 
 account of it in his Confessions, and does himself 
 honour in his choice. However, M. Maugras, with- 
 out adducing any other reason, decides in a few words 
 that " the version which Marmontel had from Diderot 
 himself seems liker the truth." Shall I tell him that 
 the version of Diderot is not in the Memoirs of Mar- 
 montel, but really in the Essai sur les Regnes de Claude 
 et de Neron, by Denis Diderot himself, that it differs 
 greatly from what we are here given, and, though 
 not identical in all points with that of Rousseau, can 
 yet be more easily reconciled with the Confessions than 
 with the version of Marmontel's Memoirs ? But I 
 shall rather tell him that Jean-Jacques, being what 
 he was, would not have thought merely of treating 
 the question, if he ought to have treated it otherwise 
 than he did, and that, as I have already hinted at the
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 reason, we shall see it much more clearly imme- 
 diately. I fear M. Maugras has not always under- 
 stood Rousseau very well. 
 
 It is the same when he asks why " the man who 
 passed his life in complaining of his lot, in condemn- 
 ing and criticising everything," should have thought 
 fit to uphold against Voltaire the cause of Pro- 
 vidence, which had, indeed, been tolerably abused in 
 his poem Le Desastre de Lisbonne. The reply, how- 
 ever, is simple enough, and " the man " has given it 
 himself. For Rousseau criticises and condemns only 
 the evils, or the causes of the evils, which civilisation 
 has introduced into the works of Providence, and has 
 need of the existence of Providence as a guarantee for 
 the hope he entertains of seeing the disappearance 
 some day of these evils and their causes. His reason- 
 ing is that of theologians who hold that sin does not 
 consist in the use of things which are by nature bad, 
 since God did not make such things, but in the bad use 
 of good things. Similarly, according to Rousseau, we 
 lack no reasons for complaint, and if we did, he would 
 undertake to furnish us with them ; but it is in us 
 that arise so many evils, and not in nature, and still 
 less in Providence in us and the inner vice of the 
 social organisation. Only change the conditions of 
 the compact, give up man to himself, re-establish 
 nature in the purity of her primitive institution, and 
 all will be well, since all was well on leaving the 
 
 hands of its author, and has degenerated only in the 
 
 152
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 hands of men. M. Maugras has not seen that by 
 depriving Rousseau's system of the dogma of Pro- 
 vidence, he deprived it of its keystone, and left not a 
 stone standing of the fragile, it may be, but grandiose 
 edifice. 
 
 To all these reasons, literary and moral, of the 
 opposition and division of the author of Emlle and 
 that of Candide^ it is now time to add this last one : 
 Voltaire is an aristocrat if ever there was one, but with 
 Rousseau the plebeian enters for the first time into the 
 history of literature. That the citizen of Geneva was 
 born of a bourgeois family is of no importance : the 
 adventures of his unfortunate youth soon lost him 
 his social standing. The fact is that Rousseau knew 
 what misfortune was, since he notes in his Confessions 
 the day when he ceased to feel hunger, and since, 
 moreover, it has been possible to hold that the distress 
 of his last years led him to suicide. I do not mention 
 this to excuse him ; but this cannot be forgotten when 
 it is maintained that the passage of the same Lettre 
 sur la Providence, where he compares his poverty with 
 the ostentatious abundance of Voltaire, is only a figure 
 of rhetoric. And just as he knew misfortune, he knew 
 the unfortunate. Voltaire never knew what passes in 
 the soul of a peasant, of a man of the people, of a 
 lackey, of the daughter of an inn, nor the angers 
 and hatreds they ruminate in silence, nor their stifled 
 grumblings against a social order, of which their 
 shoulders, if not their understandings, would still 
 
 153
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 feel that they alone were carrying the whole 
 weight. Rousseau knew it, and knew it by experi- 
 ence, and did not speak of it he would rather have 
 hidden it if he could but all these grudges passed 
 into and swelled the torrent of his eloquence. And 
 no more did Voltaire speak of it, but he felt it, and 
 felt, too, that there was something else underneath 
 it all than mere rhetoric, and that it was a declara- 
 tion of war. 
 
 This is the true secret of his animosity, as it is also 
 the meaning of the power of Rousseau. In the old 
 society, till the time of Rousseau, however low a man's 
 origin, he took his place on becoming a man of letters ; 
 he passed from his condition into another ; far from 
 being proud of his origin, he sought to efface all 
 traces of it ; with his new condition he assumed new 
 sentiments. Rousseau was the first to remain a man 
 of the people on becoming author, and to found his 
 popularity on the disdain he insolently avowed of 
 everything he was not himself. For his pride even, 
 whose nature has been so often misunderstood, is not 
 the pride of a man of letters or a wit, but it is rather 
 the pride of a plebeian, the pride of a self-made man 
 who wishes to remember his beginnings but will on 
 no account be reminded of them. Has this character- 
 istic of Rousseau been brought into sufficient pro- 
 minence ? Has he not been studied too exclusively 
 for with men of letters we usually dwell at length on 
 their origin, family, and education for this to be
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 taken into account. These are questions which I do 
 not intend to examine now, and I shall be satisfied if 
 what I have endeavoured to show is evident, that, if 
 the great lords and fine ladies, the Prince de Conti or 
 the Marechale de Luxembourg, did not recognise 
 what this plebeian brought them in his books, the 
 more aristocratic and intelligent Voltaire saw it clearly. 
 A new type of man was appearing on the scene, and 
 his first exercise of power was to be to overthrow, as 
 soon as he could, all that Voltaire had loved. 
 
 Are we to hold with Rousseau that Voltaire per- 
 secuted him, made plans against him, denounced 
 him to the rigours of the government of Geneva ? 
 On this subject may be read some of M. Maugras's 
 best chapters. But Genevans will pardon me, I hope, 
 if I dispense with recounting their intestine quarrels 
 in the eighteenth century, though that would be 
 necessary for a thorough study of the question. I 
 admit then that Voltaire, throughout the whole affair, 
 pursued Rousseau only with sarcasm and calumny ; and 
 my great reason for this is that he was not in a position 
 to damage him otherwise than by words. For as to 
 his protestations of innocence, we know what they 
 were ; and M. Maugras in general seems to put too 
 much faith in them. Nobody in the world ever lied 
 like Voltaire. When he published against Rousseau 
 that Lettre au Docteur Pansophe which Beuchot did not 
 think he needed to insert in his edition of Voltaire's 
 works, but which is none the less by the patriarch, 
 
 155
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 not content with disowning it, did he not himself 
 attribute it, first to the Abbe Coyer, and then to Bordes 
 (of Lyons), both of whom were living, and both of 
 whom were thus exposed to the reprisals of Rousseau's 
 Confessions ? These were his smallest tricks. To the 
 pleasure of injuring people he added that of misleading 
 their suspicions " with his usual candour." But, what- 
 ever may be the real state of affairs, since neither he 
 nor Rousseau was burned or hanged, let us admit that 
 Rousseau is wrong when " he poses as the victim of 
 Voltaire's intrigues," and let us acknowledge that M. 
 Maugras has proved " the innocence of the patriarch." 
 
 It does not follow all the same that Rousseau was 
 not the victim of any persecution, and we need not, 
 like M. Maugras, find in the story of the Confessions 
 only the ravings of a sick man. No more am I very 
 sure of the veracity of the Confessions. I believe he 
 often lied, and, if need be, I would nerve myself to 
 show the falsehood or error of more than one point 
 which his enthusiasts have accepted as certain. But 
 I desire justice. Rousseau's testimony is not received 
 in his own cause, and when, as was said, it makes 
 for him ; why is it received when it makes against 
 him ? 
 
 What would we now know of the youth of 
 Rousseau, of some of the saddest adventures of his life, 
 if he himself, in his Confessions, had not thought it his 
 duty to tell us them. Yet all these adventures form 
 
 part of his history, and, far from contesting them, 
 
 156
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 nobody ever thinks of discussing them. But what 
 then means this strange obstinacy of rinding him at 
 fault on Voltaire, Diderot, Grimm, and Madame 
 d'Epinay ? Were the Memoirs of Madame d'Epinay, 
 for example, the declamations of Diderot in his Essai 
 sur les Regnes de Claude et de Neron, and so many 
 other writings, not just composed in answer to the 
 Confessions, and why are they, a priori, of superior 
 credit than the Confessions themselves ? The Confes- 
 sions are believed, and we would be loth not to believe 
 them, when they admit Rousseau's fault or crime, 
 but they are not believed when they contain his excuse 
 or justification ; they are the cry of the sinner against 
 himself when he accuses himself, but they are the work 
 of his madness and the monument of his folly when he 
 dares to attack a Grimm or Diderot. But are these 
 people gods to us, who must not be touched ? It is 
 surely enough that they are so for their editors. I 
 place them all in the same rank, and, if I must choose 
 between them, I shall still prefer Rousseau. 
 
 As to the matter of the persecution, it is merely a 
 question of understanding, and, for understanding, 
 merely a question of distinguishing. Assuredly, no 
 more than Voltaire, did Diderot, or d'Alembert, or 
 Grimm, and still less M. de Malesherbes, or Madame 
 de Luxembourg "conspire" against Rousseau. In 
 the case of Emile, notably, Madame de Luxembourg 
 and M. de Malesherbes proved themselves good, 
 obliging, and devoted to Rousseau, though he repaid 
 
 "S7
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 them, I admit, only with marked ingratitude. But, 
 as for the encyclopaedists, it is impossible to deny 
 their constant hostility to him. The reasons are 
 well known. They did not dare to sign their 
 works, and this man wrote on the frontispiece of 
 his, "every honest man should avow the books he 
 publishes." They formed a coterie, and this man, 
 who stood apart, alone disputed the public atten- 
 tion they meant to monopolise. To be convinced 
 of the reality of the injury and of its importance, 
 read, in the Memoirs of Marmontel, a page that is 
 more than malevolent on ... Buffon, who did not 
 frequent, any more than Rousseau, the company of the 
 Baron d'Holbach or Madame Geoffrin. Again, in 
 their charges against the philosophers, even the bishops 
 distinguished and separated Rousseau from the rest of 
 the troop. " The famous Jean-Jacques Rousseau," 
 said one of them, "merits special exception among 
 the modern enemies of Christianity. He knows 
 better than anybody the so-called philosophers of our 
 days, and it is undoubtedly because he knows them 
 too well that he will not have in common with 
 them either the name they affect or the principles 
 they enunciate." Could they tolerate this language ? 
 So they replied, not openly for that was not 
 their method but in an underhand way, by little 
 treacherous insinuations, by attacking the writings, 
 the person, and the character of Rousseau ; by paint- 
 ing him as a " monster of pride " to those who did not 
 
 158
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 know him ; by estranging from him those who knew 
 him badly ; by making him ridiculous in the eyes of 
 those who knew him better. And as they were 
 numerous, as they filled the salons of Paris, as in the 
 absence of Rousseau himself, of BufFon, and of 
 Voltaire, they had the airs of great men and the 
 assurance of oracles, as they were in short the true 
 dispensers of esteem and literary reputation, so they 
 created among the men of letters and the ladies a 
 prejudice unfavourable and soon injurious to Rousseau. 
 The encyclopaedists persecuted Rousseau as they did 
 so many others, with the same proceedings, after 
 the same manner, and in the same measure that 
 they persecuted Freron, for example, and all those 
 generally who were not of their clique. 
 
 When to this is now added the condemnation of 
 P.mile y a warrant issued for the arrest of Rousseau 
 by the Parliament of Paris, the soil of Geneva inter- 
 dicted to the author of the Profession de fol du Vicaire 
 Savoyard, the magistrates of Berne giving him twenty- 
 four hours to leave their territory, the clergymen of 
 Neuchatel exciting the population of Motiers-Travers 
 against him then we shall understand that if this 
 is not persecution, it is at least the semblance of it, 
 and quite a good semblance, and that a man such 
 as Rousseau could easily be mistaken about it. But 
 when a little later the police forbade him, out of 
 deference to Madame d'Epinay, to read his Confessions 
 in the salons of Paris, that is to say, according to 
 
 159
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 himself, to offer his apology against his calumniators, 
 or again when Voltaire waxed loudly indignant that 
 the presence of this "clock-maker's boy" should be 
 tolerated at Paris, who was still under warrant for 
 arrest, what in all the world was Rousseau to think 
 of Voltaire and Madame d'Epinay ? 
 
 All the same, I do not deny that Rousseau 
 singularly exaggerated, magnified, disfigured the 
 facts. In the solitude, for which, whatever be said, 
 nobody was less suited, no matter what unjust or 
 absurd suspicion offers itself to his heated spirit, no 
 matter what phantom presents itself, Rousseau begins 
 by believing it, then welcomes it, puts all his trust in 
 it, does nothing to dispel it, and seeks rather to give 
 it the body and reality it lacks. His ingenuity in 
 this matter is terrible against himself. And, with 
 that characteristic pride in his own understanding, 
 he prefers to doubt his friends and protectors rather 
 than the infallibility of his imagination. This 
 is what M. Eugene Ritter had already shown so 
 well in his Nouvelles Recherches sur les Confessions et 
 la Correspondence de Rousseau, and M. Maugras has 
 endeavoured to make it still more evident. Fortunate 
 he is in this at least, that he does not return once 
 again to Madame d'Epinay, of whom Rousseau un- 
 doubtedly said much ill in his Confessions, but who 
 has had good revenge in mixing herself up as she 
 has done in the history of Rousseau ! 
 
 A good example of Rousseau's unfortunate hasti- 
 160
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 ness of suspicion will be found in the long account 
 M. Maugras gives of Emile. Why did Rousseau, 
 all of a sudden, during the leisurely printing of 
 his book, take it into his head that the Jesuits 
 had seized his work, that they were going to 
 delay its publication, and, counting on his near 
 demise, were proposing to corrupt its text and 
 opinions ? As if the Jesuits at this time had 
 not other matters to think of than persecuting 
 Rousseau ! But he takes it into his head be- 
 cause he takes it into his head, he believes it 
 because he believes it ; unless it be, as M. Maugras 
 says, that his madness was now beginning to 
 affect his brain. The same observation is to be 
 made on his great quarrel with David Hume. M. 
 Maugras gives a curious and instructive account of 
 it, to which I shall be content to add a few words. 
 Three years after the quarrel, Rousseau suddenly 
 discovers an act of treachery on the part of Hume 
 which he had not till then suspected. " They have 
 removed my portraits which are like me," he says, 
 "to replace them by one which gives me a wild 
 look and the face of a Cyclops." And here is the 
 abomination of desolation : " This pleasing portrait 
 was accompanied by one of David Hume, who really 
 has the head of a Cyclops, but whom they have given 
 a charming air." Certainly he had reason to suspect 
 that when Hume commissioned this portrait at 
 London, it was not " from friendly motives " ; but all
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 the same he could not then have divined the purpose 
 of this Cyclops. But he knows it now : by the 
 odious character of his face they wished his spirit to 
 be judged, and they succeeded. 
 
 This is another instance of Rousseau's madness, as 
 M. Maugras says rightly : but, instead of seeking a 
 purely physiological cause for his malady, should he 
 not rather have found the true cause in the pangs of 
 remorse, of which the Confessions may pass as authentic 
 testimony ; in these misfortunes, assuredly common- 
 place, whose effect upon an organisation so peculiar 
 as that of Rousseau he has but failed to recognise ; 
 and finally even in those very persecutions which he 
 had just denied ? This may well seem a paradox ; 
 but, notwithstanding his Confessions, and in spite of 
 his aggressive airs, Rousseau really wanted nothing 
 so much as that capacity of resistance, and that 
 power of reaction, which precisely establish, in the 
 history of their long quarrel, and in the history of 
 the eighteenth century, the superiority of Voltaire. 
 Nothing, not even his very persecutions, failed 
 to irritate, and excite, and exalt Voltaire, and, 
 on the other hand, nothing, not even his brief 
 elations, failed to stupefy, and cast down, and depress 
 Rousseau. 
 
 I am not surprised that Rousseau's madness has been 
 so reluctantly believed, and that so few critics or 
 historians, though they use the word, have accepted the 
 
 fact. When Voltaire called Rousseau a "madman," 
 
 162
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 and a " wretched madman," it was rather to insult 
 than commiserate him ; but as for us, who have better 
 knowledge of the Confessions and the Reveries d'un 
 promeneur solitaire, we ask ourselves, if this is the work 
 of madness, what is the work of sanity, talent, or even 
 genius ? Who can be master of his thought if this 
 man was not when he wrote so many immortal pages ? 
 These arguments belong to a time when it was believed 
 that madness, to merit its name, had to attack the 
 whole understanding. Now that we know that it 
 is otherwise, that the attack of madness is never 
 so sudden and rarely so complete, that it is even a 
 common thing for a madman to rave only on the 
 object of his delirium, we can admit the coexistence 
 of genius and madness in the mind of Rousseau, just as 
 we admit it in the mind of Swift or Tasso. The con- 
 stitutional malady from which he had suffered so long, 
 and with whose crises had coincided most of his 
 accesses of defiance or misanthropy, had not dis- 
 appeared, though time seemed to have allayed it or 
 wrought its cure : it had only changed. 
 
 "More than four years before his death," says his 
 friend Corancez, "I had frequent opportunities of 
 observing it. The access announced itself by a 
 change on his face, and a very marked movement 
 in one of his arms. . . When I visited him and 
 saw these signs, I made up my mind that I was to hear 
 from his mouth all the most extravagant statements it 
 
 is possible to imagine. . . These extravagancies were 
 
 163
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 always about the enemies by whom he thought he 
 was surrounded, and the combined and complicated 
 snares in which he thought he was entrapped." If 
 the testimony of Corancez appear perhaps suspicious 
 for Corancez needs Rousseau's madness to prove his 
 suicide we have only to open a treatise on mental 
 diseases. There we can see at once that there are 
 barely one or two of the ordinary symptoms of 
 melancholia wanting in the case of Rousseau, and 
 we can also learn that " in a great number of cases 
 melancholia becomes chronic and develops into a 
 habitual delirium which does not otherwise trouble the 
 patient." Though for long denied, from this false or 
 incomplete idea of mental derangement, and denied 
 in spite of evidence for if it is not in the Confessions 
 or the Reveries^ it flashes forth in the queer dialogues 
 entitled, Rousseau juge de "Jean-Jacques the mad- 
 ness of Rousseau cannot be doubted now. He was, 
 or became mad, not in the vague and general sense of 
 the term, but in its proper and pathological sense ; 
 and his masterpieces are no evidence to the contrary, 
 if indeed his madness does not explain the nature, 
 character, and influence of some of them. 
 
 There would surely be no reason for insisting 
 so strongly on the madness of Rousseau, if no 
 consequences are to be drawn from it, in as far 
 as they affect the history of his work or influence 
 rather than of his life. The madness of Rousseau 
 
 was certainly not the condition, and still less the 
 
 164
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 material, the stuff of his genius ; but, from the single 
 fact of his madness, there has crept into his very 
 masterpieces an unhealthy element, a source of error 
 and corruption ; and as this was the most obvious 
 thing in Rousseau, it has accordingly been the 
 most faithfully and most frequently imitated. There 
 would be an abundance of proofs of this, and I 
 should like to develop them. Such is this sove- 
 reign right of passion, which he may not have been 
 the first to proclaim, but which he aggravated, by 
 endeavouring to justify it ; and which, amidst the 
 truth of the life of this world, as may be seen 
 every day, leads those who follow it to crime, mad- 
 ness, or death, and never has led, and never will 
 lead to anything else. There are " splendid " passions 
 only as there are "splendid" diseases or "splendid" 
 crimes, and all passion is by nature bad, since it is 
 nothing practically but the worker of trouble and 
 the counsellor of iniquity. 
 
 Such, too, is this exaggeration of the ego of 
 which he is the first example, though neither the 
 most famous nor notorious, a monstrous exaggera- 
 tion, abnormal, always essentially morbid, and the 
 smallest consequence of which, by destroying the 
 sentiment of human solidarity, leads inevitably to the 
 destruction of the very principle of society. All 
 human society rests on self-sacrifice and the surrender 
 of personal desires to the common weal. 
 
 And such too, perhaps, would be this feeling for 
 165
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 nature, of which Rousseau is honoured as the great 
 discoverer. For if we must love nature, we should 
 not go the length of identifying ourselves with 
 her, and certainly not of conforming to her 
 lessons of indifference and immorality. What if 
 I were now to pass to the political and social ideas 
 of the citizen of Geneva ? For a hundred years and 
 more we have not observed that, in following the 
 impulse of Rousseau, we have chosen a sick man as 
 guide. And, to confine our observations only to 
 the history of literature, if there is so much madness 
 mingled with the grandeur of romanticism, it is the 
 "fault of Rousseau," as used to be said, and said 
 truly, but it is above all the fault of his madness. 
 Yes, the very madness of Rousseau, more than every- 
 thing else perhaps, contributed to his success in his 
 time and to his influence in ours : and his enthusiasts 
 may prefer this madness, if they wish, to the wisdom 
 of the world, but it is at least necessary to know 
 that it is madness. 
 
 In the analysis of M. Maugras's book I have 
 endeavoured to complete it, or, to put it more 
 modestly, to indicate in what points it would 
 gain by being completed. Biographical criticism 
 I repeat it in concluding, for it is the subject of 
 his continual illusion does not exist by itself, since, 
 whatever may be said, it would not deal with Vol- 
 taire or Rousseau if they were not the authors of 
 
 166
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 their works. The men take up too much place in 
 his book, the works too little : there is an abundance 
 of facts, but a scarcity of ideas. Such is the result 
 of having been too often in the company of Madame 
 d'Epinay. This kind woman was somewhat given to 
 scandal, as Voltaire said, and she had the most beauti- 
 ful black eyes, but little mental ballast. Does not 
 M. Maugras, who has inherited from her his hatred 
 of Rousseau, owe to her also his taste for gossip ? 
 Let him bear me no grudge for saying so, since, 
 at the present time, as he knows, it will only make 
 his book more certain of success. Who nowadays 
 would not give the Essai sur tes Mceurs for a few 
 fragments of Voltaire's letters to Madame du Chatelet, 
 or the Contrat social along with the Nouvelle Helo'ise 
 for the letters of Jean-Jacques to Madame d'Houdetot? 
 And I must myself confess that, if M. Maugras ever 
 finds them, I shall hasten to read them. 
 
 167
 
 THE CLASSIC AND ROMANTIC * 
 
 I 
 
 WHAT is a classic author and what is a romanticist ? 
 Such is the double question raised at once by this 
 title, assuredly well calculated to excite our curiosity 
 The Romanticism of Classics. And the answer can 
 be given in four words, if we care to believe M. 
 Emile Deschanel, four words, and no more, of which 
 his book is the pleasant, clever, and brilliant de- 
 velopment too brilliant, too clever, too pleasant 
 even sometimes. A romanticist would be simply a 
 classic author in the making ; and, reciprocally, a 
 classic author would be nothing more than a 
 romanticist who has attained his ideal. 
 
 "Those whom we now admire the most," says 
 M. Deschanel, " and who are in possession of un- 
 disputed glory for the future, were first of all, 
 each in his own way, revolutionaries in literature. 
 And those who did not make a revolution in 
 their time have not survived, because they had 
 neither the necessary importance nor force ; or they 
 
 * Le Romantisme des Classifies, par M. Emile Deschanel. Paris, 
 1883 ; Calmann Levy. [In this essay, as in M. Brunetiere's, class'ufue 
 is used in the sense of classic rather than of classicist. Translator.} 
 
 1 68
 
 ESSAYS IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 survive only in the second or third rank, in the 
 very measure and proportion of the originality of 
 their talent." Are names necessary in support of 
 this definition ? If the author of the Cid and 
 Polyeucte, for example, is now a classic to us, he 
 began by being a romanticist to his contemporaries. 
 Was not the animosity of authors, in this memorable 
 year 1636, almost universal against the Cid? And, 
 a few years later, did not the same admirers who 
 counted the poet among the wits of the Hotel de 
 Rambouillet, give an icy reception, as was then 
 said, to Polyeucte? But, on the other hand, if the 
 author of Zaire and Alzire let me distinguish him 
 from the author of Zadig and Gandidc is no longer 
 a classic for us, it is just because no man was 
 ever less romantic for his contemporaries, 1 mean 
 to say more careful to humour their literary super- 
 stitions, and to win them through their prejudices. 
 Moliere and La Fontaine, Pascal and Bossuet, Racine 
 and Boileau, Saint-Simon, Rousseau, Chateaubriand, 
 Victor Hugo, are all classics, are they not, but all 
 more or less romantic ? On the contrary, Destouches 
 and Lamotte, Nicole and Bretonneau, Dangeau, 
 Marais, Luynes as well as Barbier, Grimm 
 along with d'Alembert, and Saint- Lambert be- 
 sides Morellet, Etienne and de Jouy, Scribe and 
 Ponsard are not romantic at all, if history is to 
 be believed, but also not classic. " A man lives 
 
 down everything only by reason of strength or genius, 
 169
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 just as by reason of this very strength or this very 
 genius he began by disturbing the ways of thinking 
 of his contemporaries, by scandalising them, by re- 
 volting them, by calling forth their criticisms, their 
 railings, and their insults, by making a hole, like a 
 cannon-ball, in their prejudices and their old poetic 
 regime." 
 
 And this is why whoever was at first received 
 with the universal applause of his contemporaries, 
 and thus paid for his glory in the money of popu- 
 larity, dies with the generations whose favour he 
 has exhausted, and has nothing to claim of posterity. 
 Such was the case of Mdlle. de Scuderi, the case of 
 the Abbe Delille, the case too of twenty others. 
 From not having been sufficiently romantic, they 
 have not become classic. The House of Fame, in 
 the pretty saying of Marmontel, is like the kingdom 
 of Heaven : Regnum coelorum vim patitur^ et vlolenti 
 rapiunt illud. It is to be got into only by climbing, 
 or by knocking down the walls, or by breaking 
 the fences. To make the attempt merely, is to be 
 already a romanticist ; but to bring it to a good 
 issue is to be truly a classic. So that if all the 
 romanticists have not yet become classics, without 
 any desire for it on their part, all the classics at 
 least, without any knowledge of it, began by being 
 romanticists. And the acme of romanticism^ by a 
 consequence, perhaps unlocked for, but after all 
 apparently quite logical, is classicism. " If some 
 
 170
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 people," says M. Deschancl, " did not share all our 
 admiration for the seventeenth century, I should be 
 inclined to think that they were perhaps as ignorant 
 of the best reasons for admiring ours also, to which 
 they wish to confine themselves. ... It is from 
 the same source and the same causes that our 
 admiration arises, be it for the great writers of 
 former times, or for those of to-day." 
 
 Such is, if I mistake not, the leading motive of 
 M. Deschanel's book. We could follow, one by 
 one, the successive applications which he makes of it, 
 or, more exactly, the demonstrations which he seeks in 
 Corneille's C/W, Rotrou's Saint-Genest, and Moliere's 
 Don Juan. But this would deny the reader the 
 pleasure of searching for them in the book itself. 
 It is better, more useful, and perhaps more interest- 
 ing, to approach the idea boldly, and to show, even 
 by the contradictions it gives rise to, its importance 
 as much as its ingenuity. 
 
 Shall we accept, at the outset, M. Deschanel's 
 definition of romanticism? It is true, I admit, that 
 the word romanticism, after fifty years and more of 
 passionate discussion, is none the less, even to-day, 
 very vague and undetermined. We may therefore 
 admit that, to a certain extent, each one of us, 
 subject to the single condition that he defines it 
 clearly, uses the word for that matter pretty much 
 as he pleases. Yet, should this liberty of interpreta- 
 tion become even wider still, the fact remains that 
 
 171
 
 it is limited at least by the claims of history ; 
 and this is what M. Deschanel, in my opinion, has 
 not taken into sufficient account. It is possible, 
 for so it is said, that there are no longer any roman- 
 ticists, but all the same there is no doubt that there 
 were some formerly. Every definition of romanticism 
 should therefore agree first of all with the works 
 and the men of the well-marked historical epoch 
 of which the very word romanticism remains the 
 title in our literature. We keep on repeating 
 and criticising the saying of the master : " The 
 wretched words of strife, classic and romantic, 
 have fallen- into the abyss of 1830, as Gluckist and 
 Piccinist into the gulf of 1789"; which only 
 means that in 1883 we are not in 1827. And it is 
 true. But the historians of music, I imagine, do not 
 ticket certain contents " Gluckist " or " Piccinist," 
 according to their own invention, caprice, or fancy ; 
 and the one word and the other, if they do not 
 represent anything any longer, did unquestionably 
 represent something ; and this something is strictly 
 defined by the very nature and opposition of the 
 works of Gluck and Piccini. The historians of 
 literature, in their turn, may hold such and such an 
 idea of romanticism as they wish ; but if they claim 
 to have their definition accepted, it will have neces- 
 sarily to agree, and first of all, with the dramas of a 
 Dumas and a Victor Hugo. 
 
 I do not further insist on this point, and less 
 172
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 still on the incongruity supposed to have been found 
 in the differences of meaning which M. Deschanel 
 has given the word romanticism. It is only just to 
 observe that this book is but a beginning. M. 
 Deschanel's predecessor in the chair at the College 
 de France had attacked at the same time the very 
 history of romanticism. But M. Deschanel, who 
 considers romanticism in history as the last accom- 
 plished phase of one long evolution in literature, has 
 rather proposed to find and bring to light, during the 
 course of this evolution, the signs which prelude the 
 future romanticism. There is in Corneille, for ex- 
 ample, a tendency to choose subjects which are modern 
 and living presentations, as it were, of the historical 
 reality ; in Racine, " the most vivid portrayal of the 
 passions " ; in Boileau, " bold innovations, at least in 
 point of style and expression " ; and all this is roman- 
 ticism. And there is, too, in Bossuet, "audacity of 
 expression with simplicity, familiarity united to gran- 
 deur " ; in Saint-Simon, " that language gathered from 
 everywhere, swarming with common idioms and 
 phrases " ; in Rousseau, " the passionate feeling for and 
 true painting of exterior nature" ; and all this is still 
 romanticism. Definitions are not made a priori^ un- 
 less perhaps in mathematics. In history, they are 
 evolved imperceptibly from the patient study of facts. 
 If M. Deschanel has not given us the definition of 
 romanticism which we claimed a moment ago, it is 
 really because the object of his teaching is to prepare
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 this very definition. We shall find it where it should 
 be, at the end of the course and not at the beginning. 
 And in the meantime M. Deschanel recognises one 
 after the other, and tests by contact with works, and 
 determines by history, the divers elements which 
 finally should concur, balance in some way, and 
 blend in the unity of the definition. This is evidently 
 his right ; he was free to choose his own method. 
 
 But then what he should have defined more strictly 
 is what he means by this other word, very general 
 and wide also, of innovation in art. For example 
 he praises Corneille for the " innovation " in the very 
 choice of the subject of his Cidj an historical subject 
 at least for the men of the seventeenth century 
 and a modern subject. But, modern subjects and 
 historical subjects, a Cast on de Foix, a S 'oilman , a 
 Marie Stuart, had already been performed before 
 Corneille ; and after Corneille they continued to be 
 performed, a Thomas Morus and a Comte d'Essex^ an 
 Osman and a Bajazet, the Englishman and the Turk, 
 and even a Charles le Hardi^ due de Bourgogne^ if 
 indeed this piece was ever acted. In another place, 
 M. Deschanel honours Moliere for the " innovation " 
 of having boldly written in prose the five acts of the 
 Avare^ and cites the saying of the time : " Ah, is 
 Moliere mad to think of making us swallow five acts 
 of prose ? " But, besides the fact that M. Deschanel, 
 in regard to the authenticity of the tale, does not 
 note that the public had " swallowed " very well, four
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 years previously, the five acts in prose of Don yuan 
 if the use of prose in the drama is an innovation 
 which merits remark, it was assuredly not Moliere who 
 first made the venture. All the comedies of Pierre 
 Larivey are in prose, and in prose too all the tragedies 
 of the famous La Serre. Le Pedant joue of Cyrano 
 de Bergerac, which dates from 1654, is in five acts 
 and in prose ; and the tragedy of the celebrated Abbe 
 d'Aubignac, a Zenobie^ given in 1645, is likewise in 
 prose and in five acts. 
 
 I attribute no more importance than is necessary 
 to these trifles, for they are trifles, and M. Deschanel, 
 neglecting the exceptions, is quite right, after all, to 
 date the " innovation " only from him who made it 
 successful. All the same it is true that " innovation " 
 is a delicate question in art, and I fear that M. 
 Deschanel has not treated it fully enough. For 
 whom must " innovation " surprise, revolt, and scan- 
 dalise, to be truly " innovation " ? Is it the authors ? 
 Is it the public ? If it is the public, there would be 
 nothing new in the Ctd but the splendid revelation 
 of Corneille's genius, since, from the first day, "all 
 Paris had for Chimene the eyes of Rodrigue " ; and, 
 on the other hand, what would be new in the work of 
 Moliere would be his Garde de Navarre^ since it was 
 this that contemporaries received the most coldly. But 
 if it is the authors, we would need to be told which 
 authors : Scuderi who criticises the Cid y or Rotrou 
 who vindicates it, Voltaire who ridicules the Nouvelle
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 Heldise^ or Freron who admires it, Hoffman attacking 
 the Martyrs^ or Fontanes celebrating them in the 
 best verses he ever wrote, and Sainte-Beuve hesitating 
 to recognise in the Contemplations the poet of the 
 Orientales^ or M. Vacquerie definitely tracing him 
 in the >uatre Vents de F Esprit? I make no 
 decision, I merely state some doubts. But it will 
 perhaps be granted that in a book where the very 
 classics are studied only in so far as they are 
 " revolutionary," it would not have been at all super- 
 fluous to say by what precise signs "revolutions" and 
 " revolutionaries " in literature are to be recognised. 
 
 And yet, on this point also, M. Deschanel may 
 have had his own reasons for refraining and with- 
 holding the definition. Or rather could he not reply 
 that he had no need to give this very definition of 
 " revolution " and " innovation " in art which we ask 
 of him, since it is plainly implied in the very manner 
 in which he has put the question ? Indeed, if roman- 
 ticism is for us only the last term in a long literary 
 evolution, it is something more for M. Deschanel ; 
 it is its completion, its perfection, its crowning. And 
 when he tells us that his admiration for the great 
 writers of former times or to-day, "arises from the 
 same source and the same causes," he really im- 
 plies that he recognises in romanticism the bloom 
 and flourish of what was still only in germ in our 
 classics. The romanticism of Corneille is what 
 
 Corneille attempted in tragedy so as to come nearer 
 
 176
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 the drama of Victor Hugo : the romanticism of Moliere 
 is what seems in Moliere to prepare the drama of 
 Victor Hugo ; the romanticism of Racine is the 
 quality to be recognised in Racine which could 
 adapt itself to the drama of Victor Hugo. And, more 
 generally, the romantic elements in the classics are those 
 which are capable of being utilised by romanticism. 
 M. Deschanel calls romantic in the past everything 
 romanticism has profited by in a time nearer our own. 
 He also calls innovation everything that has been 
 successively added, so as to become romanticism^ to 
 the common base of classicism. 
 
 It is here that we part with him. M. Deschanel 
 has apparently another idea of a classic than we 
 have. Who is right ? Who is wrong ? We shall 
 make the reader judge by endeavouring to give this 
 word classic a definite meaning. It is used somewhat 
 at random. But in the desire to make it wide, 
 care must be taken not to make it meaningless. 
 
 II 
 
 BY inveterate habit we believe that if we confer 
 on any author, poet or prose - writer, this title of 
 classic, we raise him, by the mere fact of this ap- 
 pellation, above all those whom we do not hail by 
 
 M
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 the same name. But we really only distinguish 
 him from them, and this is by no means the same 
 thing. 
 
 So let us not trouble with so many subtleties, and 
 let us go back in quite a simple way to the usage. 
 In literature, as elsewhere, in the most modest and 
 at the same time most universal acceptation of the 
 word, a classic is an artist in whose school we could 
 study without fear of being misguided by his lessons 
 or his examples. Or again, it is he who possesses, 
 in a degree more or less eminent, the qualities whose 
 imitation, if it cannot do any good, cannot at least 
 do any harm. You will plainly risk nothing if 
 you take as a model of the art of writing in prose 
 the Histoire de Charles XII or the Stecle de Louis 
 XIV; and, without being able to flatter yourself 
 on ever attaining this simplicity, this ease, this pro- 
 priety, the worst that can happen to you is to learn 
 to appreciate propriety, ease, and simplicity. But, on 
 the contrary, whoever were to take Saint-Simon 
 as a model, and, as M. Deschanel says, " that some- 
 times inextricable sentence, many-headed, many-tailed, 
 entangled, but always rolling, pushed, dragged by the 
 flood of inexhaustible passion and suppressed rage," 
 could contract only the worst habits of style, and 
 ways of thinking, too, as mad as those of the noble 
 duke, even in the most unimportant affairs. 
 
 Is this to say that the nimble and correct pencil 
 
 of Voltaire is superior to the impetuous brush of 
 
 178
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 Saint-Simon, or the brilliant pictures of the Siecle 
 de Louis XIV to what M. Deschanel calls the grand 
 frescoes of the Memoirs? By no means. If the 
 possession of such and such a quality in an eminent 
 degree is not enough to give the rank of a classic, 
 there is this compensation that one can be a classic 
 and yet not have the same quality to the same 
 degree. Let us emphasise this, for here, and not 
 elsewhere, is the point of divergence. Of Sallust 
 and Tacitus, there is no doubt that the classic is 
 Sallust, but no more is there any doubt that Tacitus 
 is the greater. 
 
 It is a delicate matter to decide with sufficient 
 exactness if there are particular qualities which make 
 an artist really worthy of being taken as model. It 
 has been said there are ; and when this is asserted, it 
 is added, more or less explicitly, that these should be 
 above all qualities of order, clearness, measure, dis- 
 cretion, taste, . . let us say the word, the qualities of 
 the Mean. Now, there is no doubt, that if we attach 
 this meaning to it, Racine would be more classic than 
 Corneille, which strictly speaking may be admitted ; 
 only, Regnard would be more classic than Moliere, 
 which is sure to set us a-thinking ; Massillon more 
 classic than Bossuet, which we are decidedly unwilling 
 to believe ; and the good Nicole, in short, more classic 
 than Pascal, which ends in destroying the definition. 
 But if we note that what makes the immortal youth 
 
 of the Provinciates is its variety of tone, as what 
 
 179
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 makes the unalterable beauty not only of the Sermons 
 but even of the Funeral Orations of Bossuet is their 
 familiarity in their highest eloquence, we see another 
 idea of a classic already dawning. 
 
 We then begin to suspect that the qualities 
 which just seemed of the Mean, really seemed so only 
 by reason of their very equilibrium and the har- 
 mony of their proportions. If Massillon is to 
 some people, in the familiar word, more touch- 
 ing than Bossuet, it is because, among all the 
 qualities that constitute the orator, sensibility domin- 
 ated all the others to such an extent in Massillon, 
 that they must be sought for to be discovered and 
 given their due. In the same way if Regnard can 
 have been considered more gay than Moliere, it is 
 really because he is more constantly gay, being, more- 
 over, never moved, never profound, never, in short, 
 philosophic. And this consequence follows, that what 
 properly constitutes a classic is the equilibrium in 
 him of all the faculties which go to make the perfec- 
 tion of the work of art, a healthiness of mind, just as 
 the healthiness of the body is the equilibrium of the 
 forces which resist death. 
 
 A classic is a classic because in his work all the 
 faculties find their legitimate function without 
 imagination overstepping reason, without logic im- 
 peding the flight of the imagination, without senti- 
 ment encroaching on the rights of good sense, without 
 
 good sense chilling the warmth of sentiment, without 
 
 1 80
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 the matter allowing itself to be despoiled of the per- 
 suasive authority it should borrow from the charm of 
 the form, and without the form ever usurping an 
 interest which should belong only to the matter. 
 
 Is this equilibrium, or rather this balancing of all 
 the faculties, rarer in the history of art, or commoner, 
 than the marked predominance of one faculty over all 
 the others, of the power of imagination, for example, 
 over the power of abstraction, or the capacity of feeling 
 over the capacity of reason ? I should willingly believe 
 it, for my part ; but it is a question I do not wish to 
 broach, since, whatever way it is decided, the decision 
 does not change the condition of the problem, and the 
 definition of a classic remains the same. What alone 
 is important to state is that this healthiness of spirit, 
 in this respect always to be compared with the healthi- 
 ness of the body, depends hardly any less on the cir- 
 cumstances than on the particular nature of the subject. 
 It is not sufficient to be born with the aptitudes which 
 make a classic : these aptitudes must be invited or 
 entreated to develop by the favour of a happy con- 
 junction. We can try to determine at least some of 
 the conditions which rule this conjunction, and thus 
 eliminate what at first seems to be purely fortuitous. 
 
 181
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 III 
 
 IT is evident that in the first place the language must 
 have attained its point of perfection or maturity. The 
 comparison, we remember, is by La Bruyere ; and the 
 aptness it had even two hundred years ago is increased 
 in our time by all the excellent reasons which have been 
 urged for likening languages to organisms. For either 
 this word organism means nothing, and serves only to 
 put us on the wrong scent in our ignorance of the 
 laws which should govern the evolution of languages, 
 or it signifies above all that languages are born, live, 
 and die, and, since they live, pass a point which can be 
 justly called that of their perfection. On the one side 
 of this point they are still in the undeveloped state of 
 what begins to be, they have the greenness and crude- 
 ness of fruit which is not yet ripe ; and on the other 
 side of this point they are already in the failing state of 
 what is coming to an end. It will be noted that what 
 we here say of languages could as well be said of the 
 means of expression which are peculiar to each form 
 of art. A painter, no matter how great he be, and 
 with what marvellous faculties he be endowed, is 
 classic only in so far as he has the good luck 
 to be born at the precise moment of the perfec- 
 tion of the technical means of the art of painting. 
 Some lovers of paradoxes believed that they dealt 
 
 Raphael a fearful blow by accusing him, in a 
 
 182
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 word which is well worth preserving, of having been 
 only a simple profiteur. It is certain that if Raphael 
 had lived a hundred years earlier he would not have 
 been Raphael, just as he should not have been had he 
 been born fifty or sixty years later. But he profited 
 from the fact that he lived at his time, and it is from 
 this above all that he is a classic. It is not otherwise 
 either with the classics of Greek and Latin antiquity, 
 or with our classics of the seventeenth century, or 
 with the classics of Spanish or Italian literature, English 
 or German. In every other time than that in which 
 they lived, they might perhaps have been personally 
 what they are ; but their work would certainly not 
 have been to the same degree classic. It might have 
 had other qualities, perhaps all the other qualities to 
 be desired, but it would not have had those qualities 
 which it owes to its coincidence with the point of 
 perfection of the language ; and if the word classic 
 has any meaning, we cannot possibly deny that it is 
 these qualities which it indicates before and above all 
 the others. The comparison is in all points accurate. 
 We may prefer green apples, we may prefer bletted 
 pears, but we cannot pretend that it is just when 
 apples are green or pears are bletted that they are 
 ripe. 
 
 It will be asked what constitutes the perfection of 
 a language ; for it is very true that to say, as is some- 
 times done, that it is felt but cannot be expressed, is 
 to elude the question and to make no reply. But,
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 though there are certain questions which perhaps 
 should be eluded, I shall add that the true difficulty 
 does not lie there. With serious critics we would come 
 to an agreement easily enough as to what constitutes 
 the perfection of a language. Empirically, it would be 
 sufficient to study closely a few masterpieces of the 
 art of writing a Provinciate or a Sermon of Bossuet, 
 Athalie or Tartufe, a chapter of Gil Bias or the Siecle 
 de Louis XIV and to examine wherein their language 
 is superior to works of the same kind which come im- 
 mediately below them. Theoretically, there would 
 be found, in the very nature of a language and in its 
 conformity, more or less adherent, if I may say so, 
 to the particular nature of the national genius, not 
 only good reasons, but decisive reasons, for deciding 
 at what age, at what time of its development, it has 
 been better written than at every other time. What 
 gives greater interest to the problem we are discuss- 
 ing, for this is really the point where we fail to 
 agree, is to know, and by what signs other than those 
 which are said to characterise it, how long this time of 
 perfection has endured. If we succeed, we shall have 
 determined at the same time still another condition 
 which makes a classic. 
 
 Now it seems that in general this time of perfec- 
 tion lasts almost as long as the independence of a 
 literature with respect to foreign literatures. We give 
 and we receive, we are borrowed from and repaid, we 
 
 imitate models and set up models. There is a French 
 
 184
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 literature which is still quite Greek and Latin, and 
 there is another which is quite English and quite 
 German. There is also, by compensation, an English 
 literature which is quite French that of the time of 
 Charles II ; and there is likewise a German literature 
 that which Gottsched governed. But on the other 
 hand, there is a French literature, as well as an English 
 and a German literature, which is deeply imprinted 
 with the mark of the national genius, relieved, liber- 
 ated to use a better word, from foreign imitation, a 
 literature where a whole race recognises its own con- 
 ception of life, its particular interpretation of nature 
 and man, the personal turn it has given to the ex- 
 pression of these general sentiments which are the 
 common patrimony and lasting heritage of humanity. 
 This is properly what we call a classic literature. It 
 impresses on these general sentiments, which every 
 man who sees the light of this world is capable, since 
 he is a man, of feeling and realising, a form so particular 
 that its value escapes foreigners, and that one must 
 be national himself to feel, to relish, and to appreciate. 
 The historians of Italian literature call this period /'/ 
 secolo d'oro ; for them it is the fifteenth century, the 
 age of Ariosto in poetry and Machiavelli in prose. 
 The historians of English literature call it by a 
 more significant name, the Augustan age; it com- 
 prises, roughly, the time of Queen Anne and the 
 first George, and Prior, Pope and Gay, Swift, 
 
 Addison and Steele are the principal names. The 
 
 185
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 historians of German literature, lastly, call it by a 
 still more expressive name, die Periode der Original- 
 genus ; it extends usually from Wieland and Herder 
 to Novalis and the two Schlegels. 
 
 In France, with all deference to those who are 
 troubled by the memory of such greatness, it is the 
 age of Louis XIV. The forty or fifty years of our 
 history crowded with the work of La Fontaine, 
 Moliere, Racine, and Boileau on the one hand, and, 
 on the other, of La Rochefoucauld, Madame de 
 Sevigne, Pascal, and Bossuet, are as the noon of a 
 great day, whose dawn had been announced by the 
 work of Rabelais and Montaigne, and whose decline 
 was yet to see the appearance of the work of Diderot 
 and Rousseau. Nobody, I think, will dispute that 
 the language of the author of the Essays or of the 
 author of Gargantua is far separated from the lan- 
 guage of which the Maxims and the Provinciates 
 fixed the model. It will not be denied, too, that the 
 ease of Madame de Sevigne is as distant from the 
 ordinary awkwardness of Diderot as the natural elo- 
 quence of Bossuet is distant from the studied pomp 
 of Rousseau. But what I wish to add is that, as in 
 comparison with Pascal and La Rochefoucauld, Mon- 
 taigne is still quite Latin and Rabelais almost quite 
 Greek, so the translator of Stanyan and Shaftesbury 
 is already quite English, and the author of the Nouvelle 
 Heloise and Emile already almost German, in compari- 
 son with Bossuet and Madame de Sevigne. Who, on 
 
 186
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 the contrary, can be called more thoroughly French 
 than Racine, if it is not La Fontaine, and who more 
 Parisian even than Moliere, if it is not Boileau ? 
 There is the foundation of their popularity, of the 
 religion, as has been said, which we always profess 
 for them : they are French, and some even Gauls ; 
 faithful images of the race, bright, simple, and precise 
 like it, more esteemed, in short, than loved, appreci- 
 ated, or understood by foreigners. Admirable ex- 
 amples, accordingly, for proving what we have just 
 advanced that the time of the perfection of a lan- 
 guage is measured by the very duration of its 
 independence of foreign languages. 
 
 So the second condition doubles in a way and 
 strengthens the first. If the classic value of a work 
 depends, on the one hand, on the degree of advance- 
 ment and perfection of the language, it depends, on the 
 other hand, on the faithfulness with which these works 
 interpret the national spirit. Now, as we have said, 
 and it could easily be proved, it is just wfien they 
 interpret what is inmost in the national spirit that 
 languages attain their point of perfection. It is not 
 then enough to be born in the time of the perfection 
 of a language to become a classic : one must show 
 himself worthy of his luck, and, for example, must not 
 have employed the French language of the seventeenth 
 century in the imitation of Spanish grandiloquence or 
 Italian euphuism. The reader who is anxious to carry 
 
 the proof to its conclusion will easily perceive that here 
 
 187
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 again, as above, the generalisation includes the classics 
 of painting as well as those of literature. For, as there 
 are classics of Italian painting, there are also of 
 Flemish and Dutch painting, and they are what they 
 are exactly from the same reasons, or, in other words, 
 under the same conditions. They painted during the 
 precise time of the perfection of the technical means 
 of their art, and, what is more, their painting expressed, 
 with forms and colours, as much of the national 
 character as it could. 
 
 This is not all, and there is wanting a last con- 
 dition. Those alone really are classics, in the full 
 meaning of the word, who can join to the good 
 fortune we have just mentioned, the good fortune also 
 of having lived in the time of the perfection of their 
 literary form. For the forms, too, have only one 
 time. Like languages they too live, and when they 
 have ended living, like languages, they die. When 
 Shakespeare, in England, and his contemporaries or 
 immediate successors had, so to speak, exhausted all 
 the vitality of the drama, once it had been clearly de- 
 fined, in vain did Dryden in the seventeenth century, 
 and Addison at the beginning of the eighteenth, 
 endeavour to renew it by remodelling it on French 
 tragedy. On the other hand, in France, it was useless 
 for Voltaire to flatter himself, in the incessant search 
 for novelty and his drama has at least the merit of 
 being a very interesting proof of this on reviving the 
 
 tragedy of the seventeenth century ; Corneille and 
 
 188
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 Racine had exhausted all the power of that dramatic 
 form. On the contrary, on both sides of the Channel, 
 in the country of Le Sage as in that of Richardson, 
 the novel, before reaching its true home, had been 
 dragged clumsily from adventure to adventure, and 
 had barely given some promise in the Princesse de 
 Cleves or the Roman Comique of what it could be, 
 and one day was to be. This is why, in the history 
 of our literature as in that of English literature, the 
 classics of the novel belong to the eighteenth century. 
 The reason, if any is needed for, after all, it might 
 have been sufficient to have here noted the facts is 
 that every form has its laws, which depend much less 
 than is thought on the changes of fashion and some 
 or other supposed revolution in taste. The prettiest 
 theories on the liberty of art and the blending of the 
 forms will never make us seek at the theatre the 
 same emotion we seek in reading a book. One might 
 as well say that the same pleasure, and the same 
 kind of pleasure, is derived from works of painting 
 and sculpture. But, evidently, if it is not the same 
 pleasure (and everybody will admit it), the means of 
 satisfying it cannot be the same ; and, once this single 
 point is granted, there follow from it the laws, rules, 
 methods, or conditions (the word is of no consequence) 
 which determine the perfection of each form. And 
 once this perfection is attained, it is no longer possible 
 to surpass it. I appear to be saying something absurd. 
 
 So let me express this in a more concrete way. 
 
 189
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 If anyone, like Bossuet, for example, has once attained 
 the perfection of the funeral oration, it will not be given, 
 in the French language, to a Bourdaloue, or a Fenelon, 
 or a Massillon, even though classics themselves, to 
 surpass or equal Bossuet. They will be able to do 
 otherwise, according to the saying of one of them, but 
 whatever they do they will undoubtedly do less well. 
 
 IV 
 
 WHEN these three conditions concur, or, as is said, 
 converge, it is then that classic works appear, those 
 alone to which, in the history of literature as in the 
 history of art, the word is exactly applicable. That 
 there are other works on which we can justly exhaust 
 all our expressions of admiration matters little : they 
 are not classic as soon as one or other of these three 
 conditions is wanting. The famous Jean-Baptiste 
 Rousseau has for long been counted among the classics 
 cf our lyric poetry ; but we have since perceived 
 that, of the many odes and cantatas which used to be 
 praised, there is not one which is truly lyric, that 
 is to say, which vibrates with the personal emotion 
 of the poet ; lyric poetry in France was still too far 
 away from the perfection of its form : Jean-Baptiste 
 Rousseau is not a classic. But in our time, on the 
 
 other hand, high as are raised the Lamartines, the 
 
 190
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 Mussets, and the Hugos, no more are they classics, 
 and never will they be : they are too far away from the 
 time of the perfection of the language, and foreign 
 literatures have left too deep a mark on them. Certain 
 songs of Beranger, who is less literary in every respect, 
 and moreover hardly a poet, but Gallic in spirit, are 
 nearer the classic form. 
 
 I have evidently chosen this last example purposely. 
 For there are few which prove more clearly how far 
 the true notion of a classic can be immaterial, and in 
 some way exterior, to any judgment on the individual 
 worth of the writer. We are accustomed in our day 
 and many clever people are not far from finding in 
 it the last word of criticism to confound the works 
 with the writers, as if there were not masterpieces 
 in the history of literature or art whose author was a 
 downright fool, or as if it were difficult to cite ab- 
 solutely mediocre works from the hand of a man of 
 vast intelligence. The worth of a man is, however, 
 one thing ; the worth of a work is another. There 
 may be an entire agreement and similarity between 
 the man and his work : there can, on the contrary, 
 be dissimilarity and contradiction. The work may 
 then be classic, and so, in certain respects, superior to 
 that which we do not honour with the same name, 
 but the man may be very inferior (I mean in originality 
 of intellect) to him whose work will never be classic. 
 It has chanced in the history of our literature that 
 
 the classic epoch was at the same time that of some of 
 
 191
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 the greatest men we can name. But it could be 
 otherwise. And, indeed, it is otherwise in the history 
 of English literature, where the truly classic poets, of 
 whom the most illustrious is Pope, are inferior in 
 every point, except the privilege of the time in which 
 they lived, to those who preceded them, as Dryden per- 
 haps, Milton, and Shakespeare, or to those who followed 
 them, as Wordsworth, Byron, and Shelley. 
 
 There is nothing more difficult to understand, nor 
 more troublesome to the literary historian, than the 
 question whether there is included under the name of 
 classic the idea of a personal superiority of the artist or 
 writer. What, on the other hand, more simple, if, as 
 I have tried to show, the man who is really a classic 
 is in some way so in spite of himself, just as there 
 are so many people who, thank heaven, keep in good 
 health without any other care than that of letting 
 themselves live ? We recall the well-known saying 
 of Courier : " The merest empty-headed woman at 
 this time (the age of Louis XIV) had more influence 
 on the language than a Jean- Jacques and a Diderot." 
 But there is not the slightest doubt that this saying 
 never meant, either to Courier or to anybody else, 
 that the Memoirs of Madame de Lafayette, or the 
 Souvenirs of Madame de Cay 1 us, was a greater event 
 in the history of the human mind than the Contrat 
 social, for example, or that voluminous but perfectly 
 unreadable Encyclopedia. Only, the "merest empty- 
 headed woman " of that time was of that time, and 
 
 192
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 that time was the time of the perfection of the 
 national language, and when Jean-Jacques and Diderot 
 came it was passed, and neither their power nor even 
 that of a greater was able to restore it. There is 
 the chief point, there the essential element in the 
 definition of a classic. The classics are writers who 
 live in a given time, which, in the history of every 
 literature as of every art, is given by the conjunction 
 of the general conditions which we have endeavoured 
 to determine, and these conditions are given in their 
 turn by general events of history. When these con- 
 ditions are not yet fully realised from reasons which 
 vary with each art and in each literature the time 
 has not yet come. When these conditions begin to 
 fail, and, so to speak, to lose the power which they 
 exercised, the time is past. But, reciprocally, as long 
 as it lasts, the works which are born, as it were, under 
 the conjunction of these three conditions are properly 
 what we agree to call classics. If the high personal 
 worth of an artist is joined to them, as in our classic 
 French literature and in German classic literature, 
 so much the better, and the works are, perhaps, more 
 classic ; but they are not less classic if, as in English 
 literature and in Italian literature, poets and prose 
 writers are lacking in an originality which may be 
 noted before their time and will be noted after them ; 
 and this is the point which must be emphasised.
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 V 
 
 M. DESCHANEL'S book is a clever attempt to establish 
 a new relation between these three terms roman- 
 ticism, literary revolution, and classicism. What the 
 attempt is worth, and how far it has succeeded, we 
 shall be able to say presently. We have only to see, 
 indeed, what becomes of M. Deschanel's theory when 
 the generic word classics is replaced, in his definition 
 of romanticism, as in his idea of literary revolutions, 
 by the definition we have just given. 
 
 First of all it is clearly evident that if certain classic 
 authors were, as I agree with M. Deschanel, bold re- 
 volutionaries Moliere and Racine, for example, with 
 us, or Goethe and Schiller in Germany it is neither 
 as classics that they were revolutionaries, nor as re- 
 volutionaries that they have remained classics for us. 
 Had they been more timid revolutionaries, and even 
 had they done nothing at all by way of reformation 
 or change in their art, they would be classics none 
 the less. There are numerous examples to prove 
 this. Thus, in the history of the French drama, 
 if there is anyone who answers to the average 
 idea of a classic, it is assuredly the author of the 
 Legataire universe! or the Joueur, and I think we 
 would be rather embarrassed to say what revolution 
 he made. But, on the contrary, there are many others, 
 each of whom in his time added something positively 
 new to his art, La Chaussee, for example, the in- 
 
 194
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 ventor of the " comedie larmoyante," or Diderot, 
 the inventor of the "tragedie bourgeoise," who are 
 incontestably not classics. Similarly, in the history 
 of French prose, to whom shall we give the name of 
 classic, if not to the author of the Histoire de Charles 
 XII and the Siecle de Louis XIV? But who on the 
 other hand is not of opinion, on comparing him with 
 the author of the Nouvelle Heloise and the Confessions, 
 that the second is the innovator, and the less classic ? 
 And likewise, too, in the history of French poetry, 
 to take names nearer our time, if Victor Hugo is 
 assuredly the revolutionary, must we not admit that 
 Alfred de Musset is unquestionably much nearer the 
 common idea of a classic ? 
 
 It is quite possible then, that, there are sometimes 
 the meeting and concurrence in a great writer, as in 
 Moliere or Racine, Pascal or Bossuet, of the boldness 
 which makes the innovator, and the perfection which 
 makes the classic. But it is the exception. And in 
 any case, if we have introduced into our definition of 
 a classic all it should contain, and nothing but what 
 it should contain, not only is it not enough, but it is 
 also useless to " innovate " in order to become a classic. 
 I shall not waste time in showing that the converse is 
 true, and that it is plainly not enough to be counted 
 among the classics to have made many innovations. 
 But it should at least be shown that in the case of 
 Corneille or Moliere, the innovations for which M. 
 Deschanel took delight in praising them are un- 
 
 '95
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 doubtedly the least classic thing in their work, and 
 in them. 
 
 Some one has made bold to say it is M. Guizot, 
 I think of the great Corneille himself, that he is 
 not a classic. Without going quite so far, it is certain 
 that neither his work as a whole is classic, nor his 
 masterpieces themselves classic in all their parts. M. 
 Deschanel, however, does not seem to doubt for a 
 moment that, if there is a classic in the history of our 
 literature, it is the author of Nicornede and Don Sanche 
 J Aragon. And what he chiefly admires in Corneille 
 is doubtless to a certain extent what everybody admires, 
 but it is above all, as he says, " the painting of human 
 life in its complexity and divers aspects, now exalted, 
 now reduced, by means of these mixed dramas, at once 
 familiar and heroic, and also of these expressions taken 
 from the common language of everyday life, which 
 often surprise but are none the less just and true " ; 
 and this is what he calls expressly the romanticism of 
 Corneille. Now even admitting, which is not the 
 case, that Corneille made a revolution in bringing on 
 to the stage this " mixed drama, at once heroic and 
 familiar," it is just because he was too often unable 
 to separate these two elements, the heroic and the 
 familiar, which cross and combat and injure each 
 other in his work, that he has not succeeded in 
 reaching the classic perfection of his form. In the 
 same way also it is precisely from abounding in 
 
 "expressions taken from the common language of 
 
 196
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 everyday life," and which almost everywhere, when 
 they are not in dreadful contradiction with the senti- 
 ment the poet means to express or the effect he means 
 to produce, jar on his naturally pompous language, 
 that Corneille has not attained the classic perfection 
 of language and of the art of writing in verse. He is 
 therefore romantic in so far as he is not classic, and 
 not, as M. Deschanel would hold, classic in so far as 
 he had been romantic. Need we go further ? It 
 would be possible. I should be tempted to say, indeed, 
 that Corneille is classic from his good qualities and 
 romantic from his faults. But the example which M. 
 Deschanel has chosen in Moliere is the best proof of 
 the paradox I could wish. 
 
 " Let us admit at once," he says, " that Moliere's 
 Don j^uan, though very remarkable in many respects, 
 especially from the point of view of our present 
 subject, is yet, to say the word, a little patched up, 
 not very well put together, mixed up of incongruous 
 elements, but nevertheless extremely romantic." 
 We are entirely in accord with M. Deschanel on 
 this point. It is not only the three unities which 
 Moliere violated in his Don Juan ; the unity of 
 the character and of the type of the principal person- 
 age is strangely disfigured in each successive act. 
 Nobody is unaware, further, that the piece was com- 
 posed for the occasion, and, while admirable at cer- 
 tain places where the hand of Moliere regains its 
 
 cunning, was wretchedly written, and for the purpose 
 
 197
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 of turning to account, for the greater profit of the 
 theatre till, a subject with which the public was so 
 keenly smitten, that, between 1659 and 1667, not 
 speaking of that which was acted by the Italians, 
 we have no less than four dramatic readings of Festin 
 de Pierre. Need I say that the unities are violated 
 in the three others with the same violence as in that 
 of Moliere ? But if it was enough to advertise a 
 Festin de Pierre to attract the public, where, we ask, 
 was Moliere's " innovation " ? We ask, too, where 
 was his " romanticism," since, in the three or four 
 other Don Juans, changes of scenery, variety of in- 
 cidents, and stage-tricks are also to be found. We 
 are thus reduced to the conclusion that the most 
 "romantic" element in Moliere's Don Juan is its 
 incoherence, its incongruity, its absolute lack of 
 unity, all eminently romantic, I admit, but assuredly 
 very little classical. Moliere's romanticism in his Don 
 Juan consists in his Don Juan being prodigiously 
 inferior to his classic masterpieces. 
 
 Is this enough to entitle us to inscribe Corneille 
 or Moliere among the precursors of romanticism ? 
 If not, the discussion is closed and the case is heard. 
 But if it is, we must then impose on ourselves a de- 
 finition of romanticism, which, far from agreeing in 
 any point with the definition of classicism, would 
 now oppose it in absolute contradiction. 
 
 Indeed, he who talks about perfection perfection 
 
 of the language or perfection of a form evidently 
 
 198
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 implies separation, distinction, and choice. The per- 
 fection of a language is constituted by the choice, 
 among all the forms that can serve equally well for the 
 expression of the same thought, of the only form 
 that is suitable to the time, the circumstances, and 
 the subject. All the others fall, one alone remains 
 and survives. The language of Corneille, in his poor 
 passages, is, with just a little more force and happiness 
 of expression, the language of Mairet and Scuderi ; in 
 his good passages, it is the same language, purged 
 only of its excess of grandiloquence and preciosity : 
 and it is the classic language. Similarly the perfec- 
 tion of a form is constituted by the choice, among all 
 the forms that could almost equally well have been 
 used, of the form most sure to suit the end in view. 
 All the others are more or less suitable, but only one 
 among them all is more suitable than the others. 
 Thus, in the dramatic system of the three unities, 
 every means that can serve for the concentration of 
 the action is one step accomplished towards the per- 
 fection of the form the comedy of Moliere or the 
 tragedy of Racine. Now, from this very choice, 
 there necessarily results an elimination of all the other 
 forms. These other forms may be adopted, they may 
 be worked up, and they may sometimes be successful. 
 And this is romanticism, but it is classicism no longer. 
 It remains for me to show this briefly, and that 
 our admiration for the great writers of former times 
 
 and for those of to-day, far from being derived, as 
 
 199
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 M. Deschanel holds, from the "same source and the 
 same causes," is derived, on the contrary, from the 
 most contrary causes and the most different source 
 possible. Romanticism is no random revolution, but 
 a revolution to restore to honour all that classicism 
 had, if not dogmatically condemned, at least effect- 
 ually rejected. I speak of the classics of the seven- 
 teenth century and not of the pseudo-classics of the 
 Empire. 
 
 In the matter of language, in the first place, and 
 under the specious enough pretext of restoring its 
 ancient liberty, romanticism neglected nothing that 
 could possibly make it fall from the point of perfec- 
 tion to which the classics had carried it. Excess leads 
 to excess, I am not unaware. The so-called philo- 
 sophical grammarians of the eighteenth century had 
 weakened the language to such an extent that it was 
 absolutely necessary to give it a little body or to cease 
 to write. But the error of romanticism, animated as 
 it was by a hatred of all the classics without distinc- 
 tion, by a stupid hatred, was to leap, so to speak, over 
 the seventeenth century, and to carry us back to the 
 period of perhaps the worst disorder and the greatest 
 confusion of the language. If it was not declared in 
 precise terms, it was thought, in the cenacle of the 
 romanticists, that Racine wrote badly in comparison 
 with Du Bartas, and that Corneille himself, though 
 often emphatic, and occasionally even somewhat low, 
 
 was really only a schoolboy in comparison with Bai'f and 
 
 200
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 Jodelle. Thus was lost the benefit of the purification 
 which the language had undergone, from various in- 
 fluences, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, 
 and which perhaps we may be said not to have yet 
 recovered. ... I merely indicate here the develop- 
 ment. Every question relative to the state of a 
 language, in any period of its history, exacts too 
 cumbersome an equipment of examples and proofs 
 to be treated in passing. 
 
 It will be easier to show that romanticism was 
 mistaken in a like manner as to the reformation, 
 though that also was necessary, of tragedy. A single 
 question suffices. Where is the drama a synthesis 
 at once of the comedy of Moliere and the tragedy of 
 Racine where is the drama which the romantic Pre- 
 faces promised us so solemnly ? Is it Le Roi s* amuse ? 
 Is it Les Burgraves, perhaps ? Is it Henri III et sa 
 Cour? Is it Christine, ou Stockholm^ Fontainebleau, et 
 Rome? The truth is that if the romanticists 
 understood that the time of the tragedy of Corneille 
 and Racine was past, they did not understand that 
 the time was still further past, if I may say so, of 
 the drama of Shakespeare and Lope de Vega. " The 
 Cid entered on the true way, on the modern way," 
 says M. Deschanel, "that of the drama, under the 
 name of tragi-comedy." I shall ask him then what 
 he thinks we have met in this way during the nearly 
 eighty years since "the absurd tyranny of the three 
 unities" has ceased to dominate the French theatre 
 
 201
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 and to trammel the liberty of an Alexandre Dumas 
 and a Victor Hugo. For I consider that of the two 
 poets whom I name, the former, Dumas, had in 
 no less degree than Racine himself the instinct of 
 dramatic situation, and if I add that the latter, 
 Hugo, is no less a poet than Corneille, M. Des- 
 chanel, no doubt, will not contradict me. 
 
 Would this not simply mean that this form of the 
 drama, as well in the nineteenth as the seventeenth 
 century, does not agree with the national spirit ? 
 What happened in England when Dryden and 
 Addison attempted to acclimatise French tragedy in 
 the land of Shakespeare, happened with us when we 
 tried to accommodate to the French temperament 
 the drama of Shakespeare. It is really not very 
 philosophical to regret that Corneille or Racine 
 was not Shakespeare, and to throw on four poor 
 old pedants who are now forgotten the responsi- 
 bility of what is deliberately called the " archaeo- 
 logical, artificial, and composite character " of our 
 French drama. Why not rather be content with 
 being what one is, and not affect this silly regret 
 for not being English or Spanish ? For the whole 
 matter lies there. The question of the three unities 
 was discussed by the English too. Ben Jonson, the 
 great rival of Shakespeare, upheld the rule of twenty- 
 four hours no less ardently than an Abbe d'Aubignac 
 himself. The English chose liberty j the French 
 
 preferred rule. Liberty is good, but rule is good 
 202
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 also. Julius Ccesar is a fine drama ; Bajazet is not a 
 bad tragedy. The Merry Wives of Windsor is one 
 of the most humorous pieces ; Tartufe may pass as 
 a good enough comedy. Shakespeare is English, 
 Racine is French, Warwickshire is not Champagne, 
 and Paris is not London : what would you have 
 them do ? 
 
 The romanticists believed that they would do some- 
 thing, and, victims of this generous illusion, they 
 frankly threw themselves headlong into the imitation 
 of foreign literatures. This abandonment of the 
 national tradition is not what separates them the 
 least profoundly from our classics. Spain, Italy, 
 Germany, England (with its colonies) where, to 
 what country of the habitable world have they not 
 gone to seek motives of inspiration ? But what 
 have they brought back, for the most part, but 
 tinsel and spangle, local colour, as they said, oddities, 
 monstrosities above all, when they had the luck to 
 meet with them, but nothing solid, nothing durable, 
 nothing that could stand, nothing truly English, and 
 with better reason, as may be thought, nothing truly 
 French ? 
 
 I do not mean to examine in this connection the 
 question if here are not to be found the signs of 
 the future formation of a European literature. This 
 literature existed in the Middle Ages. And from 
 one end of civilised Europe to the other, under the 
 
 law of Christianity, ideas and sentiments were ex- 
 
 203
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 changed, thanks to Latin, it is true, in a form which 
 was neither French, English, Spanish, nor German. 
 Modern nationalities were then in what might be 
 called a state of indecision. It is quite possible that 
 peoples, who are now less strictly confined within 
 their frontiers, are about to lose the traits which 
 characterise them as peoples, in the same way that 
 by exchange of communication our old provinces 
 have lost something of their former originality. The 
 time seems to be approaching when literary work 
 will no longer betray its national origin but by 
 touches singularly delicate and difficult to distinguish. 
 But, once again, I am forgetting. We are not deal- 
 ing with romanticism in itself, nor in its conse- 
 quences, but with romanticism in its connection with 
 classicism, and the formula for it which M. Deschanel 
 has proposed. And if we have defined the classics 
 correctly, it is evident that there is absolutely nothing 
 more unlike a romanticist than a classic. 
 
 They are precisely at the two poles of the history 
 of our national literature. We can admire them in 
 their turn, we even must, if we have < breadth of 
 sympathy,' that fine phrase for what after all is little 
 else than indifference ; we can hardly admire them 
 together, no more than we can admire at the same 
 time the regularity of c good sense ' and the riot of 
 imagination, perfection in rhythm and indifference 
 to canon ; but we cannot by an means admire them 
 
 from the same reasons ; or they are then so general 
 204
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 that they cannot truly be called reasons. If every 
 kind of painting or every kind of music interests the 
 same senses, the one the eyes and the other the ear, 
 shall we say on that account that our admiration is 
 derived from the same source and the same causes ? 
 It is with the eyes that I admire a Madonna of 
 Raphael, and it is with the eyes that I admire a 
 Kermesse of Rubens : only the whole question is the 
 particular nature of my admiration. 
 
 We cannot conclude and take leave of M. Des- 
 chanel without thanking him for the opportunity 
 he has given us of discussing a question whose stimu- 
 lating interest we would like to have made the 
 reader recognise. I shall not assume that in a sub- 
 ject such as this it matters little whether or not we 
 are of accord : I have the weakness to believe that, 
 on the contrary, it matters a good deal. But it 
 matters much more still that literary criticism and 
 literary history, instead of proceeding, as M. Des- 
 chanel has said, from its first chapter and its first 
 lecture " to sink purely and simply in the quicksands 
 of philology," should sometimes think also of awaken- 
 ing ideas. Herein lies the value of M. Deschanel's 
 book. An idea dominates the subject. The facts 
 are of no value in themselves, but only in so far as 
 they help to demonstrate the idea. The digressions, 
 too, by a deviation which is sometimes rather long, 
 but always easily followed, lead back and link on 
 to the idea. And whether we have the better of 
 205
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 M. Deschanel, or M. Deschanel the better of 
 us, such books do more good to those who read 
 them than the very bulky and withal very estim- 
 able works, which doubtless pretend to greater 
 erudition. 
 
 206
 
 IMPRESSIONIST CRITICISM 
 
 WHEN a man himself follows the profession or business 
 of criticism, it is always easy and sometimes tempt- 
 ing to oppose his opinion to that of his colleagues, 
 to praise the novel they condemn, and find fault with 
 the writer they admire ; but it is not so easy to assume 
 the airs of judging them themselves and to affect 
 in this way a sort of superiority over them. This 
 smacks, as the phrase goes, of the pedantry of the 
 schools. But what is much more difficult still, and 
 may reasonably appear rather presumptuous, is to re- 
 proach them with understanding their science or their 
 art badly because they understand it differently than we 
 do, to dare to tell them so, and to claim, in short, that 
 their way of thinking should yield to and coincide with 
 ours. Yet we must do so : in the first place, that 
 we may not be imposed upon the most unpardonable 
 thing in the world in this age of Americanism ; and 
 further, because in this kind of quarrel, as we shall see 
 immediately, questions of persons include questions of 
 principles. Born before us and destined to survive us, 
 criticism would have been dead long ago, had it not an 
 
 object, a role, and a function, exterior and superior to 
 
 207
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 the idea formed of it by M. Anatole France, M. Jules 
 Lemaitre, M. Paul Desjardins, and some others whom 
 I could mention and myself. 
 
 Need I say that I have the greatest respect for M. 
 Anatole France, for his kindly, ironical, and dainty 
 manner, where such subtle thoughts are so prettily 
 veiled, with such elegance, indifference, and sometimes 
 even negligence ? I have hardly less respect for 
 M. Jules Lemaitre ; and, with all Paris, I enjoy, as 
 I well may, his learned pranks, where so much sim- 
 plicity, and ingenuousness even, is always allied to so 
 much wit, and sometimes so much sense. His master- 
 piece is perhaps the funeral oration on Victorine 
 Demay of the * Concert d'Horloge ' or the c Am- 
 bassadeurs ' and the account he has left us of the 
 interview of the popular singer with the learned author 
 of the General and Comparative History of Semitic 
 Languages. Nobody, moreover, writes better than he 
 does, in a style more lively, more supple, and more 
 full of surprises : he plays with words, he does what he 
 likes with them, he juggles with them. And I esteem 
 also M. Paul Desjardins for his anxious care, his good 
 will, his studied endeavour to be agreeable to those he 
 likes, for the touching sadness with which he tells 
 them the most unpleasant things. But, with all their 
 talent, I am afraid they may manage to lead criticism 
 into a grievous path, and if I see great difficulties 
 in it, why should I not point them out ? I like all 
 
 three very much, but I still prefer criticism ; and I 
 108
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 do not think they will be annoyed at it, and the reader 
 will commend me for it. 
 
 M. Paul Desjardins said this just the other day, in 
 reference to M. Taine ; and M. Jules Lemaitre has 
 said this twenty times if he has said it once ; but it 
 is perhaps M. Anatole France, in an article on M. 
 Jules Lemaitre, who has most energetically claimed 
 for criticism the right of being henceforth only 
 personal, impressionist, and, as is said, subjective. 
 " Objective criticism does not exist any more than 
 objective art, and all those who are pleased to think 
 they put something else than themselves into their 
 work are dupes of the most fallacious philosophy. The 
 truth is we can never come out of ourselves. It is 
 one of our greatest misfortunes. What would we not 
 give to see, for one minute, the skies and the earth 
 with the facet-eye of a fly, or to understand nature 
 with the rude and simple brain of an orang-outang ? 
 But this is quite forbidden us. We are shut up in our 
 personality as in a perpetual prison. The best thing 
 we can do, it seems to me, is to recognise this sorry 
 condition with a good grace and to admit that we 
 speak of ourselves every time we have not the strength 
 to hold our tongue." It would really be impossible to 
 insinuate more cleverly anything more " fallacious," 
 to confuse with greater adroitness ideas which are 
 more distinct, and, in short, to affirm with greater 
 assurance that there is nothing assured. 
 
 That this manner of understanding criticism has,
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 moreover, great advantages, I do not deny. It allows, 
 or rather it authorises, every compliance and every 
 contradiction. The * relativity ' of changing impres- 
 sions explains everything and answers everything. In 
 giving us its opinions not as true, but as l its own,' 
 impressionist criticism provides itself with a means of 
 changing them, which we know it does not abstain 
 from using. It dispenses accordingly with studying 
 the books it talks about or the subjects those books 
 treat, and this is sometimes a considerable gain. 
 " Need I endeavour to tell you the impression I felt 
 on reading the second volume of the History of the 
 People of Israel?" asked M. Anatole France a short 
 time ago. " Need I show you the state of my mind 
 when I dreamt between its pages ? " And, without 
 awaiting our reply for, after all, we others, officers 
 of the 1 99th infantry, or merchants of the Rue du 
 Sentier, I suppose, and good people of Carpentras or 
 Landerneau, why should we be so curious of M. 
 France's state of mind ? M. France tells us that while 
 he was a child he had among his toys " a Noah's Ark, 
 painted red, with all the animals in pairs, and Noah 
 and his children most beautifully shaped." If the pro- 
 cess is ingenious, it is apparently eminently con- 
 venient. Thanks to his Noah's Ark, M. Anatole 
 France found it quite unnecessary to read the History 
 of the People of Israel ; he dreamt between the pages 
 of the book ; and, as he is M. France, he spoke of it 
 none the less pleasantly. 
 
 2IO
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 A little less pleasantly, if we must be sincere, 
 but in the same manner did M. Paul Desjardins 
 speak the other day about the fifth volume of the 
 Origins of Contemporary France. He said that M. 
 Taine saw Bonaparte and the Revolution with the 
 eyes of M. Taine, and he added, or at least gave us 
 to understand, that his Desjardins's eyes were not 
 those of M. Taine, and he described another Revolu- 
 tion and another Bonaparte. But which Bonaparte 
 and which Revolution ? He took care not to tell us ; 
 and, after all, why did he not, since every Revolution 
 and every Bonaparte is equally legitimate, I mean to 
 say equally true ? Would it not be amusing if M. 
 Paul Desjardins has an opinion on Bonaparte or the 
 Revolution which the labours of M. Taine aimed 
 at obliging him to change ? But if he has no 
 opinion, shall we require that he should find one 
 before speaking of M. Taine or his book ? This is 
 yet another advantage in impressionist criticism : it 
 dispenses with conclusions. )uot capita^ tot sensus, so 
 said the rudiments : since we can never be freed from 
 ourselves, what is the good of trying ? What more 
 useless and more fatiguing ? What more fatiguing, 
 since it is undoubtedly no small matter to form a 
 reasoned opinion on the Revolution : what more use- 
 less, since M. Paul Desjardins, M. Jules Lemaitre, 
 and M. Anatole France think so, and since we 
 disguise ourselves to no purpose, for we can never 
 express anything but our * personal preferences.' 
 
 211
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 But I should have liked them not to be con- 
 tent with thinking it and saying it, I should have 
 liked them to endeavour to prove it : for this they 
 have forgotten to do. Metaphors are not reasons. 
 Assuredly if we had the c facet-eye of a fly ' or * the 
 rude and simple brain of an orang-outang,' our 
 vision of the world would be different, and it would 
 be above all less complex and less contradictory ; 
 it does not seem to be proved that it would be so 
 different as it appears to be laid down in theory, 
 and we know, for example, that in many animals the 
 sensations of form and colour are similar enough to 
 ours. But what is more certain still is that we 
 are neither flies nor orang-outangs ; we are men, 
 and we are so chiefly from the power we have of 
 going out of ourselves to seek and find and recognise 
 ourselves in others. Impressionist or subjective, when 
 criticism borrows arguments from metaphysics, with- 
 out even taking the trouble to consider their bearing, 
 it forgets that the value of these arguments is purely 
 metaphysical. I mean to say that we may well discuss 
 whether colour is a quality of coloured objects or a 
 mere sensation of the eyes ; but, sensation of the eyes 
 or quality of the objects, it is all one to us, and of 
 no importance ; and, in one case as in the other, 
 things happen in the same way. Red is always red, 
 and green is always green. Similarly, if what is 
 square is not round, what is round is not square. 
 Although we can speak of the relativity of our 
 
 212
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 impressions or the subjectivity of our sensations, the 
 capacity of feeling and experiencing them, which is 
 alike in every one of us if not always the same, and 
 of the same nature if not the same degree, is one of 
 the characteristics of the species, not to say a part of 
 the definition of man. So let us leave the flies and 
 the orang-outangs : we have nothing to do with 
 them, and they only cause confusion. What is fal- 
 lacious, let us say so in our turn, is to misuse words so 
 as to throw us off the scent as to the real meaning 
 of things. The deception, if there must be deception, 
 is to believe and teach that we cannot come out of 
 ourselves, when, on the contrary, life is taken up 
 with nothing else. And the reason will doubtless 
 appear strong enough if we take into account that 
 otherwise there would be neither society, language, 
 literature, nor art. 
 
 We are asked, it is true, where then arise the 
 difficulties in agreement, and how does it come 
 about that in matters of art and literature opinions 
 are so varied ? For they seem at least to be so : 
 and, to say nothing of our contemporaries whom 
 we agree we do not see from a sufficient distance or 
 height, how many judgments, how many diverse 
 judgments, have been given, for the last three or 
 four hundred years, on a Corneille or a Shakespeare, 
 a Cervantes or a Rabelais, a Raphael or a Michael 
 Angelo ! Just as there is no extravagant or absurd 
 
 opinion that some philosopher or other has not held, 
 213
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 so there is none that is scandalous, or hostile to genius, 
 that cannot find authority in the name of some critic. 
 Poets and novelists, moreover, have not been treated 
 any better by themselves : Ronsard abused Rabelais, 
 and Corneille, we know, never understood Racine : 
 he even openly declared his preference for Boursault. 
 What does this mean but that we are shut up in our 
 personality as in a l perpetual prison,' and whatever 
 effort we make to escape from it wearies us and con- 
 fines us the more closely. 
 
 It is this I take the liberty of denying ; and 
 our impressionist critics here think themselves too 
 original. It is not true that opinions are so diverse, 
 nor differences so deep. " Among true mandarins 
 of letters " the phrase is M. Jules Lemaitre's " it 
 is agreed that such writers, whatever may be their 
 faults or their manias, exist^ as is said, and are 
 worth the trouble of being closely examined." Here 
 is the first point : Racine exists, Voltaire exists, I 
 mean the author of Za'ire^ Alzire^ or Tancrede ; 
 Campistron does not exist, nor the Abbe Leblanc, 
 nor M. de Jouy. And here is a second : there 
 are degrees between Campistron and Voltaire, there 
 are other degrees between Zaire and ajazet y there 
 are degrees everywhere, and there is nobody who 
 will not admit it. We may not agree as to the 
 degrees. We may scoff" at those who ' fix the rank.' 
 We cannot refuse to put Victor Hugo above M. 
 Vacquerie, Lamartine above Madame Desbordes- 
 
 214
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 Valmore, Balzac above Charles de Bernard ; and 
 neither M. France, nor M. Lemaitre, nor M. 
 Desjardins has ever tried it, or ever will try it. 
 And to these two points I add a third : ' faults ' 
 or * manias,' they are just what some will like 
 in Balzac or Hugo, what others will like less, 
 what others still will censure, but which all will 
 recognise. And, even when it is a contemporary 
 writer, look at what M. France in the Temps, 
 M. Lemaitre in the Revue bleue, and M. Desjar- 
 dins in the "Journal des Debats have said of the 
 author of the Reve and the Bete humaine ; the 
 whole difference lies in what they have unduly 
 infused of their personality, of the expression of their 
 personal sympathies, in what they considered they 
 had to say of M. Zola : there is only a change 
 of words. 
 
 But I am wrong in saying ' unduly.' We are 
 not capable of divesting ourselves so completely of 
 our own personality, that nothing, absolutely nothing, 
 of ourselves mingles with our judgments. We are 
 too fond of ourselves for that ! In literature, as 
 in everything, we go to those who flatter us, or 
 who we believe will help us. I wish to make a 
 larger allowance still for our impressionists. Literary 
 opinion is the complex product of three unequal 
 terms. In a literary work, poem, drama, or novel, 
 we find in the first place what we bring to it of 
 
 ourselves, what we put into it of our inmost per- 
 
 215
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 sonality ; and, in this sense, as has been said, we 
 make its beauty. Some take greater pleasure in 
 Candide^ and others prefer Paul et Virginie. We 
 find, next, what their admirers or critics have pat 
 into it, the good qualities or faults which time, 
 alone, in its imperceptible course, has added, ard 
 which were not for contemporaries. Contemporaries 
 did not see in the Ecole des Femmes or Tartufe 
 what we see, and with good reason, for Moliere 
 did not think of it. No more did they see in 
 Cl'eopatre or the Grand Cyrus the tediousness, the 
 dulness, the insipidity which we do, for they did 
 not think so quickly, they read more slowly, and 
 they were less refined. But, lastly, must we not 
 find in CUopatre and Tartufe and Candide something 
 also that La Calprenede and Moliere and Voltaire 
 did put into them ? No matter what we be, who 
 can arouse in ourselves fixed impressions, must there 
 not be in Candide and Tartufe some qualities to 
 fix them or arouse them ? And is it not true that 
 these qualities, whatever they be of themselves, are 
 not to be found in a novel of the younger Crebillon 
 or in a comedy of Poisson or Montfleury ? 
 
 This is all that is necessary to establish objective 
 criticism. When we have got a clear idea of the 
 true nature of our impressions which is not always 
 easy, and which is always a slow matter : when 
 we have made allowance, which is much more 
 
 difficult still, for prejudice, for education, for the 
 
 216
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 age, for example or authority in our impressions, 
 there remains a work, a man, and a date. This is 
 enough. We can try to fix this date exactly, and 
 determine consequently in what time, at what moment 
 of literary history, in what social surroundings, amid 
 what circumstances the man lived and the work 
 appeared. We can try to say what the man was, 
 what kind of a man, sad or gay, humble or of 
 high rank, worthy of hate or admiration. For 
 generations inherit, more than they believe, from 
 everything that has preceded them : Nisard loved 
 to say that the most living thing in the present, 
 at all times, is the past. And we can then try, 
 after such an explanation, to classify and judge this 
 work. This is the whole object of criticism. What 
 do we see there that is not objective, and that is not 
 or cannot be independent of personal tastes, of the 
 private sympathies of him who tries to explain, 
 classify, and judge ? And if this is not to be seen, 
 or if it cannot be mentioned, what remains of the 
 insinuating paradoxes of M. Anatole France, the 
 sparkling paradoxes of M. Jules Lemaitre, and the 
 peevish paradoxes of M. Paul Desjardins ? 
 
 Shall I here insist on the obligation of judging ? 
 Shall I remind them that it is as much as implied 
 in the very etymology of the word criticism ? Or 
 shall I show that few judges at this very day are 
 more resolute judges than our impressionists ? The 
 
 Contemporains of M. Jules Lemaitre is nothing but 
 217
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 a collection of judgments on men, it is true, rather 
 than on works and its ' impressionism,' after all, 
 consists almost only in the malice or whimsicality 
 of the motives which influence them. Who then 
 has been severer and harder on M. George Ohnet, 
 for example, or M. Emile Zola than the sceptical, 
 indulgent, and cheerful M. France ? * Extravagance,' 
 ' platitude,' ' tediousness,' ' wretched rhapsodies,' 
 'abominable insipidities,' M. France lost that day 
 even his attic or rather alexandrian style, on 
 which he usually piques himself. And could I not 
 cite judgments of M. Desjardins, which, though less 
 brilliant, are no less decisive ? Heaven protect me 
 from reproaching them for these judgments ! I do 
 not dislike a rhapsody being called by its proper name, 
 nor a thought being freely uttered. In literature, 
 as elsewhere, it would only be for the better if this 
 were done oftener, and more boldly. But what is 
 this affectation of pretending not to judge when 
 one really does judge, of giving us as ' impressions ' 
 judgments which our conscience tells us we regard 
 as such, and, when one thing is done, of trying to 
 persuade us it is another ? 
 
 In truth I well know that if they undergo, whether 
 they will or not, the obligation of judging, for that 
 is in the nature of things, our impressionists flatter 
 themselves, on the other hand, on escaping from the 
 necessity of classifying. To classify they say is to 
 
 fix the rank, to distribute prizes, to put Balzac above 
 
 218
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 Flaubert, or a tragedy of Racine above a vaudeville of 
 Labiche ; and this work is in their eyes just the very 
 acme of absurdity. Don't speak to them only of 
 comparing men and works ! Is every pleasure not 
 as good as another ? I mean those which are called 
 aesthetic. What is the use of comparing the Fleurs 
 du mal with the Meditations? The Cid is a fine 
 thing ; Andromaque is another ; is that any reason 
 why Ruy Bias should not be a third ? If I prefer 
 Valentine to the Cousine Bette, what ground and what 
 right has anyone to try to make me change or reverse 
 the order of my preferences ? Is each one of us not 
 a little universe for himself alone ? Is variety not a 
 necessary condition of pleasure ? For of what do we 
 not weary ? What then more barbarous or more 
 inhuman, say they, than thus to try to place on 
 every head, in the name of theoretic principle and 
 abstract ideal, the heavy level of the same definitions, 
 the same rules, or the same laws ? So let the world 
 go its own way, and let each one of us appear just as 
 he is. If he discovers in himself some curious failing, 
 or the germ of some hidden flaw, let him, instead of 
 destroying it, cultivate it : and let him make with it, 
 if he can, a means of literary existence, a reputation, 
 and an income. 
 
 In opposition to these theories, I cannot discuss the 
 principles of the classification of literary forms : it 
 would take up too much space and time. But I shall 
 
 be content to reply to our impressionists that they 
 219
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 have perhaps not sufficiently considered either the 
 nature of classification or of comparison. Would it 
 not really be very extraordinary that, in an age like 
 ours, where the comparative method has renewed 
 almost everything, criticism alone should refuse its 
 assistance, so as not to expose itself to the witticisms 
 of certain philologers or certain anatomists who live 
 in their seminaries or their laboratories only to 
 compare old texts or old bones ? Why, this would 
 be a useful, interesting, and fruitful work, to compare 
 the calcaneum or the navicular of the Lemuridx 
 with that of the Simiadas, or the metre and the 
 assonances of the Chanson de Roland with the 
 assonances of the Chanson d^Aiol; but it would be 
 a waste of time to compare the tragedy of Racine 
 with the drama of Shakespeare, or the novel of Field- 
 ing with that of Balzac. And as to the * relativity ' 
 of things, what comes of that now ? A man is 
 neither big, nor small, nor thin, nor stout, nor 
 beautiful, nor ugly ; he is only more ugly or more 
 beautiful, more stout or more thin, more small or more 
 big than another, than the others, than the average of 
 his race and species. So also a work of art is what it 
 is, succeeds in being so, and is so fully and decidedly, 
 only in so far as it is compared with another. Zaire 
 would be a beautiful tragedy if there was no Bajazet^ 
 and we would doubtless still read the Doyen de Killerine 
 or Cleveland with avidity, if we did not know the novels 
 of George Sand and Balzac. All the progress that 
 
 220
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 criticism can flatter itself on having accomplished 
 during this century is due to this kind of com- 
 parison ; and it is possible that this mania of com- 
 paring, if it is persisted in, may be a sign of slowness 
 or narrowness of spirit : but in the meantime I 
 recommend it none the less to all those who believe 
 they should place truth above themselves and the 
 interests of their own particular talent. 
 
 As to the power and, if I may say so, the virtue of 
 classification, so many philosophers, so many scholars 
 have spoken of it so well, that I hardly know whom 
 I should here call to my aid, a Hasckel or an Agassiz, 
 a Stuart Mill or an Auguste Comte. I could add 
 also the Darwins and Huxleys. The fine Essay on 
 Classification by Agassiz is a book which our impres- 
 sionists cannot be too strongly advised to read. But 
 if they prefer to have a Frenchman cited, Auguste 
 Comte has shown quite as well, in his Positivist 
 Philosophy, that "in whatever kind of intellectual 
 work, be it scientific, literary, artistic, as well as in 
 natural history, "a methodical classification is not 
 only the indispensable summary of the actual system 
 of our knowledge, but also the chief logical instru- 
 ment of its subsequent perfection." And how, in 
 the hierarchy of the forms, could we place tragedy, 
 for example, above melodrama, Polyeucte above the 
 Tour de Nesle, or, in the novel, Pert Goriot above the 
 Exploits de Rocambole, without giving our reasons ? 
 
 How could we give these without penetrating further 
 221
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 into the knowledge of the history, the evolution, and 
 the essence of the form ? And the further we pene- 
 trated, how could these very reasons, whether 'sub- 
 jective' or personal, fail to become more and more 
 general, and properly * objective ' ? After the obliga- 
 tion of judging, the necessity of classifying thus seems 
 strictly inherent in the very notion of criticism. 
 
 It is not then classifying or comparing that is old 
 and superannuated, but, on the contrary, abstaining 
 from doing so ; and what is arbitrary is not to * dis- 
 tribute prizes' but to wish to be the sole judge, the 
 infallible judge, and the judge beyond appeal of the 
 prizes we award. So act the ' people of society ' 
 whose 'taste' takes the place of competence and 
 study, and whom we see deciding on the play or 
 the novel of the day by the prettiness of the things 
 they find to say about it. But Boileau, Boileau him- 
 self was even then looking to something more. He 
 knew well that if his taste was good, it was not 
 because it was his own, but on the contrary because 
 it was exterior and superior to his own, and that the 
 object of criticism is to teach men to judge often 
 against their own taste. Do not morality and educa- 
 tion also consist, like criticism, in substituting in 
 ourselves other motives of judgment and action than 
 those suggested to us by temperament, instinct, and 
 nature ? There is one other observation which I 
 submit to our impressionists. If each of us had the 
 pretension to concede or yield nothing to others, 
 
 222
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 life would be unbearable ; and, similarly, if a work 
 of art were merely the expression of the individuality 
 of the artist, not only criticism but art itself would 
 perish. 
 
 Yet judging and classifying are only a beginning, 
 and we must then explain. As to this obligation of 
 criticism, or this function, if you will, which was for 
 Sainte-Beuve the whole of criticism, and which must 
 remain one of its essential parts, shall I say that 
 impressionist criticism does not submit to it any more 
 than to the others ? In reality, impressionist criticism 
 does not explain, it states ; and it describes, or it 
 comments, but it does not interpret. I rather fear 
 I know at least one of its motives. It is that if we 
 wished to distinguish what each book and author 
 owe to all those who have preceded them and 
 ' caused ' them, so to speak, we would be startled at 
 the smallness of the originality of mankind. We all 
 write, say, a poem, a play, a novel, or an article : 
 and how much do we put into it of ourselves, which 
 is of ourselves and from ourselves, and only of and 
 from ourselves ? The explanation, then, is first to be 
 found, or at least to be sought for, everywhere but in 
 ourselves ; and too happy are those whose originality 
 has not disappeared in this very search ! There is 
 another proof, if that is needed, of the existence of 
 objective criticism. The originality of a writer of 
 M. Zola, for example, or M. Henry Becque is not 
 
 defined by reference to himself, which would imply a 
 223
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 contradiction ; it is not defined by reference to me, 
 who am doubtless less original than they are ; it is 
 defined by reference to the dramatists or novelists who 
 have preceded them, who have their place in history, 
 and it is defined by reference to the laws they have 
 themselves made of their literary form, which likewise 
 has its place in history. 
 
 The foundation of objective criticism is therefore 
 really the same as that of history. Just as there can 
 be no possible doubt or allowable hesitation about the 
 military genius of Napoleon or the political genius of 
 Richelieu, so too there can be none about the unique 
 originality of the comedy of Moliere or the tragedy 
 of Racine ; and whoever will treat as a ' scamp ' the 
 author of Andromaque will act like the simple Lanfrey 
 when he gave lessons on retrospective tactics to the 
 victor of Austerlitz : it is himself he will have judged. 
 But whoever says that one is at liberty to prefer 
 Regnard's comedy to Moliere's, the Distrait to the 
 Ecole des Femmes^ and the Folies amoureuses to Tartufe^ 
 does something much worse still, for he might as well 
 say that there is no reason for placing a living being 
 below or above another in the order of species ; and, 
 along with the foundations of objective criticism, he 
 destroys with the same blow those of natural history. 
 A literary form is, indeed, superior to another, and, in 
 the same form, drama ode or novel, a work is nearer 
 or farther away from the perfection of its form, only 
 
 from reasons analogous to those which, in the hierarchy 
 
 224
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 of organisms, raise vertebrata above mollusca, for ex- 
 ample, and, among the vertebrata, the dog and cat 
 above the ornithorhynchus. Such is the true way of 
 understanding the 'relativity of knowledge'; such is 
 the real way ; such is the only way that is not sophistry 
 or pure word-splitting. Had we the 'facet-eye of a 
 fly ' or the ' rude and simple brain of an orang-outang,' 
 things might change for us in appearance and mean- 
 ing ; but the relations which would still continue 
 to unite them, and the system formed by these 
 relations, in whatever way, yet always connected, 
 would not suffer change. And hence, since laws are 
 nothing else than the expression of these relations, the 
 result follows that to deny the possibility of objective 
 criticism is to deny the possibility of any science what- 
 ever. If there is no objective criticism, no more is 
 there objective natural history, chemistry, or physics. 
 This does not mean that criticism is a science, but that 
 they are connected ; and, as it has, like science, a 
 precise object, it can borrow from science methods, 
 processes, and directions. 
 
 How then can they have failed to recognise this ? 
 There are many reasons, of which I would choose, for 
 the present occasion, only the least unkind, or even 
 the most flattering to our impressionist critics. It 
 is no use for them to write critiques ; they all 
 nourish, in their inmost heart, the secret ambition of 
 novelist, dramatist, or poet. So too did Sainte- 
 Beuve, who well knew, since he himself confessed it
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 in so many words, that "the true condition of the 
 critical spirit is to have no art of its own " ; but who 
 could not refrain, as often as he had to speak of Balzac 
 or Hugo, from considering them from the point of 
 view of Joseph Delorme or Volupte. It is the same 
 with M. France, M. Lemaitre, and M. Paul Desjardins. 
 Even if M. Desjardins, the youngest of the three, were 
 not the author of some novels, his critical articles, the 
 form he habitually gives them, the pleasure he takes 
 in mingling traits which describe or deal with himself 
 but are equally foreign to his subject, would still 
 proclaim the novelist which lies dormant in him. As 
 for M. Lemaitre, after having made practically his 
 first appearance with his Petltes Orientates^ if I 
 remember rightly, and after having written some 
 Conies, of which there are at least two or three that 
 are charming, he is now attracted by the drama, as 
 all those know who lately applauded his Revoltee^ and, 
 more recently, his Depute Leveau. Lastly, to say 
 nothing of the Noces corinthiennes or the Poemes 
 dores^ it is not in his criticism, it is in the Crime de 
 Sylvestre Bonnard^ or still more in Thais, that M. 
 France has put his best. Evidently, if criticism 
 interests all of them, it has never been, and never 
 will be, their principal business ; or rather they 
 use it only to experiment with ideas, until they can 
 give them a different and still more personal form, 
 which will some day be the soul of their dramas, 
 
 poems, or novels. 
 
 226
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 There is nothing more natural. Poet or novelist, 
 what makes the originality of the artist is his impres- 
 sionist, subjective, or truly personal way of seeing 
 and feeling. Add something to the knowledge we 
 have of common life ; discover in it some unexplored 
 province, if such still exists ; complete, correct, or 
 modify the idea which we have of it, such is the work 
 of the poet, in the most general sense of the term. 
 And here is the work of the artist : he enlarges, 
 develops, perfects the means of his art ; he finds 
 means to render what his art had not yet expressed ; 
 and he adds to it the individuality of his own sen- 
 sations. The only precaution which, I believe, must 
 then be taken, is, in perfecting the means of the art, 
 not to reduce it entirely to the perfection of the 
 form, as our Parnassians have done, nor to begin 
 by mutilating and calumniating life in some way 
 or other before imitating it, as our naturalists have 
 done. But if the object of criticism is entirely dif- 
 ferent, do not the merits of the poet and the novelist 
 become for it as many faults ? This fashion of inter- 
 vening in person may greatly assist the novelty of 
 impressions, but does it not affect justice and truth ? 
 This is what all those believe who like Villemain 
 and Guizot formerly, like Littre, like Scherer nearer 
 our time, and lastly like M. Taine, who were much 
 more convinced of the relativity of things than our 
 impressionists themselves, and who understood it as it 
 
 should be understood have believed no less thoroughly 
 227
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 in the existence of objective criticism ; and we 
 believe in it along with them. 
 
 I do not know, indeed, if the disadvantages, or 
 even the dangers of this impressionism are evi- 
 dent, and that, in the first place, it would break 
 the bonds which closely unite criticism and history. 
 M. Anatole France, M. Jules Lemaitre, M. Paul 
 Desjardins are not merely talented writers. They are 
 also scholars, mandarins, as M. Lemaitre says, whose 
 impressions, whatever they be, are determined and 
 caused, more often than they believe, by the literary 
 education they have received. They readily re- 
 proach objective criticism that its * dogmatism ' is only 
 the form which it gives to its c personal preferences.' 
 Yet, among their c personal preferences,' or what they 
 take for such, there is quite a part of * dogmatism ' 
 which is neither theirs nor of them. It is what they 
 1 know ' ; and their knowledge preserves them from 
 the trap which impressionism keeps always laid for 
 ignorance. They may therefore prefer Madame 
 Bovary to Racine's Athalle. In reality, their paradox 
 amuses them ; they admit it in spite of themselves j 
 and the proof is that they cannot keep from letting 
 something of the truth slip in developing their para- 
 dox, and this truth ruins it. But smaller scholars 
 will come in their turn ; they have come already, 
 who will know nothing, who will abstain from read- 
 ing anything, from fear that their impressions will be 
 
 taken from them beforehand, and who will con- 
 228
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 stitute themselves, none the less, by right of their 
 impressionism, partial judges of matters of intellect. 
 I know more than twenty whom I could name. 
 Literary history would perish first ; tradition next, 
 with literary history ; and finally, with tradition, the 
 sentiment of solidarity which binds the generations 
 together. 
 
 One consequence would follow from this, that 
 criticism, now thus cut off from its connection with 
 history, would lose, at the same time as the notion 
 of its object, the knowledge of its role or function. 
 For to say that it has no function or role is another 
 error, as we saw that it was wrong, in order to deny 
 its purpose, to exaggerate gratuitously the number, 
 the nature, and the bearing of its contradictions. Its 
 province is to give directions to art ; and this may be 
 noted several times in history. With a little exaggera- 
 tion, but not without some truth, has it not been 
 claimed that modern German literature is the work 
 or the creation of Lessing's criticism ? And with us, 
 three times at least within three hundred years, has 
 not criticism directed the evolution of our poetry ? 
 Du Bellay, Ronsard himself, and Bai'f above all began 
 by being critics as much as poets ; Boileau was only 
 that ; and who now does not know that romanticism 
 was already clearly present in the Gtnie du Chrls- 
 tianisrne ? If nobody can flatter himself on ever being 
 either Chateaubriand, Boileau, or Ronsard, nobody 
 
 is forbidden, I think, from trying to follow] them : 
 229
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 and, in any case, their example is enough to show 
 what services, and what kind of services, criticism can 
 render. Infatuated as they are to-day with them- 
 selves and their sens propre^ as used to be said, if 
 criticism cannot immediately act on authors, it can 
 act, and acts to some purpose every day, on opinion, 
 of which they are only the expression, when they are 
 not its humble servants. It can take away from 
 them their public, and, by modifying the milieu, 
 it can make even the most stubborn change his 
 manner. 
 
 Are examples necessary ? Has not one of our 
 impressionists, M. Paul Desjardins, somewhere defined 
 naturalism as "the application of the processes of 
 criticism to the literature of the imagination " ; and 
 though it is a little narrow, the definition is none the less 
 ingenious and happy. But what I hold as absolutely 
 true in it, is that, without criticism, naturalism would 
 never have had the success it has had. It would be 
 easily proved that the author of La Bete humaine 
 and U Assommoir owes almost everything, not to 
 Balzac, nor even to Flaubert, but to M. Taine, to 
 M. Taine's essay on Balzac^ and to the History of 
 English Literature. So too how many times, in his 
 earliest work, when he was as yet the author only of 
 the Fortune des Rougon or the Conquete de P/assans, 
 did he not complain that M. Taine had abandoned 
 him ! )uare me dereliquisti ! If M. Taine had laid 
 
 down, in his History of English Literature^ the principles 
 230
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 of naturalism, he had been careful to mark, in his 
 Philosophy of Art y the limits which naturalism could 
 not pass without departing from the conditions of 
 art itself. So criticism has not only determined, as 
 we said, the direction of contemporary naturalism, 
 but has also protected it from its own excesses ; and 
 so what is best in naturalism and nobody, I know, 
 denies that there is much good in it must be laid to 
 the credit of criticism. 
 
 The same thing is to be said of the drama. For 
 the last twenty-five or thirty years no work has 
 appeared on the stage which marks an epoch in the 
 history of the art, which is capable of forming a school 
 and inspiring successful imitators. Yet the aesthetics 
 of the drama have completely changed. If there are 
 some of us still who used to praise the ingenious- 
 ness, the abundance of resource, the very real ability 
 of Eugene Scribe, how many are we ? And what is 
 there, in the eyes of young people, more out of fashion, 
 more artificial, and more false, than Une Chaine, for 
 example, if not Bertrand et Raton ? There is no 
 more desire for these preparations, these conventions, 
 this confusion or medley of styles. Criticism alone 
 has accomplished this work. It is criticism which 
 asked itself why the drama had remained for thirty 
 or forty years in arrear of the novel. It is criticism 
 which showed the good points in the conventions 
 which the school of Scribe had constituted as so 
 
 many articles of faith. Better still : among these 
 231
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 conventions, it is criticism which labours to separate 
 the necessary from the arbitrary. And, should M. 
 Becque, or someone else, give us one day or other 
 this comedy, doubtless not entirely new, but yet 
 freer and franker, of which we must admit that La 
 Parisienne or Les Corbeaux are little more than the 
 promise, it is still criticism to which the twentieth 
 century will be indebted. 
 
 There, in the present as in all time, is the 
 true function of criticism, which it can evidently 
 fulfil only by escaping from impressionism. If 
 criticism means to act, it must be something else, 
 and something more interesting, than the manifesta- 
 tion of our tastes and preferences, for these, to tell 
 the truth, usually interest only ourselves. Do not M. 
 Lemaitre and M. France know that the remnant of 
 authority which it still preserves in the provinces is due 
 to the presence in their judgments of reasons which 
 are not theirs but everybody's ? In the same way, 
 when reading the Memoirs or Confessions of others, 
 we think we like what we find similar or applicable 
 to ourselves, while in reality what we seek is a wider, 
 more varied, and deeper knowledge of man in general. 
 So let us admit it with a good grace : let us put some- 
 thing above our tastes ; and since there must be criti- 
 cism, let us say that there cannot be any that is not 
 objective. This is all that I have endeavoured to show 
 in these pages : and I think that to have shown it 
 
 successfully would not be a matter of indifference, 
 
 232
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 either to the idea which we must hold of criticism, 
 or to the education of the mind, or perhaps to the very 
 future of literature or to the literature of the future. 
 Now, as for some dilettanti who ask what is the 
 good of criticism and why we do not do without it, 
 we may be content to reply by asking another ques- 
 tion : what is the good also of art, of history, of 
 science ? And, indeed, the world would not be 
 changed if the Comedie-Francaise were to give us 
 this year at least a masterpiece ; and since we live 
 very comfortably in an entire ignorance of the nature 
 of Merovingian institutions, we may with stronger 
 reason do without knowing what must be thought 
 of the works of those who have studied them. But I 
 shall add that if criticism is inferior to history and 
 art in so many other respects, it has this advantage 
 or this superiority over art and history that it alone 
 can prevent the world, according to M. Renan's ex- 
 pression, from " being devoured by charlatanism." Too 
 occupied, too diligent, too much a slave to the labour 
 of daily life, unable to analyse its pleasure and recognise 
 the quality of it, the crowd always runs at the call 
 of those who flatter ; and the charlatans of art or 
 literature know this well. It is precisely the business 
 of criticism to think and to judge for the crowd. In 
 fixing the rank and distributing its prizes, it is pos- 
 sible it may give certain little philosophers something 
 to laugh at, but it does work doubly useful : it teaches 
 the crowd that there is some difference between 
 2 33
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 Ponson du Terrail and Balzac, which it is doubtless 
 well to know ; and it avenges talent for the successes 
 of mediocrity, which are humiliating some way or 
 other to everybody. Why, alas, must we end by 
 saying that, if the task has never been more urgent, 
 these latter words make no pretence to perform it ; 
 and that as our fathers might have used them, those 
 who come after us will use them in their turn ; 
 and they will be always true. 
 
 234
 
 AN APOLOGY FOR RHETORIC 
 
 IF, as has been said, there are dead men who must be 
 killed, are there not others from time to time who 
 must be brought to life again, or have at least their 
 memory revived ? This is what I was thinking a 
 short time ago while reading the invective of a worthy 
 philosopher against rhetoric, and I asked myself if the 
 time had not come to plead a little the cause of this 
 illustrious victim. For though there is certainly one 
 part of the art of writing which is divine and, as it 
 were, inspired, and which, at once inimitable and 
 incommunicable, is neither to be learned nor trans- 
 mitted, are there not also humbler parts which can 
 be taught and really have rules and theories ? Surely 
 nobody would dare to say that there is no art of sing- 
 ing. The most beautiful voice in the world is little 
 in itself, if it cannot be used and controlled. Why 
 should there not be also an art of speaking or writing ? 
 Because rhetoric has been abused, must we condemn 
 its use or despise its utility its value I shall soon be 
 saying. And because someone has said that "true 
 rhetoric laughs at rhetoric" must we take him at 
 his word ? Or shall we hold with another that a man 
 
 235
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 always writes well enough when he succeeds in making 
 himself understood ? In this case I do not know the 
 kitchen-maid or stable-boy who does not succeed as 
 well as an academician. 
 
 Yes, undoubtedly, if we never spoke but to act, 
 if when we wrote we were guided only by interests 
 superior to ourselves, interests which self-love has never 
 tainted, if we thought only of instructing, or of gain- 
 ing or converting souls, if we were Pascal since I have 
 just quoted from him or Bossuet, or Bourdaloue only, 
 then we could affect to despise rhetoric ! We could 
 throw far off its ornaments and artifices. We 
 should have the right to despise, for our speech as 
 for our person, 'all that men admire.' And yet, as 
 to Pascal himself, why did he re-write, even as often 
 as seven or eight times, each one of his Provinciates ? * 
 And Bossuet, though more disinterested than Pascal, 
 why did he re-write his Sermons ? Why did he revise 
 so carefully the text of his Oraisons funebres or his 
 Histoire universelle? To make sure of its doctrine, 
 I know, and grant ; but also that the force of the 
 
 * As it is chiefly Pascal and his saying that are cited against rhe- 
 toric, it may be well to reproduce a few lines from Nicole, in his 
 Histoire des Prb-vlnclalcs : ' This letter (the first) had all the success 
 desired. ... It produced in the minds of all the effect which was ex- 
 pected. It showed how much the style of -writing "which Montalte had chosen 
 was fitted to engage the attention of the "world In this dispute. It was plain 
 that it forced in some way or other the dullest and the most indifferent to 
 take an interest in it ; that it stirred them up, that It -won them over by en- 
 joyment ; and that, without aiming at giving them vain amusement, it 
 led them pleasantly to the knowledge of the truth.' 
 
 236
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 words should make the ideas more sure of impressing 
 the reader or listener. They did not need to despise 
 rhetoric, for they indulged in it. And though they 
 did not let it take up more place in their work than 
 it should occupy, they indulged in it all the same. 
 They knew * the power of a word put in its proper 
 place : ' they knew also that of c harmonious cadence.* 
 As they dealt with men, they captivated them by 
 human methods. Was that not better than estrang- 
 ing them at the outset, for as they had something 
 they wished to tell, should they have begun by dis- 
 couraging or disgusting them from listening ? But 
 how much more is that which is true of those men 
 true of us, I mean of all those writers who are neither 
 apostles nor leaders of souls, who write for their own 
 pleasure perhaps, but also that they may be read, 
 just as the painter aims at being looked at and the 
 musician at being heard. Only those can I forgive 
 for their contempt or disdain of rhetoric who do not 
 print, and never have printed, and will not leave 
 Memoirs behind them, who will in fact always keep 
 from writing, even against rhetoric, since we have to 
 use it as soon as we write. 
 
 It is true we must come to an understanding on the 
 meaning of the very word rhetoric, and this is no easy 
 matter, since it has been distorted from the old sense 
 it still had at the time of Pascal and Bossuet to be 
 made a kind of literary insult. Further, we live at a 
 time when everyone takes the liberty of giving words 
 237
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 whatever sense is convenient without any thought 
 on their signification, their history, or their origin. 
 What is it, for example, that M. Ernest Renan meant 
 to say in the preface to the third volume of his History 
 of the People of Israel, when he rather bitterly re- 
 proached those who did not see the resemblance be- 
 tween Felix Pyat and the prophet Jeremiah which he 
 finds so amusing with l their rhetoricians' suscepti- 
 bility ' ? I suppose he only meant to be unpleasant, 
 for what rhetoric can find a resemblance doubtful, 
 a comparison bad, an allusion unfortunate, and say 
 so very simply. Surely a man can have other 
 ideas on the Prophets than those of M. Renan, 
 and not be a c rhetorician ' for that ? But when M. 
 Maxime Du Camp in his turn tells us in his Theophile 
 Gautier that, along with the verses of Musset, those 
 of Gautier are the only ones which are not * tainted 
 with rhetoric,' what meaning does he attach to it ? 
 And what should we ? For I would have thought 
 that there was no rhetoric at all, or very little, in 
 Jocelyn and the Destinees, for example, in the verses 
 of Lamartine and Vigny : but on the other hand I 
 find much, and a good deal more than I would have 
 wished for, in Albertm and Rolla. 
 
 Regrettez-vous le temps oil le ciel sur la terre, 
 Marchait et respirait dans un pcuple de dieux. . . . 
 
 Dors-tu content, Voltaire, et ton hideux sourire 
 Voltige-t-il encor sur tes os decharnes. . . . 
 
 Clottres silencieux, voutes des monasteres, 
 C'est vous, sombres caveaux, vous qui savez aimer. . . . 
 2 3 8
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 Who has ever made a greater abuse than Musset of 
 the exclamation, and the apostrophe, and generally all 
 the figures that are catalogued in the treatises of the 
 rhetoricians ? But as for Gautier, is it not amusing 
 that anyone should wish to exempt at this day from 
 the reproach of rhetoric him of all our contemporaries 
 who believed most firmly in the power of words, in 
 their peculiar and intrinsic value, exterior and superior 
 to the ideas they express ? For fear of losing ourselves 
 among all these contradictions, let us hold by the 
 old definitions, and take the word as it has always been 
 taken from Aristotle to Fenelon. Rhetoric is the body 
 of rules and laws which govern the art of writing, con- 
 sidered in itself as inseparable from the art of think- 
 ing : and whether it is known or not, and I rather 
 fear it is not known very well, what one denies in 
 attacking rhetoric is an art of thinking and writing. 
 
 In what does it consist ? I shall take good care to 
 be vague. I am sure to be asked if I am master of it 
 myself. The joke, it is true, would mean nothing : but 
 I prefer not to give too good occasion for it. Its rules 
 and laws are to be found in all treatises on rhetoric, 
 and Aristotle and Quintilian say some very good things 
 about it, which are as true for us as for the Greeks and 
 Romans. But it will be most interesting perhaps to 
 recall the principles of this art, or rather its reasons, 
 the eternal and solid reasons which will always justify 
 it. Not only is it not such a futile and puerile thing, 
 as it is often said to be, to learn to write, but it is 
 239
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 possible that it may be essential. Brought to birth at 
 an early date, and almost contemporary in its origin 
 with Greek literature, rhetoric should undoubtedly 
 answer, and I believe it does, to some general interior 
 and profound need of literature and humanity. 
 
 " We show too little esteem of the public if we do not 
 take the trouble of preparation when dealing with it. 
 And a man who would appear in a night-cap and a 
 dressing-gown on a day of ceremony would not commit 
 a greater incivility than he who exposes to the light of 
 the world things which are good only in private or in 
 conversations only with intimate friends or valets." So 
 says Balzac somewhere, the other Balzac, the one whom 
 Sainte-Beuve preferred for quite personal reasons 
 and who, as he has so well said, had actually made 
 French prose learn its rhetoric. How many people 
 would not write, if they were made, if they could be 
 made, before writing, to think over this lesson of old 
 politeness ! How many Memoirs and Journals and 
 Confessions would literature have the luck to be rid of, 
 if we could distinguish for ourselves what is suitable 
 only for our c intimate friends ' and our l valets' if we 
 have them and what is worth being exposed ' to the 
 light of the world ' ! This is the first principle of all 
 rhetoric. A man writes and speaks for himself, but 
 also for others, and assuredly we should neither sacrifice 
 nor disguise for them what we believe to be justice 
 and truth, but should present these in a manner which 
 
 does not jar too rudely on their ears, their habits, or 
 240
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 their prejudices. Is it not thus I think it is worth 
 the passing remark that our classical literature has 
 grown and developed ? I refer no longer to Balzac. 
 But we may be sure that the author of the Provinciales, 
 had he not taken pains to win society at once to 
 his side, would never have succeeded in insinuating 
 into the minds of his time something of the severity 
 of Jansenist morality. And in truth, the means he 
 chose was excellent rhetoric, but it was rhetoric all the 
 same. 
 
 Let us remember, in fact, that literature, like art 
 in general, has really a function I am tempted to 
 say a social mission. This is the profound meaning 
 of the ancient myths, which gave eloquence a place 
 at the beginning of civilisations or even of societies. 
 Do we not know, moreover, that if great peoples 
 anywhere awake to a full consciousness of what they 
 are, it is in their literature ? And, divided as we are 
 by all sorts of means, by our interests or our passions, 
 is it not literature still that ever re-establishes a 
 solidarity, which on the other hand the attraction of 
 selfish pleasure and the hardness of the struggle 
 for life perpetually tend to dissolve ? An ode or 
 an elegy, a drama or a novel, work only on the 
 reader, if I may say so, according as they awaken 
 or produce in him ' states of mind ' which are like 
 those of the novelist or the dramatist or the poet. 
 The knowledge of these states of mind, of their most 
 general and human qualities, and consequently the art
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 or science of the means to induce them, is what the 
 ancient rhetoricians called the l topic.' We may 
 change the word if it is too Greek, too pedantic, too 
 uncouth for us nowadays : but the thing remains the 
 same. A little of the c topic ' would have prevented 
 Corneille from writing his Thfadore, his Pertharite, 
 or his Attila. It would prevent our contemporary 
 novelists from taking particular and exceptional and 
 morbid states of the human mind as ordinary and 
 general states. At least, in describing them they 
 would know how to connect them with these less 
 exceptional states of which they are only an aberra- 
 tion. Further, each of us would undoubtedly give 
 less play to his private feelings ; and what would 
 be the effect on literature I do not know, though in 
 mixing itself up with the life of the world it would 
 assuredly come nearer its true aim. It would be 
 thought no longer that originality consists in being 
 like nobody else, but only in describing a personal 
 experience of the world and life. And this would 
 still be rhetoric, and I venture to say that it would 
 be good and excellent rhetoric. 
 
 Here, perhaps, is a more important consideration. 
 Examine it closely enough and it will be seen that 
 what is really attacked under the name of rhetoric 
 is all the means for urging on men things which are 
 not to be proved. Liberty, and immortality, and even 
 morality cannot be proved : they are to be urged. 
 
 We cannot establish the necessity of obedience, or of 
 242
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 self-control, or of self-sacrifice ; but we can incline our 
 hearts to them. This is what those people cannot 
 tolerate who, as they say, believe only in what can be 
 proved. So they include indifferently under the name 
 of rhetoric with a disdain mingled with a certain 
 amount of anger all they fear may embarrass or 
 contradict their own convictions. Rhetoric they see 
 in a Provinciate of Pascal ! Rhetoric, in a sermon of 
 Bossuet, on the Honneur du monde or the Halne des 
 hommes contre la verite ! Rhetoric, in a Discours of 
 Rousseau, in his Contrat social or his Profession de 
 fol du Vicaire Savoyard! Rhetoric, in the Genie du 
 Christianisme or in the Essai sur ^Indifference / And 
 rhetoric, generally, in all they feel to oppose, not the 
 truth since it escapes us, alas, in all these matters 
 but the ideas or principles with which, in default of the 
 truth, and by their own necessities, they have decided to 
 comply. As for me, I know no finer praise of rhetoric : 
 and the more I think of it, the more it seems to me 
 that there precisely is its forte, as well as the hidden 
 reason of the severe attacks to which it is exposed. 
 
 Yes, where the power of logic and dialectic ends, 
 there begins the power of rhetoric. Where reasoning 
 wanders, and reason even blenches, there does it 
 come and found its empire. It lays hold of an 
 entire province of the human mind, not the least vast 
 and inaccessible, and impenetrable to the demonstra- 
 tions of erudition and the inductions of metaphysics ; 
 it establishes itself there, and reigns in sovereign 
 243
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 sway. " Tell me," asked Cicero, at the beginning of 
 one of his treatises on rhetoric, which contain passages 
 which are worth all his speeches, " tell me how would 
 men ever have been able to bend their minds to the 
 observation of uprightness and justice : how would 
 they have consented to yield their wishes to those of 
 their fellows : how would they have been persuaded 
 to make a common cause of the common interest, 
 and in this interest to sacrifice at need even their life, 
 if it had not been by the aid and means of persuasion 
 and eloquence and rhetoric ? " And indeed, upright- 
 ness, charity, justice, virtue, love of country, all the 
 sentiments that give the society of men its value, and 
 bring it about that not even instinct, which is always 
 selfish, but even reason, which is always calculating, 
 can dissuade us it is this, it is eloquence and rhetoric 
 which make them touch the heart, which lend them a 
 voice and gesture, which make them speak, if I may 
 say so, to their very bodies. Such is the origin of 
 their c figures,' the aim of their ' movements,' the ex- 
 planation of their power. In materialising what can 
 be neither seen nor touched, rhetoric makes them real 
 motives, or rather springs of action. The rhetoricians 
 of the sixteenth century brought about the Refor- 
 mation, and the rhetoricians of the eighteenth the 
 Revolution, and these perhaps are great enough things 
 whatever else may be thought of them. For they 
 acted, in their character of rhetoricians, at those times 
 
 when mighty resolves were afoot, and their power was 
 244
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 as if inherent in what is deepest in human nature. We 
 do not live by bread, and algebra, and exegesis alone, 
 but by every word that comes from the heart of our 
 fellows and penetrates to ours. If rhetoric is the art 
 of giving this word its value and this is a definition 
 which I think will hold neither logic nor dialectics 
 would ever prevail against it : and, instead of complain- 
 ing that this is so, it seems to me that we should rather 
 consider it a matter for congratulation. 
 
 For it matters not that it can be put to a bad use. 
 What cannot be misused ? Corruptio optiml pessima 
 est. If rhetoric had less that made for good, it 
 would have less that made for evil : and then is 
 science, which is opposed to it, so sure of having 
 produced nothing but good ? It would be an easy 
 matter to show its error if it believed so ; and 
 humanity has paid dearly for more than one service 
 that we owe to the learned. But, what is more 
 certain still, a demonstration has never triumphed 
 over a sentiment ; and therefore if there is a bad 
 rhetoric, all that we can do against it, is to oppose to 
 it a better. A speech, if I may say so, can be 
 answered only by a speech, and a sermon by a 
 sermon Demosthenes against ^Eschines, Bossuet 
 against Calvin and why may I not go the length 
 of saying that prosopopeia is to be answered only 
 by hypotyposis, and metonomy only by synecdoche ? 
 Or, in other terms, truth is not to be substituted in 
 
 our hearts for error, but one belief for another belief, 
 245
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 one sentiment for another, a stronger wish for a 
 gentler wish, a more persuasive motive of acting for 
 a more careless and sluggish one. So to proscribe 
 rhetoric under the pretext of the evils which it has caused 
 and the abuse which may be made of its examples and 
 lessons, would be, I think, and perhaps it is evident, 
 only to disarm it against itself. We have need of 
 it against itself. Since it answers to a necessity of 
 human nature, we must resign ourselves to it : and, 
 if I have clearly explained my meaning, this necessity 
 is the most imperative of all more imperative indeed 
 than the need of knowledge and understanding 
 since it is the necessity of acting. 
 
 Someone will tell me, I know, that I here con- 
 found rhetoric with eloquence. I should like him 
 then to be kind enough to tell me what is the differ- 
 ence. For, be it Demosthenes, Cicero, or Bossuet, I 
 hardly know the orator who has not been accused of 
 declamation, and I have even observed that a differ- 
 ent way of thinking is generally sufficient to give 
 rise to this accusation. Bossuet, for example, is a 
 rhetorician for Voltaire in his Discours sur PHistoire 
 universelle y but not for the author of the Soirees de 
 Saint-Petersbourg ; and let him preach his Sermon 
 sur rUnite de PEgUse, and he becomes a rhetorician 
 again for the author of Le Pape and UEgllse galll- 
 cane. That is to say that the only difference between 
 an orator and a rhetorician consists in the soundness 
 
 of what they say ; and as this soundness has not, 
 
 246
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 and never can have, any place but in the opinion 
 of their audience, the difference is evidently not very 
 great. If, however, we were to take rhetoric in its 
 narrowest sense, and, by sacrificing substance to form, 
 were to accept the definition given by those who de- 
 spise it most, there would be no lack of arguments, 
 both numerous and decisive, for a reply, and of these 
 I shall select only one. 
 
 Is language an organism ? It is said to be so, and 
 I cannot say, though I rather think it is not ; but 
 what it is assuredly, what it becomes as soon as it is 
 used for anything else than the needs of daily life, is 
 a work of art. Die Sprache ah Kunst : the title of 
 this book pleases me. What colours and lines are 
 in the plastic arts, or sounds also in music, words are 
 in a language, and, with stronger reason, the figures, 
 the turns, the arrangement of the parts of the sen- 
 tence. There are beautiful words which sound well 
 to the ear, and there are disgusting words which 
 offend and wound it and fill the imagination with 
 vulgar or impure ideas. Do I say words ? It should 
 be syllables, a simple combination of consonants and 
 vowels. As many examples as can be wished for 
 will be found in the slang dictionaries. Can that 
 art be possibly considered contemptible or only in- 
 different which endeavours to avoid these encounters 
 or concourses of sounds, these words of the gaol or 
 the convict prison, and, though it cannot always 
 
 entirely avoid them, at least does all it can to dis- 
 247
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 guise them ? If, as Pascal says, " the mere tone of 
 voice changes the aspect of a poem or speech," are 
 not accent, turn, and movement enough to modify 
 the meaning of a sentence ? By merely changing 
 the order of the words of a sentence, what was 
 obscure becomes clear ; what was heavy, light and 
 lively ; what was rude and cacophonous, rhythmical 
 and harmonious. And were not metaphors, long 
 before they became * ornaments of speech,' the means 
 and natural process of the development and fructifi- 
 cation, so to speak, of languages? It is imagination 
 which finds them ; but if rhetoric is the art of using 
 imagination, of not confounding an antithesis with 
 a similitude, if, above all, it teaches us when and 
 how imagination is to be used, to what extent, and 
 for the expression of what ideas and sentiments, 
 who can fail to see that, taken even in this its 
 narrowest sense, rhetoric always and necessarily leads 
 from the art of writing to that of thinking ? 
 
 I would really make out too good a case were I 
 to care to show that it is also the art of composing. 
 To order one's thoughts, to regulate their develop- 
 ment according to their importance, to pass from 
 one to the other by imperceptible transitions, to 
 adjust the turn of their movements to something 
 less capricious than our humour it is this that some 
 very great writers have been unable to do for want 
 of a little rhetoric, a Montesquieu, for example, 
 
 and a Chateaubriand. Are they less great on that 
 
 248
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 account, may be asked. No : but I do not think 
 they are any greater ; and the Esprit des Lois and 
 the Genie du Christianisme are, by the very faults of 
 their composition, the one less clear and intelligible, 
 and the other less persuasive and conclusive. If, 
 moreover, none of us can flatter ourselves on being 
 Chateaubriand or Montesquieu, we have undoubtedly 
 good reason to let their faults alone, for these can be 
 covered or excused only by equal or similar qualities. 
 In the meantime we run no risk, if there is an art of 
 composing, and if it can be taught, in learning it. 
 And further let us note that this class of rules con- 
 tains in itself the very means of dispensing with 
 them, if need be. To know what must not be done 
 is one part of justice, and an extensive enough part, 
 since the codes of every country turn on it. Rhetoric 
 in like manner teaches us what must be neither 
 written nor said. But it teaches us also what must 
 be done ; and though it may not follow that we can do 
 it, I really do not see that there is any harm in trying. 
 Let us remember, in short, that it is these despised 
 and much-mocked rhetoricians, these sworn weighers 
 of words and syllables, these ' recorders ' of usage, 
 these virtuosos in the art of fine speech, these leaders 
 of fashion, a Balzac, a Vaugelas, the precieuses even, 
 La Bruyere, Fenelon too, Voltaire above all, a Rollin, 
 a Rivarol and how many others ? it is they who 
 have made our French prose the supple and pliant, 
 
 the keen and delicate, the wonderful instrument it 
 249
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 is or was. This higher rhetoric which is to be 
 found, when sought for, in the writings of a Chateau- 
 briand or a Rousseau, a Bossuet or a Pascal, they 
 have set forth clearly in these writings and put within 
 our reach. Nobody knew what the natural style was: 
 Pascal appeared and revealed it, and all its merits were 
 recognised immediately. But it is the rhetoricians 
 who have examined wherein this natural style consists, 
 and whether any of its secrets may be stolen from the 
 author of the Provinciates, and it is they who have 
 pointed out the methods of the idiosyncrasies of Pascal, 
 if I may say so, and enriched the language by them. 
 If on the other hand, in another writer, the author 
 of the Petit Careme, for example, there are too many 
 useless ornaments, too great a desire to please, too 
 many pretty things, and generally more thought about 
 himself than his subject which may well be the very 
 definition of bad rhetoric it is still the rhetoricians 
 who have informed us against him, who have un- 
 veiled his artifice, who have made us feel the abuse 
 of rhetoric in the use of these very processes. I 
 cannot believe that they have here done us such a 
 bad service ; and if any one were to follow in 
 their footsteps, I do not think that he would waste 
 his time. 
 
 There is no doubt that some people have thought 
 of it, since we can no longer recognise, under 
 the diversity of words, the similarity of things. 
 
 Granted that rhetoric is a legacy of the past which 
 250
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 is sufficient with some people to discredit it we set 
 no value on rhetoricians, but quite a particular one 
 on stylists. Yet did Gautier not indulge in rhetoric 
 and very bad rhetoric, to say so in passing when he 
 wrote his Capitaine Fracasse ? Did he not keep open 
 school of rhetoric when he repeated one of his 
 favourite sayings : " I am very strong. I score five 
 hundred on the dynamometer, and / do not mix 
 metaphors" The advice has actually been followed 
 so well, that open your journals and you will 
 see that the sole measure of a writer's style is 
 not the justness but the unity of his metaphors.* 
 A mixed metaphor ! Send the culprit back to 
 school ! Nobody remembers that 'one of the chief 
 characteristics of affectation and preciosity of style 
 is precisely this unity of the metaphors. But 
 what really is the newly published correspondence 
 of Flaubert but . a course of rhetoric, in which I 
 very willingly admit there are some most excellent 
 lessons ? Here is one which it seems to me to the 
 point to quote : 
 
 " We are surprised at the worthy fellows of the age 
 
 * TRISSOTIN. 
 
 Pour cette grandefaim qu'a mes yeux on expose, 
 Un plat seul de huit vers me semble peu de chose, 
 Et je pense qu'ici je ne ferai pas mal, 
 De joindre a 1'epigramme ou bien du madrigal. 
 Le ragout d'un sonnet qui, chez une princesse, 
 A passe pour avoir quelque delicatesse, 
 II est de ul attique assaisonne partout, 
 Et vous le trouverez, je crois, d'assez bon gout . 
 251
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 of Louis XIV, but they were not men of enormous 
 genius and I know four at least in whom we are 
 mistaken but what conscientiousness ! How they 
 force themselves to find just expressions for their 
 thoughts ! What work ! What consultations with 
 one another ! What a knowledge of Latin ! How 
 slowly they read ! And all their thought is expressed : 
 the form is full, crammed and stuffed till it almost 
 cracks." Is this rhetoric or not ? I do not say it 
 is of the finest there is hardly a word less suitable 
 for Flaubert but is it not good, and almost of the 
 best ? 
 
 If, however, these considerations, though somewhat 
 summary, should not succeed in disarming or influ- 
 encing certain disdainful adversaries, others may be 
 offered which are more utilitarian, and very erudite 
 at the same time. They may be asked why the Romans 
 and Greeks cultivated rhetoric so passionately. I do 
 not see what they can possibly answer but that, in 
 the republics of antiquity, speech was a weapon, and 
 whoever wished to act had to know how to handle 
 it or fence with it. In Athens as in Rome, he who 
 could not speak not only was unable to defend him- 
 self but had to be almost invariably in the clientele or 
 political household of a superior in eloquence. Read 
 Fenelon on this point, in his Letter to the Academy. 
 For us then who live to-day under the government 
 of speech, of whom it may be said that our daily 
 
 interests are at the mercy of an oration, or the impos- 
 252
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 sibility of replying to it, it is necessary to learn to 
 speak, and, like the Greeks or Romans, we have more 
 need of rhetoric than our fathers had. We have need 
 of it even to retort to or, as used to be said, to take 
 the edge off that of our adversaries. But if I were to 
 insist on this argument, I might mix up, in a question 
 so far entirely literary, certain reasons which are less 
 so, and which it is sufficient to have indicated. After 
 all, the greatest enemies of rhetoric are perhaps those 
 also of government by speech : the liberty they like 
 is dumb, and the right they vindicate so energetically 
 for others is that of being silent. 
 
 There is another reason which seems to me still 
 stronger, and with it I shall end. Rhetoric has now 
 for a few years been deleted from our programme of 
 secondary education, to be replaced by the vague 
 ' notions on literary history,' and, if I may once dare 
 to take the liberty of speaking for myself, it is not 
 I who would complain that something was being 
 done for literary history. It is well to know on 
 leaving school that the elder Corneille, for example, 
 did not mean to flatter Louis XIV in his Clnna^ 
 under the name of Augustus. This was not known 
 till quite recently. Rhetoric is one good thing, and 
 chronology is another, and, may I say so, is one 
 of my passions. But since there is now much talk 
 of the establishment of a school of French Classics, 
 it does not seem useless to express the wish that 
 rhetoric will there retake its natural place ; and it 
 2 53
 
 BRUNETIERE'S ESSAYS 
 
 may be as well for me to give the principal reason. 
 It is that our classical literature and not merely its 
 prose, but also its poetry is essentially oratorical. 
 "The spoken word," said Vaugelas in the Preface 
 to his Remarques sur la langue franfaise, " is the first 
 in order and dignity, since the written word is only 
 its image, as it itself is the image of the thought ; " 
 and from Malherbe to Buffbn at least, to Chateau- 
 briand and even to Guizot, I can think only of a few 
 story writers whose style of writing does not verify 
 this principle. And we know, too, the attention the 
 author of Madame Bovary paid to the harmony of the 
 sentence. What does this mean but that for two or 
 three hundred years our greatest writers have not seen 
 but heard themselves write. To dispel much of the 
 cavilling at the style of Moliere, we have only not to 
 be content with running over his plays with our eyes, 
 but to go and see them played or to read them 
 aloud. Now, without a little rhetoric, how can 
 we interpret such a literature ? Would we not lose 
 half of the profit to be drawn from it ? We would 
 only be forgetting, as it were, to light our lantern. 
 Try to explain Racine's Andromaque or Britannicus 
 without insisting on that irony which is one of his 
 favourite means of shading his thought, and of which 
 he apparently meant to exhaust every turn ! Or try 
 to show the unique characteristic of the Sermons of 
 Bossuet without pointing out their superiority to those 
 
 of Bourdaloue, and be successful without the help of 
 254
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 rhetoric ! We may be assured that without rhetoric 
 the school of French Classics will at once degenerate 
 into a school of facts, and this is certainly not what 
 is wanted or at least promised. This reason alone 
 would have been sufficient to lead me to undertake 
 the defence of this despised creature. I hope, how- 
 ever, that the reader will approve of the other reasons, 
 and that, on joining all together, he will be willing to 
 agree with us that there are decidedly some of the 
 dead that must be brought to life again. 
 
 THE END 
 
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