Francois Auguste de Chateaubriand was born at Saint Malo, where he is

now buried, in 1768, and died in 1848. He belonged to a family which was

among the noblest of Britanny and of France, but which was not wealthy,

and he was a younger son. Intended at first for the navy, he was

allowed, at the outbreak of the Revolution, to indulge his fancy for

travelling, and journeyed to North America. There he learnt the

anti-monarchical turn which things had taken in France. He at once

returned and joined the emigrants at Coblentz. He was seriously wounded

at the siege of Thionville, and had some difficulty in making his way,

by Holland and Jersey, to England, where he lived in great poverty.

Chateaubriand's acceptance of the Legitimist side had been but

half-hearted, and his first published work, _Sur les Revolutions

Anciennes et Modernes_, still expresses the peculiar liberalism

which--it is sometimes forgotten--was much more deeply rooted in the

French noblesse of the eighteenth century than in any other class. This

opened the way to his return at the time that Napoleon, then entering on

the consulate, endeavoured, by all the means in his power, to conciliate

the emigrants. The _Genie du Christianisme_, which had been preceded by

_Atala_ (a kind of specimen of it), was his first original, and his most

characteristic, work. This curious book, which it is impossible to

analyse, consists partly of a rather desultory apology for Christian

doctrine, partly of a series of historical illustrations of Christian

life: it appeared in 1802. It suited the policy of Napoleon, who made

Chateaubriand, first, secretary to the Roman Embassy, and then

ambassador to the Valais. But Chateaubriand had never given up his

legitimism, and the murder of the Duke d'Enghien shocked him

irresistibly. He at once resigned his post, and thenceforward was in

more or less covert opposition, though he was not actually banished from

France. Pursuing the vein which he had opened in the _Genie_, he made a

journey to the East, the result of which was his _Itineraire de Paris a

Jerusalem_, and the unequal but remarkable prose epic of _Les Martyrs_.

This, the story of which is laid in the time of Diocletian, shifts its

scene from classical countries to Gaul, where the half-mythical heroes

of the Franks appear, and then back to Greece, Rome, and Purgatory. The

fall of Napoleon opened once more a political career, of which

Chateaubriand had always been ardently desirous. His pamphlet, _De

Bonaparte et des Bourbons_, was, perhaps, the most important literary

contribution to the re-establishment of the ancient monarchy. During the

fifteen years which elapsed between the battle of Waterloo and the

Revolution of July, Chateaubriand underwent vicissitudes due to the

difficulty of adjusting his liberalism and his legitimism, sentiments

which seem both to have been genuine, but to have been quite

unreconciled by any reasoning process on the part of their holder. Yet,

though he had again and again experienced the most ungracious treatment

both from Louis XVIII. and Charles X., the July monarchy had no sooner

established itself than he resigned his positions and pensions, and took

no further official part in political affairs during the rest of his

life. In his latter days he was much with the celebrated Madame

Recamier, and completed his affectedly-named but admirable _Memoires

d'Outre Tombe_,--an autobiography which, though marred by some of his

peculiarities, contains much of his most brilliant writing. Of the works

not hitherto noticed, _Rene_, _Le Dernier Abencerage_, _Les Natchez_,

and some sketches of travels and of French history, are the most

remarkable.

For some thirty years, from 1810 to 1840, Chateaubriand was

unquestionably the greatest man of letters of France in the estimation

of his contemporaries. His fame has since then diminished considerably,

and much has been written to account for the change. It is not, however,

very difficult to understand it. Chateaubriand is one of the chief

representatives in literature of the working of two conditions, which,

while they lend for the time much adventitious importance to the man who

takes full advantage of them, invariably lead to rapidly-diminished

estimates of him when they have ceased to work. He was a representative

at once of transition and reaction--of transition from the hard and

fast classical standards of the eighteenth century to the principles of

the romantic and eclectic schools, of reaction against the _philosophe_

era. He was one of the earliest and most influential exponents of the

so-called _maladie du siecle_, of what, from his most illustrious pupil,

is generally called Byronism. His immediate literary teachers were

Rousseau and Ossian. He was not a thoroughly well-educated man, and he

was exceptionally deficient in the purely logical and analytic faculty

as distinguished from the rhetorical and synthetic. What he could do and

did, was to glorify Christianity and monarchism in a series of

brilliantly-coloured pictures, which had an immense effect on an age

accustomed to the grey tints and monotonous argument of the opposite

school, but which, to a posterity which is placed at a different point

of view, seem to lack accuracy of detail and sincerity of emotion.

Nevertheless Chateaubriand, if not a very great man, was a very great

man of letters. His best passages are not easily to be surpassed in

brilliancy of style and vividness of colouring. If the sentiment of his

_Rene_ seems hollow now-a-days, it must be remembered that this is

almost entirely a matter of fashion and of novelty. The _Genie du

Christianisme_, despite many defects of taste, more of insight, and most

of mere learning, remains one of the most eloquent pleadings in

literature, and not one of the least effective; while the _Itineraire_

is the pattern of all the picturesque travels of modern times. All these

works, and most of the rest, are practically novels with a purpose. Even

in the autobiography the historic part is entirely subdued and moulded

to the exigencies of the dramatic and narrative construction. Regarded

merely as an individual writer, Chateaubriand would supply a volume of

'Beauties' hardly inferior to that which could be gathered from any

other prose author in France. Regarded as a precursor, he deserves far

more than any other single man, and almost more than all others put

together, the title of father of the Romantic movement.

[Sidenote: Madame de Stael.]

His chief rival in the literature of the empire was also essentially,

though not wholly or professedly, a novelist. Anne Louise Germaine

Necker, who married a Swedish diplomatist, the Baron de Stael Holstein,

and is, therefore, generally known as Madame de Stael, was the daughter

of the great financier Necker, and of Susanne Curchod, Gibbon's early

love. She was introduced young to salon life in Paris, and early

displayed ungovernable vanity, and much of the _sensibilite_ of the

time, that is to say, an indulgence in sentiment which paid equally

little heed to morality and to good sense. Her marriage was one purely

of convenience: and while her husband, of whom she seems to have had no

reason whatever to complain, obtained some wealth by it, she herself

secured a very agreeable position, inasmuch as the king of Sweden

pledged himself either to maintain M. de Stael in the Swedish embassy at

Paris, or to provide for him in other ways. She approved the early

stages of the Revolution, but was shocked at the deposition and death of

the king and queen. Whereupon she fled the country. Before she was

thirty she had written various books, _Lettres sur J. J. Rousseau_,

_Defense de la Reine_, _De l'Influence des Passions_, and other pieces

of many kinds. When the influence of Napoleon became paramount, Madame

de Stael, who had returned to Paris, found herself in an awkward

position, for she was equally determined to say what she chose, and to

have gallant attentions paid to her, and Napoleon would not comply with

either of her wishes. She, therefore, had to leave France, but not

before she had published her first romance, _Delphine_, and a book on

literature. She now travelled for some years in Germany and Italy in the

company of Benjamin Constant, who was the object of one of her numerous

accesses of affection. _Corinne_, her principal novel, and her greatest

work but one, appeared in 1807, her book _De l'Allemagne_ being

suppressed in Paris, whither she had returned, but which she soon had to

leave again. The Restoration gave her access once more to France, and

enabled her to resume possession of property which had been unjustly

seized, but she died not long afterwards, in 1817. Her _Dix Annees

d'Exil_ and her _Considerations sur la Revolution Francaise_ were

published posthumously, the latter being one of her chief works. She had

married secretly, in 1812, a M. de Rocca, a man more than young enough

to be her son.

The personality of Madame de Stael is far from being attractive owing to

her excessive vanity, which disgusted all her contemporaries, and the

folly which made a woman, who had never been beautiful, continue, long

after she had ceased to be young, to give herself in life and literature

the airs of a newest Heloise. But she is a very important figure in

French literature. Part of her influence, as represented by the book _De

l'Allemagne,_ does not directly concern us in this chapter; this part

was mainly, but not wholly, literary. It was helped and continued,

however, by her other works, especially by her novels, and, above all,

by _Corinne_. This influence, put briefly, was to break up the

narrowness of French notions on all subjects, and to open it to fresh

ideas. Her political and general works led the way to the nineteenth

century, side by side with Chateaubriand's, but in an entirely different

sense. What Chateaubriand inculcated was the sense of the beauty of

older and simpler times, countries, and faiths which the

self-satisfaction of the eighteenth century had obscured; what Madame de

Stael had to impress were general ideas of liberalism and progress to

which the same century, in its crusade against superstition and its

rather short-sighted belief in its own enlightenment, was equally blind.

_Delphine_, which is in the main a romance of French society only,

written before the author had seen much of any other world except a

close circle of French emigrants abroad, exhibits this tendency much

less than _Corinne_, which was written after that German visit--by far

the most important event of Madame de Stael's life. Here, as Rousseau

had inculcated the story of nature and savage life, as Chateaubriand

was, at the same time, inculcating the study of Christian antiquity and

the middle ages, so Madame de Stael inculcated the cultivation of

aesthetic emotions and impulses as a new influence to be brought to bear

on life. Her style, though not to be spoken of disrespectfully, is, on

the whole, inferior to her matter. It is full of the drawbacks of

eighteenth-century _eloges_ and academic discourses, now tawdry, now

deficient in colour, flexibility, and life, at one time below the

subject, at another puffed up with commonplace and insincere

declamation. Yet when she understood a subject, which was by no means

invariably the case, Madame de Stael was an excellent exponent; and when

her feelings were sincere, which they sometimes were, she was a fair

mistress of pathos.

A considerable number of names of writers of fiction during the later

republic and the empire have a traditional place in the history of

literature, and some of their works are still read, but chiefly as

school-books. Madame de Genlis, the author of _Les Veillees du Chateau_,

and also of many volumes of ill-natured, and not too accurate, memoirs

and reminiscences, continued the moral tale of the eighteenth century,

and in _Mlle. de Clermont_ produced work of merit. Fievee, a journalist

and critic of some talent, is remembered for the pretty story of the

_Dot de Suzette_. Madame de Souza, in her _Adele de Senanges_ and other

works, revived, to a certain extent, the style of Madame de la Fayette.

_Ourika_ and _Edouard_, especially the latter, preserve the name of

Madame de Duras. Madame Cottin, in _Malek Adel_, _Elizabeth_ or _Les

Exiles de Siberie_, etc., combined a mild flavour of romance with

irreproachable moral sentiments. A vigorous continuator of the

licentious style of novel, with hardly any of the literary refinement of

its eighteenth-century contributors, but with more fertility of incident

and fancy, was Pigault Lebrun, the forerunner of Paul de Kock. Madame de

Krudener, a woman of remarkable history, produced a good novel of

sentiment in _Valerie_.

[Sidenote: Xavier de Maistre.]

Two novelists, singularly different in idiosyncrasy, complete what may

be called the eighteenth-century school. Xavier de Maistre, younger

brother of the great Catholic polemist, Joseph de Maistre, was born at

Chambery, in 1763. He served in the Piedmontese army during his youth,

and his most famous work, the _Voyage autour de ma Chambre_, was

published in 1794. The national extinction of Savoy and Piedmont, at

least the annexation of Savoy and the effacement of Piedmont, made

Xavier de Maistre an exile. He joined his brother in St. Petersburg,

served in the Russian army, fought, and was wounded in the Caucasus;

attained the rank of general, and died at St. Petersburg, in 1852, at

the great age of eighty-nine. His work consists of the _Voyage_, an

account of a temporary imprisonment in his quarters at Turin, obviously

suggested by Sterne, but exceedingly original in execution; _Le Lepreux

de la Cite d'Aoste,_ in which the same inspiration and the same

independent use of it are noticeable; and _Les Prisonniers du Caucase_,

a vivid narrative rather in the manner of the nineteenth than of the

eighteenth century, with a continuation of the _Voyage_ called

_Expedition Nocturne_, which has not escaped the usual fate of

continuations, and a short version of the touching story of Prascovia,

which contrasts very curiously with Madame Cottin's more artificial

handling of the same subject. The important point about Xavier de

Maistre is that he unites the sentimentality of the eighteenth century,

and not a little of its _Marivaudage_, with an exactness of observation,

a general truth of description, and a sense of narrative art which

belong rather to the nineteenth. Although he was not a Frenchman, his

style has always been regarded as a model of French; and the great

authority of Sainte Beuve justly places him and Merimee side by side as

the most perfect tellers of tales in the simple fashion.

[Sidenote: Benjamin Constant.]

Benjamin Constant's _Adolphe_, 1815, is a very different work, but an

equally remarkable one. It may be a question whether it is not entitled

to take rank rather as the first book of the nineteenth-century school

than as the last of the eighteenth. But its author (better known as a

politician) published no further attempt to pursue the way he had

opened; and though he himself denied its application to the persons who

were usually identified with its characters, there is every reason to

believe that it was rather the record of a personal experience than a

deliberate effort of art. It is very short, dealing with the love of a

certain Adolphe for a certain Ellenore and his disenchantment. The

psychological drawing, though one-sided, is astonishingly true, and

though _sensibilite_ is still present, it has obviously lost its hold

both on the characters represented and their creator. Deliberate

analysis appears almost as much as in the work of Beyle himself. It is

in every respect a remarkable book, and many parts of it might have been

written at the present day. What distinguishes it from almost all its

forerunners is that there is hardly any attempt at incident, far less at

adventure. The play of thought and feeling is the sole source of

interest. It is true that the situation is one that could not support a

long book, and that it is thus rather an essay at the modern analytic

novel than a finished example of it. But it is such an essay, and very

far from an unsuccessful one.

FOOTNOTES:

[288] The works of fiction written by the great authors of the century

are easily obtainable. _Manon Lescaut_ has been frequently and

satisfactorily reproduced of late years--the two editions of Glady, with

and without illustrations, being especially noteworthy. Restif de la

Bretonne is a literary curiosity whose voluminous works hardly any

collector possesses in their entirety; but the three volumes of the

_Contemporaines_, selected and edited for the _Nouvelle Collection

Jannet_ by M. Assezat, will give a very fair idea of his peculiarities.

Of most of the other authors mentioned convenient, handsome, and not too

expensive editions will be found in the _Bibliotheque Amusante_ of MM.

Garnier Freres. This includes Mesdames de Tencin, de Fontaines,

Riccoboni, de Beaumont, de Genlis, de Duras, de Souza, as well as

Marivaux and Fievee. Lesage's more remarkable fictions are obtainable at

every library. Xavier de Maistre forms a single cheap volume. A handsome

little edition of Constant's _Adolphe_ has been edited by M. de Lescure

for the Librairie des Bibliophiles. Cazotte's _Diable Amoureux_ is in

the _Nouvelle Collection Jannet_. M. Uzanne's reproductions of the prose

tale-tellers are excellent.

CHAPTER IV.

HISTORIANS, MEMOIR-WRITERS, LETTER-WRITERS.

[Sidenote: Characteristics and Divisions of Eighteenth-century History.]

In the three branches of literature included in this chapter the

interest of the eighteenth century is great, but unequally divided. In

history proper, that is to say, the connected survey from documents of a

greater or lesser period of the past, the age saw, if not the beginning,

certainly the maturing of a philosophical conception of the science.

Putting Bossuet out of the question, Vico in Italy, Montesquieu and

Turgot in France, are usually and rightly credited with the working out

of this great conception. But though pretty fully worked, or at least

sketched out, it was not applied in any book of bulk and merit. The

writings of Montesquieu and Turgot themselves are not history--they are

essays of lesser or greater length in historical philosophy. Nor from

the merely literary point of view has France any historical production

of the first rank to put forward at this time. The works of greater

extent, such as Rollin's, are of no special literary value; the works of

literary value, such as Voltaire's studies, are of but small extent, and

rather resemble the historical essay of the preceding century, which

still continued to be practised, and which had one special practitioner

of merit in Rulhiere. But nothing even distantly approaching the English

masterpiece of the period, the _Decline and Fall_, was produced; hardly

anything approaching Hume's History. Nor again do the memoirs[289] of

this time equal those of the seventeenth century in literary power,

though they are useful as sources of historical and social information.

No man of letters of the first class has left such work, and no one, not

by profession a man of letters, has by such work come even near the

position of the Cardinal de Retz or the Duke de Saint Simon, the latter

of whom, it is fair to remember, actually lived into the second half of

the century. On the other hand, the letter-writers of the time are

numerous and excellent. Although no one of them equals Madame de Sevigne

in bulk and in completeness of merit, the letters of Mademoiselle de

l'Espinasse, of Madame du Deffand, of Diderot to Mademoiselle Volland,

and some others, are of very great excellence, and almost unsurpassed in

their characterization of the intellectual and social peculiarities of

the time. The absence of regular histories of the first merit would be

more surprising than it is if it were not fully accounted for by the

dominant peculiarity of the day, which is never to be forgotten in

studying its history--the absorption, that is to say, of the greater

part of the intellect of the time in the _philosophe_ polemic. Almost

all the histories that were written, except as works of pure erudition,

were in reality pamphlets intended to point, more or less allegorically,

some moral as to real or supposed abuses in the social, ecclesiastical,

or political state of France. This peculiarity could not fail to detract

from their permanent interest, even if it did not (as it too often did)

make the authors less careful to give a correct account of their subject

than to make it serve their purpose.

[Sidenote: Rollin.]

The first regular historian who deserves mention is Charles Rollin, who

perhaps had a longer and wider monopoly of a certain kind of historical

instruction than any other author. He was born at Paris in January,

1661, of the middle class, and, after studying at the College du

Plessis, he became Professor at the College de France, and, in 1694,

Rector of the University; a post in which he distinguished himself by

introducing many useful and much-needed reforms. He was a Jansenist, but

was not much inconvenienced in consequence. Rollin's book (that is to

say the only one by which he is remembered) is his extensive _Histoire

Ancienne_, 1730-1738, the work of his advanced years, which was the

standard treatise on the subject for nearly a century, and was

translated into most languages. Although showing no particular

historical grasp, written with no power of style, and not universally

accurate, it deserves such praise as may be due to a work of great

practical utility requiring much industrious labour, and not imitated

from or much assisted by any previous book. The _Histoire Romaine_,

which followed it, was of little worth, but Rollin's _Traite des Etudes_

was a very useful book in its time.

[Sidenote: Dubos.]

[Sidenote: Boulainvilliers.]

Two historians, who hardly deserve the name, are usually ranked together

in this part of French history, partly because they represent almost the

last of the fabulous school of history-writers, partly because their

disputes (for they were of opposite factions) have had the honour to be

noticed by Montesquieu. These were Dubos and Boulainvilliers. The Abbe

Dubos was a writer of some merit on a great variety of subjects; his

_Reflexions sur la Poesie et la Peinture_ being of value. His chief

historical work is entitled _Histoire Critique de l'Etablissement de la

Monarchie Francaise dans les Gaules_, in which, with a paradoxical

patriotism, which has found some echoes among living historians, he

maintained that the Frankish invasion of Gaul was the consequence of an

amicable invitation, that the Gauls were in no sense conquered, and that

all conclusions based on the supposition of such a conquest were

therefore erroneous. It is fair to Dubos to say that he had been in a

manner provoked by the arguments of the Count de Boulainvilliers.

According to this latter, the Frankish conquest had resulted in the

establishment of a dominant caste, which alone had full enfranchisement,

and which was lineally, or at least titularly, represented by the French

aristocracy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These reckless

and baseless hypotheses would not require notice, were it not important

to show how long it was before the idea of rigid enquiry into

documentary facts on the one hand, and philosophical application of

general laws on the other, were observed in historical writing.

[Sidenote: Voltaire.]

Montesquieu himself will come in for mention under the head of

philosophers, but Voltaire's ubiquity will be maintained in this

chapter. His strictly historical work was indeed considerable, even if

what is perhaps the most remarkable of it, the _Essai sur les Moeurs_

(which may be described as a treatise, with instances, on the philosophy

of history, as applied to modern times), be excluded. Besides smaller

works, the histories of Charles XII. and Peter the Great, the _Age of

Louis XIV._, the _Age of Louis XV._, and the _Annals of the Empire_,

belong to the class of which we are now treating. Of these there is no

doubt that the _Siecle de Louis Quatorze_, 1752, is the best, though the

slighter sketches of Charles, 1731, and Peter, 1759, are not undeserving

of the position they have long held as little masterpieces. Voltaire,

however, was not altogether well qualified for a historian; indeed, he

had but few qualifications for the work, except his mastery of a clear,

light, and lively style. He had no real conception, such as Montesquieu

had, of the philosophy of history, or of the operation of general

causes. His reading, though extensive, was desultory and uncritical, and

he constantly fell into the most grotesque blunders. His prejudices were

very strong, and he is more responsible than any other single person for

the absurd and ignorant disdain of the middle ages, which, so long as it

lasted, made comprehension of modern history and society simply

impossible, because the origins of both were wilfully ignored. These

various drawbacks had perhaps less influence on the _Siecle de Louis

Quatorze_ than on any other of his historical works, and it is

accordingly the best. He was well acquainted with the subject, he was

much interested in it, it touched few of his prejudices, and he was able

to speak with tolerable freedom about it. The result is excellent, and

it deserves the credit of being almost the first finished history (as

distinguished from mere diaries like those of L'Estoile) in which not

merely affairs of state, but literary, artistic, and social matters

generally found a place.

[Sidenote: Mably.]

The third and fourth quarters of the century are the special period

when history was, as has been said, degraded to the level of a party

pamphlet, especially in such works as the Abbe Raynal's _Histoire des

Indes_. This was a mere vehicle for _philosophe_ tirades on religious

and political subjects, many if not most of which are known to have

proceeded from Diderot's fertile pen. Crevier and Lebeau, however, names

forgotten now, continued the work of Rollin; and meanwhile the

descendants of the laborious school of historians mentioned in the last

book (many of whom survived until far into the century) pursued their

useful work. Not the least of these was Dom Calmet, author of the

well-known 'Dictionary of the Bible.' But the chief historical names of

the later eighteenth century are Mably and Rulhiere. Mably, who might be

treated equally well under the head of philosophy, was an abbe, and

moderately orthodox in religion, though decidedly Republican in

politics. He was a man of some learning; but, if less ignorant than

Voltaire, he was equally blind to the real meaning and influence of the

middle ages and of mediaeval institutions. He looked back to the

institutions of Rome, and still more of Greece, as models of political

perfection, without making the slightest allowance for the difference of

circumstances; and to him more than to any one else is due the

nonsensical declamation of the Jacobins about tyrants and champions of

liberty. His works, the _Entretiens de Phocion_, the _Observations sur

l'Histoire de France_, the _Droits de l'Europe fondes sur les Traites_,

are, however, far from destitute of value, though, as generally happens,

it was their least valuable part which (especially when Rousseau

followed to enforce similar ideas with his contagious enthusiasm)

produced the greatest effect.

[Sidenote: Rulhiere.]

Rulhiere, who was really a historian of excellence, and who might under

rather more favourable circumstances have been one of the most

distinguished, was born about 1735. His Christian names were Claude

Carloman. He was of noble birth, was educated at the College

Louis-le-Grand, and served in the army till he was nearly thirty years

old. He then went to St. Petersburg as secretary to the ambassador

Breteuil, whom he also accompanied to Sweden. He returned to Paris and

began to write the history of the singular proceedings which during his

stay in the Russian capital had placed Catherine II. on the throne. The

Empress, it is said, tried both to bribe and to frighten him, but could

obtain nothing but a promise not to print the sketch till her death. He

continued to live in Paris, where he was distinguished for rather

ill-natured wit and for polished verse-tales and epigrams. For some

reason he devoted himself to the history of Poland. In 1787 he was

elected to the Academy. Then he wrote some _Eclaircissements Historiques

sur les Causes de la Revocation de l'Edit de Nantes_, and is said to

have begun other historical works. He died in 1791. His 'Anecdotes on

the Revolution in Russia' did not appear till 1797; his _Histoire de

l'Anarchie de Pologne_ not till even later. The Polish book is

unfinished, and is said to have been garbled in manuscript. But it has

very considerable merits, though there is perhaps too much discussion in

proportion to the facts given. The Russian anecdotes deserve to rank

with the historical essays of Retz and Saint-Real in vividness and

precision of drawing.

These are the chief names of the century in history proper, for Volney,

who concludes it in regard to the study of history, is, like many of his

predecessors, rather a philosopher busying himself with the historical

departments and applications of his subject than a historian proper.

Still more may this be said of Diderot in such works as the _Essai sur

les Regnes de Claude et de Neron_. The creation of a school of

accomplished historians was left for the next century, when the

opportunity of such a subject as the French Revolution in the immediate

past, the stimulus of the precepts and views of the great writers on the

philosophy of history, and lastly the disinterring of the original

documents of mediaeval and ancient history, did not fail to produce

their natural effect. The number of historians of the first and second

class born towards the close of the eighteenth century is remarkable.

[Sidenote: Memoirs. Madame de Staal-Delaunay.]

[Sidenote: Duclos.]

[Sidenote: Besenval.]

[Sidenote: Madame d'Epinay.]

The first memoirs, properly so called, which have to be mentioned as

belonging to the eighteenth century, are those of Mademoiselle Delaunay,

afterwards Madame de Staal. Mademoiselle Delaunay was attached to the

household of the Duchess du Maine, the beautiful, impetuous, and

highborn wife of one of the stupidest and least interesting of men, who

happened also to be the illegitimate son of Louis XIV. The Duke du

Maine, or rather his wife, for he himself was nearly as destitute of

ambition as of ability, was at the head of the party opposed to that of

which the Duke of Orleans (the Regent) was the natural chief, and Saint

Simon the ablest partisan. The 'party of the bastards' failed, but the

duchess kept up a vigorous literary and political agitation against the

Regent. The court (as it may be called) of this opposition was held at

Sceaux, and of the doings of this court Madame de Staal has left a very

vivid account. The Marquis d'Argenson, a statesman and a man of great

intelligence, concealed under a rough and clumsy exterior, has left

memoirs which are valuable for the early and middle part of the reign of

Louis XV. The memoirs, properly so called, of Duclos are of small

extent, but he has left impersonal memoirs of the later reign of Louis

XIV. and the beginning of that of his great-grandson, which are among

the best historical work of the time. His account of the famous 'system'

of Law is one of the principal sources of information on its subject, as

is his handling of the Cellamare conspiracy and other affairs of the

regency. Duclos was a man not only of considerable literary talent, but

of wide historical reading, which appears amply in his work. The

gossiping memoirs, attributed to Madame du Hausset, bedchamber-woman to

Madame de Pompadour, give many curious details of the middle period of

Louis XV.'s reign; and in the vast collection of tittle-tattle, often

scandalous enough, called the _Memoires de Bachaumont_, much matter of

interest, and some that is of value, may be found. Among the most

valuable memoirs of this kind are those of Colle, which have been only

recently edited in full. Colle, who, though a time-server and an

ill-natured man, had much literary talent, was an acute observer, and

enjoyed great opportunities, has left important materials for the middle

of the century. The Baron de Besenval, half a Savoyard and half a Pole,

who played an important part in the early days of the Revolution, and

who had previously encouraged Marie Antoinette in the levities, harmless

enough but worse than ill-judged, which had so fatal a result, has left

reminiscences of the later years of Louis XV., and a connected

narrative of the outbreak of the Revolution. The memoirs concerning the

_Philosophes_ form a library in themselves, even those which concern

Voltaire alone making a not inconsiderable collection. Those of Madame

d'Epinay (the friend of Grimm, of Galiani, and of Rousseau), of

Marmontel, of Morellet, are perhaps the principal of this group.

Marmontel's memoirs are among his best works, and Madame d'Epinay's are

among the most characteristic of the period. There is a certain number

of interesting memoirs of actors and actresses, which dates from this

time, including those of the great actress Mademoiselle Clairon, the

tragic actor Le Kain, and others.

[Sidenote: Minor Memoirs.]

Circumstances rather political than literary have given a place in

literary history to the memoirs of Linguet and Latude concerning the

Bastile. That celebrated building, however, figures largely in the

memoirs of the time, and the experiences of Voltaire, Marmontel,

Crebillon, and others show how greatly exaggerated is the popular notion

of its dungeons and torments. The so-called memoirs of the Duke de

Richelieu (the type, and a very debased type, of the French noblesse of

the eighteenth century, as La Rochefoucauld was of that of the

seventeenth) are the work of Soulavie, a literary man and unfrocked abbe

of very dubious character: but they at least rest upon authentic data,

and abound in the most curious information. The President Henault, a man

of probity and learning, has left memoirs of value.

[Sidenote: Memoirs of the Revolutionary Period.]

As might be expected, the collection of memoirs which have reference to

the Revolution and the Empire is very large. The fortunes of the

ill-fated royal family are dealt with in three sets of memoirs, on which

all historians have been obliged to draw, those of Madame Campan, of

Weber, and of Clery, all three of whom were attendants on Louis XVI. and

Marie Antoinette. The memoirs of the first-named are supposed to be the

least accurate in matters of fact. The ill-natured and factious Madame

de Genlis has left two different works of the memoir kind, the one

entitled _Souvenirs de Felicie_, which is somewhat fictitious in form

and arrangement, but is believed to be accurate enough in facts; the

other, definitely called _Memoirs_, which was written long after date,

and is much coloured by prejudice. The Marquis de Bouille, whose gallant

conduct during the Nancy mutiny set an example which the nobility of

France were unfortunately slow to follow, and who would have saved Louis

XVI. in the Varennes flight but for ill-luck and the king's incredible

folly, has also left memoirs of value; and so has Dumouriez. The memoirs

of Louvet, of Daunou, of Riouffe, of the Duke de Lauzun, of the Comte de

Vaublanc, of the Comte de Segur, may be mentioned. The unamiable but

striking and characteristic figure of Madame Roland lives in memoirs

which are among the most celebrated of the time. A group of short but

striking accounts of eye-witnesses and narrowly-rescued victims remains

to testify to the atrocities of that Second of September, which some

recent historians have striven in vain to palliate. Many of the men of

the Revolution, of the servants of the Empire and of their wives, have

left accounts (of more or less value in point of matter) of the events

of the time, some of which have been only very recently published. Among

these latter special notice is deserved by the memoirs of Davout, of

Madame de Remusat, and of Count Miot de Melito. But with few exceptions

(those of Madame de Remusat are perhaps the principal) none of these

memoirs are of great literary importance or interest. They are often

very valuable to the historian, very curious to the student of manners

or the mere seeker after interesting and amusing facts; but no one of

them, named or unnamed, can be said to rank in literary interest with

the work which is so plentiful in the preceding century, and which

constitutes so large a part of that century's claim to a place of first

importance in the history of French literature.

[Sidenote: Abundance of Letter-writers.]

It is otherwise with letters, of which the century contributes to

literature some of the most remarkable which we possess. It is

impossible even to give a bare list of those which remain from a time

when almost every person of quality knew how to correspond either in the

natural or the artificial style; but the most remarkable (each of which

is in its way typical of a group) may be noticed with some minuteness.

Among these the correspondence of Grimm, though one of the bulkiest and

most important, may be dismissed with a brief reference; for it will be

noticed again in the succeeding chapter, and most of it is not either

the work of one man or real correspondence. The flying sheets which

Grimm, largely aided by his complaisant friends, and especially by

Diderot, sent to his august Russian and German correspondents, were in

reality periodical summaries of the state of politics, society, letters,

and art in Paris, not different in subject and style from the printed

newspaper letters of the present day. They form in the aggregate a very

important work, whether looked at from the point of view of history, or

from the point of view of literature; but they are not, properly

speaking, letters. Of the letter-writers proper three women and three

men may be selected,--Mademoiselle Aisse, Mademoiselle de Lespinasse,

and Madame du Deffand; Voltaire, Diderot, and Galiani.

[Sidenote: Mademoiselle Aisse.]

Mademoiselle Aisse had a singular history. When a child she was carried

off by Turkish rovers, and sold at Constantinople to the French

ambassador, M. de Ferriol. This was at the beginning of the century. Her

purchaser had her brought up carefully at Paris as his property, which

no doubt he always considered her. But in his old age he became

childish, and Mademoiselle Aisse was free to frequent society to which

she had been early introduced. She met and fell in love with a certain

Chevalier d'Aydie, who himself (at a later date, for the most part,) was

a letter-writer of some merit. Her letters to him and of him constitute

her claim to a position in the history of literature. They display the

_sensibilite_ of the time in a decided form, but in a milder one than

the later letters of Mademoiselle de Lespinasse. But there is something

in them more than mere _sensibilite_--a tender and affectionate spirit

finding graceful expression and deserving a happier fate. Mademoiselle

Aisse, like most other people of her time, turned devout, but earlier

than most. She died in 1733.

[Sidenote: Madame du Deffand.]

Madame du Deffand was a very different person. She was born in 1697, and

she distinguished herself when quite a girl, not merely by her beauty,

but by her wit and tendency to freethinking. She was married in 1718 to

the Marquis du Deffand, but soon separated from him, and lived for many

years the then usual life of gallantry. This merged insensibly into a

life of literary and philosophical society. Though Madame du Deffand was

not, like the wealthier but more plebeian Madame Geoffrin, and later

Madame Helvetius, a 'nursing mother of the philosophers,' in the sense

of supplying their necessities, her salon in the Rue Saint Dominique was

long one of the chief resorts of philosophism. In 1753 she became blind,

but this made little difference in her appetite for society. She lived

like many other great ladies in a monastery. She died in 1780. As a

letter-writer Madame du Deffand was the correspondent of most of the

greatest men of letters of the time (Voltaire, D'Alembert, Henault,

Montesquieu, etc.). But her most remarkable correspondence, and perhaps

her most interesting one, was with Horace Walpole, the most French of

contemporary Englishmen. Their friendship, for which it is hard to find

an exact name, unless, perhaps, it may be called a kind of passionate

community of tastes, belongs to the later part of her long life. Madame

du Deffand is the typical French lady of the eighteenth century, as

Richelieu is the typical _grand seigneur_. She was perhaps the wittiest

woman (in the strict sense of the adjective) who ever lived[290], and an

astonishingly large proportion of the best sayings of the time is traced

or attributed to her. Nearly seventy years of conversation and a great

correspondence did not exhaust her faculty of acute sallies, of ruthless

criticism, of cynical but clearsighted judgment on men and things. But

she was thoroughly unamiable, purely selfish, jealous, spiteful,

destitute of humour, if full of wit. A comparison with Madame de Sevigne

shows how the French character had, in the upper ranks at least,

degenerated (it is worth remembering that Madame du Deffand was born

just after Madame de Sevigne's death), though it must be admitted that

the earlier character shows perhaps the germs of what is repulsive in

the second.

[Sidenote: Mademoiselle de Lespinasse.]

The third most remarkable lady letter-writer of the century,

Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, was closely connected with Madame du

Deffand. She was indeed her companion, her coadjutor, and her rival.

Julie Jeanne Eleonore de Lespinasse was in reality the illegitimate

daughter of a lady of rank, the Countess d'Albon, who lived apart from

her husband, and the name Lespinasse was merely a fancy name taken from

the D'Albon genealogy. She was born, or at least baptized, at Lyons on

the 19th November, 1732. Her mother, who practically acknowledged her,

died when she was fifteen, leaving her fairly provided for. But her

half-brothers and sisters deprived her of most of her portion, though

for a time they gave her a home. In 1754 Madame du Deffand, to whom she

had been recommended, and who had just been struck with blindness,

invited her to come and live with her, which she did, after some

hesitation. For ten years the two presided jointly over their society,

but at last Madame du Deffand's jealousy broke out. Mademoiselle de

Lespinasse retired, taking with her not a few of the habitues of the

salon, with D'Alembert at their head. Madame Geoffrin seems to have

endowed her, and she established herself in the Rue de Bellechasse,

where D'Alembert before long came to join her. They lived in a curious

sort of relationship for more than ten years, until Mademoiselle de

Lespinasse died on the 22nd May, 1776. During this time she was a

gracious hostess and a bond of union to many men of letters, especially

those of the younger _philosophe_ school. But this is not what gives her

her place here. Her claim rests upon a collection of love-letters, not

addressed to D'Alembert. She was thirty-four when the earliest of her

love affairs began, and had never been beautiful. When she died she was

forty-four, and her later letters are more passionate than the earlier.

Her first lover was a young Spaniard, the Marquis Gonsalvo de Mora; her

second, the Count de Guibert, a poet and essayist of no great merit, a

military reformer said to have been of some talent, and pretty evidently

a bad-hearted coxcomb. To him the epistles we have are addressed. All

the circumstances of these letters are calculated to make them

ridiculous, yet there is hardly any word which they less deserve. The

great defect of the eighteenth century is that its _sensibilite_

excludes real passion. The men and women of feeling of the period always

seem as if they were playing at feeling; the affairs of the heart, which

occupy so large a place in its literature, show only the progress of a

certain kind of game which has its rules and stages to which the

players must conform, but which, when once over, leaves no more traces

than any other kind of game. To this Mademoiselle de Lespinasse is a

conspicuous exception. It has been said of her that her letters burn the

paper they are written on with the fervency of their sentiment, nor is

the expression an exaggerated one. Except in Rousseau and (in a

different form) in _Manon Lescaut_, it is in these letters that we must

look for almost the only genuine passion of the time. It is no doubt

unreal to a certain degree, morbid also in an even greater degree as

regards what is real in it. But it is in no sense consciously affected,

and conscious affectation was the bane of the period.

[Sidenote: Voltaire.]

The three examples which have been chosen of the masculine

letter-writing of the period are of somewhat wider range. Mademoiselle

Aisse and Mademoiselle de Lespinasse show in various forms the amiable

weaknesses of womankind, Madame du Deffand its unamiable strength. The

letters of Voltaire, of Diderot, and of the Abbe Galiani are not so

typical of a sex, but are more representative of individuals and at the

same time of the age. Voltaire's correspondence is simply enormous in

point of bulk. Fresh letters of his are constantly being discovered and

edited even now. His long life, his extraordinary industry, his position

during nearly half a century as first one of the leading men of letters,

and then unquestionably the leading man of letters of Europe, the

curious diversity of his interests, even the prosperity in point of

fortune which made him command the services of secretaries and

under-strappers, while humbler men of letters had to do the mechanical

work of composition for themselves, all contributed to bring about this

fecundity. The consequence is, that not only is the correspondence of

Voltaire of vast extent but it is also of the most various character. We

have from him early love-letters, letters to private friends of all

dates, business letters, literary letters, letters to great persons,

letters intended for publication, letters not intended for publication,

flattering letters, insulting letters, benevolent letters, patronising

letters, begging letters, letters of almost every sort and kind that the

ingenuity of human imagination can conceive or the diversity of human

relationships and circumstances require. Partial critics have contended

that the singular quality of Voltaire's genius might be sufficiently

exemplified from his letters, if no other documents were forthcoming.

Without going quite so far as this, it may be allowed that his

correspondence is a remarkable monument of those qualities in literature

which enable a man to express himself happily and rapidly on any subject

that happens to present itself. The letters of Voltaire do not perhaps

supply any ground for disputing Carlyle's sentence on Voltaire (a

sentence which has excited the wrath of French critics) that there is

not one great thought in all his works. But they enable us, even better

than any other division of those works, to appreciate the singular

flexibility of his intellect, the extraordinarily wide range of his

interests and sympathies, the practical talents which accompanied his

literary genius.

[Sidenote: Diderot.]

Diderot's correspondence is also considerable in bulk, though not in

that respect to be compared to Voltaire's. It has several minor

divisions, the chief of which is a body of letters addressed to the

sculptor Falconnet in Russia. But the main claim of this versatile

writer and most fertile thinker to rank in this chapter lies in his

letters to Mademoiselle Volland, a lady of mature years, to whom, in his

own middle and old age, he was, after the fashion of the time, much

attached. These letters were not published till forty or fifty years

after his death, and it is not too much to say that they supply not only

the most vivid picture of Diderot himself which is attainable, but also

the best view of the later and extremer _philosophe_ society. Many, if

not most of them, are written from that society's head-quarters, the

country house of the Baron d'Holbach, at Grandval, where Diderot was an

ever welcome visitor. This society had certain drawbacks which made it

irksome, not merely to orthodox and sober persons, but to fastidious

judges who were not much burdened with scruples. Horace Walpole, for

instance, found himself bored by it. But it was the most characteristic

society of the time, and Diderot's letters are the best pictures of it,

because, unlike some not dissimilar work, they unite great vividness and

power of description with an obvious absence of the least design to

'cook,' that is to say, to invent or to disguise facts and characters.

Diderot, who possessed every literary faculty except the faculty of

taking pains and the faculty of adroitly choosing subjects, was marked

out as the describer of such a society as this, where brilliancy was the

one thing never wanting, where eccentricity of act and speech was the

rule, where originals abounded and took care to make the most of their

originality, and where all restraint of convention was deliberately cast

aside. The character and tendencies of this society have been very

variously judged, and there is no need to decide here between the judges

further than to say that, on the whole, the famous essay of Carlyle on

Diderot not inadequately reduces to miniature Diderot's own picture of

it. Only the extremest prejudice can deny the extraordinary merit of

that picture itself, the vividness and effortless effect with which the

men and women dealt with--their doings and their sayings--are presented,

the completeness and dramatic force of the presentation.

[Sidenote: Galiani.]

The last of the epistolers selected for comment, the Abbe Galiani, has

this peculiarity as distinguished from Voltaire and Diderot, that he is

little except a letter-writer to the present and probably to all future

generations of readers. He will indeed appear again, but his dealings

with political economy are of merely ephemeral interest. Galiani was of

a noble Neapolitan family, was attached to the Neapolitan Legation in

Paris, and made himself a darling of _philosophe_ society there. When he

was recalled to his native country and endowed with sufficiently

lucrative employments, his chief consolation for the loss of Parisian

society was to gather as far as he could a copy of it--consisting partly

of Italians, partly of foreign and especially English visitors--to

Italy, to study classical archaeology, in which (and especially in the

department of numismatics) he was an expert, and to write letters to his

French friends. In his long residence at Paris, Galiani had acquired a

style not entirely destitute of Italianisms, but all the more piquant on

that account. His letters were published early in this century, but

incompletely and in a somewhat garbled fashion. They have recently had

the benefit of two different complete editions. They are addressed, the

greater part of them to Madame d'Epinay, and the remainder to various

correspondents. Galiani had the reputation of being one of the best

talkers of his time, and the memoirs and correspondence of his friends

(especially Diderot's) contain many reported sayings of his which amply

support the reputation. Like many famous talkers, he seems to have been

not quite so ready with the pen as with the tongue. But it is only by

comparison that his letters can be depreciated. Less voluminous and

manifold than Voltaire, less picturesque than Diderot, he is a model of

general letter-writing. He is also remarkable as an exponent of the

curious feeling of the time towards religion; a feeling which was

prevalent in the cultivated classes (with certain differences) all over

Europe. Galiani was not, like some of his French friends, a

proselytising atheist. He held some ecclesiastical employments in his

own country with decency, and died with all due attention to the rites

of the Church. But it is obvious that he was as little of a Christian,

in any definite sense of the word, as any humanist of the fifteenth

century.

The light thrown in this fashion upon the social, moral, and

intellectual characteristics of the time constitutes the chief value of

all its historical literature, except the great philosophico-historical

works of Montesquieu and Turgot. It has a certain flimsiness about it;

it is brilliant journalism rather than literature properly so called;

the dialect in which it is written wants the gravity and sonorousness,

the colour and the poetry, of the seventeenth and earlier centuries. But

it is unmatched in power of social portraiture. Written, as much of it

is, by men of the middle class, and more of it by men who, from whatever

class they sprang, were deeply interested in social, economical, and

political problems, it is free from that ignoring of any life and class

except that of the nobility which mars much of the work of earlier

times. The picture it gives is very far from being a flattering one. The

nature to which the mirror is held up is in most cases a decidedly

corrupt nature; but the mirror is held frankly, and the reflection is

useful to posterity.

FOOTNOTES:

[289] In studying the history, and especially the memoirs, of the

eighteenth century, the reader is at a disadvantage, inasmuch as the

admirable collections of MM. Buchon, Petitot, Michaud et Poujoulat,

etc., do not extend beyond its earliest years. Their place is very

imperfectly supplied by a collection in twenty-eight small volumes,

edited by F. Barriere for MM. Didot. This is useful as far as it goes,

but it is very far from complete; much of it is in extract only, and the

component parts of it are not selected as judiciously as they might be.

Separate editions of the principal memoirs of the century are of course

obtainable, and the number is being constantly increased; but such

separate editions are far less useful than the collections which enable

the memoir-writing of France during five centuries of its history to be

studied at an advantage scarcely to be paralleled in the literature of

any other nation.

[290] Her earlier contemporary, Madame de Tencin, is her chief

competitor.

CHAPTER V.

ESSAYISTS, MINOR MORALISTS, CRITICS.

[Sidenote: Occasional Writing in the Eighteenth-century. Periodicals.]

What may be, for want of a better word, called occasional writing in

prose received a considerable development during the eighteenth century.

Some of the forms which it had previously taken, the _Pensee_, the

maxim, and so forth, were less practised, though at the beginning and

end of our present period two remarkable men, Vauvenargues and Joubert,

distinguished themselves in them, and in the form of satirical aphorism

Chamfort and Rivarol, before and during the Revolution, brought them to

great perfection. But it was powerfully encouraged by the institution of

official _eloges_, pronounced in the French Academy on famous men of the

immediate or remoter past, and of prize essays, subjects for which, in

ever increasing numbers, were proposed, not merely by that body, but by

provincial societies of a similar but humbler kind. More than all this,

the growth of periodical literature, though not exactly rapid, was

steady, and gave opportunity for the cultivation of the two main

branches of occasional writing as it is understood in modern times,

namely, social or ethical essays of the Addisonian kind, and critical

studies, literary or other. A great impetus was given to this by the

novelist Prevost, who, after his return from England, edited, as has

been observed, more than one avowed imitation of the English _Spectator_

and _Tatler_. At the beginning of the century the chief place among

newspapers was occupied by the _Mercure Galant_, which had enjoyed the

contempt of La Bruyere, and the management of Vise and Thomas Corneille.

Towards the middle and end of the period, the _Gazette de France_, under

the management of Suard, held the principal place with a somewhat

higher aim; and of non-official publications the Jesuit _Journal de

Trevoux_ and the anti-_philosophe Annee Litteraire_ of Freron were

notable. It was not till after the beginning of the Revolution that

journalism proper spread and multiplied, and that journalists became a

power. A short notice of the chief of these will be found lower down in

this chapter, but a full history of French journalism is impossible

here.

[Sidenote: Fontenelle.]

The first place in point of time, and not the least in point of

importance, among the occasional writers of the eighteenth century, is

due to Fontenelle. The personal name of this curious writer, who is

perhaps the most striking example in literary history of multifarious

talent and unwearied industry just stopping short, despite their

combination, of genius, was Bernard le Bovier, and his mother was a

sister of Corneille, whose life Fontenelle himself wrote. He was

educated by the Jesuits and studied for the bar, but was unsuccessful as

an advocate, and soon gave up active practice. He came to Paris very

young, and soon became distinguished, after a fashion, in society and

literature. He was one of the last of the _precieux_, or rather he was

the inventor of a new combination of literature and gallantry which at

first exposed him to not a little satire. Unfortunately too for him he

tried first to emulate his uncles in the drama, for which he had no

talent, and one of his plays (_Aspar_), failing completely, gave his

enemies abundant opportunity. No one, however, illustrated better than

Fontenelle the saying that 'no man was ever written down except by

himself.' He was the butt of the four most dangerous satirists of his

time--Racine, Boileau, La Bruyere, and J. B. Rousseau; but though the

epigrams which Racine and Rousseau directed against him are among the

best in the language, and though the 'portrait' of Cydias, in the

_Caracteres_, at least equals them, Fontenelle received hardly any

damage from these. Finding that he was not likely to be a successful

dramatic poet, even in opera, he turned to prose, and wrote 'dialogues

of the dead,' in avowed imitation of Lucian, and a kind of romance

called '_Lettres du Chevalier d'Her_...,' in which he may be said to

have set the example of the elaborate and rather affected style,

afterwards called Marivaudage, from his most famous pupil. Even here

his success was doubtful, and he again changed his ground. He had paid

some attention to science, and he saw that there was an opening in the

growing curiosity of educated people for scientific popularising. To

this and to literary criticism and history he devoted himself for the

remainder of his long life, becoming President of the Academy of

Sciences, and virtual dictator of the Academie Francaise. His _Eloges_

and his academic essays generally were highly popular. But his chief

single works are the famous _Entretien sur la Pluralite des Mondes_, an

example of singularly hardy speculation, and of no contemptible

learning, artfully disguised by an easy style, and his _Histoire des

Oracles_, of which much the same may be said. With hardly diminished

powers Fontenelle achieved an age not often paralleled in literary

history, though his contemporary, Saint Aulaire, a minor poet, nearly

equalled it. He died in his hundredth year, and almost at the end of it,

his long life extending from the very earliest glories of the Siecle de

Louis XIV. to the very hottest period of the Encyclopaedist battle. The

singular variety of his works, and his force of character, disguised

under a somewhat frivolous exterior, but enabling him to live down

enmity and ridicule which would have crushed most men, would of

themselves make Fontenelle a remarkable figure in literature. But his

actual work has more merits than that of mere variety. He realised quite

as keenly as his enemy La Bruyere the importance of manner in

literature, though his taste was hardly so pure. If not exactly an

original thinker, he was an acute and comprehensive one, and forestalled

most of his contemporaries in taking the direction consciously which

they were pursuing almost without knowing it. He fully appreciated the

value of paradox as stimulating men's minds and giving flavour to

literature; and his positive wit was very considerable. To not many men

are more good sayings attributed, and the goodness of these is not

always verbal only. The most famous of them, uttered in defence of his

peculiar union of heterodoxy and caution, 'I may have my fist full of

truth, and yet only care to open my little finger,' may be immoral or

not, but it expressed very early, and with singular force, the

intellectual attitude of two whole generations.

[Sidenote: La Motte.]

Inseparable from Fontenelle's name in literary history, as the two were

long closely united in life, is the name of La Motte. La Motte was a

much younger man than Fontenelle, and he died more than thirty years

before him, but during the first thirty years of the century the pair

exercised a kind of joint sovereignty in the Belles Lettres. They

revived the quarrel of the ancients and moderns, inclining to the modern

side. But La Motte's translation of Homer, or rather his adaptation (for

he omitted about half), is not of a nature to inspire much confidence in

his ability to judge the matter, though his essays and letters on the

subject are triumphs of ingenious word-fence. Unlike Fontenelle, La

Motte had one considerable dramatic success with the pathetic subject of

_Ines de Castro_, and his fables are not devoid of merit. It was,

however, as a prose writer of the occasional kind, and especially as a

paradoxical essayist, that he earned and deserved most fame, his prose

style being superior to Fontenelle's own.

[Sidenote: Vauvenargues.]

The next name deserving of mention belongs to a very different writer.

Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues, covered in his brief space of

life not a third of the period allotted to Fontenelle, who was nearly

sixty when Vauvenargues was born, and outlived him ten years. Nor did he

leave any single work of consequence. Yet his scanty writings are far

more valuable in matter, if not in form, than those of the witty

centenarian. Vauvenargues was born at Aix, in Provence, on the 6th of

August, 1715. His family was ancient and honourable, but appears to have

been poor, and his education was interrupted by the bad health which

continued throughout his short life. Nevertheless he entered the army at

the age of eighteen. After this he had scanty opportunities of study,

and it is said that he was ignorant not only of Greek but even of Latin.

He served at first in Italy, and then for some years was employed on

garrison duty. At the outbreak of the war of the Austrian succession his

regiment was sent into Germany, and he had a full share of the hardships

of the Bohemian campaign. No promotion came to him, his means were

almost exhausted, and in 1744 he resigned his commission, after taking

the curiously unworldly step of writing directly to the king, asking for

a place in the diplomatic service. An application to the minister of

foreign affairs was not much more successful, and Vauvenargues, whose

evil star pursued him, had no sooner established himself with his family

than a bad attack of small-pox destroyed the little health he still had.

He set to work, however, to write, and in the short time before his

death actually published some of his works, and left others in a

condition ready for publication. He lived in Paris for the last three

years of his life, and died in 1747, at the age of thirty-two. Latterly

he had made acquaintance with Voltaire, who entertained a very high and

generous opinion of his talents, due perhaps partly to the remarkable

difference of their respective characters and points of view.

Vauvenargues' principal work is an _Introduction a la Connoissance de

l'Esprit Humain_, besides which he left a considerable number of maxims,

reflections, etc., on points of ethics and of literary criticism. In the

last part of his work there is more curiosity than instruction. It is,

however, in its way an instructive thing to see that a man of talent and

even of genius could object to Moliere for having chosen _des sujets

trop bas_, while he speaks of Boileau in the most enthusiastic terms.

The truth (and in the history of literature it is a very important

truth) is that Vauvenargues was too little versed in any language but

his own to have the requisite range of comparison necessary for literary

criticism, and that his real interest in literature was almost entirely

proportioned to its bearing upon conduct. His maxims, his _Connoissance

de l'Esprit_, his _Conseils a un Jeune Homme_, etc., are all occupied

almost entirely with questions of morality. Vauvenargues (and in this he

was remarkable) stood entirely aloof from the sceptical movement of his

age. There was, indeed, a certain scepticism in him, as in almost all

thinkers, but it was of the stamp of Pascal's, not in the least mocking

or polemical, and even, as compared with Pascal's own, much less

strictly theological. In most of his writings he shows himself an

earnest and upright man, profoundly convinced of the importance of right

conduct, gifted with an acute perception of its usual moving springs and

directions, not remarkable for humour or poetical feeling, but serious,

sober, and a little stoical. His literary characteristics reflect some

of these peculiarities, and also betray something of his neglected

education. He is never slovenly in thought, but he sometimes shocked the

exact verbal critics of the eighteenth century by such phrases as 'les

sens sont flattes d'agir, de galoper un cheval,' whereupon his censor

annotates 'neglige. Les sens ne galopent pas un cheval.' A more serious

fault is that, in his shorter maxims especially, he does not observe the

rule of absolute lucidity which La Rochefoucauld, who was as much his

model in point of style as he was his opposite in general views, never

breaks through. His sayings (it is a merit as well as a drawback) are

often rather suggestive than expressive; they remind the reader of his

own curious comparison of Corneille with Racine, 'les heros de Corneille

disent souvent de grandes choses sans les inspirer; ceux de Racine les

inspirent sans les dire.'

[Sidenote: D'Aguesseau.]

Contemporary with Fontenelle and La Motte was the Chancellor

D'Aguesseau, one of the most prominent figures of the earlier reign of

Louis XV., a steady defender of orthodoxy--yet, as was seen in the case

of the Encyclopaedia, willing to assist enlightenment--a man of

irreproachable character, and a writer of some merit. D'Aguesseau was

born in 1668, and died in 1751. He early received considerable

preferment in the law, and held the seals at intervals for the greater

part of the last thirty years of his life. He was a defender of

Gallicanism--indeed, he was suspected of Jansenist leanings--and a man

of great benevolence in private life. His legal and historical learning

was immense, and he was not without some tincture of science. He

deserves a place here chiefly for his speeches on public occasions,

which were in effect elaborate moral essays. An important part of them

consists of what were called _Mercuriales_ (that is to say, discourses

pronounced on certain Wednesdays (Die Mercurii) by the first president

of the Parliament of Paris) on the abuses of the day, the duties of

judges, the nature of justice, and similar subjects.

[Sidenote: Duclos.]

Another writer, who has been mentioned more than once before, held

somewhat aloof from the Encyclopaedists, though he was not, like

D'Aguesseau, definitely orthodox, or, like Vauvenargues, severely moral.

Charles Pinaud Duclos was one of the most miscellaneous of the

miscellaneous writers of the time. He held the office of historiographer

royal, and produced some remarkable works of the historical kind, one of

which has been noticed. He composed novels in a fanciful style midway

between Crebillon and Marivaux. He also wrote on grammar, but some of

his best work consists of short academic essays, and of a moral study

called _Considerations sur les Moeurs de Notre Temps_, which is both

well written and shows discernment. Duclos' character has been somewhat

variously represented, but the unfavourable reports (which are in the

minority) may probably be traced to the studied brusqueness of his

manners, and to his unwillingness to make common cause with the

_philosophe_ coterie, though, if some stories are to be believed, he

often conversed and argued quite in their style.

[Sidenote: Marmontel.]

Yet another typical figure of the same numerous class is Jean Francois

Marmontel, one of the most eminent professional men of letters of the

second class. Marmontel's moral tales, his _Belisaire_, and his plays

have already been noticed, but his main place in literature is that of a

journalist and critic. He was born at Bort, in the district of Limoges,

in 1723, and obtained some provincial reputation in letters. Introduced

to Voltaire in 1746, he began as a dramatist, and, after some failures,

acquired the protection of Madame de Pompadour. He was made editor of

the _Mercure_, which gave him an influential position and a competence.

He afterwards succeeded Duclos as historiographer, notwithstanding the

outcry which had been made against his _Belisaire_. He had contributed

almost all the minor articles on literary subjects to the Encyclopaedia,

and these were collected and published as _Elements de Litterature_ in

1787. He died in 1799. The _Elements de Litterature_ are, with the

_Cours de Litterature_ of La Harpe, the chief source of information as

to eighteenth-century criticism of the fashionable kind in France. They

are very voluminous, and, from the circumstances of their original form,

deal with a vast number of subjects. The style is for the most part

simple and good, destitute alike of the dryness and of the bombast which

were the two faults of contemporary writing. But Marmontel's system of

criticism will not bear a moment's examination. It consists simply in

the assumption that Racine, Boileau (though he was at first recalcitrant

to Boileau, and had to be admonished by Voltaire that _ca porte

malheur_), and their contemporaries are infallible models, and in the

application of this principle to all other nations. The passion for

finding plausible general reasons also leads Marmontel into grotesque

aberrations, as where he gives three reasons for English success in

poetry as contrasted with our inferiority in the other arts. First,

Englishmen, loving glory, saw early that poetry acquired glory for a

nation. Secondly, being naturally given to sadness and meditation, they

wish for emotions to distract and move them. Thirdly, their genius is

proper to poetry. This last remark, the reader should observe, comes

from a countryman of Moliere, a man who must have read the _Malade

Imaginaire_, and who was moreover a man of much more than ordinary

talent. Marmontel often has acute remarks, and his blunders and

absurdities are rather symptomatic of the false state in which criticism

was at the time than of individual shortcomings.

[Sidenote: La Harpe.]

Somewhat younger than Marmontel was La Harpe, who pursued the same lines

of dramatic poetry and literary criticism, the latter with more success

in his kind, so much so, that Malherbe, Boileau, and he may be ranked

together as the three representatives of the infancy, flourishing, and

decadence of the 'classical' theory of literary criticism in France. La

Harpe was born at Paris in 1739, was brought up by charity, gained a

reputation as a brilliant exhibitioner at the College d'Harcourt, and,

after the mishap of being imprisoned for a libel, obtained new success

at the Academy competitions. He acquired the favour of Voltaire, and

fairly launched himself in literature. For many years he furnished

tragedies to the stage, and criticised the literary work of others with

a singular mixture of acuteness, pedantry, and ill-temper. He was

converted from Republicanism by an imprisonment during the Terror, and

became a violent conservative and defender of orthodoxy. He died in

1803. His principal critical work is his _Cours de Litterature_, which

was the work chiefly of his later days. La Harpe had very considerable

talent, which was however warped by the false and narrow system of

criticism he adopted, and by his personal ill-temper and overbearing

disposition. He is even more than Boileau the type of the

schoolmaster-critic, who marks passages for correction according to

cut-and-dried rules instead of attempting to judge the author according

to his own standard. Yet, if he is the most typical example of the

school, he is also perhaps the best. In dealing with authors of his own

century, he is especially worthy of attention, because for the most part

they themselves had before them the standards which he used, and his

method is therefore relevant as far as it goes. La Harpe wrote well in

the fashion of his day.

[Sidenote: Thomas.]

With Duclos, Marmontel, and La Harpe, Thomas is usually named. This

writer, like others of our present subjects, was chiefly a composer of

academic _Eloges_, _Memoires_, _Discours_, and the like. He also wrote a

book on _Les Femmes_, a subject which he treated, as he did most things,

with seriousness, and with a mixture of declamation and sentimentality.

His literary value is but small.

[Sidenote: Orthodox Apologists.]

Of the definitely orthodox party only two names need be mentioned, that

of the Abbe Guenee, who devoted himself to exposing Voltaire's numerous

slips in erudition in his _Lettres de Quelques Juifs_, and that of the

Abbe Bergier, who is chiefly noteworthy as having held the singular post

of official refuter of the Encyclopaedists, in virtue of which

appointment he received two thousand _livres_ per annum from the General

Assembly of the clergy for sixteen years. He wrote with assiduity, but

was not read, and three years before the Revolution he lost his annuity,

which the Assembly struck off. Bergier was a man of learning, industry,

and good faith, but unfortunately he did not possess sufficient literary

talent to execute the task entrusted to him. The Abbe Guenee, on the

contrary, was a fair match even for Voltaire, but he did not attempt,

perhaps it was too early to attempt, anything more than skirmishing.

[Sidenote: Freron.]

A bitter personal opponent of La Harpe, and a famous man in literary

history, was Freron. Elie Catherine Freron was born at Quimper in

Britanny in 1719, and was educated by the Jesuits. He began a critical

journal when he was only seven-and-twenty, under the title (not so

strange then as now) of _Lettres de Madame la Comtesse de_.... But he

had already contributed to the _Observations_ and _Jugements_ of

Desfontaines. The _Lettres_ were suppressed in 1749, but continued

under another title, and at last, in 1754, became the celebrated _Annee

Litteraire_, which for twenty years was full of gall and wormwood for

Voltaire and all his partisans. Voltaire was never slow to retaliate in

such matters, and his retorts culminated in the play of _L'Ecossaise_,

in which Freron was caricatured under the title Frelon (hornet). Every

effort was made by the Encyclopaedists (who were not in the least

tolerant in practice) to procure the suppression of the _Annee_. But

Freron had solid supports in high places and held on gallantly. It is

said that his death, in 1776, was caused by a report that the

suppression had been at last obtained. He certainly suffered both from

gout and from heart disease, complaints not unlikely to make a sudden

shock fatal. Freron, like his English prototype John Dennis, has had the

disadvantage that his adversaries were numerous, witty, not too

scrupulous, and on the winning side. His personal character seems to

have been none of the most amiable. But he was more frequently right

than wrong in his criticisms on detached points, and his literary

standards were decidedly higher and better than those of his enemies. He

had moreover abundant wit and an imperturbable temper, which enabled him

to turn the laugh against Voltaire in his criticism of the first

representation of _L'Ecossaise_ itself.

Two other adversaries of Voltaire who deserve notice as literary critics

were the Abbe Desfontaines (already mentioned) and Palissot.

Desfontaines was a man of doubtful character; but it is not certain that

he was in the wrong in the dispute which changed him from a friend into

an enemy of Voltaire, and, like Freron, he very frequently hit blots

both in the patriarch's works and in those of his disciples. Palissot

was the author of a play called _Les Philosophes_, an _Ecossaise_ on the

other side, in which Rousseau, Diderot, and others were outrageously

ridiculed. There was no great merit in this, but Palissot was not a bad

critic in some ways, and his notes on French classics, especially

Corneille, frequently show much greater taste than those of most

contemporary annotators.

[Sidenote: Philosophe Criticism. D'Alembert, Diderot.]

[Sidenote: Les Feuilles de Grimm.]

[Sidenote: Diderot's Salons]

[Sidenote: His General Criticism.]

The leaders of the _philosophes_ themselves gave considerable attention

to criticism. Voltaire wrote this, as he wrote everything, his

principal critical work being his Commentary on Corneille, in which the

constraint of general dramatic and poetic theory which the critic

imposes on himself, and the merely conventional opinions in which he too

often indulges, do not interfere with much acute criticism on points of

detail. D'Alembert distinguished himself by his extraordinarily careful

and polished _Eloges_, or obituary notices, which remain among the

finest examples of critical appreciation of a certain kind to be found

in literature. Although he did not definitely attempt a new theory of

criticism, D'Alembert's vigorous intellect and unbiassed judgment

enabled him to estimate authors so different as (for instance) Massillon

and Marivaux with singular felicity. But the greatest of the

Encyclopaedists in this respect was unquestionably Diderot. While his

contemporaries, bent on innovation in politics and religion, accepted

without doubt or complaint the narrowest, most conventional, and most

unnatural system of literary criticism ever known, he, in his hurried

and haphazard but masterly way, practically anticipated the views and

even many of the _dicta_ of the Romantic school. Most of Diderot's

criticisms were written for Grimm's 'Leaves,' which thus acquired a

value entirely different from and far superior to any that their nominal

author could give them. Some of these short notices of current

literature are among the finest examples of the review properly so

called, though in point of mere literary style and expression they

constantly suffer from Diderot's hurried way of setting down the first

thing that came into his head in the first words that presented

themselves to clothe it. But everywhere there is to be perceived the

cardinal principle of sound criticism--that a book is to be judged, not

according to arbitrary rules laid down _ex cathedra_ for the class of

books to which it is supposed to belong, but according to the scheme of

its author in the first place, and in the second to the general laws of

aesthetics; a science which, if the Germans named it, Diderot, by their

own confession, did much to create. Even more remarkable in this respect

than his book-criticisms are his _Salons_, criticisms of the biennial

exhibitions of pictures in Paris, also written for Grimm. There are nine

of these, ranging over a period of twenty-two years, and they have

served as models for more than a century. Diderot did not adopt the old

plan (as old as the Greeks) of mere description more or less elaborate

of the picture, nor the plan of dilating on its merely technical

characteristics, though, assisted by artist friends, he managed to

introduce a fair amount of technicalities into his writing. His method

is to take in the impression produced by the painting on his mind, and

to reproduce it with the associations and suggestions it has supplied.

Thus his criticisms are often extremely discursive, and some of his most

valuable reflections on matters at first sight quite remote from the

fine arts occur in these _Salons_. Of drama Diderot had a formal theory

which he illustrated by examples not quite so happy as his precepts.

This theory involved the practical substitution of what is called in

French _drame_ for the conventional tragedy and comedy, and it brought

the French theatre (or would have brought it if it had been adopted,

which it was not until 1830) much nearer to the English than it had

been. Diderot was moreover an enthusiastic admirer of English novels,

and especially of Richardson and Sterne, partly no doubt because the

sentimentalism which characterised them coincided with his own

_sensibilite_, but also (it is fair to believe) because of their freedom

from the artificiality and the strict observance of models which

pervaded all branches of literature in France. Of poetry proper we have

little formal criticism from Diderot. His own verses are few, and of no

merit, nor was the poetry of the time at all calculated to excite any

enthusiasm in him. But the aesthetic tendency which in other ways he

expressed, and which he was the first to express, was that which, some

forty years after his death, brought about the revival of poetry in

France, through recurrence to nature, passion, truth, vividness, and

variety of sentiment.

[Sidenote: Newspapers of the Revolution.]

[Sidenote: The Influence of Journalism.]

So long as the old _regime_ lasted journalism was naturally in a

condition of suppression, but from the beginning of the Revolution it

assumed at once an important position in the state, and a position still

more important as a nursery of rising men of letters. At the time of the

outbreak only two papers of importance existed, the already mentioned

_Gazette de France_, and the _Journal de Paris_, in which Garat, Andre

Chenier, Roucher, and many other men of distinction, won their spurs.

1789, however, saw the birth of numerous sheets, some of which continued

almost till our own days. The most important was the _Gazette Nationale_

or _Moniteur Universel_, in which not merely Garat and La Harpe, but

Ginguene, a literary critic of talent and a republican of moderate

principles, together with the future historian Lacretelle, and the comic

poet, fabulist, and critic Andrieux, took part. Rivarol, Champcenetz,

and Pelletier conducted the Royalist _Actes des Apotres_, Marat started

his ultra-republican _Ami du Peuple_, Camille Desmoulins the _Courier de

Brabant_, Durozoy the _Gazette de Paris_. Barrere and Louvet, both

notorious, if not famous names, launched for the first time a paper with

a title destined to fortune, _Le Journal des Debats_; and Camille

Desmoulins changed his oddly-named journal into one named more oddly

still, _Les Revolutions de France et de Brabant_. All these, and more,

were the growth of the single year 1789. The next saw the avowedly

Royalist _Ami du Roi_ of Royou, the atrocious _Pere Duchene_ of Hebert,

the cumbrously-named _Journal des Amis de la Constitution_, on which

Fontanes, Clermont-Tonnerre, and other future Bonapartists and

Constitutionalists worked. In 1791 no paper of importance, except the

short-lived Girondist _Chronique du Mois_, appeared. In the next year

many Terrorist prints of no literary merit were started, and one,

entitled _Nouvelles Politiques_, to which the veterans Suard and

Morellet, with Guizot, a novice of the time to come, Lacretelle, Dupont

de Nemours, and others, were contributors. In the later years of the

revolutionary period, the only important newspaper was what was first

called the _Journal de l'Empire_, and at the end of Napoleon's reign the

_Journal des Debats_, on which Fievee, Geoffroy, and many other writers

of talent worked. In the early days of these various journals political

interests naturally engrossed them. But the literary tastes and

instincts of Parisians were too strong not to demand attention, and by

degrees the critical part of the newspaper became of importance. Under

the restoration this importance grew, and the result was the

_Conservateur Litteraire_ and the _Globe_, in the former of which Victor

Hugo was introduced to the public, and in the latter Sainte-Beuve. This

sudden uprise of journalism produced a remarkable change in the

conditions of literary work, and offered chances to many who would

previously have been dependent on individual patronage. But so far as

regards literature, properly so called, all its results which were worth

anything appeared subsequently in books, and there is therefore no need

to refer otherwise than cursorily to the phenomenon of its development.

Put very briefly, the influence of journalism on literature may be said

to be this: it opens the way to those to whom it might otherwise be

closed; it facilitates the destruction of erroneous principles; it

assists production; and it interferes with labour and care spent over

the thing produced.

[Sidenote: Chamfort.]

From the crowd of clever writers whom this outburst of journalism found

ready to draw their pens in one service or the other, two names emerge

as pre-eminently remarkable. Garat and Champcenetz were men of wit and

ingenuity, Andre Chenier was a great poet, and his brother, Marie

Joseph, a man of good literary taste and master of an elegant style,

Lacretelle a painstaking historian, and many others worthy of note in

their way. But Chamfort and Rivarol deserve a different kind of notice

from this. They united in a remarkable fashion the peculiarities of the

man of letters of the eighteenth century with the peculiarities of the

man of letters of the nineteenth, and their individual merit was, though

different and complementary, almost unique. Chamfort was born in

Auvergne, in 1741. He was the natural son of a person who occupied the

position of companion, and legally possessed nothing but his baptismal

name of Nicholas. Like his rival, La Harpe, he obtained an exhibition at

one of the Paris colleges, and distinguished himself. After leaving

school he lived for a time by miscellaneous literature, and at last made

his way to society and to literary success by dint of competing for and

winning academic prizes. On the second occasion of his competition he

defeated La Harpe. Afterwards Madame Helvetius assisted him, and at last

he received from Chabanon (a third-rate man of letters, who may be most

honourably mentioned here) a small annuity which made him independent.

It is said that he married, and that his wife died six months

afterwards. He was elected to the Academy, and patronised by all sorts

of persons, from the queen downwards. But at the outbreak of the

Revolution he took the popular side, though he could not continue long

faithful to it. In the Terror he was menaced with arrest, tried to

commit suicide, and died horribly mutilated in 1794. Chamfort's literary

works are considerable in bulk, but only a few of them have merit. His

tragedies are quite worthless, his comedy, _La Jeune Indienne_, not much

better. His verse tales exceed in licentiousness his models in La

Fontaine, but fall far short of them in elegance and humour. His

academic essays are heavy and scarcely intelligent. But his brief

witticisms and his short anecdotes and apophthegms hardly admit a rival.

Chamfort was a man soured by his want of birth, health, and position,

and spoilt in mental development by the necessity of hanging on to the

great persons of his time. But for a kind of tragi-comic satire, a

_saeva indignatio_, taking the form of contempt of all that is exalted

and noble, he has no equal in literature except Swift.

[Sidenote: Rivarol.]

The life of Rivarol was also an adventurous one, but much less sombre.

He was born about 1750, of a family which seems to have had noble

connections, but which, in his branch of it, had descended to

innkeeping. Indeed it is said that Riverot, and not Rivarol, was the

name which his father actually bore. He himself, however, first assumed

the title of Chevalier de Parcieux, and then that of Comte de Rivarol.

The way to literary distinction in those days was either the theatre or

criticism, and Rivarol, with the acuteness which characterised him,

knowing that he had no talent for the former, chose the latter. His

translation (with essay and notes) of Dante is an extraordinarily clever

book, and his discourse on the universality of the French tongue, which

followed, deserves the same description. It was not, however, in mere

criticism that Rivarol's forte lay, though he long afterwards continued

to exhibit his acuteness in it by utterances of various kinds. In 1788

(the year before the Revolution) he excited the laughter of all Paris,

and the intense hatred of the hack-writers of his time, by publishing,

in conjunction with Champcenetz, an _Almanach de nos Grands Hommes_, in

which, by a mixture of fiction and fact, he caricatures his smaller

contemporaries in the most pitiless manner. When the Revolution broke

out Rivarol took the Royalist side, and contributed freely to its

journals. He soon found it necessary to leave the country, and lived for

ten years in Brussels, London, Hamburg, and Berlin, publishing

occasionally pamphlets and miscellaneous works. He died at the Prussian

capital in 1801. Not only has Rivarol a considerable claim as a critic,

and a very high position as a political pamphleteer, but he is as much

the master of the prose epigram as Chamfort is of the short anecdote.

Following the example of his predecessors, he put many of his best

things in a treatise, _De l'Homme Intellectuel et Moral_, which, as a

whole, is very dull and unsatisfactory, though it is lighted up by

occasional flashes of the most brilliant wit. His detached sayings,

which are not so much _Pensees_ or maxims as conversational good things,

are among the most sparkling in literature, and, with Chamfort's, occupy

a position which they keep almost entirely to themselves. It has been

said of him and of Chamfort (who, being of similar talents and on

opposite sides, were naturally bitter foes) that they 'knew men, but

only from the outside, and from certain limited superficial and

accidental points of view. They knew books, too, but their knowledge was

circumscribed by the fashions of a time which was not favourable to

impartial literary appreciation. Hence their anecdotes are personal

rather than general, rather amusing than instructive, rather showing the

acuteness and ingenuity of the authors than able to throw light on the

subjects dealt with. But as mere tale-tellers and sayers of sharp things

they have few rivals.' It may be added that they complete and sum up the

merits and defects of the French society of the eighteenth century, and

that, in so far as literature can do this, the small extent of their

selected works furnishes a complete comment on that society.

[Sidenote: Joubert.]

Contemporary with these two writers, though, from the posthumous

publication of his works years after the end of his long life, he seems

in a manner a contemporary of our own, was Joseph Joubert, the last

great _Pensee_-writer of France and of Europe. Joubert's birthplace was

Montignac, in Perigord, and the date of his birth 1754, three years

after that of Rivarol, and about twelve after that of Chamfort. He was

educated at Toulouse, where, without taking regular orders, he joined

the Freres de la Doctrine Chretienne, a teaching community, and studied

and taught till he was twenty-two years old. Then his health being, as

it was all through his life, weak, he returned home, and succeeding

before long to a small but sufficient fortune, he went to Paris. Here he

became intimate with the second _philosophe_ generation (La Harpe,

Marmontel, etc.), and is said to have for a time been an enthusiastic

hearer of Diderot, the most splendid talker of that or any age. But

Joubert's ideals and method of thought were radically different from

those of the _Philosophes_, and he soon found more congenial literary

companions, of whom the chief were Fontanes and Chenedolle, while he

found his natural home in the salon of two ladies of rank and

cultivation, Madame de Beaumont and Madame de Vintimille. Before long he

married and established himself in Paris with a choice library, into

which, it is said, no eighteenth-century writer was admitted. His health

became worse and worse, yet he lived to the age of seventy, dying in

1824. Fourteen years afterwards Chateaubriand, at the request of his

widow, edited a selection of his remains, and four years later still his

nephew, M. de Raynal, produced a fuller edition.

Joubert's works consist (with the exception of a few letters)

exclusively of _Pensees_ and maxims, which rank in point of depth and of

exquisite literary expression with those of La Rochefoucauld, and in

point of range above them. They are even wider in this respect than

those of Vauvenargues, which they also much resemble. Ethics, politics,

theology, literature, all occupy Joubert. In politics he is, as may be

perhaps expected from his time and circumstances, decidedly

anti-revolutionary. In theology, without being exactly orthodox

according to any published scheme of orthodoxy, Joubert is definitely

Christian. In ethics he holds a middle place between the unsparing

hardness of the self-interest school and the somewhat gushing manner of

the sentimentalists. But his literary thoughts are perhaps the most

noteworthy, not merely from our present point of view. All alike have

the characteristic of intense compression (he described his literary aim

in the phrase 'tormented by the ambition of putting a book in a page, a

page into a phrase, and a phrase into a word'), while all have the same

lucidity and freedom from enigma. All are alike polished in form and

style according to the best models of the seventeenth century; but

whereas study and reflection might have been sufficient to give Joubert

the material of his other thoughts, the wide difference between his

literary judgments and those of his time is less easily explicable. No

finer criticism on style and on poetry in the abstract exists than his,

and yet his reading of poetry cannot have been very extensive. He is

even just to the writers of the eighteenth century, whose manner he

disliked, and whose society he had abjured. He seems, indeed, to have

had almost a perfect faculty of literary appreciation, and wherever his

sayings startle the reader it will generally be found that there is a

sufficient explanation beneath. There is probably no writer in any

language who has said an equal number of remarkable things on an equal

variety of subjects in an equally small space, and with an equally high

and unbroken excellence of style and expression. This is the intrinsic

worth of Joubert. In literary history he has yet another interest, that

of showing in the person of a man living out of the literary world, and

far removed from the operation of cliques, the process which was

inevitably bringing about the great revolution of 1830.

[Sidenote: Courier.]

Like Joubert, Paul Louis Courier had a great dislike and even contempt

for the authors of the eighteenth century, but curiously enough this

dislike did not in the least affect his theological or political

opinions. He was born at Paris, in 1772, being the son of a wealthy man

of the middle class. His youth was passed in the country, and he early

displayed a great liking for classical study. As a compromise between

business, which he hated, and literature, of which his father would not

hear, he entered the army in 1792. He served on the Rhine, and not long

after joining broke his leave in a manner rather unpleasantly resembling

desertion. His friends succeeded in saving him from the consequences of

this imprudence, and he served until Wagram, when he finally left the

army, again in very odd circumstances. He then lived in Italy (where his

passion for the classics led him into an absurd dispute about an alleged

injury he had caused to a manuscript of Longus) until the fall of the

Empire. When he was forty-five years old he was known in literature only

as a translator of classics, remarkable for scholarship and for careful

modelling of his style upon the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,

rather than upon the eighteenth. Although he had hitherto taken little

active part in politics, the so-called 'ideas of 89' had sunk deeply

into him. Impelled, not by any wide views on the future of the nation,

but apparently by the mere _bourgeois_ hatred of titles, old descent,

and the other privileges of the aristocracy, he began a series of

pamphlets to the success of which there is no rival except that of the

Letters of Junius, while Junius falls far short of Courier in intrinsic

literary merit. There are, indeed, few authors whose merit resides so

wholly in their style and power of expression as Courier's. His thought

is narrow in the extreme; even where its conclusions are just it rests

rather on the jealousies of the typical _bourgeois_ than on anything

else. But in irony he has, with the exception of Pascal and Swift, no

superior. He began by a _Petition aux Deux Chambres_. Then he

contributed a series of letters to _Le Censeur_, a reform journal; then

he published various pamphlets, usually signed 'Paul Louis, Vigneron,'

and ostensibly addressed to his neighbours and fellow villagers. He had

established himself on a small estate in Touraine, which he farmed

himself. But he was much in Paris, and his political writings made him

acquainted with the prison of Sainte Pelagie. His death, in April 1825,

was singular, and indeed mysterious. He was shot, the murderer escaping.

It was suspected to be one of his own servants, to whom he was a harsh

and unpopular master, and the suspicion was confirmed some years

afterwards by the confession of a game-keeper. His _Simple Discours_

against the presentation of Chambord to the Duc de Bordeaux, his _Livret

de Paul Louis_, his _Pamphlet des Pamphlets_, are all models of their

kind. Nowhere is the peculiar quality which is called in French

_narquois_ displayed with more consummate skill. The language is at once

perfectly simple and of the utmost literary polish, the arguments,

whether good or bad, always tellingly expressed. But perhaps he has

written nothing better than the _Lettre a M. Renouard_, in which he

discusses the mishap with the manuscript of Longus, and the letter to

the _Academie des Inscriptions_ on their refusal to elect him. The

style of Courier is almost unique, and its merits are only denied by

those who do not possess the necessary organ for appreciating it.

[Sidenote: Senancour.]

This chapter may perhaps be most appropriately concluded by the notice

of a singular writer who, although longer lived, was contemporary with

Courier. Etienne Pivert de Senancour may be treated almost indifferently

as a moral essayist, or as a producer of the peculiar kind of faintly

narrative and strongly ethical work which Rousseau had made fashionable.

The infusion of narrative in his principal and indeed only remarkable

work, _Obermann_, is however so slight, that he will come in best here,

though in his old age he wrote a professed novel, _Isabella_. Senancour

was born in 1770, his father being a man of position and fortune, who

lost both at the Revolution. The son was destined for the Church, but

ran away and spent a considerable time in Switzerland, where he married,

returning to France towards the end of the century. He then published

divers curious works of half-sentimental, half-speculative reflection,

by far the most important of which, _Obermann_, appeared in 1804. Then

Senancour had to take to literary hack-work for a subsistence; but in

his later years Villemain and Thiers procured pensions for him, and he

was relieved from want. He died in 1846. _Obermann_ has not been ill

described by George Sand as a _Rene_ with a difference; Chateaubriand's

melancholy hero feeling that he could do anything if he would but has no

spirit for any task, Senancour's that he is unequal to his own

aspirations. No brief epigram of this kind can ever fully describe a

book; but this, though inadequate, is not incorrect so far as it goes.

The book is a series of letters, in which the supposed writer delivers

melancholy reflections on all manner of themes, especially moral

problems and natural beauty. Senancour was in a certain sense a

_Philosophe_, in so far that he was dogmatically unorthodox and

discarded conventional ideas as to moral conduct; but he is much nearer

Rousseau than Diderot. Indeed, he sometimes seems to the reader little

more than an echo of the former, until his more distinctly modern

characteristics (characteristics which were not fully or generally felt

or reproduced till the visionary and discouraged generation of

1820-1850) reappear. It is perhaps not unfair to say that the pleasure

with which this generation recognised its own sentiments in _Obermann_

gave rise to a traditional estimate of the literary value of that book

which is a little exaggerated. Yet it has considerable merit, especially

in the simplicity and directness with which expression is given to a

class of sentiments very likely to find vent in language either

extravagant or affected. Its form is that of a series of letters, dated

from various places, but chiefly from a solitary valley in the Alps in

which the hero lives, meditates, and pursues the occupations of

husbandry on his small estate.

CHAPTER VI.

PHILOSOPHERS.

[Sidenote: The philosophe movement.]

The entire literary and intellectual movement of the eighteenth century

is very often called the _philosophe_ movement, and the writers who took

part in it _les philosophes_. The word 'philosopher' is, however, here

used in a sense widely different from its proper and usual one.

_Philosophie_, in the ordinary language of the middle and later

seventeenth century, meant simply freethinking on questions of religion.

This freethinking, of which Saint-Evremond was the most distinguished

representative, involved no revolutionary or even reforming attitude

towards politics or practical affairs of any kind. As however the next

century advanced, the character of French scepticism became altered.

Contact with English Deism gave form and precision to its theological or

anti-theological side. The reading of Locke animated it against

Cartesianism, and the study of English politics excited it against the

irresponsible despotism and the crushing system of ecclesiastical and

aristocratic privilege which made almost the entire burden of government

rest on the shoulders least able to bear it. French 'philosophism' then

became suddenly militant and practical. Toleration and liberty of

speculation in religion, constitutional government in politics, the

equalisation of pressure in taxation, and the removal of privilege,

together with reform in legal procedure, were the objects which it had

most at heart. In merely speculative philosophy, that is to say, in

metaphysics, it was much less active, though it had on the whole a

tendency towards materialism, and by a curious accident it was for the

most part rigidly conservative in literary criticism. But it was eager

in the cultivation of ethics from various points of view, and busy in

the study both of the philosophy of history, which may be said to date

from that period, and of physical science, in which Newton took the

place of Locke as guide. The almost universal presence of this practical

and reforming spirit makes it not by any means so easy to subdivide the

branches of literature, as is the case in the seventeenth century. La

Bruyere had said, in the days of acquiescence in absolutism, that to a

Frenchman 'Les grands sujets sont defendus,' meaning thereby theology

and politics. The general spirit of the eighteenth century was a

vigorous denial of this, and an eager investigation into these 'grands

sujets.' This spirit made its appearance in the most unexpected

quarters, and in the strangest forms. It converted (in the hands of

Voltaire) the stiffest and most conventional form of drama ever known

into a pamphlet. It insinuated polemics under the guise of history, and

made the ponderous and apparently matter-of-fact folios of a Dictionary

of Arts and Manufactures the vehicles of arguments for reform. It

overflowed into every department of literary occupation. Some of the

chief prose manifestations of this spirit have been discussed and

arranged in the two previous chapters under the head of history and

essay writing. The rest will be dealt with here. A certain distinction

of form, though it is often rather arbitrary than real, renders such a

subdivision possible, while it is desirable in the interest of

clearness. It will be noticed that while the attack is voluminous and

manifold, the defence is almost unrepresented in literature. This is one

of the most remarkable facts in literary history. In England, from which

the _philosophe_ movement borrowed so much, the Deists had not only not

had their own way in the literary battle, but had been beaten all along

the line by the superior intellectual and literary prowess of the

defenders of orthodoxy. The case in France went otherwise and almost by

default. The only defender of orthodoxy whose name has survived in

literature--for Freron, despite his power, was little more than a

literary critic--is the Abbe Guenee. In so singular a state was the

church of France that scarcely a single preacher or theologian, after

Massillon's death in 1742, could challenge equality with even third- or

fourth-rate men of letters; while, after the death of the Chancellor

d'Aguesseau in 1751, no layman of eminence can be named until Joseph de

Maistre, nearly half a century later, who was at once a considerable

writer and a declared defender of religion. Indeed no small proportion

of the enemies of ecclesiasticism were actually paid and privileged

members of the Church itself. Thus little opposition, except that of

simple _vis inertiae_, was offered to the new views and the crusade by

which they were supported. This crusade, however, had two very different

stages. The first, of which the greatest representatives are Montesquieu

and in a way Voltaire himself, was critical and reforming, but in no way

revolutionary; the second, of whom the Encyclopaedists are the

representatives, was, consciously or unconsciously, bent on a complete

revolution. We shall give an account first of the chief representatives

of these two great classes of the general movement, and then of those

offshoots or schools of that movement which busied themselves with the

special subjects of economics, ethics, and metaphysics, as distinguished

from general politics.

[Sidenote: Montesquieu.]

Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu et de la Brede, was born at

the _chateau_, which gave him the last-named title, in the neighbourhood

of Bordeaux, on the 18th of January, 1689. His family was not of the

oldest, but it had, as he tells us, some two or three centuries of

proved _noblesse_ to boast of, and had been distinguished in the law. He

himself was destined for that profession, and after a youth of laborious

study became councillor of the parliament of Bordeaux in 1714, and in a

year or two president. In 1721 he produced the _Lettres Persanes_, and

four years later the curious little prose poem called the _Temple de

Gnide_. Some objection was made by the minister Fleury, who was rigidly

orthodox, to the satirical tone of the former book in ecclesiastical

matters, but Montesquieu was none the less elected of the Academy in

1728. He had given up his position at the Bordeaux Parlement a few years

before this, and set out on an extensive course of travel, noting

elaborately the manners, customs, and constitution of the countries

through which he passed. Two years of this time were spent in England,

for which country, politically speaking, he conceived a great

admiration. On his return to France he lived partly in Paris, but

chiefly at his estate of La Brede, taking an active interest in its

management, and in the various occupations of a country gentleman, but

also working unceasingly at his masterpiece, the _Esprit des Lois_.

This, however, was not published for many years, and was long preceded

by the book which ranks second in importance to it, the _Grandeur et

Decadence des Romains_, 1734. This was Montesquieu's first serious work,

and it placed him as high among serious writers as the _Lettres

Persanes_ had among lighter authors. The _Esprit des Lois_ itself did

not appear till 1748. Montesquieu, whose life was in no way eventful,

lived for some years longer, dying in Paris on the 10th of February,

1755. Besides the works mentioned he had written several dialogues and

other trifles, a considerable number of _Pensees_, and some articles for

the earlier volumes of the Encyclopaedia.

[Sidenote: Lettres Persanes.]

[Sidenote: Gradeur et Decadence des Romains]

Montesquieu probably deserves the title of the greatest man of letters

of the French eighteenth century, the superior versatility and more

superficial brilliancy of Voltaire being compensated in him by far

greater originality and depth of thought. His three principal works

deserve to be considered in turn. The _Lettres Persanes_, in which the

opinions of a foreigner on French affairs are given, is not entirely

original in conception; the idea of the vehicle being possibly suggested

by the _Amusements Divers_ of Dufresny the comic author. The working

out, however, is entirely Montesquieu's, and was followed closely enough

by the various writers, who, with Voltaire and Goldsmith at their head,

have adopted a similar medium for satire and criticism since. It is not

too much to say that the entire spirit of the _philosophe_ movement in

its more moderate form is contained and anticipated in the _Lettres

Persanes_. All the weaknesses of France in political, ecclesiastical,

and social arrangements are here touched on with a light but sure hand,

and the example is thus set of attacking 'les grands sujets.' From a

literary point of view the form of this work is at least as remarkable

as the matter. Voltaire himself is nowhere more witty, while Montesquieu

has over his rival the indefinable but unquestionable advantage of

writing more like a gentleman. There is no single book in which the

admirable capacity of the French language for jesting treatment of

serious subjects is better shown than in the _Lettres Persanes_.

Montesquieu's next important work was of a very different character. The

_Considerations sur les Causes de la Grandeur et de la Decadence des

Romains_ is an entirely serious work. It does not as yet exhibit the

magnificent breadth of view and the inexhaustible fertility of

explanation which distinguish the _Esprit des Lois_, but it has been

well regarded as a kind of preliminary exercise for that great work.

Montesquieu here treats an extensive but homogeneous and manageable

subject from the point of view of philosophical history, after a method

which had been partially tried by Bossuet, and systematically arranged

by Vico in Italy, but which was not fully developed till Turgot's time.

That is to say, his object is not merely to exhibit, but to explain the

facts, and to explain them on general principles applicable with due

modifications to other times and other histories. Accordingly, the style

of the _Grandeur et Decadence_ is as grave and dignified as that of the

_Lettres Persanes_ is lively and malicious. It is sometimes a little too

sententious in tone, and suffers from the habit, induced probably by

_Pensee_-writing, of composing in very brief paragraphs. But it is an

excellent example of its kind, and especially remarkable for the extreme

clearness and lucidity with which the march and sequence of events in

the gross is exhibited.

[Sidenote: Esprit des Lois.]

The _Esprit des Lois_ is, however, a far greater book than either of

these, and far more original. The title may be thought to be not

altogether happy, and indeed rather ambiguous, because it does not of

itself suggest the extremely wide sense in which the word law is

intended to be taken. An exact if cumbrous title for the book would be

'On the Relation of Human Laws and Customs to the Laws of Nature.' The

author begins somewhat formally with the old distinction of politics

into democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy. He discusses the principles

of each and their bearings on education, on positive law, on social

conditions, on military strength, offensive and defensive, on individual

liberty, on taxation and finance. Then an abrupt return is made from the

effects to the causes of constitutions and polity. The theory of the

influence of physical conditions, and especially of climate, on

political and social institutions--a theory which is perhaps more than

any other identified with the book--receives special attention, and a

somewhat disproportionate space is given to the question of slavery in

connection with it. From climate Montesquieu passes to the nature of

the soil, as in its turn affecting civil polity. He then attacks the

subject of manners and customs as distinct from laws, of trade and

commerce, of the family, of jurisprudence, of religion. The book

concludes with an elaborate examination of the feudal system in France.

Throughout it the reader is equally surprised at the varied and exact

knowledge of the author, and at his extraordinary fertility in general

views. This fertility is indeed sometimes a snare to him, and leads to

rash generalisation. But what has to be remembered is, that he was one

of the pioneers of this method of historical exploration, and that

hundreds of principles which, after correction by his successors, have

passed into general acceptance, were discovered, or at least enunciated,

by him for the first time. Nothing is more remarkable in Montesquieu,

and nothing more distinguishes him from the common run of his somewhat

self-satisfied and short-sighted successors, than the steady hold he

keeps on the continuity of history, and his superiority to the shallow

view of his day (constantly put forward by Voltaire), according to which

the middle ages were a dark period of barbarism, the study of which

could be of no use to any one but a mere curiosity hunter. Montesquieu

too, almost alone of his contemporaries, had a matured and moderate plan

of political and social reform. While some of them indulged in an idle

and theoretical Republicanism, and others in the old unpractical

_frondeur_ spirit, eager to pull down but careless about building up,

Montesquieu had conceived the idea of a limited monarchy, not identical

with that of England, but in many ways similar to it; an ideal which in

the first quarter of the eighteenth century might have been put in

practice with far better chance of success than in the first quarter of

the nineteenth. The merely literary merits of this great book are equal

to its philosophical merits. The vast mass of facts with which the

author deals is selected with remarkable judgment, and arranged with

remarkable lucidity. The style is sober, devoid of ornament, but

admirably proportioned and worked out. There are few greater books, not

merely in French but in literature, than the _Esprit des Lois_.

[Sidenote: Voltaire.]

With Voltaire the case is very different. Very many of his innumerable

works have directly philosophical titles, but no one of them is a work

of much interest or merit. His 'Philosophic Letters,' 1733, published

after his return from England, and the source of much trouble to him,

are the lively but not very trustworthy medium of a contrast between

English liberty and toleration and French arbitrary government. His

'Discourses on Man,' and other verse of the same kind, are

verse-philosophy of the class of Pope's. The pompously named 'Treatise

on Metaphysics,' 1734, is very much the same in substance if not in

form. The remarks on Pascal's _Pensees_ are unimportant contributions to

the crusade against superstition; the Philosophical Dictionary, 1764, is

a heterogeneous collection of articles with the same object. The _Essai

sur les Moeurs_, 1756, composed not improbably in rivalry with

Montesquieu, contains much acute reflection on particulars, but is

injured by the author's imperfect information as to the subjects of

which he was treating, by his entirely unphilosophical contempt for the

'Dark Ages,' and indeed by the absence of any general conception of

history which can be called philosophical. Voltaire's real importance,

however, in connection with the _philosophe_ movement is to be found,

not in the merit or value of any one of his professedly philosophical

books, but in the fact that all his works, his poems, his plays, his

histories, his romances, his innumerable flying essays and papers of all

sorts, were invariably saturated with its spirit, and helped to

communicate it to others. It cannot be said that Voltaire had any clear

conception of the object which he wished to attain, except in so far as

the famous watchword 'Ecrasez l'Infame' goes. This means not, as has

been erroneously thought, 'crush Christianity,' but 'crush persecuting

superstition.' He was by no means in favour of any political reform,

except as far as private rights were concerned. He would have liked the

exaggerated political privileges of the Church (which enabled it to

persecute dissidents, and inflicted on laymen an unfair share of

taxation) to be revoked, the cruel and irrational procedure of the

French tribunals to be reformed, Church lands to be in great part

secularised, and so forth; but he never seems to have faced the

necessity of connecting these reforms with a radical alteration of the

whole system of government. The sharp point of his ridicule was,

however, always at the service of the aggressive party, especially for

what he had most at heart, the overthrow of dogmatic and traditional

theology and ecclesiasticism. For this purpose, as has been said

already, he was willing to make, and did make, all his works, no matter

of what kind (except a few scattered writings on mathematics and

physics, pure and simple, in which he took great interest), into more or

less elaborate pamphlets, and to put at the service of the movement his

great position as the head of French and indeed of European letters. His

habitual inaccuracy, and the inferiority of his mind in strictly logical

faculty and in commanding range of view, disabled him from really

serious contributions to philosophy of any kind. The curious mixture of

defects and merits in this great writer is apt to render piecemeal

notice of him, such as is necessitated by the plan of this book,

apparently unfavourable. But no literary historian can take leave of

Voltaire with words of intentional disfavour. The mere fact that it has

been necessary to take detailed notice of him in every one of the last

six chapters, is roughly indicative of his unequalled versatility. But,

versatile as he is, there is perhaps no department of his work, save

serious poetry and criticism, in which from the literary point of view

he fails to attain all but the highest rank.

[Sidenote: The Encyclopaedia.]

Montesquieu and Voltaire were, as has been said, precursors rather than

members of the _philosophe_ group proper, which is identified with the

Encyclopaedia, and to this group it is now time to come. The history of

this famous book is rather curious. The English Cyclopaedia of Ephraim

Chambers had appeared in 1727. About fifteen years after its publication

a translation of it was offered to and accepted by the French

bookseller, Le Breton. But Le Breton was not satisfied with a bare

translation, and wished the book to be worked up into something more

extensive. He applied to different men of letters, and finally to

Diderot, who, enlisting the Chancellor d'Aguesseau in the plan,

obtaining privilege for the enlarged work, and mustering by degrees a

staff of contributors which included almost every man of letters of any

repute in France, succeeded in carrying it out. The task was anything

but a sinecure. It occupied nearly twenty years of Diderot's life; it

was repeatedly threatened and sometimes actually prohibited; and

D'Alembert (Diderot's principal coadjutor, and in fact co-editor)

actually retired from it in disgust at the obstacles thrown in their

way. The book so produced was by no means a mere pamphlet or

controversial work, though many of the articles were made polemical by

those to whom they were entrusted. The principal of its contributors

however--Voltaire himself was one--became gradually recognised as

representing the criticism of existing institutions, many of which, it

must be confessed, were so bad at the time that simple examination of

them was in itself the severest censure. It becomes necessary,

therefore, to mention the names and works of the most remarkable of this

group who have not found or will not find a place elsewhere.

[Sidenote: Diderot.]

Denis Diderot was born at Langres, on the 15th October, 1713. He was

brilliantly successful at school, but on being required to choose a

profession rejected both church and law. It appears, however, that he

studied medicine. His father, a man of affectionate temper but strong

will, refused to support him unless he chose a regular mode of life, and

Diderot at once set up for himself and attempted literature. Not much is

authentically known of his life till, in 1743, he married; but he seems

to have lived partly by taking pupils, partly by miscellaneous literary

hack-work. After his marriage his household expenses (and others)

quickened his literary activity, and before long he received, in the

editorship of the Encyclopaedia, a charge which, though ridiculously ill

paid and very laborious, practically secured him from want for many

years, while it gave him a very important position. He made many

friends, and was especially intimate with the Baron d'Holbach, a rich

and hospitable man, and a great adept in chemistry and atheism. Before

this Diderot had had some troubles, being even imprisoned at Vincennes

for his _Essai sur les Aveugles_, 1749. Besides his Encyclopaedia work

Diderot was lavish in contributing, often without either remuneration or

acknowledgment of any kind, to the work of other men, and especially to

the correspondence by which his friend Grimm kept the sovereigns of

Germany and Russia informed of the course of things in Paris. The most

remarkable of these contributions--criticisms of literature and

art--have been noticed elsewhere, as have Diderot's historical and

fictitious productions. As he grew old his necessities were met by a

handsome act of Catherine of Russia, who bought his library, left him

the use of it, and gave him a pension nominally as payment for his

trouble as caretaker. He made, in 1773, a journey to St. Petersburg to

pay his thanks, and on his return stayed for some time in Holland. He

died in Paris in 1784. Diderot's miscellaneous works are, like

Voltaire's, penetrated by the _philosophe_ spirit, but it is less

prominent, owing to his greater acquaintance with the individual matters

which he handled. His contributions to definite philosophical literature

are not unimportant. He began by an 'Essay on Merit and Virtue,' 1745,

imitated from Shaftesbury, and by some more original _Pensees

Philosophiques_. These pieces were followed by _La Promenade du

Sceptique_, written somewhat in the fashion of Berkeley's _Alciphron_,

and by some minor treatises, the most important of which are the

_Lettres sur les Sourds et Muets_, and by the already mentioned _Lettre

sur les Aveugles_, which led to his imprisonment, with some 'Thoughts on

the Interpretation of Nature.' A singular and characteristic book

containing not a few acute but fantastic ideas is _Le Reve de

D'Alembert_, which, like an elaborate criticism on Helvetius' _De

l'Homme,_ was not printed during Diderot's life. The _Essai sur les

Regnes de Claude et de Neron_ was one of the latest of Diderot's works,

and is a kind of historico-philosophical disquisition. The last piece of

any importance which is included in the philosophical works of Diderot

is an extensive scheme for a Russian university.

The characteristics of Diderot's philosophical works are the same as the

characteristics of those other works of his which have been noticed, and

his general position as a writer may well be considered here. There has

seldom been an author who was more fertile in ideas. It is impossible to

name a subject which Diderot has not treated, and hardly possible to

name one on which he has not said striking and memorable things. The

peculiarity of his mind was, that it could adjust itself, with hardly

any effort, to any subject presented to it, grasp that subject and

express thoughts on it in a novel and effective manner. He had moreover,

what some other men of his century, notably Voltaire, lacked, a vast

supply of positive information on the subjects with which he dealt, and

an entire independence of conventional points of view in dealing with

them. This independence was in some respects pushed to an unfortunate

length, exposing him (whether deservedly or not, is an exceedingly

difficult point to resolve) to the charge of atheism, and (beyond all

doubts deservedly) to the charge of wilful disregard of the accepted

decencies of language. Another and very serious fault, arising partly

from temperament and partly from circumstances, was the want of needful

pains and deliberation which characterises most of Diderot's work. That

work is extremely voluminous, and even as it is, we have not anything

like the whole of it in a collected form. Indeed, by far the larger part

was never given to the world by the author himself in any deliberate or

finished shape, and much of what he did publish was the result of mere

improvisation. The consequence is, that Diderot is accused, not without

truth, of having written good passages, but no good book, and that a

full appreciation of his genius is only to be obtained by a most

laborious process of wading through hundreds and thousands of pages of

very inferior work. The result of that process, however, is never likely

to be doubtful in the case of competent examiners. It is the conviction

that Diderot ranks in point of originality and versatility of thought

among the most fertile thinkers of France, and in point of felicity and

idiosyncrasy of expression, among the most remarkable of her writers.

[Sidenote: D'Alembert.]

His coadjutor during the earlier part of his great work was a man

curiously different from himself. Diderot was a rapid and careless

writer, devoted to general society and conversation, interested in

everything that was brought to his notice, passionate, unselfish,

frequently extravagant. Jean le Rond d'Alembert (who was really an

illegitimate son of Madame de Tencin by an uncertain father) was an

extraordinarily careful writer, a man of retired habits, reserved,

self-centred and phlegmatic. He was born in 1717, was exposed on the

steps of a church, but was brought up carefully by a foster-mother of

the lower classes, to whom he was consigned by the authorities, and had

a not insufficient annuity settled upon him by his supposed father. He

was educated at the College Mazarin, and early showed great aptitude for

mathematics, in which equally with literature he distinguished himself

in after years. He was elected a member of the Academy of Sciences as

early as at the age of four-and-twenty. After he had joined Diderot, he

wrote a preliminary discourse for the Encyclopaedia--a famous and

admirable sketch of the sciences--besides many articles. Of these, one

on Geneva brought the book into more trouble than almost any other

contribution, though D'Alembert was equally moderate as a thinker and as

a writer. D'Alembert, as has been said, retired from the work after this

storm, being above all things solicitous of peace and quietness. His

refusals of the offers of Frederick II. in 1752 to go to Berlin as

President of the Academy, and of Catherine II. to undertake, at what was

then an enormous salary, the education of the Grand Duke Paul, have been

variously taken as evidence of his disinterestedness, and of his shrewd

dislike to possibly false positions, and the chance of such experiences

as those of Voltaire. In his later life he and Mademoiselle de

Lespinasse, as has been mentioned, kept house together. He died shortly

before Diderot, in 1783. Perhaps his best literary works are his already

mentioned Academic _Eloges_, or obituaries on important men of letters

and science. D'Alembert contributed to the movement exactness of thought

and precision of style, but his influence was more purely intellectual

than that of any other member of the _philosophe_ group.

[Sidenote: Rousseau.]

The connection of Rousseau with the Encyclopaedia itself was brief and

not important. Yet it is here that his personal and general literary

character and achievements may be most conveniently treated. Jean

Jacques Rousseau was born at Geneva, on the 28th of June, 1712, of a

family which had emigrated from France during the religious troubles.

His father was a watchmaker, his mother died when he was very young. His

education was not exactly neglected, but he went to no regular school,

which, considering his peculiarities, was perhaps a misfortune. After

being introduced to the law and to engraving, in both cases with ill

success, he ran away and practically continued a vagabond to the end of

his life. He served as a footman, was an inmate of a kind of

proselytising almshouse at Turin, and went through many odd adventures,

for which there is the dubious authority of his strange _Confessions_.

When he was just of age, he was taken in by Madame de Warens, a Savoyard

lady of birth and position, who had before been kind to him. With her he

lived for some time, chiefly at Les Charmettes, near Chambery. But being

superseded in her good graces, he went to Lyons, where he lived by

teaching. Thence he went to Paris, having little to depend on but an

imperfect knowledge of music. In 1741 he was attached to the French

Embassy at Venice under M. de Montaigu, but (as he did all through his

life) he quarrelled in some way with his patron, and returned to Paris.

Here he became intimate with Diderot, Grimm, and all the _philosophe_

circle, especially with Madame d'Epinay. She established him in a

cottage called the Hermitage with his companion Therese le Vasseur,

whose acquaintance he had made in Paris, and whom he afterwards married.

The extraordinary quarrel which took place between Rousseau and Diderot

has been endlessly written about. It need only be said that Rousseau

showed his usual temper and judgment, that Diderot was to all appearance

quite guiltless, and that the chief fault lay elsewhere, probably with

Grimm. For a time the Duke of Luxembourg protected him, then he was

obliged, or thought himself obliged, to go into exile. Marshal Keith,

Governor of Neufchatel for the King of Prussia, received and protected

him, with the inevitable result that Rousseau considered it impossible

to continue in this as in every other refuge. David Hume was his next

good angel, and carried him to England in 1766. But the same drama

repeated itself, as it did subsequently with the Prince de Conti and

with Madame d'Enghien. Rousseau's last protector was M. de Girardin, who

gave him, after he had lived in Paris in comparative quiet for several

years, a home at Ermenonville in 1778. He did not outlive the year,

dying in a somewhat mysterious fashion, which has never been fully

explained, on the 2nd of July.

Rousseau was a man of middle age before he produced any literary work of

importance. He had in his youth been given to music, and indeed

throughout his life the slender profits of music copying were almost

his only independent source of income. His knowledge of the subject was

far from scientific, but he produced an operetta which was not

unsuccessful, and, but for his singular temperament, he might have

followed up the success. His first literary work of importance was a

prose essay for the Dijon Academy on the subject of the effects of

civilisation on society. Either of his own motion, or at the suggestion

of Diderot, Rousseau took the apparently paradoxical line of arguing

that all improvements on the savage life had been curses rather than

blessings, and he gained the prize. In 1755 his _Discours sur l'Origine

de l'Inegalite_ appeared at Amsterdam; in 1760 his famous novel _Julie_,

and in 1764 _Emile_, both of which have been spoken of already. Between

the two appeared the still more famous and influential _Contrat Social_.

Of the other works of Rousseau published during his lifetime, the most

famous, perhaps, was his letter to D'Alembert on the subject of the

introduction of theatrical performances into Geneva, a characteristic

paradox which made a bitter enemy of the most powerful of French men of

letters. Besides these, the _Reveries d'un Promeneur Solitaire_, the

_Lettres de la Montagne_, and above all, the unique _Confessions_, have

to be reckoned. The last, like several of Rousseau's other works, did

not appear till after his death.