Of all the writers mentioned in this chapter the influence of Rousseau

on literature and on life was probably the largest. He was the direct

inspirer of the men who made the French Revolution, and the theories of

his _Contrat Social_ were closer at the root of Jacobin politics than

any other. His fervid declamation about equality and brotherhood, and

his sentimental republicanism, were seed as well suited to the soil in

which they were sown as Montesquieu's reasoned constitutionalism was

unsuited to it. Rousseau, indeed, if the proof of the excellence of

preaching is in the practice of the hearers, was the greatest preacher

of the century. He denounced the practice of putting infants out to

nurse, and mothers began to suckle their own children; he recommended

instruction in useful arts, and many an _emigre_ noble had to thank

Rousseau for being able to earn his bread in exile; he denounced

speculative atheism, urging the undogmatic but emotional creed of his

_Vicaire Savoyard_, and the first wave of the religious reaction was

set going to culminate in the Catholic movement of Chateaubriand and

Lamennais. But in literature itself his influence was quite as powerful.

He was not, indeed, the founder of the school of analysis of feeling in

the novel, but he was the populariser of it. He was almost the founder

of sentimentalism in general literature, and he was absolutely the first

to make word-painting of nature an almost indispensable element of all

imaginative and fictitious writing both in prose and poetry. Some of his

characteristics were taken up in quick succession by Goethe in Germany,

by Bernardin de St. Pierre and Chateaubriand in France. Others were for

the time less eagerly imitated, and though Madame de Stael and her lover

Benjamin Constant did something to spread them, it was reserved for the

Romantic movement to develop them fully. It was singular, no doubt, and

this is not the place to undertake the explanation of the singularity,

that Rousseau, who detested most of the conclusions, and almost all the

methods of the Encyclopaedists, should be counted in with them, and

should have undoubtedly helped in the first place to accomplish their

result. But such is the case. His peculiar literary characteristics are

perhaps better exhibited in the _Confessions_ and in the miscellaneous

works, than in either of the novels. The _Contrat Social_ is a very

remarkable piece of pseudo-argument. It is felt from the first that the

whole assumption on which it reposes is historically false and

philosophically absurd. Yet there is an appearance of speciousness in

the arguments, an adroit mixture of logic and rhetoric, of order and

method, which is exceedingly seductive. The _Confession du Vicaire

Savoyard_, with many passages allied to it in the smaller works, has,

despite the staleness of the language (which was hackneyed by a thousand

empty talkers during the Revolution), not a little dignity and

persuasive force. But it is in the _Confessions_ that the literary power

of the author appears at its fullest. Never, perhaps, was a more

miserable story of human weakness revealed, and the peculiar thing is

that Rousseau does not limit his exhibitions of himself to exhibitions

of engaging frailty. The acts which he admits are in many cases

indescribably base, mean, and disgusting. The course of conduct which he

portrays is at its best that of a man entirely destitute of governing

will, petulant, often positively ungrateful, always playing into the

hands of the enemies whom his hallucinations supposed to exist, and

frustrating the efforts of the friends whom he allows himself, if only

for a time, to have possessed. Yet the narrative and dramatic skill with

which all this is presented is so great, that there is hardly room for a

sense of repulsion which is merged in interest, not necessarily

sympathetic interest, but still interest. Of the feeling for natural

beauty, which is everywhere present in these remarkable works, it is

enough to say that in French prose literature, it may almost be said in

the prose literature of Europe, it was entirely original. Part of

Rousseau's devotion to nature arose no doubt from his moody and retiring

temperament, which led him to rejoice in anything rather than the

society of his fellow men. But this would not of itself have given him

the literary skill with which he expresses these feelings. It is not so

much in set descriptions of particular scenes as in slight occasional

thoughts, embodying the emotions experienced at the sight of a flower, a

lake-surface, a mountain side, a forest glade, that this mastery is

shown. Yet of the more elaborate passages of this kind in other writers

few can surpass the best things of the _Nouvelle Heloise_, the

_Confessions_, and the _Reveries_. There is nothing novel to readers of

the present day in such things, though they are seldom done so happily.

But to the readers of Rousseau's day they were absolutely novel. It is

in this that the main literary importance of Rousseau consists, though

it must not be forgotten that he is in many ways a master of French

prose. His contemporaries made use of his Genevan origin to find fault

with his style; but with a few insignificant exceptions the criticism

has no foundation. It has been very frequently renewed, and sometimes

with little better reason, in the case of Swiss authors.

Round these chiefs of the Encyclopaedic movement were grouped many lesser

men, some of whom will be most conveniently noticed here. Marmontel,

Morellet, and Saint-Lambert, whose chief importance lay in other

directions, were contributors. The Chevalier de Jaucourt, a man of no

original power, but a hack-writer of extraordinary aptitude, took

considerable part in it. There were others, however, who, partly within

and partly without the range of the Encyclopaedia, had no small share in

the promotion of what has been called the _philosophe_ movement. Some

of these have found their place under the head of Essayists. There is,

however, one remarkable division, which must be treated here--the

division of economists--before we pass to the philosophers properly so

called, who either continued the metaphysics of Locke in a directly

materialist sense, or who, restraining themselves to sensationalism,

made the most of the English philosopher in that direction.

[Sidenote: Political Economists. Vauban, Quesnay, etc.]

The science of 'Political Arithmetic,' as it was first called in

England, had a somewhat earlier birth in France than in England itself.

It is remarkable that the complete establishment of the royal authority

under Louis XIV. preceded but by a very few years the examination of the

economic condition of the kingdom by unsparing examiners. The two chief

of these, both of whom fell into disgrace for their doings, were the

great engineer Vauban, and the great theologian Fenelon. The latter was

attracted to the subject chiefly by compassion for the sufferings of the

people, and expressed his opinion in a manner more rhetorical than

scientific. Vauban's course was naturally different. In the later years

of his life he set himself to the collection of statistical facts as to

the economic condition of France, and the result was the two books

called _Oisivetes de M. de Vauban_ and _La Dime Royale_, 1707. The

former of these contained the facts, the latter the deduction from them,

which was, to put it briefly, that the existing system of privilege,

exemption, and irregular taxation was a loss to the Crown, and a torment

to the people. Vauban received the reward of his labours, attention to

which would probably have prevented the French Revolution, in the shape

of the royal displeasure, and nothing came immediately of his

investigations. In the next century, however, a regular sect of

political economists arose. They had, indeed, been preceded by an

eccentric man of letters, the Abbe de Saint-Pierre, who occupied his

life in propounding Utopian schemes of universal peace and general

prosperity. But the first and greatest of the economists properly so

called was Quesnay. The extreme misery of the common people attracted

his attention, and set him upon calculating the causes and remedies of

periodical failings. He was himself a frequent contributor to the

Encyclopaedia. Many others of the _philosophe_ set occupied themselves

with these and similar subjects, notably the Abbes Morellet and Galiani.

The former was a man of a certain vigour (Voltaire called him 'L'Abbe

Mord-Les'), the latter has been noticed already. His _Dialogue sur le

Commerce des Bles_ acquired for him a great reputation.

[Sidenote: Turgot.]

Very many writers, among them the father of the great Mirabeau (in his

curious and able, though unequal and ill-proportioned _Ami des Hommes_),

attacked economical subjects at this time. But Turgot, though not

remarkable for the form of his writings, was the most original and

influential writer of the liberal school in this department. He was a

Norman by birth, and of a good legal family. He was born in 1727, and,

being destined for the Church, was educated at the Sorbonne. Turgot,

however, shared to the full the _philosophe_ ideas of the time as to

theological orthodoxy, and did not share the usual _philosophe_ ideas as

to concealment of his principles for comfort's sake. He refused to take

orders, turning his attention to the law and the Civil Service instead

of the Church. His family had considerable influence, and at the age of

twenty-four he was appointed intendant of Limoges, a post which gave him

practical control of the government of a large, though barren and

neglected, province. His achievements in the way of administrative

reform here were remarkable, and, had they been generally imitated,

might have brought about a very different state of things in France.

After the death of Louis XV., he was recommended by Maurepas to a far

more important office, the controllership of finance. Here, too, he did

great things; but his attack on the privileged orders was ill-seconded,

and, after holding his post for about two years, he had to resign,

partly, it is true, owing to a certain unaccommodating rigidity of

demeanour, which was one of his least amiable characteristics. He died

in 1781. Turgot's literary work is not extensive, and it is not

distinguished by its style. It consists of certain discourses at the

Sorbonne, of memoirs on various political occasions, of some letters on

usury, of articles in the Encyclopaedia, of which the most noteworthy is

one on endowments, etc. All are remarkable as containing the germs of

what may be accepted as the modern liberal doctrines on the various

points of which they treat, while the second Sorbonne discourse is

entitled to the credit of first clearly announcing the principle of the

philosophy of history, the doctrine, that is to say, that human progress

follows regular laws of development, certain sets of causes invariably

tending to bring about certain sets of results.

[Sidenote: Condorcet.]

With the name of Turgot that of Condorcet is inseparably connected, and

though far less important in the history of thought, it is perhaps more

prominent in the history of literature, for the pupil and biographer (in

both of which relations Condorcet stood to Turgot) was, though a far

less original and vigorous thinker, a better writer than his master and

subject. Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, styled Marquis de Condorcet,

was born in 1743, near St. Quentin, and early distinguished himself both

in mathematics and in the belles lettres. He became Secretary of the

Academy in 1777, and he afterwards wrote the Life of Turgot, whose

method of dealing with economic questions (a more practical and less

abstract one than that of the earlier economists) he had already

followed. He took a considerable part in the French Revolution, serving

both in the Legislative Assembly and in the Convention. In the latter he

became identified with the Girondist party, and shared their troubles.

His best known work, the _Esquisse des Progres de l'Esprit Humain_, was

written while he was a fugitive and in concealment. He was at last

discovered and arrested, but the day after he was found dead in his

prison at Bourg la Reine, having apparently poisoned himself (March,

1794). Condorcet's works are voluminous, and partake strongly of the

_philosophe_ character. He is not remarkable for originality of thought,

and may indeed be said to be for the most part a mere exponent of the

current ideas of the second stage of the _philosophe_ movement. But his

style has great merits, being clear, forcible, and correct, suffering

only from the somewhat stereotyped forms, and from the absence of

flexibility and colour which distinguish the later eighteenth century in

France.

[Sidenote: Volney.]

One more remarkable name deserves to be mentioned in this place as the

last of the _Philosophes_ proper, that is to say, of those writers who

carried out the general principles of the Encyclopaedist movement with

less reference to specialist departments of literature than to a certain

general spirit and tendency. This was Constantin Francois de

Chasseboeuf, Comte de Volney, by which latter name he is generally

known. Volney was born in 1757, at Caron, in Anjou, and was educated at

Angers, and afterwards at Paris. He studied both medicine and law, but

having a sufficient fortune, practised neither. In 1783 he set out on

his travels and journeyed to the East, visiting Egypt and Syria; an

account of which journey he published four years later. When he returned

to France he was from the beginning a moderate partisan of the

Revolution, and, like most such persons, he was arrested during the

Terror, though he escaped with no worse fate than imprisonment.

Immediately after Thermidor, Volney published his most celebrated work,

_Les Ruines_, a treatise on the rise and fall of empires from a general

and philosophical point of view. Shortly after this he visited the

United States, whence he returned in 1798. He had known Napoleon in

early days, and on the establishment of the Consulate he was appointed a

senator; nor was his resignation accepted, though it was tendered when

Bonaparte assumed the crown. His countship was Napoleonic, but he was

always an opponent of the emperor's policy. Accordingly, after the

Restoration, he was nominated by Louis XVIII. as a member of the new

House of Peers. He died in 1820. Besides the books already noticed he

published some studies in ancient history and many miscellaneous works,

including a project of a universal language. Volney was, as has been

said, the last of the _philosophes_, exhibiting, long after a new order

of thought had set in, their acute but negative and one-sided criticism,

their sterile contempt of Christianity and religion generally, their

somewhat theoretic acceptance of generalisations on philosophy and

history, and of large plans for dealing with politics and ethics. As a

traveller his observation is accurate and his expression vivid; as a

philosophical historian his acuteness is perhaps not sufficiently

accompanied by real breadth of view.

[Sidenote: La Mettrie]

[Sidenote: Helvetius]

Between these philosophers, in the local and temporary sense of the

word, who dealt only with what would now be called the sociological side

of philosophy in its bearings on politics, religion, ethics, and

economics, and the strictly philosophical school of Condillac and his

followers, a small but very influential sect of materialists, who were

yet not purely philosophical materialists, has to be considered. Three

members of this school have importance in literature--La Mettrie,

Helvetius, and Holbach. La Mettrie was a native of Britanny: he entered

the medical service of the French army, acquired a speedy reputation for

heterodoxy and disorderly living, and fled for shelter to the general

patron of heterodox Frenchmen, Frederick of Prussia; at whose court he

died, at a comparatively early age, it is said in consequence of a

practical joke. La Mettrie's chief work is a paradoxical exercise in

materialist physics called _L'Homme-Machine_, in which he endeavours to

prove the purely automatic working of the human frame, and the absence

of any mind in the spiritualist sense. This he followed by a similar but

less original work, called _L'Homme-Plante_, and by some other minor

publications. La Mettrie was a very unequal thinker and writer, but he

has, as Voltaire (who disliked him) expressed it, _traits de flamme_

both in thought and style. Claude Adrian Helvetius was of Swiss descent,

and of ample fortune. Born in 1715, he was appointed to the high post of

Farmer-General when he was little more than twenty-three; but he did not

hold this appointment very long, and became Chamberlain to the Queen. He

was very popular in society, and was of a benevolent and philanthropic

disposition, though he seems to have got into trouble at his country

seat of Vore by excessive game preserving. He married, in 1751, the

beautiful Mademoiselle de Ligneville, who was long afterwards one of the

chief centres of literary society in Paris. In 1758 his book _De

l'Esprit_ appeared, and made a great sensation, being condemned as

immoral, and burnt by the hangman. Helvetius subsequently travelled in

England and Germany, dying in 1771. A second treatise, _De l'Homme,_

which appeared posthumously, is much inferior to _De l'Esprit_ in

literary merit. It was even more fiercely assailed than its predecessor,

and Diderot himself, the leader of the more active section of the

_philosophe_ party, wrote an elaborate refutation of it, which, however,

has only recently been published. The book _De l'Esprit_ is wanting in

depth, and too anecdotic in style for a serious work of philosophy,

though this very characteristic makes it all the more amusing reading.

It endeavours to make out a theory of morals based on what is called the

selfish system; and it was the naked manner in which this selfish system

of ethics, and the materialist metaphysics which it implies, are

manifested in the book which gave occasion to its ill repute. As a mere

work of literature, however, it is well, and in parts even brilliantly

written, and amid much that is desultory, inconclusive, and even

demonstrably unsound, views of extreme shrewdness and originality on

social abuses and inconsistencies are to be found.

[Sidenote: Systeme de la Nature.]

None of the writers hitherto mentioned made open profession of atheism,

and it is doubtful whether even Diderot deserves the appellation of a

consistent atheist. There was, however, a large anti-theistic school

among the _philosophes_, which increased in numbers and strength towards

the outbreak of the Revolution. The most striking work by far of this

school (which included Damilaville, Naigeon, and a few other names of no

great distinction in literature) was the _Systeme de la Nature_, which

appeared in 1770. This remarkable book, which even Voltaire and

Frederick II. set themselves seriously to refute, contains a complete

materialist system in metaphysics and theology. It represents the

existence of God as a mere creation of the superstition of men, unable

to assign a cause for the evils under which they suffer, and inventing a

supernatural entity to satisfy themselves. The book (to consider its

literary style only) is extremely unequal, passages of remarkable vigour

alternating with long and dreary tracts of inconclusive and monotonous

declamation. It appeared under the name of a dead man, Mirabaud, a

person of some slight and chiefly official name in science and letters.

It is, however, believed, if not certainly known, to be the work of the

Baron d'Holbach (who unquestionably wrote various other books of a

similar tendency), with the assistance of divers of his friends, and

especially of Diderot. The _Systeme_ is a very singular production,

animated by a kind of fanatical, and in parts almost poetical aspiration

after the annihilation of all supernatural belief, which is hardly to be

found elsewhere except in Lucretius. It had great influence, though

that influence was one of repulsion as well as of conversion, and it may

be said to be, up to the present day, the furthest step taken in the

direction of philosophical as opposed to political Nihilism. It should,

however, be observed that in parts there is a strong political tinge

observable in it.

[Sidenote: Condillac.]

In all this century of so-called philosophy, France possessed hardly

more than one really eminent and considerable metaphysician. This was

Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, brother of the Abbe de Mably, who was born

in 1715, and died in 1780. Condillac himself was an abbe, and possessing

a sufficient benefice, he lived for the most part quietly upon it, and

took no part in the political, or even the literary life of the times.

In 1746 he published his _Essai sur l'Origine des Connoissances

Humaines_; in 1749 his _Traite des Systemes_, a work critical rather

than constructive; and in 1754 the _Traite des Sensations_, his

principal work, which completes his theory. The influence of Locke was

the most powerful single influence in the _philosophe_ movement of

France, and Condillac took up Locke's work at exactly the point where

his master had faltered. He set to work to show with great plausibility

that, according to Lockeian principles, the addition of ideas of

reflection to ideas of sensation is unsustainable, and that all ideas

without exception are merely transformed sensations. One of the

illustrations which he used to support his views, that of a statue

supposed to be endowed with a single sense, and successively developing

first the others, and then the powers usually classed as reflection, is

famous in the history of philosophy. It concerns us only as giving an

instance of the method of Condillac, which is remarkable for vividness

and adaptation to the ordinary comprehension. Unlike the style of Locke

himself, Condillac's style is not in the least slovenly, but polished

and lucid, excellently suited to such a public as that of the eighteenth

century, which was at once intelligent enough to understand, and

educated enough to demand, finish of manner in discussing abstract

points.

After Condillac the history of philosophy in France during the rest of

the period is of no great interest to literature. He himself was

continued and represented chiefly by Destutt de Tracy. The reaction

against the extreme idealist and materialist constructions of Locke

respectively, which had been brought about in England by Reid and

Stewart, acquired in the last years of the eighteenth century, and the

beginning of the nineteenth, a considerable following in France. Its

chiefs were Maine de Biran, Royer Collard (who also obtained reputation

as an orator and parliamentary politician), and Jouffroy. They belong,

however, rather to the history of philosophy than to that of literature.

[Sidenote: Joseph de Maistre.]

After this long list of writers who advocated, more or less openly,

revolution in matters political and religious, but especially in the

latter, two authors who with Chateaubriand, but in a definitely

philosophical manner, set the example of reaction, and who to a great

extent indicated the lines which it was to follow, must be mentioned.

These are Joseph de Maistre, and Louis de Bonald. Joseph, Count de

Maistre, was born at Chambery, in 1753, of a noble Savoyard family,

which is said to have come originally from Languedoc. His father held

important employments in the duchy, and Joseph himself entered its civil

service. When, after the French Revolution, Savoy was invaded, and in a

short time annexed, he returned to Lausanne, and there wrote

_Considerations sur la France_, his first work of importance. For some

years he was employed at Turin in the administration of such of his

continental dominions as were left to the King of Sardinia; and then,

after the practical annexation of Piedmont, he held a similar employ in

the island of Sardinia itself. At the beginning of the present century,

he was sent to St. Petersburg to plead the cause of his master. Here he

remained till after the overthrow of Napoleon, and wrote, though he did

not publish, most of his books. In 1816 he returned to Turin, and died a

few years afterwards--in 1821. The three chief works of Joseph de

Maistre are _Du Pape_, 1817, _De l'Eglise Gallicane_, and the unfinished

_Soirees de St. Petersbourg_. The two first compose a complete treatise

on the power and position of the pope in relation both to the temporal

and to the ecclesiastical form of national government. The author is the

most uncompromising of ultramontanes. According to him the pope is the

source of all authority on earth, and temporal princes are little more

than his delegates. Except in relation to religious error, Joseph de

Maistre is not hostile to a certain ordered measure of liberty accorded

by their rulers to peoples and individuals. But, strongly impressed by

the social and moral, as well as the political and religious anarchy

brought about first by the _philosophe_ movement, and then by the

Revolution, he sees the only chance of rescue in the establishment of a

hierarchy of government culminating in that from which there is no

appeal, the single authority of the pope. He is thus a legitimist with a

difference. The _Soirees de St. Petersbourg_, which are unfinished and

not entirely uniform in plan, deal nominally with the providential

government of the world, but diverge to a large number of subjects. It

is in this book that the author develops the kind of modified terrorism

which is often, though not altogether justly, considered to be his chief

characteristic, eulogising the executioner as the foundation of society.

Joseph de Maistre is unquestionably one of the greatest thinkers and

writers of the eighteenth century. Paradoxical and strained as his

system frequently appears, it is rigorously logical. An ordered

theocracy seems to him the only polity capable of giving peace and true

prosperity to the world, and he shapes all his theories so as to fit in

with this central conception. On detached subjects his thoughts are

always vigorous, and often strikingly original. His reading was great,

and his skill in polemics of the very highest. No one possesses in

larger measure the art of hostile criticism without descending to actual

abuse. These merits of themselves imply purely literary accomplishments,

clearness, distinctness, forcible expression, in a rare kind and degree.

But Joseph de Maistre is more than this as a writer. He possesses,

though he only occasionally exercises it, a brilliant faculty of

rhetoric. His phrase is more than merely clear and forcible; it has a

peculiar incisiveness and sharpness of outline which impress it on the

memory, while, sparing as he is of ornament, his rare passages of

description and fancy have great merit. The surest testimony to his

value is the fact that, though both in his own day and since by far the

larger number of writers and thinkers have held views more or less

opposed to his, no one whose opinion is itself of the least importance

has ever spoken of him without respect and even admiration. Those who,

like Lamartine, qualify their admiration with a certain depreciation,

show inability to recognise fully the beauty of strength undisguised by

conventional elegance and grace of form.

[Sidenote: Bonald.]

Louis Gabriel Ambroise, Vicomte de Bonald, who is usually named with

Joseph de Maistre as the leader of the Catholic-monarchist reaction, was

a weaker thinker, and a writer of less accomplishment, though in both

respects he has perhaps been somewhat unfairly criticised. Born at

Milhaud, in the district of Rouergue, in 1754, he discharged various

civil and military employments in his native province during his youth;

was elected in 1790 member of the Departmental Assembly, but emigrated

next year; served in Conde's army, and then established himself at

Heidelberg. His first work was seized by the Directory, but he returned

to France soon afterwards, and was not molested. He published a good

deal during the first years of the century, and, like many other

royalists, received overtures from Napoleon through Fontanes. These he

did not exactly reject, but he availed himself of them very sparingly.

The Restoration, on the contrary, aroused him to vigour. It was owing to

him chiefly that the law of divorce was altered. He entered the Academy,

and in 1823 was made a peer; an honour which he resigned at the

revolution of July. He died in 1840.

Bonald's principal work is his _Legislation Primitive_. He also wrote a

book on divorce, and a considerable number of miscellaneous political

and metaphysical works. His chief subjects of discussion were, first,

the theory of the revelation of language; and secondly, the theory of

causality: in respect of both of which he combated the materialist

school of the eighteenth century. In politics Bonald was a thoroughgoing

legitimist and monarchist of the patriarchal school. Although an

orthodox and devout Catholic, he does not lay the stress on the temporal

power of the pope that the author of _Du Pape_ does. With him the king

is the immediate instrument of God in governing. He has been accused of

reducing things too much to formulas, and of repeating his formulas too

often. But this itself was in great part the effect of reaction against

the vague declamation of the _philosophes_.

CHAPTER VII.

SCIENTIFIC WRITERS.

As the sciences divide and subdivide themselves more and more, the works

which treat of them become less and less the subject of strictly

literary history. Besides this truth, it is necessary to remember the

fact that a large number of treatises, scientific in subject, were in

the eighteenth century professedly popularised and addressed to

unprofessional audiences. Fontenelle, D'Alembert, and many other authors

already mentioned, were _savants_, but their manner of handling their

subjects was far from being strictly or wholly scientific. Yet there

remain a certain number of writers, who, their reputation being derived

wholly or mainly from their treatment of subjects of science and

erudition, are better dealt with separately.

[Sidenote: Buffon.]

The head and chief of these is beyond all question Buffon. George Louis

Leclerc, who was made Count de Buffon by Louis XV., was born at Montbard

in Burgundy, on Sept. 7, 1707; his father was a man of wealth and of

position in the _noblesse de robe_. Buffon was destined for the law, but

early showed an inclination towards science. He became acquainted with a

young English nobleman, Lord Kingston, who with his tutor was taking the

then usual grand tour, and was permitted by his father to accompany him

through France and Italy, and to visit England. On the English language

he spent considerable pains, translating Newton, Hales, and Tull the

agriculturist. When he returned to France he devoted himself to

scientific experiments, and in 1739 he was appointed intendant or

director of the Jardin du Roi, which practically gave him command of the

national collections in zoology, botany, and mineralogy. He was thus

enabled to observe and experiment to his heart's content, and to collect

a sufficient number of facts for his vast Natural History. Buffon,

however, was only half a man of science. He was at least as anxious to

write pompous descriptions and to indulge in showy hypotheses, as to

confine himself to plain scientific enquiry. He accordingly left the

main part of the hack-work of his _Histoire Naturelle_ (a vast work

extending to thirty-six volumes) to assistants, of whom the chief was

Daubenton, himself contributing only the most striking and rhetorical

passages. The book was very remarkable for its time, as the first

attempt since Pliny at a collection of physical facts at once

exhaustive, and in a manner systematised, and though there was much

alloy mixed with its metal, it was of real value. Buffon's life was

long, and he outlived all the other chiefs of the _philosophe_ party (to

which in an outside sort of fashion he belonged), dying at Paris in the

year 1788. It is perhaps easier to condemn Buffon's extremely rhetorical

style than to do justice to it. To a modern reader it too frequently

seems to verge on the ridiculous, and to do more than verge on the

trivial. It is necessary, however, to take the point of view of the

time. Buffon found natural science in a position far below that assigned

to literary erudition and to the arts in general estimation. He also

found it customary that these arts and letters should be treated in

pompous _eloges_. His real interest in science led him to think that the

shortest way to raise it was to treat it in the same manner, and there

is little doubt that his method was effectual in its degree. It is

perhaps curious that he, the author of the phrase 'Le style c'est

l'homme,' should have so completely exemplified it. Many authors of

elaborate prose have been perfectly simple and unpretentious in private

life. Buffon was as pompous and inflated as his style. Anecdotes

respecting him are numerous; but perhaps the most instructive is that

which tells how, having heard some one speak of the style of

Montesquieu, he asked, 'Si M. de Montesquieu avait un style?' It is

needless to say that from any just standpoint, even of purely literary

criticism, the hollow pomp of the _Histoire Naturelle_ sinks into

insignificance beside the nervous and solid yet graceful vigour of the

_Esprit des Lois_.

[Sidenote: Lesser Scientific Writers.]

No single scientific writer equals the fame of Buffon, but there are not

a few who deserve to be mentioned after him. Pierre Louis Moreau de

Maupertuis, a Breton by birth, who was a considerable mathematician and

a physicist of more eccentricity than merit, owes most of his literary

celebrity to the patronage of Frederick the Second, and the pitiless

raillery of Voltaire, who quarrelled with him on his visit to Berlin,

where Maupertuis was president of the Academy. Maupertuis' chief

scientific performance was his mission to Lapland to determine the

measurement of a degree of longitude in 1736. Of this mission he

published an account. At the same time a similar mission was sent to

South America under La Condamine, who underwent considerable hardship,

and, like Maupertuis, published his adventures when he came back.

Mathematics were indeed the favourite study of the time. Clairaut, De

Moivre, Euler, Laplace, all wrote in French, or belonged to

French-speaking and French-descended races; while Voltaire's own

contributions to the reception of Newton's principles in France were not

small, and his beloved Madame du Chatelet was an expert mathematician.

Voltaire also devoted much attention to chemistry, which was the special

subject of such of the Baron d'Holbach's labours as were not devoted to

the overthrow of Christianity. It was not, however, till the eve of the

Revolution that the most important discoveries in this science were made

by Lavoisier and others. The Empire was a much more favourable time for

science than for literature. Bonaparte was fond of the society of men of

science, and pleased by their usual indifference to politics. Monge,

Berthollet, Champollion, were among his favourites. Geoffroy St. Hilaire

and Cuvier were, however, the chief men of science of this period, and

Cuvier at least had no mean command of a literary style sufficient for

his purposes. His chief work of a literary-scientific character was his

discourse _Sur les Revolutions de la Surface du Globe_. Earlier than

this the physician Cabanis, in his _Rapports de Physique et de Morale_,

composed a semi-materialist work of great excellence according to

eighteenth-century standards. Bichat's _La Vie et la Mort_, the work of

an anatomist of the greatest talent, who died young, also belongs to

literature.

[Sidenote: Voyages and Travels.]

Some contributions to letters were also made by the voyages of discovery

which formed part of the general scientific curiosity of the time. The

chief of them is that of Bougainville, 1771, which, giving the first

clear notion to Frenchmen of the South Sea Islands, had a remarkably

stimulating effect on the imaginations of the _philosophe_ party.

[Sidenote: Linguistic and Literary Study.]

In works of pure erudition more directly connected with literature, the

age was less fruitful than its immediate predecessor. The laborious

studies of the Benedictines, however, continued. One work of theirs,

important to our subject, was projected and in part carried out under

the superintendence chiefly of Dom Rivet. This was the _Histoire

Litteraire de la France_--a mighty work, which, after long interruption

by the Revolution and other causes, was taken up again, and has

proceeded steadily for many years, though it has not yet reached the

close of the middle ages. This work was part, and a very important part,

of a revival of the study of old French literature. The plan of the

Benedictines led them at first into the literature of mediaeval Latin.

But the works of the Trouveres, of their successors in the fourteenth

and fifteenth centuries, and of the authors of the French Renaissance,

also received attention, scattered at first and desultory, but gradually

co-ordinating and regulating itself. La Monnoye, Lenglet-Dufresnoy, the

President Bouhier, and many others, collected, and in some cases edited,

the work of earlier times. The Marquis de Paulmy began a vast

_Bibliotheque des Romans_, for which the Comte de Tressan undertook the

modernising and reproducing of all the stories of chivalry. Tressan, it

is true, had recourse only to late and adulterated versions, but his

work was still calculated to spread some knowledge of what the middle

ages had actually done in matter of literature. La Curne de Sainte

Palaye devoted himself eagerly to the study of the language, manners,

and customs of chivalry. Barbazan collected the specially French product

of the Fabliau, and, with his successor Meon (who also edited the _Roman

du Renart_), provided a great corpus of lighter mediaeval literature for

the student to exercise himself upon. By degrees this revived literature

forced itself upon the public eye, and before the Republic had given

place to the Empire, it received some attention at the hands of

official teachers of literature who had hitherto scorned it. M. J.

Chenier, Daunou, and others, undertook the subject, and made it in a

manner popular; while towards the extreme end of the present period

Raynouard and Fauriel added the subject of Provencal literature to that

of the literature of Northern France, and helped to propagate the study

abroad as well as at home.

In the older fields the renown of France for purely classical

scholarship diminished somewhat as compared with the days of Huet,

Menage, Dacier, and the Delphin classics. The principal work of

erudition was either directed towards the so-called philosophy in its

wide sense of enquiry and speculation into politics and manners, or else

to mathematics and physics. The Benedictines confined themselves for the

most part to Christian antiquity. Yet there were names of weight in this

department, such as the President Henault, a writer something after the

fashion of Fontenelle, but on classical subjects; and the President de

Brosses, also an archaeologist of merit, but chiefly noteworthy as having

been among the founders of the science which busies itself with the

manners and customs of primitive and prehistoric man[291].

FOOTNOTES:

[291] I owe to M. Scherer the indication of a misprint of '_des_

Brosses' for 'de' in former editions. M. Scherer says that I 'have never

heard' of the President's pleasant _Lettres sur l'Italie_, because I do

not mention them. He also says that what I do say of De Brosses is

'egalement surprenante pour ce qu'elle avance et par ce qu'elle omet.' I

am, therefore, justified in supposing that M. Scherer 'has never heard'

of the _Lettres sur Herculanum_, the _Navigations aux Terres Australes_,

or the _Culte des Dieux Fetiches_.

INTERCHAPTER IV.

SUMMARY OF EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE.

The eighteenth century was pre-eminently the century of academic

literature in France: far more so than the seventeenth, which had seen

the foundation of the Academie Francaise. The word 'academy' in this

sense was an invention of the Italian humanists, prompted by their

Platonic, or perhaps by their Ciceronian, studies. Academies, or

coteries of men of letters who united love of society with the

cultivation of literature, became common in Italy during the sixteenth

century, and from Italy were translated to France. The famous society,

which now shares with the original school of Plato the honour of being

designated in European language as 'The Academy' without distinguishing

epithet, was originally nothing but one of these coteries or clubs,

which met at the house of the judicious and amiable, but not

particularly learned, Conrart. Conrart's influence with Richelieu, the

desire of the latter to secure a favourable tribunal of critics for his

own literary attempts, or (to be generous) his foresight and his

appreciation of the genius of the French language, determined the

Cardinal to establish this society. It was modestly endowed, and was

charged with the duty of composing an authoritative Dictionary of the

French literary language; a task the slow performance of which has been

a stock subject of ridicule for two centuries and a half. The Academy,

though it suffered some vicissitudes in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic

period, has survived all changes, and is virtually one of the most

ancient existing institutions of France. But, though it from the

beginning enjoyed royal and ministerial favour, it was long before it

collected a really representative body of members, and it was subjected

at first to a good deal of raillery. One of Saint Evremond's early

works was a _Comedie des Academistes_; while one of the most polished

and severe of his later prose critical studies is a 'Dissertation on the

word "Vaste,"' in which the tendency of the Academy to trifling

discussions (the curse of all literary societies), the literary

indolence of its members, and the pedagogic limitations of its critical

standards, are bitterly, though most politely, ridiculed. It did itself

little good by lending its name to be the cover for Richelieu's jealousy

of the _Cid_, though there is more justice in its _examen_ of that

famous play than is sometimes supposed. But the institution was

thoroughly germane to the nature, tastes, and literary needs of the

French people, and it prospered. Conrart was a tower of strength to it;

and in the next generation the methodical and administrative talents of

Perrault were of great service, while it so obviously helped the design

of Louis XIV. to play the Augustus, that a tradition of royal patronage,

which was not afterwards broken, was established. The greatest blots on

the Academy were the almost unavoidable servility which rewarded this

patronage, and the private rivalries and cliques which have occasionally

kept some of the greatest names of French literature out of its lists.

Moliere and Diderot are the most shining examples among these, but many

others keep them company. Nevertheless, by the end of the seventeenth

century at least, it became the recognised aim of every Frenchman of

letters to belong to the 'forty geese that guard the Capitol' of French

literature, as Diderot, not quite a disinterested witness, called them.

Throughout the eighteenth century their power was supreme. Competition

for the various academic prizes was, in the infancy of periodicals, the

easiest and the commonest method by which a struggling man of letters

could make himself known; and literary heresy of any kind was an almost

certain cause of exclusion from the body when once the dictatorship of

Fontenelle (a benevolent autocrat who, being something of a heretic

himself, tolerated freethinking in others) had ceased. Moreover, except

in rare cases, chiefly limited to persons of rank who were elected for

reasons quite other than literary, it was not usual for an author to

gain admission to the Academy until he was well stricken in years, and

until, as a natural consequence, his tastes were for the most part

formed, and he was impatient of innovation.

At first the influence of the Academy was beyond question salutary in

the main, if not wholly. Balzac, whose importance in the history of

prose style has been pointed out, was one of its earliest members. It

was under its wing that Vaugelas undertook the much-needed enquiry into

French grammar and its principles as applied to literature. The majority

of the early members were connected with the refining and reforming

coteries of the Rambouillet and other salons. It was somewhat slow in

electing Boileau, though it is to be feared that this arose from no

higher motive than the fact that he had satirised most of its members.

But Boileau was the natural guiding spirit of an Academy, and it fell

more and more under his influence--not so much his personal influence as

that of his principles and critical estimates. In short, during the

seventeenth century it played the very useful part of model and measure

in the midst of a time when the chief danger was the neglect of measures

and of models, and it played it very fairly. But by the time that the

eighteenth century began, it was by no means of a restraining and

guiding influence that France had most need. The exuberance of creative

genius between 1630 and 1690 had supplied literature with actual models

far more valuable than any scheme of cut-and-dried rules, and it was in

need rather of a stimulant to spur it on to further development. Instead

of serving as this, the Academy served (owing, it must be confessed, in

great part to the literary conservatism of Voltaire and the

_philosophes_ generally) as a check and drag upon the spontaneous

instincts all through the century, and in all the departments of Belles

Lettres. It contributed more than anything else to the mischievous

crystallisation of literary ideas, which during this time offers so

strange a contrast to the singular state of solution in which were all

ideas relating to religion, politics, and morals. The consequence of the

propounding of a set of consecrated models, of the constant competition

in imitation of those models, and of the reward of diligent and

successful imitation by admission into the body, which in its turn

nursed and guided a new generation of imitators, was the reduction of

large and important departments of literature to a condition of

cut-and-driedness which has no parallel in history. The drama in

particular, which was artificial and limited at its best, was reduced

to something like the state of a game in which every possible move or

stroke is known and registered, and in which the sole novelty consists

in contriving some permutation of these moves or strokes which shall be,

if possible, not absolutely identical with any former combination. So in

a lesser degree, it was in poetry, in history, in prose tales, in verse

tales. If a man had a loose imagination, he tried to imitate La Fontaine

as well as he could in manner, and outbid him in matter; if he thought

himself an epigrammatist, he copied J. B. Rousseau; if he was disposed

to edification, the same poet supplied him with models; if the gods had

made him descriptive, he executed variations in the style of Delille, or

Saint Lambert, who had themselves copied others; if he wrote in any

other style, he had an eye to the work of Voltaire. Neologism in

vocabulary was carefully eschewed, and a natural consequence of this was

the resort (in the struggle not to repeat merely) to elaborate and

ingenious periphrases, such as those which have been quoted in the

chapter on eighteenth-century poetry. In short, literature had got into

a sort of treadmill in which all the effort expended was expended merely

in the repeated production of certain prescribed motions.

It was partly a natural result of this, and partly an effect of other

and accidental causes, that the actual composition of the Academy was in

the first quarter of the nineteenth century by no means such as to

inspire much respect. But it was all the less likely to initiate or to

head any movement of reform. The consequence was, that when the reform

came, it came from the outside, not from the inside, that it was

violently opposed, and that, though it prevailed, and its leaders

themselves quickly forced their way into the sacred precincts, it was as

victorious rebels, not as welcomed allies. The further consequence of

this, and of the changes of which account will be given briefly in the

following book, was the alteration to a great extent of the status of

the Academy. It still (though with the old reproach of illustrious

outsiders) includes most of the leading men of letters of France, and

its membership is still, theoretically, the greatest honour that a

French man of letters can receive. But its position is far more

ornamental than it was. It hardly pretends to be in any sense

legislative: it is an honorary assembly, not a working parliament. The

chief circumstance that keeps it before the public is the curious and

time-honoured custom which ordains that the academician appointed to

receive each new member shall, in the most polished and amiable manner,

give the most ironical description he can of the novice's achievements

and claims to recognition.

The exact change in literature which has partly caused, and has partly

coincided with this change in the relation of the Academy to letters,

will shortly be displayed, though in somewhat less detail than those

changes which are at a sufficient distance to be estimated by the aid of

what has been well called 'the firm perspective of the past.' For

cut-and-dried rules of criticism, carefully selected and limited models,

narrow range of subject, scanty vocabulary and its corollary

periphrasis, stock metaphor and ornament, stiff or fluidly insignificant

metre and rhythm, there have been substituted the exact opposites. The

gain in poetry is immense, and if it seems to be somewhat exhausted now,

it is fair to remember that fifty years is a long flowering time for any

special poetic plant, not often equalled in history, and still less

often exceeded. The gain in prose has been more dubious. Great prose

writers will have to be noticed, but it may perhaps be doubted whether

the average value of French prose as prose has not declined. There would

be nothing surprising in this, if it be the case; on the contrary, it

would be a mere repetition of the experience of the sixteenth century.

The language and literature have been flooded with new words, new forms

of speech, new ideas, new models. It takes a very long time before the

mixture thus produced can settle down (at least in the vessel of the

average prose writer) to clearness and brilliancy. It is otherwise in

poetry; in the first place because there is no such thing as an average

poet, and in the second, because the peculiar conditions of poetry

exercise of themselves a refining influence, which is not present in

prose. At present it may be said, and not without truth, that, putting

the work of the extraordinary writers aside, ordinary French prose has

lost some of its former graces--its lucidity, its proportion, its easy

march. From being the most childishly prudish of all writers about

neologisms and the _mot propre_, the French prose writer has become the

most clumsily promiscuous in his vocabulary. He is always using 'square'

instead of 'place,' 'le macadam' instead of 'le pave,' 'un caoutchouc'

when he means a waterproof overcoat. Much of this, no doubt, is due to

the singular inability which the language seems to experience in forming

genuine vernacular compounds; an inability from which a few more persons

like the much ridiculed Du Bartas might have rescued it. But, however

this may be, it must be admitted that, great as have been the benefits

of the Romantic movement, it has left the ordinary French prose style of

novel and newspaper in a condition of indigestion and disarray.

As for the movement itself, the most brilliant season of romantic

productiveness seems to have terminated, after being long represented

only by its greatest, earliest, and at the same time latest name. The

comparative disorganisation is all the more noticeable. It is in this

disorganisation that our history perforce leaves the magnificent

literature which we have traced from its source. Unsafe as all prophecy

is, there are few things less safe to prophesy about than the progress

of literary development. But it is not historically unreasonable to

expect, after the splendid harvest of the last half century, what is

called a dead season, of longer or shorter duration. There is nothing

really discouraging in such seasons either in nature or in art. In each

case there is the garnered wealth of the past to fall back upon, and in

each there is confidence that the seeming stagnation and death are in

truth only the necessary pause and period of gestation which precede and

bring about the life of the future.

BOOK V.

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.

[Sidenote: The Romantic Movement.]

The preceding chapter will at once have indicated the defects under

which the later classical literature of France laboured, and the

remedies which were necessary for them. Those remedies began to be

applied early in the reign of Charles X., and the literary revolution

which accompanied them is called the Romantic movement. Strictly

speaking, this movement did not affect, or rather was not supposed to

affect, any branch of letters except the Belles Lettres; really its

influence was far wider, and has affected every branch of literary

composition. Nor is it yet exhausted, although more than two generations

have passed since the current was started. As is usual in the later

stages of such things, this influence is in part disguised under the

form of apparent reactions, developments, modifications, and other

eddies or backwaters of the great wave. But as the Romantic movement was

above all things a movement of literary emancipation, it can never be

said to be superseded until fresh chains are imposed on literature. Of

this there is as yet no sign, except in the puerile and disgusting

school of naturalism, a mere scum-flake--to keep up the metaphor--on the

surface of the waters.

[Sidenote: Writers of the later Transition.]

The literature of the Revolution, the Empire, and the early Restoration,

which has been in part already surveyed, displayed the last effete

products of the old classical tradition side by side with the vigorous

but nondescript and tentative efforts at reform of Chateaubriand, Madame

de Stael, Courier, and others. So the first products of the new movement

found themselves side by side with what may be called a second

generation of the transition. The names which chiefly illustrate this

second generation must be dealt with before the Romantics proper are

arrived at. The chief of them are Beranger, Lamartine, Lamennais,

Cousin, Stendhal, Nodier, and the dramatists Alexandre Soumet and

Casimir Delavigne. Most of these, while irresistibly impelled half way

towards the movement, stood aloof from it in feeling and taste; others,

such as Stendhal, exercised upon it an influence not much felt at first,

but deep and lasting; one, Nodier, threw in his lot with it frankly and

decidedly.

[Sidenote: Beranger.]

Pierre Jean de Beranger is one of the most original and not the least

pleasant figures in the long list of French poets. His life, though

long, was comparatively uneventful. Despite the particle of nobility, he

belonged to the middle class, and rather to the lower than to the upper

portion of it; for, if his father was a man of business, his grandfather

was a tailor. He himself lived in his youth with an aunt at Peronne, was

then apprenticed to a printer, and was so ill off that, in 1804, he was

saved from absolute poverty only by the patronage of Lucien Bonaparte,

to whom he had sent some of his verses, and who procured him a small

government clerkship. He held this for some years. After the

Restoration, Beranger, whose political creed was an odd compound of

Bonapartism and Republicanism, got into trouble with the government for

his political songs. He was repeatedly fined and imprisoned, but each

sentence made him more popular. After the Revolution of July, however,

he refused to accept any favours from the Orleanist dynasty, and lived

quietly, publishing nothing after 1833. In 1848 he was elected to the

Assembly, but immediately resigned his seat. He behaved to the Second

Empire as he had behaved to the July monarchy, refusing all honours and

appointments. He died in 1857. Beranger's poetical works consist

entirely of _Chansons_, political, amatory, bacchanalian, satirical,

philosophical after a fashion, and of almost every other complexion that

the song can possibly take. Their form is exactly that of the

eighteenth-century _Chanson_, the frivolity and licence of language

being considerably curtailed, and the range of subjects proportionately

extended. The popularity of Beranger with ordinary readers, both in and

out of his own country, has always been immense; but a somewhat singular

reluctance to admit his merits has been shown by successive generations

of purely literary critics. In France his early contemporaries found

fault with him on the one hand for being a mere _chansonnier,_ and on

the other, for dealing with the _chanson_ in a graver tone than that of

his masters, Panard, Colle, Gouffe, and his immediate predecessor and in

part contemporary, Desaugiers. The sentimental school of the Restoration

thought him vulgar and unromantic. The Romantics proper disdained his

pedestrian and conventional style, his classic vocabulary. The

neo-Catholics disliked his Voltairianism. The Royalists and the

Republicans detested, and detest equally, though from the most opposite

sides, his devotion to the Napoleonic legend. Yet Beranger deserves his

popularity, and does not deserve the grudging appreciation of critics.

His one serious fault is the retention of the conventional mannerism of

the eighteenth century in point of poetic diction, and he might argue

that time had almost irrevocably associated this with the _chanson_

style. His versification, careless as it looks, is really studied with a

great deal of care and success. As to his matter, only prejudice against

his political, religious, and ethical attitude, can obscure the lively

wit of his best work; its remarkable pathos; its sound common sense; its

hearty, if somewhat narrow and mistaken, patriotism; its freedom from

self-seeking and personal vanity, spite, or greed; its thorough humanity

and wholesome natural feeling. Nor can it be fairly said that his range

is narrow. _Le Grenier_, _Le Roi d'Yvetot_, _Roger Bontemps_, _Les

Souvenirs du Peuple_, _Les Fous_, _Les Gueux_, cover a considerable

variety of tones and subjects, all of which are happily treated.

Beranger indeed was not in the least a literary poet. But there is room

in literature for other than merely literary poets, and among these

Beranger will always hold a very high place. The common comparison of

him to Burns is in this erroneous, that the element of passion, which is

the most prominent in Burns, is almost absent from Beranger, and that

the unliterary character which was an accident with Burns was with

Beranger essential. The point of contact is, that both were among the

most admirable of song writers, and that both hit infallibly the tastes

of the masses among their countrymen.

[Sidenote: Lamartine.]

Alphonse Prat de Lamartine was in almost every conceivable respect the

exact opposite to Beranger. He was born at Macon, on the 21st of

October, 1791, of a good family of Franche Comte, which, though never

very rich, had long devoted itself to arms and agriculture only. His

father was a strong royalist, was imprisoned during the Terror, and

escaped narrowly. Lamartine was educated principally by the Peres de la

Foi, and, after leaving school, spent some time first at home and then

in Italy. The Restoration gave him entrance to the royal bodyguard; but

he soon exchanged soldiering for diplomacy, and was appointed attache in

Italy. He had already (1820) published the _Meditations_, his first

volume of verse, which had a great success. Lamartine married an English

lady in 1822, and spent some years in the French legations at Naples and

Florence. He was elected to the Academy in 1829. After the revolution of

July he set out for the East, but, being elected by a constituency to

the Chamber of Deputies, returned. He acquired much fame as an orator,

contributed not a little to the overthrow of Louis Philippe, and in 1848

enjoyed for a brief space something not unlike a dictatorship. Power,

however, soon slipped through his hands, and he retired into private

life. His later days were troubled by money difficulties, though he

wrote incessantly. In 1867 he received a large grant from the government

of Napoleon III., and died not long afterwards--in 1869. The chief works

of Lamartine are, in verse, the already mentioned _Meditations_ (of

which a new series appeared in 1823), the _Harmonies_, 1829, the

_Recueillements_, _Le Dernier Chant du Pelerinage d'Harold_, _Jocelyn_,

_La Chute d'un Ange_, the two last being fragments of a huge epic poem

on the ages of the world; in prose, _Souvenirs d'Orient_, _Histoire des

Girondins_, _Les Confidences_, _Raphael_, _Graziella_, besides an

immense amount of work for the booksellers, in history, biography,

criticism, and fiction, produced in his later days. Lamartine's

characteristics, both in prose and verse, are well marked. He is before

all things a sentimentalist and a landscape-painter. He may indeed be

said to have wrought into verse what Rousseau, Bernardin de

Saint-Pierre, and Chateaubriand had already expressed in prose,

supplying only an additional, and perhaps original, note of meditative

tenderness. Lamartine's verse is exquisitely harmonious, and frequently

picturesque; but it is deficient in vigour and brilliancy, and marred by

the perpetual current of sentimental complaining. Beyond this he never

could get; his only important attempt in a different and larger style,

the _Chute d'un Ange_, being, though not without merits, on the whole a

failure. In harmony of verse and delicate tenderness of feeling his

poetry was an enormous advance on the eighteenth century, and its power

over its first readers is easily understood. But Lamartine made little,

if any, organic change in the mechanism of French poetry, so far as its

versification is concerned, while his want of range in subject equally

disabled him from effecting a revolution. His best poems, such as _Le

Lac_, _Paysage dans le Golfe de Genes_, _Le Premier Regret_, are however

among the happiest expressions of a dainty but rather conventional

melancholy, irreproachable from the point of view of morals and

religion, thoroughly well bred, and creditably aware of the beauties of

nature, which it describes and reproduces with a great deal of skill.

[Sidenote: Lamennais.]

The next name on the list belongs to a far stronger, if a less

accomplished, spirit than Lamartine. Felicite Robert de Lamennais was

born in 1782, at St. Malo. In the confusion of the last decade of the

eighteenth century, when, as a contemporary bears witness, even persons

holding important state offices had often received no regular education

whatever, Lamennais was for the most part his own teacher. He betook

himself, however, to literature, and in 1807 was appointed to a

mastership in the St. Malo Grammar School. Shortly afterwards he

published a treatise on 'The Church during the Eighteenth Century,' and

taking orders before long followed it up by others. These placed him in

the forefront of the Catholic reaction, of which Chateaubriand from the

picturesque, and Joseph de Maistre from the philosophical side, were the

leaders. He took priest's orders in 1816, and in 1817 published his

_Essai sur l'Indifference en Matiere de Religion_. This is a sweeping

defence of the absolute authority of the Church, but the 'rift within

the lute' already appears. Lamennais bases this authority, according to

a tradition of that very eighteenth century which he most ardently

opposes, on universal consent. Although therefore the deductive portion

of his argument is in thorough accordance with Roman doctrine, the

inductive portion can hardly be said to be so, and it prepared the way

for his subsequent change of front. For a time Lamennais contented

himself with the hope of establishing a sect of liberal royalist

Catholics. A rapid succession of journals, most of which were

suppressed, led to the _Avenir_, in which Montalembert, Lacordaire, and

others took part, and which, like some English periodicals of a later

period, aimed directly at the union of orthodox religious principles of

the Roman complexion with political liberalism, and a certain freedom of

thought in other directions. The _Avenir_ was definitely censured by

Gregory XVI. in 1832, and Lamennais rapidly fell away from his previous

orthodoxy. He had established himself in the country with a following of

youthful disciples. Of these the best-known now is Maurice de Guerin, a

feeble poet who died young, but who, with his abler sister Eugenie,

interested Sainte-Beuve, Mr. Matthew Arnold, and others. _Les Paroles

d'un Croyant_, which appeared in 1834, united speculative Republicanism

of the most advanced kind with a direct defiance of Rome in matter of

religion, and this was followed by a long series of works in the same

spirit. Lamennais' ardent and ill-balanced temperament, the chief note

of which was the most excessive personal vanity, no sooner threw off the

yoke of orthodoxy than it ran to the opposite extreme, and the Catholic

royalist of the first empire became an atheistic, or at most theistic,

democrat. Lamennais died in 1854. He had a great influence both on men

and on books in France, and his literary work is extremely remarkable.

It bears the marks of his insufficient education and of his excitable

temperament. In the _Paroles d'un Croyant_ the style is altogether

apocalyptic in its mystic and broken declamation, full of colour,

energy, and vague impressiveness, but entirely wanting in order,

lucidity, and arrangement. The earlier works show something of this,

though necessarily not so much. Lamennais' literary, as distinguished

from his political and social, importance consists in the fact that he

was practically the first to introduce this style into French. He has

since had notable disciples, among whom Michelet and even Victor Hugo

may be ranked.

[Sidenote: Victor Cousin.]

The contrast of the return from Lamennais to Cousin is almost as great

as that of the change from Lamartine to Lamennais. The careers of the

poet and the philosopher have indeed something in common, for Cousin's

delicate, exquisite, and somewhat feminine prose style is a nearer

analogue to the poetry of Lamartine even than the latter's own prose,

and the sudden decline of Cousin's reputation in philosophy almost

matches that of Lamartine's reputation as a poet. Victor Cousin was born

in 1792, at Paris, and was one of the most brilliant pupils of the Lycee

Charlemagne. He passed thence to the Ecole Normale, and, in the year of

the Restoration, became Assistant Professor to Royer Collard at the

Sorbonne. He adopted vigorously the doctrines of that philosopher, which

practically amounted to a translation of the Scottish school of Reid and

Stewart, but he soon combined with them much that he borrowed from Kant

and his successors in Germany. This latter country he visited twice; on

the second occasion with the unpleasant result of an arrest. He soon

returned to France, however, and became distinguished as a supporter of

the liberal party. The years immediately before and after the July

Revolution were Cousin's most successful time. His lectures were

crowded, his eclecticism was novel and popular, and when after July

itself he became officially powerful, he distinguished himself by

patronising young men of genius. During the reign of Louis Philippe he

was one of the most influential of men of letters, though curiously

enough, he combined with his political liberalism a certain tendency to

reaction in matters of pure literature. After 1848 he retired from

public life, and, though he survived for nearly twenty years, produced

little more in philosophy. His brilliant but patchy eclecticism had had

its day, and he saw it; but he earned new and perhaps more lasting

laurels by betaking himself to the study of French literary history, and

producing some charming essays on the ladies of the Fronde. Cousin's

history is interesting as an instance of the accidental prosperity which

in the first half of this century the mixture of politics and

literature brought to men of letters. But his own literary merits are

very considerable. Without the freedom and originality of the great

writers who were for the most part his juniors by ten or twenty years,

he possessed a style studied from the best models of the seventeenth

century, which, despite a certain artificiality, has great beauty.

Besides editions of philosophical classics, the chief works of his

earlier period are _Fragments Philosophiques_, 1827, _Cours de

l'Histoire de la Philosophie_, 1827; of his later, _Du Vrai_, _Du Beau

et Du Bien_, and his studies on the women of the seventeenth century.

[Sidenote: Beyle.]

The author now to be noticed has found little place hitherto in

histories of literature, and estimates of his positive value are even

yet much divided. Henri Beyle, who wrote under the name of De Stendhal,

was born at Grenoble, in January, 1783. His family belonged to the

middle class, though, unfortunately, Beyle allowed himself during the

Empire to be called M. _de_ Beyle, and incurred not a little ridicule in

consequence. His literary _alias_ was also, it may be noticed, arranged

so as to claim nobility. He was a clever boy, but manifested no special

predilection for any profession. At last he entered the army, and served

in it (chiefly in the non-combatant branches) on some important

occasions, including the campaigns of the St. Bernard, of Jena, and of

Moscow. He also held some employments in the civil service of the

Empire. At the Restoration he went to Italy, which was always his

favourite place of residence; but when in 1821 political troubles began

to arise, he was 'politely' expelled by the Austrian police. After this

he lived chiefly in Paris, making part of his living by the unexpected

function of contributing to the London _New Monthly Magazine_. He knew

English well, admired our literature, and visited London more than once.

Being, as far as he was a politician at all, a Bonapartist, he was not

specially interested in the Revolution of 1830; but it was profitable to

him, for through some of his friends he was appointed French consul,

first at Trieste, and then (the Austrians objecting) at Civita Vecchia.

He lived, however, chiefly at Rome, and travelled a good deal. Latterly

his health was weak, and he died at Paris, in 1842, of apoplexy. He was

buried at Montmartre; but, with his usual eccentricity, his epitaph was

by his direction written in Italian, and he was described as a Milanese.

Beyle's character, personal and literary, was very peculiar. In

temperament, religious views, and social ideas he was a belated

_philosophe_ of the Diderot school. But in literature he had improved

even on Diderot, and very nearly anticipated the full results of the

Romantic movement, while in politics, as has been said, he was an

imperialist. His works are pretty voluminous. They consist of novels

(_La Chartreuse de Parme_, _Armance_, _Le Rouge et le Noir_, _Memoires

d'un Touriste_, etc.); of criticism (_Histoire de la Peinture en

Italie_, _Racine et Shakespeare_, _Melanges_); of biography (Lives of

Napoleon, Haydn, Mozart, Metastasio, etc.); of topographical writing of

a miscellaneous kind (_Promenades dans Rome, Naples et Florence_, etc.);

and lastly, of a singular book entitled _De l'Amour_, which unites

extraordinary acuteness and originality of thought with cynicism of

expression and paradox of theory. In this book, and in his novels, Beyle

made himself the ancestor of what has been called successively realism

and naturalism in France. Perhaps, however, his most remarkable work was

Merimee, of whose family he was a friend, and who, far excelling him in

merit of style if not in freshness of thought, learnt beyond all doubt

from him his peculiar and half-affected cynicism of tone, his curious

predilection for the apparently opposed literatures of England and

Southern Europe, and not improbably also his imperialism. Beyle is a

difficult author to judge briefly, the contradictions, affectations, and

oddities in him demanding minute examination. Of his power, intrinsic

and exerted on others, there is no doubt.

[Sidenote: Nodier.]

[Sidenote: Delavigne.]

[Sidenote: Soumet.]

The three remaining writers require shorter notice. Charles Nodier, who

was born at Besancon in 1780, and died at Paris in 1844, is one of the

most remarkable failures of a great genius in French literary history.

He did almost everything--lexicography, text-editing, criticism, poetry,

romance--and he did everything well, but perhaps nothing supremely well.

If an exception be made to this verdict, it must be in favour of his

short tales, some of which are exquisite, and all but, if not quite,

masterpieces. As librarian of the Mazarin Library, Nodier was a kind of

centre of the early Romantic circle, and, though he was more than

twenty years older than most of its members, he identified himself

thoroughly with their aims and objects. His consummate knowledge of the

history and vocabulary of the French tongue probably had no mean

influence on that conservative and restorative character which was one

of the best sides of the movement. Casimir Delavigne was born at Havre

in 1793. He first distinguished himself by his _Messeniennes_, a series

of satires or patriotic jeremiads on the supposed degradation of France

under the Restoration. Then he took to the stage, and produced

successively _Les Vepres Siciliennes_, _Marino Faliero_, _Louis XI_.

(well known in England from the affection which several English tragic

actors have shown for the title part), _Les Enfants d'Edouard_, etc. He

also wrote other non-dramatic poems, most of them of a political

character. Casimir Delavigne is a writer of little intrinsic worth. He

held aloof from the Romantic movement, less from dislike to its

extravagances and its cliquism, than from genuine weakness and inability

to appreciate the defects of the classic tradition. He is in fact the

direct successor of Ducis and Marie Joseph Chenier, having forgotten

something, but learned little. The defects of his poems are parallel to

those of his plays. His patriotism is conventional, his verse

conventional, his expression conventional, though the convention is in

all three cases slightly concealed by the skilful adoption of a certain

outward colouring of energy and picturesqueness. He was not unpopular in

his day, being patronised to a certain extent by the extreme classical

party, and recommended to the public by his liberal political

principles. But he is almost entirely obsolete already, and is never

likely to recover more than the reputation due to fair literary

workmanship in an inferior style. Alexandre Soumet was another dramatist

of the same kind, but perhaps of a less artificial stamp. He adhered to

the old model of drama, or to something like it, more, apparently,

because it satisfied his requirements, than from abstract predilection

for it, or from dislike to the new models. His _Norma_ has the merit of

having at least suggested the libretto of one of the most popular of

modern operas, and his _Une Fete sous Neron_ is not devoid of merit.

Soumet was in the early days of the movement a kind of outsider in it,

and it cannot be said that at any time he became an enemy, or that his

work is conspicuous for any fatal defects according to the new method of

criticism. A deficiency of initiative, rather than, as in Delavigne's

case, a preference of inferior models, seems to have been the reason why

he did not advance further.

[Sidenote: The Romantic Propaganda in Periodicals.]

It was, however, reserved for a younger generation actually to cross the

Rubicon, and to achieve the reform which was needed. The assistance

which the vast spread of periodical literature lent to such an attempt

has been already noted, and it was in four periodical publications that

the first definite note of the literary revolution was sounded. In these

the movement was carried on for many years before the famous

representation of _Hernani_, which announced the triumph of the

innovators. These four publications were: first, _Le Conservateur

Litteraire_ (a journal published as early as 1819, before the _Odes_ of

Victor Hugo, who was one of its main-stays, or even the _Meditations_ of

Lamartine had appeared); secondly, the _Annales Romantiques_, which

began in 1823, with perhaps the most brilliant list of contributors that

any periodical--with the possible exception of the nearly contemporary

_London Magazine_--ever had; a list including Chateaubriand, Lamennais,

Lamartine, Joseph de Maistre (posthumously), Alfred de Vigny, Henri de

Latouche, Hugo, Nodier, Beranger, Casimir Delavigne, Madame

Desbordes-Valmore, and Delphine Gay, afterwards Madame de Girardin.

Although not formally, this was practically a kind of annual of the

_Muse Francaise_, which had pretty nearly the same contributors, and

conducted the warfare in more definitely polemical manner by criticism

and precept, as well as by example. Lastly, there was the important

newspaper--a real newspaper this--called _Le Globe_, which appeared in

1822. The other Romantic organs had been either colourless as regards

politics, or else more or less definitely conservative and monarchical,

the middle age influence being still strong. The _Globe_ was avowedly

liberal in politics. Men of the greatest eminence in various ways,

Jouffroy, Damiron, Pierre Leroux, and Charles de Remusat, wrote in it;

but its literary importance in history is due to the fact that here

Sainte-Beuve, the critic of the movement, began, and for a long time

carried out the vast series of critical studies of French and other

literature which, partly by destruction and partly by construction, made

the older literary theory for ever obsolete. The various names in poetry

and prose of this romantic movement must now be reviewed.

[Sidenote: Victor Hugo.]

Victor Marie Hugo was born at Besancon on the 28th of February, 1802.

His father was an officer of distinction in Napoleon's army, his mother

was of Vendean blood and of royalist principles, which last her son for

a long time shared. His literary activity began extremely early. He was,

as has been seen, a contributor to the _Conservateur Litteraire_ at the

age of seventeen, and, with much work which he did not choose to

preserve, some which still worthily finds a place in his published

collections appeared there. Indeed, with his two brothers, Abel and

Eugene, he took a principal share in the management of the periodical.

His _Odes et Poesies Diverses_ appeared in 1822, when he was twenty, and

were followed two years afterwards by a fresh collection. In these

poems, though great strength and beauty of diction are apparent, nothing

that can be called distinct innovation appears. It is otherwise with the

_Odes et Ballades_ of 1826, and the _Orientales_ of 1829. Here the

Romantic challenge is definitely thrown down. The subjects are taken by

preference from times and countries which the classical tradition had

regarded as barbarous. The metres and rhythm are studiously broken,

varied, and irregular; the language has the utmost possible glow of

colour as opposed to the cold correctness of classical poetry, the

completest disdain of conventional periphrasis, the boldest reliance on

exotic terms and daring neologisms. Two romances in prose, more

fantastic in subject and audacious in treatment than the wildest of the

_Orientales_, had preceded the latter. The first, _Han d'Islande_, was

published anonymously in 1823. It handled with much extravagance, but

with extraordinary force and picturesqueness, the adventures of a bandit

in Norway. The second, _Bug Jargal_, an earlier form of which had

already appeared in the _Conservateur_, was published in 1826. But the

rebels, of whom Victor Hugo was by this time the acknowledged chief,

knew that the theatre was at once the stronghold of their enemies, and

the most important point of vantage for themselves. Victor Hugo's

theatrical, or at least dramatic, _debut_ was not altogether happy.

_Cromwell_, which was published in 1828, was not acted, and indeed, from

its great length and other peculiarities, could hardly have been acted.

It is rather a romance thrown into dramatic form than a play. In its

published shape, however, it was introduced by an elaborate preface,

containing a full exposition of the new views which served as a kind of

manifesto. Some minor works about this time need not be noticed. The

final strokes in verse and prose were struck, the one shortly before the

revolution of July, the other shortly after it, by the drama of

_Hernani, ou l'Honneur Castillan_, and the prose romance of _Notre Dame

de Paris_. The former, after great difficulties with the actors and with

outside influences--it is said that certain academicians of the old

school actually applied to Charles X. to forbid the representation--was

acted at the Theatre Francais on the 25th of February, 1830. The latter

was published in 1831. The reading of these two celebrated works,

despite nearly sixty years of subsequent and constant production with

unflagging powers on the part of their author, would suffice to give any

one a fair, though not a complete, idea of Victor Hugo, and of the

characteristics of the literary movement of which he has been the head.

The main subject of _Hernani_ is the point of honour which compels a

noble Spaniard to kill himself, in obedience to the blast of a horn

sounded by his mortal enemy, at the very moment of his marriage with his

beloved. _Notre Dame de Paris_ is a picture by turns brilliant and

sombre of the manners of the mediaeval capital. In both the author's

great failing, a deficient sense of humour and of proportion, which

occasionally makes him overstep the line between the sublime and the

ridiculous, is sometimes perceivable. In both, too, there is a certain

lack of technical neatness and completeness in construction. But the

extraordinary command of the tragic passions of pity, admiration, and

terror, the wonderful faculty of painting in words, the magnificence of

language, the power of indefinite poetical suggestion, the sweep and

rush of style which transports the reader, almost against his will and

judgment, are fully manifest in them. As a mere innovation, _Hernani_

is the most striking of the two. Almost every rule of the old French

stage is deliberately violated. Although the language is in parts ornate

to a degree, the old periphrases are wholly excluded; and when simple

things have to be said they are said with the utmost simplicity. The

cadence and arrangement of the classical Alexandrine are audaciously

reconstructed. Not merely is the practice of _enjambement_ (or

overlapping of lines and couplets, as distinct from the rigid separation

of them) frequent and daring, but the whole balance and rhythm of the

individual line is altered. Ever since Racine the one aim of the

dramatist had been to make the Alexandrine run as monotonously as

possible. The aim of Victor Hugo was to make it run with the greatest

possible variety. In short, the whole theory of the drama was altered.

The decade which followed the revolution of July was Victor Hugo's most

triumphant period. A series of dramas, _Marion de Lorme_, _Les Roi

s'Amuse_, _Lucrece Borgia_, _Marie Tudor_, _Angelo_, _Les Burgraves_,

succeeded each other at short intervals, and were accompanied by four

volumes of immortal verse, _Les Feuilles d'Automne_, _Chants du

Crepuscule_, _Les Voix Interieures_, _Les Rayons et les Ombres_. The

dramas continued to show Victor Hugo's command of tragic passion, his

wonderful faculty of verse, his fertility in moving situations, and in

incidents of horror and grandeur; but they did not indicate an increased

acquaintance with those minor arts of the playwright, which are

necessary to the success of acted dramas, and which many of Hugo's own

pupils possessed to perfection. Accordingly, towards the end of the

decade, some reaction took place against them, and their author ceased

to write for the stage. His purely poetical productions showed, however,

an increase at once of poetical and of critical power; and of the four

volumes mentioned, each one contains many pieces which have never been

excelled in French poetry, and which may be fairly compared with the

greatest poetical productions of the same kind in other literatures.

Meanwhile, Victor Hugo's political ideas (which never, in any of their

forms, brought him much luck, literary or other) had undergone a

remarkable change. During the reign of Louis Philippe, he, who had

recently been an ardent legitimist, became, first, a constitutional

royalist (in which capacity he accepted from the king a peerage), then

an extreme liberal, and at last, when the revolution of 1848 broke out,

a republican democrat. He was banished for his opposition to Louis

Napoleon, and fled, first to Brussels, and then to the Channel Islands,

launching against his enemy a prose lampoon, _Napoleon le Petit_, and

then a volume of verse, _Les Chatiments_, of marvellous vigour and

brilliancy. During the ten years before this his literary work had been

for the most part suspended, at least as far as publication is

concerned. But his exile gave a fresh spur to his genius. After four

years' residence, first in Jersey, then in Guernsey, he published _Les

Contemplations_ (2 vols.), a collection of lyrical pieces, not different

in general form from the four volumes which had preceded them; and, in

1859, _La Legende des Siecles_, a marvellous series of narrative or

pictorial poems representing scenes from different epochs of the history

of the world. These three volumes together represent his poetical talent

at its highest. He, at other times before and since, equalled but never

surpassed them. In _La Legende des Siecles_ the variety of the music,

the majesty of some of the pieces and the pathos of others, the rapid

succession of brilliant dissolving views, and the complete mastery of

language and versification at which the poet arrived, combine to produce

an effect not easily paralleled elsewhere. The _Contemplations_, as

their name imports, are chiefly meditative. They are somewhat unequal,

and the tone of speculative pondering on the mysteries of life which

distinguishes them sometimes drops into what is called sermonising, but

their best pieces are admirable. During the whole of the Second Empire

Victor Hugo continued to reside in Guernsey, publishing, in 1862, a long

prose romance, _Les Miserables_, one of the most unequal of his books;

then another, the exquisite _Travailleurs de la Mer_, as well as a

volume of criticism on _William Shakespeare_, some passages in which

rank among the best pieces of ornate prose in French; and, in 1869,

_L'Homme qui Rit_, a historical romance of a somewhat extravagant

character, recalling his earliest attempts in this kind, but full of

power. A small collection of lyric verse, mostly light and pastoral in

character, had appeared under the title of _Chansons des Rues et des

Bois_. The Revolution which followed the troubles of France, in 1870,

restored Victor Hugo to his country only to inflict a bitter, though

passing, annoyance on him. He had somewhat mistaken the temper of the

National Assembly at Bordeaux to which he had been elected. He even

found himself laughed at, and he retired to Brussels in disgust. Here he

was identified by public opinion with the Communists, and subjected to

some manifestations of popular displeasure, which, unfortunately, his

sensitive temperament and vivid imagination magnified unreasonably.

Returning to France after the publication of nearly his weakest book,

_L'Annee Terrible_, he lived quietly, but as a kind of popular and

literary idol, till his death in 1885. Of his abundant later (including

not a little posthumous) work _Quatre-Vingt-Treize_, another historical

romance, and two books of poetry (a second series of the _Legende des

Siecles_, 1877, and _Les Quatre Vents de l'Esprit_, 1881) at their best,

equal anything he has ever done. The second _Legende_ is inferior to the

first in variety of tone and in vivid pictorial presentment, but equals

it in the declamatory vigour of its best passages. _Les Quatre Vents de

l'Esprit_ is, perhaps, the most striking single book that Victor Hugo

produced, containing as it does lyric and narrative work of the very

finest quality, and a drama of an entirely original character, which,

after more than sixty years of publicity, showed a new side of the

author's genius.

This somewhat minute account of Victor Hugo's work must be supplemented

by some general criticism of his literary characteristics. As will

probably have been observed, from what has already been said, there were

remarkable gaps in his ability. In purely intellectual characteristics,

the characteristics of the logician and the philosopher, he was weak. He

was also, as has been said, deficient in the sense of humorous contrast,

and in the perception of strict literary proportion. Long years of

solitary pre-eminence, and of the frequently unreasonable worship of

fools as well as of wise men, gave him, or encouraged in him, a tendency

to regard the universe too much from the point of view of France in the

first place, Paris in the second, and Victor Hugo in the third. His

unequalled skill in the management of proper names tempted him to abuse

them as instruments of sonority in his verse. He is often inaccurate in

fact, presenting in this respect a remarkable resemblance to his

counterpart and complement Voltaire. The one merit which swallowed up

almost all others in classical and pseudo-classical literature is

wanting in him--the sense of measure. He is a childish politician, a

visionary social reformer. But, when all this has been said, there

remains a sum total of purely literary merits which suffices to place

him on a level with the greatest in literature. The mere fact that he is

equally remarkable for the exquisite grace of his smaller lyrics, and

for the rhetorical magnificence of his declamatory passages, argues some

peculiar and masterly idiosyncrasy in him. No poet has a rarer and more

delicate touch of pathos, none a more masculine or a fuller tone of

indignation. The great peculiarity of Victor Hugo is that his poetry

always transports. No one who cares for poetry at all, and who has

mastered the preliminary necessity of acquaintance with the French

language and French prosody, can read any of his better works without

gradually rising to a condition of enthusiasm in which the possible

defects of the matter are altogether lost sight of in the unsurpassed

and dazzling excellence of the manner. This is the special test of

poetry, and there is none other. The technical means by which Victor

Hugo produces these effects have been already hinted at. They consist in

a mastery of varied versification, in an extraordinary command of

pictorial language, dealing at once with physical and mental phenomena,

and, above all, in a certain irresistible habit of never allowing the

iron to grow cold. Stroke follows stroke in the exciting and

transporting process in a manner not easily paralleled in other writers.

Other poets are often best exhibited by very short extracts, by jewels

five words long. This is not so with Victor Hugo. He has such jewels,

but they are not his chief titles to admiration. The ardour and flow, as

of molten metal, which characterise him are felt only in the mass, and

must be sought there. What has been said of his verse is true, with but

slight modifications, of his prose, which is however on the whole

inferior. His unequalled versification is a weapon which he could not

exchange for the less pointed tool of prose without losing much of his

power. His defects emerge as his merits subside. But taking him

altogether, it may be asserted, without the least fear of

contradiction, that Victor Hugo deserves the title of the greatest poet

hitherto, and of one of the greatest prose writers of France. Such a

faculty, thrown into almost any cause, must have gone far to make it

triumph. But in a cause of such merits, and so stoutly seconded by

others, as that of the destruction of the classical tradition which had

cramped and starved French literature, there could be no doubt of

success when a champion such as Victor Hugo took up and carried through

to the end the task of championship.

[Sidenote: Sainte-Beuve.]

It is very seldom that the two different forces of criticism and

creation work together as they did in the case of the Romantic movement.

Each had numerous representatives, but the point of importance is that

each was represented by one of the greatest masters. Charles Augustin

Sainte-Beuve, the critic not merely of the Romantic movement, but of the

nineteenth century, and in a manner the first scientific and universal

critic that the world has seen, was born at Boulogne on the 23rd of

December, 1804. His father held an office of some importance; his mother

was of English blood. He was well educated, first at his native town,

then at Paris. He began by studying medicine, but very soon turned to

literature, and, as has been said, distinguished himself on the _Globe_.

The most important of his articles in this paper were devoted to the

French literature of the sixteenth century, and these were published as

a volume, in 1828, with great success. Sainte-Beuve at once became the

critic _en titre_ of the movement, though he did not very long continue

in formal connection with it. It was some time, however, before he

resigned himself to purely critical work. _Les Poesies de Joseph

Delorme_, _Les Consolations_, and _Volupte_ were successive attempts at

original composition, which, despite the talent of their author, hardly

made much mark, or deserved to make it. He did not persevere further in

a career for which he was evidently unfitted, but betook himself to the

long series of separate critical studies, partly of foreign and

classical literature, but usually of French, which made his reputation.

The papers to which he chiefly contributed were the _Constitutionnel_

and the _Moniteur_, and during the middle of this century his Monday

_feuilletons_ of criticism were the chief recurring literary event of

Europe. These studies were at intervals collected and published in sets

under the titles _Critiques et Portraits Litteraires_, _Portraits

Contemporains_, _Causeries du Lundi_, and _Nouveaux Lundis_, the last

series only finishing with his death in 1869. Besides this he had

undertaken a single work of great magnitude in his _Histoire de Port

Royal_, on which he spent some twenty years. He was elected to the

Academy in 1845, and after the establishment of the Empire he was one of

the few distinguished literary men who took its side. The first reward

that he obtained was a professorship in the College de France; but some

years before his death he received the senatorship, a lucrative

position, and one which interfered very little with the studies of the

occupant. In character Sainte-Beuve strongly resembled some of the

epicureans of his favourite seventeenth century; but whatever faults he

may have had were redeemed by much good-nature and an entire absence of

literary vanity.

[Sidenote: His Method.]

[Sidenote: Dangers of the Method.]

The importance of Sainte-Beuve in literature is historically, and as a

matter of influence, superior even to that of the great poet with whom

he was for some time in close friendship, though before very long their

stars fell apart. Until his time the science of criticism had been

almost entirely conducted on what may be called pedagogic lines. The

critic either constructed for himself, or more probably accepted from

tradition, a cut-and-dried scheme of the correct plan of different kinds

of literature, and contented himself with adjusting any new work to

this, marking off its agreements or differences, and judging

accordingly. Here and there in French literature critics like

Saint-Evremond, Fenelon, La Bruyere in part, Diderot, Joubert, had

adopted another method, but the small acquaintance which most Frenchmen

possessed of literature other than their own stood in the way of

success. Sainte-Beuve was the first to found criticism on a wide study

of literature, instead of directing a more or less narrow study of

literature by critical rules. Victor Hugo himself has laid down, in the

preface to the _Orientales_, one important principle--the principle that

the critic has only to judge of the intrinsic goodness of the book, and

not of its conformity to certain pre-established ideas. There remains

the difficulty of deciding what is intrinsically good or bad. To solve

this, the only way is, first, to prepare the mind of the critic by a

wide study of literature, which may free him from merely local and

national prejudices; and, secondly, to direct his attention not so much

to cut-and-dried ideas of an epic, a sonnet, a drama, as to the object

which the author himself had before him when he composed his work. In

carrying out this principle it becomes obviously of great importance to

study the man himself as well as his works, and his works as a whole as

well as the particular sample before the judge. Sainte-Beuve was almost

the first in France to set the example of the _causerie critique_, the

essay which sets before the reader the life, circumstances, aims,

society, and literary atmosphere of the author, as well as his literary

achievements. This accounts for the extreme interest shown by the public

in what had very commonly been regarded as one of the idlest and least

profitable kinds of literature. At the same time the method has two

dangers to which it is specially exposed. One is the danger of limiting

the consideration to external facts merely, and giving a gossiping

biography rather than a criticism. The other, and the more subtle

danger, is the construction of a new cut-and-dried theory instead of the

old one, by regarding every man as simply a product of his age and

circumstances, and ticketing him off accordingly without considering his

works themselves to see whether they bear out the theory by facts. In

either case, the great question which Victor Hugo has stated, 'L'ouvrage

est-il bon ou est-il mauvais?' remains unanswered in any satisfactory

measure. Sainte-Beuve himself did not often fall into either error. His

taste was remarkably catholic and remarkably fine. The only fault which

can justly be found with him is the fault which naturally besets such a

critic, the tendency to look too complacently on persons of moderate

talent, whose merits he himself is perhaps the first to recognise fully,

and to be proportionately unjust to the greater names whose merits, on

good systems and bad alike, are universally acknowledged, in whose case

it is difficult to say anything new, and who are therefore somewhat

ungrateful subjects for the ingenious and delicate analysis which more

mixed talents repay. But study of the work of such a man as Sainte-Beuve

is an almost absolute safeguard against the intolerance of former days

in matter of literature, and this is its great merit.

[Sidenote: Dumas the Elder.]

Around Victor Hugo were grouped not a few writers who were only inferior

to himself. But, before mentioning the members of what is called the

_cenacle_, or innermost Romantic circle, a third name of almost equal

temporary importance to those of Hugo and Sainte-Beuve must be

named--that of Alexandre Dumas. This writer, one of the most prolific,

and in some respects one of the most remarkable of dramatists and

novelists, was the son of a general in the revolutionary army, and was

born, on the 23rd of July, 1806, at Villers Cotterets. He had hardly any

education; but, coming to Paris at the age of twenty, he was fortunate

enough to obtain a clerkship in the household of the Duke of Orleans. He

tried literature almost at once, and in 1829 his _Henri III. et sa Cour_

was played, and was a great success. This was a year before _Hernani_,

and though Dumas had no pretence to rival Hugo in literary merit, his

drama was quite as revolutionary in style, events, language, and general

arrangement as Hugo's. But he had not heralded it by any general

defiance, and it possessed (what his greater contemporary's dramatic

work never fully possessed) the indefinable knowledge of the stage and

its requirements, which always tells on an audience. After the

Revolution of July, the daring play of _Antony_ achieved an almost equal

success, despite its attacks on the proprieties, attacks of which at

that time French opinion was not tolerant in a serious play. Then he

returned to the historical drama in the _Tour de Nesle_, another play of

strong situations and reckless sacrifice of everything else to

excitement. After this Dumas published many plays, of which _Don Juan de

Marana_ and _Kean_ are perhaps the most extravagant, and _Mademoiselle

de Belle-Isle_, 1839, the best. But before long he fell into a train of

writing more profitable even than the drama. This was the composition of

historical romances something in Scott's manner. The most famous of

these, such as the _Three Musketeers_, _La Reine Margot_, and _Monte

Cristo_, were produced towards the latter part of the reign of Louis

Philippe, his early patron. He travelled a great deal, making books and

money out of his travels; and sometimes, as when he was the companion of

Garibaldi, finding himself in curious company. No man, probably, ever

made so much money by literature in France as Dumas, though he was not

equally skilled in keeping it. He died, in the midst of the disasters of

his country, on Christmas Eve, 1870. Dumas' literary position and

influence are not very easy to estimate, because of the strange extent

to which he carried what is called collaboration, and his frank avowal

of something very like plagiarism in many of the works which he wrote

unassisted. Endeavours have even been made to show that his most

celebrated works are the production of hack writers whom he paid to

write under his name. Nor is there the least doubt that he did resort on

a large scale to something like the practice of those portrait painters

who employ their pupils to paint in the draperies, backgrounds, and

accessories of their work. But that Dumas was the moving spirit still,

and the actual author of what is best and most peculiar in the works

that go by his name, is sufficiently proved by the fact that none of his

assistants, whose names are in many cases known, and who in not a few

instances subsequently attained eminence on their own account, have

equalled or even resembled his peculiar style. Dumas' dramatic work is

of but little value as literature properly so called. His forte is the

already mentioned playwright's instinct, as it may be termed, which made

him almost invariably choose and conduct his action in a manner so

interesting and absorbing to the audience that they had no time to think

of the merits of the style, the propriety of the morals, the congruity

of the sentiments. His plays, in short, are intended to be acted, not to

be read. Of his novels many are disfigured by long passages of the

inferior work to be expected from mere hack assistants, by unskilful

insertions of passages from his authorities, and sometimes by

plagiarisms so audacious and flagrant, that the reader takes them as

little less than an insult. His best work, however, such as the whole of

the long series ranging from _Les Trois Mousquetaires_ through _Vingt

Ans apres_ to _Le Vicomte de Bragelonne_, a second long series of which

_La Reine Margot_ is a member, and parts of others, has peculiar and

almost unique merits. The style is not more remarkable as such than that

of the dramas; there is not always, or often, a well-defined plot, and

the characters are drawn only in the broadest outline. But the cunning

admixture of incident and dialogue by which Dumas carries on the

interest of his gigantic narrations without wearying the reader is a

secret of his own, and has never been thoroughly mastered by any one

else.

[Sidenote: Honore de Balzac.]

While Dumas thus gave himself up to the novel of incident, two other

writers of equally remarkable genius, and of greater merely literary

power, also devoted themselves to prose fiction, and by this means

exercised a wide influence on their generation. Honore de Balzac was

born at Tours, on the 20th of May, 1799. He was fairly well educated,

but his father's circumstances compelled him to place his son in a

lawyer's office. This Balzac could not endure, and he very shortly

betook himself to literature, suffering very considerable hardships. The

task he attempted was fiction, and his experience in it was unique. For

years he wrote steadily, and published dozens of volumes, not merely

without attaining success, but without deserving any. But few of these

are ever read now, and when they are opened it is out of mere curiosity,

a curiosity which meets with but little return. Yet Balzac continued, in

spite of hardship and of ill success, to work on, and in his thirtieth

year he made his first mark with _Les Derniers Chouans_, a historical

novel, which, if not of great excellence, at least shows a peculiar and

decided talent. From this time forward he worked with spirit and success

in his own manner, and in twenty years produced the vast collection

which he himself termed _La Comedie Humaine_, the individual novels

being often connected by community of personages, and always by the

peculiar fashion of analytical display of character which from them is

identified with Balzac's name. The most successful of these are

concerned with Parisian life, and perhaps the most powerful of all are

_Le Pere Goriot_, _Eugenie Grandet_, _La Cousine Bette_, _La Peau de

Chagrin_, _La Recherche de l'Absolu_, _Seraphita_. The last is the best

piece of mere writing that Balzac has produced. He had also a wonderful

faculty for short tales (_Le Chef-d'oeuvre Inconnu_, _Une Passion dans

le Desert_, etc.). He tried the theatre, but failed. Notwithstanding

Balzac's untiring energy (he would often work for weeks together with

the briefest intervals of sleep) and the popularity of his books, he was

always in pecuniary difficulties. These were caused partly by his mania

for speculation, and partly by his singular habits of composition. He

would write a novel in short compass, have it printed, then enlarge the

printed sheets with corrections, and repeat this process again and again

until the expenses of the mere printing swallowed up great part of the

profits of the work. At last he obtained wealth, and, as it seemed, a

prospect of happiness. In 1850 he married Madame Hanska, a rich Polish

lady, to whom he had been attached for many years. He had prepared for a

life of opulent ease at Paris with his wife; but a few months after his

marriage he died of heart disease. Balzac is in a way the greatest of

French novelists, because he is the most entirely singular and original.

It has been said of him, with as much truth as exaggeration, that he has

drawn a whole world of character after having first created it out of

his own head. Balzac's characters are never quite human, and the

atmosphere in which they are placed has something of the same unreality

(though it is for the most part tragically and not comically unreal) as

that of Dickens. Everything is seen through a kind of distorting lens,

yet the actual vision is defined with the most extraordinary precision,

and in the most vivid colours. Balzac had great drawbacks. Despite his

noble prefix he cannot conceive or draw either a gentleman or a lady.

His virtuous characters are usually virtuous in the theatrical sense

only; his scheme of human character is altogether low and mean. But he

can analyse vice and meanness with wonderful vigour, and he is almost

unmatched in the power of conferring apparent reality upon what the

reader nevertheless feels to be imaginary and ideal. It follows almost

necessarily that he is happiest when his subject has a strong touch of

the fantastic. The already mentioned _Peau de Chagrin_--a magic skin

which confers wishing powers on its possessor but shrivels at each wish,

shortening his life correspondingly--and _Seraphita_, a purely romantic

or fantastic tale, are instances of this. Almost more striking than

either are the _Contes Drolatiques_, tales composed in imitation of the

manner and language of the sixteenth century. Here the grotesque and

fantastic incidents and tone exactly suit the writer, and some of the

stories are among the masterpieces of French literature. The same

sympathy with the abnormal may be noticed in the _Chef-d'oeuvre

Inconnu_, where a solitary painter touches and retouches his supposed

masterpiece till he loses all power of self-criticism, and at lasts

exhibits triumphantly a shapeless and unintelligible daub of mingled

colours. Balzac's style is not in itself of the best; it is clumsy,

inelastic, and destitute of the order and proportion which distinguish

the best French prose, but it is not ill suited to the peculiar

character of his work.

[Sidenote: George Sand.]

With Balzac's name is inseparably connected, if only from the striking

contrast between them, that of George Sand. Amandine Lucile Aurore

Dupin, who took the writing name of George Sand, was born at Paris in

1804, and had a somewhat singular family history, of which it is enough

to say here that she was descended through her father's mother from

Marshal Saxe, the famous son of Augustus of Saxony and Aurore von

Koeningsmarck. At the age of eighteen she married a man named Dudevant,

and was very unhappy, though it is rather difficult to determine on whom

the blame of the unhappiness ought to rest. They separated after a few

years, and she came to Paris, from her home at Nohant in Berry, to seek

a living. She found it soon in literature, having met with a friend and

companion in the novelist Jules Sandeau, and with a stern and most

useful critic in Henri de Latouche. Her first novel of importance was

_Indiana_, published in 1832. This was followed by _Valentine_, _Lelia_,

_Jacques_, etc. The interest of all or most of these turns on the

sufferings of the _femme incomprise_, a celebrated person in literature,

of whom George Sand is the historiographer, if not the inventor. A long

series of novels of this kind gave way, between 1840 and 1849, first to

a series of philosophical rhapsodies, of which _Spiridion_ is the chief,

and then to one in which the political aspirations of the socialist

Republicans appear. Of these, _Consuelo_, which is perhaps popularly

considered the author's masterpiece, was the chief. Her private history

was somewhat remarkable, and she succeeded in making at least two men of

greater genius than herself, Alfred de Musset and Chopin, utterly

miserable. They, however, afforded the subjects of two noteworthy books,

_Elle et Lui_, and _Lucrezia Floriani_, the latter perhaps the most

characteristic of all her early works. After the establishment of the

Second Empire her tastes and habits became quieter. She lived chiefly,

and latterly almost wholly, at Nohant, being greatly attached to the

country; and she wrote many charming sketches of country life with

felicitous introduction of _patois_, such as _La Mare au Diable_,

_Francois le Champi_, _La Petite Fadette_. Some voluminous memoirs,

published in 1854, dealt with her own early experiences. She lived till

the age of seventy-two, dying in 1876, and never ceased to put forth

novels which showed no distinct falling off in fertility or imagination,

or in command of literary style. She must have written in all nearly a

hundred books. As the chief characteristics of Balzac are intense

observation, concentrated thought, and the most obstinate and unwearying

labour, so the chief characteristic of George Sand is easy

improvisation. She had an active and receptive mind which took in the

surface of things, whether it was love, or philosophy, or politics, or

scenery, or manners, with remarkable and indifferent facility. She had

also a style which, if it cannot be ranked among the great literary

styles from its absence of statuesque outline, and from its too great

fluidity, was excellently suited for the task of improvisation. Her

novels, therefore, slipped from her without the slightest mental effort,

and appear to have cost her nothing. It is not true, in this case, that

what has cost nothing is worth nothing. But even favourable critics

admit that it is peculiarly difficult to read a novel of George Sand a

second time, and this is perhaps a decisive test. She is, indeed, far

more of an improvising novelist than Dumas, to whom the term has more

often been applied, though she wrote better French, and attempted more

ambitious subjects. The better characteristics of her novels reappeared,

perhaps to greater advantage, in her numerous and agreeable letters,

especially those to the novelist Flaubert.

[Sidenote: Merimee.]

In striking contrast with these three novelists was Prosper Merimee,

also a novelist for the most part, but, unlike them, a comparatively

infertile writer[292], and one of the most exquisite masters of French

prose that the nineteenth century has seen. Merimee was born in 1803,

and was therefore almost exactly of an age with the writers just

mentioned. For a time he took a certain share in the Romantic movement,

but his distinguishing characteristic was a kind of critical cynicism,

partly real, partly affected, which made him dislike and distrust

exaggeration of all kinds. He accordingly soon fell off. Possessing

independent means, and entering the service of the government, he was

not obliged to write for bread, and for many years he produced little,

devoting himself as much to archaeology and the classical languages as to

French. He accepted the Second Empire apparently from a genuine and

hearty hatred of democracy, and was rewarded with the post of senator.

But he had to assist Napoleon III. in his _Caesar_, and to dance

attendance on the Court, the latter duty being made somewhat less

irksome to him by his personal attachment to the Empress. Two

collections of letters, which have appeared since his death, one

addressed to an unknown lady, and the other to the late Sir Antonio

Panizzi, while adding to Merimee's literary reputation, have thrown very

curious light on his character, exhibiting him as a man who, with very

genuine and hearty affections, veiled them under an outward cloak of

cynicism, for fear of being betrayed into vulgarity and extravagance. He

died in 1870, at the beginning of the troubles of France, by which he

was deeply afflicted. The entire amount of Merimee's work is, as has

been said, not large, and during the last twenty years of his life it is

almost insignificant. But such as it is, it has an enduring and

monumental value, which belongs to the work of few of his

contemporaries. He began by a curious practice, which united the

romantic fancy for strange countries and strong local colour with his

personal longing for privacy and the absence of literary _eclat. Le

Theatre de Clara Gazul_--plays, nominally by a Spanish actress--was

produced when he was but one-and-twenty; two years later, with an

audacious anagram on the title of his previous work, he published, under

the title of _La Guzla_, some nominal translation of Dalmatian prose and

verse, in which he utilised with extraordinary cleverness the existing

books on Slav poetry. _La Famille de Carvajal_ was a further

_supercherie_ in the same style. In the very height and climax of the

Romantic movement Merimee produced two works, attesting at once his

marvellous supremacy of style, his strange critical appreciation of the

current forces in literature, his penetrating insight into history, and

the satiric background of all his thoughts and studies. These were _La

Jacquerie_, and a _Chronique du Regne de Charles IX_. These books, with

Balzac's _Contes Drolatiques_ (which they long preceded), are the most

happy creative criticisms extant of the middle ages and the Renaissance

in France. They are not fair or complete: on the contrary, they are

definitely and unfairly hostile. But the mastery at once of human nature

and of literary form which they display, the faculty of vivid

resurrection indicated by them, the range, the insight, the power of

expression, are extraordinary. During the rest of his life Merimee, with

some excursions into history (ancient and modern), archaeology, and

criticism, confined himself for the most part to the production, at long

intervals, of short tales or novels of very limited length. They are all

masterpieces of literature, and, like most masterpieces of literature,

they indicate, in a comparatively incidental and by-the-way fashion,

paths which duller men have followed up to the natural result of

absurdity and exaggeration. _Colomba_, _Mateo Falcone_, _La Double

Meprise_, _La Venus d'Ille_, _L'Enlevement de la Redoute_, _Lokis_, have

equals, but no superiors either in French prose fiction or in French

prose. Grasp of human character, reserved but masterly description of

scenery, delicate analysis of motive, ability to represent the

supernatural, pathos, grandeur, simple narrative excellence, appear turn

by turn in these wonderful pieces, as they appear hardly anywhere else

except in the author to whom we shall come next. It is noteworthy,

however, that Merimee is a master of the simple style in literature as

Gautier is of the ornate. One cannot be said to be greater than the

other, but between them they exhibit French prose in a perfection which,

since the seventeenth century, it had not possessed.

[Sidenote: Theophile Gautier.]

Theophile Gautier was born considerably later than most of the writers

just mentioned. His birth-year was 1811, and he was a native of Tarbes

in Gascony. His education was partly at the grammar school of that town,

and partly at the Lycee Charlemagne, where he made friends with Gerard

de Nerval, who was destined to have a great influence on his life.

After leaving school he was intended for the profession of art. But,

like Thackeray, to whom he had many points of resemblance, he had much

less artistic faculty than taste. Gerard introduced him to the circle of

Victor Hugo, and he speedily became one of the most fervent disciples of

the author of _Hernani_. In a red waistcoat which has become historic,

and in a mass of long hair which he continued to wear through life, he

was the foremost of the Hugonic _claque_ at the representation of that

famous play. Young as he was, he soon justified himself as something

more than a hanger-on of great men of letters. In 1830 itself he

produced a volume of verse, and this was followed by _Albertus_, an

audacious poem in the extremest Romantic style, and by a work which did

him both harm and good, _Mademoiselle de Maupin_. In this the most

remarkable qualities of style and artistic conception were accompanied

by a wilful disregard of the proprieties. Before long his unusual

command of style, which was partly natural, partly founded on a wide and

accurate study of the French writers of the sixteenth and early

seventeenth centuries, recommended him to newspaper work, at which he

toiled manfully for the remainder of his life. There was hardly a

department of belles lettres which he did not attempt. He travelled in

Algeria, in Russia, in Turkey, in Spain, in Italy, in England, and wrote

accounts of his travels, which are among the most brilliant ever

printed. He was an assiduous critic of art, of the drama and of

literature, and the only charge which has ever been brought against his

work in this kind is that it is usually too lenient--that his fine

appreciation of even the smallest beauties has made him overlook gross

defects. His work in prose fiction was incessant, in poetry more

intermittent, and all the more perfect. When the Empire established

itself, Gautier, who had no political sympathies, but was, in an

undecided sort of way, a conservative from the aesthetic point of view,

accepted it. But he gave it no active support, beyond continuing to

contribute to the _Moniteur_, and received from it no patronage of any

kind. Nor did he sacrifice the least iota of principle, insisting, in

the very face of _Les Chatiments_, on having his praise of Victor Hugo

inserted in the official journal on pain of his instant resignation. He

led a pleasant but laborious life in one of the suburbs of Paris, with

a household of sisters, daughters, and cats, to all of whom he was

deeply attached. Here he lived through the Prussian siege. On the

restoration of order he manfully grappled with his journalist work

again, all hopes of lucrative appointments having gone with the Empire.

But his health had been broken for some time, and he died in 1872. The

works by which Gautier will be remembered are, in miscellaneous prose, a

remarkable series of studies on curious figures, chiefly of the

seventeenth century, called _Les Grotesques_, and a companion series on

the partakers in the movement of 1830, besides his descriptive books. In

novel writing there must be mentioned an unsurpassed collection of short

tales (the best of which is _La Morte Amoureuse_); _Le Roman de la

Momie_, a clever _tour de force_ reviving ancient Egyptian life; and,

lastly, _Le Capitaine Fracasse_, a novel in the manner of Dumas, but

fashioned in his own inimitable style. In verse, he wrote, besides work

already mentioned, the _Comedie de la Mort_, some miscellaneous poems of

later date, and, finally, the _Emaux et Camees_. In prose he is, as has

been said, the greatest recent master of the ornate style of French, as

Merimee is the greatest master of the simple style. His mastery over

mere language is accompanied by a very fine sense of the total form of

his tales, so that the already-mentioned _Morte Amoureuse_ is one of the

unsurpassable things of literature. In general writing he has a singular

faculty of embalming the most trivial details in the amber of his style,

so that his articles can be read again and again for the mere beauty of

them. As a poet he is specially noteworthy for the same command of form

joined to the same exquisite perfection of language. In _Emaux et

Camees_ especially it is almost impossible to find a flaw; language,

metre, arrangement, are all complete and perfect, and this formal

completeness is further informed by abundant poetic suggestion. The

chief fault, if it be a fault, which can be found with Gautier is, that

he set himself too deliberately against the tendencies of his age, and

excluded too rigidly everything but purely aesthetic subjects of interest

from his contemplation, and from the range of his literary energy.

[Sidenote: Alfred de Musset.]

The most happily-gifted, save one, of the great men of 1830, the weakest

beyond comparison in will, in temperament, in faculty of improving his

natural gifts, has yet to be mentioned. Alfred de Musset was born at

Paris in 1810. His father held a government place of some value; his

elder brother, M. Paul de Musset, was himself a man of letters, and at

the same time deeply attached to his younger brother; and the family,

though after the death of the father their means were not great,

constantly supplied Alfred with a home. He was, fortunately or

unfortunately, thrown, when quite a boy, into the society of Victor

Hugo, the _cenacle_ or inner clique of the Romantic movement. When only

nineteen Musset published a volume of poetry, which showed in him a

poetic talent inferior only to Hugo's own, and, indeed, not so much

inferior as different. These _Contes d'Espagne et d'Italie_ were quickly

followed up by a volume entitled _Un Spectacle dans un Fauteuil_, and

Musset became famous. Unfortunately for him, he became intimate with

George Sand, and the result was a journey to Italy, from which he

returned equally broken in health and in heart. His temperament was of

almost ultra-poetic excitability, and he had a positively morbid

incapacity for undertaking any useful employment, whether it was in

itself congenial or no. Thus he refused a well-paid and agreeable

position in the French embassy at Madrid; and though he had written

admirable prose tales for his own pleasure, he was either unwilling or

unable to write them under a regular commission. As he grew older he

unfortunately became addicted to the constant and excessive use of

stimulants. He was elected to the Academy in 1852, but produced little

of value thereafter, and died in 1857. Alfred de Musset's work,

notwithstanding his comparatively short life and his want of regular

energy, is not inconsiderable in amount, and in quality is of the

highest merit and interest. His poems, its most important item, are

deficient in strictly formal merit. He is a very careless versifier and

rhymer, and his choice of language is far from exquisite. He has,

however, a wonderful note of genuine passion, somewhat of the Byronic

kind, but quite independent in species, and entirely free from the

falsetto which spoils so much of Byron's work. Besides this his lyrics

are, in what may be called 'song-quality,' scarcely to be surpassed.

_Les Nuits_, a series of meditative poems in the form of dialogues

between the poet and his muse on nights in the month of May, August,

October, and December; _Rolla_, an extravagant but powerful tale of the

_maladie du siecle_; the addresses to Lamartine and to Malibran, and a

few more poems, yield to no work of our time in genuine, original, and

passionate music. Next to his poems in subject, though not in merit, may

be ranked the prose _Confession d'un Enfant du Siecle_. His prose tales,

_Emmeline_, _Frederic et Bernerette_, etc., are of great merit, but

inferior relatively to his poems, and to his remarkable dramas. These

latter are among the most original work of the century. It was some time

before they commended themselves to audiences in France, but they have

long won their true position. They are of very various kinds. Some, and

perhaps the happiest, are of the class called, in French, _proverbes_,

dramatic illustrations, that is to say, of some common saying, _Il ne

faut jurer de rien: Il faut qu'une porte soit ouverte ou fermee_, etc.

The grace and delicacy of these, the ingenuity with which the story is

adapted to the moral, the abundant wit (for wit is one of Musset's most

prominent characteristics) which illustrates and pervades them, make

them unique in literature. Others, such as _Les Caprices de Marianne_,

_Le Chandelier_, are regular comedies, admitting, as against the

classical tradition, that a comedy may end ill; and others, as

_Lorenzaccio_, nearly attain to the dignity of the historic play. The

dramatic instinct in Musset was very strong, and may, perhaps, be said

to have exceeded in volume, originality, and variety, if not in

intensity, the purely poetical. Altogether, Musset is the most

remarkable instance in French literature, and one of the most remarkable

in the literature of Europe, of merely natural genius, hardly at all

developed by study, and not assisted in the least by critical power and

a strong will. What, perhaps, distinguished him most is the singular

conjunction of the most fervid passion and the most touching lyrical

'cry' with the finest wit, and with unusual dramatic ability.

[Sidenote: Influence of the Romantic Leaders.]

These eight sum up whatever is greatest and most influential in the

generation of 1830. Victor Hugo gave direction and leading to the

movement, identified it with his own masterly and commanding genius,

furnished it, at brief intervals, with consummate examples. Sainte-Beuve

supplied it with the necessary basis of an immense comparative

erudition, by which he was enabled to disengage and to exhibit to those

who run the true principles of literary criticism, and to point the

younger generation to the sources of a richer vocabulary, a more

flexible and highly-coloured style, a more cosmopolitan appreciation.

Alexandre Dumas, with less strictly literary virtue than any other of

the group, occupied the important vantage grounds of the theatre and the

lending library in the Romantic interest. Balzac, equalling the others

in the range of his field, added the special example of a minute

psychological analysis, and of the most untiring labour. George Sand

taught the secret of utilising to the utmost the passing currents of

personal and popular sentiment and thought. Merimee, the master least

followed, supplied, in the first place, the necessary warning against a

too enthusiastic following of school models; and, in the second, himself

held up a model of prose style of severity and exactness equal to the

finest examples of the classical school, yet possessing to the full the

romantic merits of versatile adaptability, of glowing colour, of direct

and fearless phrase. Gautier exhibited, on the one hand, a model of

absolute perfection in formal poetry, the workmanship of a gem or a

Greek vase; on the other, the model of a prose style so flexible as to

serve the most ordinary purposes, so richly equipped as to be equal to

any emergency, and yet, in its most elaborate condition, worthy to rank

with his own verse. Lastly, again as an outsider (a position which he

shares in the group with Merimee, though in very different fashion),

Musset brought the most natural and unaffected tears and laughter by

turns, to correct the too scholastic and literary character of the

movement, and to show how the most perfectly artistic effect could be

produced with the least apparatus of formal study or preparation.

Under the influence partly of these men, and directly exercised by them,

partly of the general movement of which they were the leaders and

exponents, the literature of France has developed itself for the rest of

the century. It remains to give a brief sketch of its principal

ornaments during that time. Many names, whose work is intrinsically of

all but the highest interest and merit, will have to be rapidly

dispatched, but their chief achievements and their significance in the

general march can at least be indicated.

[Sidenote: Minor Poets of 1830.]

At the head of the poets of this minor band has to be mentioned

Millevoye, who might, perhaps with equal or greater appropriateness,

have found a place in the preceding book. He is chiefly remarkable as

the author of one charming piece of sentimental verse, _La Chute des

Feuilles_; and as the occasion of an immortal criticism of

Sainte-Beuve's, 'Il se trouve dans les trois quarts des hommes un poete

qui meurt jeune tandis que l'homme survit.' The peculiarity of Millevoye

and his happiness was that he did not survive the death of the poet in

him, but died at the age of thirty-four. Except the piece just

mentioned, he wrote little of value, and his total work is not large.

But he may be described as a simpler, a somewhat less harmonious, but a

less tautologous Lamartine, to whom the gods were kind in allowing him

to die young. A curious contrast to Millevoye is furnished by his

contemporary, Ulric Guttinguer. Guttinguer was born in 1785, and, like

Nodier, he joined himself frankly to the Romantic movement, and was

looked up to as a senior by its more active promoters. Like Millevoye,

he has to rest his fame almost entirely on one piece, the verses

beginning, 'Ils ont dit: l'amour passe et sa flamme est rapide;' but,

unlike him, he lived to a great age, and was a tolerably fertile

producer. By the side of these two poets ranks Marceline

Desbordes-Valmore, who shares, with Louise Labe and Marie de France, the

first rank among the poetesses of her country. Madame Desbordes-Valmore

was born in 1787, and died in 1859. Her first volume of poems was

published in 1819, and, as in all the verse of this time, the note of

sentiment dominates. She continued to publish volumes at intervals until

1843, and another was added after her death. Great sweetness and pathos,

with a total absence of affectation, distinguish her work. Perhaps her

best piece is the charming song, in a kind of irregular rondeau form,

_S'il avait su_. Jean Polonius, whose real name was Labenski, was a

Russian, who contributed frequently to the _Annales Romantiques_, and

subsequently published two volumes of French poetry. Emile and Antoni

Deschamps were the translators of the Romantic movement. Antoni

accomplished a complete translation of Dante, Emile translated from

English, German, and Italian poets indifferently. They also published

original poems together, and separately. Madame Tastu was also a

translator, or rather a paraphraser, and an author of original poems of

a sentimental kind. Lastly, Jean Reboul, a native of Nimes, and born in

a humble situation, deserves a place among these.

Three poets deserving of all but the first rank, and belonging to the

generation of 1830 itself, require each a somewhat longer notice.

[Sidenote: Alfred de Vigny.]

Alfred de Vigny was born at Loches, on the 27th of March, 1799. He was a

man of rank, and his marriage in 1826 with an Englishwoman of wealth

gave him independence. He left the army, in which he had served for some

years, in 1828, and spent the rest of his life, until his death in 1864,

in literary ease. He had been for some time a member of the Academy. His

poetical career was peculiar. Between 1821 and 1829 he produced a small

number of poems of the most exquisite finish, which at once attained the

popularity they deserved, and were repeatedly reprinted. But for

thirty-five years he published hardly anything else in verse, his

_Poemes Philosophiques_ not appearing (at least as a volume) until after

his death. Yet he was by no means idle. He had written and published in

1826 the prose romance of _Cinq Mars_, and he followed this up, though

at considerable intervals, with others, as well as with dramas, of which

_Chatterton_ is the best and best known. He also translated _Othello_

and _The Merchant of Venice_. Alfred de Vigny may perhaps be best

described as a link between Andre Chenier and the Romantic poets. He is

not much of a lyrist, his best and most famous poems (_Moise_, _Eloa_,

_Dolorida_) being in Alexandrines, and the general form of his verse

inclines to that of the eighteenth-century elegy, while it has much of

the classical (not pseudo-classical) proportion and grace of Chenier.

But his language, and in part his versification, are romantic, though

quieter in style than those of most of his companions, whom it must be

remembered he for the most part forestalled. In _Moise_ much of what has

been called Victor Hugo's 'science of names' is anticipated, as well as

his large manner of landscape and declamation. _Eloa_ suggests rather

Lamartine, but a Lamartine with his weakness replaced by strength, while

_Dolorida_ has a strong flavour of Musset. The remarkable thing is that

in each case the peculiarities of the poet to whom Vigny has been

compared were not fully developed until after he wrote, and that

therefore he has the merit of originality. It is probable, however,

that, exquisite as his poetical power was, it lacked range, and that he,

having the rare faculty of discerning this, designedly limited his

production. The best of the posthumous poems already mentioned are fully

worthy of his earlier ones, but they display no new faculty.

[Sidenote: Auguste Barbier.]

If Alfred de Vigny is a poet of few books, Auguste Barbier is a poet of

one. Born in 1805, Barbier never formed part of the Romantic circle,

properly so called, but he shared to the full its inspiring influence.

He began by an historical novel of no great merit, but the revolution of

1830 served as the occasion of his _Iambes_, a series of extraordinarily

brilliant and vigorous satires, both political and social. The most

famous of all these is _La Curee_, a description of the ignoble scramble

for place and profit under the new Orleanist government. No satirical

work in modern days has had greater success, and few have deserved it

more; the weight and polish of the verse being altogether admirable.

Satire is, however, a vein which it is very difficult to work for any

length of time with any novelty, as may be seen sufficiently from the

fact that the works of all the best satirists, ancient and modern, are

contained in a very small compass. Barbier endeavoured to secure the

necessary variety of subjects by going to Italy in _Il Pianto_, and to

England in _Lazare_, but without success, though both contain many

examples of the nervous and splendid verse in which he excels. During

the last forty years of his life he wrote much, and he was elected to

the Academy in 1869, but _Les Iambes_ will remain his title to fame.

[Sidenote: Gerard de Nerval.]