CHAPTER VIII

TRANSITION TO THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

The spiritual life was interpreted from within by Fenelon. The facts

of the moral world, as seen in society, were studied, analysed, and

portrayed by La Bruyere and Saint-Simon.

JEAN DE LA BRUYERE (1645-96), a Parisian of the _bourgeoisie_,

appointed preceptor in history to the grandson of the great Conde,

saw with the keen eyes of a disenchanted observer the spectacle of

seventeenth-century society. In 1688, appended to his translation

of the Characters of Theophrastus, appeared his only important work,

_Les Caracteres ou les Moeurs de ce Siecle_; revised and enlarged

editions followed, until the ninth was published in 1696. "I restore

to the public," he wrote, "what the public lent me." In a series of

sixteen chapters, each consisting of detached paragraphs, his

studies of human life and of the social environment are presented

in the form of maxims, reflections, observations, portraits. For the

maxims a recent model lay before him in the little volume of La

Rochefoucauld; portraits, for which the romances of Mlle. de Scudery

had created a taste, had been exhibited in a collection formed by

Mlle. de Montpensier--the growth of her _salon_--in collaboration

with Segrais (_Divers Portraits_, 1659). Aware of his mastery as a

painter of character, La Bruyere added largely to the number of his

portraits in the later editions. Keys, professing to identify his

character-sketches with living persons, enhanced the interest

excited by the work; but in many instances La Bruyere aims at

presenting a type rather than an individual, a type which had been

individualised by his observation of actual persons.

A profound or an original thinker he was not. Incapable of employing

base means to attain worldly success, his honourable failure left

a certain bitterness in his spirit; he regarded the life around him

as a looker-on, who enjoyed the spectacle, and enjoyed also to note

the infirmities of those who took part in the game which he had

declined. He is neither a determined pessimist, nor did he see

realities through a roseate veil; he neither thinks basely of human

nature nor in a heroic fashion: he studies its weakness with a view,

he declares, to reformation, but actually, perhaps, more in the way

of an observer than of a moral teacher. He is before all else a

"naturalist," a naturalist with a sufficient field for investigation,

though the life of the provinces and that of the fields (save in their

more obvious aspect of mournful toil) lie beyond his sphere. The value

of his criticisms of men and manners arises partly from the fact that

he is not pledged to a system, that he can take up various points

of view, and express the results of many moods of mind. Now he is

severe, and again he is indulgent; now he appears almost a cynic,

and presently we find that his heart is tender; now he is grave, and

in a moment mirthful; while for every purpose and in every mood he

has irony at his command. He divines the working of the passions with

a fine intelligence, and is a master in noting every outward betrayal

or indication of the hidden processes of the heart.

The successive chapters deal with the intellect and authorship,

personal merit, women, the heart, society and conversation, the gifts

of fortune, the town, the court, men in high station, the King and

commonwealth, the nature of man, judgments and criticism, fashion,

customs, the pulpit; and under each head are grouped, without formal

system, those notes on life and studies of society that had gradually

accumulated in the author's mind. A final chapter, "Des Esprits

Forts," expresses a vague spiritual philosophy, which probably was

not insincere, and which at least served to commend the mundane

portion of his book to pious readers. The special attraction of the

whole lies in its variety. A volume merely of maxims would have been

too rigid, too oracular for such a versatile spirit as that of La

Bruyere. "Different things," he says, "are thought out by different

methods, and explained by diverse expressions, it may be by a sentence,

an argument, a metaphor or some other figure, a parallel, a simple

comparison, a complete fact, a single feature, by description, or

by portraiture." His book contains all these, and his style

corresponds with the variety of matter and method--a style, as

Voltaire justly characterises it, rapid, concise, nervous,

picturesque. "Among all the different modes in which a single thought

may be expressed," wrote La Bruyere, "only one is correct." To find

this exact expression he sometimes over-labours his style, and

searches the vocabulary too curiously for the most striking word.

In his desire for animation the periodic structure of sentence yields

to one of interruptions, suspensions, and surprises. He is at once

a moralist and a virtuoso in the literary art.

The greater part of Saint-Simon's life and the composition of his

_Memoires_ belong to the eighteenth century; but his mind was moulded

during his early years, and retained its form and lineaments. He may

be regarded as a belated representative of the great age of Louis

XIV. If he belongs in some degree to the newer age by virtue of his

sense that political reform was needed, his designs of political

reform were derived from the past rather than pointed towards the

future. LOUIS DE ROUVRAY, DUC DE SAINT-SIMON, was born at Versailles

in 1675. He cherished the belief that his ancestry could be traced

to Charlemagne. His father, a page of Louis XIII., had been named

a duke and peer of France in 1635; from his father descended to the

son a devotion to the memory of Louis XIII., and a passionate

attachment to the dignity of his own order.

Saint-Simon's education was narrow, but he acquired some Latin, and

was a diligent reader of French history. In 1691 he was presented

to the King and was enrolled as a soldier in the musketeers. He

purchased by-and-by what we should now call the colonelcy of a cavalry

regiment, but was ill-pleased with the system which had transformed

a feudal army into one where birth and rank were subjected to official

control; and in 1702, when others received promotion and he was passed

over, he sent in his resignation. Having made a fortunate and happy

marriage, Saint-Simon was almost constantly at Versailles until the

death of the King, and obtained the most intimate acquaintance with

what he terms the mechanics of the court. He had many grievances

against Louis XIV., chief among them the insult shown to the nobility

in the King's legitimatising his natural offspring; and he justly

regarded Madame de Maintenon as his enemy.

The death of the Duc de Bourgogne, to whose party he belonged, was

a blow to Saint-Simon's hopes; but the Regent remained his friend.

He helped, on a diplomatic mission to Spain, to negotiate the marriage

of Louis XV.; yet still was on fire with indignation caused by the

wrongs of the dukes and peers, whom he regarded as entitled on

historical grounds to form the great council of the monarchy, and

almost as rightful partners in the supreme power. His political life

closed in 1723 with the death of the Regent. He lived in retirement

at his chateau of La Ferte-Vidame, sorrowfully surviving his wife

and his sons. In Paris, at the age of eighty (1755), Saint-Simon died.

When nineteen years old, reading Bassompierre's _Memoires_ in a

soldier's hour of leisure, he conceived the idea of recording his

own experiences, and the _Memoires_ of Saint-Simon were begun. During

later years, in the camp or at the court, notes accumulated in his

hands, but the definitive form which they took was not determined

until, in his retirement at La Ferte-Vidame, the _Journal_ of Dangeau

came into his hands. Dangeau's _Journal_ is dry, colourless,

passionless, without insight and without art; but it is a

well-informed and an exact chronicle, extending over the years from

1684 to 1720. Saint-Simon found it "d'une fadeur a faire vomir"; its

servility towards the King and Madame de Maintenon enraged him; but

it exhibited facts in an orderly sequence; it might serve as a guide

and a clue among his own reminiscences; on the basis of Dangeau's

literal transcript of occurrences he might weave his own brilliant

recitals and passionate presentations of character. Thus

Saint-Simon's _Memoires_ came to be written.

He himself saw much, and his eye had a demonic power of observation;

nothing escaped his vision, and his passions enabled him to penetrate

through what he saw to its secret meanings. He had gathered

information from those who knew the mysteries of the palace and the

court; great persons, court ladies, even valets and waiting-women,

had been sought and searched to satisfy his insatiable curiosity.

It is true that the passions which often lit up the truth sometimes

obscured it; any gossip discreditable to those whom he hated was

welcome to him; he confesses that he did not pique himself on his

impartiality, and it is certain that he did not always verify details.

Nevertheless he did not consciously falsify facts; he had a sense

of the honour of a gentleman; his spirit was serious, and his feeling

of duty and of religion was sincere. Without his impetuosity, his

violence, his exaggerations, we might not have had his vividness,

like that of life itself, his incomparable portraits, more often

inspired by hatred than by love, his minuteness and his breadth of

style, the phrases which ineffaceably brand his victims, the lyrical

outcry of triumph over enemies of his order. His style is the large

style of seventeenth-century prose, but alive with words that sparkle

and gleam, words sometimes created by himself to express the intensity

of his imagination.

The _Memoires_, the final preparation of which was the work of his

elder years, cover the period from 1691 to 1723. His manuscripts were

bequeathed to his cousin, the Bishop of Metz; a lawsuit arose with

Saint-Simon's creditors, and in the end the papers were buried among

the public archives. Considerable fragments saw the light before the

close of the eighteenth century, but it was not until 1829-31 that

a true _editio princeps_, substantially correct, was published. The

violences and irregularities of Saint-Simon's style offered no

obstacle to the admiration of readers at a time when the romantic

movement was dominant. He was hailed as the Tacitus of French history,

and had his manner something more of habitual concentration the

comparison would not be unjust.

The eighteenth century may be said to have begun before the year 1701

with the quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns. If we can speak

of any one idea as dominant during the age of the philosophers, it

is the idea of human progress. Through an academic disputation that

idea emerged to the light. At first a religious question was

complicated with a question relating to art; afterwards the religious

question was replaced by one of philosophy. As early as 1657,

Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin, turned pietist after a youth of licence,

maintained in theory, as well as by the examples of his unreadable

epic poems, that Christian heroism and Christian faith afforded

material for imaginative handling more suitable to a Christian poet

than the history and fables of antiquity. Boileau, in the third

_chant_ of his _Art Poetique_, replied--the mysteries of the

Christian faith are too solemn, too awful, to be tricked out to gratify

the fancy.

Desmarets dying, bequeathed his contention to CHARLES PERRAULT

(1628-1703), who had burlesqued the _AEneid_, written light and

fragile pieces of verse, and occupied himself as a dilettante in

patristic and historical studies. In 1687, after various skirmishes

between partisans on either side, the quarrel assumed a new importance.

The King had recovered after a painful operation; it was a moment

for gratulation. Perrault, at a sitting of the Academy, read his poem

_Le Siecle de Louis le Grand_, in which the revolt against the

classical tyranny was formulated, and contemporary authors were

glorified at the expense of the poets of antiquity. Boileau murmured,

indignant; Racine offered ironical commendations; other

Academicians patriotically applauded their own praises.

Light-feathered epigrams sped to and fro.

Fontenelle, in his _Discours sur l'Eglogue_ and a _Digression sur

les Anciens et les Modernes_, widened the field of debate. Were trees

in ancient days taller than those in our own fields? If not, why may

not modern men equal Homer, Plato, and Demosthenes? "Nothing checks

the progress of things, nothing confines the intelligence so much

as admiration of the ancients." Genius is bestowed by Nature on every

age, but knowledge grows from generation to generation. In his

dialogues entitled the _Parallele des Anciens et des Modernes_

(1688-97), Perrault maintained that in art, in science, in literature,

the law of the human mind is a law of progress; that we are the true

ancients of the earth, wise with inherited science, more exact in

reasoning, more refined in psychological distinctions, raised to a

higher plane by Christianity, by the invention of printing, and by

the favour of a great monarch. La Fontaine in his charming _Epitre_

to Huet, La Bruyere in his _Caracteres_, Boileau in his ill-tempered

_Reflexions sur Longin_, rallied the supporters of classicism.

Gradually the fires smouldered or were assuaged; Boileau and Perrault

were reconciled.

Perrault, if he did not honour antiquity in classical forms, paid

a homage to popular tradition in his delightful _Contes de ma Mere

l'Oie_ (if, indeed, the tales be his), which have been a joy to

generations of children. With inferior art, Madame d'Aulnoy added

to the golden treasury for the young. When, fifteen or twenty years

after the earlier war, a new campaign began between the Ancients and

the Moderns, the philosophical discussion of the idea of progress

had separated itself from the literary quarrel. But in the tiltings

of Lamotte-Houdart, the champion of the moderns, against a

well-equipped female knight, the learned Madame Dacier--indignant

at Lamotte's _Iliade_, recast in the eighteenth-century taste--a new

question was raised, and one of significance for the eighteenth

century--that of the relative merits of prose and verse.

Lamotte, a writer of comedy, tragedy, opera, fables, eclogues, odes,

maintained that the highest literary form is prose, and he versified

none the less. The age was indeed an age of prose--an age when the

_salons_ discussed the latest discovery in science, the latest

doctrine in philosophy or politics. Its imaginative enthusiasm

passed over from art to speculation, and what may be called the poetry

of the eighteenth century is to be found less in its odes or dramas

or elegies than in the hopes and visions which gathered about that

idea of human progress emerging from a literary discussion, idle,

perhaps, in appearance, but in its inner significance no unfitting

inauguration of an era which looked to the future rather than to the

past.

BERNARD LE BOVIER DE FONTENELLE (1657-1757), a son of Corneille's

sister, whose intervention in the quarrel of Ancients and Moderns

turned the discussion in the direction of philosophy, belongs to both

the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. In the hundred years

which made up his life, there was indeed time for a second Fontenelle

to develop from the first. The first Fontenelle, satirised as the

Cydias of La Bruyere, "un compose du pedant et du precieux," was an

aspirant poet, without vision, without passion, who tried to

compensate his deficiencies by artificial elegances of style. The

origin of hissing is maliciously dated by Racine from his tragedy

_Aspar_. His operas fluttered before they fell; his _Eglogues_ had

not life enough to flutter. The _Dialogues des Morts_ (1683) is a

young writer's effort to be clever by paradox, an effort to show his

wit by incongruous juxtapositions, and a cynical levelling of great

reputations. But there was another Fontenelle, the untrammelled

disciple of Descartes, a man of universal interests, passionless,

but curious for all knowledge, an assimilator of new ideas, a

dissolver of old beliefs, an intermediary between science and the

world of fashion, a discreet insinuator of doubts, who smiled but

never condescended to laugh, an intelligence supple, subtle, and

untiring.

In 1686 he published his _Entretiens sur la Pluralite des Mondes_,

evening conversations between an astronomer and a marchioness,

half-scientific, half-gallant, learned coquetries with science, for

which he asked no more serious attention than a novel might require,

while he communicated the theories of Descartes and the discoveries

of Galileo, suggested that science is our safest way to truth, and

that truth at best is not absolute but relative to the human

understanding. The _Histoire des Oracles_, in which the cargo of Dutch

erudition that loaded his original by Van Dale is skilfully lightened,

glided to the edge of theological storm. Fontenelle would show that

the pagan oracles were not delivered by demons, and did not cease

at the coming of Jesus Christ; innocent opinions, but apt to

illustrate the origins and growth of superstitions, from which we

too may not be wholly free in spite of all our advantages of true

religion and sound philosophy. Of course God's chosen people are not

like unguided Greeks or Romans; and yet human beings are much the

same in all times and places. The Jesuit Baltus scented heresy, and

Fontenelle was very ready to admit that the devil was a prophet, since

Father Baltus wished it so to be, and held the opinion to be orthodox.

Appointed perpetual secretary of the _Academie des Sciences_ in 1697,

Fontenelle pronounced during forty years the panegyrics of those who

had been its members. These _Eloges des Academiciens_ are

masterpieces in a difficult art, luminous, dignified, generous

without ostentation, plain without poverty of thought or expression.

The discreet Fontenelle loved tranquillity--"If I had my hand full

of truths, I should take good care before I opened it." He never lost

a friend, acting on two prudent maxims, "Everything is possible,"

and "Every one is right." "It is not a heart," said Madame de Tencin,

"which you have in your breast; it is a brain." It was a kindly brain,

which could be for a moment courageous. And thus it was possible for

him to enter his hundredth year, still interested in ideas, still

tranquil and alert.

A great arsenal for the uses of eighteenth-century philosophy was

constructed and stored by PIERRE BAYLE (1647-1706) in his

_Dictionnaire Historique et Critique_, of which the first edition

was published in 1697. Science, which found its popular interpreter

in Fontenelle, was a region hardly entered by Bayle; the general

history of Europe, from the close of the mediaeval period, and

especially the records in every age of mythologies, religions,

theologies, philosophies, formed his province, and it was one of wide

extent. Born in 1647, son of a Protestant pastor, educated by Jesuits,

converted by them and reconverted, professor of philosophy at Sedan,

a fugitive to Rotterdam, professor there of history and philosophy,

deprived of his position for unorthodox opinions, Bayle found rest

not in cessation from toil, but in the research of a sceptical scholar,

peaceably and endlessly pursued.

His early zeal of proselytism languished and expired. In its place

came a boundless curiosity, a penetrating sagacity. His vast

accumulations of knowledge were like those of the students of the

Renaissance. The tendencies of his intellect anticipate the

tendencies of the eighteenth century, but with him scepticism had

not become ambitious or dogmatic. He followed tranquilly where reason

and research led, and saw no cause why religion and morals more than

any other subjects should not be submitted to the scrutiny of rational

inquiry. Since men have held all beliefs, and are more prone to error

than apt to find the truth, why should any opinions be held sacred?

Let us ascertain and expose the facts. In doing so, we shall learn

the lesson of universal tolerance; and if the principle of authority

in matters of religion be gently sapped, can this be considered an

evil? Morals, which have their foundation in the human understanding,

remain, though all theologies may be in doubt. If the idea of

Providence be a superstition, why should not man guide his life by

good sense and moderation? Bayle did not attack existing beliefs with

the battering-ram: he quietly removed a stone here and a stone there

from the foundations. If he is aggressive, it is by means of a tranquil

irony. The errors of human-kind are full of curious interest; the

disputes of theologians are both curious and amusing; the moral

licences of men and women are singular and often diverting. Why not

instruct and entertain our minds with the facts of the world?

The instruction is delivered by Bayle in the dense and sometimes heavy

columns of his text; the entertainment will be found in the rambling

gossip, interspersed with illuminating ideas, of his notes. Almost

every eminent writer of the eighteenth century was a debtor to Bayle's

Dictionary. He kept his contemporaries informed of all that was added

to knowledge in his periodical publication, _Nouvelles de la

Republique des Lettres_ (begun in 1684). He called himself a

cloud-compeller: "My gift is to create doubts; but they are no more

than doubts." Yet there is light, if not warmth, in such a genius

for criticism as his; and it was light not only for France, but for

Europe.

BOOK THE FOURTH

_THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY_

CHAPTER I

MEMOIRS AND HISTORY--POETRY--THE THEATRE--THE NOVEL

I

The literature of the second half of the seventeenth century was

monarchical, Christian, classical. The eighteenth century was to

lose the spirit of classical art while retaining many of its forms,

to overthrow the domination of the Church, to destroy the monarchy.

It was an age not of great art but of militant ideas, which more and

more came to utilise art as their vehicle. Political speculation,

criticism, science, sceptical philosophy invaded literature. The

influence of England--of English free-thinkers, political writers,

men of science, essayists, novelists, poets--replaced the influence

of Italy and Spain, and for long that of the models of ancient Greece

and Rome. The century of the philosophers was eminently social and

mundane; the _salons_ revived; a new preciosity came into fashion;

but as time went on the _salons_ became rather the mart of ideas

philosophical and scientific than of the daintinesses of letters and

of art. Journalism developed, and thought tended to action, applied

itself directly to public life. While the work of destructive

criticism proceeded, the bases of a moral reconstruction were laid;

the free play of intellect was succeeded by a great enfranchisement

of the passions; the work of Voltaire was followed by the work of

Rousseau.

Before the close of the reign of Louis XIV. the old order of things

had suffered a decline. War, famine, public debt, oppressive taxation

had discredited the monarchy. A dull hypocrisy hardly disguised the

gross licentiousness of the times. The revocation of the edict of

Nantes had exiled those Protestants who formed a substantial part

of the moral conscience of France. The bitter feud of brother-bishops,

Bossuet and Fenelon, hurling defiance against each other for the love

of God, had made religion a theme for mockery. Port-Royal, once the

refuge of serious faith and strict morals, was destroyed. The bull

_Unigenitus_ expelled the spiritual element from French Christianity,

reduced the clergy to a state of intellectual impotence, and made

a lasting breach between them and the better part of the laity.

Meanwhile the scientific movement had been proving its power. Science

had come to fill the place left void by religion. The period of the

Regency (1715-23) is one of transition from the past to the newer

age, shameless in morals, degraded in art; the period of Voltaire

followed, when intellect sapped and mined the old beliefs; with

Rousseau came the explosion of sentiment and an effort towards

reconstruction. A great political and social revolution closed the

century.

The life of the time is seen in many memoirs, and in the correspondence

of many distinguished persons, both men and women. Among the former

the _Memoires_ of Mdlle. Delaunay, afterwards Mme. de Staal

(1684-1750) are remarkable for the vein of melancholy, subdued by

irony, underlying a style which is formed for fine and clear exactness.

The Duchesse du Maine's lady-in-waiting, daughter of a poor painter,

but educated with care, drew delicately in her literary art with an

etcher's tool, and her hand was controlled by a spirit which had in

it something of the Stoic. The _Souvenirs_ of Mme. de Caylus

(1673-1729), niece of Mme. de Maintenon--"jamais de creature plus

seduisante," says Saint-Simon--give pictures of the court, charming

in their naivete, grace, and mirth. Mme. d'Epinay, designing to tell

the story of her own life, disguised as a piece of fiction, became

in her _Memoires_ the chronicler of the manners of her time. The

society of the _salons_ and the men of letters is depicted in the

Memoirs of Marmontel. These are but examples from an abundant

literature constantly augmented to the days of Mme. de Campan and

Mme. Roland. The general aspect of the social world in the mid-century

is presented by the historian Duclos (1704-1772) in his

_Considerations sur les Moeurs de ce Siecle_, and with reparation

for his previous neglect of the part played in society by women in

his _Memoires pour servir a l'Histoire du XVIIIe Siecle_.

As much or more may be learnt from the letter-writers as from the

writers of memoirs. If Voltaire did not take the first place by his

correspondence, so vast, so luminous, so comprehensive, it might

justly be assigned to his friend Mme. du Deffand (1697-1780), whose

lucid intelligence perceived everything, whose disabused heart

seemed detached until old age from all that most interested her

understanding. For clear good sense we turn to the Marquise de Lambert,

for bourgeois worth and kindliness to Mme. Geoffrin, for passion which

kindles the page to Mdlle. de Lespinasse, for sensibility and romance

ripening to political ardour and strenuous convictions to Mme. Roland.

Among the philosophers Diderot pours the torrent, clear or turbid,

of his genius into his correspondence with affluent improvisation;

D'Alembert is grave, temperate, lucid; the Abbe Galiani, the little

Machiavel--"a pantomime from head to foot," said Diderot--the gay

Neapolitan punchinello, given the freedom of Paris, that "capital

of curiosity," is at once wit, cynic, thinker, scholar, and buffoon.

These, again, are but examples from an epistolary swarm.

While the eighteenth century thus mirrored itself in memoirs and

letters, it did not forget the life of past centuries. The studious

Benedictines, who had already accomplished much, continued their

erudite labours. Nicolas Freret (1688-1749), taking all antiquity

for his province, illuminated the study of chronology, geography,

sciences, arts, language, religion. Daniel and Velly narrated the

history of France. Vertot (1655-1735), with little of the spirit of

historical fidelity, displayed certain gifts of an historical artist.

The school of scepticism was represented by the Jesuit Hardouin, who

doubted the authenticity of all records of the past except those of

his own numismatic treasures. Questions as to the principles of

historical certitude occupied the Academy of Inscriptions during

many sittings from 1720 onwards, and produced a body of important

studies. While the Physiocrats were endeavouring to demonstrate that

there is a natural order in social circumstances, a philosophy of

history, which bound the ages together, was developed in the writings

of Montesquieu and Turgot, if not of Voltaire. The _Esprit des Lois_,

the _Essai sur les Moeurs_, and Turgot's discourses, delivered in

1750 at the Sorbonne, contributed in different degrees and ways

towards a new and profounder conception of the life of societies or

of humanity. By Turgot for the first time the idea of progress was

accepted as the ruling principle of history. It cannot be denied that,

as regards the sciences of inorganic nature, he more than foreshadowed

Comte's theory of the three states, theological, metaphysical, and

positive, through which the mind of humanity is alleged to have

travelled.

In the second half of the century, history tended to become

doctrinaire, aggressive, declamatory--a pamphlet in the form of

treatise or narrative. Morelly wrote in the interest of socialistic

ideas, which correspond to those of modern collectivism. Mably,

inspired at first by enthusiasm for the ancient republics, advanced

to a communistic creed. Condorcet, as the century drew towards a close,

bringing together the ideas of economists and historians, traced

human progress through the past, and uttered ardent prophecies of

human perfectibility in the future.

II

Poetry other than dramatic grew in the eighteenth century upon a

shallow soil. The more serious and the more ardent mind of the time

was occupied with science, the study of nature, the study of society,

philosophical speculation, the criticism of religion, of government,

and of social arrangements. The old basis of belief upon which reposed

the great art of the preceding century had given way. The analytic

intellect distrusted the imagination. The conventions of a brilliant

society were unfavourable to the contemplative mood of high poetry.

The tyranny of the "rules" remained when the enthusiasm which found

guidance and a safeguard in the rules had departed. The language

itself had lost in richness, variety, harmony, and colour; it was

an admirable instrument for the intellect, but was less apt to render

sensations and passions; when employed for the loftier purposes of

art it tended to the oratorical, with something of over-emphasis and

strain. The contention of La Motte-Houdart that verse denaturalises

and deforms ideas, expresses the faith of the time, and La Motte's

own cold and laboured odes did not tend to refute his theory.

Chaulieu (1639-1720), the "poete de la bonne compagnie," an

anacreontic senior, patriarch of pleasure, survived the classical

century, and sang his songs of facile, epicurean delights; his friend

La Fare (1644-1712) survived, but slept and ate more than a songster

should. Anthony Hamilton (1646?-1720) wrote graceful verses, and in

his brilliant _Memoires de la Vie du Comte de Gramont_ became the

historian of the amorous intrigues of the court of Charles II.

Jean-Baptiste Rousseau (1670-1741), who in the days of Mme. de

Maintenon's authority had in his sacred _Cantates_ been pious by

command, recompensed himself by retailing unbecoming epigrams--and

for epigram he had a genuine gift--to the Society of the Temple. He

manufactured odes with skill in the mechanism of verse, and carefully

secured the fine disorder required in that form of art by factitious

enthusiasm and the abuse of mythology and allegory. When Rousseau

died, Lefranc de Pompignan mourned for "le premier chantre du monde,"

reborn as the Orpheus of France, in a poem which alone of Lefranc's

numerous productions--and by virtue of two stanzas--has not that

sanctity ascribed to them by Voltaire, the sanctity which forbids

any one to touch them. Why name their fellows and successors in the

eighteenth-century art of writing poems without poetry?

Louis Racine (1692-1763), son of the author of _Athalie_, in his

versified discourses on _La Grace_ and _La Religion_ was devout and

edifying, but with an edification which promotes slumber. If a poet

in sympathy with the philosophers desired to edify, he described the

phenomena of nature as Saint-Lambert (1716-1803) did in his

_Saisons_--"the only work of our century," Voltaire assured the

author, "which will reach posterity." To describe meant to draw out

the inventory of nature's charms with an eye not on the object but

on the page of the Encyclopaedia, and to avoid the indecency of naming

anything in direct and simple speech. The _Seasons_ of Saint-Lambert

were followed by the _Months_ (_Mois_) of Roucher (1745-94)--"the

most beautiful poetic shipwreck of the century," said the malicious

Rivarol--and by the _Jardins_ of Delille (1738-1813). When Delille

translated the _Georgics_ he was saluted by Voltaire as the Abbe

Virgil.[1] The _salons_ heard him with rapture recite his verses as

from the tripod of inspiration. He was the favourite of

Marie-Antoinette. Aged and blind, he was a third with Homer and Milton.

In death they crowned his forehead, and for three days the mourning

crowd gazed on all that remained of their great poet. And yet Delille's

_Jardins_ is no better than a patchwork of carpet-gardening, in which

the flowers are theatrical paper-flowers. If anything lives from the

descriptive poetry of the eighteenth century, it is a few detached

lines from the writings of Lemierre.

[Footnote 1: Or was this Rivarol's ironical jest?]

The successor of J.-B. Rousseau in the grand ode was Ecouchard Lebrun

(1729-1807), rival of Pindar. All he wanted to equal Pindar was some

forgetfulness of self, some warmth, some genuine enthusiasm, some

harmony, a touch of genius; a certain dignity of imagination he

exhibits in his best moments. If we say that he honoured Buffon and

was the friend of Andre Chenier, we have said in his praise that which

gives him the highest distinction; yet it may be added that if he

often falsified the ode, he, like Rousseau, excelled in epigram. It

was not the great lyric but _le petit lyrisme_ which blossomed and

ran to seed in the thin poetic soil. The singers of fragile loves

and trivial pleasures are often charming, and as often they are merely

frivolous or merely depraved. Grecourt; Piron; Bernard, the curled

and powdered Anacreon; Bernis, Voltaire's "Babet la Bouquetiere,"

King Frederick's poet of "sterile abundance"; Dorat, who could

flutter at times with an airy grace; Bertin, born in the tropics,

and with the heat of the senses in his verse; Parny, an estray in

Paris from the palms and fountains of the Isle Bourbon, the "dear

Tibullus" of Voltaire--what a swarm of butterflies, soiled or

shining!

If two or three poets deserve to be distinguished from the rest, one

is surely JEAN-BAPTISTE-LOUIS GRESSET (1709-77), whose parrot

_Vert-Vert_, instructed by the pious Sisters, demoralised by the

boatmen of the Loire, still edifies and scandalises the lover of happy

badinage in verse; one is the young and unfortunate

NICOLAS-JOSEPH-LAURENT GILBERT (1751-80), less unfortunate and less

gifted than the legend makes him, yet luckless enough and embittered

enough to become the satirist of Academicians and philosophers and

the society which had scorned his muse; and the third is JEAN-PIERRE

CLARIS DE FLORIAN (1755-94), the amiable fabulist, who, lacking La

Fontaine's lyric genius, fine harmonies, and penetrating good sense,

yet can tell a story with pleasant ease, and draw a moral with gentle

propriety.

In every poetic form, except comedy, that he attempted, Voltaire

stands high among his contemporaries; they give us a measure of his

range and excellence. But the two greatest poets of the eighteenth

century wrote in prose. Its philosophical poet was the naturalist

Buffon; its supreme lyrist was the author of _La Nouvelle Heloise_.

III

In the history of French tragedy only one name of importance--that

of Crebillon--is to be found in the interval between Racine and

Voltaire. Campistron feebly, Danchet formally and awkwardly,

imitated Racine; Duche followed him in sacred tragedy; La

Grange-Chancel (author of the _Philippiques_, directed against the

Regent) followed him in tragedies on classical subjects. If any piece

deserves to be distinguished above the rest, it is the _Manlius_

(1698) of La Fosse, a work--suggestive rather of Corneille than of

Racine--which was founded on the _Venice Preserved_ of Otway. The

art of Racine languished in inferior hands. The eighteenth century,

while preserving its form, thought to reanimate it by the provocatives

of scenic decoration and more rapid and more convulsive action.

PROSPER JOLYOT DE CREBILLON (1674-1762), a diligent reader of

seventeenth-century romances, transported the devices of romance,

its horrors, its pathetic incidents, its disguises, its surprises,

its discoveries, into the theatre, and substituted a tragedy of

violent situations for the tragedy of character. His _Rhadamiste et

Zenobie_ (1711), which has an air of Corneillean grandeur and heroism,

notwithstanding a plot so complicated that it is difficult to follow,

was received with unmeasured enthusiasm. To be atrocious within the

rules was to create a new and thrilling sensation. Torrents of tears

flowed for the unhappy heroine of La Motte's _Ines de Castro_ (1723),

secretly married to the Prince of Portugal, and pardoned only when

the fatal poison is in her veins. Voltaire's effort to renovate

classical tragedy was that of a writer who loved the theatre, first

for its own sake, afterwards as an instrument for influencing public

opinion, who conceived tragedy aright as the presentation of

character and passion seen in action. His art suffered from his

extreme facility, from his inability (except it be in _Zaire_) to

attain dramatic self-detachment, from the desire to conquer his

spectators in the readiest ways, by striking situations, or, at a

later date, by the rhetoric of philosophical doctrine and sentiment.

There is no one, with all his faults, to set beside Voltaire. Piron

and Gresset are remembered, not by their tragedies, but each by a

single comedy. Marmontel's Memoirs live; his tales have a faded glory;

as for his tragedies, the ingenious stage asp which hissed as the

curtain fell on his _Cleopatre_, was a sound critic of their

mediocrity. Lemierre, with some theatrical talent, wrote ill; as the

love of spectacle grew, he permitted his William Tell to shoot the

apple, and his widow of Malabar to die in flames upon the stage.

Saurin in _Spartacus_ (1760) declaimed and dissertated in the manner

of Voltaire. De Belloy at a lucky moment showed, in his _Siege de

Calais_ (1765), that rhetorical patriotism had survived the Seven

Years' War; he was supposed to have founded that national, historic

drama which the President Henault had projected; but with the _Siege

de Calais_ the national drama rose and fell. Laharpe (1739-1803) was

the latest writer who compounded classical tragedy according to the

approved recipe. In the last quarter of the century Shakespeare became

known to the French public through the translation of Letourneur.

Before that translation began to appear, JEAN-FRANCOIS DUCIS

(1733-1816), the patron of whose imagination was his "Saint

Guillaume" of Stratford, though he knew no English, had in a fashion

presented Hamlet (1769) and Romeo and Juliet to his countrymen; King

Lear, Macbeth, King John, Othello (1792) followed. But Ducis came

a generation too soon for a true Shakespearian rendering; simple and

heroic in his character as a man, he belonged to an age of philosophers

and sentimentalists, an age of "virtue" and "nature." Shakespeare's

translation is as strange as that of his own Bottom. Ophelia is the

daughter of King Claudius; the Queen dies by her own hand; old Montague

is a Montague-Ugolino who has devoured his sons; Malcolm is believed

to be a mountaineer's child; Lear is borne on the stage, sleeping

on a bed of roses, that he may behold a sunrise; Hedelmone (Desdemona)

is no longer Othello's wife; Iago disappears; Desdemona's

handkerchief is not among the properties; and Juliet's lark is

voiceless. Eighteenth-century tragedy is indeed a city of tombs.

Comedy made some amends. Before the appearance of Regnard, the actor

Baron, Moliere's favourite pupil, had given a lively play--_L'Homme

a bonne Fortune_ (1686). JEAN-FRANCOIS REGNARD (1655-1709) escaped

from his corsair captors and slavery at Algiers, made his sorry

company of knaves and fools acceptable by virtue of inexhaustible

gaiety, bright fantasy, and the liveliest of comic styles. His

_Joueur_ (1696) is a scapegrace, possessed by the passion of gaming,

whose love of Angelique is a devotion to her dowry, but he will console

himself for lost love by another throw of the dice. His _Legataire

Universel_, greedy, old, and ailing, is surrounded by pitiless rogues,

yet the curtain falls on a general reconciliation. Regnard's morals

may be doubtful, but his mirth is unquestionable.

Dancourt (1661-1725), with a far less happy style, had a truer power

of observation, and as quick an instinct for theatrical effects; he

exhibits in the _Chevalier a la Mode_ and the _Bourgeoises a la Mode_,

if not with exact fidelity, at least in telling caricature, the

struggle of classes in the society around him, wealth ambitious for

rank, rank prepared to sell itself for wealth. The same spirit of

cynical gaiety inspires the _Double Veuvage_ of Charles Riviere

Dufresny (1655?-1724), where husband and wife, each disappointed in

false tidings of the other's death, exhibit transports of feigned

joy on meeting, and assist in the marriage of their respective lovers,

each to accomplish the vexation of the other. Among such plays as

these the _Turcaret_ (1709) of Lesage appears as the creation of a

type, and a type which verifies itself as drawn with a realism powerful

and unfaltering.

In striking contrast with Lesage's bold and bitter satire are the

comedies of Marivaux, delicate indeed in observation of life and

character, skilled in their exploration of the byways of the heart,

brilliant in fantasy, subtle in sentiment, lightly touched by the

sensuality of the day. Philippe Nericault Destouches (1680-1754) had

the ambition to revive the comedy of character, and by its means to

read moral lessons on the stage; unfortunately what he lacked was

comic power. In his most celebrated piece, _Le Glorieux_, he returns

to the theme treated by Dancourt of the struggle between the ruined

noblesse and the aspiring middle class. Pathos and something of

romance are added to comedy.

Already those tendencies which were to produce the so-called _comedie

larmoyante_ were at work. Piron (1689-1773), who regarded it with

hostility, undesignedly assisted in its creation; _Les Fils Ingrats_,

named afterwards _L'Ecole des Peres_, given in 1728, the story of

a too generous father of ungrateful children, a play designed for

mirth, was in fact fitter to draw tears than to excite laughter.

Piron's special gift, however, was for satire. In _La Metromanie_

he smiles at the folly of the aspirant poet with all his cherished

illusions; yet young Damis with his folly, the innocent error of a

generous spirit, wins a sympathy to which the duller representatives

of good sense can make no claim. It is satire also which gives whatever

comic force it possesses to the one comedy of Gresset that is not

forgotten: _Le Mechant_ (1747), a disloyal comrade, would steal the

heart of his friend's beloved; soubrette and valet conspire to expose

the traitor; but Cleon, who loves mischief in the spirit of sport,

though unmasked, is little disconcerted. Brilliant in lines and

speeches, _Le Mechant_ is defective in its composition as a whole.

The decline in a feeling for composition, for art, for the severity

of outline, was accompanied by a development of the emotional or

sentimental element in drama. As sensibility was quickened, and

wealth and ease increased, little things came to be felt as important.

The middle class advanced in prosperity and power. Why should emperors

and kings, queens and princesses occupy the stage? Why neglect the

joys and griefs of every-day domestic life? If "nature" and "virtue"

were to be honoured, why not seek them here? Man, the new philosophy

taught, is essentially good; human nature is of itself inclined to

virtue; if it strays through force of circumstance into vice or folly,

should not its errors be viewed with sympathy, with tenderness? Thus

comedy grew serious, and tragedy put off its exalted airs; the genius

of tragedy and the genius of comedy were wedded, and the _comedie

larmoyante_, which might be named more correctly the bourgeois drama,

was born of this union.

In the plays of NIVELLE DE LA CHAUSEE (1692-1754) the new type is

already formed. The relations of wife and husband, of father and child,

form the theme of all his plays. In _Melanide_, father and son,

unrecognised, are rivals in love; the wife and mother, supposed to

be dead, is discovered; the husband returns to her arms, and is

reconciled to his son. It is the victory of nature and of innate

goodness; comic intention and comic power are wholly absent. La

Chausee's morals are those of an optimist; but those modern domestic

tragedies, the ethics of which do not err by over-sanguine views of

human nature, may trace their ancestry to _Melanide_.

For such serious comedy or bourgeois drama the appropriate vehicle,

so Diderot maintained, is prose. Diderot, among his many gifts, did

not possess a talent for dramatic writing. But as a critic his

influence was considerable. Midway between tragedy and comedy he

perceived a place for the serious drama; to right and left, on either

side of the centre, were spaces for forms approximating, the one to

tragedy, the other to comedy. The hybrid species of tragi-comedy he

wholly condemned; each genre, as he conceived it, is a unity

containing its own principle of life. The function of the theatre

is less to represent character fully formed than to study the natural

history of character, to exhibit the environments which determine

character. Its purpose is to moralise life, and the chief means of

moralisation is that effusive sensibility which is the outflow of

the inherent goodness of human nature.

Diderot attempted to justify his theory by examples, and only proved

his own incapacity as a writer for the stage. His friend SEDAINE

(1719-97) was more fortunate. Of the bourgeois drama of the eighteenth

century, _Le Philosophe sans le savoir_ alone survives. It is little

more than a domestic anecdote rendered dramatic, but it has life and

reality. The merchant Vanderk's daughter is to be married; but on

the same day his son, resenting an insult to his father, must expose

his life in a duel. Old Antoine, the intendant, would take his young

master's place of danger; Antoine's daughter, Victorine,

half-unawares has given her heart to the gallant duellist. Hopes and

fears, joy and grief contend in the Vanderk habitation. Sedaine made

a true capture of a little province of nature. When Mercier

(1740-1814) tried to write in the same vein, his "nature" was that

of declamatory sentiment imposed upon trivial incidents.

Beaumarchais, in his earlier pieces, was tearful and romantic;

happily he repented him of his lugubrious sentiment, and restored

to France its old gaiety in the _Barbier de Seville_ and the inimitable

_Mariage de Figaro_; but amid the mirth of _Figaro_ can be heard the

detonation of approaching revolutionary conflict.

IV

The history of the novel in the eighteenth century corresponds with

the general movement of ideas; the novel begins as art, and proceeds

to propagandism. ALAIN-RENE LESAGE, born at Sarzeau, near Vannes,

in 1668, belongs as much to the seventeenth as to the eighteenth

century. His life of nearly eighty years (died 1747) was the

honourable life of a bourgeois, who was also a man of genius, and

who maintained his own independence and that of his wife and children

by the steadfast diligence of his pen. He was no passionate reformer,

no preacher of ideas; he observed life and human nature with shrewd

common-sense, seeing men in general as creatures in whom good and

evil are mixed; his imagination combined and vivified all he had

observed; and he recorded the results of his study of the world in

a style admirable for naturalness and ease, though these were not

attained without the careful practice of literary art.

From translations for the readers of fiction and for the theatre,

he advanced to free adaptations, and from these to work which may

be called truly original. Directed by the Abbe de Lyonne to Spanish

literature, he endeavoured in his early plays to preserve what was

brilliant and ingenious in the works of Spanish dramatists, and to

avoid what was strained and extravagant. In his _Crispin Rival de

son Maitre_ (1707), in which the roguish valet aspires to carry off

his master's betrothed and her fortune, he borrows only the idea of

Mendoza's play; the conduct of the action, the dialogue, the

characters are his own. His prose story of the same year, _Le Diable

Boiteux_, owes but little to the suggestion derived from Guevara;

it is, in fact, more nearly related to the _Caracteres_ of La Bruyere;

when Asmodeus discloses what had been hidden under the house-roofs

of the city, a succession of various human types are presented, and,

as in the case of La Bruyere, contemporaries attempted to identify

these with actual living persons.

In his remarkable satiric comedy _Turcaret_, and in his realistic

novel _Gil Blas_, Lesage enters into full possession of his own genius.

_Turcaret, ou le Financier_, was completed early in 1708; the efforts

of the financiers to hinder its performance served in the end to

enhance its brief and brilliant success. The pitiless amasser of

wealth, Turcaret, is himself the dupe of a coquette, who in her turn

is the victim of a more contemptible swindler. Lesage, presenting

a fragment of the manners and morals of his day, keeps us in

exceedingly ill company, but the comic force of the play lightens

the oppression of its repulsive characters. It is the first

masterpiece of the eighteenth-century _comedie de moeurs_.

Much of Lesage's dramatic work was produced only for the hour or the

moment--pieces thrown off, sometimes with brilliance and wit, for

the _Theatres de la Foire_, where farces, vaudevilles, and comic opera

were popular. They served to pay for the bread of his household. His

great comedy, however, a comedy in a hundred acts, is the story of

_Gil Blas_. Its composition was part of his employment during many

years; the first volumes appeared in 1715, the last volume in 1735.

The question of a Spanish original for the story is settled--there

was none; but from Spanish fiction and from Spanish history Lesage

borrowed what suited his purpose, without in any way compromising

his originality. To the picaresque tales (and among these may be noted

a distant precursor of _Gil Blas_ in the _Francion_ of Charles Sorel)

he added his own humanity, and in place of a series of vulgar

adventures we are given a broad picture of social life; the comedy

of manners and intrigue grows, as the author proceeds, into a comedy

of character, and to this something of the historical novel is added.

The unity of the book is found in the person of Gil Blas himself:

he is far from being a hero, but he is capable of receiving all

impressions; he is an excellent observer of life, his temper is bright,

he is free from ill-nature; we meet in him a pleasant companion, and

accompany him with sympathy through the amusing Odyssey of his varied

career.

As a moralist Lesage is the reverse of severe, but he is far from

being base. "All is easy and good-humoured," wrote Sir Walter Scott,

"gay, light, and lively; even the cavern of the robbers is illuminated

with a ray of that wit with which Lesage enlightens his whole narrative.

It is a work which renders the reader pleased with himself and with

mankind, where faults are placed before him in the light of follies

rather than vices, and where misfortunes are so interwoven with the

ludicrous that we laugh in the very act of sympathising with them."

In the earlier portion incidents preponderate over character; in the

close, some signs of the writer's fatigue appear. Of Lesage's other

tales and translations, _Le Bachelier de Salamanque_ (1736) takes

deservedly the highest rank.

With PIERRE CARLET DE CHAMBLAIN DE MARIVAUX (1688-1763) the novel

ceases to be primarily a study of manners or a romance of adventures;

it becomes an analysis of passions to which manners and adventures

are subordinate. As a journalist he may be said to have proceeded

from Addison; by his novels he prepared the way for Richardson and

for Rousseau. His early travesties of Homer and of Fenelon's

_Telemaque_ seem to indicate a tendency towards realism, but

Marivaux's realism took the form not so much of observation of society

in its breadth and variety as of psychological analysis. If he did

not know the broad highway of the heart, he traversed many of its

secret paths. His was a feminine spirit, delicate, fragile, curious,

unconcerned about general ideas; and yet, while untiring in his

anatomy of the passions, he was not truly passionate; his heart may

be said to have been in his head.

In the opening of the eighteenth century there was a revival of

preciosity, which Moliere had never really killed, and in the _salon_

of Madame de Lambert, Marivaux may have learned something of his

metaphysics of love and something of his subtleties or affectations

of style. He anticipates the sensibility of the later part of the

century; but sensibility with Marivaux is not profound, and it is

relieved by intellectual vivacity. His conception of love has in it

not a little of mere gallantry. Like later eighteenth-century writers,

he at once exalts "virtue," and indulges his fancy in a licence which

does not tend towards good morals or manners. His _Vie de Marianne_

(1731-41), which occupied him during many years, is a picture of

social life, and a study, sometimes infinitely subtle, of the emotions

of his heroine; her genius for coquetry is finely allied to her maiden

pride; the hypocrite, M. de Climal--old angel fallen--is a new variety

of the family of Tartufe. _Le Paysan Parvenu_ (1735-36), which tells

of the successes of one whom women favour, is on a lower level of

art and of morals. Both novels were left unfinished; and while both

attract, they also repel, and finally weary the reader.[2] Their

influence was considerable in converting the romance of adventures

into the romance of emotional incident and analysis.

[Footnote 2: The twelfth part of _Marianne_ is by Madam Riccoboni.

Only five parts of the _Paysan_ are by Marivaux.]

The work of Marivaux for the stage is more important than his work

in prose fiction. His comedy has been described as the tragedy of

Racine transposed, with love leading to marriage, not to death. Love

is his central theme--sometimes in conflict with self-love--and

women are his protagonists. He discovers passion in its germ, and

traces it through its shy developments. His plays are little romances

handled in dramatic fashion; each records some delicate adventure

of the heart. He wrote much for the Comedie-Italienne, where he did

not suffer from the tyranny of rules and models, and where his graceful

fancy had free play. Of his large repertoire, the most admirable

pieces are _Le Jeu de l'Amour et du Hasard_ (1730) and _Les Fausses

Confidences_ (1732). In the former the heroine and her chambermaid

exchange costumes; the hero and his valet make a like exchange; yet

love is not misled, and heroine and hero find each other through their

disguises. In _Les Fausses Confidences_ the young widow Araminte is

won to a second love in spite of her resolve, and becomes the happy

victim of her own tender heart and of the devices of her assailants.

The "marivaudage" of Marivaux is sometimes a refined and novel mode

of expressing delicate shades and half-shades of feeling; sometimes

an over-refined or over-subtle attempt to express ingenuities of

sentiment, and the result is then frigid, pretentious, or pedantic.

No one excelled him in the art, described by Voltaire, of weighing

flies' eggs in gossamer scales.

The Abbe A.-F. PREVOST D'EXILES (1697-1763) is remembered by a single

tale of rare power and beauty, _Manon Lescaut_, but his work in

literature was voluminous and varied. Having deserted his

Benedictine monastery in 1728, he led for a time an irregular and

wandering life in England and Holland; then returning to Paris, he

gained a living by swift and ceaseless production for the booksellers.

In his journal, _Le Pour et le Contre_, he did much to inform his

countrymen respecting English literature, and among his translations

are those of Richardson's _Pamela_, _Sir Charles Grandison_, and

_Clarissa Harlowe_. Many of his novels are melodramatic narratives

of romantic adventure, having a certain kinship to our later romances

of Anne Radcliffe and Matthew Gregory Lewis, in which horror and pity,

blood and tears abound. Sometimes, however, when he writes of passion,

we feel that he is engaged in no sport of the imagination, but

transcribing the impulsive speech of his own tumultuous heart. The

_Memoires d'un Homme de Qualite_, _Cleveland_, _Le Doyen de

Killerine_ are tragic narratives, in which love is the presiding

power.

_Manon Lescaut_, which appeared in 1731, as an episode of the first

of these, is a tale of fatal and irresistible passion. The heroine

is divided in heart between her mundane tastes for luxury and her

love for the Chevalier des Grieux. He, knowing her inconstancy and

infirmity, yet cannot escape from the tyranny of the spell which has

subdued him; his whole life is absorbed and lost in his devotion to

Manon, and he is with her in the American wilds at the moment of her

piteous death. The admirable literary style of _Manon Lescaut_ is

unfelt and disappears, so directly does it bring us into contact with

the motions of a human heart.

In the second half of the eighteenth century, philosophy, on the one

hand, invaded the novel and the short tale; on the other hand it was

invaded by a flood of sentiment. An irritated and irritating

sensuality could accommodate itself either to sentiment or to

philosophy. Voltaire's tales are, in narrative form, criticisms of

belief or opinion which scintillate with ironic wit. His disciple,

Marmontel, would "render virtue amiable" in his _Contes Moraux_

(1761), and cure the ravage of passion with a canary's song. His more

ambitious _Belisaire_ seems to a modern reader a masterpiece in the

_genre ennuyeux_. His _Incas_ is exotic without colour or credibility.

Florian, with little skill, imitated the _Incas_ and _Telemaque_,

or was feebly idyllic and conventionally pastoral as a follower of

the Swiss Gessner. Restif de la Bretonne could be gross, corrupt,

declamatory, sentimental, humanitarian in turns or all together.

Three names are eminent--that of Diderot, who flung his good and evil

powers, mingling and fermenting, into his novels as into all else;

that of Rousseau, who interpreted passion, preached its restraints,

depicted the charms of the domestic interior, and presented the

glories of external nature in _La Nouvelle Heloise_; that of Bernardin

de Saint-Pierre, who reaches a hand to Rousseau on the one side, and

on the other to Chateaubriand.

CHAPTER II

MONTESQUIEU--VAUVENARGUES--VOLTAIRE

I

The author of _De l'Esprit des Lois_ was as important in the history

of European speculation as in that of French literature; but

inevitable changes of circumstances and ideas have caused his

influence to wane. His life was one in which the great events were

thoughts. Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de MONTESQUIEU, was born

in 1689 at La Brede, near Bordeaux. After his years of education by

the Oratorians, which left him with something of scepticism in his

intellect, and something of stoicism in his character, he pursued

legal studies, and in 1716 became President of the Parliament of

Bordeaux. The scientific researches of his day attracted him;

investigating anatomy, botany, natural philosophy, the history of

the earth, he came to see man as a portion of nature, or at least

as a creature whose life is largely determined by natural laws. With

a temper of happy serenity, and an admirable balance of faculties,

he was possessed by an eager intellectual curiosity. "I spend my

life," he said, "in examining; everything interests, everything

surprises me."

Nothing, however, interested him so much as the phenomena of human

society; he had no aptitude for metaphysical speculations; his

feeling for literature and art was defective; he honoured the antique

world, but it was the Greek and Latin historians and the ideals of

Roman virtue and patriotism which most deeply moved him. At the same

time he was a man of his own generation, and while essentially serious,

he explored the frivolous side of life, and yielded his imagination

to the licence of the day.

With enough wit and enough wantonness to capture a multitude of

readers, the _Lettres Persanes_ (1721) contain a serious criticism

of French society in the years of the Regency. It matters little that

the idea of the book may have been suggested by the Siamese travellers

of Dufresny's _Amusements_; the treatment is essentially original.

Things Oriental were in fashion--Galland had translated the _Arabian

Nights_ (1704-1708)--and Montesquieu delighted in books of travel

which told of the manners, customs, religions, governments of distant

lands. His Persians, Usbek and Rica, one the more philosophical, the

other the more satirical, visit Europe, inform their friends by letter

of all the aspects of European and especially of French life, and

receive tidings from Persia of affairs of the East, including the

troubles and intrigues of the eunuchs and ladies of the harem. The

spirit of the reaction against the despotism of Louis XIV. is

expressed in Montesquieu's pages; the spirit also of religious

free-thought, and the reaction against ecclesiastical tyranny. A

sense of the dangers impending over society is present, and of the

need of temperate reform. Brilliant, daring, ironical, licentious

as the _Persian Letters_ are, the prevailing tone is that of judicious

moderation; and already something can be discerned of the large views

and wise liberality of the _Esprit des Lois_. The book is valuable

to us still as a document in the social history of the eighteenth

century.

In Paris, Montesquieu formed many distinguished acquaintances, among

others that of Mlle. de Clermont, sister of the Duke de Bourbon.

Perhaps it was in homage to her that he wrote his prose-poem, which

pretends to be a translation from the Greek, _Le Temple de Gnide_

(1725). Its feeling for antiquity is overlaid by the artificialities,

long since faded, of his own day--"naught remains," writes M. Sorel,

"but the faint and subtle perfume of a _sachet_ long hidden in a

_rococo_ cabinet." Although his publications were anonymous,

Montesquieu was elected a member of the Academy in 1728, and almost

immediately after this he quitted France for a long course of travel

throughout Europe, undertaken with the purpose of studying the

manners, institutions, and governments of foreign lands. At Venice

he gained the friendship of Lord Chesterfield, and they arrived

together in England, where for nearly two years Montesquieu remained,

frequently hearing the parliamentary debates, and studying the

principles of English politics in the writings of Locke. His thoughts

on government were deeply influenced by his admiration of the British

constitution with its union of freedom and order attained by a balance

of the various political powers of the State. On Montesquieu's return

to La Brede he occupied himself with that great work which resumes

the observations and meditations of twenty years, the _Esprit des

Lois_. In the history of Rome, which impressed his imagination with

its vast moral, social, and political significance, he found a signal

example of the causes which lead a nation to greatness and the causes

which contribute to its decline. The study made at this point of view

detached itself from the more comprehensive work which he had

undertaken, and in 1734 appeared his _Considerations sur les Causes

de la Grandeur et de la Decadence des Romains_.

Bossuet had dealt nobly with Roman history, but in the spirit of a

theologian expounding the course of Divine Providence in human

affairs. Montesquieu studied the operation of natural causes. His

knowledge, indeed, was incomplete, but it was the knowledge afforded

by the scholarship of his own time. The love of liberty, the patriotic

pride, the military discipline, the education in public spirit

attained by discussion, the national fortitude under reverses, the

support given to peoples against their rulers, the respect for the

religion of conquered tribes and races, the practice of dealing at

one time with only a single hostile power, are pointed out as

contributing to the supremacy of Rome in the ancient world. Its

decadence is explained as the gradual result of its vast overgrowth,

its civil wars, the loss of patriotism among the soldiery engaged

in remote provinces, the inroads of luxury, the proscription of

citizens, the succession of unworthy rulers, the division of the

Empire, the incursion of the barbarians; and in treating this portion

of his subject Montesquieu may be said to be wholly original. A short

_Dialogue de Sylla et d'Eucrate_ may be viewed as a pendant to the

_Considerations_, discussing a fragment of the subject in dramatic

form. Montesquieu's desire to arrive at general truths sometimes led

him to large conclusions resting on too slender a basis of fact; but

the errors in applying his method detract only a little from the

service which he rendered to thought in a treatment of history at

least tending in the direction of philosophic truth.

The whole of his mind--almost the whole of his existence--is embodied

in the _Esprit des Lois_ (1748). It lacks the unity of a ruling idea;

it is deficient in construction, in continuity, in cohesion; much

that it contains has grown obsolete or is obsolescent; yet in the

literature of eighteenth-century thought it takes, perhaps, the

highest place; and it must always be precious as the self-revealment

of a great intellect--swift yet patient, ardent yet temperate,

liberal yet the reverse of revolutionary--an intellect that before

all else loved the light. It lacks unity, because its author's mind

was many-sided, and he would not suppress a portion of himself to

secure a factitious unity. Montesquieu was a student of science, who

believed in the potency of the laws of nature, and he saw that human

society is the product of, or at least is largely modified by, natural

law; he was also a believer in the power of human reason and human

will, an admirer of Roman virtue, a citizen, a patriot, and a reformer.

He would write the natural history of human laws, exhibit the

invariable principles from which they proceed, and reduce the study

of governments to a science; but at the same time he would exhibit

how society acts upon itself; he would warn and he would exhort; he

would help, if possible, to create intelligent and patriotic citizens.

To these intentions we may add another--that of a criticism, touched

with satire, of the contemporary political and social arrangements

of France.

And yet again, Montesquieu was a legist, with some of the curiosity

of an antiquary, not without a pride in his rank, interested in its

origins, and desirous to trace the history of feudal laws and

privileges. The _Esprit des Lois_ is not a doctrinaire exposition

of a theory, but the record of a varied life of thought, in which

there are certain dominant tendencies, but no single absolute idea.

The forms of government, according to Montesquieu, are

three--republic (including both the oligarchical republic and the

democratic), monarchy, despotism. Each of these structural

arrangements requires a principle, a moral spring, to give it force

and action: the popular republic lives by virtue of patriotism, public

spirit, the love of equality; the aristocratic republic lives by the

spirit of moderation among the members of the ruling class; monarchy

lives by the stimulus of honour, the desire of superiority and

distinction; despotism draws its vital force from fear; but each of

these principles may perish through its corruption or excess. The

laws of each country, its criminal and civil codes, its system of

education, its sumptuary regulations, its treatment of the relation

of the sexes, are intimately connected with the form of government,

or rather with the principle which animates that form.

Laws, under the several forms of government, are next considered in

reference to the power of the State for purposes of defence and of

attack. The nature of political liberty is investigated, and the

requisite separation of the legislative, judicial, and

administrative powers is exhibited in the example set forth in the

British constitution. But political freedom must include the liberty

of the individual; the rights of the citizen must be respected and

guaranteed; and, as part of the regulation of individual freedom,

the levying and collection of taxes must be studied.

From this subject Montesquieu passes to his theory, once celebrated,

of the influence of climate and the soil upon the various systems

of legislation, and especially the influence of climate upon the slave

system, the virtual servitude of woman, and the growth of political

despotism. Over against the fatalism of climate and natural

conditions he sets the duty of applying the reason to modify the

influences of external nature by wise institutions. National

character, and the manners and customs which are its direct expression,

if they cannot be altered by laws, must be respected, and something

even of direction or regulation may be attained. Laws in relation

to commerce, to money, to population, to religion, are dealt with

in successive books.

The duty of religious toleration is urged from the point of view of

a statesman, while the discussions of theology are declined. Very

noteworthy is the humble remonstrance to the inquisitors of Spain

and Portugal ascribed to a Jew of eighteen, who is supposed to have

perished in the last _auto-da-fe_. The facts of the civil order are

not to be judged by the laws of the religious order, any more than

the facts of the religious order are to be judged by civil laws. Here

the great treatise might have closed, but Montesquieu adds what may

be styled an historical appendix in his study of the origin and

development of feudal laws. At a time when antiquity was little

regarded, he was an ardent lover of antiquity; at a time when mediaeval

history was ignored, he was a student of the forgotten centuries.

Such in outline is the great work which in large measure modified

the course of eighteenth-century thought. Many of its views have been

superseded; its collections of facts are not critically dealt with;

its ideas often succeed each other without logical sequence; but

Montesquieu may be said to have created a method, if not a science;

he brought the study of jurisprudence and politics, in the widest

sense, into literature, laicising and popularising the whole

subject; he directed history to the investigation of causes; he led

men to feel the greatness of the social institution; and, while

retiring from view behind his work, he could not but exhibit, for

his own day and for ours, the spectacle of a great mind operating

over a vast field in the interests of truth, the spectacle of a great

nature that loved the light, hating despotism, but fearing revolution,

sane, temperate, wisely benevolent. In years tyrannised over by

abstract ideas, his work remained to plead for the concrete and the

historical; among men devoted to the absolute in theory and the

extreme in practice, it remained to justify the relative, to demand

a consideration of circumstances and conditions, to teach men how

large a field of reform lay within the bounds of moderation and good

sense.

The _Esprit des Lois_ was denounced by Jansenists and Jesuits; it

was placed in the Index, but in less than two years twenty-two editions

had appeared, and it was translated into many languages. The author

justified it brilliantly in his _Defense_ of 1750. His later writings

are of small importance. With failing eyesight in his declining years,

he could enjoy the society of friends and the illumination of his

great fame. He died tranquilly (1755) at the age of sixty-six, in

the spirit of a Christian Stoic.

II

The life of society was studied by Montesquieu; the inward life of

the heart was studied by a young moralist, whose premature loss was

lamented with tender passion by Voltaire.

Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de VAUVENARGUES, though neither a thinker

nor a writer of the highest order, attaches us by the beauty of his

character as seen through his half-finished work, more than any other

author of the earlier part of the eighteenth century. He was born

(1715) at Aix, in Provence, received a scanty education, served in

the army during more than ten years, retired with broken health and

found no other employment, lived on modest resources, enjoyed the

acquaintance of the Marquis de Mirabeau and the friendship and high

esteem of Voltaire, and died in 1747, at the early age of thirty-two.

His knowledge of literature hardly extended beyond that of his French

predecessors of the seventeenth century. The chief influences that

reached him came from Pascal, Bossuet, and Fenelon. His learning was

derived from action, from the observation of men, and from

acquaintance with his own heart.

The writings of Vauvenargues are the fragmentary _Introduction a la

Connaissance de l'Esprit Humain_, followed by _Reflexions et

Maximes_ (1746), and a few short pieces of posthumous publication.

He is a moralist, who studies those elements of character which tend

to action, and turns away from metaphysical speculations. His early

faith in Christianity insensibly declined and disappeared, but his

spirit remained religious; he believed in God and immortality, and

he never became a militant philosopher. He thought generously of human

nature, but without extravagant optimism. The reason, acting alone,

he distrusted; he found the source of our highest convictions and

our noblest practice in the emotions, in the heart, in the obscure

depths of character and of nature. Here, indeed, is Vauvenargues'

originality. In an age of ill living, he conceived a worthy ideal

of conduct; in an age tending towards an exaggerated homage to reason,

he honoured the passions: "Great thoughts come from the heart"; "We

owe, perhaps, to the passions the greatest gains of the intellect";

"The passions have taught men reason."

Vauvenargues, with none of the violences of Rousseau's temperament,

none of the excess of his sensibility, by virtue of his recognition

of the potency of nature, of the heart, may be called a precursor

of Rousseau. Into his literary criticism he carries the same

tendencies: it is far from judicial criticism; its merit is that it

is personal and touched with emotion. His total work seems but a

fragment, yet his life had a certain completeness; he knew how to

act, to think, to feel, and after great sufferings, borne with

serenity, he knew how to die.

III

The movement of Voltaire's mind went with that of the general mind

of France. During the first half of the century he was primarily a

man of letters; from about 1750 onwards he was the aggressive

philosopher, the social reformer, using letters as the vehicle of

militant ideas.

Born in Paris in 1694, the son of a notary of good family,

FRANCOIS-MARIE AROUET, who assumed the name VOLTAIRE (probably an

anagram formed from the letters of _Arouet l.j._, that is _le jeune_),

was educated by the Jesuits, and became a precocious versifier of

little pieces in the taste of the time. At an early age he was

introduced to the company of the wits and fine gentlemen who formed

the sceptical and licentious Society of the Temple. Old Arouet

despaired of his son, who was eager for pleasure, and a reluctant

student of the law. A short service in Holland, in the household of

the French ambassador, produced no better result than a fruitless

love-intrigue.

Again in Paris, where he ill endured the tedium of an attorney's office,

Voltaire haunted the theatres and the _salons_, wrote light verse

and indecorous tales, planned his tragedy _OEdipe_, and, inspired

by old M. de Caumartin's enthusiasm for Henri IV., conceived the idea

of his _Henriade_. Suspected of having written defamatory verses

against the Regent, he was banished from the capital, and when

readmitted was for eleven months, on the suspicion of more atrocious

libels, a prisoner in the Bastille. Here he composed--according to

his own declaration, in sleep--the second canto of the _Henriade_,

and completed his _OEdipe_, which was presented with success before

the close of 1718. The prisoner of the Bastille became the favourite

of society, and repaid his aristocratic hosts by the brilliant sallies

of his conversation.

A second tragedy, _Artemire_, afterwards recast as _Mariamne_, was

ill received in its earlier form. Court pensions, the death of his

father, and lucky financial speculations brought Voltaire

independence. He travelled in 1722 to Holland, met Jean-Baptiste

Rousseau on the way, and read aloud for his new acquaintance _Le Pour

et le Contre_, a poem of faith and unfaith--faith in Deism, disbelief

in Christianity. The meeting terminated with untimely wit at

Rousseau's expense and mutual hostility. Unable to obtain the

approbation for printing his epic, afterwards named _La Henriade_,

Voltaire arranged for a secret impression, under the title _La Ligue_,

at Rouen (1723), whence many copies were smuggled into Paris. The

young Queen, Marie Lecszinska, before whom his _Mariamne_ and the

comedy _L'Indiscret_ were presented, favoured Voltaire. His

prospects were bright, when sudden disaster fell. A quarrel in the

theatre with the Chevalier de Rohan, followed by personal violence

at the hands of the Chevalier's bullies, ended for Voltaire, not with

the justice which he demanded, but with his own lodgment in the

Bastille. When released, with orders to quit Paris, he thought of

his acquaintance and admirer Bolingbroke, and lost no time in taking

refuge on English soil.

Voltaire's residence in England extended over three years (1726-29).

Bolingbroke, Peterborough, Chesterfield, Pope, Swift, Gay, Thomson,

Young, Samuel Clarke were among his acquaintances. He discovered the

genius of that semi-barbarian Shakespeare, but found the only

reasonable English tragedy in Addison's "Cato." He admired the epic

power of Milton, and scorned Milton's allegory of Sin and Death. He

found a master of philosophy in Locke. He effected a partial entrance

into the scientific system of Newton. He read with zeal the writings

of those pupils of Bayle, the English Deists. He honoured English

freedom and the spirit of religious toleration. In 1728 the _Henriade_

was published by subscription in London, and brought the author

prodigious praise and not a little pelf. He collected material for

his _Histoire de Charles XII._, and, observing English life and

manners, prepared the _Lettres Philosophiques_, which were to make

the mind of England favourably known to his countrymen.

_Charles XII._, like _La Ligue_, was printed at Rouen, and smuggled

into Paris. The tragedies _Brutus_ and _Eriphyle_, both of which show

the influence of the English drama, were coldly received. Voltaire

rose from his fall, and produced _Zaire_ (1732), a kind of

eighteenth-century French "Othello," which proved a triumph; it was

held that Corneille and Racine had been surpassed. In 1733 a little

work of mingled verse and prose, the _Temple du Gout_, in which recent

and contemporary writers were criticised, gratified the self-esteem

of some, and wounded the vanity of a larger number of his

fellow-authors. The _Lettres Philosophiques sur les Anglais_, which

followed, were condemned by the Parliament to be burnt by the public

executioner. With other audacities of his pen, the storm increased.

Voltaire took shelter (1734) in Champagne, at Cirey, the chateau of

Madame du Chatelet.

Voltaire was forty years of age; Madame, a woman of intellect and

varied culture, was twelve years younger. During fifteen years, when

he was not wandering abroad, Cirey was the home of Voltaire, and Madame

du Chatelet his sympathetic, if sometimes his exacting companion.

To this period belong the dramas _Alzire_, _Zulime_, _L'Enfant

Prodigue_, _Mahomet_, _Merope_, _Nanine_. The divine Emilie was

devoted to science, and Voltaire interpreted the Newtonian

philosophy to France or discussed questions of physics. Many

admirable pieces of verse--ethical essays in the manner of Pope,

lighter poems of occasion, _Le Mondain_, which contrasts the golden

age of simplicity with the much more agreeable age of luxury, and

many besides--were written. Progress was made with the shameless

burlesque on Joan of Arc, _La Pucelle_. In _Zadig_ Voltaire gave the

first example of his sparkling tales in prose. Serious historical

labours occupied him--afterwards to be published--the _Siecle de

Louis XIV._ and the great _Essai sur les Moeurs_. In 1746, with the

support of Madame de Pompadour, he entered the French Academy. The

death of Madame du Chatelet, in 1749, was a cruel blow to Voltaire.

He endeavoured in Paris to find consolation in dramatic efforts,

entering into rivalry with the aged Crebillon.

Among Voltaire's correspondents, when he dwelt at Cirey, was the Crown

Prince of Prussia, a royal _philosophe_ and aspirant French poet.

Royal flatteries were not more grateful to Voltaire than philosophic

and literary flatteries were to Frederick. Personal acquaintance

followed; but Frederick would not receive Madame du Chatelet, and

Voltaire would not desert his companion. Now when Madame was dead,

when the Pompadour ceased from her favours to the poet, when Louis

turned his back in response to a compliment, Frederick was to secure

his philosopher. In July 1750 Voltaire was installed at Berlin. For

a time that city was "the paradise of _philosophes_."

The _Siecle de Louis XIV._ was published next year. Voltaire's

insatiable cupidity, his tricks, his tempers, his vindictiveness,

shown in the _Diatribe du Docteur Akakia_ (an embittered attack on

Maupertuis), alienated the King; when "the orange" of Voltaire's

genius "was sucked" he would "throw away the rind." With unwilling

delays, and the humiliation of an arrest at Frankfort, Voltaire

escaped from the territory of the royal "Solomon" (1753), and

attracted to Switzerland by its spirit of toleration, found himself

in 1755 tenant of the chateau which he named Les Delices, near Geneva,

his "summer palace," and that of Monrion, his "winter palace," in

the neighbourhood of Lausanne. His pen was busy: the tragedy

_L'Orphelin de la Chine_, tales, fugitive verses, the poem on the

earthquake at Lisbon, with its doubtful assertion of Providence as

a slender counterpoise to the certainty of innumerable evils in the

world, pursued one another in varied succession. Still keeping in

his hands Les Delices, he purchased in 1758 the chateau and demesne

of Ferney on French soil, and became a kind of prince and patriarch,

a territorial lord, wisely benevolent to the little community which

he made to flourish around him, and at the same time the intellectual

potentate of Europe.

Never had his brain been more alert and indefatigable. The years from

1760 to 1778 were years of incessant activity. Tragedy, comedy, opera,

epistles, satires, tales in verse, _La Pucelle_,[1] _Le Pauvre

Diable_ (admirable in its malignity), literary criticism, a

commentary on Corneille (published for the benefit of the great

dramatist's grandniece), brilliant tales in prose, the _Essai sur

les Moeurs et l'Esprit des Nations_, the _Histoire de l'Empire de

Russie sous Pierre le Grand_, with other voluminous historical works,

innumerable writings in philosophy, in religious polemics, including

many articles of the _Dictionnaire Philosophique_, in politics, in

jurisprudence, a vast correspondence which extended his influence

over the whole of Europe--these are but a part of the achievement

of a sexagenarian progressing to become an octogenarian.

[Footnote 1: First authorised edition, 1762; surreptitiously printed,

1755.]

His work was before all else a warfare against intolerance and in

favour of free thought. The grand enemy of intellectual liberty

Voltaire saw in the superstition of the Church; his word of command

was short and uncompromising--_Ecrasez l'Infame_. Jean Calas, a

Protestant of Toulouse, falsely accused of the murder of his son,

who was alleged to have been converted to the Roman communion, was

tortured and broken on the wheel. Voltaire, with incredible zeal,

took up the victim's cause, and finally established the dead man's

innocence. Sirven, a Protestant, declared guilty of the murder of

his Roman Catholic daughter, was beggared and banished; Voltaire

succeeded, after eight years, in effecting the reversal of the

sentence. La Barre was tortured and decapitated for alleged impiety.

Voltaire was not strong enough to overpower the French magistracy

supported now by the French monarch. He turned to Frederick with a

request that he would give shelter to a colony of _philosophes_, who

should through the printing-press make a united assault upon

_l'Infame_.

In the early days of 1778, Voltaire, urged by friends, imprudently

consented to visit Paris. His journey was like a regal progress; his

reception in the capital was an overwhelming ovation. In March he

was ailing, but he rose from his bed, was present at a performance

of his _Irene_, and became the hero and the victim of extravagant

popular enthusiasm. In April he eagerly pleaded at the French Academy

for a new dictionary, and undertook himself to superintend the letter

A. In May he was dangerously ill; on the 26th he had the joy of learning

that his efforts to vindicate the memory of the unfortunate Count

Lally were crowned with success. It was Voltaire's last triumph; four

days later, unshriven and unhouseled, he expired. Seldom had such

a coil of electrical energy been lodged within a human brain. His

desire for intellectual activity was a consuming passion. His love

of influence, his love of glory were boundless. Subject to spasms

of intensest rage, capable of malignant trickery to gain his ends,

jealous, mean, irreverent, mendacious, he had yet a heart open to

charity and pity, a zeal for human welfare, a loyalty to his ruling

ideas, and a saving good sense founded upon his swift and clear

perception of reality.

Voltaire's mind has been described as "a chaos of clear ideas." It

is easy to point out the inconsistencies of his opinions, yet certain

dominant thoughts can be distinguished amid the chaos. He believed

in a God; the arrangements of the universe require a designer; the

idea of God is a benefit to society--if He did not exist, He must

be invented. But to suppose that the Deity intervenes in the affairs

of the world is superstition; He rules through general laws--His

executive; He is represented in the heart of man by His

viceroy--conscience. The soul is immortal, and God is just; therefore

let wrong-doers beware. In _L'Histoire de Jenni_ the youthful hero

is perverted by his atheistic associates, and does not fear to murder

his creditor; he is reconverted to theism, and becomes one of the

best men in England. As to the evil which darkens the world, we cannot

understand it; let us not make it worse by vain perplexities; let

us hope that a future life will right the balance of things; and,

meanwhile, let us attend to the counsels of moderation and good sense;

let the narrow bounds of our knowledge at least teach us the lesson

of toleration.

Applied to history, such ideas lead Voltaire, in striking contrast

with Bossuet, to ignore the supernatural, to eliminate the

Providential order, and to seek the explanation of events in human

opinion, in human sentiments, in the influence of great men, even

in the influence of petty accident, the caprice of _sa Majeste le

Hasard_. In the epoch of classical antiquity--which Voltaire

understood ill--man had advanced from barbarism to a condition of

comparative well-being and good sense; in the Christian and mediaeval

period there was a recoil and retrogression; in modern times has begun

a renewed advance. In fixing attention on the _esprit et moeurs_ of

nations--their manners, opinions, institutions, sentiments,

prejudices--Voltaire was original, and rendered most important

service to the study of history. Although his blindness to the

significance of religious phenomena is a grave defect, his historical

scepticism had its uses. As a writer of historical narrative he is

admirably lucid and rapid; nor should the ease of his narration

conceal the fact that he worked laboriously and carefully among

original sources. With his _Charles XII._, his _Pierre le Grand_,

his _Siecle de Louis XIV._, we may class the _Henriade_ as a piece

of history; its imaginative power is not that of an epic, but it is

an interpretation of a fragment of French history in the light of

one generous idea--that of religious toleration.

Filled with destructive passion against the Church, Voltaire, in

affairs of the State, was a conservative. His ideal for France was

an intelligent despotism. But if a conservative, he was one of a

reforming spirit. He pleaded for freedom in the internal trade of

province with province, for legal and administrative uniformity

throughout the whole country, for a reform of the magistracy, for

a milder code of criminal jurisprudence, for attention to public

hygiene. His programme was not ambitious, but it was reasonable, and

his efforts for the general welfare have been justified by time.

As a literary critic he was again conservative. He belonged to the

classical school, and to its least liberal section. He regarded

literary forms as imposed from without on the content of poetry, not

as growing from within; passion and imagination he would reduce to

the strict bounds of uninspired good sense; he placed Virgil above

Homer, and preferred French tragedy to that of ancient Greece; from

his involuntary admiration of Shakespeare he recoiled in alarm; if

he admired Corneille, it was with many reservations. Yet his taste

was less narrow than that of some of his contemporaries; he had a

true feeling for the genius of the French language; he possessed,

after the manner of his nation and his time, _le grand gout_; he

honoured Boileau; he exalted Racine in the highest degree; and, to

the praise of his discernment, it may be said that he discovered

_Athalie_.

The spectacular effects of _Athalie_ impressed Voltaire's

imagination. In his own tragedies, while continuing the

seventeenth-century tradition, he desired to exhibit more striking

situations, to develop more rapid action, to enhance the dramatic

spectacle, to add local colour. His style and speech in the theatre

have the conventional monotonous pomp, the conventional monotonous

grace, without poetic charm, imaginative vision, or those flashes

which spring from passionate genius. When, as was frequently the case,

he wrote for the stage to advocate the cause of an idea, to preach

tolerance or pity, he attained a certain height of eloquence. Whatever

sensibility there was in Voltaire's heart may be discovered in _Zaire_.

_Merope_ has the distinction of being a tragedy from which the passion

of love is absent; its interest rests wholly on maternal affection.

_Tancrede_ is remarkable as an eighteenth-century treatment of the

chivalric life and spirit. The Christian temper of tolerance and

humanity is honoured in _Alzire_.

Voltaire's incomparable gift of satirical wit did not make him a

writer of high comedy: he could be grotesque without lightness or

brightness. But when a sentimental element mingles with the comic,

and almost obscures it, as in _Nanine_ (a dramatised tale derived

from Richardson's _Pamela_), the verse acquires a grace, and certain

scenes an amiable charm. _Nanine_, indeed, though in dramatic form,

lies close to those tales in verse in which Voltaire mingled happily

his wisdom and his wit. "The philosophy of Horace in the language

of La Fontaine, this," writes a critic, "is what we find from time

to time in Voltaire." In his lighter verses of occasion, epigram,

compliment, light mockery, half-playful, half-serious sentiment, he

is often exquisite.

No part of Voltaire's work has suffered so little at the hands of

time as his tales in prose. In his contributions to the satire of

human-kind he learned something from Rabelais, something from Swift.

It is the satire of good sense impatient against folly, and armed

with the darts of wit. Voltaire does not esteem highly the wisdom

of human creatures: they pretend to knowledge beyond their powers;

they kill one another for an hypothesis; they find ingenious reasons

for indulging their base or petty passions; their lives are under

the rule of _sa Majeste le Hasard_. But let us not rage in Timon's

manner against the human race; if the world is not the best of all

possible worlds, it is not wholly evil. Let us be content to mock

at the absurdity of the universe, and at the diverting, if irritating,

follies of its inhabitants. Above all, let us find support in work,

even though we do not see to what it tends; "Il faut cultiver notre

jardin"--such is Voltaire's word, and the final word of Candide. With

light yet effective irony, Voltaire preaches the lesson of good sense.

When bitter, he is still gay; his sad little philosophy of existence

is uttered with an accent of mirth; his art in satirical narrative

is perfect; he is not resigned; he is not enraged; he is indignant,

but at the same time he smiles; there is always the last resource

of blindly cultivating our garden.

In Voltaire's myriad-minded correspondence the whole man may be

found--his fire, his sense, his universal curiosity, his wit, his

malignity, his goodness, his Protean versatility, his ruling ideas;

and one may say that the whole of eighteenth-century Europe presses

into the pages. He is not only the man of letters, the student of

science, the philosopher; he is equally interested in politics, in

social reform, in industry, in agriculture, in political economy,

in philology, and, together with these, in the thousand incidents

of private life.

CHAPTER III

DIDEROT AND THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA--PHILOSOPHERS, ECONOMISTS,

CRITICS--BUFFON

I

"When I recall Diderot," wrote his friend Meister, "the immense

variety of his ideas, the amazing multiplicity of his knowledge, the

rapid flight, the warmth, the impetuous tumult of his imagination,

all the charm and all the disorder of his conversation, I venture

to liken his character to Nature herself, exactly as he used to

conceive her--rich, fertile, abounding in germs of every sort ...

without any dominating principle, without a master, and without a

God." No image more suitable could be found; and his works resemble

the man, in their richness, their fertility, their variety, and their

disorder. A great writer we can hardly call him, for he has left no

body of coherent thought, no piece of finished art; but he was the

greatest of literary improvisators.

DENIS DIDEROT, son of a worthy cutler of Langres, was born in 1713.

Educated by the Jesuits, he turned away from the regular professions,

and supported himself and his ill-chosen wife by hack-work for the

Paris booksellers--translations, philosophical essays directed

against revealed religion, stories written to suit the appetite for

garbage. From deism he advanced to atheism. Arguing in favour of the

relativity of human knowledge in his _Lettre sur les Aveugles_ (1749),

he puts his plea for atheism into the lips of an English man of science,

but the device did not save him from an imprisonment of three months.

In 1745 the booksellers, contemplating a translation of the English

"Cyclopaedia" of Chambers, applied to Diderot for assistance. He

readily undertook the task, but could not be satisfied with a mere

translation. In a Prospectus (1750) he indicated the design of the

"Encyclopaedia" as he conceived it: the order and connection of the

various branches of knowledge should be set forth, and in dictionary

form the several sciences, liberal arts, and mechanical arts should

be dealt with by experts. The homage which he rendered to science

expressed the mind of his time; in the honour paid to mechanical toil

and industry he was in advance of his age, and may be called an

organiser of modern democracy. At his request JEAN LE ROND D'ALEMBERT

(1717-83) undertook the direction of the mathematical articles, and

wrote the _Discours Preliminaire_, which classified the departments

of human knowledge on the basis of Bacon's conceptions, and gave a

survey of intellectual progress. It was welcomed with warm applause.

The aid of Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Buffon, Turgot, Quesnay,

and a host of less illustrious writers was secured; but the vast

enterprise excited the alarms of the ecclesiastical party; the

Jesuits were active in rivalry and opposition; Rousseau deserted and

became an enemy; D'Alembert, timid, and a lover of peace, withdrew.

In 1759 the privilege of publication was revoked, but the Government

did not enforce its own decree. Through all difficulties and dangers

Diderot held his ground. One day he wrote a fragment of the history

of philosophy; the next he was in a workshop examining the

construction of some machine: nothing was too great or too small for

his audacity or his patience. To achieve the work, tact was needed

as well as courage; at times he condescended to disguise his real

opinions, striving to weather the storm by yielding to it. In 1765

his gigantic labours were substantially accomplished, though the

last plates of the _Encyclopedie_ were not issued until 1772. When

all was finished, the scientific movement of the century was

methodised and popularised; a barrier against the invasion of the

past was erected; the rationalist philosophy, with all its truths

and all its errors, its knowledge and its ignorance, had obtained

its _Summa_.

But, besides this co-operative work, Diderot did much, and in many

directions, single-handed, flinging out his thoughts with ardent

haste, and often leaving what he had written to the mercies of chance;

a prodigal sower of good and evil seed. Several of his most remarkable

pieces came to light, as it were, by accident, and long after his

death. His novel _La Religieuse_--influenced to some extent by

Richardson, whom he superstitiously admired--is a repulsive exposure

of conventual life as it appeared to him, and of its moral disorder.

_Jacques le Fataliste_, in which the manner is coarsely imitated from

Sterne, a book ill-composed and often malodorous, contains, among

its heterogeneous tales, one celebrated narrative, the _Histoire de

Mme. de la Pommeraye_, relating a woman's base revenge on a faithless

lover. If anything of Diderot's can be named a masterpiece, it is

certainly _Le Neveu de Rameau_, a satire and a character-study of

the parasite, thrown into the form of dialogue, which he handled with

brilliant success; it remained unknown until the appearance of a

German version (1805), made by Goethe from a manuscript copy.

In his _Salons_, Diderot elevated and enlarged the criticism of the

pictorial art in France. His eye for colour and for contour was

admirable; but it is less the technique of paintings that he studies

than the subjects, the ideas, and the moral significance. Such

criticism may be condemned as literary rather than artistic; it was,

however, new and instructive, and did much to quicken the public taste.

Diderot pleaded for a return to nature in the theatre; for a bourgeois

drama, domestic tragedy and serious comedy, touched with pathos,

studied from real life, and inspired by a moral purpose; for the

presentation on the stage of "conditions" rather than individual

types--that is, of character as modified by social environments and

the habits which they produce. He maintained that the actor should

rather possess than be possessed by his theme, should be the master

rather than the slave of his sensibility.

The examples of dramatic art which Diderot gave in his own plays,

the _Pere de Famille_ and the _Fils Naturel_, are poor affectations

of a style supposed to be natural, and are patently doctrinaire in

their design, laboured developments of a moral thesis. One piece in

which he paints himself, _Est-il bon? Est-il mechant?_ and this alone,

falls little short of being admirable, and yet it fails of true

success.

A coherent system of thought cannot be found in Diderot's writings,

but they are pregnant with ideas. He is deist, pantheist, atheist;

he is a materialist--one, however, who conceives matter not as inert,

but quick with force. He is edifying and sincere in his morality;

and presently his morals become the doctrines of an anarchical licence.

All the ideas of his age struggle within him, and are never reduced

to unity or harmony; light is never separate in his nature from heat,

and light and warmth together give rise to thoughts which are

sometimes the anticipations of scientific genius; he almost leaps

forward to some of the conclusions of Darwin. His great powers and

his incessant energy were not directed to worldly prosperity. Diderot

was never rich. The Empress Catherine of Russia magnificently

purchased his library, and entrusted him with the books, as her

librarian, providing a salary which to him was wealth. He travelled

to St. Petersburg to thank her in person for her generous and delicate

gift. But her imperial generosity was not greater than his own; he

was always ready to lavish the treasures of his knowledge and thought

in the service of others; no small fragment of his work was a free

gift to his friends, and passed under their name; Holbach and Raynal

were among his debtors.

His correspondence presents a vivid image of the man and of the group

of philosophers to which he belonged; the letters addressed to Mlle.

Volland, to whom he was devotedly attached during many years, are

frank betrayals of his character and his life. Her loss saddened his

last days, but the days of sorrow were few. In July 1784, Diderot

died. His reputation and influence were from time to time enhanced

by posthumous publications. Other writers of his century impressed

their own personalities more distinctly and powerfully upon society;

no other writer mingled his genius so completely with external things,

or responded so fully and variously to the stimulus of the spirit

of his age.

II

The French philosophical movement--the "Illumination"--of the

eighteenth century, proceeds in part from the empiricism of Locke,

in part from the remarkable development of physical and natural

science; it incorporated the conclusions of English deism, and

advanced from deism to atheism. An intellectual centre for the

movement was provided by the _Encyclopedie_; a social centre was found

in Parisian _salons_. It was sustained and invigorated by the passion

for freedom and for justice asserting itself against the despotism

and abuses of government and against the oppressions and abuses of

the Church. The opposing forces were feeble, incompetent,

disorganised. The methods of government were, in truth,

indefensible; religion had surrendered dogma, and lost the austerity

of morals; within the citadel of the Church were many professed and

many secret allies of the philosophers.

While in England an apologetic literature arose, profound in thought

and adequate in learning, in France no sustained resistance was

offered to the inroad of free thought. Episcopal fulminations rolled

like stage thunder; the Bastille and Vincennes were holiday retreats

for fatigued combatants; imprisonment was tempered with cajoleries;

the censors of the press connived with their victims. The Chancellor

D'AGUESSEAU (1668-1751), an estimable magistrate, a dignified orator,

maintained the old seriousness of life and morals, and received the

reward of exile. The good ROLLIN (1661-1741) dictated lessons to youth

drawn from antiquity and Christianity, narrated ancient history, and

discoursed admirably on a plan of studies with a view to form the

heart and mind; an amiable Christian Nestor, he was not a man-at-arms.

The Abbe Guenee replied to Voltaire with judgment, wit, and erudition,

in his _Lettres de quelques Juifs_ (1769), but it was a single victory

in a campaign of many battles. The satire of Gilbert, _Le Dix-huitieme

Siecle_, is rudely vigorous; but Gilbert was only an angry youth,

disappointed of his fame. Freron, the "Wasp" (_frelon_) of Voltaire's

_L'Ecossaise_, might sting in his _Annee Litteraire_, but there were

sharper stings in satire and epigram which he must endure. Palissot

might amuse the theatrical spectators of 1760 with his ridiculous

philosophers; the _Philosophes_ was taken smilingly by Voltaire, and

was sufficiently answered by Morellet's pamphlet and the

_bouts-rimes_ of Marmontel or Piron. The _Voltairomanie_ of

Desfontaines is only the outbreak of resentment of the accomplished

and disreputable Abbe against a benefactor whose offence was to have

saved him from the galleys.

The sensationalist philosophy is inaugurated by JULIEN OFFRAY DE LA

METTRIE (1709-51) rather than by Condillac. A physician, making

observations on his own case during an attack of fever, he arrived

at the conclusion that thought is but a result of the mechanism of

the body. Man is a machine more ingeniously organised than the brute.

All ideas have their origin in sensation. As for morals, they are

not absolute, but relative to society and the State. As for God,

perhaps He exists, but why should we worship this existence more than

any other? The law of our being is to seek happiness; the law of society

is that we should not interfere with the happiness of others. The

pleasure of the senses is not the only pleasure, but it has the

distinction of being universal to our species.

La Mettrie, while opposing the spiritualism of Descartes, is more

closely connected with that great thinker, through his doctrine that

brutes are but machines, than with Locke. It is from Locke--though

from Locke mutilated--that ETIENNE BONNOT DE CONDILLAC (1715-80)

proceeds. All ideas are sensations, but sensations transformed.

Imagine a marble statue endowed successively with the several human

senses; it will be seen how perceptions, consciousness, memory, ideas,

comparison, judgment, association, abstraction, pleasure, desire

are developed. The _ego_ is but the bundle of sensations experienced

or transformed and held in recollection. Yet the unity of the _ego_

seems to argue that it is not composed of material particles.

Condillac's doctrine is sensationalist, but not materialistic.

Condillac's disciple, the physician Cabanis (1757-1808), proceeded

to investigate the nature of sensibility itself, and to develop the

physiological method of psychology. The unnecessary soul which

Condillac preserved was suppressed by Destutt de Tracy (1754-1836);

his ideology was no more than a province of zoology.

The morals of the sensationalist school were expressed by

CLAUDE-ADRIEN HELVETIUS (1715-71), a worthy and benevolent

farmer-general. The motive of all our actions is self-love, that

tendency which leads us to seek for pleasure and avoid pain; but,

by education and legislation, self-love can be guided and trained

so that it shall harmonise with the public good. It remained for a

German acclimatised to Paris to compile the full manifesto of

atheistic materialism. At Holbach's hospitable table the

philosophers met, and the air was charged with ideas. To condense

these into a system was Holbach's task. Diderot, Lagrange, Naigeon

may have lent their assistance, but PAUL-HENRY THIRY, BARON D'HOLBACH

(1723-89) must be regarded as substantially the author of the _Systeme

de la Nature_ (1770), which the title-page prudently attributed to

the deceased Mirabaud. What do we desire but that men should be happy,

just, benevolent? That they may become so, it is necessary to deliver

them from those errors on which political and spiritual despotism

is founded, from the chains of tyrants and the chimeras of priests,

and to lead them back from illusions to nature, of which man is a

part. We find everywhere matter and motion, a chain of material causes

and effects, nor can we find aught beside these. An ever-circulating

system of motions connects inorganic and organic nature, fire and

air and plant and animal; free-will is as much excluded as God and

His miraculous providence. The soul is nothing but the brain receiving

and transmitting motions; morals form a department of physiology.

Religions and governments, as they exist, are based on error, and

drive men into crime. But though Holbach "accommodated atheism," as

Grimm puts it, "to chambermaids and hairdressers," he would not hurry

forward a revolution. All will come in good time; in some happier

day Nature and her daughters Virtue, Reason, and Truth will alone

receive the adoration of mankind.[1]

[Footnote 1: The Swiss naturalist Charles Bonnet (1720-93)

endeavoured to reconcile his sensationalism with a religious faith

and a private interpretation of Christianity.]

Among the friends of Holbach and Helvetius was C.-F. de Chasseboeuf,

Count de VOLNEY (1757-1820), who modified and developed the ethics

of Helvetius. An Orientalist by his studies, he travelled in Egypt

and Syria, desiring to investigate the origins of ancient religions,

and reported what he had seen in colourless but exact description.

In _Les Ruines, ou Meditations sur les Revolutions des Empires_, he

recalls the past like "an Arab Ossian," monotonous and grandiose,

and expounds the history of humanity with cold and superficial

analysis clothed in a pomp of words. His faith in human progress,

founded on nature, reason, and justice, sustained Volney during the

rise and fall of the Girondin party.

A higher and nobler spirit, who perished in the Revolution, but ceased

not till his last moment to hope and labour for the good of men, was

J.-A.-N. de Caritat, Marquis de CONDORCET (1743-94). Illustrious in

mathematical science, he was interested by Turgot in political

economy, and took a part in the polemics of theology. While lying

concealed from the emissaries of Robespierre he wrote his _Esquisse

d'un Tableau Historique des Progres de l'Esprit Humain_. It is a

philosophy of the past, and almost a hymn in honour of human

perfectibility. The man-statue of Condillac, receiving, retaining,

distinguishing, and combining sensations, has gradually developed,

through nine successive epochs, from that of the hunter and fisher

to the citizen of 1789, who comprehends the physical universe with

Newton, human nature with Locke and Condillac, and society with Turgot

and Rousseau. In the vision of the future, with its progress in

knowledge and in morals, its individual and social improvement, its

lessening inequalities between nations and classes, the philosopher

finds his consolation for all the calamities of the present age.

Condorcet died in prison, poisoned, it is believed, by his own hand.

The economists, or, as Dupont de Nemours named them, the physiocrats,

formed a not unimportant wing of the philosophic phalanx, now in

harmony with the Encyclopaedic party, now in hostility. The sense

of the misery of France was present to many minds in the opening of

the century, and with the death of Louis XIV. came illusive hopes

of amelioration. The Abbe de Saint-Pierre (1658-1743), filled with

ardent zeal for human happiness, condemned the government of the

departed Grand Monarch, and dreamed of a perpetual peace; among his

dreams arose projects for the improvement of society which were

justified by time. Boisguillebert, and Vauban, marshal of France and

military engineer, were no visionary spirits; they pleaded for a

serious consideration of the general welfare, and especially the

welfare of the agricultural class, the wealth-producers of the

community. To violate economic laws, Boisguillebert declared, is to

violate nature; let governments restrain their meddling, and permit

natural forces to operate with freedom.

Such was the doctrine of the physiocratic school, of which FRANCOIS

QUESNAY (1694-1774) was the chief. Let human institutions conform

to nature; enlarge the bounds of freedom; give play to the spirit

of individualism; diminish the interference of government--"laissez

faire, laissez passer."[2] Agriculture is productive, let its

burdens be alleviated; manufactures are useful but "sterile": honour,

therefore, above all, to the tiller of the fields, who hugs nature

close, and who enriches humankind! The elder Mirabeau--"ami des

hommes"--who had anticipated Quesnay in some of his views, and himself

had learnt from Cantillon, met Quesnay in 1757, and thenceforth

subordinated his own fiery spirit, as far as that was possible, to

the spirit of the master. From the physiocrats--Gournay and

Quesnay--the noble-minded and illustrious TURGOT (1727-81) derived

many of those ideas of reform which he endeavoured to put into action

when intendant of Limoges, and later, when Minister of Finance. By

his _Reflexions sur la Formation et la Distribution des Richesses_,

Turgot prepared the way for Adam Smith.

[Footnote 2: This phrase had been used by Boisguillebert and by the

Marquis d'Argenson before Gournay made it a power. On D'Argenson

(1694-1757), whose _Considerations sur le Gouvernement de la France_

were not published until 1764, see the study by Mr. Arthur Ogle

(1893).]

In 1770 the Abbe Galiani, as alert of brain as he was diminutive of

stature, attacked the physiocratic doctrines in his _Dialogues sur

le Commerce des Bles_, which Plato and Moliere--so Voltaire

pronounced--had combined to write. The refutation of the _Dialogues_

by Morellet was the result of no such brilliant collaboration, and

Galiani, proposed that his own unstatuesque person should be honoured

by a statue above an inscription, declaring that he had wiped out

the economists, who were sending the nation to sleep. The fame of

his _Dialogues_ was perhaps in large measure due to the party-spirit

of the Encyclopaedists, animated by a vivacious attack upon the

physiocrats. The book was applauded, but reached no second edition.

An important body of articles on literature was contributed to the

_Encyclopedie_ by JEAN-FRANCOIS MARMONTEL. As early as 1719 a

remarkable study in aesthetics had appeared--the _Reflexions

Critiques sur la Poesie et la Peinture_, by the Abbe Dubos. Art is

conceived as a satisfaction of the craving for vivid sensations and

emotions apart from the painful consequences which commonly attend

these in actual life. That portion of Dubos' work which treats of

"physical causes in the progress of art and literature," anticipates

the views of Montesquieu on the influence of climate, and studies

the action of environment on the products of the imagination. In 1746

Charles Batteux, in his treatise _Les Beaux-Arts reduits a un meme

Principe_, defined the end of art as the imitation of nature--not

indeed of reality, but of nature in its actual or possible beauty;

of nature not as it is, but as it may be. The articles of Marmontel,

revised and collected in the six volumes of his _Elements de

Litterature_ (1787), were full of instruction for his own time,

delicate and just in observation, as they often were, if not

penetrating or profound. In his earlier _Poetique Francaise_--"a

petard," said Mairan, "laid at the doors of the Academy to blow them

up if they should not open"--he had shown himself strangely

disrespectful towards the fame of Racine, Boileau, and the poet

Rousseau.

The friend of Marmontel, Antoine-Leonard Thomas (1732-85),

honourably distinguished by the dignity of his character and conduct,

a composer of _Eloges_ on great men, somewhat marred by strain and

oratorical emphasis, put his best work into an _Essai sur les Eloges_.

At a time when Bossuet was esteemed below his great deserts,

Thomas--almost alone--recognised his supremacy in eloquence. As the

century advanced, and philosophy developed its attack on religion

and governments, the classical tradition in literature not only

remained unshaken, but seemed to gain in authority. The first

lieutenant of Voltaire, his literary "son," LAHARPE (1739-1803)

represents the critical temper of the time. In 1786 he began his

courses of lectures at the Lycee, before a brilliant audience composed

of both sexes. For the first time in France, instruction in literature,

not trivial and not erudite, but suited to persons of general culture,

was made an intellectual pleasure. For the first time the history

of literature was treated, in its sequence from Homer to modern times,

as a totality. Laharpe's judgments of his contemporaries were often

misled by his bitterness of spirit; his mind was not capacious, his

sympathies were not liberal; his knowledge, especially of Greek

letters, was defective. But he knew the great age of Louis XIV., and

he felt the beauty of its art. No one has written with finer

intelligence of Racine than he in his _Lycee, ou Cours de Litterature_.

As the Revolution approached he sympathised with its hopes and fears;

the professor donned the _bonnet rouge_. The storm which burst

silenced his voice for a time; in 1793 he suffered imprisonment; and

when he occupied his chair again, it was a converted Laharpe who

declaimed against philosophers, republicans, and atheists, the

tyrants of reason, morals, art and letters.

The finest and surest judgment in contemporary literature was that

of a gallicised German--MELCHIOR GRIMM (1723-1807). As Laharpe was

bound in filial loyalty to Voltaire, so Grimm was in fraternal

attachment to the least French of eighteenth-century French

authors--Diderot. From a basis of character in which there was a

measure of Teutonic enthusiasm and romance, his intellect rose clear,

light, and sure, with no mists of sentiment about it, and no clouds

of fancy. During thirty-seven years, as a kind of private journalist,

he furnished princely and royal persons of Germany, Russia, Sweden,

Poland, with "Correspondence," which reflected as from a mirror all

the lights of Paris to the remote North and East. His own philosophy,

his political views, were cheerless and arid; but he could judge the

work of others generously as well as severely. No one of his generation

so intelligently appreciated Shakespeare; no one more happily

interpreted Montaigne. By swift _apercu_, by criticism, by anecdote,

by caustic raillery, or serious record, he makes the intellectual

world of his day pass before us and expound its meanings. The

Revolution, the dangers of which he divined early, drove him from

Paris. In bidding it farewell he wished that he were in his grave.

III

Buffon, whose power of wing was great, and who did not love the heat

and dust of combat, soared smoothly above the philosophic strife.

Born in 1707, at Montbard, in Burgundy, GEORGE-LOUIS LECLERC, created

Comte de BUFFON by Louis XV., fortunate in the possession of riches,

health, and serenity of heart and brain, lived in his domestic circle,

apart from the coteries of Paris, pursuing with dignity and infinite

patience his proper ends. The legend describes him as a pompous

Olympian even in his home; in truth, if he was majestic--like a marshal

of France, as Hume describes him--he was also natural, genial, and

at times gay. His appointment, in 1739, as intendant of the Royal

Garden, now the _Jardin des Plantes_, turned his studies from

mathematical science to natural history.

The first volumes of his vast _Histoire Naturelle_ appeared in 1749;

aided by Daubenton and others, he was occupied with the succeeding

volumes during forty years, until death terminated his labours in

1788. The defects of his work are obvious--its want of method, its

disdain of classification, its abuse of hypotheses, its humanising

of the animal world, its pomp of style. But the progress of science,

which lowered the reputation of Buffon, has again re-established his

fame. Not a few of his disdained hypotheses are seen to have been

the divinations of genius; and if he wrote often in the ornate,

classical manner, he could also write with a grave simplicity.

In his _Discours de Reception_, pronounced before the French Academy

in 1753, he formulated his doctrine of literary style, insisting that

it is, before all else, the manifestation of order in the evolution

of ideas; ideas alone form the basis and inward substance of style.

Rejecting merely abstract conceptions as an explanation of natural

phenomena, viewing classifications as no more than a convenience of

the human intellect, refusing to regard final causes as a subject

of science, he envisaged nature with a tranquil and comprehensive

gaze, and with something of a poet's imagination. He perceived that

the globe, in its actual condition, is the result of a long series

of changes, and thereby he gave an impulse to sound geological study;

he expounded the geography of species, and almost divined the theory

of their transformation or variability; he recognised in some degree

the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest; he

regarded man as a part of nature, but as its noblest part, capable

of an intellectual and moral progress which is not the mere result

of physical laws.

Whatever may have been Buffon's errors as a thinker, he enlarged the

bounds of literature by annexing the province of natural history as

Montesquieu had annexed that of political science. His vision of the

universe was unclouded by passion, and part of its grandeur is derived

from this serenity. He studied and speculated with absolute freedom,

prepared to advance from his own ideas to others more in accordance

with observed phenomena. "He desired to be," writes a critic, "and

almost became, a pure intelligence in presence of eternal things."

How could he concern himself with the strifes and passions of a day

to whom the centuries were moments in the vast process of evolving

change? In Andre Chenier he found a disciple who would fain have been

the Lucretius of the new system of nature.

CHAPTER IV

ROUSSEAU--BEAUMARCHAIS--BERNARDIN DE SAINT-PIERRE--ANDRE CHENIER

I

JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU the man is inseparable from Rousseau the

writer; his works proceed directly from his character and his life.

Born at Geneva in 1712, he died at Ermenonville in 1778. His childhood

was followed by years of vagabondage. From 1732, the date of his third

residence with Madame de Warens, until 1741, though his vagabondage

did not wholly cease, he was collecting his powers and educating his

mind with studies ardently pursued. During nine subsequent years in

Paris, in Venice, and elsewhere, he was working his way towards the

light; it was the period of his gayer writings, ballet, opera, comedy,

and of the articles on music contributed to the _Encyclopedie_: he

had not yet begun to preach and prophesy to his age. The great fourth

period of his life, from 1749 to 1762, includes all his masterpieces

except the _Confessions_. From 1762 until his death, while his temper

grew darker and his reason was disturbed, Rousseau was occupied with

apologetic and autobiographic writings.

His mother died in giving birth to Jean-Jacques. His father, a

watchmaker, filled the child's head with the follies of romances,

which they read together, and gave him through Plutarch's Lives a

sense of the exaltations of virtue. The boy's feeling for nature was

quickened and fostered in the garden of the pastor of Bossey. From

a notary's office, where he seemed an incapable fool, he passed under

the harsh rule of an engraver of watches, learning the vices that

grow from fear. At sixteen he fled, and found protection at Annecy,

under Madame de Warens, a young and comely lady, recently converted

to the Roman communion, frank, kind, gay, and as devoid of moral

principles as any creature in the Natural History. Sent to Turin for

instruction, Rousseau renounced his Protestant faith, and soon after

found in the good Abbe Gaime the model in part of his Savoyard vicar.

Some experience of domestic service was followed by a year at Annecy,

during which Rousseau's talent as a musician was developed. From

eighteen to twenty he led a wandering life--"starved, feasted,

despaired, was happy." Rejoining Madame de Warens at Chambery in 1732,

he interested himself in music, physics, botany, and was more and

more drawn towards the study of letters. He methodised his reading

(1738-41), and passionately pursued a liberal system of

self-education, literary, scientific, and philosophical.

Rousseau's relations with his _bonne maman_, Madame de Warens, had

been troubled by the latest of her other loves. In 1741 he set off

for Paris, bearing with him the manuscript of a new system of musical

notation, which was offered to the Academie des Sciences, and was

declared neither new nor useful for instrumentalists. An experiment

in life as secretary to the French Ambassador at Venice closed, after

fourteen months, with his abrupt dismissal. Again in Paris, Rousseau

obtained celebrity by his operas and comedies, was received in the

_salons_, and associated joyously with Diderot, Marmontel, and Grimm.

He arranged his domestic life by taking an illiterate and vulgar

drudge, Therese Le Vasseur, for his companion; their children were

abandoned to the care of the Foundling Hospital.

In 1749 Diderot was a prisoner at Vincennes. Rousseau, on the road

to visit his friend, read in the _Mercure de France_ that the Academy

of Dijon had proposed as the subject for a prize to be awarded next

year the question, "Has the progress of arts and sciences contributed

to purify morals?" Suddenly a tumult of ideas arose in his brain and

overwhelmed him; it was an ecstasy of the intellect and the passions.

With Diderot's encouragement he undertook his indictment of

civilisation; in 1750 the _Discours sur les Sciences et les Arts_

was crowned. In accordance with his theory he proceeded to simplify

his own life, intensifying his self-consciousness by singularities

of assumed austerity, and playing the part (not wholly a fictitious

one) of a moral reformer. Famous as author of the _Discours_ and the

opera _Le Devin de Village_, presented before the King, he returned

to his native Switzerland, and there re-entered the Protestant

communion. In 1754 he again competed for a prize at Dijon, on the

question, "What is the origin of inequality among men, and is it

authorised by the law of nature?" Rousseau failed to obtain the prize,

but the _Discours sur l'Inegalite_ was published (1755) with a

dedication to the Republic of Geneva. He had discovered in private

property the source of all the evils of society.

In Switzerland Rousseau prepared a first redaction of his political

treatise, the _Contrat Social_, and filled his heart with the beauty

of those prospects which form an environment for the lovers in his

Heloise. In 1756 he was established, through the kindness of Madame

d'Epinay, in the Hermitage, near the borders of the forest of

Montmorency. His delight in the woods and fields was great; his

delight in Madame d'Houdetot, kinswoman of his hostess, was a more

troubled passion. Quarrels with Madame d'Epinay, quarrels with Grimm

and Diderot, estrangement from Madame d'Houdetot, closed the scene

at the Hermitage.

Authorship, however, had its joys and consolations. The _Lettre a

D'Alembert_, a censure of the theatre (1758), was succeeded by _La

Nouvelle Heloise_ (1761), by the _Contrat Social_ (1762), and _Emile_

(1762). The days at Montmorency which followed his departure from

the Hermitage passed in calm. With the publication of _Emile_ the

storms began again. The book, condemned by the Sorbonne, was ordered

by the Parliament to be burnt by the common executioner. Rousseau

escaped imprisonment by flight. In Switzerland he could not settle

near Voltaire. A champion for the doctrine of a providential order

of the world, an enemy of the stage--especially in republican

Geneva--Rousseau had flung indignant words against Voltaire, and

Voltaire had tossed back words of bitter scorn. Geneva had followed

Paris in its hostility towards Rousseau's recent publications; whose

doing could it be except Voltaire's? He fled from his persecutors

to Motiers, where the King of Prussia's governor afforded him

protection. Renewed quarrels with his countrymen, clerical

intolerance, mob violence, an envenomed pamphlet from Voltaire, once

more drove him forth. He took refuge on an island in the lake of Bienne,

only to be expelled by the authorities of Berne. Encouraged by

Hume--"le bon David"--he arrived in January 1766 in London.

At Wootton, in the Peak of Derbyshire, Rousseau prepared the first

five books of his _Confessions_. Within a little time he had assured

himself that Hume was joined with D'Alembert and Voltaire in a

triumvirate of persecutors to defame his character and render him

an outcast; the whole human race had conspired to destroy him. Again

Rousseau fled, sojourned a year at Trye-Chateau under an assumed name,

and after wanderings hither and thither, took refuge in Paris, where,

living meanly, he completed his _Confessions_, wrote other eloquent

pieces of self-vindication, and relieved his morbid cerebral

excitement by music and botanising rambles. The hospitality of M.

de Girardin at Ermenonville was gladly accepted in May 1778; and there,

on July 2, he suddenly died; suicide was surmised; the seizure was

probably apoplectic.

Rousseau was essentially an idealist, but an idealist whose dreams

and visions were inspired by the play of his sensibility upon his

intellect and imagination, and therefore he was the least impersonal

of thinkers. Generous of heart, he was filled with bitter suspicions;

inordinately proud, he nursed his pride amid sordid realities;

cherishing ideals of purity and innocence, he sank deep in the mire

of imaginative sensuality; effeminate, he was also indomitable; an

uncompromising optimist, he saw the whole world lying in wickedness;

a passionate lover of freedom, he aimed at establishing the most

unqualified of tyrannies; among the devout he was a free-thinker,

among the philosophers he was the sentimentalist of theopathy. He

stands apart from his contemporaries: they did homage to the

understanding; he was the devotee of the heart: they belonged to a

brilliant society; he was elated, suffered, brooded, dreamed in

solitude: they were aristocratic, at least by virtue of the

intellectual culture which they represented; he was plebeian in his

origin, and popular in his sympathies.

He became a great writer comparatively late in life, under the

compulsion of a ruling idea which lies at the centre of all his more

important works, excepting such as are apologetic and autobiographical:

Nature has made man good and happy; society has made him evil and

miserable. Are we, then, to return to a state of primitive savagery?

No: society cannot retrograde. But in many ways we can ameliorate

human life by approximating to a natural condition.

In the _Discours sur les Sciences et les Arts_, the _Discours sur

l'Inegalite_, and the _Lettre a D'Alembert sur les Spectacles_,

Rousseau pleads against the vices, the artificiality, the

insincerities, the luxuries, the false refinements, the factitious

passions, the dishonest pleasures of modern society. "You make one

wish," wrote Voltaire, "to walk on all fours." By nature all men are

born free and equal; society has rendered them slaves, and impounded

them in classes of rich and poor, powerful and weak, master and servant,

peasant and peer. Rousseau's conception of the primitive state of

nature, and the origin of society by a contract, may not be

historically exact--this he admits; nevertheless, it serves well,

he urges, as a working hypothesis to explain the present state of

things, and to point the way to a happier state. It exhibits property

as the confiscation of natural rights; it justifies the sacred cause

of insurrection; it teaches us to honour man as man, and the simple

citizen more than the noble, the scientific student, or the artist.

Plain morals are the only safe morals. We are told that the theatre

is a school of manners, purifying the passions; on the contrary, it

irritates and perverts them; or it offers to ridicule the man of

straightforward virtue, as Moliere was not ashamed to do in his

_Misanthrope_.

Having developed his destructive criticism against society as it is,

Rousseau would build up. In the _Contrat Social_ he would show how

freedom and government may be conciliated; how, through the

arrangements of society, man may in a certain sense return to the

law of nature. "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains;"

yet social order, Rousseau declares, is sacred. Having resigned his

individual liberty by the social pact, how may man recover that

liberty? By yielding his individual rights absolutely to a

self-governing community of which he forms a part. The _volonte

generale_, expressing itself by a plurality of votes, resumes the

free-will of every individual. If any person should resist the general

will, he thereby sacrifices his true freedom, and he must be "forced

to be free." Thus the dogma of the sovereignty of the people is

formulated by Rousseau. Government is merely a delegation of power

made by the people as sovereign for the uses of the people as subjects.

In Rousseau's system, if the tyranny of the majority be established

without check or qualification, at least equality is secured, for,

in the presence of the sovereign people and its manifested will, each

individual is reduced to the level of all his fellows.

_La Nouvelle Heloise_, in the form of a romance, considers the

purification of domestic manners. Richardson's novels are followed

in the epistolary style of narration, which lends itself to the

exposition of sentiment. The story is simple in its incidents.

Saint-Preux's crime of passion against his pupil Julie resembles that

of Abelard against Eloisa. Julie, like Eloisa, has been a consenting

party. Obedient to her father's will, Julie marries Wolmar. In despair

Saint-Preux wanders abroad. Wolmar offers him his friendship and a

home. The lovers meet, are tried, and do not yield to the temptation.

Julie dies a victim to her maternal devotion, and not too

soon--"Another day, perhaps, and I were guilty!"

In 1757 Rousseau conceived the design of his romance. It might have

been coldly edifying had not the writer's consuming passion for Madame

d'Houdetot, awakening all that he had felt as the lover of Madame

de Warens, filled it with intensity of ardour. In the first part of

the romance, passion asserts the primitive rights of nature; in the

second part, those rights are shown to be no longer rights in an

organised society. But the ideal of domestic life exhibited is one

far removed from the artificialities of the world of fashion: it is

a life of plain duties, patriarchal manners, and gracious beneficence.

Rousseau the moralist is present to rebuke Rousseau the

sentimentalist; yet the sentimentalist has his own persuasive power.

The emotion of the lovers is reinforced by the penetrating influences

of the beauty of external nature; and both are interpreted with

incomparable harmonies of style and poignant lyrical cries, in which

the violin note outsoars the orchestra.

A reform of domestic life must result in a reform of education.

Rousseau's ideal of education, capable of adaptations and

modifications according to circumstances, is presented in his

_Emile_. How shall a child be formed in accordance, not with the

vicious code of an artificial society, but in harmony with nature?

Rousseau traces the course of Emile's development from birth to adult

years. Unconstrained by swaddling-bands, suckled by his mother, the

child enjoys the freedom of nature, and at five years old passes into

the care of his father or his tutor. During the earlier years his

education is to be negative: let him be preserved from all that is

false or artificial, and enter upon the heritage of childhood, the

gladness of animal life, vigorous delights in sunshine and open air;

at twelve he will hardly have opened a book, but he will have been

in vital relation with real things, he will unconsciously have laid

the foundations of wisdom. When the time for study comes, that study

should be simple and sound--no Babel of words, but a wholesome

knowledge of things; he may have learnt little, but he will know that

little aright; a sunrise will be his first lesson in cosmography;

he may watch the workman in his workshop; he may practise the

carpenter's trade; he may read _Robinson Crusoe_, and learn the lesson

of self-help. Let him ask at every moment, "What is the good of this?"

Unpuzzled by questions of morals, metaphysics, history, he will have

grown up laborious, temperate, patient, firm, courageous.

At fifteen the passions are awake; let them be gently and wisely guided.

Let pity, gratitude, benevolence be formed within the boy's heart,

so that the self-regarding passions may fall into a subordinate place.

To read Plutarch is to commune with noble spirits; to read Thucydides

is almost to come into immediate contact with facts. The fables of

La Fontaine will serve as a criticism of the errors of the passions.

And now Emile, at eighteen, may learn the sublime mysteries of that

faith which is professed by Rousseau's Savoyard vicar. A Will moves

the universe and animates nature; that Will, acting through general

laws, is guided by supreme intelligence; if the order of Providence

be disturbed, it is only through the abuse of man's free-will; the

soul is immaterial and survives the body; conscience is the voice

of God within the soul; "dare to confess God before the philosophers,

dare to preach humanity before the intolerant;" God demands no other

worship than that of the heart. With such a preparation as this, Emile

may at length proceed to aesthetic culture, and find his chief delight

in those writers whose genius has the closest kinship to nature.

Finally, in Sophie, formed to be the amiable companion and helpmate

of man, Emile should find a resting-place for his heart. Alas, if

she should ever betray his confidence!

The _Confessions_, with its sequels in the _Dialogues, ou Rousseau

juge de Jean-Jacques_, and the _Reveries du Promeneur Solitaire_,

constitute an autobiographical romance. The sombre colours of the

last six Books throw out the livelier lights and shades of the

preceding Books. While often falsifying facts and dates, Rousseau

writes with all the sincerity of one who was capable of boundless

self-deception. He will reserve no record of shame and vice and

humiliation, confident that in the end he must appear the most

virtuous of men. As the utterance of a soul touched and thrilled by

all the influences of nature and of human life, the _Confessions_

affects the reader like a musical symphony in which various movements

are interpreted by stringed and breathing instruments. If Rousseau

here is less of the prophet than in his other writings, he is more

of the great enchanter. Should a moral be drawn from the book, the

author would have us learn that nature has made man good, that society

has the skill to corrupt him, and finally that it is in his power

to refashion himself to such virtue as the world most needs and most

impatiently rejects.

The influence of Rousseau cannot easily be over-estimated. He

restored the sentiment of religion in an age of abstract deism or

turbid materialism. He inaugurated a moral reform. He tyrannised over

France in the person of his disciple Robespierre. He emancipated the

passions from the domination of the understanding. He liberated the

imagination. He caught the harmonies of external nature, and gave

them a new interpretation.[1] He restored to French prose, colour,

warmth, and the large utterance which it had lost. He created a

literature in which all that is intimate, personal, lyrical asserted

its rights, and urged extravagant claims. He overthrew the classical

ideal of art, and enthroned the _ego_ in its room.