It will be remembered that the influence of the literature of Greece
upon that of England has been exerted in various ways, direct and
indirect, and at various epochs; and that it continues still to operate
upon us rather more than less, affecting both the matter and the form
of what is written in our midst. The literature of Latin, again, has
always exercised an influence on every generation, Latin forms and
thoughts being imbedded in our English writings beyond all enucleation
or analysis. The literature of mediaeval and Renaissance Italy, we shall
find, had indeed much to do with shaping and polishing the literature of
England during the three hundred years from the time of Chaucer to the
time of Milton, but since the last-named period it has played little part
in determining what our authors shall say, or how they shall say it.
Prior in date and influence to that of Italy comes the literature of
France, with the debts in substance or in manner which we are bound to
acknowledge to our neighbours across the Channel. Our purpose does not
require that we should pretend to traverse the whole history of French
literature. If we dwell upon a certain number of salient topics or
famous names, it is because they in particular represent the chief types
in the development of French literary history, and either directly or
indirectly affect the evolution of our own.
France has, during civilized times, been politically and socially, as
well as geographically, so near to us; Englishmen and Englishwomen have
been generally so well acquainted with the French language and French
books, that it is beyond possibility to determine exactly what effect
French models have had and are having upon us, just as on the other hand
it is beyond possibility to analyse exactly the effect which English
models have had and are having upon France. But, without aiming at this
impossible exactitude, we may at least make ourselves aware of such
periods and manners of French influence as yield themselves readily to
the student’s survey.
It will be found that, though the influence of French literature has
been felt in every generation, there are two great periods in particular
during which the creations and the critical principles of Frenchmen
have dominated those of our own authors. The one is the period between
the Conquest and the rise of Chaucer; the second is the period which
began in the seventeenth century with writers of the age of Waller and
Dryden, and continued till towards the end of the eighteenth century,
that is to say, till the time of Cowper and Burns. Approximate dates are,
perhaps, necessary here, and the following may roughly serve. From about
the year 1100 till about the year 1370, and from about the year 1660
till 1780, England took its cue in many departments of literary work
from the matter, the form, and the critical principles of contemporary
France. Doubtless at all times there have been borrowings to and fro,
but these are the periods when the borrowings have been most one-sided
and most palpable. The interval from the maturity of Chaucer till the
earlier part of the seventeenth century was more especially the era of
Italian influence, introducing and supporting that mightier influence
from pagan Greece and pagan Rome which began in what is justly styled
the Renaissance. Again, since the latter part of the eighteenth century,
the time heralded by Cowper and crowned by Burns, the English have
emancipated themselves from direct literary imitation of the French,
although, as is briefly stated at the end of this chapter, there have
been no few currents of French influence upon various classes of our
writers, and, from them, upon the reading public.
Let it then be repeated that two periods especially concern us—the
period of the Norman and Plantagenet kings preceding and reaching up to
Chaucer, and that period which embraces the literature of the reigns of
Charles II, James II, William III, Anne, and the first two Georges; or,
to put the latter period more plainly and more suitably in a literary
connection, the age of Dryden, of the “Social School,” of the comedy of
Wycherley and Congreve, of the essays of Addison and the _Spectator_, of
the verse of Pope, of the prose of David Hume and Samuel Johnson.
The former period corresponds to the era of influence from the Provençal
Troubadours and the Northern French Trouvères, from the epic _chansons
de gestes_, the several kinds and cycles of “romances,” the allegories,
_fabliaux_, and other creations of which we must take some special
account. The second period answers in particular to the names of
Corneille, Racine, Molière, Boileau, Voltaire, and of a number of famous
French novelists, letter-writers, and critics. How and in what manner
these authors came to tyrannize so completely and so long over English
literature will require some terse statement. For the rest, in the period
from the writers of the _romans_ and allegories down to Corneille,
and again in the period from Rousseau to the present, we shall speak
of French authors only as links in the chain of French development in
itself, with a passing reference to any value they may have individually
for the literature of England.
* * * * *
The greater part of the land of Gaul—the modern France—was at an early
date occupied mainly by Celts, akin to, though not precisely identical
with, the present Bretons of the north-west corner of the country. There
were also Germans in the north-east, and Euskarians in the south-west.
Under the Roman empire the land was gradually overrun with Roman
settlers, Roman merchants, and Roman soldiers, and Latin naturally became
the official language, the language of high society, of literature, and
of education.
The mixed people in process of time thus came to speak a provincial
Latin, and to call themselves “Romans.” In reality they were very far
from being true Romans, and their speech almost was as far from being
true Latin. It was both corrupted and also broken up into local dialects.
It was, in fact, a blend of Latin with influences from the various
native peculiarities. Early in the fifth century a body of Franks, a
German people and speaking a German language, invaded the heart of Gaul
and permanently held its northern half. It is from them, the Franks,
that the whole country obtained the name of “France.” These conquerors
brought many a German word—mostly of war and feudalism—into the language
of the conquered, and likewise hastened the corruption of their “Latin”
syntax. The old Latin of culture became more and more widely severed
from everyday speech, and hence “Romance,” the corrupted language of
these modern “Romans” of Gaul, was regularly used as a term in direct
opposition to the old and literary “Latin.” It came, in fact, to mean
the vulgar tongue. It was about the year 800 that, in the northern half
of Gaul, the popular or Romance speech was formally recognized. In the
tenth century, the Northmen descended on much of this region, and became
its masters. Meanwhile the southern half of Gaul, which had been subdued
by other German peoples, the Visigoths and Burgundians, was forming its
own particular corruption of the Latin, and, among the dialects which
arose in that division, the dialect of Provence, in the south-east, took
earliest shape and clearest predominance.
* * * * *
Before entering upon any account of “French” literature, we must remove
from our minds the conception of France and French as they are, and
try to see them as they were in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.
North of the Loire are various provinces and a distinctly marked Romance
language, the _langue d’oïl_, or “French.” A Celtic attachment, which has
immigrated from Great Britain, exists in Brittany, much Norman blood in
the north, and a Frankish influence has modified the Gallo-Roman staple.
South of the Loire are other states, and, for the most part, another
Romance language, the _langue d’oc_, or “Provençal,” with leanings rather
to an Italian kindred on one side, and a Catalonian-Spanish on the other.
Strictly speaking, the _langue d’oc_ extended over the country south of a
line drawn from about Charente to the Alps, while Provençal is properly
the language of the south-eastern portion of that area. Corresponding
to the two divisions of Gaul there arose two different forms and two
different spirits of literature, one “French,” one “Provençal.” Later it
was a joining of these two forms and spirits (though with a very distinct
predominance of the northern) which produced modern French literature,
or “French literature” in the ordinary sense; and it was both of them,
though chiefly the northern, which largely controlled England during two
centuries before Chaucer, and so contributed to the making of that poet
and his age.
There is a fact too often forgotten by students of English writing and
even of English history. It is that until Chaucer’s time England was
only a portion of the King of England’s dominions; the rest was on the
continent, in France. Under Henry II, King of England in the later
twelfth century, more than half of modern France, namely, Normandy and
other provinces north of the Loire, Poitou, Aquitaine and Gascony south
of it, were part of an English or Franco-English empire. At the peace of
Brétigny in 1360, Poitou, Guienne, and Gascony were still left a portion
of the realms of Edward III. This fact of the oneness of England and much
of France is of very great importance to early English literature. The
court and official tongue, and, in a large degree, the literary language,
of England were in any case French. The intercourse between England and
the _langue d’oïl_, and (though less continued) between England and the
_langue d’oc_, was, moreover, intimate and frequent. The writers and
minstrels were, in a considerable measure, common to England and to both
northern and southern France. No few of the writers belonging to old
literature in French, _e.g._, Walter Map, and Benoît de Ste. More, had
their homes in England; among them was Marie de France. The channels of
communication were constantly open, and the current flowing and ebbing
through.
* * * * *
A concise account must first be given of the two Gallic literatures,
“French” and Provençal. Provençal flourished early, and enjoyed but a
brief life. We may, therefore, trace this branch first, then the northern
French, and afterwards compare and combine the two.
Though northern France had its song of Roland and other _chansons_ at as
early a date as the love lyrics of Provence, yet, if literature implies
conscious art and system, Provençal composition is—with the exception of
Anglo-Saxon—the first real literature of modern Europe; it stimulated
Spain on the one hand, and Italy on the other; but it was in advance
of either. It is earlier than Dante, and, although it is appreciably
indebted to Ovid, and in some degree to Virgil, it is anterior to the
influence of the classical forms or spirit of the first Renaissance.
It began, helped by Moorish or “Arabian” impulses and lessons, in the
eleventh century, enjoyed a brilliant existence for two hundred years,
and died with the dying _langue d’oc_. Though it was never enriched and
made immortal by the work of any one transcendent genius, it can boast
a large number of composers possessed at least of talent and taste.
Provençal verses became models for all neighbouring countries. Frederick
Barbarossa in Germany, Richard Cœur-de-Lion in Anglo-French England,
Alfonso II in Aragon, Frederick II in Sicily, these royal personages
went out of their way to compose in the fashionable style and rhythm
of Provence. They became, in fact, _troubadours_. The terms needs some
explanation. A troubadour is not properly a wandering minstrel carrying
a guitar. That itinerant minstrel is an inferior order of person, the
_jongleur_ (in Provençal _joglar_). He stands to the troubadour as the
Anglo-Saxon “gleeman” to the “maker.” The troubadour was the “finder,”
the poet, generally a noble, a knight, sometimes even a prince. It is
no doubt true that the jongleur, who originally sang the troubadour’s
ditties, was fain, like other inferiors, to assume the higher rank, try
his own hand at composing variations, and call himself a troubadour, and
so the title became degraded. It is true also that the real troubadours
frequently chanted their own songs of love and glory, and so helped
to cause confusion between themselves and the mere jongleur minstrels.
But the troubadour proper was one who travelled sumptuously mounted and
attired, to be the honoured guest of _châtelains_ and princes.
Nearly all this Provençal literature of three centuries of troubadours is
lyric, not epic. It is generally singing, not narrating, and its theme is
chiefly personal feelings. Rhymes, which had, it is true, been sparsely
employed in monkish compositions in Latin, were then novel things in
European literature, although long and universally used by the Saracens.
The Provençal poets cultivated rhymes which grew more and more varied
and complicated; with careful elaboration of soft and harmonious sounds
they sang of two things, and almost only of two, to wit, love and glory,
gallantry and chivalry in both senses and connections. The verses were
love verses or martial verses, celebrating loyalty in love and valour
in arms. As a class they are without pretension to any profoundness
of imagination or to any sublimity. Their excellence is their music,
not any translatable substance of thought. It must be confessed that
the songs and subjects lacked variety; the same tricks of expression
and “conceits,” the same nouns and adjectives, the same situations,
the same “fantastic sentimentality,” would reappear monotonously, and
would inevitably suggest the artificial and unreal. One could hardly be
expected to read extensively in the _cansos_, or love-songs, of those
who called themselves the “gentle troubadours,” without a feeling of
satiety. The serenade (_serena_), the morning greeting (_alba_), the
dispute of lovers (_tenso_ or _joc parti_), the lament (_planh_), which
were recognized species of troubadour effort, inevitably suffered from
exhaustion of material. Nevertheless one cannot but be impressed with
the chivalrous idea of love which many of the Provençal poets professed,
and according to which they nearly always treat that passion, vaunting a
devoted tenderness and a delicate and sentimental worship. The influence
of this idea, as still further refined and ennobled in Tuscany, is
palpable in the attitude of Dante towards Beatrice, and of Petrarch
towards Laura; there are many traces of its influence in Chaucer and
his contemporaries. Through the Petrarchist sonneteers it again reaches
England in the Elizabethan age.
It must be enough merely to mention the names of Bernard de Ventadour,
Bertran de Born, Pierre Vidal, and Arnaud Daniel, among famous
troubadours. But a word may be said of that remarkable institution, the
“Court of Love,” to which a poem of Chaucer (or more probably of some
one with a large share of Chaucer’s mind) owes its conception and its
title. During the later generations of the “gentle troubadours,” the way
to speak and think of love and gallantry was reduced to a system. It was
made a science—called _el gai saber_, “the gay science”—which every poet
was supposed to understand and to have at his finger-ends. One favourite
form of poetry was the _tenso_, a dispute or altercation between
troubadours upon delicate questions and scruples of behaviour and feeling
in affairs of love. It became the fashion for noble ladies in those idle,
rather frivolous, but doubtless not unhappy days to hold mock courts,
in which poets sang one against the other, like opposing advocates;
whereafter the court gave its decision, or _arrêt d’amour_, and awarded
prizes to that troubadour whose arguments and verse were most in keeping
with the code prescribed by the gay science. “Is it a greater grief to
lose a lover by death or by unfaithfulness?” may serve as an example of
the subjects particularly favoured in these poetical courts of the ladies
of Gascony, of the Countess of Champagne, or of Queen Eleanor.
Such, briefly, was the genuine Provençal literature—lyrics of love and
bravery, with here and there a pastoral, and here and there a poem of
censure or satirical criticism. But true epics and romances of adventure,
sustained allegories, witty tales of common life, they had practically
none. For these we must look to northern France, to the land not of
the troubadours, but of the Trouvères. _Trouvère_ is the French form
corresponding to the Provençal _troubadour_, and equally means the
“finder,” who is indeed the “poet.” But in northern France there existed
different social conditions and a different clime; there was also the
sterner stuff which belongs to Franks and Normans, while in Brittany
there was the Celt, with all his melancholy fire and imaginative and
mystical emotion. The lyric literature of the north blossomed, indeed,
somewhat later than that of Provence, and is largely an imitation of it.
The romances of the trouvères are also distinctly infused with the ideas
and style of the lyric south. Nevertheless the great mass of the poetry
of northern France is of its own creation in both matter and spirit. It
is the poetry of the epic, the allegory, and the tale; the poetry of the
romance of heroic adventures, of satirical teaching, and of stories to
amuse; in other words, it produced the _chanson de geste_, the _roman_,
and the _fabliau_. It is in every way stronger than the creations of the
south, in seriousness, in vigour, in variety, in invention. According to
Ten Brink, _prouesse_, the masculine side of chivalry, is more northern,
while _courtoisie_, the feminine side, is more Provençal. But the
difference goes much deeper than any pair of terms can express it.
The old French poems of heroic adventure, blent with more or less of that
other-world imaginative quality known as “romance,” fall into three main
cycles of subjects. They deal with Charlemagne and his Paladins (in which
case they are more truly epic in character, and are called _chansons de
geste_, a term properly thus restricted to incidents in supposed French
history), or with King Arthur and his knights (together with the once
independent legends of Tristram), or with classical heroes, whether of
the Trojan legend or, like Alexander, of actual history. These three
cycles have been named the “Carlovingian” (or “French”), the “Arthurian”
(or “British”), and the “classical” (or “Grecian”). Or we may make four
by subdividing the last into “Trojan” and “Alexandrian.” At the time
of their composition the cycle which dealt with the classical subjects
of antiquity was said to deal with “matter of Rome.” All antiquity was
“Rome,” and all ancient heroes “Romans.” We find, then, songs of Roland
and Oliver, romances of Tristram or Launcelot, romances of Alexander
the Great, and many more. Some _romans_, called _d’aventures_, are
independent of any cycle and make no pretence at all to be history. The
twelfth and thirteenth centuries are rich in the poetical narratives
which tell of heroic feats, or miracles of devotion and loyalty, mixed
with much of the supernatural withal. This was the day of the Crusades,
of conquests of the Saracens, single combats, adventures in distant
lands, where dwarfs and enchanters, dragons and giants, were supposed
to dwell; and nothing pleased the venturous barons more than to be told
such tales to the music of the itinerant jongleurs. A further variety of
these songs of exploit was the _lai_, which is too short and too lyrical
to be an epic or a _roman_, and is rather the song of an epic episode.
The allegorical poems—which they also called _romans_, as being similarly
akin to epic and written in the vulgar tongue—long and tedious as they
are to us, were not disdained by Chaucer, and gave the cue to several
conspicuous works of the Chaucerians down to the sixteenth century. That
most famous of all, the _Roman de la Rose_, was translated by our master
of English undefiled. This poem, begun by Guillaume de Lorris as an “Art
of Love,” after the manner of Ovid (as filtered through Provence), was
continued a generation later by Jean de Meung as a satirical miscellany
of learning and legend. It is all about a lover who sought to pluck a
rose, about his difficulties in reaching it, about the abstract qualities
which help or hinder him, about personified virtues and vices, such as
Dame Idleness, who lets him into the garden, Avarice, Meanness, Hatred,
who stand in his way, Fair-Seeming, who has much to say in the matter,
and numerous others. Thanks to these agencies, it takes that unhappy
youth some 23,000 verses before he attains to plucking the object of his
affections. Yet it was this reading which inspired the earliest efforts
of our Chaucer, and which, in his first stage, he fell to imitating.
It was this literature which the cultivated Norman English delighted
hugely to hear. Allegorical, also, and purely satirical is the prolonged
beast-fable known as the _Roman de Renard_ (“the fox”), which enjoyed an
immense vogue throughout Europe, and provoked countless imitations.
One chief species of composition, and a highly important one, yet
remains. This was the _fabliau_, the amusing tale in verse, the one kind
of writing to let us know that the world was not wholly made of doughty
knights and gentle damosels. The _fabliau_ is a tale of real or possible
adventure in ordinary life, generally of a humorous kind. It is, in fact,
a sort of novelette. Chaucer’s _Canterbury Tales_ are often _fabliaux_.
From France the _fabliau_ was borrowed by the _Novellieri_ of Italy. It
was taken up and developed by Boccaccio, and both directly from France
and indirectly through Italy it made its way into the general stock of
European narrative material. Had it not been for _fabliaux_, one might
have thought that in those days there was nothing else for men to do but
fight and love. Yet the great ordinary mass of mankind existed all the
time, doing its sober work in towns and country places. And it was time
for this great stratum to find recognition in _bourgeois_ story.
Thus in northern France we have chiefly epics and romances of heroic
adventures, allegories more or less satirical and didactic, and amusing
tales; in southern France we have chiefly lyrics of love and chivalry. As
time goes on, each half moves closer to the other, although during the
whole epoch of the northern romances the Provençal spirit had combined
with the Celtic to pervade them with a peculiar tone of chivalric
sentiment. In 1249 the two geographical divisions became one kingdom.
Before the middle of the fourteenth century the Provençal tongue begins
to die, and its literature to perish. The story of French literature
thenceforward is one and undivided.
* * * * *
While the troubadour and trouvère literatures were thus flourishing
in the two halves of France, the cultivated circles of Norman and
Plantagenet England found those literatures sufficiently adapted to
their needs. The ordinary language of these circles was identical with
that of the trouvères, and at the same time the English possessions in
Languedoc, including the cultured centre Bordeaux (gained by the marriage
of Henry II with Eleanor of Guienne and Poitou), brought the Court
into direct communication with the lyrics of the troubadours. Henry’s
son, Richard Cœur-de-Lion, was himself a troubadour and the friend of
troubadours, in particular of Bertran de Born. But better suited to the
Anglo-Norman temperament, and, of course, completely intelligible to
the French-speaking barons and gentry, were the romances, _lais_ and
_fabliaux_ of the trouvères. The work of the Norman Wace (_Geste des
Bretons_) in 1155 was as much intended for England as for France. So also
was the _Roman de Troie_ (1160) of Benoît de Ste. More, which included
the story of Troilus. The French _Saint Grael_ stories of Walter Map
(1180) and the _lais_ of Marie de France (1210) were produced in our
island, and were the common property of England and Norman France. The
jongleurs wandered from baron’s court to baron’s court, and the stories
of Arthur,
Of Greece and Troy the strongë stryf,
There many a man lost his lyf;
Of Brute that baron bold of hand,
The first conqueroure of Engeland;
Of King Arthur, that was so riche,
Was not in his tyme him liche;
How Kyng Charles and Rowland fought,
With Sarazens nold they be caught;
Of Tristrem and Ysoude the swete,
How they with love first gan mete;
Of King John and of Isumbras,
Of Ydoine and of Amadas;
Stories of diverse thinges,
Of princes, prelates and kinges;
Many songes of divers rhyme,
As Engelish, French and Latyne.
Before French literature could make much further advance, it must pass,
after that of Italy, under pupilage to the Renaissance. As in England
of the fifteenth century, there is first a period of stagnation, and
then one during which France is borrowing and assimilating to its utmost
lessons in thought and style, in form and substance, from the lately
recovered classical masterpieces of Greece and Rome, as well as from the
Italian writers who first enjoyed and exploited these treasures. During
these stagnant and growing stages of French literature it exercises
comparatively little effect upon our own.
The Renaissance naturally reached France before it extended to England,
and the Renaissance meant in France what it had meant in Italy, and
what it afterwards came to mean in England, namely, the widening of the
intellectual and moral horizon, broader knowledge and broader views,
a shaking off of old and dry traditions. And therewith it also meant
greater variety of subjects in literature and the reign of better
models of thought and expression. The effect of the Renaissance on
French literature was to draw the thoughts of authors away from the old
monotonous round of romances and allegories, and at the same time away
from the old monotonous expressions and phrases; to make them attack
all interesting subjects of thought, and meanwhile to adapt and polish
the instrument of language which expressed them. This it was which the
recovery of the Greek and Latin classics accomplished for Italians,
Frenchmen, and Englishmen alike, supplying them with new range and scope,
with new patterns and principles.
But as in England, so in France, this new birth and literary reformation
did not exercise its full effect immediately. In England it gradually
culminated in the Elizabethan age, in France it only attained its full
development in the seventeenth century. That is to say, it was actually
slower of progress in France than in our own literature.
For a time, while the first influences of the Renaissance were being
felt, the effect in France was, as in England, a severance from the old
subjects and methods, without a full adoption of the classical subjects
and principles. The classical influence acts as a solvent before it comes
to act as a crystallizing agent. There is, in fact, a transition period,
during which writing is left free to attempt various forms. If a man
of natural genius arises in such an epoch, he will give us his natural
self, and so may create us prose or verse which, despite a deficiency
in knowledge, will be immortal through its own truth and strength. If
on the other hand at such a transition period men who write are lacking
in native power, they will write much worse when they follow no models
and adhere to no principles. In England, during the transition from the
epoch of Chaucer to the time of Wyatt and Surrey, there appeared no
distinguished poetic genius, and, except among Scottish writers like
Dunbar, little more than tiresome production. In France, on the contrary,
there were two distinguished poets, Villon (fifteenth century) and Marot
(early sixteenth). These were stimulated by the new ideas, but were not
yet dominated by the new classical models. They were freed from the
mediaeval shackles, and not yet fettered in the bonds of misapprehended
and misapplied “classical” principles.
François Villon wrote during the latter half of the fifteenth century,
and is principally known by his ballads, which were something quite new
to French literature, and have, one may venture to say, remained unique
therein. From the old artificial romances and allegories he breaks clean
away. He is as original and independent as our poet Burns, whom, by the
way, he somewhat resembled in personal character. His merit, like that
of the Greeks whom he did not know, lies in his truth, in the candid
expression of his own personal emotions, in his naive confessions, in
his sincere pathos. We all sympathize with emotions and confessions of
this nature, and therefore Villon, like Burns, possesses a permanent and
a universal value. And not only is he true in sentiment, he is clear and
direct in his phrase, and musical in his verse.
Clément Marot opens the sixteenth century. He has been called the father
of modern French poetry. If this means that he wrote with an ease and
sprightliness, and a vein of urbane satire, which are usually associated
with the _esprit gaulois_, but which skim rather along the surface of
things, it is true. But if it means that he is the consummation of
the Renaissance, and that the critical principles of French poetry
were established in his time, it is without truth. For Marot, like
Villon, is a poet and an artist without following the despotic rules
which afterwards came to prevail in France, and he furthermore sought
his themes rather in the old French subjects, the romances and the
_fabliaux_, than in realms of classical antiquity. The Italian influence,
however, touches him and leads him into pastorals, which, we must note,
were known to Spenser.
Villon and Marot are both of the transition period, and not wholly of
the Renaissance. They both fell short in one great respect; they lacked
depth and elevation. This is a vice to which all French verse is prone,
setting, as it does, so special a value on form; but it was the more
discoverable in these two poets, because the rich intellectual nutriment
of antiquity had not yet been assimilated by them, because their minds
laboured under the intellectual poverty of mediaevalism, because, in
other words, they lacked the substance with which the best ancient
literature is crammed. Their poetry has many blossoms, but bears little
fruit. Yet they mark one great step in progress. They are emancipated
from the old mediaeval artificiality.
While Villon and Marot were thus emancipated, there were others during
this transition time who were not by any means so. On the one hand they
allegorized, like the trouvères, to the utmost; their subjects were
obsolete and unreal; on the other, their language was trivial and their
contents uneven. Verse literature seemed to need bracing and correction
in the light of advancing study of the Greek and Latin masterpieces, and
it is to the administering of such correction that we come in what is
known as the _Pléiade_.
The _Pléiade_, or constellation of the seven stars, was the term applied
to seven men of letters, who formed themselves into a coterie or league
about the year 1550, with the professed resolve of reforming the French
language and French literary methods. The conception is very French.
This cool manner of looking at language and literary expression as
subject to definite laws of art, which may be codified by a league or
academy, is contrary to English notions. Not so with the French. They
have no desire for impulsive and perhaps erratic individuality. This
is one of their clearest characteristics. Of the _Pléiade_ the two
greatest names are Ronsard, the poet, and Du Bellay, who was both poet
and manifesto-writer. Their object, as stated by themselves, was to
bring French literature nearer to the classical models of Greece and
Rome, and to create a nobler form and use of the language for literary
purposes. And while Du Bellay was to write his manifesto, Ronsard was
to give a practical illustration of the theory, by himself composing
odes and sonnets in the proper style. The attempt was bold, and it was
successful. For fifty years all French literature “Ronsardized.” Here are
a few sentences of the manifesto concerning the _Défense et Illustration
de la Langue Française_. “Our ancestors have left us our language so
poor and bare, that it stands in need of the ornaments, and, so to
speak, the features of other people.... By what means can we hasten its
development? By the imitation of the ancients.... Translating is not a
sufficient means of elevating our vulgar tongue to an equality with the
most famous. What must we do? Imitate! Imitate the Romans as they did the
Greeks!... We must digest the best authors and convert them into blood
and nutriment.... You that mean to be a poet, read and re-read the Greek
and Latin models. Then leave all those old French _rondeaux_, _ballades_,
_virelais_, _chants royaux_, _chansons_ and other such vulgarities
(_épiceries_), which corrupt the taste of our tongue, and only serve
to testify to our ignorance. Throw yourself on those witty epigrams in
imitation of Martial!... Distil with a flowing style tender elegies after
the manner of Ovid and Tibullus!... Sing me some of those odes as yet
unknown to the French tongue ... and let there be nothing in which does
not appear some trace of rare and ancient learning.”
We need not agree with all this breezy advice. It is impossible to
re-create a language all at once. If there is not inspiration, there
cannot be good poetry, though one may have infinite good models to
follow. Nevertheless the new school was a success for half a century, and
both Ronsard and Du Bellay, though often mechanical and often flat, have
left a few imperishable sonnets and other pieces. Our own Elizabethans
not only read Marot and his contemporary Saint-Gelais (who introduced the
Petrarchan sonnet into France), they also read Du Bellay, who finally
established the sonnet and at the same time served as a pattern for
English writers. One writer of the Ronsardist school, Du Bartas, was
a writer of real religious conviction, and his _Semaine_ or _Week of
Creation_, translated by Sylvester, gained no small currency in England.
What calls for particular notice in this connection is the deliberate
way in which French writers and critics can contemplate and formulate
the principles and methods of good literature. The English, to whom so
much of French verse is cold and mechanical, may perhaps think that it
is this same formulating which has done incalculable harm to poetry,
a thing in its nature as incapable of regulation as are our emotions
and our thoughts. But the French are of another opinion, and it is at
least fair to say that, if writing by rules hampers the flight of genius
and prevents creations of the sublime, it on the other hand checks the
production of that utter doggerel which has been so often inflicted on
readers of English literature. We shall do best to complete at once the
history of this formulation, and then retrace our steps.
Early in the seventeenth century flourished the man to whom first were
due those definite and despotic critical principles which were fully
developed by Boileau and which came to tyrannize in England after the
restoration of Charles II, subsequently reaching their perfection in Pope
and his eighteenth-century school. It is true that Malherbe represents
a movement which was simultaneously proceeding in Italy, and was also
being begun in England by Waller and his follower Denham. But he was
destined to exert a peculiar influence. François Malherbe was by nature
critic, and not creator. He, like the _Pléiade_, offers himself as a
deliberate reformer of literature. His thoughts are fixed on style and
its correctness. His notion of verses is that they should be “beautiful
as prose,” without any of the bold irregularities of a Pindar or the
sentimental vagaries of a Petrarch. He measures words and syllables,
toils laboriously over every line he writes, and prunes down metaphors
and hazardous expressions with the deliberate knife of cold reason. What
he compasses is conciseness and preciseness of phrase, and what he revels
in is the sense, not of a profound thought or keen emotion expressed,
but of a technical difficulty overcome. He is the true parent of all
that verse, in reality but brilliant rhyming prose, which prevailed in
France for two centuries, and which also reigned in England for at least
one. It is he who taught Corneille and Racine how to form a verse, and
Boileau how to criticize one. It was Boileau who passed on the word to
our English Pope, Parnell, Gay, and Johnson. Dryden was doubtless the
intermediate step, but it is to Boileau that Pope expressly resorts. But
for Boileau, Pope’s _Essay on Criticism_ would not have existed.
Nicolas Boileau, who flourished and dictated the principles of criticism
in his _Art Poétique_ during the life of Dryden, in the latter part of
the seventeenth century, was long called in France the “law-giver of
Parnassus.” There is little doubt that the title was justified. His bent
and character were almost identical with those of Pope. He was a keen
satirist, acute critic, and clever reviewer, but he was no true “poet.”
His avowed object was to remove uncertainty of taste and to establish
criticism on a basis of mathematical finality, to set forth a positive
doctrine of literary judgement. And what his doctrine amounts to is that
reason and good sense must decide against all spontaneity of taste.
This means that poetry must attempt no audacious flights of fancy, must
restrain its metaphors, must avoid complexity, and be sheer, plain,
good sense, admirably expressed. And who that has read French poetry
thenceforth until the rise of Victor Hugo, or who that has read English
poetry from Dryden down to Cowper, will not perceive that the result of
this doctrine was disaster to poetry, and that it produced, as Matthew
Arnold expresses it, instead of so many classics of our poetry, just so
many classics of our prose writing in verse? Poetry cannot be judged by
“common sense,” nor written by “common sense.” It is an imaginative art,
and therefore requires uncommon sense.
When, after the Restoration, the second great influence from French
literature came distinctly over England, it came in this shape, one which
was, on the whole, to be regretted.
There is one particular department of French verse of the seventeenth
century which deserves a special note for students of English literature.
In this department there flourished between Malherbe and Boileau sundry
minor poets who had their representatives and pupils in the English
Court of the restored Charles II. These were the poets of amusement and
diversion, the writers of society verses on the one hand, and of drinking
songs on the other. The art of expression elaborated by Malherbe told
on these. Voiture, with his _vers de société_, and St. Amant, with his
Anacreontic poems, compose in a polished style worthy of the literary
reform which Malherbe and Boileau brought to pass. When Charles II came
back from France to England, his court was entertained by “society
verses” and by convivial songs written on the French pattern. Such, among
others, are verses and songs of Dorset, Roscommon, Sedley, and some of
those of Waller.
* * * * *
Meanwhile, in prose, the productions of France were of much greater
intrinsic importance. At the end of the fourteenth century the chatty
chronicler, or historian, Froissart, had combined much of the _naïveté_
and freshness of Herodotus with much of the narrative picturesqueness
of Walter Scott. A century later, under the growing influence of the
new thought, the conception of history has grown almost philosophical,
certainly practical and judicial, in Comines. The full effect of the
Renaissance, however, appears in three sixteenth-century writers of very
different characters and spheres of work.
Amyot, the translator of Plutarch, is not merely famous for unlocking the
treasure-house of that author to the French and thence to the English
world; he also taught how the prose of the language should be written
for biography or essay. Somewhat earlier—contemporary with Sir Thomas
More—appears the learned, satirical, gross, jolly, pathetic priest,
Rabelais, whose mock romance, the _Life of Gargantua and Pantagruel_,
is still a classic to those who know how to discern, beneath all its
terrible coarseness, its grotesque obscurity, and its deliberate
buffoonery, the bold criticism, and wise as bold, of contemporary
society, especially of religion and the church. In the freedom and range
of his thought he embodies the Renaissance, but a Renaissance which
has imparted vigour and freshness without having yet taught the lesson
of literary form and proportion. Rabelais is like no one else, but he
contains elements which recall the broader, comic side of Shakespeare,
and others which anticipate the scathing railleries of Swift. Sterne,
apart from his natural affinities with the earlier ecclesiastic, draws
upon him liberally.
More pleasant reading, both for its sweeter matter and its ease of style,
is the work of the Gascon, Michel de Montaigne—a contemporary of Sir
Philip Sidney—whose _Essays_, while the first example in that domain of
writing, have remained unique in their kind. To the reading of Seneca and
of Amyot’s Plutarch he confessedly owed much, but his conception of the
essay as an easy-going monologue of moralizing self-revelation is his
own. He chooses a theme, begins to discourse in an amiable conversational
way concerning it, rambles from it into side paths, plucking the flowers
of quotation, and returns to it when it so pleases him. Meanwhile, his
real subject is himself. Montaigne the writer is serenely contemplating
Montaigne the man. He is submitting him, his tastes, views, habits, and
feelings, to a friendly inspection, recorded in the easy style of a man
of the world, which charms the reader as he might be charmed by varied
and fruity talk. It charms him all the more because the self depicted by
Montaigne is always in many respects the self of the listener, who feels
all through that touch of nature which makes the whole world kin. For
Montaigne is no narrow egotist or pedant. He displays a wide sympathy
or tolerance, and he is no dogmatist. His motto was _Que sçais-je?_ To
Elizabethan England the _Essays_ were well known, either directly or
through the translation of Florio, with which Shakespeare was familiar.
The _Essays_ of Bacon, with all their unlikeness to Montaigne, are
clearly indebted to his example. How far the Frenchman’s influence
has since extended is rendered incalculable by its very breadth and
pervasiveness.
* * * * *
For the sake of easier apprehension we may now briefly review French
poetry proper, noting its characteristics and its effects on the poetry
of England.
Early French poetry, we have said, consisted of romances, of chivalrous
adventures, allegories, and _fabliaux_. The nature of these troubadour
and trouvère compositions has been described. Till after Chaucer’s
day the romances and allegories of France flourished almost as well
on English soil, whether read and sung in the original French or
adapted—like the _Romance of Alexander_ or the _Romance of the Rose_—in
English dress. Chaucer himself translated the _Roman de la Rose_, and
otherwise made free use of the French material, including the _fabliaux_.
His contemporary, Gower, is almost wholly a copier of the French, and,
during all the epoch which is called the Chaucerian, authors known and
nameless used the stock of mediaeval France as freely and as monotonously
as the French themselves.
This was the first period of our debt. It passed away wholly with all
other things mediaeval, with chivalry and feudalism, superstition and
ignorance.
Then came the transition period to the Renaissance, with Villon and
Marot, who are among the truest poets of France just because they wrote
without a deliberate theory. To those two poets we English are, however,
in no special debt. The _Pléiade_ next began a conscious literary reform
with a propaganda of its own, only to be further reformed in turn by
the poet-critic Malherbe, who inaugurated the era of “correctness,” of
prose in poetry, which was consummated and legislated upon by Boileau.
Thenceforth, until the early nineteenth century (the “romantic” period,
when French verse is under the influence of England and Germany), French
poetry is nearly all alike—clear, cleverly, often brilliantly expressed,
graceful, eminently sane, but generally cold, matter-of-fact, colourless,
often satirical, rarely pathetic, never deeply imaginative or informed
with profound emotion. The prime characteristic of French poetry since
Malherbe’s time is that it is beautified prose. The prime characteristic
of the French literary mind is its willingness to be disciplined and
checked, to be rendered uniform by means of rules and precepts.
On English writing in verse this French literature of the “golden
age,” the seventeenth century, had effect in two chief departments—in
determining the school of social verse-writers and convivialists at the
court of the restored Stuarts, and in dominating the poetical ideals from
Dryden down to Cowper, in producing, in fact, the so-called “correct” or
“classical” school of English literature, the school which said with Pope
True wit is nature to advantage dressed,
What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed.
This school aimed at polished, condensed, sparkling expression of
thoughts which should be reasonable and easily understandable. How
defective is such an ideal of poetry needs little demonstration. The true
note of the time is the treatment of mediocre subjects in language which
is the perfection of neatness and point.
* * * * *
Along with the development of classical verse, and of the more happily
directed prose which is the chief glory of French literature, there was
proceeding the development of the classical drama.
Dramatic performances in France began in the manner usual in all Catholic
countries, namely, with representations of religious events, biblical or
legendary, such as the Passion of Christ or the miracles of the saints.
The “Mysteries” drawn from the scriptures, and the “Miracles” drawn from
the lives of the saints, were in turn followed by the “Moralities,” or
representations of the contests of abstract virtues and vices, which
formed a pronounced step in the secularization of the drama and in
the encouragement of original plot. Into all these there was imported
a liberal amount of comedy, frequently of astounding coarseness. The
actors, from being churchmen, came to be the members of the guilds of
trade. Next, a corporation of the law-students of the Palais de Justice,
which had been established and vested with privileges at the beginning
of the fourteenth century under the name of _La Basoche_, took up the
moralities and developed them still more in the direction of comedies
with ingenious plot and literary dialogue. To the Basoche is probably
to be attributed the famous piece (of about the year 1470) called
_Lawyer Patelin_, from which at least one reiterated phrase has secured
immortality in the shape of _Revenons à nos moutons_. From the Basoche
the drama of Paris passed to the “Enfants sans Souci,” whose particular
vein lay in the so-called _Soties_, a bold species of satirical and
farcical modification of the Moralities. So bold, indeed, were these
pieces, that it became necessary for Francis I to suppress them. By this
date (which is near the middle of the sixteenth century) the revived
study of antiquity begins to act directly upon the drama also, and
members of the _Pléiade_ turn first to the translation and then to the
imitation of the drama of Greece. The latter was the course taken by
Jodelle, whose _Cléopâtre_ marks the epoch at which the serious drama
of France definitely bound itself in the chains of the “three unities,”
accepted Seneca for its model of style, and adopted the Alexandrine
couplet for its orthodox vehicle of dialogue. Comedy meanwhile enjoyed
more freedom, though taking its patterns, directly and avowedly from
Italy. Between Jodelle and the great age of the drama of Corneille, the
stage, like so much besides in France, passed under the domination,
partly of Spain, partly of Italy. The chosen models were the Spaniards,
Lope de Vega and Calderon, or the Italian Trissino, of whom something is
said in their proper places. It remained for the literary reformation of
Malherbe to find the consummation for drama also in the work of Corneille.
Pierre Corneille, the author of _Le Cid_, _Horace_, _Cinna_, _Polyeucte_,
and other plays of greater and less note, flourished about the middle
of the seventeenth century (the time of our English Civil Wars and
Commonwealth), and was followed by Racine, the author of _Phèdre_,
_Esther_, and _Athalie_, and the contemporary of our poet Dryden.
When it is said that these two dramatists possess in full the French
characteristics, it is meant that they show all the French virtues of
elegance, good sense, and polish of style, and all the French defects
of servility to rule, coldness, and consequent monotony. There can be
nothing more unlike than the typical drama of Corneille and the typical
drama of Shakespeare. The Frenchman deliberately adopts the so-called
“Aristotelian” and “classical,” but really Senecan and pedantic, rule
of the unities, of time, of place, and of action; that is to say, his
plays contain the development of but one action, which proceeds in the
same place and within a time equal to that of the representation itself.
To these conventions, which can have no natural or divine right to
call themselves “laws,” Shakespeare and the Elizabethan dramatists are
strangers. A Shakespearean play—described as “romantic” in antithesis
to “classical”—carries us from place to place, from year to year, and
embraces, if it so chooses, a number of loosely related actions and
episodes. Its unity is the unity of a whole story, not of a situation
or climax. Corneille, to use his own words, had an aversion to putting
Paris, Rome, and Constantinople on the same stage. The result is that
there is often no background of place or time at all. This was but one
difference. Again, Shakespeare’s tragedies are performed, if he thinks
fit, with all their slayings, suicides, and mutilations full in the face
of the audience. In the French theatre, as in the Greek, these actions
are regularly perpetrated out of sight and are merely reported upon the
stage.
French tragedy is mostly the working out of a moral situation. English
tragedy holds the mirror up to manifold nature. The French tragedy
is “heroic,” it seeks to interest and to elevate the soul by heroic
sentiments dramatically displayed. We meet with heroes who are altogether
noble, and with the opposite characters who are altogether base. They are
“ideal” personages, who do little else but deliver artistic declamatory
speeches in the manner of Seneca. On the other hand, the English tragedy
represents men as they are, with all their complexities, inconsistencies,
and shortcomings. The French do not, or did not, understand the English
drama any better than we understand theirs. They call it irregular and
inartistic. Voltaire at one period declared Shakespeare “a drunken
savage, without the least spark of good taste or the least knowledge
of the rules.” We, on the other hand, grow weary of the continuous and
unrelieved progress of the one and only action, and of the vagueness
of background and lack of individuality in “the ideal action performed
by ideal characters.” The French portray types, not characters. The
great masters accepted a fixed architecture for their plays and fixed
limitations to work under, and their merit is that, despite these
cramping conditions, they produced works of so elevated a literary and
so exalted a moral style. It is not meant that Corneille, Racine, and
the minor dramatists were as much alike as larger and smaller peas. A
manifest difference, for example, which renders the plays of Racine more
generally interesting than those of Corneille, is that Racine chooses
subjects which come nearer home to most human beings. He brings us into
one part, at least, of the practical human world, the world of love. The
fault of French tragic drama is excess of rule and restraint; the fault
of English drama had, by the time of the post-Shakespeareans, come to be
excess of licence and consequent bad taste bordering on absurdity.
In the midst of the French influence upon English literature, which
set in towards the end of the seventeenth century—the only time when
Englishmen as a body have shown a readiness to submit to a prescribed
code of critical principles—it is not unnatural that the English drama
also should copy the French. The imitation, however, was by no means good
as such. The English tragedy of the Restoration aims at being “heroic”
tragedy, turns declamation into rant and bombast, and ideal character
into impossible perfection. Fortunately the copying in this region was of
comparatively brief duration. Of those whom it affected Dryden was the
least guilty. He came to a theatre which had been but newly opened under
Charles II, after the Puritan tyranny, and, as with everything else under
Charles, the theatre endeavoured to take its tone from France. Dryden had
himself been largely influenced by French critical ideas. He did not,
it is true, agree entirely with the French principles; nevertheless,
he found submission necessary. On the one side he had before him the
magnificent “romantic” and “irregular” drama of Shakespeare and the other
Elizabethans, on the other the new heroic and “regular” tragedies of
France. He attempted to combine the better elements of both, and failed
through falling between two stools. That he was conscious of a deliberate
choice is clear from his own words: “Let any man, who understands
English, read diligently the works of Shakespeare and Fletcher, and I
dare undertake that he will find in every page either some solecism of
speech, or some notorious flaw in sense—many of their plots were made up
of some ridiculous incoherent story.” He mentions in particular _Love’s
Labour’s Lost_, _Winter’s Tale_, and _Measure for Measure_, and he goes
on to quote the classical rules concerning unity of action, with its
“beginning, middle, and end,” and the rest; and thereto he adds as
his authorities the names of French critics of the school of Boileau,
the now unremembered Bossu and Rapin. He does not, indeed, admire the
French coldness and monotony, and his own object, though not that of his
contemporaries, was, as has been already stated, to combine the better
elements of both the French and English style. It is a grief to note
that, in keeping with this view, it was thought no literary sin at this
time to mutilate and adapt the plays of Shakespeare till they more or
less suited the current taste. Dryden’s own dramas, _Tyrannic Love_,
_Secret Love_, _Aurengzebe_, and the _Conquest of Granada_ are largely
indebted to French originals, and have fallen between the two stools.
Whereas Shakespeare and Corneille alike survive, no one now can act, and
very few care to read, the plays of Dryden. Another play which is of
some repute, the _Cato_ of Addison, would certainly either not have been
written, or would have been a less cold and declamatory thing than it is,
if Addison had not lived in an age when France was England’s teacher in
dramatic and other literary rules.
Of French comedy a different story must be told. It is impossible to
mention the name of Jean Baptiste Poquelin, better known as Molière, the
contemporary of Corneille and Racine, without feeling that we are naming
the world’s best writer of comedy pure and simple, next to Aristophanes.
What Shakespeare might have done if he had written comedies alone, we
cannot tell. Wherever his mature plays offer us undiluted comedy, it is
superlatively comic. Yet we do not think of him primarily in connection
with Aristophanes and Molière, but rather as the writer of _Hamlet_ or
_King Lear_. If we named an English author whose genius in many respects
recalls Molière, it would perhaps be Sheridan, the writer of the _School
for Scandal_. In Molière there comes out the best side of the peculiar
French genius, the Gallic wit, the trenchant satire without brutality,
the keen entertainment without vulgarity. Molière at his zenith makes
comedy a work of art, and of refined art; a comedy which edifies while
it delights, and which delights without appealing to the lower elements
of our nature. It is a humorous feast of the delighted reason, not a
pandering to a mere taste for “lungs tickle o’ the sere.” His _Précieuses
Ridicules_ is keen and killing criticism of the silly affectations of a
literary coterie; his _Bourgeois Gentilhomme_ slays the ignorant parvenu,
and his _Tartuffe_ the hypocrite.
This comedy, delightful now to read as it was then to see, could not but
seize hold upon Englishmen of the Restoration times and later still.
Molière was copied, adapted, translated by English writers, and that
not merely for reading, but for acting purposes. Dryden translated
_L’Etourdi_ as _Sir Martin Mar-all_; Vanbrugh turned _Le Dépit Amoureux_
into _The Mistake_; Wycherley offered _The Plain Dealer_ as a version of
_Le Misanthrope_; Fielding’s _Mock-Doctor_ is _Le Médecin Malgré Lui_,
his _Miser_ is Molière’s _L’Avare_; Colley Cibber converted _Tartuffe_
into _The Non-Juror_.
So much at least does English literature proper owe to French tragedy
and comedy. Of the constant plagiarism and adaptation of French plays in
modern times nothing need be said, since these things have been for the
most part hardly literature in the proper meaning of the term.
* * * * *
Meanwhile French prose-writing, which had been of such easy simplicity
in Montaigne, passed for a while under the bad influence of the
Spanish _estilo culto_, and of the English Euphuism. This was the day
of the Hôtel de Rambouillet and of the Précieuses, with their finical
refinements and affectations of speech. In the subject-matter of
literature the Spanish influence showed itself first in the _Astrée_ of
D’Urfé (1608), a wearisome and unnatural “pastoral romance,” prompted by
the _Diana_ of the Portuguese-Spaniard Montemayor. To this work are to
be affiliated the “heroic romances” of La Calprenède and Mademoiselle
de Scudéry, who are shortly to be mentioned. As for the prose vehicle
itself, apart from these vagaries of its use, it may be said that, ever
since French literature reached its golden age in the middle of the
seventeenth century, its characteristics have been much the same as those
of French verse, namely, clearness of order, precision of statement, good
sense of thinking, a triumph of reasonable and exact expression.
Our own literature of the later part of the seventeenth century, and of
the earlier half of the eighteenth, which owes so much to France, is
nowhere more manifestly indebted than in respect of that lighter prose
which takes the shape of letters and novels, and of what would now be
called occasional journalism. The French have always been excellent
letter-writers and journalists, as well as admirable novelists.
Even the inferior French work, such as Mademoiselle de Scudéry’s
interminable pseudo-romantic prolixities—the _Grand Cyrus_, or _Clélie_
with its _Carte de Tendre_—and those of La Calprenède (_Cléopâtre_ and
_Cassandre_), was reproduced in England by writers of the calibre of Mrs.
Aphra Behn, as well as exploited by Dryden and other post-Restoration
dramatists. The novel of adventure, which we associate with the names
of Defoe (as in _Moll Flanders_ and _Colonel Jack_), Fielding (_Joseph
Andrews_), and Smollett (_Roderick Random_), and which is known as
“picaroon” or “picaresque,” is no doubt ultimately derived from Spain,
but its way into England was made through Paul Scarron, a French
seventeenth-century novelist, and through his followers and literary
heirs, among whom in the early eighteenth century is the renowned Lesage,
the author of _Gil Blas_. On the other hand, that class of fiction which
deals with character and its analysis, and which appears in English with
Richardson, the author of _Clarissa Harlowe_ and _Pamela_, dates from
Madame de la Fayette, who lived a century earlier than he, although it is
perhaps to his contemporary Marivaux that the Englishman is more directly
under obligation. The first great exemplar of modern letter-writing,
who, after Cicero and Pliny, taught Horace Walpole and Chesterfield how
to pen epistles, and who inspired the more or less mock correspondence
of Addison in the _Spectator_, was Madame de Sévigné, a contemporary of
Madame de la Fayette.
The seventeenth century in France is covered with prose-writers of clear
reasoning power, pinnacled in Descartes’ _Discours de la Méthode_ and
Pascal’s _Provincial Letters_, and with writers of essays, memoirs,
novels, letters, criticisms, character-sketches, and “maxims” in all
their various kinds. There is the _essai_, which enlarges on a theme; the
_conversation_, an essay in dialogue, like those of Landor; the _pensée_,
a miniature essay with narrower theme; and the _maxime_, a pithy sentence
forming the cream of a _pensée_. La Bruyère, La Rochefoucauld, and
St. Evremond, for example, are familiar names. For our purpose it is
enough that these writers preceded our own Addison, Swift, Steele, and
Johnson, and that English prose of the Queen Anne period and the earlier
eighteenth century was fashioned by France as much as was our verse
itself. And as the excellence of prose is perfect clearness and ease, the
influence of France herein was wholly good, just as the prosaic influence
of its verse had been mainly harmful.
In the same century stands, _sui generis_, La Fontaine, the fertile
author of the famous stories and _Fables_, to whom Dryden, Gay, and Prior
owe, besides the hint of form, no little suggestion.
* * * * *
In the eighteenth century French literature is of an inferior order,
unproductive of things noble in imagination or of great dramatic works.
At its best it is critical, not creative. Until André Chénier at the
end of the century, it has practically no poetry to show, since neither
the occasional verses of Voltaire, nor his epic _Henriade_, nor his
drama _Zaïre_, can properly bear the name. Wit indeed flourished in the
epigrams and comedy of Piron, as it could hardly fail to do in French
work of the lighter kinds; but it was not till the precursors of the
“Romantic movement” of the nineteenth century—for which France was
almost as much indebted to the English Byron and the German Goethe as to
its own Rousseau and Chateaubriand—that creative poetry appears again
with Béranger and Lamartine. The Romantic epoch itself is then embodied
in Victor Hugo. So far as the eighteenth century is productive, it is
in prose, and chiefly the prose of thought and science. The novel is
represented in the picaresque _Diable Boiteux_ and _Gil Blas_ of Lesage
early in the century, in the analytical _Marianne_ of Marivaux, in the
satirically destructive _Candide_ of Voltaire, in the powerful character
study of _Manon Lescaut_ by Prévost, in the sentimental and picturesque
_Nouvelle Héloïse_ of Rousseau and _Paul et Virginie_ of Bernardin de
St. Pierre, and in the social fiction of Madame de Staël. Of the effect
of Lesage upon England we have already spoken. Marivaux appears to have
distinctly influenced Richardson, whose _Pamela_ otherwise bears a
strange similarity to _Marianne_. But most congenial to the English mind,
now on its way to the Romantic revolt, was the work of Rousseau and St.
Pierre, in which the notion of a “return to nature” is the dominant note.
St. Pierre was the disciple; Rousseau is the master, who, whether in
the novel or in his _Confessions_, is the first writer in modern Europe
to expatiate upon inanimate nature in connection with the feelings. How
much of the “nature-worship” of Wordsworth and his age may be due to this
example from France can hardly be estimated, but the name of Rousseau was
a familiar one in England, and by him was sown much of the seed which
our own revivalists watered.
Passing over the letter-writers and minor essayists, we come to the
thinkers, the propagators of freedom of thought, commonly known as the
_philosophes_. In this case the impulse came from the English Locke and
from contact with, and personal observation of, the liberal circumstances
of England, at that time the most advanced in Europe. The crop of French
solvent ideas from these sources soon found its way back to our own
country. In his _Esprit des Lois_, Montesquieu, a writer of remarkable
wisdom, examines the natural basis and evolution of law and custom; the
fertile but superficial Voltaire, in various “Letters” and essays, lends
his powerful wit to the weakening of accepted authority, especially in
religion. Subsequently, in order to crystallize the knowledge which
forms the necessary basis to right criticism and reformation, there
was undertaken the famous, if not very successful, _Encyclopaedia_, or
_Dictionnaire Raisonné_ of sciences and arts, under the direction of
Diderot and D’Alembert. Falling into the revolutionary current, and being
in direct association with the _philosophes_ and Encyclopaedists, the
eloquent and passionate Rousseau produced the _Contrat Social_, with
its doctrines of equality and fraternity and its innovating theories
of education, and the _Confessions_, in which he lays bare his own
pettinesses, but with exquisite literary skill. As his follower must be
reckoned Chateaubriand, who, so far as expression of temperament goes,
passed on his mantle to the English Byron.
If now it is asked on what groups of our English writers French
influence is most pronounced and obvious, we should most safely reply
that in pre-Renaissance times we must name Chaucer and Gower; then,
after a gap of two hundred and fifty years, we may begin once more
with Dryden and his contemporaries, the poetic “roisterers,” Dorset
and Roscommon, and the comedians Congreve, Wycherley, Farquhar, and
Vanbrugh. In Pope and all his school the influence is manifest and
conscious. It is present in Addison and Steele, and in the novelists
Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett, different as they are; in the letters
of Walpole and Chesterfield, and, in more or less measure, consciously
and unconsciously, in all the writers of poetry, drama, letters, essays,
journals and novels from about the year 1660 for a whole century.
Since that time the influences have been rather the other way, but those
from France upon England may perhaps be enumerated as (1) the elaboration
of a sentiment for inanimate nature since Rousseau, St. Pierre, and
Chateaubriand; (2) the absorption, and sometimes imitation, of French
novels, such as _Les Misérables_ and _Notre Dame_ of Hugo, the revived
picaroons of Dumas, and the naturalistic work of Zola; (3) the Positivist
philosophy of Comte; (4) imitations or plagiarisms of French comedy,
such as that of Sardou; (5) lessons from the literary criticism of Ste.
Beuve, chiefly derived through Matthew Arnold; (6) stylistic lessons from
writers like Flaubert.