Twice at least in the course of their long history, it is known that the
literature and even the language of France has exerted over the whole of
Europe an influence, whose universal character other languages perhaps
more harmonious,--Italian for instance,--and other literatures more
original in certain respects, like English literature, have never
possessed. It is in a purely French form that our mediæval poems, our
'Chansons de Geste,' our 'Romances of the Round Table,' our _fabliaux_
themselves, whencesoever they came,--Germany or Tuscany, England or
Brittany, Asia or Greece,--conquered, fascinated, charmed, from one end
of Europe to the other, the imaginations of the Middle Ages. The
amorous languor and the subtlety of our "courteous poetry" are breathed
no less by the madrigals of Shakespeare himself than by Petrarch's
sonnets; and after such a long lapse of time we still discover something
that comes from us even in the Wagnerian drama, for instance in
'Parsifal' or in 'Tristan and Isolde.' A long time later, in a Europe
belonging entirely to classicism, from the beginning of the seventeenth
to the end of the eighteenth century, during one hundred and fifty years
or even longer, French literature possessed a real sovereignty in Italy,
in Spain, in England, and in Germany. Do not the names of Algarotti,
Bettinelli, Beccaria, Filengieri, almost belong to France? What shall I
say of the famous Gottschedt? Shall I recall the fact that in his
victorious struggle against Voltaire, Lessing had to call in Diderot's
assistance? And who ignores that if Rivarol wrote his 'Discourse upon
the Universality of the French Language,' it can be charged neither to
his vanity nor to our national vanity, since he was himself half
Italian, and the subject had been proposed by the Academy of Berlin?
All sorts of reasons have been given for this universality of French
literature: some were statistical, if I may say so, some geographical,
political, linguistic. But the true one, the good one, is different: it
must be found in the supremely sociable character of the literature
itself. If at that time our great writers were understood and
appreciated by everybody, it is because they were addressing everybody,
or better, because they were speaking to all concerning the interests of
all. They were attracted neither by exceptions nor by peculiarities:
they cared to treat only of man in general, or as is also said, of the
universal man, restrained by the ties of human society; and their very
success shows that below all that distinguishes, say, an Italian from a
German, this universal man whose reality has so often been discussed,
persists and lives, and though constantly changing never loses his own
likeness....
In comparison with the literature of France, thus defined and
characterized by its sociable spirit, the literature of England is an
individualistic literature. Let us put aside, as should be done, the
generation of Congreve and Wycherley, perhaps also the generation of
Pope and Addison,--to which, however, we ought not to forget that Swift
also belonged;--it seems that an Englishman never writes except in order
to give to himself the external sensation of his own personality.
Thence his _humor_, which may be defined as the expression of the
pleasure he feels in thinking like nobody else. Thence, in England, the
plenteousness, the wealth, the amplitude of the lyric vein; it being
granted that _individualism_ is the very spring of lyric poetry, and
that an ode or an elegy is, as it were, the involuntary surging, the
outflowing of what is most intimate, most secret, most peculiar in the
poet's soul. Thence also the _eccentricity_ of all the great English
writers when compared with the rest of the nation, as though they became
conscious of themselves only by distinguishing themselves from those who
claim to differ from them least. But is it not possible to otherwise
characterize the literature of England? It will be easily conceived that
I dare not assert such a thing; all I say here is, that I cannot better
express the differences which distinguish that literature from our own.
That is also all I claim, in stating that the essential character of the
literature of Germany is, that it is _philosophical_. The philosophers
there are poets, and the poets are philosophers. Goethe is to be found
no more, or no less, in his 'Theory of Colors' or in his 'Metamorphosis
of Plants,' than in his 'Divan' or his 'Faust'; and lyrism, if I may use
this trite expression, "is overflowing" in Schleiermacher's theology and
in Schelling's philosophy. Is this not perhaps at least one of the
reasons of the inferiority of the German drama? It is surely the reason
of the depth and scope of Germanic poetry. Even in the masterpieces of
German literature it seems that there is mixed something indistinct, or
rather mysterious, _suggestive_ in the extreme, which leads us to
thought by the channel of the dream. But who has not been struck by
what, under a barbarous terminology, there is of attractive, and as such
of eminently poetical, of realistic and at the same time idealistic, in
the great systems of Kant and Fichte, Hegel and Schopenhauer? Assuredly
nothing is further removed from the character of our French literature.
We can here understand what the Germans mean when they charge us with a
lack of depth. Let them forgive us if _we_ do not blame their literature
for not being the same as ours.
For it is good that it be thus, and for five or six hundred years this
it is that has made the greatness not only of European literature, but
of Western civilization itself; I mean that which all the great nations,
after slowly elaborating it, as it were, in their national isolation,
have afterwards deposited in the common treasury of the human race.
Thus, to this one we owe the sense of mystery, and we might say the
revelation of what is beautiful, in that which remains obscure and
cannot be grasped. To another we owe the sense of art, and what may be
called the appreciation of the power of form. A third one has handed to
us what was most heroic in the conception of chivalrous honor. And to
another, finally, we owe it that we know what is both most ferocious and
noblest, most wholesome and most to be feared, in human pride. The share
that belongs to us Frenchmen was, in the meanwhile, to bind, to fuse
together, and as it were to unify under the idea of the general society
of mankind, the contradictory and even hostile elements that may have
existed in all that. No matter whether our inventions and ideas were, by
their origin, Latin or Romance, Celtic or Gallic, Germanic even, if you
please, the whole of Europe had borrowed them from us in order to adapt
them to the genius of its different races. Before re-admitting them in
our turn, before adopting them after they had been thus transformed, we
asked only that they should be able to serve the progress of reason and
of humanity. What was troublous in them we clarified; what was
corrupting we corrected; what was local we generalized; what was
excessive we brought down to the proportions of mankind. Have we not
sometimes also lessened their grandeur and altered their purity? If
Corneille has undoubtedly brought nearer to us the still somewhat
barbaric heroes of Guillem de Castro, La Fontaine, when imitating the
author of the Decameron, has made him more indecent than he is in his
own language; and if the Italians have no right to assail Molière for
borrowing somewhat from them, the English may well complain that
Voltaire failed to understand Shakespeare. But it is true none the less
that in disengaging from the particular man of the North or the South
this idea of a universal man, for which we have been so often
reviled,--if any one of the modern literatures has breathed in its
entirety the spirit of the public weal and of civilization, it is the
literature of France. And this ideal cannot possibly be as empty as has
too often been asserted; since, as I endeavored to show, from Lisbon to
Stockholm and from Archangel to Naples, it is its manifestations that
foreigners have loved to come across in the masterpieces, or better, in
the whole sequence of the history of our literature.