D'Aguesseau.
Contemporary with Fontenelle and La Motte was the Chancellor D'Aguesseau, one of the most prominent figures of the earlier reign of Louis XV., a steady defender of orthodoxy—yet, as was seen in the case of the Encyclopædia, willing to assist enlightenment—a man of irreproachable character, and a writer of some merit. D'Aguesseau was born in 1668, and died in 1751. He early received considerable preferment in the law, and held the seals at intervals for the greater part of the last thirty years of his life. He was a defender of Gallicanism—indeed, he was suspected of Jansenist leanings—and a man of great benevolence in private life. His legal and historical learning was immense, and he was not without some tincture of science. He deserves a place here chiefly for his speeches on public occasions, which were in effect elaborate moral essays. An important part of them consists of what were calledMercuriales(that is to say, discourses pronounced on certain Wednesdays (Die Mercurii) by the first president of the Parliament of Paris) on the abuses of the day, the duties of judges, the nature of justice, and similar subjects.
Duclos.
Another writer, who has been mentioned more than once before, held somewhat aloof from the Encyclopædists, though he was not, like D'Aguesseau, definitely orthodox, or, like Vauvenargues, severely moral. Charles Pinaud Duclos was one of the most miscellaneous of the miscellaneous writers of the time. He held the office of historiographer royal, and produced some remarkable works of the historical kind, one of whichhas been noticed. He composed novels in a fanciful style midway between Crébillon and Marivaux. He also wrote on grammar, but some of his best work consists of short academic essays, and of a moral study calledConsidérations sur les Mœurs de Notre Temps, which is both well written and shows discernment. Duclos' character has been somewhat variously represented, but the unfavourable reports (which are in the minority) may probably be traced to the studied brusqueness of his manners, and to his unwillingness to make common cause with thephilosophecoterie, though, if some stories are to be believed, he often conversed and argued quite in their style.
Marmontel.
Yet another typical figure of the same numerous class is Jean François Marmontel, one of the most eminent professional men of letters of the second class. Marmontel's moral tales, hisBélisaire, and his plays have already been noticed, but his main place in literature is that of a journalist and critic. He was born at Bort, in the district of Limoges, in 1723, and obtained some provincial reputation in letters. Introduced to Voltaire in 1746, he began as a dramatist, and, after some failures, acquired the protection of Madame de Pompadour. He was made editor of theMercure, which gave him an influential position and a competence. He afterwards succeeded Duclos as historiographer, notwithstanding the outcry which had been made against hisBélisaire. He had contributed almost all the minor articles on literary subjects to the Encyclopædia, and these were collected and published asÉléments de Littératurein 1787. He died in 1799. TheÉléments de Littératureare, with theCours de Littératureof La Harpe, the chief source of information as to eighteenth-century criticism of the fashionable kind in France. They are very voluminous, and, from the circumstances of their original form, deal with a vast number of subjects. The style is for the most part simple and good, destitute alike of the dryness and of the bombast which were the two faults of contemporary writing. But Marmontel's system of criticism will not bear a moment's examination. It consists simply in the assumption that Racine, Boileau (though he was at first recalcitrant to Boileau, and had to be admonished by Voltaire thatça porte malheur), and their contemporariesare infallible models, and in the application of this principle to all other nations. The passion for finding plausible general reasons also leads Marmontel into grotesque aberrations, as where he gives three reasons for English success in poetry as contrasted with our inferiority in the other arts. First, Englishmen, loving glory, saw early that poetry acquired glory for a nation. Secondly, being naturally given to sadness and meditation, they wish for emotions to distract and move them. Thirdly, their genius is proper to poetry. This last remark, the reader should observe, comes from a countryman of Molière, a man who must have read theMalade Imaginaire, and who was moreover a man of much more than ordinary talent. Marmontel often has acute remarks, and his blunders and absurdities are rather symptomatic of the false state in which criticism was at the time than of individual shortcomings.
La Harpe.
Somewhat younger than Marmontel was La Harpe, who pursued the same lines of dramatic poetry and literary criticism, the latter with more success in his kind, so much so, that Malherbe, Boileau, and he may be ranked together as the three representatives of the infancy, flourishing, and decadence of the 'classical' theory of literary criticism in France. La Harpe was born at Paris in 1739, was brought up by charity, gained a reputation as a brilliant exhibitioner at the Collége d'Harcourt, and, after the mishap of being imprisoned for a libel, obtained new success at the Academy competitions. He acquired the favour of Voltaire, and fairly launched himself in literature. For many years he furnished tragedies to the stage, and criticised the literary work of others with a singular mixture of acuteness, pedantry, and ill-temper. He was converted from Republicanism by an imprisonment during the Terror, and became a violent conservative and defender of orthodoxy. He died in 1803. His principal critical work is hisCours de Littérature, which was the work chiefly of his later days. La Harpe had very considerable talent, which was however warped by the false and narrow system of criticism he adopted, and by his personal ill-temper and overbearing disposition. He is even more than Boileau the type of the schoolmaster-critic, who marks passagesfor correction according to cut-and-dried rules instead of attempting to judge the author according to his own standard. Yet, if he is the most typical example of the school, he is also perhaps the best. In dealing with authors of his own century, he is especially worthy of attention, because for the most part they themselves had before them the standards which he used, and his method is therefore relevant as far as it goes. La Harpe wrote well in the fashion of his day.
Thomas.
With Duclos, Marmontel, and La Harpe, Thomas is usually named. This writer, like others of our present subjects, was chiefly a composer of academicÉloges,Mémoires,Discours, and the like. He also wrote a book onLes Femmes, a subject which he treated, as he did most things, with seriousness, and with a mixture of declamation and sentimentality. His literary value is but small.
Orthodox Apologists.
Of the definitely orthodox party only two names need be mentioned, that of the Abbé Guénée, who devoted himself to exposing Voltaire's numerous slips in erudition in hisLettres de Quelques Juifs, and that of the Abbé Bergier, who is chiefly noteworthy as having held the singular post of official refuter of the Encyclopædists, in virtue of which appointment he received two thousandlivresper annum from the General Assembly of the clergy for sixteen years. He wrote with assiduity, but was not read, and three years before the Revolution he lost his annuity, which the Assembly struck off. Bergier was a man of learning, industry, and good faith, but unfortunately he did not possess sufficient literary talent to execute the task entrusted to him. The Abbé Guénée, on the contrary, was a fair match even for Voltaire, but he did not attempt, perhaps it was too early to attempt, anything more than skirmishing.
Fréron.
A bitter personal opponent of La Harpe, and a famous man in literary history, was Fréron. Elie Catherine Fréron was born at Quimper in Britanny in 1719, and was educated by the Jesuits. He began a critical journal when he was only seven-and-twenty, under the title (not so strange then as now) ofLettres de Madame la Comtesse de.... But he had already contributed to theObservationsandJugementsof Desfontaines. TheLettreswere suppressed in 1749, but continued under another title, and at last, in 1754, became the celebratedAnnée Littéraire, which for twenty years was full of gall and wormwood for Voltaire and all his partisans. Voltaire was never slow to retaliate in such matters, and his retorts culminated in the play ofL'Écossaise, in which Fréron was caricatured under the title Frélon (hornet). Every effort was made by the Encyclopædists (who were not in the least tolerant in practice) to procure the suppression of theAnnée. But Fréron had solid supports in high places and held on gallantly. It is said that his death, in 1776, was caused by a report that the suppression had been at last obtained. He certainly suffered both from gout and from heart disease, complaints not unlikely to make a sudden shock fatal. Fréron, like his English prototype John Dennis, has had the disadvantage that his adversaries were numerous, witty, not too scrupulous, and on the winning side. His personal character seems to have been none of the most amiable. But he was more frequently right than wrong in his criticisms on detached points, and his literary standards were decidedly higher and better than those of his enemies. He had moreover abundant wit and an imperturbable temper, which enabled him to turn the laugh against Voltaire in his criticism of the first representation ofL'Écossaiseitself.
Two other adversaries of Voltaire who deserve notice as literary critics were the Abbé Desfontaines (already mentioned) and Palissot. Desfontaines was a man of doubtful character; but it is not certain that he was in the wrong in the dispute which changed him from a friend into an enemy of Voltaire, and, like Fréron, he very frequently hit blots both in the patriarch's works and in those of his disciples. Palissot was the author of a play calledLes Philosophes, anÉcossaiseon the other side, in which Rousseau, Diderot, and others were outrageously ridiculed. There was no great merit in this, but Palissot was not a bad critic in some ways, and his notes on French classics, especially Corneille, frequently show much greater taste than those of most contemporary annotators.
Philosophe Criticism. D'Alembert, Diderot.
Les Feuilles de Grimm.
Diderot's Salons
His General Criticism.
The leaders of thephilosophesthemselves gave considerable attention to criticism. Voltaire wrote this, as he wrote everything,his principal critical work being his Commentary on Corneille, in which the constraint of general dramatic and poetic theory which the critic imposes on himself, and the merely conventional opinions in which he too often indulges, do not interfere with much acute criticism on points of detail. D'Alembert distinguished himself by his extraordinarily careful and polishedÉloges, or obituary notices, which remain among the finest examples of critical appreciation of a certain kind to be found in literature. Although he did not definitely attempt a new theory of criticism, D'Alembert's vigorous intellect and unbiassed judgment enabled him to estimate authors so different as (for instance) Massillon and Marivaux with singular felicity. But the greatest of the Encyclopædists in this respect was unquestionably Diderot. While his contemporaries, bent on innovation in politics and religion, accepted without doubt or complaint the narrowest, most conventional, and most unnatural system of literary criticism ever known, he, in his hurried and haphazard but masterly way, practically anticipated the views and even many of thedictaof the Romantic school. Most of Diderot's criticisms were written for Grimm's 'Leaves,' which thus acquired a value entirely different from and far superior to any that their nominal author could give them. Some of these short notices of current literature are among the finest examples of the review properly so called, though in point of mere literary style and expression they constantly suffer from Diderot's hurried way of setting down the first thing that came into his head in the first words that presented themselves to clothe it. But everywhere there is to be perceived the cardinal principle of sound criticism—that a book is to be judged, not according to arbitrary rules laid downex cathedrafor the class of books to which it is supposed to belong, but according to the scheme of its author in the first place, and in the second to the general laws of æsthetics; a science which, if the Germans named it, Diderot, by their own confession, did much to create. Even more remarkable in this respect than his book-criticisms are hisSalons, criticisms of the biennial exhibitions of pictures in Paris, also written for Grimm. There are nine of these, rangingover a period of twenty-two years, and they have served as models for more than a century. Diderot did not adopt the old plan (as old as the Greeks) of mere description more or less elaborate of the picture, nor the plan of dilating on its merely technical characteristics, though, assisted by artist friends, he managed to introduce a fair amount of technicalities into his writing. His method is to take in the impression produced by the painting on his mind, and to reproduce it with the associations and suggestions it has supplied. Thus his criticisms are often extremely discursive, and some of his most valuable reflections on matters at first sight quite remote from the fine arts occur in theseSalons. Of drama Diderot had a formal theory which he illustrated by examples not quite so happy as his precepts. This theory involved the practical substitution of what is called in Frenchdramefor the conventional tragedy and comedy, and it brought the French theatre (or would have brought it if it had been adopted, which it was not until 1830) much nearer to the English than it had been. Diderot was moreover an enthusiastic admirer of English novels, and especially of Richardson and Sterne, partly no doubt because the sentimentalism which characterised them coincided with his ownsensibilité, but also (it is fair to believe) because of their freedom from the artificiality and the strict observance of models which pervaded all branches of literature in France. Of poetry proper we have little formal criticism from Diderot. His own verses are few, and of no merit, nor was the poetry of the time at all calculated to excite any enthusiasm in him. But the æsthetic tendency which in other ways he expressed, and which he was the first to express, was that which, some forty years after his death, brought about the revival of poetry in France, through recurrence to nature, passion, truth, vividness, and variety of sentiment.
Newspapers of the Revolution.
The Influence of Journalism.
So long as the oldrégimelasted journalism was naturally in a condition of suppression, but from the beginning of the Revolution it assumed at once an important position in the state, and a position still more important as a nursery of rising men of letters. At the time of the outbreak only two papers of importance existed, the already mentionedGazette de France, and theJournal de Paris, in which Garat, André Chénier, Roucher, and many other men of distinction, won their spurs. 1789, however, saw the birth of numerous sheets, some of which continued almost till our own days. The most important was theGazette NationaleorMoniteur Universel, in which not merely Garat and La Harpe, but Ginguené, a literary critic of talent and a republican of moderate principles, together with the future historian Lacretelle, and the comic poet, fabulist, and critic Andrieux, took part. Rivarol, Champcenetz, and Pelletier conducted the RoyalistActes des Apôtres, Marat started his ultra-republicanAmi du Peuple, Camille Desmoulins theCourier de Brabant, Durozoy theGazette de Paris. Barrère and Louvet, both notorious, if not famous names, launched for the first time a paper with a title destined to fortune,Le Journal des Débats; and Camille Desmoulins changed his oddly-named journal into one named more oddly still,Les Révolutions de France et de Brabant. All these, and more, were the growth of the single year 1789. The next saw the avowedly RoyalistAmi du Roiof Royou, the atrociousPère Duchêneof Hébert, the cumbrously-namedJournal des Amis de la Constitution, on which Fontanes, Clermont-Tonnerre, and other future Bonapartists and Constitutionalists worked. In 1791 no paper of importance, except the short-lived GirondistChronique du Mois, appeared. In the next year many Terrorist prints of no literary merit were started, and one, entitledNouvelles Politiques, to which the veterans Suard and Morellet, with Guizot, a novice of the time to come, Lacretelle, Dupont de Nemours, and others, were contributors. In the later years of the revolutionary period, the only important newspaper was what was first called theJournal de l'Empire, and at the end of Napoleon's reign theJournal des Débats, on which Fiévée, Geoffroy, and many other writers of talent worked. In the early days of these various journals political interests naturally engrossed them. But the literary tastes and instincts of Parisians were too strong not to demand attention, and by degrees the critical part of the newspaper became of importance. Under the restoration this importance grew, and the result was theConservateur Littéraireand theGlobe, in the former of which Victor Hugo was introduced to the public, and in the latter Sainte-Beuve. This sudden uprise of journalism produced a remarkablechange in the conditions of literary work, and offered chances to many who would previously have been dependent on individual patronage. But so far as regards literature, properly so called, all its results which were worth anything appeared subsequently in books, and there is therefore no need to refer otherwise than cursorily to the phenomenon of its development. Put very briefly, the influence of journalism on literature may be said to be this: it opens the way to those to whom it might otherwise be closed; it facilitates the destruction of erroneous principles; it assists production; and it interferes with labour and care spent over the thing produced.
Chamfort.
From the crowd of clever writers whom this outburst of journalism found ready to draw their pens in one service or the other, two names emerge as pre-eminently remarkable. Garat and Champcenetz were men of wit and ingenuity, André Chénier was a great poet, and his brother, Marie Joseph, a man of good literary taste and master of an elegant style, Lacretelle a painstaking historian, and many others worthy of note in their way. But Chamfort and Rivarol deserve a different kind of notice from this. They united in a remarkable fashion the peculiarities of the man of letters of the eighteenth century with the peculiarities of the man of letters of the nineteenth, and their individual merit was, though different and complementary, almost unique. Chamfort was born in Auvergne, in 1741. He was the natural son of a person who occupied the position of companion, and legally possessed nothing but his baptismal name of Nicholas. Like his rival, La Harpe, he obtained an exhibition at one of the Paris colleges, and distinguished himself. After leaving school he lived for a time by miscellaneous literature, and at last made his way to society and to literary success by dint of competing for and winning academic prizes. On the second occasion of his competition he defeated La Harpe. Afterwards Madame Helvétius assisted him, and at last he received from Chabanon (a third-rate man of letters, who may be most honourably mentioned here) a small annuity which made him independent. It is said that he married, and that his wife died six months afterwards. Hewas elected to the Academy, and patronised by all sorts of persons, from the queen downwards. But at the outbreak of the Revolution he took the popular side, though he could not continue long faithful to it. In the Terror he was menaced with arrest, tried to commit suicide, and died horribly mutilated in 1794. Chamfort's literary works are considerable in bulk, but only a few of them have merit. His tragedies are quite worthless, his comedy,La Jeune Indienne, not much better. His verse tales exceed in licentiousness his models in La Fontaine, but fall far short of them in elegance and humour. His academic essays are heavy and scarcely intelligent. But his brief witticisms and his short anecdotes and apophthegms hardly admit a rival. Chamfort was a man soured by his want of birth, health, and position, and spoilt in mental development by the necessity of hanging on to the great persons of his time. But for a kind of tragi-comic satire, asaeva indignatio, taking the form of contempt of all that is exalted and noble, he has no equal in literature except Swift.
Rivarol.
The life of Rivarol was also an adventurous one, but much less sombre. He was born about 1750, of a family which seems to have had noble connections, but which, in his branch of it, had descended to innkeeping. Indeed it is said that Riverot, and not Rivarol, was the name which his father actually bore. He himself, however, first assumed the title of Chevalier de Parcieux, and then that of Comte de Rivarol. The way to literary distinction in those days was either the theatre or criticism, and Rivarol, with the acuteness which characterised him, knowing that he had no talent for the former, chose the latter. His translation (with essay and notes) of Dante is an extraordinarily clever book, and his discourse on the universality of the French tongue, which followed, deserves the same description. It was not, however, in mere criticism that Rivarol's forte lay, though he long afterwards continued to exhibit his acuteness in it by utterances of various kinds. In 1788 (the year before the Revolution) he excited the laughter of all Paris, and the intense hatred of the hack-writers of his time, by publishing, in conjunction with Champcenetz, anAlmanach de nos Grands Hommes, in which, by a mixture of fiction and fact, he caricatures his smaller contemporariesin the most pitiless manner. When the Revolution broke out Rivarol took the Royalist side, and contributed freely to its journals. He soon found it necessary to leave the country, and lived for ten years in Brussels, London, Hamburg, and Berlin, publishing occasionally pamphlets and miscellaneous works. He died at the Prussian capital in 1801. Not only has Rivarol a considerable claim as a critic, and a very high position as a political pamphleteer, but he is as much the master of the prose epigram as Chamfort is of the short anecdote. Following the example of his predecessors, he put many of his best things in a treatise,De l'Homme Intellectuel et Moral, which, as a whole, is very dull and unsatisfactory, though it is lighted up by occasional flashes of the most brilliant wit. His detached sayings, which are not so muchPenséesor maxims as conversational good things, are among the most sparkling in literature, and, with Chamfort's, occupy a position which they keep almost entirely to themselves. It has been said of him and of Chamfort (who, being of similar talents and on opposite sides, were naturally bitter foes) that they 'knew men, but only from the outside, and from certain limited superficial and accidental points of view. They knew books, too, but their knowledge was circumscribed by the fashions of a time which was not favourable to impartial literary appreciation. Hence their anecdotes are personal rather than general, rather amusing than instructive, rather showing the acuteness and ingenuity of the authors than able to throw light on the subjects dealt with. But as mere tale-tellers and sayers of sharp things they have few rivals.' It may be added that they complete and sum up the merits and defects of the French society of the eighteenth century, and that, in so far as literature can do this, the small extent of their selected works furnishes a complete comment on that society.
Joubert.
Contemporary with these two writers, though, from the posthumous publication of his works years after the end of his long life, he seems in a manner a contemporary of our own, was Joseph Joubert, the last greatPensée-writer of France and of Europe. Joubert's birthplace was Montignac, in Perigord, and the date of his birth 1754, three years after that ofRivarol, and about twelve after that of Chamfort. He was educated at Toulouse, where, without taking regular orders, he joined the Frères de la Doctrine Chrétienne, a teaching community, and studied and taught till he was twenty-two years old. Then his health being, as it was all through his life, weak, he returned home, and succeeding before long to a small but sufficient fortune, he went to Paris. Here he became intimate with the secondphilosophegeneration (La Harpe, Marmontel, etc.), and is said to have for a time been an enthusiastic hearer of Diderot, the most splendid talker of that or any age. But Joubert's ideals and method of thought were radically different from those of thePhilosophes, and he soon found more congenial literary companions, of whom the chief were Fontanes and Chênedollé, while he found his natural home in the salon of two ladies of rank and cultivation, Madame de Beaumont and Madame de Vintimille. Before long he married and established himself in Paris with a choice library, into which, it is said, no eighteenth-century writer was admitted. His health became worse and worse, yet he lived to the age of seventy, dying in 1824. Fourteen years afterwards Chateaubriand, at the request of his widow, edited a selection of his remains, and four years later still his nephew, M. de Raynal, produced a fuller edition.
Joubert's works consist (with the exception of a few letters) exclusively ofPenséesand maxims, which rank in point of depth and of exquisite literary expression with those of La Rochefoucauld, and in point of range above them. They are even wider in this respect than those of Vauvenargues, which they also much resemble. Ethics, politics, theology, literature, all occupy Joubert. In politics he is, as may be perhaps expected from his time and circumstances, decidedly anti-revolutionary. In theology, without being exactly orthodox according to any published scheme of orthodoxy, Joubert is definitely Christian. In ethics he holds a middle place between the unsparing hardness of the self-interest school and the somewhat gushing manner of the sentimentalists. But his literary thoughts are perhaps the most noteworthy, not merely from our present point of view. All alike have the characteristic of intense compression (he described his literary aim in the phrase 'tormented by the ambition of putting a book in a page, apage into a phrase, and a phrase into a word'), while all have the same lucidity and freedom from enigma. All are alike polished in form and style according to the best models of the seventeenth century; but whereas study and reflection might have been sufficient to give Joubert the material of his other thoughts, the wide difference between his literary judgments and those of his time is less easily explicable. No finer criticism on style and on poetry in the abstract exists than his, and yet his reading of poetry cannot have been very extensive. He is even just to the writers of the eighteenth century, whose manner he disliked, and whose society he had abjured. He seems, indeed, to have had almost a perfect faculty of literary appreciation, and wherever his sayings startle the reader it will generally be found that there is a sufficient explanation beneath. There is probably no writer in any language who has said an equal number of remarkable things on an equal variety of subjects in an equally small space, and with an equally high and unbroken excellence of style and expression. This is the intrinsic worth of Joubert. In literary history he has yet another interest, that of showing in the person of a man living out of the literary world, and far removed from the operation of cliques, the process which was inevitably bringing about the great revolution of 1830.
Courier.
Like Joubert, Paul Louis Courier had a great dislike and even contempt for the authors of the eighteenth century, but curiously enough this dislike did not in the least affect his theological or political opinions. He was born at Paris, in 1772, being the son of a wealthy man of the middle class. His youth was passed in the country, and he early displayed a great liking for classical study. As a compromise between business, which he hated, and literature, of which his father would not hear, he entered the army in 1792. He served on the Rhine, and not long after joining broke his leave in a manner rather unpleasantly resembling desertion. His friends succeeded in saving him from the consequences of this imprudence, and he served until Wagram, when he finally left the army, again in very odd circumstances. He then lived in Italy (where his passion for the classics led him into an absurd dispute about an alleged injury he had caused to a manuscriptof Longus) until the fall of the Empire. When he was forty-five years old he was known in literature only as a translator of classics, remarkable for scholarship and for careful modelling of his style upon the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, rather than upon the eighteenth. Although he had hitherto taken little active part in politics, the so-called 'ideas of 89' had sunk deeply into him. Impelled, not by any wide views on the future of the nation, but apparently by the merebourgeoishatred of titles, old descent, and the other privileges of the aristocracy, he began a series of pamphlets to the success of which there is no rival except that of the Letters of Junius, while Junius falls far short of Courier in intrinsic literary merit. There are, indeed, few authors whose merit resides so wholly in their style and power of expression as Courier's. His thought is narrow in the extreme; even where its conclusions are just it rests rather on the jealousies of the typicalbourgeoisthan on anything else. But in irony he has, with the exception of Pascal and Swift, no superior. He began by aPétition aux Deux Chambres. Then he contributed a series of letters toLe Censeur, a reform journal; then he published various pamphlets, usually signed 'Paul Louis, Vigneron,' and ostensibly addressed to his neighbours and fellow villagers. He had established himself on a small estate in Touraine, which he farmed himself. But he was much in Paris, and his political writings made him acquainted with the prison of Sainte Pélagie. His death, in April 1825, was singular, and indeed mysterious. He was shot, the murderer escaping. It was suspected to be one of his own servants, to whom he was a harsh and unpopular master, and the suspicion was confirmed some years afterwards by the confession of a game-keeper. HisSimple Discoursagainst the presentation of Chambord to the Duc de Bordeaux, hisLivret de Paul Louis, hisPamphlet des Pamphlets, are all models of their kind. Nowhere is the peculiar quality which is called in Frenchnarquoisdisplayed with more consummate skill. The language is at once perfectly simple and of the utmost literary polish, the arguments, whether good or bad, always tellingly expressed. But perhaps he has written nothing better than theLettre à M. Renouard, in which he discusses the mishap with the manuscript of Longus, and the letter to theAcadémie des Inscriptionson their refusal to elect him. The style of Courier is almost unique, and its merits are only denied by those who do not possess the necessary organ for appreciating it.
Sénancour.
This chapter may perhaps be most appropriately concluded by the notice of a singular writer who, although longer lived, was contemporary with Courier. Étienne Pivert de Sénancour may be treated almost indifferently as a moral essayist, or as a producer of the peculiar kind of faintly narrative and strongly ethical work which Rousseau had made fashionable. The infusion of narrative in his principal and indeed only remarkable work,Obermann, is however so slight, that he will come in best here, though in his old age he wrote a professed novel,Isabella. Sénancour was born in 1770, his father being a man of position and fortune, who lost both at the Revolution. The son was destined for the Church, but ran away and spent a considerable time in Switzerland, where he married, returning to France towards the end of the century. He then published divers curious works of half-sentimental, half-speculative reflection, by far the most important of which,Obermann, appeared in 1804. Then Sénancour had to take to literary hack-work for a subsistence; but in his later years Villemain and Thiers procured pensions for him, and he was relieved from want. He died in 1846.Obermannhas not been ill described by George Sand as aRenéwith a difference; Chateaubriand's melancholy hero feeling that he could do anything if he would but has no spirit for any task, Sénancour's that he is unequal to his own aspirations. No brief epigram of this kind can ever fully describe a book; but this, though inadequate, is not incorrect so far as it goes. The book is a series of letters, in which the supposed writer delivers melancholy reflections on all manner of themes, especially moral problems and natural beauty. Sénancour was in a certain sense aPhilosophe, in so far that he was dogmatically unorthodox and discarded conventional ideas as to moral conduct; but he is much nearer Rousseau than Diderot. Indeed, he sometimes seems to the reader little more than an echo of the former, until his more distinctly modern characteristics (characteristics which were not fully or generally felt or reproduced till the visionary and discouragedgeneration of 1820-1850) reappear. It is perhaps not unfair to say that the pleasure with which this generation recognised its own sentiments inObermanngave rise to a traditional estimate of the literary value of that book which is a little exaggerated. Yet it has considerable merit, especially in the simplicity and directness with which expression is given to a class of sentiments very likely to find vent in language either extravagant or affected. Its form is that of a series of letters, dated from various places, but chiefly from a solitary valley in the Alps in which the hero lives, meditates, and pursues the occupations of husbandry on his small estate.
The philosophe movement.
The entire literary and intellectual movement of the eighteenth century is very often called thephilosophemovement, and the writers who took part in itles philosophes. The word 'philosopher' is, however, here used in a sense widely different from its proper and usual one.Philosophie, in the ordinary language of the middle and later seventeenth century, meant simply freethinking on questions of religion. This freethinking, of which Saint-Evremond was the most distinguished representative, involved no revolutionary or even reforming attitude towards politics or practical affairs of any kind. As however the next century advanced, the character of French scepticism became altered. Contact with English Deism gave form and precision to its theological or anti-theological side. The reading of Locke animated it against Cartesianism, and the study of English politics excited it against the irresponsible despotism and the crushing system of ecclesiastical and aristocratic privilege which made almost the entire burden of government rest on the shoulders least able to bear it. French 'philosophism' then became suddenly militant and practical. Toleration and liberty of speculation in religion, constitutional government in politics, the equalisation of pressure in taxation, and the removal of privilege, together with reform in legal procedure, were the objects which it had most at heart. In merely speculative philosophy, that is to say, in metaphysics, it was much less active, though it had on the whole a tendency towards materialism, and by a curious accident it was for the most part rigidly conservative in literary criticism. But it was eager in the cultivation of ethics from various points of view, and busy in the study both of the philosophy of history, which may be said to date from that period, and of physicalscience, in which Newton took the place of Locke as guide. The almost universal presence of this practical and reforming spirit makes it not by any means so easy to subdivide the branches of literature, as is the case in the seventeenth century. La Bruyère had said, in the days of acquiescence in absolutism, that to a Frenchman 'Les grands sujets sont défendus,' meaning thereby theology and politics. The general spirit of the eighteenth century was a vigorous denial of this, and an eager investigation into these 'grands sujets.' This spirit made its appearance in the most unexpected quarters, and in the strangest forms. It converted (in the hands of Voltaire) the stiffest and most conventional form of drama ever known into a pamphlet. It insinuated polemics under the guise of history, and made the ponderous and apparently matter-of-fact folios of a Dictionary of Arts and Manufactures the vehicles of arguments for reform. It overflowed into every department of literary occupation. Some of the chief prose manifestations of this spirit have been discussed and arranged in the two previous chapters under the head of history and essay writing. The rest will be dealt with here. A certain distinction of form, though it is often rather arbitrary than real, renders such a subdivision possible, while it is desirable in the interest of clearness. It will be noticed that while the attack is voluminous and manifold, the defence is almost unrepresented in literature. This is one of the most remarkable facts in literary history. In England, from which thephilosophemovement borrowed so much, the Deists had not only not had their own way in the literary battle, but had been beaten all along the line by the superior intellectual and literary prowess of the defenders of orthodoxy. The case in France went otherwise and almost by default. The only defender of orthodoxy whose name has survived in literature—for Fréron, despite his power, was little more than a literary critic—is the Abbé Guénée. In so singular a state was the church of France that scarcely a single preacher or theologian, after Massillon's death in 1742, could challenge equality with even third- or fourth-rate men of letters; while, after the death of the Chancellor d'Aguesseau in 1751, no layman of eminence can be named until Joseph de Maistre, nearly half a century later, who was at once a considerable writer and a declared defenderof religion. Indeed no small proportion of the enemies of ecclesiasticism were actually paid and privileged members of the Church itself. Thus little opposition, except that of simplevis inertiae, was offered to the new views and the crusade by which they were supported. This crusade, however, had two very different stages. The first, of which the greatest representatives are Montesquieu and in a way Voltaire himself, was critical and reforming, but in no way revolutionary; the second, of whom the Encyclopædists are the representatives, was, consciously or unconsciously, bent on a complete revolution. We shall give an account first of the chief representatives of these two great classes of the general movement, and then of those offshoots or schools of that movement which busied themselves with the special subjects of economics, ethics, and metaphysics, as distinguished from general politics.
Montesquieu.
Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu et de la Brède, was born at thechâteau, which gave him the last-named title, in the neighbourhood of Bordeaux, on the 18th of January, 1689. His family was not of the oldest, but it had, as he tells us, some two or three centuries of provednoblesseto boast of, and had been distinguished in the law. He himself was destined for that profession, and after a youth of laborious study became councillor of the parliament of Bordeaux in 1714, and in a year or two president. In 1721 he produced theLettres Persanes, and four years later the curious little prose poem called theTemple de Gnide. Some objection was made by the minister Fleury, who was rigidly orthodox, to the satirical tone of the former book in ecclesiastical matters, but Montesquieu was none the less elected of the Academy in 1728. He had given up his position at the Bordeaux Parlement a few years before this, and set out on an extensive course of travel, noting elaborately the manners, customs, and constitution of the countries through which he passed. Two years of this time were spent in England, for which country, politically speaking, he conceived a great admiration. On his return to France he lived partly in Paris, but chiefly at his estate of La Brède, taking an active interest in its management, and in the various occupations of a country gentleman, but also working unceasingly at his masterpiece, theEsprit des Lois. This, however,was not published for many years, and was long preceded by the book which ranks second in importance to it, theGrandeur et Décadence des Romains, 1734. This was Montesquieu's first serious work, and it placed him as high among serious writers as theLettres Persaneshad among lighter authors. TheEsprit des Loisitself did not appear till 1748. Montesquieu, whose life was in no way eventful, lived for some years longer, dying in Paris on the 10th of February, 1755. Besides the works mentioned he had written several dialogues and other trifles, a considerable number ofPensées, and some articles for the earlier volumes of the Encyclopædia.
Lettres Persanes.
Gradeur et Décadence des Romains
Montesquieu probably deserves the title of the greatest man of letters of the French eighteenth century, the superior versatility and more superficial brilliancy of Voltaire being compensated in him by far greater originality and depth of thought. His three principal works deserve to be considered in turn. TheLettres Persanes, in which the opinions of a foreigner on French affairs are given, is not entirely original in conception; the idea of the vehicle being possibly suggested by theAmusements Diversof Dufresny the comic author. The working out, however, is entirely Montesquieu's, and was followed closely enough by the various writers, who, with Voltaire and Goldsmith at their head, have adopted a similar medium for satire and criticism since. It is not too much to say that the entire spirit of thephilosophemovement in its more moderate form is contained and anticipated in theLettres Persanes. All the weaknesses of France in political, ecclesiastical, and social arrangements are here touched on with a light but sure hand, and the example is thus set of attacking 'les grands sujets.' From a literary point of view the form of this work is at least as remarkable as the matter. Voltaire himself is nowhere more witty, while Montesquieu has over his rival the indefinable but unquestionable advantage of writing more like a gentleman. There is no single book in which the admirable capacity of the French language for jesting treatment of serious subjects is better shown than in theLettres Persanes. Montesquieu's next important work was of a very different character. TheConsidérations sur les Causes de la Grandeur et de la Décadence des Romainsis an entirely seriouswork. It does not as yet exhibit the magnificent breadth of view and the inexhaustible fertility of explanation which distinguish theEsprit des Lois, but it has been well regarded as a kind of preliminary exercise for that great work. Montesquieu here treats an extensive but homogeneous and manageable subject from the point of view of philosophical history, after a method which had been partially tried by Bossuet, and systematically arranged by Vico in Italy, but which was not fully developed till Turgot's time. That is to say, his object is not merely to exhibit, but to explain the facts, and to explain them on general principles applicable with due modifications to other times and other histories. Accordingly, the style of theGrandeur et Décadenceis as grave and dignified as that of theLettres Persanesis lively and malicious. It is sometimes a little too sententious in tone, and suffers from the habit, induced probably byPensée-writing, of composing in very brief paragraphs. But it is an excellent example of its kind, and especially remarkable for the extreme clearness and lucidity with which the march and sequence of events in the gross is exhibited.
Esprit des Lois.
TheEsprit des Loisis, however, a far greater book than either of these, and far more original. The title may be thought to be not altogether happy, and indeed rather ambiguous, because it does not of itself suggest the extremely wide sense in which the word law is intended to be taken. An exact if cumbrous title for the book would be 'On the Relation of Human Laws and Customs to the Laws of Nature.' The author begins somewhat formally with the old distinction of politics into democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy. He discusses the principles of each and their bearings on education, on positive law, on social conditions, on military strength, offensive and defensive, on individual liberty, on taxation and finance. Then an abrupt return is made from the effects to the causes of constitutions and polity. The theory of the influence of physical conditions, and especially of climate, on political and social institutions—a theory which is perhaps more than any other identified with the book—receives special attention, and a somewhat disproportionate space is given to the question of slavery in connectionwith it. From climate Montesquieu passes to the nature of the soil, as in its turn affecting civil polity. He then attacks the subject of manners and customs as distinct from laws, of trade and commerce, of the family, of jurisprudence, of religion. The book concludes with an elaborate examination of the feudal system in France. Throughout it the reader is equally surprised at the varied and exact knowledge of the author, and at his extraordinary fertility in general views. This fertility is indeed sometimes a snare to him, and leads to rash generalisation. But what has to be remembered is, that he was one of the pioneers of this method of historical exploration, and that hundreds of principles which, after correction by his successors, have passed into general acceptance, were discovered, or at least enunciated, by him for the first time. Nothing is more remarkable in Montesquieu, and nothing more distinguishes him from the common run of his somewhat self-satisfied and short-sighted successors, than the steady hold he keeps on the continuity of history, and his superiority to the shallow view of his day (constantly put forward by Voltaire), according to which the middle ages were a dark period of barbarism, the study of which could be of no use to any one but a mere curiosity hunter. Montesquieu too, almost alone of his contemporaries, had a matured and moderate plan of political and social reform. While some of them indulged in an idle and theoretical Republicanism, and others in the old unpracticalfrondeurspirit, eager to pull down but careless about building up, Montesquieu had conceived the idea of a limited monarchy, not identical with that of England, but in many ways similar to it; an ideal which in the first quarter of the eighteenth century might have been put in practice with far better chance of success than in the first quarter of the nineteenth. The merely literary merits of this great book are equal to its philosophical merits. The vast mass of facts with which the author deals is selected with remarkable judgment, and arranged with remarkable lucidity. The style is sober, devoid of ornament, but admirably proportioned and worked out. There are few greater books, not merely in French but in literature, than theEsprit des Lois.