Iphigenie, which is freely imitated from Euripides, was given at the fetes of Versailles in the summer of 1674. The French Iphigenia is enamoured of Achilles, and death means for her not only departure from the joy of youth and the light of the sun, but the loss of love. Here, as elsewhere, Racine complicates the moral situation with cross and counter loves: Eriphile is created to be the jealous rival of Iphigenie, and to be her substitute in the sacrifice of death. The ingenious transpositions, which were necessary to adapt a Greek play to Versailles in the second half of the seventeenth century, called forth hostile criticisms. Through miserable intrigues a competing Iphigenie, the work of Le Clerc and Coras, was produced in the spring of 1675; it was born dead, and five days later it was buried.

The hostilities culminated two years later. It is commonly said that Racine wrote in the conventional and courtly taste of his own day. In reality his presentation of tragic passions in their terror and their truth shocked the aristocratic proprieties which were the mode. He was an innovator, and his audacity at once conquered and repelled. It was known that Racine was engaged on Phedre. The Duchesse de Bouillon and her brother the Duc de Nevers were arbiters of elegance in literature, and decreed that it should fail. A rival play on the same subject was ordered from Pradon; and to insure her victory the Duchess, at a cost of fifteen thousand livres, as Boileau declares, engaged the front seats of two theatres for six successive evenings—the one to be packed with applauding spectators, the other to exhibit empty benches, diversified with creatures who could hiss. Nothing could dignify Pradon's play, as nothing could really degrade that of Racine. But Racine was in the highest degree sensitive, and such a desperate plot against his fame might well make him pause and reflect.

Phedre, like Iphigenie, is a new creation from Euripides. Its singular beauty has been accurately defined as a mingling of horror and compassion, of terror and curiosity. It is less a drama than one great part, and that part consists of a diseased state of the soul, a morbid conflict of emotions, so that the play becomes overmuch a study in the pathology of passion. The greatness of the role of the heroine constitutes the infirmity of the play as a whole; the other characters seem to exist only for the sake of deploying the inward struggle of which Phedre is the victim. Love and jealousy rage within her; remorse follows, for something of Christian sentiment is conveyed by Racine into his classical fable. Never had his power as a psychologist in art been so wonderfully exhibited; yet he had elsewhere attained more completely the ideal of the drama. In the succession of his profane masterpieces we may say of the last that it is lesser than the first and greater. Phedre lacks the balance and proportion of Andromaque; but never had Racine exhibited the tempest and ravage of passion in a woman's soul on so great a scale or with force so terrible.

The cabal might make him pause; his own play, profoundly moralised as it was, might cause him to consider. Events of the day, crimes of passion, adulteries, poisonings, nameless horrors, might agitate his spirit. Had he not fed the full-blown passions of the time? What if Nicole's word that playwrights were public poisoners should be true? Probably various causes operated on the mobile spirit of Racine; certainly the Christian, of Jansenist education, who had slumbered within him, now awakened. He resolved to quit the world and adopt the Carthusian habit. The advice of his confessor was that he should regulate his life by marriage. Racine yielded, and found his contentment in a wife who was ignorant of his plays, and in children whose inclinations and training were religious. The penitent was happy in his household, happy also in his reconciliation with Nicole and Arnauld. To Boileau he remained attached. And he did not renounce the court. Was not the King the anointed vicegerent of God, who could not be too much honoured? He accepted, with Boileau as fellow-labourer, the position of the King's historiographer, and endeavoured to fulfil its duties.

Twelve years after his withdrawal from the theatre, Racine, at the request of Madame de Maintenon, composed his Biblical tragedy of Esther (1688-89) for her cherished schoolgirls at Saint-Cyr. The subject was not unaptly chosen—a prudent and devout Esther now helped to guide the fortunes of France, and she was surrounded at Saint-Cyr by her chorus of young daughters of Sion. Esther was rendered by the pupils, with graceful splendours, before the King, and the delight was great. The confidante of the Persian Queen indeed forgot her words; at Racine's hasty complaint the young actress wept, and the poet, weeping with her, wiped away her tears.

Esther is a melodious play, exquisite in its refined style and delicate versification; but the characters are faintly drawn. Its novelty lay in its lyrical movements and in the poetical uses of its finely-imagined spectacle. Madame de Maintenon or her directors feared that the excitement and ambitions of another play in costume might derange the spirits of her girls, and when Athalie was recited at Versailles, in January 1691, it was little of an event; the play passed almost unnoticed. A noisy reception, indeed, would have been no fitting tribute to its solemn beauty. All Racine's religious feeling, all his domestic tenderness are united in Athalie with his matured feeling for Greek art. The great protagonist is the Divine Being; Providence replaces the fate of the ancient drama. A child (for Racine was still an innovator in the French theatre) was the centre of the action; the interests were political, or rather national, in the highest sense; the events were, as formerly, the developments of inward character; but events and characters were under the presiding care of God. The tragedy is lyrical, not merely through the chorus, which expresses common emotions of devout joy and fear, indignation, praise, and rapture. The chorus is less developed here, and its chants are less impressive than in Esther. There is, however, a lyrism, personal and modern, in the prophetic inspiration of the High Priest, and Racine anticipated that his boldness in presenting this might be censured by his contemporaries. The unity of place, which had been disregarded in Esther, is here preserved; the scene is the temple at Jerusalem; and by its impressive grandeur, and the awful associations of the place, the spectacle may be said to take part in the action of the play. Perhaps it would be no exaggeration to assert that grandeur and beauty are nowhere else so united in French dramatic art as in Athalie; perhaps it might truly be described as flawless in majesty and grace.

A light disfavour of the King saddened, and perhaps hastened, the close of Racine's life. Port-Royal was regarded as a centre of rebellious heresy; and Racine's piety to his early masters was humble and devout. He had further offended by drawing up a memorandum on the sufferings of the French people resulting from the wars. Madame de Maintenon assured him that the cloud would pass; but the favour of death, accepted with tranquillity, came before the returning favour of the poet's master. He died in April 1699, soon after he had entered his sixtieth year.

The highest distinction of the drama of Racine is its truth to nature—truth, that is, in its interpretation and rendering of human passion. Historical accuracy and local colour concerned him as far as they were needful with his courtly spectators for verisimilitude. The fluctuations of passion he studies to most advantage in his characters of women. Love, in all its varieties, from the passion of Roxane or Phedre to the pure devotion of Berenice, Iphigenie, or Monime; maternal tenderness or the tenderness of the foster-mother (Andromaque, Clytemnestre, Josabeth); female ambition (Agrippine, Athalie)—these are the themes of his exposition. His style has been justly characterised as a continual creation; its audacity underlies its suavity; its miracles are accomplished with the simplest means. His vocabulary is singularly small, yet with such a vocabulary he can attain the rarest effects. From sustained dignity he can pass suddenly, when the need arises, to the most direct familiarity. The music of his verse is seldom rich or sonorous; it is at once a pure vehicle for the idea and a delicate caress to the senses.



CHAPTER VII BOSSUET AND THE PREACHERS—FENELON

I

"A man set under authority"—these words, better than any other, define Bossuet. Above him was God, represented in things spiritual by the Catholic Church, in things temporal by the French monarchy; below him were the faithful confided to his charge, and those who would lead the faithful astray from the path of obedience and tradition. Duty to what was above him, duty to those placed under him, made up the whole of Bossuet's life. To maintain, to defend, to extend the tradition he had received, was the first of duties. All his powers as an orator, a controversialist, an educator were directed to this object. He wrote and spoke to dominate the intellects of men and to subdue their wills, not for the sake of personal power, but for the truth as he had received it from the Church and from the monarchy.

JACQUES-BENIGNE BOSSUET was born in 1627, at Dijon, of a middle-class family, distinguished in the magistracy. In his education, pursued with resolute ardour, the two traditions of Hellenism and Hebraism were fused together: Homer and Virgil were much to him; but the Bible, above all, nourished his imagination, his conscience, and his will. The celebrity of his scholarship and the flatteries of Parisian salons did not divert him from his course. At twenty-five he was a priest and a doctor of the Sorbonne. Six years were spent at Metz, a city afflicted by the presence of Protestants and Jews, where Bossuet fortified himself with theological studies, preached, panegyrised the saints, and confuted heretics. His fame drew him to Paris, where, during ten years, his sermons were among the great events of the time. In 1669 he was named Bishop of Condom, but, being appointed preceptor to the Dauphin, he resigned his bishopric, and devoted himself to forming the mind of a pupil, indolent and dull, who might one day be the vicegerent of God for his country. Bishop of Meaux in 1681, he opened the assembly of French clergy next year with his memorable sermon on the unity of the Church, and by his authority carried, in a form decisive for freedom while respectful towards Rome, the four articles which formulated the liberties of the Gallican Church. The duties of his diocese, controversy against Protestantism, the controversy against Quietism, in which Fenelon was his antagonist, devotional writings, strictures upon the stage, controversy against the enlightened Biblical criticism of Richard Simon, filled his energetic elder years. He ceased from a life of glorious labour and resolute combat in April 1704.

The works of Bossuet, setting aside his commentaries on Holy Scripture, devotional treatises, and letters, fall into three chief groups: the eloquence of the pulpit, controversial writings, and writings designed for the instruction of the Dauphin.

Political eloquence could not exist where power was grasped by the hands of one great ruler. Judicial eloquence lacked the breadth and elevation which come with political freedom; it contented itself with subtleties of argument, decked with artificial flowers of style. The pulpit was the school of oratory. St. Vincent de Paul had preached with unction and a grave simplicity, and Bossuet, his disciple, felt his influence. But the offering which Bossuet laid upon the altar must needs be costly, an offering of all his powers. While an unalterable good sense regulates all he wrote, the sweep of his intellect demanded plenitude of expression; his imagination, if it dealt with life and death, must needs deal with them at times in the way of magnificence, which was natural to it; and his lyrical enthusiasm, fed by the prophetic poetry of the Old Testament, could not but find an escape in words. He sought no literary fame; his sermons were acts of faith, acts of duty. Out of the vast mass of his discourses he printed one, a sermon of public importance—that on the unity of the Church.

At the request of friends, some of the Funeral Orations were published. These, with his address on the profession of Louise de La Valliere, were all that could be read of Bossuet's pulpit oratory by his contemporaries. His sermons were carefully meditated and prepared, but he would not check his power of lofty improvisation by following the words of a manuscript. After his death his papers had perilous adventures. By the devotion of his first editor, Deforis, nearly two hundred sermons were after many years recovered; later students have presented them with as close an approximation as is possible to their original form. Bossuet's first manner—that of the years at Metz—is sometimes marred by scholastic subtleties, a pomp of quotations, too curious imagery, and a temper rather aggressive than conciliating. During the period when he preached in Paris he was master of all his powers, which move with freedom and at the same time with a majestic order; his grandeur grows out of simplicity. As Bishop of Meaux he exhorted his flock out of the abundance of his heart, often without the intermediary of written preparation.

He is primarily a doctor of the faith: dogma first, determined by authority, and commending itself to human reason; morality, not independent, but proceeding from or connected with dogma, and while truly human yet resting upon divine foundations. But neither dogma nor morals are presented in the manner of the schools; both are made living powers by the preacher's awe, adoration, joy, charity, indignation, pity; in the large ordonnance of his discourse each passion finds its natural place. His eloquence grows out of his theme; his logic is the logic of clear and natural ideas; he is lucid, rapid, energetic; then suddenly some aspect of his subject awakens a lyrical emotion, and the preacher rises into the prophet.

Bossuet's panegyrics of the saints are sermons in which doctrine and morals are enforced by great examples. His Oraisons Funebres preach, for the uses of the living, the doctrine of death. Nowhere else does he so fill the mind with a sense of the greatness and the glory of life as when he stands beside the bier and reviews the achievements or presents the characters of the illustrious deceased. Observing as he did all the decorum of the occasion, his discourses do not degenerate into mere adulation; some are historic surveys, magnificent in their breadth of view and mastery of events. He presents things as he saw them, and he did not always see aright. Cromwell is a hypocrite and an impostor; the revocation of the edict of Nantes is the laudable act of a king who is a defender of the faith. The intolerance of Bossuet proceeds not so much from his heart as from the logic of his orthodoxy. His heart had a tenderness which breaks forth in many places, and signally in the discourse occasioned by the death of the Duchess of Orleans. This, and the eloquent memorials of her mother, Henrietta, Queen of England, and of the Prince de Conde, touch the heights and depths of the passions proper to the grave.

Bossuet's polemic against Protestantism is sufficiently represented by his Exposition de la Doctrine Catholique (published 1671) and the Histoire des Variations des Eglises Protestantes (1688). The latter, in its fifteen books, is an attempt to overwhelm the contending Protestant communions by one irresistible attack. Their diversities of error are contrasted with the one, unchanging faith of the infallible Church. Lutherans, Calvinists, Anglicans, the Albigenses, the Hussites, the Wicliffites are routed and slain, as opponents are slain in theological warfare—to rise again. History and theology co-operate in the result. The characters of the Protestant Reformers are studied with a remorseless scrutiny, and an art which can bring into relief what the work of art requires. Why the children of the infallible Church rose up in disobedience against their mother is left unexplained. The great heresy, Bossuet was persuaded, had almost reached its term; the intellectual chaos would soon be restored to universal order under the successors of Innocent XI.

In the embittered controversy with his brother-Bishop of Cambrai, on the significance of which the singular autobiography of Madame Guyon[1] throws much light, Bossuet remained the victor. It was a contention between dogmatic rectitude and the temper of emotional religion. Bossuet was at first unversed in the writings of the Catholic mystics. Being himself a fully-formed will, watchful and armed for obedience and command—the "man under authority"—he rightly divined the dangers to dogmatic faith arising from self-abandonment to God within the heart. The elaborate structure of orthodoxy seemed to dissolve in the ardour of a personal emotion; it seemed to him another form of the individualism which he condemned. The Church was a great objective reality; it had laid down a system of belief. A love of God which ignored the method of God, was but a spurious love, leading to destruction.

[Footnote 1: Translated into English for the first time in full, 1897, by T. T. Allen.]

Protestant self-will, mystical private emotion—these were in turn met by the champion of tradition, and, as he trusted, were subdued. Another danger he perceived, not in the unregenerate will or wandering heart, but in the critical intelligence. Bossuet again was right in viewing with alarm the Biblical studies of Richard Simon. But his scholarship was here defective. He succeeded in suppressing an edition of the Histoire Critique du Vieux Testament. There were printers in Holland beyond the reach of Bossuet's arm; and Simon continued the work which others have carried further with the aids of more exact science.

To doubt the government of His world by the Divine Ruler, who assigns us our duty and our place, is to sap the principles of authority and of obedience. The doctrine of God's providence is at the centre of all Bossuet's system of thought, at the heart of his loyal passions. On earth, the powers that be; in France, the monarch; in heaven, a greater Monarch (we will not say a magnified Louis XIV.) presiding over all the affairs of this globe. When Bossuet tried to educate his indocile pupil the Dauphin, he taught him how God is above man, as man is above the brute. Monarchy—as he showed in his Politique Tiree de l'Ecriture Sainte—is hereditary and absolute; but absolute power is not arbitrary power; the King is God's subject, and his laws must conform to those of his Divine Ruler. The Discours sur l'Histoire Universelle (1681) was written in the first instance for the Dauphin; but its purpose was partly apologetic, and Bossuet, especially in the second part of the book, had the errors of free-thinkers—Spinoza and Simon—before his mind.

The seventeenth century had not contributed largely to historical literature, save in the form of memoirs. Mezeray, in the first half of the century, Fleury, in the second, cannot be ranked among those writers who illuminate with profound and just ideas. The Cartesian philosophy viewed historical studies with haughty indifference. Bossuet's Discours is a vindication of the ways of God in history, a theology of human progress. He would exhibit the nations and generations of human-kind bound each to each under the Providential government. The life of humanity, from Adam to Charlemagne, is mapped into epochs, ages, periods—the periods of nature, of the law, and of grace. In religion is found the unity of human history. By religion is meant Judaism and Christianity; by Christianity is meant the Catholicism of Rome.

Having expounded the Divine policy in the government of the world, Bossuet is free to study those secondary causes which have determined the rise and fall of empires. With magisterial authority, and with majestic skill, he presents the movements of races and peoples. His sympathy with the genius of ancient Rome proceeds not only from his comprehensive grasp of facts, but from a kinship between his own and the Roman type of character. The magnificent design of Bossuet was magnificently accomplished. He hoped to extend his studies, and apply his method to other parts of his vast subject, but the hope was not to be fulfilled. A disinterested student of the philosophy of history he is not; he is the theologian who marshals facts under an accepted dogma. A conception of Providence may indeed emerge from the researches of a devout investigator of the life of humanity as their last result; but towards that conception the secular life and the various religions of the world will contribute; the ways of the Divine Spirit will appear other than those of the anthropomorphic Ruler of Bossuet's imagination. He was not an original thinker; he would have scorned such a distinction—"l'heretique est celui qui a une opinion"; he had received the truth, and only gave it extended applications. He is "le sublime orateur des idees communes."

More than an orator, before all else he was a combatant. Falling at his post as the eighteenth century opened, he is like some majestic, white-haired paladin of old romances which tell of the strife between French chivalry and the Saracenic hordes. Bossuet fell; the age of growing incredulity and novel faiths was inaugurated; the infidels passed over the body of the champion of conservative tradition.

II

Bossuet's contemporaries esteemed him as a preacher less highly than they esteemed the Jesuit Bourdaloue. The life of LOUIS BOURDALOUE (1632-1704) is told in the words of Vinet: "He preached, confessed, consoled, and then he died." It does credit to his hearers that they valued him aright—a modest man of simple probity. He spoke, with downcast eyes and full harmonious voice, as a soul to souls; his eloquence was not that of the rhetorician; his words were grave and plain and living, and were pressed home with the force of their reality. He aimed never at display, but always at conviction. When the crowd at St. Sulpice was moved as he entered the church and ascended the pulpit, "Silence!" cried the Prince de Conde, "there is our enemy!" Bourdaloue marshalled his arguments and expositions with the elaborate skill of a tactician; he sought to capture the judgment; he reached the heart through a wise director's knowledge of its inmost processes. When his words were touched with emotion, it was the involuntary manifestation of the life within him. His studies of character sometimes tended to the form of portraits of moral types, features in which could be identified with actual persons; but in these he was the moralist, not the satirist. During four-and-thirty years Bourdaloue distributed, to those who would take it, the bread of life—plain, wholesome, prepared skilfully and with clean hands, never varying from the evenness and excellence of its quality. He does not startle or dazzle a reader; he does what is better—he nourishes.

Bourdaloue pronounced only two Oraisons Funebres, and those under the constraint of duty. He thought the Christian pulpit was meant for less worldly uses than the eulogy of mortal men. The Oraison Funebre was more to the taste of Mascaron (1634-1703), whose unequal rhetoric was at its best in his panegyric of Turenne; more to the taste of the elegant FLECHIER, Bishop of Nimes. All the literary graces were cultivated by Flechier (1632-1710), and his eloquence is unquestionable; but it was not the eloquence proper to the pulpit. He was a man of letters, a man of the world, formed in the school of preciosity, a haunter of the Hotel de Rambouillet; knowing the surface of society, he knew as a moralist how to depict its manners and the evil that lay in them. He did not apply doctrine to life like Bossuet, nor search the heart with Bourdaloue's serious zeal; to save souls was indeed important; to exhibit his talents before the King was also important. But the true eloquence of the pulpit has deeper springs than lay in Flechier's mundane spirit. Already the decadence has begun.

Protestantism had its preacher in JACQUES SAURIN (1677-1730), clear, logical, energetic, with negligences of style and sudden flashes of genius. But he belongs to London, to Geneva, to the Hague more perhaps than to France. An autumnal colouring, bright and abundant, yet indicative of the decline, is displayed in the discourses of the latest of the great pulpit orators, JEAN-BAPTISTE MASSILLON (1663-1742), who belongs more to the eighteenth than to the seventeenth century. "He must increase," said Bourdaloue, "but I must decrease." Massillon, with gifts of person and of natural grace, sensitive, tender, a student and professor of the rhetorical art, sincerely devout, yet with waverings towards the world, had something in his genius that resembled Racine. A pathetic sentiment, a feeling for human passions, give his sermons qualities which contrast with the severer manner of Bourdaloue. They are simple in plan; the preacher's art lay in deploying and developing a few ideas, and infusing into them an imaginative sensibility; he is facile and abundant; faultless in amenity, but deficient in force and fire. Yet the opening words of the Funeral Oration on Louis XIV.—"God alone is great, my brethren"—are noble in their simplicity; and the thought of Jesus suddenly appearing in "the most august assembly of the world"—in the chapel at Versailles—startled the hearers of the sermon on the "small number of the elect." "There is an orator!" cried the actor Baron, "we are only comedians;" but no actor would have instituted a comparison between himself and Bourdaloue. "When one enters the avenue at Versailles," said Massillon, "one feels an enervating air."

He was aware of the rising tide of luxury and vice around him; he tried to meet it, tracing the scepticism of the time to its ill-regulated passions; but he met scepticism by morality detached from dogma. The Petit Careme, preached before Louis XV. when a child of eight, expresses the sanguine temper of the moment: the young King would grow into the father of his people; the days of peace would return. Great and beneficent kings are not effeminately amiable; it were better if Massillon had preached "Be strong" than "Be tender." Voltaire kept on his desk the sermons of Massillon, and loved to hear the musical periods of the Petit Careme read aloud at meal-time. To be the favourite preacher of eighteenth-century philosophers is a distinction somewhat compromising to an exponent of the faith.

III

Bossuet's great antagonist in the controversy concerning Quietism might have found the approval of the philosophers for some of his political opinions. His religious writings would have spoken to them in an unknown tongue.

FRANCOIS DE SALIGNAC DE LA MOTHE-FENELON was born in Perigord (1651), of an ancient and illustrious family. Of one whose intellect and character were infinitely subtle and complex, the blending of all opposites, it is possible to sustain the most conflicting opinions, and perhaps in the end no critic can seize this Proteus. Saint-Simon noticed how in his noble countenance every contrary quality was expressed, and how all were harmonised: "Il fallait faire effort pour cesser de le regarder." During the early years of his clerical career he acted as superior to female converts from Protestantism, and as missionary among the unconverted Calvinists. In 1689 he was appointed tutor to the King's grandson, the Duc de Bourgogne, and from a passionate boy he transformed his pupil into a youth too blindly docile. Fenelon's nomination to the Archbishopric of Cambrai (1695), which removed him from the court, was in fact a check to his ambition. His religious and his political views were regarded by Louis XIV. as dangerous for the Church and the monarchy.

Through his personal interest in Mme. Guyon, and his sympathy with her mystical doctrine in religion—one which inculcated complete abnegation of the will, and its replacement by absolute surrender to the Divine love—he came into conflict with Bossuet, and after a fierce war of diplomacy and of pamphlets, in which Fenelon displayed the utmost skill and energy as tactician and dialectician, he received a temperate condemnation from Rome, and submitted. The death of the Dauphin (1711), which left his former pupil heir to the throne, revived Fenelon's hopes of political influence, but in the next year these hopes disappeared with the decease of the young Duc de Bourgogne. At Cambrai, where he discharged his episcopal duties like a saint and a grand seigneur, Fenelon died six months before Louis XIV., in 1715.

"The most original intellect—if we set Pascal aside—of the seventeenth century"—so Fenelon is described by one excellent critic. "Antique and modern," writes his biographer, M. Paul Janet, "Christian and profane, mystical and diplomatic, familiar and noble, gentle and headstrong, natural and subtle, fascinating the eighteenth century as he had fascinated the seventeenth, believing like a child, and daring as Spinoza, Fenelon is one of the most original figures which the Catholic Church has produced." His first publication was the treatise De l'Education des Filles (written 1681, published 1687), composed at the request of his friends the Duc and Duchesse de Beauvilliers. It is based on a recognition of the dignity of woman and the duty of a serious effort to form her mind. It honours the reason, opposes severity, would make instruction, as far as possible, a delight, and would exhibit goodness in a gracious aspect; commends object-lessons in addition to book-learning, indicates characteristic feminine failings (yet liveliness of disposition is not regarded as one of these), exhorts to a dignified simplicity in dress. The range of studies recommended is narrow, but for Fenelon's time it was liberal; the book marks an epoch in the history of female education.

For his pupil the Duc de Bourgogne, Fenelon wrote his graceful prose Fables (which also include under that title short tales, allegories, and fairy stories), the Dialogues des Morts, aiming at the application of moral principles to politics, and his Telemaque, named in the first (incomplete) edition Suite du IVe Livre de l'Odyssee (1699). In this, for long the most popular of tales for the young, Fenelon's imaginative devotion to antiquity finds ample expression; it narrates the wanderings of Telemachus in search of his father Ulysses, under the warning guidance and guardianship of Minerva disguised as Mentor. Imitations and borrowings from classical authors are freely and skilfully made. It is a poem in prose, a romance of education, designed at once to charm the imagination and to inculcate truths of morals, politics, and religion. The didactic purpose is evident, yet it remains a true work of art, full of grace and colour, occasionally, indeed, languid, but often vivid and forcible.

Fenelon's views on politics were not so much fantastic as those of an idealist. He dreamed of a monarchy which should submit to the control of righteousness; he mourned over the pride and extravagance of the court; he constantly pleaded against wars of ambition; he desired that a powerful and Christian nobility should mediate between the crown and the people; he conceived a system of decentralisation which should give the whole nation an interest in public affairs; in his ecclesiastical views he was Ultramontane rather than Gallican. These ideas are put forth in his Direction pour la Conscience d'un Roi and the Plan de Gouvernement. Louis XIV. suspected the political tendency of Telemaque, and caused the printing of the first edition to be suspended. Fenelon has sometimes been regarded as a forerunner of the Revolutionary movement; but he would rather, by ideas in which, as events proved, there may have been something chimerical, have rendered revolution impossible.

Into his controversy with Bossuet he threw himself with a combative energy and a skill in defence and attack that surprise one who knows him only through his Lettres Spirituelles, which tend towards the effacement of the will in a union with God through love. Bossuet pleaded against the dangers for morals and for theology of a false mysticism; Fenelon, against confounding true mysticism with what is false. In his Traite de l'Existence de Dieu he shows himself a bold and subtle thinker: the first part, which is of a popular character, attempts to prove the existence of the Deity by the argument from design in nature and from the reason in man; the second part—of a later date—follows Descartes in metaphysical proofs derived from our idea of an infinite and a perfect being. To his other distinctions Fenelon added that of a literary critic, unsurpassed in his time, unless it be by Boileau. His Dialogues sur l'Eloquence seek to replace the elaborate methods of logical address, crowded with divisions and subdivisions, and supported with a multitude of quotations, by a style simple, natural, and delicate in its fervency.

The admirable Lettre a l'Academie, Fenelon's latest gift to literature, states the case of the ancients against the moderns, and of the moderns against the ancients, with an attempt at impartiality, but it is evident that the writer's love was chiefly given to his favourite classical authors; simplicity and natural beauty attracted him more than ingenuity or wit or laboured brilliance. He feared that the language was losing some of its richness and flexibility; he condemns the use of rhyme; he is hardly just to Racine, but honours himself by his admiration of Moliere. In dealing with historical writings he recognises the importance of the study of governments, institutions, and social life, and at the same time values highly a personal, vivid, direct manner, and a feeling for all that is real, concrete, and living. To his rare gifts of intellect and of the soul was added an inexpressible personal charm, in which something that was almost feminine was united with the reserved power and authority of a man.



CHAPTER VIII TRANSITION TO THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

The spiritual life was interpreted from within by Fenelon. The facts of the moral world, as seen in society, were studied, analysed, and portrayed by La Bruyere and Saint-Simon.

JEAN DE LA BRUYERE (1645-96), a Parisian of the bourgeoisie, appointed preceptor in history to the grandson of the great Conde, saw with the keen eyes of a disenchanted observer the spectacle of seventeenth-century society. In 1688, appended to his translation of the Characters of Theophrastus, appeared his only important work, Les Caracteres ou les Moeurs de ce Siecle; revised and enlarged editions followed, until the ninth was published in 1696. "I restore to the public," he wrote, "what the public lent me." In a series of sixteen chapters, each consisting of detached paragraphs, his studies of human life and of the social environment are presented in the form of maxims, reflections, observations, portraits. For the maxims a recent model lay before him in the little volume of La Rochefoucauld; portraits, for which the romances of Mlle. de Scudery had created a taste, had been exhibited in a collection formed by Mlle. de Montpensier—the growth of her salon—in collaboration with Segrais (Divers Portraits, 1659). Aware of his mastery as a painter of character, La Bruyere added largely to the number of his portraits in the later editions. Keys, professing to identify his character-sketches with living persons, enhanced the interest excited by the work; but in many instances La Bruyere aims at presenting a type rather than an individual, a type which had been individualised by his observation of actual persons.

A profound or an original thinker he was not. Incapable of employing base means to attain worldly success, his honourable failure left a certain bitterness in his spirit; he regarded the life around him as a looker-on, who enjoyed the spectacle, and enjoyed also to note the infirmities of those who took part in the game which he had declined. He is neither a determined pessimist, nor did he see realities through a roseate veil; he neither thinks basely of human nature nor in a heroic fashion: he studies its weakness with a view, he declares, to reformation, but actually, perhaps, more in the way of an observer than of a moral teacher. He is before all else a "naturalist," a naturalist with a sufficient field for investigation, though the life of the provinces and that of the fields (save in their more obvious aspect of mournful toil) lie beyond his sphere. The value of his criticisms of men and manners arises partly from the fact that he is not pledged to a system, that he can take up various points of view, and express the results of many moods of mind. Now he is severe, and again he is indulgent; now he appears almost a cynic, and presently we find that his heart is tender; now he is grave, and in a moment mirthful; while for every purpose and in every mood he has irony at his command. He divines the working of the passions with a fine intelligence, and is a master in noting every outward betrayal or indication of the hidden processes of the heart.

The successive chapters deal with the intellect and authorship, personal merit, women, the heart, society and conversation, the gifts of fortune, the town, the court, men in high station, the King and commonwealth, the nature of man, judgments and criticism, fashion, customs, the pulpit; and under each head are grouped, without formal system, those notes on life and studies of society that had gradually accumulated in the author's mind. A final chapter, "Des Esprits Forts," expresses a vague spiritual philosophy, which probably was not insincere, and which at least served to commend the mundane portion of his book to pious readers. The special attraction of the whole lies in its variety. A volume merely of maxims would have been too rigid, too oracular for such a versatile spirit as that of La Bruyere. "Different things," he says, "are thought out by different methods, and explained by diverse expressions, it may be by a sentence, an argument, a metaphor or some other figure, a parallel, a simple comparison, a complete fact, a single feature, by description, or by portraiture." His book contains all these, and his style corresponds with the variety of matter and method—a style, as Voltaire justly characterises it, rapid, concise, nervous, picturesque. "Among all the different modes in which a single thought may be expressed," wrote La Bruyere, "only one is correct." To find this exact expression he sometimes over-labours his style, and searches the vocabulary too curiously for the most striking word. In his desire for animation the periodic structure of sentence yields to one of interruptions, suspensions, and surprises. He is at once a moralist and a virtuoso in the literary art.

The greater part of Saint-Simon's life and the composition of his Memoires belong to the eighteenth century; but his mind was moulded during his early years, and retained its form and lineaments. He may be regarded as a belated representative of the great age of Louis XIV. If he belongs in some degree to the newer age by virtue of his sense that political reform was needed, his designs of political reform were derived from the past rather than pointed towards the future. LOUIS DE ROUVRAY, DUC DE SAINT-SIMON, was born at Versailles in 1675. He cherished the belief that his ancestry could be traced to Charlemagne. His father, a page of Louis XIII., had been named a duke and peer of France in 1635; from his father descended to the son a devotion to the memory of Louis XIII., and a passionate attachment to the dignity of his own order.

Saint-Simon's education was narrow, but he acquired some Latin, and was a diligent reader of French history. In 1691 he was presented to the King and was enrolled as a soldier in the musketeers. He purchased by-and-by what we should now call the colonelcy of a cavalry regiment, but was ill-pleased with the system which had transformed a feudal army into one where birth and rank were subjected to official control; and in 1702, when others received promotion and he was passed over, he sent in his resignation. Having made a fortunate and happy marriage, Saint-Simon was almost constantly at Versailles until the death of the King, and obtained the most intimate acquaintance with what he terms the mechanics of the court. He had many grievances against Louis XIV., chief among them the insult shown to the nobility in the King's legitimatising his natural offspring; and he justly regarded Madame de Maintenon as his enemy.

The death of the Duc de Bourgogne, to whose party he belonged, was a blow to Saint-Simon's hopes; but the Regent remained his friend. He helped, on a diplomatic mission to Spain, to negotiate the marriage of Louis XV.; yet still was on fire with indignation caused by the wrongs of the dukes and peers, whom he regarded as entitled on historical grounds to form the great council of the monarchy, and almost as rightful partners in the supreme power. His political life closed in 1723 with the death of the Regent. He lived in retirement at his chateau of La Ferte-Vidame, sorrowfully surviving his wife and his sons. In Paris, at the age of eighty (1755), Saint-Simon died.

When nineteen years old, reading Bassompierre's Memoires in a soldier's hour of leisure, he conceived the idea of recording his own experiences, and the Memoires of Saint-Simon were begun. During later years, in the camp or at the court, notes accumulated in his hands, but the definitive form which they took was not determined until, in his retirement at La Ferte-Vidame, the Journal of Dangeau came into his hands. Dangeau's Journal is dry, colourless, passionless, without insight and without art; but it is a well-informed and an exact chronicle, extending over the years from 1684 to 1720. Saint-Simon found it "d'une fadeur a faire vomir"; its servility towards the King and Madame de Maintenon enraged him; but it exhibited facts in an orderly sequence; it might serve as a guide and a clue among his own reminiscences; on the basis of Dangeau's literal transcript of occurrences he might weave his own brilliant recitals and passionate presentations of character. Thus Saint-Simon's Memoires came to be written.

He himself saw much, and his eye had a demonic power of observation; nothing escaped his vision, and his passions enabled him to penetrate through what he saw to its secret meanings. He had gathered information from those who knew the mysteries of the palace and the court; great persons, court ladies, even valets and waiting-women, had been sought and searched to satisfy his insatiable curiosity. It is true that the passions which often lit up the truth sometimes obscured it; any gossip discreditable to those whom he hated was welcome to him; he confesses that he did not pique himself on his impartiality, and it is certain that he did not always verify details. Nevertheless he did not consciously falsify facts; he had a sense of the honour of a gentleman; his spirit was serious, and his feeling of duty and of religion was sincere. Without his impetuosity, his violence, his exaggerations, we might not have had his vividness, like that of life itself, his incomparable portraits, more often inspired by hatred than by love, his minuteness and his breadth of style, the phrases which ineffaceably brand his victims, the lyrical outcry of triumph over enemies of his order. His style is the large style of seventeenth-century prose, but alive with words that sparkle and gleam, words sometimes created by himself to express the intensity of his imagination.

The Memoires, the final preparation of which was the work of his elder years, cover the period from 1691 to 1723. His manuscripts were bequeathed to his cousin, the Bishop of Metz; a lawsuit arose with Saint-Simon's creditors, and in the end the papers were buried among the public archives. Considerable fragments saw the light before the close of the eighteenth century, but it was not until 1829-31 that a true editio princeps, substantially correct, was published. The violences and irregularities of Saint-Simon's style offered no obstacle to the admiration of readers at a time when the romantic movement was dominant. He was hailed as the Tacitus of French history, and had his manner something more of habitual concentration the comparison would not be unjust.

The eighteenth century may be said to have begun before the year 1701 with the quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns. If we can speak of any one idea as dominant during the age of the philosophers, it is the idea of human progress. Through an academic disputation that idea emerged to the light. At first a religious question was complicated with a question relating to art; afterwards the religious question was replaced by one of philosophy. As early as 1657, Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin, turned pietist after a youth of licence, maintained in theory, as well as by the examples of his unreadable epic poems, that Christian heroism and Christian faith afforded material for imaginative handling more suitable to a Christian poet than the history and fables of antiquity. Boileau, in the third chant of his Art Poetique, replied—the mysteries of the Christian faith are too solemn, too awful, to be tricked out to gratify the fancy.

Desmarets dying, bequeathed his contention to CHARLES PERRAULT (1628-1703), who had burlesqued the AEneid, written light and fragile pieces of verse, and occupied himself as a dilettante in patristic and historical studies. In 1687, after various skirmishes between partisans on either side, the quarrel assumed a new importance. The King had recovered after a painful operation; it was a moment for gratulation. Perrault, at a sitting of the Academy, read his poem Le Siecle de Louis le Grand, in which the revolt against the classical tyranny was formulated, and contemporary authors were glorified at the expense of the poets of antiquity. Boileau murmured, indignant; Racine offered ironical commendations; other Academicians patriotically applauded their own praises. Light-feathered epigrams sped to and fro.

Fontenelle, in his Discours sur l'Eglogue and a Digression sur les Anciens et les Modernes, widened the field of debate. Were trees in ancient days taller than those in our own fields? If not, why may not modern men equal Homer, Plato, and Demosthenes? "Nothing checks the progress of things, nothing confines the intelligence so much as admiration of the ancients." Genius is bestowed by Nature on every age, but knowledge grows from generation to generation. In his dialogues entitled the Parallele des Anciens et des Modernes (1688-97), Perrault maintained that in art, in science, in literature, the law of the human mind is a law of progress; that we are the true ancients of the earth, wise with inherited science, more exact in reasoning, more refined in psychological distinctions, raised to a higher plane by Christianity, by the invention of printing, and by the favour of a great monarch. La Fontaine in his charming Epitre to Huet, La Bruyere in his Caracteres, Boileau in his ill-tempered Reflexions sur Longin, rallied the supporters of classicism. Gradually the fires smouldered or were assuaged; Boileau and Perrault were reconciled.

Perrault, if he did not honour antiquity in classical forms, paid a homage to popular tradition in his delightful Contes de ma Mere l'Oie (if, indeed, the tales be his), which have been a joy to generations of children. With inferior art, Madame d'Aulnoy added to the golden treasury for the young. When, fifteen or twenty years after the earlier war, a new campaign began between the Ancients and the Moderns, the philosophical discussion of the idea of progress had separated itself from the literary quarrel. But in the tiltings of Lamotte-Houdart, the champion of the moderns, against a well-equipped female knight, the learned Madame Dacier—indignant at Lamotte's Iliade, recast in the eighteenth-century taste—a new question was raised, and one of significance for the eighteenth century—that of the relative merits of prose and verse.

Lamotte, a writer of comedy, tragedy, opera, fables, eclogues, odes, maintained that the highest literary form is prose, and he versified none the less. The age was indeed an age of prose—an age when the salons discussed the latest discovery in science, the latest doctrine in philosophy or politics. Its imaginative enthusiasm passed over from art to speculation, and what may be called the poetry of the eighteenth century is to be found less in its odes or dramas or elegies than in the hopes and visions which gathered about that idea of human progress emerging from a literary discussion, idle, perhaps, in appearance, but in its inner significance no unfitting inauguration of an era which looked to the future rather than to the past.

BERNARD LE BOVIER DE FONTENELLE (1657-1757), a son of Corneille's sister, whose intervention in the quarrel of Ancients and Moderns turned the discussion in the direction of philosophy, belongs to both the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. In the hundred years which made up his life, there was indeed time for a second Fontenelle to develop from the first. The first Fontenelle, satirised as the Cydias of La Bruyere, "un compose du pedant et du precieux," was an aspirant poet, without vision, without passion, who tried to compensate his deficiencies by artificial elegances of style. The origin of hissing is maliciously dated by Racine from his tragedy Aspar. His operas fluttered before they fell; his Eglogues had not life enough to flutter. The Dialogues des Morts (1683) is a young writer's effort to be clever by paradox, an effort to show his wit by incongruous juxtapositions, and a cynical levelling of great reputations. But there was another Fontenelle, the untrammelled disciple of Descartes, a man of universal interests, passionless, but curious for all knowledge, an assimilator of new ideas, a dissolver of old beliefs, an intermediary between science and the world of fashion, a discreet insinuator of doubts, who smiled but never condescended to laugh, an intelligence supple, subtle, and untiring.

In 1686 he published his Entretiens sur la Pluralite des Mondes, evening conversations between an astronomer and a marchioness, half-scientific, half-gallant, learned coquetries with science, for which he asked no more serious attention than a novel might require, while he communicated the theories of Descartes and the discoveries of Galileo, suggested that science is our safest way to truth, and that truth at best is not absolute but relative to the human understanding. The Histoire des Oracles, in which the cargo of Dutch erudition that loaded his original by Van Dale is skilfully lightened, glided to the edge of theological storm. Fontenelle would show that the pagan oracles were not delivered by demons, and did not cease at the coming of Jesus Christ; innocent opinions, but apt to illustrate the origins and growth of superstitions, from which we too may not be wholly free in spite of all our advantages of true religion and sound philosophy. Of course God's chosen people are not like unguided Greeks or Romans; and yet human beings are much the same in all times and places. The Jesuit Baltus scented heresy, and Fontenelle was very ready to admit that the devil was a prophet, since Father Baltus wished it so to be, and held the opinion to be orthodox.

Appointed perpetual secretary of the Academie des Sciences in 1697, Fontenelle pronounced during forty years the panegyrics of those who had been its members. These Eloges des Academiciens are masterpieces in a difficult art, luminous, dignified, generous without ostentation, plain without poverty of thought or expression. The discreet Fontenelle loved tranquillity—"If I had my hand full of truths, I should take good care before I opened it." He never lost a friend, acting on two prudent maxims, "Everything is possible," and "Every one is right." "It is not a heart," said Madame de Tencin, "which you have in your breast; it is a brain." It was a kindly brain, which could be for a moment courageous. And thus it was possible for him to enter his hundredth year, still interested in ideas, still tranquil and alert.

A great arsenal for the uses of eighteenth-century philosophy was constructed and stored by PIERRE BAYLE (1647-1706) in his Dictionnaire Historique et Critique, of which the first edition was published in 1697. Science, which found its popular interpreter in Fontenelle, was a region hardly entered by Bayle; the general history of Europe, from the close of the mediaeval period, and especially the records in every age of mythologies, religions, theologies, philosophies, formed his province, and it was one of wide extent. Born in 1647, son of a Protestant pastor, educated by Jesuits, converted by them and reconverted, professor of philosophy at Sedan, a fugitive to Rotterdam, professor there of history and philosophy, deprived of his position for unorthodox opinions, Bayle found rest not in cessation from toil, but in the research of a sceptical scholar, peaceably and endlessly pursued.

His early zeal of proselytism languished and expired. In its place came a boundless curiosity, a penetrating sagacity. His vast accumulations of knowledge were like those of the students of the Renaissance. The tendencies of his intellect anticipate the tendencies of the eighteenth century, but with him scepticism had not become ambitious or dogmatic. He followed tranquilly where reason and research led, and saw no cause why religion and morals more than any other subjects should not be submitted to the scrutiny of rational inquiry. Since men have held all beliefs, and are more prone to error than apt to find the truth, why should any opinions be held sacred? Let us ascertain and expose the facts. In doing so, we shall learn the lesson of universal tolerance; and if the principle of authority in matters of religion be gently sapped, can this be considered an evil? Morals, which have their foundation in the human understanding, remain, though all theologies may be in doubt. If the idea of Providence be a superstition, why should not man guide his life by good sense and moderation? Bayle did not attack existing beliefs with the battering-ram: he quietly removed a stone here and a stone there from the foundations. If he is aggressive, it is by means of a tranquil irony. The errors of human-kind are full of curious interest; the disputes of theologians are both curious and amusing; the moral licences of men and women are singular and often diverting. Why not instruct and entertain our minds with the facts of the world?

The instruction is delivered by Bayle in the dense and sometimes heavy columns of his text; the entertainment will be found in the rambling gossip, interspersed with illuminating ideas, of his notes. Almost every eminent writer of the eighteenth century was a debtor to Bayle's Dictionary. He kept his contemporaries informed of all that was added to knowledge in his periodical publication, Nouvelles de la Republique des Lettres (begun in 1684). He called himself a cloud-compeller: "My gift is to create doubts; but they are no more than doubts." Yet there is light, if not warmth, in such a genius for criticism as his; and it was light not only for France, but for Europe.



BOOK THE FOURTH THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY



CHAPTER I MEMOIRS AND HISTORY—POETRY—THE THEATRE—THE NOVEL

I

The literature of the second half of the seventeenth century was monarchical, Christian, classical. The eighteenth century was to lose the spirit of classical art while retaining many of its forms, to overthrow the domination of the Church, to destroy the monarchy. It was an age not of great art but of militant ideas, which more and more came to utilise art as their vehicle. Political speculation, criticism, science, sceptical philosophy invaded literature. The influence of England—of English free-thinkers, political writers, men of science, essayists, novelists, poets—replaced the influence of Italy and Spain, and for long that of the models of ancient Greece and Rome. The century of the philosophers was eminently social and mundane; the salons revived; a new preciosity came into fashion; but as time went on the salons became rather the mart of ideas philosophical and scientific than of the daintinesses of letters and of art. Journalism developed, and thought tended to action, applied itself directly to public life. While the work of destructive criticism proceeded, the bases of a moral reconstruction were laid; the free play of intellect was succeeded by a great enfranchisement of the passions; the work of Voltaire was followed by the work of Rousseau.

Before the close of the reign of Louis XIV. the old order of things had suffered a decline. War, famine, public debt, oppressive taxation had discredited the monarchy. A dull hypocrisy hardly disguised the gross licentiousness of the times. The revocation of the edict of Nantes had exiled those Protestants who formed a substantial part of the moral conscience of France. The bitter feud of brother-bishops, Bossuet and Fenelon, hurling defiance against each other for the love of God, had made religion a theme for mockery. Port-Royal, once the refuge of serious faith and strict morals, was destroyed. The bull Unigenitus expelled the spiritual element from French Christianity, reduced the clergy to a state of intellectual impotence, and made a lasting breach between them and the better part of the laity. Meanwhile the scientific movement had been proving its power. Science had come to fill the place left void by religion. The period of the Regency (1715-23) is one of transition from the past to the newer age, shameless in morals, degraded in art; the period of Voltaire followed, when intellect sapped and mined the old beliefs; with Rousseau came the explosion of sentiment and an effort towards reconstruction. A great political and social revolution closed the century.

The life of the time is seen in many memoirs, and in the correspondence of many distinguished persons, both men and women. Among the former the Memoires of Mdlle. Delaunay, afterwards Mme. de Staal (1684-1750) are remarkable for the vein of melancholy, subdued by irony, underlying a style which is formed for fine and clear exactness. The Duchesse du Maine's lady-in-waiting, daughter of a poor painter, but educated with care, drew delicately in her literary art with an etcher's tool, and her hand was controlled by a spirit which had in it something of the Stoic. The Souvenirs of Mme. de Caylus (1673-1729), niece of Mme. de Maintenon—"jamais de creature plus seduisante," says Saint-Simon—give pictures of the court, charming in their naivete, grace, and mirth. Mme. d'Epinay, designing to tell the story of her own life, disguised as a piece of fiction, became in her Memoires the chronicler of the manners of her time. The society of the salons and the men of letters is depicted in the Memoirs of Marmontel. These are but examples from an abundant literature constantly augmented to the days of Mme. de Campan and Mme. Roland. The general aspect of the social world in the mid-century is presented by the historian Duclos (1704-1772) in his Considerations sur les Moeurs de ce Siecle, and with reparation for his previous neglect of the part played in society by women in his Memoires pour servir a l'Histoire du XVIIIe Siecle.

As much or more may be learnt from the letter-writers as from the writers of memoirs. If Voltaire did not take the first place by his correspondence, so vast, so luminous, so comprehensive, it might justly be assigned to his friend Mme. du Deffand (1697-1780), whose lucid intelligence perceived everything, whose disabused heart seemed detached until old age from all that most interested her understanding. For clear good sense we turn to the Marquise de Lambert, for bourgeois worth and kindliness to Mme. Geoffrin, for passion which kindles the page to Mdlle. de Lespinasse, for sensibility and romance ripening to political ardour and strenuous convictions to Mme. Roland. Among the philosophers Diderot pours the torrent, clear or turbid, of his genius into his correspondence with affluent improvisation; D'Alembert is grave, temperate, lucid; the Abbe Galiani, the little Machiavel—"a pantomime from head to foot," said Diderot—the gay Neapolitan punchinello, given the freedom of Paris, that "capital of curiosity," is at once wit, cynic, thinker, scholar, and buffoon. These, again, are but examples from an epistolary swarm.

While the eighteenth century thus mirrored itself in memoirs and letters, it did not forget the life of past centuries. The studious Benedictines, who had already accomplished much, continued their erudite labours. Nicolas Freret (1688-1749), taking all antiquity for his province, illuminated the study of chronology, geography, sciences, arts, language, religion. Daniel and Velly narrated the history of France. Vertot (1655-1735), with little of the spirit of historical fidelity, displayed certain gifts of an historical artist. The school of scepticism was represented by the Jesuit Hardouin, who doubted the authenticity of all records of the past except those of his own numismatic treasures. Questions as to the principles of historical certitude occupied the Academy of Inscriptions during many sittings from 1720 onwards, and produced a body of important studies. While the Physiocrats were endeavouring to demonstrate that there is a natural order in social circumstances, a philosophy of history, which bound the ages together, was developed in the writings of Montesquieu and Turgot, if not of Voltaire. The Esprit des Lois, the Essai sur les Moeurs, and Turgot's discourses, delivered in 1750 at the Sorbonne, contributed in different degrees and ways towards a new and profounder conception of the life of societies or of humanity. By Turgot for the first time the idea of progress was accepted as the ruling principle of history. It cannot be denied that, as regards the sciences of inorganic nature, he more than foreshadowed Comte's theory of the three states, theological, metaphysical, and positive, through which the mind of humanity is alleged to have travelled.

In the second half of the century, history tended to become doctrinaire, aggressive, declamatory—a pamphlet in the form of treatise or narrative. Morelly wrote in the interest of socialistic ideas, which correspond to those of modern collectivism. Mably, inspired at first by enthusiasm for the ancient republics, advanced to a communistic creed. Condorcet, as the century drew towards a close, bringing together the ideas of economists and historians, traced human progress through the past, and uttered ardent prophecies of human perfectibility in the future.

II

Poetry other than dramatic grew in the eighteenth century upon a shallow soil. The more serious and the more ardent mind of the time was occupied with science, the study of nature, the study of society, philosophical speculation, the criticism of religion, of government, and of social arrangements. The old basis of belief upon which reposed the great art of the preceding century had given way. The analytic intellect distrusted the imagination. The conventions of a brilliant society were unfavourable to the contemplative mood of high poetry. The tyranny of the "rules" remained when the enthusiasm which found guidance and a safeguard in the rules had departed. The language itself had lost in richness, variety, harmony, and colour; it was an admirable instrument for the intellect, but was less apt to render sensations and passions; when employed for the loftier purposes of art it tended to the oratorical, with something of over-emphasis and strain. The contention of La Motte-Houdart that verse denaturalises and deforms ideas, expresses the faith of the time, and La Motte's own cold and laboured odes did not tend to refute his theory.

Chaulieu (1639-1720), the "poete de la bonne compagnie," an anacreontic senior, patriarch of pleasure, survived the classical century, and sang his songs of facile, epicurean delights; his friend La Fare (1644-1712) survived, but slept and ate more than a songster should. Anthony Hamilton (1646?-1720) wrote graceful verses, and in his brilliant Memoires de la Vie du Comte de Gramont became the historian of the amorous intrigues of the court of Charles II. Jean-Baptiste Rousseau (1670-1741), who in the days of Mme. de Maintenon's authority had in his sacred Cantates been pious by command, recompensed himself by retailing unbecoming epigrams—and for epigram he had a genuine gift—to the Society of the Temple. He manufactured odes with skill in the mechanism of verse, and carefully secured the fine disorder required in that form of art by factitious enthusiasm and the abuse of mythology and allegory. When Rousseau died, Lefranc de Pompignan mourned for "le premier chantre du monde," reborn as the Orpheus of France, in a poem which alone of Lefranc's numerous productions—and by virtue of two stanzas—has not that sanctity ascribed to them by Voltaire, the sanctity which forbids any one to touch them. Why name their fellows and successors in the eighteenth-century art of writing poems without poetry?

Louis Racine (1692-1763), son of the author of Athalie, in his versified discourses on La Grace and La Religion was devout and edifying, but with an edification which promotes slumber. If a poet in sympathy with the philosophers desired to edify, he described the phenomena of nature as Saint-Lambert (1716-1803) did in his Saisons—"the only work of our century," Voltaire assured the author, "which will reach posterity." To describe meant to draw out the inventory of nature's charms with an eye not on the object but on the page of the Encyclopaedia, and to avoid the indecency of naming anything in direct and simple speech. The Seasons of Saint-Lambert were followed by the Months (Mois) of Roucher (1745-94)—"the most beautiful poetic shipwreck of the century," said the malicious Rivarol—and by the Jardins of Delille (1738-1813). When Delille translated the Georgics he was saluted by Voltaire as the Abbe Virgil.[1] The salons heard him with rapture recite his verses as from the tripod of inspiration. He was the favourite of Marie-Antoinette. Aged and blind, he was a third with Homer and Milton. In death they crowned his forehead, and for three days the mourning crowd gazed on all that remained of their great poet. And yet Delille's Jardins is no better than a patchwork of carpet-gardening, in which the flowers are theatrical paper-flowers. If anything lives from the descriptive poetry of the eighteenth century, it is a few detached lines from the writings of Lemierre.

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

The successor of J.-B. Rousseau in the grand ode was Ecouchard Lebrun (1729-1807), rival of Pindar. All he wanted to equal Pindar was some forgetfulness of self, some warmth, some genuine enthusiasm, some harmony, a touch of genius; a certain dignity of imagination he exhibits in his best moments. If we say that he honoured Buffon and was the friend of Andre Chenier, we have said in his praise that which gives him the highest distinction; yet it may be added that if he often falsified the ode, he, like Rousseau, excelled in epigram. It was not the great lyric but le petit lyrisme which blossomed and ran to seed in the thin poetic soil. The singers of fragile loves and trivial pleasures are often charming, and as often they are merely frivolous or merely depraved. Grecourt; Piron; Bernard, the curled and powdered Anacreon; Bernis, Voltaire's "Babet la Bouquetiere," King Frederick's poet of "sterile abundance"; Dorat, who could flutter at times with an airy grace; Bertin, born in the tropics, and with the heat of the senses in his verse; Parny, an estray in Paris from the palms and fountains of the Isle Bourbon, the "dear Tibullus" of Voltaire—what a swarm of butterflies, soiled or shining!

If two or three poets deserve to be distinguished from the rest, one is surely JEAN-BAPTISTE-LOUIS GRESSET (1709-77), whose parrot Vert-Vert, instructed by the pious Sisters, demoralised by the boatmen of the Loire, still edifies and scandalises the lover of happy badinage in verse; one is the young and unfortunate NICOLAS-JOSEPH-LAURENT GILBERT (1751-80), less unfortunate and less gifted than the legend makes him, yet luckless enough and embittered enough to become the satirist of Academicians and philosophers and the society which had scorned his muse; and the third is JEAN-PIERRE CLARIS DE FLORIAN (1755-94), the amiable fabulist, who, lacking La Fontaine's lyric genius, fine harmonies, and penetrating good sense, yet can tell a story with pleasant ease, and draw a moral with gentle propriety.

In every poetic form, except comedy, that he attempted, Voltaire stands high among his contemporaries; they give us a measure of his range and excellence. But the two greatest poets of the eighteenth century wrote in prose. Its philosophical poet was the naturalist Buffon; its supreme lyrist was the author of La Nouvelle Heloise.

III

In the history of French tragedy only one name of importance—that of Crebillon—is to be found in the interval between Racine and Voltaire. Campistron feebly, Danchet formally and awkwardly, imitated Racine; Duche followed him in sacred tragedy; La Grange-Chancel (author of the Philippiques, directed against the Regent) followed him in tragedies on classical subjects. If any piece deserves to be distinguished above the rest, it is the Manlius (1698) of La Fosse, a work—suggestive rather of Corneille than of Racine—which was founded on the Venice Preserved of Otway. The art of Racine languished in inferior hands. The eighteenth century, while preserving its form, thought to reanimate it by the provocatives of scenic decoration and more rapid and more convulsive action.

PROSPER JOLYOT DE CREBILLON (1674-1762), a diligent reader of seventeenth-century romances, transported the devices of romance, its horrors, its pathetic incidents, its disguises, its surprises, its discoveries, into the theatre, and substituted a tragedy of violent situations for the tragedy of character. His Rhadamiste et Zenobie (1711), which has an air of Corneillean grandeur and heroism, notwithstanding a plot so complicated that it is difficult to follow, was received with unmeasured enthusiasm. To be atrocious within the rules was to create a new and thrilling sensation. Torrents of tears flowed for the unhappy heroine of La Motte's Ines de Castro (1723), secretly married to the Prince of Portugal, and pardoned only when the fatal poison is in her veins. Voltaire's effort to renovate classical tragedy was that of a writer who loved the theatre, first for its own sake, afterwards as an instrument for influencing public opinion, who conceived tragedy aright as the presentation of character and passion seen in action. His art suffered from his extreme facility, from his inability (except it be in Zaire) to attain dramatic self-detachment, from the desire to conquer his spectators in the readiest ways, by striking situations, or, at a later date, by the rhetoric of philosophical doctrine and sentiment.

There is no one, with all his faults, to set beside Voltaire. Piron and Gresset are remembered, not by their tragedies, but each by a single comedy. Marmontel's Memoirs live; his tales have a faded glory; as for his tragedies, the ingenious stage asp which hissed as the curtain fell on his Cleopatre, was a sound critic of their mediocrity. Lemierre, with some theatrical talent, wrote ill; as the love of spectacle grew, he permitted his William Tell to shoot the apple, and his widow of Malabar to die in flames upon the stage.

Saurin in Spartacus (1760) declaimed and dissertated in the manner of Voltaire. De Belloy at a lucky moment showed, in his Siege de Calais (1765), that rhetorical patriotism had survived the Seven Years' War; he was supposed to have founded that national, historic drama which the President Henault had projected; but with the Siege de Calais the national drama rose and fell. Laharpe (1739-1803) was the latest writer who compounded classical tragedy according to the approved recipe. In the last quarter of the century Shakespeare became known to the French public through the translation of Letourneur. Before that translation began to appear, JEAN-FRANCOIS DUCIS (1733-1816), the patron of whose imagination was his "Saint Guillaume" of Stratford, though he knew no English, had in a fashion presented Hamlet (1769) and Romeo and Juliet to his countrymen; King Lear, Macbeth, King John, Othello (1792) followed. But Ducis came a generation too soon for a true Shakespearian rendering; simple and heroic in his character as a man, he belonged to an age of philosophers and sentimentalists, an age of "virtue" and "nature." Shakespeare's translation is as strange as that of his own Bottom. Ophelia is the daughter of King Claudius; the Queen dies by her own hand; old Montague is a Montague-Ugolino who has devoured his sons; Malcolm is believed to be a mountaineer's child; Lear is borne on the stage, sleeping on a bed of roses, that he may behold a sunrise; Hedelmone (Desdemona) is no longer Othello's wife; Iago disappears; Desdemona's handkerchief is not among the properties; and Juliet's lark is voiceless. Eighteenth-century tragedy is indeed a city of tombs.

Comedy made some amends. Before the appearance of Regnard, the actor Baron, Moliere's favourite pupil, had given a lively play—L'Homme a bonne Fortune (1686). JEAN-FRANCOIS REGNARD (1655-1709) escaped from his corsair captors and slavery at Algiers, made his sorry company of knaves and fools acceptable by virtue of inexhaustible gaiety, bright fantasy, and the liveliest of comic styles. His Joueur (1696) is a scapegrace, possessed by the passion of gaming, whose love of Angelique is a devotion to her dowry, but he will console himself for lost love by another throw of the dice. His Legataire Universel, greedy, old, and ailing, is surrounded by pitiless rogues, yet the curtain falls on a general reconciliation. Regnard's morals may be doubtful, but his mirth is unquestionable.

Dancourt (1661-1725), with a far less happy style, had a truer power of observation, and as quick an instinct for theatrical effects; he exhibits in the Chevalier a la Mode and the Bourgeoises a la Mode, if not with exact fidelity, at least in telling caricature, the struggle of classes in the society around him, wealth ambitious for rank, rank prepared to sell itself for wealth. The same spirit of cynical gaiety inspires the Double Veuvage of Charles Riviere Dufresny (1655?-1724), where husband and wife, each disappointed in false tidings of the other's death, exhibit transports of feigned joy on meeting, and assist in the marriage of their respective lovers, each to accomplish the vexation of the other. Among such plays as these the Turcaret (1709) of Lesage appears as the creation of a type, and a type which verifies itself as drawn with a realism powerful and unfaltering.

In striking contrast with Lesage's bold and bitter satire are the comedies of Marivaux, delicate indeed in observation of life and character, skilled in their exploration of the byways of the heart, brilliant in fantasy, subtle in sentiment, lightly touched by the sensuality of the day. Philippe Nericault Destouches (1680-1754) had the ambition to revive the comedy of character, and by its means to read moral lessons on the stage; unfortunately what he lacked was comic power. In his most celebrated piece, Le Glorieux, he returns to the theme treated by Dancourt of the struggle between the ruined noblesse and the aspiring middle class. Pathos and something of romance are added to comedy.

Already those tendencies which were to produce the so-called comedie larmoyante were at work. Piron (1689-1773), who regarded it with hostility, undesignedly assisted in its creation; Les Fils Ingrats, named afterwards L'Ecole des Peres, given in 1728, the story of a too generous father of ungrateful children, a play designed for mirth, was in fact fitter to draw tears than to excite laughter. Piron's special gift, however, was for satire. In La Metromanie he smiles at the folly of the aspirant poet with all his cherished illusions; yet young Damis with his folly, the innocent error of a generous spirit, wins a sympathy to which the duller representatives of good sense can make no claim. It is satire also which gives whatever comic force it possesses to the one comedy of Gresset that is not forgotten: Le Mechant (1747), a disloyal comrade, would steal the heart of his friend's beloved; soubrette and valet conspire to expose the traitor; but Cleon, who loves mischief in the spirit of sport, though unmasked, is little disconcerted. Brilliant in lines and speeches, Le Mechant is defective in its composition as a whole.

The decline in a feeling for composition, for art, for the severity of outline, was accompanied by a development of the emotional or sentimental element in drama. As sensibility was quickened, and wealth and ease increased, little things came to be felt as important. The middle class advanced in prosperity and power. Why should emperors and kings, queens and princesses occupy the stage? Why neglect the joys and griefs of every-day domestic life? If "nature" and "virtue" were to be honoured, why not seek them here? Man, the new philosophy taught, is essentially good; human nature is of itself inclined to virtue; if it strays through force of circumstance into vice or folly, should not its errors be viewed with sympathy, with tenderness? Thus comedy grew serious, and tragedy put off its exalted airs; the genius of tragedy and the genius of comedy were wedded, and the comedie larmoyante, which might be named more correctly the bourgeois drama, was born of this union.

In the plays of NIVELLE DE LA CHAUSEE (1692-1754) the new type is already formed. The relations of wife and husband, of father and child, form the theme of all his plays. In Melanide, father and son, unrecognised, are rivals in love; the wife and mother, supposed to be dead, is discovered; the husband returns to her arms, and is reconciled to his son. It is the victory of nature and of innate goodness; comic intention and comic power are wholly absent. La Chausee's morals are those of an optimist; but those modern domestic tragedies, the ethics of which do not err by over-sanguine views of human nature, may trace their ancestry to Melanide.

For such serious comedy or bourgeois drama the appropriate vehicle, so Diderot maintained, is prose. Diderot, among his many gifts, did not possess a talent for dramatic writing. But as a critic his influence was considerable. Midway between tragedy and comedy he perceived a place for the serious drama; to right and left, on either side of the centre, were spaces for forms approximating, the one to tragedy, the other to comedy. The hybrid species of tragi-comedy he wholly condemned; each genre, as he conceived it, is a unity containing its own principle of life. The function of the theatre is less to represent character fully formed than to study the natural history of character, to exhibit the environments which determine character. Its purpose is to moralise life, and the chief means of moralisation is that effusive sensibility which is the outflow of the inherent goodness of human nature.

Diderot attempted to justify his theory by examples, and only proved his own incapacity as a writer for the stage. His friend SEDAINE (1719-97) was more fortunate. Of the bourgeois drama of the eighteenth century, Le Philosophe sans le savoir alone survives. It is little more than a domestic anecdote rendered dramatic, but it has life and reality. The merchant Vanderk's daughter is to be married; but on the same day his son, resenting an insult to his father, must expose his life in a duel. Old Antoine, the intendant, would take his young master's place of danger; Antoine's daughter, Victorine, half-unawares has given her heart to the gallant duellist. Hopes and fears, joy and grief contend in the Vanderk habitation. Sedaine made a true capture of a little province of nature. When Mercier (1740-1814) tried to write in the same vein, his "nature" was that of declamatory sentiment imposed upon trivial incidents. Beaumarchais, in his earlier pieces, was tearful and romantic; happily he repented him of his lugubrious sentiment, and restored to France its old gaiety in the Barbier de Seville and the inimitable Mariage de Figaro; but amid the mirth of Figaro can be heard the detonation of approaching revolutionary conflict.

IV

The history of the novel in the eighteenth century corresponds with the general movement of ideas; the novel begins as art, and proceeds to propagandism. ALAIN-RENE LESAGE, born at Sarzeau, near Vannes, in 1668, belongs as much to the seventeenth as to the eighteenth century. His life of nearly eighty years (died 1747) was the honourable life of a bourgeois, who was also a man of genius, and who maintained his own independence and that of his wife and children by the steadfast diligence of his pen. He was no passionate reformer, no preacher of ideas; he observed life and human nature with shrewd common-sense, seeing men in general as creatures in whom good and evil are mixed; his imagination combined and vivified all he had observed; and he recorded the results of his study of the world in a style admirable for naturalness and ease, though these were not attained without the careful practice of literary art.

From translations for the readers of fiction and for the theatre, he advanced to free adaptations, and from these to work which may be called truly original. Directed by the Abbe de Lyonne to Spanish literature, he endeavoured in his early plays to preserve what was brilliant and ingenious in the works of Spanish dramatists, and to avoid what was strained and extravagant. In his Crispin Rival de son Maitre (1707), in which the roguish valet aspires to carry off his master's betrothed and her fortune, he borrows only the idea of Mendoza's play; the conduct of the action, the dialogue, the characters are his own. His prose story of the same year, Le Diable Boiteux, owes but little to the suggestion derived from Guevara; it is, in fact, more nearly related to the Caracteres of La Bruyere; when Asmodeus discloses what had been hidden under the house-roofs of the city, a succession of various human types are presented, and, as in the case of La Bruyere, contemporaries attempted to identify these with actual living persons.

In his remarkable satiric comedy Turcaret, and in his realistic novel Gil Blas, Lesage enters into full possession of his own genius. Turcaret, ou le Financier, was completed early in 1708; the efforts of the financiers to hinder its performance served in the end to enhance its brief and brilliant success. The pitiless amasser of wealth, Turcaret, is himself the dupe of a coquette, who in her turn is the victim of a more contemptible swindler. Lesage, presenting a fragment of the manners and morals of his day, keeps us in exceedingly ill company, but the comic force of the play lightens the oppression of its repulsive characters. It is the first masterpiece of the eighteenth-century comedie de moeurs.