A Short History of French Literature

Descriptive Poets. Delille.

Le Franc de Pompignan had the misfortune to incur the enmity of Voltaire, and has consequently borne in France the traditional ignominy which in England hangs on certain victims of Dryden and Pope. He had, however, some poetical talent, which was shown principally in his ode on the death of J. B. Rousseau. The charming poem of Ver-Vert (the burlesque history of a parrot, the pet of a convent) made, and not unjustly, the reputation of Gresset. This reputation his other poetical works – though he wrote a comedy of much merit – failed to sustain. Saint Lambert, the rival of Voltaire in love if not in literature, imitated Thomson's Seasons very closely in a poem of the same name, which set the fashion of descriptive poetry in France for a considerable time. The three most remarkable of his followers, all considerably superior to himself in power, were Lemierre, Delille, and Roucher. Some paradoxical critics have endeavoured to make Lemierre into a great poet; but his poems (La Peinture, Les Fastes, etc.), written on ill-selected subjects and in a style full of conventional mannerism, have at best the occasional striking lines which are to be found in Armstrong and other followers of Young or Thomson in England. Jacques Delille and his extraordinary popularity form, perhaps, the greatest satire on the taste of the eighteenth century in France. His translation of the Georgics was supposed to make him the equal of Virgil, and brought him not merely fame, but solid reward. His principal work was the poem of Les Jardins, which he followed up with others of a not dissimilar kind. Though he emigrated he did not lose his fame, and to the day of his death was considered to be the first poet of France, or to share that honour with Lebrun-Pindare. Delille has expiated his popularity by a full half-century of contempt, and his work is, indeed, valueless as poetry. But it is interesting as one of the most striking examples of talent, adjusting itself exactly to the demands made on it. The age of Delille wished to see everything described in elegant periphrases, and the periphrases arranged in harmonious verses. Delille did this and nothing more. Chess is 'le jeu réveur qu'inventa Palamède.' Backgammon is 'le jeu bruyant où, le cornet en main, L'adroit joueur calcule un hasard incertain.' Sugar is 'le miel Américain Que du suc des roseaux exprima l'Africain.' In short, poetry becomes an elaborate conundrum; nothing is called by its proper name when a circumlocution is in any way possible. Given the demand, Delille may justly claim the honour of supplying it with unequalled adroitness. Roucher, the author of Les Mois, who fell a victim to the guillotine, was a member of this school, possessing not a little vigour, though he was not free from the defects of his predecessors. To these may, perhaps, be joined the pastoral and idyllic poet Léonard.

Lebrun.

It has been said that the glory of Delille as the greatest poet of the last quarter of the century was shared by a writer whom his contemporaries surnamed (absurdly enough) Pindar. Escouchard Lebrun had a strange resemblance to J. B. Rousseau, of whom, however, he was by no means a warm admirer. Like his forerunner, he divided his time between bombastic lyrics and epigrams of very considerable merit. Lebrun was not destitute of a certain force, but his time was too much for him. He was a very long-lived man, and in his old age celebrated by turns the Republic and Bonaparte. His chief rivals as poets of the Republic were M. J. Chénier and the hunchback Desorgues, a voluminous and vigorous but crude and unfinished writer, who died in a madhouse at the age of forty-five.

Two young poets, who lived about the middle of the century, are usually mentioned together, from the fact of the younger of them having used the misfortunes of the elder to point his own complaints. Malfilâtre, a Norman by birth, had the ill-luck to write a piece of verse which gained a provincial success. He at once set out for Paris to make his fortune. He obtained the post of secretary to the Count de Lauraguais, wrote verses not without grace and full of a certain tender melancholy, and died at the age of thirty, his health broken by privations and disappointment. Gilbert, a stronger man, but who has been somewhat honoured by being called the French Chatterton, died still younger, after writing some vigorous satire, and a 'complaint' or elegy which has a good deal of pathos. But he did not, as is generally said, die of want, though he did die in a public hospital, having been carried thither after a fall from his horse.

Parny.

The places accorded by their contemporaries to Delille and Lebrun really belonged to two writers of very different character and fortune, Parny and André Chénier. Evariste de Parny, a native of the island of Bourbon, was called by the aged Voltaire 'mon cher Tibulle,' and displays, with much of the frivolity and false gallantry of the time, an extraordinary command of simple elegiac verse, and a manner almost antique in its simplicity and sweetness. Parny's best piece, a short epitaph on a young girl, is one of the best things of its kind in literature. His merits, however, are confined to his early works. In his maturer years he wrote long poems, on the model of the Pucelle, against England, Christianity, and Monarchism, which are equally remarkable for blasphemy, obscenity, extravagance, and dulness. His friend Bertin, like him a creole, resembled him in the command of graceful elegiac and epistolary verse, but had not what Parny sometimes had, genuine passion.

Chénier.

André Marie de Chénier285, beyond question the greatest poet of the eighteenth century in France, was born at Constantinople, where his father was consul-general, in 1762. His mother was a Greek. His family returned to France when he was a child; he was educated carefully, and for a short time served in the army, but soon left it. After a time he was attached (in 1787) to the French embassy in London. Here he spent four years. Returning to France he sympathised, but on the moderate side, with the Revolution. The growth of the Jacobin spirit horrified him, and the excesses of the summer of 1792 decided his attitude and his fate. He wrote frequently in the Journal de Paris, the organ of the moderate royalist party. Although he did not in any way put himself forward, he was at last arrested in March, 1794, and was guillotined on the seventh Thermidor, two days only before the event which would have saved him, the fall of Robespierre. His poems were not published till long after his death, and the text of them is even now in an unsatisfactory condition, many having been left unfinished and uncorrected by the author. André Chénier is sometimes considered as a precursor of the Romantic reform, but this is a mistake. His critical comments on Shakespeare and other writers, his favourite studies, which were confined to the Greek and Latin classics and the humanists of the Italian Renaissance, above all his poems themselves, prove the contrary. A Greek by birthplace, and half a Greek by blood, his tastes and standards were wholly classical. But the fire and force of his poetical genius made the blood circulate afresh in the veins of the old French classical tradition, without, however, permanently strengthening or renovating it. The poetry of Chénier is still in the main the poetry of Racine, though with infinitely more glow of colour and variety of harmony. His poems are mostly antique in their titles and plan, eclogues, elegies, and so forth, and are not free from a certain artificiality inseparable from the style. La Jeune Tarentine, La Jeune Captive, L'Aveugle, and some others, are of extreme merit, and all over his work (much of which is in the most fragmentary condition) lines and phrases of extraordinary beauty are scattered. The noble Iambes, or political and satirical poems, which he wrote in prison, just before his death, bear out, perhaps better than anything else, his well-known saying, as he touched his head when sentence had been passed, 'et pourtant il y avait quelque chose là.'

Minor Poets.

A few other poets or verse-makers of merit before the revival of poetry proper must be rapidly noticed. The fable of La Fontaine was cultivated vigorously, in particular by Florian, a favourite pupil of Voltaire, who will reappear in these pages. Florian's fables are graceful copies of his master. Those of Arnault, with less grace, have more originality; often, indeed, Arnault's short moral poems are not so much fables as what used to be called in English 'emblems.' The most famous of these, which of itself deserves to keep Arnault's memory green, is 'La Feuille.' Marie Joseph Chénier, the younger brother of André, and, unlike him, a fervent republican, is chiefly known as a dramatist. He had, however, a vein of satirical verse, which was not commonplace. Another dramatist, Andrieux, also deserves mention in passing. Superior to either of these as a poet, and wanting only the good-fortune of having been born a little later, was Nepomucène Lemercier, a playwright of no small merit, and a poet of extraordinary but unequal vigour. The Panhypocrisiade, a kind of satirical epic par personnages (to use the old French expression for a dramatic narrative), is his principal work, and a very remarkable one. Last of all have to be mentioned Fontanes and Chênedollé, who are the characteristic poets of the Empire, with the exception of an epic school of no value. The chief importance of Fontanes in literature is derived not from any performances of his own, but from the fact that he was the appointed intermediary between Napoleon and the men of letters of the time, and was able to exercise a good deal of useful patronage. Chênedollé was in production, if not in publication, for he published late in life, a precursor of Lamartine, much of whose style and manner may be found in him. An amiable appreciation of natural beauty, and a tendency to facile pathos, derived from the contemplation of natural objects, distinguish him from his predecessors.

Light verse. Piron.

Désaugiers.

The vigorous, if not always edifying, work of the song-writers and authors of vers de société during this century remains to be noticed. The example of La Fontaine's tales was followed by many writers of more talent than scruple, but their literary value is not sufficient to entitle them to a place here. No history of French literature, however, would be complete without a notice of Piron, the greatest epigrammatist of France, and one of her keenest and brightest wits. Piron's temper was an idle one, and he did little solid work in literature, except his epigrams and one comedy, La Métromanie. He wrote many vaudevilles and operettas, and no one, with the possible exception of Catullus, has ever excelled him in the art of packing in a few light and graceful lines the greatest possible quantity of malicious wit. Panard, also a vaudevillist, is remarkable for the number and excellence of his drinking songs, and the variety and melody of their rhythm. Collé, author of amusing but spiteful memoirs, and, like Piron and Panard, a writer of comic operettas, excelled rather in the political chanson. Gentil Bernard, the Cardinal de Bernis, the Abbé Boufflers, and Dorat, were all writers of vers de société, the last being much the best. Their style of writing was frivolous and conventional in the extreme, but long practice and the vogue which it enjoyed in French society had brought it to something like the condition of a fine art. Dorat was surnamed by a contemporary the 'glowworm of Parnassus.' The expression was not an unhappy one, and may be fairly applied to the other authors who have been mentioned in his company. He himself was a rather voluminous author in different styles. The literary baggage of the others is not heavy. Vadé, a writer of light and trifling verse, who died comparatively young, devoted himself to composing poems in the 'poissard' dialect of Paris, which are among the best of such things. At the close of the century, and deserving more particular notice, appeared Désaugiers, the best light song-writer of France, with the single exception of Béranger, and preferred to him by some critics. Désaugiers escaped the revolution by good fortune, had a short but rather adventurous career of foreign travel, and then settled down to vaudeville-writing, song-making, and jovial living in Paris. He was a great frequenter of the Caveau, a kind of irregular club of men of letters which had been instituted by Piron and his friends, and which long continued to be a literary and social rendezvous. Désaugiers was the last of the older class of Chansonniers, who relied chiefly on love and wine for their subjects, and who, if they touched on politics at all, touched on them merely from the personal and satirical point of view, with occasional indulgence in cheap patriotism. His songs have great sweetness and ease, but they contain nothing that can compare with Béranger in his more serious and pathetic mood286.

This is a sketch, necessarily and designedly rapid, of the poetical history of the eighteenth century in France. The matter thus rapidly treated is of no small interest to professed students of literature; it abounds in curious social indications; it gives frequent instances of the extremest ingenuity applied to somewhat unworthy use. But in the history of the literature as a whole, and to those who have to regard it not as a collection of curiosities, but as a fruitful field of great and noble work, it cannot but be of subordinate interest, and as such requires but cursory treatment here287.

CHAPTER II

DRAMATISTS

Divisions of Drama.

La Motte.

At the beginning, and indeed during the whole course, of the eighteenth century, the theatre continued to enjoy all the vogue which the extraordinary brilliancy of the authors of the preceding age had conferred on it. There were three tolerably distinct kinds of dramatic work – tragedy, comedy, and opera – the latter either artificial or comic, and subdividing itself into a great many classes, from the dignified opera of the Comédie Française and the Comédie Italienne, down to the vaudevilles and operettas of the so-called 'fair' theatre, Théâtre de la Foire. Towards the middle of the century there grew up a fourth class, to which the not very appropriate and still less definite name of drame is applied. This was subdivided, also somewhat arbitrarily, into tragédie bourgeoise and comédie larmoyante. Thus the dramatic author had considerable liberty of choice except in tragedy proper, where the model of Racine was enforced on him with pitiless rigour. La Motte, who was, as has been said, a brilliant writer of prose, endeavoured to break these bonds, first, by decrying the alleged superiority of the ancients; secondly, by attacking the theory of the unities; and, lastly, by boldly denying the necessity of verse in tragedy, and still more the necessity of rhyme. He was, of course, answered, and the only one of the answers which has much interest for posterity is that which Voltaire prefixed to the second edition of Œdipe. This is, as always with its author, lively and ingenious, but ill-informed, destitute of true critical principles, and entirely inconclusive. La Motte himself wrote a tragedy, Inès de Castro, in which he did not venture to carry out his own principles, and which had some success. But the justice of his strictures was best shown by the increasing feebleness of French tragedy throughout the century. Were it not for the prodigious genius of Voltaire, not a single tragedy of the age would now have much chance of being read, still less of being performed; and were it not for that genius, and the unequal but still remarkable talent of Crébillon the elder, not a single tragedy of the age would be worth reading for any motive except curiosity, simple or studious.

Crébillon the Elder.

Crébillon was born in 1674, and lived to the age of eighty-nine. His family name was Jolyot, and the most remarkable thing about his private history is, that, being clerk to a lawyer, he was enthusiastically encouraged by his master in his poetical attempts. His first acted tragedy, Idoménée, appeared in 1703; his last, 'The Triumvirate,' more than fifty years later. In the interval he was irregularly busy, and the duel of tragedies, which in his old age his partisans got up between him and Voltaire, was not entirely in favour of the more famous and gifted writer. Crébillon's best works were Atrée, 1707, and Rhadamiste et Zénobie, 1711, the latter being his masterpiece. He had in the eyes of the minute critics of his time some technical defects of style and construction. But, despite the restraints of the French stage, he succeeded in being truly tragical and truly natural; and not a few of his verses have a grandeur which has been said to be hardly discoverable elsewhere in French tragedy between Corneille and Hugo.

Voltaire and his followers.

Voltaire's own tragedies have been very differently judged by different persons. It has been said that they owed their popularity chiefly to the adroit manner in which, without going too far, the author made them opportunities for insinuating the popular opinions of the time. Yet Zaïre at least is still a successful and popular play on the stage; and it is admitted that Voltaire had both a most intimate acquaintance with the objects and methods of the playwright, and an extraordinary affection for the theatre. If to this be added his astonishing dexterity as a literary workman, his acuteness in discerning the taste of the public, and his complete mastery of the language, and if it be remembered that the classical French tragedy is almost wholly a tour de force, it will appear that it would have been very surprising if he had not succeeded in it. His tragedies, however, are by no means of equal merit. The best is, beyond all doubt, the already-mentioned Zaïre, 1732, in which Voltaire took just so much from the Othello of that Shakespeare whom he was never tired of decrying as would suffice to animate and support his own skilful workmanship. The earlier play, Œdipe, 1718, was astonishingly successful, and is still astonishingly clever. La Mort de César, another Shakespearian adaptation, is less happy. In Alzire, a play written in the time of the poet's greatest intimacy with Madame du Châtelet, and dedicated to her, his extraordinary talent once more appears, as also in Le Fanatisme, better known as Mahomet, 1742. The best, however, of his plays, next to Zaïre, is probably Mérope, 1743, which is a prodigy of ingenuity. The author has deliberately eschewed the means whereby both Corneille and Racine respectively alleviated the dryness and dulness of the Senecan model – the heroic virtues of the one, and the sighs and flames of the other. The play probably is the most perfect carrying out of the model pure and simple, and its inferiority is the inferiority of the kind, not of the individual. Indeed it may be questioned whether, on the mere technical merits, Voltaire is not superior to both Corneille and Racine, though he is of course very far inferior to them as a poet, and as a draughtsman of character. Voltaire wrote many other plays, earlier and later, of which Tancrède is the only one which requires special mention. Nor, except Crébillon, do the tragic contemporaries and successors of Voltaire require more than very short notice. Le Franc de Pompignan wrote a respectable Didon; Saurin, who was in some sort a follower of Voltaire, a more than respectable Spartacus. The subject had perhaps the chief part in the success of the Siège de Calais of Pierre Burette, who called himself De Belloy, and who followed it up by other patriotic tragedies or dramas. But he had the merit of attempting, though not with much success, some innovations on the meagreness of the established model. The tragedies of La Harpe are written throughout with the cold correctness (as correctness was then held) which characterised his work generally. Almost all the men of letters of this time wrote plays of this kind, but they are for the most part valueless. Ducis is remarkable for a serious, and to a certain extent successful, attempt to inoculate the French tragedy with Shakespearian force. Versions of Hamlet, of Macbeth, and other plays appeared from his hands, which were also busy during a long life with dramatic work of all sorts. These versions have naturally been regarded in England as mere travesties, but there seems no reason to doubt that they really operated favourably as schoolmasters to bring their audience somewhat nearer to dramatic truth. The classical tragedy was indeed expiring of simple old age, and most of the names of its practitioners, which emerge during the last quarter of the eighteenth and the first of the nineteenth century, are those of innovators in their measure and degree, whose innovations, however, were obliterated and made forgotten by the great romantic reform. Marie Joseph Chénier followed Voltaire's manner very closely (substituting for Voltaire's bait of insinuated free-thinking that of republicanism more or less violently expressed) in Charles IX., Cyrus, Caius Gracchus, Henry VIII., Tibère, the last a work of some merit. Legouvé dramatised Gessner's Death of Abel on the principles of Boileau. Nepomucène Lemercier, the strange failure of a genius who has been already noticed in the last chapter, produced much more remarkable work. His Agamemnon, his Frédégonde et Brunehault and some others display his merits, and show that he was striving after something better. But, like most transitional work, they are unsatisfactory as a whole. The Hector of Luce de Lancival, the Templiers of Raynouard, and many other pieces, were once popular, but are now utterly forgotten.

Lesage.

The list of comic writers, along with whom, for convenience' sake, those of the authors of opera and drame may be included, is far longer and more important. It includes two men, Lesage and Beaumarchais, of European reputation, half-a-dozen others, Destouches, Marivaux, Piron, Gresset, Sedaine, who have produced work of remarkable character and merit, and a crowd of clever playwrights who amused their own times, and would amuse ours, if it were not that all comedy, save the very highest, is of its nature ephemeral. The list is worthily opened by Lesage, who, during the greater part of his life, earned by vaudevilles and operettas, composed either alone or in co-operation for the Théâtre de la Foire, the bread which his incomparable novels would hardly have sufficed to procure him. This lighter dramatic work is, it may be observed, among the chief products of the century, and it has continued up to the present day to form one of the staple elements in the journey-work of French literature. Little of it has permanent qualities, yet the remarkable talents of many of the men who composed it make it, ephemeral as it is, interesting historically and even intrinsically. It derived partly from the indigenous farce, partly from the Italian comedy of stock personages, and partly from the merry-andrew performances already mentioned. The theatres at which it was performed were the object of much jealousy from the Comédie Française, and restrictions of the most annoying kind were placed on it. Once an edict forbade more than a single actor to appear – a condition surmounted by the ingenuity of Piron. Sometimes it was confined to dumb show, illustrated by songs on placards which the audience chanted. Often the audience joined in the chorus, and it may be said generally that singing was always included. Besides this rapid and perishable kind of work Lesage has left two pieces in the true style of Molière. The more extravagant and farcical side of the master's genius is represented by Crispin Rival de son Maître, 1707, a lively piece, the subject of which is indicated by its title, and which carries off the extreme and probably intentional improbability of its plot by its brisk and rapid action, its vivid pictures of character, and the shower of wit which the dialogue everywhere pours out. Turcaret, 1709, is a regular comedy of the highest merit. It has been found fault with by some French critics, enamoured of the ruling passion and central situation theory; but this is really a testimony to its merit. Turcaret is in the strictest sense a criticism of life at the time, and the author shows the true prodigality of genius in filling his canvas. It is often described as a satire on the corruption and vices of the financiers, who were the curse of France at the time; and this it is in part. But there are combined with this satire of the loose morals of the nobility, the follies of provincial coteries, the meanness of the trading classes; while each character, instead of being an abstraction, is as sharp and individual as Gil Blas himself. Like Lesage, Piron worked much for the theatre; indeed he made his début, as has been said, by venturing on a task which even Lesage had declined, – the writing of a comic opera with a single actor only. Like Lesage, too, he has left one comedy of durable reputation, La Métromanie, which, if it falls short of Turcaret in holding up the mirror to nature, equals it in wit, and has for a French audience the attraction of being written in very good verse, while Turcaret is in prose. With perhaps less genius than Piron, and certainly with less than Lesage, Destouches devoted himself to a higher class of work on the whole, and has left more pieces that are remembered. Le Philosophe Marié, 1727, and Le Glorieux, 1732, are among the classics of French comedy. Le Dissipateur, Le Tambour Nocturne, L'Obstacle Imprévu have also much merit; and if La Fausse Agnès has something of the farcical in it, it is farce of the right kind. Destouches wrote seventeen comedies; and, if bulk and general merit of work are taken together, he deserves the first place among the comic dramatists of the century in France.