A Short History of French Literature

The Encyclopædia.

Montesquieu and Voltaire were, as has been said, precursors rather than members of the philosophe group proper, which is identified with the Encyclopædia, and to this group it is now time to come. The history of this famous book is rather curious. The English Cyclopædia of Ephraim Chambers had appeared in 1727. About fifteen years after its publication a translation of it was offered to and accepted by the French bookseller, Le Breton. But Le Breton was not satisfied with a bare translation, and wished the book to be worked up into something more extensive. He applied to different men of letters, and finally to Diderot, who, enlisting the Chancellor d'Aguesseau in the plan, obtaining privilege for the enlarged work, and mustering by degrees a staff of contributors which included almost every man of letters of any repute in France, succeeded in carrying it out. The task was anything but a sinecure. It occupied nearly twenty years of Diderot's life; it was repeatedly threatened and sometimes actually prohibited; and D'Alembert (Diderot's principal coadjutor, and in fact co-editor) actually retired from it in disgust at the obstacles thrown in their way. The book so produced was by no means a mere pamphlet or controversial work, though many of the articles were made polemical by those to whom they were entrusted. The principal of its contributors however – Voltaire himself was one – became gradually recognised as representing the criticism of existing institutions, many of which, it must be confessed, were so bad at the time that simple examination of them was in itself the severest censure. It becomes necessary, therefore, to mention the names and works of the most remarkable of this group who have not found or will not find a place elsewhere.

Diderot.

Denis Diderot was born at Langres, on the 15th October, 1713. He was brilliantly successful at school, but on being required to choose a profession rejected both church and law. It appears, however, that he studied medicine. His father, a man of affectionate temper but strong will, refused to support him unless he chose a regular mode of life, and Diderot at once set up for himself and attempted literature. Not much is authentically known of his life till, in 1743, he married; but he seems to have lived partly by taking pupils, partly by miscellaneous literary hack-work. After his marriage his household expenses (and others) quickened his literary activity, and before long he received, in the editorship of the Encyclopædia, a charge which, though ridiculously ill paid and very laborious, practically secured him from want for many years, while it gave him a very important position. He made many friends, and was especially intimate with the Baron d'Holbach, a rich and hospitable man, and a great adept in chemistry and atheism. Before this Diderot had had some troubles, being even imprisoned at Vincennes for his Essai sur les Aveugles, 1749. Besides his Encyclopædia work Diderot was lavish in contributing, often without either remuneration or acknowledgment of any kind, to the work of other men, and especially to the correspondence by which his friend Grimm kept the sovereigns of Germany and Russia informed of the course of things in Paris. The most remarkable of these contributions – criticisms of literature and art – have been noticed elsewhere, as have Diderot's historical and fictitious productions. As he grew old his necessities were met by a handsome act of Catherine of Russia, who bought his library, left him the use of it, and gave him a pension nominally as payment for his trouble as caretaker. He made, in 1773, a journey to St. Petersburg to pay his thanks, and on his return stayed for some time in Holland. He died in Paris in 1784. Diderot's miscellaneous works are, like Voltaire's, penetrated by the philosophe spirit, but it is less prominent, owing to his greater acquaintance with the individual matters which he handled. His contributions to definite philosophical literature are not unimportant. He began by an 'Essay on Merit and Virtue,' 1745, imitated from Shaftesbury, and by some more original Pensées Philosophiques. These pieces were followed by La Promenade du Sceptique, written somewhat in the fashion of Berkeley's Alciphron, and by some minor treatises, the most important of which are the Lettres sur les Sourds et Muets, and by the already mentioned Lettre sur les Aveugles, which led to his imprisonment, with some 'Thoughts on the Interpretation of Nature.' A singular and characteristic book containing not a few acute but fantastic ideas is Le Rêve de D'Alembert, which, like an elaborate criticism on Helvétius' De l'Homme, was not printed during Diderot's life. The Essai sur les Règnes de Claude et de Néron was one of the latest of Diderot's works, and is a kind of historico-philosophical disquisition. The last piece of any importance which is included in the philosophical works of Diderot is an extensive scheme for a Russian university.

The characteristics of Diderot's philosophical works are the same as the characteristics of those other works of his which have been noticed, and his general position as a writer may well be considered here. There has seldom been an author who was more fertile in ideas. It is impossible to name a subject which Diderot has not treated, and hardly possible to name one on which he has not said striking and memorable things. The peculiarity of his mind was, that it could adjust itself, with hardly any effort, to any subject presented to it, grasp that subject and express thoughts on it in a novel and effective manner. He had moreover, what some other men of his century, notably Voltaire, lacked, a vast supply of positive information on the subjects with which he dealt, and an entire independence of conventional points of view in dealing with them. This independence was in some respects pushed to an unfortunate length, exposing him (whether deservedly or not, is an exceedingly difficult point to resolve) to the charge of atheism, and (beyond all doubts deservedly) to the charge of wilful disregard of the accepted decencies of language. Another and very serious fault, arising partly from temperament and partly from circumstances, was the want of needful pains and deliberation which characterises most of Diderot's work. That work is extremely voluminous, and even as it is, we have not anything like the whole of it in a collected form. Indeed, by far the larger part was never given to the world by the author himself in any deliberate or finished shape, and much of what he did publish was the result of mere improvisation. The consequence is, that Diderot is accused, not without truth, of having written good passages, but no good book, and that a full appreciation of his genius is only to be obtained by a most laborious process of wading through hundreds and thousands of pages of very inferior work. The result of that process, however, is never likely to be doubtful in the case of competent examiners. It is the conviction that Diderot ranks in point of originality and versatility of thought among the most fertile thinkers of France, and in point of felicity and idiosyncrasy of expression, among the most remarkable of her writers.

D'Alembert.

His coadjutor during the earlier part of his great work was a man curiously different from himself. Diderot was a rapid and careless writer, devoted to general society and conversation, interested in everything that was brought to his notice, passionate, unselfish, frequently extravagant. Jean le Rond d'Alembert (who was really an illegitimate son of Madame de Tencin by an uncertain father) was an extraordinarily careful writer, a man of retired habits, reserved, self-centred and phlegmatic. He was born in 1717, was exposed on the steps of a church, but was brought up carefully by a foster-mother of the lower classes, to whom he was consigned by the authorities, and had a not insufficient annuity settled upon him by his supposed father. He was educated at the Collège Mazarin, and early showed great aptitude for mathematics, in which equally with literature he distinguished himself in after years. He was elected a member of the Academy of Sciences as early as at the age of four-and-twenty. After he had joined Diderot, he wrote a preliminary discourse for the Encyclopædia – a famous and admirable sketch of the sciences – besides many articles. Of these, one on Geneva brought the book into more trouble than almost any other contribution, though D'Alembert was equally moderate as a thinker and as a writer. D'Alembert, as has been said, retired from the work after this storm, being above all things solicitous of peace and quietness. His refusals of the offers of Frederick II. in 1752 to go to Berlin as President of the Academy, and of Catherine II. to undertake, at what was then an enormous salary, the education of the Grand Duke Paul, have been variously taken as evidence of his disinterestedness, and of his shrewd dislike to possibly false positions, and the chance of such experiences as those of Voltaire. In his later life he and Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, as has been mentioned, kept house together. He died shortly before Diderot, in 1783. Perhaps his best literary works are his already mentioned Academic Éloges, or obituaries on important men of letters and science. D'Alembert contributed to the movement exactness of thought and precision of style, but his influence was more purely intellectual than that of any other member of the philosophe group.

Rousseau.

The connection of Rousseau with the Encyclopædia itself was brief and not important. Yet it is here that his personal and general literary character and achievements may be most conveniently treated. Jean Jacques Rousseau was born at Geneva, on the 28th of June, 1712, of a family which had emigrated from France during the religious troubles. His father was a watchmaker, his mother died when he was very young. His education was not exactly neglected, but he went to no regular school, which, considering his peculiarities, was perhaps a misfortune. After being introduced to the law and to engraving, in both cases with ill success, he ran away and practically continued a vagabond to the end of his life. He served as a footman, was an inmate of a kind of proselytising almshouse at Turin, and went through many odd adventures, for which there is the dubious authority of his strange Confessions. When he was just of age, he was taken in by Madame de Warens, a Savoyard lady of birth and position, who had before been kind to him. With her he lived for some time, chiefly at Les Charmettes, near Chambéry. But being superseded in her good graces, he went to Lyons, where he lived by teaching. Thence he went to Paris, having little to depend on but an imperfect knowledge of music. In 1741 he was attached to the French Embassy at Venice under M. de Montaigu, but (as he did all through his life) he quarrelled in some way with his patron, and returned to Paris. Here he became intimate with Diderot, Grimm, and all the philosophe circle, especially with Madame d'Epinay. She established him in a cottage called the Hermitage with his companion Thérèse le Vasseur, whose acquaintance he had made in Paris, and whom he afterwards married. The extraordinary quarrel which took place between Rousseau and Diderot has been endlessly written about. It need only be said that Rousseau showed his usual temper and judgment, that Diderot was to all appearance quite guiltless, and that the chief fault lay elsewhere, probably with Grimm. For a time the Duke of Luxembourg protected him, then he was obliged, or thought himself obliged, to go into exile. Marshal Keith, Governor of Neufchatel for the King of Prussia, received and protected him, with the inevitable result that Rousseau considered it impossible to continue in this as in every other refuge. David Hume was his next good angel, and carried him to England in 1766. But the same drama repeated itself, as it did subsequently with the Prince de Conti and with Madame d'Enghien. Rousseau's last protector was M. de Girardin, who gave him, after he had lived in Paris in comparative quiet for several years, a home at Ermenonville in 1778. He did not outlive the year, dying in a somewhat mysterious fashion, which has never been fully explained, on the 2nd of July.

Rousseau was a man of middle age before he produced any literary work of importance. He had in his youth been given to music, and indeed throughout his life the slender profits of music copying were almost his only independent source of income. His knowledge of the subject was far from scientific, but he produced an operetta which was not unsuccessful, and, but for his singular temperament, he might have followed up the success. His first literary work of importance was a prose essay for the Dijon Academy on the subject of the effects of civilisation on society. Either of his own motion, or at the suggestion of Diderot, Rousseau took the apparently paradoxical line of arguing that all improvements on the savage life had been curses rather than blessings, and he gained the prize. In 1755 his Discours sur l'Origine de l'Inégalité appeared at Amsterdam; in 1760 his famous novel Julie, and in 1764 Emile, both of which have been spoken of already. Between the two appeared the still more famous and influential Contrat Social. Of the other works of Rousseau published during his lifetime, the most famous, perhaps, was his letter to D'Alembert on the subject of the introduction of theatrical performances into Geneva, a characteristic paradox which made a bitter enemy of the most powerful of French men of letters. Besides these, the Rêveries d'un Promeneur Solitaire, the Lettres de la Montagne, and above all, the unique Confessions, have to be reckoned. The last, like several of Rousseau's other works, did not appear till after his death.

Of all the writers mentioned in this chapter the influence of Rousseau on literature and on life was probably the largest. He was the direct inspirer of the men who made the French Revolution, and the theories of his Contrat Social were closer at the root of Jacobin politics than any other. His fervid declamation about equality and brotherhood, and his sentimental republicanism, were seed as well suited to the soil in which they were sown as Montesquieu's reasoned constitutionalism was unsuited to it. Rousseau, indeed, if the proof of the excellence of preaching is in the practice of the hearers, was the greatest preacher of the century. He denounced the practice of putting infants out to nurse, and mothers began to suckle their own children; he recommended instruction in useful arts, and many an émigré noble had to thank Rousseau for being able to earn his bread in exile; he denounced speculative atheism, urging the undogmatic but emotional creed of his Vicaire Savoyard, and the first wave of the religious reaction was set going to culminate in the Catholic movement of Chateaubriand and Lamennais. But in literature itself his influence was quite as powerful. He was not, indeed, the founder of the school of analysis of feeling in the novel, but he was the populariser of it. He was almost the founder of sentimentalism in general literature, and he was absolutely the first to make word-painting of nature an almost indispensable element of all imaginative and fictitious writing both in prose and poetry. Some of his characteristics were taken up in quick succession by Goethe in Germany, by Bernardin de St. Pierre and Chateaubriand in France. Others were for the time less eagerly imitated, and though Madame de Stael and her lover Benjamin Constant did something to spread them, it was reserved for the Romantic movement to develop them fully. It was singular, no doubt, and this is not the place to undertake the explanation of the singularity, that Rousseau, who detested most of the conclusions, and almost all the methods of the Encyclopædists, should be counted in with them, and should have undoubtedly helped in the first place to accomplish their result. But such is the case. His peculiar literary characteristics are perhaps better exhibited in the Confessions and in the miscellaneous works, than in either of the novels. The Contrat Social is a very remarkable piece of pseudo-argument. It is felt from the first that the whole assumption on which it reposes is historically false and philosophically absurd. Yet there is an appearance of speciousness in the arguments, an adroit mixture of logic and rhetoric, of order and method, which is exceedingly seductive. The Confession du Vicaire Savoyard, with many passages allied to it in the smaller works, has, despite the staleness of the language (which was hackneyed by a thousand empty talkers during the Revolution), not a little dignity and persuasive force. But it is in the Confessions that the literary power of the author appears at its fullest. Never, perhaps, was a more miserable story of human weakness revealed, and the peculiar thing is that Rousseau does not limit his exhibitions of himself to exhibitions of engaging frailty. The acts which he admits are in many cases indescribably base, mean, and disgusting. The course of conduct which he portrays is at its best that of a man entirely destitute of governing will, petulant, often positively ungrateful, always playing into the hands of the enemies whom his hallucinations supposed to exist, and frustrating the efforts of the friends whom he allows himself, if only for a time, to have possessed. Yet the narrative and dramatic skill with which all this is presented is so great, that there is hardly room for a sense of repulsion which is merged in interest, not necessarily sympathetic interest, but still interest. Of the feeling for natural beauty, which is everywhere present in these remarkable works, it is enough to say that in French prose literature, it may almost be said in the prose literature of Europe, it was entirely original. Part of Rousseau's devotion to nature arose no doubt from his moody and retiring temperament, which led him to rejoice in anything rather than the society of his fellow men. But this would not of itself have given him the literary skill with which he expresses these feelings. It is not so much in set descriptions of particular scenes as in slight occasional thoughts, embodying the emotions experienced at the sight of a flower, a lake-surface, a mountain side, a forest glade, that this mastery is shown. Yet of the more elaborate passages of this kind in other writers few can surpass the best things of the Nouvelle Héloïse, the Confessions, and the Rêveries. There is nothing novel to readers of the present day in such things, though they are seldom done so happily. But to the readers of Rousseau's day they were absolutely novel. It is in this that the main literary importance of Rousseau consists, though it must not be forgotten that he is in many ways a master of French prose. His contemporaries made use of his Genevan origin to find fault with his style; but with a few insignificant exceptions the criticism has no foundation. It has been very frequently renewed, and sometimes with little better reason, in the case of Swiss authors.

Round these chiefs of the Encyclopædic movement were grouped many lesser men, some of whom will be most conveniently noticed here. Marmontel, Morellet, and Saint-Lambert, whose chief importance lay in other directions, were contributors. The Chevalier de Jaucourt, a man of no original power, but a hack-writer of extraordinary aptitude, took considerable part in it. There were others, however, who, partly within and partly without the range of the Encyclopædia, had no small share in the promotion of what has been called the philosophe movement. Some of these have found their place under the head of Essayists. There is, however, one remarkable division, which must be treated here – the division of economists – before we pass to the philosophers properly so called, who either continued the metaphysics of Locke in a directly materialist sense, or who, restraining themselves to sensationalism, made the most of the English philosopher in that direction.

Political Economists. Vauban, Quesnay, etc.

The science of 'Political Arithmetic,' as it was first called in England, had a somewhat earlier birth in France than in England itself. It is remarkable that the complete establishment of the royal authority under Louis XIV. preceded but by a very few years the examination of the economic condition of the kingdom by unsparing examiners. The two chief of these, both of whom fell into disgrace for their doings, were the great engineer Vauban, and the great theologian Fénelon. The latter was attracted to the subject chiefly by compassion for the sufferings of the people, and expressed his opinion in a manner more rhetorical than scientific. Vauban's course was naturally different. In the later years of his life he set himself to the collection of statistical facts as to the economic condition of France, and the result was the two books called Oisivetés de M. de Vauban and La Dîme Royale, 1707. The former of these contained the facts, the latter the deduction from them, which was, to put it briefly, that the existing system of privilege, exemption, and irregular taxation was a loss to the Crown, and a torment to the people. Vauban received the reward of his labours, attention to which would probably have prevented the French Revolution, in the shape of the royal displeasure, and nothing came immediately of his investigations. In the next century, however, a regular sect of political economists arose. They had, indeed, been preceded by an eccentric man of letters, the Abbé de Saint-Pierre, who occupied his life in propounding Utopian schemes of universal peace and general prosperity. But the first and greatest of the economists properly so called was Quesnay. The extreme misery of the common people attracted his attention, and set him upon calculating the causes and remedies of periodical failings. He was himself a frequent contributor to the Encyclopædia. Many others of the philosophe set occupied themselves with these and similar subjects, notably the Abbés Morellet and Galiani. The former was a man of a certain vigour (Voltaire called him 'L'Abbé Mord-Les'), the latter has been noticed already. His Dialogue sur le Commerce des Blés acquired for him a great reputation.

Turgot.

Very many writers, among them the father of the great Mirabeau (in his curious and able, though unequal and ill-proportioned Ami des Hommes), attacked economical subjects at this time. But Turgot, though not remarkable for the form of his writings, was the most original and influential writer of the liberal school in this department. He was a Norman by birth, and of a good legal family. He was born in 1727, and, being destined for the Church, was educated at the Sorbonne. Turgot, however, shared to the full the philosophe ideas of the time as to theological orthodoxy, and did not share the usual philosophe ideas as to concealment of his principles for comfort's sake. He refused to take orders, turning his attention to the law and the Civil Service instead of the Church. His family had considerable influence, and at the age of twenty-four he was appointed intendant of Limoges, a post which gave him practical control of the government of a large, though barren and neglected, province. His achievements in the way of administrative reform here were remarkable, and, had they been generally imitated, might have brought about a very different state of things in France. After the death of Louis XV., he was recommended by Maurepas to a far more important office, the controllership of finance. Here, too, he did great things; but his attack on the privileged orders was ill-seconded, and, after holding his post for about two years, he had to resign, partly, it is true, owing to a certain unaccommodating rigidity of demeanour, which was one of his least amiable characteristics. He died in 1781. Turgot's literary work is not extensive, and it is not distinguished by its style. It consists of certain discourses at the Sorbonne, of memoirs on various political occasions, of some letters on usury, of articles in the Encyclopædia, of which the most noteworthy is one on endowments, etc. All are remarkable as containing the germs of what may be accepted as the modern liberal doctrines on the various points of which they treat, while the second Sorbonne discourse is entitled to the credit of first clearly announcing the principle of the philosophy of history, the doctrine, that is to say, that human progress follows regular laws of development, certain sets of causes invariably tending to bring about certain sets of results.