A History of French Literature

With PIERRE CARLET DE CHAMBLAIN DE MARIVAUX (1688-1763) the novel ceases to be primarily a study of manners or a romance of adventures; it becomes an analysis of passions to which manners and adventures are subordinate. As a journalist he may be said to have proceeded from Addison; by his novels he prepared the way for Richardson and for Rousseau. His early travesties of Homer and of Fénelon's Télémaque seem to indicate a tendency towards realism, but Marivaux's realism took the form not so much of observation of society in its breadth and variety as of psychological analysis. If he did not know the broad highway of the heart, he traversed many of its secret paths. His was a feminine spirit, delicate, fragile, curious, unconcerned about general ideas; and yet, while untiring in his anatomy of the passions, he was not truly passionate; his heart may be said to have been in his head.

In the opening of the eighteenth century there was a revival of preciosity, which Molière had never really killed, and in the salon of Madame de Lambert, Marivaux may have learned something of his metaphysics of love and something of his subtleties or affectations of style. He anticipates the sensibility of the later part of the century; but sensibility with Marivaux is not profound, and it is relieved by intellectual vivacity. His conception of love has in it not a little of mere gallantry. Like later eighteenth-century writers, he at once exalts "virtue," and indulges his fancy in a licence which does not tend towards good morals or manners. His Vie de Marianne (1731-41), which occupied him during many years, is a picture of social life, and a study, sometimes infinitely subtle, of the emotions of his heroine; her genius for coquetry is finely allied to her maiden pride; the hypocrite, M. de Climal—old angel fallen—is a new variety of the family of Tartufe. Le Paysan Parvenu (1735-36), which tells of the successes of one whom women favour, is on a lower level of art and of morals. Both novels were left unfinished; and while both attract, they also repel, and finally weary the reader.26 Their influence was considerable in converting the romance of adventures into the romance of emotional incident and analysis.

The work of Marivaux for the stage is more important than his work in prose fiction. His comedy has been described as the tragedy of Racine transposed, with love leading to marriage, not to death. Love is his central theme—sometimes in conflict with self-love—and women are his protagonists. He discovers passion in its germ, and traces it through its shy developments. His plays are little romances handled in dramatic fashion; each records some delicate adventure of the heart. He wrote much for the Comédie-Italienne, where he did not suffer from the tyranny of rules and models, and where his graceful fancy had free play. Of his large repertoire, the most admirable pieces are Le Jeu de l'Amour et du Hasard (1730) and Les Fausses Confidences (1732). In the former the heroine and her chambermaid exchange costumes; the hero and his valet make a like exchange; yet love is not misled, and heroine and hero find each other through their disguises. In Les Fausses Confidences the young widow Araminte is won to a second love in spite of her resolve, and becomes the happy victim of her own tender heart and of the devices of her assailants. The "marivaudage" of Marivaux is sometimes a refined and novel mode of expressing delicate shades and half-shades of feeling; sometimes an over-refined or over-subtle attempt to express ingenuities of sentiment, and the result is then frigid, pretentious, or pedantic. No one excelled him in the art, described by Voltaire, of weighing flies' eggs in gossamer scales.

The Abbé A.-F. PRÉVOST D'EXILES (1697-1763) is remembered by a single tale of rare power and beauty, Manon Lescaut, but his work in literature was voluminous and varied. Having deserted his Benedictine monastery in 1728, he led for a time an irregular and wandering life in England and Holland; then returning to Paris, he gained a living by swift and ceaseless production for the booksellers. In his journal, Le Pour et le Contre, he did much to inform his countrymen respecting English literature, and among his translations are those of Richardson's Pamela, Sir Charles Grandison, and Clarissa Harlowe. Many of his novels are melodramatic narratives of romantic adventure, having a certain kinship to our later romances of Anne Radcliffe and Matthew Gregory Lewis, in which horror and pity, blood and tears abound. Sometimes, however, when he writes of passion, we feel that he is engaged in no sport of the imagination, but transcribing the impulsive speech of his own tumultuous heart. The Mémoires d'un Homme de Qualité, Cléveland, Le Doyen de Killerine are tragic narratives, in which love is the presiding power.

Manon Lescaut, which appeared in 1731, as an episode of the first of these, is a tale of fatal and irresistible passion. The heroine is divided in heart between her mundane tastes for luxury and her love for the Chevalier des Grieux. He, knowing her inconstancy and infirmity, yet cannot escape from the tyranny of the spell which has subdued him; his whole life is absorbed and lost in his devotion to Manon, and he is with her in the American wilds at the moment of her piteous death. The admirable literary style of Manon Lescaut is unfelt and disappears, so directly does it bring us into contact with the motions of a human heart.

In the second half of the eighteenth century, philosophy, on the one hand, invaded the novel and the short tale; on the other hand it was invaded by a flood of sentiment. An irritated and irritating sensuality could accommodate itself either to sentiment or to philosophy. Voltaire's tales are, in narrative form, criticisms of belief or opinion which scintillate with ironic wit. His disciple, Marmontel, would "render virtue amiable" in his Contes Moraux (1761), and cure the ravage of passion with a canary's song. His more ambitious Bélisaire seems to a modern reader a masterpiece in the genre ennuyeux. His Incas is exotic without colour or credibility. Florian, with little skill, imitated the Incas and Télémaque, or was feebly idyllic and conventionally pastoral as a follower of the Swiss Gessner. Restif de la Bretonne could be gross, corrupt, declamatory, sentimental, humanitarian in turns or all together. Three names are eminent—that of Diderot, who flung his good and evil powers, mingling and fermenting, into his novels as into all else; that of Rousseau, who interpreted passion, preached its restraints, depicted the charms of the domestic interior, and presented the glories of external nature in La Nouvelle Héloise; that of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, who reaches a hand to Rousseau on the one side, and on the other to Chateaubriand.

CHAPTER II

MONTESQUIEU—VAUVENARGUES—VOLTAIRE

I

The author of De l'Esprit des Lois was as important in the history of European speculation as in that of French literature; but inevitable changes of circumstances and ideas have caused his influence to wane. His life was one in which the great events were thoughts. Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de MONTESQUIEU, was born in 1689 at La Brède, near Bordeaux. After his years of education by the Oratorians, which left him with something of scepticism in his intellect, and something of stoicism in his character, he pursued legal studies, and in 1716 became President of the Parliament of Bordeaux. The scientific researches of his day attracted him; investigating anatomy, botany, natural philosophy, the history of the earth, he came to see man as a portion of nature, or at least as a creature whose life is largely determined by natural laws. With a temper of happy serenity, and an admirable balance of faculties, he was possessed by an eager intellectual curiosity. "I spend my life," he said, "in examining; everything interests, everything surprises me."

Nothing, however, interested him so much as the phenomena of human society; he had no aptitude for metaphysical speculations; his feeling for literature and art was defective; he honoured the antique world, but it was the Greek and Latin historians and the ideals of Roman virtue and patriotism which most deeply moved him. At the same time he was a man of his own generation, and while essentially serious, he explored the frivolous side of life, and yielded his imagination to the licence of the day.

With enough wit and enough wantonness to capture a multitude of readers, the Lettres Persanes (1721) contain a serious criticism of French society in the years of the Regency. It matters little that the idea of the book may have been suggested by the Siamese travellers of Dufresny's Amusements; the treatment is essentially original. Things Oriental were in fashion—Galland had translated the Arabian Nights (1704-1708)—and Montesquieu delighted in books of travel which told of the manners, customs, religions, governments of distant lands. His Persians, Usbek and Rica, one the more philosophical, the other the more satirical, visit Europe, inform their friends by letter of all the aspects of European and especially of French life, and receive tidings from Persia of affairs of the East, including the troubles and intrigues of the eunuchs and ladies of the harem. The spirit of the reaction against the despotism of Louis XIV. is expressed in Montesquieu's pages; the spirit also of religious free-thought, and the reaction against ecclesiastical tyranny. A sense of the dangers impending over society is present, and of the need of temperate reform. Brilliant, daring, ironical, licentious as the Persian Letters are, the prevailing tone is that of judicious moderation; and already something can be discerned of the large views and wise liberality of the Esprit des Lois. The book is valuable to us still as a document in the social history of the eighteenth century.

In Paris, Montesquieu formed many distinguished acquaintances, among others that of Mlle. de Clermont, sister of the Duke de Bourbon. Perhaps it was in homage to her that he wrote his prose-poem, which pretends to be a translation from the Greek, Le Temple de Gnide (1725). Its feeling for antiquity is overlaid by the artificialities, long since faded, of his own day—"naught remains," writes M. Sorel, "but the faint and subtle perfume of a sachet long hidden in a rococo cabinet." Although his publications were anonymous, Montesquieu was elected a member of the Academy in 1728, and almost immediately after this he quitted France for a long course of travel throughout Europe, undertaken with the purpose of studying the manners, institutions, and governments of foreign lands. At Venice he gained the friendship of Lord Chesterfield, and they arrived together in England, where for nearly two years Montesquieu remained, frequently hearing the parliamentary debates, and studying the principles of English politics in the writings of Locke. His thoughts on government were deeply influenced by his admiration of the British constitution with its union of freedom and order attained by a balance of the various political powers of the State. On Montesquieu's return to La Brède he occupied himself with that great work which resumes the observations and meditations of twenty years, the Esprit des Lois. In the history of Rome, which impressed his imagination with its vast moral, social, and political significance, he found a signal example of the causes which lead a nation to greatness and the causes which contribute to its decline. The study made at this point of view detached itself from the more comprehensive work which he had undertaken, and in 1734 appeared his Considérations sur les Causes de la Grandeur et de la Décadence des Romains.

Bossuet had dealt nobly with Roman history, but in the spirit of a theologian expounding the course of Divine Providence in human affairs. Montesquieu studied the operation of natural causes. His knowledge, indeed, was incomplete, but it was the knowledge afforded by the scholarship of his own time. The love of liberty, the patriotic pride, the military discipline, the education in public spirit attained by discussion, the national fortitude under reverses, the support given to peoples against their rulers, the respect for the religion of conquered tribes and races, the practice of dealing at one time with only a single hostile power, are pointed out as contributing to the supremacy of Rome in the ancient world. Its decadence is explained as the gradual result of its vast overgrowth, its civil wars, the loss of patriotism among the soldiery engaged in remote provinces, the inroads of luxury, the proscription of citizens, the succession of unworthy rulers, the division of the Empire, the incursion of the barbarians; and in treating this portion of his subject Montesquieu may be said to be wholly original. A short Dialogue de Sylla et d'Eucrate may be viewed as a pendant to the Considérations, discussing a fragment of the subject in dramatic form. Montesquieu's desire to arrive at general truths sometimes led him to large conclusions resting on too slender a basis of fact; but the errors in applying his method detract only a little from the service which he rendered to thought in a treatment of history at least tending in the direction of philosophic truth.

The whole of his mind—almost the whole of his existence—is embodied in the Esprit des Lois (1748). It lacks the unity of a ruling idea; it is deficient in construction, in continuity, in cohesion; much that it contains has grown obsolete or is obsolescent; yet in the literature of eighteenth-century thought it takes, perhaps, the highest place; and it must always be precious as the self-revealment of a great intellect—swift yet patient, ardent yet temperate, liberal yet the reverse of revolutionary—an intellect that before all else loved the light. It lacks unity, because its author's mind was many-sided, and he would not suppress a portion of himself to secure a factitious unity. Montesquieu was a student of science, who believed in the potency of the laws of nature, and he saw that human society is the product of, or at least is largely modified by, natural law; he was also a believer in the power of human reason and human will, an admirer of Roman virtue, a citizen, a patriot, and a reformer. He would write the natural history of human laws, exhibit the invariable principles from which they proceed, and reduce the study of governments to a science; but at the same time he would exhibit how society acts upon itself; he would warn and he would exhort; he would help, if possible, to create intelligent and patriotic citizens. To these intentions we may add another—that of a criticism, touched with satire, of the contemporary political and social arrangements of France.

And yet again, Montesquieu was a legist, with some of the curiosity of an antiquary, not without a pride in his rank, interested in its origins, and desirous to trace the history of feudal laws and privileges. The Esprit des Lois is not a doctrinaire exposition of a theory, but the record of a varied life of thought, in which there are certain dominant tendencies, but no single absolute idea. The forms of government, according to Montesquieu, are three—republic (including both the oligarchical republic and the democratic), monarchy, despotism. Each of these structural arrangements requires a principle, a moral spring, to give it force and action: the popular republic lives by virtue of patriotism, public spirit, the love of equality; the aristocratic republic lives by the spirit of moderation among the members of the ruling class; monarchy lives by the stimulus of honour, the desire of superiority and distinction; despotism draws its vital force from fear; but each of these principles may perish through its corruption or excess. The laws of each country, its criminal and civil codes, its system of education, its sumptuary regulations, its treatment of the relation of the sexes, are intimately connected with the form of government, or rather with the principle which animates that form.

Laws, under the several forms of government, are next considered in reference to the power of the State for purposes of defence and of attack. The nature of political liberty is investigated, and the requisite separation of the legislative, judicial, and administrative powers is exhibited in the example set forth in the British constitution. But political freedom must include the liberty of the individual; the rights of the citizen must be respected and guaranteed; and, as part of the regulation of individual freedom, the levying and collection of taxes must be studied.

From this subject Montesquieu passes to his theory, once celebrated, of the influence of climate and the soil upon the various systems of legislation, and especially the influence of climate upon the slave system, the virtual servitude of woman, and the growth of political despotism. Over against the fatalism of climate and natural conditions he sets the duty of applying the reason to modify the influences of external nature by wise institutions. National character, and the manners and customs which are its direct expression, if they cannot be altered by laws, must be respected, and something even of direction or regulation may be attained. Laws in relation to commerce, to money, to population, to religion, are dealt with in successive books.

The duty of religious toleration is urged from the point of view of a statesman, while the discussions of theology are declined. Very noteworthy is the humble remonstrance to the inquisitors of Spain and Portugal ascribed to a Jew of eighteen, who is supposed to have perished in the last auto-da-fé. The facts of the civil order are not to be judged by the laws of the religious order, any more than the facts of the religious order are to be judged by civil laws. Here the great treatise might have closed, but Montesquieu adds what may be styled an historical appendix in his study of the origin and development of feudal laws. At a time when antiquity was little regarded, he was an ardent lover of antiquity; at a time when mediæval history was ignored, he was a student of the forgotten centuries.

Such in outline is the great work which in large measure modified the course of eighteenth-century thought. Many of its views have been superseded; its collections of facts are not critically dealt with; its ideas often succeed each other without logical sequence; but Montesquieu may be said to have created a method, if not a science; he brought the study of jurisprudence and politics, in the widest sense, into literature, laicising and popularising the whole subject; he directed history to the investigation of causes; he led men to feel the greatness of the social institution; and, while retiring from view behind his work, he could not but exhibit, for his own day and for ours, the spectacle of a great mind operating over a vast field in the interests of truth, the spectacle of a great nature that loved the light, hating despotism, but fearing revolution, sane, temperate, wisely benevolent. In years tyrannised over by abstract ideas, his work remained to plead for the concrete and the historical; among men devoted to the absolute in theory and the extreme in practice, it remained to justify the relative, to demand a consideration of circumstances and conditions, to teach men how large a field of reform lay within the bounds of moderation and good sense.

The Esprit des Lois was denounced by Jansenists and Jesuits; it was placed in the Index, but in less than two years twenty-two editions had appeared, and it was translated into many languages. The author justified it brilliantly in his Défense of 1750. His later writings are of small importance. With failing eyesight in his declining years, he could enjoy the society of friends and the illumination of his great fame. He died tranquilly (1755) at the age of sixty-six, in the spirit of a Christian Stoic.

II

The life of society was studied by Montesquieu; the inward life of the heart was studied by a young moralist, whose premature loss was lamented with tender passion by Voltaire.

Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de VAUVENARGUES, though neither a thinker nor a writer of the highest order, attaches us by the beauty of his character as seen through his half-finished work, more than any other author of the earlier part of the eighteenth century. He was born (1715) at Aix, in Provence, received a scanty education, served in the army during more than ten years, retired with broken health and found no other employment, lived on modest resources, enjoyed the acquaintance of the Marquis de Mirabeau and the friendship and high esteem of Voltaire, and died in 1747, at the early age of thirty-two. His knowledge of literature hardly extended beyond that of his French predecessors of the seventeenth century. The chief influences that reached him came from Pascal, Bossuet, and Fénelon. His learning was derived from action, from the observation of men, and from acquaintance with his own heart.

The writings of Vauvenargues are the fragmentary Introduction à la Connaissance de l'Esprit Humain, followed by Réflexions et Maximes (1746), and a few short pieces of posthumous publication. He is a moralist, who studies those elements of character which tend to action, and turns away from metaphysical speculations. His early faith in Christianity insensibly declined and disappeared, but his spirit remained religious; he believed in God and immortality, and he never became a militant philosopher. He thought generously of human nature, but without extravagant optimism. The reason, acting alone, he distrusted; he found the source of our highest convictions and our noblest practice in the emotions, in the heart, in the obscure depths of character and of nature. Here, indeed, is Vauvenargues' originality. In an age of ill living, he conceived a worthy ideal of conduct; in an age tending towards an exaggerated homage to reason, he honoured the passions: "Great thoughts come from the heart"; "We owe, perhaps, to the passions the greatest gains of the intellect"; "The passions have taught men reason."

Vauvenargues, with none of the violences of Rousseau's temperament, none of the excess of his sensibility, by virtue of his recognition of the potency of nature, of the heart, may be called a precursor of Rousseau. Into his literary criticism he carries the same tendencies: it is far from judicial criticism; its merit is that it is personal and touched with emotion. His total work seems but a fragment, yet his life had a certain completeness; he knew how to act, to think, to feel, and after great sufferings, borne with serenity, he knew how to die.

III

The movement of Voltaire's mind went with that of the general mind of France. During the first half of the century he was primarily a man of letters; from about 1750 onwards he was the aggressive philosopher, the social reformer, using letters as the vehicle of militant ideas.

Born in Paris in 1694, the son of a notary of good family, FRANÇOIS-MARIE AROUET, who assumed the name VOLTAIRE (probably an anagram formed from the letters of Arouet l.j., that is le jeune), was educated by the Jesuits, and became a precocious versifier of little pieces in the taste of the time. At an early age he was introduced to the company of the wits and fine gentlemen who formed the sceptical and licentious Society of the Temple. Old Arouet despaired of his son, who was eager for pleasure, and a reluctant student of the law. A short service in Holland, in the household of the French ambassador, produced no better result than a fruitless love-intrigue.

Again in Paris, where he ill endured the tedium of an attorney's office, Voltaire haunted the theatres and the salons, wrote light verse and indecorous tales, planned his tragedy OEdipe, and, inspired by old M. de Caumartin's enthusiasm for Henri IV., conceived the idea of his Henriade. Suspected of having written defamatory verses against the Regent, he was banished from the capital, and when readmitted was for eleven months, on the suspicion of more atrocious libels, a prisoner in the Bastille. Here he composed—according to his own declaration, in sleep—the second canto of the Henriade, and completed his OEdipe, which was presented with success before the close of 1718. The prisoner of the Bastille became the favourite of society, and repaid his aristocratic hosts by the brilliant sallies of his conversation.