Landmarks in French Literature

It is this world of shifting lights, of queer, elusive, delightful absurdities, that La Fontaine has made the scene of the greater number of his stories. The stories themselves are for the most part exceedingly slight; what gives them immortality is the way they are told. Under the guise of an ingenuous, old-world manner, La Fontaine makes use of an immense range of technical powers. He was an absolute master of the resources of metre; and his rhythms, far looser and more varied than those of his contemporaries, are marvellously expressive, while yet they never depart from a secret and controlling sense of form. His vocabulary is very rich—stocked chiefly with old-fashioned words, racy, colloquial, smacking of the soil, and put together with the light elliptical constructions of the common people. Nicknames he is particularly fond of: the cat is Raminagrobis, or Grippeminaud, or Rodilard, or Maître Mitis; the mice are 'la gent trotte-menu'; the stomach is Messer Gaster; Jupiter is Jupin; La Fontaine himself is Gros-Jean. The charming tales, one feels, might almost have been told by some old country crony by the fire, while the wind was whistling in the chimney and the winter night drew on. The smile, the gesture, the singular naïveté—one can watch it all. But only for a moment. One must be childish indeed (and, by an odd irony, this exquisitively sophisticated author falls into the hands of most of his readers when they are children) to believe, for more than a moment, that the ingenuousness of the Fables was anything but assumed. In fact, to do so would be to miss the real taste of the work. There is a kind of art, as every one knows, that conceals itself; but there is another—and this is less often recognized—that displays itself, that just shows, charmingly but unmistakably, how beautifully contrived it is. And La Fontaine's art is of the latter sort. He is like one of those accomplished cooks in whose dishes, though the actual secret of their making remains a mystery, one can trace the ingredients which have gone to the concoction of the delicious whole. As one swallows the rare morsel, one can just perceive how, behind the scenes, the oil, the vinegar, the olive, the sprinkling of salt, the drop of lemon were successively added, and, at the critical moment, the simmering delicacy served up, done to a turn.

It is indeed by an infinity of small touches that La Fontaine produces his effects. And his effects are very various. With equal ease, apparently, he can be playful, tender, serious, preposterous, eloquent, meditative, and absurd. But one quality is always present in his work; whatever tune he may be playing, there is never a note too much. Alike in his shortest six-lined anecdote and his most elaborate pieces, in which detail follows detail and complex scenes are developed, there is no trace of the superfluous; every word has its purpose in the general scheme. This quality appears most clearly, perhaps, in the adroit swiftness of his conclusions. When once the careful preliminary foundation of the story has been laid, the crisis comes quick and pointed—often in a single line. Thus we are given a minute description of the friendship of the cat and the sparrow; all sorts of details are insisted on; we are told how, when the sparrow teased the cat—

En sage et discrète personne,Maître chat excusait ces jeux.

Then the second sparrow is introduced and his quarrel with the first. The cat fires up—

Le moineau du voisin viendra manger le nôtre?Non, de par tous les chats!—Entrant lors au combat,Il croque l'étranger. Vraiment, dit maître chat,Les moineaux ont un gout exquis et délicat!

And now in one line the story ends—

Cette réflexion fit aussi croquer l'autre.

One more instance of La Fontaine's inimitable conciseness may be given. When Bertrand (the monkey) has eaten the chestnuts which Raton (the cat) has pulled out of the fire, the friends are interrupted; the fable ends thus—

Une servante vint; adieu, mes gens! RatonN'était pas content, ce dit-on.

How admirable are the brevity and the lightness of that 'adieu, mes gens'! In three words the instantaneous vanishing of the animals is indicated with masterly precision. One can almost see their tails whisking round the corner.

Modern admirers of La Fontaine have tended to throw a veil of sentiment over his figure, picturing him as the consoling beatific child of nature, driven by an unsympathetic generation to a wistful companionship with the dumb world of brutes. But nothing could be farther from the truth than this conception. La Fontaine was as unsentimental as Molière himself. This does not imply that he was unfeeling: feelings he had—delicate and poignant ones; but they never dominated him to the exclusion of good sense. His philosophy—if we may call so airy a thing by such a name—was the philosophy of some gentle whimsical follower of Epicurus. He loved nature, but unromantically, as he loved a glass of wine and an ode of Horace, and the rest of the good things of life. As for the bad things—they were there; he saw them—saw the cruelty of the wolf, and the tyranny of the lion, and the rapacity of man—saw that—

Jupin pour chaque état mit deux tables au monde;L'adroit, le vigilant, et le fort sont assisA la première; et les petitsMangent leur reste à la seconde.

Yet, while he saw them, he could smile. It was better to smile—if only with regret; better, above all, to pass lightly, swiftly, gaily over the depths as well as the surface of existence; for life is short—almost as short as one of his own fables—

Qui de nous des clartés de la voûte azuréeDoit jouir le dernier? Est-il aucun momentQui vous puisse assurer d'un second seulement?

The age was great in prose as well as in poetry. The periods of BOSSUET, ordered, lucid, magnificent, reflect its literary ideals as clearly as the couplets of Racine. Unfortunately, however, in the case of Bossuet, the splendour and perfection of the form is very nearly all that a modern reader can appreciate: the substance is for the most part uninteresting and out-of-date. The truth is that Bossuet was too completely a man of his own epoch to speak with any great significance to after generations. His melodious voice enters our ears, but not our hearts. The honest, high-minded, laborious bishop, with his dignity and his enthusiasm, his eloquence and his knowledge of the world, represents for us the best and most serious elements in the Court of Louis. The average good man of those days must have thought on most subjects as Bossuet thought—though less finely and intensely; and Bossuet never spoke a sentence from his pulpit which went beyond the mental vision of the most ordinary of his congregation. He saw all round his age, but he did not see beyond it. Thus, in spite of his intelligence, his view of the world was limited. The order of things under Louis XIV was the one order: outside that, all was confusion, heresy, and the work of Satan. If he had written more often on the great unchanging fundamentals of life, more of his work would have been enduring. But it happened that, while by birth he was an artist, by profession he was a theologian; and even the style of Bossuet can hardly save from oblivion the theological controversies of two hundred years ago. The same failing mars his treatment of history. His Histoire Universelle was conceived on broad and sweeping lines, and contains some perspicacious thinking; but the dominating notion of the book is a theological one—the illustration, by means of the events of history, of the divine governance of the world; and the fact that this conception of history has now become extinct has reduced the work to the level of a finely written curiosity.

Purely as a master of prose Bossuet stands in the first rank. His style is broad, massive, and luminous; and the great bulk of his writing is remarkable more for its measured strength than for its ornament. Yet at times the warm spirit of the artist, glowing through the well-ordered phrases, diffuses an extraordinary splendour. When, in his Méditations sur l'Evangile or his Elévations sur les Mystères, Bossuet unrolls the narratives of the Bible or meditates upon the mysteries of his religion, his language takes on the colours of poetry and soars on the steady wings of an exalted imagination. In his famous Oraisons Funèbres the magnificent amplitude of his art finds its full expression. Death, and Life, and the majesty of God, and the transitoriness of human glory—upon such themes he speaks with an organ-voice which reminds an English reader of the greatest of his English contemporaries, Milton. The pompous, rolling, resounding sentences follow one another in a long solemnity, borne forward by a vast movement of eloquence which underlies, controls, and animates them all.

O nuit désastreuse! O nuit effroyable, où retentit tout-à-coup comme un éclat de tonnerre, cette étonnante nouvelle: Madame se meurt, Madame est morte!…

—The splendid words flow out like a stream of lava, molten and glowing, and then fix themselves for ever in adamantine beauty.

We have already seen that one of the chief characteristics of French classicism was compactness. The tragedies of Racine are as closely knit as some lithe naked runner without an ounce of redundant flesh; the Fables of La Fontaine are airy miracles of compression. In prose the same tendency is manifest, but to an even more marked degree. La Rochefoucauld and La Bruyère, writing the one at the beginning, the other towards the close, of the classical period, both practised the art of extreme brevity with astonishing success. The DUC DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD was the first French writer to understand completely the wonderful capacities for epigrammatic statement which his language possessed; and in the dexterous precision of pointed phrase no succeeding author has ever surpassed him. His little book of Maxims consists of about five hundred detached sentences, polished like jewels, and, like jewels, sparkling with an inner brilliance on which it seems impossible that one can gaze too long. The book was the work of years, and it contains in its small compass the observations of a lifetime. Though the reflections are not formally connected, a common spirit runs through them all. 'Vanity of vanities! All is vanity!' such is the perpetual burden of La Rochefoucauld's doctrine: but it is vanity, not in the generalized sense of the Preacher, but in the ordinary personal sense of empty egotism and petty self-love which, in the eyes of this bitter moralist, is the ultimate essence of the human spirit and the secret spring of the world. The case is overstated, no doubt; but the strength of La Rochefoucauld's position can only be appreciated when one has felt for oneself the keen arrows of his wit. As one turns over his pages, the sentences strike into one with a deadly force of personal application; sometimes one almost blushes; one realizes that these things are cruel, that they are humiliating, and that they are true. 'Nous avons tous assez de force pour supporter les maux d'autrui.'—'Quelque bien qu'on nous dise de nous, on ne nous apprend rien de nouveau.'—'On croit quelquefois haïr la flatterie, mais on ne hait que le manière de flatter.'—'Le refus de la louange est un désir d'être loué deux fois.'—'Les passions les plus violentes nous laissent quelquefois du relâche, mais la vanité nous agite toujours.' No more powerful dissolvent for the self-complacency of humanity was ever composed.

Unlike the majority of the writers of his age, La Rochefoucauld was an aristocrat; and this fact gives a peculiar tone to his work. In spite of the great labour which he spent upon perfecting it, he has managed, in some subtle way, to preserve all through it an air of slight disdain. 'Yes, these sentences are all perfect,' he seems to be saying; 'but then, what else would you have? Unless one writes perfect sentences, why should one trouble to write?' In his opinion, 'le vrai honnête homme est celui qui ne se pique de rien'; and it is clear that he followed his own dictum. His attitude was eminently detached. Though what he says reveals so intensely personal a vision, he himself somehow remains impersonal. Beneath the flawless surface of his workmanship, the clever Duke eludes us. We can only see, as we peer into the recesses, an infinite ingenuity and a very bitter love of truth.

A richer art and a broader outlook upon life meet us in the pages of LA BRUYÈRE. The instrument is still the same—the witty and searching epigram—but it is no longer being played upon a single string. La Bruyère's style is extremely supple; he throws his apothegms into an infinite variety of moulds, employing a wide and coloured vocabulary, and a complete mastery of the art of rhetorical effect. Among these short reflections he has scattered a great number of somewhat lengthier portraits or character-studies, some altogether imaginary, others founded wholly or in part on well-known persons of the day. It is here that the great qualities of his style show themselves most clearly. Psychologically, these studies are perhaps less valuable than has sometimes been supposed: they are caricatures rather than portraits—records of the idiosyncrasies of humanity rather than of humanity itself. What cannot be doubted for a moment is the supreme art with which they have been composed. The virtuosity of the language—so solid and yet so brilliant, so varied and yet so pure—reminds one of the hard subtlety of a Greek gem. The rhythm is absolutely perfect, and, with its suspensions, its elaborations, its gradual crescendos, its unerring conclusions, seems to carry the sheer beauty of expressiveness to the farthest conceivable point. Take, as one instance out of a multitude, this description of the crank who devotes his existence to the production of tulips—

Vous le voyez planté et qui a pris racine au milieu de ses tulipes et devant la Solitaire: il ouvre de grands yeux, il frotte ses mains, il se baisse, il la voit de plus près, il ne l'a jamais vue si belle, il a le coeur épanoui de joie: il la quitte pour l'Orientale; de là, il va à la Veuve; il passe au Drap d'or, de celle-ci à l'Agathe, d'où il revient enfin à la Solitaire, où il se fixe, où il se lasse, où il s'assied, où il oublie de dîner: aussi est-elle nuancée, bordée, huilée a pièces emportées; elle a un beau vase ou un beau calice; il la contemple, il l'admire; Dieu et la nature sont en tout cela ce qu'il n'admire point! il ne va pas plus loin que l'oignon de sa tulipe, qu'il ne livrerait pas pour mille écus, et qu'il donnera pour rien quand les tulipes seront néligées et que les oeillets auront prévalu. Cet homme raisonnable qui a une âme, qui a un culte et une religion, revient chez soi fatigué affamé, mais fort content de sa journée: il a vu des tulipes.

Les Caractères is the title of La Bruyère's book; but its sub-title—'Les Moeurs de ce Siècle'—gives a juster notion of its contents. The whole of society, as it appeared to the subtle and penetrating gaze of La Bruyère, flows through its pages. In them, Versailles rises before us, less in its outward form than in its spiritual content—its secret, essential self. And the judgement which La Bruyère passes on this vision is one of withering scorn. His criticism is more convincing than La Rochefoucauld's because it is based upon a wider and a deeper foundation. The vanity which he saw around him was indeed the vanity of the Preacher—the emptiness, the insignificance, the unprofitableness, of worldly things. There was nothing too small to escape his terrible attention, and nothing too large. His arraignment passes from the use of rouge to the use of torture, from the hypocrisies of false devotion to the silly absurdities of eccentrics, from the inhumanity of princes to the little habits of fools. The passage in which he describes the celebration of Mass in the Chapel of Versailles, where all the courtiers were to be seen turning their faces to the king's throne and their backs to the altar of God, shows a spirit different indeed from that of Bossuet—a spirit not far removed from the undermining criticism of the eighteenth century itself. Yet La Bruyère was not a social reformer nor a political theorist: he was simply a moralist and an observer. He saw in a flash the condition of the French peasants—

Certains animaux farouches, des mâles et des femelles, répandus par la campagne, noirs, livides, et tout brulés du soleil, attachés à la terre qu'ils fouillent et qu'ils remuent avec une opiniâtreté invincible; ils out comme une voix articulée, et, quand ils se lèvent sur leurs pieds, ils montrent une face humaine: et en effet ils sont des hommes—

saw the dreadful fact, noted it with all the intensity of his genius, and then passed on. He was not concerned with finding remedies for the evils of a particular society, but with exposing the underlying evils of all societies. He would have written as truthful and as melancholy a book if he had lived to-day.

La Bruyère, in the darkness of his pessimism, sometimes suggests Swift, especially in his sarcastically serious treatment of detail; but he was without the virulent bitterness of the great Dean. In fact his indictment owes much of its impressiveness to the sobriety with which it is presented. There is no rage, no strain, no over-emphasis; one feels as one reads that this is an impartial judge. And, more than that, one feels that the judge is not only a judge, but also a human being. It is the human quality in La Bruyère's mind which gives his book its rare flavour, so that one seems to hear, in these printed words, across the lapse of centuries, the voice of a friend. At times he forgets his gloom and his misanthropy, and speaks with a strange depth of feeling on friendship or on love. 'Un beau visage,' he murmurs, 'est le plus beau de tous les spectacles, et l'harmonie la plus douce est le son de voix de celle que l'on aime.' And then—'Être avec les gens qu'on aime, cela suffit; rever, leur parler, ne leur parler point, penser à eux, penser à des choses plus indifférentes, mais auprès d'eux tout est égal.' How tender and moving the accent, yet how restrained? And was ever more profundity of intimacy distilled into a few simple words than here—'Il y a du plaisir à rencontrer les yeux de celui à qui l'on vient de donner'? But then once more the old melancholy seizes him. Even love itself must end.—'On guérit comme on se console; on n'a pas dans le coeur de quoi toujours pleurer et toujours aimer.' He is overwhelmed by the disappointments of life.—'Les choses les plus souhaitées n'arrivent point; ou, si elles arrivent, ce n'est ni dans le temps ni dans les circonstances où elles auraient fait un extrême plaisir.' And life itself, what is it? how does it pass?—'Il n'y a pour l'homme que trois événements: naître, vivre, et mourir; il ne se sent pas naître, il souffre à mourir, et il oublie de vivre.'

The pages of La Bruyère—so brilliant and animated on the surface, so sombre in their fundamental sense—contain the final summary—we might almost say the epitaph—of the great age of Louis XIV. Within a few years of the publication of his book in its complete form (1694), the epoch, which had begun in such a blaze of splendour a generation earlier, entered upon its ultimate phase of disaster and humiliation. The political ambitions of the overweening king were completely shattered; the genius of Marlborough annihilated the armies of France; and when peace came at last it came in ruin. The country was not only exhausted to the farthest possible point, its recuperation had been made well-nigh impossible by the fatal Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, which, in circumstances of the utmost cruelty, had driven into exile the most industrious and independent portion of the population. Poverty, discontent, tyranny, fanaticism—such was the legacy that Louis left to his country. Yet that was not quite all. Though, during the last years of the reign, French literature achieved little of lasting value, the triumphs of the earlier period threw a new and glorious lustre over the reputation of France. The French tongue became the language of culture throughout Europe. In every department of literature, French models and French taste were regarded as the supreme authorities. Strange as it would have seemed to him, it was not as the conqueror of Holland nor as the defender of the Church, but as the patron of Racine and the protector of Molière that the superb and brilliant Louis gained his highest fame, his true immortality.

CHAPTER V

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

The eighteenth century in France began with Louis XIV and ended with the Revolution. It is the period which bridges the gulf between autocracy and self-government, between Roman Catholicism and toleration, between the classical spirit and the spirit of the Romantic Revival. It is thus of immense importance in the history not only of France, but of the civilized world. And from the point of view of literature it is also peculiarly interesting. The vast political and social changes which it inaugurated were the result of a corresponding movement in the current of ideas; and this movement was begun, developed, and brought to a triumphant conclusion by a series of great French writers, who deliberately put their literary abilities to the service of the causes which they had at heart. Thus the literature of the epoch offers a singular contrast to that of the preceding one. While the masterpieces of the Grand Siècle served no ulterior purpose, coming into being and into immortality simply as works of beauty and art, those of the eighteenth century were works of propaganda, appealing with a practical purpose to the age in which they were written—works whose value does not depend solely upon artistic considerations. The former were static, the latter dynamic. As the century progressed, the tendency deepened; and the literature of the age, taken as a whole, presents a spectacle of thrilling dramatic interest, in which the forces of change, at first insignificant, gradually gather in volume, and at last, accumulated into overwhelming power, carry all before them. In pure literature, the writers of the eighteenth century achieved, indeed, many triumphs; but their great, their peculiar, triumphs were in the domain of thought.

The movement had already begun before the death of Louis. The evils at which La Bruyère had shuddered had filled the attention of more practical minds. Among these the most remarkable was FÉNELON, Archbishop of Cambray, who combined great boldness of political thought with the graces of a charming and pellucid style. In several writings, among which was the famous Télémaque—a book written for the edification of the young Duc de Bourgogne, the heir to the French throne—Fénelon gave expression to the growing reaction against the rigid autocracy of the government, and enunciated the revolutionary doctrine that a monarch existed for no other purpose than the good of his people. The Duc de Bourgogne was converted to the mild, beneficent, and open-minded views of his tutor; and it is possible that if he had lived a series of judicious reforms might have prevented the cataclysm at the close of the century. But in one important respect the mind of Fénelon was not in accord with the lines on which French thought was to develop for the next eighty years. Though he was among the first to advocate religious toleration, he was an ardent, even a mystical, Roman Catholic. Now one of the chief characteristics of the coming age was its scepticism—its elevation of the secular as opposed to the religious elements in society, and its utter lack of sympathy with all forms of mystical devotion. Signs of this spirit also had appeared before the end of Louis's reign. As early as 1687—within a year of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes—FONTENELLE, the nephew of Corneille, in his Histoire des Oracles, attacked the miraculous basis of Christianity under the pretence of exposing the religious credulity of the ancient Greeks and Romans. In its mingling of the sprightly and the erudite, and in the subdued irony of its apparent submission to orthodoxy, this little book forestalled a method of controversy which came into great vogue at a later date. But a more important work, published at the very end of the seventeenth century, was the Dictionary of BAYLE, in which, amid an enormous mass of learning poured out over a multitude of heterogeneous subjects, the most absolute religious scepticism is expressed with unmistakable emphasis and unceasing reiteration. The book is an extremely unwieldy one—very large and very discursive, and quite devoid of style; but its influence was immense; and during the long combat of the eighteenth century it was used as a kind of armoury, supplying many of their sharpest weapons to the writers of the time.