CHAPTER I

With the restoration of order under Henri IV. the delights of peace began to be felt; a mundane society, polished and pleasure-loving, began to be constituted, and before many years had passed the influence of women and of the salon appeared in literature. Should such a society be permitted to remain oblivious to spiritual truth, or to repose on the pillow of scepticism provided by Charron and Montaigne? Might it not be captured for religion, if religion were presented in its most gracious aspect, as a source of peace and joy, a gentle discipline of the heart? If one who wore the Christian armour should throw over his steel some robe of courtly silk, with floral adornments, might he not prove a persuasive champion of the Cross? Such was the hope of FRANÇOIS DE SALES (1567-1622), Bishop of Geneva, when, in 1608, he published his Introduction À la Vie DÊvote. The angelic doctor charmed by his mere presence, his grace of person, his winning smile, his dove's eyes; he showed how amiable piety might be; his eloquence was festooned with blossoms; he strewed the path to heaven with roses; he conquered by docility; yet under his sweetness lay strength, and to methodise and popularise moral self-superintendence was to achieve much. The TraitÉ de l'Amour de Dieu (1616), while it expounds the highest reaches of mystical devotion, yet presents religion as accessible to every child of God. With his tender and ardent devotion, something of a poet's sentiment for nature was united; but mysticism and poetry were both subservient to his aim of regulating the conduct of the heart; he desired to show how one may remain in the world, and yet not be of the world; by personal converse and by his spiritual letters he became the director of courtiers and of ladies. The motto of the literary Academy which he founded at Annecy expresses his spirit—flores fructusque perennes—flowers for their own sake, but chiefly for the sake of fruit. Much of the genius for holiness of the courtly saint has passed into the volume of reminiscences by Bishop Camus, his companion and disciple—l'Esprit de Saint FranÇois de Sales.

A mundane society, however, where fine gentlemen and ladies meet to admire and be admired, needs other outlets for its imagination than that of the primrose way to Paradise. The labour of the fields had inspired Olivier de Serres with the prose Georgics of his ThÉÂtre d'Agriculture, a work directed towards utility; the romance of the fields, and the pastoral, yet courtly, loves of a French Arcady, were the inspiration of the endless prose bucolics found in the AstrÉe of HONORÉ D'URFÉ. The Renaissance delight in the pastoral had passed from Italy to Spain; through the Diana of the Spanish Montemayor it passed to France. After a period of turbulent strife there was a fascination in visions of a peace, into which, if warfare entered, the strange irruption only enhanced an habitual calm. A whole generation waited long to learn the issue of the passion of Celadon and AstrÉe. The romance, of which the earliest part appeared in 1610, or earlier, was not completely published until 1627, when its author was no longer living.¹ The scene is laid in the fields of d'UrfÉ's familiar Forez and on the banks of the Lignon; the time is of Merovingian antiquity. The shepherd Celadon, banished on suspicion of faithlessness from the presence of his beloved AstrÉe, seeks death beneath the stream; he is saved by the nymphs, escapes the amorous pursuit of Galatea, assumes a feminine garb, and, protected by the Druid Adamas, has the felicity of daily beholding his shepherdess. At length he declares himself, and is overwhelmed with reproaches; true lover that he is, when he offers his body to the devouring lions of the Fountain of Love, the beasts refuse their prey; the venerable Druid discreetly guides events; Celadon's fidelity receives its reward in marriage, and the banks of the Lignon become a scene of universal joy. The colours of the AstrÉe are faded now as those of some ancient tapestry, but during many years its success was prodigious. D'UrfÉ's highest honour, of many, is the confession of La Fontaine:—

The AstrÉe won its popularity, in part because it united the old attraction of a chivalric or heroic strain with that of the newer pastoral; in part because it idealised the gallantries and developed the amorous casuistry of the day, not without a real sense of the power of love; in part because it was supposed to exhibit ideal portraits of distinguished contemporaries. It was the parent of a numerous progeny; and as the heroic romance of the seventeenth century is derived in direct succession from the loves of Celadon and AstrÉe, so the comic romance, beside all that it owes to the tradition of the esprit gaulois, owes something to the mocking gaiety with which d'UrfÉ exhibits the adventures and emotional vicissitudes of his inconstant shepherd Hylas.

¹ It should be noted that the close of the AstrÉe is by D'UrfÉ's secretary Baro.

In the political and social reconstruction which followed the civil and religious wars, the need of discipline and order in literature was felt; in this province, also, unity under a law was seen to be desirable. The work of the PlÉiade had in a great measure failed; they had attempted to organise poetry and its methods, and poetry was still disorganised. To reduce the realm of caprice and fantasy to obedience to law was the work of FRANÇOIS DE MALHERBE. Born at Caen in 1555, he had published in 1587 his Larmes de Saint Pierre, an imitation of the Italian poem by Tansillo, in a manner which his maturer judgment must have condemned. It was not until about his fortieth year that he found his true direction. Du Vair, with whom he was acquainted, probably led him to a true conception of the nature of eloquence. Vigorous of character, clear in understanding, with no affluence of imagination and no excess of sensibility, Malherbe was well qualified for establishing lyrical poetry upon the basis of reason, and of general rather than individual sentiment. He chose the themes of his odes from topics of public interest, or founded them on those commonplaces of emotion which are part of the possession of all men who think and feel. If he composed his verses for some great occasion, he sought for no curiosities of a private imagination, but considered in what way its nobler aspects ought to be regarded by the community at large; if he consoled a friend for losses caused by death, he held his personal passion under restraint; he generalised, and was content to utter more admirably than others the accepted truths about the brevity and beauty of life, and the inevitable doom of death. What he gained by such a process of abstraction, he lost in vivid characterisation; his imagery lacks colour; the movement of his verse is deliberate and calculated; his ideas are rigorously enchained one to another.

It has been said that poetry—the overflow of individual emotion—is overheard; while oratory—the appeal to an audience—is heard. The processes of Malherbe's art were essentially oratorical; the lyrical cry is seldom audible in his verse; it is the poetry of eloquence thrown into studied stanzas. But the greater poetry of the seventeenth century in France—its odes, its satires, its epistles, its noble dramatic scenes—and much of its prose literature are of the nature of oratory; and for the progress of such poetry, and even of such prose, Malherbe prepared a highway. He aimed at a reformation of the language, which, rejecting all words either base, provincial, archaic, technical, or over-learned and over-curious, should employ the standard French, pure and dignified, as accepted by the people of Paris. In his hands language became too exclusively an instrument of the intelligence; yet with this instrument great things were achieved by his successors. He methodised and regulated versification, insisting on rich and exact rhymes, condemning all licence and infirmity of structure, condemning harshness of sound, inversion, hiatus, negligence in accommodating the cesura to the sense, the free gliding of couplet into couplet. It may be said that he rendered verse mechanical; but within the arrangement which he prescribed, admirable effects were attainable by the mastery of genius. He pondered every word, weighed every syllable, and thought no pains ill-spent if only clearness, precision, the logic of ordonnance, a sustained harmony were at length secured; and until the day of his death, in 1628, no decline in his art can be perceived.

Malherbe fell far short of being a great poet, but in the history of seventeenth-century classicism, in the effort of the age to rationalise the forms of art, his name is of capital importance. It cannot be said that he founded a school. His immediate disciples, MAYNARD and RACAN, failed to develop the movement which he had initiated. Maynard laid verse by the side of verse with exact care, and sometimes one or the other verse is excellent, but he lacked sustained force and flight. Racan had genuine inspiration; a true feeling for nature appears in his dramatic pastoral, the Bergeries (1625); unhappily he had neither the culture nor the patience needed for perfect execution; he was rather an admirable amateur than an artist. But if Malherbe founded no school, he gave an eminent example, and the argument which he maintained in the cause of poetic art was at a later time carried to its conclusion by Boileau.

Malherbe's reform was not accepted without opposition. While he pleaded for the supremacy of order, regularity, law, the voice of MATHURIN REGNIER (1573-1613) was heard on behalf of freedom. A nephew of the poet Desportes, Regnier was loyal to his uncle's fame and to the memory of the PlÉiade; if Malherbe spoke slightingly of Desportes, and cast aside the tradition of the school of Ronsard, the retort was speedy and telling against the arrogant reformer, tyrant of words and syllables, all whose achievement amounted to no more than proser de la rime et rimer de la prose. Unawares, indeed, Regnier, to a certain extent, co-operated with Malherbe, who recognised the genius of his younger adversary; he turned away from languid elegances to observation of life and truth of feeling; if he imitated his masters Horace and Ovid, or the Italian satiric poets, with whose writings he had become acquainted during two periods of residence in Rome, his imitations were not obsequious, like those of the PlÉiade, but vigorous and original, like those of Boileau; in his sense of comedy he anticipates some of MoliÈre's feeling for the humorous perversities of human character; his language is vivid, plain, and popular. The classical school of later years could not reject Regnier. Boileau declared that no poet before MoliÈre was so well acquainted with the manners and characters of men; through his impersonal study of life he is indeed classic. But his ardent nature rebelled against formal rule; he trusted to the native force of genius, and let his ideas and passions lead him where they would. His satires are those of a painter whose eye is on his object, and who handles his brush with a vigorous discretion; they are criticisms of society and its types of folly or of vice, full of force and colour, yet general in their intention, for, except at the poet who had affronted his uncle, "le bon Regnier" struck at no individual. Most admirable, amid much that is admirable, is the picture of the old worldling Macette, whose veil of pretended piety is gradually dropped as she discourses with growing wantonness to the maiden whom she would lead in the way she should not go: Macette is no unworthy elder of the family of Tartufe. Regnier confesses freely the passions of his own irregular life; had it been wisely conducted, his genius might have carried him far; as it was, he passed away prematurely at the age of forty, the victim of his own intemperate pursuit of pleasure.

Still more unfortunate was the life of a younger poet, who, while honouring the genius of Malherbe, pronounced, like Regnier, for freedom rather than order, and maintained that each writer of genius should be a law to himself—a poet whom his contemporaries esteemed too highly, and whom Malherbe, and afterwards Boileau, unjustly depreciated—THÉOPHILE DE VIAU. A Huguenot who had abjured his faith, afterwards pursued as a libertine in conduct and as a freethinker, ThÉophile was hunted, imprisoned, exiled, condemned to execution, and died exhausted in 1626, when only six-and-thirty years old. He has been described as the last lyrical poet of his age, and the first of the poetical exponents of the new preciosity. His dramatic Pyrame et ThisbÉ, though disfigured by those concetti which the Italian Marini—an honoured guest at the French court—and the invasion of Spanish tastes had made the mode, is not without touches of genuine pathos. The odes of ThÉophile are of free and musical movement, his descriptions of natural beauty are graciously coloured, his judgment in literary matters was sound and original; but he lacked the patient workmanship which art demands, and in proclaiming himself on the side of freedom as against order, he was retrograding from the position which had been secured for poetry under the leadership of Malherbe.

With social order came the desire for social refinement, and following the desire for refinement came the prettinesses and affectations of over-curious elegance. Peace returned to France with the monarchy of Henri IV., but the Gascon manners of his court were rude. Catherine de Vivonne, Marquise de Rambouillet, whose mother was a great Roman lady, and whose father had been French ambassador at Rome, young, beautiful, delicately nurtured, retired in 1608 from the court, and a few years later opened her salon of the HÔtel de Rambouillet to such noble and cultivated persons as were willing to be the courtiers of womanly grace and wit and taste. The rooms were arranged and decorated for the purposes of pleasure; the chambre bleue became the sanctuary of polite society, where ArthÉnice (an anagram for "Catherine") was the high priestess. To dance, to sing, to touch the lute was well; to converse with wit and refinement was something more admirable; the salon became a mart for the exchange of ideas; the fashion of Spain was added to the fashion of Italy; Platonism, Petrarchism, Marinism, Gongorism, the spirit of romance and the daintinesses of learning and of pedantry met and mingled. Hither came Malherbe, Racan, Chapelain, Vaugelas; at a later time Balzac, Segrais, Voiture, Godeau; and again, towards the mid-years of the century, Saint-Évremond and La Rochefoucauld. Here Corneille read his plays from the Cid to Rodogune; here Bossuet, a marvellous boy, improvised a midnight discourse, and Voiture declared he had never heard one preach so early or so late.

As Julie d'Angennes and her sister AngÉlique attained an age to divide their mother's authority in the salon, its sentiment grew quintessential, and its taste was subtilised well-nigh to inanity. They censured Polyeucte; they found Chapelain's unhappy epic "perfectly beautiful, but excessively tiresome"; they laid their heads together over Descartes' Discours de la MÉthode, and profoundly admired the philosopher; they were enraptured by the madrigals on flowers, more than three score in number, offered as the Guirlande de Julie on Mademoiselle's fÊte; they gravely debated the question which should be the approved spelling, muscadin or muscardin. In 1649 they were sundered into rival parties—Uranistes and Jobelins—tilting in literary lists on behalf of the respective merits of a sonnet by Voiture and a sonnet by Benserade. The word prÉcieux is said to date from 1650. The Marquise de Rambouillet survived MoliÈre's satiric comedy Les PrÉcieuses Ridicules (1659) by several years. Mme. de SÉvignÉ, Mme. de la Fayette, FlÉchier, the preacher of fashion, were among the illustrious personages of the decline of her salon. We smile at its follies and affectations; but, while it harmed literature by magnifying things that were petty, it did something to refine manners, to quicken ideas, to encourage clearness and grace of expression, and to make the pursuit of letters an avenue to social distinction. Through the HÔtel de Rambouillet, and the salons which both in Paris and the provinces imitated its modes, and pushed them to extravagance, the influence of women on literature became a power for good and for evil.

The "Works," as they were styled, of VINCENT VOITURE (1598-1648)—posthumously published—represent one side of the spirit of the salon. Capable of something higher, he lived to exhibit his ingenuity and wit in little ways, now by a cleverly-turned verse, now by a letter of gallantry. Although of humble origin, he was for long a presiding genius in the chambre bleue of ArthÉnice. His play of mind was unhappily without a subject, and to be witty on nothings puts a strain on wit. Voiture expends much labour on being light, much serious effort in attaining vanities. His letters were admired as models of ingenious elegance; the life has long since passed from their raillery and badinage, but Voiture may be credited with having helped to render French prose pliant for the uses of pleasure.

The dainty trifles of the school of preciosity fluttered at least during the sunshine of a day. Its ambitious epics, whatever attention they may have attracted in their time, cannot be said to have ever possessed real life. The great style is not to be attained by tagging platitudes with points. The Saint Louis of Lemoyne, the Clovis of Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin, the Alaric of ScudÉry, the Charlemagne of Louis le Laboureur remain only as evidences of the vanity of misplaced ambition. During twenty years JEAN CHAPELAIN, a man of no mean ability in other fields, was occupied with his La Pucelle d'OrlÉans; twelve cantos at length appeared magnificently in 1656, and won a brief applause; the remaining twelve cantos lie still inedited. The matter of history was too humble for Chapelain's genius; history is ennobled by an allegorical intention; France becomes the soul of man; Charles, swayed between good and evil, is the human will; the Maid of Orleans is divine grace. The satire of Boileau, just in its severity, was hardly needed to slay the slain.

In the prose romances, which are epics emancipated from the trammels of verse, there was more vitality. Bishop Camus, the friend of FranÇois de Sales, had attempted to sanctify the movement which d'UrfÉ had initiated; but the spirit of the AstrÉe would not unite in a single stream with the spirit of the Introduction À la Vie DÉvote. Gomberville is remembered rather for the remorseless war which he waged against the innocent conjunction car, never to be admitted into polite literature, than for his encyclopÆdic romance Polexandre, in which geography is illustrated by fiction, as copious as it is fantastic; yet it was something to annex for the first time the ocean, with all its marvels, to the scenery of adventure. Gombauld, the Beau TÉnÉbreux of the HÔtel de Rambouillet, secured a reading for his unreadable Endymion by the supposed transparence of his allusions to living persons. Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin relieved the amorous exaltations of his Ariane, a tale of the time of Nero, by excursions which touch the borders of comedy. These are books on which the dust gathers thick in ancient libraries.

But the romances of LA CALPRENÈDE and of GEORGES and MADELEINE DE SCUDÉRY might well be taken down by any lover of literature who possesses the virtue of fortitude. Since d'UrfÉ's day the taste for pastoral had declined; the newer romance was gallant and heroic. Legend or history supplied its framework; but the central motive was ideal love at odds with circumstance, love the inspirer of limitless devotion and daring. The art of construction was imperfectly understood; the narratives are of portentous length; ten, twelve, twenty volumes were needed to deploy the sentiments and the adventures. In Cassandre, in ClÉopÂtre, in Pharamond, La CalprenÈde exhibits a kind of universal history; the dissolution of the Macedonian empire, the decline of the empire of Rome, the beginnings of the French monarchy are successively presented. But the chief personages are idealised portraits drawn from the society of the author's time. The spirit of the HÔtel de Rambouillet is transferred to the period when the Scythian Oroondate was the lover of Statira, daughter of Darius; the Prince de CondÉ masks in ClÉopÂtre as Coriolan; Pharamond is the Grand Monarch in disguise. Notwithstanding the faded gallantries and amorous casuistry of La CalprenÈde's interminable romances, a certain spirit of real heroism, offspring of the writer's ardent imagination and bright southern temper, breathes through them. They were the delight of Mme. de SÉvignÉ and of La Fontaine; even in the eighteenth century they were the companions of CrÉbillon, and were not forgotten by Rousseau.

Still more popular was ArtamÈne, ou le Grand Cyrus. Mdlle. de ScudÉry, the "Sapho" of her Saturday salon, a true prÉcieuse, as good of heart and quick of wit as she was unprepossessing of person, supplied the sentiment and metaphysics of love to match the gasconading exploits of her brother's invention. It was the time not only of preciosity, but of the Fronde, with its turbulent adventures and fantastic chivalry. Under the names of Medes and Persians could be discovered the adventurers, the gallants, the fine ladies of the seventeenth century. In ClÉlie an attempt is made to study the curiosities of passion; it is a manual of polite love and elegant manners; in its carte de Tendre we can examine the topography of love-land, trace the routes to the three cities of "Tendre," and learn the dangers of the way. Thus the heroic romance reached its term; its finer spirit became the possession of the tragic drama, where it was purified and rendered sane. The modern novel had wandered in search of its true self, and had not succeeded in the quest. When Gil Blas appeared, it was seen that the novel of incident must also be the novel of character, and that in its imitation of real life it could appropriate some of the possessions which by that time comedy had lost.

The extravagances of sentiment produced a natural reaction. Not a few of the intimates of the HÔtel de Rambouillet found a relief from their fatigue of fine manners and high-pitched emotions in the unedifying jests and merry tales of the tavern. A comic, convivial, burlesque or picaresque literature became, as it were, a parody of the literature of preciosity. Saint-Amand (1594-1661) was at once a disciple of the Italian Marini, the admired "Sapurnius" of the salon, author of at least one beautiful ode—La Solitude—breathing a gentle melancholy, and a gay singer of bacchic chants. Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin, in his comedy Les Visionnaires (1637), mocked the prÉcieuses, and was applauded by the spectators of the theatre. One of his heroines is hopelessly enamoured of Alexander the Great; one is enamoured of poetry, and sees life as if it were material for the stage; and the third is enamoured of her own beauty, with its imagined potency over the hearts of men. As early as 1622 CHARLES SOREL expressed, in his Histoire Comique de Francion, a Rabelaisian and picaresque tale of low life, the revolt of the esprit gaulois against the homage of the imagination to courtly shepherdesses and pastoral cavaliers. It was reprinted more than forty times. In Le Berger Extravagant (1628) he attempted a kind of Don Quixote for his own day—an "anti-romance"—which recounts the pastoral follies of a young Parisian bourgeois, whose wits have been set wandering by such dreams as the AstrÉe had inspired; its mirth is unhappily overloaded with pedantry.

The master of this school of seventeenth-century realism was PAUL SCARRON (1610-60), the comely little abbÉ, unconcerned with ecclesiastical scruples or good manners, who, when a paralytic, twisted and tortured by disease, became the husband of D'AubignÉ's granddaughter, destined as Madame de Maintenon to become the most influential woman in all the history of France. In his Virgile Travesti he produced a vulgar counterpart to the heroic epics, which their own dead-weight would have speedily enough borne downwards to oblivion. His Roman Comique (1651), a short and lively narrative of the adventures of a troupe of comedians strolling in the provinces, contrasted with the exaltations, the heroisms, the delicate distresses of the ideal romance. The Roman Bourgeois (1666) of ANTOINE FURETIÈRE is a belated example of the group to which Francion belongs. The great event of its author's life was his exclusion from the Academy, of which he was a member, on the ground that he had appropriated for the advantage of his Dictionary the results of his fellow-members' researches for the Dictionary, then in progress, of the learned company. His Roman is a remarkable study of certain types of middle-class Parisian life, often animated, exact, effective in its satire; but the analysis of a petty and commonplace world needs some relief of beauty or generosity to make its triviality acceptable, and such relief FuretiÈre will not afford.

Somewhat apart from this group of satiric tales, yet with a certain kinship to them, lie the more fantastic satires of that fiery swashbuckler—"dÉmon des braves"—CYRANO DE BERGERAC (1619-55), Histoire Comique des États et Empires de la Lune, and Histoire Comique des États et Empires du Soleil. Cyrano's taste, caught by the mannerisms of Italy and extravagances of Spain, was execrable. To his violences of temper he added a reputation for irreligion. His comedy Le PÉdant JouÉ has the honour of having furnished MoliÈre with the most laughable scene of the Fourberies de Scapin. The voyages to the moon and the sun, in which the inhabitants, their manners, governments, and ideas, are presented, mingle audacities and caprices of invention with a portion of satiric truth; they lived in the memories of the creator of Gulliver and the creator of MicromÉgas.

CHAPTER II

The French Academy, an organised aristocracy of letters, expressed the growing sense that anarchy in literature must end, and that discipline and law must be recognised in things of the mind. It is one of the glories of RICHELIEU that he perceived that literature has a public function, and may indeed be regarded as an affair of the State. His own writings, or those composed under his direction—memoirs; letters; the Succincte Narration, which sets forth his policy; the Testament, which embodies his counsel in statecraft—belong less to literature than to French history. But he honoured the literary art; he enjoyed the drama; he devised plots for plays, and found docile poets—his Society of five—to carry out his designs.

In 1629 Valentin Conrart, secretary to the King, and one of the frequenters of the HÔtel de Rambouillet, was accustomed to receive weekly a group of distinguished men of letters and literary amateurs, who read their manuscripts aloud, discussed the merits of new works, and considered questions of criticism, grammar, and language. Tidings of these reunions having reached Richelieu, he proposed that the society should receive an official status. By the influence of Chapelain the objections of certain members were overcome. The AcadÉmie FranÇaise held its first sitting on March 13, 1634; three years later the letters patent were registered; the number of members was fixed at forty; when vacancies occurred, new members were co-opted for life. Its history to the year 1652 was published in the following year by Pellisson, and obtained him admission to a chair. The functions of the learned company were to ascertain, as far as possible, the French language, to regulate grammar, and to act as a literary tribunal if members consented to submit their works to its examination. There were hopes that authoritative treatises on rhetoric and poetics might be issued with its sanction; but these hopes were not fulfilled. A dictionary, of which Chapelain presented the plan in 1638, was, however, undertaken; progressing by slow degrees, the first edition appeared in 1694. Its aim was not to record every word of which an example could be found, but to select those approved by the usage of cultivated society and of the best contemporary or recent authors. Thus it tended to establish for literary use an aristocracy of words; and while literary expression gained in dignity and intellectual precision, gained as an instrument of reason and analysis, such regulation created a danger that it might lose in elements that have affinities with the popular mind—vivacity, colour, picturesqueness, variety. At its commencement no one was more deeply interested in the dictionary than Vaugelas (1585-1650), a gentleman of Savoie, whose concern for the purity of the language, as determined by the best usage, led him to resist innovations and the invasion of foreign phraseology. His Remarques sur la Langue FranÇaise served as a guide to his fellow-members of the Academy. Unhappily he was wholly ignorant of the history of the language. With the erudite Chapelain he mediated between the scholarship and the polite society of the time. But while Vaugelas was almost wholly occupied with the vocabulary and grammar, Chapelain did much to enforce the principles of the classical school upon literary art. The Academy took up the work which the salons had begun; its spirit was more robust and masculine than theirs; it was freer from passing fashions, affectations, prettinesses; it leaned on the side of intellect rather than of sentiment.

In what may be called the regulation of French prose the influence of JEAN-LOUIS GUEZ DE BALZAC (1594-1654) was considerable. He had learnt from Malherbe that a literary craftsman should leave nothing to chance, that every effect should be exactly calculated. It was his task to apply to prose the principles which had guided his master in verse. His Lettres, of which a first series appeared in 1624, and a second twelve years later, are not the spontaneous intercourse of friend with friend, but rather studious compositions which deal with matters of learning, literature, morals, religion, politics, events, and persons of the time. Their contents are of little importance; Balzac was not an original thinker, but he had the art of arranging his ideas, and of expressing them in chosen words marshalled in ample and sonorous sentences. A certain fire he had, a limited power of imagination, a cultivated judgment, a taste, which suffered from bad workmanship; a true affection for rural life. These hardly furnished him with matter adequate to support his elevated style. His letters were regarded as models of eloquence; but it is eloquence manufactured artificially and applied to subjects, not proceeding from them. His Prince, a treatise on the virtues of kings, with a special reference to Louis XIII., was received coldly. His Aristippe, which dealt with the manners and morals of a court, and his Socrate ChrÉtien, a study in ethics and theology, were efforts beyond his powers. His gift to literature was a gift of method and of style; others who worked in marble learned something from his studious modellings in clay.

To regulate thought required an intellect of a different order from that of Balzac, "emperor of orators." It was the task of RENÉ DESCARTES (1596-1650). A child of delicate health, born at La Haye, near Tours, he became, under Jesuit teachers, a precocious student both in languages and science. But truth, not erudition, was the demand and the necessity of his mind. Solitary investigations in mathematics were for a time succeeded by the life of a soldier in the Netherlands and Holland. The stream of thought was flowing, however, underground. Suddenly it emerged to light. In 1619, when the young volunteer was in winter quarters at Neuburg, on the Danube, on a memorable day the first principles of a new philosophical method presented themselves to his intellect, and, as it were, claimed him for their interpreter. After wanderings through various parts of Europe, and a period of studious leisure in Paris, he chose Holland for his place of abode (1629), and though often shifting his residence, little disturbed save by the controversies of philosophy and the orthodox zeal of Dutch theologians, he gave his best hours during twenty years to thought. An invitation from Queen Christina to the Swedish court was accepted in 1649. The change in his habits and the severity of a northern winter proved fatal to the health which Descartes had carefully cherished; in February of 1650 he was dead.

The mathematical cycle in the development of Descartes' system of thought preceded the metaphysical. His great achievements in analytical geometry, in optics, in physical research, his explanation of the laws of nature, and their application in his theory of the material universe, belong to the history of science. Algebra and geometry led him towards his method in metaphysical speculation. How do all primary truths verify themselves to the human mind? By the fact that an object is clearly and distinctly conceived. The objects of knowledge fall into certain groups or series; in each series there is some simple and dominant element which may be immediately apprehended, and in relation to which the subordinate elements become intelligible. Let us accept nothing on hearsay or authority; let us start with doubt in order to arrive at certitude; let us test the criterion of certitude to the uttermost. There is one fact which I cannot doubt, even in doubting all—I think, and if I think, I exist—"Je pense, donc je suis." No other evidence of this is needed than that our conception is clear and distinct; in this clearness and distinctness we find the principle of certitude. Mind, then, exists, and is known to us as a thinking substance. But the idea of an infinite, perfect Being is also present to our intellect; we, finite, imperfect beings, could not have made it; unmake it we cannot; and in the conception of perfection that of existence is involved. Therefore God exists, and therefore the laws of our consciousness, which are His laws, cannot deceive us. We have seen what mind or spirit signifies—a thinking substance. Reduce our idea of matter to clearness and distinctness, and what do we find? The idea of an extended substance. Our complex humanity, made up of soul and body, comprises both kinds of substance. But thought and extension have nothing in common; their union can only be conceived as the collocation at a single point of a machine with that which raises it above a mere machine. As for the lower animals, they are no more than automata.

Descartes' Principia and his Meditationes were written in Latin. The Discours de la MÉthode (1637) and the later TraitÉ des Passions showed how the French language could be adapted to the purposes of the reason. Such eloquence as is found in Descartes is that of thought illuminating style. The theory of the passions anticipates some of the tendencies of modern psychology in its physical investigations. No one, however, affirmed more absolutely than Descartes the freedom of the will—unless, indeed, we regard it as determined by God: it cannot directly control the passions, but it can indirectly modify them with the aid of imagination; it is the supreme mistress of action, however the passions may oppose its fiat. Spiritualist as he was, Descartes was not disposed to be the martyr of thought. Warned by the example of Galileo, he did not desire to expose himself to the dangers attending heretical opinions. He separated the province of faith from that of reason: "I revere our theology," he said; but he held that theology demanded other lights than those of the unaided powers of man. In its own province, he made the reason his absolute guide, and with results which theologians might regard as dangerous.

The spirit of Descartes' work was in harmony with that of his time, and reacted upon literature. He sought for general truths by the light of reason; he made clearness a criterion of truth; he proclaimed man a spirit; he asserted the freedom of the will. The art of the classical period sought also for general truths, and subordinated imagination to reason. It turned away from ingenuities, obscurities, mysteries; it was essentially spiritualist; it represented the crises and heroic victories of the will.

Descartes' opponent, Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655), epicurean in his physics, an empiricist, though an inconsistent one, in philosophy, chose the Latin language as the vehicle for his ideas. A group of writers whose tendencies were towards sensualism or scepticism, viewed him as their master. Chapelle in verse, La Mothe le Vayer in prose, may serve as representatives of art surrendering itself to vulgar pleasures, and thought doubting even its doubts, and finding repose in indifference.

The true successor of Descartes in French philosophy, eminent in the second half of the century, was NICOLAS DE MALEBRANCHE (1638-1715). Soul and body, Descartes had shown, are in their very nature alien each from the other. How then does the soul attain a knowledge of the external world? In God, the absolute substance, are the ideas of all things; in God we behold those ideas which matter could never convey to us, and which we could never ourselves originate; in God we see and know all things. The Recherche de la VÉritÉ (1674-75) was admirably written and was widely read. The theologians found it dangerous; and when six years later Malebranche published his TraitÉ de la Nature et de la GrÂce, characterised briefly and decidedly by Bossuet as "pulchra, nova, falsa," at Bossuet's request both Arnauld and FÉnelon attempted to refute "the extravagant Oratorian." His place in the evolution of philosophy lies between Descartes and Spinoza, who developed and completed the doctrine of Descartes. In the transition from dualism to monism Malebranche served as a mediator.

Religious thought in the seventeenth century, wedded to an austere morality, is expressed by the writers of Port-Royal, and those who were in sympathy with them. They could not follow the flowery path of piety—not the less the narrow path because it was cheerful—pointed out by St. FranÇois de Sales. Between nature and grace they saw a deep and wide abyss. In closest connection with them was one man of the highest genius—author of the Provinciales and the PensÉes—whose spiritual history was more dramatic than any miracle-play or morality of the Middle Ages.

BLAISE PASCAL was born at Clermont-Ferrand in 1623. His father, a president of the Court of Aids at Clermont, a man of intellect and character, guided his education in languages, natural science, and mathematics. The boy's precocity was extraordinary; at sixteen he had written a treatise on Conic Sections, which excited the astonishment of Descartes. But the intensity of study, preying upon a nervous constitution, consumed his health and strength; at an early age he suffered from temporary paralysis. When about twenty-three he fell under the religious influences of certain disciples of St. Cyran, read eagerly in the writings of Jansen and Arnauld, and resolved to live for God alone. But to restore his health he was urged to seek recreation, and by degrees the interests and pleasures of the world took hold upon him; the master of his mind was the sceptical Montaigne; he moved in the mundane society of the capital; and it has been conjectured from hints in his Discours sur les Passions de l'Amour that he loved the sister of his friend, the Duc de Roannez, and had the vain hope of making her his wife.

The spirit of religion, however, lived within his heart, and needed only to be reawakened. The reawakening came in 1654 through the persuasions of his sister, Jacqueline, who had abandoned the world two years previously, and entered the community of Port-Royal. The abbey of Port-Royal, situated some seven or eight miles from Versailles, was presided over by Jacqueline Arnauld, the MÈre AngÉlique, and a brotherhood of solitaries, among whom were several of the Arnauld family, had settled in the valley in the year 1637. With this unvowed brotherhood Pascal, though never actually a solitary, associated himself at the close of 1654. An escape from sudden danger in a carriage accident, and a vision or ecstasy which came to him, co-operated in his conversion. After his death, copies of a fragmentary and passionate writing referring to this period—the so-called "amulet" of Pascal—were found upon his person; its words, "renonciation totale et douce," and "joie, joie, joie, pleurs de joie," express something of his resolution and his rapture.

The affair of the Provinciales, and the design of an apology for Christianity with which his PensÉes are connected, together with certain scientific studies and the deepening passion of religion, make up what remained of Pascal's life. His spirit grew austere, but in his austerity there was an inexpressible joy. Exhausted by his ascetic practices and the inward flame of his soul, Pascal died on August 19, 1662. "May God never leave me" were his last words.

With Pascal's work as a mathematician and a physicist we are not here concerned. In it "we see," writes a scientific authority, "the strongest marks of a great original genius creating new ideas, and seizing upon, mastering, and pursuing further everything that was fresh and unfamiliar in his time. After the lapse of more than two hundred years, we can still point to much in exact science that is absolutely his; and we can indicate infinitely more which is due to his inspiration."

Jansenism and Jesuitism, opposed as they were, have this in common, that both were movements in that revival of Roman Catholicism which was stimulated by the rivalry of the Protestant Reformation. But the Jesuits sought to win the world to religion by an art of piety, in which a system of accommodation was recognised as a means of drawing worldlings to the Church; the Jansenists held up a severe moral ideal, and humbled human nature in presence of the absolute need and resistless omnipotence of divine grace. Like the Jesuits, but in a different spirit, the Port-Royalists devoted themselves much to the task of education. They honoured classical studies; they honoured science, dialectics, philosophy. Their grammar, logic, geometry were substantial additions to the literature of pedagogy. Isaac le Maistre de Sacy and others translated and annotated the Bible. Their theologian, moralist, and controversialist, Pierre Nicole (1625-95), author of Essais de Morale (1671), if not profound or brilliant, was the possessor of learning, good sense, good feeling, and religious faith. Under the influence of St. Cyran, the Port-Royalists were in close sympathy with the teaching of Jansen, Bishop of Ypres; the writings of their great theologian Antoine Arnauld were vigorously anti-Jesuitical. In 1653 five propositions, professedly extracted from Jansen's Augustinus, were condemned by a Papal bull. The insulting triumph of the Jesuits drew Arnauld again into controversy; and on a question concerning divine grace he was condemned in January 1656 by the Sorbonne. "You who are clever and inquiring" (curieux), said Arnauld to Pascal, "you ought to do something." Next day was written the first of Pascal's Lettres À un Provincial, and on 23rd January it was issued to the public; a second followed within a week; the success was immense. The writer concealed his identity under the pseudonym "Louis de Montalte."

The Lettres Provinciales are eighteen in number. The first three and the last three deal with the affair of Arnauld and the Sorbonne, and the questions under discussion as to the nature and the need of divine grace. In the opening letters the clearest intellectual insight and the deepest seriousness of spirit are united with the finest play of irony, and even with the temper of comedy. The supposed Louis de Montalte, seeking theological lights from a doctor of the Sorbonne, finds only how hopelessly divided in opinion are the opponents of Arnauld, and how grotesquely they darken counsel with speech. In the twelve letters intervening between the third and the sixteenth, Pascal takes the offensive, and deploys an incomparably skilful attack on the moral theology of the Jesuits. For the rigid they may have a stricter morality, but for the lax their casuistry supplies a pliable code of morals, which, by the aid of ingenious distinctions, can find excuses for the worst of crimes. With force of logic, with fineness of irony, with energy of moral indignation, with a literary style combining strength and lightness, Pascal presses his irresistible assault. The effect of the "Provincial Letters" was to carry the discussion of morals and theology before a new court of appeal—not the Sorbonne, but the public intelligence and the unsophisticated conscience of men. To French prose they added a masterpiece and a model.

The subject of the Provinciales is in part a thing of the past; the PensÉes deal with problems which can never lose their interest. Among Pascal's papers were found, after his early death, many fragments which his sister, Madame PÉrier, and his friends recognised as of rare value; but the editors of the little volume which appeared in 1670, imagining that they could safeguard its orthodoxy, and even amend its style, freely omitted and altered what Pascal had written. It was not until 1844 that a complete and genuine text was established in the edition of M. FaugÈre. We can hardly hope to arrange the fragments so as to exhibit the design of that apology for Christianity, with which many of them were doubtless connected, but the main outlines of Pascal's body of thought can be clearly discerned.

The intellect of Pascal, so powerful in its grasp of scientific truth, could find by its own researches no certitude in the sphere of philosophy and religion. He had been deeply influenced by the sceptical mind of Montaigne. He found within him a passionate craving for certitude; man is so constituted that he can never be at rest until he rests in knowledge of the truth; but man, as he now exists, is incapable of ascertaining truth; he is weak and miserable, and yet the very consciousness of his misery is evidence of his greatness; "Nature confounds the Pyrrhonist, and reason the dogmatist;" "Man is but a reed, the feeblest of created things, but a reed which thinks." How is this riddle of human nature to be explained? Only in one way—by a recognition of the truth taught by religion, that human nature is fallen from its true estate, that man is a dethroned king. And how is the dissonance in man's nature to be overcome? Only in one way—through union with God made man; with Jesus Christ, the centre in which alone we find our weakness and the divine strength. Through Christ man is abased and lifted up—abased without despair, and lifted up without pride; in Him all contradictions are reconciled. Such, in brief, is the vital thought from which Pascal's apologetic proceeds. It does not ignore any of the external evidences of Christianity; but the irresistible evidence is that derived from the problem of human nature and the essential needs of the spirit—a problem which religion alone can solve, and needs which Christ alone can satisfy. Pascal's "Thoughts" are those of an eminent intelligence. But they are more than thoughts; they are passionate lyrical cries of a heart which had suffered, and which had found more than consolation; they are the interpretation of the words of his amulet—"Joie, joie, joie, pleurs de joie." The union of the ardour of a poet or a saint with the scientific rigour of a great geometer, of wit and brilliance with a sublime pathos, is among the rarest phenomena in literature; all this and more is found in Pascal.

CHAPTER III

The classical and Italian drama of the sixteenth century was literary, oratorical, lyrical; it was anything but dramatic. Its last representative, ANTOINE DE MONTCHRESTIEN (1575-1621), a true poet, and one whose life was a series of strange adventures, wrote, like his predecessors, rather for the readers of poetry than for the theatre. With a gift for style, and a lyrical talent, seen not only in the chants of the chorus, but in the general character of his dramas, he had little feeling for life and movement; his personages expound their feelings in admirable verse; they do not act. He attempted a tragedy—L'Écossaise—on the story of Mary, Queen of Scots, a theme beyond his powers. In essentials he belonged rather to the past, whose traditions he inherited, than to the future of the stage. But his feeling for grandeur of character, for noble attitudes, for the pathetic founded on admiration, and together with these the firm structure of his verse, seem to warrant one in thinking of him as in some respects a forerunner of Corneille.

At the HÔtel de Bourgogne, until 1599, the ConfrÈres de la Passion still exhibited the mediÆval drama. It passed away when their theatre was occupied by the company of Valleran Lecomte, who had in his pay a dramatist of inexhaustible fertility—ALEXANDRE HARDY (c. 1560 to c. 1630). During thirty years, from the opening of the seventeenth century onwards, Hardy, author of some six or seven hundred pieces, of which forty-one remain, reigned as master of the stage.¹ A skilful improvisor, devoid of genius, devoid of taste, he is the founder of the French theatre; he first made a true appeal to the people; he first showed a true feeling for theatrical effects. Wherever material suitable for his purposes could be caught at—ancient or modern, French, Italian, or Spanish—Hardy made it his own. Whatever form seemed likely to win the popular favour, this he accepted or divined. The AstrÉe had made pastoral the fashion; Hardy was ready with his pastoral dramas. The Italian and Spanish novels were little tragi-comedies waiting to be dramatised; forthwith Hardy cast them into a theatrical mould. Writing for the people, he was not trammelled by the unities of time and place; the mediÆval stage arrangements favoured romantic freedom. In his desire to please a public which demanded animation, action, variety, Hardy allowed romantic incident to predominate over character; hence, though he produced tragedies founded on legendary or historical subjects, his special talent is seen rather in tragi-comedy. He complicated the intrigue, he varied the scenes, he shortened the monologues, he suppressed or reduced the chorus—in a word, the drama in his hands ceased to be oratorical or lyrical, and became at length dramatic. The advance was great; and it was achieved by a hack playwright scrambling for his crusts of bread.

¹ Or thirty-four pieces, if ThÉagÈne et CariclÉe be reckoned as only one.

But to dramatic life and movement it was necessary that order, discipline, regulation should be added. The rules of the unities were not observed by Hardy—were perhaps unknown to him. But they were known to others. Jean de Schelandre (the pseudonym formed from the letters of his name being Daniel d'AnchÈres), in his vast drama in two parts, Tyr et Sidon, claimed all the freedom of the mysteries in varying the scene, in mingling heroic matter with buffoonery. In the edition of 1628 a preface appears by FranÇois Ogier, a learned churchman, maintaining that the modern stage, in accordance with altered circumstances, should maintain its rights to complete imaginative liberty against the authority of the Greeks, who presented their works before different spectators under different conditions. Ogier's protest was without effect. Almost immediately after its appearance the Sophonisbe of Jean de Mairet was given, and the classical tragedy of France was inaugurated on a popular stage. In the preface to his pastoral tragi-comedy Sylvanire, Mairet in 1631 formulated the doctrine of the unities. The adhesion of Richelieu and the advocacy of Chapelain insured their triumph. The "rules" came to be regarded as the laws of a literary species.

The influence of the Spanish drama, seen in the writings of Rotrou and others, might be supposed to make for freedom. It encouraged romantic inventions and ambitious extravagances of style. Much that is rude and unformed is united with a curiosity for points and laboured ingenuity in the dramatic work of ScudÉry, Du Ryer, Tristan l'Hermite. A greater dramatist than these showed how Spanish romance could coalesce with French tragedy in a drama which marks an epoch—the Cid; and the Cid, calling forth the judgment of the Academy, served to establish the supremacy of the so-called rules of Aristotle.

PIERRE CORNEILLE, son of a legal official, was born at Rouen in 1606. His high promise as a pupil of the Jesuits was not confirmed when he attempted to practise at the bar; he was retiring, and spoke with difficulty. At twenty-three his first dramatic piece, MÉlite, a comedy, suggested, it is told, by an adventure of his youth, was given with applause in Paris; it glitters with points, and is of a complicated intrigue, but to contemporaries the plot appeared less entangled and the style more natural than they seem to modern readers. The tragi-comedy, Clitandre, which followed (1632), was a romantic drama, crowded with extravagant incidents, after the manner of Hardy. In La Veuve he returned to the style of MÉlite, but with less artificial brilliance and more real vivacity; it was published with laudatory verses prefixed, in one of which ScudÉry bids the stars retire for the sun has risen. The scene is laid in Paris, and some presentation of contemporary manners is made in La Galerie du Palais and La Place Royale. It was something to replace the nurse of elder comedy by the soubrette. The attention of Richelieu was attracted to the new dramatic author; he was numbered among the five garÇons poÈtes who worked upon the dramatic plans of the Cardinal; but he displeased his patron by his imaginative independence. Providing himself with a convenient excuse, Corneille retired to Rouen.

These early works were ventures among which the poet was groping for his true way. He can hardly be said to have found it in MÉdÉe (1635), but it was an advance to have attempted tragedy; the grandiose style of Seneca was a challenge to his genius; and in the famous line—

we see the flash of his indomitable pride of will, we hear the sudden thunder of his verse. An acquaintance, M. de Chalon, who had been one of the household of Marie de MÉdicis, directed Corneille to the Spanish drama. The Illusion Comique, the latest of his tentative plays, is a step towards the Cid; its plot is fantastical, but in some of the fanfaronades of the braggart Matamore, imported from Spain, are pseudo-heroics which only needed a certain transposition to become the language of chivalric heroism. The piece closes with a lofty eulogy of the French stage.

The sun had indeed risen and the stars might disappear when in the closing days of 1636 the Cid was given in Paris at the ThÉÂtre du Marais; the eulogy of the stage was speedily justified by its author. His subject was found by Corneille in a Spanish drama, Las Mocedades del Cid, by Guilhem de Castro; the treatment was his own; he reduced the action from that of a chronicle-history to that of a tragedy; he centralised it around the leading personages; he transferred it in its essential causes from the external world of accident to the inner world of character; the critical events are moral events, victories of the soul, triumphs not of fortune but of the will. And thus, though there are epic episodes and lyric outbreaks in the play, the Cid definitely fixed, for the first time in France, the type of tragedy. The central tragic strife here is not one of rival houses. Rodrigue, to avenge his father's wrong, has slain the father of his beloved ChimÈne; ChimÈne demands from the King the head of her beloved Rodrigue. In the end Rodrigue's valour atones for his offence. The struggle is one of passion with honour or duty; the fortunes of the hero and heroine are affected by circumstance, but their fate lies in their own high hearts.

The triumph of Corneille's play was immense. The Cardinal, however, did not join in it. Richelieu's intractable poet had glorified Spain at an inconvenient moment; he had offered an apology for the code of honour when edicts had been issued to check the rage of the duel; yet worse, he had not been crushed by the great man's censure. The quarrel of the Cid, in which Mairet and ScudÉry took an embittered part, was encouraged by Richelieu. He pressed the Academy, of which Corneille was not a member until 1647, for a judgment upon the piece, and at length he was partially satisfied by a pronouncement, drawn up by Chapelain, which condemned its ethics and its violation of dramatic proprieties, yet could not deny the author's genius. Corneille was deeply discouraged, but prepared himself for future victories.

Until 1640 he remained silent. In that illustrious year Horace and Cinna were presented in rapid succession. From Spain, the land of chivalric honour, the dramatist passed to antique Rome, the mother and the nurse of heroic virtue. In the Cid the dramatic conflict is between love and filial duty; in Horace it is between love, on the one side, united with the domestic affections, and, on the other, devotion to country. In both plays the inviolable will is arbiter of the contention. The story of the Horatii and Curiatii, as told by Livy, is complicated by the union of the families through love and marriage; but patriotism requires the sacrifice of the tenderer passions. It must be admitted that the interest declines after the third act, and that our sympathies are alienated from the younger Horace by the murder of a sister; we are required to feel that a private crime, the offence of overstrained patriotism, is obliterated in the glory of the country. In Cinna we pass from regal to imperial Rome; the commonwealth is represented by Augustus; a great monarchy is glorified, but in the noblest way, for the highest act of empire is to wield supreme power under the sway of magnanimity, and to remain the master of all self-regarding passions. The conspiracy of Cinna is discovered; it is a prince's part to pardon, and Augustus rises to a higher empire than that of Rome by the conquest of himself. In both Horace and Cinna there are at times a certain overstrain, an excess of emphasis, a resolve to pursue heroism to all extremities; but the conception of moral grandeur is genuine and lofty; the error of Corneille was the error of an imagination enamoured of the sublime.

But are there not heroisms of religion as pure as those of patriotism? And must we go back to pagan days to find the highest virtue? Or can divine grace effect no miracles above those of the natural will? Corneille gives his answer to such a challenge in the tragedy of Polyeucte (1643). It is the story of Christian martyrdom; a homage rendered to absolute self-devotion to the ideal; a canticle intoned in celebration of heavenly grace. Polyeucte, the martyr, sacrifices to his faith not only life, but love; his wife, who, while she knew him imperfectly, gave him an imperfect love, is won both for God and for her husband by his heroism; she is caught away from her tenderness for SÉvÈre into the flame of Polyeucte's devout rapture; and through her SÉvÈre himself is elevated to an unexpected magnanimity. The family, the country, the monarchy, religion—these in turn were honoured by the genius of Corneille. He had lifted the drama from a form of loose diversion to be a great art; he had recreated it as that noblest pastime whose function is to exercise and invigorate the soul.

The transition from Polyeucte to Le Menteur, of the same year, is among the most surprising in literature.² From the most elevated of tragedies we pass to a comedy, which, while not belonging to the great comedy of character, is charmingly gay. We expect no grave moralities here, nor do we find them. The play is a free and original adaptation from a work of the Spanish dramatist Alarcon, but in Corneille's hands it becomes characteristically French. Young Dorante, the liar, invents his fictions through an irresistible genius for romancing. His indignant father may justly ask, Has he a heart? Is he a gentleman? But how can a youth with such a pretty wit resist the fascination of his own lies? He is sufficiently punished by the fact that they do not assist, but rather trouble, the course of his love adventure, and we demand no further poetical justice. In Corneille's art, tragedy had defined itself, and comedy was free to be purely comic; but it is also literary—light, yet solid in structure; easy, yet exact in style. The Suite du Menteur, founded on a comedy by Lope de Vega, has a curious attraction of its own, half-fantastic as it is, and half-realistic; yet it has shared the fate of all continuations, and could not attain the popularity of its predecessor. It lacks gaiety; the liar has sunk into a rascal, and we can hardly lend credence to the amendment in his mendacious habit when he applies the art of dissimulation to generous purposes.

² Polyeucte may possibly be as early as 1641.

These are the masterpieces of Corneille. Already in PompÉe, although its date is that of Polyeucte, while the great dramatist is present throughout, he is not always present at his best. It should not surprise us that Corneille preferred Lucan to Virgil. Something of the over-emphasis of the Pharsalia, his original, has entered into the play; but the pomp of the verse is no vulgar pomp. A graver fault is the want of a dramatic centre for the action, which tends too much towards the epic. Pompey is the presiding power of the tragedy; his spirit dominates the lesser characters; but he does not appear in person. The political interest develops somewhat to the subordination of the personal interest. Corneille's unhappy theory of later years, that love is unworthy of a place in high tragedy, save as an episode, is here exemplified in the passion of CÆsar for Cleopatra; but, in truth, love is too sovereign a power to admit of its being tagged to tragedy as an ornament.

Until 1636 Corneille was seeking his way. From 1636 to 1644 his genius soared on steady pinions. During the eight years that followed he triumphed, but he also faltered. Rodogune (1644), which he preferred to all his other plays, is certainly, by virtue of the enormity of the characters, the violence of the passions, the vastness of its crimes, the most romantic of his tragedies; it is constructed with the most skilful industry; from scene to scene the emotion is intensified and heightened until the great fifth act is reached; but if by incomparable audacity the dramatist attains the ideal, it is an ideal of horror. ThÉodore, a second play of martyrdom, fell far below Polyeucte. Heraclius is obscure through the complication of its intrigue. Don Sanche d'Aragon, a romantic tragi-comedy, is less admirable as a whole than in the more brilliant scenes. In the historical drama NicomÈde (1651), side by side with tragic solemnities appears matter of a familiar kind. It was the last great effort of its author's genius. The failure of Pertharite, in 1652, led to the withdrawal of Corneille from the theatre during seven years. He completed during his seclusion a rendering into verse of the Imitation of Jesus Christ. When he returned to the stage it was with enfeebled powers, which were overstrained by the effort of his will; yet he could still write noble lines, and in the tragedy-ballet of PsychÉ, in which Quinault and MoliÈre were his collaborators, the most charming verses are those of Corneille. His young rival Racine spoke to the hearts of a generation less heroic and swayed by tenderer passion, and the old man resented the change. Domestic sorrows were added to the grief of ill success in his art. Living simply, his means were narrow for his needs. The last ten years of his life were years of silence. He died in 1684, at the age of seventy-eight.

The drama of Corneille deals with what is extraordinary, but in what is extraordinary it seeks for truth. He finds the marvellous in the triumphs of the human will. His great inventive powers were applied to creating situations for the manifestation of heroic energy. History attracted him, because a basis of fact seemed to justify what otherwise could not be accepted as probable. Great personages suited his purpose, because they can deploy their powers on the amplest scale. His characters, men and women, act not through blind, instinctive passion, but with deliberate and intelligent force; they reason, and too often with casuistical subtlety, about their emotions. At length he came to glorify the will apart from its aims and ends, when tending even to crime, or acting, as it were, in the void. He thought much of the principles of his art, and embodied his conclusions in critical dissertations and studies of his own works. He accepted the rule of the unities of place and time (of which at first he was ignorant) as far as his themes permitted, as far as the rules served to concentrate action and secure verisimilitude. His mastery in verse of a masculine eloquence is unsurpassed; his dialogue of rapid statement and swift reply is like a combat with Roman short swords; in memorable single lines he explodes, as it were, a vast charge of latent energy, and effects a clearance for the progress of his action. His faults, like his virtues, are great; and though faults and virtues may be travestied, both are in reality alike inimitable.

Alone among Corneille's dramatic rivals, if they deserve that name—Du Ryer, Tristan, ScudÉry, Boisrobert, and others—JEAN ROTROU (1610-50) had the magnanimity to render homage to the master of his art. While still a boy he read Sophocles, and resolved that he would live for the dramatic art. His facility was great, and he had the faults of a facile writer, who started on his career at the age of nineteen. He could not easily submit to the regulation of the classical drama, and squandered his talents in extravagant tragi-comedies; but his work grew sounder and stronger towards the close. Saint Genest (1645), which is derived, but in no servile fashion, from Lope de Vega, recalls Polyeucte; an actor of the time of Diocletian, in performing the part of a Christian martyr, is penetrated by the heroic passion which he represents, confesses his faith, and receives its crown in martyrdom. The tragi-comedy Don Bernard de CabrÈre and the tragedy Venceslas of the following year exhibit the romantic and passionate sides of Rotrou's genius. The intemperate yet noble Ladislas has rashly and in error slain his brother; he is condemned to death by his father Venceslas, King of Poland, and he accepts his doom. The situation is such as Corneille might have imagined; but Rotrou's young hero in the end is pardoned and receives the kingdom. If their careless construction and unequal style in general forbade the dramas of Rotrou to hold the stage, they remained as a store from which greater artists than he could draw their material. His death was noble: the plague having broken out at Dreux, he hastened from Paris to the stricken town, disregarding all affectionate warnings, there to perform his duty as a magistrate; within a few days the inhabitants followed Rotrou's coffin to the parish church.

THOMAS CORNEILLE, the faithful and tender brother of "le grand Corneille," and his successor in the Academy, belongs to a younger generation. He was born in 1625, and did not die until near the close of the first decade of the eighteenth century. As an industrious playwright he imitated his brother's manner, and reproduced his situations with a feebler hand. Many of his dramas are of Spanish origin, comic imbroglios, tragic extravagances; they rather diverted dramatic art from its true way than aided its advance. Perhaps for this reason they were the more popular. His Timocrate (1656), drawn from the romance of ClÉopÂtre, and itself a romance written for the stage, had a success rarely equalled during the century. The hero is at once the enemy and the lover of the Queen of Argos; under one name he besieges her, under another he repels his own attack; he is hated and adored, the conquered and the conqueror. The languors of conventional love and the plaintive accents of conventional grief suited the powers of the younger Corneille. His Ariane (1672) presents a heroine, Ariadne, abandoned by Theseus, who reminds us of one of Racine's women, drawn with less certain lines and fainter colours. In Le Comte d'Essex history is transformed to a romance. Perhaps the greatest glory of Thomas Corneille is that his reception as an Academician became the occasion for a just and eloquent tribute to the genius of his brother uttered by Racine, when the bitterness of rivalry was forgotten and the offences of Racine's earlier years were nobly repaired.

CHAPTER IV

Before noticing the theories of classical poetry in the writings of its master critic, Boileau, we must glance at certain writers who belonged rather to the world of public life and of society than to the world of art, but who became each a master in literary craft, as it were, by an irresistible instinct. Memoirs, maxims, epistolary correspondence, the novel, in their hands took a distinguished place in the hierarchy of literary art.

FRANÇOIS VI., DUC DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD, Prince de Marsillac, was born in 1613, of one of the greatest families of France. His life is divided into two periods—one of passionate activity, when with romantic ardour he threw himself into the struggles of the Fronde, only to be foiled and disillusioned; and the other of bitter reflection, consoled by certain social successes, loyal friendships, and an unique literary distinction. His Maximes are the brief confession of his experience of life, an utterance of the pessimism of an aristocratic spirit, moulded into a form proper to the little world of the salon—each maxim a drop of the attar not of roses but of some more poignant and bitterly aromatic blossom. In the circle of Mme. de SablÉ, now an elderly prÉcieuse, a circle half-Epicurean, half-Jansenist, frivolously serious and morosely gay, the composition of maxims and "sentences" became a fashion. Those of La Rochefoucauld were submitted to her as to an oracle; five years were given to shaping a tiny volume; fifteen years to rehandling and polishing every phrase. They are like a collection of medals struck in honour of the conquests of cynicism. The first surreptitious edition, printed in Holland in 1664, was followed by an authorised edition in 1665; the number of maxims, at first 317, rose finally in 1678 to 504; some were omitted; many were reduced to the extreme of concision; under the influence of Mme. de la Fayette, in the later texts the indictment of humanity was slightly attenuated. "Il m'a donnÉ de l'esprit," said Mme. de la Fayette, "mais j'ai rÉformÉ son coeur."

The motto of the book, "Our virtues are commonly vices in disguise," expresses its central idea. La Rochefoucauld does not absolutely deny disinterested goodness; there may be some such instinctive virtue lying below all passions which submit to be analysed; he does not consider the love of God, the parental or the filial affections; but wherever he applies analysis, it is to reduce each apparently disinterested feeling to self-love. "We all have strength enough to endure the misfortunes of another;" "When vices desert us, we flatter ourselves with the belief that it is we who desert them;" "With true love it is as with apparitions—every one talks of them, but few persons have seen them;" "Virtues lose themselves in self-interest as rivers lose themselves in the sea;" "In the adversity of our best friends we always find something which does not displease us"—such are the moral comments on life graven in ineffaceable lines by La Rochefoucauld. He is not a philosophic thinker, but he is a penetrating and remorseless critic, who remains at one fixed point of view; self-interest is assuredly a large factor in human conduct, and he exposes much that is real in the heart of man; much also that is not universally true was true of the world in which he had moved; whether we accept or reject his doctrine, we are instructed by a statement so implacable and so precise of the case against human nature as he saw it. Pitiless he was not himself; perhaps his artistic instinct led him to exclude concessions which would have marred the unity of his conception; possibly his vanity co-operated in producing phrases which live and circulate by virtue of the shock they communicate to our self-esteem. The merit of his Maximes as examples of style—a style which may be described as lapidary—is incomparable; it is impossible to say more, or to say it more adequately, in little; but one wearies in the end of the monotony of an idea unalterably applied, of unqualified brilliance, of unrelieved concision; we anticipate our surprise, and its purpose is defeated. Traces of preciosity are found in some of the earliest sentences; that infirmity was soon overcome by La Rochefoucauld, and his utterances become as clear and as hard as diamond.

He died at the age of sixty-seven, in the arms of Bossuet. His Memoires,¹ relating to the period of the Fronde, are written with an air of studied historical coldness, which presents a striking contrast to the brilliant vivacity of Retz.

¹ Ed. 1662, surreptitious and incomplete; complete ed., 1868-1884.

The most interesting figure of the Fronde, its portrait-painter, its analyst, its historian, is CARDINAL DE RETZ (1614-1679). Italian by his family, and Italian in some features of his character, he had, on a scale of grandeur, the very genius of conspiracy. When his first work, La Conjuration de Fiesque, was read by Richelieu, the judgment which that great statesman pronounced was penetrating—"VoilÀ un dangereux esprit." Low of stature, ugly, ill-made, short-sighted, Retz played the part of a gallant and a duellist. Never had any one less vocation for the spiritual duties of an ecclesiastic; but, being a churchman, he would be an illustrious actor on the ecclesiastical stage. There was something demoniac in his audacity, and with the spirit of turbulence and intrigue was united a certain power of self-restraint. When fallen, he still tried to be magnificent, though in disgrace: he would resign his archbishopric, pay his enormous debts, resign his cardinalate, exhibit himself as the hero in misfortune. "Having lived as a Catiline," said Voltaire, "he lived as an Atticus." In retirement, as his adventurous life drew towards its close, he wrote, at the request of Madame de Caumartin, those Memoirs which remained unpublished until 1717, and which have insured him a place in literature only second to Saint-Simon.

It was an age remarkable for its memoirs; those of Mlle. de Montpensier, of Mme. de Motteville, of Bussy-Rabutin are only a few of many. The MÉmoires of Retz far surpass the rest not only in their historical interest, but in their literary excellence. Arranging facts and dates so that he might superbly figure in the drama designed for future generations, he falsifies the literal truth of things; but he lays bare the inner truth of politics, of life, of character, with incomparable mastery. He exposes the disorder of his conduct in early years with little scruple. The origins of the Fronde are expounded in pages of profound sagacity. His narrative has all the impetuosity, all the warmth and hues of life, all the tumult and rumour of action; he paints, but in painting he explains; he touches the hidden springs of passion; his portraits of contemporaries are not more vivid in their colours than they are searching in their psychology: and in his style there is that negligent grandeur which belongs rather to the days of Louis XIII. than to the age of his successor, when language grew more exact for the intelligence, but lost much of its passion and untamed energy.

The epistolary art, in which the art itself is nature, may be said to have reached perfection, with scarcely an historical development, in the letters of MME. DE SÉVIGNÉ. The letters of Balzac are rhetorical exercises; those of Voiture are often, to use a word of Shakespeare, "heavy lightness, serious vanity." Mme. de SÉvignÉ entered into the gains of a cultivated society, in which graceful converse had become a necessity of existence. She wrote delightfully, because she conveyed herself into her letters, and because she conversed freely and naturally by means of her pen. Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, born in 1626, deprived of both parents in her earliest years, was carefully trained in literary studies—Latin, Italian, French—under the superintendence of her uncle, "le bien bon," the AbbÉ de Coulanges. Among her teachers were the scholar MÉnage and the poet Chapelain. Married at eighteen to an unworthy husband, the Marquis Henri de SÉvignÉ, she was left at twenty-five a widow with two children, the daughter whom she loved with excess of devotion, and a son, who received from his mother a calmer affection. She saw the life of the court, she was acquainted with eminent writers, she frequented the HÔtel de Rambouillet (retaining from it a touch of preciosity, "one superfluous ribbon," says Nisard, "in a simple and elegant toilet"), she knew and loved the country and its rural joys, she read with excellent judgment and eager delight the great books of past and present times.

When her daughter, "the prettiest girl in France," was married in 1669 to M. de Grignan, soon to be Lieutenant-General of Provence, Mme. de SÉvignÉ, desiring to be constantly one with her, at least in thought, transferred into letters her whole life from day to day, together with much of the social life of the time during a period of nearly thirty years. She allowed her pen to trot, throwing the reins, as she says, upon its neck; but if her letters are improvisations, they are improvisations regulated by an exquisite artistic instinct. Her imagination is alert in discovering, combining, and presenting the happiest meanings of reality. She is gay, witty, ironical, malicious, and all this without a trace of malignity; amiable rather than passionate, except in the ardour of her maternal devotion, which sometimes proved oppressive to a daughter who, though not unloving, loved with a temperate heart; faithful to friends, loyal to those who had fallen into misfortune, but neither sentimental nor romantic, nor disposed to the generosities of a universal humanity; a woman of spirit, energy, and good sense; capable of serious reflection, though not of profound thought; endowed with an exquisite sense of the power of words, and, indeed, the creator of a literary style. While her interests were in the main of a mundane kind, she was in sympathy with Port-Royal, admired the writings of Pascal, and deeply reverenced Nicole. Domestic affairs, business (concern for her children having involved her in financial troubles), the aristocratic life of Paris and Versailles, literature, the pleasures and tedium of the country, the dulness or gaiety of a health-resort, the rise and fall of those in power, the petty intrigues and spites and follies of the day—these, and much besides, enter into Mme. de SÉvignÉ's records, records made upon the moment, with all the animation of an immediate impression, but remaining with us as one of the chief documents for the social history of the second half of the seventeenth century. In April 1696 Mme. de SÉvignÉ died.

Beside the letters addressed to her daughter are others—far fewer in number—to her cousin Bussy-Rabutin, to her cousin Mme. de Coulanges, to Pomponne, and other correspondents. In Bussy's MÉmoires et Correspondance (1696-97) first appeared certain of her letters; a collection, very defective and inaccurate, was published in 1726; eight years later the first portion of an authorised text was issued under the sanction of the writer's grand-daughter; gradually the material was recovered, until it became of vast extent; even since the appearance of the edition among the Grands Écrivains de la France two volumes of Lettres inÉdites have been published.

Among the other letter-writers of the period, perhaps the most distinguished were Mme. de SÉvignÉ's old and attached friend Mme. de la Fayette, and the woman of supreme authority with the King, Mme. de Maintenon. A just view of Mme. de Maintenon's character has been long obscured by the letters forged under her name by La Beaumelle, and by the bitter hostility of Saint-Simon. On a basis of ardour and sensibility she built up a character of unalterable reason and good sense. Her letters are not creations of genius, unless practical wisdom and integrity of purpose be forms of genius. She does not gossip delightfully; at times she may seem a little hard or dry; but her reason is really guided by human kindness. "Her style," wrote a high authority, DÖllinger, "is clear, terse, refined, often sententious; her business letters are patterns of simplicity and pregnant brevity. They might be characterised as womanly yet manly, so well do they combine the warmth and depth of womanly feeling with the strength and lucidity of a masculine mind." The foundation of Saint-Cyr, for the education of girls wellborn but poor, was the object of her constant solicitude; there she put out her talents as a teacher and guide of youth to the best interest; there she found play for her best affections: "C'est le lieu," she said, "de dÉlices pour moi."

The friend of Madame de SÉvignÉ, the truest woman whom La Rochefoucauld had ever known, MADAME DE LA FAYETTE was the author of two historical works, of which one is exquisite—a memorial of her friend the Duchess of Orleans, and of two—perhaps three—romances, the latest of which, in the order of chronology, is the masterpiece of seventeenth-century fiction. Marie de la Vergne, born in 1634, a pupil of MÉnage, married at twenty-one to M. de la Fayette, became the trusted companion of the bright and gracious Henrietta of England. It is not that part of Madame's life, when she acted as intermediary between Louis XIV. and her brother, Charles II., that is recorded by her friend: it is the history of her heart. Nothing is more touching in its simplicity than the narrative of Madame's last moments; it serves as the best possible comment on the pathetic Funeral Oration of Bossuet. We have no grounds for asserting that the married life of Madame de la Fayette was unhappy, except through the inadequacy of a husband whose best qualities seem to have been of a negative kind. During the fifteen years which preceded the death of La Rochefoucauld her friendship for him was the centre of her existence. She seemed to bear about with her some secret grief; something remained veiled from other friends than he, and they named her le Brouillard. She outlived her friend by thirteen years, and during ten was widowed. In 1693 she died.

Her earliest novel, La Princesse de Montpensier (1662), a tale of the days of the Valois and of St. Bartholomew, is remarkable for its truthful pictures of the manners of the court, its rendering of natural and unexaggerated feeling, and for the fact that it treats of married life, occupying itself with such themes as have been dealt with in many of its modern successors. The Zayde, of eight years later, was written in collaboration with Segrais. It is in La Princesse de ClÈves (1678) that the genius and the heart of Madame de la Fayette find a perfect expression. The Princess, married to a husband who loves her devotedly, and whom she honours, but whose feelings she cannot return, is tempted by the brilliant Duc de Nemours and by the weakness of her own passion, to infidelity. She resolves to confide her struggle to her husband, and seek in him a protector against herself. The hard confession is made, but a grievous and inevitable change has passed over their lives. Believing himself deceived, M. de ClÈves is seized by a fever and dies, not without the consolation of learning his error. Nemours renews his vows and entreaties; the Princess refuses his hand, and atones for her error in cloistered seclusion. The tale has lost none of its beauty and pathos after a lapse of two centuries. Does it reveal the hidden grief of the writer's life? And was her friend, the Duc de la Rochefoucauld, delivered from his gout and more than a score of years, transformed by Madame de la Fayette into the foiled lover of her tale?

CHAPTER V

The great name in criticism of the second half of the seventeenth century is that of Boileau. But one of whom Boileau spoke harshly, a soldier, a man of the world, the friend of Ninon de l'Enclos, a sceptical Epicurean, an amateur in letters, Saint-Évremond (1613-1703), among his various writings, aided the cause of criticism by the intuition which he had of what is excellent, by a fineness of judgment as far removed from mere licence as from the pedantry of rules. Fallen into disfavour with the King, Saint-Évremond was received into the literary society of London. His criticism is that of a fastidious taste, of balance and moderation, guided by tradition, yet open to new views if they approved themselves to his culture and good sense. Had his studies been more serious, had his feelings been more generous and ardent, had his moral sense been less shallow, he might have made important contributions to literature. As it was, to be a man of the world was his trade, to be a writer was only an admirable foible.

NICOLAS BOILEAU, named DESPRÉAUX, from a field (prÉ) of his father's property at Crosne, was born in Paris, 1636, son of the registrar of the Grand Chambre du Palais. His choice of a profession lay between the Church and that with which his father was connected—the law; but though he made some study of theology, and was called to the bar, his inclination for literature could not be resisted. His whole life, indeed, was that of a man of letters—upright, honourable, serious, dignified, simple; generous to the friends whose genius he could justly applaud; merciless to books and authors condemned by his reason, his good sense, his excellent judgment. He was allied by an ardent admiration to Racine, and less intimately to MoliÈre, La Fontaine, and Chapelle; Jansenist through his religious sympathies, and closely attached to the venerable Arnauld; appointed historiographer to the King (1677) together with Racine; an Academician by the King's desire, notwithstanding the opposition of his literary enemies. In his elder years his great position of authority in the world of letters was assured, but he suffered from infirmities of body, and from an increasing severity of temper. In 1711 he died, bequeathing a large sum of money to the poor.

Boileau's literary career falls into three periods—the first, militant and destructive, in which he waged successful war against all that seemed to him false and despicable in art; the second, reconstructive, in which he declared the doctrine of what may be termed literary rationalism, and legislated for the French Parnassus; the third, dating from his appointment as historiographer, a period of comparative repose and, to some extent, of decline, but one in which the principles of his literary faith were maintained and pressed to new conclusions. His writings include twelve satires (of which the ninth, "A son Esprit," is the chief masterpiece); twelve epistles (that to Racine being pre-eminent); the literary-didactic poem, L'Art PoÉtique; a heroi-comical epic, Le Lutrin; miscellaneous shorter poems (among which may be noted the admirable epitaph on Arnauld, and an unhappy ode, Sur la Prise de Namur, 1693); and various critical studies in prose, his Lucianic dialogue Les HÉros de Roman, satirising the extravagant novels not yet dismissed to oblivion, and his somewhat truculent RÉflexions sur Longin being specially deserving of attention. The satires preceded in date the epistles; of the former, the first nine belong to the years 1660-67; the first nine of the epistles to the years 1669-77; three satires and three epistles may be described as belated. The year 1674 is memorable as that in which were published L'Art PoÉtique and the first four chants of Le Lutrin.

The genius of Boileau was in a high degree intellectual, animated by ideas; but it is an error to suppose that a sensuous element is absent from his verse. It is verse of the classical school, firm and clear, but it addresses the ear with a studied harmony, and what Boileau saw he could render into exact, definite, and vivid expression. His imagination was not in a large sense creative; he was wholly lacking in tenderness and sensibility; his feeling for external nature was no more than that of a Parisian bourgeois who enjoys for a day the repose of the fields; but for Paris itself, its various aspects, its life, its types, its manners, he had the eye and the precise rendering of a realist in art; his faithful objective touch is like that of a Dutch painter. As a moralist, he is not searching or profound; he saw too little of the inner world of the heart, and knew too imperfectly its agitations. When, however, he deals with literature—and a just judgment in letters may almost be called an element in morals—all his penetration and power become apparent.

To clear the ground for the new school of nature, truth and reason was Boileau's first task. It was a task which called for courage and skill. The public taste was still uncertain. Laboured and lifeless epics like Chapelain's La Pucelle, petty ingenuities in metre like those of Cotin, violence and over-emphasis, extravagances of sentiment, faded preciosities, inane pastoralisms, gross or vulgar burlesques, tragedies languorous and insipid, lyrics of pretended passion, affectations from the degenerate Italian literature, super-subtleties from Spain—these had still their votaries. And the conduct of life and characters of men of letters were often unworthy of the vocation they professed. "La haine d'un sot livre" was an inspiration for Boileau, as it afterwards was for our English satirist Pope; and he felt deeply that dignity of art is connected with dignity of character and rectitude of life—"Le vers se sent toujours des bassesses de coeur." He struck at the follies and affectations of the world of letters, and he struck with force: it was a needful duty, and one most effectively performed. Certain of the Epistles, which are written with less pitiless severity and with a more accomplished mastery of verse, continue the work of the Satires. From Horace he derived much, something from Juvenal, and something from his predecessor Regnier; but he had not the lightness nor the bonhomie of Horace, nor his easy and amiable wisdom.

In the Art PoÉtique Boileau is constructive; he exhibits the true doctrine of literature, as he conceived it. Granted genius, fire, imagination—the gifts of heaven—what should be the self-imposed discipline of a poet? Above all, the cultivation of that power which distinguishes false from true, and aids every other faculty—the reason. "Nothing," declares Boileau, "is beautiful save what is true;" nature is the model, the aim and end of art; reason and good sense discern reality; they test the fidelity of the artistic imitation of nature; they alone can vouch for the correspondence of the idea with its object, and the adequacy of the expression to the idea. What is permanent and universal in literature lives by the aid of no fashion of the day, but by virtue of its truth to nature. And hence is derived the authority of the ancient classics, which have been tried by time and have endured; these we do not accept as tyrants, but we may safely follow as guides.

To study nature is, however, before all else to study man—that is, human nature—and to distinguish in human nature what is universal and abiding from what is transitory and accidental; we cannot be expected to discover things absolutely new; it suffices to give to what is true a perfect expression. Unhappily, human nature, as understood by Boileau, included little beyond the court and the town. Unhappily his appreciation of classical literature was defective; to justify as true and natural the mythology of Greece he has to regard it as a body of symbols or a moral allegory. Unhappily his survey of literature was too narrow to include the truths and the splendours of MediÆval poetry and art. For historical truth, indeed, he had little sense; seeking for what is permanent and universal, he had little regard for local colour and the truth of manners. To secure assent from contemporary minds truth must assume what they take to be its image, and a Greek or Roman on the stage must not shock the demand for verisimilitude made by the courtly imagination of the days of Louis Quatorze. Art which fails to please is no longer art.

To the workmanship, the technique of poetry, Boileau attaches a high importance. Its several species—idyl, elegy, ode, sonnet, epigram, rondeau, ballade, madrigal, satire, epic, tragedy, comedy—are separated from one another by fixed boundaries, and each is subject to its own rules; but genius, on occasion, may transcend those rules, and snatch an unauthorised grace. It is difficult to understand why from among the genres of poetry Boileau omitted the fable; perhaps he did not regard its form, now in verse and now in prose, as defined; possibly he was insensible of the perfection to which the fable in verse had been carried by La Fontaine. The fourth chant of the Art PoÉtique is remarkable for its lofty conception of the position of the poet; its counsels express the dignity of the writer's own literary life. He has been charged not only with cruelty as a satirist, but with the baseness of a flatterer of the great. It would be more just to notice the honourable independence which he maintained, notwithstanding his poetical homage to the King, which was an inevitable requisition. Boileau's influence as a critic of literature can hardly be overrated; it has much in common with the influence of Pope on English literature—beneficial as regards his own time, somewhat restrictive and even tyrannical upon later generations.

Le Lutrin (completed in 1683) is not a burlesque which degrades a noble theme, but, like Pope's far more admirable Rape of the Lock, a heroi-comic poem humorously exalting humble matter of the day. It tells of the combats of ecclesiastics respecting the position of a lectern, combats in which the books of a neighbouring publisher serve as formidable projectiles. The scene is in the Sainte-Chapelle and the Palais de Justice. Boileau's gift for the vivid presentation of visible detail, and his skill in versification, served him here better than did his choice of a subject. On the whole, we think of him less as a poet than as the classical guardian and legislator of poetry. He was an emancipator by directing art towards reason and truth; when larger interpretations of truth and reason than his became possible, his influence acted unfavourably as a constraint.

All that Boileau lacked as a poet was possessed by the most easy and natural of the singers of his time—one whose art is like nature in its freedom, while yet it never wrongs the delicate bounds of art. JEAN DE LA FONTAINE was born in 1621 at ChÂteau-Thierry, in Champagne, son of the "maÎtre des eaux et forÊts." His education was less of a scholastic kind than an education derived from books read for his own pleasure, and especially from observation or reverie among the woods and fields, with their population of bird, beast, and insect, so dear to his heart and his imagination. Slipping away from theology and law, he passed ten years, from twenty-three to thirty-three, in seeming indolence, a "bon garÇon," irreclaimably wayward as regards worldly affairs, but already drawing in to himself all that fed his genius, all sights and sounds of nature, all the lore of old poets, story-tellers, translators, and already practising his art of verse. Nothing that was not natural to him, and wholly to his liking, would he or could he do; but happily he was born to write perfect verses, and the labour of the artist was with him an instinct and a delight. He allowed himself to be married to a pretty girl of fifteen, and presently forgot that he had a wife and child, drifted away, and agreed in 1659 to a division of goods; but his carelessness and egoism were without a touch of malignity, those of an overgrown child rather than of a man.

In 1654 he published a translation of the Eunuch of Terence of small worth, and not long after was favoured with the patronage of Fouquet, the superintendant of finance. To him La Fontaine presented his Adonis, a narrative poem, graceful, picturesque, harmonious, expressing a delicate feeling for external nature rarely to be found in poetry of the time, and reviving some of the bright Renaissance sense of antiquity. The genius of France is united in La Fontaine's writings with the genius of Greece. But the verses written by command for Fouquet are laboured and ineffective. His ill-constructed and unfinished Songe de Vaux, partly in prose, partly in verse, was designed to celebrate his patron's ChÂteau de Vaux.

Far happier than this is the poem in dialogue ClymÈne, a dramatic fantasy, in which Apollo on Mount Parnassus learns by the aid of the Muses the loves of Acante (La Fontaine) and ClymÈne (Madame X ...), a rural beauty, whom the god had seen wandering on the banks of Hippocrene. On the fall of his magnificent patron La Fontaine did not desert him, pleading in his ÉlÉgie aux Nymphes de Vaux on behalf of the disgraced minister. As a consequence, the poet retired for a time from Paris to banishment at Limoges. But in 1664 he is again in Paris or at ChÂteau-Thierry, his native place, where the Duchesse de Bouillon, niece of Mazarin, young, gay, pleasure-loving, bestowed on him a kind protection. His tedious paraphrase of PsychÉ, and the poem Quinquina, in which he celebrates the recovery from illness of the Duchess, were performances of duty and gratitude rather than of native impulse; but the tendencies of her salon, restrained neither by the proprieties of the classical doctrine in literature nor those of religious strictness, may have encouraged him to the production of his Contes.

In Paris, from 1661 to 1664 joyous meetings took place in Boileau's rooms in the Rue du Colombier of a distinguished group, which included MoliÈre, Chapelle, Racine, and La Fontaine. La Fontaine, the bonhomme, who escaped from the toil of conversation which did not interest him in shy or indolent taciturnity, could be a charming talker with companions of his choice. Probably to Boileau's urgency is due the first original publication of La Fontaine, a little volume of Nouvelles en Vers (1664-1665), containing the Joconde, a tale from Ariosto, and a comic story versified from Boccaccio. Almost immediately there followed a collection of ten Contes, with the author's name upon the title-page, and at various later dates were published added tales, until five parts completed the series. The success was great, but great also was the scandal, for the bonhomme, drawing from Boccaccio, the Heptameron, the Cent Nouvelles nouvelles, Rabelais, Petronius, AthenÆus, and other sources, had exhibited no more regard for decency than that which bestows the graces of lightness, brightness, wit, and gaiety upon indecency. His unabashed apology was that the artistic laws of the conte obliged him to decline the laws of modesty; and among those who applauded his tales were the Duchess de Bouillon and Mme. de SÉvignÉ. It is indeed impossible not to applaud their skill in rapid and easy narrative, and the grace, freedom, and spontaneity of the verse.

The first six books of the Fables appeared in 1668; the next five in two parts, in 1678 and 1679; the twelfth and last book in 1694. When the PsychÉ was published, soon after the first group of the Fables, the prose and verse were placed in a graceful setting, which tells of the converse of the author with his friends Boileau, Racine, and MoliÈre (or possibly Chapelle) in the midst of the unfinished gardens of Versailles, where the author of PsychÉ, named happily Polyphile (for he loved many things, and among them his friends), will read his romance for his literary comrades.

Some of his friends before long had passed away, but others came to fill their places. For many years he was cared for and caressed by the amiable and cultivated Mme. de SabliÈre, and when she dismissed other acquaintances she still kept "her dog, her cat, and her La Fontaine." The Academy would have opened its doors to him sooner than to Boileau, but the King would not have it so, and he was admitted (1684) only when he had promised Louis XIV. henceforth to be sage. When Mme. de SabliÈre died, Hervart, maÎtre des requÊtes, one day offered La Fontaine the hospitality of his splendid house. "I was on my way there," replied the poet. After a season of conversion, in which he expressed penitence for his "infamous book" of Contes, the bonhomme tranquilly died in April 1693. "He is so simple," said his nurse, "that God will not have courage to damn him." "He was the most sincere and candid soul," wrote his friend Maucroix, who had been intimate with him for more than fifty years, "that I have ever known; never a disguise; I don't know that he spoke an untruth in all his life."

All that is best in the genius of La Fontaine may be found in his Fables. The comedies in which he collaborated, the CaptivitÉ de Saint Malc, written on the suggestion of the Port-Royalists, the miscellaneous poems, though some of these are admirable, even the Contes, exhibit only a fragment of his mind; in the Fables the play of his faculties is exquisite, and is complete. His imagination was unfitted for large and sustained creation; it operated most happily in a narrow compass. The Fables, however, contain much in little; they unite an element of drama and of lyric with narrative; they give scope to his feeling for nature, and to his gift for the observation of human character and society; they form, as he himself has said—

He had not to invent his subjects; he found them in all the fabulists who had preceded him—Greek, Latin, Oriental, elder French writers—"j'en lis qui sont du Nord et qui sont du Midi;" but he may be said to have recreated the species. From an apologue, tending to an express moral, he converted the fable into a conte, in which narrative, description, observation, satire, dialogue have an independent value, and the moral is little more than an accident. This is especially true of the midmost portion of the collection—Books vii.-ix.—which appeared ten years after the earliest group. He does not impose new and great ideas on the reader; he does not interpret the deepest passions; he takes life as he sees it, as an entertaining comedy, touched at times with serious thought, with pathos, even with melancholy, but in the main a comedy, which teaches us to smile at the vanities, the follies, the egoisms of mankind, and teaches us at the same time something of tenderness and pity for all that is gentle or weak. His morality is amiable and somewhat epicurean, a morality of indulgence, of moderation, of good sense. His eye for what is characteristic and picturesque in animal life is infallible; but his humanised wild creatures are also a playful, humorous, ironical presentation of mankind and of the society of his own day, from the grand monarch to the bourgeois or the lackey.

La Fontaine's language escapes from the limitations of the classical school of the seventeenth century; his manifold reading in elder French literature enriched his vocabulary; he seems to light by instinct upon the most exact and happiest word. Yet we know that the perfection of his art was attained only as the result of untiring diligence; indolent and careless as he was in worldly affairs, he was an indefatigable craftsman in poetry. His verse is as free as it is fine; it can accomplish whatever it intends; now it is light and swift, but when needful it can be grave and even magnificent:

It is verse which depends on no mechanical rules imposed from without; its life and movement come from within, and the lines vary, like a breeze straying among blossoms, with every stress or relaxation of the writer's mood. While La Fontaine derives much from antiquity, he may be regarded as incarnating more than any other writer of his century the genius of France, exquisite in the proportion of his feeling and the expression of feeling to its source and cause. If we do not name him, with some of his admirers, "the French Homer," we may at least describe him, with Nisard, as a second Montaigne, "mais plus doux, plus aimable, plus naÏf que le premier," and with all the charm of verse superadded.

CHAPTER VI

I

The history of comedy, from Larivey to MoliÈre, is one of arrested development, followed by hasty and ill-regulated growth. During the first twenty-five years of the seventeenth century, comedy can hardly be said to have existed; whatever tended to beauty or elevation, took the form of tragi-comedy or pastoral; what was rude and popular became a farce. From the farce MoliÈre's early work takes its origin, but of the repertory of his predecessors little survives. Much, indeed, in these performances was left to the improvisation of the burlesque actors. Gros-Guillaume, Gaultier-Garguille, Turlupin, Tabarin, rejoiced the heart of the populace; but the farces tabariniques can hardly be dignified with the name of literature.

In 1632 the comedy of intrigue was advanced by Mairet in his Galanteries du Duc d'Ossone. The genius of Rotrou, follower though he was of Plautus, tended towards the tragic; if he is really gay, it is in La Soeur (1645), a bright tangle of extravagant incidents. For Rotrou the drama of Italy supplied material; the way to the Spanish drama was opened by d'Ouville, the only writer of the time devoted specially to comedy, in L'Esprit Follet (1641); once opened, it became a common highway. Scarron added to his Spanish originals in Jodelet and Don Japhet d'ArmÉnie his own burlesque humour. The comedy of contemporary manners appears with grace and charm in Corneille's early plays; the comedy of character, in his admirable Le Menteur. Saint-Évremond satirised literary affectations in La ComÉdie des AcadÉmistes; these and other follies of the time are presented with spirit in Desmaret's remarkable comedy, Les Visionnaires. If we add, for sake of its study of the peasant in the character of Mathieu Gareau, the farcical PÉdant JouÉ of Cyrano, we have named the most notable comedies of the years which preceded Les PrÉcieuses Ridicules.

Their general character is extravagance of resources in the plot, extravagance of conception in the characters. Yet in both intrigue and characters there is a certain monotony. The same incidents, romantic and humorous, are variously mingled to produce the imbroglio; the same typical characters—the braggart, the parasite, the pedant, the extravagant poet, the amorous old man, the designing woman, the knavish valet, the garrulous nurse—play their mirthful parts. If the types are studied from real life rather than adopted from Italian or Spanish models, they are exaggerated to absurdity. Corneille alone is distinguished by delicacy of imagination and the finer touch of a dexterous artist.

JEAN-BAPTISTE POQUELIN, who, when connected with the stage, named himself MOLIÈRE, was born in January 1622, in Paris, the son of a prosperous upholsterer, Jean Poquelin, and Marie CressÉ, his wife. Educated at the CollÈge de Clermont, he had among his fellow-pupils the Prince de Conti, Chapelle, the future poet Hesnault, the future traveller Bernier. There seems to be no sufficient reason to doubt that he and some of his friends afterwards received lessons in philosophy from Gassendi, whose influence must have tended to loosen him from the traditional doctrines, and to encourage independence of thought. A translation by MoliÈre of the great poem of Lucretius has been lost, but a possible citation from it appears in the second act of the Misanthrope. Legal studies followed those of philosophy. But MoliÈre had other ends in view than either those of an advocate or of the hereditary office of upholsterer to the King. In 1643, at the age of twenty-one, he decided to throw in his lot with the theatrical company in which Madeleine BÉjart and her brothers were leading members. The Illustre ThÉÂtre was constituted, but Paris looked askance at the illustrious actors; debt, imprisonment, and release through friendly aid, formed the net result of MoliÈre's first experiment.

The troupe decided at the close of 1645 or in the early days of the following year to try their fortune in the provinces. It is needless to follow in detail their movements during twelve years—twelve years fruitful in experience for one who observed life with keenest eyes, years of toil, in which the foundations of his art were laid. At Lyons, probably in 1655, possibly in 1653, a comedy, founded on the Italian of Nicolo Barbieri, L'Étourdi, saw the light, and MoliÈre revealed himself as a poet. Young LÉlie, the Étourdi, is enamoured of the beautiful CÉlie, whom the merchant Trufaldin, old and rich, has purchased from corsairs. LÉlie's valet Mascarille, who is the life of the play, invents stratagem on stratagem to aid the lover, and is for ever foiled by his master's indiscretions, until the inevitable happy dÉnouement arrives. The romantic intrigue is conventional; the charm is in the vivacity and colour of the style. In 1656 Le DÉpit Amoureux was given with applause at BÉziers; much is derived from the Italian of Secchi, something perhaps from Terence; the tender scenes of lovers' quarrels and lovers' reconciliation, contrasting with the franker comedy of the loves of waiting-maid and valet, still live, if the rest of the play be little remembered.

The years of apprenticeship were over when, in 1658, MoliÈre and his company once more in Paris presented, by command, before the King, Corneille's NicomÈde, and, leave being granted, gave his farce in the Italian style, the Docteur Amoureux, before pleased spectators. The company was now the troupe of Monsieur, the King's brother, with the Petit-Bourbon as theatre, and there, in November 1659, was enacted MoliÈre's first satiric play on contemporary manners, Les PrÉcieuses Ridicules. We do not need the legendary old man crying from the pit "Courage, MoliÈre! voilÀ la bonne comÉdie" to assure us that the comic stage possessed at length a masterpiece. The dramatist had himself known the prÉcieuses of the provinces; through them he might with less danger exhibit the follies of the HÔtel de Rambouillet and the ruelles of the capital. The good bourgeois Gorgibus is induced by his niece and daughter, two prÉcieuses, to establish himself in Paris. Their aspirant lovers, unversed in the affectations of the salon, are slighted and repelled; in revenge they employ their valets, Mascarille and Jodelet, to play the parts of men of fashion and of taste. The exposure and confusion of the ladies, with an indignant rebuke from Gorgibus, close the piece. It was a farce raised to the dignity of comedy. MoliÈre's triumph was the triumph of good sense.

After a success in Sganarelle (1660), a broad comedy of vulgar jealousy, and a decided check—the only one in his dramatic career—in the somewhat colourless tragi-comedy Don Garcie de Navarre (1661), MoliÈre found a theme, suggested by the Adelphi of Terence, which was happily suited to his genius. L'École des Maris (1661) contrasts two methods of education—one suspicious and severe, the other wisely indulgent. Two brothers, Ariste and Sganarelle, seek the hands of their wards, the orphan sisters Isabelle and LÉonor; the amiable Ariste, aided by the good sense of a gay soubrette, is rewarded with happiness; the vexatious Sganarelle is put to confusion. The drama is a plea, expressing the writer's personal thoughts, for nature and for freedom. The comedy of manners is here replaced by the comedy of character. Its success suggested to Fouquet that MoliÈre might contribute to the amusement of the King at the fÊtes of the ChÂteau de Vaux; in fifteen days the dramatist had his bright improvisation Les FÂcheux ready, a series of character sketches in scenes rather than a comedy. The King smiled approval, and, it was whispered, hinted to MoliÈre that another bore might with advantage be added to the collection—the sportsman whose talk shall be of sport. At Fontainebleau he duly appeared before his Majesty, and unkind spectators recognised a portrait of the Marquis de Soyecourt.

Next February (1662) MoliÈre, aged forty, was married to the actress Armande BÉjart, whose age was half his own—a disastrous union, which caused him inexpressible anxiety and unhappiness. In L'École des Femmes of the same year he is wiser than he had shown himself in actual life. Arnolphe would train a model wife from childhood by the method of jealous seclusion and in infantile ignorance; but love, in the person of young Horace, finds out a way. There is pathos in the anguish of Arnolphe; yet it is not the order of nature that middle-aged folks should practise perverting arts upon innocent affections. The charming AgnÈs belongs of right to Horace, and the over-wise, and therefore foolish, Arnolphe must quit the scene with his despairing cry. Some matter of offence was found by the devout in MoliÈre's play; it was the opening of a long campaign; the prÉcieuses, the dainty gentle-folk, the critical disciples of Aristotle, the rival comedians, were up in arms. MoliÈre for the occasion ignored the devout; upon the others he made brilliant reprisals in La Critique de l'École des Femmes (1663) and L'Impromptu de Versailles (1663).

Among those who war against nature and human happiness, not the least dangerous foe is the religious hypocrite. On May 12, 1664, MoliÈre presented before the King the first three acts of his great character-comedy Tartufe. Instantly Anne of Austria and the King's confessor, now Archbishop of Paris, set to work; the public performance of "The Hypocrite" was inhibited; a savage pamphlet was directed against its author by the curÉ of Saint-BarthÉlemy. Private representations, however, were given; Tartufe, in five acts, was played in November in presence of the great CondÉ. In 1665 MoliÈre's company was named the servants of the King; two years later a verbal permission was granted for the public performance of the play. It appeared under the title of L'Imposteur; the victory seemed won, when again, and without delay, the blow fell; by order of the President, M. de Lamoignon, the theatre was closed. MoliÈre bore up courageously. The King was besieging Lille; MoliÈre despatched two of his comrades to the camp, declaring that if the Tartufes of France should carry all before them he must cease to write. The King was friendly, but the Archbishop fulminated threats of excommunication against any one who should even read the play. At length in 1669, when circumstances were more favourable, Louis XIV. granted the desired permission; in its proper name MoliÈre's play obtained complete freedom. Bourdaloue might still pronounce condemnation; Bossuet might draw terrible morals from the author's sudden death; an actor, armed with the sword of the comic spirit, had proved victorious. And yet the theologians were not wholly wrong; the tendency of MoliÈre's teaching, like that of Rabelais and like that of Montaigne, is to detach morals from religion, to vindicate whatever is natural, to regard good sense and good feeling as sufficient guides of conduct.

There is an accent of indignation in the play; the follies of men and women may be subjects of sport; base egoism assuming the garb of religion deserves a lash that draws the blood. Is it no act of natural piety to defend the household against the designs of greedy and sensual imposture; no service to society to quicken the penetration of those who may be made the dupes of selfish craft? While Organ and his mother are besotted by the gross pretensions of the hypocrite, while the young people contend for the honest joy of life, the voice of philosophic wisdom is heard through the sagacious ClÉante, and that of frank good sense through the waiting-maid, Dorine. Suddenly a providence, not divine but human, intervenes in the representative of the monarch and the law, and the criminal at the moment of triumph is captured in his own snare.

When the affair of Tartufe was in its first tangle, MoliÈre produced a kind of dramatic counterpart—Don Juan, ou le Festin de Pierre (1665). In Don Juan—whose valet Sganarelle is the faithful critic of his master—the dramatist presented one whose cynical incredulity and scorn of all religion are united with the most complete moral licence; but hypocrisy is the fashion of the day, and Don Juan in sheer effrontery will invest himself for an hour in the robe of a penitent. Atheist and libertine as he is, there is a certain glamour of reckless courage about the figure of his hero, recreated by MoliÈre from a favourite model of Spanish origin. His comedy, while a vigorous study of character, is touched with the light of romance.

These are masterpieces; but neither Tartufe nor Don Juan expresses so much of the mind of MoliÈre as does Le Misanthrope (1666). His private griefs, his public warfare, had doubtless a little hardened and a little embittered his spirit. In many respects it is a sorry world; and yet we must keep on terms with it. The misanthropist Alceste is nobly fanatical on behalf of sincerity and rectitude. How does his sincerity serve the world or serve himself? And he, too, has his dose of human folly, for is he not enamoured of a heartless coquette? Philinte is accommodating, and accepts the world for what it is; and yet, we might ask, is there not a more settled misanthropy in such cynical acquiescence than there is in the intractable virtue of Alceste? Alone of MoliÈre's plays, Le Misanthrope has that Shakespearean obscurity which leaves it open to various interpretations. It is idle to try to discover actual originals for the characters. But we may remember that when Alceste cried to CÉlimÈne, "C'est pour mes pÉchÉs que je vous aime," the actors who stood face to face were MoliÈre and the wife whom he now met only on the stage.

MoliÈre's genius could achieve nothing higher than Tartufe and the Misanthrope. His powers suffered no decline, but he did not again put them to such strenuous uses. In 1668 the brilliant fantasy of Amphitryon, freely derived from Plautus, was succeeded by an admirable comedy in prose, Georges Dandin, in which the folly of unequal marriage between the substantial farmer and the fine lady is mocked with bitter gaiety. Before the year closed MoliÈre, continuing to write in prose, returned to Plautus, and surpassed him in L'Avare. To be rich and miserly is in itself a form of fatuity; but Harpagon is not only miserly but amorous, as far as a ruling passion will admit one of subordinate influence. Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (1670), a lesson of good sense to those who suffer from the social ambition to rise above their proper rank, is wholly original; it mounts in the close from comedy to the extravagance of farce, and perhaps in the uproarious laughter of the play we may discover a touch of effort or even of spasm. The operatic PsychÉ (1671) is memorable as having combined the talents of MoliÈre, Corneille, and Quinault, with the added musical gifts of Lulli.

In Les Femmes Savantes (1672) MoliÈre returned to an early theme, with variations suited to the times. The HÔtel de Rambouillet was closed; the new tribe of prÉcieuses had learnt the Cartesian philosophy, affected the sciences, were patronesses of physics, astronomy, anatomy. Something of the old romantic follies survived, and mingled strangely with the pretensions to science and the pedantries of erudition. Trissotin (doubtless a portrait in caricature from the AbbÉ Cotin) is the Tartufe of spurious culture; Vadius (a possible satire of MÉnage) is a pedant, arrogant and brutal. Shall the charming Henriette be sacrificed to gratify her mother's domineering temper and the base designs of an impostor? The forces are arrayed on either side; the varieties of learned and elegant folly in woman are finely distinguished; of the opposite party are Chrysale, the bourgeois father with his rude common-sense; the sage Ariste; the faithful servant, Martine, whose grammar may be faulty, but whose wit is sound and clear; and Henriette herself, the adorable, whom to know is more of a liberal education than to have explored all the Greek and Latin masters of Vadius and Trissotin. The final issue of the encounter between good sense, good nature, reason and folly, pedantry and pride, cannot be uncertain.

Le Malade Imaginaire was written when MoliÈre was suffering from illness; but his energy remained indomitable. The comedy continued that long polemic against the medical faculty which he had sustained in L'Amour MÉdecin, Monsieur de Pourceaugnac, and other plays. MoliÈre had little faith in any art which professes to mend nature; the physicians were the impostors of a learned hygiene. It was the dramatist's last jest at the profession. While playing the part of Argan on February 17, 1673, the "Malade Imaginaire" fell dying on the stage; he forced a laugh, but could not continue his part; at ten o'clock he was no more. Through the exertions of his widow a religious funeral was permitted to an actor who had died unfortified by the rites of the Church.

Many admirable though slighter pieces served as the relief of his mind between the effort of his chief works. In all, gaiety and good sense interpenetrate each other. Kindly natured and generous, MoliÈre, a great observer, who looked through the deeds of men, was often taciturn—le contemplateur of Boileau—and seemingly self-absorbed. Like many persons of artistic temperament, he loved splendour of life; but he was liberal in his largess to those who claimed his help. He brought comedy to nature, and made it a study of human life. His warfare was against all that is unreal and unnatural. He preached the worth of human happiness, good sense, moderation, humorous tolerance. He does not indulge in heroics, and yet there is heroism in his courageous outlook upon things. The disciple of MoliÈre cannot idealise the world into a scene of fairyland; he will conceive man as far from perfect, perhaps as far from perfectible; but the world is our habitation; let us make it a cheerful one with the aid of a sane temper and an energetic will. As a writer, MoliÈre is not free from faults; but his defects of style are like the accidents that happen within the bounds of a wide empire. His stature is not diminished when he is placed among the greatest European figures. "I read some pieces of MoliÈre's every year," said Goethe, "just as from time to time I contemplate the engravings after the great Italian masters. For we little men are not able to retain the greatness of such things within ourselves."

To study the contemporaries and immediate successors of MoliÈre in comedy—Thomas Corneille, Quinault, Montfleury, Boursault, Baron—would be to show how his genius dominates that of all his fellows. The reader may well take this fact for granted.¹

¹ An excellent guide will be found in Victor Fournel's Le ThÉÂtre au xvii. SiÈcle, La ComÉdie.

II

With the close of the sanguinary follies of the Fronde, with the inauguration of the personal government of Louis XIV. and the triumph of an absolute monarchy, a period of social and political reorganisation began. The court became the centre for literature; to please courtiers and great ladies was to secure prosperity and fame; the arts of peace were magnificently ordered; the conditions were favourable to ideals of grace and beauty rather than of proud sublimity; to isolate one's self was impossible; literature became the pastime of a cultivated society; it might be a trivial pastime, but in fitting hands it might become a noble pleasure.

The easier part was chosen by PHILIPPE QUINAULT, the more arduous by Racine. Quinault (1635-88) had given his first comedy as early as 1653; in tragedies and tragi-comedies which followed, he heaped up melodramatic incidents, but could not base them upon characters strongly conceived, or passion truly felt. A frigid sentimentality replaces passion, and this is expressed with languorous monotony. Love reigns supreme in his theatre; but love, as interpreted by Quinault, is a kind of dulcet gallantry. His tragedy Astrate (1663) was not the less popular because its sentiment was in the conventional mode. One comedy by Quinault, La MÈre Coquette, is happy in its plot and in its easy style. But he did not find his true direction until he declined—or should we rather say, until he rose?—into the librettist for the operas of Lulli. His lyric gifts were considerable; he could manipulate his light and fragile material with extraordinary skill. The tests of truth and reality were not applied to such verse; if it was decorative, the listeners were satisfied. The opera flourished, and literature suffered through its pseudo-poetics. But the libretti of Quinault and the ballets of Benserade are representative of the time, and in his mythological or chivalric inventions Benserade sometimes could attain to the poetry of graceful fantasy.

Quinault retired from the regular drama almost at the moment when Racine appeared. Born at La FertÉ-Milon in 1639, son of a procureur and comptroller of salt, JEAN RACINE lost both parents while a child. His widowed grandmother retired to Port-Royal in 1649. After six years' schooling at Beauvais the boy passed into the tutelage of the Jansenists, and among his instructors was the devout and learned Nicole. Solitude, religion, the abbey woods, Virgil, Sophocles, Euripides—these were the powers that fostered his genius. Already he was experimenting in verse. At nineteen he continued his studies in Paris, where the little abbÉ Le Vasseur, who knew the salons and haunted the theatre, introduced him to mundane pleasures. Racine's sensitive, mobile character could easily adapt itself to the world. His ode on the marriage of the King, La Nymphe de la Seine, corrected by Chapelain (for to bring Tritons into a river was highly improper), won him a gift of louis d'or. But might not the world corrupt the young Port-Royalist's innocence? The company of ladies of the Marais Theatre and that of La Fontaine might not tend to edification. So thought Racine's aunts; and, with the expectation that he would take orders, he was exiled to UzÈs, where his uncle was vicar-general, and where the nephew could study the Summa of theology, but also the Odyssey, the odes of Pindar, Petrarch, and the pretty damsels who prayed in the cathedral church.

In 1663 he was again in Paris, was present at royal levÉes, and in Boileau's chambers renewed his acquaintance with La Fontaine, and became a companion of MoliÈre. His vocation was not that of an ecclesiastic. Two dramatic works of earlier date are lost; his first piece that appeared before the public, La ThÉbaÏde, was presented in 1664 by MoliÈre's company. It is a tragedy written in discipleship to Rotrou and to Corneille, and the pupil was rather an imitator of Corneille's infirmities than of his excellences. Alexandre followed towards the close of the ensuing year—a feeble play, in which the mannered gallantry of the time was liberally transferred to the kings of India and their Macedonian conqueror. But amorous sighs were the mode, and there was a young grand monarch who might discover himself in the person of the magnanimous hero. The success was great, though Saint-Évremond pronounced his censures, and Corneille found ridiculous the trophies erected upon the imagined ruins of his own. Discontented with the performers at the Palais-Royal, Racine offered his play to the HÔtel de Bourgogne; MoliÈre's best actress seceded to the rival house. Racine's ambition may excuse, but cannot justify an injurious act; a breach between the friends was inevitable.

Boileau remained now, as ever, loyal—loyal for warning as well as for encouragement. Nicole, the former guide of Racine's studies, in his Visionnaires, had spoken of dramatic poets as "public poisoners." The reproach was taken to himself by Racine, and in two letters, written with some of the spirit of the Provinciales, he turned his wit against his Jansenist friends. Thanks to Boileau's wise and firm counsel, the second of these remained unpublished.

Madame de SÉvignÉ was the devoted admirer of the great Corneille, but when she witnessed his young rival's Andromaque she yielded to its pathos six reluctant tears. On its first appearance in 1667 a triumph almost equal to that of the Cid was secured. Never before had grace and passion, art and nature, ideality and truth, been so united in the theatre of France. Racine did not seek for novelty in the choice of a subject; Euripides had made Andromache familiar to the Greek stage. The invention of Racine was of a subtler kind than that which manufactures incidents and constructs a plot. Like Raphael in the art of painting, he could accept a well-known theme and renew it by the finest processes of genius. He did not need an extraordinary action, or personages of giant proportions; the simpler the intrigue, the better could he concentrate the interest on the states of a soul; the more truly and deeply human the characters, the more apt were they for betraying the history of a passion. In its purity of outline, its harmony of proportions, Andromaque was Greek; in its sentiment, it gained something from Christian culture; in its manners, there was a certain reflection of the Versailles of Louis XIV. It was at once classical and modern, and there was no discordance between qualities which had been rendered, to borrow a word from Shakespeare, "harmonious charmingly." With Andromaque French tragedy ceased to be oratorical, and became essentially poetic.

Adversaries there were, such as success calls forth; the irritable poet retorted with epigrams of a kind which multiply and perpetuate enmities. His true reprisal was another work, Britannicus, establishing his fame in another province of tragedy. But before Britannicus appeared he had turned aside, as if his genius needed recreation, to produce the comedy, or farce, or buffoonery, or badinage, or mockery (for it is all these), Les Plaideurs. It may be that his failure in a lawsuit moved Racine to have his jest at the gentlemen of the Palais; he and his friends of the tavern of the Mouton Blanc—FuretiÈre among them—may have put their wits together to devise material for laughter, and discussed how far The Wasps of Aristophanes could be acclimatised in Paris. At first the burlesque was meant for an Italian troupe, but Scaramouche left the town, and something more carefully developed would be expected at the HÔtel de Bourgogne. The play was received with hisses, but MoliÈre did not fear to laugh at what was comic, whether he laughed according to the rules or against them. A month later, at a court performance, Louis XIV. laughed loudly; the courtiers quickly discovered Racine's wit, and the laughter was echoed by all loyal citizens. In truth, there is laughing matter in the play; the professional enthusiasm of Dandin, the judge, who wears his robe and cap even in bed, the rage and rapture of litigation in Chicanneau and the Countess, have in them something of nature beneath the caricature; in the buffoonery there is a certain extravagant grace.

Les Plaideurs, however, was only an interlude between graver efforts. Britannicus (1669), founded on the Annals of Tacitus, exhibits with masterly power Nero's adolescence in crime; the young tiger has grace and strength, but the instinct of blood needs only to be awakened within him. Agrippine is a superb incarnation of womanly ambition, a Roman sister of Athalie. The play was at first coldly received; Corneille and his cabal did not spare their censures. In a preface Racine struck back, but afterwards repented of his bitter words and withdrew them. The critics, as he says in a later preface, disappeared; the piece remained. His conception of tragedy in contrast with that of Corneille was defined by him in memorable words—what is natural should be sought rather than what is extraordinary; the action should be simple, "chargÉe de peu de matiÈre"; it should advance gradually towards the close, sustained by the interests, sentiments, and passions of the personages.

The sprightly Henrietta of England, Duchess of Orleans, seems to have conceived the idea of bringing the rivalry between the old dramatic poet and his young successor to a decisive test. She proposed to each, without the other's knowledge, a subject for a tragedy—the parting, for reasons of State policy, of two royal lovers, Titus, Emperor of Rome, and BÉrÉnice, Queen of Palestine. Perhaps Henrietta mischievously thought of the relations of her friend Marie de Mancini with Louis XIV. The plays appeared almost simultaneously in November 1670; Corneille's was before long withdrawn; Racine's BÉrÉnice, in which the penetrating voice of La ChampmeslÉ interpreted the sorrows of the heroine, obtained a triumph. Yet the elegiac subject is hardly suited to tragedy; a situation rather than an action is presented; it needed all the poet's resources to prevent the scenes from being stationary. In BÉrÉnice there is a suavity in grief which gives a grace to her passion; the play, if not a drama of power, is the most charming of elegiac tragedies.

Bajazet (1672), a tragedy of the seraglio, although the rÔle of the hero is feeble, has virile qualities. The fury of Eastern passion, a love resembling hate, is represented in the Sultana Roxane. In the Vizier Acomat, deliberate in craft, intrepid in danger, Racine proved, as he proved by his Nero and his Joad, that he was not always doomed to fail in his characters of men. The historical events were comparatively recent; but in the perspective of the theatre, distance may produce the idealising effect of time. The story was perhaps found by Racine in Floridon, a tale by Segrais. The heroine of Mithridate (1673), the noble daughter of Ephesus, Monime, queen and slave, is an ideal of womanly love, chastity, fidelity, sacrifice; gentle, submissive, and yet capable of lofty courage. The play unites the passions of romance with a study of large political interests hardly surpassed by Corneille. The cabal which gathered head against Bajazet could only whisper its malignities when Mithridate appeared.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER VII

I

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the embittered controversy with his brother-Bishop of Cambrai, on the significance of which the singular autobiography of Madame Guyon¹ throws much light, Bossuet remained the victor. It was a contention between dogmatic rectitude and the temper of emotional religion. Bossuet was at first unversed in the writings of the Catholic mystics. Being himself a fully-formed will, watchful and armed for obedience and command—the "man under authority"—he rightly divined the dangers to dogmatic faith arising from self-abandonment to God within the heart. The elaborate structure of orthodoxy seemed to dissolve in the ardour of a personal emotion; it seemed to him another form of the individualism which he condemned. The Church was a great objective reality; it had laid down a system of belief. A love of God which ignored the method of God, was but a spurious love, leading to destruction.

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

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

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

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

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

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

II

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

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

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

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

III

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER VIII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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