VI

Lyrical self-confession reached its limit in the poetry of Musset. Detachment from self and complete surrender to the object is the law of Gautier's most characteristic work; he is an eye that sees, a hand that moulds and colours—that is all. A child of the South, born at Tarbes in 1811, THEOPHILE GAUTIER was a pupil in the painter Rioult's studio till the day when, his friend the poet Gerard de Nerval having summoned him to take part in the battle of Hernani, he swore by the skull from which Byron drank that he would not be a defaulter. His first volume, Poesies, appeared in 1830, and was followed in two years by Albertus, a fantastic manufacture of strangeness and horror, amorous sorcery, love-philtres, witches' Sabbaths. The Comedie de la Mort evokes the illustrious shades of Raphael, Faust, Don Juan to testify to the vanity of knowledge and glory and art and love. Gautier's romantic enthusiasm was genuine and ardent. The Orientales was his poetic gospel; but the Orientales is precisely the volume in which Hugo is least effusive, and pursues art most exclusively for art's sake. Love and life and death in these early poems of Gautier are themes into which he works coloured and picturesque details; sentiment, ideas are of value to him so far as they can be rendered in images wrought in high relief and tinctured with vivid pigments.

It was the sorrow of Gautier's life, that born, as he believed, for poetry, he was forced to toil day after day, year after year, as a critic of the stage and of the art-exhibitions. He performed his task in workman-like fashion, seeking rather to communicate impressions than to pronounce judgments. His most valuable pieces of literary criticism are his exhumations of the earlier seventeenth-century poets—Theophile, Cyrano, Saint-Amant, Scarron, and others—published in 1844, together with a study of Villon, under the title Les Grotesques, and the memoir of 1867, drawn up in compliance with the request of the Minister of Public Instruction, on Les Progres de la Poesie Francaise depuis 1830. A reader of that memoir to-day will feel, with Swift, that literary reputations are dislimned and shifted as quickly and softly as the forms of clouds when the wind plays aloft.

In 1840 Gautier visited Spain; afterwards he saw Italy, Algeria, Constantinople, Russia, Greece. He travelled not as a student of life or as a romantic sentimentalist. He saw exactly, and saw all things in colour; the world was for him so much booty for the eye. Endowed with a marvellous memory, an unwearied searcher of the vocabulary, he could transfer the visual impression, without a faltering outline or a hue grown dim, into words as exact and vivid as the objects which he beheld. If his imagination recomposed things, it was in the manner of some admired painter; he looked on nature through the medium of a Zurbaran or a Watteau. The dictionary for Gautier was a collection of gems that flashed or glowed; he chose and set them with the skill and precision of a goldsmith enamoured of his art. At Athens, in one of his latest wanderings, he stood in presence of the Parthenon, and found that he was a Greek who had strayed into the Middle Ages; on the faith of Notre-Dame de Paris he had loved the old cathedrals; "the Parthenon," he writes, "has cured me of the Gothic malady, which with me was never very severe."

Gautier's tales attained one of their purposes, that of astonishing the bourgeois; yet if he condescended to ideas, his ideas on all subjects except art had less value than those of the philistine. Mademoiselle de Maupin has lost any pretensions it possessed to supereminent immorality; its sensuality is that of a dream of youth; such purity as it possesses, compared with books of acrid grossness, lies in the fact that the young author loved life and cared for beauty. In shorter tales he studiously constructs strangeness—the sense of mystery he did not in truth possess—on a basis of exactly carved and exactly placed material. His best invention is the tale of actors strolling in the time most dear to his imagination, the old days of Louis XIII., Le Capitaine Fracasse, suggested doubtless by Scarron's Roman Comique, and patiently retouched during a quarter of a century.

Gautier as a poet found his true self in the little pieces of the Emaux et Camees. He is not without sensibility, but he will not embarrass himself with either feelings or ideas. He has emancipated himself from the egoism of the romantic tendency. He sees as a painter or a gem-engraver sees, and will transpose his perceptions into coloured and carven words. That is all, but that is much. He values words as sounds, and can combine them harmoniously in his little stanzas. Life goes on around him; he is indifferent to it, caring only to fix the colour of his enamel, to cut his cameo with unfaltering hand. When the Prussian assault was intended to the city, when Regnault gave away his life as a soldier, Gautier in the Muses' bower sat pondering his epithets and filing his phrases. Was it strength, or was it weakness? His work survives and will survive by virtue of its beauty—beauty somewhat hard and material, but such as the artist sought. In 1872 Gautier died. By directing art to what is impersonal he prepared the way for the Parnassien school, and may even be recognised as one of the lineal predecessors of naturalism.

These—Lamartine, Vigny, Hugo, Musset, Gautier—are the names which represent the poetry of nineteenth-century romance; four stars of varying magnitudes, and one enormous cometary apparition. There was also a via lactea, from which a well-directed glass can easily disentangle certain orbs, pallid or fiery: Sainte-Beuve, a critic and analyst of moral disease and disenchantment in the Vie, Poesies et Pensees de Joseph Delorme; a singer of spiritual reverie, modest pleasures, modest griefs, and tender memories in the Consolations and the Pensees d'Aout; a virtuoso always in his metrical researches; Auguste Barbier, eloquent in his indignant satires the Iambes, lover of Italian art and nature in Il Pianto; Auguste Brizeux, the idyllist, in his Marie, of Breton wilds and provincial works and ways; Gerard de Nerval, Hegesippe Moreau, Madame Desbordes-Valmore, and paler, lessening lights. These and others dwindle for the eye into a general stream of luminous atoms.

VII

The weaker side of the romantic school is apparent in the theatre. It put forth a magnificent programme of dramatic reform, which it was unable to carry out. The preface to Victor Hugo's Cromwell (1827) is the earliest and the most important of its manifestoes. The poetry of the world's childhood, we are told, was lyrical; that of its youth was epic; the poetry of its maturity is dramatic. The drama aims at truth before all else; it seeks to represent complete manhood, beautiful and revolting, sublime and grotesque. Whatever is found in nature should be found in art; from multiple elements an aesthetic whole is to be formed by the sovereignty of imagination; unity of time, unity of place are worthless conventions; unity of action remains, and must be maintained. The play meant to exemplify the principles of Hugo's preface is of vast dimensions, incapable of presentation on the stage; the large painting of life for which he pleaded, and which he did not attain, is of a kind more suitable to the novel than to the drama. Cromwell, which departs little from the old rules respecting time and place, is a flux and reflux of action, or of speeches in place of action, with the question of the hero's ambition for kingship as a centre; its personages are lay figures draped in the costumes of historical romance.

The genius of Hugo was pre-eminently lyrical; the movement to which he belonged was also essentially lyrical, a movement for the emancipation of the personal element in art; it is by qualities which are non-dramatic that his dramas are redeemed from dishonour. When, in 1830, his Hernani was presented at the Theatre Francais, a strange, long-haired, bearded, fantastically-attired brigade of young supporters engaged in a melee with those spectators who represented the tyranny of tradition. "Kill him! he is an Academician," was heard above the tumult. Gautier's truculent waistcoat flamed in the thickest of the fight. The enthusiasm of Gautier's party was justified by splendours of lyrism and of oratory; but Hugo's play is ill-constructed, and the characters are beings of a fantastic world. In Marion Delorme, in Le Roi s'amuse, in the prose-tragedy Lucrece Borgia, Victor Hugo develops a favourite theme by a favourite method—the moral antithesis of some purity of passion surviving amid a life of corruption, the apotheosis of virtue discovered in a soul abandoned to vice, and exhibited in violent contrasts. Marion is ennobled by the sacrifice of whatever remains to her of honour; the moral deformity of Lucrece is purified by her instinct of maternal love; the hideous Triboulet is beautiful by virtue of his devotion as a father. The dramatic study of character is too often replaced by sentimental rhetoric. Ruy Blas, like Marion Delorme and Hernani, has extraordinary beauties; yet the whole, with its tears and laughter, its lackey turned minister of state, its amorous queen, is an incredible phantasmagoria. Angelo is pure melodrama; Marie Tudor is the melodrama of history. Les Burgraves rises from declamation to poetry, or sinks from poetry to declamation; it is grandiose, epic, or, if the reader please, symbolic; it is much that it ought not to be, much that is admirable and out of place; failing in dramatic truth, it fails with a certain sublimity. The logic of action, truth of characterisation, these in tragic creation are essentials; no heights or depths of poetry which is non-dramatic can entirely justify works which do not accept the conditions proper to their kind.

The tragedy of Torquemada, strange in conception, wonderful—and wonderfully unequal—in imaginative power, was an inspiration of Hugo's period of exile, wrought into form in his latest years. The dramas of the earlier period, opening with an historical play too enormous for the stage, closed in 1843 with Les Burgraves, which is an epic in dialogue. Aspiring to revolutionary freedom, the romantic drama disdained the bounds of art; epic, lyric, tragedy, comedy met and mingled, with a result too often chaotic. The desired harmony of contraries was not attained. Past ages were to be revived upon the stage. The historic evocation possessed too often neither historic nor human truth; it consisted in "local colour," and local colour meant a picturesque display of theatrical bric-a-brac. Yet a drama requires some centre of unity. Failing of unity in coherent action and well-studied character, can a centre be provided by some philosophical or pseudo-philosophical idea? Victor Hugo, wealthy in imagery, was not wealthy in original ideas; in grandiose prefaces he attempted to exhibit his art as the embodiment of certain abstract conceptions. A great poet is not necessarily a philosophical poet. Hugo's interpretations of his own art are only evidence of the fact that a writer's vanity can practise on his credulity.

Among the romantic poets the thinker was Vigny. But it is not by its philosophical symbolism that his Chatterton lives; it is by virtue of its comparative strength of construction, by what is sincere in its passion, what is genuine in its pathos, and by the character of its heroine, Kitty Bell. In the instincts of a dramaturgist both Vigny and Hugo fell far short of ALEXANDRE DUMAS (1803-70). Before the battle of Hernani he had unfolded the romantic banner in his Henri III. et sa Cour (1829); it dazzled by its theatrical inventions, its striking situations, its ever-changing display of the stage properties of historical romance. His Antony, of two years later, parent of a numerous progeny, is a domestic tragedy of modern life, exhaling Byronic passion, misanthropy, crime, with a bastard, a seducer, a murderer for its hero, and for its ornaments all those atrocities which fascinate a crowd whose nerves can bear to be agreeably shattered. Something of abounding vitality, of tingling energy, of impetuosity, of effrontery, secured a career for Antony, the Tour de Nesle, and his other plays. The trade in horrors lost its gallant freebooting airs and grew industriously commercial in the hands of Frederic Soulie. When in 1843—the year of Hugo's unsuccessful Les Burgraves—a pseudo-classical tragedy, the Lucrece of Ponsard, was presented on the stage, the enthusiasm was great; youth and romance, if they had not vanished, were less militant than in the days of Hernani; it seemed as if good sense had returned to the theatre.[2]

[Footnote 2: The influence of the great actress Rachel helped to restore to favour the classical theatre of Racine and Corneille.]

Casimir Delavigne (1793-1843) is remembered in lyric poetry by his patriotic odes, Les Messeniennes, suggested by the military disasters of France. His dramatic work is noteworthy, less for the writer's talent than as indicating the influence of the romantic movement in checking the development of classical art. Had he been free to follow his natural tendencies, Delavigne would have remained a creditable disciple of Racine; he yielded to the stream, and timidly approached the romantic leaders in historical tragedy. Once in comedy he achieved success; L'Ecole des Vieillards has the originality of presenting an old husband who is generous in heart, and a young wife who is good-natured amid her frivolity. Comedy during the second quarter of the century had a busy ephemeral life. The name of Eugene Scribe, an incessant improvisator during forty years, from 1811 onwards, in comedy, vaudeville, and lyric drama, seems to recall that of the seventeenth-century Hardy. His art was not all commerce; he knew and he loved the stage; a philistine writing for philistines, Scribe cared little for truth of character, for beauty of form; the theatrical devices became for him ends in themselves; of these he was as ingenious a master as is the juggler in another art when he tosses his bewildering balls, or smiles at the triumph of his inexplicable surprises.



CHAPTER IV THE NOVEL

I

The novel in the nineteenth century has yielded itself to every tendency of the age; it has endeavoured to revive the past, to paint the present, to embody a social or political doctrine, to express private and personal sentiment, to analyse the processes of the heart, to idealise life in the magic mirror of the imagination. The literature of prose fiction produced by writers who felt the influence of the romantic movement tended on the one hand towards lyrism, the passionate utterance of individual emotion—George Sand's early tales are conspicuous examples; on the other hand it turned to history, seeking to effect a living and coloured evocation of former ages. The most impressive of these evocations was assuredly Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris. It was not the earliest; Vigny's Cinq-Mars preceded Notre-Dame by five years. The writer had laboriously mastered those details which help to make up the romantic mise en scene; but he sought less to interpret historical truth by the imagination than to employ the material of history as a vehicle for what he conceived to be ideal truth. In Merimee's Chronique de Charles IX. (1829), which also preceded Hugo's romance, the historical, or, if not this, the archaeological spirit is present; it skilfully sets a tale of the imagination in a framework of history.

Hugo's narratives are eminent by virtue of his imagination as a poet; they are lyrical, dramatic, epic; as a reconstitution of history their value is little or is none. The historical novel fell into the hands of Alexandre Dumas. No one can deny the brilliance, the animation, the bustle, the audacity, the inexhaustible invention of Les Trois Mousquetaires and its high-spirited fellows. There were times when no company was so inspiriting to us as that of the gallant Athos, Porthos, and Aramis. Let the critics assure us that Dumas' history is untrue, his characters superficial, his action incredible; we admit it, and we are caught again by the flash of life, the fanfaronade of adventure. We throw Eugene Sue to the critics that we may save Alexandre Dumas. But Dumas' brain worked faster than his hand—or any human hand—could obey its orders; the mine of his inventive faculty needed a commercial company and an army of diggers for its exploitation. He constituted himself the managing director of this company; twelve hundred volumes are said to have been the output of the chief and his subordinates; the work ceased to be literature, and became mere commerce. The money that Dumas accumulated he recklessly squandered. Half genius, half charlatan, his genius decayed, and his charlatanry grew to enormous proportions. Protected by his son, he died a poor man amid the disasters of the Franco-Prussian war.

II

HENRI BEYLE, who wrote under the pseudonym of Stendhal, not popular among his contemporaries, though winning the admiration of Merimee and the praise of Balzac, predicted that he would be understood about 1880. If to be studied and admired is to be understood, the prediction has been fulfilled. Taine pronounced him the greatest psychologist of the century; M. Zola, doing violence to facts, claimed him as a literary ancestor; M. Bourget discovered in him the author of a nineteenth-century Bible and a founder of cosmopolitanism in letters. During his lifetime Beyle was isolated, and had a pride in isolation. Born at Grenoble in 1783, he had learnt, during an unhappy childhood, to conceal his natural sensibility; in later years this reserve was pushed to affectation. He served under Napoleon with coolness and energy; he hated the Restoration, and, a lover of Italian manners and Italian music, he chose Milan for his place of abode. The eighteenth-century materialists were the masters of his intellect; "the only excuse for God," he declared, "is that he does not exist"; in man he saw a being whose end is pleasure, whose law is egoism, and who affords a curious field for studying the dynamics of the passions. He honoured Napoleon as an incarnation of force, the greatest of the condottieri. He loved the Italian character because the passions in Italy manifest themselves with the sudden outbreaks of nature. He indulged his own passions as a refuge from ennui, and turned the scrutiny of his intelligence upon every operation of his heart. Fearing to be duped, he became the dupe of his own philosophy. He aided the romantic movement by the paradox that all the true classical writers were romantic in their own day—they sought to please their time; the pseudo-classical writers attempt to maintain a lifeless tradition. But he had little in common with the romantic school, except a love for Shakespeare, a certain feeling for local colour, and an interest in the study of passion; the effusion and exaltation of romance repelled him; he laboured to be "dry," and often succeeded to perfection.

His analytical study De l'Amour, resting on a sensual basis, has all the depth and penetration which is possible to a shallow philosophy. His notes on travel and art anticipate in an informal way the method of criticism which became a system in the hands of Taine; in a line, in a phrase, he resolves the artist into the resultant of environing forces. His novels are studies in the mechanics of the passions and the will. Human energy, which had a happy outlet in the Napoleonic wars, must seek a new career in Restoration days. Julien Sorel, the low-born hero of Le Rouge et le Noir, finding the red coat impossible, must don the priestly black as a cloak for his ambition. Hypocrite, seducer, and assassin, he ends his career under the knife of the guillotine. La Chartreuse de Parme exhibits the manners, characters, intrigues of nineteenth-century Italy, with a remarkable episode which gives a soldier's experiences of the field of Waterloo. In the artist's plastic power Beyle was wholly wanting; a collection of ingenious observations in psychology may be of rare value, but it does not constitute a work of art. His writings are a whetstone for the intelligence, but we must bring intelligence to its use, else it will grind down or break the blade. In 1842 he died, desiring to perpetuate his expatriation by the epitaph which names him Arrigo Beyle Milanese.

III

Lyrical and idealistic are epithets which a critic is tempted to affix to the novels of George Sand; but from her early lyrical manner she advanced to perfect idyllic narrative; and while she idealised, she observed, incorporating in her best work the results of a patient and faithful study of reality. A vaguer word may be applied to whatever she wrote; offspring of her idealism or her realism, it is always in a true sense poetic.

LUCILE-AURORE DUPIN, a descendant of Marshal Saxe, was born in Paris in 1804, the daughter of Lieutenant Dupin and a mother of humble origin—a child at once of the aristocracy and of the people. Her early years were passed in Berri, at the country-house of her grandmother. Strong, calm, ruminating, bovine in temperament, she had a large heart and an ardent imagination. The woods, the flowers, the pastoral heights and hollows, the furrows of the fields, the little peasants, the hemp-dressers of the farm, their processes of life, their store of old tales and rural superstitions made up her earliest education. Already endless stories shaped themselves in her brain. At thirteen she was sent to be educated in a Paris convent; from the boisterous moods which seclusion encouraged, she sank of a sudden into depths of religious reverie, or rose to heights of religious exaltation, not to be forgotten when afterwards she wrote Spiridion. The country cooled her devout ardour; she read widely, poets, historians, philosophers, without method and with boundless delight; the Genie du Christianisme replaced the Imitation; Rousseau and Byron followed Chateaubriand, and romance in her heart put on the form of melancholy. At eighteen the passive Aurore was married to M. Dudevant, whose worst fault was the absence of those qualities of heart and brain which make wedded union a happiness. Two children were born; and having obtained her freedom and a scanty allowance, Madame Dudevant in 1831, in possession of her son and daughter, resolved upon trying to obtain a livelihood in the capital.

Perhaps she could paint birds and flowers on cigar-cases and snuff-boxes; happily her hopes received small encouragement. Perhaps she could succeed in journalism under her friend Delatouche; she proved wholly wanting in cleverness; her imagination had wings; it could not hop on the perch; before she had begun the beginning of an article the column must end. With her compatriot Jules Sandeau, she attempted a novel—Rose et Blanche. "Sand" and Sandeau were fraternal names; a countryman of Berri was traditionally George. Henceforth the young Bohemian, who traversed the quais and streets in masculine garb, should be GEORGE SAND.

To write novels was to her only a process of nature; she seated herself before her table at ten o'clock, with scarcely a plot, and only the slightest acquaintance with her characters; until five in the evening, while her hand guided a pen, the novel wrote itself. Next day and the next it was the same. By-and-by the novel had written itself in full, and another was unfolding. Not that she composed mechanically; her stories were not manufactured; they grew—grew with facility and in free abundance. At first, a disciple of Rousseau and Chateaubriand, her theme was the romance of love. In Indiana, Valentine, Lelia, Jacques, she vindicated the supposed rights of passion. These novels are lyrical cries of a heart that had been wounded; protests against the crime of loveless marriage, against the tyranny of man, the servitude of woman; pleas for the individualism of the soul—superficial in thought, ill-balanced in feeling, unequal in style, yet rising to passages of rare poetic beauty, and often admirable in descriptive power. The imagination of George Sand had translated her private experiences into romance; yet she, the spectator of her own inventions, possessed of a fund of sanity which underlay the agitations of her genius, while she lent herself to her creations, plied her pen with a steady hand from day to day. Unwise and blameful in conduct she might be for a season; she wronged her own life, and helped to ruin the life of Musset, who had neither her discretion nor her years; but when the inevitable rupture came she could return to her better self.

Through Andre, Simon, Mauprat—the last a tale of love subduing and purifying the savage instincts in man—her art advanced in sureness and in strength. Singularly accessible to external influences, singularly receptive of ideas, the full significance and relations of which she failed to comprehend, she felt the force of intelligences stronger than her own—of Lamennais, of Ledru-Rollin, of Jean Raynaud, of Pierre Leroux. Mystical religious sentiment, an ardent enthusiasm of humanity, mingled in her mind with all the discordant formulas of socialism. From 1840 to 1848 her love and large generosity of nature found satisfaction in the ideals and the hopes of social reform. Her novels Consuelo, Jeanne, Le Meunier d'Angibault, Le Peche de M. Antoine, become expositions of a thesis, or are diverted from their true development to advocate a cause. The art suffers. Jeanne, so admirable in its rural heroine, wanders from nature to humanitarian symbolism; Consuelo, in which the writer studies so happily the artistic temperament, too often loses itself in a confusion of ill-understood ideas and tedious declamation. But the gain of escape from the egoism of passion to a more disinterested, even if a doctrinaire, view of life was great. George Sand was finding her way.

Indeed, while writing novels in this her second manner, she had found her way; her third manner was attained before the second had lost its attraction. La Mare au Diable belongs to the year 1846; La Petite Fadette, to the year of Revolution, 1848, which George Sand, ever an optimist, hailed with joy; Francois le Champi is but two years later. In these delightful tales she returns from humanitarian theories to the fields of Berri, to humble walks, and to the huts where poor men lie. The genuine idyll of French peasant life was new to French literature; the better soul of rural France, George Sand found deep within herself; she had read the external circumstances and incidents of country life with an eye as faithful in observation as that of any student who dignifies his collection of human documents with the style and title of realism in art; with a sense of beauty and the instincts of affection she merged herself in what she saw; her feeling for nature is realised in gracious art, and her art seems itself to be nature.

In the novels of her latest years she moved from Berri to other regions of France, and interpreted aristocratic together with peasant life. Old, experienced, infinitely good and attaching, she has tales for her grandchildren, and romances—Jean de la Roche, Le Marquis de Villemer, and the rest—for her other grandchildren the public. The soul of the peasant, of the artist, of the man who must lean upon a stronger woman's arm, of the girl—neither child nor fully adult—she entered into with deepest and truest sympathy. The simple, austere, stoical, heroic man she admired as one above her. Her style at its best, flowing without impetuosity, full and pure without commotion, harmonious without complex involutions, can mirror beauty as faithfully and as magically as an inland river. "Calme, toujours plus calme," was a frequent utterance of her declining years. "Ne detruisez pas la verdure" were her latest words. In 1876 George Sand died. Her memoirs and her correspondence make us intimate with a spirit, amid all its errors, sweet, generous, and gaining through experience a wisdom for the season of old age.

IV

George Sand may be described as an "idealist," if we add the words "with a remarkable gift for observation." Her great contemporary HONORE DE BALZAC is named a realist, but he was a realist haunted or attacked by phantasms and nightmares of romance. Born in 1799 at Tours, son of an advocate turned military commissariat-agent, Honore de Balzac, after some training in the law, resolved to write, and, if possible, not to starve. With his robust frame, his resolute will, manifest in a face coarsely powerful, his large good-nature, his large egoism, his audacity of brain, it seemed as if he might shoulder his way through the crowd to fortune and to fame. But fortune and fame were hard to come at. His tragedy Cromwell was condemned by all who saw the manuscript; his novels were published, and lie deep in their refuge under the waters of oblivion. He tried the trades of publisher, printer, type-founder, and succeeded in encumbering himself with debt. At length in 1829 Le Dernier Chouan, a half-historical tale of Brittany in 1800, not uninfluenced by Scott, was received with a measure of favour.

Next year Balzac found his truer self, overlaid with journalism, pamphleteering, and miscellaneous writing, in a Dutch painting of bourgeois life, Le Maison du Chatqui-pelote, which relates the sorrows of the draper's daughter, Augustine, drawn from her native sphere by an artist's love. From the day that Balzac began to wield his pen with power to the day, in 1850, when he died, exhausted by the passion of his brain, his own life was concentrated in that of the creatures of his imagination. He had friends, and married one of the oldest of them, Madame Hanska, shortly before his death. Sometimes for a little while he wandered away from his desk. More than once he made wild attempts to secure wealth by commercial enterprise or speculation. These were adventures or incidents of his existence. That existence itself is summed up in the volumes of his Human Comedy. He wrote with desperate resolve and a violence of imagination; he attacked the printer's proof as if it were crude material on which to work. At six in the evening he retired to sleep; he rose at the noon of night, urged on his brain with cups of coffee, and covered page after page of manuscript, until the noon of day released him. So it went on for nearly twenty years, until the intemperance of toil had worn the strong man out.

There is something gross in Balzac's genius; he has little wit, little delicacy, no sense of measure, no fine self-criticism, no lightness of touch, small insight into the life of refined society, an imperfect sense of natural beauty, a readiness to accept vulgar marvels as the equivalent of spiritual mysteries; he is monarchical without the sentiment of chivalric loyalty, a Catholic without the sentiment of religion; he piles sentence on sentence, hard and heavy as the accumulated stones of a cairn. Did he love his art for its own sake? It must have been so; but he esteemed it also as an implement of power, as the means of pushing towards fame and grasping gold.

Within the gross body of his genius, however, an intense flame burnt. He had a vivid sense of life, a perception of all that can be seen and handled, an eager interest in reality, a vast passion for things, an inexhaustible curiosity about the machinery of society, a feeling, exultant or cynical, of the battle of existence, of the conflict for wealth and power, with its triumphs and defeats, its display of fierce volition, its pushing aside of the feeble, its trampling of the fallen, its grandeur, its meanness, its obscure heroisms, and the cruelties of its pathos. He flung himself on the life of society with a desperate energy of inspection, and tried to make the vast array surrender to his imagination. And across his vision of reality shot strange beams and shafts of romantic illumination—sometimes vulgar theatrical lights, sometimes gleams like those which add a new reality of wonder to the etchings of Rembrandt. What he saw with the eyes of the senses or those of the imagination he could evoke without the loss of any fragment of its life, and could transfer it to the brain of his reader as a vision from which escape is impossible.

The higher world of aristocratic refinement, the grace and natural delicacy of virginal souls, in general eluded Balzac's observation. He found it hard to imagine a lady; still harder—though he tried and half succeeded—to conceive the mystery of a young girl's mind, in which the airs of morning are nimble and sweet. The gross bourgeois world, which he detested, and a world yet humbler were his special sphere. He studied its various elements in their environment; a street, a house, a chamber is as much to him as a human being, for it is part of the creature's shell, shaped to its uses, corresponding to its nature, limiting its action. He has created a population of persons which numbers two thousand. Where Balzac does not fail, each of these is a complete individual; in the prominent figures a controlling passion is the centre of moral life—the greed of money, the desire for distinction, the lust for power, some instinct or mania of animal affection. The individual exists in a group; power circulates from inanimate objects to the living actors of his tale; the environment is an accomplice in the action; power circulates from member to member of the group; finally, group and group enter into correspondence or conflict; and still above the turmoil is heard the groundswell of the tide of Paris.

The change from the Renes and Obermanns of melancholy romance was great. But in the government of Louis-Philippe the bourgeoisie triumphed; and Balzac hated the bourgeoisie. From 1830 to 1840 were his greatest years, which include the Peau de Chagrin, Eugenie Grandet, La Recherche de l'Absolu, Le Pere Goriot, and other masterpieces. To name their titles would be to recite a Homeric catalogue. At an early date Balzac conceived the idea of connecting his tales in groups. They acquired their collective title, La Comedie Humaine, in 1842. He would exhibit human documents illustrating the whole social life of his time; "the administration, the church, the army, the judicature, the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, the proletariat, the peasantry, the artists, the journalists, the men of letters, the actors, ... the shopkeepers of every degree, the criminals," should all appear in his vast tableau of society. His record should include scenes from private life, scenes from Parisian, provincial, political, military, rural life, with philosophical studies in narrative and analytic treatises on the passions. The spirit of system took hold upon Balzac; he had, in common with Victor Hugo, a gift for imposing upon himself with the charlatanry of pseudo-ideas; to observe, to analyse, to evoke with his imagination was not enough; he also would be among the philosophers—and Balzac's philosophy is often pretentious and vulgar, it is often banal. Outside the general scheme of the human comedy lie his unsuccessful attempts for the theatre, and the Contes Drolatiques, in which the pseudo-antique Rabelaisian manner and the affluent power do not entirely atone for the anachronism of a grossness more natural in the sixteenth than in the nineteenth century.

V

Was it possible to be romantic without being lyrical? Was it possible to produce purely objective work, reserving one's own personality, and glancing at one's audience only with an occasional look of superior irony? Such was the task essayed by PROSPER MERIMEE (1803-70). With some points of resemblance in character to Beyle, whose ideas were influential on his mind, Merimee possessed the plastic imagination and the craftsman's skill, in which Beyle was deficient. "He is a gentleman," said Cousin, and the words might serve for Merimee's epitaph; a gentleman not of nature's making, or God Almighty's kind, but constructed in faultless bearing according to the rules. Such a gentleman must betray no sensibility, must express no sentiment, must indulge no enthusiasm, must attach himself to no faith, must be superior to all human infirmities, except the infirmity of a pose which is impressive only by its correctness; he may be cynical, if the cynicism is wholly free from emphasis; he may be ironical, if the irony is sufficiently disguised; he may mystify his fellows, if he keeps the pleasure of mystification for his private amusement. Should he happen to be an artist, he must appear to be only a dilettante. He must never incur ridicule, and yet his whole attitude may be ridiculous.

Such a gentleman was Prosper Merimee. He had the gift of imagination, psychological insight, the artist's shaping hand. His early romantic plays were put forth as those of Clara Gazul, a Spanish comedienne. His Illyrian poems, La Guzla, were the work of an imaginary Hyacinthe Maglanovich, and Merimee could smile gently at the credulity of a learned public. He took up the short story where Xavier de Maistre, who had known how to be both pathetic and amiably humorous, and Charles Nodier, who had given play to a graceful fantasy, left it. He purged it of sentiment, he reduced fantasy to the law of the imagination, and produced such works as Carmen and Colomba, each one a little masterpiece of psychological truth, of temperate local colour, of faultless narrative, of pure objective art. The public must not suppose that he cares for his characters or what befell them; he is an archaeologist, a savant, and only by accident a teller of tales. Merimee had more sensibility than he would confess; it shows itself for moments in the posthumous Lettres a une Inconnue; but he has always a bearing-rein of ironical pessimism to hold his sensibility in check. The egoism of the romantic school appears in Merimee inverted; it is the egoism not of effusion but of disdainful reserve.[1]

[Footnote 1: It is one of Merimee's merits that he awakened in France an interest in Russian literature.]



CHAPTER V HISTORY—LITERARY CRITICISM

I

The progress of historical literature in the nineteenth century was aided by the change which had taken place in philosophical opinion; instead of a rigid system of abstract ideas, which disdained the thought of past ages as superstition, had come an eclecticism guided by spiritual beliefs. The religions of various lands and various ages were viewed with sympathetic interest; the breach of continuity from mediaeval to modern times was repaired; the revolutionary spirit of individualism gave way before a broader concern for society; the temper in politics grew more cautious and less dogmatic; the great events of recent years engendered historical reflection; literary art was renewed by the awakening of the romantic imagination.

The historical learning of the Empire is represented by Daunou, an explorer in French literature; by Ginguene, the literary historian of Italy; by Michaud, who devoted his best years to a History of the Crusades. In his De la Religion (1824-31) Benjamin Constant, in Restoration days, traced the progress of the religious sentiment, cleaving its way through dogma and ordinance to a free and full development. Sismondi (1773-1842), in his Histoire des Francais, investigated such sources as were accessible to him, studied economic facts, and in a liberal spirit exhibited the life of the nation, and not merely the acts of monarchs or the intrigues of statesmen. His wide, though not profound, erudition comprehended Italy as well as France; the Histoire des Republiques Italiennes is the chart of a difficult labyrinth. The method of disinterested narrative, which abstains from ethical judgments, propounds no thesis, and aims at no doctrinaire conclusion, was followed by Barante in his Histoire des Ducs de Bourgogne. The precept of Quintilian expresses his rule: "Scribitur ad narrandum, non ad probandum."

Each school of nineteenth-century thought has had its historical exponents. Liberal Catholicism is represented by Montalembert, Ozanam, De Broglie; socialism, by Louis Blanc; a patriotic Caesarism, by Thiers; the democratic school, by Michelet and Quinet; philosophic liberalism, by Guizot, Mignet, and Tocqueville.

AUGUSTIN THIERRY (1795-1856) nobly led the way. Some pages of Chateaubriand, full of the sentiment of the past, were his first inspiration; at a later time the influence of Fauriel and the novels of Walter Scott, "the master of historical divination," confirmed him in his sense of the uses of imagination as an aid to the scholarship of history. For a time he acted as secretary to Saint-Simon, and under his influence proposed a scheme for a community of European peoples which should leave intact the nationality of each. Then he parted from his master, to pursue his way in independence. It seemed to him that the social condition and the revolutions of modern Europe had their origins in the Germanic invasions, and especially in the Norman Conquest of England. As he read the great collection of the original historians of France and Gaul, he grew indignant against the modern travesties named history, indignant against writers without erudition, who could not see, and writers without imagination, who could not depict. The conflict of races—Saxons and Normans in England, Gauls and Franks in his own country—remained with him as a dominant idea, but he would not lose himself in generalisations; he would involve the abstract in concrete details; he would see, and he would depict. There was much philosophy in abstaining from philosophy overmuch. The Lettres sur l'Histoire de France were followed in 1825 by the Histoire de la Conquete de l'Angleterre, in which the art of historiography attained a perfection previously unknown. Through charter and chronicle, Thierry had reached the spirit of the past. He had prophesied upon the dry bones and to the wind, and the dry bones lived. As a liberal, he had been interested in contemporary politics. His political ardour had given him that historical perspicacity which enabled him to discover the soul behind an ancient text.

In 1826 Thierry, the martyr of his passionate studies, suffered the calamity of blindness. With the aid of his distinguished brother, of friends, and secretaries—above all, with the aid of the devoted woman who became his wife, he pursued his work. The Recits des Temps Merovingiens and the Essai sur l'Histoire de la Formation du Tiers Etat were the labours of a sightless scholar. His passion for perfection was greater than ever; twenty, fifteen lines a day contented him, if his idea was rendered clear and enduring in faultless form. Paralysis made its steady advance; still he kept his intellect above his infirmities, and followed truth and beauty. On May 22, 1856, he woke his attendant at four in the morning, and dictated with laboured speech the alteration of a phrase for the revised Conquete. On the same day, "insatiable of perfection," Thierry died. He is not, either in substance, thought, or style, the greatest of modern French historians; but, more than any other, he was an initiator.

The life of FRANCOIS GUIZOT—great and venerable name—is a portion of the history of his country. Born at Nimes in 1787, of an honourable Protestant family, he died, with a verse of his favourite Corneille or a text of Scripture on his lips, in 1874. Austere without severity, simple in habit without rudeness, indomitable in courage, imperious in will, gravely eloquent, he had at once the liberality and the narrowness of the middle classes, which he represented when in power. A threefold task, as he conceived, lies before the historian: he must ascertain facts; he must co-ordinate these facts under laws, studying the anatomy and the physiology of society; finally, he must present the external physiognomy of the facts. Guizot was not endowed with the artist's imagination; he had no sense of life, of colour, of literary style; he was a thinker, who saw the life of the past through the medium of ideas; he does not in his pages evoke a world of animated forms, of passionate hearts, of vivid incidents; he distinguishes social forces, with a view to arrive at principles; he considers those forces in their play one upon another.

The Histoire Generale de la Civilisation en Europe and the Histoire de la Civilisation en France consist of lectures delivered from 1828 to 1830 at the Sorbonne.[1] Guizot recognised that the study of institutions must be preceded by a study of the society which has given them birth. In the progress of civilisation he saw not merely the development of communities, but also that of the individual. The civilisation of Europe, he held, was most intelligibly exhibited in that of France, where, more than in other countries, intellectual and social development have moved hand in hand, where general ideas and doctrines have always accompanied great events and public revolutions. The key to the meaning of French history he found in the tendency towards national and political unity. From the tenth to the fourteenth century four great forces met in co-operation or in conflict—royalty, the feudal system, the communes, the Church. Feudalism fell; a great monarchy arose upon its ruins. The human mind asserted its spiritual independence in the Protestant reformation. The tiers etat was constantly advancing in strength. The power of the monarchy, dominant in the seventeenth century, declined in the century that followed; the power of the people increased. In modern society the elements of national life are reduced to two—the government on the one hand, the people on the other; how to harmonise these elements is the problem of modern politics. As a capital example for the French bourgeoisie, Guizot, returning to an early work, made a special study of the great English revolution of the seventeenth century. In Germany, of the preceding century, the revolution was religious and not political. In France, of the succeeding century, the revolution was political and not religious. The rare good fortune of England lay in the fact that the spirit of religious faith and the spirit of political freedom ruled together, and co-operated towards a common result.

[Footnote 1: The History of Civilisation in France closes with the fourteenth century.]

The work of FRANCOIS MIGNET (1796-1884), eminent for its research, exactitude, clearness, ordonnance, has been censured for its historical fatalism. In reality Mignet's mind was too studious of facts to be dominated by a theory. He recognised the great forces which guide and control events; he recognised also the power and freedom of the individual will. His early Histoire de la Revolution Francaise is a sane and lucid arrangement of material that came to his hands in chaotic masses. His later and more important writings deal with his special province, the sixteenth century; his method, as he advanced, grew more completely objective; we discern his ideas through the lines of a well-proportioned architecture.

The analytic method of Guizot, supported by a method of patient induction, was applied by ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE (1805-59) to the study of the great phenomenon of modern democracy. Limiting the area of investigation to America, which he had visited on a public mission, he investigated the political organisation, the manners and morals, the ideas, the habits of thought and feeling of the United States as influenced by the democratic equality of conditions. He wrote as a liberal in whom the spirit of individualism was active. He regarded the progress of democracy in the modern world as inevitable; he perceived the dangers—formidable for society and for individual character—which accompany that progress; he believed that by foresight and wise ordering many of the dangers could be averted. The fears and hopes of the citizen guided and sustained in Tocqueville a philosophical intelligence. Turning from America to France, he designed to disengage from the tangle of events the true historical significance of the Revolution. Only one volume, L'Ancien Regime et la Revolution, was accomplished. It can stand alone as a work of capital importance. In the great upheaval he saw that all was not progress; the centralisation of power under the old regime remained, and was rendered even more formidable than before; the sentiment of equality continued to advance in its inevitable career; unhappily the spirit of liberty was not always its companion, its moderator, or its guide.

ADOLPHE THIERS (1797-1877) was engaged at the same time as Mignet, his lifelong friend, upon a history of the French Revolution (1823-27). The same liberal principles were held in common by the young authors. Their methods differed widely: Mignet's orderly and compact narration was luminous through its skilful arrangement; Thiers' Histoire was copious, facile, brilliant, more just in its general conception than exact in statement, a plea for revolutionary patriotism as against the royalist reaction of the day, and not without influence in preparing the spirit of the country for the approaching Revolution of July. His Histoire du Consulat et de l'Empire (1845-62) is the great achievement of Thiers' maturity; journalist, orator, minister of state, until he became the chief of stricken France in 1871 his highest claim to be remembered was this vast record of his country's glory. He had an appetite for facts; no detail—the price of bread, of soap, of candles—was a matter of indifference to him; he could not show too many things, or show them too clearly; his supreme quality was intelligence; his passion was the pride of patriotism; his foible was the vanity of military success, the zeal of a chauvinist. He was a liberal; but Napoleon summed up France, and won her battles, therefore Napoleon, the great captain, who "made war with his genius and politics with his passions," must be for ever magnified. The coup d'etat of the third Napoleon owed a debt to the liberal historian who had reconstructed the Napoleonic legend. The campaigns and battle-pieces of Thiers are unsurpassed in their kind. His style in narrative is facile, abundant, animated, and so transparent that nothing seems to intervene between the object and the reader who has become a spectator; a style negligent at times, and even incorrect, adding no charm of its own to a lucid presentation of things.

JULES MICHELET, the greatest imaginative restorer of the past, the greatest historical interpreter of the soul of ancient France, was born in 1798 in Paris, an infant seemingly too frail and nervous to remain alive. His early years gave him experience, brave and pathetic, of the hardships of the poor. His father, an unsuccessful printer, often found it difficult to procure bread or fire for his household; but he resolved that his son should receive an education. The boy, of a fine and sensitive organisation, knew cold and hunger; he watched his mother toiling, and from day to day declining in health. Two sources of consolation he found—the Imitation, which told him of a Divine refuge from sorrow, and the Museum of French monuments, which made him forget all present distress in visions of the vanished centuries. Mocked and persecuted by his schoolfellows, he never lost courage, and had the joy of rewarding his parents with the cross won by his schoolboy theme. In happy country days his aunt Alexis told him legendary tales, and read to him the old chroniclers of France. Michelet's vocation was before long revealed, and its summons was irresistible.

In 1827 he published his earliest works, the Precis de l'Histoire Moderne, a modest survey of a wide field, in which genius illuminated scholarship, and a translation of the Scienza Nuova of Vico, the master who impressed him with the thought that humanity is in a constant process of creation under the influence of the Divine ideas. The Histoire Romaine and the Introduction a l'Histoire Universelle followed; the latter a little book, written with incredible ardour under the inspiration of the days of July. His friend Quinet had taught him to see in history an ever-broadening combat for freedom—in Michelet's words, "an eternal July," and the exposition of this idea was of the nature of a philosophical entrancement.

A teacher at the Ecole Normale, appointed chief of the historical section of the National Archives in 1831, Guizot's substitute at the Sorbonne in 1833, professor of history and morals at the College de France in 1838, Michelet lived in and for the life of his people and of his land. The Histoire de France, begun in 1830, was completed thirty-seven years later. After the disasters of the war of 1870-71, with failing strength the author resumed his labours, endeavouring to add, as it were, an appendix on the nineteenth century.

A passionate searcher among original sources, published and unpublished, handling documents as if they were things of flesh and blood, seeing the outward forms of existence with the imaginative eye, pressing through these to the soul of each successive epoch, possessed by an immense pity for the obscure generations of human toilers, having, more than almost any other modern writer, Virgil's gift of tears, ardent in admiration, ardent in indignation, with ideas impregnated by emotions, and emotions quickened by ideas, Michelet set himself to resuscitate the buried past. It seemed to him that his eminent predecessors—Guizot, Mignet, Thiers, Thierry—had each envisaged history from some special point of view. Each had too little of the outward body or too little of the inward soul of history. Michelet dared to hope that a resurrection of the integral life of the dead centuries was possible. All or nothing was his word. It was a bold venture, but it was a venture, or rather an act, of faith. Thierry had been tyrannised by the idea of the race: the race is much, but the people does not march in the air; it has a geographical basis; it draws its nutriment from a particular soil. Michelet, at the moment of his narrative when France began to have a life distinct from Germany, enters upon a survey of its geography, in which the physiognomy and the genius of each region are studied as if each were a separate living creature, and the character of France itself is discovered in the cohesion or the unity of its various parts. Reaching the tenth and eleventh centuries, he feels the sadness of their torpor and their violence; yet humanity was living, and soon in the enthusiasm of Gothic art and the enthusiasm of the Crusades the sacred aspirations of the soul had their manifestation. At the close of the mediaeval period everything seems to droop and decay: no! it was then, during the Hundred Years' War, that the national consciousness was born, and patriotism was incarnated in an armed shepherdess, child of the people.

By the thirteenth year of his labours—1843—Michelet had traversed the mediaeval epoch, and reached the close of the reign of Louis XI. There he paused. Seeing one day high on the tower of Reims Cathedral, below which the kings of France received their consecration, a group or garland of tortured and mutilated figures carved in stone, the thought possessed him that the soul and faith of the people should be confirmed within his own soul before he could trust himself to treat of the age of the great monarchy. He leaped at once the intervening centuries, and was at work during eight years—from 1845 to 1853—on the French Revolution. He found a hero for his revolutionary epic in the people.

The temper of 1848 was hardly the temper in which the earlier Revolution could be judiciously investigated. Michelet and Quinet had added to their democratic zeal the passions connected with an anticlerical campaign. The violence of liberalism was displayed in Des Jesuites, and Du Pretre, de la Femme et de la Famille. When the historian returned to the sixteenth century his spirit had undergone a change: he adored the Middle Ages; but was it not the period of the domination of the Church, and how could it be other than evil? He could no longer be a mere historian; he must also be a prophet. The volumes which treat of the Reformation, the Renaissance, the wars of religion, are as brilliant as earlier volumes, but they are less balanced and less coherent. The equilibrium between Michelet's intellect and his imagination, between his ideas and his passions, was disturbed, if not destroyed.

Michelet, who had been deprived of his chair in the College de France, lost also his post in the Archives upon his refusal, in 1852, to swear allegiance to the Emperor. Near Nantes in his tempest-beaten home, near Genoa in a fold of the Apennines, where he watched the lizards sleep or slide, a great appeasement came upon his spirit. He had interpreted the soul of the people; he would now interpret the soul of humbler kinsfolk—the bird, the insect; he would interpret the inarticulate soul of the mountain and the sea. He studied other documents—the documents of nature—with a passion of love, read their meanings, and mingled as before his own spirit with theirs. L'Oiseau, L'Insecte, La Mer, La Montagne, are canticles in prose by a learned lover of the external world, rather than essays in science; often extravagant in style, often extreme in sentiment, and uncontrolled in imagination, but always the betrayals of genius.

Michelet's faults as an historian are great, and such as readily strike an English reader. His rash generalisations, his lyrical outbreaks, his Pindaric excitement, his verbiage assuming the place of ideas, his romantic excess, his violence in ecclesiastical affairs, his hostility to our country, his mysticism touched with sensuality, his insistence on physiological details, his quick and irregular utterance—these trouble at times his imaginative insight, and mar his profound science in documents. He died at Hyeres in 1874, hoping that God would grant him reunion with his lost ones, and the joys promised to those who have sought and loved.

EDGAR QUINET (1803-1875), the friend and brother-in-arms of Michelet in his attack upon the Jesuits, born at Bourg, of a Catholic father and a Protestant mother, approached the study of literature and history with that tendency to large vues d'ensemble which was natural to his mind, and which had been strengthened by discipleship to Herder. Happy in temper, sound of conscience, generous of heart, he illuminated many subjects, and was a complete master of none. A poet of lofty intentions, in his Ahasverus (1833)—the wandering Jew, type of humanity in its endless Odyssey—in his Napoleon, his Promethee, his vast encyclopaedic allegory Merlin l'Enchanteur (1860), his poetry lacked form, and yielded itself to the rhetoric of the intellect.

In the Genie des Religions Quinet endeavoured to exhibit the religious idea as the germinative power of civilisation, giving its special character to the political and social idea. La Revolution, which is perhaps his most important work, attempts to replace the Revolutionary hero-worship, the Girondin and Jacobin legends, by a faithful interpretation of the meaning of events. The principles of modern society and the principles of the Roman Catholic Church, Quinet regarded as incapable of conciliation. In the incompetence of the leaders to perceive and apply this truth, and in the fatal logic of their violent and anarchic methods, lay, as he believed, the causes of the failure which followed the bright hopes of 1789. In 1848 Quinet was upon the barricades; the Empire drove him into exile. In his elder years, like Michelet, he found a new delight in the study of nature. La Creation (1870) exhibits the science of nature and that of human history as presenting the same laws and requiring kindred methods. It closes with the prophecy of science that creation is not yet fully accomplished, and that a nobler race will enter into the heritage of our humanity.

II

Literary criticism in the eighteenth century had been the criticism of taste or the criticism of dogma; in the nineteenth century it became naturalistic—a natural history of individual minds and their products, a natural history of works of art as formed or modified by social, political, and moral environments, and by the tendencies of races. Such criticism must inevitably have followed the growth of the comparative study of literatures in an age dominated by the scientific spirit. If we are to name any single writer as its founder, we must name Mme. de Stael. The French nation, she explained in L'Allemagne, inclines towards what is classical; the Teutonic nations incline towards what is romantic. She cares not to say whether classical or romantic art should be preferred; it is enough to show that the difference of taste results not from accidental causes, but from the primitive sources of imagination and of thought.

The historical tendency, proceeding from the eighteenth century, influenced alike the study of philosophy, of politics, and of literature. While Cousin gave an historical interpretation of philosophy, and Guizot applied history to the exposition of politics, a third eminent professor, ABEL-FRANCOIS VILLEMAIN (1790-1870) was illuminating literature with the light of history. An accomplished classical scholar, a student of English, Italian, and Spanish authors, Villemain, in his Tableau de la Litterature au Moyen Age, and his more admirable Tableau de la Litterature au XVIIIe Siecle, viewed a wide prospect, and could not apply a narrow rule to the measurement of all that he saw. He did not formulate a method of criticism; but instinctively he directed criticism towards history. He perceived the correspondence between literary products and the other phenomena of the age; he observed the movement in the spirit of a period; he passed from country to country; he made use of biography as an aid in the study of letters. His learning was at times defective; his views often superficial; he suffered from his desire to entertain his audience or to capture them by rhetoric. Yet Villemain served letters well, and, accepted as a master by the young critics of the Globe, he prepared the way for Sainte-Beuve.

While such criticism as that of Villemain was maintained by Saint-Marc Girardin (1801-73), professor of French poetry at the Sorbonne, the dogmatic or doctrinaire school of criticism was represented with rare ability by DESIRE NISARD (1806-88). His capital work, the Histoire de la Litterature Francaise, the labour of many years, is distinguished by a magisterial application of ideas to the decision of literary questions. Criticism with Nisard is not a natural history of minds, nor a study of historical developments, so much as the judgment of literary art in the light of reason. He confronts each book on which he pronounces judgment with that ideal of its species which he has formed in his own mind: he compares it with the ideal of the genius of France, which attains its highest ends rather through discipline than through freedom; he compares it with the ideal of the French language; finally, he compares it with the ideal of humanity as seen in the best literature of the world. According to the result of the comparison he delivers condemnation or awards the crown. In French literature, at its best, he perceives a marvellous equilibrium of the faculties under the control of reason; it applies general ideas to life; it avoids individual caprice; it dreads the chimeras of imagination; it is eminently rational; it embodies ideas in just and measured form. Such literature Nisard found in the great age of Louis XIV. Certain gains there may have been in the eighteenth century, but these gains were more than counterbalanced by losses. To disprove the saying that there is no disputing about tastes, to establish an order and a hierarchy in letters, to regulate intellectual pleasures, was Nisard's aim; but in attempting to constitute an exact science founded upon general principles, he too often derived those principles from the attractions and repulsions of his individual taste. Criticism retrograded in his hands; yet, in retrograding, it took up a strong position: the influence of such a teacher was not untimely when facile sympathies required the guidance or the check of a director.

The admirable critic of the romantic school, CHARLES-AUGUSTIN SAINTE-BEUVE (1804-69), developed, as time went on, into the great critic of the naturalistic method. In his Tableau de la Poesie Francaise au XVIe Siecle he found ancestors for the romantic poets as much older than the ancestors of classical art in France as Ronsard is older than Malherbe. Wandering endlessly from author to author in his Portraits Litteraires and Portraits Contemporains, he studied in all its details what we may term the physiology of each. The long research of spirits connected with his most sustained work, Port-Royal, led him to recognise certain types or families under which the various minds of men can be grouped and classified. During a quarter of a century he investigated, distinguished, defined in the vast collection of little monographs which form the Causeries du Lundt and the Nouveaux Lundis. They formed, as it were, a natural history of intellects and temperaments; they established a new method, and illustrated that method by a multitude of examples.

Never was there a more mobile spirit; but he was as exact and sure-footed as he was mobile. When we have allowed for certain personal jealousies or hostilities, and for an excessive attraction towards what may be called the morbid anatomy of minds, we may give our confidence with scarcely a limit to the psychologist critic Sainte-Beuve. Poet, novelist, student of medicine, sceptic, believer, socialist, imperialist—he traversed every region of ideas; as soon as he understood each position he was free to leave it behind. He did not pretend to reduce criticism to a science; he hoped that at length, as the result of numberless observations, something like a science might come into existence. Meanwhile he would cultivate the relative and distrust the absolute. He would study literary products through the persons of their authors; he would examine each detail; he would inquire into the physical characteristics of the subject of his investigation; view him through his ancestry and among his kinsfolk; observe him in the process of education; discover him among his friends and contemporaries; note the moment when his genius first unfolded itself; note the moment when it was first touched with decay; approach him through admirers and disciples; approach him through his antagonists or those whom he repelled; and at last, if that were possible, find some illuminating word which resumes the results of a completed study. There is no "code Sainte-Beuve" by which off-hand to pronounce literary judgments; a method of Sainte-Beuve there is, and it is the method which has best served the study of literature in the nineteenth century.

* * * * *

Here this survey of a wide field finds its limit. The course of French literature since 1850 may be studied in current criticism; it does not yet come within the scope of literary history. The product of these years has been manifold and great; their literary importance is attested by the names—among many others—of Leconte de Lisle, Sully Prudhomme, Verlaine, in non-dramatic poetry; of Augier and the younger Dumas in the theatre; of Flaubert, Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Zola, Daudet, Bourget, Pierre Loti, Anatole France, in fiction; of Taine and Renan in historical study and criticism; of Fromentin in the criticism of art; of Scherer, Brunetiere, Faguet, Lemaitre, in the criticism of literature.

The dominant fact, if we discern it aright, has been the scientific influence, turning poetry from romantic egoism to objective art, directing the novel and the drama to naturalism and to the study of social environments, informing history and criticism with the spirit of curiosity, and prompting research for laws of evolution. Whether the spiritualist tendency observable at the present moment be a symptom of languor and fatigue, or the indication of a new moral energy, future years will determine.



BIBLIOGRAPHY

The following notes are designed as an indication of some books which may be useful to students.

Of the many Histories of French Literature the fullest and most trustworthy is that at present in course of publication under the editorship of M. Petit de Julleville, Histoire de la Langue et de la Litterature francaise (A. Colin et Cie.). M. Lanson's Histoire de la Litterature francaise should be in the hands of every student, and this may be supplemented by M. Lintilhac's Litterature francaise (2 vols.).

The works of Mr. Saintsbury, Geruzez, Demogeot, are widely known, and have proved useful during many years. Much may be learnt and learnt pleasantly from Paul Albert's volumes on the literature of the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Two volumes out of five of M. Charles Gidel's Histoire de la Litterature francaise (Lemerre) are occupied with literature from 1815 to 1886. M. Hermann Pergamini's Histoire generale de la Litterature francaise (Alcan) sometimes gives fresh and interesting views. For a short school history by an accomplished scholar, none is better than M. Petit de Julleville's Histoire de la Litterature francaise, which, in 555 pages, packs a great deal of information. The Histoire elementaire de la Litterature francaise, by M. Jean Fleury, has been popular; it tells much of the contents of great books, and makes no assumption that the reader is already acquainted with them. Dr. Warren's A Primer of French Literature (Heath, Boston, U.S.A.) is well proportioned and well arranged, but it has room for little more than names, dates, and the briefest characterisations. Dr. Wells's Modern French Literature (Roberts, Boston, U.S.A.) sketches French literature to Chateaubriand, and treats with considerable fulness the literature from Chateaubriand and Mme. de Stael to the present time. For the present century M. G. Pellissier's Le Mouvement litteraire au XIXe Siecle is valuable.

Of elder histories that by Nisard is by far the most distinguished, the work of a scholar and a thinker. (See the final section of the present volume.)

The student will find Merlet's Etudes litteraires sur les Classiques francais (2 vols.), revised and enlarged by M. Lintilhac, highly instructive; the second volume is wholly occupied with Corneille, Racine, and Moliere.

For the history of the French theatre the best introduction is M. Petit de Julleville's Le Theatre en France; it may be supplemented by M. Brunetiere's Les Epoques du Theatre francais. Learning wide and exact, and original thought, characterise all the work of M. Brunetiere; each of his many volumes should be searched by the student for what he may need. The studies of M. Faguet on the writers of the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries are the work of a critic who is penetrating in his psychological study of authors, and who, just or unjust, is always suggestive. For numberless little monographs the student may turn to Sainte-Beuve. Monographs on a larger scale will be found in the admirable series of Grands Ecrivains francais (Hachette); the Classiques populaires (Lecene, Oudin et Cie.) are in some instances no less scholarly. The writings of Scherer, of M. Jules Lemaitre, and of M. Anatole France are especially valuable on nineteenth-century literature. The best study of French historical literature is Professor Flint's The Philosophy of History (1893).

Provided with such books as these the student will hardly need the general histories of French literature by German writers. I may name Prof. Bornhak's Geschichte der Franzosischen Literatur, and the more popular history by Engel (4th ed., 1897). Lotheissen's Geschichte der Franzosischen Literatur im XVII. Jahrhundert seems to me the best book on the period. The monographs in German are numberless.

The editions of authors in the Grands Ecrivains de la France are of the highest authority. The best anthology of French poetry is Crepet's Les Poetes francais (4 vols.). Small anthologies of French poetry since the fifteenth century, and of French lyrical poets of the nineteenth century, are published by Lemerre.

The list which follows is taken partly from books which I have used in writing this volume, partly from the Bibliography in M. Lintilhac's Histoire de la Litterature francaise. To name English writers and books seems unnecessary.

THE MIDDLE AGES

Histoire litteraire de la France (a vast repertory on mediaeval literature).

GASTON PARIS. La Litterature francaise au moyen Age. 1890.

AUBERTIN. Hist. de la Langue et de la Litt. francaises au moyen Age. 2 vols. 1883.

G. PARIS. La Poesie du moyen Age. 2 vols. 1887.

LEON GAUTIER. Les Epopees francaises. 2nd edition. 4 vols. 1878-94.

J. BEDIER. Les Fabliaux, Etudes de Litt. populaire et d'Histoire litt. du moyen Age. 1895.

L. SUDRE. Les Sources du Roman de Renart. 1893.

LENIENT. La Satire en France au moyen Age. 1883.

E. LANGLOIS. Origines et Sources du Roman de la Rose. 1890.

A. DEBIDOUR. Les Chroniqueurs. 2 vols. 1892. (Classiques populaires.)

A. JEANROY. Les Origines de la Poesie lyrique en France. 1889.

CLEDAT. Rutebeuf. 1891. (Grands Ecrivains fr.)

MARY DARMESTETER. Froissart. 1894. (Grands Ecrivains fr.)

A. SARRADIN. Eustache Deschamps. 1879.

C. BEAUFILS. Etude sur la Vie et les Poesies de Charles d'Orleans. 1861.

A. CAMPAUX. Francois Villon. 1859.

A. LONGNON. Etude biographique sur. Fr. Villon. 1877.

LECOY DE LA MARCHE. La Chaire fr. au moyen Age. 1886.

PETIT DE JULLEVILLE. Les Mysteres. 2 vols. 1880.

PETIT DE JULLEVILLE. Les Comediens en Fr. au moyen Age. 1885.

PETIT DE JULLEVILLE. La Comedie et les Moeurs en France au moyen Age. 1886.

PETIT DE JULLEVILLE. Repertoire du Theatre comique en France au moyen Age. 1885.

FAGUET. XVIe Siecle. 1894. (On Commines.)

MERLET. Etudes litt. (On Villehardouin, Froissart, Commines.) Edited by Lintilhac. 1894.

L. CLEDAT. La Poesie du moyen Age. 1893. (Classiques populaires.)

SIXTEENTH CENTURY

A. DARMESTETER ET A. HATZFELD. Le XVIe Siecle en France. 1878.

FAGUET. XVIe Siecle. 1894.

SAINTE-BEUVE. Tableau historique et critique de la Poesie fr. au XVIe Siecle.

L. FEUGERE. Caracteres et Portraits litt. du XVIe Siecle. 1859.

EGGER. L'Hellenisme en France. 1869.

FAGUET. La Tragedie fr. au XVIe Siecle. 1883.

E. CHASLES. La Comedie en France au XVIe Siecle. 1862.

E. BOURCIEZ. Les Moeurs polies et la Litt. de Cour sous Henri II. 1886.

P. STAPFER. Rabelais. 1889.

R. MILLET. Rabelais. 1892. (Grands Ecrivains fr.)

E. GEBHART. Rabelais, la Renaissance et la Reforme. 1895.

HAAG ET BORDIER. La France protestante. 2nd edition. (Vols. i.-vi. have appeared.)

F. BUNGENER. Calvin, sa Vie, son OEuvre et ses Ecrits. 1862.

A. BIRSCH-HIRSCHFELD. Geschichte der Franzosischen Litteratur, seit Anfang des XVI. Jahrhunderts. Erster Band: Das Zeitalter der Renaissance. 1889.

EBERT. Entwickelungs-Geschichte der Fr. Tragodie, vornamlich im XVI. Jahrhundert. 1856.

F. GODEFROY. Histoire de la Litt. fr. depuis le XVIe Siecle jusqu'a nos Jours. 1878.

G. MERLET. Les grands Ecrivains du XVIe Siecle. 1875.

C. LENIENT. La Satire en France, ou la Litt. militante au XVIe Siecle. 1886.

E. COUGNY. Guillaume du Vair. 1857.

A. SAYOUS. Etudes litt. sur les Ecrivains fr. de la Reformation. 1854.

A. VINET. Moralistes des XVIe et XVIIe Siecles. 1859.

P. STAPFER. Montaigne. 1895. (Grands Ecrivains fr.)

P. BONNEFON. Montaigne, l'Homme et l'OEuvre. 1893.

SAINT-MARC GIRARDIN. Tableau de la Litt. fr. au XVIe Siecle. 1862.

CH. NORMAND. Monluc. (Classiques populaires.)

G. BIZOS. Ronsard. (Classiques populaires.)

GERUZEZ. Essais d'Histoire litt. 1853.

P. MORILLOT. Discours sur la Vie et les OEuvres d'Agrippa d'Aubigne. 1884.

H. PERGAMINI. La Satire au XVIe Siecle et les Tragiques d'Agrippa d'Aubigne. 1881.

SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

F. LOTHEISSEN. Geschichte der Franzosischen Litteratur im XVII. Jahrhundert. 2 vols. 1897.

A. DUPUY. Histoire de la Litt. fr. au XVIIe Siecle. 1892.

LE R. PERE G. LONGHAYE. Histoire de la Litt. fr. au XVIIe Siecle. 1895.

J. DEMOGEOT. Tableau de la Litt. fr. au XVIIe Siecle avant Corneille et Descartes. 1859.

LE DUC DE BROGLIE. Malherbe. 1897. (Grands Ecrivains fr.)

V. COUSIN. La Societe fr. au XVIIe Siecle. 1858.

V. COUSIN. Mme. de Sable. 1882.

V. COUSIN. Jacqueline Pascal. 1878.

V. COUSIN. La Jeunesse de Mme. de Longueville. 1853.

V. COUSIN. Mme. de Longueville et la Fronde. 1859.

G. LARROUMET. Introduction to edition of Les Precieuses ridicules. 1884.

A. LE BRETON. Le Roman au XVIIe Siecle. 1890.

SAINTE-BEUVE. Portraits de Femmes. 1855.

A. BOURGOIN. Valentin Conrart. 1883.

A. BOURGOIN. Les Maitres de la Critique au XVIIe Siecle. 1889.

PELLISSON ET D'OLIVET. Histoire de l'Academie fr. 2 vols. 1858.

E. ROY. Etude sur Charles Sorel. 1893.

P. MORILLOT. Scarron et le Genre burlesque. 1888.

P. MORILLOT. Le Roman en France depuis 1610 jusqu'a nos Jours.

A. FOUILLEE. Descartes. 1893. (Grands Ecrivains fr.)

F. BOUILLIER. Histoire de la Philosophie cartesienne. 2 vols. 1868.

E. RIGAL. Alexandre Hardy et le Theatre fr. 1889.

E. RIGAL. Esquisse d'une Histoire des Theatres de Paris de 1548 a 1635. 1887.

GUIZOT. Corneille et son Temps. 1880.

G. REYNIER. Thomas Corneille, sa Vie et son Theatre. 1892.

P. MONCEAUX. Racine. (Classiques populaires.)

SAINTE-BEUVE. Port-Royal. 7 vols. 1888.

E. DESCHANEL. Le Romantisme des Classiques. 1883.

P. STAPFER. Racine et Victor Hugo. 1887.

G. LARROUMET. La Comedie de Moliere. 1889.

H. DURAND. Moliere. 1889. (Classiques populaires.)

MAHRENHOLTZ. Molieres Leben und Werke. 1881.

V. FOURNEL. Le Theatre au XVIIe Siecle: la Comedie. 1888.

H. RIGAULT. Hist. de la Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes. 1856.

P. MORILLOT. Boileau. (Classiques populaires.)

G. LANSON. Boileau. 1892. (Grands Ecrivains fr.)

G. LAFENESTRE. La Fontaine. 1895. (Grands Ecrivains fr.)

H. TAINE. La Fontaine et ses Fables. 1879.

PREVOST-PARADOL. Les Moralistes fr. 1865.

P. JANET. Les Passions et les Caracteres dans la Litt. du XVIIe Siecle. 1888.

PELLISSON. La Bruyere. 1892. (Classiques populaires.)

JACQUINET. Des Predicateurs du XVIIe Siecle avant Bossuet. 1863.

G. LANSON. Bossuet. 1891. (Classiques populaires.)

A. FEUGERE. Bourdaloue, sa Predication et son Temps. 1874.

LEHANNEUR. Mascaron. 1878.

L'ABBE FABRE. Flechier orateur. 1885.

L'ABBE BAYLE. Massillon 1867.

G. BIZOS. Fenelon. 1887. (Classiques populaires.)

P. JANET. Fenelon. 1892. (Grands Ecrivains fr.)

R. VALLERY RADOT. Mme. de Sevigne. 1888. (Classiques populaires.)

G. BOISSIER. Mme. de Sevigne. 1887. (Grands Ecrivains fr.)

CTE. D'HAUSSONVILLE. Mme. de la Fayette. 1891. (Grands Ecrivains fr.)

G. BOISSIER. Saint-Simon. 1892. (Grands Ecrivains fr.)

J. BOURDEAU. La Rochefoucauld. 1895. (Grands Ecrivains fr.)

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

H. HETTNER. Literaturgeschichte des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts: Zweiter Theil. 1872.

VILLEMAIN. Tableau de la Litt. au XVIIIe Siecle. 4 vols. 1841.

DE BARANTE. Tableau de la Litt. fr. au XVIIIe Siecle. 1856.

BERSOT. Etudes sur le XVIIIe Siecle. 1852.

VINET. Hist. de la Litt. fr. au XVIIIe Siecle. 1853.

J. BARNI. Hist. des Idees morales et politiques en France au XVIIIe Siecle. 1865.

CARO. La Fin du XVIIIe Siecle. 1881.

TAINE. Les Origines de la France contemporaine. 1882. (Vol. i.)

A. SOREL. Montesquieu. 1889. (Grands Ecrivains fr.)

H. LEBASTEUR. Buffon. 1888. (Classiques populaires.)

M. PALEOLOGUE. Vauvenargues. 1890. (Grands Ecrivains fr.)

G. DESNOIRESTERRES. Voltaire et la Societe au XVIIIe Siecle. 8 vols. 1871-76.

E. FAGUET. Voltaire. 1895. (Classiques populaires.)

A. CHUQUET. J.-J. Rousseau. 1893. (Grands Ecrivains fr.)

H. BEAUDOUIN. La Vie et les OEuvres de J.-J. Rousseau. 1871.

SAINT-MARC GIRARDIN. J.-J. Rousseau, sa Vie et ses Ouvrages. 2 vols. 1875.

CH. LENIENT. La Comedie en France au XVIIIe Siecle. 2 vols. 1888.

E. LINTILHAC. Lesage. 1893. (Grands Ecrivains fr.)

E. LINTILHAC. Beaumarchais et ses Ouvres. 1887.

A. HALLAYS. Beaumarchais. 1897. (Grands Ecrivains fr.)

LEO CLARETIE. Essai sur Lesage romancier. 1890.

LEO CLARETIE. Florian. 1888. (Classiques populaires.)

G. LARROUMET. Marivaux, sa Vie et ses OEuvres. 1882.

J. REINACH. Diderot. 1894. (Grands Ecrivains fr.)

J. BERTRAND. D'Alembert. 1889. (Grands Ecrivains fr.)

L. SAY. Turgot. 1889. (Grands Ecrivains fr.)

REVOLUTION AND NINETEENTH CENTURY

E. GERUZEZ. Hist. de la Litt. fr. pendant la Revolution. 1881.

E. ROUSSE. Mirabeau. 1891. (Grands Ecrivains fr.)

DE LESCURE. Rivarol et la Societe fr. pendant la Revolution et l'Emigration. 1883.

DE LESCURE. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. (Classiques populaires.)

DE LESCURE. Chateaubriand. 1892. (Grands Ecrivains fr.)

G. MERLET. Tableau de la Litt. fr. 1800-1815. 1883.

ARVEDE BARINE. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. 1892. (Grands Ecrivains fr.)

SAINTE-BEUVE. Chateaubriand et son Groupe litt. 2 vols. 1889.

A. BARDOUX. Chateaubriand. 1893. (Classiques populaires.)

A. SOREL. Mme. de Stael. 1893. (Grands Ecrivains fr.)

G. BRANDES. Die Hauptstromungen der Litteratur des 19 Jahrhundert. Vol. v. 1894.

E. FAGUET. Politiques et Moralistes du XIXe Siecle. 1891.

G. PELLISSIER. Le Mouvement litteraire au XIXe Siecle. 1893.

TH. GAUTIER. Histoire de Romantisme. 1874.

E. ROD. Lamartine. 1893. (Classiques populaires.)

E. DESCHANEL. Lamartine. 2 vols. 1893.

E. BIRE. Victor Hugo avant 1830. 1883.

E. DUPUY. V. Hugo, l'Homme et le Poete. 1887.

M. PALEOLOGUE. Alfred de Vigny. 1891. (Grands Ecrivains fr.)

DORISON. Alfred de Vigny, Poete et Philosophe. 1892.

A. BARINE. Alfred de Musset. 1893. (Grands Ecrivains fr.)

A. CLAVEAU. Alfred de Musset. (Classiques populaires.)

M. DU CAMP. Theophile Gautier. 1890. (Grands Ecrivains fr.)

G. COGORDAN. Joseph de Maistre. 1894. (Grands Ecrivains fr.)

E. SPULLER. Lamennais, sa Vie et ses OEuvres. 1893.

J. SIMON. Victor Cousin. 1887. (Grands Ecrivains fr.)

E. CARO. George Sand. 1887. (Grands Ecrivains fr.)

E. ROD. Stendhal. 1892. (Grands Ecrivains fr.)

F. CORREARD. Michelet. 1887. (Classiques populaires.)

P. DE REMUSAT. Thiers. 1889. (Grands Ecrivains fr.)

E. ZEVORT. Thiers. 1892. (Classiques populaires.)

A. FILON. Merimee et ses Amis. 1894.

BRUNETIERE. L'Evolution de la Poesie lyrique en France au XIXe Siecle. 2 vols. 1894.



INDEX

Abondance, Jean d', 75

Adam de la Halle, 26, 27, 72

Alarcon, 167

Alberic de Briancon, 17

Alexis, Vie de Saint, 4

Amadis des Gaules, 23, 92

Amis et Amiles, 12

Amyot, Jacques, 96-97

Andrieux, 336

Anne of Austria, 201

Argenson, Marquis d', 304 note

Armentieres, Peronne d', 59

Arnauld, Antoine, 153, 156-157, 184, 185, 215

Arnauld, Jacqueline, 155

Arnault, 335

Arouet, see Voltaire

Aubigne, Agrippa d', 112, 113, 115, 117-119

Aucassin et Nicolette, 22

Aulnoy, Mme. d', 243

Auvergne, Martial d', 63

Baif, Antoine de, 98, 103

Ballanche, 357

Baltus, 245

Balzac, Guez de, 149-150, 177

Balzac, Honore de, 404-408

Baour-Lormian, 336, 337

Barante, 412

Barbier, Auguste, 391

Barbieri, Nicolo, 198

Barlaam et Joasaph, 5

Barnave, 339

Baron, 207, 229, 262

Bartas, Du, 117

Barthelemy, Abbe, 329

Basoche, La, 76

Bassompierre, 239

Batteux, Charles, 306

Baude, Henri, 63

Bayle, Pierre, 245-247

Beaulieu, Geoffroy de, 51

Beaumarchais, 265, 323-325

Bejart, Armande, 200

Bejart, Madeleine, 198

Bellay, Jean du, 88

Bellay, Joachim du, 98, 99, 100, 104-105

Belleau, Remi, 98, 103-104

Benedictines, the, 254

Benoit de Sainte-More, 15

Benserade, 140, 208

Beranger, J.-P. de, 366-367

Bercuire, Pierre, 46

Bernard, 258

Bernard, Saint, 44

Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, 272, 325-329

Bernay, Alexandre de, 16

Bernis, 258

Beroul, 19

Bertaut, Jean, 106

Bertin, 258

Beyle, Henri, 366, 398-399

Beze, Theodore de, 94, 107

Bichat, 341

Bien-Avise, Mal-Avise, 72

Blanc, Louis, 412

Blois, Gui de, 54

Bodel, Jean, 67

Bodin, Jean, 111

Boetie, La, 96, 122

Boileau, Nicolas, 183-189, 241, 242

Boisguillebert, 304

Boissonade, J.-F., 354

Bolingbroke, 284

Bonald, Vicomte de, 357

Bonnet, Charles, 302 note

Bossuet, Jacques-Benigne, 139, 153, 202, 219-226, 233, 276

Bouillon, Duchesse de, 190, 191, 214

Bounin, Gabriel, 107

Bourdaloue, 202, 227

Boursault, 207

Brantome, 113-114

Bretel, Jacques, 26

Brizeux, Auguste, 391

Buchanan, 106

Bude, Guillaume, 82, 87

Buffon, 308-310, 327

Bunbury, Lydia, 373

Bussy-Rabutin, 176, 179

Cabanis, 301

Calas, Jean, 287

Calvin, Jean, 92-94

Campan, Mme. de, 253

Campistron, 259

Camus, Bishop, 132, 141

Cantillon, 305

Cato, Angelo, 56

Caumartin, de, 283

Caumartin, Mme. de, 176

Caylus, Count de, 329

Caylus, Mme. de, 253

Cent Nouvelles nouvelles, 66

Chamfort, 322

Chapelain, Jean, 141, 147, 149, 162, 177, 186

Chapelle, 153, 184, 192

Charles, Mme., 368

Charron, Pierre, 126-127

Chartier, Alain, 60-61

Chastelain, Georges, 65

Chateaubriand, 328, 343, 348-353

Chatelain de Couci, the, 27

Chatelet, Mme. du, 285, 286

Chaulieu, 256

Chenedolle, 337

Chenier, Andre, 329-331, 338

Chenier, Marie-Joseph, 335, 337

Chesterfield, Lord, 275

Chrestien, 116

Chretien de Troyes, 17, 21

Christine de Pisan, 60

Clari, Robert de, 49

Clermont, Mlle. de, 275

Collin d'Harleville, 336

Commines, Philippe de, 55-57

Comte, Auguste, 255, 360-361

Condillac, 301

Condorcet, 255, 303-304

Confrerie de la Passion, 68, 71, 160

Conon de Bethune, 27

Conrart, Valentin, 147

Constant, Benjamin, 345, 411

Coquillard, 63

Coras, 214

Corneille, Pierre, 139, 163-170, 204

Corneille, Thomas, 171-172, 206

Cotin, 186, 205

Coulanges, Abbe de, 177

Coulanges, Mme. de, 179

Courier, Paul-Louis, 354-355

Cousin Victor, 358-359

Crebillon, P. J. de, 259-260

Cretin, 65

Creuse de Lesser, 337

Cuvier, 341

Cuvier, Le, 75

Cyrano de Bergerac, 145-146, 197

Dacier, Mme., 243

D'Aguesseau, 299

D'Alembert, 254, 295

Danchet, 259

Dancourt, 262

Dangeau, 239

Daniel, 254

Danse Macabre, 63

Danton, 338, 339

Daubenton, 309

Daunou, 411

Daurat, Jean, 98

Debats, Journal de, 338

De Belloy, 261

De Broglie, 412

Decade Philosophique, 338

De Feletz, 342

Deffand, Mme. du, 253, 322

Deforis, 221

Delatouche, 401

Delavigne, Casimir, 395

Delille, 257-258

Desaugiers, 336

Desbordes-Valmore, Mme., 391

Descartes, Rene, 150-153

Deschamps, Antony, 366

Deschamps, Emile, 366

Desfontaines, 300

Desmarets de St.-Sorlin, 141, 142, 144, 197, 241

Des-Masures, Loys, 107

Desmoulins, Camille, 338

Desportes, Philippe, 105-106, 137

Despreaux, see Boileau

Destouches, 263

Diderot, Denis, 254, 265, 272, 294-299, 302, 313

Digulleville, Guillaume de, 43

Dollinger, 180

Dorat, 258

Dubos, Abbe, 305

Duche, 259

Ducis, 261

Duclos, 253

Dudevant, Mme., see Sand, George

Dufresny, 262, 274

Dumas, Alexandre, 394, 397

Dumont, Abbe, 370

Dupont de Nemours, 304

Duplessis-Mornay, 115

Du Ryer, 162, 170

Dussault, 342

Duval, 336

Eneas, 16

Enfants san Souci, 74, 76

Epinay, Mme. d', 253, 314

Estienne, Henri, 101 note, 110, 115

Estissac, Geoffroy d', 87

Estoile, Pierre de l', 114 note

Etienne, 336

Fabre d'Eglantine, 336

Fantosme, Jordan, 47

Fauchet, Claude, 110

Fauriel, 341

Fayette, Mme. de la, 174, 179, 180-182

Fenelon, 153, 230-234

Flechier, 140, 228

Fleury, 225

Floovent, 8

Florian, 259, 272

Fontanes, 337, 349

Fontenelle, 242, 243-245

Foucher, Adele, 375

Fougeres, Etienne de, 42

Foulechat, Denis, 46

Fouquet, 190, 200

Fourier, 359

Fournival, Richard de, 41

Franc-Archer de Bagnolet, 74

Francis I., 82

Frederick the Great, 286, 288

Freron, 300

Froissart, Jean, 53-55

Furetiere, Antoine, 145, 211

Gace Brule, 27

Gaimar, 47

Gaime, Abbe, 312

Galiani, 254, 305

Galland, 274

Garnier, Robert, 108

Garnier de Pont-Sainte-Maxence, 6, 47

Gassendi, Pierre, 153

Gautier, Theophile, 365, 387-390, 392

Gautier de Coinci, 6

Gelee, Jacquemart, 31

Gens Nouveaux, 74

Geoffrin, Mme., 254

Geoffroi of Brittany, 28

Geoffroy, 342

Gerson, 44, 45

Gilbert, 258-259, 300

Gillot, 116

Ginguene, 341, 411

Girardin, M. de, 315

Girardin, Saint-Marc, 425

Godeau, 139

Goethe, 297, 345

Gombault, 142

Gomberville, 142

Gournay, 305

Gournay, Mlle. de, 123

Grandes Chroniques, 50

Greban, Arnoul, 69

Greban, Simon, 69

Grecourt, 258

Gresset, 258, 260, 263

Grevin, 107

Grignan, Mme. de, 178

Grimm, Melchior, 307

Gringoire, Pierre, 74

Griselidis, Histoire de, 68

Guenee, Abbe, 300

Guevara, 267

Guillaume le Clerc, 42

Guillaume le Marechal, Vie de, 47

Guirlande de Julie, 140

Guizot, Francois, 412, 414-416

Guyon, Mme., 224, 230

Hamilton, Anthony, 256

Hardouin, 254

Hardy, Alexandre, 161

Helgaire, 8

Helvetius, 301

Henault, 261

Henri le Glichezare, 30

Herberay des Essarts, 92

Hoffman, 342

Holbach, Baron d', 302

Hospital, Michel de l', 100, 115

Hotman, Francois, 114

Houdetot, Mme. d', 314, 318

Huet, 242

Hugo, Victor, 365, 375-383, 391-393, 396

Hume, David, 315

Jacot de Forest, 16

Jansen, 156

Jeannin, President, 114 note

Jehan de Thuin, 16

Jobelins, 140

Jodelle, 98, 103, 107

Joinville, Jean de, 50-52

Joubert, Joseph, 342-343, 349

Jouffroy, Theodore, 359

La Barre, 288

Labe, Louise, 97

La Beaumelle, 179

Laboureur, Louis le, 141

La Bruyere, 235-238, 242

La Calprenede, 142, 143

Lacordaire, 357, 358

La Fare, 256

La Fontaine, Jean de, 189-195

La Fosse, 259

Lagrange, 302

La Grange-Chancel, 259

Laharpe, 261, 306-307

La Haye, Fragment of, 9

Lally, Count, 288

Lamarck, 341

Lamartine, Alphonse de, 329, 367-371

Lambert, Marquise de, 254, 269