The Encyclopaedia would never have come into existence without the genius, the energy, and the enthusiasm of one man—DIDEROT. In him the spirit of the age found its most typical expression. He was indeed the Philosophe—more completely than all the rest universal, brilliant, inquisitive, sceptical, generous, hopeful, and humane. It was he who originated the Encyclopaedia, who, in company with Dalembert, undertook its editorship, and who, eventually alone, accomplished the herculean task of bringing the great production, in spite of obstacle after obstacle—in spite of government prohibitions, lack of funds, desertions, treacheries, and the mischances of thirty years—to a triumphant conclusion. This was the work of his life; and it was work which, by its very nature, could leave—except for that long row of neglected volumes—no lasting memorial. But the superabundant spirit of Diderot was not content with that: in the intervals of this stupendous labour, which would have exhausted to their last fibre the energies of a lesser man, he found time not only to pour out a constant flow of writing in a multitude of miscellaneous forms—in dramas, in art criticism, in philosophical essays, and in a voluminous correspondence—but also to create on the sly as it were, and without a thought of publication, two or three finished masterpieces which can never be forgotten. Of these, the most important is Le Neveu de Rameau, where Diderot's whole soul gushes out in one clear, strong, sparkling jet of incomparable prose. In the sheer enchantment of its vitality this wonderful little book has certainly never been surpassed. It enthrals the reader as completely as the most exciting romance, or the talk of some irresistibly brilliant raconteur. Indeed, the writing, with its ease, its vigour, its colour, and its rapidity, might almost be taken for what, in fact, it purports to be—conversation put into print, were it not for the magical perfection of its form. Never did a style combine more absolutely the movement of life with the serenity of art. Every sentence is exciting, and every sentence is beautiful. The book must have been composed quickly, without effort, almost off-hand; but the mind that composed it was the mind of a master, who, even as he revelled in the joyous manifestation of his genius, preserved, with an instinctive power, the master's control. In truth, beneath the gay galaxies of scintillating thoughts that strew the pages, one can discern the firm, warm, broad substance of Diderot's very self, underlying and supporting all. That is the real subject of a book which seems to have taken all subjects for its province—from the origin of music to the purpose of the universe; and the central figure—the queer, delightful, Bohemian Rameau, evoked for us with such a marvellous distinctness—is in fact no more than the reed with many stops through which Diderot is blowing. Of all his countrymen, he comes nearest, in spirit and in manner, to the great Cure of Meudon. The rich, exuberant, intoxicating tones of Rabelais vibrate in his voice. He has—not all, for no son of man will ever again have that; but he has some of Rabelais' stupendous breadth, and he has yet more of Rabelais' enormous optimism. His complete materialism—his disbelief in any Providence or any immortality—instead of depressing him, seems rather to have given fresh buoyancy to his spirit; if this life on earth were all, that only served, in his eyes, to redouble the intensity of its value. And his enthusiasm inspired him with a philanthropy unknown to Rabelais—an active benevolence that never tired. For indeed he was, above all else, a man of his own age: a man who could think subtly and work nobly as well as write splendidly; who could weep as well as laugh. He is, perhaps, a smaller figure than Rabelais; but he is much nearer to ourselves. And, when we have come to the end of his generous pages, the final impression that is left with us is of a man whom we cannot choose but love.

Besides Diderot, the band of the Philosophes included many famous names. There was the brilliant and witty mathematician, Dalembert; there was the grave and noble statesman, Turgot; there was the psychologist, Condillac; there was the light, good-humoured Marmontel; there was the penetrating and ill-fated Condorcet. Helvetius and D'Holbach plunged boldly into ethics and metaphysics; while, a little apart, in learned repose, Buffon advanced the purest interests of science by his researches in Natural History. As every year passed there were new accessions to this great array of writers, who waged their war against ignorance and prejudice with an ever-increasing fury. A war indeed it was. On one side were all the forces of intellect; on the other was all the mass of entrenched and powerful dullness. In reply to the brisk fire of the Philosophes—argument, derision, learning, wit—the authorities in State and Church opposed the more serious artillery of censorships, suppressions, imprisonments, and exiles. There was hardly an eminent writer in Paris who was unacquainted with the inside of the Conciergerie or the Bastille. It was only natural, therefore, that the struggle should have become a highly embittered one, and that at times, in the heat of it, the party whose watchword was a hatred of fanaticism should have grown itself fanatical. But it was clear that the powers of reaction were steadily losing ground; they could only assert themselves spasmodically; their hold upon public opinion was slipping away. Thus the efforts of the band of writers in Paris seemed about to be crowned with success. But this result had not been achieved by their efforts alone. In the midst of the conflict they had received the aid of a powerful auxiliary, who had thrown himself with the utmost vigour into the struggle, and, far as he was from the centre of operations, had assumed supreme command.

It was Voltaire. This great man had now entered upon the final, and by far the most important, period of his astonishing career. It is a curious fact that if Voltaire had died at the age of sixty he would now only be remembered as a writer of talent and versatility, who had given conspicuous evidence, in one or two works, of a liberal and brilliant intelligence, but who had enjoyed a reputation in his own age, as a poet and dramatist, infinitely beyond his deserts. He entered upon the really significant period of his activity at an age when most men have already sought repose. Nor was this all; for, by a singular stroke of fortune, his existence was prolonged far beyond the common span; so that, in spite of the late hour of its beginning, the most fruitful and important epoch of his life extended over a quarter of a century (1754-78). That he ever entered upon this last period of his career seems in itself to have depended as much on accident as his fateful residence in England. After the publication of the Lettres Philosophiques, he had done very little to fulfil the promise of that work. He had retired to the country house of Madame du Chatelet, where he had devoted himself to science, play-writing, and the preparation of a universal history. His reputation had increased; for it was in these years that he produced his most popular tragedies—Zaire, Merope, Alzire, and Mahomet—while a correspondence carried on in the most affectionate terms with Frederick the Great yet further added to his prestige; but his essential genius still remained quiescent. Then at last Madame du Chatelet died and Voltaire took the great step of his life. At the invitation of Frederick he left France, and went to live as a pensioner of the Prussian king in the palace at Potsdam. But his stay there did not last long. It seemed as if the two most remarkable men in Europe liked each other so well that they could not remain apart—and so ill that they could not remain together. After a year or two, there was the inevitable explosion. Voltaire fled from Prussia, giving to the world before he did so one of the most amusing jeux d'esprit ever written—the celebrated Diatribe du Docteur Akakia—and, after some hesitation, settled down near the Lake of Geneva. A few years later he moved into the chateau of Ferney, which became henceforward his permanent abode.

Voltaire was now sixty years of age. His position was an enviable one. His reputation was very great, and he had amassed a considerable fortune, which not only assured him complete independence, but enabled him to live in his domains on the large and lavish scale of a country magnate. His residence at Ferney, just on the border of French territory, put him beyond the reach of government interference, while he was yet not too far distant to be out of touch with the capital. Thus the opportunity had at last come for the full display of his powers. And those powers were indeed extraordinary. His character was composed of a strange amalgam of all the most contradictory elements in human nature, and it would be difficult to name a single virtue or a single vice which he did not possess. He was the most egotistical of mortals, and the most disinterested; he was graspingly avaricious, and profusely generous; he was treacherous, mischievous, frivolous, and mean, yet he was a firm friend and a true benefactor, yet he was profoundly serious and inspired by the noblest enthusiasms. Nature had carried these contradictions even into his physical constitution. His health was so bad that he seemed to pass his whole life on the brink of the grave; nevertheless his vitality has probably never been surpassed in the history of the world. Here, indeed, was the one characteristic which never deserted him: he was always active with an insatiable activity; it was always safe to say of him that, whatever else he was, he was not at rest. His long, gaunt body, frantically gesticulating, his skull-like face, with its mobile features twisted into an eternal grin, its piercing eyes sparkling and darting—all this suggested the appearance of a corpse galvanized into an incredible animation. But in truth it was no dead ghost that inhabited this strange tenement, but the fierce and powerful spirit of an intensely living man.

Some signs had already appeared of the form which his activity was now about to take. During his residence in Prussia he had completed his historical Essai sur les Moeurs, which passed over in rapid review the whole development of humanity, and closed with a brilliant sketch of the age of Louis XIV. This work was highly original in many ways. It was the first history which attempted to describe the march of civilization in its broadest aspects, which included a consideration of the great Eastern peoples, which dealt rather with the progress of the arts and the sciences than with the details of politics and wars. But its chief importance lay in the fact that it was in reality, under its historical trappings, a work of propaganda. It was a counterblast to Bossuet's Histoire Universelle. That book had shown the world's history as a part of the providential order—a grand unfolding of design. Voltaire's view was very different. To him, as to Montesquieu, natural causes alone were operative in history; but this was not all; in his eyes there was one influence which, from the earliest ages, had continually retarded the progress of humanity, and that influence was religious belief. Thus his book, though far more brilliant and far more modern than that of Bossuet, was nevertheless almost equally biased. It was history with a thesis, and the gibe of Montesquieu was justifiable. 'Voltaire,' he said, 'writes history to glorify his own convent, like any Benedictine monk.' Voltaire's 'convent' was the philosophical school in Paris; and his desire to glorify it was soon to appear in other directions.

The Essai sur les Moeurs is an exceedingly amusing narrative, but it is a long and learned work filling several volumes, and the fruit of many years of research. Voltaire was determined henceforward to distil its spirit into more compendious and popular forms. He had no more time for elaborate dissertations; he must reach the public by quicker and surer ways. Accordingly there now began to pour into Paris a flood of short light booklets—essays, plays, poems, romances, letters, tracts—a multitude of writings infinitely varied in form and scope, but all equally irresistible and all equally bearing the unmistakable signs of their origin at Ferney. Voltaire's inimitable style had at last found a medium in which it could display itself in all its charm and all its brilliance. The pointed, cutting, mocking sentences laugh and dance through his pages like light-toed, prick-eared elves. Once seen, and there is no help for it—one must follow, into whatever dangerous and unknown regions those magic imps may lead. The pamphlets were of course forbidden, but without effect; they were sold in thousands, and new cargoes, somehow or other, were always slipping across the frontier from Holland or Geneva. Whenever a particularly outrageous one appeared, Voltaire wrote off to all his friends to assure them that he knew nothing whatever of the production, that it was probably a translation from the work of an English clergyman, and that, in short, everyone would immediately see from the style alone that it was—not his. An endless series of absurd pseudonyms intensified the farce. Oh no! Voltaire was certainly not the author of this scandalous book. How could he be? Did not the title-page plainly show that it was the work of Frere Cucufin, or the uncle of Abbe Bazin, or the Comte de Boulainvilliers, or the Emperor of China? And so the game proceeded; and so all France laughed; and so all France read.

Two forms of this light literature Voltaire made especially his own. He brought the Dialogue to perfection; for the form suited him exactly, with its opportunities for the rapid exposition of contrary doctrines, for the humorous stultification of opponents, and for witty repartee. Into this mould he has poured some of his finest materials; and in such pieces as Le Diner du Comte de Boulainvilliers and Frere Rigolet et l'Empereur de la Chine one finds the concentrated essence of his whole work. Equally effective and equally characteristic is the Dictionnaire Philosophique, which contains a great number of very short miscellaneous articles arranged in alphabetical order. This plan gave Voltaire complete freedom both in the choice of subjects and in their manipulation; as the spirit seized him he could fly out into a page of sarcasm or speculation or criticism or buffoonery, and such liberty was precisely to his taste; so that the book which had first appeared as a pocket dictionary—'ce diable de portatif', he calls it in a letter proving quite conclusively that he, at any rate, was not responsible for the wretched thing—were there not Hebrew quotations in it? and who could accuse him of knowing Hebrew?—had swollen to six volumes before he died.

The subjects of these writings were very various. Ostensibly, at least, they were by no means limited to matters of controversy. Some were successful tragedies, others were pieces of criticism, others were historical essays, others were frivolous short stories, or vers de societe. But, in all of them, somewhere or other, the cloven hoof was bound to show itself at last. Whatever disguises he might assume, Voltaire in reality was always writing for his 'convent'; he was pressing forward, at every possible opportunity, the great movement against the old regime. His attack covers a wide ground. The abuses of the financial system, the defects in the administration of justice, the futility of the restraints upon trade—upon these and a hundred similar subjects he poured out an incessant torrent of gay, penetrating, frivolous and remorseless words. But there was one theme to which he was perpetually recurring, which forms the subject for his bitterest jests, and which, in fact, dominates the whole of his work, 'Ecrasez l'infame!' was his constant exclamation; and the 'infamous thing' which he wished to see stamped underfoot was nothing less than religion. The extraordinary fury of his attack on religion has, in the eyes of many, imprinted an indelible stigma upon his name; but the true nature of his position in this matter has often been misunderstood, and deserves some examination.

Voltaire was a profoundly irreligious man. In this he resembled the majority of his contemporaries; but he carried the quality perhaps to a further pitch than any man of his age. For, with him, it was not merely the purely religious and mystical feelings that were absent; he lacked all sympathy with those vague, brooding, emotional states of mind which go to create the highest forms of poetry, music, and art, and which are called forth into such a moving intensity by the beauties of Nature. These things Voltaire did not understand; he did not even perceive them; for him, in fact, they did not exist; and the notion that men could be influenced by them, genuinely and deeply, he considered to be so absurd as hardly to need discussion. This was certainly a great weakness in him—a great limitation of spirit. It has vitiated a large part of his writings; and it has done more than that—it has obscured, to many of his readers, the real nature and the real value of his work. For, combined with this inability to comprehend some of the noblest parts of man's nature, Voltaire possessed other qualities of high importance which went far to compensate for his defects. If he was blind to some truths, he perceived others with wonderful clearness; if his sympathies in some directions were atrophied, in others they were sensitive to an extraordinary degree. In the light of these considerations his attitude towards religion becomes easier to understand. All the highest elements of religion—the ardent devotion, the individual ecstasy, the sense of communion with the divine—these things he simply ignored. But, unfortunately, in his day there was a side of religion which, with his piercing clear-sightedness, he could not ignore. The spirit of fanaticism was still lingering in France; it was the spirit which had burst out on the Eve of St. Bartholomew, and had dictated the fatal Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. In every branch of life its influence was active, infusing prejudice, bitterness, and strife; but its effects were especially terrible in the administration of justice. It so happened that while Voltaire was at Ferney some glaring instances of this dreadful fact came to light. A young Protestant named Calas committed suicide in Toulouse, and, owing to the blind zealotry of the magistrates of the town, his father, completely innocent, was found guilty of his murder and broken on the wheel. Shortly afterwards, another Protestant, Sirven, was condemned in similar circumstances, but escaped to Ferney. A few years later, two youths of seventeen were convicted at Abbeville for making some profane jokes. Both were condemned to have their tongues torn out and to be decapitated; one managed to escape, the other was executed. That such things could happen in eighteenth-century France seems incredible; but happen they did, and who knows how many more of a like atrocity? The fact that these three came to light at all was owing to Voltaire himself. But for his penetration, his courage, and his skill, the terrible murder of Calas would to this day have remained unknown, and the dreadful affair of Abbeville would have been forgotten in a month. Different men respond most readily to different stimuli: the spectacle of cruelty and injustice bit like a lash into the nerves of Voltaire, and plunged him into an agony of horror. He resolved never to rest until he had not only obtained reparation for these particular acts of injustice, but had rooted out for ever from men's minds the superstitious bigotry which made them possible. It was to attain this end that he attacked with such persistence and such violence all religion and all priestcraft in general, and, in particular, the orthodox dogmas of the Roman Catholic Church. It became the great object of his life to convince public opinion that those dogmas were both ridiculous and contemptible in themselves, and abominable in their results. In this we may think him right or we may think him wrong; our judgement will depend upon the nature of our own opinions. But, whatever our opinions, we cannot think him wicked; for we cannot doubt that the one dominating motive in all that he wrote upon the subject of religion was a passionate desire for the welfare of mankind.

Voltaire's philosophical views were curious. While he entirely discarded the miraculous from his system, he nevertheless believed in a Deity—a supreme First Cause of all the phenomena of the universe. Yet, when he looked round upon the world as it was, the evil and the misery in it were what seized his attention and appalled his mind. The optimism of so many of his contemporaries appeared to him a shallow crude doctrine unrelated to the facts of existence, and it was to give expression to this view that he composed the most famous of all his works—Candide. This book, outwardly a romance of the most flippant kind, contains in reality the essence of Voltaire's maturest reflections upon human life. It is a singular fact that a book which must often have been read simply for the sake of its wit and its impropriety should nevertheless be one of the bitterest and most melancholy that was ever written. But it is a safe rule to make, that Voltaire's meaning is deep in proportion to the lightness of his writing—that it is when he is most in earnest that he grins most. And, in Candide, the brilliance and the seriousness alike reach their climax. The book is a catalogue of all the woes, all the misfortunes, all the degradations, and all the horrors that can afflict humanity; and throughout it Voltaire's grin is never for a moment relaxed. As catastrophe follows catastrophe, and disaster succeeds disaster, not only does he laugh himself consumedly, but he makes his reader laugh no less; and it is only when the book is finished that the true meaning of it is borne in upon the mind. Then it is that the scintillating pages begin to exercise their grim unforgettable effect; and the pettiness and misery of man seem to borrow a new intensity from the relentless laughter of Voltaire.

But perhaps the most wonderful thing about Candide is that it contains, after all, something more than mere pessimism—it contains a positive doctrine as well. Voltaire's common sense withers the Ideal; but it remains common sense. 'Il faut cultiver notre jardin' is his final word—one of the very few pieces of practical wisdom ever uttered by a philosopher.

Voltaire's style reaches the summit of its perfection in Candide; but it is perfect in all that he wrote. His prose is the final embodiment of the most characteristic qualities of the French genius. If all that that great nation had ever done or thought were abolished from the world, except a single sentence of Voltaire's, the essence of their achievement would have survived. His writing brings to a culmination the tradition that Pascal had inaugurated in his Lettres Provinciales: clarity, simplicity and wit—these supreme qualities it possesses in an unequalled degree. But these qualities, pushed to an extreme, have also their disadvantages. Voltaire's style is narrow; it is like a rapier—all point; with such neatness, such lightness, the sweeping blade of Pascal has become an impossibility. Compared to the measured march of Bossuet's sentences, Voltaire's sprightly periods remind one almost of a pirouette. But the pirouette is Voltaire's—executed with all the grace, all the ease, all the latent strength of a consummate dancer; it would be folly to complain; yet it was clear that a reaction was bound to follow—and a salutary reaction. Signs of it were already visible in the colour and passion of Diderot's writing; but it was not until the nineteenth century that the great change came.

Nowhere is the excellence of Voltaire's style more conspicuous than in his Correspondence, which forms so large and important a portion of his work. A more delightful and a more indefatigable letter-writer never lived. The number of his published letters exceeds ten thousand; how many more he may actually have written one hardly ventures to imagine, for the great majority of those that have survived date only from the last thirty years of his long life. The collection is invaluable alike for the light which it throws upon Voltaire's career and character, and for the extent to which it reflects the manners, sentiments, and thought of the age. For Voltaire corresponded with all Europe. His reputation, already vast before he settled at Ferney, rose after that date to a well-nigh incredible height. No man had wielded such an influence since the days when Bernard of Clairvaux dictated the conduct of popes and princes from his monastic cell. But, since then, the wheel had indeed come full circle! The very antithesis of the Middle Ages was personified in the strange old creature who in his lordly retreat by the Lake of Geneva alternately coquetted with empresses, received the homage of statesmen and philosophers, domineered over literature in all its branches, and laughed Mother Church to scorn. As the years advanced, Voltaire's industry, which had always been astonishing, continually increased. As if his intellectual interests were not enough to occupy him, he took to commercial enterprise, developed the resources of his estates, and started a successful colony of watchmakers at Ferney. Every day he worked for long hours at his desk, spinning his ceaseless web of tracts, letters, tragedies, and farces. In the evening he would discharge the functions of a munificent host, entertain the whole neighbourhood with balls and suppers, and take part in one of his own tragedies on the stage of his private theatre. Then a veritable frenzy would seize upon him; shutting himself up in his room for days together, he would devote every particle of his terrific energies to the concoction of some devastating dialogue, or some insidious piece of profanation for his Dictionnaire Philosophique. At length his fragile form would sink exhausted—he would be dying—he would be dead; and next morning he would be up again as brisk as ever, directing the cutting of the crops.

One day, quite suddenly, he appeared in Paris, which he had not visited for nearly thirty years. His arrival was the signal for one of the most extraordinary manifestations of enthusiasm that the world has ever seen. For some weeks he reigned in the capital, visible and glorious, the undisputed lord of the civilized universe. The climax came when he appeared in a box at the Theatre Francais, to witness a performance of the latest of his tragedies, and the whole house rose as one man to greet him. His triumph seemed to be something more than the mere personal triumph of a frail old mortal; it seemed to be the triumph of all that was noblest in the aspirations of the human race. But the fatigue and excitement of those weeks proved too much even for Voltaire in the full flush of his eighty-fourth year. An overdose of opium completed what Nature had begun; and the amazing being rested at last.

French literature during the latter half of the eighteenth century was rich in striking personalities. It might have been expected that an age which had produced both Diderot and Voltaire would hardly be able to boast of yet another star of equal magnitude. But, in JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU, there appeared a man in some ways even more remarkable than either of his great contemporaries. The peculiar distinction of Rousseau was his originality. Neither Voltaire nor Diderot possessed this quality in a supreme degree. Voltaire, indeed, can only claim to be original by virtue of his overwhelming common sense, which enabled him to see clearly what others could only see confusedly, to strike without fear where others were only willing to wound; but the whole bulk of his thought really rested on the same foundation as that which supported the ordinary conceptions of the average man of the day. Diderot was a far bolder, a far more speculative thinker; but yet, though he led the very van of the age, he was always in it; his originality was never more than a development—though it was often an extreme development—of the ideas that lay around him. Rousseau's originality went infinitely further than this. He neither represented his age, nor led it; he opposed it. His outlook upon the world was truly revolutionary. In his eyes, the reforms which his contemporaries were so busy introducing into society were worse than useless—the mere patching of an edifice which would never be fit to live in. He believed that it was necessary to start altogether afresh. And what makes him so singularly interesting a figure is that, in more than one sense, he was right. It was necessary to start afresh; and the new world which was to spring from the old one was to embody, in a multitude of ways, the visions of Rousseau. He was a prophet, with the strange inspiration of a prophet—and the dishonour in his own country.

But inspiration and dishonour are not the only characteristics of prophets: as a rule, they are also highly confused in the delivery of their prophecies; and Rousseau was no exception. In his writings, the true gist of his meaning seems to be only partially revealed; and it is clear that he himself was never really aware of the fundamental notions that lay at the back of his thought. Hence nothing can be easier than to pull his work to pieces, and to demonstrate beyond a doubt that it is full of fallacies, inconsistencies, and absurdities. It is very easy to point out that the Control Social is a miserable piece of logic-chopping, to pour scorn on the stilted sentiment and distorted morality of La Nouvelle Heloise, and finally to draw a cutting comparison between Rousseau's preaching and his practice, as it stands revealed in the Confessions—the lover of independence who never earned his own living, the apostle of equality who was a snob, and the educationist who left his children in the Foundling Hospital. All this has often been done, and no doubt will often be done again; but it is futile. Rousseau lives, and will live, a vast and penetrating influence, in spite of all his critics. There is something in him that eludes their foot-rules. It is so difficult to take the measure of a soul!

Difficult, indeed; for, if we examine the doctrine that seems to be Rousseau's fundamental one—that, at least, on which he himself lays most stress—here, too, we shall find a mass of error. Rousseau was perpetually advocating the return to Nature. All the great evils from which humanity suffers are, he declared, the outcome of civilization; the ideal man is the primitive man—the untutored Indian, innocent, chaste, brave, who adores the Creator of the universe in simplicity, and passes his life in virtuous harmony with the purposes of Nature. If we cannot hope to reach quite that height of excellence, let us at least try to get as near it as we can. So far from pressing on the work of civilization, with the Philosophes, let us try to forget that we are civilized and be natural instead. This was the burden of Rousseau's teaching, and it was founded on a complete misconception of the facts. The noble Indian was a myth. The more we find out about primitive man, the more certain it becomes that, so far from being the ideal creature of Rousseau's imagination, he was in reality a savage whose whole life was dominated, on the one hand by the mere brute necessities of existence, and on the other by a complicated and revolting system of superstitions. Nature is neither simple nor good; and all history shows that the necessary condition for the production of any of the really valuable things of life is the control of Nature by man—in fact, civilization. So far, therefore, the Philosophes were right; if the Golden Age was to have any place at all in the story of humanity, it must be, not at the beginning, but the end.

But Rousseau was not, at bottom, concerned with the truth of any historical theory at all. It was only because he hated the present that he idealized the past. His primitive Golden Age was an imaginary refuge from the actual world of the eighteenth century. What he detested and condemned in that world was in reality not civilization, but the conventionality of civilization—the restrictions upon the free play of the human spirit which seemed to be inherent in civilized life. The strange feeling of revolt that surged up within him when he contemplated the drawing-rooms of Paris, with their brilliance and their philosophy, their intellect and their culture, arose from a profounder cause than a false historical theory, or a defective logical system, or a mean personal jealousy and morbid pride. All these elements, no doubt, entered into his feeling—for Rousseau was a very far from perfect human being; but the ultimate source was beyond and below them—in his instinctive, overmastering perception of the importance and the dignity of the individual soul. It was in this perception that Rousseau's great originality lay. His revolt was a spiritual revolt. In the Middle Ages the immense significance of the human spirit had been realized, but it had been inextricably involved in a mass of theological superstition. The eighteenth century, on the other hand, had achieved the great conception of a secular system of society; but, in doing so, it had left out of account the spiritual nature of man, who was regarded simply as a rational animal in an organized social group. Rousseau was the first to unite the two views, to revive the medieval theory of the soul without its theological trappings, and to believe—half unconsciously, perhaps, and yet with a profound conviction—that the individual, now, on this earth, and in himself, was the most important thing in the world.

This belief, no doubt, would have arisen in Europe, in some way or other, if Rousseau had never lived; but it was he who clothed it with the splendour of genius, and, by the passion of his utterance, sowed it far and wide in the hearts of men. In two directions his influence was enormous. His glowing conception of individual dignity and individual rights as adhering, not to a privileged few, but to the whole mass of humanity, seized upon the imagination of France, supplied a new and potent stimulus to the movement towards political change, and produced a deep effect upon the development of the Revolution. But it is in literature, and those emotions of real life which find their natural outlet in literature, that the influence of Rousseau's spirit may be most clearly seen.

It is often lightly stated that the eighteenth century was an unemotional age. What, it is asked, could be more frigid than the poetry of Pope? Or more devoid of true feeling than the mockery of Voltaire? But such a view is a very superficial one; and it is generally held by persons who have never given more than a hasty glance at the works they are so ready to condemn. It is certainly true that at first sight Pope's couplets appear to be cold and mechanical; but if we look more closely we shall soon find that these apparently monotonous verses have been made the vehicle for some of the most passionate feelings of disgust and animosity that ever agitated a human breast. As for Voltaire, we have already seen that to infer lack of feeling from his epigrams and laughter would be as foolish as to infer that a white-hot bar of molten steel lacked heat because it was not red. The accusation is untenable; the age that produced—to consider French literature alone—a Voltaire, a Diderot, and a Saint-Simon cannot be called an age without emotion. Yet it is clear that, in the matter of emotion, a distinction of some sort does exist between that age and this. The distinction lies not so much in the emotion itself as in the attitude towards emotion, adopted by the men of those days and by ourselves. In the eighteenth century men were passionate—intensely passionate; but they were passionate almost unconsciously, in a direct unreflective way. If anyone had asked Voltaire to analyse his feelings accurately, he would have replied that he had other things to think about; the notion of paying careful attention to mere feelings would have seemed to him ridiculous. And, when Saint-Simon sat down to write his Memoirs, it never occurred to him for a moment to give any real account of what, in all the highly personal transactions that he describes, he intimately felt. He tells us nothing of his private life; he mentions his wife once, and almost apologizes for doing so; really, could a gentleman—a duke—dwell upon such matters, and preserve his self-respect? But, to us, it is precisely such matters that form the pivot of a personality—the index of a soul. A man's feelings are his very self, and it is around them that all that is noblest and profoundest in our literature seems naturally to centre. A great novelist is one who can penetrate and describe the feelings of others; a great poet is one who can invest his own with beauty and proclaim them to the world. We have come to set a value upon introspection which was quite unknown in the eighteenth century—unknown, that is, until Rousseau, in the most valuable and characteristic of his works—his Confessions—started the vast current in literature and in sentiment which is still flowing to-day. The Confessions is the detailed, intimate, complete history of a soul. It describes Rousseau's life, from its beginning until its maturity, from the most personal point of view, with no disguises or reticences of any kind. It is written with great art. Rousseau's style, like his matter, foreshadows the future; his periods are cast in a looser, larger, more oratorical mould than those of his contemporaries; his sentences are less fiery and excitable; though he can be witty when he wishes, he is never frivolous; and a tone of earnest intimate passion lingers in his faultless rhythms. With his great powers of expression he combined a wonderful aptitude for the perception of the subtlest shades of feeling and of mood. He was sensitive to an extraordinary degree—with the sensitiveness of a proud, shy nature, unhardened by the commerce of the world. There is, indeed, an unpleasant side to his Confessions. Rousseau, like most explorers, became obsessed by his own discoveries; he pushed the introspective method to its farthest limits; the sanctity of the individual seemed to him not only to dignify the slightest idiosyncrasies of temperament and character, but also, in some sort of way, to justify what was positively bad. Thus his book contains the germs of that Byronic egotism which later became the fashion all over Europe. It is also, in parts, a morbid book. Rousseau was not content to extenuate nothing; his failings got upon his nerves; and, while he was ready to dilate upon them himself with an infinite wealth of detail, the slightest hint of a reflection on his conduct from any other person filled him with an agony and a rage which, at the end of his life, developed into madness. To strict moralists, therefore, and to purists in good taste, the Confessions will always be unpalatable. More indulgent readers will find in those pages the traces of a spirit which, with all its faults, its errors, its diseases, deserves something more than pity—deserves almost love. At any rate, it is a spirit singularly akin to our own. Out of the far-off, sharp, eager, unpoetical, unpsychological eighteenth century, it speaks to us in the familiar accents of inward contemplation, of brooding reminiscence, of subtly-shifting temperament, of quiet melancholy, of visionary joy. Rousseau, one feels, was the only man of his age who ever wanted to be alone. He understood that luxury: understood the fascination of silence, and the loveliness of dreams. He understood, too, the exquisite suggestions of Nature, and he never wrote more beautifully than when he was describing the gentle process of her influences on the solitary human soul. He understood simplicity: the charm of little happinesses, the sweetness of ordinary affections, the beauty of a country face. The paradox is strange; how was it that it should have been left to the morbid, tortured, half-crazy egoist of the Confessions to lead the way to such spiritual delicacies, such innocent delights?

The paradox was too strange for Rousseau's contemporaries. They could not understand him. His works were highly popular; he was received into the most brilliant circles in Paris; he made friends with the most eminent men of the day; and then ensued misunderstandings, accusations, quarrels, and at last complete disaster. Rousseau vanished from society, driven out, according to his account, by the treacheries of his friends; the victim, according to their account, of his own petty jealousies and morbid suspicions. At every point in the quarrel, his friends, and such great and honest men as Diderot and Hume were among them, seem to have been in the right; but it seems no less clear that they were too anxious to proclaim and emphasize the faults of a poor, unfortunate, demented man. We can hardly blame them; for, in their eyes, Rousseau appeared as a kind of mad dog—a pest to society, deserving of no quarter. They did not realize—they could not—that beneath the meanness and the frenzy that were so obvious to them was the soul of a poet and a seer. The wretched man wandered for long in Switzerland, in Germany, in England, pursued by the ever-deepening shadows of his maniacal suspicions. At last he returned to France, to end his life, after years of lingering misery, in obscurity and despair.

Rousseau and Voltaire both died in 1778—hardly more than ten years before the commencement of the Revolution. Into that last decade of the old regime there seemed to be concentrated all the ardour, all the hope, all the excitement, all the brilliance of the preceding century. Had not Reason and Humanity triumphed at last? Triumphed, at any rate, in spirit; for who was not converted? All that remained now was the final, quick, easy turn which would put into action the words of the philosophers and make this earth a paradise. And still new visions kept opening out before the eyes of enthusiasts—strange speculations and wondrous possibilities. The march of mind seemed so rapid that the most advanced thinkers of yesterday were already out of date. 'Voltaire est bigot: il est deiste,' exclaimed one of the wits of Paris, and the sentiment expressed the general feeling of untrammelled mental freedom and swift progression which was seething all over the country. It was at this moment that the production of BEAUMARCHAIS' brilliant comedy, Le Mariage de Figaro, electrified the intellectual public of Versailles and the capital. In that play the old regime was presented, not in the dark colours of satire, but under the sparkling light of frivolity, gaiety, and idleness—a vision of endless intrigue and vapid love-making among the antiquated remains of feudal privileges and social caste. In this fairyland one being alone has reality—Figaro, the restless, fiendishly clever, nondescript valet, sprung from no one knows where, destined to no one knows what, but gradually emerging a strange and sinister profile among the laughter and the flowers. 'What have you done, Monsieur le Comte,' he bursts out at last to his master, 'to deserve all these advantages?—I know. Vous vous etes donne la peine de naitre!' In that sentence one can hear—far off, but distinct—the flash and snap of the guillotine. To those happy listeners, though, no such sound was audible. Their speculations went another way. All was roseate, all was charming as the coaches dashed through the narrow streets of Paris, carrying their finely-powdered ladies and gentlemen, in silks and jewels, to the assemblies of the night. Within, the candles sparkled, and the diamonds, and the eyes of the company, sitting round in gilded delicate chairs. And then there was supper, and the Marquise was witty, and the Comte was sententious, while yet newer vistas opened of yet happier worlds, dancing on endlessly through the floods of conversation and champagne.



CHAPTER VI

THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT

The French Revolution was like a bomb, to the making of which every liberal thinker and writer of the eighteenth century had lent a hand, and which, when it exploded, destroyed its creators. After the smoke had rolled away, it became clear that the old regime, with its despotisms and its persecutions, had indeed been abolished for ever; but the spirit of the Philosophes had vanished likewise. Men's minds underwent a great reaction. The traditions of the last two centuries were violently broken. In literature, particularly, it seemed as if the very foundations of the art must be laid anew; and, in this task, if men looked at all for inspiration from the Past, it was towards that age which differed most from the age of their fathers—towards those distant times before the Renaissance, when the medieval Church reigned supreme in Europe.

But before examining these new developments more closely, one glance must be given at a writer whose qualities had singularly little to do with his surroundings. ANDRE CHENIER passed the active years of his short life in the thick of the revolutionary ferment, and he was guillotined at the age of thirty-two; but his most characteristic poems might have been composed in some magic island, far from the haunts of men, and untouched by 'the rumour of periods'. He is the only French writer of the eighteenth century in whom the pure and undiluted spirit of poetry is manifest. For this reason, perhaps, he has often been acclaimed as the forerunner of the great Romantic outburst of a generation later; but, in reality, to give him such a title is to misjudge the whole value of his work. For he is essentially a classic; with a purity, a restraint, a measured and accomplished art which would have delighted Boileau, and which brings him into close kinship with Racine and La Fontaine. If his metrical technique is somewhat looser than the former poet's, it is infinitely less loose than the latter's; and his occasional departures from the strict classical canons of versification are always completely subordinated to the controlling balance of his style. In his Eglogues the beauty of his workmanship often reaches perfection. The short poems are Attic in their serenity and their grace. It is not the rococo pseudo-classicism of the later versifiers of the eighteenth century, it is the delicate flavour of true Hellenism that breathes from them; and, as one reads them, one is reminded alternately of Theocritus and of Keats. Like Keats, Chenier was cut off when he had hardly more than given promise of what his achievement might have been. His brief and tragic apparition in the midst of the Revolution is like that of some lovely bird flitting on a sudden out of the darkness and the terror of a tempest, to be overcome a moment later, and whirled to destruction.

The lines upon which the Romantic Movement was to develop had no connexion whatever with Chenier's exquisite art. Throughout French Literature, it is easy to perceive two main impulses at work, which, between them, have inspired all the great masterpieces of the language. On the one hand, there is that positive spirit of searching and unmitigated common sense which has given French prose its peculiar distinction, which lies at the root of the wonderful critical powers of the nation, and which has produced that remarkable and persistent strain of Realism—of absolute fidelity to the naked truth—common to the earliest Fabliaux of the Middle Ages and the latest Parisian novel of to-day. On the other hand, there is in French literature a totally different—almost a contradictory—tendency, which is no less clearly marked and hardly less important—the tendency towards pure Rhetoric. This love of language for its own sake—of language artfully ordered, splendidly adorned, moving, swelling, irresistible—may be seen alike in the torrential sentences of Rabelais, in the sonorous periods of Bossuet, and in the passionate tirades of Corneille. With the great masters of the seventeenth century—Pascal, Racine, La Fontaine, La Bruyere—the two influences met, and achieved a perfect balance. In their work, the most penetrating realism is beautified and ennobled by all the resources of linguistic art, while the rhetorical instinct is preserved from pomposity and inflation by a supreme critical sense. With the eighteenth century, however, a change came. The age was a critical age—an age of prose and common sense; the rhetorical impulse faded away, to find expression only in melodramatic tragedy and dull verse; and the style of Voltaire, so brilliant and yet so colourless, so limited and yet so infinitely sensible, symbolized the literary character of the century. The Romantic Movement was an immense reaction against the realism which had come to such perfection in the acid prose of Voltaire. It was a reassertion of the rhetorical instinct in all its strength and in all its forms. There was no attempt simply to redress the balance; no wish to revive the studied perfection of the classical age. The realistic spirit was almost completely abandoned. The pendulum swung violently from one extreme to the other.

The new movement had been already faintly discernible in Diderot's bright colouring and the oratorical structure of Rousseau's writing. But it was not until after the Revolution, in the first years of the nineteenth century, that the Romantic spirit completely declared itself—in the prose of CHATEAUBRIAND. Chateaubriand was, at bottom, a rhetorician pure and simple—a rhetorician in the widest sense of the word. It was not merely that the resources of his style were enormous in colour, movement, and imagery, in splendour of rhythm, in descriptive force; but that his whole cast of mind was in itself rhetorical, and that he saw, felt, and thought with the same emphasis, the same amplitude, the same romantic sensibility with which he wrote. The three subjects which formed the main themes of all his work and gave occasion for his finest passages were Christianity, Nature, and himself. His conception of Christianity was the very reverse of that of the eighteenth century. In his Genie du Christianisme and his Martyrs the analytical and critical spirit of his predecessors has entirely vanished; the religion which they saw simply as a collection of theological dogmas, he envisioned as a living creed, arrayed in all the hues of poetry and imagination, and redolent with the mystery of the past. Yet it may be doubted whether Chateaubriand was essentially more religious than Voltaire. What Voltaire dissected in the dry light of reason, Chateaubriand invested with the cloak of his own eloquence—put it up, so to speak, on a platform, in a fine attitude, under a tinted illumination. He lacked the subtle intimacy of Faith. In his descriptions of Nature, too, the same characteristics appear. Compared with Rousseau's, they are far bolder, far richer, composed on a more elaborate and imposing scale; but they are less convincing; while Rousseau's landscapes are often profoundly moving, Chateaubriand's are hardly ever more than splendidly picturesque. There is a similar relation between the egoisms of the two men. Chateaubriand was never tired of writing about himself; and in his long Memoires d'Outre-Tombe—the most permanently interesting of his works—he gave a full rein to his favourite passion. His conception of himself was Byronic. He swells forth, in all his pages, a noble, melancholy, proud, sentimental creature whom every man must secretly envy and every woman passionately adore. He had all the vanity of Rousseau, but none of his honesty. Rousseau, at any rate, never imposed upon himself; and Chateaubriand always did. Thus the vision that we have of him is of something wonderful but empty, something striking but unreal. It is the rhetorician that we see, and not the man.

Chateaubriand's influence was very great. Beside his high-flowing, romantic, imaginative writings, the tradition of the eighteenth century seemed to shrivel up into something thin, cold and insignificant. A new and dazzling world swam into the ken of his readers—a world in which the individual reigned in glory amid the glowing panorama of Nature and among the wondrous visions of a remote and holy past. His works became at once highly popular, though it was not until a generation later that their full effect was felt. Meanwhile, the impetus which he had started was continued in the poems of LAMARTINE. Here there is the same love of Nature, the same religious outlook, the same insistence on the individual point of view; but the tints are less brilliant, the emphasis is more restrained; the rhetorical impulse still dominates, but it is the rhetoric of elegiac tenderness rather than of picturesque pomp. A wonderful limpidity of versification which, while it is always perfectly easy, is never weak, and a charming quietude of sentiment which, however near it may seem to come to the commonplace, always just escapes it—these qualities give Lamartine a distinguished place in the literature of France. They may be seen in their perfection in the most famous of his poems, Le Lac, a monody descriptive of his feelings on returning alone to the shores of the lake where he had formerly passed the day with his mistress. And throughout all his poetical work precisely the same characteristics are to be found. Lamartine's lyre gave forth an inexhaustible flow of melody—always faultless, always pellucid, and always, in the same key.

* * * * *

During the Revolution, under the rule of Napoleon, and in the years which followed his fall, the energies of the nation were engrossed by war and politics. During these forty years there are fewer great names in French literature than in any other corresponding period since the Renaissance. At last, however, about the year 1830, a new generation of writers arose who brought back all the old glories and triumphantly proved that the French tongue, so far from having exhausted its resources, was a fresh and living instrument of extraordinary power. These writers—as has so often been the case in France—were bound together by a common literary creed. Young, ardent, scornful of the past, dazzled by the possibilities of the future, they raised the standard of revolt against the traditions of Classicism, promulgated a new aesthetic doctrine, and, after a sharp struggle and great excitement, finally succeeded in completely establishing their view. The change which they introduced was of enormous importance, and for this reason the date 1830 is a cardinal one in the literature of France. Every sentence, every verse that has been written in French since then bears upon it, somewhere or other, the imprint of the great Romantic Movement which came to a head in that year. What it was that was then effected—what the main differences are between French literature before 1830 and French literature after—deserves some further consideration.

The Romantic School—of which the most important members were VICTOR HUGO, ALFRED DE VIGNY, THEOPHILE GAUTIER, ALEXANDRE DUMAS, and ALFRED DE MUSSET—was, as we have said, inspired by that supremely French love of Rhetoric which, during the long reign of intellect and prose in the eighteenth century, had been almost entirely suppressed. The new spirit had animated the prose of Chateaubriand and the poetry of Lamartine; but it was the spirit only: the form of both those writers retained most of the important characteristics of the old tradition. It was new wine in old bottles. The great achievement of the Romantic School was the creation of new bottles—of a new conception of form, in which the vast rhetorical impulse within them might find a suitable expression. Their actual innovations, however, were by no means sweeping. For instance, the numberless minute hard-and-fast metrical rules which, since the days of Malherbe, had held French poetry in shackles, they only interfered with to a very limited extent. They introduced a certain number of new metres; they varied the rhythm of the Alexandrine; but a great mass of petty and meaningless restrictions remained untouched, and no real attempt was made to get rid of them until more than a generation had passed. Yet here, as elsewhere, what they had done was of the highest importance. They had touched the ark of the covenant and they had not been destroyed. They had shown that it was possible to break a 'rule' and yet write good poetry. This explains the extraordinary violence of the Romantic controversy over questions of the smallest detail. When Victor Hugo, in the opening lines of Hernani, ventured to refer to an 'escalier derobe', and to put 'escalier' at the end of one line, and 'derobe' at the beginning of the next, he was assailed with the kind of virulence which is usually reserved for the vilest of criminals. And the abuse had a meaning in it: it was abuse of a revolutionary. For in truth, by the disposition of those two words, Victor Hugo had inaugurated a revolution. The whole theory of 'rules' in literature—the whole conception that there were certain definite traditional forms in existence which were, absolutely and inevitably, the best—was shattered for ever. The new doctrine was triumphantly vindicated—that the form of expression must depend ultimately, not upon tradition nor yet upon a priori reasonings, but simply and solely on the thing expressed.

The most startling and the most complete of the Romantic innovations related to the poetic Vocabulary. The number of words considered permissible in French poetry had been steadily diminishing since the days of Racine. A distinction had grown up between words that were 'noble' and words that were 'bas'; and only those in the former class were admitted into poetry. No word could be 'noble' if it was one ordinarily used by common people, or if it was a technical term, or if, in short, it was peculiarly expressive; for any such word would inevitably produce a shock, introduce mean associations, and destroy the unity of the verse. If the sense demanded the use of such a word, a periphrasis of 'noble' words must be employed instead. Racine had not been afraid to use the word 'chien' in the most exalted of his tragedies; but his degenerate successors quailed before such an audacity. If you must refer to such a creature as a dog, you had better call it 'de la fidelite respectable soutien'; the phrase actually occurs in a tragedy of the eighteenth century. It is clear that, with such a convention to struggle against, no poetry could survive. Everything bold, everything vigorous, everything surprising became an impossibility with a diction limited to the vaguest, most general, and most feebly pompous terms. The Romantics, in the face of violent opposition, threw the doors of poetry wide open to every word in the language. How great the change was, and what was the nature of the public opinion against which the Romantics had to fight, may be judged from the fact that the use of the word 'mouchoir' during a performance of Othello a few years before 1830 produced a riot in the theatre. To such a condition of narrowness and futility had the great Classical tradition sunk at last!

The enormous influx of words into the literary vocabulary which the Romantic Movement brought about had two important effects. In the first place, the range of poetical expression was infinitely increased. French literature came out of a little, ceremonious, antiquated drawing-room into the open air. With the flood of new words, a thousand influences which had never been felt before came into operation. Strangeness, contrast, complication, immensity, curiosity, grotesqueness, fantasy—effects of this kind now for the first time became possible and common in verse. But, one point must be noticed. The abolition of the distinction between words that were 'bas' and 'noble' did not at first lead (as might have been expected) to an increase of realism. Rather the opposite took place. The Romantics loved the new words not because they made easier the expression of actual facts, but for their power of suggestion, for the effects of remoteness, contrast, and multiplicity which could be produced by them—in fact, for their rhetorical force. The new vocabulary came into existence as an engine of rhetoric, not as an engine of truth. Nevertheless—and this was the second effect of its introduction—in the long run the realistic impulse in French literature was also immensely strengthened. The vocabulary of prose widened at the same time as that of verse; and the prose of the first Romantics remained almost completely rhetorical. But the realistic elements always latent in prose—and especially in French prose—soon asserted themselves; the vast opportunities for realistic description which the enlarged vocabulary opened out were eagerly seized upon; and it was not long before there arose in French literature a far more elaborate and searching realism than it had ever known before.

* * * * *

It was, perhaps, unfortunate that the main struggle of the Romantic controversy should have been centred in the theatre. The fact that this was so is an instance of the singular interest in purely literary questions which has so often been displayed by popular opinion in France. The controversy was not simply an academic matter for connoisseurs and critics to decide upon in private; it was fought out in all the heat of popular excitement on the public stage. But the wild enthusiasm aroused by the triumphs of Dumas and Hugo in the theatre shows, in a no less striking light, the incapacity of contemporaries to gauge the true significance of new tendencies in art. On the whole, the dramatic achievement of the Romantic School was the least valuable part of their work. Hernani, the first performance of which marked the turning-point of the movement, is a piece of bombastic melodrama, full of the stagiest clap-trap and the most turgid declamation. Victor Hugo imagined when he wrote it that he was inspired by Shakespeare; if he was inspired by anyone it was by Voltaire. His drama is the old drama of the eighteenth century, repainted in picturesque colours; it resembles those grotesque country-houses that our forefathers were so fond of, where the sham-Gothic turrets and castellations ill conceal the stucco and the pilasters of a former age. Of true character and true passion it has no trace. The action, the incidents, the persons—all alike are dominated by considerations of rhetoric, and of rhetoric alone. The rhetoric has, indeed, this advantage over that of Zaire and Alzire—it is bolder and more highly coloured; but then it is also more pretentious. All the worst tendencies of the Romantic Movement may be seen completely displayed in the dramas of Victor Hugo.

For throughout his work that wonderful writer expressed in their extreme forms the qualities and the defects of his school. Above all, he was the supreme lord of words. In sheer facility, in sheer abundance of language, Shakespeare alone of all the writers of the world can be reckoned his superior. The bulk of his work is very great, and the nature of it is very various; but every page bears the mark of the same tireless fecundity, the same absolute dominion over the resources of speech. Words flowed from Victor Hugo like light from the sun. Nor was his volubility a mere disordered mass of verbiage: it was controlled, adorned, and inspired by an immense technical power. When one has come under the spell of that great enchanter, one begins to believe that his art is without limits, that with such an instrument and such a science there is no miracle which he cannot perform. He can conjure up the strangest visions of fancy; he can evoke the glamour and the mystery of the past; he can sing with exquisite lightness of the fugitive beauties of Nature; he can pour out, in tenderness or in passion, the melodies of love; he can fill his lines with the fire, the stress, the culminating fury, of prophetic denunciation; he can utter the sad and secret questionings of the human spirit, and give voice to the solemnity of Fate. In the long roll and vast swell of his verse there is something of the ocean—a moving profundity of power. His sonorous music, with its absolute sureness of purpose, and its contrapuntal art, recalls the vision in Paradise Lost of him who—

with volant touch Fled and pursued transverse the resonant fugue.

What kind of mind, what kind of spirit, must that have been, one asks in amazement, which could animate with such a marvellous perfection the enormous organ of that voice?

But perhaps it would be best to leave the question unasked—or at least unanswered. For the more one searches, the clearer it becomes that the intellectual scope and the spiritual quality of Victor Hugo were very far from being equal to his gifts of expression and imagination. He had the powers of a great genius and the soul of an ordinary man. But that was not all. There have been writers of the highest excellence—Saint-Simon was one of them—the value of whose productions have been unaffected, or indeed even increased, by their personal inferiority. They could not have written better, one feels, if they had been ten times as noble and twenty times as wise as they actually were. But unfortunately this is not so with Victor Hugo. His faults—his intellectual weakness, his commonplace outlook, his lack of humour, his vanity, his defective taste—cannot be dismissed as irrelevant and unimportant, for they are indissolubly bound up with the very substance of his work. It was not as a mere technician that he wished to be judged; he wrote with a very different intention; it was as a philosopher, as a moralist, as a prophet, as a sublime thinker, as a profound historian, as a sensitive and refined human being. With a poet of such pretensions it is clearly most relevant to inquire whether his poetry does, in fact, reveal the high qualities he lays claim to, or whether, on the contrary, it is characterized by a windy inflation of sentiment, a showy superficiality of thought, and a ridiculous and petty egoism. These are the unhappy questions which beset the mature and reflective reader of Victor Hugo's works. To the young and enthusiastic one the case is different. For him it is easy to forget—or even not to observe—what there may be in that imposing figure that is unsatisfactory and second-rate. He may revel at will in the voluminous harmonies of that resounding voice; by turns thrilling with indignation, dreaming in ecstasy, plunging into abysses, and soaring upon unimaginable heights. Between youth and age who shall judge? Who decide between rapture and reflection, enthusiasm and analysis? To determine the precise place of Victor Hugo in the hierarchy of poets would be difficult indeed. But this much is certain: that at times the splendid utterance does indeed grow transfused with a pure and inward beauty, when the human frailties vanish, and all is subdued and glorified by the high purposes of art. Such passages are to be found among the lyrics of Les Feuilles d'Automne, Les Rayons et Les Ombres, Les Contemplations, in the brilliant descriptions and lofty imagery of La Legende des Siecles, in the burning invective of Les Chatiments. None but a place among the most illustrious could be given to the creator of such a stupendous piece of word-painting as the description of the plain of Waterloo in the latter volume, or of such a lovely vision as that in La Legende des Siecles, of Ruth looking up in silence at the starry heaven. If only the wondrous voice had always spoken so!

* * * * *

The romantic love of vastness, richness, and sublimity, and the romantic absorption in the individual—these two qualities appear in their extremes throughout the work of Hugo: in that of ALFRED DE VIGNY it is the first that dominates; in that of ALFRED DE MUSSET, the second. Vigny wrote sparingly—one or two plays, a few prose works, and a small volume of poems; but he produced some masterpieces. A far more sober artist than Hugo, he was also a far profounder thinker, and a sincerer man. His melancholy, his pessimism, were the outcome of no Byronic attitudinizing, but the genuine intimate feelings of a noble spirit; and he could express them in splendid verse. His melancholy was touched with grandeur, his pessimism with sublimity. In his Moise, his Colere de Samson, his Maison du Berger, his Mont des Oliviers, and others of his short reflective poems, he envisions man face to face with indifferent Nature, with hostile Destiny, with poisoned Love, and the lesson he draws is the lesson of proud resignation. In La Mort du Loup, the tragic spectacle of the old wolf driven to bay and killed by the hunters inspires perhaps his loftiest verses, with the closing application to humanity—'Souffre et meurs sans parler'—summing up his sad philosophy. No less striking and beautiful are the few short stories in his Servitude et Grandeur Militaires, in which some heroic incidents of military life are related in a prose of remarkable strength and purity. In the best work of Vigny there are no signs of the strain, the over-emphasis, the tendency towards the grotesque, always latent in Romanticism; its nobler elements are alone preserved; he has achieved the grand style.

Alfred de Musset presents a complete contrast. He was the spoilt child of the age—frivolous, amorous, sensuous, charming, unfortunate, and unhappy; and his poetry is the record of his personal feelings, his varying moods, his fugitive loves, his sentimental despairs.

Le seul bien qui me reste au monde Est d'avoir quelquefois pleure,

he exclaims, with an accent of regretful softness different indeed from that of Vigny. Among much that is feeble, ill constructed, and exaggerated in his verse, strains of real beauty and real pathos constantly recur. Some of his lyrics are perfect; the famous song of Fortunio in itself entitles him to a high place among the masters of the language; and in his longer pieces—especially in the four Nuits—his emotion occasionally rises, grows transfigured, and vibrates with a strange intensity, a long, poignant, haunting note. But doubtless his chief claim to immortality rests upon his exquisite little dramas (both in verse and prose), in which the romance of Shakespeare and the fantasy of Marivaux mingle with a wit, a charm, an elegance, which are all Musset's own. In his historical drama, Lorenzaccio, he attempted to fill a larger canvas, and he succeeded. Unlike the majority of the Romantics, Musset had a fine sense of psychology and a penetrating historical vision. In this brilliant, vivacious, and yet subtle tragedy he is truly great.

We must now glance at the effects which the Romantic Movement produced upon the art which was destined to fill so great a place in the literature of the nineteenth century—the art of prose fiction. With the triumph of Classicism in the seventeenth century, the novel, like all other forms of literature, grew simplified and compressed. The huge romances of Mademoiselle de Scudery were succeeded by the delicate little stories of Madame de Lafayette, one of which—La Princesse de Cleves—a masterpiece of charming psychology and exquisite art, deserves to be considered as the earliest example of the modern novel. All through the eighteenth century the same tendency is visible. Manon Lescaut, the passionate and beautiful romance of l'Abbe Prevost, is a very small book, concerned, like La Princesse de Cleves, with two characters only—the lovers, whose varying fortunes make up the whole action of the tale. Precisely the same description applies to the subtle and brilliant Adolphe of Benjamin Constant, produced in the early years of the nineteenth century. Even when the framework was larger—as in Le Sage's Gil Blas and Marivaux's Vie de Marianne—the spirit was the same; it was the spirit of selection, of simplification, of delicate skill. Both the latter works are written in a prose style of deliberate elegance, and both consist rather of a succession of small incidents—almost of independent short stories—than of one large developing whole. The culminating example of the eighteenth-century form of fiction may be seen in the Liaisons Dangereuses of Laclos, a witty, scandalous and remarkably able novel, concerned with the interacting intrigues of a small society of persons, and revealing on every page a most brilliant and concentrated art. Far more modern, both in its general conception and in the absolute realism of its treatment, was Diderot's La Religieuse; but this masterpiece was not published till some years after the Revolution; and the real honour of having originated the later developments in French fiction—as in so many other branches of literature—belongs undoubtedly to Rousseau. La Nouvelle Heloise, faulty as it is as a work of art, with its feeble psychology and loose construction, yet had the great merit of throwing open whole new worlds for the exploration of the novelist—the world of nature on the one hand, and on the other the world of social problems and all the living forces of actual life. The difference between the novels of Rousseau and those of Hugo is great; but yet it is a difference merely of degree. Les Miserables is the consummation of the romantic conception of fiction which Rousseau had adumbrated half a century before. In that enormous work, Hugo attempted to construct a prose epic of modern life; but the attempt was not successful. Its rhetorical cast of style, its ceaseless and glaring melodrama, its childish presentments of human character, its endless digressions and—running through all this—its evidences of immense and disordered power, make the book perhaps the most magnificent failure—the most 'wild enormity' ever produced by a man of genius. Another development of the romantic spirit appeared at about the same time in the early novels of George Sand, in which the ardours of passionate love are ecstatically idealized in a loose and lyric flow of innumerable words.

There can be little doubt that if the development of fiction had stopped at this point the infusion into it of the romantic spirit could only have been judged a disaster. From the point of view of art, such novels as those of Victor Hugo and the early works of George Sand were a retrogression from those of the eighteenth century. Manon Lescaut, tiny, limited, unambitious as it is, stands on a far higher level of artistic achievement than the unreal and incoherent Les Miserables. The scale of the novel had indeed been infinitely enlarged, but the apparatus for dealing adequately with the vast masses of new material was wanting. It is pathetic to watch the romantic novelists trying to infuse beauty and significance into their subjects by means of fine writing, lyrical outbursts, impassioned philosophical dissertations, and all the familiar rhetorical devices so dear to them. The inevitable result was something lifeless, formless, fantastic; they were on the wrong track. The true method for the treatment of their material was not that of rhetoric at all; it was that of realism. This fact was discovered by STENDHAL, who was the first to combine an enlarged view of the world with a plain style and an accurate, unimpassioned, detailed examination of actual life. In his remarkable novel, Le Rouge et Le Noir, and in some parts of his later work, La Chartreuse de Parme, Stendhal laid down the lines on which French fiction has been developing ever since. The qualities which distinguish him are those which have distinguished all the greatest of his successors—a subtle psychological insight, an elaborate attention to detail, and a remorseless fidelity to the truth.

Important as Stendhal is in the history of modern French fiction, he is dwarfed by the colossal figure of BALZAC. By virtue of his enormous powers, and the immense quantity and variety of his output, Balzac might be called the Hugo of prose, if it were not that in two most important respects he presents a complete contrast to his great contemporary. In the first place, his control of the technical resources of the language was as feeble as Hugo's was mighty. Balzac's style is bad; in spite of the electric vigour that runs through his writing, it is formless, clumsy, and quite without distinction; it is the writing of a man who was highly perspicacious, formidably powerful, and vulgar. But, on the other hand, he possessed one great quality which Hugo altogether lacked—the sense of the real. Hugo was most himself when he was soaring on the wings of fancy through the empyrean; Balzac was most himself when he was rattling in a hired cab through the streets of Paris. He was of the earth earthy. His coarse, large, germinating spirit gave forth, like the earth, a teeming richness, a solid, palpable creation. And thus it was he who achieved what Hugo, in Les Miserables, had in vain attempted. La Comedie Humaine, as he called the long series of his novels, which forms in effect a single work, presents, in spite of its limitations and its faults, a picture of the France of that age drawn on the vast scale and in the grand manner of an epic.

The limitations and the faults of Balzac's work are, indeed, sufficiently obvious and sufficiently grave. The same coarseness of fibre which appears in his style made him incapable of understanding the delicacies of life—the refined shades of emotion, the subtleties of human intercourse. He probably never read Jane Austen; but if he had he certainly would have considered her an utterly pointless writer; and he would have been altogether at sea in a novel by Henry James. The elusive things that are so important, the indecisive things that are so curious, the intimate things that are so thrilling—all these slipped through his rough, matter-of-fact grasp. His treatment of the relations between the sexes is characteristic. The subject fills a great place in his novels; he approaches it with an unflinching boldness, and a most penetrating gaze; yet he never succeeds in giving a really satisfactory presentment of the highest of those relations—love. That eluded him: its essence was too subtle, too private, too transcendental. No one can describe love who has not the makings of a poet in him. And a poet was the very last thing that Balzac was.

But his work does not merely suffer from the absence of certain good qualities; it is also marred by the presence of positively bad ones. Balzac was not simply a realist. There was a romantic vein in him, which occasionally came to the surface with unfortunate results. When that happened, he plunged into the most reckless melodrama, revelled in the sickliest sentiment, or evolved the most grotesque characters, the most fantastic plots. And these lapses occur quite indiscriminately. Side by side with some detailed and convincing description, one comes upon glaring absurdities; in the middle of some narrative of extraordinary actuality, one finds oneself among hissing villains, disguises, poisons, and all the paraphernalia of a penny novelette. Balzac's lack of critical insight into his own work is one of the most singular of his characteristics. He hardly seems to have known at all what he was about. He wrote feverishly, desperately, under the impulsion of irresistible genius. His conceptions crowded upon him in vivid, serried multitudes—the wildest visions of fantasy mixed pell-mell with the most vital realizations of fact. It was not for him to distinguish; his concern was simply, somehow or other, to get them all out: good, bad, or indifferent, what did it matter? The things were in his brain; and they must be expressed.

Fortunately, it is very easy for the reader to be more discriminating than Balzac. The alloy is not inextricably mingled with the pure metal—the chaff may be winnowed off, and the grain left. His errors and futilities cannot obscure his true achievement—his evocation of multitudinous life. The whole of France is crammed into his pages, and electrified there into intense vitality. The realism of the classical novelists was a purely psychological realism; it was concerned with the delicately shifting states of mind of a few chosen persons, and with nothing else. Balzac worked on a very different plan. He neglected the subtleties of the spirit, and devoted himself instead to, displaying the immense interest that lay in those prosaic circumstances of existence which the older writers had ignored. He showed with wonderful force that the mere common details of everyday life were filled with drama, that, to him who had eyes to see, there might be significance in a ready-made suit of clothes, and passion in the furniture of a boarding-house. Money in particular gave him an unending theme. There is hardly a character in the whole vast range of his creation of whose income we are not exactly informed; and it might almost be said that the only definite moral that can be drawn from La Comedie Humaine is that the importance of money can never be over-estimated. The classical writers preferred to leave such matters to the imagination of the reader; it was Balzac's great object to leave nothing to the imagination of the reader. By ceaseless effort, by infinite care, by elaborate attention to the minutest details, he would describe all. He brought an encyclopaedic knowledge to bear upon his task; he can give an exact account of the machinery of a provincial printing-press; he can write a dissertation on the methods of military organization; he can reveal the secret springs in the mechanism of Paris journalism; he is absolutely at home in the fraudulent transactions of money-makers, the methods of usurers, the operations of high finance. And into all this mass of details he can infuse the spirit of life. Perhaps his masterpiece in realistic description is his account of La Maison Vauquer—a low boarding-house, to which he devotes page after page of minute particularity. The result is not a mere dead catalogue: it is a palpitating image of lurid truth. Never was the sordid horror which lurks in places and in things evoked with a more intense completeness.

Undoubtedly it is in descriptions of the sordid, the squalid, the ugly, and the mean that Balzac particularly excels. He is at his greatest when he is revealing the horrible underside of civilization—the indignities of poverty, the low intrigues of parasites, the long procession of petty agonies that embitter and ruin a life. Over this world of shadow and grime he throws strange lights. Extraordinary silhouettes flash out and vanish; one has glimpses of obscure and ominous movements on every side; and, amid all this, some sudden vision emerges from the darkness, of pathos, of tenderness, of tragic and unutterable pain.

Balzac died in 1850, and at about that time the Romantic Movement came to an end. Victor Hugo, it is true, continued to live and to produce for more than thirty years longer; but French literature ceased to be dominated by the ideals of the Romantic school. That school had accomplished much; it had recreated French poetry, and it had revolutionized French prose. But, by the very nature of its achievement, it led the way to its own supersession. The spirit which animated its doctrines was the spirit of progress and of change; it taught that there were no fixed rules for writing well; that art, no less than science, lived by experiment; that a literature which did not develop was dead. Therefore it was inevitable that the Romantic ideal itself should form the stepping-stone for a fresh advance. The complex work of Balzac unites in a curious way many of the most important elements of the old school and of the new. Alike by his vast force, his immense variety, his formlessness, his lack of critical and intellectual power, he was a Romantic; but he belonged to the future in his enormous love of prosaic detail, his materialist cast of mind, and his preoccupation with actual facts.



CHAPTER VII

THE AGE OF CRITICISM

With the generation of writers who rose to eminence after the death of Balzac, we come within the reach of living memory, so that a just estimate of their work is well-nigh impossible: it is so close to us that it is bound to be out of focus. And there is an additional difficulty in the extreme richness and variety of their accomplishment. They explored so many fields of literature, and produced so much of interest and importance, that a short account of their work can hardly fail to give a false impression of it. Only its leading characteristics and its most remarkable manifestations can be touched upon here.

The age was before all else an age of Criticism. A strong reaction set in against the looseness of construction and the extravagance of thought which had pervaded the work of the Romantics; and a new ideal was set up—an ideal which was to combine the width and diversity of the latter with the precision of form and the deliberate artistic purpose of the Classical age. The movement affected the whole of French literature, but its most important results were in the domain of Prose. Nowhere were the defects of the Romantics more obvious than in their treatment of history. With a very few exceptions they conceived of the past as a picturesque pageant—a thing of contrasts and costumes, an excuse for rhetorical descriptions, without inner significance or a real life of its own. One historian of genius they did indeed produce—MICHELET; and the contrast between his work and that of his successors, TAINE and RENAN, is typical of the new departure. The great history of Michelet, with its strange, convulsive style, its capricious and imaginative treatment of facts, and its undisguised bias, shows us the spectacle of the past in a series of lurid lightning-flashes—a spectacle at once intensely vivid and singularly contorted; it is the history of a poet rather than of a man of science. With Taine and Renan the personal element which forms the very foundation of Michelet's work has been carefully suppressed. It is replaced by an elaborate examination of detail, a careful, sober, unprejudiced reconstruction of past conditions, an infinitely conscientious endeavour to tell the truth and nothing but the truth. Nor is their history merely the dead bones of analysis and research; it is informed with an untiring sympathy; and—in the case of Renan especially—a suave and lucid style adds the charm and amenity which art alone can give.

The same tendencies appear to a still more remarkable degree in Criticism. With SAINTE-BEUVE, in fact, one might almost say that criticism, as we know it, came into existence for the first time. Before him, all criticism had been one of two things: it had been either a merely personal expression of opinion, or else an attempt to establish universal literary canons and to judge of writers by the standards thus set up. Sainte-Beuve realized that such methods—the slap-dash pronouncements of a Johnson or the narrow generalizations of a Boileau—were in reality not critical at all. He saw that the critic's first duty was not to judge, but to understand; and with this object he set himself to explore all the facts which could throw light on the temperament, the outlook, the ideals of his author; he examined his biography, the society in which he lived, the influences of his age; and with the apparatus thus patiently formed he proceeded to act as the interpreter between the author and the public. His Causeries du Lundi—short critical papers originally contributed to a periodical magazine and subsequently published in a long series of volumes—together with his Port Royal—an elaborate account of the movements in letters and philosophy during the earlier years of Louis XIV's reign—contain a mass of material of unequalled value concerning the whole of French literature. His analytical and sympathetic mind is reflected in the quiet wit and easy charm of his writing. Undoubtedly the lover of French literature will find in Sainte-Beuve's Lundis at once the most useful and the most agreeable review of the subject in all its branches; and the more his knowledge increases, the more eagerly will he return for further guidance and illumination to those delightful books.