A Short History of French Literature
artificial tragedy: in prose, first history, then miscellaneous work,
and lastly artificial and elaborate fiction. It is a curious and
somewhat complex phenomenon that the cycle which began with verse
fiction should apparently end with fiction in prose, but the foregoing
pages will have shewn sufficiently how dangerous it would be to
generalise from this.
One thing however may be safely concluded from the mere fact of this
remarkable resistance to foreign influence, or rather from the still
more remarkable power of assimilation which this resistance implies. The
literature which has been able to exert both must have very strongly
marked general characteristics of its own. As a matter of fact French
literature has these characteristics: and a brief enumeration and
description of them may complete, more appropriately than anything else
could do, the survey of its history. French literature, notwithstanding
the revolution of fifty years ago, is generally and rightly held to be
the chief representative among the greater European literatures of the
classical rather than the romantic spirit. It is therefore necessary to
define what is meant by these much controverted terms; and the
definition which best expresses the views of the present writer is one
somewhat modified from the definition given by Heine. The terms classic
and romantic apply to treatment not to subject, and the difference is
that the treatment is classic when the idea is represented as directly
and with as exact an adaptation of form as possible, while it is
romantic when the idea is left to the reader's faculty of divination
assisted only by suggestion and symbol. Of these two modes of treatment
France has always inclined to the classic: during at least two
centuries, the seventeenth and eighteenth, she relied upon it almost
wholly. But the fertility of her mediaeval and Renaissance literature in
strictly romantic examples, and the general tendency of the literature
of the nineteenth century, have shewn a romantic faculty inferior, but
only inferior, to the classical. To illustrate this statement by a
contrast, it may be pointed out that in Greek the romantic element is
almost in abeyance, while in English all without exception of our
greatest masterpieces have been purely romantic. Or to put the matter in
yet other words, the sense of the vague is, among authors of the highest
rank, rarely present to a Greek, always present to an Englishman, and
alternately present and absent, but oftener absent, to a Frenchman.
The qualities which this general differentia has developed in French may
now be enumerated.
The first is a great and remarkable _sobriety_. It is true that there is
nothing more extravagant than an extravagant Frenchman, but that is the
natural result of reaction. As a rule, the contributions of matter which
France received so abundantly from other nations are always toned and
sobered by her in their literary formation. The main materials of her
wonderful mediaeval literature of fiction were furnished by Wales, by
Germany, and by the East; all of them, to judge by the later but more or
less independent handlings which we have from indigenous sources, must
have teemed with the supernatural. In the Chansons de Gestes, in the
Arthurian romances, and even in the earlier Romans d'Aventures, the
supernatural, though recognised as became a devout age and country, is
yet to a certain extent rationalised. It rarely obtrudes itself, and it
still more rarely presents itself with exaggerated attributes. A
continual spirit of criticism exhibits itself throughout French
literature; it always, as represented by its most numerous and on the
whole most famous representatives, tends to order, to measure, to
symmetry.
The next characteristic is abundant and almost superabundant _wit_. The
terms wit and humour have been argued over even more than classical and
romantic, and it is equally impossible to enter into the controversy
here. Suffice it to say that, according to the most satisfactory
definition of humour (thinking in jest while feeling in earnest), wit
might be defined to be thinking in jest without interrogating the
consciousness as to whether the feeling is earnest or not. At a very
early period, as soon indeed as the French spirit had thoroughly emerged
from its German-Latin-Celtic swaddling clothes, this faculty of half
reckless thinking in jest made its appearance. In classical literature
wit is notoriously absent with rare exceptions (Aristophanes and Lucian
being almost the only ones of importance); in scarcely any other modern
literature does it make its appearance early. But it shows in French by
the twelfth century, and it increases during every century that
succeeds: while joined to sobriety it begets that satirical criticism,
which is so noteworthy a secondary product of French.
A third quality closely connected with the two former but not, like
satirical criticism, simply derived from them, is the close _attention
to form_ which has always distinguished French. At the present time,
despite the great advance made by other literatures and a certain
falling off in itself, French prose is on the average superior in formal
merit to any other prose written in a modern language. If we look back
for eight hundred years, French verse is found to be more carefully and
artistically arranged than the corresponding poetical beginnings of any
other European country. In the excogitation of careful rules and the
deft carrying out of those rules no literature can on the whole approach
this except Greek. No literature therefore, with that exception, gives
so much of the pleasure which is given by the spectacle of not
unreasonable difficulty skilfully overcome in a game which is well
played.
A fourth merit is to be found in the _inventiveness_ of Frenchmen of
letters. In no literature is there a greater variety, and in none is
that variety so obviously the effect not of happy blundering but of
organised and almost scientific development of the possibilities of art.
The wonderful fertility with which the early Trouveres handled and
re-handled the motives of the Arthurian and Carlovingian legends has
been noticed; and, as a very different but complementary instance, the
surprising success and variety with which a scheme so limited as that of
the classical tragedy was applied, deserves mention. At the present day
in one important department of literature (the drama) inventiveness is
almost limited to Frenchmen, and there are few periods of their present
history at which they have not in this respect led the van in one
department or in another.
Yet another characteristic must be noted, which is, in respect to
matter, the complement of the already mentioned attention to form. This
is the singular _clearness_ and _precision_ with which not merely the
greatest Frenchmen of letters, but all save the least, are accustomed to
put their meaning. Whereas the two great classical languages, from the
licence of order given by their abundant inflections and complicated
syntax, are sometimes enigmatic; whereas German notoriously lends itself
to the wrapping up of a simple meaning in a cloud of words; whereas
English seems to encourage those who use it not indeed to obscurity but
to desultoriness and beating about the bush, French properly used is
almost automatically clear and precise. Rivarol's somewhat sententious
conceit that the French language has a 'probite attachee a son genie' is
not a conceit merely. That this lucidity is sometimes accompanied by
want of depth is quite true, but it is equally true that it is often
mistaken for it. There is no want of depth in Descartes or in
Malebranche, yet there are no clearer writers in the whole range of
philosophic literature.
To these main characteristics others which are in a way corollaries
might be added, such as urbanity, ease, ready adaptation to different
classes of subject, and the like. But those already dwelt upon are the
principal, and they have sufficed to make French, as far as general
usefulness and interest go, the best vehicle of expression in prose
among European languages. In poetry it is not quite the same. Most of
the qualities just enumerated are in poetry but of secondary use, some
of them are almost directly unfavourable to the vagueness, the
indefinite suggestion, the 'making the common uncommon,' which are
necessary to poetry. The clearness of French prose has a tendency to
become colourless in French poetry, its sobriety turns to the bald, its
wit to conceits and prettinesses, its inventiveness to an undue reliance
on complicated devices for creating an artificial attraction, its sense
of form and rule to dryness and lack of passion. Moreover the merely
sonorous qualities of French render it a difficult instrument for the
production of varied poetical sounds. It is almost wholly destitute of
quantity, and the intonation which supplies that want is of such a kind
that hardly any foot but the iambus is possible in it. On the other hand
its terminations admit of elaborate and harmonious rhymes (indeed French
poetry without rhyme is a practical impossibility), and the abundance of
mute _e_ endings has facilitated the adoption of an artificial source of
variation of sound in the so-called 'masculine and feminine' rhyming
which is in its perfection almost peculiar to the language. With these
aids and by the most elaborate attention to metre and euphony, the great
poets of France have been enabled to surmount to a very large extent the
corresponding difficulties of their prosody. But they have not on the
whole been equally fortunate in surmounting the difficulties caused by
the very genius of the language--the clear, sober, critical _ethos_ of
French. This is an enemy to mystery, to vagueness, to what may be called
the twilight of sense--all things more or less necessary to the highest
poetry. It will not I think be alleged by any impartial reader of this
book that its author is insensible to the majesty or to the charm of
French verse. But it is impossible for me to admit that that majesty and
that charm are shewn in the highest degree (in the degree in which not
merely Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Shelley, Heine, shew them, but many minor
names in Greek, in English, and in German), by any but a very few
Frenchmen, and by these in more than comparatively few places. A very
competent and obliging French critic has said that it is impossible for
any Frenchman to agree with me exactly in my estimate of La Fontaine,
and probably there is no better instance than La Fontaine of the
fundamental difference of conception of poetry which corresponds to the
English channel. Inexhaustibly inventive, full of criticism of life, a
master of harmonious language, managing rhythms and metres with a skill
only the more artful that it seems so artless, La Fontaine yet has too
little of dawn or sunset, still less of twilight or moonlight, too much
of the light of common day to deserve, according to my estimate, the
title of poet in the highest degree. The same may be said of most other
French poets except a few who are to be found almost exclusively in the
middle ages, in the Renaissance, and in the nineteenth century. Only in
one form of the highest poetry, the passionate declamation which is in
effect oratory of the most picturesque kind, France has never been
wanting, and in this she has for half the time been mightily helped by
the possession of the magnificent Alexandrine metre.
[294]At the close of the eleventh century and at the beginning of the
twelfth we find the vulgar tongue in France not merely in full
organisation for literary purposes, but already employed in most of the
forms of poetical writing. An immense outburst of epic and narrative