A Short History of French Literature
as a duellist, and adherence, after conversion, to the unpopular cause
of Mazarin, gave him a position which his works fail to sustain. They
are not, however, devoid of merit. His _Pedant Joue_, a comedy, gave
Moliere some useful hints; his _Agrippine_, a tragedy, has passages of
declamatory energy. But his best work comes under the head of fiction.
The _Voyages a la Lune et au Soleil_[246], in which the author partly
followed Rabelais, and partly indulged his own fancy for rodomontade,
personal satire, and fantastic extravagance, have had attributed to them
the great and wholly unmerited honour of setting a pattern to Swift.
Cyrano, let it be repeated, was a man of talent, but his powers (he died
before he was thirty-five) had not time to mature, and the reckless
boastfulness of his character would probably have disqualified him at
all times from adequate study and self-criticism. Personally, he is an
amusing and interesting figure in literary history, but he is not much
more. In company with him and with Scarron may be mentioned Dassoucy,
alternately a friend and enemy of Cyrano, and a light writer of some
merit.
[Sidenote: Furetiere.]
Charles Sorel, an exceedingly voluminous author, historiographer of
France, deserves mention in passing for his _Histoire Comique de
Francion_[247], in which, as in almost all the fictitious work of the
time, serious as well as comic, living persons are introduced. The
chief remarkable thing about _Francion_ is the evidence it gives of an
attempt at an early date (1623) to write a novel of ordinary manners. It
is a dull story with loose episodes. More interesting is Antoine
Furetiere, author of the _Roman Bourgeois_[248]. Furetiere, who was a
man of varied talent, holds no small place in the history of the
calamities of authors. He wrote poems, short tales, fables, satires,
criticisms. He is said to have given both Boileau and Racine not
inconsiderable assistance. Unfortunately for him, though he had been
elected an academician in 1662, he conceived and executed the idea of
outstripping his tardy colleagues in their dictionary work. He produced
a book of great merit and utility, but one which brought grave troubles
on his own head. It was alleged that he had infringed the privileges of
the Academy; he was expelled from that body, his own privilege for his
own book was revoked, and it was not published till after his death,
becoming eventually the well-known _Dictionnaire de Trevoux_.
Furetiere's side has been warmly taken in these days, and it has been
sought, not without success, to free him from the charge of all
impropriety of conduct, except the impropriety of continuing to be a
member of the Academy, while what he was doing could hardly be regarded
as anything but a slight on it. The _Roman Bourgeois_ is an original and
lively book, without any general plot, but containing a series of very
amusing pictures of the Parisian middle-class society of the day, with
many curious traits of language and manners. It was published in 1666.
[Sidenote: Madame de la Fayette.]
Of very different importance is the Countess de la Fayette, who has the
credit, and justly, of substituting for mere romances of adventure on
the one hand, and for stilted heroic work on the other, fiction in which
the display of character is held of chief account. In the school,
indeed, of which Scarron set the example in France, especially in _Gil
Blas_, its masterpiece, the most accurate knowledge and drawing of human
motives and actions is to be found. But it is knowledge and drawing of
human motives and actions in the gross rather than in particular. Gil
Blas, and even Tom Jones, are types rather than individuals, though the
genius of their creators hides the fact. It is, perhaps, an arguable
point of literary criticism, whether the persevering analysis of
individual, and more or less unusual, character does not lead novelists
away from the best path--as it certainly leads in the long run to
monstrosities of the modern French and English 'realist' type. But this
is a detail of criticism into which there is no need to enter here. It
is sufficient that the style has produced some of the most admirable,
and much of the most characteristic, work of the last century, and that
Madame de la Fayette is on the whole entitled to the credit of being its
originator. Her pen was taken up in the next century by the Abbe Prevost
and by Richardson, and from these three the novel, as opposed to the
romance, may be said to descend. The maiden name of Madame de la
Fayette[249] was Marie Madeleine Pioche de la Vergne, and she was born
at Paris in 1634. Her father was governor of Havre. She was carefully
brought up under Menage and Rapin, among others, and was one of the most
brilliant of the _precieuses_ of the Hotel Rambouillet. In 1655 she
married the Count de la Fayette, but was soon left a widow. After his
death she contracted a kind of Platonic friendship with La
Rochefoucauld, who was then in the decline of life, tormented with gout,
and consoling himself for the departure of the days when he was one of
the most important men in France by the composition of his undying
Maxims. She survived him thirteen years, and died herself in 1693.
During the whole of her life she was on the most intimate terms with
Madame de Sevigne, as well as with many of the foremost men of letters
of the time. In particular there are extant a large number of letters
between her and Huet, bishop of Avranches, one of the most learned,
amiable, and upright prelates of the age. Her first attempt at
novel-writing was _La Princesse de Montpensier_. This was followed by
_Zaide_, published in 1670, a book of considerable excellence; and this
in its turn by _La Princesse de Cleves_, published in 1677, which is one
of the classics of French literature. The book is but a small one, not
amounting in size to a single volume of a modern English novel, and this
must of itself have been no small novelty and relief after the
portentous bulk of the Scudery romances. Its scene is laid at the court
of Henri II., and there is a certain historical basis; but the principal
personages are drawn from the author's own experience, herself being the
heroine, her husband the Prince of Cleves, and Rochefoucauld the Duke de
Nemours, while other characters are identified with Louis XIV. and his
courtiers by industrious compilers of 'keys.' If, however, the interest
of the book had been limited to this it would now-a-days have lost all
its attraction, or have retained so much at most as is due to simple
curiosity. But it has far higher merits, and what may be called its
court apparatus, and the multitude of small details about court
business, are rather drawbacks to it now. Such charm as it has is
derived from the strict verisimilitude of the character drawing, and the
fidelity with which the emotions are represented. This interest may,
indeed, appear thin to a modern reader fresh from the works of those who
have profited by two centuries of progress in the way which Madame de la
Fayette opened. But when it is remembered that her book appeared thirty
years before _Gil Blas_, forty before the masterpieces of Defoe, and
more than half a century before the English novel properly so called
made its first appearance, her right to the place she occupied will
hardly be contested[250].
The precise origin of the fancy for writing fairy stories, which took
possession of polite society in France at the end of the seventeenth
century, has been the subject of much discussion, and cannot be said to
have been finally settled. Probably the fables of La Fontaine, which are
very closely allied to the style, may have given the required impulse.
As soon as an example was set this style was seen to lend itself very
well to the still surviving fancy for _coterie_ compositions, and the
total amount of work of the kind produced in the last years of the
seventeenth and the first of the eighteenth century must be enormous.
Much of it has not yet been printed, and the names of but few of the
authors are generally known, or perhaps worth knowing[251]. Three,
however, emerge from the mass and deserve attention--Anthony Hamilton,
Madame d'Aulnoy, and above all, Charles Perrault, the master beyond all
comparison of the style.
[Sidenote: Fairy Tales.]
Marie Catherine, Comtesse d'Aulnoy, was born about the middle of the
seventeenth century, and died in 1720. It is sufficient to say that
among her works are the 'Yellow Dwarf' and the 'White Cat,' stories
which no doubt she did not invent, but to which she has given their
permanent and well-known form. She wrote much else, memoirs and novels
which were bad imitations of the style of Madame de la Fayette, but her
fairy tales alone are of value. Anthony Hamilton was one of the rare
authors who acquire a durable reputation by writing in a language which
is not their native tongue. He was born in Ireland in 1646, and followed
the fortunes of the exiled royal family. He returned with Charles II.,
but adhering to Catholicism, was excluded from preferment in England
until James II.'s reign, and he passed most of his time before the
Revolution, and all of it afterwards, in France. Hamilton produced
(besides many fugitive poems and minor pieces) two books of great note
in French, the _Memoires de Grammont_, his brother-in-law, which perhaps
is the standard book for the manners of the court of Charles II., and a
collection of fairy tales, less simple than those of Perrault and Madame
d'Aulnoy and more subordinated to a sarcastic intention, but full of wit
and written in French, which is only more piquant for its very slight
touch of a foreign element. Many phrases of Hamilton's tales have passed
into ordinary quotation, notably 'Belier, mon ami, tu me ferais plaisir
si tu voulais commencer par le commencement.'
[Sidenote: Perrault.]
The master of the style was, however, as has been said, Charles
Perrault, whose literary history was peculiar. He was born at Paris in
1628, being the son of Pierre Perrault, a lawyer, who had three other
sons, all of them of some distinction, and one of them, Claude Perrault,
famous in the oddly conjoined professions of medicine and architecture.
Charles was well educated at the College de Beauvais, and at first
studied law, but his father soon afterwards bought a place of value in
the financial department, and Charles was appointed clerk in 1662. He
received a curious and rather nondescript preferment (as secretary to
Colbert for all matters dependent on literature and arts), which, among
other things, enabled him to further his brother's architectural career.
In 1671 he was, under the patronage of Colbert, elected of the Academy,
into the affairs and proceedings of which he imported order almost for
the first time. He had done and for some time did little in literature,
being occupied by the duties which, under Colbert, he had as controller
of public works. But after a few essays in poetry, partly burlesque and
partly serious, notably a _Siecle de Louis XIV._, he embarked on the
rather unlucky work which gave him his chief reputation among his own
contemporaries, the _Parallele des Anciens et des Modernes_, in which he
took the part of the moderns. The dispute which followed, due
principally to the overbearing rudeness of Boileau, has had something
more than its proper place in literary history, and there is no need to
give an account of it. It is enough to say that while Boileau as far as
his knowledge went (and that was not far, for he knew nothing of
English, not very much of Greek, and it would seem little of Italian or
Spanish) had the better case, Perrault, assisted by his brother, made a
good deal the best use of his weapons, Boileau's unlucky 'Ode on Namur'