A Short History of French Literature
time. But done as it was, and when it was, Balzac's work was really of
importance and advantage to his countrymen. The prose literature of the
sixteenth century had been admirable, but it had not resulted in the
elaboration of any general style of all work. Each writer had followed
his instincts, and when those instincts were under the guidance of
genius, as they frequently were, many writers had produced admirable
results. But the general use of the printing press, and the adaptation
of literature to all sorts of journey-work, made it imperatively
necessary that the tools should be put ready fashioned into the hands of
ordinary workmen instead of each man having to manufacture them for
himself. Various steps had been taken in this direction. Guillaume du
Vair had already written a _Traite de l'Eloquence Francaise_; Vaugelas,
a Savoyard by birth, was shortly to undertake some valuable _Remarques_
on French grammar and style, which long remained a standard book. But
not many examples of deliberate composition had been given. It was these
examples of deliberate composition which Balzac furnished, and which, in
a lighter and more graceful fashion, and to a more limited circle, were
also given by the letters of the poet Voiture. Balzac, as is natural in
the first attempts at a polished prose style, has the drawback of being
somewhat rhetorical and occasionally ponderous. But the important point
is that the mechanism of the clause, the sentence, and the paragraph has
evidently been considered by him, and that he has succeeded in getting
it into very tolerable condition. His sentences no longer run on to the
interminable length of earlier writers, or finish in the haphazard
manner, neglectful of rhythm, balance, and proportion, also noticeable
in his predecessors. The substitution of the full stop for the
conjunction, which, speaking generally, may be said to be the initiating
secret of style (though of course it must not be applied too
indiscriminately), is at once apparent in Balzac's best passages, and he
rarely falls into the error which waits on this substitution, the error
of scrappiness. His style is perhaps better suited to oratory than to
writing; a not unlikely result, since his models were pretty obviously
the classical orators. But there can be no doubt that to him in no small
part is due the extraordinary outburst of rhetorical power which
distinguished the preachers of the latter half of the century. Nor was
it long before what was faulty in Balzac's style was corrected by the
example of very different writers.
[Sidenote: Pascal.]
Blaise Pascal[266] was born at Clermont, in Auvergne, on the 19th of
June, 1623. His father was President of the Court of Aids, but when the
boy was eight years old the family moved to Paris. Pascal was one of the
small number of extraordinarily precocious children who have justified
their precocity by genius equally extraordinary in after-life; but it
does not appear that he was forced by his father (who took the whole
charge of his education), and it is said that he did not begin Latin
until he was twelve years old--a very late age for the time.
Mathematics, however, were his chief study and delight, and he early
excelled in them, showing also an extraordinary faculty in applying them
to physics. At nineteen he invented a calculating machine. But his
application to study did not improve his health. He was but
five-and-twenty at the time of his famous experiment with the barometer
on the Puy de Dome in his native province. He was soon exposed to the
philosophical influence of Descartes on the one hand, and the
theological influence of the Jansenists on the other, and he felt both
deeply. His greatest work, the _Provinciales_, appeared in 1656. He died
on the 19th of August, 1662, having long lived in retirement and
asceticism, giving much of his substance to the poor, and abandoning
himself almost entirely to religious, mathematical, and philosophical
meditation.
We have nothing to do here with his purely mathematical works or those
in natural science. The two books by which he belongs to literature, and
which have placed him among the foremost writers of his country, are the
_Provinciales_ and the so-called _Pensees_. The former were regularly
published by himself in his lifetime, though they were ostensibly
anonymous, or rather pseudonymous. The _Pensees_ consist of scattered
reflections, which were found in his papers after his death. They were
published, but, as has been discovered of late years, with much omission
and garbling, and the restoration of them to their authentic form has
been effected in comparatively recent times.
The famous title of _Les Provinciales_ is only a convenient abbreviation
of the original, which is _Lettres Ecrites par Louis de Montalte a un
Provincial de ses Amis et aux Reverends Peres Jesuites sur le Sujet de
la Morale et de la Politique de ces Peres_. This somewhat cumbrous
appellation has at any rate the merit of exactly describing the
contents of the book, except that Louis de Montalte is of course a
pseudonym. The letters were written at the height of the early struggle
(which had not yet been interfered with by the secular arm) of
Jansenists and Jesuits, and they inflicted on the famous society a blow
from which it has never wholly recovered, and from which it can never
wholly recover. The method and style of Pascal are entirely original,
except in so far as a slight trace of indebtedness to Descartes may be
observed in the first respect, and a slight debt to Montaigne and the
_Satire Menippee_ in the second. His great weapon is polite irony, which
he first brought to perfection, and in the use of which he has hardly
been equalled and has certainly not been surpassed since. The intricate
casuistries of the Jesuits are unfolded in the gravest fashion and
without the least exaggeration or burlesque, but with a running comment
or rather insinuation of sarcasm which is irresistible. The author never
breaks out into a laugh, never allows himself to be declamatory and
indignant. There is always a smile on his countenance, but never
anything more pronounced than a smile. Yet the contempt of this is more
crushing than that of the bitterest invective. In the later letters
indeed the mask of irony is to a certain extent dropped, and a more
serious tone is taken. But effective as these are they are not the most
effective part of the _Provinciales_. That part is the earlier one, in
which, without dry scholastic argument, without the coarse abuse which
the sixteenth century had regarded as inseparable from theological
controversy, and at the same time with almost absolute accuracy of
statement--for the misrepresentations which two centuries of eager and
able apologists for the Order have been able to detect are
insignificant--the author carried the discussion out of the schools into
the drawing-room, made every man of fair education and breeding a judge
of it, and triumphantly brought the judgment of the vast majority of
such men on his side. To this day Pascal, with Swift and Courier, is the
greatest example in modern literature of irony, excelling Swift as much
in elegance and good-breeding as he falls short of him in sombre force,
and having the advantage over his brilliant follower at the beginning of
this century in depth and nobility of thought.
The _Pensees_ supply the reverse side of Pascal's character, and the
supplement to any proper estimate of his literary genius. But from the
circumstances already referred to, they are evidence of a less complete
though an even more genuine kind than the _Provinciales_. The scepticism
which ate so deeply into the heart of the seventeenth century affected
Pascal, though he rarely wavered in point of abstract faith. To few men,
however, was doubt more painful, and as no clearer or more piercing
intellect has ever existed, so to none was doubt more constantly
present. The _Pensees_ in their genuine form exhibit the thoughts to
which this conflict of opinion gave rise in him, and are in remarkable
contrast with the polished and sedate badinage of the letters. But few
if any of them are finally worked up into the form in which the author
would have been likely to present them to the public, and therefore,
from the point of view of pure literary criticism, they require less
notice here than the sister volume.
The revolution, as far as style is concerned, which in point of time is
already noticeable in Descartes, has entirely accomplished itself in
Pascal. The last vestige of archaism, of quaintness of phrase, of
clumsiness in the architecture of the sentence or the paragraph, has
passed away. Indeed, it can hardly be said that two centuries have added
much to the language except in point of richness and adaptation to the
more multifarious needs of the describer in modern times. The style is
extremely simple, but it has none of the monotony, the lack of colour,
and the stereotyped form which are the great drawbacks of French after
Boileau as contrasted with French before him. It is extraordinarily
graphic, sparkling with epigram at every point, and yet never
sacrificing sense to the play of words. The _Pensees_ (which it must
always be remembered were never finally worked up) yield matter which
will compare with the carefully concocted Maxims of La Rochefoucauld or
of Joubert, while the _Provinciales_ are, as has been said,
unsurpassable in their own line. It is probable that most good judges
would allot to Pascal in French the place which Dryden occupies in
English, that is to say, the place of the writer who combines most of
the advantages of the elder and younger manners. But Pascal, who wrote
merely to please himself, had this great advantage over Dryden, that his
work contains no mere journey-work, and especially nothing unworthy of
him. Admirable as it is in style, it is equally admirable in meaning and
in adaptation to that meaning, and it has thus both the sources of
lasting popularity at command. Dealing, moreover, as it does with
subjects of perennial importance and interest, it is almost entirely
exempt from the necessity of comment and explanation which weighs down
much admirable work of past ages. No man, however indisposed to serious
reading, can put down the _Provinciales_ as dull; no man, however
unwilling to read anything that is not serious, can complain of levity
in the _Pensees_. There are few authors in any language who unite as
Pascal does the claims of importance of subject, charm of style, and
bulk, without too great voluminousness of production. He has, moreover,
the additional merit of being in a high degree representative of his
age. That age had grown too complex for one man to reflect the whole of
it, but Pascal and Moliere (with perhaps Saint Evremond or La
Rochefoucauld as thirdsman) supply an almost complete reflection.
Saint Evremond[267], who was thirteen years Pascal's senior, and who
outlived him by more than forty years, was, in almost every respect
except intellectual vigour and literary faculty, his opposite. He was a
Norman by birth (Charles de Marguetel de Saint Denis was his proper
name), and was born in 1610. He was educated by the Jesuits, entered the
army early, served through the later campaigns of the Thirty Years' War
and in the Fronde, was a favourite of Conde's but fell into disgrace
with him, and after the fall of Fouquet, which led to the discovery of
his very able and very uncourtly letter on the Peace of the Pyrenees,
also incurred the king's displeasure. This displeasure is said to have
been aggravated by his notorious membership of the freethinking and
materialist school which Gassendi, if he had not founded it, had helped
to spread. Saint Evremond was practically if not formally banished, and