A Short History of French Literature
the time of his misfortune coinciding pretty nearly with the
Restoration in England, he made his way thither, was well received by
the king and his courtiers, many of whom he had known in their exile,
and dwelt in London for almost the whole remainder of his long life. He
died in 1703, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. His works are almost
entirely occasional, consisting of 'conversations,' letters,
'portraits,' short literary disquisitions and tractates on subjects of
historical and ethical interest. They display a placid epicurean
philosophy which in its indifference to the assaults of fortune is not
destitute of nobility, an extraordinary catholicity and acuteness of
literary judgment, and remarkable wit and _finesse_. The _Conversation
du Pere Canaye_, which is of the same date as the _Provinciales_, is
worthy of Pascal for its irony, and possesses a certain air of being
written by a 'person of quality,' which Saint Evremond could throw over
his writings better almost than any one else. His Portraits, not always
flattering, are full of nervous vigour. But his literary remarks are
perhaps the most surprising of his works. At a time when English
literature was almost unknown in France, and when Boileau ostentatiously
pretended never to have heard of Dryden, Saint Evremond, perhaps with
some assistance from his friend Waller, drew up some masterly remarks on
the humour-comedy of the Jonson school. His criticisms of French plays,
as compared with classical tragedy and comedy, are also full of pregnant
thought; and some comparative studies of his on Corneille and Racine
show a power of detachment and independence which may be due in some
part to the cosmopolitanism given by residence abroad, but which is
certainly due also to native power. From the point of view of literary
history, however, Saint Evremond is perhaps most remarkable as having
formed, in conjunction with Pascal and Bayle, a singular trio, which
supplied Voltaire with the models[268] whence he drew his peculiar style
of persiflage. As far as form is concerned, it may be fairly said that
Saint Evremond was the most influential of the three. Like many other
men of his time he rarely published anything in the ordinary way, and it
was not till very late in life that he empowered Desmaizeaux to issue
an authorised edition of work that had either circulated in manuscript
or been piratically printed.
[Sidenote: La Rochefoucauld.]
Francois de Marcillac[269], Duke de la Rochefoucauld, was born in 1613
of one of the noblest families of France. His father had just been
created duke and peer, the highest honour possible to a French subject,
and for many years the son was known under the title of Prince de
Marcillac. He was very imperfectly educated, but was early sent to serve
in the army and introduced to the court. Young as he was, he was deeply
engaged in the various intrigues against Richelieu, chiefly in
consequence of his affection for the celebrated Madame de Chevreuse.
After Richelieu's death and the comparative effacement of Madame de
Chevreuse, he transferred his affections to Madame de Longueville and
his aversion to Mazarin. He was one of the chiefs of the Princes' party,
and fought all through the Fronde, winning a reputation, not so much for
military skill as for the most reckless bravery. The establishment of
the royal authority first sent him into retirement, and then reduced him
to the position of an ordinary courtier. This last period of his life
was distinguished by a third attachment to a lady hardly less celebrated
than either of his former loves, Madame de la Fayette, the author of _La
Princesse de Cleves_, in which novel he is said to figure under another
name. He was also an intimate friend of Madame de Sevigne. In the latter
part of his life he suffered terribly from gout, and died of that
disease in 1680.
His Memoirs have been already noticed. The more famous and far more
remarkable Maxims were published shortly afterwards, and at once
attained a wide popularity. The first edition appeared in 1665, and four
others were published, with considerable alterations and additions,
during the author's lifetime, in 1666, 1671, 1675, and 1678. After his
death a sixth edition was published by Claude Barbin, containing fifty
new maxims, the authenticity of which is uncertain but probable.
The fullest authoritative edition of La Rochefoucauld's Maxims contains
504 separate paragraphs, to which, besides the fifty just noticed, about
another fifty can be added by restoring those which the author
suppressed during his lifetime. The last, which is avowedly a kind of
appendix, and on a different plan from the others, extends to a couple
of pages. But the average length of the remainder is not more than three
or four lines, and many do not contain more than a dozen words. The art
of compressing thought and then pointedly expressing it has never been
pushed so far except by Joubert, and hardly even by him. All La
Rochefoucauld's maxims, without exception, are on ethical subjects, and
with a certain allowance they may be said to be generally concerned with
the reduction of the motives and conduct of men to the single principle
of self-love. In consequence, accusations of misanthropy, of unfairness,
of short-sightedness, have been showered upon the author by those who do
not like a spade to be called a spade. We have nothing to do with the
moral side of the matter here, and it is sufficient to say that La
Rochefoucauld is not an advocate of the selfish or any other school of
moralists. He is simply an observer, setting down with the utmost
literary skill the results of a long life of unusual experience in
business and pleasure of every kind. He is a man of science who has got
together a large collection of facts, and who expounds and arranges them
on a certain coherent and sufficient hypothesis. As a work of literary
art the result of his exposition is unrivalled. The whole of the Maxims,
even with the doubtful or rejected ones, need not occupy more than a
hundred pages, and they contain matter which in the hands of an ordinary
writer would have filled a dozen volumes. Yet there is no undue
compression. It is impossible ever to mistake the meaning, though the
comprehension of the full application of that meaning depends, of
course, on the intellectual equipment and social experience of the
reader. The clearness with which Descartes had first endowed French is
here displayed in its very highest degree. The style, as was unavoidable
in work of the kind, is entirely devoid of ornament. Imagery is wholly
absent, and though metaphorical expressions abound, they are of the
plainest and simplest kind of metaphor. The philosophical language of
the day is present, but in no very prominent measure. The motto of the
book (at least in the fourth and fifth editions), 'Nos vertus ne sont le
plus souvent que des vices deguises,' is a very fair example of the
simple straightforward fashion of La Rochefoucauld's style. Sometimes,
but rarely, the author explains his meaning, and slightly lengthens his
phrase by repeating the sentiment in a somewhat different form, as thus,
'Le plaisir de l'amour est d'aimer, et l'on est plus heureux par la
passion qu'on a que par celle que l'on donne.' But even here it is to be
observed that the explanation is in a manner necessary to take off the
air of sententious enigma, which the words 'le plaisir de l'amour est
d'aimer' might have had by themselves. La Rochefoucauld is never
enigmatical, rarely sententious merely, and is almost indifferent to the
production of _mots_. How continually the study of brevity, combined
with precision, occupied the author, and how severe he was on any
exuberance, can be seen very instructively in the successive alterations
of his work. Thus, in the first edition Maxim 295 ran, 'La jeunesse est
une ivresse continuelle, c'est la fievre de la sante, c'est la folie de
la raison;' but La Rochefoucauld seems to have thought this unduly
pleonastic, and it appears later as 'La jeunesse est une ivresse
continuelle, c'est la fievre de la raison,' the improvement of which in
point and freshness is sufficiently obvious. The result of this process
is that the best of these Maxims are absolutely unrivalled in their own
peculiar style, and that all subsequent writers in the same style have
taken their form as a model. French critics have, as a rule, rather
under-than over-estimated the purely literary talent of La
Rochefoucauld. But this is due to two causes: first, to the supposed
antagonism of his spirit to conventional morality; secondly, to the fact
that he somewhat anticipated the writers of the particular period which
for a century and a half was the idol of academic criticism. His
language is rather that of Louis XIII. than of Louis XIV., and in his
words and phrases there is a certain archaism, not to say an occasional
irregularity, which critics who look only at the stop-watch apparently
find it hard to forgive.
[Sidenote: La Bruyere.]
These critics generally give the palm of style, as concerns writing of
this kind, to Jean de la Bruyere[270]. Less is known of the personal
history of this author than of that of any contemporary writer of great
eminence. He was born at Paris, in August 1645, and his family appears
to have been anciently connected with the law. He must have been a man
of some means and of good education, for he had just bought himself an
important financial post at Caen, when, on the recommendation of
Bossuet, he was appointed Historical Preceptor to Duke Louis of Bourbon,
the grandson of Conde, in whose household he continued till his death in
1696. He had published his _Caracteres_ in 1687, and was elected to the
Academy in 1693.
The works of La Bruyere consist of the _Caracteres_ just mentioned, of a
translation of Theophrastus, of a few literary discourses, and
(probably) of some chapters on Quietism, written on the side of his
patron Bossuet during the great controversy with Fenelon, but not
published till after the author's death. The _Caracteres_ alone are of
much importance or interest.
The design of this curious and celebrated book is taken, like its title,
from Theophrastus, but the plan is very much altered as well as
extended. Instead of copying directly the abstract qualities of
Theophrastus and his brief, pregnant, but somewhat artificial and jejune
description of them, La Bruyere adopted a scheme much better suited to
his own age. He took for the most part actual living people, well known
to all his readers, and, disguising them thinly under names of the kind
which the romances of the middle of the century had rendered
fashionable, made them body forth the characters he wished to define and
satirise. These portraits he inserted in a framework not altogether
unlike that of the Montaigne essay, preserving no very consecutive plan,
but passing from moral reflection to literary criticism, and from
literary criticism to one of the half-personal, half-moralising
portraits just mentioned, with remarkable ease and skill. The titles of
his chapters are rather more indicative of their actual contents than
those of Montaigne's essays, but they represent, for the most part,
merely very elastic frames, in which the author's various observations
and reflections are mounted. The result of this variety, not to say
desultoriness, combined as it is with the display of very great literary
art, is that La Bruyere's is a book of almost unparalleled interest to
take up and lay down at odd moments. Its apparently continuous form and
its intermixture of narrative save it from the appearance of severity
which the avowed Maxim or Pensee has; while the bond between the
different chapters, and even the different paragraphs, is so slight that