A Short History of French Literature
its border, at Les Delices and Ferney. During the whole of his long life
his literary production was incessant, and the form most congenial to
him was poetry, or at least verse. Besides the _Henriade_, his only
poem of great bulk is the scandalous burlesque epic of the _Pucelle_,
nominally imitated from Ariosto, but destitute of the poetical feeling
prominent in the _Orlando_. Voltaire's talent, however, was so much
greater in the lighter kinds of poetry than in the severer, that the
_Pucelle_ is not only more amusing, but actually better as poetry, than
the _Henriade_, the latter being stiff in plan and servilely modelled on
the classical epics, declamatory in tone, tedious in action, and
commonplace in character. Besides these two long poems Voltaire produced
an immense quantity of miscellaneous work, tales in verse, epistles in
verse, discourses in verse, satires, epigrams, _vers de societe_ of
every possible kind. These are almost invariably distinguished by the
felicity of expression--spoilt only by too close adherence to the
mannerism of the time--the brilliant wit, the keen observation which are
identified with the name of Voltaire. The number and the small
individual size of these works make it impossible to particularise them
here. But _Le Pauvre Diable_ may be specified as an almost unique
example of easy Horatian satire less conventional than most of its kind;
and the verses to the Princess Ulrique of Prussia as a model of
artificial but exquisitely polished gallantry in verse.
[Sidenote: Descriptive Poets. Delille.]
Le Franc de Pompignan had the misfortune to incur the enmity of
Voltaire, and has consequently borne in France the traditional ignominy
which in England hangs on certain victims of Dryden and Pope. He had,
however, some poetical talent, which was shown principally in his ode on
the death of J. B. Rousseau. The charming poem of _Ver-Vert_ (the
burlesque history of a parrot, the pet of a convent) made, and not
unjustly, the reputation of Gresset. This reputation his other poetical
works--though he wrote a comedy of much merit--failed to sustain. Saint
Lambert, the rival of Voltaire in love if not in literature, imitated
Thomson's _Seasons_ very closely in a poem of the same name, which set
the fashion of descriptive poetry in France for a considerable time. The
three most remarkable of his followers, all considerably superior to
himself in power, were Lemierre, Delille, and Roucher. Some paradoxical
critics have endeavoured to make Lemierre into a great poet; but his
poems (_La Peinture_, _Les Fastes_, etc.), written on ill-selected
subjects and in a style full of conventional mannerism, have at best the
occasional striking lines which are to be found in Armstrong and other
followers of Young or Thomson in England. Jacques Delille and his
extraordinary popularity form, perhaps, the greatest satire on the taste
of the eighteenth century in France. His translation of the Georgics was
supposed to make him the equal of Virgil, and brought him not merely
fame, but solid reward. His principal work was the poem of _Les
Jardins_, which he followed up with others of a not dissimilar kind.
Though he emigrated he did not lose his fame, and to the day of his
death was considered to be the first poet of France, or to share that
honour with Lebrun-_Pindare_. Delille has expiated his popularity by a
full half-century of contempt, and his work is, indeed, valueless as
poetry. But it is interesting as one of the most striking examples of
talent, adjusting itself exactly to the demands made on it. The age of
Delille wished to see everything described in elegant periphrases, and
the periphrases arranged in harmonious verses. Delille did this and
nothing more. Chess is 'le jeu reveur qu'inventa Palamede.' Backgammon
is 'le jeu bruyant ou, le cornet en main, L'adroit joueur calcule un
hasard incertain.' Sugar is 'le miel Americain Que du suc des roseaux
exprima l'Africain.' In short, poetry becomes an elaborate conundrum;
nothing is called by its proper name when a circumlocution is in any way
possible. Given the demand, Delille may justly claim the honour of
supplying it with unequalled adroitness. Roucher, the author of _Les
Mois_, who fell a victim to the guillotine, was a member of this school,
possessing not a little vigour, though he was not free from the defects
of his predecessors. To these may, perhaps, be joined the pastoral and
idyllic poet Leonard.
[Sidenote: Lebrun.]
It has been said that the glory of Delille as the greatest poet of the
last quarter of the century was shared by a writer whom his
contemporaries surnamed (absurdly enough) Pindar. Escouchard Lebrun had
a strange resemblance to J. B. Rousseau, of whom, however, he was by no
means a warm admirer. Like his forerunner, he divided his time between
bombastic lyrics and epigrams of very considerable merit. Lebrun was
not destitute of a certain force, but his time was too much for him. He
was a very long-lived man, and in his old age celebrated by turns the
Republic and Bonaparte. His chief rivals as poets of the Republic were
M. J. Chenier and the hunchback Desorgues, a voluminous and vigorous but
crude and unfinished writer, who died in a madhouse at the age of
forty-five.
Two young poets, who lived about the middle of the century, are usually
mentioned together, from the fact of the younger of them having used the
misfortunes of the elder to point his own complaints. Malfilatre, a
Norman by birth, had the ill-luck to write a piece of verse which gained
a provincial success. He at once set out for Paris to make his fortune.
He obtained the post of secretary to the Count de Lauraguais, wrote
verses not without grace and full of a certain tender melancholy, and
died at the age of thirty, his health broken by privations and
disappointment. Gilbert, a stronger man, but who has been somewhat
honoured by being called the French Chatterton, died still younger,
after writing some vigorous satire, and a 'complaint' or elegy which has
a good deal of pathos. But he did not, as is generally said, die of
want, though he did die in a public hospital, having been carried
thither after a fall from his horse.
[Sidenote: Parny.]
The places accorded by their contemporaries to Delille and Lebrun really
belonged to two writers of very different character and fortune, Parny
and Andre Chenier. Evariste de Parny, a native of the island of Bourbon,
was called by the aged Voltaire 'mon cher Tibulle,' and displays, with
much of the frivolity and false gallantry of the time, an extraordinary
command of simple elegiac verse, and a manner almost antique in its
simplicity and sweetness. Parny's best piece, a short epitaph on a young
girl, is one of the best things of its kind in literature. His merits,
however, are confined to his early works. In his maturer years he wrote
long poems, on the model of the _Pucelle_, against England,
Christianity, and Monarchism, which are equally remarkable for
blasphemy, obscenity, extravagance, and dulness. His friend Bertin, like
him a creole, resembled him in the command of graceful elegiac and
epistolary verse, but had not what Parny sometimes had, genuine
passion.
[Sidenote: Chenier.]
Andre Marie de Chenier[285], beyond question the greatest poet of the
eighteenth century in France, was born at Constantinople, where his
father was consul-general, in 1762. His mother was a Greek. His family
returned to France when he was a child; he was educated carefully, and
for a short time served in the army, but soon left it. After a time he
was attached (in 1787) to the French embassy in London. Here he spent
four years. Returning to France he sympathised, but on the moderate
side, with the Revolution. The growth of the Jacobin spirit horrified
him, and the excesses of the summer of 1792 decided his attitude and his
fate. He wrote frequently in the _Journal de Paris_, the organ of the
moderate royalist party. Although he did not in any way put himself
forward, he was at last arrested in March, 1794, and was guillotined on
the seventh Thermidor, two days only before the event which would have
saved him, the fall of Robespierre. His poems were not published till
long after his death, and the text of them is even now in an
unsatisfactory condition, many having been left unfinished and
uncorrected by the author. Andre Chenier is sometimes considered as a
precursor of the Romantic reform, but this is a mistake. His critical
comments on Shakespeare and other writers, his favourite studies, which
were confined to the Greek and Latin classics and the humanists of the
Italian Renaissance, above all his poems themselves, prove the contrary.
A Greek by birthplace, and half a Greek by blood, his tastes and
standards were wholly classical. But the fire and force of his poetical
genius made the blood circulate afresh in the veins of the old French
classical tradition, without, however, permanently strengthening or
renovating it. The poetry of Chenier is still in the main the poetry of
Racine, though with infinitely more glow of colour and variety of
harmony. His poems are mostly antique in their titles and plan,
eclogues, elegies, and so forth, and are not free from a certain
artificiality inseparable from the style. _La Jeune Tarentine_, _La
Jeune Captive_, _L'Aveugle_, and some others, are of extreme merit, and
all over his work (much of which is in the most fragmentary condition)
lines and phrases of extraordinary beauty are scattered. The noble
_Iambes_, or political and satirical poems, which he wrote in prison,
just before his death, bear out, perhaps better than anything else, his
well-known saying, as he touched his head when sentence had been passed,
'et pourtant il y avait quelque chose la.'
[Sidenote: Minor Poets.]
A few other poets or verse-makers of merit before the revival of poetry
proper must be rapidly noticed. The fable of La Fontaine was cultivated
vigorously, in particular by Florian, a favourite pupil of Voltaire, who
will reappear in these pages. Florian's fables are graceful copies of
his master. Those of Arnault, with less grace, have more originality;
often, indeed, Arnault's short moral poems are not so much fables as
what used to be called in English 'emblems.' The most famous of these,
which of itself deserves to keep Arnault's memory green, is 'La
Feuille.' Marie Joseph Chenier, the younger brother of Andre, and,
unlike him, a fervent republican, is chiefly known as a dramatist. He
had, however, a vein of satirical verse, which was not commonplace.
Another dramatist, Andrieux, also deserves mention in passing. Superior
to either of these as a poet, and wanting only the good-fortune of
having been born a little later, was Nepomucene Lemercier, a playwright
of no small merit, and a poet of extraordinary but unequal vigour. The
_Panhypocrisiade_, a kind of satirical epic _par personnages_ (to use
the old French expression for a dramatic narrative), is his principal
work, and a very remarkable one. Last of all have to be mentioned
Fontanes and Chenedolle, who are the characteristic poets of the Empire,
with the exception of an epic school of no value. The chief importance
of Fontanes in literature is derived not from any performances of his
own, but from the fact that he was the appointed intermediary between
Napoleon and the men of letters of the time, and was able to exercise a
good deal of useful patronage. Chenedolle was in production, if not in
publication, for he published late in life, a precursor of Lamartine,
much of whose style and manner may be found in him. An amiable
appreciation of natural beauty, and a tendency to facile pathos, derived
from the contemplation of natural objects, distinguish him from his
predecessors.
[Sidenote: Light verse. Piron.]
[Sidenote: Desaugiers.]