A Short History of French Literature
Diderot, who possessed every literary faculty except the faculty of
taking pains and the faculty of adroitly choosing subjects, was marked
out as the describer of such a society as this, where brilliancy was the
one thing never wanting, where eccentricity of act and speech was the
rule, where originals abounded and took care to make the most of their
originality, and where all restraint of convention was deliberately cast
aside. The character and tendencies of this society have been very
variously judged, and there is no need to decide here between the judges
further than to say that, on the whole, the famous essay of Carlyle on
Diderot not inadequately reduces to miniature Diderot's own picture of
it. Only the extremest prejudice can deny the extraordinary merit of
that picture itself, the vividness and effortless effect with which the
men and women dealt with--their doings and their sayings--are presented,
the completeness and dramatic force of the presentation.
[Sidenote: Galiani.]
The last of the epistolers selected for comment, the Abbe Galiani, has
this peculiarity as distinguished from Voltaire and Diderot, that he is
little except a letter-writer to the present and probably to all future
generations of readers. He will indeed appear again, but his dealings
with political economy are of merely ephemeral interest. Galiani was of
a noble Neapolitan family, was attached to the Neapolitan Legation in
Paris, and made himself a darling of _philosophe_ society there. When he
was recalled to his native country and endowed with sufficiently
lucrative employments, his chief consolation for the loss of Parisian
society was to gather as far as he could a copy of it--consisting partly
of Italians, partly of foreign and especially English visitors--to
Italy, to study classical archaeology, in which (and especially in the
department of numismatics) he was an expert, and to write letters to his
French friends. In his long residence at Paris, Galiani had acquired a
style not entirely destitute of Italianisms, but all the more piquant on
that account. His letters were published early in this century, but
incompletely and in a somewhat garbled fashion. They have recently had
the benefit of two different complete editions. They are addressed, the
greater part of them to Madame d'Epinay, and the remainder to various
correspondents. Galiani had the reputation of being one of the best
talkers of his time, and the memoirs and correspondence of his friends
(especially Diderot's) contain many reported sayings of his which amply
support the reputation. Like many famous talkers, he seems to have been
not quite so ready with the pen as with the tongue. But it is only by
comparison that his letters can be depreciated. Less voluminous and
manifold than Voltaire, less picturesque than Diderot, he is a model of
general letter-writing. He is also remarkable as an exponent of the
curious feeling of the time towards religion; a feeling which was
prevalent in the cultivated classes (with certain differences) all over
Europe. Galiani was not, like some of his French friends, a
proselytising atheist. He held some ecclesiastical employments in his
own country with decency, and died with all due attention to the rites
of the Church. But it is obvious that he was as little of a Christian,
in any definite sense of the word, as any humanist of the fifteenth
century.
The light thrown in this fashion upon the social, moral, and
intellectual characteristics of the time constitutes the chief value of
all its historical literature, except the great philosophico-historical
works of Montesquieu and Turgot. It has a certain flimsiness about it;
it is brilliant journalism rather than literature properly so called;
the dialect in which it is written wants the gravity and sonorousness,
the colour and the poetry, of the seventeenth and earlier centuries. But
it is unmatched in power of social portraiture. Written, as much of it
is, by men of the middle class, and more of it by men who, from whatever
class they sprang, were deeply interested in social, economical, and
political problems, it is free from that ignoring of any life and class
except that of the nobility which mars much of the work of earlier
times. The picture it gives is very far from being a flattering one. The
nature to which the mirror is held up is in most cases a decidedly
corrupt nature; but the mirror is held frankly, and the reflection is
useful to posterity.
FOOTNOTES:
[289] In studying the history, and especially the memoirs, of the
eighteenth century, the reader is at a disadvantage, inasmuch as the
admirable collections of MM. Buchon, Petitot, Michaud et Poujoulat,
etc., do not extend beyond its earliest years. Their place is very
imperfectly supplied by a collection in twenty-eight small volumes,
edited by F. Barriere for MM. Didot. This is useful as far as it goes,
but it is very far from complete; much of it is in extract only, and the
component parts of it are not selected as judiciously as they might be.
Separate editions of the principal memoirs of the century are of course
obtainable, and the number is being constantly increased; but such
separate editions are far less useful than the collections which enable
the memoir-writing of France during five centuries of its history to be
studied at an advantage scarcely to be paralleled in the literature of
any other nation.
[290] Her earlier contemporary, Madame de Tencin, is her chief
competitor.
CHAPTER V.
ESSAYISTS, MINOR MORALISTS, CRITICS.
[Sidenote: Occasional Writing in the Eighteenth-century. Periodicals.]
What may be, for want of a better word, called occasional writing in
prose received a considerable development during the eighteenth century.
Some of the forms which it had previously taken, the _Pensee_, the
maxim, and so forth, were less practised, though at the beginning and
end of our present period two remarkable men, Vauvenargues and Joubert,
distinguished themselves in them, and in the form of satirical aphorism
Chamfort and Rivarol, before and during the Revolution, brought them to
great perfection. But it was powerfully encouraged by the institution of
official _eloges_, pronounced in the French Academy on famous men of the
immediate or remoter past, and of prize essays, subjects for which, in
ever increasing numbers, were proposed, not merely by that body, but by
provincial societies of a similar but humbler kind. More than all this,
the growth of periodical literature, though not exactly rapid, was
steady, and gave opportunity for the cultivation of the two main
branches of occasional writing as it is understood in modern times,
namely, social or ethical essays of the Addisonian kind, and critical
studies, literary or other. A great impetus was given to this by the
novelist Prevost, who, after his return from England, edited, as has
been observed, more than one avowed imitation of the English _Spectator_
and _Tatler_. At the beginning of the century the chief place among
newspapers was occupied by the _Mercure Galant_, which had enjoyed the
contempt of La Bruyere, and the management of Vise and Thomas Corneille.
Towards the middle and end of the period, the _Gazette de France_, under
the management of Suard, held the principal place with a somewhat
higher aim; and of non-official publications the Jesuit _Journal de
Trevoux_ and the anti-_philosophe Annee Litteraire_ of Freron were
notable. It was not till after the beginning of the Revolution that
journalism proper spread and multiplied, and that journalists became a
power. A short notice of the chief of these will be found lower down in
this chapter, but a full history of French journalism is impossible
here.
[Sidenote: Fontenelle.]
The first place in point of time, and not the least in point of
importance, among the occasional writers of the eighteenth century, is
due to Fontenelle. The personal name of this curious writer, who is
perhaps the most striking example in literary history of multifarious
talent and unwearied industry just stopping short, despite their
combination, of genius, was Bernard le Bovier, and his mother was a
sister of Corneille, whose life Fontenelle himself wrote. He was
educated by the Jesuits and studied for the bar, but was unsuccessful as
an advocate, and soon gave up active practice. He came to Paris very
young, and soon became distinguished, after a fashion, in society and
literature. He was one of the last of the _precieux_, or rather he was
the inventor of a new combination of literature and gallantry which at
first exposed him to not a little satire. Unfortunately too for him he
tried first to emulate his uncles in the drama, for which he had no
talent, and one of his plays (_Aspar_), failing completely, gave his
enemies abundant opportunity. No one, however, illustrated better than
Fontenelle the saying that 'no man was ever written down except by
himself.' He was the butt of the four most dangerous satirists of his
time--Racine, Boileau, La Bruyere, and J. B. Rousseau; but though the
epigrams which Racine and Rousseau directed against him are among the
best in the language, and though the 'portrait' of Cydias, in the
_Caracteres_, at least equals them, Fontenelle received hardly any
damage from these. Finding that he was not likely to be a successful
dramatic poet, even in opera, he turned to prose, and wrote 'dialogues
of the dead,' in avowed imitation of Lucian, and a kind of romance
called '_Lettres du Chevalier d'Her_...,' in which he may be said to
have set the example of the elaborate and rather affected style,
afterwards called Marivaudage, from his most famous pupil. Even here
his success was doubtful, and he again changed his ground. He had paid
some attention to science, and he saw that there was an opening in the
growing curiosity of educated people for scientific popularising. To
this and to literary criticism and history he devoted himself for the
remainder of his long life, becoming President of the Academy of
Sciences, and virtual dictator of the Academie Francaise. His _Eloges_
and his academic essays generally were highly popular. But his chief
single works are the famous _Entretien sur la Pluralite des Mondes_, an
example of singularly hardy speculation, and of no contemptible
learning, artfully disguised by an easy style, and his _Histoire des
Oracles_, of which much the same may be said. With hardly diminished
powers Fontenelle achieved an age not often paralleled in literary
history, though his contemporary, Saint Aulaire, a minor poet, nearly
equalled it. He died in his hundredth year, and almost at the end of it,
his long life extending from the very earliest glories of the Siecle de
Louis XIV. to the very hottest period of the Encyclopaedist battle. The
singular variety of his works, and his force of character, disguised
under a somewhat frivolous exterior, but enabling him to live down
enmity and ridicule which would have crushed most men, would of
themselves make Fontenelle a remarkable figure in literature. But his
actual work has more merits than that of mere variety. He realised quite
as keenly as his enemy La Bruyere the importance of manner in
literature, though his taste was hardly so pure. If not exactly an
original thinker, he was an acute and comprehensive one, and forestalled
most of his contemporaries in taking the direction consciously which
they were pursuing almost without knowing it. He fully appreciated the
value of paradox as stimulating men's minds and giving flavour to
literature; and his positive wit was very considerable. To not many men
are more good sayings attributed, and the goodness of these is not
always verbal only. The most famous of them, uttered in defence of his