A Short History of French Literature
1803. His principal critical work is his _Cours de Litterature_, which
was the work chiefly of his later days. La Harpe had very considerable
talent, which was however warped by the false and narrow system of
criticism he adopted, and by his personal ill-temper and overbearing
disposition. He is even more than Boileau the type of the
schoolmaster-critic, who marks passages for correction according to
cut-and-dried rules instead of attempting to judge the author according
to his own standard. Yet, if he is the most typical example of the
school, he is also perhaps the best. In dealing with authors of his own
century, he is especially worthy of attention, because for the most part
they themselves had before them the standards which he used, and his
method is therefore relevant as far as it goes. La Harpe wrote well in
the fashion of his day.
[Sidenote: Thomas.]
With Duclos, Marmontel, and La Harpe, Thomas is usually named. This
writer, like others of our present subjects, was chiefly a composer of
academic _Eloges_, _Memoires_, _Discours_, and the like. He also wrote a
book on _Les Femmes_, a subject which he treated, as he did most things,
with seriousness, and with a mixture of declamation and sentimentality.
His literary value is but small.
[Sidenote: Orthodox Apologists.]
Of the definitely orthodox party only two names need be mentioned, that
of the Abbe Guenee, who devoted himself to exposing Voltaire's numerous
slips in erudition in his _Lettres de Quelques Juifs_, and that of the
Abbe Bergier, who is chiefly noteworthy as having held the singular post
of official refuter of the Encyclopaedists, in virtue of which
appointment he received two thousand _livres_ per annum from the General
Assembly of the clergy for sixteen years. He wrote with assiduity, but
was not read, and three years before the Revolution he lost his annuity,
which the Assembly struck off. Bergier was a man of learning, industry,
and good faith, but unfortunately he did not possess sufficient literary
talent to execute the task entrusted to him. The Abbe Guenee, on the
contrary, was a fair match even for Voltaire, but he did not attempt,
perhaps it was too early to attempt, anything more than skirmishing.
[Sidenote: Freron.]
A bitter personal opponent of La Harpe, and a famous man in literary
history, was Freron. Elie Catherine Freron was born at Quimper in
Britanny in 1719, and was educated by the Jesuits. He began a critical
journal when he was only seven-and-twenty, under the title (not so
strange then as now) of _Lettres de Madame la Comtesse de_.... But he
had already contributed to the _Observations_ and _Jugements_ of
Desfontaines. The _Lettres_ were suppressed in 1749, but continued
under another title, and at last, in 1754, became the celebrated _Annee
Litteraire_, which for twenty years was full of gall and wormwood for
Voltaire and all his partisans. Voltaire was never slow to retaliate in
such matters, and his retorts culminated in the play of _L'Ecossaise_,
in which Freron was caricatured under the title Frelon (hornet). Every
effort was made by the Encyclopaedists (who were not in the least
tolerant in practice) to procure the suppression of the _Annee_. But
Freron had solid supports in high places and held on gallantly. It is
said that his death, in 1776, was caused by a report that the
suppression had been at last obtained. He certainly suffered both from
gout and from heart disease, complaints not unlikely to make a sudden
shock fatal. Freron, like his English prototype John Dennis, has had the
disadvantage that his adversaries were numerous, witty, not too
scrupulous, and on the winning side. His personal character seems to
have been none of the most amiable. But he was more frequently right
than wrong in his criticisms on detached points, and his literary
standards were decidedly higher and better than those of his enemies. He
had moreover abundant wit and an imperturbable temper, which enabled him
to turn the laugh against Voltaire in his criticism of the first
representation of _L'Ecossaise_ itself.
Two other adversaries of Voltaire who deserve notice as literary critics
were the Abbe Desfontaines (already mentioned) and Palissot.
Desfontaines was a man of doubtful character; but it is not certain that
he was in the wrong in the dispute which changed him from a friend into
an enemy of Voltaire, and, like Freron, he very frequently hit blots
both in the patriarch's works and in those of his disciples. Palissot
was the author of a play called _Les Philosophes_, an _Ecossaise_ on the
other side, in which Rousseau, Diderot, and others were outrageously
ridiculed. There was no great merit in this, but Palissot was not a bad
critic in some ways, and his notes on French classics, especially
Corneille, frequently show much greater taste than those of most
contemporary annotators.
[Sidenote: Philosophe Criticism. D'Alembert, Diderot.]
[Sidenote: Les Feuilles de Grimm.]
[Sidenote: Diderot's Salons]
[Sidenote: His General Criticism.]
The leaders of the _philosophes_ themselves gave considerable attention
to criticism. Voltaire wrote this, as he wrote everything, his
principal critical work being his Commentary on Corneille, in which the
constraint of general dramatic and poetic theory which the critic
imposes on himself, and the merely conventional opinions in which he too
often indulges, do not interfere with much acute criticism on points of
detail. D'Alembert distinguished himself by his extraordinarily careful
and polished _Eloges_, or obituary notices, which remain among the
finest examples of critical appreciation of a certain kind to be found
in literature. Although he did not definitely attempt a new theory of
criticism, D'Alembert's vigorous intellect and unbiassed judgment
enabled him to estimate authors so different as (for instance) Massillon
and Marivaux with singular felicity. But the greatest of the
Encyclopaedists in this respect was unquestionably Diderot. While his
contemporaries, bent on innovation in politics and religion, accepted
without doubt or complaint the narrowest, most conventional, and most
unnatural system of literary criticism ever known, he, in his hurried
and haphazard but masterly way, practically anticipated the views and
even many of the _dicta_ of the Romantic school. Most of Diderot's
criticisms were written for Grimm's 'Leaves,' which thus acquired a
value entirely different from and far superior to any that their nominal
author could give them. Some of these short notices of current
literature are among the finest examples of the review properly so
called, though in point of mere literary style and expression they
constantly suffer from Diderot's hurried way of setting down the first
thing that came into his head in the first words that presented
themselves to clothe it. But everywhere there is to be perceived the
cardinal principle of sound criticism--that a book is to be judged, not
according to arbitrary rules laid down _ex cathedra_ for the class of
books to which it is supposed to belong, but according to the scheme of
its author in the first place, and in the second to the general laws of
aesthetics; a science which, if the Germans named it, Diderot, by their
own confession, did much to create. Even more remarkable in this respect
than his book-criticisms are his _Salons_, criticisms of the biennial
exhibitions of pictures in Paris, also written for Grimm. There are nine
of these, ranging over a period of twenty-two years, and they have
served as models for more than a century. Diderot did not adopt the old
plan (as old as the Greeks) of mere description more or less elaborate
of the picture, nor the plan of dilating on its merely technical
characteristics, though, assisted by artist friends, he managed to
introduce a fair amount of technicalities into his writing. His method
is to take in the impression produced by the painting on his mind, and
to reproduce it with the associations and suggestions it has supplied.
Thus his criticisms are often extremely discursive, and some of his most
valuable reflections on matters at first sight quite remote from the
fine arts occur in these _Salons_. Of drama Diderot had a formal theory
which he illustrated by examples not quite so happy as his precepts.
This theory involved the practical substitution of what is called in
French _drame_ for the conventional tragedy and comedy, and it brought
the French theatre (or would have brought it if it had been adopted,
which it was not until 1830) much nearer to the English than it had
been. Diderot was moreover an enthusiastic admirer of English novels,
and especially of Richardson and Sterne, partly no doubt because the
sentimentalism which characterised them coincided with his own
_sensibilite_, but also (it is fair to believe) because of their freedom
from the artificiality and the strict observance of models which
pervaded all branches of literature in France. Of poetry proper we have
little formal criticism from Diderot. His own verses are few, and of no
merit, nor was the poetry of the time at all calculated to excite any
enthusiasm in him. But the aesthetic tendency which in other ways he
expressed, and which he was the first to express, was that which, some
forty years after his death, brought about the revival of poetry in
France, through recurrence to nature, passion, truth, vividness, and
variety of sentiment.
[Sidenote: Newspapers of the Revolution.]
[Sidenote: The Influence of Journalism.]
So long as the old _regime_ lasted journalism was naturally in a
condition of suppression, but from the beginning of the Revolution it
assumed at once an important position in the state, and a position still
more important as a nursery of rising men of letters. At the time of the
outbreak only two papers of importance existed, the already mentioned
_Gazette de France_, and the _Journal de Paris_, in which Garat, Andre
Chenier, Roucher, and many other men of distinction, won their spurs.
1789, however, saw the birth of numerous sheets, some of which continued
almost till our own days. The most important was the _Gazette Nationale_
or _Moniteur Universel_, in which not merely Garat and La Harpe, but
Ginguene, a literary critic of talent and a republican of moderate
principles, together with the future historian Lacretelle, and the comic
poet, fabulist, and critic Andrieux, took part. Rivarol, Champcenetz,
and Pelletier conducted the Royalist _Actes des Apotres_, Marat started
his ultra-republican _Ami du Peuple_, Camille Desmoulins the _Courier de
Brabant_, Durozoy the _Gazette de Paris_. Barrere and Louvet, both
notorious, if not famous names, launched for the first time a paper with
a title destined to fortune, _Le Journal des Debats_; and Camille
Desmoulins changed his oddly-named journal into one named more oddly
still, _Les Revolutions de France et de Brabant_. All these, and more,
were the growth of the single year 1789. The next saw the avowedly
Royalist _Ami du Roi_ of Royou, the atrocious _Pere Duchene_ of Hebert,
the cumbrously-named _Journal des Amis de la Constitution_, on which
Fontanes, Clermont-Tonnerre, and other future Bonapartists and
Constitutionalists worked. In 1791 no paper of importance, except the
short-lived Girondist _Chronique du Mois_, appeared. In the next year
many Terrorist prints of no literary merit were started, and one,
entitled _Nouvelles Politiques_, to which the veterans Suard and
Morellet, with Guizot, a novice of the time to come, Lacretelle, Dupont
de Nemours, and others, were contributors. In the later years of the
revolutionary period, the only important newspaper was what was first
called the _Journal de l'Empire_, and at the end of Napoleon's reign the