A Short History of French Literature
business, which he hated, and literature, of which his father would not
hear, he entered the army in 1792. He served on the Rhine, and not long
after joining broke his leave in a manner rather unpleasantly resembling
desertion. His friends succeeded in saving him from the consequences of
this imprudence, and he served until Wagram, when he finally left the
army, again in very odd circumstances. He then lived in Italy (where his
passion for the classics led him into an absurd dispute about an alleged
injury he had caused to a manuscript of Longus) until the fall of the
Empire. When he was forty-five years old he was known in literature only
as a translator of classics, remarkable for scholarship and for careful
modelling of his style upon the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
rather than upon the eighteenth. Although he had hitherto taken little
active part in politics, the so-called 'ideas of 89' had sunk deeply
into him. Impelled, not by any wide views on the future of the nation,
but apparently by the mere _bourgeois_ hatred of titles, old descent,
and the other privileges of the aristocracy, he began a series of
pamphlets to the success of which there is no rival except that of the
Letters of Junius, while Junius falls far short of Courier in intrinsic
literary merit. There are, indeed, few authors whose merit resides so
wholly in their style and power of expression as Courier's. His thought
is narrow in the extreme; even where its conclusions are just it rests
rather on the jealousies of the typical _bourgeois_ than on anything
else. But in irony he has, with the exception of Pascal and Swift, no
superior. He began by a _Petition aux Deux Chambres_. Then he
contributed a series of letters to _Le Censeur_, a reform journal; then
he published various pamphlets, usually signed 'Paul Louis, Vigneron,'
and ostensibly addressed to his neighbours and fellow villagers. He had
established himself on a small estate in Touraine, which he farmed
himself. But he was much in Paris, and his political writings made him
acquainted with the prison of Sainte Pelagie. His death, in April 1825,
was singular, and indeed mysterious. He was shot, the murderer escaping.
It was suspected to be one of his own servants, to whom he was a harsh
and unpopular master, and the suspicion was confirmed some years
afterwards by the confession of a game-keeper. His _Simple Discours_
against the presentation of Chambord to the Duc de Bordeaux, his _Livret
de Paul Louis_, his _Pamphlet des Pamphlets_, are all models of their
kind. Nowhere is the peculiar quality which is called in French
_narquois_ displayed with more consummate skill. The language is at once
perfectly simple and of the utmost literary polish, the arguments,
whether good or bad, always tellingly expressed. But perhaps he has
written nothing better than the _Lettre a M. Renouard_, in which he
discusses the mishap with the manuscript of Longus, and the letter to
the _Academie des Inscriptions_ on their refusal to elect him. The
style of Courier is almost unique, and its merits are only denied by
those who do not possess the necessary organ for appreciating it.
[Sidenote: Senancour.]
This chapter may perhaps be most appropriately concluded by the notice
of a singular writer who, although longer lived, was contemporary with
Courier. Etienne Pivert de Senancour may be treated almost indifferently
as a moral essayist, or as a producer of the peculiar kind of faintly
narrative and strongly ethical work which Rousseau had made fashionable.
The infusion of narrative in his principal and indeed only remarkable
work, _Obermann_, is however so slight, that he will come in best here,
though in his old age he wrote a professed novel, _Isabella_. Senancour
was born in 1770, his father being a man of position and fortune, who
lost both at the Revolution. The son was destined for the Church, but
ran away and spent a considerable time in Switzerland, where he married,
returning to France towards the end of the century. He then published
divers curious works of half-sentimental, half-speculative reflection,
by far the most important of which, _Obermann_, appeared in 1804. Then
Senancour had to take to literary hack-work for a subsistence; but in
his later years Villemain and Thiers procured pensions for him, and he
was relieved from want. He died in 1846. _Obermann_ has not been ill
described by George Sand as a _Rene_ with a difference; Chateaubriand's
melancholy hero feeling that he could do anything if he would but has no
spirit for any task, Senancour's that he is unequal to his own
aspirations. No brief epigram of this kind can ever fully describe a
book; but this, though inadequate, is not incorrect so far as it goes.
The book is a series of letters, in which the supposed writer delivers
melancholy reflections on all manner of themes, especially moral
problems and natural beauty. Senancour was in a certain sense a
_Philosophe_, in so far that he was dogmatically unorthodox and
discarded conventional ideas as to moral conduct; but he is much nearer
Rousseau than Diderot. Indeed, he sometimes seems to the reader little
more than an echo of the former, until his more distinctly modern
characteristics (characteristics which were not fully or generally felt
or reproduced till the visionary and discouraged generation of
1820-1850) reappear. It is perhaps not unfair to say that the pleasure
with which this generation recognised its own sentiments in _Obermann_
gave rise to a traditional estimate of the literary value of that book
which is a little exaggerated. Yet it has considerable merit, especially
in the simplicity and directness with which expression is given to a
class of sentiments very likely to find vent in language either
extravagant or affected. Its form is that of a series of letters, dated
from various places, but chiefly from a solitary valley in the Alps in
which the hero lives, meditates, and pursues the occupations of
husbandry on his small estate.
CHAPTER VI.
PHILOSOPHERS.
[Sidenote: The philosophe movement.]
The entire literary and intellectual movement of the eighteenth century
is very often called the _philosophe_ movement, and the writers who took
part in it _les philosophes_. The word 'philosopher' is, however, here
used in a sense widely different from its proper and usual one.
_Philosophie_, in the ordinary language of the middle and later
seventeenth century, meant simply freethinking on questions of religion.
This freethinking, of which Saint-Evremond was the most distinguished
representative, involved no revolutionary or even reforming attitude
towards politics or practical affairs of any kind. As however the next
century advanced, the character of French scepticism became altered.
Contact with English Deism gave form and precision to its theological or
anti-theological side. The reading of Locke animated it against
Cartesianism, and the study of English politics excited it against the
irresponsible despotism and the crushing system of ecclesiastical and
aristocratic privilege which made almost the entire burden of government
rest on the shoulders least able to bear it. French 'philosophism' then
became suddenly militant and practical. Toleration and liberty of
speculation in religion, constitutional government in politics, the
equalisation of pressure in taxation, and the removal of privilege,
together with reform in legal procedure, were the objects which it had
most at heart. In merely speculative philosophy, that is to say, in
metaphysics, it was much less active, though it had on the whole a
tendency towards materialism, and by a curious accident it was for the
most part rigidly conservative in literary criticism. But it was eager
in the cultivation of ethics from various points of view, and busy in
the study both of the philosophy of history, which may be said to date
from that period, and of physical science, in which Newton took the
place of Locke as guide. The almost universal presence of this practical
and reforming spirit makes it not by any means so easy to subdivide the
branches of literature, as is the case in the seventeenth century. La
Bruyere had said, in the days of acquiescence in absolutism, that to a
Frenchman 'Les grands sujets sont defendus,' meaning thereby theology
and politics. The general spirit of the eighteenth century was a
vigorous denial of this, and an eager investigation into these 'grands
sujets.' This spirit made its appearance in the most unexpected
quarters, and in the strangest forms. It converted (in the hands of
Voltaire) the stiffest and most conventional form of drama ever known
into a pamphlet. It insinuated polemics under the guise of history, and
made the ponderous and apparently matter-of-fact folios of a Dictionary
of Arts and Manufactures the vehicles of arguments for reform. It
overflowed into every department of literary occupation. Some of the
chief prose manifestations of this spirit have been discussed and
arranged in the two previous chapters under the head of history and
essay writing. The rest will be dealt with here. A certain distinction
of form, though it is often rather arbitrary than real, renders such a
subdivision possible, while it is desirable in the interest of
clearness. It will be noticed that while the attack is voluminous and
manifold, the defence is almost unrepresented in literature. This is one
of the most remarkable facts in literary history. In England, from which
the _philosophe_ movement borrowed so much, the Deists had not only not
had their own way in the literary battle, but had been beaten all along
the line by the superior intellectual and literary prowess of the
defenders of orthodoxy. The case in France went otherwise and almost by
default. The only defender of orthodoxy whose name has survived in
literature--for Freron, despite his power, was little more than a
literary critic--is the Abbe Guenee. In so singular a state was the
church of France that scarcely a single preacher or theologian, after
Massillon's death in 1742, could challenge equality with even third- or
fourth-rate men of letters; while, after the death of the Chancellor
d'Aguesseau in 1751, no layman of eminence can be named until Joseph de
Maistre, nearly half a century later, who was at once a considerable
writer and a declared defender of religion. Indeed no small proportion
of the enemies of ecclesiasticism were actually paid and privileged
members of the Church itself. Thus little opposition, except that of
simple _vis inertiae_, was offered to the new views and the crusade by
which they were supported. This crusade, however, had two very different
stages. The first, of which the greatest representatives are Montesquieu
and in a way Voltaire himself, was critical and reforming, but in no way
revolutionary; the second, of whom the Encyclopaedists are the
representatives, was, consciously or unconsciously, bent on a complete
revolution. We shall give an account first of the chief representatives
of these two great classes of the general movement, and then of those
offshoots or schools of that movement which busied themselves with the
special subjects of economics, ethics, and metaphysics, as distinguished
from general politics.
[Sidenote: Montesquieu.]
Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu et de la Brede, was born at
the _chateau_, which gave him the last-named title, in the neighbourhood
of Bordeaux, on the 18th of January, 1689. His family was not of the
oldest, but it had, as he tells us, some two or three centuries of
proved _noblesse_ to boast of, and had been distinguished in the law. He
himself was destined for that profession, and after a youth of laborious
study became councillor of the parliament of Bordeaux in 1714, and in a