A Short History of French Literature
France, and Condillac took up Locke's work at exactly the point where
his master had faltered. He set to work to show with great plausibility
that, according to Lockeian principles, the addition of ideas of
reflection to ideas of sensation is unsustainable, and that all ideas
without exception are merely transformed sensations. One of the
illustrations which he used to support his views, that of a statue
supposed to be endowed with a single sense, and successively developing
first the others, and then the powers usually classed as reflection, is
famous in the history of philosophy. It concerns us only as giving an
instance of the method of Condillac, which is remarkable for vividness
and adaptation to the ordinary comprehension. Unlike the style of Locke
himself, Condillac's style is not in the least slovenly, but polished
and lucid, excellently suited to such a public as that of the eighteenth
century, which was at once intelligent enough to understand, and
educated enough to demand, finish of manner in discussing abstract
points.
After Condillac the history of philosophy in France during the rest of
the period is of no great interest to literature. He himself was
continued and represented chiefly by Destutt de Tracy. The reaction
against the extreme idealist and materialist constructions of Locke
respectively, which had been brought about in England by Reid and
Stewart, acquired in the last years of the eighteenth century, and the
beginning of the nineteenth, a considerable following in France. Its
chiefs were Maine de Biran, Royer Collard (who also obtained reputation
as an orator and parliamentary politician), and Jouffroy. They belong,
however, rather to the history of philosophy than to that of literature.
[Sidenote: Joseph de Maistre.]
After this long list of writers who advocated, more or less openly,
revolution in matters political and religious, but especially in the
latter, two authors who with Chateaubriand, but in a definitely
philosophical manner, set the example of reaction, and who to a great
extent indicated the lines which it was to follow, must be mentioned.
These are Joseph de Maistre, and Louis de Bonald. Joseph, Count de
Maistre, was born at Chambery, in 1753, of a noble Savoyard family,
which is said to have come originally from Languedoc. His father held
important employments in the duchy, and Joseph himself entered its civil
service. When, after the French Revolution, Savoy was invaded, and in a
short time annexed, he returned to Lausanne, and there wrote
_Considerations sur la France_, his first work of importance. For some
years he was employed at Turin in the administration of such of his
continental dominions as were left to the King of Sardinia; and then,
after the practical annexation of Piedmont, he held a similar employ in
the island of Sardinia itself. At the beginning of the present century,
he was sent to St. Petersburg to plead the cause of his master. Here he
remained till after the overthrow of Napoleon, and wrote, though he did
not publish, most of his books. In 1816 he returned to Turin, and died a
few years afterwards--in 1821. The three chief works of Joseph de
Maistre are _Du Pape_, 1817, _De l'Eglise Gallicane_, and the unfinished
_Soirees de St. Petersbourg_. The two first compose a complete treatise
on the power and position of the pope in relation both to the temporal
and to the ecclesiastical form of national government. The author is the
most uncompromising of ultramontanes. According to him the pope is the
source of all authority on earth, and temporal princes are little more
than his delegates. Except in relation to religious error, Joseph de
Maistre is not hostile to a certain ordered measure of liberty accorded
by their rulers to peoples and individuals. But, strongly impressed by
the social and moral, as well as the political and religious anarchy
brought about first by the _philosophe_ movement, and then by the
Revolution, he sees the only chance of rescue in the establishment of a
hierarchy of government culminating in that from which there is no
appeal, the single authority of the pope. He is thus a legitimist with a
difference. The _Soirees de St. Petersbourg_, which are unfinished and
not entirely uniform in plan, deal nominally with the providential
government of the world, but diverge to a large number of subjects. It
is in this book that the author develops the kind of modified terrorism
which is often, though not altogether justly, considered to be his chief
characteristic, eulogising the executioner as the foundation of society.
Joseph de Maistre is unquestionably one of the greatest thinkers and
writers of the eighteenth century. Paradoxical and strained as his
system frequently appears, it is rigorously logical. An ordered
theocracy seems to him the only polity capable of giving peace and true
prosperity to the world, and he shapes all his theories so as to fit in
with this central conception. On detached subjects his thoughts are
always vigorous, and often strikingly original. His reading was great,
and his skill in polemics of the very highest. No one possesses in
larger measure the art of hostile criticism without descending to actual
abuse. These merits of themselves imply purely literary accomplishments,
clearness, distinctness, forcible expression, in a rare kind and degree.
But Joseph de Maistre is more than this as a writer. He possesses,
though he only occasionally exercises it, a brilliant faculty of
rhetoric. His phrase is more than merely clear and forcible; it has a
peculiar incisiveness and sharpness of outline which impress it on the
memory, while, sparing as he is of ornament, his rare passages of
description and fancy have great merit. The surest testimony to his
value is the fact that, though both in his own day and since by far the
larger number of writers and thinkers have held views more or less
opposed to his, no one whose opinion is itself of the least importance
has ever spoken of him without respect and even admiration. Those who,
like Lamartine, qualify their admiration with a certain depreciation,
show inability to recognise fully the beauty of strength undisguised by
conventional elegance and grace of form.
[Sidenote: Bonald.]
Louis Gabriel Ambroise, Vicomte de Bonald, who is usually named with
Joseph de Maistre as the leader of the Catholic-monarchist reaction, was
a weaker thinker, and a writer of less accomplishment, though in both
respects he has perhaps been somewhat unfairly criticised. Born at
Milhaud, in the district of Rouergue, in 1754, he discharged various
civil and military employments in his native province during his youth;
was elected in 1790 member of the Departmental Assembly, but emigrated
next year; served in Conde's army, and then established himself at
Heidelberg. His first work was seized by the Directory, but he returned
to France soon afterwards, and was not molested. He published a good
deal during the first years of the century, and, like many other
royalists, received overtures from Napoleon through Fontanes. These he
did not exactly reject, but he availed himself of them very sparingly.
The Restoration, on the contrary, aroused him to vigour. It was owing to
him chiefly that the law of divorce was altered. He entered the Academy,
and in 1823 was made a peer; an honour which he resigned at the
revolution of July. He died in 1840.
Bonald's principal work is his _Legislation Primitive_. He also wrote a
book on divorce, and a considerable number of miscellaneous political
and metaphysical works. His chief subjects of discussion were, first,
the theory of the revelation of language; and secondly, the theory of
causality: in respect of both of which he combated the materialist
school of the eighteenth century. In politics Bonald was a thoroughgoing
legitimist and monarchist of the patriarchal school. Although an
orthodox and devout Catholic, he does not lay the stress on the temporal
power of the pope that the author of _Du Pape_ does. With him the king
is the immediate instrument of God in governing. He has been accused of
reducing things too much to formulas, and of repeating his formulas too
often. But this itself was in great part the effect of reaction against
the vague declamation of the _philosophes_.
CHAPTER VII.
SCIENTIFIC WRITERS.
As the sciences divide and subdivide themselves more and more, the works
which treat of them become less and less the subject of strictly
literary history. Besides this truth, it is necessary to remember the
fact that a large number of treatises, scientific in subject, were in
the eighteenth century professedly popularised and addressed to
unprofessional audiences. Fontenelle, D'Alembert, and many other authors
already mentioned, were _savants_, but their manner of handling their
subjects was far from being strictly or wholly scientific. Yet there
remain a certain number of writers, who, their reputation being derived
wholly or mainly from their treatment of subjects of science and
erudition, are better dealt with separately.
[Sidenote: Buffon.]
The head and chief of these is beyond all question Buffon. George Louis
Leclerc, who was made Count de Buffon by Louis XV., was born at Montbard
in Burgundy, on Sept. 7, 1707; his father was a man of wealth and of
position in the _noblesse de robe_. Buffon was destined for the law, but
early showed an inclination towards science. He became acquainted with a
young English nobleman, Lord Kingston, who with his tutor was taking the
then usual grand tour, and was permitted by his father to accompany him
through France and Italy, and to visit England. On the English language
he spent considerable pains, translating Newton, Hales, and Tull the
agriculturist. When he returned to France he devoted himself to
scientific experiments, and in 1739 he was appointed intendant or
director of the Jardin du Roi, which practically gave him command of the
national collections in zoology, botany, and mineralogy. He was thus
enabled to observe and experiment to his heart's content, and to collect
a sufficient number of facts for his vast Natural History. Buffon,
however, was only half a man of science. He was at least as anxious to
write pompous descriptions and to indulge in showy hypotheses, as to
confine himself to plain scientific enquiry. He accordingly left the
main part of the hack-work of his _Histoire Naturelle_ (a vast work
extending to thirty-six volumes) to assistants, of whom the chief was
Daubenton, himself contributing only the most striking and rhetorical
passages. The book was very remarkable for its time, as the first
attempt since Pliny at a collection of physical facts at once
exhaustive, and in a manner systematised, and though there was much
alloy mixed with its metal, it was of real value. Buffon's life was
long, and he outlived all the other chiefs of the _philosophe_ party (to
which in an outside sort of fashion he belonged), dying at Paris in the
year 1788. It is perhaps easier to condemn Buffon's extremely rhetorical
style than to do justice to it. To a modern reader it too frequently
seems to verge on the ridiculous, and to do more than verge on the
trivial. It is necessary, however, to take the point of view of the
time. Buffon found natural science in a position far below that assigned
to literary erudition and to the arts in general estimation. He also
found it customary that these arts and letters should be treated in
pompous _eloges_. His real interest in science led him to think that the
shortest way to raise it was to treat it in the same manner, and there
is little doubt that his method was effectual in its degree. It is
perhaps curious that he, the author of the phrase 'Le style c'est
l'homme,' should have so completely exemplified it. Many authors of