French Classics Part 1

French Cla.s.sics.

by William Cleaver Wilkinson.

PREFACE.

The preparation of the present volume proposed to the author a task more difficult far than that undertaken in the case of either of the literatures, the Greek or the Latin, treated in the four preceding volumes of the present series. Those volumes dealt with literatures limited and finished; this volume deals with a literature indefinitely vast in extent, and still in vital process of growth. The selection of material to be used was, in the case of the earlier volumes, virtually made for the author beforehand, in a manner greatly to ease his sense of responsibility for the exercise of individual judgment and taste. Long prescription, joined to the winnowing effect of wear and waste through time and chance, had left little doubt what works of what writers, Greek and Roman, best deserved now to be shown to the general reader. Besides this, the prevalent custom of the schools of cla.s.sical learning could then wisely be taken as a clew of guidance to be implicitly followed, whatever might be the path through which it should lead. There is here no similar avoidance of responsibility possible; for the schools have not established a custom, and French literature is a living body, from which no important members have ever yet been rent by the ravages of time.

The plan of this volume, together with the compa.s.s proposed for it, created the necessity of establishing from the outset certain limits to be very strictly observed. There could be no introductory general matter, beyond a rapid and summary review of that literature, as a whole, which is the subject of the book. The list of authors selected for representation must not include the names of any still living. A third thing resolved upon was to make the number of representative names small rather than large, choice rather than inclusive. The principle at this point adopted was to choose those authors only whose merit, or whose fame, or whose influence, might be supposed unquestionably such that their names and their works would certainly be found surviving, though the language in which they wrote should, like its parent Latin, have perished from the tongues of men. The proportion of s.p.a.ce severally allotted to the different authors was to be measured partly according to their relative importance, and partly according to their estimated relative capacity of interesting in translation the average intelligent reader of to-day.

In one word, the single inspiring aim of the author has here been to furnish enlightened readers, versed only in the English language, the means of acquiring, through the medium of their vernacular, some proportioned, trustworthy, and effective knowledge and appreciation, in its chief cla.s.sics, of the great literature which has been written in French. This object has been sought, not through narrative and description, making books and authors the subject, but through the literature itself, in specimen extracts illuminated by the necessary explanation and criticism.

FRENCH CLa.s.sICS IN ENGLISH

I.

FRENCH LITERATURE.

Of French literature, taken as a whole, it may boldly be said that it is, not the wisest, not the weightiest, not certainly the purest and loftiest, but by odds the most brilliant and the most interesting, literature in the world. Strong at many points, at some points triumphantly strong, it is conspicuously weak at only one point,--the important point of poetry. In eloquence, in philosophy, even in theology; in history, in fiction, in criticism, in epistolary writing, in what may be called the pamphlet; in another species of composition, characteristically, peculiarly, almost uniquely, French--the Thought and the Maxim; by eminence in comedy, and in all those related modes of written expression for which there is scarcely any name but a French name--the _jeu d'esprit_, the _bon mot_, _persiflage_, the _phrase_; in social and political speculation; last, but not least, in scientific exposition elegant enough in form and in style to rise to the rank of literature proper--the French language has abundant achievement to show, that puts it, upon the whole, hardly second in wealth of letters to any other language whatever, either ancient or modern.

What const.i.tutes the charm--partly a perilous charm--of French literature is before all else its incomparable clearness, its precision, its neatness, its point; then, added to this, its lightness of touch, its sureness of aim; its vivacity, sparkle, life; its inexhaustible gayety; its impulsion toward wit--impulsion so strong as often to land it in mockery; the sense of release that it breathes and inspires; its freedom from p.r.i.c.k to the conscience; its exquisite study and choice of effect; its deference paid to decorum--decorum, we mean, in taste, as distinguished from morals; its infinite patience and labor of art, achieving the perfection of grace and of ease--in one word, its style.

We speak, of course, broadly and in the gross. There are plenty of French authors to whom some of the traits just named could by no means be attributed, and there is certainly not a single French author to whom one could truthfully attribute them all. Voltaire insisted that what was not clear was not French--so much, to the conception of this typical Frenchman, was clearness the genius of the national speech. Still, Montaigne, for example, was sometimes obscure; and even the tragedist Corneille wrote here and there what his commentator, Voltaire, declared to be hardly intelligible. So, too, Rabelais, coa.r.s.est of humorists, offending decorum in various ways, offended it most of all exactly in that article of taste, as distinguished from morals, which, with first-rate French authors in general, is so capital a point of regard.

On the other hand, Pascal--not to mention the moralists by profession, such as Nicole, and the preachers Bourdaloue and Ma.s.sillon--Pascal, quivering himself, like a soul unclad, with sense of responsibility to G.o.d, constantly probes you, reading him, to the inmost quick of your conscience. Rousseau, notably in the "Confessions," and in the "Reveries" supplementary to the "Confessions;" Chateaubriand, echoing Rousseau; and that wayward woman of genius, George Sand, disciple she to both--were so far from being always light-heartedly gay, that not seldom they spread over their page a somber atmosphere almost of gloom--gloom flushed pensively, as with a clouded "setting sun's pathetic light." In short, when you speak of particular authors, and naturally still more when you speak of particular works, there are many discriminations to be made. Such exceptions, however, being duly allowed, the literary product of the French mind, considered in the aggregate, will not be misconceived if regarded as possessing the general characteristics in style that we have now sought briefly to indicate.

French literature, we have hinted, is comparatively poor in poetry. This is due in part, no doubt, to the genius of the people; but it is also due in part to the structure of the language. The language, which is derived chiefly from Latin, is thence in such a way derived as to have lost the regularity and stateliness of its ancient original, without having compensated itself with any richness and sweetness of sound peculiarly its own; like, for instance, that canorous vowel quality of its sister derivative, the Italian. The French language, in short, is far from being an ideal language for the poet.

In spite, however, of this fact, disputed by n.o.body, it is true of French literature, as it is true of almost any national literature, that it took its rise in verse instead of in prose. Anciently there were two languages subsisting together in France which came to be distinguished from each other in name by the word of affirmation--_oc_ or _ol_, yes--severally peculiar to them, and thus to be known respectively as _langue d'oc_ and _langue d'ol_. The future belonged to the latter of the two forms of speech--the one spoken in the northern part of the country. This, the _langue d'ol_, became at length the French language.

But the _langue d'oc_, a soft and musical tongue, survived long enough to become the vehicle of lyric strains, mostly on subjects of love and gallantry, still familiar in mention, and famous as the songs of the troubadours. The flourishing time of the troubadours was in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Provencal is an alternative name of the language.

Side by side with the southern _troubadours_, or a little later than they, the _trouveres_ of the north sang, with more manly ambition, of national themes, and, like Virgil, of arms and of heroes. Some productions of the _trouveres_ may fairly be allowed an elevation of aim and of treatment ent.i.tling them to be called epic in character.

_Chansons de geste_ (songs of exploit), or _romans_, is the native name by which those primitive French poems are known. They exist in three princ.i.p.al cycles, or groups, of productions--one cycle composed of those pertaining to Charlemagne; one, of those pertaining to British Arthur, and a third, of those pertaining to ancient Greece and Rome, notably to Alexander the Great. The cycle revolving around the majestic legend of Charlemagne for its center was Teutonic, rather than Celtic, in spirit as well as in theme. It tended to the religious in tone. The Arthurian cycle was properly Celtic. It dealt more with adventures of love. The Alexandrian cycle, so named from one princ.i.p.al theme celebrated--namely, the deeds of Alexander the Great--mixed fantastically the traditions of ancient Greece and Rome with the then prevailing ideas of chivalry, and with the figments of fairy lore. (The metrical form employed in these poems gave its name to the Alexandrine line later so predominant in French poetry.) The volume of this quasi-epical verse, existing in its three groups, or cycles, is immense. So is that of the satire and the allegory in meter that followed. From this latter store of stock and example, Chaucer drew to supply his muse with material. The _fabliaux_, so called--fables, that is, or stories--were still another form of French literature in verse. It is only now, within the current decade of years, that a really ample collection of _fabliaux_--hitherto, with the exception of a few printed volumes of specimens, extant exclusively in ma.n.u.script--has been put into course of publication. Rutebeuf, a _trouvere_ of the reign of St. Louis (Louis IX., thirteenth century), is perhaps as conspicuous a personal name as any that thus far emerges out of the sea of practically anonymous early French authorship. A frankly sordid and mercenary singer, Rutebeuf always tending to mockery, was not seldom licentious--in both these respects antic.i.p.ating, as probably also to some extent by example conforming, the subsequent literary spirit of his nation. The _fabliaux_ generally mingled with their narrative interest that spice of raillery and satire constantly so dear to the French literary appet.i.te. Thibaud was, in a double sense, a royal singer of songs; for he reigned over Navarre, as well as chanted sweetly in verse his love and longing, so the disputed legend a.s.serts, for Queen Blanche of Castile. Thibaud bears the historic t.i.tle of The Song-maker.

He has been styled the Beranger of the thirteenth century. To Thibaud is said to be due the introduction of the feminine rhyme into French poetry--a metrical variation of capital importance. The songs of Abelard, in the century preceding Thibaud, won a wide popularity.

Prose, meantime, had been making noteworthy approaches to form.

Villehardouin must be named as first in time among French writers of history. His work is ent.i.tled, "Conquest of Constantinople." It gives an account of the fourth crusade. Joinville, a generation later, continues the succession of chronicles with his admiring story of the life of St.

Louis, whose personal friend he was. But Froissart of the fourteenth century, and Comines of the fifteenth, are greater names. Froissart, by his simplicity and his narrative art, was the Herodotus, as Philip de Comines, for his political sagacity, has been styled the Tacitus, of French historical literature. Up to the time of Froissart, the literature which we have been treating as French was different enough in form from the French of to-day to require what might be called translation in order to become generally intelligible to the living generation of Frenchmen. The text of Froissart is pretty archaic, but it definitely bears the aspect of French.

With the name of Comines, who wrote of Louis XI. (compare Walter Scott's "Quentin Durward"), we reach the fifteenth century, and are close upon the great revival of learning which accompanied the religious reformation under Luther and his peers. Now come Rabelais, boldly declared by Coleridge one of the great creative minds of literature; and Montaigne, with those essays of his, still living, and, indeed, certain always to live. John Calvin, meantime, writes his "Inst.i.tutes of the Christian Religion" in French as well as in Latin, showing, once and for all, that in the right hands his vernacular tongue was as capable of gravity as many a writer before him had superfluously shown that it was capable of levity. Amyot, the translator of Plutarch, is a French writer of power, without whom the far greater Montaigne could hardly have been.

The influence of Amyot on French literary history is wider in reach and longer in duration than we thus indicate; but Montaigne's indebtedness to him is alone enough to prove that a mere translator had in this man made a very important contribution to the forming prose literature of France.

"The Pleiades," so called, were a group of seven writers, who, about the middle of the sixteenth century, banded themselves together in France, with the express aim of supplying influential example to improve the French language for literary purposes. Their peculiar appellation, "The Pleiades," was copied from that of a somewhat similar group of Greek writers that existed in the time of Ptolemy Philadelphus. Of course, the implied allusion in it is to the constellation of the Pleiades. The individual name by which the "Pleiades" of the sixteenth century may best be remembered is that of Ronsard, the poet, a.s.sociated with the romantic and pathetic memory of Mary Queen of Scots. Never, perhaps, in the history of letters was the fame of a poet in the poet's own life-time more universal and more splendid than was the fame of Ronsard.

A high court of literary judicature formally decreed to Ronsard the t.i.tle of The French Poet by eminence. This occurred in the youth of the poet. The wine of success so brilliant turned the young fellow's head.

He soon began to play lord paramount of Parna.s.sus, with every air of one born to the purple. The kings of the earth vied with each other to do him honor. Ronsard affected scholarship, and the foremost scholars of his time were proud to place him with Homer and with Virgil on the roll of the poets. Ronsard's peculiarity in style was the free use of words and constructions not properly French. Boileau indicated whence he enriched his vocabulary and his syntax, by satirically saying that Ronsard spoke Greek and Latin in French. At his death, Ronsard was almost literally buried under praises. Sainte-Beuve strikingly says that he seemed to go forward into posterity as into a temple.

Sharp posthumous reprisals awaited the extravagant fame of Ronsard.

Malherbe, coming in the next generation, legislator of Parna.s.sus, laughed the literary pretensions of Ronsard to scorn. This stern critic of form, such is the story, marked up his copy of Ronsard with notes of censure so many, that a friend of his, seeing the annotated volume, observed, "What here is not marked will be understood to have been approved by you." Whereupon Malherbe, taking his pen, with one indiscriminate stroke drew it abruptly through the whole volume. "There I Ronsardized," the contemptuous critic would exclaim, when in reading his own verses to an acquaintance--for Malherbe was a poet himself--he happened to encounter a word that struck him as harsh or improper.

Malherbe, in short, sought to chasten and check the luxuriant overgrowth to which the example and method of the Pleiades were tending to push the language of poetry in French. The resultant effect of the two contrary tendencies--that of literary wantonness on the one hand, and that of literary prudery on the other--was at the same time to enrich and to purify French poetical diction. Balzac (the elder), close to Malherbe in time, performed a service for French prose similar to that which the latter performed for French verse. These two critical and literary powers brought in the reign of what is called cla.s.sicism in France.

French cla.s.sicism had its long culmination under Louis XIV.

But it was under Louis XIII., or rather under that monarch's great minister, Cardinal Richelieu, that the rich and splendid Augustan age of French literature was truly prepared. Two organized forces, one of them private and social, the other official and public, worked together, though sometimes perhaps not in harmony, to produce the magnificent literary result that ill.u.s.trated the time of Louis XIV. Of these two organized forces the Hotel de Rambouillet was one, and the French Academy was the other. The Hotel de Rambouillet has become the adopted name of a literary society, presided over by the fine inspiring genius of the beautiful and accomplished Italian wife of the Marquis de Rambouillet, a lady who generously conceived the idea of rallying the feminine wit and virtue of the kingdom to exert a potent influence for regenerating the manners and morals, and indeed the literature, of France. At the high court of blended rank and fashion and beauty and polish and virtue and wit, thus established in the exquisitely builded and decorated saloons of the Rambouillet mansion, the selectest literary genius and fame of France were proud and glad to a.s.semble for the discussion and criticism of literature. Here came Balzac and Voiture; here Corneille read aloud his masterpieces before they were represented on the stage; here Descartes philosophized; here the large and splendid genius of Bossuet first unfolded itself to the world; here Madame de Sevigne brought her bright, incisive wit, trebly commended by stainless reputation, unwithering beauty, and charming address, in the woman who wielded it. The n.o.blest blood of France added the decoration and inspiration of their presence. It is not easy to overrate the diffusive beneficent influence that hence went forth to change the fashion of literature, and to change the fashion of society, for the better. The Hotel de Rambouillet proper lasted two generations only; but it had a virtual succession, which, though sometimes interrupted, was scarcely extinct until the brilliant and beautiful Madame Recamier ceased, about the middle of the present century, to hold her famous _salons_ in Paris.

The continuous fame and influence of the French Academy, founded by Richelieu, everybody knows. No other European language has been elaborately and sedulously formed and cultivated like the French.

But great authors are better improvers of a language than any societies, however influential. Corneille, Descartes, Pascal, did more for French style than either the Hotel de Rambouillet or the Academy--more than both these two great literary societies together. In verse, Racine, following Corneille, advanced in some important respects upon the example and lead of that great original master; but in prose, when Pascal published his "Provincial Letters," French style reached at once a point of perfection beyond which it never since has gone. Bossuet, Bourdaloue, Fenelon, Ma.s.sillon, Moliere, La Fontaine, Boileau, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyere--what a constellation of names are these to glorify the age of Louis XIV.! And Louis XIV. himself, royal embodiment of a literary good sense carried to the pitch of something very like real genius in judgment and taste--what a sun was he (with that talent of his for kingship, probably never surpa.s.sed), to balance and to sway, from his unshaken station, the august intellectual system of which he alone const.i.tuted the despotic center to attract and repel! Seventy-two years long was this sole individual reign. Louis XIV. still sat on the throne of France when the seventeenth century became the eighteenth.

The eighteenth century was an age of universal reaction in France.

Religion, or rather ecclesiasticism--for, in the France of those times, religion was the Church, and the Church was the Roman Catholic hierarchy--had been the dominant fashion under Louis XIV. Infidelity was a broad literary mark, written all over the face of the eighteenth century. It was the hour and power of the Encyclopaedists and the Philosophers--of Voltaire, of Diderot, of D'Alembert, of Rousseau.

Montesquieu, though contemporary, belongs apart from these writers. More really original, more truly philosophical, he was far less revolutionary, far less destructive, than they. Still, his influence was, on the whole, exerted in the direction, if not of infidelity, at least of religious indifferentism. The French Revolution was laid in train by the great popular writers whom we have now named, and by their fellows. It needed only the spark, which the proper occasion would be sure soon to strike out, and the awful earthshaking explosion would follow. After the Revolution, during the First Empire, so called--the usurpation, that is, of Napoleon Bonaparte--literature was well-nigh extinguished in France. The names, however, then surpa.s.singly brilliant, of Chateaubriand and Madame de Stael, belong to this period.

Three centuries have now elapsed since the date of "The Pleiades."

Throughout this long period, French literature has been chiefly under the sway of that spirit of cla.s.sicism in style which the reaction against Ronsardism, led first by Malherbe and afterward by Boileau, had established as the national standard in literary taste and aspiration.

But Rousseau's genius acted as a powerful solvent of the cla.s.sic tradition. Chateaubriand's influence was felt on the same side, continuing Rousseau's. George Sand, too, and Lamartine, were forces that strengthened this component. Finally, the great personality of Victor Hugo proved potent enough definitively to break the spell that had been so long and so heavily laid on the literary development of France. The bloodless warfare was fierce between the revolutionary Romanticists and the conservative Cla.s.sicists in literary style, but the victory seemed at last to remain with the advocates of the new romantic revival. It looked, on the face of the matter, like a signal triumph of originality over prescription, of genius over criticism, of power over rule. We still live in the midst of the dying echoes of this resonant strife.

Perhaps it is too early, as yet, to determine on which side, by the merit of the cause, the advantage truly belongs. But, by the merit of the respective champions, the result was, for a time at least, triumphantly decided in favor of the Romanticists, against the Cla.s.sicists. The weighty authority, however, of Sainte-Beuve, at first thrown into the scale that was destined to sink, was thence withdrawn, and at last, if not resolutely cast upon the opposite side of the balance, was left wavering in a kind of equipoise between the one and the other.

But our preliminary sketch already reaches the limit within which our choice of authors for representation is necessarily confined.

With first a few remarks, naturally suggested, that may be useful, on the general subject thus rather touched merely than handled, the present writer gives way to let now the representative authors themselves, selected for the purpose, supply to the reader a just and lively idea of French literature.

The first thing, perhaps, to strike the thoughtful mind in a comprehensive view of the subject is not so much the length--though this is remarkable--as the long _continuity_ of French literary history. From its beginning down to the actual moment, French literature has suffered no serious break in the course of its development. There have been periods of greater and periods of less prosperity and fruit; but wastes of marked suspension and barrenness there have been none.

The second thing noticeable is, that French literature has, to a singular degree, lived an independent life of its own. It has found copious springs of health and growth within its own bosom.

But then a third thing to be also observed is that, on the other hand, the touch of foreign influence, felt and acknowledged by this most proudly and self-sufficiently national of literatures, has proved to it, at various epochs, a sovereign force of revival and elastic expansion.

Thus, the great renascence in the sixteenth century of ancient Greek and Latin letters was new life to French literature. So, again, Spanish literature, brought into contact with French through Corneille and Moliere, with others, gave to the national mind of France a new literary launch. But the most recent and perhaps the most remarkable example of foreign influence quickening French literature to make it freshly fruitful is supplied in the great romanticizing movement under the lead of Victor Hugo. English literature--especially Shakespeare--was largely the pregnant cause of this attempted emanc.i.p.ation of the French literary mind from the bondage of cla.s.sicism.

A fourth very salient trait in French literary history consists in the self-conscious, elaborate, persistent efforts put forth from time to time by individuals, and by organizations, both public and private, in France, to improve the language and to elevate the literature of the nation. We know of nothing altogether comparable to this anywhere else in the literature of the world.

A fifth striking thing about French literature is, that it has, to a degree as we believe beyond parallel, exercised a real and vital influence on the character and the fortune of the nation. The social, the political, the moral, the religious, history of France is from age to age a faithful reflex of the changing phases of its literature. Of course, a reciprocal influence has been constantly reflected back and forth from the nation upon its literature, as well as from its literature upon the nation. But where else in the world has it ever been so extraordinarily, we may say so appallingly, true as in France, that the nation was such because such was its literature?

French literature, it will at once be seen, is a study possessing, beyond the literary, a social, a political, and even a religious, interest.

Readers desiring to push their conversance with the literary history of France further into the catalogue of its less important names than the present volume will enable them to do will consult with profit either the Primer, or the Short History, of French Literature, by Mr. George Saintsbury. Mr. Saintsbury is a well-informed writer, who diffuses himself perhaps too widely to do his best possible work. But he has made French literature a specialty, and he is in general a trustworthy authority on the subject.

Another writer on the subject is Mr. H. Van Laun. Him, although a predecessor of his own in the field, Mr. Saintsbury severely ignores, by claiming that he is himself the first to write in English a history of French literature based on original and independent reading of the authors. We are bound to say that Mr. Van Laun's work is of very poor quality. It offers, indeed, to the reader one advantage not afforded by either of Mr. Saintsbury's works--the advantage, namely, of ill.u.s.trative extracts from the authors treated extracts, however, not unfrequently marred by wretched translation.

A noteworthy book of the year 1889 is "A History of French Literature"

by Charles Woodward Hutson, Professor of Modern Languages in the University of Mississippi. This is an intelligent, well-studied, well-written, carefully conscientious, comprehensive account of French letters from the beginning down to the present day. It has, as a concluding chapter, a notice of the "French Writers of Louisiana." An admirable series of books, translated from the French, on the great French writers, has recently been brought out in Chicago. These two last mentions, by the way, strikingly suggest how wide, territorially, the bounds of the republic of letters are becoming in our country.

The cyclopaedias are, some of them, both in articles on particular authors and in their sketches of French literary history as a whole, good sources of general information on the subject. Readers who command the means of comparing several different cyclopaedias, or several successive editions of some one cyclopaedia, as, for example, the "Encyclopaedia Britannica," will find enlightening and stimulating the not always harmonious views presented on the same topics. Hallam's "History of Literature in Europe" is an additional authority by no means to be overlooked. And, finally, it is to be remembered that any good general history of France will almost certainly contain notices of the more important literary events co-ordinately with those of political, social, economic, or scientific moment.