Among these the correspondence of Grimm, though one of the bulkiest and
most important, may be dismissed with a brief reference; for it will be
noticed again in the succeeding chapter, and most of it is not either
the work of one man or real correspondence. The flying sheets which
Grimm, largely aided by his complaisant friends, and especially by
Diderot, sent to his august Russian and German correspondents, were in
reality periodical summaries of the state of politics, society, letters,
and art in Paris, not different in subject and style from the printed
newspaper letters of the present day. They form in the aggregate a very
important work, whether looked at from the point of view of history, or
from the point of view of literature; but they are not, properly
speaking, letters. Of the letter-writers proper three women and three
men may be selected,--Mademoiselle Aïssé, Mademoiselle de Lespinasse,
and Madame du Deffand; Voltaire, Diderot, and Galiani.

[Sidenote: Mademoiselle Aïssé.]

Mademoiselle Aïssé had a singular history. When a child she was carried
off by Turkish rovers, and sold at Constantinople to the French
ambassador, M. de Ferriol. This was at the beginning of the century. Her
purchaser had her brought up carefully at Paris as his property, which
no doubt he always considered her. But in his old age he became
childish, and Mademoiselle Aïssé was free to frequent society to which
she had been early introduced. She met and fell in love with a certain
Chevalier d'Aydie, who himself (at a later date, for the most part,) was
a letter-writer of some merit. Her letters to him and of him constitute
her claim to a position in the history of literature. They display the
_sensibilité_ of the time in a decided form, but in a milder one than
the later letters of Mademoiselle de Lespinasse. But there is something
in them more than mere _sensibilité_--a tender and affectionate spirit
finding graceful expression and deserving a happier fate. Mademoiselle
Aïssé, like most other people of her time, turned devout, but earlier
than most. She died in 1733.

[Sidenote: Madame du Deffand.]

Madame du Deffand was a very different person. She was born in 1697, and
she distinguished herself when quite a girl, not merely by her beauty,
but by her wit and tendency to freethinking. She was married in 1718 to
the Marquis du Deffand, but soon separated from him, and lived for many
years the then usual life of gallantry. This merged insensibly into a
life of literary and philosophical society. Though Madame du Deffand was
not, like the wealthier but more plebeian Madame Geoffrin, and later
Madame Helvétius, a 'nursing mother of the philosophers,' in the sense
of supplying their necessities, her salon in the Rue Saint Dominique was
long one of the chief resorts of philosophism. In 1753 she became blind,
but this made little difference in her appetite for society. She lived
like many other great ladies in a monastery. She died in 1780. As a
letter-writer Madame du Deffand was the correspondent of most of the
greatest men of letters of the time (Voltaire, D'Alembert, Hénault,
Montesquieu, etc.). But her most remarkable correspondence, and perhaps
her most interesting one, was with Horace Walpole, the most French of
contemporary Englishmen. Their friendship, for which it is hard to find
an exact name, unless, perhaps, it may be called a kind of passionate
community of tastes, belongs to the later part of her long life. Madame
du Deffand is the typical French lady of the eighteenth century, as
Richelieu is the typical _grand seigneur_. She was perhaps the wittiest
woman (in the strict sense of the adjective) who ever lived[290], and an
astonishingly large proportion of the best sayings of the time is traced
or attributed to her. Nearly seventy years of conversation and a great
correspondence did not exhaust her faculty of acute sallies, of ruthless
criticism, of cynical but clearsighted judgment on men and things. But
she was thoroughly unamiable, purely selfish, jealous, spiteful,
destitute of humour, if full of wit. A comparison with Madame de Sévigné
shows how the French character had, in the upper ranks at least,
degenerated (it is worth remembering that Madame du Deffand was born
just after Madame de Sévigné's death), though it must be admitted that
the earlier character shows perhaps the germs of what is repulsive in
the second.

[Sidenote: Mademoiselle de Lespinasse.]

The third most remarkable lady letter-writer of the century,
Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, was closely connected with Madame du
Deffand. She was indeed her companion, her coadjutor, and her rival.
Julie Jeanne Eléonore de Lespinasse was in reality the illegitimate
daughter of a lady of rank, the Countess d'Albon, who lived apart from
her husband, and the name Lespinasse was merely a fancy name taken from
the D'Albon genealogy. She was born, or at least baptized, at Lyons on
the 19th November, 1732. Her mother, who practically acknowledged her,
died when she was fifteen, leaving her fairly provided for. But her
half-brothers and sisters deprived her of most of her portion, though
for a time they gave her a home. In 1754 Madame du Deffand, to whom she
had been recommended, and who had just been struck with blindness,
invited her to come and live with her, which she did, after some
hesitation. For ten years the two presided jointly over their society,
but at last Madame du Deffand's jealousy broke out. Mademoiselle de
Lespinasse retired, taking with her not a few of the habitués of the
salon, with D'Alembert at their head. Madame Geoffrin seems to have
endowed her, and she established herself in the Rue de Bellechasse,
where D'Alembert before long came to join her. They lived in a curious
sort of relationship for more than ten years, until Mademoiselle de
Lespinasse died on the 22nd May, 1776. During this time she was a
gracious hostess and a bond of union to many men of letters, especially
those of the younger _philosophe_ school. But this is not what gives her
her place here. Her claim rests upon a collection of love-letters, not
addressed to D'Alembert. She was thirty-four when the earliest of her
love affairs began, and had never been beautiful. When she died she was
forty-four, and her later letters are more passionate than the earlier.
Her first lover was a young Spaniard, the Marquis Gonsalvo de Mora; her
second, the Count de Guibert, a poet and essayist of no great merit, a
military reformer said to have been of some talent, and pretty evidently
a bad-hearted coxcomb. To him the epistles we have are addressed. All
the circumstances of these letters are calculated to make them
ridiculous, yet there is hardly any word which they less deserve. The
great defect of the eighteenth century is that its _sensibilité_
excludes real passion. The men and women of feeling of the period always
seem as if they were playing at feeling; the affairs of the heart, which
occupy so large a place in its literature, show only the progress of a
certain kind of game which has its rules and stages to which the
players must conform, but which, when once over, leaves no more traces
than any other kind of game. To this Mademoiselle de Lespinasse is a
conspicuous exception. It has been said of her that her letters burn the
paper they are written on with the fervency of their sentiment, nor is
the expression an exaggerated one. Except in Rousseau and (in a
different form) in _Manon Lescaut_, it is in these letters that we must
look for almost the only genuine passion of the time. It is no doubt
unreal to a certain degree, morbid also in an even greater degree as
regards what is real in it. But it is in no sense consciously affected,
and conscious affectation was the bane of the period.

[Sidenote: Voltaire.]

The three examples which have been chosen of the masculine
letter-writing of the period are of somewhat wider range. Mademoiselle
Aïssé and Mademoiselle de Lespinasse show in various forms the amiable
weaknesses of womankind, Madame du Deffand its unamiable strength. The
letters of Voltaire, of Diderot, and of the Abbé Galiani are not so
typical of a sex, but are more representative of individuals and at the
same time of the age. Voltaire's correspondence is simply enormous in
point of bulk. Fresh letters of his are constantly being discovered and
edited even now. His long life, his extraordinary industry, his position
during nearly half a century as first one of the leading men of letters,
and then unquestionably the leading man of letters of Europe, the
curious diversity of his interests, even the prosperity in point of
fortune which made him command the services of secretaries and
under-strappers, while humbler men of letters had to do the mechanical
work of composition for themselves, all contributed to bring about this
fecundity. The consequence is, that not only is the correspondence of
Voltaire of vast extent but it is also of the most various character. We
have from him early love-letters, letters to private friends of all
dates, business letters, literary letters, letters to great persons,
letters intended for publication, letters not intended for publication,
flattering letters, insulting letters, benevolent letters, patronising
letters, begging letters, letters of almost every sort and kind that the
ingenuity of human imagination can conceive or the diversity of human
relationships and circumstances require. Partial critics have contended
that the singular quality of Voltaire's genius might be sufficiently
exemplified from his letters, if no other documents were forthcoming.
Without going quite so far as this, it may be allowed that his
correspondence is a remarkable monument of those qualities in literature
which enable a man to express himself happily and rapidly on any subject
that happens to present itself. The letters of Voltaire do not perhaps
supply any ground for disputing Carlyle's sentence on Voltaire (a
sentence which has excited the wrath of French critics) that there is
not one great thought in all his works. But they enable us, even better
than any other division of those works, to appreciate the singular
flexibility of his intellect, the extraordinarily wide range of his
interests and sympathies, the practical talents which accompanied his
literary genius.

[Sidenote: Diderot.]

Diderot's correspondence is also considerable in bulk, though not in
that respect to be compared to Voltaire's. It has several minor
divisions, the chief of which is a body of letters addressed to the
sculptor Falconnet in Russia. But the main claim of this versatile
writer and most fertile thinker to rank in this chapter lies in his
letters to Mademoiselle Volland, a lady of mature years, to whom, in his
own middle and old age, he was, after the fashion of the time, much
attached. These letters were not published till forty or fifty years
after his death, and it is not too much to say that they supply not only
the most vivid picture of Diderot himself which is attainable, but also
the best view of the later and extremer _philosophe_ society. Many, if
not most of them, are written from that society's head-quarters, the
country house of the Baron d'Holbach, at Grandval, where Diderot was an
ever welcome visitor. This society had certain drawbacks which made it
irksome, not merely to orthodox and sober persons, but to fastidious
judges who were not much burdened with scruples. Horace Walpole, for
instance, found himself bored by it. But it was the most characteristic
society of the time, and Diderot's letters are the best pictures of it,
because, unlike some not dissimilar work, they unite great vividness and
power of description with an obvious absence of the least design to
'cook,' that is to say, to invent or to disguise facts and characters.
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 Abbé 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 archæology, 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. Barrière 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 _Pensée_, 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 _éloges_, 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 Prévost, 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 Bruyère, and the management of Visé 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
Trévoux_ and the anti-_philosophe Année Littéraire_ of Fréron 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 _précieux_, 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 Bruyère, 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
_Caractères_, 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 Académie Française. His _Éloges_
and his academic essays generally were highly popular. But his chief
single works are the famous _Entretien sur la Pluralité 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 Siècle de
Louis XIV. to the very hottest period of the Encyclopædist 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 Bruyère 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
peculiar union of heterodoxy and caution, 'I may have my fist full of
truth, and yet only care to open my little finger,' may be immoral or
not, but it expressed very early, and with singular force, the
intellectual attitude of two whole generations.

[Sidenote: La Motte.]

Inseparable from Fontenelle's name in literary history, as the two were
long closely united in life, is the name of La Motte. La Motte was a
much younger man than Fontenelle, and he died more than thirty years
before him, but during the first thirty years of the century the pair
exercised a kind of joint sovereignty in the Belles Lettres. They
revived the quarrel of the ancients and moderns, inclining to the modern
side. But La Motte's translation of Homer, or rather his adaptation (for
he omitted about half), is not of a nature to inspire much confidence in
his ability to judge the matter, though his essays and letters on the
subject are triumphs of ingenious word-fence. Unlike Fontenelle, La
Motte had one considerable dramatic success with the pathetic subject of
_Inès de Castro_, and his fables are not devoid of merit. It was,
however, as a prose writer of the occasional kind, and especially as a
paradoxical essayist, that he earned and deserved most fame, his prose
style being superior to Fontenelle's own.

[Sidenote: Vauvenargues.]

The next name deserving of mention belongs to a very different writer.
Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues, covered in his brief space of
life not a third of the period allotted to Fontenelle, who was nearly
sixty when Vauvenargues was born, and outlived him ten years. Nor did he
leave any single work of consequence. Yet his scanty writings are far
more valuable in matter, if not in form, than those of the witty
centenarian. Vauvenargues was born at Aix, in Provence, on the 6th of
August, 1715. His family was ancient and honourable, but appears to have
been poor, and his education was interrupted by the bad health which
continued throughout his short life. Nevertheless he entered the army at
the age of eighteen. After this he had scanty opportunities of study,
and it is said that he was ignorant not only of Greek but even of Latin.
He served at first in Italy, and then for some years was employed on
garrison duty. At the outbreak of the war of the Austrian succession his
regiment was sent into Germany, and he had a full share of the hardships
of the Bohemian campaign. No promotion came to him, his means were
almost exhausted, and in 1744 he resigned his commission, after taking
the curiously unworldly step of writing directly to the king, asking for
a place in the diplomatic service. An application to the minister of
foreign affairs was not much more successful, and Vauvenargues, whose
evil star pursued him, had no sooner established himself with his family
than a bad attack of small-pox destroyed the little health he still had.
He set to work, however, to write, and in the short time before his
death actually published some of his works, and left others in a
condition ready for publication. He lived in Paris for the last three
years of his life, and died in 1747, at the age of thirty-two. Latterly
he had made acquaintance with Voltaire, who entertained a very high and
generous opinion of his talents, due perhaps partly to the remarkable
difference of their respective characters and points of view.
Vauvenargues' principal work is an _Introduction à la Connoissance de
l'Esprit Humain_, besides which he left a considerable number of maxims,
reflections, etc., on points of ethics and of literary criticism. In the
last part of his work there is more curiosity than instruction. It is,
however, in its way an instructive thing to see that a man of talent and
even of genius could object to Molière for having chosen _des sujets
trop bas_, while he speaks of Boileau in the most enthusiastic terms.
The truth (and in the history of literature it is a very important
truth) is that Vauvenargues was too little versed in any language but
his own to have the requisite range of comparison necessary for literary
criticism, and that his real interest in literature was almost entirely
proportioned to its bearing upon conduct. His maxims, his _Connoissance
de l'Esprit_, his _Conseils à un Jeune Homme_, etc., are all occupied
almost entirely with questions of morality. Vauvenargues (and in this he
was remarkable) stood entirely aloof from the sceptical movement of his
age. There was, indeed, a certain scepticism in him, as in almost all
thinkers, but it was of the stamp of Pascal's, not in the least mocking
or polemical, and even, as compared with Pascal's own, much less
strictly theological. In most of his writings he shows himself an
earnest and upright man, profoundly convinced of the importance of right
conduct, gifted with an acute perception of its usual moving springs and
directions, not remarkable for humour or poetical feeling, but serious,
sober, and a little stoical. His literary characteristics reflect some
of these peculiarities, and also betray something of his neglected
education. He is never slovenly in thought, but he sometimes shocked the
exact verbal critics of the eighteenth century by such phrases as 'les
sens sont flattés d'agir, de galoper un cheval,' whereupon his censor
annotates 'négligé. Les sens ne galopent pas un cheval.' A more serious
fault is that, in his shorter maxims especially, he does not observe the
rule of absolute lucidity which La Rochefoucauld, who was as much his
model in point of style as he was his opposite in general views, never
breaks through. His sayings (it is a merit as well as a drawback) are
often rather suggestive than expressive; they remind the reader of his
own curious comparison of Corneille with Racine, 'les héros de Corneille
disent souvent de grandes choses sans les inspirer; ceux de Racine les
inspirent sans les dire.'

[Sidenote: D'Aguesseau.]

Contemporary with Fontenelle and La Motte was the Chancellor
D'Aguesseau, one of the most prominent figures of the earlier reign of
Louis XV., a steady defender of orthodoxy--yet, as was seen in the case
of the Encyclopædia, willing to assist enlightenment--a man of
irreproachable character, and a writer of some merit. D'Aguesseau was
born in 1668, and died in 1751. He early received considerable
preferment in the law, and held the seals at intervals for the greater
part of the last thirty years of his life. He was a defender of
Gallicanism--indeed, he was suspected of Jansenist leanings--and a man
of great benevolence in private life. His legal and historical learning
was immense, and he was not without some tincture of science. He
deserves a place here chiefly for his speeches on public occasions,
which were in effect elaborate moral essays. An important part of them
consists of what were called _Mercuriales_ (that is to say, discourses
pronounced on certain Wednesdays (Die Mercurii) by the first president
of the Parliament of Paris) on the abuses of the day, the duties of
judges, the nature of justice, and similar subjects.

[Sidenote: Duclos.]

Another writer, who has been mentioned more than once before, held
somewhat aloof from the Encyclopædists, though he was not, like
D'Aguesseau, definitely orthodox, or, like Vauvenargues, severely moral.
Charles Pinaud Duclos was one of the most miscellaneous of the
miscellaneous writers of the time. He held the office of historiographer
royal, and produced some remarkable works of the historical kind, one of
which has been noticed. He composed novels in a fanciful style midway
between Crébillon and Marivaux. He also wrote on grammar, but some of
his best work consists of short academic essays, and of a moral study
called _Considérations sur les Moeurs de Notre Temps_, which is both
well written and shows discernment. Duclos' character has been somewhat
variously represented, but the unfavourable reports (which are in the
minority) may probably be traced to the studied brusqueness of his
manners, and to his unwillingness to make common cause with the
_philosophe_ coterie, though, if some stories are to be believed, he
often conversed and argued quite in their style.

[Sidenote: Marmontel.]

Yet another typical figure of the same numerous class is Jean François
Marmontel, one of the most eminent professional men of letters of the
second class. Marmontel's moral tales, his _Bélisaire_, and his plays
have already been noticed, but his main place in literature is that of a
journalist and critic. He was born at Bort, in the district of Limoges,
in 1723, and obtained some provincial reputation in letters. Introduced
to Voltaire in 1746, he began as a dramatist, and, after some failures,
acquired the protection of Madame de Pompadour. He was made editor of
the _Mercure_, which gave him an influential position and a competence.
He afterwards succeeded Duclos as historiographer, notwithstanding the
outcry which had been made against his _Bélisaire_. He had contributed
almost all the minor articles on literary subjects to the Encyclopædia,
and these were collected and published as _Éléments de Littérature_ in
1787. He died in 1799. The _Éléments de Littérature_ are, with the
_Cours de Littérature_ of La Harpe, the chief source of information as
to eighteenth-century criticism of the fashionable kind in France. They
are very voluminous, and, from the circumstances of their original form,
deal with a vast number of subjects. The style is for the most part
simple and good, destitute alike of the dryness and of the bombast which
were the two faults of contemporary writing. But Marmontel's system of
criticism will not bear a moment's examination. It consists simply in
the assumption that Racine, Boileau (though he was at first recalcitrant
to Boileau, and had to be admonished by Voltaire that _ça porte
malheur_), and their contemporaries are infallible models, and in the
application of this principle to all other nations. The passion for
finding plausible general reasons also leads Marmontel into grotesque
aberrations, as where he gives three reasons for English success in
poetry as contrasted with our inferiority in the other arts. First,
Englishmen, loving glory, saw early that poetry acquired glory for a
nation. Secondly, being naturally given to sadness and meditation, they
wish for emotions to distract and move them. Thirdly, their genius is
proper to poetry. This last remark, the reader should observe, comes
from a countryman of Molière, a man who must have read the _Malade
Imaginaire_, and who was moreover a man of much more than ordinary
talent. Marmontel often has acute remarks, and his blunders and
absurdities are rather symptomatic of the false state in which criticism
was at the time than of individual shortcomings.

[Sidenote: La Harpe.]

Somewhat younger than Marmontel was La Harpe, who pursued the same lines
of dramatic poetry and literary criticism, the latter with more success
in his kind, so much so, that Malherbe, Boileau, and he may be ranked
together as the three representatives of the infancy, flourishing, and
decadence of the 'classical' theory of literary criticism in France. La
Harpe was born at Paris in 1739, was brought up by charity, gained a
reputation as a brilliant exhibitioner at the Collége d'Harcourt, and,
after the mishap of being imprisoned for a libel, obtained new success
at the Academy competitions. He acquired the favour of Voltaire, and
fairly launched himself in literature. For many years he furnished
tragedies to the stage, and criticised the literary work of others with
a singular mixture of acuteness, pedantry, and ill-temper. He was
converted from Republicanism by an imprisonment during the Terror, and
became a violent conservative and defender of orthodoxy. He died in
1803. His principal critical work is his _Cours de Littérature_, 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 _Éloges_, _Mémoires_, _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 Abbé Guénée, who devoted himself to exposing Voltaire's numerous
slips in erudition in his _Lettres de Quelques Juifs_, and that of the
Abbé Bergier, who is chiefly noteworthy as having held the singular post
of official refuter of the Encyclopædists, 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 Abbé Guénée, 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: Fréron.]

A bitter personal opponent of La Harpe, and a famous man in literary
history, was Fréron. Elie Catherine Fréron 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 _Année
Littéraire_, 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'Écossaise_,
in which Fréron was caricatured under the title Frélon (hornet). Every
effort was made by the Encyclopædists (who were not in the least
tolerant in practice) to procure the suppression of the _Année_. But
Fréron 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. Fréron, 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'Écossaise_ itself.

Two other adversaries of Voltaire who deserve notice as literary critics
were the Abbé 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 Fréron, 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 _Écossaise_ 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 _Éloges_, 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
Encyclopædists 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
æsthetics; 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
_sensibilité_, 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 æsthetic 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 _régime_ 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, André
Chénier, 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
Ginguené, 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 Apôtres_, Marat started
his ultra-republican _Ami du Peuple_, Camille Desmoulins the _Courier de
Brabant_, Durozoy the _Gazette de Paris_. Barrère and Louvet, both
notorious, if not famous names, launched for the first time a paper with
a title destined to fortune, _Le Journal des Débats_; and Camille
Desmoulins changed his oddly-named journal into one named more oddly
still, _Les Révolutions 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 _Père Duchêne_ of Hébert,
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
_Journal des Débats_, on which Fiévée, Geoffroy, and many other writers
of talent worked. In the early days of these various journals political
interests naturally engrossed them. But the literary tastes and
instincts of Parisians were too strong not to demand attention, and by
degrees the critical part of the newspaper became of importance. Under
the restoration this importance grew, and the result was the
_Conservateur Littéraire_ and the _Globe_, in the former of which Victor
Hugo was introduced to the public, and in the latter Sainte-Beuve. This
sudden uprise of journalism produced a remarkable change in the
conditions of literary work, and offered chances to many who would
previously have been dependent on individual patronage. But so far as
regards literature, properly so called, all its results which were worth
anything appeared subsequently in books, and there is therefore no need
to refer otherwise than cursorily to the phenomenon of its development.
Put very briefly, the influence of journalism on literature may be said
to be this: it opens the way to those to whom it might otherwise be
closed; it facilitates the destruction of erroneous principles; it
assists production; and it interferes with labour and care spent over
the thing produced.

[Sidenote: Chamfort.]

From the crowd of clever writers whom this outburst of journalism found
ready to draw their pens in one service or the other, two names emerge
as pre-eminently remarkable. Garat and Champcenetz were men of wit and
ingenuity, André Chénier was a great poet, and his brother, Marie
Joseph, a man of good literary taste and master of an elegant style,
Lacretelle a painstaking historian, and many others worthy of note in
their way. But Chamfort and Rivarol deserve a different kind of notice
from this. They united in a remarkable fashion the peculiarities of the
man of letters of the eighteenth century with the peculiarities of the
man of letters of the nineteenth, and their individual merit was, though
different and complementary, almost unique. Chamfort was born in
Auvergne, in 1741. He was the natural son of a person who occupied the
position of companion, and legally possessed nothing but his baptismal
name of Nicholas. Like his rival, La Harpe, he obtained an exhibition at
one of the Paris colleges, and distinguished himself. After leaving
school he lived for a time by miscellaneous literature, and at last made
his way to society and to literary success by dint of competing for and
winning academic prizes. On the second occasion of his competition he
defeated La Harpe. Afterwards Madame Helvétius assisted him, and at last
he received from Chabanon (a third-rate man of letters, who may be most
honourably mentioned here) a small annuity which made him independent.
It is said that he married, and that his wife died six months
afterwards. He was elected to the Academy, and patronised by all sorts
of persons, from the queen downwards. But at the outbreak of the
Revolution he took the popular side, though he could not continue long
faithful to it. In the Terror he was menaced with arrest, tried to
commit suicide, and died horribly mutilated in 1794. Chamfort's literary
works are considerable in bulk, but only a few of them have merit. His
tragedies are quite worthless, his comedy, _La Jeune Indienne_, not much
better. His verse tales exceed in licentiousness his models in La
Fontaine, but fall far short of them in elegance and humour. His
academic essays are heavy and scarcely intelligent. But his brief
witticisms and his short anecdotes and apophthegms hardly admit a rival.
Chamfort was a man soured by his want of birth, health, and position,
and spoilt in mental development by the necessity of hanging on to the
great persons of his time. But for a kind of tragi-comic satire, a
_saeva indignatio_, taking the form of contempt of all that is exalted
and noble, he has no equal in literature except Swift.

[Sidenote: Rivarol.]

The life of Rivarol was also an adventurous one, but much less sombre.
He was born about 1750, of a family which seems to have had noble
connections, but which, in his branch of it, had descended to
innkeeping. Indeed it is said that Riverot, and not Rivarol, was the
name which his father actually bore. He himself, however, first assumed
the title of Chevalier de Parcieux, and then that of Comte de Rivarol.
The way to literary distinction in those days was either the theatre or
criticism, and Rivarol, with the acuteness which characterised him,
knowing that he had no talent for the former, chose the latter. His
translation (with essay and notes) of Dante is an extraordinarily clever
book, and his discourse on the universality of the French tongue, which
followed, deserves the same description. It was not, however, in mere
criticism that Rivarol's forte lay, though he long afterwards continued
to exhibit his acuteness in it by utterances of various kinds. In 1788
(the year before the Revolution) he excited the laughter of all Paris,
and the intense hatred of the hack-writers of his time, by publishing,
in conjunction with Champcenetz, an _Almanach de nos Grands Hommes_, in
which, by a mixture of fiction and fact, he caricatures his smaller
contemporaries in the most pitiless manner. When the Revolution broke
out Rivarol took the Royalist side, and contributed freely to its
journals. He soon found it necessary to leave the country, and lived for
ten years in Brussels, London, Hamburg, and Berlin, publishing
occasionally pamphlets and miscellaneous works. He died at the Prussian
capital in 1801. Not only has Rivarol a considerable claim as a critic,
and a very high position as a political pamphleteer, but he is as much
the master of the prose epigram as Chamfort is of the short anecdote.
Following the example of his predecessors, he put many of his best
things in a treatise, _De l'Homme Intellectuel et Moral_, which, as a
whole, is very dull and unsatisfactory, though it is lighted up by
occasional flashes of the most brilliant wit. His detached sayings,
which are not so much _Pensées_ or maxims as conversational good things,
are among the most sparkling in literature, and, with Chamfort's, occupy
a position which they keep almost entirely to themselves. It has been
said of him and of Chamfort (who, being of similar talents and on
opposite sides, were naturally bitter foes) that they 'knew men, but
only from the outside, and from certain limited superficial and
accidental points of view. They knew books, too, but their knowledge was
circumscribed by the fashions of a time which was not favourable to
impartial literary appreciation. Hence their anecdotes are personal
rather than general, rather amusing than instructive, rather showing the
acuteness and ingenuity of the authors than able to throw light on the
subjects dealt with. But as mere tale-tellers and sayers of sharp things
they have few rivals.' It may be added that they complete and sum up the
merits and defects of the French society of the eighteenth century, and
that, in so far as literature can do this, the small extent of their
selected works furnishes a complete comment on that society.

[Sidenote: Joubert.]

Contemporary with these two writers, though, from the posthumous
publication of his works years after the end of his long life, he seems
in a manner a contemporary of our own, was Joseph Joubert, the last
great _Pensée_-writer of France and of Europe. Joubert's birthplace was
Montignac, in Perigord, and the date of his birth 1754, three years
after that of Rivarol, and about twelve after that of Chamfort. He was
educated at Toulouse, where, without taking regular orders, he joined
the Frères de la Doctrine Chrétienne, a teaching community, and studied
and taught till he was twenty-two years old. Then his health being, as
it was all through his life, weak, he returned home, and succeeding
before long to a small but sufficient fortune, he went to Paris. Here he
became intimate with the second _philosophe_ generation (La Harpe,
Marmontel, etc.), and is said to have for a time been an enthusiastic
hearer of Diderot, the most splendid talker of that or any age. But
Joubert's ideals and method of thought were radically different from
those of the _Philosophes_, and he soon found more congenial literary
companions, of whom the chief were Fontanes and Chênedollé, while he
found his natural home in the salon of two ladies of rank and
cultivation, Madame de Beaumont and Madame de Vintimille. Before long he
married and established himself in Paris with a choice library, into
which, it is said, no eighteenth-century writer was admitted. His health
became worse and worse, yet he lived to the age of seventy, dying in
1824. Fourteen years afterwards Chateaubriand, at the request of his
widow, edited a selection of his remains, and four years later still his
nephew, M. de Raynal, produced a fuller edition.

Joubert's works consist (with the exception of a few letters)
exclusively of _Pensées_ and maxims, which rank in point of depth and of
exquisite literary expression with those of La Rochefoucauld, and in
point of range above them. They are even wider in this respect than
those of Vauvenargues, which they also much resemble. Ethics, politics,
theology, literature, all occupy Joubert. In politics he is, as may be
perhaps expected from his time and circumstances, decidedly
anti-revolutionary. In theology, without being exactly orthodox
according to any published scheme of orthodoxy, Joubert is definitely
Christian. In ethics he holds a middle place between the unsparing
hardness of the self-interest school and the somewhat gushing manner of
the sentimentalists. But his literary thoughts are perhaps the most
noteworthy, not merely from our present point of view. All alike have
the characteristic of intense compression (he described his literary aim
in the phrase 'tormented by the ambition of putting a book in a page, a
page into a phrase, and a phrase into a word'), while all have the same
lucidity and freedom from enigma. All are alike polished in form and
style according to the best models of the seventeenth century; but
whereas study and reflection might have been sufficient to give Joubert
the material of his other thoughts, the wide difference between his
literary judgments and those of his time is less easily explicable. No
finer criticism on style and on poetry in the abstract exists than his,
and yet his reading of poetry cannot have been very extensive. He is
even just to the writers of the eighteenth century, whose manner he
disliked, and whose society he had abjured. He seems, indeed, to have
had almost a perfect faculty of literary appreciation, and wherever his
sayings startle the reader it will generally be found that there is a
sufficient explanation beneath. There is probably no writer in any
language who has said an equal number of remarkable things on an equal
variety of subjects in an equally small space, and with an equally high
and unbroken excellence of style and expression. This is the intrinsic
worth of Joubert. In literary history he has yet another interest, that
of showing in the person of a man living out of the literary world, and
far removed from the operation of cliques, the process which was
inevitably bringing about the great revolution of 1830.

[Sidenote: Courier.]

Like Joubert, Paul Louis Courier had a great dislike and even contempt
for the authors of the eighteenth century, but curiously enough this
dislike did not in the least affect his theological or political
opinions. He was born at Paris, in 1772, being the son of a wealthy man
of the middle class. His youth was passed in the country, and he early
displayed a great liking for classical study. As a compromise between
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 _Pétition 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 Pélagie. 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 à M. Renouard_, in which he
discusses the mishap with the manuscript of Longus, and the letter to
the _Académie 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: Sénancour.]

This chapter may perhaps be most appropriately concluded by the notice
of a singular writer who, although longer lived, was contemporary with
Courier. Étienne Pivert de Sénancour 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_. Sénancour
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
Sénancour 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 _René_ with a difference; Chateaubriand's
melancholy hero feeling that he could do anything if he would but has no
spirit for any task, Sénancour'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. Sénancour 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
Bruyère had said, in the days of acquiescence in absolutism, that to a
Frenchman 'Les grands sujets sont défendus,' 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 Fréron, despite his power, was little more than a
literary critic--is the Abbé Guénée. 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 Encyclopædists 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 Brède, was born at
the _château_, 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
year or two president. In 1721 he produced the _Lettres Persanes_, and
four years later the curious little prose poem called the _Temple de
Gnide_. Some objection was made by the minister Fleury, who was rigidly
orthodox, to the satirical tone of the former book in ecclesiastical
matters, but Montesquieu was none the less elected of the Academy in
1728. He had given up his position at the Bordeaux Parlement a few years
before this, and set out on an extensive course of travel, noting
elaborately the manners, customs, and constitution of the countries
through which he passed. Two years of this time were spent in England,
for which country, politically speaking, he conceived a great
admiration. On his return to France he lived partly in Paris, but
chiefly at his estate of La Brède, taking an active interest in its
management, and in the various occupations of a country gentleman, but
also working unceasingly at his masterpiece, the _Esprit des Lois_.
This, however, was not published for many years, and was long preceded
by the book which ranks second in importance to it, the _Grandeur et
Décadence des Romains_, 1734. This was Montesquieu's first serious work,
and it placed him as high among serious writers as the _Lettres
Persanes_ had among lighter authors. The _Esprit des Lois_ itself did
not appear till 1748. Montesquieu, whose life was in no way eventful,
lived for some years longer, dying in Paris on the 10th of February,
1755. Besides the works mentioned he had written several dialogues and
other trifles, a considerable number of _Pensées_, and some articles for
the earlier volumes of the Encyclopædia.

[Sidenote: Lettres Persanes.]

[Sidenote: Gradeur et Décadence des Romains]

Montesquieu probably deserves the title of the greatest man of letters
of the French eighteenth century, the superior versatility and more
superficial brilliancy of Voltaire being compensated in him by far
greater originality and depth of thought. His three principal works
deserve to be considered in turn. The _Lettres Persanes_, in which the
opinions of a foreigner on French affairs are given, is not entirely
original in conception; the idea of the vehicle being possibly suggested
by the _Amusements Divers_ of Dufresny the comic author. The working
out, however, is entirely Montesquieu's, and was followed closely enough
by the various writers, who, with Voltaire and Goldsmith at their head,
have adopted a similar medium for satire and criticism since. It is not
too much to say that the entire spirit of the _philosophe_ movement in
its more moderate form is contained and anticipated in the _Lettres
Persanes_. All the weaknesses of France in political, ecclesiastical,
and social arrangements are here touched on with a light but sure hand,
and the example is thus set of attacking 'les grands sujets.' From a
literary point of view the form of this work is at least as remarkable
as the matter. Voltaire himself is nowhere more witty, while Montesquieu
has over his rival the indefinable but unquestionable advantage of
writing more like a gentleman. There is no single book in which the
admirable capacity of the French language for jesting treatment of
serious subjects is better shown than in the _Lettres Persanes_.
Montesquieu's next important work was of a very different character. The
_Considérations sur les Causes de la Grandeur et de la Décadence des
Romains_ is an entirely serious work. It does not as yet exhibit the
magnificent breadth of view and the inexhaustible fertility of
explanation which distinguish the _Esprit des Lois_, but it has been
well regarded as a kind of preliminary exercise for that great work.
Montesquieu here treats an extensive but homogeneous and manageable
subject from the point of view of philosophical history, after a method
which had been partially tried by Bossuet, and systematically arranged
by Vico in Italy, but which was not fully developed till Turgot's time.
That is to say, his object is not merely to exhibit, but to explain the
facts, and to explain them on general principles applicable with due
modifications to other times and other histories. Accordingly, the style
of the _Grandeur et Décadence_ is as grave and dignified as that of the
_Lettres Persanes_ is lively and malicious. It is sometimes a little too
sententious in tone, and suffers from the habit, induced probably by
_Pensée_-writing, of composing in very brief paragraphs. But it is an
excellent example of its kind, and especially remarkable for the extreme
clearness and lucidity with which the march and sequence of events in
the gross is exhibited.

[Sidenote: Esprit des Lois.]

The _Esprit des Lois_ is, however, a far greater book than either of
these, and far more original. The title may be thought to be not
altogether happy, and indeed rather ambiguous, because it does not of
itself suggest the extremely wide sense in which the word law is
intended to be taken. An exact if cumbrous title for the book would be
'On the Relation of Human Laws and Customs to the Laws of Nature.' The
author begins somewhat formally with the old distinction of politics
into democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy. He discusses the principles
of each and their bearings on education, on positive law, on social
conditions, on military strength, offensive and defensive, on individual
liberty, on taxation and finance. Then an abrupt return is made from the
effects to the causes of constitutions and polity. The theory of the
influence of physical conditions, and especially of climate, on
political and social institutions--a theory which is perhaps more than
any other identified with the book--receives special attention, and a
somewhat disproportionate space is given to the question of slavery in
connection with it. From climate Montesquieu passes to the nature of
the soil, as in its turn affecting civil polity. He then attacks the
subject of manners and customs as distinct from laws, of trade and
commerce, of the family, of jurisprudence, of religion. The book
concludes with an elaborate examination of the feudal system in France.
Throughout it the reader is equally surprised at the varied and exact
knowledge of the author, and at his extraordinary fertility in general
views. This fertility is indeed sometimes a snare to him, and leads to
rash generalisation. But what has to be remembered is, that he was one
of the pioneers of this method of historical exploration, and that
hundreds of principles which, after correction by his successors, have
passed into general acceptance, were discovered, or at least enunciated,
by him for the first time. Nothing is more remarkable in Montesquieu,
and nothing more distinguishes him from the common run of his somewhat
self-satisfied and short-sighted successors, than the steady hold he
keeps on the continuity of history, and his superiority to the shallow
view of his day (constantly put forward by Voltaire), according to which
the middle ages were a dark period of barbarism, the study of which
could be of no use to any one but a mere curiosity hunter. Montesquieu
too, almost alone of his contemporaries, had a matured and moderate plan
of political and social reform. While some of them indulged in an idle
and theoretical Republicanism, and others in the old unpractical
_frondeur_ spirit, eager to pull down but careless about building up,
Montesquieu had conceived the idea of a limited monarchy, not identical
with that of England, but in many ways similar to it; an ideal which in
the first quarter of the eighteenth century might have been put in
practice with far better chance of success than in the first quarter of
the nineteenth. The merely literary merits of this great book are equal
to its philosophical merits. The vast mass of facts with which the
author deals is selected with remarkable judgment, and arranged with
remarkable lucidity. The style is sober, devoid of ornament, but
admirably proportioned and worked out. There are few greater books, not
merely in French but in literature, than the _Esprit des Lois_.

[Sidenote: Voltaire.]

With Voltaire the case is very different. Very many of his innumerable
works have directly philosophical titles, but no one of them is a work
of much interest or merit. His 'Philosophic Letters,' 1733, published
after his return from England, and the source of much trouble to him,
are the lively but not very trustworthy medium of a contrast between
English liberty and toleration and French arbitrary government. His
'Discourses on Man,' and other verse of the same kind, are
verse-philosophy of the class of Pope's. The pompously named 'Treatise
on Metaphysics,' 1734, is very much the same in substance if not in
form. The remarks on Pascal's _Pensées_ are unimportant contributions to
the crusade against superstition; the Philosophical Dictionary, 1764, is
a heterogeneous collection of articles with the same object. The _Essai
sur les Moeurs_, 1756, composed not improbably in rivalry with
Montesquieu, contains much acute reflection on particulars, but is
injured by the author's imperfect information as to the subjects of
which he was treating, by his entirely unphilosophical contempt for the
'Dark Ages,' and indeed by the absence of any general conception of
history which can be called philosophical. Voltaire's real importance,
however, in connection with the _philosophe_ movement is to be found,
not in the merit or value of any one of his professedly philosophical
books, but in the fact that all his works, his poems, his plays, his
histories, his romances, his innumerable flying essays and papers of all
sorts, were invariably saturated with its spirit, and helped to
communicate it to others. It cannot be said that Voltaire had any clear
conception of the object which he wished to attain, except in so far as
the famous watchword 'Écrasez l'Infâme' goes. This means not, as has
been erroneously thought, 'crush Christianity,' but 'crush persecuting
superstition.' He was by no means in favour of any political reform,
except as far as private rights were concerned. He would have liked the
exaggerated political privileges of the Church (which enabled it to
persecute dissidents, and inflicted on laymen an unfair share of
taxation) to be revoked, the cruel and irrational procedure of the
French tribunals to be reformed, Church lands to be in great part
secularised, and so forth; but he never seems to have faced the
necessity of connecting these reforms with a radical alteration of the
whole system of government. The sharp point of his ridicule was,
however, always at the service of the aggressive party, especially for
what he had most at heart, the overthrow of dogmatic and traditional
theology and ecclesiasticism. For this purpose, as has been said
already, he was willing to make, and did make, all his works, no matter
of what kind (except a few scattered writings on mathematics and
physics, pure and simple, in which he took great interest), into more or
less elaborate pamphlets, and to put at the service of the movement his
great position as the head of French and indeed of European letters. His
habitual inaccuracy, and the inferiority of his mind in strictly logical
faculty and in commanding range of view, disabled him from really
serious contributions to philosophy of any kind. The curious mixture of
defects and merits in this great writer is apt to render piecemeal
notice of him, such as is necessitated by the plan of this book,
apparently unfavourable. But no literary historian can take leave of
Voltaire with words of intentional disfavour. The mere fact that it has
been necessary to take detailed notice of him in every one of the last
six chapters, is roughly indicative of his unequalled versatility. But,
versatile as he is, there is perhaps no department of his work, save
serious poetry and criticism, in which from the literary point of view
he fails to attain all but the highest rank.

[Sidenote: The Encyclopædia.]

Montesquieu and Voltaire were, as has been said, precursors rather than
members of the _philosophe_ group proper, which is identified with the
Encyclopædia, and to this group it is now time to come. The history of
this famous book is rather curious. The English Cyclopædia of Ephraim
Chambers had appeared in 1727. About fifteen years after its publication
a translation of it was offered to and accepted by the French
bookseller, Le Breton. But Le Breton was not satisfied with a bare
translation, and wished the book to be worked up into something more
extensive. He applied to different men of letters, and finally to
Diderot, who, enlisting the Chancellor d'Aguesseau in the plan,
obtaining privilege for the enlarged work, and mustering by degrees a
staff of contributors which included almost every man of letters of any
repute in France, succeeded in carrying it out. The task was anything
but a sinecure. It occupied nearly twenty years of Diderot's life; it
was repeatedly threatened and sometimes actually prohibited; and
D'Alembert (Diderot's principal coadjutor, and in fact co-editor)
actually retired from it in disgust at the obstacles thrown in their
way. The book so produced was by no means a mere pamphlet or
controversial work, though many of the articles were made polemical by
those to whom they were entrusted. The principal of its contributors
however--Voltaire himself was one--became gradually recognised as
representing the criticism of existing institutions, many of which, it
must be confessed, were so bad at the time that simple examination of
them was in itself the severest censure. It becomes necessary,
therefore, to mention the names and works of the most remarkable of this
group who have not found or will not find a place elsewhere.

[Sidenote: Diderot.]

Denis Diderot was born at Langres, on the 15th October, 1713. He was
brilliantly successful at school, but on being required to choose a
profession rejected both church and law. It appears, however, that he
studied medicine. His father, a man of affectionate temper but strong
will, refused to support him unless he chose a regular mode of life, and
Diderot at once set up for himself and attempted literature. Not much is
authentically known of his life till, in 1743, he married; but he seems
to have lived partly by taking pupils, partly by miscellaneous literary
hack-work. After his marriage his household expenses (and others)
quickened his literary activity, and before long he received, in the
editorship of the Encyclopædia, a charge which, though ridiculously ill
paid and very laborious, practically secured him from want for many
years, while it gave him a very important position. He made many
friends, and was especially intimate with the Baron d'Holbach, a rich
and hospitable man, and a great adept in chemistry and atheism. Before
this Diderot had had some troubles, being even imprisoned at Vincennes
for his _Essai sur les Aveugles_, 1749. Besides his Encyclopædia work
Diderot was lavish in contributing, often without either remuneration or
acknowledgment of any kind, to the work of other men, and especially to
the correspondence by which his friend Grimm kept the sovereigns of
Germany and Russia informed of the course of things in Paris. The most
remarkable of these contributions--criticisms of literature and
art--have been noticed elsewhere, as have Diderot's historical and
fictitious productions. As he grew old his necessities were met by a
handsome act of Catherine of Russia, who bought his library, left him
the use of it, and gave him a pension nominally as payment for his
trouble as caretaker. He made, in 1773, a journey to St. Petersburg to
pay his thanks, and on his return stayed for some time in Holland. He
died in Paris in 1784. Diderot's miscellaneous works are, like
Voltaire's, penetrated by the _philosophe_ spirit, but it is less
prominent, owing to his greater acquaintance with the individual matters
which he handled. His contributions to definite philosophical literature
are not unimportant. He began by an 'Essay on Merit and Virtue,' 1745,
imitated from Shaftesbury, and by some more original _Pensées
Philosophiques_. These pieces were followed by _La Promenade du
Sceptique_, written somewhat in the fashion of Berkeley's _Alciphron_,
and by some minor treatises, the most important of which are the
_Lettres sur les Sourds et Muets_, and by the already mentioned _Lettre
sur les Aveugles_, which led to his imprisonment, with some 'Thoughts on
the Interpretation of Nature.' A singular and characteristic book
containing not a few acute but fantastic ideas is _Le Rêve de
D'Alembert_, which, like an elaborate criticism on Helvétius' _De
l'Homme,_ was not printed during Diderot's life. The _Essai sur les
Règnes de Claude et de Néron_ was one of the latest of Diderot's works,
and is a kind of historico-philosophical disquisition. The last piece of
any importance which is included in the philosophical works of Diderot
is an extensive scheme for a Russian university.

The characteristics of Diderot's philosophical works are the same as the
characteristics of those other works of his which have been noticed, and
his general position as a writer may well be considered here. There has
seldom been an author who was more fertile in ideas. It is impossible to
name a subject which Diderot has not treated, and hardly possible to
name one on which he has not said striking and memorable things. The
peculiarity of his mind was, that it could adjust itself, with hardly
any effort, to any subject presented to it, grasp that subject and
express thoughts on it in a novel and effective manner. He had moreover,
what some other men of his century, notably Voltaire, lacked, a vast
supply of positive information on the subjects with which he dealt, and
an entire independence of conventional points of view in dealing with
them. This independence was in some respects pushed to an unfortunate
length, exposing him (whether deservedly or not, is an exceedingly
difficult point to resolve) to the charge of atheism, and (beyond all
doubts deservedly) to the charge of wilful disregard of the accepted
decencies of language. Another and very serious fault, arising partly
from temperament and partly from circumstances, was the want of needful
pains and deliberation which characterises most of Diderot's work. That
work is extremely voluminous, and even as it is, we have not anything
like the whole of it in a collected form. Indeed, by far the larger part
was never given to the world by the author himself in any deliberate or
finished shape, and much of what he did publish was the result of mere
improvisation. The consequence is, that Diderot is accused, not without
truth, of having written good passages, but no good book, and that a
full appreciation of his genius is only to be obtained by a most
laborious process of wading through hundreds and thousands of pages of
very inferior work. The result of that process, however, is never likely
to be doubtful in the case of competent examiners. It is the conviction
that Diderot ranks in point of originality and versatility of thought
among the most fertile thinkers of France, and in point of felicity and
idiosyncrasy of expression, among the most remarkable of her writers.

[Sidenote: D'Alembert.]

His coadjutor during the earlier part of his great work was a man
curiously different from himself. Diderot was a rapid and careless
writer, devoted to general society and conversation, interested in
everything that was brought to his notice, passionate, unselfish,
frequently extravagant. Jean le Rond d'Alembert (who was really an
illegitimate son of Madame de Tencin by an uncertain father) was an
extraordinarily careful writer, a man of retired habits, reserved,
self-centred and phlegmatic. He was born in 1717, was exposed on the
steps of a church, but was brought up carefully by a foster-mother of
the lower classes, to whom he was consigned by the authorities, and had
a not insufficient annuity settled upon him by his supposed father. He
was educated at the Collège Mazarin, and early showed great aptitude for
mathematics, in which equally with literature he distinguished himself
in after years. He was elected a member of the Academy of Sciences as
early as at the age of four-and-twenty. After he had joined Diderot, he
wrote a preliminary discourse for the Encyclopædia--a famous and
admirable sketch of the sciences--besides many articles. Of these, one
on Geneva brought the book into more trouble than almost any other
contribution, though D'Alembert was equally moderate as a thinker and as
a writer. D'Alembert, as has been said, retired from the work after this
storm, being above all things solicitous of peace and quietness. His
refusals of the offers of Frederick II. in 1752 to go to Berlin as
President of the Academy, and of Catherine II. to undertake, at what was
then an enormous salary, the education of the Grand Duke Paul, have been
variously taken as evidence of his disinterestedness, and of his shrewd
dislike to possibly false positions, and the chance of such experiences
as those of Voltaire. In his later life he and Mademoiselle de
Lespinasse, as has been mentioned, kept house together. He died shortly
before Diderot, in 1783. Perhaps his best literary works are his already
mentioned Academic _Éloges_, or obituaries on important men of letters
and science. D'Alembert contributed to the movement exactness of thought
and precision of style, but his influence was more purely intellectual
than that of any other member of the _philosophe_ group.

[Sidenote: Rousseau.]

The connection of Rousseau with the Encyclopædia itself was brief and
not important. Yet it is here that his personal and general literary
character and achievements may be most conveniently treated. Jean
Jacques Rousseau was born at Geneva, on the 28th of June, 1712, of a
family which had emigrated from France during the religious troubles.
His father was a watchmaker, his mother died when he was very young. His
education was not exactly neglected, but he went to no regular school,
which, considering his peculiarities, was perhaps a misfortune. After
being introduced to the law and to engraving, in both cases with ill
success, he ran away and practically continued a vagabond to the end of
his life. He served as a footman, was an inmate of a kind of
proselytising almshouse at Turin, and went through many odd adventures,
for which there is the dubious authority of his strange _Confessions_.
When he was just of age, he was taken in by Madame de Warens, a Savoyard
lady of birth and position, who had before been kind to him. With her he
lived for some time, chiefly at Les Charmettes, near Chambéry. But being
superseded in her good graces, he went to Lyons, where he lived by
teaching. Thence he went to Paris, having little to depend on but an
imperfect knowledge of music. In 1741 he was attached to the French
Embassy at Venice under M. de Montaigu, but (as he did all through his
life) he quarrelled in some way with his patron, and returned to Paris.
Here he became intimate with Diderot, Grimm, and all the _philosophe_
circle, especially with Madame d'Epinay. She established him in a
cottage called the Hermitage with his companion Thérèse le Vasseur,
whose acquaintance he had made in Paris, and whom he afterwards married.
The extraordinary quarrel which took place between Rousseau and Diderot
has been endlessly written about. It need only be said that Rousseau
showed his usual temper and judgment, that Diderot was to all appearance
quite guiltless, and that the chief fault lay elsewhere, probably with
Grimm. For a time the Duke of Luxembourg protected him, then he was
obliged, or thought himself obliged, to go into exile. Marshal Keith,
Governor of Neufchatel for the King of Prussia, received and protected
him, with the inevitable result that Rousseau considered it impossible
to continue in this as in every other refuge. David Hume was his next
good angel, and carried him to England in 1766. But the same drama
repeated itself, as it did subsequently with the Prince de Conti and
with Madame d'Enghien. Rousseau's last protector was M. de Girardin, who
gave him, after he had lived in Paris in comparative quiet for several
years, a home at Ermenonville in 1778. He did not outlive the year,
dying in a somewhat mysterious fashion, which has never been fully
explained, on the 2nd of July.

Rousseau was a man of middle age before he produced any literary work of
importance. He had in his youth been given to music, and indeed
throughout his life the slender profits of music copying were almost
his only independent source of income. His knowledge of the subject was
far from scientific, but he produced an operetta which was not
unsuccessful, and, but for his singular temperament, he might have
followed up the success. His first literary work of importance was a
prose essay for the Dijon Academy on the subject of the effects of
civilisation on society. Either of his own motion, or at the suggestion
of Diderot, Rousseau took the apparently paradoxical line of arguing
that all improvements on the savage life had been curses rather than
blessings, and he gained the prize. In 1755 his _Discours sur l'Origine
de l'Inégalité_ appeared at Amsterdam; in 1760 his famous novel _Julie_,
and in 1764 _Emile_, both of which have been spoken of already. Between
the two appeared the still more famous and influential _Contrat Social_.
Of the other works of Rousseau published during his lifetime, the most
famous, perhaps, was his letter to D'Alembert on the subject of the
introduction of theatrical performances into Geneva, a characteristic
paradox which made a bitter enemy of the most powerful of French men of
letters. Besides these, the _Rêveries d'un Promeneur Solitaire_, the
_Lettres de la Montagne_, and above all, the unique _Confessions_, have
to be reckoned. The last, like several of Rousseau's other works, did
not appear till after his death.

Of all the writers mentioned in this chapter the influence of Rousseau
on literature and on life was probably the largest. He was the direct
inspirer of the men who made the French Revolution, and the theories of
his _Contrat Social_ were closer at the root of Jacobin politics than
any other. His fervid declamation about equality and brotherhood, and
his sentimental republicanism, were seed as well suited to the soil in
which they were sown as Montesquieu's reasoned constitutionalism was
unsuited to it. Rousseau, indeed, if the proof of the excellence of
preaching is in the practice of the hearers, was the greatest preacher
of the century. He denounced the practice of putting infants out to
nurse, and mothers began to suckle their own children; he recommended
instruction in useful arts, and many an _émigré_ noble had to thank
Rousseau for being able to earn his bread in exile; he denounced
speculative atheism, urging the undogmatic but emotional creed of his
_Vicaire Savoyard_, and the first wave of the religious reaction was
set going to culminate in the Catholic movement of Chateaubriand and
Lamennais. But in literature itself his influence was quite as powerful.
He was not, indeed, the founder of the school of analysis of feeling in
the novel, but he was the populariser of it. He was almost the founder
of sentimentalism in general literature, and he was absolutely the first
to make word-painting of nature an almost indispensable element of all
imaginative and fictitious writing both in prose and poetry. Some of his
characteristics were taken up in quick succession by Goethe in Germany,
by Bernardin de St. Pierre and Chateaubriand in France. Others were for
the time less eagerly imitated, and though Madame de Stael and her lover
Benjamin Constant did something to spread them, it was reserved for the
Romantic movement to develop them fully. It was singular, no doubt, and
this is not the place to undertake the explanation of the singularity,
that Rousseau, who detested most of the conclusions, and almost all the
methods of the Encyclopædists, should be counted in with them, and
should have undoubtedly helped in the first place to accomplish their
result. But such is the case. His peculiar literary characteristics are
perhaps better exhibited in the _Confessions_ and in the miscellaneous
works, than in either of the novels. The _Contrat Social_ is a very
remarkable piece of pseudo-argument. It is felt from the first that the
whole assumption on which it reposes is historically false and
philosophically absurd. Yet there is an appearance of speciousness in
the arguments, an adroit mixture of logic and rhetoric, of order and
method, which is exceedingly seductive. The _Confession du Vicaire
Savoyard_, with many passages allied to it in the smaller works, has,
despite the staleness of the language (which was hackneyed by a thousand
empty talkers during the Revolution), not a little dignity and
persuasive force. But it is in the _Confessions_ that the literary power
of the author appears at its fullest. Never, perhaps, was a more
miserable story of human weakness revealed, and the peculiar thing is
that Rousseau does not limit his exhibitions of himself to exhibitions
of engaging frailty. The acts which he admits are in many cases
indescribably base, mean, and disgusting. The course of conduct which he
portrays is at its best that of a man entirely destitute of governing
will, petulant, often positively ungrateful, always playing into the
hands of the enemies whom his hallucinations supposed to exist, and
frustrating the efforts of the friends whom he allows himself, if only
for a time, to have possessed. Yet the narrative and dramatic skill with
which all this is presented is so great, that there is hardly room for a
sense of repulsion which is merged in interest, not necessarily
sympathetic interest, but still interest. Of the feeling for natural
beauty, which is everywhere present in these remarkable works, it is
enough to say that in French prose literature, it may almost be said in
the prose literature of Europe, it was entirely original. Part of
Rousseau's devotion to nature arose no doubt from his moody and retiring
temperament, which led him to rejoice in anything rather than the
society of his fellow men. But this would not of itself have given him
the literary skill with which he expresses these feelings. It is not so
much in set descriptions of particular scenes as in slight occasional
thoughts, embodying the emotions experienced at the sight of a flower, a
lake-surface, a mountain side, a forest glade, that this mastery is
shown. Yet of the more elaborate passages of this kind in other writers
few can surpass the best things of the _Nouvelle Héloïse_, the
_Confessions_, and the _Rêveries_. There is nothing novel to readers of
the present day in such things, though they are seldom done so happily.
But to the readers of Rousseau's day they were absolutely novel. It is
in this that the main literary importance of Rousseau consists, though
it must not be forgotten that he is in many ways a master of French
prose. His contemporaries made use of his Genevan origin to find fault
with his style; but with a few insignificant exceptions the criticism
has no foundation. It has been very frequently renewed, and sometimes
with little better reason, in the case of Swiss authors.

Round these chiefs of the Encyclopædic movement were grouped many lesser
men, some of whom will be most conveniently noticed here. Marmontel,
Morellet, and Saint-Lambert, whose chief importance lay in other
directions, were contributors. The Chevalier de Jaucourt, a man of no
original power, but a hack-writer of extraordinary aptitude, took
considerable part in it. There were others, however, who, partly within
and partly without the range of the Encyclopædia, had no small share in
the promotion of what has been called the _philosophe_ movement. Some
of these have found their place under the head of Essayists. There is,
however, one remarkable division, which must be treated here--the
division of economists--before we pass to the philosophers properly so
called, who either continued the metaphysics of Locke in a directly
materialist sense, or who, restraining themselves to sensationalism,
made the most of the English philosopher in that direction.

[Sidenote: Political Economists. Vauban, Quesnay, etc.]

The science of 'Political Arithmetic,' as it was first called in
England, had a somewhat earlier birth in France than in England itself.
It is remarkable that the complete establishment of the royal authority
under Louis XIV. preceded but by a very few years the examination of the
economic condition of the kingdom by unsparing examiners. The two chief
of these, both of whom fell into disgrace for their doings, were the
great engineer Vauban, and the great theologian Fénelon. The latter was
attracted to the subject chiefly by compassion for the sufferings of the
people, and expressed his opinion in a manner more rhetorical than
scientific. Vauban's course was naturally different. In the later years
of his life he set himself to the collection of statistical facts as to
the economic condition of France, and the result was the two books
called _Oisivetés de M. de Vauban_ and _La Dîme Royale_, 1707. The
former of these contained the facts, the latter the deduction from them,
which was, to put it briefly, that the existing system of privilege,
exemption, and irregular taxation was a loss to the Crown, and a torment
to the people. Vauban received the reward of his labours, attention to
which would probably have prevented the French Revolution, in the shape
of the royal displeasure, and nothing came immediately of his
investigations. In the next century, however, a regular sect of
political economists arose. They had, indeed, been preceded by an
eccentric man of letters, the Abbé de Saint-Pierre, who occupied his
life in propounding Utopian schemes of universal peace and general
prosperity. But the first and greatest of the economists properly so
called was Quesnay. The extreme misery of the common people attracted
his attention, and set him upon calculating the causes and remedies of
periodical failings. He was himself a frequent contributor to the
Encyclopædia. Many others of the _philosophe_ set occupied themselves
with these and similar subjects, notably the Abbés Morellet and Galiani.
The former was a man of a certain vigour (Voltaire called him 'L'Abbé
Mord-Les'), the latter has been noticed already. His _Dialogue sur le
Commerce des Blés_ acquired for him a great reputation.

[Sidenote: Turgot.]

Very many writers, among them the father of the great Mirabeau (in his
curious and able, though unequal and ill-proportioned _Ami des Hommes_),
attacked economical subjects at this time. But Turgot, though not
remarkable for the form of his writings, was the most original and
influential writer of the liberal school in this department. He was a
Norman by birth, and of a good legal family. He was born in 1727, and,
being destined for the Church, was educated at the Sorbonne. Turgot,
however, shared to the full the _philosophe_ ideas of the time as to
theological orthodoxy, and did not share the usual _philosophe_ ideas as
to concealment of his principles for comfort's sake. He refused to take
orders, turning his attention to the law and the Civil Service instead
of the Church. His family had considerable influence, and at the age of
twenty-four he was appointed intendant of Limoges, a post which gave him
practical control of the government of a large, though barren and
neglected, province. His achievements in the way of administrative
reform here were remarkable, and, had they been generally imitated,
might have brought about a very different state of things in France.
After the death of Louis XV., he was recommended by Maurepas to a far
more important office, the controllership of finance. Here, too, he did
great things; but his attack on the privileged orders was ill-seconded,
and, after holding his post for about two years, he had to resign,
partly, it is true, owing to a certain unaccommodating rigidity of
demeanour, which was one of his least amiable characteristics. He died
in 1781. Turgot's literary work is not extensive, and it is not
distinguished by its style. It consists of certain discourses at the
Sorbonne, of memoirs on various political occasions, of some letters on
usury, of articles in the Encyclopædia, of which the most noteworthy is
one on endowments, etc. All are remarkable as containing the germs of
what may be accepted as the modern liberal doctrines on the various
points of which they treat, while the second Sorbonne discourse is
entitled to the credit of first clearly announcing the principle of the
philosophy of history, the doctrine, that is to say, that human progress
follows regular laws of development, certain sets of causes invariably
tending to bring about certain sets of results.

[Sidenote: Condorcet.]

With the name of Turgot that of Condorcet is inseparably connected, and
though far less important in the history of thought, it is perhaps more
prominent in the history of literature, for the pupil and biographer (in
both of which relations Condorcet stood to Turgot) was, though a far
less original and vigorous thinker, a better writer than his master and
subject. Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, styled Marquis de Condorcet,
was born in 1743, near St. Quentin, and early distinguished himself both
in mathematics and in the belles lettres. He became Secretary of the
Academy in 1777, and he afterwards wrote the Life of Turgot, whose
method of dealing with economic questions (a more practical and less
abstract one than that of the earlier economists) he had already
followed. He took a considerable part in the French Revolution, serving
both in the Legislative Assembly and in the Convention. In the latter he
became identified with the Girondist party, and shared their troubles.
His best known work, the _Esquisse des Progrès de l'Esprit Humain_, was
written while he was a fugitive and in concealment. He was at last
discovered and arrested, but the day after he was found dead in his
prison at Bourg la Reine, having apparently poisoned himself (March,
1794). Condorcet's works are voluminous, and partake strongly of the
_philosophe_ character. He is not remarkable for originality of thought,
and may indeed be said to be for the most part a mere exponent of the
current ideas of the second stage of the _philosophe_ movement. But his
style has great merits, being clear, forcible, and correct, suffering
only from the somewhat stereotyped forms, and from the absence of
flexibility and colour which distinguish the later eighteenth century in
France.

[Sidenote: Volney.]

One more remarkable name deserves to be mentioned in this place as the
last of the _Philosophes_ proper, that is to say, of those writers who
carried out the general principles of the Encyclopædist movement with
less reference to specialist departments of literature than to a certain
general spirit and tendency. This was Constantin François de
Chasseboeuf, Comte de Volney, by which latter name he is generally
known. Volney was born in 1757, at Caron, in Anjou, and was educated at
Angers, and afterwards at Paris. He studied both medicine and law, but
having a sufficient fortune, practised neither. In 1783 he set out on
his travels and journeyed to the East, visiting Egypt and Syria; an
account of which journey he published four years later. When he returned
to France he was from the beginning a moderate partisan of the
Revolution, and, like most such persons, he was arrested during the
Terror, though he escaped with no worse fate than imprisonment.
Immediately after Thermidor, Volney published his most celebrated work,
_Les Ruines_, a treatise on the rise and fall of empires from a general
and philosophical point of view. Shortly after this he visited the
United States, whence he returned in 1798. He had known Napoleon in
early days, and on the establishment of the Consulate he was appointed a
senator; nor was his resignation accepted, though it was tendered when
Bonaparte assumed the crown. His countship was Napoleonic, but he was
always an opponent of the emperor's policy. Accordingly, after the
Restoration, he was nominated by Louis XVIII. as a member of the new
House of Peers. He died in 1820. Besides the books already noticed he
published some studies in ancient history and many miscellaneous works,
including a project of a universal language. Volney was, as has been
said, the last of the _philosophes_, exhibiting, long after a new order
of thought had set in, their acute but negative and one-sided criticism,
their sterile contempt of Christianity and religion generally, their
somewhat theoretic acceptance of generalisations on philosophy and
history, and of large plans for dealing with politics and ethics. As a
traveller his observation is accurate and his expression vivid; as a
philosophical historian his acuteness is perhaps not sufficiently
accompanied by real breadth of view.

[Sidenote: La Mettrie]

[Sidenote: Helvétius]

Between these philosophers, in the local and temporary sense of the
word, who dealt only with what would now be called the sociological side
of philosophy in its bearings on politics, religion, ethics, and
economics, and the strictly philosophical school of Condillac and his
followers, a small but very influential sect of materialists, who were
yet not purely philosophical materialists, has to be considered. Three
members of this school have importance in literature--La Mettrie,
Helvétius, and Holbach. La Mettrie was a native of Britanny: he entered
the medical service of the French army, acquired a speedy reputation for
heterodoxy and disorderly living, and fled for shelter to the general
patron of heterodox Frenchmen, Frederick of Prussia; at whose court he
died, at a comparatively early age, it is said in consequence of a
practical joke. La Mettrie's chief work is a paradoxical exercise in
materialist physics called _L'Homme-Machine_, in which he endeavours to
prove the purely automatic working of the human frame, and the absence
of any mind in the spiritualist sense. This he followed by a similar but
less original work, called _L'Homme-Plante_, and by some other minor
publications. La Mettrie was a very unequal thinker and writer, but he
has, as Voltaire (who disliked him) expressed it, _traits de flamme_
both in thought and style. Claude Adrian Helvétius was of Swiss descent,
and of ample fortune. Born in 1715, he was appointed to the high post of
Farmer-General when he was little more than twenty-three; but he did not
hold this appointment very long, and became Chamberlain to the Queen. He
was very popular in society, and was of a benevolent and philanthropic
disposition, though he seems to have got into trouble at his country
seat of Voré by excessive game preserving. He married, in 1751, the
beautiful Mademoiselle de Ligneville, who was long afterwards one of the
chief centres of literary society in Paris. In 1758 his book _De
l'Esprit_ appeared, and made a great sensation, being condemned as
immoral, and burnt by the hangman. Helvétius subsequently travelled in
England and Germany, dying in 1771. A second treatise, _De l'Homme,_
which appeared posthumously, is much inferior to _De l'Esprit_ in
literary merit. It was even more fiercely assailed than its predecessor,
and Diderot himself, the leader of the more active section of the
_philosophe_ party, wrote an elaborate refutation of it, which, however,
has only recently been published. The book _De l'Esprit_ is wanting in
depth, and too anecdotic in style for a serious work of philosophy,
though this very characteristic makes it all the more amusing reading.
It endeavours to make out a theory of morals based on what is called the
selfish system; and it was the naked manner in which this selfish system
of ethics, and the materialist metaphysics which it implies, are
manifested in the book which gave occasion to its ill repute. As a mere
work of literature, however, it is well, and in parts even brilliantly
written, and amid much that is desultory, inconclusive, and even
demonstrably unsound, views of extreme shrewdness and originality on
social abuses and inconsistencies are to be found.

[Sidenote: Système de la Nature.]

None of the writers hitherto mentioned made open profession of atheism,
and it is doubtful whether even Diderot deserves the appellation of a
consistent atheist. There was, however, a large anti-theistic school
among the _philosophes_, which increased in numbers and strength towards
the outbreak of the Revolution. The most striking work by far of this
school (which included Damilaville, Naigeon, and a few other names of no
great distinction in literature) was the _Système de la Nature_, which
appeared in 1770. This remarkable book, which even Voltaire and
Frederick II. set themselves seriously to refute, contains a complete
materialist system in metaphysics and theology. It represents the
existence of God as a mere creation of the superstition of men, unable
to assign a cause for the evils under which they suffer, and inventing a
supernatural entity to satisfy themselves. The book (to consider its
literary style only) is extremely unequal, passages of remarkable vigour
alternating with long and dreary tracts of inconclusive and monotonous
declamation. It appeared under the name of a dead man, Mirabaud, a
person of some slight and chiefly official name in science and letters.
It is, however, believed, if not certainly known, to be the work of the
Baron d'Holbach (who unquestionably wrote various other books of a
similar tendency), with the assistance of divers of his friends, and
especially of Diderot. The _Système_ is a very singular production,
animated by a kind of fanatical, and in parts almost poetical aspiration
after the annihilation of all supernatural belief, which is hardly to be
found elsewhere except in Lucretius. It had great influence, though
that influence was one of repulsion as well as of conversion, and it may
be said to be, up to the present day, the furthest step taken in the
direction of philosophical as opposed to political Nihilism. It should,
however, be observed that in parts there is a strong political tinge
observable in it.

[Sidenote: Condillac.]

In all this century of so-called philosophy, France possessed hardly
more than one really eminent and considerable metaphysician. This was
Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, brother of the Abbé de Mably, who was born
in 1715, and died in 1780. Condillac himself was an abbé, and possessing
a sufficient benefice, he lived for the most part quietly upon it, and
took no part in the political, or even the literary life of the times.
In 1746 he published his _Essai sur l'Origine des Connoissances
Humaines_; in 1749 his _Traité des Systèmes_, a work critical rather
than constructive; and in 1754 the _Traité des Sensations_, his
principal work, which completes his theory. The influence of Locke was
the most powerful single influence in the _philosophe_ movement of
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 Chambéry, 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
_Considérations 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'Église Gallicane_, and the unfinished
_Soirées de St. Pétersbourg_. 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 _Soirées de St. Pétersbourg_, 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 Condé'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 _Législation 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