The school of scepticism was represented by the Jesuit Hardouin, who doubted the authenticity of all records of the past except those of his own numismatic treasures. Questions as to the principles of historical cert.i.tude occupied the Academy of Inscriptions during many sittings from 1720 onwards, and produced a body of important studies. While the Physiocrats were endeavouring to demonstrate that there is a natural order in social circ.u.mstances, a philosophy of history, which bound the ages together, was developed in the writings of Montesquieu and Turgot, if not of Voltaire. The _Esprit des Lois_, the _Essai sur les Moeurs_, and Turgot"s discourses, delivered in 1750 at the Sorbonne, contributed in different degrees and ways towards a new and profounder conception of the life of societies or of humanity. By Turgot for the first time the idea of progress was accepted as the ruling principle of history. It cannot be denied that, as regards the sciences of inorganic nature, he more than foreshadowed Comte"s theory of the three states, theological, metaphysical, and positive, through which the mind of humanity is alleged to have travelled.
In the second half of the century, history tended to become doctrinaire, aggressive, declamatory--a pamphlet in the form of treatise or narrative. Morelly wrote in the interest of socialistic ideas, which correspond to those of modern collectivism. Mably, inspired at first by enthusiasm for the ancient republics, advanced to a communistic creed. Condorcet, as the century drew towards a close, bringing together the ideas of economists and historians, traced human progress through the past, and uttered ardent prophecies of human perfectibility in the future.
II
Poetry other than dramatic grew in the eighteenth century upon a shallow soil. The more serious and the more ardent mind of the time was occupied with science, the study of nature, the study of society, philosophical speculation, the criticism of religion, of government, and of social arrangements. The old basis of belief upon which reposed the great art of the preceding century had given way. The a.n.a.lytic intellect distrusted the imagination. The conventions of a brilliant society were unfavourable to the contemplative mood of high poetry.
The tyranny of the "rules" remained when the enthusiasm which found guidance and a safeguard in the rules had departed. The language itself had lost in richness, variety, harmony, and colour; it was an admirable instrument for the intellect, but was less apt to render sensations and pa.s.sions; when employed for the loftier purposes of art it tended to the oratorical, with something of over-emphasis and strain. The contention of La Motte-Houdart that verse denaturalises and deforms ideas, expresses the faith of the time, and La Motte"s own cold and laboured odes did not tend to refute his theory.
Chaulieu (1639-1720), the "poete de la bonne compagnie," an anacreontic senior, patriarch of pleasure, survived the cla.s.sical century, and sang his songs of facile, epicurean delights; his friend La Fare (1644-1712) survived, but slept and ate more than a songster should. Anthony Hamilton (1646?-1720) wrote graceful verses, and in his brilliant _Memoires de la Vie du Comte de Gramont_ became the historian of the amorous intrigues of the court of Charles II.
Jean-Baptiste Rousseau (1670-1741), who in the days of Mme. de Maintenon"s authority had in his sacred _Cantates_ been pious by command, recompensed himself by retailing unbecoming epigrams--and for epigram he had a genuine gift--to the Society of the Temple. He manufactured odes with skill in the mechanism of verse, and carefully secured the fine disorder required in that form of art by fact.i.tious enthusiasm and the abuse of mythology and allegory. When Rousseau died, Lefranc de Pompignan mourned for "le premier chantre du monde,"
reborn as the Orpheus of France, in a poem which alone of Lefranc"s numerous productions--and by virtue of two stanzas--has not that sanct.i.ty ascribed to them by Voltaire, the sanct.i.ty which forbids any one to touch them. Why name their fellows and successors in the eighteenth-century art of writing poems without poetry?
Louis Racine (1692-1763), son of the author of _Athalie_, in his versified discourses on _La Grace_ and _La Religion_ was devout and edifying, but with an edification which promotes slumber. If a poet in sympathy with the philosophers desired to edify, he described the phenomena of nature as Saint-Lambert (1716-1803) did in his _Saisons_--"the only work of our century," Voltaire a.s.sured the author, "which will reach posterity." To describe meant to draw out the inventory of nature"s charms with an eye not on the object but on the page of the Encyclopaedia, and to avoid the indecency of naming anything in direct and simple speech. The _Seasons_ of Saint-Lambert were followed by the _Months_ (_Mois_) of Roucher (1745-94)--"the most beautiful poetic shipwreck of the century," said the malicious Rivarol--and by the _Jardins_ of Delille (1738-1813). When Delille translated the _Georgics_ he was saluted by Voltaire as the Abbe Virgil.[1] The _salons_ heard him with rapture recite his verses as from the tripod of inspiration. He was the favourite of Marie-Antoinette. Aged and blind, he was a third with Homer and Milton.
In death they crowned his forehead, and for three days the mourning crowd gazed on all that remained of their great poet. And yet Delille"s _Jardins_ is no better than a patchwork of carpet-gardening, in which the flowers are theatrical paper-flowers. If anything lives from the descriptive poetry of the eighteenth century, it is a few detached lines from the writings of Lemierre.
[Footnote 1: Or was this Rivarol"s ironical jest?]
The successor of J.-B. Rousseau in the grand ode was ecouchard Lebrun (1729-1807), rival of Pindar. All he wanted to equal Pindar was some forgetfulness of self, some warmth, some genuine enthusiasm, some harmony, a touch of genius; a certain dignity of imagination he exhibits in his best moments. If we say that he honoured Buffon and was the friend of Andre Chenier, we have said in his praise that which gives him the highest distinction; yet it may be added that if he often falsified the ode, he, like Rousseau, excelled in epigram. It was not the great lyric but _le pet.i.t lyrisme_ which blossomed and ran to seed in the thin poetic soil. The singers of fragile loves and trivial pleasures are often charming, and as often they are merely frivolous or merely depraved. Grecourt; Piron; Bernard, the curled and powdered Anacreon; Bernis, Voltaire"s "Babet la Bouquetiere,"
King Frederick"s poet of "sterile abundance"; Dorat, who could flutter at times with an airy grace; Bertin, born in the tropics, and with the heat of the senses in his verse; Parny, an estray in Paris from the palms and fountains of the Isle Bourbon, the "dear Tibullus" of Voltaire--what a swarm of b.u.t.terflies, soiled or shining!
If two or three poets deserve to be distinguished from the rest, one is surely JEAN-BAPTISTE-LOUIS GRESSET (1709-77), whose parrot _Vert-Vert_, instructed by the pious Sisters, demoralised by the boatmen of the Loire, still edifies and scandalises the lover of happy badinage in verse; one is the young and unfortunate NICOLAS-JOSEPH-LAURENT GILBERT (1751-80), less unfortunate and less gifted than the legend makes him, yet luckless enough and embittered enough to become the satirist of Academicians and philosophers and the society which had scorned his muse; and the third is JEAN-PIERRE CLARIS DE FLORIAN (1755-94), the amiable fabulist, who, lacking La Fontaine"s lyric genius, fine harmonies, and penetrating good sense, yet can tell a story with pleasant ease, and draw a moral with gentle propriety.
In every poetic form, except comedy, that he attempted, Voltaire stands high among his contemporaries; they give us a measure of his range and excellence. But the two greatest poets of the eighteenth century wrote in prose. Its philosophical poet was the naturalist Buffon; its supreme lyrist was the author of _La Nouvelle Helose_.
III
In the history of French tragedy only one name of importance--that of Crebillon--is to be found in the interval between Racine and Voltaire. Campistron feebly, Danchet formally and awkwardly, imitated Racine; d.u.c.h.e followed him in sacred tragedy; La Grange-Chancel (author of the _Philippiques_, directed against the Regent) followed him in tragedies on cla.s.sical subjects. If any piece deserves to be distinguished above the rest, it is the _Manlius_ (1698) of La Fosse, a work--suggestive rather of Corneille than of Racine--which was founded on the _Venice Preserved_ of Otway. The art of Racine languished in inferior hands. The eighteenth century, while preserving its form, thought to reanimate it by the provocatives of scenic decoration and more rapid and more convulsive action.
PROSPER JOLYOT DE CReBILLON (1674-1762), a diligent reader of seventeenth-century romances, transported the devices of romance, its horrors, its pathetic incidents, its disguises, its surprises, its discoveries, into the theatre, and subst.i.tuted a tragedy of violent situations for the tragedy of character. His _Rhadamiste et Zen.o.bie_ (1711), which has an air of Corneillean grandeur and heroism, notwithstanding a plot so complicated that it is difficult to follow, was received with unmeasured enthusiasm. To be atrocious within the rules was to create a new and thrilling sensation. Torrents of tears flowed for the unhappy heroine of La Motte"s _Ines de Castro_ (1723), secretly married to the Prince of Portugal, and pardoned only when the fatal poison is in her veins. Voltaire"s effort to renovate cla.s.sical tragedy was that of a writer who loved the theatre, first for its own sake, afterwards as an instrument for influencing public opinion, who conceived tragedy aright as the presentation of character and pa.s.sion seen in action. His art suffered from his extreme facility, from his inability (except it be in _Zare_) to attain dramatic self-detachment, from the desire to conquer his spectators in the readiest ways, by striking situations, or, at a later date, by the rhetoric of philosophical doctrine and sentiment.
There is no one, with all his faults, to set beside Voltaire. Piron and Gresset are remembered, not by their tragedies, but each by a single comedy. Marmontel"s Memoirs live; his tales have a faded glory; as for his tragedies, the ingenious stage asp which hissed as the curtain fell on his _Cleopatre_, was a sound critic of their mediocrity. Lemierre, with some theatrical talent, wrote ill; as the love of spectacle grew, he permitted his William Tell to shoot the apple, and his widow of Malabar to die in flames upon the stage.
Saurin in _Spartacus_ (1760) declaimed and dissertated in the manner of Voltaire. De Belloy at a lucky moment showed, in his _Siege de Calais_ (1765), that rhetorical patriotism had survived the Seven Years" War; he was supposed to have founded that national, historic drama which the President Henault had projected; but with the _Siege de Calais_ the national drama rose and fell. Laharpe (1739-1803) was the latest writer who compounded cla.s.sical tragedy according to the approved recipe. In the last quarter of the century Shakespeare became known to the French public through the translation of Letourneur.
Before that translation began to appear, JEAN-FRANcOIS DUCIS (1733-1816), the patron of whose imagination was his "Saint Guillaume" of Stratford, though he knew no English, had in a fashion presented Hamlet (1769) and Romeo and Juliet to his countrymen; King Lear, Macbeth, King John, Oth.e.l.lo (1792) followed. But Ducis came a generation too soon for a true Shakespearian rendering; simple and heroic in his character as a man, he belonged to an age of philosophers and sentimentalists, an age of "virtue" and "nature." Shakespeare"s translation is as strange as that of his own Bottom. Ophelia is the daughter of King Claudius; the Queen dies by her own hand; old Montague is a Montague-Ugolino who has devoured his sons; Malcolm is believed to be a mountaineer"s child; Lear is borne on the stage, sleeping on a bed of roses, that he may behold a sunrise; Hedelmone (Desdemona) is no longer Oth.e.l.lo"s wife; Iago disappears; Desdemona"s handkerchief is not among the properties; and Juliet"s lark is voiceless. Eighteenth-century tragedy is indeed a city of tombs.
Comedy made some amends. Before the appearance of Regnard, the actor Baron, Moliere"s favourite pupil, had given a lively play--_L"Homme a bonne Fortune_ (1686). JEAN-FRANcOIS REGNARD (1655-1709) escaped from his corsair captors and slavery at Algiers, made his sorry company of knaves and fools acceptable by virtue of inexhaustible gaiety, bright fantasy, and the liveliest of comic styles. His _Joueur_ (1696) is a scapegrace, possessed by the pa.s.sion of gaming, whose love of Angelique is a devotion to her dowry, but he will console himself for lost love by another throw of the dice. His _Legataire Universel_, greedy, old, and ailing, is surrounded by pitiless rogues, yet the curtain falls on a general reconciliation. Regnard"s morals may be doubtful, but his mirth is unquestionable.
Dancourt (1661-1725), with a far less happy style, had a truer power of observation, and as quick an instinct for theatrical effects; he exhibits in the _Chevalier a la Mode_ and the _Bourgeoises a la Mode_, if not with exact fidelity, at least in telling caricature, the struggle of cla.s.ses in the society around him, wealth ambitious for rank, rank prepared to sell itself for wealth. The same spirit of cynical gaiety inspires the _Double Veuvage_ of Charles Riviere Dufresny (1655?-1724), where husband and wife, each disappointed in false tidings of the other"s death, exhibit transports of feigned joy on meeting, and a.s.sist in the marriage of their respective lovers, each to accomplish the vexation of the other. Among such plays as these the _Turcaret_ (1709) of Lesage appears as the creation of a type, and a type which verifies itself as drawn with a realism powerful and unfaltering.
In striking contrast with Lesage"s bold and bitter satire are the comedies of Marivaux, delicate indeed in observation of life and character, skilled in their exploration of the byways of the heart, brilliant in fantasy, subtle in sentiment, lightly touched by the sensuality of the day. Philippe Nericault Destouches (1680-1754) had the ambition to revive the comedy of character, and by its means to read moral lessons on the stage; unfortunately what he lacked was comic power. In his most celebrated piece, _Le Glorieux_, he returns to the theme treated by Dancourt of the struggle between the ruined n.o.blesse and the aspiring middle cla.s.s. Pathos and something of romance are added to comedy.
Already those tendencies which were to produce the so-called _comedie larmoyante_ were at work. Piron (1689-1773), who regarded it with hostility, undesignedly a.s.sisted in its creation; _Les Fils Ingrats_, named afterwards _L"ecole des Peres_, given in 1728, the story of a too generous father of ungrateful children, a play designed for mirth, was in fact fitter to draw tears than to excite laughter.
Piron"s special gift, however, was for satire. In _La Metromanie_ he smiles at the folly of the aspirant poet with all his cherished illusions; yet young Damis with his folly, the innocent error of a generous spirit, wins a sympathy to which the duller representatives of good sense can make no claim. It is satire also which gives whatever comic force it possesses to the one comedy of Gresset that is not forgotten: _Le Mechant_ (1747), a disloyal comrade, would steal the heart of his friend"s beloved; soubrette and valet conspire to expose the traitor; but Cleon, who loves mischief in the spirit of sport, though unmasked, is little disconcerted. Brilliant in lines and speeches, _Le Mechant_ is defective in its composition as a whole.
The decline in a feeling for composition, for art, for the severity of outline, was accompanied by a development of the emotional or sentimental element in drama. As sensibility was quickened, and wealth and ease increased, little things came to be felt as important.
The middle cla.s.s advanced in prosperity and power. Why should emperors and kings, queens and princesses occupy the stage? Why neglect the joys and griefs of every-day domestic life? If "nature" and "virtue"
were to be honoured, why not seek them here? Man, the new philosophy taught, is essentially good; human nature is of itself inclined to virtue; if it strays through force of circ.u.mstance into vice or folly, should not its errors be viewed with sympathy, with tenderness? Thus comedy grew serious, and tragedy put off its exalted airs; the genius of tragedy and the genius of comedy were wedded, and the _comedie larmoyante_, which might be named more correctly the bourgeois drama, was born of this union.
In the plays of NIVELLE DE LA CHAUSeE (1692-1754) the new type is already formed. The relations of wife and husband, of father and child, form the theme of all his plays. In _Melanide_, father and son, unrecognised, are rivals in love; the wife and mother, supposed to be dead, is discovered; the husband returns to her arms, and is reconciled to his son. It is the victory of nature and of innate goodness; comic intention and comic power are wholly absent. La Chausee"s morals are those of an optimist; but those modern domestic tragedies, the ethics of which do not err by over-sanguine views of human nature, may trace their ancestry to _Melanide_.
For such serious comedy or bourgeois drama the appropriate vehicle, so Diderot maintained, is prose. Diderot, among his many gifts, did not possess a talent for dramatic writing. But as a critic his influence was considerable. Midway between tragedy and comedy he perceived a place for the serious drama; to right and left, on either side of the centre, were s.p.a.ces for forms approximating, the one to tragedy, the other to comedy. The hybrid species of tragi-comedy he wholly condemned; each genre, as he conceived it, is a unity containing its own principle of life. The function of the theatre is less to represent character fully formed than to study the natural history of character, to exhibit the environments which determine character. Its purpose is to moralise life, and the chief means of moralisation is that effusive sensibility which is the outflow of the inherent goodness of human nature.
Diderot attempted to justify his theory by examples, and only proved his own incapacity as a writer for the stage. His friend SEDAINE (1719-97) was more fortunate. Of the bourgeois drama of the eighteenth century, _Le Philosophe sans le savoir_ alone survives. It is little more than a domestic anecdote rendered dramatic, but it has life and reality. The merchant Vanderk"s daughter is to be married; but on the same day his son, resenting an insult to his father, must expose his life in a duel. Old Antoine, the intendant, would take his young master"s place of danger; Antoine"s daughter, Victorine, half-unawares has given her heart to the gallant duellist. Hopes and fears, joy and grief contend in the Vanderk habitation. Sedaine made a true capture of a little province of nature. When Mercier (1740-1814) tried to write in the same vein, his "nature" was that of declamatory sentiment imposed upon trivial incidents.
Beaumarchais, in his earlier pieces, was tearful and romantic; happily he repented him of his lugubrious sentiment, and restored to France its old gaiety in the _Barbier de Seville_ and the inimitable _Mariage de Figaro_; but amid the mirth of _Figaro_ can be heard the detonation of approaching revolutionary conflict.
IV
The history of the novel in the eighteenth century corresponds with the general movement of ideas; the novel begins as art, and proceeds to propagandism. ALAIN-RENe LESAGE, born at Sarzeau, near Vannes, in 1668, belongs as much to the seventeenth as to the eighteenth century. His life of nearly eighty years (died 1747) was the honourable life of a bourgeois, who was also a man of genius, and who maintained his own independence and that of his wife and children by the steadfast diligence of his pen. He was no pa.s.sionate reformer, no preacher of ideas; he observed life and human nature with shrewd common-sense, seeing men in general as creatures in whom good and evil are mixed; his imagination combined and vivified all he had observed; and he recorded the results of his study of the world in a style admirable for naturalness and ease, though these were not attained without the careful practice of literary art.
From translations for the readers of fiction and for the theatre, he advanced to free adaptations, and from these to work which may be called truly original. Directed by the Abbe de Lyonne to Spanish literature, he endeavoured in his early plays to preserve what was brilliant and ingenious in the works of Spanish dramatists, and to avoid what was strained and extravagant. In his _Crispin Rival de son Maitre_ (1707), in which the roguish valet aspires to carry off his master"s betrothed and her fortune, he borrows only the idea of Mendoza"s play; the conduct of the action, the dialogue, the characters are his own. His prose story of the same year, _Le Diable Boiteux_, owes but little to the suggestion derived from Guevara; it is, in fact, more nearly related to the _Caracteres_ of La Bruyere; when Asmodeus discloses what had been hidden under the house-roofs of the city, a succession of various human types are presented, and, as in the case of La Bruyere, contemporaries attempted to identify these with actual living persons.
In his remarkable satiric comedy _Turcaret_, and in his realistic novel _Gil Blas_, Lesage enters into full possession of his own genius.
_Turcaret, ou le Financier_, was completed early in 1708; the efforts of the financiers to hinder its performance served in the end to enhance its brief and brilliant success. The pitiless ama.s.ser of wealth, Turcaret, is himself the dupe of a coquette, who in her turn is the victim of a more contemptible swindler. Lesage, presenting a fragment of the manners and morals of his day, keeps us in exceedingly ill company, but the comic force of the play lightens the oppression of its repulsive characters. It is the first masterpiece of the eighteenth-century _comedie de moeurs_.
Much of Lesage"s dramatic work was produced only for the hour or the moment--pieces thrown off, sometimes with brilliance and wit, for the _Theatres de la Foire_, where farces, vaudevilles, and comic opera were popular. They served to pay for the bread of his household. His great comedy, however, a comedy in a hundred acts, is the story of _Gil Blas_. Its composition was part of his employment during many years; the first volumes appeared in 1715, the last volume in 1735.
The question of a Spanish original for the story is settled--there was none; but from Spanish fiction and from Spanish history Lesage borrowed what suited his purpose, without in any way compromising his originality. To the picaresque tales (and among these may be noted a distant precursor of _Gil Blas_ in the _Francion_ of Charles Sorel) he added his own humanity, and in place of a series of vulgar adventures we are given a broad picture of social life; the comedy of manners and intrigue grows, as the author proceeds, into a comedy of character, and to this something of the historical novel is added.
The unity of the book is found in the person of Gil Blas himself: he is far from being a hero, but he is capable of receiving all impressions; he is an excellent observer of life, his temper is bright, he is free from ill-nature; we meet in him a pleasant companion, and accompany him with sympathy through the amusing Odyssey of his varied career.
As a moralist Lesage is the reverse of severe, but he is far from being base. "All is easy and good-humoured," wrote Sir Walter Scott, "gay, light, and lively; even the cavern of the robbers is illuminated with a ray of that wit with which Lesage enlightens his whole narrative.
It is a work which renders the reader pleased with himself and with mankind, where faults are placed before him in the light of follies rather than vices, and where misfortunes are so interwoven with the ludicrous that we laugh in the very act of sympathising with them."
In the earlier portion incidents preponderate over character; in the close, some signs of the writer"s fatigue appear. Of Lesage"s other tales and translations, _Le Bachelier de Salamanque_ (1736) takes deservedly the highest rank.
With PIERRE CARLET DE CHAMBLAIN DE MARIVAUX (1688-1763) the novel ceases to be primarily a study of manners or a romance of adventures; it becomes an a.n.a.lysis of pa.s.sions to which manners and adventures are subordinate. As a journalist he may be said to have proceeded from Addison; by his novels he prepared the way for Richardson and for Rousseau. His early travesties of Homer and of Fenelon"s _Telemaque_ seem to indicate a tendency towards realism, but Marivaux"s realism took the form not so much of observation of society in its breadth and variety as of psychological a.n.a.lysis. If he did not know the broad highway of the heart, he traversed many of its secret paths. His was a feminine spirit, delicate, fragile, curious, unconcerned about general ideas; and yet, while untiring in his anatomy of the pa.s.sions, he was not truly pa.s.sionate; his heart may be said to have been in his head.
In the opening of the eighteenth century there was a revival of preciosity, which Moliere had never really killed, and in the _salon_ of Madame de Lambert, Marivaux may have learned something of his metaphysics of love and something of his subtleties or affectations of style. He antic.i.p.ates the sensibility of the later part of the century; but sensibility with Marivaux is not profound, and it is relieved by intellectual vivacity. His conception of love has in it not a little of mere gallantry. Like later eighteenth-century writers, he at once exalts "virtue," and indulges his fancy in a licence which does not tend towards good morals or manners. His _Vie de Marianne_ (1731-41), which occupied him during many years, is a picture of social life, and a study, sometimes infinitely subtle, of the emotions of his heroine; her genius for coquetry is finely allied to her maiden pride; the hypocrite, M. de Climal--old angel fallen--is a new variety of the family of Tartufe. _Le Paysan Parvenu_ (1735-36), which tells of the successes of one whom women favour, is on a lower level of art and of morals. Both novels were left unfinished; and while both attract, they also repel, and finally weary the reader.[2] Their influence was considerable in converting the romance of adventures into the romance of emotional incident and a.n.a.lysis.
[Footnote 2: The twelfth part of _Marianne_ is by Madam Riccoboni.
Only five parts of the _Paysan_ are by Marivaux.]
The work of Marivaux for the stage is more important than his work in prose fiction. His comedy has been described as the tragedy of Racine transposed, with love leading to marriage, not to death. Love is his central theme--sometimes in conflict with self-love--and women are his protagonists. He discovers pa.s.sion in its germ, and traces it through its shy developments. His plays are little romances handled in dramatic fashion; each records some delicate adventure of the heart. He wrote much for the Comedie-Italienne, where he did not suffer from the tyranny of rules and models, and where his graceful fancy had free play. Of his large repertoire, the most admirable pieces are _Le Jeu de l"Amour et du Hasard_ (1730) and _Les Fausses Confidences_ (1732). In the former the heroine and her chambermaid exchange costumes; the hero and his valet make a like exchange; yet love is not misled, and heroine and hero find each other through their disguises. In _Les Fausses Confidences_ the young widow Araminte is won to a second love in spite of her resolve, and becomes the happy victim of her own tender heart and of the devices of her a.s.sailants.
The "marivaudage" of Marivaux is sometimes a refined and novel mode of expressing delicate shades and half-shades of feeling; sometimes an over-refined or over-subtle attempt to express ingenuities of sentiment, and the result is then frigid, pretentious, or pedantic.
No one excelled him in the art, described by Voltaire, of weighing flies" eggs in gossamer scales.
The Abbe A.-F. PReVOST D"EXILES (1697-1763) is remembered by a single tale of rare power and beauty, _Manon Lescaut_, but his work in literature was voluminous and varied. Having deserted his Benedictine monastery in 1728, he led for a time an irregular and wandering life in England and Holland; then returning to Paris, he gained a living by swift and ceaseless production for the booksellers.
In his journal, _Le Pour et le Contre_, he did much to inform his countrymen respecting English literature, and among his translations are those of Richardson"s _Pamela_, _Sir Charles Grandison_, and _Clarissa Harlowe_. Many of his novels are melodramatic narratives of romantic adventure, having a certain kinship to our later romances of Anne Radcliffe and Matthew Gregory Lewis, in which horror and pity, blood and tears abound. Sometimes, however, when he writes of pa.s.sion, we feel that he is engaged in no sport of the imagination, but transcribing the impulsive speech of his own tumultuous heart. The _Memoires d"un Homme de Qualite_, _Cleveland_, _Le Doyen de Killerine_ are tragic narratives, in which love is the presiding power.
_Manon Lescaut_, which appeared in 1731, as an episode of the first of these, is a tale of fatal and irresistible pa.s.sion. The heroine is divided in heart between her mundane tastes for luxury and her love for the Chevalier des Grieux. He, knowing her inconstancy and infirmity, yet cannot escape from the tyranny of the spell which has subdued him; his whole life is absorbed and lost in his devotion to Manon, and he is with her in the American wilds at the moment of her piteous death. The admirable literary style of _Manon Lescaut_ is unfelt and disappears, so directly does it bring us into contact with the motions of a human heart.
In the second half of the eighteenth century, philosophy, on the one hand, invaded the novel and the short tale; on the other hand it was invaded by a flood of sentiment. An irritated and irritating sensuality could accommodate itself either to sentiment or to philosophy. Voltaire"s tales are, in narrative form, criticisms of belief or opinion which scintillate with ironic wit. His disciple, Marmontel, would "render virtue amiable" in his _Contes Moraux_ (1761), and cure the ravage of pa.s.sion with a canary"s song. His more ambitious _Belisaire_ seems to a modern reader a masterpiece in the _genre ennuyeux_. His _Incas_ is exotic without colour or credibility.
Florian, with little skill, imitated the _Incas_ and _Telemaque_, or was feebly idyllic and conventionally pastoral as a follower of the Swiss Gessner. Restif de la Bretonne could be gross, corrupt, declamatory, sentimental, humanitarian in turns or all together.
Three names are eminent--that of Diderot, who flung his good and evil powers, mingling and fermenting, into his novels as into all else; that of Rousseau, who interpreted pa.s.sion, preached its restraints, depicted the charms of the domestic interior, and presented the glories of external nature in _La Nouvelle Heloise_; that of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, who reaches a hand to Rousseau on the one side, and on the other to Chateaubriand.
CHAPTER II MONTESQUIEU--VAUVENARGUES--VOLTAIRE