[Sidenote: Voltaire.]
The three examples which have been chosen of the masculine letter-writing of the period are of somewhat wider range. Mademoiselle a.s.se and Mademoiselle de Lespina.s.se show in various forms the amiable weaknesses of womankind, Madame du Deffand its unamiable strength. The letters of Voltaire, of Diderot, and of the Abbe Galiani are not so typical of a s.e.x, 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 circ.u.mstances require. Partial critics have contended that the singular quality of Voltaire"s genius might be sufficiently exemplified from his letters, if no other doc.u.ments 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 Abbe 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 n.o.ble 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 cla.s.sical archaeology, 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 dest.i.tute 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 cla.s.ses (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 const.i.tutes 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 cla.s.s, and more of it by men who, from whatever cla.s.s they sprang, were deeply interested in social, economical, and political problems, it is free from that ignoring of any life and cla.s.s except that of the n.o.bility 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, Pet.i.tot, 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. Barriere 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 princ.i.p.al 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 compet.i.tor.
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 _Pensee_, 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 inst.i.tution of official _eloges_, p.r.o.nounced 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 Prevost, 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 Bruyere, and the management of Vise and Thomas Corneille.
Towards the middle and end of the period, the _Gazette de France_, under the management of Suard, held the princ.i.p.al place with a somewhat higher aim; and of non-official publications the Jesuit _Journal de Trevoux_ and the anti-_philosophe Annee Litteraire_ of Freron 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 _precieux_, 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, ill.u.s.trated better than Fontenelle the saying that "no man was ever written down except by himself." He was the b.u.t.t of the four most dangerous satirists of his time--Racine, Boileau, La Bruyere, 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 _Caracteres_, 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 Academie Francaise. His _eloges_ and his academic essays generally were highly popular. But his chief single works are the famous _Entretien sur la Pluralite 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 Siecle de Louis XIV. to the very hottest period of the Encyclopaedist 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 Bruyere 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 att.i.tude 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 _Ines 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 s.p.a.ce 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" princ.i.p.al work is an _Introduction a 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 Moliere 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 a 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 flattes d"agir, de galoper un cheval," whereupon his censor annotates "neglige. 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 heros 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 Encyclopaedia, willing to a.s.sist 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 p.r.o.nounced 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 Encyclopaedists, 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 Crebillon and Marivaux. He also wrote on grammar, but some of his best work consists of short academic essays, and of a moral study called _Considerations 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 cla.s.s is Jean Francois Marmontel, one of the most eminent professional men of letters of the second cla.s.s. Marmontel"s moral tales, his _Belisaire_, 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 _Belisaire_. He had contributed almost all the minor articles on literary subjects to the Encyclopaedia, and these were collected and published as _elements de Litterature_ in 1787. He died in 1799. The _elements de Litterature_ are, with the _Cours de Litterature_ 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 circ.u.mstances of their original form, deal with a vast number of subjects. The style is for the most part simple and good, dest.i.tute 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 a.s.sumption that Racine, Boileau (though he was at first recalcitrant to Boileau, and had to be admonished by Voltaire that _ca porte malheur_), and their contemporaries are infallible models, and in the application of this principle to all other nations. The pa.s.sion 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 Moliere, 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 "cla.s.sical" 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 College d"Harcourt, and, after the mishap of being imprisoned for a libel, obtained new success at the Academy compet.i.tions. 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 princ.i.p.al critical work is his _Cours de Litterature_, 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 pa.s.sages 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 _eloges_, _Memoires_, _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 Abbe Guenee, who devoted himself to exposing Voltaire"s numerous slips in erudition in his _Lettres de Quelques Juifs_, and that of the Abbe Bergier, who is chiefly noteworthy as having held the singular post of official refuter of the Encyclopaedists, in virtue of which appointment he received two thousand _livres_ per annum from the General a.s.sembly of the clergy for sixteen years. He wrote with a.s.siduity, but was not read, and three years before the Revolution he lost his annuity, which the a.s.sembly 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 Abbe Guenee, 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: Freron.]
A bitter personal opponent of La Harpe, and a famous man in literary history, was Freron. Elie Catherine Freron 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 t.i.tle (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 t.i.tle, and at last, in 1754, became the celebrated _Annee Litteraire_, 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"ecossaise_, in which Freron was caricatured under the t.i.tle Frelon (hornet). Every effort was made by the Encyclopaedists (who were not in the least tolerant in practice) to procure the suppression of the _Annee_. But Freron 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. Freron, 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"ecossaise_ itself.
Two other adversaries of Voltaire who deserve notice as literary critics were the Abbe 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 Freron, 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 _ecossaise_ 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 cla.s.sics, 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 princ.i.p.al 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 _eloges_, 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 unbia.s.sed judgment enabled him to estimate authors so different as (for instance) Ma.s.sillon and Marivaux with singular felicity. But the greatest of the Encyclopaedists 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 antic.i.p.ated 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 cla.s.s 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 aesthetics; 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, a.s.sisted 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 a.s.sociations 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 ill.u.s.trated by examples not quite so happy as his precepts.
This theory involved the practical subst.i.tution 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 _sensibilite_, 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 aesthetic 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, pa.s.sion, truth, vividness, and variety of sentiment.