A History of French Literature Part 10

Through his personal interest in Mme. Guyon, and his sympathy with her mystical doctrine in religion--one which inculcated complete abnegation of the will, and its replacement by absolute surrender to the Divine love--he came into conflict with Bossuet, and after a fierce war of diplomacy and of pamphlets, in which Fenelon displayed the utmost skill and energy as tactician and dialectician, he received a temperate condemnation from Rome, and submitted. The death of the Dauphin (1711), which left his former pupil heir to the throne, revived Fenelon's hopes of political influence, but in the next year these hopes disappeared with the decease of the young Duc de Bourgogne.

At Cambrai, where he discharged his episcopal duties like a saint and a _grand seigneur_, Fenelon died six months before Louis XIV., in 1715.

"The most original intellect--if we set Pascal aside--of the seventeenth century"--so Fenelon is described by one excellent critic. "Antique and modern," writes his biographer, M. Paul Janet, "Christian and profane, mystical and diplomatic, familiar and n.o.ble, gentle and headstrong, natural and subtle, fascinating the eighteenth century as he had fascinated the seventeenth, believing like a child, and daring as Spinoza, Fenelon is one of the most original figures which the Catholic Church has produced." His first publication was the treatise _De l'education des Filles_ (written 1681, published 1687), composed at the request of his friends the Duc and d.u.c.h.esse de Beauvilliers. It is based on a recognition of the dignity of woman and the duty of a serious effort to form her mind. It honours the reason, opposes severity, would make instruction, as far as possible, a delight, and would exhibit goodness in a gracious aspect; commends object-lessons in addition to book-learning, indicates characteristic feminine failings (yet liveliness of disposition is not regarded as one of these), exhorts to a dignified simplicity in dress. The range of studies recommended is narrow, but for Fenelon's time it was liberal; the book marks an epoch in the history of female education.

For his pupil the Duc de Bourgogne, Fenelon wrote his graceful prose _Fables_ (which also include under that t.i.tle short tales, allegories, and fairy stories), the _Dialogues des Morts_, aiming at the application of moral principles to politics, and his _Telemaque_, named in the first (incomplete) edition _Suite du IVe Livre de l'Odyssee_ (1699). In this, for long the most popular of tales for the young, Fenelon's imaginative devotion to antiquity finds ample expression; it narrates the wanderings of Telemachus in search of his father Ulysses, under the warning guidance and guardians.h.i.+p of Minerva disguised as Mentor. Imitations and borrowings from cla.s.sical authors are freely and skilfully made. It is a poem in prose, a romance of education, designed at once to charm the imagination and to inculcate truths of morals, politics, and religion. The didactic purpose is evident, yet it remains a true work of art, full of grace and colour, occasionally, indeed, languid, but often vivid and forcible.

Fenelon's views on politics were not so much fantastic as those of an idealist. He dreamed of a monarchy which should submit to the control of righteousness; he mourned over the pride and extravagance of the court; he constantly pleaded against wars of ambition; he desired that a powerful and Christian n.o.bility should mediate between the crown and the people; he conceived a system of decentralisation which should give the whole nation an interest in public affairs; in his ecclesiastical views he was Ultramontane rather than Gallican.

These ideas are put forth in his _Direction pour la Conscience d'un Roi_ and the _Plan de Gouvernement_. Louis XIV. suspected the political tendency of _Telemaque_, and caused the printing of the first edition to be suspended. Fenelon has sometimes been regarded as a forerunner of the Revolutionary movement; but he would rather, by ideas in which, as events proved, there may have been something chimerical, have rendered revolution impossible.

Into his controversy with Bossuet he threw himself with a combative energy and a skill in defence and attack that surprise one who knows him only through his _Lettres Spirituelles_, which tend towards the effacement of the will in a union with G.o.d through love. Bossuet pleaded against the dangers for morals and for theology of a false mysticism; Fenelon, against confounding true mysticism with what is false. In his _Traite de l'Existence de Dieu_ he shows himself a bold and subtle thinker: the first part, which is of a popular character, attempts to prove the existence of the Deity by the argument from design in nature and from the reason in man; the second part--of a later date--follows Descartes in metaphysical proofs derived from our idea of an infinite and a perfect being. To his other distinctions Fenelon added that of a literary critic, unsurpa.s.sed in his time, unless it be by Boileau. His _Dialogues sur l'eloquence_ seek to replace the elaborate methods of logical address, crowded with divisions and subdivisions, and supported with a mult.i.tude of quotations, by a style simple, natural, and delicate in its fervency.

The admirable _Lettre a l'Academie_, Fenelon's latest gift to literature, states the case of the ancients against the moderns, and of the moderns against the ancients, with an attempt at impartiality, but it is evident that the writer's love was chiefly given to his favourite cla.s.sical authors; simplicity and natural beauty attracted him more than ingenuity or wit or laboured brilliance. He feared that the language was losing some of its richness and flexibility; he condemns the use of rhyme; he is hardly just to Racine, but honours himself by his admiration of Moliere. In dealing with historical writings he recognises the importance of the study of governments, inst.i.tutions, and social life, and at the same time values highly a personal, vivid, direct manner, and a feeling for all that is real, concrete, and living. To his rare gifts of intellect and of the soul was added an inexpressible personal charm, in which something that was almost feminine was united with the reserved power and authority of a man.

CHAPTER VIII TRANSITION TO THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

The spiritual life was interpreted from within by Fenelon. The facts of the moral world, as seen in society, were studied, a.n.a.lysed, and portrayed by La Bruyere and Saint-Simon.

JEAN DE LA BRUYeRE (1645-96), a Parisian of the _bourgeoisie_, appointed preceptor in history to the grandson of the great Conde, saw with the keen eyes of a disenchanted observer the spectacle of seventeenth-century society. In 1688, appended to his translation of the Characters of Theophrastus, appeared his only important work, _Les Caracteres ou les Moeurs de ce Siecle_; revised and enlarged editions followed, until the ninth was published in 1696. "I restore to the public," he wrote, "what the public lent me." In a series of sixteen chapters, each consisting of detached paragraphs, his studies of human life and of the social environment are presented in the form of maxims, reflections, observations, portraits. For the maxims a recent model lay before him in the little volume of La Rochefoucauld; portraits, for which the romances of Mlle. de Scudery had created a taste, had been exhibited in a collection formed by Mlle. de Montpensier--the growth of her _salon_--in collaboration with Segrais (_Divers Portraits_, 1659). Aware of his mastery as a painter of character, La Bruyere added largely to the number of his portraits in the later editions. Keys, professing to identify his character-sketches with living persons, enhanced the interest excited by the work; but in many instances La Bruyere aims at presenting a type rather than an individual, a type which had been individualised by his observation of actual persons.

A profound or an original thinker he was not. Incapable of employing base means to attain worldly success, his honourable failure left a certain bitterness in his spirit; he regarded the life around him as a looker-on, who enjoyed the spectacle, and enjoyed also to note the infirmities of those who took part in the game which he had declined. He is neither a determined pessimist, nor did he see realities through a roseate veil; he neither thinks basely of human nature nor in a heroic fas.h.i.+on: he studies its weakness with a view, he declares, to reformation, but actually, perhaps, more in the way of an observer than of a moral teacher. He is before all else a "naturalist," a naturalist with a sufficient field for investigation, though the life of the provinces and that of the fields (save in their more obvious aspect of mournful toil) lie beyond his sphere. The value of his criticisms of men and manners arises partly from the fact that he is not pledged to a system, that he can take up various points of view, and express the results of many moods of mind. Now he is severe, and again he is indulgent; now he appears almost a cynic, and presently we find that his heart is tender; now he is grave, and in a moment mirthful; while for every purpose and in every mood he has irony at his command. He divines the working of the pa.s.sions with a fine intelligence, and is a master in noting every outward betrayal or indication of the hidden processes of the heart.

The successive chapters deal with the intellect and authors.h.i.+p, personal merit, women, the heart, society and conversation, the gifts of fortune, the town, the court, men in high station, the King and commonwealth, the nature of man, judgments and criticism, fas.h.i.+on, customs, the pulpit; and under each head are grouped, without formal system, those notes on life and studies of society that had gradually acc.u.mulated in the author's mind. A final chapter, "Des Esprits Forts," expresses a vague spiritual philosophy, which probably was not insincere, and which at least served to commend the mundane portion of his book to pious readers. The special attraction of the whole lies in its variety. A volume merely of maxims would have been too rigid, too oracular for such a versatile spirit as that of La Bruyere. "Different things," he says, "are thought out by different methods, and explained by diverse expressions, it may be by a sentence, an argument, a metaphor or some other figure, a parallel, a simple comparison, a complete fact, a single feature, by description, or by portraiture." His book contains all these, and his style corresponds with the variety of matter and method--a style, as Voltaire justly characterises it, rapid, concise, nervous, picturesque. "Among all the different modes in which a single thought may be expressed," wrote La Bruyere, "only one is correct." To find this exact expression he sometimes over-labours his style, and searches the vocabulary too curiously for the most striking word.

In his desire for animation the periodic structure of sentence yields to one of interruptions, suspensions, and surprises. He is at once a moralist and a virtuoso in the literary art.

The greater part of Saint-Simon's life and the composition of his _Memoires_ belong to the eighteenth century; but his mind was moulded during his early years, and retained its form and lineaments. He may be regarded as a belated representative of the great age of Louis XIV. If he belongs in some degree to the newer age by virtue of his sense that political reform was needed, his designs of political reform were derived from the past rather than pointed towards the future. LOUIS DE ROUVRAY, DUC DE SAINT-SIMON, was born at Versailles in 1675. He cherished the belief that his ancestry could be traced to Charlemagne. His father, a page of Louis XIII., had been named a duke and peer of France in 1635; from his father descended to the son a devotion to the memory of Louis XIII., and a pa.s.sionate attachment to the dignity of his own order.

Saint-Simon's education was narrow, but he acquired some Latin, and was a diligent reader of French history. In 1691 he was presented to the King and was enrolled as a soldier in the musketeers. He purchased by-and-by what we should now call the colonelcy of a cavalry regiment, but was ill-pleased with the system which had transformed a feudal army into one where birth and rank were subjected to official control; and in 1702, when others received promotion and he was pa.s.sed over, he sent in his resignation. Having made a fortunate and happy marriage, Saint-Simon was almost constantly at Versailles until the death of the King, and obtained the most intimate acquaintance with what he terms the mechanics of the court. He had many grievances against Louis XIV., chief among them the insult shown to the n.o.bility in the King's legitimatising his natural offspring; and he justly regarded Madame de Maintenon as his enemy.

The death of the Duc de Bourgogne, to whose party he belonged, was a blow to Saint-Simon's hopes; but the Regent remained his friend.

He helped, on a diplomatic mission to Spain, to negotiate the marriage of Louis XV.; yet still was on fire with indignation caused by the wrongs of the dukes and peers, whom he regarded as ent.i.tled on historical grounds to form the great council of the monarchy, and almost as rightful partners in the supreme power. His political life closed in 1723 with the death of the Regent. He lived in retirement at his chateau of La Ferte-Vidame, sorrowfully surviving his wife and his sons. In Paris, at the age of eighty (1755), Saint-Simon died.

When nineteen years old, reading Ba.s.sompierre's _Memoires_ in a soldier's hour of leisure, he conceived the idea of recording his own experiences, and the _Memoires_ of Saint-Simon were begun. During later years, in the camp or at the court, notes acc.u.mulated in his hands, but the definitive form which they took was not determined until, in his retirement at La Ferte-Vidame, the _Journal_ of Dangeau came into his hands. Dangeau's _Journal_ is dry, colourless, pa.s.sionless, without insight and without art; but it is a well-informed and an exact chronicle, extending over the years from 1684 to 1720. Saint-Simon found it "d'une fadeur a faire vomir"; its servility towards the King and Madame de Maintenon enraged him; but it exhibited facts in an orderly sequence; it might serve as a guide and a clue among his own reminiscences; on the basis of Dangeau's literal transcript of occurrences he might weave his own brilliant recitals and pa.s.sionate presentations of character. Thus Saint-Simon's _Memoires_ came to be written.

He himself saw much, and his eye had a demonic power of observation; nothing escaped his vision, and his pa.s.sions enabled him to penetrate through what he saw to its secret meanings. He had gathered information from those who knew the mysteries of the palace and the court; great persons, court ladies, even valets and waiting-women, had been sought and searched to satisfy his insatiable curiosity.

It is true that the pa.s.sions which often lit up the truth sometimes obscured it; any gossip discreditable to those whom he hated was welcome to him; he confesses that he did not pique himself on his impartiality, and it is certain that he did not always verify details.

Nevertheless he did not consciously falsify facts; he had a sense of the honour of a gentleman; his spirit was serious, and his feeling of duty and of religion was sincere. Without his impetuosity, his violence, his exaggerations, we might not have had his vividness, like that of life itself, his incomparable portraits, more often inspired by hatred than by love, his minuteness and his breadth of style, the phrases which ineffaceably brand his victims, the lyrical outcry of triumph over enemies of his order. His style is the large style of seventeenth-century prose, but alive with words that sparkle and gleam, words sometimes created by himself to express the intensity of his imagination.

The _Memoires_, the final preparation of which was the work of his elder years, cover the period from 1691 to 1723. His ma.n.u.scripts were bequeathed to his cousin, the Bishop of Metz; a lawsuit arose with Saint-Simon's creditors, and in the end the papers were buried among the public archives. Considerable fragments saw the light before the close of the eighteenth century, but it was not until 1829-31 that a true _editio princeps_, substantially correct, was published. The violences and irregularities of Saint-Simon's style offered no obstacle to the admiration of readers at a time when the romantic movement was dominant. He was hailed as the Tacitus of French history, and had his manner something more of habitual concentration the comparison would not be unjust.

The eighteenth century may be said to have begun before the year 1701 with the quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns. If we can speak of any one idea as dominant during the age of the philosophers, it is the idea of human progress. Through an academic disputation that idea emerged to the light. At first a religious question was complicated with a question relating to art; afterwards the religious question was replaced by one of philosophy. As early as 1657, Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin, turned pietist after a youth of licence, maintained in theory, as well as by the examples of his unreadable epic poems, that Christian heroism and Christian faith afforded material for imaginative handling more suitable to a Christian poet than the history and fables of antiquity. Boileau, in the third _chant_ of his _Art Poetique_, replied--the mysteries of the Christian faith are too solemn, too awful, to be tricked out to gratify the fancy.

Desmarets dying, bequeathed his contention to CHARLES PERRAULT (1628-1703), who had burlesqued the _aeneid_, written light and fragile pieces of verse, and occupied himself as a dilettante in patristic and historical studies. In 1687, after various skirmishes between partisans on either side, the quarrel a.s.sumed a new importance.

The King had recovered after a painful operation; it was a moment for gratulation. Perrault, at a sitting of the Academy, read his poem _Le Siecle de Louis le Grand_, in which the revolt against the cla.s.sical tyranny was formulated, and contemporary authors were glorified at the expense of the poets of antiquity. Boileau murmured, indignant; Racine offered ironical commendations; other Academicians patriotically applauded their own praises.

Light-feathered epigrams sped to and fro.

Fontenelle, in his _Discours sur l'eglogue_ and a _Digression sur les Anciens et les Modernes_, widened the field of debate. Were trees in ancient days taller than those in our own fields? If not, why may not modern men equal Homer, Plato, and Demosthenes? "Nothing checks the progress of things, nothing confines the intelligence so much as admiration of the ancients." Genius is bestowed by Nature on every age, but knowledge grows from generation to generation. In his dialogues ent.i.tled the _Parallele des Anciens et des Modernes_ (1688-97), Perrault maintained that in art, in science, in literature, the law of the human mind is a law of progress; that we are the true ancients of the earth, wise with inherited science, more exact in reasoning, more refined in psychological distinctions, raised to a higher plane by Christianity, by the invention of printing, and by the favour of a great monarch. La Fontaine in his charming _epitre_ to Huet, La Bruyere in his _Caracteres_, Boileau in his ill-tempered _Reflexions sur Longin_, rallied the supporters of cla.s.sicism.

Gradually the fires smouldered or were a.s.suaged; Boileau and Perrault were reconciled.

Perrault, if he did not honour antiquity in cla.s.sical forms, paid a homage to popular tradition in his delightful _Contes de ma Mere l'Oie_ (if, indeed, the tales be his), which have been a joy to generations of children. With inferior art, Madame d'Aulnoy added to the golden treasury for the young. When, fifteen or twenty years after the earlier war, a new campaign began between the Ancients and the Moderns, the philosophical discussion of the idea of progress had separated itself from the literary quarrel. But in the tiltings of Lamotte-Houdart, the champion of the moderns, against a well-equipped female knight, the learned Madame Dacier--indignant at Lamotte's _Iliade_, recast in the eighteenth-century taste--a new question was raised, and one of significance for the eighteenth century--that of the relative merits of prose and verse.

Lamotte, a writer of comedy, tragedy, opera, fables, eclogues, odes, maintained that the highest literary form is prose, and he versified none the less. The age was indeed an age of prose--an age when the _salons_ discussed the latest discovery in science, the latest doctrine in philosophy or politics. Its imaginative enthusiasm pa.s.sed over from art to speculation, and what may be called the poetry of the eighteenth century is to be found less in its odes or dramas or elegies than in the hopes and visions which gathered about that idea of human progress emerging from a literary discussion, idle, perhaps, in appearance, but in its inner significance no unfitting inauguration of an era which looked to the future rather than to the past.

BERNARD LE BOVIER DE FONTENELLE (1657-1757), a son of Corneille's sister, whose intervention in the quarrel of Ancients and Moderns turned the discussion in the direction of philosophy, belongs to both the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. In the hundred years which made up his life, there was indeed time for a second Fontenelle to develop from the first. The first Fontenelle, satirised as the Cydias of La Bruyere, "un compose du pedant et du precieux," was an aspirant poet, without vision, without pa.s.sion, who tried to compensate his deficiencies by artificial elegances of style. The origin of hissing is maliciously dated by Racine from his tragedy _Aspar_. His operas fluttered before they fell; his _eglogues_ had not life enough to flutter. The _Dialogues des Morts_ (1683) is a young writer's effort to be clever by paradox, an effort to show his wit by incongruous juxtapositions, and a cynical levelling of great reputations. But there was another Fontenelle, the untrammelled disciple of Descartes, a man of universal interests, pa.s.sionless, but curious for all knowledge, an a.s.similator of new ideas, a dissolver of old beliefs, an intermediary between science and the world of fas.h.i.+on, a discreet insinuator of doubts, who smiled but never condescended to laugh, an intelligence supple, subtle, and untiring.

In 1686 he published his _Entretiens sur la Pluralite des Mondes_, evening conversations between an astronomer and a marchioness, half-scientific, half-gallant, learned coquetries with science, for which he asked no more serious attention than a novel might require, while he communicated the theories of Descartes and the discoveries of Galileo, suggested that science is our safest way to truth, and that truth at best is not absolute but relative to the human understanding. The _Histoire des Oracles_, in which the cargo of Dutch erudition that loaded his original by Van Dale is skilfully lightened, glided to the edge of theological storm. Fontenelle would show that the pagan oracles were not delivered by demons, and did not cease at the coming of Jesus Christ; innocent opinions, but apt to ill.u.s.trate the origins and growth of superst.i.tions, from which we too may not be wholly free in spite of all our advantages of true religion and sound philosophy. Of course G.o.d's chosen people are not like unguided Greeks or Romans; and yet human beings are much the same in all times and places. The Jesuit Baltus scented heresy, and Fontenelle was very ready to admit that the devil was a prophet, since Father Baltus wished it so to be, and held the opinion to be orthodox.

Appointed perpetual secretary of the _Academie des Sciences_ in 1697, Fontenelle p.r.o.nounced during forty years the panegyrics of those who had been its members. These _eloges des Academiciens_ are masterpieces in a difficult art, luminous, dignified, generous without ostentation, plain without poverty of thought or expression.

The discreet Fontenelle loved tranquillity--"If I had my hand full of truths, I should take good care before I opened it." He never lost a friend, acting on two prudent maxims, "Everything is possible,"

and "Every one is right." "It is not a heart," said Madame de Tencin, "which you have in your breast; it is a brain." It was a kindly brain, which could be for a moment courageous. And thus it was possible for him to enter his hundredth year, still interested in ideas, still tranquil and alert.

A great a.r.s.enal for the uses of eighteenth-century philosophy was constructed and stored by PIERRE BAYLE (1647-1706) in his _Dictionnaire Historique et Critique_, of which the first edition was published in 1697. Science, which found its popular interpreter in Fontenelle, was a region hardly entered by Bayle; the general history of Europe, from the close of the mediaeval period, and especially the records in every age of mythologies, religions, theologies, philosophies, formed his province, and it was one of wide extent. Born in 1647, son of a Protestant pastor, educated by Jesuits, converted by them and reconverted, professor of philosophy at Sedan, a fugitive to Rotterdam, professor there of history and philosophy, deprived of his position for unorthodox opinions, Bayle found rest not in cessation from toil, but in the research of a sceptical scholar, peaceably and endlessly pursued.

His early zeal of proselytism languished and expired. In its place came a boundless curiosity, a penetrating sagacity. His vast acc.u.mulations of knowledge were like those of the students of the Renaissance. The tendencies of his intellect antic.i.p.ate the tendencies of the eighteenth century, but with him scepticism had not become ambitious or dogmatic. He followed tranquilly where reason and research led, and saw no cause why religion and morals more than any other subjects should not be submitted to the scrutiny of rational inquiry. Since men have held all beliefs, and are more p.r.o.ne to error than apt to find the truth, why should any opinions be held sacred?

Let us ascertain and expose the facts. In doing so, we shall learn the lesson of universal tolerance; and if the principle of authority in matters of religion be gently sapped, can this be considered an evil? Morals, which have their foundation in the human understanding, remain, though all theologies may be in doubt. If the idea of Providence be a superst.i.tion, why should not man guide his life by good sense and moderation? Bayle did not attack existing beliefs with the battering-ram: he quietly removed a stone here and a stone there from the foundations. If he is aggressive, it is by means of a tranquil irony. The errors of human-kind are full of curious interest; the disputes of theologians are both curious and amusing; the moral licences of men and women are singular and often diverting. Why not instruct and entertain our minds with the facts of the world?

The instruction is delivered by Bayle in the dense and sometimes heavy columns of his text; the entertainment will be found in the rambling gossip, interspersed with illuminating ideas, of his notes. Almost every eminent writer of the eighteenth century was a debtor to Bayle's Dictionary. He kept his contemporaries informed of all that was added to knowledge in his periodical publication, _Nouvelles de la Republique des Lettres_ (begun in 1684). He called himself a cloud-compeller: "My gift is to create doubts; but they are no more than doubts." Yet there is light, if not warmth, in such a genius for criticism as his; and it was light not only for France, but for Europe.

BOOK THE FOURTH _THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY_

CHAPTER I MEMOIRS AND HISTORY--POETRY--THE THEATRE--THE NOVEL

I

The literature of the second half of the seventeenth century was monarchical, Christian, cla.s.sical. The eighteenth century was to lose the spirit of cla.s.sical art while retaining many of its forms, to overthrow the domination of the Church, to destroy the monarchy.

It was an age not of great art but of militant ideas, which more and more came to utilise art as their vehicle. Political speculation, criticism, science, sceptical philosophy invaded literature. The influence of England--of English free-thinkers, political writers, men of science, essayists, novelists, poets--replaced the influence of Italy and Spain, and for long that of the models of ancient Greece and Rome. The century of the philosophers was eminently social and mundane; the _salons_ revived; a new preciosity came into fas.h.i.+on; but as time went on the _salons_ became rather the mart of ideas philosophical and scientific than of the daintinesses of letters and of art. Journalism developed, and thought tended to action, applied itself directly to public life. While the work of destructive criticism proceeded, the bases of a moral reconstruction were laid; the free play of intellect was succeeded by a great enfranchis.e.m.e.nt of the pa.s.sions; the work of Voltaire was followed by the work of Rousseau.

Before the close of the reign of Louis XIV. the old order of things had suffered a decline. War, famine, public debt, oppressive taxation had discredited the monarchy. A dull hypocrisy hardly disguised the gross licentiousness of the times. The revocation of the edict of Nantes had exiled those Protestants who formed a substantial part of the moral conscience of France. The bitter feud of brother-bishops, Bossuet and Fenelon, hurling defiance against each other for the love of G.o.d, had made religion a theme for mockery. Port-Royal, once the refuge of serious faith and strict morals, was destroyed. The bull _Unigenitus_ expelled the spiritual element from French Christianity, reduced the clergy to a state of intellectual impotence, and made a lasting breach between them and the better part of the laity.

Meanwhile the scientific movement had been proving its power. Science had come to fill the place left void by religion. The period of the Regency (1715-23) is one of transition from the past to the newer age, shameless in morals, degraded in art; the period of Voltaire followed, when intellect sapped and mined the old beliefs; with Rousseau came the explosion of sentiment and an effort towards reconstruction. A great political and social revolution closed the century.

The life of the time is seen in many memoirs, and in the correspondence of many distinguished persons, both men and women. Among the former the _Memoires_ of Mdlle. Delaunay, afterwards Mme. de Staal (1684-1750) are remarkable for the vein of melancholy, subdued by irony, underlying a style which is formed for fine and clear exactness.

The d.u.c.h.esse du Maine's lady-in-waiting, daughter of a poor painter, but educated with care, drew delicately in her literary art with an etcher's tool, and her hand was controlled by a spirit which had in it something of the Stoic. The _Souvenirs_ of Mme. de Caylus (1673-1729), niece of Mme. de Maintenon--"jamais de creature plus seduisante," says Saint-Simon--give pictures of the court, charming in their navete, grace, and mirth. Mme. d'epinay, designing to tell the story of her own life, disguised as a piece of fiction, became in her _Memoires_ the chronicler of the manners of her time. The society of the _salons_ and the men of letters is depicted in the Memoirs of Marmontel. These are but examples from an abundant literature constantly augmented to the days of Mme. de Campan and Mme. Roland. The general aspect of the social world in the mid-century is presented by the historian Duclos (1704-1772) in his _Considerations sur les Moeurs de ce Siecle_, and with reparation for his previous neglect of the part played in society by women in his _Memoires pour servir a l'Histoire du XVIIIe Siecle_.

As much or more may be learnt from the letter-writers as from the writers of memoirs. If Voltaire did not take the first place by his correspondence, so vast, so luminous, so comprehensive, it might justly be a.s.signed to his friend Mme. du Deffand (1697-1780), whose lucid intelligence perceived everything, whose disabused heart seemed detached until old age from all that most interested her understanding. For clear good sense we turn to the Marquise de Lambert, for bourgeois worth and kindliness to Mme. Geoffrin, for pa.s.sion which kindles the page to Mdlle. de Lespina.s.se, for sensibility and romance ripening to political ardour and strenuous convictions to Mme. Roland.

Among the philosophers Diderot pours the torrent, clear or turbid, of his genius into his correspondence with affluent improvisation; D'Alembert is grave, temperate, lucid; the Abbe Galiani, the little Machiavel--"a pantomime from head to foot," said Diderot--the gay Neapolitan punchinello, given the freedom of Paris, that "capital of curiosity," is at once wit, cynic, thinker, scholar, and buffoon.

These, again, are but examples from an epistolary swarm.

While the eighteenth century thus mirrored itself in memoirs and letters, it did not forget the life of past centuries. The studious Benedictines, who had already accomplished much, continued their erudite labours. Nicolas Freret (1688-1749), taking all antiquity for his province, illuminated the study of chronology, geography, sciences, arts, language, religion. Daniel and Velly narrated the history of France. Vertot (1655-1735), with little of the spirit of historical fidelity, displayed certain gifts of an historical artist.