A History of French Literature Part 19

CHAPTER V HISTORY--LITERARY CRITICISM

I

The progress of historical literature in the nineteenth century was aided by the change which had taken place in philosophical opinion; instead of a rigid system of abstract ideas, which disdained the thought of past ages as superst.i.tion, had come an eclecticism guided by spiritual beliefs. The religions of various lands and various ages were viewed with sympathetic interest; the breach of continuity from mediaeval to modern times was repaired; the revolutionary spirit of individualism gave way before a broader concern for society; the temper in politics grew more cautious and less dogmatic; the great events of recent years engendered historical reflection; literary art was renewed by the awakening of the romantic imagination.

The historical learning of the Empire is represented by Daunou, an explorer in French literature; by Ginguene, the literary historian of Italy; by Michaud, who devoted his best years to a _History of the Crusades_. In his _De la Religion_ (1824-31) Benjamin Constant, in Restoration days, traced the progress of the religious sentiment, cleaving its way through dogma and ordinance to a free and full development. Sismondi (1773-1842), in his _Histoire des Francais_, investigated such sources as were accessible to him, studied economic facts, and in a liberal spirit exhibited the life of the nation, and not merely the acts of monarchs or the intrigues of statesmen. His wide, though not profound, erudition comprehended Italy as well as France; the _Histoire des Republiques Italiennes_ is the chart of a difficult labyrinth. The method of disinterested narrative, which abstains from ethical judgments, propounds no thesis, and aims at no doctrinaire conclusion, was followed by Barante in his _Histoire des Ducs de Bourgogne_. The precept of Quintilian expresses his rule: "Scribitur ad narrandum, non ad probandum."

Each school of nineteenth-century thought has had its historical exponents. Liberal Catholicism is represented by Montalembert, Ozanam, De Broglie; socialism, by Louis Blanc; a patriotic Caesarism, by Thiers; the democratic school, by Michelet and Quinet; philosophic liberalism, by Guizot, Mignet, and Tocqueville.

AUGUSTIN THIERRY (1795-1856) n.o.bly led the way. Some pages of Chateaubriand, full of the sentiment of the past, were his first inspiration; at a later time the influence of Fauriel and the novels of Walter Scott, "the master of historical divination," confirmed him in his sense of the uses of imagination as an aid to the scholars.h.i.+p of history. For a time he acted as secretary to Saint-Simon, and under his influence proposed a scheme for a community of European peoples which should leave intact the nationality of each. Then he parted from his master, to pursue his way in independence. It seemed to him that the social condition and the revolutions of modern Europe had their origins in the Germanic invasions, and especially in the Norman Conquest of England. As he read the great collection of the original historians of France and Gaul, he grew indignant against the modern travesties named history, indignant against writers without erudition, who could not see, and writers without imagination, who could not depict. The conflict of races--Saxons and Normans in England, Gauls and Franks in his own country--remained with him as a dominant idea, but he would not lose himself in generalisations; he would involve the abstract in concrete details; he would see, and he would depict. There was much philosophy in abstaining from philosophy overmuch. The _Lettres sur l'Histoire de France_ were followed in 1825 by the _Histoire de la Conquete de l'Angleterre_, in which the art of historiography attained a perfection previously unknown.

Through charter and chronicle, Thierry had reached the spirit of the past. He had prophesied upon the dry bones and to the wind, and the dry bones lived. As a liberal, he had been interested in contemporary politics. His political ardour had given him that historical perspicacity which enabled him to discover the soul behind an ancient text.

In 1826 Thierry, the martyr of his pa.s.sionate studies, suffered the calamity of blindness. With the aid of his distinguished brother, of friends, and secretaries--above all, with the aid of the devoted woman who became his wife, he pursued his work. The _Recits des Temps Merovingiens_ and the _Essai sur l'Histoire de la Formation du Tiers etat_ were the labours of a sightless scholar. His pa.s.sion for perfection was greater than ever; twenty, fifteen lines a day contented him, if his idea was rendered clear and enduring in faultless form. Paralysis made its steady advance; still he kept his intellect above his infirmities, and followed truth and beauty. On May 22, 1856, he woke his attendant at four in the morning, and dictated with laboured speech the alteration of a phrase for the revised _Conquete_. On the same day, "insatiable of perfection,"

Thierry died. He is not, either in substance, thought, or style, the greatest of modern French historians; but, more than any other, he was an initiator.

The life of FRANcOIS GUIZOT--great and venerable name--is a portion of the history of his country. Born at Nimes in 1787, of an honourable Protestant family, he died, with a verse of his favourite Corneille or a text of Scripture on his lips, in 1874. Austere without severity, simple in habit without rudeness, indomitable in courage, imperious in will, gravely eloquent, he had at once the liberality and the narrowness of the middle cla.s.ses, which he represented when in power.

A threefold task, as he conceived, lies before the historian: he must ascertain facts; he must co-ordinate these facts under laws, studying the anatomy and the physiology of society; finally, he must present the external physiognomy of the facts. Guizot was not endowed with the artist's imagination; he had no sense of life, of colour, of literary style; he was a thinker, who saw the life of the past through the medium of ideas; he does not in his pages evoke a world of animated forms, of pa.s.sionate hearts, of vivid incidents; he distinguishes social forces, with a view to arrive at principles; he considers those forces in their play one upon another.

The _Histoire Generale de la Civilisation en Europe_ and the _Histoire de la Civilisation en France_ consist of lectures delivered from 1828 to 1830 at the Sorbonne.[1] Guizot recognised that the study of inst.i.tutions must be preceded by a study of the society which has given them birth. In the progress of civilisation he saw not merely the development of communities, but also that of the individual. The civilisation of Europe, he held, was most intelligibly exhibited in that of France, where, more than in other countries, intellectual and social development have moved hand in hand, where general ideas and doctrines have always accompanied great events and public revolutions. The key to the meaning of French history he found in the tendency towards national and political unity. From the tenth to the fourteenth century four great forces met in co-operation or in conflict--royalty, the feudal system, the communes, the Church.

Feudalism fell; a great monarchy arose upon its ruins. The human mind a.s.serted its spiritual independence in the Protestant reformation.

The _tiers etat_ was constantly advancing in strength. The power of the monarchy, dominant in the seventeenth century, declined in the century that followed; the power of the people increased. In modern society the elements of national life are reduced to two--the government on the one hand, the people on the other; how to harmonise these elements is the problem of modern politics. As a capital example for the French bourgeoisie, Guizot, returning to an early work, made a special study of the great English revolution of the seventeenth century. In Germany, of the preceding century, the revolution was religious and not political. In France, of the succeeding century, the revolution was political and not religious. The rare good fortune of England lay in the fact that the spirit of religious faith and the spirit of political freedom ruled together, and co-operated towards a common result.

[Footnote 1: The _History of Civilisation in France_ closes with the fourteenth century.]

The work of FRANcOIS MIGNET (1796-1884), eminent for its research, exact.i.tude, clearness, ordonnance, has been censured for its historical fatalism. In reality Mignet's mind was too studious of facts to be dominated by a theory. He recognised the great forces which guide and control events; he recognised also the power and freedom of the individual will. His early _Histoire de la Revolution Francaise_ is a sane and lucid arrangement of material that came to his hands in chaotic ma.s.ses. His later and more important writings deal with his special province, the sixteenth century; his method, as he advanced, grew more completely objective; we discern his ideas through the lines of a well-proportioned architecture.

The a.n.a.lytic method of Guizot, supported by a method of patient induction, was applied by ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE (1805-59) to the study of the great phenomenon of modern democracy. Limiting the area of investigation to America, which he had visited on a public mission, he investigated the political organisation, the manners and morals, the ideas, the habits of thought and feeling of the United States as influenced by the democratic equality of conditions. He wrote as a liberal in whom the spirit of individualism was active. He regarded the progress of democracy in the modern world as inevitable; he perceived the dangers--formidable for society and for individual character--which accompany that progress; he believed that by foresight and wise ordering many of the dangers could be averted.

The fears and hopes of the citizen guided and sustained in Tocqueville a philosophical intelligence. Turning from America to France, he designed to disengage from the tangle of events the true historical significance of the Revolution. Only one volume, _L'Ancien Regime et la Revolution_, was accomplished. It can stand alone as a work of capital importance. In the great upheaval he saw that all was not progress; the centralisation of power under the old regime remained, and was rendered even more formidable than before; the sentiment of equality continued to advance in its inevitable career; unhappily the spirit of liberty was not always its companion, its moderator, or its guide.

ADOLPHE THIERS (1797-1877) was engaged at the same time as Mignet, his lifelong friend, upon a history of the French Revolution (1823-27).

The same liberal principles were held in common by the young authors.

Their methods differed widely: Mignet's orderly and compact narration was luminous through its skilful arrangement; Thiers'

_Histoire_ was copious, facile, brilliant, more just in its general conception than exact in statement, a plea for revolutionary patriotism as against the royalist reaction of the day, and not without influence in preparing the spirit of the country for the approaching Revolution of July. His _Histoire du Consulat et de l'Empire_ (1845-62) is the great achievement of Thiers' maturity; journalist, orator, minister of state, until he became the chief of stricken France in 1871 his highest claim to be remembered was this vast record of his country's glory. He had an appet.i.te for facts; no detail--the price of bread, of soap, of candles--was a matter of indifference to him; he could not show too many things, or show them too clearly; his supreme quality was intelligence; his pa.s.sion was the pride of patriotism; his foible was the vanity of military success, the zeal of a chauvinist. He was a liberal; but Napoleon summed up France, and won her battles, therefore Napoleon, the great captain, who "made war with his genius and politics with his pa.s.sions," must be for ever magnified. The _coup d'etat_ of the third Napoleon owed a debt to the liberal historian who had reconstructed the Napoleonic legend. The campaigns and battle-pieces of Thiers are unsurpa.s.sed in their kind. His style in narrative is facile, abundant, animated, and so transparent that nothing seems to intervene between the object and the reader who has become a spectator; a style negligent at times, and even incorrect, adding no charm of its own to a lucid presentation of things.

JULES MICHELET, the greatest imaginative restorer of the past, the greatest historical interpreter of the soul of ancient France, was born in 1798 in Paris, an infant seemingly too frail and nervous to remain alive. His early years gave him experience, brave and pathetic, of the hards.h.i.+ps of the poor. His father, an unsuccessful printer, often found it difficult to procure bread or fire for his household; but he resolved that his son should receive an education. The boy, of a fine and sensitive organisation, knew cold and hunger; he watched his mother toiling, and from day to day declining in health. Two sources of consolation he found--the _Imitation_, which told him of a Divine refuge from sorrow, and the Museum of French monuments, which made him forget all present distress in visions of the vanished centuries. Mocked and persecuted by his schoolfellows, he never lost courage, and had the joy of rewarding his parents with the cross won by his schoolboy theme. In happy country days his aunt Alexis told him legendary tales, and read to him the old chroniclers of France.

Michelet's vocation was before long revealed, and its summons was irresistible.

In 1827 he published his earliest works, the _Precis de l'Histoire Moderne_, a modest survey of a wide field, in which genius illuminated scholars.h.i.+p, and a translation of the _Scienza Nuova_ of Vico, the master who impressed him with the thought that humanity is in a constant process of creation under the influence of the Divine ideas.

The _Histoire Romaine_ and the _Introduction a l'Histoire Universelle_ followed; the latter a little book, written with incredible ardour under the inspiration of the days of July. His friend Quinet had taught him to see in history an ever-broadening combat for freedom--in Michelet's words, "an eternal July," and the exposition of this idea was of the nature of a philosophical entrancement.

A teacher at the ecole Normale, appointed chief of the historical section of the National Archives in 1831, Guizot's subst.i.tute at the Sorbonne in 1833, professor of history and morals at the College de France in 1838, Michelet lived in and for the life of his people and of his land. The _Histoire de France_, begun in 1830, was completed thirty-seven years later. After the disasters of the war of 1870-71, with failing strength the author resumed his labours, endeavouring to add, as it were, an appendix on the nineteenth century.

A pa.s.sionate searcher among original sources, published and unpublished, handling doc.u.ments as if they were things of flesh and blood, seeing the outward forms of existence with the imaginative eye, pressing through these to the soul of each successive epoch, possessed by an immense pity for the obscure generations of human toilers, having, more than almost any other modern writer, Virgil's gift of tears, ardent in admiration, ardent in indignation, with ideas impregnated by emotions, and emotions quickened by ideas, Michelet set himself to resuscitate the buried past. It seemed to him that his eminent predecessors--Guizot, Mignet, Thiers, Thierry--had each envisaged history from some special point of view. Each had too little of the outward body or too little of the inward soul of history.

Michelet dared to hope that a resurrection of the integral life of the dead centuries was possible. All or nothing was his word. It was a bold venture, but it was a venture, or rather an act, of faith.

Thierry had been tyrannised by the idea of the race: the race is much, but the people does not march in the air; it has a geographical basis; it draws its nutriment from a particular soil. Michelet, at the moment of his narrative when France began to have a life distinct from Germany, enters upon a survey of its geography, in which the physiognomy and the genius of each region are studied as if each were a separate living creature, and the character of France itself is discovered in the cohesion or the unity of its various parts. Reaching the tenth and eleventh centuries, he feels the sadness of their torpor and their violence; yet humanity was living, and soon in the enthusiasm of Gothic art and the enthusiasm of the Crusades the sacred aspirations of the soul had their manifestation. At the close of the mediaeval period everything seems to droop and decay: no! it was then, during the Hundred Years' War, that the national consciousness was born, and patriotism was incarnated in an armed shepherdess, child of the people.

By the thirteenth year of his labours--1843--Michelet had traversed the mediaeval epoch, and reached the close of the reign of Louis XI.

There he paused. Seeing one day high on the tower of Reims Cathedral, below which the kings of France received their consecration, a group or garland of tortured and mutilated figures carved in stone, the thought possessed him that the soul and faith of the people should be confirmed within his own soul before he could trust himself to treat of the age of the great monarchy. He leaped at once the intervening centuries, and was at work during eight years--from 1845 to 1853--on the French Revolution. He found a hero for his revolutionary epic in the people.

The temper of 1848 was hardly the temper in which the earlier Revolution could be judiciously investigated. Michelet and Quinet had added to their democratic zeal the pa.s.sions connected with an anticlerical campaign. The violence of liberalism was displayed in _Des Jesuites_, and _Du Pretre, de la Femme et de la Famille_. When the historian returned to the sixteenth century his spirit had undergone a change: he adored the Middle Ages; but was it not the period of the domination of the Church, and how could it be other than evil? He could no longer be a mere historian; he must also be a prophet. The volumes which treat of the Reformation, the Renaissance, the wars of religion, are as brilliant as earlier volumes, but they are less balanced and less coherent. The equilibrium between Michelet's intellect and his imagination, between his ideas and his pa.s.sions, was disturbed, if not destroyed.

Michelet, who had been deprived of his chair in the College de France, lost also his post in the Archives upon his refusal, in 1852, to swear allegiance to the Emperor. Near Nantes in his tempest-beaten home, near Genoa in a fold of the Apennines, where he watched the lizards sleep or slide, a great appeas.e.m.e.nt came upon his spirit. He had interpreted the soul of the people; he would now interpret the soul of humbler kinsfolk--the bird, the insect; he would interpret the inarticulate soul of the mountain and the sea. He studied other doc.u.ments--the doc.u.ments of nature--with a pa.s.sion of love, read their meanings, and mingled as before his own spirit with theirs.

_L'Oiseau_, _L'Insecte_, _La Mer_, _La Montagne_, are canticles in prose by a learned lover of the external world, rather than essays in science; often extravagant in style, often extreme in sentiment, and uncontrolled in imagination, but always the betrayals of genius.

Michelet's faults as an historian are great, and such as readily strike an English reader. His rash generalisations, his lyrical outbreaks, his Pindaric excitement, his verbiage a.s.suming the place of ideas, his romantic excess, his violence in ecclesiastical affairs, his hostility to our country, his mysticism touched with sensuality, his insistence on physiological details, his quick and irregular utterance--these trouble at times his imaginative insight, and mar his profound science in doc.u.ments. He died at Hyeres in 1874, hoping that G.o.d would grant him reunion with his lost ones, and the joys promised to those who have sought and loved.

EDGAR QUINET (1803-1875), the friend and brother-in-arms of Michelet in his attack upon the Jesuits, born at Bourg, of a Catholic father and a Protestant mother, approached the study of literature and history with that tendency to large _vues d'ensemble_ which was natural to his mind, and which had been strengthened by disciples.h.i.+p to Herder. Happy in temper, sound of conscience, generous of heart, he illuminated many subjects, and was a complete master of none. A poet of lofty intentions, in his _Ahasverus_ (1833)--the wandering Jew, type of humanity in its endless Odyssey--in his _Napoleon_, his _Promethee_, his vast encyclopaedic allegory _Merlin l'Enchanteur_ (1860), his poetry lacked form, and yielded itself to the rhetoric of the intellect.

In the _Genie des Religions_ Quinet endeavoured to exhibit the religious idea as the germinative power of civilisation, giving its special character to the political and social idea. _La Revolution_, which is perhaps his most important work, attempts to replace the Revolutionary hero-wors.h.i.+p, the Girondin and Jacobin legends, by a faithful interpretation of the meaning of events. The principles of modern society and the principles of the Roman Catholic Church, Quinet regarded as incapable of conciliation. In the incompetence of the leaders to perceive and apply this truth, and in the fatal logic of their violent and anarchic methods, lay, as he believed, the causes of the failure which followed the bright hopes of 1789. In 1848 Quinet was upon the barricades; the Empire drove him into exile. In his elder years, like Michelet, he found a new delight in the study of nature.

_La Creation_ (1870) exhibits the science of nature and that of human history as presenting the same laws and requiring kindred methods.

It closes with the prophecy of science that creation is not yet fully accomplished, and that a n.o.bler race will enter into the heritage of our humanity.

II

Literary criticism in the eighteenth century had been the criticism of taste or the criticism of dogma; in the nineteenth century it became naturalistic--a natural history of individual minds and their products, a natural history of works of art as formed or modified by social, political, and moral environments, and by the tendencies of races. Such criticism must inevitably have followed the growth of the comparative study of literatures in an age dominated by the scientific spirit. If we are to name any single writer as its founder, we must name Mme. de Stael. The French nation, she explained in _L'Allemagne_, inclines towards what is cla.s.sical; the Teutonic nations incline towards what is romantic. She cares not to say whether cla.s.sical or romantic art should be preferred; it is enough to show that the difference of taste results not from accidental causes, but from the primitive sources of imagination and of thought.

The historical tendency, proceeding from the eighteenth century, influenced alike the study of philosophy, of politics, and of literature. While Cousin gave an historical interpretation of philosophy, and Guizot applied history to the exposition of politics, a third eminent professor, ABEL-FRANcOIS VILLEMAIN (1790-1870) was illuminating literature with the light of history. An accomplished cla.s.sical scholar, a student of English, Italian, and Spanish authors, Villemain, in his _Tableau de la Litterature au Moyen age_, and his more admirable _Tableau de la Litterature au XVIIIe Siecle_, viewed a wide prospect, and could not apply a narrow rule to the measurement of all that he saw. He did not formulate a method of criticism; but instinctively he directed criticism towards history. He perceived the correspondence between literary products and the other phenomena of the age; he observed the movement in the spirit of a period; he pa.s.sed from country to country; he made use of biography as an aid in the study of letters. His learning was at times defective; his views often superficial; he suffered from his desire to entertain his audience or to capture them by rhetoric. Yet Villemain served letters well, and, accepted as a master by the young critics of the _Globe_, he prepared the way for Sainte-Beuve.

While such criticism as that of Villemain was maintained by Saint-Marc Girardin (1801-73), professor of French poetry at the Sorbonne, the dogmatic or doctrinaire school of criticism was represented with rare ability by DeSIRe NISARD (1806-88). His capital work, the _Histoire de la Litterature Francaise_, the labour of many years, is distinguished by a magisterial application of ideas to the decision of literary questions. Criticism with Nisard is not a natural history of minds, nor a study of historical developments, so much as the judgment of literary art in the light of reason. He confronts each book on which he p.r.o.nounces judgment with that ideal of its species which he has formed in his own mind: he compares it with the ideal of the genius of France, which attains its highest ends rather through discipline than through freedom; he compares it with the ideal of the French language; finally, he compares it with the ideal of humanity as seen in the best literature of the world. According to the result of the comparison he delivers condemnation or awards the crown. In French literature, at its best, he perceives a marvellous equilibrium of the faculties under the control of reason; it applies general ideas to life; it avoids individual caprice; it dreads the chimeras of imagination; it is eminently rational; it embodies ideas in just and measured form. Such literature Nisard found in the great age of Louis XIV. Certain gains there may have been in the eighteenth century, but these gains were more than counterbalanced by losses.

To disprove the saying that there is no disputing about tastes, to establish an order and a hierarchy in letters, to regulate intellectual pleasures, was Nisard's aim; but in attempting to const.i.tute an exact science founded upon general principles, he too often derived those principles from the attractions and repulsions of his individual taste. Criticism retrograded in his hands; yet, in retrograding, it took up a strong position: the influence of such a teacher was not untimely when facile sympathies required the guidance or the check of a director.

The admirable critic of the romantic school, CHARLES-AUGUSTIN SAINTE-BEUVE (1804-69), developed, as time went on, into the great critic of the naturalistic method. In his _Tableau de la Poesie Francaise au XVIe Siecle_ he found ancestors for the romantic poets as much older than the ancestors of cla.s.sical art in France as Ronsard is older than Malherbe. Wandering endlessly from author to author in his _Portraits Litteraires_ and _Portraits Contemporains_, he studied in all its details what we may term the physiology of each.

The long research of spirits connected with his most sustained work, _Port-Royal_, led him to recognise certain types or families under which the various minds of men can be grouped and cla.s.sified. During a quarter of a century he investigated, distinguished, defined in the vast collection of little monographs which form the _Causeries du Lundt_ and the _Nouveaux Lundis_. They formed, as it were, a natural history of intellects and temperaments; they established a new method, and ill.u.s.trated that method by a mult.i.tude of examples.

Never was there a more mobile spirit; but he was as exact and sure-footed as he was mobile. When we have allowed for certain personal jealousies or hostilities, and for an excessive attraction towards what may be called the morbid anatomy of minds, we may give our confidence with scarcely a limit to the psychologist critic Sainte-Beuve. Poet, novelist, student of medicine, sceptic, believer, socialist, imperialist--he traversed every region of ideas; as soon as he understood each position he was free to leave it behind. He did not pretend to reduce criticism to a science; he hoped that at length, as the result of numberless observations, something like a science might come into existence. Meanwhile he would cultivate the relative and distrust the absolute. He would study literary products through the persons of their authors; he would examine each detail; he would inquire into the physical characteristics of the subject of his investigation; view him through his ancestry and among his kinsfolk; observe him in the process of education; discover him among his friends and contemporaries; note the moment when his genius first unfolded itself; note the moment when it was first touched with decay; approach him through admirers and disciples; approach him through his antagonists or those whom he repelled; and at last, if that were possible, find some illuminating word which resumes the results of a completed study. There is no "code Sainte-Beuve" by which off-hand to p.r.o.nounce literary judgments; a method of Sainte-Beuve there is, and it is the method which has best served the study of literature in the nineteenth century.

Here this survey of a wide field finds its limit. The course of French literature since 1850 may be studied in current criticism; it does not yet come within the scope of literary history. The product of these years has been manifold and great; their literary importance is attested by the names--among many others--of Leconte de Lisle, Sully Prudhomme, Verlaine, in non-dramatic poetry; of Augier and the younger Dumas in the theatre; of Flaubert, Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Zola, Daudet, Bourget, Pierre Loti, Anatole France, in fiction; of Taine and Renan in historical study and criticism; of Fromentin in the criticism of art; of Scherer, Brunetiere, f.a.guet, Lemaitre, in the criticism of literature.

The dominant fact, if we discern it aright, has been the scientific influence, turning poetry from romantic egoism to objective art, directing the novel and the drama to naturalism and to the study of social environments, informing history and criticism with the spirit of curiosity, and prompting research for laws of evolution. Whether the spiritualist tendency observable at the present moment be a symptom of languor and fatigue, or the indication of a new moral energy, future years will determine.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The following notes are designed as an indication of some books which may be useful to students.

Of the many Histories of French Literature the fullest and most trustworthy is that at present in course of publication under the editors.h.i.+p of M. Pet.i.t de Julleville, _Histoire de la Langue et de la Litterature francaise_ (A. Colin et Cie.). M. Lanson's _Histoire de la Litterature francaise_ should be in the hands of every student, and this may be supplemented by M. Lintilhac's _Litterature francaise_ (2 vols.).

The works of Mr. Saintsbury, Geruzez, Demogeot, are widely known, and have proved useful during many years. Much may be learnt and learnt pleasantly from Paul Albert's volumes on the literature of the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Two volumes out of five of M. Charles Gidel's _Histoire de la Litterature francaise_ (Lemerre) are occupied with literature from 1815 to 1886.

M. Hermann Pergamini's _Histoire generale de la Litterature francaise_ (Alcan) sometimes gives fresh and interesting views. For a short school history by an accomplished scholar, none is better than M. Pet.i.t de Julleville's _Histoire de la Litterature francaise_, which, in 555 pages, packs a great deal of information. The _Histoire elementaire de la Litterature francaise_, by M. Jean Fleury, has been popular; it tells much of the contents of great books, and makes no a.s.sumption that the reader is already acquainted with them. Dr.

Warren's _A Primer of French Literature_ (Heath, Boston, U.S.A.) is well proportioned and well arranged, but it has room for little more than names, dates, and the briefest characterisations. Dr. Wells's _Modern French Literature_ (Roberts, Boston, U.S.A.) sketches French literature to Chateaubriand, and treats with considerable fulness the literature from Chateaubriand and Mme. de Stael to the present time. For the present century M. G. Pellissier's _Le Mouvement litteraire au XIXe Siecle_ is valuable.