THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.
CHAPTER I.
POETS.
Literary Degeneracy of the Eighteenth Century.
The literature of the eighteenth century, despite the many great names which adorn it, and the extraordinary practical influence which it exercised, is, from the point of view of strict literary criticism, which busies itself with form rather than matter, a period of decadence. In all the departments of Belles Lettres a servile imitation of the models of the great classical period is observable. The language, according to an inevitable process which the more clearsighted of the men of Louis the Fourteenth's time, such as Fénelon and La Bruyère, themselves foresaw and deprecated, became more and more incapable of expressing deep passion, varied scenery, the intricacies and eccentricities of character. For a time a few survivors of the older class and manner, such as Fontenelle, Saint Simon, Massillon, resisted the tendency of the age more or less successfully. As they one by one dropped off, the militant energy of the great philosophe movement, which may be said to coincide with the second and third quarters of the century, communicated a temporary brilliance to prose. But during the reign of Louis XVI., the Revolution and the Empire (for in the widest sense the eighteenth century of literature does not cease till the Restoration, or even later), the average literary value of what is written in French is but small, and, with few exceptions, what is valuable belongs to those who, consciously or unconsciously, were in an attitude of revolt, and were clearing the way for the men of 1830.
especially manifest in Poetry.
Poetry and the drama naturally suffered most from this course of events, and poetry pure and simple suffered even more than the drama. By the opening of the eighteenth century epic and lyric in the proper sense had been rendered nearly impossible by the full and apparently final adoption of the conception of poetry recommended by Malherbe, and finally rendered orthodox by Boileau. The impossibility was not recognised, and France, in the opinion of her own critics, at last got her epic poem in the Henriade, and her perfect lyrists in Rousseau and Lebrun. But posterity has not ratified these judgments. Fortunately, however, the men of the eighteenth century had in La Fontaine a model for lighter work which their principles permitted them to follow, and the irresistible attractions of the song left song-writers tolerably free from the fatal restrictions of dignified poetry. Once, towards the close of the century, a poet of exceptional genius, André Chénier, showed what he might have done under happier circumstances. But for the most part the history of poetry during this time in France is the history of verse almost uninspired by the poetic spirit, and destitute even of the choicer graces of poetic form.
J. B. Rousseau.
For convenience' sake it will be well to separate the graver and the lighter poets, and to treat each in order, with the proviso that in most cases those mentioned in the first division have some claim to figure in the second also, for few poets of the time were wholly serious. The first poet who is distinctively of the eighteenth century, and not the least remarkable, was Jean Baptiste Rousseau[284] (1669-1741). Rousseau's life was a singular and rather an unfortunate one. In the first place he was exiled for a piece of scandalous literature, of which in all probability he was quite guiltless; and, in the second, meeting in his exile with Voltaire, who professed (and seems really to have felt) admiration for him, he offended the irritable disciple and was long the butt of his attacks. Here, however, Rousseau concerns us as a direct pupil of Boileau, who, with great faculties for the formal part of poetry, and not without some tincture of its spirit, set himself to be a lyric poet after Boileau's fashion. He tried play-writing also, but his dramas are quite unimportant. Rousseau's principal works are certain odes, most of which are either panegyrical after the fashion of the celebrated Namur specimen (though he is seldom so absurd as his master), or else sacred and drawn from the Bible. The Cantates are of the same kind as the latter. These elaborate and formal works, which owed much of their popularity to the vogue given to piety at court in the later years of Louis XVI., are curiously contrasted with the third principal division of his poems, consisting of epigrams which allow themselves the full epigrammatic licence in subject and treatment. The contrast is, however, probably due to a very simple cause, the state of demand at the time, and perhaps also to the study of Marot, the only pre-seventeenth century poet of France who was allowed to pass muster in the school of Boileau. Rousseau's merits have been already indicated, and his defects may be easily divined, even from this brief notice. He is almost always adroit, often eloquent, sometimes remarkably clever; but he is seldom other than artificial, never passionate, and only once or twice sublime. Nor is it superfluous to mention that he is more responsible than any other person for the intolerable frippery of classical mythology which loads eighteenth-century verse.