Age of Louis XIV. in France. 3. This period, the second part of the seventeenth century, comprehends the most considerable, and in every sense the most important and distinguished portion of what was once called the great age in France, the reign of Louis XIV. In this period the literature of France was adorned by its most brilliant writers; since, notwithstanding the genius and popularity of some who followed, we generally find a still higher place awarded by men of fine taste to Bossuet and Pascal than to Voltaire and Montesquieu. The language was written with a care that might have fettered the powers of ordinary men, but rendered those of such as we have mentioned more resplendent. The laws of taste and grammar, like those of nature, were held immutable; it was the province of human genius to deal with them, as it does with nature, by a skilful employment, not by a preposterous and ineffectual rebellion against their control. Purity and perspicuity, simplicity and ease, were conditions of good writing; it was never thought that an author, especially in prose, might transgress the recognised idiom of his mother tongue, or invent words unknown to it, for the sake of effect or novelty; or, if in some rare occurrence so bold a course might be forgiven, these exceptions were but as miracles in religion, which would cease to strike us, or be no miracles at all, but for the regularity of the laws to which they bear witness even while they violate them. We have not thought it necessary to defer the praise which some great French writers have deserved on the score of their language for this chapter. Bossuet, Malebranche, Arnauld, and Pascal, have already been commemorated; and it is sufficient to point out two causes in perpetual operation during this period which ennobled and preserved in purity the literature of France; one, the salutary influence of the Academy, the other, that emulation between the Jesuits and Jansenists for public esteem, which was better displayed in their politer writings, than in the abstruse and endless controversy of the five propositions. A few remain to be mentioned, and as the subject of this chapter, in order to avoid frequent subdivisions, is miscellaneous, the reader must expect to find that we do not, in every instance, confine ourselves to what he may consider as polite letters.
Fontenelle—his character. 4. Fontenelle, by the variety of his talents, by their application to the pursuits most congenial to the intellectual character of his contemporaries, and by that extraordinary longevity which made those contemporaries not less than three generations of mankind, may be reckoned the best representative of French literature. Born in 1657, and dying within a few days of a complete century, in 1757, he enjoyed the most protracted life of any among the modern learned; and that a life in the full sunshine of Parisian literature, without care and without disease. In nothing was Fontenelle a great writer; his mental and moral disposition resembled each other; equable, without the capacity of performing, and hardly of conceiving, anything truly elevated, but not less exempt from the fruits of passion, from paradox, unreasonableness, and prejudice. His best productions are, perhaps, the eulogies on the deceased members of the Academy of Sciences, which he pronounced during almost forty years, but these nearly all belong to the eighteenth century; they are just and candid, with sufficient, though not very profound, knowledge of the exact sciences, and a style pure and flowing, which his good sense had freed from some early affectation, and his cold temper as well as sound understanding restrained from extravagance. In his first works we have symptoms of an infirmity belonging more frequently to age than to youth; but Fontenelle was never young in passion. He affects the tone of somewhat pedantic and frigid gallantry which seems to have survived the society of the Hôtel Rambouillet who had countenanced it, and which borders too nearly on the language which Molière and his disciples had well exposed in their coxcombs on the stage.
His Dialogues of the Dead. 5. The Dialogues of the Dead, published, I think, in 1685, are condemned by some critics for their false taste and perpetual strain at something unexpected, and paradoxical. The leading idea is, of course, borrowed from Lucian; but Fontenelle has aimed at greater poignancy by contrast; the ghosts in his dialogues are exactly those who had least in common with each other in life, and the general object is to bring, by some happy analogy which had not occurred to the reader, or by some ingenious defence of what he had been accustomed to despise, the prominences and depressions of historic characters to a level. This is what is always well received in the kind of society for which Fontenelle wrote; but if much is mere sophistry in his dialogues, if the general tone is little above that of the world, there is also, what we often find in the world, some acuteness and novelty, and some things put in a light which it may be worth while not to neglect.
Those of Fenelon. 6. Fenelon, not many years afterwards, copied the scheme, though not the style, of Fontenelle in his own Dialogues of the Dead, written for the use of his pupil the Duke of Burgundy. Some of these dialogues are not truly of the dead; the characters speak as if on earth, and with earthly designs. They have certainly more solid sense and a more elevated morality than those of Fontenelle, to which La Harpe has preferred them. The noble zeal of Fenelon not to spare the vices of kings, in writing for the heir of one so imperious and so open to the censure of reflecting minds, shines throughout these dialogues; but designed as they were for a boy, they naturally appear in some places rather superficial.
Fontenelle’s Plurality of Worlds. 7. Fontenelle succeeded better in his famous dialogues on the Plurality of Worlds, Les Mondes; in which, if the conception is not wholly original, he has at least developed it with so much spirit and vivacity, that it would show as bad taste to censure his work, as to reckon it a model for imitation. It is one of those happy ideas which have been privileged monopolies of the first inventor; and it will be found accordingly that all attempts to copy this whimsical union of gallantry with science have been insipid almost to a ridiculous degree. Fontenelle throws so much gaiety and wit into his compliments to the lady whom he initiates in his theory, that we do not confound them with the nonsense of coxcombs; and she is herself so spirited, unaffected, and clever, that no philosopher could be ashamed of gallantry towards so deserving an object. The fascinating paradox, as then it seemed, though our children are now taught to lisp it, that the moon, the planets, the fixed stars, are full of inhabitants, is presented with no more show of science than was indispensable, but with a varying liveliness that, if we may judge by the consequences, has served to convince as well as amuse. The plurality of worlds had been suggested by Wilkins, and probably by some Cartesians in France; but it was first rendered a popular tenet by this agreeable little book of Fontenelle, which had a great circulation in Europe. The ingenuity with which he obviates the difficulties he is compelled to acknowledge, is worthy of praise; and a good deal of the popular truths of physical astronomy is found in these dialogues.
His History of Oracles. 8. The History of Oracles, which Fontenelle published in 1687, is worthy of observation as a sign of the change that was working in literature. In the provinces of erudition and of polite letters, long so independent, perhaps even so hostile, some tendency towards a coalition began to appear. The men of the world, especially after they had acquired a free temper of thinking in religion, and become accustomed to talk about philosophy, desired to know something of the questions which the learned disputed; but they demanded this knowledge by a short and easy road, with no great sacrifice of their leisure or attention. Fontenelle, in the History of Oracles, as in the dialogues on the Plurality of Worlds, prepared a repast for their taste. A dull work of a learned Dutch physician, Van Dale, had taken up the subject of the ancient oracles, and explained them by human imposture instead of that of the devil, which had been the more orthodox hypothesis. A certain degree of paradox, or want of orthodoxy, already gave a zest to a book in France; and Fontenelle’s lively manner, with more learning than good society at Paris possessed, and about as much as it could endure, united to a clear and acute line of argument, created a popularity for his History of Oracles, which we cannot reckon altogether unmerited.[1012]
[1012] I have not compared, or indeed read, Van Dale’s work; but I rather suspect that some of the reasoning, not the learning, of Fontenelle is original.
St. Evremond. 9. The works of St. Evremond were collected after his death in 1705; but many had been printed before, and he evidently belongs to the latter half of the seventeenth century. The fame of St. Evremond as a brilliant star, during a long life, in the polished aristocracy of France and England, gave for a time a considerable lustre to his writings, the greater part of which are such effusions as the daily intercourse of good company called forth. In verse or in prose, he is the gallant friend, rather than lover, of ladies who, secure probably of love in some other quarter, were proud of the friendship of a wit. He never, to do him justice, mistakes his character which as his age was not a little advanced might have incurred ridicule. Hortense Mancini, Duchess of Mazarin, is his heroine; but we take little interest in compliments to a woman neither respected in her life, nor remembered since. Nothing can be more trifling than the general character of the writings of St. Evremond; but sometimes he rises to literary criticism, or even civil history; and on such topics he is clear, unaffected, cold, without imagination or sensibility; a type of the frigid being, whom an aristocratic and highly polished society is apt to produce. The chief merit of St. Evremond is in his style and manner; he has less wit than Voiture who contributed to form him, or than Voltaire whom he contributed to form; but he shows neither the effort of the former, nor the restlessness of the latter. Voltaire, however, when he is most quiet, as in the earliest and best of his historical works, seems to bear a considerable resemblance to St. Evremond, and there can be no doubt that he was familiar with the latter’s writings.
Madame de Sevigné. 10. A woman has the glory of being full as conspicuous in the graces of style as any writer of this famous age. It is evident that this was Madame de Sevigné. Her letters, indeed, were not published till the eighteenth century, but they were written in the mid-day of Louis’s reign. Their ease and freedom from affectation are more striking, by contrast with the two epistolary styles which had been most admired in France, that of Balzac, which is laboriously tumid, and that of Voiture, which becomes insipid by dint of affectation. Everyone perceives that in the letters of a mother to her daughter, the public, in a strict sense, is not thought of; and yet the habit of speaking and writing what men of wit and taste would desire to hear and read, gives a certain mannerism, I will not say air of effort, even to the letters of Madame de Sevigné. The abandonment of the heart to its casual impulses is not so genuine as in some that have since been published. It is, at least, clear that it is possible to become affected in copying her unaffected style; and some of Walpole’s letters bear witness to this. Her wit and talent of painting by single touches are very eminent; scarcely any collection of letters, which contain so little that can interest a distant age, are read with such pleasure; if they have any general fault, it is a little monotony and excess of affection towards her daughter, which is reported to have wearied its object, and, in contrast with this, a little want of sensibility towards all beyond her immediate friends, and a readiness to find something ludicrous in the dangers and sufferings of others.[1013]
[1013] The proofs of this are numerous enough in her letters. In one of them she mentions that a lady of her acquaintance, having been bitten by a mad dog, had gone to be dipped in the sea, and amuses herself by taking off the provincial accent with which she will express herself on the first plunge. She makes a jest of La Voisin’s execution; and though that person was as little entitled to sympathy as anyone, yet, when a woman is burned alive, it is not usual for another woman to turn it into drollery.