[1037] Camusat, p. 28. Sallo had also attacked the Jesuits.
[1038] Eloge de Gallois, par Fontenelle, in the latter’s works, vol. v., p. 168. Biographie Universelle, arts. Sallo and Gallois. Gallois is said to have been a coadjutor of Sallo from the beginning, and some others are named by Camusat as its contributors, among whom were Gomberville and Chapelain.
Reviews established by Bayle. 26. The path thus opened to all that could tempt a man who made writing his profession—profit, celebrity, a perpetual appearance in the public eye, the facility of pouring forth every scattered thought of his own, the power of revenge upon every enemy, could not fail to tempt more conspicuous men than Sallo or his successor Gallois. Two of very high reputation, at least of reputation that hence became very high, entered it, Bayle and Le Clerc. The former, in 1684, commenced a new review, Nouvelles de la Republique des Lettres. He saw and was well able to improve the opportunities which periodical criticism furnished to a mind eminently qualified for it; extensively, and in some points, deeply learned; full of wit, acuteness, and a happy talent of writing in a lively tone without the insipidity of affected politeness. The scholar and philosopher of Rotterdam had a rival, in some respects, and ultimately an adversary, in a neighbouring city. |And Le Clerc| Le Clerc, settled at Amsterdam as professor of belles lettres and of Hebrew in the Arminister seminary, undertook in 1686, at the age of twenty-nine, the first of those three celebrated series of reviews, to which he owes so much of his fame. This was the Bibliothèque Universelle, in all the early volumes of which La Croze, a much inferior person, was his coadjutor, published monthly in a very small form. Le Clerc had afterwards a disagreement with La Croze, and the latter part of the Bibliothèque Universelle (that after the tenth volume) is chiefly his own. It ceased to be published in 1693, and the Bibliothèque Choisie, which is perhaps even a more known work of Le Clerc, did not commence till 1708. But the fulness, the variety, the judicious analysis and selection, as well as the value of the original remarks, which we find in the Bibliothèque Universelle, renders it of signal utility to those who would embrace the literature of that short, but not unimportant period which it illustrates.
Leipsic Acts. 27. Meantime a less brilliant, but by no means less erudite, review, the Leipsic Acts, had commenced in Germany. The first volume of this series was published in 1682. But being written in Latin, with more regard to the past than to the growing state of opinions, and consequently almost excluding the most attractive, and indeed the most important, subject, with a Lutheran spirit of unchangeable orthodoxy in religion, and with an absence of anything like philosophy or even connected system in erudition, it is one of the most unreadable books, relatively to its utility in learning, which has ever fallen into my hands. Italy had entered earlier on this critical career; the Giornale de’ Litterati was begun at Rome in 1668; the Giornale Veneto de’ Litterati, at Venice in 1671. They continued for some time; but with less conspicuous reputation than those above mentioned. The Mercure Savant, published at Amsterdam in 1684, was an indifferent production, which induced Bayle to set up his own Nouvelles de la Republique des Lettres in opposition to it. Two reviews were commenced in the German language within the seventeenth century, and three in English. The first of these latter was the “Weekly Memorials for the Ingenious,” London, 1682. This, I believe, lasted but a short time. It was followed by one, entitled “The Works of the Learned,” in 1691; and by another “History of the Works of the Learned,” in 1699. I have met with none of these, nor will any satisfactory account of them, I believe, be readily found.[1039]
[1039] Jugler, Hist. Litteraria, cap. 9. Bibliothèque Universelle, xiii. 41.
Bayle’s Thoughts on the Comet. 28. Bayle had first become known in 1682, by the Pensées Diverses sur la Comète de 1680; a work which I am not sure that he ever decidedly surpassed. Its purpose is one hardly worthy, we should imagine, to employ him; since those who could read and reason were not likely to be afraid of comets, and those who could do neither would be little the better for his book. But with this ostensible aim Bayle had others in view; it gave scope to his keen observation of mankind, if we may use the word observation for that which he chiefly derived from modern books, and to the calm philosophy which he professed. There is less of the love of paradox, less of a cavilling pyrrhonism, and though much diffuseness, less of pedantry and irrelevant instances in the Pensées Diverses than in his greater work. It exposed him, however, to controversy; Jurieu, a French minister in Holland, the champion of Calvinistic orthodoxy, waged a war that was only terminated with their lives; and Bayle’s defence of the Thoughts on the Comet is fully as long as the original performance, but far less entertaining.
His Dictionary. 29. He now projected an immortal undertaking, the Historical and Critical Dictionary. Moreri, a laborious scribe, had published in 1673 a kind of encyclopedic dictionary, biographical, historical, and geographical; Bayle professed to fill up the numerous deficiencies, and to rectify the errors of this compiler. It is hard to place his dictionary, which appeared in 1694, under any distinct head in a literary classification which does not make a separate chapter for lexicography. It is almost equally difficult to give a general character of this many-coloured web, that great erudition and still greater acuteness and strength of mind wove for the last years of the seventeenth century. The learning of Bayle was copious, especially in what most required it, the controversies, the anecdotes, the miscellaneous facts and sentences, scattered over the vast surface of literature for two preceding centuries. In that of antiquity he was less profoundly versed, yet so quick in application of his classical stores, that he passes for even a better scholar than he was. His original design may have been only to fill up the deficiencies of Moreri; but a mind so fertile and excursive could not be restrained in such limits. We may find however in this an apology for the numerous omissions of Bayle, which would, in a writer absolutely original, seem both capricious and unaccountable. We never can anticipate with confidence that we shall find any name in his dictionary. The notes are most frequently unconnected with the life to which they are appended; so that, under a name uninteresting to us, or inapposite to our purpose, we may be led into the richest vein of the author’s fine reasoning or lively wit. Bayle is admirable in exposing the fallacies of dogmatism, the perplexities of philosophy, the weaknesses of those who affect to guide the opinions of mankind. But, wanting the necessary condition of good reasoning, an earnest desire to reason well, a moral rectitude from which the love of truth must spring, he often avails himself of petty cavils, and becomes dogmatical in his very doubts. A more sincere spirit of inquiry could not have suffered a man of his penetrating genius to acquiesce, even contingently; in so superficial a scheme as the Manichean. The sophistry of Bayle, however, bears no proportion to his just and acute observations. Less excuse can be admitted for his indecency, which almost assumes the character of monomania, so invariably does it recur, even where there is least pretext for it.
Baillet.—Morhof. 30. The Jugemens des Sçavans by Baillet, published in 1685 and 1686, the Polyhistor of Morhof in 1689, are certainly works of criticism as well as of bibliography. But neither of these writers, especially the latter, are of much authority in matters of taste; their erudition was very extensive, their abilities respectable, since they were able to produce such useful and comprehensive works; but they do not greatly serve to enlighten or correct our judgments; nor is the original matter in any considerable proportion to that which they have derived from others. I have taken notice of both these in my preface.
The Ana. 31. France was very fruitful of that miscellaneous literature which, desultory and amusing, has the advantage of remaining better in the memory than more systematic books, and in fact is generally found to supply the man of extensive knowledge with the materials of his conversation, as well as to fill the vacancies of his deeper studies. The memoirs, the letters, the travels, the dialogues and essays, which might be ranged in so large a class as that we now pass in review, are too numerous to be mentioned, and it must be understood that most of them are less in request even among the studious than they were in the last century. One group has acquired the distinctive name of Ana; the reported conversation, the table-talk of the learned. Several belong to the last part of the sixteenth century, or the first of the next; the Scaligerana, the Perroniana, the Pithæana, the Naudæana, the Casauboniana; the last of which are not conversational, but fragments collected from the common-place books and loose papers of Isaac Casaubon. Two collections of the present period are very well known; the Menagiana, and the Mélanges de Littérature par Vigneul-Marville; which differs indeed from the rest in not being reported by others, but published by the author himself; yet comes so near in spirit and manner, that we may place it in the same class. The Menagiana has the common fault of these Ana, that it rather disappoints expectation, and does not give us as much new learning as the name of its author seems to promise; but it is amusing, full of light anecdote of a literary kind, and interesting to all who love the recollections of that generation. Vigneul-Marville is an imaginary person; the author of the Mélanges de Littérature is D’Argonne, a Benedictine of Rouen. This book has been much esteemed; the mask gives courage to the author, who writes, not unlike a Benedictine, but with a general tone of independent thinking, united to good judgment and a tolerably extensive knowledge of the state of literature. He had entered into the religious profession rather late in life. The Chevræana and Segraisiana, especially the latter, are of little value. The Parrhasiana of Le Clerc are less amusing and less miscellaneous than some of the Ana; but in all his writings there is a love of truth and a zeal against those who obstruct inquiry, which to congenial spirits is as pleasing as it is sure to render him obnoxious to opposite tempers.
English style in this Period. 32. The characteristics of English writers in the first division of the century were not maintained in the second, though the change, as was natural, did not come on by very rapid steps. The pedantry of unauthorized Latinisms, the affectation of singular and not generally intelligible words from other sources, the love of quaint phrases, strange analogies, and ambitious efforts at antithesis, gave way by degrees; a greater ease of writing was what the public demanded, and what the writers after the Restoration sought to attain; they were more strictly idiomatic and English than their predecessors. But this ease sometimes became negligence and feebleness, and often turned to coarseness and vulgarity. The language of Sevigné and Hamilton is eminently colloquial; scarce a turn occurs in their writings which they would not have used in familiar society; but theirs was the colloquy of the gods, ours of men; their idiom, though still simple and French, had been refined in the saloons of Paris, by that instinctive rejection of all that is low which the fine tact of accomplished women dictates; while in our own contemporary writers, with little exception, theirs is what defaces the dialogue of our comedy, a tone not so much of provincialism, or even of what is called the language of the common people, as of one much worse, the dregs of vulgar ribaldry, which a gentleman must clear from his conversation before he can assert that name. Nor was this confined to those who led irregular lives; the general manners being unpolished, we find in the writings of the clergy, wherever they are polemic or satirical, the same tendency to what is called slang; a word which, as itself belongs to the vocabulary it denotes, I use with some unwillingness. The pattern of bad writing in this respect was Sir Roger L’Estrange; his Æsop’s Fables will present everything that is hostile to good taste; yet by a certain wit and readiness in raillery L’Estrange was a popular writer and may even now be read, perhaps, with some amusement. The translation of Don Quixote, published in 1682, may also be specified as incredibly vulgar, and without the least perception of the tone which the original author has preserved.