Meanwhile French prose-writing, which had been of such easy simplicity in Montaigne, passed for a while under the bad influence of the Spanish estilo culto, and of the English Euphuism. This was the day of the Hôtel de Rambouillet and of the Précieuses, with their finical refinements and affectations of speech. In the subject-matter of literature the Spanish influence showed itself first in the Astrée of D’Urfé (1608), a wearisome and unnatural “pastoral romance,” prompted by the Diana of the Portuguese-Spaniard Montemayor. To this work are to be affiliated the “heroic romances” of La Calprenède and Mademoiselle de Scudéry, who are shortly to be mentioned. As for the prose vehicle itself, apart from these vagaries of its use, it may be said that, ever since French literature reached its golden age in the middle of the seventeenth century, its characteristics have been much the same as those of French verse, namely, clearness of order, precision of statement, good sense of thinking, a triumph of reasonable and exact expression.
Our own literature of the later part of the seventeenth century, and of the earlier half of the eighteenth, which owes so much to France, is nowhere more manifestly indebted than in respect of that lighter prose which takes the shape of letters and novels, and of what would now be called occasional journalism. The French have always been excellent letter-writers and journalists, as well as admirable novelists. Even the inferior French work, such as Mademoiselle de Scudéry’s interminable pseudo-romantic prolixities—the Grand Cyrus, or Clélie with its Carte de Tendre—and those of La Calprenède (Cléopâtre and Cassandre), was reproduced in England by writers of the calibre of Mrs. Aphra Behn, as well as exploited by Dryden and other post-Restoration dramatists. The novel of adventure, which we associate with the names of Defoe (as in Moll Flanders and Colonel Jack), Fielding (Joseph Andrews), and Smollett (Roderick Random), and which is known as “picaroon” or “picaresque,” is no doubt ultimately derived from Spain, but its way into England was made through Paul Scarron, a French seventeenth-century novelist, and through his followers and literary heirs, among whom in the early eighteenth century is the renowned Lesage, the author of Gil Blas. On the other hand, that class of fiction which deals with character and its analysis, and which appears in English with Richardson, the author of Clarissa Harlowe and Pamela, dates from Madame de la Fayette, who lived a century earlier than he, although it is perhaps to his contemporary Marivaux that the Englishman is more directly under obligation. The first great exemplar of modern letter-writing, who, after Cicero and Pliny, taught Horace Walpole and Chesterfield how to pen epistles, and who inspired the more or less mock correspondence of Addison in the Spectator, was Madame de Sévigné, a contemporary of Madame de la Fayette.
The seventeenth century in France is covered with prose-writers of clear reasoning power, pinnacled in Descartes’ Discours de la Méthode and Pascal’s Provincial Letters, and with writers of essays, memoirs, novels, letters, criticisms, character-sketches, and “maxims” in all their various kinds. There is the essai, which enlarges on a theme; the conversation, an essay in dialogue, like those of Landor; the pensée, a miniature essay with narrower theme; and the maxime, a pithy sentence forming the cream of a pensée. La Bruyère, La Rochefoucauld, and St. Evremond, for example, are familiar names. For our purpose it is enough that these writers preceded our own Addison, Swift, Steele, and Johnson, and that English prose of the Queen Anne period and the earlier eighteenth century was fashioned by France as much as was our verse itself. And as the excellence of prose is perfect clearness and ease, the influence of France herein was wholly good, just as the prosaic influence of its verse had been mainly harmful.
In the same century stands, sui generis, La Fontaine, the fertile author of the famous stories and Fables, to whom Dryden, Gay, and Prior owe, besides the hint of form, no little suggestion.
In the eighteenth century French literature is of an inferior order, unproductive of things noble in imagination or of great dramatic works. At its best it is critical, not creative. Until André Chénier at the end of the century, it has practically no poetry to show, since neither the occasional verses of Voltaire, nor his epic Henriade, nor his drama Zaïre, can properly bear the name. Wit indeed flourished in the epigrams and comedy of Piron, as it could hardly fail to do in French work of the lighter kinds; but it was not till the precursors of the “Romantic movement” of the nineteenth century—for which France was almost as much indebted to the English Byron and the German Goethe as to its own Rousseau and Chateaubriand—that creative poetry appears again with Béranger and Lamartine. The Romantic epoch itself is then embodied in Victor Hugo. So far as the eighteenth century is productive, it is in prose, and chiefly the prose of thought and science. The novel is represented in the picaresque Diable Boiteux and Gil Blas of Lesage early in the century, in the analytical Marianne of Marivaux, in the satirically destructive Candide of Voltaire, in the powerful character study of Manon Lescaut by Prévost, in the sentimental and picturesque Nouvelle Héloïse of Rousseau and Paul et Virginie of Bernardin de St. Pierre, and in the social fiction of Madame de Staël. Of the effect of Lesage upon England we have already spoken. Marivaux appears to have distinctly influenced Richardson, whose Pamela otherwise bears a strange similarity to Marianne. But most congenial to the English mind, now on its way to the Romantic revolt, was the work of Rousseau and St. Pierre, in which the notion of a “return to nature” is the dominant note. St. Pierre was the disciple; Rousseau is the master, who, whether in the novel or in his Confessions, is the first writer in modern Europe to expatiate upon inanimate nature in connection with the feelings. How much of the “nature-worship” of Wordsworth and his age may be due to this example from France can hardly be estimated, but the name of Rousseau was a familiar one in England, and by him was sown much of the seed which our own revivalists watered.
Passing over the letter-writers and minor essayists, we come to the thinkers, the propagators of freedom of thought, commonly known as the philosophes. In this case the impulse came from the English Locke and from contact with, and personal observation of, the liberal circumstances of England, at that time the most advanced in Europe. The crop of French solvent ideas from these sources soon found its way back to our own country. In his Esprit des Lois, Montesquieu, a writer of remarkable wisdom, examines the natural basis and evolution of law and custom; the fertile but superficial Voltaire, in various “Letters” and essays, lends his powerful wit to the weakening of accepted authority, especially in religion. Subsequently, in order to crystallize the knowledge which forms the necessary basis to right criticism and reformation, there was undertaken the famous, if not very successful, Encyclopaedia, or Dictionnaire Raisonné of sciences and arts, under the direction of Diderot and D’Alembert. Falling into the revolutionary current, and being in direct association with the philosophes and Encyclopaedists, the eloquent and passionate Rousseau produced the Contrat Social, with its doctrines of equality and fraternity and its innovating theories of education, and the Confessions, in which he lays bare his own pettinesses, but with exquisite literary skill. As his follower must be reckoned Chateaubriand, who, so far as expression of temperament goes, passed on his mantle to the English Byron.
If now it is asked on what groups of our English writers French influence is most pronounced and obvious, we should most safely reply that in pre-Renaissance times we must name Chaucer and Gower; then, after a gap of two hundred and fifty years, we may begin once more with Dryden and his contemporaries, the poetic “roisterers,” Dorset and Roscommon, and the comedians Congreve, Wycherley, Farquhar, and Vanbrugh. In Pope and all his school the influence is manifest and conscious. It is present in Addison and Steele, and in the novelists Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett, different as they are; in the letters of Walpole and Chesterfield, and, in more or less measure, consciously and unconsciously, in all the writers of poetry, drama, letters, essays, journals and novels from about the year 1660 for a whole century.
Since that time the influences have been rather the other way, but those from France upon England may perhaps be enumerated as (1) the elaboration of a sentiment for inanimate nature since Rousseau, St. Pierre, and Chateaubriand; (2) the absorption, and sometimes imitation, of French novels, such as Les Misérables and Notre Dame of Hugo, the revived picaroons of Dumas, and the naturalistic work of Zola; (3) the Positivist philosophy of Comte; (4) imitations or plagiarisms of French comedy, such as that of Sardou; (5) lessons from the literary criticism of Ste. Beuve, chiefly derived through Matthew Arnold; (6) stylistic lessons from writers like Flaubert.
BRIEF CONSPECTUS OF FRENCH LITERATURE.
Transcriber’s Note: An image of the original table is available by downloading the HTML version of the book from Project Gutenberg.