And now in the wake of Malherbe so thick do the great names throng that I must perforce touch swiftly only on what seems to demand amplification rather than dwell at length, as it would be much less difficult to do, on the many admirable views the book contains. And first as regards the literary significance of René Descartes. Professor Dowden places himself in accord with the customary views of criticism in assigning to Descartes a preponderating influence on the literary art of his century. "The spirit of Descartes's work was in harmony with that of his time, and reacted upon literature. He sought for general truths by the light of reason; he made clearness a criterion of truth; he proclaimed man a spirit; he asserted the freedom of the will. The art of the classical period sought also for general truths, and subordinated imagination to reason. It turned away from ingenuities, obscurities, mysteries; it was essentially spiritualist; it represented the crises and heroic victories of the will." This sounds reasonable, and is indeed in large measure in accordance with the actual conditions observable in the seventeenth century. Yet there is no doubt that the literature of Louis XIV is more intimately penetrated by the ascetic spirit of Jansenism as conveyed in the famous doctrines of Port-Royal, and it is to Jansenism, and emphatically not to Cartesianism, that the literature of the seventeenth century owes that aspect of grandeur and moral serenity which characterizes it. To quote Brunetière: "Pendant plus de cinquante ans, la conscience française, si l'on peut ainsi dire, incarnée dans le jansénisme, et rendue par lui à elle-même, a fait contre la frivolité naturelle de la race le plus grand effort qu'elle eut fait depuis les premiers temps de la réforme ou du calvinisme." Indeed, the tenaciously religious Jansenist spirit of the "grand siècle" would have been universal were it not that Molière and La Fontaine were apathetically indifferent, nay, sometimes actively hostile, to the general enthusiasm.
Let us, however, examine in all brevity the fundamental doctrines of Cartesianism. The terms are familiar enough. The identity of being and of thought. The objectivity of science. The all-powerfulness of reason. Progress to infinity. Optimism at all times. We can not fail to observe the significance of these categories, and how they contain the germs of almost every great subject debated by the leviathians of the eighteenth century. Yet the nation struggled long before it had strength to shake the incubus of Jansenism from its back, and the stimulating work of Bayle had to be supported by events of actual political significance before the stringent and constraining dogmas of catholicism relaxed their grasp on thought and conduct. The revocation of the Edict of Nantes, the Quietistic movement with its unseemly attendant episcopal quarrels, and finally the actual persecution of the Jansenists, all pointed inevitably in one direction, and stimulating the anti-religious sentiment and opening the flood gates to immorality, induced a potent reaction of Cartesianism in the fundamental theories of the eighteenth century.
In his treatment of Corneille, Professor Dowden "opens his hands only sufficiently to let out a portion of the truth he holds," but what he says is admirable to a degree. Of his diction he writes: "His mastery in verse of a masculine eloquence is unsurpassed; his dialogue of rapid statement and swift reply is like a combat with Roman short swords; in memorable single lines he explodes, as it were, a vast charge of latent energy, and effects a clearance for the progress of his action." This is well said, but hardly indicates how Corneille soared so often in the region of Spanish bombast, or crept among the insipid flowers of Italian preciosity; defects from which Racine's severer Greek taste held him free.
It is refreshing when we come to Boileau to find an English mind impartial enough to do justice to the much-abused "lawgiver of Parnassus." Criticism has for so long deplored his narrowness that we relish an encomium on his good sense. But beyond this there is an opinion which the general reader would be reluctant to admit, but which Professor Dowden has had the courage and the discernment to enforce, when he writes as follows: "But for Paris itself, its various aspects, its life, its types, its manners, he had the eye and the precise rendering of a realist in art; his faithful objective touch is like that of a Dutch painter." Let the incredulous merely turn to the satires to appreciate the scope and truth of the remark. It is difficult to imagine that a more brilliant and effective account of Boileau's work and influence could be presented within so limited a space; yet might not the author have added that whereas Malherbe is the representative of the aristocratic element in literature, Boileau is the first great incarnation in modern times of the bourgeois spirit?
With regard to La Fontaine it need only be observed that Professor Dowden recognizes what French critics with repeated insistence emphasize, the cunning harmonies of his verse.
Much space is of right devoted to Molière, who with La Fontaine has ever been a stumbling-block to English criticism. Professor Dowden voices our national feeling in refusing to consider him as a poet, preferring to emphasize his profound and healthy philosophy of life. Tartufe he considers to be an attack on religious hypocrisy merely. Is not the interpretation perhaps correct which regards it as an attack on the intolerance and Puritanism of all religion, even the most sincere?
Once again, in dealing with Racine, the author shows that subtle discernment in which his criticism abounds. He penetrates to the heart of the secret reason for the cabals that harassed Racine in the later years of his dramatic activity, and which doubtless had their influence in enforcing his retirement. Have we ever sufficiently realized that Boileau, Molière, and Racine were waging constant war against a rebirth of the précieux spirit which threatened not only society with ridiculousness but literature with ruin? Such, indeed, was the case, and in the eyes of the super-refined coterie that grouped itself round the Duchesse de Bouillon, Boileau and his fellow-workers were innovators of a dangerous and revolutionary order. Does not this idea carry us far from our preconceived notions of the narrow conservatism that dominated the leaders of classical thought? Referring to the disastrous check of Racine's Phèdre, the author writes: "It is commonly said that Racine wrote in the conventional and courtly taste of his own day. In reality his presentation of tragic passions in their terror and their truth shocked the aristocratic proprieties which were the mode. He was an innovator, and his audacity at once conquered and repelled." The point of view may seem extreme to us, and this vaunted realism may show pale and weakly when contrasted with the grossness of much of the realism that prevails at the present day, or with the graphic directness of the best examples of the type. But the words ring true if we are willing to accept the refined psychological realism of Racine as equally worthy to the title with the physiological naturalism of our more scientific age. Our whole conception of Racine's art falls into line with this view, and his constant solicitude for an easy and natural intrigue in the structure of his tragedies may be brought home to the same healthy impulse of his mind. Was it not Faguet who maintained that so natural indeed were the processes of his plots that a happy ending would have alone been needed to make any of his tragedies, with some added modicum of wit, in all essential features a comedy that Molière might have penned? Mr. Saintsbury, on the other hand, in dealing with Racine is seemingly swayed by some innate prejudice, or he could hardly have denied the poet a high moral character, merely granting him the possession of great shrewdness and discernment. True passion, he remarks, was not popular with the crowd, but "love-making, on the contrary, would draw, and love-making accordingly is the staple of all his plays." It is against this view, and against Mr. Saintsbury's further opinion that the tragedy of Racine is at the furthest remove from an imitation of Nature, that Professor Dowden makes a strong and timely protest.
While applauding, however, the value of such novel opinions in English criticism at least, we may suspect that in his desire to clinch his arguments the author may have driven the nail too ruthlessly home. And so it would appear when we seek in vain for any statement which contains the shadow of a justification for the existence of that powerful précieux spirit against which the greater classicists rebelled. We are too inclined to take Molière's word for it that they were solely ridiculous, forgetting the explicit reserve of his preface—"aussi les véritables précieuses auraient tort de se piquer lorsqu'on joue les ridicules qui les imitent mal." So let us then give the Précieuses credit for what they did confer to the advantage of letters amid so much folly, and, weighing the matter carefully, their gift to literature amounts to this: First, amid much linguistic and metaphorical pedantry they were free from the equally damaging and ridiculous pedantry of a labored erudition which pervaded the literature of the day. In the second place, whether we regard it as an advantage or the contrary, their influence made directly against the licentiousness of the esprit gaulois, and for politeness and decency in expression; and as a third count in their favor can we doubt that straining as they did to express the nuances of sentiment and gallantry, they were instrumental in stimulating that ardor of mental analysis which is of all things the distinguishing mark of the century? A word finally might have been said with a view to elucidating the inherent divergence of the précieux spirit from our own Euphuism, from the Marinism of Italy, or the Gongorism of Spain; a divergence due certainly to the fact that the précieuses allied themselves to, and accordingly strengthened, that spirit of social coherence so characteristic of the life and letters of the time in France, whereas the influences of similar movements abroad were more transitory, inasmuch as in some degree more isolated and tentative.
The chapter devoted to the seventeenth century closes with a critical review of the series of great preachers and theologians who have left their mark more or less upon the development of thought, while their literary significance can be comparatively slighted in a history of this kind; and the chapter which discusses the transition to the eighteenth century broaches questions of such large issue that an exhaustive treatment of them was not to be expected. Such are the memorable quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns, and the philosophe idea of perfectibility and human progress. The chapter closes with an account of the great protagonist and pioneer in the warfare against Christianity, the patient, plodding, dangerous Pierre Bayle. So effectually was his teaching absorbed by Voltaire and the encyclopedists that he is read no longer; but low as his flame has sunk, he remains one of the beacons lighting us over the lurid threshold of the century of strife.
We are in safe hands when it is Professor Dowden who guides us on the highways and bypaths of the eighteenth century, but by very reason of his accurate knowledge of the ground whereon he treads we are disappointed when he fails to point out to us some special feature of the landscape. Beauties we could hardly hope to meet with on our journey. There was not sap enough in that arid soil to nourish flowers, or send a flush of living green over hill and valley. The most serious omission is to have left entirely out of account the exceedingly interesting reactionary influences that leaped back and forth across the Channel when Marivaux's romances were devoured in England, and Richardson's Pamela was in every French pocket large enough to hold it. It is in itself still an open question which of these two authors exerted the initial influence on the other, although eighteenth-century criticism invariably held that in Marianne Richardson found his inspiration.