French Classics

by William Cleaver Wilkinson

With first a few remarks, naturally suggested, that may be useful, on the general subject thus rather touched merely than handled, the present writer gives way to let now the representative authors themselves, selected for the purpose, supply to the reader a just and lively idea of French literature.

The first thing, perhaps, to strike the thoughtful mind in a comprehensive view of the subject is not so much the length—though this is remarkable—as the long continuity of French literary history. From its beginning down to the actual moment, French literature has suffered no serious break in the course of its development. There have been periods of greater and periods of less prosperity and fruit; but wastes of marked suspension and barrenness there have been none.

The second thing noticeable is, that French literature has, to a singular degree, lived an independent life of its own. It has found copious springs of health and growth within its own bosom.

But then a third thing to be also observed is that, on the other hand, the touch of foreign influence, felt and acknowledged by this most proudly and self-sufficiently national of literatures, has proved to it, at various epochs, a sovereign force of revival and elastic expansion. Thus, the great renascence in the sixteenth century of ancient Greek and Latin letters was new life to French literature. So, again, Spanish literature, brought into contact with French through Corneille and Molière, with others, gave to the national mind of France a new literary launch. But the most recent and perhaps the most remarkable example of foreign influence quickening French literature to make it freshly fruitful is supplied in the great romanticizing movement under the lead of Victor Hugo. English literature—especially Shakespeare—was largely the pregnant cause of this attempted emancipation of the French literary mind from the bondage of classicism.

A fourth very salient trait in French literary history consists in the self-conscious, elaborate, persistent efforts put forth from time to time by individuals, and by organizations, both public and private, in France, to improve the language and to elevate the literature of the nation. We know of nothing altogether comparable to this anywhere else in the literature of the world.

A fifth striking thing about French literature is, that it has, to a degree as we believe beyond parallel, exercised a real and vital influence on the character and the fortune of the nation. The social, the political, the moral, the religious, history of France is from age to age a faithful reflex of the changing phases of its literature. Of course, a reciprocal influence has been constantly reflected back and forth from the nation upon its literature, as well as from its literature upon the nation. But where else in the world has it ever been so extraordinarily, we may say so appallingly, true as in France, that the nation was such because such was its literature?

French literature, it will at once be seen, is a study possessing, beyond the literary, a social, a political, and even a religious, interest.

Readers desiring to push their conversance with the literary history of France further into the catalogue of its less important names than the present volume will enable them to do will consult with profit either the Primer, or the Short History, of French Literature, by Mr. George Saintsbury. Mr. Saintsbury is a well-informed writer, who diffuses himself perhaps too widely to do his best possible work. But he has made French literature a specialty, and he is in general a trustworthy authority on the subject.

Another writer on the subject is Mr. H. Van Laun. Him, although a predecessor of his own in the field, Mr. Saintsbury severely ignores, by claiming that he is himself the first to write in English a history of French literature based on original and independent reading of the authors. We are bound to say that Mr. Van Laun’s work is of very poor quality. It offers, indeed, to the reader one advantage not afforded by either of Mr. Saintsbury’s works—the advantage, namely, of illustrative extracts from the authors treated extracts, however, not unfrequently marred by wretched translation.

A noteworthy book of the year 1889 is “A History of French Literature” by Charles Woodward Hutson, Professor of Modern Languages in the University of Mississippi. This is an intelligent, well-studied, well-written, carefully conscientious, comprehensive account of French letters from the beginning down to the present day. It has, as a concluding chapter, a notice of the “French Writers of Louisiana.” An admirable series of books, translated from the French, on the great French writers, has recently been brought out in Chicago. These two last mentions, by the way, strikingly suggest how wide, territorially, the bounds of the republic of letters are becoming in our country.