Poets: Quevedo, Gongora, Lope de Vega, Ercilla, Calderon, Rojas, etc. Prose Writers: Montemayor, Cervantes, etc. Portugal: De Camoens, etc. The Stage.
POETRY: QUEVERO; GONGORA.—The sixteenth century and the first half at least of the seventeenth century were the golden age of both Spanish and Portuguese literature. In poetry Quevedo is the first to be noticed, and he is also notable in prose. Born at Madrid, but compelled by the consequences of his youthful follies to take refuge in Sicily, then back in Spain and either at the height of his fortune near the Duke of Olivares or else pursued, imprisoned, and tortured by that minister, he possessed facility and force which were alike extraordinary. His poems, which are most satirical, revealed a glow and a freshness that were very remarkable.
Gongora, like Lyly in England and Marini in Italy, enjoyed the fame of founding a bad school. It was Gongorism: that is, the art of writing not to make oneself read, which could only suit lawyers, orators, critics, and scientists, but the art of writing to cause one's idea only to be discovered after many efforts, or even so as to prevent its being discovered at all. Gongorism belongs to every epoch, and in each epoch is the means of scaring away the crowd, of obtaining a small band of enthusiastic admirers, and of being able to scorn the suffrage of the multitude. Gongora, both in Spain and in France, found devoted admirers and imitators.
LOPE DE VEGA.—Lope de Vega was one of the greatest of the world's poets, although he was intelligible. Prodigiously fertile, which is not necessarily a sign of mediocrity, he published some romances in prose (Dorothea Arcadia), some novels, epic or historic poems (Circe, Shepherds of Bethlehem, Jerusalem Conquered, The Beauty of Angelica, The Pilgrim in his Land, The White Rose, The Tragic Crown, of which Mary Stuart is the heroine, The Laurel of Apollo, etc.), burlesque and satirical poems, and dramatic poems the number of which exceed eighteen hundred. In this mass of production may be discerned comedies of manners, comedies of intrigue, pastorals, historical comedies (with characters whose names are known in history), classical and religious tragedies, mythological, philosophical, and hagiological comedies. Despite these distinctions, which are useful as a guide in this throng, all the dramatic work of Lope de Vega is that of imagination which seems to owe little to practical observation and is valuable through happy invention, dexterous composition, and the charming fertility and variety of ideas in the details. The dramatic work of Lope de Vega (as yet incompletely published and which probably never will be published in its entirety) was a vast mine wherein quarried not only all the dramatic authors but all the romancists and novelists of Europe. This prodigious producer, who wrote millions of verses, is the Homer of Spain and more fertile than Homer, whilst also a Homer as to whose existence there is no doubt.
ERCILLA.—Alonso de Ercilla created a peculiar species, that of memorialist epic poems. He was a man concerned in important events, who took daily notes and subsequently, or even concurrently, put them into verse. Thus Ercilla made his Araucana: that is, the poem of the expedition against the Araucanians in Chili, or rather he thus wrote the first (and best) of the three parts; later, desirous of rising to epic heights, he had resort to the contrivances and conventional traditional ornaments of this type of work and became dull, without entirely losing all his skill. "This poem is more savage than the nations which form its theme," said Voltaire in a pretty phrase which was somewhat hyperbolical. The Araucana is agreeably savage in its first part without being ferocious and fastidiously civilised in the sequels without being contemptible.
MENDOZA.—Hurtado de Mendoza must be regarded—that proud, gloomy, bellicose and haughty minister of Charles V—because he was the earliest of the picaresque romancists. The picaresque method consisted in delineating the habits of outcasts, bohemians, spongers, swindlers, and vagrants. It lasted for about three quarters of a century. To this class belonged Guzmar of Alfargue, by Mateo Aleman; Marco of Obregon, by Espinel; The Devil on Two Sticks, by Guevara; and somewhat, in France, the Gil Bias of Le Sage. Now the prototype of all these was The Lazarillo of Tormes, by Hurtado de Mendoza.
GUEVARA.—A moment's heed must be paid to the amiable Antonio de Guevara, an insinuating moralist whose Familiar Letters and Dial of Princes, though rather affectedly grave, contain interesting passages which commend the author to readers. He is more particularly interesting to Frenchmen because it was from him La Fontaine borrowed his Countrymen of the Danube, attributing it to Marcus Aurelius (which led to much confusion), because the principal personage in The Dial of Princes is one Marcus Aurelius, who is discreetly intended for Charles V. In spite of what Taine wrote, though his criticisms in detail were accurate, La Fontaine followed pretty closely the fine and highly original wording of Guevara.
THE ROMANCE.—The Spanish romance was at its zenith in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It had a legion of authors, but here the principal only can be mentioned. Montemayor, who lived at the close of the sixteenth century and led an adventurous existence, wrote the Diana in Love, which became celebrated in every country under the title of "Diana of Montemayor." It is a mythological, bucolic, and magical romance, entirely lacking in order, being wholly fantastical, sometimes cruelly dull, sometimes graceful, affecting, seductive, and pathetic, always ridiculously romantic. Its vogue was considerable in Spain, France, and Italy. The Astrea of Honoré d'Urfé proceeds in part from it, but is more sensible and more restrained.
QUEVEDO.—Here Quevedo is again found, now as prose writer and in this no worse than as poet. He was prolific in romances or satirical fantasies, in social reveries wherein contemporary society is not spared and Juvenal is often suggested. Finally, he put forth all his powers, which were considerable, in his great romance, Don Pablo of Segovia, which, twenty years ago, would have been called naturalist. Quevedo obviously was an observer, possessed psychological penetration or, at least, the wisdom of the moralist; but above all, his imagination was curiously original, he invented, on an apparently true foundation, adventures which were almost probable and were diverting, burlesque, or possessed a bitter flavour. His was one of the most original brains in Spain, which has abounded in mental originalities.
CERVANTES.—Montesquieu has said of the Spaniards: "They have only one good book, the one which mocks at all the others." Nothing could be more witty nor more unjust; but it is true that the greatest Spanish book is that in which the author does mock at many other Spanish books. Cervantes wrote his Don Quixote to ridicule the romances of chivalry which in his land were a craze among the townsfolk and smaller aristocratic landowners, but he wrote in no spirit of animosity and even reserved for his comic hero, that is, for his victim, a discreet sympathy which he made his reader share. A hero of chivalry himself, warrior with indomitable courage, thrice wounded at the battle of Lepanto, where he lost an arm, seven years in captivity in Algiers, on his return to Spain he became involved in adventures which again consigned him to prison before he at length attained success, if not fortune, with Don Quixote. Don Quixote is a realistic romance traversed by a frenzied idealist: here are the manners of the populace, of innkeepers, muleteers, galley-slaves, monks, petty traders, peasants, and amid them passes a man who views the entire world as a romance and who believes he finds romance at every turn of his road. This perpetual contrast is, first, effective and supremely artistic in itself, then is of a reality superior to that of any realism, since it is the complete life of humanity which is thus painted and penetrated to its very foundations and shown in all its aspects. There are two portions to this romance, and they are constantly near each other and, as it were, interlaced; namely, the episodes and the conversations. The episodes, comic incidents, humorous or sentimental adventures are of infinite variety and display incredible imagination; the conversations between Don Quixote and his faithful Sancho represent the two tendencies of the human mind to recognise on the one side, the goodness, generosity, devotion, the spirit of sacrifice, and the illusions; on the other side, common sense, the sense of reality, the sense of the just mean and, as it were, the proverbial reason, without malice or bitterness. This masterpiece is perhaps the one for which would have had to be invented the epithet of inexhaustible.
Apart from his immortal romance, Cervantes wrote novels, romances, sonnets, and also tried the drama, at which he did not succeed. The whole world, literally, was infatuated with Don Quixote, and, despite all changes of taste, it has never ceased to excite the admiration of all who read.
THE DRAMA: FERDINAND DE ROJAS.—The drama, even apart from Lope de Vega, of whom we have written, was most brilliant in Spain during these two centuries. The Spanish stage was very characteristic, very original among all drama in that, more than the ancient drama, more than in the plays of Shakespeare himself, it was essentially lyrical, or, to express the fact more clearly, it was based on a continual mixture of the lyric and the dramatic; also it nearly always laid stress on the sentiment and the susceptibility of honour, "the point of honour," as it was called, and upon its laws, which were severe, tyrannical, and even cruel. These two principal characteristics gave it a distinct aspect differing from all the other European theatres. Without going back to the confused origins and without expressing much interest in the Spanish drama until the religious dramas of the autos sacramentales(which continued their career until the seventeenth century), it is necessary, first, to note, at the close of the fifteenth century, the celebrated Celestine of Ferdinand de Rojas, a spirited work, unmeasured, enormous, unequal, at times profoundly licentious, at times attaining a great height of moral exaltation, and also at times farcical and at others deeply pathetic. Celestine was translated several times in various languages, and especially in Italy and France was as much appreciated as in Spain.
CALDERON.—In the seventeenth century (after Lope de Vega) came Calderon. Almost as prolific as Lope, author of at least two hundred plays, some authorities say a thousand, Calderon was first prodigiously inventive, then he was dogmatic, moralising, almost a preacher. Whether in his religious plays, in his love dramas, in his cap and sword tragedies, even in his comedies and highly complicated intrigues, the great sentiments of the Spanish soul—honour, faith, the inviolability of the oath, loyalty, fidelity, the spirit of great adventures—broaden, animate and elevate the whole work. With Calderon the titles are always indicative of the subject. His most celebrated plays are: In this Life All Is Truth and Falsehood, Life is a Dream, The Devotion to the Cross, The Lady before All, The Mayor of Zamalea, Love after Death, The Physician of his Own Honour.
ALARCON.—Alarcon comes nearer to us owing to his regular and almost classic compositions. Nevertheless he was a man of imagination and humour with an adequate dramatic force. His tragedies must be mentioned: What Is Worth Much Costs Much, Cruelty through Honour, The Master of Stars; his comedies, The Examination of Husbands, and that charming The Truth Suspected, from which Corneille derived The Liar.
TIRSO DE MOLINA.—Tirso de Molina was another prodigy of dramatic literature, and his fellow-countrymen assert that he wrote three hundred dramas, of which sixty-five are in existence. All Spanish dramatists were unequal, he more especially; he passed from grossness to sublimity with surprising facility and ease. He particularly delighted in ingeniously complicated intrigue, in surprises, and in unexpected theatrical touches. Yet The Condemned in Doubt is a sort of moral epopee, adapted to the stage, possessing real beauty and not without depth. His most celebrated drama, in so far as it has aroused direct or indirect imitations, and owing to the type he was the first to suggest, was The Jester of Seville: that is, Don Juan. All European literatures, utilising Don Juan, became tributaries to Tirso de Molina.
FRANCIS DE ROJAS; CASTRO; DIAMANTE.—Francis de Rojas, who must not be confused with Ferdinand de Rojas, author of Celestine, though possessing less spirit than his predecessors, is nevertheless a distinguished dramatic poet. The French of the seventeenth century freely pilfered from him. Thomas Corneille borrowed a goodly portion of his Bertrand de Cigarral, Scarron a large part of his Jodelet, Le Sage an episode in Gil Blas. If only for their connection with the French drama, William de Castro and Diamante must be noticed. William de Castro wrote a play, The Exploits of the Cid in Youth, which Corneille knew and which he imitated in his celebrated tragedy, adding incomparable beauty. Diamante in his turn imitated Corneille very closely in The Son who Avenges his Father. Voltaire, mistaken in dates, believed Corneille had imitated Diamante.
PORTUGUESE WRITERS.—In Portugal the sixteenth century was the golden age. Poets, dramatists, historians, and moralists were extremely numerous; several possessed genius and many displayed great talent. Among lyrical poets were Bernardin Ribeiro, Christoval Falcam, Diogo Bernardes, Andrade Caminha, Alvarez do Oriente, Rodriguez Lobo. Ribeiro wrote eclogues half in narrative or dialogue, half lyrical. He also produced a romance intersected with tales (Le Sage in his Gil Blas thus wrote, as is known, and in this only imitated the Spaniards), entitled The Innocent Girl, which often evinces great refinement.
Christoval Falcam was also bucolic, but his eclogues often ran to nine hundred verses. He also wrote Voltas, which are lyric poems suitable for setting to music. Diogo Bernardes also wrote eclogues and letters collected under the title of the Lyma. The Lyma is a river. To Bernardes the Lyma was what the Lignon was to D'Urfé in his Astrea.
Caminha, a court poet decidedly analogous to the French Saint-Gelais, possessed dexterity and happy phraseology. Eclogues, elegiacs, epitaphs, and epistles were the ordinary occupations of his muse.
Alvarez do Oriente has left a great romanesque work, a medley of prose and verse entitled Portugal Transformed (Lusitania transformanda), which is extremely picturesque apart from its idylls and lyrical poems.
Lobo was highly prolific. He was author of pastoral romances, medleys of verse and prose (The Strange Shepherd, The Spring, Disenchantment), a great epic poem (The Court at the Village), in prose conversations on moral and literary questions which have remained classic in Portugal, as well as romances and eclogues.
EPIC POETS.—The most notable epic poets were Corte-Real, Manzinho, Pereira de Castro, Francisco de Saa e Menezès, Doña de la Lacerda, and, finally, the great Camoens. Corte-Real, a writer of the highest talent, was author of an epic which we would style a romance in verse, although founded on fact, upon The Shipwreck of Sepulveda and her husband Lianor. The varied and picturesque narrative is often pathetic. It would be more so, to us at least, were it not for the incessant intervention of pagan deities.
Francisco de Saa e Menezès sang of the great Albuquerque and of Malaca Conquered. He mingled amorous and romantic tales with narratives and descriptions of battles. He possessed the sense of local colour and brilliant imagination; he has been accused of undue negligence with regard to correction.
Doña de la Lacerda, professor of Latin literature to the children of Philip III, although born at Porto, wrote nearly always in Spanish. The Spain Delivered (from the Moors), an epic poem, is her chief work; she also composed comedies and various poems in Spanish. On rare occasions she wrote in Portuguese prose.
CAMOËNS.—The glory of these sound poets is effaced by that of Camoëns. Exiled in early youth for a reason analogous to the one which occasioned the banishment of Ovid, a soldier who lost an eye at Ceuta, wandering in India, shipwrecked and, according to tradition, only saving his poem which he held in one hand whilst swimming with the other, he returned to Portugal after sixteen years of exile, assisting at the struggles, decline, and subjection of his country, dying (1579) at the moment when for a time Portugal ceased to have a political existence. He wrote The Lusiad (that is the Portuguese), which was the history of Vasco da Gama and of his expedition to India. The description of Africa, the Cape of Tempests (the Cape of Good Hope), with the giant Adamaston opposing the passage, and the description of India were the foundation of the narrative. Episodes narrated by individuals, as in Virgil and as in the Spanish romance, formed an internal supplement, and thus was narrated almost all the history of Portugal, and so it came to pass that the love of Inez de Castro and of Don Pedro formed part of the story of Vasco da Gama. Camoëns was a powerful narrator, a magnificent orator in verse, and, above all, a very great painter. He evinced curious taste, even as compared with his contemporaries, such as the continual commingling of mythological divinities with Christian truths: for instance, a prayer addressed by Vasco to Jesus Christ was granted by Venus. It may also be observed that the poem lacked unity and was only a succession of poems. But, as Voltaire said, "The art of relating details, by the pleasure it affords, can make up for all the rest; and that proves the work to be full of great beauties, since for two hundred years it has formed the delight of a clever race who must be well aware of its faults."
DRAMATISTS.—The principal Portuguese dramatists were Saa de Miranda, Antonio Ferreira, Gil Vicente. Saa de Miranda was a philosophical poet or, to express it more correctly, a poet with ideas; he broke with the eternal idylls, eclogues, bucolics, and pastorals of his predecessors without declining to furnish excellent examples, but more often aiming elsewhere and higher. He also reformed the versification, introducing metres employed in other languages, but hitherto unused in his tongue. He wrote odes, epistles after the manner of Horace, sonnets, lyric poems in Latin, and epic compositions. In all this portion of his work he may be compared to Ronsard. Finally, he wrote two comedies in prose—The Strangers and The Villalpandios (the Villalpandios are Spanish soldiers, who have a recognised position in comedy). His mind was one of the most elevated and best stored with classic literature that Portugal ever produced.
FERREIRA.—Ferreira, who wrote lyric poems, elegiac poems, and especially epistles, by which he gained for himself the name of the Portuguese Horace, was more particularly a dramatist. He created Farcas, which must not be regarded as farces, but as dramatic poems in which the profane and religious are interwoven; he wrote The Bristo, a popular comedy; The Jealous One, which was perhaps the earliest comedy of character ever produced in Europe, and finally, a tragedy, Inez de Castro, the national tragedy, a tragedy so orthodox and regular in form that the author felt bound to introduce a chorus in the classic manner; it is charged with pathos and handled with much art.
GIL VICENTE.—Gil Vicente, a prolific poet who wrote forty-two dramatic pieces, two thirds in Spanish and the rest in Portuguese, touched every branch of theatrical literature; he produced religious plays (autos), tragedies, romantic dramas, comedies, and farces. His chief works are The Sibyl Cassandra, The Widow, Amadis de Gaule, The Temple of Apollo, The Boat of Hell. His comedies possess a vivacity that is Italian rather than Portuguese. Tradition has it that Erasmus learnt Portuguese for the sole purpose of reading the comedies of Gil Vicente.
Of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: Fontenelle, Bayle. Of the Eighteenth: Poets: La Motte, Jean Baptiste Rousseau, Voltaire, etc. Prose Writers: Montesquieu, Voltaire, Buffon, Jean Jacques Rousseau, etc. Of the Nineteenth Century: Poets: Lamartine, Victor Hugo, Musset, Vigny, etc.; Prose Writers: Chateaubriand, Michelet, George Sand, Mérimée, Renan, etc.
FONTENELLE.—The eighteenth century, which was announced, and announced with great precision, by La Bruyère, was inaugurated by his enemy Fontenelle. Fontenelle, nephew of Corneille, began with despicable trifles, eclogues, operas, stilted tragedies, letters of a dandy, so he might be justly regarded as an inferior Voiture. Very soon, because he possessed the passion of the eighteenth century for science and free-thought, he showed himself to be a serious man, and because he had wit he showed himself an amusing serious man, which is rare. His Dialogues of the Dead were very humorous and, at the same time, in many passages profound; he wrote his Discourses on the Plurality of (Habitable) Worlds; then because he was perpetual secretary of the Academy of Sciences, came his charming and often astonishing Eulogies of Sages, which ought to be regarded as the best existent history of science in the seventeenth century and in the eighteenth up to 1740.
BAYLE.—Bayle, a Frenchman who lived in Holland on account of religion, a journalist and lexicographer, in his News of the Republic of Letters and in his immense Dictionary, gave proof of broad erudition about all earthly questions, especially philosophical and religious, guiding his readers to absolute scepticism. Fontenelle and Bayle are the two heralds who opened the procession of the eighteenth century. Successively must now be examined first the poets and then the prose writers of the first half of that era.
LA MOTTE.—La Motte, as celebrated in his own time as he is forgotten in ours, was lyricist, fabulist, dramatic orator, epical even after a certain fashion. He wrote odes that were deadly cold, fables that were often quite witty but affected and laboured, comedies sufficiently mediocre, of which The Magnificent Lover was the most remarkable, and a tragedy, Inez de Castro, which was excellent and enjoyed one of the greatest successes of the French stage. Finally, becoming the partisan of the modernists against the classicists, he abridged the Iliad of Homer into a dozen books as frigid as his own lyric poems. He had parodoxical ideas in literature, and, being a poet, or believing himself one, he considered that verse enervated thought and that sentiments should only be written in prose. It was against these tendencies that Voltaire so vigorously reacted.
J.B. ROUSSEAU; POMPIGNAN.—Beside La Motte, being more gifted as a poet, Jean Baptiste Rousseau was conspicuous. He wrote lyrical poems which were cold as lyrics but were well composed and, sometimes at least, attained a certain degree of eloquence. From Malherbe to Lamartine, lyrical poetry was almost completely neglected by French poets, or at least very badly treated. Jean Baptiste Rousseau had the advantage of being nearly solitary and for approximately century was regarded as the greatest national lyrical poet.
Le Franc de Pompignan has endured much ridicule, not the least being for a certain naive vanity perceptible directly he passed from the south to the north of France; but he had some knowledge; he was acquainted with Hebrew, then a sufficiently rare accomplishment, and he was an assiduous student of classic literature. His tragedy, Dido, succeeded; his Sacred Songs enjoyed popularity, no matter what Voltaire might say, and deserved their success; in his odes, which were too often cold, he rarely succeeded—only once triumphantly, in his ode on the death of Jean Baptiste Rousseau.
THE HENRIADE.—So far as poets, strictly speaking, were concerned, the foregoing are all that have to be indicated in the first half of the eighteenth century, except the ingenious and frigid Henriade of Voltaire.
DRAMATIC POETS.—To counterbalance, the dramatic poets are numerous and not without merit. Let us recall Inez de Castro by De la Motte. Campistron, the feeble pupil of Racine (and, moreover, there could be no pupil of Racine, so original was the latter, so closely was his genius associated with his mind), perpetrated numerous tragedies and operas which enjoyed the success obtained by all imitative works: that is, a success which arouses no discussion, and which today appears to be the climax of tediousness.
CRÉBILLON.—Crébillon followed, vigorous, energetic, violently shaking the nerves, master of horror and of terrors, not lacking some analogy with Shakespeare, but without delicacy or depth, never even giving a thought to being psychological or a moralist, writing badly and to a certain extent meriting the epithet of "the barbarian" bestowed on him by Voltaire.
The latter was infatuated with the drama, having the feeling for beautiful themes and for new and original topics, adapting them to the stage with sufficient aptitude, delighting, in addition, in pomp, mimicry, and decorativeness, and causing tragedy to lean towards opera, which in his day was no bad thing; but weak in execution, never creating characters because he could not escape from himself, as moderate in psychology and morality as Crébillon himself and replacing analysis of passion by these and philosophical commonplaces. He left tragic dramas which until about 1815 enjoyed success, but which then fell into a disregard from which there is no probability they will ever emerge.
COMIC POETS.—The comic poets of this period were highly agreeable. The most notable were Destouches, Regnard, La Chaussée. Destouches was the very type of the comic writers of the eighteenth century already alluded to, who took a portrait by La Bruyère and turned it into a comedy, and that is what was called a comedy of character. Thus he wrote The Braggart, The Irresolute, The Ungrateful, The Backbiter, The Spendthrift, etc. Sometimes he took pains to be a trifle more original, as in The False Agnes, The Married Philosopher; sometimes he borrowed a subject from a foreign literature and adapted it fairly dexterously for the Gallic stage, as in The Impertinent Inquisitive, taken from Don Quixote and The Night Drum, borrowed from an English author. His versification was dexterous and correct without possessing other merit.
REGNARD.—Regnard, on the contrary, was an original genius, though frequently imitative of Molière. He possessed the comic spirit, gaiety, animation, the sense of drollery, and a prodigious capacity for humorous verse of great flexibility and incredible ease, highly superior in point of form to that of Boileau and even of Molière, for he suggests a Scarron perfected by Molière himself and by the Italian poets. Still alive and probably imperishable are such works as The Gamester, The Universal Legatee, The Unexpected Return.
THE DRAMA: LA CHAUSSÉE.—La Chaussée possessed a vein of the popular novel, the serial, as we should say, and at the same time a taste for the stage. The result was he created a new species, which in itself is no small achievement. He created the drama: that is, the stage-play wherein common people, and no longer kings and princes, affect us by their misfortunes. This has been called by all possible names; when it is a comedy it is described as a tearful comedy; when a tragedy, as a dramatic tragedy. This is the drama we have known in France for a hundred and fifty years; such as it already existed in the sixteenth century under the title of the morality play, such as Corneille, who foresaw everything, anticipated and predicted in his preface to Don Sancho: "I would rather say, sir, that tragedy should excite pity and fear, and that in its essentials, since there is necessity for definition. Now if it be true that this latter feeling is only excited in us when we see those like ourselves suffer, and that their misfortunes put us in fear of similar calamities, is it not also true that we can be more strongly moved by disasters arriving to people of our own rank, having resemblance to ourselves, than by the picture of the overthrow from their thrones of the greatest monarchs, who can have no relation to us except in so far as we are susceptible to the passions that overwhelmed them, which is not always the case?" This domestic tragedy La Chaussée wrote in verse, which is not against French rules, and which has been done by dramatists a hundred and twenty years later; but it is probably an error, being even more unlikely that citizens would express themselves in metre than that kings and heroes should give utterance with a certain solemnity which entails rhythm. Thus he wrote The Fashionable Prejudice, The School of Friends, Melanide, very pathetic, The School of Mothers, etc. It must be stated that he wrote his plays in verse somewhat systematically; he had made his first appearance in literature by a defence of versification against the doctrines of La Motte.
PIRON.—According to the old system, but in original verse, Piron, after having met with scant success in tragedy, wrote the delicious Metromania which, with The Turcaret of Le Sage, The Bad Man of Gresset, the masterpieces of Marivaux and the two great comedies of Beaumarchais rank among the seven or eight superior comedies produced in the eighteenth century.
GREAT PROSE WRITERS: MONTESQUIEU.—In prose, writers, and even great writers, were abundant at this period. Immediately after Fontenelle and Bayle appeared Montesquieu, sharp, malicious, satirical, already profound, in The Persian Letters, a great political philosopher and master of jurisprudence in The Spirit of Laws, a great philosophical historian in The Grandeur and Decadence of the Romans. The influence of Montesquieu on Voltaire, no matter what the latter may have said; on Rousseau, however silent the latter may have been about it; on Mably, on Raynal, on the encyclopaedists, on a large portion of the men in the French Revolution, on the greatest minds of the nineteenth century, has been profound and difficult to measure. As writer he was concise, collected, and striking, seeking the motive and often finding it, seeking the formula and invariably finding it—Tacitus mingled with Sallust.
LE SAGE; SAINT-SIMON.—In considering Le Sage and Saint-Simon, it is not, perhaps, the one who is instinctively thought of as a novelist who really was the greater romancer. They each wrote at the same time as Montesquieu. Saint-Simon narrated the age of Louis XIV as an eyewitness, both with spirit and with a feeling for the picturesque that were alike inimitable, expressed in a highly characteristic fashion, which was often incorrect, always incredibly vigorous, energetic, and masterful. Le Sage, in the best of all French styles, that of the purest seventeenth century, narrated Spanish stories in which he mingled many observations made in Paris, and set the model for the realistic novel in his admirable Gil Blas. As a dramatist he will be dealt with later.
MARIVAUX; PRÉVOST.—Marivaux also essayed the realistic novel in his very curious Marianne, full of types drawn from contemporary life and drawn with an art which was less condensed but as exact as that of La Bruyère, and in his Perverted Peasant with an art which was more gross, but still highly interesting.
The Abbé Prévost, much inferior, much overpraised, generally insipid in his novels of adventure, once found a good theme, Manon Lescaut, and, though writing as badly as was his wont, evoked tears which, it may be said, still flow.
HISTORY: DRAMA.—In history Voltaire furnished a model of vivid, rapid, truly epic narration in his History of Charles XII, and an example, at least, of exact documentation and of contemporaneous history studied with zeal and passion in his Philosophical Letters on England. On the stage, in prose there were the pretty, witty, and biting light comedies of Dancourt, De Brueys and Palaprat, and Dufresny, then the delicious drama, at once fantastic and perceptive, romantic and psychological, of Marivaux, who, in The Legacy, The False Confidences, The Test, The Game of Love and of Shame, showed himself no less than the true heir of Racine and the only one France has ever had.
VOLTAIRE.—In the second portion of the eighteenth century, Voltaire reigned. He multiplied historical studies (Century of Louis XIV), philosophies (Philosophical Dictionary), dramas (Zaïre, Mérope, Alzire [before 1750], Rome Saved, The Chinese Orphan, Tancred, Guèbres, Scythia, Irene), comedies (Nanine, The Prude), romances(Tales and Novels), judicial exquisitions (the Calas, Labarre, and Sirven cases), and articles, pamphlets, and fugitive papers on all conceivable subjects.
THE PHILOSOPHERS.—But the second generation of philosophers was now reached. There was Diderot, philosophical romancer (The Nun, James the Fatalist), art critic(Salons), polygraphist (collaboration in the Encyclopaedia); there was Jean Jacques Rousseau, philosophic novelist in The New Héloise, publicist in his discourse against Literature and the Arts and Origin of Inequality, schoolmaster in his Emilius, severe moralist in his Letters to M. d'Alembert on the Spectacles, half-romancer, charming, impassioned, and passion-inspiring in the autobiography which he called his Confessions; there was Duclos, interesting though rather tame in his Considerations on the Manners of this Century; there was Grimm, an acute and subtle critic of the highest intelligence in his Correspondence; then Condillac, precise, systematic, restrained, but infinitely clear in the best of diction in his Treatise on the Sensations; finally Turgot, the philosophical economist, in his Treatise on the Formation and Distribution of Wealth.
BUFFON; MARMONTEL; DELILLE.—Philosophy, meditation on great problems, filled almost all the literary horizon, while scientific literature embraced a score of illustrious representatives, of which the most impressive was Buffon, with his Natural History. Nevertheless, in absolute literature there were also names to cite: Marmontel gave his Moral Tales, his Belisarius, his Incas, and his Elements of Literature.
Delille, with his translation in verse of the Georgics of Virgil, commenced a noble poetic career which he pursued until the nineteenth century; Gilbert wrote some mordant satires which recalled Boileau, and some farewells to life which are among the best lyrics; Saint Lambert sang of The Seasons with felicity, and Roucher treated the same theme with more vivid sensibility.
THE STAGE.—On the stage, a little before 1750. Gresset gave his Wicked Man, which was witty and in such felicitous metre that it carried the tradition of great comedy in verse; Diderot, theorist and creator of the drama in prose, followed La Chaussée, and produced The Father of a Family, The Natural Son, and Is He Good, Is He Bad? being the portrait of himself. Innumerable dramas by the fertile Mercier and a score of others followed, including Beaumarchais, himself a devotee of the drama, but only able to succeed in comedy, wherein he gave his two charming works, The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro.
ANDRÉ CHÉNIER.—Almost on the verge of the Revolution, quite unexpectedly there emerged a really great poet, André Chénier, marvellously gifted in every way. As the poet of love he recalled Catullus and Tibullus; in political lyricism he suggested d'Aubigny, though with more fervour; as elegiac poet he possessed a grace that was truly Grecian; as the poet of nature he employed the large manner of Lucretius; in polemical prose he was remarkably eloquent. Struck down whilst quite young amid the turmoil of the Revolution, he bequeathed immortal fragments. No doubt he would have been the greatest French poet between Racine and Lamartine.
BERNARDIN DE SAINT-PIERRE.—In prose, his contemporary, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, primarily was a man of genius, since he wrote that immortal idyllic romance, Paul and Virginia; subsequently he became a gracious and amiable pupil of Jean Jacques Rousseau, being smitten with the sentiment of nature in his Harmonies of Nature; finally he attained a great importance in literary history as the creator of exotic literature through the descriptions he wrote of many lands: Asia, African isles traversed and studied by him, Russia, and Germany.
THE REVOLUTIONARY ORATORS.—During the revolutionary period may be pointed out the great orators of the Assembly: Mirabeau, Barnave, Danton, Vergniaud, Robespierre; the ill-starred authors of national songs: Marie Joseph Chénier; the author of the Marseillaise, Rouget de Lisle, who only succeeded on the day that he wrote it. And so we reach the nineteenth century.
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.—At the commencement of a century which was so brilliant from the literary aspect, James Delille was despotic: his earlier efforts have already been attended to. A skilled versifier, but without fire or many ideas, he made cultured translations from Virgil and Milton, wrote perennially descriptive poems, such as The Man in the Fields, The Gardens, etc., and a witty satirical poem on Conversation, which, in our opinion, was the best thing he wrote.
GREAT POETS: LAMARTINE.—Great poets were to come. Aroused, without doubt, by the poetic genius of the prose writer Chateaubriand, the first generation of the romantics was formed by Lamartine, Victor Hugo, and Alfred de Vigny. Romanticism was the preponderance of imagination and sensibility over reason and observation. Lamartine rebathed poetry in its ancient and eternal sources: love, religion, and the sentiment of nature. In his Meditations, his Harmonies, and his Contemplations, he reawoke feelings long slumbering, and profoundly moved the hearts of men. In Jocelyn he widened his scope, and, emerging from himself, narrated, as he imagined it, the story of the soul of a priest during the Revolution, and subsequently in the obscurity of a rural parish; in The Fall of an Angel he reverted to the life of primaeval man as he conceived it to be when humanity was still barbarous. Apart from his poetic works, he wrote The History of the Girondins, which is a romanesque history of almost the whole of the Revolution, some novels, some autobiographic episodes, and a few discourses on literature.
VICTOR HUGO.—Victor Hugo, though less sensitive than Lamartine but more imaginative, began with lyrical poems which were somewhat reminiscent of the classical manner, then went on to pictures of the East, thence to meditations on what happened to himself, and on all subjects (Autumn Leaves, Lights and Shades); next, in full possession of his genius, he dwelt on great philosophical meditations in his Contemplations, and in The Legend of the Centuries gave that epic fragment which is a picture of history. His was one of the most powerful imaginations that the world has ever seen, as well as a creator of style, who made a style for himself all in vision and colour, and also in melody and orchestration. Although in prose he lacked one part of his resources, he utilised the rest magnificently, and Notre Dame and The Miserable are works which excite admiration, at least in parts. Later, he will be dealt with as a dramatist.
ALFRED DE VIGNY.—Alfred de Vigny was the most philosophical of these three great poets, though inferior to the other two in creative imaginativeness. He meditated deeply on the existence of evil on earth, on the misfortunes of man, and the sadness of life, and his most despairing songs, which were also his most beautiful, left a profound echo in the hearts of his contemporaries. Some of his poems, such as The Bottle in the Sea, The Shepherd's House, The Fury of Samson, are among the finest works of French literature.
MUSSET; THÉOPHILE GAUTIER.—The second generation of romanticism, which appeared about 1830, possessed Alfred de Musset and Théophile Gautier as chief representatives. They bore little mutual resemblance, be it said, the former only knowing how to sing about himself, his pleasures, his illusions, his angers, and, above all, his sorrows, always with sincerity and in accents that invariably charmed and sometimes lacerated; the latter, supremely artist, always seeking the fair exterior and delighting in reproducing it as though he were a painter, a sculptor, or a musician, and excellent and dexterous in these "transpositions of art," whether they were in verse or prose.
THE PROSE WRITERS: CHATEAUBRIAND.—The French prose writers of this first half of the nineteenth century were emphatically poets, as had also already been Jean Jacques Rousseau and even Buffon. Imagination, sensibility, and the sentiment for nature were the mistresses of their faculties. Chateaubriand was the promoter of all the literary movement of the nineteenth century, alike in prose and poetry. He was a literary theorist, an epic poet in prose, traveller, polemist, orator. His great literary theory was in The Genius of Christianity, and consisted in supporting that all true poetic beauties lay in Christianity. His epic poems in prose are The Natchez, a picture of the customs of American Indians, The Martyrs, a panorama of the struggle of paganism at its close and of Christianity at its beginning; his travels were The Voyage in America and The Itinerary from Paris to Jerusalem. Member of the parliamentary assemblies, ambassador and minister, he wrote and spoke in the most brilliant and impassioned manner on the subjects that he took up. Finally, falling back on himself, as he had never ceased to do more or less all through his career, he left, in his marvellous Memoirs from Beyond the Tomb, a posthumous work which is, perhaps, his masterpiece. His infinitely supple and variegated style formed a continuous artistic miracle, so harmonious and musical was it more musical even than that of Jean Jacques Rousseau.
MME. DE STAËL.—At the same time, though she died long before him, Mme. de Staël, by her curious and interesting, though never affecting, novels, Delphine and Corinne, by her dissertations on various serious subjects, by her work on Germany, which initiated the French into the habits and literature of neighbours they were ill acquainted with, also directed the minds of men into new paths, and she was prodigal of ideas which she had almost always borrowed, but which she thoroughly understood, profoundly reconsidered, and to which she imparted an appearance of originality even in the eyes of those who had given them to her.
THE HISTORIANS.—Even the historians of this first half of the century were poets: Augustin Thierry, who reconstituted scientifically but imaginatively The Merovingian Era; Michelet, pupil of Vico, who saw in history the development of an immense poem and cast over his account of the Middle Ages the fire and feverishness of his ardent imagination and tremulous sensitiveness. Guizot and Thiers can be left apart, for they were statesmen by education and, although capable of passion, sought the one to rationally generalise and "discipline history," as was said, the other solely to capture facts accurately and to set them out clearly in orderly fashion.
THE PHILOSOPHERS.—The philosophers were not sheltered from this contagion, and if Cousin and his eclectic school loved to attach themselves to the seventeenth century both in mind and style, Lamennais, first in his Essay on Indifference, then in his Study of a Philosophy and in his Words of a Believer, impassioned, impetuous, and febrile, underwent the influence of romanticism, but also gave to the romantics the greater portion of the ideas they put in verse.
THE NOVEL.—As for the novel, it was only natural that it should be deeply affected by the spirit of the new school. George Sand wrote lyrical novels, if the phrase may be used—and, as I think, it is here the accurate expression—entitled Indiana, Valentine, Mauprat, and especially Lelia. She was to impart wisdom later on.
It even happened that a mind born to see reality in an admirably accurate manner, saw it so only by reason of the times, or at least partly due to the times, associated it with a magnifying but deforming imagination converting it into a literary megalomania; and this was the case of Honoré de Balzac.
NON-ROMANTIC LITERATURE.—Nevertheless, as was only natural, throughout the whole of the romantic epoch there was an entire literature which did not submit to its influence, and simply carried on the tradition of the eighteenth century. In poetry there was the witty, malicious, and very often highly exalted Béranger, whose songs are almost always excellent songs and sometimes are odes; and there was also the able and dexterous but frigid Casimir Delavigne. In prose there was Benjamin Constant, supremely oratorical and a very luminous orator, also a religious philosopher in his work On Religions, and a novelist in his admirable Adolphus, which was semi-autobiographical.
Classical also were Joseph de Maistre, in his political considerations (Evenings in St. Petersburg), and, in fiction, Mérimée, accurate, precise, trenchant, and cultured; finally in criticism, Sainte-Beuve, who began, it is true, by being the theorist and literary counsellor of romanticism, but who was soon freed from the spell, almost from 1830, and became author of Port Royal. Though possessing a wide and receptive mind because he was personified intelligence, he was decisively classical in his preferences, sentiments, ideas, and even in his style.
Stendhal, pure product of the eighteenth century, and even exaggerating the spirit of that century in the dryness of his soul and of his style, a pure materialist writing with precision and with natural yet intentional nakedness, possessed valuable gifts of observation, and in his famous novel, Red and Black, in the first part of the Chartreuse of Parma, and in his Memoirs of a Tourist, knew how to draw characters with exactness, sobriety, and power, and to set them in reliefs that were remarkably rare.
THE STAGE.—The drama was very brilliant during this first half of the nineteenth century. The struggle was lively for thirty or thirty-five years between the classicists and the romanticists; the classics defending their citadel, the French stage, much more by their polemics in the newspapers than by the unimportant works which they brought to the Comédie française, the romantics here producing nearly all the plays of Hugo (Hernani, Marion de Lorme, Ruy Blas, The Burghers, etc.), and the works of Vigny(Othello, Marshal d'Ancre), as well as the dramas of Dumas (Henry III and his Court, etc.). Between the two schools, both of which were on the stage nearer to the modern than to the antique, the dexterous Casimir Delavigne, with almost invariable success, gave Marino Faliero, Louis XI, The Children of Edward, Don Juan of Austria, and Princess Aurelia, which was pretty, but without impassioned interest.
A veritable dramatic genius, although destitute of style, of elevation of thought and of ideas, but a prodigious constructor of well-made plays, was Eugène Scribe, who, by his dramas and comedies, as well as the libretti of operas, was the chief purveyor to the French stage between 1830 and 1860.
ROMANTICISM AND REALISM.—So far as pure literature was concerned, the second half of the nineteenth century was divided between enfeebled but persistent romanticism and realism. Théophile Gautier, in 1853, gave his Enamels and Cameos, his best poetic work, and later (1862) his Captain Fracasse. Hugo wrote his Miserables, the second and third Legends of the Centuries, Songs of the Streets and the Woods, etc.
A third romantic generation, of which Théodore de Banville was the most brilliant representative, and which proceeded far more from Gautier than from Hugo or De Musset, pushed verbal and rhythmic virtuosity to the limit and perhaps beyond. Then great or highly distinguished poets appeared.
FAMOUS POETS.—Leconte de Lisle, philosophical poet, attracted by Indian literature, by pessimism, by the taste for nothingness, and the thirst for death, forcing admiration by his sculptural form and majestic rhythm; Sully-Prudhomme, another philosopher, especially psychological, manipulating the lyrical elegy with much art and, above all, infusing into it a grave, sad, and profound sensibility which would have awakened the affection and earned the respect of Catullus, Tibullus, and Lucretius; Francis Coppée, the poet of the joys and sorrows of the lowly, a dexterous versifier too, and possessed of a sincerity so candid as to make the reader forget that there is art in it; Baudelaire, inquisitive about rare and at times artificial sensations, possessing a laborious style, but sometimes managing to produce a deep impression either morbid or lugubrious, considered by an entire school which is still extant as one of the greatest poets within the whole range of French literature; Verlaine, extremely unequal, often detestable and contemptible, but suddenly charming and touching or revealing a religious feeling that suggests a clerk of the Middle Ages; Catulle Mendès, purely romantic, wholly virtuoso, but an astonishingly dexterous versifier. To these poets some highly curious literary dandies set themselves in opposition, being desirous of renovating the poetic art by ascribing more value to the sound of words than to their meaning, striving to make a music of poesy and, in a general way—which is their chief characteristic—being difficult to understand. They gave themselves the name of symbolists, and accepted that of decadents; they regarded Stephen Mallarmé either as their chief or as a friend who did them honour. This school has been dignified by no masterpieces and will probably ere long be forgotten.
REALISTIC LITERATURE.—Confronting all this literature, which had a romantic origin even when it affected scorn of the men of 1830, was developed an entire realistic literature composed almost exclusively of writers in prose, but of prose imbued with poetry written by some who had read the romantics and who would not have achieved what they did had romanticism not already existed, a fact which they themselves have not denied, and which is now almost universally accepted. Flaubert, whose masterpiece, Madame Bovary, is dated 1857, was very precisely divided between the two schools; he possessed the taste for breadth of eloquence, for the adventurous, and for Oriental colouring, and also the taste for the common, vulgar, well visualised, thoroughly assimilated truth, tersely portrayed in all its significance. But as he has succeeded better, at least in the eyes of his contemporaries, as a realist than as a man with imagination, he passes into history as the founder of realism always conditionally upon considering Balzac as possessing much of the vigorous realism which provided the impulse and furnished models.
NATURALISM.—From the realism of Flaubert was born the naturalism of Zola, which is the same thing more grossly expressed. Also by his energetic, violent, and tenacious talent, as well as by a weighty though powerful imagination, he exercised over his contemporaries a kind of fascination which it would be puerile to regard as an infatuation for which there was no cause.
More refined and even extremely delicate, though himself also fond of the small characteristic fact; possessed, too, with a graceful and gracious sensibility, Alphonse Daudet often charmed and always interested us in his novels, which are the pictorial anecdotes of the Parisian world at the close of the second Empire and the opening of the third Republic.
The brothers De Goncourt also enjoyed notable success, being themselves absorbed in the exceptional deed and the exceptional character whilst possessing a laboured style which is sometimes seductive because of its unlooked-for effects.
THE POSITIVISTS.—Two great men filled with their renown an epoch already so brilliant; namely, Renan and Taine, both equally historians and philosophers. Renan composed The History of the Children of Israel and The Origins of Christianity, as well as various works of general philosophy, of which the most celebrated is entitled Philosophical Dialogues. Taine wrote the history of The Origins of Contemporary France: that is, the history of the French Revolution, and sundry philosophical works of which the principal are On Intelligence and The French Philosophers of the Eighteenth Century. Both were "positivists," that is to say, elevating Auguste Comte, who has his place in the history of philosophy, but not here, because he was not a good writer; both were positivists, but Renan possessed a lively and profound sense of the grandeur and the moral beauty of Christianity, Taine being imbued with more philosophic strictness. Renan, with infinite flexibility of intelligence, applied himself to understand thoroughly and always (with some excess) to bring home to us the great figures of the Bible, the Gospels, and the early Christians, as well as their foes down to the time of Marcus Aurelius. Further, he affirmed science to possess unique value in his Future of Science; elsewhere, under the similitude of "dreams," he indulged in conceptions, hypotheses, and metaphysical imaginations which were voluntarily rash and infinitely seductive. As always happens, he possessed the style of his mind, supple, sinuous, undulating, astonishingly plastic, insatiable, and charming, evoking the comment, "That is admirably done and it is impossible to know with what it is done."
TAINE.—Taine, more rigid, accumulating documents and methodically arranging them in a method that refuses to be concealed, advances in a rectilineal order, step by step, and with a measured gait, to a solid truth which he did not wish to be either evasive or complex. Highly pessimistic and a little affecting to be so, just as Renan was optimistic and much affected being so, he believed in the evil origin of man and of the necessity for him to be drastically curbed if he is to remain inoffensive. He has written a history of the Revolution wherein he has refused admiration and respect for the crimes then committed, which is why posterity now begins to be very severe upon him. His learned style is wholly artificial, coloured without his being a colourist, composed of metaphors prolonged with difficulty, yet remaining singularly imposing and powerful. He was a curious philosopher, an upright, severe, and rather systematic historian, solid and laboriously original as a writer.
BRUNETIÈRE.—Brunetière, of the great French thinkers before our contemporaneous epoch, was critic, literary historian, philosopher, theologian, and orator. As critic, he defended classic tradition against bold innovations, and, especially, moral literature against licentious or gross literature; as a literary historian he renovated literary history by the introduction of the curious, audacious, and fruitful theory of evolution, and his Manual of the History of French Literature was a masterpiece; as philosopher he imparted clearness and precision into the system of Auguste Comte, whose disciple he was; as theologian, exceeding Comte and utilising him, he added weight to Catholicism in France by finding new and decisive "reasons for belief"; as orator he raised his marvellously eloquent tones in France, Switzerland, and America, making more than a hundred "fighting speeches." Since the death of Renan and Taine, he has been the sole director of French thought, which he continues to guide by his books and by the diffusion of his thought among the most vigorous, serious, and meditative minds of the day.
THE CONTEMPORANEOUS DRAMA.—The drama, since 1850, has been almost exclusively written in prose. Emil Augier, however, composed some comedies and dramas in verse and in verse particularly suited to the stage; but the major portion of his work is in prose, whilst Alexander Dumas and Sardou have written exclusively in prose. Augier and Dumas came from Balzac, and remained profoundly realistic, which was particularly suitable to authors of comedy. They studied the manners of the second Empire and depicted them wittily; they studied the social questions which agitated educated minds at this time and drew useful inspiration. Augier leant towards good middle-class common-sense, which did not prevent him from having plenty of wit. Dumas was more addicted to paradox and possessed as much ability as his rival. Victorien Sardou, as dexterous a dramatic constructor as Scribe, and who sometimes rose above this, dragged his easy tolerance from the grand historic drama to the comedy of manners, to light comedy and to insignificant comedy with prodigious facility and inexhaustible fertility.
The most admired living authors, whom we shall be content only to name because they are living, are poets: Edmond Rostand, author of Loiterings; Edmond Haraucourt, author of The Naked Soul and The Hope of the World; Jean Aicard, author of Miette el Noré; Jean Richepin, author of Césarine, Caresses, Blasphemies, etc.; in fiction, Paul Bourget, Marcel Prévost, René Bazin, Bordeaux, Boylesve, Henri de Régnier; in history, Ernest Lavisse, Aulard, Seignobos, D'Haussonville; in philosophy, Boutroux, Bergson, Théodule Ribot, Fouillée, Izoulet; in the drama, Paul Hervieu, Lavedan, Bataille, Brieux, Porto-Riche, Bernstein, Wolff, Tristan Bernard, Edmond Rostand, author of Cyrano de Bergerac and of The Aiglon; as orators, Alexander Ribot, De Mun Poincaré, Jaurès, etc.