art is without limits, that with such an instrument and such a science there is no miracle which he cannot perform. He can conjure up the strangest visions of fancy; he can evoke the glamour and the mystery of the past; he can sing with exquisite lightness of the fugitive beauties of Nature; he can pour out, in tenderness or in passion, the melodies of love; he can fill his lines with the fire, the stress, the culminating fury, of prophetic denunciation; he can utter the sad and secret questionings of the human spirit, and give voice to the solemnity of Fate. In the long roll and vast swell of his verse there is something of the ocean–a moving profundity of power. His sonorous music, with its absolute sureness of purpose, and its contrapuntal art, recalls the vision in _Paradise Lost_ of him who–
with volant touch
Fled and pursued transverse the resonant fugue.
What kind of mind, what kind of spirit, must that have been, one asks in amazement, which could animate with such a marvellous perfection the enormous organ of that voice?
But perhaps it would be best to leave the question unasked–or at least unanswered. For the more one searches, the clearer it becomes that the intellectual scope and the spiritual quality of Victor Hugo were very far from being equal to his gifts of expression and imagination. He had the powers of a great genius and the soul of an ordinary man. But that was not all. There have been writers of the highest excellence–Saint-Simon was one of them–the value of whose productions have been unaffected, or indeed even increased, by their personal inferiority. They could not have written better, one feels, if they had been ten times as noble and twenty times as wise as they actually were. But unfortunately this is not so with Victor Hugo. His faults–his intellectual weakness, his commonplace outlook, his lack of humour, his vanity, his defective taste–cannot be dismissed as irrelevant and unimportant, for they are indissolubly bound up with the very substance of his work. It was not as a mere technician that he wished to be judged; he wrote with a very different intention; it was as a philosopher, as a moralist, as a prophet, as a sublime thinker, as a profound historian, as a sensitive and refined human being. With a poet of such pretensions it is clearly most relevant to inquire whether his poetry does, in fact, reveal the high qualities he lays claim to, or whether, on the contrary, it is characterized by a windy inflation of sentiment, a showy superficiality of thought, and a ridiculous and petty egoism. These are the unhappy questions which beset the mature and reflective reader of Victor Hugo’s works. To the young and enthusiastic one the case is different. For him it is easy to forget–or even not to observe–what there may be in that imposing figure that is unsatisfactory and second-rate. _He_ may revel at will in the voluminous harmonies of that resounding voice; by turns thrilling with indignation, dreaming in ecstasy, plunging into abysses, and soaring upon unimaginable heights. Between youth and age who shall judge? Who decide between rapture and reflection, enthusiasm and analysis? To determine the precise place of Victor Hugo in the hierarchy of poets would be difficult indeed. But this much is certain: that at times the splendid utterance does indeed grow transfused with a pure and inward beauty, when the human frailties vanish, and all is subdued and glorified by the high purposes of art. Such passages are to be found among the lyrics of _Les Feuilles d’Automne, Les Rayons et Les Ombres, Les Contemplations_, in the brilliant descriptions and lofty imagery of _La Legende des Siecles_, in the burning invective of _Les Chatiments_. None but a place among the most illustrious could be given to the creator of such a stupendous piece of word-painting as the description of the plain of Waterloo in the latter volume, or of such a lovely vision as that in _La Legende des Siecles_, of Ruth looking up in silence at the starry heaven. If only the wondrous voice had always spoken so!
* * * * *
The romantic love of vastness, richness, and sublimity, and the romantic absorption in the individual–these two qualities appear in their extremes throughout the work of Hugo: in that of ALFRED DE VIGNY it is the first that dominates; in that of ALFRED DE MUSSET, the second. Vigny wrote sparingly–one or two plays, a few prose works, and a small volume of poems; but he produced some masterpieces. A far more sober artist than Hugo, he was also a far profounder thinker, and a sincerer man. His melancholy, his pessimism, were the outcome of no Byronic attitudinizing, but the genuine intimate feelings of a noble spirit; and he could express them in splendid verse. His melancholy was touched with grandeur, his pessimism with sublimity. In his _Moise_, his _Colere de Samson_, his _Maison du Berger_, his _Mont des Oliviers_, and others of his short reflective poems, he envisions man face to face with indifferent Nature, with hostile Destiny, with poisoned Love, and the lesson he draws is the lesson of proud resignation. In _La Mort du Loup_, the tragic spectacle of the old wolf driven to bay and killed by the hunters inspires perhaps his loftiest verses, with the closing application to humanity–‘Souffre et meurs sans parler’–summing up his sad philosophy. No less striking and beautiful are the few short stories in his _Servitude et Grandeur Militaires_, in which some heroic incidents of military life are related in a prose of remarkable strength and purity. In the best work of Vigny there are no signs of the strain, the over-emphasis, the tendency towards the grotesque, always latent in Romanticism; its nobler elements are alone preserved; he has achieved the grand style.
Alfred de Musset presents a complete contrast. He was the spoilt child of the age–frivolous, amorous, sensuous, charming, unfortunate, and unhappy; and his poetry is the record of his personal feelings, his varying moods, his fugitive loves, his sentimental despairs.
Le seul bien qui me reste au monde
Est d’avoir quelquefois pleure,
he exclaims, with an accent of regretful softness different indeed from that of Vigny. Among much that is feeble, ill constructed, and exaggerated in his verse, strains of real beauty and real pathos constantly recur. Some of his lyrics are perfect; the famous song of Fortunio in itself entitles him to a high place among the masters of the language; and in his longer pieces–especially in the four _Nuits_–his emotion occasionally rises, grows transfigured, and vibrates with a strange intensity, a long, poignant, haunting note. But doubtless his chief claim to immortality rests upon his exquisite little dramas (both in verse and prose), in which the romance of Shakespeare and the fantasy of Marivaux mingle with a wit, a charm, an elegance, which are all Musset’s own. In his historical drama, _Lorenzaccio_, he attempted to fill a larger canvas, and he succeeded. Unlike the majority of the Romantics, Musset had a fine sense of psychology and a penetrating historical vision. In this brilliant, vivacious, and yet subtle tragedy he is truly great.
We must now glance at the effects which the Romantic Movement produced upon the art which was destined to fill so great a place in the literature of the nineteenth century–the art of prose fiction. With the triumph of Classicism in the seventeenth century, the novel, like all other forms of literature, grew simplified and compressed. The huge romances of Mademoiselle de Scudery were succeeded by the delicate little stories of Madame de Lafayette, one of which–_La Princesse de Cleves_–a masterpiece of charming psychology and exquisite art, deserves to be considered as the earliest example of the modern novel. All through the eighteenth century the same tendency is visible. _Manon Lescaut_, the passionate and beautiful romance of l’Abbe Prevost, is a very small book, concerned, like _La Princesse de Cleves_, with two characters only–the lovers, whose varying fortunes make up the whole action of the tale. Precisely the same description applies to the subtle and brilliant _Adolphe_ of Benjamin Constant, produced in the early years of the nineteenth century. Even when the framework was larger–as in Le Sage’s _Gil Blas_ and Marivaux’s _Vie de Marianne_–the spirit was the same; it was the spirit of selection, of simplification, of delicate skill. Both the latter works are written in a prose style of deliberate elegance, and both consist rather of a succession of small incidents–almost of independent short stories–than of one large developing whole. The culminating example of the eighteenth-century form of fiction may be seen in the _Liaisons Dangereuses_ of Laclos, a witty, scandalous and remarkably able novel, concerned with the interacting intrigues of a small society of persons, and revealing on every page a most brilliant and concentrated art. Far more modern, both in its general conception and in the absolute realism of its treatment, was Diderot’s _La Religieuse_; but this masterpiece was not published till some years after the Revolution; and the real honour of having originated the later developments in French fiction–as in so many other branches of literature–belongs undoubtedly to Rousseau. _La Nouvelle Heloise_, faulty as it is as a work of art, with its feeble psychology and loose construction, yet had the great merit of throwing open whole new worlds for the exploration of the novelist–the world of nature on the one hand, and on the other the world of social problems and all the living forces of actual life. The difference between the novels of Rousseau and those of Hugo is great; but yet it is a difference merely of degree. _Les Miserables_ is the consummation of the romantic conception of fiction which Rousseau had adumbrated half a century before. In that enormous work, Hugo attempted to construct a prose epic of modern life; but the attempt was not successful. Its rhetorical cast of style, its ceaseless and glaring melodrama, its childish presentments of human character, its endless digressions and–running through all this–its evidences of immense and disordered power, make the book perhaps the most magnificent failure–the most ‘wild enormity’ ever produced by a man of genius. Another development of the romantic spirit appeared at about the same time in the early novels of George Sand, in which the ardours of passionate love are ecstatically idealized in a loose and lyric flow of innumerable words.
There can be little doubt that if the development of fiction had stopped at this point the infusion into it of the romantic spirit could only have been judged a disaster. From the point of view of art, such novels as those of Victor Hugo and the early works of George Sand were a retrogression from those of the eighteenth century. _Manon Lescaut_, tiny, limited, unambitious as it is, stands on a far higher level of artistic achievement than the unreal and incoherent _Les Miserables_. The scale of the novel had indeed been infinitely enlarged, but the apparatus for dealing adequately with the vast masses of new material was wanting. It is pathetic to watch the romantic novelists trying to infuse beauty and significance into their subjects by means of fine writing, lyrical outbursts, impassioned philosophical dissertations, and all the familiar rhetorical devices so dear to them. The inevitable result was something lifeless, formless, fantastic; they were on the wrong track. The true method for the treatment of their material was not that of rhetoric at all; it was that of realism. This fact was discovered by STENDHAL, who was the first to combine an enlarged view of the world with a plain style and an accurate, unimpassioned, detailed examination of actual life. In his remarkable novel, _Le Rouge et Le Noir_, and in some parts of his later work, _La Chartreuse de Parme_, Stendhal laid down the lines on which French fiction has been developing ever since. The qualities which distinguish him are those which have distinguished all the greatest of his successors–a subtle psychological insight, an elaborate attention to detail, and a remorseless fidelity to the truth.
Important as Stendhal is in the history of modern French fiction, he is dwarfed by the colossal figure of BALZAC. By virtue of his enormous powers, and the immense quantity and variety of his output, Balzac might be called the Hugo of prose, if it were not that in two most important respects he presents a complete contrast to his great contemporary. In the first place, his control of the technical resources of the language was as feeble as Hugo’s was mighty. Balzac’s style is bad; in spite of the electric vigour that runs through his writing, it is formless, clumsy, and quite without distinction; it is the writing of a man who was highly perspicacious, formidably powerful, and vulgar. But, on the other hand, he possessed one great quality which Hugo altogether lacked–the sense of the real. Hugo was most himself when he was soaring on the wings of fancy through the empyrean; Balzac was most himself when he was rattling in a hired cab through the streets of Paris. He was of the earth earthy. His coarse, large, germinating spirit gave forth, like the earth, a teeming richness, a solid, palpable creation. And thus it was he who achieved what Hugo, in _Les Miserables_, had in vain attempted. _La Comedie Humaine_, as he called the long series of his novels, which forms in effect a single work, presents, in spite of its limitations and its faults, a picture of the France of that age drawn on the vast scale and in the grand manner of an epic.
The limitations and the faults of Balzac’s work are, indeed, sufficiently obvious and sufficiently grave. The same coarseness of fibre which appears in his style made him incapable of understanding the delicacies of life–the refined shades of emotion, the subtleties of human intercourse. He probably never read Jane Austen; but if he had he certainly would have considered her an utterly pointless writer; and he would have been altogether at sea in a novel by Henry James. The elusive things that are so important, the indecisive things that are so curious, the intimate things that are so thrilling–all these slipped through his rough, matter-of-fact grasp. His treatment of the relations between the sexes is characteristic. The subject fills a great place in his novels; he approaches it with an unflinching boldness, and a most penetrating gaze; yet he never succeeds in giving a really satisfactory presentment of the highest of those relations–love. That eluded him: its essence was too subtle, too private, too transcendental. No one can describe love who has not the makings of a poet in him. And a poet was the very last thing that Balzac was.
But his work does not merely suffer from the absence of certain good qualities; it is also marred by the presence of positively bad ones. Balzac was not simply a realist. There was a romantic vein in him, which occasionally came to the surface with unfortunate results. When that happened, he plunged into the most reckless melodrama, revelled in the sickliest sentiment, or evolved the most grotesque characters, the most fantastic plots. And these lapses occur quite indiscriminately. Side by side with some detailed and convincing description, one comes upon glaring absurdities; in the middle of some narrative of extraordinary actuality, one finds oneself among hissing villains, disguises, poisons, and all the paraphernalia of a penny novelette. Balzac’s lack of critical insight into his own work is one of the most singular of his characteristics. He hardly seems to have known at all what he was about. He wrote feverishly, desperately, under the impulsion of irresistible genius. His conceptions crowded upon him in vivid, serried multitudes–the wildest visions of fantasy mixed pell-mell with the most vital realizations of fact. It was not for him to distinguish; his concern was simply, somehow or other, to get them all out: good, bad, or indifferent, what did it matter? The things were in his brain; and they must be expressed.
Fortunately, it is very easy for the reader to be more discriminating than Balzac. The alloy is not inextricably mingled with the pure metal–the chaff may be winnowed off, and the grain left. His errors and futilities cannot obscure his true achievement–his evocation of multitudinous life. The whole of France is crammed into his pages, and electrified there into intense vitality. The realism of the classical novelists was a purely psychological realism; it was concerned with the delicately shifting states of mind of a few chosen persons, and with nothing else. Balzac worked on a very different plan. He neglected the subtleties of the spirit, and devoted himself instead to, displaying the immense interest that lay in those prosaic circumstances of existence which the older writers had ignored. He showed with wonderful force that the mere common details of everyday life were filled with drama, that, to him who had eyes to see, there might be significance in a ready-made suit of clothes, and passion in the furniture of a boarding-house. Money in particular gave him an unending theme. There is hardly a character in the whole vast range of his creation of whose income we are not exactly informed; and it might almost be said that the only definite moral that can be drawn from _La Comedie Humaine_ is that the importance of money can never be over-estimated. The classical writers preferred to leave such matters to the imagination of the reader; it was Balzac’s great object to leave nothing to the imagination of the reader. By ceaseless effort, by infinite care, by elaborate attention to the minutest details, he would describe _all_. He brought an encyclopaedic knowledge to bear upon his task; he can give an exact account of the machinery of a provincial printing-press; he can write a dissertation on the methods of military organization; he can reveal the secret springs in the mechanism of Paris journalism; he is absolutely at home in the fraudulent transactions of money-makers, the methods of usurers, the operations of high finance. And into all this mass of details he can infuse the spirit of life. Perhaps his masterpiece in realistic description is his account of La Maison Vauquer–a low boarding-house, to which he devotes page after page of minute particularity. The result is not a mere dead catalogue: it is a palpitating image of lurid truth. Never was the sordid horror which lurks in places and in things evoked with a more intense completeness.
Undoubtedly it is in descriptions of the sordid, the squalid, the ugly, and the mean that Balzac particularly excels. He is at his greatest when he is revealing the horrible underside of civilization–the indignities of poverty, the low intrigues of parasites, the long procession of petty agonies that embitter and ruin a life. Over this world of shadow and grime he throws strange lights. Extraordinary silhouettes flash out and vanish; one has glimpses of obscure and ominous movements on every side; and, amid all this, some sudden vision emerges from the darkness, of pathos, of tenderness, of tragic and unutterable pain.
Balzac died in 1850, and at about that time the Romantic Movement came to an end. Victor Hugo, it is true, continued to live and to produce for more than thirty years longer; but French literature ceased to be dominated by the ideals of the Romantic school. That school had accomplished much; it had recreated French poetry, and it had revolutionized French prose. But, by the very nature of its achievement, it led the way to its own supersession. The spirit which animated its doctrines was the spirit of progress and of change; it taught that there were no fixed rules for writing well; that art, no less than science, lived by experiment; that a literature which did not develop was dead. Therefore it was inevitable that the Romantic ideal itself should form the stepping-stone for a fresh advance. The complex work of Balzac unites in a curious way many of the most important elements of the old school and of the new. Alike by his vast force, his immense variety, his formlessness, his lack of critical and intellectual power, he was a Romantic; but he belonged to the future in his enormous love of prosaic detail, his materialist cast of mind, and his preoccupation with actual facts.
CHAPTER VII
THE AGE OF CRITICISM
With the generation of writers who rose to eminence after the death of Balzac, we come within the reach of living memory, so that a just estimate of their work is well-nigh impossible: it is so close to us that it is bound to be out of focus. And there is an additional difficulty in the extreme richness and variety of their accomplishment. They explored so many fields of literature, and produced so much of interest and importance, that a short account of their work can hardly fail to give a false impression of it. Only its leading characteristics and its most remarkable manifestations can be touched upon here.
The age was before all else an age of Criticism. A strong reaction set in against the looseness of construction and the extravagance of thought which had pervaded the work of the Romantics; and a new ideal was set up–an ideal which was to combine the width and diversity of the latter with the precision of form and the deliberate artistic purpose of the Classical age. The movement affected the whole of French literature, but its most important results were in the domain of Prose. Nowhere were the defects of the Romantics more obvious than in their treatment of history. With a very few exceptions they conceived of the past as a picturesque pageant–a thing of contrasts and costumes, an excuse for rhetorical descriptions, without inner significance or a real life of its own. One historian of genius they did indeed produce–MICHELET; and the contrast between his work and that of his successors, TAINE and RENAN, is typical of the new departure. The great history of Michelet, with its strange, convulsive style, its capricious and imaginative treatment of facts, and its undisguised bias, shows us the spectacle of the past in a series of lurid lightning-flashes–a spectacle at once intensely vivid and singularly contorted; it is the history of a poet rather than of a man of science. With Taine and Renan the personal element which forms the very foundation of Michelet’s work has been carefully suppressed. It is replaced by an elaborate examination of detail, a careful, sober, unprejudiced reconstruction of past conditions, an infinitely conscientious endeavour to tell the truth and nothing but the truth. Nor is their history merely the dead bones of analysis and research; it is informed with an untiring sympathy; and–in the case of Renan especially–a suave and lucid style adds the charm and amenity which art alone can give.
The same tendencies appear to a still more remarkable degree in Criticism. With SAINTE-BEUVE, in fact, one might almost say that criticism, as we know it, came into existence for the first time. Before him, all criticism had been one of two things: it had been either a merely personal expression of opinion, or else an attempt to establish universal literary canons and to judge of writers by the standards thus set up. Sainte-Beuve realized that such methods–the slap-dash pronouncements of a Johnson or the narrow generalizations of a Boileau–were in reality not critical at all. He saw that the critic’s first duty was not to judge, but to understand; and with this object he set himself to explore all the facts which could throw light on the temperament, the outlook, the ideals of his author; he examined his biography, the society in which he lived, the influences of his age; and with the apparatus thus patiently formed he proceeded to act as the interpreter between the author and the public. His _Causeries du Lundi_–short critical papers originally contributed to a periodical magazine and subsequently published in a long series of volumes–together with his _Port Royal_–an elaborate account of the movements in letters and philosophy during the earlier years of Louis XIV’s reign–contain a mass of material of unequalled value concerning the whole of French literature. His analytical and sympathetic mind is reflected in the quiet wit and easy charm of his writing. Undoubtedly the lover of French literature will find in Sainte-Beuve’s _Lundis_ at once the most useful and the most agreeable review of the subject in all its branches; and the more his knowledge increases, the more eagerly will he return for further guidance and illumination to those delightful books.
But the greatest prose-writer of the age devoted himself neither to history nor to criticism–though his works are impregnated with the spirit of both–but to Fiction. In his novels, FLAUBERT finally accomplished what Balzac had spasmodically begun–the separation of the art of fiction from the unreality, the exaggeration, and the rhetoric of the Romantic School. Before he began to write, the movement towards a greater restraint, a more deliberate art, had shown itself in a few short novels by GEORGE SAND–the first of the long and admirable series of her mature works–where, especially in such delicate masterpieces as _La Mare au Diable, La Petite Fadette_, and _Francois le Champi_, her earlier lyricism and incoherence were replaced by an idyllic sentiment strengthened and purified by an exquisite sense of truth. Flaubert’s genius moved in a very different and a far wider orbit: but it was no less guided by the dictates of deliberate art. In his realism, his love of detail, and his penetrating observation of facts, Flaubert was the true heir of Balzac; while in the scrupulosity of his style and the patient, laborious, and sober treatment of his material he presented a complete contrast to his great predecessor. These latter qualities make Flaubert the pre-eminent representative of his age. The critical sense possessed him more absolutely and with more striking results than all the rest of his contemporaries. His watchfulness over his own work was almost infinite. There has never been a writer who took his art with such a passionate seriousness, who struggled so incessantly towards perfection, and who suffered so acutely from the difficulties, the disappointments, the desperate, furious efforts of an unremitting toil. His style alone cost him boundless labour. He would often spend an entire day over the elaboration and perfection of a single sentence, which, perhaps, would be altogether obliterated before the publication of the book. He worked in an apoplectic fervour over every detail of his craft–eliminating repetitions, balancing rhythms, discovering the precise word for every shade of meaning, with an extraordinary, an almost superhuman, persistence. And in the treatment of his matter his conscientiousness was equally great. He prepared for his historical novels by profound researches in the original authorities of the period, and by personal visits to the localities he intended to describe. When he treated of modern life he was no less scrupulously exact. One of his scenes was to pass in a cabbage-garden by moonlight. But what did a cabbage-garden by moonlight really look like? Flaubert waited long for a propitious night, and then went out, notebook in hand, to take down the precise details of what he saw. Thus it was that his books were written very slowly, and his production comparatively small. He spent six years over the first and most famous of his works–_Madame Bovary_; and he devoted no less than thirteen to his encyclopedic _Bouvard et Pecuchet_, which was still unfinished when he died.
The most abiding impression produced by the novels of Flaubert is that of solidity. This is particularly the case with his historical books. The bric-a-brac and fustian of the Romantics has disappeared, to be replaced by a clear, detailed, profound presentment of the life of the past. In _Salammbo_, ancient Carthage rises up before us, no crazy vision of a picturesque and disordered imagination, but in all the solidity of truth; coloured, not with the glaring contrasts of rhetoric, but with the real blaze of an eastern sun; strange, not with an imported fantastic strangeness manufactured in nineteenth-century Paris, but with the strangeness–so much more mysterious and significant–of the actual, barbaric Past.
The same characteristics appear in Flaubert’s modern novels. _Madame Bovary_ gives us a picture of life in a French provincial town in the middle of the last century–a picture which, with its unemphatic tones, its strong, sensitive, and accurate drawing, its masterly design, produces an effect of absolutely convincing veracity. The character and the fate of the wretched woman who forms the central figure of the story come upon us, amid the grim tepidity of their surroundings, with extraordinary force. Flaubert’s genius does not act in sudden flashes, but by the method of gradual accumulation. The effects which it produces are not of the kind that overwhelm and astonish, but of the more subtle sort that creep into the mind by means of a thousand details, an infinitude of elaborated fibres, and which, once there, are there for ever.
The solidity of Flaubert’s work, however, was not unaccompanied with drawbacks. His writing lacks fire; there is often a sense of effort in it; and, as one reads his careful, faultless, sculpturesque sentences, it is difficult not to long, at times, for some of the irregular vitality of Balzac. Singularly enough, Flaubert’s correspondence–one of the most interesting collections of letters in the language–shows that, so far as his personal character was concerned, irregular vitality was precisely one of his dominating qualities. But in his fiction he suppressed this side of himself in the interests, as he believed, of art. It was his theory that a complete detachment was a necessary condition for all great writing; and he did his best to put this theory into practice. But there was one respect in which he did not succeed in his endeavour. His hatred and scorn of the mass of humanity, his conception of them as a stupid, ignorant, and vulgar herd, appears throughout his work, and in his unfinished _Bouvard et Pecuchet_ reaches almost to the proportion of a monomania. The book is an infinitely elaborate and an infinitely bitter attack on the ordinary man. There is something tragic in the spectacle of this lonely, noble, and potent genius wearing out his life at last over such a task–in a mingled agony of unconscious frenzied self-expression and deliberate misguided self-immolation.
In poetry, the reaction against Romanticism had begun with the _Emaux et Camees_ of THEOPHILE GAUTIER–himself in his youth one of the leaders of the Romantic School; and it was carried further in the work of a group of writers known as the _Parnassiens_–the most important of whom were LECONTE DE LISLE, SULLY PRUDHOMME, and HEREDIA. Their poetry bears the same relation to that of Musset as the history of Renan bears to that of Michelet, and the prose of Flaubert to that of Hugo. It is restrained, impersonal, and polished to the highest degree. The bulk of it is not great; but not a line of it is weak or faulty; and it possesses a firm and plastic beauty, well expressed by the title of Gautier’s volume, and the principles of which are at once explained and exemplified in his famous poem beginning–
Oui, l’oeuvre sort plus belle
D’une forme au travail
Rebelle,
–Vers, marbre, onyx, email.
The _Parnassiens_ particularly devoted themselves to classical subjects, and to descriptions of tropical scenes. Their rich, sonorous, splendidly-moulded language invests their visions with a noble fixity, an impressive force. Among the gorgeous descriptive pieces of Leconte de Lisle, the exquisite lyrics of Sully Prudhomme, and the chiselled sonnets of Heredia some of the finest and weightiest verse of the century is to be found.
The age produced one other poet who, however, by the spirit of his work, belongs rather to the succeeding epoch than to his own. This was BAUDELAIRE, whose small volume–_Les Fleurs du Mal_–gives him a unique place among the masters of the poetic art. In his form, indeed, he is closely related to his contemporaries. His writing has all the care, the balance, the conscientious polish of the _Parnassiens_; it is in his matter that he differs from them completely. He was not interested in classical imaginations and impersonal descriptions; he was concerned almost entirely with the modern life of Paris and the actual experiences of a disillusioned soul. As intensely personal as the _Parnassiens_ were detached, he poured into his verse all the gloom of his own character, all the bitterness of his own philosophy, all the agony of his own despair. Some poets–such as Keats and Chenier–in spite of the misfortunes of their lives, seem to distil nothing but happiness and the purest beauty into their poetry; they only come to their true selves amid the sunlight and the flowers. Other writers–such as Swift and Tacitus–rule supreme over the kingdom of darkness and horror, and their finest pages are written in the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Writers of this kind are very rarely poets; and it is Baudelaire’s great distinction that he was able to combine the hideous and devastating conceptions of complete pessimism with the passion, the imagination, and the formal beauty that only live in magnificent verse. He is the Swift of poetry. His vision is black and terrible. Some of his descriptions are even more disgusting than those of Swift, and most of his pages are no fit reading for the young and ignorant. But the wise reader will find in this lurid poetry elements of profundity and power which are rare indeed. Above all, he will find in it a quality not common in French poetry–a passionate imagination which clothes the thought with splendour, and lifts the strange words of this unhappy mortal into the deathless regions of the sublime.
CONCLUSION
With the death of Flaubert in 1880, French literature entered upon a new phase–a phase which, in its essential qualities, has lasted till to-day, and which forms a suitable point for the conclusion of the present sketch.
This last phase has been dominated by two men of genius. In prose, MAUPASSANT carried on the work of Flaubert with a sharper manner and more vivid style, though with a narrower range. He abandoned the exotic and the historical visions of his predecessor, and devoted himself entirely, in his brilliant novels and yet more brilliant short stories, to an almost fiendishly realistic treatment of modern life. A precisely contrary tendency marks the poetry of VERLAINE. While Maupassant completely disengaged prose from every alien element of poetry and imagination, pushing it as far as it could go in the direction of incisive realism, Verlaine and his fellow-workers in verse attempted to make poetry more truly poetical than it had ever been before, to introduce into it the vagueness and dreaminess of individual moods and spiritual fluctuations, to turn it away from definite fact and bring it near to music.
It was with Verlaine and his successors that French verse completely broke away from the control of those classical rules, the infallibility of which had been first attacked by the Romantics. In order to express the delicate, shifting, and indecisive feelings which he loved so well, Verlaine abolished the last shreds of rhythmical regularity, making his verse a perfectly fluid substance, which he could pour at will into the subtle mould of his feeling and his thought. The result justified the means. Verlaine’s poetry exhales an exquisite perfume–strange, indistinct, and yet, after the manner of perfume, unforgettable. Listening to his enchanting, poignant music, we hear the trembling voice of a soul. This last sad singer carries us back across the ages, and, mingling his sweet strain with the distant melancholy of Villon, symbolizes for us at once the living flower and the unchanging root of the great literature of France.
* * * * *
We have now traced the main outlines of that literature from its dim beginnings in the Dark Ages up to the threshold of the present time. Looking back over the long line of writers, the first impression that must strike us is one of extraordinary wealth. France, it is true, has given to the world no genius of the colossal stature and universal power of Shakespeare. But, then, where is the equal of Shakespeare to be found? Not even in the glorious literature of Greece herself. Putting out of account such an immeasurable magnitude, the number of writers of the first rank produced by France can be paralleled in only one other modern literature–that of England. The record is, indeed, a splendid one which contains, in poetry and drama, the names of Villon, Ronsard, Corneille, Moliere, Racine, La Fontaine, Chenier, Lamartine, Hugo, Vigny, Gautier, Baudelaire, Verlaine; and in prose those of Froissart, Rabelais, Montaigne, Pascal, Bossuet, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyere, Montesquieu, Saint-Simon, Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, Chateaubriand, Balzac, Flaubert, and Maupassant. And, besides this great richness and variety, another consideration gives a peculiar value to the literature of France. More than that of any other nation in Europe, it is distinctive and individual; if it had never existed, the literature of the world would have been bereft of certain qualities of the highest worth which France alone has been able to produce. Where else could we find the realism which would replace that of Stendhal and Balzac, Flaubert and Maupassant? Where else should we look for the brilliant lucidity and consummate point which Voltaire has given us? Or the force and the precision that glow in Pascal? Or the passionate purity that blazes in Racine?
Finally, if we would seek for the essential spirit of French literature, where shall we discover it? In its devotion to truth? In its love of rhetoric? In its clarity? In its generalizing power? All these qualities are peculiarly its own, but, beyond and above them, there is another which controls and animates the rest. The one high principle which, through so many generations, has guided like a star the writers of France is the principle of deliberation, of intention, of a conscious search for ordered beauty; an unwavering, an indomitable pursuit of the endless glories of art.
CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF AUTHORS AND THEIR PRINCIPAL WORKS
I. _Middle Ages_
CHANSONS DE GESTE, eleventh to thirteenth centuries. _Chanson de Roland, circa_ 1080.
ROMANS BRETONS, twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
CHRETIEN DE TROYES, wrote _circa_ 1170-80.
FABLIAUX, twelfth and thirteenth centuries. _Roman de Renard_, thirteenth century.
_Aucassin et Nicolete, circa_ thirteenth century.
VILLEHARDOUIN, _d_. 1213.
_Conquete de Constantinople_, 1205-13.
GUILLAUME DE LORRIS (?).
_La Roman de la Rose_ (first part), _circa_ 1237.
JEAN DE MEUNG, _d_. 1305.
_La Roman de la Rose_ (second part), 1277.
JOINVILLE, 1224-1319.
_Vie de Saint Louis_, 1309.
FROISSART, 1337-_circa_ 1410.
_Chroniques_, 1373-1400.
VILLON, 1431-(?).
_Grand Testament_, 1461.
COMMYNES, 1445-1509.
_Memoires_, 1488-98.
II. _Renaissance_
MAROT, 1496-1544.
RABELAIS, _circa_ 1494-1553.
RONSARD, 1524-85.
DU BELLAY, 1522-60.
_Defense et Illustration de la Langue Francaise_, 1549.
JODELLE, 1532-73.
_Cleopatre_, 1552.
MONTAIGNE, 1533-92.
_Essays_, 1580-88.
III. _Age of Transition_
MALHERBE, 1555-1628.
_Odes_, 1607-28.
HARDY, 1570-1631 (_circa_).
_Tragedies_, 1593-1630.
ACADEMY, founded 1629.
CORNEILLE, 1606-84.
_Le Cid_, 1636.
_Les Horaces_, 1640.
_Cinna_, 1640.
_Polyeucte_, 1643.
PASCAL, 1623-62.
_Lettres Provinciales_, 1656-57.
_Pensees_, first edition 1670, first complete edition 1844.
IV. _Age of Louis XIV_
MOLIERE, 1622-73.
_Les Precieuses Ridicules_, 1659.
_L’Ecole des Femmes_, 1662.
_Tartufe_, 1664.
_Le Misanthrope_, 1666.
_Le Malade Imaginaire_, 1673.
LA ROCHEFOUCAULD, 1613-80.
_Maximes_, 1665.
BOILEAU, 1636-1711.
_Satires_, 1666.
_Art Poetique_, 1674.
RACINE, 1639-99.
_Andromaque_, 1667.
_Phedre_, 1677.
_Athalie_, 1691.
LA FONTAINE, 1621-95.
_Fables_, 1668-92.
BOSSUET, 1627-1704.
_Oraisons Funebres_, 1669-87.
_Histoire Universelle_, 1681.
MADAME DE SEVIGNE, 1626-96.
_Letters_, 1671-96.
MADAME DE LAFAYETTE, 1634-93.
_La Princesse de Cleves_, 1678.
LA BRUYERE, 1645-96.
_Les Caracteres_, 1688-94.
V. _Eighteenth Century_
FONTENELLE, 1657-1757.
_Histoire des Oracles_, 1687.
BAYLE, 1647-1706.
_Dictionnaire Historique et Critique_, 1697.
FENELON, 1651-1715.
_Telemaque_, 1699.
MONTESQUIEU, 1689-1755.
_Lettres Persanes_, 1721.
_L’Esprit des Lois_, 1748.
VOLTAIRE (1694-1778).
_La Henriade_, 1723.
_Zaire_, 1732.
_Lettres Philosophiques_, 1734.
_Essai sur les Moeurs_, 1751-56.
_Candide_, 1759.
_Dictionnaire Philosophique_, 1764. _Dialogues_, etc., 1755-78.
LE SAGE, 1668-1747.
_Gil Blas_, 1715-35.
MARIVAUX, 1688-1763.
_Vie de Marianne_, 1731-41.
_Les Jeu de l’Amour et du Hasard_, 1734.
SAINT-SIMON, 1675-1755.
_Memoires_, begun 1740, first edition 1830.
DIDEROT, 1713-84.
_Encyclopedie_, 1751-80.
_La Religieuse_, first edition 1796. _Le Neveu de Rameau_, first edition 1823.
ROUSSEAU, 1712-78.
_La Nouvelle Heloise_, 1761.
_Contrat Social_, 1762.
_Confessions_, first edition 1781-88.
BEAUMARCHAIS, 1732-99.
_Le Mariage de Figaro_, 1784.
CONDORCET, 1743-94.
_Progres de l’Esprit Humain_, 1794.
CHENIER, 1762-94.
_Poems_, 1790-94, first edition 1819.
VI. _Nineteenth Century_–I
CHATEAUBRIAND, 1768-1848.
_Atala_, 1801.
_Genie du Christianisme_, 1802.
_Memoires d’Outre-Tombe_, published 1849.
LAMARTINE, 1790-1869.
_Meditations_, 1820.
HUGO, 1802-85.
_Hernani_, 1830.
_Les Feuilles d’Automne_, 1831.
_Notre-Dame de Paris_, 1831.
_Les Chatiments_, 1852.
_Les Contemplations_, 1856.
_La Legende des Siecles_, 1859.
_Les Miserables_, 1862.
VIGNY, 1797-1863.
_Poemes Antiques et Modernes_, 1826. _Servitude et Grandeur Militaires_, 1835.
MUSSET, 1810-57.
_Caprices de Marianne_, 1833.
_Lorenzaccio_, 1834.
_Les Nuits_, 1835-40.
GEORGE SAND, 1804-76.
_Indiana_, 1832.
_Francois le Champi_, 1850.
STENDHAL, 1783-1842.
_Le Rouge et le Noir_, 1831.
BALZAC, 1799-1850.
_La Comedie Humaine_, 1829-50.
MICHELET, 1798-1874.
_History_, 1833-67.
VII. _Nineteenth Century_–II
SAINTE-BEUVE, 1804-69.
_Lundis_, 1850-69.
RENAN, 1833-92.
_Vie de Jesus_, 1863.
TAINE, 1828-93.
FLAUBERT, 1821-80.
_Madame Bovary_, 1857.
_Salammbo_, 1862.
GAUTIER, 1811-72.
_Emaux et Camees_, 1852.
BAUDELAIRE, 1821-67.
_Les Fleurs du Mal_, 1857.
LECONTE DE LISLE, 1818-94.
_Poems_, 1853-84.
SULLY PRUDHOMME, 1839-1907.
_Poems_, 1865-88.
HEREDIA, 1842-1905.
_Les Trophees_, 1893.
MAUPASSANT, 1850-93.
VERLAINE, 1844-96.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
The number of works dealing with the history and criticism of French literature is very large indeed. The following are the most useful reviews of the whole subject:–
PETIT DE JULLEVILLE. _Histoire de la Langue et de la Litterature francaise_ (8 vols.).
LANSON. _Histoire de la Litterature francaise_ (1 vol.).
BRUNETIERE. _Manuel de l’histoire de la Litterature francaise_ (1 vol.).
DOWDEN. _History of French Literature_ (1 vol.).
An excellent series of biographies of the principal authors, by the leading modern critics, is that of _Les Grands Ecrivains Francais_ (published by Hachette).
The critical essays of Sainte-Beuve are particularly valuable. They are contained in his _Causeries du Lundi, Premiers Lundis, Nouveaux Lundis, Portraits de Femmes, Portraits Litteraires_, and _Portraits Contemporains_.
Some interesting criticisms of modern writers are to be found in _La Vie Litteraire_, by Anatole France.
Editions of the principal authors are very numerous. The monumental series of _Les Grands Ecrivains de la France_ (Hachette) contains complete texts of most of the great writers, with elaborate and scholarly commentaries of the highest value. Cheaper editions of the masterpieces of the language are published by Hachette, La Bibliotheque Nationale, Jean Gillequin, Nelson, Dent, Gowans & Gray.
There are also numerous lyrical anthologies, of which two of the best are _Les Chefs-d’oeuvre de la Poesie lyrique francaise_ (Gowans & Gray) and _The Oxford Book of French Verse_ (Clarendon Press). But it must be remembered that the greater part of what is most characteristic in French literature appears in its poetic drama and its prose, and is therefore necessarily excluded from such collections.
INDEX
Academy, the French, 34-36
Aesop, 80
Aristotle, 67
Arnold, Matthew, 64
_Aucassin et Nicolete_, 11-12, 13
Austen, Jane, 161
Balzac, Honore de (1799-1850), 160-164, 166, 168, 171, 175, 176 _La Comedie Humaine_, 161-164
Baudelaire, Charles (1821-67), 172-173, 175 _Les Fleurs du Mal_, 172
Bayle, Pierre (1647-1706)
_Dictionnaire Historique et Critique_, 96 Beaumarchais, De [_pseud. of_ Pierre Auguste Caron] (1732-99), 140-141 _Le Mariage de Figaro_, 140-141
Bernard of Clairvaux (1091-1153), 130 Boileau, Nicolas (1636-1711), 53-55, 143, 167 _Art Poetique_, 53
_A son Esprit_, 54
Bolingbroke, 102
Bossuet, Jacques Benigne (1627-1704), 85-86, 122, 129, 144, 175 _Elevations sur les Mysteres_, 86
_Histoire Universelle_, 85, 122
_Meditations sur l’Evangile_, 86
_Oraisons Funebres_, 86
Bourgogne, Duc de, 95
Browne, Sir Thomas, 35
Buffon, Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de (1707-88), 118 Byron, 35, 137, 146, 156
Calas, Jean (1698-1762), 126
Catherine of Russia, 115
Cervantes, 56
_Chanson de Roland_, 8, 12
_Chansons de Geste_, 8, 9
Chapelain, Jean (1595-1674), 55
Chateaubriand, Francois Rene, Vicomte de (1768-1848), 145-146, 148, 175 _Genie du Christianisme_, 145
_Martyrs_, 145
_Memoires d’Outre-Tombe_, 146
Chenier, Andre (1762-94), 142-143, 173, 175 _Eglogues_, 143
Chretien de Troyes (12th century), 14 Columbus, 111
Commynes, Philippe de (1445-1509), 17-18 _Memoires_, 17
Condillac, Etienne Bonnot de Mably de (1715-80), 118 Condorcet, Marquis de (1743-94), 114, 118 _Progres de l’Esprit Humain_, 115
Congreve, 35
Constant, Benjamin (1845-1902), 158 _Adolphe_, 158
Copernicus, 44, 111
Corneille, Pierre (1606-84), 36-41, 48, 55, 77, 144, 175 _Le Cid_, 36, 37, 39
_Cinna_, 39
_Les Horaces_, 39
_Polyeucte_, 39
Cotin, l’Abbe (1604-82), 55
Dalembert, Jean le Rond (1717-83), 118 Dante, 8, 56, 101
Diderot, Denis (1713-84), 35, 116, 118, 131, 136, 139, 145, 158, 175 _Le Neveu de Rameau_, 116-117
_La Religieuse_, 158
Dryden, 64
Du Bellay, Joachim (1522-60), 22
_Les Antiquites de Rome_, 24
_La Defense et Illustration de la Langue Francaise_, 22 Du Chatelet, Mme., 119-120
Du Deffand, Mme. (1697-1780), 99
Dumas, Alexandra (1824-95), 148
_Encyclopedie_, 115-116
_Fabliaux_, 10, 144
Fenelon, Francois (1651-1715), 95, 110 _Telemaque_, 95
Flaubert, Gustave (1821-80), 35, 168-171, 172, 174, 175, 176 _Bouvard et Pecuchet_, 170
_Madame Bovary_, 170
_Salammbo_, 170
Fontenelle, Bernard le Bovyer de (1657-1757), 95-96 _Histoire des Oracles_, 96
Francis I, 21
Frederick the Great, 115, 120
Froissart, Jean (_c._ 1337-_c_. 1410), 16-17, 41, 175 _Chroniques_, 16-17
Gautier, Theophile, (1811-72), 148, 171-172, 175 _Emaux et Camees_, 171-172
Gray, Thomas, 35
Hardy, Alexandra (_c._ 1570-_c_. 1631), 36, 37 Helvetius, Claude Adrien (1715-71), 118
Heredia, Jose-Maria de (1842-1905), 172 Holbach, Baron d’ (1723-89), 118
Homer, 101
Hugo, Victor (1802-85), 37, 148, 149-155, 158, 159, 160, 161, 164, 172, 175
_Les Chatiments_, 155
_Les Contemplations_, 155
_Les Feuilles d’Automne_, 155
_Hernani_, 149, 152
_La Legende des Siecles_, 155
_Les Miserables_, 159, 161
_Les Rayons et Les Ombres_, 155
Hume, David, 139
James, Henry, 161
Jodelle, Etienne (1532-73), 36, 37
_Cleopatre_, 36
Johnson, Samuel, 167
Joinville, Jean, Sire de (1224-1319), 13-14, 41 _Vie de Saint Louis_, 13-14
Keats, John, 143, 173
Labe, Louise (_c._ 1520-66), 24
La Bruyere, Jean de (1645-96), 87, 88-92, 106-107, 144, 175 _Les Caracteres_, 89-91
Laclos, Pierre Choderlos de (1741-1803), 158 _Liaisons Dangereuses_, 158
Lafayette, Mme. de (1634-93), 157, 158 _La Princess de Cleves_, 157, 158
La Fontaine, Jean de (1621-95), 11, 53, 79-84, 87, 143, 144, 175 Lamartine, Alphonse (1790-1869), 147, 148, 175 _Le Lac_, 147
La Rochefoucauld, Duc de (1613-80), 87-88, 175 Leconte de Lisle, Charles Marie (1818-94), 172 Le Sage, Alain-Rene (1668-1747), 158
_Gil Blas_, 158
Locke, John, 102
Lorris, Guillaume de (_fl._ 13th century), 14-15 _La Roman de la Rose_, 14-15
Louis IX, 13-14
Louis XI, 17
Louis XIII, 32
Louis XIV, 31, 33, 41, 45-93, 94-95, 97, 105, 106, 168 Louis XV, 110
Luther, Martin, 111
Machiavelli, 17
Malherbe, Francois de (1555-1628), 32-34, 38, 41, 149 Marivaux, Pierre (1688-1763), 103-105, 157, 158 _Les Jeu de l’Amour et du Hasard_, 104
_Vie de Marianne_, 158
Marlowe, Christopher, 37
Marmontel, Jean Francois (1723-99), 118 Marot, Clement (1496-1544), 21-22
Maupassant, Guy de (1850-93), 174, 175, 176 Meung, Jean de (_c._ 1250-1305), 14-15, 25 _La Roman de la Rose_, 15
Michelet, Jules (1798-1874), 166-167, 172 Milton, 62, 101, 153
Moliere [_pseud. of_ Jean-Baptiste Poquelin] (1622-73), 35, 53, 55-64, 77, 84, 93, 175
_Don Juan_, 61, 62
_L’Ecole des Femmes_, 57
_Les Femmes Savantes_, 61
_Le Malade Imaginaire_, 58
_Le Misanthrope_, 59, 61, 63
_Les Precieuses Ridicules_, 57, 62 _Tartufe_, 60, 62
Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de (1533-92), 27-30, 31, 41, 175 _Apologie de Raimond Sebond_, 28
Montesquieu, Baron de (1689-1755), 96-100, 103, 110, 122, 175 _Considerations sur la Grandeur et la Decadence des Romains_, 98 _L’Esprit des Lois_, 98-99, 113
_Lettres Persanes_, 96-98, 100
Musset, Alfred de (1810-57), 148, 155, 156-157, 172 _Lorenzaccio_, 157
_Les Nuits_, 157
_Parnassiens, Les_, 172, 173
Pascal, Blaise (1623-62), 41-44, 129, 144, 175, 176 _Lettres Provinciales_, 41-42, 43, 129
_Pensees_, 43-44
_Philosophes, Les_, 111-115, 118, 133, 134 _Pleiade, La_, 22-24, 31, 32
Pombal, 115
Pope, Alexander, 135
Pradon, Nicolas (1632-98), 55
_Precieux, Les_, 33-34, 41, 55
Prevost, l’Abbe (1697-1763), 157-158 _Manon Lescaut_, 157-158, 159
Rabelais, Francois (_c._ 1494-_c._ 1553), 24-27, 28, 31, 117, 175 Racine, Jean (1639-99), 37, 48, 53, 55, 56, 64-79, 85, 87, 93, 100, 103, 143, 144, 150, 175, 176
_Andromaque_, 76
_Bajazet_, 77
_Berenice_, 68, 70-71
_Britannicus_, 77
_Phedre_, 77-79
_Les Plaideurs_, 77
Renan, Ernest (1823-92), 167, 172
Richelieu, Cardinal de (1585-1642), 32, 36 _Romans Bretons_, 9, 10
_Roman de Renard_, 10
_Roman de la Rose_, 14-16
Ronsard, Pierre de (1524-85), 22, 23-34, 175 _La Franciade_, 23
_Odes_, 23
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1712-78), 112, 131-139, 145, 146, 158, 159, 175 _Confessions_, 133, 137-138
_Le Contrat Social_, 132
_La Nouvelle Heloise_, 132, 158
Sainte-Beuve, Charles-Augustin (1804-69), 167-168 _Causeries du Lundi_, 168
_Port-Royal_, 168
Saint-Simon, Duc de (1675-1755), 105-110, 136, 153, 175 _Memoires_, 105-110, 136
Sand, George [_pseud. of_ Amandine Lucile Aurore Dupin] (1804-76), 159, 168
_Francois le Champi_, 168
_La Mare au Diable_, 168
_La Petite Fadette_, 168
Scott, Sir Walter, 35
Scudery, Madeleine de (1607-1701), 157 Sevigne, Mme. de (1626-96), 48
Shakespeare, 35, 56, 60, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 73, 102, 152, 153, 157, 175
Sirven (1709-64), 126
Sophocles, 78
Stendhal [_pseud, of_ Marie-Henri Beyle] (1783-1842), 160, 176 _La Chartreuse de Parme_, 160
_Le Rouge et Le Noir_, 160
Sully Prudhomme, Rene Francois Armand (1839-1907), 172 Swift, Jonathan, 173
Tacitus, 173
Taine, Henri (1828-93), 167
Theocritus, 143
Turgot, Anne Robert Jacques (1727-81), 112, 118
Verlaine, Paul (1844-96), 174-175
Versailles, 45-47, 106
Vigny, Alfred de (1797-1863), 148, 155-156, 175 _Colere de Samson_, 156
_Maison du Berger_, 156
_Moise_, 156
_Monts des Oliviers_, 156
_La Mort du Loup_, 156
_Servitude et Grandeur Militaires_, 156 Villehardouin, Geoffroi de (_c._ 1160-1213), 13, 14 _La Conquete de Constantinople_, 12-13
Villon, Francois (1431-1463 or after), 18-19, 20, 24, 175 _Grand Testament_, 18
_Petit Testament_, 18
Virgil, 8, 101
Voltaire, Francois Marie Arouet de (1694-1778), 35, 100-103, 105, 110, 119-131, 135, 136, 139, 140, 144, 145, 152, 175, 176 _Alzire_, 119, 152
_Candide_, 127-128
Correspondence, 129
_Diatribe du Docteur Akakia_, 120
_Dictionnaire Philosophique_, 123, 130 _Le Diner du Comte de Boulainvilliers_, 123 _Essai sur les Moeurs_, 121-122
_Frere Rigolet et l’Empereur de la Chine_, 123 _La Henriade_, 101
_Lettres Philosophiques_, 102, 119 _Life of Charles XII_, 101
_Mahomet_, 119
_Merope_, 119
_Zaire_, 119, 152
Watteau, Antoine, 104
Wordsworth, William, 74