subject and dominates it less. Nicole, a far inferior writer as
well as thinker, has also left a considerable number of Pensées,
which have about them something more of the essay and less
of the aphorism. They are, however, though not comparable
to Pascal, excellent in matter and style, and go far to justify
Bayle in calling their author “l’une des plus belles plumes de
l’Europe.” In sharp contrast with these thinkers, who are
invariably not merely respecters of religion but ardently and
avowedly religious, who treat morality from the point of view
of the Bible and the church, there arose side by side with them,
or only a little later, a very different group of moralists, whose
writings have been as widely read, and who have had as great
a practical and literary influence as perhaps any other class
of authors. The earliest to be born and the last to die of these
was Charles de Saint-Denis, seigneur de saint-Évremond (1613–1703).
Saint-Évremond.
Saint-Évremond was long known rather as a
conversational wit, some of whose good things were
handed about in manuscript, or surreptitiously printed
in foreign lands, than as a writer, and this is still to a certain
extent his reputation. He was at least as cynical as his still
better known contemporary La Rochefoucauld, if not more so,
and he had less intellectual force and less nobility of character.
But his wit was very great, and he set the example of the brilliant
societies of the next century. Many of Saint-Évremond’s
printed works are nominally works of literary criticism, but
the moralizing spirit pervades all of them. No writer had a
greater influence on Voltaire, and through Voltaire on the
whole course of French literature after him. In direct literary
value, however, no comparison can be made between Saint-Évremond
and the author of the Sentences et maximes morales.
François, duc de la Rochefoucauld (1613–1680), has other literary
La Rochefoucauld.
claims besides those of this famous book. His Mémoires
were very favourably judged by his contemporaries,
and they are still held to deserve no little praise even
among the numerous and excellent works of the kind which that
age of memoir-writers produced. But while the Mémoires thus
invite comparison, the Maximes et sentences stand alone. Even
allowing that the mere publication of detached reflections in
terse language was not absolutely new, it had never been carried,
perhaps has never since been carried, to such a perfection.
Beside La Rochefoucauld all other writers are diffuse, vacillating,
unfinished, rough. Not only is there in him never a word too
much, but there is never a word too little. The thought is always
fully expressed, not compressed. Frequently as the metaphor
of minting or stamping coin has been applied to the art of managing
words, it has never been applied so appropriately as to the
maxims of La Rochefoucauld. The form of them is almost
beyond praise, and its excellencies, combined with their immense
and enduring popularity, have had a very considerable share in
influencing the character of subsequent French literature. Of
hardly less importance in this respect, though of considerably
less intellectual and literary individuality, was the translator
of Theophrastus and the author of the Caractères, La Bruyère.
La Bruyère.
Jean de la Bruyère (1645–1696), though frequently
epigrammatic, did not aim at the same incredible
terseness as the author of the Maximes. His plan did
not, indeed, render it necessary. Both in England and in France
there had been during the whole of the century a mania for
character writing, both of the general and Theophrastic kind, and
of the historical and personal order. The latter, of which our
own Clarendon is perhaps the greatest master, abound in the
French memoirs of the period. The former, of which the naïve
sketches of Earle and Overbury are English examples, culminated
in those of La Bruyère, which are not only light and easy in
manner and matter, but also in style essentially amusing, though
instructive as well. Both he and La Rochefoucauld had an
enduring effect on the literature which followed them—an effect
perhaps superior to that exercised by any other single work in
French, except the Roman de la rose and the Essais of Montaigne.
17th-century Savants.—Of the literature of the 17th century there only remains to be dealt with the section of those writers who devoted themselves to scientific pursuits or to antiquarian erudition of one form or another. It was in this century that literary criticism of French and in French first began to be largely composed, and after this time we shall give it a separate heading. It was very far, however, from attaining the excellence or observing the form which it afterwards assumed. The institution of the Academy led to various linguistic works. One of the earliest of these was the Remarques of the Savoyard Claude Favre de Vaugelas (1595–1650), afterwards re-edited by Thomas Corneille. Pellisson wrote a history of the Academy itself when it had as yet but a brief one. The famous Examen du Cid was an instance of the literary criticism of the time which was afterwards represented by René Rapin (1621–1687), Dominique Bouhours (1628–1702) and René de Bossu (1631–1680), while Adrien Baillet (1649–1706) has collected the largest thesaurus of the subject in his Jugemens des savants. Boileau set the example of treating such subjects in verse, and in the latter part of the century Reflexions, Discourses, Observations, and the like, on particular styles, literary forms and authors, became exceedingly numerous. In earlier years France possessed a numerous band of classical scholars of the first rank, such as Scaliger and Casaubon, who did not lack followers. But all or almost all this sort of work was done in Latin, so that it contributed little to French literature properly so-called, though the translations from the classics of Nicolas Perrot d’Ablancourt (1606–1664) have always taken rank among the models of French style. On the other hand, mathematical studies were pursued by persons of far other and far greater genius, and, taking from this time forward a considerable position in education and literature in France, had much influence on both. The mathematical discoveries of Pascal and Descartes are well known. Of science proper, apart from mathematics, France did not produce many distinguished cultivators in this century. The philosophy of Descartes was not on the whole favourable to such investigations, which were in the next century to be pursued with ardour. Its tendencies found more congenial vent and are more thoroughly Controversy between Ancients and Moderns. exemplified in the famous quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns. This, of Italian origin, was mainly started in France by Charles Perrault (1628–1703), who thereby rendered much less service to literature than by his charming fairy tales. The opposite side was taken by Boileau, and the fight was afterwards revived by Antoine Houdar[d, t] de la Motte (1672–1731), a writer of little learning but much talent in various ways, and by the celebrated Madame Dacier, Anne Lefèvre (1654–1720). The discussion was conducted, as is well known, without very much knowledge or judgment among the disputants on the one side or on the other. But at this very time there were in France students and scholars of the most profound erudition. We have already mentioned Fleury and his ecclesiastical history. But Fleury is only the last and the most popular of a race of omnivorous and untiring scholars, whose labours have ever since, until the modern fashion of first-hand investigations came in, furnished the bulk of historical and scholarly references and quotations. To this century belong le Nain de Tillemont (1637–1698), whose enormous Histoire des empereurs and Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire ecclésiastique served Gibbon and a hundred others as quarry; Charles Dufresne, seigneur de Ducange (1614–1688), whose well-known glossary was only one of numerous productions; Jean Mabillon (1632–1707), one of the most voluminous of the voluminous Benedictines; and Bernard de Montfaucon (1655–1741), chief of all authorities of the dry-as-dust kind on classical archaeology and art.
Opening of the 18th Century.—The beginning of the 18th century is among the dead seasons of French literature. All the greatest men whose names had illustrated the early reign of Louis XIV. in profane literature passed away long before him, and the last if the least of them, Boileau and Thomas Corneille, only survived into the very earliest years of the new age. The political and military disasters of the last years of the reign were accompanied by a state of things in society unfavourable to literary development. The devotion to pure literature and philosophy proper which Descartes and Corneille had inspired had
