died out, and the devotion to physical science, to sociology,
and to a kind of free-thinking optimism which was to inspire
Voltaire and the Encyclopedists had not yet become fashionable.
Fénelon and Malebranche still survived, but they were emphatically
men of the last age, as was Massillon, though he lived till
nearly the middle of the century. The characteristic literary
figures of the opening years of the period are d’Aguesseau,
Fontenelle, Saint-Simon, personages in many ways interesting
and remarkable, but purely transitional in their characteristics.
Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle (1657–1757) is, indeed, perhaps
the most typical figure of the time. He was a dramatist, a
moralist, a philosopher, physical and metaphysical, a critic, an
historian, a poet and a satirist. The manner of his works is
always easy and graceful, and their matter rarely contemptible.
18th-Century Poetry.—The dispiriting signs shown during the 17th century by French poetry proper received entire fulfilment in the following age. The two poets who were most prominent at the opening of the period were the abbé de Chaulieu (1639–1720) and the marquis de la Fare (1644–1712), poetical or rather versifying twins who are always quoted together. They were both men who lived to a great age, yet their characteristics are rather those of their later than of their earlier contemporaries. They derive on the one hand from the somewhat trifling school of Voiture, on the other from the Bacchic sect of Saint-Amant; and they succeed in uniting the inferior qualities of both with the cramped and impoverished though elegant style of which Fénelon had complained. Their compositions are as a rule lyrical, as lyrical poetry was understood after the days of Malherbe—that is to say, quatrains of the kind ridiculed by Molière, and Pindaric odes, which have been justly described as made up of alexandrines after the manner of Boileau cut up into shorter or longer lengths. They were followed, however, by the one poet who succeeded in producing something resembling poetry J. B. Rousseau. in this artificial style, J. B. Rousseau (1671–1741). Rousseau, who in some respects was nothing so little as a religious poet, was nevertheless strongly influenced, as Marot had been, by the Psalms of David. His Odes and his Cantates are perhaps less destitute of that spirit than the work of any other poet of the century excepting André Chénier. Rousseau was also an extremely successful epigrammatist, having in this respect, too, resemblances to Marot. Le Franc de Pompignan (1700–1784), to whom Voltaire’s well-known sarcasms are not altogether just, and Louis Racine (1692–1763), who wrote pious and altogether forgotten poems, belonged to the same poetical school; though both the style and matter of Racine are strongly tinctured by his Port Royalist sympathies and education. Lighter verse was represented in the 18th century by the long-lived Saint-Aulaire (1643–1742), by Gentil Bernard (1710–1775), by the abbé (afterwards cardinal) de Bernis (1715–1794), by Claude Joseph Dorat (1734–1780), by Antoine Bertin (1752–1790) and by Evariste de Parny (1753–1814), the last the most vigorous, but all somewhat deserving the term applied to Dorat of ver luisant du Parnasse. The jovial traditions of Saint-Amant begat a similar school of anacreontic songsters, which, represented in turn by Charles François Panard (1674–1765), Charles Collé (1709–1783), Armand Gouffé (1775–1845), and Marc-Antoine-Madeleine Desaugiers (1772–1827), led directly to the best of all such writers, Béranger. To this class Rouget de Lisle (1760–1836) perhaps also belongs; though his most famous composition, the Marseillaise, is of a different stamp. Nor is the account of the light verse of the 18th century complete without reference to a long succession of fable writers, who, in an unbroken chain, connect La Fontaine in the 17th century with Viennet in the 19th. None of the links, however, of this chain, with the exception of Jean Pierre Florian (1759–1794) deserve Voltaire (poetry). much attention. The universal faculty of Voltaire (1694–1778) showed itself in his poetical productions no less than in his other works, and it is perhaps not least remarkable in verse. It is impossible nowadays to regard the Henriade as anything but a highly successful prize poem, but the burlesque epic of La Pucelle, discreditable as it may be from the moral point of view, is remarkable enough as literature.
The epistles and satires are among the best of their kind, the verse tales are in the same way admirable, and the epigrams, impromptus, and short miscellaneous poems generally are the ne plus ultra of verse which is not poetry. The Anglomania of the century extended into poetry, and the Seasons of Thomson set the example of a whole library of tedious descriptive verse, which in its turn revenged France upon England by producing or helping to produce English poems of the Darwin school. The first of these descriptive performances was the Saisons of Jean François de Saint-Lambert (1716–1803), identical in title with its model, but of infinitely inferior value. Saint-Lambert was followed by Jacques Delille (1738–1813) in Les Jardins, Antoine Marin le Mierre (1723–1793) in Les Fastes, and Jean Antoine Roucher (1745–1794) in Les Mois. Indeed, everything that could be described was seized upon by these describers. Delille also translated the Georgics, and for a time was the greatest living poet of France, the title being only disputed by Escouchard le Brun (1729–1807), a lyrist and ode writer of the school of J. B. Rousseau, but not destitute of energy. The only other poets until Chénier who deserve notice are Nicolas Gilbert (1751–1780)—the French Chatterton, or perhaps rather the French Oldham, who died in a workhouse at twenty-nine after producing some vigorous satires and, at the point of death, an elegy of great beauty; Jacques Charles Louis Clinchaut de Malfilâtre (1732–1767), another short-lived poet whose “Ode to the Sun” has a certain stateliness; and Jean Baptiste Gresset (1709–1777), the author of Ver-Vert and of other poems of the lighter order, which are not far, if at all, below the Chénier. level of Voltaire. André Chénier (1762–1794) stands far apart from the art of his century, though the strong chain of custom, and his early death by the guillotine, prevented him from breaking finally through the restraints of its language and its versification. Chénier, half a Greek by blood, was wholly one in spirit and sentiment. The manner of his verses, the very air which surrounds them and which they diffuse, are different from those of the 18th century; and his poetry is probably the utmost that its language and versification could produce. To do more, the revolution which followed a generation after his death was required.
18th-Century Drama.—The results of the cultivation of dramatic poetry at this time were even less individually remarkable than those of the attention paid to poetry proper. Here again the astonishing power and literary aptitude of Voltaire gave value to his attempts in a style which, notwithstanding that it counts Racine among its practitioners, was none the less predestined to failure. Voltaire’s own efforts in this kind are indisputably as successful as they could be. Foreigners usually prefer Mahomet and Zaïre to Bajazet and Mithridate, though there is no doubt that no work of Voltaire’s comes up to Polyeucte and Rodogune, as certainly no single passage in any of his plays can approach the best passages of Cinna and Les Horaces. But the remaining tragic writers of the century, with the single exception of Crébillon père, are scarcely third-rate. C. Jolyot de Crébillon (1674–1762) himself had genius, and there are to be found in his work evidences of a spirit which had seemed to die away with Saint-Genest, and was hardly to revive until Hernani. Of the imitators of Racine and Voltaire, La Motte in Inés de Castro was not wholly unsuccessful. François Joseph de la Grange-Chancel (1677–1758) copied chiefly the worst side of the author of Britannicus, and Bernard Joseph Saurin (1706–1781) and Pierre-Laurent de Belloy (1727–1775) performed the same service for Voltaire. Le Mierre and La Harpe, mentioned and to be mentioned, were tragedians; but the Iphigénie en Tauride of Guimond de la Touche (1725–1760) deserves more special mention than anything of theirs. There was an infinity of tragic writers and tragic plays in this century, but hardly any others of them even deserve mention. The muse of comedy was decidedly more happy in her devotees. Molière was a far safer if a more difficult model than Racine, and the inexorable fashion which had bound down tragedy to a feeble imitation of Euripides did not similarly prescribe an undeviating adherence to Terence. Tragedy had never been, has scarcely been since, anything but an exotic in France; comedy was of the
