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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Initiation into Literature, by Emile Faguet
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Initiation into Literature
+
+Author: Emile Faguet
+
+Translator: Home Gordon
+
+
+Release Date: July, 2005 [EBook #8555]
+This file was first posted on July 22, 2003
+Last Updated: May 22, 2013
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK INITIATION INTO LITERATURE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Ted Garvin, Marlo Dianne, Charles Franks and
+the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+INITIATION INTO LITERATURE
+
+By Emile Faguet
+
+
+Translated From The French By Sir Home Gordon, Bart.
+
+The Translator begs to acknowledge with appreciation the courtesy of the
+Author in graciously consenting to make some valuable additions, at his
+request, specially for the English version.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+This volume, as indicated by the title, is designed to show the way to
+the beginner, to satisfy and more especially to excite his initial
+curiosity. It affords an adequate idea of the march of facts and of
+ideas. The reader is led, somewhat rapidly, from the remote origins to
+the most recent efforts of the human mind.
+
+It should be a convenient repertory to which the mind may revert in order
+to see broadly the general opinion of an epoch--and what connected it
+with those that followed or preceded it. It aims above all at being _a
+frame_ in which can conveniently be inscribed, in the course of
+further studies, new conceptions more detailed and more thoroughly
+examined.
+
+It will have fulfilled its design should it incite to research and
+meditation, and if it prepares for them correctly.
+
+E. FAGUET.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+ANCIENT INDIA
+
+The Vedas. Buddhist Literature. Great Epic Poems, then very Diverse, much
+Shorter Poems. Dramatic Literature. Moral Literature.
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+HEBRAIC LITERATURE
+
+The Bible, a Collection of Epic, Lyric, Elegiac, and Sententious
+Writings. The Talmud, Book of Ordinances. The Gospels.
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE GREEKS
+
+Homer. Hesiod. Elegiac and Lyric Poets. Prose Writers. Philosophers and
+Historians. Lyric Poets, Dramatic Poets. Comic Poets. Orators. Romancers.
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE LATINS
+
+The Latins, Imitators of the Greeks. Epic Poets. Dramatic Poets. Golden
+Age: Virgil, Horace, Ovid. Silver Age: Prose Writers, Historians, and
+Philosophers: Titus-Livy, Tacitus, Seneca. Decadence Still Brilliant.
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE MIDDLE AGES: FRANCE
+
+_Chansons de Geste: Song of Roland_ and Lyric Poetry. Popular
+Epopee: _Romances of Renard_. Popular Short Stories: Fables.
+Historians. The Allegorical Poem: _Romance of the Rose_. Drama.
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+THE MIDDLE AGES: ENGLAND
+
+Literature in Latin, in Anglo-Saxon, and in French. The Ancestor of
+English Literature: Chaucer.
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE MIDDLE AGES: GERMANY
+
+Epic Poems: _Nibelungen_. Popular Poems. Very Numerous Lyric Poems.
+Drama.
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE MIDDLE AGES: ITALY
+
+Troubadours of Southern Italy. Neapolitan and Sicilian Poets: Dante,
+Petrarch, Boccaccio.
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+THE MIDDLE AGES: SPAIN AND PORTUGAL
+
+Epic Poems: _Romanceros_. Didactic Books. Romances of Chivalry.
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+THE SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES: FRANCE
+
+First Portion of Sixteenth Century: Poets: Marot, Saint-Gelais; Prose
+Writers: Rabelais, Comines. Second Portion of Sixteenth Century: Poets:
+"The Pleiade"; Prose Writers: Amyot, Montaigne. First Portion of
+Seventeenth Century: Intellectual and Brilliant Poets: Malherbe,
+Corneille; Great Prose Writers: Balzac, Descartes. Second Portion of
+Seventeenth Century: Poets: Racine, Moliere, Boileau, La Fontaine; Prose
+Writers: Bossuet, Pascal, La Bruyere, Fenelon, etc.
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+THE SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES: ENGLAND
+
+Dramatists: Marlowe, Shakespeare. Prose Writers: Sidney, Francis Bacon,
+etc. Epic Poet: Milton. Comic Poets.
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+THE SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES: GERMANY
+
+Luther, Zwingli, Albert Duerer, Leibnitz, Gottsched.
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+THE SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES: ITALY
+
+Poets: Ariosto, Tasso, Guarini, Folengo, Marini, etc. Prose Writers:
+Machiavelli, Guicciardini, Davila.
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+THE SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES: SPAIN AND PORTUGAL
+
+Poets: Quevedo, Gongora, Lope de Vega, Ercilla, Calderon, Rojas, etc.
+Prose Writers: Montemayor, Cervantes, etc. Portugal: De Camoens, etc. The
+Stage.
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+THE EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES: FRANCE
+
+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, Merimee,
+Renan, etc.
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+THE EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES: ENGLAND
+
+Poets of the Eighteenth Century: Pope, Young, MacPherson, etc. Prose
+Writers of the Eighteenth Century: Daniel Defoe, Richardson, Fielding,
+Swift, Sterne, David Hume. Poets of the Nineteenth Century: Byron,
+Shelley, the Lake Poets. Prose Writers of the Nineteenth Century: Walter
+Scott, Macaulay, Dickens, Carlyle.
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+THE EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES: GERMANY
+
+Poets of the Eighteenth Century: Klopstock, Lessing, Wieland. Prose
+Writers of the Eighteenth Century: Herder, Kant. Poets of the Nineteenth
+Century: Goethe, Schiller, Koerner.
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+THE EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES: ITALY
+
+Poets: Metastasio, Goldoni, Alfieri, Monti, Leopardi. Prose Writers:
+Silvio Pellico, Fogazzaro, etc.
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+THE EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES: SPAIN
+
+The Drama still Brilliant: Moratin. Historians and Philosophers,
+Novelists, Orators.
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+RUSSIAN LITERATURE
+
+Middle Ages. Some Epic Narratives. Renaissance in the Seventeenth
+Century. Literature Imitative of the West in the Eighteenth Century.
+Original Literature in the Nineteenth Century.
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+POLISH LITERATURE
+
+At an Early Date Western Influence Sufficiently Potent. Sixteenth Century
+Brilliant; Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries highly Cultured;
+Nineteenth Century Notably Original.
+
+
+INDEX
+
+
+
+
+INITIATION INTO LITERATURE
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+ANCIENT INDIA
+
+The _Vedas_. Buddhist Literature. Great Epic Poems, then very
+Diverse, much Shorter Poems. Dramatic Literature. Moral Literature.
+
+
+THE _VEDAS_.--The ancient Indians, who spoke Sanscrit, possess a
+literature which goes back, perhaps, to the fifteenth century before
+Christ. At first, like all other races, they possessed a sacred
+literature intimately bound up with their religion. The earliest volumes
+of sacred literature are the _Vedas_. They describe and glorify the
+gods then worshipped, to wit, Agni, god of fire, of the domestic hearth,
+of the celestial fire (the sun), of the atmospheric fire (lightning);
+Indra, god of atmosphere, analogous to Zeus of the Greeks; Soma, the
+moon; Varuna, the nocturnal vault, the god who rewards the good and
+punishes the evil; Rudra, the irascible god, more evil than well
+disposed, though sometimes helpful; others too, very numerous.
+
+The style of the _Vedas_ is continually poetic and metaphorical.
+They contain a sort of metaphysics as well as continual allegories.
+
+BUDDHA.--Buddhism, a philosophical religion, sufficiently analogous to
+Christianity, which Sakyamuni, surnamed Buddha (the wise), spread through
+India towards 550 B.C., created a new literature. It taught, as will be
+remembered, the equality of all castes in the sight of religion,
+metempsychosis, charity, and detachment from all passions and desires in
+order to arrive at absolute calm (_nirvana_). The literature it
+inspired was primarily _gnomic_, that is, sententious, analogous to
+that of Pythagoras, with a tendency towards little moral tales and
+parables, as in the Gospel.
+
+This literature subsequently expanded into large and even immense epic
+poems, of which the principal are the _Mahabharata_ and the _Ramayana_.
+
+THE _MAHABHARATA_; THE _RAMAYANA_.--The _Mahabharata_ (that is, the
+_great history of the Bharatas_) is a legend or a novel in verse
+intersected with moral digressions, with episodes vaguely related to the
+subject, with discourses and prayers. There are charming episodes full of
+delicate sensibility, of moving tenderness--that is to say, of human
+beauty, comparable to the farewells of Hector and Andromache in Homer;
+and everywhere, amid tediousness and monotony, is found a powerful and
+superabundant imagination.
+
+The _Ramayana_, the name of the author of which, Valmiki, has come
+down to us, is a poem yet more vast and unequal. There are portions which
+to us are quite unreadable, and there are others comparable to the most
+imposing and most touching in all epic poetry. Reduced to its theme, the
+subject of _Mahabharata_ is extremely simple; it is the history of
+Prince Rama, dispossessed of his throne, who saw his beloved wife, Sita,
+ravished by the monstrous demon Ravana, who made alliance with the good
+monkeys and with them constructed a bridge over the sea to reach the
+island on which Sita was detained, who vanquished and slew Ravana, who
+re-found Sita, and finally went back happily to his kingdom, which had
+also been re-conquered.
+
+The most noticeable exterior characteristic of the _Mahabharata_ is
+the almost constant mingling of men and animals, a mingling which one
+feels is in conformity with the dogma of the transmigration of souls. Not
+only monkeys but vultures, eagles, gazelles, etc., are brought into the
+work and form important personages. We are in the epoch when the animals
+spoke. Battles are numerous and described in great detail; the
+_Ramayana_ is the _Iliad_ of the Indians; pathetic scenes, as
+well as those of love, of friendship, of gratitude are not rare, and are
+sometimes exquisite. The whole poem is imbued with a great feeling of
+humanity, heroism, and justice. Victory is to the good and right is
+triumphant; the gods permit that the just should suffer and be compelled
+to struggle; but invariably it is only for a time and the merited
+happiness is at the end of all.
+
+After these two vast giant epics there were written among the Indians a
+number of shorter narrative poems, very varied both in tone and manner,
+which suggest an uninterrupted succession of highly important and
+animated schools of literature. Nearer to our own time--that is, towards
+the fifth or sixth century of our era, lyric poetry and the drama were,
+as it were, detached from the epopee and existed on their own merits.
+Songs of love, of hate, of sadness, or of triumph took ample scope; they
+were more often melancholy than sad, for India is the land of optimism,
+or at least of resignation.
+
+DRAMATIC POETRY.--As for the dramatic poetry, that is very curious; it is
+not mixed with epopee in the precise sense of the word; but it is
+continually mingled with descriptions of nature, with word-paintings of
+nature and invocations to nature. The Indian dramatic poet did not
+separate man from the air he breathed nor from the world around him; in
+recalling the moment of the day or night in which the scene takes place,
+_the actual hour_, the poet, no doubt in obedience to a law dictated
+to him by his public, kept his characters in communication with earth
+and heaven, with the dawn he described, the moon he painted, the evening
+he caused to be seen, the plants he portrayed as withering or reviving,
+the birds which he showed everywhere in the country or returning to their
+habitation, etc.
+
+From the purely dramatic aspect, these plays are often affecting or
+curious, possessing penetrating and thoughtful psychology. The most
+celebrated dramas still left to us of the Indian stage are _The Chariot
+of Baked Clay_ and the affecting and delicate _Sakuntala_ the gem
+of Indian literature, the work of the poet Kalidas, who was also a
+remarkable lyric poet.
+
+GNOMIC POETRY.--Gnomic, that is sententious, poetry, which, it has been
+indicated, very early enjoyed high appreciation among the Indians, long
+continued to obtain their approval. It was always wise and often
+intellectual. The collection of Barthari, who belonged to the sixth or
+seventh century A.D., contains thoughts which would do honour to the
+highest moralists of the most enlightened epochs. "The fortune, ample or
+restricted, which the Creator hath inscribed on thy forehead thou wilt
+assuredly attain; wert thou in the desert or in the gold-mines of Meru,
+more couldst thou not acquire. Therefore, of what avail to torment
+thyself and to humiliate thyself before the powerful. A pot does not draw
+more water from the sea than from a well."
+
+And this might be by a modern man opposing La Rochefoucauld: "The modest
+man is one poor in spirit, the devout a hypocrite, the honest man is
+artful, the hero is a barbarian, the ascetic is a fool, the unreserved
+a chatterbox, the prudent a waverer. Tell me, which is the virtue among
+all the virtues that human malice cannot vilify?"
+
+Here, finally, is a truth for all time: "It is easy to persuade the
+ignorant, still easier to persuade the very wise; but he who hath a
+commencement of wisdom Brahma himself could not cajole."
+
+Indian literature continued to be productive, though losing much of its
+fecundity, until the fifteenth or sixteenth century of our era. Without
+exaggeration, it is permissible to conject that its scope extended over
+twenty-five centuries. It possesses the uniquely honourable trait that it
+is, assuredly, the only one which owes nothing to any other and is
+literally indigenous.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+HEBRAIC LITERATURE
+
+The Bible, a Collection of Epic, Lyric, Elegiac, and Sententious
+Writings. The Talmud, Book of Ordinances. The Gospels.
+
+
+THE BIBLE.--The Hebrew race possessed a literature from about 1050 B.C.
+It embodied in poems the legends which had circulated among the people
+since the most remote epoch of their existence. It was those poems,
+gathered later into one collection, which formed what, since
+approximately the year 400, we call the Bible--that is, the Book of
+books.
+
+In the Bible there are histories (_Genesis_, _History of the Jews
+up to Joshua_, the _Book of Joshua_, _Judges_, _Kings_, etc.), then
+anecdotal episodes (_Ruth_, _Esdras_, _Tobit_, _Judith_, _Esther_), then
+books of moral philosophy(_Proverbs of Solomon_, _Ecclesiastes_,
+_Wisdom_, _Ecclesiasticus_), then books of an oratorical and lyrical
+character (_Psalms of David_ and all the _Prophets_). Finally, a single
+work, still lyrical but in which there are marked traces of the dramatic
+type (the _Song of Songs_).
+
+THE TALMUD.--To the works which have been gathered into the Bible, it is
+necessary to add the Talmud, a collection of commentaries on the civil
+and religious laws of the Jews, which forms an indispensable supplement
+to the Bible, to anyone desiring to understand the Hebraic civilisation.
+
+THE GOSPELS.--The Gospels, published in the Greek tongue, have nothing
+Hebraic except that they were compiled by Jews or by their immediate
+disciples and that they have preserved something of the manner of writing
+of the Jews.
+
+BIBLICAL WRITINGS.--The Biblical writings, regarded solely from the
+literary point of view, form one of the finest monuments of human
+thought. The sentiment of grandeur and even of infinity in _Genesis_;
+the profound and simple sensibility as in the _History of Joseph_,
+_Tobit_, and _Esther_; eloquence and exquisite religious sentiment as in
+the _Book of Job_ and the _Psalms of David_; ecstatic lyricism, vehement
+and fiery, accompanied with incredible satiric force as in the
+_Prophets_; wisdom alike equal to that of the Stoics and of the serious
+Epicureans as in _Ecclesiastes_ and the _Proverbs_; everywhere
+marvellous imagination, always concise at least, if not restrained;
+lyrical sensuality which recalls the most perturbed creations of erotic
+Greeks and Latins, whilst surpassing them in beauty as in the _Song of
+Songs_; and throughout there is this grandeur, this simple majesty, this
+easy and natural sublimity which in the same degree is to be found only
+occasionally in Homer and which appears to be the privilege of the
+people who were the first to believe in a single God. That is what
+makes, almost in a continuous way, the astonishing beauty of the Bible,
+and which explains how whole nations, of other origin, have made down to
+our own day, and still continue to make, the Bible their uninterrupted
+study, and draw from it courage, serenity, exaltation of soul, and a
+singular ferment of their poetic and literary genius.
+
+As has been the case with many other literary monuments, it is possible,
+without owning that it is desirable, that the Bible may even survive the
+numerous and important religions which have been born from it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+THE GREEKS
+
+Homer. Hesiod. Elegiac and Lyric Poets. Prose Writers. Philosophers and
+Historians. Lyric Poets. Dramatic Poets. Comic Poets. Orators. Romancers.
+
+
+HOMER.--The most ancient Greek writer known is Homer, and it cannot be
+absolutely stated in what epoch he lived.
+
+Since the seventeenth century it has even been asked if he ever existed
+and if his poems are not collections of epic songs which had circulated
+in ancient Greece and which at a very recent epoch, that of Pisistratus,
+had been gathered into two grand consecutive poems, thanks to some
+rearrangement and editing. At the commencement of the nineteenth century
+the erudite were generally agreed that Homer had never existed. Now
+they are reverting to the belief that there were only two Homers, one the
+author of the _Iliad_ and the other of the _Odyssey_.
+
+THE _ILIAD_.--The _Iliad_ is the story of the wrath of Achilles, of his
+retreat far from his friends who were endeavouring to capture Troy and of
+his return to them.
+
+It is the poem of patriotism. It is filled with the spirit that when a
+people is divided against itself, all misfortunes fall on and overwhelm
+it. Achilles, unjustly offended, deprived his fellow-countrymen of his
+support; they are all on the point of perishing; he returns to them in
+order to avenge the death of his dearest friend and they are saved.
+
+The _Iliad_ is almost entirely filled with battles, which are very
+skillfully diversified. Some episodes, such as the farewell of Hector to
+his wife Andromache when he quits her for the fight, or King Priam
+coming, in tears, to ask Achilles for the corpse of his son Hector that
+he may piously inter it, are among the most beautiful passages that ever
+came from a human inspiration.
+
+THE _ODYSSEY_.--The _Odyssey_ is also the poem of patriotism,
+of the _little homeland_, of the native land. It is the story of
+Ulysses, after the siege of Troy, reconquering Ithaca, the small island
+of which he is king, and taking ten years to acquire it. What makes the
+unity of the poem, what forms the backbone of the poem, is the smoke
+which rises above the house of Ulysses, which he always perceives in the
+dream of his hopes and desires, which invincibly attracts him, which he
+desires to see again before he dies, and the thought of which sustains
+him in his trials and causes him to scorn all joys on his road thither.
+The thousand adventures of Ulysses, his sojourn with the nymph Calypso,
+his terrible perils in the cave of the giant Polyphemus and near the isle
+of the Sirens, the tempests which he survives, the hospitality he
+receives from King Alcinoues, the visit he pays to the dead--among whom is
+Achilles regretting the earth and preferring to be a ploughman among the
+living rather than king among the dead; these are vigorous, curious,
+interesting, touching, picturesque scenes from which all subsequent
+literatures have drawn inspiration and which still delight all races.
+
+HESIOD.--Posterior, very probably, to Homer, Hesiod has left two great
+poems, one on the families of the gods (_Theogenia_) and the other
+on the works of man (_Works and Days_). The _Theogenia_ is very
+valuable to us because we learn from it and it makes us understand how
+the Greeks understood the divinity, its different manifestations, and, so
+to say, its evolution through the world. _Works and Days_ is a poem
+filled with both sadness and courage, the author finding the world wicked
+and men unjust; but always concluding that with energy, perseverance, and
+obstinacy it is possible to save oneself from anything, and that there is
+only one real misfortune, which is to know despair.
+
+ELEGIACAL AND LYRICAL POETS.--Almost from the most remote antiquity, from
+the seventh century, perhaps the eighth century before the Christian era,
+the Greeks possessed elegiacal and lyrical poets--that is to say, poets
+who put into verse their personal sentiments, the joys and sorrows which
+they felt as men. Such were Callinos, the satiric Archilochus, the
+satiric Simonides of Amorgos, the martial Tyrtaeus. Then there were
+the poets who made verses to be set to music: Alcaeus, Sappho, Anacreon,
+Alcman. Alcaeus appears to have been the greatest lyrical Greek poet
+judging by the fragments we possess by him and by the lyrical poems of
+Horace, which there are reasons for believing were imitated from Alcaeus.
+
+Of the poetess Sappho we have too little to enable us to judge her very
+exactly; but throughout antiquity she enjoyed a glory equal to that of
+the greatest. She specially sang of love and in such a manner as to lead
+to the belief that she herself had not escaped the passion.
+
+Anacreon sang after the same fashion and with a charm, a grace, a witty
+ingenuity which are fascinating. He was the epicurean of poetry (before
+the birth of Epicurus) and from him was born a type of literature known
+as anacreonotic, which extended right through ancient times and has been
+prolonged to modern times.
+
+PROSE WRITERS.--Finally prose was born, in the sixth century before
+Christ, with the philosophers Thales, Heraclitus, Anaxagoras, and with
+the historians, of whom only one of that epoch has remained famous,
+namely Herodotus.
+
+HERODOTUS.--Herodotus, in a general history of his own time and of that
+immediately preceding it, is often not far from epic poetry. His style is
+at once limpid and warm, he possesses a pleasing power of distinction,
+the taste for and curiosity about the manners of foreign peoples, a
+laughing and easy imagination without any pretence at the philosophy of
+history or of moralising through history. He was, above all, a delightful
+writer.
+
+AESOP.--To this period (albeit somewhat at hazard) it is possible to
+ascribe Aesop, about whom nothing is known except that he wrote the
+fables which have been imitated from generation to generation. The
+collection that we possess under his name is one of these imitations,
+perpetrated long after his death, but as to which it is impossible to
+assign a date.
+
+PINDAR.--Pindar, the Theban, broadened and extended the lyrical type.
+Under him it preserved its power, its high spirits, its verse and, so to
+say, its fine fury; but he introduced into the epic the narration of
+ancient legends, the acts and gestures of the ancient heroes, and
+effected this so admirably that the most lyrical of Grecian lyricists is
+an historian. Capable of sustained elevation, of sublime thoughts and
+expressions, of a fine disorder which has been overpraised, and which on
+close expression is found to be very careful, he has been regarded as the
+very type of dignified and poetic style, and more or less to be imitated
+by all ambitious poets commencing with Ronsard. The wise, like Horace,
+have contented themselves with praising him. From fragments left to us he
+is infinitely impassioned to read.
+
+GREEK TRAGEDY.--Greek tragedy, which is one of the miracles of the human
+brain, began in the sixth century B.C. It was born of the dithyramb. The
+dithyramb is a chant in chorus in honour of a god or a hero. From this
+chorus emerged a single actor who sang the praises of the god, and to
+which the choir replied. When, instead of one actor, there were two who
+addressed one another in dialogue and were answered by the choir, the
+dramatic poem was founded. When there were three--and there were hardly
+ever any more--tragedy, as the Greeks understood it, existed.
+
+THESPIS; AESCHYLUS; SOPHOCLES.--Thespis was the earliest known to us who
+took rudimentary tragedies from town to town in Attica. Then came
+Aeschylus, whose tragedy, already rigid and hieratical, was very
+powerful, imbued with terrible majesty; then came Sophocles, a religious
+philosopher, having a feeling for the old religion and the art of giving
+it a moral character, great lyrical poet, master of dialogue, eloquent,
+moving, knowing how to construct and carry on a dramatic poem with
+infinite skill, to whom, in fact, can be denied no quality of dramatic
+poetry and who attains a conception of perfection.
+
+EURIPIDES.--Euripides, less religious as a philosopher, sometimes
+suggesting the sophist and a little the rhetorician, but full of ideas,
+eloquent, affecting, "the most tragic" (that is, the most pathetic) of
+all the acting dramatists, as Aristotle observed, the most modern, too,
+and the one we best understand, has been the true source whence have been
+freely drawn the tragedies of modern times, more particularly of our own.
+
+The greatest works of Aeschylus are _Seven Against Thebes_ and
+_Prometheus Bound_; the greatest of Sophocles: _Antigone_, _Oedipus
+the Tyrant_ and _Oedipus at Colonos_; the greatest of Euripides:
+_Hippolytus_ and _Iphigenia_.
+
+After Euripides tragedy was exhausted and only produced very second-rate
+works.
+
+COMEDY.--Comedy enjoyed a longer existence. Very obscure in origin, no
+doubt proceeding from the opprobrious jests exchanged by the lower
+classes in mirthful hours, it was at first freely fantastical, composed
+in dialogue, oratorical, lyrical, satirical, even epical at times. Like
+tragedy, it possessed a chorus for which the lyrical part was specially
+reserved. It was personal--that is, it directly attacked known
+contemporaries, often by name and often by bringing them on the stage.
+The celebrated authors of this "ancient comedy" were Eupolis, Cratinos,
+of whom we have only fragments, and Aristophanes, whose work has come
+down to us.
+
+ARISTOPHANES.--Aristophanes was a great poet, with incisive humour and
+also incomparable lyrical power, with voluntary vulgarity which is often
+shocking and an elevation of ideas and language which frequently raise
+him to the heights of Aeschylus and Sophocles. Here was one of the
+grandest poetic minds that the world has produced. His most considerable
+achievements are _The Frogs_, the earliest known work of literary
+criticism, in dramatic form too, wherein he sets up a parallel between
+Aeschylus and Euripides and cruelly jeers at the latter; _The
+Clouds_, in which he mocks the sophists; _The Wasps_, wherein he
+ridicules the Athenian mania for judging, and magnificently praises the
+old Athenians of the time of Marathon.
+
+MENANDER.--To this "ancient comedy," immediately succeeded the "middle
+comedy," in which it was forbidden to introduce personalities and of
+which Aristophanes gave an example and a model in his _Plutus_.
+Later, in the fourth century before Christ, with the refined, witty, and
+discreet Menander, the "new comedy" was analogous to that of Plautus, of
+Terence, and that of our own of the seventeenth century.
+
+THUCYDIDES.--To return to the time of Pericles; Attic prose developed in
+the hands of historians, sages, and philosophers. Thucydides founded true
+history, scientific, drawn from the sources, supported and strengthened
+by all the information and corroboration that the skilled historian can
+gather, examine, and control. As a writer, Thucydides was terse, bare,
+limpid, and possessed an agreeable sober elegance. He introduced into his
+history imaginary discourses between great historical personages which
+allowed him to show the general state of Greece or of particular portions
+of Greece at certain important times. It is not known why these
+discourses were written in a style differing from that of the rest of the
+work, wise, even beautiful, but so extremely concise and elliptic as, in
+consequence, to be extremely difficult to understand.
+
+HIPPOCRATES.--Hippocrates created scientific medicine, the medicine of
+observation, denying prodigies, seeking natural causes for diseases, and
+already setting up rational therapeutics. There are seventy-two works
+called "Hippocratical," which belong to his school; some may be by
+himself.
+
+SOPHISTS AND ORATORS.--The language grew flexible in the hands of the
+learned, subtle, and ingenious sophists (Gorgias, Protagoras) who
+attacked Socrates by borrowing his weapons, as it were, and making them
+perfect.
+
+A new type of literature was created: the oratorical. Antiphon was the
+earliest in date alike of the Athenian orators and of the professors of
+eloquence. In a crowd after him came Isocrates, Andocides, Lysias,
+Aeschines, Hyperides, and the master of them all, that astonishing
+logician, that impassioned and terrible orator, Demosthenes.
+
+THE PHILOSOPHERS: PLATO.--Contemporaneously the philosophers, quite as
+much as the sophists, even confining the matter to the literary aspect,
+cast immortal glory on Attica. Imbued with the spirit of Socrates, even
+when more or less unfaithful to him, Plato, psychologist, moralist,
+metaphysician, sociologist, marvellous poet in prose, seductive and
+fascinating mythologist, really created philosophy in such fashion that
+even the most modern systems, if not judged by how much they agree or
+differ from him, at least invariably recall him, whether they seem a
+distant echo of him or whether they challenge and combat him.
+
+ARISTOTLE; XENOPHON; THEOPHRASTUS.--Aristotle, pre-eminently learned,
+admirably cultivated naturalist, acquainted also with everything known in
+his day, more prudent metaphysician than Plato but without his depth, a
+precise and sure logician and the founder of scientific logic, a clear
+and dexterous moralist, an ingenious and pure literary theorist;
+Xenophon, who commanded the retreat of the ten thousand, moralist and
+Intelligent pedagogue displaying much attractiveness in his
+_Cyropoedia_, the sensible, refined, and delightful master of
+familiar and practical life in his _Economics_; Theophrastus,
+botanist, very witty satirical moralist, highly caustic and
+realistic--these three established Greek wisdom for centuries, and
+probably for ever, erecting a solid and elegant temple wherein humanity
+has almost continuously sought salutary truths, and where some at least
+of our descendants, and those not the least illustrious, will always
+perform their devotions.
+
+The chief works of Plato are the _Socratic Dialogues_, the
+_Gorgias_, the _Timoeus_, the _Phaedo_ (immortality of the
+soul), the _Republic_, and the _Laws_. The principal books of
+Aristotle are his _Natural History_, _Metaphysics_, _Logic_, _Rhetoric_,
+_Poetica_. The most notable volumes of Xenophon are the _Cyropoedia_,
+the _Economics_ and the _Memorabilia of Plato_. The only work of
+Theophrastus we possess is his _Characters_, which was translated
+and _continued_ by La Bruyere.
+
+STOICS AND EPICUREANS.--In the fourth and even the third century,
+philosophy spoke to mankind through two principal schools: those of the
+Stoics and of the Epicureans. The chief representatives of the Stoics
+were Zeno and Cleanthes. Chrysippus taught an austere morality which may
+be summed up in these words: "Abstain and endure." The Epicureans, whose
+chief representatives were Epicurus and Aristippus, taught, when all was
+taken into account, the same morality but starting from a different
+principle, which was that happiness must be sought, and in pursuance of
+this principle they advised less austerity, even in their precepts.
+Although these are schools of philosophy, yet they must be taken into
+account here because each of them has exercised much influence over
+writers, the first on Seneca and much later on Corneille; the second on
+Lucretius and Horace; both sometimes on the same man, one example being
+Montaigne.
+
+After Alexander, intellectual Greece extended and enlarged itself so that
+Instead of having one centre, Athens, it possessed five or six: Athens,
+Alexandria, Antioch, Pergamos, Syracuse. This was an admirable literary
+efflorescence; the geniuses were less stupendous but the talents were
+innumerable.
+
+In the cities named, and in others, history, rhetoric, geography,
+philosophy, history of philosophy, philology, were taught with ardour and
+learnt with enthusiasm; the literary soil was rich and it was assiduously
+cultivated.
+
+ALEXANDRINE LITERATURE.--From this soil rose a fresh literature--more
+erudite, less spontaneous, less rich in popular vigour, yet very
+interesting. This is the literature known as _Alexandrine_. With
+this literature first appeared the _romance_, unknown to the
+ancients. The historical romance began with Hecataeus of Abdera, the
+philosophical romance with Evemerus of Messenia, who pretended to have
+found an ancient inscription proving that the gods of ancient Greece were
+old-time kings of the land deified after death, an ingenious invention
+from which was to come a whole school of criticism of ancient mythology.
+
+THE ELEGY AND IDYLL: THEOCRITUS.--True and, at the same time, great poets
+belonged to this period. One was Philetas of Cos, founder of the Grecian
+elegy, celebrated and affectionately saluted centuries later by Andre
+Chenier. Of his works only a few terse fragments remain. Another was
+Asclepiades of Samos, both elegiac and lyric, of whose _epigrams_,
+(short elegies) those preserved to us are charming. Yet another was the
+sad and charming Leonidas of Tarentum. The two leaders of this choir were
+Theocritus and Callimachus. Theocritus, a Sicilian, passes as the founder
+of the idyll which he did not invent, but to which he gave the importance
+of a type by marking it with his imprint. The idyll of Theocritus was
+always a picture of popular customs and even a little drama of popular
+morals; but at times it had its scene set in the country, at others in a
+town, or again by the sea, and consequently there are rustic idylls
+(properly _bucolics_), maritime idylls, popular urban idylls. An
+astonishing sense of reality united to a personal poetic gift and a
+highly alert sensitiveness made his little poems alike beautiful for
+their truth and also for a certain ideal of ardent and profound passion.
+It is curious without being astonishing that the idyll of Theocritus
+often suggests the poetry of the Bible.
+
+PUPILS OF THEOCRITUS.--Moschus and Bion were the immediate pupils of
+Theocritus. He had more illustrious ones, commencing with Virgil in his
+_Eclogues_, continuing with the numerous idylls of the Renaissance
+in France and Italy, as well as with Segrais in the seventeenth century,
+and ending, if it be desired, with Andre Chenier, though others more
+modern can be traced.
+
+CALLIMACHUS.--Callimachus, more erudite, more scholastic, was what is
+termed a neoclassic, which is that he desired to treat in a new way the
+same subjects that had been dealt with by the great men of ancient
+Greece, and so far as possible to conceive them in the same spirit.
+Therefore he wrote tragedies, comedies, "satiric dramas" (a kind of farce
+in which secondary deities were characterised), lyric and elegiac poems
+after the manner of Alcaeus or Sappho, a familiar epopee, a romance in
+verse, which was perhaps a novel type, but more probably imitated from
+certain poems of ancient Greece which we no longer possess. To us his
+poetry seems cold and calculated, although clever and dexterous. It was
+held in high esteem not only in his own day but to the close of
+antiquity.
+
+DIDACTIC POETRY: ARATUS; APOLLONIUS.--Didactic poetry, of the cultivation
+of which there had been no trace since Hesiod, was destined to be revived
+in this clever period; and, in fact, at this time Aratus wrote his
+_Phoenomena_, which is a course of astronomy and meteorology in
+conformity with the science of his era. More ambitious, and desirous not
+only of writing an epic fragment like Callimachus, but also of restoring
+the old-time grand epic poem after the manner of Homer (Callimachus and
+he had a violent quarrel on the subject), Apollonius of Rhodes in his
+_Argonautics_ narrated the expedition of Jason. It was a fine epic
+poem and especially an astonishing psychological poem. The study of
+passion and of the progress and catastrophe of the infatuation of Medea
+form a masterpiece. Assuredly Virgil in his _Dido_, and perhaps
+Racine in his _Phedre_ remembered Apollonius.
+
+LYCOPHRON.--Lycophron also belongs to this period. He left such an
+admirable poem (_Alexandra_, that is Cassandra) that his
+contemporaries themselves failed to understand it in spite of all their
+efforts. He is the head and ancestor of that great school of inaccessible
+or impenetrable poets who are most ardently admired. Maurice Sceve in the
+sixteenth century is the illustrious example.
+
+THE EPIGRAMMATISTS: MELEAGER.--To these numerous men of great talent must
+be added the epigrammatists--that is, those who wrote very short, very
+concise, very limpid poems wherein they sought absolute perfection. They
+were almost innumerable. The most illustrious was Meleager, in whom we
+can yet appreciate delicate genius and exquisite sensibility.
+
+POLYBIUS.--Reduced to Roman provinces (successively greater Greece,
+Greece proper, Egypt, Syria), the Grecian world none the less continued
+to be an admirable intellectual haven. As early as the Punic wars, the
+Greek Polybius revealed he was an excellent historian, military,
+political, and philosophical, inquisitive about facts, inquisitive, too,
+about probable causes, constitutions, and social institutions, the
+morals, character, and the underlying temperament of races. His principal
+work is the _Histories_--that is, the history of the Graeco-Roman
+world from the second Punic war until the capture of Corinth by the
+Romans. He was an intellectual master; unfortunately he wrote very badly.
+
+EPICTETUS; MARCUS AURELIUS.--It must, however, be recognised that in the
+first century before Christ and in the first after, Greece--even
+intellectually--was in a state of depression. But dating from the Emperor
+Nerva--that is, from the commencement of the second century--there was a
+remarkable Hellenic revival. Primarily, it was the most brilliant moment
+since Plato in Grecian philosophy. Stoicism exerted complete sway over
+the cultivated classes; Epictetus gave his _Enchiridion_ and
+_Manual_, wherein are condensed the elevated and profound thoughts
+most deeply realised of the doctrine of Zeno; later, the Emperor Marcus
+Aurelius, in his solitary meditations entitled _For Myself_, depicts
+his own soul, admirable, chaste, pure, severe to himself, indulgent to
+others, pathetically resigned to the universal order of things and
+adhering to them with a renunciation and a faith that are truly
+religious. Less severe, even playful and smiling, Dion Chrysostom (that
+is, mouth of gold, nickname given to him because of his eloquence) is
+penetrated with the same spirit a little mingled with Platonism, which
+makes him, therefore, perhaps, penetrate more easily than the
+over-austere pure Stoics.
+
+PLUTARCH.--Plutarch, as historian discreetly romantic, as philosophical
+moralist decidedly dexterous, gently obstinate in conciliation and
+concord, in a large portion of his _Parallel Lives_ narrated those
+of illustrious Romans and Greeks to show how excellent they were and how
+highly they ought to esteem one another; elsewhere, in his moral works,
+he sought to conciliate philosophy and paganism, no doubt believing in a
+single God, as did Plato, but also believing in a crowd of intermediary
+spirits between God and man, which allowed him to regard the deities of
+paganism as misunderstood beings and even in a certain sense to admit
+their authority. Emphatically a man who observed the golden mean, he
+opposed the Stoics for being too severe on human nature and the
+Epicureans for being too easy or for too lightly risking the future. He
+was an elegant writer--gracious, self-restraining; nearer, all said and
+done, to eclecticism than to simplicity, and he must not be judged by the
+geniality which was virtually imparted to him by Amyot in translating
+him. Throughout Europe, since the Renaissance, of all the Grecian authors
+he has perhaps been the most read, the most quoted, the best loved, and
+the most carefully edited.
+
+THE GREEK HISTORIANS.--Greek historians multiplied about this period. To
+mention only the most notable: Arrian, philosopher, disciple of
+Epictetus, and historian of the expedition of Alexander; Appian, who
+wrote the history of the Roman people from their origin until the time of
+Trajan; Dion Cassius, who also compiled Roman history in a sustained
+manner full of elegance and nobility; Herodian, historian of the
+successors of Marcus Aurelius, who would only narrate what he had himself
+witnessed, a showy writer who seems over-polished and a little
+artificial.
+
+A historian of a highly individualistic character was Diogenes of
+Laertius, who wrote the _Lives of Philosophers_, being very little
+of a philosopher himself and too prone to drop into anecdotage, but
+interesting and invaluable to us because of the scanty information we
+possess about ancient philosophy.
+
+LUCIAN.--Immeasurably superior to those just cited since Plutarch, Lucian
+of Samosata (Syria) may be regarded as the Voltaire of antiquity--witty,
+sceptical, amusing, even comic. He was primarily a lecturer, wandering
+like a sophist from town to town, in order to talk in vivacious,
+animated, nimble, and paradoxical fashion. Then he was a polygraphic
+writer, producing treatises, satires, and pamphlets on the most diverse
+subjects. He wrote against the Christians, the pagans, the philosophers,
+the prejudiced, sometimes against common sense. Amongst his works were
+_The Way to Write History_, partly serious, partly sarcastic; _The
+Dialogues of the Dead_, moralising and satirical, imitated much later
+in very superior fashion by Fontenelle; _The Dialogues of the Gods_,
+against mythology; _True History_, a parody of the false or romantic
+histories then so fashionable, more especially about Alexander. He
+certainly possessed little depth, but his talent was incredible:
+alertness, causticity, amusing logic, burlesque dialectics, an
+astonishing instinct for caricature, the art of natural dialogue, gay
+insolence, light but vivid psychological penetration, an almost profound
+sense of the ridiculous, joyous fooling; above all, that first essential
+of satire, to be himself amused by what he wrote to amuse others; all
+these he possessed in a high degree. Rabelais has been called the Homeric
+buffoon, Lucian is certainly the Socratic.
+
+POETRY AND ROMANCE.--Greek poetry no longer existed at this period.
+Hardly is it permissible to cite the didactic Oppian, with his poem on
+sin, and the fabulist Babrius, imitator of Aesop in his fables. In
+reparation, the romance was born and the scientific literature was
+important. The romance claimed among its representatives Antonius
+Diogenes, with his _Marvels Beyond Thule_; Heliodorus, with his
+_Aethiopica_ or _Theagenes and Chariclea_, the love-story so
+much admired by Racine in his youth; Longus, with his _Daphnis and
+Chloe_, which still retains general approval and which possesses real,
+though somewhat studied grace, and of which the ability of the style is
+quite above the normal.
+
+SCIENTIFIC LITERATURE.--Scientific literature includes the highly
+illustrious mathematician and astronomer Ptolemy, whose system obtained
+respect and belief until the advent of Copernicus; the physician Galen;
+the philosopher-physician Sextus Empiricus, who was a good historian,
+highly sceptical, but well informed and intelligent about philosophical
+ideas.
+
+DECADENCE OF THE GREEK SPIRIT.--Vitality was slowly withdrawn from the
+Grecian world, although not without revivals and highly interesting
+semi-renaissances. In the fourth century, the sophist--that is, the
+professor of philosophy and of rhetoric--Libanius left a vast number of
+official or academic discourses and letters which were dissertations.
+Like his friend the Emperor Julian, he was a convinced pagan, and with
+kindly but firm spirit combated the Christian bishops, priests, and
+particularly the monks, who were objects of veritable repulsion to him.
+He possessed talent of a secondary but honourable rank.
+
+THE EMPEROR JULIAN.--The Emperor Julian, a Christian in childhood, but
+who on attaining manhood reverted to paganism, which earned him the title
+of "the Apostate," was highly intelligent, pure in heart, and filled with
+a spirit of tolerance; but he was a heathen and he wrote against
+Christianity. He possessed satiric force and wit, even a measure of
+eloquence. A pamphlet by him, the _Misopogon_, directed against the
+inhabitants of Antioch, who had chaffed him about his beard, makes
+amusing reading. He died quite young; he would, in all probability, have
+become a very great man.
+
+PROCOPIUS.--It is necessary to advance to the sixth century to mention
+the historian Procopius, that double-visaged annalist who, in his
+official histories, was lost in admiration of Justinian, and who, in his
+_Secret History_, only published long after his death, related to us
+the turpitude, real or imagined, of Theodora, wife of the Emperor
+Justinian, and of Antonina, wife of Belisarius.
+
+POETRY.--Greek poetry was not dead. Quintus of Smyrna, who was of the
+fourth century, perhaps later, wrote a _Sequel to Homer_, without
+much imagination, but with skill and dexterity; Nonnus wrote the
+_Dionysiaca_, a poetic history of the expedition of Bacchus to
+India, declamatory, copious, and powerful, full alike of faults and
+talent; Musaeus (date absolutely unknown) has remained justly celebrated
+for his delicious little poem _Hero and Leander_, countless times
+translated both in prose and verse.
+
+GRECIAN CHRISTIAN WRITERS.--It is necessary to revert to the fourth
+century in order to enumerate Grecian Christian writers. As might be
+expected these were almost all controversial orators. Saint Athanasius of
+Alexandria was an admirable man of action, a fiery and impassioned
+orator, the highly polemical historian of the Church, after the manner of
+Bossuet in his _History of Variations_. Saint Basil, termed by his
+admirers "the Great," without there being much hyperbole in the
+qualification, was an incomparable orator. He, as it were, reigned over
+Eastern Christianity, thanks to his word, his skill, and his courage.
+Even to us his works possess charm. He intermingled the finest ideas of
+Plato and of Christianity in the happiest and most orthodox manner. The
+humanists held him in esteem for having rendered justice to antiquity in
+his _Lecture on Profane Authors_ and having advised Christians to
+study it with prudence but with esteem. Saint Gregory of Nazianzen, the
+intimate friend of Saint Basil, was also a great orator, exalted, ardent,
+and lyrical, whilst he was also as a poet, refined, gracious, and full of
+charm. Saint Gregory of Nyssa, brother of Saint Basil, was essentially a
+theologian and in his day a theological authority.
+
+SAINT JOHN CHRYSOSTOM.--The most splendid figure of the Greek Church was
+Saint John Chrysostom, celebrated in political history for his struggle
+with the Emperor Arcadius and the Empress Eudoxia, and for the
+persecutions he had in consequence to suffer. His heated, fiery, and
+violent eloquence, which was altogether that of a tribune of the people,
+can still profoundly affect us because therein can be felt a deeply
+sincere ardour, a passion for justice, charity, and love. A bellicose
+moralist, he was, like Bourdaloue, a realist and therefore an exact and
+cruel delineator of the customs of his time, which were not good; and he
+teaches us better than anyone else what was the sad state of Eastern
+morality in his day. His widely varied genius, passing from the most
+spiritually familiar of tones to the height of moving and imposing
+eloquence, was one of the grandest of all antiquity.
+
+EUSEBIUS.--Allusion should be made to that good historian Eusebius, who
+narrated Christian history from its origins until the year 323.
+
+THE BYZANTINE PERIOD.--What is termed the Byzantine period extended from
+the close of the reign of Justinian to the definite fall of the Eastern
+Empire (565-1453). This long epoch, practically corresponding to the
+Middle Ages of the West, is very weak from the literary point of view,
+but yet possessed a number of interesting and valuable historians (Joseph
+of Byzantium, Comnenus, etc.) and skilled and learned grammarians, that
+is professors of language and literature (Eustathius, Cephalon, Planudes,
+Lascaris). It was the later of these grammarians, among them Lascaris,
+who after the fall of Constantinople being welcomed in France and Italy,
+brought the Greek writers to the West, commentated on them, made them
+known, and thence came the Renaissance of Literature.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+THE LATINS
+
+The Latins, Imitators of the Greeks. Epic Poets, Dramatic Poets. Golden
+Age: Virgil, Horace, Ovid. Silver Age: Prose Writers, Historians and
+Philosophers:--Titus-Livy, Tacitus, Seneca. Decadence Still Brilliant.
+
+
+LATIN LITERATURE.--Latin literature is little more than a branch of Greek
+literature. It commenced much later, finished earlier, and has always
+poured into the others at least a portion of its living force. Roman
+literature really begins only at the moment when the Romans came into
+contact with the Greeks, read their works, and were tempted to imitate
+them; that is to say, it commences in the third century before Christ.
+The first manifestation of this literature was epic. Naevius and Livius
+Andronicus made epopees. They are destitute of talent. Ennius made one:
+it possessed merit; what the Latin critics have quoted of his
+_Annals_ is marked, first by an energetic patriotic sentiment which
+affords pleasure; then it possesses energy and sometimes even a certain
+brilliance. In addition, Ennius wrote several didactic and satiric poems.
+Among the Romans, Ennius was the great ancestor and father of Latin
+literature.
+
+LUCILIUS.--Lucilius was a satirist. Judging by the fragments of his work
+which have come down to us, he was a very acute and penetrating political
+satirist. Horace, despite his sovereign disdain for all that preceded his
+own century, did not fail to value him and agreed that there was
+something to be drawn and appreciated from this "muddy torrent."
+
+COMEDY: PLAUTUS; TERENCE.--Comedy and tragedy existed at this period. It
+may be apposite here to point out that it was later and in the finest
+period of Latin literature that they ceased to exist. Plautus conceived
+the plan of transporting to Rome Grecian comedies of the time of the new
+comedy and of adapting them more or less to Latin morals. He possessed a
+strong and brutal verve which did not lack power, and more than once
+Moliere did him the honour of taking inspiration from him. Terence, after
+him, the friend of Scipio the second Africanus, and perhaps in
+collaboration with him, in a way widely different from that of Plautus so
+far as type of talent, tender, gentle, romantic, sentimental, smiling
+rather than witty, so far as can be judged directly inspired by Menander,
+wrote comedies which are highly agreeable to read, but it is doubtful if
+they could ever have been widely appreciated on the stage. However, the
+Roman writers held him in great esteem, and at one epoch of our own
+history, in the seventeenth century, he enjoyed remarkable and unanimous
+appreciation.
+
+L'ATELLANE.--To comedy strictly defined, whether it dealt with Romans or
+Greeks, the Romans also added the atellane, which came to them from the
+Etruscans (Atella, a city of Etruria) and which was a sort of farce with
+stereotyped characters (the fat glutton, the lean glutton, the old miser
+always baffled, etc.). Pomponius and Naevius endeavoured to raise this
+popular recreation to a literary standard and succeeded. It then became a
+thoroughly national characteristic. There was considerable analogy
+between it and the modern popular Italian comedy, showing its Cassandras,
+its Pantaloon, and its Harlequin, without it being possible to assert
+that the Italian comedy proceeded from the atellane. The atellane enjoyed
+much success in the second century before Christ. It was, however, ousted
+by the mime, which was the kind of comic literature thoroughly national
+at Rome. The mime was a farce of popular morals, particularly of the
+lower classes; it was a portrayal of the dregs of society in their comic
+aspects. It maintained its sway until the close of the Roman Empire
+without becoming more dignified; rather the reverse. The names of some
+authors of mimes have survived: Publius Syrus and Laberius, in the time
+of Caesar. What is curious is that these mimes, licentious and even
+obscene though they were, throughout gave occasional utterance to highly
+moral observations which Latin grammarians have preserved for us. This
+curious mixture may be explained or contrasted at pleasure; perhaps it
+was only a conventional habit.
+
+TRAGEDY.--As for what there was of tragedy, it was destined to be yet
+shorter-lived than comedy, but it was evidently very brilliant and it is
+regrettable that it has not been preserved. Livius Andronicus and Nasvius
+wrote tragedies, but the three greatest tragedians were Ennius, his
+nephew Pacuvius, and Attius. Ennius imitated Euripides, Pacuvius
+Sophocles, and Attius Aeschylus. All three soared to the grand, the
+majestic, and the sublime; all seem to have been very sententious and
+replete with maxims; but it is needful to be cautious: these authors are
+known to us only by the citations made by grammarians, and grammarians
+who, having naturally cited phrases rather than fragments of dialogue,
+make it possible that these authors appear to us sententious when they
+were in reality not abnormally so.
+
+PROSE LITERATURE.--Prose literature at Rome appeared almost at the same
+time as the poetic. Cicero has given us the names of great orators,
+contemporaries of Ennius, and there were historians and didacticians in
+prose of the same period. The elder Cato, the great censor, was an
+historian; he wrote a work, _The Origins_, which seems to have been
+the history not only of Rome but of all Italy since the foundation of
+Rome; he was didactic; he wrote a _De Re Rustica_ (On Rural Life)
+which has come down to us and is infinitely valuable as showing the
+simplicity, the hardness, and the avarice of the old Roman proprietors,
+all qualities which Cato thoroughly well knew they possessed.
+
+THE AGE OF CAESAR.--The age of Caesar was a great literary epoch. Before
+all and almost over all was Caesar himself: great orator, letter-writer,
+grammarian, and historian. His _Commentaries_, that is, his memoirs,
+history of his campaigns, are admirable in their conciseness and
+precision of rapid and running narrative. Apart from him, Cornelius Nepos
+made a very clear abridgment, characterised by marked sobriety, of
+universal history under the title of _Chronica_. Varro, a kind of
+encyclopaedist, wrote a _De Re Rustica_, also a work on the Latin
+language, _Menippic Satires_--satires it is true, but mixtures of
+prose and verse--and a work on _Roman Life_, as well as a crowd of
+small books dealing with every possible subject. Cicero told him, "You
+have taught us all things human and divine." He possessed immense
+erudition and a violent mind not without charm. He can be imagined as a
+sage of our own sixteenth century.
+
+CICERO.--Cicero was perhaps the greatest _litterateur_ that has ever
+lived. It is obvious that all tastes were in his soul at the same time,
+as Voltaire said of himself, and he gratified them all. He was
+politician, lawyer, orator, poet, philosopher, professor of rhetoric,
+moralist, grammarian, political writer, correspondent; he encompassed all
+human knowledge, involved himself in all human matters and was a very
+great writer. What to-day interests us most in his immense output are his
+political discourses, his letters and his moral treatises. His political
+discourses are those of an honest man who always held upright views and
+the sentiment of the great interests of his country; his letters are
+those of a witty man and of an excellent friend; his moral treatises,
+more particularly his _De Officiis_ (On Duties), are in a very
+elevated spirit which subordinates all other human duties beneath
+obligations towards one's country. He did not always rise to
+circumstances; he was well content, on the contrary, that they should
+serve him.
+
+SALLUST.--Sallust, who as an individual seems to have been contemptible,
+was a highly sagacious and excellent historian. He has left a history of
+Catiline and another of Jugurtha. They are masterpieces of lucidity and
+of dramatic vivacity. Admirable especially are his maxims, which seem as
+well thought out as those of La Rochefoucauld: "Friendship is to desire
+the same things and to hate the same things"; "the spirit of faction is
+the friendship of scoundrels."
+
+POETRY: CATULLUS.--Poetry was not less brilliant than prose in the time
+of Caesar. It was the era of Lucretius and of Catullus. Catullus, a
+delightful man of the world, a charming voluptuary, passionate and
+eloquent lover, formidable epigrammatist, a little coloured by
+Alexandrianism (but barely, for this trait has been much exaggerated),
+comes very close to being a great poet. In many respects he closely
+recalls Andre Chenier, who, it may be added, was thoroughly conversant
+with his writing.
+
+LUCRETIUS.--Lucretius is a very noble poet. If we knew Epicurus otherwise
+than by fragments, it is highly probable we should be tempted to assert
+that Lucretius was only a translator; but on that we cannot pronounce,
+and of the didactic part of the poem of Lucretius (_On Nature_),
+even if it were a simple translation, all the oratorical and the
+descriptive portions would remain, and they are the most beautiful of the
+work. In his invocations to Epicurus, in his prosopopoeia of nature to
+man inviting resignation to death, in his descriptions of the immolation
+of Iphigenia and of the cow wandering in the fields in search of her lost
+heifer, there are a breadth, a grasp, and an epic grandeur, which recall
+Homer, arouse thoughts of Dante, and which Virgil himself, whilst much
+less unequal though never greater, has not attained.
+
+THE AUGUSTAN AGE.--The Augustan Age, which was only really very great if
+under this title is also included the epoch of Caesar and also that of
+Octavius, and thus it was understood by our ancestors, does not fail to
+offer writers of fine genius. These are Virgil, Horace, and Titus-Livy.
+
+TITUS-LIVY.--Titus-Livy, who is one of the purest and most beautiful
+writers and an orator of seductive talent in his own chamber, wrote a
+Roman history composed, as to the first portion, of the legends
+transmitted at Rome from generation to generation, and in which it is
+impossible for us to distinguish the false from the true; for two-thirds
+of the work made very accurate investigations of all that previous
+historians and the annals of the pontiffs could give the author. As has
+been observed, Titus-Livy, being a Cisalpine, was a Gaul who already
+possessed the French qualities: order, clearness, regulated development,
+sustained and careful style, oratorical tastes. An ardent patriot,
+republican at his soul, yet treated in friendly fashion by Augustus, he
+wrote Roman history at first, no doubt, to make it known, but above all
+to inspire the Romans of his own time with admiration, respect, and love
+for the austere morals and exalted virtues of their ancestors. He erected
+a monument, one portion of which is unhappily destroyed, but into which
+modern tragedians have often quarried and which orators have not scorned
+when desiring to instruct themselves in their art.
+
+VIRGIL.--Virgil came from almost the same country. His was a charming
+soul, tender and gentle, infinitely capable of friendship, very pure and
+white, as Horace said, with a tendency to melancholy. The two sources of
+his inspiration were Homer and love of Rome; add, for a time, Theocritus.
+Lover of the country and of moral life, he first wrote those delicious
+_Bucolics_ wherein he did not venture to be as realistic as the
+Sicilian poet, but in which there is not only infinite grace and delicate
+sensibility, but also, in certain verses, admirable descriptions that
+arouse memories of those of La Fontaine. Lover of the soil and desirous,
+in harmony with Augustus, to attract the Italians back to a taste for
+agriculture, he wrote the _Georgics_: that is, the toils of the
+field, describing these labours with singular exactitude and precision;
+then, to give the reader variety, he introduced from time to time an
+episode which is a fragment of history or of mythological legend. At
+length, desirous of attributing to Rome the most glorious past possible,
+he revived the old legend which claimed that the ancient kings of Rome
+descended from the famous kings of Troy in her zenith, and he composed
+the _Aeneid_. The _Aeneid_ is at once both an _Odyssey_ and an
+_Iliad_. The first five books containing the adventures of
+Aeneas after the fall of Troy until his arrival in Italy form an
+_Odyssey_; the last six books, containing the combats of Aeneas in
+Italy in order to conquer a place for himself, form an _Iliad_. In
+the middle, the sixth book is a descent into hell, again an imitation of
+Homer, yet altogether new, enriched as it is with very fine philosophical
+ideas which Homer could never have known. The main theme of the poem and
+what gives it unity is Rome, which does not yet exist, but which is
+always to be seen looming in the future. All the poem leans in that
+direction, and alike by ingenious artifices, by prophecies more and more
+exact, by the description of the shield of Aeneas, Roman history itself,
+in its broad lines, is traced.
+
+The sovereign merit of Virgil is his artistic sense. Others are more
+powerful or more profound. No man has written better verse than he on any
+subject on which he wrote.
+
+HORACE.--Horace was a man of infinite wit, profoundly conversant with the
+Grecian poets. With that knowledge of the poets he filled his odes with
+recollections of Alcasus and Stesichorus; they were minutely and finely
+polished, accustoming the Romans to find in Latin words the musical
+phrases of the Greeks, but withal remaining very cold. With his wit, his
+verve, his very lively sense of humour, his pretty moral philosophy
+borrowed a little from the Stoics but mainly from the Epicureans, he
+created his _Satires_ and his _Epistles_, which form the most
+delicate feast and which have no more lost their interest for us than
+Montaigne has. Here was a charming man. He was not a great poet. He was
+the most witty of poets, the poet of the men of wit.
+
+TIBULLUS; PROPERTIUS; OVID.--Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid immediately
+followed him. Tibullus was a tender and sad elegiast, less passionate and
+less powerful than Catullus, but gracious and touching. All the elegiacal
+poets, and Andre Chenier in particular, have evinced recollections of
+him. Propertius possessed great talent for versification, but was more
+erudite than inspired; being almost pure Alexandrine, he is more
+interesting to the humourist than to the ordinary man. Ovid, gifted with
+facility and the skill of a prodigious versifier, dexterous descriptist
+in his _Metamorphoses_, ingenious and cold in his _Art of
+Love_, has found some pathetic notes in his elegies wherein as an
+exile he weeps over his own misfortunes.
+
+DECADENCE.--With the second century arrived the commencement of
+decadence. The rhetoricians, who in Rome were what the sophists were in
+Athens, only far less intelligent, directed the public mind. They did
+not spoil it completely, but they did not give it strength, and the
+Latins, believing they had reached the zenith of the Greeks, seemed to
+draw less inspiration from the eternal models.
+
+QUINTUS CURTIUS.--However, the Latin sap is still strong. Quintus
+Curtius, romantic historian, who wrote a history of Alexandria which is
+too generous towards the legendary, narrates brilliantly and strews his
+pages with vigorously phrased maxims and apothegms. He is a remarkable
+author. The elder Pliny, a very erudite sage and a somewhat precious
+writer, is a worthy successor of Varro.
+
+SENECA.--Seneca, who certainly was well nurtured in Greek philosophy,
+preached stoicism in concise, antithetic, and epigrammatic styles, all in
+highly thoughtful points which sometimes attain power.
+
+PETRONIUS; LUCIAN; MARTIAL.--Petronius was a man possessing highly
+refined taste who painted extremely ugly morals. Tragedy endeavoured to
+obtain renaissance with Seneca the tragic, who is perhaps the same as the
+moralist Seneca, alluded to above, and the effort was sufficiently
+brilliant for our tragedians of the sixteenth century, and even Racine in
+his _Phedre_, frequently to follow it. Perseus, pupil of Horace so
+far as his satires are concerned, was concise to the point of obscurity,
+but often displayed such vigour and ruggedness as to be powerfully
+moving. Lucian, spoilt by a certain taste for declamation, is really a
+sound poet, more especially as a poetic orator, and in this respect he is
+often admirable. Silius Italicus, Valerius Flaccus, Statius, revert to
+the school of Virgil and display talent for versification. Martial,
+almost exclusively epigrammatic, was extremely witty.
+
+JUVENAL.--Juvenal, arising sardonically from the crowd, is the prince of
+satirists for all time. He possessed a passion for honesty, spirit, and
+oratorical breadth, and incredible vigour as colourist, the gift of verse
+cast in medallions and also the gift of energetic metallic sonorousness.
+Victor Hugo, in the satiric portion of his work, not merely drew
+inspiration from but seemed saturated with him.
+
+THE TRAJAN EPOCH.--now came the Trajan epoch. Quintilian, in elegant
+fashion, with point and rather affected graces, taught us excellent
+rhetoric full of sense and taste. Pliny the Younger, gentle and gay,
+honest and amusing, pleaded as an insinuating orator, and, under the
+pretext of _Letters_ to his friends, wrote essays of amiable
+morality which evoke recollections of Montaigne.
+
+TACITUS.--Tacitus is a great psychological historian and moralist. He is,
+as Racine observed, "the greatest painter of antiquity," and Racine meant
+the greatest painter of portraits. He possessed an entirely fresh style
+of his own creation: nervous, articulate, coloured, concise, with brief
+metaphors which reveal not only a poet, but a fine poet, in the vein of
+Michelet, but with the difference of febrility to the potent discharge of
+power.
+
+AULUS GELLIUS; APULEIUS.--Under Marcus Aurelius Latin literature fell
+into decay. Aulus Gellius was only a rather untidy or at least not very
+methodical scholar who wrote feebly; Apuleius with his _Golden Ass_
+was merely a fantastic romancist, very complex, curious about everything,
+more especially with regard to singularities, lively, amusing, mystical
+at times; in short, distinctly disconcerting.
+
+WRITERS ON CHRISTIANITY.--Christianity was at an adult age. There were
+writers of importance and some who were really great; the energetic and
+violent Tertullian, beloved by Bossuet; Saint Cyprian, full of unction,
+gentleness, and charity; Lactantius, skilful Christian philosopher,
+ingenious and possessing insinuating subtlety; Saint Hilarius, an ardent
+polemist, impetuous and torrential; Saint Ambrose, exalted, wise, serene,
+very well read, very "Roman," who may be styled the Cicero of
+Christianity; Saint Jerome, ardent, impassioned, possessing lively
+sensibility, an animated and seductive imagination, who--excluding all
+idea of scandal--suggests what is purest and most beautiful in Jean
+Jacques Rousseau; finally, that great doctor and noble philosopher of
+the Church, Saint Augustine.
+
+SAINT AUGUSTINE.--Saint Augustine is pre-eminently a philosopher, a man
+who analysed ideas and saw all that they contained, their first principle
+and their trend as well as their ultimate consequences. He was in
+addition a great orator; he was also a historian, or at least a
+philosopher of history, in his _City of God_; finally, he was a poet
+at heart and imbued with the most exquisite sensibility in his immortal
+_Confessions_. Probably he was the most extraordinary man of the
+world of antiquity.
+
+CHRISTIAN POETS.--Christianity even had its poets: Commodian, Juvencus,
+the impassioned and skilful Prudentius, St. Paulinus of Nola. None were
+very prominent, all possessed lively sentiment, such as Chateaubriand
+evinced, for what is profoundly poetic in Christianity.
+
+SECULAR POETS.--The last mundane poets were more brilliant than those of
+Christianity. Avienus possessed charming elegance and rather effeminate
+grace. It should be noted that he (with Prudentius) was the sole lyric
+poet after Horace. Ausonius had sensibility and remarkable descriptive
+talent; Claudian, rhetorician in verse, rose sometimes to veritable
+eloquence and maintained a continual brilliance which is fatiguing
+because it is continual, but does not fail to be a marvellous fault.
+Finally must be cited Rutilius, first because he had talent, then because
+even amid the invasions of the barbarians he made an impassioned eulogy
+of Rome which is, involuntarily, a funeral oration; finally, because,
+despite being a bitter foe to Christianity, he once more involuntarily
+defined the great and noble change from paganism to Christianity: _Tunc
+mutabantur corpora, nunc animi_ ("Formerly bodies were metamorphosed,
+now souls").
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+THE MIDDLE AGES: FRANCE
+
+_Chansons de Geste: Song of Roland_ and Lyric Poetry. Popular
+Epopee: _Romances of Renard_. Popular Short Stories: Fables.
+Historians. The Allegorical Poem: _Romance of the Rose_. Drama.
+
+
+_CHANSONS DE GESTE_.--The literature of the Middle Ages freed itself from
+Latin about the tenth century. This was the moment when the great epopees
+which are called _chansons de geste_ began to be heard. The most
+celebrated is the one entitled _The Song of Roland_. It is the story
+of the last struggle in which Roland engaged on returning from Spain at
+the pass of Roncevaux and of his death. The form of this poem is rather
+dry and a little monotonous; but there are admirable passages such as the
+benediction of the dying by the Bishop Turpin, the farewell of Roland to
+Oliver, Roland holding out his glove to his Lord God at the moment of
+death, etc. The _chansons de geste_ were numerous. Some
+commemorated Charlemagne and his comrades, others Arthur, King of
+Britain, and his knights, others, as a rule less interesting, were about
+the heroes of antiquity, Troy, Alexander, not well known but not
+forgotten. The _chansons de geste_ permeated the whole of the
+eleventh and twelfth centuries.
+
+JOINVILLE; VILLEHARDOUIN.--In the thirteenth century appeared an
+historian, Joinville, friend of St. Louis, who described the crusade in
+which he took part with his master. He possessed _naivete_, grace,
+naturalness, and picturesqueness. Villehardouin, who described the fourth
+crusade, in which he played his part, was a realist--exact, precise,
+luminous--in whom the strangeness and grandeur of the things he had
+witnessed sometimes inspired a true nobility, simple enough but
+singularly impressive.
+
+THE TROUBADOURS.--Lyric poetry barely existed during these centuries
+except south of the Loire, in the Latin country, among the poets called
+troubadours; nevertheless, in the north, the noble Count Thibaut of
+Champagne, to cite only one, wrote songs possessing amiable inspiration
+and happily turned. Beside him must be instanced the highly remarkable
+Ruteboeuf, narrator, elegiast, lyric orator, admirably gifted, who, to be
+a great poet, only needed to live in a more favourable period and to have
+at his disposition a more flexible language, one more abundant and more
+widely elaborated.
+
+_THE ROMANCES OF RENARD_.--In the fourteenth century, the _Romances of
+Renard_ enjoyed remarkably wide popularity and multiplied in
+abundance. Each was like a fable by La Fontaine expanded to the
+proportions of an epic poem. Under the names of animals they were human
+types in action and concerned in multifarious adventures: the lion was
+the king; the bear, called Bruin, was the seigneurial lord of the soil;
+the fox was the artful, circumspect citizen; the cock, called
+Chanticleer, was the hero of warfare, and so on. Some of the _Romances
+of Renard_ are insipid; others possess a satiric and parodying spirit
+that is extremely diverting.
+
+THE FABLES.--Contemporaneously the _Fables_ amused our ancestors.
+They were anecdotes, tales in verse for the most part dealing with
+adventures of citizens, analogous to the tales of La Fontaine. The
+majority were jeering, bantering, and satirical; some few were affecting
+and refined. They were certainly the most living and characteristic
+portion of old French literature.
+
+THE BIBLES.--The Middle Ages, after the manner of the ancients, delighted
+in gathering into one volume all the knowledge current. These didactic
+books were called bibles. Some were celebrated: the _Bible_ of Guyot
+of Provence, the _Bible_ of Hugo of Berzi. As a rule, whilst learned
+as far as the resources of the times permitted, they were also satiric,
+precisely as almost the whole of the literature of the Middle Ages is
+satiric.
+
+_THE ROMANCE OF THE ROSE_.--The _Romance of the Rose_, which was by
+two authors writing with almost half a century of interval between them,
+was in the first portion, of which the author is William of Lorris, an
+art of love in the form of a romance in verse; and the second part,
+written by John de Meung, formed in some measure a continuation of the
+first, but above all was a work of erudition and instruction, in which
+the poet put all that he knew as well as his philosophical conceptions,
+often of a remarkable and highly unexpected boldness. Aptly John de Meung
+has been compared with Rabelais, and it is not astonishing that the
+popularity of this poem should have lasted more than two centuries nor
+that it should have charmed or irritated our ancestors according to the
+tendency of their minds.
+
+FROISSART.--The representative of history in the fourteenth century was
+Froissart, a picturesque chronicler, very vital, always full of interest,
+although it is indisputable that he was lacking in historical criticism;
+and among the orators, polemists, and controversialists of the times must
+at least be cited the impassioned and virtuous Gerson, who expended his
+life in incessant struggles on behalf of his Christian faith.
+
+To him, without decisive proof, has often been attributed the
+_Imitation of Jesus Christ_, which, in any case, whoever wrote it,
+must be emphasised as one of the purest products of the religious spirit
+of the Middle Ages.
+
+CHARLES OF ORLEANS; VILLON.--The fifteenth century, otherwise somewhat
+sterile, introduced one distinguished poet, Charles of Orleans, graceful
+and pleasing; and one who at moments rose to the height of being almost
+a great poet: this was Francis Villon, the celebrated author of _The
+Ballade of Dames of Ancient Times_, of which the yet more famous
+refrain was, "Where are the snows of last year?"
+
+MYSTERIES AND MIRACLES.--To deal with the theatre of the Middle Ages it
+is necessary to go further back. Without considering as drama those pious
+performances which the clergy organised or tolerated even in the churches
+from the tenth century and probably earlier, there was already a popular
+drama in the twelfth century outside the church whereat were performed
+veritable dramas drawn from holy writ or legends of saints. This
+developed in the thirteenth century, and in the fourteenth and fifteenth
+it was prolific in immense dramatic poems which needed several days for
+their performance. These were _Mysteries_, as they were termed, or
+_Miracles_, wherein comedy and tragedy were interwoven and a great
+deed in religious history or sometimes in national history commemorated,
+such as the _Mystery of the Siege of Orleans_, by Greban.
+
+FARCES; FOLLIES; MORALITIES.--The comic theatre also existed. It provided
+_farces_, which were really little comedies (the most famous was the
+_Farce of the Lawyer Patelin_); _follies_, which are farcical
+but good-humoured caricatures of students and clerks; and
+_moralities_, which are small serious dramas, interspersed with
+comedy, having real personages mingled with allegorical ones. The drama
+of the Middle Ages was very living and highly original, coming from the
+soil and exactly adapted to the sentiments, passions, and ideas of the
+people for whom and, a little later, by whom it was written.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+THE MIDDLE AGES: ENGLAND
+
+Literature in Latin, in Anglo-Saxon, and in French. The Ancestor of
+English Literature: Chaucer.
+
+
+THE THREE LITERATURES.--In England, prior to the Norman invasion, that is
+before 1066, England possessed Saxon bards who sang of the prowess of
+forbears or contemporaries, and monks who wrote in Latin the lives of
+saints or even lay histories.
+
+From 1066 must be distinguished in England three parallel literatures:
+the Latin literature of the cloister, the Anglo-Saxon literature, and the
+French literature of the conquerors.
+
+Latin literature, so far as prose is regarded, was devoted exclusively to
+philosophy and history; in verse the subjects are more diversified,
+satire more especially flourished.
+
+The poets of the French tongue wrote more particularly _chansons de
+geste_, and those of such songs which form what is termed the _Cycle
+of Artus_ are for the most part the work of poets born in England.
+
+Finally, in the different popular dialects, Saxon, Western English, etc.,
+epic poems were written in verse, or romances, discourses, homilies,
+different religious work in prose. The Normans, ardent, energetic, and
+practical, had founded universities whence issued, endowed and equipped,
+those who by patriotic sentiment or taste were destined to write in
+Anglo-Saxon or in English.
+
+CHAUCER; GOWER.--The greatest name of the period and the one which
+radiates most brilliantly is that of Chaucer in the fourteenth century,
+author of _The Canterbury Tales_ and a crowd of other works. He
+possessed very varied imagination, sometimes vigorous, sometimes
+humorous, an extraordinary sense of reality, much spirit, and a fertility
+of mind which made him the ancestor and precursor of Shakespeare. To his
+illustrious name must be added that of his friend and pupil Gower, who is
+curious because he is representative of the three literatures still in
+use in his day, having written his _Speculum Meditatus_ in French,
+his _Vox Clamantis_ in Latin, and his _Confessio Amantis_ in
+English. So far as I am aware this phenomenon was never repeated.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+THE MIDDLE AGES: GERMANY
+
+Epic Poems: _Nibelungen_. Popular Poems. Very numerous Lyric Poems.
+Drama.
+
+
+FIRST LITERARY WORK.--The most ancient monument of German literature is
+the _Song of Hildebrand_, which goes back to an unknown antiquity,
+perhaps to the ninth century, and a very beautiful fragment of which has
+been preserved by a happy chance. We are entirely ignorant of works
+written in German between the _Song of Hildebrand_ and the
+_Nibelungen_, except for some religious poems such as the
+_Heliand_ in low German and the _Book of the Gospels_ in high
+German.
+
+THE NIBELUNGEN,--The _Nibelungen_ form a vast poem, written probably
+in the thirteenth century (or, at that epoch, formed by juxtaposition of
+more ancient popular songs). It is a great national monument wherein are
+collected the legendary exploits of all the ancestors of the Germans,
+Huns, Goths, Burgundians and Franks especially. Portions possess
+admirable dramatic qualities. The analogy with the _Iliad_ is
+remarkable, and the comparison may be made even from the literary point
+of view.
+
+VARIOUS PRODUCTIONS.--Then come productions less national in type,
+imitations of French poems. _Song of Roland_, _Alexander_, songs of
+the _Cycle of Arthur_ or of the _Round Table_, imitations of
+Latin poems: for instance, the _Aeneid_, etc. Here, too, was spread
+the _Story of Renard_, as in France, and even now the question is
+unsettled whether the first poem of _Renard_ is French or German.
+Religious and satiric poems were abundant in the thirteenth and
+fourteenth centuries, but what is highly characteristic is the large
+number of lyrical poets (Dietmar of Ast, Kuerenberg, Frederic of Hausen,
+the Emperor Henry VI, etc.) produced by the Middle Ages in Germany. This
+poetry was generally amorous and melancholy, sometimes full of the
+warlike ardour which is found among our own troubadours. The poets who,
+as in France, wandered through Germany, from court to court and from
+castle to castle, called themselves minnesingers (singers of love). The
+one who has remained most famous is Tannhaeuser. A fantastic and touching
+legend has formed about his name.
+
+Germany, like France, possessed a popular drama, less prolific possibly,
+but very similar. Among the most ancient popular tragedies now known may
+be cited _The Prophets of Christ_ and the _Game of Antichrist_,
+which are curious because of the juxtaposition of biblical acts and
+contemporaneous events. Later came _The Miracles of the Virgin_,
+_The Wise and Foolish Virgins_, dramas more varied, with more
+numerous characters, more elaborate mounting, and with the interest
+relatively more concentrated.
+
+COMEDY.--Comedy, as a rule very gross in character, enjoyed wide esteem,
+especially in the fourteenth century. What were performed under the title
+of _Carnival Games_ were generally nothing but _fables_ in
+dialogue, domestic scenes, incidents in the market, interludes at the
+cross-roads. Here was the vulgar plebeian joy allowing itself full
+licence. The literary activity of Germany in the Middle Ages was at least
+equal to that of the three literary western nations.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+THE MIDDLE AGES: ITALY
+
+Troubadours of Southern Italy. Neapolitan and Sicilian Poets. Dante,
+Petrarch, Boccaccio.
+
+
+THE TROUBADOURS.--The Italian literature of the Middle Ages is intimately
+associated with the literature of the Troubadours in the south of France.
+To express the case more definitely, the literature styled "Provencal,"
+apart from mere differences of dialect, extended from the Limousine to
+the Roman campagna, and French literature existed only in the northern
+and central provinces of France, the rest being Provencal-Italian
+literature. The Italian Troubadours, by which I mean those born in Italy,
+who must at least be cited, are Malaspina, Lanfranc Cicala, Bartolomeo
+Ziorgi (of Venice), Bordello (of Mantua), etc.
+
+NAPLES AND SICILY.--Naples and Sicily, where were founded large
+universities, were the seat of a purely Italian literature in the
+thirteenth century, thanks to the impetus of the Emperor Frederick II. At
+this seat were Peter of Vignes (_Petrus de Vineis_), who passes as
+inventor of the sonnet; Ciullo of Alcamo, author of the first known
+Italian _canzone_, etc. The influence of Sicily on all Italy was
+such that for long in Italy all writing in verse was termed Sicilian.
+
+BOLOGNA; FLORENCE.--The literary centre then passed, that is in the
+thirteenth century, to Bologna and Florence. Among the celebrated Tuscans
+of this epoch was Guittone of Arezzo, mentioned by Dante and Petrarch
+with more or less consideration; Jacopone of Todi, at once both mystic
+and buffoon, in whom it has been sought, in a manner somewhat flattering
+to him, to trace a predecessor of Dante; Brunetto Latini, the authentic
+master of Dante, who was encyclopaedic, after a fashion, and who
+published, first in French, whilst he was in Paris, _The Treasure_,
+a compilation of the knowledge of his time, then, in Italian,
+_Tesoretto_, a collection of maxims drawn from his previous work,
+besides some poetry and translations from Latin.
+
+The fourteenth century, which for the French, Germans, and English was
+the last or even the last century but one of the Middle Ages, was for the
+Italians the first of the Renaissance. Two great names dominate this
+century: Dante and Petrarch.
+
+DANTE: _THE DIVINE COMEDY_.--Dante, highly erudite, theologian,
+philosopher, profound Latin scholar, not ignorant of Greek, much involved
+in the agitations of his age, exiled from his home, Florence, in the
+tumult of political discords, proscribed and a wanderer, coming as far as
+France, studied at the University of Paris, wrote "songs," that is to
+say, lyrical poetry gathered into the volume entitled _The
+Canzoniere_, the _Vita Nuova_, which is also a collection of
+lyric efforts, though more philosophical, and finally _The Divine
+Comedy_, which is a theological epic poem. _The Divine Comedy_ is
+composed of three parts: hell, purgatory, and heaven. Hell is composed
+of nine circles which contract as they approach the centre of the earth.
+There Dante placed the famous culprits of history and his own particular
+enemies. The most popular episodes of hell are Ugolino in the tower of
+hunger devouring his dead children, Francesca of Rimini relating her
+guilty passions and their disastrous consequence, the meeting with
+Sordello, the great Lord of Mantua, ever invincibly proud, looking "like
+the lion when he reposes." Purgatory is a cone of nine circles which
+contract as they rise to heaven. Heaven, finally, is composed of
+nine globes superimposed on one another; over each of the first seven
+presides a planet, the eighth is the home of the fixed stars, and the
+last is pure infinity, home of the Trinity and of the elect. The power of
+general imagination and of varied invention always renewed in style, and
+the warmth of passion which throws life and heat into each part, have
+assured Dante universal admiration. The community of literature
+pre-eminently admires the hell; the eclectic have been compelled to
+assert and therefore to believe that the paradise is infinitely superior.
+
+PETRARCH.--Petrarch, a Florentine born in exile, brought up at Avignon,
+Carpentras, and Montpellier, during four fifths of his life thought only
+of being a great scholar, of writing in Latin, and of obtaining the
+repute of an excellent humanist. Hence his innumerable works in Latin.
+But when twenty-three he was deeply affected by love for a maiden of
+Avignon, and he sang of her living and dead and still triumphant in glory
+and eternity, and hence his poems in Italian, the _Rhymes_ and
+_Triumphs_. The sensitiveness of Petrarch was admirable; never did
+pure love, growing mystical and mingling with divine love, find accents
+alike more profound and noble than came from this Platonist refined with
+Italian subtlety. Petrarchism became a fashion among the mediocre and a
+school among these above the common. In the fifteenth and sixteenth
+centuries there were innumerable imitators of Petrarch in Italy, and
+later still in France. It is impossible not to instance Lamartine as the
+last in date.
+
+BOCCACCIO: _THE DECAMERON_.--Immediately after these two great men
+came Boccaccio, born in Paris but of Italian parentage, who resided at
+Naples at the court of King Robert. He was a great admirer of Dante and
+Petrarch, and himself wrote several estimable poems, but, in despair no
+doubt of attaining the height of his models and also to please the taste
+of Mary, daughter of King Robert, he wrote the libertine tales which are
+gathered in the collection entitled _The Decameron_ and which
+established his fame. He is one of the purest authors, as stylist, of all
+Italian literature, and may be regarded as the principle creator of prose
+in his own land.
+
+THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY IN ITALY.--The fifteenth century, less great among
+the Italians than the fourteenth, yielded many wise men: Marsiglio
+Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, Aurispa, etc. But omission must not be
+made of poets such as Ange Politien, refined humanist, graceful lyrist;
+and the earliest of dramatic poets of any rank, such as Pulci and
+Bojardo. In prose note Pandolfini, master and delineator of domestic
+life, as was Xenophon in Greece, and Leonardo da Vinci, the great painter
+who left a treatise on his art; nor must it be forgotten that Savonarola
+was a remarkably fine orator.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+THE MIDDLE AGES: SPAIN AND PORTUGAL
+
+Epic Poems: _Romanceros_. Didactic Books, Romances of Chivalry
+
+
+COMMENCEMENTS OF SPANISH LITERATURE.--Known Spanish literature does not
+go back beyond the twelfth century. Like that of the French it began with
+a _chanson de geste_, and if France has Roland, Spain has the Cid.
+The _Poem of the Cid_, or _The Song of the Cid_, dates from the
+commencement of the thirteenth century; in rude but expressive language
+it narrates the ripe years and old age of the famous captain.
+
+ALPHONSO X; JOHN MANUEL.--At the close of this century, Alphonso X, King
+of Castile, surnamed the Sage or the Wise, versed in all the knowledge of
+his time, produced, no doubt with collaborators, the universal chronicle,
+history mingled with legends, of all peoples on the earth, and the
+_Seven Parts_, a philosophical, moral, and legal encyclopaedia. His
+nephew, Don John Manuel, regent of Castile during the minority of
+Alphonso XI, a very pure and erudite writer, collated the code of the
+kingdom in his _Book of the Child_, and the code of chivalry in his
+_Book of the Knight and Squire_, with a series of apologues in the
+volume known under the title of _The Count Lucanor_.
+
+_THE ROMANCERO_.--Of the same period and going back to the commencement
+of the thirteenth century, if not earlier, is what is called the
+_Romancero_. The _Romancero_ is the collection of all the
+national romances, which are more or less short but are never long epic
+poems. All the romances relating to a hero form the _Romancero_ of
+that personage, and all the _Romanceros_ are called the Spanish
+_Romancero_. It is in the _Romancero_ of Rodriguez that we find
+the youth of Cid as known to us, or approximately, for it is purified
+and spiritualised by ageing and, for example, Chimanes curses Rodriguez
+but also asks for him in marriage: "Oh, king ... each day that shines, I
+see him that slew my father parading on horseback and loosing his falcon
+to my dovecot and with the blood of my doves has he stained my skirts and
+he has sent me word he will cut the hem of my robe.... He who slew my
+father, give him to me for equal; for he who did me so much harm I am
+convinced will do me some good." And the king said: "I have always heard
+said and now see that the feminine sex is most extraordinary. Until now
+hath she asked of me justice against him and now she doth ask him of me
+in marriage. I will do it with a good will. I shall send him a letter,
+etc...."
+
+THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY.--The fifteenth century in Spain, as everywhere
+else, was destitute of great works. In poetry it was the era of lovesongs
+and of the influence of Italian literature, which only later was
+decidedly happy. In prose may be found many chronicles extremely valuable
+to the historian, and some moral works such as the _Dialogue of the
+Happy Life_ of Lucena and, finally, the famous _Amadis des
+Gaules_, an ancient chivalric romance of unknown origin, brought to
+publicity in that century by Montalvo.
+
+PORTUGUESE LITERATURE.--Portuguese literature, which is highly
+interesting though evolved in too restricted a circle, is, above
+all, epic and lyrical. The Portuguese lyrics almost exclusively dealt
+with love; the epic poets celebrated a certain number of salient
+achievements in national history. It is only in the sixteenth century
+that a genuine expansion of Portuguese literature can be noted.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+THE SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES: FRANCE
+
+First Portion of Sixteenth Century: Poets: Marot, Saint-Gelais; Prose
+Writers: Rabelais, Comines. Second Portion of Sixteenth Century: Poets:
+"The Pleiade"; Prose Writers: Amyot, Montaigne. First Portion of
+Seventeenth Century: Intellectual and Brilliant Poets: Malherbe,
+Corneille. Great Prose Writers: Balzac, Descartes. Second Portion of
+Seventeenth Century: Poets: Racine, Moliere, Boileau, La Fontaine; Prose
+Writers: Bossuet, Pascal, La Bruyere, Fenelon, etc.
+
+
+THE RENAISSANCE OF LETTERS.--The sixteenth century was for France the
+epoch of the Renaissance of letters. What is called the Renaissance of
+letters is the result, to each race, of the closest contact of the
+educated people with ancient literature, contact which sometimes
+strengthened the national vein, sometimes weakened it, according to the
+divergent temperaments of these races.
+
+MAROT; SAINT-GELAIS.--The sixteenth century in France was ushered in by
+Marot and Saint-Gelais. Marot was a gracious, fluent, and satiric singer.
+He was infinitely witty without venom, or mannerism, or affectation; at
+times he attained to a somewhat serious philosophic poesy and also to
+eloquence. Saint-Gelais, because he was most emphatically court-poet of
+all those who have ever been court-poets, was placed by his
+contemporaries above Marot, and literary historians have left him for the
+most part in that position. The truth is that his work is worthless. It
+would be impossible, however, to rob him of the glory of having brought
+the sonnet from Italy, where he long abode in youth.
+
+COMINES.--In this first half of the sixteenth century must be noted
+Comines, the historian of Louis XI, a political historian and a
+historical statesman, remarkably subtle in perceiving the characters and
+temperaments of prominent individuals, as well as a writer possessing
+exactitude and limpidity rare in his generation.
+
+RABELAIS.--Francis Rabelais, in his two epic romances, _Gargantua_
+and _Pantagruel_, was erudite, capable of a certain philosophic
+wisdom which has been greatly exaggerated, but above all was picturesque
+to one's heart's content, and possessed the art of telling a tale as well
+as any one in the wide world. He has been called "the buffoon Homer," and
+the nickname may be legitimately granted to him.
+
+THE PLEIADE.--The second half of the sixteenth century was in all
+respects the more remarkable. In poetry there was the Pleiade:
+that is, the true and complete "Renaissance," although Marot had already
+been a good workman at its dawn. The Pleiade consisted of Ronsard, Du
+Bellay, Pontus of Tyard, Remy Belleau, and others; that is, folk who
+wished to give to France in French the equivalent of what the classics
+had produced in nobility and beauty. They did not succeed, but they had
+the honour of having undertaken the task, and they also, all said and
+done, produced some fine things.
+
+RONSARD; DU BELLAY.--If the truth must be written, Ronsard created an
+epic poem which it is impossible to read, and some rather overpowering
+odes after the Pindaric manner; but he wrote detached epic pieces which,
+though always a trifle artificial, possess real beauty, and some
+_odelettes_ which are enchanting in their grace and genuineness of
+feeling, as well as sonnets that are in all respects marvellous. Joachim
+du Bellay, on his part, wrote sonnets which must be numbered among the
+most beautiful in the French tongue--the rest often had agreeable
+inspirations.
+
+DRAMATIC POETS.--Add to their group some dramatic poets who did not yet
+grasp what constituted a living tragedy and who, even when they imitated
+Euripides, belonged to the school of Seneca, but who knew how to write in
+verse, to make a discourse, and, occasionally, a gentle elegy. To mention
+only the chief, these were Jodelle, Robert Garnier, and Montchrestien.
+
+PROSE WRITERS: AMYOT; CALVIN.--In prose, in this second half of the
+sixteenth century, there were translators like Amyot, who set forth
+Plutarch in a limpid French full of ease and geniality, as well as
+somewhat careless. Religious writings such as those of Calvin, in a hard
+style and "dreary," as Bossuet expressed it, exhibited vigour, power, and
+sobriety. Among political writers was the eloquent La Boetie, the friend
+of Montaigne, who in his _Discourse on Voluntary Servitude_
+vindicated the rights of the people against _One_, that is the
+monarch. Among authors of _Memoirs_ were Montluc and Brantome,
+picturesque in divergent manners, but both inquisitive, well-informed,
+very alert and furnishing important contributions to history.
+
+MORALISTS: DU VAIR.--Finally, there were moralists such as Du Vair, too
+long forgotten, and Montaigne. Du Vair was an eloquent orator who
+exhibited plenty of courage during the troubles of the League; he left
+some fine philosophical treatises: _The Moral Philosophy of the Stoics_,
+_On Constancy and Consolation in Public Calamities_, etc.
+
+MONTAIGNE.--Montaigne, less grave and stoical, a far better writer, and
+one of the two or three greatest masters of prose France ever produced,
+possessed excellent sense sharpened with wit and enriched with a charming
+imagination. According to his humour--now stoic, next epicurean, then
+sceptic--always wise and refined and also always the sincere admirer of
+greatness of soul and of courage, he is the best of advisers and of
+companions through life, and of him more than of anyone else it ought to
+be said: "To have found pleasure in him is to have profited by him." The
+sole reproach could be that he wrote a little too much of himself,
+that is, in entering into personal details that could well have been
+spared.
+
+COMMENCEMENT OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.--The first half of the
+seventeenth century in France was only the corollary of the sixteenth,
+though naturally with some distinctive personalities and with one,
+practically isolated, effort of reaction against that sixteenth century.
+At that period could be found writing men, like Agrippa d'Aubigne, who
+were absolutely in the spirit of the previous century; d'Aubigne,
+amiable, gracious, and also fairly often witty, which is too frequently
+forgotten, was ardent, passionate, a rough and violent fighter more
+particularly in his _tragedies_, which are baldly crude satires,
+illumined with astonishingly beautiful passages fairly frequent in
+recurrence, against the Catholics and their leaders. Others of very
+different temperament displayed yet more than the poets of the sixteenth
+century that liberty, that fantasy, that disorder which were
+characteristic of the times of Ronsard. So far as poets were concerned,
+that generation must be regarded as entering on a first romanticism.
+Theophilus de Vian, a fine but over-prodigal poet, without ballast, did
+not live long enough to grow wise and acquire self-mastery: Cyrano
+de Bergerac was a brilliant madman, sometimes sparkling with wit and
+imagination, but often dirty and ridiculous. Saint-Amant possessed plenty
+of imagination and capacity for exquisite poetical feeling, but he lacked
+taste and too often was puerile. Wiser than they, yet themselves verbose,
+long-winded, slow, and spun out, Desportes translated into French verse
+Italian poetry of the sixteenth century, often with very happy turns of
+expression, and Bertaut, melancholy and graceful, lacked brilliance even
+if he possessed poetic emotion.
+
+REGNIER.--Regnier the satirist, pupil of Horace and Juvenal, also assumed
+the mental attitude of the sixteenth century owing to his viridity, his
+crudity, his lack of avoidance of obscenity, even though he was a true
+poet, vigorous, powerful, oratorical, and epigrammatical, as well as a
+witty and mordant caricaturist.
+
+PRECIEUX AND BURLESQUES.--Then succeeded the _precieux_ and the
+_burlesques_, who resembled each other, the _precieux_ seeking
+wit and believing that all literary art consisted in saying it did not
+matter what in a dainty and unexpected fashion; the _burlesques_
+also sought wit but on a lower plane, desiring to be "droll," buffoons,
+prone to cock-and-bull stories or crude pranks in thought, style, and
+parody. Voiture is the most brilliant representative of the
+_preieux_ and Scarron the most prominent of the _burlesques_.
+
+MALHERBE.--In the midst of this unrestrained literature one man attempted
+to impose reason, accuracy of mind, taste, and conciseness. This was
+Malherbe, who was also a powerful lyric poet, a stylist with an ear for
+melody. His influence was considerable, but forty years after his own
+time; for it was the poets of 1660 who were formed of him and proclaimed
+themselves his disciples. In his own day he had only Maynard and Racan
+as pupils, or rather as partisans, for their work but little resembled
+his.
+
+THE THEATRE.--On the stage the first portion of the seventeenth century,
+certainly as far as 1636, was only the corollary of the sixteenth. Hardy,
+writing without method or rule, being in addition a very weak poet,
+presided in the theatre whilst Mairet, in imitation of the Italians and
+in imitation too of the bulk of the dramatists of the sixteenth century,
+essayed to establish formal tragedy, but without creating much effect
+because his talent was of an inferior description.
+
+At last Corneille arose and, after feeling his way a little, created
+French tragedy; but as this was only in 1636, and as in the course of his
+long career he came into the second half of the century, he will be dealt
+with a little later.
+
+PROSE: BALZAC; DESCARTES.--In prose, the first half of the seventeenth
+century was fruitful in important works. Cardinal de Perron, who began as
+an amiable elegant poetaster, became a great orator and formidable
+controversialist. Guez de Balzac, a little lacking in ideas yet an
+extremely good writer, though but little detached from preciosity, as
+Voltaire observed, imparted harmony to his phrases both in his letters
+and in his _Socrates a Christian_. Vaugelas arranged the code of
+the language founded on custom. Descartes, with whose philosophic ideas
+we have here nothing to do, in his broad, ample periods, well delivered
+and powerfully articulated, reproduced the Ciceronian phrase though
+without its rather weak grace, and in great measure formed the mould
+whence later was to flow the eloquence of Bossuet. The important works of
+Descartes are his _Discourses on Method_, his _Meditation_, and
+his _Treatise on the Passions_.
+
+THE GOLDEN AGE: CORNEILLE.--The second half of the seventeenth century is
+in all respects the golden age of French literature. Great poets and
+great prose writers were then crowded in serried ranks. To begin with the
+dramatic poets, who furnished the most vivid glory of the epoch, there
+was Corneille, who, from 1636, with _The Cid_, was in full splendour
+and who before 1650 had produced his most beautiful works, _Cinna_, _The
+Horaces_, _Polyeucte_, continued for twenty-four years after 1650 to
+furnish the stage with dramas that often possessed many fine qualities,
+among which must be cited _Don Sancho of Aragon_, _Nicomedes_, _Oedipus_,
+_Sertorius_, _Sophonisba_, _Titus and Berenice_, _Psyche_ (with Moliere),
+_Rodogune Heraclius_, _Pulcheria_. Corneille must be regarded as the
+real creator of _all_ the French drama, because he wrote comedies,
+tragedies, operas, melodramas. It was therein, apart from his universal
+virtuosity, that he more particularly made his mark, and in his best work
+he was the delineator of the human will overcoming passions and, as it
+were, intoxicated with this victory and his own power, so that he has
+become a great advocate of energy and a prominent apostle of duty.
+
+RACINE.--Racine, altogether different, without being opposed to duty,
+loved to depict passions victorious over man and man the victim of his
+passions and of the over-powering misfortunes therefrom resulting, thus
+furnishing a moral lesson. He was a more penetrating psychologist than
+Corneille, although the latter knew the human heart well, and he showed
+himself infallibly wise in composition and dramatic disposition, as well
+as an absolutely incomparable master of verse. His tragedies, especially
+_Andromache_, _Britannicus_, _Berenice_, _Bajazet_, _Phedre_, and
+_Athalie_ will always enchant mankind.
+
+MOLIERE.--Moliere who was admirably gifted to seize the ridiculous with
+its causes and consequences, very quick and penetrating in insight, armed
+with somewhat narrow but solid common-sense calculated to please the
+middle classes of all time, possessed prodigious comic humour, and who
+never gave the spectator leisure to reflect or breathe--in short, a great
+writer although hasty and careless--created a whole repertoire of comedy
+(_The School of Women_, _Don Juan_, _Tartufe_, _The Misanthrope_,
+_Learned Ladies_) which left all known comedy far behind, which
+eliminated all rivalry in his own time, knew eclipse only in the middle
+of the eighteenth century, and for the last hundred and forty years has
+proved the delight of Europe. He remains the master of universal comedy.
+
+BOILEAU.--Boileau was only a man of good sense, of ability, and of
+excellent taste, who wrote verse industriously. This was not enough to
+constitute a great poet but enough to make him what he was, a diverting
+and acute satirist, an agreeable moralist and critic in verse--which his
+master Horace had been so often--expert, dexterous, and possessing much
+authority. His _Poetic Art_ for long was the tables of the law of
+Parnassus, and even now can be read not only with pleasure but even with
+profit.
+
+LA FONTAINE.--La Fontaine was one of the greatest poets of any epoch. He
+had a profound sentiment for nature, a fine and penetrating knowledge of
+the character of men he depicted under the names of animals; he was free
+and fantastic as a philosopher but well instructed and sometimes
+profound; he had a gentle and smiling sensibility capable at times of
+melancholy and also now and again of a delicious elegiac; above all, he
+was endowed with incomparable artistic sense, which rendered him the
+safest and most dexterous manipulator of verse, of rhythms, and of
+musical sonorities, who appeared in France prior to Victor Hugo. It is
+much more difficult to state what he lacked than to enumerate the
+multiple and miraculous gifts with which he was endowed. His complete
+lack of morality or his ingenuous carelessness in this respect formed the
+only subject for regret.
+
+SECONDARY ABILITY.--Near such great geniuses, it is only possible to
+mention those of secondary talent; but no compunction need be felt at
+alluding to Segrais, a graceful manufacturer of eclogues, and Benserade,
+who rhymed delightfully for masquerades and was capable, on occasions, of
+being wittily but also tenderly elegiac.
+
+GREAT PROSE WRITERS.--The writers in prose of the second half of the
+seventeenth century are legion and but few fail to attain greatness. La
+Rochefoucauld, in his little volume of _Maxims_, enshrined thoughts
+that were often profound in a highly accurate and delicate setting.
+Cardinal de Retz narrated his tumultuous career in his _Memoirs_,
+which are strangely animated, vivid, and representative of what occurred.
+Arnauld and Nicole have explained their rigid Catholicism, which was
+Jansenism, in solid and luminous volumes; the latter, more especially,
+merits consideration and in his _Moral Essays_ proved an excellent
+writer. Mezeray, conscientious, laborious, circumstantial as well as
+capable writer, should be reckoned as the earliest French historian.
+Bourdaloue, sound logician and good moralist, from his pulpit as a
+preacher uttered discourses that were admirable, though too dogmatically
+composed, and painted word-pictures that piously satirised the types and
+the eccentrics of his day. Malebranche, reconsidering what Descartes had
+thought and revitalising his conclusions, arranged in his _Research
+after Truth_ a complete system of spiritualist and idealistic
+philosophy which he rendered clear, in spite of its depth,
+and extremely attractive owing to the merits of his powerful and
+facile imagination and of his rich, copious, and elastic style, that
+attained the happy mean between conversation and instruction. But five
+writers of the highest rank came into the perennial forefront, attracting
+and retaining general attention: Pascal, Bossuet, Mme. de Sevigne,
+La Bruyere, and Fenelon.
+
+PASCAL.--Pascal, a scholar and also by scientific education
+mathematician, geometrician, physician, turned, not to letters
+which he scorned, but to the exposition of those religious ideas which at
+the age of thirty-three were precious to him. To defend his friends the
+Jansenists against their foes the Jesuits, he wrote _The Provincial
+Letters_ (1656), which have often been regarded as the foremost
+monument of classic French prose; such is not our view, but they
+certainly form a masterpiece of argument, of dialectics, of irony, of
+humour, of eloquence, and are throughout couched in a magnificent style.
+Dying whilst still young, he left notes on various subjects, more
+particularly religion, philosophy, and morality, which have been
+collected under the title of _Thoughts_ and are the product of a
+great Christian philosopher, of a profound moralist, of a marvellously
+concise orator, and also of a poet who lacked neither acute sensitiveness
+nor vast and imposing imagination.
+
+BOSSUET.--Bossuet is universally admitted to be the king of French
+orators; all his life he preached with a serious, imposing, vast,
+copious, and sonorous eloquence, fed from recollections of Holy Writ and
+of the Fathers, being insistent, convincing, and persuasive. His few
+funeral orations (on Henrietta of France, Henrietta of England, the
+Prince de Conde) are prose poems of glory, grief, and piety. He wrote
+against all those he regarded as enemies of true religion (_History
+of Variations_, _Quarrels of Quietness_), controversial works sparkling
+with irony and exalted eloquence. He traced in his _Universal
+History_ the great design in all its stages of God towards humanity
+and the world. He knew all the resources of the French language and of
+French style, and in his hands they were expanded. Despite his errors,
+which were those of his epoch, his date counts in the history of France
+as a great date, the date in which the religion to which he belonged
+reached its apogee and when the grand style of French prose was in its
+zenith.
+
+MADAME DE SEVIGNE.--Madame de Sevigne only wrote letters to her friends;
+but they were so witty, lively, picturesque, admirable in aptly
+recounting the anecdotes of her day and in depicting the scenes and
+those concerned in them, written in a style so brisk and seductive,
+uniting the promise of 1630 with the harvest of 1670, that her work still
+remains one of the greatest favourites with people of literary taste.
+
+She was the friend of M. de la Rochefoucauld, of Cardinal de Retz, and of
+that amiable, refined, and gentle Mme. de la Fayette, whose novel, _The
+Princess of Cleves_, is still read with interest and emotion.
+
+LA BRUYERE.--La Bruyere translated and continued Theophrastus; he was a
+moralist, or rather a depicter of morals. He described the court, the
+town, and (very rarely) the village and the country. He was on the
+lookout for fools in order to be their scourge. He painted, or, better
+still, he engraved in an incisive way that was sharp, like aqua-fortis.
+Almost invariably bitter to an extreme, he sometimes had flashes of quite
+unexpected and very singular sensibility which make him beloved. Somewhat
+in imitation of La Rochefoucauld, but more particularly in conformity
+with his own nature, he developed a brief, concise, brusque style which
+became that of the moralist and even of the general author for the next
+fifty years, a style which was that of Montesquieu and Voltaire, and
+superseded the broad, sustained, balanced, harmonious, and measured style
+of the majority of the writers of the eighteenth century. In the field of
+ridicule, wherein he sowed copiously, more so even than Moliere, the
+comic poets of the eighteenth century came to glean copiously, which did
+them less credit (for it is better to observe than to read) than it
+conferred on the wise and ingenious author of the _Characters_.
+
+FENELON.--Fenelon, extremely individual and original, having on every
+subject ideas of his own which were sometimes daring, often practical,
+always generous and noble, was a preacher like Bossuet; also like
+Bossuet, he was a dexterous, skilled, and formidable controversialist,
+whilst, for the instruction of the Duke of Burgundy, which had been
+confided to him, he became a fabulist, an author of dialogues, in some
+degree a romancer or epic poet in prose in his famous _Telemachus_,
+overadmired, then overdepreciated, and which, despite weaknesses, remains
+replete with strength and dazzling brilliance. Nowadays there is a marked
+return to this prince of the Church and of literature, whose brain was
+complex and even complicated, but whose heart was quite pure and his
+reasoning on a high level.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+
+THE SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES: ENGLAND
+
+Dramatists: Marlowe, Shakespeare. Prose Writers: Sidney, Francis Bacon,
+etc. Epic Poet: Milton. Comic Poets.
+
+
+ELIZABETHAN AGE: SPENSER.--In England the Elizabethan Age is the period
+extending from the commencement of the reign of Elizabeth to the end of
+her successor, James I; that is, from 1558 to 1625. This was the golden
+age of English literature: the epoch in which, awakened or excited by the
+Renaissance, her genius gave forth all its development in fruits that
+were marvellous.
+
+First, there was Spenser, alike impregnated with the Italian Renaissance
+and gifted with the slightly fantastic imagination of his own countrymen,
+who wrote eclogues, in his _Shepheard's Calender_, in imitation of
+Theocritus and Virgil as well as of the Italians of the sixteenth
+century, and who gave charming descriptions in his _Faerie Queene_.
+
+Next came Sidney, the sonnetist, at once passionate and precious, and
+then that highest glory of this glorious period, the dramatic poets.
+
+THE STAGE: MARLOWE.--As in France, the English stage in the Middle Ages
+had been devoted to the performance of mysteries (under the name of
+_miracles_), later of moralities. As in France, tragedy, strictly
+speaking, was constituted in the sixteenth century. Towards its close
+appeared Marlowe, a very great genius, still rugged but with
+extraordinary power, more especially lyrical. His great works are
+_Doctor Faustus_ and _Edward II_.
+
+SHAKESPEARE.--Then (at the same time as the rest, for they are of about
+the same age, though Marlowe appeared the earlier) came William
+Shakespeare, who is perhaps the greatest known dramatic poet. His immense
+output, which includes plays carelessly put together and, one may venture
+to say, negligibly, also contains many masterpieces: _Othello_, _Romeo
+and Juliet_, _Macbeth_, _Hamlet_, _The Taming of the Shrew_, _The Merry
+Wives of Windsor_, _As You Like It_, and _The Tempest_. The _types_ and
+personages of Shakespeare, which have remained celebrated and are still
+daily cited in human intercourse, include Othello, that tragic figure of
+jealousy; Romeo and Juliet, the young lovers separated by the feuds of
+their families but united in death; Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, the
+ambitious criminals; Hamlet, the young man with a great mind and a great
+heart but with a feeble will which collapses under too heavy a task and
+comes to the verge of insanity; Cordelia, the English Antigone, the
+devoted daughter of the proscribed King Lear; Falstaff, glutton, coward,
+diverting and gay, a kind of Anglo-Saxon Panurge. A whole dramatic
+literature has come from Shakespeare. To France he was introduced by
+Voltaire and then scorned by him because he had succeeded only too well
+in popularising him; subsequently he was exalted, praised to hyperbole,
+and imitated beyond discretion by the romantics. In addition to his
+dramatic works, Shakespeare left _Sonnets_, some of which are obscure,
+but the majority are perfect.
+
+BEN JONSON.--Ben Jonson, classical, exact, pretty faithful imitator of
+the writers of antiquity, interested in unusual characters and customs,
+gifted with a ready and lively imagination in both comedy and tragedy
+like Shakespeare, succeeded especially in comedy (_Every Man in his
+Humour_, _The Silent Woman_, etc.). Beaumont and Fletcher, who wrote in
+collaboration, are full of elevation, of delicacy and grace expressed in
+a style which is regarded by their fellow-countrymen as exceptionally
+beautiful.
+
+PROSE WRITERS: LYLY; SIDNEY; BACON; BURTON.--In prose this amazing
+period was equally productive. Lyly, who corresponds approximately to the
+French Voiture, created _euphemism_: that is, witty preciosity. Sidney,
+in his _Arcadia_ furnished a curious example of the chivalric romance.
+Further in his _Defence of Poesie_, he founded literary criticism.
+Francis Bacon, historian, moralist, philosopher, perhaps collaborator
+with Shakespeare, has a place equally allocated to him in a history of
+literature as in a history of philosophical ideas. Robert Burton,
+moralist or rather _Meditator_, who gave himself the pseudonym of
+Democritus Junior because he was consumed with sadness, left a great
+work, but one in which there are many quotations, called _The Anatomy of
+Melancholy_. There is much analogy between him and the French Senancour.
+Sterne, without acknowledgment, profusely pilfered from him. He is
+thoroughly English. He did not create melancholy but he greatly
+contributed to it and made a specialty of it. Despite his pranks and
+whimsicality, he possessed high literary merit.
+
+POETRY: WALLER.--The English seventeenth century, strictly speaking,
+virtually commencing about 1625, was inferior to the sixteenth, that has
+just been considered, which is easily explained by the civil wars
+distracting England at this period. In poetry, on the one hand, may be
+noticed the softened and pleasing Epicureans, of which the most prominent
+representative was Waller, a witty man of the world, who dwelt long in
+France, and was a friend of Saint-Evremond (who himself spent a portion
+of his life in England). Waller made a very fine eulogy of his cousin
+Cromwell, later another of Charles II, and was told by the latter, "This
+is not so good as that on Cromwell," whereupon he replied, "Sire, you
+know that poets always succeed better in fiction than in fact." Here was
+a man of much wit.
+
+HERBERT; HABINGTON.--Also must be remarked the austere and mystical such
+as George Herbert, with his _Temple_, a collection of religious and
+melancholy poems, and like Habington, sad and gloomy even as far as the
+thirst for dissolution, analogous to the modern Schopenhauer: "My God, if
+it be Thy supreme decree, if Thou wilt that this moment be the last
+wherein I breathe this air, my heart obeys, happy to retire far from the
+false favours of the great, from betrayals where the just are preyed
+upon...."
+
+DRAMATIC POETS.--Let the estimable dramatic poets be alluded to.
+Davenant, perhaps a son of Shakespeare; Otway, the illustrious author of
+_Venice Preserved_ and of many adaptations from the French (_Titus
+and Berenice_, the _Tricks of Scapin_, etc.); Dryden, declamatory,
+emphatic, but admirably gifted with dramatic genius, author of _The
+Virgin Queen_, _All for Love_ (Cleopatra), _Don Sebastian_, was always
+hesitating between the influence of Shakespeare and that of the French,
+over-inclined, too, to licentious scenes but pathetic and eloquent.
+
+MILTON.--Quite apart arose Milton, the imperishable author of _Paradise
+Lost_, the type and model of the religious epic permeated, in fact, with
+profound and ardent religious feeling, but also possessing very
+remarkable grandeur and philosophical breadth. Milton became a second
+Bible to the people to whom the Bible was the inevitable and essential
+daily study. To _Paradise Lost_, Milton added the inferior _Paradise
+Regained_ and the poem of _Samson_. Apart from his great religious poems,
+Milton wrote Latin poems (especially in his youth) which are extremely
+agreeable, and also works in prose, generally in relation to polemical
+politics, which came from a vigorous and exalted mind. Milton, from the
+aspect of his prodigious productiveness and his varied life, divided
+between literature and the intellectual battles of his times, is
+comparable to Voltaire, reservation being made for his high moral
+character, wherein no comparison can be entertained with the French
+satirist. He did himself full justice. Having become blind, he wrote:
+
+
+  "Cyriack, this three years' day these eyes, though clear,
+    To outward view, of blemish or of spot,
+    Bereft of light, their seeing have forgot;
+    Nor to their idle orbs doth sight appear
+  Of sun, or moon, or star, throughout the year,
+    Or man, or woman. Yet I argue not
+    Against Heaven's hand or will, nor bate a jot
+    Of heart or hope, but still bear up and steer
+  Right onward. What supports me, dost thou ask?
+    The conscience, friend, to have lost them overplied
+    In Liberty's defence, my noble task,
+  Of which all Europe rings from side to side.
+    This thought might lead me through the world's vain mask
+    Content, though blind, had I no better guide."
+
+
+NOTABLE PROSE WRITERS.--In prose must be noted, on the austere side,
+George Fox, founder of the sect of Quakers, impassioned and powerful
+popular orator, author of the _Book of Martyrs_; John Bunyan, an
+obstinate ascetic, author of _Grace Abounding_, a kind of edifying
+autobiography, and of _The Pilgrim's Progress_, which became one of the
+volumes of edification and of spiritual edification to the emigrant
+founders of the United States of America; on the side of the Libertines,
+Wycherley, who, thoroughly perceiving the moral lowness, fairly well
+concealed, which lies at the source of Moliere, carried this Gallic vein
+to an extreme in shameless imitations of _The School for Women_
+and _The Misanthrope_ (_The Country Wife_ and _The Plain Dealer_);
+delightful Congreve, a far more amusing companion--witty, spiritual,
+sardonic, writing excellently, knowing how to create a type and charming
+his contemporaries whilst not failing to write for posterity in his
+_Old Bachelor_, _Love for Love_, and _Way of the World_.
+
+NEWTON; LOCKE.--It must not be forgotten that at this epoch Newton and
+Locke, the one belonging more to the history of science and the other to
+the history of philosophy, both wrote in a manner entirely commensurate
+with their genius.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+
+THE SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES: GERMANY
+
+Luther, Zwingli, Albert Duerer, Leibnitz, Gottsched
+
+
+NO RENAISSANCE.--The great originality of Germany from the literary point
+of view--perhaps, too, from others--is that she _had no renaissance_, no
+contact, at all events close, with classic antiquity. Her temperament
+was no doubt hostile; the Reformation, that is, the impassioned adoption
+of a primitive unadulterated Christianity conservative and directly
+opposed to antiquity whether pagan or philosophical, added to the
+repugnance. However that may be, the fact remains: Germany enjoyed no
+renaissance.
+
+LUTHER.--Also in the sixteenth century in Germany, as in France in the
+fourteenth century, there was only popular poetry, and all the prose is
+German, all reformist, all moralising, and has little or practically no
+echo of antiquity. Luther, by his translation of the Bible into the
+vulgar tongue, by his _prefaces_ to each book of the Bible, in his
+polemical writings (_The Papacy and its Members_, _The Papacy Elevated at
+Rome by the Devil_, etc.), by his _Sermons and Letters_, gave to Teutonic
+thought a direction which long endured, and to Teutonic prose a solidity,
+purity, sobriety, and vigour which exercised an immense influence on
+human minds.
+
+THE REFORMERS.--Following Luther, Zwingli, Hutten, Eberling, Melanchthon
+(but in Latin), Erasmus (most frequently in Latin but sometimes in
+French) spread the new doctrine or doctrines in relation thereto.
+
+ERASMUS; ALBERT DUeRER; GOTTSCHED.--An exception must be made about
+Erasmus in what has just been observed. With a very unfettered mind,
+often as much in opposition to the side of Luther as to the side of Rome,
+and also prone to attack the pure humanists who styled themselves
+Ciceronians, Erasmus was a humanist, an impassioned student of ancient
+letters, so that he has one foot in the Renaissance and one in reform,
+and withal possessed a very original brain, and was, from every aspect,
+"ultra-modern."
+
+Albert Duerer must also be cited: mathematician, architect, painter, yet
+belonging to our subject by his _four books on the human proportion_
+wherein he shows, in chastened and precise style, that he himself is
+nothing less than the earliest founder of Teutonic aestheticism.
+
+The seventeenth century--extending it, as is reasonable enough, up to the
+region of 1730--is almost exclusively the era of French influence and a
+little, if desired, of Italian influence. The critic Gottsched (_Poetic
+Art, Grammar, Eloquence_) maintained the excellence of French literature
+and the necessity of drawing inspiration from it with an energy of
+conviction which drew on him the hatred of the succeeding generation.
+
+LEIBNITZ.--German poetry of his period, possessing neither originality
+nor power, could only interest the erudite and the searchers. The domain
+of prose is more enthralling. Leibnitz, who wrote in Latin and French,
+and even in German, is pre-eminently the great thinker he is reputed
+to be; but though he never possessed nor even pretended to possess
+originality in style, he is nevertheless highly esteemed for the purity,
+limpidity, and facility of his language.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+
+THE SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES: ITALY
+
+Poets: Ariosto, Tasso, Guarini, Folengo, Marini, etc. Prose Writers:
+Machiavelli, Guicciardini, Davila.
+
+
+THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY.--Italy, after Dante and Petrarch, possessed
+literary strength and much literary glory in the sixteenth century.
+She produced an admirable pleiad of poets and prose writers of high
+merit. These were Ariosto, Tasso, Berni, Sannazaro, Machiavelli,
+Bandello, Guicciardini. Below them were a hundred distinguished writers,
+among which must be cited Aretino, Folengo, Bembo, Baldi, Tansillo,
+Dolce, Benvenuto Cellini, Hannibal Caro, and Guarini.
+
+ARIOSTO.--Ariosto wrote _Orlando Furioso_, which is not the epic in
+parody, as has been too often observed, but the gay and joyous epopee of
+Orlando and his companions. The principal characters are Orlando,
+Charlemagne, Renaud, Agramant, Ferragus, Angelica, Bradamante, Marphisa.
+The tone is extremely varied and the author is in turns joyous,
+satirical, pathetic, melancholy, and even tragical. Ariosto is the
+superlative poet of fantastic imagination combined with a foundation of
+good sense, reason, and benevolence. Goethe has said of him very aptly:
+"From a cloud of gold wisdom sometimes thunders sublime sentences, whilst
+to a harmonious lute, folly seems to riot in savage digressions yet all
+the while maintains a perfect measure." Ariosto was well read in the
+classics, but fundamentally his master was Homer.
+
+TASSO.--Torquato Tasso, whose life was characterised by a thousand trials
+and who was long the victim of a mental malady, wrote a poem on the
+crusade of Godfrey de Bouillon. The poem is full of the supernatural;
+the chief characters are Renaud, Tancred, the enchantress Armida,
+Clorinda. The inspiration of Tasso is specially mystic and lyrical;
+his facility for description is delicious. The repute of _Jerusalem
+Delivered_ in the seventeenth century was immense, and all the
+literatures of Europe have innumerable references to the personages and
+episodes of the poem. In Italy there were fervid partisans of the
+superiority of Tasso over Ariosto or of Ariosto over Tasso, and many
+duels on the subject, the most bellicose being, as always happens,
+between those who had read neither.
+
+BERNI.--Berni, like Ariosto, was half burlesque in the diverting portions
+of his works. He wrote satires which were often virulent, paradoxes such
+as the eulogy of the plague and of famine, and an _Amorous Orlando_
+which is quite agreeable. The Bernesque type, that is, the humoristic,
+was created by him and bears his name.
+
+SANNAZARO.--Sannazaro wrote both in Latin and Italian. His chief claim to
+fame lies in his _Arcadia_, an idyllic poem of bucolic sentiment,
+destined to evoke thousands of imitations. He also produced eclogues and
+sonnets in Italian which give sufficient grounds for regarding him as one
+of the chief masters of that language.
+
+MACHIAVELLI.--Great thinker, great politician, great moral philosopher,
+Machiavelli possessed one of the most powerful minds ever known. He wrote
+_The Prince_, _Discourses upon Livius_, an _Art of War_, diplomatic
+letters and reports, for he was at one time secretary to the Florentine
+Republic, a _History of Florence_, a comedy (_The Mandrake_),
+romances and tales. _The Prince_ is a treatise of the art of acquiring
+and preserving power by all possible means and more particularly by
+intelligent and discreet crime. Machiavelli emphasised the separation, at
+times relative, at times absolute, which exists between politics and
+morals. His _Discourses upon Livius_ are full of sense, penetration, and
+profundity; his light works show a singular dexterity of thought united
+to a fundamental grossness which it would be impossible to misunderstand
+or excuse.
+
+BANDELLO.--Bandello is the author of novels in the vein of those of
+Boccaccio or of Brantome. His voluntary or spontaneous originality
+consists in mixing licentious tales with sentences and maxims which are
+most austere and moral. He also wrote elegiac odes that were highly
+esteemed. His very pure style is considered in Italy to be strictly
+classical.
+
+GUICCIARDINI.--Guicciardini wrote with infinite patience, severe
+conscientiousness, and imperturbable frigidity in a style that was
+pure, though somewhat prolix, that _History of Florence_, virtually a
+history of Italy, which from its first appearance was hailed as a classic
+and has remained one. His history is altogether that of a statesman; he
+passed his life among prominent public affairs, being Governor of Modena,
+Parma, and Bologna, a diplomatist involved in the most important
+negotiations; this historian is himself a historical personage.
+
+FOLENGO.--Folengo wrote a macaronic poem: that is to say, one in which
+Latin and Italian were mixed, called _Coccacius_ (which must be
+remembered because when translated into French it became the earliest
+model for Rabelais), as well as _Orlandini_ (childhood of Orlando), which
+is amusing. Other serious works did not merit serious consideration.
+
+ARETINO.--Aretino was a satirist and a poet so fundamentally licentious
+that he has remained the type of infamous author. He wrote comedies
+(_The Courtesan_, _The Marshal_, _The Philosopher_, _The Hypocrite_),
+intimate letters that are extremely interesting for the study of the
+customs of his day, religious and edifying books, replete with talent if
+not with sincerity, as well as an innumerable mass of satires, pamphlets,
+statements, diatribes which caused all the princes of his day to tremble,
+and through making them tremble also brought gold into the coffers of
+Aretino; he had raised blackmail to the height of a literary department.
+
+BEMBO; BALDI.--Cardinal Bembo, a devout Ciceronian to the verge of
+fanaticism, wrote more especially in Latin, but left Italian poems of
+much elegance and charm; he ranks among the most brilliant
+representatives of the Italian Renaissance.
+
+Baldi, a very widely versed scholar, sought relaxation from his erudition
+in writing _eclogues_, _moral poems_, and a very curious didactic poem on
+_navigation_.
+
+TANSILLO; DOLCE.--Tansillo, a very fertile poet, composed a rather
+licentious poem entitled _The Vintager_, and a religious poem called
+_The Tears of St. Peter_ (which the younger Malherbe thought so beautiful
+that he partially translated it), _The Rustic Prophet_ and _The
+Nurse_, wherein he showed himself the pupil of Tasso, comedies, a
+bucolic drama, etc.
+
+Dolce, not less prolific, produced five epic poems of which the best is
+_The Childhood of Orlando_, many comedies, for the most part imitations
+of Plautus, tragedies after Euripides and Seneca, and then one which
+seems to have been original and was the celebrated _Mariamna_, so often
+imitated in French. He was also an indefatigable translator of Horace,
+Cicero, Philostrates, etc.
+
+BENVENUTO CELLINI.--The great sculptor and chaser, Benvenuto Cellini,
+belongs to literary history because of his _Treatise on Goldsmithing and
+Sculpture_ and his admirable _Memoirs_, which are certainly in part
+fictitious, but are a literary work of the foremost rank.
+
+HANNIBAL CARO; GUARINI.--Hannibal Caro, by his _poems_, his
+_letters_, his literary criticism, his comedy, _The Beggars_, and his
+metrical translation of the _Aeneid_, acquired high rank in the judgment
+both of Italy and Europe.
+
+Guarini, the friend of Tasso, whom he helped in the labour of revising
+and correcting _Jerusalem Delivered_, was unquestionably his pupil. Tasso
+having written a bucolic poem, _Aminta_, Guarini wrote a bucolic poem,
+_The Faithful Shepherd_, which has been one of the greatest literary
+successes ever known. It was a kind of irregular drama mingled with
+songs and dances, highly varied, poetic, pathetic sometimes in a rather
+insipid way. All the _pastorals_, whether French or Italian, and later
+the opera itself, can be traced to Guarini, or at least the taste for the
+eclogue may be derived from the dramas Guarini originated. This was a man
+whose influence has been considerable not only on literature, but also on
+manners, customs, and morals.
+
+DECADENCE OF LITERATURE.--In the seventeenth century Italian literature
+indisputably was in decadence. In verse more especially, but also in
+prose, it was the period of ability without depth and even without
+foundation, of elegant and affected verbiage or burlesque lacking alike
+in power, thought, and passion. Marini loomed large with his _Adonis_, an
+ingenious mythological epic, sometimes brilliant but also lame, sometimes
+full of points, but also with trifles. Great as was his reputation in
+Italy, it was perhaps surpassed in France, where he was welcomed and
+flattered by Marie de' Medici and hyperbolically praised by Voiture,
+Balzac, Scudery, etc.
+
+SALVATOR ROSA; TASSONI; MAFFEI.--The great painter Salvator Rosa devoted
+himself hardly less to literature; he left lyrical poems and particularly
+satires which are far from lacking spirit, though often destitute of
+taste. Satiric, too, was the paradoxical Tassoni, who scoffed at
+Petrarch, and who in his _Thoughts_, long prior to J.J. Rousseau, was the
+first, perhaps (but who knows?), to maintain that literature is highly
+prejudicial to society and humanity, and who achieved fame by his _Rape
+of the Bucket_: that is, by a burlesque poem on the quarrel between
+the Bolognese and the inhabitants of Modena about a bucket.
+
+Maffei (intruding somewhat on the eighteenth century), good scholar and
+respected historian, produced in 1714 his _Merope_, which was an
+excellent tragedy, as Voltaire well knew and also testified.
+
+HISTORIANS AND CRITICS.--In prose there are none to point out in the
+eighteenth century in Italy except historians and critics. Among
+the historians must be noted Davila, who spent his youth in France near
+Catherine de' Medici, served in the French armies, and on his return to
+Padua devoted his old age to history. He wrote a _History of the Civil
+Wars in France_ which was highly esteemed, and which Fenelon recollected
+when writing his _Letter on the Pursuits of the French Academy_. The
+foregoing are what must be mentioned as notable manifestations of
+literary activity in Italy during the seventeenth century, but let it
+not be forgotten that the scientific activity of the period was
+magnificent, and that it was the century of Galileo, of Torricelli; of
+the _four_ Cassini, as well as of so many others who were praised, as
+they deserved to be, in the _Eulogies of the Learned_ of Fontenelle.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+
+THE SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES: SPAIN AND PORTUGAL
+
+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 Honore d'Urfe 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'Urfe 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 Menezes, Dona 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 Menezes 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.
+
+Dona 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.
+
+CAMOENS.--The glory of these sound poets is effaced by that of Camoens.
+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. Camoens 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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+
+THE EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES: FRANCE
+
+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, Merimee,
+Renan, etc.
+
+
+FONTENELLE.--The eighteenth century, which was announced, and announced
+with great precision, by La Bruyere, 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.
+
+CREBILLON.--Crebillon 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 Crebillon 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 Chaussee. Destouches was the
+very type of the comic writers of the eighteenth century already alluded
+to, who took a portrait by La Bruyere 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 Moliere. 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 Moliere, for he suggests a Scarron
+perfected by Moliere 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 CHAUSSEE.--La Chaussee 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 Chaussee 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; PREVOST.--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 Bruyere,
+and in his _Perverted Peasant_ with an art which was more gross, but
+still highly interesting.
+
+The Abbe Prevost, 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 (_Zaire_, _Merope_,
+_Alzire_ [before 1750], _Rome Saved_, _The Chinese Orphan_, _Tancred_,
+_Guebres_, _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 Heloise_, 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 Chaussee, 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_.
+
+ANDRE CHENIER.--Almost on the verge of the Revolution, quite unexpectedly
+there emerged a really great poet, Andre Chenier, 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 Chenier; 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; THEOPHILE GAUTIER.--The second generation of romanticism, which
+appeared about 1830, possessed Alfred de Musset and Theophile 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 STAEL.--At the same time, though she died long before him, Mme.
+de Stael, 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
+Honore 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 Beranger, 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, Merimee, 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
+_Comedie francaise_, 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 Eugene 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. Theophile 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 Theodore 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 Coppee, 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 Mendes, 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 Mallarme 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.
+
+BRUNETIERE.--Brunetiere, 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 Nore_; Jean Richepin,
+author of _Cesarine_, _Caresses_, _Blasphemies_, etc.; in fiction, Paul
+Bourget, Marcel Prevost, Rene Bazin, Bordeaux, Boylesve, Henri de
+Regnier; in history, Ernest Lavisse, Aulard, Seignobos, D'Haussonville;
+in philosophy, Boutroux, Bergson, Theodule Ribot, Fouillee, 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
+Poincare, Jaures, etc.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+
+THE EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES: ENGLAND
+
+Poets of the Eighteenth Century: Pope, Young, MacPherson, etc.: Prose
+Writers of the Eighteenth Century: Daniel Defoe, Richardson, Fielding,
+Swift, Sterne, David Hume. Poets of the Nineteenth Century: Byron,
+Shelley, the Lake Poets: Prose Writers of the Nineteenth Century: Walter
+Scott, Macaulay, Dickens, Carlyle.
+
+
+THE REIGN OF QUEEN ANNE: POETS.--As in France, the eighteenth century
+(the age of Queen Anne) was in England richer in prose than in poetry. As
+poets, however, must be indicated Thomson, descriptive and dramatic,
+whose profound feeling for nature was not without influence over French
+writers of the same century; Pope, descriptive writer, translator,
+moralist, elegiast, very intelligent and highly polished, whose _Essay on
+Criticism_ and _Essay on Man_ were remarkably utilised by Voltaire;
+Edward Young, whose _Night Thoughts_ enjoyed the same prodigious
+success in France as in England, and who contributed in no small measure
+to darken and render gloomy both literatures; MacPherson, who invented
+_Ossian_, that is, pretended poems of the Middle Ages, a magnificent
+genius, be it said, who exercised considerable influence over the
+romanticism of both lands; Chatterton, who trod the same road, but with
+less success, yet was valued almost equally by the French romantic poets,
+and to them he has owed at least the consolidation of his immortality;
+Cowper, elegiac and fantastic, with a highly humorous vein; Crabbe, a
+very close observer of popular customs and an ingenious novelist in
+verse, quite analogous to the Dutch painters; Burns, a peasant-poet,
+sensitive and impassioned, yet at the same time a careful artist
+moved by local customs, the manifestations of which he saw displayed
+before his eyes.
+
+PROSE WRITERS.--The masters of prose (some being also true poets) were
+innumerable. Daniel Defoe, journalist, satirist, pamphleteer, was the
+author of the immortal _Robinson Crusoe_; Addison, justly adored by
+Voltaire, author of a sound tragedy, _Cato_, is supremely a scholar, the
+acute, sensible, and extremely thoughtful editor of _The Spectator_;
+Richardson, the idol of Diderot and of Jean Jacques Rousseau, enjoyed a
+European success with his sentimental and virtuous novels, _Pamela_,
+_Clarissa Harlowe_, and _Sir Charles Grandison_. As a critic and as a
+personality, Dr. Johnson has no parallel in any age or land. His
+_Dictionary_ is famous despite its faults, and _Rasselas_, which he
+wrote to pay for his mother's funeral, can still be read.
+
+Fielding, who began by being only the parodist of Richardson, in
+_Joseph Andrews_, ended by becoming an astounding realistic novelist, the
+worthy predecessor of Thackeray and Dickens in his extraordinary _Tom
+Jones_. The amiable Goldsmith, more akin to Richardson, wrote that
+idyllic novel _The Vicar of Wakefield_, the charm of which was still felt
+throughout Europe only fifty years ago. Laurence Sterne, the most
+accurate representative of English _humour_, capable of emotion more
+especially ironical, jester, mystificator, has both amused and disquieted
+several generations with his _Sentimental Journey_ and his fantastical,
+disconcerting and enchanting _Tristram Shandy_. Swift, horribly bitter, a
+corrosive and cruel satirist, sadly scoffed at all the society of his
+time in _Gulliver's Travels_, in _Drapier's Letters_, in his _Proposal to
+Prevent the Children of the Poor Being a Burden_, in a mass of other
+small works wherein the most infuriated wrath is sustained under the form
+of calm and glacial irony.
+
+HISTORY.--History was expressed in England in the eighteenth century by
+David Hume, who chronicled the progress of the English race from the
+Middle Ages until the eighteenth century; by Robertson, who similarly
+handled the Scotch and who narrated the reign of Charles V; and by
+Gibbon, so habitually familiar with the French society of his time, who
+followed the Romans from the first Caesars to Marcus Aurelius, then more
+closely from Marcus Aurelius to the epoch of Constantine, and finally
+the Byzantine Empire up to the period of the Renaissance. The imposing
+erudition, the rather pompous but highly distinguished style of the
+author, without counting his animosity to Christianity, caused him to
+enjoy a great success, especially in France. The work of Gibbon is
+regarded as the finest example of history written by an Englishman.
+
+THE STAGE.--The stage in England in the eighteenth century sank far below
+its importance in the seventeenth century; yet who does not know _She
+Stoops to Conquer_ of Goldsmith, and that sparkling and lively comedy,
+_The School for Scandal_, by Sheridan? Note, as an incomparable
+journalist, the famous and mysterious Junius, who, from 1769 to 1772,
+waged such terrible war on the minister Grafton.
+
+THE LAKE POETS.--In the nineteenth century appeared those poets so
+familiar to the French romanticists, or else the latter pretended
+they were, who were termed the lake poets, because they were lovers of
+the countryside; these were Southey, Coleridge, and Wordsworth. Southey
+was an epic and elegiac poet, whilst he was also descriptive; Coleridge,
+philosopher, metaphysician, a little nebulous and disordered, had very
+fine outbursts and some lamentable falls. Wordsworth was a most
+distinguished lyricist. Lord Byron did not acquire honour by so roughly
+handling Southey and Wordsworth.
+
+THE ROMANTIC EPOCH.--The two greatest English poets of the romantic
+period were Lord Byron and Shelley; the former the admirable poet of
+disenchantment and of despair, gifted with a noble epic genius, creating
+and vitalising characters which, it must be confessed, differed very
+little from one another, but an exalted figure with a grand manner and,
+except Shakespeare, the only English poet who exercised genuine influence
+over French literature; the latter an idealistic poet of the most suave
+delicacy, aerial and heavenly, despite a private life of the utmost
+disorder and even guilt, he is one of the most perfect poets that ever
+lived; a great tragedian, too, in his _Cenci_, quite unknown in France
+until the middle of the nineteenth century, but since then the object of
+a sort of adoration among the larger number of Gallic poets and lovers
+of poetry.
+
+Keats was as romantic as Shelley and Byron, both in spite of and because
+of his desperate efforts to assimilate the Grecian spirit. He dreamt of
+its heroes and its ancient myths, but there is in him little that is
+Grecian except the choice of subjects, and it is not in his grand poem,
+_Endymion_, nor even in that fine fragment, _Hyperion_, that can be found
+the real melancholy, sensitive, and modern poet, but in his last short
+poems, _The Skylark_, _On a Greek Vase_, _Autumn_, which, by the
+exquisite perfection of their form and the harmonious richness of the
+style, take rank among the most beautiful songs of English lyrism.
+
+Nearer to us came Tennyson, possessing varied inspiration, epical,
+lyrical, elegiac poet, always exalted and pure, approaching the
+classical, and himself already a classic.
+
+Swinburne, almost exclusively lyrical, a dexterous and enchanting
+versifier, inspired by the ancient Greeks, generally evinced a highly
+original poetic temperament, and Dante Rossetti, imbued with mediaeval
+inspiration, possessed a powerful and slightly giddy imagination. Far
+less known on the Continent, where critics may feel surprise at her
+necessary inclusion here, is his sister, Christina Rossetti. Her
+qualities as a poet are a touching and individual grace, much delicate
+spontaneity, a pure and often profound emotion, and an instinct as a
+stylist which is almost infallible. The Brownings form a celebrated
+couple, and about them Carlyle, on hearing of their marriage, observed
+that he hoped they would understand each other. Elizabeth Barrett
+Browning, translator of Aeschylus of Theocritus, gave proof in her
+original poetry of a vigour, of a vividness, and of a vigorous exuberance
+of similes that often recalled the Elizabethans, but marred her work by
+declamatory rhetoric and by a tormented and often obscure style. Robert
+Browning was yet more difficult, owing to his overpowering taste for
+subtlety and the bizarre--nay, even the grotesque. Almost ignored, or at
+least unappreciated by his contemporaries, he has since taken an exalted
+place in English admiration, which he owes to the depth, originality, and
+extreme richness of his ideas, all the more, perhaps, because they lend
+themselves to a number of differing interpretations.
+
+THE NOVELISTS.--In prose the century began with the historical novelist,
+Sir Walter Scott, full of lore and knowledge, reconstructor and
+astonishing _reviver_ of past times, more especially the Middle Ages,
+imbuing all his characters with life, and even in some measure vitalising
+the objects he evoked. None more than he, not even Byron, has enjoyed
+such continuous appreciation with both French romantic poets and also the
+French reading public. The English novel, recreated by this great master,
+was worthily continued by Dickens, both sentimentalist and humourist, a
+jesting, though genial, delineator of the English middle class, and an
+accurate and sympathetic portrayer of the poor; by Thackeray, supreme
+railer and satirist, terrible to egoists, hypocrites, and snobs; by the
+prolific and entertaining Bulwer-Lytton, by the grave, philosophical,
+and sensible George Eliot, by Charlotte Bronte, author of the affecting
+_Jane Eyre_, etc., and her sister Emily, whose _Wuthering Heights_ has
+been almost extravagantly admired.
+
+Four other great prose writers presenting startling divergences from one
+another cannot be omitted. Belonging to the first half of the nineteenth
+century, Charles Lamb earned wide popularity by his _Tales from
+Shakespeare_ and _Poetry for Children_, written in collaboration with his
+sister Mary; but he was specially remarkable for his famed _Essays of
+Elia_, wherein he affords evidence of possessing an almost paradoxical
+mixture of delicate sensibility and humour, as well as of accurate and
+also fantastic observation. Newman, at first an English clergyman but
+subsequently a cardinal, after conversion to the Catholic Church, appears
+to me hardly eligible in a history of literature in which Lamennais has
+no place. As a literary man, his famous sermons at Oxford and the Tracts
+exercised much influence, and provoked such impassioned and prodigious
+revival of old doctrines and of an antiquated spirit in religion; then
+the _Apologia Pro Vita Sua_, _Callista_, and the _History of Arianism_,
+revealed him as a master of eloquence.
+
+Ruskin, as art critic, in his bold volumes illumined with remarkable
+beauty of styles, _Modern Painters_, _The Seven Lamps of
+Architecture_, and _The Stones of Venice_, formulated the creed and the
+school of pre-Raphaelitism. At the time of the religious revival at
+Oxford, he preached a servile imitation of antiquity by the path of the
+Renaissance, appealing to national and mediaeval inspiration, not without
+_naivete_ and archaism, none the less evident because he was sincere and
+mordant. George Meredith, who died only in 1910, was a prolific and often
+involved novelist (the Browning of prose), with a passion for metaphors
+and a too freely expressed eclectic scorn for the multitude. Withal, he
+had a profound knowledge of life and of the human soul; impregnated with
+humour, he was creator of unforgettable types of character, and no
+pre-occupation of his epoch was foreign to his mind, whilst his vigorous
+realism always obstinately refused to turn from contemporaneous themes,
+or to gratify the needs and aspirations which it was possible to satisfy.
+His epitaph might well be that he understood the women of his time, a
+rare phenomenon.
+
+HISTORY.--History could show two writers of absolute
+superiority--Macaulay (_History of England since James II_), an
+omnivorous reader and very brilliant writer, and Carlyle, the English
+Michelet, feverish, passionate, incongruous, and disconcerting, who dealt
+with history as might a very powerful lyrical poet.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+
+THE EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES: GERMANY
+
+Poets of the Eighteenth Century: Klopstock, Lessing, Wieland; Prose
+Writers of the Eighteenth Century: Herder, Kant. Poets of the Nineteenth
+Century: Goethe, Schiller, Koerner.
+
+
+THE AGE OF FREDERICK THE GREAT.--In the literature of Germany the
+eighteenth century, sometimes designated under the title of the age of
+Frederick the Great, forms a Renaissance or, if preferred, an awakening
+after a fairly prolonged slumber. This awakening was assisted by a
+quarrel, sufficiently unimportant in itself, but which proved fertile,
+between Gottsched, the German Boileau, and Bodmer, the energetic
+vindicator of the rights of the imagination. In the train of Bodmer came
+Haller, like him a Swiss; then suddenly Klopstock appeared. _The
+Messiah_ of Klopstock is an epic poem; it is the history of Jesus Christ
+from Cana to the Resurrection, with a crowd of episodes dexterously
+attached to the action. The profound religious sentiment, the grandeur of
+the setting, the beauty of the scenes, the purity and nobility of the
+sermon, the Biblical colour so skilfully spread over the whole
+composition, cause this vast poem, which was perhaps unduly praised on
+its first appearance, to be one of the finest products of the human mind,
+even when all reservations are made. German literature revived. As for
+Gottsched, he was vanquished.
+
+THE POETS.--Then came Lavater, Buerger, Lessing, Wieland. Lavater, a Swiss
+like Haller, is remembered for his scientific labours, but was also a
+meritorious poet, and his naive and moving _Swiss Hymns_ have remained
+national songs; Buerger was a great poet, lyrical, impassioned, personal,
+original, vibrating; Wieland, the Voltaire of Germany, although he began
+by being the friend of Klopstock, witty, facile, light, and graceful,
+whose _Oberon_ and _Agathon_ preserve the gift of growing old
+felicitously, is one of the most delightful minds that Germany produced.
+Napoleon did him the honour of desiring to converse with him as with
+Goethe.
+
+LESSING.--Lessing, personally, was a great author, and owing to the
+influence he exercised over his fellow-countrymen, he holds one of the
+noblest positions in the history of German literature. He was a critic,
+and in his _Dramaturgie of Hamburg_ and elsewhere, with all his strength,
+and often unjustly, he combated French literature to arrest the
+ascendency which, according to his indolent opinion, it exercised over
+the Germans; and in his _Laocooen_, with admirable lucidity, he made a
+kind of classification of the arts. As author, properly speaking, he
+wrote _Fables_ which to our taste are dry and cold; he made several
+dramatic efforts none of which were masterpieces, the best being _Minna
+von Barnhelm_ and _Emilia Galotti_, and a philosophical poem in dialogue
+(for it could hardly be termed drama), _Nathan the Sage_, which
+possessed great moral and literary beauties.
+
+HERDER.--Herder was the Vico of Germany. Here was the historical
+philosopher, or rather the thoughtful philosopher on history. He did
+everything: literary criticism, works of erudition, translations, even
+personal poems, but his great work was _Ideas on the Philosophy of the
+History of Mankind_. This was the theory of progress in all its breadth
+and majesty, supported by arguments that are at least spacious and
+imposing. From Michelet to Quinet, on to Renan, every French author who
+has at all regarded the unity of the destinies of the human race has
+drawn inspiration from him. His broad, measured, and highly coloured
+style is on the level of the subject and conforms to it. Even in an
+exclusively literary history Kant must not be forgotten, because when he
+set himself to compose a moral dissertation, as, for example, the one
+upon lying, he took high rank as a writer.
+
+THE GLORIOUS EPOCH.--Thus is reached the end of the eighteenth close on
+the beginning of the nineteenth century. In this intermediary epoch shone
+the most glorious hour of Teutonic literature. Simultaneously Iffland,
+Kotzebue, Koerner, Schiller, and Goethe were to the fore. This formed a
+great constellation. Iffland, actor, manager, and author, friend and
+protector of Schiller, wrote numerous dramas, the principal of which were
+_The Criminal through Ambition_, _The Pupil_, _The Hunters_, _The
+Lawyers_, _The Friends of the House_. He was realistic without being
+gloomy. He resembled the French Sedaine. Kotzebue, who was the friend of
+Catherine of Russia, subsequently disgraced by her, possessed a highly
+irritable and quarrelsome disposition, and was finally killed in 1819
+as a reactionary by a Liberal student, did not fall far short of genius.
+He wrote a number of dramas and comedies. Those still read with pleasure
+are _Misanthropy and Repentance_, _Hugo Grotius_, _The Calumniator_, and
+_The Small German Town_, which has remained a classic.
+
+KOeRNER.--Koerner, the "Tyrtaeus of Germany," was simultaneously a brave
+soldier and a great lyrical poet who was killed on the battlefield of
+Gadebusch, wrote lyrical poems, dramas, comedies, farces, and, above all,
+_The Lyre and Sword_, war-songs imbued with splendid spirit.
+
+SCHILLER.--Schiller is a vast genius, historian, lyrical poet, dramatic
+poet, critic, and in all these different fields he showed himself to be
+profoundly original. He wrote _The Thirty Years' War_; odes, ballads,
+dithyrambic poems, such as _The Clock_, so universally celebrated;
+dissertations of philosophic criticism, such as _The God of Greece_ and
+_The Artists_; finally, a whole repertory of drama (the only point on
+which it is possible to show that he surpasses Goethe), in which may be
+remarked his first audacious and anarchical work, _The Brigands_, then
+the _Conjuration of Fieso_, _Intrigue and Love_, _Don Carlos_,
+_Wallenstein_ (a trilogy composed of _The Camp of Wallenstein_, _The
+Piccolomini_, _The Death of Wallenstein_), _Mary Stuart_, _The Betrothed
+of Messina_, _The Maid of Orleans_, _William Tell_. By his example
+primarily, and by his instruction subsequently (_Twelve Letters on Don
+Carlos_, _Letters on Aesthetic Education_, _The Sublime_, etc.), he
+exercised over literature and over German thought an influence at least
+equal, and I believe superior, to that of Goethe. He was united to Goethe
+by the ties of a profound and undeviating friendship. He died whilst
+still young, in 1805, twenty-seven years before his illustrious friend.
+
+GOETHE.--Goethe, whom posterity can only put in the same rank as Homer,
+is even more universal genius, and has approached yet closer to absolute
+beauty. Of Franco-German education, he subsequently studied at Strasburg,
+commencing, whilst still almost a student, with the imperishable
+_Werther_, to which it may be said that a whole literature is devoted
+and, parenthetically, a literature diametrically opposed to what Goethe
+subsequently became. Then a journey through Italy, which revealed Goethe
+to himself, made him a man who never ceased to desire to combine classic
+beauty and Teutonic ways of thinking, and who was often magnificently
+successful. To put it in another way, Goethe in his own land is a
+Renaissance in himself, and the Renaissance which Germany had not known
+in either the sixteenth or seventeenth century came as the gift of
+Goethe. Immediately after his return from Italy he wrote _Tasso_ (of
+classic inspiration), _Wilhelm Meister_ (of Teutonic inspiration),
+_Iphigenia_ (classical), _Egmont_ (Teutonic), etc. Then came _Hermann and
+Dorothea_, which was absolutely classic in the simplicity of its plan and
+purity of lyric verse, but essentially modern in its picture of German
+customs; _The Roman Elegies_, _The Elective Affinities_, _Poetry and
+Truth_ (autobiography mingled with romance), _The Western Eastern Divan_,
+lyrical poems, and finally, the two parts of _Faust_. In the first part
+of _Faust_, Goethe was, and desired to be, entirely German; in the
+second, through many reveries more or less relative to the theme, he more
+particularly desires to depict the union of the German spirit with that
+of classical genius, which formed his own life, and led to _intelligent
+action_, which also was a portion of his existence. And for beauty,
+drama, pathos, ease, phantasy, and fertility in varied invention, nothing
+has ever surpassed if anything has even equalled the two parts of _Faust_
+regarded as a single poem.
+
+Apart from his literary labours, Goethe occupied himself with the
+administration of the little duchy of Weimar, and in scientific research,
+notably on plants, animals, and the lines in which he displayed marked
+originality. He died in 1832, having been born in 1749. His literary
+career extends over, approximately, sixty years, equal to that of Victor
+Hugo, and almost equal to that of Voltaire.
+
+THE CONTEMPORANEOUS PERIOD.--After the death of Goethe, Germany could not
+maintain the same height. Once more was she glorified in poetry by Henry
+Heine, an extremely original witty traveller, in his _Pictures of
+Travel_, elegiac and deeply lyrical, affecting and delightful at the same
+time in _The Intermezzo_; by the Austrian school, Zedlitz, Gruen, and the
+melancholy and deep-thinking Lenau; in prose, above all, by the
+philosophers, Fichte, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Hartmann, and lastly
+Nietzsche--at once philosopher, moralist (after his own manner), and
+poet, with an astonishing imagination; by the historians Niebuhr (before
+1830), Treitschke, Mommsen, etc. Germany seems to have drooped, so far as
+literature is concerned, despite some happy exceptions (especially in the
+drama: Hauptmann, Sudermann), since her military triumphs of 1870 and the
+consequent industrial activity.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+
+THE EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES: ITALY
+
+Poets: Metastasio, Goldoni, Alfieri, Monti, Leopardi. Prose Writers:
+Silvio Pellico, Fogazzaro, etc.
+
+
+LITERARY AWAKENING.--After a long decadence, Italy, less overwhelmed
+politically than previously, reawoke about 1750. Once more poets came
+forward: Metastasio, author of tragedies and operas; Goldoni, a very
+witty and gay comic poet; Alfieri who revived Italian tragedy, which had
+been languishing and silent since Maffei, and who, like Voltaire in
+France, and with greater success, established a philosophical and
+political tribune; Foscolo, sufficiently feeble in tragedy but very
+touching and eloquent in _The Tombs_, inspired by Young's _Night
+Thoughts_ and _The Letters of Jacob Ortis_, an interesting novelist and
+eloquently impassioned patriot; Monti, versatile and master of all
+recantations according to his own interests, but a very pure writer and
+not without brilliance in his highly diversified poems.
+
+EMINENT PROSE WRITERS.--Italy could show eminent prose writers, such as
+those jurisprudent philanthropists Filangieri and Beccaria; critics and
+literary historians like Tiraboschi.
+
+NINETEENTH CENTURY.--In the nineteenth century may first be found among
+poets that great poet, the unhappy Leopardi, the bard of suffering, of
+sorrow, and of despair; Carducci, a brilliant orator, imbued with
+vigorous passions; Manzoni, lyricist, dramatist, vibrating with patriotic
+enthusiasm, affecting in his novel _The Betrothal_, which became popular
+in every country in Europe. In prose, Silvio Pellico equally moved Europe
+to tears by his book _My Prisons_, wherein he narrated the experiences of
+his nine years of captivity at the hands of Austria, and found his
+agreeable tragedy of _Francesca da Rimini_ welcomed with flattering
+appreciation. Philosophy was specially represented by Gioberti, author of
+_The Treatise on the Supernatural_, and journalism by Giordani, eloquent,
+at times with grace and ease, and at others with harshness and violence.
+
+THE MODERNS.--As these words were written came the news of the death of
+the illustrious novelist Fogazzaro. Gabriel d'Annunzio, poet and
+ultra-romantic novelist, and Mathilde Serao, an original novelist, pursue
+their illustrious careers.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+
+THE EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES: SPAIN
+
+The Drama still Brilliant: Moratin. Historians and Philosophers,
+Novelists, Orators.
+
+
+THE DRAMA. Since the middle of the seventeenth century, approximately,
+Spain has exercised less literary influence than in the preceding
+centuries. Nevertheless Spanish literature was not extinct; it was in the
+drama more especially that it was manifest. Candamo, Canizares, and
+Zamora all illumined the stage. Candamo devoted himself to the historical
+drama; his masterpiece in this type was _The Slave in Golden Chains_;
+Canizares, powerful satirist, displayed the comic spirit in his comedies
+of character; Zamora manipulated the comedy of intrigue with remarkable
+dexterity. Then came Vincente de la Huerta, skilful in combining the type
+of French tragedy with something of the ancient dramatic national genius;
+then Leandro Moratin (called Moratin the Younger to distinguish him from
+his father Nicholas), very imitative, no doubt, of Moliere, but in
+himself highly gifted, and of whose works can still be read with pleasure
+_The Old Man and the Young Girl_, _The New Comedy on the Coffee_, _The
+Female Hypocrite_, etc. He also wrote lyrical poems and sonnets. He lived
+long in France, where he became impregnated with Gallic classical
+literature.
+
+PROSE.--Stronger and more brilliant at that period than the poetry, the
+prose was represented by Father Florez, author of _Ecclesiastical Spain_;
+by the Marquis de San Phillipo, author of the _War of Succession in
+Spain_; by Antonio de Solis, author of _The Conquest of Mexico_. In
+fiction there was the interesting Father Isla, a Jesuit, who gave a
+clever imitation of the _Don Quixote_ of Cervantes in his _History of the
+Preacher Friar Gerund_. He was well read and patriotic. He was convinced
+that Le Sage had taken all his _Gil Blas_ from various Spanish authors,
+and he published a translation of his novel under the title: _The
+Adventures of Gil Blas of Santiago, stolen from Spain and adopted in
+France by M. Le Sage, restored to their country and native tongue by
+a jealous Spaniard who will not endure being laughed at_. Another Jesuit
+(and it may be noticed that Spanish Jesuits of the seventeenth century
+often displayed a very liberal and modern mind), Father Feijoo, wrote a
+kind of philosophical dictionary entitled _Universal Dramatic Criticism_,
+a review of human opinions which was satirical, humorous, and often
+extremely able. The historian Antonio de Solis, who was also a reasonably
+capable dramatist, produced a _History of the Conquest of South America
+Known under the name of New Spain_, in a chartered style that was very
+elegant and even too elegant. Jovellanos wrote much in various styles.
+Among others he wrote one fine tragedy, _Pelagia_; a comedy presenting
+clever contrasts, entitled _The Honorable Criminal_; a mass of studies on
+the past of Spain, economic treatises, satires, and pamphlets. Engaged in
+all the historical and political vicissitudes of his country, he expired
+miserably in 1811, after having been alternately in exile and at the head
+of affairs.
+
+ROMANTICISM.--In the nineteenth century Spanish romanticism was brought
+back in dignified poetic style by Angel Saavedra, Jose Zorilla, Ventura
+de la Vega, Ramon Campoamor, Espronceda. The latter especially counts
+among the great literary Spaniards, for he was poet and novelist, who
+wrote _The Student of Salamanca_ (Don Juan), _The Devil World_ (a kind of
+Faust), lyrical poems, and an historical novel, _Sancho Saldano_.
+
+THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.--In drama, _Quintana_ also produced a _Pelagia_;
+the Duke of Rivas a _Don Alvaro_, which enjoyed an immediate success;
+Zorilla a _Don Juan_ entirely novel in conception; Martinez de la Rose
+tragedies, some in the classic vein, others with modern intrigue and
+comedies; Gutierrez, by his _Foundling_, attracted the attention of
+librettists of French operas; Breton de los Herreros wrote sparkling
+comedies, the multiplicity of which suggest Scribe. In prose, Fernan
+Caballero was a fertile novelist and an attentive and accurate painter of
+manner. Trueba (who was also an elegant poet) was an affecting idyllic
+novelist. Emilio Castelar, the Lamartine of Spain as he was called by
+Edmond About, was a splendid orator, thrown by the chances of political
+life for one hour at the head of national affairs, who raised himself to
+the highest rank in the admiration of his contemporaries by his novels:
+for instance, _The Sister of Charity_ and his works on philosophical
+history and the history of art, _Civilisation in the First Centuries of
+Christianity_, _The Life of Byron_, _Souvenirs of Italy_, etc. In our
+day, there have been numerous distinguished authors (and for us, at
+least, out of the crowd stands forth the dramatist Jose Echegaray), who
+carry on the glorious tradition of Spanish literature.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+
+RUSSIAN LITERATURE
+
+Middle Ages. Some Epic Narratives. Renaissance in the Seventeenth
+Century. Literature Imitative of the West in the Eighteenth Century.
+Original Literature in the Nineteenth Century.
+
+
+THE MIDDLE AGES.--Russia possessed a literature even in the Middle Ages.
+In the eleventh century the metropolitan Hilarion wrote a discourse on
+the Old and the New Testament. In the twelfth century, the _Chronicle_
+that is said to be by _Nestor_ is the first historical monument of
+Russia. At the same period Vladimir Monomaque, Prince of Kief, who
+devoted his life to fighting with all his neighbours, left his son an
+autobiographic _instruction_, which is very interesting for the light it
+throws on the events and, especially, on the customs of his day. At the
+same time the hegumen (abbot) Daniel left an account of his pilgrimage to
+the Holy Land. In the thirteenth century (probably) another Daniel,
+Daniel the prisoner, wrote from his distant place of exile to his prince
+a supplicatory letter, which is astonishing because in it is found a
+remarkable and wholly unexpected degree of literary talent. In the
+thirteenth or fourteenth century two epic pieces, _The Lay of the Battle
+of Igor_ and _The Zadonstchina_, of which it is uncertain which imitated
+the other, alike present vigorous and vivid accounts of battles. In the
+fifteenth or sixteenth century there is a didactic work, _The Domostroi_,
+which is a moral treatise, a handbook of domestic economy, a manual of
+gardening, and a cookery book, etc. The Tzar Ivan the Terrible (sixteenth
+century) was a dexterous diplomatist and a precise, nervous, and ironical
+writer. He left highly curious letters.
+
+RENAISSANCE.--Kutochikine (seventeenth century), who was minister in his
+own land, then disgraced and exiled in Sweden, wrote an extremely
+interesting book on the habits of his contemporaries. The "Renaissance,"
+if it may be so termed, that is, the contact between the Russian spirit
+and Western genius, occurred in the eighteenth century. Prince Kantemir,
+Russian ambassador in London, who knew Montesquieu, Maupertuis, the Abbe
+Guasco, etc., wrote satires in the manner of Horace and of Boileau.
+Trediakowski took on himself to compose a very tedious _Telemachidus_,
+but he knew how to unravel the laws of Russian metre and to write odes
+which at least were indicative of the right direction.
+
+LOMONOSOV.--Lomonosov is regarded as the real father of Russian
+literature, as the Peter the Great of literature--a great man withal,
+engineer, chemist, professor, grammarian. Regarding him solely as a
+literary man, he made felicitous essays in tragedy, lyrical poetry, epic
+poetry, polished the Russian versification, established its grammar, and
+imparted a powerful impulse in a multitude of directions.
+
+CREATION OF THE DRAMA.--Soumarokoff founded the Russian drama. He was
+manager of the first theatre opened in St. Petersburg (1756). In the
+French vein he wrote tragedies, comedies, fables, satires, and epigrams.
+He corresponded with Voltaire. The latter wrote to him in 1769: "Sir,
+your letter and your works are a great proof that genius and taste
+pertain to all lands. Those who said that poetry and music belonged only
+to temperate climates were deeply in error. If climate were so potent,
+Greece would still produce Platos and Anacreons, just as she produces the
+same fruits and flowers; Italy would have Horaces, Virgils, Ariostos, and
+Tassos.... The sovereigns who love the arts change the climates; they
+cause roses to bud in the midst of snows. That is what your incomparable
+monarch has done. I could believe that the letters with which she has
+honoured me came from Versailles and yours from one of my colleagues in
+the Academy.... Over me you possess one prodigious advantage: I do not
+know a word of your language and you are completely master of
+mine.... Yes, I regard Racine as the best of our tragic poets.... He is
+the only one who has treated love tragically; for before him Corneille
+had only expressed that passion well in _The Cid_, and _The Cid_ is not
+his. Love is ridiculous or insipid in nearly all his other works. I think
+as you do about Quinault; he is a great man in his own way. He would not
+have written the _Art of Poetry_, but Boileau would not have written
+_Armida_. I entirely agree with what you write about Moliere and of the
+tearful comedy which, to the national disgrace, has succeeded to the only
+real comic type brought to perfection by the inimitable Moliere. Since
+Regnard, who was endowed with a truly comic genius and who alone came
+near Moliere, we have only had monstrosities.... That, sir, is the
+profession of faith you have asked of me." This letter is quoted, despite
+its errors, because it forms, as it were, _a preface to Russian
+literature_, and also a patent of nobility granted to this literature.
+
+CATHERINE II.--The Empress wrote _in Russian_ advice as to the education
+of her grandson, very piquant comedies, and review articles. Von Vizin, a
+comic author, was the first to look around and to depict the custom of
+his country, which means that he was the earliest humorous national
+writer. The classic works of Von Vizin were _The Brigadier_ and _The
+Minor_. Whilst pictures of contemporaneous manners, they were also
+pleadings in favour of a reformed Russia against the Russia that existed
+before Peter the Great, which still in part subsisted, as was only
+natural. He made a journey to France and it will be seen from his
+correspondence that he brought back a highly flattering impression.
+
+RADISTCHEF.--Radistchef was the first Russian political writer. Under
+the pretext of a _Voyage from Petersburg to Moscow_, he attacked serfdom,
+absolute government, even religion, for which he was condemned to death
+and exiled to Siberia. He was pardoned later on by Paul I, but soon after
+committed suicide. He was verbose, but often really eloquent.
+
+ORATORS AND POETS.--The preacher Platon, whose real name was Levchine,
+was an orator full of sincerity, unction, and sometimes of real power. He
+was religious tutor to the hereditary Grand Duke, son of Catherine II.
+Another preacher, and his successor at the siege of Moscow, Vinogradsky,
+was likewise a really great orator. It was he who, after the French
+retreat from Russia, delivered the funeral oration on the soldiers killed
+at Borodino. Ozerov was a classical tragedy writer after the manner of
+Voltaire, and somewhat hampered thereby. Batiouchkov, although he lived
+right into the middle of the nineteenth century, is already a classic. He
+venerated and imitated the writers of antiquity; he was a devout admirer
+of Tibullus, and wrote elegies which are quite exquisite. Krylov was a
+fabulist: a dexterous delineator of animals and a delicate humourist.
+Frenchmen and Italians have been alike fascinated by him, and his works
+have often been translated; until the middle of the nineteenth century he
+enjoyed European popularity.
+
+THE GOLDEN AGE: PUSHKIN.--The true Russian nineteenth century and its
+golden age must be dated from Pushkin. He wrote from his earliest youth.
+He was an epic poet, novelist, and historian. His principal poems were
+_Ruslan and Liudmila_, _Eugene Onegin_, _Poltava_; his most remarkable
+historical essay was _The Revolt of Pugachev_. He possessed a fertile and
+vigorous imagination, which he developed by continual and enthusiastic
+study of Byron. He did not live long enough either for his own fame or
+for the welfare of Russian literature, being killed in a duel at the age
+of thirty-eight. Merimee translated much by Pushkin. The French lyric
+stage has mounted one of his most delicate inspirations, _La Rousalka_
+(the water nymph). He was quite conscious of his own genius and, freely
+imitating the _Exegi monumentum_ of Horace, as will be seen, he wrote: "I
+have raised to myself a monument which no human hand has constructed....
+I shall not entirely perish ... the sound of my name shall permeate
+through vast Russia.... For long I shall be dear to my race because my
+lyre has uttered good sentiments, because, in a brutal age, I have
+vaunted liberty and preached love for the down-trodden. Oh, my Muse, heed
+the commands of God, fear not offence, claim no crown; receive with equal
+indifference eulogy and calumny, but never dispute with fools."
+
+LERMONTOV.--Lermontov was not inferior to his friend Pushkin, whom he
+closely resembled. Like him he drew inspiration from the romantic poets
+of the West. He loved the East, and his short, glorious suggestions came
+to him from the Caucasus. Among his finest poetic works may be cited _The
+Novice Ismael Bey_, _The Demon_, _The Song of the Tzar Ivan_. He wrote a
+novel, perhaps autobiographical, entitled _A Hero of Our Own Time_, the
+hero of which is painted in highly Byronic colours.
+
+GOGOL.--Russian taste was already veering to the epic novel or epopee in
+prose, of which Gogol was the most illustrious representative until
+Tolstoy. He was highly gifted. In him the feeling for Nature was acutely
+active, and recalling his descriptions of the plains of the Crimea, its
+rivers and steppes, he must be regarded as the Rousseau and Chateaubriand
+of Russia. Further, he was a close student of village habits, and a
+painter in astonishing hues. He eminently possessed the sense of epic
+grandeur, and added a sarcastic vein of delightful irony. His _Taras
+Bulba_, _King of the Dwarfs_, _History of a Fool_, and _Dead Souls_, have
+the force of arresting realism, his _Revisor_ (inspector of finances) is
+a caustic comedy which has been a classic not only in Russia but in
+France, where it was introduced in translation by Merimee.
+
+TURGENEV.--Turgenev, less epical than Gogol, was also studious of local
+habits and dexterous in describing them. He began with exquisite
+_Huntsman's Tales_ impregnated with truth and precision, as well as
+intimate and picturesque details; then he extended his scope and wrote
+novels, but never at great length, and therefore suited to the exigencies
+or habits of Western Europe (such as _Smoke_). He had selected Paris as
+his abode, and he mixed with the greatest thinkers of the day: Taine,
+Flaubert, Edmond About. In the eyes of his fellow-countrymen he became
+ultimately too Western and too Parisian. His was a delicate, sensitive
+soul, prone to melancholy and perpetually dreaming. He had a cult of form
+in which he went so far as to make it a sort of scruple and superstition.
+
+TOLSTOY.--Tolstoy, so recently dead, was a great epic poet in prose, a
+very powerful and affecting novelist, and in some measure an apostle. He
+began with _Boyhood Adolescence and Youth_, in itself very curious and
+particularly valuable because of the idea it conveys of the life of the
+lords of the Russian soil, and for its explanation of the formation of
+the soul and genius of Tolstoy; then came _The Cossacks_, full of
+magnificent descriptions of the Caucasus and of interesting scenes of
+military and rural life; subsequently that masterpiece of Tolstoy's, _War
+and Peace_, narratives dealing with the war of Napoleon with Russia and
+of the subsequent period of peaceful and healthy rural life. It is
+impossible to adequately admire the power of narration and descriptive
+force, the fertility of incidents, characterisations, and dramatic
+moments, the art or rather the gift of portraiture, and finally, the
+grandeur and moral elevation, in fact, all the qualities, not one of
+which he appeared to lack, of which Tolstoy gave proof and which he
+displayed in this immense history of the Russian soul at the commencement
+of the nineteenth century; for it is thus that it is meet to qualify this
+noble creation. The only analogy is with _Les Miserables_ of Victor Hugo,
+and it must be admitted that despite its incomparable merits, the French
+work is the more unequal. _Anna Karenina_ is only a novel in the vein of
+French novels, but very profound and remarkable for its analysis of
+character and also impassioned and affecting, besides having considerable
+moral range. _The Kreutzer Sonata_ is a romance rather than a novel, but
+cruelly beautiful because it exposes with singular clairvoyance the
+misery of a soul impotent for happiness. _Resurrection_ shows that
+mournful and impassioned pity felt by Tolstoy for the humble and the
+"fallen," to use the phrase of Pushkin; it realises a lofty dramatic
+beauty. Tolstoy, in a thousand pamphlets or brief works, preached to his
+own people and to mankind the strict morality of Christ, charity,
+renunciation, peace at all price, without taking into account the
+necessities of social life; and he denounced, as had Jean Jacques
+Rousseau, the culpability of art and literature, being resigned to
+recognising his own works as condemnable. His was the soul of an exalted
+poet and a lofty poetical mind; from a poet must not be demanded
+practical common sense or that feeling for reality which is demanded,
+often unavailingly, from a statesman.
+
+DOSTOEVSKY.--Dostoevsky, with a tragic genius as great as that of
+Tolstoy, may be said to have been more restricted because he exclusively
+delineated the unhappy, the miserable, and those defeated in life. He
+knew them personally because, after being arrested in 1849 at the age of
+fifty for the crime of belonging to a secret society, he spent years in
+the convict prisons of Siberia. Those miseries he describes in the most
+exact terms and with heart-rending eloquence in _Buried Alive: Ten Years
+in Siberia_, and in the remarkable novel entitled _Crime and Punishment_.
+He has lent invaluable aid in the propagation of two sentiments which
+have created some stir in the West and which, assuredly, we desire to
+foster: namely, "the religion of human suffering" and the cult of
+"expiation."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+
+POLISH LITERATURE
+
+At an Early Date Western Influence sufficiently Potent. Sixteenth Century
+Brilliant; Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries highly Cultured;
+Nineteenth Century Notably Original.
+
+
+WESTERN INFLUENCE--Widely different from Russian literature, much more
+Western, based more on Greek and Latin culture, Polish literature holds
+high rank in the histories of European literature. Christians from the
+tenth century, the Poles knew from this epoch religious songs written by
+monks, in the vulgar tongue. To this is due the possession of the
+_Bogarodzica_, a religious and bellicose song dedicated to the Virgin
+mother of God, which is even now comprehensible, so little has the Polish
+language changed. All through the Middle Ages, literary historians can
+only find chronicles written sometimes in Latin, sometimes in the native
+language. Under the influence of the universities, and also of the
+parliamentary rule, the language acquired alike more consistency and more
+authority in the fifteenth century, whilst the sixteenth was the golden
+literary epoch of the Poles. There were poets, and even great poets, as
+well as orators and historians. Such was Kochanowski, very much a
+Western, who lived some time in Italy, also seven years in France, and
+was a friend of Ronsard. His writings were epical, lyrical, tragical,
+satirical, and especially elegiacal. He is a classic in Poland.
+Grochowski left a volume of diversified poems, hymns on various texts of
+Thomas a Kempis, _The Nights_ of Thorn, etc. Martin Bielski, who was an
+historian too, but in Latin, left two political satires on the condition
+of Poland, and his son Joachim wrote a history of his native land in
+Polish.
+
+SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES.--Though somewhat less brilliant
+than the preceding, the period of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
+is not unfavourable to Poland. Then may be enumerated the satirical
+Opalinski, the lyrical Kochanowski, the dramatist Bogulawski, manager of
+the theatre at Warsaw, who not only translated plays from the French,
+English, and Spanish, but himself wrote several comedies, of which _The
+Lover, Author, and Servant_ has remained the most celebrated. Rzewuski
+was a dramatic author with such national plays as _Wladislas at Varna_
+and _Zolkewishi_, and comedies as _The Vexations_ and _The Capricious_,
+and he also was historian, orator, literary critic, and theorist.
+
+Potocki was a literary and theoretical critic and founder of a sort of
+Polish academy (society for the perfection of the tongue and of style).
+Prince Czartoryski showed himself an excellent moralist in his _Letters
+to Doswiadryski_. Niemcewicz extended his great literary talent into a
+mass of diversified efforts. He wrote odes held in esteem, tragedies,
+comedies, fables, and tales, historical novels, and he translated the
+poems of Pope and the _Athalie_ of Racine.
+
+LITERARY RENAISSANCE.--Losing her national independence, Poland
+experienced a veritable literary renaissance, which offered but slender
+compensation. She applied herself to explore her origins, to regain the
+ancient spirit, and to live nationally in her literature. Hence her great
+works of patriotic erudition. Czacki with his _Laws of Poland and of
+Lithuania_, Kollontay with his _Essay on the Heredity of the Throne of
+Poland_, and his _Letters of an Anonymous to Stanislas Malachowski_,
+etc., Bentkowski with his _History of Polish Literature_ and his
+_Introduction to General Literature_, etc. Thence came the revival of
+imaginative literature, Felinski, on the one hand translator of
+Crebillon, Delille and Alfieri on the other, he was the personally
+distinguished author of the drama _Barbe Radzivill_; Bernatowicz, author
+of highly remarkable historical novels, among which _Poiata_ gives a
+picture of the triumph of Christianity in Lithuania in the fourteenth
+century; Karpinski, dramatist, author of _Judith_, a tragedy;
+_Alcestis_, an opera; _Cens_, a comedy, etc.; Mickiewicz, scholar, poet,
+and novelist, who, exiled from his own land, was professor of literature
+at Lausanne, then in Paris, at the College of France, extremely popular
+in France, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy, the friend of Goethe,
+Lamennais, Cousin, Michelet, and of all the French youth. He was the
+author of fine poems, of a great historical novel, _Conrade
+Vattenrod_, of _The People and the Polish Pilgrims_, of a _Lesson on the
+Slav States_.
+
+MODERN EPOCH.--At the time of writing, Poland continues to be a literary
+nation well worthy of attention. She presents an example to the races
+which incur the risk of perishing as nations because of their political
+incapacity; by preserving their tongue and by sanctifying it with a
+worthy literature they guard their country and, like the Greeks and
+Italians, hope to reconquer it some day through the sudden turns of
+fortune shown in history.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX OF NAMES CITED
+
+
+     A
+
+     About
+     Addison
+     Aeschines
+     Aeschylus
+     Aesop
+     Aicard
+     Alarcon
+     Alcasus
+     Alcamo, Ciullo of
+     Aleman
+     Alexander
+     Alfieri
+     Alphonso X
+     Alphonso XI
+     Alvarez
+     Ambrose, St.
+     Amyot
+     Anacreon
+     Anaxagoras
+     Andocides
+     Anne, Queen
+     Annunzio, Gabriel d'
+     Antiphon
+     Antonina
+     Antonius Diogenes
+     Apollonius
+     Appian
+     Apuleius
+     Aratus
+     Arcadius
+     Archilochus
+     Aretino
+     Ariosto
+     Aristophanes
+     Aristotle
+     Arnauld
+     Arrian
+     Asclepiades
+     Athanasius, St.
+     Attius
+     Aubigne, Agrippa d'
+     Augier
+     Augustine, St.
+     Augustus
+     Aulard
+     Aurispa
+     Ausonius
+     Avienus
+
+     B
+
+     Babrius
+     Bacon, Francis
+     Baldi
+     Balzac, G. de
+     Balzac, H. de
+     Bandello
+     Banville, T. de
+     Barnave
+     Barthari
+     Basil, S.
+     Bataille
+     Batiouchkov
+     Baudelaire
+     Bayle
+     Bazin
+     Beaumarchais
+     Beaumont
+     Beccaria
+     Belisarius
+     Bellay, Joachim du
+     Belleau
+     Bembo
+     Benserade
+     Bentkowski
+     Beranger
+     Bergerac, Cyrano de
+     Bergson
+     Bernard, Tristan
+     Bernardes
+     Bernatowicz
+     Berni
+     Bernstein
+     Bertaut
+     Bielski, Joachim
+     Bielski, Martin
+     Bion
+     Boccaccio
+     Bodmer
+     Boetie, La
+     Bogulawski
+     Boileau
+     Bojardo
+     Bordeaux
+     Bordello
+     Bossuet
+     Bourdaloue
+     Bourget
+     Boutroux
+     Boylesve
+     Brantome
+     Brieux
+     Bronte, C.
+     Bronte, E.
+     Browning, E. B.
+     Browning, Robert
+     Brueys, de
+     Brunetiere
+     Brunetto
+     Buddha
+     Buffon
+     Bulwer-Lytton
+     Bunyan
+     Buerger
+     Burgundy, Duke of
+     Burns
+     Burton, Robert
+     Byron
+
+     C
+
+     Caballero
+     Caesar, Julius
+     Calderon
+     Callimachus
+     Callinos
+     Calvin
+     Caminha
+     Camoens
+     Campistron
+     Campoamor
+     Candamo
+     Canizares
+     Carducci
+     Carlyle
+     Caro
+     Cassini
+     Cassius
+     Castelar
+     Castro
+     Catherine of Russia
+     Cato
+     Catullus
+     Cellini, Benvenuto
+     Cephalon
+     Cervantes
+     Charles of Orleans
+     Charles II
+     Charles V
+     Chateaubriand
+     Chatterton
+     Chaucer
+     Chenier, Andre
+     Chenier, Marie-Joseph
+     Chrysippus
+     Chrysostom
+     Cicero
+     Claudian
+     Cleanthes
+     Coleridge
+     Comines
+     Commodian
+     Comnenus
+     Comte
+     Condillac
+     Congreve
+     Constant
+     Copernicus
+     Coppee
+     Corneille
+     Corte-Real
+     Cousin
+     Cowper
+     Crabbe
+     Cratinos
+     Crebillon
+     Cromwell
+     Cyprian, St.
+     Czacki
+     Czartoryski
+
+     D
+
+     Dancourt
+     Daniel (the abbot)
+     Daniel (the prisoner)
+     Dante
+     Danton
+     Daudet
+     Davenant
+     Davila
+     Defoe
+     Delavigne
+     Delille
+     Demosthenes
+     Descartes
+     Desportes
+     Destouches
+     Diamante
+     Dickens
+     Diderot
+     Dietmar
+     Diogenes
+     Dolce
+     Dostoevsky
+     Dryden
+     Duclos
+     Dufresny
+     Dumas, (_pere_)
+     Dumas, (_fils_)
+     Duerer
+
+     E
+
+     Eberling
+     Echegaray
+     Eliot, George
+     Elisabeth
+     Ennius
+     Epictetus
+     Epicurus
+     Erasmus
+     Ercilla
+     Espinel
+     Espronceda
+     Eudoxia
+     Eupolis
+     Euripides
+     Eusebius
+     Eustathius
+     Evemerus
+
+     F
+
+     Falcam
+     Fayette, Mme. de la
+     Feijoo
+     Felinski
+     Fenelon
+     Ferreira
+     Fichte
+     Ficino
+     Fielding
+     Filangieri
+     Flaubert
+     Fletcher
+     Florez
+     Fogazzaro
+     Folengo
+     Fontenelle
+     Foscolo
+     Fouillee
+     Fox
+     Frederick II
+     Froissart
+
+     G
+
+     Galen
+     Galileo
+     Garnier
+     Gautier
+     Gellius Aulus
+     Gerson
+     Gibbon
+     Gilbert
+     Gil Vicente
+     Gioberti
+     Giordani
+     Goethe
+     Gogol
+     Goldoni
+     Goldsmith
+     Goncourt, de
+     Gongora
+     Gorgias
+     Gottsched
+     Gower
+     Gregory, St.
+     Gresset
+     Grimm
+     Grochowski
+     Gruen
+     Guarini
+     Guasco
+     Guevara
+     Guicciardini
+     Guittone
+     Guizot
+     Gutierrez
+     Guyot
+
+     H
+
+     Habington
+     Haller
+     Haraucourt
+     Hartmann
+     Hauptmann
+     Haussonville, d'
+     Hecataeus of Abdera
+     Hegel
+     Heine
+     Heliodorus
+     Henry VI
+     Heraclitus
+     Herbert
+     Herder
+     Herodian
+     Herodotus
+     Herreros
+     Hervieu
+     Hesiod
+     Hilarion
+     Hilarius, St.
+     Hildebrand
+     Hippocrates
+     Homer
+     Horace
+     Huerta
+     Hugo, Victor
+     Hugo of Berzi
+     Hume
+     Hutten
+     Hyperides
+
+     I
+
+     Iffland
+     Isla
+     Isocrates
+     Ivan
+     Izoulet
+
+     J
+
+     Jacopone
+     James I
+     Jaures
+     Jerome, St.
+     Jodelle
+     Johnson, Dr
+     Joinville
+     Jonson, Ben
+     Joseph of Byzantium
+     Jovellanos
+     Julian the Apostate
+     Junius
+     Justinian
+     Juvenal
+     Juvencus
+
+     K
+
+     Kalidas
+     Kant
+     Kantemir
+     Karpinski
+     Keats
+     Kempis, T. a
+     Klopstock
+     Kochanowski
+     Kollontay
+     Koerner
+     Kotzebue
+     Krylov
+     Kuerenberg
+     Kutochikine
+
+     L
+
+     Laberius
+     La Bruyere
+     Lacerda
+     La Chaussee
+     Lactantius
+     La Fontaine
+     Lamartine
+     Lamb, C
+     Lamennais
+     La Motte
+     Lanfranc
+     La Rochefoucauld
+     Lascaris
+     Lavater
+     Lavedan
+     Lavisse
+     Leconte de Lisle
+     Leibnitz
+     Lenau
+     Leonardo da Vinci
+     Leonidas
+     Leopardi
+     Lermontov
+     Le Sage
+     Lessing
+     Libanius
+     Livius
+     Livy
+     Lobo
+     Locke
+     Lomonosov
+     Longus
+     Lope de Vega
+     Lorris, William of
+     Louis, St
+     Louis XI
+     Lucena
+     Lucian
+     Lucilius
+     Lucretius
+     Luther
+     Lycophron
+     Lyly
+     Lysias
+
+     M
+
+     Mably
+     Macaulay
+     Machiavelli
+     MacPherson
+     Maffei
+     Mairet
+     Maistre, Joseph de
+     Malaspina
+     Malebranche
+     Malherbe
+     Mallarme
+     Manuel, John
+     Manzinho
+     Manzoni
+     Marcus Aurelius
+     Marini
+     Marivaux
+     Marlowe
+     Marmontel
+     Marot
+     Martial
+     Martinez, Rose de la
+     Mary, Princess
+     Maynard
+     Medici, Catherine de'
+     Medici, Marie de'
+     Melanchthon
+     Meleager
+     Menander
+     Mendes
+     Mendoza
+     Mercier
+     Meredith
+     Merimee
+     Metastasio
+     Meung, John de
+     Mezeray
+     Michelet
+     Mickiewicz
+     Milton
+     Mirabeau
+     Moliere
+     Mommsen
+     Monomaque
+     Montaigne
+     Montalvo
+     Montchrestien
+     Montemayor
+     Montesquieu
+     Monti
+     Montluc
+     Moratin, Leandro
+     Moratin, Nicholas
+     Moschus
+     Mun, de
+     Musseus
+     Musset, A. de
+
+     N
+
+     Naevius
+     Napoleon
+     Nepos
+     Nerva
+     Newman
+     Newton
+     Nicole
+     Niebuhr
+     Niemcewicz
+     Nietzsche
+     Nonnus
+
+     O
+
+     Olivares
+     Opalinski
+     Oppian
+     Otway
+     Ovid
+     Ozerov
+
+     P
+
+     Pacuvius
+     Palaprat
+     Pandolfini
+     Pascal
+     Paulinus, St.
+     Paul I
+     Pellico
+     Pereira
+     Pericles
+     Perron
+     Perseus
+     Peter the Great
+     Petrarch
+     Petronius
+     Philetas
+     Philip III
+     Philostrates
+     Pico della Mirandola
+     Pindar
+     Piron
+     Pisistratus
+     Planudes
+     Plato
+     Platon
+     Plautus
+     Pliny the Elder
+     Pliny the Younger
+     Plutarch
+     Politien
+     Polybius
+     Pompignan
+     Pomponius
+     Pontus
+     Pope
+     Porto-Riche
+     Potocki
+     Prevost, Abbe
+     Prevost, Marcel.
+     Procopius
+     Propertius
+     Protagoras
+     Prudentius
+     Ptolemy
+     Publius Syrus
+     Pulci
+     Pushkin
+
+     Q
+
+     Quevedo
+     Quinet
+     Quintana
+     Quintilian
+     Quintus
+     Quintus Curtius
+
+     R
+
+     Rabelais
+     Racan
+     Racine
+     Radistchef
+     Raynal
+     Regnard
+     Regnier, H. de
+     Regnier, M.
+     Renan
+     Retz, Cardinal de
+     Ribeiro
+     Ribot, A.
+     Ribot, T.
+     Richardson
+     Richepin
+     Rivas
+     Robert
+     Robertson
+     Robespierre
+     Rojas
+     Ronsard
+     Rosa
+     Rosa, Salvator
+     Rossetti, Christina
+     Rossetti, Dante
+     Rostand
+     Roucher
+     Rouget de Lisle
+     Rousseau, J. B.
+     Rousseau, J. J.
+     Ruskin
+     Rutilius
+     Rzewuski
+
+     S
+
+     Saa de Miranda
+     Saa e Menezes
+     Saavedra
+     Saint-Amant
+     Saint-Evremond
+     Saint-Gelais
+     Saint-Lambert
+     Saint-Pierre, Bernardin de
+     Saint-Simon
+     Sainte-Beuve
+     Sakyamuni
+     Sallust
+     Sand, George
+     San Phillipo
+     Sannazaro
+     Sappho
+     Sardou
+     Savonarola
+     Scarron
+     Sceve, Maurice
+     Schiller
+     Schopenhauer
+     Scipio
+     Scott
+     Scribe
+     Scudery
+     Sedaine
+     Segrais
+     Seignobos
+     Senancour
+     Seneca the Philosopher
+     Seneca the Tragic
+     Serao
+     Sevigne
+     Sextus Empiricus
+     Shakespeare
+     Shelley
+     Sheridan
+     Sidney
+     Silius Italicus
+     Simonides
+     Socrates
+     Solis
+     Sophocles
+     Soumarokoff
+     Southey
+     Spenser
+     Stael, Mme. de
+     Statius
+     Stendhal
+     Sterne
+     Sudermann
+     Sully-Prudhomme
+     Swift
+     Swinburne
+
+     T
+
+     Tacitus
+     Taine
+     Tannhaeuser
+     Tansillo
+     Tasso
+     Tassoni
+     Tennyson
+     Terence
+     Tertullian
+     Thackeray
+     Thales
+     Theocritus
+     Theodora
+     Theophrastus
+     Thespis
+     Thibaut
+     Thierry
+     Thiers
+     Thomson
+     Thorn
+     Thucydides
+     Tibullus
+     Tiraboschi
+     Tirso de Molina
+     Tolstoy
+     Torricelli
+     Trajan
+     Trediakowski
+     Treitschke
+     Trueba
+     Turgenev
+     Turgot
+     Tyrtaeus
+
+     U
+
+     Urfe, Honore d'
+
+     V
+
+     Vair, du
+     Valerius Flaccus
+     Valmiki
+     Varro
+     Vaugelas
+     Ventura de la Vega
+     Vergniaud
+     Verlaine
+     Vian, Theophilus de
+     Vico
+     Vignes, Peter of
+     Vigny, Alfred de
+     Villehardouin
+     Villon
+     Vinogradsky
+     Virgil
+     Vizin, von
+     Voiture
+     Voltaire
+
+     W
+
+     Waller
+     Wieland
+     Wolff
+     Wordsworth
+     Wycherley
+
+     X
+
+     Xenophon
+
+     Y
+
+     Young
+
+     Z
+
+     Zamora
+     Zedlitz
+     Zeno
+     Ziorgi
+     Zola
+     Zorilla
+     Zwingli
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
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