Chapter XXII: The Age of Louis Xiv:148 Aspects of Its Civilisation

Augustus, Leo X, Louis XIV appear to us in the illumination of
art and poetry. Alexander, Cæsar, and Napoleon are greater, but
have they such a divine cortège?--ARSÈNE HOUSSAYE.[f]

[Sidenote: [1610-1715 A.D.]]

That development of French civilisation and letters which attained its apogee in the second half of the seventeenth century, the progress of science and the taste for art, was not the work of Louis XIV. The movement was begun; Louis XIV had only to support it and give it a particular direction.

In order to seek and determine the causes, it is necessary to go further back. They will be found in the language, which became polished through the aspiration of society, which was reformed after the religious wars, in a better education which had reacted on manners, in a more general education and one more appropriate to the time--in fact, in the development of all the moral energies of France since Henry IV and Richelieu. Those great and independent geniuses, Richelieu, Corneille, and Descartes, gave the impulse, aroused writers or thinkers, and inspired the best society with that love, that admiration of the beautiful, which elevates the soul of a nation.

The cares of war and of power were far from engrossing all the attention of Richelieu. He completed the construction of the Palais Cardinal, which was one of the most sumptuous dwellings ever seen, and which during his lifetime he bequeathed to the king, with the sole proviso that only a prince should ever inhabit it. He likewise embellished his house at Ruel, and his château at Richelieu in Touraine. He patronised Simon Vouet, recalled Poussin from Rome, bought paintings of Lesueur and Philippe de Champagne. He established the royal printing house, and tried, although with little success, to re-establish the royal manufactures established under the preceding reign and almost abandoned since then.

FOUNDATION OF THE FRENCH ACADEMY

In 1635 Richelieu conceived the idea of founding an association whose mission should be the perfecting of the language, and which should be the highest authority in the criticism of literary works submitted by their authors. Boisrobert, Conrart, Chapelain, Rotrou, and the great Corneille are counted among the founders of this association, which was the Académie Française. The men of letters, until then placed only too often in the “domesticity” of the great--a name then far removed from the sense given to it to-day--by means of this association acquired more independence and influence. Formerly they had flattered the powerful; now they began to develop a power of their own and to be flattered in their turn. The parliament made some difficulty about the incorporation of the academy, because it had an invincible distrust of the cardinal’s ideas, whose works seemed to it always despotic, and because it feared the new company might be invested with too great privileges and with jurisdiction. It was far from imagining that the academy was to become one of the glories of France, in a time when Corneille led the list of great French writers, when Descartes wrote the _Méthode_, when French society was the most polished in Europe, when Europe already borrowed the language of France, and took France for a model in everything.[b]

THE PATRONAGE SYSTEM

In the first thirty years of the seventeenth century royalty did not yet seek to exercise any influence in intellectual matters. Richelieu is the first to have had the idea of offering royal patronage to the “Nurselings of the Muses.” He distributed a few pensions.[c]

Of all styles of literature the drama was most encouraged by Richelieu. Until then it had hardly been more than a popular amusement; it now became that of the most refined and most polished society. Doubtless, the talent of Rotrou and the genius of Corneille bore the principal part in this, but Richelieu aided them. His wish was to replace the ballets and other ordinary diversions of the court by amusements of a nobler sort, by tragedies and comedies of intrigue. He had a theatre in the Palais Cardinal and another in his mansion at Ruel. He often had plays represented there whose plan had been submitted to him. He gave advice to authors, worked with them, and even wrote himself.

His patronage extended also to tuition and studies. An important transformation was taking place in the schools. The reform of the university under Henry IV had had the effect of substituting the study of the great authors for that of scholasticism. Since then the teaching of theology had been renewed; it is well known what brilliancy it gave to the seventeenth century. The teaching of literature was not long delayed, and it is not to be doubted that a more healthful direction of men’s minds had largely contributed to prepare the intellectual superiority of this century over those preceding it. Richelieu built the Sorbonne. He favoured competition between the university and the Jesuits and showed his usual superiority in discussing questions of education.

He thought moreover that liberal education was not for everybody, and that the greatest number of families ought to prepare their children for trade or for war. Therefore he founded at his own expense an academy,--a military college for the education of the young nobility.

However, until the end of the Fronde, the court, filled with soldiers, or given up to ambitious rivalries of the noble, full of intrigues with Marie de’ Medici, of sadness with Louis XIII, of suspicions with Richelieu, of agitations under Anne of Austria, could not assume to be the supreme regulator of taste, the theatre of the arts, and impose rules or regulations upon genius. After the Fronde it was different. The refined elegance and magnificence of Mazarin, the brilliant festivities of the first years of the personal reign of Louis XIV, the transformation of the great into courtiers, the spirit of subordination substituted for a spirit of independence, increased the importance of the court. Gradually one became accustomed to look to it alone. It surrounded royalty like a luminous circle, and its brilliancy made all else pale. It became even a means of government. It contributed by its preponderance to annul parliaments and other national bodies.

Louis XIV, who instinctively sought everywhere for aids to his grandeur, understood how to nourish the brilliant society which surrounded the persons and the works of the great writers and artists. He offered the latter a magnificent theatre and unparalleled publicity. He united the scattered forces into a mighty group, displaying their talents in a strong light, making of them a majestic whole. He had all the qualities necessary for this--disposition, taste, the feeling for the beautiful, and particularly the sense of rule and harmony. He established a sort of concert of the great writers, in the same manner as he put the great ministers in harmony with each other.

From this time, with the striking uniformity, regularity, and discipline which was the character of letters and arts under his reign, the men of genius had full sway, nothing held them back. But their place was determined in the great ensemble, and they felt they were obeying a law. A great and noble harmony was established among literary efforts of the most diverse character, as among the arts destined to compete in the grandeur of the same edifice.

Less spontaneous, less audacious, perhaps even less original than in the time of the preceding generation, literature attained a perfection under Louis XIV which it never had to such a degree in any other epoch. It attained this perfection because it addressed itself less to the king and sovereign than to the flower of society grouped around him. The highest society had never before formed such a public. Bred in a grand school of admiration and surrounded by masterpieces, it evinced the greatest interest in matters of intellect. Conversation was an art and a talent, the literary taste an affectation of fashion, in fact a point of honour. The women took part in the movement, and to such a degree that it is to one of them that we owe most of our appreciation of it. Madame de Sévigné[h] in her correspondence, so well named written conversation, immortalised the society of the great century in painting it from life.[b]

Colbert took up the idea of pensions with more liberality and amplitude than did Richelieu. He created the _feuille des pensions_, which was a sort of pendant to the _feuille des bénéfices_. It was started in 1663 partly on the suggestion of Chapelain. Among those on the list was Chapelain, who called himself “the greatest French poet that has ever lived, and the one with the soundest judgment,” but whom Boileau simply characterises as “the wealthiest of all the _beaux esprits_”; also some of the great names of literature--Molière, the two Corneilles, Racine, Fléchier, Mézeray, Quinault, Charles Perrault, later Boileau himself, besides many mediocrities. Along with Frenchmen were foreigners--Graziani, the littérateur; the jurisconsult Conring; Ferrari, professor of oratory at the University of Padua; the erudites Böklerus, Gevartius, Heinsius, and Vossius; mathematicians and astronomers, such as Cassini of Bologna, Viviani of Florence, Huygens of the Hague and Helvelius of Dantzic. Louis XIV did more than pension some of the artists. He ennobled Lully, Le Nôtre, Mansart, and Lebrun. To the savants Colbert gave not only money but means of working; for them he created new chairs in the Jardin du Roi, built the Observatory of Paris, and subsidised missions and scientific expeditions. He was the founder of the _Journal des Savants_ which exists to-day.[149]

The Renaissance was above all things a period of freedom. The age of Louis XIV is characterised by order and monarchical discipline. The historians soon perceived that the king was a more exacting protector than the lords of olden times. The latter, provided their families were eulogised, left their clients perfect liberty in other matters, but the history of Louis XIV’s ancestors was the history of the whole country, and as his glory reached out in all directions, the historian was no longer free in anything. Colbert let Mézeray know that if he wished to keep his pension of 4,000 livres he would have to speak with more discretion of the _gabelle_ and the _taille_ and to abstain from too free reflections on the policies of former kings. Mézeray only half understood, and half his pension was suppressed.

Assuredly the royal protection had its good effect, but there was caprice in the king’s favours. For a sovereign to control letters and art without making mistakes, he would have to be infallible and with a mind to embrace and understand everything. But Louis XIV did not understand everything and was often mistaken. When, in 1667, he forbade the funeral eulogy of Descartes did he know that the latter was the most eminent thinker of the age?

LITERARY CHARACTERISTICS

In the literary history of the seventeenth century a division must be noted. Voltaire[i] has neglected it when he introduces into what he calls the _Siècle de Louis XIV_ such dissimilar geniuses as Corneille and Racine, Bossuet and Fénelon. But even while retaining this time-honoured expression, it should be applied only to that period during which Louis XIV’s personality, the prestige of his glory and the action of his laws and institutions were predominant. Now during an entirely earlier period of more than sixty years a whole group of writers was absolutely outside his influence. Régnier, Rotrou, Corneille, Descartes, and Pascal, to speak only of the greatest ones, had accomplished their labours before the personal government of Louis XIV began. On the contrary Racine, Bossuet, La Fontaine, and Boileau, and for the greater part of his work Molière, belong to the generation which saw the splendour of Louis XIV, and which disappeared from the scene before the decadence of the monarchy had commenced. Finally La Bruyère, Fénelon, Vauban, and Bois-Guilbert, without mentioning the great Protestant writers of France, are the products of an entirely different period. In reality the true “century” of Louis XIV did not last more than a quarter of that time, from 1661 to 1685.

The seventeenth century may thus be divided into three periods which present certain common characteristics, and are also distinguished by special characteristics. All three are equally a continuation of the sixteenth-century Renaissance. The charm of antiquity revealed by the humanists is still felt. The gods of the _littérateur_ are those of Greece, or rather Greek gods under Roman names. If the French literature of the seventeenth century had perished in some great cataclysm, and if after a score of centuries some erudite Australian or American had found some of its fragments, he might have believed that the contemporaries of Louis XIV worshipped the same gods as the Athenians and the Romans. However, the French, so smitten with antiquity, knew little about it. They were, after all, so original, so French, and so steeped in their own age that they showed a singular inability to imagine what was really the civilisation of Athens and of Rome. Louis XIV’s contemporaries studied Demosthenes, Plato, and Plutarch to no purpose; they got from them nothing but a deification of the monarchy. They read the ancient authors with keen pleasure, but it did not occur to them to do so in the light of the conditions of ancient life, and they applied to them the same rules of criticism as to the authors of their own day. Since journeys to the East were at that time most infrequent, and no archæological research had yet been undertaken, the age had no idea as to what were the architecture, the furnishings, the costumes, and the manners of antiquity. The French dramatic poets give the title of “prince” to Agamemnon or Theseus, and addressed Phædra or Andromache as “madame,” as though these personages had been their contemporaries.

In spite of the cult, well or ill understood, of pagan antiquity, no century was so profoundly Christian as the seventeenth. The absence of the marvellous, from a Christian point of view, in literary works is explained not by indifference for Christianity, but by respect and scruple. Corneille wrote _Polyeucte_ and other sacred pieces; but let his _Cid_ be compared with those of the Spaniards; all the supernatural is banished to such a degree that the type of the Castilian champion is transformed and almost mutilated. Santiago no longer appears on the battle-field to revive the hero’s courage. One of the rules of taste in the seventeenth century is precisely to avoid a mixture of the sacred and the profane.

Seventeenth-century literature chose its subjects from antiquity, from contemporaneous society, from human psychology, but almost never from nature. The world of letters no longer lived in the field as in the sixteenth century; it lived in the cities, especially in Paris, or at the court. Malherbe boasts of going to learn the real French language on the place Maubert; Régnier, Chapelle, Bachaumont, and many others were habitués of the Parisian _cabarets_, and in the narrow streets of the capital formed, as we say nowadays, a literary Bohemia. Racan and some others claimed to have composed _idylles champêtres_, but what is their background? It is no more the French countryside than their shepherds and shepherdesses are French peasants.

A strophe of Malherbe on the banks of the Orne, a few laboured alexandrines of Boileau upon his country house and its trees; one fine page of Honoré d’Urfé upon a valley of Forez--this is almost all that Louis XIV’s contemporaries have to say about nature. They looked too much into their ancient authors and too much at themselves to see it well. It is for the same reasons that Le Nôtre was able to create that strange and unreal nature in the gardens of Versailles, and that in painting the genre of pure landscape is almost unknown in the seventeenth century.

As for the special characteristics in the first period--an Italian and Spanish influence is perceptible. Corneille takes from Spanish history the story of the _Cid_, and Molière that of _Don Juan_. After Louis XIV assumed the government, the French borrowed almost nothing from their neighbours. French taste is formed; it is original; it is exquisite.

The first period is a period of freedom; it continues the sixteenth century. Literature has not yet felt the yoke of literary rules. All forms are attempted--tragedy, comedy, and burlesque, and the three are even combined without scruple.

The theatre, the Christian pulpit itself, have singular license. Descartes creates a philosophy and Pascal polemics. On the contrary the first twenty years of Louis XIV’s government are signalled at once by the domination of rules and by the apotheosis of the king. Parnassus has a legislator, Boileau, and a sort of Congregation of the Index, the French Academy.[c]

SCIENCE

The seventeenth century was one of the great scientific ages of humanity. It saw the birth of analytical geometry and of the infinitesimal calculus, the formulation of the astronomical laws of Kepler and Newton, and the workings of astronomical discovery. It witnessed the first great stride of physics, the progress of optics and acoustics, the invention of the barometer, the thermometer, the manometer, the air-pump, the electrical machine; the first rudiments of the steam-engine; the first researches on plant life, and the first attempt at botanical classification. Anatomy and physiology were revolutionised by the discovery of the circulation of the blood, of the chyliferous and lymphatic systems, by the beginning of histology and microscopic research. Medicine made progress in all its branches and was enriched by new medicaments.

But much of this was accomplished outside of France. In mathematics the French may place the names of Descartes, Pascal, and Fermat alongside of Kepler, Galileo, Newton, and Leibnitz; but the great Keplerian and Newtonian laws of universal gravitation; the great Leibnitzian theories on the formation of our globe; the astronomic discoveries of Galileo, Huygens, and Helvelius surpassed the work of Gassendi, Picard, Cassini, Bouillaud, and Cassegrain. In physics, Pascal, Descartes, Mariotte, and Denis Papin upheld the French name, but they have but one zoölogist[150] (Claude Perrault also a physician and architect) to place alongside with those of Italy, England, and especially Holland; in botany Tournefort let himself be outdistanced by the English; in geology the French had but Descartes and Maillet; in the medical sciences they had only Pacquet, Duverney, and a few skilful practitioners. This comparative inferiority of French science to art and letters proves that it needs an organisation for work, and a liberality on the part of the public powers which at that time it did not have. The yoke of authority, so harmful to free research, was heavier in France than in the Protestant countries, where scientific progress especially manifested itself. The French superiority in mathematics is due perhaps to the fact that mathematics never had and cannot have an Aristotle. Finally we must take into account the bent of the French mind in that period when the people were above all artists, orators, and moralists. “The physical sciences,” said Dacier at a later date, “were little cultivated in an age which seems to find no charm but in literature.” We might correct wherein this judgment goes perhaps too far by this appreciation of Cuvier: he says that Francis I was the first to make erudition flourish in France, Richelieu literature, and Louis XIV science.

René Descartes, descendant of a noble family, was born in La Haye, Touraine, in 1596. In 1612 he terminated his studies with the Jesuits at La Flèche. The period between 1612 and 1629 was spent in travel, which was followed by his stay in Holland. Just one year after the appearance of the masterpiece of Corneille, _The Cid_, Descartes gave to the world, in 1637, the _Discourse on Method_. This and his _Metaphysical Meditations_ (1641) are his two chief works. In 1644 appeared his third great work, _Principles of Philosophy_, in which is propounded his theory of the world and the doctrine of Vortices. Descartes never married. In 1647 the French court granted him a pension; and shortly after he went to the Swedish court, where he had been visited by Queen Christina.[a]

(1596-1650)]

France held it an honour to have given birth to René Descartes. While still very young he solves certain famous mathematical problems; writes, under the name of D’Abrégé, a treatise on music; and shuts himself up for twenty years in a sort of retreat in Holland, where he devotes himself with admirable assiduity to the research of truth, and composes those works which are to have such an influence on the future progress, not alone of science, but of civilisation. In 1629 he promulgates the law of refraction, aspires to make clear the cause of celestial movements, already demonstrated by Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler, by reducing them all to a mechanical system. He conceives the idea of whirling clouds of rarefied matter, in the centre of which he places the sun and planets, supposing that the movement of the planets carries around with them the satellites, and that planets and satellites are in turn swept in a circular orbit round the sun. His theories seize upon the popular imagination, and arouse keen enthusiasm; by what he calls his system of “methodical doubting” he points out to humanity the true road that leads to the intuitive perception of nature’s laws, and succeeds in so impressing his lessons upon all minds that the absolute empire given by the Arabs and their imitators to the theories of Aristotle--an empire that would have been disavowed by that immortal man himself--is completely destroyed. One of his aims is also to obtain command over the human heart, that he may thereby fortify the basis of morality all over the world, and to this end he gives forth his meditations on the existence of God and the immortality of the soul.[q]

Meanwhile the theories of Descartes were invading France and all Europe. In 1650, when occurred the death at Stockholm, at the age of fifty-four, of the man who had given back to the modern world Pythagoras, Socrates, and Plato, victory was assured, the science of philosophy was founded. There are gaps and imperfections in the system which may expose it to temporary eclipse, but as a whole it will never perish.[g]

Of the fifty-four years which Descartes thus passed on earth, more than thirty were spent in a state of self-abnegation such as no anchorite has ever emulated. It was little that his sleep and diet and exercise were exactly regulated by the single purpose of securing, to the utmost possible extent, the independence of his soul on his body. His mental appetites were subjugated to a still more rigid discipline. To secure to his reason an undisputed supremacy over all his other faculties, he laboured, not only to cast down every idol of the cavern, but to consign to oblivion all the interests, the sentiments, and the events with which either his heart or his imagination had ever been occupied. He even attempted to emancipate himself from the memory of those deceptive languages, Greek and Latin, in which such subtle disguises have been found for so many mental illusions. That he might ascend to the sanctuary of truth, he thus aspired to become a pure abstraction of defæcated intellect.

“_Cogito, ergo sum_” is the massive foundation stone of the colossal edifice erected by Descartes. That famous proposition, though really “the well-ripened fruit of long delay,” may perhaps sound not only as a truism, but as of all truisms the most meagre. Such a judgment would, however, prove nothing except the ignorance and incompetency of the judge.

“I think, therefore I exist,” is not the fragment of a syllogism which might be reconstructed thus: “Whatever thinks, exists. But I think. Therefore I exist.” It is rather an enthymeme--that is, an immediate sequence of two propositions, of which the second is the necessary offspring of the first. “I think”--that is, I am conscious of the act of thinking. Myself and my thoughts are a plurality, not a unity. They are the objects of which I am the subject. My consciousness of them is my adjudication that such objects exist. Or suppose that I can doubt even the existence of my own thoughts. Well, even so; that very doubt is itself a thought of which I am conscious. Let my scepticism be so absolute, and so universal, as to involve in uncertainty every other conceivable position, yet that very scepticism is the affirmation of myself as a thinking being.

Here, then, the naked reason has at length set her foot upon one resting-place, narrow, if you will, but yet firm and immovable. Here is one truth which cannot be assailed, even by doubt itself; or, rather, here is a truth which doubt itself does but verify and confirm. Nor is this a barren position. It is rather a ground which, when duly cultivated, is prolific of results of the highest moment to every thinking being.

Francis Bacon was not more the founder of rationalism in England, than René Descartes was the founder of it in France. Nor was he content to vindicate the rights of reason. He laboured, also, to determine and enforce her obligations. In Descartes the characteristic logic of the French understanding attained its perfection, as, in his writings, it found its model.

Blaise Pascal was a Cartesian. Like Descartes he began with doubt, in order that he might end in certainty. Like him he renounced all allegiance to merely human authorities, however exalted, and however venerable. In the spirit of his master, he received what was passing in the microcosm of his own mind, as being, at least to himself, the primary and indispensable witness of truth. As a true disciple of that severe school, he not only revered his own reason as the supreme earthly judge of every question so brought under his cognisance, but conducted all such investigations by the aid of the same geometrical logic by which Descartes himself had been guided.

But here the similitude ended, and the divergence began. Descartes impersonated the “Pure reason,” sojourning among men, to occupy herself, not with the business of their lives, but with the mysteries of their nature. Pascal impersonated human sympathy, yearning over the world from which he had withdrawn, and still responding to all the sorrows by which it was agitated. Lofty as was the range of his thoughts, they were never averted from that great human family to which he belonged. Every afflicted member of it had in him a fellow-sufferer.[g]

(1623-1662)]

Pascal was born at Clermont-Ferrand (1623), and died at Paris (1662). He was, like Descartes, a universal scientist. His health, naturally feeble, was still more injured by his intense thought. He was deeply religious, and saw Christianity in Jansenism. A carriage accident, which occurred on the Neuilly bridge, and which endangered his life, caused him to become rigorously devout. He even became subject to visions and hallucinations, and finally withdrew to Port-Royal, where he lived in retirement. He devoted the last years of his life to collecting material for a great work, destined to prove the truth of the Christian religion. The fragments of this great work, notes, pieces of paper, strung together without order or system, were found after his death. His friends at Port-Royal made selections from these, and published them in 1670,--the first edition, very incomplete, of his _Thoughts_ (_Pensées_). This book of thoughts is above all a history of a great soul, tormented by doubt, terrified, at the same time attracted, by the mysteries of the faith.[c] _The Provincial Letters_ (1656), considered by many his masterpiece, was a biting satire on the Jesuits. The greatest French critics, including Voltaire and D’Alembert, agree in the statement that this work contributed more than any other composition to form and polish the French language. His ascetic life tended to shorten his life. He died in Paris, aged 39.[a] After his death, appeared also two other little tracts, one of which is _Equilibrium of Fluids_, the other _The Weight of the Mass of Air_. To err on the side of rigour, is not the usual fault of genius: but Pascal was in all respects singular, and differed, not only from ordinary men, but from other men of genius. With every deduction that can be made for a few errors arising out of his education, Pascal was undoubtedly one of the ornaments of human nature; and if a few have rivalled him in talents, no man of equal eminence, perhaps, can be found who lived so innocently as Pascal.[r]

POETRY: BOILEAU

The writings of Descartes and Pascal, the doctrines of the French Academy and of Port-Royal, had perfected the art of prose writing. This had not been done for poetry nor yet for the art of writing in verse, which constitutes the perfection of poetry. On this head much still remained to be done, after the time of Malherbe, to consolidate his work. This was the task of Boileau. To the glory of Port-Royal must be added that of having enlightened, both by precept and example in the art of writing in prose, the poet who best understood and perhaps best practised the art of writing in verse.

For two centuries Boileau has been a bugbear, whom all poets fear. All of them, in fact, find him on their road, threatening with innumerable difficulties, with fatigue and labour, who so would aspire to the glory of verse. The dramatic poet, the lyrist, the elegist, the writer of comedies, and even the writer of sonnets, must take him into consideration. They are all tormented by the ideal of style which Boileau has set up, and by that other ideal of perfection of language--indispensable to all styles, and without which nothing lasting can be written.[d]

The taste of the great and the noble--in one word, the particular taste of Louis XIV--dominated everything. Gallic and burlesque literature disappeared. The admiration of Louis was universal, profound, and of such sincerity that it excluded, in the grossest flatteries, all reproach of flattery; love of the king was confused with love of the country, and one would not have been believed more of an adulator in glorifying the king than he would be to-day in glorifying France. The great care of writers was studied elegance and perfection of form. Never was literature so completely and exclusively literary and, with the exception of a few works, especially those of Molière, one might say that it was void of new ideas. The ideas which antiquity or Christian tradition furnished, the great general ideas which belong to all ages and all countries, the commonplaces of morality and human psychology were sufficient. It was on this foundation that Racine pushed the analysis of passion to perfection, that La Bruyère[j] struck off, as clean-cut and brilliant as medals from the mint, his _Caractères_, and La Rochefoucauld[k] his _Maximes_.[c]

ORATORY: BOSSUET

The moral and social side of this great literature showed itself above all in works of another kind. La Rochefoucauld wrote the thoughts of a courtier, Nicole those of a director of consciences. The Christian pulpit rose with Bossuet to an unparalleled greatness to keep with Bourdaloue in that middle course, calm and regular, where wisdom tempers strength, and dignity never lowers itself. Bourdaloue was the ordinary preacher of the king and the court, and made for his audience as his audience was made for him. In the pulpit he had the nobility and perfection of Racine. As to Bossuet, he is above all comparison. If he does not for one instant lose sight of rule and law, without which strength cannot be sure of itself, he obeyed less the spirit of his time than he dominated it. While leading the funeral cortège of all the grandeurs of the age, he surrounded it with an incomparable lustre, which still retains the illusion, by the majesty of his eloquence.

Bossuet has not treated of political subjects any more than Nicole or Bourdaloue. He viewed society only from the heights of Christianity. If he exalts the splendours of the court and the king, it is to humiliate them all the more profoundly under the hand of God. The root of his eloquence is in religion, as the form of it is in the Bible, the language of which he applied so marvellously to the things of his time. He touched on history and politics in only two works,[l] written for the dauphin. Even there it is the preacher who speaks. He unrolls before the dauphin the sequence of the purposes of God. He demonstrated to him according to the Bible the sacredness of royalty, and if he deduced from this sacredness the duty of obedience for subjects, he also deduced corelative duties for kings. He recognises the fundamental law that kings should be respected; he warns them against the danger of their passions, above all against the mania for conquests which ruin the people. The clergy of the seventeenth century ruled the court and the world because it was disinterested. It took the temporal government of France, such as Louis XIV had made it, and strove to raise it to a Christian ideal. The government had a panegyrist of another disposition--Louis XIV himself. Louis XIV was not content to be the author or inspirator of the acts of his reign, he was also its first, one might say its only political writer. His _Mémoires_,[m] of which the basis belongs to him, and of which it matters little that the style has been polished by Périgny or Pellisson, explain his conduct admirably. It is drawn there with the fidelity which he himself admired and which he hoped would win so much public admiration, that there was nothing to hide.[b]

(1627-1704)]

THE THIRD PERIOD

The third period has an entirely different aspect. Royalty has so much abused its principle that it is being discussed. The Revocation, whose aim was to complete the reign of silence at home, caused an outbreak of a thousand rebellious voices beyond the frontiers which had its echoes in France. The war which Louis XIV waged for one idea brought back the reign of ideas. That confusion of king and country which hitherto had been complete suddenly ceased. Formerly everything was admired; everything was well. The plaints which arose from devastated fields and ruined industries dealt a blow to this optimism. La Bruyère in a few lines paints a terrifying picture of the French peasant. Fénelon in a letter to Louis XIV judges with mournful severity both the government and the character of the king. Now everything is not all right and other things are sought for. Vauban proposes tax reform; Bois-Guilbert, a whole new economic system. To this desolate reality Fénelon opposes in his _Télémaque_ a Utopia, an ideal city--the Salento of King Idomeneus. To the perpetual warfare the abbé de Saint-Pierre[n] would substitute his project for perpetual peace, which appeared in 1713, and to the government by one man a government by several. Finally in a room in his hôtel at Versailles a man, a duke and a peer, every evening--his day as a courtier over--shuts himself up and with what he has seen and heard still vivid in his mind, adds a few pages to that colossal monument known as the _Mémoires de Saint-Simon_.[o] It is from this that posterity, disabused of eulogy and panegyric, will learn to know another king, another Versailles from those which Racine and Bossuet have shown it. In that period of French literature what is uppermost are new ideas. What matters it now whether the form be elegant and harmonious as with Fénelon, energetic and incorrect as with Saint-Simon, diffuse and dull as with the abbé de Saint-Pierre? The interest no longer lies here; the day of marvellous style and the time of art for art’s sake is past. Henceforth the great writers will write only to uphold a thesis, propose a reform, or prepare a revolution. Their greatness will be measured by their success. The eighteenth century has begun.

THE DRAMA: TRAGEDY

The sixteenth century handed down, in France, two forms of dramatic poetry, the mystery plays--that is to say, the religious drama--and the tragedy, a so-called imitation of the ancient form. Mystery plays were, in 1548, forbidden in Paris; the ancient tragedy had become sterile. The real French theatre remained to be founded.[c]

_Corneille_

At last Corneille appears. _Mélite_ is the play given and the public applauds it with transports under which there seems to lurk premonition of the glory to which dramatic art is later to attain in France. Corneille surpasses rather than falls short of this expectation. Having made a deep study of the ancient tragic writers and the dramatic authors of modern times, he weighs carefully all the rules which he observes them to have used, and, while slavishly following none, adopts those which he finds most conformable to his own needs. With the ease of one who is their superior, or at least their equal, he reveals the inmost workings of the minds and hearts of the famous men whom he introduces on the stage; breathes into them, as it were, his own enthusiasms, raises them up to his own high stature. He presents his characters with the fidelity of history, but in proportions that would alone command admiration. He paints portraits of a resemblance so striking that they seem to have come from the hand of the subtlest of political writers, the most consummate of statesmen, or the greatest of military leaders. To his astonished and enraptured countrymen he gives _The Cid_, _Les Horaces_, _Cinna_, _Polyeucte_, _Pompée_, _Rodogune_, and _Héraclius_, and may be said to create French comedy when he writes _Le Menteur_. This genius seems the more sublime when it is compared with the simplicity and modesty of his private life. In his old age his head is crowned with laurels, and it is of him that the great Racine says, “It is not easy to find a poet who unites such a number of talents, so many excellent manifestations of art, force, judgment, wit. We cannot too greatly admire the nobility and economy of his subjects, the vehemence of his passion, the depth and gravity of his sentiments, and the dignity as well as the prodigious variety of his characters.”[q] Pierre Corneille was born at Rouen, 1606, and according to a time-worn chronicle,[151] “of considerable parents, his father holding no small places under Louis XIII.” He was brought up to the bar but soon deserted it. His great success brought upon him the enmity of his rivals, even Richelieu entering into this cabal. He was chosen a member of the French Academy. His private life was uneventful, due perhaps to the fact that his manners were simple and he was never successful in paying court to the great. He died in Paris in 1684, leaving several children. Corneille’s works consist of thirty plays, tragedies and comedies.[a]

The drama of Corneille preserves a certain freedom of manner that is not found in the succeeding generation. Thus he chooses sacred as well as profane subjects; he restores Christianity to the theatre whence the prejudices of a good society had banished it; from the acts of the martyrs he borrowed the subject of _Polyeucte_ and _Théodore_. In such works as _Nicomède_ or _Don Sanche_ the comic element mingles with the tragic. Above all he finds it difficult to conform to the prescriptions of Aristotle’s _Poetics_ to the rule of the three unities. Now Chapelain had just discovered the _Poetics_; he had recommended its precepts to Mairet for his _Sophonisbe_, Leagued with the Academy against the success of the _Cid_, he tried to impose them on Corneille. Being commissioned to draw up “the sentiments of the Academy” concerning this play, he did not fail to denounce the author’s violations of the unity of time and the unity of place. Corneille defended his tragedies. Finally, seized with scruples and intimidated by this phantom of a system of poetics made for a theatre wholly different from the French, Corneille submits. He writes plays following all the rules, such as _Pertharite_, _Agésilas_, _Attila_; but it is just these which are his weakest.[c]

_Racine_

(1639-1699)]

Racine, who rose when Corneille declined, founded his dramas on a very different principle. With him the great motive is passion, and passion no longer arrested by the conflict of duty. His characters are as though carried away by their frenzies. The type of Racine’s tragedy is indeed the drama of passion. What he excels in painting is love, furious and cruel with Hermione, Roxane, Phædra; plaintive and resigned with Iphigenia or Junia; grave and ready for sacrifice with Monima; full of tears and of gentle reproaches with Bérénice.

This man, who divided with Corneille the glory of French classical tragedy, was born in Ferté-Milon (1639) of bourgeois parents. He received his education at the college of Beauvais and at Port-Royal. Becoming disgusted with theology, which study he had entered into, he went to Paris, where he formed his friendships with Molière and Boileau. It was his ode on the marriage of Louis XIV, for which he received a pension, which first brought him into prominence. Of a sensitive disposition and inclined to melancholy, the criticisms and intrigues of the court made him renounce dramatic composition. However after his marriage in 1677 he became reconciled with the gentlemen of Port-Royal and was appointed historiographer by Louis XIV. At the suggestion of Madame de Maintenon he wrote _Esther_ and afterward, _Athalie_. His tragedies are _Andromaque_, _Britannicus_, _Bérénice_, _Mithridate_, _Iphigénie_, and _Phèdre_. “I avow,” says Voltaire,[i] “that I regard _Iphigénie_ as the chef-d’œuvre of the stage.” Racine was admitted to the Academy in 1673. The ill reception of his _Athalie_ caused him to entirely renounce poetry. Hurt by a disapproving criticism of the king on a memorial he had written, “he conceived dreadful ideas of the king’s displeasure: and indulging his chagrin and fears, brought on a fever, which surpassed the power of medicine, for he died of it, after being grievously afflicted with pains, in 1699.”[152][a]

With Racine French classical tragedy is finally constituted. It is a quite peculiar species of literature, and one which could have arisen only at one particular period of French history. It differs from Greek tragedy for it dispenses with the accompaniment of music and does not admit choruses.[153] It is the antipodes of the Shakespearian drama. The latter journeys freely through time and space, multiplies characters, allows the interposition of the crowd, mingles the comic with the tragic, speaks alternately in the most poetic and the most trivial language, evokes spectres from the tomb, brings shipwrecks, battles, murders, executions on the scene. French tragedy makes the entire action take place in a period which, according to the precepts laid down, must not exceed twenty-four hours; it never changes the scene and to avoid difficulties everything generally takes place in the vestibule of a palace or the square of a city; it admits no more than three or at most four characters, to whom are added confidants whose mission is to listen to what the chief personages have to say to the public; when a valiant army or an immense crowd is to be indicated an accessory character is made to follow the principal actor. It never unbends, never exhibits either a buffoon or a poltroon, it seldom takes its subjects from elsewhere than Greek and Roman antiquity; it brings on the stage only noble personages, gods, demigods, heroes, emperors, kings, or princes, or servants who are not less dignified and who know how to keep their places. It speaks the noblest and purest language; it leaves the spectres in their vaults, and reduces the fantastic element to the recital of some dream; all murders, the assassination of Pyrrhus, the poisoning of Britannicus, the strangling of Monima, the execution of Haman or of Athaliah are relegated behind the scenes, out of sight of the spectator. If the actor cannot do otherwise than kill himself on the stage, he kills himself neatly with a poniard or sword of a temper peculiar to tragedy, for they do not draw blood. There is no action on the stage: we only see the impression which the action produces on the characters, and hear the reflections with which it inspires them.

This mould of classical tragedy maintained itself intact for nearly two centuries. It contented the contemporaries of Louis XIV, of Louis XV, of Robespierre and of Napoleon successively. The neighbouring nations hastened to adopt it: even England herself did so though she continued to play Shakespeare.

COMEDY

French comedy, during more than half the seventeenth century, was feeling her way. She was hesitating between two types--antique comedy, so difficult to transport to the French stage, and naturally cold because it represented manners so very different from those of France; and Italian comedy, in which under the most diverse names there incessantly recur the old good-man who is deceived, the shrewd ward, the bold lover, the cunning valet, or the complaisant soubrette. Most of the comedies on which Corneille tried his hand and the first which came from Molière belong to the Italian type.

When, in 1659, Molière put the _Précieuses ridicules_ on the stage, there was a surprise almost equal to that which had been occasioned by the _Cid_. After French tragedy, French comedy was now revealing itself. The comical element proceeded not from some flimsy plot, a hundred times repeated, but from the lively painting of contemporary manners. Molière was to rise higher still and to paint not the absurdities of a day but the eternal characters of humanity. Those whom he brings before us in his great comedies--the hypocrite and dupe of his _Tartuffe_, the Alceste, the Philinte and Célimène of his _Misanthrope_; the Harpagon of his _Avare_; the vain _roturier_ of his _Bourgeois gentilhomme_, his _Femmes savantes_, his _Malade imaginaire_--are so far as concerns their main characteristics, of all times and all countries. Yet these personages, though they are universal types, are quite specially of the time and country in which Molière lived. Molière’s destiny required that he should have to please three sorts of public: the court, the men of letters, and the people. For the king he wrote _Amphitryon_ and the comic ballets; for the literary men he drew his immortal types; for the people he returned to the comic elements of the Italian theatre and the theatres at the fairs and he raised them to the level of high art. If any one of these three very diverse influences had been exercised alone upon the genius of Molière, it might have refined, or ennobled, or vulgarised him to excess; but by a happy combination he owed to the one that elegance and nobility, to one that depth and knowledge, to the third that overflowing _verve_, that power at once comic and dramatic, which are the characteristics of his genius. He was not exclusively either the poet of the court or of the Academy or of the crowd; this is why he has been and will remain the national poet _par excellence_.[c]

Molière, whose true name was Jean Baptiste Pocquelin, was born at Paris about 1620. He was both son and grandson to _valets de chambres_ on one side, and tapestry-makers on the other, to Louis XIII and was designed for the latter business, with a view of succeeding his father in that place. But the grandfather being very fond of the boy, and at the same time a great lover of plays, used to take him often with him to the hôtel de Bourgogne; which presently roused up Molière’s natural genius and taste for dramatic representations, and created in him such a disgust to the trade of tapestry-making, that at last his father consented to let him go, and study under the Jesuits, at the college of Clermont. He finished his studies there in five years’ time, in which he contracted an intimate friendship with Chapelle, Bernier, and Cyrano. Chapelle, with whom Bernier was an associate in his studies, had the famous Gassendi for his tutor, who willingly admitted Molière to his lectures, as he afterwards also admitted Cyrano. It was here that Molière deeply drank of that sound philosophy, and stored himself with those great principles of knowledge, which served as a foundation to all his comic productions. When Louis XIII went to Narbonne, in 1641, his studies were interrupted; for his father, who was grown infirm, not being able to attend the court, Molière was obliged to go there to supply his place. Upon his return to Paris, however, when his father was dead, his passion for the stage, which had induced him first to study, revived more strongly than ever; and if it be true, as some have said, that he, for a time studied the law, and was admitted an advocate, he soon yielded to the influence of his stars, which had destined him to be the restorer of comedy in France.

What became of him from 1648 to 1652 we know not, this interval being the time of the civil wars, which caused disturbances in Paris; but it is probable, that he was employed in composing some of those pieces which were afterwards exhibited to the public. La Béjart, an actress of Champagne, waiting, as well as he, for a favourable time to display her talents, Molière was particularly kind to her; and as their interests became mutual, they formed a company together, and went to Lyons in 1653, where Molière produced his first play, called, _L’Étourdi_, or _The Blunderers_. In 1663, Molière obtained a pension of a thousand livres; and, in 1665, his company was altogether in his majesty’s service.

His last comedy was _Le malade imaginaire_, or _The Hypochondriac_; and it was acted for the fourth time, February 17th, 1673. Upon this very day Molière died.

ARCHITECTURE

The fine arts, even more than literature, bear the impress of the period, because a government has more means to act on them. If it cannot create them, nor supply individual inspiration, it can at least impress a certain direction by the nature of the works it orders from artists, and the nature of the patronage which it affords them. For instance, Louis XIV had a passion for building. His architectural constructions are of a style apart, in harmony with his tastes, the needs of his court, and the characteristics of his royalty.[b]

The French architecture of the Renaissance happily blended the elements of ogival art and those of ancient art recovered in Italy. The seventeenth century broke more completely with the national past. One of the latest cathedrals is that of Orleans, constructed under Henry IV and his successors, but which had been designed in the sixteenth century. The ogival style was no longer in fashion; it was freely regarded as a relic of ancient barbarism, and it was branded with the epithet of “Gothic.” Numerous acts of vandalism were committed on the most venerable monuments of the past. In 1699 Robert de Cotte, under the pretext of “restoring” the interior of Notre Dame de Paris, destroyed the close, pulled down the rood-loft, burned the wooden stalls, tore out the tombs and stone effigies, and broke the coloured glass windows.

(1651-1715)]

The dominating influence of the age was that of the Italian monuments, not only of the first epoch of the Renaissance but also that of its decadence. However, French artists did not limit themselves to imitation; and under the inspiration of those ideas of grandeur and majesty which are the cachet of the seventeenth century, they created a truly original art, as characteristic of Louis XIV’s reign as was its literature.

To obtain more imposing façades, instead of dividing them up as in the preceding epoch into almost equal stories, each distinguished by a different ornamentation, now only one principal story was admitted. Below, it rests on a ground floor which sometimes is almost a basement; above, it is surmounted by an attic which was only half or two-thirds the height of the principal story. Everything is sacrificed to the latter. To enhance still further the desired impression of unity and grandeur the ornamentation is greatly reduced. None of those architectural accidents, those happy caprices, or that ingenious variety which in sixteenth century monuments interested the eye and the mind--nothing but great sober lines severe to monotony. This is what is called the colossal style and what might be called the Louis XIV style.[c]

Versailles is the indestructible monument of the royalty of Louis XIV. One is struck at first by its large proportions; it is above all its majestic regularity which produces such imposing effects. All is in harmony with the habits of the court of the great king. One may criticise the arrangements, and Saint-Simon[o] without being an artist has done so with humour, sometimes with truth. But the ensemble leaves a profound impression of admiration, almost of respect. One feels that Versailles, to-day a vast solitude, was built to be peopled by an immense court, where Louis XIV lived in the midst of a France made in his image. Versailles, with its grandeur, its regularity, its majestic and classic ornamentation, merits to be the type of an architecture truly royal. If nobility is one of the principal conceptions of the ideal of beauty, this ideal has never been attained in an equal degree. Also, even as the court of Louis XIV gave the tone to the greater part of European courts, Versailles has become the type and model of the greater part of royal and foreign châteaux and gardens.

Other châteaux, like those of St. Cloud and Marly, were built almost in the same style by Mansart and Le Nôtre, the one the architect of the palace, and the other of the gardens of Versailles. St. Cloud was the residence of Monsieur, brother of the king. Marly, which was begun after Nimeguen, could offer a sort of retreat to the court fatigued by magnificence. Meudon, Sceaux, Choisy, built for princes, princesses, or ministers, produced in their more restricted proportions the essential characteristics of this royal architecture.

Paris has kept fewer traces of Louis XIV; he rarely made long sojourns there. The principal monuments he raised there were the triumphal arches at the portes du Trône, St. Antoine, St. Bernard, St. Denis, and St. Martin, monuments erected to celebrate his re-entry into Paris after the Peace of the Pyrenees, or his victories during the war with Holland. Meanwhile he also joined the Louvre to the Tuileries by means of the magnificent colonnade designed by Perrault. To this reign also belongs the northern boulevards arranged as great avenues, the Champs-Élysées, and finally the garden of the Tuileries.[b]

SCULPTURE AND PAINTING

The taste for statuary did not revive until the time of the Italian regent Marie de’ Medici. Puget (1622-1694) was an independent. The other sculptors of the time bent themselves to monarchical discipline. They entered academies of sculpture and painting and placed themselves under the direction of Lebrun, for at that time it seemed natural to subordinate sculpture to painting. The sculpture of the great epoch of Louis XIV shows the influence of the vigorous studies the artists made from the antique. It is a diversified sculpture, but skilful and strong.

The Renaissance had been in France more brilliant for architecture and even sculpture than for painting. The French had still much to learn from the Italians and the Flemish. They had a few painters, but they had no French school. Besides it was in Italy that the first generation of French artists of the seventeenth century was formed. Lesueur is perhaps the sole great painter who did not leave France. Of these illustrious travellers, some preferred to apply themselves to imitation of the severe design of the Roman school; others stopped in the Venetian cities and sought to worm from the canvases of Titian and Paul Veronese the secret of their admirable colouring and obtain a knowledge of the science of composition on a large scale. Whence comes the great variety in the French school. But all got the feeling of classical beauty, from the brilliant sky, the living types, and the magnificent antiquities of Italy. Moreover the French artists found a hospitable welcome in the peninsula; at a time when their kings were not rich enough to furnish artists means of support, work was ordered of them by the popes, cardinals, sovereigns, and great lords of Italy. Colbert’s foundation of the Academy of Rome was to assure the education of French genius, for centuries, by the genius of antiquity and of Italy.

In France the painters were organised as a corporation which was known as the Academy of St. Luke, and into which no one was received, as in the corporation of joiners or hatters, until he had served an apprenticeship or had produced a masterpiece. The academy was all powerful in the art-world until in 1648 it was confronted with a rival that eclipsed it--the Academy of Painting and Sculpture. We must not forget that in 1673 the first exhibition of painting took place in the court of the Palais Royal. Hitherto there had been open-air exhibitions--a kind of picture fairs, as for example that held in the place Dauphine. In 1699 the exposition was held in the Apollo Gallery of the Louvre.

As in political and literary history, the history of painting in the seventeenth century may be divided into three periods. The first sixty years are years of artistic freedom; with the personal government of the king the rule of Lebrun over the fine arts was established. At the latter’s death a transformation took place. When the regent Marie de’ Medici wished to decorate the vast galleries of the Luxembourg palace, she believed that she could not do better than to summon the great Flemish painter, Peter Paul Rubens. But she soon became better acquainted with the artistic resources of France, and sent for a number of Frenchmen to collaborate in the decoration of the Luxembourg. Among them were Simon Vouet (1590-1649), Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665), and Philippe de Champagne (1602-1674). If we examine the dates of the deaths of these artists and others, such as Claude Lorraine (1600-1682), Lesueur (1616-1655), or better, perhaps, the most brilliant period of their productiveness it will be admitted that Louis XIV and Lebrun had no influence over them whatever.

In the second period, Charles Lebrun of Paris (1619-1690) was the leader of the French school. He might have, as has been said, paraphrased the saying attributed to the king and have said “_L’Art, c’est moi_.” He was the Louis XIV of the fine arts. The artist, whose genius sympathised so completely with that of his sovereign, was nevertheless a very great painter. He possessed the sacred fire; at the age of fifteen he had produced two paintings that attracted attention, and he developed his natural gift by arduous labour and incessant study. He went to Rome and received instruction from Poussin. He painted for Louis XIV those immense canvases representing the exploits of Alexander--the _Crossing the Granicus_, the _Battle of Arbela_, the _Defeat of Porus_, and the _Entrance into Babylon_--which form an epic series. Lebrun pushed perfection of detail so far as to have horses sketched in Syria, so that they would be typically Asiatic.

MUSIC AND THE OPERA

It is easy to count the musicians that France produced in the sixteenth century; the true home of their art was then in Italy. Nevertheless the French court acquired a taste for lyric representations, and the kings, to free the art from religious domination, founded troops of lay artists, and at the head of their singers and instrumentalists they placed a superintendent of music.

These representations which the French called _ballets_ or _mascarades_ were an incoherent mixture of the three arts of poetry, music, and dancing which the modern opera has brought into harmony. A ballet was divided into _parties_ or acts, and the _parties_ into _entrées_ or scenes, both of variable number. There was no fixed plan for the composition--or rather there was no composition. In front of a great canvas the king and the nobles who were taking part in the _divertissement_ composed or had composed the words at their fancy, accommodated them to or made them accommodate familiar airs, putting the words into the hands of the ladies, in order that they might follow the piece, abandoning themselves in the end to the _boutade_, that is to say to the inspiration.

Music was considered such an inferior art that the instrumentalists were recruited from among the lackeys, and to be a violin player was almost a sign of servitude. The airs were vulgar; the instruments were reduced to lutes and viols, the dances were slow and monotonous like the _bourrée_ of the peasant of central France. Such was the court ballet, such, for example, the ballet of the _Délivrance de Renaud_ danced by Louis XIII and his courtiers in 1614. The court was lost in admiration and it was declared that Europe had never heard anything so ravishing.

Mazarin tried to revive the fashion by bringing dancers, singers, and musicians from Italy, obtaining the libretti and the music from composers of the same country. The courtiers admired in order to please the cardinal and the queen-regent, but Madame de Motteville[p] admits in all frankness that these representations seemed to her mortally long and tiresome. It is probable that French ears were not yet trained to Italian music and that Madame de Motteville, like Molière’s Alceste, would have given all the operas for one of the old popular airs like “_J’aime mieux ma mie, au gué_.”

The taste of the court was too frivolous, the actors in their quality of king or noble too unruly for opera thus conceived to raise itself to the level of a serious art. Therefore the public but privileged theatres succeeded to the aristocratic or court theatre. The abbé Perrin, a prolific writer of _livrets_, although a most mediocre poet, associated himself with Cambert, the most distinguished of French composers and with the marquis de Sourdéac, who understood scenery and stage mechanism. He obtained letters patent on June 28th, 1669. Thus was founded the Royal Academy of Music, which has nothing in common with the learned academies of the age; for the Italian word _accademia_ signifies simply concert. The first result of this association was the representation of _Pomone_, in 1671, words by Perrin; music by Cambert. The associates were preparing to mount another opera when misunderstandings broke out among them. Lully took advantage of this and through Madame de Montespan’s influence was given the privilege. Cambert in vexation went to England where, although he was well received by Charles II, he died of chagrin. Lully [himself an Italian], who had claimed that it was impossible to write an elegant score to French words, now became director of the first French National Theatre of Music (1672).

Lully created a music distinctly French in spirit and his influence extended over his contemporaries and successors, but his was the only original work that appeared at the Academy. Its organisation was too authoritative to lend itself easily to innovations. A large portion of the public was not interested in that solemn monotonous music which only concerned itself with mythological tragedies. Already in the seventeenth century (1640) the _Comédie des Chansons_, sometimes attributed to Timothy de Chillac and sometimes to Charles Beys, had furnished the type of a kind that resembles both vaudeville and the French _opéra-comique_. It was called the _comédie à ariettes_ and became universally popular. In 1678 at the St. Laurent fair Allard and Maurice Vanderberg presented the _Forces of Love and Magic_, which had a great success. This irritated Lully, and invoking the privilege of the Academy he had an order served upon these two itinerant directors to reduce their orchestra to four violins and one oboe. The Academy decided however to sign a contract with Catherine Vanderberg, permitting her to give pieces with song, orchestra, and dance. Such was the origin of the _opéra-comique_, a term first employed by Le Sage, in 1715.

RAPID DECLINE OF THE AGE OF LOUIS XIV

One characteristic of this age was that the efflorescence of arts and letters was of short duration. The age was great so long as Louis was surrounded by men whose talent had already seen the light when he began to protect them; but new geniuses were not born and when that generation was exhausted another did not arise to replace it.

The personal government presents but a single and very short period of literary and artistic splendour. The last great work of secular literature, _Athalie_, dates from 1691. If Bossuet, Fénelon, Bourdaloue, and Massillon--that is to say the group of churchmen--were not there; if Saint-Simon were not secretly writing his accusing _Mémoires_, one might say that not a single work of high literary value was written in France after the Peace of Ryswick (1697). The same observation may be made of the arts. Many of the great painters of the seventeenth century owed nothing to Louis XIV, for Le Valentin died in 1632, Lesueur in 1655, Laurent de Lahire in 1656, Poussin in 1665. Claude Lorraine and Philippe de Champagne, who died, the one in 1682, the other in 1674, were already in the fullness of their genius when the king began to govern. Of the four great architects of the age, Mansart, Claude Perrault, Blondel, and Bruant, none lived to see the year 1697. Puget, the great sculptor, died in 1694, Lully in 1687. The poet Quinault, who usually furnished the latter the libretto of his operas, died the following year. After these there is certainly a wide gap in the history of French art.[c] Indeed, as Buckle says: “At the moment when Louis XIV died, there was scarcely a writer or an artist in France who enjoyed European reputation.”[e]

A FRENCH VIEW OF THE EFFECT OF THE AGE

But it had been a royal epoch! Louis XIV had the rôle of a demi-god. His Olympus was only a theatre, his _fêtes_ were only fairy-like scenes and masquerades, but all was on a grandiose scale. Before his time the king of France lived in a strong castle. He was, even after the time of Francis I, a mighty baron shut up behind his battlements, his thick walls, his deep moats. One can see the gloomy shadow of the monarch flitting from window to window in the vast halls of the Château de Blois, isolated, cold, imprisoned, anxious. Spies, guards, armed men; courts where echoed the tread of sentinels; secret staircases where men charged with dark errands mounted and descended--all proclaimed a shadowy king watching with his hand upon his sword, spying out all, sharing the fear which he inspired in others. But under Louis XIV all was changed. The staircases widened, air and light circulated in the royal house; _fêtes_ replaced the gloomy official receptions; courtiers succeeded soldiers. This time royalty was sure of victory. It trod on laurels, as half a century later it walked on roses, without dreaming that either the laurel- or the rose-strewn path would lead to the scaffold.[f] On that splendid horizon of the seventeenth century great storm clouds appeared one by one, lightning still unaccompanied by thunder flashed through space; but the eyes of the multitude, blinded by the royal sun, did not perceive these threatening gleams. Intoxicated France abandoned herself to the contemplation of her present glory, without thinking to seize or to understand the true reasons of that glory, and did not realise that she was being dragged to a yawning chasm.

Never was error more excusable. How resist that seduction which all realised, but which all contributed to exercise? Society is like an immense concert all of whose parts mingle together to form, by their divers accents, a universal harmony. Every class, every man, gave all that he had to give to the work of common grandeur. The mass of the people, confident in the good intentions of their prince, comforted by the good order of the administration, bore their burden the more lightly, and patiently awaited from the future a still greater relief. The clergy, more worthy and more enlightened than in any other epoch of French history, instructed and guided the society it no longer governed. The nobility, which had gained in discipline not less than in polish what it had lost in independence, furnished the majority of the warriors; the third estate furnished almost all the rest, especially the great administration and the great writers. By means of intellectual and moral energy, of practical sense, of inventive and active force, the French bourgeoisie reached the highest degree of its development--what a bourgeoisie, to have produced within a half century Colbert, Corneille, Pascal, Molière, Racine, La Fontaine, Boileau, Bossuet, Bourdaloue, Arnauld, Nicole, Domat, Fabert, Poussin, Lesueur, Lorraine, Lebrun, the Perraults, and Puget, without counting those men as powerful and more for evil than for good--Fouquet and Louvois!

Marvellous assemblage of the most highly developed and complete society that has appeared in the world since ancient times; vast and living picture whose aspect produced on those who regarded it an enduring fascination! All peoples admired and imitated it. The language, the fashions, the ideas of France invaded Europe. Literary styles, like the styles of costume, like the styles of objects of art and of luxury, like the habits of life, formed themselves, at least in the upper classes, and for long, after the French. It was not the breath of a momentary fancy, but it was an atmosphere which enveloped little by little all objects and all beings, a medium outside of which it became impossible for man to live.[g]

FOOTNOTES

[148] By this term is meant the period covering the reigns of Louis XIII and Louis XIV (1610-1715 A.D.).

[149] [Colbert’s foundation of learned academies is described in chapter XIX.]

[150] An anecdote will show how much the science of zoölogy was still in its infancy. In 1613 some fossil bones, probably those of a mammoth or some other prehistoric quadruped, were exhumed near the Château of Langon in Dauphiné. A surgeon, Habicot by name, recognised them as the bones of the giant Teutobochus, king of the Teutons, and published a ridiculous poem entitled _Gigantéostologie_. A physician named Riolan suspected that they might be the bones of an elephant, but as that animal was then unknown in France he searched for a description of it in the Greek authors; then he abandoned this trail, which was the right one, and came to believe that these bones were simply stones to which a caprice of nature had given extraordinary forms. At that time the custom was to explain thus what could not be understood.

[151] _Biographical Dictionary_, London, 1798, 15 vols.

[152] _Biographical Dictionary_, London, 1798, 15 vols.

[153] [Except in _Esther_ and _Athalie_; but these two sacred dramas are not, for Racine, dramas for the theatre.]

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