TO attempt to express and to sum up in a word the essential characteristic of a great literature, so varied and so rich as the French, which dates back eight or nine hundred years, seems at first sight a rash, imprudent, and altogether chimerical undertaking. What connection can be discovered between a romance of the Round Table, such as “Le Chevalier au Lion,” by Crestien de Troyes, for instance, and “Le Maître de Forges,” by M. Georges Ohnet, or “Doit-on le Dire,” or “La Cagnotte,” or any other play you please, by Eugène Labiche, or Edmond Gondinet? Do not the authors, their subjects, their language, the times and the places in which they lived, all differ one from another? And if, in order to determine the essential characteristic of a literature, we begin by eliminating from its history all diversifying elements, what an insignificant “precipitate,”—what literary or even historic fact is likely to be left, and what shall we, who speciously pretended to characterize it, have done but attenuate the substance of our observations to the vanishing point?
This objection can easily be met. In the first place, even if it is not an absolute mathematical truth, verifiable at any given time, that a great literature is the complete expression of the genius of a race, and its annals the faithful summary of the whole history of a civilization, the contrary is still less true: and whatever differences an interval of six or seven hundred years—a long period in the life of a nation—may have effected between a trouvère of the twelfth century and a playwright or novelist of the Third Republic, yet, as they are both French, there must necessarily exist some relation between them. Observe again, how in this Europe of ours, in which so many different races, alien and hostile one to another, have been everywhere clashing and fighting and cutting one another’s throats, mutual intercourse and understandings have been steadily on the increase. It was their literature that gave the great modern nationalities a point of union and concentration, through which they became conscious of themselves. Would united Italy exist if there had been nothing in common between Dante and Alfieri? Would Germany, if there had not been something of Luther in the soul of every German? And what finally justifies an inquiry into the essential characteristic of a literature is the flood of light which this characteristic, once defined, throws upon the innermost history of that literature, enabling us to understand the slow succession of elements that have contributed to the creation of “the souls of nations.”
Suppose, for instance, that the essential characteristic of the Italian is to be what I may call an artistic literature. This characteristic alone would at once differentiate it from all other modern literatures—French or German, Spanish or English. These latter are certainly not deficient in works of art, but none of them, so far as I know, makes art its chief aim; nor do their authors, like Ariosto or Tasso, propose, as their sole aim and object, to realize some purely poetic fantasy or dream of beauty. The close affinities which have always connected the literature of Italy with the other arts, especially with painting and music, are included in the enunciation of this characteristic. There is something of Orcagna and of Fra Angelico in the “Divina Commedia”; and when we read the “Jerusalem” or the “Aminta,” does it not seem as though the transformation from the epic to the grand opera were taking place before our very eyes? This artistic character suffices also to explain the preponderating influence of Italian literature at the time of the Renaissance. The French, during the reigns of Francis I. and Henry II., and the English in Henry VIII.’s and Elizabeth’s time, owed their first sensation of art to the Italians. The idea of the power of art, if it does not sum up the whole Renaissance, constitutes perhaps its most important feature. And who cannot perceive the intimate connection between this conception of a purely artistic literature and what the Italians have termed virtù, which certainly does not mean “virtue” (it may possess some of that quality, though the reverse has often been the case), but which is, in terms of logic, the genus of which “virtuosity” is only a species? Who does not see in what way the definition of the essential characteristic of a literature leads by easy steps to a knowledge of the soul of a people and a race?
To take another example. Let us suppose that the essential characteristic of the Spanish is to be a chivalrous literature. Are not all its annals illuminated by this definition as by a flash of light? We grasp immediately the relationship uniting works so different as the epic legends and songs of the “Romancero”; the stories of adventure and amorous pastorals in the style of the “Amadis” or the “Diana” of Montemayor; the dramas of Calderon and Lope de Vega, such as the “Physician of His Honor,” or “Mudarra the Bastard”; and mystic treatises and picaresque romances after the manner of the “Castle of the Soul” and “Lazarillo de Tormes.” We recognize in all these the family features, the hereditary something which bears eternal witness to their common origin, namely, that Castilian chivalry, which, in its sometimes sublime and sometimes grotesque exaggeration, seems according to occasion to lead indifferently to the extremes of devotion or folly. Then read “Don Quixote.”… If in this political and financial, industrial, utilitarian, and positivist Europe, we have not yet quite lost the sense of the chivalrous, we owe it to the influence of Spanish literature. It could easily be proved that Spain has saved and preserved for us whatever of the spirit of the Middle Ages deserved perchance not utterly to perish. And who will say that it is useless to take cognizance of this—useless, I mean, for a more accurate knowledge, for a more intimate understanding of Spanish literature, of its rôle in history, and of the genius of Spain herself?
The essential characteristic of French literature is more difficult to determine; not, I need scarcely say, because our national literature is more original than the others, or richer in masterpieces, or more resplendent with great names. Nothing could be more impertinent than to urge such a pretension—nothing more ridiculous than to believe it. If the Spaniards have not had a Voltaire, nor the Italians a Molière, we French have not had either a Dante or a Cervantes. But it may be said that the French is certainly the richest of all modern literatures. It is also the oldest; and we may here be permitted to recall what Dante, with whom Italian literature properly begins, and Chaucer, whose “Canterbury Tales” may be said to have inaugurated English literature, owed, the one to our troubadours and the other to the more or less anonymous authors of our old fabliaux. Again, has not French literature been the most ready in its recognition and welcome of others? Has it not always exhibited the keenest curiosity about foreign literatures; and has it not been most richly and liberally inspired by them? Is there any that has showed less scruple in converting the Italian and Spanish novels “into blood and nutriment” for its own purpose? Ronsard is almost an Italian poet when he sings of his Cassandre, his Marie, his Hélène, his “divers loves,” with metaphors borrowed from Petrarch and Bembo. And is not Corneille himself, in spite of some Norman attributes, a kind of Spanish dramatist? When he does not derive his inspiration from Alarcon or Guillen de Castro, he seeks it in Seneca or Lucan, who were both natives of Cordova. We have prose writers, too, like Diderot, about whom it is still a moot point, after the lapse of fully one hundred years, whether he was the most German or the most English of our Champenois. Why, if we are not careful, very soon no one at Paris will read any but Russian novelists, such as Goncharoff or Shtchedrin, or play any but Scandinavian melodramas, like “The Lady of the Sea” or “The Wild Duck.” I may add that, while French literature is international or cosmopolitan in this sense, it is still more so in that it can claim to have attracted more foreigners than any other. Thus Italians, such as Brunetto Latini, the master of Dante, down to Galiani, the friend of our encyclopedists; Englishmen, like Hamilton, Chesterfield, and Walpole; and Germans, like Leibnitz and Frederick the Great, all fell beneath its fascination. No doubt these circumstances combine to diversify our literature, but they also render it exceedingly difficult to characterize in one word.
If, however, it were to be said that over and above everything else, even above those qualities of order and clearness, logic and precision, elegance and politeness, which have almost become the crambe repetita of criticism—if it were to be said that the French is an essentially sociable or social literature, the definition would not perhaps express the entire truth, but it would not be much in error. From Crestien de Troyes, whom I mentioned above, down to M. François Coppée, the author of the “Humbles” and the “Intimités,” scarcely any French writer has written either in prose or in verse, except with a view to influence society. In the expression of their thoughts they always consider the public to whom they are addressing themselves, and consequently they have never differentiated the art of writing from that of pleasing, persuading, or convincing. No doctrine was ever more opposed to the practice of our great writers than that of “art for art’s sake”; and in this connection I will quote a fine passage of Bossuet. “The poets of Greece,” he says, “who were read by the common folk afforded them instruction even more than entertainment. The most renowned of conquerors regarded Homer as a master in the art of good government. That great poet likewise inculcated the virtue of obedience and good citizenship. He, and many other poets, whose works, though yielding pleasure, are none the less of serious import, celebrate those arts alone which are useful to human life. They aspire only to further the public weal, the good of their country and of society, and that admirable ‘civility’ which we have already explained.” Why should we not believe that in thus defining Greek poetry—which he has no doubt regarded from a rather ideal standpoint, and in which he has at any rate excluded from consideration some of Aristophanes’ comedies, some epigrams of the Anthology—Bossuet was defining his own literary ideal? Certainly this criticism of Æschylus or Sophocles, the authors of the “Persæ” and the “Antigone,” holds perhaps even more true of Corneille or Voltaire, the authors of “Les Horaces” and “Zaïre”; and, if there were still room to doubt that the desire of “celebrating the arts which are useful to human life” is really the guiding spirit of French literature, I should be convinced by the number and diversity of facts in the history of French literature which, it will be seen, this theory explains, and indeed can alone explain….
The social characteristic is so inherent, innate, and completely adequate as a definition of French literature, that it explains its defects no less than its qualities. The long inferiority of our lyric poetry is an excellent instance. If the Pleiad miscarried of old in its generous enterprise—if Ronsard and his friends only left behind them from a literary standpoint an equivocal reputation, which is continually being assailed—if, for two hundred and fifty or three hundred years, up to the appearance of Lamartine and Hugo, there was nothing more empty, more cold, and more false than a French ode or elegy, it is absurd to reproach Boileau or Malherbe, as people do, for what is solely due to force of circumstances. And the reason of it is that, by compelling literature to fulfill a social function, properly speaking, as we have just seen, by requiring the poet to subordinate his way of thinking and feeling to the common way of thinking and feeling, and by denying him the right to allow his own personality to appear in or to inform his work, the living sources of lyrism were necessarily dammed or dried up. French literature has thus paid for its superiority in the “common” kinds by its too unmistakable inferiority in the personal kinds of art. For, no sooner was accessibility to everybody the object aimed at, than it became at once necessary to restrain the expression of feelings—I do not mean the rarer or the more exceptional, but the too personal and individual feelings. Similarly, our writers had to sacrifice all the peculiar and intimate feeling that local detail lends to the expression of general sentiments, through fear of including in the analysis or description elements that might not be true of every time and every place. Thus the predominance of the social characteristic over all others reduced the manifestation of the poet’s personality to the modicum allowed in Horace’s proprie communia dicere, and although we have had more than one Æschylus and Sophocles, more than one Cicero and Horace, we have had no Pindar, nor even a Petrarch or a Tasso…. It would be more difficult to say why we have not had either a Homer or a Dante, an Ariosto or a Milton.
Is that, perhaps, why French literature has been sometimes blamed for lack of depth and originality? We will accept the reproach, seeing therein but one more proof of the eminently social character of our literature, without inquiring, in this connection, whether some of our accusers may not have confounded depth with obscurity; or whether, again, our great writers may not have sometimes indulged in the courtier-like sprightliness of men of the world when they wished to express profound truths in lucid language. Thus, few of our writers have examined the problem of the relativity of knowledge, or the identity of contradictories, because few writers have attached any interest to it outside the schools. However it may be with the categories of the understanding or the modes of thought, we in France have decided that social life has little or nothing to do with the problem of the temporification of space or the spatialization of time. We have likewise come to the conclusion that, as the questions of religious toleration or popular sovereignty have only a very remote connection with that of knowing “how the Ego and the Non-Ego, posited in the Ego by the Ego, limit one another reciprocally,” a true philosopher might do well to examine the latter question en passant, but should by no means become so deeply absorbed in it as to forget the first two. Further, it seems to us that if, before dealing with practical questions, we have to wait for the elucidation of the deeper problems, which definition cannot solve, and which turn upon the unknowable, we may have to wait a long time:—
| “Vivendi qui recte prorogat horam, | |
| Rusticus expectat dum defluat amnis: at ille | |
| Labitur, et labetur in omne volubilis ævum.” |
By comparison with French literature, thus defined and characterized, the English is an individualist literature. With the exception of three or four generations in its long history, that of Congreve and Wycherley, for instance, or that of Pope and Addison,—to whom it should not be forgotten must also be added the name of Swift,—you will find that the English only write in order to experience the exterior sensation of their individuality. Hence that “humor,” which may be defined as the expression of the pleasure they feel in giving vent to their peculiar thoughts, often in a manner unexpected by themselves. Hence, too, the abundance, diversity, and richness of their lyric vein, since individualism is its real source, and an ode or elegy is the involuntary afflux, as it were, and overflow of the innermost feelings in the poet’s soul. Hence, again, the eccentricity of the majority of their great writers with respect to the rest of their compatriots, as if, in truth, they only became conscious of themselves by taking up the opposite ground to those who believed they resembled them most. Hence, in a word, the nature of their imagination and their sensibility. As if a man’s capacity of representing himself and his feelings to another man—as if fantasy truly so called, which is the most variable of faculties, constituted the element of most permanent value!… But cannot English literature be otherwise characterized? As you may imagine, I do not venture to answer in the affirmative; and all I say is, that I cannot better characterize in one word that which differentiates English from French literature.
