How distinctly may be read the political vicissitudes of France in her literature,classic, highly finished, keen, and formal, when a monarch was idolized and authors wrote only for courts and scholars: Bossuet, with his rhetorical graces; La Bruyère, with his gallery of characters, not one of which was moulded among the people; De la Rochefoucauld's maxims, drawn from the arcana of fashionable life; Racine, whose heroes die with an immaculate couplet and speak the faint echoes of Grecian or Roman sentiment! When politics became common property, and the walls of a prescriptive and conventional system fell, how wild ran speculation and sentiment in the copious and superficial Voltaire and the vague humanities of Rousseau! When an era of military despotism supervened upon the reign of license, how destitute of lettered genius seemed the nation, except when the pensive enthusiasm of Chateaubriand breathed music from American wilds or a London garret, and Madame de Staël gave utterance to her eloquent philosophy in exile at Geneva! "Napoléon eût voulu faire manoeuvrer l'esprit humain comme il faisait manoeuvrer ses vieux bataillons." Yet more emphatic is the reaction of political conditions upon literary development after the Restoration. The tragic horrors and protracted fever of the Revolution, and the passion for military glory exaggerated by the victories of Napoleon, legitimately initiated the intense school, which during the present century has signalized French literature. The prestige of the scholar revived, and literary eclipsed warlike fame; but with the revival of letters came the revolutionary spirit before exhibited on the battle-field and in cabinets. For the artificial and elegant was substituted the melodramatic and effective; lyrics from the overwrought heart broke in dreamy sweetness from Lamartine and in simple energy from Béranger; fiction the most elaborate, incongruous, and exciting, here quaintly artistic, there morbidly scientific, revealed the chaos and the earthquakes that laid bare and upheaved life and society in the preceding epochs; the journal became an intellectual gymnasium and Olympic game, where the first minds of the nation sought exercise and glory; the feuilleton almost necessitated the novelist to concentrate upon each chapter the amount of interest once diffused through a volume; criticism, from tedious analysis, became a brilliant ordeal; egotism inspired a world of new confessions, political questions a new school of popular writing, the love of effect and the passion for excitement a multitude of dramatic, narrative, and biographical books, wherein the serenity of thought, the tranquil beauty of truth, and the healthful tone of nature were sacrificed, not without dazzling genius, to immediate fame, pecuniary reward, and the delight d'éprouver une sensation. Even in the history of the fine arts, we find the political element guiding the pencil and ruling the fortunes of genius. David was the government painter, and regarded Gros and Girodet as suspects. He effected a revolution in Art by going back to severe anatomical principles in design. There were conspiracies against him in the studios, and war was declared between color and design; the palette and the pencil were in conflict; David, the Napoleon of the former,Prud'hon, Géricault, Delacroix, and others, leaders in the latter faction. Each party was surrounded by its respective corps of amateurs; and military terms were in vogue in the atelier and academy. "S'il est permis" says Delacroix, speaking of his Sardanapalus, "de comparer les petites choses aux grandes, ce fut mon Waterloo. Je devenais l'abomination de la peinture; il fallait me refuser l'eau et le sel." "If you wish to share the favors of the government," said an official to another artist, "you must change your manner." From the tyranny of external influences have arisen the incongruities of the French schools of painting, and especially what has been well called "that meretricious breed which continue to depict the Magdalen with the united attractions of Palestine and the Palais Royal." The large pictures which Gros painted during the Empire were consigned to long obscurity at the Restoration. The lives, too, of many of these cultivators of the arts of peace had a tragic close. Haydon's fate made a deep impression in England, because it was an exceptional case; while, of the modern painters of France, whose career was far more harmonious and successful than his, Gros drowned himself, Robert cut his throat, Prud'hon died in misery, and Greuze was buried in Potter's Field. The side of life we naturally associate with tranquillity thus offers, in this dramatic realm, scenes of excitement and pity. It is the same in literature. Witness the fierce struggle between the Romantic and Classic schools,the early victories of the enfant sublime, Victor Hugo. And we must acknowledge that "les lettres et les arts ont aussi leurs émeutes et leurs révolutions," and accept the inference of one of the Parisian literati,that "l'esprit a toujours quelque chose de satanique." Every revolution is identified with some musical air: when Louis XVIII. first appeared at the theatre, after his long exile, he was greeted with the "Vive Henri IV.," and the new constitution of 1830 was ushered in by the "Marseillaise." The Vaudeville theatre, we are told, during the Revolution and under the Empire, was essentially political. An imaginary resemblance between la chaste Suzanne and Marie Antoinette caused the prohibition of that drama; and the interest which Cambacères took in an actress of this establishment led him to give it his official protection.
In the family of nations France is the child of illusions, and excites the sympathy of the magnanimous because her destinies have been marred through the errors of the imagination rather than of the heart. Government, religion, and societythe three great elements of civil lifehave nowhere been so modified by the dominion of fancy over fact. Take the history of French republicanism, of Quietism, of court and literary circles; what perspicuity in the expression, and vagueness in the realization of ideas! In each a mania to fascinate, in none a thorough basis of truth; abundance of talent, but no faith; gayety, gallantry, wit, devotion, dreams, and epigrams in perfection, without the solid foundation of principles and the efficient development in practice, either of polity, a social system, or religious belief,the theory and the sentiment of each being at the same time luxuriant, attractive, and prolific.
The popular writers are eloquent in abstractions, but each seems inspired by a thorough egotism. Descartes, their philosopher, drew all his inferences from consciousness; Madame de Sévigné, the epistolary queen, had for her central motive of all speculation and gossip the love of her daughter; Madame Guyon eliminated her tenets from the ecstasy of self-love; Rochefoucauld derived a set of philosophical maxims from the lessons of mere worldly disappointment; Calvin sought to reform society through the stern bigotry of a private creed; La Bruyère elaborated generic characters from the acute, but narrow observation of artificial society; Boileau established a classical standard of criticism suggested by personal taste, which ignored the progress of the human mind.
The redeeming grace of the nation is to be found in its wholesome sense of the enjoyable and the available in ordinary life, in its freedom from the discontent which elsewhere is born of avarice and unmitigated materialism. The love of pleasing, the influence of women, and a frivolous temper everywhere and on all occasions signalize them. "Why, people laugh at everything here!" naively exclaimed the young Duchess of Burgundy, on her arrival at the French court.