A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE.* FEW books are more needed

by the average English reader than one which should give a clear and comprehensive survey of French literature, tracing the stages in its development and expansion, and showing its real and permanent forces. Professor Dowden seemed the very man to do this, but we must admit that his book disappoints the expectation. It is, of course, excellently well done ; accurate in facts and dates, just in criticism, well arranged in method; but there is no blinking the fact that it is, as a whole, not interesting to read. The writer does not seem to be in full sym- pathy with his subject ; and, curiously enough, he is most in sympathy with that side of the French genius which makes particularly little appeal to English minds. In his judgment of their poetry he distinctly underrates what is most truly lyrical, as, for instance, the poetry of the Pleiade ; and he takes the characteristically French elegiac poetry, of which Lamartine's "Lac" is the supreme type, at a French valuation. He praises Racine more skilfully than Moliere, and seems more at home with Bossuet than with Rabelais. In a word, he puts himself at the standpoint of an extremely academie French critic; but it would be hard to find a Frenchman with so little tolerance for the esprit gaulois.

It is reasonable to expect from an English history of French literature something different from what any French- man could give us. It should emphasise particularly those excellences which have told upon the mind of Europe, not of France. Now, we all know that from the seventeenth century onwards France has furnished an array of serious and weighty writers, who have set the world a model in style of dignity, refinement, and lucid order ; admirable architects of a logical system. Yet the fact remains that these weighty and dignified writers do not retain their • d History of French Literature. By Edward Damien, LL D., D.C.L., Pro- fessor of English L:t!rature in the University of DiPAin. London : William Heinemann,

interest for a foreigner, and have not made a great mark upon history. The constructive side of French genius has not gone for much ; the destructive, with its light artillery of laughter, has been little short of omnipotent. The one man

among the serious writers whose influence remains paramount is Pascal ; and it was Pascal who elevated irony into the dead- liest weapon of attack. After all, the truest representative of France—truer than MoliZ:re, for MoUre, like Shakespeare, is too big to be a type—was Voltaire, and the work which best expresses Voltaire's genius is undoubtedly C«ailide. Professor Dowden has been, in our judgment. ill advised in attempting, so far as be has done, to give a sketch of each man's contribution to thought; so mach so that his book is in some measure a history of French thought. It has been the function of French thinkers to popularise

ideas originated elsewhere. Thus Comte, for instance, appears to us to receive undue attention here ; his philosophy was in itself unimportant, his importance from the point of view of literature was his power to disseminate a philosophy. Undue

stress has been laid upon those who introduced something into French thought which can be re-stated ; too little upon those who affected the form and the spirit of the literature. Ant holly Hamilton, author of the .11Vmoires de Gra ill, of whom Voltaire said that he was the first to give a toes to the language, has to be content with the barest mention.

Rochefoncauld, who probably affected French thought more

profoundly than all the eloquent philosophers put together, does not interest Professor Dowden, nor receive his due at all. Yet Rochefoucauld seems to us typical of the French outlook on life; clear, trenchant, and unsparing in his thought ; seeing only one side of a question, but seeing 1.1.1t in the driest of lights; moved by life itself to a laughter that has no tenderness, but that is merciless to the false. It may not be true to say that Rochefeecauld was a greater man than

Bossuet or Chateaubriand ; but outside of France, at all events, he has been a far more potent force.

Yet after all perhaps one is led to injustice by a lack of similarity in taste. For instance, Professor Dowden slides lightly over Brantimse, for whose Dames Gala tes there is nothing to be said. But the Vies des Daisies I 11 as( res is one of

the most charming things in any language ; and BrantOme's account of the execution of Mary Queen of Scots might almost have touched Elizabeth. He has that exquisite simplicity and ease in narration which in later French one finds only in Madame de Siwigne. The rondeaux of Charles d'Orkens only strike Professor Dowden as pretty bite of artifice; we

think ourselves more fortunate in a true enjoyment of them. With his treatment of Villon we find no fault, for Villon has certainly been overpraised by those who would put hint on a

level with Burns. Romani, perhaps by the picturesqueness of his truly laureate position, has a fascination which Professor Dowden evidently cannot feel, and may judge him the more correctly. But what does this mean : "In the fine melancholy of his elegiac poetry he is almost modern " ? Was no one sad before Shelley then ? Mathurin Regnier is one of those real geniuses whom it is wrong to dismiss, as he is here dismissed, in a few formal phrases. There is an intensity of life in all that he wrote which animates even so transitory an art as the satirist's; and is there not a curious pathos in his epitaph for himself ?— "J'ai ve'eu sans nul pensement, Me laissant aller doueement A la bonne lot naturelle,

Et si m'etonne fort pourquoi La mort daigna penser it moi Qui ne pensai jamais en elle."

However, if Regnier is slighted, Malherbe gets ample justice. He was of course a turning point; and we quote Professor Dowden's estimate of him for an example of what is beat in this book,—lucid exposition of general tendencies :—

" It has been said that poetry—the overflow of individual emotion—is overheard ; while oratory—the appeal to an audience —is heard. The processes of Malherbe's art were essentially oratorical ; the lyrical cry is seldom audible in his verse ; it is the poetry of eloquence thrown into studied stanzas. But the greater poetry of the seventeenth century in France—its odes, its satires, its epistles, its noble dramatic scenes—and much of its prose literature are of the nature of oratory ; and for the progress of such poetry and even of such a prose Malherbe prepared a high- way. Ile aimed at a reformation of the language, which, rejecting all words either base, provincial, archaic, technical, or over- learned and over-curious, should employ the standard French, pure and dignified, as accepted by the people of Paris. In his hands language became too exclusively an instrument of the intern-

gence ; yet with this instrument great things were achieved by his successors. He niethodised and regulated versification, insisting on rich and exact rhymes, condemning all licence and infirmity of structure, condemning harshness of sound, inversion, hiatus, negligence in accommodating the caesura to the sense, the free gliding of couplet into couplet. It may be said that he rendered verse mechanical ; but within the arrangement which he prescribed admirable effects were attainable by the mastery of genius."

They may have been attainable, but who attained them except in the stage alexandrines ? It seems to us that French poetry was worthless as poetry from the day when Malherbe imposed the fetters which Boileau riveted till Hugo knocked them off. La Fontaine succeeded by disregarding them; Corneille wrote one truly Horatian lyric, it is true, and Corneille's dramas, like Racine's, are poetry, though their best qualities are scarcely those of verse. But for the life of us we have never been able to see that Malherbe really did the

language a service at all.

Professor Dowden's work is, as we have said, not likely to generate enthusiasm for French literature, largely because

his own preferences in that literature are for such things as are least generally acceptable to our race. But it is, of course, likely to be useful to students, being the work of a man who is not only a highly qualified critic but the founder of a teaching school of literature ; and the excellent biblio-

graphy with which it concludes will be invaluable to those who wish to pursue the study further on their own lines.