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 poetrywhich 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 Eschylus 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 con nection, 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 Let us, therefore, organize social life, to begin with. We may then, if there is time, inquire into its metaphysical basis. Is not this the visible and actual order of phenomena ? The German metaphysics of the nineteenth century were only made possible by the French literature of the eighteenth. French literature, in fact, has only lacked depth through a superabundance, as it were, of practical spirit. Kant is not more profound than Pascal, nor Fichte than Rousseau. The sole distinction lies in the fact that Fichte and Kant chose to treat a whole series of ideas, which Pascal and Rousseau thought better to leave untouched. The latter expended as much effort in the cause of intelligibility as the ohter two in coating or rather arming themselves with bristling formulæ, with the result of making themselves obscure. And all this, it may be seen, brings us back continually to the idea of sociability as the essential characteristic of French literature. 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. 659 WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT (1794-1878) ILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT was essentially a poet, and it is in his poetry rather than his prose that he has attained his highest excellence. But though we do not find in his prose the same exalted feeling and sublimity of language which make his "Thanatopsis" and ode "To a Waterfowl" masterpieces of their kind, we do find even in his newspaper prose even when most loosely written the disjecta membra poeta - the unmistakable evidences of the same genius which expresses itself in his noblest poems. The demands of the daily newspapers in the early days of the telegraph resulted in a style of essays which have almost ceased to exist - the "letters" dealing not with news, but with the life, habits, and morals of the peoples of other cities and countries. Bryant's letters to the Evening Post of which for fifty years he was editor, are among the best of their class. In "A Day in Florence" he shows the same sympathy for form, the same imaginative power of grasping, grouping, and developing incident which makes the poet. He was born in Cummington, Massachusetts, November 3d, 1794. His genius was precocious, and its first adequate expression, «Thanatopsis," written when he was nineteen, is in the general judgment his masterpiece. After leaving Williams College where he spent two years, he studied law, but after becoming connected with the New York Evening Post in 1826, he remained with it until his death, June 12th, 1878. His life as a journalist was one of the highest usefulness. He devoted himself and his paper to every worthy cause which needed help. The standard of metropolitan journalism as he represented it was rectitude, and he demonstrated that there is nothing absurd, unbusiness-like or unprofessional in so conducting a newspaper as to make it represent editorial brains and conscience. His "Letters of a Traveler" (1852), "Letters from Spain and Other Countries» (1859), and "Letters from the East" (1869), were all originally contributed to the Evening Post. |