Part 37 (1/2)

[Sidenote: Newspapers of the Revolution.]

[Sidenote: The Influence of Journalism.]

So long as the old _regime_ lasted journalism was naturally in a condition of suppression, but from the beginning of the Revolution it a.s.sumed at once an important position in the state, and a position still more important as a nursery of rising men of letters. At the time of the outbreak only two papers of importance existed, the already mentioned _Gazette de France_, and the _Journal de Paris_, in which Garat, Andre Chenier, Roucher, and many other men of distinction, won their spurs.

1789, however, saw the birth of numerous sheets, some of which continued almost till our own days. The most important was the _Gazette Nationale_ or _Moniteur Universel_, in which not merely Garat and La Harpe, but Ginguene, a literary critic of talent and a republican of moderate principles, together with the future historian Lacretelle, and the comic poet, fabulist, and critic Andrieux, took part. Rivarol, Champcenetz, and Pelletier conducted the Royalist _Actes des Apotres_, Marat started his ultra-republican _Ami du Peuple_, Camille Desmoulins the _Courier de Brabant_, Durozoy the _Gazette de Paris_. Barrere and Louvet, both notorious, if not famous names, launched for the first time a paper with a t.i.tle destined to fortune, _Le Journal des Debats_; and Camille Desmoulins changed his oddly-named journal into one named more oddly still, _Les Revolutions de France et de Brabant_. All these, and more, were the growth of the single year 1789. The next saw the avowedly Royalist _Ami du Roi_ of Royou, the atrocious _Pere d.u.c.h.ene_ of Hebert, the c.u.mbrously-named _Journal des Amis de la Const.i.tution_, on which Fontanes, Clermont-Tonnerre, and other future Bonapartists and Const.i.tutionalists worked. In 1791 no paper of importance, except the short-lived Girondist _Chronique du Mois_, appeared. In the next year many Terrorist prints of no literary merit were started, and one, ent.i.tled _Nouvelles Politiques_, to which the veterans Suard and Morellet, with Guizot, a novice of the time to come, Lacretelle, Dupont de Nemours, and others, were contributors. In the later years of the revolutionary period, the only important newspaper was what was first called the _Journal de l'Empire_, and at the end of Napoleon's reign the _Journal des Debats_, on which Fievee, Geoffroy, and many other writers of talent worked. In the early days of these various journals political interests naturally engrossed them. But the literary tastes and instincts of Parisians were too strong not to demand attention, and by degrees the critical part of the newspaper became of importance. Under the restoration this importance grew, and the result was the _Conservateur Litteraire_ and the _Globe_, in the former of which Victor Hugo was introduced to the public, and in the latter Sainte-Beuve. This sudden uprise of journalism produced a remarkable change in the conditions of literary work, and offered chances to many who would previously have been dependent on individual patronage. But so far as regards literature, properly so called, all its results which were worth anything appeared subsequently in books, and there is therefore no need to refer otherwise than cursorily to the phenomenon of its development.

Put very briefly, the influence of journalism on literature may be said to be this: it opens the way to those to whom it might otherwise be closed; it facilitates the destruction of erroneous principles; it a.s.sists production; and it interferes with labour and care spent over the thing produced.

[Sidenote: Chamfort.]

From the crowd of clever writers whom this outburst of journalism found ready to draw their pens in one service or the other, two names emerge as pre-eminently remarkable. Garat and Champcenetz were men of wit and ingenuity, Andre Chenier was a great poet, and his brother, Marie Joseph, a man of good literary taste and master of an elegant style, Lacretelle a painstaking historian, and many others worthy of note in their way. But Chamfort and Rivarol deserve a different kind of notice from this. They united in a remarkable fas.h.i.+on the peculiarities of the man of letters of the eighteenth century with the peculiarities of the man of letters of the nineteenth, and their individual merit was, though different and complementary, almost unique. Chamfort was born in Auvergne, in 1741. He was the natural son of a person who occupied the position of companion, and legally possessed nothing but his baptismal name of Nicholas. Like his rival, La Harpe, he obtained an exhibition at one of the Paris colleges, and distinguished himself. After leaving school he lived for a time by miscellaneous literature, and at last made his way to society and to literary success by dint of competing for and winning academic prizes. On the second occasion of his compet.i.tion he defeated La Harpe. Afterwards Madame Helvetius a.s.sisted him, and at last he received from Chabanon (a third-rate man of letters, who may be most honourably mentioned here) a small annuity which made him independent.

It is said that he married, and that his wife died six months afterwards. He was elected to the Academy, and patronised by all sorts of persons, from the queen downwards. But at the outbreak of the Revolution he took the popular side, though he could not continue long faithful to it. In the Terror he was menaced with arrest, tried to commit suicide, and died horribly mutilated in 1794. Chamfort's literary works are considerable in bulk, but only a few of them have merit. His tragedies are quite worthless, his comedy, _La Jeune Indienne_, not much better. His verse tales exceed in licentiousness his models in La Fontaine, but fall far short of them in elegance and humour. His academic essays are heavy and scarcely intelligent. But his brief witticisms and his short anecdotes and apophthegms hardly admit a rival.

Chamfort was a man soured by his want of birth, health, and position, and spoilt in mental development by the necessity of hanging on to the great persons of his time. But for a kind of tragi-comic satire, a _saeva indignatio_, taking the form of contempt of all that is exalted and n.o.ble, he has no equal in literature except Swift.

[Sidenote: Rivarol.]

The life of Rivarol was also an adventurous one, but much less sombre.

He was born about 1750, of a family which seems to have had n.o.ble connections, but which, in his branch of it, had descended to innkeeping. Indeed it is said that Riverot, and not Rivarol, was the name which his father actually bore. He himself, however, first a.s.sumed the t.i.tle of Chevalier de Parcieux, and then that of Comte de Rivarol.

The way to literary distinction in those days was either the theatre or criticism, and Rivarol, with the acuteness which characterised him, knowing that he had no talent for the former, chose the latter. His translation (with essay and notes) of Dante is an extraordinarily clever book, and his discourse on the universality of the French tongue, which followed, deserves the same description. It was not, however, in mere criticism that Rivarol's forte lay, though he long afterwards continued to exhibit his acuteness in it by utterances of various kinds. In 1788 (the year before the Revolution) he excited the laughter of all Paris, and the intense hatred of the hack-writers of his time, by publis.h.i.+ng, in conjunction with Champcenetz, an _Almanach de nos Grands Hommes_, in which, by a mixture of fiction and fact, he caricatures his smaller contemporaries in the most pitiless manner. When the Revolution broke out Rivarol took the Royalist side, and contributed freely to its journals. He soon found it necessary to leave the country, and lived for ten years in Brussels, London, Hamburg, and Berlin, publis.h.i.+ng occasionally pamphlets and miscellaneous works. He died at the Prussian capital in 1801. Not only has Rivarol a considerable claim as a critic, and a very high position as a political pamphleteer, but he is as much the master of the prose epigram as Chamfort is of the short anecdote.

Following the example of his predecessors, he put many of his best things in a treatise, _De l'Homme Intellectuel et Moral_, which, as a whole, is very dull and unsatisfactory, though it is lighted up by occasional flashes of the most brilliant wit. His detached sayings, which are not so much _Pensees_ or maxims as conversational good things, are among the most sparkling in literature, and, with Chamfort's, occupy a position which they keep almost entirely to themselves. It has been said of him and of Chamfort (who, being of similar talents and on opposite sides, were naturally bitter foes) that they 'knew men, but only from the outside, and from certain limited superficial and accidental points of view. They knew books, too, but their knowledge was circ.u.mscribed by the fas.h.i.+ons of a time which was not favourable to impartial literary appreciation. Hence their anecdotes are personal rather than general, rather amusing than instructive, rather showing the acuteness and ingenuity of the authors than able to throw light on the subjects dealt with. But as mere tale-tellers and sayers of sharp things they have few rivals.' It may be added that they complete and sum up the merits and defects of the French society of the eighteenth century, and that, in so far as literature can do this, the small extent of their selected works furnishes a complete comment on that society.

[Sidenote: Joubert.]

Contemporary with these two writers, though, from the posthumous publication of his works years after the end of his long life, he seems in a manner a contemporary of our own, was Joseph Joubert, the last great _Pensee_-writer of France and of Europe. Joubert's birthplace was Montignac, in Perigord, and the date of his birth 1754, three years after that of Rivarol, and about twelve after that of Chamfort. He was educated at Toulouse, where, without taking regular orders, he joined the Freres de la Doctrine Chretienne, a teaching community, and studied and taught till he was twenty-two years old. Then his health being, as it was all through his life, weak, he returned home, and succeeding before long to a small but sufficient fortune, he went to Paris. Here he became intimate with the second _philosophe_ generation (La Harpe, Marmontel, etc.), and is said to have for a time been an enthusiastic hearer of Diderot, the most splendid talker of that or any age. But Joubert's ideals and method of thought were radically different from those of the _Philosophes_, and he soon found more congenial literary companions, of whom the chief were Fontanes and Chenedolle, while he found his natural home in the salon of two ladies of rank and cultivation, Madame de Beaumont and Madame de Vintimille. Before long he married and established himself in Paris with a choice library, into which, it is said, no eighteenth-century writer was admitted. His health became worse and worse, yet he lived to the age of seventy, dying in 1824. Fourteen years afterwards Chateaubriand, at the request of his widow, edited a selection of his remains, and four years later still his nephew, M. de Raynal, produced a fuller edition.

Joubert's works consist (with the exception of a few letters) exclusively of _Pensees_ and maxims, which rank in point of depth and of exquisite literary expression with those of La Rochefoucauld, and in point of range above them. They are even wider in this respect than those of Vauvenargues, which they also much resemble. Ethics, politics, theology, literature, all occupy Joubert. In politics he is, as may be perhaps expected from his time and circ.u.mstances, decidedly anti-revolutionary. In theology, without being exactly orthodox according to any published scheme of orthodoxy, Joubert is definitely Christian. In ethics he holds a middle place between the unsparing hardness of the self-interest school and the somewhat gus.h.i.+ng manner of the sentimentalists. But his literary thoughts are perhaps the most noteworthy, not merely from our present point of view. All alike have the characteristic of intense compression (he described his literary aim in the phrase 'tormented by the ambition of putting a book in a page, a page into a phrase, and a phrase into a word'), while all have the same lucidity and freedom from enigma. All are alike polished in form and style according to the best models of the seventeenth century; but whereas study and reflection might have been sufficient to give Joubert the material of his other thoughts, the wide difference between his literary judgments and those of his time is less easily explicable. No finer criticism on style and on poetry in the abstract exists than his, and yet his reading of poetry cannot have been very extensive. He is even just to the writers of the eighteenth century, whose manner he disliked, and whose society he had abjured. He seems, indeed, to have had almost a perfect faculty of literary appreciation, and wherever his sayings startle the reader it will generally be found that there is a sufficient explanation beneath. There is probably no writer in any language who has said an equal number of remarkable things on an equal variety of subjects in an equally small s.p.a.ce, and with an equally high and unbroken excellence of style and expression. This is the intrinsic worth of Joubert. In literary history he has yet another interest, that of showing in the person of a man living out of the literary world, and far removed from the operation of cliques, the process which was inevitably bringing about the great revolution of 1830.

[Sidenote: Courier.]

Like Joubert, Paul Louis Courier had a great dislike and even contempt for the authors of the eighteenth century, but curiously enough this dislike did not in the least affect his theological or political opinions. He was born at Paris, in 1772, being the son of a wealthy man of the middle cla.s.s. His youth was pa.s.sed in the country, and he early displayed a great liking for cla.s.sical study. As a compromise between business, which he hated, and literature, of which his father would not hear, he entered the army in 1792. He served on the Rhine, and not long after joining broke his leave in a manner rather unpleasantly resembling desertion. His friends succeeded in saving him from the consequences of this imprudence, and he served until Wagram, when he finally left the army, again in very odd circ.u.mstances. He then lived in Italy (where his pa.s.sion for the cla.s.sics led him into an absurd dispute about an alleged injury he had caused to a ma.n.u.script of Longus) until the fall of the Empire. When he was forty-five years old he was known in literature only as a translator of cla.s.sics, remarkable for scholars.h.i.+p and for careful modelling of his style upon the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, rather than upon the eighteenth. Although he had hitherto taken little active part in politics, the so-called 'ideas of 89' had sunk deeply into him. Impelled, not by any wide views on the future of the nation, but apparently by the mere _bourgeois_ hatred of t.i.tles, old descent, and the other privileges of the aristocracy, he began a series of pamphlets to the success of which there is no rival except that of the Letters of Junius, while Junius falls far short of Courier in intrinsic literary merit. There are, indeed, few authors whose merit resides so wholly in their style and power of expression as Courier's. His thought is narrow in the extreme; even where its conclusions are just it rests rather on the jealousies of the typical _bourgeois_ than on anything else. But in irony he has, with the exception of Pascal and Swift, no superior. He began by a _Pet.i.tion aux Deux Chambres_. Then he contributed a series of letters to _Le Censeur_, a reform journal; then he published various pamphlets, usually signed 'Paul Louis, Vigneron,'

and ostensibly addressed to his neighbours and fellow villagers. He had established himself on a small estate in Touraine, which he farmed himself. But he was much in Paris, and his political writings made him acquainted with the prison of Sainte Pelagie. His death, in April 1825, was singular, and indeed mysterious. He was shot, the murderer escaping.

It was suspected to be one of his own servants, to whom he was a harsh and unpopular master, and the suspicion was confirmed some years afterwards by the confession of a game-keeper. His _Simple Discours_ against the presentation of Chambord to the Duc de Bordeaux, his _Livret de Paul Louis_, his _Pamphlet des Pamphlets_, are all models of their kind. Nowhere is the peculiar quality which is called in French _narquois_ displayed with more consummate skill. The language is at once perfectly simple and of the utmost literary polish, the arguments, whether good or bad, always tellingly expressed. But perhaps he has written nothing better than the _Lettre a M. Renouard_, in which he discusses the mishap with the ma.n.u.script of Longus, and the letter to the _Academie des Inscriptions_ on their refusal to elect him. The style of Courier is almost unique, and its merits are only denied by those who do not possess the necessary organ for appreciating it.

[Sidenote: Senancour.]

This chapter may perhaps be most appropriately concluded by the notice of a singular writer who, although longer lived, was contemporary with Courier. etienne Pivert de Senancour may be treated almost indifferently as a moral essayist, or as a producer of the peculiar kind of faintly narrative and strongly ethical work which Rousseau had made fas.h.i.+onable.

The infusion of narrative in his princ.i.p.al and indeed only remarkable work, _Obermann_, is however so slight, that he will come in best here, though in his old age he wrote a professed novel, _Isabella_. Senancour was born in 1770, his father being a man of position and fortune, who lost both at the Revolution. The son was destined for the Church, but ran away and spent a considerable time in Switzerland, where he married, returning to France towards the end of the century. He then published divers curious works of half-sentimental, half-speculative reflection, by far the most important of which, _Obermann_, appeared in 1804. Then Senancour had to take to literary hack-work for a subsistence; but in his later years Villemain and Thiers procured pensions for him, and he was relieved from want. He died in 1846. _Obermann_ has not been ill described by George Sand as a _Rene_ with a difference; Chateaubriand's melancholy hero feeling that he could do anything if he would but has no spirit for any task, Senancour's that he is unequal to his own aspirations. No brief epigram of this kind can ever fully describe a book; but this, though inadequate, is not incorrect so far as it goes.

The book is a series of letters, in which the supposed writer delivers melancholy reflections on all manner of themes, especially moral problems and natural beauty. Senancour was in a certain sense a _Philosophe_, in so far that he was dogmatically unorthodox and discarded conventional ideas as to moral conduct; but he is much nearer Rousseau than Diderot. Indeed, he sometimes seems to the reader little more than an echo of the former, until his more distinctly modern characteristics (characteristics which were not fully or generally felt or reproduced till the visionary and discouraged generation of 1820-1850) reappear. It is perhaps not unfair to say that the pleasure with which this generation recognised its own sentiments in _Obermann_ gave rise to a traditional estimate of the literary value of that book which is a little exaggerated. Yet it has considerable merit, especially in the simplicity and directness with which expression is given to a cla.s.s of sentiments very likely to find vent in language either extravagant or affected. Its form is that of a series of letters, dated from various places, but chiefly from a solitary valley in the Alps in which the hero lives, meditates, and pursues the occupations of husbandry on his small estate.

CHAPTER VI.

PHILOSOPHERS.

[Sidenote: The philosophe movement.]

The entire literary and intellectual movement of the eighteenth century is very often called the _philosophe_ movement, and the writers who took part in it _les philosophes_. The word 'philosopher' is, however, here used in a sense widely different from its proper and usual one.

_Philosophie_, in the ordinary language of the middle and later seventeenth century, meant simply freethinking on questions of religion.