generation, as the dispensers and living types of God's everlasting wisdom, commissioned to make it manifest, and, as their particular times require, to reveal and embody it by successive fragments in their works.

The philosopher proceeds (in his course of lectures delivered at Jena, On the Being of the Literary Man*) to explain how each age, by its peculiar inherent tendencies, is different from every other age, and demands a different representation of this Divine Idea; how every laborer in the vineyard of letters, at all times and in all departments, must first have possessed himself of this Divine Idea, or at least with his whole heart and soul striven to attain it; and how a man, the more he is inspired by it, becomes the true and perfect literary character, whilst he who, on the contrary, is not actuated by it, but is a stranger to its feeling and impulse, sinks into a mere groper in the dark.

The literary man, as thus portrayed by Fichte with regard to his functions and duties, is invested with an incomparable grandeur and dignity, befitting his elevated mission; and the sentiments he teaches seem the more sacred from the austere brevity in which he announces them—a brevity far more impressive than highly wrought rhetoric. It is not to be denied that this metaphysical theory of Fichte may be called in question, and readily enough misapprehended; but we cannot doubt that a thought so generous and sublime must find a responsive echo in many a heart. It explains the true civilizing principle of literature, and expands it to its true and natural limits, embracing all things divine and human.

Literature is indeed a most varied and unbounded universe; it is not only, according to the usual French definition, the expression of society, but also its very life and soul. With its numerous names, forms, and species, literature is not only a mirror reflecting society or national progress, but is also the breath that animates and vivifies a nation, arousing it to life and greatness, or impelling it to crime and anarchy. Literature may either be a powerful instrument for creation and regeneration, or a fatal one for destruction. Ages and nations may owe their formation to books, as much as books are engendered by ages and nations. The heroic grandeur of Greece inspired Homer; but it was from Homer that its civilization sprung.

No literature has perhaps been, so much as that of France, not only the image, the expression of society, but the very spring

*Ucber das Wesen des Gelehrten, Jena: 1805.

VILLEHARDOUIN-FROISSARD-MONTAIGNE.

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of nationality. Nowhere could Buffon have said with so much truth, "Le style c'est l'homme." During the thirteenth century, literature is the perfect image of that most dramatic period of the history of France; the noble, vigorous, epic style of Villehardouin is characterized by all the heroic roughness and the naïveté of those valorous knights whose blood covered the soil of Italy, Constantinople and Palestine. The language of the thirteenth century became afterwards impoverished, and never recovered the Latin idiom, or the expressive, energetic words that are to be found in Villehardouin, many of which the English language has so happily preserved. Nevertheless, the diction of Froissard, of Comines, of Montaigne, faithfully corresponds with the prevailing passions and ideas of France. In the Chronicles of the Fourteenth Century, the expressions are picturesque, capricious, and fraught with an exuberance of images, all irregular as those martial bands of the time, so greedy of warfare. The language of Philippe de Comines is more subdued and sober, rarely indulging in that play of fancy and feeling so abundant and brilliant in the pages of Villehardouin, Joinville, and Froissard. The language has lost in Comines its former raciness and vigor; it becomes dull, ambiguous, and commercial in its tone, in accordance with the policy and spirit of the times; it has left the field of battle, shorn of its epic vividness, for the closet of the crafty Louis XI.; in short, along with the country and government, it has abandoned the age of Poetry and lapsed into that of Prose.

But with Montaigne the French language takes a new construction, turning again to Greek and Latin sources, and withal so skilfully and happily modified, as, despite its classical coloring, still to remain intrinsically Gallic. The style of Montaigne combines many admirable qualities: the mirror of feeling and nature, it is the harmonious organ at once of imagination and reason, of philosophy and poetry. The delineation of human emotion seems its only aim, but it possesses also the necessary precision for the artist and the man of thought. Yet this same language, so plastic and idiomatic in the Essays of Montaigne, takes a new form in the hands of Pascal. With him, French becomes firm, austere, and subservient to reasoning alone-the Latin influence ceases to be. predominant-the sole object in view is to give clearness, regularity, and power to the expressions. The diction of Pascal eschews all flippant, meretricious ornament, and binds the language, as it were, within the strictest logical confines.

The rigid, austere, and lofty style of Pascal, is softened in the Esprit des Lois, and the Essai sur les Mœurs. The phraseology of Montesquieu and Voltaire rivals that of Pascal in regularity and artistic beauty, but is distinguished for greater smoothness, lightness, and buoyancy. Again, Rousseau, with his rich exuberance of language, is sometimes faulty and ungrammatical; whilst Buffon, on the contrary, is an immortal specimen of graceful majesty and uniform correctness. Thus, the beginning of the nineteenth century found the French language polished and perfected by the intellectual efforts of these great men during a course of five centuries, having at that time attained, by universal suffrage, a remarkable degree of elegance, perspicuity, and strength. It then began, with the age, to receive new forms, to undergo strange metamorphoses; in short, it was plunged into that revolution, which, signally chequered in its objects and results, in its crimes and virtues, materially affected the fortunes of all that fell within its scope. The language, the faithful image of the national spirit, struggling to shake off all fetters, has fallen, at times, into dark abysses. It has imbibed all the love of novelty characteristic of the era, and delights to revel in new phrases, words, and forms, assuming a thousand shapes to express the tumultuous feelings of the nation.

Recurring to the seventeenth century, the literature of the age of Louis XIV. presents a uniformity similar to that of the absolute monarchy; the despotic sovereign constrained the literary world to regard him alone as the object of homage and attention, and repressed the efforts and speculations of the mind within the narrow limit of progression which he permitted to things physical and material. The Grecian models were then successfully imitated; Euripides revived in Racine, and Aristophanes in Molière-Homer alone remained like an isolated gigantic monument. Hitherto the epic fire has smouldered in the atmosphere of France.

The literary character of the eighteenth century is totally different: the nation was beginning to embrace a cynical philosophy, destined to shake the social edifice to its very foundation. The ancient religion of the country was attacked with irreverence, and public opinion became deeply tainted with destructive dogmas, unredeemed by the healing principle of reconstruction. An intoxicating passion for change, for subversion, seized society: it was the effect of the execrable vices and despotism of the regency and of Louis XV. Two men, especially, became the representatives of the popular feeling, and therefore exer

INFLUENCE OF ROUSSEAU AND VOLTAIRE.

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cised a great influence on the eighteenth century, and indirectly a no less great one on the nineteenth. Voltaire had already assailed the empire of the classics, and Rousseau was preparing the basis whereon a new and distinct literature might be reared. Voltaire drew upon the resources of a matchless, inexhaustible wit; but Rousseau poured forth the effusions of a glowing yet morbid and incongruous sensibility: the former wrote profusely, merely to satisfy his thirst for glory, while the latter was stirred by the overflowing emotions of the heart. Voltaire by his works fostered the bias to infidelity, standing in the van of others, his compeers in impious sarcasm and ridicule; Rousseau seemed, on the contrary, to have consolations for even dismal scepticism; he exhorted to feelings of comparative piety, and to the ever-fruitful love of nature; the soul, in its attributes, affections, pangs, was his exalted theme, the subject that elicited the brightest emanations of his genius. Thus was heralded the mighty convulsion : the revolution burst forth in all its wildness, and France was suddenly hurled into anarchy and barbarism. Happily it was not of long duration; the reign of terror, indeed, covered the country with streams of blood, and overturned the social edifice; but soon after a new society, a youthful generation, arose from the ruins a society of orphans, united by the common tie of misfortune, still bearing traces of tears in their smiles. Everything then took a graver aspect—a character more generous, certainly, but sombre in its hue; for France was covered with tombs. The revolutionary storm was followed by a calm, the harbinger of returning prosperity. A great reconciliation signalized the end of the revolution; Frenchmen united to lament over the misfortunes of the country, to defend its soil from foreign aggression, to remove or mitigate all existing evils. Eventually, an extraordinary man stepped from the crowd, and threw a mantle of glory over the deep and gory gash left by the revolution.

But with respect to the influence of Voltaire, of Rousseau, and the philosophers of the eighteenth century, let us pause a moment, and inquire in what degree they are really guilty of the aberrations that marked their own time and succeeding years. It has unfortunately ever been usual to attack individuals rather than principles. The culpability of individuals is certainly at times fatally influential; but it must also be admitted that men are often irresistibly, unwittingly, carried away by the flowing current of ideas. Instead of denouncing the principles of a philosopher, the philosopher himself is generally assailed; whereas,

in all controversies, it is a wholesome rule that persons should be scrupulously respected. When a man is attacked merely for his opinions, it should be done with great caution, since allowance is to be made for the origin of those opinions for the causes which have engendered them. Is it not a duty on the part of those who are so ready to lavish hatred and odium on the memory of the dead and the reputation of the living, to reflect a little how an opinion is adopted, and how far he who has adopted it is responsible for having done so? There is nothing more ridiculous, for instance, than the exaggerated attacks on the philosophers of the eighteenth century for having thought as they did. The French nation was beginning to read-to understand—to believe—to doubt—in short, to have an opinion, whatever it might be; and when has it been seen that an opinion, good or bad, ridiculous or sublime, had no representatives? That such is always the case is a maxim of undoubted truth, nay, a fact of necessary and unavoidable occurrence. A great man comes to represent an idea at the precise time when that idea is inevitable; he is the representative of a power not his own, for mere individual power is pitiful, and no man yields to another man he yields only to the representative of a general power. To upbraid Voltaire and his followers for what they thought, is, in truth, to blame an effect irrrespective of the cause-to condemn a wall for breaking a head wilfully dashed against it. Voltaire and his friends were guilty, but their age was much more guilty the era in which their lot was cast is chiefly obnoxious to censure for doctrines and ideas whereof they were the mere organs. And although those very writers, so omnipotent in their day, may seem flippant and superficial to us of the present generation, it is certain that they appeared most profound and sagacious to the age in which they lived. Deeply imbued with the spirit of that age, and impelled by the genius, good or evil, which incites men to attempt to sway and influence their contemporaries, they broke forth, the beacons and luminaries not alone of their own times but of after epochs.

Benjamin Constant, in his work De la Religion, has justly characterized the philosophers of the eighteenth century as to the nature and extent of their knowledge; but the opprobrium with which he covers them is unjust, because he takes them in an isolated point of view-a course signally unfair and uncandid, for a man neither can nor ought to be judged without a previous accurate estimate and knowledge of his times; he must be appreciated with reference to his epoch. The fact is, that, if