A History of Modern French Literature

by Christopher Prendergast

  But what exactly, in the realm of imaginative literature, is being proved or demonstrated? Here we come to the final element of Perrault’s aesthetics: its didacticism. Conceptual design and methodical execution both ultimately serve, he affirms, the reader’s instruction. For Perrault, the utility of literature is, we have seen, “intellectual” and “spiritual.” But more important, especially in the domain of fiction—whether dramatic or narrative, verse or prose—it is fundamentally moral. Precision and economy are simply tools to effectively deliver a carefully formulated lesson. The position may seem banal, but the repercussions are critical. Valuing above all moral clarity, Perrault casts serious doubts, for example, on the merits of Aristotelian pathos, whose effects of “pity and fear” depend in part on the imperfections of a virtuous yet flawed hero. To this moral murkiness, Perrault prefers characters painted in black and white. Indeed, in the preface to the first volume of the Parallèle, he decries translations of morally suspect ancient poetry as a menace to public’s well-being. The dissemination of such Greek works, he asserts in language recalling Plato’s Republic, goes “against the political good.” In contrast, he hails modern works such as Jean Chapelain’s recent epic poem about Joan of Arc, La Pucelle, for their stark “contrast” between an impeccably “perfect hero” and an unambiguously evil (“très méchant”) villain. Only such absolute and edifying dichotomies can “furnish a morality which the masters of art demand from such works so as to make them useful to the entire public.”

  As Perrault’s censure of classical literature’s moral ambiguities suggests, the demands of contemporary propriety required breaking some ancient idols. Old artistic forms needed serious revision. Indeed, new genres needed to be created. In terms of the dramatic arts, this translated into support for the innovative libretti of the very first French operas. For poetry, it meant embracing the edification of Christian verse epic, as opposed to the pagan Homeric model backed by partisans of the ancients. Perrault himself penned such a religious epic, a Saint Paulin that proved as largely overlooked as Chapelain’s Pucelle. But another of Perrault’s modernizing creations would not be so soon forgotten. In an effort to provide a French response to (and replacement for) the lurid tales of pagan mythology, Perrault crafted his own fictions filled with magical marvels more fitting modern morals. Starting in the mid-1690s with verse tales such as “Peau d’âne” (“Donkey Skin”), followed by the 1697 prose Contes (Tales) that introduced in print such figures as La belle au bois dormant (Sleeping Beauty) and Cendrillon (Cinderella), Perrault published the first versions of these fairy tales, an event whose impact would be felt throughout Europe. Ironically enough, their success owed much to their playfully irreverent and often ambiguous moral messages. This should not be surprising. Perrault was after all a writer whose genius could resist his own theoretical demands (the same might be said of his opponent, Boileau). But whatever sly indulgences he permitted himself, Perrault insisted that he was strictly guided by his literary principles, and in his preface he proudly proclaimed that his fairy tales, unlike scandalous Greek myths, consistently promoted “good morals” and contained nothing that “might offend either modesty or decorum.”

  What did Boileau and his allies make of these modern literary and aesthetic principles? It must first be admitted that they hardly rejected them in totality. Boileau was a man of his day, and just like Perrault, he is well known for praising clarity, reason, and moral propriety. In retrospect, both men (and both parties) reveal themselves to be champions of neoclassicism. Although the term was not yet in currency, it can help to illuminate the conflict. The Modern party might be said to put the “neo-” in neoclassicism: they updated and indeed fortified the classical ideals of luminous intelligibility and flawless decorum through the favorable reinforcements of contemporary rationalism and politeness. Boileau and his allies, in contrast, kept the “classic” in neoclassicism—“classic” taken here in the sense (current in the seventeenth century) of a long-admired author who served as an exemplary model for a genre. In other words, while the defenders of antiquity did not fail to promote their own abstract principles, they nevertheless privileged above all the concretely individual works from whose irreducible artistry these principles were presumably culled. They furthermore attributed the enduring allure of these classics not only to their demonstrable (if not geometric) coherence and concision, but also to the more obscure operations of creative genius and the mysterious effects of language that transcended, they argued, mere rational method. And these primordial qualities, flourishing in simpler times, were often resistant to the historical trajectories of ameliorative progress on which glided other human pursuits. In this sense, they constituted a truly “ancient” party rather than a merely classicizing one. Indeed, their use of antiquity might prove disturbing to any notion of classicism or neoclassicism identified solely with order, lucidity, and reason.

  Boileau staked out his position well before the quarrel officially commenced, most notably with two critical works published together in 1674. The first was his celebrated literary treatise in verse form, the Art poétique, which offered an elegant variation on the basic principles of poetic unity and decorum inherited from Aristotle and Horace and refined by earlier Renaissance humanists. Appealing to the common sense of the leisured reading public, the poem presents a carefully modulated form of neoclassicism. Its opening lines, for example, equitably balance the requirements of reason and regularity with enthusiastic praise for the mysteries of Parnassian inspiration and instinctual genius. The beginning of its third canto likewise mitigates the demands of decorum and didacticism by extolling the fierce passions of tragedy, including the thrill afforded by such “horrendous” (affreux) spectacles as those of a “blood-soaked Oedipus” and a “parricidal Orestes.” Through this balancing act, the Art poétique constitutes an effort to claim the center ground in literary debates, cautiously containing—without rejecting—the contemporary dictates of rationalism and propriety.

  Boileau’s sensible centrism, however, proved wobbly. With his second great work of 1674, the translation from ancient Greek of Longinus’s treatise On the Sublime, he adopted a considerably more pointed position. Turning from the mainstream tradition of Horatian and Aristotelian criticism to the more neglected Longinus, Boileau entered into an audacious defense of the apparently unmethodical, even inexplicable, aspects of ancient literature. He did so by turning the traditional reading of Longinus’s work—that of a pedagogic manual for the orator—on its head. In his preface, Boileau crucially defines the sublime not as a mere (albeit the highest) register of rhetoric, but instead as something very different: as the ineffable power of language that escapes the logical mechanics of rhetorical production and analysis. The sublime becomes in Boileau’s hands a type of supernatural force vested in poetry, “the marvel inside language” (le merveilleux dans le discours). It adds to the common use of words an indefinable supplement. This intangible dimension of language produces in the reader not a comforting pleasure but a violent movement: the sublime, Boileau famously exults, “carries away, ravishes, transports” (enlève, ravit, transporte) the reader.

  Boileau’s embrace of Longinus so defined the Ancient party that it was sometimes called the party (or, more polemically, the “cabal”) of the Sublime. It is thus fitting that Boileau’s most sustained responses to Perrault, begun in 1692, are contained in his twelve Réflexions critiques sur quelques passages du rhéteur Longin (Critical Reflections on Some Passages from the Rhetor Longinus), the last three of which were published only in the years after his death in 1711. Although more impassioned in tone and less systematic in approach than Perrault, Boileau nevertheless offers here a counteraesthetic to the one elaborated by the Modern party leader. In place of Perrault’s emphasis on denotative exactitude, Boileau’s explication of the mysteries of the sublime lead him to praise what appears to be the opposite of transparent precision: a certain shadowy power in words that he calls a “majestic and elegant obscurity.” As t
he qualifiers “majestic” and “elegant” make clear, the “obscurity” in question does not result from just any poetic gibberish. Boileau was after all as rigorous in his own way as Perrault. Nevertheless, by lauding obscurity, Boileau has consciously picked fighting words. He has asserted that great literature depends on something other than the light of reason alone. “The sublime,” he explains, “is not, properly speaking, a thing that can be proved or demonstrated; instead … it is a wonder that seizes, strikes, makes itself felt.”

  Boileau is taking aim not just at the intellectualism of Perrault’s approach, but also at the abstract quality of that intellectualism. The literary force that “seizes, strikes, makes itself felt” arises for Boileau not so much from the immaterial and conceptual design lauded by his modern opponent, but instead from the irreducible concreteness of the words themselves and their sonorous and connotative effects. Boileau takes on here Perrault’s preference for the corrective translation over the suggestive original. Despite his own enthusiasm for translating classics, Boileau proves to be something of a theoretician of the untranslatable. The auditory and associative networks of each language are fundamentally unique, he claims, and words that are “noble and sweet to the ear in their original language, would be base and gross once translated into French.” Whereas Perrault firmly subordinates the musicality of language to “the purely intellectual and spiritual joy” of its carefully constructed meaning, Boileau privileges instead a “power” and “beauty” that “consists primarily in the number, arrangement, and magnificence of the words.”

  It is furthermore a beauty, according to Boileau, that “method” alone cannot produce. Boileau rallies to the notion of an unmethodical “beautiful disorder” (beau désordre) that he earlier adopted in his Art poétique. In opposition to Perrault’s maxim dictating that poets be guided by their inner philosopher, the Ancient party leader promotes elusive intuition as a crucial source of the sublime. In another work aimed directly at Perrault, the 1693 Discours sur l’ode (Discourse on the ode), Boileau exuberantly claims that “beautiful disorder” can result from an “impetuous” talent that succeeds by “sometimes disregarding the rules,” and even by surrendering to the arbitrary inspiration of “chance” itself. He puts genius before method. In retrospect, Boileau, for all his praise elsewhere for measure and restraint, might strike us as more Romantic than neoclassical, particularly when extolling, as here, the “movements and transports where the mind appears to be led more by the demon of poetry than guided by reason.”

  Boileau’s “demon of poetry” could be quite diabolical indeed. Not just poetically, but also morally. This brings us to a final aspect of Boileau’s sublime, its prudent but unmistakable resistance to the Modern party’s emphasis on didacticism. Just as the sublime asks readers to temporarily abandon the cognitive norms of their reasoning intellect, so too they must sometimes set aside, however briefly, the moral norms of their age and nation. Of course, there are for Boileau strict limits to this literary license. He could, after all, attack what he deplored as “lubricious” modern novels and operas with a zeal at least equaling Perrault’s denunciation of what he, for his part, labeled ancient “filth.” Boileau nevertheless positioned himself early as a critic who sought to clearly distinguish a work’s emotional impact from its moral influence. When commenting in the Art poétique on the passions of Virgil’s Dido, for example, he insists that the reader may “condemn her fault while partaking in her tears.” The ethical gray area of tragic pathos, which we have seen treated with skepticism by Perrault, requires for Boileau the reader’s nuanced leniency.

  The pleasures of the sublime demand equal permissiveness. Thus, in the tenth of his Réflexions he elevates as a great exemplar of the modern sublime the mad egoistical cry of Pierre Corneille’s Médée (Medea), who when asked what might guarantee the success of her murderous revenge plot, exclaims “Moi / Moi, dis-je, et c’est assez!” (Me / Me, I say, and that’s enough!). The horror of the infanticide here foreshadowed forced Corneille himself, despite his claims that he had no need to excuse his heroine’s infamous crime, to defend himself in his later dedicatory preface to the 1635 play by asserting that tragic characters need not be virtuous, but simply accurately depicted. When explaining the verse’s power, Boileau goes a step further by not even bothering with such justifications; he simply dodges all moral considerations as apparently irrelevant. “Can one deny that in this monosyllabic Me there is the Sublime, and the highest Sublime? What strikes us in this passage if not the audacious pride of this magician, and the confidence she has in her art?”

  Boileau’s defense, hesitant though it often was, of a certain moral autonomy for literature became one of the most consequential arguments adopted by the future champions of antiquity. Anne Dacier, for example, could divorce literature from morality in the starkest terms: “The aim of poetry is to imitate,” she states in her preface to Homer’s Iliad, “and its imitation can be [as] vicious in regard to good politics, as it is excellent in regard to good poetry.” Others went further and suggested that literary value and the political good were not only frequently independent of each other, but that they could even bear an inverse relation. Such was the gist of Fénelon’s defense of Homer when he claimed, “The more the [pagan] religion was monstrous and ridiculous, the more one must admire [Homer] for having raised it up with so many magnificent images. The cruder the morals and manners were, the more stirring it is to see that he lent such power to what is so irregular, so absurd, so shocking.” Faced with his own conflicted admiration for Homer, Fénelon urges the reader to develop a kind of double consciousness: a philosophical and moral one that disapproves and an aesthetic one that takes delight.

  The vexing relation between literature and philosophy would prove to be one of the great questions stimulating thinkers throughout the rest of the eighteenth century. Ancient literature continued to be a crucial battleground, and the arguments of the quarrel resonated powerfully in the Enlightenment. But after the storm of the conflict finally began to quiet, the partisan divisions—always, as we have seen, intricate and nuanced—proved even more paradoxical. The progressive and freethinking Diderot, for example, was in many ways an heir of the Modern party. Yet when it came to literature and the arts, he embraced precisely the primitive sublimity that Perrault denounced. In antiquity he found an antidote to the stifling constraints of modern decorum. These refinements might serve societal happiness, but they proved deadly to imaginative genius. Thus, after enumerating in his 1758 essay “De la poésie dramatique” (“On Dramatic Poetry”) a lurid catalog of the barbarous ancient customs that produced terrifying tragedies and sublime epics, he observes, “I do not say such customs are good, only that they are poetic,” explaining, “the more a people are civilized and polite, the less their manners and morals are poetical.”

  Jean-Jacques Rousseau was, in a very different manner, equally conflicted. Indeed, he might be called a one-man quarrel of the ancients and moderns. The ancient partisan in him reserved a special disdain for the moderns’ celebration of progress and refinement, for which he blamed the prevailing vices of artificiality and inequality. He admired the simplicity of Homer, even arguing in his posthumous “Essai sur l’origine des langues” (“Essay on the Origin of Languages”) that the primitive orality of his epics was vastly superior to the vain sophistication of more advanced literate societies. Yet when it came to the moral and political function of literature, he proved in many ways an heir to the same modern partisans he elsewhere scorned. Beginning in 1750 with what is called his First Discourse (Discours sur les sciences et les arts), he unflinchingly denounced the continuing sway of Greco-Roman paganism in poetry and the arts, castigating the “images of all the waylaying distractions of the heart and reason, carefully drawn from ancient mythology.” His 1758 Lettre à d’Alembert went considerably further, condemning with a zeal worthy of Perrault the immorality of classical tragedy, attacking its flawed heroes and heroines, and endorsing in the name of “pub
lic rectitude” the banning of all such works’ performance. He thus adopts the solution proposed by Plato in The Republic and seconded by modern partisans: discarding the old, the contemporary world must craft new forms of art aimed at inculcating what Rousseau called “useful lessons” for the public good.

  Finally, the quarrel owes its enduring influence not only to the substance of its arguments, such as those evoked by Diderot and Rousseau, but also to the manner and the context in which those arguments were originally made. The word “quarrel” (querelle) is instructive here. The great literary and theatrical querelles that preceded it, those, for example, around Corneille’s Le Cid (1637), and Molière’s L’école des femmes (School for Wives, 1662–63) and Tartuffe (1664–69), had begun to establish the terrain for debates engaging the reading (or viewing) public. Lasting decades rather than only a few months or years, the quarrel of the ancients and moderns vastly expanded the field for such discussions from a single topic to the entire gamut of cultural production across the ages, and to the full array of issues at stake concerning literary value and the progress of the arts. It also continued to broaden the audience for these debates. It is crucial to note here that the Ancient party, as much as the Modern one, wrote in approachable and elegant French, avoiding neo-Latin learning and pedantic terminology. More important, Boileau and his allies joined their opponents in generally rejecting arguments based on authority, whether it was scholarly, religious, or institutional. Recourse to such extraneous support was, they understood, risible to the leisured and cultivated readers whom they targeted. Ancient as well as modern champions thus appealed to the pride this audience took in its independent reason and innate good taste. The parties argued through graceful verse, witty dialogues, and seductive prose. Perhaps more significant, they published compelling translations (and free adaptations) of classics into modern French, opening these newly accessible texts up to a broader public.