TENDENCIES IN FRENCH LITERATURE. 217 



confirms the flippant utilitarian point of view, which we must beware 

 of regarding as a personal conviction. " I insist particularly on the 

 immortality of the soul, because there is nothing to which I hold more 

 than the idea of hell. We have to do with a host of rogues who have 

 never thought; a crowd of petty people, brutes and drunkards and 

 thieves. Preach to them if you will that there is no hell and that the 

 soul is mortal. As for me I will cry in their ears that they are 

 damned if they rob me." It is needless to add that convictions of 

 this eminently practical nature did not seriously hamper Voltaire in 

 his anti-religious crusade. 



To every branch of letters Voltaire brought the same splendid 

 qualities of mind, and need I add the same defective qualities of con- 

 science and carelessness of the truth when his personal glory or his 

 material advancement were concerned? The sordid pages of his life 

 would weary us in the turning, yet his native generosity and sympathy 

 incline us to charity; and it is wonderful how his never-failing wit 

 can temper his vindictiveness for us, now that the sting has lost its 

 living poison. 



I have referred to Professor Dowden's unsatisfactory treatment 

 of the international reactions which characterize the literary history 

 of the eighteenth century. There is another omission which I have 

 remarked in the book on a reperusal of the pages devoted to Rousseau 

 and the encyclopedists. It might have been easily within the scope 

 of a literary story of even moderate dimensions to have more ex- 

 plicitly accounted for the crumbling of the old classical ideal, to have 

 shown that the once impregnable citadel of classical art was rotten at 

 the base, and that those who still defended the imaginary stronghold 

 were themselves the unconscious agents of its destruction. With 

 reference to the irreligious influences of Cartesianism and the philo- 

 sophical system of Bayle I shall say no more, save that the evident 

 loss in prestige of the traditional religious faith, combined as it was 

 with the rapid decentralization of the sovereign power in the state, 

 must perforce make impossible the survival of literature on the old 

 national basis. Again, in point of pure art a decline was inevitable 

 in connection with the revival of Cartesianism among writers of the 

 stamp of Fontenelle ; for their prestige was synchronous with the tri- 

 umph of the modern party in the famous quarrel; and no student of 

 the Art Poetique will fail to appreciate the sesthetical significance of 

 an abandonment of classical standards of taste as an unimpeachable 

 canon of art. Defending as Boileau did the supreme value of reason 

 and good sense, what justification could he have found for poetry 

 unless he had proved to the satisfaction of his generation that poetry 

 better than any other mode of expression could render permanent 

 the promptings of the diviner reason, as witness the eternal monu- 



