_Origins._--The history of French literature in the proper sense of the term can hardly be said to extend farther back than the 11th century. The actual manuscripts which we possess are seldom of older date than the century subsequent to this. But there is no doubt that by the end at least of the 11th century the French language, as a completely organized medium of literary expression, was in full, varied and constant use. For many centuries previous to this, literature had been composed in France, or by natives of that country, using the term France in its full modern acceptation; but until the 9th century, if not later, the written language of France, so far as we know, was Latin; and despite the practice of not a few literary historians, it does not seem reasonable to notice Latin writings in a history of French literature. Such a history properly busies itself only with the monuments of French itself from the time when the so-called Lingua Romana Rustica assumed a sufficiently independent form to deserve to be called a new language. This time it is indeed impossible exactly to determine, and the period at which literary compositions, as distinguished from mere conversation, began to employ the new tongue is entirely unknown. As early as the 7th century the Lingua Romana, as distinguished from Latin and from Teutonic dialects, is mentioned, and this Lingua Romana would be of necessity used for purposes of clerical admonition, especially in the country districts, though we need not suppose that such addresses had a very literary character. On the other hand, the mention, at early dates, of certain _cantilenae_ or songs composed in the vulgar language has served for basis to a superstructure of much ingenious argument with regard to the highly interesting problem of the origin of the _Chansons de Geste_, the earliest and one of the greatest literary developments of northern French. It is sufficient in this article, where speculation would be out of place, to mention that only two such _cantilenae_ actually exist, and that neither is French. One of the 9th century, the "Lay of Saucourt," is in a Teutonic dialect; the other, the "Song of St Faron," is of the 7th century, but exists only in Latin prose, the construction and style of which present traces of translation from a poetical and vernacular original. As far as facts go, the most ancient monuments of the written French language consist of a few documents of very various character, ranging in date from the 9th to the 11th century. The oldest gives us the oaths interchanged at Strassburg in 842 between Charles the Bald and Louis the German. The next probably in date and the first in literary merit is a short song celebrating the martyrdom of St Eulalia, which may be as old as the end of the 9th century, and is certainly not younger than the beginning of the 10th. Another, the _Life of St Leger_, in 240 octosyllabic lines, is dated by conjecture about 975. The discussion indeed of these short and fragmentary pieces is of more philological than literary interest, and belongs rather to the head of French language. They are, however, evidence of the progress which, continuing for at least four centuries, built up a literary instrument out of the decomposed and reconstructed Latin of the Roman conquerors, blended with a certain limited amount of contributions from the Celtic and Iberian dialects of the original inhabitants, the Teutonic speech of the Franks, and the Oriental tongue of the Moors who pressed upwards from Spain. But all these foreign elements bear a very small proportion to the element of Latin; and as Latin furnished the greater part of the vocabulary and the grammar, so did it also furnish the principal models and helps to literary composition. The earliest French versification is evidently inherited from that of the Latin hymns of the church, and for a certain time Latin originals were followed in the choice of literary forms. But by the 11th century it is tolerably certain that dramatic attempts were already being made in the vernacular, that lyric poetry was largely cultivated, that laws, charters, and such-like documents were written, and that commentators and translators busied themselves with religious subjects and texts. The most important of the extant documents, outside of the epics presently to be noticed, has of late been held to be the _Life of Saint Alexis_, a poem of 625 decasyllabic lines, arranged in five-line stanzas, each of one assonance or vowel-rhyme, which may be as early as 1050. But the most important development of the 11th century, and the one of which we are most certain, is that of which we have evidence remaining in the famous _Chanson de Roland_, discovered in a manuscript at Oxford and first published in 1837. This poem represents the first and greatest development of French literature, the chansons de geste (this form is now preferred to that with the plural _gestes_). The origin of these poems has been hotly debated, and it is only recently that the importance which they really possess has been accorded to them,--a fact the less remarkable in that, until about 1820, the epics of ancient France were unknown, or known only through late and disfigured prose versions. Whether they originated in the north or the south is a question on which there have been more than one or two revolutions of opinion, and will probably be others still, but which need not be dealt with here. We possess in round numbers a hundred of these chansons. Three only of them are in Provençal. Two of these, _Ferabras_ and _Betonnet d'Hanstonne_, are obviously adaptations of French originals. The third, _Girartz de Rossilho_ (Gerard de Roussillon), is undoubtedly Provençal, and is a work of great merit and originality, but its dialect is strongly tinged with the characteristics of the Langue d'Oïl, and its author seems to have been a native of the debatable land between the two districts. To suppose under these circumstances that the Provençal originals of the hundred others have perished seems gratuitous. It is sufficient to say that the chanson de geste, as it is now extant, is the almost exclusive property of northern France. Nor is there much authority for a supposition that the early French poets merely versified with amplifications the stories of chroniclers. On the contrary, chroniclers draw largely from the chansons, and the question of priority between _Roland_ and the pseudo-Turpin, though a hard one to determine, seems to resolve itself in favour of the former. At most we may suppose, with much probability, that personal and family tradition gave a nucleus for at least the earliest. Entry: FRENCH
II. _External History._--(a) _Political._--By the Roman conquests the language of Rome was spread over the greater part of southern and western Europe, and gradually supplanted the native tongues. The language introduced was at first nearly uniform over the whole empire, Latin provincialisms and many more or less general features of the older vulgar language being suppressed by the preponderating influence of the educated speech of the capital. As legions became stationary, as colonies were formed, and as the natives adopted the language of their conquerors, this language split up into local dialects, the distinguishing features of which are due, as far as can be ascertained (except, to some extent, as to the vocabulary), not to speakers of different nationalities misspeaking Latin, each with the peculiarities of his native language, but to the fact that linguistic changes, which are ever occurring, are not perfectly uniform over a large area, however homogeneous the speakers. As Gaul was not conquered by Caesar till the middle of the first century before our era, its Latin cannot have begun to differ from that of Rome till after that date; but the artificial retention of classical Latin as the literary and official language after the popular spoken language had diverged from it, often renders the chronology of the earlier periods of the Romanic languages obscure. It is, however, certain that the popular Latin of Gaul had become differentiated from that of central Italy before the Teutonic conquest of Gaul, which was not completed till the latter half of the 5th century; the invaders gradually adopted the language of their more civilized subjects, which remained unaffected, except in its vocabulary. Probably by this time it had diverged so widely from the artificially preserved literary language that it could no longer be regarded merely as mispronounced Latin; the Latin documents of the next following centuries contain many clearly popular words and forms, and the literary and popular languages are distinguished as _latina_ and _romana_. The term _gallica_, at first denoting the native Celtic language of Gaul, is found applied to its supplanter before the end of the 9th century, and survives in the Breton _gallek_, the regular term for "French." After the Franks in Gaul had abandoned their native Teutonic language, the term _francisca_, by which this was denoted, came to be applied to the Romanic one they adopted, and, under the form _française_, remains its native name to this day; but this name was confined to the Romanic of northern Gaul, which makes it probable that this, at the time of the adoption of the name _francisca_, had become distinct from the Romanic of southern Gaul. _Francisca_ is the Teutonic adjective _frankisk_, which occurs in Old English in the form _frencise_; this word, with its umlauted _e_ from _a_ with following _i_, survives under the form _French_, which, though purely Teutonic in origin and form, has long been exclusively applied to the Romanic language and inhabitants of Gaul. The German name _franzose_, with its accent on, and _o_ in, the second syllable, comes from _françois_, a native French form older than _français_, but later than the Early Old French _franceis_. The Scandinavian settlers on the north-west coast of France early in the 10th century quickly lost their native speech, which left no trace except in some contributions to the vocabulary of the language they adopted. The main feature since is the growth of the political supremacy of Paris, carrying with it that of its dialect; in 1539 Francis I. ordered that all public documents should be in French (of Paris), which then became the official language of the whole kingdom, though it is still foreign to nearly half its population. Entry: II
From a purely literary point of view, few studies would prove more curious and fruitful than the study of slang. It is a whole language within a language, a sort of sickly excrescence, an unhealthy graft which has produced a vegetation, a parasite which has its roots in the old Gallic trunk, and whose sinister foliage crawls all over one side of the language. This is what may be called the first, the vulgar aspect of slang. But, for those who study the tongue as it should be studied, that is to say, as geologists study the earth, slang appears like a veritable alluvial deposit. According as one digs a longer or shorter distance into it, one finds in slang, below the old popular French, Provencal, Spanish, Italian, Levantine, that language of the Mediterranean ports, English and German, the Romance language in its three varieties, French, Italian, and Romance Romance, Latin, and finally Basque and Celtic. A profound and unique formation. A subterranean edifice erected in common by all the miserable. Each accursed race has deposited its layer, each suffering has dropped its stone there, each heart has contributed its pebble. A throng of evil, base, or irritated souls, who have traversed life and have vanished into eternity, linger there almost entirely visible still beneath the form of some monstrous word.
The necessary consequence of all this was that the Latin language was most tenacious in Italy, and that the elaboration of the new vulgar tongue was very slow,--being in fact preceded by two periods of Italian literature in foreign languages. That is to say, there were many Italians who wrote Provençal poems, such as the Marchese Alberto Malaspina (12th century), Maestro Ferrari of Ferrara, Cigala of Genoa, Zorzi of Venice, Sordello of Mantua, Buvarello of Bologna, Nicoletto of Turin and others, who sang of love and of war, who haunted the courts, or lived in the midst of the people, accustoming them to new sounds and new harmonies. At the same time there was other poetry of an epic kind, written in a mixed language, of which French was the basis, but in which forms and words belonging to the Italian dialects were continually mingling. We find in it hybrid words exhibiting a treatment of sounds according to the rules of both languages,--French words with Italian terminations, a system of vocalization within the words approaching the Italo-Latin usage,--in short, something belonging at once to both tongues, as it were an attempt at interpenetration, at fusion. Such were the _Chansons de Geste_, _Macaire_, the _Entrée en Espagne_ written by Niccola of Padua, the _Prise de Pampelune_ and some others. All this preceded the appearance of a purely Italian literature. Entry: ITALIAN
Restoration comedy at first followed Jonson, whom it was easy to try and imitate; Shadwell and Wilson, whose works are a museum for the social antiquary, photographed the humours of the town. Dryden's many comedies often show his more boisterous and blatant, rarely his finer qualities. Like all playwrights of the time he pillages from the French, and vulgarizes Molière without stint or shame. A truer light comedy began with Sir George Etherege, who mirrored in his fops the gaiety and insolence of the world he knew. The society depicted by William Wycherley, the one comic dramatist of power between Massinger and Congreve, at first seems hardly human; but his energy is skilful and faithful as well as brutal; he excels in the graphic reckless exhibition of outward humours and bustle; he scavenges in the most callous good spirits and with careful cynicism. _The Plain Dealer_ (1677), a skilful transplantation, as well as a depravation of Molière's _Le Misanthrope_, is his best piece: he writes in prose, and his prose is excellent, modern and lifelike. Entry: IV
LEOPARDI, GIACOMO, COUNT (1798-1837), Italian poet, was born at Recanati in the March of Ancona, on the 29th of June 1798. All the circumstances of his parentage and education conspired to foster his precocious and sensitive genius at the expense of his physical and mental health. His family was ancient and patrician, but so deeply embarrassed as to be only rescued from ruin by the energy of his mother, who had taken the control of business matters entirely into her own hands, and whose engrossing devotion to her undertaking seems to have almost dried up the springs of maternal tenderness. Count Monaldo Leopardi, the father, a mere nullity in his own household, secluded himself in his extensive library, to which his nervous, sickly and deformed son had free access, and which absorbed him exclusively in the absence of any intelligent sympathy from his parents, any companionship except that of his brothers and sister, or any recreation in the dullest of Italian towns. The lad spent his days over grammars and dictionaries, learning Latin with little assistance, and Greek and the principal modern languages with none at all. Any ordinarily clever boy would have emerged from this discipline a mere pedant and bookworm. Leopardi came forth a Hellene, not merely a consummate Greek scholar, but penetrated with the classical conception of life, and a master of antique form and style. At sixteen he composed a Latin treatise on the Roman rhetoricians of the 2nd century, a commentary on Porphyry's life of Plotinus and a history of astronomy; at seventeen he wrote on the popular errors of the ancients, citing more than four hundred authors. A little later he imposed upon the first scholars of Italy by two odes in the manner of Anacreon. At eighteen he produced a poem of considerable length, the _Appressamento alla Morte_, which, after being lost for many years, was discovered and published by Zanino Volta. It is a vision of the omnipotence of death, modelled upon Petrarch, but more truly inspired by Dante, and in its conception, machinery and general tone offering a remarkable resemblance to Shelley's _Triumph of Life_ (1822), of which Leopardi probably never heard. This juvenile work was succeeded (1819) by two lyrical compositions which at once placed the author upon the height which he maintained ever afterwards. The ode to Italy, and that on the monument to Dante erected at Florence, gave voice to the dismay and affliction with which Italy, aroused by the French Revolution from the torpor of the 17th and 18th centuries, contemplated her forlorn and degraded condition, her political impotence, her degeneracy in arts and arms and the frivolity or stagnation of her intellectual life. They were the outcry of a student who had found an ideal of national existence in his books, and to whose disappointment everything in his own circumstances lent additional poignancy. But there is nothing unmanly or morbid in the expression of these sentiments, and the odes are surprisingly exempt from the failings characteristic of young poets. They are remarkably chaste in diction, close and nervous in style, sparing in fancy and almost destitute of simile and metaphor, antique in spirit, yet pervaded by modern ideas, combining Landor's dignity with a considerable infusion of the passion of Byron. These qualities continued to characterize Leopardi's poetical writings throughout his life. A third ode, on Cardinal Mai's discoveries of ancient MSS., lamented in the same spirit of indignant sorrow the decadence of Italian literature. The publication of these pieces widened the breach between Leopardi and his father, a well-meaning but apparently dull and apathetic man, who had lived into the 19th century without imbibing any of its spirit, and who provoked his son's contempt by a superstition unpardonable in a scholar of real learning. Very probably from a mistaken idea of duty to his son, very probably, too, from his own entire dependence in pecuniary matters upon his wife, he for a long time obstinately refused Leopardi funds, recreation, change of scene, everything that could have contributed to combat the growing pessimism which eventually became nothing less than monomaniacal. The affection of his brothers and sister afforded him some consolation, and he found intellectual sympathy in the eminent scholar and patriot Pietro Giordani, with whom he assiduously corresponded at this period, partly on the ways and means of escaping from "this hermitage, or rather seraglio, where the delights of civil society and the advantages of solitary life are alike wanting." This forms the keynote of numerous letters of complaint and lamentation, as touching but as effeminate in their pathos as those of the banished Ovid. It must be remembered in fairness that the weakness of Leopardi's eyesight frequently deprived him for months together of the resource of study. At length (1822) his father allowed him to repair to Rome, where, though cheered by the encouragement of C. C. J. Bunsen and Niebuhr, he found little satisfaction in the trifling pedantry that passed for philology and archaeology, while his sceptical opinions prevented his taking orders, the indispensable condition of public employment in the Papal States. Dispirited and with exhausted means, he returned to Recanati, where he spent three miserable years, brightened only by the production of several lyrical masterpieces, which appeared in 1824. The most remarkable is perhaps the _Bruto Minore_, the condensation of his philosophy of despair. In 1825 he accepted an engagement to edit Cicero and Petrarch for the publisher Stella at Milan, and took up his residence at Bologna, where his life was for a time made almost cheerful by the friendship of the countess Malvezzi. In 1827 appeared the _Operette Morali_, consisting principally of dialogues and his imaginary biography of Filippo Ottonieri, which have given Leopardi a fame as a prose writer hardly inferior to his celebrity as a poet. Modern literature has few productions so eminently classical in form and spirit, so symmetrical in construction and faultless in style. Lucian is evidently the model; but the wit and irony which were playthings to Lucian are terribly earnest with Leopardi. Leopardi's invention is equal to Lucian's and his only drawback in comparison with his exemplar is that, while the latter's campaign against pretence and imposture commands hearty sympathy, Leopardi's philosophical creed is a repulsive hedonism in the disguise of austere stoicism. The chief interlocutors in his dialogues all profess the same unmitigated pessimism, claim emancipation from every illusion that renders life tolerable to the vulgar, and assert or imply a vast moral and intellectual superiority over unenlightened mankind. When, however, we come to inquire what renders them miserable, we find it is nothing but the privation of pleasurable sensation, fame, fortune or some other external thing which a lofty code of ethics would deny to be either indefeasibly due to man or essential to his felicity. A page of _Sartor Resartus_ scatters Leopardi's sophistry to the winds, and leaves nothing of his dialogues but the consummate literary skill that would render the least fragment precious. As works of art they are a possession for ever, as contributions to moral philosophy they are worthless, and apart from their literary qualities can only escape condemnation if regarded as lyrical expressions of emotion, the wail extorted from a diseased mind by a diseased body. _Filippo Ottonieri_ is a portrait of an imaginary philosopher, imitated from the biography of a real sage in Lucian's _Demonax_. Lucian has shown us the philosopher he wished to copy, Leopardi has truly depicted the philosopher he was. Nothing can be more striking or more tragical than the picture of the man superior to his fellows in every quality of head and heart, and yet condemned to sterility and impotence because he has, as he imagines, gone a step too far on the road to truth, and illusions exist for him no more. The little tract is full of remarks on life and character of surprising depth and justice, manifesting what powers of observation as well as reflection were possessed by the sickly youth who had seen so little of the world. Entry: LEOPARDI
_16th-Century Theologians._--In France, as in all other countries, the Reformation was an essentially popular movement, though from special causes, such as the absence of political homogeneity, the nobles took a more active part both with pen and sword in it than was the case in England. But the great textbook of the French Reformation was not the work of any noble. Jean Calvin's _Institution of the Christian Religion_ is a book equally remarkable in matter and in form, in circumstances and in result. It is the first really great composition in argumentative French prose. Its severe logic and careful arrangement had as much influence on the manner of future thought, both in France and the other regions whither its widespread popularity carried it, as its style had on the expression of such thought. It was the work of a man of only seven-and-twenty, and it is impossible to exaggerate the originality of its manner when we remember that hardly any models of French prose then existed except tales and chronicles, which required and exhibited totally different qualities of style. It is indeed probable that had not the _Institution_ been first written by its author in Latin, and afterwards translated by him, it might have had less dignity and vigour; but it must at the same time be remembered that this process of composition was at least equally likely, in the hands of any but a great genius, to produce a heavy and pedantic style neither French nor Latin in character. Something like this result was actually produced in some of Calvin's minor works, and still more in the works of many of his followers, whose lumbering language gained for itself, in allusion to their exile from France, the title of "style refugié." Nevertheless, the use of the vulgar tongue on the Protestant side, and the possession of a work of such importance written therein, gave the Reformers an immense advantage which their adversaries were some time in neutralizing. Even before the _Institution_, Lefèvre d'Étaples (1455-1537) and Guillaume Farel (1489-1565) saw and utilized the importance of the vernacular. Calvin (1509-1564) was much helped by Pierre Viret (1511-1571), who wrote a large number of small theological and moral dialogues, and of satirical pamphlets, destined to captivate as well as to instruct the lower people. The more famous Beza (Théodore de Bèze) (1519-1605) wrote chiefly in Latin, but he composed in French an ecclesiastical history of the Reformed churches and some translations of the Psalms. Marnix de Sainte Aldegonde (1530-1593), a gentleman of Brabant, followed Viret as a satirical pamphleteer on the Protestant side. On the other hand, the Catholic champions at first affected to disdain the use of the vulgar tongue, and their pamphleteers, when they did attempt it, were unequal to the task. Towards the end of the century a more decent war was waged with Philippe du Plessis Mornay (1549-1623) on the Protestant side, whose work is at least as much directed against freethinkers and enemies of Christianity in general as against the dogmas and discipline of Rome. His adversary, the redoubtable Cardinal du Perron (1556-1618), who, originally a Calvinist, went over to the other side, employed French most vigorously in controversial works, chiefly with reference to the eucharist. Du Perron was celebrated as the first controversialist of the time, and obtained dialectical victories over all comers. At the same time the bishop of Geneva, St Francis of Sales (1567-1622), supported the Catholic side, partly by controversial works, but still more by his devotional writings. The _Introduction to a Devout Life_, which, though actually published early in the next century, had been written some time previously, shares with Calvin's _Institution_ the position of the most important theological work of the period, and is in remarkable contrast with it in style and sentiment as well as in principles and plan. It has indeed been accused of a certain effeminacy, the appearance of which is in all probability mainly due to this very contrast. The 16th century does not, like the 17th, distinguish itself by literary exercises in the pulpit. The furious preachers of the League, and their equally violent opponents, have no literary value. Entry: D