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During that period of the nineteenth century, we remark the same activity as during the corresponding period of the eighteenth century to import English literature to France. Amédée Pichot founded the Bibliothèque Britannique towards 1820.

From 1814 to 1832 Walter Scott taught familiar and living history to all our historians, Augustin Thiery, de Barante, Michelet, Quinet. Augustin Thiery wrote: "My admiration for the great writer increased as I contrasted in my studies his prodigious intelligence of the past with the petty and dull learning of modern historians, even the most celebrated. It was with transports of enthusiasm that I welcomed the appearance of this master-piece, Ivanhoe."

At the Salon of 1831 Henri Heine counted no less than thirty pictures representing episodes of the novels of Walter Scott. Alfred de Vigny borrowed Cinq Mars from him, Merimée borrowed the Chronique de Charles IX., Victor Hugo Notre Dame de Paris, Balzac les Chouans, and, as for Alexandre Dumas, he drew all his theatrical pieces and novels therefrom.

In 1769 Ducis had tried to make a tragedy of Hamlet, correcting the barbarous irregularities"; in 1784 he attempted a similar treatment of Macbeth, " taking away the impression of horror." In 1792 he put Othello on the boards, but he turned the Moorish man into a yellow man, replaced the pillow by a dagger, and took care to announce that the traitor would be punished. He wanted, in fact, to make Shakespeare virtuous and sensitive.

Népomucène Lemercier ventured to violate unity of place in Christopher Columbus, and when the spectators saw the play carried from Spain to the New World, they protested against the journey.

Shakespeare's great influence dates from 1827, when Kemble and Miss Smithson came to Paris to play, in English, Hamlet, Romeo, The Merchant of Venice, and Othello. Alexandre Dumas saw dramatic and stirring situations in the plays; Musset sought inspiration therein for his fantastic comedies; Victor Hugo Jadmired the metaphors, the mixture of tragic and grotesque, and he wrote the Préface de Cromwell. Nevertheless, in this play he observed unity of time and almost of place.

Shakespeare had taken legendary personages or had borrowed them from chronicles. He did not form them purposely for the construction of the play. The play itself results from the characters of the men and the events on which their characters work, as also from the reaction of those events on the men. Hence those very human accents, full of reality, which his personages give vent to. While believing that he was seeking inspiration

from Shakespeare, Victor Hugo was in reality proceeding differently. In Ruy Blas he said that he wished to depict "the Spanish monarchy one hundred and forty years ago "; in Lucrèce Borgia that he wished to depict "mother's love" incarnate in a "moral monster "; in Marie Tudor should be a woman, great as a queen, true as a woman," &c.

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In spite of his pretensions he does not make the grotesque start from the sublime, or the sublime from the grotesque. He merely juxtaposes them. He distributes his scenes, here a sublime one, there a grotesque one.

All the French romantics retain the tragic method of the seventeenth century: Racine and Victor Hugo bring on the scene automatons, manufactured by them to repeat verses and deliver speeches.

The influence of the English novel, with its intense degree of perception and of setting forth the scenes of daily life, was very great. Thackeray, Bulwer Lytton, and Dickens have had, among our French novelists, imitators who went even so far as to falsify. Alphonse Daudet only knew Dickens in translations. Nevertheless, in le Petit Chose, in Jack we find methods which are borrowed from the English novelist, and also the description of the fog in the first chapter of Nabab and the receipt-boy's ballad in Fromont Jeune et Risler ainé. George Eliot with the Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner taught us how to paint peasants and the real members of the lower middle class.

VI.

PHILOSOPHIC AND SOCIAL INFLUENCE.

French philosophy had stopped at Condillac when, in 1811, M. Royer Collard was appointed Professor of Philosophy. Taine1 relates that he was much embarrassed when he discovered at one of the second-hand bookstalls on the quays the translation of an unknown book called Researches on Human Understanding, according to Common-sense Principles, by Doctor Thomas Reid. He paid thirty sous for it, and, says Taine, "he had then just bought and founded the new French philosophy." Cousin and Jouffroy carried it on with Dugald Stewart.

John Stuart Mill's Logic (1843), sufficiently deductive not to alter too considerably our French habits, replaced the logic of Port Royal. Although differing on many points from Auguste Comte, the founder of positivism, he allowed him a pension which enabled him to live and continue his labours.

The formula" The greatest happiness for the greatest number" (1) Les philosophes classiques, p. 22.

is due to the French philosopher Helvetius. It was carried tc England by Priestley. Bentham related the impression it caused him when he discovered it. He follows the English tradition, which consists in seeking the useful rather than losing one's self in speculative conceptions. Thanks to his collaborator, the Genevese Etienne Dumont, he published his works in French at the same time as in English. He sent to the National Assembly of 1789 projects concerning the taxes, tribunals, prisons, colonies, &c. Although he wished to subject the actions of public powers to his formula, he was individualist, for he put on the first plane of a legislator's duties that of ensuring safety of property. All the measures proposed by Bentham had a deep influence on the French publicists. John Stuart Mill differed from Bentham on certain subjects, but his book On Liberty (1859) and his other book, Considerations on Representative Government (1861), had, at the end of the Empire, the greatest possible effect on French youth. However, forty years after, we do not yet admit, in practice, his assertion that an organised opposition in presence of power is the indispensable element of progress.

2

Adam Smith's book, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, appeared in 1776. J. B. Say spread it in 1804, by means of his Traité d'Economie politique, adding certain views, and he developed its teaching in his class on political economy at the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers. Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer also sought inspiration from the English economist. The habits of mind of Englishmen and Frenchmen being what they are, it is a Frenchman who should have applied the deductive method to Economical Science, as was done by Ricardo. And yet it was never accepted by the French even in the small dose prescribed by John Stuart Mill in his Principles of Political Economy. When Bastiat translated Cobden et la Ligue he brought the economical studies under the influence of the Manchester School, and it is objective. The French economists have studied the English economists, and know English facts, whereas the socialists of the chair and the democratic socialists refer to the Germans.

The History of England has continued to be studied as a political manual useful for Frenchmen. Guizot sought in his Histoire de la Révolution d'Angleterre "the causes which gave to the English monarchy the firm success which France and Europe still pursue." He was unable to attain it.

Gibbon had written the history of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire under Voltaire's influence, but in his turn he

(1) Deontologie.

(2) Voir Charles Comte, Traité de Législation, 2nd edition, 1835.

put forth a book which served as model for all the historians of the nineteenth century. Hume, Robertson, Hallam, Macaulay, Buckle, Freeman, the works of Mr. Flint on the philosophy of history, and the works of Mr. James Bryce have been studied by all men who believe that history is a composition and not a mere unconnected string of facts.

Carlyle, with his vehement style, his discoveries, his bias, and his obscurity, had his imitators in France. Michelet belongs to the same family, Taine felt his imprint, and all the Cæsarians invoke his authority.

The English have produced detailed monographs of their famous men, corresponding to the manner in which Sainte-Beuve practised criticism; he studies the childhood, family, education, occupations, means of existence, dietary, manias, fads, faults and qualities of each man he writes about. He everywhere shows mistrust for the methodic system.

From a purely scientific point of view the English did not exert a lesser influence in the nineteenth century than in the eighteenth. They transformed our methods in natural science.

In France we were still at the theatrical conception of the Revolutions of the Globe, brought forth by Cuvier, when Charles Lyell came to substitute (1830-33) the true and definite theory of actual causes. The Frenchmen Lamarck and Geoffroy

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Saint Hilaire had foreseen evolution; but when in 1858 Darwin showed the part played by selection and struggle for life he brought about a complete transformation in biology.

Herbert Spencer tried to explain the Universe systematically, and to show the conditions of evolution. By a series of deductions, always resting on inductions, he followed up the development of human activity under all its phases, moral, artistic, and political. The greater number of his works were translated into French, and in spite of the philosophy, cloudy, oratorical, and subtle, which the University continued to teach, they certainly made their mark on French thought.

It is very fortunate; for Herbert Spencer recalled to the French thinkers, sons of Plato, that words must not be taken for things. The constant appeal to facts is the first condition of all scientific research, and it implies a second loyalty. English men of science do not try to astonish by sophism, they have truth for their object, and after giving to the world the experimental method, they oblige everyone to practise it scrupulously.

Hence it is easy to recognise in France the authors, professors, political writers, and scholars who have felt English influence. Their works are characterised by a sincerity and probity which do not appear in the others.

VII.

CONCLUSIONS.

As conclusions, I would say that the intellectual influence of England on France has been exercised in the following forms : 1. The chief one is liberty; England has freed French thought, French science from the "authority ́authority" argument; Shakespeare freed our theatre from the Aristotelian rules; Locke and English institutions taught the rest of the world the true conditions of political liberty.

2. The second form, which is a consequence of the first, is the scientific form. It is Bacon against Plato, Newton against Descartes, Lyell against Cuvier. The movement was continued by Darwin and Herbert Spencer. It was strengthened also by Adam Smith. It is the inductive method opposed to intuitive conception. It is reality opposed to the assertions and subtleties which we inherited from the Greek sophists.

3. From a literary point of view, its character is similar. Swift and Daniel Defoe gave to their inventions the reality of legal reports. Walter Scott made history familiar by making his heroes eat, drink, and sleep. Richardson, Fielding, Thackeray, Dickens, and George Eliot taught us to see and relate little facts of everyday life.

4. From a political point of view, England has rendered a distinct service to the world, which it is only just beginning to realise in all its bearing.

In ancient republics, and more especially in absolute governments, parties were considered as factions; the party which had seized the reins of power was bound to crush and destroy the others. England has shown a system established on co-existence and free competition of the different parties; a system which has sheltered that nation from revolutions for more than two centuries, and however badly may be adapted the Parliamentary government to the various countries who have borrowed it, it has put an end, in most of them, to conspiracies, pronunciamientos, and revolutions.

In short, the intellectual influence of the English over the French taught the latter to subordinate his subjective conceptions to objective method, and to learn the character and utility of the competition in politics, in economics, and in biology.

YVES GUYOT.

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