[1717-1789 A.D.] his own. Gluck had suffered long from the insignificance of the Italian background, and his dramatic genius was never truly revealed until he found themes worthy of his inspiration and a librettist capable of giving them form. "It has been my aim," he writes, "to reduce music to its true function, that of seconding poetry by giving additional force to sentiments and situations without obstructing the action or allowing the interest to cool by the introduction of superfluous ornament." Having first made a name in Italy, which recognised his greatness while rejecting his principles of art, he came to Paris, where he took up permanent residence, making the French tongue his own. France received with enthusiasm this glorious adopted son, but Italy, again on the offensive, challenged Gluck's success in France and inaugurated that war between the Gluckists and the Piccinnists, or between the French school and the Italian school, which raged up to the eve of the Revolution. Grétry and Gluck differed widely in genius, but their views on music were the same. For both of them expression was everything; neither could conceive the idea of separating words from music, and even in overtures and ritournelles they sought to maintain a direct relation with the text that had preceded or was about to follow. The pure French school without doubt set to musical inspiration limits that were far too narrow; but the contrary excess has been observed in that Italian school which a brilliant genius has brought to prominence in our day, and which has in turn been modified by French influence until it more nearly approaches the happy medium discovered by the great Mozart. From a philosophical point of view, hesitation would not be possible in making a choice between the two opposite standpoints since the question of technical methods is so largely one of moral character. Gluck comprehends music after the manner of the ancient Greeks; his austere inspiration presages harmonies that would be more in place in the field of battle than on the operatic stage. The same spirit is apparent in the plastic arts. Though Pigalle and Falconet maintain French sculpture in a relatively high position in Europe, there is imparted to it no decided impulse such as made architecture advance after 1760. Antique severity and simplicity is the style aimed at, and all fantastic curves and strange and artificial ornamental forms are inexorably banished. The hôtel des Monnaies, the beautiful edifices of the place Louis XV, and in larger if not faultless proportions the St. Geneviève or Panthéon of Soufflot attest a profound modification of taste, but do not foretell the peculiar turn the classical school is to take when it everywhere sets to reproducing Greek temples, as though there could be in architecture any absolute type which should not vary according to climate or customs. A like revolution is to be observed in the art of painting.e New influences acted upon the artists. As fewer convents and churches were built and the age was not one of devotion, there were fewer religious pictures produced. Since the king and the high personages had not the " "great taste" of Louis XIV, there were fewer historical paintings. There were fewer vast wall spaces and expansive domes to be covered with colour. A different architecture, especially in the interior of private edifices, demands a different school of painting. Another variety of Mæcenases arose -the farmers-general, the parvenus of finance and stock-jobbing who no longer had the ambition to imitate the grand monarch at a distance, but abandoned themselves to their own instincts, which were not elevating: the actresses who set the fashions gave the tone to the city and to the court, and like La [1717-1789 A.D.] Guimard had fine mansions built for themselves; finally there were the great ladies whose great ambition was to be taken for actresses. For the new world there must be a new kind of art. To ornament the cosy salons, the boudoirs, the petites appartements of the petites maisons the canvases of the preceding century were of too vast proportions, too severe, too majestic. More appropriate were mythological scenes lightly treated, pastorals, fêtes galantes, hunting scenes, the so-called scènes champêtres, or even readings, conversations, and concerts (sacred terms). The great French landscape painters Poussin and Claude Lorrain (Claude Gelée) could no longer have recognised the trees, the skies, and the fountains of the canvases à la mode; for they are the trees, the skies, the fountains of the opera. The theatre, which had invaded private life, also ruled over the arts. If painting had been entirely abandoned to the taste of the Mæcenases of the day there would have been a marked decadence. Fortunately, about the middle of the century, with the periodic picture exhibitions, art criticism was born. Diderot, in his Salons (1765–1767), Grimm, and Laharpe jeered at the caprices in fashion, upheld the true but unrecognised painters, and encouraged the return to nature. It was these men that revealed to the public the genius of Chardin and Greuze and extolled genre painting. The fêtes galantes and the genre painting produced some real artists, and in spite of their faults they developed a true French art. The greatest of these painters had gone to Rome in vain; the influence of antiquity upon them was almost nothing. From the Eternal City they came back the eighteenth-century Frenchmen they went. If one would seek the real master of Watteau, Boucher, Chardin, and Greuze, he will be found in Rubens with his Marie de' Medici series.b The achievements of these men, were, however, but a prelude to what was to follow; the art of grand, historical painting, dead for more than half a century, was to live again in a period of exceptional brilliancy. A certain eager, determined young man, a relation and pupil of Boucher but without as yet any definite, artistic aim, was sent as laureate, in 1775, to Rome, where he came under the influence of Winckelmann and his History of Ancient Art (Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums), published in 1764. Acted upon by a double current, that of Winckelmann's enthusiastic æstheticism and the republican fervour of Rousseau and Mably, the painter Louis David was formed. From the one source he received his subjects and his inspiration, from the other his sense of form and his tendency to paint figures that are like statues, just as the sculptors early in the eighteenth century were given to making statues that were like painted figures.e SCIENCE It was only in the first half of the seventeenth century that the great men of letters, like Descartes and Pascal, appear as great savants. Later on Bossuet, Fénelon, and Fontenelle are the sole littérateurs who show a certain acquaintance with science- and that particularly because the sciences, thanks to Descartes, were considered a branch of philosophy. On the contrary, in the eighteenth century every great man of letters is also a savant. D'Alembert was above all a mathematician. Condillac published treatises on arithmetic, algebra, mechanics, and astronomy. The less known but assuredly estimable portion of Montesquieu's writings are his works in the sciences. Rousseau prepared himself for his Emile by arduous scientific study, followed the courses of the chemist Rouellé and composed a treatise [1717-1789 A.D.] on botany. Diderot wrote on mathematics, on the cohesion of solid bodies, and published numerous scientific articles in his Encyclopædia.1 Poets, great ladies, and great lords, beginning with the regent Orleans everyone was interested in scientific discovery; it was the topic of the salon and the boudoir as of the academies. Nothing contributed more to form the spirit of the eighteenth century, at once classical and full of innovation, frivolous and serious, loving light literature and weighty demonstration. The philosophers, applying to political social questions the rigour of scientific methods, gave a more resolute turn to the war upon the past. Finally the great discoveries in every direction, exalting the imagination and inflating all hearts with pride, contributed not a little to inculcate in the French that absolute confidence in the all-powerfulness of reason. In the eighteenth century the new methods of analytical geometry and the infinitesimal calculus continued to be developed. Although French astronomers seem to play but a secondary rôle in the great celestial discoveries of the age, we must not forget the work of D'Alembert and of Clairaut. The superiority and the special work of the French in this century is the application of pure mathematics to astronomy. What was retarding the progress of chemistry was that those impalpable and invisible substances called gases were little understood. Especially the most active of these gases, oxygen, was unknown [until 1774]. Lavoisier gave to Priestley's discovery of oxygen its full value and recognised the important rôle played by this gas in nature. He was the first to establish clearly that air is not a simple body.2 In 1783 Lavoisier decomposed water and showed that it was composed of oxygen and hydrogen. Now that oxygen was known, chemistry became a science. Assisted by Guyton de Morveau, Fourcroy, and Berthollet, Lavoisier established the chemical nomenclature in 1787 and dowered the new science with a precise and supple language lending itself to all its perfections, and which was adopted by the whole of Europe. Hitherto the terminology of the science had been a matter of whim and caprice. Such names as "liver of sulphur," "mercury of life," "horned moon," "the double secret," "the salt of many virtues," and the like, had been accepted without protest by the chemical world. With such a terminology continued progress was as impossible as human progress without speech. The new chemistry of Lavoisier and his confrères, following the model set by zoölogy half a century earlier, designated each substance by a name instead of a phrase, applied these names according to fixed rules, and, in short, classified the chemical knowledge of the time and brought it into a system, lacking which no body of knowledge has full title to the name of science.g The eighteenth century abounds in savants who, renouncing all pretensions to the universality affected in the Middle Ages, devoted their entire lives to a special branch of zoology. Buffon, appointed intendant of the jardin du Roi, began his great Natural History. From 1749 to 1767 he published fifteen volumes upon quadrupeds in collaboration with Daubenton. From 1770 to 1780 appeared the History of Birds, in nine volumes, with the collaboration of Guéneau de Montbélard, the Abbé Bexon, Sonnini, and De Manoncourt. Afterwards came the History of Minerals. The sequel to [1 No attempt has been made to give in this chapter an account of the great Encyclopædia and its influence, since the matter has already been fully treated. See above, pp. 62-64.] [2 In common with other chemists of the time, Lavoisier supposed oxygen gas itself to be a compound. He considered its components to be a metal oxygen combined with the alleged element heat; Dr. Priestley thought it a compound of positive electricity and "phlogiston"; and Humphry Davy, a little later, supposed it to be a compound of oxygen and light.] [1717-1789 A.D.] this vast work, Reptiles, Fishes, etc., was left for Lacépède. In 1788 Buffon's masterpiece, Les Epoques de la Nature, appeared. Herein are displayed his great theories on the unity of nature's plan proceeding "according to a primitive and general design; on the continuous scale of beings from the zoöphyte to man; on the mutability of species, which may modify their organs to accommodate themselves to new environments, and finally on the distribution of species over the surface of the globe. For the first time we see these great philosophic ideas applied to natural history. Buffon's pompous style, a certain taste for lofty paraphrase in place of a single word, a certain tendency to generalisation, exposed him to the criticism of some of his contemporaries. Réaumur reproaches him with reasoning too much and Buffon reproached Réaumur with the very strange criticism of observing too much. Daubenton separated from Buffon because the latter mutilated his anatomical demonstrations. He jeered at certain too classic phrases, as "the lion is the king of animals," saying that the animals had no king. The greatest physiological discovery of the eighteenth century was made [in part] by Lavoisier. He explained in 1785 the phenomena of respiration. This discovery Daremberg calls "the greatest of modern times after the circulation of the blood." It should not be overlooked, however, that here again Lavoisier was following in the footsteps of Priestley, and that Scheele in Sweden, Spallanzani in Italy, and Davy in England must be credited with a share in clearing up the mystery of respiration.a To the reign of Louis XV also belonged Réaumur, who devised the thermometer and thermometric scale bearing his name; the botanists Adanson and Bernard de Jussieu; Lacaille, who went to the Cape of Good Hope in 1750 to chart the heavens; Bouguer and La Condamine, who sailed to the equator in 1736, while Clairaut and Maupertuis were in the arctic regions to determine the measuring of a degree and the shape of the earth. But a far greater coterie of scientists was to come upon the scene about the close of the century, rendering French science of a later generation illustrious. Meantime literature rather than science is the key-note of the Age of Voltaire.a CHAPTER V LOUIS XVI AND MARIE ANTOINETTE [1774–1789 A.D.] THERE is nothing better proved by a course of historic study than the strange fact that the people on the very verge of change and revolution have no idea that anything is about to take place. A nation is always taken by surprise when its institutions are overthrown, like a child when its house of cards is toppled over by its own height. Contemporaries in other lands are generally quite as blind; but the spectator from a distance of time sees everything more clearly. All the performers in the great drama, of which we are not yet come to the final act, were now upon the scene. There were Louis XVI, aged twenty years, gentle and kind; Louis XVIII, aged nineteen, clearer in intellect and more marked in character; and Charles X, aged seventeen, stubborn and proud. These were the three grandsons of Louis XV, and all attained the throne. But there was another personage at that time alive who also the likeness of a kingly crown had on it was a little child of seven months old, a grandson of the false and dissolute regent, who, after a long period of struggle and obscurity, emerges at the end of his career as Louis Philippe. Four Bourbons and a Bonaparte were all preparing for their parts in the year 1774-three princes, a boy playing the hoop in the streets of Ajaccio, and a baby in arms. A young king is always popular; he has made no personal or public enemies, and there is a length of reign before him which will enable him to reward his friends. But there perhaps never was so popular a king as Louis XVI. Married at sixteen to the beautiful daughter of the emperor of Germany, one year his junior, he and Marie Antoinette, when their establishment was formed, presented to the admiring eyes of the Parisians the model of a perfectly happy life. They reminded the observers of some of those charming fairy tales where royal shepherds and shepherdesses exchange the cares of power for the enjoyments of Arcadia; and if the enjoyments were a little expensive, and Arcadia a domain filled with princes and princesses, |