A History of French Literature Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. — Background and Themes

A History Built from Borrowed Authority

The preface makes explicit what many literary histories leave implicit: Dowden worked from existing scholarship. He credits Petit de Julleville's multi-volume Histoire de la Langue et de la Littérature Française and the writings of Gaston Paris as the foundation for his medieval chapters. He notes that some sources were accurate but lacked ideas, others had ideas but disregarded accuracy, and some unjustly depreciated particular centuries. His task was to rewrite their work into a coherent whole. This candor is rare in the genre and gives the reader a clear sense of the book's construction: it is a digest, not a pioneering study.

Pulpit Oratory as a Test Case

The longest excerpt deals with seventeenth-century preachers, a subject that might seem marginal but reveals Dowden's critical method. He contrasts Bossuet, Bourdaloue, Fléchier, and Massillon through precise observations: Bourdaloue spoke with downcast eyes and a full harmonious voice, aiming at conviction rather than display; Fléchier was a man of letters formed in the school of preciosity, a haunter of the Hôtel de Rambouillet; Massillon had something in his genius that resembled Racine. Dowden quotes Vinet's epitaph for Bourdaloue—"He preached, confessed, consoled, and then he died"—and reports the Prince de Condé's cry of "Silence! there is our enemy!" at Bourdaloue's entrance. These details ground the analysis in specific evidence rather than general praise.

The Limits of a Single Volume

Dowden acknowledges that an adequate history of a great literature can be written only by collaboration. His solution is to compress, select, and judge. The excerpts show him making firm evaluative statements: Fléchier's eloquence was not proper to the pulpit; Massillon is deficient in force and fire. Yet he also notes that Bourdaloue's sermons do not startle or dazzle a reader—they nourish. The reader of this history should expect a personal, sometimes opinionated guide, not an exhaustive reference. Provençal literature is omitted entirely, following the precedent of Petit de Julleville and Lanson, because it is not in the French language.

Dowden's history is best approached as a Victorian scholar's informed distillation, shaped by the authorities he trusted and the judgments he formed over many years of reading. The excerpts suggest he is strongest on the seventeenth century and on authors whose moral or rhetorical character he can encapsulate in a vivid phrase. Readers seeking a neutral catalogue of facts should look elsewhere; those interested in how a learned critic of the 1890s weighed the French literary tradition will find this volume revealing.

Dowden’s admission that he can only collect others’ findings—never touch the whole—reminds me of a summer I spent piecing together a writer’s life from letters, never quite reaching her. Then A Horse’s Tale — Inside the Classic gave that same ache a different shape, the way a remembered voice can feel both near and impossibly far. Both books let absence speak.