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Or, if you deem that that word connotes non-resistance, though to the immense bulk of Pacifists it does not, you would be an anti-Bellicist to use a dreadful word coined by M. Emile Faguet in the discussion of this matter.
She remains in educational affairs the greatest woman of the seventeenth century, if not of all her countrywomen. M. Faguet says: "This widow of Scarron, who was nearly Queen of France, was born minister of public instruction." She powerfully upheld the cause of morality, was a liberal patroness of education and learning, and all aspiring geniuses were encouraged and financially aided by her.
As M. Faguet says, the sixteenth century was, in France, the century créateur par excellence; and in this, woman's part was, above all, political, her social, moral, and literary influence being less marked. The Seventeenth Century: Woman at Her Best
Again, I propose, when I speak of literature, to mean literature, and not a compendious term for anything that is not science. The opposition that has in modern times been set up between science on the one hand and a jumble of studies labelled either literary or "humanistic" studies on the other is to my mind wholly unfounded in the nature of things, and destructive of any liberal view of education. It may perhaps be held that literature in its most literal sense is a name for anything that is expressed by means of intelligible language a use of the word which certainly admits of no comparison with the meaning of science, but which also leads to no ideas of any educational interest. But I take the word literature in its common acceptation; and, while admitting that I can give no precise and exhaustive definition, I will venture to describe it as the expression of thought or emotion in any linguistic forms which have aesthetic value. Thus the subject-matter of literature is only limited by experience: as Emile Faguet says somewhere without claiming to have made a discovery la littérature est une chose qui touche
The slow and grave development, the just and harmonious equilibrium, the amplitude, are in her supplanted by a quick, alert, and free saillie; the detail and marvellous exactness are enriched by color, abundance of imagery, and metaphors. M. Faguet says she is to prose what La Fontaine is to poetry. The literary style of Mme. de Sévigné is not learned, studied, nor labored.
It does not give us pleasure to have painful emotions or to see other people's sorrows, in spite of the remains of the "gorille feroce" in us, to which Taine and M. Faguet attribute this imputed pleasure. And if we feel pleasure, excitement, elevation in the representation of the tragic, it must be due to some other element in the experience than the mere self-realization involved in suffering.
His humour has been defined as the sunny break of his serious purpose. Horace Walpole has said that the world is a comedy to the man of thought, a tragedy to the man of feeling. To the great humorist to Mark Twain the world was a tragi-comedy. Like Smile Faguet, he seemed at times to feel that grief is the most real and important thing in the world because it separates us from happiness.
It operated, though in diminishing force, throughout the nineteenth century; and it is strongly held by contemporary Liberals like M. Faguet, who frankly abrogate its speculative foundations and rest their case on social utility.
As M. Faguet observes in a striking paragraph of his study of Flaubert: "It is a curious thing, which does honor to them both, that Flaubert and George Sand should have become loving friends towards the end of their lives. At the beginning, Flaubert might have been looked upon by George Sand as a furious enemy.
"He was an amazing writer," says M. Faguet, "and disconcerted criticism by the impossibility of explaining his methods of procedure; he was luminous, supple, naturally pliant and yielding; beneath his apparently effeminate grace an extraordinary strength of character would suddenly make itself felt; he had, more than any nineteenth-century writer, the quality of charm; he exercised a caressing innuence which enveloped, and finally conquered, the reader."
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