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Updated: June 9, 2025
Of that highly intellectual circle, Mme. de Sévigné was the leading spirit by force of her extraordinary faculty for making friends, her wonderful talent as a writer, her originality and her charming disposition. She gave the tone to letters; M. Faguet says that her epistles were all masterpieces of amiable badinage, lively narration, maternal passion, true eloquence.
The judgments of foreigners upon our Revolution are usually distinctly severe, and we cannot be surprised when we remember how Europe suffered during the twenty years of upheaval in France. The Germans in particular have been most severe. Their opinion is summed up in the following lines by M. Faguet:
The peasant, the moujik, is to be the criterion of art, an art which, in that case, ought to be a cross between fireworks and the sign-writing of the Aztecs. Vogüé declared that Tolstoy had, like an intrepid explorer, leaped into an abysm of philosophical contradictions. Even the moderate French critic Faguet becomes enraged at the puerilities of the Russian.
Thiers, Mignet, Louis Blanc, Taine, and Lanfrey wrote on the Revolution or Napoleon. The most eminent of the newer school of scientific historians are Boissier, Sorel, Lavisse, Luchaire, and Aulard. Sainte-Beuve is only one of the foremost in the class of literary critics, in which are included Renan, Sarcey, Brunetiere, Lemaitre, Faguet, and others, themselves authors.
It was always so, and this, no doubt, is why popular democracy, from Plato's to our own times, has never been defended by the great thinkers. This fact has greatly struck Emile Faguet. ``Almost all the thinkers of the nineteenth century, he says, ``were not democrats. When I was writing my Politiques et moralistes du XIXe siecle this was my despair.
Balzac Balzac, that magnificent combination of Bonaparte and Byron, pirate and poet was apparently leading the life of a saint, but his most careful student, Viscount Spelboerch de Lovenjoul whose name is veritably Balzac-ian tells us some different stories; even Gustave Flaubert, the ascetic giant of Rouen, had a romance with Madame Louise Colet, a mediocre writer and imitator of Sand, as was Countess d'Agoult, the Frankfort Jewess better known as "Daniel Stern," that lasted from 1846 to 1854, according to Emile Faguet.
As M. Faguet says in the introduction to his "Politiques et Moralistes du Dix-Neuvième Siècle," from which I have already quoted: "Liberté et Égalité sont donc contradictoires et exclusives l'une et l'autre; mais la Fraternité les concilierait. La Fraternité non seulement concilierait la Liberté et l'Égalité, mais elle les ferait gêneratrices l'une et l'autre."
The view of confrontation as the dramatic principle is confirmed by dramatic literature. We emphasize in our study of Greek plays their simplicity of plot, their absence of intrigue, their sculptural, bas-relief quality. The Greek drama makes of a poem a crisis, says M. Faguet.
Hamilton and the constitutional liberals asserted that the state should interfere exclusively on behalf of individual liberty; but Hamilton was no democrat and was not outlining the policy of a democratic state. In point of fact democracies have never been satisfied with a definition of democratic policy in terms of liberty. Not only have the particular friends of liberty usually been hostile to democracy, but democracies both in idea and behavior have frequently been hostile to liberty; and they have been justified in distrusting a political régime organized wholly or even chiefly for its benefit. "La Liberté," says Mr. Emile Faguet, in the preface to his "Politiques et Moralistes du Dix-Neuvième Siècle" "La Liberté s'oppose
There is often a pervading melancholy about Hawthorne, as Faguet says of de Musset "without posture, without noise but penetrating." There is at times the mysticism and serenity of the ocean, which Jules Michelet sees in "its horizon rather than in its waters." There is a sensitiveness to supernatural sound waves.
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