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remarkable book was not original: some Eastern travellers were supposed to arrive in Paris, and to describe, in a correspondence with their countrymen in Persia, the principal features of life in the French capital. But the uses to which Montesquieu put this borrowed plot were all his own. He made it the base for a searching attack on the whole system of the government of Louis XIV. The corruption of the Court, the privileges of the nobles, the maladministration of the finances, the stupidities and barbarisms of the old autocratic régime these are the topics to which he is perpetually drawing his reader's attention. But he does more than this: his criticism is not merely particular, it is general; he points out the necessarily fatal effects of all despotisms, and he indicates his own conception of what a good constitution should be. All these discussions are animated by a purely secular spirit. He views religion from an outside standpoint; he regards it rather as one of the functions of administration than as an inner spiritual force. As for all the varieties of fanaticism and intolerance, he abhors them utterly.

It might be supposed that a book containing such original and far-reaching theories was a solid substantial volume, hard to master and

laborious to read. The precise opposite is the case. Montesquieu has dished up his serious doctrines into a spicy story, full of epigrams and light topical allusions, and romantic adventures, and fancy visions of the East. Montesquieu was a magistrate; yet he ventured to indulge here and there in reflections of dubious propriety, and to throw over the whole of his book an airy veil of voluptuous intrigue. All this is highly typical of the literature of the age which was now beginning. The serious, formal tone of the classical writers was abandoned, and was replaced by a gay, unemphatic, pithy manner, in which some grains of light-hearted licentiousness usually gave a flavour to the wit. The change was partly due to the shifting of the centre of society from the elaborate and spectacular world of Versailles to the more intimate atmosphere of the drawing-rooms of Paris. With the death of the old king the ceremonial life of the Court fell into the background; and the spirits of the time flew off into frivolity with a sense of freedom and relief. But there was another influence at work. Paradoxical as it may sound, it was the very seriousness of the new writers which was the real cause of their lack of decorum. Their great object was to be read—and by the largest possible

number of readers; the old select circle of literary connoisseurs no longer satisfied them; they were eager to preach their doctrines to a wider public—to the brilliant, inquisitive, and increasingly powerful public of the capital. And with this public no book had a chance of success unless it was of the kind that could be <run through rapidly, pleasantly, on a sofa, between dinner and the opera, and would furnish the material for spicy anecdotes and good talk. Like the jesters of the Middle Ages, the philosophers of the eighteenth century found in the use of pranks and buffoonery the best way of telling the truth.

Until about the middle of the century, Montesquieu was the dominating figure in French thought. His second book-Considérations sur la Grandeur et la Décadence des Romains is an exceedingly able work, in which a series of interesting and occasionally profound historical reflections are expressed in a style of great brilliance and incisiveness. Here Montesquieu definitely freed history from the medieval fetters which it had worn even in the days of Bossuet, and considered the development of events from a purely secular point of view, as the result of natural causes. But his greatest work, over which he spent the greater part of his life, and on which his

reputation must finally rest, was L'Esprit des Lois (published in 1748). The discussion of this celebrated book falls outside the domain of literature, and belongs rather to the history of political thought. It is enough to say that here all Montesquieu's qualities-his power of generalisation, his freedom from prejudice, his rationalism, his love of liberty and hatred of fanaticism, his pointed, epigrammatic style -appear in their most characteristic form. Perhaps the chief fault of the book is that it is too brilliant. When Madame du Deffand said that its title should have been De l'Esprit sur les Lois she put her finger on its weak spot. Montesquieu's generalisations are always bold, always original, always fine; unfortunately, they are too often unsound into the bargain. The fluid elusive facts slip through his neat sentences like water in a sieve. His treatment of the English constitution affords an illustration of this. One of the first foreigners to recognise the importance and to study the nature of English institutions, Montesquieu nevertheless failed to give an accurate account of them. He believed that he had found in them a signal instance of his favourite theory of the beneficial effects produced by the separation of the three powers of government—the judicial, the legis

lative, and the executive; but he was wrong. In England, as a matter of fact, the powers of the legislative and the executive were intertwined. This particular error has had a curious history. Montesquieu's great reputation led to his view of the constitution of England being widely accepted as the true one; as such it was adopted by the American leaders after the War of Independence; and its influence is plainly visible in the present constitution of the United States. Such is the strange power of good writing over the affairs of men!

At about the same time as the publication of the Lettres Persanes, there appeared upon the scene in Paris a young man whose reputation was eventually destined far to outshine that of Montesquieu himself. This young man was François Arouet, known to the world as VOLTAIRE. Curiously enough, however, the work upon which Voltaire's reputation was originally built up has now sunk into almost complete oblivion. It was as a poet, and particularly as a tragic poet, that he won his fame; and it was primarily as a poet that he continued to be known to his contemporaries during the first sixty years of his life (1694-1754). But to-day his poetry—the serious part of it, at least,—is never read, and

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