their perception that society had
been treated in the eighteenth century in too mechanical a way, that
institutions grow, that the conception of individual men divested of
their life in society is a misleading abstraction. They put this in
extravagant and untenable forms, but there was a large measure of truth
in their criticism, which did its part in helping the nineteenth century
to revise and transcend the results of eighteenth century speculation.

In this reactionary literature we can see the struggle of the doctrine
of Providence, declining before the doctrine of Progress, to gain the
upper-hand again. Chateaubriand, Bonald, De Maistre, Lamennais firmly
held the dogma of an original golden age and the degradation of man,
and denounced the whole trend of progressive thought from Bacon to
Condorcet. These writers were unconsciously helping Condorcet's doctrine
to assume a new and less questionable shape. [Footnote: Bonald indeed in
his treatise De pouvoir adopted the idea of development and applied it
to religion (as Newman did afterwards) for the purpose of condemning the
Reformation as a retrograde movement.]

3.

Along with the discovery of the Middle Ages came the discovery of German
literature. In the intellectual commerce between the two countries in
the age of Frederick the Great, France had been exclusively the giver,
Germany the recipient. It was due, above all, to Madame de Stael
that the tide began to flow the other way. Among the writers of the
Napoleonic epoch, Madame de Stael is easily first in critical talent
and intellectual breadth. Her study of the Revolution showed a
more dispassionate appreciation of that convulsion than any of her
contemporaries were capable of forming. But her chef-d'oeuvre is her
study of Germany, De l'Allemagne, [Footnote: A.D. 1813.] which revealed
the existence of a world of art and thought, unsuspected by the French
public. Within the next twenty years Herder and Lessing, Kant and Hegel
were exerting their influence at Paris. She did in France what Coleridge
was doing in England for the knowledge of German thought.

Madame de Stael had raised anew the question which had been raised in
the seventeenth century and answered in the negative by Voltaire: is
there progress in aesthetic literature? Her early book on Literature had
clearly defined the issue. She did not propose the thesis that there is
any progress or improvement (as some of the Moderns had contended in the
f