ar, and almost at the end of it,
his long life extending from the very earliest glories of the Siecle de
Louis XIV. to the very hottest period of the Encyclopaedist battle. The
singular variety of his works, and his force of character, disguised
under a somewhat frivolous exterior, but enabling him to live down
enmity and ridicule which would have crushed most men, would of
themselves make Fontenelle a remarkable figure in literature. But his
actual work has more merits than that of mere variety. He realised quite
as keenly as his enemy La Bruyere the importance of manner in
literature, though his taste was hardly so pure. If not exactly an
original thinker, he was an acute and comprehensive one, and forestalled
most of his contemporaries in taking the direction consciously which
they were pursuing almost without knowing it. He fully appreciated the
value of paradox as stimulating men's minds and giving flavour to
literature; and his positive wit was very considerable. To not many men
are more good sayings attributed, and the goodness of these is not
always verbal only. The most famous of them, uttered in defence of his
peculiar union of heterodoxy and caution, 'I may have my fist full of
truth, and yet only care to open my little finger,' may be immoral or
not, but it expressed very early, and with singular force, the
intellectual attitude of two whole generations.

[Sidenote: La Motte.]

Inseparable from Fontenelle's name in literary history, as the two were
long closely united in life, is the name of La Motte. La Motte was a
much younger man than Fontenelle, and he died more than thirty years
before him, but during the first thirty years of the century the pair
exercised a kind of joint sovereignty in the Belles Lettres. They
revived the quarrel of the ancients and moderns, inclining to the modern
side. But La Motte's translation of Homer, or rather his adaptation (for
he omitted about half), is not of a nature to inspire much confidence in
his ability to judge the matter, though his essays and letters on the
subject are triumphs of ingenious word-fence. Unlike Fontenelle, La
Motte had one considerable dramatic success with the pathetic subject of
_Ines de Castro_, and his fables are not devoid of merit. It was,
however, as a prose writer of the occasional kind, and especially as a
paradoxical essayist, that he earned and deserved most fame, his prose
style being superior to Fontenelle's own.

[Sidenote: Vauvenarg