Fontenelle, BERNARD LE BOVIER DE

Fontenelle, BERNARD LE BOVIER DE, was born at Rouen, February 11, 1657. His mother was a sister of Corneille. He was educated by the Jesuits and studied for the bar, but entered early in life upon a purely literary career in Paris. In the great quarrel of Moderns versus Ancients, which was then raging in France, he took part with La Motte and the other champions of the Moderns, assailing the Greek writers and their French imitators, and receiving in return the satiric shafts of Boileau, Racine, J. B. Rousseau, and La Bruyère. La Bruyère ridiculed him pitilessly in the Caractères, where he figures as Cydias, the pedant who ranks himself above Plato and Theocritus, and confidently awaits the hour when men will recognise his superiority to Homer. After the failure on the stage of his Aspar—a play to which Racine ascribed the origin of the practice of hissing in theatres—Fontenelle produced an imitation of Lucian, entitled Dialogues des Morts, and the Lettres du Chevalier d'Her..., a work of fiction written in the 'precious' style afterwards adopted by Marivaux. Thenceforth he devoted himself mainly to literary criticism and to the task of popularising science. His prose works brought him a remarkable reputation, which was to some extent merited by the elegance of the style and the perspicuity of the exposition. In 1697 he was made secretary to the Académie des Sciences, of which he afterwards became president. His Éloges des Académiciens added greatly to his fame, and after the death of Boileau in 1711 he enjoyed a well-nigh absolute rule in the Academy. He died in his hundredth year at Paris, on January 9, 1757, and is thus a link between the age of Molière and Boileau and the age of Diderot and Voltaire. He was a man of remarkable vigour and versatility of intellect. The best writers of his day endeavoured in vain to crush him. Had he not possessed rare strength of character he must have succumbed to the attacks of the brilliant men whose enmity he incurred. He attempted well-nigh every form of literature, he wrote idylls, and satires, and dialogues, and critical essays, histories, and verses of society, tragedies (Aspar and Idalie), scientific treatises, and operas (Endymion, Thétis et Pélée, &c.). He has left no book of outstanding merit; he was not a strong original thinker, and he seems to have cared less for truth than for paradoxes and piquant phrases. But his learning was far from contemptible, his style was graceful, and his wit was keen. His best works, the Entretiens sur la Pluralité des Mondes, and the Histoire des Oracles, the latter based on the treatise of the Dutchman, Van Dale, are still worth reading for the felicity of the expression and the frequent acuteness and ingenuity of the thought. Mr Lang has discovered the germ of his explanation of myths in Fontenelle's dissertation on Fables.