able facilities of the Bibliothèque Royale, all contributed to the formation of a remarkable group of comparative philologists.* Romance, even to its humblest dialects, had its workers. As early as 1803, A. W. Schlegel classifies the Provençal MSS in Paris libraries, and from then on the activity is unceasing: Fernow's treatise on Italian dialects appears in 1808; Adelung's Mithridates, 1809; Champollion-Figeac, a friend of Nodier, publishes, in the same year, his Nouvelles recherches sur les patois ou idiomes vulgaires de la France; Bastide's article on the 7" mouillé " is of 1810; Henry's lectures on the History of the French language, 1812; the continuation of the Histoire littéraire de la France, 1820. The year 1816 had marked the foundation of the Journal des Savants and the appearance of Raynouard's Choix des poésies originales des Troubadours. It will be remembered that Raynouard's connection with this periodical was a long and active one." Overshadowed by the contributions to philology produced by the masters of the Sorbonne and their foreign pupils, the feebler works of Nodier have passed into a benevolent obscurity. Let us revive them for a moment, if it is only to recall their dates: 1808. Dictionnaire des onomatopées, produced according to Ste.-Beuve, while the author was still an exile in Switzerland. 1810. Archéologie ou système universel et raisonné des langues. 1813. Dictionnaire de la langue écrite. La langue illyrienne (Laybach Télégraphe, May 27th). 1817. Les Celtes antérieurement aux temps historiques. 1819. Prefatory article on the Dictionnaire universel of Boiste (Débats). 1820. Mélanges, in which may be pointed out the following articles: Des Celtes, p. 28. L'Académie Française et l'orthographie de Voltaire (177). Benfey, Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft, especially p. 358, for the collaboration of Langlès and Hamilton on the cataloguing of the Sanskrit MSS. "Grimm, in 1812, had taken the stand that no patois is beneath the linguist's notice; Jespersen, Language, Its Nature, Development and Origin, p. 41. Gröber's Grundriss, 1, 64-66. "The fact that Champollion-Figeac and Burnouf were honorary pallbearers at the funeral of Raynouard shows the close connection between the Romance scholars and the comparative group. See Guiraud, F. M. J. Raynouard, Sa vie, Bonn diss., p. 91. It is, incidentally, interesting that an active pallbearer was Villemain. 1824. Satire Ménippée, etc., augmenté de notes tirées des éditions de Dupuy et Le Duchat, Par Verger et d'un commentaire historique, littéraire et philologique par M. Charles Nodier. 1826. Dictionnaire universel de la langue française, rédigé d'après le dictionnaire de l'Académie et ceux de Laveaux par Ch. Nodier et N. Verger. 1828. Examen critique des dictionnaires de la langue française, ou recherches grammaticales et littéraires sur l'orthographe, l'accep 1830. tion, la définition et l'étymologie des mots. De la prose française et de Diderot (Revue de Paris). 1834. Notions élémentaires de linguistique ou histoire abrégée de la parole et de l'écriture, pour servir d'introduction à la grammaire 1839. et aux dictionnaires. Notices bibliographiques et littéraires: vii. Du langage factice appelé macaronique. X. Comment les patois furent détruits en France. xiv. De quelques langues artificielles qui se sont introduites dans la langue vulgaire. xv ff. Dictionnaire de l'Académie Française et des satires publiées à l'occasion de la première édition de ce dictionnaire. Series of articles in Le Temps: De l'orthographie et de l'étymologie. De l'étymologie et du dictionnaire étymologique. Des mots nouveaux (furiously against them). De l'origine des noms propres et locaux. Des patois. Des langues de convention. Ce qui reste à faire dans les langues. 1836. Vocabulaire de la langue française (in collaboration). Consultation grammaticale sur le mot "Marchandise." Les termes d'arts et métiers, seront-ils admis dans le dictionnaire de la langue française? Read at Academy, Feb. 14th and published in the Bull. du Bibliophile of the same year, p. 121. 1841. Diatribe du docteur Néophobus contre les fabricateurs de mots. This bibliography does not include the many reviews of linguistic contributions published during an active career. The list is sufficiently extensive as it is; and when one considers that it represents only one phase of his activity and that we must take into account, along with his purely literary work, a considerable number of titles relating to botany and the like, the list is imposing. And yet, from the standpoint of the modern philologist, it produces only a shrug of the shoulders. 9 Many circumstances prevented Nodier from becoming a good philologist. First, and chiefly, we must take account of his unstable character. Ste.-Beuve says: "Ce qui caractérise précisément son personnage littéraire, c'est de n'avoir eu aucun parti spécial, de s'être essayé dans tout, de façon à montrer qu'il aurait pu réussir à tout, de s'être porté sur maints points à certains moments avec une vivacité extrême, avec une surexcitation passionnée, et d'avoir été vu aussitôt ailleurs, philologue ici, romanesque là. Bref, son talent, ses oeuvres, sa vie littéraire, c'est une riche, brillante et innombrable armée, où l'on trouve toutes les bannières, toutes les couleurs, . . . tout, hormis le quartier général." Hence, says the critic, he seems rather a contemporary of Court de Gébelin than of Grimm or Humboldt. Second, with all due respect to these luminaries of the early nineteenth century, his failings were largely those of his period so far as his technique is concerned. "Il a mis beaucoup de lui-même et surtout des modes auxquelles il obéissait jusque dans ses études sur les dictionnaires " says Larat; 10 celticism à outrance,11 primitivism, especially with reference to the all-powerfulness of onomatopoeia as a linguistic mainspring, the dream of a universal, ideal language, all these ideas were quite characteristic of the time. Condillac, whom, by the way, Larat does not quote, had spoken of the instinctive cries that constituted the most rudimentary language and of the subsequent selection; so had Herder. The Berlin Academy, acting according to the principles of Leibnitz, had offered, in 1794, a prize for an essay concerning the nature of a perfect language and a comparison of the European languages as measured by the standard of this ideal tongue. For all that, we cannot accept Salomon's statement that Nodier did not become a good philologist because the comparative method was "unknown in France." Renan, given as the authority, makes no such explicit statement.12 If indeed, he concludes that the 10 La tradition, etc. 11 See Court de Gébelin's Grammaire. 12 Mélanges, p. 429, essay on Les grammairiens grecs. What he says is this: "On peut donc soutenir sans exaggération que Apollonius a régné en grammaire jusqu'au moment où le génie des Schlegel, des Humboldt, des linguistic revolution of the first decades of the century "est encore à peu près non avenue parmi nous," he immediately follows it up with these words "je ne veux d'autre preuve que le peu de succès des ouvrages, pleins de mérite cependant, qui ont aspiré à détrôner Lhomond." His concern is rather with the study and teaching of the French language and with the fact that the "Raisonneur " school still has a strong position in the country. Again, Renan himself mentioned among the great philologists a French name, Burnouf; he could not have been ignorant of the fact that Bopp's Conjugationssystem was done in Paris, in the atmosphere of the Sorbonne.13 The names mentioned at the beginning of this paper are sufficient warrant of the assiduity with which the scientific study of language was cultivated in France. True, Romance did not perhaps share to quite the same degree the benefits of the comparative method, still one may well wish, for the sake of Nodier's scholarly reputation, that he had done as well as Raynouard,11 if not Burnouf. Nodier's contacts during his formative period were not fortunate. Sir Herbert Croft, his employer, the "epicure of syntax" to use Ste.-Beuve's expression, was not the right kind of person to steer him in the proper track. "Est-ce trop loin" says our authority que de croire de Nodier bibliographe, lexicographe et philologue, qu'après tout l'élève du chevalier Croft garda toujours quelquechose Bopp, des Grimm, des Burnouf a ouvert à la science du langage une voie toute nouvelle, en créant la méthode comparative, qui embrasse chaque famille de langue comme un ensemble organique et vivant, et substitue les explications historiques aux explications artificielles de l'ancienne philologie." Salomon, op. cit., p. 233, expresses himself as follows: "La méthode comparative, si elle s'inaugurait en Allemagne, était ignorée en France, et l'explication historique ne s'était pas encore substituée aux explications artificielles de l'ancienne philologie,” and ibid. n. 1: Renan le (?) constate dans une étude sur les Grammairiens Grecs." To say nothing of not using the verb "substituer" in the same tense as Renan, the connotation in which the expression as a whole is placed does not seem the same, but appears rather to have been distorted. 14 See Larat, op. cit., p. 251, for Nodier's reviews of Raynouard. No mention is made of Raynouard's review of Nodier's "Examen critique" (Journal des Savants, 1828, pp. 734-745). 1 de lui?" For Croft's narrow pedantry was capable only of appreciating the "miettes friandes" of philology.15 By the time Nodier came into active contact with Paul Lacroix, Leroux de Lincy, and Paulin Paris as co-editors of the Bulletin du Bibliophile, his habits had been well set; to the end of his days Rabelais represented to him a fairly good philologist because of his agility in the juggling of words. To think that such a philologist could be referred to in a matter of life and death by the Supreme Court of Belgium, where the decision in the trial of a counterfeiter depended upon the meaning of a word! 16 It is certain that, in his earliest days, Nodier did not have the proper conditions for work. Hard pressed, as he likes to make his reader believe, by Napoleon's police, as a result of an indiscreet poem, he carried around from place to place the Dictionnaire des onomatopées. Not until 1824, when he was installed as librarian of the Arsénal, did he have the best of available accommodations. What books were at the disposal of the assiduous bibliophile in that famous room of the Cénacle? It is a part of the décor indispensable, in the present writer's opinion, in considering his activity; yet the works on Nodier do not tell us what these books were. A description of the Catalogue (1844), the chief source of the following list, would form the subject of a separate paper, and hence the selection of titles must be drastic: No. 143 Tory, Champfleury (Under Art de l'écriture). 173 Du Bellay, Deffence et Illustration de la langue françoyse. 175 Fauchet, Recueil, etc. 177 Périon, Dialogues (notable for the attempt to derive French from Greek). 178 Estienne, Conformité, etc. 183 Id., Hypomneses. 184 Sylvius, Isagoge. 187 Meigret, Tretté. 188 Ramus, Grammaire. 190 Estienne, Dialogues du nouveau langage françois italianizé. 15 Portraits litt., pp. 467, 469. 16 See the curious account of Lacroix in the Bulletin du Bibliophile for 1862, p. 1319. |