There had long been a flourishing versified literature in the vernacular of France, before anyone thought of writing French prose. It was the desire to be exact in giving informa tion which led to a partial divergence from metre. The transla tor of the Chronicle of Turpin mentions that he writes in prose "because rhyme entails the addition of words not in the Latin." Thus about 1200 verse began to be abandoned by chroniclers who had some definite statements to impart. They ceased to sing; they wrote as those around them spoke. The earliest French prose was translated from the Latin, but Baldwin VI. (d. 1205) is said to have commissioned several scribes to compile in the vulgar tongue a history of the world. If this was ever written it is lost, but we possess a Book of Stories written about 1225 by a clerk at Lille, which may fairly be said to be the beginning of French prose history. When once, however, a taste for prose was admitted, the superiority of that medium over verse as material for exact history could not but be perceived. The earliest French prose writer of genius was Villehardouin, who put down memoirs of his life between 1198 and 1207; he left his book, The Conquest of Constantinople, incomplete. In the history of prose, Villehar douin takes an eminent place. In his style are seen many of the most precious elements of French prose, its lucidity, its force, its sobriety and its charm. He had been trained as an orator, and was content to write as he had learned to speak. He was followed by other admirable writers of memoirs, Robert of Clari, Henri of Valenciennes, the anonymous chronicler of Bethune, to whom we owe the famous description of Bouvines, and the Min strel of Reims. The last-named finished his Recits in 1260. These works in the new easy manner of writing were found to be as elegant and as vivacious as any in verse. They led the way directly to the earliest historian of modern Europe, Joinville, who fin ished his Histoire de St. Louis in 1309. A century later Froissart left his famous Chroniques unfinished in 1404, and again ioo years passed before Philippe de Commines dropped the thread of his Memoires in 1511. These three are simply the most eminent fig ures in a great cloud of prose-writers, who helped to facilitate the use of the national language. In the 15th century, moreover, Antoine de la Salle deserves mention as practically the earliest of French novelists. But with the Renaissance came the infusion into France of the spirit of antiquity, and in Rabelais there was revealed an author of the very highest genius. The year 1532, in which the first brief sketch of Gargantua appeared, was critical in French literature. In 1549 appeared the Defense et illustration de la longue francaise of Joachim du Bellay, in which the founda tions of French literary criticism were firmly laid. The liberation of the language proceeded simultaneously in all directions. In 1539 it was officially decreed that all judicial acts were thence forward to be written "en langage maternal francais." Calvin led the theologians, and his precise and transparent prose gave the model to a long line of sober rhetoricians. It is in Calvin that we meet for the first time with a simple French prose style, which is easily intelligible to-day. There is some pedantry in St. Fran cois de Sales, some return to the spirit of mediaeval French in Montaigne ; so that the prose of these great writers seems to us more antiquated than that of Calvin. Yet the Institution belongs at latest to 156o, and the immortal Essais at earliest to 1580. We are approaching the moment when there should be nothing left for French prose to learn. But we pause at Brantome, in whom the broad practice of French as Froissart and the mediaeval chroniclers had used it was combined with the modern passion for minute and picturesque detail. With the beginning of the I 7th century there sprang up almost an infatuation for making prose uniformly dignified, for avoiding all turns of speech which could remind the reader of the "barbarous" origins of the lan guage; the earliest examples of this subjection of eloquence to purely aristocratic forms have been traced back to the Servitude volontaire of La Boetie (153o-63). In the pursuit of this dignity the prose writers of the 16th century ventured to borrow not words merely but peculiarities of syntax from Greece and Rome. The necessity of remaining intelligible, however, checked excess, and after a few wild experiments the general result was discovered to be the widening of the capacities of the language. In the 17th century a great stimulus was given to easy prose by the writers of romances, led by d'Urfe, and by the writers of letters, led by Balzac, with whom French prose lost its heaviness and its solem nity ; it became an instrument fit to record the sentiments of social life; here was discovered what Voltaire calls the nombre et harmonie de la prose. French style became capable of still more when it was used by Descartes and by Pascal to interpret their majestic thoughts. At this moment, in 1637, the French Academy was founded, for the distinct purpose of purifying and enlarging the French language; and in time, out of the midst of the academy, arose the important Remarques (5647) of Vaugelas, a work of grave authority, which was the earliest elaborate treatise on the science of prose in any language. Antiquated as Vaugelas now
seems, and little regarded by modern writers his work is still the basis of authority on the subject. In common with his colleagues he laid down laws by which harmony of structure, a graceful sobriety and exactitude of expression, could be secured to every practised French writer. He was not accepted as infallible, even in his own age ; he was immediately exposed to the criticism of La Mothe le Vayer, who, however, was radically at one with him regarding the basis of his definition. The great demerit of the early academicians was that they knew little about mediaeval French. They thrust everything aside which they regarded as barbarous, and the work of the 19th century was to recover from a past behind Rabelais elements of great value which the i 7th had arbitrarily rejected. In the succeeding centuries there has been a vast extension of the practice of French prose, but in spite of all neologisms, and of the waves of preciosity which have periodically swept over the French language, the treatise of Vaugelas remains the final code in which the laws that govern French prose are preserved.
The case of prose in Italian has this unique feature that, instead of gathering form obscurely and slowly, it came into sudden existence at the will of one of the greatest of writers. Latin had almost universally been used in Italy until the close of the 13th century, when Dante created a vernacular prose in the non-metrical part of his Vita Nuova (c. 1293). For a long time the prose of Dante stood practically alone, and Petrarch affected to despise the works which his great predecessor had written in the vulgar tongue. But about 1348 Boccaccio started his Decameron, which gave classic form to the prose romance of Italy. It should have been greatly to the advantage of Italy that in the hands of Dante and Boccaccio prose was born full-grown, and had not to pass through the periods of uncertain development which awaited it elsewhere. After this brilliant beginning, however, there was a decline, the writers of the next age lacking the courage to be inde pendent of antiquity. There was a return to Latin phraseology which made many works almost macaronic in character; the famous Hypnerotomachia of Colonna is an instance. Something of the purity of Boccaccio was recovered by Sannazaro in his Arcadia (1489); even Sanna.zaro, however, did not see how need ful it was to cast off Latin constructions. At length Machiavelli and Guicciardini succeeded in releasing prose from the yoke of Rome, and in writing undiluted Tuscan. In the i6th century the prose writers of Italy became extremely prolific, with Pietro Bembo at their head. The novelists were now prominent, but, although they take a foremost place in the history of Italian liter ature, there was little art in their employment of language. Many of them were born out of Tuscany, and, like Bandello, never learned the rules of pure Italian prose. Since the i6th century Italian would seem to have undergone no radical changes, and its prose has been stationary in form. At the close of the 19th cen tury a new school of writers, with Gabriele d'Annunzio at its head, created a demand for a new prose, but the remedy suggested by these innovators was neither more nor less than a return to Boccaccio and Machiavelli.
German.—The earliest attempts in German prose belong to the age of Charlemagne, and the first example usually quoted is the Strassburger Eidschwiire of 842. For all literary purposes, however, metrical language was used exclusively during the mittel hochdeutsch period, which lasted until the end of the 13th cen tury. What little prose there was, was limited to jurisprudence and theology. David of Augsburg (d. 1272) is named as the earliest vernacular preacher, but only one of his sermons has reached us. More important was Berthold "the Sweet" (122o-72), whose sermons were published in 1824. Historical prose began with the Saxon Chronicle of 1248. There was little to record in the next two centuries, until prose was revived by Geiler von Kaisersburg (1445-1510) in his sermons. About the same time translations were made of the Decameron and other Italian novelle. The devel opment of prose in Germany is, however, negligible until we reach Luther's Bible (N.T., 15 2 2 ), on which all classic German prose is based. Johann Fischart composed important secular books in the vernacular, in particular the Bienenkorb (1579) and an imi tation of Gargantua (1575), the earliest German novel. Nearly a century passes before we reach the curious picaresque romance of Simp/icissimus (1669) of Grimmelshausen. But the neglect of prose by the German nation was still general. Even men of the stamp of Leibnitz wrote in Latin or French. What Luther had done was, however, completed and confirmed in the middle of the 18th century by Lessing, the creator of modern German prose. The critical period in this revival was 1764 to 1768, which saw the production of Laocoon and the Hamburgische Drama turgie. We pass presently to Jean Paul Richter, and so to Goethe, in whose hands German prose became the organ of thought and eloquence which it has been ever since.