MISCELLANEOUS PROSE.
[Sidenote: General use of Prose.]
It was natural, and indeed necessary, that, when the use of prose as an
allowable vehicle for literary composition was once understood and
established, it should gradually but rapidly supersede the more
troublesome and far less appropriate form of verse. Accordingly we find
that, from the beginning of the thirteenth century, the amount of prose
literature is constantly on the increase. It happens, however, or, to
speak more precisely, it follows that this miscellaneous prose
literature is of much less importance and of much less interest than the
contemporary and kindred literature in verse. For in the nature of
things much of it was occupied with what may be called the journey-work
of literature,--the stuff which, unless there be some special attraction
in its form, grows obsolete, or retains a merely antiquarian interest in
the course of time. There was, moreover, still among the chief patrons
of literature a preference for verse which diverted the brightest
spirits to the practice of that form. Yet again, the best prose
composition of the middle ages, with the exception of a few works of
fiction, is to be found in its chronicles, and these have already been
noticed. A review, therefore, much less minute in scale than that which
in the first ten chapters of this book has been given to the mediaeval
poetry of France, will suffice for its mediaeval prose, and such a
review will appropriately close the survey of the literature of the
middle ages.
[Sidenote: Prose Sermons. St. Bernard.]
[Sidenote: Maurice de Sully.]
[Sidenote: Later Preachers. Gerson.]
It has already been pointed out in the first chapter that documentary
evidence exists to prove the custom of preaching in French (or at least
in _lingua romana_) at a very early date. It is not, however, till many
centuries after the date of Mummolinus, that there is any trace of
regularly written vernacular discourses. When these appear in the
twelfth century the Provencal dialects appear to have the start of
French proper. Whether the forty-four prose sermons of St. Bernard which
exist were written by him in French, or were written in Latin and
translated, is a disputed point. The most reasonable opinion seems to be
that they were translated, but it is uncertain whether at the beginning
of the thirteenth or the middle of the twelfth century. However this may
be, the question of written French sermons in the twelfth century does
not depend on that of St. Bernard's authorship. Maurice de Sully, who
presided over the See of Paris from 1160 to 1195, has left a
considerable number of sermons which exist in manuscripts of very
different dialects. Perhaps it may not be illegitimate to conclude from
this, that at the time such written sermons were not very common, and
that preachers of different districts were glad to borrow them for their
own use. These also are thought to have been first written in Latin and
then translated. But whether Maurice de Sully was a pioneer or not, he
was very quickly followed by others. In the following century the number
of preachers whose vernacular work has been preserved is very large; the
increase being, beyond all doubt, partially due to the foundation of the
two great preaching orders of St. Francis and St. Dominic. The existing
literature of this class, dating from the thirteenth, the fourteenth,
and the early fifteenth centuries, is enormous, but the remarks made at
the beginning of this chapter apply to it fully. Its interest is almost
wholly antiquarian, and not in any sense literary. Distinguished names
indeed occur in the catalogue of preachers, but, until we come to the
extreme verge of the mediaeval period proper, hardly one of what may be
called the first importance. The struggle between the Burgundian and
Orleanist, or Armagnac parties, and the ecclesiastical squabbles of the
Great Schism, produced some figures of greater interest. Such are Jean
Petit, a furious partisan, who went so far as to excuse the murder of
the Duke of Orleans, and Jean Charlier, or Gerson, one of the most
respectable and considerable names of the later mediaeval literature.
Gerson was born in 1363, at a village of the same name in Lorraine. He
early entered the College de Navarre, and distinguished himself under
Peter d'Ailly, the most famous of the later nominalists. He became
Chancellor of the University, received a living in Flanders, and for
many years preached in the most constantly attended churches of Paris.
He represented the University at the Council of Constance, and, becoming
obnoxious to the Burgundian party, sought refuge with one of his
brothers at Lyons, where he is said to have taught little children. He
died in 1429. Gerson, it should perhaps be added, is one of the numerous
candidates (but one of the least likely) for the honour of having
written the _Imitation_. He concerns us here only as the author of
numerous French sermons. His work in this kind is very characteristic of
the time. Less mixed with burlesque than that of his immediate
successors, it is equally full of miscellaneous, and, as it now seems,
somewhat inappropriate erudition, and far fuller of the fatal
allegorising and personification of abstract qualities which were in
every branch of literature the curse of the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries. Yet there are passages of real eloquence in Gerson, though
perhaps the chief literary point about him is the evidence he gives of
the insufficiency of the language in its then condition for serious
prose work.
[Sidenote: Moral and Devotional Treatises.]
[Sidenote: Translators.]
[Sidenote: Political and Polemical Works.]
This is indeed the lesson of most of the writing which we have to notice
in this chapter. Next to sermons may most naturally be placed devotional
and moral works, for, as may easily be imagined, theology and
philosophy, properly so called, did not condescend to the vulgar tongue
until after the close of the period. Only treatises for the practical
use of the unlearned and ignorant adopted the vernacular. Of such there
are manuals of devotion and sketches of sacred history which date from
the thirteenth century, besides numerous later treatises, among the
authors of which Gerson is again conspicuous. The most popular, perhaps,
and in a way the most interesting of all such moral and devotional
treatises, is the book of the Chevalier de la Tour Landry[142], written
in the third quarter of the fourteenth century. This book, destined for
the instruction of the author's three daughters, is composed of Bible
stories, moral tales from ordinary literature and from the writer's
experience, precepts and rules of conduct, and so forth; in short, a
Whole Duty of Girls. Most however of the works of this sort which were
current were, as may be supposed, not original, but translated, and
these translations played a very important part in the history of the
language. The earliest of all are translations of the Bible, especially
of the Psalms and the book of Kings, the former of which may perhaps
date from the end of the eleventh century. Translations of the fathers,
and of the Lives of the Saints, followed in such numbers that, in 1199,
Pope Innocent III. blamed their indiscriminate use. The translation of
profane literature hardly begins much before the thirteenth century. In
this it becomes frequent; and in the following many classical writers
and more mediaeval authors in Latin underwent the process. But it was
not till the close of the fourteenth century that the most important
translations were made, and that translation began to exercise its
natural influence on a comparatively unsophisticated language, by
providing terms of art, by generally enriching the vocabulary, and by
the elaboration of the peculiarities of syntax and style necessary for
rendering the sentences of languages so highly organised as Latin and
Greek. Under John of Valois and his three successors considerable
encouragement was given by the kings of France to this sort of work, and
three translators, Pierre Bersuire, Nicholas Oresme, and Raoul de
Presles, have left special reputations. The eldest of these, Pierre
Bersuire or Bercheure, a friend of Petrarch, was born in 1290, and
towards the end of his life, about 1352, translated part of Livy.
Nicholas Oresme, the date of whose birth is unknown, but who entered the
College de Navarre in 1348, and is likely to have been at that time
thirteen or fourteen years old, and who became Dean of Rouen and Bishop
of Lisieux, translated, in 1370 and the following years, the _Ethics_,
_Politics_, and _Economics_ of Aristotle (from the Latin, not the
Greek). He died in 1382. Oresme was a good writer, and particularly
dexterous in adopting neologisms necessary for his purpose. Raoul de
Presles executed translations of the Bible and of St. Augustine's _De
Civitate Dei_. All these writers furnished an enlarged vocabulary to
their successors, the most remarkable of whom were the already mentioned
Christine de Pisan and Alain Chartier. The latter is especially
noteworthy as a prose writer, and the comments already made on his style
and influence as a poet apply here also. His _Quadriloge Invectif_ and
_Curial_, both satirical or, at least, polemical works, are his chief
productions in this kind. Raoul de Presles also composed a polemical
work, dealing chiefly with the burning question of the papal and royal
powers, under the title of _Songe du Verger_.
[Sidenote: Codes and Legal Treatises.]
It might seem unlikely at first sight that so highly technical a subject
as law should furnish a considerable contingent to early vernacular
literature; but there are some works of this kind both of ancient date
and of no small importance. England and Normandy furnish an important
contingent, the 'Laws of William the Conqueror' and the _Coutumiere
Normandie_ being the most remarkable: but the most interesting document
of this kind is perhaps the famous _Assises de Jerusalem_, arranged by
Godfrey of Bouillon and his crusaders as the code of the kingdom of
Jerusalem in 1099, and known also as the _Lettres du Sepulcre_, from the
place of their custody. The original text was lost or destroyed at the
capture of Jerusalem by Saladin in 1187; but a new _Assise_, compiled
from the oral tradition of the jurists who had seen and used the old,
was written by Philippe de Navarre in 1240, or thereabouts, for the use
of the surviving Latin principalities of the East. This was shortly
afterwards enlarged and developed by Jean d'Ibelin, a Syrian baron, who
took part in the crusade of St. Louis. These codes concerned themselves
only with one part of the original _Lettres du Sepulcre_, the laws
affecting the privileged classes; but the other part, the _Assises des
Bourgeois_, survives in _Le Livre de la Cour des Bourgeois_, which has
been thought to be older than the loss of the original. These various
works contain the most complete account of feudal jurisprudence in its
palmy days that is known, for the still earlier Anglo-Norman laws
represent a more mixed state of things. It was especially in Cyprus that
the Jerusalem codes were observed. The chief remaining works of the
same kind which deserve mention are the _Etablissements de St. Louis_
and the _Livre de Justice et de Plet_, which both date from the time of
Louis himself; the _Conseil_, a treatise on law by Pierre de Fontaines,
who died in 1289, and the _Coutumes du Beauvoisis_ of Philippe de
Beaumanoir, who wrote in 1283. The legal literature of the fourteenth
century is abundant, but possesses considerably less interest.
[Sidenote: Miscellanies and Didactic Works.]
Last of all, before coming to prose fiction, a vast if not very
interesting class of miscellaneous prose work must be mentioned. The
word class has been used, but perhaps improperly, for classification is
almost impossible. Books of accounts and domestic economy of all sorts
(generally called _livres de raison_) were very common; treatises of all
kinds of more general character on household management abounded. We
have a _Menagier de Paris_, a _Viandier de Paris_, both of the
fourteenth century. But much earlier the orderly and symmetrical spirit
which has always distinguished the French makes itself apparent in
literature. The _Livre des Metiers de Paris_ of Etienne Boileau, dating
from the thirteenth century, gives a complete idea of the organisation
of guilds and trades at that time. An innumerable multitude of treatises
on the minor morals, on love, on manners, exists in manuscript, and in
rare instances in print. The _Tresors_, or compendious encyclopaedias,
which have already been noticed in verse, began in the thirteenth
century to be composed in prose, the most remarkable being that of
Brunetto Latini, the master of Dante, who avowedly used French as his
vehicle of composition, because it was the most commonly read of
European languages. This book was written apparently about or before
1270. Nor did the separate arts lack illustration in prose. Medicine and
alchemy, astronomy and poetry, war and chess, had their treatises, while
Bestiaries and Lapidaries are almost as numerous in prose as in verse.
Finally, there is the important category of books of travel. There are a
certain number of voyages to the Holy Land[143]; some miscellaneous
travels mostly, though not universally, translated from the Latin; and
last, but not least, the great book of Marco Polo, which seems to have
been written originally in French, the author, when in captivity at
Genoa, having dictated it to Rusticien of Pisa, who also figures as a
compiler of late versions of the Arthurian legend, and who thus had some
skill in French composition.
[Sidenote: Fiction]
The prose fiction of the period has been kept to the last, because it
expresses a different order of literary endeavour from those divisions
which have hitherto been treated. The language of the middle ages was
ill-suited for work other than narrative; for narrative work it was
supremely well adapted. Yet the prose fiction which we have is not on
the whole equal in merit to the poetry, though in one or two instances
it is of great value. The medium of communication was not generally
known or used until the period of decadence had been reached, and the
peculiar defects of mediaeval literature, prolixity and verbiage, show
themselves more conspicuously and more annoyingly in prose than in
verse. We have, however, some remarkable work of the later periods, and
in the latest of all we have one writer, Antoine de la Salle, who
deserves to rank with the great chroniclers as a fashioner of French
prose.
The French prose fiction of the middle ages resolves itself into several
classes: the early Arthurian Romances already noticed; the scattered
tales of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, which are chiefly to
be studied in two excellent volumes of the _Bibliotheque
Elzevirienne_[144]; the versions of such collections of legends, chiefly
oriental in origin, as the _History of the Seven Wise Men_ and the
_Gesta Romanorum_; the longer classical romances in prose; the late
prose _remaniements_ of the great verse epics and romances of the
twelfth century; and the more or less original work of the fifteenth
century, when prose was becoming an independent and coequal literary
exponent. The first class requires no further mention; of the third, the
editions of the _Roman des Sept Sages_, by M. Gaston Paris[145], and of
the _Violier des Histoires Romaines_, by M. Gustave Brunet[146], may be
referred to as sufficient instances; of the fourth a very interesting
specimen has been made accessible by the publication of the prose _Roman
de Jules Cesar_ of Jean de Tuim[147], a free version from Lucan made
apparently in the course of the thirteenth century, and afterwards
imitated by the author of the verse romance; the fifth, though very
numerous, are not of much value, though the great romance of
_Perceforest_ and a few others may be excepted from this general
condemnation. The second and the last deserve a longer mention.
The tales of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, as published by
MM. Moland and Hericault, are eight in number. Those of the second
volume are on the whole inferior in interest to those of the first. They
consist of _Asseneth_, a graceful legend of the marriage of Joseph with
the daughter of the Egyptian high-priest; _Troilus_, interesting chiefly
as a prose version of Benoist de Ste. More's legend of _Troilus and
Cressida_, through the channel of Guido Colonna and Boccaccio; and a
very curious English story, that of the rebel Fulk Fitzwarine. The
thirteenth-century tales consist of _L'Empereur Constant_, the story
with which Mr. Morris has made English readers familiar under the title
of the 'Man born to be King;' of a prose version of the ubiquitous
legend of _Amis et Amiles_; of _Le roi Flore et la belle Jehanne_, a
kind of version of _Griselda_, though the particular trial and
exhibition of fidelity is quite different; of the _Comtesse de
Ponthieu_, the least interesting of all; and lastly, of the finest prose
tale of the French middle ages, _Aucassin et Nicolette_. In this
exquisite story Aucassin, the son of the count of Beaucaire, falls in
love with Nicolette, a captive damsel. It is very short, and is written
in mingled verse and prose. The theme is for the most part nothing but
the desperate love of Aucassin, which is careless of religion, which
makes him indifferent to the joy of battle and to everything, except
'Nicolette ma tres-douce mie,' and which is, of course, at last
rewarded. But the extreme beauty of the separate scenes makes it a
masterpiece.
[Sidenote: Antoine de la Salle.]
Antoine de la Salle is one of the most fortunate of authors. The
tendency of modern criticism is generally to endeavour to prove that
some famous author has been wrongly credited with some of the work which
has made his fame. Homer, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Rabelais, have all had
to pay this penalty. In the case of Antoine de la Salle, on the
contrary, critics have vied with each other in heaping unacknowledged
masterpieces on his head. His only acknowledged work is the charming
romance of _Petit Jean de Saintre_[148]. The first thing added to this
has been the admirable satire of the _Quinze Joyes du Mariage_[149], the
next the famous collection of the _Cent Nouvelles_[150], and the last
the still more famous farce of _Pathelin_[151]. There are for once few
or no external reasons why these various attributions should not be
admitted, while there are many internal ones why they should. Antoine de
la Salle was born in 1398, and spent his life in the employment of
different kings and princes;--Louis III of Anjou, King of Naples, his
son the good King Rene, the count of Saint Pol, and Philip the Good of
Burgundy, who was his natural sovereign. Nothing is known of him after
1461. Of the three prose works which have been attributed to him--there
are others of a didactic character in manuscript--the _Quinze Joyes du
Mariage_ is extremely brief, but it contains the quintessence of all the
satire on that honourable estate which the middle ages had elaborated.
Every chapter--there is one for each 'joy' with a prologue and
conclusion--ends with a variation on this phrase descriptive of the
unhappy Benedict, 'est sy est enclose dans la nasse, et a l'aventure ne
s'en repent point et s'il n'y estait il se y mettroit bientot; la usera
sa vue en languissant, et finira miserablement ses jours.' The satire is
much quieter and of a more humorous and less boisterous character than
was usual at the time. The _Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles_ are to all intents
and purposes prose _fabliaux_. They have the full licence of that class
of composition, its sparkling fun, its truth to the conditions of
ordinary human life. Many of them are taken from the work of the Italian
novelists, but all are handled in a thoroughly original manner. In style
they are perhaps the best of all the late mediaeval prose works, being
clear, precise, and definite without the least appearance of baldness or
dryness. _Petit Jehan de Saintre_ is, together with the _Chronique de
Messire Jacques de Lalaing_[152] of Georges Chastellain (a delightful
biography, which is not a work of fiction), the hand-book of the last
age of chivalry. Jehan de Saintre, who was a real person of the
preceding century, but from whom the novelist borrows little or nothing
but his name, falls in love with a lady who is known by the fantastic
title of 'la dame des belles cousines.' He wins general favour by his
courtesy, true love, and prowess; but during his absence in quest of
adventures, his faithless mistress betrays him for a rich abbot. The
latter part of this book exhibits something of the satiric intention,
which was never long absent from the author's mind; the former contains
a picture, artificial perhaps, but singularly graceful, of the elaborate
religion, as it may almost be called, of chivalry. Strikingly evident in
the book is the surest of all signs of a dying stage of society, the
most delicate observation and sympathetic description joined to
sarcastic and ironical criticism.
As examples of this prose literature we may take a fragment of one of
the sermons attributed to St. Bernard (twelfth century), an extract from
_Aucassin et Nicolette_ (thirteenth century), and one from the _Curial_
of Alain Chartier (early fifteenth century):--
ST. BERNARD.
Granz est ceste mers, chier frere, et molt large, c'est
ceste presente vie ke molt est amere et molt plaine de granz
ondes, ou trois manieres de gent puyent solement
trespesseir, ensi k'il delivreit en soient, et chascuns en
sa maniere. Troi homme sunt: Noe, Daniel et Job. Li primiers
de cez trois trespesset a neif, li seconz par pont et li
tierz par weit. Cist troi homme signifient trois ordenes ki
sunt en sainte eglise. Noe conduist l'arche par mei lo peril
del duluve, en cui je reconois aparmenmes la forme de ceos
qui sainte eglise ont a governeir. Daniel, qui apeleiz est
bers de desiers, ki abstinens fut et chastes, il est li
ordenes des penanz et des continanz ki entendent solement a
deu. Et Job, ki droituriers despensiers fut de la sustance
de cest munde, signifiet lo feaule peule qui est en
mariaige, a cuy il loist bien avoir en possession les choses
terrienes. Del primier et del secont nos covient or parler,
ear ci sunt or de present nostre frere, et ki abbeit sunt si
cum nos, ki sunt del nombre des prelaiz; et si sunt assi ci
li moine ki sunt de l'ordene des penanz dont nos mismes, qui
abbeit sommes, ne nos doyens mies osteir, si nos par
aventure, qui jai nen avignet, nen avons dons oblieit nostre
profession por la grace de nostre office. Lo tierz ordene,
c'est de ceos ki en mariaige sunt, trescorrai ju or
briement, si cum ceos qui tant nen apartienent mies a nos
cum li altre. c'est cil ordenes ki a vveit trespesset ceste
grant meir; et cist ordenes est molt peneuous et perillous,
et ki vait par molt longe voie, si cum cil ki nule sente ne
quierent ne nule adrece. En ceu appert bien ke molt est
perillouse lor voie, ke nos tant de gent i veons perir, dont
nos dolor avons, et ke nos si poc i veons de ceos ki ensi
trespessent cum mestiers seroit; ear molt est gries chose
d'eschuir l'abysme des vices et les fosses des criminals
pechiez entre les ondes de cest seule, nomeyement or en cest
tens ke li malices est si enforciez.
_AUCASSIN ET NICOLETTE._
Aucasins fu mis en prison si com vos aves, oi et entendu, et
Nicolete fu d'autre part en le canbre. Ce fu el tans d'este,
el mois de mai, que li jor sont caut, lonc et cler, et les
nuis coies et series. Nicolete jut une nuit en son lit, si
vit la lune luire cler par une fenestre, et si oi le
lorseilnol canter en garding, se li sovint d'Aucasin son ami
qu'ele tant amoit. ele se comenca a porpenser del conte
Garin de Biaucaire qui de mort le haoit; si se pensa qu'ele
ne remanroit plus ilec, que s'ele estoit acusee et li quens
Garins le savoit, il le feroit de male mort morir. ele senti
que li vielle dormoit qui aveuc li estoit. ele se leva, si
vesti un bliaut de drap de soie que ele avoit molt bon; si
prist dras de lit et touailes, si noua l'un a l'autre, si
fist une corde si longe conme ele pot, si le noua au piler
de le fenestre, si s'avala contreval le gardin, et prist se
vesture a l'une main devant et a l'autre deriere; si
s'escorca por le rousee qu'ele vit grande sor l'erbe, si
s'en ala aval le gardin. Ele avoit les caviaus blons et
menus recerceles, et les ex vairs et rians, et le face
traitice et le nes haut et bien assis, et les levretes
vermelletes plus que n'est cerisse ne rose el tans d'este,
et les dens blans et menus, et avoit les mameletes dures qui
li souslevoient sa vesteure ausi com ce fuissent II nois
gauges, et estoit graille parmi les flans, qu'en vos dex
mains le peuscies enclorre; et les flors des margerites
qu'ele ronpoit as ortex de ses pies, qui li gissoient sor le
menuisse du pie par deseure, estoient droites noires avers
ses pies et ses ganbes, tant par estoit blance la mescinete.
Ele vint au postic; si le deffrema, si s'en isci par mi les
rues de Biaucaire par devers l'onbre, ear la lune luisoit
molt clere, et erra tant qu'ele vint a le tor u ses amis
estoit. Li tors estoit faele de lius en lius, et ele se
quatist deles l'un des pilers. si s'estraint en son mantel,
si mist sen cief par mi une creveure de la tor qui vielle
estoit et anciienne, si oi Aucasin qui la dedens pleuroit et
faisoit mot grant dol et regretoit se douce amie que tant
amoit. et quant ele l'ot asses escoute, si comenca a dire.
ALAIN CHARTIER.
La court, affin que tu l'entendes, est ung couvent de gens
qui soubz faintise du bien commun sont assemblez pour eulx
interrompre; ear il n'y a gueres de gens qui ne vendent,
achaptent ou eschangent aucunes foiz leurs rentes ou leurs
propres vestemens; ear entre nous de la court nous sommes
marchans affectez qui achaptons les autres gens et
autresfoiz pour leur argent nous leur vendons nostre
humanite precieuse. Nous leur vendons et achaptons autruy
par flaterie ou par corrupcions; mais nous scavons tres bien
vendre nous mesmes a ceulx qui ont de nous a faire. Combien
donc y peus tu acquerir qui es certain sans doubte et sans
peril? veulx tu aller a la court vendre ou perdre ce bien de
vertu, que tu as acquis hors d'icelle court? Certes, frere,
tu demandes ce que tu deusses reffuser, tu te fies en ce
dont tu te deusses deffier et fiches ton esperance en ce que
te tire a peril. Et se tu y viens, la court te servira de
tant de mensonges controverses d'une part, et de l'autre de
bailler tant de tours et de charges que tu auras dedans toy
mesmes bataille continuelle et soussiz angoisseux et pour
certain homme qui pourra bonnement dire que ceste vie fust
bieneuree qui par tant de tempestes est achatee et en tant
de contrarietez esprouvee.
FOOTNOTES:
[142] Ed. Montaiglon. Paris, 1854.
[143] A good example of these is the _Saint Voyage de Jerusalem_ of the
Seigneur d'Anglure (1385), edited by MM. Bonnardot and Longnon. Paris,
1878.
[144] _Nouvelles du 13'e et du 14'e siecle._ Ed. Moland et Hericault. 2
vols. Paris, 1856.
[145] Paris, 1876.
[146] Paris, 1858.
[147] Ed. Settegast. Halle, 1881.
[148] Ed. Guichard. Paris, 1843.
[149] Ed. Jannet. Paris, 1853; 2nd ed. 1857.
[150] Ed. Wright. Paris, 1858.
[151] Ed. Fournier, _Theatre Francais avant la Renaissance_. Paris, n. d.
[152] Ed. Kervyn de Lettenhove, viii. 1-259.
INTERCHAPTER I.
SUMMARY OF MEDIAEVAL LITERATURE.
In the foregoing book a view has been given of the principal
developments of mediaeval literature in France. The survey has extended,
taking the extremest chronological limits, over some eight centuries.
But, until the end of the eleventh, the monuments of ancient French
literature are few and scattered, and the actual manuscripts which we
possess date in hardly any case further back than the twelfth. In
reality the history of mediaeval literature in France is the history of
the productions of the twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth and early
fifteenth centuries with a long but straggling introduction, ranging
from the eighth or even the seventh. Its palmy time is unquestionably in
the twelfth and the thirteenth. During these two hundred years almost
every kind of literature is attempted. Vast numbers of epic poems are
written; one great story, that of Arthur, exercises the imagination as
hardly any other story has exercised it either in ancient or in modern
times; the drama is begun in all its varieties of tragedy, comedy, and
opera; lyric poetry finds abundant and exquisite expression; history
begins to be written, not indeed from the philosophic point of view, but
with vivid and picturesque presentment of fact; elaborate codes are
drawn; vernacular homilies, not mere rude colloquial discourses, are
composed; the learning of the age, such as it is, finds popular
treatment; and in particular a satiric literature, more abundant and
more racy if less polished than any that classical antiquity has left
us, is committed to writing. It is often wondered at and bewailed that
this vigorous growth was succeeded by a period of comparative stagnation
in which little advance was made, and in which not a little decided
falling off is noticeable. Except the formal lyric poetry of the
fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, and the multiplied dramatic
energy of the latter, nothing novel or vigorous appears for some hundred
and forty years, until the extreme verge of the period, when the
substitution of the prose tale, as exemplified in the work attributed to
Antoine de la Salle, for the verse Fabliau, opens a prospect which four
centuries of progress have not closed. The early perfection of Italian,
a language later to start than French, has been regretfully compared
with this, and the blame has been thrown on the imperfection of
mediaeval arrangements for educating the people. The complaint is
mistaken, and almost foolish. It is not necessary to look much further
than Italian itself to see the Nemesis of a too early development.
French, like English, which had a yet tardier literary growth, has
pursued its course unhasting, unresting, to the present hour. Italian
since the close of the sixteenth century has contributed not a single
masterpiece to European literature, and not much that can be called good
second-rate. It is not impossible that the political troubles of
France--the Hundred Years' War especially--checked the intellectual
development of the country, but if so, the check was in the long run
altogether salutary. The middle ages were allowed to work themselves
out--to produce their own natural fruit before the full influx of
classical literature. What is more, a breathing time was allowed after
the exhaustion of the first set of influences, before the second was
felt. Hence the French renaissance was a far more vigorous growth than
the renaissance of Italy, which displays at once the signs of precocity
and of premature decay. But we are more immediately concerned at the
present moment with the literary results of the middle ages themselves.
It is only of late years that it has been possible fully to estimate
these, and it is now established beyond the possibility of doubt that to
France almost every great literary style as distinguished from great
individual works is at this period due. The testimony of Brunetto Latini
as to French being the common literary tongue of Europe in the
thirteenth century has been quoted, and those who have read the
foregoing chapters attentively will be able to recall innumerable
instances of the literary supremacy of France. It must of course be
remembered that she enjoyed for a long time the advantage of enlisting
in her service the best wits of Southern England, of the wide district
dominated by the Provencal dialects, and of no small part of Germany and
of Northern Italy. But these countries took far more than they gave: the
Chansons de Gestes were absorbed by Italy, the Arthurian Romances by
Germany; the Fabliaux crossed the Alps to assume a prose dress in the
Southern tongue; the mysteries and miracles made their way to every
corner of Europe to be copied and developed. To the origination of the
most successful of all artificial forms of poetry--the sonnet--France
has indeed no claim, but this is almost a solitary instance. The three
universally popular books (to use the word loosely) of profane
literature in the middle ages, the epic of Arthur, the satire of Reynard
the Fox, the allegorical romance of the Rose, are of French origin. In
importance as in bulk no literature of these four centuries could dare
to vie with French.
This astonishing vigour of imaginative writing was however accompanied
by a corresponding backwardness in the application of the vernacular to
the use of the exacter and more serious departments of letters. Before
Comines, the French chronicle was little more than gossip, though it was
often the gossip of genius. No philosophical, theological, ethical, or
political work deserving account was written in French prose before the
beginning of the sixteenth century. The very language remained utterly
unfitted for any such use. Its vocabulary, though enormously rich in
mere volume, was destitute of terms of the subtlety and precision
necessary for serious prose; its syntax was hardly equal to anything but
a certain loose and flowing narration, which, when turned into the
channel of argument, became either bald or prolix. The universal use of
Latin for graver purposes had stunted and disabled it. At the same time
great changes passed over the language itself. In the fourteenth century
it lost with its inflections not a little of its picturesqueness, and
had as yet hit upon no means of supplying the want. The loose
orthography of the middle ages had culminated in a fantastic redundance
of consonants which was reproduced in the earliest printed books. This,
as readers of Rabelais are aware, was an admirable assistance to
grotesque effect, but it was fatal to elegance or dignity except in the
omnipotent hands of a master like Rabelais himself. In the fifteenth
century, moreover, the stereotyped forms of poetry were losing their
freshness and grace while retaining their stately precision. The faculty
of sustained verse narrative had fled the country, only to return at
very long intervals and in very few cases. The natural and almost
childish outspokenness of early times had brought about in all
departments of comic literature a revolting coarseness of speech. The
farce and the prose tale almost outdo the more naif _fabliau_ in this.
Nothing like a critical spirit had yet manifested itself in matters
literary, unless the universal following of a few accepted models may be
called criticism. The very motives of the mediaeval literature, its
unquestioning faith, its sense of a narrow circle of knowledge
surrounded by a vast unknown, its acceptance of classes and orders in
church and state (tempered as this acceptance had been by the sharpest
satire on particulars but by hardly any argument on general points),
were losing their force. Everything was ready for a renaissance, and the
next book will show how the Renaissance came and what it did.
BOOK II.
THE RENAISSANCE.
CHAPTER I.
VILLON, COMINES, AND THE LATER FIFTEENTH CENTURY.
[Sidenote: The Middle Ages and the Renaissance.]
[Sidenote: Characteristics of Fifteenth-century Literature.]
To determine at what period exactly mediaeval literature ceases in
France and modern literature begins, is not one of the easiest problems
of literary history. It has sometimes been solved by the obvious
expedient of making out of the fifteenth century a period of transition,
sometimes by continuing the classification of 'mediaeval' until the time
when Marot and Rabelais gave unmistakeable evidence of the presence and
working of the modern spirit. Perhaps, however, there may, after all,
have been something in the instinct which, in words clumsily enough
chosen, made Boileau date modern French poetry from Villon[153], and
there can hardly be any doubt that, as far as spirit if not form goes,
modern French prose dates from Comines. These two contemporary authors,
moreover, have in them the characteristic which perhaps more than any
other distinguishes modern from mediaeval literature, the predominance
of the personal element. In their works, especially if Villon be taken
with the immediately preceding and partially contemporary Charles
d'Orleans, a difference of the most striking kind is noticeable at once.
It is not that the prince who served the god Nonchaloir so piously is
deficient in personal characteristics or personal attractiveness, but
that his personality is still, so to speak, generic rather than
individual. He is still the Trouvere of the nobler class, dallying with
half-imaginary woes in the forms consecrated by tradition to the record
of them. Not so the vagabond whose words after four centuries appeal
directly to the spirit of the modern reader. That reader is cut off from
Charles d'Orleans' world by a gulf across which he can only project
himself by a great effort of study or of sympathetic determination. The
barriers which separate him from Villon are slight enough, consisting
mostly of trifling changes in language and manners which a little
exertion easily overcomes.
The latter portion of the fifteenth century, or, to speak more
correctly, its last two-thirds, have frequently been described as a
'dead season' in French literature. The description is not wholly just.
Even if, according to the plan just explained, we throw Charles
d'Orleans and Antoine de la Salle, two names of great importance, back
into the mediaeval period, and if we allow most of the chroniclers who
preceded Comines to accompany them, there are still left, before the
reign of Francis the First witnessed the definite blooming of the
Renaissance in France, the two names of consummate importance which
stand at the head of this chapter, a few minor writers of interest such
as Coquillart, Baude, Martial d'Auvergne, an interesting group of
literary or at least oratorical ecclesiastics, and a much larger and,
from a literary point of view, more important group of elaborate
versifiers, the so-called _grands rhetoriqueurs_ who preceded the
Pleiade in endeavouring to Latinise the French tongue, and whose stiff
verse produced by a natural rebound the easy grace of Clement Marot.
Each of these persons and groups will demand some notice, and the
mention of them will bring us to the Renaissance of which the subjects
of this chapter were the forerunners.
[Sidenote: Villon.]
Francois Villon[154], or Corbueil, or Corbier, or de Montcorbier, or des
Loges, was certainly born at Paris in the year 1431. Of the date of his
death nothing certain is known, some authorities extending his life
towards the close of the century in order to adjust Rabelais' anecdotes
of him[155], others supposing him to have died before the publication of
the first edition of his works in 1489. That Villon was not his
patronymic, whichsoever of his numerous aliases may really deserve that
distinction, is certain. He was a citizen of Paris and a member of the
university, having the status of _clerc_. But his youth was occupied in
other matters than study. In 1455 he killed, apparently in self-defence,
a priest named Philip Sermaise, fled from Paris, was condemned to
banishment in default of appearance, and six months afterwards received
letters of pardon. In 1456 a faithless mistress, Catherine de
Vausselles, drew him into a second affray, in which he had the worst,
and again he fled from Paris. During his absence a burglary committed in
the capital put the police on the track of a gang of young
good-for-nothings among whom Villon's name figured, and he was arrested,
tried, tortured, and condemned to death. On appeal, however, the
sentence was commuted to banishment. Four years after he was in prison
at Meung, consigned thither by the Bishop of Orleans, but the king,
Louis the Eleventh, set him free. Thenceforward nothing certain is known
of him. He had at one time relations with Charles d'Orleans. Such are
the bare facts of his singular life, to which the peculiar character of
his work has directed perhaps disproportionate attention. This work
consists of a poem in forty stanzas of eight octosyllabic lines (each
rhymed a, b, a, b, b, c, b, c) called the _Petit Testament_[156]; of a
poem in 173 similar stanzas called the _Grand Testament_, in which about
a score of minor pieces, chiefly ballades or rondeaux, are inserted; of
a _Codicil_ composed mainly of ballades; of a few separate pieces, and
of some ballades in _argot_, collectively called _Le Jargon_. Besides
these there are doubtful pieces, including a curious work called _Les
Repues Franches_, which describes in octaves like those of the
Testaments the swindling tricks of Villon and his companions, an
excellent Dialogue between two characters, the Seigneurs de Mallepaye
and Baillevent, and a still better Monologue entitled _Le Franc Archier
de Bagnolet_. The Little Testament was written after the affair with
Catherine de Vausselles, the Great Testament after his liberation from
the Bishop's Prison at Meung. Many of the minor poems contain allusions
which enable us to fix them to various events in the poet's life. The
first edition of his works was, as has been said, published in 1489. In
1533 he had the honour of having Marot for editor, and up to the date of
the Bibliophile Jacob's edition of 1854 (since when there have been
several editions), the number had reached thirty-two.
The characteristics of Villon may be looked at either technically or
from the point of view of the matter of his work. He had an
extraordinary mastery of the most artificial forms of poetry which have
ever been employed. The rondel, which Charles d'Orleans wrote with so
much grace, he did not use, but his rondeaux are generally exquisite.
The ballade, however, was his special province. No writer has ever got
the full virtue out of the recurrent rhymes and refrains, which are the
special characteristics of the form, as Villon has. No one has infused
into a mere string of names, such as his famous _Ballade des Dames du
Temps Jadis_ and others, such exquisitely poetical effects by dint of an
epithet here and there and of a touching burden. But the matter of his
verse is in many ways perfectly on a level with its manner. No one
excels him in startling directness of phrase, in simple but infinite
pathos of expression. Of the former, the sudden cry of the Belle
Heaulmiere after the recital of her former triumphs--
Que m'en reste-t-il? honte et peche;
and the despairing conclusion of the lover of La Grosse Margot--
Je suis paillard, paillardise me suit--
are examples in point; of the latter the line in the rondeau to Death--
Deux etions et n'avions qu'un coeur.
No one has bolder strokes of the picturesque, as for instance--
De Constantinoble
L'emperier aux poings dores;
and no one can render the sombre horror of a scene better than Villon
has rendered it in the famous epitaph of the gibbeted corpses--
La pluie nous a debues et laves,
Et le soleil desseches et noircis,
Pies, corbeaulx nous out les yeux caves
Et arraches la barbe et les sourcils.
These are some of Villon's strongest points. Yet in his comparatively
limited work--limited in point of bulk and peculiar in style and
subject--he has contrived to show perhaps more general poetical power
than any other writer who has left so small a total of verse. The note
of his song is always true and always sweet; and despite the intensely
allusive character of most of it, and the necessary loss of the key to
many of the allusions, it has in consequence continued popular through
all changes of language and manners. Of very few French poets can it be
said as of Villon that their charm is immediate and universal, and the
reason of this is that his work is full of touches of nature which are
universally perceived, as well as distinguished by consummate art of
expression. In the great literature which we are discussing, the latter
characteristic is almost universally present, the former not so
constantly.
[Sidenote: Comines.]
The literary excellence of Comines[157] is of a very different kind from
that of Villon, but he represents the changed attitude of the modern
spirit towards practical affairs almost as strongly as Villon does the
change in its relations to art and sentiment. Philippe de Comines was
born, not at the chateau of the same name which was then in the
possession of his uncle, but at Renescure, not very far from Hazebrouck.
His family name was Vandenclyte, and his ancestors (Flemings, as their
name implies) had been citizens of Ghent before they acquired seignorial
position and rank. The education of Comines was neglected (he never
possessed any knowledge of Latin), and his heritage was heavily
encumbered. He was born before 1447, and entered the service of Philip
of Burgundy and of his son Charles of Charolais, the future Charles le
Temeraire. Comines was present at Montlhery and at the siege of Liege,
while he played a considerable part in the celebrated affair of
Peronne, when Louis XI. was in such danger. Before 1471 he had been
charged with several important negotiations by Charles, now duke, in
France, England, and Spain. But, either personally disobliged by
Charles, or, as seems most likely from the Memoirs, presaging with the
keen, unscrupulous intelligence of the time the downfall of the headlong
prince, he quitted Burgundy and its master in 1472 and entered the
service of Louis, from whom he had already accepted a pension. He was
richly rewarded, married an heiress in Poitou, and at one time enjoyed
the forfeited fief of Talmont, a domain of the first importance, which
he afterwards had to restore to its rightful owners, the La Tremouilles.
The accession of Charles VIII. was not favourable to him, and, having
taken part against the Lady of Beaujeu, he was imprisoned and deprived
of Talmont. But with his usual sagacity, he had in the Duke of Orleans,
afterwards Louis XII., chosen the representative of the side destined to
win in the long run. The Italian wars gave scope to his powers. He was
sent to Venice, was present at the battle of Fornovo, and met
Machiavelli at Florence. In the reign of Louis XII. he received new
places and pensions, and he died in 1511 aged at least sixty-four.
Comines is not a master of style, though at times the weight of his
thought and the simplicity of his expression combine to produce an
effect not unhappy. He has odd peculiarities of diction, especially
inversions of phrase and sudden apostrophes which enliven an otherwise
rather awkward manner of writing. Thus, in describing the bad education
of the young nobles of his time, he says, 'de nulles lettres ils n'ont
connaissance. Un seul sage homme on ne leur met a l'entour.' And in his
account of the operations before the battle of Morat he says, 'Il (the
Duke of Burgundy) sejourna a Losanne en Savoie ou vous monseigneur de
Vienne le servites d'un bon conseil en une grande maladie qu'il eut de
douleur et de tristesse.' On the whole, however, no one would think of
reading Comines for the merit, or even the quaintness of his style, nor
can he be commended as a vivid, even if an inelegant describer. The
gallant shows which excited the imaginations of his predecessors, the
mediaeval chroniclers from Villehardouin to Froissart, find in him a
clumsy annalist and a not too careful observer. His interest is
concentrated exclusively on the turns of fortune, the successes of
statecraft, and the lessons of conduct to be noticed in or extracted
from the business in hand. With this purpose he is perpetually
digressing. The affairs of one country remind him of something that has
happened in another, and he stops to give an account of this. To a
certain extent the mediaeval influence is still strong on Comines,
though it shows itself in connection with evidences of the modern
spirit. He is religious to a degree which might be called ostentatious
if it were not pretty evidently sincere; and this religiosity is shown
side by side with the exhibition of a typically unscrupulous and
non-moral, if not positively immoral, statecraft. Again, his reflexions,
though usually lacking neither in acuteness nor in depth, are often
appended to a commonplace on the mutability of fortune, the error of
anger, the necessity of adapting means to ends, and so forth. Everywhere
in Comines is evident, however, the anti-feudal and therefore
anti-mediaeval conception of a centralised government instead of a loose
assemblage of powerful vassals. The favourite mediaeval ideal, of which
Saint Simon was perhaps the last sincere champion, finds no defence in
Comines; and it seems only just to allow him, in his desertion of the
Duke of Burgundy, some credit for drawing from the anarchy of the Bien
Public, and from his observations of Germany, England, and Spain, the
conclusion that France must be united, and that union was only possible
for her under a king unhampered by largely appanaged and only nominally
dependent princes. It should be said that the Memoires of Comines are
not a continuous history. The first six books deal with the reign of
Louis XI. from 1465 to 1483. But the seventh is busied with Charles the
Eighth's Italian wars only, the author having passed over the period of
his own disgrace. Besides the Memoirs we possess a collection of
_Lettres et Negotiations_.[158]
[Sidenote: Coquillart.]
There are three persons who, while of very much less importance than
those just introduced to the reader, deserve a mention in passing as
characteristic and at the same time meritorious writers, during the
second and third quarters of the fifteenth century, the extreme verge of
which the life of all three appears to have touched. These are
Guillaume Coquillart, Henri Baude, and Martial d'Auvergne. All three
were poets, all three have been somewhat over-praised by the scholars
who in days more or less recent have drawn them from their obscurity,
but all three made creditable head against what was mistaken and absurd
in the literary fashions of the time. In the writings of all of them
moreover there is to be found something, if not much, which is
positively good, and which deserves the attention, hardly perhaps of the
general reader, but of students of literature. Coquillart[159] was a
native, and for great part of his life an inhabitant, of Rheims. The
extreme dates given for his birth and death are 1421 and 1510, but there
is in reality, as is usual in the case of all men of letters before the
sixteenth century, very little solid authority for his biography. It may
be mentioned that Marot declares him to have cut short his life by
gaming. A life can hardly be said to be cut short at ninety, nor is that
an age at which gaming is a frequent ruling passion. All that can be
said is that he was certainly, as we should now say, in the civil
service of the province of Champagne during the reign of Louis XI., that
like many other men of the time he united ecclesiastical with legal
functions, being not only a town-councillor but a canon, and that he has
left satirical works of some merit and importance. These last alone
concern us much. His chief production is a poem entitled _Les Droits
Nouveaux_, in octosyllabic verses, not arranged in stanzas of definite
length, but, on the other hand, interlacing the rhymes, and not in
couplets after the older fashion. The plan of this poem is by no means
easy to describe. It is partly a social satire, partly a professional
lampoon on the current methods of learning and teaching law, partly a
political diatribe on the alterations introduced into provincial and
national life and polity under Louis XI. Not very different in character
and exactly similar in form, except that it is arranged as the age would
have said _par personnages_, that is to say semi-dramatically, is the
_Plaidoyer de la Simple et de la Rusee_. The _Blason des Armes et des
Dames_ takes up a mediaeval theme in a mediaeval style. The _procureurs_
(advocates) of arms and of ladies endeavour to show each that his
client--war or love--deserves the chief attention of a prince. Here, as
elsewhere with Coquillart, though of course more covertly, satire
dominates. But the best of the pieces attributed to Coquillart are his
monologues. There are three of these, the _Monologue Coquillart_, the
_Monologue du Puys_, and the _Monologue du Gendarme Casse_. This last is
a ferocious satire on its subject, coarse in language, like most of the
author's poems, but full of rude vigour. The professional soldier as
distinguished from the feudal militia or the train-bands of the towns
was odious to the later middle ages.
[Sidenote: Baude.]
Henri Baude[160] is a still less substantial figure. He seems to have
been an _elu_ (member of a provincial board) for the province of
Limousin, but to have lived mostly at Paris. He was born at Moulins
towards the beginning of the second quarter of the century, and formed
part of the poetical circle of Charles d'Orleans in his old age. He had
troubles with lawless seigneurs and with the police of Paris; he finally
succeeded in obtaining the protection of the Duke of Bourbon, and he did
not die till the end of the century. Only a selection from his poems has
yet been published. The chief thing remarkable about them (they are
mostly occasional and of no great length) is the plainness, the
directness, and, in not a few cases, the elegance of the diction, which
differs remarkably from the cumbrous phrases and obscure allusive
conceits of the time. Many of them are personal appeals for protection
and assistance, others are satirical. Baude had a peculiar mastery of
the rondeau form. His rondeau to the king, expressing a sentiment often
uttered by lackpenny bards in the days of patrons, is a good example of
his style, though it is hardly as simple and devoid of obscurity as
usual.
[Sidenote: Martial d'Auvergne.]
Martial d'Auvergne[161], or Martial de Paris (for by an odd chance both
of these local surnames are given him, probably from the fact that, like
Baude, he was a native of the centre of France and spent his life in
the capital), like Coquillart and Baude, was something of a lawyer by
profession, and has left work in prose as well as in verse. He certainly
died in 1508, and, as he is spoken of as _senio confectus_, he cannot
have been born much later than 1420, especially as his poem, the
_Vigilles de Charles VII._, was written on the death of that prince in
1461. This poem is of considerable extent, and is divided into nine
'Psalms' and nine 'Lessons.' The staple metre is the quatrain, but
detached pieces in other measures occur. A complete history of the
subject is given, and in some of the digressions there are charming
passages, notably one (given by M. de Montaiglon) on the country life.
Another very beautiful poem, commonly attributed to Martial, is entitled
_L'Amant rendu Cordelier au service de l'Amour_, a piece of amorous
allegory at once characteristic of the later middle ages, and free from
the faults usually found in such work. A prose work of a somewhat
similar kind, entitled _Arrets d'Amour_, is known to be Martial's. In no
writer is there to be found more of the better part of Marot, as in the
light skipping verses:--
Mieux vault la liesse,
L'accueil et l'addresse,
L'amour et simplesse,
De bergers pasteurs,
Qu'avoir a largesse
Or, argent, richesse,
Ne la gentillesse
De ces grants seigneurs.
Car ils ont douleurs
Et des maulx greigneurs,
Mais pour nos labeurs
Nous avons sans cesse
Les beaulx pres et fleurs,
Fruitages, odeurs
Et joye a nos coeurs
Sans mal qui nous blesse.
There is something of the old _pastourelles_ in this, and of a note of
simplicity which French poetry had long lost.
[Sidenote: The Rhetoriqueurs.]
Such verse as this of Martial d'Auvergne was, indeed, the exception at
the time. The staple poetry of the age was that of the _grands
rhetoriqueurs_, as it has become usual to call them, apparently from a
phrase of Coquillart's. Georges Chastellain[162] was the great master of
this school. But to him personally some injustice has been done. His
pupils and successors, however, for the most part deserve the ill repute
in which they are held. This school of poetry had three principal
characteristics. It affected the most artificial forms of the artificial
poetry which the fourteenth century had seen established, the most
complicated modulations of rhyme, such as the repetition, twice or even
thrice at the end of a line, of the same sound in a different sense, and
all the other puerilities of this particular Ars Poetica. Secondly, it
pursued to the very utmost the tradition of allegorising, of which the
_Roman de la Rose_ had established the popularity. Thirdly, it followed
the example set by Chartier and his contemporaries of loading the
language as much as possible with Latinisms, and in a less degree,
because Greek was then but indirectly known, Graecisms. These three
things taken together produced some of the most intolerable poetry ever
written. The school had, indeed, much vitality in it, and overlapped the
beginnings of the Renaissance in such a manner that it will be necessary
to take note of it again in the next chapter. Some, however, of its
greatest lights belonged to the present period. Such were Robertet, a
heavy versifier and the author of letters not easily to be excelled in
pedantic coxcombry, who enjoyed much patronage, royal and other;
Molinet, a direct disciple of Chastellain, and, like him, of the
Burgundian party; and Meschinot (died 1509), a Breton, who has left us
an allegorical work on the 'Spectacles of Princes,' and poems which can
be read in thirty different ways, any word being as good to begin with
as any other. Such also was the father of a better poet than himself,
Octavien de Saint Gelais (1466-1502), who died young and worn out by
debauchery. Jean Marot, the father of Clement, was a not inconsiderable
master of the ballade, and has left poems which do not show to great
disadvantage by the side of those of his accomplished son. But the
leader of the whole was Guillaume Cretin (birth and death dates
uncertain), whom his contemporaries extolled in the most extravagant
fashion, and whom a single satirical stroke of Rabelais has made a
laughing-stock for some three hundred and fifty years. The rondeau
ascribed to Raminagrobis, the 'vieux poete francais' of
_Pantagruel_[163], is Cretin's, and the name and character have stuck.
Cretin was not worse than his fellows; but when even such a man as Marot
could call him a _poete souverain_, Rabelais no doubt felt it time to
protest in his own way. Marot himself, it is to be observed, confines
himself chiefly to citing Cretin's _vers equivoques_, which of their
kind, and if we could do otherwise than pronounce that kind hopelessly
bad, are without doubt ingenious. His poems are chiefly occasional
verse, letters, _debats_, etc., besides ballades and rondeaux of all
kinds.
[Sidenote: Chansons du XV'eme Siecle.]
One charming book which has been preserved to us gives a pleasant
contrast to the formal poetry of the time. The _Chansons du XV'eme
Siecle_, which M. Gaston Paris has published for the Old French Text
Society[164], exhibit informal and popular poetry in its most agreeable
aspect. They are one hundred and forty-three in number, some of them no
doubt much older than the fifteenth century, but certainly none of them
younger. There are _pastourelles_, war-songs, love-songs in great
number, a few patriotic ditties, and a few which may be called pure
folksongs, with the story half lost and only a musical tangle of words
remaining. Nothing can be more natural and simple than most of these
pieces.
[Sidenote: Preachers.]
Few of the miscellaneous branches of literature at this time deserve
notice. But there was a group of preachers who have received attention,
which is said by students of the whole subject of the mediaeval pulpit
in France to be disproportionate, but which they owe perhaps not least
to the citations of them in a celebrated and amusing book of the next
age, the _Apologie pour Herodote_ of Henri Estienne. These are Menot
(1440-1518) and Maillard the Franciscans, and Raulin (1443-1514), a
doctor of the Sorbonne. These preachers, living at a time which was not
one of popular sovereignty, did not meddle with politics as preachers
had done in France before and were to do again. But they carried into
the pulpit the habit of satirical denunciation in social as well as in
purely religious matters, and gave free vent to their zeal. No
illustrations of the singular licence which the middle ages permitted on
such occasions are more curious than these sermons. Not merely did the
preachers attack their audience for their faults in the most outspoken
manner, but they interspersed their discourses (as indeed was the
invariable custom throughout the whole middle ages) with stories of all
kinds. In Raulin, the gravest of the three, occurs the famous history of
the church bells, which reappears in Rabelais, _a propos_ of the
marriage of Panurge.
FOOTNOTES:
[153]
Villon sut le premier, dans ces siecles grossiers,
Debrouiller l'art confus de nos vieux romanciers.
_Art Poet._ Ch. 1.
[154] Ed. P. L. Jacob. Paris, 1854. Villon's life has been the subject
of numerous elaborate investigations, the latest and best of which is
that of A. Longnon. Paris, 1877. Dr. Bijvanck, a Dutch scholar, has
dealt since with the MSS.
[155] One of these anecdotes makes him patronised by Edward the _Fifth_
of England. But the very terms of it are unsuitable to that king.
[156] The reader may be reminded that the _Testament_ was a recognised
mediaeval style. It was satirical and allegorical, the legacies which it
gave being mostly indicative of the legatee's weaknesses or personal
peculiarities.
[157] Ed. Chantelauze. Paris, 1881. Also usefully in Michaud et
Poujoulat.
[158] Ed. Kervyn de Lettenhove. 2 vols. Brussels, 1867-8.
[159] Ed. Hericault. 2 vols. Paris, 1857.
[160] Edited in part by J. Quicherat. Paris, 1856.
[161] Martial d'Auvergne had the exceptional good luck to be reprinted
in the 18th century (_Vigilles_ 1724, _Arrets_ 1731), but he has not
recently found an editor, though an edition of the _Amant rendu
Cordelier_ has been for some time due from the Societe des Anciens
Textes. The notice by M. de Montaiglon (the promised editor of the
edition just mentioned) in Crepet's _Poetes Francais_, i. 427, has been
chiefly used here for facts.
[162] Ed. Kervyn de Lettenhove, as previously cited. For the remainder
of the poets reviewed in this paragraph, few of whom have found modern
editors, see Crepet, _Poetes Francais_, vol. i.
[163] iii. 21.
[164] Paris, 1876.
CHAPTER II.
MAROT AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES.
[Sidenote: Hybrid School of Poetry.]
The beginnings of the Renaissance in France manifest, as we should
expect, a mixture of the characteristics of the later middle ages and of
the new learning. In those times the influence of reforms of any kind
filtered slowly through the dense crust of custom which covered the
national life of each people, and there is nothing surprising in the
fact that while Italy felt the full influence of the influx of classical
culture in the fifteenth century, that influence should be only
partially manifest in France during the first quarter of the sixteenth,
while it was not until the century was more than half over that it
showed itself in England. The complete manifestation of the combined
tendencies of mediaeval and neo-pagan thought was only displayed in
Shakespeare, but by that time, as is the wont of all such things, it had
already manifested itself partially, though in each part more fully and
characteristically, elsewhere. It is in the literature of France that we
find the most complete exposition of these partial developments. Marot,
Ronsard, Rabelais, Calvin, Garnier, Montaigne, will not altogether make
up a Shakespeare, yet of the various ingredients which go to make up the
greatest of literary productions each of them had shown, before
Shakespeare began to write, some complete and remarkable embodiment. It
is this fact which gives the French literature of the sixteenth century
its especial interest. Italy had almost ceased to be animated by the
genius of the middle ages before her literature became in any way
perfect in form, and the survival of the classical spirit was so strong
there that mediaeval influence was never very potent in the moulding of
the national letters. England had lost the mediaeval differentia, owing
to religious and political causes, before the Renaissance made its way
to her shores. But in France the two currents met, though the earlier
had lost most of its force, and, according to the time-honoured
parallel, flowed on long together before they coalesced. In the
following chapters we shall trace the history of this process, and here
we shall trace the first stage of it in reference to French poetry. In
the period of which Marot is the representative name, the earlier force
was still dominant in externals; in that of which Ronsard is the
exponent, the Greek and Latin element shows itself as, for the moment,
all-powerful.
[Sidenote: Jean le Maire.]
[Sidenote: Jehan du Pontalais.]
Between the _rhetoriqueurs_ proper, the Chastellains and the Cretins and
the Molinets on the one hand, and Marot and his contemporaries and
disciples on the other, a school of poets, considerable at least in
numbers, intervened. The chief of these was Jean le Maire des
Belges[165]. He was the nephew of Molinet, and his birth at Belges or
Bavia in Hainault, as well as his literary ancestry and predilections,
inclined him to the Burgundian, or, as it was now, the Austrian side.
But the strong national feeling which was now beginning to distinguish
French-speaking men threw him on the side of the King of Paris, and he
was chiefly occupied in his serious literary work on tasks which were
wholly French. His _Illustrations des Gaules_ is his principal prose
work, and in this he displays a remarkable faculty of writing prose at
once picturesque and correct. The titles of his other works (_Temple
d'Honneur et de Vertu_, etc.) still recall the fifteenth century, and
the Latinising tradition of Chartier appears strong in him. But at the
same time he Latinises with a due regard to the genius of the language,
and his work, pedantic and conceited as it frequently is, stands in
singular contrast to the work of some of his models. Something not
dissimilar, though in this case the _rhetoriqueur_ influence is less
apparent, may be said of Pierre Gringore, whose true title to a place in
a history of French literature is, however, derived from his dramatic
work, and who will accordingly be mentioned later. Nor had the tradition
of Villon, overlaid though it was by the abundance and popularity of
formal and allegorising poetry, died out in France. At least two
remarkable figures, Jehan du Pontalais and Roger de Collerye, represent
it in the first quarter of the century. The former indeed[166] owes his
place here rather to a theory than to certain information; for if M.
d'Hericault's notion that Jehan du Pontalais is the author of a work
entitled _Contreditz du Songecreux_ be without foundation, Jehan falls
back into the number of half mythical Bohemians, bilkers of tavern bills
and successful out-witters of the officers of justice, who possess a
shadowy personality in the literary history of France. _Les Contreditz
du Songecreux_ ranks among the most remarkable examples of the liberty
which was accorded to the press under the reign of Louis XII., a king
who inherited some affection for literature from his father, Charles
d'Orleans, and a keen perception of the importance of literary
co-operation in political work from his ancestor, Philippe le Bel, and
his cousin Louis XI. In precision and strikingness of expression Jehan
recalls Villon; in the boldness of his satire on the great and the
bitterness of his attacks on the character of women he recalls Antoine
de la Salle and Coquillart. A trait illustrating the former power may be
found in the line descriptive of the hen-pecked man's condition--
Tous ses cinq sens lui fault retraire.
while his attacks on the nobility are almost up to the level of Burns--
Noblesse enrichie Richesse ennoblie Tiennent leurs estatz,
Qui n'a noble vie Je vous certifie Noble n'est pas.
[Sidenote: Roger de Collerye.]
[Sidenote: Minor Predecessors of Marot.]
Roger de Collerye[167] was a Burgundian, living at the famous and vinous
town of Auxerre, and he has celebrated his loves, his distress, his
amiable tendency to conviviality, in many rondeaux and other poems,
sometimes attaining a very high level of excellence. 'Je suis
Bon-temps, vous le voyez' is the second line of one of his irregular
ballades, and the nickname expresses his general attitude well enough.
Mediaeval legacies of allegory, however, supply him with more unpleasant
personages, Faute d'Argent and Plate-Bourse, for his song, and his
mistress, Gilleberte de Beaurepaire, appears to have been anything but
continuously kind. Collerye has less perhaps of the _rhetoriqueur_
flavour than any poet of this time before Marot, and his verse is very
frequently remarkable for directness and grace of diction. But like most
verse of the kind it frequently drops into a conventionality less
wearisome but not much less definite than that of the mere allegorisers.
Jehan Bouchet[168], a lawyer of Poitiers (not to be confounded with
Guillaume Bouchet, author of the _Serees_), imitated the _rhetoriqueurs_
for the most part in form, and surpassed them in length, excelling
indeed in this respect even the long-winded and long-lived poets of the
close of the fourteenth century. Bouchet is said to have composed a
hundred thousand verses, and even M. d'Hericault avers that he read
two-thirds of the number without discovering more than six quotable
lines. Such works of Bouchet as we have examined fully confirm the
statement. Still, he was an authority in his way, and had something of a
reputation. His fanciful _nom de plume_ 'Le Traverseur des Voies
Perilleuses' is the most picturesque thing he produced, and is not
uncharacteristic of the later middle age tradition. Rabelais himself,
who was a fair critic of poetry when his friends were not concerned, but
who was no poet, and was even strikingly deficient in some of the
characteristics of the poet, admired and emulated Bouchet in heavy
verse; and a numerously attended school, hardly any of the pupils being
worth individual mention, gathered round the lawyer. Charles de Bordigne
is only remarkable for having, in his _Legende de Pierre Faifeu_, united
the _rhetoriqueur_ style with a kind of Villonesque or rather
pseudo-Villonesque subject. The title of the chief poems of Symphorien
Champier, _Le Nef des Dames Amoureuses_, sufficiently indicates his
style. But Champier, though by no means a good poet, was a useful and
studious man of letters, and did much to form the literary _cenacle_
which gathered at Lyons in the second quarter of the century, and which,
both in original composition, in translations of the classics, and in
scholarly publication of work both ancient and modern, rendered
invaluable service to literature. Gratien du Pont[169] continued the now
very stale mediaeval calumnies on women in his _Controverses des Sexes
Masculin et Feminin_. Eloy d'Amerval, a Picard priest, also fell into
mediaeval lines in his _Livre de la Deablerie_, in which the personages
of Lucifer and Satan are made the mouthpieces of much social satire.
Jean Parmentier, a sailor and a poet, combined his two professions in
_Les Merveilles de Dieu_, a poem including some powerful verse. A
vigorous ballade, with the refrain _Car France est Cymetiereaux
Anglois_, has preserved the name of Pierre Vachot. But the remaining
poets of this time could only find a place in a very extended literary
history. Most of them, in the words of one of their number, took
continual lessons _es oeuvres Cretiniques et Bouchetiques_, and some
of them succeeded at last in imitating the dulness of Bouchet and the
preposterous mannerisms of Cretin. Perhaps no equal period in all early
French history produced more and at the same time worse verse than the
reign of Louis XII. Fortunately, however, a true poet, if one of some
limitations, took up the tradition, and showed what it could do. Marot
has sometimes been regarded as the father of modern French poetry,
which, unless modern French poetry is limited to La Fontaine and the
poets of the eighteenth century, is absolutely false. He is sometimes
regarded as the last of mediaeval poets, which, though truer, is false
likewise. What he really was can be shown without much difficulty.
[Sidenote: Clement Marot.]
Clement Marot[170] was a man of more mixed race than was usual at this
period, when the provincial distinctions were still as a rule maintained
with some sharpness. His father, Jean Marot, a poet of merit, was a
Norman, but he emigrated to Quercy, and Marot's mother was a native of
Cahors, a town which, from its Papal connections, as well as its
situation on the borders of Gascony, was specially southern. Clement was
born probably at the beginning of 1497, and his father educated him with
some pains in things poetical. This, as times went, necessitated an
admiration of Cretin and such like persons, and the practice of
rondeaux, and of other poetry strict in form and allegorical in matter.
As it happened, the discipline was a very sound one for Marot, whose
natural bent was far too vigorous and too lithe to be stiffened or
stunted by it, while it unquestionably supplied wholesome limitations
which preserved him from mere slovenly facility. It is evident, too,
that he had a sincere and genuine love of things mediaeval, as his
devotion to the _Roman de la Rose_ and to Villon's poems, both of which
he edited, sufficiently shows. He 'came into France,' an expression of
his own, which shows the fragmentary condition of the kingdom even at
this late period, when he was about ten years old. His father held an
appointment as 'Escripvain' to Anne of Brittany, and accompanied her
husband to Genoa in 1507. The University of Paris, and a short sojourn
among the students of law, completed Clement's education, and he then
became a page to a nobleman, thus obtaining a position at court or, at
least, the chance of one. It is not known when his earliest attempt at
following the Cretinic lessons was composed; but in 1514, being then but
a stripling, he presented his _Jugement de Minos_ to Francois de Valois,
soon to be king. A translation of the first Eclogue of Virgil had even
preceded this. Both poems are well written and versified, but decidedly
in the _rhetoriqueur_ style. In 1519, having already received or assumed
the title of 'Facteur' (poet) to Queen Claude, he became one of the
special adherents of Marguerite d'Angouleme, the famous sister of
Francis, from whom, a few years later, we find him in receipt of a
pension. He also occupied some post in the household of her husband, the
King of Navarre. In 1524 he went to Italy with Francis, was wounded and
taken prisoner at Pavia, but returned to France the next year.
Marguerite's immediate followers were distinguished, some by their
adherence to the principles of the Reformation, others by free thought
of a still more unorthodox description, and Marot soon after his return
was accused of heresy and lodged in the Chatelet. He was, however, soon
transferred to a place of mitigated restraint, and finally set at
liberty. About this time his father died. In 1528 he obtained a post and
a pension in the King's own household. He was again in difficulties, but
again got out of them, and in 1530 he married. But the next year he was
once more in danger on the old charge of heresy, and was again rescued
from the _chats fourres_ by Marguerite. He had already edited the _Roman
de la Rose_, but no regular edition of his own work had appeared. In
1533 came out not merely his edition of Villon, but a collection of his
own youthful work under the pretty title _Adolescence Clementine_. In
1535 the Parliament of Paris for a fourth time molested Marot.
Marguerite's influence was now insufficient to protect him, and the poet
fled first to Bearn and then to Ferrara. Here, under the protection of
Renee de France, he lived and wrote for some time, but the persecution
again grew hot. He retired to Venice, but in 1539 obtained permission to
return to France. Francis gave him a house in the Faubourg Saint
Germain, and here apparently he wrote his famous Psalms, which had an
immense popularity; these the Sorbonne condemned, and Marot once more
fled, this time to Geneva. He found this place an uncomfortable sojourn,
and crossed the Alps into Piedmont, where, not long afterwards, he died
in 1544.
Marot's work is sufficiently diverse in form, but the classification of
it adopted in the convenient edition of Jannet is perhaps the best,
though it neglects chronology. There are some dozen pieces of more or
less considerable length, among which may specially be mentioned _Le
Temple de Cupido_, an early work of _rhetoriqueur_ character for the
most part, in dizains of ten and eight syllables alternately, a Dialogue
of two Lovers, an Eclogue to the King; _L'Enfer_, a vigorous and
picturesque description of his imprisonment in the Chatelet, and some
poems bearing a strong Huguenot impression. Then come sixty-five
epistles written in couplets for the most part decasyllabic. These
include the celebrated _Coq-a-l'Ane_, a sort of nonsense-verse, with a
satirical tendency, which derives from the mediaeval _fatrasie_, and was
very popular and much imitated. Another mediaeval restoration of
Marot's, also very popular and also much imitated, was the _blason_, a
description, in octosyllables. Twenty-six elegies likewise adopt the
couplet, and show, as do the epistles, remarkable power over that form.
Fifteen ballades, twenty-two songs in various metres, eighty-two
rondeaux, and forty-two songs for music, contain much of Marot's most
beautiful work. His easy graceful style escaped the chief danger of
these artificial forms, the danger of stiffness and monotony; while he
was able to get out of them as much pathos and melody as any other
French poet, except Charles d'Orleans and Villon. Numerous _etrennes_
recall the _Xenia_ of Martial, and funeral poems of various lengths and
styles follow. Then we have nearly three hundred epigrams, many of them
excellent in point and elegance, a certain number of translations, the
Psalms, fifty in number, certain prayers, and two versified renderings
of Erasmus' _Colloquies_.
It will be seen from this enumeration that the majority of Marot's work
is what is now called occasional. No single work of his of a greater
length than a few hundred lines exists; and, after his first attempts in
the allegorical kind, almost all his works were either addressed to
particular persons, or based upon some event in his life. Marot was
immensely popular in his lifetime; and though after his death a
formidable rival arose in Ronsard, the elder poet's fame was sustained
by eager disciples. With the discredit of the Pleiade, in consequence of
Malherbe's criticisms, Marot's popularity returned in full measure, and
for two centuries he was the one French poet before the classical period
who was actually read and admired with genuine admiration by others
besides professed students of antiquity. Since the great revival of the
taste for older literature, which preceded and accompanied the Romantic
movement, Marot has scarcely held this pride of place. The Pleiade on
the one hand, the purely mediaeval writers on the other, have pushed him
from his stool. But sane criticism, which declines to depreciate one
thing because it appreciates another, will always have hearty admiration
for his urbanity, his genuine wit, his graceful turn of words; and his
flashes of pathos and poetry.
It is, as has been said, one of the commonplaces of the subject to speak
of Marot as the father of modern French poetry; the phrase is, like all
such phrases, inaccurate, but, like most such phrases, it contains a
certain amount of truth. To the characteristics of the lighter French
poetry, from La Fontaine to Beranger, which has always been more popular
both at home and abroad than the more ambitious and serious efforts of
French poets, Marot does in some sort stand in a parental relation. He
retained the sprightliness and sly fun of the Fabliau-writers, while he
softened their crudity of expression, he exchanged clumsiness and
horse-play for the play of wit, and he emphasised fully in the language
the two characteristics which have never failed to distinguish it since,
elegance and urbanity. His style is somewhat pedestrian, though on
occasion he can write with exquisite tenderness, and with the most
delicate suggestiveness of expression. But as a rule he does not go
deep; ease and grace, not passion or lofty flights, are his strong
points. Representing, as he did, the reaction from the stiff forms and
clumsily classical language of the _rhetoriqueurs_, it was not likely
that he should exhibit the tendency of his own age to classical culture
and imitation very strongly. He and his school were thus regarded by
their immediate successors of the Pleiade as rustic and uncouth singers,
for the most part very unjustly. But still Marot's work was of less
general and far-reaching importance than that of Ronsard. He brought out
the best aspect of the older French literature, and cleared away some
disfiguring encumbrances from it, but he imported nothing new. It would
hardly be unjust to say that, given the difference of a century in point
of ordinary progress, Charles d'Orleans is Marot's equal in elegance and
grace, and his superior in sentiment, while Marot is not comparable to
Villon in passion or in humour. His limitation, and at the same time his
great merit, was that he was a typical Frenchman. A famous epigram,
applied to another person two centuries later, might be applied with
very little difficulty or alteration to Marot. He had more than anybody
else of his time the literary characteristics which the ordinary
literary Frenchman has. We constantly meet in the history of literature
this contrast between the men who are simply shining examples of the
ordinary type, and men who cross and blend that type with new
characters and excellences. Unquestionably the latter are the greater,
but the former cannot on any equitable scheme miss their reward. It must
be added that the positive merit of much of Marot's work is great,
though, as a rule, his longer pieces are very inferior to his shorter.
Many of the epigrams are admirable; the Psalms, which have been unjustly
depreciated of late years by French critics, have a sober and solemn
music, which is almost peculiar to the French devotional poetry of that
age; the satirical ballade of _Frere Lubin_ is among the very best
things of its kind; while as much may be said of the rondeaux 'Dedans
Paris' in the lighter style, and 'En la Baisant' in the graver. Perhaps
the famous line--
Un doux nenny avec un doux sourire,
supposed to have been addressed to the Queen of Navarre, expresses
Marot's poetical powers as well as anything else, showing as it does
grace of language, tender and elegant sentiment, and suppleness, ease,
and fluency of style.
[Sidenote: The School of Marot.]
Marot formed a very considerable school, some of whom directly imitated
his mannerisms, and composed _blasons_[171] and _Coq-a-l'Ane_ in
emulation of their master and of each other, while others contented
themselves with displaying the same general characteristics, and setting
the same poetical ideals before them. Among the idlest, but busiest
literary quarrels of the century, a century fertile in such things, was
that between Marot and a certain insignificant person named Francois
Sagon, a belated _rhetoriqueur_, who found some other rhymers of the
same kind to support him. One of Marot's best things, an answer of which
his servant, Fripelipes, is supposed to be the spokesman, came of the
quarrel; but of the other contributions, not merely of the principals,
but of their followers, the _Marotiques_ and _Sagontiques_, nothing
survives in general memory, or deserves to survive. Of Marot's
disciples, one, Mellin de Saint Gelais, deserves separate mention, the
others may be despatched in passing. Victor Brodeau, who, like his
master, held places in the courts both of Marguerite and her brother,
wrote not merely a devotional work, _Les Louanges de Jesus Christ notre
Seigneur_, which fairly illustrates the devotional side of the Navarrese
literary coterie, but also epigrams and rondeaux of no small merit.
Etienne Dolet, better known both as a scholar and translator, and as the
publisher of Marot and (surreptitiously) of Rabelais, composed towards
the end of his life poems in French, the principal of which was taken in
title and idea from Marot's _Enfer_, and which, though very unequal,
have passages of some poetical power. Marguerite herself has left a
considerable collection of poems of the most diverse kind and merit, the
title of which, _Marguerites de la Marguerite des Princesses_[172], is
perhaps not the worst thing about them. Farces, mysteries, religious
poems, such as _Le Triomphe de l'Agneau_, and _Le Miroir de l'Ame
Pecheresse_, with purely secular pieces on divers subjects, make up
these curious volumes. Not a few of the poems display the same nobility
of tone and stately sonorousness of verse, which has been and will be
noticed as a characteristic of the serious poetry of the age, and which
reached its climax in Du Bartas, D'Aubigne, and the choruses of Garnier
and Montchrestien. Bonaventure des Periers, an admirable prose writer,
was a poet, though not a very strong one. Francois Habert, 'Le Banni de
Liesse,' must not be confounded with Philippe Habert, author of a
remarkable _Temple de la Mort_ in the next century. Gilles Corrozet,
author of fables in verse, who, like many other literary men of the
time, was a printer and publisher as well, Jacques Gohorry, a pleasant
song writer, Gilles d'Aubigny, Jacques Pelletier, Etienne Forcadel,
deserve at least to be named. Of more importance were Hugues Salel,
Charles Fontaine, Antoine Heroet, Maurice Sceve. All these were members
of the Lyonnese literary coterie, and in connection with this Louise
Labe also comes in. Salel, famous as the first French translator of the
Iliad, or rather of Books I-XII thereof, distinguished himself as a
writer of _blasons_ in imitation of Marot, as well as by composing many
small poems of the occasional kind. Charles Fontaine exhibited the fancy
of the time for conceits in the entitling of books by denominating his
poems _Ruisseaux de la Fontaine_, and was one of the chief champions on
Marot's side in the quarrel with Sagon, while he afterwards defended the
_style Marotique_ against Du Bellay's announcement of the programme of
the Pleiade. But perhaps he would hardly deserve much remembrance, save
for a charming little poem to his new-born son, which M. Asselineau has
made accessible to everybody in Crepet's _Poetes Francais_[173]. He also
figures in a literary tournament very characteristic of the age. La
Borderie, another disciple of Marot, had written a poem entitled _L'Amye
de Cour_, which defended libertinism, or at least worldly-mindedness in
love, in reply to the _Parfaite Amye_ of Antoine Heroet, which exhibits
very well a certain aspect of the half-amorous, half-mystical sentiment
of the day. Fontaine rejoined in a _Contr'Amye de Cour_. Maurice Sceve
is also a typical personage. He was, it may be said, the head of the
Lyonnese school, and was esteemed all over France. He was excepted by
the irreverent champions of the Pleiade from the general ridicule which
they poured on their predecessors, and was surrounded by a special body
of feminine devotees and followers, including his kinswomen Claudine and
Sibylle Sceve, Jeanne Gaillarde, and above all Louise Labe. Sceve's
poetical work is strongly tinged with classical affectation and Platonic
mysticism; and his chief poem, _De l'Objet de la plus haute Vertu_,
consists of some four hundred and fifty dizains written in what in
England and later has been, not very happily, called a metaphysical
style. Last of all comes the just-mentioned Louise Labe, 'La belle
Cordiere,' one of the chief ornaments of Lyons, and the most important
French poetess of the sixteenth century. Louise was younger, and wrote
later than most of the authors just mentioned, and in some respects she
belongs to the school of Ronsard, like her supposed lover, Olivier de
Magny. But the Lyons school was essentially _Marotique_, and much of the
style of the elder master is observable in the writings of Louise[174].
She has left a prose _Dialogue d'Amour et de Folie_, three elegies, and
a certain number of sonnets. Her poems are perhaps the most genuinely
passionate of the time and country, and many of the sonnets are
extremely beautiful. The language is on the whole simple and elegant,
without the over-classicism of the Pleiade, or the obscurity of her
master Sceve. Strangely enough the poems of this young Lyonnese lady
have in many places a singular approach to the ring of Shakespeare's
sonnets and minor works, and that not merely by virtue of the general
resemblance common to all the love poetry of the age, but in some very
definite traits. Her surname of 'La belle Cordiere' came from her
marriage with a rich merchant, Ennemond Perrin by name, who was by trade
a ropemaker. Her poems have had their full share of the advantages of
reprints, which have of late years fallen to the lot of
sixteenth-century authors in France.
[Sidenote: Mellin de St. Gelais.]
Mellin de Saint Gelais[175], the last to be mentioned but the most
important of the school of Marot, has been very variously judged. The
mere fact that he was probably the introducer of the sonnet into France
(the counter claim of Pontus de Tyard seems to be unfounded) would
suffice to give him a considerable position in the history of letters.
But Mellin's claims by no means rest upon this achievement. He was a man
of higher position than most of the other poets of the time, being the
reputed son of Octavien de Saint Gelais, and himself enjoying a good
deal of royal favour. In his old age, as the representative of the
school of Marot, he had to bear the brunt of the Pleiade onslaught, and
knew how to defend himself, so that a truce was made. He was born in
1487, and died in 1558. His name is also spelt Merlin, and even Melusin,
the Saint Gelais boasting descent from the Lusignans, and thus from the
famous fairy heroine Melusine. In his youth he spent a good deal of time
in Italy, at the Universities of Bologna and Padua. On returning to
France, he was at once received into favour at court, and having taken
orders, obtained various benefices and appointments which assured his
fortune. It is remarkable that though he violently opposed Ronsard's
rising favour at court, both the Prince of Poets and Du Bellay
completely forgave him, and pay him very considerable compliments, the
latter praising his 'vers emmielles,' the former speaking, even after
his death, of his proficiency in the combined arts of music and poetry.
Saint Gelais was a good musician, and an affecting story is told of his
swan-song, for which, as for other anecdotes, there is no space here.
His work, though not inconsiderable in volume, is, even more than that
of Marot and other poets of the time and school, composed for the most
part of very short pieces, epigrams, rondeaux, dizains, huitains, etc.
These pieces display more merit than most recent critics have been
disposed to allow to them. The style is fluent and graceful, free from
puns and other faults of taste common at the time. The epigrams are
frequently pointed, and well expressed, and the complimentary verse is
often skilful and well turned. Mellin de Saint Gelais is certainly not a
poet of the highest order, but as a court singer and a skilful master of
language he deserves a place among his earlier contemporaries only
second to that of Marot.
[Sidenote: Miscellaneous Verse. Anciennes Poesies Francaises.]
Something of the same sort may be said of all the writers in verse of
the first half of the century. Their importance is chiefly relative. Few
of their works are conceived or executed on a scale sufficient to
entitle them to the rank of great poets, and, saving always Marot, the
excellence even of the trifling compositions to which they confined
themselves is very unequal and intermittent. But all are evidences of a
general diffusion of the literary spirit among the people of France, and
most of them in their way, and according to their powers, helped in
perfecting the character of French as a literary instrument. The advance
which the language experienced in this respect is perhaps nowhere better
shown than in the miscellaneous and popular poetry of the time, a vast
collection of which has been made accessible by the reprinting of rare
or unique printed originals in the thirteen volumes of MM. de Montaiglon
and de Rothschild's _Anciennes Poesies Francaises_, published in the
_Bibliotheque Elzevirienne_[176]. This flying literature, as it is well
called in French, lacks in most cases the freshness and spontaneity of
mediaeval folk-song. But it has in exchange gained in point of subject a
wide extension of range, and in point of form a considerable advance in
elegance of language, absence of commonplace, and perfection of
literary form and style. The stiffness which characterises much
mediaeval and almost all fifteenth-century work has disappeared in great
measure. The writers speak directly and to the point, and find no
difficulty in so using their mother tongue as to express their
intentions. The tools in short are more effective and more completely
under the control of the worker. A certain triviality is indeed
noticeable, and the tendency of the middle ages to perpetuate favourite
forms and models is by no means got rid of. But much that was useless
has been discarded, and of what is left a defter and more distinctly
literary use is made. Had French remained as Marot left it, it would
indeed have been unequal to the expression of the noblest thoughts, the
gravest subjects, to the treatment and exposition of intricate and
complicated problems of life and mind. But in his hands it attained
perhaps the perfection of usefulness as an exponent of the pure _esprit
gaulois_, to use a phrase which has been tediously abused by French
writers, but which is expressive of a real fact in French history and
French literature. It had been suppled and pointed: it remained for it
to be weighted, strengthened, and enriched. This was not the appointed
task of Marot and his contemporaries, but of the men who came after
them. But what they themselves had to do they did, and did it well. To
this day the lighter verse of France is more an echo of Clement Marot
than of any other man who lived before the seventeenth century, and,
with the exception of his greater follower, La Fontaine, of any man who
came after him at any time[177].
FOOTNOTES:
[165] _De_ Belges, though the less usual, is the more accurate form. We
are at length promised a complete edition of him in the admirable series
of the Belgian Academy, one of the best in appearance and editing, and
by far the cheapest of all such series. He was born in 1475, held posts
in the household of the Governors of the Netherlands, was
historiographer to Louis XII., and died either in 1524 or in 1548.
[166] See _Poetes Francais_, i. 532. It is perhaps well to say that M.
C. d'Hericault, though a very agreeable as well as a very learned
writer, is particularly open to the charge that his geese are swans.
[167] Ed. C. d'Hericault. Paris, 1855.
[168] See _Poetes Francais_, vol. i. _ad fin._, for the poets mentioned
in this paragraph and others of their kind.
[169] He was in his old age conspicuous among the enemies of Etienne
Dolet. See _Etienne Dolet_, by R. C. Christie. London, 1880.
[170] Ed Jannet et C. d'Hericault. 4 vols. Paris, 2nd ed. 1873. M.
d'Hericault has prefixed a much larger study of Marot than is to be
found here to his edition of the 'beauties' of the poet, published by
Messrs. Garnier. The late M. Guiffrey published two volumes of a costly
and splendid edition, which his death interrupted.
[171] The _blason_ (description) was a child of the mediaeval _dit_.
Marot's examples, _Le beau Tetin_ and _Le laid Tetin_, were copied _ad
infinitum_. The first is panegyric, the second abuse.
[172] Ed. Frank. 4 vols. Paris, 1873-4.
[173] i. 651.
[174] Ed. Tross. Paris, 1871.
[175] Ed. Blanchemain, 3 vols. Paris, 1873.
[176] This great collection, which awaits its completion of glossary,
etc., was published between 1855 and 1878, and is invaluable to any one
desiring to appreciate the general characteristics of the poetical
literature of the time.
[177] Much help has been received in the writing of this chapter, and
indeed of this book, from the excellent work of MM. Hatzfeld and
Darmesteter, _Le Seizieme Siecle en France_ (Paris, 1878), one of the
best histories extant in a small compass of a brief but important period
of literature. We may hope for a still more elaborate study of the same
subject in English from Mr. Arthur Tilley, of King's College, Cambridge.
An introductory volume to this study appeared in 1885.
CHAPTER III.
RABELAIS AND HIS FOLLOWERS.
[Sidenote: Fiction at the beginning of the Sixteenth Century.]
At the beginning of the sixteenth century prose fiction in France was
represented by a considerable mass of literature divided sharply into
two separate classes of very different nature and value. On the one hand
the prose versions of the Chansons de Gestes and the romances, Arthurian
and adventurous, which had succeeded the last and most extensive verse
rehandlings of these works in the fourteenth century, made up a
considerable body of work, rarely possessing much literary merit, and
characterised by all the faults of monotony, repetition, and absence of
truthful character-drawing which distinguish late mediaeval work. On the
other hand, there was a smaller body of short prose tales[178] sometimes
serious in character and of not inconsiderable antiquity, more
frequently comic and satirical, and corresponding in prose to the
Fabliaux in verse. It has been pointed out that in the hands, real or
supposed, of Antoine de la Salle this latter kind of work had attained a
high standard of perfection. But it was as yet extremely limited in
style, scope, and subject. Valour, courtesy, and love made up the list
of subjects of the serious work, and the stock materials for satire,
women, marriage, priests, etc., that of the comic. Although we have some
lively presentment of the actual manners of the time in Antoine de la
Salle, it is accidental only, and of its thoughts on any but the stock
subjects we have nothing. There was thus room for a vast improvement,
or rather for a complete revolution, in this particular class of work,
and this revolution was at a comparatively early period of the new
century effected by the greatest man and the greatest book of the French
Renaissance.
[Sidenote: Rabelais.]
Francois Rabelais[179] was born at Chinon about 1495 (the alternative
date of 1483 which used to be given is improbable if not impossible),
and at an early age was destined to the cloister. He not only became a
full monk, but also took priest's orders. Before he was thirty he
acquired the reputation of a good classical scholar, and this seems to
have brought him into trouble with his brethren the Cordeliers or
Franciscans, who were at this time among the least cultivated of the
monastic orders. With the consent of the Pope he migrated to a
Benedictine convent, and became canon at Maillezais. This migration,
however, did not satisfy him, and before long he quitted his new convent
without permission and took to the life of a wandering scholar. The
tolerance of the first period of the Renaissance however still existed
in France, and he suffered no inconvenience from this breach of rule.
After studying medicine and natural science under the protection of
Geoffrey d'Estissac, Bishop of Maillezais, he went to Montpellier to
continue these studies, and in the early years of the fourth decade of
the century practised regularly at Lyons. He was attached to the suite
of Cardinal du Bellay in two embassies to Rome, returned to Montpellier,
took his doctor's degree, and again practised in several cities of the
South. Towards 1539 Du Bellay again established him in a convent,
probably as a safeguard against the persecution which was then
threatening. But the conventual life as then practised was too repugnant
to Rabelais to be long endured, and he once more set out on his travels,
this time in Savoy and Italy, the personal protection of the king
guaranteeing him from danger. He then returned to France, taking however
the precaution to soften some expressions in his books. At the death of
Francis he retired first to Metz, and then to Rome, still with Du
Bellay. The Cardinal de Chatillon, soon after gave him the living of
Meudon, which he held with another in Maine for a year or two,
resigning them both in 1551, and dying in 1553. Such at least are the
most probable and best ascertained dates and events in a life which has
been overlaid with a good deal of fiction, and many of the facts of
which are decidedly obscure. Rabelais did not very early become an
author, and his first works were of a purely erudite kind. During his
stay at Lyons he seems to have done a good deal of work for the
printers, as editor and reader, especially in reference to medical
works, such as Galen and Hippocrates. He edited too, and perhaps in part
re-wrote, a prose romance, _Les Grandes et Inestimables Chroniques du
Grant et Enorme Geant Gargantua_. This work, the author of which is
unknown, and no earlier copies of which exist, gave him no doubt at
least the idea of his own famous book. The next year (1532) followed the
first instalment of this--_Pantagruel Roi des Dipsodes Restitue en Son
naturel avec ses Faicts et Proueses Espouvantables_. Three years
afterwards came _Gargantua_ proper, the first book of the entire work as
we now have it. Eleven years however passed before the work was
continued, the second book of _Pantagruel_ not being published till
1546, and the third six years later, just before the author's death, in
1552. The fourth or last book did not appear as a whole until 1564,
though the first sixteen chapters had been given to the world two years
before. This fourth book, the fifth of the entire work, has, from the
length of time which elapsed before its publication and from certain
variations which exist in the MS. and the first printed editions, been
suspected of spuriousness. Such a question cannot be debated here at
length. But there is no external testimony of sufficient value to
discredit Rabelais' authorship, while the internal testimony in its
favour is overwhelming[180]. It may be said, without hesitation, that
not a single writer capable of having written it, save Rabelais himself,
is known to literary history at the time. It has been supposed, with a
good deal of probability, that the book was left in the rough. The
considerable periods which, as has been mentioned, intervened between
the publications of the other books seem to show that the author
indulged a good deal in revision; and, as the third book was only
published just before his death, he could have had little time for this
in the case of the fourth. This would account for a certain appearance
of greater boldness and directness in the satire as well as for
occasional various readings. In genius both of thought and expression
this book is perhaps superior to any other; and, if it were decided that
Rabelais did not write it, much of what are now considered the
Rabelaisian characteristics must be transferred to an entirely unknown
writer who has left not the smallest vestige of himself or his genius.
It is not possible to give here a detailed abstract of _Gargantua_ and
_Pantagruel_: indeed, from the studied desultoriness of the work, any
such abstract must of necessity be nearly as long as the book
itself[181]. It is sufficient to say that both Gargantua and his son
Pantagruel are the heroes of adventures, designedly exaggerated and
burlesqued from those common in the romances of chivalry. The chief
events of the earlier romance are, first, the war between Grandgousier,
Gargantua's father, the pattern of easy-going royalty, and Picrochole,
king of Lerne, the ideal of an arbitrary despot intent only on conquest;
and, secondly, the founding of the Abbey of Thelema, a fanciful
institution, in which Rabelais propounds as first principles everything
that is most opposed to the forced abstinence, the real self-indulgence,
the idleness and the ignorance of the debased monastic communities he
knew so well and hated so much. Pantagruel is Gargantua's son, and, like
him, a giant, but the extravagances derived from his gianthood are not
kept up in the second part as they are in the first. A very important
personage in _Pantagruel_ is Panurge, a singular companion, whom
Pantagruel picks up at Paris, and who is perhaps the greatest single
creation of Rabelais. Some ideas may have been taken for him from the
Cingar of Merlinus Coccaius, or Folengo, a Macaronic Italian poet[182],
but on the whole he is original, and is hardly comparable to any one
else in literature except Falstaff. The main idea of Panurge is the
absence of morality in the wide Aristotelian sense with the presence of
almost all other good qualities. After a time, in which Pantagruel and
his companions (among whom, as in the former romance, Friar John is the
embodiment of hearty and healthy animalism, as Panurge is of a somewhat
diseased intellectual refinement) are engaged in wars of the old romance
kind, a whim of Panurge determines the conclusion of the story. He
desires to get married; and an entire book is occupied by the various
devices to which he resorts in order to determine whether it is wise or
not for him to do so. At last it is decided that a voyage must be made
to the oracle of the Dive Bouteille. The last two books are occupied
with this voyage, in which many strange countries are visited, and at
last, the oracle being reached, the word _Trinq_ is vouchsafed, not
only, it would seem, to solve Panurge's doubts, but also as a general
answer to the riddle of the painful earth.
Besides his great work, Rabelais was the author of a few extant letters,
and probably of a good many that are not extant, of a little burlesque
almanack called the _Pantagrueline Prognostication_, which is full of
his peculiar humour, of a short work entitled _Sciomachie_, describing a
festival at Rome, and of a few poems of no great merit. In _Gargantua_
and _Pantagruel_, however, his whole literary interest and character are
concentrated. Few books have been the subject of greater controversy as
to their meaning and general intention. The author, as if on purpose to
baffle investigation, mixes up real persons mentioned by their real
names, real persons mentioned in transparent allegory, and entirely
fictitious characters, in the most inextricable way. Occasionally, as in
his chapters on education, he is perfectly serious, and allows no touch
of humour or satire to escape him. Elsewhere he indulges in the wildest
buffoonery. Two of the most notable characteristics of Rabelais are,
first, his extraordinary predilection for heaping up piles of synonymous
words, and huge lists of things; secondly, his habit of indulging in the
coarsest allusions and descriptions. Both of these were to some extent
mere exaggerations of his mediaeval models, but both show the peculiar
characteristics of their author. The book as a whole has received the
most various explanations as well as the most various appreciations. It
has been regarded as in the main a political and personal satire, in
every incident and character of which some reference must be sought to
actual personages and events of the time; as an elaborate pamphlet
against the Roman Catholic Church; as a defence of mere epicurean
materialism, and even an attack on Christianity itself; as a huge piece
of mischief intended to delude readers into the belief that something
serious is meant, when in reality nothing of the kind is intended. Even
more fantastic explanations than these have been attempted; such, for
instance, as the idea that the voyage of Pantagruel is an allegorical
account of the processes employed in the manufacture of wine. The true
explanation, as far as there is any, of the book seems, however, to be
not very difficult to make out, provided that the interpreter does not
endeavour to force a meaning where there very probably is none. The form
of it was pretty well prescribed by the old romances of adventure, and
must be taken as given to Rabelais, not as invented by him for a special
purpose; a war, a quest, these are the subjects of every story in verse
and prose for five centuries, and Rabelais followed the stream. But when
he had thus got his main theme settled, he gave the widest licence of
comment, allusion, digression, and adaptation to his own fancy and his
own intellect. Both of these were typical, and, except for a certain
deficiency in the poetical element, fully typical of the time. Rabelais
was a very learned man, a man of the world, a man of pleasure, a man of
obvious interest in political and ecclesiastical problems. He was
animated by that lively appetite for enjoyment, business, study, all the
occupations of life, which characterised the Renaissance in its earlier
stages, in all countries and especially in France. Nor had science of
any kind yet been divided and subdivided so that each man could only
aspire to handle certain portions of it. Accordingly, Rabelais is
prodigal of learning in season and out of season. But independently of
all this, he had an immense humour, and this pervades the whole book,
turning the preposterous adventures into satirical allegories or half
allegories, irradiating the somewhat miscellaneous erudition with
lambent light, and making the whole alive and fresh to this day. The
extreme coarseness of language, which makes Rabelais difficult to read
now-a-days, seems to have arisen from a variety of causes. The essence
of his book was exaggeration, and he exaggerated in this as in other
matters. His keen appetite for the ludicrous, and a kind of
shamelessness which may have been partly due to individual peculiarity,
but had not a little also to do with his education and studies, inclined
him to make free with a department of thought where ludicrous ideas are,
as it has been said, to be had for the picking up by those whom shame
does not trouble at the expense of those whom it does. But besides all
this, there was in Rabelais a knowledge of human nature, and a faculty
of expressing that knowledge in literary form, in which he is inferior
to Shakespeare alone. Caricatured as his types purposely are, they are
all easily reducible to natural dimensions and properties; while
occasionally, though all too rarely, the author drops his mask and
speaks gravely, seriously, and then always wisely. These latter passages
are, it may be added, unsurpassed in mere prose style for many long
years after the author's death.
Altogether, independently of the intrinsic interest of Rabelais' work,
we go to him as we can go to only some score or half score of the
greatest writers of the world, for a complete reflection of the
sentiment and character of his time. As with all great writers, what he
shows is in great part characteristic of humanity at all times and in
all places, but, as also with all great writers except Shakespeare, more
of it is local and temporary merely. This local and temporary element
gives him his great historical importance. Rabelais is the literary
exponent of the earlier Renaissance, with its appetite for the good
things of the world as yet unblunted. Yet even in him there is a
foretaste of satiety, and the Oracle of the Bottle has something, for
all its joyousness, of the conclusion of the Preacher.
The popularity of Rabelais was immense, and of itself sufficed to
protect him against the enmity which his hardly veiled attacks on
monachism, and on other fungoid growths of the Church, could not have
failed to attract. In such a case imitation was certain, and, long
before the genuine series of the Pantagrueline Chronicles was
completed, spurious supplements and continuations appeared, all of them
without exception worthless. A more legitimate imitation coloured the
work of many of the fiction writers of the remaining part of the
century, though the tradition of short story writing, on the model of
the Fabliaux and of the Italian tales borrowed from them, continued and
was only indirectly affected by Rabelais. In this latter class one
mediocre writer and two of the greatest talent--of talent amounting
almost to genius--have to be noticed. In 1535, Nicholas of Troyes, a
saddler by trade, produced a book entitled _Grand Parangon de Nouvelles
Nouvelles_, in which he followed rather, as his title indicates, the
_Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles_ than any other model. His sources seem to
have been the _Decameron_ and the _Gesta Romanorum_ principally, though
some of his tales are original. Very different books are the _Contes_ of
Marguerite de Navarre, usually termed the 'Heptameron,' and the _Contes
et Joyeux Devis_ of her servant Bonaventure des Periers. Neither of
these books was published till a considerable period after the death,
not merely of Rabelais, but of their authors.
[Sidenote: Bonaventure des Periers.]
There are few persons of the time of whom less is known than of
Bonaventure des Periers[183], and, by no means in consequence merely of
this mystery, there are few more interesting. He must have been born
somewhere about the beginning of the sixteenth century, and his friend
Dolet calls him _Aeduum poetam_, which would seem to fix his birth
somewhere in the neighbourhood at least of Autun. He was undoubtedly one
of the literary courtiers of Marguerite d'Angouleme. Finally, it seems
that in the persecution which, during the later years of Francis I.'s
reign, came upon the Protestants and freethinkers, and which the
influence of Marguerite was powerless to prevent, he committed suicide
to escape the clutches of the law. Henri Estienne, however, attributes
the act to insanity or delirium. However this may be, there is no doubt
that Des Periers was a remarkable example of a humanist. He was
certainly a good scholar, and he was also a decided freethinker. He has
left poems of some merit, but not great perhaps, some translations and
minor prose pieces, but certainly two works of the highest interest, the
_Cymbalum Mundi_ (1537) and the _Nouvelles Recreations et Joyeux Devis_
(1558). The _Cymbalum Mundi_ betrays the influence of Lucian, which was
also very strong on Rabelais. It is a work in dialogue, satirising the
superstitions of antiquity with a hardly dubious reference to the
religious beliefs of Des Periers' own day. The _Nouvelles Recreations et
Joyeux Devis_ are compact of less perilous stuff, while they exhibit
equal and perhaps greater literary skill. They consist of a hundred and
twenty-nine short tales, similar in general character to those of the
_Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles_ and other collections. Although, however, a
great licence of subject is still allowed, the language is far less
coarse than in the work of Antoine de la Salle, while the literary
merits of the style are very much greater. Des Periers was beyond all
doubt a great master of half-serious and half-joyous French prose. Nor
is his matter much less remarkable than his style. Like Rabelais, but
with the difference that his was a more poetical temperament than that
of his greater contemporary, he has sudden accesses of seriousness,
almost of sentiment. At these times the spirit of the French
Renaissance, in its more cultivated and refined representatives, comes
out in him very strongly. This spirit may be defined as a kind of
cultivated sensuality, ardently enamoured of the beautiful in the world
of sense, while fully devoted to intellectual truth, and at the same
time always conscious of the nothingness of things, the instant pressure
of death, the treacherousness of mortal delights. The rare sentences in
which Des Periers gives vent to the expression of this mental attitude
are for the most part admirably written, while as a teller of tales,
either comic or romantic, he has few equals and fewer superiors.
[Sidenote: The Heptameron.]
The same spirit which has just been described found even fuller
expression, with greater advantages of scale and setting, in the
_Heptameron_[184] of Marguerite of Navarre. The exact authorship of this
celebrated book is something of a literary puzzle. Marguerite was a
prolific author, if all the works which were published under her name be
unhesitatingly ascribed[185] to her. Besides the poems printed under the
pretty title of _Les Marguerites de la Marguerite_, she produced many
other works, as well as the _Heptameron_ which was not given to the
world until after her death (1558). The House of Valois was by no means
destitute of literary talent. But that which seems most likely to be the
Queen's genuine work hardly corresponds with the remarkable power shown
in the _Heptameron_. On the other hand, Marguerite for years maintained
a literary court, in which all the most celebrated men of the time,
notably Marot and Bonaventure des Periers, held places. If it were
allowable to decide literary questions simply by considerations of
probability, there could be little hesitation in assigning the entire
_Heptameron_ to Des Periers himself, and then its unfinished condition
would be intelligible enough. The general opinion of critics, however,
is that it was probably the result of the joint work of the Queen, of
Des Periers, and of a good many other men, and probably some women, of
letters. The idea and plan of the work are avowedly borrowed from
Boccaccio, but the thing is worked out with so much originality that it
becomes nothing so little as an imitation. A company of ladies and
gentlemen returning from Cauterets are detained by bad weather in an
out-of-the-way corner of the Pyrenees, and beguile the time by telling
stories. The interludes, however, in which the tale-tellers are brought
on the stage in person, are more circumstantial than those of the
Decameron, and the individual characters are much more fully worked out.
Indeed, the mere setting of the book, independently of its seventy-two
stories (for the eighth day is begun), makes a very interesting tale,
exhibiting not merely those characteristics of the time and its society
which have been noticed in connection with the _Contes et Joyeux Devis_,
but, in addition, a certain religiosity in which that time and society
were also by no means deficient, though it existed side by side with
freethinking of a daring kind and with unbridled licentiousness. The
head of the party, Dame Oisille, is the chief representative of this
religious spirit, though all the party are more or less penetrated by
it. The subjects of the tales do not differ much from those of
Boccaccio, though they are, as a rule, occupied with a higher class of
society, and of necessity display a more polished condition of manners.
They are much longer than the anecdotes of the _Contes et Joyeux Devis_,
and generally, though not always, deal with something like a connected
story instead of with mere isolated traits or apophthegms. The best of
them are animated by the same spirit of refined voluptuousness which
animates so much of the writing and art of the time, and which may
indeed be said to be its chief feature. But this spirit has seldom been
presented in a light so attractive as that which it bears in the
_Heptameron_.
[Sidenote: Noel du Fail.]
[Sidenote: G. Bouchet.]
[Sidenote: Cholieres.]
The influence of Rabelais on the one hand, of the _Heptameron_ on the
other, is observable in almost all the work of the same kind which the
second half of the sixteenth century produced. The fantastic buffoonery
and the indiscriminate prodigality of learning, which were to the
outward eye the distinguishing characteristics of _Pantagruel_, found
however more imitators than the poetical sentiment of the _Heptameron_.
The earliest of the successors of Rabelais was Noel du Fail, a gentleman
and magistrate of Britanny, who, five years before the master's death,
produced two little books, _Propos Rustiques_[186] and _Baliverneries_,
which depict rural life and its incidents with a good deal of vividness
and colour. The imitation of Rabelais is very perceptible, and sometimes
a little irritating, but the work on the whole has merit, and abounds in
curious local traits. The _Propos Rustiques_, too, are interesting
because they underwent a singular travesty in the next century, and
appeared under a new and misleading title. Much later, near forty years
afterwards in fact, Du Fail produced the _Contes d'Eutrapel_[187], which
are rather critical and satirical dialogues than tales. There is a good
deal of dry humour in them. The provinciality to be noticed in Du Fail
was still a feature of French literature; and in this particular
department it long continued to be prominent, perhaps owing to the
example of Rabelais, who, wide as is his range, frequently takes
pleasure in mixing up petty local matters with his other materials.
Thus, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, Guillaume Bouchet (to
be carefully distinguished from Jean Bouchet, the poet of the early
sixteenth century) wrote a large collection of _Serees_[188] (Soirees),
containing gossip on a great variety of subjects, mingled with details
of Angevin manners; and Tabourot des Accords composed his _Escraignes
Dijonnaises_. A singular book, or rather two singular books[189], _Les
Matinees_ and _Les Apres-Dinees_, were produced by a person, the
Seigneur de Cholieres, of whom little else is known. Cholieres is a bad
writer, and a commonplace if not stupid thinker; but he tells some
quaint stories, and his book shows us the deep hold which the example of
Rabelais had given to the practice of discussing grave subjects in a
light tone.
[Sidenote: Apologie pour Herodote.]
[Sidenote: Moyen de Parvenir.]
There remain two books of sufficient importance to be treated
separately. The first of these is the _Apologie pour Herodote_[190]
(1566) of the scholar Henri Estienne. In the guise of a serious defence
of Herodotus from the charges of untrustworthiness and invention
frequently brought against him Estienne indulges in an elaborate
indictment against his own and recent times, especially against the
Roman Catholic clergy. Much of his book is taken from Rabelais, or from
the _Heptameron_; much from the preachers of the fifteenth century. Its
literary merit has been a good deal exaggerated, and its extreme
desultoriness and absence of coherence make it tedious to read for any
length of time, but it is in a way amusing enough. Much later (1610) the
last--it may almost be said the first--echo of the genuine spirit of
Rabelais was sounded in the _Moyen de Parvenir_[191] of Beroalde de
Verville. This eccentric work is perhaps the most perfect example of a
_fatrasie_ in existence. In the guise of guests at a banquet the author
brings in many celebrated persons of the day and of antiquity, and
makes them talk from pillar to post in the strangest possible fashion.
The licence of language and anecdote which Rabelais had permitted
himself is equalled and exceeded; but many of the tales are told with
consummate art, and, in the midst of the ribaldry and buffoonery,
remarks of no small shrewdness are constantly dropped as if by accident.
There seems to have been at the time something not unlike a serious idea
that the book was made up from unpublished papers of Rabelais himself.
All external considerations make this in the highest degree unlikely,
and the resemblances are obviously those of imitation rather than of
identical authorship. But undoubtedly nothing else of the kind comes so
near to the excellences of _Gargantua_ and _Pantagruel_.
FOOTNOTES:
[178] Among these may be mentioned the charming story of _Jehan de
Paris_ (ed. Montaiglon, Paris, 1874), which M. de Montaiglon has clearly
proved to be of the end of the fifteenth century. It is a cross between
a Roman d'aventures and a nursery tale, telling how the King of France
as 'John of Paris' outwitted the King of England in the suit for the
hand of the Infanta of Spain.
[179] Ed. Jannet and Moland. 7 vols. (2nd ed.) Paris, 1873. Also ed.
Marty-Laveaux, vols. 1-4. Paris, 1870-81.
[180] The question has been again discussed since the text was written
by M. Paul Lacroix (Paris, 1881), whose facts and arguments fully bear
out the view taken here. The other side is taken, though not very
decidedly, in the fourth volume of M. Marty-Laveaux' edition. The two
contain a tolerably complete survey of the question.
[181] The best general commentary on Rabelais is that of M. J. Fleury. 2
vols. St. Petersburg, 1876-7.
[182] For an excellent account of Folengo, see Symonds' _Renaissance in
Italy_, vol. v. chap. 14.
[183] Ed. Lacour. 2 vols. Paris, 1866.
[184] Ed. Leroux de Lincy. 3 vols. Paris, 1855.