best-known and oftenest quoted passage of any memoirs of the time, that
in which the Princess describes the night of St. Bartholomew. There are
not many such stirring passages in them, but throughout Marguerite gives
evidence of the remarkable talent which distinguished the Valois. Her
evident object is to justify herself, and this makes the book somewhat
artificial. It is dedicated to Brantome, but shows in its manner rather
the influence of Ronsard and the Pleiade by the classical correctness of
the style, the absence of archaisms, and the precision and form of the
sentences. According to the principles of the school, the vocabulary is
simple and vernacular enough, for the Pleiade regarded ornate
classicisms of language as proper to poetry.
In a rank not much below those mentioned must be placed the so-called
_Memoires de Vieilleville_, the _Chronologies_ of Palma-Cayet, the
_Registres-Journaux_ of Pierre de l'Estoile, the Letters of
Duplessis-Mornay, Cardinal d'Ossat, and Henri IV. himself, and the
_Negotiations_ of the President Jeannin.
[Sidenote: Vieilleville.]
The Marechal de Vieilleville was one of the foremost French generals of
the sixteenth century, and, considering the violent and unscrupulous
ways of the time, he had a good reputation for moderation, probity, and
patriotism, as well as for courage and ability. His Memoirs are not his
own work, but that of his secretary and lifelong companion, Vincent
Carloix. They have some of the defects of a deliberate panegyric; but
Carloix is a vigorous and able writer, who, without completely
emancipating himself from the tyranny of the long involved sentence,
contrives to write clearly, and often with much picturesque effect.
[Sidenote: Palma-Cayet.]
Pierre Victor Palma-Cayet was of mean extraction, but received a good
education, and was introduced by La Noue to Jeanne d'Albret as a
suitable assistant-tutor for her son. After the accession of his pupil,
he was appointed to various offices, one of which, that of Chronologer
Royal, no doubt occasioned the odd titles of his two principal works,
_Chronologie Novenaire_ and _Chronologie Septenaire_, which give the
history of Henri's reign, dividing it into two portions, the one of nine
years, the other of seven. Cayet also wrote several minor works, and
divides with D'Aubigne the doubtful honour of being the author of the
_Divorce Satirique_, a scurrilous pamphlet against Marguerite. The
_Chronologies_ are extremely full of matter, and admirably precise in
their information, but their literary value is not great.
[Sidenote: Pierre de l'Estoile.]
From this point of view Pierre de l'Estoile[221] is of a higher class.
He was a lawyer of rank and an indefatigable writer. Day by day he put
down in his _Tablettes_ all sorts of public and private affairs, as well
as literary extracts, obituary notices, and, in short, almost the entire
material of a modern newspaper. Pierre de l'Estoile, much more than
Brantome, is the French Pepys. Although occasionally prejudiced, the
writer seems to have been acute and well-informed, and his manner of
dealing with his heterogeneous materials is light and lively.
[Sidenote: D'Ossat.]
Of the three correspondence-writers just mentioned, though Henri himself
is a vigorous and fertile writer, the most important by far is Cardinal
D'Ossat. He was born in the south of France in 1536, and had not, unlike
many of the diplomatist ecclesiastics of the period, the advantage of
high birth. Like many of his contemporaries, he began as a lawyer and
only subsequently took orders. He began diplomatic life as Secretary to
the Archbishop of Toulouse, who was ambassador at Rome, and later on
conducted the negotiations which led to the conversion of Henri IV. He
then became Bishop of Rennes and cardinal. His letters are almost
entirely devoted to subjects connected with his profession, and have
always held a position as one of the earliest models of diplomatic
writing. D'Ossat's style, especially in respect of its vocabulary, was
long regarded as a pattern, but it has less character than that of some
other sixteenth-century writers.
[Sidenote: Sully.]
The last two books to be named belong, in point of date, to the next
century, but were written by, or for, men who were emphatically of the
sixteenth. The extraordinary form of Sully's Memoirs is well known. They
are neither written as if by himself, nor of him as by a historian of
the usual kind. They are directly addressed to the hero in the form of
an elaborate reminder of his own actions. 'You then said this;' 'his
Majesty thereupon sent you there;' 'when you were two leagues from your
halting-place, you saw a courier coming,' etc. It is needless to say
that this manner of telling history is in the highest degree unnatural
and heavy, and, after the first quaintness of it wears off, it makes the
book very hard to read. It contains, however, a very large number of
short memoirs and documents of all kinds, in which the elaborate farce
of 'Vous' is perforce abandoned. It shows Sully as he was--a great and
skilful statesman: but it does not give a pleasant idea of his
character.
[Sidenote: Jeannin.]
Pierre Jeannin was, like D'Ossat, a diplomatist in the service of Henri
IV. He had previously discharged many legal functions of importance, and
subsequently he was Controller-General of the Finances. His
_Negotiations_ contain the record of his proceedings on a mission to the
Netherlands to watch over the interests of France. The book consists of
letters, despatches, treaties, and such-like documents, very clear,
precise, and written in a remarkably simple and natural style.
[Sidenote: Minor Memoir-writers.]
There were many other writers of memoirs during the period, most of
whose works are comprised in the invaluable collections of Petitot,
Michaud, Poujoulat, and Buchon. But few of them require a separate
mention here. Guillaume and Martin du Bellay, two brothers, have left a
history of Francis I.'s reign, of which the part belonging to Guillaume
is only a small fragment of an immense work which he entitled _Les
Ogdoades_, it being divided into seven batches of eight books each. The
imitation of the classics is obvious, and the constant intrusion of
classical parallels rather tedious. The Memoirs of the Duke of Guise,
composed in great part of what we should call his secretary's
letter-book, are very voluminous, but not of much literary value.
Francois de Rabutin, author of _Commentaires des Guerres de la Gaule
Belgique_, has the fault, common to his time, of enormous sentences, but
is often lively and picturesque enough, as becomes a member of the
family of Madame de Sevigne and of Bussy-Rabutin. The famous Marshal de
Tavannes, on whom more than on any single man rests the blood of St.
Bartholomew's Day, found a biographer in his son Jean de Tavannes, whose
work, though somewhat too elaborate, is interesting. Another son,
Guillaume de Saulx-Tavannes, has written his own memoirs on a smaller
scale. The memoirs of Michel de Castelnau show more of the tradition of
Comines than most of their contemporaries, and are remarkably full of
political studies. Boyvin du Villars, of whom little is known, left
voluminous memoirs which have some literary merit. The last book of
memoirs of some size which needs to be mentioned, is that of Nicholas de
Neufville, Seigneur de Villeroy, a politician of eminence and a vigorous
writer. Some short pieces may be noticed, such as the Siege of Metz, by
Bertrand de Salignac, that of St. Quentin, by Coligny himself, the only
literary monument of the Admiral (an excellent specimen of the military
writing of the time), and a very curious history of Annonay in the
Vivarais by Achille Gamon, which gives perhaps the liveliest idea
obtainable of the sufferings of the French provincial towns during the
religious wars.
[Sidenote: General Historians.]
The general histories, which make up a second class of historical
writings, are, as a rule, of very much less value than these personal
memoirs. Not till the extreme end of the period did the historical
conception take a firm hold in De Thou, and the _Thuana_ was written in
Latin, which excludes it and its author from detailed notice here.
D'Aubigne's _Histoire Universelle_ of his own time has been mentioned
for convenience' sake already. Lancelot de la Popeliniere attempted in
the last quarter of the century a general history of France, and
incidentally of Europe during his own day. He is said to have spent all
his fortune on getting together the materials, but his literary powers
were small. About the same time Bernard Girard, Seigneur du Haillan,
published a history of France from the earliest times, which an extract
of Thierry's, giving the speeches of Charamond and Quadrek, Merovingians
of Du Haillan's own creation, who speak on the advantages of different
forms of government at the election of Pharamond, has made known to many
persons who never saw the original. The source of this grotesque
imagination is of course obvious to readers of Herodotus, and similar
imitation of classical models is frequent in Du Haillan's work. Francois
de Belleforest also wrote a general history of France, which was long
read, and the names of Du Tillet, Jean de Serres, Charron, Dupleix, etc.
may be mentioned. But they represent writers of little importance,
either from the point of view of history, or from that of literature.
FOOTNOTES:
[213] The standard edition until recently has been that of Le Clerc (4
vols. Paris, 1866). That of Louandre in the Bibliotheque Charpentier is
handy and useful. MM. Courbet and Roger have begun a handsome edition.
[214] The references are to the edition of Louandre.
[215] _De la Sagesse._ 2 vols. Paris, 1789.
[216] Ed. 1641.
[217] Ed. 1578.
[218] Ed. Feugere. Paris, 1846.
[219] Ed. Buchon. 2 vols. Paris, 1839. The Societe de l'Histoire de
France has a voluminous edition on hand. Merimee, who was a great
admirer of Brantome, began an edition for the Bibliotheque Elzevirienne,
but left it unfinished.
[220] Montluc's _Memoirs_, as well as most of those mentioned below,
will be found in the collection of Michaud and Poujoulat.
[221] The earlier editions of this writer are not complete. In 1875 a
full reprint was begun.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE _SATYRE MENIPPEE_. REGNIER.
[Sidenote: Satyre Menippee.]
The period of the Renaissance in France closed with two works (one for
the most part in prose and due to various authors, the other wholly in
verse and the work of one only) which exhibit the highest excellence.
The _Satyre Menippee_ and the satires of Regnier are separated in point
of date of publication by some fifteen years, and the contributors to
the first-named work belong for the most part to an earlier generation,
and represent a less accomplished state of the language than the great
satirist who, after fifteen centuries, took up the traditions of his
Roman masters. But both are satirical in substance, though the
_Menippee_ is almost wholly political, and Regnier busies himself with
social and moral subjects only. Both possess in a high degree the
characteristics of the period which they close. Both exhibit a
remarkable power of treating ephemeral subjects in a manner calculated
to make their interest something more than ephemeral. Both have met with
the just reward of continuing to be popular even at times when the most
unjust unpopularity rested on work scarcely less excellent but less
calculated to please the taste of those who, however much they may
sympathise with the fashions of their own day, are unable to sympathise
with those of a day which is not theirs.
The _Satyre Menippee_[222] was a remarkable, and, for those who take an
interest both in literature and in politics, a most encouraging instance
of the power of literary treatment at certain crises of political
matters. It appeared in 1594, at the crucial period of the League. For
years there had existed the party known for the most part
uncomplimentarily as _Les Politiques_. These persons professed
themselves unable to find, in the simple difference of Catholic _v._
Protestant, a _casus belli_ for Frenchmen against Frenchmen. Their
influence, however, though it occasionally rose to the surface in the
days of Charles IX. and Henri III., had never been lasting, and they
laboured under the charge of being Laodiceans, trimmers, men who cared
for nothing but hollow peace and material prosperity. The assassination
of Henri III., and the open confederation between the Leaguers and the
Spanish party, at last gave them their opportunity, and it was seized
with an adroitness which would have been remarkable in a single man, but
which is still more remarkable in a group of men of very different
antecedents, professions, ages, and beliefs. The _Satyre Menippee_ is,
in fact, the first and most admirable example of the theory of the
modern newspaper--the theory that the combined ability of many men is
likely, on the whole, to treat complicated and ephemeral affairs better
than the limited, though perhaps individually greater, ability of any
one man. The _Menippee_, prose and verse, was due to the working of a
new Pleiade--Leroy, Gillot, Passerat, Rapin, Chrestien, Pithou, and
Durant. Most of them were lawyers, a few were more or less connected
with the Church. Pierre Leroy, a canon of Rouen, of whom nothing is
known, but whose character De Thou praises, is said to have planned the
book, and to have acted in some way as editor. Jacques Gillot,
clerk-advocate of the Parliament, received the literary conspirators in
his house. Passerat and Rapin represented the mixed classical and French
culture of the immediate companions of Ronsard. Florent Chrestien was a
converted Huguenot, much given to translation of ancient authors. Pithou
(the writer of the harangue of Claude d'Aubray, the most important piece
of the whole and containing the moral and idea of the book) was, like
Chrestien, a convert. He ranks as one of the most distinguished members
of the French bar, and had a deserved reputation for every kind of
learning in his time. Lastly, Durant, who contributed rather to the
appendix of the book than to the book itself, was an Auvergnat
gentleman, who preferred poetry to law, and justified his preference by
some capital work, partly of a satirical kind, partly of an elegant and
tender gallantry, anticipating, as has been justly said, the eighteenth
century in elegance, and excelling it in tenderness.
The plan of the _Menippee_ (the title of which, it is hardly necessary
to say, is borrowed from the name of the cynic philosopher celebrated by
Lucian) is for the time singularly original and bold; but the spirit in
which the subject is treated is more original still. Generally speaking,
the piece has the form of a _compte-rendu_ of the assembly of the states
at Paris. The full title is _De la Vertu du Catholicon d'Espagne et de
la Tenue des Etats de Paris_. The preface contains a sarcastic harangue
in orthodox charlatan style on the merits of the new Catholicon or
Panacea. Then comes a description (in which, as throughout the work,
actual facts are blended inextricably with satirical comment) of the
opening procession. To this succeeds a sketch of the tapestries with
which the hall of meeting was hung, all of which are, of course,
allegorical, and deal with murders of princes, betrayal of native
countries to foreigners, etc. Next comes _L'Ordre tenu pour les
Seances_, in which the chief personages on the side of the League are
enumerated in a long catalogue, every item of which contains some bitter
allusion to the private or public conduct of the person named. Seven
solemn speeches are then delivered by the Duke de Mayenne as lieutenant,
by the legate, by the Cardinal de Pelve, by the bishop of Lyons, by
Rose, the fanatical rector of the University, by the Sieur de Rieux, as
representative of the nobility; and, lastly, by a certain Monsieur
d'Aubray, for the _Tiers-Etat_. A burlesque _coda_ concludes the volume,
the joints of which are, first, a short verse satire on Pelve; secondly,
a collection of epigrams due to Passerat; and, thirdly, Durant's _Regret
Funebre a Mademoiselle ma Commere sur le Trepas de son Ane_, a
delightful satire on the Leaguers, which did not appear in the first
edition, but which yields to few things in the book.
It has been said that the plan of the _Menippee_ has of itself not a
little originality. Satirical comment and travesty devoted to political
affairs had been common enough almost for centuries in France, but no
satire of the kind had hitherto flown so high, or with so well-organised
a flight. The seven speeches, which form the bulk of the book, display
moreover a remarkable variety and a still more remarkable combination of
excellences. The first six--those of Mayenne, the legate, Pelve, the
bishop of Lyons, Rose, and Rieux, none of which is long--are, without
exception, caricatures, and of that peculiar order of caricature in
which the victim is made, without a glaring violation of probability, to
render himself vile and ridiculous, and to give utterance to the satire
and invective which the author desires to pour upon him. Butler (who
beyond all doubt had the _Satyre Menippee_ in his mind when he projected
his own immortal travesty of the Puritan party) is the only writer who
has ever come near to its authors in this particular department of
satire. Treated as they were by different hands, there is a curiously
pleasing variety of style in the portraits. Mayenne uses a mixture of
aristocratic and somewhat haughty frankness with garrulous digression.
The two cardinals indulge in an astounding macaronic jargon, the one of
Italian mingled with Latin, the other of Latin mingled with French. The
bishop of Lyons, and Rose the rector, preach sermons, after the fashion
of the time, thickly larded with quotations, stories, and so forth.
Rieux (he was a noted bandit) expresses with soldierly frankness his
extreme surprise that he should have become a gentleman and the
representative of the nobility, and mildly reproaches Mayenne and the
League for not having given _carte-blanche_ to himself and his likes to
finish off the _Politiques_ bag-and-baggage. But in the last harangue,
that of the representative of the _Tiers-Etat_, Claude d'Aubray, which
is, as has been said, the work of Pithou, and which occupies something
like half the book, the tone is entirely altered. In this remarkable
discourse the whole political situation is treated seriously, and with a
mixture of practical vigour and literary skill of which there had hardly
been any precedent instance. D'Aubray denounces the condition of Paris
first, and the condition of the kingdom afterwards. The foreign
garrisons, the sufferings of private persons by the war, the deprivation
or suspension of privileges, are all commented upon. A remarkable
historical sketch of the religious wars follows, and then turn by turn
the speaker attacks those who have spoken before him, and exposes their
conduct. A vigorous sketch of 'Le Roy que nous voulons et que nous
aurons,' leads up to the announcement that this king is no other than
'Notre vray Roy legitime, naturel et souverain, Seigneur Henry de
Bourbon, cy-devant Roy de Navarre.' After this discomposing harangue the
assembly breaks up in some confusion.
The _Satyre Menippee_ had an immense effect, and may, perhaps, be justly
described as the first example, in modern politics, of a literary work
the effect of which was really great and lasting. It is not surprising
that such should have been its fortune. For it is a remarkably happy
mixture of the older style of _gaulois_ jocularity (in which
exaggeration, personal attack, insinuations of a more or less scandalous
character and the like, furnished the attraction) and the newer style of
chastened and comparatively polished prose. The greater part of the
first six speeches are of a more antique cast than Montaigne; and though
the speech of D'Aubray exhibits a more elaborate and less familiar
style, it too is definitely plain and popular in manner. Although there
are the allusions usual at the time to classical subjects, the Pleiade
pedantry, with which at least two of the contributors, Passerat and
Rapin, were sufficiently imbued, is conspicuously absent. Rabelais is
frequently alluded to; and when the style of the book and the obvious
intention of appealing to the general, which it exhibits, are
considered, no better testimony to the popularity of _Gargantua_ and
_Pantagruel_ could be produced. The descriptions, too, have a
Rabelaisian minuteness and richness about them; and in the burlesque
parts the influence of that master is equally perceptible. But the
strictly practical point of view is always maintained; and the
temptation, always a strong one with French writers of the middle age
and Renaissance, to lose sight of this in endless developments of mere
amusing buffoonery, is constantly resisted. There is certainly less
exaggeration in the _Menippee_ than in _Hudibras_, though the personal
weaknesses of the innumerable individual persons satirised contribute
more to the general effect than they do in Butler's great satire. The
distinguishing trait of the _Satyre Menippee_, next to those already
mentioned, is the constant rain of slight ironical touches contributing
to the general effect. Thus the arms of the processioning Leaguers are,
'le tout rouille par Humilite Catholique;' the League scholastics and
preachers 'forment tous leurs arguments in _ferio_.' The deputies'
benches are covered with cloth, 'parsemees de croisettes de Lorraine et
de larmes miparties de vair et de faux argent.' These sure and rapid
touches distinguish the book strongly from nearly all mediaeval satire,
in which the satirists are wont, whenever they make a point, to dwell on
it, and expound it, and illustrate it, and make the most of it, until it
loses almost all its piquancy. Very different from this over-elaboration
is the confident irony of the _Menippee_, which trusts to the
intelligence of the reader for understanding and emphasis. 'Vous
prevoyez bien,' says Mayenne, 'les dangers et inconveniens de la paix
qui met ordre a tout, et rend le droit a qui il appartient.' Hardly even
Antoine de la Salle, and certainly no other among the authors of the
preceding centuries, would have ventured to leave this, obvious as it
seems now-a-days, to reach the reader by itself.
[Sidenote: Regnier.]
A similar but a still more remarkable, because an individually complete,
example of the combination of Gallican tradition with classical study
was soon afterwards shown by Mathurin Regnier[223]. Regnier was born at
Chartres on the 21st of December, 1573, his father being Jacques
Regnier, a citizen of position; his mother was Simonne Desportes, sister
of the poet. Jacques Regnier desired for his son the ecclesiastical, but
not the poetical, eminence of his brother-in-law, and Mathurin was
tonsured at nine years old. The boy, however, wished to follow his
uncle's steps in the other direction, and early began to write. It is
said that he wrote lampoons on the inhabitants of his native town, and,
repeating them to the frequenters of a tennis-court which his father had
built, got himself thus into trouble. His father's threats and
punishments, however, had no more effect than is usual in such cases,
and Regnier soon, but at a date not exactly known, betook himself to his
uncle at Paris. By Desportes, who was in favour with many high
personages, he was recommended to the Cardinal de Joyeuse, and took part
in that prelate's embassy to Rome in 1593. Joyeuse, however, did nothing
for him, and in 1601 he again went to Rome in the suite of Philippe de
Bethune. He returned before long, and, in 1604, a canonry, to the
reversion of which he had been presented long before, fell in. His first
collection of satires appeared in 1608. Five years afterwards, in 1613,
on the 22nd of October, he died at Rouen, having not quite completed his
fortieth year. His way of life had unfortunately been by no means
regular, and his early death is said to have been directly caused by his
excesses.
In this short sketch almost everything that is known of Regnier, except
a few anecdotes, has been included, and the total is, it will be seen,
exceedingly meagre. Nor is his work abundant even for a man who died
comparatively young. Sixteen satires, three epistles, five elegies, and
a few miscellaneous pieces, make it up, and probably the total does not
exceed seven or eight thousand lines. The relative excellence of this
work is however exceedingly high. Regnier is almost the only French poet
before the so-called classical period who has continuously maintained
his reputation, and who has only been decried by a few eccentric or
incompetent critics. He was an ardent defender of the Ronsardising
tradition, yet Malherbe, whom he did not hesitate to attack, thought and
spoke highly of him. In the next age Boileau allotted to him a mixture
of praise and blame which is not too apposite, but in which the praise
far exceeds the blame, and elsewhere declared him to be the French
writer, before Moliere, who best knew human nature. The approval of
Boileau secured that of the eighteenth century, while Regnier's defence
of the Pleiade propitiated the first Romantics. Thus buttressed on
either side, he has had nothing to fear from literary revolutions. Nor
will any judgment which looks rather at merit than authority arrive at
an unfavourable conclusion respecting him. His satires are not indeed
absolutely the first of their kind in French. Vauquelin de la Fresnaye,
Jean de la Taille, and above all, D'Aubigne, had preceded him. But in
breadth as well as, except in the case of D'Aubigne, in force, and above
all in even excellence and technical merit, he far surpassed those who
in a manner had shown him the way. His satire is exclusively social, and
thus it escapes one of the chief drawbacks of political satire, that of
dealing with matters of more or less ephemeral existence and interest.
He has indeed borrowed considerably from the ancients, but he has
almost always made his borrowings his own, and he has in some cases
improved on his originals. He has softened the exaggerated air of moral
indignation which his English contemporaries, Hall and Marston, borrowed
from Juvenal, and which sits so awkwardly on them and on many other
satirists. He has avoided such still more awkward followings as that
which made Pope upset all English literary history in order to echo
Horace's remarks about Rome and Greece. Sometimes he has fallen into the
besetting sin of his countrymen, the tendency to represent mere types or
even abstractions instead of lifelike individuals embodying the type,
but he has more often avoided it. His descriptive passages are of
extraordinary vigour and accuracy of touch, and his occasional strokes
are worthy of almost any satiric or didactic poet. He is perhaps
weakest, like all poets with the signal exception of Dryden, when he is
panegyrical. Yet his first satire--in the order of arrangement not of
writing--addressed to the King, Henri IV., has much merit. The second,
on poets, has more, and abounds in vigorous strokes, such as that of the
courtier bard who
Meditant un sonnet, medite un eveche;
and as the couplet which concludes a lively sketch of his diplomatic
experiences--
Mais instruit par le temps a la fin j'ai connu
Que la fidelite n'est pas grand revenu.
This poem, which contains some humorous descriptions of the poverty of
poets, ends with an eloquent panegyric on Ronsard. The next, on 'La Vie
de la Cour,' attacks a very favourite subject of the age, and winds up
with an extremely well-told version of the fable of the beast of prey
and the mule whose name is written on its hoof. The fourth returns to
the subject of the poverty of poets. The fifth argues at some length,
and in a spirit not very far removed from that of Montaigne, the thesis
that 'Le gout particulier decide de tout.' It contains some of Regnier's
finest passages. A subject somewhat similar in kind, 'L'honneur ennemi
de la vie,' gives further occasion, in the sixth, for the display of
the moralising spirit of the age, which, in Regnier, takes the form of
a kind of epicurean pococurantism mingled with occasional bursts of
noble sentiment. The seventh is one of the most personal of all; it is
entitled 'L'amour qu'on ne peut dompter,' and is a comment on the text
_Video meliora proboque_. The eighth is one of the innumerable
imitations of the famous ninth satire of the first book of Horace, _Ibam
forte via sacra_, and perhaps the happiest of all such, though it is
difficult not to regret that Regnier should have devoted his too rare
moments of work to mere imitation. The ninth, however, is open to no
such charge. It is entitled _Le Critique outre_, and is an
extraordinarily vigorous and happy remonstrance against the intolerant
pedantry with which Malherbe was criticising the Pleiade. This satire is
addressed to Rapin, the veteran contributor to the _Menippee._ It is
impossible to describe the weak side of the reforms which Malherbe, and
after him Boileau, introduced into French poetry, better than in these
lines, which deserve citation for their literary importance:--
Cependant leur scavoir ne s'estend seulement
Qu'a regratter un mot douteux au jugement,
Prendre garde qu'un qui ne heurte une diphtongue;
Espier si des vers la rime est breve ou longue;
Ou bien si la voyelle, a l'autre s'unissant,
Ne rend point a l'oreille un vers trop languissant.
Ils rampent bassement, foibles d'inventions,
Et n'osent, peu hardis, tenter les fictions,
Froids a l'imaginer; ear s'ils font quelque chose
C'est proser de la rime, et rimer de la prose,
Que l'art lime et relime, et polit de facon,
Qu'elle rend a l'oreille un agreable son.
The tenth satire, with its title 'Le souper ridicule,' seems to return
to Horace, but in reality the scene described has little in common with
the _Coena_ of Nasidienus. It affords Regnier an excellent opportunity
for displaying his talent for Dutch painting, but is in this respect
inferior to the sequel 'Le mauvais gite.' The subject of this is
sufficiently unsavoury, and the satire is almost the only one which in
the least deserves Boileau's strictures on the author's 'rimes
cyniques,' but the vigour and skill of the treatment are most
remarkable. The twelfth is short, and once more apologetically personal.
But the thirteenth is the longest, one of the most famous, and
unquestionably on the whole the best work of the author. It is entitled
'Macette,' and describes an old woman who hides vice under a
hypocritical mask and corrupts youth with her evil philosophy of the
world and its ways. Indebted in some measure to the _Roman de la Rose_
for the idea of his central character, Regnier is entirely original in
his method of treatment. Nowhere are his verses more vigorous--
Son oeil tout penitent ne pleure qu'eau beniste.
L'honneur est un vieux saint que l'on ne chomme plus.
La sage se sait vendre ou la sotte se donne.
Nowhere is Regnier so uniformly free from technical defects and from
colloquialisms in which he sometimes indulges. The fourteenth returns to
general and somewhat vague satire, dealing with the vanity of human
reason and conduct, while the fifteenth is once more personal, 'Le Poete
malgre soi.' Lastly, the sixteenth sums up the author's theoretical
philosophy in the opening line, 'N'avoir crainte de rien et ne rien
esperer.'
The satires are in bulk and in importance so much the larger part of the
work of Regnier, and represent such an important innovation in French
literature, that it has seemed well to describe them with some
minuteness. The miscellaneous poems may be reviewed more rapidly, though
the best of them add very considerably to the poet's reputation, because
they show him in an entirely different light. Not a few of the elegies
are imitated from Ovid, and some of them might perhaps have been left
unwritten with advantage. Indeed, Regnier is here much more open to
Boileau's censure than in his more famous verse. But some lyrical pieces
exhibit his command of other measures besides the Alexandrine, and
afford occasion for the expression of a melancholy and genuine
sensibility which is not common in French poetry. The poem called
'Plainte' is very beautiful, and is written in a lyric stanza of much
more elaboration than any which was to be used in France for two
centuries. One of its peculiarities is a hemistich replacing the
expected fourth line of the stanza, which is of eight verses, with
singularly musical effect. A so-called 'Ode' is almost better, and ends
thus:--
Un regret pensif et confus
D'avoir este, et n'estre plus,
Rend mon ame aux douleurs ouverte;
A mes despens, las! je vois bien
Qu'un bonheur comme estoit le mien
Ne se cognoist que par la perte.
Regnier was in many ways a fitting representative for the close of the
great poetical school of the sixteenth century. In manner he represented
the fusion of the purely Gallic school of Marot and Rabelais, with the
classical tradition of the Pleiade in its best form. His Alexandrines,
if not quite so vigorous as D'Aubigne's, have all the polish that could
be expected before the administration of Malherbe's rules. His lyric
measures have the boldness and harmony which those rules banished from
French poetry for full seven generations. In matter he displays a
singular mixture of acute observation and philosophic criticism with
ardent sensibility both to pleasure and pain. This, as has been
repeatedly pointed out, is the dominant temper of the French
Renaissance, and though in Regnier it shows something of the melancholy
of the decadence as compared with the springing hope of Rabelais and the
calm maturity of Montaigne, it is scarcely less characteristic.
FOOTNOTES:
[222] Ed. Labitte. Paris, 1869.
[223] Ed. Courbet. Paris, 1875. In this edition some of the dates and
statements in the text, which have been generally accepted, are
contested.
INTERCHAPTER II.
SUMMARY OF RENAISSANCE LITERATURE.
The literary movements of the sixteenth century in France and their
accomplishments--in other words, the course and result of the French
Renaissance--can be traced with greater ease and with more precision
than those of any other age of the literature. The movement is double,
but, unlike most movements, literary and other, it is not sufficiently
described as flux and reflux or action and reaction. The later or
Pleiade half of the century was in no sense a reaction against the first
or Marot-Rabelais half. If there is an appearance of opposition between
the two it is only because, both in Marot and in Rabelais, there was
actually a kind of reaction from the movement which faintly and
imperfectly foreshadowed that of the Pleiade, the _rhetoriqueur_
pedantry of the writers from Chartier to Cretin. In this first half of
the century, while something of a protest was made by Rabelais
explicitly, and implicitly by Marot, against the indiscriminate
Latinising of the French tongue, very much more was done by their
contemporaries, and in a manner by Rabelais himself, in the way of
importing novelties of subject, style, and language, both from ancient
and modern sources. Long before Du Bellay wrote, Calvin had modelled the
first serious and scholarly work of French prose very closely on a Latin
pattern. The translators, with Etienne Dolet and Amyot at their head,
had begun to transfer to the vernacular, in versions or in original
work, the principles of style which they had admired and imitated in the
classics. On the other hand, Marot, representing the extreme vernacular
school, succeeded, tolerably early in the period, in refining and
chastening the language of the fifteenth century to such an extent that
his style, transmitted through La Fontaine, and then through the
lighter work of the eighteenth century, has retained a certain hold on
literature for its particular purpose almost to the present day. The
most remarkable writer, from the point of view of style, in this part of
the century is perhaps Bonaventure des Periers, who displays both the
vernacular purity free from classical mixture, and at the same time the
Renaissance admiration and imitation of the classics in a very high
degree. Yet the same lesson is taught by the prose of Des Periers as by
the verse of Marot. The language had not as yet arrived at its full
growth, it had not taken in its full supply of nourishment. It was
therefore not equal to the complete duties of a literary tongue. It
wanted enriching, strengthening, educating.
This task it was which was performed, and performed on the whole with
remarkable skill and success, by the Pleiade movement. It is not easy to
fix on any period in the history of any other language in which, at an
interval of fifty years, the advance in the capacities, as distinguished
from the mere accomplishments of the tongue, is so noticeable as it is
in French between 1550 and 1600. It is not merely that between these
dates writers of talent and even genius may be mentioned by the dozen,
that the language can boast of having added to its stores the odes of
Ronsard, the sonnets of Du Bellay, the myriad graceful songs of the
lesser poets of the Pleiade, the stately descriptions of Du Bartas, the
fiery invective of D'Aubigne, the polished satire of Regnier, the essays
of Montaigne, the immortal pasquinades of the Menippee--it is that the
whole constitution and organisation of the language has been
strengthened and improved. That the secret of the Alexandrine has at
last been mastered means that the whole future course of French poetry
is in a manner mapped out. That lyric measures have been devised,
intricate, not merely in arrangement like those of the mediaeval forms,
but in harmony, means that at any future time French poets who choose to
recur to this storehouse may find the withal to equip themselves. That
the vocabulary has been enormously if somewhat indiscriminately
increased, means that writers in the future, at whatever loss they may
be for thought, need certainly be at no loss for words to express it.
But the gain is greater even than this. Not merely have the glossary,
the grammar, the prosody of the language been enriched, but entirely
new moulds in which literary work can be cast have been added to the
literature. The form of drama in which France was to achieve, with but
little formal alteration, some of her greatest literary triumphs, has
been discovered and acclimatised; the essay has become a recognised
thing; attempts at history proper as distinct from mere annals and
chronicles have been made. Literature, in short, is organised, and
literary labour works in matter roughly at least prepared and shaped.
One of the greatest drawbacks of mediaeval literature, the confusion of
styles, the handling of science in verse, of theology in terms taken
from amatory romances, of politics in 'dreams,' of social satire in
clumsy allegories, is cleared away. The form most suitable for every
kind of literary work has been more or less made clear to the literary
workman, and a plentiful supply of material in the shape of vocabulary
is at his disposal.
That this great accomplishment is on the whole the doing of the Pleiade
in its larger sense, as designating and including the men of letters of
1550-1600, no impartial student of the period can doubt. But at the same
time there is no doubt either that their work was both incomplete and in
some respects open to grave objection. They had, like all reformers,
literary as well as political, neglected to preserve the historical
continuity, and deliberately turned their backs on the traditions of the
language and the literature. Their importations and imitations had been
sometimes unnecessary, sometimes awkward, sometimes absurd. The mass of
their contributions required examination, arrangement, and no doubt in
some cases rejection. Moreover, they had on the whole concentrated their
attention too much upon poetry; prose, the less exquisite but the more
useful instrument, had been comparatively neglected. Almost all styles
had been tried in it, but no general style nor the conditions of any had
been elaborated. In drama much remained to be done. The model was there
in the rough, but the workmen had been unskilful, and fifty years of
practice on the plan of Jodelle had not yet resulted in the composition
of one really dramatic play. In short, though the Pleiade movement had
begun by being nothing if not critical, it had not kept up the habit of
self-criticism. The application of this criticism was what was left for
the seventeenth century to supply, and at the same time the elaboration
of a complete and workman-like prose style. We shall see how early and
how eagerly this task was accepted, and how thoroughly it was carried
out; so thoroughly, that the seventeenth century is the age of perfect
French prose. But what was gained in prose was lost in poetry, and,
putting the dramatists aside, the drop in this respect from the
sixteenth to the seventeenth century is immense. The sixteenth is,
putting our own days out of question, the palmy time of poetry in
France. The urbanity of Marot, the stately grace of Ronsard and his
followers, the majesty of Du Bartas, the fire of D'Aubigne, the nervous
and yet effortless strength of Regnier, have never been surpassed, and
until the last half century they have rarely been equalled. If to this
be added the more irregular and unequal, but hardly inferior merits of
the best sixteenth-century prose, the inexhaustible humour of Rabelais,
the simplicity and varied colour of the great memoir-writers, the subtle
eloquence of Montaigne, it may perhaps seem that the period can contest
the primacy with any other. The dispute between it and its successor is,
however, only an instance of one which recurs again and again in
literature, and which neither need nor should be handled here at
length.
BOOK III.
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.
CHAPTER I.
POETS.
[Sidenote: Malherbe.]
The history of the poetry of the seventeenth century in France naturally
and necessarily opens with Malherbe, though he was forty-five years old
at its beginning, and considerably the senior of Regnier, who has been
included among the poets of the Renaissance. Francois de Malherbe[224]
was born at Caen in 1555, being the eldest son of his father, another
Francois de Malherbe, and both on the father's and mother's side of
noble family. He was educated at his native town, in Germany and in
Paris, and when he was twenty-one he entered the army. He married in
1581, and had three children, two of whom died young--a circumstance not
immaterial in connection with his most famous poem, which is a
'Consolation' to a certain M. du Perier, whose daughter Marguerite had
died in her youth. He seems to have written verses tolerably early, but,
exercising on himself the same rigid principles of criticism which he
applied to others, he preserved none or hardly any of them. It was not
till he was past forty that his best-known poems were written, and the
whole amount of his surviving work is not large. During the first
two-thirds of his life he was not rich, for his patrimony was scanty,
and the death of the Grand Prior, Henri d'Angouleme, to whom he had
attached himself, deprived him of the chances of preferment. But in
1605 he was presented to Henri IV.; he soon afterwards received various
places, and for more than twenty years was a court favourite, and in a
way the autocrat of poetry. He died in 1628.
It has been said that Malherbe's poetical work is by no means
voluminous: a small volume of two hundred pages, not very closely or
minutely printed, contains it all; and ingenious persons have calculated
that as a rule he did not write more than four or five verses a month.
Nor even of this carefully produced, and still more carefully weeded,
result is there much that can be read with pleasure by a modern student
of poetry. The verse by which Malherbe is best known,
Et, rose, elle a vecu ce que vivent les roses,
is worth all the rest of his work, and it can hardly be said to be more
than a very graceful and touching conceit. But Malherbe's position in
the history of French poetry is a very important one. He deliberately
assumed the functions of a reformer of literature; and whatever may be
thought of the result of his reforms, their durability and the almost
entire acquiescence with which they were received prove that there must
have been something in them remarkably germane to the spirit and taste
and genius of the nation. His first attempt was the overthrow of the
Pleiade. He ridiculed their phraseology, frowned on their metres, and,
being himself destitute of the romantic inspiration which had animated
them, set himself to reduce poetry to carefully-worded metrical prose.
The story is always told of him that he went minutely through a copy of
Ronsard, striking out whatever he disapproved of; and when some one
pointed out the mass of lines that were left, that he drew his pen
(presumably across the title-page, for it is not obvious how else he
could have done it) through the rest at one stroke. The insolent folly
of this is glaring enough, for Malherbe is not worthy as a poet to
unloose the shoe-latchet of Ronsard. But the critic had rightly
appreciated his time. The tendency of the French seventeenth century in
poetry proper was towards the restriction of vocabulary and rhythm, the
avoidance of original and daring metaphor and suggestion, the perfecting
of a few metres (with the Alexandrine at their head) into a delicate
but monotonous harmony, and the rejection of individual licence in
favour of rigid rule. The influence of Boileau came rapidly to second
that of Malherbe, and the result is that not a single poet--the
dramatists are here excluded--of the seventeenth century in France
deserves more than fair second-class rank. La Fontaine, indeed, was a
writer of the greatest genius, but, though the form which his work takes
is metrical, the highest merits of poetry proper are absent. La
Fontaine, too, was himself, though an admirer of Malherbe, a rebel to
the Malherbe tradition, and delighted both in reading and imitating the
work of the Renaissance and the middle ages. But he is always clear,
precise, and matter-of-fact in the midst of fancy, never attaining to
the peculiar vague suggestiveness which constitutes the charm of poetry
proper.
[Sidenote: The School of Malherbe.]
[Sidenote: Vers de Societe.]
[Sidenote: Voiture.]
It was, however, impossible that so large a change should accomplish
itself at once, and signs of mixed influences appear accordingly in all
the poetical work of the first half of the century. Cardinal du Perron,
Malherbe's introducer at court, was himself a poet of merit, but rather
in the Pleiade style. His _Temple de l'Inconstance_, though rougher in
form, is more poetical in substance than anything, save a very few
pieces, of Malherbe's. Chassignet displayed some of the same
characteristics with a graver and more elegiac spirit. Gombaud is
chiefly remarkable as a sonneteer. The two most famous of the actual
pupils of Malherbe were Maynard and Racan. Maynard was a diplomatist and
lawyer of rank, who was born at Toulouse in 1582, and died in 1646. His
work is miscellaneous, and not very extensive, but it shows that he had
learned the secret of polished versification from Malherbe, and that he
was able to apply it with a good deal of vigour and of variety. Honorat
de Bueil, Marquis de Racan[225], was the author of a pastoral drama,
_Les Bergeries_, founded on, or imitated from, the _Astree_ of D'Urfe,
of an elaborate version of the Psalms, and of a considerable number of
the miscellaneous poems, _stances_, _odes_, _epitres_, etc., which were
fashionable. Racan, though his amiable private character and the
compliance of his principal work with a fashionable folly of the time
have caused him to be somewhat over-estimated traditionally, was a
thoroughly pleasing poet, with a great command of fluent and melodious
verse, a genuine love of nature, and occasionally a power of producing
poetry of a true kind which was shared by few of his contemporaries. The
remarkable author of _Tyr et Sidon_, Jean de Schelandre, produced,
besides his play, a considerable number of miscellaneous poems; but he
was a thorough reactionary, avowed his contempt of Malherbe, and
studied, not without success, Ronsard and his own coreligionist Du
Bartas as models. One of the most original, though at the same time one
of the most unequal poets of the early seventeenth century, was
Theophile de Viaud, often called Theophile[226] simply. He, too, was a
dramatist, but his dramas do not do him much credit, their style being
exaggerated and 'precious.' On the other hand, his miscellaneous poems,
though very unequal, include much work of remarkable beauty. The pieces
entitled 'La Solitude,' 'Sur une Tempete,' and the stanzas beginning
'Quand tu me vois baiser tes bras,' have all the fervour and
picturesqueness of the Pleiade without its occasional blemishes of
pedantic expression. Theophile was a loose liver and an unfortunate man.
He was accused, justly or unjustly, of writing indecent verses, was
imprisoned, and died young. All the poets hitherto mentioned were
writers of miscellaneous verse, who, except in so far as they held to
the elder tradition of Ronsard or the new gospel of Malherbe, can hardly
be said to have belonged to any school. Towards the middle of the
century, however, two well-defined fashions of poetry, with some minor
ones, distinguished themselves. There was, in the first place, the
school of the _coterie_ poets, who devoted themselves to producing _vers
de societe_, either for the ladies, or for the great men of the period.
The chief of this school was beyond all question Voiture[227]. This
admirable writer of prose and verse published absolutely nothing during
his lifetime, though his work was in private the delight of the salons.
That it should be, under the circumstances, somewhat frivolous is almost
unavoidable. But, especially after the cessation of the great flow of
inspiration which had characterised the sixteenth century, it was of no
small importance that the art of perfect expression should be cultivated
in French. Voiture was one of those who contributed most to the
cultivation of this art. His letters are as correct as those of Balzac,
and much less stilted; and of his poetry it is sufficient to say that
nothing more charming of the kind has ever been written than the sonnet
to Uranie, which stirred up a literary war, or the rondeau 'Ma foi c'est
fait de moi.' This last put once more in fashion a beautiful and
thoroughly French form, which it had been one of the worst deeds of the
Pleiade to make unfashionable. The chief rival of Voiture was Benserade,
a much younger man, whose sonnet on Job was held to excel, though it
certainly does not, that to Uranie. Benserade was of higher birth and
larger fortune than Voiture, and long outlived him. He was a great
writer of ballets or masques, and not unfrequently, like Voiture, showed
that a true poet underlay the fantastic disguises he put on. Around
these two are grouped numerous minor poets of different merit.
Boisrobert, the favourite of Richelieu and the companion of Rotrou and
Corneille in that minister's band of 'five poets;' Maleville, who in one
of the sonnet-tournaments of the time, that of the _Belle Matineuse_,
was supposed to have excelled even Voiture; Colletet, whose poems make
him less important in literature than his Lives of the French poets,
which unfortunately perished during the Commune before they had been
fully printed; Gomberville, more famous as a novelist; Sarrasin, an
admirable prose writer, and a clever composer of ballades and other
light verse; Godeau, a bishop and a very clever versifier; Blot, who was
rather a political than a social rhymer; Marigny, who was also famous
for his Mazarinades, but whose satirical power was by no means the only
side of his poetical talent; Charleval, whose personal popularity was
greater than his literary ability; Maucroix, the friend of La Fontaine;
Segrais, an eclogue writer of no small merit; Chapelle, an idle
epicurean, who derives most of his fame from the fact of his having been
intimate with all the foremost literary men of the time, and from his
having composed, in company with Bachaumont, a _Voyage_ in mixed prose
and verse, the form of which was long very popular in France and was
imitated with especial success by Anthony Hamilton and Voltaire;
Pavillon, who deserves a very similar general description, but who gave
no such single example of his abilities: all belong to this class.
[Sidenote: Epic School. Chapelain.]
Side by side with the frivolous school, but in curious contrast with it,
there existed a school of ponderous epic writers, the extirpation of
which is the best claim of Boileau to the gratitude of posterity. The
typical poets of this class are Georges de Scudery, the author of
_Alaric_, and Chapelain, the author of the _Pucelle_. Scudery was a
soldier and a man of considerable talent, who lacked nothing but
patience and the power of self-criticism to produce really good work.
Like his more famous sister, he had invention and literary facility. His
plays are not without merit in parts, and his epic of _Alaric_, amidst
astonishing platitudes and extravagances, has occasional good lines. But
Chapelain is by far the most remarkable figure of the school. He was
bred up to be a poet from his earliest age, and by a stroke of luck,
impossible in less anomalous times, he was taken at his own valuation
for years. _La Pucelle_ was quoted in manuscript, and anxiously expected
for half a short lifetime. It only appeared to be hopelessly damned.
There are passages in it of merit, but they are associated with lines
which read like designed burlesques. The onslaughts of Boileau have
created a kind of reaction in favour of Chapelain with some who disagree
with Boileau's poetical principles: but he is not defensible. His odes
are indeed tolerable in parts; not so the _Pucelle_, save, as has been
said, in occasional lines. The _Clovis_ of Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin is
worse than the _Pucelle_. On the other hand, the Pere le Moyne in his
_St. Louis_, taking apparently Du Bartas as his model, produced work
which, if not very readable as a whole, manifests real and very
considerable poetical talent. Lastly, Saint Amant in the _Moise Sauve_
showed how far below himself a clever writer may be when he mistakes his
style.
[Sidenote: Bacchanalian School. Saint Amant.]
Saint Amant[228], who, to do him justice, did not call _Moise Sauve_ an
epic but an 'idylle heroique,' is the link between this school and a
third composed of purely convivial poets, who even in this century
furnished work of remarkable excellence, and who produced a numerous and
brilliant progeny in the next. Saint Amant's Anacreontic poems are of
great merit. Of the same class was Saint Pavin, who was not merely a
free liver, but a member of the small but influential free-thinking sect
which preceded and gave birth to the _Philosophes_ of the next century.
This time, moreover, was the period of a curious literary trick, the
resuscitation or forging of the convivial poems of Oliver Basselin by a
Norman lawyer of the name of Jean le Houx. A genuine and contemporary
Basselin, in the person of a carpenter named Adam Billaut, produced some
notable work of the same kind. Unfortunately the Anacreontic poetry of
this time suffers from the too frequent coarseness of its language; a
fault which indeed was not fully corrected until Beranger's days.
[Sidenote: La Fontaine.]
The members, however, of all these schools have long lost their hold on
all but students of literature, and, with the exception of La Fontaine
and Boileau, it is not easy to mention any non-dramatic poet of the
seventeenth century who has kept a place in the general memory. Jean la
Fontaine[229] was born at Chateau Thierry in Champagne in the year 1621,
and died at Paris in 1695. His father held a considerable post as ranger
of the neighbouring forests, an office which passed to his son. La
Fontaine seems to have been carelessly educated, but after a certain
time literature attracted him, and he began to study in a desultory
fashion, without however, as it would appear, being himself tempted to
write. At the age of six-and-twenty he married Marie Hericart, a girl of
sixteen, who is said to have been both amiable and beautiful, and not
long afterwards he was left his own master by his father's death. He was
suited very ill by nature either to fill a responsible office or to be
head of a house. The well-known stories of his absence of mind, his
simplicity, his indifference to outward affairs, have no doubt been
exaggerated, but there is, equally without doubt, a foundation of fact
in them. On the other hand, though the most serious charges against his
wife seem to rest on no foundation, it is certain that she had little
aptitude for housewifery. After a time the household was broken up,
though there was offspring of the marriage. A division of goods was
effected, and husband and wife separated, not to meet again except on
visits and for brief spaces of time, though they seem to have remained
on perfectly friendly terms. La Fontaine went to Paris, and very soon
attracted the notice of Fouquet, the magnificent superintendent of the
finances, who gave him a pension of a thousand livres and made him a
member of his literary household. Here La Fontaine began to write. At
the downfall of Fouquet he was constant to his friend, and produced the
best-known of his miscellaneous poems, the 'Pleurez, Nymphes de
Vaux[230].' The misfortune unsettled him for a time, and he travelled
about. But returning to his native place, he was taken into favour by
the Duchess of Bouillon, and this was the beginning of a series of
patronages which lasted till the end of his life. Once more visiting
Paris, he became a favourite with many men and women of rank, and began
his serious literary work by producing the first part of his _Contes_.
The remaining parts and the _Fables_ appeared at intervals during the
remainder of his life. His second visit to Paris brought about his
traditional association with Boileau, Moliere, and Racine, the four
meeting at regular intervals, either in taverns or at lodgings in the
Rue Vieux Colombier. During the later years of his life La Fontaine was
a confirmed Parisian. His office at Chateau Thierry had been sold, and
he was the guest of various hospitable persons, the chief of whom was
Madame de la Sabliere. In 1668 appeared the first part of the _Fables_
with universal approval. But the free character of the _Contes_, and
still more the association of La Fontaine with some of the freethinkers
who were in ill-repute with the king's spiritual advisers, retarded his
admission to the Academy. When Colbert died, La Fontaine and Boileau
were the two candidates; an awkward accident, considering their
friendship, and the fact that the court was as decidedly for Boileau as
the Academy itself for La Fontaine. The latter was elected, but the king
delayed his assent, and even seemed likely to exercise a veto, when
fortunately a second vacancy occurred, and Boileau being elected, both
were approved by the king, Boileau warmly, La Fontaine with the
grudging terms 'Vous pouvez recevoir La Fontaine; il a promis d'etre
sage.' A curious warning of a similar tenor was contained in the
'Discours de Reception.'
La Fontaine's work is considerable, including many miscellaneous poems,
the romance of _Psyche_, and various dramatic attempts which were more
or less failures. But the _Contes_ and the _Fables_ are the only works
which have held their ground with posterity, and it is upon them that
his reputation is justly based. The first part of the _Contes_ appeared
at the extreme end of 1664[231], the second in 1667, the third in 1671,
but the author added pieces in successive editions. The first part of
the _Fables_ appeared in 1668, dedicated to the Dauphin, the second in
1679, dedicated to Madame de Montespan, the third in 1693, dedicated to
the Duc de Bourgogne, who is said to have been taught by Fenelon to
delight in La Fontaine, and to have sent him just before his death all
the money he had. The two books are complementary to each other, and La
Fontaine's genius cannot be judged by either alone. It has been remarked
that he was a diligent though apparently a very desultory reader. He
read the Italians, and, apparently with still more relish and profit,
the works of the old French writers, to whom the Italians owed so much.
The spirit of the Fabliaux had been dead, or at any rate dormant, since
Marot and Rabelais; La Fontaine revived it. Even purists, like his
friend Boileau, admitted a certain archaism in lighter poetry, and La
Fontaine would in all probability have troubled himself very little if
they had not. His language is, therefore, more supple, varied, and racy
than even that of Moliere, and this is his first excellence. His second
is a faculty of easy narration in verse, which is absolutely unequalled
except perhaps in Pulci and Ariosto, while it is certainly unsurpassed
anywhere. His third distinguishing point is his power of insinuating, it
may be a satirical point, it may be a moral reflection, which is also
hardly equalled and as certainly unsurpassed. In the authors whom La
Fontaine followed, either deliberately or unconsciously, the models of
his tales and his fables were indiscriminately mingled; but he separated
them by so rigid a line that, while there is hardly a phrase in his
_Fables_ which is not suited _virginibus puerisque_, the _Contes_ are
not exactly a book for youth. In the latter the author has taken
subjects, always amusing but not unfrequently loose, from the old
fabulists, from Boccaccio, from the French prose tale-tellers of the
_Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles_ and similar collections, from Rabelais, from
a few Italian writers of the Renaissance, and has dressed them up in the
incomparable narrative of which he alone has the secret. Where he treads
in the steps of the greatest writers he is almost always best. 'Joconde'
supplies the opportunity of a remarkable comparison with Ariosto; 'La
Fiancee du Roi de Garbe' of a still more remarkable comparison with
Boccaccio. In this latter respect the palm of vivid and varied narration
is with La Fontaine, but he misses something of the spirit of the
original in his portrait of Alaciel; indeed La Fontaine's weakest point
is in the comparatively pedestrian character of his treatment. He has
little romance, and in translating, not merely the Italians but such
countrymen and women of his own as the authors of the Heptameron, he
loses the poetical charm which, as has been pointed out, graces and
saves the morality or immorality of the Renaissance. Therefore, despite
the wonderful variety and vivid painting of the _Contes_, presenting a
series of pictures which for these qualities have few rivals in
literature, the disapproval with which censors more rigid than Johnson
(whose excuse of Prior will fairly stretch to Prior's original) have
visited them is not altogether unjustifiable.
The Fables, with hardly less excellence of the purely literary kind, are
fortunately free from the least vestige of any similar fault. La
Fontaine, instead of in the smallest degree degrading the beast-fable,
has, on the contrary, exalted it to almost the highest point of which it
is capable. Not many books have made and kept a more durable and solid
reputation. The few dissentient voices in the chorus of eulogy have been
those of eccentric crotcheteers like Rousseau, or sentimentalists like
Lamartine. It is, indeed, impossible to read the Fables without
prejudice and not be captivated by them. As mere narratives they are
charming, and the perpetual presence of an undercurrent of sly,
good-humoured, satirical meaning relieves them from all charge of
insipidity. La Fontaine, like Goldsmith, was with his pen in his hand as
shrewd and as deeply learned in human nature as without it he was simple
and _naif_.
Something has to be said of the form and strictly poetical value of
these two remarkable books--as remarkable, let it be remembered, for
their bulk as for their excellence, for between them they cannot contain
much less than 30,000 verses. The measure is almost always an irregular
mixture of lines of different lengths, rhyming sometimes in couplets,
sometimes in interlaced stanzas, which La Fontaine established as the
vehicle of serio-comic narration. For this, in his hands, it is
extraordinarily well fitted. As for the strictly poetic value of the
work, it is perhaps significant that though he is, taking quantity and
excellence together, the most important non-dramatic writer of verse of
the whole century in France, he is rarely thought of (out of France) as
a poet. A poet, indeed, in the highest sense of the word he is not. He
has hardly any passion, evidences of it being almost confined to the
elegy to Fouquet and, perhaps, as M. Theodore de Banville pleads, to the
'Faucon' and 'Courtisane Amoureuse' of the _Contes_. He has no
indefinite suggestion of beauty; even his descriptions of nature, though
always accurate and picturesque, being somewhat prosaic. He may be said
to be a prose writer of the very first class who chose to write in
verse, and who justified his choice by a wonderful technical ability in
the particular form of verse which he used. There is no greater mistake
than the supposition that La Fontaine's verse-writing is mere facile
improvisation.
[Sidenote: Boileau.]
Nicolas Boileau[232], who was long known in France as the 'Law-giver of
Parnassus,' and who, perhaps, exercised a more powerful and lasting
influence over the literature of his native country than any other
critic has ever enjoyed, was born at Paris on All Saints' Day, 1636. His
father held the post of registrar of one of the numerous courts of law,
and his family had legal connections of wide range and long date. He
himself was brought up to the law, but had not the least inclination
for it; and at his father's death, which happened exactly when he
attained his majority, his inheritance was considerable enough to allow
him to do as he pleased. The family was a large one, and, according to a
custom of the time, the brothers, or at least some of them, were
distinguished by additional surnames. That which Nicolas
took--Despreaux--was, at any rate during his youth, more frequently used
than his patronymic, and has continued to be applied to him
indifferently, thereby causing some odd blunders on the part of ignorant
people. He himself sometimes signed Despreaux and sometimes
Boileau-Despreaux. Besides law, he had also studied theology, and,
though he never took orders, he enjoyed for a considerable time a priory
at Beauvais, the profits of which, however, he returned when he
definitely abandoned the idea of the church as a profession. He very
early made attempts in literature, and when he was a man of seven- or
eight-and-twenty, he joined La Fontaine, Racine, and Moliere in the
celebrated society of four. Social and literary criticism was even thus
early his forte, and his first collections of Horatian satire were
published in 1666, though, owing to the influence of Chapelain, the
royal privilege was shortly after withdrawn from them. Boileau, however,
soon became a great favourite with the king, as, though in actual
conversation he retained his natural freedom of speech, he did not
hesitate to use the most grovelling flattery of expression in verse.
Pensions and places were given to him freely, so that, his own property
being not inconsiderable, he was one of the few wealthy men of letters
of the day. He was kept out of the Academy for some time by the fact
that he had libelled half its members and was unpopular with the other
half, but the royal influence at last got him in in 1684. In his later
years the morose arrogance, which was his chief characteristic,
increased on him, and was doubtless aggravated by the bad health from
which he suffered during the whole of his long life. He died in 1711,
having outlived all his friends except Louis himself.
Boileau's works consist of twelve satires, of the same number of
epistles, of an _Art Poetique_, of the _Lutrin_, a serio-comic poem, of
two odes, and of three or four score epigrams and miscellaneous pieces
in verse, with a translation of Longinus on the Sublime, some short
critical dissertations, and a number of letters in prose. With the
exception of the _Lutrin_ it will be observed that almost all his
poetical work is very closely modelled on Horace. His satire is
extremely clever, but, as necessarily happens when the frame and manner
of one time are used for the circumstances of another, it is altogether
artificial. The Horatian satire is nothing if not personal, and as
Boileau (even more than Pope, who strongly resembles him) had a bad
heart, his personalities are unusually reckless and offensive. Thus in a
couplet against parasites he inserted at one time the name of Colletet
(son of the Colletet mentioned above), at another that of Pelletier,
though both were notoriously free from the vice, and guilty of no fault
except poverty and a disposition to produce indifferent verse. Boileau's
crusade, too, against the minor poets of his day was unfortunately
followed by his own production of a ridiculous ode, excellently
burlesqued by Prior, on the taking of Namur in 1692 by the French. This,
with certain pieces of Young's, is perhaps the most glaring example
extant of how a writer of great talent and literary skill may combine
the basest flattery with the most abjectly bad verse. But where he
confined himself to his proper sphere, Boileau exhibited no small power.
He was, in fact, a slashing reviewer in verse, and there has rarely been
so effective a practitioner of the craft. Narrow as was his idea of
poetry, it was perfectly clear and precise, and, as his pupil Racine
showed, he could teach it to others with the most striking success. _Le
Lutrin_, too, is a poem which, in a rather trivial kind, is something of
a masterpiece. Its subject, the quarrel of a chapter of ecclesiastics
about the position of a _lutrin_ (lectern), afforded Boileau plenty of
opportunity for introducing that sarcasm on the upper middle classes
which was his forte; the verse is polished and correct, the satire,
though rather facile and conventional, agreeable enough. His satires and
epistles are full of striking traits evidently studied from the life,
but he is always personal and almost always artificial, never rising to
the large satiric conception of Regnier or of Dryden. So, too, most of
the stories which are recorded of him (and they are many) are stories of
ill-natured remarks. In his heart of hearts he knew and acknowledged
the greatness of Corneille, yet formally and in public he could not
refrain from directing unjust satire at the veteran whose masterpieces
had been produced when he was in his cradle, in order to exalt his own
pupil Racine, whom he privately owned to be simply a very clever and
docile rhymester. He himself was very much the same with the exception
of the docility. His good sense, his talents, his eye for the
ludicrous--except in his own work--were admirable, and the ill-nature of
his satires, with their frequent injustice and the strange ignorance
they display of all literature except the Latin classics and French and
Italian contemporary authors, does not prevent their being excellent
examples of French and of the art of polite libelling. It is probable
that Boileau might have fared better but for his inconceivable folly in
attempting, in the Namur ode, a style for which he had not the least
aptitude, and for the parrot-like monotony with which Frenchmen before
1830, and even some of them since that date, have lauded and quoted him
and accepted his dicta. But the most lenient estimate of him can hardly
amount to more than that he was an excellent writer of prose and
pedestrian verse, a critic of singular acuteness within a narrow range,
and a satirist who had a keen eye for the ludicrous aspect of things and
persons, and a remarkable skill at reproducing that aspect in words.
[Sidenote: Minor Poets of the later Seventeenth Century.]
The list of poets of the century has to be completed by some of more or
less importance who flourished in the later days of Louis XIV., and, in
some few cases, outlived him. Brebeuf might have been mentioned before,
as he was Boileau's elder, and, dying young, did not reach even the most
brilliant period of the reign. But he is unlike any of the three schools
who have been described, and his language is more modern than that of
most of the poets who wrote before or during the Fronde. His principal
work is a translation of the _Pharsalia_, in which both the defects and
the merits of the original are represented with remarkable fidelity.
Boileau, who found fault with his _fatras obscur_, allowed him frequent
flashes of genius, and these flashes are rather more frequent than might
be supposed, being also of a kind which Boileau was not usually inclined
to recognise. Brebeuf is decidedly of what may be called the right
school of French poets, though he is one of the least of that school.
His minor poetry displays the same characteristics as his translation,
but is of less importance. Madame Deshoulieres, still more unjustly
criticised by Boileau, is unquestionably one of the chief poetesses of
France; indeed, with Louise Labe and Marceline Desbordes Valmore, she is
almost the only one of importance. Her poems, like those of most of her
contemporaries, are of the occasional order, and have too much in them
that is artificial, but frequently also they have real pathos and
occasionally not a little vigour. 'Le Songe' is a very admirable ode,
having some of the characteristics of the English Caroline school.
Racine himself, independently of his dramas, and the choruses inserted
in them, wrote some poetry, chiefly religious, which has his usual
characteristics of refinement in language and versification. Anthony
Hamilton has left some verses (notably an exquisite song, beginning
'Celle qu'adore mon coeur n'est ni brune ni blonde') as dainty and
original as his prose. At the end of the century two poets, whose names
always occur together in literary history, the Abbe de Chaulieu and the
Marquis de la Fare, close the record. They were not only alike in their
literary work, but were personal friends, and not the worst of
Chaulieu's pieces is an elegy on La Fare, whom, though the older man of
the two, he survived. They were both members of the libertine society of
the Temple, over which the Duke de Vendome presided, and which, somewhat
later, formed Voltaire. The verses of both were strictly occasional.
Chaulieu, like many men of letters of the time, published nothing during
his long life, though his poems were known to French society in
manuscript. Besides the verses on La Fare, Chaulieu's best poem is,
perhaps, that 'On a Country Life' (the author being an inveterate
inhabitant of towns). La Fare, on the other hand, is best known by his
stanzas to Chaulieu on 'La Paresse,' which he was well qualified to
sing, inasmuch as it is said that during many years of his long life he
did nothing but sleep and eat. The verses of the two continued to be
models of style, and (in a way) of choice of subject, during the whole
eighteenth century. Macaulay's rhetorical description of Frederic's
verses, as 'hateful to gods and men, the faint echo of the lyre of
Chaulieu,' is not quite just in its suggestion. Chaulieu, and still
more La Fare, wrote very fair occasional poetry. One curious application
of verse during this century requires mention in conclusion. This was
the Gazette, or rhymed news-letter, in which the gossip of the day, the
diversions of the court, etc., were recorded for the amusement and
instruction of great persons in the most pedestrian of octosyllables.
The chief writer of these trifles, which are very voluminous, and which
have preserved many curious particulars, was Loret, who was succeeded by
Robinet, Boursault, Laurent, and others.
FOOTNOTES:
[224] Ed. Lalanne. 5 vols. Paris, 1862 67; also (poems only)
conveniently by Jannet. Paris, 1874. Besides his verse Malherbe wrote
some translations of Seneca and Livy, and a great number of letters,
including many to Peiresc, a savant of the time who is best known from
Gassendi's _Life_ of him.
[225] Ed. Latour. 2 vols. Paris, 1857.
[226] Ed. Alleaume. 2 vols. Paris, 1855.
[227] Ed. Ubicini. 2 vols. Paris, 1855.
[228] Ed. Livet. 2 vols. Paris, 1855.
[229] This is in reality the beginning of the _second_ line of the poem,
though it is often quoted as if it were the first.
[230] Ed. Moland. 7 vols. Paris, 1879. Also ed. Regnier, vol. i. Paris,
1883.
[231] In previous editions this date was, by an oversight, wrongly
printed as 1662. M. Scherer in correcting it has himself made a probable
mistake in giving '1665.' That date is on the title-page, but the
_acheve d'imprimer_ is dated Dec. 10, 1664, and as a second edition was
finished by Jan. 10, 1665, it is practically certain that the book was
out before the end of the year.
[232] Ed. Fournier. Paris, 1873.
CHAPTER II.
DRAMATISTS.
While the influence of Malherbe was thus cramping and withering poetry
proper in France, it combined with some other causes to enable drama to
attain the highest perfection possible in the particular style
practised. In non-dramatic poetry, the only name of the seventeenth
century which can be said even to approach the first class is that of La
Fontaine, whose verse, except for its technical excellence, is almost as
near to prose as to poetry itself. But the names of Corneille, Racine,
and Moliere stand in the highest rank of French authors, and their works
will remain the chief examples of the kind of drama which they
professed. Nor is this difference in any way surprising. It has been
already shown that the style of drama introduced into France by the
Pleiade, and pursued with but little alteration afterwards, was a highly
artificial and a highly limited kind. It lent itself successfully to
comparatively few situations; it excluded variety of action on the
stage; it gave no opening for the display of complicated character. But
these very limitations made it susceptible of very high polish and
elaboration within its own limited range, and made such polish and
elaboration almost a necessity if it was to be tolerable at all. The
correct and cold language and style which Malherbe preached; the
regularity and harmony of versification on which he insisted; the strict
attention to rule rather than impulse which he urged, all suited a thing
in itself so artificial as the Senecan tragedy. They were not so
suitable to the more libertine genius of comedy. But here, fortunately
for France, the regulations were less rigid, and the abiding popularity
of the indigenous farce gave a healthy corrective. The astonishing
genius of Moliere succeeded in combining the two influences--the lawless
freedom of the old farce, and the ordered decency of the Malherbian
poetry. Even his theatre shows some sign of the taint with which
'classical' drama is so deeply imbued, but its force and truth almost or
altogether redeem the imperfections of its scheme.
[Sidenote: Montchrestien.]
We have seen that the early tragedy, which was more or less directly
reproductive of Seneca, attained its highest pitch in the work of
Garnier. This pitch was on the whole well maintained by Antoine de
Montchrestien, a man of a singular history and of a singular genius. The
date of his birth is not exactly known, but he was the son of an
apothecary at Falaise, and belonged to the Huguenot party. Duels and
lawsuits succeed each other in his story, and by some means or other he
was able to assume the title of Seigneur de Vasteville. In one of his
duels he killed his man, and had to fly to England. Being pardoned, he
returned to France and took to commerce. But after the death of Henri
IV. he joined a Huguenot rising, and was killed in October 1621.
Montchrestien wrote a treatise on Political Economy (he is even said to
have been the first to introduce the term into French), some poems, and
six tragedies, _Sophonisbe_, or _La Cartaginoise_, _Les Lacenes_,
_David_, _Aman_, _Hector_, and _L'Ecossaise_. Racine availed himself not
a little of _Aman_, but _L'Ecossaise_ is Montchrestien's best piece. In
it he set the example to a long line of dramatists, from Vondel to Mr.
Swinburne, who have since treated the story of Mary Queen of Scots. It
is not part of the merit of Montchrestien to have improved on the
technical defects of the Jodelle-Garnier model. His action is still
deficient, his speeches immoderately long. But his choric odes are of
great beauty, and his _tirades_, disproportionate as they are, show a
considerable advance in the power of indicating character as well as in
style and versification. Beyond this, however, the force of the model
could no further go, and some alteration was necessary. Indeed it is by
no means certain that the later plays of this class were ever acted at
all, or were anything more than closet drama.
[Sidenote: Hardy.]
[Sidenote: Minor predecessors of Corneille.]
For a not inconsiderable time the fate of French tragedy trembled in
the balance. During the first thirty years of the seventeenth century
the most prominent dramatist was Alexandre Hardy[233]. He is the first
and not the least important example in French literary history of a
dramatic author pure and simple, a playwright who was a playwright, and
nothing else. Hardy was for years attached to the regular company of
actors who had succeeded the _Confrerie_ at the Hotel de Bourgogne, and
wrote or adapted pieces for them at the tariff (it is said) of fifty
crowns a play. His fertility was immense; and he is said to have written
some hundreds of plays. The exact number is variously stated at from
five to seven hundred. Forty-one exist in print. Although not destitute
of original power, Hardy was driven to the already copious theatre of
Spain for subjects and models. His plays being meant for acting and for
nothing else, the scholarly but tedious exercitations of the Pleiade
school were out of the question. Yet, while he introduced a great deal
of Spanish embroilment into his plots, and a great deal of Spanish
bombast into his speeches, Hardy still accepted the general outline of
the classical tragedy, and, though utterly careless of unity of place
and time, adhered for the most part to the perhaps more mischievous
unity of action. His best play, _Mariamne_, is powerfully written, is
arranged with considerable skill, and contains some fine lines and even
scenes; but, little as Hardy hampered himself with rules, it still has,
to an English reader, a certain thinness of interest. A contemporary of
Hardy's, Jean de Schelandre, made, in a play[234] which does not seem
ever to have been acted, a remarkable attempt at enfranchising French
tragedy with the full privileges rather of the English than of the
Spanish drama; but this play, _Tyr et Sidon_, had no imitators and no
influence, and the general model remained unaltered. But during the
first quarter of the century the theatre was exceedingly popular, and
the institution of strolling troops of actors spread its popularity all
over France. Nearly a hundred names of dramatic writers of this time are
preserved. Most of these, no doubt, were but retainers of the houses or
the troops, and did little but patch, adapt, and translate. But of the
immediate predecessors of Corneille, and his earlier contemporaries, at
least half-a-dozen are more or less known to fame, besides the really
great name of Rotrou. Mairet, Tristan, Du Ryer, Scudery, Claveret, and
D'Aubignac, were the chief of these. Mairet has been called the French
Marston, and the resemblance is not confined to the fact that both wrote
tragedies on the favourite subject of Sophonisba. The chief work of
Tristan, who was also a poet of some merit, was _Marianne_ (Mariamne),
very closely modelled on an Italian original, and much less vigorous,
though more polished than Hardy's play on the same subject. Du Ryer had
neither Mairet's vigour nor Tristan's tenderness, but he made more
progress than either of them had done in the direction of the completed
tragedy of Corneille and Racine. Scudery's _Amour Tyrannique_ is
vigorous and bombastic. Claveret and D'Aubignac (the latter of whom was
an active critic as well as a bad playwright) principally derive their
reputation, such as it is, from the acerbity with which they attacked
Corneille in the dispute about the Cid; nor should the name of Theophile
de Viaud be passed over in this connection. His _Pyrame et Thisbe_ is
often considered as almost the extreme example (though Corneille's
_Clitandre_ is perhaps worse) of the conceited Spanish-French style in
tragedy. The passage in which Thisbe accuses the poniard with which
Pyramus has stabbed himself of blushing at having sullied itself with
the blood of its master is a commonplace of quotation. Yet, like all
Theophile's work, _Pyrame et Thisbe_ has value, and so has the
unrepresented tragedy of _Pasiphae_.
[Sidenote: Rotrou.]
Among these forgotten names, and others more absolutely forgotten still,
that of Rotrou[235] is pre-eminently distinguished. Jean de Rotrou (the
particle is not uniformly allowed him) was born at Dreux in 1609, and
was thus three years younger than Corneille. He went earlier to Paris,
however, and at once betook himself to dramatic poetry, his
_Hypocondriaque_ being represented before he was nineteen. He formed
with Corneille, Colletet, Bois-Robert, and L'Etoile, the band of
Richelieu's 'Five Poets,' who composed tragedies jointly on the
Cardinal's plans[236]. He also worked unceasingly at the theatre on his
own account. Thirty-five pieces are certainly, and five more doubtfully,
attributed to him. For some time he had to work for bread, and the only
weakness charged against him, a mania for gambling, left him poor, and
perhaps prevented him from devoting to his work as much pains as he
might otherwise have given. After a time, however, he was pensioned, and
appointed to various legal posts which members of his family had
previously held at Dreux. His fidelity to his official duty was the
cause of his death. He was at Paris when a violent epidemic broke out at
Dreux. All who could left the town, and Rotrou was strongly dissuaded
from returning. But he felt himself responsible for the maintenance of
order, likely at such a time to be specially endangered. He returned at
once, caught the infection, and died. Rotrou's plays are too numerous
for a complete list of them to be here given, and by common consent two
of them, _Le Veritable Saint Genest_ and _Venceslas_, greatly excel the
rest, though vigorous verse and good scenes are to be found in almost
all. These plays, it should be observed, were not written until after
the publication of Corneille's early masterpieces, though Rotrou had
exhibited a play the year before the appearance of _Melite_. The two
poets were friends, and though Corneille in a manner supplanted him,
Rotrou was unwavering throughout his life in expressions of admiration
for his great rival. Of the two plays just mentioned, _Venceslas_ is the
more regular, the better adapted to the canons of the French stage, and
the more even in its excellence. _Saint Genest_ is perhaps the more
interesting. The central idea is remarkable. Genest, an actor, performs
before Diocletian a part in which he represents a Christian martyr. He
is miraculously converted during the study of the piece, and at its
performance, after astonishing the audience by the fervour and vividness
with which he plays his part, boldly speaks in his own person, and,
avowing his conversion, is led off to prison and martyrdom. Many of the
speeches in this play are admirable poetry, and the plot is far from
ill-managed. The play within a play, of which _Hamlet_ and the _Taming
of the Shrew_ are English examples, was, at this transition period, a
favourite stage incident in France. Corneille's _Illusion_ is the most
complicated example of it, but _Saint Genest_ is by far the most
interesting and the best managed.
[Sidenote: Corneille.]
There is every reason to believe that though, as has been said, Rotrou's
best pieces were influenced by Corneille, the greater poet owed
something at the beginning of his career to the example of his friend.
Pierre Corneille[237] was born at Rouen in 1606. His father, of the same
name, was an official of rank in the legal hierarchy; his mother was
named Marthe le Pesant. He was educated in the Jesuits' school, went to
the bar, and obtained certain small legal preferments which he
afterwards sold. He practised, but 'sans gout et sans succes,' says
Fontenelle, his nephew and biographer. His first comedy, _Melite_, is
said to have been suggested by a personal experience. It succeeded at
Rouen, and the author took it to Paris. His next attempt was a tragedy
or a tragi-comedy, _Clitandre_, of a really marvellous extravagance. It
was followed by several other pieces, in all of which there is
remarkable talent, though the author had not yet found his way. He found
it at last in _Medee_, where the famous reply of the heroine 'Que vous
reste-t-il?' 'Moi,' struck at once the note which no one but Corneille
himself and Victor Hugo has ever struck since, and which no one had ever
struck before. Corneille, as has been said above, was one of Richelieu's
five poets, but he was indocile to the Cardinal's caprices; and either
this indocility or jealousy set Richelieu against _Le Cid_. This great
and famous play was suggested by, rather than copied from, the Spanish
of Guillem de Castro. It excited an extraordinary turmoil among men of
letters, but the public never went wrong about it from the first.
Boileau's phrase--
Tout Paris pour Chimene a les yeux de Rodrigue,
is as sound in fact as it is smart in expression. The _Cid_ appeared in
1636, and for some years Corneille produced a succession of
masterpieces. _Horace_, _Cinna_, _Polyeucte_, _Le Menteur_ (a remarkable
comic effort, to which Moliere acknowledged his indebtedness), and
_Rodogune_, in some respects the finest of all, succeeded each other at
but short intervals. Half-a-dozen plays, somewhat inferior in actual
merit, and which had the drawback of coming before a public used to the
author and his method, followed, and the last and least good of them,
_Pertharite_, was damned. Corneille, always the proudest of writers, was
deeply wounded by this ill-success, and publicly renounced the stage. He
devoted himself for some years to a strange task, the turning of the
_Imitation_ of A'Kempis into verse. At last Fouquet, the Maecenas of the
day, prevailed on him to begin again. He did so with _Oedipe_, which
was successful. It was followed by many other plays, which had varying
fates. Racine, with a method refined upon Corneille's own, and a greater
sympathy with the actual generation, became the rival of the elder poet,
and Corneille did not obey the wise maxim, _solve senescentem_. Yet his
later plays have far more merit than is usually allowed to them.
The private life of Corneille was not unhappy, though his haughty and
sensitive temperament brought him many vexations. His gains were small,
never exceeding two hundred louis for a play, and though this was
supplemented by occasional gifts from rich dedicatees and by a scanty
private fortune, the total was insufficient. 'Je suis saoul de gloire et
affame d'argent' is one of the numerous sayings of scornful discontent
recorded of him. He had a pension, but it was in his later days very ill
paid. Nor was he one of the easy-going men of letters who console
themselves by Bohemian indulgence. In general society he was awkward,
constrained, and silent: but his home, which was long shared with his
brother Thomas--they married two sisters--seems to have been a happy
one. He retained till his death in 1684, if not the favour of the King
and the general public, that of the persons whose favour was best worth
having, such as Saint-Evremond and Madame de Sevigne, and his own
confidence in his genius never deserted him.
Corneille's dramatic career may be divided into four parts; the first
reaching from _Melite_ to _L'Illusion Comique_; the second (that of his
masterpieces), from the _Cid_ to _Rodogune_; the third, from _Theodore_
to _Pertharite_; the fourth, that of the decadence, from _Oedipe_ to
_Surena_. The following is a list of the names and dates (these latter
being sometimes doubtful and contentious) of his plays. _Melite_, 1629,
a comedy improbable and confused in incident and overdone with verbal
_pointes_, but much beyond anything previous to it. _Clitandre_, 1630, a
tragedy in the taste of the time, one of the maddest of plays. _La
Veuve_, 1634, a comedy, well written and lively. _La Galerie du Palais_
(same year), a capital comedy of its immature kind, bringing in the
humours of contemporary Paris. _La Suivante_, a comedy (same year), in
which the great character of the soubrette makes her first appearance.
_La Place Royale_, a comedy, 1635, duller than the _Galerie du Palais_,
which it in some respects resembles. _Medee_, a tragedy (same year),
incomparably the best French tragedy up to its date. _L'Illusion
Comique_, 1636, a tragi-comedy of the extremest Spanish type,
complicated and improbable to a degree in its action, which turns on the
motive of a play within a play, and produces, as the author himself
remarks, a division into prologue (Act i), an imperfect comedy (Acts
ii-iv), and a tragedy (Act v). _Le Cid_, 1636, the best-known if not the
best of Corneille's plays, and, from the mere playwright's point of
view, the most attractive. _Horace_, 1639, often, but improperly, called
_Les Horaces_, in which the Cornelian method is seen complete. The final
speech of Camille before her brother kills her was as a whole never
exceeded by the author, and the 'qu'il mourut' of the elder Horace is
equally characteristic. _Cinna_, 1639, the general favourite in France,
but somewhat stilted and devoid of action to foreign taste. _Polyeucte_,
1640, the greatest of all Christian tragedies. _La Mort de Pompee_,
1641, full of stately verse, but heavy and somewhat grandiose. _Le
Menteur_, 1642, a charming comedy, followed by a _Suite du Menteur_,
1643, not inferior, though the fickleness of public taste disapproved
it. _Theodore_, 1645, a noble tragedy, which only failed because the
prudery of theatrical precisians found fault with its theme--the
subjection of a Christian virgin to the last and worst trial of her
honour and faith. _Rodogune_, 1646, the _chef-d'oeuvre_ of the style,
displaying from beginning to end an astonishing power of moving
admiration and terror. This play marks the climax of Corneille's
faculty. In _Heraclius_, 1647, no real falling-off is visible; indeed,
the character of Phocas stands almost alone on the French stage as a
parallel in some sort to Iago. _Andromede_, 1650, introduced a
considerable amount of spectacle and decoration, not unhappily. _Don
Sanche d'Aragon_, 1651, _Nicomede_, 1652, and _Pertharite_, 1653 (each
of which may possibly be a year older than these respective dates), show
what political economists might call the stationary state of the poet's
genius. The first two plays produced after the interval, _Oedipe_,
1659, and _La Toison d'Or_, 1660, both show the benefit of the rest the
poet had had, together with certain signs of advancing years. _La Toison
d'Or_, like _Andromede_, includes a great deal of spectacle, and is
rather an elaborate masque interspersed with regular dramatic scenes
than a tragedy. It is one of the best specimens of the kind. In
_Sertorius_, 1662, there are occasional passages of much grandeur and
beauty, but _Sophonisbe_, 1663, is hardly a success, nor is _Othon_,
1664. _Agesilas_, 1666, and _Attila_, 1667, have been (the latter
unfairly) damned by a quatrain of Boileau's. But _Tite et Berenice_,
1670, must be acknowledged to be inferior to the play of Racine in
rivalry with which it was produced. _Pulcherie_, 1672, and _Surena_,
1674, are last-fruits off an old tree, which, especially the second, are
not unworthy of it. Nor was Corneille's contribution to the remarkable
opera of _Psyche_, 1671, inconsiderable. This completes his dramatic
work, which amounts to thirty pieces and part of another. It should be
added that, to all the plays up to _La Toison d'Or_, he subjoined in a
collected edition very remarkable criticisms of them, which he calls
_Examens_.
The characteristics of this great dramatist are perhaps more uniform
than those of any writer of equal rank, and there can be little doubt
that this uniformity, which, considering the great bulk of his work,
amounts almost to monotony, was the cause of his gradual loss of
popularity. We shall not here notice the points which he has in common
with Racine, as a writer of the French classical drama. These will come
in more suitably when Racine himself has been dealt with. In Corneille
the academic criticism of the time found the fault that he rather
excited admiration than pity and terror, and it held that admiration
was 'not a tragic passion.' The criticism was clumsy, and to a great
extent futile, but it has a certain basis of truth. It is comparatively
rare for Corneille to attempt, after his earliest period, to interest
his hearers or readers in the fortunes of his characters. It is rather
in the way that they bear their fortunes, and particularly in a kind of
haughty disdain for fortune itself, that these characters impress us.
Sometimes, as in the Cleopatre of _Rodogune_, this masterful temper is
engaged on the side of evil, more frequently it is combined with amiable
or at least respectable characteristics. But there is always something
'remote and afar' about it, and the application by La Bruyere of the
famous comparison between the Greek tragedians is in the main strictly
accurate. It follows that Corneille's demand upon his hearers or readers
is a somewhat severe one, and one with which many men are neither
disposed nor able to comply. It was a greater misfortune for him than
for almost any one else that the French and not the English drama was
the Sparta which it fell to his lot to decorate. His powers were not in
reality limited. The _Menteur_ shows an excellent comic faculty, and the
strokes of irony in his serious plays have more of true humour in them
than appears in almost any other French dramatist. Had the licence of
the English stage been his, he would probably have been able to impart a
greater interest to his plays than they already possess, without
sacrificing his peculiar faculty of sublime moral portraiture, and
certainly without losing the credit of the magnificent single lines and
isolated passages which abound in his work. The friendly criticism of
Moliere on these sudden flashes is well known. 'My friend Corneille,' he
said, 'has a familiar who comes now and then and whispers in his ear the
finest verses in the world, but sometimes the familiar deserts him, and
then he writes no better than anybody else.' The most fertile familiar
cannot suggest fifty or sixty thousand of these finest lines in the
world; and the consequence is that, what with the lack of central
interest which follows from Corneille's own plan, with the absence of
subsidiary interest and relief which is inevitable in the French
classical model, and with the drawbacks of his somewhat declamatory
style, there are long passages, sometimes whole scenes and acts, if not
whole plays of his, which are but dreary reading, and could hardly be,
even with the most appreciative and creative acting, other than dreary
to witness. It was Corneille's fault that, while bowing himself to the
yoke of the Senecan drama, he did not perceive or would not accept the
fact that there is practically but one situation, by the working out of
which that drama can be made tolerable to modern audiences. This
situation is love-making, which in real life necessitates a vast deal of
talking, and about which, even on the stage, a vast deal of talking is
admissible. The characters of the French classic or heroic play are
practically allowed to do nothing but talk, and the author who would
make them interesting must submit himself to his fate. Corneille would
not submit wholly and cheerfully, though he has, as might be expected,
been obliged to introduce love-making into most of his plays.
To a modern reader the detached passages already referred to, and the
magnificent versification which is displayed in them, make up the real
charm of Corneille except in a very few plays, such as the _Cid_,
_Polyeucte_, _Rodogune_, and perhaps a few others. Du Bartas, D'Aubigne,
and Regnier, had indicated the capacities of the Alexandrine; Corneille
demonstrated them and illustrated them almost indefinitely. He did not
indulge in the pedantry of _rimes difficiles_, by which Racine attracted
his hearers, nor was his verse so uniformly smooth as that of his
younger rival. But what it lacked in polish and grace it more than made
up in grandeur and dignity. The best lines of Corneille, like those of
D'Aubigne, of Rotrou, from whom, comparatively stammering as was the
teacher, Corneille perhaps learnt the art, and of Victor Hugo, have a
peculiar crash of sound which hardly any other metre of any other
language possesses. A slight touch of archaism (it is very slight) which
is to be discovered in his work assists its effect not a little. The
inveterate habit which exists in England of comparing all dramatists
with Shakespeare has been prejudicial to the fame of Corneille with us.
But he is certainly the greatest tragic dramatist of France on the
classical model, and as a fashioner of dramatic verse of a truly
poetical kind he has at his best few equals in the literature of Europe.
[Sidenote: Racine.]
The character, career, and work of Racine were curiously different from
those of Corneille. Jean Racine[238] was more than thirty years younger
than his greater rival, having been born at La Ferte Milon, at no great
distance from Soissons, in 1639. His father held an official position at
this place, but he died, as Racine's mother had previously died, in the
boy's infancy, leaving him without any fortune. His grandparents,
however, were alive, and able to take care of him, and they, with other
relatives, willingly undertook the task. He was well educated, going to
school at Beauvais, from 1650 (probably) to 1655, and then spending
three years under the care of the celebrated Port Royalists, where he
made considerable progress. A year at the College d'Harcourt, where he
should have studied law, completed his regular education; but he was
always studious, and had on the whole greater advantages of culture than
most men of letters of his time and country. For some years he led a
somewhat undecided life. His relations did their best to obtain a
benefice for him, and in other ways endeavoured to put him in the way of
a professional livelihood; but ill-luck and probably disinclination on
his part stood in the way. He wrote at least two plays at a
comparatively early age which were refused, and are not known to exist,
and he produced divers pieces of miscellaneous poetry, especially the
'Nymphe de la Seine,' which brought him to the notice of Chapelain. At
last, in 1664, he obtained a pension of six hundred livres for an ode on
the king's recovery from sickness, and the same year _La Thebaide_ was
accepted and produced. For the next thirteen years plays followed in
rapid, but not too rapid succession. Racine was the favourite of the
king, and consequently of all those who had no taste of their own, as
well as of some who had, though the best critics inclined to Corneille,
between whom and Racine rivalry was industriously fostered. The somewhat
indecent antagonism which Racine had shown towards a man who had won
renown ten years before his own birth was justly punished in his own
temporary eclipse by the almost worthless Pradon. He withdrew disgusted
from the stage in 1677. About the same time he married, was made
historiographer to the king, and became more or less fervently devout.
Years afterwards, at the request of Madame de Maintenon, he wrote for
her school-girls at St. Cyr the dramatic sketch of _Esther_, and soon
afterwards the complete tragedy of _Athalie_, the greatest of his works.
Then he relapsed into silence as far as dramatic utterance was
concerned. He died in 1699. Thus he presented the singular spectacle,
only paralleled by our own Congreve, and that not exactly, of a short
period of consummate activity followed by almost complete inaction. That
this inaction was not due to exhaustion of genius was abundantly shown
by _Esther_ and _Athalie_. But Racine was of a peculiar and in many ways
an unamiable temper. He was very jealous of his reputation, acutely
sensitive to criticism, and envious to the last degree of any public
approbation bestowed on others. Having made his fame, he seems to have
preferred, in the language of the French gaming table, _faire
Charlemagne_, and to run no further risks. He had, however, worse
failings than any yet mentioned. Moliere gave him valuable assistance,
and he repaid it with ingratitude. With hardly a shadow of provocation
he attacked in a tone of the utmost acrimony the Port Royal fathers, to
whom he was under deep obligations. The charge of hypocrisy in religious
matters which has been brought against him is probably gratuitous, and,
in any case, does not concern us here. But his character in his literary
relations is far from being a pleasant one.
The following is a list of Racine's theatrical pieces. _La Thebaide_,
1664, indicates with sufficient clearness the lines upon which all
Racine's plays, save the two last, were to be constructed--a minute
adherence to the rules, very careful versification and subordination of
almost all other interests to stately gallantry--but it is altogether
inferior to its successors. In _Alexandre le Grand_, 1665, the
characteristics are accentuated, and what Corneille disdainfully
called--
Le commerce rampant de soupirs et de flammes
is more than ever prominent. In _Andromaque_, 1667, an immense advance
is perceptible. The characters become personally interesting (Hermione
is perhaps more attractive than any of Corneille's women), and a power
of passionate invective not unworthy to be compared with Corneille's,
but with more of a feminine character about it, appears. This was
followed by Racine's only attempt in the comic sock, _Les Plaideurs_,
1668, a most charming trifle which has had, and has deserved, more
genuine and lasting popularity than any of his tragedies. He returned to
tragedy, and rapidly showed the defects of the stereotyped mannerism
inevitably imposed on him by his plan. _Britannicus_, 1669, _Berenice_,
1670, _Bajazet_, 1672, and _Mithridate_, 1673, with all their perfection
of _technique_, announce, as clearly as anything can well do, the fatal
monotony into which French tragedy had once more fallen, and in which it
was to continue for a century and a half. _Iphigenie_, 1674, has much
more liveliness and variety, the deep pathos and terror of the situation
making even Racine's interminable love casuistry natural and
interesting. But _Phedre_, 1677, the last of the series, is
unquestionably the most remarkable of Racine's regular tragedies. By it
the style must stand or fall, and a reader need hardly go farther to
appreciate it. _Britannicus_ was indeed preferred by eighteenth-century
judges; but for excellence of construction, artful beauty of verse,
skilful use of the limited means of appeal at the command of the
dramatist, no play can surpass _Phedre_; and if it still is found
wanting, as it undoubtedly is by the vast majority of critics (including
nowadays a powerful minority even among Frenchmen themselves), the fault
lies rather in the style than in the author, or at least in the author
for adopting the style. _Esther_, 1689, and _Athalie_, 1691, on the
other hand, while retaining a certain similarity of form and machinery,
are radically different from the other plays. It is evident that Racine
before writing them had attentively studied the sixteenth-century drama,
to the strict form of which with its choruses he returns, and from which
he borrows, in some cases directly, the _Aman_ of Montchrestien having
clearly suggested passages in _Esther_. His great poetical faculty has
freer play; he escapes the monotonous 'soupirs et flammes' altogether,
and the result is in _Esther_ on the whole, in _Athalie_ wholly,
admirable.
Racine's peculiarities as a dramatist have been already indicated, but
may now be more fully described. He was emphatically one of those
writers--Virgil and Pope are the other chief notable representatives of
the class--who, with an incapacity for the finest original strokes of
poetry, have an almost unlimited capacity for writing from models, for
improving the technical execution of their poems, and for adjusting the
conception of their pieces to their powers of rendering. These writers
are always impossible without forerunners, and not usually possible
without critics of the pedagogic kind. Racine was extraordinarily
fortunate in his forerunner, and still more fortunate in his critic. He
was able to start with all the advantages which thirty years of work on
the part of his rival, Corneille, gave him; and he had for his trainer,
Boileau, one of the most capable, if one of the most limited and
prejudiced, of literary schoolmasters. Boileau was no respecter of
persons, and arrogant as he was, he was rather an admirer of Racine than
of Corneille; yet, according to a well-known story, he distinguished
between the two by saying that Corneille was a great poet, and Racine a
very clever man, to whom he himself had taught the knack of easy
versification with elaborate rhyming. It is indeed in his versification
that both the strength and the weakness of Racine lie, and in this
respect he is an exact analogue to the poets mentioned above. He treated
the Alexandrine of Corneille exactly as Pope treated the decasyllable of
Dryden, and as Virgil treated the hexameter of Lucretius. In his hands
it acquired smoothness, softness, polish, and mechanical perfections of
many kinds, only to suffer at the same time a compensatory monotony
which, when the honied sweetness of it began to cloy, was soon
recognised as a terrible drawback. The extraordinary estimation in which
Racine is held by those who abide by the classical tradition in France
depends very mainly on the melody of his versification and rhymes, but
it does not depend wholly upon this. There must also be taken into
account the perfection of workmanship with which he carries out the idea
of the drama which he practised. What that ideal was must therefore be
considered.
It must be remembered that the object of the French drama of Racine's
time was not in the least to hold the mirror up to nature. The model
which, owing to admiration of the classics, the Pleiade had almost at
haphazard followed, rendered such an object simply unattainable. The
so-called irregularity of the English stage, which used to fill French
critics with alternate wonder and disgust, is nothing but the result of
an unflinching adherence to this standard. It is impossible to reproduce
the _subtilitas naturae_ in its most subtle example--the character of
man--without introducing a large diversity of circumstance and action.
That diversity in its turn cannot be produced without a great
multiplication of characters, a duplication or triplication of plot, and
a complete disregard of pre-established 'common form.' Now this 'common
form' was the essence of French tragedy. Following, or thinking that
they followed, the ancients, French dramatists and dramatic critics
adopted certain fixed rules according to which a poet had to write just
as a whist-player has to play the game. There was to be no action on the
stage, or next to none, the interest of the play was to be rigidly
reduced to a central situation, subsidiary characters were to be avoided
as far as possible, the only means afforded to the personages of
explaining themselves was by dialogue with confidantes--the curse of the
French stage--and the only way of informing the audience of the progress
of the action was by messengers. Corneille accepted these limitations
partially, and without too much good-will, but he evaded the difficulty
by emphasising the moral lesson. The ethical standard of his plays is
perhaps higher on the whole than that of any great dramatist, and the
wonderful bursts of poetry which he could command served to sugar the
pill. But Racine was not a man of high moral character, and he was a man
of great shrewdness and discernment. He evidently distrusted the
willingness of audiences perpetually to admire moral grandeur, whether
he did or did not hold that admiration was not a tragic passion.
Probably he would have put it that it was not a passion that would draw.
Love-making, on the contrary, would draw, and love-making accordingly is
the staple of all his plays. But the defect which has attended all
French literature, which was aggravated enormously by this style of
drama, and which is noticeable even in his greater contemporaries,
Corneille and Moliere, manifested itself in his work almost inevitably.
If there is one fault to be found with the creations of French literary
art, it is that they run too much into types. It has been well said that
the duty of art is to give the universal in the particular. But to do
this exactly is difficult. It is the fault of English and of German
literature to give the particular without a sufficient tincture of the
universal, to lose themselves in mere 'humours.' It is the fault of
French literature to give the type only without differentiation. An
ill-natured critic constantly feels inclined to alter the lists of
Racine's dramatis personae, and instead of the proper names to
substitute 'a lover,' 'a mother,' 'a tyrant,' and so forth. So great an
artist and so careful a worker as Racine could not, of course, escape
giving some individuality to his creations. Hermione, Phedre, Achille,
Berenice, Athalie, are all individual enough of their class. But the
class is the class of types rather than of individuals. After long
debate this difference has been admitted by most reasonable French
critics, and they now confine themselves to the argument that the two
processes, the illustration of the universal by means of the particular,
and the indication of the particular by means of the universal, are
processes equally legitimate and equally important. The difficulty
remains that, by common consent of mankind--Frenchmen not
excluded--Hamlet, Othello, Falstaff, Rosalind, are fictitious persons
far more interesting to their fellow-creatures who are not fictitious
than any personages of the French stage. There is, moreover, a simple
test which can be applied. No one can doubt that, if Shakespeare had
chosen to adopt the style, and had accepted the censorship of a Boileau,
he could easily have written _Phedre_. It would be a bold man who should
say that Racine could, with altered circumstances but unaltered powers,
have written _Othello_.
[Sidenote: Minor Tragedians.]
The style of tragedy which was likely to be successful in France had
been pointed out so clearly by Corneille and by Racine that it could not
fail to find imitators. As usual, the weakness of the style was more
fully manifested by these imitators than its strength. The best of them
was Thomas Corneille, the younger brother of Pierre. A much more facile
versifier than his brother, he produced a large number of plays, of
which _Camma_, _Laodice_, _Ariane_, _Le Comte d'Essex_, have
considerable merit. Thomas Corneille succeeded his brother in the
Academy, and died at a great old age. He was an active journalist and
miscellaneous writer as well as a dramatist, and his principal
misfortune was that he had a brother of greater genius than himself.
Pradon, whose success against _Phedre_ so bitterly annoyed Racine, was a
dramatist of the third, or even the fourth class, though he enjoyed some
temporary popularity. Campistron, a follower rather than a rival of
Racine, was a better writer than Pradon, but pushed to an extreme the
softness and almost effeminacy of subject and treatment which made
Corneille contemptuously speak of his younger rival and his party as
'les doucereux.' Quinault, before writing good operas and fair comedies,
wrote bad tragedies. The only other authors of the day worth mentioning
are Duche and Lafosse. Lafosse is a man of one play, though as a matter
of fact he wrote four. In _Manlius_ he gave Roman names and setting to
the plot of Otway's _Venice Preserved_, and achieved a decided success.
[Sidenote: Development of Comedy.]
The history of French comedy is remarkably different from that of French
tragedy. In the latter case a foreign model was followed almost
slavishly; in the former the actual possessions of the language received
grafts of foreign importation, and the result was one of the capital
productions of European literature. Whether the popularity of the
indigenous farce of itself saved France from falling into the same false
groove with Italy it is not easy to say, but it is certain that at the
time of the Renaissance there was some danger. At first it seemed as if
Terence was to serve as a model for comedy just as Seneca served as a
model for tragedy. The first comedy, _Eugene_, is strongly Terentian,
though even here a greater freedom of movement, a stronger infusion of
local colour is observable than in _Didon_ or _Cleopatre_. So, too, when
the Italian Larivey adapted his remarkable comedies the vernacular
savour became still stronger. Yet it was very long before genuine comedy
was produced in France. The farces continued, and kinds of dramatic
entertainment, lower even than the farce, such as those which survive in
the work of the merry-andrew Tabarin[239], were relished. The Spanish
comedy, with its strong spice of tragi-comedy, was imitated to a
considerable extent. A few examples of the _Commedia erudita_, or
Terentian play, continued to be produced at intervals; and the stock
personages of the _Commedia dell'arte_, Harlequin, Scaramouch, etc., at
one time invaded France, and, under cover of the comic opera and the
_Foire_ pieces, made something of a lodgment. In the earlier years of
the seventeenth century, moreover, a considerable number of fantastic
experiments were tried. We have a _Comedie des Proverbes_, in which the
action is altogether subordinate to the introduction of the greatest
possible number of popular sayings; a _Comedie des Chansons_ spun out of
a vast and precious collection of popular songs; a _Comedie des
Comedies_, which is a cento made up of extracts from Balzac, the
moralist and letter-writer; a _Comedie des Comediens_, in which the
famous actors of the day are brought on the stage in their own
persons[240], etc., etc. While French comedy was thus endeavouring to
find its way in all manner of tentative and sometimes grotesque
experiments, dramatists of talent occasionally struck, as if by
accident, into some of the side paths of that way, and directed their
successors into the way itself. The early comedies of Corneille have
been spoken of; despite the improbability of their Spanish plots, they
show a distinct feeling after real excellence. The eccentric Cyrano de
Bergerac, especially in his _Pedant Joue_, furnished Moliere with hints,
and displayed considerable comic power. Scarron, a not dissimilar
person, whose _Roman Comique_ shows the interest he felt in the theatre,
also wrote comedies, the chief of which were extremely popular, the
character of Jodelet in the play of the same name (1645) becoming for
the time a stock one both in name and type. Scarron's other chief pieces
were _Don Japhet d'Armenie_, _L'Heritier ridicule_, _La Precaution
inutile_. It was in the _Menteur_ of Corneille that Moliere himself
considered that true comedy had been first reached, and it was this play
which set him on the track. But French comedy of the seventeenth
century, before Moliere, is one of the subjects which have hardly any
but a historical and antiquarian interest. Although far less artificial
than contemporary tragedy, it is inferior as literature. It was
attempted by writers of less power, and it is disfigured by too frequent
coarseness of language and incident. It was on the whole the lowest of
literary styles during the first half of the century. With Moliere it
became at one bound the highest.
[Sidenote: Moliere.]
Jean Baptiste Poquelin[241], afterwards called Moliere, was born at
Paris, probably in January 1622, in the Rue St. Honore. The Poquelin
family seem to have come from Beauvais. Some hypotheses as to a Scotch
origin have been disproved. Moliere's father was an upholsterer, holding
an appointment in the royal household, and of some wealth and position.
Moliere himself had every advantage of education, being at school at the
famous Jesuit College de Clermont, and afterwards studying philosophy
(under Gassendi) and law. He was, according to some accounts, actually
called to the bar. At his majority he seems to have received a
considerable share of his mother's fortune, and thus to have become
independent. He joined some other young men of fair position in
establishing a theatrical company called _L'Illustre Theatre_, which,
however, failed with heavy loss to him, notwithstanding the assistance
of a family of professional actors and actresses, one of whom, Madeleine
Bejart, figures prominently in his private history. He was not to be
thus disgusted with his profession. In 1646 he set out on a strolling
tour through the provinces, and was absent from the capital for nearly
thirteen years. The notices of this interesting part of his career which
exist are unfortunately few, and, like many other points connected with
it, have given rise to much controversy. It is sufficient to say that he
returned to Paris in 1658, and on the 24th of October performed with his
troupe before the court. He had long been a dramatist as well as an
actor, and had written besides minor pieces, most of which are lost, the
_Etourdi_ and the _Depit Amoureux_. Moliere soon acquired the favour of
the king, and the _Precieuses Ridicules_, the first of his really great
works, gained for him that of the public. In 1662 he married Armande
Bejart, the younger sister of Madeleine--a marriage which brought him
great unhappiness, though it was probably not without influence on some
of his finest work. The king was godfather to the first child of the
marriage, and Moliere was a prosperous man. He became valet-de-chambre
to Louis, and it was some insolence of his noble colleagues which is
alleged, in a late and improbable though famous story, to have
occasioned the incident of his partaking of the king's _en cas de nuit_.
The highest point of his genius was shortly reached; _Tartuffe_, the
_Festin de Pierre_, and _Le Misanthrope_ being the work of three
successive years, 1664-6. _Tartuffe_ brought him some trouble because it
was supposed to be irreligious in tendency, or at least to satirise the
profession of religion. These, his three greatest comedies, were not all
warmly received, and he fell back upon lighter work, producing in rapid
succession farce-comedies for the public theatre, and _divertissements_
of divers kinds for the court until his death in February 1673, which
happened almost on the stage.
The following is a complete list of Moliere's work which has come down
to us. During his provincial sojourn he had written many slight pieces
half-way in kind between the Italian comedy and the native farce. Of
these two only survive, _Le Medecin Volant_ and _La Jalousie du
Barbouille_. Both have considerable merit, and Moliere subsequently
worked up their materials, as no doubt he did those of the lost pieces.
_L'Etourdi_, 1653, is a regular comedy in five acts, still strongly
Italian in style and somewhat improbable in circumstances, but full of
sparkle and lively action and dialogue. _Le Depit Amoureux_, 1654, is
even better and more independent. Nothing had yet been seen on the
French stage so good as the quarrels and reconciliation of the quartette
of master, mistress, valet, and _soubrette_. But _Les Precieuses
Ridicules_, 1659, struck an entirely different note. The stage had been
employed often enough for personal satire, but it had not yet been made
use of for the actual delineation and criticism of contemporary manners
as manners and not as the foibles of individuals. The play was directed
against the affectations and unreal language of the members of literary
_coteries_ which, with that of the Hotel Rambouillet as the chief, had
long been prominent in French society. It has but a single act, but in
its way it has never been surpassed either as a piece of social satire
or a piece of brilliant dialogue illustrating ludicrous action and
character. _Sganarelle_, 1660, relapses into the commonplaces of farce,
and has no moral or satirical intention, but is amusing enough. _Don
Garcie de Navarre_, 1661, may be called Moliere's only failure. He
styles it a _comedie heroique_, and it is in fact a kind of anticipation
of Racine's manner, but applied to less serious subjects. The jealousy
of the hero is, however, the only motive of the piece, and its
exhibition is rather tiresome than anything else. The play is monotonous
and unrelieved by action. The genius of the author reappeared in its
appropriate sphere in _L'Ecole des Maris_ (same date), where a Terentian
suggestion is adapted and carried out with the greatest skill. Then,
still in the same prolific year, Moliere returned to social satire in
_Les Facheux_, an audacious lampoon on the forms of fashionable boredom
common among the courtiers of the time. In 1662 appeared _L'Ecole des
Femmes_, which is generally considered the best of Moliere's plays
before _Tartuffe_. A certain slyness about the character of Agnes is its
only drawback. This gave occasion to the brilliant and most amusing
_Critique de L'Ecole des Femmes_, 1663. Here the author is once more the
satirist of contemporary society, which he introduces as criticising his
own work. _L'Impromptu de Versailles_ (same date), according to a
curious habit which Moliere did not originate, brings the author himself
and his troupe in their own names and persons before the spectator. _Le
Mariage Force_, 1664, a slight piece, was worked up into a ballet for
the court. _La Princesse d'Elide_ (same date) is Moliere's most
important court piece, or _comedie-ballet_, and, though necessarily
artificial, has great beauty. Next in point of composition came _The
Hypocrite_, that is to say _Tartuffe_, but the difficulties which this
met with made _Le Festin de Pierre_, 1665, appear first. This is a
tragi-comic working up of the Don Juan story, and is of a different
class from any other of Moliere's comedies. It has been thought, but
without sufficient ground, that Moliere here gave expression to a
modified form of the freethinking which was so common at the time. It
may, perhaps, be more truly regarded as an excursion into romantic
comedy--the comedy which, like Shakespeare's work, is not directly
satiric on society or on individuals, but tells stories poetically and
in dramatic form with comic touches. It is noteworthy that Don Juan is
of all Moliere's heroes least exposed to the charge of being an
abstraction rather than a man. The pleasant trifle, _L'Amour Medecin_
(same date), was succeeded by _Le Misanthrope_, 1666. Here Moliere's
special vein of satire was worked most deeply and to most profit, though
the reproach that the handling is somewhat too serious for comedy is not
undeserved. Alceste the impatient but not cynical hero, Celimene the
coquette, Oronte the fop, Eliante the reasonable woman, Arsinoe the
mischief-maker, are all immortal types. The admirable farce-comedy of
the _Medecin malgre Lui_ (same date), founded upon an old _fabliau_,
followed, and this was succeeded almost immediately by the graceful
pastoral of _Melicerte_, the amusing _Pastorale Comique_, and the slight
sketch of _Le Sicilien, ou L'Amour Peintre_. At last, in 1667,
_Tartuffe_ got itself represented. It is a vigorous and almost ferocious
satire on religious pretension masking vice, and many of its separate
strokes are of the dramatist's happiest. Here however, more than
elsewhere, is felt the drawback of the method. Comparing Tartuffe with
Iago, we have all the difference between a skilful but not wholly
probable presentation of wickedness in the abstract, and a picture of a
wicked man. In _Amphitryon_, 1668, Moliere measured himself with Plautus
and produced an admirable play. _George Dandin_ (same date), the working
up of _La Jalousie du Barbouille_, is one of the happiest of his
sketches of conjugal infelicity. Then came _L'Avare_ (same date), in
which Moliere was once more indebted to the ancients and to his French
predecessors, but in which he amply justified his borrowings. At this
time he extended his field and brought his knowledge of provincial and
bourgeois life to bear. _M. de Pourceaugnac_, 1669, is an ingenious
satire, pushed to the verge of burlesque and farce, on the country
squires of France. _Les Amants Magnifiques_, 1670, shows the writer once
more in his capacity of court playwright. But _Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme_
(same date) is the most audacious and by far the most successful of the
wonderful extravaganzas in which a sound and perennial motive of satire
on society is wrapped up, the theme this time being the bourgeoisie of
Paris, of which the author was himself a member. _Psyche_, 1671, is,
perhaps, the most remarkable example of collaboration in literature,
Moliere, Pierre Corneille, and Quinault, the greatest comic dramatist,
the greatest tragic dramatist, and the greatest opera librettist of the
day, having joined their forces with a result not unworthy of them. _Les
Fourberies de Scapin_ (same date) is again farce, but farce such as only
Moliere could write; and in _La Comtesse d'Escarbagnas_ (same date) the
theme of _M. de Pourceaugnac_ is taken up with a certain heightening of
colour and manner. _Les Femmes Savantes_, 1672, brings the reader back
to what is as emphatically 'la bonne comedie' as its original _Les
Precieuses Ridicules_. The tone and treatment are more serious than in
the older piece and deal with a different variety of feminine coxcombry,
but the effect is not less happy, and is free from the broader elements
of farce. Lastly, _Le Malade Imaginaire_, 1673, the swan-song of
Moliere, combined both his greatest excellences, the power of raising
audacious farce into the region of true comedy and the power of
satirising social abuses with a pitiless but good-humoured hand. The
main theme here is the absurdity of the current practice of medicine,
but as usual the genius of the writer veils the fact of the drama being
a drama with a purpose.