THE CRITICISM OF THE _PLÉIADE_.
THE ‘RHETORICS’ OF THE TRANSITION—SIBILET—DU BELLAY—THE ‘DÉFENSE ET
ILLUSTRATION DE LA LANGUE FRANÇAISE’—ITS POSITIVE GOSPEL AND THE
VALUE THEREOF—THE ‘QUINTIL HORATIEN’—PELLETIER’S ‘ART
POÉTIQUE’—RONSARD: HIS GENERAL IMPORTANCE—THE ‘ABRÉGÉ DE L’ART
POÉTIQUE’—THE ‘PREFACES TO THE FRANCIADE’—HIS CRITICAL GOSPEL—SOME
MINORS—PIERRE DE LAUDUN—VAUQUELIN DE LA FRESNAYE—ANALYSIS OF HIS
‘ART POÉTIQUE’—THE FIRST BOOK—THE SECOND—THE THIRD—HIS EXPOSITION OF
‘PLÉIADE’ CRITICISM—OUTLIERS: TORY, FAUCHET, ETC.—PASQUIER: THE
‘RECHERCHES’—HIS KNOWLEDGE OF OLDER FRENCH LITERATURE, AND CRITICISM
OF CONTEMPORARY FRENCH POETRY—MONTAIGNE: HIS REFERENCES TO
LITERATURE—THE ESSAY ‘ON BOOKS.’
There is, perhaps, no more remarkable proof of the extraordinarily
germinal character of Italian literature than the influence which it
exercised on France in the department with which we here deal.
[Sidenote: _The_ Rhetorics _of the Transition_.] It is needless to say
that the subsequent story of French literature has shown how deep and
wide is the critical vein in the French literary spirit. But up to the
middle of the sixteenth century this vein was almost absolutely
_irrepertum_—whether _sic melius situm_ or not. A few _Arts_ of Poetry
and Rhetoric had indeed been introduced across the Channel long before
we had any on this side, as we should expect in a language so much more
advanced than English, and as we have partly seen in the preceding
volume. The _Art de dittier_ of Eustache Deschamps, at the end of the
fourteenth century, had been followed[157] throughout the fifteenth by
others, some of them bearing the not uninteresting or unimportant title
of “_Seconde Rhétorique_,” as distinguishing Poetics from the Art of
Oratory. The chief of these,[158] almost exactly a century later than
the treatise of Deschamps, used to be assigned to Henri de Croy, and is
now (very likely with no more reason) handed over to Molinet. But they
were almost entirely, if not entirely, occupied with the intricacies of
the “forms” of _ballade_, &c., and included no criticism properly so
called.
Footnote 157:
See Petit de Julleville, ii. 392, who quotes four between _c._ 1405
and _c._ 1475; and for a monograph E. Langlois, _De Artibus Rhetoricæ
Rythmicæ_, Paris, 1890. To this may be added, as commentaries on this
chapter, the corresponding division in Spingarn, _op. cit._, Part II.,
pp. 172-250; the extensive and valuable Introduction to M. Georges
Pellissier’s edition of Vauquelin de la Fresnaye (Paris, 1885); and
Herr Rücktaschel’s _Einige Arts Poétiques aus der Zeit Ronsards und
Malherbes_ (Leipsic, 1889).
-----
Footnote 158:
_L’Art et Science de Rhétorique_, 1493, printed by Verard, and
reprinted by Crapelet. Another, a little later, was printed about
1500, and reprinted in the Bibliothèque Elzévirienne, _Anciennes
Poésies Françaises_, iii. 118. It is odd that M. Petit de Julleville,
who does not give the volume and page of that very extensive
collection, and misquotes its title, should speak of this as “in
prose.” It is in verse: divided under short headings, sometimes of
teaching, sometimes of example, as in this notable “Rondel équivoqué,”
Avoir, Fait Avoir Avoir, Avoir Fait-Avoir, Fait, where each word is a
line. The interpretation may be left as a treat for the reader.
-----
The spirit and substance of these treatises seems to have been caught up
and embodied, about the year 1500, in another Rhetoric,[159] which
became very popular, and was known by such titles as the “Flower” or
“Garden of Rhetoric,” but the author of which is only known by one of
those agreeably conceited _noms de guerre_ so frequent at the time, as
“‘l’Infortunaté’” Its matter appeared, without much alteration or real
extension, in the works of Pierre Fabri[160] and Gratien du Pont
(1539),[161] and the actual birth of French criticism proper is
postponed, by most if not all historians, till the fifth decade of the
century, when Pelletier translated the _Ars Poetica_ of Horace in 1545,
while Sibilet wrote an original _Art Poétique_ three years later, and
just before Du Bellay’s epoch-making _Défense_.
-----
Footnote 159:
_L’Instructif de la seconde Rhétorique_, or _Le Jardin de Plaisance_.
Footnote 160:
_Grant et vray art de pleine Rhétorique_, Rouen, 1521.
Footnote 161:
_Rhétorique Métrifiée_, Paris, 1539. Between Fabri and Gratien du Pont
appeared in 1529 Geoffrey Tory’s _Champfleury_, a more grammatical
than critical miscellany, which is elsewhere glanced at; and the very
noteworthy critical remarks prefixed by Marot to his edition of Villon
in 1533. M. Gaston Paris is assuredly right when he calls this (in his
charming little book on the author of the _Ballade des Pendus_, Paris,
1901) “un des plus anciens morceaux de critique littéraire que l’on
ait écrits en français,” and its appreciative sympathy, if not
co-extensive with the merits of the work, leaves little to desire in
the points which it touches. In fact, the mere selection of Villon and
of the _Roman de la Rose_, as the subjects of his editorial care,
shows in Master Clement the presence of a deep instinctive critical
faculty, which has only partially and incidentally developed itself.
In this, as in not a few other points, Marot himself seems to me to
have had for the most part inadequate justice from critics; though
here as elsewhere it may be allowed that time and circumstance
prevented him from doing himself justice. His intense affection for
literature and poetry, the light glancing quality of his wit and
intellect, the absence of all pomposity, pedantry, and parade, and the
shrewd sense which (in judgment if not quite in conduct) distinguished
him, go very far to constitute the equipment of the accomplished
critic. But his short life, perhaps a certain instability of
character, and the immature condition of the special state of
literature in his time, with the ever-deplorable distractions of the
religious upheaval, gave him little chance.
-----
There is little possibility of difference of opinion as to the striking
critical moment presented to us by the juxtaposition, [Sidenote:
_Sibilet._] with but a single twelvemonth between, of Sibilet and Du
Bellay. The importance of this movement is increased, not lessened, by
the fact that Sibilet himself is by no means such a copyist of Gratien
du Pont as Du Pont is of Fabri, and Fabri of the unknown “Unfortunate,”
and the “Unfortunate” of all his predecessors to Deschamps. He does
repeat the lessons of the _Rhetorics_ as to verse and rhyme, and so
forth. He has no doubt about the excellence of that “equivocal” rhyme to
which France yet clings, though it has always been unpleasing to an
English ear. And (though with an indication that they are passing out of
fashion) he admits the most labyrinthine intricacies of the ballade and
its group.[162]
-----
Footnote 162:
With the Lyons reprint (_v. infra_) of Sibilet and the _Quintil
Horatien_ is given an _Autre Art Poétique_, short and strictly
practical. It notices Ronsard, but gives the old forms.
-----
But he is far indeed from stopping here. He was (and small blame to him)
a great admirer of Marot, and he had already learnt to distrust that
outrageous “aureation” of French with Greek and Latin words which the
_rhétoriqueurs_ had begun, which the intermediate school of Scève and
Heroet were continuing,[163] and which the _Pléiade_, though with an
atoning touch of elegance and indeed of poetry, was to maintain and
increase, in the very act of breaking with other _rhétoriqueur_
traditions. He delights in Marot’s own epigrams, and in the sonnets of
Mellin de Saint-Gelais; and he is said to have anticipated Ronsard in
the adoption of the term “ode” in French, though his odes are not in the
least Pindaric (as for the matter of that Ronsard’s are not). The
epistle and the elegy give fresh intimation of his independent following
of the classics, and he pays particular attention to the eclogue, dwells
on the importance of the “version” (translation from Greek or Latin into
French verse), and in the opening of his book is not very far from that
half-Platonic, half anti-Platonic, deification of Poetry which is the
catch-cry of the true Renaissance critic everywhere. There is not very
much real, and probably still less intentional, innovation or revolt in
Sibilet; and it is precisely this that makes him so valuable. Fabri and
Gratien du Pont are merely of the old: in no important way do the form
and pressure of the coming time set their mark on them. Du Bellay is
wholly of the new: he is its champion and crusader, full of scorn for
the old. Sibilet, between them, shows, uncontentiously, the amount of
leaning towards sometimes revised or exotic novelty, and away from
immediate and domestic antiquity, which influenced the generation.
-----
Footnote 163:
It would be clearly improper to load this book with much general
French literary history. But those who would thoroughly appreciate the
position may find an endeavour to put it briefly in my _Short History_
of the subject, Book II. chaps, i., ii., and iv. (6th ed., Oxford,
1901). If they want more they had better go to MM. Darmesteter and
Hatzfeld’s admirable _Seizième Siècle_ in France (Paris, 1878), or,
best of all, to the last 150 pp. of the first vol. of Crepet’s _Poètes
Français_. M. Ch. d’Héricault’s prefaces here, with his introduction
to Marot (ed. Garnier), are not likely to be soon equalled.
-----
The position of the _Défense et Illustration de la Langue Française_ may
be said to be in the main assured and uncontested, nor do I think it
necessary to make such a curious dictum as that it is “not in any true
sense a work of literary criticism at all” the subject of much
counter-argument. [Sidenote: _Du Bellay._] In that case most undoubtedly
the _De Vulgari Eloquio_, of which it has been not much less strangely
held to be little more than a version adapted to the latitude of Paris,
is not such a work either. I think it very likely that Du Bellay knew
the _De Vulgari_, which Trissino had long before published in Italian;
but both the circumstances and the purpose of the two books seem to me
as entirely different as their position in literary criticism seems to
me absolutely secure.
Whether this be so or not, Du Bellay’s circumstances are perfectly well
known, and his purpose is sun-clear, alike before him and before his
readers. [Sidenote: _The_ Défense et Illustration de la Langue
Française.] He is justifying the vulgar tongue,[164] but he is
justifying it as Ascham and his friends were doing in England; with the
proviso that it shall be reformed upon, strengthened by, and altogether
put to school to, the classical languages in the first place, with in
the second (and here Ascham would _not_ have agreed) Italian and even
Spanish. His dealing is no doubt titularly and ostensibly directed to
the language; but his anxieties are wholly concentrated on the language
_as the organ of literature_—and specially of poetry. That he made a
mistake in turning his back, with the scorn he shows, on the older
language itself, and even on the verse-forms which had so long occupied
it, is perfectly true. This is the besetting sin of the Renaissance—its
special form of that general sin which, as we said at the outset, doth
so easily beset every age. But his scheme for the improvement is far
more original; and, except in so far as it may have been faintly
suggested by a passage of Quintilian,[165] had not, so far as I know,
been anticipated by any one in ancient or modern times. Unlike Sibilet,
and unlike preceding writers generally, he did not believe so very much
in translation—seeing justly that by it you get the matter, but nothing,
or at least not much, more.[166] He did not believe in the mere
“imitation” of the ancients either. I cannot but think that M.
Brunetière[167] has been rather unjust in upbraiding Du Bellay with the
use of this word. He does use it: but he explains it. He wishes the
ancients to be imitated in their processes, not merely in their results.
His is no Ciceronianism; no “Bembism”; none of that frank advice to
“convey” which Vida had given before him, and to which, unluckily, his
master Ronsard condescended later. “How,” he asks, “did Greek and Latin
become such great literary languages?” Were they always so? Not at all.
It was due to culture, to care, to (in the case of Latin at least)
ingenious grafting of fresh branches from Greek. So is French to graft
from Greek, from Latin, from Italian, from Spanish even—so is the
essence of the classics and the other tongues to be converted into the
blood and nourishment of French.[168]
-----
Footnote 164:
For a poet of such eminence and a book of such importance, Du Bellay
and the _Défense_ are curiously difficult of access. M. Marty-Laveaux'
ed. of the Works, with the Pléiade generally (Paris, 1876), is very
scarce and dear. M. Becq de Fouquières’ _Selections_ are, it is said,
out of print, though they can be obtained. A Versailles reprint I know
only through the British Museum Catalogue. It is odd how, in almost
all languages, reprinting, like a more agreeable, if less troublesome,
process, seems to “go by favour.”
Footnote 165:
That quoted _supra_, at i. 316.
Footnote 166:
Of course in an earlier stage you _do_ get much more. English, for
instance, profited almost infinitely by translation from French and
from Latin prose in the late fourteenth century, and throughout the
fifteenth. But French was past this stage, or nearly past it, when Du
Bellay wrote.
Footnote 167:
_L’Evolution des genres_ (Paris, 1890), p. 43 _sq._
Footnote 168:
M. Brunetière quotes this famous and striking expression, but
complains that we are not told how it is to be done. Our English
supplies a sufficient reply to this in famous words, “by reading,
marking, learning, and inwardly digesting.”
-----
Is this “not in any pure sense literary criticism at all”? Is this
“young” and “pedantic” and “too much praised” by (of [Sidenote: _Its
positive gospel and the value thereof._] all Sauls among the prophets!)
Désiré Nisard? I have a great respect for Mr Spingarn’s erudition; I
have a greater for M. Brunetière’s masterly insight and grasp in
criticism; but here I throw down the glove to both. That Du Bellay was
absolutely wrong in his scorn for _ballade_ and _rondeau_ and other
“_épiceries_” I am sure; that his master was right in looking at least
as much to the old French lexicon as to new constructions or adoptions I
am sure. But Du Bellay (half or all unawares, as is the wont of finders
and founders) has seized a secret of criticism which is of the most
precious, and which—with all politeness be it spoken—I venture to think
that M. Brunetière himself rather acknowledges and trembles at, than
really ignores. This free trade in language, in forms, in
processes,—this resolute determination to convert all the treasures of
antiquity and modernity alike into “food” for the literary organism,
“blood” for the literary veins, marrow for the literary bones,—is no
small thing. It may not be the absolute and sole secret of literary
greatness. But we can almost see that Greek, the most perfectly literary
of all languages for a time, withered and dwindled because it did not
pursue this course; that Latin followed it on too small a scale; above
all, that English owes great part of its strength, and life, and
splendid flourishing of centuries, to it. Du Bellay preached, perhaps
more or less unconsciously, what Shakespeare practised—whether
consciously or unconsciously we need neither know nor care, any more
than in all probability he knew or cared himself.
No doubt all languages and all literatures have not the digestive
strength required to swallow poison and food, bread and stones, almost
indiscriminately, assimilating all the good, and dismissing most if not
all of the evil. There are not, and never have been in England, wanting
people, from the towering head of Swift down to quite creeping things of
our own time, who have been distressed by “mob” and by “bamboozle,” by
“velleity” and by “meticulous.” No doubt in France the objection has
been still greater, and perhaps better founded on reason. But these
propositions will not affect, in the slightest degree, the other
proposition that Du Bellay, in the _Défense_, stumbled upon, and perhaps
even half-consciously realised, that view of literature, and of language
as the instrument of literature, which will have the whole to be mainly
_un grand peut-être_—a vast and endless series of explorations in
unknown seas, rather than a mathematical or chemical process of
compounding definite formulas and prescriptions, so as to reach results
antecedently certain. Very far would it have been from Nisard, who was
no doubt bribed by the militant classicism of the Pléiade, to have given
his praise had he thought this: I am even prepared to admit that Du
Bellay himself would probably not have thanked me for the compliment of
my theory. But hatred is often more sagacious than friendship. Malherbe
and those about Malherbe knew perfectly well what the real spirit of the
Pléiade was. And so does M. Brunetière, who has a scent as keen as that
of Malherbe and those about Malherbe, and is very much better read, very
much more scientifically equipped, and quite infinitely better provided
with intellectual and critical gift.[169]
-----
Footnote 169:
The small space given to the _Défense_ here may seem inconsistent with
the importance assigned to it. The fact is, however,—and this fact no
doubt explains to some extent, if it does not excuse, the views of
those who do _not_ think it very important,—that its details require
little notice. Its claim lies in its eager eloquence, in the new
position sketched above, and (negatively) in its onslaught on the
forms of French poetry for two hundred years past. Du Bellay’s
critical views reappear in the “Epistle to the Reader” in his _Olive_
(ed. Becq de Fouquières, pp. 67-76), in that prefixed to his _Vers
Traduits_ (ibid., pp. 151-157), in the vigorous defence of vernacular
verse addressed to the second of the three Valois Marguerites (ibid.,
pp. 127-129), and elsewhere.
-----
It was unlikely, or rather impossible, that so revolutionary a challenge
should lack its answer, which duly appeared a year later under the odd
title of _Le Quintil Horatien_.[170] [Sidenote: _The_ Quintil Horatien.]
This used to be attributed to Charles Fontaine, a poet of parts; but it
seems that he repudiated it, and it is now handed over to a pedagogue of
the name of Aneau. It is a dogged little book, which treats the
_Défense_ very much as if it were an impertinent school exercise, and
goes through it with the lead pencil in a fashion at once laborious,
ineffectual, and suggestive of a vain desire to substitute the birch
rod. The author, whoever he was, might have found plenty of things to
say against Du Bellay, and he is on fairly solid ground when he
indignantly protests that William of Lorris, Chartier, Villon, and
others were not the artless clowns, or positive sinners, that this
petulant-sparkling star of the Pléiade had looked awry upon. But even
here his own ignorance of the still better things before the _Rose_
disabled him: and it is by no means certain that he would have had the
wit to appreciate them if he had known them. He thinks the sonnet too
“easy,” poor man! condemns the elegy on the absurd ground that it
saddens the reader; and (committing the same fault in defence which more
modern critics have committed in attack) bases his main, if not his
whole, praise of _Ballade_ and _Chant Royal_, _Rondeau_ and _Rondel_, on
their mere difficulty. But his most unfortunate, if not his most absurd,
error was the line which, in common with most respectable persons, both
then and since, he takes up against the _verbum inusitatum_, as shown in
the new poetic diction of the _Pléiade_. This was doubly unlucky: first,
because the fifteenth-century poets whom he champions had themselves
“aureated” the language in or out of all conscience already; and
secondly, because this kind of criticism, whether it be applied to
Montaigne or Dryden, to Carlyle or Browning, is always a dangerous
delusion. Very classical critics have pecked and mocked at the author of
the _Quintil Horatien_ because he black-marks not merely words useful or
beautiful, like _sinueux_, _oblivieux_, _rasséréner_, but even such now
sterling coin as _liquide_ and _patrie_. It would be well if they, or
those like them, would think twice before condemning, as neologisms,
terms which may not impossibly seem as much matter of course to the
twenty-fourth century as _patrie_ does to the twentieth. But the author
of the _Quintil_ is really of that breed of carping critics which carps
itself out of all common-sense. He makes ponderous fun of the initial
signature I. D. B. A. (“J. du Bellay Angevin”); objects to the statement
that “nature gave us _tongues_ to speak,” because Aristotle, Galen, and
Petrus Hispanus agree that palate, throat, lips, and teeth are also
necessary to the process; to the use of _voix_ instead of _son_, where
animals are not concerned. The sea would have no voice for him—and
doubtless had none.
-----
Footnote 170:
Others call it _Le Quintil Censeur_. It appears not unnecessary to say
that “Quintil” has not, and could not have, any reference to
“Quintilian,” but refers to the Quintilius of Horace (_Art. Po._,
438). The original edition seems to be very rare: the British Museum
only possesses the Lyons reprint (with Sibilet) of 1556. It seems to
have been also reprinted with Du Bellay at Versailles in 1878, but
this I do not possess. Some make the title _Horatian_ or _Horace_.
-----
From such mere “denigration” (the censor permits himself this word as a
stone to throw at Du Bellay) no good thing [Sidenote: _Pelletier’s_ Art
Poétique.] could come: and besides, for some generation or more, the
brother stars were to fight in their courses for Pléiade criticism as
well as for Pléiade poetry. The second _Ars Poetica_ of the French
Renaissance—the first in any full modern sense—appeared in 1555 from the
hand of Jacques Pelletier, himself a spelling reformer, a professor,
and, what is more, a mathematician; but a man of versatile ability and
much eagerness to welcome any new good thing, with no small power of
starting such things. He was a pleasant poet, full of Pléiade manner
before the Pléiade had been formed; nor can even his absurd
spelling[171] quite hide the beauty of such things as
“Alors que la vermeille Aurore.”
And when, at the age of nearly forty, he wrote his _Poetic_, nobody
could charge him with being a mere theorist. He went heart and soul for
the _Pléiade_ ideas, and like Du Bellay and the rest, as indeed was
unavoidable, busied himself first of all with the reform of the
language. He recommends the formation of a regular poetic diction, and
goes so far (I do not say that it is too far) as to approve of retaining
double forms, one fully “frenchified,” one simply Latin with a French
termination (_e.g._, _repousse_ and _repulse_), the first for prosaic,
the second for poetic use. The famous Pléiade stumbling-blocks, the
compound epithet and the inverted order of words, are no
stumbling-blocks for him—he takes them triumphantly in the stride of his
revolutionary ardour: and he joins Ronsard also in the safer if not more
popular recommendation of archaism, and of adoption of didactic forms at
pleasure. No doubt he is not always wise: though the Classical school
which followed had lost the right to reproach him with abusing the
principle of suiting the sound to the sense. But still there is a great
wisdom in him. Himself an excellent rhymer, he has some of the qualms
about rhyme which were so frequent in the sixteenth century; but he is
sound on the point (in French not admitting of any serious contest) that
without rhyme poetry becomes prose, and he is more than lukewarm as to
classical metres. It is sad but not surprising that he joins Du Bellay
in condemning the delightful if not all-sufficing metrical kinds which
had produced such charming things from Lescurel to Villon; and he duly
recommends comedy, tragedy, and epic in their place. As he had himself
translated the _Epistle to the Pisos_ eleven years earlier, it is not
wonderful that he sticks very close to it. Whether, as has been said by
some, he does not know Aristotle, may not be quite certain; but it is
certain that Aristotelian doctrines make no figure in him: it will be
remembered that they had not made much even in Italy at this time. In
fact, it seems reasonable to doubt whether, despite their adoration of
Greek, the Pléiade writers ever drew much direct inspiration from the
_Poetics_, though, in Italian translations and commentaries at least, it
must have influenced them to some extent.
-----
Footnote 171:
“Vermeille” with him is “vermeilhæ”; “voix,” “voès”; “neigeux,”
“negeus”; Lucan, “Lukein,” &c.
-----
The most interesting figure of Pléiade criticism, however, is, as it
should be, Ronsard[172] himself. [Sidenote: _Ronsard: his general
importance._] The greatness of this really great poet must be
injuriously affected, but ought not to be obscured to critical judgment,
both by the fact (for which he is to blame) that he tried too many
things and wrote too much; and by the other fact (for which he is
blameless) that he attempted a new theory and practice of poetry, not,
like his younger and more fortunate contemporary Spenser, at the
beginning of a great poetic wave in his own country, but at a time when
that country’s energies were steadily settling towards prose. Yet he was
nothing if not critical. The actual amount of critical expression that
he has left us is not large: it is a pity that he did not devote to it
some of the time which he might well have spared from his too copious,
and sometimes too undistinguished, versemanship. He is, like Dryden
(whom he resembles in not a few ways so much that I should be surprised
if the parallel has not struck others), somewhat careless of outward
consistency in his critical utterances—a carelessness indicative in each
case of real critical sincerity, of the fact that the two poets were
honestly seeking the way, and had the sense not to persevere in blind
alleys when they found them blind. Above all, like the whole of his
school, he is distinguished by a critical note, which must be dwelt on
in the Interchapter succeeding this book, but which may well be
indicated here—the note that they are much more bent on the production
of new literature than on the study of old.
-----
Footnote 172:
_Œuvres Complètes_, ed. Blanchemain, 8 vols., Paris, 1857-1867. They
are not quite “complete,” but the omissions (which may be found, if
anybody wants them, in such respectable works as the _Cabinet
Satirique_ &c.) fortunately do not concern _us_.
-----
But, for all this, he is a remarkable critic, and in his critical
_aperçus_ we can ourselves perceive germs, indications, suggestions,
which might have resulted in the creation of a much larger body of
actual criticism. Indeed these are (as M. Pellissier[173] and others
have shown) actually responsible for much that is most characteristic,
and for most of what is best, in the Classical school of the next
century, which affected to despise him, as well as for other things
which, if that school had followed them out, would have saved it from
its most fatal mistakes and shortcomings.
-----
Footnote 173:
In ed. of Vauquelin (_sup. cit._), xxviii. _sq._
-----
The main critical _loci_ in Ronsard have been duly pointed out by his
editor, M. Prosper Blanchemain. [Sidenote: _The_ Abrégé de l’Art
Poétique.] They are the formal _Abrégé de l’Art Poétique_ of 1565; the
prefatory matter to his not too well-starred epic, the _Franciade_, ten
years later and onwards; and the remarkable _Caprice au Seigneur Simon
Nicolas_—a poem written late, and not, it seems, published save
posthumously. The “Abridgement”[174] answers to its name, for it only
fills just twenty Elzevirian pages. It begins in a manner which shows
(as so many other things do in Ronsard) the gaps which separated him
from, as well as the ties which united him to, the usual thought of the
Renaissance, and still more that of the seventeenth century. Although
there are of course exceptions, the general drift of Italian criticism
had been that poetry, like any other art or science, is a thing
teachable and learnable. On no other ground could the “archæolatry,”
which we have found almost universal, be maintained for a moment. Now
Ronsard, though he dwells again and again on the necessity of study,
begins with an apology for writing an Art of Poetry at all. He has had,
he says modestly, some experience and practice, and he will do his best
to give his correspondent[175] the benefit thereof. But poesy is _plus
mental que traditif_, which we may translate “more native to the mind
than communicable to it.” He accordingly converts (with an agreeable
twist) the stock invocation to the Muses into a real prayer for this
mental endowment, and with equal ingenuity freshens up the stale
_clichés_ about the divinity of Ancient poets, and about the Muses
refusing to lodge save in a virtuous and pious mind. Therefore, too,
study of these former favourites of poetry is requisite. But from these
generalities he plunges straight into extremely minute details. Greek,
Latin, and French—it is probable that he does not mention Italian
because his correspondent, Delbène, was of Italian extraction—are to be
carefully studied as languages. The rules of French prosody—among which
is here for the first time authoritatively included the alternation of
masculine and feminine rhymes—are to be carefully observed, and _e_ is
to be always elided before a vowel. It is perhaps worth noting that
Ronsard uses “cæsura” for “elision,” a catachresis in which he had
followers, and which even affected Dryden. Greek and Roman proper names
are, where possible, to be frenchified in termination. “The old words of
our romances” (this is of the first importance) are not to be ejected,
but to be chosen with care and prudence. Terms of art and technical
similes are to be sought out with extreme diligence, so as to supply
life and nerve to the book. Dialect-words may be used at need; the
example of the Greeks being invoked here—perhaps a little rashly.
Invention, says Ronsard, is the working of the Imagination; but he seems
still inclined to the old limitation of this word to the retailing of
images, and reprobates more strongly than is perhaps necessary or
desirable _ces inventions fantastiques et mélancholiques qui ne se
rapportent non plus l’une à l’autre que les songes entrecoupés des
frénétiques_. There is to be first of all (note the Frenchman) Order and
Disposition in poetical devices.
-----
Footnote 174:
_Ed. cit._, vii. 317-337
Footnote 175:
Alphonse Delbène, Abbé of Haute-Combe in Savoy.
-----
This order and this disposition are to be secured by a happy nature in
the first place, and by a careful study of good models in the second.
Among these good models, “those who have illustrated our language in the
last fifteen years” (_i.e._, since the _Défense_) are to be counted in;
and (this was added later) foreign modern languages are also to be
carefully studied for the enriching of the mother tongue. “Elocution” is
nothing else than “a propriety and splendour of words well chosen, and
ornamented with grave and short sentences, which make verses shine, like
as do precious stones, well mounted, the fingers of some great
seignior.”[176] The vocabulary must be copious and composed of
well-sifted words, with plentiful description and comparison, moulded
specially on Homer. The common form of “great” poem-making follows, with
reference to Aristotle as well as Horace, with caution against trite and
otiose epithets, against epithet-strings _à l’Italienne_, but with a
strong praise of the _mot propre_. Rhyme is treated rather briefly; and
then Ronsard drops to minutiæ of _e_'s and _h_'s, discusses Alexandrines
(which, in a later edition, he says he should have employed in the
_Franciade_ but for powerful command) and “common” (decasyllabic) verse,
and others, passes to some grammatical and orthographical cautions, and
ends with the promise, unluckily never fulfilled, of a longer _Poetic_
some day.
-----
Footnote 176:
“Jewels five words long
That on the stretched forefinger of all time
Sparkle for ever.”
—TENNYSON, _The Princess_.
-----
It may have been in part payment of this promise that he wrote the
Prefatory matter to the _Franciade_.[177] [Sidenote: _The_ Prefaces to
the Franciade.] This, which, as it stands in the modern editions, is
triform, consists of a short Preface (or _Au Lecteur_) in prose, from
the master’s own hand, to the original edition; of a verse exordium, or
rather Introduction, separate from the poem proper; and, between the
two, of a second Preface or _Treatise on Heroic Poetry_ of some length,
which we have, not as it left the author’s pen, but arranged and revised
(it is said under his direction) by Claude Binet. The critical interest
of the verse Proem lies in the enthusiastic glorification of Homer and
Virgil (who have shown the whole secret of epic-writing, and whose work
the author bids his own “adore on its knees”), and in a spirited reissue
of the cardinal doctrine of the _Pléiade_ that French is a fertile soil,
all overgrown and untilled, which must be brought under cultivation by
the unsparing labour of poets and scholars.
-----
Footnote 177:
_Ed. cit._, iii. 7-39.
-----
The first Preface begins with the time-honoured comparison, or contrast,
between History and Poetry, as dealing, the one with verity, the other
with verisimilitude. Hence Ronsard strikes off to set Homer and Virgil
far above all others, and to fix a stigma on Ariosto as presenting a
body handsome enough in members, but so counterfeit and monstrous as a
whole that it is like an unwholesome dream. He has evidently on his mind
the objections, perhaps of the ancients, perhaps of some Italians, to
the combination of historical poetry, and endeavours to meet the
objection that he comes nearer to actual history “than Virgilian art
permits” by the rather perilous excuse that Virgil only lived under a
_second_ emperor, while he himself lives under the successor of a long
line of kings, and that Charles our Lord and King insisted on no
invidious preference being shown to some of his ancestors over the
others. Indeed Ronsard is too typical a Frenchman for a sense of humour
to be exactly his strong point.
He then proceeds to name, as his example, rather “the naïve facility of
Homer than the curious diligence of Virgil”: though he ventures to
reprehend some excess of improbability in the scheme and details of the
_Iliad_, and ends with some particulars of apology and explanation. The
most curious of these are a passage giving reasons (by no means in
strict accordance with the sentence referred to above) for rejecting the
Alexandrine in favour of the decasyllable, and a pathetic appeal to the
reader _not_ to read his poem like an official document,[178] but to
accommodate his voice to its passion, and especially to raise that voice
whenever he comes to a mark of exclamation.
-----
Footnote 178:
_Plustost à la façon d’une missive, ou de quelques lettres royaux, que
d’un poème bien prononcé._
-----
The second, later, longer, and, as we have said, not quite authentic,
Preface, addressed to the _Lecteur Aprentif_, is a discourse on the
Heroic Poem in general; and as such is responsible for the specimens of
the kind with which the next century was troubled in France, if not for
those from the _Henriade_ downwards, which serve as even less cheerful
ornaments to the French literature of the eighteenth. We have seen
already how carefulness and trouble about this thing had been gathering
and growing in Italy, and how it was, in Ronsard’s own days, causing the
storm about the _Gerusalemme_. The “Maronolatry” which France shared
with Italy led to it directly; and even the championship of Homer (as in
Ronsard’s own case)—the attempt to establish two kings of the Epic
Brentford—was certain to conduce to it. Ronsard himself, however, does
not at first attempt the general question; indeed it is hardly possible
to draw attention too often to the far greater abstinence from general
and deductive consideration which at this time characterises the French
critics, as compared with the Italians. He begins with a fresh attack
(not quite in the best faith, if his own later remarks be pressed, as
perhaps they need not be) on the Alexandrine; and, by a deflection more
natural in the original than it appears in a summary, goes off to a
panegyric of periphrasis, which again was only too docilely received by
his successors of all schools for the next two centuries in France. His
examples are taken from Virgil—indeed the earlier part of this Preface,
at any rate, is as enthusiastically Virgilian as Scaliger himself could
desire. Then he puts stress once more on the significant epithet, lays
down _obiter_ the delightfully arbitrary dictum that, as the unity of
drama is the revolution of a day, so the unity of at least a war-epic is
the revolution of a year, dwells largely on his favourite distinction
between the poet and the versifier, which he justifies (not too well) by
insisting on artful variations of the narrative by speeches, dreams,
prophecies, pictures,[179] auguries, fantastic visions, and appearances
of gods and demons. All this time we have heard nothing of Homer, and
indeed have read nearly half a score pages before his name occurs as
furnishing Virgil with some of his facts and personages, just as he had
drawn his own from older stories, “comme nous faisons des contes de
Lancelot, de Tristan, de Gauvain, et d’Artus,” a passage to be noted.
The dozen or so which remain are oddly occupied by a sort of jumble of
notes and hints to the epic poet, reminding one of that valuable paper
of advice which Sir John Hawkins sent to Captain Amyas Leigh, on “all
points from the mounting of ordnance to the use of vitriol and limmons
against the scurvy.” He must describe splendid palaces and grounds,
trace heroes and heroines to gods and nymphs, dress them handsomely,
wound them in the right places,[180] not invent too much, allow himself
_enjambement_ and hiatus, use plentiful comparisons and terms of art, do
things handsomely in general, boil his very kettles with a Homeric
afflatus,[180] be thoroughly careful about study, but, above all, attend
to diction, as to which the cautions and licences of the _Abrégé_ are
repeated in fuller form, with a special injunction not to Ciceronianise
idly, but to _faire un lexicon des vieils mots d’Artus, de Lancelot, et
de Gauvain_.
-----
Footnote 179:
_Principalement des boucliers._
Footnote 180:
Odd as these things may seem, they are not fool-born jests of an idle
historian. Ronsard actually says them, though at greater length. See
p. 28, _“Su tu veux faire mourir sur-le-champ quelque capitaine, il le
faut navrer au plus mortel lieu du corps, comme le cerveau, le cœur,
la gorge_,” &c., &c.; and, p. 29, “_Car s’il fait bouillir de l’eau en
un chaudron_,” &c., &c.
-----
Ronsard will necessarily give us text for remark on the criticism of the
Pléiade in the Interchapter following this Book. [Sidenote: _His
critical gospel._] But we must say a little of his critical attitude
here. That it is of more interest than positive importance cannot easily
be denied. Not only for our purpose, but for its own, it is injured by
the very sincerity, practicalness, and common-sense of the writer’s
purpose and view. He clearly does not regard the past of French
literature with quite such a petulant contempt as that of Pelletier and
Du Bellay. But he is even more steadily and thoroughly convinced that
something better can, should, and shall be done: and it is on the doing
of this, by himself and others, that all his thoughts are fixed. He does
not give himself the time—he does not, it is evident, think it in the
least worth while—to take a critical survey of the past in any detail,
or with any general grouping. It is enough for him that Homer and Virgil
are of the greatest, and that their work is also of the greatest; and he
wishes Frenchmen to go and do likewise. He almost, if not altogether,
accepts the end as a datum; and is only troubled about the means. In
regard to some of these means his doctrine, though somewhat _ondoyant_
and even inconsistent, is surprisingly sound and original. If part of it
was accepted with advantage by his countrymen in the centuries which
followed, other parts were discarded and neglected, with an almost
incalculably disastrous result. That “lexicon of the old words of
_Lancelot_ and _Artus_” would have saved French from the drab smug
insignificance of its eighteenth-century garb; those cautions about
_enjambement_ and the like might almost have done for France what
Spenser and Shakespeare did for England.
But this comparative independence in some points was—probably from the
want of that real historical horizontality of view which, of all the
sixteenth-century critics, Cinthio, Castelvetro, and Patrizzi alone seem
in various degrees to have attained—accompanied by a singular servility
and conventionality in others. “Why, O Prince of Poets!” one feels
inclined to say, “with all reverence to your grey and laurelled head—why
should we trouble ourselves about _peintures insérées contre le dos
d’une muraille, et des harnois, et principalement des boucliers_ because
one very great poet found them useful to produce historical effects
nearly three thousand years ago, and another much lesser poet chose to
imitate him slavishly some thousand years later? Why should we do it,
even supposing the two poets to be on a level? Very likely Homer’s
warriors _had_ painted or graven bucklers. We have not. Arthur’s knights
had not—at least the paintings (assuming them to be armorial) were quite
different. Why should we have the ‘monstrous language of horses wounded
to death’? Why this childish limitation in imitation? Handsome dresses
are admirable things: but why must we be limited to lion-skins and
panther-skins and bearskins for the material? If we have got to make a
cauldron boil, let it double double, boil and bubble by all means: but
suppose we _don’t_ want to boil it?” To all this we not only get no
answer from Ronsard; but in his critical writing (not, as we have said,
extensive nor always outwardly consistent, but thoroughly uniform in
spirit) we find no trace of any such _aporia_ ever having presented
itself to his mind. _They_ did these things and produced good effects:
let _us_ do them that we may produce good. It seems a “good old rule”
enough: yet perhaps it is “a simple plan” also in more senses than one.
Good or bad, complete or incomplete, this criticism is the very soul of
the _Pléiade_. Its playwrights, such as Grévin[181] and Jean de la
Taille,[182] followed Italian practice in prefixing argumentative
discussions to their plays—reflecting on the mediæval drama, comparing,
in modest or buoyant spirit, their own work to that of the ancients, and
the like. [Sidenote: _Some minors._] A section of the school (as was
almost unavoidable, despite the “No-Surrender” resistance which French
as a language opposes to the proceeding) tried classical metres after
the principles of Tolomei: and Jacques de la Taille, the brother of
Jean, a poet and dramatist of fantastic but distinct ability, wrote a
tractate[183] in defence of them. They made closer and closer
approximations to the absolute Trinity of Unities: and though Du Bellay
in his youthful fervour had committed himself to a not unwise
antinomianism, they more and more showed themselves as the true
ancestors of the neo-classic school, by framing and insisting on
“rules.” The great men of letters who were more or less unattached, but
well-willing irregulars of the school, such as Pasquier and Montaigne,
bestow, in their different ways, increasing attention on literary
criticism and literary history. And, just before and after the junction
of the centuries, when the _Pléiade_ proper had set, and its influence
was about to wane before the narrow and arbitrary classicism of Malherbe
on the one hand, and the rococo-picaresque of the Spanish school on the
other, there appeared two formal _Arts of Poetry_, the one the complete
and final code of Pléiade Poetic, the other a rather hybrid and
nondescript product, chequering Ronsardism with a good deal of Italian
matter.
-----
Footnote 181:
In the Prefatory Discourse to his _Mort de César_ (1562). He extols
Aristotle and Horace, but does not like Seneca.
Footnote 182:
In the prefatory matter of his _Saül le Furieux_, 1572. Jean assails
the native drama, especially the Moralities, and thinks highly of
Seneca.
Footnote 183:
_La Manière de faire des vers en Français comme en Grec et en Latin_,
Paris, 1573. There is a useful abstract of this in Rücktaschel, _op.
cit._, pp. 23-27.
-----
This last,[184] the earlier to appear, in 1598, had for author Pierre de
Laudun, sometimes spoken of, from a seignory of his, as de Laudun
d’Aigaliers. [Sidenote: _Pierre de Laudun._] It is in prose, and its
author, who is roundly described by Herr Rücktaschel as a “copyist of
the purest water,” diversifies his borrowings from Sibilet, Ronsard, and
Pelletier on the one hand, from Scaliger and “Vituperani” on the other,
with plentiful examples from his own work; for he had followed one
greater man with a _Franciade_ and ante-dated another with a _Horace_. I
cannot enter any strong protest against the hard words (not confined to
those already quoted) which his German critic bestows on him.[185] His
real interest is purely that of symptom and tendency, in which respect
he shows a rather odd but not uninstructive mixture. On one side he
rejects the Ronsardising coinage of words and adoption of dialect forms,
with other Pléiade traits. On another he shows himself recalcitrant to
the coming classicastry by declaring that “we are not bound by their
laws”—_e.g._, in regard to the number of acts. On a third we find him
emphasising this attitude into an absolute refusal of the Unity of Time,
against which he says almost all the obvious and sensible things, in a
fashion to some extent redeeming what is on the whole the work of a not
very intelligent bookmaker.
-----
Footnote 184:
_L’art Poétique Français_, Paris, 1598. This, like almost all the
works noticed in this chapter, is but a little book, odd to compare
with the close-packed Italian quartos. But it is longer than most of
its fellows.
Footnote 185:
Some abatement, however, may be claimed, if only on the ground that
Laudun is absolutely sound on the vernacular question.
-----
Vauquelin de la Fresnaye has not this sudden cry of the voice in the
desert: but his _Art Poétique_ is, as a whole, a book of infinitely
greater interest and value than Laudun’s. Vauquelin was a gentleman and
lawyer of Normandy, who, born at the _château_ whence he took his name,
near Falaise, fought, amused himself, loved the country and its sports,
became President at Caen, and wrote verses of no small merit in various
kinds. [Sidenote: _Vauquelin de la Fresnaye._] His _Art Poétique_ was
more than thirty years on the stocks: and having had its keel laid in
1574, when the _Pléiade_, though a quarter of a century old, was still
in full flourishing, did not get launched till 1605, when a new age had
begun in more than chronological fashion. It is a composition of
considerable bulk, consisting of three books, each running to rather
under twelve hundred lines. Either of deliberation, or as a result of
intermittent attention during the time in which it was a-preparing,
Vauquelin arranged it (or failed to arrange it) in most admired
disorder. The precisians of the next age would have been horrified at
the promiscuous character of its observations; and some would have been
grateful to its latest editor[186] if, in addition to, or instead of,
part of the elaborate and very valuable _apparatus criticus_ of various
kinds which he has given, he had prefixed an argument. As it is, we must
make one: for the book, if not one of our very greatest _points de
repère_, is yet such a point.
-----
Footnote 186:
M. Pellissier, to whose already cited edition the references following
are made.
-----
After a prose address to the Reader, containing a rather touching
reference to the flight of time and the change of public opinion since
he had begun his work, to the cares of life, and the troubles of the
realm, and the death of old friends—he begins with the proper
invocation. [Sidenote: _Analysis of his_ Art Poétique.] Immediately
after he gives, as has been justly observed, a warning note by an
elaborate simile-description of Poesy as an ordered garden, with beds
and paths and hedges, wherein if any rude boy should trample on the
beds, desert the paths, and break down the espaliers, the gardener would
assuredly make injurious observations to him, and drive him out—the
Gardener being further identified as no less a person than the Divinity.
This comparison would of itself show that Vauquelin aims at no arrogant
originality; but he is yet more explicit. His four guides are _le fils
de Nicomache_ (Aristotle, of course; but note how Ronsard’s fatal
counsel of periphrasis has already sunk, never to be quite extracted,
into the French mind!), the “harper of Calabria” (Horace), Vida, and
Minturno.[187] But he hardly apologises for writing in French. Then,
borrowing from Cleanthes, through Seneca, the old comparison of verse to
“a trumpet which adds power to the voice,” he passes _non sine Dis_—with
abundant indulgence in mythology—to the exaltation of Number and Harmony
at large, and to theorising in the Imitation of Nature. He holds high
the banner of the Ronsardian unification of Arts; and while insisting
that even the ugly may be made interesting, if not beautiful, in the
imitation of it, repeats the old cautions about inconsistent and too
fantastic admixture of imagery. Among other followings of Ronsard we
note the earnest advice to cultivate stately descriptions and abundant
ornament. But he does not omit—though it must be allowed he does not
observe it over strictly himself—the caution to keep the thread,
“Si tu fais un Sonnet, ou si tu fais une Ode.”
-----
Footnote 187:
I agree with Mr Spingarn (p. 187) and disagree with M. Pellissier (p.
xxxviii) in thinking that this reference to Minturno is quite serious.
The French editor, indeed, speaks of Minturno rather oddly, coupling
him with Vida as “les deux _poètes_ Italiens,” and saying that both
“ne font que remâcher les préceptes des anciens,” which Vauquelin only
says of Vida. This is of more than doubtful justice as to Minturno,
and why call him a “poet”? He may have written in verse on other
occasions, for aught I know, but his two _Poetics_ are as
unquestionably in prose as Vida’s one is in verse.
-----
The praise of order and consistency gives place to remarks on diction
which repeat the Ronsardist canons and cautions, and to a fashionable
contempt (to be taken up later, as so much else was, by the thankless
Neo-Classics) of Anagrams and Acrostics. [Sidenote: _The First Book._]
The usual twinning of Homer and Virgil is succeeded by reference to some
other classics: and for a time Vauquelin seems to be confining himself
(in so far as his expatiatory manner ever admits confinement) to the
_ouvrage héroique_, whence he turns to other kinds, and the verse-forms
suitable for them. He repeats Du Bellay’s curse on _ballade_ and
_rondeau_,[188] and passes like him to a special eulogy of the Sonnet,
in which (as Du Bellay was not able to do) he is able now to produce a
stately list of French practitioners. This part of the Book, a little
after its middle, is full of literary history and allusion, the latter
touching foreign languages and literatures as well as French. And the
rest of it is occupied with a fresh and rather disorderly account of
styles and kinds, with the verse and diction proper to each, ending up
with a curious amplification of Quintilian’s story[189] about Apelles
and Antigonus, the moral of which seems to be a sort of _Medio
tutissimus ibis_
-----
Footnote 188:
_Oste moy la Ballade, oste moy le Rondeau._
Footnote 189:
_Inst. Orat._, II. xiii. 13. The anecdote in Quintilian is very
simple: Apelles paints Antigonus in profile to hide a lost eye.
Vauquelin (on uncertain authority) expands this into a long story of a
competition between Polygnotus, Scopas, and Diocles.
-----
The Second Book also has its due invocations to the Muses and the King:
and Vauquelin divagates, in his amiable way, for some hundred lines
before he settles down to paraphrase Horace’s warning about the
_scriptor cyclicus_, and to give, as examples of exordium, not merely a
refashioning in Alexandrines of the opening of Ronsard’s _Franciade_,
but a long extract from his own projected epic of the _Israëlide_.
[Sidenote: _The Second._] But as soon as he has done this (to the
extent, it is true, of some fifty lines) he affects shame at quoting
himself, and bids the poet swim in the Greek and Latin sea, especially
in Virgil. In fact, Vauquelin is much more of a Virgil-worshipper than
Ronsard, and almost as much as Vida, if not as Scaliger; and it is
curious to see in his work that unconquerable, and as it were magnetic,
repulsion from the greater poetry of Homer, and attraction towards the
lesser verse of Virgil, which more and more shows itself, from the start
of the Renaissance to the finish of the eighteenth century. Although he
again and again diverges to the prose Epic (with the usual example of
Heliodorus and the _Æthiopica_), to the artificial epic unity of a year
(which he doubtless took, after Ronsard, from Minturno), and so forth,
he as constantly returns to Virgil, describing him in one place plumply
as “second to Homer in age, but first in rank.”
Then he reverts to his Horace, and, not forgetting a hint to the poet
(one frequent with him) that he had better take French and Christian
subjects such as the crusade of St Louis, he dilutes largely the famous
clauses of his model on keeping the type of age and youth, &c. This
leads him naturally to the subject of drama, on which he is, of course,
severely Horatian; especially in regard to messengers and the avoidance
of awkward things on the stage. He has the _Pléiade_ drama, too, before
him as he writes; extols the Chorus, and again does not forget his hints
of Christian subjects. But in the sequel he leaves his ancient
authorities, and their severer tastes, rather on one side, in order to
dwell at great length on the accessories of the stage—music,
_mise-en-scène_, &c., with a not uninteresting reference—like that of
Sibilet (_v. supra_) earlier, and possibly due to it—to the moralities
of _nos vieux François_, as well as a welcome to the Ballet and to his
native _Vaux-de-Vire_. He indulges in a warm eulogy of French as a
language passing all the vulgars of Europe, and of French poetry, and
then handles Satire, a subject in which he was an expert, and which he
had treated in a prose _Discourse_, joined to his own exercises in the
kind. He connects it with the Provençal _Sirvente_, allows the
_coq-à-l'âne_ a sort of poor-relationship, and dwells on French lyric
poets at some length, once more commending Latin models and (in a
deflection, more logical than some of his, to the subject of iambic and
other metre) noticing the recent attempts at a quantified prosody. On
this subject he prudently declines to commit himself: posterity must
decide. And the rest of the Book again busies itself with various styles
and kinds, the measures proper to them, and the authors, modern as well
as ancient, who have treated them best.
These lucubrations, however, disorderly as they may seem, contain
numerous things of interest—a just remark on rhyme as practically the
equivalent of stricter metrical arrangement; observations on the prose
_Lancelot_, &c., showing that Vauquelin was not destitute of that
knowledge of the older literature of his country which distinguished
France and Frenchmen rather creditably in the Renaissance, and to which
we shall presently return. Divers contemporary authors are also
mentioned, Garnier being singled out for special (and well deserved)
praise; and there is a pleasant reminiscence of the time when
Nous passions dans Poitiers l’Avril de notre vie,
and, instead of attending to the study of the law, followed the frolics
of the Muses. The actual close of the Second Book is a neither
undignified nor ill-felt wail over the sufferings of France in the
religious wars, and an expression of confidence in the King’s powers of
healing.
[Sidenote: _The Third._]
The Third Book, after the usual decorative beginnings, returns to Drama,
and takes up Comedy, with praise for Grévin and Belleau, and a long
discussion of the nature and varieties of the kind, including
Tragi-comedy, in which, naturally, the _Bradamante_ of Garnier, the only
considerable example, is taken for study. Next a turn, half abrupt, is
made to Pastoral; and then Vauquelin returns to his favourite Satire and
to other forms, taking his texts from Horace, Vida, and his own fancy,
in a slightly bewildering manner, but to some extent carrying off the _à
propos de bottes_ of his argument by his serene indifference to it, and
the total absence of any awkward apologies or attempts to join. By
degrees he settles, or seems to be settling, to the general questions
(What is the end of poetry? Instruction or Pleasure? and the like), but
turns from them to a long catalogue of the poets of his time.
The foot-by-foot following of Horace, which is more noticeable than ever
in the last three or four hundred lines—with the licence of going off at
any tangent from Horatian texts which Vauquelin also permits
himself—would account for any amount of the desultoriness which is only
disguised (if, indeed, it can be said to be disguised) from the most
careless, in Horace himself, by the brevity of his scale and the
brilliancy of his phrase. But we do not, of course, go to Vauquelin for
an orderly treatise; we go to him that he may tell us what an
interesting and remarkable division of French men of letters knew of
criticism and thought of literature.
His answer is not the less, but the more, valuable because of its
apparent incoherence, this incoherence being itself a piece of evidence
in the case. [Sidenote: _His exposition of_ Pléiade _criticism._] The
_Pléiade_, as we have said more than once, was eagerly critical; but it
had a strictly practical object, its criticism being entirely subsidiary
and preliminary to the desire of creation. We meet here with nothing of
the rather fatally “disinterested” investigation of the Italians. Even
the ancients are studied less with a view to appreciating their beauties
than with the desire to steal their thunder.
The precepts of Vauquelin’s four guides—of Horace first and most of all,
of Aristotle occasionally, of Vida pretty often, and of Minturno
_nonnunquam_, are all adjusted to this end. Incidentally, of course,
Vauquelin shows us some general critical views—the canonisation of
Virgil, the adherence to the classical Senecan drama, the discouragement
of mediæval forms, if not entirely of mediæval subjects and language.
But, directly, he is the technical instructor, not the theoretical
critic. His _technique_, with some slight alterations, is almost purely
that of Ronsard, and displays the same admixture of the classical
tendency which the seventeenth century took up and hardened, with a
quasi-romantic breadth and licence which that century rejected. It is
easy to say, and not very difficult to see, that it might—that it
actually did—result in a practice too promiscuous at worst, at best a
little too eclectic—that French was not ready in point of time, and
perhaps not quite suited in point of temperament, for the bridle to be
flung too freely on the neck of Pegasus; and that Vauquelin is almost
directly responsible for inciting the growth of the weeds at which his
successor Boileau slashed with such a desperate hook sixty years later.
It is even possible to say, on the other side, that Du Bellay’s
questioning of rules altogether was, from the Romantic point of view,
sounder than Vauquelin’s provision of what may be called conditional
licences. We ought, however, to look at the _Art Poétique_ rather in the
light of what had gone before its long-delayed appearance than of what
followed—at the production of 1559-1600, not at that of 1600-1660. It is
in effect an _a posteriori_ rationalising and methodising of _Pléiade_
Poetry. This poetry is even now not much known in England, and its
defects—inequality, heaviness at times, pedantry, a strange and almost
irritating inability to get the wings quite free save at rare
moments—are undeniable. But there is something, in the _Art_ itself, of
the better qualities of its subjects: and to those who give themselves
the trouble to make their acquaintance, these subjects have a strange
and a peculiar charm, in their mixture of gravity and grace, of love and
lore, of paganism and piety, yea, of Classic and Romantic themselves.
The _hedone_ of the _Pléiade_ is _alethes_ as well as _oikeia_, and in
this handbook of the school Vauquelin has revealed at least some of its
secrets. Those who can do this are no contemptible, and no common,
critics.
But though Vauquelin thus sums up, in spirit as in time, the formal
criticism of the _Pléiade_, we have not yet quite done with this.
[Sidenote: _Outliers: Tory, Fauchet, &c._] It has been, throughout, the
practice of this book to take into consideration not only such formal
expressions, but also those of men who, outside formal rhetoric or
deliberate criticism, represent the literary taste of their time. The
latter part of the French sixteenth century is not poor in such. On the
contrary, the interest in literature of this kind which it displays
perhaps exceeds that shown in any country of Europe. Even Italy, despite
its immensely greater volume of formal literary discussion and academic
literary history, falls short in a certain intelligent independence of
consideration. We might draw on works of many kinds, from the eccentric
and mainly grammatical or typographical but extremely interesting
_Champfleury_ of Geoffroy Tory (which, as is well known, contains the
original of Rabelais’ Limousin scholar) as early as 1529; we might
without too great straining bring in Master Francis himself, and we
cannot justly neglect the name of Claude Fauchet, who almost deserves
that of Premier historian of literature in Europe. But, obeying that
system of representative treatment, especially in the outlying
departments, of the subject, the necessity of which grows more urgent at
every chapter and almost every page of this book, we may chiefly deal
with two writers, the one almost as much of an antiquary and historian
as Fauchet, but of greater literary faculty and a pleasanter style; the
other one of the great names of the world’s letters, and, in his own
fitful fashion, referring to literature itself frequently and
importantly enough. To those who know anything of the time this last
sentence will have already named, without naming, Etienne Pasquier and
Michel de Montaigne.
The chapters of Pasquier’s[190] _Recherches de la France_, in which he
deals with French literature, are perhaps the most interesting of the
whole. [Sidenote: _Pasquier: The_ Recherches.] He had himself been an
ardent disciple of the _Pléiade_, and a pleasant poet, in his youth; and
in his maturer years he applied to the history of literature the same
untiring research and sound good sense which made him the first
historical inquirer, as distinguished from mere chroniclers, in France.
It is not entirely unimportant that, in his preliminary remarks on the
subject, he announces his intention of devoting his seventh book to
French Poetry and his eighth to French language—a pointed if
unintentional expression of the predominance of poetry in literature
even as late as the end of the sixteenth century. His first observations
are directed to the difference between French and other modern languages
on the one hand, and ancient poetry on the other, in the matter of
rhyme, which he would derive (not without at least as much justification
of probability and history as other theorists can allege) from the
rhythmical parallelisms of prose speech, at first accidentally sweetened
by homœoteleuton, and then deliberately by rhyme itself. He is well
aware that the language of the Franks must have been German; and his
theory of French as composed of three languages, Walloon (by which he
probably means Gallic or Celtic), Latin, and Frankish, will be more
obnoxious to philological pedants than to philosophical philologists. He
knows the monorhymed _chansons_ such as _Berte aux grans Piés_, but is
disposed to put them unnecessarily late—nay, he seems to think that
there was little before the thirteenth century and Philip Augustus. Yet
he is not unaware of the much greater antiquity of the decasyllable as
compared with the Alexandrine.
-----
Footnote 190:
The _Recherches_ have not been completely reprinted, I think, since
1723. All their literary matter, however, is included in M. Léon
Feugère’s extremely useful and well-edited _Œuvres Choisies d’E. P._
(2 vols., Paris, 1849). It extends from i. 230 to ii. 134, what
follows on the University of Paris being itself not quite irrelevant.
-----
Indeed Pasquier has a not inconsiderable knowledge of mediæval poetry—a
knowledge at any rate extending far beyond that of the _Pléiade_
generally, who were as a rule content to recognise, with a certain
toleration, the _Roman de la Rose_. [Sidenote: _His knowledge of older
French literature_,] He knows and praises Helinand, the authors of the
great _Alixandre_, Thibaut de Champagne, Chrestien de Troyes, Raoul de
Houdenc—not merely, it would seem, from Fauchet’s book, but in
themselves; and he quotes _Ogier le Danois_, _Athis et Prophilias_,
_Cléomadès_, &c. Like a sensible man, he has that indispensable chapter
on Provençal literature which some would cast out of French literary
history, thereby making it unintelligible. And then he passes to the
prose Arthurian romances, and to the formal poetry of the fourteenth
century, of which he speaks without any of the exaggerated and slightly
unintelligent—certainly intolerant—contempt of Du Bellay and Vauquelin.
“_Servitude, que je ne die gêne d’esprit, admirable_,” “_ces
mignardises_” are his mild censures of them, and he gives particular
attention to Froissart and Alain Chartier, with mention of Villon and
others, and a very high eulogium of _Pathelin_. He does not, he says,
know the author (nor do we), but he will dare to say that this farce, as
a whole and in parts, _fait contrecarre_ to the comedies of both Greeks
and Romans. He is fairly copious on the men of letters of the first half
of the century, and then begins a new chapter with the picturesque and
often-quoted phrase about the “great fleet of poets” that the reign of
Henri II. brought forth, and their new style of poetry.
He gives to Maurice Scève the honour of captaining the leading ship of
this fleet; and then follow all the well-known names (and some not so
well known) of the school proper, the catalogue being capped by some
extremely interesting and valuable critical-anecdotic remarks on the
greater writers, especially Ronsard himself. [Sidenote: _and criticism
of contemporary French poetry._] One could hardly be more just on this
difficult[191] poet than is Pasquier, who allows him not merely grandeur
but sweetness to almost any extent, “quand il a voulu _doux couler_”;
calls him _grand poète entre poètes_, but admits that he was “très
mauvais censeur et aristarque de ses livres.” Then he partly returns
upon his steps in another chapter, where he approaches French poetry
from a different side, considering especially its verse-structure, with
examples from Marot downwards, and dwelling on the alternation of
masculine and feminine rhymes which Ronsard had sanctioned. On this
matter the historical equity of Pasquier is especially noticeable, as
opposed to the somewhat excessive correctness (according to pedagogic
ideas of the correct) shown by most Frenchmen. He declines to take a
side between “this new diligence and the old nonchalance.” And he makes
the very acute observation that Marot only allowed himself this
nonchalance in verse _which was not to be sung_—a proof, as he remarks,
that though Master Clement might not be Ronsard’s equal in learning, he
had a _facilité d’esprit admirable_. In yet another passage he compares
French with Italian poetry, and, emboldened by this, with Latin itself;
taking the patriotic side with equal courage and ingenuity, and ending
with the citation of some of his own Latin verses on Ronsard, and with
the sigh, “De toute cette grande compagnie qui mit la main à la plume
sous Henri II. il restait quatre, Théodore de Bèze, Ponthus de Thyard,
Louis le Caron, et moi.” Then, after a short appendix-chapter on
classical metres in French (which he would like to approve, but seems in
two minds about), he passes to language, on his treatment of which we
cannot dwell. But he never allows himself to stray far from literature,
and makes a pretext for returning at some length to his beloved
_Pathelin_.
-----
Footnote 191:
Difficult, that is, to appraise critically—not to understand.
-----
It may be observed that Pasquier, though interested in letters to an
extreme degree, enjoys more than he judges—not perhaps the worst defect
of the critic.
The agile and penetrating intelligence of Montaigne could hardly have
failed in any age to devote itself to literature; in his own age this
devotion was especially inevitable. [Sidenote: _Montaigne: his
references to literature._] That his dealings with the subject are
dealings in the height of his own fashion, it is unnecessary to say. Not
many things could be more characteristic than the Essay on Pedantry (I.
24), in which the whole spirit and motive, not merely of the _Pléiade_,
but of the sixteenth century generally, are subjected to the irregular
glancing criticism of the essayist. This single paper would enable one
to understand the fling of a man like Ben Jonson—the reverse of
unintelligent, the reverse of unhumorous, but full of erudition, and of
sixteenth-century reverence for it—at “All the essayists, even their
master Montaigne.” On the general question whether what is commonly
called pedantry is a good or a bad thing, Montaigne’s verdict comes
simply to a “Mass! I cannot tell!” He bestows hearty praise on Du
Bellay, a non-pedantic and courtier-like man of letters, who yet was
enthusiastic for learning; heartier on Adrian Turnebus, a pedant in the
common injurious sense; and in the middle of his essay he plays on study
of Greek and Latin, on quotations from Plato and Cicero, on “arming
oneself against the fear of death, at the cost and charges of
Seneca.”[192] The much longer chapter on Education, addressed to Diane
de Foix, which immediately follows, contains one of the worst
expressions of Renaissance contempt of mediæval literature, in the boast
that “of the Lancelots of the Lake, the Amadis, the Huons of Bordeaux,
with which childhood amuses itself,” he did not know so much as the
name. “My Lord Michael” is great, but even he might have been greater if
he _had_ known them.
-----
Footnote 192:
Vol. i. p. 165, ed. Courbet and Royer. _Je n’aime point cette
suffisance relative et mendiée_, he goes on with his own absolute and
unborrowed stamp of phrase and epithet.
-----
Indeed hardly anywhere does Montaigne exhibit his own undulation and
diversity more fully than in relation to letters—at one time amassing
ancient instances as if he were totally oblivious of the remarks above
about Plato and Seneca; at another criticising for himself[193] with
inimitable freshness and gusto; and at another again informing the
scholar, with much coolness, that if he will take off hood and gown,
drop Latin, and not deafen men’s ears with unmitigated Aristotle, he
will be at the level of all the world, and perhaps below it.
-----
Footnote 193:
Cf., for instance, the remarkable critical comparison of Tacitus and
Seneca in the Eighth Essay of the Third Book, towards the close (iv.
37 _ed. cit._)
-----
Even this, it will be seen, is not so very far from the cardinal
_Pléiade_ principle, that study of the ancients is an excellent thing,
but that its chief value is to equip and strengthen the student for
practice in French. And Montaigne, like the rest of his contemporaries
and compatriots, always had this “cultivation of the garden” before him.
It is well known how the real pedants of his own time objected to his
neologisms, just as Fontaine (or whoever was the author of the
_Quintil_) did to those of Du Bellay; and how large a part these
neologisms played in the development and nourishing of French prose.
Every one who knows anything of Montaigne knows his enthusiastic eulogy
of Amyot, and of the services which that _grant translateur_ had
rendered to French. And everybody should know the delicate and subtle
appreciation which he lavishes, in a fashion so different from the
indiscriminate laudations of Scaliger, on favourite passages of the
ancients, more particularly[194] on the Venus and Vulcan passage of
Virgil, and the Venus and Mars passage of Lucretius.
-----
Footnote 194:
If there is anywhere a happier critical phrase, in its particular
kind, than “cette noble _circumfusa_, mère du gentil _infusus_,” I do
not know it.
-----
Of course Montaigne’s interests, despite his exquisite literary
accomplishment, are not primarily literary. [Sidenote: _The Essay_ On
Books.] But he has given one entire Essay (II. 10), and that not of the
shortest, to Books; and he has frequent glancings at the subject,
sometimes characteristically racy, as that at the _Heptameron_, “un
gentil livre _pour son estoffe_.” The “Books” essay begins with one of
his familiar jactations of imperfection. He has some reading, but no
faculty of retention. He often intentionally plagiarises—for instance
from Plutarch and Seneca. He does not seek in books anything more than
amusement and knowledge of himself and of life. He refuses to grapple—at
any great expense of labour—with difficulties. He likes Rabelais,
Boccaccio, and Johannes Secundus for mere pastime, but repeats his
depressing scorn for romances, and confesses, as did Darwin on the score
of Shakespeare, that he cannot take the pleasure he used to take in
Ariosto and Ovid. He thinks Virgil, Lucretius, Horace, and Catullus
(especially Virgil in the _Georgics_ and the Fifth _Æneid_) at the top
of poetry—a grouping which makes us long to pin the elusive Perigourdin
down, and force him, Proteus as he is, to give us his exquisite reasons.
His judgment on Lucan is a little commonplace, “not the style but the
sentiments”—whereas the sentiments of Lucan are but Roman “common form,”
and his style, if not of the best kind, is great in a kind not the best.
He thinks Terence “the very darling and grace of Latin,” and is half
apologetic as to the equalling of Lucretius to Virgil, positively
violent (it is, he thinks, _bestise et stupidité barbarique_)[195] on
that of Virgil to Ariosto, and depressing again in regard to Plautus
(Terence _sent bien mieux son gentilhomme_). He returns again and again
to the style of Terence; and warns us of the coming classicism by his
objections to the “fantastiques élévations Espagnoles et Pétrarchistes,”
being equally “correct” in exalting (or at least in his reasons for the
exaltation, there being no doubt about the fact) Catullus above Martial.
On Greek authors as such he frankly and repeatedly declares his
incompetence to give judgment; but “now that Plutarch has been made
French,” he can as frankly yoke him once more with Seneca, and extol the
pair _super æthera_, boldly expressing his comparative distaste for
Cicero. He would like to have “a dozen of [Diogenes] Laertius,” for the
“human document,” of course; and puts Cæsar above all other historians,
including Sallust, while he has something to say of divers French
writers of the class—Froissart (who, he thinks, gives “the crude matter
of history”), Comines, Du Bellay-Langey, and others. It is to be noted
that in this place he says nothing about French poetry. And when he does
take up the subject much later, in II. 17, at the end of the “Essay on
Presumption,” he is very brief, only saying that he thinks Ronsard and
Du Bellay “hardly far from the ancient perfection.” At the beginning of
II. 36 he divides with the majority on the merits of Homer and Virgil,
though he once more admits a disqualification, which in this case is, of
course, total. And in the famous remark,[196] “Poetry is an amusement
proper for women; it is a frolic and subtle art, disguised, talkative,
quite occupied with pleasure and display, like them,” he gives no doubt
a certain measure of his critical capacity in less specially conditioned
matters.
-----
Footnote 195:
_Ed. cit._, ii. 112. Most of the expressions quoted are in the
immediate context.
Footnote 196:
III. 3, _Les Trois Commerces_, _ed. cit._, iii. 288.
-----
This capacity is, indeed, strictly limited. Montaigne is almost, if not
quite, as much set as his beloved Plutarch on the _life_-side of
literature, as the only one that really interests him; and, in addition,
he has an obstinate prosaic inclination, with which Plutarch does not
seem to be nearly so chargeable. Yet he must have found mention here,
not merely as our first very great French man of letters,[197] who has
left us literary opinions, but as the very light and glory of the French
intellect at the meeting of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and
as thus giving an index of the greatest value to its tastes and
opinions. He displays (conditioning it in the ways just mentioned, and
others, by his intense idiosyncrasy) the general literary attitude of
the time—an active, practical, striving towards performance, a rather
conventional and arbitrary admiration of the farther past, a contempt,
or at least good-natured underestimation, of the nearer, and fair, if
vague, hopes for the future. But considering the intensely critical
character of Montaigne’s intellect in most directions, its exertions in
this direction tell us even more by what they do not, than by what they
do.
-----
Footnote 197:
Rabelais is no real exception. It is needless to say that _Gargantua_
and _Pantagruel_ do contain matter touching on literature. But
Rabelais comes too early to be critical. The “Library of Saint-Victor”
and other things are simply alarums and excursions of his general
campaign against the rearguard of “monkish ignorance”; and in his
references to French poetry he does not seem to have got beyond—or to
have wished to get beyond—complacent acquiescence in _rhétoriqueur_
pedantry.
-----