CHAPTER I

Produced by Ron Swanson

Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II.

Edited by Edmund Gosse

A History of

FRENCH LITERATURE

BY

EDWARD DOWDEN

D.LITT., LL.D. (DUB.), D.C.L. (OXON.), LL.D. (EDIN.)

LL.D. (PRINCETON)

PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE UNIVERSITY OF DUBLIN

London

WILLIAM HEINEMANN

MCMXIV

_First Edition_, 1897

_New Impressions_, 1899, 1904, 1907, 1911, 1914

_Copyright, London_ 1897, _by William Heinemann_

PREFACE

French prose and French poetry had interested me during so many years

that when Mr. Gosse invited me to write this book I knew that I was

qualified in one particular--the love of my subject. Qualified in

knowledge I was not, and could not be. No one can pretend to know

the whole of a vast literature. He may have opened many books and

turned many pages; he cannot have penetrated to the soul of all books

from the _Song of Roland_ to _Toute la Lyre_. Without reaching its

spirit, to read a book is little more than to amuse the eye with printed

type.

An adequate history of a great literature can be written only by

collaboration. Professor Petit de Julleville, in the excellent

_Histoire de la Langue et de la Litterature Francaise_, at present

in process of publication, has his well-instructed specialist for

each chapter. In this small volume I too, while constantly exercising

my own judgment, have had my collaborators--the ablest and most

learned students of French literature--who have written each a part

of my book, while somehow it seems that I have written the whole.

My collaborators are on my shelves. Without them I could not have

accomplished my task; here I give them credit for their assistance.

Some have written general histories of French literature; some have

written histories of periods--the Middle Ages, the sixteenth,

seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth centuries; some have studied

special literary fields or forms--the novel, the drama, tragedy,

comedy, lyrical poetry, history, philosophy; many have written

monographs on great authors; many have written short critical studies

of books or groups of books. I have accepted from each a gift. But

my assistants needed to be controlled; they brought me twenty thousand

pages, and that was too much. Some were accurate in statement of fact,

but lacked ideas; some had ideas, but disregarded accuracy of

statement; some unjustly depreciated the seventeenth century, some

the eighteenth. For my purposes their work had to be rewritten; and

so it happens that this book is mine as well as theirs.

The sketch of mediaeval literature follows the arrangement of matter

in the two large volumes of M. Petit de Julleville and his

fellow-labourers, to whom and to the writings of M. Gaston Paris I

am on almost every page indebted. Many matters in dispute have here

to be briefly stated in one way; there is no space for discussion.

Provencal literature does not appear in this volume. It is omitted

from the History of M. Petit de Julleville and from that of M. Lanson.

In truth, except as an influence, it forms no part of literature in

the French language.

The reader who desires guidance in bibliography will find it at the

close of each chapter of the History edited by M. Petit de Julleville,

less fully in the notes to M. Lanson's History, and an excellent table

of critical and biographical studies is appended to each volume of

M. Lintilhac's _Histoire de la Litterature Francaise_. M. Lintilhac,

however, omits many important English and German titles--among

others, if I am not mistaken, those of Birsch-Hirschfeld's

_Geschichte der Franzosichen Litteratur: die Zeit der Renaissance_,

of Lotheissen's important _Geschichte der Franzosichen Litteratur

im XVII. Jahrhundert_, and of Professor Flint's learned _Philosophy

of History_ (1893).

M. Lanson's work has been of great service in guiding me in the

arrangement of my subjects, and in giving me courage to omit many

names of the second or third rank which might be expected to appear

in a history of French literature. In a volume like the present,

selection is important, and I have erred more by inclusion than by

exclusion. The limitation of space has made me desire to say no word

that does not tend to bring out something essential or characteristic.

M. Lanson has ventured to trace French literature to the present

moment. I have thought it wiser to close my survey with the decline

of the romantic movement. With the rise of naturalism a new period

opens. The literature of recent years is rather a subject for current

criticism than for historical study.

I cannot say how often I have been indebted to the writings of M.

Brunetiere, M. Faguet, M. Larroumet, M. Paul Stapfer, and other living

critics: to each of the volumes of _Les Grands Ecrivains Francais_,

and to many of the volumes of the _Classiques Populaires_. M.

Lintilhac's edition of Merlet's _Etudes Litteraires_ has also often

served me. But to name my aids to study would be to fill some pages.

While not unmindful of historical and social influences, I desire

especially to fix my reader's attention on great individuals, their

ideas, their feelings, and their art. The general history of ideas

should, in the first instance, be discerned by the student of

literature through his observation of individual minds.

That errors must occur where so many statements are made, I am aware

from past experience; but I have taken no slight pains to attain

accuracy. It must not be hastily assumed that dates here recorded

are incorrect because they sometimes differ from those given in other

books. For my errors I must myself bear the responsibility; but by

the editorial care of Mr. Gosse, in reading the proof-sheets of this

book, the number of such errors has been reduced.

EDWARD DOWDEN.

DUBLIN, _June_ 1897.

CONTENTS

_BOOK THE FIRST_--_THE MIDDLE AGES_

CHAPTER PAGE

I. NARRATIVE RELIGIOUS POETRY--THE NATIONAL EPIC--THE EPIC OF

ANTIQUITY--ROMANCES OF LOVE AND COURTESY . . . . . . . . 3

II. LYRICAL POETRY--FABLES, AND RENARD THE FOX--FABLIAUX--THE

ROMANCE OF THE ROSE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24

III. DIDACTIC LITERATURE--SERMONS--HISTORY . . . . . . . . . . 40

IV. LATEST MEDIAEVAL POETS--THE DRAMA . . . . . . . . . . . . .

58

_BOOK THE SECOND_--_THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY_

I. RENAISSANCE AND REFORMATION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81

II. FROM THE PLEIADE TO MONTAIGNE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96

_BOOK THE THIRD_--_THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY_

I. LITERARY FREEDOM AND LITERARY ORDER . . . . . . . . . . . 131

II. THE FRENCH ACADEMY--PHILOSOPHY (DESCARTES)--RELIGION

(PASCAL) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147

III. THE DRAMA (MONTCHRESTIEN TO CORNEILLE) . . . . . . . . . . 160

IV. SOCIETY AND PUBLIC LIFE IN LETTERS . . . . . . . . . . . . 173

V. BOILEAU AND LA FONTAINE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183

VI. COMEDY AND TRAGEDY--MOLIERE--RACINE . . . . . . . . . . . 196

VII. BOSSUET AND THE PREACHERS--FENELON . . . . . . . . . . . . 219

VIII. TRANSITION TO THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY . . . . . . . . . . . 235

_BOOK THE FOURTH_--_THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY_

I. MEMOIRS AND HISTORY--POETRY--THE THEATRE--THE NOVEL . . . 251

II. MONTESQUIEU--VAUVENARGUES--VOLTAIRE . . . . . . . . . . . 273

III. DIDEROT AND THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA--PHILOSOPHERS, ECONOMISTS,

CRITICS--BUFFON . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 294

IV. ROUSSEAU--BEAUMARCHAIS--BERNARDIN DE SAINT-PIERRE--ANDRE

CHENIER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 311

_BOOK THE FIFTH_--1789-1850

I. THE REVOLUTION AND THE EMPIRE--MADAME DE STAEL--

CHATEAUBRIAND . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 335

II. THE CONFLICT OF IDEAS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 354

III. POETRY OF THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 363

IV. THE NOVEL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 396

V. HISTORY--LITERARY CRITICISM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 411

BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 429

INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 437

BOOK THE FIRST

_THE MIDDLE AGES_

CHAPTER I

NARRATIVE RELIGIOUS POETRY--THE NATIONAL EPIC--THE EPIC OF

ANTIQUITY--ROMANCES OF LOVE AND COURTESY

The literature of the Middle Ages is an expression of the spirit of

feudalism and of the genius of the Church. From the union of feudalism

and Christianity arose the chivalric ideals, the new courtesy, the

homage to woman. Abstract ideas, ethical, theological, and those of

amorous metaphysics, were rendered through allegory into art.

Against these high conceptions, and the overstrained sentiment

connected with them, the positive intellect and the mocking temper

of France reacted; a literature of satire arose. By degrees the

bourgeois spirit encroached upon and overpowered the chivalric

ideals. At length the mediaeval conceptions were exhausted.

Literature dwindled as its sources were impoverished; ingenuities

and technical formalities replaced imagination. The minds of men were

prepared to accept the new influences of the Renaissance and the

Reformation.

I

NARRATIVE RELIGIOUS POETRY

The oldest monument of the French language is found in the Strasburg

Oaths (842); the oldest French poem possessing literary merit is the

_Vie de Saint Alexis_, of which a redaction belonging to the middle

of the eleventh century survives. The passion of piety and the passion

of combat, the religious and the warrior motives, found early

expression in literature; from the first arose the Lives of Saints

and other devout writings, from the second arose the _chansons de

geste_. They grew side by side, and had a like manner of development.

If one takes precedence of the other, it is only because by the chances

of time _Saint Alexis_ remains to us, and the forerunners of the

_Chanson de Roland_ are lost. With each species of poetry

_cantilenes_--short lyrico-epic poems--preceded the narrative form.

Both the profane and what may be called the religious _chanson de

geste_ were sung or recited by the same jongleurs--men of a class

superior to the vulgar purveyors of amusement. Gradually the poems

of both kinds expanded in length, and finally prose narrative took

the place of verse.

The Lives of Saints are in the main founded on Latin originals; the

names of their authors are commonly unknown. _Saint Alexis_, a tale

of Syriac origin, possibly the work of Tedbalt, a canon of Vernon,

consists of 125 stanzas, each of five lines which are bound together

by a single assonant rhyme. It tells of the chastity and poverty of

the saint, who flies from his virgin bride, lives among beggars,

returns unrecognised to his father's house, endures the insults of

the servants, and, dying at Rome, receives high posthumous honours;

finally, he is rejoined by his wife--the poet here adding to the

legend--in the presence of God, among the company of the angels. Some

of the sacred poems are derived from the Bible, rhymed versions of

which were part of the jongleur's equipment; some from the apocryphal

gospels, or legends of Judas, of Pilate, of the Cross, or, again,

from the life of the Blessed Virgin. The literary value of these is

inferior to that of the versified Lives of the Saints. About the tenth

century the marvels of Eastern hagiography became known in France,

and gave a powerful stimulus to the devout imagination. A certain

rivalry existed between the claims of profane and religious

literature, and a popular audience for narrative poems designed for

edification was secured by their recital in churches. Wholly fabulous

some of these are--as the legend of St. Margaret--but they were not

on this account the less welcome or the less esteemed. In certain

instances the tale is dramatically placed in the mouth of a narrator,

and thus the way was in a measure prepared for the future

mystery-plays.

More than fifty of these Lives of Saints are known, composed generally

in octosyllabic verse, and varying in length from some hundreds of

lines to ten thousand. In the group which treats of the national saints

of France, an element of history obscured by errors, extravagances,

and anachronisms may be found. The purely legendary matter occupies

a larger space in those derived from the East, in which the religious

ideal is that of the hermit life. The celebrated _Barlaam et Joasaph_,

in which Joasaph, son of a king of India, escaping from his father's

restraints, fulfils his allotted life as a Christian ascetic, is

traceable to a Buddhist source. The narratives of Celtic origin--such

as those of the Purgatory of St. Patrick and the voyages of St.

Brendan--are coloured by a tender mysticism, and sometimes charm us

with a strangeness of adventure, in which a feeling for external

nature, at least in its aspects of wonder, appears. The Celtic saints

are not hermits of the desert, but travellers or pilgrims. Among the

lives of contemporary saints, by far the most remarkable is that of

our English Becket by Garnier de Pont-Sainte-Maxence. Garnier had

himself known the archbishop; he obtained the testimony of witnesses

in England; he visited the places associated with the events of

Becket's life; his work has high value as an historical document;

it possesses a personal accent, rare in such writings; a genuine

dramatic vigour; and great skill and harmonious power in its stanzas

of five rhyming lines.

A body of short poems, inspired by religious feeling, and often

telling of miracles obtained by the intercession of the Virgin or

the saints, is known as _Contes pieux_. Many of these were the work

of Gautier de Coinci (1177-1236), a Benedictine monk; he translates

from Latin sources, but with freedom, adding matter of his own, and

in the course of his pious narratives gives an image, far from

flattering, of the life and manners of his own time. It is he who

tells of the robber who, being accustomed to commend himself in his

adventures to our Lady, was supported on the gibbet for three days

by her white hands, and received his pardon; and of the illiterate

monk who suffered shame because he knew no more than his _Ave Maria_,

but who, when dead, was proved a holy man by the five roses that came

from his mouth in honour of the five letters of Maria's name; and

of the nun who quitted her convent to lead a life of disorder, yet

still addressed a daily prayer to the Virgin, and who, returning after

long years, found that the Blessed Mary had filled her place, and

that her absence was unknown. The collection known as _Vies des Peres_

exhibits the same naivete of pious feeling and imagination. Man is

weak and sinful; but by supernatural aid the humble are exalted,

sinners are redeemed, and the suffering innocent are avenged. Even

Theophile, the priest who sold his soul to the devil, on repentance

receives back from the Queen of Heaven the very document by which

he had put his salvation in pawn. The sinner (_Chevalier au barillet_)

who endeavours for a year to fill the hermit's little cask at running

streams, and endeavours in vain, finds it brimming the moment one

tear of true penitence falls into the vessel. Most exquisite in its

feeling is the tale of the _Tombeur de Notre-Dame_--a poor acrobat--a

jongleur turned monk--who knows not even the _Pater noster_ or the

_Credo_, and can only offer before our Lady's altar his tumbler's

feats; he is observed, and as he sinks worn-out and faint before the

shrine, the Virgin is seen to descend, with her angelic attendants,

and to wipe away the sweat from her poor servant's forehead. If there

be no other piety in such a tale as this, there is at least the piety

of human pity.

II

THE NATIONAL EPIC

Great events and persons, a religious and national spirit, and a

genius for heroic narrative being given, epic literature arises, as

it were, inevitably. Short poems, partly narrative, partly lyrical,

celebrate victories or defeats, the achievements of conquerors or

defenders, and are sung to relieve or to sustain the passion of the

time. The French epopee had its origin in the national songs of the

Germanic invaders of Gaul, adopted from their conquerors by the

Gallo-Romans. With the baptism of Clovis at Reims, and the acceptance

of Christianity by the Franks (496), a national consciousness began

to exist--a national and religious ideal arose. Epic heroes--Clovis,

Clotaire, Dagobert, Charles Martel--became centres for the popular

imagination; an echo of the Dagobert songs is found in _Floovent_,

a poem of the twelfth century; eight Latin lines, given in the _Vie

de Saint Faron_ by Helgaire, Bishop of Meaux, preserve, in their

ninth-century rendering, a fragment of the songs which celebrated

Clotaire II. Doubtless more and more in these lost _cantilenes_ the

German element yielded to the French, and finally the two streams

of literature--French and German--separated; gradually, also, the

lyrical element yielded to the epic, and the _chanson de geste_ was

developed from these songs.

In Charlemagne, champion of Christendom against Islam, a great epic

figure appeared; on his person converged the epic interest; he may

be said to have absorbed into himself, for the imagination of the

singers and the people, the persons of his predecessors, and even,

at a later time, of his successors; their deeds became his deeds,

their fame was merged in his; he stood forth as the representative

of France. We may perhaps regard the ninth century as the period of

the transformation of the _cantilenes_ into the _chansons de geste_;

in the fragment of Latin prose of the tenth century--reduced to prose

from hexameters, but not completely reduced--discovered at La Haye

(and named after the place of its discovery), is found an epic episode

of Carlovingian war, probably derived from a _chanson de geste_ of

the preceding century. In each _chanson_ the _gesta_,[1] the deeds

or achievements of a heroic person, are glorified, and large as may

be the element of invention in these poems, a certain historical basis

or historical germ may be found, with few exceptions, in each. Roland

was an actual person, and a battle was fought at Roncevaux in 778.

William of Orange actually encountered the Saracens at Villedaigne

in 793. Renaud de Montauban lived and fought, not indeed against

Charlemagne, but against Charles Martel. Ogier, Girard de Roussillon,

Raoul de Cambrai, were not mere creatures of the fancy. Even when

the narrative records no historical series of events, it may express

their general significance, and condense into itself something of

the spirit of an epoch. In the course of time, however, fantasy made

a conquest of the historical domain; a way for the triumph of fantasy

had been opened by the incorporation of legend into the narrative,

with all its wild exaggerations, its reckless departures from truth,

its conventional types of character, its endlessly-repeated

incidents of romance--the child nourished by wild beasts, the combat

of unrecognised father and son, the hero vulnerable only in one point,

the vindication of the calumniated wife or maiden; and by the

over-labour of fantasy, removed far from nature and reality, the epic

material was at length exhausted.

[Footnote 1: _Gestes_ meant (1) deeds, (2) their history, (3) the

heroic family.]

The oldest surviving _chanson de geste_ is the SONG OF ROLAND, and

it is also the best. The disaster of Roncevaux, probably first sung

in _cantilenes_, gave rise to other chansons, two of which, of earlier

date than the surviving poem, can in a measure be reconstructed from

the Chronicle of Turpin and from a Latin _Carmen de proditione

Guenonis_. These, however, do not detract from the originality of

the noble work in our possession, some of the most striking episodes

of which are not elsewhere found. The oldest manuscript is at Oxford,

and the last line has been supposed to give the author's

name--Touroude (Latinised "Turoldus")--but this may have been the

name of the jongleur who sang, or the transcriber who copied. The

date of the poem lies between that of the battle of Hastings, 1066,

where the minstrel Taillefer sang in other words the deeds of Roland,

and the year 1099. The poet was probably a Norman, and he may have

been one of the Norman William's followers in the invasion of England.

More than any other poem, the _Chanson de Roland_ deserves to be named

the Iliad of the Middle Ages. On August 15, 778, the rearguard of

Charlemagne's army, returning from a successful expedition to the

north of Spain, was surprised and destroyed by Basque mountaineers

in the valley of Roncevaux. Among those who fell was Hrodland (Roland),

Count of the march of Brittany. For Basques, the singers substituted

a host of Saracens, who, after promise of peace, treacherously attack

the Franks, with the complicity of Roland's enemy, the traitor Ganelon.

By Roland's side is placed his companion-in-arms, Olivier, brave but

prudent, brother of Roland's betrothed, _la belle Aude_, who learns

her lover's death, and drops dead at the feet of Charlemagne. In fact

but thirty-six years of age, Charlemagne is here a majestic old man,

_a la barbe fleurie_, still full of heroic vigour. Around him are

his great lords--Duke Naime, the Nestor of this Iliad; Archbishop

Turpin, the warrior prelate; Oger the Dane; the traitor Ganelon. And

overhead is God, who will send his angels to bear heavenwards the

soul of the gallant Roland. The idea of the poem is at once national

and religious--the struggle between France, as champion of

Christendom, and the enemies of France and of God. Its spirit is that

of the feudal aristocracy of the eleventh century. The characters

are in some degree representative of general types, but that of Roland

is clearly individualised; the excess of soldierly pride which will

not permit him, until too late, to sound his horn and recall

Charlemagne to his aid, is a glorious fault. When all his comrades

have fallen, he still continues the strife; and when he dies, it is

with his face to the retreating foe. His fall is not unavenged on

the Saracens and on the traitor. The poem is written in decasyllabic

verse--in all 4000 lines--divided into sections or _laisses_ of

varying length, the lines of each _laisse_ being held together by

a single assonance.[2] And such is the form in which the best _chansons

de geste_ are written. The decasyllabic line, derived originally from

popular Latin verse, rhythmical rather than metrical, such as the

Roman legionaries sang, is the favourite verse of the older chansons.

The alexandrine,[3] first seen in the _Pelerinage de Jerusalem_ of

the early years of the twelfth century, in general indicates later

and inferior work. The _laisse_, bound in one by its identical

assonance, might contain five lines or five hundred. In chansons of

late date the full rhyme often replaces assonance; but inducing, as

it did in unskilled hands, artificial and feeble expansions of the

sense, rhyme was a cause which co-operated with other causes in the

decline of this form of narrative poetry.

[Footnote 2: _Assonance_, _i.e._ vowel-rhyme, without an agreement

of consonants.]

[Footnote 3: Verse of twelve syllables, with cesura after the sixth

accented syllable. In the decasyllabic line the cesura generally

followed the fourth, but sometimes the sixth, tonic syllable.]

Naturally the chansons which celebrated the achievements of one epic

personage or one heroic family fell into a group, and the idea of

cycles of songs having arisen, the later poets forced many independent

subjects to enter into the so-called cycle of the king (Charlemagne),

or that of William of Orange, or that of Doon of Mayence. The second

of these had, indeed, a genuine cyclic character: it told of the

resistance of the south of France to the Mussulmans. The last cycle

to develop was that of the Crusades. Certain poems or groups of poems

may be distinguished as _gestes_ of the provinces, including the

_Geste des Lorrains_, that of the North (_Raoul de Cambrai_), that

of Burgundy, and others.[4] Among these may be placed the beautiful

tale of _Amis et Amiles_, a glorification of friendship between man

and man, which endures all trials and self-sacrifices. Other poems,

again, are unconnected with any of these cycles; and, indeed, the

cyclic division is more a convenience of classification than a fact

in the spontaneous development of this form of art. The entire period

of the evolution of epic song extends from the tenth or eleventh to

the fifteenth century, or, we might say, from the _Chanson de Roland_

to the _Chronique de Bertrand Duguesclin_. The eleventh century

produced the most admirable work; in the twelfth century the chansons

are more numerous, but nothing was written of equal merit with the

Song of Roland; after the death of Louis VII. (1180) the old epic

material was rehandled and beaten thin--the decadence was already

in progress.

[Footnote 4: The epopee composed in Provencal, sung but not

transcribed, is wholly lost. The development of lyric poetry in the

South probably checked the development of the epic.]

The style in which the _chansons de geste_ are written is something

traditional, something common to the people and to the time, rather

than characteristic of the individual authors. They show little of

the art of arranging or composing the matter so as to produce an unity

of effect: the narrative straggles or condenses itself as if by

accident; skill in transitions is unknown. The study of character

is rude and elementary: a man is either heroic or dastard, loyal or

a traitor; wholly noble, or absolutely base. Yet certain types of

manhood and womanhood are presented with power and beauty. The feeling

for external nature, save in some traditional formulae, hardly

appears. The passion for the marvellous is everywhere present: St.

Maurice, St. George, and a shining company, mounted on white steeds,

will of a sudden bear down the hordes of the infidel; an angel stands

glorious behind the throne of Charlemagne; or in narrative of Celtic

origin angels may be mingled with fays. God, the great suzerain, to

whom even kings owe homage, rules over all; Jesus and Mary are watchful

of the soldiers of the cross; Paradise receives the souls of the

faithful. As for earth, there is no land so gay or so dear as _la

douce France_. The Emperor is above all the servant and protector

of the Church. As the influence of the great feudal lords increased,

they are magnified often at the expense of the monarchy; yet even

when in high rebellion, they secretly feel the duty of loyalty. The

recurring poetic epithet and phrase of formula found in the _chansons

de geste_ often indicate rather than veil a defect of imagination.

Episodes and adventures are endlessly repeated from poem to poem with

varying circumstances--the siege, the assault, the capture, the duel

of Christian hero and Saracen giant, the Paynim princess amorous of

a fair French prisoner, the marriage, the massacre, and a score of

other favourite incidents.

The popularity of the French epopee extended beyond France. Every

country of Europe translated or imitated the _chansons de geste_.

Germany made the fortunate choice of _Roland_ and _Aliscans_. In

England two of the worst examples, _Fierabras_ and _Otinel_, were

special favourites. In Norway the chansons were applied to the purpose

of religious propaganda. Italy made the tales of Roland, Ogier, Renaud,

her own. Meanwhile the national epopee declined in France; a breath

of scepticism touched and withered the leafage and blossom of

imagination; it even became possible to parody--as in _Audigier_--the

heroic manner. The employment of rhyme in place of assonance, and of

the alexandrine in place of the decasyllabic line, encouraged what may

be called poetical padding. The influence of the Breton romances

diverted the _chansons de geste_ into ways of fantasy; "We shall never

know," writes M. Leon Gautier, "the harm which the Round Table has

done us." Finally, verse became a weariness, and was replaced by

prose. The decline had progressed to a fall.

III

THE EPIC OF ANTIQUITY

Later to develop than the national epopee was that which formed the

cycle of antiquity. Their romantic matter made the works of the

Greco-Roman decadence even more attractive than the writings of the

great classical authors to poets who would enter into rivalry with

the singers of the _chansons de geste_. These poems, which

mediaevalise ancient literature--poems often of portentous

length--have been classified in three groups--epic romances,

historical or pseudo-historical romances, and mythological tales,

including the imitations of Ovid. The earliest in date of the first

group (about 1150-1155) is the ROMANCE OF THEBES, the work of an

unknown author, founded upon a compendium of the Thebaid of Statius,

preceded by the story of OEdipus. It opened the way for the vast

ROMANCE OF TROY, written some ten years later, by Benoit de

Sainte-More. The chief sources of Benoit were versions, probably more

or less augmented, of the famous records of the Trojan war, ascribed

to the Phrygian Dares, an imaginary defender of the city, and the

Cretan Dictys, one of the besiegers. Episodes were added, in which,

on a slender suggestion, Benoit set his own inventive faculty to work,

and among these by far the most interesting and admirable is the story

of Troilus and Briseida, known better to us by her later name of

Cressida. Through Boccaccio's _Il Filostrato_ this tale reached our

English Chaucer, and through Chaucer it gave rise to the strange,

half-heroic, half-satirical play of Shakespeare.

Again, ten years later, an unknown poet was adapting Virgil to the

taste of his contemporaries in his _Eneas_, where the courtship of

the Trojan hero and Lavinia is related in the chivalric manner. All

these poems are composed in the swift octosyllabic verse; the _Troy_

extends to thirty thousand lines. While the names of the personages

are classical, the spirit and life of the romances are wholly

mediaeval: Troilus, and Hector, and AEneas are conceived as if knights

of the Middle Ages; their wars and loves are those of gallant

chevaliers. The _Romance of Julius Caesar_ (in alexandrine verse),

the work of a certain Jacot de Forest, writing in the second half

of the thirteenth century, versifies, with some additions from the

Commentaries of Caesar, an earlier prose translation by Jehan de Thuin

(about 1240) of Lucan's Pharsalia--the oldest translation in prose

of any secular work of antiquity. Caesar's passion for Cleopatra in

the Romance is the love prescribed to good knights by the amorous

code of the writer's day, and Cleopatra herself has borrowed something

of the charm of Tristram's Iseult.

If _Julius Caesar_ may be styled historical, the ROMAN D'ALEXANDRE,

a poem of twenty thousand lines (to the form of which this romance

gave its name--"alexandrine" verse), the work of Lambert le Tort and

Alexandre de Bernay, can only be described as legendary. All--or

nearly all--that was written during the Middle Ages in French on the

subject of Alexander may be traced back to Latin versions of a Greek

compilation, perhaps of the first century, ascribed to Callisthenes,

the companion of Alexander on his Asiatic expedition.[5] It is

uncertain how much the _Alexandre_ may owe to a Provencal poem on

the same subject, written in the early years of the twelfth century,

probably by Alberic de Briancon, of which only a short fragment, but

that of high merit, has been preserved. From his birth, and his

education by Aristotle and the enchanter Nectanebus, to the division,

as death approaches, of his empire between his twelve peers, the story

of Alexander is a series of marvellous adventures; the imaginary

wonders of the East, monstrous wild beasts, water-women,

flower-maidens, Amazons, rain of fire, magic mountains, magic

fountains, trees of the sun and of the moon, are introduced with a

liberal hand. The hero is specially distinguished by the virtue of

liberality; a jongleur who charms him by lays sung to the flute, is

rewarded with the lordship of Tarsus, a worthy example for the

twelfth-century patrons of the poet. The romance had a resounding

fame.

[Footnote 5: Not quite all, for certain borrowings were made from

the correspondence of Alexander with Dindimus, King of the Brahmans,

and from the _Alexandri Magni iter ad Paradisum_.]

Of classical poets, Ovid ranked next to Virgil in the esteem of the

Middle Ages. The mythology of paganism was sanctified by the

assumption that it was an allegory of Christian mysteries, and thus

the stories might first be enjoyed by the imagination, and then be

expounded in their spiritual meaning. The _Metamorphoses_ supplied

Chretien de Troyes with the subject of his _Philomena_; other writers

gracefully dealt with the tales of _Piramus_ and of _Narcissus_. But

the most important work founded upon Ovid was a versified translation

of the _Metamorphoses_ (before 1305) by a Franciscan monk, Chretien

Legouais de Sainte-Maure, with appended interpretations, scientific,

historical, moral, or religious, of the mythological fables. Ovid's

_Art of Love_, of which more than one rendering was made, aided in

the formation or development of the mediaeval theory of love and the

amorous casuistry founded upon that theory.

IV

ROMANCES OF LOVE AND COURTESY

Under the general title of the _Epopee courtoise_--the Epopee of

Courtesy--may be grouped those romances which are either works of

pure imagination or of uncertain origin, or which lead us back to

Byzantine or to Celtic sources. They include some of the most

beautiful and original poems of the Middle Ages. Appearing first about

the opening of the twelfth century, later in date than the early

_chansons de geste_, and contemporary with the courtly lyric poetry

of love, they exhibit the chivalric spirit in a refined and graceful

aspect; their marvels are not gross wonders, but often surprises of

beauty; they are bright in colour, and varied in the play of life;

the passions which they interpret, and especially the passion of love,

are felt with an exquisite delicacy and a knowledge of the workings

of the heart. They move lightly in their rhymed or assonanced verse;

even when they passed into the form of prose they retained something

of their charm. Breton harpers wandering through France and England

made Celtic themes known through their _lais_; the fame of King Arthur

was spread abroad by these singers and by the _History_ of Geoffrey

of Monmouth. French poets welcomed the new matter of romance, infused

into it their own chivalric spirit, made it a receptacle for their

ideals of gallantry, courtesy, honour, grace, and added their own

beautiful inventions. With the story of King Arthur was connected

that of the sacred vessel--the graal--in which Joseph of Arimathea

at the cross had received the Saviour's blood. And thus the rude Breton

_lais_ were elevated not only to a chivalric but to a religious

purpose.

The romances of Tristan may certainly be named as of Celtic origin.

About 1150 an Anglo-Norman poet, BEROUL, brought together the

scattered narrative of his adventures in a romance, of which a large

fragment remains. The secret loves of Tristan and Iseut, their

woodland wanderings, their dangers and escapes, are related with fine

imaginative sympathy; but in this version of the tale the fatal

love-philtre operates only for a period of three years; Iseut, with

Tristan's consent, returns to her husband, King Marc; and then a

second passion is born in their hearts, a passion which is the

offspring not of magic but of natural attraction, and at a critical

moment of peril the fragment closes. About twenty years later (1170)

the tale was again sung by an Anglo-Norman named THOMAS. Here--again

in a fragment--we read of Tristan's marriage, a marriage only in name,

to the white-handed Iseut of Brittany, his fidelity of heart to his

one first love, his mortal wound and deep desire to see the Queen

of Cornwall, the device of the white or black sails to announce the

result of his entreaty that she should come, his deception, and the

death of his true love upon her lover's corpse. Early in the thirteenth

century was composed a long prose romance, often rehandled and

expanded, upon the same subject, in which Iseut and Tristan meet at

the last moment and die in a close embrace.

_Le Chevrefeuille_ (The Honeysuckle), one of several _lais_ by a

twelfth-century poetess, MARIE, living in England, but a native of

France, tells gracefully of an assignation of Tristan and Iseut, their

meeting in the forest, and their sorrowful farewell. Marie de France

wrote with an exquisite sense of the generosities and delicacy of

the heart, and with a skill in narrative construction which was rare

among the poets of her time. In _Les Deux Amants_, the manly pride

of passion, which in a trial of strength declines the adventitious

aid of a reviving potion, is rewarded by the union in death of the

lover and his beloved. In _Yonec_ and in _Lanval_ tales of love and

chivalry are made beautiful by lore of fairyland, in which the element

of wonder is subdued to beauty. But the most admirable poem by Marie

de France is unquestionably her _Eliduc_. The Breton knight Eliduc

is passionately loved by Guilliadon, the only daughter of the old

King of Exeter, on whose behalf he had waged battle. Her tokens of

affection, girdle and ring, are received by Eliduc in silence; for,

though her passion is returned, he has left in Brittany, unknown to

Guilliadon, a faithful wife. Very beautiful is the self-transcending

love of the wife, who restores her rival from seeming death, and

herself retires into a convent. The lovers are wedded, and live in

charity to the poor, but with a trouble at the heart for the wrong

that they have done. In the end they part; Eliduc embraces the

religious life, and the two loving women are united as sisters in

the same abbey.

Wace, in his romance of the _Brut_ (1155), which renders into verse

the _Historia_ of Geoffrey of Monmouth, makes the earliest mention

of the Round Table. Whether the Arthurian legends be of Celtic or

of French origin--and the former seems probable--the French romances

of King Arthur owe but the crude material to Celtic sources; they

may be said to begin with CHRETIEN DE TROYES, whose lost poem on

Tristan was composed about 1160. Between that date and 1175 he wrote

his _Erec et Enide_ (a tale known to us through Tennyson's idyll of

Geraint and Enid, derived from the Welsh _Mabinogion_), _Cliges_,

_Le Chevalier de la Charrette_, _Le Chevalier au Lion_, and _Perceval_.

In _Cliges_ the maidenhood of his beloved Fenice, wedded in form to

the Emperor of Constantinople, is guarded by a magic potion; like

Romeo's Juliet, she sleeps in apparent death, but, happier than Juliet,

she recovers from her trance to fly with her lover to the court of

Arthur. The _Chevalier de la Charrette_, at first unknown by name,

is discovered to be Lancelot, who, losing his horse, has condescended,

in order that he may obtain sight of Queen Guenievre, and in passionate

disregard of the conventions of knighthood, to seat himself in a cart

which a dwarf is leading. After gallant adventures on the Queen's

behalf, her indignant resentment of his unknightly conduct,

estrangement, and rumours of death, he is at length restored to her

favour.[6] While _Perceval_ was still unfinished, Chretien de Troyes

died. It was continued by other poets, and through this romance the

quest of the holy graal became a portion of the Arthurian cycle. A

_Perceval_ by ROBERT DE BORON, who wrote in the early part of the

thirteenth century, has been lost; but a prose redaction of the

romance exists, which closes with the death of King Arthur. The great

_Lancelot_ in prose--a vast compilation--(about 1220) reduces the

various adventures of its hero and of other knights of the King to

their definitive form; and here the achievement of the graal is

assigned, not to Perceval, but to the saintly knight Sir Galaad;

Arthur is slain in combat with the revolter Mordret; and Lancelot

and the Queen enter into the life of religion. Passion and piety are

alike celebrated; the rude Celtic legends have been sanctified. The

earlier history of the sacred vase was traced by Robert de Boron in

his _Joseph d'Arimathie_ (or the _Saint-Graal_), soon to be rehandled

and developed in prose; and he it was who, in his _Merlin_--also

presently converted into prose--on suggestions derived from Geoffrey

of Monmouth, brought the great enchanter into Arthurian romance. By

the middle of the thirteenth century the cycle had received its full

development. Towards the middle of the fourteenth century, in

_Perceforest_, an attempt was made to connect the legend of Alexander

the Great with that of King Arthur.

[Footnote 6: Chretien de Troyes is the first poet to tell of the love

of Lancelot for the Queen.]

Beside the so-called Breton romances, the _Epopee courtoise_ may be

taken to include many poems of Greek, of Byzantine, or of uncertain

origin, such as the _Roman de la Violette_, the tale of a wronged

wife, having much in common with that novel of Boccaccio with which

Shakespeare's _Cymbeline_ is connected, the _Floire et

Blanchefleur_; the _Partenopeus de Blois_, a kind of "Cupid and

Psyche" story, with the parts of the lovers transposed, and others.

In the early years of the thirteenth century the prose romance

rivalled in popularity the romance in verse. The exquisite

_chante-fable_ of _Aucassin et Nicolette_, of the twelfth century,

is partly in prose, partly in assonanced _laisses_ of seven-syllable

verse. It is a story of the victory of love: the heir of Count Garin

of Beaucaire is enamoured of a beautiful maiden of unknown birth,

purchased from the Saracens, who proves to be daughter of the King

of Carthage, and in the end the lovers are united. In one remarkable

passage unusual sympathy is shown with the hard lot of the peasant,

whose trials and sufferings are contrasted with the lighter troubles

of the aristocratic class.

In general the poems of the _Epopee courtoise_ exhibit much of the

brilliant external aspect of the life of chivalry as idealised by

the imagination; dramatic situations are ingeniously devised; the

emotions of the chief actors are expounded and analysed, sometimes

with real delicacy; but in the conception of character, in the

recurring incidents, in the types of passion, in the creation of

marvel and surprise, a large conventional element is present. Love

is independent of marriage, or rather the relation of wedlock excludes

love in the accepted sense of the word; the passion is almost

necessarily illegitimate, and it comes as if it were an irresistible

fate; the first advance is often made by the woman; but, though at

war with the duty of wedlock, love is conceived as an ennobling

influence, prompting the knight to all deeds of courage and

self-sacrifice. Through the later translation of the Spanish _Amadis

des Gaules_, something of the spirit of the mediaeval romances was

carried into the chivalric and pastoral romances of the seventeenth

century.

CHAPTER II

LYRICAL POETRY--FABLES, AND RENARD THE FOX--FABLIAUX--THE ROMANCE

OF THE ROSE

I

LYRICAL POETRY

Long before the date of any lyrical poems that have come down to us,

song and dance were a part of the life of the people of the North

as well as of the South of France; religious festivals were celebrated

with a gaiety which had its mundane side; love and malicious sport

demanded an expression as well as pious joy. But in tracing the forms

of lyrical verse anterior to the middle of the twelfth century, when

the troubadour influence from the South began to be felt, we must

be guided partly by conjecture, derived from the later poetry, in

which--and especially in the refrains--earlier fragments have been

preserved.

The common characteristic which distinguishes the earlier lyrics is

the presence in them of an objective element: they do not merely render

an emotion; they contain something of a story, or they suggest a

situation. In this literature of sentiment, the singer or imagined

singer is commonly a woman. The _chanson d'histoire_ is also known

as _chanson de toile_, for the songs were such as suited "the spinsters

and the knitters in the sun." Their inspiring motive was a girl's

joy or grief in love; they lightly outline or suggest the facts of

a miniature drama of passion, and are aided by the repeated lyrical

cry of a refrain. As yet, love was an affair for the woman; it was

she alone who made a confession of the heart. None of these poems

are later than the close of the twelfth century. If the author be

represented as actor or witness, the poem is rather a _chanson a

personnages_ than a _chanson d'histoire_; most frequently it is a

wife who is supposed to utter to husband, or lover, or to the poet,

her complaint of the grievous servitude of marriage. The _aube_ is,

again, a woman's song, uttered as a parting cry when the lark at

daybreak, or the watcher from his tower, warns her lover to depart.

In the _pastourelle_--a form much cultivated--a knight and a

shepherdess meet; love proposals are made, and find a response

favourable or the reverse; witnesses or companions may be present,

and take a part in the action. The _rondet_ is a dancing-song, in

which the refrain corresponds with one of the movements of the dance;

a solo-singer is answered by the response of a chorus; in the progress

of time the _rondet_ assumed the precise form of the modern triolet;

the theme was still love, at first treated seriously if not tragically,

but at a later time in a spirit of gaiety. It is conjectured that

all these lyrical forms had their origin in the festivities of May,

when the return of spring was celebrated by dances in which women

alone took part, a survival from the pagan rites of Venus.

The _poesie courtoise_, moulded in form and inspired in its sentiment

by the Provencal lyrics, lies within the compass of about one hundred

and thirty years, from 1150 to 1280. The Crusade of 1147 served,

doubtless, as a point of meeting for men of the North and of the South;

but, apart from this, we may bear in mind the fact that the mediaeval

poet wandered at will from country to country and from court to court.

In 1137, Louis VII. married Eleonore of Aquitaine, who was an ardent

admirer of the poetry of courtesy. Her daughters inherited her taste,

and themselves became patronesses of literature at the courts of their

husbands, Henri de Champagne and Thibaut de Blois. From these courts,

and that of Paris, this poetry of culture spread, and the earlier

singers were persons of royal or noble rank and birth. The chief period

of its cultivation was probably from 1200 to 1240. During the

half-century before its sudden cessation, while continuing to be a

fashion in courts and high society, it reached the wealthy bourgeoisie

of the North. At Arras, where Jacques Bretel and Adam de la Halle,

the hunchback, were eminent in song, it had its latest moments of

splendour.

It is essentially a poetry of the intellect and of the imagination,

dealing with an elaborated theory of love; the simple and spontaneous

cry of passion is rarely heard. According to the amorous doctrine,

love exists only between a married woman and the aspirant to her heart,

and the art of love is regulated by a stringent code. Nothing can

be claimed by the lover as a right; the grace of his lady, who is

placed far above him, must be sought as a favour; for that favour

he must qualify himself by all knightly virtues, and chief among these,

as the position requires, are the virtues of discretion and patience.

Hence the poet's ingenuities of adoration; hence often the monotony

of artificial passion; hence, also, subtleties and curiosities of

expression, and sought-out delicacies of style. In the earlier

chansons some outbreak of instinctive feeling may be occasionally

present; but, as the amorous metaphysics developed, what came to be

admired was the skill shown in manipulating a conventional sentiment;

the lady became an abstraction of exalted beauty, the lover an

interpreter of the theory of love; the most personal of passions lost

the character of individuality. Occasionally, as in the poems of the

Chatelain de Couci, of Conon de Bethune, of Thibaut de Champagne,

and of Adam de la Halle, something personal to the writer may be

discerned; but in general the poetry is that of a doctrine and of

a school.

In some instances the reputation of the lyrical trouvere was founded

rather on his music than his verse. The metrical forms were various,

and were gradually reduced to rule; the _ballette_, of Provencal

origin, was a more elaborate _rondet_, consisting of stanzas and

refrain; the _estampie_ (_stampon_, to beat the ground with the foot)

was a dancing-song; the lyric _lai_, virtually identical with the

_descort_, consisted of stanzas which varied in structure; the

_motet_, a name originally applied to pieces of church music, was

freer in versification, and occasionally dealt with popular themes.

Among forms which cannot be included under the general title of

chansons, are those in dialogue derived from the Provencal

literature; in the _tenson_ or _debat_ the two interlocutors put forth

their opinions on what theme they may please; in the _jeu parti_ one

of the imagined disputants proposes two contrary solutions of some

poetical or amorous question, and defends whichever solution his

associate refuses to accept; the earliest _jeu parti_, attributed

to Gace Brule and Count Geoffroi of Brittany, belongs to the second

half of the twelfth century. The _serventois_ were historical poems,

and among them songs of the crusades, or moral, or religious, or

satirical pieces, directed against woman and the worship of woman.

To these various species we should add the songs in honour of the

saints, the sorrows of the Virgin uttered at the foot of the cross,

and other devout lyrics which lie outside the _poesie courtoise_.

With the close of the thirteenth century this fashion of artificial

love-lyric ceased: a change passed over the modes of thought and

feeling in aristocratic society, and other forms took the place of

those found in the _poesie courtoise_.

II

FABLES, AND RENARD THE FOX

The desire of ecclesiastical writers in the Middle Ages to give

prominence to that part of classical literature which seemed best

suited to the purpose of edification caused the fables of Phaedrus

and Avianus to be regarded with special honour. Various renderings

from the thirteenth century onwards were made under the title of

_Isopets_,[1] a name appropriated to collections of fables whether

derived from AEsop or from other sources. The twelfth-century fables

in verse of Marie de France, founded on an English collection, include

apologues derived not only from classical authors but from the tales

of popular tradition. A great collection made about 1450 by

Steinhoewel, a physician of Ulm, was translated into French, and

became the chief source of later collections, thus appearing in the

remote ancestry of the work of La Fontaine. The aesthetic value of

the mediaeval fables, including those of Marie de France, is small;

the didactic intention was strong, the literary art was feeble.

[Footnote 1: The earlier "Romulus" was the name of the supposed author

of the fables of Phaedrus, while that of Phaedrus was still unknown.]

It is far otherwise with the famous beast-epic, the ROMAN DE RENARD.

The cycle consists of many parts or "branches" connected by a common

theme; originating and obscurely developed in the North, in Picardy,

in Normandy, and the Isle of France, it suddenly appeared in

literature in the middle of the twelfth century, and continued to

receive additions and variations during nearly two hundred years.

The spirit of the _Renard_ poems is essentially bourgeois; the heroes

of the _chansons de geste_ achieve their wondrous deeds by strength

and valour; Renard the fox is powerful by skill and cunning; the

greater beasts--his chief enemy the wolf, and others--are no match

for his ingenuity and endless resources; but he is powerless against

smaller creatures, the cock, the crow, the sparrow. The names of the

personages are either significant names, such as Noble, the lion,

and Chanticleer, the cock, or proper names, such as Isengrin, the

wolf, Bruno, the bear, Tibert, the cat, Bernard, the ass; and as

certain of these proper names are found in the eastern district, it

has been conjectured that a poet of Lotharingia in the tenth century

first told in Latin the wars of fox and wolf, and that through

translations the epic matter, derived originally from popular

tradition, reached the trouveres of the North. While in a certain

degree typical figures, the beasts are at the same time individual;

Renard is not the representative merely of a species; he is Renard,

an individual, with a personality of his own; Isengrin is not merely

a wolf, he is the particular wolf Isengrin; each is an epic individual,

heroic and undying. Classical fable remotely exerted an influence

on certain branches of the Romance; but the vital substance of the

epic is derived from the stores of popular tradition in which material

from all quarters--the North of Europe and the Eastern world--had

been gradually fused. In the artistic treatment of such material the

chief difficulty lies in preserving a just measure between the

beast-character and the imported element of humanity. Little by

little the anthropomorphic features were developed at the expense

of verisimilitude; the beast forms became a mere masquerade; the

romances were converted into a satire, and the satire lost rather

than gained by the inefficient disguise.

The earliest branches of the cycle have reached us only in a

fragmentary way, but they can be in part reconstructed from the Latin

_Isengrinus_ of Nivard of Ghent (about 1150), and from the German

_Reinhart Fuchs_, a rendering from the French by an Alsatian, Henri

le Glichezare (about 1180). The wars of Renard and Isengrin are here

sung, and the failure of Renard's trickeries against the lesser

creatures; the spirit of these early branches is one of frank gaiety,

untroubled by a didactic or satirical intention. In the branches of

the second period the parody of human society is apparent; some of

the episodes are fatiguing in their details; some are intolerably

gross, but the poem known as the Branch of the Judgment is masterly--an

ironical comedy, in which, without sacrifice of the primitive

character of the beast-epic, the spirit of mediaeval life is

transported into the animal world. Isengrin, the accuser of Renard

before King Noble and his court, is for a moment worsted; the fox

is vindicated, when suddenly enters a funeral cortege--Chanticleer

and his four wives bear upon a litter the dead body of one of their

family, the victim of Renard's wiles. The prayers for the dead are

recited, the burial is celebrated with due honour, and Renard is

summoned to justice; lie heaped upon lie will not save him; at last

he humbles himself with pious repentance, and promising to seek God's

pardon over-sea, is permitted in his pilgrim's habit to quit the court.

It is this Judgment of Renard which formed the basis of the _Reineke

Fuchs_, known to us through the modernisation of Goethe.

From the date of the Branch of the Judgment the Renard Romances

declined. The Judgment was imitated by inferior hands, and the beasts

were more and more nearly transformed to men; the spirit of gaiety

was replaced by seriousness or gloom; Renard ceased to be a

light-footed and ingenious rogue; he became a type of human fraud

and cruelty; whatever in society was false and base and merciless

became a form of "renardie," and by "renardie" the whole world seemed

to be ruled. Such is the temper expressed in _Le Couronnement Renard_,

written in Flanders soon after 1250, a satire directed chiefly against

the mendicant orders, in which the fox, turned friar for a season,

ascends the throne. _Renard le Nouveau_, the work of a poet of Lille,

Jacquemart Gelee, nearly half a century later, represents again the

triumph of the spirit of evil; although far inferior in execution

to the _Judgment_, it had remarkable success, to which the allegory,

wearying to a modern reader, no doubt contributed at a time when

allegory was a delight. The last of the Renard romances, _Renard le

Contrefait_, was composed at Troyes before 1328, by an ecclesiastic

who had renounced his profession and turned to trade. In his leisure

hours he spun, in discipleship to Jean de Meun, his interminable poem,

which is less a romance than an encyclopaedia of all the knowledge

and all the opinions of the author. This latest _Renard_ has a value

akin to that of the second part of _Le Roman de la Rose_; it is a

presentation of the ideas and manners of the time by one who freely

criticised and mocked the powers that be, both secular and sacred,

and who was in sympathy with a certain movement or tendency towards

social, political, and intellectual reform.

III

FABLIAUX

The name _fabliaux_ is applied to short versified tales, comic in

character, and intended rather for recitation than for song. Out of

a far larger number about one hundred and fifty have survived. The

earliest--_Richeut_--is of the year 1159. From the middle of the

twelfth century, together with the heroic or sentimental poetry of

feudalism, we find this bourgeois poetry of realistic observation;

and even in the _chansons de geste_, in occasional comic episodes,

something may be seen which is in close kinship with the fabliaux.

Many brief humorous stories, having much in common under their various

disguises, exist as part of the tradition of many lands and peoples.

The theory which traces the French fabliaux to Indian originals is

unproved, and indeed is unnecessary. The East, doubtless,

contributed its quota to the common stock, but so did other quarters

of the globe; such tales are ubiquitous and are undying, only the

particular form which they assume being determined by local

conditions.

The fabliaux, as we can study them, belong especially to the north

and north-east of France, and they continued to be put forth by their

rhymers until about 1340, the close of the twelfth and the beginning

of the thirteenth century being the period of their greatest

popularity. Simple and obvious jests sufficed to raise a laugh among

folk disposed to good humour; by degrees something of art and skill

was attained. The misfortunes of husbands supplied an inexhaustible

store of merriment; if woman and the love of woman were idealised

in the romances, the fabliaux took their revenge, and exhibited her

as the pretty traitress of a shameless comedy. If religion was

honoured in the age of faith, the bourgeois spirit found matter of

mirth in the adventures of dissolute priests and self-indulgent monks.

Not a few of the fabliaux are cynically gross--ribald but not

voluptuous. To literary distinction they made small pretence. It

sufficed if the tale ran easily in the current speech, thrown into

rhyming octosyllables; but brevity, frankness, natural movement are

no slight or common merits in mediaeval poetry, and something of the

social life of the time is mirrored in these humorous narratives.

To regard them as a satire of class against class, inspired by

indignation, is to misconceive their true character; they are rather

miniature comedies or caricatures, in which every class in turn

provides material for mirth. It may, however, be said that with the

writers of the fabliaux to hold woman in scorn is almost an article

of faith. Among these writers a few persons of secular rank or

dignified churchmen occasionally appeared; but what we may call the

professional rhymers and reciters were the humbler jongleurs

addressing a bourgeois audience--degraded clerics, unfrocked monks,

wandering students, who led a bohemian life of gaiety alternating

with misery. In the early part of the fourteenth century these errant

jongleurs ceased to be esteemed; the great lord attached a minstrel

to his household, and poetry grew more dignified, more elaborate in

its forms, more edifying in its intention, and in its dignity grew

too often dull. Still for a time fabliaux were written; but the age

of the jongleurs was over. _Virelais_, _rondeaux_, _ballades_,

_chants royaux_ were the newer fashion; and the old versified tale

of mirth and ribaldry was by the middle of the century a thing of

the past.

IV

THE ROMANCE OF THE ROSE

The most extraordinary production in verse of the thirteenth century

is undoubtedly _Le Roman de la Rose_. It is indeed no single

achievement, but two very remarkable poems, written at two different

periods, by two authors whose characters and gifts were not only alien,

but opposed--two poems which reflect two different conditions of

society. Of its twenty-two thousand octosyllabic lines, upwards of

four thousand are the work of GUILLAUME DE LORRIS; the remainder is

the work of a later writer, JEAN DE MEUN.

Lorris is a little town situated between Orleans and Montargis. Here,

about the year 1200, the earlier poet was born. He was a scholar,

at least as far as knowledge of Latin extends, and learned above all

in the lore of love. He died young, probably before 1230, and during

the five years that preceded his death the first part of _Le Roman

de la Rose_ was composed. Its subject is an allegorised tale of love,

his own or imagined, transferred to the realm of dreams. The writer

would fain win the heart of his beloved, and at the same time he would

instruct all amorous spirits in the art of love. He is twenty years

of age, in the May-morn of youth. He has beheld his beautiful lady,

and been charmed by her fairness, her grace, her courtesy; she has

received him with gentleness, but when he declares his love she grows

alarmed. He gains at last the kiss which tells of her affection; but

her parents intervening, throw obstacles between the lovers. Such,

divested of ornament, allegory, and personification, is the theme

of the poem.

To pluck the rose in the garden of delight is to win the maiden; her

fears, her virgin modesty and pride, her kindness, her pity, are the

company of friends or foes by whom the rose is surrounded; and to

harmonise the real and the ideal, all the incidents are placed in

the setting of a dream. Wandering one spring morning by the

river-banks, the dreamer finds himself outside the walls of a fair

orchard, owned by Deduit (Pleasure), of which the portress is Oiseuse

(Idleness); on the walls are painted figures of Hatred, Envy, Sadness,

Old Age, Poverty, and other evil powers; but unterrified by these,

he enters, and finds a company of dancers on the turf, among whom

is Beauty, led by the god of Love. Surrounded by a thorny hedge is

the rosebud on which all his desire now centres. He is wounded by

the arrows of Love, does homage to the god, and learns his commandments

and the evils and the gains of love. Invited by Bel-Accueil, the son

of Courtoisie, to approach the rose, he is driven back by Danger and

his companions, the guardians of the blossom. Raison descends from

a tower and discourses against the service of Love; Ami offers his

consolations; at length the lover is again admitted to the flowery

precinct, finds his rosebud half unclosed, and obtains the joy of

a kiss. But Jealousy raises an unscalable wall around the rose; the

serviceable Bel-Accueil is imprisoned, and with a long lament of the

lover, the poem (line 4068) closes.

Did Guillaume de Lorris ever complete his poem, or did he die while

it was still but half composed? We may conjecture that it wanted little

to reach some denouement--perhaps the fulfilment of the lover's

hopes; and it is not impossible that a lost fragment actually brought

the love-tale to its issue. But even if the story remained without

an end, we possess in Guillaume's poem a complete mediaeval Art of

Love; and if the amorous metaphysics are sometimes cold, conventional,

or laboured, we have gracious allegories, pieces of brilliant

description, vivid personifications, and something of ingenious

analysis of human passion. Nevertheless the work of this Middle-Age

disciple of Ovid and of Chretien de Troyes owes more than half its

celebrity to the continuation, conceived in an entirely opposite

spirit, by his successor, Jean de Meun.

The contrast is striking: Guillaume de Lorris was a refined and

graceful exponent of the conventional doctrine of love, a seemly

celebrant in the cult of woman, an ingenious decorator of accepted

ideas; Jean de Meun was a passionate and positive spirit, an ardent

speculator in social, political, and scientific questions, one who

cared nothing for amorous subtleties, and held woman in scorn.

Guillaume addressed an aristocratic audience, imbued with the

sentiments of chivalry; Jean was a bourgeois, eager to instruct, to

arouse, to inflame his fellows in a multitude of matters which

concerned the welfare of their lives. He was little concerned for

the lover and his rose, but was deeply interested in the condition

of society, the corruptions of religion, the advance of knowledge.

He turned from ideals which seemed spurious to reason and to nature;

he had read widely in Latin literature, and found much that suited

his mood and mind in Boethius' _De Consolatione Philosophiae_ and

in the _De Planctu Naturae_ of the "universal doctor" of the twelfth

century, Alain de Lille, from each of which he conveyed freely into

his poem. Of his life we know little; Jean Clopinel was born at Meun

on the Loire about the year 1240; he died before the close of 1305;

his continuation of Guillaume's _Roman_ was made about 1270. His later

poems, a _Testament_, in which he warned and exhorted his

contemporaries of every class, the _Codicille_, which incited to

almsgiving, and his numerous translations, prove the unabated energy

of his mind in his elder years.

The rose is plucked by the lover in the end; but lover and rose are

almost forgotten in Jean's zeal in setting forth his views of life,

and in forming an encyclopaedia of the knowledge of his time. Reason

discourses on the dangers of passion, commends friendship or

universal philanthropy as wiser than love, warns against the

instability of fortune and the deceits of riches, and sets charity

high above justice; if love be commendable, it is as the device of

nature for the continuation of the species. The way to win woman and

to keep her loyalty is now the unhappy way of squandered largess;

formerly it was not so in the golden age of equality, before private

property was known, when all men held in common the goods of the earth,

and robber kings were evils of the future. The god of Love and his

barons, with the hypocrite monk Faux-Semblant--a bitter satirist of

the mendicant orders--besiege the tower in which Bel-Accueil is

imprisoned, and by force and fraud an entrance is effected. The old

beldame, who watches over the captive, is corrupted by promises and

gifts, and frankly exposes her own iniquities and those of her sex.

War is waged against the guardians of the rose, Venus, sworn enemy

of chastity, aiding the assailants. Nature, devoted to the

continuance of the race, mourns over the violation of her laws by

man, unburdens herself of all her scientific lore in a confession

to her chaplain Genius, and sends him forth to encourage the lover's

party with a bold discourse against the crime of virginity. The

triumph of the lover closes the poem.

The graceful design of the earlier poet is disregarded; the love-story

becomes a mere frame for setting forth the views of Jean de Meun,

his criticism of the chivalric ideal, his satire upon the monkish

vices, his revolutionary notions respecting property and government,

his advanced opinions in science, his frank realism as to the

relations of man and woman. He possesses all the learning of his time,

and an accomplished judgment in the literature which he had studied.

He is a powerful satirist, and passages of narrative and description

show that he had a poet's feeling for beauty; he handles the language

with the strength and skill of a master. On the other hand, he lacks

all sense of proportion, and cannot shape an imaginative plan; his

prolixity wearies the reader, and it cannot be denied that as a moral

reformer he sometimes topples into immorality. The success of the

poem was extraordinary, and extended far beyond France. It was

attacked and defended, and up to the time of Ronsard its influence

on the progress of literature--encouraging, as it did, to excess the

art of allegory and personification--if less than has commonly been

alleged, was unquestionably important.

CHAPTER III

DIDACTIC LITERATURE--SERMONS--HISTORY

I

DIDACTIC LITERATURE

The didactic literature, moral and scientific, of the Middle Ages

is abundant, and possesses much curious interest, but it is seldom

original in substance, and seldom valuable from the point of view

of literary style. In great part it is translated or derived from

Latin sources. The writers were often clerks or laymen who had turned

from the vanities of youth--fabliau or romance--and now aimed at

edification or instruction. Science in the hands of the clergy must

needs be spiritualised and moralised; there were sermons to be found

in stones, pious allegories in beast and bird; mystic meanings in

the alphabet, in grammar, in the chase, in the tourney, in the game

of chess. Ovid and Virgil were sanctified to religious uses. The

earliest versified Bestiary, which is also a Volucrary, a Herbary,

and a Lapidary, that of Philippe de Thaon (before 1135), is versified

from the Latin _Physiologus_, itself a translation from the work of

an Alexandrian Greek of the second century. In its symbolic zoology

the lion and the pelican are emblems of Christ; the unicorn is God;

the crocodile is the devil; the stones "turrobolen," which blaze when

they approach each other, are representative of man and woman. A

_Bestiaire d'Amour_ was written by Richard de Fournival, in which

the emblems serve for the interpretation of human love. A Lapidary,

with a medical--not a moral--purpose, by Marbode, Bishop of Rennes,

was translated more than once into French, and had, indeed, an

European fame.

Bestiaries and Lapidaries form parts of the vast encyclopaedias,

numerous in the thirteenth century, which were known by such names

as _Image du Monde_, _Mappe-monde_, _Miroir du Monde_. Of these

encyclopaedias, the only one which has a literary interest is the

_Tresor_ (1265), by Dante's master, Brunetto Latini, who wrote in

French in preference to his native Italian. In it science escapes

not wholly from fantasy and myth, but at least from the allegorising

spirit; his ethics and rhetoric are derived from Latin originals;

his politics are his own. The _Somme des Vices et des Vertus_, compiled

in 1279 by Friar Lorens, is a well-composed _tresor_ of religion and

morals. Part of its contents has become familiar to us through the

Canterbury discourse of Chaucer's parson. The moral experience of

a man of the world is summed up in the prose treatise on "The Four

Ages of Man," by Philippe de Novare, chancellor of Cyprus. With this

edifying work may be grouped the so-called _Chastiements_, counsels

on education and conduct, designed for readers in general or for some

special class--women, children, persons of knightly or of humble

rank; studies of the virtues of chivalry, the rules of courtesy and

of manners.[1] Other writings, the _Etats du Monde_, present a view

of the various classes of society from a standpoint ethical, religious,

or satirical, with warnings and exhortations, which commonly

conclude with a vision of the last judgment and the pains of hell.

With such a scene of terror closes the interesting _Poeme Moral_ of

Etienne de Fougeres, in which the life of St. Moses, the converted

robber, serves as an example to monks, and that of the converted Thais

to ladies who are proud of their beauty. Its temper of moderation

contrasts with the bitter satire in the _Bible_ by Guiot de Provins,

and with many shorter satirical pieces directed against clerical

vices or the infirmities of woman. The _Besant de Dieu_, by Guillaume

le Clerc, a Norman poet (1227), preaches in verse, with eloquence

and imaginative power, the love of God and contempt of the world from

the texts of two Scripture parables--that of the Talents and that

of the Bridegroom; Guillaume anticipates the approaching end of the

world, foreshown by wars, pestilence, and famine, condemns in the

spirit of Christian charity the persecution of the Albigenses, and

mourns over the shame that has befallen the Holy Sepulchre.

[Footnote 1: Two works of the fourteenth century, interesting in the

history of manners and ideas, may here be mentioned--the _Livre du

Chevalier de la Tour-Landry_ (1372), composed for the instruction

of the writer's daughters, and the _Menagier de Paris_, a treatise

on domestic economy, written by a Parisian bourgeois for the use of

his young wife.]

Among the preacher poets of the thirteenth century the most

interesting personally is the minstrel RUTEBEUF, who towards the

close of his gay though ragged life turned to serious thoughts, and

expressed his penitent feelings with penetrating power. Rutebeuf,

indeed--the Villon of his age--deployed his vivid and ardent powers

in many directions, as a writer of song and satire, of allegory, of

fabliaux, of drama. On each and all he impressed his own personality;

the lyric note, imaginative fire, colour, melody, these were gifts

that compensated the poet's poverty, his conjugal miseries, his lost

eye, his faithless friends, his swarming adversaries. The

personification of vices and virtues, occasional in the _Besant_ and

other poems, becomes a system in the _Songe d'Enfer_, a pilgrim's

progress to hell, and the _Voie de Paradis_, a pilgrim's progress

to heaven, by Raoul de Houdan (after 1200). The _Pelerinage de la

Vie Humaine_--another "way to Paradise"; the _Pelerinage de

l'Ame_--a vision of hell, purgatory, and heaven; and the _Pelerinage

de Jesus-Christ_--a narrative of the Saviour's life, by Guillaume

de Digulleville (fourteenth century), have been imagined by some to

have been among the sources of Bunyan's allegories. Human life may

be represented in one aspect as a pilgrimage; in another it is a

knightly encounter; there is a great strife between the powers of

good and evil; in _Le Tornoiement Antecrist_, by Huon de Meri, Jesus

and the Knights of the Cross, among whom, besides St. Michael, St.

Gabriel, Confession, Chastity, and Alms, are Arthur, Launcelot, and

Gawain, contend against Antichrist and the infernal barons--Jupiter,

Neptune, Beelzebub, and a crowd of allegorical personages. But the

battles and _debats_ of a chivalric age were not only religious; there

are battles of wine and water, battles of fast and feasting, battles

of the seven arts. A disputation between the body and the soul, a

favourite subject for separate treatment by mediaeval poets, is found

also in one of the many sermons in verse; the _Debat des Trois Morts

et des Trois Vifs_ recalls the subject of the memorable painting in

the Campo Santo at Pisa.

II

SERMONS

The Latin sermons of the Middle Ages were countless; but it is not

until Gerson and the close of the fourteenth century that we find

a series of discourses by a known preacher written and pronounced

in French. It is maintained that these Latin sermons, though prepared

in the language of the Church, were delivered, when addressed to lay

audiences, in the vernacular, and that those composite sermons in

the macaronic style, that is, partly in French, partly in Latin, which

appear in the thirteenth century and are frequent in the fifteenth,

were the work of reporters or redactors among the auditory. On the

other hand, it is argued that both Latin and French sermons were

pronounced as each might seem suitable, before the laity, and that

the macaronic style was actually practised in the pulpit. Perhaps

we may accept the opinion that the short and simple homilies designed

for the people, little esteemed as compositions, were rarely thought

worthy of preservation in a Latin form; those discourses which remain

to us, if occasionally used before an unlearned audience, seem to

have been specially intended for clerkly hearers. The sermons of St.

Bernard, which have been preserved in Latin and in a French

translation of the thirteenth century, were certainly not his

eloquent popular improvisations; they are doctrinal, with crude or

curious allegorisings of Holy Scripture. Those of Maurice de Sully,

Archbishop of Paris, probably also translated from the Latin, are

simpler in manner and more practical in their teaching; but in these

characteristics they stand apart from the other sermons of the twelfth

century.

It was not until the mendicant orders, Franciscans and Dominicans,

began their labours that preaching, as preserved to us, was truly

laicised and popularised. During the thirteenth century the work of

the pulpit came to be conceived as an art which could be taught;

collections of anecdotes and illustrations--_exempla_--for the

enlivening of sermons, manuals for the use of preachers were formed;

rules and precepts were set forth; themes for popular discourse were

proposed and enlarged upon, until at length original thought and

invention ceased; the preacher's art was turned into an easy trade.

The effort to be popular often resulted in pulpit buffoonery. When

GERSON preached at court or to the people towards the close of the

fourteenth century, gravely exhorting high and low to practical

duties, with tender or passionate appeals to religious feeling, his

sermons were noble exceptions to the common practice. And the descent

from Gerson to even his more eminent successors is swift and steep.

The orators of the pulpit varied their discourse from burlesque mirth

or bitter invective to gross terrors, in which death and judgment,

Satan and hell-fire were largely displayed. The sermons of Michel

Menot and Olivier Maillard, sometimes eloquent in their censure of

sin, sometimes trivial or grotesque, sometimes pedantic in their

exhibition of learning, have at least an historical value in

presenting an image of social life in the fifteenth century.

A word must be said of the humanism which preceded the Renaissance.

Scholars and students there were in France two hundred years before

the days of Erasmus and of Bude; but they were not scholars inspired

by genius, and they contented themselves with the task of translators,

undertaken chiefly with a didactic purpose. If they failed to

comprehend the spirit of antiquity, none the less they did something

towards quickening the mind of their own time and rendering the French

language less inadequate to the intellectual needs of a later age.

All that was then known of Livy's history was rendered into French

in 1356 by the friend of Petrarch, Pierre Bercuire. On the suggestion

of Charles V., Nicole Oresme translated from the Latin the Ethics,

Politics, and Economics of Aristotle. It was to please the king that

the aged Raoul de Presles prepared his version of St. Augustine's

_De Civitate Dei_, and Denis Foulechat, with very scanty scholarship,

set himself to render the _Polycraticus_ of John of Salisbury. The

dukes of Bourbon, of Berry, of Burgundy, were also patrons of letters

and encouraged their translators. We cannot say how far this movement

of scholarship might have progressed, if external conditions had

favoured its development. In Jean de Montreuil, secretary of Charles

VI., the devoted student of Cicero, Virgil, and Terence, we have an

example of the true humanist before the Renaissance. But the seeming

dawn was a deceptive aurora; the early humanism of France was clouded

and lost in the tempests of the Hundred Years' War.

III

HISTORY

While the mediaeval historians, compilers, and abbreviators from

records of the past laboured under all the disadvantages of an age

deficient in the critical spirit, and produced works of little value

either for their substance or their literary style, the chroniclers,

who told the story of their own times, Villehardouin, Joinville,

Froissart, Commines, and others, have bequeathed to us, in living

pictures or sagacious studies of events and their causes, some of

the chief treasures of the past. History at first, as composed for

readers who knew no Latin, was comprised in those _chansons de geste_

which happened to deal with matter that was not wholly--or almost

wholly--the creation of fancy. Narrative poems treating of

contemporary events came into existence with the Crusades, but of

these the earliest have not survived, and we possess only rehandlings

of their matter in the style of romance. What happened in France might

be supposed to be known to persons of intelligence; what happened

in the East was new and strange. But England, like the East, was

foreign soil, and the Anglo-Norman trouveres of the eleventh and

twelfth centuries busied themselves with copious narratives in rhyme,

such as Gaimar's _Estorie des Engles_ (1151), Wace's _Brut_ (1155)

and his _Roman de Rou_, which, if of small literary importance, remain

as monuments in the history of the language. The murder of Becket

called forth the admirable life of the saint by Garnier de

Pont-Sainte-Maxence, founded upon original investigations; Henry

II.'s conquest of Ireland was related by an anonymous writer; his

victories over the Scotch (1173-1174) were strikingly described by

Jordan Fantosme. But by far the most remarkable piece of versified

history of this period, remarkable alike for its historical interest

and its literary merit, is the _Vie de Guillaume le Marechal_--William,

Earl of Pembroke, guardian of Henry III.--a poem of nearly twenty

thousand octosyllabic lines by an unknown writer, discovered by M.

Paul Meyer in the library of Sir Thomas Phillipps. "The masterpiece

of Anglo-Norman historiography," writes M. Langlois, "is assuredly

this anonymous poem, so long forgotten, and henceforth classic."

Prose, however, in due time proved itself to be the fitting medium

for historical narrative, and verse was given over to the

extravagances of fantasy. Compilations from the Latin, translations

from the pseudo-Turpin, from Geoffrey of Monmouth, from Sallust,

Suetonius, and Caesar were succeeded by original record and testimony.

GEOFFROY DE VILLEHARDOUIN, born between 1150 and 1164, Marshal of

Champagne in 1191, was appointed eight years later to negotiate with

the Venetians for the transport of the Crusaders to the East. He was

probably a chief agent in the intrigue which diverted the fourth

Crusade from its original destination--the Holy Land--to the assault

upon Constantinople. In the events which followed he had a prominent

part; before the close of 1213 Villehardouin was dead. During his

last years he dictated the unfinished Memoirs known as the _Conquete

de Constantinople_, which relate the story of his life from 1198 to

1207. Villehardouin is the first chronicler who impresses his own

personality on what he wrote: a brave leader, skilful in resource,

he was by no means an enthusiast possessed by the more extravagant

ideas of chivalry; much more was he a politician and diplomatist,

with material interests well in view; not, indeed, devoid of a certain

imaginative wonder at the marvels of the East; not without his moments

of ardour and excitement; deeply impressed with the feeling of feudal

loyalty, the sense of the bond between the suzerain and his vassal;

deeply conscious of the need of discipline in great adventures;

keeping in general a cool head, which could calculate the sum of profit

and loss.

It is probable that Villehardouin knew too much of affairs, and was

too experienced a man of the world to be quite frank as a historian:

we can hardly believe, as he would have us, that the diversion of

the crusading host from its professed objects was unpremeditated;

we can perceive that he composes his narrative so as to form an

apology; his recital has been justly described as, in part at least,

"un memoire justificatif." Nevertheless, there are passages, such

as that which describes the first view of Constantinople, where

Villehardouin's feelings seize upon his imagination, and, as it were,

overpower him. In general he writes with a grave simplicity, sometimes

with baldness, disdaining ornament, little sensible to colour or

grace of style; but by virtue of his clear intelligence and his real

grasp of facts his chronicle acquires a certain literary dignity,

and when his words become vivid we know that it is because he had

seen with inquisitive eyes and felt with genuine ardour. Happily for

students of history, while Villehardouin presents the views of an

aristocrat and a diplomatist, the incidents of the same extraordinary

adventure can be seen, as they struck a simple soldier, in the record

of Robert de Clari, which may serve as a complement and a counterpoise

to the chronicle of his more illustrious contemporary. The unfinished

_Histoire de l'Empereur Henri_, which carries on the narrative of

events for some years subsequent to those related by Villehardouin,

the work of Henri de Valenciennes, is a prose redaction of what had

originally formed a _chanson de geste_.

The versified chronicle or history in the thirteenth century declined

among Anglo-Norman writers, but was continued in Flanders and in

France. Prose translations and adaptations of Latin chronicles,

ancient and modern, were numerous, but the literary value of many

of these is slight. In the Abbey of Saint-Denis a corpus of national

history in Latin had for a long while been in process of formation.

Utilising this corpus and the works from which it was constructed,

one of the monks of the Abbey--perhaps a certain Primat--compiled,

in the second half of the century, a History of France in the

vernacular--the _Grandes Chroniques de Saint-Denis_--with which

later additions were from time to time incorporated, until under

Charles V. the _Grandes Chroniques de France_ attained their

definitive form.[2] Far more interesting as a literary composition

is the little work known as _Recits d'un Menestrel de Reims_ (1260),

a lively, graceful, and often dramatic collection of traditions,

anecdotes, dialogues, made rather for the purposes of popular

entertainment than of formal instruction, and expressing the ideas

of the middle classes on men and things. Forgotten during several

centuries, it remains to us as one of the happiest records of the

mediaeval spirit.

[Footnote 2: The _Chroniques_ were continued by lay writers to the

accession of Louis XI.]

But among the prose narratives to which the thirteenth century gave

birth, the _Histoire de Saint Louis_, by JEAN DE JOINVILLE, stands

pre-eminent. Joinville, born about 1224, possessed of such literary

culture as could be gained at the Court of Thibaut IV. of Champagne,

became a favoured companion of the chivalric and saintly Louis during

his six years' Crusade from 1248 to 1254. The memory of the King

remained the most precious possession of his follower's elder years.

It is probable that soon after 1272 Joinville prepared an

autobiographic fragment, dealing with that period of his youth which

had been his age of adventure. When he was nearly eighty, Jeanne of

Navarre, wife of Philippe le Bel, invited the old seneschal to put

on record the holy words and good deeds of Saint Louis. Joinville

willingly acceded to the request, and incorporating the fragment of

autobiography, in which the writer appeared in close connection with

his King, he had probably almost completed his work at the date of

Queen Jeanne's death (April 2, 1305); to her son, afterwards Louis

X., it was dedicated. His purpose was to recite the pious words and

set forth the Christian virtues of the royal Saint in one book of

the History, and to relate his chivalric actions in the other; but

Joinville had not the art of construction, he suffered from the

feebleness of old age, and he could not perfectly accomplish his

design; in 1317 Joinville died. Deriving some of his materials from

other memoirs of the King, especially those by Geoffroy de Beaulieu

and Guillaume de Nangis, he drew mainly upon his own recollections.

Unhappily the most authoritative manuscripts of the _Histoire de

Saint Louis_ have been lost; we possess none earlier than the close

of the fourteenth century; but by the learning and skill of a modern

editor the text has been substantially established.

We must not expect from Joinville precision of chronology or

exactitude in the details of military operations. His recollections

crowd upon him; he does not marshal them by power of intellect, but

abandons himself to the delights of memory. He is a frank, amiable,

spirited talker, who has much to tell; he succeeds in giving us two

admirable portraits--his own and that of the King; and unconsciously

he conveys into his narrative both the chivalric spirit of his time,

and a sense of those prosaic realities which tempered the ideals of

chivalry. What his eyes had rested on lives in his memory, with all

its picturesque features, all its lines and colours, undimmed by time;

and his curious eyes had been open to things great and small. He

appears as a brave soldier, but, he confesses, capable of mortal fear;

sincerely devout, but not made for martyrdom; zealous for his master's

cause, but not naturally a chaser of rainbow dreams; one who enjoys

good cheer, who prefers his wine unallayed with water, who loves

splendid attire, who thinks longingly of his pleasant chateau, and

the children awaiting his return; one who will decline future

crusading, and who believes that a man of station may serve God well

by remaining in his own fields among his humble dependants. But

Joinville felt deeply the attraction of a nature more under the

control of high, ideal motives than was his own; he would not himself

wash the feet of the poor; he would rather commit thirty mortal sins

than be a leper; but a kingly saint may touch heights of piety which

are unattainable by himself. And, at the same time, he makes us feel

that Louis is not the less a man because he is a saint. Certain human

infirmities of temper are his; yet his magnanimity, his sense of

justice, his ardent devotion, his charity, his pure self-surrender

are made so sensible to us as we read the record of Joinville that

we are willing to subscribe to the sentence of Voltaire: "It is not

given to man to carry virtue to a higher point."

During the fourteenth century the higher spirit of feudalism

declined; the old faith and the old chivalry were suffering a decay;

the bourgeoisie grew in power and sought for instruction; it was an

age of prose, in which learning was passing to the laity, or was

adapted to their uses. Yet, while the inner life of chivalry failed

day by day, and self-interest took the place of heroic self-surrender,

the external pomp and decoration of the feudal world became more

brilliant than ever. War was a trade practised from motives of vulgar

cupidity; but it was adorned with splendour, and had a show of

gallantry. The presenter in literature of this glittering spectacle

is the historian JEAN FROISSART. Born in 1338, at Valenciennes, of

bourgeois parents, Froissart, at the age of twenty-two, a

disappointed lover, a tonsured clerk, and already a poet, journeyed

to London, with his manuscript on the battle of Poitiers as an offering

to his countrywoman, Queen Philippa of Hainault. For nearly five years

he was the _ditteur_ of the Queen, a sharer in the life of the court,

but attracted before all else to those "ancient knights and squires

who had taken part in feats of arms, and could speak of them rightly."

His patroness encouraged Froissart's historical inquiries. In the

_Chroniques_ of Jean le Bel, canon of Liege, he found material ready

to his hand, and freely appropriated it in many of his most admirable

pages; but he also travelled much through England and Scotland, noting

everything that impressed his imagination, and gathering with

delight the testimony of those who had themselves been actors in the

events of the past quarter of a century. He accompanied the Black

Prince to Aquitaine, and, later, the Duke of Clarence to Milan. The

death of Queen Philippa, in 1369, was ruinous to his prospects. For

a time he supported himself as a trader in his native place. Then

other patrons, kinsfolk of the Queen, came to his aid. The first

revised redaction of the first book of his Chronicles was his chief

occupation while cure of Lestinnes; it is a record of events from

1325 to the death of Edward III., and its brilliant narrative of events

still recent or contemporary insured its popularity with

aristocratic readers. Under the influence of Queen Philippa's

brother-in-law, Robert of Namur, it is English in its sympathies and

admirations. Unhappily Froissart was afterwards moved by his patron,

Gui de Blois, to rehandle the book in the French interest; and once

again in his old age his work was recast with a view to effacing the

large debt which he owed to his predecessor, Jean le Bel. The first

redaction is, however, that which won and retained the general favour.

If his patron induced Froissart to wrong his earlier work, he made

amends, for it is to Gui de Blois that we owe the last three books

of the history, which bring the tale of events down to the

assassination of Richard II. Still the cure of Lestinnes and the canon

of Chimai pursued his early method of travel--to the court of Gaston,

Count of Foix, to Flanders, to England--ever eager in his

interrogation of witnesses. It is believed that he lived to the close

of 1404, but the date of his death is uncertain.

Froissart as a poet wrote gracefully in the conventional modes of

his time. His vast romance _Meliador_, to which Wenceslas, Duke of

Brabant, contributed the lyric part--famous in its day, long lost

and recently recovered--is a construction of external marvels and

splendours which lacks the inner life of imaginative faith. But as

a brilliant scene-painter Froissart the chronicler is unsurpassed.

His chronology, even his topography, cannot be trusted as exact; he

is credulous rather than critical; he does not always test or control

the statements of his informants; he is misled by their prejudices

and passions; he views all things from the aristocratic standpoint;

the life of the common people does not interest him; he has no sense

of their wrongs, and little pity for their sufferings; he does not

study the deeper causes of events; he is almost incapable of

reflection; he has little historical sagacity; he accepts

appearances without caring to interpret their meanings. But what a

vivid picture he presents of the external aspects of fourteenth-century

life! What a joy he has in adventure! What an eye for the picturesque!

What movement, what colour! What a dramatic--or should we say

theatrical?--feeling for life and action! Much, indeed, of the

vividness of Froissart's narrative may be due to the eye-witnesses

from whom he had obtained information; but genius was needed to

preserve--perhaps to enhance--the animation of their recitals. If he

understood his own age imperfectly, he depicted its outward appearance

with incomparable skill; and though his moral sense was shallow, and

his knowledge of character far from profound, he painted portraits

which live in the imagination of his readers.

The fifteenth century is rich in historical writings of every

kind--compilations of general history, domestic chronicles, such as

the _Livre des Faits du bon Messire Jean le Maingre, dit Bouciquaut_,

official chronicles both of the French and Burgundian parties,

journals and memoirs. The Burgundian Enguerrand de Monstrelet was

a lesser Froissart, faithful, laborious, a transcriber of documents,

but without his predecessor's genius. On the French side the so-called

_Chronique Scandaleuse_, by Jean de Roye, a Parisian of the time of

Louis XI., to some extent redeems the mediocrity of the writers of

his party.

In PHILIPPE DE COMMINES we meet the last chronicler of the Middle

Ages, and the first of modern historians. Born about 1445, in Flanders,

of the family of Van den Clyte, Commines, whose parents died early,

received a scanty education; but if he knew no Latin, his acquaintance

with modern languages served him well. At first in the service of

Charles the Bold, in 1472 he passed over to the cause of Louis XI.

His treason to the Duke may be almost described as inevitable; for

Commines could not attach himself to violence and folly, and was

naturally drawn to the counsels of civil prudence. The bargain was

as profitable to his new master as to the servant. On the King's death

came a reverse of fortune for Commines: for eight months he was cramped

in the iron cage; during two years he remained a prisoner in the

Conciergerie (1487-89), with enforced leisure to think of the

preparation of his _Memoires_.[3] Again the sunshine of royal favour

returned; he followed Charles VIII. to Italy, and was engaged in

diplomatic service at Venice. In 1511 he died.

[Footnote 3: Books I.-VI., written 1488-94; Books VII., VIII.,

written 1494-95.]

The _Memoires_ of Commines were composed as a body of material for

a projected history of Louis XI. by Archbishop Angelo Cato; the writer,

apparently in all sincerity, hoped that his unlearned French might

thus be translated into Latin, the language of scholars; happily we

possess the Memoirs as they left their author's mind. And, though

Commines rather hides than thrusts to view his own personality, every

page betrays the presence of a remarkable intellect. He was no artist

either in imaginative design or literary execution; he was before

all else a thinker, a student of political phenomena, a searcher after

the causes of events, an analyst of motives, a psychologist of

individual character and of the temper of peoples, and, after a

fashion, a moralist in his interpretation of history. He cared little,

or not at all, for the coloured surface of life; his chief concern

is to seize the master motive by which men and events are ruled, to

comprehend the secret springs of action. He is aristocratic in his

politics, monarchical, an advocate for the centralisation of power;

but he would have the monarch enlightened, constitutional, and

pacific. He values solid gains more than showy magnificence; and

knowing the use of astuteness, he knows also the importance of good

faith. He has a sense of the balance of European power, and anticipates

Montesquieu in his theory of the influence of climates on peoples.

There is something of pity, something of irony, in the view which

he takes of the joyless lot of the great ones of the earth. Having

ascertained how few of the combinations of events can be controlled

by the wisest calculation, he takes refuge in a faith in Providence;

he finds God necessary to explain this entangled world; and yet his

morality is in great part that which tries good and evil by the test

of success. By the intensity of his thought Commines sometimes becomes

striking in his expression; occasionally he rises to a grave

eloquence; occasionally his irony is touched by a bitter humour. But

in general he writes with little sentiment and no sense of beauty,

under the control of a dry and circumspect intelligence.

CHAPTER IV

LATEST MEDIAEVAL POETS--THE DRAMA

I

LATEST MEDIAEVAL POETS

The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries form a period of transition

from the true Middle Ages to the Renaissance. The national epopee

was dead; the Arthurian tales were rehandled in prose; under the

influence of the _Roman de la Rose_, allegory was highly popular,

and Jean de Meun had shown how it could be applied to the

secularisation of learning; the middle classes were seeking for

instruction. In lyric poetry the free creative spirit had declined,

but the technique of verse was elaborated and reduced to rule; ballade,

chant royal, lai, virelai, rondeau were the established forms, and

lyric verse was often used for matter of a didactic, moral, or

satirical tendency. Even Ovid was tediously moralised (_c_. 1300)

in some seventy thousand lines by Chretien Legouais. Literary

societies or _puys_[1] were instituted, which maintained the rules

of art, and awarded crowns to successful competitors in poetry; a

formal ingenuity replaced lyrical inspiration; poetry accepted

proudly the name of "rhetoric." At the same time there is gain in

one respect--the poets no longer conceal their own personality behind

their work: they instruct, edify, moralise, express their real or

simulated passions in their own persons; if their art is mechanical,

yet through it we make some acquaintance with the men and manners

of the age.

[Footnote 1: _Puy_, mountain, eminence, signifying the elevated seat

of the judges of the artistic competition.]

The chief exponent of the new art of poetry was GUILLAUME DE MACHAUT.

Born about 1300, he served as secretary to the King of Bohemia, who

fell at Crecy. He enjoyed a tranquil old age in his province of

Champagne, cultivating verse and music with the applause of his

contemporaries. The ingenuities of gallantry are deployed at length

in his _Jugement du Roi de Navarre_; he relates with dull prolixity

the history of his patron, Pierre de Lusignan, King of Cyprus, in

his _Prise d'Alexandrie_; the _Voir dit_ relates in varying verse

and prose the course of his sexagenarian love for a maiden in her

teens, Peronne d'Armentieres, who gratified her coquetry with an old

poet's adoration, and then wedded his rival.

In the forms of his verse EUSTACHE DESCHAMPS, also a native of

Champagne (_c_. 1345-1405), was a disciple of Machaut: if he was not

a poet, he at least interests a reader by rhymed journals of his own

life and the life of his time, written in the spirit of an honest

bourgeois, whom disappointed personal hopes and public misfortune

had early embittered. Eighty thousand lines, twelve hundred ballades,

nearly two hundred rondeaux, a vast unfinished satire on woman, the

_Miroir de Mariage_, fatigued even his own age, and the official court

poet of France outlived his fame. He sings of love in the conventional

modes; his historical poems, celebrating events of the day, have

interest by virtue of their matter; as a moralist in verse he deplores

the corruption of high and low, the cupidity in Church and State,

and, above all, applies his wit to expose the vices and infirmities

of women. The earliest Poetic in French--_L'art de dictier et de fere

chancons, balades, virelais, et rondeaulx_ (1392)--is the work of

Eustache Deschamps, in which the poet, by no means himself a master

of harmonies, insists on the prime importance of harmony in verse.

The exhaustion of the mediaeval sources of inspiration is still more

apparent in the fifteenth-century successors of Deschamps. But

already something of the reviving influence of Italian culture makes

itself felt. CHRISTINE DE PISAN, Italian by her parentage and place

of birth (_c_. 1363), was left a widow with three young children at

the age of twenty-five. Her sorrow, uttered in verse, is a genuine

lyric cry; but when in her poverty she practised authorship as a trade,

while she wins our respect as a mother, the poetess is too often at

once facile and pedantic. Christine was zealous in maintaining the

honour of her sex against the injuries of Jean de Meun; in her prose

_Cite des Dames_ she celebrates the virtues and heroism of women,

with examples from ancient and modern times; in the _Livre des Trois

Vertus_ she instructs women in their duties. When advanced in years,

and sheltered in the cloister, she sang her swan-song in honour of

Joan of Arc. Admirable in every relation of life, a patriot and a

scholar, she only needed one thing--genius--to be a poet of

distinction.

A legend relates that the Dauphiness, Margaret of Scotland, kissed

the lips of a sleeper who was the ugliest man in France, because from

that "precious mouth" had issued so many "good words and virtuous

sayings." The sleeper was Christine's poetical successor, ALAIN

CHARTIER. His fame was great, and as a writer of prose he must be

remembered with honour, both for his patriotic ardour, and for the

harmonious eloquence (modelled on classical examples) in which that

ardour found expression. His first work, the _Livre des Quatre Dames_,

is in verse: four ladies lament their husbands slain, captured, lost,

or fugitive and dishonoured, at Agincourt. Many of his other poems

were composed as a distraction from the public troubles of the time;

the title of one, widely celebrated in its own day, _La Belle Dame

sans Mercy_, has obtained a new meaning of romance through its

appropriation by Keats. In 1422 he wrote his prose _Quadrilogue

Invectif_, in which suffering France implores the nobles, the clergy,

the people to show some pity for her miserable state. If Froissart

had not discerned the evils of the feudal system, they were patent

to the eyes of Alain Chartier. His _Livre de l'Esperance_, where the

oratorical prose is interspersed with lyric verse, spares neither

the clergy nor the frivolous and dissolute gentry, who forget their

duty to their country in wanton self-indulgence; yet his last word,

written at the moment when Joan of Arc was leaving the pastures for

battle, is one of hope. His _Curial_ (_The Courtier_) is a satire

on the vices of the court by one who had acquaintance with its

corruption. The large, harmonious phrase of Alain Chartier was new

to French prose, and is hardly heard again until the seventeenth

century.

The last grace and refinements of chivalric society blossom in the

poetry of CHARLES D'ORLEANS, "la grace exquise des choses freles."

He was born in 1391, son of Louis, Duke of Orleans, and an Italian

mother, Valentine of Milan. Married at fifteen to the widow of Richard

II. of England, he lost his father by assassination, his mother by

the stroke of grief, his wife in childbirth. From the battlefield

of Agincourt he passed to England, where he remained a prisoner,

closely guarded, for twenty-five years. It seems as if events should

have made him a tragic poet; but for Charles d'Orleans poetry was

the brightness or the consolation of his exile. His elder years at

the little court of Blois were a season of delicate gaiety, when he

enjoyed the recreations of age, and smiled at the passions of youth.

He died in 1465. Neither depth of reflection nor masculine power of

feeling finds expression in his verse; he does not contribute new

ideas to poetry, nor invent new forms, but he rendered the old material

and made the accepted moulds of verse charming by a gracious

personality and an exquisite sense of art. Ballade, rondeau, chanson,

each is manipulated with the skill of a goldsmith setting his gems.

He sings of the beauty of woman, the lighter joys of love, the pleasure

of springtide, the song of the birds, the gliding of a stream or a

cloud; or, as an elder man, he mocks with amiable irony the fatiguing

ardours of young hearts. When St. Valentine's day comes round, his

good physician "Nonchaloir" advises him to abstain from choosing a

mistress, and recommends an easy pillow. The influence of Charles

d'Orleans on French poetry was slight; it was not until 1734 that

his forgotten poems were brought to light.

In the close of the mediaeval period, when old things were passing

away and new things were as yet unborn, the minds of men inclined

to fill the void with mockery and satire. Martin Lefranc (_c_. 1410-61)

in his _Champion des Dames_--a poem of twenty-four thousand lines, in

which there is much spirit and vigour of versification--balances one

against another the censure and the praise of women. Coquillard, with

his railleries assuming legal forms and phrases, laughs at love and

lovers, or at the _Droits Nouveaux_ of a happy time when licence had

become the general law. Henri Baude, a realist in his keen observation,

satirises with direct, incisive force, the manners and morals of his

age. Martial d'Auvergne (_c_. 1433-1508), chronicling events in his

_Vigiles de Charles VII._, a poem written according to the scheme of

the liturgical Vigils, is eloquent in his expression of the wrongs of

the poor, and in his condemnation of the abuses of power and station.

If the _Amant rendu Cordelier_ be his, he too appears among those who

jest at the follies and extravagance of love. His prose _Arrets

d'Amour_ are discussions and decisions of the imaginary court which

determines questions of gallantry.

Amid such mockery of life and love, the horror of death was ever

present to the mind of a generation from which hope and faith seemed

to fail; it was the time of the _Danse Macabre_; the skeleton became

a grim humourist satirising human existence, and verses written for

the dance of women were ascribed in the manuscript which preserves

them to Martial d'Auvergne.

Passion and the idea of death mingle with a power at once realistic

and romantic in the poetry of FRANCOIS VILLON. He was born in poverty,

an obscure child of the capital, in 1430 or 1431; he adopted the name

of his early protector, Villon; obtained as a poor scholar his

bachelor's degree in 1449, and three years later became a _maitre

es arts_; but already he was a master of arts less creditable than

those of the University. In 1455 Villon--or should we call him

Monterbier, Montcorbier, Corbueil, Desloges, Mouton (aliases

convenient for vagabondage)?--quarrelled with a priest, and killed

his adversary; he was condemned to death, and cheered his spirits

with the piteous ballade for those about to swing to the kites and

the crows; but the capital punishment was commuted to banishment.

Next winter, stung by the infidelity and insults of a woman to whom

he had abandoned himself, he fled, perhaps to Angers, bidding his

friends a jesting farewell in the bequests of his _Petit Testament_.

Betrayed by one who claimed him as an associate in robbery, Villon

is lost to view for three years; and when we rediscover him in 1461,

it is as a prisoner, whose six months' fare has been bread and water

in his cell at Meun-sur-Loire. The entry of Louis XI., recently

consecrated king, freed the unhappy captive. Before the year closed

he had composed his capital work, the _Grand Testament_, and proved

himself the most original poet of his century. And then Villon

disappears; whether he died soon after, whether he lived for half

a score of years, we do not know.

While he handles with masterly ease certain of the fifteenth-century

forms of verse--in particular the ballade--Villon is a modern in his

abandonment of the traditional machinery of the imagination, its

convention of allegories and abstractions, and those half-realised

moralisings which were repeated from writer to writer; he is modern

in the intensity of a personal quality which is impressed upon his

work, in the complexity of his feelings, passing from mirth to despair,

from beauty to horror, from cynical grossness to gracious memories

or aspirations; he is modern in his passion for the real, and in those

gleams of ideal light which are suddenly dashed across the vulgar

surroundings of his sorry existence. While he flings out his scorn

and indignation against those whom he regarded as his ill-users, or

cries against the injuries of fortune, or laments his miserable past,

he yet is a passionate lover of life; and shadowing beauty and youth

and love and life, he is constantly aware of the imminent and

inexorable tyranny of death. The ideas which he expresses are few

and simple--ideas common to all men; but they take a special colour

from his own feelings and experiences, and he renders them with a

poignancy which is his own, with a melancholy gaiety and a desperate

imaginative sincerity. His figure is so interesting in itself--that

of the _enfant perdu_ of genius--and so typical of a class, that the

temptation to create a Villon legend is great; but to magnify his

proportions to those of the highest poets is to do him wrong. His

passionate intensity within a limited range is unsurpassed; but

Villon wanted sanity, and he wanted breadth.

In his direct inspiration from life, co-operating with an admirable

skill and science in literary form, Villon stands alone. For

others--Georges Chastelain, Meschinot, Molinet, Cretin--poetry was

a cumbrous form of rhetoric, regulated by the rules of those arts

of poetry which during the fifteenth century appeared at not

infrequent intervals. The _grands rhetoriqueurs_ with their

complicated measures, their pedantic diction, their effete allegory,

their points and puerilities, testify to the exhaustion of the Middle

Ages, and to the need of new creative forces for the birth of a living

literature.

There is life, however, in the work of one remarkable prose-writer

of the time--ANTOINE DE LA SALLE. His residence in Rome (1422) had

made him acquainted with the tales of the Italian _novellieri_; he

was a friend of the learned and witty Poggio; Rene of Anjou entrusted

to him the education of his son; when advanced in years he became

the author certainly of one masterpiece, probably of three. If he

was the writer of the _Quinze Joies de Mariage_, he knew how to mask

a rare power of cynical observation under a smiling face: the Church

had celebrated the fifteen joys of the Blessed Virgin; he would

ironically depict the fifteen afflictions of wedded life, in scenes

finely studied from the domestic interior. How far the _Cent Nouvelles

nouvelles_ are to be ascribed to him is doubtful; it is certain that

these licentious tales reproduce, with a new skill in narrative prose,

the spirit of indecorous mirth in their Italian models. The _Petit

Jehan de Saintre_ is certainly the work of Antoine de la Salle; the

irony of a realist, endowed with subtlety and grace, conducts the

reader through chivalric exaltations to vulgar disillusion. The

writer was not insensible to the charm of the ideals of the past,

but he presents them only in the end to cover them with disgrace.

The anonymous farce of _Pathelin_, and the _Chronique de petit Jehan

de Saintre_, are perhaps the most instructive documents which we

possess with respect to the moral temper of the close of the Middle

Ages; and there have been critics who have ventured to ascribe both

works to the same hand.

II

THE DRAMA

The mediaeval drama in France, though of early origin, attained its

full development only when the Middle Ages were approaching their

term; its popularity continued during the first half of the sixteenth

century. It waited for a public; with the growth of industry, the

uprising of the middle classes, it secured its audience, and in some

measure filled the blank created by the disappearance of the _chansons

de geste_. The survivals of the drama of the twelfth and thirteenth

centuries are few; the stream, as we know, was flowing, but it ran

underground.

The religious drama had its origin in the liturgical offices of the

Church. At Christmas and at Easter the birth and resurrection of the

Saviour were dramatically recited to the people by the clergy, within

the consecrated building, in Latin paraphrases of the sacred text;

but, as yet, neither Jesus nor His mother appeared as actors in the

drama. By degrees the vernacular encroached upon the Latin and

displaced it; the scene passed from the church to the public place

or street; the action developed; and the actors were priests supported

by lay-folk, or were lay-folk alone.

The oldest surviving drama written in French (but with interspersed

liturgical sentences of Latin) is of the twelfth century--the

_Representation d'Adam_: the fall of man, and the first great crime

which followed--the death of Abel--are succeeded by the procession

of Messianic prophets. It was enacted outside the church, and the

spectators were alarmed or diverted by demons who darted to and fro

amidst the crowd. Of the thirteenth century, only two religious pieces

remain. Jean Bodel, of Arras, was the author of _Saint Nicholas_.

The poet, himself about to assume the cross, exhibits a handful of

Crusaders in combat with the Mussulmans; all but one, a supplicant

of the saint, die gloriously, with angelic applause and pity;

whereupon the feelings of the audience are relieved by the mirth and

quarrels of drinkers in a tavern, who would rob St. Nicholas of the

treasure entrusted to his safeguard; miracles, and general

conversion of the infidels, conclude the drama. The miracle of

_Theophile_, the ambitious priest who pawned his soul to Satan, and

through our Lady's intercession recovered his written compact, is

by the trouvere Rutebeuf. These are scanty relics of a hundred years;

yet their literary value outweighs that of the forty-two _Miracles

de Notre Dame_ of the century which followed--rude pieces, often

trivial, often absurd in their incidents, with mystic extravagance

sanctifying their vulgar realism. They formed, with two exceptions,

the dramatic repertory of some mediaeval _puy_, an association

half-literary, half-religious, devoted to the Virgin's honour; their

rhymed octosyllabic verse--the special dramatic form--at times

borders upon prose. One drama, and only one, of the fourteenth century,

chooses another heroine than our Lady--the _Histoire de Griselidis_,

which presents, with pathos and intermingling mirth, those marvels

of wifely patience celebrated for other lands by Boccaccio, by

Petrarch, and by Chaucer.

The fifteenth-century Mystery exhibits the culmination of the

mediaeval sacred drama. The word _mystere_,[2] first appropriated

to tableaux vivants, is applied to dramatic performances in the royal

privilege which in 1402 conferred upon the association known as the

_Confrerie de la Passion_ the right of performing the plays of our

Redemption. Before this date the Blessed Virgin and the infant Jesus

had appeared upon the scene. The Mystery presents the course of sacred

story, derived from the Old and the New Testaments, together with

the lives of the saints from apostolic times to the days of St. Dominic

and St. Louis; it even includes, in an extended sense, subjects from

profane history--the siege of Orleans, the destruction of Troy--but

such subjects are of rare occurrence during the fifteenth century.

[Footnote 2: Derived from _ministerium_ (_metier_), but doubtless

often drawing to itself a sense suggested by the _mysteries_ of

religion.]

For a hundred years, from 1450 onwards, an unbounded enthusiasm for

the stage possessed the people, not of Paris merely, but of all France.

The _Confreres de la Passion_, needing a larger repertoire, found

in young ARNOUL GREBAN, bachelor in theology, an author whose vein

was copious. His _Passion_, written about the middle of the fifteenth

century, embraces the entire earthly life of Christ in its thirty-four

thousand verses, which required one hundred and fifty performers and

four crowded days for the delivery. Its presentation was an

unprecedented event in the history of the theatre. The work of Greban

was rehandled and enlarged by Jean Michel, and great was the triumph

when it was given at Angers in 1486. Greban was not to be outdone

either by his former self or by another dramatist; in collaboration

with his brother Simon, he composed the yet more enormous _Actes des

Apotres_, in sixty-two thousand lines, demanding the services of five

hundred performers. When presented at Bourges as late as 1536, the

happiness of the spectators was extended over no fewer than forty

days. The Mystery of the Old Testament, selecting whatever was

supposed to typify or foreshadow the coming of the Messiah, is only

less vast, and is not less incoherent. Taken together, the Mysteries

comprise over a million verses, and what remains is but a portion

of what was written.

Though the literary value of the Mysteries is slight, except in

occasional passages of natural feeling or just characterisation,

their historical importance was great; they met a national

demand--they constituted an animated and moving spectacle of

universal interest. A certain unity they possessed in the fact that

everything revolved around the central figure of Christ and the

central theme of man's salvation; but such unity is only to be

discovered in a broad and distant view. Near at hand the confusion

seems great. Their loose construction and unwieldy length

necessarily endangered their existence when a truer feeling for

literary art was developed. The solemnity of their matter gave rise

to a further danger; it demanded some relief, and that relief was

secured by the juxtaposition of comic scenes beside scenes of gravest

import. Such comedy was occasionally not without grace--a passage

of pastoral, a song, a naive piece of gaiety; but buffoonery or vulgar

riot was more to the taste of the populace. It was pushed to the

furthest limit, until in 1548 the Parlement of Paris thought fit to

interdict the performance of sacred dramas which had lost the sense

of reverence and even of common propriety. They had scandalised

serious Protestants; the Catholics declined to defend what was

indefensible; the humanists and lovers of classical art in

Renaissance days thought scorn of the rude mediaeval drama. Though

it died by violence, its existence could hardly have been prolonged

for many years. But in the days of its popularity the performance

of a mystery set a whole city in motion; carpenters, painters,

costumiers, machinists were busy in preparation; priests, scholars,

citizens rehearsed their parts; country folk crowded to every

hostelry and place of lodging. On the day preceding the first morning

of performance the personages, duly attired--Christians, Jews,

Saracens, kings, knights, apostles, priests--defiled through the

streets on their way to the cathedral to mass. The vast stage hard

by the church presented, with primitive properties, from right to

left, the succession of places--lake, mountain, manger, prison,

banquet-chamber--in which the action should be imagined; and from

one station to another the actors passed as the play proceeded. At

one end of the stage rose heaven, where God sat throned; at the other,

hell-mouth gaped, and the demons entered or emerged. Music aided the

action; the drama was tragedy, comedy, opera, pantomime in one. The

actors were amateurs from every class of society--clergy, scholars,

tradesmen, mechanics, occasionally members of the _noblesse_. In

Paris the Confraternity of the Passion had almost an exclusive right

to present these sacred plays; in the provinces associations were

formed to carry out the costly and elaborate performance. To the

_Confreres de la Passion_--bourgeois folk and artisans--belonged the

first theatre, and it was they who first presented plays at regular

intervals. From the Hospital of the Trinity, originally a shelter

for pilgrims, they migrated in 1539 to the Hotel de Flandres, and

thence in 1548 to the Hotel de Bourgogne. Their famous place of

performance passed in time into the hands of professional actors;

but it was not until 1676 that the Confrerie ceased to exist.

Comedy, unlike the serious drama, suffered no breach of continuity

during its long history. The jongleurs of the Middle Ages were the

immediate descendants of the Roman mimes and histrions; their

declamations, accompanied by gestures, at least tended towards the

dramatic form. Classical comedy was never wholly forgotten in the

schools; the liturgical drama and the sacred pieces developed from

it had an indirect influence as encouraging dramatic feeling, and

providing models which could be applied to other uses. The earliest

surviving _jeux_ are of Arras, the work of ADAM DE LA HALLE. In the

_Jeu d'Adam_ or _de la Feuillee_ (_c_. 1262) satirical studies of

real life mingle strangely with fairy fantasy; the poet himself,

lamenting his griefs of wedlock, his father, his friends are

humorously introduced; the fool and the physician play their

laughable parts; and the three fay ladies, for whom the citizens have

prepared a banquet under _la feuillee_, grant or refuse the wishes

of the mortal folk in the traditional manner of enchantresses amiable

or perverse. The _Jeu de Robin et Marlon_--first performed at Naples

in 1283--is a pastoral comic opera, with music, song, and dance; the

good Marion is loyal to her rustic lover, and puts his rival, her

cavalier admirer, to shame. These were happy inventions happily

executed; but they stand alone. It is not until we reach the fifteenth

century that mediaeval comedy, in various forms, attained its true

evolution.

The Moralities, of which sixty-five survive, dating, almost all, from

1450 to 1550, differed from the Mysteries in the fact that their

purpose was rather didactic than religious; as a rule they handled

neither historical nor legendary matter; they freely employed

allegorical personification after the fashion of the _Roman de la

Rose_. The general type is well exemplified in _Bien-Avise,

Mal-Avise_, a kind of dramatic Pilgrim's Progress, with two

pilgrims--one who is instructed in the better way by all the

personified powers which make for righteousness; the other finding

his companions on the primrose path, and arriving at the everlasting

bonfire. Certain Moralities attack a particular vice--gluttony or

blasphemy, or the dishonouring of parents. From satirising the social

vices of the time, the transition was easy to political satire or

invective. In the sixteenth century both the partisans of the

Reformation and the adherents to the traditional creed employed the

Morality as a medium for ecclesiastical polemics. Sometimes treating

of domestic manners and morals, it became a kind of bourgeois drama,

presenting the conditions under which character is formed. Sometimes

again it approached the farce: two lazy mendicants, one blind, the

other lame, fear that they may suffer a cure and lose their trade

through the efficacy of the relics of St. Martin; the halt, mounted

on the other's back, directs his fellow in their flight; by ill luck

they encounter the relic-bearers, and are restored in eye and limb;

the recovered cripple swears and rages; but the man born blind,

ravished by the wonders of the world, breaks forth in praise to God.

The higher Morality naturally selected types of character for satire

or commendation. It is easy to perceive how such a comic art as that

of Moliere lay in germ in this species of the mediaeval drama. At

a late period examples are found of the historical Morality. The

pathetic _l'Empereur qui tua son Neveu_ exhibits in its action and

its stormy emotion something of tragic power. The advent of the

pseudo-classical tragedy of the Pleiade checked the development of

this species. The very name "Morality" disappears from the theatre

after 1550.

The _sottie_, like the Morality, was a creation of the fifteenth

century. Whether it had its origin in a laicising of the irreverent

celebration of the Feast of Fools, or in that parade of fools which

sometimes preceded a Mystery, it was essentially a farce, but a farce

in which the performers, arrayed in motley, and wearing the long-eared

cap, distributed between them the several roles of human folly.

Associations of _sots_, known in Paris as _Enfants sans Souci_, known

in other cities by other names, presented the unwisdom or madness

of the world in parody. The _sottie_ at times rose from a mere

diversion to satire; like the Morality, it could readily adapt itself

to political criticism. The _Gens Nouveaux_, belonging perhaps to

the reign of Louis XI., mocks the hypocrisy of those sanguine

reformers who promise to create the world anew on a better model,

and yet, after all, have no higher inspiration than that old greed

for gold and power and pleasure which possessed their predecessors.

Louis XII., who permitted free comment on public affairs from actors

on the stage, himself employed the poet Pierre Gringoire to satirise

his adversary the Pope. In 1512 the _Jeu du Prince des Sots_ was given

in Paris; Gringoire, the _Mere-Sotte_, but wearing the Papal robes

to conceal for a time the garb of folly, discharged a principal part.

Such dangerous pleasantries as this were vigorously restrained by

Francois I.

A dramatic monologue or a _sermon joyeux_ was commonly interposed

between the _sottie_ and the Morality or miracle which followed. The

sermon parodied in verse the pulpit discourses of the time, with text

duly announced, the customary scholastic divisions, and an

incredible licence in matter and in phrase. Among the dramatic

monologues of the fifteenth century is found at least one little

masterpiece, which has been ascribed on insufficient grounds to

Villon, and which would do no discredit to that poet's genius--the

_Franc-Archer de Bagnolet_. The francs-archers of Charles VII.--a

rural militia--were not beloved of the people; the _miles gloriosus_

of Bagnolet village, boasting largely of his valour, encounters a

stuffed scarecrow, twisting to the wind; his alarms, humiliations,

and final triumph are rendered in a monologue which expounds the

action of the piece with admirable spirit.

If the Mystery served to fill the void left by the national epopee,

the farce may be regarded as to some extent the dramatic inheritor

of the spirit of the fabliau. It aims at mirth and laughter for their

own sakes, without any purpose of edification; it had, like the

fabliau, the merit of brevity, and not infrequently the fault of

unabashed grossness. But the very fact that it was a thing of little

consequence allowed the farce to exhibit at times an audacity of

political or ecclesiastical criticism which transformed it into a

dramatised pamphlet. In general it chose its matter from the ludicrous

misadventures of private life: the priest, the monk, the husband,

the mother-in-law, the wife, the lover, the roguish servant are the

agents in broadly ludicrous intrigues; the young wife lords it over

her dotard husband, and makes mockery of his presumptive heirs, in

_La Cornette_ of Jean d'Abondance; in _Le Cuvier_, the husband, whose

many household duties have been scheduled, has his revenge--the list,

which he deliberately recites while his wife flounders helpless in

the great washing-tub, does not include the task of effecting her

deliverance.

Amid much that is trivial and much that is indecent, one farce stands

out pre-eminent, and may indeed be called a comedy of manners and

of character--the merry misfortunes of that learned advocate,

_Maitre Pierre Pathelin_. The date is doubtless about 1470; the author,

probably a Parisian and a member of the Basoche, is unknown. With

all his toiling and cheating, Pathelin is poor; with infinite art

and spirit he beguiles the draper of the cloth which will make himself

a coat and his faithful Guillemette a gown; when the draper, losing

no time, comes for his money and an added dinner of roast goose, behold

Maitre Pathelin is in a raging fever, raving in every dialect. Was

the purchase of his cloth a dream, or work of the devil? To add to

the worthy tradesman's ill-luck, his shepherd has stolen his wool

and eaten his sheep. The dying Pathelin unexpectedly appears in court

to defend the accused, and having previously advised his client to

affect idiocy and reply to all questions with the senseless utterance

_bee_, he triumphantly wins the case; but the tables are turned when

Master Pathelin demands his fee, and can obtain no other response

than _bee_ from the instructed shepherd. The triumph of rogue over

rogue is the only moral of the piece; it is a satire on fair dealing

and justice, and, though the morals of a farce are not to be gravely

insisted on, such morals as _Maitre Pathelin_ presents agree well

with the spirit of the age which first enjoyed this masterpiece of

caricature.

The actors in mediaeval comedy, as in the serious drama, were amateurs.

The members of the academic _puys_ were succeeded by the members of

guilds, or _confreries_, or _societes joyeuses_. Of these societies

the most celebrated was that of the Parisian _Enfants sans Souci_.

With this were closely associated the Basochiens, the corporation

of clerks to the _procureurs_ of the Parlement of Paris.[3] It may

be that the _sots_ of the capital were only members of the _basoche_,

assuming for the occasion the motley garb. In colleges, scholars

performed at first in Latin plays, but from the fifteenth century

in French. At the same time, troupes of performers occasionally moved

from city to city, exhibiting a Mystery, but they did not hold together

when the occasion had passed. Professional comedians were brought

from Italy to Lyons in 1548, for the entertainment of Henri II. and

Catherine de Medicis. From that date companies of French actors appear

to become numerous. New species of the drama--tragedy, comedy,

pastoral--replace the mediaeval forms; but much of the genius of

French classical comedy is a development from the Morality, the

_sottie_, and the farce. To present these newer forms the service

of trained actors was required. During the last quarter of the

sixteenth century the amateur performers of the ancient drama finally

disappear.

[Footnote 3: This corporation, known as the _Royaume de la Basoche_

(_basilica_), was probably as old as the fourteenth century.]

BOOK THE SECOND

_THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY_

CHAPTER I

RENAISSANCE AND REFORMATION

The literature of the sixteenth century is dominated by two chief

influences--that of the Renaissance and that of the Reformation. When

French armies under Charles VIII. and Louis XII. made a descent on

Italy, they found everywhere a recognition of the importance of art,

an enthusiasm for beauty, a feeling for the aesthetic as well as the

scholarly aspects of antiquity, a new joy in life, an universal

curiosity, a new confidence in human reason. To Latin culture a Greek

culture had been added; and side by side with the mediaeval master

of the understanding, Aristotle, the master of the imaginative reason,

Plato, was held in honour. Before the first quarter of the sixteenth

century closed, France had received a great gift from Italy, which

profoundly modified, but by no means effaced, the characteristics

of her national genius. The Reformation was a recovery of Christian

antiquity and of Hebraism, and for a time the religious movement made

common cause with the Renaissance; but the grave morals, the

opposition of grace to nature, and the dogmatic spirit of theology

after a time alienated the Reforming party from the mere humanism

of literature and art. An interest in general ideas and a capacity

for dealing with them were fostered by the study of antiquity both

classical and Christian, by the meeting of various tendencies, and

by the conflict of rival creeds. To embody general ideas in art under

a presiding feeling for beauty, to harmonise thought and form, was

the great work of the seventeenth century; but before this could be

effected it was necessary that France should enjoy tranquillity after

the strife of the civil wars.

Learning had received the distinction of court patronage when Louis

XII. appointed the great scholar Bude his secretary. Around Francis

I., although he was himself rather a lover of the splendour and

ornament of the Renaissance than of its finer spirit, men of learning

and poets gathered. On the suggestion of GUILLAUME BUDE he endowed

professorships of Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, to which were added those

of medicine, mathematics, and philosophy (1530-40), and in this

projected foundation of the College de France an important step was

made towards the secularisation of learned studies. The King's sister,

MARGUERITE OF NAVARRE (1492-1549), perhaps the most accomplished

woman of her time, represents more admirably than Francis the genius

of the age. She studied Latin, Italian, Spanish, German, Hebrew, and,

when forty, occupied herself with Greek. Her heart was ardent as well

as her intellect; she was gay and mundane, and at the same time she

was serious (with even a strain of mystical emotion) in her concern

for religion. Although not in communion with the Reformers, she

sympathised with them, and extended a generous protection to those

who incurred danger through their liberal opinions. Her poems,

_Marguerites de la Marguerite des Princesses_ (1547), show the

mediaeval influences forming a junction with those of the Renaissance.

Some are religious, but side by side with her four dramatic Mysteries

and her eloquent _Triomphe de l'Agneau_ appears the _Histoire des

Satyres et Nymphes de Diane_, imitated from the Italian of Sannazaro.

Among her latest poems, which remained in manuscript until 1896, are

a pastoral dramatic piece expressing her grief for the death of her

brother Francis I.; a second dramatic poem, _Comedie jouee au Mont

de Marsan_, in which love (human or divine) triumphs over the spirit

of the world, over superstitious asceticism, and over the wiser temper

of religious moderation. _Les Prisons_ tells in allegory of her

servitude to passion, to worldly ambition, and to the desire for human

knowledge, until at last the divine love brought her deliverance.

The union of the mundane and the moral spirit is singularly shown

in Marguerite's collection of prose tales, written in imitation of

Boccaccio, the _Heptameron des Nouvelles_ (1558).

These tales were not an indiscretion of youth; probably Marguerite

composed them a few years before her death; perhaps their licence

and wanton mirth were meant to enliven the melancholy hours of her

beloved brother; certainly the writer is ingenious in extracting

edifying lessons from narratives which do not promise edification.

They are not so gross as other writings of the time, and this is

Marguerite's true defence; to laugh at the immoralities of monks and

priests was a tradition in literature which neither the spirit of

the Renaissance nor that of the Reformation condemned. A company of

ladies and gentlemen, detained by floods on their return from the

Pyrenean baths, beguile the time by telling these tales, and the pious

widow Dame Oisille gives excellent assistance in showing how they

tend to a moral purpose. The series, designed to equal in number the

tales of the Decameron, is incomplete. Possibly Marguerite was aided

by some one or more of the authors of whom she was the patroness and

protector; but no sufficient evidence exists for the ascription of

the _Heptameron_ to Bonaventure des Periers.

Among the poets whom Marguerite received with favour at her court

was CLEMENT MAROT, the versifier, as characterised by Boileau, of

"elegant badinage." His predecessors and early contemporaries in the

opening years of the sixteenth century continued the manner of the

so-called _rhetoriqueurs_, who endeavoured to maintain allegory, now

decrepit or effete, with the aid of ingenuities of versification and

pedantry of diction; or else they carried on something of the more

living tradition of Villon or of Coquillard. Among the former, Jean

le Maire de Belges deserves to be remembered less for his verse than

for his prose work, _Illustrations de Gaule et Singularitez de Troie_,

in which the Trojan origin of the French people is set forth with

some feeling for beauty and a mass of crude erudition. Clement Marot,

born at Cahors in 1495 or 1496, a poet's son, was for a time in the

service of Francis I. as _valet de chambre_, and accompanied his

master to the battle of Pavia, where he was wounded and made prisoner.

Pursued by the Catholics as a heretic, and afterwards by the Genevan

Calvinists as a libertine, he was protected as long as was possible

by the King and by his sister. He died at Turin, a refugee to Italy,

in 1544.

In his literary origins Marot belongs to the Middle Ages; he edited

the _Roman de la Rose_ and the works of Villon; his immediate masters

were the _grands rhetoriqueurs_; but the spirit of the Renaissance

and his own genius delivered him from the oppression of their

authority, and his intellect was attracted by the revolt and the

promise of freedom found in the Reforming party. A light and

pleasure-loving nature, a temper which made the prudent conduct of

life impossible, exposed him to risks, over which, aided by protectors

whom he knew how to flatter with a delicate grace, he glided without

fatal mishap. He did not bring to poetry depth of passion or solidity

of thought; he brought what was needed--a bright intelligence, a sense

of measure and proportion, grace, gaiety, _esprit_. Escaping, after

his early _Temple de Cupido_, from the allegorising style, he learned

to express his personal sentiments, and something of the gay,

bourgeois spirit of France, with aristocratic distinction. His

poetry of the court and of occasion has lost its savour; but when

he writes familiarly (as in the _Epitre au Roi pour avoir ete derobe_),

or tells a short tale (like the fable of the rat and the lion), he

is charmingly bright and natural. None of his poems--elegies,

epistles, satires, songs, epigrams, rondeaux, pastorals,

ballades--overwhelm us by their length; he was not a writer of vast

imaginative ambitions. His best epigrams are masterpieces in their

kind, with happy turns of thought and expression in which art seems

to have the ease of nature. The satirical epistle supposed to be sent,

not by Marot, but by his valet, to Marot's adversary, Sagon, is

spirited in its insolence. _L'Enfer_ is a satiric outbreak of

indignation suggested by his imprisonment in the Chatelet on the

charge of heresy. His versified translation of forty-nine Psalms

added to his glory, and brought him the honour of personal danger

from the hostility of the Sorbonne; but to attempt such a translation

is to aim at what is impossible. His gift to French poetry is

especially a gift of finer art--firm and delicate expression,

felicity in rendering a thought or a feeling, certainty and grace

in poetic evolution, skill in handling the decasyllabic line. A great

poet Marot was not, and could not be; but, coming at a fortunate moment,

his work served literature in important ways; it was a return from

laboured rhetoric to nature. In the classical age his merit was

recognised by La Bruyere, and the author of the _Fables_ and the

_Contes_--in some respects a kindred spirit--acknowledged a debt to

Marot.

From Marot as a poet much was learned by Marguerite of Navarre. Of

his contemporaries, who were also disciples, the most distinguished

was MELIN DE SAINT-GELAIS, and on the master's death Melin passed

for an eminent poet. We can regard him now more justly, as one who

in slender work sought for elegance, and fell into a mannered

prettiness. While preserving something of the French spirit, he

suffered from the frigid ingenuities which an imitation of Italian

models suggested to him; but it cannot be forgotten that Saint-Gelais

brought the sonnet from Italy into French poetry. The school of Marot,

ambitious in little things, affected much the _blason_, which

celebrates an eyebrow, a lip, a bosom, a jewel, a flower, a precious

stone; lyrical inspiration was slender, but clearness and grace were

worth attaining, and the conception of poetry as a fine art served

to lead the way towards Ronsard and the Pleiade.

The most powerful personality in literature of the first half of the

sixteenth century was not a poet, though he wrote verses, but a great

creator in imaginative prose, great partly by virtue of his native

genius, partly because the sap of the new age of enthusiasm for science

and learning was thronging in his veins--FRANCOIS RABELAIS. Born

about 1490 or 1495, at Chinon, in Touraine, of parents in a modest

station, he received his education in the village of Seuille and at

the convent of La Baumette. He revolted against the routine of the

schools, and longed for some nutriment more succulent and savoury.

For fifteen years he lived as a Franciscan monk in the cell and

cloisters of the monastery at Fontenay-le-Comte. In books, but not

those of a monastic library, he found salvation; mathematics,

astronomy, law, Latin, Greek consoled him during his period of

uncongenial seclusion. His criminal companions--books which might

be suspected of heresy--were sequestrated. The young Bishop of

Maillezais--his friend Geoffroy d'Estissac, who had aided his

studies--and the great scholar Bude came to his rescue, and passing

first, by favour of the Pope, to the Benedictine abbey of Maillezais,

before long he quitted the cloister, and, as a secular priest, began

his wanderings of a scholar in search of universal knowledge. In

1530-31 he was at Montpellier, studying medicine and lecturing on

medical works of Hippocrates and Galen; next year, at Lyons, one of

the learned group gathered around the great printers of that city,

he practised his art of physic in the public hospital, and was known

as a scientific author. Towards the close of 1532 he re-edited the

popular romance _Chroniques Gargantuines_, which tells the

adventures of the "enormous giant Gargantua." It was eagerly read,

and brought laughter to the lips of Master Rabelais' patients.

Learning, he held, was good, but few things in this world are

wholesomer than laughter. The success of the _Chroniques_ seems to

have moved him to write a continuation, and in 1533 appeared

_Pantagruel_, the story of the deeds and prowess of Gargantua's giant

son, newly composed by Alcofribas Nasier, an anagram which concealed

the name of Francois Rabelais. It forms the second of the five books

which make up its author's famous work. A recast or rather a new

creation of the Chronicles of Gargantua, replacing the original

_Chroniques_, followed in 1535. It was not until 1546 and 1552 that

the second and--in its complete form--the third books of _Pantagruel_

appeared, and the authorship was acknowledged. The last book was

posthumous (1562 in part, 1564 in full), and the inferiority of style,

together with the more bitter spirit of its satire, have led many

critics to the opinion that it is only in part from the hand of the

great and wise humourist.

Rabelais was in Rome in 1534, and again in 1535, as physician to the

French ambassador, Jean du Bellay, Bishop of Paris. He pursued his

scientific studies in medicine and botany, took lessons in Arabic,

and had all a savant's intelligent curiosity for the remains of

antiquity. Some years of his life were passed in wandering from one

French university to another. Fearing the hostility of the Sorbonne,

during the last illness of his protector Francis I., he fled to the

imperial city of Metz. He was once again in Rome with Cardinal du

Bellay, in 1549. Next year the author of _Pantagruel_ was appointed

cure of Meudon, near Paris, but, perhaps as a concession to public

opinion, he resigned his clerical charges on the eve of the

publication of his fourth book. Rabelais died probably in 1552 or

1553, aged about sixty years.

On his death it might well have been said that the gaiety of nations

was eclipsed; but to his contemporaries Rabelais appeared less as

the enormous humourist, the buffoon Homer, than as a great scholar

and man of science, whose bright temper and mirthful conversation

were in no way inconsistent with good sense, sound judgment, and even

a habit of moderation. It is thus that he should still be regarded.

Below his laughter lay wisdom; below his orgy of grossness lay a noble

ideality; below the extravagances of his imagination lay the

equilibrium of a spirit sane and strong. The life that was in him

was so abounding and exultant that it broke all dikes and dams; and

laughter for him needed no justification, it was a part of this

abounding life. After the mediaeval asceticism and the intellectual

bondage of scholasticism, life in Rabelais has its vast outbreak and

explosion; he would be no fragment of humanity, but a complete man.

He would enjoy the world to the full, and yet at the same time there

is something of stoicism in his philosophy of life; while gaily

accepting the good things of the earth, he would hold himself detached

from the gifts of fortune, and possess his soul in a strenuous sanity.

Let us return--such is his teaching--to nature, honouring the body,

but giving higher honour to the intellect and to the moral feeling;

let us take life seriously, and therefore gaily; let us face death

cheerfully, knowing that we do not wholly die; with light in the

understanding and love in the heart, we can confront all dangers and

defy all doubts.

He is the creator of characters which are types. His

giants--Grandgousier, Gargantua, Pantagruel--are giants of good

sense and large benevolence. The education of Pantagruel presents

the ideal pedagogy of the Renaissance, an education of the whole

man--mind and body--in contrast with the dwarfing subtleties and

word-spinning of the effete mediaeval schools. Friar John is the monk

whose passion for a life of activity cannot be restrained; his

violence is the overflow of wholesome energy. It is to his care that

the Abbey of Thelema is confided, where young men and maidens are

to be occupied with every noble toil and every high delight, an abbey

whose rule has but a single clause (since goodness has no rule save

freedom), "Do what you will." Of such a fraternity, love and marriage

are the happiest outcome. Panurge, for whom the suggestion was derived

from the macaronic poet Folengo, is the fellow of Shakespeare's

Falstaff, in his lack of morals, his egoism, his inexhaustible wit;

he is the worst and best of company. We would dispense with such a

disreputable associate if we could, but save that he is a "very wicked

lewd rogue," he is "the most virtuous man in the world," and we cannot

part with him. Panurge would marry, but fears lest he may be the victim

of a faithless wife; every mode of divination, every source of

prediction except one is resorted to, and still his fate hangs

threatening; it only remains to consult the oracle of La Dive

Bouteille. The voyaging quest is long and perilous; in each island

at which the adventurers touch, some social or ecclesiastical abuse

is exhibited for ridicule; the word of the oracle is in the end the

mysterious "Drink"--drink, that is, if one may venture to interpret

an oracle, of the pure water of wisdom and knowledge, and let the

unknown future rest.

The obscenity and ordure of Rabelais were to the taste of his time;

his severer censures of Church and State were disguised by his

buffoonery; flinging out his good sense and wise counsels with a

liberal hand, he also wields vigorously the dunghill pitchfork. If

he is gross beyond what can be described, he is not, apart from the

evil of such grossness, a corrupter of morals, unless morals be

corrupted by a belief in the goodness of the natural man. The graver

wrongs of his age--wars of ambition, the abuse of public justice,

the hypocrisies, cruelties, and lethargy of the ecclesiastics,

distrust of the intellectual movement, spurious ideals of life--are

vigorously condemned. Rabelais loves goodness, charity, truth; he

pleads for the right of manhood to a full and free development of

all its powers; and if questions of original sin and divine grace

trouble him little, and his creed has some of the hardihood of the

Renaissance, he is full of filial gratitude to _le bon Dieu_ for His

gift of life, and of a world in which to live strongly should be to

live joyously.

The influence of Rabelais is seen in the writers of prose tales who

were his contemporaries and successors; but they want his broad good

sense and real temperance. BONAVENTURE DES PERIERS, whom Marguerite

of Navarre favoured, and whose _Nouvelles Recreations_, with more

of the tradition of the French fabliaux and farces and less of the

Italian manner, have something in common with the stories of the

_Heptameron_, died in desperation by his own hand about 1543. His

Lucianic dialogues which compose the _Cymbalum Mundi_ show the

audacity of scepticism which the new ideas of the Renaissance

engendered in ill-balanced spirits. With all his boldness and ardour

Rabelais exercised a certain discretion, and in revising his own text

clearly exhibited a desire to temper valour with prudence.

It is remarkable that just at the time when Rabelais published the

second and best book of his _Pantagruel_, in which the ideality and

the realism of the Renaissance blossom to the full, there was a certain

revival of the chivalric romance. The Spanish _Amadis des Gaules_

(1540-48), translated by Herberay des Essarts, was a distant echo

of the Romances of the Round Table. The gallant achievements of

courtly knights, their mystical and platonic loves, were a delight

to Francis I., and charmed a whole generation. Thus, for the first

time, the literature of Spain reached France, and the influence of

_Amadis_ reappears in the seventeenth century in the romances of

d'Urfe and Mdlle. de Scudery.

If the genius of the Renaissance is expressed ardently and amply in

the writings of Rabelais, the genius of the Reformation finds its

highest and most characteristic utterance through one whom Rabelais

describes as the "demoniacle" of Geneva--JEAN CALVIN (1509-64). The

pale face and attenuated figure of the great Reformer, whose life

was a long disease, yet whose indomitable will sustained him amid

bodily infirmities, present a striking contrast to the sanguine

health and overflowing animal spirits of the good physician who

reckoned laughter among the means of grace. Yet Calvin was not merely

a Reformer: he was also a humanist, who, in his own way, made a profound

study of man, and who applied the learning of a master to the

determination of dogma. His education was partly theological, partly

legal; and in his body of doctrine appear some of the rigour, the

severity, and the formal procedures of the law. Indignation against

the imprisonment and burning of Protestants, under the pretence that

they were rebellious anabaptists, drew him from obscurity; silence,

he thought, was treason. He addressed to the King an eloquent letter,

in which he maintained that the Reformed faith was neither new nor

tending towards schism, and next year (1536) he published his lucid

and logical exposition of Protestant doctrine--the _Christianae

Religionis Institutio_. It placed him, at the age of twenty-seven,

as leader in the forefront of the new religious movement.

But the movement was not merely learned, it was popular, and Calvin

was resolved to present his work to French readers in their own tongue.

His translation--the _Institution_--appeared probably in 1541.

Perhaps no work by an author of seven-and-twenty had ever so great

an influence. It consists of four books--of God, of Jesus as a Mediator,

of the effects of His mediatorial work, and of the exterior forms

of the Church. The generous illusion of Rabelais, that human nature

is essentially good, has no place in Calvin's system. Man is fallen

and condemned under the law; all his righteousness is as filthy rags;

God, of His mere good pleasure, from all eternity predestinated some

men to eternal life and others to eternal death; the Son of God came

to earth to redeem the elect; through the operation of the Holy Spirit

in the gift of faith they are united to Christ, are justified through

His righteousness imputed to them, and are sanctified in their hearts;

the Church is the body of the faithful in every land; the officers

of the Church are chosen by the people; the sacraments are

two--baptism and the Lord's Supper. In his spirit of system, his

clearness, and the logical enchainment of his ideas, Calvin is

eminently French. On the one side he saw the Church of Rome, with--as

he held--its human tradition, its mass of human superstitions,

intervening between the soul and God; on the other side were the

scepticism, the worldliness, the religious indifference of the

Renaissance. Within the Reforming party there was the conflict of

private opinions. Calvin desired to establish once for all, on the

basis of the Scriptures, a coherent system of dogma which should

impose itself upon the minds of men as of divine authority, which

should be at once a barrier against the dangers of superstition and

the dangers of libertine speculation. As the leaders of the French

Revolution propounded political constitutions founded on the idea

of the rights of man, so Calvin aimed at setting forth a creed

proceeding, if we may so put it, from a conception of the absolute

rights of God. Through the mere good pleasure of our Creator, Ruler,

Judge, we are what we are.

It is not perhaps too much to say that Calvin is the greatest writer

of the sixteenth century. He learned much from the prose of Latin

antiquity. Clearness, precision, ordonnance, sobriety, intellectual

energy are compensations for his lack of grace, imagination,

sensibility, and religious unction. He wrote to convince, to impress

his ideas upon other minds, and his austere purpose was attained.

In the days of the pagan Renaissance, it was well for France that

there should also be a Renaissance of moral rigour; if freedom was

needful, so also was discipline. On the other hand, it may be admitted

that Calvin's reason is sometimes the dupe of Calvin's reasoning.

His _Life_ was written in French by his fellow-worker in the

Reformation, Theodore de Beze, who also recorded the history of the

Reformed Churches in France (1580). Beze and Viret, together with

their leader Calvin, were eminent in pulpit exposition and

exhortation, and in Beze the preacher was conjoined with a poet. At

Calvin's request he undertook his translation of the Psalms, to

complete that by Marot, and in 1551 his sacred drama the _Tragedie

Francaise du sacrifice d'Abraham_, designed to inculcate the duty

of entire surrender to the divine will, and written with a grave and

restrained ardour, was presented at the University of Lausanne.

CHAPTER II

FROM THE PLEIADE TO MONTAIGNE

The classical Renaissance was not necessarily opposed to high ethical

ideals; it was not wholly an affair of the sensuous imagination; it

brought with it the conception of Roman virtue, and this might well

unite itself (as we see afterwards in Corneille) with Christian faith.

Among the many translators of the sixteenth century was Montaigne's

early friend--the friend in memory of all his life--ETIENNE DE LA

BOETIE (1530-63). It is not, however, for his fragments of Plutarch

or his graceful rendering of Xenophon's Economics (named by him the

_Mesnagerie_) that we remember La Boetie; it is rather for his

eloquent pleading on behalf of freedom in the _Discours de la

Servitude Volontaire_ or _Contr'un_, written at sixteen--revised

later--in which, with the rhetoric of youth, he utters his invective

against tyranny. Before La Boetie's premature death the morals of

antiquity as seen in action had been exhibited to French readers in

the pages of Amyot's delightful translation of Plutarch's Lives

(1559), to be followed, some years later, by his _OEuvres Morales

de Plutarque_. JACQUES AMYOT (1513-93), from an ill-fed, ragged boy,

rose to be the Bishop of Auxerre. His scholarship, seen not only in

his Plutarch, but in his rendering of the _Daphnis et Chloe_ of Longus,

and other works, was exquisite; but still more admirable was his sense

of the capacities of French prose. He divined with a rare instinct

the genius of the language; he felt the affinities between his Greek

original and the idioms of his own countrymen; he rather re-created

than translated Plutarch. "We dunces," wrote Montaigne, "would have

been lost, had not this book raised us from the mire; thanks to it,

we now venture to speak and write; ... it is our breviary." The life

and the ideas of the ancient world became the possession, not of

scholars only, but of all French readers. The book was a school of

manners and of thought, an inspirer of heroic deeds. "To love

Plutarch," said the greatest Frenchman of the century, Henry of

Navarre, "is to love me, for he was long the master of my youth."

It was such an interest in the life and ideas of antiquity as Amyot

conveyed to the general mind of France that was wanting to Ronsard

and the group of poets surrounding him. Their work was concerned

primarily with literary form; of the life of the world and general

ideas, apart from form, they took too little heed. The transition

from Marot to Ronsard is to be traced chiefly through the school of

Lyons. In that city of the South, letters flourished side by side

with industry and commerce; Maurice Sceve celebrated his mistress

Delie, "object of the highest virtue," with Petrarchan ingenuities;

and his pupil LOUISE LABE, "la belle Cordiere," sang in her sonnets

of a true passion felt, as she declares, "en ses os, en son sang,

en son ame." The Lyonese poets, though imbued with Platonic ideas,

rather carry on the tradition of Marot than announce the Pleiade.

PIERRE DE RONSARD, born at a chateau a few leagues from Vendome, in

the year 1524, was in the service of the sons of Francis I. as page,

was in Scotland with James V., and later had the prospect of a

distinguished diplomatic career, when deafness, consequent on a

serious malady, closed for him the avenue to public life. He threw

himself ardently into the study of letters; in company with the boy

Antoine de Baif he received lessons from an excellent Hellenist, Jean

Daurat, soon to be principal of the College Coqueret. At the College

a group of students--Ronsard, Baif, Joachim du Bellay, Remi

Belleau--gathered about the master. The "Brigade" was formed, which,

by-and-by, with the addition of Jodelle and Pontus de Thyard, and

including Daurat, became the constellation of the Pleiade. The seven

associates read together, translated and imitated the classics; a

common doctrine of art banded them in unity; they thought scorn of

the vulgar ways of popular verse; poetry for them was an arduous and

exquisite toil; its service was a religion. At length, in 1549, they

flung out their manifesto--the _Defense et Illustration de la Langue

Francaise_ by Du Bellay, the most important study in literary

criticism of the century. With this should be considered, as less

important manifestoes, the later _Art Poetique_ of Ronsard, and his

prefaces to the _Franciade_. To formulate principles is not always

to the advantage of a movement in literature; but champions need a

banner, reformers can hardly dispense with a definite creed. Against

the popular conception of the ignorant the Pleiade maintained that

poetry was a high and difficult form of art; against the pedantry

of humanism they maintained that the native tongue of France admitted

of literary art worthy to take its place beside that of Greece or

Rome. The French literary vocabulary, they declared, has excellences

of its own, but it needs to be enriched by technical terms, by words

of local dialects, by prudent adoptions from Greek and Latin, by

judicious developments of the existing families of words, by the

recovery of words that have fallen into disuse.

It is unjust to the Pleiade to say that they aimed at overloading

poetic diction with neologisms of classical origin; they sought to

innovate with discretion; but they unquestionably aimed at the

formation of a poetic diction distinct from that of prose; they turned

away from simplicity of speech to ingenious periphrasis; they desired

a select, aristocratic idiom for the service of verse; they

recommended a special syntax in imitation of the Latin; for the elder

forms of French poetry they would substitute reproductions or

re-creations of classical forms. Rondeaux, ballades, virelais,

chants royaux, chansons are to be cast aside as _epiceries_; and their

place is to be taken by odes like those of Pindar or of Horace, by

the elegy, satire, epigram, epic, or by newer forms justified by the

practice of Italian masters. Rich but not over-curious rhymes are

to be cultivated, with in general the alternation of masculine and

feminine rhymes; the caesura is to fall in accordance with the meaning.

Ronsard, more liberal than Du Bellay, permits, on the ground of

classical example, the gliding from couplet to couplet without a pause.

"The alexandrine holds in our language the place of heroic verse among

the Greeks and Romans"--in this statement is indicated the chief

service rendered to French poetry by Ronsard and the rest of the

Pleiade; they it was who, by their teaching and example, imposed on

later writers that majestic line, possessing the most varied powers,

capable of the finest achievements, which has yielded itself alike

to the purposes of Racine and to those of Victor Hugo.

Ronsard and Du Bellay broke with the tradition of the Middle Ages,

and inaugurated the French classical school; it remained for Malherbe,

at a later date, to reform the reformation of the Pleiade, and to

win for himself the glory which properly belongs to his predecessors.

Unfortunately from its origin the French classical school had in it

the spirit of an intellectual aristocracy, which removed it from

popular sympathies; unfortunately, also, the poets of the Pleiade

failed to perceive that the masterpieces of Greece and Rome are

admirable, not because they belong to antiquity, but because they

are founded on the imitation of nature and on ideas of the reason.

They were regarded as authorities equal with nature or independent

of it; and thus while the school of Ronsard did much to renew literary

art, its teaching involved an error which eventually tended to the

sterilisation of art. That error found its correction in the

literature of the seventeenth century, and expressly in the doctrine

set forth by Boileau; yet under the correction some of the

consequences of the error remained. Ronsard and his followers, on

the other hand, never made the assumption, common enough in the

seventeenth century, that poetry could be manufactured by observance

of the rules, nor did they suppose that the total play of emotion

must be rationalised by the understanding; they left a place for the

instinctive movements of poetic sensibility.

During forty years Ronsard remained the "Prince of Poets." Tasso

sought his advice; the Chancellor Michel de l'Hospital wrote in his

praise; Brantome placed him above Petrarch; Queen Elizabeth and Mary

Stuart sent him gifts; Charles IX. on one occasion invited him to

sit beside the throne. In his last hours he was still occupied with

his art. His death, at the close of 1585, was felt as a national

calamity, and pompous honours were awarded to his tomb. Yet Ronsard,

though ambitious of literary distinction, did not lose his true self

in a noisy fame. His was the delicate nature of an artist; his deafness

perhaps added to his timidity and his love of retirement; we think

of him in his garden, cultivating his roses as "the priest of Flora."

His work as a poet falls into four periods. From 1550 to 1554 he was

a humanist without discretion or reserve. In the first three books

of the _Odes_ he attempted to rival Pindar; in the _Amours de

Cassandre_ he emulates the glory of Petrarch. From 1554 to 1560,

abandoning his Pindarism, he was in discipleship to Anacreon[1] and

Horace. It is the period of the less ambitious odes found in the fourth

and fifth books, the period of the _Amours de Marie_ and the _Hymnes_.

From 1560 to 1574 he was a poet of the court and of courtly occasions,

an eloquent declaimer on public events in the _Discours des Miseres

de ce Temps_, and the unfortunate epic poet of his unfinished

_Franciade_. During the last ten years of his life he gave freer

expression to his personal feelings, his sadness, his gladness; and

to these years belong the admirable sonnets to Helene de Surgeres,

his autumnal love.

[Footnote 1: _i.e._ the Anacreontic poems, found, and published in

1554, by Henri Estienne.]

Ronsard's genius was lyrical and elegiac, but the tendencies of a

time when the great affair was the organisation of social life, and

as a consequence the limitation of individual and personal passions,

were not favourable to the development of lyrical poetry. In his

imitations of Pindar a narrative element checks the flight of song,

and there is a certain unreality in the premeditated attempt to

reproduce the passionate fluctuations and supposed disorder of his

model. The study of Pindar, however, trained Ronsard in the handling

of sustained periods of verse, and interested him in complex lyrical

combinations. His Anacreontic and Horatian odes are far happier;

among these some of his most delightful work is found. If he was

deficient in great ideas, he had delicacy of sentiment and an

exquisite sense of metrical harmony. The power which he possessed

as a narrative poet appears best in episodes or epic fragments. His

ambitious attempt to trace the origin of the French monarchy from

the imaginary Trojan Francus was unfortunate in its subject, and

equally unfortunate in its form--the rhyming decasyllabic verse.

In pieces which may be called hortatory, the pulpit eloquence, as

it were, of a poet addressing his contemporaries on public matters,

the utterances of a patriot and a citizen moved by pity for his fellows,

such poetry as the _Discours des Miseres de ce Temps_ and the

_Institution pour l'Adolescence du Roi, Charles IX._, Ronsard is

original and impressive, a forerunner of the orator poets of the

seventeenth century. His eclogues show a true feeling for external

nature, touched at times by a tender sadness. When he escapes from

the curiosities and the strain of his less happy Petrarchism, he is

an admirable poet of love in song and sonnet; no more beautiful

variation on the theme of "gather the rosebuds while ye may" exists

than his sonnet _Quand vous serez bien vieille_, unless it be his

dainty ode _Mignonne, allons voir si la Rose_. Passionate in the

deepest and largest sense Ronsard is not; but it was much to be sincere

and tender, to observe just measure, to render a subtle phase of

emotion. In the fine melancholy of his elegiac poetry he is almost

modern. Before all else he is a master of his instrument, an inventor

of new effects and movements of the lyre; in his hands the entire

rhythmical system was renewed or was purified. His dexterity in

various metres was that of a great virtuoso, and it was not the mere

dexterity which conquers difficulties, it was a skill inspired and

sustained by the sentiment of metre.

Of the other members of the Pleiade, one--Jodelle--is remembered

chiefly in connection with the history of the drama. Baif (1532-89),

son of the French ambassador at Venice, translated from Sophocles

and Terence, imitated Plautus, Petrarchised in sonnets, took from

Virgil's Georgics the inspiration of his _Meteores_, was guided by

the Anacreontic poems in his _Passe-Temps_, and would fain rival

Theognis in his most original work _Les Mimes_, where a moral or

satiric meaning masks behind an allegory or a fable. He desired to

connect poetry more closely with music, and with this end in view

thought to reform the spelling of words and to revive the quantitative

metrical system of classical verse.[2] REMI BELLEAU (1528-77)

practised the Horatian ode and the sonnet; translated Anacreon;

followed the Neapolitan Sannazaro in his _Bergerie_ of connected

prose and verse, where the shepherds are persons of distinction

arrayed in a pastoral disguise; and adapted the mediaeval _lapidary_

(with imitations of the pseudo-Orpheus) to the taste of the

Renaissance in his _Amours et Nouveaux Eschanges des Pierres

Precieuses_. These little myths and metamorphoses of gems are

ingenious and graceful. The delicate feeling for nature which Belleau

possessed is seen at its best in the charming song _Avril_, included

in his somewhat incoherent _Bergerie_. Among his papers was found,

after his death, a comedy, _La Reconnue_, which, if it has little

dramatic power, shows a certain instinct for satire.

[Footnote 2: The "Baifin verse," French not classical, is of fifteen

syllables, divided into hemistichs of seven and eight syllables.]

These are minor lights in the poetical constellation; but the star

of JOACHIM DU BELLAY shines with a ray which, if less brilliant than

that of Ronsard, has a finer and more penetrating influence. Du Bellay

was born about 1525, at Lire, near Angers, of an illustrious family.

His youth was unhappy, and a plaintive melancholy haunts his verse.

Like Ronsard he suffered from deafness, and he has humorously sung

its praises. _Olive_, fifty sonnets in honour of his Platonic or

Petrarchan mistress, Mlle. de Viole (the letters of whose name are

transposed to Olive), appeared almost at the same moment as the

earliest _Odes_ of Ronsard; but before long he could mock in sprightly

stanzas the fantasies and excesses of the Petrarchan style. It was

not until his residence in Rome (1551) as intendant of his cousin

Cardinal du Bellay, the French ambassador, that he found his real

self. In his _Antiquites de Rome_ he expresses the sentiment of ruins,

the pathos of fallen greatness, as it had never been expressed before.

The intrigues, corruption, and cynicism of Roman society, his broken

health, an unfortunate passion for the Faustina of his Latin verses,

and the longing for his beloved province and little Lire depressed

his spirits; in the sonnets of his _Regrets_ he embodied his intimate

feelings, and that lively spirit of satire which the baseness of the

Pontifical court summoned into life. This satiric vein had, indeed,

already shown itself in his mocking counsel to _le Poete courtisan_:

the courtier poet is to be a gentleman who writes at ease; he is not

to trouble himself with study of the ancients; he is to produce only

pieces of occasion, and these in a negligent style; the rarer and

the smaller they are the better; and happily at last he may cease

to bring forth even these. Possibly his _poete courtisan_ was Melin

de Saint-Gelais. As a rural poet Du Bellay is charming; his _Jeux

Rustiques_, while owing much to the _Lusus_ of the Venetian poet

Navagero, have in them the true breath of the fields; it is his _douce_

province of Anjou which inspires him; the song to _Venus_ in its

happiest stanzas is only less admirable than the _Vanneur de Ble_,

with which more than any other single poem the memory of Du Bellay

is associated. The personal note, which is in general absent from

the poetry of Ronsard, is poignantly and exquisitely audible in the

best pieces of Du Bellay. He did not live long enough to witness the

complete triumph of the master; in 1560 he died exhausted, at the

age of thirty-five.

The Pleiade served literature by their attention to form, by their

skill in poetic instrumentation; but they were incapable of

interpreting life in any large and original way. In the hands of their

successors poetry languished for want of an inspiring theme. PHILIPPE

DESPORTES (1546-1606) was copious and skilful in his reproduction

and imitation of Italian models; as a courtier poet he reduced

literary flattery to a fine art; but his mannered graces are cold,

his pretence of passion is a laboured kind of _esprit_. A copy of

his works annotated by the hand of Malherbe survives; the comments,

severe and just, remained unpublished, probably because the writer

was unwilling to pursue an adversary whom death had removed from his

way. Jean Bertaut, his disciple, is a lesser Desportes. Satire was

developed by Jean Vauquelin de la Fresnaye, and to him we owe an _Art

Poetique_ (1575) which adapts to his own time the teaching of

Aristotle and Horace. More interesting than these is JEAN PASSERAT

(1534-1602), whose spirit is that of old France in its mirth and

mockery, and whose more serious verse has the patriotism of French

citizenship; his field was small, but he tilled his field gaily and

courageously. The villanelle _J'ai perdu ma tourterelle_ and the ode

on May-day show Passerat's art in its happiest moments.

The way for a reform in dramatic poetry had been in some degree

prepared by plays of the sixteenth century, written in Latin--the

work of Buchanan, Muret, and others--by translations from Terence,

Sophocles, Euripides, translations from Italian comedy, and

renderings of one Spanish model, the highly-popular _Celestina_ of

Fernando de Rojas. The Latin plays were acted in schools. The first

performance of a play in French belonging to the new tendency was

that of Ronsard's translation of the Plutus of Aristophanes, in 1549,

by his friends of the College de Coqueret. It was only by amateurs,

and before a limited scholarly group of spectators, that the new

classical tragedies could be presented. Gradually both tragedy and

comedy came to be written solely with a view to publication in print.

The mediaeval drama still held the stage.

JODELLE'S _Cleopatre_ (1552), performed with enthusiasm by amateurs,

was therefore a false start; it was essentially literary, and not

theatrical. Greek models were crudely imitated, with a lack of almost

everything that gave life and charm to the Greek drama. Seneca was

more accessible than Sophocles, and his faults were easy to

imitate--his moralisings, his declamatory passages, his excess of

emphasis. The so-called Aristotelian dramatic canons, formulated by

Scaliger in his Poetic, were rigorously applied. Unity of place is

preserved in _Cleopatre_; the time of the action is reduced to twelve

hours; there are interminable monologues, choral moralities, a ghost

(in Seneca's manner), a narration of the heroine's death; of action

there is none, the stage stands still. If Jodelle's _Didon_ has some

literary merit, it has little dramatic vitality. The oratorical

energy of Grevin's _Jules Cesar_, the studies of history in _La Mort

de Daire_ and _La Mort d'Alexandre_, by Jacques de La Taille, do not

compensate their deficiency in the qualities required by the theatre.

One tragedy alone, _La Sultane_, by Gabriel Bounin (1561), amid its

violences and extravagances, shows a feeling for dramatic action and

scenic effect.

Could the mediaeval mystery and classical tragedy be reconciled? The

Protestant Reformer Beze, in his _Sacrifice d'Abraham_, attempted

something of the kind; his sacred drama is a mystery by its subject,

a tragedy in the conduct of the action. Three tragedies on the life

of David--one of them admirable in its rendering of the love of Michol,

daughter of Saul--were published in 1556 by Loys Des-Masures: the

stage arrangements are those of the mediaeval drama, but the unity

of time is observed, and chorus and semi-chorus respond in alternate

strains. No junction of dramatic systems essentially opposed proved

in the end possible. When Jean de La Taille wrote on a biblical subject

in his _Saul le Furieux_, a play remarkable for its impressive

conception and development of the character of Saul, he composed it

_selon l'art_, and in the manner of "the old tragic authors." He is

uncompromising in his classical method; the mediaeval drama seemed

inartificial to him in the large concessions granted by the spectators

to the authors and actors; he would have what passes on the stage

approximate, at least, to reality; the unities were accepted not

merely on the supposed authority of Aristotle, but because they were

an aid in attaining verisimilitude.

The most eminent name in the history of French tragedy of the sixteenth

century is that of ROBERT GARNIER (1534-90). His discipleship to

Seneca was at first that of a pupil who reproduces with exaggeration

his master's errors. Sensible of the want of movement in his scenes,

he proceeded in later plays to accumulate action upon action without

reducing the action to unity. At length, in _Les Juives_ (1583), which

exhibits the revolt of the Jewish King and his punishment by

Nabuchodonosor, he attained something of true pity and terror, beauty

of characterisation, beauty of lyrical utterance in the plaintive

songs of the chorus. Garnier was assuredly a poet; but even in _Les

Juives_, the best tragedy of his century, he was not a master of

dramatic art. If anywhere he is in a true sense dramatic, it is in

his example of the new form of tragi-comedy. _Bradamante_, derived

from the _Orlando Furioso_ of Ariosto, shows not only poetic

imagination, but a certain feeling for the requirements of the

theatre.

Comedy in the sixteenth century, dating from Jodelle's _Eugene_, is

either a development of the mediaeval farce, indicated in point of

form by the retention of octosyllabic verse, or an importation from

the drama of Italy. Certain plays of Aristophanes, of Terence, of

Plautus were translated; but, in truth, classical models had little

influence. Grevin, while professing originality, really follows the

traditions of the farce. Jean de La Taille, in his prose comedy _Les

Corrivaux_, prepared the way for the easy and natural dialogue of

the comic stage. The most remarkable group of sixteenth-century

comedies are those translated in prose from the Italian, with such

obvious adaptations as might suit them to French readers, by PIERRE

DE LARIVEY (1540 to after 1611). Of the family of the Giunti, he had

gallicised his own name (_Giunti_, i.e. _Arrives_); and the

originality of his plays is of a like kind with that of his name;

they served at least to establish an Italian tradition for comedy,

which was not without an influence in the seventeenth century; they

served to advance the art of dialogue. If any comedy of the period

stands out as superior to its fellows, it is _Les Contents_ (1584),

by Odet de Turnebe, a free imitation of Italian models united with

something imported from the Spanish _Celestina_. Its intrigue is an

Italian imbroglio; but there are lively and natural scenes, such as

can but rarely be found among the predecessors of Moliere. In general

the comedy of the sixteenth century is wildly confused in plot,

conventional in its types of character, and too often as grossly

indecent as the elder farces. Before the century closed, the pastoral

drama had been discovered, and received influences from both Italy

and Spain; the soil was being prepared for that delicate flower of

poetry, but as yet its nurture was little understood, nor indeed can

it be said to have ever taken kindly to the climate of France.

While on the one hand the tendencies of the Pleiade may be described

as exotic, going forth, as they did, to capture the gifts of classical

and Italian literature, on the other hand they pleaded strenuously

that thus only could French literature attain its highest

possibilities. In the scholarship of the time, side by side with the

humanism which revived and restored the culture of Greece and Rome,

was another humanism which was essentially national. The historical

origins of France were studied for the first time with something of

a critical spirit by CLAUDE FAUCHET in his _Antiquites Gauloises et

Francoises_ (1579-1601). His _Recueil de l'Origine de la Langue et

Poesie Francoise_, in spite of its errors, was an effort towards

French philology; and in calling attention to the trouveres and their

works, Fauchet may be considered a remote master of the school of

modern literary research. ESTIENNE PASQUIER (1529-1615), the jurist

who maintained in a famous action the cause of the University against

the Jesuits, in his _Recherches de la France_ treated with learning

and vigour various important points in French history--civil and

ecclesiastical--language, literary history, and the foundation of

universities. HENRI ESTIENNE (1531-98), who entered to the full into

the intoxication of classical humanism, was patriotic in his

reverence for his native tongue. In a trilogy of little treatises

(1565-79), written with much spirit, he maintained that of modern

languages the French has the nearest affinity to the Greek, attempted

to establish its superiority to Italian, and much more to Spanish,

and mocked the contemporary fashion of Italianised French.

The study of history is supported on the one hand by such erudite

research as that of Fauchet and Pasquier; on the other hand it is

supported by political philosophy and speculation. To philosophy,

in the wider sense of the word, the sixteenth century made no large

and coherent contribution; the Platonism, Pyrrhonism, Epicureanism,

Stoicism of the Renaissance met and clashed together; the rival

theologies of the Roman and Reformed Churches contended in a struggle

for life. PIERRE DE LA RAMEE (1515-72) expressed the revolt of

rationalism against the methods of the schoolmen and the authority

of Aristotle; but he ordinarily wrote in Latin, and his _Dialectique_,

the first philosophical work in the vulgar tongue, hardly falls within

the province of literary history.

The philosophy of politics is represented by one great name, that

of JEAN BODIN (1529-96), whose _Republique_ may entitle him to be

styled the Montesquieu of the Renaissance. In an age which tended

towards the formation of great monarchies he was vigorously

monarchical. The patriarchal power of the sovereign might well be

thought needful, in the second half of the century, as a barrier

against anarchy; but Bodin was no advocate of tyranny; he condemned

slavery, and held that religious persecution can only lead to a

dissolution of religious belief. A citizen is defined by Bodin as

a free man under the supreme government of another; like Montesquieu,

he devotes attention to the adaptation of government to the varieties

of race and climate. The attempts at a general history of France in

the earlier part of the sixteenth century preserved the arid methods

and unilluminated style of the mediaeval chronicles;[3] in the second

half of the century they imitated with little skill the models of

antiquity. Histories of contemporary events in Europe were written

with conscientious impartiality by Lancelot de la Popeliniere, and

with personal and party passion, struggling against his well-meant

resolves, by Agrippa d'Aubigne. The great _Historia mei Temporis_

of De Thou, faithful and austere in its record of fact, was a

highly-important contribution to literature, but it is written in

Latin.

[Footnote 3: The narrative of the life of Bayard, by his secretary,

writing under the name of "Le Loyal Serviteur" (1527), is admirable

for its clearness, grace, and simplicity.]

With a peculiar gift for narrative, the French have been long

pre-eminent as writers of memoirs, and already in the sixteenth

century such personal recitals are numerous. The wars of Francois

I. and of Henri II. gave abundant scope for the display of individual

enterprise and energy; the civil wars breathed into the deeds of men

an intensity of passion; the actors had much to tell, and a motive

for telling it each in his own interest.

The _Commentaires_ of BLAISE DE MONLUC (1502-77) are said to have

been named by Henri IV. "the soldier's Bible"; the Bible is one which

does not always inculcate mercy or peace. Monluc, a Gascon of

honourable birth and a soldier of fortune, had the instinct of battle

in his blood; from a soldier he rose through every rank to be the

King's lieutenant of Guyenne and a Marshal of France; during fifty

years he fought, as a daring captain rather than as a great general,

amorous of danger, and at length, terribly disfigured by wounds, he

sat down, not to rest, but to wield his pen as if it were a sword

of steel. His _Commentaires_ were meant to be a manual for hardy

combatants, and what model could he set before the young aspirant

so animating as himself? In his earlier wars against the foreign foes

of his country, Monluc was indeed a model of military prowess; the

civil wars added cruelty to his courage; after a fashion he was

religious, and a short shrift and a cord were good enough for heretics

and adversaries of his King. An unlettered soldier, Monluc, by virtue

of his energy of character and directness of speech, became a most

impressive and spirited narrator. His Memoirs close with a sigh for

stern and inviolable solitude. Among the Pyrenean rocks he had

formerly observed a lonely monastery, in view at once of Spain and

France; there it was his wish to end his days.

From the opposite party in the great religious and political strife

came the temperate Memoirs of Lanoue, the simple and beautiful record

of her husband's life by Madame de Mornay, and that of his own career,

written in an old age of gloom and passion, by D'Aubigne. The ideas

of Henri IV.--himself a royal author in his _Lettres missives_--are

embodied in the _OEconomies Royales_ of the statesman Sully, whose

secretaries were employed for the occasion in laboriously reciting

his words and deeds as they had learnt them from their chief. The

superficial aspects of the life of society, the manners and morals--or

lack of morals--of the time, are lightly and brightly exhibited by

PIERRE DE BOURDEILLE, lord of BRANTOME, Catholic abbe, soldier and

courtier, observer of the great world, gossip of amorous secrets.

His _Vies des Hommes Illustres et des Grands Capitaines_, his _Vies

des Dames Illustres et des Dames Galantes_, and his _Memoires_

contained matter too dangerous, perhaps, for publication during his

lifetime, but the author cherished the thought of his posthumous

renown. Brantome, wholly indifferent to good and evil, had a vivid

interest in life; virtue and vice concerned him alike and equally,

if only they had vivacity, movement, colour; and although, as with

Monluc, it was a physical calamity that made him turn to authorship,

he wrote with a naive art, an easy grace, and abundant spirit. To

correct and complete Brantome's narrative as it related to herself,

Marguerite, Queen of Navarre, first wife of Henri IV., prepared her

unfinished Memoirs, which opens the delightful series of

autobiographies and reminiscences of women. Her account of the night

of St. Bartholomew is justly celebrated; the whole record, indeed,

is full of interest; but there were passages of her life which it

was natural that she should pass over in silence; her sins of omission,

as Bayle has observed, are many.[4]

[Footnote 4: The _Memoires-Journeaux_ of Pierre de l'Estoile are a

great magazine of the gains of the writer's disinterested curiosity.

The _Lettres_ of D'Ossat and the _Negotiations_ of the President

Jeannin are of importance in the records of diplomacy.]

The controversies of the civil wars produced a militant literature,

in which the extreme parties contended with passion, while between

these a middle party, the aspirants to conciliation, pleaded for the

ways of prudence, and, if possible, of peace. FRANCOIS HOTMAN, the

effect of whose Latin _Franco-Gallia_, a political treatise

presenting the Huguenot demands, has been compared to that of

Rousseau's _Contrat Social_, launched his eloquent invective against

the Cardinal de Lorraine, in the _Epistre envoyee au Tigre de la

France_. Hubert Languet, the devoted friend of Philip Sidney, in his

_Vindiciae contra Tyrannos_, justified rebellion against princes who

violate by their commands the laws of God. D'Aubigne, in his

_Confession de Sancy_, attacked with characteristic ardour the

apostates and waverers of the time, above the rest that threefold

recanter of his faith, Harlay de Sancy. Marnix de Sainte-Aldegonde,

in his _Tableau des Differands de la Religion_, mingles theological

erudition with his raillery against the Roman communion. Henri

Estienne applied the spirit and learning of a great humanist to

religious controversy in the second part of his _Apologie pour

Herodote_; the marvellous tales of the Greek historian may well be

true, he sarcastically maintains, when in this sixteenth century the

abuses of the Roman Church seem to pass all belief. On the other hand,

Du Perron, a cardinal in 1604, replied to the arguments and citations

of the heretics. As the century drew towards its close, violence

declined; the struggle was in a measure appeased. In earlier days

the Chancellor, Michel de l'Hospital, had hoped to establish harmony

between the rival parties; grief for the massacre of St. Bartholomew

hastened his death. The learned Duplessis-Mornay, leader and guide

of the Reformed Churches of France, a devoted servant of Henri of

Navarre, while fervent in his own beliefs, was too deeply attached

to the common faith of Christianity to be an extreme partisan. The

reconciliation of Henri IV. with the Church of Rome, which delivered

France from anarchy, was, however, a grief to some of his most loyal

supporters, and of these Duplessis-Mornay was the most eminent.

The cause of Henri against the League was served by the manuscript

circulation of a prose satire, with interspersed pieces of verse,

the work of a group of writers, moderate Catholics or converted

Protestants, who loved their country and their King, the _Satire

Menipee_.[5] When it appeared in print (1594; dated on the title-page

1593) the cause was won; the satire rose upon a wave of success, like

a gleaming crest of bitter spray. It is a parody of the Estates of

the League which had been ineffectually convoked to make choice of

a king. Two Rabelaisian charlatans, one from Spain, one from Lorraine,

offer their drugs for sale in the court of the Louvre; the virtues

of the Spanish Catholicon, a divine electuary, are manifold--it will

change the blackest criminal into a spotless lamb, it will transform

a vulgar bonnet to a cardinal's hat, and at need can accomplish a

score of other miracles. Presently the buffoon Estates file past to

their assembly; the hall in which they meet is tapestried with

grotesque scenes from history; the order of the sitting is determined,

and the harangues begin, harangues in which each speaker exposes his

own ambitions, greeds, hypocrisies, and egoism, until Monsieur

d'Aubray, the orator of the _tiers etat_, closes the debate with a

speech in turn indignant, ironical, or grave in its commiseration

for the popular wrongs--an utterance of bourgeois honesty and good

sense. The writers--Canon Pierre Leroy; Gillot, clerk-advocate of

the Parliament of Paris; Rapin, a lettered combatant at Ivry; Jean

Passerat, poet and commentator on Rabelais; Chrestien and Pithou,

two Protestants discreetly converted by force of events--met in a

room of Gillot's house, where, according to the legend, Boileau was

afterwards born, and there concocted the venom of their pamphlet.

Its wit, in spite of some extravagances and the tedium of certain

pages, is admirable; farce and comedy, sarcasm and moral prudence

alternate; and it had the great good fortune of a satire, that of

coming at the lucky moment.

[Footnote 5: Varro, who to a certain extent copied from Menippus the

Gadarene, had called his satires _Saturae Menippeae_; hence the

title.]

The French Huguenots were not without their poets. Two of

these--Guillaume Saluste, Seigneur du Bartas, and Agrippa

d'Aubigne--are eminent. The fame of DU BARTAS (1544-90) was indeed

European. Ronsard sent him a pen of gold, and feared at a later time

the rivalry of his renown; Tasso drew inspiration from his verse;

the youthful Milton read him with admiration in the rendering by

Sylvester; long afterwards Goethe honoured him with praise beyond

his deserts. To read his poems now, notwithstanding passages of vivid

description and passages of ardent devotional feeling, would need

rare literary fortitude. His originality lies in the fact that while

he was a disciple of the Pleiade, a disciple crude, intemperate, and

provincial, he deserted Greece and Rome, and drew his subjects from

Hebraic sources. His _Judith_ (1573), composed by the command of

Jeanne d'Albret, has more of Lucan than of Virgil in its over-emphatic

style. _La Sepmaine, ou la Creation en Sept Journees_, appeared in

1578, and within a few years had passed through thirty editions. Du

Bartas is always copious, sometimes brilliant, sometimes majestic;

but laboured and rhetorical description, never ending and still

beginning, fatigues the mind; an encyclopaedia of the works of

creation weighs heavily upon the imagination; we sigh for the arrival

of the day of rest.

THEODORE-AGRIPPA D'AUBIGNE (1550-1630) was not among the admirers

of Du Bartas. His natural temper was framed for pleasure; at another

time he might have been known only as a poet of the court, of lighter

satire, and of love; the passions of the age transformed him into

an ardent and uncompromising combatant. His classical culture was

wide and exact; at ten years old he translated the _Crito_; Latin,

Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Spanish were at his command. He might, had

France been at peace with herself, have appeared in literature as

a somewhat belated Ronsardist; but his hereditary cause became his

own. While still a child he accepted from his father, in presence

of the withering heads of the conspirators of Amboise, the oath of

immitigable vengeance. Pursuits, escapes, the camp, the battle-field,

the prison, the court made up no small part of his life of vicissitude

and of unalterable resolve. He roused Henri of Navarre from the

lethargy of pleasure; he warned the King against the crime of

apostasy; he dreaded the mass, but could cheerfully have accepted

the stake. Extreme in his rage of party, he yet in private affairs

could show good sense and generosity. His elder years were darkened

by what he regarded as treason in his King, and by the falling away

from the faith of that son who, by an irony of fate, became the father

of Madame de Maintenon. Four times condemned to death, he died in

exile at the age of eighty.

D'Aubigne's satirical tale, _Les Aventures du Baron de Faeneste_,

contrasts the man who _appears_--spreading his plumes in the sunshine

of the court--with the man who _is_, the man who lives upon his estate,

among his rustic neighbours, tilling his fields and serving his people

and his native land. As an elegiac poet D'Aubigne is little more than

a degenerate issue from the Pleiade. It is in his vehement poem of

mourning and indignation and woe, _Les Tragiques_, begun in 1577 but

not published till 1616, that his power is fully manifested. To

D'Aubigne, as its author, the characterisation of Sainte-Beuve

exactly applies: "Juvenal du xvi. siecle, apre, austere, inexorable,

herisse d'hyperboles, etincelant de beautes, rachetant une rudesse

grossiere par une sublime energie." In seven books it tells of the

misery of France, the treachery of princes, the abuse of public law

and justice, the fires and chains of religious persecution, the

vengeance of God against the enemies of the saints, and the final

judgment of sinners, when air and fire and water become the accusers

of those who have perverted the powers of nature to purposes of cruelty.

The poem is ill composed, its rhetoric is often strained or hard and

metallic, its unrelieved horrors oppress the heart; but the cry of

true passion is heard in its finer pages; from amid the turmoil and

smoke, living tongues of flame seem to dart forth which illuminate

the gloom. The influence of _Les Tragiques_ may still be felt in

passages of Victor Hugo's fulgurant eloquence.

In the midst of strife, however, there were men who pursued the

disinterested service of humanity and whose work made for peace. The

great surgeon Ambroise Pare, full of tolerance and deeply pious,

advanced his healing art on the battle-field or amid the ravages of

pestilence, and left a large contribution to the literature of science.

Bernard Palissy, a devout Huguenot, was not only the inventor of

"rustic figulines," the designer of enamelled cups and platters, but

a true student of nature, who would substitute the faithful

observation of phenomena for vain and ambitious theory. Olivier de

Serres, another disciple of Calvin, cultivated his fields, helped

to enrich France by supporting Henri IV. in the introduction of the

industry in silk, and amassed his knowledge and experience in his

admirably-written _Theatre d'Agriculture_. At a later date Antoine

de Montchrestien, adventurous and turbulent in his Protestant zeal,

the writer of tragedies which connect the sixteenth century with the

classical school of later years, became the advocate of a

protectionist and a colonial policy in his _Traicte de l'OEconomie

Politique_; the style of his essay towards economic reform has some

of the passion and enthusiasm of a poet.

A refuge from the troubles and vicissitudes of the time was sought

by some in a Christianised Stoicism. Guillaume du Vair (1556-1621),

eminent as a magistrate, did not desert his post of duty; he pleaded

eloquently, as chief orator of the middle party of conciliation, on

behalf of unity under Henri of Navarre. In his treatise on French

eloquence he endeavoured to elevate the art of public speaking above

laboured pedantry to true human discourse. But while taking part in

the contentious progress of events, he saw the flow of human affairs

as from an elevated plateau. In the conversations with friends which

form his treatise _De la Constance et Consolation es Calamites

Publiques_, Du Vair's counsels are those of courage and resignation,

not unmingled with hope. He rendered into French the stoical morals

of Epictetus; and in his own _Sainte Philosophie_ and _Philosophie

Morale des Stoiques_ he endeavoured, with honest purpose, rather than

with genius, to ally speculation to religion, and to show how human

reason can lead the way to those ethical truths which are the guiding

lights of conduct.

Perhaps certitude sufficient for human life may be found by

limitation; a few established truths will, after all, carry us from

the cradle to the grave; and beyond the bounds of certitude lies a

limitless and fascinating field for observation and dubious

conjecture. Amid the multitude of new ideas which the revival of

antiquity brought with it, amid the hot disputes of the rival churches,

amid the fierce contentions of civil war, how delightful to possess

one's soul in quiet, to be satisfied with the needful knowledge, small

though it be, which is vouchsafed to us, and to amuse the mind with

every opinion and every varying humour of that curious and wayward

creature man! And who so wayward, who so wavering as one's self in

all those parts of our composite being which are subject to the play

of time and circumstance? Such, in an age of confusion working towards

clearness, an age of belligerency tending towards concord, were the

reflections of a moralist, the most original of his century--Michel

de Montaigne.

MICHEL EYQUEM, SEIGNEUR DE MONTAIGNE, was born at a chateau in

Perigord, in the year 1533. His father, whom Montaigne always

remembered with affectionate reverence, was a man of original ideas.

He entrusted the infant to the care of peasants, wishing to attach

him to the people; educated him in Latin as if his native tongue;

roused him at morning from sleep to the sound of music. From his sixth

to his thirteenth year Montaigne was at the College de Guyenne, where

he took the leading parts in Latin tragedies composed by Muret and

Buchanan. In 1554 he succeeded his father as councillor in the court

_des aides_ of Perigueux, the members of which were soon afterwards

incorporated in the Parliament of Bordeaux. But nature had not

destined Montaigne for the duties of the magistracy; he saw too many

sides of every question; he chose rather to fail in justice than in

humanity. In 1565 he acquired a large fortune by marriage, and having

lost his father, he retired from public functions in 1570, to enjoy

a tranquil existence of meditation, and of rambling through books.

He had published, a year before, in fulfilment of his father's desire,

a translation of the _Theologia Naturalis_ of Raimond de Sebonde,

a Spanish philosopher of the fifteenth century; and now he occupied

himself in preparing for the press the writings of his dead friend

La Boetie. Love for his father and love for his friend were the two

passions of Montaigne's life. From 1571 to 1580 he dwelt in retreat,

in company with his books and his ideas, indulging his humour for

tranquil freedom of the mind. It was his custom to enrich the margins

of his books with notes, and his earliest essays may be regarded as

an extension of such notes; Plutarch and Seneca were, above all, his

favourites; afterwards, the volume which he read with most enjoyment,

and annotated most curiously, was that of his own life.

And, indeed, Montaigne's daily life, with outward monotony and

internal variety, was a pleasant miscellany on which to comment. He

was of a middle temperament, "between the jovial and the melancholic";

a lover of solitude, yet the reverse of morose; choosing bright

companions rather than sad; able to be silent, as the mood took him,

or to gossip; loyal and frank; a hater of hypocrisy and falsehood;

a despiser of empty ceremony; disposed to interpret all things to

the best; cheerful among his children; careless of exercising

authority; incapable of household management; trustful and kind

towards his neighbours; indulgent in his judgments, yet warm in his

admiration of old, heroic virtue. His health, which in boyhood had

been robust, was shaken in middle life by an internal malady. He

travelled in the hope of finding strength, visiting Germany,

Switzerland, Italy, Tyrol, and observing, with a serious amusement,

the varieties of men and manners. While still absent from France,

in 1581, he learned that he had been elected mayor of Bordeaux; he

hesitated in accepting an honourable but irksome public office; the

King permitted no dallying, and Montaigne obeyed. Two years later

the mayor was re-elected; it was a period of difficulty; a Catholic

and a Royalist, he had a heretic brother, and himself yielded to the

charm of Henri of Navarre; "for the Ghibelline I was a Guelph, for

the Guelph a Ghibelline." When, in 1585, pestilence raged in Bordeaux,

Montaigne's second period of office had almost expired; he quitted

the city, and the election of his successor took place in his absence.

His last years were brightened by the friendship--almost filial--of

Mlle. de Gournay, an ardent admirer, and afterwards editor, of the

_Essais_. In 1592 Montaigne died, when midway in his sixtieth year.

The first two books of the _Essais_ were published by their author

in 1580; in 1588 they appeared in an augmented text, with the addition

of the third book. The text superintended by Mlle. de Gournay, based

upon a revised and enlarged copy left by Montaigne, is of the year

1595.

The unity of the book, which makes no pretence to unity, may be found

in the fact that all its topics are concerned with a common

subject--the nature of man; that the writer accepts himself as the

example of humanity most open to his observation; and that the same

tranquil, yet insatiable curiosity is everywhere present. Man, as

conceived by Montaigne, is of all creatures the most variable,

unstable, inconstant. The species includes the saint and the brute,

the hero and the craven, while between the extremes lies the average

man, who may be anything that nature, custom, or circumstances make

him. And as the species varies indefinitely, so each individual varies

endlessly from himself: his conscience controls his temperament; his

temperament betrays his conscience; external events transform him

from what he was. Do we seek to establish our moral being upon the

rock of philosophical dogma? The rock gives way under our feet, and

scatters as if sand. Such truth as we can attain by reason is relative

truth; let us pass through knowledge to a wise acceptance of our

ignorance; let us be contented with the probabilities which are all

that our reason can attain. The truths of conduct, as far as they

are ascertainable, were known long since to the ancient moralists.

Can any virtue surpass the old Roman virtue? We believe in God,

although we know little about His nature or His operations; and why

should we disbelieve in Christianity, which happens to be part of

the system of things under which we are born? But why, also, should

we pay such a compliment to opinions different from our own as to

burn a heretic because he prefers the Pope of Geneva to the Pope of

Rome? Let each of us ask himself, "Que sais-je?"--"What do I really

know?" and the answer will serve to temper our zeal.

While Montaigne thus saps our confidence in the conclusions of the

intellect, when they pass beyond a narrow bound, he pays a homage

to the force of will; his admiration for the heroic men of Plutarch

is ardent. An Epicurean by temperament, he is a Stoic through his

imagination; but for us and for himself, who are no heroes, the

appropriate form of Stoical virtue is moderation within our sphere,

and a wise indifference, or at most a disinterested curiosity, in

matters which lie beyond that sphere. Let us resign ourselves to life,

such as it is; let us resign ourselves to death; and let the

resignation be cheerful or even gay. To spend ourselves in attempted

reforms of the world, of society, of governments, is vain. The world

will go its own way; it is for us to accept things as they are, to

observe the laws of our country because it is ours, to smile at them

if we please, and to extract our private gains from a view of the

reformers, the enthusiasts, the dogmatists, the credulous, the

combatants; there is one heroism possible for us--the heroism of good

sense. "It is an absolute perfection, and as it were divine," so we

read on the last page of Florio's translation of the _Essais_, "for

a man to know how to enjoy his being loyally. We seek for other

conditions because we understand not the use of ours; and go out of

ourselves, forasmuch as we know not what abiding there is. We may

long enough get upon stilts, for be we upon them, yet must we go with

our legs. And sit we upon the highest throne of the world, yet sit

we upon our own tail. The best and most commendable lives, and best

pleasing me are (in my conceit), those which with order are fitted,

and with decorum are ranged, to the common mould and human model;

but without wonder or extravagancy. Now hath old age need to be handled

more tenderly. Let us recommend it unto that God who is the protector

of health and fountain of all wisdom; but blithe and social." And

with a stanza of Epicurean optimism from Horace the Essay closes.

Such, or somewhat after this fashion, is the doctrine of Montaigne.

It is conveyed to the reader without system, in the most informal

manner, in a series of discourses which seem to wander at their own

will, resembling a bright and easy conversation, vivid with imagery,

enlivened by anecdote and citation, reminiscences from history,

observations of curious manners and customs, offering constantly to

view the person of Montaigne himself in the easiest undress. The style,

although really carefully studied and superintended, has an air of

light facility, hardly interposing between the author and his reader;

the book is of all books the most sociable, a living companion rather

than a book, playful and humorous, amiable and well bred, learned

without pedantry, and wise without severity.

During the last three years of his life Montaigne enjoyed the

friendship of a disciple who was already celebrated for his eloquence

as a preacher. PIERRE CHARRON (1541-1603), legist and theologian,

under the influence of Montaigne's ideas, aspired to be a philosopher.

It was as a theologian that he wrote his book of the _Trois Verites_,

which attempts to demonstrate the existence of God, the truth of

Christianity, and the exclusive orthodoxy of the Roman communion.

It was as a philosopher, in the _Traite de la Sagesse_, that he

systematised the informal scepticism of Montaigne. Instead of

putting the question, "Que sais-je?" Charron ventures the assertion,

"Je ne sais." He exhibits man's weakness, misery, and bondage to the

passions; gives counsel for the enfranchisement of the mind; and

studies the virtues of justice, prudence, temperance, and valiance.

God has created man, says Charron, to know the truth; never can he

know it of himself or by human means, and one who despairs of reason

is in the best position for accepting divine instruction; a Pyrrhonist

at least will never be a heretic; even if religion be regarded as

an invention of man, it is an invention which has its uses. Not a

few passages of the _Sagesse_ are directly borrowed, with slight

rehandling, from Montaigne and from Du Vair; but, instead of

Montaigne's smiling agnosticism, we have a grave and formal

indictment of humanity; we miss the genial humour and kindly temper

of the master; we miss the amiable egotism and the play of a versatile

spirit; we miss the charm of an incomparable literary style.

BOOK THE THIRD

_THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY_

CHAPTER I

LITERARY FREEDOM AND LITERARY ORDER

With the restoration of order under Henri IV. the delights of peace

began to be felt; a mundane society, polished and pleasure-loving,

began to be constituted, and before many years had passed the

influence of women and of the _salon_ appeared in literature. Should

such a society be permitted to remain oblivious to spiritual truth,

or to repose on the pillow of scepticism provided by Charron and

Montaigne? Might it not be captured for religion, if religion were

presented in its most gracious aspect, as a source of peace and joy,

a gentle discipline of the heart? If one who wore the Christian armour

should throw over his steel some robe of courtly silk, with floral

adornments, might he not prove a persuasive champion of the Cross?

Such was the hope of FRANCOIS DE SALES (1567-1622), Bishop of Geneva,

when, in 1608, he published his _Introduction a la Vie Devote_. The

angelic doctor charmed by his mere presence, his grace of person,

his winning smile, his dove's eyes; he showed how amiable piety might

be; his eloquence was festooned with blossoms; he strewed the path

to heaven with roses; he conquered by docility; yet under his

sweetness lay strength, and to methodise and popularise moral

self-superintendence was to achieve much. The _Traite de l'Amour de

Dieu_ (1616), while it expounds the highest reaches of mystical

devotion, yet presents religion as accessible to every child of God.

With his tender and ardent devotion, something of a poet's sentiment

for nature was united; but mysticism and poetry were both subservient

to his aim of regulating the conduct of the heart; he desired to show

how one may remain in the world, and yet not be of the world; by personal

converse and by his spiritual letters he became the director of

courtiers and of ladies. The motto of the literary Academy which he

founded at Annecy expresses his spirit--_flores fructusque

perennes_--flowers for their own sake, but chiefly for the sake of

fruit. Much of the genius for holiness of the courtly saint has passed

into the volume of reminiscences by Bishop Camus, his companion and

disciple--_l'Esprit de Saint Francois de Sales_.

A mundane society, however, where fine gentlemen and ladies meet to

admire and be admired, needs other outlets for its imagination than

that of the primrose way to Paradise. The labour of the fields had

inspired Olivier de Serres with the prose Georgics of his _Theatre

d'Agriculture_, a work directed towards utility; the romance of the

fields, and the pastoral, yet courtly, loves of a French Arcady, were

the inspiration of the endless prose bucolics found in the _Astree_

of HONORE D'URFE. The Renaissance delight in the pastoral had passed

from Italy to Spain; through the _Diana_ of the Spanish Montemayor

it passed to France. After a period of turbulent strife there was

a fascination in visions of a peace, into which, if warfare entered,

the strange irruption only enhanced an habitual calm. A whole

generation waited long to learn the issue of the passion of Celadon

and Astree. The romance, of which the earliest part appeared in 1610,

or earlier, was not completely published until 1627, when its author

was no longer living.[1] The scene is laid in the fields of d'Urfe's

familiar Forez and on the banks of the Lignon; the time is of

Merovingian antiquity. The shepherd Celadon, banished on suspicion

of faithlessness from the presence of his beloved Astree, seeks death

beneath the stream; he is saved by the nymphs, escapes the amorous

pursuit of Galatea, assumes a feminine garb, and, protected by the

Druid Adamas, has the felicity of daily beholding his shepherdess.

At length he declares himself, and is overwhelmed with reproaches;

true lover that he is, when he offers his body to the devouring lions

of the Fountain of Love, the beasts refuse their prey; the venerable

Druid discreetly guides events; Celadon's fidelity receives its

reward in marriage, and the banks of the Lignon become a scene of

universal joy. The colours of the _Astree_ are faded now as those

of some ancient tapestry, but during many years its success was

prodigious. D'Urfe's highest honour, of many, is the confession of

La Fontaine:--

"_Etant petit garcon je lisais son roman,

Et je le lis encore ayant la barbe grise._"

The _Astree_ won its popularity, in part because it united the old

attraction of a chivalric or heroic strain with that of the newer

pastoral; in part because it idealised the gallantries and developed

the amorous casuistry of the day, not without a real sense of the

power of love; in part because it was supposed to exhibit ideal

portraits of distinguished contemporaries. It was the parent of a

numerous progeny; and as the heroic romance of the seventeenth century

is derived in direct succession from the loves of Celadon and Astree,

so the comic romance, beside all that it owes to the tradition of

the _esprit gaulois_, owes something to the mocking gaiety with which

d'Urfe exhibits the adventures and emotional vicissitudes of his

inconstant shepherd Hylas.

[Footnote 1: It should be noted that the close of the _Astree_ is

by D'Urfe's secretary Baro.]

In the political and social reconstruction which followed the civil

and religious wars, the need of discipline and order in literature

was felt; in this province, also, unity under a law was seen to be

desirable. The work of the Pleiade had in a great measure failed;

they had attempted to organise poetry and its methods, and poetry

was still disorganised. To reduce the realm of caprice and fantasy

to obedience to law was the work of FRANCOIS DE MALHERBE. Born at

Caen in 1555, he had published in 1587 his _Larmes de Saint Pierre_,

an imitation of the Italian poem by Tansillo, in a manner which his

maturer judgment must have condemned. It was not until about his

fortieth year that he found his true direction. Du Vair, with whom

he was acquainted, probably led him to a true conception of the nature

of eloquence. Vigorous of character, clear in understanding, with

no affluence of imagination and no excess of sensibility, Malherbe

was well qualified for establishing lyrical poetry upon the basis

of reason, and of general rather than individual sentiment. He chose

the themes of his odes from topics of public interest, or founded

them on those commonplaces of emotion which are part of the possession

of all men who think and feel. If he composed his verses for some

great occasion, he sought for no curiosities of a private imagination,

but considered in what way its nobler aspects ought to be regarded

by the community at large; if he consoled a friend for losses caused

by death, he held his personal passion under restraint; he generalised,

and was content to utter more admirably than others the accepted

truths about the brevity and beauty of life, and the inevitable doom

of death. What he gained by such a process of abstraction, he lost

in vivid characterisation; his imagery lacks colour; the movement

of his verse is deliberate and calculated; his ideas are rigorously

enchained one to another.

It has been said that poetry--the overflow of individual emotion--is

overheard; while oratory--the appeal to an audience--is heard. The

processes of Malherbe's art were essentially oratorical; the lyrical

cry is seldom audible in his verse; it is the poetry of eloquence

thrown into studied stanzas. But the greater poetry of the seventeenth

century in France--its odes, its satires, its epistles, its noble

dramatic scenes--and much of its prose literature are of the nature

of oratory; and for the progress of such poetry, and even of such

prose, Malherbe prepared a highway. He aimed at a reformation of the

language, which, rejecting all words either base, provincial,

archaic, technical, or over-learned and over-curious, should employ

the standard French, pure and dignified, as accepted by the people

of Paris. In his hands language became too exclusively an instrument

of the intelligence; yet with this instrument great things were

achieved by his successors. He methodised and regulated

versification, insisting on rich and exact rhymes, condemning all

licence and infirmity of structure, condemning harshness of sound,

inversion, hiatus, negligence in accommodating the cesura to the

sense, the free gliding of couplet into couplet. It may be said that

he rendered verse mechanical; but within the arrangement which he

prescribed, admirable effects were attainable by the mastery of

genius. He pondered every word, weighed every syllable, and thought

no pains ill-spent if only clearness, precision, the logic of

ordonnance, a sustained harmony were at length secured; and until

the day of his death, in 1628, no decline in his art can be perceived.

Malherbe fell far short of being a great poet, but in the history

of seventeenth-century classicism, in the effort of the age to

rationalise the forms of art, his name is of capital importance. It

cannot be said that he founded a school. His immediate disciples,

MAYNARD and RACAN, failed to develop the movement which he had

initiated. Maynard laid verse by the side of verse with exact care,

and sometimes one or the other verse is excellent, but he lacked

sustained force and flight. Racan had genuine inspiration; a true

feeling for nature appears in his dramatic pastoral, the _Bergeries_

(1625); unhappily he had neither the culture nor the patience needed

for perfect execution; he was rather an admirable amateur than an

artist. But if Malherbe founded no school, he gave an eminent example,

and the argument which he maintained in the cause of poetic art was

at a later time carried to its conclusion by Boileau.

Malherbe's reform was not accepted without opposition. While he

pleaded for the supremacy of order, regularity, law, the voice of

MATHURIN REGNIER (1573-1613) was heard on behalf of freedom. A nephew

of the poet Desportes, Regnier was loyal to his uncle's fame and to

the memory of the Pleiade; if Malherbe spoke slightingly of Desportes,

and cast aside the tradition of the school of Ronsard, the retort

was speedy and telling against the arrogant reformer, tyrant of words

and syllables, all whose achievement amounted to no more than _proser

de la rime et rimer de la prose_. Unawares, indeed, Regnier, to a

certain extent, co-operated with Malherbe, who recognised the genius

of his younger adversary; he turned away from languid elegances to

observation of life and truth of feeling; if he imitated his masters

Horace and Ovid, or the Italian satiric poets, with whose writings

he had become acquainted during two periods of residence in Rome,

his imitations were not obsequious, like those of the Pleiade, but

vigorous and original, like those of Boileau; in his sense of comedy

he anticipates some of Moliere's feeling for the humorous

perversities of human character; his language is vivid, plain, and

popular. The classical school of later years could not reject Regnier.

Boileau declared that no poet before Moliere was so well acquainted

with the manners and characters of men; through his impersonal study

of life he is indeed classic. But his ardent nature rebelled against

formal rule; he trusted to the native force of genius, and let his

ideas and passions lead him where they would. His satires are those

of a painter whose eye is on his object, and who handles his brush

with a vigorous discretion; they are criticisms of society and its

types of folly or of vice, full of force and colour, yet general in

their intention, for, except at the poet who had affronted his uncle,

"le bon Regnier" struck at no individual. Most admirable, amid much

that is admirable, is the picture of the old worldling Macette, whose

veil of pretended piety is gradually dropped as she discourses with

growing wantonness to the maiden whom she would lead in the way she

should not go: Macette is no unworthy elder of the family of Tartufe.

Regnier confesses freely the passions of his own irregular life; had

it been wisely conducted, his genius might have carried him far; as

it was, he passed away prematurely at the age of forty, the victim

of his own intemperate pursuit of pleasure.

Still more unfortunate was the life of a younger poet, who, while

honouring the genius of Malherbe, pronounced, like Regnier, for

freedom rather than order, and maintained that each writer of genius

should be a law to himself--a poet whom his contemporaries esteemed

too highly, and whom Malherbe, and afterwards Boileau, unjustly

depreciated--THEOPHILE DE VIAU. A Huguenot who had abjured his faith,

afterwards pursued as a libertine in conduct and as a freethinker,

Theophile was hunted, imprisoned, exiled, condemned to execution,

and died exhausted in 1626, when only six-and-thirty years old. He

has been described as the last lyrical poet of his age, and the first

of the poetical exponents of the new preciosity. His dramatic _Pyrame

et Thisbe_, though disfigured by those _concetti_ which the Italian

Marini--an honoured guest at the French court--and the invasion of

Spanish tastes had made the mode, is not without touches of genuine

pathos. The odes of Theophile are of free and musical movement, his

descriptions of natural beauty are graciously coloured, his judgment

in literary matters was sound and original; but he lacked the patient

workmanship which art demands, and in proclaiming himself on the side

of freedom as against order, he was retrograding from the position

which had been secured for poetry under the leadership of Malherbe.

With social order came the desire for social refinement, and following

the desire for refinement came the prettinesses and affectations of

over-curious elegance. Peace returned to France with the monarchy

of Henri IV., but the Gascon manners of his court were rude. Catherine

de Vivonne, Marquise de Rambouillet, whose mother was a great Roman

lady, and whose father had been French ambassador at Rome, young,

beautiful, delicately nurtured, retired in 1608 from the court, and

a few years later opened her _salon_ of the Hotel de Rambouillet to

such noble and cultivated persons as were willing to be the courtiers

of womanly grace and wit and taste. The rooms were arranged and

decorated for the purposes of pleasure; the _chambre bleue_ became

the sanctuary of polite society, where Arthenice (an anagram for

"Catherine") was the high priestess. To dance, to sing, to touch the

lute was well; to converse with wit and refinement was something more

admirable; the _salon_ became a mart for the exchange of ideas; the

fashion of Spain was added to the fashion of Italy; Platonism,

Petrarchism, Marinism, Gongorism, the spirit of romance and the

daintinesses of learning and of pedantry met and mingled. Hither came

Malherbe, Racan, Chapelain, Vaugelas; at a later time Balzac, Segrais,

Voiture, Godeau; and again, towards the mid-years of the century,

Saint-Evremond and La Rochefoucauld. Here Corneille read his plays

from the _Cid_ to _Rodogune_; here Bossuet, a marvellous boy,

improvised a midnight discourse, and Voiture declared he had never

heard one preach so early or so late.

As Julie d'Angennes and her sister Angelique attained an age to divide

their mother's authority in the _salon_, its sentiment grew

quintessential, and its taste was subtilised well-nigh to inanity.

They censured _Polyeucte_; they found Chapelain's unhappy epic

"perfectly beautiful, but excessively tiresome"; they laid their

heads together over Descartes' _Discours de la Methode_, and

profoundly admired the philosopher; they were enraptured by the

madrigals on flowers, more than three score in number, offered as

the _Guirlande de Julie_ on Mademoiselle's fete; they gravely debated

the question which should be the approved spelling, _muscadin_ or

_muscardin_. In 1649 they were sundered into rival parties--_Uranistes_

and _Jobelins_--tilting in literary lists on behalf of the respective

merits of a sonnet by Voiture and a sonnet by Benserade. The word

_precieux_ is said to date from 1650. The Marquise de Rambouillet

survived Moliere's satiric comedy _Les Precieuses Ridicules_ (1659) by

several years. Mme. de Sevigne, Mme. de la Fayette, Flechier, the

preacher of fashion, were among the illustrious personages of the

decline of her _salon_. We smile at its follies and affectations; but,

while it harmed literature by magnifying things that were petty, it did

something to refine manners, to quicken ideas, to encourage clearness

and grace of expression, and to make the pursuit of letters an avenue

to social distinction. Through the Hotel de Rambouillet, and the

_salons_ which both in Paris and the provinces imitated its modes, and

pushed them to extravagance, the influence of women on literature

became a power for good and for evil.

The "Works," as they were styled, of VINCENT VOITURE

(1598-1648)--posthumously published--represent one side of the

spirit of the _salon_. Capable of something higher, he lived to

exhibit his ingenuity and wit in little ways, now by a cleverly-turned

verse, now by a letter of gallantry. Although of humble origin, he

was for long a presiding genius in the _chambre bleue_ of Arthenice.

His play of mind was unhappily without a subject, and to be witty

on nothings puts a strain on wit. Voiture expends much labour on being

light, much serious effort in attaining vanities. His letters were

admired as models of ingenious elegance; the life has long since

passed from their raillery and badinage, but Voiture may be credited

with having helped to render French prose pliant for the uses of

pleasure.

The dainty trifles of the school of preciosity fluttered at least

during the sunshine of a day. Its ambitious epics, whatever attention

they may have attracted in their time, cannot be said to have ever

possessed real life. The great style is not to be attained by tagging

platitudes with points. The _Saint Louis_ of Lemoyne, the _Clovis_

of Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin, the _Alaric_ of Scudery, the

_Charlemagne_ of Louis le Laboureur remain only as evidences of the

vanity of misplaced ambition. During twenty years JEAN CHAPELAIN,

a man of no mean ability in other fields, was occupied with his _La

Pucelle d'Orleans_; twelve cantos at length appeared magnificently

in 1656, and won a brief applause; the remaining twelve cantos lie

still inedited. The matter of history was too humble for Chapelain's

genius; history is ennobled by an allegorical intention; France

becomes the soul of man; Charles, swayed between good and evil, is

the human will; the Maid of Orleans is divine grace. The satire of

Boileau, just in its severity, was hardly needed to slay the slain.

In the prose romances, which are epics emancipated from the trammels

of verse, there was more vitality. Bishop Camus, the friend of

Francois de Sales, had attempted to sanctify the movement which d'Urfe

had initiated; but the spirit of the _Astree_ would not unite in a

single stream with the spirit of the _Introduction a la Vie Devote_.

Gomberville is remembered rather for the remorseless war which he

waged against the innocent conjunction _car_, never to be admitted

into polite literature, than for his encyclopaedic romance

_Polexandre_, in which geography is illustrated by fiction, as

copious as it is fantastic; yet it was something to annex for the

first time the ocean, with all its marvels, to the scenery of adventure.

Gombauld, the _Beau Tenebreux_ of the Hotel de Rambouillet, secured

a reading for his unreadable _Endymion_ by the supposed transparence

of his allusions to living persons. Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin

relieved the amorous exaltations of his _Ariane_, a tale of the time

of Nero, by excursions which touch the borders of comedy. These are

books on which the dust gathers thick in ancient libraries.

But the romances of LA CALPRENEDE and of GEORGES and MADELEINE DE

SCUDERY might well be taken down by any lover of literature who

possesses the virtue of fortitude. Since d'Urfe's day the taste for

pastoral had declined; the newer romance was gallant and heroic.

Legend or history supplied its framework; but the central motive was

ideal love at odds with circumstance, love the inspirer of limitless

devotion and daring. The art of construction was imperfectly

understood; the narratives are of portentous length; ten, twelve,

twenty volumes were needed to deploy the sentiments and the adventures.

In _Cassandre_, in _Cleopatre_, in _Pharamond_, La Calprenede

exhibits a kind of universal history; the dissolution of the

Macedonian empire, the decline of the empire of Rome, the beginnings

of the French monarchy are successively presented. But the chief

personages are idealised portraits drawn from the society of the

author's time. The spirit of the Hotel de Rambouillet is transferred

to the period when the Scythian Oroondate was the lover of Statira,

daughter of Darius; the Prince de Conde masks in _Cleopatre_ as

Coriolan; Pharamond is the Grand Monarch in disguise. Notwithstanding

the faded gallantries and amorous casuistry of La Calprenede's

interminable romances, a certain spirit of real heroism, offspring of

the writer's ardent imagination and bright southern temper, breathes

through them. They were the delight of Mme. de Sevigne and of La

Fontaine; even in the eighteenth century they were the companions of

Crebillon, and were not forgotten by Rousseau.

Still more popular was _Artamene, ou le Grand Cyrus_. Mdlle. de

Scudery, the "Sapho" of her Saturday _salon_, a true _precieuse_,

as good of heart and quick of wit as she was unprepossessing of person,

supplied the sentiment and metaphysics of love to match the

gasconading exploits of her brother's invention. It was the time not

only of preciosity, but of the Fronde, with its turbulent adventures

and fantastic chivalry. Under the names of Medes and Persians could

be discovered the adventurers, the gallants, the fine ladies of the

seventeenth century. In _Clelie_ an attempt is made to study the

curiosities of passion; it is a manual of polite love and elegant

manners; in its _carte de Tendre_ we can examine the topography of

love-land, trace the routes to the three cities of "Tendre," and learn

the dangers of the way. Thus the heroic romance reached its term;

its finer spirit became the possession of the tragic drama, where

it was purified and rendered sane. The modern novel had wandered in

search of its true self, and had not succeeded in the quest. When

_Gil Blas_ appeared, it was seen that the novel of incident must also

be the novel of character, and that in its imitation of real life

it could appropriate some of the possessions which by that time comedy

had lost.

The extravagances of sentiment produced a natural reaction. Not a

few of the intimates of the Hotel de Rambouillet found a relief from

their fatigue of fine manners and high-pitched emotions in the

unedifying jests and merry tales of the tavern. A comic, convivial,

burlesque or picaresque literature became, as it were, a parody of

the literature of preciosity. Saint-Amand (1594-1661) was at once

a disciple of the Italian Marini, the admired "Sapurnius" of the

_salon_, author of at least one beautiful ode--_La Solitude_--breathing

a gentle melancholy, and a gay singer of bacchic chants. Desmarets de

Saint-Sorlin, in his comedy _Les Visionnaires_ (1637), mocked the

_precieuses_, and was applauded by the spectators of the theatre. One

of his heroines is hopelessly enamoured of Alexander the Great; one is

enamoured of poetry, and sees life as if it were material for the

stage; and the third is enamoured of her own beauty, with its imagined

potency over the hearts of men. As early as 1622 CHARLES SOREL

expressed, in his _Histoire Comique de Francion_, a Rabelaisian and

picaresque tale of low life, the revolt of the _esprit gaulois_ against

the homage of the imagination to courtly shepherdesses and pastoral

cavaliers. It was reprinted more than forty times. In _Le Berger

Extravagant_ (1628) he attempted a kind of Don Quixote for his own

day--an "anti-romance"--which recounts the pastoral follies of a young

Parisian bourgeois, whose wits have been set wandering by such dreams

as the _Astree_ had inspired; its mirth is unhappily overloaded with

pedantry.

The master of this school of seventeenth-century realism was PAUL

SCARRON (1610-60), the comely little abbe, unconcerned with

ecclesiastical scruples or good manners, who, when a paralytic,

twisted and tortured by disease, became the husband of D'Aubigne's

granddaughter, destined as Madame de Maintenon to become the most

influential woman in all the history of France. In his _Virgile

Travesti_ he produced a vulgar counterpart to the heroic epics, which

their own dead-weight would have speedily enough borne downwards to

oblivion. His _Roman Comique_ (1651), a short and lively narrative

of the adventures of a troupe of comedians strolling in the provinces,

contrasted with the exaltations, the heroisms, the delicate

distresses of the ideal romance. The _Roman Bourgeois_ (1666) of

ANTOINE FURETIERE is a belated example of the group to which

_Francion_ belongs. The great event of its author's life was his

exclusion from the Academy, of which he was a member, on the ground

that he had appropriated for the advantage of his Dictionary the

results of his fellow-members' researches for the Dictionary, then

in progress, of the learned company. His _Roman_ is a remarkable study

of certain types of middle-class Parisian life, often animated, exact,

effective in its satire; but the analysis of a petty and commonplace

world needs some relief of beauty or generosity to make its triviality

acceptable, and such relief Furetiere will not afford.

Somewhat apart from this group of satiric tales, yet with a certain

kinship to them, lie the more fantastic satires of that fiery

swashbuckler--"demon des braves"--CYRANO DE BERGERAC (1619-55),

_Histoire Comique des Etats et Empires de la Lune_, and _Histoire

Comique des Etats et Empires du Soleil_. Cyrano's taste, caught by

the mannerisms of Italy and extravagances of Spain, was execrable.

To his violences of temper he added a reputation for irreligion. His

comedy _Le Pedant Joue_ has the honour of having furnished Moliere

with the most laughable scene of the _Fourberies de Scapin_. The

voyages to the moon and the sun, in which the inhabitants, their

manners, governments, and ideas, are presented, mingle audacities

and caprices of invention with a portion of satiric truth; they lived

in the memories of the creator of Gulliver and the creator of

Micromegas.