phenomena which more or less closely resemble those marked on the
geographical map. The surface is not uniform, but diversified by ups and
downs, of the feature that we call taste or fashion. A special interest
attaches to what may be described as the watersheds of literature, the
periods which display these changes of direction in thought and
language. I propose to bring before you briefly some characteristics of
one of the most saliently marked of all these points of alteration, that
which led irresistibly and imminently to the classical school, as it is
called, in France, and from France ultimately to the whole of Europe.
Before doing so, I must draw your attention to the fact that while most
of us are led to give special heed to movements which tend, like the
Romantic renaissance of poetry in England two centuries later, to the
emancipation and even the revolution of literature, that of which I am
about to speak was deliberately introduced in the interests of law and
order, and was in all its features conservative, and, if you choose to
call it so, retrogressive. It did not aim at enlarging the field of
expression, but at enclosing it within rules, excluding from it
eccentricities and licentious freaks, and rendering it subservient to a
rigorous discipline. In this University of Oxford, where the practice of
poetry is now conducted with so much ardour and with such audacity of
experiment, you may or may not, as you please, see any parallel between
the condition of France in 1595 and our own condition to-day. My
purpose is, with your leave, to describe the former without criticizing
the latter.
The sixteenth century had been a period of great activity in the
literature of France, where the interaction of two vast forces, the
Renaissance and the Reformation, had introduced wholly new forms of
expression into the language. Prose had started from its mediaeval
condition into full modernity in Calvin, and then in Montaigne. In
poetry, with which we are concerned to-day, there had existed since 1550
the brilliant and feverish army of versifiers who accompanied Ronsard,
"the Prince of Poets," and claimed with him to have created out of the
rude elements of the Middle Ages a literary art which linked modern
France directly with ancient Greece. While England was still languishing
under the early Tudors, and Italy had grown weary of her burst of
chivalrous epic, France gave the world the spectacle of a society
palpitating with literary ambition. Ronsard's magnificent audacity had
conquered for poetry, an art which had hitherto enjoyed little honour in
France, the foremost position in the world of mental activity. Verse,
which had been treated as a butterfly skipping from flower to flower,
was now celebrated by the Pleiade as a temple, as a sunrise, as the
apotheosis of the intellect. Immensely flattered by being suddenly
lifted to the status of a priesthood, all the budding versifiers of
France, who a generation earlier would have withered into
insignificance, expanded into affluent and profuse blossom. By the year
1560 it was "roses, roses all the way," but the misfortune was that the
flowers were foreign, had been transplanted from Greece and Rome and
Italy, and were not really native to the soil of France.
During the next generation, under conditions with which we have no time
to occupy us to-day, there was a steady, indeed an almost precipitous
decline in the quality of French verse. If we turn to our own literature
of half a century later, we see a parallel decline in the drama down
from Shakespeare to Shirley and the later disciples of Ben Jonson. We
all know how disconcerting it is to pass from the sheer beauty of the
great Elizabethans to the broken verse and the mixture of flatness and
violence of the lesser poets of the Commonwealth. But in France the
decadence had been still more striking, because of the extremely high
line adopted by Ronsard and Du Bellay in their prose manifestos. The
doctrine of the Pleiade had been as rigorous and lofty as a creed in
literature could well be, and it rose to an altogether higher plane than
was dreamed of by the English critics half a century later. No dignity,
no assurance of high and pure poetic resolution could surpass the
apparent aim of the manifestos of 1549. Frenchmen, it seemed, had
nothing to do but follow these exalted precepts and to produce the most
wonderful poetry which the world had seen since the days of Pindar and
Sappho. We cannot to-day enter into the question why these high hopes
were almost immediately shattered, except so far as to suggest that
excellent principles are sometimes insufficient to produce satisfactory
practice. We have to look abruptly this afternoon into the conditions of
French poetry in the last years of the sixteenth century, and to realize
that those conditions had brought French literature to a point where
reform was useless and revolution was inevitable.
There was no slackening--and I ask your particular attention to this
fact--there was no slackening in the popularity of the poetic art. There
existed, in 1595, as great a crowd of versifiers as had been called
forth fifty years earlier by the splendour of the Pleiade. A feature of
poetic history which is worthy of our notice is that an extreme
abundance of poetical composition is by no means necessarily connected
with the wholesomeness and vigour of the art at that moment. There was a
crowd of poets in France during the reign of Henri IV, but they were
distinguished more by their exuberance and their eccentricity than by
their genius. I shall, in a few moments, endeavour to give you an idea
of their character. In the meantime, let us be content to remark that
the exquisite ideals of the Pleiade had degenerated into extravagant
conventionality, into which an attempt was made to infuse life by a
spasmodic display of verbal fireworks. The charm of sobriety, of
simplicity, was wholly disregarded, and the importance of logic and
discipline in literature ignored and outraged. The earlier theory, a
very dangerous one, had been that poetry was the language of the gods
rather than of men, that it was _grandiloquentia_, an oracular
inspiration. Being above mankind in its origin, it was not for mortal
men to question its authority. It possessed a celestial freedom, it was
emancipated from all rules save what it laid down for itself. Let us see
what was the effect of this arrogance.
The scope of imaginative literature as practised by the Pleiade had been
curiously narrow, so much so that it is difficult to distinguish the
work of different hands except by the dexterity of the technique. The
odes and pastorals of the lesser masters are just like those of Ronsard,
except that Ronsard is very much more skilful. But by the close of the
century there was a wide divergence between the various poets in their
themes and their points of view. Two of them greatly excelled their
contemporaries in eminence and popularity, and these two were as unlike
each other in substance as it was easy for them to be. The elder of
these two was Salluste du Bartas, a writer whose quartos are now allowed
to gather dust on the shelves, and who, when he died in 1590, was, with
the exception of Tasso, the most eminent European writer of verse. His
influence on English poetry in the next generation was immense.
Translations of his works by Joshua Sylvester and others had begun to
appear before his death, and were extremely popular. Du Bartas possessed
qualities of intellect and art which are by no means to be despised, but
his taste was execrable. He wished to create a national religious poetry
on a large scale, and he has been called the "Milton manque de la
France." Du Bartas is all relinquished to evangelical and moral
exhortation, and his immense _Les Semaines_, besides being one of the
longest, is the most unblushingly didactic encyclopaedia of verse that
was ever put forth as a poem. He had a very heavy hand, and he sowed
with the whole sack. Our own Bishop Joseph Hall of Norwich, who called
him "some French angel, girt with bays," described Du Bartas as--
The glorious Sallust, moral, true, divine,
Who, all inspired with a holy rage,
Makes Heaven his subject, and the earth his stage.
In his own time his myriad admirers preferred him above "golden Homer
and great Maro." His earnestness and his cleverness--among other things
he was the first man after the Renaissance to see that the obsession of
the heathen gods was ridiculous in a Christian literature--his abundance
and his vehemence, made Du Bartas a very formidable figure in the path
of any possible reform.
As an instance of the violence of fancy and gaudy extravagance of
language which had become prevalent with the decline of the Pleiade, I
will now present to you what I select as a favourable, not a ridiculous,
example of the art of Du Bartas. He wishes to paraphrase the simple
statement in Genesis that, on the fourth day, God set the stars in the
firmament of heaven to give light upon the earth. This is how he does
it, as translated by Joshua Sylvester:
Even as a peacock, prickt with love's desire,
To woo his mistress, strutting stately by her,
Spreads round the rich pride of his pompous vail,
His azure wings and starry-golden tail,
With rattling pinions wheeling still about,
The more to set his beauteous beauty out,--
The Firmament, as feeling like above,
Displays his pomp, pranceth about his love,
Spreads his blue curtain, mixt with golden marks,
Set with gilt spangles, sown with glistening sparks,
Sprinkled with eyes, speckled with tapers bright,
Powdered with stars streaming with glorious light,
To inflame the Earth the more, with lover's grace
To take the sweet fruit of his kind embrace.
Our first impression of such a passage as this is one of admiration of
its colour and of its ingenuity. It is more than rich, it is sumptuous;
the picture of the wheeling peacock is original and brilliantly
observed. But there commendation must cease. What could be meaner or
less appropriate than to compare the revolution of the starry firmament
as it proceeded from its Creator's hand with the strut of a conceited
bird in a poultry-yard? The works of Du Bartas are stuffed full with
these strained and fantastic similes, his surface sparkles with the
glitter of tinsel and pinchbeck. At every turn something majestic
reminds him of an embroidery, of a false jewel, of something picturesque
and mean. The planets, in their unison, are like the nails in a
cart-wheel; when darkness comes on, heaven is playing at blind man's
buff; the retreat of the armies of the King of Assyria reminds the poet
of a gamekeeper drawing his ferret. He desires the snow to fall that it
may "perriwig with wool the bald-pate woods." All is extravagant and
false, all is offensive to the modesty of nature.
Du Bartas is stationed at the left wing of the army of poets. The right
is held by Philippe Desportes, whose name has recently been made
familiar to us by Sir Sidney Lee's investigations into the extraordinary
way in which his works were pillaged in his lifetime by our Elizabethan
sonneteers. Even Shakespeare seems to have read, and possibly imitated,
Desportes's _Amours de Diane_. The producer in vast quantities of a kind
of work which is exactly in the fashion of the moment is sure of a wide
popular welcome, and the cleverness of Desportes was to see that after
the death of Ronsard French taste went back on the severity of Du
Bellay's classicism, and returned to the daintiness and artificial
symmetry of the Petrarchists. It has been said that to the Italians of
the sixteenth century Petrarch had become what Homer was to the Greeks
and Virgil to the Latins. He was the unquestioned leader, the
unchallenged exemplar. This infatuation, which spread through Europe, is
of importance to us in our inquiry to-day, for Petrarch was really the
worm, the crested and luminous worm, at the root of sixteenth-century
poetry. It was extremely easy to imitate the amorous conceits of the
Italian imitators of Petrarch, and of these imitators in France by far
the most abundant, skilful, and unwearying was Philippe Desportes, to
whom Petrarch's ingenious elocution appeared, as it appeared to all the
critics of Europe, "pure beauty itself." By the close of the century it
was no longer the greater Italians, such as Francesco Molza, who
represented at its height the victorious heresy of Petrarchism, it was a
Frenchman, of whom our own great lyrist, Lodge, in his _Margarite of
America_ in 1596, wrote: "few men are able to second the sweet conceits
of Philippe Desportes, whose poetical writings are ordinarily in
everybody's hand." Desportes exercised over the whole of Europe an
authority which surpassed that of Tennyson over the British Empire at
the height of his reputation.
Here, then, was another and still more formidable lion couched at the
gate of poetry to resist all possible reform. The career of Desportes
had been one of unbroken prosperity. He had become, without an effort,
the wealthiest and the most influential person of letters of his time.
His courtly elegance had enabled him to be all things to all men, and
although a priest of unblemished character, he had attended one Valois
king after another without betraying his inward feelings by a single
moral grimace. He had found no difficulty in celebrating the virtues of
Henri III, and the anecdote about him that is best known is that he had
been rewarded with an abbey for the homage of a single sonnet. He had
exaggerated all the tricks of his predecessors with a certain sweetness
and brilliance of his own, which had fascinated the polite world. The
best that can be said of Desportes is that he was an artificer of
excellent skill, who manufactured metrical jewellery by rearranging
certain commonplaces, such as that teeth are pearls, that lips are
roses, that cheeks are lilies, that hair is a golden network. But I will
give you his own statement of his aim, not attempting to paraphrase his
remarkable language. Desportes gives the following account of his
ambition:
I desire to build a temple to my chaste goddess. My eye shall be the
lamp, and the immortal flame which ceaselessly consumes me shall serve
as candle. My body shall be the altar, and my sighs the vows, and I will
intone the service in thousands and thousands of verses.
What a ridiculous confusion of imagery! Here we have a man whose body is
an altar, and whose eye--one of whose eyes--is a lamp, and whose passion
is the candle in that lamp, and whose mouth and throat are detached from
his body, and are performing miracles in the vicinity. This is to take
Desportes at his worst, and it is only fair to admit that the reader who
winnows the vast floor of his work will find some grains of pure gold
left. But the mass of these sonnets and odes and madrigals is
extraordinarily insipid and cold, the similes are forced and grotesque,
and everywhere pedantry takes the place of passion. When there is beauty
it is artificial and affected, it is an Alexandrine beauty, it is the
colour of the dying dolphin.
Such was the poetry which occupied the taste of France at the close of
the sixteenth century, and whether its form was brief and amorous, as in
the sonnets of Desportes, or long-winded and hortatory, as in the sacred
epics of Du Bartas, it was uniformly exaggerated, lifeless, and
incorrect. In all its expressions it was characterized by an abuse of
language, and indeed, in the hands of the poets of the late Valois
kings, the French tongue was hurrying down to ruin. One curious vice
consisted in the fabrication of new phrases and freshly coined composite
words. Of these latter, some one has counted no fewer than 300 in the
writings of Du Bartas alone, and Professor Paul Morillot has observed
that the licence which the poets of that age indulged in has been the
cause of subsequent poverty in that direction, French having received
and rejected such a glut of new and useless words as to have lost all
appetite for additions of vocabulary. Another vice of the period was the
ceaseless cultivation, in season and out of season, of a sort of
antithetical wit. The sincerity of Nature was offended at every turn by
the monstrous cleverness of the writer, who evidently was thinking far
more about himself than about his subject. Here is an example:
Weep on, mine eyes, weep much, ye have seen much,
And now in water let your penance be,
Since 'twas in fire that you committed sin,
and so on, with wearisome iteration of the hyperbole. We were to suffer
from the same disease fifty years later, when a great English poet,
capable of far nobler things, was to call the eyes of St. Mary Magdalene
Two walking baths, two weeping motions,
Portable and compendious oceans.
An excellent grammarian, M. Ferdinand Brunot, has remarked that at the
end of the sixteenth century a lawless individualism--and in this term
he sums up all the component parts of literature, style, grammar,
treatment, and tone--had set in; that everybody had become a law to
himself; and that the French language was suffering from the incessant
disturbance caused by "the fantastic individuality of writers" both in
prose and verse.
This chaotic state of things, which threatened French literature with
anarchy and French logic with bankruptcy, was brought to a standstill
and successfully confronted by the energy and determination of a single
person. I recollect no other instance in the history of literature in
which one individual has contrived to stem the whole flood of national
taste. Of course, an instinct of French lucidity and reasonableness must
have been ready to respond to the doctrine of the new critic, yet it is
none the less certain that through the early years of the struggle there
remains no evidence of his having been supported by any associate
opinion. I dare say you recollect a famous Japanese print which
represents a young lady standing on the edge of a cliff, and gazing
calmly out to sea while she restrains the action of a great plunging
horse by simply holding one of her feet down upon the reins. In the same
way the runaway Pegasus of France was held, and was reduced to
discipline, by the almost unparalleled resolution of a solitary man.
This was Francois Malherbe, whose name, but perhaps very little else,
will be familiar to you. I hope to show you that this poet, by the
clearness of his vision and his rough independence, brought about a
revolution in literature which was unparalleled. He cut a clear stroke,
as with a hatchet, between the sixteenth century and all that came after
it down to the romantic revival at the beginning of the nineteenth
century, and he did this by sheer force of character. Malherbe was not a
great poet, but he was a great man, and he is worthy of our close
consideration.
Francois Malherbe was a Norman; there is a hint of the family having
come from Suffolk, in which case the name may have been Mallerby, but we
need not dwell on that. His parents were Calvinists, and he was born at
Caen in 1555. This was, you observe, between the births of Spenser and
Shakespeare; and Rabelais was just dead. Cervantes was eight years old,
Lope de Vega was to be born seven years later. We ought to notice these
dates: they give us a sense of what was preparing in Europe, and what
was passing away; a great period of transition was about to expand.
Until he was thirty years of age Malherbe appears to have taken no
interest whatever in poetry; he was a soldier, a military secretary, a
man of business. Then he went to live in Provence, where he read the
Italian verse fashionable in his day, and began to imitate it. The
kindest and most enthusiastic of his later disciples told Tallemant that
Malherbe's early poems were "pitiful." We can judge for ourselves, since
at the age of thirty-two he published a paraphrase, or rather a series
of selections from Tansillo's _Lagrime di San Pietro_. The bad poets of
the age were lachrymose to the last degree. Nothing but the honour of
addressing you to-day would have induced me to read these "Tears of St.
Peter." I have done so, and have even amused myself by paraphrasing some
of them, but these I will not inflict upon you. It is sufficient to
assure you that up to the age of forty the verses of Malherbe were not
merely, as Racan put it, pitiful, but marred by all the ridiculous
faults of the age. After all, I must give you a single example. This is
translated literally from "The Tears of St. Peter":
Aurora, in one hand, forth from her portals led,
Holds out a vase of flowers, all languishing and dead;
And with the other hand empties a jar of tears;
While through a shadowy veil, woven of mist and storm,
That hides her golden hair, she shows in mortal form
All that a soul can feel of cruel pains and fears.
At what moment Malherbe observed that this was a detestable way of
writing, and conceived the project of a great reversal of opinion, we do
not know. His early life, and just that part of it on which we should
like light to be thrown, remains impenetrably obscure. But we do know
that when he arrived in Paris he had formulated his doctrine and laid
out his plan of campaign. At Aix-en-Provence he had been admitted to the
meetings of a literary society, the chief ornament of which was the
celebrated orator and moralist Du Vair, who ought perhaps to be
considered as in some directions the master of Malherbe. The ideas of Du
Vair have been traced in some of Malherbe's verses, and the poet
afterwards said, in his dictatorial way, "There is no better writer in
our language than M. Du Vair." It was probably the dignity of the
orator's attitude and the severity of his taste in rhetoric which
encouraged the poet to adopt a similar lucidity and strenuousness in
verse. The two men, who were almost exactly of the same age, may perhaps
be most safely looked upon as parallel reformers, the one of French
verse, the other of French prose.
Few things would be more interesting to us, in our present mood, than to
know how Malherbe, arriving in Paris at the mature age of fifty, set
about his revolution. He found the polite world tired of frigid
conceits and extravagant sentimentality, above all tired of the licence
of the poets and the tricks which they were taking with the French
language. There was undoubtedly a longing for order and regularity, such
as invariably follows a period of revolutionary lawlessness, but no one
was giving this sentiment a voice. What was wanted after such a glut of
ornament and exuberance was an arbiter and tyrant of taste who should
bring poetry rigidly into line with decency, plainness, and common
sense, qualities which had long been thought unnecessary to, and even
ridiculously incompatible with, literature of a high order. All this we
may divine, but what is very difficult to understand is the mode in
which Malherbe became the recognized tyrant of taste. It was not by the
production, and still less by the publication, of quantities of verse
composed in accordance with his own new doctrine. Malherbe had hesitated
long in the retirement of the country, waiting to be summoned to Court.
Somehow, although he had published no book and can scarcely have been
known to more than a handful of persons, he had a few powerful friends,
and among them, strange to say, three poets whose work was
characteristic of everything which it was to be Malherbe's mission to
destroy. These were the Cardinal Du Perron, Bertaut, and Vauquelin de la
Fresnaye. They formed the van of the poetical army of the moment, and it
is a very curious thing that these three remarkable writers, each of
whom remained faithful to the tradition of Ronsard, should have welcomed
with open arms the rebel who was to cover Ronsard with ridicule. With a
divine simplicity, they opened the wicket and let the wolf in among the
sheep. They urged the King to invite Malherbe to Court, and, when His
Majesty delayed, Malherbe very characteristically did not wait for a
summons. He came to Paris of his own accord in 1605, was presented to
Henri IV, and composed in September of that year the long ode called a
"Prayer for the King on his going to Limoges." This is the earliest
expression of classical verse in the French language.
In those days the intelligent favour of the King did more for a
reputation than a dozen glowing reviews in the chief newspapers will do
to-day. We must give credit to Henri IV for the promptitude with which
he perceived that the cold new poetry, which must have sounded very
strangely on his ears accustomed to the lute of Desportes and the
trumpet of Du Bartas, was exactly what was wanted in France. He himself
had laboured to bring back to this country, distracted as it had been in
its late political disorders, the virtues of law, logic, and discipline.
He recognized in this grim, middle-aged Norman gentleman the same
desires, but directed to the unity and order of literature. A recent
French historian has pointed out that "the very nature of Malherbe's
talent, its haughty, solemn, and majestic tone, rendered him peculiarly
fitted to become the official and, as it were, the impersonal singer of
the King's great exploits, and to engrave in letters of brass, as on a
triumphal monument, the expression of public gratitude and admiration."
Malherbe, as has been said, was appointed "the official poet of the
Bourbon dynasty."