Malherbe kept up from 1606 till his death in 1628, a correspondence
which was still unknown a hundred years ago, throws a good deal of light
upon the final years of the poet, and in particular on the favour with
which he was entertained at Court. There are more than 200 of these
letters, which nevertheless, like most such collections of that age,
succeed in concealing from us the very facts which we are most anxious
to hear about. Thus, while Malherbe expatiates to Peiresc about queens
and princes, he tells us nothing, or next to nothing, about the literary
life in which we know that he made so disconcerting a figure. But that
most enchanting of gossips, Tallemant des Reaux, has preserved for us an
anecdote of a highly illuminating nature. We have seen that the
supremacy in French poetry had been held for many years by Philippe
Desportes, who was now approaching the close of a long life of sumptuous
success. It could not be a matter of indifference to the last and most
magnificent of the Ronsardists that an upstart, till now unheard of,
should suddenly be welcomed at Court. He desired his nephew, Mathurin
Regnier--himself a man of genius, but not in our picture to-day--he
desired Regnier to bring this M. de Malherbe to dinner. They arrived,
but were late, and dinner stood already on the table. The old Desportes
received Malherbe with all the politeness conceivable, and said that he
wished to give him a copy of the new edition of his _Psalms_, in which
he had made many corrections and additions. Such a compliment from the
acknowledged head of French poetry was extreme, but Malherbe had already
made up his mind to bring down the reputation of Desportes with a crash,
as Samson destroyed the gates of Dagon in Gaza. Desportes was starting
to go upstairs to fetch the book, when Malherbe in rough country fashion
(_rustiquement_) told him he had seen it already, that it was not worth
while to let his soup grow cold, for it was likely to be better than his
_Psalms_ were. Upon this they sat down to dinner at once, but Malherbe
said nothing more, and when dinner was done he went away, leaving the
host heart-broken and young Regnier furious. This must have been very
soon after Malherbe's arrival in Paris, for Desportes died in 1606.
All that has been recorded of the manners and conversation of Malherbe
tends to explain this story. He could be courtly and even magnificent,
and he had a bluff kind of concentrated politeness, when he chose to
exercise it, which was much appreciated by the royal family. He was a
tall, handsome man, with keen eyes, authoritative and even domineering,
generally silent in society, but ready to break in with a brusque
contradiction of what somebody else was saying. He was a scorner of
human frailty, believing himself to be above the reach of all emotional
weakness. The violent force, which burned arrogantly in his spirit,
comes out in everything which is preserved about him, in his verses, in
his letters, in the anecdotes of friends and enemies. His retorts were
like those of Dr. Samuel Johnson, but without the healing balsam of
Johnson's tenderness. There was nothing tender about Malherbe, and we
may admit that he could not have carried out his work if there had been.
His intellectual conscience was implacable; he allowed nothing in the
world to come between him and his inexorable doctrine. When he learned
that the Vicomtesse d'Auchy (Charlotte des Ursins), the "Caliste" of his
own verses, had been encouraging a poet of the old school, he went to
her house, pushed into her bedroom, and slapped her face as she lay upon
her bed.
Tallemant tells us that "meditation and art made a poet" of Malherbe,
_non nascitur sed fit_. At no time did he learn to write with ease, and
after so many years spent in the passionate cultivation of the Muse, his
poetical writings are contained in as narrow a compass as those of Gray,
who confessed that his "works" were so small that they might be mistaken
for those of a pismire. Malherbe had long pauses during which he seemed
to do nothing at all except meditate and lay down the law. Balzac, who
was one of those young men in whose company he delighted, declares that
whenever Malherbe had written a thousand verses he rested for ten years.
All this was part of a studied frugality. The Ronsardists and their
followers had been lavish in everything; they had poured out floods of
slack verse, loose in construction, faulty in grammar. If a slight
difficulty presented itself to them, they evaded it, they leaped over
it. Having no reverence for the French language, they invented hideous
and reckless words, they stretched or curtailed syllables, in order to
fit the scansion. There is recorded a saying of Malherbe which is
infinitely characteristic. When he was asked what, in fact, was his
object in all he was doing, he replied that he proposed "to rescue
French poetry from the hands of the little monsters who were
dishonouring it." The glorious Desportes, the sublime Du Bartas, the
rest of the glittering and fashionable Petrarchists of Paris, what were
they in the eyes of this implacable despot of the new intellectual
order? They were simply "little monsters" who were "dishonouring" what
he worshipped with a fanatic zeal, the language of France.
When we turn to his own poetry, we see what there was in it which
fascinated the opening seventeenth century. After all the tortures and
the spasms, the quietude of it was delicious. If you go to Malherbe now,
you must learn to put aside all your romantic preoccupations. His verse
is very largely concerned with negations: it is _not_ ornamented, it is
not preposterous, it is not pedantic. It swept away all the insincere
imagery and all the violent oddities of the earlier school. For example,
Bertaut had written, wishing to explain his tears:
By the hydraulic of mine eyes
The humid vapours of my grief are drawn
Through vacuums of my sighs.
Desportes had talked of a lover who was "intoxicated by the delectation
of the concert of the divine harmony" of his mistress. All this
preciousness, all this affectation of the use of scientific terms in
describing simple emotions, was the object of Malherbe's ruthless
disdain. Ronsard had said, "The more words we have in our language, the
more perfect it will be." Malherbe replied, "No, certainly not, if they
are useless and grotesque words, dragged by the hair of their heads out
of Greek and Latin, an outrage on the purity of French grammar." He
advised his disciples to eject the monstrous creations of the
neo-Hellenes, and to go down to the quays of Paris and listen to the
dock-labourers. They used genuine French words which ought to be
redeemed from vulgar use, and brought back to literary service.
The existing poems of Malherbe, written at intervals during the last
twenty years of his life, are largely pieces of circumstance. They are
odes on public events, such as the retaking of Marseilles, the official
journeys of the King, the regency of the Queen Mother, and the alliance
between France and Spain. They are elegies on the deaths of private
persons, a subject on which Malherbe expatiates with the utmost dignity
and solemnity. They are sonnets, very unlike the glittering rosy
gimcracks of the preceding generation, but stiff with stately
compliment and colourless art. There is no exact English analogue to
the poetry of Malherbe, because in the seventeenth century whenever
English verse, except in the hands of Milton, aimed at an effect of
rhetorical majesty, its stream became clouded. We may observe the case
of Cowley, who, I think, had certainly read Malherbe and was influenced
by him, in spite of the diametrical views they nourished with regard to
the merit of Pindar. Cowley, at his rare and occasional best, has the
same serious music, the same clear roll of uplifted enthusiasm, the same
absolute assurance as Malherbe. He has the same felicity in his sudden
and effective openings. But there is too frequently confusion, artifice,
and negligence in Cowley. In Malherbe all is perfectly translucent,
nothing turbid is allowed to confuse the vision, no abuse of wit is left
to dazzle the attention or trip up steadily advancing progress of
thought. It is not easy to give an impression in English of the movement
of this clear and untrammelled advance. But here are a couple of stanzas
from the 1611 Ode to the Queen Regent on occasion of the King's
Mediterranean expedition:
Ah! may beneath thy son's proud arm down fall
The bastions of the Memphian wall,
And from Marseilles to Tyre itself extend
His empire without end.
My wishes, p'rhaps, are wild; but--by your leave--
What cannot ardent prayer achieve?
And if the gods reward your service so
They'll pay but what they owe.
By general consent the crown of Malherbe's poetic genius is the famous
"Consolation to Monsieur Du Perier on the death of his daughter." It
contains the best-known line of Malherbe--
Et, Rose, elle a vecu ce que vivent les roses,
about which I would merely say that it is one of those accidental
romantic verses which occur here and there in all the great classical
poets. There are several in Pope, where they are no more characteristic
of his general style than is this of Malherbe's. So far from being the
chief line in the poem, it is, in spite of its beauty, the least
important to us in our present inquiry. The "Consolation" consists of
twenty-one stanzas, written long after the sad event of the death of the
young lady, whose name, by the way, was not Rose, but Marguerite. The
advice which the poet gives to the stricken father is stoical and Roman.
Weary yourself no more with these useless and prolonged lamentations;
but henceforth be wise, and love a shadow as a shadow, and extinguish
the memory of extinguished ashes. The instances of Priam and Alcides may
seem to have little in them to cheer Du Perier, but we must remember
that antiquity was held a more sacred authority three hundred years ago
than it is now. Malherbe, with great decorum, recalls to Du Perier the
fact that he himself has lost two beloved children. The poor man under
his thatched roof is subject to the laws of death, nor can the guard on
watch at the gates of the Louvre protect our kings against it. To
complain of the inevitable sacrifice, and to lose patience with
Providence, is to lack wisdom. The only philosophy which can bring
repose to a heart bereaved is implicit submission to the will of God.
All this may not seem very original, but it is exquisitely phrased, and
it is sensible, dignified, and wholesome. There is in it a complete
absence of the ornament and circumstance of death which had taken so
preposterous a place in the abundant elegiac poetry of the sixteenth
century. We are familiar with the grotesque and sumptuous appeals to the
_macabre_ which we meet with in Raleigh, in Donne, in Quarles, all the
dismal trappings of the tomb and embroideries of the winding-sheet. They
are wholly set aside by Malherbe, whose sonnet on the death of his son
is worthy of special study. This young man, who was the pride of the
poet's life, was killed in a duel, or, as the father vociferously
insisted, murdered by a treacherous ruffian. Malherbe made the courts
ring with his appeals, but he also composed a sonnet, which is a
typical example of his work. It is not what we should call "poetical,"
but in clearness, in force, in full capacity to express exactly what the
author had in mind to say, it is perfect. We seem to hear the very cry
of the fierce old man shrieking for revenge on the slayer of his son.
The sonnet was composed some time after the event, for the whole art of
Malherbe was the opposite of improvisation. One amusing instance of his
deliberate method is to be found in the history of his ode to console
President Nicolas de Verdun on the death of his wife. Malherbe composed
his poem so slowly, that while he was writing it the President widower
not merely married a second time, but died. The poet, with consummate
gravity, persisted in his task, and was able to present the widow with
the consolation which her late husband should have received after the
death of her predecessor.
During thirty years of growing celebrity, Malherbe fought for his
doctrine. He had but slowly become a convert to his own laws, but when
once they were clearly set out in his brain, he followed them
scrupulously, and he insisted that the world should obey them too. It
seems a strange thing that it was the young men who followed him first,
and with most enthusiasm, until the fashionable ladies of Paris began to
compete with one another in support of the classical doctrine, and in
repudiation of their old favourite Desportes, whose fame came down
clattering in a single night, like Beckford's tower at Fonthill.
Malherbe brought poetry into line with the Court and the Church, in a
decent formality. Largely, as is always the case in the history of
literature, the question was one more of language than of substance.
Take, for example, the "Stanzas to Alcandre on the Return of Oranthe to
Fontainebleau," and you will find them as preposterous in sentiment, as
pretentious and affected in conception, as any sonnet of Desportes,
perhaps more so, but their diction is perfectly simple and graceful, and
they are composed in faultless modern French. Long before Moliere was
born Malherbe was in the habit of reading his verses to an old servant,
and if there was a single phrase which gave her difficulty, he would
scrupulously revise it.
He was supported by a sublime conviction of his own value. It was a
commonplace in all the poetical literature of the sixteenth century to
claim immortality. Desportes had told his mistress that she would live
for ever like the Phoenix, in the flame of his sonnets. We all remember
Shakespeare's boast that "not marble, nor the gilded monuments of
princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme." But no one was ever more
certain of leaving behind him a lasting monument than Malherbe. He said,
addressing the King:
All pour their praise on you, but not with equal hand,
For while a common work survives one year or two,
What Malherbe writes is stamped with immortality.
The self-gratulation at the close of the noble "Ile de Re" ode is quite
disconcerting. In this case, also, he reminds the King that
The great Amphion, he whose voice was nonpareil,
Amazed the universe by fanes it lifted high;
Yet he with all his art has builded not so well
As by my verse have I.
His boast, extravagant as it sounds, was partly justified. Not in his
own verse, but in that which his doctrine encouraged others to
write--and not in verse only, but in prose, and in the very arrangement
and attitude of the French intellect--Malherbe's influence was
wide-spreading, was potent, and will never be wholly superseded. He
found French, as a literary language, confused, chaotic, no longer in
the stream of sound tradition. He cleared out the channel, he dredged
away the mud and cut down the weeds; and he brought the pure water back
to its proper course. Let us not suppose that he did this completely, or
that his authority was not challenged. It was, and Malherbe did not
live to see the victory of his ideas. He did not survive long enough to
found the Academie, or to welcome Vaugelas, the great grammarian who
would have been the solace of his old age. There were still many men of
talent, such as Pelisson and Agrippa d'Aubigne, who resisted his
doctrine. But he had made his great appeal for order and regularity; he
had wound his slug-horn in the forest. He had poured his ideas into the
fertile brain of Richelieu; he had started the momentous discussions of
the Hotel Rambouillet. He had taught a new generation to describe
objects in general terms, to express natural ideas with simplicity, to
select with scrupulous care such words as were purely French and no
others, to eschew hiatus and inversion and to purify rhyme, to read the
ancients with sympathetic attention but not to pillage them. His own
limitations were marked. He seems to have had no sense whatever for
external nature; while he overvalued a mathematical exactitude of
balance in versification and a grandiose severity in rhetoric.
But we are not attempting this afternoon to define the French Classic
School, but merely to comprehend how and when it came into being. It
preceded our own Classic School by the fifty years which divide Malherbe
from Dryden, who, in like manner, but with far less originality, freed
poetry from distortion, prolixity, and artifice. When Malherbe died no
one could guess how prodigious would be the effect of his teaching.
Indeed, at that moment, October 6, 1628, there might even seem to be a
certain retrogression to the old methods, a certain neglect of the new
doctrine, which seemed to have been faintly taken up. But, looking back,
we now see that at the moment of Malherbe's death, Corneille was on the
point of appearing, while there were children in the nurseries who were
to be La Fontaine, Pascal, Moliere, Mme. de Sevigne, Bossuet. Boileau
and Racine were not even born, for Malherbe sowed early and the harvest
came late.
The ruling passion accompanied this resolute reformer to the very close
of his career. His faithful disciple, Racan, his Boswell, has drawn for
us the last scene:
One hour before he died, Mr. de Malherbe woke with a start out of a
deep slumber, to rebuke his hostess, who was also his nurse, for
using an expression which he did not consider to be correct French.
When his confessor ventured to chide him, he replied that he could
not help it, and that he wished to preserve up to the moment of his
death the purity of the French language.
THE FOUNDATION OF THE FRENCH ACADEMY
For three centuries past there have been frequent discussions as to the
possibility of founding an Academy of Letters in England, but it was not
until June, 1910, that a modest and partial experiment in this direction
was successfully made. After long deliberations between two accredited
bodies, the Royal Society of Literature and the Society of Authors,
thirty-three persons were nominated to form, within the corporation of
the former, an Academic Committee which should attempt to exercise
something resembling the functions of the Academie Francaise. Lord
Morley was elected President, and now, without claiming any excessive
publicity, this Academic Committee, founded for the protection and
encouragement of a pure English style in prose and verse, has occupied a
position in letters which gives every evidence of persisting and
increasing. It was assailed, as was natural and right, by satire and by
caricature, but it has survived the attacks which were directed against
it, and there can be little doubt that, with good luck, it may become a
prominent feature of our intellectual and social system. Already,
although so young, it has received that consecration of death which
makes it a part of history. No fewer than eight, that is to say nearly a
quarter, of its original members have passed away, and among them those
delicate humanists Butcher and Verrall, a poet so philosophical as
Alfred Lyall, critics of such fine temper as Andrew Lang and Edward
Dowden. Like the Academie Francaise, the Academic Committee has its
_parti des ducs_, and it mourns the loss of an exquisite amateur, George
Wyndham. These men leave to their successors the memory of lives
devoted to the purest literature.[4]
This, then, seems a not inappropriate moment for considering more
closely in detail than has commonly been done, the circumstances
attending the most successful experiment that the world has seen to
create and sustain a public body whose duty it should be to guard the
purity of a national language and to insure the permanence of its best
literary forms. It will not be necessary here to do more than remind our
readers that the Academie Francaise was not the earliest corporation in
Europe, or even in France, which was formed for the purpose of carrying
out these difficult and perilous designs. It was simply the most
successful and the most durable. As early as about the year 1490, an
Academy was founded in Florence in the deepest piety of the Renaissance.
Its motives were pathetically Greek. The gardens of the Medicis were to
represent Academe; Arno was to be its Cephisus; in the great Plotinist,
Marsiglio Ficino, it was to find its incomparable leader, its visible
Plato. By the sixteenth century, Italy was full of imitations; there
were the Intronati at Siena, the Della Crusca at Florence, the Otiosi at
Bologna, the Humoristi and the Fantastici in Rome. In France itself, in
1570, the poets of the Pleiade instituted, under Charles IX, their
Academie de Musique et de Poesie, which became in due course the
Academie du Palais, and died inglorious during the Civil Wars. Later
there was founded, in Savoy, that Academie Florimontane, which
flourished for a little while under St. Francois de Sales. It was in
imitation of those vague and ephemeral institutions that, supported by
the powerful patronage of Richelieu, the great corporation which still
exercises so lively an influence in France came, in the fulness of the
seventeenth century, into permanent existence. It is too seldom realized
out of what accidental conjunction of circumstances it arose, and how
humble and unfavourable were the auspices which attended its birth.
The French Academy came into the world so silently, and was long so
inconspicuous, that it is difficult to point to its exact source. But
there is no doubt that its inception was due to the hospitable temper
and the intellectual curiosity of a young man whose name deserves well
of the world. He was not a great writer, nor even a great scholar, but
he possessed to an extraordinary degree the gift of literary solidarity.
In the year 1629, Valentin Conrart, who was twenty-six years of age, was
living in a convenient and agreeable house at the corner of the Rue
Saint Martin and the Rue des Vielles-Etuves. About this time his
relative, probably his cousin, Antoine Godeau, two years younger than
Conrart, came up to Paris from Dreux to seek his fortune. It is thought
that he lodged with his cousin; at all events Conrart looked after him
in his universally obliging way. Godeau confessed that he wrote verses,
and he showed them to Conrart, who adored poetry, and who burned to
spread an appreciation of it. He thought his kinsman's verses good, and
he invited a few of his literary friends to come and listen to them. No
doubt he asked them to dinner, for he had a famous cook; and after
dinner the company settled down to listen. The poet was excessively
short and preposterously ugly, but he was subtle and agreeable, and he
already possessed to a conspicuous degree the art of pleasing.
When the future bishop of Grasse and Vence had recited his poems, which
were love-pieces and doubtless of a light description--for he afterwards
begged them back from Conrart and burned them--the conversation became
general, and the evening passed so pleasantly that the company was
unanimous that these instructive and entertaining meetings must be
repeated. There were eight of these friends gathered together, all
authors or men intimately occupied with literature. They were agreed in
determining to keep up their discussions, and first of all it was
proposed that they should meet successively in each other's houses. But
no one of them was rich, and Conrart's house was far the most
comfortably situated; he was anxious to be the perpetual host, and the
rest were glad to give way to him. They decided to meet once every week
to discuss literature and language in Conrart's house at the corner of
the Rue Saint Martin. The names of the eight friends are not equally
celebrated in the history of French literature; most of them, indeed,
are not celebrated at all; but I must record them here, before I
proceed, because of the leading part they took at the inception of the
Academie. They were Chapelain, Conrart, Godeau, Gombauld, Philippe
Habert, Habert de Cerisy, Serisay, and Malleville. We must try to form
some impression of each of them, though most are but fugitive and
phantasmal figures.