LANDMARKS IN FRENCH LITERATURE
by
LYTTON STRACHEY
London, 1912
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I ORIGINS--THE MIDDLE AGES 7
II THE RENAISSANCE 20
III THE AGE OF TRANSITION 31
IV THE AGE OF LOUIS XIV 45
V THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 94
VI THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT 142
VII THE AGE OF CRITICISM 166
CONCLUSION 174
CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF AUTHORS AND
THEIR PRINCIPAL WORKS 177
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 183
INDEX 185
TO
J.M.S.
CHAPTER I
ORIGINS--THE MIDDLE AGES
When the French nation gradually came into existence among the ruins of
the Roman civilization in Gaul, a new language was at the same time
slowly evolved. This language, in spite of the complex influences which
went to the making of the nationality of France, was of a simple origin.
With a very few exceptions, every word in the French vocabulary comes
straight from the Latin. The influence of the pre-Roman Celts is almost
imperceptible; while the number of words introduced by the Frankish
conquerors amounts to no more than a few hundreds. Thus the French
tongue presents a curious contrast to that of England. With us, the
Saxon invaders obliterated nearly every trace of the Roman occupation;
but though their language triumphed at first, it was eventually affected
in the profoundest way by Latin influences; and the result has been that
English literature bears in all its phases the imprint of a double
origin. French literature, on the other hand, is absolutely homogeneous.
How far this is an advantage or the reverse it would be difficult to
say; but the important fact for the English reader to notice is that
this great difference does exist between the French language and his
own. The complex origin of the English tongue has enabled English
writers to obtain those effects of diversity, of contrast, of
imaginative strangeness, which have played such a dominating part in our
literature. The genius of the French language, descended from its single
Latin stock, has triumphed most in the contrary direction--in
simplicity, in unity, in clarity, and in restraint.
Some of these qualities are already distinctly visible in the earliest
French works which have come down to us--the _Chansons de Geste_. These
poems consist of several groups or cycles of narrative verse, cast in
the epic mould. It is probable that they first came into existence in
the eleventh and twelfth centuries; and they continued to be produced in
various forms of repetition, rearrangement, and at last degradation,
throughout the Middle Ages. Originally they were not written, but
recited. Their authors were the wandering minstrels, who found, in the
crowds collected together at the great fairs and places of pilgrimage of
those early days, an audience for long narratives of romance and
adventure drawn from the Latin chronicles and the monkish traditions of
a still more remote past. The earliest, the most famous, and the finest
of these poems is the _Chanson de Roland_, which recounts the mythical
incidents of a battle between Charlemagne, with 'all his peerage', and
the hosts of the Saracens. Apart from some touches of the
marvellous--such as the two hundred years of Charlemagne and the
intervention of angels--the whole atmosphere of the work is that of
eleventh-century France, with its aristocratic society, its barbaric
vigour, its brutality, and its high sentiments of piety and honour. The
beauty of the poem lies in the grand simplicity of its style. Without a
trace of the delicacy and variety of a Homer, farther still from the
consummate literary power of a Virgil or a Dante, the unknown minstrel
who composed the _Chanson de Roland_ possessed nevertheless a very real
gift of art. He worked on a large scale with a bold confidence.
Discarding absolutely the aids of ornament and the rhetorical
elaboration of words, he has succeeded in evoking with an extraordinary,
naked vividness the scenes of strife and heroism which he describes. At
his best--in the lines of farewell between Roland and Oliver, and the
well-known account of Roland's death--he rises to a restrained and
severe pathos which is truly sublime. This great work--bleak, bare,
gaunt, majestic--stands out, to the readers of to-day, like some huge
mass of ancient granite on the far horizon of the literature of France.
While the _Chansons de Geste_ were developing in numerous cycles of
varying merit, another group of narrative poems, created under different
influences, came into being. These were the _Romans Bretons_, a series
of romances in verse, inspired by the Celtic myths and traditions which
still lingered in Brittany and England. The spirit of these poems was
very different from that of the _Chansons de Geste_. The latter were the
typical offspring of the French genius--positive, definite,
materialistic; the former were impregnated with all the dreaminess, the
mystery, and the romantic spirituality of the Celt. The legends upon
which they were based revolved for the most part round the history of
King Arthur and his knights; they told of the strange adventures of
Lancelot, of the marvellous quest of the Holy Grail, of the overwhelming
and fatal loves of Tristan and Yseult. The stories gained an immense
popularity in France, but they did not long retain their original
character. In the crucible of the facile and successful CHRÉTIEN DE
TROYES, who wrote towards the close of the twelfth century, they assumed
a new complexion; their mystical strangeness became transmuted into the
more commonplace magic of wizards and conjurers, while their elevated,
immaterial conception of love was replaced by the superfine affectations
of a mundane gallantry. Nothing shows more clearly at what an early
date, and with what strength, the most characteristic qualities of
French literature were developed, than the way in which the vague
imaginations of the Celtic romances were metamorphosed by French writers
into the unambiguous elegances of civilized life.
Both the _Chansons de Geste_ and the _Romans Bretons_ were aristocratic
literature: they were concerned with the life and ideals--the martial
prowess, the chivalric devotion, the soaring honour--of the great nobles
of the age. But now another form of literature arose which depicted, in
short verse narratives, the more ordinary conditions of middle-class
life. These _Fabliaux_, as they were called, are on the whole of no
great value as works of art; their poetical form is usually poor, and
their substance exceedingly gross. Their chief interest lies in the fact
that they reveal, no less clearly than the aristocratic _Chansons_, some
of the most abiding qualities of the French genius. Its innate love of
absolute realism and its peculiar capacity for cutting satire--these
characteristics appear in the _Fabliaux_ in all their completeness. In
one or two of the stories, when the writer possesses a true vein of
sensibility and taste, we find a surprising vigour of perception and a
remarkable psychological power. Resembling the _Fabliaux_ in their
realism and their bourgeois outlook, but far more delicate and witty,
the group of poems known as the _Roman de Renard_ takes a high place in
the literature of the age. The humanity, the dramatic skill, and the
command of narrative power displayed in some of these pleasant satires,
where the foibles and the cunning of men and women are thinly veiled
under the disguise of animal life, give a foretaste of the charming art
which was to blossom forth so wonderfully four centuries later in the
Fables of La Fontaine.
One other work has come down to us from this early epoch, which presents
a complete contrast, both with the rough, bold spirit of the _Chansons
de Geste_ and the literal realism of the _Fabliaux_. This is the
'chante-fable' (or mingled narrative in verse and prose) of _Aucassin et
Nicolete_. Here all is delicacy and exquisiteness--the beauty, at once
fragile and imperishable, of an enchanting work of art. The unknown
author has created, in his light, clear verse and his still more
graceful and poetical prose, a delicious atmosphere of delicate romance.
It is 'the tender eye-dawn of aurorean love' that he shows us--the
happy, sweet, almost childish passion of two young creatures who move,
in absolute innocence and beauty, through a wondrous world of their own.
The youth Aucassin, who rides into the fight dreaming of his beloved,
who sees her shining among the stars in heaven--
Estoilette, je te voi,
Que la lune trait à soi;
Nicolete est avec toi,
M'amiete o le blond poil.
(Little star, I see thee there,
That the moon draws close to her!
Nicolette is with thee there,
My love of the yellow hair.)--
who disdains the joys of Paradise, since they exclude the joys of
loving--
En paradis qu'ai-je a faire? Je n'i quier entrer, mais que j'aie
Nicolete, ma très douce amie que j'aime tant.... Mais en enfer voil
jou aler. Car en enfer vont li bel clerc et li bel cevalier, qui
sont mort as tournois et as rices guerres, et li bien sergant, et
li franc homme.... Avec ciax voil jou aler, mais que j'aie
Nicolete, ma très douce amie, avec moi. [What have I to do in
Paradise? I seek not to enter there, so that I have Nicolette, my
most sweet friend, whom I love so well.... But to Hell will I go.
For to Hell go the fine clerks and the fine knights, who have died
in tourneys and in rich wars, and the brave soldiers and the
free-born men.... With these will I go, so that I have Nicolette,
my most sweet friend, with me.]
--Aucassin, at once brave and naïf, sensuous and spiritual, is as much
the type of the perfect medieval lover as Romeo, with his ardour and his
vitality, is of the Renaissance one. But the poem--for in spite of the
prose passages, the little work is in effect simply a poem--is not all
sentiment and dreams. With admirable art the author has interspersed
here and there contrasting episodes of realism or of absurdity; he has
woven into his story a succession of vivid dialogues, and by means of an
acute sense of observation he has succeeded in keeping his airy fantasy
in touch with actual things. The description of Nicolette, escaping from
her prison, and stepping out over the grass in her naked feet, with the
daisies, as she treads on them, showing black against her whiteness, is
a wonderful example of his power of combining imagination with detail,
beauty with truth. Together with the _Chanson de Roland_--though in such
an infinitely different style--_Aucassin et Nicolete_ represents the
most valuable elements in the French poetry of this early age.
With the thirteenth century a new development began, and one of the
highest importance--the development of Prose. _La Conquête de
Constantinople_, by VILLEHARDOUIN, written at the beginning of the
century, is the earliest example of those historical memoirs which were
afterwards to become so abundant in French literature; and it is
written, not in the poetical prose of _Aucassin et Nicolete_, but in the
simple, plain style of straightforward narrative. The book cannot be
ranked among the masterpieces; but it has the charm of sincerity and
that kind of pleasant flavour which belong to innocent antiquity. The
good old Villehardouin has something of the engaging _naïveté_,
something of the romantic curiosity, of Herodotus. And in spite of the
sobriety and dryness of his writing he can, at moments, bring a sense of
colour and movement into his words. His description of the great fleet
of the crusaders, starting from Corfu, has this fine sentence: 'Et le
jour fut clair et beau: et le vent doux et bon. Et ils laissèrent aller
les voiles au vent.' His account of the spectacle of Constantinople,
when it appeared for the first time to the astonished eyes of the
Christian nobles, is well known: 'Ils ne pouvaient croire que si riche
ville pût être au monde, quand ils virent ces hauts murs et ces riches
tours dont elle était close tout autour à la ronde, et ces riches palais
et ces hautes églises.... Et sachez qu'il n'y eut si hardi à qui la
chair ne frémit; et ce ne fut une merveille; car jamais si grande
affaire ne fut entreprise de nulles gens, depuis que le monde fut créé.'
Who does not feel at such words as these, across the ages, the thrill of
the old adventure!
A higher level of interest and significance is reached by JOINVILLE in
his _Vie de Saint Louis_, written towards the close of the century. The
fascination of the book lies in its human qualities. Joinville narrates,
in the easy flowing tone of familiar conversation, his reminiscences of
the good king in whose service he had spent the active years of his
life, and whose memory he held in adoration. The deeds, the words, the
noble sentiments, the saintly devotion of Louis--these things he relates
with a charming and ingenuous sympathy, yet with a perfect freedom and
an absolute veracity. Nor is it only the character of his master that
Joinville has brought into his pages; his book is as much a
self-revelation as a biography. Unlike Villehardouin, whose chronicle
shows hardly a trace of personal feeling, Joinville speaks of himself
unceasingly, and has impressed his work indelibly with the mark of his
own individuality. Much of its charm depends upon the contrast which he
thus almost unconsciously reveals between himself and his master--the
vivacious, common-sense, eminently human nobleman, and the grave,
elevated, idealizing king. In their conversations, recounted with such
detail and such relish by Joinville, the whole force of this contrast
becomes delightfully apparent. One seems to see in them, compressed and
symbolized in the characters of these two friends, the conflicting
qualities of sense and spirit, of worldliness and self-immolation, of
the most shrewd and literal perspicacity and the most visionary
exaltation, which make up the singular antithesis of the Middle Ages.
A contrast no less complete, though of a different nature, is to be
found in the most important poetical work of the thirteenth century--_Le
Roman de la Rose_. The first part of this curious poem was composed by
GUILLAUME DE LORRIS, a young scholar who wrote for that aristocratic
public which, in the previous generation, had been fascinated by the
courtly romances of Chrétien de Troyes. Inspired partly by that writer,
and partly by Ovid, it was the aim of Lorris to produce an _Art of
Love_, brought up to date, and adapted to the tastes of his aristocratic
audience, with all the elaborate paraphernalia of learned disquisition
and formal gallantry which was then the mode. The poem, cast in the form
of an intricate allegory, is of significance chiefly on account of its
immense popularity, and for its being the fountain-head of a school of
allegorical poetry which flourished for many centuries in France. Lorris
died before he had finished his work, which, however, was destined to be
completed in a singular manner. Forty years later, another young
scholar, JEAN DE MEUNG, added to the 4000 lines which Lorris had left no
fewer than 18,000 of his own. This vast addition was not only quite out
of proportion but also quite out of tone with the original work. Jean de
Meung abandoned entirely the refined and aristocratic atmosphere of his
predecessor, and wrote with all the realism and coarseness of the middle
class of that day. Lorris's vapid allegory faded into insignificance,
becoming a mere peg for a huge mass of extraordinarily varied discourse.
The whole of the scholastic learning of the Middle Ages is poured in a
confused stream through this remarkable and deeply interesting work. Nor
is it merely as a repository of medieval erudition that Jean de Meung's
poem deserves attention; for it is easy to perceive in it an
intellectual tendency far in advance of its age--a spirit which, however
trammelled by antiquated conventions, yet claims kinship with that of
Rabelais, or even that of Voltaire. Jean de Meung was not a great
artist; he wrote without distinction, and without sense of form; it is
his bold and voluminous thought that gives him a high place in French
literature. In virtue alike of his popularization of an encyclopedic
store of knowledge and of his underlying doctrine--the worship of
Nature--he ranks as a true forerunner of the great movement of the
Renaissance.
The intellectual stirring, which seemed to be fore-shadowed by the
second part of the _Roman de la Rose_, came to nothing. The disasters
and confusion of the Hundred Years War left France with very little
energy either for art or speculation; the horrors of a civil war
followed; and thus the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries are perhaps
the emptiest in the annals of her literature. In the fourteenth century
one great writer embodied the character of the time. FROISSART has
filled his splendid pages with 'the pomp and circumstance of glorious
war'. Though he spent many years and a large part of his fortune in the
collection of materials for his history of the wars between France and
England, it is not as an historian that he is now remembered; it is as a
writer of magnificent prose. His _Chroniques_, devoid of any profundity
of insight, any true grasp of the movements of the age, have rarely been
paralleled in the brilliance and animation of their descriptions, the
vigour of their character-drawing, the flowing picturesqueness of their
style. They unroll themselves like some long tapestry, gorgeously
inwoven with scenes of adventure and chivalry, with flags and spears and
chargers, and the faces of high-born ladies and the mail-clad figures of
knights. Admirable in all his descriptions, it is in his battle-pieces
that Froissart particularly excels. Then the glow of his hurrying
sentences redoubles, and the excitement and the bravery of the combat
rush out from his pen in a swift and sparkling stream. One sees the
serried ranks and the flashing armour, one hears the clash of weapons
and the shouting of the captains: 'Montjoie! Saint Denis! Saint George!
Giane!'--one feels the sway and the press and the tumult, one laments
with the vanquished, one exults with the victors, and, amid the
glittering panoply of 'grand seigneur, conte, baron, chevalier, et
escuier', with their high-sounding titles and their gallant prowess, one
forgets the reverse side of all this glory--the ravaged fields, the
smoking villages, the ruined peasants--the long desolation of France.
The Chronicles of Froissart are history seen through the eyes of a
herald; the _Memoirs_ of PHILIPPE DE COMMYNES are history envisaged by a
politician and a diplomatist. When Commynes wrote--towards the close of
the fifteenth century--the confusion and strife which Froissart had
chronicled with such a gusto were things of the past, and France was
beginning to emerge as a consolidated and centralized state. Commynes
himself, one of the confidential ministers of Louis XI, had played an
important part in this development; and his book is the record of the
triumphant policy of his crafty and sagacious sovereign. It is a fine
piece of history, written with lucidity and firmness, by a man who had
spent all his life behind the scenes, and who had never been taken in.
The penetration and the subtlety of Commynes make his work interesting
chiefly for its psychological studies and for the light that it throws
on those principles of cunning statecraft which permeated the politics
and diplomacy of the age and were to receive their final exposition in
the _Prince_ of Machiavelli. In his calm, judicious, unaffected pages we
can trace the first beginnings of that strange movement which was to
convert the old Europe of the Middle Ages, with its universal Empire and
its universal Church, into the new Europe of independent secular
nations--the Europe of to-day.
Commynes thus stands on the brink of the modern world; though his style
is that of his own time, his matter belongs to the future: he looks
forward into the Renaissance. At the opposite end of the social scale
from this rich and powerful diplomatist, VILLON gave utterance in
language of poignant beauty to the deepest sentiments of the age that
was passing away. A ruffian, a robber, a murderer, haunting the vile
places of Paris, flying from justice, condemned, imprisoned, almost
executed, and vanishing at last, none knows how or where, this
extraordinary genius lives now as a poet and a dreamer--an artist who
could clothe in unforgettable verse the intensest feelings of a soul.
The bulk of his work is not large. In his _Grand Testament_--a poem of
about 1500 lines, containing a number of interspersed ballades and
rondeaus--in his _Petit Testament_, and in a small number of
miscellaneous poems, he has said all that he has to say. The most
self-communicative of poets, he has impressed his own personality on
every line that he wrote. Into the stiff and complicated forms of the
rondeau and rondel, the ballade and double ballade, with their limited
rhymes and their enforced repetitions, he has succeeded in breathing not
only the spirit of beauty, but the spirit of individuality. He was not a
simple character; his melancholy was shot with irony and laughter;
sensuality and sentimentality both mingled with his finest imaginations
and his profoundest visions; and all these qualities are reflected,
shifting and iridescent, in the magic web of his verse. One thought,
however, perpetually haunts him; under all his music of laughter or of
passion, it is easy to hear one dominating note. It is the thought of
mortality. The whining, leering, brooding creature can never for a
moment forget that awful Shadow. He sees it in all its aspects--as a
subject for mockery, for penitence, for resignation, for despair. He
sees it as the melancholy, inevitable end of all that is beautiful, all
that is lovely on earth.
Dictes moi où, n'en quel pays
Est Flora, la belle Rommaine;
Archipiada, ne Thaïs--
and so through the rest of the splendid catalogue with its sad,
unanswerable refrain--
Mais où sont les neiges d'antan?
Even more persistently, the vision rises before him of the physical
terrors of death--the hideousness of its approaches, the loathsomeness
of its corruptions; in vain he smiles, in vain he weeps; the grim
imagination will not leave him. In the midst of his wildest debauches,
he suddenly remembers the horrible features of decaying age; he repents;
but there, close before him, he sees the fatal gibbet, and his own body
swinging among the crows.
With Villon the medieval literature of France comes at once to a climax
and a termination. His potent and melancholy voice vibrates with the
accumulated passion and striving and pain of those far-off generations,
and sinks mysteriously into silence with the birth of a new and happier
world.