THE AGE OF TRANSITION
In the seventy years that elapsed between the death of Montaigne (1592)
and the accession to power of Louis XIV the tendencies in French
literature were fluctuating and uncertain. It was a period of change, of
hesitation, of retrogression even; and yet, below these doubtful,
conflicting movements, a great new development was germinating, slowly,
surely, and almost unobserved. From one point of view, indeed, this age
may be considered the most important in the whole history of the
literature, since it prepared the way for the most splendid and
characteristic efflorescence in prose and poetry that France has ever
known; without it, there would have been no _Grand Siècle._ In fact, it
was during this age that the conception was gradually evolved which
determined the lines upon which all French literature in the future was
to advance. It can hardly be doubted that if the fertile and varied
Renaissance movement, which had given birth to the _Pléiade_, to
Rabelais, and to Montaigne, had continued to progress unbroken and
unchecked, the future literature of France would have closely resembled
the contemporary literatures of Spain and England--that it would have
continued to be characterized by the experimental boldness and the loose
exuberance of the masters of the sixteenth century. But in France the
movement _was_ checked: and the result was a body of literature, not
only of the highest value, but also of a unique significance in European
letters.
The break in the Renaissance movement was largely the result of
political causes. The stability and peace which seemed to be so firmly
established by the brilliant monarchy of Francis I vanished with the
terrible outbreak of the Wars of Religion. For about sixty years, with a
few intermissions, the nation was a prey to the horrors of civil strife.
And when at last order was restored under the powerful rule of Cardinal
Richelieu, and the art of writing began to be once more assiduously
practised, the fresh rich glory of the Renaissance spirit had
irrevocably passed away. Already, early in the seventeenth century, the
poetry of MALHERBE had given expression to new theories and new ideals.
A man of powerful though narrow intelligence, a passionate theorist, and
an ardent specialist in grammar and the use of words, Malherbe reacted
violently both against the misplaced and artificial erudition of the
_Pléiade_ and their unforced outbursts of lyric song. His object was to
purify the French tongue; to make it--even at the cost of diminishing
its flavour and narrowing its range--strong, supple, accurate and
correct; to create a language which, though it might be incapable of
expressing the fervours of personal passion or the airy fancies of
dreamers, would be a perfect instrument for the enunciation of noble
truths and fine imaginations, in forms at once simple, splendid and
sincere. Malherbe's importance lies rather in his influence than in his
actual work. Some of his Odes--among which his great address to Louis
XIII on the rebellion of La Rochelle deserves the highest place--are
admirable examples of a restrained, measured and weighty rhetoric,
moving to the music not of individual emotion, but of a generalized
feeling for the beauty and grandeur of high thoughts. He was
essentially an oratorical poet; but unfortunately the only forms of
verse ready to his hand were lyrical forms; so that his genius never
found a full scope for its powers. Thus his precept outweighs his
example. His poetical theories found their full justification only in
the work of his greater and more fortunate successors; and the masters
of the age of Louis XIV looked back to Malherbe as the intellectual
father of their race.
Malherbe's immediate influence, however, was very limited. Upon the
generation of writers that followed him, his doctrines of sobriety and
simplicity made no impression whatever. Their tastes lay in an entirely
different direction. For now, in the second quarter of the seventeenth
century, there set in, with an extreme and sudden violence, a fashion
for every kind of literary contortion, affectation and trick. The value
of a poet was measured by his capacity for turning a somersault in
verse--for constructing ingenious word-puzzles with which to express
exaggerated sentiments; and no prose-writer was worth looking at who
could not drag a complicated, ramifying simile through half a dozen
pages at least. These artificialities lacked the saving grace of those
of the Renaissance writers--their abounding vigour and their inventive
skill. They were cold-blooded artificialities, evolved elaborately,
simply for their own sake. The new school, with its twisted conceits and
its super-subtle elegances, came to be known as the 'Precious' school,
and it is under that name that the satire of subsequent writers has
handed it down to the laughter of after-generations. Yet a perspicacious
eye might have seen even in these absurd and tasteless productions the
signs of a progressive movement--the possibility, at least, of a true
advance. For the contortions of the 'Precious' writers were less the
result of their inability to write well than of their desperate efforts
to do so. They were trying, as hard as they could, to wriggle themselves
into a beautiful pose; and, naturally enough, they were unsuccessful.
They were, in short, too self-conscious; but it was in this very
self-consciousness that the real hope for the future lay. The teaching
of Malherbe, if it did not influence the actual form of their work, at
least impelled them towards a deliberate effort to produce _some_ form,
and to be content no longer with the vague and the haphazard. In two
directions particularly this new self-consciousness showed itself. It
showed itself in the formation of literary _salons_--of which the chief
was the famous blue drawing-room of the Hôtel de Rambouillet--where
every conceivable question of taste and art, grammar and vocabulary, was
discussed with passionate intensity; and it showed itself even more
strongly in the establishment, under the influence of Richelieu, of an
official body of literary experts--the French Academy.
How far the existence of the Academy has influenced French literature,
either for good or for evil, is an extremely dubious question. It was
formed for the purpose of giving fixity and correctness to the language,
of preserving a high standard of literary taste, and of creating an
authoritative centre from which the ablest men of letters of the day
should radiate their influence over the country. To a great extent these
ends have been attained; but they have been accompanied by corresponding
drawbacks. Such an institution must necessarily be a conservative one;
and it is possible that the value of the Academy as a centre of purity
and taste has been at least balanced by the extreme reluctance which it
has always shown to countenance any of those forms of audacity and
change without which no literature can be saved from petrifaction. All
through its history the Academy has been timid and out of date. The
result has been that some of the very greatest of French
writers--including Molière, Diderot, and Flaubert--have remained outside
it; while all the most fruitful developments in French literary theory
have come about only after a bitter and desperate resistance on its
part. On the whole, perhaps the most important function performed by the
Academy has been a more indirect one. The mere existence of a body of
writers officially recognized by the authorities of the State has
undoubtedly given a peculiar prestige to the profession of letters in
France. It has emphasized that tendency to take the art of writing
seriously--to regard it as a fit object for the most conscientious
craftsmanship and deliberate care--which is so characteristic of French
writers. The amateur is very rare in French literature--as rare as he is
common in our own. How many of the greatest English writers have denied
that they were men of letters!--Scott, Byron, Gray, Sir Thomas Browne,
perhaps even Shakespeare himself. When Congreve begged Voltaire not to
talk of literature, but to regard him merely as an English gentleman,
the French writer, who, in all his multifarious activities, never forgot
for a moment that he was first and foremost a follower of the profession
of letters, was overcome with astonishment and disgust. The difference
is typical of the attitude of the two nations towards literature: the
English, throwing off their glorious masterpieces by the way, as if they
were trifles; and the French bending all the resources of a trained and
patient energy to the construction and the perfection of marvellous
works of art.
Whatever view we may take of the ultimate influence of the French
Academy, there can be no doubt at all that one of its first actions was
singularly inauspicious. Under the guidance of Cardinal Richelieu it
delivered a futile attack upon the one writer who stood out head and
shoulders above his contemporaries, and whose works bore all the marks
of unmistakable genius--the great CORNEILLE. With the production, in
1636, of Corneille's tragedy, _Le Cid_, modern French drama came into
existence. Previous to that date, two main movements are discernible in
French dramatic art--one carrying on the medieval traditions of the
mystery-and miracle-play, and culminating, early in the seventeenth
century, with the rough, vigorous and popular drama of Hardy; and the
other, originating with the writers of the Renaissance, and leading to
the production of a number of learned and literary plays, composed in
strict imitation of the tragedies of Seneca,--plays of which the typical
representative is the _Cléopâtre_ of Jodelle. Corneille's achievement
was based upon a combination of what was best in these two movements.
The work of Jodelle, written with a genuinely artistic intention, was
nevertheless a dead thing on the stage; while Hardy's melodramas,
bursting as they were with vitality, were too barbaric to rank as
serious works of art. Corneille combined art with vitality, and for the
first time produced a play which was at once a splended piece of
literature and an immense popular success. Henceforward it was certain
that French drama would develop along the path which had been opened out
for it so triumphantly by the _Cid_. But what was that path? Nothing
shows more strikingly the strength of the literary opinion of that age
than the fact that it was able to impose itself even upon the mighty and
towering spirit of Corneille. By nature, there can be little doubt that
Corneille was a romantic. His fiery energy, his swelling rhetoric, his
love of the extraordinary and the sublime, bring him into closer kinship
with Marlowe than with any other writer of his own nation until the time
of Victor Hugo. But Corneille could not do what Marlowe did. He could
not infuse into the free form of popular drama the passion and splendour
of his own genius, and thus create a type of tragedy that was at once
exuberant and beautiful. And he could not do this because the literary
theories of the whole of the cultivated society of France would have
been opposed to him, because he himself was so impregnated with those
very theories that he failed to realize where the true bent of his
genius lay. Thus it was that the type of drama which he impressed upon
French literature was not the romantic type of the English Elizabethans,
but the classical type of Senecan tragedy which Jodelle had imitated,
and which was alone tolerable to the French critics of the seventeenth
century. Instead of making the vital drama of Hardy artistic, he made
the literary drama of Jodelle alive. Probably it was fortunate that he
did so; for he thus led the way straight to the most characteristic
product of the French genius--the tragedy of Racine. With Racine, the
classical type of drama, which so ill befitted the romantic spirit of
Corneille, found its perfect exponent; and it will be well therefore to
postpone a more detailed examination of the nature of that type until we
come to consider Racine himself, the value of whose work is inextricably
interwoven with its form. The dominating qualities of Corneille may be
more easily appreciated.
He was above all things a rhetorician; he was an instinctive master of
those qualities in words which go to produce effects of passionate
vehemence, vigorous precision, and culminating force. His great
_tirades_ carry forward the reader, or the listener (for indeed the
verse of Corneille loses half its value when it is unheard), on a
full-flowing tide of language where the waves of the verse, following
one another in a swift succession of ever-rising power, crash down at
last with a roar. It is a strange kind of poetry: not that of
imaginative vision, of plastic beauty, of subtle feeling; but that of
intellectual excitement and spiritual strength. It is the poetry of
Malherbe multiplied a thousandfold in vigour and in genius, and
expressed in the form most appropriate to it--the dramatic Alexandrine
verse. The stuff out of which it is woven, made up, not of the images of
sense, but of the processes of thought, is, in fact, simply argument.
One can understand how verse created from such material might be
vigorous and impressive; it is difficult to imagine how it could also be
passionate--until one has read Corneille. Then one realizes afresh the
compelling power of genius. His tragic personages, standing forth
without mystery, without 'atmosphere', without local colour, but simply
in the clear white light of reason, rivet our attention, and seem at
last to seize upon our very souls. Their sentences, balanced, weighty
and voluble, reveal the terrors of destiny, the furies of love, the
exasperations of pride, with an intensity of intellectual precision that
burns and blazes. The deeper these strange beings sink into their
anguish, the more remorseless their arguments become. They prove their
horror in dreadful syllogisms; every inference plunges them farther into
the abyss; and their intelligence flames upward to its highest point,
when they are finally engulfed.
Such is the singular passion that fills Corneille's tragedies. The
creatures that give utterance to it are hardly human beings: they are
embodiments of will, force, intellect and pride. The situations in which
they are placed are calculated to expose these qualities to the utmost;
and all Corneille's masterpieces are concerned with the same
subject--the combat between indomitable egoism and the forces of Fate.
It is in the meeting of these 'fell incensed opposites' that the tragedy
consists. In _Le Cid_, Chimene's passion for Rodrigue struggles in a
death-grapple with the destiny that makes Rodrigue the slayer of her
father. In _Polyeucte_ it is the same passion struggling with the
dictates of religion. In _Les Horaces_, patriotism, family love and
personal passion are all pitted against Fate. In _Cinna_, the conflict
passes within the mind of Auguste, between the promptings of a noble
magnanimity and the desire for revenge. In all these plays the central
characters display a superhuman courage and constancy and self-control.
They are ideal figures, speaking with a force and an elevation unknown
in actual experience; they never blench, they never waver, but move
adamantine to their doom. They are for ever asserting the strength of
their own individuality.
Je suis maître de moi comme de l'univers,
Je le suis, je veux l'être,
declares Auguste; and Médée, at the climax of her misfortunes, uses the
same language--
'Dans un si grand revers que vous reste-t-il?'--'Moi!
Moi, dis-je, et c'est assez!'
The word 'moi' dominates these tragedies; and their heroes, bursting
with this extraordinary egoism, assume even more towering proportions in
their self-abnegation than in their pride. Then the thrilling
clarion-notes of their defiances give way to the deep grand music of
stern sublimity and stoic resignation. The gigantic spirit recoils upon
itself, crushes itself, and reaches its last triumph.
Drama of this kind must, it is clear, lack many of the qualities which
are usually associated with the dramatic art; there is no room in it for
variety of character-drawing, for delicacy of feeling, or for the
realistic presentation of the experiences of life. Corneille hardly
attempted to produce such effects as these; and during his early years
his great gifts of passion and rhetoric easily made up for the
deficiency. As he grew older, however, his inspiration weakened; his
command of his material left him; and he was no longer able to fill the
figures of his creation with the old intellectual sublimity. His heroes
and his heroines became mere mouthing puppets, pouring out an endless
stream of elaborate, high-flown sentiments, wrapped up in a complicated
jargon of argumentative verse. His later plays are miserable failures.
Not only do they illustrate the inherent weaknesses of Corneille's
dramatic method, but they are also full of the characteristic bad taste
and affectations of the age. The vital spirit once withdrawn, out sprang
the noisome creatures from their lurking-places to feast upon the
corpse.
Nevertheless, with all his faults, Corneille dominated French literature
for twenty years. His genius, transcendent, unfortunate, noble in
endeavour, unequal in accomplishment, typifies the ambiguous movement
of the time. For still the flood of 'Precious' literature poured from
the press--dull, contorted epics, and stilted epigrams on my lady's
eyebrow, and learned dissertations decked out in sparkling tinsel, and
infinitely long romances, full of alembicated loves. Then suddenly one
day a small pamphlet in the form of a letter appeared on the bookstalls
of Paris; and with its appearance the long reign of confused ideals and
misguided efforts came to an end for ever. The pamphlet was the first of
Pascal's _Lettres Provinciales_--the work which ushered into being the
great classical age--the _Grand Siècle_ of Louis XIV.
In the _Lettres Provinciales_ PASCAL created French prose--the French
prose that we know to-day, the French prose which ranks by virtue of its
vigour, elegance and precision as a unique thing in the literature of
the world. Earlier prose-writers--Joinville, Froissart, Rabelais,
Montaigne--had been in turns charming, or picturesque, or delicate, or
overflowing with vitality; but none had struck upon the really
characteristically French note. They lacked form, and those fine
qualities of strength and clarity which form alone can give. Their
sentences were indeterminate--long, complex, drifting, and connected
together by conjunctions into a loose aggregate. The 'Precious' writers
had dimly realized the importance of form, but they had not realized at
all the importance of simplicity. This was Pascal's great discovery. His
sentences are clear, straightforward, and distinct; and they are bound
together into a succession of definitely articulated paragraphs, which
are constructed, not on the system of mere haphazard aggregation, but
according to the logical development of the thought. Thus Pascal's
prose, like the verse of Malherbe and Corneille, is based upon reason;
it is primarily intellectual. But, with Pascal, the intellect expresses
itself even more exactly. The last vestiges of medieval ambiguities have
been discarded; the style is perfectly modern. So wonderfully did Pascal
master the resources of the great instrument which he had forged, that
it is true to say that no reader who wishes to realize once for all the
great qualities of French prose could do better than turn straight to
the _Lettres Provinciales_. Here he will find the lightness and the
strength, the exquisite polish and the delicious wit, the lambent irony
and the ordered movement, which no other language spoken by man has ever
quite been able to produce. The _Lettres_ are a work of controversy;
their actual subject-matter--the ethical system of the Jesuits of the
time--is remote from modern interests; yet such is the brilliance of
Pascal's art that every page of them is fascinating to-day. The vivacity
of the opening letters is astonishing; the tone is the gay, easy tone of
a man of the world; the attack is delivered in a rushing onslaught of
raillery. Gradually, as the book proceeds, there are signs of a growing
seriousness; we have a sense of graver issues, and round the small
question of the Jesuits' morality we discern ranged all the vast forces
of good and evil. At last the veil of wit and laughter is entirely
removed, and Pascal bursts forth into the full fury of invective. The
vials of wrath are opened; a terrific denunciation rolls out in a
thundering cataract; and at the close of the book there is hardly a note
in the whole gamut of language, from the airiest badinage to the darkest
objurgation, which has not been touched.
In sheer genius Pascal ranks among the very greatest writers who have
lived upon this earth. And his genius was not simply artistic; it
displayed itself no less in his character and in the quality of his
thought. These are the sides of him which are revealed with
extraordinary splendour in his _Pensées_--a collection of notes intended
to form the basis for an elaborate treatise in defence of Christianity
which Pascal did not live to complete. The style of many of these
passages surpasses in brilliance and force even that of the _Lettres
Provinciales_. In addition, one hears the intimate voice of Pascal,
speaking upon the profoundest problems of existence--the most momentous
topics which can agitate the minds of men. Two great themes compose his
argument: the miserable insignificance of all that is human--human
reason, human knowledge, human ambition; and the transcendent glory of
God. Never was the wretchedness of mankind painted with a more
passionate power. The whole infinitude of the physical universe is
invoked in his sweeping sentences to crush the presumption of man. Man's
intellectual greatness itself he seizes upon to point the moral of an
innate contradiction, an essential imbecility. 'Quelle chimère,' he
exclaims, 'est-ce donc que l'homme! quelle nouveauté, quel monstre, quel
chaos, quel sujet de contradiction, quel prodige! Juge de toutes choses,
imbécile ver de terre, dépositaire du vrai, cloaque d'incertitude et
d'erreur, gloire et rebut de l'univers!' In words of imperishable
intensity, he dwells upon the omnipotence of Death: 'Nous sommes
plaisants de nous reposer dans la société de nos semblables. Misérables
comme nous, impuissants comme nous, ils ne nous aideront pas; on mourra
seul.' Or he summons up in one ghastly sentence the vision of the
inevitable end: 'Le dernier acte est sanglant, quelque belle que soit la
comédie en tout le reste. On jette enfin de la terre sur la tête, et en
voilà pour jamais.' And so follows the conclusion of the whole:
'Connaissez donc, superbe, quel paradoxe vous êtes à vous-même.
Humiliez-vous, raison impuissante; taisez-vous, nature imbécile ... et
entendez de votre maître votre condition véritable que vous ignorez.
Écoutez Dieu.'
Modern as the style of Pascal's writing is, his thought is deeply
impregnated with the spirit of the Middle Ages. He belonged, almost
equally, to the future and to the past. He was a distinguished man of
science, a brilliant mathematician; yet he shrank from a consideration
of the theory of Copernicus: it was more important, he declared, to
think of the immortal soul. In the last years of his short life he sank
into a torpor of superstition--ascetic, self-mortified, and rapt in a
strange exaltation, like a medieval monk. Thus there is a tragic
antithesis in his character--an unresolved discord which shows itself
again and again in his _Pensées_. 'Condition de l'homme,' he notes,
'inconstance, ennui, inquiétude.' It is the description of his own
state. A profound inquietude did indeed devour him. He turned
desperately from the pride of his intellect to the consolations of his
religion. But even there--? Beneath him, as he sat or as he walked, a
great gulf seemed to open darkly, into an impenetrable abyss. He looked
upward into heaven, and the familiar horror faced him still: 'Le silence
éternel de ces espaces infinis m'effraie!'