The French Renaissance ended in the Classic. The fate of all that
exuberance was to find order, and that chaos of generation settled down
to the obedience of unchanging laws. This transition, which fixed,
perhaps for ever, the nature of the French tongue, is bound up with the
name of Malherbe.
When what the French have entitled "the great time," when the generation
of Louis XIV looked back to find an origin for its majestic security in
letters, it was in Malherbe that such an origin was discovered; he had
tamed the wildness of the Renaissance, he had bent its vigour to an
arrangement and a frame; by him first were explicitly declared those
rules within which all his successors were content to be narrowed. The
devotion to his memory is nowhere more exalted or more typically
presented than in the famous cry--_enfin Malherbe vint_. His name
carried with it a note of completion and of an end.
When the romantic revival of our own time sought for one mind on which
to lay the burden of its anger, one hard master or pedant who could be
made responsible for the drying up of the wells, Malherbe again was
found. He became the butt of Hugo's splendid ridicule. He was the god of
plaster that could not hear or speak or feel, but which fools had
worshipped; a god easy to break to pieces. His austerity--for them
without fullness--his meagre output, his solemn reiterated code of
"perfect taste," moved them to a facile but intense aggression. He it
was that had turned to fossil stone the living matter of the sixteenth
century: He that had stifled and killed the spirit they attempted to
recall.
This man so praised, so blamed, for such a quality, was yet exactly,
year for year, the contemporary of Shakespeare, born earlier and dying
later. No better example could be discovered of the contrast between the
French and English tempers.
The Romantics, I say, believed that they had destroyed Malherbe and left
the Classic a ruined, antiquated thing. They were in error. Victor Hugo
himself, the leader, who most believed the classic to have become
isolated and past, was yet, in spite of himself, constrained by it.
Lamartine lived in it. After all the fantastic vagaries of mystics and
realists and the rest, it is ruling to-day with increasing power,
returning as indeed the permanent religion, the permanent policy, of the
nation are also returning after a century of astounding adventures: for
the Classic has in it something necessary to the character of the French
people.
Consider what the Classic is and why all mighty civilisations have
demanded and obtained some such hard, permanent and, as it were, sacred
vehicle for the expression of their maturity.
Nations that have a long continuous memory of their own past, nations
especially whose gods have suffered transformation, but never death,
develop the somewhat unelastic wisdom of men in old age. They mistrust
the taste of the moment. They know that things quite fresh and violent
seem at first greater than they are: that such enthusiasm forms no
lasting legacy for posterity. Their very ancient tradition gives them a
thirst for whatever shall certainly remain. The rigid Classic satisfies
that need.
Again, you will discover that those whose energy is too abundant seek
for themselves by an instinct the necessary confines without which such
energy is wasted--and wasted the more from its excess. They canalise for
their own security a torrent which, undisciplined, would serve but to
destroy. Such an instinct is apparent in every department of French
life. To their jurisprudence the French have ever attempted to attach a
code, to their politics the stone walls of a Constitution, or, at the
least, of a fundamental theory. Their theology from Athanasius through
St. Germanus to the modern strict defence against all "liberals" has
glorified the unchanging. Every outburst of the interior fires in the
history of Gaul has been followed by a rapid, plastic action which
reduced to human use what might otherwise have crystallised into an
amorphous lava. So the wild freedom of the twelfth century was captured
to form the Monarchy, the University, the full Gothic of the thirteenth:
so the Revolution permitted Napoleon and produced, not the visionary
unstable grandeur of the Gironde, but the schools and laws and roads and
set government we see to-day. So the spring storms of the Renaissance
settled, I say, into that steady summer of stable form which has now for
three hundred years dominated the literature of the country.
Caught on with this aspect of energy producing the Classic is the truth
that energy alone can dare to be classical. Where the great currents of
the soul run feebly a perpetual acceleration, whether by novelty or by
extravagance, will be demanded; where they run full and heavy, then,
under the restraint of form, they will but run more proudly and more
strong. It is the flickering of life that fears hard rules in verse and
may not feel the level classics of our Europe. Their rigidity is not
that of marble; they are not dead. A human acquaintance with their
sobriety soon fills us as we read. If we lie in the way of the giants
who conceived them (let me say Corneille or the great Dryden),
re-reading and further knowledge--especially a deeper experience of
common life about us--reveal to us the steadfast life of these images;
the eyes open, the lips might almost move; the statue descends and
lives.
The man who imposed design and authority and unity upon the letters of
his country, and who so closed the epoch with which I have been dealing,
was singularly suited to his task. Observant, something of a stoic,
uninspired; courageous, witty, a soldier; lucid, critical of method
only, he corresponded to the movement which, all around him, was
ushering in the Bourbons: the hardening of Goujon's and de l'Orme's
luxuriance into the conventions of the great colonnades and the sombre
immensity of the new palaces; the return of one national faith to a
people weary of so many random quarrels; the mistrust of an ill-ordered
squirearchy; the firm founding of a central government.
He was Norman. Right of that north whence the vigour, though not the
inspiration, of the Renaissance had proceeded, and into which it
returned. Caen gave him birth, and still remembers him. Normans still
edit his works--and dedicate these books to the town which also bred
Corneille. Norman, learned with that restrained but vigorous learning of
the province, he was also of the province in his blood, for he came of
one of those fixed families whose heads held great estates all round
Falaise, and whose cadets branched off into chances abroad: one of the
Boughtons, in Kent, is still "Boughton Malherbe[1]."
[Footnote 1: Not from the Conquest. It is near Charing, originally de
Braose land, but an heiress married a Malherbe in the early twelfth
century.]
He was poor. His father, who held one of those magistracies which the
smaller nobility bought or inherited, had not known where to turn in the
turmoil of the central century. In a moment of distress he called
himself Huguenot when that party seemed to triumph, and Malherbe in
anger against the apostasy went down south, a boy of nineteen, and
fought as a soldier--but chiefly duels; for he loved that sport. He lay
under a kind of protection from the great Catholic houses, though still
poor, till in 1601--he was a man of forty-six--Henri IV heard of him. In
all these years he had worked at the rule of poetry like an artisan,
thinking of nothing else, not even of fame. Those who surrounded him
took it for granted that he was a master critic--a sort of judge without
appeal, but it was a very little provincial circle surrounding a very
unimportant house in Provence. Thus, careless it seems of everything
except that "form of language" which was with him a passion, like the
academic or theological passions, he was astonished on coming to Paris
in 1605 to discover how suited such a pre-occupation was to such a time,
and how rapidly he became the first name in contemporary letters. Of men
who poured out verse the age was satiated; of men who could seize the
language at this turn in its fortune, fix it and give it rules, the age
had no knowledge till he came: the age fastened upon him, and insisted
upon making him a master.
A full twenty years from 1607 he governed the transformation, not of
thought, for that he little changed, but of method and of expression. He
decided what should be called the typical metres, the alternative of
feminine and masculine in verse, the order of emphasis, the proportion
of inversion tolerable, the propriety, the modernity, the archaism of
words. It is a function to our time meaningless and futile: to such a
period as that, indispensable and even noble. He interpreted and
published the national sentiment upon this major thing, the architecture
of letters. The power of his mind, tortured and insufficient in actual
production, was supreme in putting forth clearly and finally that
criticism which ran as an unspoken and obscure current of opinion in the
mind of his age. This was his glory, and it was true.
His dryness was extraordinary. In a life of seventy-two years, during
which he wrote and erased incessantly, he, the poet, wrote just so much
verse as will fill in large type a little pocket volume of 250 pages; to
be accurate, forty-three lines a year. Of this scraping and pumice stone
in the mind a better example than his verse is to be found in his
letters. A number remain. They might seem to be written by two different
men! Half a dozen are models of that language he adored--they cost him,
to our knowledge, many days--the rest are slipshod notes that any man
might write, for he thought they would not survive, and, indeed, the
majority of his editors have had the piety to suppress them.
No one will understand Malherbe who only hears of how, like a dusty
workman, he cut and polished, and so fixed the new jewel of letters. In
our less happy age the academic spirit is necessarily associated with a
lethargic stupidity. In his it was not so. His force, by which this work
was carried through, lay in a character of penetration. His face
expresses it. His very keen and ready eyes, his high lifted brow, his
sharp nose, and the few active lines of his cheek and forehead, the
poise of his head, the disdain of his firm mouth, all build him back
alive for us. His talk, which stammered in its volubility, was incessant
and varied; his temper ready; his bodily command of gesture and
definition perfect in old age: he was of good metal all those years.
Of his intense Toryism, his vivacity, his love of arms, his tenacity of
perception, Racan gives us in his biography an admirable picture. Just
before he died his son was killed in a duel--he, at seventy-two, desired
passionately to kill the adversary. "Gambling," he said, "my pence of
life against the gold of his twenty-five years." He had wit, and he
hated well--hating men after death:
Here richly with ridiculous display
Killed by excess was Wormwood laid away,
While all of his acquaintance sneered and slanged,
I wept: for I had longed to see him hanged.
His zeal for his tongue was real. As he lay upon his death-bed making
his confession after so vigorous a life, he heard his nurse say
something to herself which sounded ungrammatical and, turning round from
the priest, he put her right in a manner most violent and sudden. His
confessor, startled, said: "The time is not relevant". "All times are
relevant!" he answered, sinking back. "I will defend with my last breath
the purity and grandeur of the French tongue."
To such a man the meaning of the solution at which his people had
arrived after a century of civil war lay, above all, in their ancient
religion. On that converged those deeper and more permanent things in
his soul of which even his patriotism and his literary zeal were but the
surface. In the expression of that final solution his verse, which was
hardly that of a poet, rises high into poetry; under the heat and
pressure of his faith, single lines here and there have crystallized
into diamonds. By far the most vigorous of so many frigid odes is the
battle cry addressed by him in old age to Louis XIII setting out against
La Rochelle. He visited that siege, but had the misfortune to die a bare
week before the fall of the city. The most powerful of his sonnets, or
rather the only powerful one, is that in which he calls to Our Lord for
vengeance against the men who killed his son. Catholicism in its every
effect, political and personal, as it were literary too, possessed the
man, so that in ending the types of the French Renaissance with him you
see how the terms in which ultimately the French express themselves are
and will remain religious. The last two lines of his most famous and
most Catholic poem have about them just that sound which saves them, in
spite of their too simple words, from falling into the vulgar
commonplace of vague and creedless men. In writing them down one seems
to be writing down the fate of the great century now tamed, alas! and
ordered, as must be the violence of over-human things:--
Vouloir ce que Dieu veut est la seule Science
Qui nous met en repos.