THE SUCCESSORS OF RABELAIS AND THE INFLUENCE OF THE "AMADIS" ROMANCES
In the present chapter we shall endeavour to treat two divisions of
actual novel- or at least fiction-writing--strikingly opposed to each
other in character; and a third subject, to include which in the title
would have made that title too long, and which is not strictly a branch
of novel-_writing_, but which had perhaps as important an influence on
the progress of the novel itself as anything mentioned or to be
mentioned in all this _History_. The first division is composed of the
followers--sometimes in the full, always in the chronological sense--of
Rabelais, a not very strong folk as a rule, but including one brilliant
example of co-operative work, and two interesting, if in some degree
problematical, persons. The second, strikingly contrasting with the
general if not the universal tendency of the first, is the great
translated group of _Amadis_ romances, which at once revived romance of
the older kind itself, and exercised a most powerful, if not an actually
generative, influence on newer forms which were themselves to pass into
the novel proper. The third is the increasing body of memoir- and
anecdote-writers who, with Brantome at their head, make actual
personages and actual events the subjects of a kind of story-telling,
not perhaps invariably of unexceptionable historic accuracy, but
furnishing remarkable situations of plot and suggestions of character,
together with abundant new examples of the "telling" faculty itself.
[Sidenote: Subsidiary importance of Brantome and other
character-mongers.]
The last point, as an apparent digression but really a most important
contribution to the History, may perhaps be discussed and dismissed
first. All persons who have even a slight knowledge of French literature
must be aware how early and how remarkable are its possessions in what
is vaguely called the "Memoir" department. There is nothing at the time,
in any modern literature known to the present writer, similar to
Villehardouin, or a little later to Joinville,--one might almost say
that there is nothing in any literature at any time superior, if there
be anything equal, in its kind to Froissart. In the first two cases
there is pure personal experience; in the third there is, of course, a
certain amount of precedent writing on the subject for guidance, and a
large gathering of information by word of mouth. But in all these, and
to a less extent in others up to the close of the fifteenth century,
there is the indefinable gift of treatment--of "telling a story." In
Villehardouin this gift may be almost wholly, and in principle very
mainly, limited to the two great subjects which made the mediaeval end
as far as profane matters were concerned--fighting and counselling; but
this is by no means the case in Froissart, whom one is sometimes tempted
to regard as a Sir Walter Scott thrown away upon base reality.
With the sixteenth century this gift once more burgeoned and spread
itself out--dealing, indeed, very mainly with the somewhat ungrateful
subject of the religious disputes and wars, but flowering or fruiting
into the unsurpassable gossip--though gossip is too undignified a
word--of Pierre de Bourdeilles, Abbe de Brantome, that Froissart and
Pepys in one, with the noble delight in noble things of the first,
inextricably united to the almost innocent shamelessness of the second,
and a narrative gift equal to that of either in idiosyncrasy, and
ranging beyond the subjects of both. Himself a soldier and a courtier
(his abbacy, like many others, was purely titular and profitable--not
professional in the least), his favourite subjects in literature, and
obviously his idols in life, were great soldiers and fair ladies,
"Bayard and the two Marguerites," as some one has put it. And his vivid
irregular fashion of writing adapts itself with equal ease to a gallant
feat of arms and a ferocious, half-cut-throat duel, to an exquisite
piece of sentimental passion like that which tells us the story how the
elder Queen of Navarre rebuked the lover carelessly stepping over the
grave of his dead mistress, and to an unquotable anecdote to parallel
the details of which, in literature of high rank, one must go to
Rabelais himself, to Martial, or to Aristophanes. But, whatever the
subject, the faculty of lively communication remains unaltered, and the
suggestion of its transference from fact (possibly a little coloured) to
pure fiction becomes more and more possible and powerful.[110]
[Sidenote: The _Heptameron_.]
No book has been more subject to the "insupportable advances" of the
"key"-monger than the _Heptameron_, and the rage for identifying has
gone so far that the pretty old name of "Emarsuite" for one of the
characters has been discarded for an alleged and much uglier
"Ennasuite," which is indeed said to have MS. authority, but which is
avowedly preferred because it can be twisted into "_Anne_ a Suite"
("Anne in Waiting"), and so can be fastened to an actual Maid of Honour
of Marguerite's. It is only fair, however, to admit that something of
the kind is at least suggested by the book itself. Even by those who do
not trouble themselves in the least about the personages who may or may
not have been disguised under the names of Nomerfide (the Neifile of
this group) and Longarine, Saffredent and Dagoucin and Gebron (Geb_u_ron
they call him now), admit the extreme probability of the Queen having
invited identification of herself with Parlamente, the younger matron of
the party, and of Hircan her husband with the King of Navarre.[111] But
some (among whom is the present writer) think that this delightful and
not too well-fated type of Renaissance amorousness, letteredness, and
piety combined made a sort of dichotomy of herself here, and intended
the personage of Oisille, the elder duenna (though by no means a very
stern one) of the party, to stand for her as well as Parlamente--to whom
one really must give the Italian pronunciation to get her out of the
abominable suggestion of our "talking-machine."
[Sidenote: Character and "problems."]
A much more genuinely literary question has been raised and discussed as
to the exact authorship of the book. That it is entirely Marguerite's,
not the most jealous admirers of the Queen need for a moment contend.
She is known to have had a sort of literary court from Marot and
Rabelais downwards, some of the members of which were actually resident
with her, and not a few of whom--such as Boaistuau and Le Macon, the
translators of Bandello and Boccaccio, and Bonaventure Desperiers (_v.
inf._)--were positive experts in the short story. Moreover, the custom
of distributing these collections among different speakers positively
invited collaboration in writing. The present critic and his friend, Mr.
Arthur Tilley of King's College, Cambridge, who has long been our chief
specialist in the literature of the French Renaissance, are in an
amicable difference as to the part which Desperiers in particular may
have played in the _Heptameron_; but this is of no great importance
here, and though Marguerite's other literary work is distinctly inferior
in style, it is not impossible that the peculiar tone of the best parts
of it, especially as regards the religious-amorous flavour, was infused
by her or under her direct influence. The enthusiasm of Rabelais and
Marot; the striking anecdote already mentioned which Brantome, whose
mother had been one of Marguerite's maids of honour, tells us, and one
or two other things, suggest this; for Desperiers was more of a satirist
than of an amorist, and though the charges of atheism brought against
him are (_v. inf._ again) scarcely supported by his work, he was
certainly no pietist. I should imagine that he revised a good deal and
sometimes imparted his nervous and manly, but, in his own _Contes_,
sometimes too much summarised style. But some striking phrases, such as
"_l'impossibilite_ de nostre chair,"[112] may be hers, and the following
remarkable speech of Parlamente probably expresses her own sentiments
pretty exactly. It is very noteworthy that Hircan, who is generally
represented as "taking up" his wife's utterances with a certain sarcasm,
is quite silent here.
[Sidenote: Parlamente on human and divine love.]
"Also," said Parlamente, "I have an opinion that never will
a man love God perfectly if he has not perfectly loved some
of God's creatures in this world." "But what do you call
'perfect loving'?" said Saffredent. "Do you reckon as
perfect lovers those who are _transis_,[113] and who adore
ladies at a distance, without daring to make their wishes
known?" "I call perfect lovers," answered Parlamente, "those
who seek in what they love some perfection--be it beauty,
kindness, or good grace,--always striving towards virtue;
and such as have so high and honourable a heart, that they
would not, were they to die for it, take for their object
the base things which honour and conscience disapprove: for
the soul, which is only created that it may return to its
Sovereign Good, does naught while it is in the body but long
for the attainment of this. But because the senses by which
alone it can acquire information are darkened and made
carnal by the sin of our first father, they can only show
her the visible things which approach closest to
perfection--and after these the soul runs, thinking to find
in outward beauty, in visible grace, and in moral virtue,
grace, beauty, and virtue in sovereign degree. But when she
has sought them and tried them, and finds not in them Him
whom she loves, she leaves them alone,[114] just as a child,
according to his age, likes dolls and other trivialities,
the prettiest he sees, and thinks a collection of pebbles
actual riches, but as he grows up prefers his dolls alive,
and gets together the goods necessary for human life. Yet
when he knows, by still wider experience, that in earthly
things there is neither perfection nor felicity, he desires
to seek the Creator and the Source of these. Nevertheless,
if God open not the eye of faith in him he would be in
danger of becoming, instead of a merely ignorant man, an
infidel philosopher.[115] For Faith alone can demonstrate
and make receivable the good that the carnal and animal man
cannot understand."
This gives the better Renaissance temper perhaps as well as anything to
be found, and may, or should in fairness, be set against the worser tone
of mere libertinage in which some even of the ladies indulge here, and
still more against that savagery which has been noticed above. This
undoubtedly was in Milton's mind when he talked of "Lust hard by Hate,"
and it makes Hircan coolly observe, after a story has been told in which
an old woman successfully interferes to save a girl's chastity, that in
the place of the hero he should certainly have killed the hag and
enjoyed the girl. This is obviously said in no bravado, and not in the
least humorously: and the spirit of it is exemplified in divers not in
the least incredible anecdotes of Brantome's in the generation
immediately following, and of Tallemant des Reaux in the next. The
religiosity displayed is of a high temper of Christian Platonism, and we
cannot, as we can elsewhere, say what the song says of something else,
that "it certainly looks very queer." The knights and ladies do go to
mass and vespers; but to say that they go punctually would be altogether
erroneous, for Hircan makes wicked jokes on his and Parlamente's being
late for the morning office, and, on one occasion at least, they keep
the unhappy monks of the convent where they are staying (who do not seem
to dare to begin vespers without them) waiting a whole hour while they
are finishing not particularly edifying stories. The less complaisant
casuists, even of the Roman Church, would certainly look askance at the
piety of the distinguished person (said by tradition to have been King
Francis himself) who always paid his respects to Our Lady on his way to
illegitimate assignations, and found himself the better therefor on one
occasion of danger. But the tone of our extract is invariably that of
Oisille and Parlamente. The purer love part of the matter is a little,
as the French themselves say, "alembicated." But still the whole is
graceful and fascinating, except for a few pieces of mere passionless
coarseness, which Oisille generally reproves. And it is scarcely
necessary to say what large opportunities these tones and colours of
fashion and "quality," of passion and manners, give to the future
novelist, whose treatment shall stand to them very much as they stand to
the shorter and sometimes almost shorthand written tales of Desperiers
himself.
[Sidenote: Desperiers.]
With the _Cymbalum Mundi_ of this rather mysterious person we need have
little to do. It is, down to the dialogue-form, an obvious imitation of
Lucian--a story about the ancient divinities (especially Mercury) and a
certain "Book of Destiny" and talking animals, and a good deal of often
rather too transparent allegory. It has had, both in its own day and
since, a very bad reputation as being atheistical or at least
anti-Christian, and seems really to have had something to do with the
author's death, by suicide or otherwise. There need, however, be very
little harm in it; and there is not very much good as a story, nor,
therefore, much for us. It does not carry the art of its particular kind
of fiction any further than Lucian himself, who is, being much more of a
genius, on the whole a much better model, even taking him at that rather
inferior rate. The _Contes et Joyeux Devis_, on the other hand, though
the extreme brevity of some has perhaps sometimes prejudiced readers
against them, have always seemed to the present writer to form the most
remarkable book, as literature, of all the department at the time except
_Gargantua_ and _Pantagruel_ and the _Heptameron_, and to supply a
strong presumption that their author had more than a minor hand in the
_Heptameron_ itself. It must, of course, be admitted that the fashion in
which they are delivered may not only offend in one direction, but may
possibly mislead in another. One may read too much into the brevity, and
so fall into the error of that other Englishman who was beguiled by the
mysterious signs of Desperiers' greatest contemporary's most original
creation. But a very large and long experience of literary weighing and
measuring ought to be some safeguard against the mistake of Thaumast.
[Sidenote: _Contes et Joyeux Devis._]
One remarkable difference which may seem, at first sight, to be against
the theory of Desperiers having had a large share in the _Heptameron_ is
the contrasted and, as it may seem again at first sight, antagonistic
tone of the two. There are purely comic and even farcical passages in
Marguerite's book, but the general colour, as has been said, is
religious-sentimental or courtly-amatory, with by no means infrequent
excursions into the purely tragical. The _Contes et Joyeux Devis_, on
the other hand, in the main continue the wholly jocular tone of the old
_fabliaux_. But Desperiers must have been, not only _not_ the great man
of letters which the somewhat exaggerated zeal of his editor, M. Louis
Lacour, ranked him as being, but a very weak and feeble writer, if he
could not in this way write comedy in one book and tragedy in another.
In fact Rabelais gives us (as the greatest writers so often do) what is
in more senses than one a master-key to the contrast. Desperiers has in
the _Contes_ constant ironic qualifications and asides which may even
have been directly imitated from his elder and greater contemporary;
Marguerite has others which pair off in the same way with the most
serious Rabelaisian "intervals," to which attention has been drawn in
the last chapter. One point, however, does seem, at least to me, to
emerge from the critical consideration of these two books with the other
works of the Queen on the one hand and the other works of
Desperiers[116] on the other. It is that the latter had a much crisper
and stronger style than Marguerite's own, and that he had a faculty of
grave ironic satire, going deeper and ranging wider than her
"sensibility" would allow. There is one on the fatal and irremediable
effects of disappointing ladies in their expectations, wherein there is
something more than the mere _grivoiserie_, which in other hands it
might easily have remained. The very curious Novel XIII.--on King
Solomon and the philosopher's stone and the reason of the failure of
alchemy--is of quite a different type from most things in these
story-collections, and makes one regret that there is not more of it,
and others of the same kind. For sheer amusement, which need not be
shocking to any but the straitest-laced of persons, the story (XXXIV.)
of a curate completely "scoring off" his bishop (who did not observe the
caution given by Ophelia to Laertes) has not many superiors in its
particular kind.
[Sidenote: Other tale-collections.]
The fancy for these collections of tales spread widely in the sixteenth
century, and a respectable number of them have found a home in histories
of literature. Sometimes they present themselves honestly as what they
are, and sometimes under a variety of disguises, the most extravagant of
which is the title of the rather famous work of Henri Estienne,
_Apologie pour Herodote_. Others, more or less fantastic, are the
_Propos Rustiques_ and _Baliverneries_ of Noel Du Fail, a Breton squire
(as we should say), and his later _Contes d'Eutrapel_; the _Escraignes
Dijonnaises_ and other books of Tabourot des Accords; the _Matinees_ and
_Apres Dinees_ of Cholieres, and, the largest collection of all, the
_Serees_ [Soirees] of the Angevin Guillaume Bouchet,[117] while after
the close of the actual century, but probably representing earlier work,
appeared the above-mentioned _Moyen de Parvenir_, by turns attributed
and denied to Beroalde de Verville. In all these, without exception, the
imitation of Rabelais, in different but unmistakable ways, is to be
found; and in not a few, that of the _Heptameron_ and of Desperiers;
while not unfrequently the same tales are found in more than one
collection. The _fatrasie_ character--that is to say, the stuffing
together of all sorts of incongruous matter in more or less burlesque
style--is common to all of them; the licence of subject and language to
most; and there are hardly any, except a few mere modernisings of old
_fabliaux_, in which you will not find the famous farrago of the
Renaissance--learning, religious partisanship, war, law, love, almost
everything. All the writers are far below their great master,[118] and
none of them has the appeal of the _Heptameron_. But the spirit of
tale-telling pervades the whole shelf-ful, and there is one more special
point of importance "for us."
[Sidenote: The "provincial" character of these.]
It will be observed that some of them actually display in their titles
(such as that of Tabouret's book as quoted) the fact that they have a
definite provinciality in no bad sense: while Bouchet is as clearly
Angevin and Du Fail as distinctly Breton as Des Accords is Burgundian
and as the greatest of all had been Tourangeau. It can scarcely be
necessary to point out at great length what a reinforcement of vigour
and variety must have been brought by this plantation in the different
soils of those provinces which have counted for so much--and nearly
always for so much good[119]--in French literature and French things
generally. The great danger and defect of mediaeval writing had been its
tendency to fall into schools and ruts, and the "printed book"
(especially such a printed book as Rabelais) was, at least in one way,
by no means unlikely to exercise this bad influence afresh. To this the
provincial differences opposed a salutary variety of manners, speech,
local colour, almost everything. Moreover, manners themselves
generally--one of the fairest and most fertile fields of the
novel-kingdom--became thus more fully and freely the object and subject
of the tale-teller. Character, in the best and most extensive and
intensive sense of the word, still lagged behind; and as the drama
necessarily took that up, it was for more reasons than one encouraged,
as we may say, in its lagging. But meanwhile Amyot and Calvin[120] and
Montaigne were getting the language more fully ready for the
prose-writer's use, and the constant "sophistication" of literature with
religion, politics, knowledge of the physical world in all ways,
commerce, familiarity with foreign nations--everything almost that
touched on life--helped to bring on the slow but inevitable appearance
of the novel itself. But it had more influences to assimilate and more
steps to go through before it could take full form.
[Sidenote: The _Amadis_ romances.]
No more curious contrast (except, perhaps, the not very dissimilar one
which will meet us in the next chapter) is to be found in the present
_History_, or perhaps in any other, than that of the matter just
discussed with the great body of _Amadis_ romance which, at this same
time, was introduced into French literature by the translation or
adaptation of Nicolas Herberay des Essarts and his continuators. That
Herberay[121] deserves, according to the best and most catholic students
of French, a place with the just-mentioned writers among the formers or
reformers of the French tongue, is a point of some importance, but, for
us, minor. Of the controversial part of the _Amadis_ subject it must, as
in other cases, be once more unnecessary for us to say much. It may be
laid down as certain, on every principle of critical logic and research,
that the old idea of the Peninsular cycle being borrowed direct from any
French original is hopelessly absurd. There is, notoriously, no external
evidence of any such original ever having existed, and there is an
immense improbability against any such original ever having existed.
Further, the internal characteristics of the Spanish romances, though,
undoubtedly, they might never have come into existence at all but for
the French, and though there is a very slight "catch-on" of _Amadis_
itself to the universally popular Arthurian legend, are not in the least
like those of French or English. How the actual texts came into that
existence; whether, as used to be thought at first, after some expert
criticism was turned on them, the actual original was Portuguese, and
the refashioned and prolific form Spanish, is again a question utterly
beyond bounds for us. The quality of the romances themselves--their huge
vogue being a matter of fact--and the influence which they exercised on
the future development of the novel,--these are the things that concern
us, and they are quite interesting and important enough to deserve a
little attention.
[Sidenote: Their characteristics.]
What is certain is that these Spanish romances themselves--which, as
some readers at any rate may be presumed to know, branch out into
endless genealogies in the _Amadis_ and _Palmerin_ lines, besides the
more or less outside developments which fared so hardly with the censors
of Don Quixote's library--as well as the later French examples of a not
dissimilar type, the capital instance of which, for literature, is Lord
Berners's translation of _Arthur of Little Britain_--do show the most
striking differences, not merely from the original twelfth- and
thirteenth-century Charlemagne and Arthur productions, but also from
intermediate variants and expansions of these. The most obvious of these
discrepancies is the singular amplification of the supernatural
elements. Of course these were not absent in the older romance
literature, especially in the Arthurian cycle. But there they had
certain characteristics which might almost deserve the adjective
"critical"--little criticism proper as there was in the Middle Ages.
They were very generally religious, and they almost always had what may
be called a poetic restraint about them. The whole Graal-story is
deliberately modelled on Scriptural suggestions; the miracle of
reconciliation and restoration which concludes _Amis and Amiles_ is the
work of a duly commissioned angel. There are giants, but they are
introduced moderately and equipped in consonance. The Saint's Life,
which, as it has been contended, exercised so large an influence on the
earlier romance, carried the nature, the poetry, the charm of its
supernatural elements into the romance itself.
[Sidenote: Extravagance in incident, nomenclature, etc.]
In the _Amadis_ cycle and in romances like _Arthur of Little Britain_
all this undergoes a change--not by any means for the better. What has
been unkindly, but not perhaps unjustly, called the "conjuror's
supernatural" takes the place of the poet's variety. One of the
personages of the _Knight of the Sun_ is a "Bedevilled Faun," and it is
really too much not to say that most of such personages are bedevilled.
In _Arthur of_ (so much the Lesser) _Britain_ there is, if I remember
rightly, a giant whose formidability partly consists in his spinning
round on a sort of bedevilled music-stool: and his class can seldom be
met with without three or seven heads, a similarly large number of legs
and hands, and the like. This sort of thing has been put down, not
without probability, to the Oriental suggestion which would come so
readily into Spain. It may be so or it may not. But it certainly imports
an element of puerility into romance, which is regrettable, and it
diminishes the dignity and the poetry of the things rather lamentably.
Whether it diminishes, and still more whether it originally diminished
the _readability_ of these same things, is quite another question.
Closely connected with it is the fancy for barbaric names of great
length and formidable sound, such as Famongomadan, Pintiquinestra, and
the like--a trait which, if anybody pleases, may be put down to the
distorted echo of more musical[122] appellations in Arabic and other
Eastern tongues, or to a certain childishness, for there is no doubt
that the youthful mind delights, and always has delighted, in such
things. The immense length of these romances even in themselves, and
still more with continuations from father to son and grandson, and
trains of descendants sometimes alternately named, can be less charged
as an innovation, though there is no doubt that it established a rule
which had only been an exception before. But, as will have been seen
earlier, the continuation of romance genealogically had been not
uncommon, and there had been a constant tendency to lengthen from the
positively terse _Roland_ to the prolix fifteenth-century forms. In fact
this went on till the extravagant length of the Scudery group made
itself impossible, and even afterwards, as all readers of Richardson
know, there was reluctance to shorten.
[Sidenote: The "cruel" heroine.]
We have, however, still to notice another peculiarity, and the most
important by far as concerns the history of the novel: this is the
ever-increasing tendency to exaggerate the "cruelty" of the heroine and
the sufferings of the lovers. This peculiarity is not specially
noticeable in the earliest and best of the group itself. Amadis suffers
plentifully; yet Oriana can hardly be called "cruel." But of the two
heroines of _Palmerin_, Polisarda does play the part to some extent, and
Miraguarda (whose name it is not perhaps fantastic to interpret as
"Admire her but beware of her") is positively ill-natured. Of course the
thing was no more a novelty in literature than it was in life. The
lines--
And cruel in the New
As in the Old one,
may certainly be transferred from the geographical world to the
historical. But in classical literature "cruelty" is attributed rather
indiscriminately to both sexes. The cliff of Leucas knew no distinction
of sex, and Sappho can be set against Anaxarete. Indeed, it was safer
for men to be cruel than for women, inasmuch as Aphrodite, among her
innumerable good qualities, was very severe upon unkind girls, while one
regrets to have to admit that no particular male deity was regularly
"affected" to the business of punishing light o' love men, though
Eros-Cupid may sometimes have done so. The Eastern mistress, for obvious
reasons, had not much chance of playing the Miraguarda part as a rule,
though there seems to me more chance of the convention coming from Arab
and Hebrew poetry than from any other source. But in the _Arabian
Nights_ at least, though there are lustful murderesses--eastern
Margarets of Burgundy, like Queen Labe of the Magicians,--there is
seldom any "cruelty," or even any tantalising, on the part of the
heroines.
A hasty rememberer of the sufferings of Lancelot and one or two other
heroes of the early and genuine romance might say, "Why go further than
this?" But on a little examination the cases will be found very
different. Neither Iseult nor Guinevere is cruel to her lover;
Orgueilleuse has a fair excuse in difference of rank and slight
acquaintance; persons like Tennyson's Ettarre, still more his Vivien,
are "sophisticated"--as we have pointed out already. Besides, Vivien and
Ettarre are frankly bad women, which is by no means the case with the
Polisardas and Miraguardas. They, if they did not introduce the
thing--which is, after all, as the old waterman in _Jacob Faithful_
says, "Human natur',"--established and conventionalised the Silvius and
Phoebe relation of lover and mistress. If Lancelot is banished more than
once or twice, it is because of Guinevere's real though unfounded
jealousy, not of any coquettish "cruelty" on her part; if Partenopeus
nearly perishes in his one similar banishment, it is because of his own
fault--his fault great and inexcusable. But the Amadisian heroes, as a
rule--unless they belong to the light o' love Galaor type, which would
not mind cruelty if it were exercised, but would simply laugh and ride
away--are almost painfully faithful and deserving; and their sojourns in
Tenebrous Isles, their encounters with Bedevilled Fauns, and the like,
are either pure misfortunes or the deliberate results of capricious
tyranny on the part of their mistresses.
Now of course this is the sort of thing which may be (and as a matter of
fact it no doubt was) tediously abused; but it is equally evident that
in the hands of a novelist of genius, or even of fair talent and
craftsmanship, it gives opportunity for extensive and ingenious
character-drawing, and for not a little "polite conversation." If _la
donna e mobile_ generally, she has very special opportunities of
exhibiting her mobility in the exercise of her caprice: and if it is the
business of the lover (as it is of minorities, according to a Right
Honourable politician) to suffer, the _amoureux transi_ who has some
wits and some power of expression can suffer to the genteelest of tunes
with the most ingenious fugues and variations. A great deal of the
actual charm of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poetry in all
languages comes from the rendering in verse of this very relation of
woman and man. We owe to the "dear Lady Disdain" idea not merely
Beatrice, but Beatrix long after her, and many another good thing both
in verse and in prose between Shakespeare and Thackeray.
In the _Amadis_ group (as in its slightly modernised successor, that of
the _Grand Cyrus_), the handling is so preposterously long and the
reliefs of dialogue and other things frequently managed with so little
skill, that, except for sheer passing of time, the books have been found
difficult to read. The present writer's knowledge of Spanish is too
sketchy to enable him to read them in the original with full comfort.
_Amadis_ and _Palmerin_ are legible enough in Southey's translations,
made, as one would expect from him, with all due effort to preserve the
language of the old English versions where possible. But Herberay's
sixteenth-century French is a very attractive and perfectly easy
language, thoroughly well suited to the matter. And if anything that has
been said is read as despite to these romances, the reading is wrong.
They have grave faults, but also real delights, and they have no small
"place i' the story."[123]
FOOTNOTES:
[110]
[Sidenote: Note on Montaigne.]
This suggestive influence may be found almost as strongly, though shown
with less literary craftsmanship, in Brantome's successor and to some
extent overlapper, Tallemant des Reaux. And it is almost needless to say
that in both _subjects_ for novel treatment "foison," as both French and
English would have said in their time. Nor may it be improper to add
that Montaigne himself, though more indirectly, assisted in speeding the
novel. The actual telling of a story is indeed not his strongest point:
the dulness of the _Travels_, if they were really his (on which point
the present writer cannot help entertaining a possibly unorthodox
doubt), would sufficiently show this. But the great effect which he
produced on French prose could not, as in the somewhat similar case of
Dryden in English a century later, but prove of immense aid to the
novelist. Except in the deliberately eccentric style, as in Rabelais'
own case, or in periods such as the Elizabethan and our own, where there
is a coterie ready to admire jargon, you cannot write novels, to
interest and satisfy readers, without a style, or a group of styles,
providing easy and clear narrative media. We shall see how, in the next
century, writers in forms apparently still more alien from the novel
helped it in the same way.
[111] The character of this Bourbon prince seems to have been very
faithfully though not maliciously drawn by Margaret (for the name,
_Gallice pulchrum_, is _Anglice pulchrius_, and our form may be
permitted in a note) as not ungenial, not exactly ungentlemanly, and by
no means hating his wife or being at all unkind to her, but constantly
"hard" on her in speech, openly regarding infidelity to her as a matter
of course, and not a little tinged by the savagery which (one is afraid)
the English wars had helped to introduce among the French nobility;
which the religious wars were deepening, and which, in the times of the
Fronde, came almost to its very worst, and, though somewhat tamed later,
lasted, and was no mean cause, if not so great a one as some think, of
the French Revolution. Margaret's love for her brother was ill rewarded
in many ways--among others by brutal scandal--and her later days were
embittered by failure to protect the new learning and the new faith she
had patronised earlier. But one never forgets Rabelais' address to her,
or the different but still delightful piece in which Marot is supposed
to have commemorated her Platonic graciousness; while her portrait,
though drawn in the hard, dry manner of the time, and with the tendency
of that time to "make a girl's nose a proboscis," is by no means
unsuggestive of actual physical charm.
[112] This phrase, though Biblical, of course, in spirit, is not, so far
as I remember, anywhere found textually in Holy Writ. It may be
patristic; in which case I shall be glad of learned information. It
sounds rather like St. Augustine. But I do not think it occurs earlier
in French, and the word _impossibilite_ is not banal in the connection.
[113] The famous phrase "amoureux _transi_" is simply untranslatable by
any single word in English for the adjective, or rather participle. Its
unmetaphorical use is, of course, commonest in the combination _transi
de froid_, "frozen," and so suggests in the other a lover shivering
actually under his mistress's shut window, or, metaphorically, under her
disdain.
[114] The expression (_passe oultre_) commented on in speaking of
Rabelais, and again one which has no English equivalent.
[115] A very early example of the special sense given to this word in
French increasingly during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth
centuries, of "freethinker" deepening to "atheist." Johnson's friend, it
will be remembered, regarded Philosophy as something to which the
irruption of Cheerfulness was fatal; Butler, as something acquirable by
reading Alexander Ross; a famous ancient saying, as the remembrancer of
death; and a modern usage, as something which has brass and glass
"instruments." But it was Hegel, was it not? or Carlyle? who summarised
the French view and its time of prevalence in the phrase, "When every
one was a philosopher who did not believe in the Devil."
[116] His translations of the _Andria_ and of Plato's _Lysis_; and his
verses, the chief charm of which is to be found in his adoption of the
"cut and broken" stanzas which the French Renaissance loved.
[117] Not to be confused with _Jehan_ Bouchet the poet, a much older
man, indeed some twenty years older than Rabelais, and as dull as
Raminagrobis Cretin himself, but the inventor or discoverer of that
agreeable _agnomen_ "Traverseur des Voies Perilleuses" which has been
noted above.
[118] Cholieres, I think, deserves the prize for sinking lowest.
[119] From all the endless welter of abuse of God's great gift of speech
[and writing] about the French Revolution, perhaps nothing has emerged
more clearly than that its evils were mainly due to the sterilisation of
the regular Provincial assemblies under the later monarchy.
[120] A person not bad of blood will always be glad to mention one of
the few good sides of a generally detestable character; and a person of
humour must always chuckle at some of the ways in which Calvin's
services to French prose were utilised.
[121] He did not confine his good offices to romances of _caballeria_.
In 1539 he turned into French the _Arnalte and Lucenda_ of Diego de San
Pedro (author of the more widely known _Carcel de Amor_), a very curious
if also rather tedious-brief love-story which had great influence in
France (see Reynier, _op. cit. inf._ pp. 66-73). This (though M. Reynier
did not know it) was afterwards versified in English by one of our minor
Carolines, and will appear in the third volume of the collected edition
of them now in course of publication by the Clarendon Press.
[122] Not always. Nouzhatoul-aouadat is certainly not as musical as
Pintiquinestra, though Nouronnihar as certainly is.
[123]
[Sidenote: Note on Helisenne de Crenne.]
There should be added here a very curious, and now, if not in its own
time, very rare book, my first knowledge of which I owed to a work
already mentioned, M. Gustave Reynier's _Le Roman Sentimental avant
l'Astree_ (Paris, 1908), though I was able, after this chapter was
composed, to find and read the original in the British Museum. It was
first printed in 1538, and bears, like other books of its time, a
disproportionately long title, which may, however, be easily shortened,
"_Les Angoisses douloureuses qui procedent d'Amour_ ... composees par
dame Helisenne de Crenne." This Helisenne or Helisaine seems to have
been a real person: and not the least of the remarkable group of women
authors who illustrate her time in France, though M. Reynier himself
admits that "it is difficult to know exactly _who_ she was." She appears
to have been of Picardy, and other extant and non-extant works are
attributed to her. Like almost everybody of her time she wrote in the
extreme _rhetoriqueur_ style--so much so indeed as to lead even Pasquier
into the blunder of supposing that Rabelais hit at her in the dialect of
the "Limousin scholar." The _Angoisses_, which M. Reynier's acute
examination shows to have been written by some one who must have known
Boccaccio's _Fiammetta_ (more than once Frenched about this time), is,
or gives itself out to be, the autobiography of a girl of noble birth
who, married at eleven years old and at first very fond of her husband,
becomes at thirteen the object of much courtship from many gallants. Of
these she selects, entirely on the love-at-first-sight principle, a very
handsome young man who passes in the street. She is well read and tries
to keep herself in order by stock examples, classical and romantic, of
ill-placed and ill-fated affection. Her husband (who seems to have been
a very good fellow for his time) gives her unconsciously what should
have been the best help of all, by praising her self-selected lover's
good looks and laughing at the young man's habit of staring at her. But
she has already spoken frankly of her own _appetit sensuel_, and she
proceeds to show this in the fashion which makes the fifteenth century
and the early sixteenth a sort of trough of animalism between the
altitudes of Mediaeval and Renaissance passion. Her lover turns out to
be an utter cad, boastful, blabbing, and almost cowardly (he tells her
in the usual stolen church interview, _Je crains merveilleusement
monsieur votre mari_). But it makes not the slightest difference; nor
does the at last awakened wrath of an at last not merely threatened but
wideawake husband. Apparently she never has the chance of being actually
guilty, for her husband finally, and very properly, shuts her up in a
country house under strong duennaship. This finishes the first part, but
there are two more, which return to more ancient ways. The lover
Guenelic goes off to seek adventures, which he himself recounts, and
acquires considerable improvement in them. He comes back, endeavours to
free his mistress from her captivity, and does actually fly with her;
but they are pursued; and though the lover and a friend of his with the
rather Amadisian name of "Quezinstra" do their best, the heroine dies of
weariness and shock, to be followed by her lover.
This latter part is comparatively commonplace. M. Reynier thinks very
highly of the first. It is possible to go with him a certain part of the
way, but not, I think, the whole, except from a purely "naturalist" and
not at all "sentimental" point of view. Some bold bad men have, of
course, maintained that when the other sex is possessed by an _appetit
sensuel_ this overcomes everything else, and seems, if not actually to
exclude, at any rate by no means always or often to excite, that
accompanying transcendentalism which is not uncommon with men, and
which, comprised with the appetite, makes the love of the great lovers,
whether they are represented by Dante or by Donne, by Shakespeare or by
Shelley. Whether this be truth or libel _non nostrum est_. But it is
certain that Helisenne, as she represents herself, does not make the
smallest attempt to spiritualise (even in the lowest sense) or inspirit
the animality of her affection. She wants her lover as she might want a
pork chop instead of a mutton one; and if she is sometimes satisfied
with seeing him, it is as if she were looking at that pork chop through
a restaurateur's window and finding it better than not seeing it at all
and contenting herself with the mutton. Still this result is probably
the result at least as much of want of art as of original _mis_feeling;
and the book certainly does deserve notice here.
The original _Oeuvres_ of Helisenne form a rather appetising little
volume, fat, and close and small printed, as indeed is the case with
most, but not quite all, of the books now under notice. The
complementary pieces are mainly moralities, as indeed are, in intention,
the _Angoisses_ themselves. These latter seem to me better worth
reprinting than most other things as yet not reprinted, from the
_Heptameron_ (Helisenne, be it remembered, preceded Marguerite) for
nearly a hundred years. The later parts, though (or perhaps even
because) they contrast curiously with the first, are by no means
destitute of interest; and M. Reynier, I think, is a little hard on them
if he has perhaps been a little kind to their predecessor. The lingo is
indeed almost always stupendous and occasionally terrible. The printer
aids sometimes; for it was not at once that I could emend the
description of the B. V. M. as "Mere et Fille de _l'aliltonat_ [ant]
plasmateur" into "_altitonant_" ("loud-thundering"), while _plasmateur_
itself, though perfectly intelligible and legitimate, a favourite with
the _rhetoriqueurs_, and borrowed from them even in Middle Scots, is not
exactly everybody's word. But from her very exordium she may be fairly
judged. "Au temps que la Deesse Cibele despouilla son glacial et gelide
habit, et vestit sa verdoyante robe, tapissee de diverses couleurs, je
fus procree, de noblesse." And, after all, there _is_ a certain nobility
in this fashion of speech and of literary presentation.