Part 5

First among the poets of the period falls to be mentioned the shadowy personality of Olivier Basselin. Modern criticism has attacked the identity of the jovial miller, who was once supposed to have written and perhaps invented the songs called _vaux de vire_, and to have also carried on a patriotic warfare against the English. But though Jean le Houx may have written the poems published under Basselin's name two centuries later, it is taken as certain that an actual Olivier wrote actual vaux de vire at the beginning of the 15th century. About Christine de Pisan (1363-1430) and Alain Chartier (1392-c. 1430) there is no such doubt. Christine was the daughter of an Italian astrologer who was patronized by Charles V. She was born in Italy but brought up in France, and she enriched the literature of her adopted country with much learning, good sense and patriotism. She wrote history, devotional works and poetry; and though her literary merit is not of the highest, it is very far from despicable. Alain Chartier, best known to modern readers by the story of _Margaret of Scotland's Kiss_, was a writer of a somewhat similar character. In both Christine and Chartier there is a great deal of rather heavy moralizing, and a great deal of rather pedantic erudition. But it is only fair to remember that the intolerable political and social evils of the day called for a good deal of moralizing, and that it was the function of the writers of this time to fill up as well as they could the scantily filled vessels of medieval science and learning. A very different person is Charles d'Orleans (1391-1465), one of the greatest of _grands seigneurs_, for he was the father of a king of France, and heir to the duchies of Orleans and Milan. Charles, indeed, if not a Roland or a Bayard, was an admirable poet. He is the best-known and perhaps the best writer of the graceful poems in which an artificial versification is strictly observed, and helps by its recurrent lines and modulated rhymes to give to poetry something of a musical accompaniment even without the addition of music properly so called. His ballades are certainly inferior to those of Villon, but his rondels are unequalled. For fully a century and a half these forms engrossed the attention of French lyrical poets. Exercises in them were produced in enormous numbers, and of an excellence which has only recently obtained full recognition even in France. Charles d'Orleans is himself sufficient proof of what can be done in them in the way of elegance, sweetness, and grace which some have unjustly called effeminacy. But that this effeminacy was no natural or inevitable fault of the ballades and the rondeaux was fully proved by the most remarkable literary figure of the 15th century in France. To Francois Villon (1431-1463?), as to other great single writers, no attempt can be made to do justice in this place. His remarkable life and character especially lie outside our subject. But he is universally recognized as the most important single figure of French literature before the Renaissance. His work is very strange in form, the undoubtedly genuine part of it consisting merely of two compositions, known as the great and little Testament, written in stanzas of eight lines of eight syllables each, with lyrical compositions in ballade and rondeau form interspersed. Nothing in old French literature can compare with the best of these, such as the "Ballade des dames du temps jadis," the "Ballade pour sa mere," "La Grosse Margot," "Les Regrets de la belle Heaulmiere," and others; while the whole composition is full of poetical traits of the most extraordinary vigour, picturesqueness and pathos. Towards the end of the century the poetical production of the time became very large. The artificial measures already alluded to, and others far more artificial and infinitely less beautiful, were largely practised. The typical poet of the end of the 15th century is Guillaume Cretin (d. 1525), who distinguished himself by writing verses with punning rhymes, verses ending with double or treble repetitions of the same sound, and many other tasteless absurdities, in which, as Pasquier remarks, "il perdit toute la grace et la liberte de la composition." The other favourite direction of the poetry of the time was a vein of allegorical moralizing drawn from the _Roman de la rose_ through the medium of Chartier and Christine, which produced "Castles of Love," "Temples of Honour," and such like. The combination of these drifts in verse-writing produced a school known in literary history, from a happy phrase of the satirist Coquillart (_v. inf._), as the "Grands Rhetoriqueurs." The chief of these besides Cretin were Jean Molinet (d. 1507); Jean Meschinot (c. 1420-1491), author of the _Lunettes des princes_; Florimond Robertet (d. 1522); Georges Chastellain (1404-1475), to be mentioned again; and Octavien de Saint-Gelais (1466-1502), father of a better poet than himself. Yet some of the minor poets of the time are not to be despised. Such are Henri Baude (1430-1490), a less pedantic writer than most, Martial d'Auvergne (1440-1508), whose principal work is _L'Amant rendu cordelier au service de l'amour_, and others, many of whom formed part of the poetical court which Charles d'Orleans kept up at Blois after his release.

Coquillart.

While the serious poetry of the age took this turn, there was no lack of lighter and satirical verse. Villon, indeed, were it not for the depth and pathos of his poetical sentiment, might be claimed as a poet of the lighter order, and the patriotic diatribes against the English to which we have alluded easily passed into satire. The political quarrels of the latter part of the century also provoked much satirical composition. The disputes of the Bien Public and those between Louis XI. and Charles of Burgundy employed many pens. The most remarkable piece of the light literature of the first is "Les Anes Volants," a ballad on some of the early favourites of Louis. The battles of France and Burgundy were waged on paper between Gilles des Ormes and the above-named Georges Chastelain, typical representatives of the two styles of 15th-century poetry already alluded to--Des Ormes being the lighter and more graceful writer, Chastelain a pompous and learned allegorist. The most remarkable representative of purely light poetry outside the theatre is Guillaume Coquillart (1421-1510), a lawyer of Champagne, who resided for the greater part of his life in Reims. This city, like others, suffered from the pitiless tyranny of Louis XI. The beginnings of the standing army which Charles VII. had started were extremely unpopular, and the use to which his son put them by no means removed this unpopularity. Coquillart described the military man of the period in his _Monologue du gendarme casse_. Again, when the king entertained the idea of unifying the taxes and laws of the different provinces, Coquillart, who was named commissioner for this purpose, wrote on the occasion a satire called _Les Droits nouveaux_. A certain kind of satire, much less good-tempered than the earlier forms, became indeed common at this epoch. M. Lenient has well pointed out that a new satirical personification dominates this literature. It is no longer Renart with his cynical gaiety, or the curiously travestied and almost amiable Devil of the Middle Ages. Now it is Death as an incident ever present to the imagination, celebrated in the thousand repetitions of the _Danse Macabre_, sculptured all over the buildings of the time, even frequently performed on holidays and in public. With the usual tendency to follow pattern, the idea of the "dance" seems to have been extended, and we have a _Danse aux aveugles_ (1464) from Pierre Michaut, where the teachers are fortune, love and death, all blind. All through the century, too, anonymous verse of the lighter kind was written, some of it of great merit. The folk-songs already alluded to, published by Gaston Paris, show one side of this composition, and many of the pieces contained in M. de Montaiglon's extensive _Recueil des anciennes poesies francaises_ exhibit others.

The 15th century was perhaps more remarkable for its achievements in prose than in poetry. It produced, indeed, no prose writer of great distinction, except Comines; but it witnessed serious, if not extremely successful, efforts at prose composition. The invention of printing finally substituted the reader for the listener, and when this substitution has been effected, the main inducement to treat unsuitable subjects in verse is gone. The study of the classics at first hand contributed to the same end. As early as 1458 the university of Paris had a Greek professor. But long before this time translations in prose had been made. Pierre Bercheure (Bersuire) (1290-1352) had already translated Livy. Nicholas Oresme (c. 1334-1382), the tutor of Charles V., gave a version of certain Aristotelian works, which enriched the language with a large number of terms, then strange enough, now familiar. Raoul de Presles (1316-1383) turned into French the _De civitate Dei_ of St Augustine. These writers or others composed _Le Songe du vergier_, an elaborate discussion of the power of the pope. The famous chancellor, Jean Charlier or Gerson (1363-1429), to whom the _Imitation_ has among so many others been attributed, spoke constantly and wrote often in the vulgar tongue, though he attacked the most famous and popular work in that tongue, the _Roman de la rose_. Christine de Pisan and Alain Chartier were at least as much prose writers as poets; and the latter, while he, like Gerson, dealt much with the reform of the church, used in his _Quadriloge invectif_ really forcible language for the purpose of spurring on the nobles of France to put an end to her sufferings and evils. These moral and didactic treatises were but continuations of others, which for convenience sake we have hitherto left unnoticed. Though verse was in the centuries prior to the 15th the favourite medium for literary composition, it was by no means the only one; and moral and educational treatises--some referred to above--already existed in pedestrian phrase. Certain household books (_Livres de raison_) have been preserved, some of which date as far back as the 13th century. These contain not merely accounts, but family chronicles, receipts and the like. Accounts of travel, especially to the Holy Land, culminated in the famous _Voyage_ of Mandeville which, though it has never been of so much importance in French as in English, perhaps first took vernacular form in the French tongue. Of the 14th century, we have a _Menagier de Paris_, intended for the instruction of a young wife, and a large number of miscellaneous treatises of art, science and morality, while private letters, mostly as yet unpublished, exist in considerable numbers, and are generally of the moralizing character; books of devotion, too, are naturally frequent.

Early sermon-writers.

Comines.

But the most important divisions of medieval energy in prose composition are the spoken exercises of the pulpit and the bar. The beginnings of French sermons have been much discussed, especially the question whether St Bernard, whose discourses we possess in ancient, but doubtfully contemporary French, pronounced them in that language or in Latin. Towards the end of the 12th century, however, the sermons of Maurice de Sully (1160-1196) present the first undoubted examples of homiletics in the vernacular, and they are followed by many others--so many indeed that the 13th century alone counts 261 sermon-writers, besides a large body of anonymous work. These sermons were, as might indeed be expected, chiefly cast in a somewhat scholastic form--theme, exordium, development, example and peroration following in regular order. The 14th-century sermons, on the other hand, have as yet been little investigated. It must, however, be remembered that this age was the most famous of all for its scholastic illustrations, and for the early vigour of the Dominican and Franciscan orders. With the end of the century and the beginning of the 15th, the importance of the pulpit begins to revive. The early years of the new age have Gerson for their representative, while the end of the century sees the still more famous names of Michel Menot (1450-1518), Olivier Maillard (c. 1430-1502), and Jean Rauhn (1443-1514), all remarkable for the practice of a vigorous and homely style of oratory, recoiling before no aid of what we should nowadays style buffoonery, and manifesting a creditable indifference to the indignation of principalities and powers. Louis XI. is said to have threatened to throw Maillard into the Seine, and many instances of the boldness of these preachers and the rough vigour of their oratory have been preserved. Froissart had been followed as a chronicler by Enguerrand de Monstrelet (c. 1390-1453) and by the historiographers of the Burgundian court, Chastelain, already mentioned, whose interesting _Chronique de Jacques de Lalaing_ is much the most attractive part of his work, and Olivier de la Marche. The memoir and chronicle writers, who were to be of so much importance in French literature, also begin to be numerous at this period. Juvenal des Ursins (1388-1473), an anonymous bourgeois de Paris (two such indeed), and the author of the _Chronique scandaleuse_, may be mentioned as presenting the character of minute observation and record which has distinguished the class ever since. Jean le maire de (not _des_) Belges (1473-c. 1525) was historiographer to Louis XII. and wrote _Illustrations des Gaules_. But Comines (1445-1509) is no imitator of Froissart or of any one else. The last of the quartette of great French medieval historians, he does not yield to any of his three predecessors in originality or merit, but he is very different from them. He fully represents the mania of the time for statecraft, and his book has long ranked with that of Machiavelli as a manual of the art, though he has not the absolutely non-moral character of the Italian. His memoirs, considered merely as literature, show a style well suited to their purport,--not, indeed, brilliant or picturesque, but clear, terse and thoroughly well suited to the expression of the acuteness, observation and common sense of their author.

The Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles.

Antoine de la Salle.

Influence of the Renaissance.

But prose was not content with the domain of serious literature. It had already long possessed a respectable position as a vehicle of romance, and the end of the 14th and the beginning of the 15th centuries were pre-eminently the time when the epics of chivalry were re-edited and extended in prose. Few, however, of these extensions offer much literary interest. On the other hand, the best prose of the century, and almost the earliest which deserves the title of a satisfactory literary medium, was employed for the telling of romances in miniature. The _Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles_ is undoubtedly the first work of prose belles-lettres in French, and the first, moreover, of a long and most remarkable class of literary work in which French writers may challenge all comers with the certainty of victory--the short prose tale of a comic character. This remarkable work has usually been attributed, like the somewhat similar but later _Heptameron_, to a knot of literary courtiers gathered round a royal personage, in this case the dauphin Louis, afterwards Louis XI. Some evidence has recently been produced which seems to show that this tradition, which attributed some of the tales to Louis himself, is erroneous, but the question is still undecided. The subjects of the _Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles_ are by no means new. They are simply the old themes of the fabliaux treated in the old way. The novelty is in the application of prose to such a purpose, and in the crispness, the fluency and the elegance of the prose used. The fortunate author or editor to whom these admirable tales have of late been attributed is Antoine de la Salle (1398-1461), who, if this attribution and certain others be correct, must be allowed to be one of the most original and fertile authors of early French literature. La Salle's one acknowledged work is the story of _Petit Jehan de Saintre_, a short romance exhibiting great command of character and abundance of delicate draughtsmanship. To this not only the authorship, part-authorship or editorship of the _Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles_ has been added; but the still more famous and important work of _L'Avocat Patelin_ has been assigned by respectable, though of course conjecturing, authority to the same paternity. The generosity of critics towards La Salle has not even stopped here. A fourth masterpiece of the period, _Les Quinze Joies de mariage_, has also been assigned to him. This last work, like the other three, is satirical in subject, and shows for the time a wonderful mastery of the language. Of the fifteen joys of marriage, or, in other words, the fifteen miseries of husbands, each has a chapter assigned to it, and each is treated with the peculiar mixture of gravity and ridicule which it requires. All who have read the book confess its infinite wit and the grace of its style. It is true that it has been reproached with cruelty and with a lack of the moral sentiment. But humanity and morality were not the strong point of the 15th century. There is, it must be admitted, about most of its productions a lack of poetry and a lack of imagination, produced, it may be, partly by political and other conditions outside literature, but very observable in it. The old forms of literature itself had lost their interest, and new ones possessing strength to last and power to develop themselves had not yet appeared. It was impossible, even if the taste for it had survived, to spin out the old themes any longer. But the new forces required some time to set to work, and to avail themselves of the tremendous weapon which the press had put into their hands. When these things had adjusted themselves, literature of a varied and vigorous kind became once more possible and indeed necessary, nor did it take long to make its appearance.

_16th Century._--In no country was the literary result of the Renaissance more striking and more manifold than in France. The double effect of the study of antiquity and the religious movement produced an outburst of literary developments of the most diverse kinds, which even the fierce and sanguinary civil dissensions of the Reformation did not succeed in checking. While the Renaissance in Italy had mainly exhausted its effects by the middle of the 16th century, while in Germany those effects only paved the way for a national literature, and did not themselves greatly contribute thereto, while in England it was not till the extreme end of the period that a great literature was forthcoming--in France almost the whole century was marked by the production of capital works in every branch of literary effort. Not even the 17th century, and certainly not the 18th, can show such a group of prose writers and poets as is formed by Calvin, St Francis de Sales, Montaigne, du Vair, Bodin, d'Aubigne, the authors of the _Satire Menippee_, Monluc, Brantome, Pasquier, Rabelais, des Periers, Herberay des Essarts, Amyot, Garnier, Marot, Ronsard and the rest of the "Pleiade," and finally Regnier. These great writers are not merely remarkable for the vigour and originality of their thoughts, the freshness, variety and grace of their fancy, the abundance of their learning and the solidity of their arguments in the cases where argument is required. Their great merit is the creation of a language and a style able to give expression to these good gifts. The foregoing account of the medieval literature of France will have shown sufficiently that it is not lawful to despise the literary capacities and achievements of the older French. But the old language, with all its merits, was ill-suited to be a vehicle for any but the simpler forms of literary composition. Pleasant or affecting tales could be told in it with interest and pathos. Songs of charming _naivete_ and grace could be sung; the requirements of the epic and the chronicle were suitably furnished. But it was barren of the terms of art and science; it did not readily lend itself to sustained eloquence, to impassioned poetry or to logical discussion. It had been too long accustomed to leave these things to Latin as their natural and legitimate exponent, and it bore marks of its original character as a _lingua rustica_, a tongue suited for homely conversation, for folk-lore and for ballads, rather than for the business of the forum and the court, the speculations of the study, and the declamation of the theatre. Efforts had indeed been made, culminating in the heavy and tasteless erudition of the schools of Chartier and Cretin, to supply the defect; but it was reserved for the 16th century completely to efface it. The series of prose writers from Calvin to Montaigne, of poets from Marot to Regnier, elaborated a language yielding to no modern tongue in beauty, richness, flexibility and strength, a language which the reactionary purism of succeeding generations defaced rather than improved, and the merits of which have in still later days been triumphantly vindicated by the confession and the practice of all the greatest writers of modern France.

Marot.

Ronsard.

The Pleiade.