Part 12

Before French literature could make much further advance, it must pass, after that of Italy, under pupilage to the Renaissance. As in England of the fifteenth century, there is first a period of stagnation, and then one during which France is borrowing and assimilating to its utmost lessons in thought and style, in form and substance, from the lately recovered classical masterpieces of Greece and Rome, as well as from the Italian writers who first enjoyed and exploited these treasures. During these stagnant and growing stages of French literature it exercises comparatively little effect upon our own.

The Renaissance naturally reached France before it extended to England, and the Renaissance meant in France what it had meant in Italy, and what it afterwards came to mean in England, namely, the widening of the intellectual and moral horizon, broader knowledge and broader views, a shaking off of old and dry traditions. And therewith it also meant greater variety of subjects in literature and the reign of better models of thought and expression. The effect of the Renaissance on French literature was to draw the thoughts of authors away from the old monotonous round of romances and allegories, and at the same time away from the old monotonous expressions and phrases; to make them attack all interesting subjects of thought, and meanwhile to adapt and polish the instrument of language which expressed them. This it was which the recovery of the Greek and Latin classics accomplished for Italians, Frenchmen, and Englishmen alike, supplying them with new range and scope, with new patterns and principles.

But as in England, so in France, this new birth and literary reformation did not exercise its full effect immediately. In England it gradually culminated in the Elizabethan age, in France it only attained its full development in the seventeenth century. That is to say, it was actually slower of progress in France than in our own literature.

For a time, while the first influences of the Renaissance were being felt, the effect in France was, as in England, a severance from the old subjects and methods, without a full adoption of the classical subjects and principles. The classical influence acts as a solvent before it comes to act as a crystallizing agent. There is, in fact, a transition period, during which writing is left free to attempt various forms. If a man of natural genius arises in such an epoch, he will give us his natural self, and so may create us prose or verse which, despite a deficiency in knowledge, will be immortal through its own truth and strength. If on the other hand at such a transition period men who write are lacking in native power, they will write much worse when they follow no models and adhere to no principles. In England, during the transition from the epoch of Chaucer to the time of Wyatt and Surrey, there appeared no distinguished poetic genius, and, except among Scottish writers like Dunbar, little more than tiresome production. In France, on the contrary, there were two distinguished poets, Villon (fifteenth century) and Marot (early sixteenth). These were stimulated by the new ideas, but were not yet dominated by the new classical models. They were freed from the mediaeval shackles, and not yet fettered in the bonds of misapprehended and misapplied “classical” principles.

François Villon wrote during the latter half of the fifteenth century, and is principally known by his ballads, which were something quite new to French literature, and have, one may venture to say, remained unique therein. From the old artificial romances and allegories he breaks clean away. He is as original and independent as our poet Burns, whom, by the way, he somewhat resembled in personal character. His merit, like that of the Greeks whom he did not know, lies in his truth, in the candid expression of his own personal emotions, in his naive confessions, in his sincere pathos. We all sympathize with emotions and confessions of this nature, and therefore Villon, like Burns, possesses a permanent and a universal value. And not only is he true in sentiment, he is clear and direct in his phrase, and musical in his verse.

Clément Marot opens the sixteenth century. He has been called the father of modern French poetry. If this means that he wrote with an ease and sprightliness, and a vein of urbane satire, which are usually associated with the _esprit gaulois_, but which skim rather along the surface of things, it is true. But if it means that he is the consummation of the Renaissance, and that the critical principles of French poetry were established in his time, it is without truth. For Marot, like Villon, is a poet and an artist without following the despotic rules which afterwards came to prevail in France, and he furthermore sought his themes rather in the old French subjects, the romances and the _fabliaux_, than in realms of classical antiquity. The Italian influence, however, touches him and leads him into pastorals, which, we must note, were known to Spenser.

Villon and Marot are both of the transition period, and not wholly of the Renaissance. They both fell short in one great respect; they lacked depth and elevation. This is a vice to which all French verse is prone, setting, as it does, so special a value on form; but it was the more discoverable in these two poets, because the rich intellectual nutriment of antiquity had not yet been assimilated by them, because their minds laboured under the intellectual poverty of mediaevalism, because, in other words, they lacked the substance with which the best ancient literature is crammed. Their poetry has many blossoms, but bears little fruit. Yet they mark one great step in progress. They are emancipated from the old mediaeval artificiality.

While Villon and Marot were thus emancipated, there were others during this transition time who were not by any means so. On the one hand they allegorized, like the trouvères, to the utmost; their subjects were obsolete and unreal; on the other, their language was trivial and their contents uneven. Verse literature seemed to need bracing and correction in the light of advancing study of the Greek and Latin masterpieces, and it is to the administering of such correction that we come in what is known as the _Pléiade_.

The _Pléiade_, or constellation of the seven stars, was the term applied to seven men of letters, who formed themselves into a coterie or league about the year 1550, with the professed resolve of reforming the French language and French literary methods. The conception is very French. This cool manner of looking at language and literary expression as subject to definite laws of art, which may be codified by a league or academy, is contrary to English notions. Not so with the French. They have no desire for impulsive and perhaps erratic individuality. This is one of their clearest characteristics. Of the _Pléiade_ the two greatest names are Ronsard, the poet, and Du Bellay, who was both poet and manifesto-writer. Their object, as stated by themselves, was to bring French literature nearer to the classical models of Greece and Rome, and to create a nobler form and use of the language for literary purposes. And while Du Bellay was to write his manifesto, Ronsard was to give a practical illustration of the theory, by himself composing odes and sonnets in the proper style. The attempt was bold, and it was successful. For fifty years all French literature “Ronsardized.” Here are a few sentences of the manifesto concerning the _Défense et Illustration de la Langue Française_. “Our ancestors have left us our language so poor and bare, that it stands in need of the ornaments, and, so to speak, the features of other people.... By what means can we hasten its development? By the imitation of the ancients.... Translating is not a sufficient means of elevating our vulgar tongue to an equality with the most famous. What must we do? Imitate! Imitate the Romans as they did the Greeks!... We must digest the best authors and convert them into blood and nutriment.... You that mean to be a poet, read and re-read the Greek and Latin models. Then leave all those old French _rondeaux_, _ballades_, _virelais_, _chants royaux_, _chansons_ and other such vulgarities (_épiceries_), which corrupt the taste of our tongue, and only serve to testify to our ignorance. Throw yourself on those witty epigrams in imitation of Martial!... Distil with a flowing style tender elegies after the manner of Ovid and Tibullus!... Sing me some of those odes as yet unknown to the French tongue ... and let there be nothing in which does not appear some trace of rare and ancient learning.”

We need not agree with all this breezy advice. It is impossible to re-create a language all at once. If there is not inspiration, there cannot be good poetry, though one may have infinite good models to follow. Nevertheless the new school was a success for half a century, and both Ronsard and Du Bellay, though often mechanical and often flat, have left a few imperishable sonnets and other pieces. Our own Elizabethans not only read Marot and his contemporary Saint-Gelais (who introduced the Petrarchan sonnet into France), they also read Du Bellay, who finally established the sonnet and at the same time served as a pattern for English writers. One writer of the Ronsardist school, Du Bartas, was a writer of real religious conviction, and his _Semaine_ or _Week of Creation_, translated by Sylvester, gained no small currency in England.

What calls for particular notice in this connection is the deliberate way in which French writers and critics can contemplate and formulate the principles and methods of good literature. The English, to whom so much of French verse is cold and mechanical, may perhaps think that it is this same formulating which has done incalculable harm to poetry, a thing in its nature as incapable of regulation as are our emotions and our thoughts. But the French are of another opinion, and it is at least fair to say that, if writing by rules hampers the flight of genius and prevents creations of the sublime, it on the other hand checks the production of that utter doggerel which has been so often inflicted on readers of English literature. We shall do best to complete at once the history of this formulation, and then retrace our steps.

Early in the seventeenth century flourished the man to whom first were due those definite and despotic critical principles which were fully developed by Boileau and which came to tyrannize in England after the restoration of Charles II, subsequently reaching their perfection in Pope and his eighteenth-century school. It is true that Malherbe represents a movement which was simultaneously proceeding in Italy, and was also being begun in England by Waller and his follower Denham. But he was destined to exert a peculiar influence. François Malherbe was by nature critic, and not creator. He, like the _Pléiade_, offers himself as a deliberate reformer of literature. His thoughts are fixed on style and its correctness. His notion of verses is that they should be “beautiful as prose,” without any of the bold irregularities of a Pindar or the sentimental vagaries of a Petrarch. He measures words and syllables, toils laboriously over every line he writes, and prunes down metaphors and hazardous expressions with the deliberate knife of cold reason. What he compasses is conciseness and preciseness of phrase, and what he revels in is the sense, not of a profound thought or keen emotion expressed, but of a technical difficulty overcome. He is the true parent of all that verse, in reality but brilliant rhyming prose, which prevailed in France for two centuries, and which also reigned in England for at least one. It is he who taught Corneille and Racine how to form a verse, and Boileau how to criticize one. It was Boileau who passed on the word to our English Pope, Parnell, Gay, and Johnson. Dryden was doubtless the intermediate step, but it is to Boileau that Pope expressly resorts. But for Boileau, Pope’s _Essay on Criticism_ would not have existed.

Nicolas Boileau, who flourished and dictated the principles of criticism in his _Art Poétique_ during the life of Dryden, in the latter part of the seventeenth century, was long called in France the “law-giver of Parnassus.” There is little doubt that the title was justified. His bent and character were almost identical with those of Pope. He was a keen satirist, acute critic, and clever reviewer, but he was no true “poet.” His avowed object was to remove uncertainty of taste and to establish criticism on a basis of mathematical finality, to set forth a positive doctrine of literary judgement. And what his doctrine amounts to is that reason and good sense must decide against all spontaneity of taste. This means that poetry must attempt no audacious flights of fancy, must restrain its metaphors, must avoid complexity, and be sheer, plain, good sense, admirably expressed. And who that has read French poetry thenceforth until the rise of Victor Hugo, or who that has read English poetry from Dryden down to Cowper, will not perceive that the result of this doctrine was disaster to poetry, and that it produced, as Matthew Arnold expresses it, instead of so many classics of our poetry, just so many classics of our prose writing in verse? Poetry cannot be judged by “common sense,” nor written by “common sense.” It is an imaginative art, and therefore requires uncommon sense.

When, after the Restoration, the second great influence from French literature came distinctly over England, it came in this shape, one which was, on the whole, to be regretted.

There is one particular department of French verse of the seventeenth century which deserves a special note for students of English literature. In this department there flourished between Malherbe and Boileau sundry minor poets who had their representatives and pupils in the English Court of the restored Charles II. These were the poets of amusement and diversion, the writers of society verses on the one hand, and of drinking songs on the other. The art of expression elaborated by Malherbe told on these. Voiture, with his _vers de société_, and St. Amant, with his Anacreontic poems, compose in a polished style worthy of the literary reform which Malherbe and Boileau brought to pass. When Charles II came back from France to England, his court was entertained by “society verses” and by convivial songs written on the French pattern. Such, among others, are verses and songs of Dorset, Roscommon, Sedley, and some of those of Waller.

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Meanwhile, in prose, the productions of France were of much greater intrinsic importance. At the end of the fourteenth century the chatty chronicler, or historian, Froissart, had combined much of the _naïveté_ and freshness of Herodotus with much of the narrative picturesqueness of Walter Scott. A century later, under the growing influence of the new thought, the conception of history has grown almost philosophical, certainly practical and judicial, in Comines. The full effect of the Renaissance, however, appears in three sixteenth-century writers of very different characters and spheres of work.

Amyot, the translator of Plutarch, is not merely famous for unlocking the treasure-house of that author to the French and thence to the English world; he also taught how the prose of the language should be written for biography or essay. Somewhat earlier—contemporary with Sir Thomas More—appears the learned, satirical, gross, jolly, pathetic priest, Rabelais, whose mock romance, the _Life of Gargantua and Pantagruel_, is still a classic to those who know how to discern, beneath all its terrible coarseness, its grotesque obscurity, and its deliberate buffoonery, the bold criticism, and wise as bold, of contemporary society, especially of religion and the church. In the freedom and range of his thought he embodies the Renaissance, but a Renaissance which has imparted vigour and freshness without having yet taught the lesson of literary form and proportion. Rabelais is like no one else, but he contains elements which recall the broader, comic side of Shakespeare, and others which anticipate the scathing railleries of Swift. Sterne, apart from his natural affinities with the earlier ecclesiastic, draws upon him liberally.

More pleasant reading, both for its sweeter matter and its ease of style, is the work of the Gascon, Michel de Montaigne—a contemporary of Sir Philip Sidney—whose _Essays_, while the first example in that domain of writing, have remained unique in their kind. To the reading of Seneca and of Amyot’s Plutarch he confessedly owed much, but his conception of the essay as an easy-going monologue of moralizing self-revelation is his own. He chooses a theme, begins to discourse in an amiable conversational way concerning it, rambles from it into side paths, plucking the flowers of quotation, and returns to it when it so pleases him. Meanwhile, his real subject is himself. Montaigne the writer is serenely contemplating Montaigne the man. He is submitting him, his tastes, views, habits, and feelings, to a friendly inspection, recorded in the easy style of a man of the world, which charms the reader as he might be charmed by varied and fruity talk. It charms him all the more because the self depicted by Montaigne is always in many respects the self of the listener, who feels all through that touch of nature which makes the whole world kin. For Montaigne is no narrow egotist or pedant. He displays a wide sympathy or tolerance, and he is no dogmatist. His motto was _Que sçais-je?_ To Elizabethan England the _Essays_ were well known, either directly or through the translation of Florio, with which Shakespeare was familiar. The _Essays_ of Bacon, with all their unlikeness to Montaigne, are clearly indebted to his example. How far the Frenchman’s influence has since extended is rendered incalculable by its very breadth and pervasiveness.

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For the sake of easier apprehension we may now briefly review French poetry proper, noting its characteristics and its effects on the poetry of England.

Early French poetry, we have said, consisted of romances, of chivalrous adventures, allegories, and _fabliaux_. The nature of these troubadour and trouvère compositions has been described. Till after Chaucer’s day the romances and allegories of France flourished almost as well on English soil, whether read and sung in the original French or adapted—like the _Romance of Alexander_ or the _Romance of the Rose_—in English dress. Chaucer himself translated the _Roman de la Rose_, and otherwise made free use of the French material, including the _fabliaux_. His contemporary, Gower, is almost wholly a copier of the French, and, during all the epoch which is called the Chaucerian, authors known and nameless used the stock of mediaeval France as freely and as monotonously as the French themselves.

This was the first period of our debt. It passed away wholly with all other things mediaeval, with chivalry and feudalism, superstition and ignorance.

Then came the transition period to the Renaissance, with Villon and Marot, who are among the truest poets of France just because they wrote without a deliberate theory. To those two poets we English are, however, in no special debt. The _Pléiade_ next began a conscious literary reform with a propaganda of its own, only to be further reformed in turn by the poet-critic Malherbe, who inaugurated the era of “correctness,” of prose in poetry, which was consummated and legislated upon by Boileau. Thenceforth, until the early nineteenth century (the “romantic” period, when French verse is under the influence of England and Germany), French poetry is nearly all alike—clear, cleverly, often brilliantly expressed, graceful, eminently sane, but generally cold, matter-of-fact, colourless, often satirical, rarely pathetic, never deeply imaginative or informed with profound emotion. The prime characteristic of French poetry since Malherbe’s time is that it is beautified prose. The prime characteristic of the French literary mind is its willingness to be disciplined and checked, to be rendered uniform by means of rules and precepts.

On English writing in verse this French literature of the “golden age,” the seventeenth century, had effect in two chief departments—in determining the school of social verse-writers and convivialists at the court of the restored Stuarts, and in dominating the poetical ideals from Dryden down to Cowper, in producing, in fact, the so-called “correct” or “classical” school of English literature, the school which said with Pope

True wit is nature to advantage dressed, What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed.

This school aimed at polished, condensed, sparkling expression of thoughts which should be reasonable and easily understandable. How defective is such an ideal of poetry needs little demonstration. The true note of the time is the treatment of mediocre subjects in language which is the perfection of neatness and point.

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Along with the development of classical verse, and of the more happily directed prose which is the chief glory of French literature, there was proceeding the development of the classical drama.

Dramatic performances in France began in the manner usual in all Catholic countries, namely, with representations of religious events, biblical or legendary, such as the Passion of Christ or the miracles of the saints. The “Mysteries” drawn from the scriptures, and the “Miracles” drawn from the lives of the saints, were in turn followed by the “Moralities,” or representations of the contests of abstract virtues and vices, which formed a pronounced step in the secularization of the drama and in the encouragement of original plot. Into all these there was imported a liberal amount of comedy, frequently of astounding coarseness. The actors, from being churchmen, came to be the members of the guilds of trade. Next, a corporation of the law-students of the Palais de Justice, which had been established and vested with privileges at the beginning of the fourteenth century under the name of _La Basoche_, took up the moralities and developed them still more in the direction of comedies with ingenious plot and literary dialogue. To the Basoche is probably to be attributed the famous piece (of about the year 1470) called _Lawyer Patelin_, from which at least one reiterated phrase has secured immortality in the shape of _Revenons à nos moutons_. From the Basoche the drama of Paris passed to the “Enfants sans Souci,” whose particular vein lay in the so-called _Soties_, a bold species of satirical and farcical modification of the Moralities. So bold, indeed, were these pieces, that it became necessary for Francis I to suppress them. By this date (which is near the middle of the sixteenth century) the revived study of antiquity begins to act directly upon the drama also, and members of the _Pléiade_ turn first to the translation and then to the imitation of the drama of Greece. The latter was the course taken by Jodelle, whose _Cléopâtre_ marks the epoch at which the serious drama of France definitely bound itself in the chains of the “three unities,” accepted Seneca for its model of style, and adopted the Alexandrine couplet for its orthodox vehicle of dialogue. Comedy meanwhile enjoyed more freedom, though taking its patterns, directly and avowedly from Italy. Between Jodelle and the great age of the drama of Corneille, the stage, like so much besides in France, passed under the domination, partly of Spain, partly of Italy. The chosen models were the Spaniards, Lope de Vega and Calderon, or the Italian Trissino, of whom something is said in their proper places. It remained for the literary reformation of Malherbe to find the consummation for drama also in the work of Corneille.