A History of French Literature Part 4

The obscenity and ordure of Rabelais were to the taste of his time; his severer censures of Church and State were disguised by his buffoonery; flinging out his good sense and wise counsels with a liberal hand, he also wields vigorously the dunghill pitchfork. If he is gross beyond what can be described, he is not, apart from the evil of such grossness, a corrupter of morals, unless morals be corrupted by a belief in the goodness of the natural man. The graver wrongs of his age--wars of ambition, the abuse of public justice, the hypocrisies, cruelties, and lethargy of the ecclesiastics, distrust of the intellectual movement, spurious ideals of life--are vigorously condemned. Rabelais loves goodness, charity, truth; he pleads for the right of manhood to a full and free development of all its powers; and if questions of original sin and divine grace trouble him little, and his creed has some of the hardihood of the Renaissance, he is full of filial grat.i.tude to _le bon Dieu_ for His gift of life, and of a world in which to live strongly should be to live joyously.

The influence of Rabelais is seen in the writers of prose tales who were his contemporaries and successors; but they want his broad good sense and real temperance. BONAVENTURE DES PeRIERS, whom Marguerite of Navarre favoured, and whose _Nouvelles Recreations_, with more of the tradition of the French fabliaux and farces and less of the Italian manner, have something in common with the stories of the _Heptameron_, died in desperation by his own hand about 1543. His Lucianic dialogues which compose the _Cymbalum Mundi_ show the audacity of scepticism which the new ideas of the Renaissance engendered in ill-balanced spirits. With all his boldness and ardour Rabelais exercised a certain discretion, and in revising his own text clearly exhibited a desire to temper valour with prudence.

It is remarkable that just at the time when Rabelais published the second and best book of his _Pantagruel_, in which the ideality and the realism of the Renaissance blossom to the full, there was a certain revival of the chivalric romance. The Spanish _Amadis des Gaules_ (1540-48), translated by Herberay des Essarts, was a distant echo of the Romances of the Round Table. The gallant achievements of courtly knights, their mystical and platonic loves, were a delight to Francis I., and charmed a whole generation. Thus, for the first time, the literature of Spain reached France, and the influence of _Amadis_ reappears in the seventeenth century in the romances of d'Urfe and Mdlle. de Scudery.

If the genius of the Renaissance is expressed ardently and amply in the writings of Rabelais, the genius of the Reformation finds its highest and most characteristic utterance through one whom Rabelais describes as the "demoniacle" of Geneva--JEAN CALVIN (1509-64). The pale face and attenuated figure of the great Reformer, whose life was a long disease, yet whose indomitable will sustained him amid bodily infirmities, present a striking contrast to the sanguine health and overflowing animal spirits of the good physician who reckoned laughter among the means of grace. Yet Calvin was not merely a Reformer: he was also a humanist, who, in his own way, made a profound study of man, and who applied the learning of a master to the determination of dogma. His education was partly theological, partly legal; and in his body of doctrine appear some of the rigour, the severity, and the formal procedures of the law. Indignation against the imprisonment and burning of Protestants, under the pretence that they were rebellious anabaptists, drew him from obscurity; silence, he thought, was treason. He addressed to the King an eloquent letter, in which he maintained that the Reformed faith was neither new nor tending towards schism, and next year (1536) he published his lucid and logical exposition of Protestant doctrine--the _Christianae Religionis Inst.i.tutio_. It placed him, at the age of twenty-seven, as leader in the forefront of the new religious movement.

But the movement was not merely learned, it was popular, and Calvin was resolved to present his work to French readers in their own tongue.

His translation--the _Inst.i.tution_--appeared probably in 1541.

Perhaps no work by an author of seven-and-twenty had ever so great an influence. It consists of four books--of G.o.d, of Jesus as a Mediator, of the effects of His mediatorial work, and of the exterior forms of the Church. The generous illusion of Rabelais, that human nature is essentially good, has no place in Calvin's system. Man is fallen and condemned under the law; all his righteousness is as filthy rags; G.o.d, of His mere good pleasure, from all eternity predestinated some men to eternal life and others to eternal death; the Son of G.o.d came to earth to redeem the elect; through the operation of the Holy Spirit in the gift of faith they are united to Christ, are justified through His righteousness imputed to them, and are sanctified in their hearts; the Church is the body of the faithful in every land; the officers of the Church are chosen by the people; the sacraments are two--baptism and the Lord's Supper. In his spirit of system, his clearness, and the logical enchainment of his ideas, Calvin is eminently French. On the one side he saw the Church of Rome, with--as he held--its human tradition, its ma.s.s of human superst.i.tions, intervening between the soul and G.o.d; on the other side were the scepticism, the worldliness, the religious indifference of the Renaissance. Within the Reforming party there was the conflict of private opinions. Calvin desired to establish once for all, on the basis of the Scriptures, a coherent system of dogma which should impose itself upon the minds of men as of divine authority, which should be at once a barrier against the dangers of superst.i.tion and the dangers of libertine speculation. As the leaders of the French Revolution propounded political const.i.tutions founded on the idea of the rights of man, so Calvin aimed at setting forth a creed proceeding, if we may so put it, from a conception of the absolute rights of G.o.d. Through the mere good pleasure of our Creator, Ruler, Judge, we are what we are.

It is not perhaps too much to say that Calvin is the greatest writer of the sixteenth century. He learned much from the prose of Latin antiquity. Clearness, precision, ordonnance, sobriety, intellectual energy are compensations for his lack of grace, imagination, sensibility, and religious unction. He wrote to convince, to impress his ideas upon other minds, and his austere purpose was attained.

In the days of the pagan Renaissance, it was well for France that there should also be a Renaissance of moral rigour; if freedom was needful, so also was discipline. On the other hand, it may be admitted that Calvin's reason is sometimes the dupe of Calvin's reasoning.

His _Life_ was written in French by his fellow-worker in the Reformation, Theodore de Beze, who also recorded the history of the Reformed Churches in France (1580). Beze and Viret, together with their leader Calvin, were eminent in pulpit exposition and exhortation, and in Beze the preacher was conjoined with a poet. At Calvin's request he undertook his translation of the Psalms, to complete that by Marot, and in 1551 his sacred drama the _Tragedie Francaise du sacrifice d'Abraham_, designed to inculcate the duty of entire surrender to the divine will, and written with a grave and restrained ardour, was presented at the University of Lausanne.

CHAPTER II FROM THE PLeIADE TO MONTAIGNE

The cla.s.sical Renaissance was not necessarily opposed to high ethical ideals; it was not wholly an affair of the sensuous imagination; it brought with it the conception of Roman virtue, and this might well unite itself (as we see afterwards in Corneille) with Christian faith.

Among the many translators of the sixteenth century was Montaigne's early friend--the friend in memory of all his life--eTIENNE DE LA BOeTIE (1530-63). It is not, however, for his fragments of Plutarch or his graceful rendering of Xenophon's Economics (named by him the _Mesnagerie_) that we remember La Boetie; it is rather for his eloquent pleading on behalf of freedom in the _Discours de la Servitude Volontaire_ or _Contr'un_, written at sixteen--revised later--in which, with the rhetoric of youth, he utters his invective against tyranny. Before La Boetie's premature death the morals of antiquity as seen in action had been exhibited to French readers in the pages of Amyot's delightful translation of Plutarch's Lives (1559), to be followed, some years later, by his _OEuvres Morales de Plutarque_. JACQUES AMYOT (1513-93), from an ill-fed, ragged boy, rose to be the Bishop of Auxerre. His scholars.h.i.+p, seen not only in his Plutarch, but in his rendering of the _Daphnis et Chloe_ of Longus, and other works, was exquisite; but still more admirable was his sense of the capacities of French prose. He divined with a rare instinct the genius of the language; he felt the affinities between his Greek original and the idioms of his own countrymen; he rather re-created than translated Plutarch. "We dunces," wrote Montaigne, "would have been lost, had not this book raised us from the mire; thanks to it, we now venture to speak and write; ... it is our breviary." The life and the ideas of the ancient world became the possession, not of scholars only, but of all French readers. The book was a school of manners and of thought, an inspirer of heroic deeds. "To love Plutarch," said the greatest Frenchman of the century, Henry of Navarre, "is to love me, for he was long the master of my youth."

It was such an interest in the life and ideas of antiquity as Amyot conveyed to the general mind of France that was wanting to Ronsard and the group of poets surrounding him. Their work was concerned primarily with literary form; of the life of the world and general ideas, apart from form, they took too little heed. The transition from Marot to Ronsard is to be traced chiefly through the school of Lyons. In that city of the South, letters flourished side by side with industry and commerce; Maurice Sceve celebrated his mistress Delie, "object of the highest virtue," with Petrarchan ingenuities; and his pupil LOUISE LABe, "la belle Cordiere," sang in her sonnets of a true pa.s.sion felt, as she declares, "en ses os, en son sang, en son ame." The Lyonese poets, though imbued with Platonic ideas, rather carry on the tradition of Marot than announce the Pleiade.

PIERRE DE RONSARD, born at a chateau a few leagues from Vendome, in the year 1524, was in the service of the sons of Francis I. as page, was in Scotland with James V., and later had the prospect of a distinguished diplomatic career, when deafness, consequent on a serious malady, closed for him the avenue to public life. He threw himself ardently into the study of letters; in company with the boy Antoine de Baf he received lessons from an excellent h.e.l.lenist, Jean Daurat, soon to be princ.i.p.al of the College Coqueret. At the College a group of students--Ronsard, Baf, Joachim du Bellay, Remi Belleau--gathered about the master. The "Brigade" was formed, which, by-and-by, with the addition of Jodelle and Pontus de Thyard, and including Daurat, became the constellation of the Pleiade. The seven a.s.sociates read together, translated and imitated the cla.s.sics; a common doctrine of art banded them in unity; they thought scorn of the vulgar ways of popular verse; poetry for them was an arduous and exquisite toil; its service was a religion. At length, in 1549, they flung out their manifesto--the _Defense et Ill.u.s.tration de la Langue Francaise_ by Du Bellay, the most important study in literary criticism of the century. With this should be considered, as less important manifestoes, the later _Art Poetique_ of Ronsard, and his prefaces to the _Franciade_. To formulate principles is not always to the advantage of a movement in literature; but champions need a banner, reformers can hardly dispense with a definite creed. Against the popular conception of the ignorant the Pleiade maintained that poetry was a high and difficult form of art; against the pedantry of humanism they maintained that the native tongue of France admitted of literary art worthy to take its place beside that of Greece or Rome. The French literary vocabulary, they declared, has excellences of its own, but it needs to be enriched by technical terms, by words of local dialects, by prudent adoptions from Greek and Latin, by judicious developments of the existing families of words, by the recovery of words that have fallen into disuse.

It is unjust to the Pleiade to say that they aimed at overloading poetic diction with neologisms of cla.s.sical origin; they sought to innovate with discretion; but they unquestionably aimed at the formation of a poetic diction distinct from that of prose; they turned away from simplicity of speech to ingenious periphrasis; they desired a select, aristocratic idiom for the service of verse; they recommended a special syntax in imitation of the Latin; for the elder forms of French poetry they would subst.i.tute reproductions or re-creations of cla.s.sical forms. Rondeaux, ballades, virelais, chants royaux, chansons are to be cast aside as _epiceries_; and their place is to be taken by odes like those of Pindar or of Horace, by the elegy, satire, epigram, epic, or by newer forms justified by the practice of Italian masters. Rich but not over-curious rhymes are to be cultivated, with in general the alternation of masculine and feminine rhymes; the caesura is to fall in accordance with the meaning.

Ronsard, more liberal than Du Bellay, permits, on the ground of cla.s.sical example, the gliding from couplet to couplet without a pause.

"The alexandrine holds in our language the place of heroic verse among the Greeks and Romans"--in this statement is indicated the chief service rendered to French poetry by Ronsard and the rest of the Pleiade; they it was who, by their teaching and example, imposed on later writers that majestic line, possessing the most varied powers, capable of the finest achievements, which has yielded itself alike to the purposes of Racine and to those of Victor Hugo.

Ronsard and Du Bellay broke with the tradition of the Middle Ages, and inaugurated the French cla.s.sical school; it remained for Malherbe, at a later date, to reform the reformation of the Pleiade, and to win for himself the glory which properly belongs to his predecessors.

Unfortunately from its origin the French cla.s.sical school had in it the spirit of an intellectual aristocracy, which removed it from popular sympathies; unfortunately, also, the poets of the Pleiade failed to perceive that the masterpieces of Greece and Rome are admirable, not because they belong to antiquity, but because they are founded on the imitation of nature and on ideas of the reason.

They were regarded as authorities equal with nature or independent of it; and thus while the school of Ronsard did much to renew literary art, its teaching involved an error which eventually tended to the sterilisation of art. That error found its correction in the literature of the seventeenth century, and expressly in the doctrine set forth by Boileau; yet under the correction some of the consequences of the error remained. Ronsard and his followers, on the other hand, never made the a.s.sumption, common enough in the seventeenth century, that poetry could be manufactured by observance of the rules, nor did they suppose that the total play of emotion must be rationalised by the understanding; they left a place for the instinctive movements of poetic sensibility.

During forty years Ronsard remained the "Prince of Poets." Ta.s.so sought his advice; the Chancellor Michel de l'Hospital wrote in his praise; Brantome placed him above Petrarch; Queen Elizabeth and Mary Stuart sent him gifts; Charles IX. on one occasion invited him to sit beside the throne. In his last hours he was still occupied with his art. His death, at the close of 1585, was felt as a national calamity, and pompous honours were awarded to his tomb. Yet Ronsard, though ambitious of literary distinction, did not lose his true self in a noisy fame. His was the delicate nature of an artist; his deafness perhaps added to his timidity and his love of retirement; we think of him in his garden, cultivating his roses as "the priest of Flora."

His work as a poet falls into four periods. From 1550 to 1554 he was a humanist without discretion or reserve. In the first three books of the _Odes_ he attempted to rival Pindar; in the _Amours de Ca.s.sandre_ he emulates the glory of Petrarch. From 1554 to 1560, abandoning his Pindarism, he was in disciples.h.i.+p to Anacreon[1] and Horace. It is the period of the less ambitious odes found in the fourth and fifth books, the period of the _Amours de Marie_ and the _Hymnes_.

From 1560 to 1574 he was a poet of the court and of courtly occasions, an eloquent declaimer on public events in the _Discours des Miseres de ce Temps_, and the unfortunate epic poet of his unfinished _Franciade_. During the last ten years of his life he gave freer expression to his personal feelings, his sadness, his gladness; and to these years belong the admirable sonnets to Helene de Surgeres, his autumnal love.

[Footnote 1: _i.e._ the Anacreontic poems, found, and published in 1554, by Henri Estienne.]

Ronsard's genius was lyrical and elegiac, but the tendencies of a time when the great affair was the organisation of social life, and as a consequence the limitation of individual and personal pa.s.sions, were not favourable to the development of lyrical poetry. In his imitations of Pindar a narrative element checks the flight of song, and there is a certain unreality in the premeditated attempt to reproduce the pa.s.sionate fluctuations and supposed disorder of his model. The study of Pindar, however, trained Ronsard in the handling of sustained periods of verse, and interested him in complex lyrical combinations. His Anacreontic and Horatian odes are far happier; among these some of his most delightful work is found. If he was deficient in great ideas, he had delicacy of sentiment and an exquisite sense of metrical harmony. The power which he possessed as a narrative poet appears best in episodes or epic fragments. His ambitious attempt to trace the origin of the French monarchy from the imaginary Trojan Francus was unfortunate in its subject, and equally unfortunate in its form--the rhyming decasyllabic verse.

In pieces which may be called hortatory, the pulpit eloquence, as it were, of a poet addressing his contemporaries on public matters, the utterances of a patriot and a citizen moved by pity for his fellows, such poetry as the _Discours des Miseres de ce Temps_ and the _Inst.i.tution pour l'Adolescence du Roi, Charles IX._, Ronsard is original and impressive, a forerunner of the orator poets of the seventeenth century. His eclogues show a true feeling for external nature, touched at times by a tender sadness. When he escapes from the curiosities and the strain of his less happy Petrarchism, he is an admirable poet of love in song and sonnet; no more beautiful variation on the theme of "gather the rosebuds while ye may" exists than his sonnet _Quand vous serez bien vieille_, unless it be his dainty ode _Mignonne, allons voir si la Rose_. Pa.s.sionate in the deepest and largest sense Ronsard is not; but it was much to be sincere and tender, to observe just measure, to render a subtle phase of emotion. In the fine melancholy of his elegiac poetry he is almost modern. Before all else he is a master of his instrument, an inventor of new effects and movements of the lyre; in his hands the entire rhythmical system was renewed or was purified. His dexterity in various metres was that of a great virtuoso, and it was not the mere dexterity which conquers difficulties, it was a skill inspired and sustained by the sentiment of metre.

Of the other members of the Pleiade, one--Jodelle--is remembered chiefly in connection with the history of the drama. Baf (1532-89), son of the French amba.s.sador at Venice, translated from Sophocles and Terence, imitated Plautus, Petrarchised in sonnets, took from Virgil's Georgics the inspiration of his _Meteores_, was guided by the Anacreontic poems in his _Pa.s.se-Temps_, and would fain rival Theognis in his most original work _Les Mimes_, where a moral or satiric meaning masks behind an allegory or a fable. He desired to connect poetry more closely with music, and with this end in view thought to reform the spelling of words and to revive the quant.i.tative metrical system of cla.s.sical verse.[2] REMI BELLEAU (1528-77) practised the Horatian ode and the sonnet; translated Anacreon; followed the Neapolitan Sannazaro in his _Bergerie_ of connected prose and verse, where the shepherds are persons of distinction arrayed in a pastoral disguise; and adapted the mediaeval _lapidary_ (with imitations of the pseudo-Orpheus) to the taste of the Renaissance in his _Amours et Nouveaux eschanges des Pierres Precieuses_. These little myths and metamorphoses of gems are ingenious and graceful. The delicate feeling for nature which Belleau possessed is seen at its best in the charming song _Avril_, included in his somewhat incoherent _Bergerie_. Among his papers was found, after his death, a comedy, _La Reconnue_, which, if it has little dramatic power, shows a certain instinct for satire.

[Footnote 2: The "Bafin verse," French not cla.s.sical, is of fifteen syllables, divided into hemistichs of seven and eight syllables.]

These are minor lights in the poetical constellation; but the star of JOACHIM DU BELLAY s.h.i.+nes with a ray which, if less brilliant than that of Ronsard, has a finer and more penetrating influence. Du Bellay was born about 1525, at Lire, near Angers, of an ill.u.s.trious family.

His youth was unhappy, and a plaintive melancholy haunts his verse.

Like Ronsard he suffered from deafness, and he has humorously sung its praises. _Olive_, fifty sonnets in honour of his Platonic or Petrarchan mistress, Mlle. de Viole (the letters of whose name are transposed to Olive), appeared almost at the same moment as the earliest _Odes_ of Ronsard; but before long he could mock in sprightly stanzas the fantasies and excesses of the Petrarchan style. It was not until his residence in Rome (1551) as intendant of his cousin Cardinal du Bellay, the French amba.s.sador, that he found his real self. In his _Antiquites de Rome_ he expresses the sentiment of ruins, the pathos of fallen greatness, as it had never been expressed before.

The intrigues, corruption, and cynicism of Roman society, his broken health, an unfortunate pa.s.sion for the Faustina of his Latin verses, and the longing for his beloved province and little Lire depressed his spirits; in the sonnets of his _Regrets_ he embodied his intimate feelings, and that lively spirit of satire which the baseness of the Pontifical court summoned into life. This satiric vein had, indeed, already shown itself in his mocking counsel to _le Poete courtisan_: the courtier poet is to be a gentleman who writes at ease; he is not to trouble himself with study of the ancients; he is to produce only pieces of occasion, and these in a negligent style; the rarer and the smaller they are the better; and happily at last he may cease to bring forth even these. Possibly his _poete courtisan_ was Melin de Saint-Gelais. As a rural poet Du Bellay is charming; his _Jeux Rustiques_, while owing much to the _Lusus_ of the Venetian poet Navagero, have in them the true breath of the fields; it is his _douce_ province of Anjou which inspires him; the song to _Venus_ in its happiest stanzas is only less admirable than the _Vanneur de Ble_, with which more than any other single poem the memory of Du Bellay is a.s.sociated. The personal note, which is in general absent from the poetry of Ronsard, is poignantly and exquisitely audible in the best pieces of Du Bellay. He did not live long enough to witness the complete triumph of the master; in 1560 he died exhausted, at the age of thirty-five.

The Pleiade served literature by their attention to form, by their skill in poetic instrumentation; but they were incapable of interpreting life in any large and original way. In the hands of their successors poetry languished for want of an inspiring theme. PHILIPPE DESPORTES (1546-1606) was copious and skilful in his reproduction and imitation of Italian models; as a courtier poet he reduced literary flattery to a fine art; but his mannered graces are cold, his pretence of pa.s.sion is a laboured kind of _esprit_. A copy of his works annotated by the hand of Malherbe survives; the comments, severe and just, remained unpublished, probably because the writer was unwilling to pursue an adversary whom death had removed from his way. Jean Bertaut, his disciple, is a lesser Desportes. Satire was developed by Jean Vauquelin de la Fresnaye, and to him we owe an _Art Poetique_ (1575) which adapts to his own time the teaching of Aristotle and Horace. More interesting than these is JEAN Pa.s.sERAT (1534-1602), whose spirit is that of old France in its mirth and mockery, and whose more serious verse has the patriotism of French citizens.h.i.+p; his field was small, but he tilled his field gaily and courageously. The villanelle _J'ai perdu ma tourterelle_ and the ode on May-day show Pa.s.serat's art in its happiest moments.

The way for a reform in dramatic poetry had been in some degree prepared by plays of the sixteenth century, written in Latin--the work of Buchanan, Muret, and others--by translations from Terence, Sophocles, Euripides, translations from Italian comedy, and renderings of one Spanish model, the highly-popular _Celestina_ of Fernando de Rojas. The Latin plays were acted in schools. The first performance of a play in French belonging to the new tendency was that of Ronsard's translation of the Plutus of Aristophanes, in 1549, by his friends of the College de Coqueret. It was only by amateurs, and before a limited scholarly group of spectators, that the new cla.s.sical tragedies could be presented. Gradually both tragedy and comedy came to be written solely with a view to publication in print.

The mediaeval drama still held the stage.

JODELLE'S _Cleopatre_ (1552), performed with enthusiasm by amateurs, was therefore a false start; it was essentially literary, and not theatrical. Greek models were crudely imitated, with a lack of almost everything that gave life and charm to the Greek drama. Seneca was more accessible than Sophocles, and his faults were easy to imitate--his moralisings, his declamatory pa.s.sages, his excess of emphasis. The so-called Aristotelian dramatic canons, formulated by Scaliger in his Poetic, were rigorously applied. Unity of place is preserved in _Cleopatre_; the time of the action is reduced to twelve hours; there are interminable monologues, choral moralities, a ghost (in Seneca's manner), a narration of the heroine's death; of action there is none, the stage stands still. If Jodelle's _Didon_ has some literary merit, it has little dramatic vitality. The oratorical energy of Grevin's _Jules Cesar_, the studies of history in _La Mort de Daire_ and _La Mort d'Alexandre_, by Jacques de La Taille, do not compensate their deficiency in the qualities required by the theatre.

One tragedy alone, _La Sultane_, by Gabriel Bounin (1561), amid its violences and extravagances, shows a feeling for dramatic action and scenic effect.

Could the mediaeval mystery and cla.s.sical tragedy be reconciled? The Protestant Reformer Beze, in his _Sacrifice d'Abraham_, attempted something of the kind; his sacred drama is a mystery by its subject, a tragedy in the conduct of the action. Three tragedies on the life of David--one of them admirable in its rendering of the love of Michol, daughter of Saul--were published in 1556 by Loys Des-Masures: the stage arrangements are those of the mediaeval drama, but the unity of time is observed, and chorus and semi-chorus respond in alternate strains. No junction of dramatic systems essentially opposed proved in the end possible. When Jean de La Taille wrote on a biblical subject in his _Saul le Furieux_, a play remarkable for its impressive conception and development of the character of Saul, he composed it _selon l'art_, and in the manner of "the old tragic authors." He is uncompromising in his cla.s.sical method; the mediaeval drama seemed inartificial to him in the large concessions granted by the spectators to the authors and actors; he would have what pa.s.ses on the stage approximate, at least, to reality; the unities were accepted not merely on the supposed authority of Aristotle, but because they were an aid in attaining verisimilitude.

The most eminent name in the history of French tragedy of the sixteenth century is that of ROBERT GARNIER (1534-90). His disciples.h.i.+p to Seneca was at first that of a pupil who reproduces with exaggeration his master's errors. Sensible of the want of movement in his scenes, he proceeded in later plays to acc.u.mulate action upon action without reducing the action to unity. At length, in _Les Juives_ (1583), which exhibits the revolt of the Jewish King and his punishment by Nabuchodonosor, he attained something of true pity and terror, beauty of characterisation, beauty of lyrical utterance in the plaintive songs of the chorus. Garnier was a.s.suredly a poet; but even in _Les Juives_, the best tragedy of his century, he was not a master of dramatic art. If anywhere he is in a true sense dramatic, it is in his example of the new form of tragi-comedy. _Bradamante_, derived from the _Orlando Furioso_ of Ariosto, shows not only poetic imagination, but a certain feeling for the requirements of the theatre.

Comedy in the sixteenth century, dating from Jodelle's _Eugene_, is either a development of the mediaeval farce, indicated in point of form by the retention of octosyllabic verse, or an importation from the drama of Italy. Certain plays of Aristophanes, of Terence, of Plautus were translated; but, in truth, cla.s.sical models had little influence. Grevin, while professing originality, really follows the traditions of the farce. Jean de La Taille, in his prose comedy _Les Corrivaux_, prepared the way for the easy and natural dialogue of the comic stage. The most remarkable group of sixteenth-century comedies are those translated in prose from the Italian, with such obvious adaptations as might suit them to French readers, by PIERRE DE LARIVEY (1540 to after 1611). Of the family of the Giunti, he had gallicised his own name (_Giunti_, i.e. _Arrives_); and the originality of his plays is of a like kind with that of his name; they served at least to establish an Italian tradition for comedy, which was not without an influence in the seventeenth century; they served to advance the art of dialogue. If any comedy of the period stands out as superior to its fellows, it is _Les Contents_ (1584), by Odet de Turnebe, a free imitation of Italian models united with something imported from the Spanish _Celestina_. Its intrigue is an Italian imbroglio; but there are lively and natural scenes, such as can but rarely be found among the predecessors of Moliere. In general the comedy of the sixteenth century is wildly confused in plot, conventional in its types of character, and too often as grossly indecent as the elder farces. Before the century closed, the pastoral drama had been discovered, and received influences from both Italy and Spain; the soil was being prepared for that delicate flower of poetry, but as yet its nurture was little understood, nor indeed can it be said to have ever taken kindly to the climate of France.

While on the one hand the tendencies of the Pleiade may be described as exotic, going forth, as they did, to capture the gifts of cla.s.sical and Italian literature, on the other hand they pleaded strenuously that thus only could French literature attain its highest possibilities. In the scholars.h.i.+p of the time, side by side with the humanism which revived and restored the culture of Greece and Rome, was another humanism which was essentially national. The historical origins of France were studied for the first time with something of a critical spirit by CLAUDE FAUCHET in his _Antiquites Gauloises et Francoises_ (1579-1601). His _Recueil de l'Origine de la Langue et Poesie Francoise_, in spite of its errors, was an effort towards French philology; and in calling attention to the trouveres and their works, Fauchet may be considered a remote master of the school of modern literary research. ESTIENNE PASQUIER (1529-1615), the jurist who maintained in a famous action the cause of the University against the Jesuits, in his _Recherches de la France_ treated with learning and vigour various important points in French history--civil and ecclesiastical--language, literary history, and the foundation of universities. HENRI ESTIENNE (1531-98), who entered to the full into the intoxication of cla.s.sical humanism, was patriotic in his reverence for his native tongue. In a trilogy of little treatises (1565-79), written with much spirit, he maintained that of modern languages the French has the nearest affinity to the Greek, attempted to establish its superiority to Italian, and much more to Spanish, and mocked the contemporary fas.h.i.+on of Italianised French.

The study of history is supported on the one hand by such erudite research as that of Fauchet and Pasquier; on the other hand it is supported by political philosophy and speculation. To philosophy, in the wider sense of the word, the sixteenth century made no large and coherent contribution; the Platonism, Pyrrhonism, Epicureanism, Stoicism of the Renaissance met and clashed together; the rival theologies of the Roman and Reformed Churches contended in a struggle for life. PIERRE DE LA RAMeE (1515-72) expressed the revolt of rationalism against the methods of the schoolmen and the authority of Aristotle; but he ordinarily wrote in Latin, and his _Dialectique_, the first philosophical work in the vulgar tongue, hardly falls within the province of literary history.

The philosophy of politics is represented by one great name, that of JEAN BODIN (1529-96), whose _Republique_ may ent.i.tle him to be styled the Montesquieu of the Renaissance. In an age which tended towards the formation of great monarchies he was vigorously monarchical. The patriarchal power of the sovereign might well be thought needful, in the second half of the century, as a barrier against anarchy; but Bodin was no advocate of tyranny; he condemned slavery, and held that religious persecution can only lead to a dissolution of religious belief. A citizen is defined by Bodin as a free man under the supreme government of another; like Montesquieu, he devotes attention to the adaptation of government to the varieties of race and climate. The attempts at a general history of France in the earlier part of the sixteenth century preserved the arid methods and unilluminated style of the mediaeval chronicles;[3] in the second half of the century they imitated with little skill the models of antiquity. Histories of contemporary events in Europe were written with conscientious impartiality by Lancelot de la Popeliniere, and with personal and party pa.s.sion, struggling against his well-meant resolves, by Agrippa d'Aubigne. The great _Historia mei Temporis_ of De Thou, faithful and austere in its record of fact, was a highly-important contribution to literature, but it is written in Latin.

[Footnote 3: The narrative of the life of Bayard, by his secretary, writing under the name of "Le Loyal Serviteur" (1527), is admirable for its clearness, grace, and simplicity.]

With a peculiar gift for narrative, the French have been long pre-eminent as writers of memoirs, and already in the sixteenth century such personal recitals are numerous. The wars of Francois I. and of Henri II. gave abundant scope for the display of individual enterprise and energy; the civil wars breathed into the deeds of men an intensity of pa.s.sion; the actors had much to tell, and a motive for telling it each in his own interest.

The _Commentaires_ of BLAISE DE MONLUC (1502-77) are said to have been named by Henri IV. "the soldier's Bible"; the Bible is one which does not always inculcate mercy or peace. Monluc, a Gascon of honourable birth and a soldier of fortune, had the instinct of battle in his blood; from a soldier he rose through every rank to be the King's lieutenant of Guyenne and a Marshal of France; during fifty years he fought, as a daring captain rather than as a great general, amorous of danger, and at length, terribly disfigured by wounds, he sat down, not to rest, but to wield his pen as if it were a sword of steel. His _Commentaires_ were meant to be a manual for hardy combatants, and what model could he set before the young aspirant so animating as himself? In his earlier wars against the foreign foes of his country, Monluc was indeed a model of military prowess; the civil wars added cruelty to his courage; after a fas.h.i.+on he was religious, and a short shrift and a cord were good enough for heretics and adversaries of his King. An unlettered soldier, Monluc, by virtue of his energy of character and directness of speech, became a most impressive and spirited narrator. His Memoirs close with a sigh for stern and inviolable solitude. Among the Pyrenean rocks he had formerly observed a lonely monastery, in view at once of Spain and France; there it was his wish to end his days.

From the opposite party in the great religious and political strife came the temperate Memoirs of Lanoue, the simple and beautiful record of her husband's life by Madame de Mornay, and that of his own career, written in an old age of gloom and pa.s.sion, by D'Aubigne. The ideas of Henri IV.--himself a royal author in his _Lettres missives_--are embodied in the _OEconomies Royales_ of the statesman Sully, whose secretaries were employed for the occasion in laboriously reciting his words and deeds as they had learnt them from their chief. The superficial aspects of the life of society, the manners and morals--or lack of morals--of the time, are lightly and brightly exhibited by PIERRE DE BOURDEILLE, lord of BRANToME, Catholic abbe, soldier and courtier, observer of the great world, gossip of amorous secrets.

His _Vies des Hommes Ill.u.s.tres et des Grands Capitaines_, his _Vies des Dames Ill.u.s.tres et des Dames Galantes_, and his _Memoires_ contained matter too dangerous, perhaps, for publication during his lifetime, but the author cherished the thought of his posthumous renown. Brantome, wholly indifferent to good and evil, had a vivid interest in life; virtue and vice concerned him alike and equally, if only they had vivacity, movement, colour; and although, as with Monluc, it was a physical calamity that made him turn to authors.h.i.+p, he wrote with a nave art, an easy grace, and abundant spirit. To correct and complete Brantome's narrative as it related to herself, Marguerite, Queen of Navarre, first wife of Henri IV., prepared her unfinished Memoirs, which opens the delightful series of autobiographies and reminiscences of women. Her account of the night of St. Bartholomew is justly celebrated; the whole record, indeed, is full of interest; but there were pa.s.sages of her life which it was natural that she should pa.s.s over in silence; her sins of omission, as Bayle has observed, are many.[4]

[Footnote 4: The _Memoires-Journeaux_ of Pierre de l'Estoile are a great magazine of the gains of the writer's disinterested curiosity.

The _Lettres_ of D'Ossat and the _Negotiations_ of the President Jeannin are of importance in the records of diplomacy.]

The controversies of the civil wars produced a militant literature, in which the extreme parties contended with pa.s.sion, while between these a middle party, the aspirants to conciliation, pleaded for the ways of prudence, and, if possible, of peace. FRANcOIS HOTMAN, the effect of whose Latin _Franco-Gallia_, a political treatise presenting the Huguenot demands, has been compared to that of Rousseau's _Contrat Social_, launched his eloquent invective against the Cardinal de Lorraine, in the _Epistre envoyee au Tigre de la France_. Hubert Languet, the devoted friend of Philip Sidney, in his _Vindiciae contra Tyrannos_, justified rebellion against princes who violate by their commands the laws of G.o.d. D'Aubigne, in his _Confession de Sancy_, attacked with characteristic ardour the apostates and waverers of the time, above the rest that threefold recanter of his faith, Harlay de Sancy. Marnix de Sainte-Aldegonde, in his _Tableau des Differands de la Religion_, mingles theological erudition with his raillery against the Roman communion. Henri Estienne applied the spirit and learning of a great humanist to religious controversy in the second part of his _Apologie pour Herodote_; the marvellous tales of the Greek historian may well be true, he sarcastically maintains, when in this sixteenth century the abuses of the Roman Church seem to pa.s.s all belief. On the other hand, Du Perron, a cardinal in 1604, replied to the arguments and citations of the heretics. As the century drew towards its close, violence declined; the struggle was in a measure appeased. In earlier days the Chancellor, Michel de l'Hospital, had hoped to establish harmony between the rival parties; grief for the ma.s.sacre of St. Bartholomew hastened his death. The learned Duplessis-Mornay, leader and guide of the Reformed Churches of France, a devoted servant of Henri of Navarre, while fervent in his own beliefs, was too deeply attached to the common faith of Christianity to be an extreme partisan. The reconciliation of Henri IV. with the Church of Rome, which delivered France from anarchy, was, however, a grief to some of his most loyal supporters, and of these Duplessis-Mornay was the most eminent.

The cause of Henri against the League was served by the ma.n.u.script circulation of a prose satire, with interspersed pieces of verse, the work of a group of writers, moderate Catholics or converted Protestants, who loved their country and their King, the _Satire Menipee_.[5] When it appeared in print (1594; dated on the t.i.tle-page 1593) the cause was won; the satire rose upon a wave of success, like a gleaming crest of bitter spray. It is a parody of the Estates of the League which had been ineffectually convoked to make choice of a king. Two Rabelaisian charlatans, one from Spain, one from Lorraine, offer their drugs for sale in the court of the Louvre; the virtues of the Spanish Catholicon, a divine electuary, are manifold--it will change the blackest criminal into a spotless lamb, it will transform a vulgar bonnet to a cardinal's hat, and at need can accomplish a score of other miracles. Presently the buffoon Estates file past to their a.s.sembly; the hall in which they meet is tapestried with grotesque scenes from history; the order of the sitting is determined, and the harangues begin, harangues in which each speaker exposes his own ambitions, greeds, hypocrisies, and egoism, until Monsieur d'Aubray, the orator of the _tiers etat_, closes the debate with a speech in turn indignant, ironical, or grave in its commiseration for the popular wrongs--an utterance of bourgeois honesty and good sense. The writers--Canon Pierre Leroy; Gillot, clerk-advocate of the Parliament of Paris; Rapin, a lettered combatant at Ivry; Jean Pa.s.serat, poet and commentator on Rabelais; Chrestien and Pithou, two Protestants discreetly converted by force of events--met in a room of Gillot's house, where, according to the legend, Boileau was afterwards born, and there concocted the venom of their pamphlet.

Its wit, in spite of some extravagances and the tedium of certain pages, is admirable; farce and comedy, sarcasm and moral prudence alternate; and it had the great good fortune of a satire, that of coming at the lucky moment.

[Footnote 5: Varro, who to a certain extent copied from Menippus the Gadarene, had called his satires _Saturae Menippeae_; hence the t.i.tle.]

The French Huguenots were not without their poets. Two of these--Guillaume Sal.u.s.te, Seigneur du Bartas, and Agrippa d'Aubigne--are eminent. The fame of DU BARTAS (1544-90) was indeed European. Ronsard sent him a pen of gold, and feared at a later time the rivalry of his renown; Ta.s.so drew inspiration from his verse; the youthful Milton read him with admiration in the rendering by Sylvester; long afterwards Goethe honoured him with praise beyond his deserts. To read his poems now, notwithstanding pa.s.sages of vivid description and pa.s.sages of ardent devotional feeling, would need rare literary fort.i.tude. His originality lies in the fact that while he was a disciple of the Pleiade, a disciple crude, intemperate, and provincial, he deserted Greece and Rome, and drew his subjects from Hebraic sources. His _Judith_ (1573), composed by the command of Jeanne d'Albret, has more of Lucan than of Virgil in its over-emphatic style. _La Sepmaine, ou la Creation en Sept Journees_, appeared in 1578, and within a few years had pa.s.sed through thirty editions. Du Bartas is always copious, sometimes brilliant, sometimes majestic; but laboured and rhetorical description, never ending and still beginning, fatigues the mind; an encyclopaedia of the works of creation weighs heavily upon the imagination; we sigh for the arrival of the day of rest.

THeODORE-AGRIPPA D'AUBIGNe (1550-1630) was not among the admirers of Du Bartas. His natural temper was framed for pleasure; at another time he might have been known only as a poet of the court, of lighter satire, and of love; the pa.s.sions of the age transformed him into an ardent and uncompromising combatant. His cla.s.sical culture was wide and exact; at ten years old he translated the _Crito_; Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Spanish were at his command. He might, had France been at peace with herself, have appeared in literature as a somewhat belated Ronsardist; but his hereditary cause became his own. While still a child he accepted from his father, in presence of the withering heads of the conspirators of Amboise, the oath of immitigable vengeance. Pursuits, escapes, the camp, the battle-field, the prison, the court made up no small part of his life of vicissitude and of unalterable resolve. He roused Henri of Navarre from the lethargy of pleasure; he warned the King against the crime of apostasy; he dreaded the ma.s.s, but could cheerfully have accepted the stake. Extreme in his rage of party, he yet in private affairs could show good sense and generosity. His elder years were darkened by what he regarded as treason in his King, and by the falling away from the faith of that son who, by an irony of fate, became the father of Madame de Maintenon. Four times condemned to death, he died in exile at the age of eighty.