A History of French Literature Part 3

He died in 1465. Neither depth of reflection nor masculine power of feeling finds expression in his verse; he does not contribute new ideas to poetry, nor invent new forms, but he rendered the old material and made the accepted moulds of verse charming by a gracious personality and an exquisite sense of art. Ballade, rondeau, chanson, each is manipulated with the skill of a goldsmith setting his gems.

He sings of the beauty of woman, the lighter joys of love, the pleasure of springtide, the song of the birds, the gliding of a stream or a cloud; or, as an elder man, he mocks with amiable irony the fatiguing ardours of young hearts. When St. Valentine's day comes round, his good physician "Nonchaloir" advises him to abstain from choosing a mistress, and recommends an easy pillow. The influence of Charles d'Orleans on French poetry was slight; it was not until 1734 that his forgotten poems were brought to light.

In the close of the mediaeval period, when old things were pa.s.sing away and new things were as yet unborn, the minds of men inclined to fill the void with mockery and satire. Martin Lefranc (_c_. 1410-61) in his _Champion des Dames_--a poem of twenty-four thousand lines, in which there is much spirit and vigour of versification--balances one against another the censure and the praise of women. Coquillard, with his railleries a.s.suming legal forms and phrases, laughs at love and lovers, or at the _Droits Nouveaux_ of a happy time when licence had become the general law. Henri Baude, a realist in his keen observation, satirises with direct, incisive force, the manners and morals of his age. Martial d'Auvergne (_c_. 1433-1508), chronicling events in his _Vigiles de Charles VII._, a poem written according to the scheme of the liturgical Vigils, is eloquent in his expression of the wrongs of the poor, and in his condemnation of the abuses of power and station.

If the _Amant rendu Cordelier_ be his, he too appears among those who jest at the follies and extravagance of love. His prose _Arrets d'Amour_ are discussions and decisions of the imaginary court which determines questions of gallantry.

Amid such mockery of life and love, the horror of death was ever present to the mind of a generation from which hope and faith seemed to fail; it was the time of the _Danse Macabre_; the skeleton became a grim humourist satirising human existence, and verses written for the dance of women were ascribed in the ma.n.u.script which preserves them to Martial d'Auvergne.

Pa.s.sion and the idea of death mingle with a power at once realistic and romantic in the poetry of FRANcOIS VILLON. He was born in poverty, an obscure child of the capital, in 1430 or 1431; he adopted the name of his early protector, Villon; obtained as a poor scholar his bachelor's degree in 1449, and three years later became a _maitre es arts_; but already he was a master of arts less creditable than those of the University. In 1455 Villon--or should we call him Monterbier, Montcorbier, Corbueil, Desloges, Mouton (aliases convenient for vagabondage)?--quarrelled with a priest, and killed his adversary; he was condemned to death, and cheered his spirits with the piteous ballade for those about to swing to the kites and the crows; but the capital punishment was commuted to banishment.

Next winter, stung by the infidelity and insults of a woman to whom he had abandoned himself, he fled, perhaps to Angers, bidding his friends a jesting farewell in the bequests of his _Pet.i.t Testament_.

Betrayed by one who claimed him as an a.s.sociate in robbery, Villon is lost to view for three years; and when we rediscover him in 1461, it is as a prisoner, whose six months' fare has been bread and water in his cell at Meun-sur-Loire. The entry of Louis XI., recently consecrated king, freed the unhappy captive. Before the year closed he had composed his capital work, the _Grand Testament_, and proved himself the most original poet of his century. And then Villon disappears; whether he died soon after, whether he lived for half a score of years, we do not know.

While he handles with masterly ease certain of the fifteenth-century forms of verse--in particular the ballade--Villon is a modern in his abandonment of the traditional machinery of the imagination, its convention of allegories and abstractions, and those half-realised moralisings which were repeated from writer to writer; he is modern in the intensity of a personal quality which is impressed upon his work, in the complexity of his feelings, pa.s.sing from mirth to despair, from beauty to horror, from cynical grossness to gracious memories or aspirations; he is modern in his pa.s.sion for the real, and in those gleams of ideal light which are suddenly dashed across the vulgar surroundings of his sorry existence. While he flings out his scorn and indignation against those whom he regarded as his ill-users, or cries against the injuries of fortune, or laments his miserable past, he yet is a pa.s.sionate lover of life; and shadowing beauty and youth and love and life, he is constantly aware of the imminent and inexorable tyranny of death. The ideas which he expresses are few and simple--ideas common to all men; but they take a special colour from his own feelings and experiences, and he renders them with a poignancy which is his own, with a melancholy gaiety and a desperate imaginative sincerity. His figure is so interesting in itself--that of the _enfant perdu_ of genius--and so typical of a cla.s.s, that the temptation to create a Villon legend is great; but to magnify his proportions to those of the highest poets is to do him wrong. His pa.s.sionate intensity within a limited range is unsurpa.s.sed; but Villon wanted sanity, and he wanted breadth.

In his direct inspiration from life, co-operating with an admirable skill and science in literary form, Villon stands alone. For others--Georges Chastelain, Meschinot, Molinet, Cretin--poetry was a c.u.mbrous form of rhetoric, regulated by the rules of those arts of poetry which during the fifteenth century appeared at not infrequent intervals. The _grands rhetoriqueurs_ with their complicated measures, their pedantic diction, their effete allegory, their points and puerilities, testify to the exhaustion of the Middle Ages, and to the need of new creative forces for the birth of a living literature.

There is life, however, in the work of one remarkable prose-writer of the time--ANTOINE DE LA SALLE. His residence in Rome (1422) had made him acquainted with the tales of the Italian _novellieri_; he was a friend of the learned and witty Poggio; Rene of Anjou entrusted to him the education of his son; when advanced in years he became the author certainly of one masterpiece, probably of three. If he was the writer of the _Quinze Joies de Mariage_, he knew how to mask a rare power of cynical observation under a smiling face: the Church had celebrated the fifteen joys of the Blessed Virgin; he would ironically depict the fifteen afflictions of wedded life, in scenes finely studied from the domestic interior. How far the _Cent Nouvelles nouvelles_ are to be ascribed to him is doubtful; it is certain that these licentious tales reproduce, with a new skill in narrative prose, the spirit of indecorous mirth in their Italian models. The _Pet.i.t Jehan de Saintre_ is certainly the work of Antoine de la Salle; the irony of a realist, endowed with subtlety and grace, conducts the reader through chivalric exaltations to vulgar disillusion. The writer was not insensible to the charm of the ideals of the past, but he presents them only in the end to cover them with disgrace.

The anonymous farce of _Pathelin_, and the _Chronique de pet.i.t Jehan de Saintre_, are perhaps the most instructive doc.u.ments which we possess with respect to the moral temper of the close of the Middle Ages; and there have been critics who have ventured to ascribe both works to the same hand.

II THE DRAMA

The mediaeval drama in France, though of early origin, attained its full development only when the Middle Ages were approaching their term; its popularity continued during the first half of the sixteenth century. It waited for a public; with the growth of industry, the uprising of the middle cla.s.ses, it secured its audience, and in some measure filled the blank created by the disappearance of the _chansons de geste_. The survivals of the drama of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries are few; the stream, as we know, was flowing, but it ran underground.

The religious drama had its origin in the liturgical offices of the Church. At Christmas and at Easter the birth and resurrection of the Saviour were dramatically recited to the people by the clergy, within the consecrated building, in Latin paraphrases of the sacred text; but, as yet, neither Jesus nor His mother appeared as actors in the drama. By degrees the vernacular encroached upon the Latin and displaced it; the scene pa.s.sed from the church to the public place or street; the action developed; and the actors were priests supported by lay-folk, or were lay-folk alone.

The oldest surviving drama written in French (but with interspersed liturgical sentences of Latin) is of the twelfth century--the _Representation d'Adam_: the fall of man, and the first great crime which followed--the death of Abel--are succeeded by the procession of Messianic prophets. It was enacted outside the church, and the spectators were alarmed or diverted by demons who darted to and fro amidst the crowd. Of the thirteenth century, only two religious pieces remain. Jean Bodel, of Arras, was the author of _Saint Nicholas_.

The poet, himself about to a.s.sume the cross, exhibits a handful of Crusaders in combat with the Mussulmans; all but one, a supplicant of the saint, die gloriously, with angelic applause and pity; whereupon the feelings of the audience are relieved by the mirth and quarrels of drinkers in a tavern, who would rob St. Nicholas of the treasure entrusted to his safeguard; miracles, and general conversion of the infidels, conclude the drama. The miracle of _Theophile_, the ambitious priest who p.a.w.ned his soul to Satan, and through our Lady's intercession recovered his written compact, is by the trouvere Rutebeuf. These are scanty relics of a hundred years; yet their literary value outweighs that of the forty-two _Miracles de Notre Dame_ of the century which followed--rude pieces, often trivial, often absurd in their incidents, with mystic extravagance sanctifying their vulgar realism. They formed, with two exceptions, the dramatic repertory of some mediaeval _puy_, an a.s.sociation half-literary, half-religious, devoted to the Virgin's honour; their rhymed octosyllabic verse--the special dramatic form--at times borders upon prose. One drama, and only one, of the fourteenth century, chooses another heroine than our Lady--the _Histoire de Griselidis_, which presents, with pathos and intermingling mirth, those marvels of wifely patience celebrated for other lands by Boccaccio, by Petrarch, and by Chaucer.

The fifteenth-century Mystery exhibits the culmination of the mediaeval sacred drama. The word _mystere_,[2] first appropriated to tableaux vivants, is applied to dramatic performances in the royal privilege which in 1402 conferred upon the a.s.sociation known as the _Confrerie de la Pa.s.sion_ the right of performing the plays of our Redemption. Before this date the Blessed Virgin and the infant Jesus had appeared upon the scene. The Mystery presents the course of sacred story, derived from the Old and the New Testaments, together with the lives of the saints from apostolic times to the days of St. Dominic and St. Louis; it even includes, in an extended sense, subjects from profane history--the siege of Orleans, the destruction of Troy--but such subjects are of rare occurrence during the fifteenth century.

[Footnote 2: Derived from _ministerium_ (_metier_), but doubtless often drawing to itself a sense suggested by the _mysteries_ of religion.]

For a hundred years, from 1450 onwards, an unbounded enthusiasm for the stage possessed the people, not of Paris merely, but of all France.

The _Confreres de la Pa.s.sion_, needing a larger repertoire, found in young ARNOUL GREBAN, bachelor in theology, an author whose vein was copious. His _Pa.s.sion_, written about the middle of the fifteenth century, embraces the entire earthly life of Christ in its thirty-four thousand verses, which required one hundred and fifty performers and four crowded days for the delivery. Its presentation was an unprecedented event in the history of the theatre. The work of Greban was rehandled and enlarged by Jean Michel, and great was the triumph when it was given at Angers in 1486. Greban was not to be outdone either by his former self or by another dramatist; in collaboration with his brother Simon, he composed the yet more enormous _Actes des Apotres_, in sixty-two thousand lines, demanding the services of five hundred performers. When presented at Bourges as late as 1536, the happiness of the spectators was extended over no fewer than forty days. The Mystery of the Old Testament, selecting whatever was supposed to typify or foreshadow the coming of the Messiah, is only less vast, and is not less incoherent. Taken together, the Mysteries comprise over a million verses, and what remains is but a portion of what was written.

Though the literary value of the Mysteries is slight, except in occasional pa.s.sages of natural feeling or just characterisation, their historical importance was great; they met a national demand--they const.i.tuted an animated and moving spectacle of universal interest. A certain unity they possessed in the fact that everything revolved around the central figure of Christ and the central theme of man's salvation; but such unity is only to be discovered in a broad and distant view. Near at hand the confusion seems great. Their loose construction and unwieldy length necessarily endangered their existence when a truer feeling for literary art was developed. The solemnity of their matter gave rise to a further danger; it demanded some relief, and that relief was secured by the juxtaposition of comic scenes beside scenes of gravest import. Such comedy was occasionally not without grace--a pa.s.sage of pastoral, a song, a nave piece of gaiety; but buffoonery or vulgar riot was more to the taste of the populace. It was pushed to the furthest limit, until in 1548 the Parlement of Paris thought fit to interdict the performance of sacred dramas which had lost the sense of reverence and even of common propriety. They had scandalised serious Protestants; the Catholics declined to defend what was indefensible; the humanists and lovers of cla.s.sical art in Renaissance days thought scorn of the rude mediaeval drama. Though it died by violence, its existence could hardly have been prolonged for many years. But in the days of its popularity the performance of a mystery set a whole city in motion; carpenters, painters, costumiers, machinists were busy in preparation; priests, scholars, citizens rehea.r.s.ed their parts; country folk crowded to every hostelry and place of lodging. On the day preceding the first morning of performance the personages, duly attired--Christians, Jews, Saracens, kings, knights, apostles, priests--defiled through the streets on their way to the cathedral to ma.s.s. The vast stage hard by the church presented, with primitive properties, from right to left, the succession of places--lake, mountain, manger, prison, banquet-chamber--in which the action should be imagined; and from one station to another the actors pa.s.sed as the play proceeded. At one end of the stage rose heaven, where G.o.d sat throned; at the other, h.e.l.l-mouth gaped, and the demons entered or emerged. Music aided the action; the drama was tragedy, comedy, opera, pantomime in one. The actors were amateurs from every cla.s.s of society--clergy, scholars, tradesmen, mechanics, occasionally members of the _n.o.blesse_. In Paris the Confraternity of the Pa.s.sion had almost an exclusive right to present these sacred plays; in the provinces a.s.sociations were formed to carry out the costly and elaborate performance. To the _Confreres de la Pa.s.sion_--bourgeois folk and artisans--belonged the first theatre, and it was they who first presented plays at regular intervals. From the Hospital of the Trinity, originally a shelter for pilgrims, they migrated in 1539 to the Hotel de Flandres, and thence in 1548 to the Hotel de Bourgogne. Their famous place of performance pa.s.sed in time into the hands of professional actors; but it was not until 1676 that the Confrerie ceased to exist.

Comedy, unlike the serious drama, suffered no breach of continuity during its long history. The jongleurs of the Middle Ages were the immediate descendants of the Roman mimes and histrions; their declamations, accompanied by gestures, at least tended towards the dramatic form. Cla.s.sical comedy was never wholly forgotten in the schools; the liturgical drama and the sacred pieces developed from it had an indirect influence as encouraging dramatic feeling, and providing models which could be applied to other uses. The earliest surviving _jeux_ are of Arras, the work of ADAM DE LA HALLE. In the _Jeu d'Adam_ or _de la Feuillee_ (_c_. 1262) satirical studies of real life mingle strangely with fairy fantasy; the poet himself, lamenting his griefs of wedlock, his father, his friends are humorously introduced; the fool and the physician play their laughable parts; and the three fay ladies, for whom the citizens have prepared a banquet under _la feuillee_, grant or refuse the wishes of the mortal folk in the traditional manner of enchantresses amiable or perverse. The _Jeu de Robin et Marlon_--first performed at Naples in 1283--is a pastoral comic opera, with music, song, and dance; the good Marion is loyal to her rustic lover, and puts his rival, her cavalier admirer, to shame. These were happy inventions happily executed; but they stand alone. It is not until we reach the fifteenth century that mediaeval comedy, in various forms, attained its true evolution.

The Moralities, of which sixty-five survive, dating, almost all, from 1450 to 1550, differed from the Mysteries in the fact that their purpose was rather didactic than religious; as a rule they handled neither historical nor legendary matter; they freely employed allegorical personification after the fashion of the _Roman de la Rose_. The general type is well exemplified in _Bien-Avise, Mal-Avise_, a kind of dramatic Pilgrim's Progress, with two pilgrims--one who is instructed in the better way by all the personified powers which make for righteousness; the other finding his companions on the primrose path, and arriving at the everlasting bonfire. Certain Moralities attack a particular vice--gluttony or blasphemy, or the dishonouring of parents. From satirising the social vices of the time, the transition was easy to political satire or invective. In the sixteenth century both the partisans of the Reformation and the adherents to the traditional creed employed the Morality as a medium for ecclesiastical polemics. Sometimes treating of domestic manners and morals, it became a kind of bourgeois drama, presenting the conditions under which character is formed. Sometimes again it approached the farce: two lazy mendicants, one blind, the other lame, fear that they may suffer a cure and lose their trade through the efficacy of the relics of St. Martin; the halt, mounted on the other's back, directs his fellow in their flight; by ill luck they encounter the relic-bearers, and are restored in eye and limb; the recovered cripple swears and rages; but the man born blind, ravished by the wonders of the world, breaks forth in praise to G.o.d.

The higher Morality naturally selected types of character for satire or commendation. It is easy to perceive how such a comic art as that of Moliere lay in germ in this species of the mediaeval drama. At a late period examples are found of the historical Morality. The pathetic _l'Empereur qui tua son Neveu_ exhibits in its action and its stormy emotion something of tragic power. The advent of the pseudo-cla.s.sical tragedy of the Pleiade checked the development of this species. The very name "Morality" disappears from the theatre after 1550.

The _sottie_, like the Morality, was a creation of the fifteenth century. Whether it had its origin in a laicising of the irreverent celebration of the Feast of Fools, or in that parade of fools which sometimes preceded a Mystery, it was essentially a farce, but a farce in which the performers, arrayed in motley, and wearing the long-eared cap, distributed between them the several roles of human folly.

a.s.sociations of _sots_, known in Paris as _Enfants sans Souci_, known in other cities by other names, presented the unwisdom or madness of the world in parody. The _sottie_ at times rose from a mere diversion to satire; like the Morality, it could readily adapt itself to political criticism. The _Gens Nouveaux_, belonging perhaps to the reign of Louis XI., mocks the hypocrisy of those sanguine reformers who promise to create the world anew on a better model, and yet, after all, have no higher inspiration than that old greed for gold and power and pleasure which possessed their predecessors.

Louis XII., who permitted free comment on public affairs from actors on the stage, himself employed the poet Pierre Gringoire to satirise his adversary the Pope. In 1512 the _Jeu du Prince des Sots_ was given in Paris; Gringoire, the _Mere-Sotte_, but wearing the Papal robes to conceal for a time the garb of folly, discharged a princ.i.p.al part.

Such dangerous pleasantries as this were vigorously restrained by Francois I.

A dramatic monologue or a _sermon joyeux_ was commonly interposed between the _sottie_ and the Morality or miracle which followed. The sermon parodied in verse the pulpit discourses of the time, with text duly announced, the customary scholastic divisions, and an incredible licence in matter and in phrase. Among the dramatic monologues of the fifteenth century is found at least one little masterpiece, which has been ascribed on insufficient grounds to Villon, and which would do no discredit to that poet's genius--the _Franc-Archer de Bagnolet_. The francs-archers of Charles VII.--a rural militia--were not beloved of the people; the _miles gloriosus_ of Bagnolet village, boasting largely of his valour, encounters a stuffed scarecrow, twisting to the wind; his alarms, humiliations, and final triumph are rendered in a monologue which expounds the action of the piece with admirable spirit.

If the Mystery served to fill the void left by the national epopee, the farce may be regarded as to some extent the dramatic inheritor of the spirit of the fabliau. It aims at mirth and laughter for their own sakes, without any purpose of edification; it had, like the fabliau, the merit of brevity, and not infrequently the fault of unabashed grossness. But the very fact that it was a thing of little consequence allowed the farce to exhibit at times an audacity of political or ecclesiastical criticism which transformed it into a dramatised pamphlet. In general it chose its matter from the ludicrous misadventures of private life: the priest, the monk, the husband, the mother-in-law, the wife, the lover, the roguish servant are the agents in broadly ludicrous intrigues; the young wife lords it over her dotard husband, and makes mockery of his presumptive heirs, in _La Cornette_ of Jean d'Abondance; in _Le Cuvier_, the husband, whose many household duties have been scheduled, has his revenge--the list, which he deliberately recites while his wife flounders helpless in the great washing-tub, does not include the task of effecting her deliverance.

Amid much that is trivial and much that is indecent, one farce stands out pre-eminent, and may indeed be called a comedy of manners and of character--the merry misfortunes of that learned advocate, _Maitre Pierre Pathelin_. The date is doubtless about 1470; the author, probably a Parisian and a member of the Basoche, is unknown. With all his toiling and cheating, Pathelin is poor; with infinite art and spirit he beguiles the draper of the cloth which will make himself a coat and his faithful Guillemette a gown; when the draper, losing no time, comes for his money and an added dinner of roast goose, behold Maitre Pathelin is in a raging fever, raving in every dialect. Was the purchase of his cloth a dream, or work of the devil? To add to the worthy tradesman's ill-luck, his shepherd has stolen his wool and eaten his sheep. The dying Pathelin unexpectedly appears in court to defend the accused, and having previously advised his client to affect idiocy and reply to all questions with the senseless utterance _bee_, he triumphantly wins the case; but the tables are turned when Master Pathelin demands his fee, and can obtain no other response than _bee_ from the instructed shepherd. The triumph of rogue over rogue is the only moral of the piece; it is a satire on fair dealing and justice, and, though the morals of a farce are not to be gravely insisted on, such morals as _Maitre Pathelin_ presents agree well with the spirit of the age which first enjoyed this masterpiece of caricature.

The actors in mediaeval comedy, as in the serious drama, were amateurs.

The members of the academic _puys_ were succeeded by the members of guilds, or _confreries_, or _societes joyeuses_. Of these societies the most celebrated was that of the Parisian _Enfants sans Souci_.

With this were closely a.s.sociated the Basochiens, the corporation of clerks to the _procureurs_ of the Parlement of Paris.[3] It may be that the _sots_ of the capital were only members of the _basoche_, a.s.suming for the occasion the motley garb. In colleges, scholars performed at first in Latin plays, but from the fifteenth century in French. At the same time, troupes of performers occasionally moved from city to city, exhibiting a Mystery, but they did not hold together when the occasion had pa.s.sed. Professional comedians were brought from Italy to Lyons in 1548, for the entertainment of Henri II. and Catherine de Medicis. From that date companies of French actors appear to become numerous. New species of the drama--tragedy, comedy, pastoral--replace the mediaeval forms; but much of the genius of French cla.s.sical comedy is a development from the Morality, the _sottie_, and the farce. To present these newer forms the service of trained actors was required. During the last quarter of the sixteenth century the amateur performers of the ancient drama finally disappear.

[Footnote 3: This corporation, known as the _Royaume de la Basoche_ (_basilica_), was probably as old as the fourteenth century.]

BOOK THE SECOND _THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY_

CHAPTER I RENAISSANCE AND REFORMATION

The literature of the sixteenth century is dominated by two chief influences--that of the Renaissance and that of the Reformation. When French armies under Charles VIII. and Louis XII. made a descent on Italy, they found everywhere a recognition of the importance of art, an enthusiasm for beauty, a feeling for the aesthetic as well as the scholarly aspects of antiquity, a new joy in life, an universal curiosity, a new confidence in human reason. To Latin culture a Greek culture had been added; and side by side with the mediaeval master of the understanding, Aristotle, the master of the imaginative reason, Plato, was held in honour. Before the first quarter of the sixteenth century closed, France had received a great gift from Italy, which profoundly modified, but by no means effaced, the characteristics of her national genius. The Reformation was a recovery of Christian antiquity and of Hebraism, and for a time the religious movement made common cause with the Renaissance; but the grave morals, the opposition of grace to nature, and the dogmatic spirit of theology after a time alienated the Reforming party from the mere humanism of literature and art. An interest in general ideas and a capacity for dealing with them were fostered by the study of antiquity both cla.s.sical and Christian, by the meeting of various tendencies, and by the conflict of rival creeds. To embody general ideas in art under a presiding feeling for beauty, to harmonise thought and form, was the great work of the seventeenth century; but before this could be effected it was necessary that France should enjoy tranquillity after the strife of the civil wars.

Learning had received the distinction of court patronage when Louis XII. appointed the great scholar Bude his secretary. Around Francis I., although he was himself rather a lover of the splendour and ornament of the Renaissance than of its finer spirit, men of learning and poets gathered. On the suggestion of GUILLAUME BUDe he endowed professorships of Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, to which were added those of medicine, mathematics, and philosophy (1530-40), and in this projected foundation of the College de France an important step was made towards the secularisation of learned studies. The King's sister, MARGUERITE OF NAVARRE (1492-1549), perhaps the most accomplished woman of her time, represents more admirably than Francis the genius of the age. She studied Latin, Italian, Spanish, German, Hebrew, and, when forty, occupied herself with Greek. Her heart was ardent as well as her intellect; she was gay and mundane, and at the same time she was serious (with even a strain of mystical emotion) in her concern for religion. Although not in communion with the Reformers, she sympathised with them, and extended a generous protection to those who incurred danger through their liberal opinions. Her poems, _Marguerites de la Marguerite des Princesses_ (1547), show the mediaeval influences forming a junction with those of the Renaissance.

Some are religious, but side by side with her four dramatic Mysteries and her eloquent _Triomphe de l'Agneau_ appears the _Histoire des Satyres et Nymphes de Diane_, imitated from the Italian of Sannazaro.

Among her latest poems, which remained in ma.n.u.script until 1896, are a pastoral dramatic piece expressing her grief for the death of her brother Francis I.; a second dramatic poem, _Comedie jouee au Mont de Marsan_, in which love (human or divine) triumphs over the spirit of the world, over superst.i.tious asceticism, and over the wiser temper of religious moderation. _Les Prisons_ tells in allegory of her servitude to pa.s.sion, to worldly ambition, and to the desire for human knowledge, until at last the divine love brought her deliverance.

The union of the mundane and the moral spirit is singularly shown in Marguerite's collection of prose tales, written in imitation of Boccaccio, the _Heptameron des Nouvelles_ (1558).

These tales were not an indiscretion of youth; probably Marguerite composed them a few years before her death; perhaps their licence and wanton mirth were meant to enliven the melancholy hours of her beloved brother; certainly the writer is ingenious in extracting edifying lessons from narratives which do not promise edification.

They are not so gross as other writings of the time, and this is Marguerite's true defence; to laugh at the immoralities of monks and priests was a tradition in literature which neither the spirit of the Renaissance nor that of the Reformation condemned. A company of ladies and gentlemen, detained by floods on their return from the Pyrenean baths, beguile the time by telling these tales, and the pious widow Dame Oisille gives excellent a.s.sistance in showing how they tend to a moral purpose. The series, designed to equal in number the tales of the Decameron, is incomplete. Possibly Marguerite was aided by some one or more of the authors of whom she was the patroness and protector; but no sufficient evidence exists for the ascription of the _Heptameron_ to Bonaventure des Periers.

Among the poets whom Marguerite received with favour at her court was CLeMENT MAROT, the versifier, as characterised by Boileau, of "elegant badinage." His predecessors and early contemporaries in the opening years of the sixteenth century continued the manner of the so-called _rhetoriqueurs_, who endeavoured to maintain allegory, now decrepit or effete, with the aid of ingenuities of versification and pedantry of diction; or else they carried on something of the more living tradition of Villon or of Coquillard. Among the former, Jean le Maire de Belges deserves to be remembered less for his verse than for his prose work, _Ill.u.s.trations de Gaule et Singularitez de Troie_, in which the Trojan origin of the French people is set forth with some feeling for beauty and a ma.s.s of crude erudition. Clement Marot, born at Cahors in 1495 or 1496, a poet's son, was for a time in the service of Francis I. as _valet de chambre_, and accompanied his master to the battle of Pavia, where he was wounded and made prisoner.

Pursued by the Catholics as a heretic, and afterwards by the Genevan Calvinists as a libertine, he was protected as long as was possible by the King and by his sister. He died at Turin, a refugee to Italy, in 1544.

In his literary origins Marot belongs to the Middle Ages; he edited the _Roman de la Rose_ and the works of Villon; his immediate masters were the _grands rhetoriqueurs_; but the spirit of the Renaissance and his own genius delivered him from the oppression of their authority, and his intellect was attracted by the revolt and the promise of freedom found in the Reforming party. A light and pleasure-loving nature, a temper which made the prudent conduct of life impossible, exposed him to risks, over which, aided by protectors whom he knew how to flatter with a delicate grace, he glided without fatal mishap. He did not bring to poetry depth of pa.s.sion or solidity of thought; he brought what was needed--a bright intelligence, a sense of measure and proportion, grace, gaiety, _esprit_. Escaping, after his early _Temple de Cupido_, from the allegorising style, he learned to express his personal sentiments, and something of the gay, bourgeois spirit of France, with aristocratic distinction. His poetry of the court and of occasion has lost its savour; but when he writes familiarly (as in the _epitre au Roi pour avoir ete derobe_), or tells a short tale (like the fable of the rat and the lion), he is charmingly bright and natural. None of his poems--elegies, epistles, satires, songs, epigrams, rondeaux, pastorals, ballades--overwhelm us by their length; he was not a writer of vast imaginative ambitions. His best epigrams are masterpieces in their kind, with happy turns of thought and expression in which art seems to have the ease of nature. The satirical epistle supposed to be sent, not by Marot, but by his valet, to Marot's adversary, Sagon, is spirited in its insolence. _L'Enfer_ is a satiric outbreak of indignation suggested by his imprisonment in the Chatelet on the charge of heresy. His versified translation of forty-nine Psalms added to his glory, and brought him the honour of personal danger from the hostility of the Sorbonne; but to attempt such a translation is to aim at what is impossible. His gift to French poetry is especially a gift of finer art--firm and delicate expression, felicity in rendering a thought or a feeling, certainty and grace in poetic evolution, skill in handling the decasyllabic line. A great poet Marot was not, and could not be; but, coming at a fortunate moment, his work served literature in important ways; it was a return from laboured rhetoric to nature. In the cla.s.sical age his merit was recognised by La Bruyere, and the author of the _Fables_ and the _Contes_--in some respects a kindred spirit--acknowledged a debt to Marot.

From Marot as a poet much was learned by Marguerite of Navarre. Of his contemporaries, who were also disciples, the most distinguished was MELIN DE SAINT-GELAIS, and on the master's death Melin pa.s.sed for an eminent poet. We can regard him now more justly, as one who in slender work sought for elegance, and fell into a mannered prettiness. While preserving something of the French spirit, he suffered from the frigid ingenuities which an imitation of Italian models suggested to him; but it cannot be forgotten that Saint-Gelais brought the sonnet from Italy into French poetry. The school of Marot, ambitious in little things, affected much the _blason_, which celebrates an eyebrow, a lip, a bosom, a jewel, a flower, a precious stone; lyrical inspiration was slender, but clearness and grace were worth attaining, and the conception of poetry as a fine art served to lead the way towards Ronsard and the Pleiade.

The most powerful personality in literature of the first half of the sixteenth century was not a poet, though he wrote verses, but a great creator in imaginative prose, great partly by virtue of his native genius, partly because the sap of the new age of enthusiasm for science and learning was thronging in his veins--FRANcOIS RABELAIS. Born about 1490 or 1495, at Chinon, in Touraine, of parents in a modest station, he received his education in the village of Seuille and at the convent of La Baumette. He revolted against the routine of the schools, and longed for some nutriment more succulent and savoury.

For fifteen years he lived as a Franciscan monk in the cell and cloisters of the monastery at Fontenay-le-Comte. In books, but not those of a monastic library, he found salvation; mathematics, astronomy, law, Latin, Greek consoled him during his period of uncongenial seclusion. His criminal companions--books which might be suspected of heresy--were sequestrated. The young Bishop of Maillezais--his friend Geoffroy d'Estissac, who had aided his studies--and the great scholar Bude came to his rescue, and pa.s.sing first, by favour of the Pope, to the Benedictine abbey of Maillezais, before long he quitted the cloister, and, as a secular priest, began his wanderings of a scholar in search of universal knowledge. In 1530-31 he was at Montpellier, studying medicine and lecturing on medical works of Hippocrates and Galen; next year, at Lyons, one of the learned group gathered around the great printers of that city, he practised his art of physic in the public hospital, and was known as a scientific author. Towards the close of 1532 he re-edited the popular romance _Chroniques Gargantuines_, which tells the adventures of the "enormous giant Gargantua." It was eagerly read, and brought laughter to the lips of Master Rabelais' patients.

Learning, he held, was good, but few things in this world are wholesomer than laughter. The success of the _Chroniques_ seems to have moved him to write a continuation, and in 1533 appeared _Pantagruel_, the story of the deeds and prowess of Gargantua's giant son, newly composed by Alcofribas Nasier, an anagram which concealed the name of Francois Rabelais. It forms the second of the five books which make up its author's famous work. A recast or rather a new creation of the Chronicles of Gargantua, replacing the original _Chroniques_, followed in 1535. It was not until 1546 and 1552 that the second and--in its complete form--the third books of _Pantagruel_ appeared, and the authorship was acknowledged. The last book was posthumous (1562 in part, 1564 in full), and the inferiority of style, together with the more bitter spirit of its satire, have led many critics to the opinion that it is only in part from the hand of the great and wise humourist.

Rabelais was in Rome in 1534, and again in 1535, as physician to the French amba.s.sador, Jean du Bellay, Bishop of Paris. He pursued his scientific studies in medicine and botany, took lessons in Arabic, and had all a savant's intelligent curiosity for the remains of antiquity. Some years of his life were pa.s.sed in wandering from one French university to another. Fearing the hostility of the Sorbonne, during the last illness of his protector Francis I., he fled to the imperial city of Metz. He was once again in Rome with Cardinal du Bellay, in 1549. Next year the author of _Pantagruel_ was appointed cure of Meudon, near Paris, but, perhaps as a concession to public opinion, he resigned his clerical charges on the eve of the publication of his fourth book. Rabelais died probably in 1552 or 1553, aged about sixty years.

On his death it might well have been said that the gaiety of nations was eclipsed; but to his contemporaries Rabelais appeared less as the enormous humourist, the buffoon Homer, than as a great scholar and man of science, whose bright temper and mirthful conversation were in no way inconsistent with good sense, sound judgment, and even a habit of moderation. It is thus that he should still be regarded.

Below his laughter lay wisdom; below his orgy of grossness lay a n.o.ble ideality; below the extravagances of his imagination lay the equilibrium of a spirit sane and strong. The life that was in him was so abounding and exultant that it broke all dikes and dams; and laughter for him needed no justification, it was a part of this abounding life. After the mediaeval asceticism and the intellectual bondage of scholasticism, life in Rabelais has its vast outbreak and explosion; he would be no fragment of humanity, but a complete man.

He would enjoy the world to the full, and yet at the same time there is something of stoicism in his philosophy of life; while gaily accepting the good things of the earth, he would hold himself detached from the gifts of fortune, and possess his soul in a strenuous sanity.

Let us return--such is his teaching--to nature, honouring the body, but giving higher honour to the intellect and to the moral feeling; let us take life seriously, and therefore gaily; let us face death cheerfully, knowing that we do not wholly die; with light in the understanding and love in the heart, we can confront all dangers and defy all doubts.

He is the creator of characters which are types. His giants--Grandgousier, Gargantua, Pantagruel--are giants of good sense and large benevolence. The education of Pantagruel presents the ideal pedagogy of the Renaissance, an education of the whole man--mind and body--in contrast with the dwarfing subtleties and word-spinning of the effete mediaeval schools. Friar John is the monk whose pa.s.sion for a life of activity cannot be restrained; his violence is the overflow of wholesome energy. It is to his care that the Abbey of Thelema is confided, where young men and maidens are to be occupied with every n.o.ble toil and every high delight, an abbey whose rule has but a single clause (since goodness has no rule save freedom), "Do what you will." Of such a fraternity, love and marriage are the happiest outcome. Panurge, for whom the suggestion was derived from the macaronic poet Folengo, is the fellow of Shakespeare's Falstaff, in his lack of morals, his egoism, his inexhaustible wit; he is the worst and best of company. We would dispense with such a disreputable a.s.sociate if we could, but save that he is a "very wicked lewd rogue," he is "the most virtuous man in the world," and we cannot part with him. Panurge would marry, but fears lest he may be the victim of a faithless wife; every mode of divination, every source of prediction except one is resorted to, and still his fate hangs threatening; it only remains to consult the oracle of La Dive Bouteille. The voyaging quest is long and perilous; in each island at which the adventurers touch, some social or ecclesiastical abuse is exhibited for ridicule; the word of the oracle is in the end the mysterious "Drink"--drink, that is, if one may venture to interpret an oracle, of the pure water of wisdom and knowledge, and let the unknown future rest.