A History of French Literature Part 5

D'Aubigne's satirical tale, _Les Aventures du Baron de Faeneste_, contrasts the man who _appears_--spreading his plumes in the sunshine of the court--with the man who _is_, the man who lives upon his estate, among his rustic neighbours, tilling his fields and serving his people and his native land. As an elegiac poet D'Aubigne is little more than a degenerate issue from the Pleiade. It is in his vehement poem of mourning and indignation and woe, _Les Tragiques_, begun in 1577 but not published till 1616, that his power is fully manifested. To D'Aubigne, as its author, the characterisation of Sainte-Beuve exactly applies: "Juvenal du xvi. siecle, apre, austere, inexorable, herisse d'hyperboles, etincelant de beautes, rachetant une rudesse grossiere par une sublime energie." In seven books it tells of the misery of France, the treachery of princes, the abuse of public law and justice, the fires and chains of religious persecution, the vengeance of G.o.d against the enemies of the saints, and the final judgment of sinners, when air and fire and water become the accusers of those who have perverted the powers of nature to purposes of cruelty.

The poem is ill composed, its rhetoric is often strained or hard and metallic, its unrelieved horrors oppress the heart; but the cry of true pa.s.sion is heard in its finer pages; from amid the turmoil and smoke, living tongues of flame seem to dart forth which illuminate the gloom. The influence of _Les Tragiques_ may still be felt in pa.s.sages of Victor Hugo's fulgurant eloquence.

In the midst of strife, however, there were men who pursued the disinterested service of humanity and whose work made for peace. The great surgeon Ambroise Pare, full of tolerance and deeply pious, advanced his healing art on the battle-field or amid the ravages of pestilence, and left a large contribution to the literature of science.

Bernard Palissy, a devout Huguenot, was not only the inventor of "rustic figulines," the designer of enamelled cups and platters, but a true student of nature, who would subst.i.tute the faithful observation of phenomena for vain and ambitious theory. Olivier de Serres, another disciple of Calvin, cultivated his fields, helped to enrich France by supporting Henri IV. in the introduction of the industry in silk, and ama.s.sed his knowledge and experience in his admirably-written _Theatre d'Agriculture_. At a later date Antoine de Montchrestien, adventurous and turbulent in his Protestant zeal, the writer of tragedies which connect the sixteenth century with the cla.s.sical school of later years, became the advocate of a protectionist and a colonial policy in his _Traicte de l'OEconomie Politique_; the style of his essay towards economic reform has some of the pa.s.sion and enthusiasm of a poet.

A refuge from the troubles and vicissitudes of the time was sought by some in a Christianised Stoicism. Guillaume du Vair (1556-1621), eminent as a magistrate, did not desert his post of duty; he pleaded eloquently, as chief orator of the middle party of conciliation, on behalf of unity under Henri of Navarre. In his treatise on French eloquence he endeavoured to elevate the art of public speaking above laboured pedantry to true human discourse. But while taking part in the contentious progress of events, he saw the flow of human affairs as from an elevated plateau. In the conversations with friends which form his treatise _De la Constance et Consolation es Calamites Publiques_, Du Vair's counsels are those of courage and resignation, not unmingled with hope. He rendered into French the stoical morals of Epictetus; and in his own _Sainte Philosophie_ and _Philosophie Morale des Stoques_ he endeavoured, with honest purpose, rather than with genius, to ally speculation to religion, and to show how human reason can lead the way to those ethical truths which are the guiding lights of conduct.

Perhaps cert.i.tude sufficient for human life may be found by limitation; a few established truths will, after all, carry us from the cradle to the grave; and beyond the bounds of cert.i.tude lies a limitless and fascinating field for observation and dubious conjecture. Amid the mult.i.tude of new ideas which the revival of antiquity brought with it, amid the hot disputes of the rival churches, amid the fierce contentions of civil war, how delightful to possess one's soul in quiet, to be satisfied with the needful knowledge, small though it be, which is vouchsafed to us, and to amuse the mind with every opinion and every varying humour of that curious and wayward creature man! And who so wayward, who so wavering as one's self in all those parts of our composite being which are subject to the play of time and circ.u.mstance? Such, in an age of confusion working towards clearness, an age of belligerency tending towards concord, were the reflections of a moralist, the most original of his century--Michel de Montaigne.

MICHEL EYQUEM, SEIGNEUR DE MONTAIGNE, was born at a chateau in Perigord, in the year 1533. His father, whom Montaigne always remembered with affectionate reverence, was a man of original ideas.

He entrusted the infant to the care of peasants, wishing to attach him to the people; educated him in Latin as if his native tongue; roused him at morning from sleep to the sound of music. From his sixth to his thirteenth year Montaigne was at the College de Guyenne, where he took the leading parts in Latin tragedies composed by Muret and Buchanan. In 1554 he succeeded his father as councillor in the court _des aides_ of Perigueux, the members of which were soon afterwards incorporated in the Parliament of Bordeaux. But nature had not destined Montaigne for the duties of the magistracy; he saw too many sides of every question; he chose rather to fail in justice than in humanity. In 1565 he acquired a large fortune by marriage, and having lost his father, he retired from public functions in 1570, to enjoy a tranquil existence of meditation, and of rambling through books.

He had published, a year before, in fulfilment of his father's desire, a translation of the _Theologia Naturalis_ of Raimond de Sebonde, a Spanish philosopher of the fifteenth century; and now he occupied himself in preparing for the press the writings of his dead friend La Boetie. Love for his father and love for his friend were the two pa.s.sions of Montaigne's life. From 1571 to 1580 he dwelt in retreat, in company with his books and his ideas, indulging his humour for tranquil freedom of the mind. It was his custom to enrich the margins of his books with notes, and his earliest essays may be regarded as an extension of such notes; Plutarch and Seneca were, above all, his favourites; afterwards, the volume which he read with most enjoyment, and annotated most curiously, was that of his own life.

And, indeed, Montaigne's daily life, with outward monotony and internal variety, was a pleasant miscellany on which to comment. He was of a middle temperament, "between the jovial and the melancholic"; a lover of solitude, yet the reverse of morose; choosing bright companions rather than sad; able to be silent, as the mood took him, or to gossip; loyal and frank; a hater of hypocrisy and falsehood; a despiser of empty ceremony; disposed to interpret all things to the best; cheerful among his children; careless of exercising authority; incapable of household management; trustful and kind towards his neighbours; indulgent in his judgments, yet warm in his admiration of old, heroic virtue. His health, which in boyhood had been robust, was shaken in middle life by an internal malady. He travelled in the hope of finding strength, visiting Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Tyrol, and observing, with a serious amus.e.m.e.nt, the varieties of men and manners. While still absent from France, in 1581, he learned that he had been elected mayor of Bordeaux; he hesitated in accepting an honourable but irksome public office; the King permitted no dallying, and Montaigne obeyed. Two years later the mayor was re-elected; it was a period of difficulty; a Catholic and a Royalist, he had a heretic brother, and himself yielded to the charm of Henri of Navarre; "for the Ghibelline I was a Guelph, for the Guelph a Ghibelline." When, in 1585, pestilence raged in Bordeaux, Montaigne's second period of office had almost expired; he quitted the city, and the election of his successor took place in his absence.

His last years were brightened by the friendship--almost filial--of Mlle. de Gournay, an ardent admirer, and afterwards editor, of the _Essais_. In 1592 Montaigne died, when midway in his sixtieth year.

The first two books of the _Essais_ were published by their author in 1580; in 1588 they appeared in an augmented text, with the addition of the third book. The text superintended by Mlle. de Gournay, based upon a revised and enlarged copy left by Montaigne, is of the year 1595.

The unity of the book, which makes no pretence to unity, may be found in the fact that all its topics are concerned with a common subject--the nature of man; that the writer accepts himself as the example of humanity most open to his observation; and that the same tranquil, yet insatiable curiosity is everywhere present. Man, as conceived by Montaigne, is of all creatures the most variable, unstable, inconstant. The species includes the saint and the brute, the hero and the craven, while between the extremes lies the average man, who may be anything that nature, custom, or circ.u.mstances make him. And as the species varies indefinitely, so each individual varies endlessly from himself: his conscience controls his temperament; his temperament betrays his conscience; external events transform him from what he was. Do we seek to establish our moral being upon the rock of philosophical dogma? The rock gives way under our feet, and scatters as if sand. Such truth as we can attain by reason is relative truth; let us pa.s.s through knowledge to a wise acceptance of our ignorance; let us be contented with the probabilities which are all that our reason can attain. The truths of conduct, as far as they are ascertainable, were known long since to the ancient moralists.

Can any virtue surpa.s.s the old Roman virtue? We believe in G.o.d, although we know little about His nature or His operations; and why should we disbelieve in Christianity, which happens to be part of the system of things under which we are born? But why, also, should we pay such a compliment to opinions different from our own as to burn a heretic because he prefers the Pope of Geneva to the Pope of Rome? Let each of us ask himself, "Que sais-je?"--"What do I really know?" and the answer will serve to temper our zeal.

While Montaigne thus saps our confidence in the conclusions of the intellect, when they pa.s.s beyond a narrow bound, he pays a homage to the force of will; his admiration for the heroic men of Plutarch is ardent. An Epicurean by temperament, he is a Stoic through his imagination; but for us and for himself, who are no heroes, the appropriate form of Stoical virtue is moderation within our sphere, and a wise indifference, or at most a disinterested curiosity, in matters which lie beyond that sphere. Let us resign ourselves to life, such as it is; let us resign ourselves to death; and let the resignation be cheerful or even gay. To spend ourselves in attempted reforms of the world, of society, of governments, is vain. The world will go its own way; it is for us to accept things as they are, to observe the laws of our country because it is ours, to smile at them if we please, and to extract our private gains from a view of the reformers, the enthusiasts, the dogmatists, the credulous, the combatants; there is one heroism possible for us--the heroism of good sense. "It is an absolute perfection, and as it were divine," so we read on the last page of Florio's translation of the _Essais_, "for a man to know how to enjoy his being loyally. We seek for other conditions because we understand not the use of ours; and go out of ourselves, forasmuch as we know not what abiding there is. We may long enough get upon stilts, for be we upon them, yet must we go with our legs. And sit we upon the highest throne of the world, yet sit we upon our own tail. The best and most commendable lives, and best pleasing me are (in my conceit), those which with order are fitted, and with decorum are ranged, to the common mould and human model; but without wonder or extravagancy. Now hath old age need to be handled more tenderly. Let us recommend it unto that G.o.d who is the protector of health and fountain of all wisdom; but blithe and social." And with a stanza of Epicurean optimism from Horace the Essay closes.

Such, or somewhat after this fashion, is the doctrine of Montaigne.

It is conveyed to the reader without system, in the most informal manner, in a series of discourses which seem to wander at their own will, resembling a bright and easy conversation, vivid with imagery, enlivened by anecdote and citation, reminiscences from history, observations of curious manners and customs, offering constantly to view the person of Montaigne himself in the easiest undress. The style, although really carefully studied and superintended, has an air of light facility, hardly interposing between the author and his reader; the book is of all books the most sociable, a living companion rather than a book, playful and humorous, amiable and well bred, learned without pedantry, and wise without severity.

During the last three years of his life Montaigne enjoyed the friendship of a disciple who was already celebrated for his eloquence as a preacher. PIERRE CHARRON (1541-1603), legist and theologian, under the influence of Montaigne's ideas, aspired to be a philosopher.

It was as a theologian that he wrote his book of the _Trois Verites_, which attempts to demonstrate the existence of G.o.d, the truth of Christianity, and the exclusive orthodoxy of the Roman communion.

It was as a philosopher, in the _Traite de la Sagesse_, that he systematised the informal scepticism of Montaigne. Instead of putting the question, "Que sais-je?" Charron ventures the a.s.sertion, "Je ne sais." He exhibits man's weakness, misery, and bondage to the pa.s.sions; gives counsel for the enfranchis.e.m.e.nt of the mind; and studies the virtues of justice, prudence, temperance, and valiance.

G.o.d has created man, says Charron, to know the truth; never can he know it of himself or by human means, and one who despairs of reason is in the best position for accepting divine instruction; a Pyrrhonist at least will never be a heretic; even if religion be regarded as an invention of man, it is an invention which has its uses. Not a few pa.s.sages of the _Sagesse_ are directly borrowed, with slight rehandling, from Montaigne and from Du Vair; but, instead of Montaigne's smiling agnosticism, we have a grave and formal indictment of humanity; we miss the genial humour and kindly temper of the master; we miss the amiable egotism and the play of a versatile spirit; we miss the charm of an incomparable literary style.

BOOK THE THIRD _THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY_

CHAPTER I LITERARY FREEDOM AND LITERARY ORDER

With the restoration of order under Henri IV. the delights of peace began to be felt; a mundane society, polished and pleasure-loving, began to be const.i.tuted, and before many years had pa.s.sed the influence of women and of the _salon_ appeared in literature. Should such a society be permitted to remain oblivious to spiritual truth, or to repose on the pillow of scepticism provided by Charron and Montaigne? Might it not be captured for religion, if religion were presented in its most gracious aspect, as a source of peace and joy, a gentle discipline of the heart? If one who wore the Christian armour should throw over his steel some robe of courtly silk, with floral adornments, might he not prove a persuasive champion of the Cross?

Such was the hope of FRANcOIS DE SALES (1567-1622), Bishop of Geneva, when, in 1608, he published his _Introduction a la Vie Devote_. The angelic doctor charmed by his mere presence, his grace of person, his winning smile, his dove's eyes; he showed how amiable piety might be; his eloquence was festooned with blossoms; he strewed the path to heaven with roses; he conquered by docility; yet under his sweetness lay strength, and to methodise and popularise moral self-superintendence was to achieve much. The _Traite de l'Amour de Dieu_ (1616), while it expounds the highest reaches of mystical devotion, yet presents religion as accessible to every child of G.o.d.

With his tender and ardent devotion, something of a poet's sentiment for nature was united; but mysticism and poetry were both subservient to his aim of regulating the conduct of the heart; he desired to show how one may remain in the world, and yet not be of the world; by personal converse and by his spiritual letters he became the director of courtiers and of ladies. The motto of the literary Academy which he founded at Annecy expresses his spirit--_flores fructusque perennes_--flowers for their own sake, but chiefly for the sake of fruit. Much of the genius for holiness of the courtly saint has pa.s.sed into the volume of reminiscences by Bishop Camus, his companion and disciple--_l'Esprit de Saint Francois de Sales_.

A mundane society, however, where fine gentlemen and ladies meet to admire and be admired, needs other outlets for its imagination than that of the primrose way to Paradise. The labour of the fields had inspired Olivier de Serres with the prose Georgics of his _Theatre d'Agriculture_, a work directed towards utility; the romance of the fields, and the pastoral, yet courtly, loves of a French Arcady, were the inspiration of the endless prose bucolics found in the _Astree_ of HONORe D'URFe. The Renaissance delight in the pastoral had pa.s.sed from Italy to Spain; through the _Diana_ of the Spanish Montemayor it pa.s.sed to France. After a period of turbulent strife there was a fascination in visions of a peace, into which, if warfare entered, the strange irruption only enhanced an habitual calm. A whole generation waited long to learn the issue of the pa.s.sion of Celadon and Astree. The romance, of which the earliest part appeared in 1610, or earlier, was not completely published until 1627, when its author was no longer living.[1] The scene is laid in the fields of d'Urfe's familiar Forez and on the banks of the Lignon; the time is of Merovingian antiquity. The shepherd Celadon, banished on suspicion of faithlessness from the presence of his beloved Astree, seeks death beneath the stream; he is saved by the nymphs, escapes the amorous pursuit of Galatea, a.s.sumes a feminine garb, and, protected by the Druid Adamas, has the felicity of daily beholding his shepherdess.

At length he declares himself, and is overwhelmed with reproaches; true lover that he is, when he offers his body to the devouring lions of the Fountain of Love, the beasts refuse their prey; the venerable Druid discreetly guides events; Celadon's fidelity receives its reward in marriage, and the banks of the Lignon become a scene of universal joy. The colours of the _Astree_ are faded now as those of some ancient tapestry, but during many years its success was prodigious. D'Urfe's highest honour, of many, is the confession of La Fontaine:--

"_etant pet.i.t garcon je lisais son roman, Et je le lis encore ayant la barbe grise._"

The _Astree_ won its popularity, in part because it united the old attraction of a chivalric or heroic strain with that of the newer pastoral; in part because it idealised the gallantries and developed the amorous casuistry of the day, not without a real sense of the power of love; in part because it was supposed to exhibit ideal portraits of distinguished contemporaries. It was the parent of a numerous progeny; and as the heroic romance of the seventeenth century is derived in direct succession from the loves of Celadon and Astree, so the comic romance, beside all that it owes to the tradition of the _esprit gaulois_, owes something to the mocking gaiety with which d'Urfe exhibits the adventures and emotional vicissitudes of his inconstant shepherd Hylas.

[Footnote 1: It should be noted that the close of the _Astree_ is by D'Urfe's secretary Baro.]

In the political and social reconstruction which followed the civil and religious wars, the need of discipline and order in literature was felt; in this province, also, unity under a law was seen to be desirable. The work of the Pleiade had in a great measure failed; they had attempted to organise poetry and its methods, and poetry was still disorganised. To reduce the realm of caprice and fantasy to obedience to law was the work of FRANcOIS DE MALHERBE. Born at Caen in 1555, he had published in 1587 his _Larmes de Saint Pierre_, an imitation of the Italian poem by Tansillo, in a manner which his maturer judgment must have condemned. It was not until about his fortieth year that he found his true direction. Du Vair, with whom he was acquainted, probably led him to a true conception of the nature of eloquence. Vigorous of character, clear in understanding, with no affluence of imagination and no excess of sensibility, Malherbe was well qualified for establishing lyrical poetry upon the basis of reason, and of general rather than individual sentiment. He chose the themes of his odes from topics of public interest, or founded them on those commonplaces of emotion which are part of the possession of all men who think and feel. If he composed his verses for some great occasion, he sought for no curiosities of a private imagination, but considered in what way its n.o.bler aspects ought to be regarded by the community at large; if he consoled a friend for losses caused by death, he held his personal pa.s.sion under restraint; he generalised, and was content to utter more admirably than others the accepted truths about the brevity and beauty of life, and the inevitable doom of death. What he gained by such a process of abstraction, he lost in vivid characterisation; his imagery lacks colour; the movement of his verse is deliberate and calculated; his ideas are rigorously enchained one to another.

It has been said that poetry--the overflow of individual emotion--is overheard; while oratory--the appeal to an audience--is heard. The processes of Malherbe's art were essentially oratorical; the lyrical cry is seldom audible in his verse; it is the poetry of eloquence thrown into studied stanzas. But the greater poetry of the seventeenth century in France--its odes, its satires, its epistles, its n.o.ble dramatic scenes--and much of its prose literature are of the nature of oratory; and for the progress of such poetry, and even of such prose, Malherbe prepared a highway. He aimed at a reformation of the language, which, rejecting all words either base, provincial, archaic, technical, or over-learned and over-curious, should employ the standard French, pure and dignified, as accepted by the people of Paris. In his hands language became too exclusively an instrument of the intelligence; yet with this instrument great things were achieved by his successors. He methodised and regulated versification, insisting on rich and exact rhymes, condemning all licence and infirmity of structure, condemning harshness of sound, inversion, hiatus, negligence in accommodating the cesura to the sense, the free gliding of couplet into couplet. It may be said that he rendered verse mechanical; but within the arrangement which he prescribed, admirable effects were attainable by the mastery of genius. He pondered every word, weighed every syllable, and thought no pains ill-spent if only clearness, precision, the logic of ordonnance, a sustained harmony were at length secured; and until the day of his death, in 1628, no decline in his art can be perceived.

Malherbe fell far short of being a great poet, but in the history of seventeenth-century cla.s.sicism, in the effort of the age to rationalise the forms of art, his name is of capital importance. It cannot be said that he founded a school. His immediate disciples, MAYNARD and RACAN, failed to develop the movement which he had initiated. Maynard laid verse by the side of verse with exact care, and sometimes one or the other verse is excellent, but he lacked sustained force and flight. Racan had genuine inspiration; a true feeling for nature appears in his dramatic pastoral, the _Bergeries_ (1625); unhappily he had neither the culture nor the patience needed for perfect execution; he was rather an admirable amateur than an artist. But if Malherbe founded no school, he gave an eminent example, and the argument which he maintained in the cause of poetic art was at a later time carried to its conclusion by Boileau.

Malherbe's reform was not accepted without opposition. While he pleaded for the supremacy of order, regularity, law, the voice of MATHURIN REGNIER (1573-1613) was heard on behalf of freedom. A nephew of the poet Desportes, Regnier was loyal to his uncle's fame and to the memory of the Pleiade; if Malherbe spoke slightingly of Desportes, and cast aside the tradition of the school of Ronsard, the retort was speedy and telling against the arrogant reformer, tyrant of words and syllables, all whose achievement amounted to no more than _proser de la rime et rimer de la prose_. Unawares, indeed, Regnier, to a certain extent, co-operated with Malherbe, who recognised the genius of his younger adversary; he turned away from languid elegances to observation of life and truth of feeling; if he imitated his masters Horace and Ovid, or the Italian satiric poets, with whose writings he had become acquainted during two periods of residence in Rome, his imitations were not obsequious, like those of the Pleiade, but vigorous and original, like those of Boileau; in his sense of comedy he antic.i.p.ates some of Moliere's feeling for the humorous perversities of human character; his language is vivid, plain, and popular. The cla.s.sical school of later years could not reject Regnier.

Boileau declared that no poet before Moliere was so well acquainted with the manners and characters of men; through his impersonal study of life he is indeed cla.s.sic. But his ardent nature rebelled against formal rule; he trusted to the native force of genius, and let his ideas and pa.s.sions lead him where they would. His satires are those of a painter whose eye is on his object, and who handles his brush with a vigorous discretion; they are criticisms of society and its types of folly or of vice, full of force and colour, yet general in their intention, for, except at the poet who had affronted his uncle, "le bon Regnier" struck at no individual. Most admirable, amid much that is admirable, is the picture of the old worldling Macette, whose veil of pretended piety is gradually dropped as she discourses with growing wantonness to the maiden whom she would lead in the way she should not go: Macette is no unworthy elder of the family of Tartufe.

Regnier confesses freely the pa.s.sions of his own irregular life; had it been wisely conducted, his genius might have carried him far; as it was, he pa.s.sed away prematurely at the age of forty, the victim of his own intemperate pursuit of pleasure.

Still more unfortunate was the life of a younger poet, who, while honouring the genius of Malherbe, p.r.o.nounced, like Regnier, for freedom rather than order, and maintained that each writer of genius should be a law to himself--a poet whom his contemporaries esteemed too highly, and whom Malherbe, and afterwards Boileau, unjustly depreciated--THeOPHILE DE VIAU. A Huguenot who had abjured his faith, afterwards pursued as a libertine in conduct and as a freethinker, Theophile was hunted, imprisoned, exiled, condemned to execution, and died exhausted in 1626, when only six-and-thirty years old. He has been described as the last lyrical poet of his age, and the first of the poetical exponents of the new preciosity. His dramatic _Pyrame et Thisbe_, though disfigured by those _concetti_ which the Italian Marini--an honoured guest at the French court--and the invasion of Spanish tastes had made the mode, is not without touches of genuine pathos. The odes of Theophile are of free and musical movement, his descriptions of natural beauty are graciously coloured, his judgment in literary matters was sound and original; but he lacked the patient workmanship which art demands, and in proclaiming himself on the side of freedom as against order, he was retrograding from the position which had been secured for poetry under the leadership of Malherbe.

With social order came the desire for social refinement, and following the desire for refinement came the prettinesses and affectations of over-curious elegance. Peace returned to France with the monarchy of Henri IV., but the Gascon manners of his court were rude. Catherine de Vivonne, Marquise de Rambouillet, whose mother was a great Roman lady, and whose father had been French amba.s.sador at Rome, young, beautiful, delicately nurtured, retired in 1608 from the court, and a few years later opened her _salon_ of the Hotel de Rambouillet to such n.o.ble and cultivated persons as were willing to be the courtiers of womanly grace and wit and taste. The rooms were arranged and decorated for the purposes of pleasure; the _chambre bleue_ became the sanctuary of polite society, where Arthenice (an anagram for "Catherine") was the high priestess. To dance, to sing, to touch the lute was well; to converse with wit and refinement was something more admirable; the _salon_ became a mart for the exchange of ideas; the fashion of Spain was added to the fashion of Italy; Platonism, Petrarchism, Marinism, Gongorism, the spirit of romance and the daintinesses of learning and of pedantry met and mingled. Hither came Malherbe, Racan, Chapelain, Vaugelas; at a later time Balzac, Segrais, Voiture, G.o.deau; and again, towards the mid-years of the century, Saint-evremond and La Rochefoucauld. Here Corneille read his plays from the _Cid_ to _Rodogune_; here Bossuet, a marvellous boy, improvised a midnight discourse, and Voiture declared he had never heard one preach so early or so late.

As Julie d'Angennes and her sister Angelique attained an age to divide their mother's authority in the _salon_, its sentiment grew quintessential, and its taste was subtilised well-nigh to inanity.

They censured _Polyeucte_; they found Chapelain's unhappy epic "perfectly beautiful, but excessively tiresome"; they laid their heads together over Descartes' _Discours de la Methode_, and profoundly admired the philosopher; they were enraptured by the madrigals on flowers, more than three score in number, offered as the _Guirlande de Julie_ on Mademoiselle's fete; they gravely debated the question which should be the approved spelling, _muscadin_ or _muscardin_. In 1649 they were sundered into rival parties--_Uranistes_ and _Jobelins_--tilting in literary lists on behalf of the respective merits of a sonnet by Voiture and a sonnet by Benserade. The word _precieux_ is said to date from 1650. The Marquise de Rambouillet survived Moliere's satiric comedy _Les Precieuses Ridicules_ (1659) by several years. Mme. de Sevigne, Mme. de la Fayette, Flechier, the preacher of fashion, were among the ill.u.s.trious personages of the decline of her _salon_. We smile at its follies and affectations; but, while it harmed literature by magnifying things that were petty, it did something to refine manners, to quicken ideas, to encourage clearness and grace of expression, and to make the pursuit of letters an avenue to social distinction. Through the Hotel de Rambouillet, and the _salons_ which both in Paris and the provinces imitated its modes, and pushed them to extravagance, the influence of women on literature became a power for good and for evil.

The "Works," as they were styled, of VINCENT VOITURE (1598-1648)--posthumously published--represent one side of the spirit of the _salon_. Capable of something higher, he lived to exhibit his ingenuity and wit in little ways, now by a cleverly-turned verse, now by a letter of gallantry. Although of humble origin, he was for long a presiding genius in the _chambre bleue_ of Arthenice.

His play of mind was unhappily without a subject, and to be witty on nothings puts a strain on wit. Voiture expends much labour on being light, much serious effort in attaining vanities. His letters were admired as models of ingenious elegance; the life has long since pa.s.sed from their raillery and badinage, but Voiture may be credited with having helped to render French prose pliant for the uses of pleasure.

The dainty trifles of the school of preciosity fluttered at least during the sunshine of a day. Its ambitious epics, whatever attention they may have attracted in their time, cannot be said to have ever possessed real life. The great style is not to be attained by tagging plat.i.tudes with points. The _Saint Louis_ of Lemoyne, the _Clovis_ of Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin, the _Alaric_ of Scudery, the _Charlemagne_ of Louis le Laboureur remain only as evidences of the vanity of misplaced ambition. During twenty years JEAN CHAPELAIN, a man of no mean ability in other fields, was occupied with his _La Pucelle d'Orleans_; twelve cantos at length appeared magnificently in 1656, and won a brief applause; the remaining twelve cantos lie still inedited. The matter of history was too humble for Chapelain's genius; history is enn.o.bled by an allegorical intention; France becomes the soul of man; Charles, swayed between good and evil, is the human will; the Maid of Orleans is divine grace. The satire of Boileau, just in its severity, was hardly needed to slay the slain.

In the prose romances, which are epics emanc.i.p.ated from the trammels of verse, there was more vitality. Bishop Camus, the friend of Francois de Sales, had attempted to sanctify the movement which d'Urfe had initiated; but the spirit of the _Astree_ would not unite in a single stream with the spirit of the _Introduction a la Vie Devote_.

Gomberville is remembered rather for the remorseless war which he waged against the innocent conjunction _car_, never to be admitted into polite literature, than for his encyclopaedic romance _Polexandre_, in which geography is ill.u.s.trated by fiction, as copious as it is fantastic; yet it was something to annex for the first time the ocean, with all its marvels, to the scenery of adventure.

Gombauld, the _Beau Tenebreux_ of the Hotel de Rambouillet, secured a reading for his unreadable _Endymion_ by the supposed transparence of his allusions to living persons. Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin relieved the amorous exaltations of his _Ariane_, a tale of the time of Nero, by excursions which touch the borders of comedy. These are books on which the dust gathers thick in ancient libraries.

But the romances of LA CALPRENeDE and of GEORGES and MADELEINE DE SCUDeRY might well be taken down by any lover of literature who possesses the virtue of fort.i.tude. Since d'Urfe's day the taste for pastoral had declined; the newer romance was gallant and heroic.

Legend or history supplied its framework; but the central motive was ideal love at odds with circ.u.mstance, love the inspirer of limitless devotion and daring. The art of construction was imperfectly understood; the narratives are of portentous length; ten, twelve, twenty volumes were needed to deploy the sentiments and the adventures.

In _Ca.s.sandre_, in _Cleopatre_, in _Pharamond_, La Calprenede exhibits a kind of universal history; the dissolution of the Macedonian empire, the decline of the empire of Rome, the beginnings of the French monarchy are successively presented. But the chief personages are idealised portraits drawn from the society of the author's time. The spirit of the Hotel de Rambouillet is transferred to the period when the Scythian Oroondate was the lover of Statira, daughter of Darius; the Prince de Conde masks in _Cleopatre_ as Coriolan; Pharamond is the Grand Monarch in disguise. Notwithstanding the faded gallantries and amorous casuistry of La Calprenede's interminable romances, a certain spirit of real heroism, offspring of the writer's ardent imagination and bright southern temper, breathes through them. They were the delight of Mme. de Sevigne and of La Fontaine; even in the eighteenth century they were the companions of Crebillon, and were not forgotten by Rousseau.

Still more popular was _Artamene, ou le Grand Cyrus_. Mdlle. de Scudery, the "Sapho" of her Sat.u.r.day _salon_, a true _precieuse_, as good of heart and quick of wit as she was unprepossessing of person, supplied the sentiment and metaphysics of love to match the gasconading exploits of her brother's invention. It was the time not only of preciosity, but of the Fronde, with its turbulent adventures and fantastic chivalry. Under the names of Medes and Persians could be discovered the adventurers, the gallants, the fine ladies of the seventeenth century. In _Clelie_ an attempt is made to study the curiosities of pa.s.sion; it is a manual of polite love and elegant manners; in its _carte de Tendre_ we can examine the topography of love-land, trace the routes to the three cities of "Tendre," and learn the dangers of the way. Thus the heroic romance reached its term; its finer spirit became the possession of the tragic drama, where it was purified and rendered sane. The modern novel had wandered in search of its true self, and had not succeeded in the quest. When _Gil Blas_ appeared, it was seen that the novel of incident must also be the novel of character, and that in its imitation of real life it could appropriate some of the possessions which by that time comedy had lost.

The extravagances of sentiment produced a natural reaction. Not a few of the intimates of the Hotel de Rambouillet found a relief from their fatigue of fine manners and high-pitched emotions in the unedifying jests and merry tales of the tavern. A comic, convivial, burlesque or picaresque literature became, as it were, a parody of the literature of preciosity. Saint-Amand (1594-1661) was at once a disciple of the Italian Marini, the admired "Sapurnius" of the _salon_, author of at least one beautiful ode--_La Solitude_--breathing a gentle melancholy, and a gay singer of bacchic chants. Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin, in his comedy _Les Visionnaires_ (1637), mocked the _precieuses_, and was applauded by the spectators of the theatre. One of his heroines is hopelessly enamoured of Alexander the Great; one is enamoured of poetry, and sees life as if it were material for the stage; and the third is enamoured of her own beauty, with its imagined potency over the hearts of men. As early as 1622 CHARLES SOREL expressed, in his _Histoire Comique de Francion_, a Rabelaisian and picaresque tale of low life, the revolt of the _esprit gaulois_ against the homage of the imagination to courtly shepherdesses and pastoral cavaliers. It was reprinted more than forty times. In _Le Berger Extravagant_ (1628) he attempted a kind of Don Quixote for his own day--an "anti-romance"--which recounts the pastoral follies of a young Parisian bourgeois, whose wits have been set wandering by such dreams as the _Astree_ had inspired; its mirth is unhappily overloaded with pedantry.

The master of this school of seventeenth-century realism was PAUL SCARRON (1610-60), the comely little abbe, unconcerned with ecclesiastical scruples or good manners, who, when a paralytic, twisted and tortured by disease, became the husband of D'Aubigne's granddaughter, destined as Madame de Maintenon to become the most influential woman in all the history of France. In his _Virgile Travesti_ he produced a vulgar counterpart to the heroic epics, which their own dead-weight would have speedily enough borne downwards to oblivion. His _Roman Comique_ (1651), a short and lively narrative of the adventures of a troupe of comedians strolling in the provinces, contrasted with the exaltations, the heroisms, the delicate distresses of the ideal romance. The _Roman Bourgeois_ (1666) of ANTOINE FURETIeRE is a belated example of the group to which _Francion_ belongs. The great event of its author's life was his exclusion from the Academy, of which he was a member, on the ground that he had appropriated for the advantage of his Dictionary the results of his fellow-members' researches for the Dictionary, then in progress, of the learned company. His _Roman_ is a remarkable study of certain types of middle-cla.s.s Parisian life, often animated, exact, effective in its satire; but the a.n.a.lysis of a petty and commonplace world needs some relief of beauty or generosity to make its triviality acceptable, and such relief Furetiere will not afford.

Somewhat apart from this group of satiric tales, yet with a certain kinship to them, lie the more fantastic satires of that fiery swashbuckler--"demon des braves"--CYRANO DE BERGERAC (1619-55), _Histoire Comique des etats et Empires de la Lune_, and _Histoire Comique des etats et Empires du Soleil_. Cyrano's taste, caught by the mannerisms of Italy and extravagances of Spain, was execrable.

To his violences of temper he added a reputation for irreligion. His comedy _Le Pedant Joue_ has the honour of having furnished Moliere with the most laughable scene of the _Fourberies de Scapin_. The voyages to the moon and the sun, in which the inhabitants, their manners, governments, and ideas, are presented, mingle audacities and caprices of invention with a portion of satiric truth; they lived in the memories of the creator of Gulliver and the creator of Micromegas.

CHAPTER II THE FRENCH ACADEMY--PHILOSOPHY (DESCARTES)--RELIGION (PASCAL)