Aspects and Impressions Part 6

In all this matter of the foundation of the Hotel and the opening of the famous _salon_, M. Magne has made considerable discoveries, which should be distinguished from much in his charming books in which he has had no choice but to follow earlier published authorities. He has made excellent use of the _Inventaires_ of 1652, 1666 and 1671, to which attention had, however, already been drawn by M. Charles Sauze. But a ground plan of the Hotel de Rambouillet, from a contemporary map of Paris by Gomboust, is less known, and a reproduction of this is a singular aid to the reader of M. Magne's _Voiture_. We see that it stood actually next door to the famous Hotel de Chevreuse, in comparison with which, in its sparkling newness, in its slated turrets and its charming combinations of pale stone and salmon-coloured brick, it seemed an expression of the new age in a triumphant defiance of the old. From both houses could be seen, just across the quiet Rue Saint-Thomas, and over a strip of waste ground, the ma.s.sive contour of the Louvre; a great garden, on the west side, stretched away behind the house, down to the corner of the Rue de Richelieu.

M. Magne has discovered that M. and Mme. de Rambouillet took up their abode in their new house early in 1607; this fixes what has. .h.i.therto been quite vague, the commencement of the Hotel de Rambouillet. But the Marquise was still only nineteen years of age, and it would be a mistake to suppose that, precocious as people were in those days, she began at once to exercise her celebrated hospitality, or to fill the rooms with tapestry, statues and men of wit. This came on gradually and naturally, without any violence of forethought. It has been suggested that the Marquise founded her _salon_, or, less pompously, began to gather congenial friends about her, in 1613. It is difficult to say on what doc.u.ments this exact date is based. Her known aversion from Louis XIII, and her growing preference for receiving her friends at home over appearing in a crowd at court--both of them, doubtless, symptoms of her personal delicacy, which shrank from the suspicion of roughness--were probably emphasized after the murder of Concini in 1617, when the great n.o.bles, who had defied the weak regency of Marie de Medicis, boldly swept back into Paris. Doubtless this was the time when Madame de Rambouillet began to practise a more cloistered virtue among the splendour and fragility of her treasures, and first intimated to n.o.ble and elegant friends, who were scandalized by the rowdiness of the Louvre, that here was an asylum where they might discuss poetry for hours on the velvet of her incrusted couches, or walk, in solemn ranks, among the parterres of her exquisite walled garden.

The character of pedantry and preciosity which the Hotel afterwards incurred, is not to be traced in any of its original features. In its early years there was no atmosphere of "intellectual beat.i.tude" about it. But that a certain intellectual standard was set up from the very first it is impossible to question. From the compliments of the earliest inmates of the Hotel to the eulogistic epitaphs which were scattered on the hea.r.s.e of the Marquise, all her devotees agree in celebrating her pa.s.sionate love of literature. Clumsy phrases, rude expressions, the coa.r.s.eness of a language still in process of purification, were a positive distress to her; and Tallemant has a droll anecdote about the agitation into which she was thrown by the use of so vulgar a word as "scurvy," _teigneux_, in an epigram which was being read to her. With these tendencies, she was peculiarly fitted to welcome to her intimacy the man who of all others was at that time most occupied with the task of correcting and clarifying the French language. An inevitable attraction must have drawn Malherbe to the doors of the Hotel de Rambouillet.

It would be of interest, and even of some importance, if we could discover the date at which Malherbe began to frequent the Hotel de Rambouillet, since there can be little doubt that it was to him that it owed its intellectual direction. Unfortunately, this is not easy to do.

The poet Racan, whose invaluable notes and anecdotes were adopted by Tallemant to form the body of the _historiette_ on Malherbe, did not antic.i.p.ate how grateful posterity would be for a few dates sprinkled here and there over his narrative. But the fact that Tallemant here took the line, so very unusual with him, of adopting somebody else's life of one of his heroes, can only be accounted for by the double supposition that Malherbe could not be omitted from his gallery, and yet had quitted the scene too early for Tallemant to know much about him at first hand.

He must indeed have arrived at the Hotel very soon after its formation, since he was sixty-two years of age when we suppose it to have begun, and in 1628 he died. The Duc de Broglie was probably right when he conjectured that Malherbe was practically the first, and as long as he lived the foremost, of the literary clan which met in the Chambre Bleue.

Racan, who accompanied and may have introduced the elder poet to the Hotel de Rambouillet, says that it was "sur les vieux jours de Malherbe"

that the latter had the curious conversation about the proper heroic name, or poetic pseudonym, which ought to fix all future references to the Marquise, a conversation which led to his writing an eclogue in which he calls himself Melibee and his disciple Arcan. I quote Tallemant, who is quoting Racan:

"The very day that he sketched out this eclogue, fearing that the name Arthenice [Catherine] if it were used of two persons [for Racan had addressed Catherine Chabot as Arthenice, in a pastoral]

would make a confusion between those two persons, Malherbe pa.s.sed the whole afternoon with Racan turning the name about. All they could make of it was Arthenice, Eracinte and Carintee. The first of those they considered the prettiest, but as Racan was using this also in a pastoral, Malherbe concluded by choosing Rodante."

Unfortunately Madame de Rambouillet, who had plenty of humour, declined the name of Rodante, which would better have adorned a mouse than a great lady, and Malherbe threw his consideration for Racan to the winds. Madame de Rambouillet became for him and remained

Celle pour qui je fis le beau nom d'Arthenice,

and he called her

Cette jeune bergere a qui les destinees Sembloient avoir donne mes dernieres annees.

We gather that the sound judgment and the exquisite charm of Madame de Rambouillet attracted Malherbe away from the other _salons_ which he affected, particularly from those of the Vicomtesse d'Aulchy and of Madame des Loges. It was the latter lady whose ears the grim poet soundly boxed in her own house on a celebrated occasion. He was a formidable guest as well as a tyrant in literature.

But the relations of Malherbe with Madame de Rambouillet during the last ten years of his life were kept on a level of unruffled dignity on the one side and on the other. It is evident that the Marquise was predisposed to accept _la Doctrine_ which Malherbe, with so splendid a force and pride, was about to impose upon his countrymen. No man of letters has lived, in any country, who was more possessed than he by the necessity of watching over the purity of language, of cultivating in prose and verse a simple, lucid, and logical style, of removing from the surface of literature, by an arrogant discipline, all traces of obscurity, pomposity and looseness. He held the honour of the French language above all other obligations, and the stories of his sacrificing questions of personal interest, and even affection, to his pa.s.sion for correct diction, for a n.o.ble manner of writing and speaking, are eloquent of the austere and dry genius of this masterful rather than charming poet, who, nevertheless, had so profound and so lasting an influence on French letters. Such a man as this, fanatically possessed by an abstract ambition, needs the sympathy of a wise and beneficent woman, and the old Malherbe, in the twilight of his days, found such an Egeria in Catherine de Rambouillet. It was in the Hotel that the famous discussions on the value, selection, and meaning of words, on n.o.bility in eloquence, on purity and force in versification, first took place, and the heat from them radiated through France. The new era of style found its cradle in the Chambre Bleue.

But what was this Blue Room, this mysterious and azure grot in which the genius of French cla.s.sic poetry went through its transformation? There was not much mystery about it. It was a room, deep in the magnificence of the Hotel, where the Marquise was in the habit of receiving the familiar visits of her best friends. The novelty of it was its colour; all other _salons_ in Paris being at that time painted red or drab. Out of the Blue Room there opened a more secret retreat, her _cabinet_ or _alcove_, where she could withdraw from all companionship, and spend her time in reading or meditating. The furniture of the whole Hotel de Rambouillet was on a scale of opulent splendour, but the rarity of the objects brought together was concentrated in the _cabinet_, which was, as M. Magne puts it, a sort of altar which the Marquise raised to herself. Every object in it was fragile, brilliant, and precious. In the days when Malherbe frequented the Hotel, it is probable that no inner room existed. Tallemant gives us the very odd history of what led to its formation. The Marquise in her youth was active and ready to expose herself to the weather, but about 1623 she began to be threatened by an _incommodite_, which made her unable to bear exposure to heat. She had been in the habit of taking long walks in Paris, but one summer's day, when the sun suddenly came out while she was strolling at La Cour-la-Reine, on the Champs Elysees, she nearly fainted, and was threatened with erysipelas. The following winter, the first time that she drew up her chair to read by the fire, the same phenomenon came on.

She was now divided between perishing with cold or suffering miseries of heat, and she therefore invented, taking the idea from the Spanish "alcove," a little supplementary room, where she could sit close to her friends, while they gathered round the hearth, and yet not be smitten by the flames. In 1656, in the great winter, we hear of her, now an elderly woman, lying on her bed, heaped over with furs, but not daring to have a fire in sight.

Her energy did not leave her because of this disability. The letter-writers of the period describe her extraordinary activity. She had a great love of pretty and elaborate practical jokes which were in the taste of the time. Hers, however, were distinguished by the fact that they were never indecent and never ill-natured. But when an idea occurred to Madame de Rambouillet, she rested not until the wild scheme was accomplished. Voiture and Tallemant are full of instances of her fertility. One instance out of many was the pa.s.sion which she expended in making a cascade in the park at Rambouillet, to startle a party of guests. The water had to be brought up from the little tarn of Montorgueil, and the Marquise superintended every spade and every pipe.

Carried on by her enthusiastic presence, a team of workmen laboured night and day to complete the prodigious plaything, conducting their ingenious hydraulics by the flare of torches. I could fill pages with the proofs of her gaiety, her ingenuity, the amazing freshness and vivacity of her mind, but the reader can turn to the original sources for them. It may be suggested that, while the various independent authorities really confirm the legend in its outline, when they tell the same story, it will generally be found that Tallemant tells it more naturally and more exactly than Segrais or Voiture. It is also to be remembered that it was Tallemant who observed longest and most closely, and brought least suspicion of vanity to bear on his relation. There is a phrase buried somewhere in the vast tissue of the _Historiettes_ which deserves to be better known. Speaking incidentally of the Marquise de Rambouillet, Tallemant betrays that she was really the source of all his inspiration: "c'est d'elle que je tiens la plus grande et la meilleure partie de ce que j'ai escrit et que j'escriray dans ce livre." This gives his statements their peculiar authority with regard to that Blue Room, which he elsewhere calls "le rendez-vous de ce qu'il y avait de plus galant a la Cour, et de plus joly parmy les beaux-esprits du siecle." He quite frequently introduces an anecdote with the words "J'ay ouy dire a Mme. de Rambouillet."

It would therefore be ungrateful to speak of the Hotel de Rambouillet without paying a tribute to the strange quality of Tallemant des Reaux.

French criticism, in applauding his industry, has hardly done justice to the talent, almost the genius, of this extraordinary man. With an unrivalled gift of observation, he combined that clear objective sense of the value of little things, which is so valuable in a memoir-writer, and he is the very prince of those biographers to whom nothing regarding the subjects of their art seems common or unclean. He has the keen eye for detail of his English contemporary, John Aubrey, and his _Historiettes_ are really, in the sense of Aubrey, _Minutes of Lives_.

But Tallemant has much more design in his work, and a broader sense of the relation of moral and intellectual values. Saint-Simon, who was a child when Tallemant died, has more pa.s.sion, a more impetuous and broader sweep of style, and a more intelligent appreciation of the scene of life. It was not for Tallemant des Reaux to paint "des grands fresques historiques." He is as trivial and as picturesque as Boswell, as crude as Pepys, and, like them both, he is completely indifferent to what other people may find scandalous. He moved in the best society, and he was of it; but in his lifetime no one seems to have paid him much attention. Voiture was often in the centre of the stage at the Hotel de Rambouillet, and what answered in those days to limelight followed him whenever he made one of his brilliant appearances; Tallemant was a shadowy super, hanging about in the wings, but he was always there.

He had the best right in the world to be there. Gedeon Tallemant was a close kinsman of the Marquis, whose sister, Marie de Rambouillet, had married the biographer's father, a Huguenot banker of Bordeaux, head of one of the best provincial families of the day. Gedeon was born at La Roch.e.l.le in 1619, and was therefore thirty years younger than his cousin's wife, the famous chatelaine of the Hotel de Rambouillet, whom he adored.[2] When he came to Paris, about 1637, her coterie was already at its height, but he was immediately admitted to it, and no doubt began no less immediately to ask questions and to take notes. He had every possible opportunity; his brother and a cousin were members of the new French Academy: his father was a Maecenas to Corneille and others: he himself married (in January, 1646) his cousin Elizabeth de Rambouillet, a union which made him the familiar of La Fontaine and La Sabliere. In 1650 he bought the chateau and estate of Plessis-Rideau, in Touraine, and by letters-patent changed the name to Les Reaux, which he then adopted as a surname. Here he entertained his lifelong friends--the a.s.sociates of the Hotel, and other men of high professional rank, Patru, Ablancourt, the Pere Rapin. He knew absolutely everybody; he was adorably indiscreet; and those who a.s.sociated with him perceived in him only a wonderful talker (Maucroix says that he "racontait aussy bien qu'homme de France"), and a lover of poetry who started writing an _dipe_ before Corneille. What few of them knew was that this obliging friend and graceful companion was putting down in an immense MS. all the anecdotes, all the intrigues, all the tricks of manner, all the traits of character, of the mult.i.tude of his polite acquaintances.

He has left more than 500 of his little highly finished portraits of people he knew, and he knew everyone in that age and place worth knowing.

It is doubtful at what particular time he wrote the _Historiettes_. He was composing, or perhaps revising, part of them in 1657, but some must be later, and many may be earlier in date than that; it is probable that he ceased writing in 1665. He has been accused of being a spiteful chronicler of the vices of the great, and he has been charged with a love of looseness. But his own description is more just: "Je pretends dire le bien et le mal, sans dissimuler la verite." He writes with an air of humorous malice, pleased to draw the cloak off the limbs of hypocrisy, but not moved by any strong moral indignation. Like Pepys, he enjoyed giving a disinterested picture of the details of ordinary private life, but was rather more cynically amused by them than scandalized. He wrote, or at least intended to write, _Memoires de la regence d'Anne d'Autriche,_ but this has totally disappeared, and we need not regret it. Gedeon Tallemant is amply immortalized by the _Historiettes_, which fill ten closely printed volumes in the excellent edition of MM. Monmerque and Paulin of Paris. They are like the work of some brilliant Dutch painter of sordid interiors. He is not always well inspired. He says nothing more adequate about Pascal than that he was "ce garcon qui inventa une machine admirable pour l'arithmetique," but Pascal was hardly of his world. In 1685 Tallemant became a Catholic, converted by the Pere Rapin, and, having outlived all his friends, he died, probably in November, 1692, leaving a huge MS., the princ.i.p.al subject of which is an a.n.a.lysis of the society that met within the Hotel de Rambouillet.

At his death that MS. vanished, "as rare things will." It turned up again in a library at Montigny-Lencoup in 1803. We may note, as a curious coincidence, that while the publication of Evelyn's _Diary_ dates from 1818, and while the deciphering of Pepys began in 1819, it was in 1820, that Chateaugiron set to work at copying out the _Historiettes_, which were not published until 1835. Three of the most important MS. memoirs of the seventeenth century were thus independently examined for the first time at practically the same moment of the nineteenth. Each publication was an event in literary history.

No such concealment, no such late discovery, has marked the course of Voiture, whose letters and poems were published by his nephew Pinchesne in 1650, only two years after the poet's death. In this remarkable miscellany, which has been incessantly reprinted, and which forms one of the recognized lesser cla.s.sics of France, we find ourselves breathing the very atmosphere of the Hotel de Rambouillet. It is, indeed, amusing to reflect that, for fifteen years before her death, the Marquise and all her circle possessed, and shared with a wide public, this elaborate body of evidence as to their friendships, their tastes, and their amus.e.m.e.nts. In the _uvres_ of Voiture, reprinted at least seventeen times during the lifetime of the Marquise, the world at large was admitted to the conversations of the Blue Room, and it eagerly responded to the invitation. There was something about the supple genius of Voiture, at once daring and discreet, apparently tearing every veil off an intimacy, and yet in fact wrapping it in an impenetrable gauze of mystery, which made him the ideal revealer to excite and baffle curiosity, so that though he tells so much, as he stands at the top of the stairs of the Hotel and takes the town into his confidence, yet he leaves plenty of things untold, to be whispered into the ears of posterity by Tallemant and Conrart.

The father of Voiture was a shopkeeper who sold wine at the sign of the Chapeau de Roses at Amiens, and there his son Vincent was born in 1595.

The author of _Alcidalis et Zelide_, was therefore the contemporary of Herrick and of George Herbert. If the last-mentioned had not rejected "the painted pleasures of a Court-life" for the retirements of a saint, he might have been the English Voiture, with his charming gifts and ingenious graces. The year 1626, which saw Herbert adopt the solemn vocation of a priest, is probably that in which Voiture, introduced by Chardebonne, took up his station for the rest of his life, as princ.i.p.al literary oracle and master of the gaieties in the Hotel de Rambouillet.

His father was honestly supplying wine to the Queen-Mother, Marie de Medicis, and there was no question in his son's case, as in that of some others, of doubtful or partial n.o.bility. Vincent Voiture was frankly and openly a _bourgeois_, admitted into that strictly guarded aristocracy because of his abundant talents, his wit, his pleasantness, his delicious social qualities, and also because it was part of the scheme of the Marquise de Rambouillet to break down the boredom of the exclusive privilege of rank for its own sake.

The main principle of the Hotel was a study of the art of how to behave. The rules of _la bienseance_ were strictly laid down there, after close discussion among persons of light and leading. There was a strong resistance made to the roughness of the country n.o.ble, to the awkwardness of the ordinary citizen, to the inky fingers of the pedant, to the slovenly petticoat, the disordered wig, the bespattered boot. The attention of both s.e.xes was persistently called to these matters of behaviour and _tenue_, which had an importance at that date which we may easily, in our twentieth-century intolerance, ridicule and ignore. We see the comic side of this extreme solicitude about dress and ceremony, etiquette and behaviour, in such a book as Furetiere's amusing _Roman Bourgeois_ (1666), but we may see the seriousness, the stately value of it, in the tragedies of Corneille and the maxims of La Rochefoucauld.

The school of _la politesse_ became that in which every talent must graduate, however grave its after-labours were to be. Even the solemn Baillet, writing the life of no less dignified a person than Descartes, mentions that the philosopher pa.s.sed, like all other well-bred lads, "aux promenades, au jeu et aux autres divertiss.e.m.e.nts qui font l'occupation des personnes de qualite et des honnetes gens du siecle."

In this school, the elegant and supple Voiture, impregnated with the literature of _Amadis de Gaule_, and with the language of Spanish chivalry, intimidated by no hyperbole of compliment, capable alike of plunging into the deep waters and of swimming safe to sh.o.r.e, always on the verge of absurdity, always gliding down the agreeable side of it, persistent, subtle, entertaining, extravagant--in this school Voiture was the triumphant, the unmastered master. His best letters, his best sonnets, show him to have been able, at his most vibrating moments, to rise out of this element of billets-doux to better things. He is of all composers of society verse and prose the lightest and the swiftest, and we may say to those who sneer at so unique a talent what Madame de Sevigne said of them in her day: "Tant pis pour ceux qui ne l'entendent pas!"

If one literary figure is more closely identified with the Hotel de Rambouillet than Voiture, it must be Chapelain. It is therefore curious that while M. Magne was preparing his picturesque volumes on the former, M. Collas should be independently writing the earliest biography of the latter. These coincidences are odd, but we are accustomed to them; they show that a subject is "in the air." When Chapelain made his first appearance at the Hotel, perhaps in 1635, Voiture had long been installed there. They fell out at first sight, like dog and cat. When the author of the _Preface de l'Adone_ stumbled over the precious floor, dressed like a scarecrow, in hunting boots and dirty linen, and made his clownish obeisance to the Marquise, she shrank a little from him, and Voiture broke into a scream of elfish laughter. Madame de Rambouillet never learned to care for Chapelain, and when he made clumsy love to Mlle. Paulet, "the lioness," the Blue Room shook with mirth. But when Mlle. Julie became a great personage, and especially as soon as the Duc de Montausier introduced the pure cultivation of pedantry into the Hotel, the strong character of Chapelain a.s.serted itself, while the death of Voiture left him unquestioned in authority. Grotesque as Chapelain was, he had a wonderful talent for adapting himself to circ.u.mstances, and his conversation, though ma.s.sive and solemn, had charm, which even his enemies admitted to be extraordinary. Chapelain was never on those terms of petted intimacy with his host and hostess which the insinuating Voiture enjoyed, but he conquered a position of more genuine respect and esteem.

But to follow M. Collas and M. Magne into the later years of the Hotel, when Mlle. de Rambouillet gave to the Blue Room a peculiar air of her own, would be impossible for us, with the limited s.p.a.ce at our command.

We must not go further than 1641, the year in which was produced the celebrated _Guirlande de Julie_. After this point, not merely does the character of the scene change, and its tone become less pleasing, or at least less sympathetic, but for the reviewer the abundance of trees makes the wood itself almost invisible. Here we may point to an example of the superabundance of French material, which may almost console us for the comparative dimness and bareness of the contemporary English landscape. In dealing with this crowded age, M. Magne and M. Collas have shown a learned adroitness and the happy logic to which scholars of their race are trained. Of the two, M. Magne is the more vivacious, as befits the biographer of Voiture. M. Collas has more difficulty in reconciling us with the tedious and pedantic Chapelain, who, nevertheless, as the founder of modern criticism and the mainstay of the infant Academie Francaise, deserved to find a biographer at last. The worst of it is that while Voiture, dancing-master to the Muses if you will, and _pet.i.t-maitre_ in excelsis, is at least a brisk and highly diverting personality, poor Chapelain, the typical academician, the mediocre poet, the spider at the heart of the wide intellectual web of his time, is not man enough to awaken our vivid sympathies. Moreover, to conclude on a note of bathos, M. Collas has neglected to append an index to his vast compendium of facts.

We must therefore refrain from entering the labyrinths of the later _preciosite_, amusing as they are, and must continue to concentrate our attention on the clearness, the sweetness, the purity with which the founder of the Hotel, the great Madame de Rambouillet, throughout her long life, created an atmosphere of sympathy and unity around her. As long as she was paramount there, and until the influence of her daughter and her daughter's husband, together with her own languor, pushed her a little into the second line, gaiety was in the ascendant at the famous Hotel. It is needful to a.s.sure ourselves of this, because in the later days it became purely intellectual, and dry in its priggishness. M.

Magne, it is true, attributes this change not so much to the pedantic Latinism of the Duc de Montausier, and the hair-splitting of the academicians, as to the decay produced by gaiety itself. In an ingenious pa.s.sage he says:

The taste for badinage perverted in Voiture the taste for beauty.

His genius glittered, quivered, frisked and palpitated, and the smile he wore was ever melting into irony. To depth he deliberately preferred an elegant futility. He was impregnated with the quality to which the age had given, in a n.o.ble sense, the name of gallantry. But, in reacting everywhere against vulgar roughness, the very excess of his effort landed him at last in preciosity.

It never had that deplorable effect upon Madame de Rambouillet herself, on whose charming figure, swaying like a young pine-tree of the forest, we must fix our attention, if we would see only what was best in that remarkable and so vividly French revival of civilization which took place under Louis XIII. Her purity of conduct was combined with no uncouth prudery. She refrained from judging others hardly, but she preserved, without a lapse, her own high standard of behaviour. She had a lively horror of scandal, and desired that those about her, if they could not contrive to be virtuous, should at least be discreet. It was detestable to her to hear the gallants of the court boasting of their conquests. She said, in her amusing way, that if she herself could ever have been persuaded to leave the path of propriety, she must have chosen for a paramour some unctuous and secret prelate, but that she had never discovered one whom she could trust. It was her temperament, both of heart and brain, which led her to rejoice in the new spirit of Malherbe, whose simple, firm and lucid verses responded, after a revel of romanticism, to her cla.s.sic craving for harmony and dignity. In Racan's pastoral poems, she welcomed a recovered love of country pleasures, and the graceful convention of a shepherd. She liked private letters, hitherto so pompous, to be composed in such terms that one seemed to hear the writer's voice chatting at the chimney-corner. Richelieu, although M. Magne denies the legend of his _Discours sur l'Amour_, used to come to the Blue Room to have a good laugh with its delightful occupant, and everyone unbent in her sweet and easy presence. Tallemant has a story of no less dignified a personage than the Cardinal de La Valette romping with the Rambouillet children, and discovered by the Marquise hiding from them under a bed.

The close of the life of this marvellous woman was a sad one. She outlived all her early friends, even outlived the prestige of her own Blue Room. Six days after her death, Robinet composed a sort of funeral ode to her memory, closing with an epitaph, which, as it is little known, may be given here. It was written in January, 1666:

Ci gist la divine Arthenice, Qui fut l'ill.u.s.tre protectrice Des Arts que les neuf Surs inspirent aux humains.

Rome luy donna la naissance; Elle vint retablir en France La gloire des anciens Romains.

Sa maison, des vertus le temple, Sert aux particuliers d'un merveilleux exemple, Et pourrait bien instruire encor les souverains.

This is not very good poetry, but it would be difficult to sum up more neatly the services of Madame de Rambouillet to France and to civilization.

MALHERBE AND THE CLa.s.sICAL REACTION[3]

In contemplating the chart of literary history we are confronted by phenomena which more or less closely resemble those marked on the geographical map. The surface is not uniform, but diversified by ups and downs, of the feature that we call taste or fashion. A special interest attaches to what may be described as the watersheds of literature, the periods which display these changes of direction in thought and language. I propose to bring before you briefly some characteristics of one of the most saliently marked of all these points of alteration, that which led irresistibly and imminently to the cla.s.sical school, as it is called, in France, and from France ultimately to the whole of Europe.

Before doing so, I must draw your attention to the fact that while most of us are led to give special heed to movements which tend, like the Romantic renaissance of poetry in England two centuries later, to the emanc.i.p.ation and even the revolution of literature, that of which I am about to speak was deliberately introduced in the interests of law and order, and was in all its features conservative, and, if you choose to call it so, retrogressive. It did not aim at enlarging the field of expression, but at enclosing it within rules, excluding from it eccentricities and licentious freaks, and rendering it subservient to a rigorous discipline. In this University of Oxford, where the practice of poetry is now conducted with so much ardour and with such audacity of experiment, you may or may not, as you please, see any parallel between the condition of France in 1595 and our own condition to-day. My purpose is, with your leave, to describe the former without criticizing the latter.

The sixteenth century had been a period of great activity in the literature of France, where the interaction of two vast forces, the Renaissance and the Reformation, had introduced wholly new forms of expression into the language. Prose had started from its mediaeval condition into full modernity in Calvin, and then in Montaigne. In poetry, with which we are concerned to-day, there had existed since 1550 the brilliant and feverish army of versifiers who accompanied Ronsard, "the Prince of Poets," and claimed with him to have created out of the rude elements of the Middle Ages a literary art which linked modern France directly with ancient Greece. While England was still languishing under the early Tudors, and Italy had grown weary of her burst of chivalrous epic, France gave the world the spectacle of a society palpitating with literary ambition. Ronsard's magnificent audacity had conquered for poetry, an art which had hitherto enjoyed little honour in France, the foremost position in the world of mental activity. Verse, which had been treated as a b.u.t.terfly skipping from flower to flower, was now celebrated by the Pleiade as a temple, as a sunrise, as the apotheosis of the intellect. Immensely flattered by being suddenly lifted to the status of a priesthood, all the budding versifiers of France, who a generation earlier would have withered into insignificance, expanded into affluent and profuse blossom. By the year 1560 it was "roses, roses all the way," but the misfortune was that the flowers were foreign, had been transplanted from Greece and Rome and Italy, and were not really native to the soil of France.

During the next generation, under conditions with which we have no time to occupy us to-day, there was a steady, indeed an almost precipitous decline in the quality of French verse. If we turn to our own literature of half a century later, we see a parallel decline in the drama down from Shakespeare to Shirley and the later disciples of Ben Jonson. We all know how disconcerting it is to pa.s.s from the sheer beauty of the great Elizabethans to the broken verse and the mixture of flatness and violence of the lesser poets of the Commonwealth. But in France the decadence had been still more striking, because of the extremely high line adopted by Ronsard and Du Bellay in their prose manifestos. The doctrine of the Pleiade had been as rigorous and lofty as a creed in literature could well be, and it rose to an altogether higher plane than was dreamed of by the English critics half a century later. No dignity, no a.s.surance of high and pure poetic resolution could surpa.s.s the apparent aim of the manifestos of 1549. Frenchmen, it seemed, had nothing to do but follow these exalted precepts and to produce the most wonderful poetry which the world had seen since the days of Pindar and Sappho. We cannot to-day enter into the question why these high hopes were almost immediately shattered, except so far as to suggest that excellent principles are sometimes insufficient to produce satisfactory practice. We have to look abruptly this afternoon into the conditions of French poetry in the last years of the sixteenth century, and to realize that those conditions had brought French literature to a point where reform was useless and revolution was inevitable.

There was no slackening--and I ask your particular attention to this fact--there was no slackening in the popularity of the poetic art. There existed, in 1595, as great a crowd of versifiers as had been called forth fifty years earlier by the splendour of the Pleiade. A feature of poetic history which is worthy of our notice is that an extreme abundance of poetical composition is by no means necessarily connected with the wholesomeness and vigour of the art at that moment. There was a crowd of poets in France during the reign of Henri IV, but they were distinguished more by their exuberance and their eccentricity than by their genius. I shall, in a few moments, endeavour to give you an idea of their character. In the meantime, let us be content to remark that the exquisite ideals of the Pleiade had degenerated into extravagant conventionality, into which an attempt was made to infuse life by a spasmodic display of verbal fireworks. The charm of sobriety, of simplicity, was wholly disregarded, and the importance of logic and discipline in literature ignored and outraged. The earlier theory, a very dangerous one, had been that poetry was the language of the G.o.ds rather than of men, that it was _grandiloquentia_, an oracular inspiration. Being above mankind in its origin, it was not for mortal men to question its authority. It possessed a celestial freedom, it was emanc.i.p.ated from all rules save what it laid down for itself. Let us see what was the effect of this arrogance.

The scope of imaginative literature as practised by the Pleiade had been curiously narrow, so much so that it is difficult to distinguish the work of different hands except by the dexterity of the technique. The odes and pastorals of the lesser masters are just like those of Ronsard, except that Ronsard is very much more skilful. But by the close of the century there was a wide divergence between the various poets in their themes and their points of view. Two of them greatly excelled their contemporaries in eminence and popularity, and these two were as unlike each other in substance as it was easy for them to be. The elder of these two was Sall.u.s.te du Bartas, a writer whose quartos are now allowed to gather dust on the shelves, and who, when he died in 1590, was, with the exception of Ta.s.so, the most eminent European writer of verse. His influence on English poetry in the next generation was immense.

Translations of his works by Joshua Sylvester and others had begun to appear before his death, and were extremely popular. Du Bartas possessed qualities of intellect and art which are by no means to be despised, but his taste was execrable. He wished to create a national religious poetry on a large scale, and he has been called the "Milton manque de la France." Du Bartas is all relinquished to evangelical and moral exhortation, and his immense _Les Semaines_, besides being one of the longest, is the most unblushingly didactic encyclopaedia of verse that was ever put forth as a poem. He had a very heavy hand, and he sowed with the whole sack. Our own Bishop Joseph Hall of Norwich, who called him "some French angel, girt with bays," described Du Bartas as--

The glorious Sall.u.s.t, moral, true, divine, Who, all inspired with a holy rage, Makes Heaven his subject, and the earth his stage.

In his own time his myriad admirers preferred him above "golden Homer and great Maro." His earnestness and his cleverness--among other things he was the first man after the Renaissance to see that the obsession of the heathen G.o.ds was ridiculous in a Christian literature--his abundance and his vehemence, made Du Bartas a very formidable figure in the path of any possible reform.

As an instance of the violence of fancy and gaudy extravagance of language which had become prevalent with the decline of the Pleiade, I will now present to you what I select as a favourable, not a ridiculous, example of the art of Du Bartas. He wishes to paraphrase the simple statement in Genesis that, on the fourth day, G.o.d set the stars in the firmament of heaven to give light upon the earth. This is how he does it, as translated by Joshua Sylvester: