The Century of Columbus Part 33

The most important writer in France at this time, however, was undoubtedly Francis' sister, Margaret of Navarre or Angouleme. Her "Heptameron" has been widely read in practically every generation since her own, and though some doubt has been thrown on her authorship of it, it is probable that the age-long attribution to her must remain. The book is about as evil in its influence as any that was ever written. Its author was undoubtedly a saint. She had the best of intentions, and her work ill.u.s.trates how easy it is for good intentions to go wrong. h.e.l.l was paved with good intentions then as now. As I have suggested in the chapter on Some Great Women of the Century, a corresponding mistake is being made by many good women now in the crusade of providing s.e.x information as a protection for the young. Margaret's work is one of the best specimens of French prose of the time. Saintsbury, in his volume on "The Early Renaissance," calls it a very remarkable book which has, as a rule, been undervalued, "presenting almost equal attractions for those who read for mere amus.e.m.e.nt, to those who appreciate literature as literature, and to those who like extra literary puzzles of various kinds from authorship to allusion."

Margaret's reputation has suffered more than was deserved from the condemnation of the "Heptameron." Her personality merits to be judged rather from the charming poetry of a {466} mystical character which she wrote. Her book, "Les Marguerites de la Marguerite des Princesses," is too well known to be much more than mentioned here. It has a charming grace and an exquisite delicacy. It is the true index to her character. As Imbert de Saint-Amand has said in his "Women of the Valois Court," "Poetry and religion were her two consolers." Her resolution when she looked at her crucifix and burst into poetry was:

"It is my will and firm intent To be no more what I have been, Nor to amuse myself in this poor world.

Seeing the griefs that reign there and abound.

And which by day and night torment my heart."

There are bursts of piety in her collection worthy of her great mystical contemporary, St. Teresa. The following would almost remind one of St. Teresa's cry, "I die that I may die."

"Lord, when shall come the day I long to see, When by pure love I shall Be drawn to Thee?

That nuptial day, O Lord, So long delays.

That no content I find In wealth or praise.

Wipe from these sorrowing eyes The tear that flows, And grant me Thy best gift, A sweet repose."

The French poetess, Louise Labe, _la cordiere,_ the cord-wainer's wife, as she was called, in reference to her husband's occupation, deserves a place because she represents at once the opportunities even of the lowly born of her s.e.x for the higher education at this time, and her writings exhibit a natural grace and ardent pa.s.sion that place them in a high rank of lyric poetry. Poetesses of pa.s.sion there have been a-plenty since, {467} yet it is doubtful if many of them have surpa.s.sed much the French lady of the Renaissance from the middle cla.s.ses. The sonnet form would seem highly unsuitable to us for such pa.s.sionate expression, but it was the fashion to use it, and Louise Labe antic.i.p.ates by some three hundred years Mrs. Browning's use of this form for a very similar purpose. One of her sonnets may very well be read beside some of those of Mrs. Browning.

"As soon as ever I begin to take.

In my soft bed, the rest which I desire, Forth from my frame does my sad soul retire, And hastes toward thee its eager way to make.

Then in my tender heart, ere I awake.

The bliss I gain to which I most aspire.

The bliss for which to sigh I never tire.

For which I weep as though my heart would break.

A kindly sleep, O sleep to me so blest, Happy repose, full of tranquillity.

Grant that each night I may renew my dream.

And if my sad heart, by all love possest.

Must ne'er be happy in reality.

Yet while I sleep so let me falsely seem."

The humor of the end of Columbus' Century is very well ill.u.s.trated in some of the epigrams of Melin de Saint Gelais, like Marot, the son of a poet and brought up in poetic circles, who knew how to write elegant trivialities, or who was, as the French say, _maitre en l'art de badiner avec elegance._ Curiously enough, it was he who imported the sonnet from Italy. It had been hitherto unknown to French poets, but was unfortunately, as it must seem to most of us, destined to eclipse the ballades, rondeaux, virelais and other poetic forms that had been for so long in vogue in France. I prefer to quote here two of his shorter epigramatic poems which serve to show how old the new is in wit and humor:

"You find great fault with me, my friend.

Because your neighbor I commend, And yet from you all praise withhold: {468} But say, why should I waste my time Praising your merits or your rhyme?

You do it best a hundredfold."

The second treats in vivid satire the eternal question of the honor due the scholar:

"Friend! tell of these two things the just degree, Great learning or great wealth; the better which?

I know not. But the learned still I see Paying great court and homage to the rich."

The _"Defense et Ill.u.s.tration de la Langue Francaise,"_ which is the manifesto of the Pleiades, was written by Joachim du Bellay just at the end of Columbus' Century and published in February, 1550, according to the modern calendar, but 1549 in the old, which made the year begin on Lady Day (March 25). With that a group of men, most of them about twenty-five years of age, entered upon a new period of French literature. A sham middle age had been lingering on,--the mere remnants and echo of the Romance of the Rose, and now a new spirit was to enter into French literature. The genius of it had all been cradled in Columbus' Century. The poets of the Pleiades came to teach the modern note. Pierre Ronsard was the greatest of them, and in five years all Europe knew something of the new birth in French poetry. Two such very different minds as those of Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth of England became ardent admirers and indeed almost patrons of the new poets, and particularly of Ronsard. Many of the poems had been conceived, and some of the best were issued within a year or two after the close of what we have called Columbus' Century. The little lyric _"Mignonne! Allons voir si la Rose,"_ which has always been a favorite in every generation with any poetry in its soul, was known throughout Europe within a year of its publication in 1552.

There is another ode of Ronsard's of much more serious vein which serves to show that the poets of the older time could think of other things besides love and beauty and the rose, and face the sterner problems of their time and sing the {469} meaning of them with poetic depth. Because its subject is quite as eternal in its interest as that of the love poems and has perhaps more significance for our time, I prefer to quote it:

"Why, poor peasant, should you dread Sceptered hand or crowned head?

They shall soon--slight shades--be sent The number of the dead t' augment.

To all mortals--dost not wis?-- Death's wide gate e'er open is.

There th' imperial soul must wend, There as speedily descend, Charon's fatal boat to find, As the soul of serf or hind.

Courage you who delvers are; These great thunderbolts of war No more than yourselves shall go Armed with breastplate there below, As though battling as of yore.

Mail shall profit them no more-- Lance and shield and battle blade-- Than shall you your scythe and spade.

Rhadamanthus, judge severe, Be you sure no more will fear Armor in his dread abode Than the peasant's wooden goad; Nor does more or less admire Richest robe or mean attire, Or the gorgeous pageantry Where the king in state doth lie."

Joachim du Bellay, s.n.a.t.c.hed away at the early age of thirty-five after having pa.s.sed many years in illness, owed his inspiration to write poetry to his reading of the cla.s.sics. It was he who wrote the proclamation of the Pleiades which I have already mentioned. Had his fate been happier, doubtless there {470} would have been many great poems from him and he would have been a serious rival of his friend Ronsard. As it is, there are from his pen some poems that will always have an interest for the French and for the educated in every country.

One of the more serious deserves to be quoted.

"If, then, our life is shorter than a day Lost in all time; if the revolving year Hurries our days past hope to reappear; If all things born must fail and pa.s.s away--

What, O my prisoned soul, dost dream of? say!

Why so much love our days of darkness here.

If to take flight to an abode more dear, Well-feathered wings you on your shoulders sway?

There is the good which ever soul desires.

There the repose to which the world aspires, And there is love and pleasure evermore.

There, O my soul, rapt to the highest skies, You will in actual substance recognize Th' ideal beauty which I now adore."

In the French prose of our century there is Comines at the beginning, a not unworthy fourth in that wonderful quartette of French historical writers which began with Villehardouin at the end of the twelfth century, gave us Joinville in the thirteenth, Froissart in the fourteenth and Comines in the latter half of the fifteenth. He is one of the historians who will ever be read; with a political sagacity and philosophic outlook on history that give him a place of his own. He was no mere chronicler, and the individuality of his work, that quality by which history is raised into literature, sets him far above many a modern writer of what is called history, though it is merely a collection of materials for some historian who will inform them with a soul. At the end of the century there was Michel de L'Hopital, whose orations, numerous memoirs and special treatises mainly connected with explanations of {471} law have the defects of legal writing at all times, and yet exhibit a power of expression that has seldom been equalled at any time.

After Rabelais, undoubtedly the greatest of the prose writers of the time was Amyot, whose first work, a translation of a Greek romance, "Theagene et Charicle," was published in 1546, and who, in the subsequent years of a life that reached almost to ninety, published his translations of Plutarch, a work for which he received the designation of preceptor of the royal children and the Bishopric of Auxerre. He was the grand almoner.

Amyot's translation of Plutarch has been declared practically a new and original work. Montaigne said of it:

"I am grateful to Amyot above all things for having had the wit to select so worthy and so suitable a work to present his country. We ignorant folk had been lost, had not this lifted us out of the mire; thanks to it, we now dare speak and write, and ladies give lessons out of it to school-masters; 'tis our breviary." For English-speaking people its significance is greatly enhanced from the consideration that it was really Amyot's version which, in the English dress of Florio, became Shakespeare's Plutarch. Anyone who knows how closely Shakespeare followed his Plutarch will appreciate, then, what an important influence on world literature Amyot was destined to have.

This translation of Plutarch has come to be looked upon as probably one of the best translations ever made. It has sometimes been said that "to translate is to betray" and that the best translations are at most tapestries seen from the wrong side, but Amyot's "Plutarch" must be considered an exception to this rule. Erasmus said of Linacre's translation into Latin of Galen that it was better than the original Greek. Amyot's "Plutarch" has become a French cla.s.sic, though the Greek author was by no means cla.s.sic in the limited sense of the word in the original. Racine would read no other because he thought there was nothing to equal it in French. Amyot's works are a treasure house of the French language, and modern French critics often regret that many of his expressions have been allowed to sink into desuetude.

{472}

France glories in the possession of another of these striking characters of the Renaissance period, Rabelais, about the estimation of whose character and place in history, just as with regard to Machiavelli, the world has not quite made up its mind. There is no doubt at all as to his genius, nor his breadth of view and comprehensive grasp of the knowledge of his time, nor of his ability as a vigorous writer, though his crudities of style and frequent indulgence in vulgarity, have made him a writer largely for men, and even many of these have been deterred from the study of his writings because of the glaringness of these faults. His defects were largely those of his time, for they were accustomed to call a spade a spade in the Renaissance. It was not because of looseness of his own life that his crudities of style are so manifest. Careful investigations and research in our time have made it very clear that there are many misunderstandings with regard to his personal character which should be removed. Rabelais ran the whole gamut of life in his time. He was first a friar, then a monk, took his medical degrees at Montpellier, a physician who gained considerable prestige for his knowledge of medicine, a writer of books that were widely read, a scholar whose journeys to Rome gave him a breadth of knowledge unusual even in his time, and the intimate friend of some of the great and good churchmen and literary men of his time.

The old legend which represented him as a gluttonous and wine-bibbing buffoon, wandering in revels as an unfrocked priest, must now be abandoned. His transitions from friar to monk, to physician, were all accomplished with due ecclesiastical permission, and in spite of the freedom of speech and liberalizing tendencies to be found in his writings he never got into serious trouble with the ecclesiastical authorities. Evidently he was looked upon as a genius whose good will might be depended on to keep him from serious heretical divagations, though occasionally his superabundant vital spirit would lead him into expressions that were often indiscreet and sometimes needed correction. His relations with Guillaume and Jean du Bellay and with the bishops of Maillezais and Montpellier, as well as the distinguished jurist, Tiraqueau, furnish most convincing proof of the high regard in which he was held not {473} only by men of his own rank, but by those far above him in power and station--Princes of the Church and patrons of humanism.

In spite of their deterring vulgarity, his works have been much read ever since and are still often in the hands of scholars and those who want to appreciate one phase at least of the true inwardness and all-comprehensiveness of the spirit of the Renaissance. The number of Greek and Latin writers from whom he quotes is very large, and his reading must have been very wide. He seems also to have known some Hebrew. Very few of his contemporaries realized at all that in his writings he had made an enduring contribution not only to French, but to world literature. So good a critic, however, as Joachim du Bellay in the "Defence and Ill.u.s.tration of the French Tongue" alludes to him as the man "who has brought back Aristophanes to life and who imitates so well the satirical wit of Lucian."

The fact that his book should be published at this time without its author incurring serious censure, much less persecution, is a proof that the usual persuasion of many who write on the history of this time that heresy-baiting was a favorite occupation of the Churchmen is unfounded and shows how absurd is the impression entertained by not a few that the slightest imprudence might have even fatal consequences.

Men like etienne Dolet and Giordano Bruno lost their lives at this time on heretical charges, but that was because their writings seemed to the Church, and above all the civil authorities of the time, to undermine authority and to propagate anarchy. This has always been a dangerous suspicion for a philosophic writer to fall under at any time, and is not without its serious dangers, social rather than legal, even in our time. In other matters, however, as the example of Rabelais shows, there was, if not a modern liberty, at least a large tolerance of expression, provided the thoughts were tempered by humor and the character of the writer known to be such that genuine ill-will or anarchic tendencies towards civil and ecclesiastical authorities were not the manifest purpose of the writings.

The interest of our own generation in Rabelais is best {474} ill.u.s.trated by the foundation in 1902 of the Societe des etudes Rabelaisiennes at Paris. The organ of the Society, the _Revue des etudes Rabelaisiennes,_ made its first appearance in January, 1903, and has already added much to our knowledge of Rabelais. It has now been thoroughly demonstrated that Gargantua was a popular and folk-lore character long before Rabelais' time, and that he a.s.sumed the character only in order to give popular vogue to his own ideas. In spite of the cruder side of his work he has so much to say that is valuable with regard to education, valuable even for our time, so much of correction of popular errors and emphatic restatement of the philosophy of life by which men may secure their happiness, not through selfishness, but love for their fellowmen, that whenever men think deeply for themselves and do not merely drift in the wake of other thinkers, Rabelais will always attract attention. It is always a good sign when Rabelais becomes popular in France, for men are usually thinking more deeply than before. Like Dante, he is a touchstone of sincerity and honesty of thought and purpose among his countrymen.

Rabelais is a most difficult man to sum up for those who are not French. Saintsbury in his "Earlier Renaissance" has perhaps furnished the best brief appreciation when he said:

"On the pure credit side his (Rabelais') a.s.sets are so great that one can only marvel at the undervaluation of them by any competent auditor. . . . You _may_ say some things against him, and some of these _some_ things truly. But three things will remain. He is (let the competent gainsay it if they dare) one of the greatest writers of the world; he is one of the great satirists of the world; and he is--as not all great writers and very few great satirists have been--one who sincerely and strenuously loved his fellowmen."

In the first paragraph of his "Francois Rabelais" [Footnote 45]

(written for the French Men of Letters Series), Arthur Tilley, whose "Literature of the French Renaissance" had shown how competent he was to judge, has summed up the character and place of Rabelais. It is to Tilley that I owe most of the {475} details that are given here, and his paragraph will serve as a fitting conclusion.

[Footnote 45: Lippincott, Phila., 1907.]