A History of Literary Criticism in the Renaissance Part 18

[393] _Art Poet._ i. 22 _sq._

[394] _Ibid._ i. 813. _Cf._ Ronsard, ii. 12.

[395] Ronsard, vii. 320, 332.

[396] The early Italian poetry written in cla.s.sical metres has been collected by Carducci, _La Poesia Barbara nei Secoli XV e XVI_, Bologna, 1881.

[397] Carducci, p. 2.

[398] _Ibid._ p. 6 _sq._

[399] Carducci, pp. 55, 87, etc.

[400] _Ibid._ pp. 327, 443. _Cf._ Du Bellay, _Defense_, ii. 7.

[401] For the history of cla.s.sical metres in France, _cf._ Egger, _h.e.l.lenisme en France_, p. 290 _sq._, and Darmesteter and Hatzfeld, _Seizieme Siecle en France_, p. 113 _sq._

[402] Estienne Pasquier, in his _Recherches de la France_, vii. 11, attempts to prove that the French language is capable of employing quant.i.ty in its verse, but does not decide whether quant.i.ty or rhymed verse is to be preferred.

[403] _Cf._ Rucktaschel, p. 24 _sq._, and Carducci, p. 413 _sq._

[404] This academy has been made the subject of an excellent monograph by e. Fremy, _L'Academie des Derniers Valois_, Paris, n. d. The statutes of the academy will be found on page 39 of this work, and the letters-patent granted to it by Charles IX. on page 48.

[405] _Defense_, ii. 11.

[406] _Art Poet._ i. 3.

[407] _Art Poet._ ii. 10; i. 9.

[408] Ronsard, vii. 321, 324.

[409] _Ibid._ iii. 17 _sq._

[410] Sidney, _Defence_, p. 29.

[411] _Essais_, i. 54.

[412] _Cf._ the _Revue d'Hist. litt. de la France_, 1896, iii. 1 _sq._

[413] Ronsard, iii. 28; Du Bellay, _Defense_, ii. 11.

[414] Arnaud, app. ii.

[415] Vauquelin, _Art Poet._ iii. 845; _cf._ iii. 33; i. 901.

[416] Ronsard, vii. 322.

CHAPTER IV

THE FORMATION OF THE CLa.s.sIC IDEAL IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

I. _The Romantic Revolt_

IT is a well-known fact that between 1600 and 1630 there was a break in the national evolution of French literature. This was especially so in the drama, and in France the drama is the connecting link between century and century. The dramatic works of the sixteenth century had been fas.h.i.+oned after the regular models borrowed by the Italians from Seneca. The change that came was a change from Italian cla.s.sical to Spanish romantic models. The note of revolt was beginning to be heard in Grevin, De Laudun, and others. The seventeenth century opened with the production of Hardy's irregular drama, _Les Amours de Theagene et Cariclee_ (1601), and the influence of the Spanish romantic drama and the Italian pastoral, dominant for over a quarter of a century, was inaugurated in France.

The logic of this innovation was best expounded in Spain, and it was there that arguments in favor of the romantic and irregular drama were first formulated. The two most interesting defences of the Spanish national drama are doubtless the _Egemplar Poetico_ of Juan de la Cueva (1606) and Lope de Vega's _Arte Nuevo de Hacer Comedias_ (1609). Their inspiration is at bottom the same. Their authors were both cla.s.sicists at heart, or rather cla.s.sicists in theory, yet with differences. Juan de la Cueva's conception of poetry is entirely based on the precepts of the Italians, except in what regards the national drama, for here he is a partisan and a patriot. He insists that the difference of time and circ.u.mstance frees the Spanish playwright from all necessity of imitating the ancients or obeying their rules. "This change in the drama," he says, "was effected by wise men, who applied to new conditions the new things they found most suitable and expedient; for we must consider the various opinions, the times, and the manners, which make it necessary for us to change and vary our operations."[417] His theory of the drama was entirely opposed to his conception of the other forms of poetry. According to this standpoint, as a recent writer has put it, "the theatre was to imitate nature, and to please; poetry was to imitate the Italians, and satisfy the orthodox but minute critic."[418]

Lope de Vega, writing three years later, does not deny the universal applicability of the Aristotelian canons, and even acknowledges that they are the only true rules. But the people demand romantic plays, and the people, rather than the poet's literary conscience, must be satisfied by the playwright. "I myself," he says, "write comedies according to the art invented by those whose sole object it is to obtain the applause of the crowd. After all, since it is the public who pays for these stupidities, why should we not serve what it wants?"[419]

Perhaps the most interesting of all the expositions of the theory of the Spanish national drama is a defence of Lope de Vega's plays by one Alfonso Sanchez, published in 1618 in France, or possibly in Spain with a false French imprint. The apology of Sanchez is comprehended in six distinct propositions. First, the arts have their foundation in nature.

Secondly, a wise and learned man may alter many things in the existing arts. Thirdly, nature does not obey laws, but gives them. Fourthly, Lope de Vega has done well in creating a new art. Fifthly, in his writings everything is adjusted to art, and that a real and living art. Lastly, Lope de Vega has surpa.s.sed all the ancient poets.[420] The following pa.s.sage may be extracted from this treatise, if only to show how little there was of novelty in the tenets of the French romanticists two centuries later:--

"Is it said that we have no infallible art by which to adjust our precepts? But who can doubt it? We have art, we have precepts and rules which bind us, and the princ.i.p.al precept is to imitate nature, for the works of poets express the nature, the manners, and the genius of the age in which they write....

Lope de Vega writes in conformity with art, because he follows nature. If, on the contrary, the Spanish drama adjusted itself to the rules and laws of the ancients, it would proceed against the requirements of nature, and against the foundations of poetry.... The great Lope has done things over and above the laws of the ancients, but never against these laws."

Another Spanish writer defines art as "an attentive observation of examples graded by experience, and reduced to method and the majesty of laws."[421]

It was this naturalistic conception of the poetic art, and especially of the drama, that obtained in France during the first thirty years of the seventeenth century. The French playwrights imitated the Spanish drama in practice, and from the Spanish theorists seemed to have derived the critical justification of their plays. Hardy himself, like Lope de Vega, argues that "everything which is approved by usage and the public taste is legitimate and more than legitimate." Another writer of this time, Francois Ogier, in the preface of the second edition of Jean de Schelandre's remarkable drama of _Tyr et Sidon_ (1628), argues for intellectual independence of the ancients much in the same way as Giraldi Cintio, Pigna, and the other partisans of the _romanzi_ had done three-quarters of a century before. The taste of every nation, he says, is quite different from any other. "The Greeks wrote for the Greeks, and in the judgment of the best men of their time they succeeded. But we should imitate them very much better by giving heed to the tastes of our own country, and the genius of our own language, than by forcing ourselves to follow step by step both their intention and their expression." This would seem to be at bottom Goethe's famous statement that we can best imitate the Greeks by trying to be as great men as they were. It is interesting to note, in all of these early critics, traces of that historical criticism which is usually regarded as the discovery of our own century. But after all, the French like the Spanish playwrights were merely beginning to practise what the Italian dramatists in their prefaces, and some of the Italian critics in their treatises, had been preaching for nearly a century.

The Abbe d'Aubignac speaks of Hardy as "arresting the progress of the French theatre"; and whatever practical improvements the French theatre owes to him, there can be little doubt that for a certain number of years the evolution of the cla.s.sical drama was partly arrested by his efforts and the efforts of his school. But during this very period the foundations of the great literature that was to come were being built on cla.s.sical lines; and the continuance of the cla.s.sical tradition after 1630 was due to three distinct causes, each of which will be discussed by itself as briefly as possible. These three causes were the reaction against the Pleiade, the second influx of the critical ideas of the Italian Renaissance, and the influence of the rationalistic philosophy of the period.

II. _The Reaction against the Pleiade_

The reaction against the Pleiade was effected, or at least begun, by Malherbe. Malherbe's power or message as a poet is of no concern here; in his role of grammarian and critic he accomplished certain important and widespread reforms in French poetry. These reforms were connected chiefly, if not entirely, with the external or formal side of poetry.

His work was that of a grammarian, of a prosodist--in a word, that of a purist. He did not, indeed, during his lifetime, publish any critical work, or formulate any critical system. But the reforms he executed were on this account no less influential or enduring. His critical att.i.tude is to be looked for in the memoirs of his life written by his disciple Racan, and in his own _Commentaire sur Desportes_, which was not published in its entirety until very recently.[422] This commentary consists of a series of ma.n.u.script notes written by Malherbe about the year 1606 in the margins of a copy of Desportes. These notes are of a most fragmentary kind; they seldom go beyond a word or two of disapproval, such as _faible_, _mal concu_, _superflu_, _sans jugement_, _sottise_, or _mal imagine_; and yet, together with a few detached utterances recorded in his letters and in the memoirs by Racan, they indicate quite clearly the critical att.i.tude of Malherbe and the reforms he was bent on bringing about.

These reforms were, in the first place, largely linguistic. The Pleiade had attempted to widen the sphere of poetic expression in French literature by the introduction of words from the cla.s.sics, from the Italian and even the Spanish, from the provincial dialects, from the old romances, and from the terminology of the mechanic arts. All these archaisms, neologisms, Latinisms, compound words, and dialectic and technical expressions, Malherbe set about to eradicate from the French language. His object was to purify French, and, as it were, to centralize it. The test he set up was actual usage, and even this was narrowed down to the usage of the court. Ronsard had censured the exclusive use of courtly speech in poetry, on the ground that the courtier cares more about fighting well than about speaking or writing well. But Malherbe's ideal was the ideal of French cla.s.sicism--the ideal of Boileau, Racine, and Bossuet. French was to be no longer a hodgepodge or a patois, but the pure and perfect speech of the king and his court.

Malherbe, while thus reacting against the Pleiade, made no pretensions of returning to the linguistic usages of Marot; his test was present usage, his model the living language.[423] At the same time his reforms in language, as in other things, represent a reaction against foreign innovations and a return to the pure French idiom. They were in the interest of the national traditions; and it is this national element which is his share in the body of neo-cla.s.sical theory and practice. His reforms were all in the direction of that verbal and mechanical perfection, the love of which is innate in the French nature, and which forms the indigenous or racial element in French cla.s.sicism. He eliminated from French verse hiatus, enjambement, inversions, false and imperfect rhymes, and licenses or cacophonies of all kinds. He gave it, as has been said, mechanical perfection,--

"Et reduisit la Muse aux regles du devoir."

For such a man--_tyran des mots et des syllabes_, as Balzac called him--the higher qualities of poetry could have little or no meaning. His ideals were propriety, clearness, regularity, and force. These, as Chapelain perceived at the time, are oratorical rather than purely poetic qualities; yet for these, all the true qualities that go to make up a great poet were to be sacrificed. Of imagination and poetic sensibility he takes no account whatsoever. After the verbal perfection of the verse, the logical unity of the poem was his chief interest.

Logic and reason are without doubt important things, but they cannot exist in poetry to the exclusion of imagination. By eliminating inspiration, as it were, Malherbe excluded the possibility of lyrical production in France throughout the period of cla.s.sicism. He hated poetic fictions, since for him, as for Boileau, only actual reality is beautiful. If he permitted the employment of mythological figures, it was because they are reasonable and universally intelligible symbols.

The French mind is essentially rational and logical, and Malherbe reintroduced this native rationality into French poetry. He set up common sense as a poetic ideal, and made poetry intelligible to the average mind. The Pleiade had written for a learned literary coterie; Malherbe wrote for learned and unlearned alike. For the Pleiade, poetry had been a divine office, a matter of prophetic inspiration; for Malherbe, it was a trade, a craft, to be learnt like any other. Du Bellay had said that "it is a well-accepted fact, according to the most learned men, that natural talents without learning can accomplish more in poetry than learning without natural talents." Malherbe, it has been neatly said, would have upheld the contrary doctrine that "learning without natural talents can accomplish more than natural talents without learning."[424] After all, eloquence was Malherbe's ideal; and as the French are by nature an eloquent rather than a poetic people, he deserves the honor of having first shown them how to regain their true inheritance. In a word, he accomplished for cla.s.sical poetry in France all that the national instinct, the _esprit gaulois_, could accomplish by itself. Consistent structural laws for the larger poetic forms he could not give; these France owes to Italy. Nor could he appreciate the high notion of abstract perfection, or the cla.s.sical conception of an absolute standard of taste--that of several expressions or several ways of doing something, one way and only one is the right one; this France owes to rationalistic philosophy. Malherbe seems almost to be echoing Montaigne when he says in a letter to Balzac:--

"Do you not know that the diversity of opinions is as natural as the difference of men's faces, and that to wish that what pleases or displeases us should please or displease everybody is to pa.s.s the limits where it seems that G.o.d in His omnipotence has commanded us to stop?"[425]

With this individualistic expression of the questions of opinion and taste, we have but to compare the following pa.s.sage from La Bruyere to indicate how far Malherbe is still from the cla.s.sic ideal:--

"There is a point of perfection in art, as of excellence or maturity in nature. He who is sensible of it and loves it has perfect taste; he who is not sensible of it and loves this or that else on either side of it has a faulty taste. There is then a good and a bad taste, and men dispute of tastes not without reason."[426]

III. _The Second Influx of Italian Ideas_