Chapter IV: The Criticism of the Pléiade (2)

The Second Book also has its due invocations to the Muses and the King: and Vauquelin divagates, in his amiable way, for some hundred lines before he settles down to paraphrase Horace’s warning about the _scriptor cyclicus_, and to give, as examples of exordium, not merely a refashioning in Alexandrines of the opening of Ronsard’s _Franciade_, but a long extract from his own projected epic of the _Israëlide_. [Sidenote: _The Second._] But as soon as he has done this (to the extent, it is true, of some fifty lines) he affects shame at quoting himself, and bids the poet swim in the Greek and Latin sea, especially in Virgil. In fact, Vauquelin is much more of a Virgil-worshipper than Ronsard, and almost as much as Vida, if not as Scaliger; and it is curious to see in his work that unconquerable, and as it were magnetic, repulsion from the greater poetry of Homer, and attraction towards the lesser verse of Virgil, which more and more shows itself, from the start of the Renaissance to the finish of the eighteenth century. Although he again and again diverges to the prose Epic (with the usual example of Heliodorus and the _Æthiopica_), to the artificial epic unity of a year (which he doubtless took, after Ronsard, from Minturno), and so forth, he as constantly returns to Virgil, describing him in one place plumply as “second to Homer in age, but first in rank.”

Then he reverts to his Horace, and, not forgetting a hint to the poet (one frequent with him) that he had better take French and Christian subjects such as the crusade of St Louis, he dilutes largely the famous clauses of his model on keeping the type of age and youth, &c. This leads him naturally to the subject of drama, on which he is, of course, severely Horatian; especially in regard to messengers and the avoidance of awkward things on the stage. He has the _Pléiade_ drama, too, before him as he writes; extols the Chorus, and again does not forget his hints of Christian subjects. But in the sequel he leaves his ancient authorities, and their severer tastes, rather on one side, in order to dwell at great length on the accessories of the stage—music, _mise-en-scène_, &c., with a not uninteresting reference—like that of Sibilet (_v. supra_) earlier, and possibly due to it—to the moralities of _nos vieux François_, as well as a welcome to the Ballet and to his native _Vaux-de-Vire_. He indulges in a warm eulogy of French as a language passing all the vulgars of Europe, and of French poetry, and then handles Satire, a subject in which he was an expert, and which he had treated in a prose _Discourse_, joined to his own exercises in the kind. He connects it with the Provençal _Sirvente_, allows the _coq-à-l'âne_ a sort of poor-relationship, and dwells on French lyric poets at some length, once more commending Latin models and (in a deflection, more logical than some of his, to the subject of iambic and other metre) noticing the recent attempts at a quantified prosody. On this subject he prudently declines to commit himself: posterity must decide. And the rest of the Book again busies itself with various styles and kinds, the measures proper to them, and the authors, modern as well as ancient, who have treated them best.

These lucubrations, however, disorderly as they may seem, contain numerous things of interest—a just remark on rhyme as practically the equivalent of stricter metrical arrangement; observations on the prose _Lancelot_, &c., showing that Vauquelin was not destitute of that knowledge of the older literature of his country which distinguished France and Frenchmen rather creditably in the Renaissance, and to which we shall presently return. Divers contemporary authors are also mentioned, Garnier being singled out for special (and well deserved) praise; and there is a pleasant reminiscence of the time when

Nous passions dans Poitiers l’Avril de notre vie,

and, instead of attending to the study of the law, followed the frolics of the Muses. The actual close of the Second Book is a neither undignified nor ill-felt wail over the sufferings of France in the religious wars, and an expression of confidence in the King’s powers of healing.

[Sidenote: _The Third._]

The Third Book, after the usual decorative beginnings, returns to Drama, and takes up Comedy, with praise for Grévin and Belleau, and a long discussion of the nature and varieties of the kind, including Tragi-comedy, in which, naturally, the _Bradamante_ of Garnier, the only considerable example, is taken for study. Next a turn, half abrupt, is made to Pastoral; and then Vauquelin returns to his favourite Satire and to other forms, taking his texts from Horace, Vida, and his own fancy, in a slightly bewildering manner, but to some extent carrying off the _à propos de bottes_ of his argument by his serene indifference to it, and the total absence of any awkward apologies or attempts to join. By degrees he settles, or seems to be settling, to the general questions (What is the end of poetry? Instruction or Pleasure? and the like), but turns from them to a long catalogue of the poets of his time.

The foot-by-foot following of Horace, which is more noticeable than ever in the last three or four hundred lines—with the licence of going off at any tangent from Horatian texts which Vauquelin also permits himself—would account for any amount of the desultoriness which is only disguised (if, indeed, it can be said to be disguised) from the most careless, in Horace himself, by the brevity of his scale and the brilliancy of his phrase. But we do not, of course, go to Vauquelin for an orderly treatise; we go to him that he may tell us what an interesting and remarkable division of French men of letters knew of criticism and thought of literature.

His answer is not the less, but the more, valuable because of its apparent incoherence, this incoherence being itself a piece of evidence in the case. [Sidenote: _His exposition of_ Pléiade _criticism._] The _Pléiade_, as we have said more than once, was eagerly critical; but it had a strictly practical object, its criticism being entirely subsidiary and preliminary to the desire of creation. We meet here with nothing of the rather fatally “disinterested” investigation of the Italians. Even the ancients are studied less with a view to appreciating their beauties than with the desire to steal their thunder.

The precepts of Vauquelin’s four guides—of Horace first and most of all, of Aristotle occasionally, of Vida pretty often, and of Minturno _nonnunquam_, are all adjusted to this end. Incidentally, of course, Vauquelin shows us some general critical views—the canonisation of Virgil, the adherence to the classical Senecan drama, the discouragement of mediæval forms, if not entirely of mediæval subjects and language. But, directly, he is the technical instructor, not the theoretical critic. His _technique_, with some slight alterations, is almost purely that of Ronsard, and displays the same admixture of the classical tendency which the seventeenth century took up and hardened, with a quasi-romantic breadth and licence which that century rejected. It is easy to say, and not very difficult to see, that it might—that it actually did—result in a practice too promiscuous at worst, at best a little too eclectic—that French was not ready in point of time, and perhaps not quite suited in point of temperament, for the bridle to be flung too freely on the neck of Pegasus; and that Vauquelin is almost directly responsible for inciting the growth of the weeds at which his successor Boileau slashed with such a desperate hook sixty years later. It is even possible to say, on the other side, that Du Bellay’s questioning of rules altogether was, from the Romantic point of view, sounder than Vauquelin’s provision of what may be called conditional licences. We ought, however, to look at the _Art Poétique_ rather in the light of what had gone before its long-delayed appearance than of what followed—at the production of 1559-1600, not at that of 1600-1660. It is in effect an _a posteriori_ rationalising and methodising of _Pléiade_ Poetry. This poetry is even now not much known in England, and its defects—inequality, heaviness at times, pedantry, a strange and almost irritating inability to get the wings quite free save at rare moments—are undeniable. But there is something, in the _Art_ itself, of the better qualities of its subjects: and to those who give themselves the trouble to make their acquaintance, these subjects have a strange and a peculiar charm, in their mixture of gravity and grace, of love and lore, of paganism and piety, yea, of Classic and Romantic themselves. The _hedone_ of the _Pléiade_ is _alethes_ as well as _oikeia_, and in this handbook of the school Vauquelin has revealed at least some of its secrets. Those who can do this are no contemptible, and no common, critics.

But though Vauquelin thus sums up, in spirit as in time, the formal criticism of the _Pléiade_, we have not yet quite done with this. [Sidenote: _Outliers: Tory, Fauchet, &c._] It has been, throughout, the practice of this book to take into consideration not only such formal expressions, but also those of men who, outside formal rhetoric or deliberate criticism, represent the literary taste of their time. The latter part of the French sixteenth century is not poor in such. On the contrary, the interest in literature of this kind which it displays perhaps exceeds that shown in any country of Europe. Even Italy, despite its immensely greater volume of formal literary discussion and academic literary history, falls short in a certain intelligent independence of consideration. We might draw on works of many kinds, from the eccentric and mainly grammatical or typographical but extremely interesting _Champfleury_ of Geoffroy Tory (which, as is well known, contains the original of Rabelais’ Limousin scholar) as early as 1529; we might without too great straining bring in Master Francis himself, and we cannot justly neglect the name of Claude Fauchet, who almost deserves that of Premier historian of literature in Europe. But, obeying that system of representative treatment, especially in the outlying departments, of the subject, the necessity of which grows more urgent at every chapter and almost every page of this book, we may chiefly deal with two writers, the one almost as much of an antiquary and historian as Fauchet, but of greater literary faculty and a pleasanter style; the other one of the great names of the world’s letters, and, in his own fitful fashion, referring to literature itself frequently and importantly enough. To those who know anything of the time this last sentence will have already named, without naming, Etienne Pasquier and Michel de Montaigne.

The chapters of Pasquier’s[190] _Recherches de la France_, in which he deals with French literature, are perhaps the most interesting of the whole. [Sidenote: _Pasquier: The_ Recherches.] He had himself been an ardent disciple of the _Pléiade_, and a pleasant poet, in his youth; and in his maturer years he applied to the history of literature the same untiring research and sound good sense which made him the first historical inquirer, as distinguished from mere chroniclers, in France. It is not entirely unimportant that, in his preliminary remarks on the subject, he announces his intention of devoting his seventh book to French Poetry and his eighth to French language—a pointed if unintentional expression of the predominance of poetry in literature even as late as the end of the sixteenth century. His first observations are directed to the difference between French and other modern languages on the one hand, and ancient poetry on the other, in the matter of rhyme, which he would derive (not without at least as much justification of probability and history as other theorists can allege) from the rhythmical parallelisms of prose speech, at first accidentally sweetened by homœoteleuton, and then deliberately by rhyme itself. He is well aware that the language of the Franks must have been German; and his theory of French as composed of three languages, Walloon (by which he probably means Gallic or Celtic), Latin, and Frankish, will be more obnoxious to philological pedants than to philosophical philologists. He knows the monorhymed _chansons_ such as _Berte aux grans Piés_, but is disposed to put them unnecessarily late—nay, he seems to think that there was little before the thirteenth century and Philip Augustus. Yet he is not unaware of the much greater antiquity of the decasyllable as compared with the Alexandrine.

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Footnote 190:

The _Recherches_ have not been completely reprinted, I think, since
1723. All their literary matter, however, is included in M. Léon
Feugère’s extremely useful and well-edited _Œuvres Choisies d’E. P._
(2 vols., Paris, 1849). It extends from i. 230 to ii. 134, what
follows on the University of Paris being itself not quite irrelevant.

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Indeed Pasquier has a not inconsiderable knowledge of mediæval poetry—a knowledge at any rate extending far beyond that of the _Pléiade_ generally, who were as a rule content to recognise, with a certain toleration, the _Roman de la Rose_. [Sidenote: _His knowledge of older French literature_,] He knows and praises Helinand, the authors of the great _Alixandre_, Thibaut de Champagne, Chrestien de Troyes, Raoul de Houdenc—not merely, it would seem, from Fauchet’s book, but in themselves; and he quotes _Ogier le Danois_, _Athis et Prophilias_, _Cléomadès_, &c. Like a sensible man, he has that indispensable chapter on Provençal literature which some would cast out of French literary history, thereby making it unintelligible. And then he passes to the prose Arthurian romances, and to the formal poetry of the fourteenth century, of which he speaks without any of the exaggerated and slightly unintelligent—certainly intolerant—contempt of Du Bellay and Vauquelin. “_Servitude, que je ne die gêne d’esprit, admirable_,” “_ces mignardises_” are his mild censures of them, and he gives particular attention to Froissart and Alain Chartier, with mention of Villon and others, and a very high eulogium of _Pathelin_. He does not, he says, know the author (nor do we), but he will dare to say that this farce, as a whole and in parts, _fait contrecarre_ to the comedies of both Greeks and Romans. He is fairly copious on the men of letters of the first half of the century, and then begins a new chapter with the picturesque and often-quoted phrase about the “great fleet of poets” that the reign of Henri II. brought forth, and their new style of poetry.

He gives to Maurice Scève the honour of captaining the leading ship of this fleet; and then follow all the well-known names (and some not so well known) of the school proper, the catalogue being capped by some extremely interesting and valuable critical-anecdotic remarks on the greater writers, especially Ronsard himself. [Sidenote: _and criticism of contemporary French poetry._] One could hardly be more just on this difficult[191] poet than is Pasquier, who allows him not merely grandeur but sweetness to almost any extent, “quand il a voulu _doux couler_”; calls him _grand poète entre poètes_, but admits that he was “très mauvais censeur et aristarque de ses livres.” Then he partly returns upon his steps in another chapter, where he approaches French poetry from a different side, considering especially its verse-structure, with examples from Marot downwards, and dwelling on the alternation of masculine and feminine rhymes which Ronsard had sanctioned. On this matter the historical equity of Pasquier is especially noticeable, as opposed to the somewhat excessive correctness (according to pedagogic ideas of the correct) shown by most Frenchmen. He declines to take a side between “this new diligence and the old nonchalance.” And he makes the very acute observation that Marot only allowed himself this nonchalance in verse _which was not to be sung_—a proof, as he remarks, that though Master Clement might not be Ronsard’s equal in learning, he had a _facilité d’esprit admirable_. In yet another passage he compares French with Italian poetry, and, emboldened by this, with Latin itself; taking the patriotic side with equal courage and ingenuity, and ending with the citation of some of his own Latin verses on Ronsard, and with the sigh, “De toute cette grande compagnie qui mit la main à la plume sous Henri II. il restait quatre, Théodore de Bèze, Ponthus de Thyard, Louis le Caron, et moi.” Then, after a short appendix-chapter on classical metres in French (which he would like to approve, but seems in two minds about), he passes to language, on his treatment of which we cannot dwell. But he never allows himself to stray far from literature, and makes a pretext for returning at some length to his beloved _Pathelin_.

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Footnote 191:

Difficult, that is, to appraise critically—not to understand.

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It may be observed that Pasquier, though interested in letters to an extreme degree, enjoys more than he judges—not perhaps the worst defect of the critic.

The agile and penetrating intelligence of Montaigne could hardly have failed in any age to devote itself to literature; in his own age this devotion was especially inevitable. [Sidenote: _Montaigne: his references to literature._] That his dealings with the subject are dealings in the height of his own fashion, it is unnecessary to say. Not many things could be more characteristic than the Essay on Pedantry (I. 24), in which the whole spirit and motive, not merely of the _Pléiade_, but of the sixteenth century generally, are subjected to the irregular glancing criticism of the essayist. This single paper would enable one to understand the fling of a man like Ben Jonson—the reverse of unintelligent, the reverse of unhumorous, but full of erudition, and of sixteenth-century reverence for it—at “All the essayists, even their master Montaigne.” On the general question whether what is commonly called pedantry is a good or a bad thing, Montaigne’s verdict comes simply to a “Mass! I cannot tell!” He bestows hearty praise on Du Bellay, a non-pedantic and courtier-like man of letters, who yet was enthusiastic for learning; heartier on Adrian Turnebus, a pedant in the common injurious sense; and in the middle of his essay he plays on study of Greek and Latin, on quotations from Plato and Cicero, on “arming oneself against the fear of death, at the cost and charges of Seneca.”[192] The much longer chapter on Education, addressed to Diane de Foix, which immediately follows, contains one of the worst expressions of Renaissance contempt of mediæval literature, in the boast that “of the Lancelots of the Lake, the Amadis, the Huons of Bordeaux, with which childhood amuses itself,” he did not know so much as the name. “My Lord Michael” is great, but even he might have been greater if he _had_ known them.

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Footnote 192:

Vol. i. p. 165, ed. Courbet and Royer. _Je n’aime point cette
suffisance relative et mendiée_, he goes on with his own absolute and
unborrowed stamp of phrase and epithet.

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Indeed hardly anywhere does Montaigne exhibit his own undulation and diversity more fully than in relation to letters—at one time amassing ancient instances as if he were totally oblivious of the remarks above about Plato and Seneca; at another criticising for himself[193] with inimitable freshness and gusto; and at another again informing the scholar, with much coolness, that if he will take off hood and gown, drop Latin, and not deafen men’s ears with unmitigated Aristotle, he will be at the level of all the world, and perhaps below it.

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Footnote 193:

Cf., for instance, the remarkable critical comparison of Tacitus and
Seneca in the Eighth Essay of the Third Book, towards the close (iv.
37 _ed. cit._)

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Even this, it will be seen, is not so very far from the cardinal _Pléiade_ principle, that study of the ancients is an excellent thing, but that its chief value is to equip and strengthen the student for practice in French. And Montaigne, like the rest of his contemporaries and compatriots, always had this “cultivation of the garden” before him. It is well known how the real pedants of his own time objected to his neologisms, just as Fontaine (or whoever was the author of the _Quintil_) did to those of Du Bellay; and how large a part these neologisms played in the development and nourishing of French prose. Every one who knows anything of Montaigne knows his enthusiastic eulogy of Amyot, and of the services which that _grant translateur_ had rendered to French. And everybody should know the delicate and subtle appreciation which he lavishes, in a fashion so different from the indiscriminate laudations of Scaliger, on favourite passages of the ancients, more particularly[194] on the Venus and Vulcan passage of Virgil, and the Venus and Mars passage of Lucretius.

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Footnote 194:

If there is anywhere a happier critical phrase, in its particular
kind, than “cette noble _circumfusa_, mère du gentil _infusus_,” I do
not know it.

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Of course Montaigne’s interests, despite his exquisite literary accomplishment, are not primarily literary. [Sidenote: _The Essay_ On Books.] But he has given one entire Essay (II. 10), and that not of the shortest, to Books; and he has frequent glancings at the subject, sometimes characteristically racy, as that at the _Heptameron_, “un gentil livre _pour son estoffe_.” The “Books” essay begins with one of his familiar jactations of imperfection. He has some reading, but no faculty of retention. He often intentionally plagiarises—for instance from Plutarch and Seneca. He does not seek in books anything more than amusement and knowledge of himself and of life. He refuses to grapple—at any great expense of labour—with difficulties. He likes Rabelais, Boccaccio, and Johannes Secundus for mere pastime, but repeats his depressing scorn for romances, and confesses, as did Darwin on the score of Shakespeare, that he cannot take the pleasure he used to take in Ariosto and Ovid. He thinks Virgil, Lucretius, Horace, and Catullus (especially Virgil in the _Georgics_ and the Fifth _Æneid_) at the top of poetry—a grouping which makes us long to pin the elusive Perigourdin down, and force him, Proteus as he is, to give us his exquisite reasons. His judgment on Lucan is a little commonplace, “not the style but the sentiments”—whereas the sentiments of Lucan are but Roman “common form,” and his style, if not of the best kind, is great in a kind not the best. He thinks Terence “the very darling and grace of Latin,” and is half apologetic as to the equalling of Lucretius to Virgil, positively violent (it is, he thinks, _bestise et stupidité barbarique_)[195] on that of Virgil to Ariosto, and depressing again in regard to Plautus (Terence _sent bien mieux son gentilhomme_). He returns again and again to the style of Terence; and warns us of the coming classicism by his objections to the “fantastiques élévations Espagnoles et Pétrarchistes,” being equally “correct” in exalting (or at least in his reasons for the exaltation, there being no doubt about the fact) Catullus above Martial. On Greek authors as such he frankly and repeatedly declares his incompetence to give judgment; but “now that Plutarch has been made French,” he can as frankly yoke him once more with Seneca, and extol the pair _super æthera_, boldly expressing his comparative distaste for Cicero. He would like to have “a dozen of [Diogenes] Laertius,” for the “human document,” of course; and puts Cæsar above all other historians, including Sallust, while he has something to say of divers French writers of the class—Froissart (who, he thinks, gives “the crude matter of history”), Comines, Du Bellay-Langey, and others. It is to be noted that in this place he says nothing about French poetry. And when he does take up the subject much later, in II. 17, at the end of the “Essay on Presumption,” he is very brief, only saying that he thinks Ronsard and Du Bellay “hardly far from the ancient perfection.” At the beginning of II. 36 he divides with the majority on the merits of Homer and Virgil, though he once more admits a disqualification, which in this case is, of course, total. And in the famous remark,[196] “Poetry is an amusement proper for women; it is a frolic and subtle art, disguised, talkative, quite occupied with pleasure and display, like them,” he gives no doubt a certain measure of his critical capacity in less specially conditioned matters.

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Footnote 195:

_Ed. cit._, ii. 112. Most of the expressions quoted are in the
immediate context.

Footnote 196:

III. 3, _Les Trois Commerces_, _ed. cit._, iii. 288.

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This capacity is, indeed, strictly limited. Montaigne is almost, if not quite, as much set as his beloved Plutarch on the _life_-side of literature, as the only one that really interests him; and, in addition, he has an obstinate prosaic inclination, with which Plutarch does not seem to be nearly so chargeable. Yet he must have found mention here, not merely as our first very great French man of letters,[197] who has left us literary opinions, but as the very light and glory of the French intellect at the meeting of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and as thus giving an index of the greatest value to its tastes and opinions. He displays (conditioning it in the ways just mentioned, and others, by his intense idiosyncrasy) the general literary attitude of the time—an active, practical, striving towards performance, a rather conventional and arbitrary admiration of the farther past, a contempt, or at least good-natured underestimation, of the nearer, and fair, if vague, hopes for the future. But considering the intensely critical character of Montaigne’s intellect in most directions, its exertions in this direction tell us even more by what they do not, than by what they do.

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Footnote 197:

Rabelais is no real exception. It is needless to say that _Gargantua_
and _Pantagruel_ do contain matter touching on literature. But
Rabelais comes too early to be critical. The “Library of Saint-Victor”
and other things are simply alarums and excursions of his general
campaign against the rearguard of “monkish ignorance”; and in his
references to French poetry he does not seem to have got beyond—or to
have wished to get beyond—complacent acquiescence in _rhétoriqueur_
pedantry.

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