Chapter VI: Other Influences Summarized 216 (6)

Meanwhile, in prose, the productions of France were of much greater intrinsic importance. At the end of the fourteenth century the chatty chronicler, or historian, Froissart, had combined much of the _naïveté_ and freshness of Herodotus with much of the narrative picturesqueness of Walter Scott. A century later, under the growing influence of the new thought, the conception of history has grown almost philosophical, certainly practical and judicial, in Comines. The full effect of the Renaissance, however, appears in three sixteenth-century writers of very different characters and spheres of work.

Amyot, the translator of Plutarch, is not merely famous for unlocking the treasure-house of that author to the French and thence to the English world; he also taught how the prose of the language should be written for biography or essay. Somewhat earlier—contemporary with Sir Thomas More—appears the learned, satirical, gross, jolly, pathetic priest, Rabelais, whose mock romance, the _Life of Gargantua and Pantagruel_, is still a classic to those who know how to discern, beneath all its terrible coarseness, its grotesque obscurity, and its deliberate buffoonery, the bold criticism, and wise as bold, of contemporary society, especially of religion and the church. In the freedom and range of his thought he embodies the Renaissance, but a Renaissance which has imparted vigour and freshness without having yet taught the lesson of literary form and proportion. Rabelais is like no one else, but he contains elements which recall the broader, comic side of Shakespeare, and others which anticipate the scathing railleries of Swift. Sterne, apart from his natural affinities with the earlier ecclesiastic, draws upon him liberally.

More pleasant reading, both for its sweeter matter and its ease of style, is the work of the Gascon, Michel de Montaigne—a contemporary of Sir Philip Sidney—whose _Essays_, while the first example in that domain of writing, have remained unique in their kind. To the reading of Seneca and of Amyot’s Plutarch he confessedly owed much, but his conception of the essay as an easy-going monologue of moralizing self-revelation is his own. He chooses a theme, begins to discourse in an amiable conversational way concerning it, rambles from it into side paths, plucking the flowers of quotation, and returns to it when it so pleases him. Meanwhile, his real subject is himself. Montaigne the writer is serenely contemplating Montaigne the man. He is submitting him, his tastes, views, habits, and feelings, to a friendly inspection, recorded in the easy style of a man of the world, which charms the reader as he might be charmed by varied and fruity talk. It charms him all the more because the self depicted by Montaigne is always in many respects the self of the listener, who feels all through that touch of nature which makes the whole world kin. For Montaigne is no narrow egotist or pedant. He displays a wide sympathy or tolerance, and he is no dogmatist. His motto was _Que sçais-je?_ To Elizabethan England the _Essays_ were well known, either directly or through the translation of Florio, with which Shakespeare was familiar. The _Essays_ of Bacon, with all their unlikeness to Montaigne, are clearly indebted to his example. How far the Frenchman’s influence has since extended is rendered incalculable by its very breadth and pervasiveness.

* * * * *

For the sake of easier apprehension we may now briefly review French poetry proper, noting its characteristics and its effects on the poetry of England.

Early French poetry, we have said, consisted of romances, of chivalrous adventures, allegories, and _fabliaux_. The nature of these troubadour and trouvère compositions has been described. Till after Chaucer’s day the romances and allegories of France flourished almost as well on English soil, whether read and sung in the original French or adapted—like the _Romance of Alexander_ or the _Romance of the Rose_—in English dress. Chaucer himself translated the _Roman de la Rose_, and otherwise made free use of the French material, including the _fabliaux_. His contemporary, Gower, is almost wholly a copier of the French, and, during all the epoch which is called the Chaucerian, authors known and nameless used the stock of mediaeval France as freely and as monotonously as the French themselves.

This was the first period of our debt. It passed away wholly with all other things mediaeval, with chivalry and feudalism, superstition and ignorance.

Then came the transition period to the Renaissance, with Villon and Marot, who are among the truest poets of France just because they wrote without a deliberate theory. To those two poets we English are, however, in no special debt. The _Pléiade_ next began a conscious literary reform with a propaganda of its own, only to be further reformed in turn by the poet-critic Malherbe, who inaugurated the era of “correctness,” of prose in poetry, which was consummated and legislated upon by Boileau. Thenceforth, until the early nineteenth century (the “romantic” period, when French verse is under the influence of England and Germany), French poetry is nearly all alike—clear, cleverly, often brilliantly expressed, graceful, eminently sane, but generally cold, matter-of-fact, colourless, often satirical, rarely pathetic, never deeply imaginative or informed with profound emotion. The prime characteristic of French poetry since Malherbe’s time is that it is beautified prose. The prime characteristic of the French literary mind is its willingness to be disciplined and checked, to be rendered uniform by means of rules and precepts.

On English writing in verse this French literature of the “golden age,” the seventeenth century, had effect in two chief departments—in determining the school of social verse-writers and convivialists at the court of the restored Stuarts, and in dominating the poetical ideals from Dryden down to Cowper, in producing, in fact, the so-called “correct” or “classical” school of English literature, the school which said with Pope

True wit is nature to advantage dressed,
What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed.

This school aimed at polished, condensed, sparkling expression of thoughts which should be reasonable and easily understandable. How defective is such an ideal of poetry needs little demonstration. The true note of the time is the treatment of mediocre subjects in language which is the perfection of neatness and point.

* * * * *

Along with the development of classical verse, and of the more happily directed prose which is the chief glory of French literature, there was proceeding the development of the classical drama.

Dramatic performances in France began in the manner usual in all Catholic countries, namely, with representations of religious events, biblical or legendary, such as the Passion of Christ or the miracles of the saints. The “Mysteries” drawn from the scriptures, and the “Miracles” drawn from the lives of the saints, were in turn followed by the “Moralities,” or representations of the contests of abstract virtues and vices, which formed a pronounced step in the secularization of the drama and in the encouragement of original plot. Into all these there was imported a liberal amount of comedy, frequently of astounding coarseness. The actors, from being churchmen, came to be the members of the guilds of trade. Next, a corporation of the law-students of the Palais de Justice, which had been established and vested with privileges at the beginning of the fourteenth century under the name of _La Basoche_, took up the moralities and developed them still more in the direction of comedies with ingenious plot and literary dialogue. To the Basoche is probably to be attributed the famous piece (of about the year 1470) called _Lawyer Patelin_, from which at least one reiterated phrase has secured immortality in the shape of _Revenons à nos moutons_. From the Basoche the drama of Paris passed to the “Enfants sans Souci,” whose particular vein lay in the so-called _Soties_, a bold species of satirical and farcical modification of the Moralities. So bold, indeed, were these pieces, that it became necessary for Francis I to suppress them. By this date (which is near the middle of the sixteenth century) the revived study of antiquity begins to act directly upon the drama also, and members of the _Pléiade_ turn first to the translation and then to the imitation of the drama of Greece. The latter was the course taken by Jodelle, whose _Cléopâtre_ marks the epoch at which the serious drama of France definitely bound itself in the chains of the “three unities,” accepted Seneca for its model of style, and adopted the Alexandrine couplet for its orthodox vehicle of dialogue. Comedy meanwhile enjoyed more freedom, though taking its patterns, directly and avowedly from Italy. Between Jodelle and the great age of the drama of Corneille, the stage, like so much besides in France, passed under the domination, partly of Spain, partly of Italy. The chosen models were the Spaniards, Lope de Vega and Calderon, or the Italian Trissino, of whom something is said in their proper places. It remained for the literary reformation of Malherbe to find the consummation for drama also in the work of Corneille.

Pierre Corneille, the author of _Le Cid_, _Horace_, _Cinna_, _Polyeucte_, and other plays of greater and less note, flourished about the middle of the seventeenth century (the time of our English Civil Wars and Commonwealth), and was followed by Racine, the author of _Phèdre_, _Esther_, and _Athalie_, and the contemporary of our poet Dryden. When it is said that these two dramatists possess in full the French characteristics, it is meant that they show all the French virtues of elegance, good sense, and polish of style, and all the French defects of servility to rule, coldness, and consequent monotony. There can be nothing more unlike than the typical drama of Corneille and the typical drama of Shakespeare. The Frenchman deliberately adopts the so-called “Aristotelian” and “classical,” but really Senecan and pedantic, rule of the unities, of time, of place, and of action; that is to say, his plays contain the development of but one action, which proceeds in the same place and within a time equal to that of the representation itself. To these conventions, which can have no natural or divine right to call themselves “laws,” Shakespeare and the Elizabethan dramatists are strangers. A Shakespearean play—described as “romantic” in antithesis to “classical”—carries us from place to place, from year to year, and embraces, if it so chooses, a number of loosely related actions and episodes. Its unity is the unity of a whole story, not of a situation or climax. Corneille, to use his own words, had an aversion to putting Paris, Rome, and Constantinople on the same stage. The result is that there is often no background of place or time at all. This was but one difference. Again, Shakespeare’s tragedies are performed, if he thinks fit, with all their slayings, suicides, and mutilations full in the face of the audience. In the French theatre, as in the Greek, these actions are regularly perpetrated out of sight and are merely reported upon the stage.

French tragedy is mostly the working out of a moral situation. English tragedy holds the mirror up to manifold nature. The French tragedy is “heroic,” it seeks to interest and to elevate the soul by heroic sentiments dramatically displayed. We meet with heroes who are altogether noble, and with the opposite characters who are altogether base. They are “ideal” personages, who do little else but deliver artistic declamatory speeches in the manner of Seneca. On the other hand, the English tragedy represents men as they are, with all their complexities, inconsistencies, and shortcomings. The French do not, or did not, understand the English drama any better than we understand theirs. They call it irregular and inartistic. Voltaire at one period declared Shakespeare “a drunken savage, without the least spark of good taste or the least knowledge of the rules.” We, on the other hand, grow weary of the continuous and unrelieved progress of the one and only action, and of the vagueness of background and lack of individuality in “the ideal action performed by ideal characters.” The French portray types, not characters. The great masters accepted a fixed architecture for their plays and fixed limitations to work under, and their merit is that, despite these cramping conditions, they produced works of so elevated a literary and so exalted a moral style. It is not meant that Corneille, Racine, and the minor dramatists were as much alike as larger and smaller peas. A manifest difference, for example, which renders the plays of Racine more generally interesting than those of Corneille, is that Racine chooses subjects which come nearer home to most human beings. He brings us into one part, at least, of the practical human world, the world of love. The fault of French tragic drama is excess of rule and restraint; the fault of English drama had, by the time of the post-Shakespeareans, come to be excess of licence and consequent bad taste bordering on absurdity.

In the midst of the French influence upon English literature, which set in towards the end of the seventeenth century—the only time when Englishmen as a body have shown a readiness to submit to a prescribed code of critical principles—it is not unnatural that the English drama also should copy the French. The imitation, however, was by no means good as such. The English tragedy of the Restoration aims at being “heroic” tragedy, turns declamation into rant and bombast, and ideal character into impossible perfection. Fortunately the copying in this region was of comparatively brief duration. Of those whom it affected Dryden was the least guilty. He came to a theatre which had been but newly opened under Charles II, after the Puritan tyranny, and, as with everything else under Charles, the theatre endeavoured to take its tone from France. Dryden had himself been largely influenced by French critical ideas. He did not, it is true, agree entirely with the French principles; nevertheless, he found submission necessary. On the one side he had before him the magnificent “romantic” and “irregular” drama of Shakespeare and the other Elizabethans, on the other the new heroic and “regular” tragedies of France. He attempted to combine the better elements of both, and failed through falling between two stools. That he was conscious of a deliberate choice is clear from his own words: “Let any man, who understands English, read diligently the works of Shakespeare and Fletcher, and I dare undertake that he will find in every page either some solecism of speech, or some notorious flaw in sense—many of their plots were made up of some ridiculous incoherent story.” He mentions in particular _Love’s Labour’s Lost_, _Winter’s Tale_, and _Measure for Measure_, and he goes on to quote the classical rules concerning unity of action, with its “beginning, middle, and end,” and the rest; and thereto he adds as his authorities the names of French critics of the school of Boileau, the now unremembered Bossu and Rapin. He does not, indeed, admire the French coldness and monotony, and his own object, though not that of his contemporaries, was, as has been already stated, to combine the better elements of both the French and English style. It is a grief to note that, in keeping with this view, it was thought no literary sin at this time to mutilate and adapt the plays of Shakespeare till they more or less suited the current taste. Dryden’s own dramas, _Tyrannic Love_, _Secret Love_, _Aurengzebe_, and the _Conquest of Granada_ are largely indebted to French originals, and have fallen between the two stools. Whereas Shakespeare and Corneille alike survive, no one now can act, and very few care to read, the plays of Dryden. Another play which is of some repute, the _Cato_ of Addison, would certainly either not have been written, or would have been a less cold and declamatory thing than it is, if Addison had not lived in an age when France was England’s teacher in dramatic and other literary rules.

Of French comedy a different story must be told. It is impossible to mention the name of Jean Baptiste Poquelin, better known as Molière, the contemporary of Corneille and Racine, without feeling that we are naming the world’s best writer of comedy pure and simple, next to Aristophanes. What Shakespeare might have done if he had written comedies alone, we cannot tell. Wherever his mature plays offer us undiluted comedy, it is superlatively comic. Yet we do not think of him primarily in connection with Aristophanes and Molière, but rather as the writer of _Hamlet_ or _King Lear_. If we named an English author whose genius in many respects recalls Molière, it would perhaps be Sheridan, the writer of the _School for Scandal_. In Molière there comes out the best side of the peculiar French genius, the Gallic wit, the trenchant satire without brutality, the keen entertainment without vulgarity. Molière at his zenith makes comedy a work of art, and of refined art; a comedy which edifies while it delights, and which delights without appealing to the lower elements of our nature. It is a humorous feast of the delighted reason, not a pandering to a mere taste for “lungs tickle o’ the sere.” His _Précieuses Ridicules_ is keen and killing criticism of the silly affectations of a literary coterie; his _Bourgeois Gentilhomme_ slays the ignorant parvenu, and his _Tartuffe_ the hypocrite.

This comedy, delightful now to read as it was then to see, could not but seize hold upon Englishmen of the Restoration times and later still. Molière was copied, adapted, translated by English writers, and that not merely for reading, but for acting purposes. Dryden translated _L’Etourdi_ as _Sir Martin Mar-all_; Vanbrugh turned _Le Dépit Amoureux_ into _The Mistake_; Wycherley offered _The Plain Dealer_ as a version of _Le Misanthrope_; Fielding’s _Mock-Doctor_ is _Le Médecin Malgré Lui_, his _Miser_ is Molière’s _L’Avare_; Colley Cibber converted _Tartuffe_ into _The Non-Juror_.

So much at least does English literature proper owe to French tragedy and comedy. Of the constant plagiarism and adaptation of French plays in modern times nothing need be said, since these things have been for the most part hardly literature in the proper meaning of the term.

* * * * *

Meanwhile French prose-writing, which had been of such easy simplicity in Montaigne, passed for a while under the bad influence of the Spanish _estilo culto_, and of the English Euphuism. This was the day of the Hôtel de Rambouillet and of the Précieuses, with their finical refinements and affectations of speech. In the subject-matter of literature the Spanish influence showed itself first in the _Astrée_ of D’Urfé (1608), a wearisome and unnatural “pastoral romance,” prompted by the _Diana_ of the Portuguese-Spaniard Montemayor. To this work are to be affiliated the “heroic romances” of La Calprenède and Mademoiselle de Scudéry, who are shortly to be mentioned. As for the prose vehicle itself, apart from these vagaries of its use, it may be said that, ever since French literature reached its golden age in the middle of the seventeenth century, its characteristics have been much the same as those of French verse, namely, clearness of order, precision of statement, good sense of thinking, a triumph of reasonable and exact expression.

Our own literature of the later part of the seventeenth century, and of the earlier half of the eighteenth, which owes so much to France, is nowhere more manifestly indebted than in respect of that lighter prose which takes the shape of letters and novels, and of what would now be called occasional journalism. The French have always been excellent letter-writers and journalists, as well as admirable novelists. Even the inferior French work, such as Mademoiselle de Scudéry’s interminable pseudo-romantic prolixities—the _Grand Cyrus_, or _Clélie_ with its _Carte de Tendre_—and those of La Calprenède (_Cléopâtre_ and _Cassandre_), was reproduced in England by writers of the calibre of Mrs. Aphra Behn, as well as exploited by Dryden and other post-Restoration dramatists. The novel of adventure, which we associate with the names of Defoe (as in _Moll Flanders_ and _Colonel Jack_), Fielding (_Joseph Andrews_), and Smollett (_Roderick Random_), and which is known as “picaroon” or “picaresque,” is no doubt ultimately derived from Spain, but its way into England was made through Paul Scarron, a French seventeenth-century novelist, and through his followers and literary heirs, among whom in the early eighteenth century is the renowned Lesage, the author of _Gil Blas_. On the other hand, that class of fiction which deals with character and its analysis, and which appears in English with Richardson, the author of _Clarissa Harlowe_ and _Pamela_, dates from Madame de la Fayette, who lived a century earlier than he, although it is perhaps to his contemporary Marivaux that the Englishman is more directly under obligation. The first great exemplar of modern letter-writing, who, after Cicero and Pliny, taught Horace Walpole and Chesterfield how to pen epistles, and who inspired the more or less mock correspondence of Addison in the _Spectator_, was Madame de Sévigné, a contemporary of Madame de la Fayette.

The seventeenth century in France is covered with prose-writers of clear reasoning power, pinnacled in Descartes’ _Discours de la Méthode_ and Pascal’s _Provincial Letters_, and with writers of essays, memoirs, novels, letters, criticisms, character-sketches, and “maxims” in all their various kinds. There is the _essai_, which enlarges on a theme; the _conversation_, an essay in dialogue, like those of Landor; the _pensée_, a miniature essay with narrower theme; and the _maxime_, a pithy sentence forming the cream of a _pensée_. La Bruyère, La Rochefoucauld, and St. Evremond, for example, are familiar names. For our purpose it is enough that these writers preceded our own Addison, Swift, Steele, and Johnson, and that English prose of the Queen Anne period and the earlier eighteenth century was fashioned by France as much as was our verse itself. And as the excellence of prose is perfect clearness and ease, the influence of France herein was wholly good, just as the prosaic influence of its verse had been mainly harmful.

In the same century stands, _sui generis_, La Fontaine, the fertile author of the famous stories and _Fables_, to whom Dryden, Gay, and Prior owe, besides the hint of form, no little suggestion.

* * * * *

In the eighteenth century French literature is of an inferior order, unproductive of things noble in imagination or of great dramatic works. At its best it is critical, not creative. Until André Chénier at the end of the century, it has practically no poetry to show, since neither the occasional verses of Voltaire, nor his epic _Henriade_, nor his drama _Zaïre_, can properly bear the name. Wit indeed flourished in the epigrams and comedy of Piron, as it could hardly fail to do in French work of the lighter kinds; but it was not till the precursors of the “Romantic movement” of the nineteenth century—for which France was almost as much indebted to the English Byron and the German Goethe as to its own Rousseau and Chateaubriand—that creative poetry appears again with Béranger and Lamartine. The Romantic epoch itself is then embodied in Victor Hugo. So far as the eighteenth century is productive, it is in prose, and chiefly the prose of thought and science. The novel is represented in the picaresque _Diable Boiteux_ and _Gil Blas_ of Lesage early in the century, in the analytical _Marianne_ of Marivaux, in the satirically destructive _Candide_ of Voltaire, in the powerful character study of _Manon Lescaut_ by Prévost, in the sentimental and picturesque _Nouvelle Héloïse_ of Rousseau and _Paul et Virginie_ of Bernardin de St. Pierre, and in the social fiction of Madame de Staël. Of the effect of Lesage upon England we have already spoken. Marivaux appears to have distinctly influenced Richardson, whose _Pamela_ otherwise bears a strange similarity to _Marianne_. But most congenial to the English mind, now on its way to the Romantic revolt, was the work of Rousseau and St. Pierre, in which the notion of a “return to nature” is the dominant note. St. Pierre was the disciple; Rousseau is the master, who, whether in the novel or in his _Confessions_, is the first writer in modern Europe to expatiate upon inanimate nature in connection with the feelings. How much of the “nature-worship” of Wordsworth and his age may be due to this example from France can hardly be estimated, but the name of Rousseau was a familiar one in England, and by him was sown much of the seed which our own revivalists watered.

Passing over the letter-writers and minor essayists, we come to the thinkers, the propagators of freedom of thought, commonly known as the _philosophes_. In this case the impulse came from the English Locke and from contact with, and personal observation of, the liberal circumstances of England, at that time the most advanced in Europe. The crop of French solvent ideas from these sources soon found its way back to our own country. In his _Esprit des Lois_, Montesquieu, a writer of remarkable wisdom, examines the natural basis and evolution of law and custom; the fertile but superficial Voltaire, in various “Letters” and essays, lends his powerful wit to the weakening of accepted authority, especially in religion. Subsequently, in order to crystallize the knowledge which forms the necessary basis to right criticism and reformation, there was undertaken the famous, if not very successful, _Encyclopaedia_, or _Dictionnaire Raisonné_ of sciences and arts, under the direction of Diderot and D’Alembert. Falling into the revolutionary current, and being in direct association with the _philosophes_ and Encyclopaedists, the eloquent and passionate Rousseau produced the _Contrat Social_, with its doctrines of equality and fraternity and its innovating theories of education, and the _Confessions_, in which he lays bare his own pettinesses, but with exquisite literary skill. As his follower must be reckoned Chateaubriand, who, so far as expression of temperament goes, passed on his mantle to the English Byron.

If now it is asked on what groups of our English writers French influence is most pronounced and obvious, we should most safely reply that in pre-Renaissance times we must name Chaucer and Gower; then, after a gap of two hundred and fifty years, we may begin once more with Dryden and his contemporaries, the poetic “roisterers,” Dorset and Roscommon, and the comedians Congreve, Wycherley, Farquhar, and Vanbrugh. In Pope and all his school the influence is manifest and conscious. It is present in Addison and Steele, and in the novelists Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett, different as they are; in the letters of Walpole and Chesterfield, and, in more or less measure, consciously and unconsciously, in all the writers of poetry, drama, letters, essays, journals and novels from about the year 1660 for a whole century.

Since that time the influences have been rather the other way, but those from France upon England may perhaps be enumerated as (1) the elaboration of a sentiment for inanimate nature since Rousseau, St. Pierre, and Chateaubriand; (2) the absorption, and sometimes imitation, of French novels, such as _Les Misérables_ and _Notre Dame_ of Hugo, the revived picaroons of Dumas, and the naturalistic work of Zola; (3) the Positivist philosophy of Comte; (4) imitations or plagiarisms of French comedy, such as that of Sardou; (5) lessons from the literary criticism of Ste. Beuve, chiefly derived through Matthew Arnold; (6) stylistic lessons from writers like Flaubert.

BRIEF CONSPECTUS OF FRENCH LITERATURE.

DEPARTMENTS OF LITERATURE.
CHIEF REPRESENTATIVES.
DATES.
TYPICAL WORKS.
SOME EFFECTS ON ENGLISH LITERATURE.
Epic tales of Chivalry (Chansons de Geste)
Various Trouvères (mostly unknown)
Twelfth and thirteenth centuries
1. Romances of Charlemagne’s Paladins.
2. Romances of ancient heroes, _e.g._, _Roman de Troie_.
3. Romances of Arthur.
Allegorical Epic (Romans)
Mostly anonymous, but _Roman de la Rose_ begun by Guillaume de
Lorris and completed by Jean de Meung
Twelfth and thirteenth centuries
_Roman de Renart_ (_Reynard the Fox_), _Roman de la Rose._
Fabliaux
Generally anonymous
Twelfth and thirteenth centuries
These works and their like were practically as familiar to
the “reading public” of England as of France during the
pre-Chaucerian period, when French was the social, official,
and literary language. Some portions were contributed by
Anglo-Normans, _e.g._, Wace and Benoît de Sainte-More.
Chaucer began by translating and imitating from the French,
_e.g._, in his _Romance of the Rose_. His _Canterbury
Tales_ include a number of _fabliaux_, and also
borrowings from the _romans_. Gower is still more after
the same school. The _Romance of the Rose_ and other
allegories continued in vogue till the Renaissance.
The _Chansons de Geste_ exerted much influence on Italian
writers of romantic heroics (Pulci, Boiardo, Ariosto, etc.),
thence again affected England (through Spenser, etc.). The
_fabliaux_ were utilized by Boccaccio and the Italian
_novellieri_, and thence influenced Elizabethan novel and
drama.
Poetry: (Other than Drama)
Transition to Renaissance.
VILLON
1431-1500
Personal lyrics.
MAROT
1495-1544
Epistles, elegies, eclogues.
Marot and his followers, _e.g._, Saint-Gelais, were an
influence upon Wyatt, Spenser, etc. Spenser copies Marot
in eclogue.
(Till eighteenth century)
Pléiade reformers.
RONSARD
1524-1585
DU BELLAY
_ob._ 1560
Odes, sonnets
Spenser begins his poetical work by paraphrasing Du Bellay. The
school of Ronsard aided the Italian school in bringing the
so-called “classical” forms of verse into England.
Apostle of “correctness.”
MALHERBE
1556-1628
The influence of the doctrine of “correctness” on English
literature begins in the latter part of the seventeenth century,
and extends till late in the eighteenth. _See_ “Boileau” below.
VOITURE
1598-1648
SAINT-AMANT
1594-1660
Occasional verses, _vers de société_, bacchanalian verse.
Models for post-Restoration writers, _e.g._, Dorset, Sedley.
LA FONTAINE
1621-1695
_Fables_ and _Contes_
Influenced Dryden, Gay, Prior in similar compositions.
Legislator in poetic style.
BOILEAU
1636-1711
_L’Art Poétique_, satires, etc.
The authority of Boileau was almost as high in England as in
France. Pope, Addison, and the “correct” school generally follow
him. Pope’s _Essay on Criticism_ echoes Boileau.
Drama:
(_a_) Tragedy
CORNEILLE
1606-1684
_Cinna_, _Le Cid_, _Polyeucte_, etc.
RACINE
1639-1699
_Phèdre_, _Esther Attalie_, etc.
Effect of French dramatic principles appears with the re-opening
of theatres under Charles II. It is considered necessary to
recast Shakespeare, and an effort is made after the “unities.”
The “heroic plays” of Dryden’s time are due to a combination of
French tragedy with French romance (_e.g._, _Tyrannic Love_,
_Conquest of Granada_, etc.). Addison’s Cato is a full attempt
at “classical” drama in imitation of the French.
(_b_) Comedy
MOLIÈRE
1622-1673
_Le Misanthrope_, _Tartuffe_, _L’Avare_, etc.
French comedy was imitated, but debased, by Wycherley, Farquhar,
etc. Molière was much utilized by post-Restoration dramatists,
_e.g._, in Wycherley’s _Plain Dealer_ (= _Misanthrope_),
_Country Wife_ (= _L’École des Femmes_ + _L’École des
Maris_), Dryden’s _Sir Martin Mar-all_ (= _L’Elounis_).
Prose Fiction:
(_a_) Allegorical (satirical)
RABELAIS
1483-1553
_Life of Gargantua and Pantagruel._
Appreciably the precursor of Swift and Sterne.
(_b_) Heroic romances (of sentiment)
LA CALPRENÈDE
1602-1663
_Cléopâtre_, etc.
MLLE. DE SCUDÉRY
1607-1701
_Le Grand Cyrus_, etc.
These long and ranting works were translated into English and
were much read. They were imitated by Aphra Behn. Combined with
French “classical” tragedy they produced the English “heroic
plays,” _e.g._, Dryden’s _Secret Love_ (from the _Grand
Cyrus_) and Settle’s _Ibrahim_.
(_c_) Picaroon romances (adventures after Spanish models)
SCARRON
1610-1660
LESAGE
1668-1747
_Gil Blas_, _Le Diable Boiteux_
DUMAS (the elder)
1803-1870
_Three Musketeers_, etc.
This style was taken up in particular by Defoe, Fielding, and
Smollett. Of late there has been a recrudescence of Dumas in
minor English fiction.
(_d_) Character novel
MME. DE LA FAYETTE
1633-1693
_Zaide_, _Princesse de Clèves_
MARIVAUX
1688-1763
_Marianne_
BALZAC
1799-1850
Novels of the _Comédie Humaine_
Followed by Richardson (_Clarissa Harlowe_, etc.), who began
the vogue which has continued till the present.
Essays, moralizings, philosophy
MONTAIGNE
1533-1592
_Essais_
The first model of the “Essay” proper. Well known to
Elizabethans (Bacon, Shakespeare, etc.). Translated by Florio.
PASCAL
1623-1662
_Provincial Letters_, _Pensées_
DESCARTES
1596-1650
_Discours de la Méthode_
LA ROCHEFOUCAULD
1613-1680
_Maxims_
LA BRUYÈRE
1639-1696
_Characters_
MONTESQUIEU
1689-1755
_Esprit des Lois_
VOLTAIRE
1694-1778
_Candide_, _Essai sur les Mœurs_, etc.
ROUSSEAU
1712-1778
_Contrat Social_, _Confessions_, etc.
CHATEAUBRIAND
1768-1848
_Génie du Christianisme_
COMTE
1798-1857
_Philosophie Positive._
All this literature was widely read and assimilated in England,
but precise effects can hardly be specified. Rousseau, however,
is the first to evoke the “Nature worship,” or the study of
natural influence upon the feelings, which becomes so prominent
in the English poetry of the early nineteenth century. The same
influence from Chateaubriand is seen in Byron.
Letter-writing
MME. DE SÉVIGNÉ
1627-1696
The model for English letter-writers of the eighteenth century,
Horace Walpole being the great exemplar for our own country.
The mock-correspondence of the _Spectator_ already shows
the vogue.
Literary Criticism
BOILEAU
1636-1711
(_See_ “Poetry”).
STE. BEUVE
1804-1869
_Portraits Littéraires_, _Causeries du Lundi_, etc.
Exponent of criticism based on wide knowledge of literature.
Matthew Arnold was his avowed disciple.

V

ITALIAN LITERATURE AND ENGLISH

To Italy there always attaches a singular fascination. Its natural beauties, its historic associations, its ancient ruins, its mediaeval buildings, its collections of art—these things scattered thickly and in endless variety from one end of the peninsula to the other, from Sicily to Milan, from Genoa to Venice, make Italy the country of countries for the traveller of culture and sensibility, of enthusiasm for things splendid and beautiful.

This being so, it might seem a most inconsistent and regrettable fact that, while there are thousands who go, guidebook in hand, through the galleries of the Vatican or the palace of the Venetian Doges, or through that Florentine church of Santa Croce where they read the name of a Michelangelo or a Machiavelli on illustrious tombs, yet a very few have thought fit to look into Italian literature, to see if it perhaps contains things as worthy of regard as Italian edifices or Italian pictures. Few also realize that it is often impossible to understand Italian art without understanding contemporary Italian literature.

Time was when education was hardly a complete and liberal education if it did not include the knowledge of Italian and of the best thoughts of Italy. Time was when England was the pupil of Italy in letters, as it has largely continued to be in those other arts which are called “fine.” At two periods, namely, first in the days of Chaucer, and afterwards for more than a century, from the time of Wyatt and Surrey to the prime of Milton, Italian masterpieces and Italian style were chief patterns to Englishmen, and Italian thoughts and subjects were borrowed without stint.

Doubtless Italy has had her day as our teacher in letters, and we look to her no more for inspiration or guidance in poetry or prose. Nevertheless it is a mistake to seek so little direct knowledge of what is meant by the names of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio, of Ariosto and Tasso, and of others well known to the ear. The study of writers like these in their own tongue would do much to remove the false impressions we are so apt to form of foreign peoples and their character. Literature is the “expression of the soul of a people,” and the only sure way of getting at a people’s soul is to study the expression of that soul in its literature. For instance, are the Italians a people of profound feeling, of much imagination, of high ideals of conduct? It is not travel which will readily tell us this, but a study of the emotions, imaginings, and moral conceptions which are revealed in their books.

* * * * *

The Italians are in but a partial degree descendants of the ancient Romans. The Romans proper never did fill much of Italy. To the south of Rome and in Sicily lay colonies of Greeks, at Naples, Reggio, Taranto, Syracuse and Palermo. To the north lay the alien and rather mysterious Etruscans in modern Tuscany. Still further north lay various Celtic Gauls along the valleys of Piedmont and Lombardy. And even in central Italy there were many tribes and many dialects, which were only brought by force under a common Roman empire and a common literary and official Latin tongue. The Romans did their best to weld all these diverse elements into a homogeneous people with a common feeling of nationality, common ideals and common customs. But at no time did one identical race or one identical dialect fill the peninsula of Italy.

With the fall of the Roman empire Italy became the prey of Goths and Lombards in the north, and later of Saracens, Normans, and Spaniards successively in the south. Modern times have seen these elements also combining as best they can into one people, with a national sentiment and a national soul.

The modern Italians are, therefore, descendants of ancient Romans and their kindred tribes, intermixed in intricate ways with Etruscans, Ligurians, and Gaulish Celts, with Goths and other Teutons, with Greeks, Spaniards, and a strain of Saracen. Nevertheless, among all these constituents, it is the Roman mental attitude which most prevails. Beyond doubt the literary ideal which possesses modern Italy is an inheritance from ancient Rome.

The modern Italian speech is the child of Latin, in the sense in which French and Spanish are the children of Latin; or rather, like French and Spanish, it is a new shape which Latin has gradually put on after hundreds of years of use and misuse. Perhaps a word must be said in order to explain the chasm between Latin literature and the Italian literature of Dante. At no time, even in the zenith of Roman prosperity, did all parts of Italy speak the same Latin, even if they spoke Latin at all. Local peculiarities of grammar and pronunciation were numerous and marked. Moreover, in the most golden days of Latin speech, that Latin which we know and learn was the language of a literary and cultured class; the Latin of the people was different and more free. As generations went by, and the Roman empire grew, the difference between the literary and the popular speech became wider and wider still, until the one was scarcely recognizable in the other. And when Italy in the Dark Ages was ravaged, unsettled, and dismembered; when little state sprang up here and little state there; when the literary and cultured class almost disappeared, the upshot was that the speech of the people prevailed, just as Saxon-English prevailed over Norman-French. In each district its own dialect became the law, so that people at Naples, at Rome, at Florence, at Bologna, at Venice, and at Milan, were speaking in distinct manners of their own, while recognized Italian language there was none. Dialects exist in all these places, and in many more, even to-day; nevertheless there is an orthodox Italian language, the “Tuscan speech with the Roman utterance,” in which cultivated people endeavour to speak, and which is the only language recognized for serious literature. Many still imagine that it was Dante who made that language. On the contrary, no great literature can exist till the language is shaped. English had to be formed before Chaucer could come. An Italian tongue was necessary before Dante could build his masterpiece.

It appears at first a remarkable thing that the first literature which can pretend to any extensive influence in Italy was called “Sicilian.” Moreover the ideal language of Dante was one which he called the “courtly language”—the _lingua aulica cortigiana_—whereas no court existed in his Tuscan Republics. The two facts have their relation. Until late in the twelfth century Italy, having no recognized language, had produced nothing. Meanwhile the southern half of France had been for several generations ringing with the musical voices of the Provençal troubadours. Yet Italy, except for some troubadour influence in the north, was silent. But about the year 1220, Frederick II, of the “two Sicilies,” had gathered about himself, in his rich and luxurious court at Palermo, scholars and men of refinement from all parts of Italy and Provence. At his seat, where cultured Saracens were numerous, and their artistic tastes in strong evidence, Provençal troubadours were to be found rhyming their dainty and harmonious songs of love and chivalry. “Sicilians” and others, gathered from the rest of Italy, took the key from these, and in Sicily sprang up for the first time in Italy a definite form of poetry composed in a popular speech instead of Latin. It is a love-poetry, which, in kind, is copied from Provence, aiming solely at a fine air of style and harmony of verse, and caring nothing for variety of subject or for originality of thought. There are the same trite comparisons, the same threadbare reflections, self-communings, and self-pityings. But the language employed was the Italian of the court, an eclectic diction, polished and regulated, and known as the _lingua cortigiana_ or _lingua aulica_—the “court language.” To the Italians assembled in Frederick’s dominions this diction became the model for literary speech. Any who composed in it were “courtly makers” in “Sicilian.”

After the decline of Frederick’s power in the south, it was Florence, Pisa, Lucca and the Tuscan communes that possessed the chief vitality and influence in Italy, and it was these that chiefly carried on the literary tradition. But the Tuscan dialect, like the East Midland English, was the most central. Its peculiarities were therefore the least pronounced among the dialects of the peninsula. The Tuscans readily formed from their own dialect a “courtly language” similar to that of the Sicilian poetry, and it was to Florence and its neighbourhood that Italians came to look for the choicest literature, as they looked for the most vigorous commerce. The custom of turning literary compositions from the local dialects into Tuscan as the fashionable language—the process called _Toscaneggiamento_—had begun before Dante wrote. And when Dante had written in Tuscan that monumental and immortal work, the _Divine Comedy_, it was inevitable that Tuscan should remain for all time the one and only language of ambitious Italian composition.

The first promptings to any Italian literature thus came from the graceful and musical, but often sickly and always artificial, poems of the troubadours, whether clustered about Frederick or brought by visitors to the northern courts of Milan, Ferrara, or Verona. The contribution of Italy itself had so far been the sonnet form, invented in Sicily and destined to play the most important part among all Italian lyrics. The ideal erected had been one of polish, not of thought, and unhappily for the most part this suited the Italian genius only too well. But fortunately for the literature of the peninsula, there came very early the man to whom life was real and earnest, and to whom writing meant the expression of things intensely serious and vital.

Dante Alighieri was born at Florence in 1265, and died in exile at Ravenna in 1321. The first great writer of Italian is its very greatest—a name to be written with those of Homer and Shakespeare. It would require a volume to speak adequately and with illustration of the profound impression of nobility of character which he leaves upon his readers, of the vast reach of his imagination, of the startling vividness of the visions which he creates, of his master-power to make simple words tell just what he sees. To read the story of his life and times is a romance in itself. To place oneself in that Florence of six centuries ago, where Guelfs are conflicting with Ghibellines and “Whites” with “Blacks,” where the burghers are at one moment filling the streets with songs and gay processions and pageants, and at another moment with the shouts of fighting and scenes of murder; to see among these same burghers the firm-set face of the future poet Dante, as he goes out to battle at Campaldino; to see him sitting as a magistrate of the city, and then again driven into exile and wandering, with a price upon his head, to Verona or Ravenna—it is tempting to dwell upon such visions, but the temptation is one which we must resist.

Dante is a figure in the literature of the world, not of Italy alone. Like Shakespeare, he began with the lyric work dominant in his age. Like Shakespeare, he therein revealed a power beyond his contemporaries or predecessors. His sonnets and _Canzoni_ are indeed limited by the prevailing conventions of that style, but from him they gain a pure nobility of feeling and an intrinsic weight which no Provençal had displayed, and to which the best Italians had but striven. But to the world at large he is the author of the _Divine Comedy_. His readers, not he himself, called it the “Divine,” both because it deals with things heavenly and mystical beyond all ordinary vision, and also because it transcends all other works which bore the name of “Comedy”—divine in its subject, divine in its execution. Dante himself called it _Commedia_. He knew nothing of the correct distinctions of true drama, for none existed in his day. To him _commedia_ meant a medley, with a happy ending, something written in the vulgar tongue, not aspiring to be an epic, like that of the great master Virgil, but written in the middle style. The poem, as a fact, is no more a comedy than _Paradise Lost_ is a comedy. Yet the title is his own and is indefeasible.

The _Divine Comedy_ is a work which stands alone in literature, without a distinct prototype and without a worthy follower. The fact that Homer had made Odysseus descend to the shades, and that Virgil had done the same with Aeneas, accounts for the shape or machinery, but for no more. It is a work involving the most stupendous materials—no less than an epitome of contemporary thought, belief, mysticism, aspiration, passion, history—and handled with stupendous unconsciousness of mastery.

On the face of it, it is a narrative of a journey taken by the poet through Hell, through Purgatory, and into Paradise. In Easter week of the year 1300, Dante is led by Virgil (who to the Middle Ages had strangely enough become the incarnation of this world’s wisdom) down through the concentric circles of Hell—a funnel-shaped abyss within the centre of the earth—and descends step after step to greater and greater horrors. There he sees the gluttons wallowing in fetid mud, and the leaders of heresies burning in half-opened tombs; he sees the sinners of avarice and of prodigality suffer together with mutual revilings; he sees the steady rain of burning flakes of fire; he is amazingly fertile in other agonies for unrepentant or unshriven sinners. Then, from the _Inferno_, under the self-same guidance, he mounts to the light and ascends the mountain of Purgatorio, which rises like a cone, plane after plane, in seven tiers for the seven deadly sins. Here the souls that are being purified are suffering penances, which grow less and less awful as we approach the summit. On the summit itself is the Terrestrial Paradise. Further than that Virgil, the pagan poet, may not go; but Beatrice, Dante’s lost love and his emblem of Christian faith, comes down to meet him, and together they rise in spiral rings of flight, upward and upward through glory after glory, till they reach the true Paradise, and stand in the presence of the Beatific Vision.

There is something awe-inspiring in the very contemplation of a subject so vast: yet Dante combines and handles all these mysteries with such a vivid realistic power that the last suggestion to rise in the reader’s mind is any suspicion of grotesque, still less of futile, extravagance. His pictures are intensely vivid. His creations live. It would be no wonder if the good people of Verona really pointed him out in awe, and said, “Yonder is the man who has been in Hell!” A pictorial artist could scarcely exhaust Dante in subjects for paintings. And, with it all, his mere language is as simple and direct as was ever used by a poet’s pen. It is so far Homeric. Almost the mere noun and verb suffice to say what he has to say, and yet, somehow, that same noun and verb combine into a sweet and majestic harmony which fit the sublime subject as the “organ-voice” of Milton fitted his. We must, of course, make all concession to the ignorance of his day and the unattractive subtleties of the philosophy. These may often affect our interest, but they take nothing from the poet’s genius.

Such was the narrative on the face of it. But the narrative is only the cloak for an allegory. Dante, unlike most other Italian writers, was a profoundly pious, and not merely a pietistic man. Moreover, his mind was stored with all the theology, science, and philosophy of the time, and he meant his work to have another and a deeper interpretation. In the _Inferno_ and _Purgatorio_ he represents the moral passage of man through life, learning to see its vices and their punishments, descending through them, and thence again mounting through self-mortification and cleansing fires upward to moral purity and wisdom. Virgil is the embodiment of moral philosophy; and so far moral philosophy can guide us. But Beatrice is the personification of Divine philosophy, the heavenly wisdom of theology, and it is this which is required to bring man to the full beauty and beatitude of perfect holiness. That, on the one hand, so many should read the narrative as narrative, and be awed and fascinated by it, while they miss, or are unconcerned with, the allegory beneath; and that, on the other, the allegorical interpretation should not obtrude itself, and yet should be so clear and so symmetrical when discovered, is a superlative token of the poet’s extraordinary genius.

There had been nothing really like this poem before, and there has been nothing since. We cannot explain away the original genius of Dante. Before him Italian literature had nothing but the amatory effusions of the Provençal-Sicilian type, insipid songs, laboured and affected sonnets, and some crude visions and allegories. From these the _Divine Comedy_ utterly departs. All that it can be said to owe to the writer’s times and his nation is the vivid realistic way in which spiritual conceptions are apprehended. The tendency which had been awakened by St. Francis of Assisi and St. Dominic had become general in Dante’s day, a tendency to make material and visible, in symbols, in painting, and in acting, all the mysterious things hoped and feared in religion—a tendency to picture the details, the scenes, and the personages in Heaven and Hell—a tendency in which we do not share, and which sometimes shocks the weaker brethren when they read the _Divine Comedy_.

There is one other topic to be considered, which must keenly interest both readers of Dante in particular, and students of literature, including English, in general. Before his great masterpiece, Dante had written a work in which stately prose alternates with grave and stately sonnets. This was the _Vita Nuova_ (or _New Life_), a work full of a profoundly touching, if quaint, nobility of manner, and one which places Dante more humanly, so to speak, among the writers of his time. His sonnets, we have said, are a prelude to greater work. They are the outcome of his era. The attitude towards love comes from Provence, and the sonnet from Sicily, while a certain allegorical metaphysics had been imparted by the Italian Guido Guinicelli, who had combined with the troubadour spirit the philosophic learning—such as it was—of Bologna. Dante had contemporaries, Guido Cavalcanti and Cino da Pistoia, who composed sonnets in a vein closely resembling that of the greater master. And in all of them the treatment is of one and the same thing—love.