Chapter XV: The Literary Progress of France in the Sixteenth Century

“It is in Rabelais, in the satire of Ménippée, and in Montaigne
that we shall find principles of social justice, ideas of
reformation, expressed with as much profundity as eloquence;
in these writers they are scattered, hidden under buffoonery
in Rabelais, tempered by philosophical _insouciance_ in
Montaigne; but they bear witness to the extent to which the
study of antiquity, the religious struggles, and the civil war
had set political ideas in motion. The great history of the
President de Thou marked in the highest degree the spirit of
legal freedom under the monarchy. Calvin had been the despotic
legislator of a democracy, yet the Reformation everywhere
raised the questions of civil liberty involved in the question
of religious liberty; and as the governments of the Middle Ages
owed their origin to the church the political innovators owed
theirs to dissenting theologians.”--VILLEMAIN.[b]

While we have followed the fortunes of Henry of Navarre another century has been rounded out. Almost a hundred years have passed since Francis I came to the throne; more than half a hundred since that monarch laid down the sceptre. It has been a troublous epoch for France as we have seen: a time of foreign and civil wars that would have disrupted a less stable civil organisation. Yet the new forces of the Renaissance and the Reformation were making themselves felt throughout this period, and, as so often happens, the time of military strife has been also a time of social development. Some phases of this development we have studied, particularly in connection with the reign of Francis I; it remains to mention in some detail the work of three great writers who made this century memorable in French literary annals. We have already cited a comment of Villemain on the retardation of the French literary Renaissance. How marked this retardation was will be even more evident when we reflect that the century which has just been rounded out saw Italian culture in its decadence, and that the immediate period of Henry IV is precisely contemporary with the age of Elizabeth in England,--the time of Bacon, Ben Jonson, and Shakespeare; whereas French literature is only at its beginnings. Notable beginnings these are however, for the names that we now have to chronicle are those of Rabelais, of Calvin, and of Montaigne. It is true that Stephen, whom we quote now somewhat in extenso, cites this trio as the second great literary triumvirate of France; having named Joinville, Froissart, and Comines as the great triumvirate of an earlier period. In the widest view this classification no doubt is just; yet it can hardly be asserted that these earlier chroniclers are classic in the same sense as are Rabelais and Montaigne. The earlier writers are preserved more for their method than for their manner; and it is only work in which literary form takes precedence over mere fact that can be classified on the highest plane of art. According to this standard, the work of Calvin scarcely belongs beside that of Rabelais and Montaigne; yet a study of French literary development in the sixteenth century from which that work was omitted would be obviously incomplete. Let us glance then at the work of these three greatest French writers of the sixteenth century, between whom, as Sir James Stephen asserts “the parallelisms are as remarkable as the contradictions.” Taking them in the order of time we have first to consider the great humourist Rabelais, mention of whose work has already been made when we were speaking of the French Renaissance of the middle of the century.[a]

Rabelais, the son of an innkeeper at Chinon, was born at that place in the year 1483.[83] He became a Franciscan friar, a deacon, and a priest in holy orders; and then, at the mature age of forty-two, commenced the study of medicine in the college at Montpellier. Various medical treatises were the fruit of those labours; and the reputation derived from them was sufficient to obtain for him the office of physician to the public hospital at Lyons. But his professional books proving unsaleable, Rabelais, to indemnify his bookseller, wrote and published his _Pantagruel_, or _Chronique Gargantuine_, of which (as he says) more copies were sold in two months than of the Bible in ten years. Having thus discovered the secret of his power, he next produced the _Gargantua_; the work which has secured for him the admiration of all subsequent ages, though the reverence of none. It is a romance in which Rabelais may be considered as depicting the habits, opinions, errors, crimes, and follies of that age of religious and intellectual revolutions, in the centre of which he lived. Yet the critics have doubted, and must ever continue to doubt--whether Gargantua and his son Pantagruel are actual portraits of those who led the armaments (literary, theological, or military) of those times, or are mere impersonations of those abstract qualities by which the world was then governed--whether Panurge and Friar John had any living prototypes amongst the men of the sixteenth century--or whether the one is but a name for mediocrity, ceasing to be honest as it becomes conspicuous; and the other a name for sensuality, rescued from contempt by a shrewd and jovial spirit. But why investigate these and such other riddles, proposed by their author in avowed defiance of any such attempt? Why, indeed, read at all a book of which not only the general scope, but almost every page is enigmatical? Why squander time and patience on a writer who, of set purpose, makes his readers dependent on the guidance of some dull and doubtful commentator? For those passages which do reward the toil of the student are separated from each other, not only by this profound obscurity, but by foul abysses of impurity, which no skill or caution can always succeed in overleaping. I know not how to describe them in terms at once accurate and decorous, except by borrowing Mr. Carlyle’s denunciation of a work of Diderot’s, and saying with him, or in words resembling his, that he who, even undesignedly, shall come into contact with these parts of Rabelais’ great work, should forthwith plunge into running waters, and regard himself, for the rest of the day, as something more than ceremonially unclean.

Yet he whose business, or whose determination, it is to appreciate aright the civil, and therefore the literary, history of France, must needs pay this heavy price of knowledge. For, in that history, the romance of _Gargantua_ is an indispensable link. From the revival of heathen antiquity, Rabelais had gathered a mass of learning resembling the diet of his own Pantagruel, who had 4,600 cows milked every morning for his breakfast. From the revival of Christian antiquity, he had learned to despise the authority and the superstitions of the church of Rome; without, at the same time, learning to reverence the authority and the doctrines of the Gospel. He thus traversed the boundless expanse of human knowledge. He traversed it under the guidance of his own wit, sagacity, and humour, a wit, vaulting at a bound, from the arctic to the antarctic poles of thought; a sagacity embracing all the higher questions of man’s social existence, and many of the deeper problems of his moral constitution; and a humour which fairly baffles all attempts to analyse or to describe it. For it was the result, not of natural temperament alone, but also of the most assiduous and severe studies. The language of Greece had become as familiar to him as his mother-tongue; and, while he learned from Galen and Hippocrates to investigate the properties of living or of inert matter, he was trained, by Plato, to spiritual meditation, and by Lucian to a scepticism and a buffoonery, alike audacious and unintermitted. From the union of such a disposition and of such discipline, emerged the strange phenomenon of a philosopher in his revels. In contemplating it one knows not, as it has been well said, “whether to wonder most that such wisdom should ever assume the mask of folly, or that such folly should permit the growth and development of any true wisdom.” It is, however, an apparent, rather than a real, difficulty. The wisdom is never sublime, and the folly but seldom abject. Each is but a different aspect of a nature, of which the parts are, indeed, inharmonious, but not incompatible--of a genuine Epicurean gifted with gigantic powers, but of cold affections, and of debased appetites; ever worshipping and obeying his one idol, pleasure, though at one time she bids him soar to the empyrean, and at another commands him to wallow in the sty.

Rabelais was wise in the sense in which any man may be so who delights in the strenuous exercise of a powerful understanding, and loves thinking for thinking’s sake. He was wise to detect popular fallacies, and to discern unpopular truths. He was wise to see how the young might be better educated, laws better made, nations better governed, wars more vigorously conducted, and peace more securely maintained. He was wise to call down both theology and philosophy from the skies above to the earth beneath us. And he was not more wise than eloquent; sometimes arraying truth in the noblest forms of speech, though more frequently enhancing her beauty by enveloping and contrasting her with the homeliest. At his prolific touch his native tongue germinated into countless new varieties of expression; and the mines of wealth, both intellectual and verbal, which he bequeathed to future ages, after being wrought by multitudes in each, still appear inexhaustible.

The wisdom of Rabelais, was, however, of the world, worldly. It never ascended to the eternal fountains of light, nor descended to illuminate the dark places of the earth. It neither sought to interpret the awful mysteries of our nature, nor bowed down to adore in the contemplation of them. It aimed at no exalted ends, nor did it ever lead the way through any rugged and self-denying paths. It expressed neither sympathy for the wretchedness, nor pity for the sorrows, of mankind; but was satisfied to be shrewd, and witty, and comical upon them all. To the keen gaze of Rabelais, the frauds, and follies, and ignorance, and licentiousness of the papal court and priesthood afforded endless matter of scorn and merriment; but to his last hour he lived in their outward garb and communion. To that penetrating eye had been clearly revealed the majesty of the truth which the Reformers taught, and the majesty of the sufferings which they endured in its defence; but not one glow of enthusiasm could they ever kindle in his bosom, as they toiled in indigence, and died in martyrdom, to evangelise the world. Secure in the absolution of Clement VII for whatever he had done and written against the church, and secure in the license of Francis I, to publish whatever else he might please, Rabelais delighted to assume the character of a chartered libertine, or, as it might almost be said, of an intellectual debauchee. And yet, voluptuary, scoffer, and sceptic as he was, his laughter was so hearty, his glee so natural, his frolic so riotous, and his buffoonery so irresistible, that he became, not merely the tolerated, but the favoured and privileged, Momus of his times. He became also a proof to all later times, that, by the great mass of mankind, anything will be forgiven or permitted to genius, when, abandoning its native supremacy, it condescends to undertake the strangely inappropriate office of master of the revels.[c]

“In the works of Rabelais,” says Michelet,[f] “the French language appeared in a greatness it never possessed before nor since. What Dante accomplished for Italian, Rabelais did for French. He employed and blended every dialect, the elements of every period and province developed in the Middle Age, adding the while a wealth of technical expression furnished by art and science. Another man would have been overwhelmed by this immense variety, but he,--he harmonised everything. Antiquity, especially the Greek genius, and a knowledge of all modern languages permitted him to envelop and master that of France.” Saintsbury[e] declares that the only two men who can be compared to him in character of work and force of genius combined are Lucian and Swift, adding: “He is much less of a mere mocker than Lucian, and he is entirely destitute, even when he deals with monks or pedants, of the ferocity of Swift. He neither sneers nor rages; the _rire immense_ which distinguishes him is altogether good-natured; but he is nearer to Lucian than to Swift, and Lucian is perhaps the author whom it is most necessary to know in order to understand him rightly.”[a]

CALVIN

One cannot better show how contrarieties are related than by the immediate transition from Francis Rabelais to John Calvin;[84] for, probably, no two men of commanding minds were ever more curiously contrasted with each other, as certainly no two minds were ever enshrined in bodies more dissimilar. To look upon, Rabelais was a drunken Silenus, Calvin a famished Ugolino. The one emptied his bottle before he wrote, while he was writing, and after he had written; the other contented himself with a repast of bread and water once in each six-and-thirty hours. Reposing in his easy chair, the merry doctor was hailed as lord of misrule by all the jovial spirits of his age; enthroned in the consistory of Geneva, the inexorable divine was dreaded as the disciplinarian of himself and of the whole subject city. The witty physician was L’Allegro, the austere minister Il Penseroso, of their generation. The reader of the _Gargantua_ yields by turns to disgust, to admiration, and to merriment; but Democritus himself would not have found matter for one passing smile throughout the whole of the _Christian Institute_. To Rabelais, human life appeared a farce as broad as the knights of Aristophanes; to Calvin, a tragedy more dismal than the Agamemnon of Æschylus. And as they wrote, so they also lived. The traditional stories about Rabelais, if true, attest his love, and, even if untrue, they attest his reputed love, of that kind of wit which is called practical; all the traditions of Calvin represent him as a man at whose appearance mirth instantly took flight.

The gay doctor is made in these tales to play off his tricks on the graduates in medicine, on the chancellor du Prât, on the king and queen of France, and even on the mule of the pope himself; while the solemn theologian makes his domiciliary visits to ascertain that no dinner table at Geneva was rendered the pretext for levity of discourse, or for excess of diet.

What, then, is the congruity on which to found any comparison between these most incongruous minds? The answer is (to borrow an expressive word), that they were both devoted _ergoists_, each of them being at once a mighty master, and a submissive slave, of logic.[c] With the religious significance of Calvin’s teaching we have no present concern. We shall have occasion to see something more of this in the course of our study of the Reformation. Here we are concerned rather with Calvin the writer--the author of the _Institution Chrétienne_.

Published in 1536 this book was received with unbounded delight.[a] We may, indeed, reject the story, that a thousand editions of it were sold in his own lifetime; but we cannot dispute that, during a century and a half, it exercised an unrivalled supremacy over a large part of Protestant Europe. For that dominion it was indebted, in part, to the novelty and comprehensiveness of the design it accomplished,--to the vast compass of learning, scriptural, patristic, and historical, which it embraced,--to the depth and the height of the morality which it inculcated,--and to the calm but energetic keenness with which it exposed the errors of his adversaries. But the popularity and the influence of this remarkable book is also, in part, to be ascribed to its literary merits. Calvin has been described as the Bossuet of his age. Of all the French authors whom France had as yet produced, he was the most philosophical when he speculated, the most sublime when he adored, the most methodical and luminous in the development of truth, the most acute in the refutation of error, and the most obedient to that law or spirit of his nation, which demands symmetry in the proportions, harmony in the details, and concert in all the parts of every work of art, whether it be wrought by the pen, the pencil, or the chisel. In the ninth chapter of Bossuet’s _Histoire des Variations_ may, indeed, be found the best, as it is a very reluctant, eulogy on the literary excellence of his great rival and predecessor. Even in the haughty gloom which the bishop of Meaux discovers in the style and tone of the reformer of Geneva, there is a not inappropriate interest. The beautiful lake of that city, and the mountains which encircle it, lay before his eyes as he wrote; but they are said to have suggested to his fancy no images, and to have drawn from his pen not so much as one transient allusion. With his mental vision ever directed to that melancholy view of the state and prospects of our race, which he had discovered in the book of life, it would, indeed, have been incongruous to have turned aside to depict any of those glorious aspects of the creative benignity which were spread around him in the book of nature.

MONTAIGNE

The immediate effect of the servitude into which Calvin had subdued the minds of his disciples was to provoke a formidable revolt. When he was giving his latest touches to his _Institution Chrétienne_, Michel de Montaigne,[85] then in his twenty-second year, had just taken his seat in the Parliament of Bordeaux. That he afterwards became a deputy in the states-general of Blois, though maintained by no inconsiderable authorities, seems to me impossible; but it is clear that his early manhood was devoted to public, and especially to judicial, affairs. He was thus brought into contact with the busy world at the moment of a greater agitation of human society than had occurred since the overthrow of the Roman Empire. Marvellous revolutions, and discoveries still more marvellous, in the world of letters, of politics, of geography, and of religion,--the welfare of inappeasable passions,--the working of whatever is most base, and of whatever is most sublime, in our common nature,--and calamities which might seem to have fulfilled the most awful of the apocaliptic visions, had passed in rapid succession before the eyes of this acute and curious observer. It was an unwelcome and repulsive spectacle. He turned from it to seek the shelter and the repose of his hereditary mansion. In that retirement he indulged, or cherished, a spirit inflexibly opposed to the spirit by which his native country was convulsed. The age was idolatrous of novelties; and, therefore, Montaigne lived in the retrospect of a remote antiquity. It was an age of restless ambition; and, therefore, he passively committed himself and his fortunes to the current of events. The minds of other men were exploring the foundations, and criticising the superstructure, of every social polity; and, therefore, his mind was averted altogether from the affairs of the commonwealth. Because his neighbours yielded themselves to every gust of passion, he must be passionless. Because the times were treacherous, he must punctiliously cherish his personal honour. Because they were inhuman, he cultivated all the amenities of life. Because calamity swept over the world, he was enamoured of epicurean ease. Heroism was the boast of not a few, and to their virtues he paid the homage of an incredulous obeisance. Dogmatism was the habit of very many; and, therefore, Montaigne must surrender himself to an almost universal scepticism.

The contrast was as captivating as it was complete. With a temper easily satisfied,--with affections as tranquil as they were kindly,--with a curiosity ever wakeful, but never impetuous,--with competency, health, friends, books, and leisure, Montaigne had all the means of happiness which can be brought within the reach of those to whom life is not a self-denying existence, but a pleasant pastime. Yet, with him, it was the pastime of an active, enlightened, and amiable mind. The study of man as a member of society was his chosen pursuit, but he conducted it in a mode altogether his own. The individual man, Michel Montaigne, such as he would be in every imaginable relation and office of society, was the subject of his daily investigation. He became, of all egotists, the most pleasant, versatile, and comprehensive. He produced complete sketches of himself with an air of the most unreserved frankness, and in a tone frequently passing from quiet seriousness to graceful badinage. He describes his tastes, his humours, his opinions, his frailties, his pursuits, and his associates with the most exuberant fertility of invention, and has wrought out a general delineation of our common humanity from the profound knowledge of a single member of it. And, as the variety is boundless, so is the unity well sustained. His essays are a mirror in which every reader sees his own image reflected, but in which he also sees the image of Montaigne reflecting it. There he is, ever changing, and yet ever the same. He looks on the world with a calm indifference, which would be repulsive were it not corrected by his benevolent curiosity about its history and its prospects. He has not one malignant feeling about him, except it be towards the tiresome, and especially towards such of them as provoke his yawns and his resentment by misplaced and by commonplace wisdom. He has a quick relish for pleasure, but with a preference for such pleasures as are social, inoffensive, and easily procured. He has a love for virtue, but chiefly, if not exclusively, when she exacts no great effort, nor any considerable sacrifice. He loves his fellow-men, but does not much, or seriously, esteem them. He loves study and meditation, but stipulates that they shall expose him to no disagreeable fatigue. He cherishes every temper which makes life pass sociably and pleasantly. He takes things as he finds them in perfect good humour, makes the best of them all, and never burdens his mind with virtuous indignation, unattainable hopes, or profitless regrets. In short, as exhibited in his own self-portraiture, he is an Epicurean, who knows how to make his better dispositions tributary to his comfort, and also knows how to prevent his evil tempers from troubling his repose.

The picture of himself, which Montaigne thus holds up to his readers as a representation of themselves, is not sublime, nor is it beautiful; but it is a striking and a masterly likeness. It is drawn with inimitable grace and freedom, and with the most transparent perspicuity; and they who are best entitled to pronounce such a judgment, admire in his language a richness and a curious felicity unknown to any preceding French writers. Even they to whom his tongue is not native, can perceive that his style is the easy, the luminous, and the flexible vehicle of his thoughts, and never degenerates into a mere apology for the want of thought; and that his imagination, without ever disfiguring his ideas, however abstract, and however subtle they may be, habitually clothes them with the noblest forms and the most appropriate colouring.

But our more immediate object is, to notice the relation in which Montaigne stands to the other great moral teachers of his native land, and to those habits of thought by which France is, and has so long been, characterised. The antagonist in everything of the spirit of his times, he seems to have regarded with peculiar aversion the peremptory confidence by which the great controversy of his age was conducted, both by the adherents of Rome and by the founder of Calvinism. Because they would admit no doubt whatever, every form of doubt found harbour with him. Because they were dogmatists, he must be a sceptic.

In M. Faugère’s edition of Pascal’s _Thoughts_ will be found the famous dialogue on the scepticism of Montaigne, between Pascal and De Sacy,--a delineation so exquisite, that it seems mere folly to attempt any addition to it. The genius of Port Royal, however, exhibits there its severity, not less than its justice; and a few words may not be misplaced in the attempt to mitigate a little of the rigour of the condemnation. Montaigne was a sceptic (as very many are), because his sagacity and diligence were buoyant enough to raise his mind to the clouds which float over our heads, but were not buoyant enough to elevate him to the pure regions of light which lie beyond them. His learning was various rather than recondite. It was drawn chiefly from Latin authors, and from the Latin authors of a degenerating age; not from Cicero or Virgil, but from Seneca and Pliny. Of Greek he knew but little, though he was profoundly conversant with the translation of Plutarch, with which Amyot had lately rendered all French readers familiar. From such masters Montaigne did not learn, and could not have learned, the love of truth. They taught him rather to content himself with loose historical gossip, and with half-formed notions in philosophy. They taught him not how to resolve, but how to amuse himself with the great problems of human existence. They encouraged his characteristic want of seriousness and earnestness of purpose. From such studies, and from the events of his life and times, he learned to flutter over the surface of things, and to traverse the whole world of moral, religious, and political inquiry, without finding, and without seeking, a resting-place. His aimless curiosity and versatile caprice form at once the fascination and the vice of his writings, though not indeed their only vice, for the name of Montaigne belongs to that melancholy roll of the great French sceptical writers--Rabelais, Montesquieu, Bayle, Voltaire, and Diderot--who, not content to assault the principles of virtue, have so far debased themselves, as laboriously to stimulate the disorderly appetites of their readers.

Yet the scepticism of Montaigne was not altogether such as theirs is. He has none of their dissolute revelry in confounding the distinctions of truth and falsehood, of good and evil. He does not, like some of them, delight in the darkness with which he believes the mind of man to be hopelessly enveloped. He rather placidly and contentedly acquiesces in the conviction that truth is beyond his reach. He could amuse himself with doubt, and play with it. With few positive and no dearly cherished opinions, he had no ardour for any opinion, and had not the slightest desire to make proselytes to his own Pyrrhonism. He was, on the contrary, to the last degree, tolerant of dissent from his own judgment; and, in the lack of other opponents, was prompt, and even glad, to contradict himself. Of all human infirmities, dulness, and obscurity, and vehemence, are those from which he was most exempt. Of all human passions, the zeal which fires the bosom of a missionary is that from which he was the most remote. We associate with him as one of the most pleasant of all our illustrious companions, and quit him as one of the least impressive of all our eminent instructors.[c]

Montaigne’s fame has passed through several very different phases. Among his own contemporaries it grew without overstepping a somewhat restricted circle of enlightened minds. After that, the main current of French thought took a direction opposite to that of Montaigne’s. Dogmatism returned and the seventeenth century in general adhered to it. Pascal launched anathemas at Montaigne. But the sumptuous edifice of the age of Louis XIV soon crumbled away, and Montaigne came forward again, hailed as a glorious ancestor by the entire age of Voltaire and Rousseau. To-day he has ceased to arouse any tempests, but he occupies his uncontested place in the national pantheon. He will live as a writer as long as French literature exists, for like the other great sixteenth century writers, men of strong individualities like Rabelais and Calvin, he had his own language as well as his own thought--a language sovereignly free, eternally young, inimitable, and above all a fertile source of rejuvenation for the whole language. He will live as a philosopher as long as men practise the axiom of the _Essays_, “Know thyself.”[d]

FOOTNOTES

[83] [The date of Rabelais’ birth is not certain, although most authorities place it about 1483. Of his early years very little is known, but from 1519 his history is more definite. He was educated at a convent school and, after his entrance into the Franciscan order, devoted himself to serious study. In 1524 he became a Benedictine, this change of order and dwelling-place being attributed by some to a disgust with the cloister. Six years later he is found studying medicine in Montpellier and afterwards practising in Lyons. John du Bellay, bishop of Paris, took him with him to Rome in 1534 as physician. Rabelais died at Paris in 1553.]

[84] [John Calvin, the celebrated Protestant reformer and theologian, was born at Noyon, Picardy, France, in 1509, and died at Genoa, May 27th, 1564. His father, Gerard Calvin, was a notary-apostolic and procurator-fiscal for the lordship of Noyon, besides holding other ecclesiastical offices. His early years are obscure, but from childhood he showed great religious feeling and an intense earnestness. He studied at Paris, Orleans, and Bourges, and although brought up with the intention of entering the priesthood, after close study of the Bible, he embraced the Reformation. In 1532 Calvin published his first work, an edition of Seneca’s _De Clementia_ with an elaborate commentary. In 1533, on account of speeches in opposition to the court, he was banished from Paris and it is said it was during his retirement at Saintonge that he made his first sketch of his _Institution Chrétienne_. His other works are all of a religious nature, mostly controversial. A great many of these are of an exegetical character, of which his expository comments or homilies on the books of Scripture are by some considered the most valuable of his works. (For a further account of Calvin, see the history of the Reformation movement, volume xiii.)]

[85] Lacépède, referring to Montaigne’s _Essays_, says: “In a work that one reads again with delight and self-improvement, Michel de Montaigne has given a new glory to France.” Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, was born at Périgord, of an ancient and noble family, in 1533. Perhaps the finish of his _Essays_, his principal work, is due to his early training, his father having so managed his education, that at the age of five he spoke the purest Latin, and, as an old book gives it, “was also taught Greek by way of recreation.” He was married at the age of thirty-three. He lived at the court of Francis II and Henry VIII. He became mayor of Bordeaux in 1581 and in 1592; according to one old chronicle, “he died a constant and philosophic death, when he was some months short of sixty.” His _Essays_ were first published in 1580; the edition of 1588 was the last to be published in the author’s lifetime.