A Short History of French Literature

Minor Reformers and Controversialists.

Despite the fervid interest taken in religious disputation and the masterly example which Calvin had set both to friends and foes, theology proper did not contribute very much of value to literature during the period. Beza wrote chiefly in Latin, his Histoire des Églises Réformées being the chief exception. Pierre Viret, a Swiss by birth, who passed the last twenty years of his life at various towns in the south of France as a preacher and theological teacher, wrote a considerable number of treatises, both serious and satirical. The titles of some of the latter, L'Alchimie du Purgatoire, La Cosmographie Infernale, etc., are characteristic of the time. But Viret's literary merit was not remarkable. This kind of theological pasquinading was in great favour throughout the period, and authors of very various merit, such as Marnix de Sainte Aldegonde, Doré, Claude de Saintes, Arthus Désiré, and others, contributed plentifully to it. But the interest of their work is for the most part historical and antiquarian only. The title of 'Protestant Rabelais' has been absurdly given to Marnix. It is only so far deserved that the scurril language and gross images which with the master were but accessories, were with the pupil the main point. In the latter part of the century, after the quieting of the troubles of the League, two more serious disputants arose, each of considerable literary eminence. These were on the Protestant side, Philippe de Mornay, better known as Duplessis-Mornay, who distinguished himself equally as a soldier, a diplomatist, and a man of letters, and the still more famous Cardinal Du Perron, a converted Calvinist, who was supposed to be the most expert controversialist of a time which was nothing if not controversial. The chief theological work of Duplessis-Mornay was his Traité de la Vérité de la Religion Chrétienne. The chief written theological work of Du Perron was a Traité du Sacrement de l'Euchariste, in reply to a work on the same subject by Mornay.

Preachers of the League.

Between the controversies of the earlier part of the century and those of the latter, preaching, if not dogmatic theology, held an important place because of its political bearing. The pulpit style of the sixteenth century was for the most part an aggravation of that (already described) of the fifteenth, the acrimony of sectarian and factious partisanship leading the preachers to indulge in every kind of verbal excess. During the League the partisans of that organisation, especially in Paris, were perpetually excited against Henri III. and his successor by the most atrocious pulpit diatribes, the chief artists in which were Boucher, Rose, Launay, Feuardent, and Génébrard. The literary value of these furious outpourings however is very small. After their cessation a reaction set in, and for some time before the splendid period of pulpit eloquence, which lasted from St. Francis de Sales to Massillon, the general style of French homiletics was dull and laboured.

Amyot.

Jacques Amyot210 was born at Melun in 1513, and belonged to the lowest class. He was educated as a servitor at the famous Collège de Navarre, and took his degree in arts at the age of nineteen. He then held various tutorships and attracted the notice of Marguerite, Queen of Navarre, the constant patroness of men of letters, who gave him a Readership at Bourges. After some years of University teaching in the classics, he began his series of translations with the Theagenes and Chariclea in 1546. This was three years in advance of Du Bellay's manifesto, and though not a few translations had already appeared, none had even approached Amyot's in elegance. As usual at the time his literary reputation was rewarded by Church preferment and employment in the diplomatic service. He was also made tutor to Charles IX. and Henri of Anjou. His elder pupil, when he came to the throne, made him, first, Grand Almoner of France, and then Bishop of Auxerre, while Henri III. added the honour of a commandership in the order of the Holy Ghost. For a time, in the midst of the troubles of the League, Amyot was driven from his palace, but he returned and died, at the full age of fourscore, in 1594.

Besides the work of Heliodorus, Amyot translated Diodorus Siculus (1554), Daphnis and Chloe, Plutarch's Lives (1559), and Plutarch's Morals (1574). It may seem at first sight that his selection of authors to translate was somewhat peculiar. It was however, either by accident or design, singularly well suited to the age which he addressed. The positive merit of Heliodorus, and still more of Longus, is certainly greater than is usually admitted nowadays. But for that time they were peculiarly suited (and especially Longus) by their combination of romantic and adventurous description with graceful pictures of nature and amatory interludes. Plutarch, on the other hand, expressed, more than any other author, the practical and moralising spirit which accompanied this taste for romance. Montaigne confessed that he could not do without Plutarch, and it may be doubted whether any other single author of antiquity, after the Ciceronian mania was over, exercised such an influence as Plutarch, through Amyot, North, and Shakespeare (a direct succession of channels), upon France and England.

The merit of the translator had not a little to do with the success of the books. Here is the testimony of the greatest in a literary sense of Amyot's readers. 'I give,' says Montaigne, 'and I think I am right in doing so, the palm to Jacques Amyot over all French writers, not only for the simplicity and purity of his vocabulary, in which he surpasses all others, nor for his industry in so long a task, nor for the depth of his learning which has enabled him to expound so happily a writer so thorny and crabbed. I am above all grateful to him for having selected and chosen a book so worthy and so suitable as a present to his country. We dunces were lost had not this book plucked us out of the mire. Thanks to it, we dare to speak and to write. By it ladies are in a position to give lessons to schoolmasters. It is our very breviary.' This praise, which is not exaggerated in itself, and still less when taken as an expression of the feeling of the time, refers of course to the 'Plutarch,' and in estimating it it is necessary to take account of Montaigne's especial affection for the author translated. But if we take in the lighter work, and especially the Daphnis and Chloe, Amyot will stand higher, not lower. His merit is not so much that he has known how to adjust himself and his style to two very different authors, but that in rendering both those authors he has written French of a most original model and of the greatest excellence. The common fault of translation, the insensible adoption of a foreign idiom – especially difficult to avoid at a time when no classical standards or models of the tongue used by the translator exist – is here almost entirely overcome. The style of Amyot, who had little before him, if Calvin and Rabelais be excepted, but the clumsy examples of the rhétoriqueur school, is, as Montaigne justly says, perfectly simple and pure; and so little is it tinged either with archaism or with classicism that the seventeenth century itself, unjust as it was for the most part towards its predecessors, acknowledged its merit.

Minor Translators.

Dolet.

Although Amyot was by far the most considerable of the French translators of the sixteenth century, he was not by any means the first. Claude de Seyssel translated many Greek authors, Pierre Saliat produced a version of Herodotus, Lefèvre d'Étaples was the author of the first complete French translation of the Bible, and a cluster of learned writers, some of them remarkable for other work, such as Bonaventure des Périers, devoted themselves to Plato. Among these latter there is one who was in many ways a typical representative of the time. Étienne Dolet211 was born at Orleans in 1509, lived a stormy life diversified by many quarrels, literary and theological, did much service to literature both in Latin and French, and, falling out with the powers that were, was burnt (having first been, as a matter of grace and in consequence of a previous recantation, hanged) in the Place Maubert, at Paris, on his birthday, August 3, 1554. Dolet had written many Latin speeches and tractates in the Ciceronian style – that of a curious section of humanists who entertained an exclusive and exaggerated devotion to Cicero. Then, becoming himself a master-printer, he wrote several small treatises on French grammar, some poems, a short history of Francis the First, and finally, a translation of the Platonic or Pseudo-Platonic Axiochus, which was the proximate cause of his death. He was one of the earliest of the French humanist students to devote himself to the vernacular, and, though his short and troubled life did not enable him to perfect his French style, he is very interesting as a specimen. His friendship with Marot and Rabelais had in each case an unhappy end. In the latter this was due to a pirated edition of Pantagruel and Gargantua, which reproduced expressions that Rabelais, in the rising storm of persecution, had been anxious to modify. As a Latin scholar Dolet was accurate and sound. His translations suffer somewhat from the want of a sufficiently definite and flexible French style, but the striving after such a style is apparent in them.

Dolet and the other persons just mentioned had translated for the most part prose into prose. Sanxon, Hugues Salel, Lazare de Baïf, Sibilet, and others, translated verse into verse; but the theory of French versification had not as yet been sufficiently studied to make the attempt really profitable. After the innovations of the Pléiade many of Ronsard's followers bent themselves to the same task with a better equipment and with more success. Almost all the poets mentioned elsewhere executed translations of more or less merit.

Fauchet.

From a literary point of view, however, the exercises of the century, in what may be called applied scholarship, were, leaving out of sight for the moment Amyot's work, and also that, presently to be mentioned, of Herberay, of greater merit than its pure translations. All the mediaeval legends, assigning classical or semi-classical origins to the populations of France, were resumed and amplified by Jean Lemaire de Belges, in the first years of the century, in his Illustrations des Gaules. Lemaire belongs, as has been said elsewhere, for the most part to the earlier school of the Rhétoriqueurs, but his literary power was considerable. The style of research, mingling as it did antiquarian and historical elements with a strong infusion of what was purely literary, was illustrated during the period by three persons who deserve special mention. Claude Fauchet is a name of great importance in French literary history. So long as mediaeval literature actually flourished we should expect to find, and we do find, no attention paid to its history and development. Fauchet was the first person, so far as is known, who devoted himself to something like a critical examination of its results; and as many of the materials which he had at his disposal have perished, his work, with all its drawbacks, is still very valuable. His Antiquités Gauloises et Françoises are purely historical, but display a sound spirit of criticism. His Recueil de l'Origine de la Langue et Poésie Françoise, Ryme et Romans, plus les Noms et Sommaires des Œuvres de CXXVII Poètes François vivans avant l'an MCCC, is a work for its period (1581) almost unique. Philologically, of course, Fauchet is far from infallible, as, for instance, in his theory, obviously indefensible, that French is a cross between the tongues of the Gauls and the Romans. But his 'Noms et Sommaires' are actually taken from the study of manuscripts; and, as the works of the Trouvères had, with few exceptions, long dropped out of sight, except in late fifteenth-century prose versions, the attempt to make them known was as salutary as it was bold.

Pasquier.

Fauchet unfortunately was not a good writer. This cannot be said of his principal rival, or rather successor, Étienne Pasquier. Pasquier was born at Paris in 1529, and early devoted himself to legal studies, which he pursued all through his life. His most famous performance as an advocate was his speech for the University of Paris against the Jesuits in 1565. He afterwards took a vigorous part in the Royalist polemic against the League. He did not die till 1615. His works, as yet unpublished in a complete form, are in modern times accessible chiefly in the selection of M. Léon Feugère212. They are voluminous, but by far the most important (with the exception perhaps of the valuable Letters) is the Recherches de la France. This is a somewhat desultory but very interesting collection of remarks on politics, history, social changes, and last, not least, literature. To us the most attractive part of Pasquier's literary history is the account he gives of the great poetical and literary movement of his own day, the revolution of the Pléiade, or, as he describes it picturesquely, 'De la Grande Flotte de Poètes que produisit le Règne du Roi Henry Deuxième.' But his notes on the previous history of literature in France, though necessarily based on somewhat imperfect knowledge, are full of interest, and not destitute of instruction, such, for instance, as his chapters on the farce of Pathelin, on Provençal poetry, on the formal measures of the fourteenth century, etc. Pasquier's style is very delightful. Despite his erudition, and even what may be called his Ronsardising, he does not aim at the new severity and classicism. But his manner is exceedingly picturesque, perfectly clear, and distinguished by a sort of gossiping ingenuousness without any lack of dignity, the secret of which the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in France and England seem to have possessed and carried off with them.

Henri Estienne.

The third of three not dissimilar names is that of Henri Estienne. His remarkable Apologie pour Hérodote, like not a few other works of the same kind, would be less remarkable if it were stripped of borrowed plumes; but his three treatises on French linguistics, the Traité de la Conformité du Français avec le Grec, the Précellence de la Langue Française, and the Nouveaux Dialogues de Langage Français Italianisé, would give him a considerable place in the history of French literature if he had written no Apologie and published no Thesaurus. All three works are more or less directed against the Italianising mania of the day.

Herberay.

Here, perhaps, better than elsewhere, may be mentioned the name of one of the best, if not the best, purely narrative writer of French prose during the century, Herberay des Essarts. It is to Herberay that the famous romance of Amadis of Gaul owes most of its fame. According to the most probable story, the Amadis was originally translated by the Spaniard Montalvo from a lost Portuguese original of the fourteenth century. There is absolutely no trace of a French original, the existence of which has been assumed by French critics. In form the Amadis is a long prose Roman d'Aventures, distinguished only from its French companions and predecessors by a somewhat higher strain of romantic sentiment, and by a greater abundance of giants, dwarfs, witches, and other condiments, which, even in its most luxuriant day, the simpler and more academic French taste had known how to do without, or at most, to apply moderately. It had been continued in the Spanish by more than one author, and was a very voluminous work when, in 1540, Herberay undertook to give a French version of it. He, in his turn, had continuators, but none who equalled his popularity or power. Readers of the Spanish complain that Herberay has not been a faithful translator, and, in particular, that he has been guilty of no few anachronisms. He probably troubled himself very little about exact fidelity or strict local and temporal colour. But he ranks, in order of time, second only to Calvin in the production of a clear, elegant, and scholarly French prose style. The book became immensely popular. It is said that it was the usual reading book for foreign students of French for a considerable period, and it was highly thought of by the best critics (such as Pasquier) of its own and the next generation. It had moreover a great influence on what came after it. To no single book can be so clearly traced the heroic romances of the early seventeenth century.

Palissy.

It may seem somewhat premature to speak of scientific writers in the sixteenth century. Yet there are three who usually and deservedly hold a place in French literary history, and who cannot be conveniently classed under any other head. There are few better known names of the time than Bernard Palissy. His famous enamels are no doubt partly the cause of this, but other artists as great or greater are not nearly so living to us as this maker of pottery. He was born in or about 1510, at a village, Chapelle Broin, near Agen, and he died in the Bastile, in 1589, a prisoner for his Protestantism. Catherine de Medicis had saved him from the massacre of St. Bartholomew. His long life was occupied mainly in art and scientific researches, partly also in lecturing on natural history and physics, and in writing accounts of his investigations, which are not very voluminous, but which possess an extraordinary vividness of style and description. His treatise on pottery, the Art de la Terre, contains the passage which has become classical, describing his desperate efforts to discover the secret of the Italian enamellers. He also wrote a Recepte véritable par laquelle tous les hommes de la France pourront apprendre à multiplier et à augmenter leurs Trésors, and, some ten years before his death, a Discours admirable de la Nature des Eaux et Fontaines. His literary work is an almost unique mixture of research with genuine literary fancy.

Paré.

Ambroise Paré, also a famous name, was born about the same time as Palissy, and died the year after him. A freethinker in his way, he escaped all temptation to embrace the dangerous heresy which was so fatal, or, at least, so inconvenient, to many other men of science and letters, and for the last forty years of his life he was court-surgeon. His literary work is not inconsiderable in amount, consisting, as might be expected, chiefly of professional treatises. The most interesting of his books, however, from a general point of view, and, as it happens, also by far the best written, is his Apologie et Voyages, a kind of autobiography which contains a large collection of anecdotes and details, not unimportant for the history of the time, as well as of much personal interest. The style of this book is often vivid and picturesque, as well as clear and precise.

Olivier de Serres.

It was fitting that agriculture, which is the staple industry of France, should contribute to her literature at this period – the most genuine and exuberant period of its history, if not that which produced the most minutely finished work. The Théâtre de l'Agriculture et du Ménage des Champs of Olivier de Serres was published in the last year of the century. The author was a native of the town of Villeneuve du Berg, in the present department of Ardèche. He was a Protestant and a great favourite of Henri IV., to whom he was useful in developing Sully's plans of internal economy. The Théâtre de l'Agriculture was long the classic book on the subject, and the author has been honoured, in quite recent times, by statues and other demonstrations. Like most books of the kind, it is much overlaid with erudition, but this only adds to its picturesqueness; and, as the author's precepts were founded on a life's experience of his subject, it certainly cannot be reproached with a want of practical knowledge and aim.

Not a few other authors would require notice, if space permitted, in this class of scientific and erudite authors, particularly in the class of linguistics and literature. Such is Geoffroy Tory, a printer, grammarian, and prose-writer of merit in the early part of the century, who anticipated Rabelais in his protest against the indiscriminate Latinisation of the later Rhétoriqueurs. Not a few other writers, such as Pelletier and Fontaine, busied themselves during the period with grammar and prosody; while towards the close of it, the first French bibliographers of eminence, La Croix du Maine, and Du Verdier, made their appearance. But the works of all these, as rather ancillary to literature than actually literary, must here be passed over.

CHAPTER VII

MONTAIGNE AND BRANTÔME

Disenchantment of the late Renaissance.

A period of enthusiasm passes naturally and almost necessarily into one of scepticism, and it is in no way surprising that the prominent literary figure of the second half of the sixteenth century in France should have taken for his motto rather 'Que sais-je?' than, like Rabelais, 'Sursum Corda.' The early hopes of the Renaissance had been curiously disappointed. The Reformation had resulted not merely in cruel and destructive civil war, but in the formation, in too many cases, of a Protestantism not less imperious and far more illiberal than the Catholicism against which it protested. The economic and social effects of the discovery of the New World had been equally discouraging, and even the recovery of classical learning had produced a race of pedants almost as trifling as the last doting defenders of scholasticism. The evils of the civil state of France, moreover, drove nearly all the best men into the sect of Politiques, or Trimmers, who avowedly regarded high questions of truth and faith as subordinate to a politic opportunism. The age had not lost its power of enjoyment of affairs and of pleasure, but its appetite for higher things was somewhat blunted. In this state of matters a few persons, of whom Montaigne was incomparably the most important, philosophised sceptically about life, and a great many, of whom Brantôme is the most typical, took pleasure in describing the ways and acts of an aristocracy which combined extraordinary luxury and corruption with great love of wit, singular intellectual ability, and a keen interest in war and business.

Montaigne.

Michel Eyquem, Sieur de Montaigne213, was born, 'between eleven and twelve o'clock of the day' (the detail is characteristic), on the 28th of February, 1533, at the château from which he derived his name, and which he has made illustrious. Montaigne is situated in the old province of Perigord, or, according to modern nomenclature, in the department of Dordogne and the arrondissement of Bergerac. It is at no great distance from Bordeaux. The family was long believed from a phrase of Montaigne's own to have been of English extraction, introduced during the long tenure of Aquitaine by our sovereigns. But recent and industrious researches have shown that it may with greater probability have been of local origin and yeoman status. Pierre Eyquem, the father, had filled many important municipal offices at Bordeaux. Michel was his third son among nine children, but by the death of his elder brothers he inherited the family estate. He was educated early, and after the manner of a time when education was a subject on which almost all men of independent thought rode hobbies. Latin he learnt by conversation at a very early age, Greek as a kind of amusement. At the mature age of six he was placed at the Collège de Guyenne in Bordeaux, not the least famous of the famous schools of the time, for there it was that Buchanan, Muretus, and Guérente, by the Latin plays which they wrote for their scholars to act, introduced the Senecan drama into France and showed the way to the French tragedy of the Pléiade. Seven years of study completed Montaigne's school education at the age of thirteen, when nowadays boys quit their preparatory cradles. He was set to work at law, but little positive is known of him for many years. In 1554, being then twenty-one, he was made counsellor in the Bordeaux Parlement, and in 1566 he married Françoise de la Chassaigne, daughter of one of his colleagues. Except casual references in the Essays, which are seldom precise, all we know of him during these years is his friendship with Étienne de la Boëtie. He almost certainly served one or more campaigns; but the most positive thing that can be said of his middle life is that, according to an existing inscription of his own, he finally retired, in 1571, on his thirty-eighth birthday, to the château which had become his by his father's death two years previously. He had already translated the Theologia Naturalis of Raymond de Sebonde. In the year of his retirement he edited the works of La Boëtie. But he now began a much more important task. The first two books of the Essais appeared in 1580; and immediately afterwards Montaigne, who suffered from severe internal disorders, undertook a long journey into Italy, Switzerland, and Germany, which occupied nearly a year and a-half. While sojourning at the baths of Lucca, he received the news of his appointment as mayor of Bordeaux, and hastened home. In 1588 he published the third Book of the Essays, and had troubles with the Leaguers in Paris. Four years afterwards, on the 13th September, 1592, he died of quinsy. Although Montaigne's municipal and legal appointments at Bordeaux are all that we know him to have enjoyed, he is styled 'gentleman in ordinary to the king,' and letters extant from and to Charles IX., Henri III., and Henri IV., show him to have enjoyed a considerable social as well as literary position. He was a knight of the Order of St. Michael. By his wife he had several children, but all died young, except one daughter, who survived him and left offspring. His adopted daughter, however, Mademoiselle de Gournay, a celebrated character of the next age, and the first editor of his complete works after his death, is better known.