A History of French Literature

In 1654 he published a translation of the Eunuch of Terence of small worth, and not long after was favoured with the patronage of Fouquet, the superintendant of finance. To him La Fontaine presented his Adonis, a narrative poem, graceful, picturesque, harmonious, expressing a delicate feeling for external nature rarely to be found in poetry of the time, and reviving some of the bright Renaissance sense of antiquity. The genius of France is united in La Fontaine's writings with the genius of Greece. But the verses written by command for Fouquet are laboured and ineffective. His ill-constructed and unfinished Songe de Vaux, partly in prose, partly in verse, was designed to celebrate his patron's Château de Vaux.

Far happier than this is the poem in dialogue Clymène, a dramatic fantasy, in which Apollo on Mount Parnassus learns by the aid of the Muses the loves of Acante (La Fontaine) and Clymène (Madame X …), a rural beauty, whom the god had seen wandering on the banks of Hippocrene. On the fall of his magnificent patron La Fontaine did not desert him, pleading in his Élégie aux Nymphes de Vaux on behalf of the disgraced minister. As a consequence, the poet retired for a time from Paris to banishment at Limoges. But in 1664 he is again in Paris or at Château-Thierry, his native place, where the Duchesse de Bouillon, niece of Mazarin, young, gay, pleasure-loving, bestowed on him a kind protection. His tedious paraphrase of Psyché, and the poem Quinquina, in which he celebrates the recovery from illness of the Duchess, were performances of duty and gratitude rather than of native impulse; but the tendencies of her salon, restrained neither by the proprieties of the classical doctrine in literature nor those of religious strictness, may have encouraged him to the production of his Contes.

In Paris, from 1661 to 1664 joyous meetings took place in Boileau's rooms in the Rue du Colombier of a distinguished group, which included Molière, Chapelle, Racine, and La Fontaine. La Fontaine, the bonhomme, who escaped from the toil of conversation which did not interest him in shy or indolent taciturnity, could be a charming talker with companions of his choice. Probably to Boileau's urgency is due the first original publication of La Fontaine, a little volume of Nouvelles en Vers (1664-1665), containing the Joconde, a tale from Ariosto, and a comic story versified from Boccaccio. Almost immediately there followed a collection of ten Contes, with the author's name upon the title-page, and at various later dates were published added tales, until five parts completed the series. The success was great, but great also was the scandal, for the bonhomme, drawing from Boccaccio, the Heptameron, the Cent Nouvelles nouvelles, Rabelais, Petronius, Athenæus, and other sources, had exhibited no more regard for decency than that which bestows the graces of lightness, brightness, wit, and gaiety upon indecency. His unabashed apology was that the artistic laws of the conte obliged him to decline the laws of modesty; and among those who applauded his tales were the Duchess de Bouillon and Mme. de Sévigné. It is indeed impossible not to applaud their skill in rapid and easy narrative, and the grace, freedom, and spontaneity of the verse.

The first six books of the Fables appeared in 1668; the next five in two parts, in 1678 and 1679; the twelfth and last book in 1694. When the Psyché was published, soon after the first group of the Fables, the prose and verse were placed in a graceful setting, which tells of the converse of the author with his friends Boileau, Racine, and Molière (or possibly Chapelle) in the midst of the unfinished gardens of Versailles, where the author of Psyché, named happily Polyphile (for he loved many things, and among them his friends), will read his romance for his literary comrades.

"J'aime le jeu, l'amour, les livres, la musique,La ville et la campagne, enfin tout: il n'est rienQui ne me soit souverain bienJusq'aux sombres plaisirs d'un coeur mélancolique."

Some of his friends before long had passed away, but others came to fill their places. For many years he was cared for and caressed by the amiable and cultivated Mme. de Sablière, and when she dismissed other acquaintances she still kept "her dog, her cat, and her La Fontaine." The Academy would have opened its doors to him sooner than to Boileau, but the King would not have it so, and he was admitted (1684) only when he had promised Louis XIV. henceforth to be sage. When Mme. de Sablière died, Hervart, maître des requêtes, one day offered La Fontaine the hospitality of his splendid house. "I was on my way there," replied the poet. After a season of conversion, in which he expressed penitence for his "infamous book" of Contes, the bonhomme tranquilly died in April 1693. "He is so simple," said his nurse, "that God will not have courage to damn him." "He was the most sincere and candid soul," wrote his friend Maucroix, who had been intimate with him for more than fifty years, "that I have ever known; never a disguise; I don't know that he spoke an untruth in all his life."

All that is best in the genius of La Fontaine may be found in his Fables. The comedies in which he collaborated, the Captivité de Saint Malc, written on the suggestion of the Port-Royalists, the miscellaneous poems, though some of these are admirable, even the Contes, exhibit only a fragment of his mind; in the Fables the play of his faculties is exquisite, and is complete. His imagination was unfitted for large and sustained creation; it operated most happily in a narrow compass. The Fables, however, contain much in little; they unite an element of drama and of lyric with narrative; they give scope to his feeling for nature, and to his gift for the observation of human character and society; they form, as he himself has said—

"Une ample comédie à cents actes diversEt dont la scène est l'univers."

He had not to invent his subjects; he found them in all the fabulists who had preceded him—Greek, Latin, Oriental, elder French writers—"j'en lis qui sont du Nord et qui sont du Midi;" but he may be said to have recreated the species. From an apologue, tending to an express moral, he converted the fable into a conte, in which narrative, description, observation, satire, dialogue have an independent value, and the moral is little more than an accident. This is especially true of the midmost portion of the collection—Books vii.-ix.—which appeared ten years after the earliest group. He does not impose new and great ideas on the reader; he does not interpret the deepest passions; he takes life as he sees it, as an entertaining comedy, touched at times with serious thought, with pathos, even with melancholy, but in the main a comedy, which teaches us to smile at the vanities, the follies, the egoisms of mankind, and teaches us at the same time something of tenderness and pity for all that is gentle or weak. His morality is amiable and somewhat epicurean, a morality of indulgence, of moderation, of good sense. His eye for what is characteristic and picturesque in animal life is infallible; but his humanised wild creatures are also a playful, humorous, ironical presentation of mankind and of the society of his own day, from the grand monarch to the bourgeois or the lackey.

La Fontaine's language escapes from the limitations of the classical school of the seventeenth century; his manifold reading in elder French literature enriched his vocabulary; he seems to light by instinct upon the most exact and happiest word. Yet we know that the perfection of his art was attained only as the result of untiring diligence; indolent and careless as he was in worldly affairs, he was an indefatigable craftsman in poetry. His verse is as free as it is fine; it can accomplish whatever it intends; now it is light and swift, but when needful it can be grave and even magnificent:

"Aurait-il imprimé sur le front des étoilesCe que la nuit des temps enferme dans ses voiles?"

It is verse which depends on no mechanical rules imposed from without; its life and movement come from within, and the lines vary, like a breeze straying among blossoms, with every stress or relaxation of the writer's mood. While La Fontaine derives much from antiquity, he may be regarded as incarnating more than any other writer of his century the genius of France, exquisite in the proportion of his feeling and the expression of feeling to its source and cause. If we do not name him, with some of his admirers, "the French Homer," we may at least describe him, with Nisard, as a second Montaigne, "mais plus doux, plus aimable, plus naïf que le premier," and with all the charm of verse superadded.

CHAPTER VI

COMEDY AND TRAGEDY—MOLIÈRE—RACINE

I

The history of comedy, from Larivey to Molière, is one of arrested development, followed by hasty and ill-regulated growth. During the first twenty-five years of the seventeenth century, comedy can hardly be said to have existed; whatever tended to beauty or elevation, took the form of tragi-comedy or pastoral; what was rude and popular became a farce. From the farce Molière's early work takes its origin, but of the repertory of his predecessors little survives. Much, indeed, in these performances was left to the improvisation of the burlesque actors. Gros-Guillaume, Gaultier-Garguille, Turlupin, Tabarin, rejoiced the heart of the populace; but the farces tabariniques can hardly be dignified with the name of literature.

In 1632 the comedy of intrigue was advanced by Mairet in his Galanteries du Duc d'Ossone. The genius of Rotrou, follower though he was of Plautus, tended towards the tragic; if he is really gay, it is in La Soeur (1645), a bright tangle of extravagant incidents. For Rotrou the drama of Italy supplied material; the way to the Spanish drama was opened by d'Ouville, the only writer of the time devoted specially to comedy, in L'Esprit Follet (1641); once opened, it became a common highway. Scarron added to his Spanish originals in Jodelet and Don Japhet d'Arménie his own burlesque humour. The comedy of contemporary manners appears with grace and charm in Corneille's early plays; the comedy of character, in his admirable Le Menteur. Saint-Évremond satirised literary affectations in La Comédie des Académistes; these and other follies of the time are presented with spirit in Desmaret's remarkable comedy, Les Visionnaires. If we add, for sake of its study of the peasant in the character of Mathieu Gareau, the farcical Pédant Joué of Cyrano, we have named the most notable comedies of the years which preceded Les Précieuses Ridicules.

Their general character is extravagance of resources in the plot, extravagance of conception in the characters. Yet in both intrigue and characters there is a certain monotony. The same incidents, romantic and humorous, are variously mingled to produce the imbroglio; the same typical characters—the braggart, the parasite, the pedant, the extravagant poet, the amorous old man, the designing woman, the knavish valet, the garrulous nurse—play their mirthful parts. If the types are studied from real life rather than adopted from Italian or Spanish models, they are exaggerated to absurdity. Corneille alone is distinguished by delicacy of imagination and the finer touch of a dexterous artist.

JEAN-BAPTISTE POQUELIN, who, when connected with the stage, named himself MOLIÈRE, was born in January 1622, in Paris, the son of a prosperous upholsterer, Jean Poquelin, and Marie Cressé, his wife. Educated at the Collège de Clermont, he had among his fellow-pupils the Prince de Conti, Chapelle, the future poet Hesnault, the future traveller Bernier. There seems to be no sufficient reason to doubt that he and some of his friends afterwards received lessons in philosophy from Gassendi, whose influence must have tended to loosen him from the traditional doctrines, and to encourage independence of thought. A translation by Molière of the great poem of Lucretius has been lost, but a possible citation from it appears in the second act of the Misanthrope. Legal studies followed those of philosophy. But Molière had other ends in view than either those of an advocate or of the hereditary office of upholsterer to the King. In 1643, at the age of twenty-one, he decided to throw in his lot with the theatrical company in which Madeleine Béjart and her brothers were leading members. The Illustre Théâtre was constituted, but Paris looked askance at the illustrious actors; debt, imprisonment, and release through friendly aid, formed the net result of Molière's first experiment.

The troupe decided at the close of 1645 or in the early days of the following year to try their fortune in the provinces. It is needless to follow in detail their movements during twelve years—twelve years fruitful in experience for one who observed life with keenest eyes, years of toil, in which the foundations of his art were laid. At Lyons, probably in 1655, possibly in 1653, a comedy, founded on the Italian of Nicolo Barbieri, L'Étourdi, saw the light, and Molière revealed himself as a poet. Young Lélie, the Étourdi, is enamoured of the beautiful Célie, whom the merchant Trufaldin, old and rich, has purchased from corsairs. Lélie's valet Mascarille, who is the life of the play, invents stratagem on stratagem to aid the lover, and is for ever foiled by his master's indiscretions, until the inevitable happy dénouement arrives. The romantic intrigue is conventional; the charm is in the vivacity and colour of the style. In 1656 Le Dépit Amoureux was given with applause at Béziers; much is derived from the Italian of Secchi, something perhaps from Terence; the tender scenes of lovers' quarrels and lovers' reconciliation, contrasting with the franker comedy of the loves of waiting-maid and valet, still live, if the rest of the play be little remembered.

The years of apprenticeship were over when, in 1658, Molière and his company once more in Paris presented, by command, before the King, Corneille's Nicomède, and, leave being granted, gave his farce in the Italian style, the Docteur Amoureux, before pleased spectators. The company was now the troupe of Monsieur, the King's brother, with the Petit-Bourbon as theatre, and there, in November 1659, was enacted Molière's first satiric play on contemporary manners, Les Précieuses Ridicules. We do not need the legendary old man crying from the pit "Courage, Molière! voilà la bonne comédie" to assure us that the comic stage possessed at length a masterpiece. The dramatist had himself known the précieuses of the provinces; through them he might with less danger exhibit the follies of the Hôtel de Rambouillet and the ruelles of the capital. The good bourgeois Gorgibus is induced by his niece and daughter, two précieuses, to establish himself in Paris. Their aspirant lovers, unversed in the affectations of the salon, are slighted and repelled; in revenge they employ their valets, Mascarille and Jodelet, to play the parts of men of fashion and of taste. The exposure and confusion of the ladies, with an indignant rebuke from Gorgibus, close the piece. It was a farce raised to the dignity of comedy. Molière's triumph was the triumph of good sense.

After a success in Sganarelle (1660), a broad comedy of vulgar jealousy, and a decided check—the only one in his dramatic career—in the somewhat colourless tragi-comedy Don Garcie de Navarre (1661), Molière found a theme, suggested by the Adelphi of Terence, which was happily suited to his genius. L'École des Maris (1661) contrasts two methods of education—one suspicious and severe, the other wisely indulgent. Two brothers, Ariste and Sganarelle, seek the hands of their wards, the orphan sisters Isabelle and Léonor; the amiable Ariste, aided by the good sense of a gay soubrette, is rewarded with happiness; the vexatious Sganarelle is put to confusion. The drama is a plea, expressing the writer's personal thoughts, for nature and for freedom. The comedy of manners is here replaced by the comedy of character. Its success suggested to Fouquet that Molière might contribute to the amusement of the King at the fêtes of the Château de Vaux; in fifteen days the dramatist had his bright improvisation Les Fâcheux ready, a series of character sketches in scenes rather than a comedy. The King smiled approval, and, it was whispered, hinted to Molière that another bore might with advantage be added to the collection—the sportsman whose talk shall be of sport. At Fontainebleau he duly appeared before his Majesty, and unkind spectators recognised a portrait of the Marquis de Soyecourt.

Next February (1662) Molière, aged forty, was married to the actress Armande Béjart, whose age was half his own—a disastrous union, which caused him inexpressible anxiety and unhappiness. In L'École des Femmes of the same year he is wiser than he had shown himself in actual life. Arnolphe would train a model wife from childhood by the method of jealous seclusion and in infantile ignorance; but love, in the person of young Horace, finds out a way. There is pathos in the anguish of Arnolphe; yet it is not the order of nature that middle-aged folks should practise perverting arts upon innocent affections. The charming Agnès belongs of right to Horace, and the over-wise, and therefore foolish, Arnolphe must quit the scene with his despairing cry. Some matter of offence was found by the devout in Molière's play; it was the opening of a long campaign; the précieuses, the dainty gentle-folk, the critical disciples of Aristotle, the rival comedians, were up in arms. Molière for the occasion ignored the devout; upon the others he made brilliant reprisals in La Critique de l'École des Femmes (1663) and L'Impromptu de Versailles (1663).

Among those who war against nature and human happiness, not the least dangerous foe is the religious hypocrite. On May 12, 1664, Molière presented before the King the first three acts of his great character-comedy Tartufe. Instantly Anne of Austria and the King's confessor, now Archbishop of Paris, set to work; the public performance of "The Hypocrite" was inhibited; a savage pamphlet was directed against its author by the curé of Saint-Barthélemy. Private representations, however, were given; Tartufe, in five acts, was played in November in presence of the great Condé. In 1665 Molière's company was named the servants of the King; two years later a verbal permission was granted for the public performance of the play. It appeared under the title of L'Imposteur; the victory seemed won, when again, and without delay, the blow fell; by order of the President, M. de Lamoignon, the theatre was closed. Molière bore up courageously. The King was besieging Lille; Molière despatched two of his comrades to the camp, declaring that if the Tartufes of France should carry all before them he must cease to write. The King was friendly, but the Archbishop fulminated threats of excommunication against any one who should even read the play. At length in 1669, when circumstances were more favourable, Louis XIV. granted the desired permission; in its proper name Molière's play obtained complete freedom. Bourdaloue might still pronounce condemnation; Bossuet might draw terrible morals from the author's sudden death; an actor, armed with the sword of the comic spirit, had proved victorious. And yet the theologians were not wholly wrong; the tendency of Molière's teaching, like that of Rabelais and like that of Montaigne, is to detach morals from religion, to vindicate whatever is natural, to regard good sense and good feeling as sufficient guides of conduct.

There is an accent of indignation in the play; the follies of men and women may be subjects of sport; base egoism assuming the garb of religion deserves a lash that draws the blood. Is it no act of natural piety to defend the household against the designs of greedy and sensual imposture; no service to society to quicken the penetration of those who may be made the dupes of selfish craft? While Organ and his mother are besotted by the gross pretensions of the hypocrite, while the young people contend for the honest joy of life, the voice of philosophic wisdom is heard through the sagacious Cléante, and that of frank good sense through the waiting-maid, Dorine. Suddenly a providence, not divine but human, intervenes in the representative of the monarch and the law, and the criminal at the moment of triumph is captured in his own snare.

When the affair of Tartufe was in its first tangle, Molière produced a kind of dramatic counterpart—Don Juan, ou le Festin de Pierre (1665). In Don Juan—whose valet Sganarelle is the faithful critic of his master—the dramatist presented one whose cynical incredulity and scorn of all religion are united with the most complete moral licence; but hypocrisy is the fashion of the day, and Don Juan in sheer effrontery will invest himself for an hour in the robe of a penitent. Atheist and libertine as he is, there is a certain glamour of reckless courage about the figure of his hero, recreated by Molière from a favourite model of Spanish origin. His comedy, while a vigorous study of character, is touched with the light of romance.

These are masterpieces; but neither Tartufe nor Don Juan expresses so much of the mind of Molière as does Le Misanthrope (1666). His private griefs, his public warfare, had doubtless a little hardened and a little embittered his spirit. In many respects it is a sorry world; and yet we must keep on terms with it. The misanthropist Alceste is nobly fanatical on behalf of sincerity and rectitude. How does his sincerity serve the world or serve himself? And he, too, has his dose of human folly, for is he not enamoured of a heartless coquette? Philinte is accommodating, and accepts the world for what it is; and yet, we might ask, is there not a more settled misanthropy in such cynical acquiescence than there is in the intractable virtue of Alceste? Alone of Molière's plays, Le Misanthrope has that Shakespearean obscurity which leaves it open to various interpretations. It is idle to try to discover actual originals for the characters. But we may remember that when Alceste cried to Célimène, "C'est pour mes péchés que je vous aime," the actors who stood face to face were Molière and the wife whom he now met only on the stage.

Molière's genius could achieve nothing higher than Tartufe and the Misanthrope. His powers suffered no decline, but he did not again put them to such strenuous uses. In 1668 the brilliant fantasy of Amphitryon, freely derived from Plautus, was succeeded by an admirable comedy in prose, Georges Dandin, in which the folly of unequal marriage between the substantial farmer and the fine lady is mocked with bitter gaiety. Before the year closed Molière, continuing to write in prose, returned to Plautus, and surpassed him in L'Avare. To be rich and miserly is in itself a form of fatuity; but Harpagon is not only miserly but amorous, as far as a ruling passion will admit one of subordinate influence. Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (1670), a lesson of good sense to those who suffer from the social ambition to rise above their proper rank, is wholly original; it mounts in the close from comedy to the extravagance of farce, and perhaps in the uproarious laughter of the play we may discover a touch of effort or even of spasm. The operatic Psyché (1671) is memorable as having combined the talents of Molière, Corneille, and Quinault, with the added musical gifts of Lulli.

In Les Femmes Savantes (1672) Molière returned to an early theme, with variations suited to the times. The Hôtel de Rambouillet was closed; the new tribe of précieuses had learnt the Cartesian philosophy, affected the sciences, were patronesses of physics, astronomy, anatomy. Something of the old romantic follies survived, and mingled strangely with the pretensions to science and the pedantries of erudition. Trissotin (doubtless a portrait in caricature from the Abbé Cotin) is the Tartufe of spurious culture; Vadius (a possible satire of Ménage) is a pedant, arrogant and brutal. Shall the charming Henriette be sacrificed to gratify her mother's domineering temper and the base designs of an impostor? The forces are arrayed on either side; the varieties of learned and elegant folly in woman are finely distinguished; of the opposite party are Chrysale, the bourgeois father with his rude common-sense; the sage Ariste; the faithful servant, Martine, whose grammar may be faulty, but whose wit is sound and clear; and Henriette herself, the adorable, whom to know is more of a liberal education than to have explored all the Greek and Latin masters of Vadius and Trissotin. The final issue of the encounter between good sense, good nature, reason and folly, pedantry and pride, cannot be uncertain.