A History of French Literature

While on the one hand the tendencies of the Pléiade may be described as exotic, going forth, as they did, to capture the gifts of classical and Italian literature, on the other hand they pleaded strenuously that thus only could French literature attain its highest possibilities. In the scholarship of the time, side by side with the humanism which revived and restored the culture of Greece and Rome, was another humanism which was essentially national. The historical origins of France were studied for the first time with something of a critical spirit by CLAUDE FAUCHET in his Antiquités Gauloises et Françoises (1579-1601). His Recueil de l'Origine de la Langue et Poésie Françoise, in spite of its errors, was an effort towards French philology; and in calling attention to the trouvères and their works, Fauchet may be considered a remote master of the school of modern literary research. ESTIENNE PASQUIER (1529-1615), the jurist who maintained in a famous action the cause of the University against the Jesuits, in his Recherches de la France treated with learning and vigour various important points in French history—civil and ecclesiastical—language, literary history, and the foundation of universities. HENRI ESTIENNE (1531-98), who entered to the full into the intoxication of classical humanism, was patriotic in his reverence for his native tongue. In a trilogy of little treatises (1565-79), written with much spirit, he maintained that of modern languages the French has the nearest affinity to the Greek, attempted to establish its superiority to Italian, and much more to Spanish, and mocked the contemporary fashion of Italianised French.

The study of history is supported on the one hand by such erudite research as that of Fauchet and Pasquier; on the other hand it is supported by political philosophy and speculation. To philosophy, in the wider sense of the word, the sixteenth century made no large and coherent contribution; the Platonism, Pyrrhonism, Epicureanism, Stoicism of the Renaissance met and clashed together; the rival theologies of the Roman and Reformed Churches contended in a struggle for life. PIERRE DE LA RAMÉE (1515-72) expressed the revolt of rationalism against the methods of the schoolmen and the authority of Aristotle; but he ordinarily wrote in Latin, and his Dialectique, the first philosophical work in the vulgar tongue, hardly falls within the province of literary history.

The philosophy of politics is represented by one great name, that of JEAN BODIN (1529-96), whose République may entitle him to be styled the Montesquieu of the Renaissance. In an age which tended towards the formation of great monarchies he was vigorously monarchical. The patriarchal power of the sovereign might well be thought needful, in the second half of the century, as a barrier against anarchy; but Bodin was no advocate of tyranny; he condemned slavery, and held that religious persecution can only lead to a dissolution of religious belief. A citizen is defined by Bodin as a free man under the supreme government of another; like Montesquieu, he devotes attention to the adaptation of government to the varieties of race and climate. The attempts at a general history of France in the earlier part of the sixteenth century preserved the arid methods and unilluminated style of the mediæval chronicles;16 in the second half of the century they imitated with little skill the models of antiquity. Histories of contemporary events in Europe were written with conscientious impartiality by Lancelot de la Popelinière, and with personal and party passion, struggling against his well-meant resolves, by Agrippa d'Aubigné. The great Historia mei Temporis of De Thou, faithful and austere in its record of fact, was a highly-important contribution to literature, but it is written in Latin.

With a peculiar gift for narrative, the French have been long pre-eminent as writers of memoirs, and already in the sixteenth century such personal recitals are numerous. The wars of François I. and of Henri II. gave abundant scope for the display of individual enterprise and energy; the civil wars breathed into the deeds of men an intensity of passion; the actors had much to tell, and a motive for telling it each in his own interest.

The Commentaires of BLAISE DE MONLUC (1502-77) are said to have been named by Henri IV. "the soldier's Bible"; the Bible is one which does not always inculcate mercy or peace. Monluc, a Gascon of honourable birth and a soldier of fortune, had the instinct of battle in his blood; from a soldier he rose through every rank to be the King's lieutenant of Guyenne and a Marshal of France; during fifty years he fought, as a daring captain rather than as a great general, amorous of danger, and at length, terribly disfigured by wounds, he sat down, not to rest, but to wield his pen as if it were a sword of steel. His Commentaires were meant to be a manual for hardy combatants, and what model could he set before the young aspirant so animating as himself? In his earlier wars against the foreign foes of his country, Monluc was indeed a model of military prowess; the civil wars added cruelty to his courage; after a fashion he was religious, and a short shrift and a cord were good enough for heretics and adversaries of his King. An unlettered soldier, Monluc, by virtue of his energy of character and directness of speech, became a most impressive and spirited narrator. His Memoirs close with a sigh for stern and inviolable solitude. Among the Pyrenean rocks he had formerly observed a lonely monastery, in view at once of Spain and France; there it was his wish to end his days.

From the opposite party in the great religious and political strife came the temperate Memoirs of Lanoue, the simple and beautiful record of her husband's life by Madame de Mornay, and that of his own career, written in an old age of gloom and passion, by D'Aubigné. The ideas of Henri IV.—himself a royal author in his Lettres missives—are embodied in the OEconomies Royales of the statesman Sully, whose secretaries were employed for the occasion in laboriously reciting his words and deeds as they had learnt them from their chief. The superficial aspects of the life of society, the manners and morals—or lack of morals—of the time, are lightly and brightly exhibited by PIERRE DE BOURDEILLE, lord of BRANTÔME, Catholic abbé, soldier and courtier, observer of the great world, gossip of amorous secrets. His Vies des Hommes Illustres et des Grands Capitaines, his Vies des Dames Illustres et des Dames Galantes, and his Mémoires contained matter too dangerous, perhaps, for publication during his lifetime, but the author cherished the thought of his posthumous renown. Brantôme, wholly indifferent to good and evil, had a vivid interest in life; virtue and vice concerned him alike and equally, if only they had vivacity, movement, colour; and although, as with Monluc, it was a physical calamity that made him turn to authorship, he wrote with a naïve art, an easy grace, and abundant spirit. To correct and complete Brantôme's narrative as it related to herself, Marguerite, Queen of Navarre, first wife of Henri IV., prepared her unfinished Memoirs, which opens the delightful series of autobiographies and reminiscences of women. Her account of the night of St. Bartholomew is justly celebrated; the whole record, indeed, is full of interest; but there were passages of her life which it was natural that she should pass over in silence; her sins of omission, as Bayle has observed, are many.17

The controversies of the civil wars produced a militant literature, in which the extreme parties contended with passion, while between these a middle party, the aspirants to conciliation, pleaded for the ways of prudence, and, if possible, of peace. FRANÇOIS HOTMAN, the effect of whose Latin Franco-Gallia, a political treatise presenting the Huguenot demands, has been compared to that of Rousseau's Contrat Social, launched his eloquent invective against the Cardinal de Lorraine, in the Epistre envoyée au Tigre de la France. Hubert Languet, the devoted friend of Philip Sidney, in his Vindiciæ contra Tyrannos, justified rebellion against princes who violate by their commands the laws of God. D'Aubigné, in his Confession de Sancy, attacked with characteristic ardour the apostates and waverers of the time, above the rest that threefold recanter of his faith, Harlay de Sancy. Marnix de Sainte-Aldegonde, in his Tableau des Différands de la Religion, mingles theological erudition with his raillery against the Roman communion. Henri Estienne applied the spirit and learning of a great humanist to religious controversy in the second part of his Apologie pour Hérodote; the marvellous tales of the Greek historian may well be true, he sarcastically maintains, when in this sixteenth century the abuses of the Roman Church seem to pass all belief. On the other hand, Du Perron, a cardinal in 1604, replied to the arguments and citations of the heretics. As the century drew towards its close, violence declined; the struggle was in a measure appeased. In earlier days the Chancellor, Michel de l'Hospital, had hoped to establish harmony between the rival parties; grief for the massacre of St. Bartholomew hastened his death. The learned Duplessis-Mornay, leader and guide of the Reformed Churches of France, a devoted servant of Henri of Navarre, while fervent in his own beliefs, was too deeply attached to the common faith of Christianity to be an extreme partisan. The reconciliation of Henri IV. with the Church of Rome, which delivered France from anarchy, was, however, a grief to some of his most loyal supporters, and of these Duplessis-Mornay was the most eminent.

The cause of Henri against the League was served by the manuscript circulation of a prose satire, with interspersed pieces of verse, the work of a group of writers, moderate Catholics or converted Protestants, who loved their country and their King, the Satire Ménipée.18 When it appeared in print (1594; dated on the title-page 1593) the cause was won; the satire rose upon a wave of success, like a gleaming crest of bitter spray. It is a parody of the Estates of the League which had been ineffectually convoked to make choice of a king. Two Rabelaisian charlatans, one from Spain, one from Lorraine, offer their drugs for sale in the court of the Louvre; the virtues of the Spanish Catholicon, a divine electuary, are manifold—it will change the blackest criminal into a spotless lamb, it will transform a vulgar bonnet to a cardinal's hat, and at need can accomplish a score of other miracles. Presently the buffoon Estates file past to their assembly; the hall in which they meet is tapestried with grotesque scenes from history; the order of the sitting is determined, and the harangues begin, harangues in which each speaker exposes his own ambitions, greeds, hypocrisies, and egoism, until Monsieur d'Aubray, the orator of the tiers état, closes the debate with a speech in turn indignant, ironical, or grave in its commiseration for the popular wrongs—an utterance of bourgeois honesty and good sense. The writers—Canon Pierre Leroy; Gillot, clerk-advocate of the Parliament of Paris; Rapin, a lettered combatant at Ivry; Jean Passerat, poet and commentator on Rabelais; Chrestien and Pithou, two Protestants discreetly converted by force of events—met in a room of Gillot's house, where, according to the legend, Boileau was afterwards born, and there concocted the venom of their pamphlet. Its wit, in spite of some extravagances and the tedium of certain pages, is admirable; farce and comedy, sarcasm and moral prudence alternate; and it had the great good fortune of a satire, that of coming at the lucky moment.

The French Huguenots were not without their poets. Two of these—Guillaume Saluste, Seigneur du Bartas, and Agrippa d'Aubigné—are eminent. The fame of DU BARTAS (1544-90) was indeed European. Ronsard sent him a pen of gold, and feared at a later time the rivalry of his renown; Tasso drew inspiration from his verse; the youthful Milton read him with admiration in the rendering by Sylvester; long afterwards Goethe honoured him with praise beyond his deserts. To read his poems now, notwithstanding passages of vivid description and passages of ardent devotional feeling, would need rare literary fortitude. His originality lies in the fact that while he was a disciple of the Pléiade, a disciple crude, intemperate, and provincial, he deserted Greece and Rome, and drew his subjects from Hebraic sources. His Judith (1573), composed by the command of Jeanne d'Albret, has more of Lucan than of Virgil in its over-emphatic style. La Sepmaine, ou la Création en Sept Journées, appeared in 1578, and within a few years had passed through thirty editions. Du Bartas is always copious, sometimes brilliant, sometimes majestic; but laboured and rhetorical description, never ending and still beginning, fatigues the mind; an encyclopædia of the works of creation weighs heavily upon the imagination; we sigh for the arrival of the day of rest.

THÉODORE-AGRIPPA D'AUBIGNÉ (1550-1630) was not among the admirers of Du Bartas. His natural temper was framed for pleasure; at another time he might have been known only as a poet of the court, of lighter satire, and of love; the passions of the age transformed him into an ardent and uncompromising combatant. His classical culture was wide and exact; at ten years old he translated the Crito; Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Spanish were at his command. He might, had France been at peace with herself, have appeared in literature as a somewhat belated Ronsardist; but his hereditary cause became his own. While still a child he accepted from his father, in presence of the withering heads of the conspirators of Amboise, the oath of immitigable vengeance. Pursuits, escapes, the camp, the battle-field, the prison, the court made up no small part of his life of vicissitude and of unalterable resolve. He roused Henri of Navarre from the lethargy of pleasure; he warned the King against the crime of apostasy; he dreaded the mass, but could cheerfully have accepted the stake. Extreme in his rage of party, he yet in private affairs could show good sense and generosity. His elder years were darkened by what he regarded as treason in his King, and by the falling away from the faith of that son who, by an irony of fate, became the father of Madame de Maintenon. Four times condemned to death, he died in exile at the age of eighty.

D'Aubigné's satirical tale, Les Aventures du Baron de Fæneste, contrasts the man who appears—spreading his plumes in the sunshine of the court—with the man who is, the man who lives upon his estate, among his rustic neighbours, tilling his fields and serving his people and his native land. As an elegiac poet D'Aubigné is little more than a degenerate issue from the Pléiade. It is in his vehement poem of mourning and indignation and woe, Les Tragiques, begun in 1577 but not published till 1616, that his power is fully manifested. To D'Aubigné, as its author, the characterisation of Sainte-Beuve exactly applies: "Juvénal du xvi. siècle, âpre, austère, inexorable, hérissé d'hyperboles, étincelant de beautés, rachetant une rudesse grossière par une sublime énergie." In seven books it tells of the misery of France, the treachery of princes, the abuse of public law and justice, the fires and chains of religious persecution, the vengeance of God against the enemies of the saints, and the final judgment of sinners, when air and fire and water become the accusers of those who have perverted the powers of nature to purposes of cruelty. The poem is ill composed, its rhetoric is often strained or hard and metallic, its unrelieved horrors oppress the heart; but the cry of true passion is heard in its finer pages; from amid the turmoil and smoke, living tongues of flame seem to dart forth which illuminate the gloom. The influence of Les Tragiques may still be felt in passages of Victor Hugo's fulgurant eloquence.

In the midst of strife, however, there were men who pursued the disinterested service of humanity and whose work made for peace. The great surgeon Ambroise Paré, full of tolerance and deeply pious, advanced his healing art on the battle-field or amid the ravages of pestilence, and left a large contribution to the literature of science. Bernard Palissy, a devout Huguenot, was not only the inventor of "rustic figulines," the designer of enamelled cups and platters, but a true student of nature, who would substitute the faithful observation of phenomena for vain and ambitious theory. Olivier de Serres, another disciple of Calvin, cultivated his fields, helped to enrich France by supporting Henri IV. in the introduction of the industry in silk, and amassed his knowledge and experience in his admirably-written Théâtre d'Agriculture. At a later date Antoine de Montchrestien, adventurous and turbulent in his Protestant zeal, the writer of tragedies which connect the sixteenth century with the classical school of later years, became the advocate of a protectionist and a colonial policy in his Traicté de l'OEconomie Politique; the style of his essay towards economic reform has some of the passion and enthusiasm of a poet.

A refuge from the troubles and vicissitudes of the time was sought by some in a Christianised Stoicism. Guillaume du Vair (1556-1621), eminent as a magistrate, did not desert his post of duty; he pleaded eloquently, as chief orator of the middle party of conciliation, on behalf of unity under Henri of Navarre. In his treatise on French eloquence he endeavoured to elevate the art of public speaking above laboured pedantry to true human discourse. But while taking part in the contentious progress of events, he saw the flow of human affairs as from an elevated plateau. In the conversations with friends which form his treatise De la Constance et Consolation ès Calamités Publiques, Du Vair's counsels are those of courage and resignation, not unmingled with hope. He rendered into French the stoical morals of Epictetus; and in his own Sainte Philosophie and Philosophie Morale des Stoïques he endeavoured, with honest purpose, rather than with genius, to ally speculation to religion, and to show how human reason can lead the way to those ethical truths which are the guiding lights of conduct.

Perhaps certitude sufficient for human life may be found by limitation; a few established truths will, after all, carry us from the cradle to the grave; and beyond the bounds of certitude lies a limitless and fascinating field for observation and dubious conjecture. Amid the multitude of new ideas which the revival of antiquity brought with it, amid the hot disputes of the rival churches, amid the fierce contentions of civil war, how delightful to possess one's soul in quiet, to be satisfied with the needful knowledge, small though it be, which is vouchsafed to us, and to amuse the mind with every opinion and every varying humour of that curious and wayward creature man! And who so wayward, who so wavering as one's self in all those parts of our composite being which are subject to the play of time and circumstance? Such, in an age of confusion working towards clearness, an age of belligerency tending towards concord, were the reflections of a moralist, the most original of his century—Michel de Montaigne.

MICHEL EYQUEM, SEIGNEUR DE MONTAIGNE, was born at a château in Périgord, in the year 1533. His father, whom Montaigne always remembered with affectionate reverence, was a man of original ideas. He entrusted the infant to the care of peasants, wishing to attach him to the people; educated him in Latin as if his native tongue; roused him at morning from sleep to the sound of music. From his sixth to his thirteenth year Montaigne was at the Collège de Guyenne, where he took the leading parts in Latin tragedies composed by Muret and Buchanan. In 1554 he succeeded his father as councillor in the court des aides of Périgueux, the members of which were soon afterwards incorporated in the Parliament of Bordeaux. But nature had not destined Montaigne for the duties of the magistracy; he saw too many sides of every question; he chose rather to fail in justice than in humanity. In 1565 he acquired a large fortune by marriage, and having lost his father, he retired from public functions in 1570, to enjoy a tranquil existence of meditation, and of rambling through books. He had published, a year before, in fulfilment of his father's desire, a translation of the Theologia Naturalis of Raimond de Sebonde, a Spanish philosopher of the fifteenth century; and now he occupied himself in preparing for the press the writings of his dead friend La Boétie. Love for his father and love for his friend were the two passions of Montaigne's life. From 1571 to 1580 he dwelt in retreat, in company with his books and his ideas, indulging his humour for tranquil freedom of the mind. It was his custom to enrich the margins of his books with notes, and his earliest essays may be regarded as an extension of such notes; Plutarch and Seneca were, above all, his favourites; afterwards, the volume which he read with most enjoyment, and annotated most curiously, was that of his own life.

And, indeed, Montaigne's daily life, with outward monotony and internal variety, was a pleasant miscellany on which to comment. He was of a middle temperament, "between the jovial and the melancholic"; a lover of solitude, yet the reverse of morose; choosing bright companions rather than sad; able to be silent, as the mood took him, or to gossip; loyal and frank; a hater of hypocrisy and falsehood; a despiser of empty ceremony; disposed to interpret all things to the best; cheerful among his children; careless of exercising authority; incapable of household management; trustful and kind towards his neighbours; indulgent in his judgments, yet warm in his admiration of old, heroic virtue. His health, which in boyhood had been robust, was shaken in middle life by an internal malady. He travelled in the hope of finding strength, visiting Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Tyrol, and observing, with a serious amusement, the varieties of men and manners. While still absent from France, in 1581, he learned that he had been elected mayor of Bordeaux; he hesitated in accepting an honourable but irksome public office; the King permitted no dallying, and Montaigne obeyed. Two years later the mayor was re-elected; it was a period of difficulty; a Catholic and a Royalist, he had a heretic brother, and himself yielded to the charm of Henri of Navarre; "for the Ghibelline I was a Guelph, for the Guelph a Ghibelline." When, in 1585, pestilence raged in Bordeaux, Montaigne's second period of office had almost expired; he quitted the city, and the election of his successor took place in his absence. His last years were brightened by the friendship—almost filial—of Mlle. de Gournay, an ardent admirer, and afterwards editor, of the Essais. In 1592 Montaigne died, when midway in his sixtieth year.

The first two books of the Essais were published by their author in 1580; in 1588 they appeared in an augmented text, with the addition of the third book. The text superintended by Mlle. de Gournay, based upon a revised and enlarged copy left by Montaigne, is of the year 1595.

The unity of the book, which makes no pretence to unity, may be found in the fact that all its topics are concerned with a common subject—the nature of man; that the writer accepts himself as the example of humanity most open to his observation; and that the same tranquil, yet insatiable curiosity is everywhere present. Man, as conceived by Montaigne, is of all creatures the most variable, unstable, inconstant. The species includes the saint and the brute, the hero and the craven, while between the extremes lies the average man, who may be anything that nature, custom, or circumstances make him. And as the species varies indefinitely, so each individual varies endlessly from himself: his conscience controls his temperament; his temperament betrays his conscience; external events transform him from what he was. Do we seek to establish our moral being upon the rock of philosophical dogma? The rock gives way under our feet, and scatters as if sand. Such truth as we can attain by reason is relative truth; let us pass through knowledge to a wise acceptance of our ignorance; let us be contented with the probabilities which are all that our reason can attain. The truths of conduct, as far as they are ascertainable, were known long since to the ancient moralists. Can any virtue surpass the old Roman virtue? We believe in God, although we know little about His nature or His operations; and why should we disbelieve in Christianity, which happens to be part of the system of things under which we are born? But why, also, should we pay such a compliment to opinions different from our own as to burn a heretic because he prefers the Pope of Geneva to the Pope of Rome? Let each of us ask himself, "Que sais-je?"—"What do I really know?" and the answer will serve to temper our zeal.