CHAPTER I

The literature of the sixteenth century is dominated by two chief influences—that of the Renaissance and that of the Reformation. When French armies under Charles VIII. and Louis XII. made a descent on Italy, they found everywhere a recognition of the importance of art, an enthusiasm for beauty, a feeling for the Æsthetic as well as the scholarly aspects of antiquity, a new joy in life, an universal curiosity, a new confidence in human reason. To Latin culture a Greek culture had been added; and side by side with the mediÆval master of the understanding, Aristotle, the master of the imaginative reason, Plato, was held in honour. Before the first quarter of the sixteenth century closed, France had received a great gift from Italy, which profoundly modified, but by no means effaced, the characteristics of her national genius. The Reformation was a recovery of Christian antiquity and of Hebraism, and for a time the religious movement made common cause with the Renaissance; but the grave morals, the opposition of grace to nature, and the dogmatic spirit of theology after a time alienated the Reforming party from the mere humanism of literature and art. An interest in general ideas and a capacity for dealing with them were fostered by the study of antiquity both classical and Christian, by the meeting of various tendencies, and by the conflict of rival creeds. To embody general ideas in art under a presiding feeling for beauty, to harmonise thought and form, was the great work of the seventeenth century; but before this could be effected it was necessary that France should enjoy tranquillity after the strife of the civil wars.

Learning had received the distinction of court patronage when Louis XII. appointed the great scholar BudÉ his secretary. Around Francis I., although he was himself rather a lover of the splendour and ornament of the Renaissance than of its finer spirit, men of learning and poets gathered. On the suggestion of GUILLAUME BUDÉ he endowed professorships of Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, to which were added those of medicine, mathematics, and philosophy (1530-40), and in this projected foundation of the CollÈge de France an important step was made towards the secularisation of learned studies. The King's sister, MARGUERITE OF NAVARRE (1492-1549), perhaps the most accomplished woman of her time, represents more admirably than Francis the genius of the age. She studied Latin, Italian, Spanish, German, Hebrew, and, when forty, occupied herself with Greek. Her heart was ardent as well as her intellect; she was gay and mundane, and at the same time she was serious (with even a strain of mystical emotion) in her concern for religion. Although not in communion with the Reformers, she sympathised with them, and extended a generous protection to those who incurred danger through their liberal opinions. Her poems, Marguerites de la Marguerite des Princesses (1547), show the mediÆval influences forming a junction with those of the Renaissance. Some are religious, but side by side with her four dramatic Mysteries and her eloquent Triomphe de l'Agneau appears the Histoire des Satyres et Nymphes de Diane, imitated from the Italian of Sannazaro. Among her latest poems, which remained in manuscript until 1896, are a pastoral dramatic piece expressing her grief for the death of her brother Francis I.; a second dramatic poem, ComÉdie jouÉe au Mont de Marsan, in which love (human or divine) triumphs over the spirit of the world, over superstitious asceticism, and over the wiser temper of religious moderation. Les Prisons tells in allegory of her servitude to passion, to worldly ambition, and to the desire for human knowledge, until at last the divine love brought her deliverance. The union of the mundane and the moral spirit is singularly shown in Marguerite's collection of prose tales, written in imitation of Boccaccio, the HeptamÉron des Nouvelles (1558).

These tales were not an indiscretion of youth; probably Marguerite composed them a few years before her death; perhaps their licence and wanton mirth were meant to enliven the melancholy hours of her beloved brother; certainly the writer is ingenious in extracting edifying lessons from narratives which do not promise edification. They are not so gross as other writings of the time, and this is Marguerite's true defence; to laugh at the immoralities of monks and priests was a tradition in literature which neither the spirit of the Renaissance nor that of the Reformation condemned. A company of ladies and gentlemen, detained by floods on their return from the Pyrenean baths, beguile the time by telling these tales, and the pious widow Dame Oisille gives excellent assistance in showing how they tend to a moral purpose. The series, designed to equal in number the tales of the Decameron, is incomplete. Possibly Marguerite was aided by some one or more of the authors of whom she was the patroness and protector; but no sufficient evidence exists for the ascription of the HeptamÉron to Bonaventure des PÉriers.

Among the poets whom Marguerite received with favour at her court was CLÉMENT MAROT, the versifier, as characterised by Boileau, of "elegant badinage." His predecessors and early contemporaries in the opening years of the sixteenth century continued the manner of the so-called rhÉtoriqueurs, who endeavoured to maintain allegory, now decrepit or effete, with the aid of ingenuities of versification and pedantry of diction; or else they carried on something of the more living tradition of Villon or of Coquillard. Among the former, Jean le Maire de Belges deserves to be remembered less for his verse than for his prose work, Illustrations de Gaule et Singularitez de Troie, in which the Trojan origin of the French people is set forth with some feeling for beauty and a mass of crude erudition. ClÉment Marot, born at Cahors in 1495 or 1496, a poet's son, was for a time in the service of Francis I. as valet de chambre, and accompanied his master to the battle of Pavia, where he was wounded and made prisoner. Pursued by the Catholics as a heretic, and afterwards by the Genevan Calvinists as a libertine, he was protected as long as was possible by the King and by his sister. He died at Turin, a refugee to Italy, in 1544.

In his literary origins Marot belongs to the Middle Ages; he edited the Roman de la Rose and the works of Villon; his immediate masters were the grands rhÉtoriqueurs; but the spirit of the Renaissance and his own genius delivered him from the oppression of their authority, and his intellect was attracted by the revolt and the promise of freedom found in the Reforming party. A light and pleasure-loving nature, a temper which made the prudent conduct of life impossible, exposed him to risks, over which, aided by protectors whom he knew how to flatter with a delicate grace, he glided without fatal mishap. He did not bring to poetry depth of passion or solidity of thought; he brought what was needed—a bright intelligence, a sense of measure and proportion, grace, gaiety, esprit. Escaping, after his early Temple de Cupido, from the allegorising style, he learned to express his personal sentiments, and something of the gay, bourgeois spirit of France, with aristocratic distinction. His poetry of the court and of occasion has lost its savour; but when he writes familiarly (as in the ÉpÎtre au Roi pour avoir ÉtÉ derobÉ), or tells a short tale (like the fable of the rat and the lion), he is charmingly bright and natural. None of his poems—elegies, epistles, satires, songs, epigrams, rondeaux, pastorals, ballades—overwhelm us by their length; he was not a writer of vast imaginative ambitions. His best epigrams are masterpieces in their kind, with happy turns of thought and expression in which art seems to have the ease of nature. The satirical epistle supposed to be sent, not by Marot, but by his valet, to Marot's adversary, Sagon, is spirited in its insolence. L'Enfer is a satiric outbreak of indignation suggested by his imprisonment in the ChÂtelet on the charge of heresy. His versified translation of forty-nine Psalms added to his glory, and brought him the honour of personal danger from the hostility of the Sorbonne; but to attempt such a translation is to aim at what is impossible. His gift to French poetry is especially a gift of finer art—firm and delicate expression, felicity in rendering a thought or a feeling, certainty and grace in poetic evolution, skill in handling the decasyllabic line. A great poet Marot was not, and could not be; but, coming at a fortunate moment, his work served literature in important ways; it was a return from laboured rhetoric to nature. In the classical age his merit was recognised by La BruyÈre, and the author of the Fables and the Contes—in some respects a kindred spirit—acknowledged a debt to Marot.

From Marot as a poet much was learned by Marguerite of Navarre. Of his contemporaries, who were also disciples, the most distinguished was MELIN DE SAINT-GELAIS, and on the master's death Melin passed for an eminent poet. We can regard him now more justly, as one who in slender work sought for elegance, and fell into a mannered prettiness. While preserving something of the French spirit, he suffered from the frigid ingenuities which an imitation of Italian models suggested to him; but it cannot be forgotten that Saint-Gelais brought the sonnet from Italy into French poetry. The school of Marot, ambitious in little things, affected much the blason, which celebrates an eyebrow, a lip, a bosom, a jewel, a flower, a precious stone; lyrical inspiration was slender, but clearness and grace were worth attaining, and the conception of poetry as a fine art served to lead the way towards Ronsard and the PlÉiade.

The most powerful personality in literature of the first half of the sixteenth century was not a poet, though he wrote verses, but a great creator in imaginative prose, great partly by virtue of his native genius, partly because the sap of the new age of enthusiasm for science and learning was thronging in his veins—FRANÇOIS RABELAIS. Born about 1490 or 1495, at Chinon, in Touraine, of parents in a modest station, he received his education in the village of SeuillÉ and at the convent of La Baumette. He revolted against the routine of the schools, and longed for some nutriment more succulent and savoury. For fifteen years he lived as a Franciscan monk in the cell and cloisters of the monastery at Fontenay-le-Comte. In books, but not those of a monastic library, he found salvation; mathematics, astronomy, law, Latin, Greek consoled him during his period of uncongenial seclusion. His criminal companions—books which might be suspected of heresy—were sequestrated. The young Bishop of Maillezais—his friend Geoffroy d'Estissac, who had aided his studies—and the great scholar BudÉ came to his rescue, and passing first, by favour of the Pope, to the Benedictine abbey of Maillezais, before long he quitted the cloister, and, as a secular priest, began his wanderings of a scholar in search of universal knowledge. In 1530-31 he was at Montpellier, studying medicine and lecturing on medical works of Hippocrates and Galen; next year, at Lyons, one of the learned group gathered around the great printers of that city, he practised his art of physic in the public hospital, and was known as a scientific author. Towards the close of 1532 he re-edited the popular romance Chroniques Gargantuines, which tells the adventures of the "enormous giant Gargantua." It was eagerly read, and brought laughter to the lips of Master Rabelais' patients. Learning, he held, was good, but few things in this world are wholesomer than laughter. The success of the Chroniques seems to have moved him to write a continuation, and in 1533 appeared Pantagruel, the story of the deeds and prowess of Gargantua's giant son, newly composed by Alcofribas Nasier, an anagram which concealed the name of FranÇois Rabelais. It forms the second of the five books which make up its author's famous work. A recast or rather a new creation of the Chronicles of Gargantua, replacing the original Chroniques, followed in 1535. It was not until 1546 and 1552 that the second and—in its complete form—the third books of Pantagruel appeared, and the authorship was acknowledged. The last book was posthumous (1562 in part, 1564 in full), and the inferiority of style, together with the more bitter spirit of its satire, have led many critics to the opinion that it is only in part from the hand of the great and wise humourist.

Rabelais was in Rome in 1534, and again in 1535, as physician to the French ambassador, Jean du Bellay, Bishop of Paris. He pursued his scientific studies in medicine and botany, took lessons in Arabic, and had all a savant's intelligent curiosity for the remains of antiquity. Some years of his life were passed in wandering from one French university to another. Fearing the hostility of the Sorbonne, during the last illness of his protector Francis I., he fled to the imperial city of Metz. He was once again in Rome with Cardinal du Bellay, in 1549. Next year the author of Pantagruel was appointed curÉ of Meudon, near Paris, but, perhaps as a concession to public opinion, he resigned his clerical charges on the eve of the publication of his fourth book. Rabelais died probably in 1552 or 1553, aged about sixty years.

On his death it might well have been said that the gaiety of nations was eclipsed; but to his contemporaries Rabelais appeared less as the enormous humourist, the buffoon Homer, than as a great scholar and man of science, whose bright temper and mirthful conversation were in no way inconsistent with good sense, sound judgment, and even a habit of moderation. It is thus that he should still be regarded. Below his laughter lay wisdom; below his orgy of grossness lay a noble ideality; below the extravagances of his imagination lay the equilibrium of a spirit sane and strong. The life that was in him was so abounding and exultant that it broke all dikes and dams; and laughter for him needed no justification, it was a part of this abounding life. After the mediÆval asceticism and the intellectual bondage of scholasticism, life in Rabelais has its vast outbreak and explosion; he would be no fragment of humanity, but a complete man. He would enjoy the world to the full, and yet at the same time there is something of stoicism in his philosophy of life; while gaily accepting the good things of the earth, he would hold himself detached from the gifts of fortune, and possess his soul in a strenuous sanity. Let us return—such is his teaching—to nature, honouring the body, but giving higher honour to the intellect and to the moral feeling; let us take life seriously, and therefore gaily; let us face death cheerfully, knowing that we do not wholly die; with light in the understanding and love in the heart, we can confront all dangers and defy all doubts.

He is the creator of characters which are types. His giants—Grandgousier, Gargantua, Pantagruel—are giants of good sense and large benevolence. The education of Pantagruel presents the ideal pedagogy of the Renaissance, an education of the whole man—mind and body—in contrast with the dwarfing subtleties and word-spinning of the effete mediÆval schools. Friar John is the monk whose passion for a life of activity cannot be restrained; his violence is the overflow of wholesome energy. It is to his care that the Abbey of Thelema is confided, where young men and maidens are to be occupied with every noble toil and every high delight, an abbey whose rule has but a single clause (since goodness has no rule save freedom), "Do what you will." Of such a fraternity, love and marriage are the happiest outcome. Panurge, for whom the suggestion was derived from the macaronic poet Folengo, is the fellow of Shakespeare's Falstaff, in his lack of morals, his egoism, his inexhaustible wit; he is the worst and best of company. We would dispense with such a disreputable associate if we could, but save that he is a "very wicked lewd rogue," he is "the most virtuous man in the world," and we cannot part with him. Panurge would marry, but fears lest he may be the victim of a faithless wife; every mode of divination, every source of prediction except one is resorted to, and still his fate hangs threatening; it only remains to consult the oracle of La Dive Bouteille. The voyaging quest is long and perilous; in each island at which the adventurers touch, some social or ecclesiastical abuse is exhibited for ridicule; the word of the oracle is in the end the mysterious "Drink"—drink, that is, if one may venture to interpret an oracle, of the pure water of wisdom and knowledge, and let the unknown future rest.

The obscenity and ordure of Rabelais were to the taste of his time; his severer censures of Church and State were disguised by his buffoonery; flinging out his good sense and wise counsels with a liberal hand, he also wields vigorously the dunghill pitchfork. If he is gross beyond what can be described, he is not, apart from the evil of such grossness, a corrupter of morals, unless morals be corrupted by a belief in the goodness of the natural man. The graver wrongs of his age—wars of ambition, the abuse of public justice, the hypocrisies, cruelties, and lethargy of the ecclesiastics, distrust of the intellectual movement, spurious ideals of life—are vigorously condemned. Rabelais loves goodness, charity, truth; he pleads for the right of manhood to a full and free development of all its powers; and if questions of original sin and divine grace trouble him little, and his creed has some of the hardihood of the Renaissance, he is full of filial gratitude to le bon Dieu for His gift of life, and of a world in which to live strongly should be to live joyously.

The influence of Rabelais is seen in the writers of prose tales who were his contemporaries and successors; but they want his broad good sense and real temperance. BONAVENTURE DES PÉRIERS, whom Marguerite of Navarre favoured, and whose Nouvelles RÉcrÉations, with more of the tradition of the French fabliaux and farces and less of the Italian manner, have something in common with the stories of the HeptamÉron, died in desperation by his own hand about 1543. His Lucianic dialogues which compose the Cymbalum Mundi show the audacity of scepticism which the new ideas of the Renaissance engendered in ill-balanced spirits. With all his boldness and ardour Rabelais exercised a certain discretion, and in revising his own text clearly exhibited a desire to temper valour with prudence.

It is remarkable that just at the time when Rabelais published the second and best book of his Pantagruel, in which the ideality and the realism of the Renaissance blossom to the full, there was a certain revival of the chivalric romance. The Spanish Amadis des Gaules (1540-48), translated by Herberay des Essarts, was a distant echo of the Romances of the Round Table. The gallant achievements of courtly knights, their mystical and platonic loves, were a delight to Francis I., and charmed a whole generation. Thus, for the first time, the literature of Spain reached France, and the influence of Amadis reappears in the seventeenth century in the romances of d'UrfÉ and Mdlle. de ScudÉry.

If the genius of the Renaissance is expressed ardently and amply in the writings of Rabelais, the genius of the Reformation finds its highest and most characteristic utterance through one whom Rabelais describes as the "demoniacle" of Geneva—JEAN CALVIN (1509-64). The pale face and attenuated figure of the great Reformer, whose life was a long disease, yet whose indomitable will sustained him amid bodily infirmities, present a striking contrast to the sanguine health and overflowing animal spirits of the good physician who reckoned laughter among the means of grace. Yet Calvin was not merely a Reformer: he was also a humanist, who, in his own way, made a profound study of man, and who applied the learning of a master to the determination of dogma. His education was partly theological, partly legal; and in his body of doctrine appear some of the rigour, the severity, and the formal procedures of the law. Indignation against the imprisonment and burning of Protestants, under the pretence that they were rebellious anabaptists, drew him from obscurity; silence, he thought, was treason. He addressed to the King an eloquent letter, in which he maintained that the Reformed faith was neither new nor tending towards schism, and next year (1536) he published his lucid and logical exposition of Protestant doctrine—the ChristianÆ Religionis Institutio. It placed him, at the age of twenty-seven, as leader in the forefront of the new religious movement.

But the movement was not merely learned, it was popular, and Calvin was resolved to present his work to French readers in their own tongue. His translation—the Institution—appeared probably in 1541. Perhaps no work by an author of seven-and-twenty had ever so great an influence. It consists of four books—of God, of Jesus as a Mediator, of the effects of His mediatorial work, and of the exterior forms of the Church. The generous illusion of Rabelais, that human nature is essentially good, has no place in Calvin's system. Man is fallen and condemned under the law; all his righteousness is as filthy rags; God, of His mere good pleasure, from all eternity predestinated some men to eternal life and others to eternal death; the Son of God came to earth to redeem the elect; through the operation of the Holy Spirit in the gift of faith they are united to Christ, are justified through His righteousness imputed to them, and are sanctified in their hearts; the Church is the body of the faithful in every land; the officers of the Church are chosen by the people; the sacraments are two—baptism and the Lord's Supper. In his spirit of system, his clearness, and the logical enchainment of his ideas, Calvin is eminently French. On the one side he saw the Church of Rome, with—as he held—its human tradition, its mass of human superstitions, intervening between the soul and God; on the other side were the scepticism, the worldliness, the religious indifference of the Renaissance. Within the Reforming party there was the conflict of private opinions. Calvin desired to establish once for all, on the basis of the Scriptures, a coherent system of dogma which should impose itself upon the minds of men as of divine authority, which should be at once a barrier against the dangers of superstition and the dangers of libertine speculation. As the leaders of the French Revolution propounded political constitutions founded on the idea of the rights of man, so Calvin aimed at setting forth a creed proceeding, if we may so put it, from a conception of the absolute rights of God. Through the mere good pleasure of our Creator, Ruler, Judge, we are what we are.

It is not perhaps too much to say that Calvin is the greatest writer of the sixteenth century. He learned much from the prose of Latin antiquity. Clearness, precision, ordonnance, sobriety, intellectual energy are compensations for his lack of grace, imagination, sensibility, and religious unction. He wrote to convince, to impress his ideas upon other minds, and his austere purpose was attained. In the days of the pagan Renaissance, it was well for France that there should also be a Renaissance of moral rigour; if freedom was needful, so also was discipline. On the other hand, it may be admitted that Calvin's reason is sometimes the dupe of Calvin's reasoning.

His Life was written in French by his fellow-worker in the Reformation, ThÉodore de BÈze, who also recorded the history of the Reformed Churches in France (1580). BÈze and Viret, together with their leader Calvin, were eminent in pulpit exposition and exhortation, and in BÈze the preacher was conjoined with a poet. At Calvin's request he undertook his translation of the Psalms, to complete that by Marot, and in 1551 his sacred drama the TragÉdie FranÇaise du sacrifice d'Abraham, designed to inculcate the duty of entire surrender to the divine will, and written with a grave and restrained ardour, was presented at the University of Lausanne.

CHAPTER II

The classical Renaissance was not necessarily opposed to high ethical ideals; it was not wholly an affair of the sensuous imagination; it brought with it the conception of Roman virtue, and this might well unite itself (as we see afterwards in Corneille) with Christian faith. Among the many translators of the sixteenth century was Montaigne's early friend—the friend in memory of all his life—ÉTIENNE DE LA BOÉTIE (1530-63). It is not, however, for his fragments of Plutarch or his graceful rendering of Xenophon's Economics (named by him the Mesnagerie) that we remember La BoÉtie; it is rather for his eloquent pleading on behalf of freedom in the Discours de la Servitude Volontaire or Contr'un, written at sixteen—revised later—in which, with the rhetoric of youth, he utters his invective against tyranny. Before La BoÉtie's premature death the morals of antiquity as seen in action had been exhibited to French readers in the pages of Amyot's delightful translation of Plutarch's Lives (1559), to be followed, some years later, by his OEuvres Morales de Plutarque. JACQUES AMYOT (1513-93), from an ill-fed, ragged boy, rose to be the Bishop of Auxerre. His scholarship, seen not only in his Plutarch, but in his rendering of the Daphnis et ChloÉ of Longus, and other works, was exquisite; but still more admirable was his sense of the capacities of French prose. He divined with a rare instinct the genius of the language; he felt the affinities between his Greek original and the idioms of his own countrymen; he rather re-created than translated Plutarch. "We dunces," wrote Montaigne, "would have been lost, had not this book raised us from the mire; thanks to it, we now venture to speak and write; ... it is our breviary." The life and the ideas of the ancient world became the possession, not of scholars only, but of all French readers. The book was a school of manners and of thought, an inspirer of heroic deeds. "To love Plutarch," said the greatest Frenchman of the century, Henry of Navarre, "is to love me, for he was long the master of my youth."

It was such an interest in the life and ideas of antiquity as Amyot conveyed to the general mind of France that was wanting to Ronsard and the group of poets surrounding him. Their work was concerned primarily with literary form; of the life of the world and general ideas, apart from form, they took too little heed. The transition from Marot to Ronsard is to be traced chiefly through the school of Lyons. In that city of the South, letters flourished side by side with industry and commerce; Maurice ScÈve celebrated his mistress DÉlie, "object of the highest virtue," with Petrarchan ingenuities; and his pupil LOUISE LABÉ, "la belle CordiÈre," sang in her sonnets of a true passion felt, as she declares, "en ses os, en son sang, en son Âme." The Lyonese poets, though imbued with Platonic ideas, rather carry on the tradition of Marot than announce the PlÉiade. PIERRE DE RONSARD, born at a chÂteau a few leagues from VendÔme, in the year 1524, was in the service of the sons of Francis I. as page, was in Scotland with James V., and later had the prospect of a distinguished diplomatic career, when deafness, consequent on a serious malady, closed for him the avenue to public life. He threw himself ardently into the study of letters; in company with the boy Antoine de BaÏf he received lessons from an excellent Hellenist, Jean Daurat, soon to be principal of the CollÈge Coqueret. At the College a group of students—Ronsard, BaÏf, Joachim du Bellay, Remi Belleau—gathered about the master. The "Brigade" was formed, which, by-and-by, with the addition of Jodelle and Pontus de Thyard, and including Daurat, became the constellation of the PlÉiade. The seven associates read together, translated and imitated the classics; a common doctrine of art banded them in unity; they thought scorn of the vulgar ways of popular verse; poetry for them was an arduous and exquisite toil; its service was a religion. At length, in 1549, they flung out their manifesto—the DÉfense et Illustration de la Langue FranÇaise by Du Bellay, the most important study in literary criticism of the century. With this should be considered, as less important manifestoes, the later Art PoÉtique of Ronsard, and his prefaces to the Franciade. To formulate principles is not always to the advantage of a movement in literature; but champions need a banner, reformers can hardly dispense with a definite creed. Against the popular conception of the ignorant the PlÉiade maintained that poetry was a high and difficult form of art; against the pedantry of humanism they maintained that the native tongue of France admitted of literary art worthy to take its place beside that of Greece or Rome. The French literary vocabulary, they declared, has excellences of its own, but it needs to be enriched by technical terms, by words of local dialects, by prudent adoptions from Greek and Latin, by judicious developments of the existing families of words, by the recovery of words that have fallen into disuse.

It is unjust to the PlÉiade to say that they aimed at overloading poetic diction with neologisms of classical origin; they sought to innovate with discretion; but they unquestionably aimed at the formation of a poetic diction distinct from that of prose; they turned away from simplicity of speech to ingenious periphrasis; they desired a select, aristocratic idiom for the service of verse; they recommended a special syntax in imitation of the Latin; for the elder forms of French poetry they would substitute reproductions or re-creations of classical forms. Rondeaux, ballades, virelais, chants royaux, chansons are to be cast aside as Épiceries; and their place is to be taken by odes like those of Pindar or of Horace, by the elegy, satire, epigram, epic, or by newer forms justified by the practice of Italian masters. Rich but not over-curious rhymes are to be cultivated, with in general the alternation of masculine and feminine rhymes; the cÆsura is to fall in accordance with the meaning. Ronsard, more liberal than Du Bellay, permits, on the ground of classical example, the gliding from couplet to couplet without a pause. "The alexandrine holds in our language the place of heroic verse among the Greeks and Romans"—in this statement is indicated the chief service rendered to French poetry by Ronsard and the rest of the PlÉiade; they it was who, by their teaching and example, imposed on later writers that majestic line, possessing the most varied powers, capable of the finest achievements, which has yielded itself alike to the purposes of Racine and to those of Victor Hugo.

Ronsard and Du Bellay broke with the tradition of the Middle Ages, and inaugurated the French classical school; it remained for Malherbe, at a later date, to reform the reformation of the PlÉiade, and to win for himself the glory which properly belongs to his predecessors. Unfortunately from its origin the French classical school had in it the spirit of an intellectual aristocracy, which removed it from popular sympathies; unfortunately, also, the poets of the PlÉiade failed to perceive that the masterpieces of Greece and Rome are admirable, not because they belong to antiquity, but because they are founded on the imitation of nature and on ideas of the reason. They were regarded as authorities equal with nature or independent of it; and thus while the school of Ronsard did much to renew literary art, its teaching involved an error which eventually tended to the sterilisation of art. That error found its correction in the literature of the seventeenth century, and expressly in the doctrine set forth by Boileau; yet under the correction some of the consequences of the error remained. Ronsard and his followers, on the other hand, never made the assumption, common enough in the seventeenth century, that poetry could be manufactured by observance of the rules, nor did they suppose that the total play of emotion must be rationalised by the understanding; they left a place for the instinctive movements of poetic sensibility.

During forty years Ronsard remained the "Prince of Poets." Tasso sought his advice; the Chancellor Michel de l'Hospital wrote in his praise; BrantÔme placed him above Petrarch; Queen Elizabeth and Mary Stuart sent him gifts; Charles IX. on one occasion invited him to sit beside the throne. In his last hours he was still occupied with his art. His death, at the close of 1585, was felt as a national calamity, and pompous honours were awarded to his tomb. Yet Ronsard, though ambitious of literary distinction, did not lose his true self in a noisy fame. His was the delicate nature of an artist; his deafness perhaps added to his timidity and his love of retirement; we think of him in his garden, cultivating his roses as "the priest of Flora."

His work as a poet falls into four periods. From 1550 to 1554 he was a humanist without discretion or reserve. In the first three books of the Odes he attempted to rival Pindar; in the Amours de Cassandre he emulates the glory of Petrarch. From 1554 to 1560, abandoning his Pindarism, he was in discipleship to Anacreon¹ and Horace. It is the period of the less ambitious odes found in the fourth and fifth books, the period of the Amours de Marie and the Hymnes. From 1560 to 1574 he was a poet of the court and of courtly occasions, an eloquent declaimer on public events in the Discours des MisÈres de ce Temps, and the unfortunate epic poet of his unfinished Franciade. During the last ten years of his life he gave freer expression to his personal feelings, his sadness, his gladness; and to these years belong the admirable sonnets to HÉlÈne de SurgÈres, his autumnal love.

¹ i.e. the Anacreontic poems, found, and published in 1554, by Henri Estienne.

Ronsard's genius was lyrical and elegiac, but the tendencies of a time when the great affair was the organisation of social life, and as a consequence the limitation of individual and personal passions, were not favourable to the development of lyrical poetry. In his imitations of Pindar a narrative element checks the flight of song, and there is a certain unreality in the premeditated attempt to reproduce the passionate fluctuations and supposed disorder of his model. The study of Pindar, however, trained Ronsard in the handling of sustained periods of verse, and interested him in complex lyrical combinations. His Anacreontic and Horatian odes are far happier; among these some of his most delightful work is found. If he was deficient in great ideas, he had delicacy of sentiment and an exquisite sense of metrical harmony. The power which he possessed as a narrative poet appears best in episodes or epic fragments. His ambitious attempt to trace the origin of the French monarchy from the imaginary Trojan Francus was unfortunate in its subject, and equally unfortunate in its form—the rhyming decasyllabic verse.

In pieces which may be called hortatory, the pulpit eloquence, as it were, of a poet addressing his contemporaries on public matters, the utterances of a patriot and a citizen moved by pity for his fellows, such poetry as the Discours des MisÈres de ce Temps and the Institution pour l'Adolescence du Roi, Charles IX., Ronsard is original and impressive, a forerunner of the orator poets of the seventeenth century. His eclogues show a true feeling for external nature, touched at times by a tender sadness. When he escapes from the curiosities and the strain of his less happy Petrarchism, he is an admirable poet of love in song and sonnet; no more beautiful variation on the theme of "gather the rosebuds while ye may" exists than his sonnet Quand vous serez bien vieille, unless it be his dainty ode Mignonne, allons voir si la Rose. Passionate in the deepest and largest sense Ronsard is not; but it was much to be sincere and tender, to observe just measure, to render a subtle phase of emotion. In the fine melancholy of his elegiac poetry he is almost modern. Before all else he is a master of his instrument, an inventor of new effects and movements of the lyre; in his hands the entire rhythmical system was renewed or was purified. His dexterity in various metres was that of a great virtuoso, and it was not the mere dexterity which conquers difficulties, it was a skill inspired and sustained by the sentiment of metre.

Of the other members of the PlÉiade, one—Jodelle—is remembered chiefly in connection with the history of the drama. BaÏf (1532-89), son of the French ambassador at Venice, translated from Sophocles and Terence, imitated Plautus, Petrarchised in sonnets, took from Virgil's Georgics the inspiration of his MÉtÉores, was guided by the Anacreontic poems in his Passe-Temps, and would fain rival Theognis in his most original work Les Mimes, where a moral or satiric meaning masks behind an allegory or a fable. He desired to connect poetry more closely with music, and with this end in view thought to reform the spelling of words and to revive the quantitative metrical system of classical verse.² REMI BELLEAU (1528-77) practised the Horatian ode and the sonnet; translated Anacreon; followed the Neapolitan Sannazaro in his Bergerie of connected prose and verse, where the shepherds are persons of distinction arrayed in a pastoral disguise; and adapted the mediÆval lapidary (with imitations of the pseudo-Orpheus) to the taste of the Renaissance in his Amours et Nouveaux Éschanges des Pierres PrÉcieuses. These little myths and metamorphoses of gems are ingenious and graceful. The delicate feeling for nature which Belleau possessed is seen at its best in the charming song Avril, included in his somewhat incoherent Bergerie. Among his papers was found, after his death, a comedy, La Reconnue, which, if it has little dramatic power, shows a certain instinct for satire.

² The "BaÏfin verse," French not classical, is of fifteen syllables, divided into hemistichs of seven and eight syllables.

These are minor lights in the poetical constellation; but the star of JOACHIM DU BELLAY shines with a ray which, if less brilliant than that of Ronsard, has a finer and more penetrating influence. Du Bellay was born about 1525, at LirÉ, near Angers, of an illustrious family. His youth was unhappy, and a plaintive melancholy haunts his verse. Like Ronsard he suffered from deafness, and he has humorously sung its praises. Olive, fifty sonnets in honour of his Platonic or Petrarchan mistress, Mlle. de Viole (the letters of whose name are transposed to Olive), appeared almost at the same moment as the earliest Odes of Ronsard; but before long he could mock in sprightly stanzas the fantasies and excesses of the Petrarchan style. It was not until his residence in Rome (1551) as intendant of his cousin Cardinal du Bellay, the French ambassador, that he found his real self. In his AntiquitÉs de Rome he expresses the sentiment of ruins, the pathos of fallen greatness, as it had never been expressed before. The intrigues, corruption, and cynicism of Roman society, his broken health, an unfortunate passion for the Faustina of his Latin verses, and the longing for his beloved province and little LirÉ depressed his spirits; in the sonnets of his Regrets he embodied his intimate feelings, and that lively spirit of satire which the baseness of the Pontifical court summoned into life. This satiric vein had, indeed, already shown itself in his mocking counsel to le PoÈte courtisan: the courtier poet is to be a gentleman who writes at ease; he is not to trouble himself with study of the ancients; he is to produce only pieces of occasion, and these in a negligent style; the rarer and the smaller they are the better; and happily at last he may cease to bring forth even these. Possibly his poÈte courtisan was Melin de Saint-Gelais. As a rural poet Du Bellay is charming; his Jeux Rustiques, while owing much to the Lusus of the Venetian poet Navagero, have in them the true breath of the fields; it is his douce province of Anjou which inspires him; the song to VÉnus in its happiest stanzas is only less admirable than the Vanneur de BlÉ, with which more than any other single poem the memory of Du Bellay is associated. The personal note, which is in general absent from the poetry of Ronsard, is poignantly and exquisitely audible in the best pieces of Du Bellay. He did not live long enough to witness the complete triumph of the master; in 1560 he died exhausted, at the age of thirty-five.

The PlÉiade served literature by their attention to form, by their skill in poetic instrumentation; but they were incapable of interpreting life in any large and original way. In the hands of their successors poetry languished for want of an inspiring theme. PHILIPPE DESPORTES (1546-1606) was copious and skilful in his reproduction and imitation of Italian models; as a courtier poet he reduced literary flattery to a fine art; but his mannered graces are cold, his pretence of passion is a laboured kind of esprit. A copy of his works annotated by the hand of Malherbe survives; the comments, severe and just, remained unpublished, probably because the writer was unwilling to pursue an adversary whom death had removed from his way. Jean Bertaut, his disciple, is a lesser Desportes. Satire was developed by Jean Vauquelin de la Fresnaye, and to him we owe an Art PoÉtique (1575) which adapts to his own time the teaching of Aristotle and Horace. More interesting than these is JEAN PASSERAT (1534-1602), whose spirit is that of old France in its mirth and mockery, and whose more serious verse has the patriotism of French citizenship; his field was small, but he tilled his field gaily and courageously. The villanelle J'ai perdu ma tourterelle and the ode on May-day show Passerat's art in its happiest moments.

The way for a reform in dramatic poetry had been in some degree prepared by plays of the sixteenth century, written in Latin—the work of Buchanan, Muret, and others—by translations from Terence, Sophocles, Euripides, translations from Italian comedy, and renderings of one Spanish model, the highly-popular Celestina of Fernando de Rojas. The Latin plays were acted in schools. The first performance of a play in French belonging to the new tendency was that of Ronsard's translation of the Plutus of Aristophanes, in 1549, by his friends of the CollÈge de Coqueret. It was only by amateurs, and before a limited scholarly group of spectators, that the new classical tragedies could be presented. Gradually both tragedy and comedy came to be written solely with a view to publication in print. The mediÆval drama still held the stage.

JODELLE'S ClÉopÂtre (1552), performed with enthusiasm by amateurs, was therefore a false start; it was essentially literary, and not theatrical. Greek models were crudely imitated, with a lack of almost everything that gave life and charm to the Greek drama. Seneca was more accessible than Sophocles, and his faults were easy to imitate—his moralisings, his declamatory passages, his excess of emphasis. The so-called Aristotelian dramatic canons, formulated by Scaliger in his Poetic, were rigorously applied. Unity of place is preserved in ClÉopÂtre; the time of the action is reduced to twelve hours; there are interminable monologues, choral moralities, a ghost (in Seneca's manner), a narration of the heroine's death; of action there is none, the stage stands still. If Jodelle's Didon has some literary merit, it has little dramatic vitality. The oratorical energy of GrÉvin's Jules CÉsar, the studies of history in La Mort de Daire and La Mort d'Alexandre, by Jacques de La Taille, do not compensate their deficiency in the qualities required by the theatre. One tragedy alone, La Sultane, by Gabriel Bounin (1561), amid its violences and extravagances, shows a feeling for dramatic action and scenic effect.

Could the mediÆval mystery and classical tragedy be reconciled? The Protestant Reformer BÈze, in his Sacrifice d'Abraham, attempted something of the kind; his sacred drama is a mystery by its subject, a tragedy in the conduct of the action. Three tragedies on the life of David—one of them admirable in its rendering of the love of Michol, daughter of Saul—were published in 1556 by Loys Des-Masures: the stage arrangements are those of the mediÆval drama, but the unity of time is observed, and chorus and semi-chorus respond in alternate strains. No junction of dramatic systems essentially opposed proved in the end possible. When Jean de La Taille wrote on a biblical subject in his SaÜl le Furieux, a play remarkable for its impressive conception and development of the character of Saul, he composed it selon l'art, and in the manner of "the old tragic authors." He is uncompromising in his classical method; the mediÆval drama seemed inartificial to him in the large concessions granted by the spectators to the authors and actors; he would have what passes on the stage approximate, at least, to reality; the unities were accepted not merely on the supposed authority of Aristotle, but because they were an aid in attaining verisimilitude.

The most eminent name in the history of French tragedy of the sixteenth century is that of ROBERT GARNIER (1534-90). His discipleship to Seneca was at first that of a pupil who reproduces with exaggeration his master's errors. Sensible of the want of movement in his scenes, he proceeded in later plays to accumulate action upon action without reducing the action to unity. At length, in Les Juives (1583), which exhibits the revolt of the Jewish King and his punishment by Nabuchodonosor, he attained something of true pity and terror, beauty of characterisation, beauty of lyrical utterance in the plaintive songs of the chorus. Garnier was assuredly a poet; but even in Les Juives, the best tragedy of his century, he was not a master of dramatic art. If anywhere he is in a true sense dramatic, it is in his example of the new form of tragi-comedy. Bradamante, derived from the Orlando Furioso of Ariosto, shows not only poetic imagination, but a certain feeling for the requirements of the theatre.

Comedy in the sixteenth century, dating from Jodelle's EugÈne, is either a development of the mediÆval farce, indicated in point of form by the retention of octosyllabic verse, or an importation from the drama of Italy. Certain plays of Aristophanes, of Terence, of Plautus were translated; but, in truth, classical models had little influence. GrÉvin, while professing originality, really follows the traditions of the farce. Jean de La Taille, in his prose comedy Les Corrivaux, prepared the way for the easy and natural dialogue of the comic stage. The most remarkable group of sixteenth-century comedies are those translated in prose from the Italian, with such obvious adaptations as might suit them to French readers, by PIERRE DE LARIVEY (1540 to after 1611). Of the family of the Giunti, he had gallicised his own name (Giunti, i.e. ArrivÉs); and the originality of his plays is of a like kind with that of his name; they served at least to establish an Italian tradition for comedy, which was not without an influence in the seventeenth century; they served to advance the art of dialogue. If any comedy of the period stands out as superior to its fellows, it is Les Contents (1584), by Odet de TurnÈbe, a free imitation of Italian models united with something imported from the Spanish Celestina. Its intrigue is an Italian imbroglio; but there are lively and natural scenes, such as can but rarely be found among the predecessors of MoliÈre. In general the comedy of the sixteenth century is wildly confused in plot, conventional in its types of character, and too often as grossly indecent as the elder farces. Before the century closed, the pastoral drama had been discovered, and received influences from both Italy and Spain; the soil was being prepared for that delicate flower of poetry, but as yet its nurture was little understood, nor indeed can it be said to have ever taken kindly to the climate of France.

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;³ 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.

³ The narrative of the life of Bayard, by his secretary, writing under the name of "Le Loyal Serviteur" (1527), is admirable for its clearness, grace, and simplicity.

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.⁴

⁴ The MÉmoires-Journeaux of Pierre de l'Estoile are a great magazine of the gains of the writer's disinterested curiosity. The Lettres of D'Ossat and the NÉgotiations of the President Jeannin are of importance in the records of diplomacy.

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.⁵ 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.

⁵ Varro, who to a certain extent copied from Menippus the Gadarene, had called his satires SaturÆ MenippeÆ; hence the title.

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.

While Montaigne thus saps our confidence in the conclusions of the intellect, when they pass beyond a narrow bound, he pays a homage to the force of will; his admiration for the heroic men of Plutarch is ardent. An Epicurean by temperament, he is a Stoic through his imagination; but for us and for himself, who are no heroes, the appropriate form of Stoical virtue is moderation within our sphere, and a wise indifference, or at most a disinterested curiosity, in matters which lie beyond that sphere. Let us resign ourselves to life, such as it is; let us resign ourselves to death; and let the resignation be cheerful or even gay. To spend ourselves in attempted reforms of the world, of society, of governments, is vain. The world will go its own way; it is for us to accept things as they are, to observe the laws of our country because it is ours, to smile at them if we please, and to extract our private gains from a view of the reformers, the enthusiasts, the dogmatists, the credulous, the combatants; there is one heroism possible for us—the heroism of good sense. "It is an absolute perfection, and as it were divine," so we read on the last page of Florio's translation of the Essais, "for a man to know how to enjoy his being loyally. We seek for other conditions because we understand not the use of ours; and go out of ourselves, forasmuch as we know not what abiding there is. We may long enough get upon stilts, for be we upon them, yet must we go with our legs. And sit we upon the highest throne of the world, yet sit we upon our own tail. The best and most commendable lives, and best pleasing me are (in my conceit), those which with order are fitted, and with decorum are ranged, to the common mould and human model; but without wonder or extravagancy. Now hath old age need to be handled more tenderly. Let us recommend it unto that God who is the protector of health and fountain of all wisdom; but blithe and social." And with a stanza of Epicurean optimism from Horace the Essay closes.

Such, or somewhat after this fashion, is the doctrine of Montaigne. It is conveyed to the reader without system, in the most informal manner, in a series of discourses which seem to wander at their own will, resembling a bright and easy conversation, vivid with imagery, enlivened by anecdote and citation, reminiscences from history, observations of curious manners and customs, offering constantly to view the person of Montaigne himself in the easiest undress. The style, although really carefully studied and superintended, has an air of light facility, hardly interposing between the author and his reader; the book is of all books the most sociable, a living companion rather than a book, playful and humorous, amiable and well bred, learned without pedantry, and wise without severity.

During the last three years of his life Montaigne enjoyed the friendship of a disciple who was already celebrated for his eloquence as a preacher. PIERRE CHARRON (1541-1603), legist and theologian, under the influence of Montaigne's ideas, aspired to be a philosopher. It was as a theologian that he wrote his book of the Trois VeritÉs, which attempts to demonstrate the existence of God, the truth of Christianity, and the exclusive orthodoxy of the Roman communion. It was as a philosopher, in the TraitÉ de la Sagesse, that he systematised the informal scepticism of Montaigne. Instead of putting the question, "Que sais-je?" Charron ventures the assertion, "Je ne sais." He exhibits man's weakness, misery, and bondage to the passions; gives counsel for the enfranchisement of the mind; and studies the virtues of justice, prudence, temperance, and valiance. God has created man, says Charron, to know the truth; never can he know it of himself or by human means, and one who despairs of reason is in the best position for accepting divine instruction; a Pyrrhonist at least will never be a heretic; even if religion be regarded as an invention of man, it is an invention which has its uses. Not a few passages of the Sagesse are directly borrowed, with slight rehandling, from Montaigne and from Du Vair; but, instead of Montaigne's smiling agnosticism, we have a grave and formal indictment of humanity; we miss the genial humour and kindly temper of the master; we miss the amiable egotism and the play of a versatile spirit; we miss the charm of an incomparable literary style.