THE PLÉIADE—RONSARD—THE LESSER STARS—‘THE DÉFENSE ET ILLUSTRATION DE LA LANGUE FRANÇAISE’—THE WORK OF RONSARD—HIS PLACE IN POETRY—JOACHIM DU BELLAY—REMI BELLEAU—BAÏF—DU BARTAS—D’AUBIGNÉ—THE DRAMATIC WORK OF THE PLÉIADE—JODELLE—GREVIN AND LA TAILLE—MONTCHRESTIEN—THE COMEDY—‘LA RECONNUE’—CAUSES OF FAILURE OF EARLY DRAMATIC LITERATURE.

The French literature of the later Renaissance is divided, almost as it were by visible mechanical barriers, from what had gone before, and from what was to come after. The distinction is less marked in prose, but even here it is real, while the poetry of the time is the work of a school, with a creed and a set of formulas all its own. It has ever been much the custom of the French, whether in politics, in art, or in literature, to move altogether, and to make a clean sweep. Every new school rejects its predecessor with more or less indiscriminate contempt, becomes a tyranny in its turn, and is, in the fulness of time, rebelled against, and destroyed. The process has never been shown more fully and with fewer disturbing elements than in the history of the PlÉiade. Exactly in the middle of the century a small body of young writers took possession of French poetry, dismissed the forms of their elders as “grocery” (Épiceries), just as the romantic writers of this century labelled the classic style as “wig” (perruque), and ruled without opposition, till one fine day they were scored out by the equally irreverent, though more pedantic, and less generous pen of Malherbe.

The poets of the PlÉiade are entitled to the respect of the historian of literature for several reasons, and to his gratitude for this, that they formed a compact body which he need be at no trouble to disentangle, because they stood deliberately apart, or to define, because they did the work for him, by publishing an exhaustive manifesto of their principles. There is nowhere a better example of that situation nette which the French love. The PlÉiade knew its own mind, and what it wanted to do. Moreover, if it did not always achieve its purpose, at least it knew how the work was to be done. Some slight doubt exists as to the names of the seven forming the original constellation. The most orthodox list gives Daurat, Ronsard, Du Bellay, Belleau, BaÏf, Jodelle, and Pontus de Thyard, but another of less authority replaces the sixth and seventh by ScÉvole de Sainte Marthe and Muret. It does not matter which of the two is taken, since both include the important names. Jodelle has a notable place in French dramatic literature, but the drama is subordinate in the history of the PlÉiade. Pontus de Thyard (1521-1603), though the first-born and the last survivor of the fellowship, is not an essential member, and may pass behind his leaders, Ronsard, Du Bellay, Belleau, and BaÏf.

All these poets were by birth gentlemen, and several of them were highly connected. Pierre de Ronsard, the master of them all, and the “Prince of Poets” of his century, not only in the opinion of his countrymen, but by the consent of many foreigners, was the son of the maÎtre d’hÔtel (steward of the household) of Francis I. He was born at VendÔme in 1524, and entered the service of the Duke of Orleans as page. When James V. brought back his second wife, Mary of Lorraine, to Scotland, Ronsard followed them, and spent thirty months in their service, returning to France by way of England. When hors de page, he was attached to the suite of more than one ambassador. Among them was Lazare de BaÏf, whose natural son, Jean Antoine de BaÏf, was receiving his education under the care of the humanist, Jean Dorat, Daurat, or D’Aurat (1508-1588). Ronsard showed a taste for reading from his early years, and if he rejected the forms of Clement Marot, it was not without knowing them. An illness, which may have been the result of his sufferings during a shipwreck on the coast of Scotland, left him deaf in 1546. He now, and as it would seem not unwillingly, left the service of the Court, and betook himself to study at the college of Coqueret under the direction of Daurat, and in company of Jean Antoine de BaÏf. Remi Belleau was a pupil at the same college. An accidental meeting between Ronsard and Joachim du Bellay added this latter to the fellowship. "The lesser stars." The four, Daurat advising and approving, undertook to revolutionise French poetry, and they did it. The later dates in their biographies may be briefly noted. Ronsard enjoyed great favour at Court, earned not only by admiration of his poetry, but by his singularly amiable personal character. On the death of Charles IX., himself a fair verse-writer, Ronsard retired to the Abbey of Croix Val, of which he was lay abbot, and died in 1584. Remi Belleau (1528-1577) passed a peaceful life in the service of the house of Lorraine, and was carried to his grave by brother poets. Joachim du Bellay (1525?-1560), member of a very distinguished family of soldiers and statesmen, some of whom made their mark in French memoir literature, accompanied his kinsman the Cardinal du Bellay to Rome, but fell out of favour and returned to France. He was of weak health, and appears to have suffered from family troubles. He died suddenly of apoplexy at the age of thirty-six. Jean Antoine de BaÏf (1532-1589) had a busy life in public affairs, and suffered changes of fortune. Characteristically enough he founded an early French Academy, for which he received a patent from Charles IX. in 1570.[89] It lasted for several years.

The DÉfense et Illustration de la Langue FranÇaise, which is the manifesto of the school, was written by Joachim du Bellay. It was published in February 1550, according to the modern calendar, but 1549 in the old, which made the year begin on Lady Day. If Boileau, before dismissing Ronsard and his friends so contemptuously, had taken the trouble to read this treatise, he would have learnt that it was not their intention to speak Latin and Greek in French, or to make a new art after their own fashion. Their purpose was very different. It was their aim to write good French, but to use all the resources of the language in order to reproduce the forms of the great classic literatures—the Epic, the Drama, the Satire, the Ode, and the Italian models—the Canzone and the Sonnet. They held, and not unjustly, that the French verse of Marot’s school was poor in rhythm, and “frivolous.” It had come to be satisfied with turning out nine insignificant verses, if it can put “le petit mot pour rire” into the tenth. A sham Middle Age was lingering on—the mere remnants and echo of the Roman de la Rose allegory. Du Bellay speaks of the Roman and of its authors—Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meung—with respect. He was sufficiently an admirer of French mediÆval literature to quote the stories of Lancelot as fit to be used for epic. But he insists that the prosaic language used by the school of Marot was not adequate for poetry, and that a new poetic tongue must be formed, which could only be done by the ardent study of Greek and Latin. What the student learnt he was to assimilate and make French. There was nothing in this which was not at once inevitable when the immense influence of the classic literatures in that generation is allowed for, and was not also in itself sound. It was a misfortune that the PlÉiade cut itself off so completely from the mediÆval tradition; and there is unanswerable force in Sainte-Beuve’s criticism that if Ronsard and his school were looking for Épiceries, they had as good cause to condemn the sonnet as the “rondeau” or the “ballade.” Yet it was not the great mediÆval literature which they had before them. That was already forgotten. They did a work by which the seventeenth century, while treating them with contempt, profited. If they did not achieve all they aimed at, it was because no one among them—not even Ronsard—was a man of the first rank of poetic genius, not because their principles and method were at fault. And there is this to be said—that if some of their followers fell into extravagances of language (the poets of the PlÉiade proper and their contemporaries were not, at least in their earlier years, open to the reproach), they did not impoverish the French tongue. They did not reduce it, when used for literary purposes, to colourless general terms; nor did they tie the Alexandrine into sets of two lines by making a meaningless rule that the sense was never to be carried over into a third. Their revolution was more fruitful, and less merely destructive, than Malherbe’s.

Although Du Bellay appeared as the spokesman of the school, he was instantly eclipsed by Ronsard. The Odes of the “Prince of Poets” were published in 1550, at about the same time as the Sonnets to Olive (an anagram of Mlle. de Viole) of Du Bellay. He was at once accepted as the poet of his time, and his supremacy endured till his death without question, except for one moment in his later years when it appeared to be shaken by the popularity of Du Bartas. The Amours de Cassandre[90] followed in 1552, with a second edition in the following years, which contains the famous “Mignonne allons voir si la rose.” In 1555 appeared the Hymns, and in 1560 he collected all he had as yet written in a complete edition at the request of Queen Mary, who was his ardent admirer, as was also Queen Elizabeth. Between 1561 and 1574 he was attached to the service of Charles IX., who treated him with kindness, and whose “virtues” he celebrated, even after his death, in terms which sound strange to us. As Court poet he wrote “by command,” which is not a favourable source of inspiration. It was to please the king that he wrote his fragmentary epic, Franciade, which his most sincere admirers have to confess is “dull.” It had the misfortune to be published on the eve of the Saint Bartholomew. Yet his Discours des MisÈres du Temps (1562) and his Remonstrance au Peuple de France (1563) belong to these years, and they were drawn from him by the shocking miseries of the time. Henri III., though generous to some, was less a favourer of poets than his brother, and Ronsard was free to express himself in the lyrics and melancholy sonnets of his last years. At the very end, when his health was broken down and his mind affected, he made an unfortunate and negligible revision of his work, published in 1584.

It is perhaps some excuse for the sweeping condemnation of Ronsard by Malherbe that even the Romantic reaction of this century has not succeeded in regaining favour for the part of the poetry of the chief of the PlÉiade for which he was most admired by his contemporaries, and of which he was most proud. In the vigorous sonnet beginning “Ils ont menty, d’Aurat,” written against Du Bartas—or at least against his admirers—Ronsard appealed to his own Francus, and

as witnesses that he was not less than the author of the Semaine. Now it is precisely this part of his poetry, that in which he would be an epic poet, or wear the Pindaric robe, which is dead, and can by no effort be brought to life again. When Malherbe condemned it he passed a sentence which no later admirer of the poetry of the sixteenth century has been able to reverse. The gross error of the later school was that it did not make allowance for the passing and temporary fashion of imitation of the classic models, and did shut its eyes to the fact that, besides Ronsard le Pindarique, there was Ronsard the author of “Mignonne allons voir si la Rose,” and the beautiful sonnet to HÉlÈne, “Quand tu seras bien vieille.” This Ronsard was a very genuine, and elegant, if not very great, poet. That he would not himself have been pleased to know that he was to be admired for these themes, and not for his Franciade and his Pindaric ode to Michel de L’Hospital, is possible. Yet his erroneous estimate of the relative values of different parts of his work does not affect his real glory, which is that he raised French verse from the condition of prose tagged with rhyme, into which it had fallen, gave it a new melody, and breathed into it a new poetic spirit. He did for France what Surrey and Wyatt began, and Spenser and Sidney completed for us, what the Spanish poets of the school of Boscan and Garcilaso attempted for Castilian. He set up a model of sweeter and statelier measures, and he brought the ancient classic inspiration out of pure scholarship into literature. If he had far less power than his English contemporaries, he was infinitely more original than the Spaniards. There is no mere slavish repetition of foreign models in him, but the constant and successful effort to give a genuine French equivalent, which is quite another thing.

The followers of “a prince” are inevitably eclipsed by their leader, and that is the more likely to be the case when a body of poets are memorable for their accomplishment, their general poetic spirit, their scholarship—for anything, in short, rather than for power. Power, indeed, is not what can be attributed to the poets of the PlÉiade. When it appears among the younger men it is in the verse of the Huguenots Du Bartas and D’AubignÉ, in whom there is again less scholarly accomplishment. Among the other poets of Ronsard’s school, from his brother in literature Joachim du Bellay down to his last follower Jean Bertaut (1532-1611), the best is commonly what is melancholy or what is gay and graceful. Joachim du Bellay[91] published his first volume, which contained the Sonnets to Olive, the MusagnÆomachie, or “Battle between the Muses and Ignorance,” and some Odes in 1550, a little before Ronsard. The sonnet had already been written in French by Mellin de Saint-Gelais, but Du Bellay claimed, and was allowed, the honour of having first “acclimatised” it. The model adopted and constantly followed in France was the Petrarchan. His most memorable work was born of his new experiences in Italy. It was there that he wrote the AntiquitÉs de Rome—the sonnets translated by Spenser under the name of The Ruins—his Regrets, in which he gives expression to his disgust at the papal capital and his home-sickness, and his Jeux Rustiques, inspired by the Latin poetry of Navagiero, the Venetian who advised Boscan to write in the Italian manner. Du Bellay himself wrote Latin verse. The Jeux Rustiques, published at the same time as the Regrets, 1558, contain his best known pieces, the perfectly gay and graceful Vanneur (“the Winnower”), and the lines to Venus, in which he has done all there was to be done with that very artificial product the pastoral poetry of learned poets. Withal Du Bellay carried beak and claws. He was praised for having put the epigram into the sonnet, and there are certainly few better examples how that can be achieved than in the numbers of the Regrets which contrast the outward courtesy and dignity with the inward treason and meanness of the Roman court. Du Bellay is more uniformly excellent than Ronsard, but the bulk of his work is far smaller and he tried less.

The gentil Belleau was a less strong man than Du Bellay, and it is to the honour of his critical faculty that he recognised the truth. He left the ode, Pindaric or Horatian, alone, and devoted himself either to translation (he translated Anacreon) or to poetry of the style of the Jeux Rustiques. His Bergerie, 1565, and his DeuxiÈme JournÉe de la Bergerie, 1572, are of this order, while his Amours et Nouveau Eschanges des pierres prÉcieuses vertus et propriÉtÉs d’icelles is an imitation, or adaptation, of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the poets of the Greek decadence, based on a book about the properties of precious stones, written by a Bishop of Rennes in the eleventh century. Our own Euphuists must have gone to the same source. The first Bergerie contains the really delightful

which ranks with Du Bellay’s Vanneur as the masterpiece of the style. It is a curious comment on the theory which accounts for literature by the “circumstances” that all this light verse about graceful things belongs to the years of the conspiracy of Amboise, when the streets of that town were, in the vehement words of Regnier de la Planche, tapestried with the corpses of executed Huguenots, and while the wars of Religion, the Saint Bartholomew, and the League were deluging France in blood.

Like Belleau, J. B. de BaÏf was a translator. His versions of the Antigone, and of the Eunuchus of Terence, were published in 1565, and other translations of Greek and Latin drama were left unpublished by him at his death, and have been lost. BaÏf was also the author of a comedy imitated from Plautus, Le Brave, acted in 1567. His poetry includes the Ravissement d’Europe and Les Amours de MÉline, 1552, Les Amours de Francine, 1555—these are sonnet cycles—the MÉtÉores of 1567, his Étrennes de Poesie FranÇaise, 1574, and the Mimes, 1576. BaÏf, who was more scholar than poet, took the lead in an attempt to reform French spelling, which indeed at that time stood in no small need of being reduced to order, and he also was one of a small body of writers who repeated in France the hopeless attempt to force the poetry of modern languages to conform to classic metres. His Academy has already been mentioned. Jean Daurat and Pontus de Thyard are chiefly worth mention because their names are associated with those of more original men. Daurat was a humanist, whose share in producing the poetry of the PlÉiade was to direct the reading of his pupils at the college of Coqueret, and to write Greek and Latin verse in praise of them. His French verse is insignificant. Pontus de Thyard could claim to be a forerunner of the PlÉiade, for his Erreurs Amoureuses appeared shortly before the first published verse of Ronsard and Du Bellay. But he soon renounced verse for theology and mathematics.[92]

Of most of the poets who followed “the conquering banner” of their Prince, Ronsard, as of the lesser learned poets of Spain, no detailed mention can be made here. The abundance of literary talent which has seldom been wanting in France accounts sufficiently for the “crop of poets” which sprang up “at the summons of Du Bellay, and under the hand of Ronsard.” That time of war, oppression, and conspiracy might have seemed to be “wholly consecrated to the Muses.” Olivier de Magny (d. 1560), Jacques Tahureau (1527-1555), Nicolas Denisot (1515-1559), called “le Comte d’Alsinois” by anagram, Louis le Caron (1536-1617), who called himself Charondas, Estienne de la Boetie (1530-1563), the friend of Montaigne, who indeed saved him from oblivion, and others whom it were tedious to mention, were men of talent, respectable members of the army of minor poets, which in nations of considerable literary faculty, and in times of literary vigour, has never been wanting. One really original poet usually makes many who are accomplished, but who without the example might never have written, and would certainly not have written so well. It was perhaps the necessity for finding a rhyme to haut which induced Boileau to quote, from among all the followers of Ronsard, the names of “Desportes and Bertaut.” His dogmatic assertion that they were made “more restrained” by the fall of Ronsard is perfectly unfounded. Desportes (1546-1606), who in character was a courtier of the baser kind, owed his great popularity at Court to the fact that he was an echo of one part of Ronsard.[93] Bertaut (1552-1611), another courtier, was also another Desportes. Their greater measure was mainly due to the fact that they represented the decadence of their school.

There are, however, three poets of the later sixteenth century in France who stand apart, though all are fairly describable as followers of Ronsard, and to one of them it was given, in the French phrase, to “tell its fact” to the meticulous criticism of Malherbe. They are Du Bartas, AubignÉ, and Regnier.

Guillaume Salluste, Seigneur du Bartas, was born in or about 1544, at Montfort, near Auch, in Gascony. He served Henry IV. both in diplomacy and in war, and died in 1590 of wounds received at the battle of Ivry. Du Bartas was one of the many of his time who in a once favourite phrase were “tam Marte quam Mercurio,” equally devoted to arms and to letters. On the suggestion of Jeanne d’Albret, the Queen of Navarre, he began by writing a poem on the story of Judith; but his fame was gained by the Semaine, or “Week of Creation,” published in 1579. It was followed by the Uranie, the Triomphe de la Foi, and the Seconde Semaine, of which part was published in 1584, and which remained unfinished at his death. Du Bartas is an interesting figure, and his literary fortune has been curious. With men of his class in France a profession of Protestantism was commonly only a form of political opposition. They were “of the Religion” because they were the enemies of the House of Guise, and the great majority of them fell away from it in the following generations. But with Du Bartas the religious enthusiasm was manifestly real. He was of the Puritan type, and in that lies part, at least, of the explanation of his strange literary fortune in his own country. He was at first extraordinarily popular. Even Ronsard praised him, and sent him a present of a pen. But his party began to claim that he was the superior of the courtier poet. This not unnaturally drew from Ronsard the emphatic denial of the sonnet to Daurat, and the opinion of Frenchmen has been favourable to the older poet. Du Bartas has been treated with neglect, and even contempt, by his own countrymen.[94] Abroad he has had better fortune. He was widely translated. The English version of Joshua Sylvester was long popular with us, and in comparatively recent times he has been praised by Goethe for showing qualities wanting in other Frenchmen. But Frenchmen, to whom the Puritan type has always been uncongenial, have disliked him on those very grounds. They have always insisted on looking exclusively at his faults, his want of taste, his provincialism, and his pedantry. All are undeniable, but the critics who have endeavoured to secure justice for the PlÉiade ought to have remembered that this last was only an exaggeration of the teaching of Ronsard and Du Bellay. They had recommended adaptation of the language of classic poetry, Greek and Latin. They had used inversions, and had argued that French writers were entitled to form compound words on the Greek model. Du Bellay, for example, justifies the construction of such a word as “fervÊtu.” Du Bartas certainly took a very wide licence in this respect. He wrote such lines as—

and careful examiners have found more than three hundred examples of such words in his verse. As the French have not chosen to make use of a freedom legitimate enough in a language which contains such words as marche-pied and aigredoux, Du Bartas has suffered for his boldness. It is easy enough to find pedantry and bad taste in him; and it would be easy, by confining attention to the “Pindaric” side of Ronsard, to show that he was a stilted and pompous writer. But it is no less the case that there is a vehement grandeur in Du Bartas which is painfully rare in the correct poetry of France. It may be fairly said that if the quality of the French mind, which Frenchmen call “le bon sens franÇais,” achieved one of its triumphs when it wholly rejected Du Bartas, it also condemned its literature to possess no Milton. When it is your exclusive ambition to be without fault, to be merely correct, your safest course is to abstain. If you will keep from the “wine cup” and “the red gold,” from love, adventure, and ambition, then you may “easy live and quiet die”; but you will hardly do anything passionate. Nothing is so “correct” as cold water.

Theodore Agrippa D’AubignÉ, the contemporary, friend, and kindred spirit of Du Bartas, was a gentleman of an ancient family in Saintonge. His long life was full of agitation and many-sided activity. Jean D’AubignÉ, his father, was Chancellor of Navarre. The son was born in 1550, and received a careful education, by which he unquestionably profited, though we may doubt the exact accuracy of his own assertion that he could read Greek, Latin, and Hebrew at the age of six. Jean D’AubignÉ was a vehement Calvinist. It is one of the best-known stories of the time that he made his son, then a mere boy, swear, in the presence of the decapitated heads of La Renaudie and the other chiefs of the conspiracy of Amboise, to revenge their deaths. D’AubignÉ kept this “oath of Hannibal” to the end of his life. When only nine years old he risked the stake, “his horror of the Mass having overcome his fear of the fire.” He took part in the defence of Orleans in the first war of Religion, and from thence escaped to Geneva, where he studied under Theodore Beza. At a later time he served under CondÉ, and then attached himself to Henry of Navarre. It was his good fortune to be in hiding for a duel when the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew took place. He remained with Henry at the French Court. During this period he seems to have so far departed from the rigidity of his principles as to bow down with his master “in the temple of Rimmon.” At this time he certainly met Ronsard, and fell under his influence. He wrote court poetry, composed a tragedy, and belonged to the Academy of BaÏf. When Henry of Navarre made his escape, D’AubignÉ accompanied him. The Bearnais had no more daring or faithful servant, and none who spoke to him with a ruder frankness. The abjuration of Henry IV. was a bitter blow to D’AubignÉ, and he risked his master’s favour by his blunt condemnation of that politic act. Yet Henry knew the essential fidelity of D’AubignÉ, and left him the possession of his offices of Governor of Saintonge and Vice-Admiral of Poitou. After the murder of the king he took part in the unfortunate opposition to Marie de Medici. The publication of his Histoire Universelle aroused enemies against him, and in 1620 he fled to Geneva, where he died in 1630, energetic to the last—“lassÉ de vains travaux, rassasiÉ, et non ennuyÉ de vivre,” as he describes himself in his will. The prose work of D’AubignÉ is very large, and will be dealt with elsewhere.[95] His poetry is divided into the lighter verse which he wrote under the influence of Ronsard, and Les Tragiques, which unquestionably show the influence of Du Bartas. If his own words are to be taken in the literal sense, they were written in the very stress of the war with the League; but there is internal evidence that this can only be true of the three first. The others were at least largely written after the peace of Vervins in 1598. There are seven poems in Les Tragiques, called MisÈres, Princes, La Chambre DorÉe, Les Feux, Les Fers, Vengeances, Jugement. They are historical poems, written in verse which is sometimes heavy, but often magnificent, and always animated by a grim force. D’AubignÉ denounces wickedness in the form of a Latin satirist; but the spirit comes from the Hebrew prophet, and that is perhaps belittled if we call it satire.

It would be difficult to find a sharper contrast than is shown between the long restless life of D’AubignÉ and the career of Mathurin Regnier. He was born at Chartres in 1573, in a family of the middle class, and was nephew to the prosperous court poet Desportes. His family destined him to the Church, and he was tonsured at the age of eleven. By the influence, in all probability, of his uncle, he was appointed to a place in the suite of the Cardinal Joyeuse, French Ambassador in Italy. Later on he was provided for by a canonry in his native town, and died there in 1613. The character of Regnier may unfortunately be described nearly in the terms which the Duke of Wellington used of an English military adventurer who had served under him in the Peninsula. He was, said the Duke, “a brave fellow, but a sad drunken dog.” A considerable poet, but a sad drunken dog, is, it is to be feared, the description of Regnier. His habits rather than the quality of his verse justify the epithet of “cynical” which has been applied to him.[96] Although he wrote other verse, including some fine lyrics, Regnier is chiefly memorable as a satirist. This he was in the proper sense of the word. He attacked vices, and did not only say savage things about people whom he disliked. In the form of his verse Regnier was so far correct that he escaped the condemnation which the school of Malherbe passed on all the other poets of his century. Yet he kept much of the freedom of the earlier time, and in his ninth satire he pointed out with admirable precision exactly what were the weaknesses of the reform of Malherbe. There is an individuality and an air of sincerity in Regnier which saves his work from the too common fault of modern satire—which is to be a mere echo of Juvenal, verse written not because the author feels any indignation, but only because he thought it a distinguished action to imitate the classics and scold his contemporaries.

The ambition of the PlÉiade included the reform of dramatic as well as of other literature. Its poets wished to replace the Mysteries, Moralities, “Sotties,” and “Farces” by tragedy and comedy. Their chances of success in this field might have seemed, if anything, more promising than elsewhere. The taste for the theatre was very strong in France. In Paris there existed a guild, established by charter from the king in 1402, for the performance of mysteries and moralities, which possessed a theatre at the Hospital de la TrinitÉ, near the gate of St Denis. Two other societies, the Clercs de la Bazoche, or Clerks of the Parliament of Paris, and the Enfants sans Souci, a body of volunteers who performed farces, existed by the side of, and to some extent under the control of, the chief guild, which was called the ConfrÉrie de la Passion. In the provinces there were numerous societies named puys which existed to produce plays. And while the stage enjoyed so much popularity, a number of causes were at work to render it no longer possible to continue the religious plays of the Middle Ages. The influence of the Renaissance helped to discredit their form, while the spread of the Reformation began to make their old downright realistic piety look ridiculous. As early as 1540 the Parliament of Paris had protested against the performances of the ConfrÉrie de la Passion as leading to scandal. In 1548 it was strictly forbidden to present religious mysteries.

As the poets of the PlÉiade were just about organising themselves in those years, and were to present their first attempt to repeat the classic models in French in 1552, it would seem on the face of it that they had a singularly favourable opportunity. They had only to step into the place left vacant. But that was in reality far from being the case. Although the ConfrÉrie de la Passion was forbidden to play sacred mysteries, it was left in possession of its exclusive privilege to open a theatre in Paris, and was thus able to silence all rivals. The tradesmen and artisans who formed the guild were little likely to favour their contemptuous literary rivals, while the poets were as little disposed to go cap in hand to such masters. Thus the men of letters were practically shut out from the real stage, and were driven to seek a chance of getting their pieces acted at Court or in colleges. They had no access to any body of actors. We need not attach too great importance to this exclusion from the real theatre. If Jodelle and Garnier had possessed dramatic genius of a high order, their works would bear witness for them. In time, too—the date is 1588—the ConfrÉrie de la Passion did consent to the establishment of an independent theatre. After the restoration of peace in 1593 there was always one in Paris. Thenceforward it was within the power of any Frenchman who possessed the necessary faculties to be the Lope de Vega or the Shakespeare of his country. If none appeared, it was doubtless because no such Frenchman was born; and perhaps in the long-run the non-appearance of the right man is the one adequate explanation of the want of any form of literature in any country. Yet it may be allowed that the monopoly of the ConfrÉrie did have a certain effect on the dramatic work of the PlÉiade by confining them to coteries and colleges, and so intensifying whatever tendency there was in them to produce mere school exercises on a classic model. It must also be kept in mind that the sacred mysteries continued to be acted in the provinces. A few traces of them are to be found to this day in the form of the religious marionette plays performed in Brittany. In Paris itself the ConfrÉrie de la Passion continued to give profane mysteries, which appear to have been long straggling successions of scenes taken from history, or from the tales of chivalry through Ariosto. Its stage has this much vitality, that it was used for political purposes by the League. But all this belongs to the history of the stage proper or to curiosity, not to literature.

Whatever causes may be held to be responsible, the fact remains that the dramatic is the weakest part of the work of the poets of the PlÉiade. Here they made little effort to assimilate and reproduce in genuine French form. They repeated the shape slavishly. In tragedy they did not try at all to go beyond the model given them by Buchanan in the Latin plays written for his pupils at Bordeaux, which again were taken from Seneca. In comedy there was less slavery, and less break with the mediÆval literature. But the poets did comparatively little in comedy; and the liveliest comic writer of the later sixteenth century in France, Larivey, who was of Italian descent, did not achieve more than to give bold adaptations of Italian originals.

The title of father of modern French dramatic literature, tragic and comic, belongs to Estienne Jodelle, Seigneur de Lymodin. He was born at Paris in 1532. Jodelle was a copious miscellaneous writer; but only two tragedies, one comedy, and some poetry written in his youth, survive.[97] His ClÉopÂtre Captive, and the comedy EugÈne, were performed before King Henry II. in 1552 by Jodelle himself and his friends. The king was so pleased that he gave the dramatist five hundred crowns, a handsome sum of money at the time. In the pardonable joy of their hearts, Jodelle and his friends celebrated their success by a supper at Arcueil, which became the excuse for a scandal. Being full of a classic zeal, not always according to knowledge, the poets impounded a goat, crowned it, and chanted some nonsense verses, largely composed of Greek words, the work of BaÏf. The New Learning had always been open to the reproach of paganism, and the Reformers accused the party of having performed a heathen sacrifice. The ConfrÉrie de la Passion, glad of an excuse to bring rivals into trouble, joined in the cry. Jodelle’s second tragedy, Didon se sacrifiant, was written later, and apparently never played. In 1558 he fell into disgrace through the failure of a mask on the Argonauts, provided for the reception of Henry II. at the HÔtel de Ville. It is said that the stage carpenter mistook the word rochers for clochers, and provided bell-towers instead of rocks in the properties. Jodelle never recovered favour; but this accident is not accountable for the misfortunes of his later years. There is evidence that “much bad living kill’d Teste Noire at last,” for Jodelle, unlike his brother poets, who seem to have been orderly people, was of the character of our own Bohemian forerunners of Shakespeare. He died worn out, and in great distress, in 1573.

Jodelle is of importance rather because of his date, and on the ground that he indicated the road which French literary drama was to follow, than for his intrinsic merits. His tragedies are little more than school exercises. His model was the Latin tragedy of Seneca, which in itself is a thin dry copy of the mere machinery of the Greeks. The popularity of these very tiresome pieces during the Renaissance can be partly accounted for by the fact that Greek was far less familiar than Latin. But it is easy to make too much of this. Sophocles and Euripides were not unknown. Buchanan caused Greek plays to be performed by his pupils at Bordeaux; while, if Jodelle could not read Greek himself, he might have had the help of Daurat, and he had the translations of Sophocles by Lazare de BaÏf and others to guide him to a better model than Seneca. They would have been quite enough for a writer who had any dramatic instinct. But Seneca was easy to imitate. A well-known story, told mostly in long speeches, by a messenger or other “utility,” no play of character, and a chorus which chants commonplaces, having only a very general relation to the story these are the notes of the Senecan tragedy. It is obvious that they are easy to reproduce. The opening they afforded for serious moral reflection must have had an attraction for the poets of the PlÉiade, who had a very definite purpose to expel “frivolity” from poetry.

A tragedy which began in such conditions as those described here could hardly hope to become a national drama. It is certainly the fact that very little which was written before the seventeenth century has much interest except as a curiosity. Jodelle and his immediate successors can hardly be said even to have written for the stage in the proper sense of the word. When they were acted at all, it was at the Court or in colleges. They had so far an influence that they succeeded in establishing the chorus as a necessity. It was introduced even into the wild anti-Royalist pieces of the League; but these writers understood the classic model so little that they treated the chorus as a mere means of filling in the intervals between the acts, and not as an integral part of the play. They in fact exaggerated one of the defects of Seneca, as is the way with the mere imitator. We have to wait for the generation of Rotrou and Corneille before seeing how an intelligent attempt could be made to give a new form to the principles of the classic drama. As for the earlier poets, as they chose to allow themselves to be bound by the pedantic rules laid down by Joseph Scaliger in his De Tragediis et Comediis (1560), which said that this and the other must be done by every right-minded man because Seneca had done them, their plays were doomed to want life.

Of Jodelle’s two tragedies, the ClÉopÂtre possesses, though by no merit of his, the better plot. The story of the death of the Queen of Egypt is in itself so picturesque and so complete that it would be difficult to spoil it altogether. His second tragedy is rather better written. There is more force in the dialogue, more poetry in the moral reflections of the chorus of Didon; but then the plot is inevitably inferior. It is difficult indeed to see what could be done with the story of Dido and Æneas on the stage, unless the intention is to make the hero odious or ridiculous. It is true that Jodelle does not fail to attain to a comic effect, which is, however, too obviously undesigned. The last words he puts into the mouth of Æneas are—

These are too like the sailor’s traditional excuse to be worthy of the son of Anchises, who at least had the grace to sail “multa gemens, magnoque animum labefactus amore.” It is but just to add that not dissimilar plunges into the ridiculous where what was called for was the sublime, might be found in the great, the truly great, Corneille. It must also be remembered that Jodelle established the Alexandrine as the metre of French tragedy, though he did not submit to the strict rules enforced in the next century.

The names of Jacques GrÉvin and Jean de la Taille are entitled to little more than bare mention among the followers of Jodelle. Grevin (1540?-1570) was for a time a favourite with Ronsard; but he was a strong Calvinist, and broke with the Prince of Poets in resentment against the Discours sur les MisÈres du Temps. Ronsard retaliated by cancelling his praise of GrÉvin. One tragedy, CÉsar, and two comedies, La TrÉsoriÈre and Les Esbahis, all three written in his youth, still survive.[98] Jacques de la Taille (1540?-1608), a soldier, and in poetry a follower of Ronsard, lives in all literary histories by a piece of unjust ill-luck. He wrote the two famous lines at which everybody has laughed—

M. Suard, who habitually took a contemptuous tone to the early dramatists of his country, made the remark—a very fair example of the silly would-be clever—that La Taille found it easier to shorten his words than to lengthen his line. Yet such a stroke of mistaken realism as this is less essentially foolish than the flat absurdity which Jodelle puts into the mouth of Æneas. The attempt to be true to life was at least meritorious in intention, and there is force in La Taille’s tragedy of Les Gabaonites, on the story of the sons of Rizpah.[99]

Robert Garnier (1545-1601) was a far stronger man than any of these three. He was born at La FertÉ-Bernard, was a magistrate all his life, and was finally made Counsellor of State by Henry IV. Garnier was much less open to the reproach of being “a barren rascal” than Jodelle, Grevin, or La Taille. His list of plays is of respectable length. Porcie was written in 1568, CornÉlie (translated into English by Kyd) in 1574, and Marc Antoine in 1578. L’Hippolyte, the Troade, and the Antigone are translations or adaptations of Sophocles and Euripides. There are two other plays more original than either of these—Les Juives (1583), a “Sacred Tragedy” founded on the story of Zedekiah; and Bradamante (1582), a romantic drama founded on passages in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso.[100] These two plays are of special interest. Les Juives is an example of all that could be done with Garnier’s model. The story supplies just such a catastrophe as was fit to be treated in the measured, and, when good, stately Senecan fashion. The prophet, to whom Garnier gives no name, Zedekiah and his mother Amutal (SÉdÉcie and Amital in the French), the King of Babylon and his general Nabuzardan, are exactly the characters required; while the chorus is abundantly provided with matter for lamentations, reflections on the instability of all human things, the justice of God, and the cruelty of the wicked. In this case also the chorus of Jewesses, to which the play owes its name, though less truly a personage in the drama than it is in the Œdipus the King or the Agamemnon, is not a mere voice used to fill up the intervals between the acts. Garnier was very free from the want of taste which allowed Jodelle to drop into vulgarity. He had an instinct for the “grand manner,” and does not fall below his subject. The Bradamante is a still more interesting play than Les Juives. There is something almost pathetic about it, for in the Bradamante Garnier may be said to have brought French literary drama to within touch of emancipation from the tyranny of Seneca’s form. If he had gone a step further, or had found a worthy follower, the work of Corneille might have been antedated by half a century, and in happier circumstances. The subject is neither classical nor Biblical, and this perhaps gave Garnier the courage to drop the chorus. As the Bradamante is not, in the full sense of the word, a tragedy, since it has a happy ending, the chorus was not strictly necessary; but as it was not meant to be a comic piece, the natural course at the time would have been to supply one. As has been noted above, the chorus was habitually introduced into pieces which were meant to be serious even when the subject was not classical. At the same time Garnier showed, by introducing a “confidant,” that he had a real sense of the theatre. He knew that over and above the main personages there must always be some who explain, or to whom explanations are made, and to whom it falls to render the action intelligible. The name does not alter the nature of the thing. Horatio is a confidant, and Mercutio is not much else, though we do not call them by the title. That they are also interesting human beings is an argument for incorporating the chorus in the play, not a proof that some such wheel in the machinery is superfluous.[101] Then, as he was not under the obligation to maintain the perpetual gravity proper to classical and Biblical subjects, Garnier felt free to relieve the heroic passages by comedy. Aymon, the father of Bradamante, is a human, peppery, and peremptory old gentleman, very much the barba of the Spanish comedia, and a true figure of comedy. This, it need hardly be said, is quite a different thing from the introduction of scenes of clowns who have nothing to do with the action. It is a detail worth noting that Garnier, who does not seem to have cared much whether his play was acted or not, adds a note to his preliminary argument to tell any manager who chooses to bring it out that he is free to replace the absent chorus by interludes between the acts, “in order that they may not be confounded, and not to join together what requires a certain interval of time.” This, besides proving how fully the French dramatists of the day accepted Scaliger’s most disputable theory, that the chorus served only to separate the acts, is an example of what has already been said of the Spanish and the English stages—namely, that an audience expected something more than the play, which the Spaniards gave in saynetes and dances between the acts, and the English inserted in the body of the piece.

Antoine de Montchrestien, the last survivor of the French dramatists of the sixteenth century, may by a slight stretch of charity be described as the Racine of the epoch in which Garnier was the Corneille. The date of his birth is unknown, but he was killed in a skirmish during a Huguenot rising in 1621, after a very agitated life. At one time he was an exile in England on a charge of homicide, and owed his pardon to the intercession of James I., whose favour he had earned by a play on the death of Mary Queen of Scots, called L’Écossaise. It is sad to relate that he was afterwards accused of coining false money. In 1615 he published a TraitÉ de l’Économie Politique, and was indeed the first to use the term. Montchrestien wrote a poem Suzanne, and a Bergerie, or Pastoral, in addition to his six tragedies—Sophonisbe, or La CartagÉnoise (translated from Trissino), Les LacÈnes, David, Aman, Hector, and L’Écossaise. Montchrestien was an accomplished writer of the school to which he belonged, but his plays show no great originality. They were published in 1601, and were probably all written in his youth. It does not appear that they were ever acted.

The comedy of this school was less a pure imitation of classic models, but it was also on the whole less interesting, and cannot be described as original, since it took freely from the Italians. Every one of the nine surviving plays of Pierre Larivey (1540?-1611?) has an Italian original. He was descended from the family of the Giunti, printers at Florence and Venice.[102] His father had settled at Troyes, and had translated his name into L’ArrivÉ, which was again corrupted into Larivey. Pierre was a copious translator from his father’s native language. The nine comedies he left are adaptations as well as translations. He subjected his originals to the revision which the English playwright has so often applied to French plays, but it was not for the purpose of forcing them to become decent. Through Larivey much of the common matter of comedy was handed on to MoliÈre, who may also have owed his predecessor something on the side of the technical skill. It is, however, mainly on this ground that they belong to French literature. The comedy of the later sixteenth century is on the whole unimportant. It cannot be said to have had any particular character of its own. One piece has indeed some promise and considerable merit of execution. This is the Reconnue of Belleau.[103]

The story has the merit of being drawn from the real life of the time. A young lady named Henriette has been placed while a child in a religious house at Poitiers. She has no vocation, and escapes from the convent to become a Huguenot. In the storm of the city by the king’s army she is made prize by a certain Captain Rodomont, whom (a pleasing touch of the manners of the age) she fully recognises as her lawful master. The captain is a very honest man, who is well disposed to marry his captive. But he is summoned away to take part in the recovery of Havre from the English, and leaves her, having always “treated her as a sister,” in charge of an old lawyer in Paris. At this point the play begins. The old lawyer falls in love with Henriette, and thereby arouses the jealousy of his wife. To quiet her he arranges to marry Henriette to his clerk, Jehan, who is likely to prove a complacent husband. He tells Henriette that the captain has been killed at Havre. In the meantime we learn that a certain young advocate has fallen in love with Henriette. She, who would willingly marry either the captain or the advocate—for she is a downright though honest young person—nevertheless resigns herself to marry Jehan, seeing that the captain is dead, and she dare not go home. At this crisis the captain turns up enriched by booty, and immediately afterwards Henriette’s father. The “recognition” gives its name to the play. Henriette is married to the advocate. The captain is consoled with the promise of another wife, and all ends happily. Here are the elements of a very lively play, and one can imagine what Lope de Vega or Dekker would have made of them. Belleau falls much short of what was possible, largely because his respect for classic models made him feel it incumbent on him to tell his story, not by dialogue and action, but by narratives. The return of the captain, for instance, which might have made an excellent scene, is only described by the old lawyer’s servant. The merits of the comedy are none the less considerable. They lie in the brisk flowing verse of the dialogue, which, as was to be expected of “le gentil Belleau,” is wholly free from mere grossness, and in the human truth of the characters. Even the author’s excessive deference to the classics is partly atoned for. His descriptions of what it would have been better to tell by action are mostly given by Jeanne, the lawyer’s servant, who is an excellent study of that very French personage, the Bonne À tout faire, the general servant, who is partly the drudge, but also partly the friend, and a little the tyrant, of the family. Jeanne is truly the ancestress of the servante of MoliÈre. With La Reconnue, as with Garnier’s Bradamante, we feel that only a little was wanted to make a complete success. But that little was not supplied, and the difference between the complete and the incomplete is in itself infinite. "Causes of failure of the early dramatic literature." Of the dramatic work of the French poets of the later sixteenth century it has to be said that on the whole it was lost labour. The tragedy is too artificial, too slavishly imitated from a poor model. The comedy, as all can see who will look at the EugÈne of Jodelle, or the Esbahis of GrÉvin, was incoherent, being partly a rehandling of the “sotties” and the “farces” of the Middle Ages, partly an imitation of Plautus and Terence, nowhere an original growth. Its authors were men of letters, doing exercises in kinds of literature to which they were attracted by their prestige. They did not really work for the stage. Now the theatre, in the material sense, is as necessary to the dramatist as the model is to the painter. The most “learned” of artists will soon find that his work loses life and reality unless he keeps the living figure constantly before his eyes. A play is meant to be talked and acted to an audience. When it is written only to be read, it soon loses life. From “the cart of Thespis” down to the “four boards” of Lope de Rueda in the Spanish market-place, there has always been the stage first, and then the dramatic literature. That is equally true in France. The history of the French stage is continuous from the ConfrÉrie de la Passion, through the Enfants sans Souci, and the professional actors who succeeded them at the HÔtel de Bourgogne, down to the “maison de MoliÈre.” But in the sixteenth century it skirted literature, and the alliance was not made between them till the time of Rotrou and Corneille. So the earlier dramatic literature remains a curiosity, or at the most an indication of what was to come. Its best tragedy is an “essai pÂle et noble,” and its comedy a rough experiment, too often the very reverse of noble. In order to show how the writers of the great time, and of the eighteenth century classic school, while working on the same fund of principles, and with similar aims, differed from their predecessors, it would be necessary to go beyond the scope of this book.