Joel Elias Spingarn

THE FORMATION OF THE CLASSIC IDEAL IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

I. The Romantic Revolt

It is a well-known fact that between 1600 and 1630 there was a break in the national evolution of French literature. This was especially so in the drama, and in France the drama is the connecting link between century and century. The dramatic works of the sixteenth century had been fashioned after the regular models borrowed by the Italians from Seneca. The change that came was a change from Italian classical to Spanish romantic models. The note of revolt was beginning to be heard in GrÉvin, De Laudun, and others. The seventeenth century opened with the production of Hardy's irregular drama, Les Amours de ThÉagÈne et CariclÉe (1601), and the influence of the Spanish romantic drama and the Italian pastoral, dominant for over a quarter of a century, was inaugurated in France.

The logic of this innovation was best expounded in Spain, and it was there that arguments in favor of the romantic and irregular drama were first formulated. The two most interesting defences of the Spanish national drama are doubtless the Egemplar PoÉtico of Juan de la Cueva (1606) and Lope de Vega's Arte Nuevo de Hacer Comedias (1609). Their inspiration is at bottom the same. Their authors were both classicists at heart, or rather classicists in theory, yet with differences. Juan de la Cueva's conception of poetry is entirely based on the precepts of the Italians, except in what regards the national drama, for here he is a partisan and a patriot. He insists that the difference of time and circumstance frees the Spanish playwright from all necessity of imitating the ancients or obeying their rules. "This change in the drama," he says, "was effected by wise men, who applied to new conditions the new things they found most suitable and expedient; for we must consider the various opinions, the times, and the manners, which make it necessary for us to change and vary our operations."[417] His theory of the drama was entirely opposed to his conception of the other forms of poetry. According to this standpoint, as a recent writer has put it, "the theatre was to imitate nature, and to please; poetry was to imitate the Italians, and satisfy the orthodox but minute critic."[418] Lope de Vega, writing three years later, does not deny the universal applicability of the Aristotelian canons, and even acknowledges that they are the only true rules. But the people demand romantic plays, and the people, rather than the poet's literary conscience, must be satisfied by the playwright. "I myself," he says, "write comedies according to the art invented by those whose sole object it is to obtain the applause of the crowd. After all, since it is the public who pays for these stupidities, why should we not serve what it wants?"[419]

Perhaps the most interesting of all the expositions of the theory of the Spanish national drama is a defence of Lope de Vega's plays by one Alfonso Sanchez, published in 1618 in France, or possibly in Spain with a false French imprint. The apology of Sanchez is comprehended in six distinct propositions. First, the arts have their foundation in nature. Secondly, a wise and learned man may alter many things in the existing arts. Thirdly, nature does not obey laws, but gives them. Fourthly, Lope de Vega has done well in creating a new art. Fifthly, in his writings everything is adjusted to art, and that a real and living art. Lastly, Lope de Vega has surpassed all the ancient poets.[420] The following passage may be extracted from this treatise, if only to show how little there was of novelty in the tenets of the French romanticists two centuries later:—

"Is it said that we have no infallible art by which to adjust our precepts? But who can doubt it? We have art, we have precepts and rules which bind us, and the principal precept is to imitate nature, for the works of poets express the nature, the manners, and the genius of the age in which they write.... Lope de Vega writes in conformity with art, because he follows nature. If, on the contrary, the Spanish drama adjusted itself to the rules and laws of the ancients, it would proceed against the requirements of nature, and against the foundations of poetry.... The great Lope has done things over and above the laws of the ancients, but never against these laws."

Another Spanish writer defines art as "an attentive observation of examples graded by experience, and reduced to method and the majesty of laws."[421]

It was this naturalistic conception of the poetic art, and especially of the drama, that obtained in France during the first thirty years of the seventeenth century. The French playwrights imitated the Spanish drama in practice, and from the Spanish theorists seemed to have derived the critical justification of their plays. Hardy himself, like Lope de Vega, argues that "everything which is approved by usage and the public taste is legitimate and more than legitimate." Another writer of this time, FranÇois Ogier, in the preface of the second edition of Jean de Schelandre's remarkable drama of Tyr et Sidon (1628), argues for intellectual independence of the ancients much in the same way as Giraldi Cintio, Pigna, and the other partisans of the romanzi had done three-quarters of a century before. The taste of every nation, he says, is quite different from any other. "The Greeks wrote for the Greeks, and in the judgment of the best men of their time they succeeded. But we should imitate them very much better by giving heed to the tastes of our own country, and the genius of our own language, than by forcing ourselves to follow step by step both their intention and their expression." This would seem to be at bottom Goethe's famous statement that we can best imitate the Greeks by trying to be as great men as they were. It is interesting to note, in all of these early critics, traces of that historical criticism which is usually regarded as the discovery of our own century. But after all, the French like the Spanish playwrights were merely beginning to practise what the Italian dramatists in their prefaces, and some of the Italian critics in their treatises, had been preaching for nearly a century.

The AbbÉ d'Aubignac speaks of Hardy as "arresting the progress of the French theatre"; and whatever practical improvements the French theatre owes to him, there can be little doubt that for a certain number of years the evolution of the classical drama was partly arrested by his efforts and the efforts of his school. But during this very period the foundations of the great literature that was to come were being built on classical lines; and the continuance of the classical tradition after 1630 was due to three distinct causes, each of which will be discussed by itself as briefly as possible. These three causes were the reaction against the PlÉiade, the second influx of the critical ideas of the Italian Renaissance, and the influence of the rationalistic philosophy of the period.

II. The Reaction against the PlÉiade

The reaction against the PlÉiade was effected, or at least begun, by Malherbe. Malherbe's power or message as a poet is of no concern here; in his rÔle of grammarian and critic he accomplished certain important and widespread reforms in French poetry. These reforms were connected chiefly, if not entirely, with the external or formal side of poetry. His work was that of a grammarian, of a prosodist—in a word, that of a purist. He did not, indeed, during his lifetime, publish any critical work, or formulate any critical system. But the reforms he executed were on this account no less influential or enduring. His critical attitude is to be looked for in the memoirs of his life written by his disciple Racan, and in his own Commentaire sur Desportes, which was not published in its entirety until very recently.[422] This commentary consists of a series of manuscript notes written by Malherbe about the year 1606 in the margins of a copy of Desportes. These notes are of a most fragmentary kind; they seldom go beyond a word or two of disapproval, such as faible, mal conÇu, superflu, sans jugement, sottise, or mal imaginÉ; and yet, together with a few detached utterances recorded in his letters and in the memoirs by Racan, they indicate quite clearly the critical attitude of Malherbe and the reforms he was bent on bringing about.

These reforms were, in the first place, largely linguistic. The PlÉiade had attempted to widen the sphere of poetic expression in French literature by the introduction of words from the classics, from the Italian and even the Spanish, from the provincial dialects, from the old romances, and from the terminology of the mechanic arts. All these archaisms, neologisms, Latinisms, compound words, and dialectic and technical expressions, Malherbe set about to eradicate from the French language. His object was to purify French, and, as it were, to centralize it. The test he set up was actual usage, and even this was narrowed down to the usage of the court. Ronsard had censured the exclusive use of courtly speech in poetry, on the ground that the courtier cares more about fighting well than about speaking or writing well. But Malherbe's ideal was the ideal of French classicism—the ideal of Boileau, Racine, and Bossuet. French was to be no longer a hodgepodge or a patois, but the pure and perfect speech of the king and his court. Malherbe, while thus reacting against the PlÉiade, made no pretensions of returning to the linguistic usages of Marot; his test was present usage, his model the living language.[423] At the same time his reforms in language, as in other things, represent a reaction against foreign innovations and a return to the pure French idiom. They were in the interest of the national traditions; and it is this national element which is his share in the body of neo-classical theory and practice. His reforms were all in the direction of that verbal and mechanical perfection, the love of which is innate in the French nature, and which forms the indigenous or racial element in French classicism. He eliminated from French verse hiatus, enjambement, inversions, false and imperfect rhymes, and licenses or cacophonies of all kinds. He gave it, as has been said, mechanical perfection,—

"Et rÉduisit la Muse aux rÈgles du devoir."

For such a man—tyran des mots et des syllabes, as Balzac called him—the higher qualities of poetry could have little or no meaning. His ideals were propriety, clearness, regularity, and force. These, as Chapelain perceived at the time, are oratorical rather than purely poetic qualities; yet for these, all the true qualities that go to make up a great poet were to be sacrificed. Of imagination and poetic sensibility he takes no account whatsoever. After the verbal perfection of the verse, the logical unity of the poem was his chief interest. Logic and reason are without doubt important things, but they cannot exist in poetry to the exclusion of imagination. By eliminating inspiration, as it were, Malherbe excluded the possibility of lyrical production in France throughout the period of classicism. He hated poetic fictions, since for him, as for Boileau, only actual reality is beautiful. If he permitted the employment of mythological figures, it was because they are reasonable and universally intelligible symbols. The French mind is essentially rational and logical, and Malherbe reintroduced this native rationality into French poetry. He set up common sense as a poetic ideal, and made poetry intelligible to the average mind. The PlÉiade had written for a learned literary coterie; Malherbe wrote for learned and unlearned alike. For the PlÉiade, poetry had been a divine office, a matter of prophetic inspiration; for Malherbe, it was a trade, a craft, to be learnt like any other. Du Bellay had said that "it is a well-accepted fact, according to the most learned men, that natural talents without learning can accomplish more in poetry than learning without natural talents." Malherbe, it has been neatly said, would have upheld the contrary doctrine that "learning without natural talents can accomplish more than natural talents without learning."[424] After all, eloquence was Malherbe's ideal; and as the French are by nature an eloquent rather than a poetic people, he deserves the honor of having first shown them how to regain their true inheritance. In a word, he accomplished for classical poetry in France all that the national instinct, the esprit gaulois, could accomplish by itself. Consistent structural laws for the larger poetic forms he could not give; these France owes to Italy. Nor could he appreciate the high notion of abstract perfection, or the classical conception of an absolute standard of taste—that of several expressions or several ways of doing something, one way and only one is the right one; this France owes to rationalistic philosophy. Malherbe seems almost to be echoing Montaigne when he says in a letter to Balzac:—

"Do you not know that the diversity of opinions is as natural as the difference of men's faces, and that to wish that what pleases or displeases us should please or displease everybody is to pass the limits where it seems that God in His omnipotence has commanded us to stop?"[425]

With this individualistic expression of the questions of opinion and taste, we have but to compare the following passage from La BruyÈre to indicate how far Malherbe is still from the classic ideal:—

III. The Second Influx of Italian Ideas

The second influx of Italian critical ideas into France came through two channels. In the first place, the direct literary relations between Italy and France during this period were very marked. The influence of Marino, who lived for a long time at Paris and published a number of his works there, was not inconsiderable, especially upon the French concettists and prÉcieux. Two Italian ladies founded and presided over the famous Hotel de Rambouillet,—Julie Savelli, Marquise de Pisani, and Catherine de Vivonne, Marquise de Rambouillet. It was partly to the influence of the Accademia della Crusca that the foundation of the French Academy was due. Chapelain and MÉnage were both members of the Italian society, and submitted to it their different opinions on a verse of Petrarch. Like the Accademia della Crusca, the French Academy purposed the preparation of a great dictionary; and each began its existence by attacking a great work of literature, the Gerusalemme Liberata in the case of the Italian society, Corneille's Cid in the case of the French. The regency of Marie de Medici, the supremacy of Mazarin, and other political events, all conspired to bring Italy and France into the closest social and literary relationship.

But the two individuals who first brought into French literature and naturalized the primal critical concepts of Italy were Chapelain and Balzac. Chapelain's private correspondence indicates how thorough was his acquaintance with the critical literature of Italy. "I have a particular affection for the Italian language," he wrote in 1639 to Balzac.[427] Of the Cid, he says that "in Italy it would be considered barbarous, and there is not an academy which would not banish it beyond the confines of its jurisdiction."[428] Speaking of the greatness of Ronsard, he says that his own opinion was in accord with that of "two great savants beyond the Alps, Speroni and Castelvetro";[429] and he had considerable correspondence with Balzac on the subject of the controversy between Caro and Castelvetro in the previous century. In a word, he knew and studied the critics and scholars of Italy, and was interested in discussing them. Balzac's interest, on the other hand, was rather toward Spanish literature; but he was the agent of the Cardinal de la Valette at Rome, and it was on his return to France that he published the first collection of his letters. The influence of both Chapelain and Balzac on French classicism was considerable. During the sixteenth century, literary criticism had been entirely in the hands of learned men. Chapelain and Balzac vulgarized the critical ideas of the Italian Renaissance, and made them popular, human, but inviolable. Balzac introduced into France the fine critical sense of the Italians; Chapelain introduced their formal rules, and imposed the three unities on French tragedy. Together they effected a humanizing of the classical ideal, even while subjecting it to rules.

It was to the same Italian influences that France owed the large number of artificial epics that appeared during this period. About ten epics were published in the fifteen years between 1650 and 1665.[430] The Italians of the sixteenth century had formulated a fixed theory of the artificial epic; and the nations of western Europe rivalled one another in attempting to make practical use of this theory. It is to this that the large number of Spanish epics in the sixteenth century and of French epics in the seventeenth may be ascribed. Among the latter we may mention ScudÉry's Alaric, Lemoyne's Saint Louis, Saint-Amant's Moyse SauvÉ, and Chapelain's own epic, La Pucelle, awaited by the public for many years, and published only to be damned forever by Boileau.

The prefaces of all these epics indicate clearly enough their indebtedness to the Italians. They were indeed scarcely more than attempts to put the rules and precepts of the Italian Renaissance into practice. "I then consulted the masters of this art," says ScudÉry, in the preface of Alaric, "that is to say, Aristotle and Horace, and after them Macrobius, Scaliger, Tasso, Castelvetro, Piccolomini, Vida, Vossius, Robortelli, Riccoboni, Paolo Beni, Mambrun, and several others; and passing from theory to practice I reread very carefully the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Æneid, the Pharsalia, the Thebaid, the Orlando Furioso, and the Gerusalemme Liberata, and many other epic poems in diverse languages." Similarly, Saint-Amant, in the preface of his Moyse SauvÉ, says that he had rigorously observed "the unities of action and place, which are the principal requirements of the epic; and besides, by an entirely new method, I have restricted my subject not only within twenty-four hours, the limit of the dramatic poem, but almost within half of that time. This is more than even Aristotle, Horace, Scaliger, Castelvetro, Piccolomini, and all the other moderns have ever required." It is obvious that for these epic-makers the rules and precepts of the Italians were the final tests of heroic poetry. Similarly, the AbbÉ d'Aubignac, at the beginning of his Pratique du ThÉÂtre, advises the dramatic poet to study, among other writers, "Aristotle, Horace, Castelvetro, Vida, Heinsius, Vossius, and Scaliger, of whom not a word should be lost." From the Italians also came the theory of poetry in general as held throughout the period of classicism, and expounded by the AbbÉ d'Aubignac, La MesnardiÈre, Corneille, Boileau, and numerous others; and it is hardly necessary to repeat that Rapin, tracing the history of criticism at the beginning of his RÉflexions sur la PoÉtique, deals with scarcely any critics but the Italians.

Besides the direct influence of the Italian critics, another influence contributed its share to the sum of critical ideas which French classicism owes to the Italian Renaissance. This was the tradition of Scaliger, carried on by the Dutch scholars Heinsius and Vossius. Daniel Heinsius was the pupil of Joseph Scaliger, the illustrious son of the author of the Poetics; and through Heinsius the dramatic theories of the elder Scaliger influenced classical tragedy in France. The treatise of Heinsius, De TragoediÆ Constitutione, published at Leyden in 1611, was called by Chapelain "the quintessence of Aristotle's Poetics"; and Chapelain called Heinsius himself "a prophet or sibyl in matters of criticism."[431] Annoted by Racine, cited as an infallible authority by Corneille, Heinsius's work exercised a marked influence on French tragedy by fixing upon it the laws of Scaliger; and later the works of Vossius coÖperated with those of Heinsius in widening the sphere of the Italian influence. It is evident, therefore, that while French literature had already during the sixteenth century taken from the Italian Renaissance its respect for antiquity and its admiration for classical mythology, the seventeenth century owed to Italy its definitive conception of the theory of poetry, and especially certain rigid structural laws for tragedy and epic. It may be said without exaggeration that there is not an essential idea or precept in the works of Corneille and D'Aubignac on dramatic poetry, or of Le Bossu and Mambrun on epic poetry, that cannot be found in the critical writings of the Italian Renaissance.

IV. The Influence of Rationalistic Philosophy

The influence of rationalistic philosophy on the general attitude of classicism manifested itself in what may be called the gradual rationalization of all that the Renaissance gave to France. The process thus effected is most definitely exhibited in the evolution of the rules which France owed to Italy. It has already been shown how the rules and precepts of the Italians had originally been based on authority alone, but had gradually obtained a general significance of their own, regardless of their ancient authority. Somewhat later, in England, the Aristotelian canons were defended by Ben Jonson on the ground that Aristotle understood the causes of things, and that what others had done by chance or custom, Aristotle did by reason alone.[432] By this time, then, the reasonableness of the Aristotelian canons was distinctly felt, although they were still regarded as having authoritativeness in themselves; and it was first in the French classicists of the seventeenth century that reason and the ancient rules were regarded as one and inseparable.

Rationalism, indeed, is to be found at the very outset of the critical activity of the Renaissance; and Vida's words, already cited, "Semper nutu rationis eant res," represent in part the attitude of the Renaissance mind toward literature. But the "reason" of the earlier theorists was merely empirical and individualistic; it did not differ essentially from Horace's ideal of "good sense." In fact, rationalism and humanism, while existing together throughout the Renaissance, were never to any extent harmonized; and extreme rationalism generally took the form of an avowed antagonism to Aristotle. The complete rationalization of the laws of literature is first evident toward the middle of the seventeenth century. "The rules of the theatre," says the AbbÉ d'Aubignac, at the beginning of his Pratique du ThÉÂtre, "are founded, not on authority, but on reason," and if they are called the rules of the ancients, it is simply "because the ancients have admirably practised them." Similarly, Corneille, in his discourse Des Trois UnitÉs, says that the unity of time would be arbitrary and tyrannical if it were merely required by Aristotle's Poetics, but that its real prop is the natural reason; and Boileau sums up the final attitude of classicism in these words:—

Here the rationalizing process is complete, and the actual requirements of authority become identical with the dictates of the reason.

The rules expounded by Boileau, while for the most part the same as those enunciated by the Italians, are no longer mere rules. They are laws dictated by abstract and universal reason, and hence inevitable and infallible; they are not tyrannical or arbitrary, but imposed upon us by the very nature of the human mind. This is not merely, as we have said, the good nature and the good sense, in a word, the sweet reasonableness, of such a critic as Horace.[434] There is more than this in the classicists of the seventeenth century. Good sense becomes universalized, becomes, in fact, as has been said, not merely an empirical notion of good sense, but the abstract and universal reason itself. From this follows the absolute standard of taste at the bottom of classicism, as exemplified in the passage already cited from La BruyÈre, and in such a line as this from Boileau:—

This rationalization of the Renaissance rules of poetry was effected by contemporary philosophy; if not by the works and doctrines of Descartes himself, at least by the general tendency of the human mind at this period, of which these works and doctrines are the most perfect expressions. Boileau's Art PoÉtique has been aptly called the Discours de la MÉthode of French poetry. So that while the contribution of Malherbe and his school to classicism lay in the insistence on clearness, propriety, and verbal and metrical perfection, and the contribution of the Italian Renaissance lay in the infusion of respect for classical antiquity and the imposition of a certain body of fixed rules, the contribution of contemporary philosophy lay in the rationalization or universalization of these rules, and in the imposition of an abstract and absolute standard of taste.

But Cartesianism brought with it certain important limitations and deficiencies. Boileau himself is reported to have said that "the philosophy of Descartes has cut the throat of poetry;"[436] and there can be no doubt that this is the exaggerated expression of a certain inevitable truth. The excessive insistence on the reason brought with it a corresponding undervaluation of the imagination. The rational and rigidly scientific basis of Cartesianism was forced on classicism; and reality became its supreme object and its final test:—

Reference has already been made to various disadvantages imposed on classicism by the very nature of its origin and growth; but the most vital of all these disadvantages was the influence of the Cartesian philosophy or philosophic temper. With the scientific basis thus imposed on literature, its only safeguard against extinction was the vast influence of a certain body of fixed rules, which literature dared not deviate from, and which it attempted to justify on the wider grounds of philosophy. These rules, then, the contribution of Italy, saved poetry in France from extinction during the classical period; and of this a remarkable confirmation is to be found in the fact that not until the rationalism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was superseded in France, did French literature rid itself of this body of Renaissance rules. Cartesianism, or at least the rationalistic spirit, humanized these rules, and imposed them on the rest of Europe. But though quintessentialized, they remained artificial, and circumscribed the workings of the French imagination for over a century.top