THE PLéIADE—RONSARD—THE LESSER STARS—‘THE DéFENSE ET ILLUSTRATION DE LA LANGUE FRAN?AISE’—THE WORK OF RONSARD—HIS PLACE IN POETRY—JOACHIM DU BELLAY—REMI BELLEAU—BA?F—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[291] 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 Pléiade.

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, Ba?f, 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[292] 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 Ba?f.
Ronsard.

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 ma?tre d’h?tel (steward of the household) of Francis I. He was born at Vend?me 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 Ba?f, whose natural son, Jean Antoine de Ba?f, 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 Ba?f. Remi Belleau was a pupil at the same college. An accidental meeting[293] 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 Ba?f (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 Fran?aise.

The Défense et Illustration de la Langue Fran?aise, which is the manifesto of the school, was written by[294] 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 medi?val 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[295] 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 medi?val 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 medi?val 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.
The work of Ronsard.

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[296] 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[297] 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.
His place in poetry.

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
“Les neuf belles s?urs
Qui trempèrent mes vers dans leurs graves douceurs,”

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[298] 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.
Joachim du Bellay.

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[299] 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 Musagn?omachie, 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[300] 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.
Remi Belleau.

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
“Avril l’honneur et des Bois
Et des Mois,”

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[301] 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.
Ba?f.

Like Belleau, J. B. de Ba?f 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. Ba?f 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 Fran?aise, 1574, and the Mimes, 1576. Ba?f, 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[302] 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[303] 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.
Du Bartas.

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[304] 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[305] 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—
“Le feu donne-clarté, porte-chaud jette-flamme;”

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 fran?ais,” 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[306] 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.
Agrippa D’Aubigné.

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[307] 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 Ba?f. 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 L............