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]
La Reconnue.
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.
CHAPTER XI.
FRENCH PROSE-WRITERS OF THE LATER SIXTEENTH CENTURY.
ABUNDANCE OF LATER SIXTEENTH-CENTURY PROSE—A DISTINCTION—SULLY—BODIN—THE GREAT MEMOIR-WRITERS—CARLOIX—LA NOUE—D’AUBIGNÉ—MONLUC—BRANTÔME—THE ‘SATYRE MÉNIPÉE’—ITS ORIGIN—ITS AUTHORS—ITS FORM AND SPIRIT—MONTAIGNE—HIS ‘ESSAYS’—THE SCEPTICISM OF MONTAIGNE—HIS STYLE—CHARRON AND DU VAIR.
Abundance of later sixteenth-century prose.
No race has ever allowed less of what it has done, suffered, or even only seen, to be lost than the French. It has ever been the ambition of the men of that people to leave some record of themselves. We have to thank what an ill-conditioned critic might call its vanity for a memoir-literature which would be inadequately praised if it were only called the first in the world. The world has not only no equal, but no second, to be used as a comparison. The France of the wars of Religion, agitated as it was, was exceptionally rich in these delightful books. For that we have good reason to be grateful, since this time, full as it was of colour, of ability, of passion, and of the most remote extremes in character, has left us the means of knowing it more fully than we can know our own generation. As it was also an age of great political and religious strife, treatises on politics and religion were naturally written, seeing that amid all the turmoil and fury men continued to write. There is more cause for surprise when we meet also with works of science, or on the arts—though the surprise is not perhaps fully justified, since even in the wildest times the great mass of men live their lives very much as in peace. When commotions have reached the point of causing universal disturbance, they soon end. Mankind would starve if they were not suspended.
A distinction.