1 It should be noted that the close of the Astrée is by D'Urfé's secretary Baro.
In the political and social reconstruction which followed the civil and religious wars, the need of discipline and order in literature was felt; in this province, also, unity under a law was seen to be desirable. The work of the Pléiade had in a great measure failed; they had attempted to organise poetry and its methods, and poetry was still disorganised. To reduce the realm of caprice and fantasy to obedience to law was the work of FRANÇOIS DE MALHERBE. Born at Caen in 1555, he had published in 1587 his Larmes de Saint Pierre, an imitation of the Italian poem by Tansillo, in a manner which his maturer judgment must have condemned. It was not until about his fortieth year that he found his true direction. Du Vair, with whom he was acquainted, probably led him to a true conception of the nature of eloquence. Vigorous of character, clear in understanding, with no affluence of imagination and no excess of sensibility, Malherbe was well qualified for establishing lyrical poetry upon the basis of reason, and of general rather than individual sentiment. He chose the themes of his odes from topics of public interest, or founded them on those commonplaces of emotion which are part of the possession of all men who think and feel. If he composed his verses for some great occasion, he sought for no curiosities of a private imagination, but considered in what way its nobler aspects ought to be regarded by the community at large; if he consoled a friend for losses caused by death, he held his personal passion under restraint; he generalised, and was content to utter more admirably than others the accepted truths about the brevity and beauty of life, and the inevitable doom of death. What he gained by such a process of abstraction, he lost in vivid characterisation; his imagery lacks colour; the movement of his verse is deliberate and calculated; his ideas are rigorously enchained one to another.
It has been said that poetry—the overflow of individual emotion—is overheard; while oratory—the appeal to an audience—is heard. The processes of Malherbe's art were essentially oratorical; the lyrical cry is seldom audible in his verse; it is the poetry of eloquence thrown into studied stanzas. But the greater poetry of the seventeenth century in France—its odes, its satires, its epistles, its noble dramatic scenes—and much of its prose literature are of the nature of oratory; and for the progress of such poetry, and even of such prose, Malherbe prepared a highway. He aimed at a reformation of the language, which, rejecting all words either base, provincial, archaic, technical, or over-learned and over-curious, should employ the standard French, pure and dignified, as accepted by the people of Paris. In his hands language became too exclusively an instrument of the intelligence; yet with this instrument great things were achieved by his successors. He methodised and regulated versification, insisting on rich and exact rhymes, condemning all licence and infirmity of structure, condemning harshness of sound, inversion, hiatus, negligence in accommodating the cesura to the sense, the free gliding of couplet into couplet. It may be said that he rendered verse mechanical; but within the arrangement which he prescribed, admirable effects were attainable by the mastery of genius. He pondered every word, weighed every syllable, and thought no pains ill-spent if only clearness, precision, the logic of ordonnance, a sustained harmony were at length secured; and until the day of his death, in 1628, no decline in his art can be perceived.
Malherbe fell far short of being a great poet, but in the history of seventeenth-century classicism, in the effort of the age to rationalise the forms of art, his name is of capital importance. It cannot be said that he founded a school. His immediate disciples, MAYNARD and RACAN, failed to develop the movement which he had initiated. Maynard laid verse by the side of verse with exact care, and sometimes one or the other verse is excellent, but he lacked sustained force and flight. Racan had genuine inspiration; a true feeling for nature appears in his dramatic pastoral, the Bergeries (1625); unhappily he had neither the culture nor the patience needed for perfect execution; he was rather an admirable amateur than an artist. But if Malherbe founded no school, he gave an eminent example, and the argument which he maintained in the cause of poetic art was at a later time carried to its conclusion by Boileau.
Malherbe's reform was not accepted without opposition. While he pleaded for the supremacy of order, regularity, law, the voice of MATHURIN REGNIER (1573-1613) was heard on behalf of freedom. A nephew of the poet Desportes, Regnier was loyal to his uncle's fame and to the memory of the Pléiade; if Malherbe spoke slightingly of Desportes, and cast aside the tradition of the school of Ronsard, the retort was speedy and telling against the arrogant reformer, tyrant of words and syllables, all whose achievement amounted to no more than proser de la rime et rimer de la prose. Unawares, indeed, Regnier, to a certain extent, co-operated with Malherbe, who recognised the genius of his younger adversary; he turned away from languid elegances to observation of life and truth of feeling; if he imitated his masters Horace and Ovid, or the Italian satiric poets, with whose writings he had become acquainted during two periods of residence in Rome, his imitations were not obsequious, like those of the Pléiade, but vigorous and original, like those of Boileau; in his sense of comedy he anticipates some of Molière's feeling for the humorous perversities of human character; his language is vivid, plain, and popular. The classical school of later years could not reject Regnier. Boileau declared that no poet before Molière was so well acquainted with the manners and characters of men; through his impersonal study of life he is indeed classic. But his ardent nature rebelled against formal rule; he trusted to the native force of genius, and let his ideas and passions lead him where they would. His satires are those of a painter whose eye is on his object, and who handles his brush with a vigorous discretion; they are criticisms of society and its types of folly or of vice, full of force and colour, yet general in their intention, for, except at the poet who had affronted his uncle, "le bon Regnier" struck at no individual. Most admirable, amid much that is admirable, is the picture of the old worldling Macette, whose veil of pretended piety is gradually dropped as she discourses with growing wantonness to the maiden whom she would lead in the way she should not go: Macette is no unworthy elder of the family of Tartufe. Regnier confesses freely the passions of his own irregular life; had it been wisely conducted, his genius might have carried him far; as it was, he passed away prematurely at the age of forty, the victim of his own intemperate pursuit of pleasure.
Still more unfortunate was the life of a younger poet, who, while honouring the genius of Malherbe, pronounced, like Regnier, for freedom rather than order, and maintained that each writer of genius should be a law to himself—a poet whom his contemporaries esteemed too highly, and whom Malherbe, and afterwards Boileau, unjustly depreciated—THÉOPHILE DE VIAU. A Huguenot who had abjured his faith, afterwards pursued as a libertine in conduct and as a freethinker, Théophile was hunted, imprisoned, exiled, condemned to execution, and died exhausted in 1626, when only six-and-thirty years old. He has been described as the last lyrical poet of his age, and the first of the poetical exponents of the new preciosity. His dramatic Pyrame et Thisbé, though disfigured by those concetti which the Italian Marini—an honoured guest at the French court—and the invasion of Spanish tastes had made the mode, is not without touches of genuine pathos. The odes of Théophile are of free and musical movement, his descriptions of natural beauty are graciously coloured, his judgment in literary matters was sound and original; but he lacked the patient workmanship which art demands, and in proclaiming himself on the side of freedom as against order, he was retrograding from the position which had been secured for poetry under the leadership of Malherbe.
With social order came the desire for social refinement, and following the desire for refinement came the prettinesses and affectations of over-curious elegance. Peace returned to France with the monarchy of Henri IV., but the Gascon manners of his court were rude. Catherine de Vivonne, Marquise de Rambouillet, whose mother was a great Roman lady, and whose father had been French ambassador at Rome, young, beautiful, delicately nurtured, retired in 1608 from the court, and a few years later opened her salon of the Hôtel de Rambouillet to such noble and cultivated persons as were willing to be the courtiers of womanly grace and wit and taste. The rooms were arranged and decorated for the purposes of pleasure; the chambre bleue became the sanctuary of polite society, where Arthénice (an anagram for "Catherine") was the high priestess. To dance, to sing, to touch the lute was well; to converse with wit and refinement was something more admirable; the salon became a mart for the exchange of ideas; the fashion of Spain was added to the fashion of Italy; Platonism, Petrarchism, Marinism, Gongorism, the spirit of romance and the daintinesses of learning and of pedantry met and mingled. Hither came Malherbe, Racan, Chapelain, Vaugelas; at a later time Balzac, Segrais, Voiture, Godeau; and again, towards the mid-years of the century, Saint-Évremond and La Rochefoucauld. Here Corneille read his plays from the Cid to Rodogune; here Bossuet, a marvellous boy, improvised a midnight discourse, and Voiture declared he had never heard one preach so early or so late.
As Julie d'Angennes and her sister Angélique attained an age to divide their mother's authority in the salon, its sentiment grew quintessential, and its taste was subtilised well-nigh to inanity. They censured Polyeucte; they found Chapelain's unhappy epic "perfectly beautiful, but excessively tiresome"; they laid their heads together over Descartes' Discours de la Méthode, and profoundly admired the philosopher; they were enraptured by the madrigals on flowers, more than three score in number, offered as the Guirlande de Julie on Mademoiselle's fête; they gravely debated the question which should be the approved spelling, muscadin or muscardin. In 1649 they were sundered into rival parties—Uranistes and Jobelins—tilting in literary lists on behalf of the respective merits of a sonnet by Voiture and a sonnet by Benserade. The word précieux is said to date from 1650. The Marquise de Rambouillet survived Molière's satiric comedy Les Précieuses Ridicules (1659) by several years. Mme. de Sévigné, Mme. de la Fayette, Fléchier, the preacher of fashion, were among the illustrious personages of the decline of her salon. We smile at its follies and affectations; but, while it harmed literature by magnifying things that were petty, it did something to refine manners, to quicken ideas, to encourage clearness and grace of expression, and to make the pursuit of letters an avenue to social distinction. Through the Hôtel de Rambouillet, and the salons which both in Paris and the provinces imitated its modes, and pushed them to extravagance, the influence of women on literature became a power for good and for evil.
The "Works," as they were styled, of VINCENT VOITURE (1598-1648)—posthumously published—represent one side of the spirit of the salon. Capable of something higher, he lived to exhibit his ingenuity and wit in little ways, now by a cleverly-turned verse, now by a letter of gallantry. Although of humble origin, he was for long a presiding genius in the chambre bleue of Arthénice. His play of mind was unhappily without a subject, and to be witty on nothings puts a strain on wit. Voiture expends much labour on being light, much serious effort in attaining vanities. His letters were admired as models of ingenious elegance; the life has long since passed from their raillery and badinage, but Voiture may be credited with having helped to render French prose pliant for the uses of pleasure.
The dainty trifles of the school of preciosity fluttered at least during the sunshine of a day. Its ambitious epics, whatever attention they may have attracted in their time, cannot be said to have ever possessed real life. The great style is not to be attained by tagging platitudes with points. The Saint Louis of Lemoyne, the Clovis of Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin, the Alaric of Scudéry, the Charlemagne of Louis le Laboureur remain only as evidences of the vanity of misplaced ambition. During twenty years JEAN CHAPELAIN, a man of no mean ability in other fields, was occupied with his La Pucelle d'Orléans; twelve cantos at length appeared magnificently in 1656, and won a brief applause; the remaining twelve cantos lie still inedited. The matter of history was too humble for Chapelain's genius; history is ennobled by an allegorical intention; France becomes the soul of man; Charles, swayed between good and evil, is the human will; the Maid of Orleans is divine grace. The satire of Boileau, just in its severity, was hardly needed to slay the slain.