Never was any mind more independent in voluntary submission to an inexorable logic. Rene Descartes, who was born at La Haye, near Tours, in 1596, and died at Stockholm in 1650, escaped the influence of Richelieu by the isolation to which he condemned himself, as well as by the proud and somewhat uncouth independence of his character. Engaging as a volunteer, at one and twenty, in the Dutch army, he marched over Germany in the service of several princes, returned to France, where he sold his property, travelled through the whole of Italy, and ended, in 1629, by settling himself in Holland, seeking everywhere solitude and room for his thoughts. “In this great city of Amsterdam, where I am now,” he wrote to Balzac, “and where there is not a soul, except myself, that does not follow some commercial pursuit, everybody is so attentive to his gains, that I might live there all my life without being noticed by anybody. I go walking every day amidst the confusion of a great people with as much freedom and quiet as you could do in your forest-alleys, and I pay no more attention to the people who pass before my eyes than I should do to the trees that are in your forests and to the animals that feed there. Even the noise of traffic does not interrupt my reveries any more than would that of some rivulet.” Having devoted himself for a long time past to the study of geometry and astronomy, he composed in Holland his Treatise on the World (Traite du Monde). “I had intended to send you my World for your New Year’s gift,” he wrote to the learned Minime, Father Mersenne, who was his best friend; “but I must tell you that, having had inquiries made, lately, at Leyden and at Amsterdam, whether Galileo’s system of the world was to be obtained there, word was sent me that all the copies of it had been burned at Rome, and the author condemned to some fine, which astounded me so mightily that I almost resolved to burn all my papers, or at least not let them be seen by anybody. I confess that if the notion of the earth’s motion is false, all the foundations of my philosophy are too, since it is clearly demonstrated by them. It is so connected with all parts of my treatise that I could not detach it without rendering the remainder wholly defective. But as I would not, for anything in the world, that there should proceed from me a discourse in which there was to be found the least word which might be disapproved of by the church, so would I rather suppress it altogether than let it appear mutilated.”
Descartes’ independence of thought did not tend to revolt, as he had proved: in publishing his Discourse on Method he halted at the threshold of Christianism without laying his hand upon the sanctuary. Making a clean sweep of all he had learned, and tearing himself free, by a supreme effort, from the whole tradition of humanity, he resolved “never to accept anything as true until he recognized it to be clearly so, and not to comprise amongst his opinions anything but what presented itself so clearly and distinctly to his mind that he could have no occasion to hold it in doubt.” In this absolute isolation of his mind, without past and without future, Descartes, first of all assured of his own personal existence by that famous axiom, “Cogito, ergo sum” (I think, therefore I am), drew from it, as a necessary consequence, the fact of the separate existence of soul and of body; passing oft by a sort of internal revelation which he called innate ideas, he came to the pinnacle of his edifice, concluding for the existence of a God from the notion of the infinite impressed on the human soul. A laborious reconstruction of a primitive and simple truth which the philosopher could not, for a single moment, have banished from his mind all the while that he was laboring painfully to demonstrate it.
By a tacit avowal of the weakness of the human mind, the speculations of Descartes stopped short at death. He had hopes, however, of retarding the moment of it. “I felt myself alive,” he said, at forty years of age, “and, examining myself with as much care as if I were a rich old man, I fancied I was even farther from death than I had been in my youth.” He had yielded to the entreaties of Queen Christina of Sweden, who had promised him an observatory, like that of Tycho Brahe. He was delicate, and accustomed to follow a regimen adapted to his studies. “O flesh!” he wrote to Gassendi, whose philosophy contradicted his own: “O idea!” answered Gassendi. The climate of Stockholm was severe; Descartes caught inflammation of the lungs; he insisted upon doctoring himself, and died on the 11th of February, 1650. “He didn’t want to resist death,” said his friends, not admitting that their master’s will could be vanquished by death itself. His influence remained for a long while supreme over his age. Bossuet and Fenelon were Cartesians. “I think, therefore I am,” wrote Madame de Sevigne to her daughter. “I think of you tenderly, therefore I love you; I think only of you in that manner, therefore I love you only.” Pascal alone, though adopting to a certain extent Descartes’ form of reasoning, foresaw the excess to which other minds less upright and less firm would push the system of the great philosopher. “I cannot forgive Descartes,” he said; “he would have liked, throughout his philosophy, to be able to do without God, but he could not help making Him give just a flick to set the world in motion; after that he didn’t know what to do with God.” A severe, but a true saying; Descartes had required everything of pure reason; he had felt a foreshadowing of the infinite and the unknown without daring to venture into them. In the name of reason, others have denied the infinite and the unknown. Pascal was wiser and bolder when, with St. Augustine, he found in reason itself a step towards faith. “Reason would never give in if she were not of opinion that there are occasions when she ought to give in.”
By his philosophical method, powerful and logical, as well as by the clear, strong, and concise style he made use of to expound it, Descartes accomplished the transition from the sixteenth century to the seventeeth; he was the first of the great prose-writers of that incomparable epoch, which laid forever the foundations of the language. At the same moment the great Corneille was rendering poetry the same service.
It had come out of the sixteenth century more disturbed and less formed than prose; Ronsard and his friends had received it from the hands of Marot, quite young, unsophisticated and undecided; they attempted, at the first effort, to raise it to the level of the great classic models of which their minds were full. The attempt was bold, and the Pleiad did not pretend to consult the taste of the vulgar. “The obscurity of Ronsard,” says M. Guizot, in his Corneille et son Temps, “is not that of a subtle mind torturing itself to make something out of nothing; it is the obscurity of a full and a powerful mind, which is embarrassed by its own riches, and has not learned to regulate the use of them. Furnished, by his reading of the ancients, with that which was wanting in our poetry, Ronsard thought he could perceive in his lofty and really poetical imagination what was needed to supply it; he cast his eyes in all directions, with the view of enriching the domain of poetry. ‘Thou wilt do well to pick dexterously,’ he says, in his abridgment of the art of French poetry, ‘and adopt to thy work the most expressive words in the dialects of our own France; there is no need to care whether the vocables are Gascon, or Poitevin, or Norman, or Mancese, or Lyonnese, or of other districts, provided that they are good, and properly express what thou wouldst say.’ Ronsard was too bold in extending his conquests over the classical languages; it was that exuberance of ideas, that effervescence of a genius not sufficiently master over its conceptions, which brought down upon him, in after times, the contempt of the writers who, in the seventeenth century, followed, with more wisdom and taste, the road which he had contributed to open. ‘He is not,’ said Balzac, ‘quite a poet; he has the first beginnings and the making of a poet; we see in his works nascent and half-animated portions of a body which is in formation, but which does not care to arrive at completion.’”
This body is that of French poetry; Ronsard traced out its first lineaments, full of elevation, play of fancy, images, and a poetic fire unknown before him. He was the first to comprehend the dignity which befits grand subjects, and which earned him in his day the title of Prince of poets. He lived in stormy times, not much adapted for poetry, and steeped in the most cruel tragedies; he felt deeply the misfortunes of his country rent by civil war, when he wrote,—
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“A cry of dread, a din, a thundering sound Of men and clashing harness roars around; Peoples ‘gainst peoples furiously rage; Cities with cities deadly battle wage; Temples and towns—one heap of ashes lie; Justice and equity fade out and die Unchecked the soldier’s wicked will is done With human blood the outraged churches run; Bedridden Age, disbedded, perisheth, And over all grins the pale face of Death.” |
There was something pregnant, noble, and brilliant about Ronsard, in spite of his exaggerations of style and faults of taste; his friends and disciples imitated and carried to an extreme his defects, without possessing his talent; the unruliness was such as to call for reform. Peace revived with Henry IV., and the court, henceforth in accord with the nation, resumed that empire over taste, manners, and ideas, which it was destined to exercise so long and so supremely under Louis XIV. Malherbe became the poet of the court, whose business it was to please it, to adopt for it that literature which had but lately been reserved for the feasts of the learned. “He used often to say, and chiefly when he was reproached with not following the meaning of the authors he translated or paraphrased, that he did not dress his meat for cooks, as if he had meant to infer that he cared very little to be praised by the literary folks who understood the books he had translated, provided that he was understood by the court-folks.” A complete revolution in the opposite direction to that which Ronsard attempted appeared to have taken place, but the human mind never loses all the ground it has once won; in the verses of Malherbe, often bearing the imprint of beauties borrowed from the ancients, the language preserved, in consequence of the character given to it by Ronsard, a dignity, a richness of style, of which the times of Marot showed no conception; and it was falling, moreover, under the chastening influence of an elegant correctness. It was for the court that Malherbe made verses, “striving,” as he said, “to degasconnize it,” seeking there his public and the source of honor as well as profit. As passionate an admirer of Richelieu as of Henry IV., naturally devoted to the service of the order established in the state as well as in poetry, he, under the regency of Mary de’ Medici, favored the taste which was beginning to show itself for intellectual things, for refined pleasures, and elegant occupations. It was not around the queen that this honorable and agreeable society gathered; it was at the Hotel Rambouillet, around Catherine de Vivonne, in Rue St. Thomas du Louvre. Literature was there represented by Malherbe and Racan, afterwards by Balzac and Voiture, Gombault and Chapelain, who constantly met there, in company with Princess de Conde and her daughter, subsequently Duchess de Longueville, Mademoiselle du Vigean, Madame and Mdlle. d’Epernon, and the Bishop of Lucon himself, quite young as yet, but already famous. “All the wits were received at the Hotel Rambouillet, whatever their condition,” says M. Cousin: “all that was asked of them was to have good manners; but the aristocratic tone was established there without any effort, the majority of the guests at the house being very great lords, and the mistress being at one and the same time Rambouillet and Vivonne. The wits were courted and honored, but they did not hold the dominion.” At that great period which witnessed the growth of Richelieu’s power, and of the action he universally exercised upon French society, at the outcome from the moral licentiousness which Henry IV.‘s example had encouraged in his court, and after a certain roughness, the fruit of long civil wars, a lesson was taught at Madame de Rambouillet’s of modesty, grace, and lofty politeness, together with the art of forming good ideas and giving them good expression, sometimes with rather too much of far-fetched and affected cleverness, always in good company, and with much sweetness and self-possession on the part of the mistress of the house. In 1627, Cardinal Richelieu, having become minister, sent the Marquis of Rambouillet as ambassador to Spain. He wanted to be repaid for this favor. One of his friends went to call upon Madame de Rambouillet. At the first hint of what was expected from her, “I do not believe that there are any intrigues between Cardinal Valette and the princess,” said she, “and, even if there were, I should not be the proper person for the office it is intended to put upon me. Besides, everybody is so convinced of the consideration and friendship I have for his Eminence that nobody would dare to speak ill of him in my presence; I cannot, therefore, ever have an opportunity of rendering him the services you ask of me.”