But this comparative independence in some points was—probably from the want of that real historical horizontality of view which, of all the sixteenth-century critics, Cinthio, Castelvetro, and Patrizzi alone seem in various degrees to have attained—accompanied by a singular servility and conventionality in others. “Why, O Prince of Poets!” one feels inclined to say, “with all reverence to your grey and laurelled head—why should we trouble ourselves about peintures insérées contre le dos d’une muraille, et des harnois, et principalement des boucliers because one very great poet found them useful to produce historical effects nearly three thousand years ago, and another much lesser poet chose to imitate him slavishly some thousand years later? Why should we do it, even supposing the two poets to be on a level? Very likely Homer’s warriors had painted or graven bucklers. We have not. Arthur’s knights had not—at least the paintings (assuming them to be armorial) were quite different. Why should we have the ‘monstrous language of horses wounded to death’? Why this childish limitation in imitation? Handsome dresses are admirable things: but why must we be limited to lion-skins and panther-skins and bearskins for the material? If we have got to make a cauldron boil, let it double double, boil and bubble by all means: but suppose we don’t want to boil it?” To all this we not only get no answer from Ronsard; but in his critical writing (not, as we have said, extensive nor always outwardly consistent, but thoroughly uniform in spirit) we find no trace of any such aporia ever having presented itself to his mind. They did these things and produced good effects: let us do them that we may produce good. It seems a “good old rule” enough: yet perhaps it is “a simple plan” also in more senses than one.
Good or bad, complete or incomplete, this criticism is the very soul of the Pléiade. Its playwrights, such as Grévin[[181]] and Jean de la Taille,[[182]] followed Italian practice in prefixing argumentative discussions to their plays—reflecting on the mediæval drama, comparing, in modest or buoyant spirit, their own work to that of the ancients, and the like. Some minors. A section of the school (as was almost unavoidable, despite the “No-Surrender” resistance which French as a language opposes to the proceeding) tried classical metres after the principles of Tolomei: and Jacques de la Taille, the brother of Jean, a poet and dramatist of fantastic but distinct ability, wrote a tractate[[183]] in defence of them. They made closer and closer approximations to the absolute Trinity of Unities: and though Du Bellay in his youthful fervour had committed himself to a not unwise antinomianism, they more and more showed themselves as the true ancestors of the neo-classic school, by framing and insisting on “rules.” The great men of letters who were more or less unattached, but well-willing irregulars of the school, such as Pasquier and Montaigne, bestow, in their different ways, increasing attention on literary criticism and literary history. And, just before and after the junction of the centuries, when the Pléiade proper had set, and its influence was about to wane before the narrow and arbitrary classicism of Malherbe on the one hand, and the rococo-picaresque of the Spanish school on the other, there appeared two formal Arts of Poetry, the one the complete and final code of Pléiade Poetic, the other a rather hybrid and nondescript product, chequering Ronsardism with a good deal of Italian matter.
This last,[[184]] the earlier to appear, in 1598, had for author Pierre de Laudun, sometimes spoken of, from a seignory of his, as de Laudun d’Aigaliers. Pierre de Laudun. It is in prose, and its author, who is roundly described by Herr Rücktaschel as a “copyist of the purest water,” diversifies his borrowings from Sibilet, Ronsard, and Pelletier on the one hand, from Scaliger and “Vituperani” on the other, with plentiful examples from his own work; for he had followed one greater man with a Franciade and ante-dated another with a Horace. I cannot enter any strong protest against the hard words (not confined to those already quoted) which his German critic bestows on him.[[185]] His real interest is purely that of symptom and tendency, in which respect he shows a rather odd but not uninstructive mixture. On one side he rejects the Ronsardising coinage of words and adoption of dialect forms, with other Pléiade traits. On another he shows himself recalcitrant to the coming classicastry by declaring that “we are not bound by their laws”—e.g., in regard to the number of acts. On a third we find him emphasising this attitude into an absolute refusal of the Unity of Time, against which he says almost all the obvious and sensible things, in a fashion to some extent redeeming what is on the whole the work of a not very intelligent bookmaker.
Vauquelin de la Fresnaye has not this sudden cry of the voice in the desert: but his Art Poétique is, as a whole, a book of infinitely greater interest and value than Laudun’s. Vauquelin was a gentleman and lawyer of Normandy, who, born at the château whence he took his name, near Falaise, fought, amused himself, loved the country and its sports, became President at Caen, and wrote verses of no small merit in various kinds. Vauquelin de la Fresnaye. His Art Poétique was more than thirty years on the stocks: and having had its keel laid in 1574, when the Pléiade, though a quarter of a century old, was still in full flourishing, did not get launched till 1605, when a new age had begun in more than chronological fashion. It is a composition of considerable bulk, consisting of three books, each running to rather under twelve hundred lines. Either of deliberation, or as a result of intermittent attention during the time in which it was a-preparing, Vauquelin arranged it (or failed to arrange it) in most admired disorder. The precisians of the next age would have been horrified at the promiscuous character of its observations; and some would have been grateful to its latest editor[[186]] if, in addition to, or instead of, part of the elaborate and very valuable apparatus criticus of various kinds which he has given, he had prefixed an argument. As it is, we must make one: for the book, if not one of our very greatest points de repère, is yet such a point.
After a prose address to the Reader, containing a rather touching reference to the flight of time and the change of public opinion since he had begun his work, to the cares of life, and the troubles of the realm, and the death of old friends—he begins with the proper invocation. Analysis of his Art Poétique. Immediately after he gives, as has been justly observed, a warning note by an elaborate simile-description of Poesy as an ordered garden, with beds and paths and hedges, wherein if any rude boy should trample on the beds, desert the paths, and break down the espaliers, the gardener would assuredly make injurious observations to him, and drive him out—the Gardener being further identified as no less a person than the Divinity. This comparison would of itself show that Vauquelin aims at no arrogant originality; but he is yet more explicit. His four guides are le fils de Nicomache (Aristotle, of course; but note how Ronsard’s fatal counsel of periphrasis has already sunk, never to be quite extracted, into the French mind!), the “harper of Calabria” (Horace), Vida, and Minturno.[[187]] But he hardly apologises for writing in French. Then, borrowing from Cleanthes, through Seneca, the old comparison of verse to “a trumpet which adds power to the voice,” he passes non sine Dis—with abundant indulgence in mythology—to the exaltation of Number and Harmony at large, and to theorising in the Imitation of Nature. He holds high the banner of the Ronsardian unification of Arts; and while insisting that even the ugly may be made interesting, if not beautiful, in the imitation of it, repeats the old cautions about inconsistent and too fantastic admixture of imagery. Among other followings of Ronsard we note the earnest advice to cultivate stately descriptions and abundant ornament. But he does not omit—though it must be allowed he does not observe it over strictly himself—the caution to keep the thread,
“Si tu fais un Sonnet, ou si tu fais une Ode.”
The praise of order and consistency gives place to remarks on diction which repeat the Ronsardist canons and cautions, and to a fashionable contempt (to be taken up later, as so much else was, by the thankless Neo-Classics) of Anagrams and Acrostics. The First Book. The usual twinning of Homer and Virgil is succeeded by reference to some other classics: and for a time Vauquelin seems to be confining himself (in so far as his expatiatory manner ever admits confinement) to the ouvrage héroique, whence he turns to other kinds, and the verse-forms suitable for them. He repeats Du Bellay’s curse on ballade and rondeau,[[188]] and passes like him to a special eulogy of the Sonnet, in which (as Du Bellay was not able to do) he is able now to produce a stately list of French practitioners. This part of the Book, a little after its middle, is full of literary history and allusion, the latter touching foreign languages and literatures as well as French. And the rest of it is occupied with a fresh and rather disorderly account of styles and kinds, with the verse and diction proper to each, ending up with a curious amplification of Quintilian’s story[[189]] about Apelles and Antigonus, the moral of which seems to be a sort of Medio tutissimus ibis
The Second Book also has its due invocations to the Muses and the King: and Vauquelin divagates, in his amiable way, for some hundred lines before he settles down to paraphrase Horace’s warning about the scriptor cyclicus, and to give, as examples of exordium, not merely a refashioning in Alexandrines of the opening of Ronsard’s Franciade, but a long extract from his own projected epic of the Israëlide. The Second. But as soon as he has done this (to the extent, it is true, of some fifty lines) he affects shame at quoting himself, and bids the poet swim in the Greek and Latin sea, especially in Virgil. In fact, Vauquelin is much more of a Virgil-worshipper than Ronsard, and almost as much as Vida, if not as Scaliger; and it is curious to see in his work that unconquerable, and as it were magnetic, repulsion from the greater poetry of Homer, and attraction towards the lesser verse of Virgil, which more and more shows itself, from the start of the Renaissance to the finish of the eighteenth century. Although he again and again diverges to the prose Epic (with the usual example of Heliodorus and the Æthiopica), to the artificial epic unity of a year (which he doubtless took, after Ronsard, from Minturno), and so forth, he as constantly returns to Virgil, describing him in one place plumply as “second to Homer in age, but first in rank.”
Then he reverts to his Horace, and, not forgetting a hint to the poet (one frequent with him) that he had better take French and Christian subjects such as the crusade of St Louis, he dilutes largely the famous clauses of his model on keeping the type of age and youth, &c. This leads him naturally to the subject of drama, on which he is, of course, severely Horatian; especially in regard to messengers and the avoidance of awkward things on the stage. He has the Pléiade drama, too, before him as he writes; extols the Chorus, and again does not forget his hints of Christian subjects. But in the sequel he leaves his ancient authorities, and their severer tastes, rather on one side, in order to dwell at great length on the accessories of the stage—music, mise-en-scène, &c., with a not uninteresting reference—like that of Sibilet (v. supra) earlier, and possibly due to it—to the moralities of nos vieux François, as well as a welcome to the Ballet and to his native Vaux-de-Vire. He indulges in a warm eulogy of French as a language passing all the vulgars of Europe, and of French poetry, and then handles Satire, a subject in which he was an expert, and which he had treated in a prose Discourse, joined to his own exercises in the kind. He connects it with the Provençal Sirvente, allows the coq-à-l'âne a sort of poor-relationship, and dwells on French lyric poets at some length, once more commending Latin models and (in a deflection, more logical than some of his, to the subject of iambic and other metre) noticing the recent attempts at a quantified prosody. On this subject he prudently declines to commit himself: posterity must decide. And the rest of the Book again busies itself with various styles and kinds, the measures proper to them, and the authors, modern as well as ancient, who have treated them best.
These lucubrations, however, disorderly as they may seem, contain numerous things of interest—a just remark on rhyme as practically the equivalent of stricter metrical arrangement; observations on the prose Lancelot, &c., showing that Vauquelin was not destitute of that knowledge of the older literature of his country which distinguished France and Frenchmen rather creditably in the Renaissance, and to which we shall presently return. Divers contemporary authors are also mentioned, Garnier being singled out for special (and well deserved) praise; and there is a pleasant reminiscence of the time when