He gives to Maurice Scève the honour of captaining the leading ship of this fleet; and then follow all the well-known names (and some not so well known) of the school proper, the catalogue being capped by some extremely interesting and valuable critical-anecdotic remarks on the greater writers, especially Ronsard himself. and criticism of contemporary French poetry. One could hardly be more just on this difficult[[191]] poet than is Pasquier, who allows him not merely grandeur but sweetness to almost any extent, “quand il a voulu doux couler”; calls him grand poète entre poètes, but admits that he was “très mauvais censeur et aristarque de ses livres.” Then he partly returns upon his steps in another chapter, where he approaches French poetry from a different side, considering especially its verse-structure, with examples from Marot downwards, and dwelling on the alternation of masculine and feminine rhymes which Ronsard had sanctioned. On this matter the historical equity of Pasquier is especially noticeable, as opposed to the somewhat excessive correctness (according to pedagogic ideas of the correct) shown by most Frenchmen. He declines to take a side between “this new diligence and the old nonchalance.” And he makes the very acute observation that Marot only allowed himself this nonchalance in verse which was not to be sung—a proof, as he remarks, that though Master Clement might not be Ronsard’s equal in learning, he had a facilité d’esprit admirable. In yet another passage he compares French with Italian poetry, and, emboldened by this, with Latin itself; taking the patriotic side with equal courage and ingenuity, and ending with the citation of some of his own Latin verses on Ronsard, and with the sigh, “De toute cette grande compagnie qui mit la main à la plume sous Henri II. il restait quatre, Théodore de Bèze, Ponthus de Thyard, Louis le Caron, et moi.” Then, after a short appendix-chapter on classical metres in French (which he would like to approve, but seems in two minds about), he passes to language, on his treatment of which we cannot dwell. But he never allows himself to stray far from literature, and makes a pretext for returning at some length to his beloved Pathelin.
It may be observed that Pasquier, though interested in letters to an extreme degree, enjoys more than he judges—not perhaps the worst defect of the critic.
The agile and penetrating intelligence of Montaigne could hardly have failed in any age to devote itself to literature; in his own age this devotion was especially inevitable. Montaigne: his references to literature. That his dealings with the subject are dealings in the height of his own fashion, it is unnecessary to say. Not many things could be more characteristic than the Essay on Pedantry (I. 24), in which the whole spirit and motive, not merely of the Pléiade, but of the sixteenth century generally, are subjected to the irregular glancing criticism of the essayist. This single paper would enable one to understand the fling of a man like Ben Jonson—the reverse of unintelligent, the reverse of unhumorous, but full of erudition, and of sixteenth-century reverence for it—at “All the essayists, even their master Montaigne.” On the general question whether what is commonly called pedantry is a good or a bad thing, Montaigne’s verdict comes simply to a “Mass! I cannot tell!” He bestows hearty praise on Du Bellay, a non-pedantic and courtier-like man of letters, who yet was enthusiastic for learning; heartier on Adrian Turnebus, a pedant in the common injurious sense; and in the middle of his essay he plays on study of Greek and Latin, on quotations from Plato and Cicero, on “arming oneself against the fear of death, at the cost and charges of Seneca.”[[192]] The much longer chapter on Education, addressed to Diane de Foix, which immediately follows, contains one of the worst expressions of Renaissance contempt of mediæval literature, in the boast that “of the Lancelots of the Lake, the Amadis, the Huons of Bordeaux, with which childhood amuses itself,” he did not know so much as the name. “My Lord Michael” is great, but even he might have been greater if he had known them.
Indeed hardly anywhere does Montaigne exhibit his own undulation and diversity more fully than in relation to letters—at one time amassing ancient instances as if he were totally oblivious of the remarks above about Plato and Seneca; at another criticising for himself[[193]] with inimitable freshness and gusto; and at another again informing the scholar, with much coolness, that if he will take off hood and gown, drop Latin, and not deafen men’s ears with unmitigated Aristotle, he will be at the level of all the world, and perhaps below it.
Even this, it will be seen, is not so very far from the cardinal Pléiade principle, that study of the ancients is an excellent thing, but that its chief value is to equip and strengthen the student for practice in French. And Montaigne, like the rest of his contemporaries and compatriots, always had this “cultivation of the garden” before him. It is well known how the real pedants of his own time objected to his neologisms, just as Fontaine (or whoever was the author of the Quintil) did to those of Du Bellay; and how large a part these neologisms played in the development and nourishing of French prose. Every one who knows anything of Montaigne knows his enthusiastic eulogy of Amyot, and of the services which that grant translateur had rendered to French. And everybody should know the delicate and subtle appreciation which he lavishes, in a fashion so different from the indiscriminate laudations of Scaliger, on favourite passages of the ancients, more particularly[[194]] on the Venus and Vulcan passage of Virgil, and the Venus and Mars passage of Lucretius.
Of course Montaigne’s interests, despite his exquisite literary accomplishment, are not primarily literary. The Essay On Books. But he has given one entire Essay (II. 10), and that not of the shortest, to Books; and he has frequent glancings at the subject, sometimes characteristically racy, as that at the Heptameron, “un gentil livre pour son estoffe.” The “Books” essay begins with one of his familiar jactations of imperfection. He has some reading, but no faculty of retention. He often intentionally plagiarises—for instance from Plutarch and Seneca. He does not seek in books anything more than amusement and knowledge of himself and of life. He refuses to grapple—at any great expense of labour—with difficulties. He likes Rabelais, Boccaccio, and Johannes Secundus for mere pastime, but repeats his depressing scorn for romances, and confesses, as did Darwin on the score of Shakespeare, that he cannot take the pleasure he used to take in Ariosto and Ovid. He thinks Virgil, Lucretius, Horace, and Catullus (especially Virgil in the Georgics and the Fifth Æneid) at the top of poetry—a grouping which makes us long to pin the elusive Perigourdin down, and force him, Proteus as he is, to give us his exquisite reasons. His judgment on Lucan is a little commonplace, “not the style but the sentiments”—whereas the sentiments of Lucan are but Roman “common form,” and his style, if not of the best kind, is great in a kind not the best. He thinks Terence “the very darling and grace of Latin,” and is half apologetic as to the equalling of Lucretius to Virgil, positively violent (it is, he thinks, bestise et stupidité barbarique)[[195]] on that of Virgil to Ariosto, and depressing again in regard to Plautus (Terence sent bien mieux son gentilhomme). He returns again and again to the style of Terence; and warns us of the coming classicism by his objections to the “fantastiques élévations Espagnoles et Pétrarchistes,” being equally “correct” in exalting (or at least in his reasons for the exaltation, there being no doubt about the fact) Catullus above Martial. On Greek authors as such he frankly and repeatedly declares his incompetence to give judgment; but “now that Plutarch has been made French,” he can as frankly yoke him once more with Seneca, and extol the pair super æthera, boldly expressing his comparative distaste for Cicero. He would like to have “a dozen of [Diogenes] Laertius,” for the “human document,” of course; and puts Cæsar above all other historians, including Sallust, while he has something to say of divers French writers of the class—Froissart (who, he thinks, gives “the crude matter of history”), Comines, Du Bellay-Langey, and others. It is to be noted that in this place he says nothing about French poetry. And when he does take up the subject much later, in II. 17, at the end of the “Essay on Presumption,” he is very brief, only saying that he thinks Ronsard and Du Bellay “hardly far from the ancient perfection.” At the beginning of II. 36 he divides with the majority on the merits of Homer and Virgil, though he once more admits a disqualification, which in this case is, of course, total. And in the famous remark,[[196]] “Poetry is an amusement proper for women; it is a frolic and subtle art, disguised, talkative, quite occupied with pleasure and display, like them,” he gives no doubt a certain measure of his critical capacity in less specially conditioned matters.
This capacity is, indeed, strictly limited. Montaigne is almost, if not quite, as much set as his beloved Plutarch on the life-side of literature, as the only one that really interests him; and, in addition, he has an obstinate prosaic inclination, with which Plutarch does not seem to be nearly so chargeable. Yet he must have found mention here, not merely as our first very great French man of letters,[[197]] who has left us literary opinions, but as the very light and glory of the French intellect at the meeting of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and as thus giving an index of the greatest value to its tastes and opinions. He displays (conditioning it in the ways just mentioned, and others, by his intense idiosyncrasy) the general literary attitude of the time—an active, practical, striving towards performance, a rather conventional and arbitrary admiration of the farther past, a contempt, or at least good-natured underestimation, of the nearer, and fair, if vague, hopes for the future. But considering the intensely critical character of Montaigne’s intellect in most directions, its exertions in this direction tell us even more by what they do not, than by what they do.
[157]. See Petit de Julleville, ii. 392, who quotes four between c. 1405 and c. 1475; and for a monograph E. Langlois, De Artibus Rhetoricæ Rythmicæ, Paris, 1890. To this may be added, as commentaries on this chapter, the corresponding division in Spingarn, op. cit., Part II., pp. 172-250; the extensive and valuable Introduction to M. Georges Pellissier’s edition of Vauquelin de la Fresnaye (Paris, 1885); and Herr Rücktaschel’s Einige Arts Poétiques aus der Zeit Ronsards und Malherbes (Leipsic, 1889).
[158]. L’Art et Science de Rhétorique, 1493, printed by Verard, and reprinted by Crapelet. Another, a little later, was printed about 1500, and reprinted in the Bibliothèque Elzévirienne, Anciennes Poésies Françaises, iii. 118. It is odd that M. Petit de Julleville, who does not give the volume and page of that very extensive collection, and misquotes its title, should speak of this as “in prose.” It is in verse: divided under short headings, sometimes of teaching, sometimes of example, as in this notable “Rondel équivoqué,” Avoir, Fait Avoir Avoir, Avoir Fait-Avoir, Fait, where each word is a line. The interpretation may be left as a treat for the reader.