That this great accomplishment is on the whole the doing of the Pléiade in its larger sense, as designating and including the men of letters of 1550-1600, no impartial student of the period can doubt. But at the same time there is no doubt either that their work was both incomplete and in some respects open to grave objection. They had, like all reformers, literary as well as political, neglected to preserve the historical continuity, and deliberately turned their backs on the traditions of the language and the literature. Their importations and imitations had been sometimes unnecessary, sometimes awkward, sometimes absurd. The mass of their contributions required examination, arrangement, and no doubt in some cases rejection. Moreover, they had on the whole concentrated their attention too much upon poetry; prose, the less exquisite but the more useful instrument, had been comparatively neglected. Almost all styles had been tried in it, but no general style nor the conditions of any had been elaborated. In drama much remained to be done. The model was there in the rough, but the workmen had been unskilful, and fifty years of practice on the plan of Jodelle had not yet resulted in the composition of one really dramatic play. In short, though the Pléiade movement had begun by being nothing if not critical, it had not kept up the habit of self-criticism. The application of this criticism was what was left for the seventeenth century to supply, and at the same time the elaboration of a complete and workman-like prose style. We shall see how early and how eagerly this task was accepted, and how thoroughly it was carried out; so thoroughly, that the seventeenth century is the age of perfect French prose. But what was gained in prose was lost in poetry, and, putting the dramatists aside, the drop in this respect from the sixteenth to the seventeenth century is immense. The sixteenth is, putting our own days out of question, the palmy time of poetry in France. The urbanity of Marot, the stately grace of Ronsard and his followers, the majesty of Du Bartas, the fire of D'Aubigné, the nervous and yet effortless strength of Regnier, have never been surpassed, and until the last half century they have rarely been equalled. If to this be added the more irregular and unequal, but hardly inferior merits of the best sixteenth-century prose, the inexhaustible humour of Rabelais, the simplicity and varied colour of the great memoir-writers, the subtle eloquence of Montaigne, it may perhaps seem that the period can contest the primacy with any other. The dispute between it and its successor is, however, only an instance of one which recurs again and again in literature, and which neither need nor should be handled here at length.
BOOK III.
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.
CHAPTER I.
POETS.
Malherbe.
The history of the poetry of the seventeenth century in France naturally and necessarily opens with Malherbe, though he was forty-five years old at its beginning, and considerably the senior of Regnier, who has been included among the poets of the Renaissance. François de Malherbe[224] was born at Caen in 1555, being the eldest son of his father, another François de Malherbe, and both on the father's and mother's side of noble family. He was educated at his native town, in Germany and in Paris, and when he was twenty-one he entered the army. He married in 1581, and had three children, two of whom died young—a circumstance not immaterial in connection with his most famous poem, which is a 'Consolation' to a certain M. du Périer, whose daughter Marguerite had died in her youth. He seems to have written verses tolerably early, but, exercising on himself the same rigid principles of criticism which he applied to others, he preserved none or hardly any of them. It was not till he was past forty that his best-known poems were written, and the whole amount of his surviving work is not large. During the first two-thirds of his life he was not rich, for his patrimony was scanty, and the death of the Grand Prior, Henri d'Angoulême, to whom he had attached himself, deprived him of the chances of preferment. But in 1605 he was presented to Henri IV.; he soon afterwards received various places, and for more than twenty years was a court favourite, and in a way the autocrat of poetry. He died in 1628.