[161] Martial d'Auvergne had the exceptional good luck to be reprinted in the 18th century (Vigilles 1724, Arrêts 1731), but he has not recently found an editor, though an edition of the Amant rendu Cordelier has been for some time due from the Société des Anciens Textes. The notice by M. de Montaiglon (the promised editor of the edition just mentioned) in Crepet's Poètes Français, i. 427, has been chiefly used here for facts.
[162] Ed. Kervyn de Lettenhove, as previously cited. For the remainder of the poets reviewed in this paragraph, few of whom have found modern editors, see Crepet, Poètes Français, vol. i.
[163] iii. 21.
[164] Paris, 1876.
CHAPTER II.
MAROT AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES.
Hybrid School of Poetry.
The beginnings of the Renaissance in France manifest, as we should expect, a mixture of the characteristics of the later middle ages and of the new learning. In those times the influence of reforms of any kind filtered slowly through the dense crust of custom which covered the national life of each people, and there is nothing surprising in the fact that while Italy felt the full influence of the influx of classical culture in the fifteenth century, that influence should be only partially manifest in France during the first quarter of the sixteenth, while it was not until the century was more than half over that it showed itself in England. The complete manifestation of the combined tendencies of mediaeval and neo-pagan thought was only displayed in Shakespeare, but by that time, as is the wont of all such things, it had already manifested itself partially, though in each part more fully and characteristically, elsewhere. It is in the literature of France that we find the most complete exposition of these partial developments. Marot, Ronsard, Rabelais, Calvin, Garnier, Montaigne, will not altogether make up a Shakespeare, yet of the various ingredients which go to make up the greatest of literary productions each of them had shown, before Shakespeare began to write, some complete and remarkable embodiment. It is this fact which gives the French literature of the sixteenth century its especial interest. Italy had almost ceased to be animated by the genius of the middle ages before her literature became in any way perfect in form, and the survival of the classical spirit was so strong there that mediaeval influence was never very potent in the moulding of the national letters. England had lost the mediaeval differentia, owing to religious and political causes, before the Renaissance made its way to her shores. But in France the two currents met, though the earlier had lost most of its force, and, according to the time-honoured parallel, flowed on long together before they coalesced. In the following chapters we shall trace the history of this process, and here we shall trace the first stage of it in reference to French poetry. In the period of which Marot is the representative name, the earlier force was still dominant in externals; in that of which Ronsard is the exponent, the Greek and Latin element shows itself as, for the moment, all-powerful.