French Romances—La Fayette and others—Pilgrim’s Progress—Turkish Spy.
Quevedo’s Visions. 48. Spain had about the middle of this century a writer of various literature, who is only known in Europe by his fictions, Quevedo. His visions and his life of the great Tacaño, were early translated, and became very popular.[1053] They may be reckoned superior to anything in comic romance, except Don Quixote, that the seventeenth century produced; and yet this commendation is not a high one. In the picaresque style, the life of Tacaño is tolerably amusing; but Quevedo, like others, has long since been surpassed. The Sueños, or Visions, are better; they show spirit and sharpness with some originality of invention. But Las Zahurdas de Pluton, which, like the other sueños, bears a general resemblance to the Pilgrim’s Progress, being an allegorical dream, is less powerfully and graphically written; the satire is also rather too obvious. “Lucian,” says Bouterwek, “furnished him with the original idea of satirical visions; but Quevedo’s were the first of their kind in modern literature. Owing to frequent imitations, their faults are no longer disguised by the charm of novelty, and even their merits have ceased to interest.”[1054]
[1053] The translation of this, “made English by a person of honour” takes great liberties with the original, and endeavours to excel it in wit by means of frequent interpolation.
[1054] Hist. of Spanish Literature, p. 471.
French heroic romances. 49. No species of composition seems less adapted to the genius of the French nation in the reign of Louis XIV. than the heroic romances so much admired in its first years. It must be confessed that this was but the continuance, and in some respect possibly, an improvement of a long established style of fiction. But it was not fitted to endure reason or ridicule, and the societies of Paris knew the use of both weapons. Molière sometimes tried his wit upon the romances; and Boileau, rather later in the day, when the victory had been won, attacked Mademoiselle Scudery with his sarcastic irony in a dialogue on the heroes of her invention.
Novels of Madame La Fayette. 50. The first step in descending from the heroic romance was to ground not altogether dissimilar. The feats of chivalry were replaced by less wonderful adventures; the love became less hyperbolical in expression, though not less intensely engrossing the personages; the general tone of manners was lowered down better to that of nature, or at least of an ideality which the imagination did not reject; a style already tried in the minor fictions of Spain. The earliest novels that demand attention in this line are those of the Countess de la Fayette, celebrated while Mademoiselle de la Vergne under the name of Laverna in the Latin poetry of Menage.[1055] Zayde, the first of these, is entirely in the Spanish style; the adventures are improbable, but various and rather interesting to those who carry no scepticism into fiction; the language is polished and agreeable, though not very animated; and it is easy to perceive that while that kind of novel was popular, Zayde would obtain a high place. It has, however, the usual faults; the story is broken by intervening narratives, which occupy too large a space; the sorrows of the principal characters excite, at least as I should judge, little sympathy; and their sentiments and emotions are sometimes too much refined in the alembic of the Hôtel Rambouillet. In a later novel, the Princess of Cleves, Madame La Fayette threw off the affectation of that circle to which she had once belonged, and though perhaps Zayde is, or was in its own age, the more celebrated novel, it seems to me that in this she has excelled herself. The story, being nothing else than the insuperable and insidious, but not guilty, attachment of a married lady to a lover, required a delicacy and correctness of taste which the authoress has well displayed in it. The probability of the incidents, the natural course they take, the absence of all complication and perplexity, give such an inartificial air to this novel, that we can scarcely help believing it to shadow forth some real event. A modern novelist would probably have made more of the story; the style is always calm, sometimes almost languid; a tone of decorous politeness, like that of the French stage, is never relaxed; but it is precisely by this means that the writer has kept up a moral dignity, of which it would have been so easy to lose sight. The Princess of Cleves is perhaps the first work of mere invention (for though the characters are historical, there is no known foundation for the story) which brought forward the manners of the aristocracy; it may be said, the contemporary manners; for Madame La Fayette must have copied her own times. As this has become a popular theme of fiction, it is just to commemorate the novel which introduced it.
[1055] The name Laverna, though well-sounding, was in one respect unlucky, being that given by antiquity to the goddess of thieves. An epigram on Menage, almost, perhaps, too trite to be quoted, is piquant enough:
Lesbia nulla tibi, nulla est tibi dicta Corinna;
Carmine laudatur Cynthia nulla tuo.
Sed cum doctorum compilas scrinia vatum,
Nil mirum, si sit culta Laverna tibi.
Scarron’s Roman Comique. 51. The French have few novels of this class in the seventeenth century which they praise; those of Madame Villedieu, or Des Jardins, may deserve to be excepted; but I have not seen them. Scarron, a man deformed and diseased, but endowed with vast gaiety, which generally exuberated in buffoon jests, has the credit of having struck out into a new path by his Roman Comique. The Spaniards, however, had so much like this that we cannot perceive any great originality in Scarron. The Roman Comique is still well known, and if we come to it in vacant moments, will serve its end in amusing us; the story and characters have no great interest, but they are natural; yet, without the least disparagement to the vivacity of Scarron, it is still true that he has been left at an immense distance in observation of mankind, in humorous character, and in ludicrous effect by the novelists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is said that Scarron’s romance is written in a pure style; and some have even pretended that he has not been without effect in refining the language. The Roman Bourgeois of Furetière appears to be a novel of middle life; it had some reputation, but I cannot speak of it with any knowledge.
Cyrano de Bergerac. 52. Cyrano de Bergerac had some share in directing the public taste towards those extravagances of fancy which were afterwards highly popular. He has been imitated himself, as some have observed, by Swift and Voltaire, and I should add, to a certain degree, by Hamilton; but all the three have gone far beyond him. He is not himself a very original writer. His Voyage to the Moon and History of the Empire of the Sun are manifestly suggested by the True History of Lucian; and he had modern fictions, especially the Voyage to the Moon by Godwin, mentioned in our last volume, which he had evidently read, to imp the wings of an invention not perhaps eminently fertile. Yet Bergerac has the merit of being never wearisome; his fictions are well conceived, and show little effort, which seems also the character of his language in this short piece; though his letters had been written in the worst style of affectation, so as to make us suspect that he was turning the manner of some contemporaries into ridicule. |Segrais.| The novels of Segrais such at least as I have seen, are mere pieces of light satire, designed to amuse by transient allusions the lady by whom he was patronized, Mademoiselle de Montpensier. If they deserve any regard at all, it is as links in the history of fiction between the mock-heroic romance, of which Voiture had given an instance, and the style of fantastic invention, which was perfected by Hamilton.