The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare

by J. J. Jusserand

burial of sir guy of warwick.

The transformation occurred first in France, and was received with great applause. The times indeed were most propitious for a display, not of the barbaric heroism of olden times, but of courtly heroism; of an heroism which plumes, wigs and ribbons well fitted, and which, with scarcely any change, could be transferred from the battle field to the drawing-room, from Rocroy to the Hôtel de Rambouillet: no mean heroism, however, for all its ribbons. At this period, in France, manly and lofty virtues, as well as worldly ones, were worshipped in life, in literature and in art. From the commencement to the end of the century, examples of undoubted heroes were not lacking; Henri IV., Richelieu, Mme. de Longueville, Condé, Louis XIV., Turenne, now by their good qualities, now by their caprices, now by their deeds and now by their looks, resembled heroes of romance, and popularized in France an ideal of nobleness and greatness. In order to please and to be admired, it was necessary to show a lofty character; men must be superior to fortune, and women must appear superior to the allurements of passion; the hero made a display of magnanimity, the heroine of chastity. The hero won the battle of Fribourg, and the heroine had Montausier to pay court to her for thirteen years before she consented to be united to him in the bonds of wedlock. Such were the persons most admired in real life; such were the characters of romance and tragedy whom the public liked best, without, however, distinguishing between them. The Cid, Alceste, Artaban, Nicomède, as well as Julie d'Angennes, Montausier and Condé, were all members of the same family, and not any one of them more than another appeared comic or ridiculous: that is why Montausier was very far from being offended that traits of the character of Alceste were thought to be found in him, and that is why Mme. de Sévigné, a passionate admirer of Corneille, becomes as honestly enthusiastic over the extravagant heroes of the new romances as over those of the great Cornelian tragedies. "I am mad for Corneille; everything must yield to his genius ... My daughter, let us take good care not to compare Racine with him. Let us feel the difference!"[316] She writes elsewhere with regard to the heroes of La Calprenède: "The beauty of the sentiments, the violence of the emotions, the grandeur of the incidents and the miraculous success of their invincible swords, all that delights me like a young girl."[317]

This change, which consisted, not of course in the introduction of heroism into novels, where it had in all times found place, but in the magnifying, to an extraordinary degree, of this source of interest, and in a transformation of costume and of tone of speech, appeared not only in romances, but in the drama also, and even in history. Everything worthy of attention was for many years to be heroical. Heroes defy earth and heaven; they do not, like Aucassin, with a temper of ironical submission, give up Paradise in the hope of joining Nicolete in the nether world; they make the nether world itself tremble on its foundations: for nothing can resist them. Even in serious historical works the old rulers of the French nation appear under an heroical garb. King Clovis is thus described by Scipion Dupleix, historiographer royal, in his "Histoire Générale de France," 1634: "The hour of Easter-eve at which the King was to receive the baptism at the hands of St. Remy having come, he appeared with a proud countenance, a dignified gait, a majestic port, very richly dressed, musked and powdered; his flowing wig was curiously combed, curled, frizzed, undulated and perfumed, according to the custom of the old french Kings;"[318] but much more it seems according to the custom of less ancient sovereigns; and there is at the Louvre, a portrait of Louis XIII. bare-legged, periwigged, ermine-cloaked, which corresponds far better to this description than anything we know of Clovis.

The same characteristics appear in the epic and the drama. Antoine de Montchrestien, besides having written the earliest treatise of political economy, and thus having stood, if nothing more, godfather to a new science,[319] wrote a number of plays, flavoured most of them with a grandiloquence and heroism which give us a foretaste of Dryden. In his "Aman ou la vanité," he treats the same subject as Racine in his "Esther," but he has nothing in common with his successor, and much with the dramatists of the heroical school. In order, doubtless, to justify from the first the title of the play, Aman indulges his "vanité" in an opening monologue to the following effect:

"Whether fair Phœbus coming out of the hollow waters brings back colour to the face of the world, whether with his warmer rays he sets day ablaze or departs to take his rest in his watery bower, he cannot see in all the inhabited world a single man to be compared with me for successes of any sort. My glory is without peer, and if any of the gods were to exchange heaven for earth and dwell under the lunar disc, he would content himself with such a brilliant fortune as mine."[320]

Nearly all the dramas of Scudéry are made up of such speeches, and they were the rage in Paris before Corneille arose, Corneille in whom something of this style yet lingers. Each of Scudéry's heroes, be it in his dramas, in his epics, in his romances, is like his Alaric, nothing less than "le vainqueur des vainqueurs de la terre"; and having conquered all the world is in his turn conquered by Love. To write thus was supposed to be following the noble impulse given by the Renaissance, to be Roman, to outdo Seneca.[321]

In the novel especially this style shone in all its lustre and beauty. All the heroes of the interminable romances of the time, by Gomberville, George and Madeleine de Scudéry, La Calprenède and many others, be they Greek, Roman, Turk or French, are all of them the conquerors of the world and the captives of Love. "I can scarcely believe," wrote wise censors, "that the Cyrus and the Alexanders have suddenly become, as I hear it reported, so many Thyrsis and Celadons."[322] But their protests were of no avail, for a time, and romance heroes continued to reign in France, having had from the first for their palace and chief place of resort the famous Hôtel de Rambouillet.

This hotel had been building from 1610 to 1617 in the Rue St. Thomas-du-Louvre. Polite society began to gather there soon after its completion, and began to desert it only thirty years later. The heroic romances of the period were among the chief topics of conversation; and this is easily understood: they were meant as copies of this same polite society, and of its chiefs; under feigned names people recognized in Cyrus the Grand Condé; in Mandane, Madame de Longueville; in Sapho, the authoress herself, Mdlle. de Scudéry; in Aristhée, the poet Jean Chapelain. Persons thus designated often continued in real life to be called by their romance appellations; thus Madame de Sévigné is wont to subscribe herself "the very humble servant of the adorable Amalthée."[323] Men and women considered it a great honour to have their portraits in a romance; they felt sure then of going down to the remotest posterity, a fond belief to which posterity has already given the lie. Much intrigue went on to obtain such a valuable favour. While we are scarcely able now to plod on for a few chapters along the winding road which led Cyrus to his victories, these volumes were awaited with intense interest and discussed with passion as soon as published. Neither the expectation of the next number of the "Revue des deux Mondes," when it contains some important new study of actual life, nor the discussion about the last play of Dumas, can give us now an adequate idea of the amount of interest concentrated in Paris at that time upon those heroical, grandiloquent, periwigged figures.