[p. 393.
Any number of speeches of this sort are to be found in the heroical dramas of Dryden, Settle, Lee, and their contemporaries. Roman, Arab, Turk, Greek or Moorish heroes, pirates or princes, when they mean to set anything at defiance, choose nothing less than heaven and earth as their object; they divide the world between them as if it were an orange; they rush to the fight or stop for a speech with a fine shake of the head which sends a majestic undulation round the wig worn by them, even by the Moors, as we may see in one of the very rare dramas then published with engravings. They are represented there with embroidered justaucorps, wigs and ribbons.[349]
Crowne besides his romance wrote several dramas that secured him a wide, if temporary, popularity. He also adapted Racine's "Andromaque" for the English stage, but he was very much disgusted with this work; the French original, though not "the worst" of French plays, was after all so mean and tame! "If the play be barren of fancy, you must blame the original author. I am as much inclined to be civil to strangers as any man; but then they must be strangers of merit. I would no more be at the pains to bestow wit (if I had any) on a French play, than I would be at the cost to bestow cloaths on every shabby Frenchman that comes over." Here we have Racine put in his proper place; what claim had he to be considered "a stranger of merit"? True, some crabbed English critics seem to have taken his part against the translator, and, incredible as it may seem, they have expressed a thought that "this suffered much in the translation.—I cannot tell in what," answers Crowne, "except in not bestowing verse upon it, which I thought it did not deserve. For otherwise, there is all that is in the French play, verbatim, and something more, as may be seen in the last act, where what is dully recited in the French play is there represented, which is no small advantage."[350] And true, it is, Pyrrhus is slain before our eyes; there are "alarums" and other lively, if customary, ornaments.
In this age obviously Racine could not please. Nor would Shakespeare have pleased a French audience, but as we know no attempt in that direction was made in Paris. The two nations lent one another, if anything, their defects. "Alaric" was named with praise by Dryden; Scudéry and La Calprenède continued to be most popular French authors during the century. Even in the next we find something remaining of their fame. Among the books in the library of the fashionable Leonora, Addison notices: "'Cassandra,' 'Cleopatra,' 'Astræa' ... the 'Grand Cyrus,' with a pin stuck in one of the middle leaves ... 'Clelia,' which opened of it self in the place that describes two lovers in a bower,"[351] &c. The passions in them which seem to us now so incredibly frigid, had not yet cooled down; their warmth was still felt: so much so that in one of Farquhar's plays, "Cassandra" is mentioned as greatly responsible for Lady Lurewell's first and greatest fault, the beginning of many others: "After supper I went to my chamber and read 'Cassandra,' then went to bed and dreamt of it all night, rose in the morning and made verses ..."[352] We cannot follow her in her account of the consequences.
All that was truly noble and simple in French literature was known, but at the same time generally misunderstood in England. To make French authors acceptable, grossness was added to Molière, bombast to Racine; even Otway, when translating "Bérénice," transformed Racine's "Titus" into a bully of romance who, in order to assuage his grief, goes to overrun "the Universe" and make "the worlds" as wretched as he is.[353] Madame de la Fayette had shown how it was possible to copy from life, in a novel, true heroism and true tenderness without exaggeration; her exquisite masterpiece was translated of course as was everything then that was French; but oblivion soon gathered round the "Princess of Cleve," and the only proof we have that it did not pass unnoticed is a clumsy play by Lee, in which this best of old French novels is mercilessly caricatured.[354] There was no attempt to imitate the Comtesse's pure and perfect style and high train of thought.
IV.
Reaction against the heroical romances did not wait, however, till the eighteenth century to assert itself in England; it set in early and very amusingly: but it remained powerless. As the evil had chiefly come from France, so did the remedy; but the remedy in France proved sufficient for a cure. In that country at all times the tale had flourished, and at all times in the tale, to the detriment of chivalry and heroism, writers had prided themselves on seeking mere truth. Thus, in the charming preface of the Reine de Navarre's "Heptaméron," Dame Parlamente establishes the theory of these narratives, and relates how, at the court, it had been decided to write a series of them, but to exclude from the number of their authors "those who should have studied and be men of letters; for Monseigneur the Dauphin did not wish their artifice to be introduced into them, and was also afraid lest the beauty of rhetoric should in some place injure the truth of the tale."
In the seventeenth century, the tradition of the old story-tellers is carried on in France in more developed writings, in actual novels, such as the "Baron de Fœneste" of D'Aubigné, 1617; the "Francion" of Charles Sorel, 1622(?); the "Berger extravagant" of the same, 1628; the "Roman Comique" of Scarron, 1651; the "Roman bourgeois" of Furetière, 1666, and many others. Scarron, who had travestied Virgil, was not the man to spare La Calprenède, and he does not lose his opportunity. "I cannot exactly tell you," he writes of one of his characters, "whether he had sup'd that night, or went to bed empty, as some Romance-mongers use to do, who regulate all their heroes' actions, making them rise early, and tell on their story till dinner time, then dine lightly, and after their meal proceed in the discourse: or else retire to some shady grove to talk by themselves, unless they have something to discover to the rocks and trees."