It is about the middle of the sixteenth century, then, that the influence of Italian criticism is first visible. The literature of Italy was read with avidity in France. Many educated young Frenchmen travelled in Italy, and several Italian men of letters visited France. Girolamo Muzio travelled in France in 1524, and again in 1530 with Giulio Camillo.[312] Aretino mentions the fact that a Vincenzo Maggi was at the Court of France in 1548, but it has been doubted whether this was the author of the commentary on the Poetics.[313] In 1549, after the completion of the two last parts of his Poetica, dedicated to the Bishop of Arras, Trissino made a tour about France.[314] Nor must we forget the number of Italian scholars called to Paris by Francis I.[315] The literary relations between the two countries do not concern us here; but it is no insignificant fact that the great literary reforms of the Pléiade should take place between 1548 and 1550, the very time when critical activity first received its great impetus in Italy. This Italian influence is just becoming apparent in Sibilet, for whom the poets between Jean le Maire de Belges and Clément Marot are the chief models, but who is not wholly averse to the moderate innovations derived by France from classical antiquity and the Italian Renaissance.
M. Brunetière, in a very suggestive chapter of his History of French Criticism, regards the Défense of Du Bellay, the Poetics of Scaliger, and the Art Poétique of Vauquelin de la Fresnaye as the most important critical works in France during the sixteenth century.[316] It may indeed be said that Du Bellay's Défense (1549) is not in any true sense a work of literary criticism at all; that Scaliger's Poetics (1561) is the work, not of a French critic, but of an Italian humanist; and that Vauquelin's Art Poétique (not published until 1605), so far as any influence it may have had is concerned, does not belong to the sixteenth century, and can hardly be called important. At the same time these three works are interesting documents in the literary history of France, and represent three distinct stages in the development of French criticism in the sixteenth century. Du Bellay's work marks the beginning of the introduction of classical ideals into French literature; Scaliger's work, while written by an Italian and in Latin, was composed and published in France, and marks the introduction of the Aristotelian canons into French criticism; and Vauquelin's work indicates the sum of critical ideas which France had gathered and accepted in the sixteenth century.
With Du Bellay's Défense et Illustration de la Langue française (1549) modern literature and modern criticism in France may be said to begin. The Défense is a monument of the influence of Italian upon French literary and linguistic criticism. The purpose of the book, as its title implies, is to defend the French language, and to indicate the means by which it can approach more closely to dignity and perfection. The fundamental contention of Du Bellay is, first, that the French language is capable of attaining perfection; and, secondly, that it can only hope to do so by imitating Greek and Latin. This thesis is propounded and proved in the first book of the Défense; and the second book is devoted to answering the question: By what specific means is this perfection, based on the imitation of the perfection of Greek and Latin, to be attained by the French tongue? Du Bellay contends that as the diversity of language among the different nations is ascribable entirely to the caprice of men, the perfection of any tongue is due exclusively to the diligence and artifice of those who use it. It is the duty, therefore, of every one to set about consciously to improve his native speech. The Latin tongue was not always as perfect as it was in the days of Virgil and Cicero; and if these writers had regarded language as incapable of being polished and enriched, or if they had imagined that their language could only be perfected by the imitation of their own national predecessors, Latin would never have arrived at a higher state of perfection than that of Ennius and Crassus. But as Virgil and Cicero perfected Latin by imitating Greek, so the French tongue can only be made beautiful by imitating Greek, Latin, and Italian, all of which have attained a certain share of perfection.[317]
At the same time, two things must be guarded against. The French tongue cannot be improved by merely translating the classic and Italian tongues. Translation has its value in popularizing ideas; but by mere translation no language or literature can hope to attain perfection. Nor is a mere bald imitation sufficient; but, in Du Bellay's oft-cited phrase, the beauties of these foreign tongues "must be converted into blood and nourishment."[318] The classics have "blood, nerves, and bones," while the older French writers have merely "skin and color."[319] The modern French writer should therefore dismiss with contempt the older poets of France, and set about to imitate the Greeks, Latins, and Italians. He should leave off composing rondeaux, ballades, virelays, and such épiceries, which corrupt the taste of the French language, and serve only to show its ignorance and poverty; and in their stead he should employ the epigram, which mingles, in Horace's words, the profitable with the pleasant, the tearful elegy, in imitation of Ovid and Tibullus, the ode, one of the sublimest forms of poetry, the eclogue, in imitation of Theocritus, Virgil, and Sannazaro, and the beautiful sonnet, an Italian invention no less learned than pleasing.[320] Instead of the morality and the farce, the poet should write tragedies and comedies; he should attempt another Iliad or Æneid for the glory and honor of France. This is the gist of Du Bellay's argument in so far as it deals in general terms with the French language and literature. The six or seven concluding chapters treat of more minute and detailed questions of language and versification. Du Bellay advises the adoption of classical words as a means of enriching the French tongue, and speaks with favor of the use of rhymeless verse in imitation of the classics. The Défense ends with an appeal to the reader not to fear to go and despoil Greece and Rome of their treasures for the benefit of French poetry.[321]
From this analysis it will be seen that the Défense is really a philological polemic, belonging to the same class as the long series of Italian discussions on the vulgar tongue which begins with Dante, and which includes the works of Bembo, Castiglione, Varchi, and others. It is, as a French critic has said, a combined pamphlet, defence, and ars poetica;[322] but it is only an ars poetica in so far as it advises the French poet to employ certain poetic forms, and treats of rhythm and rhyme in a concluding chapter or two. But curiously enough, the source and inspiration of Du Bellay's work have never been pointed out. The actual model of the Défense was without doubt Dante's De Vulgari Eloquio, which, in the Italian version of Trissino, had been given to the world for the first time in 1529, exactly twenty years before the Défense. The two works, allowing for the difference in time and circumstance, resemble each other closely in spirit and purpose as well as in contents and design. Du Bellay's work, like Dante's, is divided into two books, each of which is again divided into about the same number of chapters. The first book of both works deals with language in general, and the relations of the vulgar tongue to the ancient and modern languages; the second book of both works deals with the particular practices of the vulgar tongue concerning which each author is arguing. Both works begin with a somewhat similar theory of the origin of language; both works close with a discussion of the versification of the vernacular. The purpose of both books is the justification of the vulgar tongue, and the consideration of the means by which it can attain perfection; the title of De Vulgari Eloquio might be applied with equal force to either treatise. The Défense, by this justification of the French language on rational if not entirely cogent and consistent grounds, prepared the way for critical activity in France; and it is no insignificant fact that the first critical work of modern France should have been based on the first critical work of modern Italy. Thirty years later, Henri Estienne, in his Précellence du Langage françois, could assert that French is the best language of ancient or modern times, just as Salviati in 1564 had claimed that preëminent position for Italian.[323]
It is not to be expected that so radical a break with the national traditions of France as was implied by Du Bellay's innovations would be left unheeded by the enemies of the Pléiade. The answer came soon, in an anonymous pamphlet, entitled Le Quintil Horatian sur la Défense et Illustration de la Langue françoise. Until a very few years ago, this treatise was ascribed to a disciple of Marot, Charles Fontaine. But in 1883 an autograph letter of Fontaine's was discovered, in which he strenuously denies the authorship of the Quintil Horatian; and more recent researches have shown pretty conclusively that the real author was a friend of Fontaine's, Barthélemy Aneau, head of the College of Lyons.[324] The Quintil Horatian was first published in 1550, the year after the appearance of the Défense.[325] The author informs us that he had translated the whole of Horace's Ars Poetica into French verse "over twenty years ago, before Pelletier or any one else," that is, between 1525 and 1530.[326] This translation was never published, but fragments of it are cited in the Quintil Horatian. The pamphlet itself takes up the arguments of Du Bellay step by step, and refutes them. The author finds fault with the constructions, the metaphors, and the neologisms of Du Bellay. Aneau's temperament was dogmatic and pedagogic; his judgment was not always good; and modern French critics cannot forgive him for attacking Du Bellay's use of such a word as patrie.
But it is not entirely just to speak of the Quintil Horatian, in the words of a modern literary historian, as full of futile and valueless criticisms. The author's minute linguistic objections are often hypercritical, but his work represents a natural reaction against the Pléiade. His chief censure of the Défense was directed against the introduction of classical and Italian words into the French language. "Est-ce là défense et illustration," he exclaims, "ou plus tost offense et dénigration?" He charges the Pléiade with having contemned the classics of French poetry; the new school advocated the disuse of the complicated metrical forms merely because they were too difficult. The sonnet, the ode, and the elegy he dismisses as useless innovations. The object of poetry, according to Horace, is to gladden and please, while the elegy merely saddens and brings tears to the eyes. "Poetry," he says, "is like painting; and as painting is intended to fill us with delight, and not to sadden us, so the mournful elegy is one of the meanest forms of poetry." Aneau is unable to appreciate the high and sublime conception of the poet's office which the Pléiade first introduced into French literature; for him the poet is a mere versifier who amuses his audience. He represents the general reaction of the national spirit against the classical innovations of the Pléiade; and the Quintil Horatian may therefore be called the last representative work of the older school of poetry.
It was at about this period that Aristotle's Poetics first influenced French criticism. In one of the concluding chapters of the Défense Du Bellay remarks that "the virtues and vices of a poem have been diligently treated by the ancients, such as Aristotle and Horace, and after them by Hieronymus Vida."[327] Horace is mentioned and cited in numerous other places, and the influence of the general rhetorical portions of the Ars Poetica is very marked throughout the Défense; there are also many traces of the influence of Vida. But there is no evidence whatsoever of any knowledge of Aristotle's Poetics. Of its name and importance Du Bellay had probably read in the writings of the Italians, but of its contents he knew little or nothing. There is indeed no well-established allusion to the Poetics in France before this time. None of the French humanists seems to have known it. Its title is cited by Erasmus in a letter dated February 27, 1531, and it was published by him without any commentary at Basle in the same year, though Simon Grynæus appears to have been the real editor of this work. An edition of the Poetics was also published at Paris in 1541, but does not seem to have had any appreciable influence on the critical activity of France. Several years after the publication of the Défense, in the satirical poem, Le Poëte Courtisan, written shortly after his return from Italy in 1555, Du Bellay shows a somewhat more definite knowledge of the contents of the Poetics:—
"Je ne veux point ici du maistre d'Alexandre [i.e. Aristotle],
Touchant l'art poétic, les preceptes t'apprendre
Tu n'apprendras de moy comment jouer il faut
Les miseres des rois dessus un eschaffaut:
Je ne t'enseigne l'art de l'humble comœdie
Ni du Méonien la muse plus hardie:
Bref je ne monstre ici d'un vers horacien
Les vices et vertus du poëme ancien:
Je ne depeins aussi le poëte du Vide."[328]
In 1555 Guillaume Morel, the disciple of Turnebus, published an edition of Aristotle's Poetics at Paris. It is interesting to note, however, that the reference in the Défense is the first allusion to the Poetics to be found in the critical literature of France; by 1549 the Italian Renaissance, and Italian criticism, had come into France for good. In 1560, the year before the publication of Scaliger's Poetics, Aristotle's treatise had acquired such prominence that in a volume of selections from Aristotle's works, published at Paris in that year, Aristotelis Sententiæ, the selections from the Poetics are placed at the head of the volume.[329] In 1572 Jean de la Taille refers his readers to what "the great Aristotle in his Poetics, and after him Horace though not with the same subtlety, have said more amply and better than I."[330]