The foreign debt of English literature

by T. G. Tucker

Clément Marot opens the sixteenth century. He has been called the father of modern French poetry. If this means that he wrote with an ease and sprightliness, and a vein of urbane satire, which are usually associated with the esprit gaulois, but which skim rather along the surface of things, it is true. But if it means that he is the consummation of the Renaissance, and that the critical principles of French poetry were established in his time, it is without truth. For Marot, like Villon, is a poet and an artist without following the despotic rules which afterwards came to prevail in France, and he furthermore sought his themes rather in the old French subjects, the romances and the fabliaux, than in realms of classical antiquity. The Italian influence, however, touches him and leads him into pastorals, which, we must note, were known to Spenser.

Villon and Marot are both of the transition period, and not wholly of the Renaissance. They both fell short in one great respect; they lacked depth and elevation. This is a vice to which all French verse is prone, setting, as it does, so special a value on form; but it was the more discoverable in these two poets, because the rich intellectual nutriment of antiquity had not yet been assimilated by them, because their minds laboured under the intellectual poverty of mediaevalism, because, in other words, they lacked the substance with which the best ancient literature is crammed. Their poetry has many blossoms, but bears little fruit. Yet they mark one great step in progress. They are emancipated from the old mediaeval artificiality.

While Villon and Marot were thus emancipated, there were others during this transition time who were not by any means so. On the one hand they allegorized, like the trouvères, to the utmost; their subjects were obsolete and unreal; on the other, their language was trivial and their contents uneven. Verse literature seemed to need bracing and correction in the light of advancing study of the Greek and Latin masterpieces, and it is to the administering of such correction that we come in what is known as the Pléiade.

The Pléiade, or constellation of the seven stars, was the term applied to seven men of letters, who formed themselves into a coterie or league about the year 1550, with the professed resolve of reforming the French language and French literary methods. The conception is very French. This cool manner of looking at language and literary expression as subject to definite laws of art, which may be codified by a league or academy, is contrary to English notions. Not so with the French. They have no desire for impulsive and perhaps erratic individuality. This is one of their clearest characteristics. Of the Pléiade the two greatest names are Ronsard, the poet, and Du Bellay, who was both poet and manifesto-writer. Their object, as stated by themselves, was to bring French literature nearer to the classical models of Greece and Rome, and to create a nobler form and use of the language for literary purposes. And while Du Bellay was to write his manifesto, Ronsard was to give a practical illustration of the theory, by himself composing odes and sonnets in the proper style. The attempt was bold, and it was successful. For fifty years all French literature “Ronsardized.” Here are a few sentences of the manifesto concerning the Défense et Illustration de la Langue Française. “Our ancestors have left us our language so poor and bare, that it stands in need of the ornaments, and, so to speak, the features of other people.... By what means can we hasten its development? By the imitation of the ancients.... Translating is not a sufficient means of elevating our vulgar tongue to an equality with the most famous. What must we do? Imitate! Imitate the Romans as they did the Greeks!... We must digest the best authors and convert them into blood and nutriment.... You that mean to be a poet, read and re-read the Greek and Latin models. Then leave all those old French rondeaux, ballades, virelais, chants royaux, chansons and other such vulgarities (épiceries), which corrupt the taste of our tongue, and only serve to testify to our ignorance. Throw yourself on those witty epigrams in imitation of Martial!... Distil with a flowing style tender elegies after the manner of Ovid and Tibullus!... Sing me some of those odes as yet unknown to the French tongue ... and let there be nothing in which does not appear some trace of rare and ancient learning.”

We need not agree with all this breezy advice. It is impossible to re-create a language all at once. If there is not inspiration, there cannot be good poetry, though one may have infinite good models to follow. Nevertheless the new school was a success for half a century, and both Ronsard and Du Bellay, though often mechanical and often flat, have left a few imperishable sonnets and other pieces. Our own Elizabethans not only read Marot and his contemporary Saint-Gelais (who introduced the Petrarchan sonnet into France), they also read Du Bellay, who finally established the sonnet and at the same time served as a pattern for English writers. One writer of the Ronsardist school, Du Bartas, was a writer of real religious conviction, and his Semaine or Week of Creation, translated by Sylvester, gained no small currency in England.

What calls for particular notice in this connection is the deliberate way in which French writers and critics can contemplate and formulate the principles and methods of good literature. The English, to whom so much of French verse is cold and mechanical, may perhaps think that it is this same formulating which has done incalculable harm to poetry, a thing in its nature as incapable of regulation as are our emotions and our thoughts. But the French are of another opinion, and it is at least fair to say that, if writing by rules hampers the flight of genius and prevents creations of the sublime, it on the other hand checks the production of that utter doggerel which has been so often inflicted on readers of English literature. We shall do best to complete at once the history of this formulation, and then retrace our steps.

Early in the seventeenth century flourished the man to whom first were due those definite and despotic critical principles which were fully developed by Boileau and which came to tyrannize in England after the restoration of Charles II, subsequently reaching their perfection in Pope and his eighteenth-century school. It is true that Malherbe represents a movement which was simultaneously proceeding in Italy, and was also being begun in England by Waller and his follower Denham. But he was destined to exert a peculiar influence. François Malherbe was by nature critic, and not creator. He, like the Pléiade, offers himself as a deliberate reformer of literature. His thoughts are fixed on style and its correctness. His notion of verses is that they should be “beautiful as prose,” without any of the bold irregularities of a Pindar or the sentimental vagaries of a Petrarch. He measures words and syllables, toils laboriously over every line he writes, and prunes down metaphors and hazardous expressions with the deliberate knife of cold reason. What he compasses is conciseness and preciseness of phrase, and what he revels in is the sense, not of a profound thought or keen emotion expressed, but of a technical difficulty overcome. He is the true parent of all that verse, in reality but brilliant rhyming prose, which prevailed in France for two centuries, and which also reigned in England for at least one. It is he who taught Corneille and Racine how to form a verse, and Boileau how to criticize one. It was Boileau who passed on the word to our English Pope, Parnell, Gay, and Johnson. Dryden was doubtless the intermediate step, but it is to Boileau that Pope expressly resorts. But for Boileau, Pope’s Essay on Criticism would not have existed.

Nicolas Boileau, who flourished and dictated the principles of criticism in his Art Poétique during the life of Dryden, in the latter part of the seventeenth century, was long called in France the “law-giver of Parnassus.” There is little doubt that the title was justified. His bent and character were almost identical with those of Pope. He was a keen satirist, acute critic, and clever reviewer, but he was no true “poet.” His avowed object was to remove uncertainty of taste and to establish criticism on a basis of mathematical finality, to set forth a positive doctrine of literary judgement. And what his doctrine amounts to is that reason and good sense must decide against all spontaneity of taste. This means that poetry must attempt no audacious flights of fancy, must restrain its metaphors, must avoid complexity, and be sheer, plain, good sense, admirably expressed. And who that has read French poetry thenceforth until the rise of Victor Hugo, or who that has read English poetry from Dryden down to Cowper, will not perceive that the result of this doctrine was disaster to poetry, and that it produced, as Matthew Arnold expresses it, instead of so many classics of our poetry, just so many classics of our prose writing in verse? Poetry cannot be judged by “common sense,” nor written by “common sense.” It is an imaginative art, and therefore requires uncommon sense.

When, after the Restoration, the second great influence from French literature came distinctly over England, it came in this shape, one which was, on the whole, to be regretted.