French Lyrics

by Unknown

From the middle of the twelfth century the native lyric in the north was entirely submerged under the flood of imitations of the Troubadours. The marriage of Eleanor of Poitiers with Louis VII. in 1137 brought Provence and France together, and opened the north, particularly about her court and that of her daughter Marie, Countess of Champagne, at Troyes, to the ideas and manners of the south. The first result was an eager and widespread imitation of the Provençal models. Among these earliest cultivators of literary art in the French language the most noteworthy were CONON DE BÉTHUNE (d. 1224), BLONDEL DE NESLE, GACE BRÛLÉ, GUI DE COUCI (d. 1201), GAUTIER D'ESPINAUS, and THIBAUT DE CHAMPAGNE, King of Navarre (d. 1253). There is in the work of these poets a great sameness. Their one theme was love as the essential principle of perfect courtly conduct, and their treatment was made still more lifeless by the use of allegory which was beginning to reveal its fascination for the mediaeval mind. From all their work the note of individuality is almost completely absent. Their art consisted in saying the same conventional commonplaces in a form that was not just like any other previously devised. So the predominance of the formal element was a matter of necessity. Some variation from existing forms was the one thing required of a piece of verse.

This school of direct imitation flourished for about a century. Then it suddenly ceased and for another century there was almost no lyric production of any sort. In the fourteenth century Guillaume de Machault (1295- 1377) inaugurated a revival, hardly of lyric poetry, but of the cultivation of lyric forms. He introduced a new style which made the old conventional themes again presentable by refinement of phrase and rhetorical embellishments, and he directed the pursuit of form not to the invention of ever new variations, but to the perfection of a few forms. And it is noticeable that these fixed forms were not selected from those elaborated under Provençal influence, but were the developments of the forms of the earlier chansons à danser, the rondets, ballettes, and virelis. The new poetic art that proceeded from Machault spent itself mainly in refining the phrase of the old commonplaces, allegories, and reflections, and on turning them out in rondels, rondeaux, triolets, ballades, chants royaux, and virelis. The new fashion was followed by FROISSART (1337-1410), EUSTACHE DESCHAMPS (approximately 1340-1407), who rhymed one thousand four hundred and forty ballades, CHRISTINE DE PISAN (1363-?), and CHARLES D'ORLÉANS (1391-1465), who marks the culmination of the movement by the perfection of formal elegance and easy grace which his rondels and ballades exhibit.

All this lyric poetry had been the product of an aristocratic and polite society. But there existed at the same time in the north of France a current of lyrical production in an entirely different social region. The bourgeoisie, at least in the larger and industrial towns, followed the example of the princely courts, and vied with them in cultivating a formal lyric, and numerous societies, called puis, arranged poetical competitions and offered prizes. Naturally in their hands the courtly lyric only degenerated. But there were now and then men of greater individuality who, if their verses lacked something of the refinement and elaborateness of the courtly lyric, more than atoned for it by the greater directness and sincerity of their utterance, and by their closer contact with common life and real experience. Here belong the farewell poems (congés) of JEAN BODEL (twelfth century) and ADAM DE LA HALLE (about 1235-1285), of Arras; here belong especially two Parisians who were real poets, RUTEBEUF (d. about 1280) and FRANÇOIS VILLON (1431- 146?), who distinctly announces the end of the old order of things and the beginning of modern times, not by any renewal of the fixed forms, within which he continued to move, but by cutting loose from the conventional round of subjects and ideas, and by giving a strikingly direct and personal expression to thoughts and feelings that he had the originality to think and feel for himself.

But no one at once appeared to make VILLON'S example fruitful for the development of lyric verse, and it went on its way of formal refinement at the hands of the industrious school of rhetoricians, becoming more and more dry and empty, more and more a matter of intricate mechanism and ornament. No more signal proof of the sterility of the school could be imagined than the triumphs of the art of some of the grands rhétoriqueurs like MESCHINOT (1415?-1491), or MOLINET (d. 1507), the recognized leader of his day. The last expiring effort of this essentially mediaeval lyric is seen in CLÉMENT MAROT. He had already begun to catch the glow of the dawn of the Renaissance, but he was rooted in the soil of the middle ages and his real masters were his immediate predecessors. He avoided their absurdities of alliteration and redundant rhyme and their pedantry; but he appropriated the results of their efforts at perfecting the verse structure and adhered to the traditional forms. The great stores of the ancient literatures that were thrown open to France in the course of the first half of the sixteenth century came too late to be the main substance of MAROT'S culture.

But it was far otherwise with the next generation. It was nurtured on the literatures of Greece, Rome, and Italy, which was also a classical land for the France of that day; and it was almost beside itself with enthusiasm for them. The traditions of the mediaeval lyric and all its fixed forms were swept away with one breath as barbarous rubbish by the proclamations of the young admirers of antiquity. The manifesto of the new movement, the Défense et Illustration de la langue française by JOACHIM DU BELLAY, bade the poet "leave to the Floral Games of Toulouse and to the puis of Rouen all those old French verses, such as Rondeaux, Ballades, Virelais, Chants royaux, Chansons, and other like vulgar trifles," and apply himself to rivaling the ancients in epigrams, elegies, odes, satires, epistles, eclogues, and the Italians in sonnets. But the transformation which this movement effected for the lyric did not come from the substitution of different forms as models. It had a deeper source.

Acquaintance with the ancients and the attendant great movement of ideas of the Renaissance reopened the true springs of lyric poetry. The old moulds of thought and feeling were broken. The human individual had a new, more direct and more personal view of nature and of life. That note of direct personal experience, almost of individual sensation, that was possible to a VILLON only by virtue of a very strong temperament and of a very exceptional social position, became the privilege of a whole generation by reason of the new aspect in which the world appeared. The Renaissance transformed indeed the whole of French literature, but the first branch to blossom at its breath was the lyric. Of the famous seven, RONSARD, DU BELLAY, BAÏF, BELLEAU, PONTUS DE THYARD, JODELLE, and DAURAT, self-styled the Pléiade, who were the champions of classical letters, all except JODELLE were principally lyric poets, and RONSARD and DU BELLAY have a real claim to greatness. This new lyric strove consciously to be different from the older one. Instead of ballades and rondeaux, it produced odes, elegies, sonnets, and satires. It condemned the common language and familiar style of VILLON and MAROT as vulgar, and sought nobility, elevation, and distinction. To this end it renewed its vocabulary by wholesale borrowing and adaptation from the Latin, much enriching the language, though giving color to the charge of Boileau that RONSARD'S muse "en français parlait grec et latin".

Of this constellation of poets RONSARD was the bright particular star. The others hailed him as master, and he enjoyed for the time an almost unexampled fame. To him were addressed the well known lines attributed to Charles IX.:

Tous deux également nous portons des couronnes:
Mais, roi, je la reçus: poète, tu la donnes.

His example must be reckoned high for his younger contemporaries beside the ancient writers to whom he pointed them.

But his authority was of short duration. RÉGNIER and D'AUBIGNÉ, who lived into the seventeenth century, could still be counted of his school. But they had already fallen upon times which began to be dissatisfied with the work of RONSARD and his disciples, to find their language crude and undigested, their grammar disordered, their expression too exuberant, lacking in dignity, sobriety, and reasonableness. There was a growing disposition to exalt the claims of regularity, order, and a recognized standard. A strict censorship was exercised over an author's vocabulary, grammar, and versification. Individual freedom was brought under the curb of rule. The man who voiced especially this growing temper of the times was MALHERBE (1555-1628). No doubt his service was great to French letters as a whole, since the movement that he stood for prepared those qualities which give French literature of the classic period its distinction. But these qualities are those of a highly objective and impersonal expression, seeking perfection in conformity to the general consensus of reasonable and intelligent minds, not of an intensely subjective expression, concerned in the first place with being true to the promptings of an individual temperament; and lyric expression is essentially of the latter kind. MALHERBE, therefore, in repressing the liberty of the individual temperament, sealed the springs of lyric poetry, which the Renaissance had opened, and they were not again set running till a new emancipation of the individual had come with the Revolution. Between MALHERBE and CHATEAUBRIAND, that is for almost two hundred years, poetry that breathes the true lyric spirit is practically absent from French literature. There were indeed the chansonniers, who produced a good deal of bacchanalian verse, but they hardly ever struck a serious note. Almost the most genuinely lyric productions of this long period are those which proceed more or less directly from a reading of Hebrew poetry, like the numerous paraphrases of the Psalms or the choruses of RACINE'S biblical plays. The typical lyric product of the time was the ode, trite, pompous, and frigid. Even ANDRÉ CHÉNIER, who came on the eve of the Revolution and freed himself largely from the narrow restraint of the literary tradition by imbibing directly the spirit of the Greek poets, hardly yielded to a real lyric impulse till he felt the shadow of the guillotine. It is significant of the difficulty that the whole poetical theory put in the way of the lyric that perhaps the most intensely lyrical temperament of these two hundred years, JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU, did not write in verse at all.