That imbecile idea of some European nations, who, instead of disinfecting the medium, find it better to put down the doctors who propose remedies, can not make itself at home except among peoples who are destined to perish.[S]—Translated for the Popular Science Monthly from the Archives di Psichiatria.
TENDENCIES IN FRENCH LITERATURE.[T]
SUGGESTED BY PROFESSOR DOWDEN'S RECENT BOOK.
By PELHAM EDGAR, Ph. D.
"To present Victor Hugo in a few pages is to carve a colossus on a cherry stone." Thus Professor Dowden prefaces his ten admirable pages on the great French poet; and with equal appropriateness we might assign the phrase as a motto for the whole undertaking. The subject is too vast to cope with adequately in the limits of a slender volume, the tendencies too complex; and the appeal from human interest, which since the days of Sainte-Beuve and Taine has formed such an important element in scientific criticism, had to be abandoned in favor of generalized views of literary conditions and tendencies necessarily abstract or impersonal in character. Yet, despite these evident restrictions which the requirements of his task imposed upon him, Professor Dowden has produced a work of extraordinary merit, a masterpiece indeed in its kind. If we were not assured that everything which the eminent critic writes is its own sufficient justification, we might be inclined to question the necessity of the present volume, in view of the painstaking and conscientious treatise that Mr. Saintsbury gave to the public some sixteen years ago, and which has deservedly remained until the present time the most reliable English text-book upon the subject of French literature. With no desire to disparage Mr. Saintsbury's scholarly contribution, the present work does in truth supply a need which the earlier book, in spite of its abundant merit, failed to satisfy. It is not harsh criticism to state that Mr. Saintsbury's volume, crammed as it is with a plethora of dates and titles, is at best a compendium for convenient reference, and consequently quite unreadable as a book. Professor Dowden, on the other hand, has conquered the dry-as-dust problem with admirable skill, and the charm of his diction and the easy sequence of his ideas lead the reader insensibly on to the close of a delightful volume. Nor is the book lacking in instructive value of a highly reliable kind, for, in addition to an intimate knowledge of French criticism, Professor Dowden is evidently familiar at first hand with all the more important works of which he treats, and not infrequently proffers fertile suggestions upon debated questions.
Having avowed, therefore, a genuine admiration of Professor Dowden's book, will it be thought a graceless task if, with the proverbial perversity of critics, I endeavor to point out here and there questions of importance that may seem to have merited more attention than the author was perhaps able to afford to them within his restricted space?
The mediæval portion of Professor Dowden's book is valuable not for its originality, but rather as the reflection of advanced modern criticism in France. Therefore, in this brief review the mediæval period may be neglected, and turning to the second book, which deals with the sixteenth century, the first writer of capital importance whom we encounter is Clément Marot. The author has justly indicated the decrepit conditions of poetry in Marot's youth in the degenerate hands of the Rhétoriqueurs, and also the powerful attraction which the allegorizing mania exercised on the poet's early work. His later manner is justly emphasized, and his prowess in the lighter familiar forms of verse; but it is only by inference that we apprehend the comparative neglect of his work until the later classical reaction restored him to favor. Professor Dowden, indeed, throughout his book has hardly conveyed a proper idea of the reactionary shocks by which French literature has invariably advanced. Thus the Pléiade, in the enthusiasm of their rupture with middle-age traditions, were blind to the Renaissance elements in Marot's work, and seeking as they did to elevate poetry to nobler themes and a nobler manner, his easy familiar grace was distasteful to them.
Rabelais, of course, is another "colossus on a cherry stone," and the purport of his message is epitomized in a few luminous sentences. The elements of contrast in the man, and his full-blooded joy in living, which was the sign-manual of the Renaissance upon him, are indicated as follows: "Below his laughter lay wisdom; below his orgy of grossness lay a noble ideality; below the extravagances of his imagination lay the equilibrium of a spirit sane and strong. The life that was in him was so abounding and exultant that it broke all dikes and dams; and laughter for him needed no justification, it was a part of this abounding life. After the mediæval asceticism and the intellectual bondage of scholasticism, life in Rabelais has its vast outbreak and explosion; he would be no fragment of humanity, but a complete man."
Proceeding to the Pléiade, we find its doctrine admirably enunciated, and one point of literary history is well brought out—namely, that to the Pléiade, and not to Malherbe alone, belongs the honor of establishing the bases of classicism in France, the difference chiefly residing in the fact that the programme of the Pléiade was one of expansion in matters of language and prosody, whereas it is precisely in these points that Malherbe and Boileau are concerned with restrictive refinements. Again Professor Dowden, following perhaps in the wake of M. Brunetière, characterizes the conditions of the time as being unfavorable to lyrical expansiveness. "Ronsard's genius was lyrical and elegiac, but the tendencies of a time when the great affair was the organization of social life, and as a consequence the limitation of individual and personal passions, were not favorable to the development of lyrical poetry." These words are ripe with suggestiveness, and duly weighed, they afford the true solution of the oratorical and impersonal character of French literature for two long centuries, when the social genres in prose and poetry usurped dominion over the national mind. With our eye then upon the social conditions in France, the often-quoted words "Malherbe a tué le lyrisme" mean nothing more than that he struck a prostrate body.
Before turning from the sixteenth century it should perhaps be observed that in discussing the comedy of that period the author might have amplified his statement of Italian influences by at least a reference to the Commedia dell' Arte which we find established in France in 1576, with its traditional repertory of stock characters, whose antiquity ascends to the venerable times of the early Latin farces, and whose survival the work of Molière, nay, even of Beaumarchais, will adequately attest. The last great figure that greets us in the sixteenth century is Montaigne, and we feel a sense of disappointed curiosity when he is relentlessly dismissed at the end of the five pages to which he is entitled here. This singularly modern doubter still smiles inscrutably at us through the misty centuries that flow between us, and we would prefer to loiter with him by the way rather than pass him with a curt nod of recognition. But Montaigne is more important in the history of thought than in the history of literature, so, crossing the threshold of the sixteenth century, we meet the great lawgiver Malherbe, a Moses who really entered the promised land. Professor Dowden is eminently just and appreciative in his judgment of this pedantic and unsympathetic figure, estimating his merits and impartially noting his defects without presuming in his character as literary historian to stamp them as such. Malherbe undeniably eliminated personality from poetry. Shall we regard this as a defect? A century's masterpieces of objective art survive to say us nay, and if the critic's personal sympathies sway him to the side of lyric eloquence, the historian of literature observing without prejudice judges without rancor. "The processes of Malherbe's art were essentially oratorical; the lyrical cry is seldom audible in his verse; it is the poetry of eloquence thrown into studied stanzas. But the greater poetry of the seventeenth century in France, its odes, its satires, its epistles, its noble dramatic scenes, and much of its prose literature, are of the nature of oratory; and for the progress of such poetry, and even of such prose, Malherbe prepared a highway."