A Short History of French Literature
Jean Parmentier, a sailor and a poet, combined his two professions in
_Les Merveilles de Dieu_, a poem including some powerful verse. A
vigorous ballade, with the refrain _Car France est Cymetiereaux
Anglois_, has preserved the name of Pierre Vachot. But the remaining
poets of this time could only find a place in a very extended literary
history. Most of them, in the words of one of their number, took
continual lessons _es oeuvres Cretiniques et Bouchetiques_, and some
of them succeeded at last in imitating the dulness of Bouchet and the
preposterous mannerisms of Cretin. Perhaps no equal period in all early
French history produced more and at the same time worse verse than the
reign of Louis XII. Fortunately, however, a true poet, if one of some
limitations, took up the tradition, and showed what it could do. Marot
has sometimes been regarded as the father of modern French poetry,
which, unless modern French poetry is limited to La Fontaine and the
poets of the eighteenth century, is absolutely false. He is sometimes
regarded as the last of mediaeval poets, which, though truer, is false
likewise. What he really was can be shown without much difficulty.
[Sidenote: Clement Marot.]
Clement Marot[170] was a man of more mixed race than was usual at this
period, when the provincial distinctions were still as a rule maintained
with some sharpness. His father, Jean Marot, a poet of merit, was a
Norman, but he emigrated to Quercy, and Marot's mother was a native of
Cahors, a town which, from its Papal connections, as well as its
situation on the borders of Gascony, was specially southern. Clement was
born probably at the beginning of 1497, and his father educated him with
some pains in things poetical. This, as times went, necessitated an
admiration of Cretin and such like persons, and the practice of
rondeaux, and of other poetry strict in form and allegorical in matter.
As it happened, the discipline was a very sound one for Marot, whose
natural bent was far too vigorous and too lithe to be stiffened or
stunted by it, while it unquestionably supplied wholesome limitations
which preserved him from mere slovenly facility. It is evident, too,
that he had a sincere and genuine love of things mediaeval, as his
devotion to the _Roman de la Rose_ and to Villon's poems, both of which
he edited, sufficiently shows. He 'came into France,' an expression of
his own, which shows the fragmentary condition of the kingdom even at
this late period, when he was about ten years old. His father held an
appointment as 'Escripvain' to Anne of Brittany, and accompanied her
husband to Genoa in 1507. The University of Paris, and a short sojourn
among the students of law, completed Clement's education, and he then
became a page to a nobleman, thus obtaining a position at court or, at
least, the chance of one. It is not known when his earliest attempt at
following the Cretinic lessons was composed; but in 1514, being then but
a stripling, he presented his _Jugement de Minos_ to Francois de Valois,
soon to be king. A translation of the first Eclogue of Virgil had even
preceded this. Both poems are well written and versified, but decidedly
in the _rhetoriqueur_ style. In 1519, having already received or assumed
the title of 'Facteur' (poet) to Queen Claude, he became one of the
special adherents of Marguerite d'Angouleme, the famous sister of
Francis, from whom, a few years later, we find him in receipt of a
pension. He also occupied some post in the household of her husband, the
King of Navarre. In 1524 he went to Italy with Francis, was wounded and
taken prisoner at Pavia, but returned to France the next year.
Marguerite's immediate followers were distinguished, some by their
adherence to the principles of the Reformation, others by free thought
of a still more unorthodox description, and Marot soon after his return
was accused of heresy and lodged in the Chatelet. He was, however, soon
transferred to a place of mitigated restraint, and finally set at
liberty. About this time his father died. In 1528 he obtained a post and
a pension in the King's own household. He was again in difficulties, but
again got out of them, and in 1530 he married. But the next year he was
once more in danger on the old charge of heresy, and was again rescued
from the _chats fourres_ by Marguerite. He had already edited the _Roman
de la Rose_, but no regular edition of his own work had appeared. In
1533 came out not merely his edition of Villon, but a collection of his
own youthful work under the pretty title _Adolescence Clementine_. In
1535 the Parliament of Paris for a fourth time molested Marot.
Marguerite's influence was now insufficient to protect him, and the poet
fled first to Bearn and then to Ferrara. Here, under the protection of
Renee de France, he lived and wrote for some time, but the persecution
again grew hot. He retired to Venice, but in 1539 obtained permission to
return to France. Francis gave him a house in the Faubourg Saint
Germain, and here apparently he wrote his famous Psalms, which had an
immense popularity; these the Sorbonne condemned, and Marot once more
fled, this time to Geneva. He found this place an uncomfortable sojourn,
and crossed the Alps into Piedmont, where, not long afterwards, he died
in 1544.
Marot's work is sufficiently diverse in form, but the classification of
it adopted in the convenient edition of Jannet is perhaps the best,
though it neglects chronology. There are some dozen pieces of more or
less considerable length, among which may specially be mentioned _Le
Temple de Cupido_, an early work of _rhetoriqueur_ character for the
most part, in dizains of ten and eight syllables alternately, a Dialogue
of two Lovers, an Eclogue to the King; _L'Enfer_, a vigorous and
picturesque description of his imprisonment in the Chatelet, and some
poems bearing a strong Huguenot impression. Then come sixty-five
epistles written in couplets for the most part decasyllabic. These
include the celebrated _Coq-a-l'Ane_, a sort of nonsense-verse, with a
satirical tendency, which derives from the mediaeval _fatrasie_, and was
very popular and much imitated. Another mediaeval restoration of
Marot's, also very popular and also much imitated, was the _blason_, a
description, in octosyllables. Twenty-six elegies likewise adopt the
couplet, and show, as do the epistles, remarkable power over that form.
Fifteen ballades, twenty-two songs in various metres, eighty-two
rondeaux, and forty-two songs for music, contain much of Marot's most
beautiful work. His easy graceful style escaped the chief danger of
these artificial forms, the danger of stiffness and monotony; while he
was able to get out of them as much pathos and melody as any other
French poet, except Charles d'Orleans and Villon. Numerous _etrennes_
recall the _Xenia_ of Martial, and funeral poems of various lengths and
styles follow. Then we have nearly three hundred epigrams, many of them
excellent in point and elegance, a certain number of translations, the
Psalms, fifty in number, certain prayers, and two versified renderings
of Erasmus' _Colloquies_.
It will be seen from this enumeration that the majority of Marot's work
is what is now called occasional. No single work of his of a greater
length than a few hundred lines exists; and, after his first attempts in
the allegorical kind, almost all his works were either addressed to
particular persons, or based upon some event in his life. Marot was
immensely popular in his lifetime; and though after his death a
formidable rival arose in Ronsard, the elder poet's fame was sustained
by eager disciples. With the discredit of the Pleiade, in consequence of
Malherbe's criticisms, Marot's popularity returned in full measure, and
for two centuries he was the one French poet before the classical period
who was actually read and admired with genuine admiration by others
besides professed students of antiquity. Since the great revival of the
taste for older literature, which preceded and accompanied the Romantic
movement, Marot has scarcely held this pride of place. The Pleiade on
the one hand, the purely mediaeval writers on the other, have pushed him
from his stool. But sane criticism, which declines to depreciate one
thing because it appreciates another, will always have hearty admiration
for his urbanity, his genuine wit, his graceful turn of words; and his
flashes of pathos and poetry.
It is, as has been said, one of the commonplaces of the subject to speak
of Marot as the father of modern French poetry; the phrase is, like all
such phrases, inaccurate, but, like most such phrases, it contains a
certain amount of truth. To the characteristics of the lighter French
poetry, from La Fontaine to Beranger, which has always been more popular
both at home and abroad than the more ambitious and serious efforts of
French poets, Marot does in some sort stand in a parental relation. He
retained the sprightliness and sly fun of the Fabliau-writers, while he
softened their crudity of expression, he exchanged clumsiness and
horse-play for the play of wit, and he emphasised fully in the language
the two characteristics which have never failed to distinguish it since,
elegance and urbanity. His style is somewhat pedestrian, though on
occasion he can write with exquisite tenderness, and with the most
delicate suggestiveness of expression. But as a rule he does not go
deep; ease and grace, not passion or lofty flights, are his strong
points. Representing, as he did, the reaction from the stiff forms and
clumsily classical language of the _rhetoriqueurs_, it was not likely
that he should exhibit the tendency of his own age to classical culture
and imitation very strongly. He and his school were thus regarded by
their immediate successors of the Pleiade as rustic and uncouth singers,
for the most part very unjustly. But still Marot's work was of less
general and far-reaching importance than that of Ronsard. He brought out
the best aspect of the older French literature, and cleared away some
disfiguring encumbrances from it, but he imported nothing new. It would
hardly be unjust to say that, given the difference of a century in point
of ordinary progress, Charles d'Orleans is Marot's equal in elegance and
grace, and his superior in sentiment, while Marot is not comparable to
Villon in passion or in humour. His limitation, and at the same time his
great merit, was that he was a typical Frenchman. A famous epigram,
applied to another person two centuries later, might be applied with
very little difficulty or alteration to Marot. He had more than anybody
else of his time the literary characteristics which the ordinary
literary Frenchman has. We constantly meet in the history of literature
this contrast between the men who are simply shining examples of the
ordinary type, and men who cross and blend that type with new
characters and excellences. Unquestionably the latter are the greater,
but the former cannot on any equitable scheme miss their reward. It must
be added that the positive merit of much of Marot's work is great,
though, as a rule, his longer pieces are very inferior to his shorter.
Many of the epigrams are admirable; the Psalms, which have been unjustly
depreciated of late years by French critics, have a sober and solemn
music, which is almost peculiar to the French devotional poetry of that
age; the satirical ballade of _Frere Lubin_ is among the very best
things of its kind; while as much may be said of the rondeaux 'Dedans
Paris' in the lighter style, and 'En la Baisant' in the graver. Perhaps
the famous line--
Un doux nenny avec un doux sourire,
supposed to have been addressed to the Queen of Navarre, expresses
Marot's poetical powers as well as anything else, showing as it does