A Short History of French Literature
and in both his volumes of sonnets, but especially in the _Soupirs_,
excellent examples of the form are to be found. Magny had a strong
feeling for the formal art of poetry, and it was thus natural that he
should eagerly embrace the gospel of Ronsard. But besides this, he had a
true poetical imagination, and a real command of poetical language. A
sonnet in dialogue, which greatly attracted the admiration of Colletet,
the historian of French poetry in the next age, is perhaps not much more
than a _tour de force_. But many of his other pieces show real feeling,
and have a certain youthfulness about them which suits well with the
sentiments they express, and the ardour of literary as well as amatory
devotion which the poet endeavours to convey.
[Sidenote: Tahureau.]
Still younger and probably still more short-lived, but superior as a
poet, was Jacques Tahureau[199]. He was born at Le Mans of a noble
family, and died at the age of twenty-eight. But his life, if short, was
a happy one, and, like most of his contemporaries, he published a volume
of amatory sonnets under the title, gracefully affected even for that
age of graceful affectation, of _Mignardises Amoureuses de l'Admiree_.
Unlike many of the heroines of the Pleiade and their satellites, who are
either known or shrewdly suspected to have been imaginary, the _Admiree_
of Tahureau was a real person. What is more, he married her, and they
lived together for three years before his early death. Before the
_Mignardises_, he had published a _Premier Recueil_, and after them he
produced a third volume of odes, sonnets, etc. All three display the
same peculiarities, and these peculiarities are sufficiently remarkable.
Tahureau was named by the flattery and the classical fancies of his
contemporaries the French Catullus, and the parallel is not so rash as
might be thought. It is true that it came originally from Du Bellay in
one of his satirical veins. But a later poetical critic, Vauquelin de la
Fresnaye, is more precise in his description, and oddly enough uses the
very term which was afterwards applied in England to Shakespeare's
youthful sonnets. Tahureau, he says:--
Nous affrianda tous au sucre de cet art.
The author of the _Mignardises_ is indeed somewhat 'sugared' in his
style of writing; but there are genuine passion and genuine poetical
feeling as well in his verse. Of the minor poets of the time he is
probably the best.
[Sidenote: Minor Ronsardists.]
Before noticing the four remaining poets who have been mentioned as
occupying the highest places next to the Pleiade itself, a brief review
of the minor poets until the end of the century may be given. Etienne de
la Boetie wrote poems which, though they have some of the stiffness and
a little of the hollowness of his _Contre-un,_ possess a certain
grandeur of sentiment and a knack of diction other than commonplace,
which explain Montaigne's admiration. Claude Buttet is chiefly
remarkable for having made a curious attempt to combine the classicism
of the new school with the romanticism of the old. He wrote Sapphics in
rhyme, an idea sufficiently ingenious, but hardly successful. Yet it is
fair to remember that some of the varieties of Leonine verse lacked
neither force nor elegance. The truth is, that these classic metres are
so alien to all modern tongues, that, rhymed or unrhymed, they are
doomed to failure. Jean de la Peruse was, like Magny and Tahureau, a
poet who died before he had reached his term. At twenty-five few men
have left lasting works. Yet La Peruse not only produced a tragedy of
some merit, but minor poems promising more. Jean Doublet was a much
older man, and is chiefly noticeable as an example of the writers who,
beginning with Marot, or even with Cretin, and the Rhetoriqueurs for
models, bowed to the overmastering influence of the Pleiade. Docility of
this kind, however, rarely promises much poetical worth, and Doublet was
not a great poet; but his poems, which have had better fortune in the
way of reprints than those of greater men, show power of versification.
Amadis Jamyn was a somewhat more distinguished poet than those who have
just been mentioned. Born in 1540, he came to Paris, when the triumph
and supremacy of Ronsard was completely assured, and was taken under
the protection of the Prince of Poets. He was also honoured, as we have
seen, by being allowed to stand by the side of Ronsard, of Baif, of
Desportes, at the funeral of Remy Belleau. He translated the last twelve
books of the Iliad to complete Salel, and began a translation of the
Odyssey; besides which he wrote a poem on the Chase, another on
Generosity, and, like everybody else at the time, abundance of
miscellaneous pieces. He was a good scholar, and there was more ease in
his verse than is usually to be found in his contemporaries (save the
greatest of them), who too often allowed their classical studies to
stiffen and starch their verse. Another admirable poet, though of no
great compass, was the dramatist Grevin. His _Villanesques_, a modified
form of the favourite Villanelle, which had survived the other
_epiceries_ condemned by Du Bellay, are singularly graceful and tender,
epithets which are also applicable to his _Baisers_. The brothers La
Taille also, like Grevin, are chiefly known as dramatists. Jean de la
Taille, though but a boy of ten years old when the _style Marotique_ was
swept out of fashion, had sufficient independence to compose _blasons_
(and very pretty ones) of the daisy and the rose. Others of his poems
have mediaeval forms or settings, but he imitated Ronsard in his _Mort
de Paris_, and Du Bellay in his _Courtisan Retire_. The works of Jacques
de la Taille, who died young, were chiefly epigrams. Guy du Faur de
Pibrac wrote moral quatrains, which had a great vogue, and which in a
way deserved it. Nicolas Rapin was, with the exception of Passerat, the
chief of the poets of the _Menippee_, a remarkable group, who will be
noticed further when we come to that singular production. But Passerat
himself deserves more notice than simply as a political satirist and a
famous Latin scholar. Of all the poets of the sixteenth century before
Regnier and after Marot, Passerat was the one who possessed most comic
talent. His works are full of little touches which exhibit this, while
at the same time he was a master of the graceful love of poetry which
imitation of the ancients had made fashionable. His Villanelle 'J'ai
perdu ma Tourterelle' is probably the most elegant specimen of a
poetical trifle that the age produced, and has of late years attracted
great admiration. Vauquelin de la Fresnaye, a lawyer, the author of an
Art of Poetry, and of the first satires, so called, in French, had a
good deal of poetical power, which he expended chiefly on pastoral
subjects; but unfortunately his command of language and style was by no
means always equal to his command of fresh and agreeable imagery and
sentiment.
[Sidenote: Du Bartas.]
Guillaume de Saluste du Bartas[200], the 'Protestant Ronsard,' was born
in 1544 at Montfort, near Auch, served Henry of Navarre in war and
diplomacy, was wounded at Ivry, and died of his wounds in 1590. His
first work was _Judith_; then followed _La Premiere Semaine_, and next
_Uranie_, _Le Triomphe de la Foi_, and the _Seconde Semaine_. He also
wrote numerous smaller poems, including one on the battle of Ivry. The
'First Week of Creation' is his greatest and most famous work. It went
through thirty editions in a few years; was translated into English by
Sylvester, gave not a little inspiration to Milton, and was warmly
admired by Goethe. Ronsard at first eagerly welcomed Du Bartas; but his
jealousy being aroused by the pretensions of the Calvinist party to set
up their poet as a rival to himself, he resented this in an indignant
and vigorous address to Daurat, which contains some very just criticisms
on Du Bartas. Nevertheless the merits of the latter are extremely great,
and his personage and work very interesting. It has been said of him
that he represents, in the first place, the extreme development of the
Ronsardising innovation; in the second place, the highest literary
culture attained by the French Calvinists. Inferior to D'Aubigne in
knowledge of the world, in the choice of subjects perennially
interesting, and in terse vigour of expression, Du Bartas was the
superior of the great Protestant satirist in picturesqueness, in
imagination, and in facility of descriptive power. The stately and
gorgeous abundance of the vocabulary with which the Hellenising and
Latinising innovations of the Pleiade enriched the French language
supplied him with colours and material to work with, and his own genius
did the rest. His attempt to naturalise Greek compounds, such as
'Aime-Lyre,' 'Donne-Ame,' and the rest, has done him more harm than
anything else; but his combination of classical learning, with the
varied colour and vivid imagination of the middle age and the
Renaissance, often results in extraordinarily striking expressions.
_L'Eschine azuree_, for instance, is a singularly picturesque, if also
somewhat barbaric, reminiscence of [Greek: eurea nota thalasses]: the
enforcement of the idea of _hora novissima tempora pessima_ in the four
following lines is admirable:--
Nos execrables moeurs, dedans Gomorrhe apprises,
Les troublees saisons, les civiles fureurs,
Les menaces du ciel, sont les avant-coureurs
De Christ, qui vient tenir ses dernieres assises.
In such a passage again as the following, the power and simplicity of
the diction can escape no reader; the piling up of the strokes is worthy
of Victor Hugo:--
Les etoiles cherront. Le desordre, la nuict,
La frayeur, le trespas, la tempeste, le bruit,
Entreront en quartier.
All that was wanting to make Du Bartas a poet of the first rank was some
faculty of self-criticism; of natural _verve_ and imagination as well as
of erudition he had no lack, but in critical faculty he seems to have
been totally deficient. His beauties, rare in kind and not small in
amount, are alloyed with vast quantities of dull absurdity.
[Sidenote: D'Aubigne.]
[Sidenote: Desportes.]
Agrippa d'Aubigne[201] was a few years Du Bartas' junior, and long
outlived him. He was an important prose-writer as well as poet, and his
long life was as full of interesting events as of literary occupations.
At six years old he read Latin, Greek, and Hebrew; a year or two later
his father made him swear, in presence of the gibbeted corpses of the
unsuccessful conspirators of Amboise, to revenge their death. Shortly
afterwards he narrowly escaped the stake. For a time he dwelt with Henry
of Navarre at the court of Charles IX., and there thoroughly imbued
himself with the Ronsardising tradition. But he soon escaped with his
master, and for years was a Calvinist irreconcileable, always for war to
the knife, and as rude and bold in the council chamber as in the field.
The death of his master was unfortunate for D'Aubigne; but, though he at
first opposed the regency of Marie de Medicis, he made terms for
himself. The publication, however, of his 'History' brought enemies on
him, and he fled to Geneva, finishing his days there. His prose works
are too numerous to mention separately: the chief besides his histories
are the _Confession de Sancy_ and the _Aventures du Baron de Faeneste_,
both satirical in character and full of vigour. He began as a poet by
poems in the lighter Pleiade style, but his masterpiece is the strange
work called _Les Tragiques_. This consists of seven books, amounting to
not much less than ten thousand lines, and entitled _Miseres_,
_Princes_, _La Chambre Doree_, _Les Feux_, _Les Fers_, _Vengeance_,
_Jugement_. The poem is half historical and half satirical, dealing with