A Short History of French Literature
admirable prose writer, and a clever composer of ballades and other
light verse; Godeau, a bishop and a very clever versifier; Blot, who was
rather a political than a social rhymer; Marigny, who was also famous
for his Mazarinades, but whose satirical power was by no means the only
side of his poetical talent; Charleval, whose personal popularity was
greater than his literary ability; Maucroix, the friend of La Fontaine;
Segrais, an eclogue writer of no small merit; Chapelle, an idle
epicurean, who derives most of his fame from the fact of his having been
intimate with all the foremost literary men of the time, and from his
having composed, in company with Bachaumont, a _Voyage_ in mixed prose
and verse, the form of which was long very popular in France and was
imitated with especial success by Anthony Hamilton and Voltaire;
Pavillon, who deserves a very similar general description, but who gave
no such single example of his abilities: all belong to this class.
[Sidenote: Epic School. Chapelain.]
Side by side with the frivolous school, but in curious contrast with it,
there existed a school of ponderous epic writers, the extirpation of
which is the best claim of Boileau to the gratitude of posterity. The
typical poets of this class are Georges de Scudery, the author of
_Alaric_, and Chapelain, the author of the _Pucelle_. Scudery was a
soldier and a man of considerable talent, who lacked nothing but
patience and the power of self-criticism to produce really good work.
Like his more famous sister, he had invention and literary facility. His
plays are not without merit in parts, and his epic of _Alaric_, amidst
astonishing platitudes and extravagances, has occasional good lines. But
Chapelain is by far the most remarkable figure of the school. He was
bred up to be a poet from his earliest age, and by a stroke of luck,
impossible in less anomalous times, he was taken at his own valuation
for years. _La Pucelle_ was quoted in manuscript, and anxiously expected
for half a short lifetime. It only appeared to be hopelessly damned.
There are passages in it of merit, but they are associated with lines
which read like designed burlesques. The onslaughts of Boileau have
created a kind of reaction in favour of Chapelain with some who disagree
with Boileau's poetical principles: but he is not defensible. His odes
are indeed tolerable in parts; not so the _Pucelle_, save, as has been
said, in occasional lines. The _Clovis_ of Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin is
worse than the _Pucelle_. On the other hand, the Pere le Moyne in his
_St. Louis_, taking apparently Du Bartas as his model, produced work
which, if not very readable as a whole, manifests real and very
considerable poetical talent. Lastly, Saint Amant in the _Moise Sauve_
showed how far below himself a clever writer may be when he mistakes his
style.
[Sidenote: Bacchanalian School. Saint Amant.]
Saint Amant[228], who, to do him justice, did not call _Moise Sauve_ an
epic but an 'idylle heroique,' is the link between this school and a
third composed of purely convivial poets, who even in this century
furnished work of remarkable excellence, and who produced a numerous and
brilliant progeny in the next. Saint Amant's Anacreontic poems are of
great merit. Of the same class was Saint Pavin, who was not merely a
free liver, but a member of the small but influential free-thinking sect
which preceded and gave birth to the _Philosophes_ of the next century.
This time, moreover, was the period of a curious literary trick, the
resuscitation or forging of the convivial poems of Oliver Basselin by a
Norman lawyer of the name of Jean le Houx. A genuine and contemporary
Basselin, in the person of a carpenter named Adam Billaut, produced some
notable work of the same kind. Unfortunately the Anacreontic poetry of
this time suffers from the too frequent coarseness of its language; a
fault which indeed was not fully corrected until Beranger's days.
[Sidenote: La Fontaine.]
The members, however, of all these schools have long lost their hold on
all but students of literature, and, with the exception of La Fontaine
and Boileau, it is not easy to mention any non-dramatic poet of the
seventeenth century who has kept a place in the general memory. Jean la
Fontaine[229] was born at Chateau Thierry in Champagne in the year 1621,
and died at Paris in 1695. His father held a considerable post as ranger
of the neighbouring forests, an office which passed to his son. La
Fontaine seems to have been carelessly educated, but after a certain
time literature attracted him, and he began to study in a desultory
fashion, without however, as it would appear, being himself tempted to
write. At the age of six-and-twenty he married Marie Hericart, a girl of
sixteen, who is said to have been both amiable and beautiful, and not
long afterwards he was left his own master by his father's death. He was
suited very ill by nature either to fill a responsible office or to be
head of a house. The well-known stories of his absence of mind, his
simplicity, his indifference to outward affairs, have no doubt been
exaggerated, but there is, equally without doubt, a foundation of fact
in them. On the other hand, though the most serious charges against his
wife seem to rest on no foundation, it is certain that she had little
aptitude for housewifery. After a time the household was broken up,
though there was offspring of the marriage. A division of goods was
effected, and husband and wife separated, not to meet again except on
visits and for brief spaces of time, though they seem to have remained
on perfectly friendly terms. La Fontaine went to Paris, and very soon
attracted the notice of Fouquet, the magnificent superintendent of the
finances, who gave him a pension of a thousand livres and made him a
member of his literary household. Here La Fontaine began to write. At
the downfall of Fouquet he was constant to his friend, and produced the
best-known of his miscellaneous poems, the 'Pleurez, Nymphes de
Vaux[230].' The misfortune unsettled him for a time, and he travelled
about. But returning to his native place, he was taken into favour by
the Duchess of Bouillon, and this was the beginning of a series of
patronages which lasted till the end of his life. Once more visiting
Paris, he became a favourite with many men and women of rank, and began
his serious literary work by producing the first part of his _Contes_.
The remaining parts and the _Fables_ appeared at intervals during the
remainder of his life. His second visit to Paris brought about his
traditional association with Boileau, Moliere, and Racine, the four
meeting at regular intervals, either in taverns or at lodgings in the
Rue Vieux Colombier. During the later years of his life La Fontaine was
a confirmed Parisian. His office at Chateau Thierry had been sold, and
he was the guest of various hospitable persons, the chief of whom was
Madame de la Sabliere. In 1668 appeared the first part of the _Fables_
with universal approval. But the free character of the _Contes_, and
still more the association of La Fontaine with some of the freethinkers
who were in ill-repute with the king's spiritual advisers, retarded his
admission to the Academy. When Colbert died, La Fontaine and Boileau
were the two candidates; an awkward accident, considering their
friendship, and the fact that the court was as decidedly for Boileau as
the Academy itself for La Fontaine. The latter was elected, but the king
delayed his assent, and even seemed likely to exercise a veto, when
fortunately a second vacancy occurred, and Boileau being elected, both
were approved by the king, Boileau warmly, La Fontaine with the
grudging terms 'Vous pouvez recevoir La Fontaine; il a promis d'etre
sage.' A curious warning of a similar tenor was contained in the
'Discours de Reception.'
La Fontaine's work is considerable, including many miscellaneous poems,
the romance of _Psyche_, and various dramatic attempts which were more
or less failures. But the _Contes_ and the _Fables_ are the only works
which have held their ground with posterity, and it is upon them that
his reputation is justly based. The first part of the _Contes_ appeared
at the extreme end of 1664[231], the second in 1667, the third in 1671,
but the author added pieces in successive editions. The first part of
the _Fables_ appeared in 1668, dedicated to the Dauphin, the second in
1679, dedicated to Madame de Montespan, the third in 1693, dedicated to
the Duc de Bourgogne, who is said to have been taught by Fenelon to
delight in La Fontaine, and to have sent him just before his death all
the money he had. The two books are complementary to each other, and La
Fontaine's genius cannot be judged by either alone. It has been remarked
that he was a diligent though apparently a very desultory reader. He
read the Italians, and, apparently with still more relish and profit,
the works of the old French writers, to whom the Italians owed so much.
The spirit of the Fabliaux had been dead, or at any rate dormant, since
Marot and Rabelais; La Fontaine revived it. Even purists, like his
friend Boileau, admitted a certain archaism in lighter poetry, and La
Fontaine would in all probability have troubled himself very little if
they had not. His language is, therefore, more supple, varied, and racy
than even that of Moliere, and this is his first excellence. His second
is a faculty of easy narration in verse, which is absolutely unequalled
except perhaps in Pulci and Ariosto, while it is certainly unsurpassed
anywhere. His third distinguishing point is his power of insinuating, it
may be a satirical point, it may be a moral reflection, which is also
hardly equalled and as certainly unsurpassed. In the authors whom La
Fontaine followed, either deliberately or unconsciously, the models of
his tales and his fables were indiscriminately mingled; but he separated
them by so rigid a line that, while there is hardly a phrase in his
_Fables_ which is not suited _virginibus puerisque_, the _Contes_ are
not exactly a book for youth. In the latter the author has taken
subjects, always amusing but not unfrequently loose, from the old
fabulists, from Boccaccio, from the French prose tale-tellers of the
_Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles_ and similar collections, from Rabelais, from
a few Italian writers of the Renaissance, and has dressed them up in the
incomparable narrative of which he alone has the secret. Where he treads
in the steps of the greatest writers he is almost always best. 'Joconde'
supplies the opportunity of a remarkable comparison with Ariosto; 'La
Fiancee du Roi de Garbe' of a still more remarkable comparison with
Boccaccio. In this latter respect the palm of vivid and varied narration
is with La Fontaine, but he misses something of the spirit of the
original in his portrait of Alaciel; indeed La Fontaine's weakest point
is in the comparatively pedestrian character of his treatment. He has
little romance, and in translating, not merely the Italians but such
countrymen and women of his own as the authors of the Heptameron, he
loses the poetical charm which, as has been pointed out, graces and
saves the morality or immorality of the Renaissance. Therefore, despite
the wonderful variety and vivid painting of the _Contes_, presenting a
series of pictures which for these qualities have few rivals in
literature, the disapproval with which censors more rigid than Johnson
(whose excuse of Prior will fairly stretch to Prior's original) have
visited them is not altogether unjustifiable.
The Fables, with hardly less excellence of the purely literary kind, are
fortunately free from the least vestige of any similar fault. La
Fontaine, instead of in the smallest degree degrading the beast-fable,