THE PLEIADE "Les ombres, les esprits, les idoles affreuses, Des morts chargés d'offense errent pendant la nuit; "Pour ce qu'ils sont privés des délices heureuses "Souvent tu peux ouïr mon âme tout ainsi "Déesse, prends pitié de son cruel tourment, 325 The Pléiade, when all is considered, rendered great service to French literature; it sent it back to the great school of antiquity, it turned it towards great subjects, and diverted it from trifles. It gave French literature a great care for its own dignity, and, it may be said, gave it a conscience. From one point of view, in its desire to see nothing beautiful but what was Latin, Greek, or Italian, it was a kind of deviation, and interrupted the "natural" development of French literature from Villon to Marot, from Marot to Desportes, from Desportes to Racan, and from Racan to La Fontaine. But so true is it that one cannot escape from one's own nature that the Pléiade itself, once its first enthusiasms and extravagances were over-in Ronsard of the shorter poems, in Joachim du Bellay almost entirely, and in Belleau without exception was a development along the "natural" lines of French literature, and Joachim du Bellay is a link, far more than Desportes, between Marot and Racan. Hence it must be concluded that the Pléiade never really caused French literature to deviate from its natural course, but simply gave it more force, more loftiness of spirit, greater richness of language, and a greater care for perfection. CHAPTER XI POETS FROM 1580-1610 AFTER the death of Ronsard, between 1580 and 1610, his school showed signs of decadence-in its exaggeration, seen in the works of Du Bartas and d'Aubigné; in its enervation and weakness, exemplified by Desportes and Bertaut. Quite apart from this school we have Regnier who was so original and so entirely himself, in spite of his imitations from the Italian, that it is almost impossible to classify him. Du Bartas was the cause of much vexation to Ronsard, who towards the end of his life saw his young rival preferred to him. Salluste du Bartas was born in 1544. The great friend of the King of Navarre (later Henry IV.), a valiant soldier and a poet of distinction, he published in 1579 his "Semaine ou la Création," a long encyclopædic poem, extremely diffuse and often very wearisome, but containing now and again striking passages of real beauty. Du Bartas possessed a type of imagi nation which was little else but an extreme mastery over words, very often found among the Gascons, and sometimes very deceptive. He exaggerated all the faults of Ronsard, the compound words, the new words created by harmonious imitation. He said floflottants to express more fully the sensation of the undulation (flottement) of the waves; he described the lark " avec son tirelire, tirant l'ire à l'iré et tirant lirant lire" towards the sky, and he wrote without faltering : "Apollon porte-jour, Herme guide-navire, Mercure, échelle-ciel, invente-art, aime-lyre.... He brought back all the ingenuities and tricks of the "vers rapportés" of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This is his description of chaos: "Le feu, la terre, l'air se tenaient dans la mer; Etienne Pasquier declared this "inimitable," and fortunately it has been little imitated. But the poem had a great success and enthusiastic partisans. It is very curious that a century later it should have been admired in Germany. "We have kept our admiration for him," Goethe said, "and many of our critics have bestowed upon him the title of king of the French poets." He is absolutely disregarded amongst us, in spite of this admiration of the Germans, unless, perhaps, this admiration had something to do with this loss of reputation. D'Aubigné is a quite different sort of man. He was a narrow-minded, violent sectarian, a passionate fighter for his ideas and his party from the age of ten to that of eighty; but he was a very noble man, and possessed great imagination. He wrote enormously, both in prose and verse. In prose we have the "Histoire universelle of his own times, to which reference has already been made; the "Confession catholique du Sieur de Sancy," a Calvinistic pamphlet of extraordinary violence, though sometimes very amusing; "Lettres," dissertations on points of history and science; the "Histoire secrète " of Agrippa d'Aubigné, a very interesting autobiography; the "Aventures du Baron de Foeneste," a pleasant novel of manners, almost realistic, partly historical, and displaying observation of a very superficial kind, but satirical, gay, and witty. Besides these prose works there are a large number of pleasant, graceful poems, such as the "Printemps de M. d'Aubigné,” and lofty, serious, and almost sublime ones, like that entitled the "Hiver de M. d'Aubigné." It may be described as an ode to old age :— "Mes volages humeurs, plus stériles que belles, Allez nicher ailleurs, pour ne fâcher, impures, "D'un seul point le soleil n'éloigne l'hémisphère ; J'aime l'hiver, qui vient purger mon cœur de vices, "Voici moins de plaisirs, mais voici moins de peines: "Mais la mort n'est pas loin. Cette mort est suivie Vie de notre vie et mort de notre mort. Qui a jamais été si friand du voyage Que la longueur en soit plus douce que le port?" Finally, there is the book which gives him his chief title to fame, "Les Tragiques," written in 1577, but not published till 1616. "Les Tragiques" is not, properly speaking, an epic, but a picture in seven books of the troubles of France and the persecution of the Protestants. The first book is entitled "Misères," and gives a picture of the whole; the second, "Les Princes," is a fierce satire on the Court of Henry III.; the third, "La Chambre dorée," is a diatribe against the administration of justice; the fourth, the "Feux," and the fifth, the "Fers," give an account of the various tortures to which the Protestants were subjected; the sixth, "Vengeances,' threatens men with the anger of God for having despised Him; the seventh, "Jugement," is an appeal to the justice of God, the redresser of wrong. It will be seen from this brief summary of its contents that the poem is badly constructed, and that the author runs the risk of saying the same thing several times over. This is, indeed, exactly what does happen. This tragic poem of d'Aubigné's is very monotonous, and the author cannot vary the monotony of subject by variety of style. He is too constantly exasperated to change either his tone or his manner. The result is that the whole tone of the book is tense and violent, and the effect on the reader is very painful; it is, indeed, almost impossible to read the "Tragiques" straight through. The book, however, is redeemed, and wins our admiration, by beauties of expression and isolated passages which are really admirable. The narratives and descriptions themselves are not so beautiful as the oratorical passages which occur in both. D'Aubigné, who showed quite clearly elsewhere, as in the "Confession de Sancy," that he was an orator, is often a very great oratorical poet in "Les Tragiques." He possessed what had hitherto been unknown in France, and only reappears with Victor Hugo's "Châtiments," the gift of lyrical invective, of satire that is a discourse, and of discourse that has the movement of an ode. His poems are Pindaric philippics, or, to speak more correctly, they possess the eloquence of the Biblical prophets. That is d'Aubigné's true sphere, and not only is he here easy to read, which is not always the case elsewhere, but he impresses himself on our memory in tongues of flame :— "Ah! que nos cruautés fussent ensevelies Dans le centre du monde ! Ah! que nos ordes vies N'eussent empuanti le nez de l'étranger! Parmi les étrangers nous irions sans danger, L'œil gai, la face haut, d'une brave assurance. Nous porterions au front l'honneur ancien de France. Le chien fidèle et doux et le chien enragé, L'athéiste affligeant, le chrétien affligé. Nous sommes pleins de sang; l'un en perd, l'autre en tire. Regardez qui reçoit ou qui donne le coup. Ne criez sur l'agneau quand vous criez au loup." |