FRANCE
193
FRANCE
occasionally it goes on in several different places at the
same time. If the conception was original and inter-
esting, the execution of it, unfortvmately, was very
mediocre. The autliors of mysteries were not artists;
they knew nothing of character-drawing, their charac-
ters are all of a piece, without individual traits. Above
all, the style is deplorable, and but seldom escapes
platitude and solecism. The fifteenth was, as a whole,
the great century of the mysteries; they were then in
perfect harmony with the itleas and sentiments of the
period. In the next century, with the change of those
ideas and sentiments, they were to enter upon their
decadence and to tlisappear.
Did comedy too, in its turn, come forth from the Church? Can we connect it with the burlesque offices of the "Feast of Fools "and the "Feast of the Ass"? — Beyoml tloiibt we cannot. But in the fourteenth cen- tury joyous bands of comrades organized themselves for their own common amusement — the "Basoche", a society of lawyers, and the "Sots" or the "Enfants sans souci". It was by these societies that comic pieces were composed and played throughout the fif- teenth centurj'. Farces, moralities, and follies (soties) were the kinds of compositions which they cul- tivated. The farce wa.s a comic piece the only aim of which was to amuse; although it did not issue all complete from the jahUau, the farce bore a strong analogy to that form, and, as the themes were identi- cal, the farce was often nothing more than a fabliau in action. The best specimen of the type is "La Farce del'.^vocat Pathelin" (1470), which presents a duel of wits between an advocate and a cloth-merchant, the one as thorough a rascal as the other. The morality, a comic piece with moral aims, is far inferior to the farce. Essentially pedantic, it constantly eniploj's allegory, personifying the sentiments, defects, and good qualities of men, and sets them in opposition to each other on the stage. As for the folly (sotic), which may be called a dramatic pamphlet or squib, and belongs to the satiric drama, it was the special work of the "Enfants .sans .souci" and lasted but a short while.
The true literary distinction of the fifteenth century is to have given France a great poet — not the elegant, cold Charles d'Orleans, but that child of "poor and mean extraction" (de poi're et petite extrace), that " raauvais gargon" who was Francois Villon. Insub- ordinate scholar, haunter of taverns, guilty of theft and even of assassination, the marvel is that he should have been able to evoke his grave and lofty poetry from that life of infamy. His chief collection, "Le Grand Testament" (1489), is dominated by that thought of death which, for the first time in France, finds its expression in the "Ballade des Dames du Temps jadis". Thus did the Christian Middle .^ges utter through Villon what had been their essential preoccupation.
The. Renaissance and the Reformation. — When the sixteenth century opens, literature in France may be regarded as exhausted and moribund. What had been lacking in the Middle Ages was the enthusiasm for form, the worship of art, combined with a language sufficiently supple and opulent. The Renaissance was about to bestow these gifts ; it was to communi- cate the sense of beauty to the writers of that age by setting before them as models the great masterpieces of antiquity. Reversion to antiquity — this is the characteristic which dominates all the literature of the sixteenth century. The movement did not attain its effect directly, but through Italy, and as a sequel to the wars of Charles VIII. "The first contact with Italy", says Brunetiere, "was in truth a kind of reve- lation for us French. In the midst of the feudal bar- barism of which the fifteenth century still bore the stamp, Italy presented the spectacle of an old civili- zation. She awed the foreigner by the ancient author- ity of her religion and all the pomp of w-ealth and of VI.— 13
the arts. Add to this the allurement of her climate
and her manners. Italy of the Renaissance, invaded,
devastated, trampled under foot by these men of the
North, suddenly, like Greece of yore, took possession
of the rude concjuerors. They conceived the idea of
another life, more free, more ornate — in one word,
more 'human' — than that which they had been lead-
ing for five or six centuries ; a confused feeling of the
power of beauty twined itself into the souls of gen-
darmes and lansquenets, and it was then that the
breath of the Renaissance, coming over the moun-
tains with the armies of Charles VIII, of Louis XII,
and of Francis I, completed in less than fifty years the
dissipation of what little still survived of the medieval
tradition."
If the language very quickly undergoes the modifi- cations brought about by this new spirit, it is only little by little that the various forms of literature allow themselves to be penetrated by it. Such is the case with poetry. The principal poet of the earlier half of the sixteenth cen- tury, Clement Marot (1497- 1544), belongs, by his inspiration, to both the Middle Ages and the Ren- aissance. Of the Middle Ages he has first of all his scholastic educa- tion and also an imcontroUed pas- sion for allegories and for bizarre and complicatcil versification. In the best of his " E pttres " he sacrifices to the
XIV Century MS., Vatican Library
worst of the faults held in honour by the fifteenth
century: the taste for alliteration, for playing upon
words, and for childish tricks of rhyme. On another
side the influence of the Renaissance reveals itself
in his work in many imitations of the Latins, Virgil,
Catullus, Ovid. The "Epitres", his masterpiece,
are, besides, in a style of composition borrowed
from the Latin. A court poet, attached to the per-
sonal suite of Marguerite de Valois, herself a humanist
and a patroness of humanists, no man was more fav-
ourably situated for the effect of that influence.
Marot is, in other respects, a very original poet; his
"Epitres" mark the appearance of a quality almost
new in French literature — wit. The art of saying
things prettily, of telling a stor}^ cleverly, of winning
pardon for his mockeries by mocking at himself, was
Marot's.
Gra-co-Latin imitation is really only an accidental feature in the work of Marot; with the poets who suc- ceed him it becomes the very origin of their inspiration. For the poets who later formed the group called "La Pl^iade" Joachim du Bellay furnished a programme in the "Deffence et Illustration de la langue fran- ?aise" (1.549). To eschew the superannuated formu- la; and the "condiments" (ipicerics) of the Middle Ages, to imitate without reserve everything that has come down to us from antiquity, to enrich the lan- guage by every means practicable — by borrowing from Greek, from Latin, from the vocabulary of the handicrafts — these are the principles which this author lays down in his work. And these are the principles which the chief of the "Pleiade", Pierre de Ronsard (1524-85), applies. Ronsard's ambition is to exercise his wits in all the styles of composition in which the Greeks and Romans excelled. After their example he
