by Will Durant
He accepted the classic prohibition of violent action on the stage, and therefore restricted himself to expressing passion by speech. This put a heavy burden upon style; the drama became a succession of orations, and the uninterrupted march of alexandrines—twelve-syllable lines rhyming in couplets—skirts the edge of monotony; we miss in Racine and Corneille the flexibility, naturalness, and incalculable variety of Elizabethan blank verse. What a labor of genius must have been required to lift this narrow form out of a wearying sameness by the force and beauty of style! Racine and Corneille should not be read, they must be heard, preferably at night in the court of the Invalides or the Louvre.
To compare Racine with Corneille is an old pastime among the French. Mme. de Sévigné, after seeing Bajazet, and before Iphigénie or Phèdre had been staged, pronounced for Corneille with her usual verve. Rashly, but perhaps rightly, she predicted:
Racine will never be able to go beyond . . . Andromaque . . . His plays are written for [Mlle.] Champmeslé . . . When he grows old and ceases to be in love, then it will be seen whether I am mistaken or not. Long live, then, our friend Corneille; and let us forgive the bad lines we meet with in him for the sake of those divine passages that so often transport us . . .
It is in general the opinion of everyone of good taste. 31 But Voltaire, having undertaken to edit Corneille, shocked the French Academy by noting the faults, the crudities, the rhetoric of the great dramatist. “I confess,” he wrote, “that in editing Corneille I become an idolater of Racine.” 32 Time has recognized those faults, and has forgiven them in one who had not Racine’s advantage of coming after Corneille. To have raised the French drama from its previous level to the height of Le Cid and Polyeucte was a more difficult achievement than to reach the passionate ecstasies and melodious beauty of Andromaque and Phèdre. Corneille and Racine are the masculine and feminine themes in the poetry of the Great Century—the powerful expression of honor and love. They must be taken together to feel the scope and strength of the French classical drama, just as we must take Michelangelo and Raphael together to judge the Italian Renaissance, or Beethoven and Mozart to understand German music at the close of the eighteenth century.
David Hume, a canny Scot well versed in the language and literature of France, thought that “with regard to the stage, the French have excelled even the Greeks, who far excelled the English.” 33 This is a judgment that would have surprised Racine himself, who worshiped Sophocles as perfection, though he dared to rival Euripides. And in this he succeeded, which is praise indeed. He kept the modern drama at a level that only Shakespeare and Corneille had reached, and that no one but Goethe has touched again.
IV. LA FONTAINE: 1621–95
In that age of flamboyant literary enmities it is a pleasure to hear of the famous, half-legendary friendship of Boileau, Molière, Racine, and La Fontaine—la société des Quatre Amis.
Jean de La Fontaine was the black sheep of the group. Like the others, he came from the middle class; the aristocracy is too interested in the art of life to spare time for the life of art. Born at Château-Thierry in Champagne, son of the local Master of the Waters and Forests, he grew up as an eager part of surrounding nature, became a lover of fields, woods, trees, streams, and all their denizens; he learned the habits, and divined with sympathy the aims, worries, and thoughts of a hundred species of animals; all he had to do, when he wrote, was to make these multipede philosophers speak, and he became another Aesop, fused by his fables into the memory of millions.
His parents thought they would make a priest of him, but he had no flair for the supernatural. He tried to practice law, but he found poetry much more intelligible. He married a rich girl (1647), gave her a son, arranged a separation from his wife (1658), went to Paris, pleased Fouquet, and received from that amiable embezzler a pension of a thousand livres, on condition of quarterly payments in verses. When Fouquet fell La Fontaine addressed to the King a courageous petition for the financier’s pardon; consequently he never basked in the royal sun. Shorn of his pension, La Fontaine, who had no notion of making a living, was housed and fed by the Duchesse de Bouillon, whom we have met as a Frondeuse. While under her wing he published (1664) the first book of his Contes, a collection of novelettes in verse, Boccaccianly risqué, but told with such disarming simplicity that soon half of France, even blushing maidens, read them.*
Shortly thereafter Marguerite of Lorraine, dowager Duchess of Orléans, installed him in the Luxembourg Palace as gentleman in waiting. There he wrote more Contes, and thence he sent to the printer the first six books of his fabulous Fables (1668). He pretended that they were paraphrases of Aesop or Phaedrus; some were; some were taken from the legendary Bidpai of India, some from the fabliaux of France; but most of them were re-created in the bubbling rivulet of La Fontaine’s mind and verse. The very first one was an unwitting summary of his careless, singing life:
La cigale, ayant chanté
The grasshopper, having sung
Tout l’été, se trouve fort dépourvue
All summer, found himself quite destitute
Quant la bise fut venue;
When the frost came;
Pas un seul petit morceau
Not a single tiny piece
De mouche ou de vermisseau;
Of fly or little worm;
Elle alla crier famine
She went to plead her hunger
Chez la fourmi, sa voisine,
To the ant her neighbor,
La priant de lui prêter
Begging her to lend her
Quelque grain pour subsister
Some grain to live on
Jusqu’à la saison nouvelle;
Until the new season.
Je vous paierai, lui dit-elle,
“I will pay you,” she said,
Avant l’août, foi d’animal,
“Before harvest, on the faith of
Interêt et principal.
An animal, interest and principal.”
La fourmi n’est pas prêteuse;
The ant is not a lender;
C’est là son moindre défaut;
This is his least fault;
Que faisiez vous au temps chaud?
“What were you doing in summer?”
Dit-elle à cette emprunteuse.—
He asked this borrower.
Nuit et jour à tout venant
“Night and day to every comer
Je chantois, ne vous déplaisez.—
I sang; do not be displeased.”
Vous chantiez! j’en suis fort aisé.
“You sang! I am happy to hear it.
Hé bien, dansez maintenant.
Well, then, dance now.”
La Fontaine was wiser than Descartes, who thought all animals to be thoughtless automata; the poet loved them, sensed their reasoning, and found in them all the livable lessens of philosophy. France was charmed to receive wisdom in such digestible doses. The fabulist became the most widely read author in the land. The critics for once agreed with the people, and joined in his praise; for though simplicity was his soul, he knew the French language in its peasant color and earthy tang, and gave his verses such supple grace, delectable turns, vivid pictures in a line, that all the bourgeois gentilshommes in France rejoiced to find that their animals, even their insects, had been talking poetry all the time. “I use animals,” La Fontaine said, “to instruct men.” 35
In 1673 Marguerite of Lorraine died, and the poet, who had been singing improvidently and had not managed well the modest fees allowed him for his books, found himself rich in debts. He had better luck than his grasshopper, for the learned and kindly Mme. de La Sablière gave him lodging, food, and motherly care in her home on the Rue St.-Honoré, and there he lived in quiet content till her death in 1693. He divided his time (he tells us) into two parts: one part for sleep, the other for doing nothing. 36 La Bruyère described him as a man who could make animals, trees, and stones speak elegantly, but was himself dull, “heavy; and stupid�
� in conversation; 37 however, there are contrary reports that he could be a lively causeur when he found congenial ears. 38 A hundred anecdotes, largely legendary, celebrated his absent-mindedness. Being late for dinner, he excused himself: “I have just come from the funeral of an ant; I followed the procession to the cemetery, and I escorted the family home.” 39
Louis XIV opposed his election to the French Academy, on the ground that the poet’s life and Contes were hardly exemplary; finally he relented (1684), saying that La Fontaine had promised to behave. But the old poet knew no distinction between virtue and sin, only between natural and unnatural; he had learned his ethics in the woods. Like Molière, he felt no attraction toward Port-Royal, those bons disputeurs (he called them) whose “lessons seem to me a bit depressing.” 40 For a time he joined the coterie of freethinkers at the Temple, but when a stroke nearly felled him in the street, he thought it time to make his peace with the Church; still, he wondered, “was St. Augustine as wise as Rabelais?” 41 He died in 1695, aged seventy-four. His nurse was confident of his eternal salvation, for, she said, “he was so simple that God would not have the courage to damn him.” 42
V. BOILEAU: 1636–1711
In the meetings of the Four Friends in the Rue du Vieux Colombier the conversation was usually dominated by Nicolas Boileau, who laid down the rules of literature and morals with all the authority and confidence of Dr. Johnson at the Turk’s Head Tavern in Soho. Like Johnson, Boileau was more important as a voice than as an author; his best works are middling poetry, but his edicts were of more lasting effect in literature than those of Louis XIV in politics. His friendship and critical acclaim helped Molière and Racine to survive the antics of hostile cabals.
He was the fourteenth child of a clerk in the Paris Parlement. Destined for the priesthood, he studied theology at the Sorbonne. He rebelled, took up law, and was entering practice when his father died (1657), leaving him a patrimony sufficient to support him in verse. He spent ten years sharpening his pen; then, in twelve Satires (1666f.), he pronounced judgment upon his fellow men. He was alarmed by “this frightful crowd of famished rhymesters”; 43 he attacked it as a horde of locusts; he named names, making enemies by the rhyme; and, to bring the women too down upon his head, he ridiculed the romances with which Mmes. de Scudéry and de La Fayette were using the paper and hours of France. He praised the ancients, and, among the moderns, Malherbe and Racan, Molière and Racine. “I think,” he said, “that without wounding conscience or the state, we may call bad poetry bad, and have full right to be bored by a foolish book.” 44 These Satires bore us in their turn because their aim was achieved: the poets condemned were destroyed beyond our memory or interest; moreover, the tender-minded amongst us, especially if we are authors, prefer critics who direct us to the good rather than those who belabor the bad.
Having adopted the severity of Juvenal in the Satires, Boileau in a series of Epistles (1669–95) restrained his hatchet to Horace’s milder mood, and achieved a smoother style. It was these poetic letters that led Louis to invite him to the court. The King asked him which of his own verses he thought the best. Boileau, with an eye to the main chance, read nothing from his published work, but recited as “least bad” some still unprinted lines in honor of Le Grand Monarque. He was rewarded with a pension of two thousand livres, 45 and became persona grata at the court. “I like Boileau,” said Louis, “as a necessary scourge that we can pit against the bad taste of second-rate authors.” 46 And as Louis sustained Molière against the bigots, so he raised no protest when Boileau published a mock epic, Lutrin (1674), poking fun at sleepy and gluttonous ecclesiastics. In 1677 the satirist was made an official historiographer along with Racine; and in 1684 he was finally admitted to the Academy at the explicit behest of the King and over the protests of those whom he had flayed.
The poem that has carried him over the whirlpools of time is L’Art poétique (1674), which has rivaled in influence its model, Horace’s Ars poética. At the outset Boileau warns young bards that Parnassus is steep; let them be sure, before they set out to climb that sacred mount of the Muses, that they have something worth saying, something that will strengthen truth and tendra au bon sens—will make for good sense and taste. Vary your discourse, he advises them; a style too equal and uniform (like Boileau’s) puts us to sleep; and “happy the poet who, with a light touch, passes from the grave to the sweet, from the pleasant to the severe.” 47 Keep a sharp ear for the cadence of your words. Follow Malherbe’s rules on language and style. Study not your contemporaries but the ancients: in epic poetry Homer and Virgil, in tragic drama Sophocles, in comedy Terence, in satire Horace, in eclogue Theocritus. “Make haste slowly; without losing courage, put your work on the anvil twenty times . . . Add occasionally, omit often.” 48 “Love those who criticize you, and, bowing to reason, correct yourself without complaint.” 49 “Work for glory, and let not sordid gain be ever the object of your toil.” 50 If you write dramas, observe the unities:
Qu’en un lieu, qu’en un jour, un seul fait accompli
Tienne jusqu’ à la fin le théâtre rempli
—“Let one action, completed in one place and one day, keep the theater full to the end.” 51 “Study the court and familiarize yourself with the city; both are rich in models; perhaps that is how Molière won the prize in his art.” 52
Boileau joined Molière in making les précieuses ridiculous, and he scorned the artificial love poetry that had enfeebled French verse. Against this bathos of sentiment he raised the Cartesian worship of reason and the classic inculcation of restraint. He formulated the principles of the classic style, and summarized them in two classic lines:
Aimez donc la raison; que toujours vos écrits
Empruntent d’elle seule et leur lustre et leur prix
—“Love reason, then; let your writings take from it both their splendor and their worth.” 53 No sentimentality, no emotionalism, no bombast; no pedantry, no artificiality, no pompous obscurity. The ideal in literature, as in life, is a stoic self-control, and “nothing in excess.”
Boileau loved Molière, but regretted his descents into farce. He loved Racine, but apparently did not remark his romantic exaltation of feeling, and his emotion-bursting heroines—Hermione, Berenice, Phèdre. A warrior must exaggerate his share of the truth. Boileau was too lusty a battler to understand what Pascal had said—that the heart has its reasons which the head cannot understand, and that literature without feeling may be as smooth as marble and as cold. Horace had allowed for feeling: “If you wish me to weep,” to feel what you write, “you must weep first”—you must feel the matter yourself. All the literature and art of the Middle Ages remained hidden from Boileau.
The influence of his teaching was immense. Through three generations French poetry and prose tried to adhere to his classic rules. These shared in molding the style of English literature in the “Augustan Age,” whose Pope frankly imitated L’Art poétique in his Essay on Criticism. Boileau’s influence did harm and good. By deprecating imagination and feeling, it put a damper on poetry in France after Racine and in England after Dryden; verse at its best took on the chiseled form of sculpture, but lost the warmth and color of painting. Nevertheless it was good that the ideal of reason should enter into belles-lettres; too much nonsense had been written about love and shepherds; Europe needed Boileau’s angry scorn to cleanse the literary air of absurdity, affectation, and shallow sentiment. Perhaps it was in part through Boileau that Molière rose from farce to philosophy, and Racine perfected his art.
It was just like Boileau that when, with a gift from the King (1687), he bought a house and garden in Auteuil, he said nothing in his writings of the nature that surrounded him—except that from those fields he now took the name Despréaux. There, for nearly all his remaining years, he lived in simple peace, never visiting the court, but warmly welcoming his friends. People noted that “he had many friends, though he spoke ill of everybody.” 54 He was brave enough to express sympathy for Port-Royal, and to t
ell a Jesuit that Pascal’s Provincial Letters were a masterpiece of French prose. He outlived all of the circle of which he had been the honored theorist: Molière was long since gone, La Fontaine went in 1695, Racine in 1699; the old and ailing satirist spoke feelingly of “the dear friends whom we have lost, and who have disappeared velut somnium surgentis “—like the dream of a man rising from sleep. 55 As death neared he left Auteuil, and went to die (1711) in the rooms of his confessor in the cloister of Notre Dame. There, he hoped, Satan would not dare touch him.
VI. THE ROMANTIC PROTEST
The ladies did not take as kindly to the classic canons of reason, moderation, and restraint as old Corneille and young Racine. Their world was a realm of feeling and romance, and the mariages de convenance that they contracted stirred rather than checked the fantasies of love. Alongside the classic drama the romantic novel grew to immense proportions, wide acclaim, and international influence. The ladies of France never had enough of such novels, and never found them too long. When Gauthier de La Calprenède stopped his Cléopâtre after ten volumes (1656), his fiancée refused to marry him until he had concluded it in two more. 56
Mile. Madeleine de Scudéry enslaved half of France with her ten-volume novels, Artamène, ou le Grand Cyrus (1649–53) and Clélie (1654–60). French society was flattered to find that in these romantic proliferations the characters, under pseudonyms, described and revealed the celebrities of the time. Soon the ladies and gentlemen of the salons called themselves by names from the romances, and learned to sigh and deny like their heroes and heroines; Mlle. de Scudéry herself became Sappho, and was so addressed in the salons to the end of her ninety-four years. She wrote to please her brother Georges, published her books under his name, and preferred his surveillance to marriage. Her reign over literate women and perfumed men continued until Molière’s Précieuses ridicules and Femmes savantes changed literary fashions; then Madeleine bravely kept the last of her ninety volumes from the press. Those who suffer from leisure may still locate in the fifteen thousand pages of Le Grand Cyrus, or the ten thousand of Clélie, passages distinguished by the delicacy of their sentiment, or remarkable for their analysis of character. And La Scudéry deserves remembrance, too, for having labored to advance the education of women in France.