The 17th century Literature and society Refinement of the language At the beginning of the 17th century the full flowering of the Classical manner was still remote, but various signs of a tendency toward order, stability, and refinement can be seen. A widespread desire for cultural self-improvement is reflected in the numerous manuals of politesse, or formal politeness, which appeared through the first half of the century; while at the celebrated salon of Mme de Rambouillet men of letters, mostly of bourgeois origin, and the nobility and leaders of fashionable society mixed in an easy relationship to enjoy the pleasures of the mind. Such gatherings did much to refine the literary language and also helped to prepare a cultured public for the serious analysis of moral and psychological problems. The earliest imaginative literature to reflect the new taste was written in imitation of the pastoral literature of Italy and Spain; the masterpiece of the genre was L'Astree (1607-27) by Honore d'Urfe. Manners are stylized, settings are conventional, and the plot is highly contrived; but the psychology of the characters is handled with insight. Refinement of the language of poetry was the self-imposed task of Francois de Malherbe: resolutely opposed to the exalted conception held by La Pleiade of the poet as inspired favourite of the Muses, he owes his place in literary history not to his undistinguished creative writing but to a critical doctrine imposed on fellow poets by word of mouth and personal example. Malherbe called for a simple, harmonious metre and a sober, almost prosaic vocabulary, pruned of imaginative poetic fancy. His influence helped to make French lyric verse, for nearly two centuries, elegant and refined but lacking imaginative inspiration. Malherbe's alexandrine, however--clear, measured, and energetic--was a metre marvellously suited to be a vehicle for Pierre Corneille's dramatic verse. Not all poets of the 1620s accepted Malherbe's lead. The most distinguished of the independents was Theophile de Viau (referred to as Theophile), who not only opposed Malherbe in style and technique but also expressed the free thought inherited from Renaissance Italy. Theophile's verse, with its engaging flavour of spontaneity and sincerity, shows a sensual delight in the natural world. His whole way of life was a provocation to the bien-pensants ("right-minded"): he was the leader of a freethinking bohemia of young noblemen and men of letters, practicing and preaching social and intellectual unorthodoxy. His persecution, imprisonment, and early death ended all this, however: libertinage went underground, and repressive orthodoxy was entrenched for a century or more. The poetry of Theophile and other independents exemplifies that manner to which modern criticism has given the name baroque. The baroque poet has been said to possess "a vision of life distorted through imagination and sensibility." Whereas in the case of Malherbe and his school sensibility is constantly controlled by common sense, baroque writers embellish their descriptions of nature by subjective flights of fancy that may even assume an absurd or surrealist flavour, resulting in an intensely personal picture of the world, far removed from Malherbe's cliche-like generalizations. Development of drama Unlike the humanist playwrights of previous generations, Alexandre Hardy was nothing if not a man of the theatre. Poete a gages (staff poet) to the Comediens du Roi company at the Hotel de Bourgogne in Paris, he wrote hundreds of plays, of which 34 were published (1623-28). In addition to writing tragedies, he developed the tragicomedy and pastoral, which became the most popular genres between 1600 and 1630. While Hardy's plays possess the vigour and colour of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, his style is unattractive; but, in the theatre as elsewhere, the pastoral was a refining influence, providing a vehicle for the subtle analysis of feeling. Although the finest play of the 1620s is a tragedy, Theophile's Pyrame et Thisbe (1623), which shares the fresh, lyrical charm of the pastorals, tragicomedy is without a doubt the baroque form at its best. Here, the favourite theme of false appearances, the episodic structure, and devices such as the play within the play reflect the essentials of baroque art. During the 1630s a crucial struggle took place between this irregular type of drama and a simpler and more disciplined alternative. Theoretical discussion focussed on the conventional rules (the unities of time, place, and action, mistakenly ascribed to Aristotle), but the bienseances (conventions regarding subject matter and style) were no less important in determining the form and idiom the mature Classical theatre was to adopt. Comedy gained a fresh impetus about 1630; and the new style, defined by Corneille as "une peinture de la conversation des honnetes gens" ("a painting of the conversation of the gentry"), simply transposes the pastoral into an urban setting. At the same time, ambitious young playwrights competing for public favour and the support of the two Paris theatre companies, the Hotel de Bourgogne and the Marais, did not neglect other types of drama; and Corneille, together with Jean Mairet, Tristan (Francois L'Hermite), and Jean de Rotrou, inaugurated "regular" tragedy. But it was some time before Corneille, any more than his rivals, turned exclusively to tragedy. The eclecticism of these years is illustrated by L'Illusion comique (1635), a brilliant exploitation of the interplay between reality and illusion that characterizes baroque art. The two trends come together in Corneille's theatre in Le Cid (1637), which, though often called the first Classical tragedy, was created as a tragicomedy. The emotional range Corneille achieves with his verse in Le Cid is something previously unmatched. Contemporary audiences at once recognized the play as a masterpiece, but it was subjected to an unprecedented critical attack. The querelle du Cid (quarrel of Le Cid) caused such a stir that it led to the intervention of the Cardinal de Richelieu, who referred the play to the judgment of the newly founded Academie Francaise. The formation of the Academie, an early move to place cultural activity under the patronage of the state, dates from 1634; examination of Le Cid on Richelieu's orders was an exception to its normal functions, which concerned the standardization of the French language. This effort bore fruit in the Academie's own Dictionnaire of 1694, though by then rival works had appeared in the dictionaries of Richelet (1680) and Furetiere (1690). A similar desire for systematic analysis inspired Claude Favre, sieur de Vaugelas, also an Academician, whose Remarques sur la langue francoise (1647) record polite usage of the time. In the field of literary theory the same rational approach produced the Poetique of La Mesnardiere (1639) and the Abbe d'Aubignac's Pratique du theatre (1657), both treatises, which strongly influenced the establishment of Classical doctrine being instigated by Richelieu's personal patronage. Meanwhile another protege, Jean Chapelain, began in the 1630s to exert an influence similar to that of Malherbe a generation earlier. Although he produced no important doctrinal work and made his mark in the salons and in occasional writings, Chapelain was nevertheless a major architect of Classicism in France. More liberal than Malherbe, he made allowance for that intangible element ("le je ne sais quoi") that rules cannot produce. The Sentiments de l'Academie (1638), compiled by Chapelain as a judgment on Le Cid, reflect prudent compromise, but one can sense beneath the pedantry of certain comments a genuine feeling for the harmony and regularity that Classical tragedy was to achieve. The effect of the querelle du Cid on Corneille's evolution is unmistakable: all his experimentation was henceforth to be carried out within the stricter Classical formula. A remarkable spell of creative activity produced in quick succession Horace (1640), Cinna (1640), and Polyeucte (1643), which, with Le Cid, represent the playwright's highest achievement: a triumphant justification of the formula that Mairet and others had helped to develop but which Corneille himself perfected. The essence of Classical tragedy is a single action, seized at crisis point. Despite the prominence always given to the unities of time and place, it is unity of action that gives Classical tragedy its essential character. The other unities merely help to make unity of action effective. Tragicomedy lingered on as a popular alternative. Rotrou's Saint-Genest (1647), for example, provides an interesting contrast with Polyeucte, treating in the baroque manner similar themes of divine grace and conversion. But by the 1640s writers and their public had become more responsive to various standardizing influences. Rene Descartes's Discours de la methode (1637; Discourse on Method), with its opening sentence, "Le bon sens est la chose du monde la mieux partagee . . ." ("Good sense is of all things in the world the most equally distributed . . ."), clearly assumes that the mental processes of all men, if properly conducted, will lead to identical conclusions. A similar assumption is implicit, as regards the psychology of the passions, in Descartes's Traite des passions de l'ame (1649; Treatise on Passions). In the field of creative writing, poets sometimes come to distrust their individual sensibilities and prefer to mold their imaginations to the common denominator of a social group. In lyric poetry, the linguistic tendencies crystallized by the reforms of Malherbe and Vaugelas combine with the preoccupations of the salons to produce writing that is seldom more than mannered wordplay. Generally speaking, such tendencies toward a literature expressing the cultural values of a homogeneous society affect form more than content. For the self-centred aristocratic idealism that inspired the Fronde (a series of civil wars between 1648 and 1653) also finds expression in the literature of the period, and nowhere more clearly than in Corneille's tragedies. His self-reliant heroes, meeting every challenge and overcoming every obstacle, are motivated by the self-conscious moral code that animated the Cardinal de Retz, Mme de Longueville, and other leaders of the heroic but futile resistance to Cardinal Mazarin. In neither case is devotion to a cause free from self-glorification; in both, the approbation of others is as necessary as the desire to leave an example for posterity. Such optimistic, heroic attitudes may seem incompatible with a tragic view of the world; indeed, Corneille provides the key to his originality in substituting for the traditional Aristotelian emotions of pity and fear a new goal of admiration. Corneille asks that his audience admire something larger than life, and the best of his plays are still capable of arousing this response. The heroic ideal The same appetite for heroic subject matter is reflected in the mid-century novels. These resemble L'Astree in that they are long-winded, multivolume adventure stories with highly complicated plots, but they have moved from the world of the pastoral to that of ancient history. The two best known examples, Artamene ou le grand Cyrus (1649-53) and Clelie (1654-60), both by Mlle de Scudery, are set in Persia and Rome, respectively. Such novels reflect the society of the time. They also show how the readers and playgoers of the Classical age were formed: the minute analysis of the passions, when divorced from the superficial romanesque, looks forward to the psychological subtlety of Racine. Other writers of the period make a more individual use of the novel form. Cyrano de Bergerac returned to the Renaissance tradition of fictional travel as a vehicle for social and political satire and may be seen as an early exponent of science fiction. So provocative were the ideas expressed in his Histoire comique des etats et empires de la lune (1656) and Histoire comique des etats et empires du soleil (1661; A Voyage to the Moon: With Some Account of the Solar World) that neither work was published until after 1655, the year of his death. Paul Scarron was more down-to-earth in purpose and manner: in Le Roman comique (1651-57) he set out to parody the heroic novels. His novel follows the fortunes of an itinerant troupe of actors and has some value as documentary, but in his portrayal of provincial society Scarron yields to his penchant for good-humoured burlesque, also illustrated in his mock-epic Virgile travesti (1648-52). The honnete homme Partly because of the influence of the salons and partly as a result of disillusionment at the failure of the Fronde, the heroic ideal was gradually replaced in the 1650s by the concept of honnetete. The word literally means "honesty" but figuratively refers to a sincere refinement of tastes and manners. Unlike the aspirant after gloire ("glory"), the honnete homme ("gentleman") cultivated the social graces and valued the pleasures of social intercourse. A cultured amateur, modest and self-effacing, he took as his model the Renaissance uomo universale ("universal man"), the complete all-rounder. Francois de La Rochefoucauld provides an interesting illustration of the transition between the two ages. An aristocrat who played a leading part in the Fronde, he was motivated in his early life by ambition and family pride but retired to begin a new career as man of letters. The Maximes (1665), his principal achievement, is a collection of 500 epigrammatic reflections on human behaviour, expressed in the most universal terms: the general tone is cynical, self-interest being seen as the source of all actions. If a more positive message is to be seen, it is the recognition of honnetete as a code of behaviour that holds society together. However, even this is touched with cynicism. La Rochefoucauld's view of honnetete is a pragmatic one, falling as far short of the ideal defined by Antoine Gombaud, chevalier de Mere, in his Discours de la vraie honnetete (1701; "Discourse on True Honnetete") and other essays, where it is presented as a true art de vivre, as it does of the example set by Charles de Saint-Denis, sieur de Saint-Evremond, who, in the opinion of contemporaries, most nearly lived up to such an ideal. Few honnetes gens had the culture, the taste, and the temperament to practice the art of living in such an exemplary way, but the ideal of tolerant, cultured Epicureanism for a while set the tone of social life in Paris. This period also saw the fullest development of the feminine cult of preciosite, a style of thought and expression exhibiting delicacy of taste and sentiment. Inasmuch as honnetete stands for moderation in all things, and preciosite, in the extreme, for affectation and extravagance, the two phenomena may seem to be opposites. The sentiments and manners satirized by Moliere in Les precieuses ridicules (1659) do not represent the whole picture, however, and, although the natural desire of these early feminists to assert themselves meant that their ideas were often taken to extremes, precieuses like Mlle de Scudery were responsible for introducing a new subtlety into the language, establishing new standards of delicacy in matters of taste, and propagating advanced ideas about the equality of the sexes in marriage. Their aims thus ran parallel to those of the honnetes gens, and the ideal of the educated, emancipated woman was the female counterpart of the masculine ideal defined above. The fullest representation of the honnete homme in imaginative literature is to be found in the theatre of Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, known as Moliere. A bourgeois by birth, a courtier, and an honnete homme, Moliere was also an actor-manager and an entertainer. He toured the provinces with his theatre troupe from about 1645 until 1658, when they returned to Paris. Moliere soon succeeded in imposing on audiences a completely new type of comedy. While his early plays may be divided conventionally into comedies litteraires and popular farces, from L'Ecole des femmes (1662) onward these two strains are fused, creating a formula that combined the Classical structure, the linguistic refinement, and the portrayal of manners expected of comedy with the caricatural characterization proper to farce. Even in stylized verse plays such as L'Ecole des femmes, Le Misanthrope (1666), Le Tartuffe (1664), or Les Femmes savantes (1672), the comedy of manners merely provides a framework for the comic portrait of a central character, in which exaggeration and fantasy play a considerable part. However topical the subject and however prominent the satirical content of Moliere's plays, his characters always possess a common denominator of universal humanity. Most plays contain, alongside the comic character, one or more examples of the honnete homme; and the social norm against which his comic characters offend is that of a tolerant, humane honnetete. In Le Tartuffe, and in Dom Juan (1665), topical references and satirical implications were so provocative, because both plays dealt with the delicate subject of religious belief, that there were strong reactions from churchmen. However, from the start of his Paris career Moliere could count on the active support of the king, Louis XIV. A number of his plays were written for performance at Versailles or other courts; and Moliere also wrote several comedies-ballets and collaborated in other divertissements that brought together the arts of poetry, music, and dance. The biggest box-office success of the century, judged by length of first run, was the Timocrate (1656) of Pierre Corneille's younger brother Thomas, a prolific playwright adept at gauging the public taste. Timocrate was exactly contemporary with the precieux novels of Mlle de Scudery, and, like Philippe Quinault in his tragedies galantes, the author reproduced the disguises and amorous intrigues so much admired by habitues of the salons. However, the 1660s were to see the rivalry between two acknowledged masters of serious drama. Pierre Corneille, returning to the theatre in 1659 after a hiatus, wrote several more plays; but though Sertorius (1662) or his last play, Surena (1674), bear comparison with earlier masterpieces, the heroic idealism had lost conviction. While Corneille retained his partisans among older playgoers, it was Jean Racine who appealed to newer audiences, less idealistic in their attitude to psychology: the new realism was in tune with La Rochefoucauld's Maximes rather than with Descartes's Traite des passions. Racine's fatalism Whether Racine's Jansenist upbringing determined his view of a human nature controlled by perverse and willful passions, or whether his knowledge of Greek tragedy explains the fatalism of his own plays, the imaginary world inhabited by his heroes could not be more different from that of Corneille's. Tragedy for Racine is an inexorable series of events leading to a foreseeable catastrophe. Plot is of the simplest; the play opens with the action at crisis point; and once the first step is taken, tension mounts between incompatible protagonists until one or more is destroyed. Racine's career began in 1664 with La Thebade, a grim account of the mutual hatred of Oedipus' sons; this was followed by Alexandre le grand (1665), his only attempt at the manner of Quinault. The masterpieces date from the highly successful Andromaque (1667), another subject from Greek legend, after which, for Britannicus (1669) and Berenice (1670), Racine turned to topics from Roman history. Bajazet (1672) is based on modern Turkish history; Mithridate (1673) has as its hero the famous enemy of Rome; and finally there followed two plays with Greek mythological subjects: Iphigenie (1674) and Phedre (1677). Nondramatic verse Nondramatic verse still enjoyed a special prestige, as shown in L'Art poetique (1674) of Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux, where the genres most highly esteemed are the epic (of which no distinguished example was written during the century), the ode (a medium for official commemorative verse), and the satire. Boileau himself, in his satires (from 1660) and epistles (from 1674), as well as in L'Art poetique, established himself as the foremost critic of his day; but despite a flair for judging contemporaries, his criteria were limited by current aesthetic doctrines. In Le Lutrin (1674-83), a model for Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock, he produced a masterpiece of comic writing in the Classical manner. Jean de La Fontaine's Fables (1668; 1678-79; 1692-94) succeed in transcending the limitations of the genre; and although readers formerly concentrated excessively on the moral teaching they offer, it is possible to appreciate beneath their apparent navete the mature skills of a highly imaginative writer, who displays great originality in adapting to his needs the linguistic and metrical resources of the Classical age. The Classical manner Though the novel was still considered to be a secondary genre, it produced one masterpiece that embodied the Classical manner to perfection. In La Princesse de Cleves (1678) by Mme de La Fayette, the narrative forsakes the fanciful settings of its pastoral and heroic predecessors and explores the relationship between the individual and society in a sober, realistic context. The language achieves its effects by understatement and subtle nuance rather than by rhetorical flourish; and it is appropriate that a woman writer should have created this lasting tribute to the feminine influence, which, in the salons, helped to form such an expressive medium for psychological analysis. The other great woman writer of her age, Mme de Sevigne, was (like La Fontaine) too idiosyncratic to be truly representative. Her intimate, informal correspondence--totally unlike that of Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac half a century earlier--was nevertheless composed with a careful eye to literary effect. Mme de Sevigne not only was an admirable example of the cultured reader for whom the grands classiques wrote but was herself one of the most skillful prose writers of her day. The most distinguished prose writer of the age, however, was a man who, if he does reflect the society he lived in, does so in a highly critical light. The Pensees of Blaise Pascal present an uncompromising reminder of the spiritual values of the Christian faith. The work remains incomplete, so that in place of the dialectical cogency of Les Provinciales (1656-57), his masterly satire of Jesuit casuistry, it possesses an enigmatic, incoherent quality in spite of the aphoristic brilliance of many fragments. The central theme is clear enough: Pascal's view of human nature has much in common with that of La Rochefoucauld or Mme de La Fayette, but in his case the misery of godless man is contrasted with the potential greatness man can attain through divine grace. Pascal is the first master of a really modern prose style. Whereas Descartes's prose is full of awkward Latinisms, Pascal uses a short sentence and is sparing with subordinate clauses. The clarity and precision he achieves are equally appropriate to the penetrating analysis of human nature in the Pensees and to the irony and comic force of the Provinciales. Religious authors A new intellectual climate can be recognized from 1680 onward. An increased spiritual awareness resulting from Jansenist teaching, the preaching of Jacques-Benigne Bossuet and others, and the influence of Mme de Maintenon at court, marked French cultural life with a new moral earnestness and devotion. The position of Bossuet is an ambivalent one. In spite of his outspoken criticism of king and court, his view of kingship and of the relationship between church and state made him one of the principal pillars of the regime of the Sun King, carrying Richelieu's policies to their logical conclusion. His ultraorthodox views are expressed in writings such as the Discours sur l'histoire universelle (1681); but he also exerted a considerable moral influence in his sermons and funeral orations, which took the art of pulpit oratory to a new high level. Francois de La Mothe-Fenelon was a much less orthodox churchman, and the influence he wielded was of a more liberal nature. Like Bossuet, he was a tutor in the royal household, and he was also author of a classical novel, Les Aventures de Telemaque (1699). Just as Fenelon chose a Classical model--his novel purports to be the continuation of Book Four of the Odyssey--so Jean de La Bruyere chose to write his Caracteres de Theophraste traduits du grec, avec les caracteres ou les moeurs de ce siecle (1688) in the style of the Greek moralist Theophrastus. However, his work, appended to his translation of Theophrastus, was from the beginning more specific in its reference to his own times; and successive editions, up to 1694, made of it a powerful indictment of the vanity and pretensions of a status-conscious society, and even of the extravagance and warmongering of the King himself. At best, La Bruyere writes as an ironic commentator on the social comedy around him. An equally satirical picture of the age is left by a number of Moliere's successors writing for the comic theatre (which, from the founding of the Theatre Francais in 1680, was organized on a monopoly basis). Comedy, at the hands of such writers as Jean-Francois Regnard, Florent Carton Dancourt, and Alain-Rene Lesage, continued to be lively and inventive; but the writing of tragedy, by contrast, already had become a much more derivative exercise. Exception must be made for Racine's last two plays, Esther (1689) and Athalie (1691), written not for the professional theatre but for the girls' school at Saint-Cyr. The latter in particular is as powerful as any of the secular plays. The Ancients and the Moderns Finally, the end of Louis XIV's reign witnessed the critical debate known as the querelle des anciens et des modernes (Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns), a long-standing controversy that came to a head in the Academie and in various published works. Whereas Boileau and others saw imitation of the literature of antiquity as the only possible guarantee of excellence, moderns such as Charles Perrault in his Parallele des anciens et des modernes (1688-97) and Bernard Le Bovier, sieur de Fontenelle, in his Digression sur les anciens et les modernes (1688) claimed that the best contemporary works were inevitably superior, because of the greater maturity of the human mind. It was a sterile and inconclusive debate, but the underlying issue was most important, for the moderns indirectly, if not explicitly, anticipated those 18th-century thinkers whose rejection of a single universal aesthetic in favour of a relativist approach was to hasten the end of the Neoclassical age. |