that all great and vast as the sea is, it has its | an infinitely superior work, directed against limits, but you have not any, and all who know similar follies, produced thirteen years your understanding confess that it has neither later, met with little success, which points bottom nor shore. I beseech you from what to the conclusion that the précieuse had abyss do you draw that deluge of beautiful fallen into obscurity, and therefore no longthings that you scatter around you? er interested the general public. Until the eighteenth century French literature could boast of little originality, it being more or less the reflection of that of antiquity, or of surrounding nations. Catherine de Médicis brought the Italian into fashion, and for nearly a century the French poets were imitators of Petrarch and his successors. But towards the end of Henri Quatre's reign there came a rage for Spanish manners, costume, and literature, and everything à la mode must be à Despagnol. Here we have the origin of the exaggerated gallantry and the forced conceits of the Hôtel de Rambouillet, and of the bombastic novels of Madame de Scudéry, which latter were but modernized imitations of the old romances of chivalry -"Amadis of Gaul" and the others so felicitously ridiculed by Cervantes in his "Don Quixote." The Spaniards had borrowed these forms from the Moors; but the fire of the rich oriental language and imagination, of which such hyperbolisms were the natural utterance, could not be imparted to the colder dialect and more barren fancy of the north, and that which in the one was living poetry became in the other a frigid burlesque. What Cervantes did for the Spanish romances Molière did for their imitations. I was present [says Ménage ] at the first representation of "Les Précieuses Ridicules, at the Hôtel Petit Bourbon.* Madame de Rambouillet was there, also M. Chapelin, and I have dwelt thus long upon this curious phase of the society of the seventeenth century as the influence of these coteries upon the literature, language, and manners of that age was all powerful; Corneille, Boileau, Sévigné, Fontenelle, Molière, La Bruyère, in fine, every great writer of at least the first half of the century, was an habitué of those salons, and was more or less dominated by their tastes. Those tastes, pedantries, and false refinements quenched all the fire and spontaneity of genius, creating in their place cold correctness and false glitter; but they created literary society and public opinion, elevated the man of letters to his true importance in the commonwealth, polished the rude manners of a semi-barbarous age, and, while stripping it of much of its original vigour and simplicity, rendered the French tongue the most elegant and perspicuous medium of conversation in Europe. The bolder intellects of the eighteenth century, in returning to a more natural style of writing, broke through the artificial bonds which had repressed their predecessors, but that charming grace of manner, that exquisite courtesy and inimitable elegance, which rendered the French, par excellence, the gentlemen of Europe, and the tradition of which still clings to them even now when successive revolutions have destroyed the reality, first emanated from the Hôtel de Rambouillet. almost all the Hôtel de Rambouillet. The To pass from the salons of the prépiece was played with general applause, and I cieuses to the Académie Française is still was so satisfied with it on my own part as I to remain in the same company and minsaw the effect it was going to produce. In gle with the same people, since every subleaving the theatre, I took M. Chapelin by ject brought forward in the latter was first the hand, and said to him, "You and I ap- submitted to the judgment of the former. prove this folly which has just been criticised Indeed, it was these assemblies which sugso cleverly and with such good sense, but be-gested to Cardinal Richelieu the first idea lieve me, to use the words of St. Remi to Clovis, 'We must burn what we have adored, and adore what we have burned.'" It has happened as I predicted, and from that first representation we have returned from fustian and forced style. All Paris crowded to the Petit Bourbon to laugh at and applaud Molière's clever satire; the prices of admission were trebled and the play ran four successive months. "Les Femmes Savantes," Molière's theatre. of that famous institution, which he established in 1629. Here every word of the language was exhaustively discussed, and so great a zeal was evinced by the purists that it was once proposed that each member should bind himself by an oath never to use any word that had not been approved by the entire body. Antique forms of expression were eliminated so rapidly that some of the elder writers, then living, seemed to have composed in a foreign idiom. One of these laments the changes in the following epigram : — En cheveux gris il me faut donc aller, Comme un enfant, tous les jours à l'école ; Que je suis fou d'apprendre bien parler, Lorsque la mort vient m'ôter la parole.* Ménage composed a "petition" of the old dictionaries ("Requêtes des Dictionnaires"), to the Academy, in which he pleaded for the retention of some of the ancient words, and ridiculed the over-zeal of the academicians for new forms and phrases, and St. Evremond wrote a comedy, "Les Académiciens," in which he represented them quarrelling and abusing each other over words which some wished to condemn, others to retain. and buffoon, and scores of others whose names have long since passed into obliv ion, but who were the true and universal representatives of the age. It would seem as though so many successive depraved kings, murderous priests and internecine wars, above all, that of the Fronde, had so obscured all the nobler qualities of human nature that man no longer believed in their existence. A distinguishing characteristic of the bulk of the literature of this period, is the desire to degrade every higher and nobler attribute of our being to the level of the mean and sordid. There was a taste of Dead Sea fruit in Yet but for such fetters as those im- men's mouths, a perpetual cui bono? in posed by the Académie, the language their hearts; the religious fervour, which amongst the crowd who wielded the pen was the soul of the Middle Ages, was exmight have fallen into utter barbarism. tinguished in the blood shed in the wars The literary tastes of the great minister of the creeds; the fierce conflicts of of Louis the Thirteenth, and the generous opinion which had agitated previous genpatronage he extended to all men of let-erations had shaken and destroyed the old ters, rendered writing the rage; from an extreme paucity, the number of authors suddenly rose to legion. Every man who had an idea in his brain rushed into print. Pamphlets, sermons, pasquinades, odes, burlesques, madrigals, satires, plays, songs appeared in thousands. But the old feudal contempt for the pen still survived in the prejudices even of the men who wielded it. "I have passed more years among arms than hours in my cabinet," says George de Scudéry, "and used more matches for arquebusses than for candles, so that I know better how to arrange soldiers than words, and how to place battalions better than periods." In this disdain for the forms of expression lay that danger to the language which the Académie averted. The Hôtel de Rambouillet, however, represented but a narrow section of the literary society of the age; in startling contrast to it were the joyous Bohemians who met at the cabaret of "La Pomme de Pin," at the house of Paul Scarron, and in the salons of Ninon de l'Enclos, the Parisian Aspasia; the bacchanalian poet, St. Amant, who was ever chanting the glories of wine and love (not the love of the précieuses), the witty and licentious Boisrobert, churchman, poet, play-writer, Though my hair is grey I must go like a child to school every day; how foolish I am to learn to speak correctly when death is just about to take away my speech. Mascarelle, in "Les Précieuses Ridicules," boasts of having made "two hundred songs, as many sonnets, four hundred epigrams, and more than a thousand madrigals, without counting enigmas and portraits," and of his intention to put the whole Roman history into madrigals. faith in the infallibility of the one Church, thing too sacred for attack: : In spite of their diversity we recognize a general character, the only one which agrees, in all the literature of the seventeenth century; it is the absence of all true and serious sentiment, of that inspiration drawn from the same objects, and which transports them first all entire into the imagination and then into the verses of the poet. Religious enthusiasm did not inspire the numerous versifiers who then translated or paraphrased the Psalms; love Such is the account given by Fontenelle, in his life of the poet, of the origin of "Mélite," his first play, performed in 1629. It was a love-story of the précieuse school, cold and tame, but nevertheless obtained so great a success that a new troupe of comedians was formed for the representation of this and of other works which followed. To account for the sensation created by so inferior a work, it will be necessary to take a brief view of the condition of the French theatre previous to its production. did not dictate a single one of the ten thou- | girl with whom he was in love. The newsand sonnets, ballads, and madrigals which comer rendered himself more agreeable than repeated to satiety his name; the sentiment of his introducer, and the pleasure of this advennature, the aspect of its beauties did not pro-ture excited in Corneille a talent of which he duce a passage which came from the heart, or was not before cognisant. from an imagination greatly moved. Whatever object was chosen to make verses upon, was regarded only as a jeu d'esprit, an occasion to combine more or less ingeniously words more or less harmonious, and ideas more or less agreeable; and no man in making verses thought of seeking in his soul his true sentiments, his real desires, his fears and his hopes, of interrogating the movements of his heart, the remembrances of his life, of being, in short, a poet, and not a man who made Some wanderings of a delirious imagination might be truthfully rendered; the hyperbole of the malice or humour of a mind furnished some piquant features for an epigram; but nothing of that which touches man's natural affections, nothing of that which is truly serious and real in his existence appeared proper to furnish subjects or images to poets who made verses upon everything; and the impossibility of finding in the poetical works of half a century a passage truly elevated, energetic, or pathetic, is a phenomenon which enables us to understand under what aspect poetry was considered at an epoch when natural and powerful emotions were not, more than in any other, strangers to the human heart. (Guizot, "Corneille.") verses. Of all species of composition, however, the drama found the most cultivators, that being the literature especially favoured by the great cardinal.* He was himself a dramatist, had written one play and kept five poets constantly at work composing dialogues to fit the plots he amused himself by inventing; each man wrote one act of each play. These five poets were L'Etoile, Boisrobert, Collette, Rotrou, and PIERRE CORNEILLE. One day the latter had the audacity to make a slight alteration in the plan of one of the dramas given him to versify, for which offence he forfeited his patron's favour, and retired The pilgrims who returned from Palestine and other holy places used to compose songs upon their adventures, intermixing them with scriptural stories and incidents. These songs, illustrated by appropriate pantomime, were at first chanted in the public streets; but after a time some citizens of Paris erected a theatre for such exhibitions, and Charles the Sixth granted a patent to a certain number, who were enrolled under the title of "Les Confrères de la Passion,” and licensed as the sole lawful representatives of the mystery and miracle plays, the name under which these performances went. After a time some young gentlemen of good family, who called themselves "Les Enfans Sans Souci," formed a society for the representation of a broadly humorous species of entertainment, which went by the name of "farces." The two companies, after a long career of jealous rivalry, ended by amalgamating. After this came the clercs de la basoche, young men, clerks to the procureurs of the Parlement, who assumed the curious title of "Le Royaume de la Basoche et l'Empire de Galilée;" their representations consisted of moralities, farces, and a species of Aristophanic comedy, in which living persons and the events of the day were coarsely burlesqued. But these satires became at length so gross and immoral, that in 1540 they were suppressed by royal edict. Eight years afterwards another edict was issued prohibiting the use of all "mysteries scriptural subjects the had become too lewd and blasphemous even for that age and the appearance of the brotherhood upon the stage. In the same year the confrères erected a theatre near the Hôtel de Bourgogne, and were there were 147 authors of 450 tragedies, comedies, and paid a crown for each performance by the company who used it. Jodelle, who be from his service. Corneille was born at Rouen, in the year 1606. His father was an advocate, and he himself was educated for the same profession, but his genius irresistibly led him to the stage:· Hardy was growing old, and his death would very soon have made a great gap in the theatre, when a little event happened in the home of a bourgeois in a provincial town which gave him an illustrious successor. A young man introduced one of his friends to a It has been computed that between 1628 and 1658 pastorals imitated from the Italian and Spanish. If I have kept this piece within the limits of a day it is not because I repent of not having so restricted "Mélite," or that I have resolved the present time some worship that rule, many to bind myself to such henceforward. At despise it; for myself I only wished to show that my neglect of it was not from want of knowledge. gan to write in 1552,* was the first French" Clitandre," his second work, in which, writer who divided his plays into acts, and however, he observed the unity of time, followed the rules and construction of the he speaks of these rules somewhat conancients. About the same time Baïf and temptuously: others translated several of the masterpieces of the Greek drama, but these were usually performed in colleges at the expense of some great lord. In 1600 a second theatre was erected in the Marais by a company of provincial comedians, to whom was attached the poet Hardy, the French Lope de Vega. Hardy is said to have composed six hundred plays, all in verse, of which only forty-one survive. Twentyfour hours sufficed him to write a tragedy or comedy, and many were written, studied, and acted within three days. If their quality was not of the best the payment was commensurate, being only three crowns each! Nevertheless, they were a great advance upon all that had gone before. Around him sprang up Théophile, Racan, Rotrou, all improving in decency of tone and propriety of language. The theatre in which these works were represented was even more rude than they. It was an oblong tennis-court, with an alcove at one end; three or four wooden frames on each side, and a painted curtain in the background; bands of blue paper, hanging from the ceiling, represented clouds. When the scene changed from one place to another, which happened very frequently, some draperies were raised or drawn aside, much in the fashion of modern scenery. Of the lives and social condition of the actors Scarron has given us some graphic pictures in his "Roman Comique." La Bruyère, writing some years later, says: "The condition of the actor was infamous among the Romans, honourable among the Greeks; what is it with us? We think of them as the Romans, we live with them as the Greeks." Although all his later and greater works are de règle, they were so fettered, probably, rather out of obsequiousness to the cardinal and the critics than from conviction or preference. The merits and demerits of the three unities have been so frequently and fully discussed that a very few remarks upon them will suffice in this place. Their effect upon the French stage is evidenced in the frigid and unnatural productions of its classical era. The absurdity of such restrictions is apparent at a glance. If the imagination of the spectator is suffi ciently strong to enable him to believe that while seated in his comfortable fauteuil he has been suddenly transported to the streets of ancient Rome, surely it can realize that during the interval of an act, or even of a change of scene, he has been shifted into a house, or a temple, or even into another land; if he can suppose that two thousand or more years have elapsed since he entered the theatre, he can imagine that a few weeks, or months, or even years elapse while he is seated there. Even the observance of the rules necessitate great stretches of fancy; they allow twenty-four hours for the development of an action which requires at most only three to represent. If an audience can make three stand for twenty-four, where is the difficulty of still further increasing the limit? Surely the most discursive action cannot be more absurd than to compress the great events of a life into a day and a night. The unities placed the poet at times in the most ridiculous and unnatural dilemmas. As an instance, in "The Cid," Rodrigue slays Don Gomes, marries his daughter, and conquers the Moors within the orthodox time: while Chimène changes from love to hate and back again to love within the same period; a not unparalleled instance, perhaps, in the psy chological history of woman, but, under the given circumstances, making a great Nine years earlier than the appearance of Sackville's Gordubuc," the first regular play in the En-demand upon our credulity. glish language. The classical forms and unities introduced by Jodelle, Baïf, and others, were entirely ignored by Hardy and his contemporaries, whose works were as irregular as Shakespeare's histories or "Winter's Tale." It was Chapelain who first suggested to Richelieu the propriety of enforcing the Aristotelian rules, a suggestion which so delighted the cardinal that he bestowed upon him a pension of one thousand crowns and full authority over all the poets. Corneille was greatly censured by the critics for totally ignoring such restrictions in his "Mélite." In his preface to Corneille quickly followed up "Mélite” been offered to account for this dislike; some assert that he was jealous of a reception so much superior to that accorded to his own play; others that, for political reasons, he was averse to the glorification of the Spaniards. Whatever might have been the cause, he constrained the Académie to condemn it. At first it hesitated to run counter to the universal verdict of the public. "Make these gentlemen un and "Clitandre" with other comedies "La Suivante, “La Place Royale," "La Galerie du Palais," etc.; the last is remarkable as being the first play into which the soubrette was introduced. It was about this period he entered the service of Cardinal Richelieu. Upon losing the minister's favour he returned home. But in the mean time "Médée" had been produced. It was little more than a translation from Seneca, a cold and turgid pro-derstand," he said to one of the officers duction, but a great advance upon those mixtures of triviality and bombast which Hardy and his school dignified by the name of tragedies. A M. Chalons, who had been secretary to Marie de Médicis, had taken up his abode in Rouen. One day he was felicitating the poet upon his successes: "Your comedies are full of wit," he said; "but allow me to tell you the species you have adopted is unworthy of your talents; you can acquire in it only a passing renown. You will find among the Spaniards subjects which treated in our style, by such a hand as yours, would produce great effects. Learn their language; it is easy. I shall be pleased to show you all I know. We will first translate together some things of Guillen de Castro." The result of these studies was his first great work, "Le Cid," produced in 1637. It was founded partly upon the ancient Spanish ballads which Southey's "Chronicles of the Cid" have made familiar to us, and partly from the drama of Guillen de Castro. Its success was prodigious both with the court and the public; people never grew weary of witnessing it; it was the all-engrossing subject of conversation in all circles; every one knew passages of it by heart, and taught them to their children; in some parts of France "beautiful as the Cid passed into a proverb; it was translated into almost every European tongue. Until then we knew not upon the stage [writes Guizot, in his "Corneille,"] either passion, duty, tenderness, or grandeur; and it was love, it was honour, such as the most exalted imagination conceives them, which for the first time and suddenly appeared in all their glory before a public for whom honour was the first virtue, and love the principal occupation of life. Notwithstanding the furore it created, however, it pleased not the Hôtel de Rambouillet or the critics, and what was of more serious consequence to the author, the cardinal evinced against it a remark able hostility. Various suggestions have VOL. XIII. 603 LIVING AGE. of his household, "that I desire it, and that I shall love them as they love me." He was obeyed; and “The Cid” was condemned. But even so powerful a condemnation produced no effect upon the public, who continued to flock to the theatre in as great numbers, and to applaud the play as enthusiastically as before. "The one who commenced was M. de Scudéry, who The The published his 'Observations against the Cid,' first of |