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A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times
Louis XIII., Richelieu, And Literature.
by Guizot, M.
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Cardinal Richelieu was dead, and "his works followed him," to use the
words of Holy Writ. At home and abroad, in France and in Europe, he had
to a great extent continued the reign of Henry IV., and had completely
cleared the way for that of Louis XIV. "Such was the strength and
superiority of his genius that he knew all the depths and all the
mysteries of government," said La Bruyere in his admission-speech before
the French Academy; "he was regardful of foreign countries, he kept in
hand crowned heads, he knew what weight to attach to their alliance;
with allies he hedged himself against the enemy. . . . And, can you
believe it, gentlemen? this practical and austere soul, formidable to the
enemies of the state, inexorable to the factious, overwhelmed in
negotiations, occupied at one time in weakening the party of heresy, at
another in breaking up a league, and at another in meditating a conquest,
found time for literary culture, and was fond of literature and of those
who made it their profession!" From inclination and from personal
interest therein this indefatigable and powerful mind had courted
literature; he had foreseen its nascent power; he had divined in the
literary circle he got about him a means of acting upon the whole nation;
he had no idea of neglecting them; he did not attempt to subjugate them
openly; he brought them near to him and protected them. It is one of
Richelieu's triumphs to have founded the French Academy.
We must turn back for a moment and cast a glance at the intellectual
condition which prevailed at the issue of the Renaissance and the
Reformation.
For sixty years a momentous crisis had been exercising language and
literature as well as society in France. They yearned to get out of it.
Robust intellectual culture had, ceased to be the privilege of the
erudite only; it began to gain a footing on the common domain; people no
longer wrote in Latin, like Erasmus; the Reformation and the Renaissance
spoke French. In order to suffice for this change, the language was
taking form; everybody had lent a hand to the work; Calvin with his
Christian Institutes (Institution Chretienne) at the same time as
Rabelais with his learned and buffoonish romance, Ramus with his
Dialectics, and Bodin with his Republic, Henry Estienne with his essays
in French philology, as well as Ronsard and his friends by their
classical crusade. Simultaneously with the language there was being
created a public intelligent, inquiring, and eager. Scarcely had the
translation of Plutarch by Amyot appeared, when it at once became, as
Montaigne says, "the breviary of women and of ignoramuses." "God's life,
my love," wrote Henry IV. to Mary de' Medici, "you could not have sent me
any more agreeable news than of the pleasure you have taken in reading.
Plutarch has a smile for me of never-failing freshness; to love him is to
love me, for he was during a long while the instructor of my tender age;
my good mother, to whom I owe everything, and who set so great store on
my good deportment, and did not want me to be (that is what she used to
say) an illustrious ignoramus, put that book into my hands, though I was
then little more than a child at the breast. It has been like my
conscience to me, and has whispered into my ear many good hints and
excellent maxims for my behavior and for the government of my affairs."
Thanks to Amyot, Plutarch "had become a Frenchman:" Montaigne would not
have been able to read him easily in Greek. Indifferent to the
Reformation, which was too severe and too affirmative for him, Montaigne,
"to whom Latin had been presented as his mother-tongue," rejoiced in the
Renaissance without becoming a slave to it, or intoxicated with it like
Rabelais or Ronsard. "The ideas I had naturally formed for myself about
man," he says, "I confirmed and fortified by the authority of others and
by the sound examples of the ancients, with whom I found my judgment in
conformity." Born in 1533, at the castle of Montaigne in Perigord, and
carefully brought up by "the good father God had given him," Michael de
Montaigne was, in his childhood, "so heavy, lazy, and sleepy, that he
could not be roused from sloth, even for the sake of play." He passed
several years in the Parliament of Bordeaux, but he had never taken a
liking to jurisprudence, though his father had steeped him in it, when
quite a child, to his very lips, and he was always asking himself why
common language, so easy for every other purpose, becomes obscure and
unintelligible in a contract or will, which made him fancy that the men
of law had "muddled everything in order to render themselves necessary."
He had lost the only man he had ever really loved, Stephen de la Boetie,
an amiable and noble philosopher, counsellor in the Parliament of
Bordeaux. "If I am pressed to declare why I loved him," Montaigne used
to say, "I feel that it can only be expressed by answering, because he
was he, and I was I." Montaigne gave up the Parliament, and travelled in
Switzerland and Italy, often stopping at Paris, and gladly returning to
his castle of Montaigne, where he wrote down what he had seen; "hungering
for self-knowledge," inquiring, indolent, without ardor for work, an
enemy of all constraint, he was at the same time frank and subtle,
gentle, humane, and moderate. As an inquiring spectator, without
personal ambition, he had taken for his life's motto, "Who knows? (Que
sais-je?)" Amidst the wars of religion he remained without political or
religious passion. "I am disgusted by novelty, whatever aspect it may
assume, and with good reason," he would say, "for I have seen some very
disastrous effects of it." Outside as well as within himself, Montaigne
studied mankind without regard to order and without premeditated plan.
"I have no drill-sergeant to arrange my pieces (of writing) save
hap-hazard only," he writes; "just as my ideas present themselves, I heap
them together; sometimes they come rushing in a throng, sometimes they
straggle single file. I like to be seen at my natural and ordinary pace,
all a-hobble though it be; I let myself go, just as it happens. The
parlance I like is a simple and natural parlance, the same on paper as in
the mouth, a succulent and a nervous parlance, short and compact, not so
much refined and finished to a hair as impetuous and brusque, difficult
rather than wearisome, devoid of affectation, irregular, disconnected,
and bold, not pedant-like, not preacher-like, not pleader-like." That
fixity which Montaigne could not give to his irresolute and doubtful mind
he stamped upon the tongue; it came out in his Essays supple, free, and
bold; he had made the first decisive step towards the formation of the
language, pending the advent of Descartes and the great literature of
France.
The sixteenth century began everything, attempted everything; it
accomplished and finished nothing; its great men opened the road of the
future to France; but they died without having brought their work well
through, without foreseeing that it was going to be completed. The
Reformation itself did not escape this misappreciation and discouragement
of its age; and nowhere do they crop out in a more striking manner than
in Montaigne. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, Rabelais is a
satirist and a cynic, he is no sceptic; there is felt circulating through
his book a glowing sap of confidence and hope; fifty years later,
Montaigne, on the contrary, expresses, in spite of his happy nature,
in vivid, picturesque, exuberant language, only the lassitude of an
antiquated age. Henry IV. was still disputing his throne with the League
and Spain. Several times, amidst his embarrassments and his wars, the
king had manifested his desire to see Montaigne; but the latter was ill,
and felt "death nipping him continually in the throat or the reins." And
he died, in fact, at his own house, on the 13th of September, 1592,
without having had the good fortune to see Henry IV. in peaceable
possession of the kingdom which was destined to receive from him,
together with stability and peace, a return of generous hope. All the
writers of mark in the reign of Henry IV. bear the same imprint; they all
yearn to get free from the chaos of those ideas and sentiments which the
sixteenth century left still bubbling up. In literature as well as in
the state, one and the same need of discipline and unity, one universal
thirst for order and peace was bringing together all the intellects and
all the forces which were but lately clashing against and hampering one
another; in literature, as well as in the state, the impulse, everywhere
great and effective, proceeded from the king, without pressure or effort.
"Make known to Monsieur de Geneve," said Henry IV. to one of the friends
of St. Francis de Sales, "that I desire of him a work to serve as a
manual for all persons of the court and the great world, without
excepting kings and princes, to fit them for living Christianly each
according to their condition. I want this manual to be accurate,
judicious, and such as any one can make use of." St. Francis de Sales
published, in 1608, the Introduction to a Devout Life, a delightful and
charming manual of devotion, more stern and firm in spirit than in form,
a true Christian regimen softened by the tact of a delicate and acute
intellect, knowing the world and its ways. "The book has surpassed my
hope," said Henry IV. The style is as supple, the fancy as rich, as
Montaigne's; but scepticism has given place to Christianism; St. Francis
de Sales does not doubt, he believes; ingenious and moderate withal, he
escapes out of the controversies of the violent and the incertitudes of
the sceptics. The step is firm, the march is onward towards the
seventeenth century, towards the reign of order, rule, and method.
The vigorous language and the beautiful arrangement in the style of the
magistrates had already prepared the way for its advent. Descartes was
the first master of it and its great exponent.
Never was any mind more independent in voluntary submission to an
inexorable logic. Rene Descartes, who was born at La Haye, near Tours,
in 1596, and died at Stockholm in 1650, escaped the influence of
Richelieu by the isolation to which he condemned himself, as well as by
the proud and somewhat uncouth independence of his character. Engaging
as a volunteer, at one and twenty, in the Dutch army, he marched over
Germany in the service of several princes, returned to France, where he
sold his property, travelled through the whole of Italy, and ended, in
1629, by settling himself in Holland, seeking everywhere solitude and
room for his thoughts. "In this great city of Amsterdam, where I am
now," he wrote to Balzac, "and where there is not a soul, except myself,
that does not follow some commercial pursuit, everybody is so attentive
to his gains, that I might live there all my life without being noticed
by anybody. I go walking every day amidst the confusion of a
great people with as much freedom and quiet as you could do in your
forest-alleys, and I pay no more attention to the people who pass before
my eyes than I should do to the trees that are in your forests and to the
animals that feed there. Even the noise of traffic does not interrupt my
reveries any more than would that of some rivulet." Having devoted
himself for a long time past to the study of geometry and astronomy, he
composed in Holland his Treatise on the World (Traite du Monde). "I
had intended to send you my World for your New Year's gift," he wrote
to the learned Minime, Father Mersenne, who was his best friend; "but I
must tell you that, having had inquiries made, lately, at Leyden and at
Amsterdam, whether Galileo's system of the world was to be obtained
there, word was sent me that all the copies of it had been burned at
Rome, and the author condemned to some fine, which astounded me so
mightily that I almost resolved to burn all my papers, or at least not
let them be seen by anybody. I confess that if the notion of the earth's
motion is false, all the foundations of my philosophy are too, since it
is clearly demonstrated by them. It is so connected with all parts of my
treatise that I could not detach it without rendering the remainder
wholly defective. But as I would not, for anything in the world, that
there should proceed from me a discourse in which there was to be found
the least word which might be disapproved of by the church, so would I
rather suppress it altogether than let it appear mutilated."
Descartes' independence of thought did not tend to revolt, as he had
proved: in publishing his Discourse on Method he halted at the
threshold of Christianism without laying his hand upon the sanctuary.
Making a clean sweep of all he had learned, and tearing himself free,
by a supreme effort, from the whole tradition of humanity, he resolved
"never to accept anything as true until he recognized it to be clearly
so, and not to comprise amongst his opinions anything but what presented
itself so clearly and distinctly to his mind that he could have no
occasion to hold it in doubt." In this absolute isolation of his mind,
without past and without future, Descartes, first of all assured of his
own personal existence by that famous axiom, "Cogito, ergo sum" (I think,
therefore I am), drew from it, as a necessary consequence, the fact of
the separate existence of soul and of body; passing oft by a sort of
internal revelation which he called innate ideas, he came to the pinnacle
of his edifice, concluding for the existence of a God from the notion of
the infinite impressed on the human soul. A laborious reconstruction of
a primitive and simple truth which the philosopher could not, for a
single moment, have banished from his mind all the while that he was
laboring painfully to demonstrate it.
By a tacit avowal of the weakness of the human mind, the speculations of
Descartes stopped short at death. He had hopes, however, of retarding
the moment of it. "I felt myself alive," he said, at forty years of age,
"and, examining myself with as much care as if I were a rich old man, I
fancied I was even farther from death than I had been in my youth." He
had yielded to the entreaties of Queen Christina of Sweden, who had
promised him an observatory, like that of Tycho Brahe. He was delicate,
and accustomed to follow a regimen adapted to his studies. "O flesh!"
he wrote to Gassendi, whose philosophy contradicted his own: "O idea!"
answered Gassendi. The climate of Stockholm was severe; Descartes caught
inflammation of the lungs; he insisted upon doctoring himself, and died
on the 11th of February, 1650. "He didn't want to resist death," said
his friends, not admitting that their master's will could be vanquished
by death itself. His influence remained for a long while supreme over
his age. Bossuet and Fenelon were Cartesians. "I think, therefore I
am," wrote Madame de Sevigne to her daughter. "I think of you tenderly,
therefore I love you; I think only of you in that manner, therefore I
love you only." Pascal alone, though adopting to a certain extent
Descartes' form of reasoning, foresaw the excess to which other minds
less upright and less firm would push the system of the great
philosopher. "I cannot forgive Descartes," he said; "he would have
liked, throughout his philosophy, to be able to do without God, but he
could not help making Him give just a flick to set the world in motion;
after that he didn't know what to do with God." A severe, but a true
saying; Descartes had required everything of pure reason; he had felt a
foreshadowing of the infinite and the unknown without daring to venture
into them. In the name of reason, others have denied the infinite and
the unknown. Pascal was wiser and bolder when, with St. Augustine, he
found in reason itself a step towards faith. "Reason would never give in
if she were not of opinion that there are occasions when she ought to
give in."
By his philosophical method, powerful and logical, as well as by the
clear, strong, and concise style he made use of to expound it, Descartes
accomplished the transition from the sixteenth century to the seventeeth;
he was the first of the great prose-writers of that incomparable epoch,
which laid forever the foundations of the language. At the same moment
the great Corneille was rendering poetry the same service.
It had come out of the sixteenth century more disturbed and less formed
than prose; Ronsard and his friends had received it from the hands of
Marot, quite young, unsophisticated and undecided; they attempted, at the
first effort, to raise it to the level of the great classic models of
which their minds were full. The attempt was bold, and the Pleiad did
not pretend to consult the taste of the vulgar. "The obscurity of
Ronsard," says M. Guizot, in his Corneille et son Temps, "is not that
of a subtle mind torturing itself to make something out of nothing; it is
the obscurity of a full and a powerful mind, which is embarrassed by its
own riches, and has not learned to regulate the use of them. Furnished,
by his reading of the ancients, with that which was wanting in our
poetry, Ronsard thought he could perceive in his lofty and really
poetical imagination what was needed to supply it; he cast his eyes in
all directions, with the view of enriching the domain of poetry.
'Thou wilt do well to pick dexterously,' he says, in his abridgment of
the art of French poetry, 'and adopt to thy work the most expressive
words in the dialects of our own France; there is no need to care whether
the vocables are Gascon, or Poitevin, or Norman, or Mancese, or Lyonnese,
or of other districts, provided that they are good, and properly express
what thou wouldst say.' Ronsard was too bold in extending his conquests
over the classical languages; it was that exuberance of ideas, that
effervescence of a genius not sufficiently master over its conceptions,
which brought down upon him, in after times, the contempt of the writers
who, in the seventeenth century, followed, with more wisdom and taste,
the road which he had contributed to open. 'He is not,' said Balzac,
'quite a poet; he has the first beginnings and the making of a poet; we
see in his works nascent and half-animated portions of a body which is in
formation, but which does not care to arrive at completion.'"
This body is that of French poetry; Ronsard traced out its first
lineaments, full of elevation, play of fancy, images, and a poetic fire
unknown before him. He was the first to comprehend the dignity which
befits grand subjects, and which earned him in his day the title of
Prince of poets. He lived in stormy times, not much adapted for poetry,
and steeped in the most cruel tragedies; he felt deeply the misfortunes
of his country rent by civil war, when he wrote,—
"A cry of dread, a din, a thundering sound
Of men and clashing harness roars around;
Peoples 'gainst peoples furiously rage;
Cities with cities deadly battle wage;
Temples and towns—one heap of ashes lie;
Justice and equity fade out and die
Unchecked the soldier's wicked will is done
With human blood the outraged churches run;
Bedridden Age, disbedded, perisheth,
And over all grins the pale face of Death."
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There was something pregnant, noble, and brilliant about Ronsard, in
spite of his exaggerations of style and faults of taste; his friends and
disciples imitated and carried to an extreme his defects, without
possessing his talent; the unruliness was such as to call for reform.
Peace revived with Henry IV., and the court, henceforth in accord with
the nation, resumed that empire over taste, manners, and ideas, which it
was destined to exercise so long and so supremely under Louis XIV.
Malherbe became the poet of the court, whose business it was to please
it, to adopt for it that literature which had but lately been reserved
for the feasts of the learned. "He used often to say, and chiefly when
he was reproached with not following the meaning of the authors he
translated or paraphrased, that he did not dress his meat for cooks, as
if he had meant to infer that he cared very little to be praised by the
literary folks who understood the books he had translated, provided that
he was understood by the court-folks." A complete revolution in the
opposite direction to that which Ronsard attempted appeared to have taken
place, but the human mind never loses all the ground it has once won; in
the verses of Malherbe, often bearing the imprint of beauties borrowed
from the ancients, the language preserved, in consequence of the
character given to it by Ronsard, a dignity, a richness of style, of
which the times of Marot showed no conception; and it was falling,
moreover, under the chastening influence of an elegant correctness.
It was for the court that Malherbe made verses, "striving," as he said,
"to degasconnize it," seeking there his public and the source of honor as
well as profit. As passionate an admirer of Richelieu as of Henry IV.,
naturally devoted to the service of the order established in the state as
well as in poetry, he, under the regency of Mary de' Medici, favored the
taste which was beginning to show itself for intellectual things, for
refined pleasures, and elegant occupations. It was not around the queen
that this honorable and agreeable society gathered; it was at the Hotel
Rambouillet, around Catherine de Vivonne, in Rue St. Thomas du Louvre.
Literature was there represented by Malherbe and Racan, afterwards by
Balzac and Voiture, Gombault and Chapelain, who constantly met there, in
company with Princess de Conde and her daughter, subsequently Duchess de
Longueville, Mademoiselle du Vigean, Madame and Mdlle. d'Epernon, and the
Bishop of Lucon himself, quite young as yet, but already famous. "All
the wits were received at the Hotel Rambouillet, whatever their
condition," says M. Cousin: "all that was asked of them was to have good
manners; but the aristocratic tone was established there without any
effort, the majority of the guests at the house being very great lords,
and the mistress being at one and the same time Rambouillet and Vivonne.
The wits were courted and honored, but they did not hold the dominion."
At that great period which witnessed the growth of Richelieu's power, and
of the action he universally exercised upon French society, at the
outcome from the moral licentiousness which Henry IV.'s example had
encouraged in his court, and after a certain roughness, the fruit of long
civil wars, a lesson was taught at Madame de Rambouillet's of modesty,
grace, and lofty politeness, together with the art of forming good ideas
and giving them good expression, sometimes with rather too much of
far-fetched and affected cleverness, always in good company, and with
much sweetness and self-possession on the part of the mistress of the
house. In 1627, Cardinal Richelieu, having become minister, sent the
Marquis of Rambouillet as ambassador to Spain. He wanted to be repaid
for this favor. One of his friends went to call upon Madame de
Rambouillet. At the first hint of what was expected from her, "I do not
believe that there are any intrigues between Cardinal Valette and the
princess," said she, "and, even if there were, I should not be the proper
person for the office it is intended to put upon me. Besides, everybody
is so convinced of the consideration and friendship I have for his
Eminence that nobody would dare to speak ill of him in my presence; I
cannot, therefore, ever have an opportunity of rendering him the services
you ask of me."
The cardinal did not persist, and remained well disposed towards Hotel
Rambouillet. Completely occupied in laying solidly the foundations of
his power, in checkmating and punishing conspiracies at court, and in
breaking down the party of the Huguenots, he had no leisure just yet to
think of literature and the literary. He had, nevertheless, in 1626,
begun removing the ruins of the Sorbonne, with a view of reconstructing
the buildings on a new plan and at his own expense. He wrote, in 1627,
to M. Saintot, "I thank him for the care he has taken of the Sorbonne,
begging him to continue it, assuring him that, though I have many
expenses on my hands, I am as desirous of continuing to build up that
house as of contributing, to the best of my little ability, to pull down
the fortifications of La Rochelle." The works were not completely
finished at the death of the cardinal, who provided therefor by his will.
At the same time that he was repairing and enriching the Sorbonne, the
cardinal was helping Guy de la Brosse, the king's physician, to create
the Botanic Gardens (Le Jardin des Plantes), he was defending the
independence of the College of France against the pretensions of the
University of Paris, and gave it for its Grand Almoner his brother, the
Archbishop of Lyons. He was preparing the foundation of the King's Press
(Imprimerie royale), definitively created in 1640; and he gave the
Academy or King's College (college royal) of his town of Richelieu a
regulation-code of studies which bears the imprint of his lofty and
strong mind. He prescribed a deep study of the French tongue. "It often
happens, unfortunately, that the difficulties which must be surmounted
and the long time which is employed in learning the dead languages,
before any knowledge of the sciences can be arrived at, have the effect,
at the outset, of making young gentlemen disgusted and hasten to betake
themselves to the exercise of arms without having been sufficiently
instructed in good literature, though it is the fairest ornament of their
profession. . . . It has, therefore, been thought necessary to
establish a royal academy at which discipline suitable to their condition
may be taught them in the French tongue, in order that they may exercise
themselves therein, and that even foreigners, who are curious about it,
may learn to know its riches and the graces it hath in unfolding the
secrets of the highest discipline." Herein is revealed the founder of
the French Academy, skilful as he was in divining the wants of his day,
and always ready to profit by new means of action, and to make them his
own whilst doing them service.
Associations of the literary were not unknown in France; Ronsard and his
friends, at first under the name of the brigade and then under that of
the Pleiad, often met to read together their joint productions, and to
discuss literary questions; and the same thing was done, subsequently, in
Malherbe's rooms.
"Now let us speak at our ease," Balzac would say, when the sitting was
over, "and without fear of committing solecisms."
When Malherbe was dead and Balzac had retired to his country house on the
borders of the Charente, some friends, "men of letters and of merits very
much above the average," says Pellisson in his Histoire de l'Academie
Francaise, "finding that nothing was more inconvenient in this great
city than to go often and often to call upon one another without finding
anybody at home, resolved to meet one day in the week at the house of one
of them. They used to assemble at M. Conrart's, who happened to be most
conveniently quartered for receiving them, and in the very heart of the
city (Rue St. Martin). There they conversed familiarly as they would
have on an ordinary visit, and upon all sorts of things, business, news,
and literature. If any one of the company had a work done, as, often
happened, he readily communicated its contents to all the others, who
freely gave him their opinion of it, and their conferences were followed
sometimes by a walk and sometimes by a collation which they took
together. Thus they continued for three or four years, as I have heard
many amongst them say; it was an extreme pleasure and an incredible gain,
insomuch that, when they speak nowadays of that time and of those early
days of the Academy, they speak of it as a golden age during the which,
without bustle and without show, and without any other laws but those of
friendship, they enjoyed all that is sweetest and most charming in the
intercourse of intellects and in rational life."
Even after the intervention and regulationizing of Cardinal Richelieu,
the French Academy still preserved something of that sweetness and that
polished familiarity in their relations which caused the regrets of its
earliest founders. [They were MM. Godeau, afterwards Bishop of Grasse,
Conrart and Gombault who were Huguenots, Chapelain, Giry, Habert, Abbe de
Cerisy, his brother, M. de Serizay and M. de Maleville.] The secret of
the little gatherings was not so well kept but that Bois-Robert, the
cardinal's accredited gossip, ever on the alert for news to divert his
patron, heard of them and begged before long to be present at them.
"There was no probability of his being refused, for, besides that he was
on friendly terms with many of these gentlemen, the very favor he enjoyed
gave him some sort of authority and added to his consequence. He was
full of delight and admiration at what he saw, and did not fail to give
the cardinal a favorable account of the little assembly, insomuch that
the cardinal, who had a mind naturally inclined towards great things, and
who loved the French language, which he himself wrote extremely well,
asked if those persons would not be disposed to form a body and assembly
regularly and under public authority." Bois-Robert was intrusted with
the proposal.
Great was the consternation in the little voluntary and friendly Academy.
"There was scarcely one of these gentlemen who did not testify
displeasure:" MM. de Serizay and de Maleville, who were attached to the
households of the Duke of La Rochefoucauld and Marshal Bassompierre, one
in retirement on his estates and the other a prisoner in the Bastille,
were for refusing and excusing themselves as best they might to the
cardinal. Chapelain, who had a pension from his Eminence, represented
that "in good truth he could have been well pleased to dispense with
having their conferences thus bruited abroad, but in the position to
which things were reduced, it was not open to them to follow the more
agreeable of the two courses; they had to do with a man who willed in no
half-hearted way whatever he willed, and who was not accustomed to meet
resistance or to stiffer it with impunity; he would consider as an insult
the disregard shown for his protection, and might visit his resentment
upon each individual; he could, at any rate, easily prohibit their
assemblies, breaking up by that means a society which every one of them
desired to be eternal." The arguments were strong, the members yielded;
Bois-Robert was charged to thank his Eminence very humbly for the honor
he did them, assuring him that they were all resolved to follow his
wishes. "I wish to be of that assembly the protector and the father,"
said Richelieu, giving at once divers proofs that he took a great
interest in that establishment, a fact which soon brought the Academy
solicitations from those who were most intimate with the cardinal, and
who, being in some sort of repute for wit, gloried in being admitted to a
body which he regarded with favor.
In making of this little private gathering a great national institution,
Cardinal Richelieu yielded to his natural yearning for government and
dominion; he protected literature as a minister and as an admirer; the
admirer's inclination was supported by the minister's influence. At the
same time, and perhaps without being aware of it, he was giving French
literature a centre of discipline and union whilst securing for the
independence and dignity of writers a supporting-point which they had
hitherto lacked. Whilst recompensing them by favors nearly always
conferred in the name of the state, he was preparing for them afar off
the means of withdrawing themselves from that private dependence, the
yoke of which they nearly always had to bear. Set free at his death from
the weight of their obligations to him, they became the servants of the
state; ere long the French Academy had no other protector but the king.
Order and rule everywhere accompanied Cardinal Richelieu; the Academy
drew up its statutes, chose a director, a chancellor, and a perpetual
secretary: Conrart was the first to be called to that honor; the number
of Academicians was set down at forty by letters patent from the king.
"As soon as God had called us to the conduct of this realm, we had for
aim, not only to apply a remedy to the disorders which the civil wars had
introduced into it, but also to enrich it with all ornaments suitable for
the most illustrious and the most ancient of the monarchies that are at
this day in the world. Although we have labored without ceasing at the
execution of this design, it hath been impossible for us hitherto to see
the entire fulfilment thereof. The disturbances so often excited in the
greater part of our provinces, and the assistance we have been obliged to
give to many of our allies, have diverted us from any other thought but
that of war, and have hindered us for a long while from enjoying the
repose we procured for others. . . . Our very clear and very much
beloved cousin, the cardinal-duke of Richelieu, who hath had the part
that everybody knows in all these things, hath represented to us that one
of the most glorious signs of the happiness of a kingdom was that the
sciences and arts should flourish there, and that letters should be in
honor there as well as arms; that, after having performed so many
memorable exploits, we had nothing further to do but to add agreeable
things to the necessary, and ornament to utility; and he was of opinion
that we could not begin better than with the most noble of all the arts,
which is eloquence; that the French tongue, which up to the present hath
only too keenly felt the neglect of those who might have rendered it the
most perfect of the day, is more than ever capable of becoming so, seeing
the number of persons who have knowledge of the advantages it possesses;
it is to establish fixed rules for it that he hath ordained an assembly
whose propositions were satisfactory to him. For these reasons and in
order to secure the said conferences, we will that they continue
henceforth, in our good city of Paris, under the name of French Academy,
and that letters patent be enregistered to that end by our gentry of the
Parliament of Paris."
The Parliament was not disposed to fulfil the formality of
enregistration. The cardinal had compressed it, stifled it, but he had
never mastered it; the Academy was a new institution, it was regarded as
his work; on that ground it inspired great distrust in the public as well
as the magistrates. "The people, to whom everything that came from this
minister looked suspicious, knew not whether beneath these flowers there
were not a serpent concealed, and were apprehensive that this
establishment was, at the very least, a new prop to support is
domination, that it was but a batch of folks in his pay, hired to
maintain all that he did and to observe the actions and sentiments of
others. It went about that he cut down scavenging expenses of Paris by
eighty thousand livres in order to give them a pension of two thousand
livres apiece; the vulgar were so frightened, without attempting to
account for their terror, that a tradesman of Paris, who had taken a
house that suited him admirably in Rue Cinq Diamants, where the Academy
then used to meet at M. Chapelain's, broke off his bargain on no other
ground but that he did not want to be in a street where a 'Cademy of
Conspirators (une Cademie e Manopoleurs) met every week." The wits,
like St. Evremond, in his comedy of the Academistes, turned into ridicule
the body which, as it was said, claimed to subject the language of the
public to its decisions:—
"So I, with hoary head, to' school
Must, like a child, go day by day,
And learn my parts of speech, poor fool, when
Death is taking speech away!"
|
said Maynard, who, nevertheless, was one of the forty.
The letters patent for establishment of the French Academy had been sent
to the Parliament in 1635; they were not registered until 1637 at the
express instance of the cardinal, who wrote to the premier President to
assure him that "the foundation of the Academy was useful and necessary
to the public, and the purpose of the Academicians was quite different
from what it had been possible to make people believe hitherto."
The decree of verification, when it at length appeared, bore traces of
the jealous prejudices of the Parliament. "They the said assembly and
academy," it ran, "shall not be powered to take cognizance of anything
but the ornamentation, embellishment, and augmentation of the French
language, and of the books that shall be made by them and by other
persons who shall desire it and want it."
The French Academy was founded; it was already commencing its Dictionary
in accordance with the suggestion enunciated by Chapelain at the second
meeting; the cardinal was here carrying out that great moral idea of
literature which he had expressed but lately in a letter to Balzac: "The
conceptions in your letters," said he, "are forcible and as far removed
from ordinary imaginations as they are in conformity with the common
sense of those who have superior judgment. Truth has this advantage,
that it forces those who have eyes and mind sufficiently clear to discern
what it is to represent it without disguise." Neither Balzac and his
friends, nor the protection of Cardinal Richelieu, sufficed as yet to
give lustre to the Academy; great minds and great writers alone could
make the glory of their society. The principle of the association of men
of letters was, however, established: men of the world, friendly to
literature, were already preparing to mingle with them; the literary,
but lately servitors of the great, had henceforth at their disposal a
privilege envied and sought after by courtiers; their independence grew
by it and their dignity gained by it. The French Academy became an
institution, and took its place amongst the glories of France. It had
this piece of good fortune, that Cardinal Richelieu died without being
able to carry out the project he had conceived. He had intended to open
on the site of the horse-market, near Porte St. Honore and behind the
Palais-Cardinal, "a great Place which he would have called Ducale in
imitation of the Royale, which is at the other end of the city," says
Pellisson; he had placed in the hands of M. de la Mesnardiere, a
memorandum drawn up by himself for the plan of a college "which he was
meditating for all the noble sciences, and in which he designed to employ
all that was most telling for the cause of literature in Europe. He had
an idea of making the members of the Academy directors and as it were
arbiters of this great establishment, and aspired, with a feeling worthy
of the immortality with which he was so much in love, to set up the
French Academy there in the most distinguished position in the world, and
to offer an honorable and pleasant repose to all persons of that class
who had deserved it by their labors." It was a noble and a liberal idea,
worthy of the great mind which had conceived it; but it would have
stifled the fertile germ of independence and liberty which he had
unconsciously buried in the womb of the French Academy. Pensioned and
barracked, the Academicians would have remained men of letters, shut off
from society and the world. The Academy grew up alone, favored indeed,
but never reduced to servitude; it alone has withstood the cruel shocks
which have for so long a time agitated France; in a country where nothing
lasts, it has lasted, with its traditions, its primitive statutes, its
reminiscences, its respect for the past. It has preserved its courteous
and modest dignity, its habits of polite neutrality, the suavity and
equality of the relations between its members. It was said just now that
Richelieu's work no longer existed save in history, and that revolutions
have left him nothing but his glory; but that was a mistake: the French
Academy is still standing, stronger and freer than at its birth, and it
was founded by Richelieu, and has never forgotten him.
Amongst the earliest members of the Academy the cardinal had placed his
most habitual and most intimate literary servants, Bois-Robert,
Desmarets, Colletet, all writers for the theatre, employed by Richelieu
in his own dramatic attempts. Theatrical representations were the only
pleasure the minister enjoyed, in accord with the public of his day. He
had everywhere encouraged this taste, supporting with marked favor
Hardy and the Theatre Parisien. With his mind constantly exercised by
the wants of the government, he soon sought in the theatre a means of
acting upon the masses. He had already foreseen the power of the press;
he had laid hands on Doctor Renaudot's Gazette de France; King Louis
XIII. often wrote articles in it; the manuscript exists in the National
Library, with some corrections which appear to be Richelieu's. As for
the theatre, the cardinal aspired to try his own hand at the work; his
literary labors were nearly all political pieces; his tragedy of
Mirame, to which he attached so much value, and which he had
represented at such great expense for the opening of his theatre in the
Palais-Cardinal, is nothing but one continual allusion, often bold even
to insolence, to Buckingham's feelings towards Anne of Austria. The
comedy, in heroic style, of Europe, which appeared in the name of
Desmarets, after the cardinal's death, is a political allegory touching
the condition of the world. Francion and Ibere contend together for the
favors of Europe, not without, at the same time, paying court to the
Princess Austrasia (Lorraine). All the cardinal's foreign policy, his
alliances with Protestants, are there described in verses which do not
lack a certain force: Germanique (the emperor) pleads the cause of Ibere
with Europe:—
"No longer can he brook to gaze on such as these,
Destroyers of the shrines, foes of the Deities,
By Francion evoked from out the Frozen Main,[1]
That he might cope with us and equal war maintain.
|
EUROPE.
O, call not by those names th' indomitable race,
Who 'midst my champions hold honorable place.
Unlike to us, they own no shrine, no sacrifice;
But still, unlike Ibere, they use no artifice;
About the Gods they speak their mind as seemeth best,
Whilst he, with pious air, still keepeth me opprest;
Through them I hold mine own, from harm and insult free,
Their errors I deplore, their valor pleases me.
What was that noble king,[2] that puissant conqueror,
Who through thy regions, like a mighty torrent, tore?
Who marched with giant strides along the path of fame,
And, in the hour of death, left victory with his name?
What are those gallant chiefs, who from his ashes rose,
Whom still, methinks, his shade assists against their foes?
[1] The Swedes. [2] Gustavus Adolphus.
|
What was that Saxon heart,[1] so full of noble rage,
He, whom thine own decrees drove from his heritage?
Who, with his gallant few, full many a deed hath done
Within thine own domains, and many a laurel won?
Who, wasting not his strength in strife with granite walls,
Routs thee in open field, and lo! the fortress falls?
Who, taking just revenge for loss of all his own,
Compressed thy boundaries, and cut thy frontiers down.
How many virtues in that prince's [2] heart reside
Who leads yon free-set [3] people's armies in their pride,
People who boldly spurned Ibere and all his laws,
Bravely shook off his yoke and bravely left his cause?
Francion, without such aid, thou say'st would helpless be;
What were Ibere without thy provinces and thee?
|
GERMANIQUE.
But I am of his blood:—own self same Deities.
|
EUROPE.
All they are of my blood:—gaze on the self-same skies
Do all your hosts adore the Deities we own?
Nay, from your very midst come errors widely sown.
Ibere for chief support on erring men relies
Yet, what himself may do, to others he denies.
What! Francion favor error! This is idle prate:
He who from irreligion thoroughly purged the state!
Who brought the worship back to altars in decay;
Who built the temples up that in their ashes lay;
True son of them, who, spite of all thy fathers' feats,
Replaced my reverend priests upon their holy seats!
'Twixt Francion and Ibere this difference remains:
One sets them in their seats, and one in iron chains."
|
[1] Bernard of Saxe-Weimar. [2] Prince of Orange. [3] The Hollanders.
Already, in Mirame, Richelieu had celebrated the fall of Rochelle and of
the Huguenot party, bringing upon the scene the King of Bithynia, who is
taking arms
"To tame a rebel slave,
Perched proudly on his rock washed by the ocean-wave."
|
As epigraph to Europe there were these lines:—
"All friends of France to this my work will friendly be;
And all unfriends of her will say the author ill;
Yet shall I be content, say, reader, what you will;
The joy of some, the rage of others, pleases me."
|
The enemies of France did not wait for the comedy, in heroic style, of
Europe in order to frequently say ill of Cardinal Richelieu.
Occupied as he was in governing the affairs of France and of Europe
otherwise than in verse, the cardinal chose out work-fellows; there were
five of them, to whom he gave his ideas and the plan of his piece; he
intrusted to each the duty of writing an act, and "by this means finished
a comedy a month," says Pellisson. Thus was composed the comedy of the
Tuileries and the Aveugle de Smyrne, which were printed in 1638;
Richelieu had likewise taken part in the composition of the Visionnaires
of Desmarets, and supported in a rather remarkable scene the rule of the
three unities against its detractors. A new comedy, the Grande
Pastorale, was in hand. "When he was purposing to publish it," says the
History of the Academy, "he desired M. Chapelain to look over it, and
make careful observations upon it. These observations were brought to
him by M. de Bois-Robert, and, though they were written with much
discretion and respect, they shocked and nettled him to such a degree,
either by their number or by the consciousness they caused him of his
faults, that, without reading them through, he tore them up. But on the
following night, when he was in bed, and all his household asleep, having
thought over the anger he had shown, be did a thing incomparably more
estimable than the best comedy in the world, that is to say, he listened
to reason, for he gave orders to collect and glue together the pieces of
that torn paper, and, having read it from one end to the other, and given
great thought to it, he sent and awakened M. de Bois-Robert to tell him
that he saw quite well that the gentlemen of the Academy were better
informed about such matters than he, and that there must be nothing more
said about that paper and print."
The cardinal ended by permitting the liberties taken in literary matters
by Chapelain and even Colletet. His courtiers were complimenting him
about some success or other obtained by the king's arms, saying that
nothing could withstand his Eminence. "You are mistaken," he answered,
laughing; "and I find even in Paris persons who withstand me. There's
Colletet, who, after having fought with me yesterday over a word, does
not give in yet; look at this long letter that he has just written me!"
He counted, at any rate, in the number of his five work-fellows one mind
too independent to be subservient for long to the ideas and wishes of
another, though it were Cardinal Richelieu and the premier minister. In
conjunction with Colletet, Bois-Robert, De l'Etoile, and Rotrou, Peter
Corneille worked at his Eminence's tragedies and comedies. He handled
according to his fancy the act intrusted to him, with so much freedom
that the cardinal was shocked, and said that he lacked, in his opinion,
"the follower-spirit" (l'esprit de suite). Corneille did not appeal
from this judgment; he quietly took the road to Rouen, leaving henceforth
to his four work-fellows the glory of putting into form the ideas of the
all-powerful minister; he worked alone, for his own hand, for the glory
of France and of the human mind.
Peter Corneille, born at Rouen on the 6th of June, 1606, in a family of
lawyers, had been destined for the bar from his infancy; he was a
briefless barrister; his father had purchased him two government posts,
but his heart was otherwise set than "on jurisprudence;" in 1635, when he
quietly renounced the honor of writing for the cardinal, Corneille had
already had several comedies played. He himself said of the first,
Melite, which he wrote at three and twenty, "It was my first attempt,
and it has no pretence of being according to the rules, for I did not
know then that there were any. I had for guide nothing but a little
common sense, together with the models of the late Hardy, whose vein was
rather fertile than polished." "The comedies of Corneille had met with
success; praised as he was by his competitors in the career of the
theatre, he was as yet, in their eyes, but one of the supports of that
literary glory which was common to them all. Tranquil in their
possession of bad taste, they were far from foreseeing the revolution
which was about to overthrow its sway and their own." [Corneille et son
Temps, by M. Guizot.]
Corneille made his first appearance in tragedy, in 1633, with a Medee.
"Here are verses which proclaim Corneille," said Voltaire:—
"After so many boons, to leave me can he bear?
After so many sins, to leave me can he dare?"
|
They proclaimed tragedy; it had appeared at last to Corneille; its
features, roughly sketched, were nevertheless recognizable. He was
already studying Spanish with an old friend of his family, and was
working at the Cid, when he brought out his Illusion Comique, a
mediocre piece, Corneille's last sacrifice to the taste of his day.
Towards the end of the year 1636, the Cid was played for the first time
at Paris. There was a burst of enthusiasm forthwith. "I wish you were
here," wrote the celebrated comedian Mondory to Balzac, on the 18th of
January, 1637, "to enjoy amongst other pleasures that of the beautiful
comedies that are being played, and especially a Cid who has charmed
all Paris. So beautiful is he that he has smitten with love all the most
virtuous ladies, whose passion has many times blazed out in the public
theatre. Seated in a body on the benches of the boxes have been seen
those who are commonly seen only in gilded chamber and on the seat with
the fleurs-de-lis. So great has been the throng at our doors, and our
place has turned out so small, that the corners of the theatre, which
served at other times as niches for the pageboys, have been given as a
favor to blue ribbons, and the scene has been embellished, ordinarily,
with the crosses of knights of the order." "It is difficult," says
Pellisson, "to imagine with what approbation this piece was received by
court and people." It was impossible to tire of seeing it, nothing else
was talked of in company; everybody knew some portion by heart; it was
taught to children, and in many parts of France it had passed into a
proverb to say, "Beautiful as the Cid." Criticism itself was silenced
for a while; carried along in the general twirl, bewildered by its
success, the rivals of Corneille appeared to join the throng of his
admirers; but they soon recovered their breath, and their first sign of
life was an effort of resistance to the torrent which threatened to carry
them away; with the exception of Rotrou, who was worthy to comprehend and
enjoy Corneille, the revolt was unanimous. The malcontents and the
envious had found in Richelieu an eager and a powerful auxiliary.
Many attempts have been made to fathom the causes of the cardinal's
animosity to the Cid. It was a Spanish piece, and represented in a
favorable light the traditional enemies of France and of Richelieu; it
was all in honor of the duel which the cardinal had prosecuted with such
rigorous justice; it depicted a king simple, patriarchal, genial in the
exercise of his power, contrary to all the views cherished by the
minister touching royal majesty; all these reasons might have contributed
to his wrath, but there was something more personal and petty in its
bitterness. In tacit disdain for the work that had been entrusted to
him, Corneille had abandoned Richelieu's pieces; he had retired to Rouen;
far away from the court, he had only his successes to set against the
perfidious insinuations of his rivals. The triumph of the Cid seemed
to the resentful spirit of a neglected and irritated patron a sort of
insult. Therewith was mingled a certain shade of author's jealousy.
Richelieu saw in the fame of Corneille the success of a rebel. Egged on
by base and malicious influences, he attempted to crush him as he had
crushed the house of Austria and the Huguenots.
The cabal of bad taste enlisted to a man in this new war. Scudery was
standard-bearer; astounded that such fantastic beauties should have
seduced knowledge as well as ignorance, and the court as well as the cit,
and conjuring decent folks to suspend judgment for a while, and not
condemn without a hearing Sophonisbe, Cesar, Cleopdtre, Hercule,
Marianne, Cleomedon, and so many other illustrious heroes who had
charmed them on the stage. Corneille might have been satisfied; his
adversaries themselves recognized his great popularity and success.
A singular mixture of haughtiness and timidity, of vigorous imagination
and simplicity of judgment! It was by his triumphs that Corneille had
become informed of his talents; but, when once aware, he had accepted the
conviction thereof as that of those truths which one does not arrive at
by one's self absolutely, without explanation, without modification.
"I know my worth, and well believe men's rede of it;
I have no need of leagues, to make myself admired;
Few voices may be raised for me, but none is hired;
To swell th' applause my just ambition seeks no claque,
Nor out of holes and corners hunts the hireling pack:
Upon the boards, quite self-supported, mount my plays,
And every one is free to censure or to praise;
There, though no friends expound their views or preach my
cause,
It hath been many a time my lot to win applause;
There, pleased with the success my modest merit won,
With brilliant critics' laws I seek to dazzle none;
To court and people both I give the same delight,
Mine only partisans the verses that I write;
To them alone I owe the credit of my pen,
To my own self alone the fame I win of men;
And if, when rivals meet, I claim equality,
Methinks I do no wrong to whosoe'er it be."
|
"Let him rise on the wings of composition," said La Bruyere, "and he is
not below Augustus, Pompey, Nicodemus, Sertorius; he is a king and a
great king; he is a politician, he is a philosopher." Modest and bashful
in what concerns himself, when it has nothing to do with his works and
his talents, Corneille, who does not disdain to receive a pension from
Cardinal Richelieu, or, in writing to Scudery, to call him "your master
and mine," becomes quite another creature when he defends his genius:
"Leaving full oft the earth, soon as he leaves the goal,
With lofty flight he soars into the upper air,
Looks down on envious men, and smiles at their despair."
|
The contest was becoming fierce and bitter; much was written for and
against the Cid; the public remained faithful to it; the cardinal
determined to submit it to the judgment of the Academy, thus exacting
from that body an act of complaisance towards himself as well as an act
of independence and authority in the teeth of predominant opinion. At
his instigation, Scudery wrote to the Academy to make them the judges in
the dispute. "The cardinal's desire was plain to see," says Pellisson;
"but the most judicious amongst that body testified a great deal of
repugnance to this design. They said that the Academy, which was only in
its cradle, ought not to incur odium by a judgment which might perhaps
displease both parties, and which could not fail to cause umbrage to one
at least, that is to say, to a great part of France; that they were
scarcely tolerated, from the mere fancy which prevailed that they
pretended to some authority over the French tongue; what would be the
case if they proved to have exercised it in respect of a work which had
pleased the majority and won the approbation of the people? M. Corneille
did not ask for this judgment, and, by the statutes of the Academy, they
could only sit in judgment upon a work with the consent and at the
entreaty of the author." Corneille did not facilitate the task of the
Academicians: he excused himself modestly, protesting that such
occupation was not worthy of such a body, that a mere piece
(un libelle) did not deserve their judgment. . . . "At length,
under pressure from M. de Bois-Robert, who gave him pretty plainly to
understand what was his master's desire, this answer slipped from him:
'The gentlemen of the Academy can do as they please; since you write me
word that my Lord would like to see their judgment, and it would divert
his Eminence, I have nothing further to say.'"
These expressions were taken as a formal consent, and as the Academy
still excused themselves, "Let those gentlemen know," said the cardinal
at last, "that I desire it, and that I shall love them as they love me."
There was nothing for it but to obey. Whilst Bois-Robert was amusing his
master by representing before him a parody of the Cid, played by his
lackeys and scullions, the Academy was at work drawing up their
Sentiments respecting the Cid.
Thrice submitted to the cardinal, who thrice sent it back with some
strong remarks appended, the judgment of the Academicians did not succeed
in satisfying the minister. "What was wanted was the complaisance of
submission, what was obtained was only that of gratitude." "I know quite
well," says Pellisson, "that his Eminence would have wished to have the
Cid more roughly handled, if he had not been adroitly made to
understand that a judge must not speak like a party to a suit, and that
in proportion as he showed passion, he would lose authority."
Balzac, still in retirement at his country-place, made no mistake as to
the state of mind either in the Academy or in the world when he wrote to
Scudery, who had sent him his Observations sur le Cid, "Reflect, sir,
that all France takes sides with M. Corneille, and that there is not one,
perhaps, of the judges with whom it is rumored that you have come to an
agreement, who has not praised that which you desire him to condemn; so
that, though your arguments were incontrovertible and your adversary
should acquiesce therein, he would still have the wherewith to give
himself glorious consolation for the loss of his case, and be able to
tell you that it is something more to have delighted a whole kingdom than
to have written a piece according to regulation. This being so, I doubt
not that the gentlemen of the Academy will find themselves much hampered
in delivering a judgment on your case, and that, on the one hand, your
arguments will stagger them, whilst, on the other, the public approbation
will keep them in check. You have the best of it in the closet; he has
the advantage on the stage. If the Cid be guilty, it is of a crime
which has met with reward; if he be punished, it will be after having
triumphed; if Plato must banish him from his republic, he must crown him
with flowers whilst banishing him, and not treat him worse than he
formerly treated Homer."
The Sentiments de l'Academie at last saw the light in the month of
December, 1637, and as Chapelain had foreseen, they did not completely
satisfy either the cardinal or Scudery, in spite of the thanks which the
latter considered himself bound to express to that body, or Corneille,
who testified bitter displeasure. "The Academy proceeds against me with
so much violence, and employs so supreme an authority to close my mouth,
that all the satisfaction I have is to think that this famous production,
at which so many fine intellects have been working for six months, may no
doubt be esteemed the opinion of the French Academy, but will probably
not be the opinion of the rest of Paris. I wrote the Cid for my
diversion and that of decent folks who like Comedy. All the favor that
the opinion of the Academy can hope for is to make as much way; at any
rate, I have had my account settled before them, and I am not at all sure
that they can wait for theirs."
Corneille did not care to carry his resentment higher than the Academy.
At the end of December, 1637, when writing to Bois-Robert a letter of
thanks for getting him his pension, which he calls "the liberalities of
my Lord," he adds, "As you advise me not to reply to the Sentiments de
l'Academie, seeing what personages are concerned therein, there is no
need of interpreters to understand that; I am somewhat more of this world
than Heliodorus was, who preferred to lose his bishopric rather than his
book; and I prefer my master's good graces to all the reputations on
earth. I shall be mum, then, not from disdain, but from respect."
The great Corneille made no further defence he had become a servitor
again; but the public, less docile, persisted in their opinion.
"In vain against the Cid a minister makes league;
All Paris, gazing on Chimene, thinks with Rodrigue;
In vain to censure her th' Academy aspires;
The stubborn populace revolts and still admires;"
|
said Boileau subsequently.
The dispute was ended, and, in spite of the judgment of the Academy, the
cardinal did not come out of it victorious; his anger, however, had
ceased: the Duchess of Aiguillon, his niece, accepted the dedication of
the Cid; when Horace appeared, in 1639, the dedicatory epistle,
addressed to the cardinal, proved that Corneille read his works to him
beforehand; the cabal appeared for a while on the point of making head
again. "Horace, condemned by the decemvirs, was acquitted by the
people," said Corneille. The same year Cinna came to give the
finishing touch to the reputation of the great poet:—
"To the persecuted Cid the Cinna owed its birth."
|
Corneille had withdrawn to the obscurity which suited the simplicity of
his habits; the cardinal, it was said, had helped him to get married; he
had no longer to defend his works, their fame was amply sufficient.
"Henceforth Corneille walks freely by himself and in the strength of his
own powers; the circle of his ideas grows larger, his style grows loftier
and stronger, together with his thoughts, and purer, perhaps, without his
dreaming of it; a more correct, a more precise expression comes to him,
evoked by greater clearness in idea, greater fixity of sentiment; genius,
with the mastery of means, seeks new outlets. Corneille writes
Polyeucte." [Corneille et son Temps, by M. Guizot.]
It was a second revolution accomplished for the upsetting of received
ideas, at a time when paganism was to such an extent master of the
theatre that, in the midst of an allegory of the seventeenth century,
alluding to Gustavus Adolphus and the wars of religion, Richelieu and
Desmarets, in the heroic comedy of Europe, dared not mention the name
of God save in the plural. Corneille read his piece at the Hotel
Rambouillet. "It was applauded to the extent demanded by propriety and
the reputation already achieved by the author," says Fontenelle; "but
some days afterwards, M. de Voiture went to call upon M. Corneille, and
took a very delicate way of telling him that Polyeucte had not been so
successful as he supposed, that the Christianism had been extremely
displeasing." "The story is," adds Voltaire, "that all the Hotel
Rambouillet, and especially the Bishop of Vence, Godeau, condemned the
attempt of Polyeucte to overthrow idols." Corneille, in alarm, would
have withdrawn the piece from the hands of the comedians who were
learning it, and he only left it on the assurance of one of the
comedians, who did not play in it because he was too bad an actor.
Posterity has justified the poor comedian against the Hotel Rambouillet;
amongst so many of Corneille's masterpieces it has ever given a place
apart to Polyeucte; neither the Saint-Genest of Rotrou, nor the
Zaire of Voltaire, in spite of their various beauties, have dethroned
Polyeucte; in fame as well as in date it remains the first of the few
pieces in which Christianism appeared, to gain applause, upon the French
classic stage.
Richelieu was no longer there to lay his commands upon the court and upon
the world: he was dead, without having been forgiven by Corneille:—
"Of our great cardinal let men speak as they will,
By me, in prose or verse, they shall not be withstood;
He did me too much good for me to say him ill,
He did me too much ill for me to say him good!"
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The great literary movement of the seventeenth century had begun; it had
no longer any need of a protector; it was destined to grow up alone
during twenty years, amidst troubles at home and wars abroad, to flourish
all at once, with incomparable splendor, under the reign and around the
throne of Louis XIV. Cardinal Richelieu, however, had the honor of
protecting its birth; he had taken personal pleasure in it; he had
comprehended its importance and beauty; he had desired to serve it whilst
taking the direction of it. Let us end, as we began, with the judgment
of La Bruyere: "Compare yourselves, if you dare, with the great
Richelieu, you men devoted to fortune, you who say that you know nothing,
that you have read nothing, that you will read nothing. Learn that
Cardinal Richelieu did know, did read; I say not that he had no
estrangement from men of letters, but that he loved them, caressed them,
favored them, that he contrived privileges for them, that he appointed
pensions for them, that he united them in a celebrated body, and that he
made of them the French Academy."
The Academy, the Sorbonne, the Botanic Gardens (Jardin des Plantes),
the King's Press have endured; the theatre has grown and been enriched by
many masterpieces, the press has become the most dreaded of powers; all
the new forces that Richelieu created or foresaw have become developed
without him, frequently in opposition to him and to the work of his whole
life; his name has remained connected with the commencement of all these
wonders, beneficial or disastrous, which he had grasped and presaged, in
a future happily concealed from his ken.
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