A History of French Literature. Edward Dowden

live long enough to witness the complete triumph of the master; in 1560 he died exhausted, at the age of thirty-five.

      The Pléiade served literature by their attention to form, by their skill in poetic instrumentation; but they were incapable of interpreting life in any large and original way. In the hands of their successors poetry languished for want of an inspiring theme. PHILIPPE DESPORTES (1546-1606) was copious and skilful in his reproduction and imitation of Italian models; as a courtier poet he reduced literary flattery to a fine art; but his mannered graces are cold, his pretence of passion is a laboured kind of esprit. A copy of his works annotated by the hand of Malherbe survives; the comments, severe and just, remained unpublished, probably because the writer was unwilling to pursue an adversary whom death had removed from his way. Jean Bertaut, his disciple, is a lesser Desportes. Satire was developed by Jean Vauquelin de la Fresnaye, and to him we owe an Art Poétique (1575) which adapts to his own time the teaching of Aristotle and Horace. More interesting than these is JEAN PASSERAT (1534-1602), whose spirit is that of old France in its mirth and mockery, and whose more serious verse has the patriotism of French citizenship; his field was small, but he tilled his field gaily and courageously. The villanelle J'ai perdu ma tourterelle and the ode on May-day show Passerat's art in its happiest moments.

      The way for a reform in dramatic poetry had been in some degree prepared by plays of the sixteenth century, written in Latin—the work of Buchanan, Muret, and others—by translations from Terence, Sophocles, Euripides, translations from Italian comedy, and renderings of one Spanish model, the highly-popular Celestina of Fernando de Rojas. The Latin plays were acted in schools. The first performance of a play in French belonging to the new tendency was that of Ronsard's translation of the Plutus of Aristophanes, in 1549, by his friends of the Collège de Coqueret. It was only by amateurs, and before a limited scholarly group of spectators, that the new classical tragedies could be presented. Gradually both tragedy and comedy came to be written solely with a view to publication in print. The mediæval drama still held the stage.

      JODELLE'S Cléopâtre (1552), performed with enthusiasm by amateurs, was therefore a false start; it was essentially literary, and not theatrical. Greek models were crudely imitated, with a lack of almost everything that gave life and charm to the Greek drama. Seneca was more accessible than Sophocles, and his faults were easy to imitate—his moralisings, his declamatory passages, his excess of emphasis. The so-called Aristotelian dramatic canons, formulated by Scaliger in his Poetic, were rigorously applied. Unity of place is preserved in Cléopâtre; the time of the action is reduced to twelve hours; there are interminable monologues, choral moralities, a ghost (in Seneca's manner), a narration of the heroine's death; of action there is none, the stage stands still. If Jodelle's Didon has some literary merit, it has little dramatic vitality. The oratorical energy of Grévin's Jules César, the studies of history in La Mort de Daire and La Mort d'Alexandre, by Jacques de La Taille, do not compensate their deficiency in the qualities required by the theatre. One tragedy alone, La Sultane, by Gabriel Bounin (1561), amid its violences and extravagances, shows a feeling for dramatic action and scenic effect.

      Could the mediæval mystery and classical tragedy be reconciled? The Protestant Reformer Bèze, in his Sacrifice d'Abraham, attempted something of the kind; his sacred drama is a mystery by its subject, a tragedy in the conduct of the action. Three tragedies on the life of David—one of them admirable in its rendering of the love of Michol, daughter of Saul—were published in 1556 by Loys Des-Masures: the stage arrangements are those of the mediæval drama, but the unity of time is observed, and chorus and semi-chorus respond in alternate strains. No junction of dramatic systems essentially opposed proved in the end possible. When Jean de La Taille wrote on a biblical subject in his Saül le Furieux, a play remarkable for its impressive conception and development of the character of Saul, he composed it selon l'art, and in the manner of "the old tragic authors." He is uncompromising in his classical method; the mediæval drama seemed inartificial to him in the large concessions granted by the spectators to the authors and actors; he would have what passes on the stage approximate, at least, to reality; the unities were accepted not merely on the supposed authority of Aristotle, but because they were an aid in attaining verisimilitude.