Antoine de Malherbe

“ The processes of Malherbe's art were essentially oratorical; the lyrical cry is seldom audible in his verse; it is the poetry of eloquence thrown into studied stanzas. But the greater poetry of the seventeenth century in France, its odes, its satires, its epistles, its noble dramatic scenes, and much of its prose literature, are of the nature of oratory; and for the progress of such poetry, and even of such prose, Malherbe prepared a highway. ”

“ I am even prepared to admit that Du Bellay himself would probably not have thanked me for the compliment of my theory. But hatred is often more sagacious than friendship. Malherbe and those about Malherbe knew perfectly well what the real spirit of the Pléiade was. And so does M. Brunetière, who has a scent as keen as that of Malherbe and those about Malherbe, and is very much better read, very much more scientifically equipped, 116and quite infinitely better provided with intellectual and critical gift. ”

“ Les chats aux rats feront la guerre.
MALHERBE.
The French Renaissance ended in the Classic. The fate of all that exuberance was to find order, and that chaos of generation settled down to the obedience of unchanging laws. This transition, which fixed, perhaps for ever, the nature of the French tongue, is bound up with the name of Malherbe.
When what the French have entitled "the great time," when the generation of Louis XIV looked back to find an origin for its majestic security in letters, it was in Malherbe that such an origin was discovered ”

“ It was perhaps a little dangerous for Malherbe to be so prodigal of the words “pedantry” and “stupidity” as he is; while time and use have sometimes made his peremptory judgments look rather foolish. For instance, Desportes had used poumons in the plural, as we have practically always used “lungs” in English. “On ne dit,” says our usher, with an almost audible bang of the ferule on the desk,—“On ne dit point qu’un homme ait des poumons: et ne m’allègue pas qu’il y a plusieurs lobes au poumon, car tu serais un sot.” ”

“ There are a great number of these; and some very much older than others.
A curious old house is to the right hand corner of the street St. Jean: as you go to the Post Office. But I must inform you that the residence of the famous MALHERBE yet exists in the street leading to the Abbey of St. Stephen. This house is of the middle of the sixteenth century: and what Corneille is to Rouen, Malherbe is to Caen. "ICI NAQUIT MALHERBE," &c. as you will perceive from the annexed view of this house, inscribed upon the front of the building. Malherbe has been doomed to receive greater honours. ”

“ Of modern works devoted to him, La Doctrine de Malherbe, by G. Brunot (1891) , is not only the most important but a work altogether capital in regard to the study of French language and literature. Others are A. Gasté, La Jeunesse de Malherbe (1890) ; V. Bourrienne, Points obscurs dans la vie normande de Malherbe (1895) ; and the duc de Broglie’s “Malherbe” in Les Grands écrivains français. On his position in French and general critical history, G. Saintsbury’s History of Criticism, vol. ”

“ This young man, who was the pride of the poet's life, was killed in a duel, or, as the father vociferously insisted, murdered by a treacherous ruffian. Malherbe made the courts ring with his appeals, but he also composed a sonnet, which is a typical example of his work. It is not what we should call "poetical," but in clearness, in force, in full capacity to express exactly what the author had in mind to say, it is perfect. We seem to hear the very cry of the fierce old man shrieking for revenge on the slayer of his son. ”

“ Nor even of this carefully produced, and still more carefully weeded, result is there much that can be read with pleasure by a modern student of poetry. The verse by which Malherbe is best known,
Et, rose, elle a vécu ce que vivent les roses,
is worth all the rest of his work, and it can hardly be said to be more than a very graceful and touching conceit. ”

“ Bouterwek has criticised Malherbe with some justice, but with greater severity. [472] He deems him no poet, which in a certain sense is surely true. But we narrow our definition of poetry too much, when we exclude from it the versification of good sense and select diction. This may probably be ascribed to Malherbe; though Bouhours, an acute and somewhat rigid critic, has pointed out some passages which he deems nonsensical. Another writer of the same age, Rapin, whose own taste was not very glowing, observes that there is much prose in Malherbe ”

“ Ronsard had censured the exclusive use of courtly speech in poetry, on the ground that the courtier cares more about fighting well than about speaking or writing well. But Malherbe's ideal was the ideal of French classicism—the ideal of Boileau, Racine, and Bossuet. French was to be no longer a hodgepodge or a patois, but the pure and perfect speech of the king and his court. Malherbe, while thus reacting against the Pléiade, made no pretensions of returning to the linguistic usages of Marot; his test was present usage, his model the living language. ”

“ MALHERBE, FRANÇOIS DE (1555–1628) , French poet, critic and translator, was born at Caen in 1555. His family was of some position, though it seems not to have been able to establish to the satisfaction of heralds the claims which it made to nobility older than the 16th century. The poet was the eldest son of another François de Malherbe, conseiller du roi in the magistracy of Caen. He himself was elaborately educated at Caen, at Paris, at Heidelberg and at Basel. ”

“ Dacier, a poetical pedant after all, was asked who was the greater poet, Homer or Virgil? he honestly answered, "Homer by a thousand years!"
But it is mortifying to find among the anti-poetical even poets themselves! Malherbe, the first poet in France in his day, appears little to have esteemed the art. He used to say that "a good poet was not more useful to the state than a skilful player of nine-pins!" Malherbe wrote with costive labour. When a poem was shown to him which had been highly commended, he sarcastically asked if it would "lower the price of bread?" ”

“ His merits as a poet were made known to Henri IV. by Cardinal du Périer, on the death of whose daughter Malherbe had written the most beautiful, in its dignified pathos, of all his poems; and from 1605 to his death he was laureate—and no poet was ever more essentially and entirely a laureate poet—to Henri, to Marie de Médicis, to Richelieu, and to Louis XIII.
Malherbe's earliest work was probably Ronsardist in character, but he soon discovered, like Pope, that his way to fame lay through "correctness," and no poet ever became a more thorough-going disciple and prophet of thatPurity. ”

“ Of imagination and poetic sensibility he takes no account whatsoever. After the verbal perfection of the verse, the logical unity of the poem was his chief interest. Logic and reason are without doubt important things, but they cannot exist in poetry to the exclusion of imagination. By eliminating inspiration, as it were, Malherbe excluded the possibility of lyrical production in France throughout the period of classicism. He hated poetic fictions, since for him, as for Boileau, only actual reality is beautiful. ”

“ These were the Cardinal Du Perron, Bertaut, and Vauquelin de la Fresnaye. They formed the van of the poetical army of the moment, and it is a very curious thing that these three remarkable writers, each of whom remained faithful to the tradition of Ronsard, should have welcomed with open arms the rebel who was to cover Ronsard with ridicule. With a divine simplicity, they opened the wicket and let the wolf in among the sheep. They urged the King to invite Malherbe to Court, and, when His Majesty delayed, Malherbe very characteristically did not wait for a summons. ”

“ Cardinal du Perron, Malherbe's introducer at court, was himself a poet of merit, but rather in the Pléiade style. His Temple de l'Inconstance, though rougher in form, is more poetical in substance than anything, save a very few pieces, of Malherbe's. Chassignet displayed some of the same characteristics with a graver and more elegiac spirit. Gombaud is chiefly remarkable as a sonneteer. The two most famous of the actual pupils of Malherbe were Maynard and Racan. Maynard was a diplomatist and lawyer of rank, who was born at Toulouse in 1582, and died in 1646. ”

“ The lines of Boileau beginning Enfin Malherbe vint are rendered only partially applicable by the extraordinary ignorance of older French poetry which distinguished that peremptory critic. But the good as well as bad side of Malherbe’s theory and practice is excellently described by his contemporary and superior Regnier, who was animated against him, not merely by reason of his own devotion to Ronsard but because of Malherbe’s discourtesy towards Regnier’s uncle P. Desportes, whom the Norman poet had at first distinctly copied. ”

“ If France was ever to possess a literature containing something besides fabliaux and farces, the tongue must be enriched and strengthened. This accession of wealth and vigour it received from Ronsard and the Ronsardists. Doubtless they went too far and provoked to some extent the reaction which Malherbe led. Their importations were sometimes unnecessary. It is almost impossible to read the Franciade of Ronsard, and not too easy to read the tragedies of Jodelle and Garnier, fine as the latter are in parts. ”

“ 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 ”

“ The gravity of these speeches was enhanced by the warlike preparations which were in progress all over France for the execution of the “Great Enterprise”: the scheme of liberating [169] Europe from the domination of the House of Austria and giving France her rightful place in the world, which Henri IV. had cherished ever since his accession to the throne. It was, however, believed by many that these formidable preparations had no other object than the forcible recovery of the Princesse de Condé, and Malherbe wrote—
“Deux beaux yeux sont l’empire
Pour qui je soupire.” ”

“ He who had hitherto been distinguished from the nobles of his Court by the simplicity and even negligence of his attire, might now be seen dressing and adorning himself with as much care as the youngest and most dandified of his courtiers, and, on one occasion, he appeared at a tilting-match wearing “a scented ruff, a doublet with sleeves of Chinese satin, and the colours of the Princesse de Condé, who called him ‘her knight.’” [153] “The King is well and grows younger every day,” wrote Malherbe to his friend Peiresc. ”

“ Where duelling is a habitual and honourable exercise, men do not take the trouble to restrain primitive passions. Even in dealings with ladies of their own rank, French nobles often stepped over the line where rudeness {32} ends and insult begins. When Malherbe boxed the ears of a viscountess he did nothing which he was unwilling to talk about. Ladies not less than lords treated their servants like dirt, and justified such conduct by the statement that the base-born deserve no consideration. There was, indeed, no class—not even the clergy—which was exempt from assault by wrathful nobles. ”

“ Lyric poetry lighter than before. 17. The pompous tone of Ronsard and Du Bartas had become ridiculous in the reign of Louis XIV. Even that of Malherbe was too elevated for the public taste; none at least imitated that writer, though the critics had set the example of admiring him. Boileau, who had done much to turn away the world from imagination to plain sense, once attempted to emulate the grandiloquent strains of Pindar in an ode on the taking of Namur, but with no such success as could encourage himself or others to repeat the experiment. ”

“ Madame makes us write, under her dictation, lines from Malherbe, the French poet.
We have a pianoforte, and a German, who directs our orchestra, gives us lessons; he receives three hundred florins every year. Barbara plays quite well. After the music lesson, the hair dresser comes to arrange our hair; he always begins with the eldest. When he has unfortunately heard of some new fashion, we rarely escape without shedding some blood. ”

“ Condé and his wife remained at Valery until the first week in July, when they were compelled to return to Court, in order to attend the marriage of César de Vendôme, Henri IV.’s eldest son by Gabrielle d’Estrées, and Mlle. de Mercœur. The King’s passion became more violent than ever, and his conduct would have been ludicrous to the last degree had it been less culpable. Not only did he continue to commission Malherbe to bombard the princess with elegies and sonnets, but “one saw him alter in less than no time his hair, his beard, and his countenance.” ”

“ He was an ardent defender of the Ronsardising tradition, yet Malherbe, whom he did not hesitate to attack, thought and spoke highly of him. In the next age Boileau allotted to him a mixture of praise and blame which is not too apposite, but in which the praise far exceeds the blame, and elsewhere declared him to be the French writer, before Molière, who best knew human nature. The approval of Boileau secured that of the eighteenth century, while Regnier's defence of the Pléiade propitiated the first Romantics. ”