French Lyrics | Page 4

of the new aspect in which
the world appeared. The Renaissance transformed indeed the whole of
French literature, but the first branch to blossom at its breath was the
lyric. Of the famous seven, RONSARD, DU BELLAY, BAÏF,
BELLEAU, PONTUS DE THYARD, JODELLE, and DAURAT,
self-styled the _Pléiade_, who were the champions of classical letters,
all except JODELLE were principally lyric poets, and RONSARD and
DU BELLAY have a real claim to greatness. This new lyric strove
consciously to be different from the older one. Instead of ballades_ and
_rondeaux, it produced odes, elegies, sonnets, and satires. It
condemned the common language and familiar style of VILLON and
MAROT as vulgar, and sought nobility, elevation, and distinction. To
this end it renewed its vocabulary by wholesale borrowing and
adaptation from the Latin, much enriching the language, though giving
color to the charge of Boileau that RONSARD'S muse "_en français
parlait grec et latin_".
Of this constellation of poets RONSARD was the bright particular star.
The others hailed him as master, and he enjoyed for the time an almost
unexampled fame. To him were addressed the well known lines
attributed to Charles IX.:
Tous deux également nous portons des couronnes:
Mais, roi, je la
reçus: poète, tu la donnes.
His example must be reckoned high for his younger contemporaries
beside the ancient writers to whom he pointed them.
But his authority was of short duration. RÉGNIER and D'AUBIGNÉ,
who lived into the seventeenth century, could still be counted of his
school. But they had already fallen upon times which began to be
dissatisfied with the work of RONSARD and his disciples, to find their

language crude and undigested, their grammar disordered, their
expression too exuberant, lacking in dignity, sobriety, and
reasonableness. There was a growing disposition to exalt the claims of
regularity, order, and a recognized standard. A strict censorship was
exercised over an author's vocabulary, grammar, and versification.
Individual freedom was brought under the curb of rule. The man who
voiced especially this growing temper of the times was MALHERBE
(1555-1628). No doubt his service was great to French letters as a
whole, since the movement that he stood for prepared those qualities
which give French literature of the classic period its distinction. But
these qualities are those of a highly objective and impersonal
expression, seeking perfection in conformity to the general consensus
of reasonable and intelligent minds, not of an intensely subjective
expression, concerned in the first place with being true to the
promptings of an individual temperament; and lyric expression is
essentially of the latter kind. MALHERBE, therefore, in repressing the
liberty of the individual temperament, sealed the springs of lyric poetry,
which the Renaissance had opened, and they were not again set running
till a new emancipation of the individual had come with the Revolution.
Between MALHERBE and CHATEAUBRIAND, that is for almost
two hundred years, poetry that breathes the true lyric spirit is
practically absent from French literature. There were indeed the
chansonniers, who produced a good deal of bacchanalian verse, but
they hardly ever struck a serious note. Almost the most genuinely lyric
productions of this long period are those which proceed more or less
directly from a reading of Hebrew poetry, like the numerous
paraphrases of the Psalms or the choruses of RACINE'S biblical plays.
The typical lyric product of the time was the ode, trite, pompous, and
frigid. Even ANDRÉ CHÉNIER, who came on the eve of the
Revolution and freed himself largely from the narrow restraint of the
literary tradition by imbibing directly the spirit of the Greek poets,
hardly yielded to a real lyric impulse till he felt the shadow of the
guillotine. It is significant of the difficulty that the whole poetical
theory put in the way of the lyric that perhaps the most intensely lyrical
temperament of these two hundred years, JEAN JACQUES
ROUSSEAU, did not write in verse at all.

That which again unsealed the lyric fountains was Romanticism.
Whatever else this much discussed but ill defined word

involves--sympathy with the middle ages, new perception of the world
of nature, interest in the foreign and the unusual--it certainly suggests a
radically new estimate of the importance and of the authority of the
individual. It was to the profit of the individual that the old social and
political forms had been broken up and melted in the Revolution. It
could seem for a moment as if, with the proclamation of the freedom
and independence of the individual, all the barriers were down that
hemmed in his free motion, as if there were no limits to his
self-assertion. His separate personal life got a new amplitude, its
possibilities expanded infinitely, and its interest was vastly increased.
The whole new world of ideas and impulses urged the individual to
pursue and to express his own