The heroic and the elegant were the cult of the Hôtel, and of the society which it represented and reformed. The heroic spirit of the early century, its idealisation of freedom regarded not as licence. but as the power of the will to rise superior to passion and circumstances, is expressed most perfectly in Descartes' Traité des Passions and Corneille's great tragedies. It was in the pursuit of elegance that the influence of a now decadent Italy —of Guarini and Marino, as well as the Spanish Guevara made itself felt, and set the stamp of "préciosité" on conversation and literature. In France, as in England, as in Italy, as in Spain, poetry, lyric and dramatic, was infected by the passion for conceits- not the metaphysical scholastic conceits with which Donne lightened and darkened English poetry, but the Marinistic conceit, super-refined, super-elegant, super-absurd refinements of compliment and flattery. But what was a symptom of decadence in Italian poetry was in French literature-like euphuism at an earlier stage in English -a symptom of a higher concern about style. The preciousness which Molière finally laughed out of fashion had by that time done its work in helping to refine and elevate the language of conversation and literature. Many of the phrases, it has often been pointed out, which Somaise collected in his Dictionnaire des Précieuses (1660), are simply felicitous and elegant expressions which have become part and parcel of literary French. Among the poets most enamoured of conceit are Théophile. some in whom lingered the fancy, picturesqueness, and lyrical inspiration which Malherbe banished from French poetry. Théophile de Viau 1 (1591-1626), whose philosophic "libertinism" connects him with an older generation, has many conceits besides the famous dagger which blushed for its crime, and generally they are poetical as well as precious. "Si tu mouilles tes doigts d'ivoire comes from a poem, La Solitude, full of feeling and unequal, and his odes to great men are as vapid and wearisome as the majority of such pieces at the time. There is something of the same fancy and picturesqueness, mingled with tasteless conceits, in the earliest work-La Solitude and Le Con Saint-Amant. templateur of Saint-Amant 2 (1594-1661), famous for his debaucheries, who visited England in 1643 with the Comte d'Harcourt, and wrote in l'Albion: caprice héroï-comique, a not very flattering account of her people, and their troubles. SaintAmant's most characteristic work, however, is his detailed, realistic, Dutch-like pictures of convivial and tavern life, as the Cabarets, Le Poète crotté, Fromage, Gazette du Pont-Neuf, and his experiments 1 Euvres Complètes, ed. M. Alleaume, 2 vols., Paris, 1855-6. 2 Euvres Complètes, par M. Ch. L. Livet, Paris, 1855. (Bibl. Elz.) in mock - heroic suggested by Tassoni's poem. In this rather tedious kind the best work was done by Paul Scarron, whose Typhon and Virgile travesti are still known. cam The representative poet of elegant conceit and badinage, the cleverest writer of "vers de société," was Vincent Voiture1 (1598-1648). The Voiture. son of a wine-merchant in Amiens, who was also a money-lender, young Voiture, introduced to Paris society under the protection of the Comte d'Avaux and Cardinal de la Valette, became by his wit and literary facility the darling of the Hôtel. In the service of Gaston d'Orléans he saw paigning, and visited Spain and the Low Countries, and Richelieu sent him as far as Rome; but he remained always a child of Paris. He was not professedly a poet or a man of letters, but simply an "honnête homme," who wrote occasional verses and letters to his friends and patrons. In short, he employed talents that might have done greater work to make himself the most amusing member of the society in which he moved. To amuse and to pay compliments is the sole aim of his poems as of his letters. How coarse the badinage could be which the refined Hôtel enjoyed may be seen from the wickedly witty stanzas to a lady who had the misfortune to be overturned in a carriage. His complimentary verses are very high-flown, and abound in the conventional mythology which Théophile deprecated, but they are kept from being 1 Œuvres, nouvelle édition, par Amedée Roux, Paris, 1858. frigid by the vein of humour which pervades them. Voiture can mingle flattery and badinage with the most airy playfulness “Julie a l'esprit et les yeux Que l'astre du jour et midi, Elle a tout en perfection, Hors qu'elle a trop d'aversion, Pour les amants et les souris, It is in this airy spirit that he composed most of his rondeaux a form which had been too much neglected after Marot by the serious poets of the Pleiad. The famous Ma foi is a good example, and so is Un buveur d'eau; but in Dans la prison he strikes a more serious note, and in En bon Français he uses the form to attack Godeau with vivacity and point. Of his sonnets, the best known is the "Il faut finir mes jours en l'amour d'Uranie," over the respective merits of which and of the sonnet in octosyllables, Job, of Isaac Benserade (1612-1694), the graceful poet of the king's "ballets mythologiques," a lively discussion went on for some time in the circle of the Hôtel. His verse-epistles are easy, natural, and gay. The most philosophic and felicitous is that to the Prince of Condé "sur son retour d'Allemagne" on the vanity of posthumous fame. Préciosité' or Marinism found in the verse of Voiture its best escape from frigidity and tediousness in the confessedly humorous extravagance of social compliment and badinage: unredeemed by the salt of wit, it soon cloyed and disgusted. But the decay of the lyric spirit, of which "préciosité" and the measured eloquence of Malherbe were both alike symptoms, proved complete. Artificiality was expelled from French poetry not by the reawakening of a purer and deeper poetic inspiration, but by the growing respect for good sense, logic, and order, and the consequent development in the drama of a style lucid and rhetorical rather than picturesque and lyrical. Of this style the great perfecter and master in the first half of the century was Pierre Corneille, of whose dramatic work we shall speak at length in the next chapter. Corneille's non-dramatic verse consists of a complete paraphrase of the De Imitatione Christi, which he composed during the years that he had abandoned the stage, similar paraphrases of other hymns and religious poems, and some occasional verses. The sonorous eloquence of Corneille's poetry is not in harmony with the deep and quiet inwardness of the Imitation, and he gives too often merely a flamboyant paraphrase. But when the poet's imagination is moved, Corneille's verse, as in the drama, has an incomparable élan, an elevation of soul as well as style and rhythm, which raises it far above the level of Malherbe's "Parle, parle, Seigneur, ton serviteur écoute; Je dis ton serviteur, car enfin je le suis ; Je le suis, je veux l'être, et marcher dans ta route R |