CHAPTER IV THE FORMATION OF THE CLASSIC IDEAL IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY I. The Romantic Revolt IT is a well-known fact that between 1600 and 1630 there was a break in the national evolution of French literature. This was especially so in the drama, and in France the drama is the connecting link between century and century. The dramatic works of the sixteenth century had been fashioned after the regular models borrowed by the Italians from Seneca. The change that came was a change from Italian classical to Spanish romantic models. The note of revolt was beginning to be heard in Grévin, De Laudun, and others. The seventeenth century opened with the production of Hardy's irregular drama, Les Amours de Théagène et Cariclée (1601), and the influence of the Spanish romantic drama and the Italian pastoral, dominant for over a quarter of a century, was inaugurated in France. The logic of this innovation was best expounded in Spain, and it was there that arguments in favor of the romantic and irregular drama were first formulated. The two most interesting defences of the Spanish national drama are doubtless the Egemplar Poético of Juan de la Cueva (1606) and Lope de Vega's Arte Nuevo de Hacer Comedias (1609). Their inspiration is at bottom the same. Their authors were both classicists at heart, or rather classicists in theory, yet with differences. Juan de la Cueva's conception of poetry is entirely based on the precepts of the Italians, except in what regards the national drama, for here he is a partisan and a patriot. He insists that the difference of time and circumstance frees the Spanish playwright from all necessity of imitating the ancients or obeying their rules. "This change in the drama," he says, "was effected by wise men, who applied to new conditions the new things they found most suitable and expedient; for we must consider the various opinions, the times, and the manners, which make it necessary for us to change and vary our operations."1 His theory of the drama was entirely opposed to his conception of the other forms of poetry. According to this standpoint, as a recent writer has put it, "the theatre was to imitate nature, and to please; poetry was to imitate the Italians, and satisfy the orthodox but minute critic." Lope de Vega, writing three years later, does not deny the universal applicability of the Aristotelian canons, and even acknowledges that they are the only true rules. But the people demand romantic plays, and the people, rather than the poet's literary conscience, must be satisfied by the playwright. "I myself," he says, 2 1 Sedano, Parnaso Español, viii. 61. "write comedies according to the art invented by those whose sole object it is to obtain the applause of the crowd. After all, since it is the public who pays for these stupidities, why should we not serve what it wants? "1 Perhaps the most interesting of all the expositions of the theory of the Spanish national drama is a defence of Lope de Vega's plays by one Alfonso Sanchez, published in 1618 in France, or possibly in Spain with a false French imprint. The apology of Sanchez is comprehended in six distinct propositions. First, the arts have their foundation in nature. Secondly, a wise and learned man may alter many things in the existing arts. Thirdly, nature does not obey laws, but gives them. Fourthly, Lope de Vega has done well in creating a new art. Fifthly, in his writings everything is adjusted to art, and that a real and living art. Lastly, Lope de Vega has surpassed all the ancient poets. The following passage may be extracted from this treatise, if only to show how little there was of novelty in the tenets of the French romanticists two centuries later: 2 "Is it said that we have no infallible art by which to adjust our precepts? But who can doubt it? We have art, we have precepts and rules which bind us, and the principal precept is to imitate nature, for the works of poets express the nature, the manners, and the genius of the age in which they write. . . . Lope de Vega writes in conformity with art, because he follows nature. If, on the contrary, the Spanish drama adjusted itself to the rules and laws of the 2 Ibid. iii. 447 sq. ... 1 Menéndez y Pelayo, iii. 434. ancients, it would proceed against the requirements of nature, and against the foundations of poetry. . . . The great Lope has done things over and above the laws of the ancients, but never against these laws." Another Spanish writer defines art as an attentive observation of examples graded by experience, and reduced to method and the majesty of laws."1 It was this naturalistic conception of the poetic art, and especially of the drama, that obtained in France during the first thirty years of the seventeenth century. The French playwrights imitated the Spanish drama in practice, and from the Spanish theorists seemed to have derived the critical justification of their plays. Hardy himself, like Lope de Vega, argues that "everything which is approved by usage and the public taste is legitimate and more than legitimate." Another writer of this time, François Ogier, in the preface of the second edition of Jean de Schelandre's remarkable drama of Tyr et Sidon (1628), argues for intellectual independence of the ancients much in the same way as Giraldi Cintio, Pigna, and the other partisans of the romanzi had done three-quarters of a century before. The taste of every nation, he says, is quite different from any other. "The Greeks wrote for the Greeks, and in the judgment of the best men of their time they succeeded. But we should imitate them very much better by giving heed to the tastes of our own country, and the genius of our own language, than by forcing ourselves to follow step by step both their intention and their expression." This would 1 Menéndez y Pelayo, iii. 464. seem to be at bottom Goethe's famous statement that we can best imitate the Greeks by trying to be as great men as they were. It is interesting to note, in all of these early critics, traces of that historical criticism which is usually regarded as the discovery of our own century. But after all, the French like the Spanish playwrights were merely beginning to practise what the Italian dramatists in their prefaces, and some of the Italian critics in their treatises, had been preaching for nearly a century. The Abbé d'Aubignac speaks of Hardy as "arresting the progress of the French theatre"; and whatever practical improvements the French theatre owes to him, there can be little doubt that for a certain number of years the evolution of the classical drama was partly arrested by his efforts and the efforts of his school. But during this very period the foundations of the great literature that was to come were being built on classical lines; and the continuance of the classical tradition after 1630 was due to three distinct causes, each of which will be discussed by itself as briefly as possible. These three causes were the reaction against the Pléiade, the second influx of the critical ideas of the Italian Renaissance, and the influence of the rationalistic philosophy of the period. II. The Reaction against the Pléiade The reaction against the Pléiade was effected, or at least begun, by Malherbe. Malherbe's power or |