verse was in the centuries prior to the 15th the favourite medium
for literary composition, it was by no means the only one; and
moral and educational treatises—some referred to above—already
existed in pedestrian phrase. Certain household books (Livres de
raison) have been preserved, some of which date as far back
as the 13th century. These contain not merely accounts, but
family chronicles, receipts and the like. Accounts of travel,
especially to the Holy Land, culminated in the famous Voyage
of Mandeville which, though it has never been of so much importance
in French as in English, perhaps first took vernacular
form in the French tongue. Of the 14th century, we have a
Menagier de Paris, intended for the instruction of a young wife,
and a large number of miscellaneous treatises of art, science
and morality, while private letters, mostly as yet unpublished,
exist in considerable numbers, and are generally of the moralizing
character; books of devotion, too, are naturally frequent.
But the most important divisions of medieval energy in prose composition are the spoken exercises of the pulpit and the bar. The beginnings of French sermons have been much discussed, especially the question whether St Bernard, whose discourses we possess in ancient, but doubtfully Early sermon-writers. contemporary French, pronounced them in that language or in Latin. Towards the end of the 12th century, however, the sermons of Maurice de Sully (1160–1196) present the first undoubted examples of homiletics in the vernacular, and they are followed by many others—so many indeed that the 13th century alone counts 261 sermon-writers, besides a large body of anonymous work. These sermons were, as might indeed be expected, chiefly cast in a somewhat scholastic form—theme, exordium, development, example and peroration following in regular order. The 14th-century sermons, on the other hand, have as yet been little investigated. It must, however, be remembered that this age was the most famous of all for its scholastic illustrations, and for the early vigour of the Dominican and Franciscan orders. With the end of the century and the beginning of the 15th, the importance of the pulpit begins to revive. The early years of the new age have Gerson for their representative, while the end of the century sees the still more famous names of Michel Menot (1450–1518), Olivier Maillard (c. 1430–1502), and Jean Rauhn (1443–1514), all remarkable for the practice of a vigorous and homely style of oratory, recoiling before no aid of what we should nowadays style buffoonery, and manifesting a creditable indifference to the indignation of principalities and powers. Louis XI. is said to have threatened to throw Maillard into the Seine, and many instances of the boldness of these preachers and the rough vigour of their oratory have been preserved. Froissart had been followed as a chronicler by Enguerrand de Monstrelet (c. 1390–1453) and by the historiographers of the Burgundian court, Chastelain, already mentioned, whose interesting Chronique de Jacques de Lalaing is much the most attractive part of his work, and Olivier de la Marche. The memoir and chronicle writers, who were to be of so much importance in French literature, also begin to be numerous at this period. Juvenal des Ursins (1388–1473), an anonymous bourgeois de Paris (two such indeed), and the author of the Chronique scandaleuse, may be mentioned as presenting the character of minute observation and record which has distinguished the class ever since. Jean le maire de (not des) Belges (1473–c. 1525) was historiographer to Louis XII. and wrote Illustrations des Gaules. But Comines (1445–1509) is no imitator of Froissart Comines. or of any one else. The last of the quartette of great French medieval historians, he does not yield to any of his three predecessors in originality or merit, but he is very different from them. He fully represents the mania of the time for statecraft, and his book has long ranked with that of Machiavelli as a manual of the art, though he has not the absolutely non-moral character of the Italian. His memoirs, considered merely as literature, show a style well suited to their purport,—not, indeed, brilliant or picturesque, but clear, terse and thoroughly well suited to the expression of the acuteness, observation and common sense of their author.
But prose was not content with the domain of serious literature.
It had already long possessed a respectable position as a vehicle
of romance, and the end of the 14th and the beginning of the
15th centuries were pre-eminently the time when
the epics of chivalry were re-edited and extended in The Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles.
prose. Few, however, of these extensions offer much
literary interest. On the other hand, the best prose of
the century, and almost the earliest which deserves the title of
a satisfactory literary medium, was employed for the telling
of romances in miniature. The Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles is
undoubtedly the first work of prose belles-lettres in French,
and the first, moreover, of a long and most remarkable class
of literary work in which French writers may challenge all
comers with the certainty of victory—the short prose tale
of a comic character. This remarkable work has usually been
attributed, like the somewhat similar but later Heptaméron,
to a knot of literary courtiers gathered round a royal personage,
in this case the dauphin Louis, afterwards Louis XI. Some
evidence has recently been produced which seems to show that
this tradition, which attributed some of the tales to Louis
himself, is erroneous, but the question is still undecided. The
subjects of the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles are by no means new.
They are simply the old themes of the fabliaux treated in the
old way. The novelty is in the application of prose to such a
purpose, and in the crispness, the fluency and the elegance of
the prose used. The fortunate author or editor to whom these
admirable tales have of late been attributed is Antoine de la Antoine de
la Salle.
Salle (1398–1461), who, if this attribution and certain
others be correct, must be allowed to be one of the
most original and fertile authors of early French literature.
La Salle’s one acknowledged work is the story
of Petit Jehan de Saintré, a short romance exhibiting great command
of character and abundance of delicate draughtsmanship.
To this not only the authorship, part-authorship or editorship
of the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles has been added; but the still
more famous and important work of L’Avocat Patelin has been
assigned by respectable, though of course conjecturing, authority
to the same paternity. The generosity of critics towards La
Salle has not even stopped here. A fourth masterpiece of the
period, Les Quinze Joies de mariage, has also been assigned
to him. This last work, like the other three, is satirical in subject,
and shows for the time a wonderful mastery of the language.
Of the fifteen joys of marriage, or, in other words, the fifteen
miseries of husbands, each has a chapter assigned to it, and each
is treated with the peculiar mixture of gravity and ridicule which
it requires. All who have read the book confess its infinite wit
and the grace of its style. It is true that it has been reproached
with cruelty and with a lack of the moral sentiment. But
humanity and morality were not the strong point of the 15th
century. There is, it must be admitted, about most of its
productions a lack of poetry and a lack of imagination, produced,
it may be, partly by political and other conditions outside literature,
but very observable in it. The old forms of literature Influence of the Renaissance.
itself had lost their interest, and new ones possessing
strength to last and power to develop themselves
had not yet appeared. It was impossible, even if the
taste for it had survived, to spin out the old themes
any longer. But the new forces required some time to set to
work, and to avail themselves of the tremendous weapon which
the press had put into their hands. When these things had
adjusted themselves, literature of a varied and vigorous kind
became once more possible and indeed necessary, nor did it
take long to make its appearance.
16th Century.—In no country was the literary result of the Renaissance more striking and more manifold than in France. The double effect of the study of antiquity and the religious movement produced an outburst of literary developments of the most diverse kinds, which even the fierce and sanguinary civil dissensions of the Reformation did not succeed in checking. While the Renaissance in Italy had mainly exhausted its effects by the middle of the 16th century, while in Germany those effects only paved the way for a national literature, and did not themselves greatly contribute thereto, while in England it was not
