Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 9.djvu/685

FIFTEENTH CENTURY.] FRANCE 049 or merit, but he is very different from them. He fully re presents the mania of the time for statecraft, and his book has long ranked with that of Macchiavelli as a manual of the art. He is a painter of character rather than of scenes or events he has very few prejudices or predilections; he gives us an early example of those Renaissance statesmen who looked at politics chiefly as a game in which means are connected with ends, without much, if any, reference to the goodness or badness of the one or the other. But he has not the absolutely non-moral character of the Italian, and he is sincerely religious in his way. His memoirs, con sidered 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 posi tion 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 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 literary prose in French, and the first, moreover, of a long and most remarkable series of literary works, in which French writers may challenge all comers with the certainty of victory. The short prose tale of a comic character is the one French literary product the pre-eminence and perfection of which it is impossible to dispute, and the prose tale first appears to advantage in the 1 JGent Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles. This remarkable work has usually been attributed, like the somewhat similar but later Heptameron, 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 to whom these admirable tales iue have of late been attributed is Antoine do la 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 acknow ledged work is the story of Petit Jehaii de Saintre, a short romance exhibiting great command of "naracter and abundance of delicate draughtsmanship. To this it is now proposed to add the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles ; and the still more famous and important work of L Avocat Pateliti has been assigned by respectable 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 du 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 bo admitted, about most of its productions a lack of poetry and a lack of imagination. The hideous disorders of the Hundred Years War had exasperated men s minds, and had at the same time accustomed them to suffer, to witness, and in too many cases to perpetrate outrage and injustice of all kinds. The glaring disregard of anything but their own private interest which actuated almost all those of the higher orders, from the great crown vassals and princes of the blood to the leaders of free companions and the owners of petty fortresses, disgusted the people. The great schism of the West, and the scandals which accom panied it, shook their confidence, not merely in individual ecclesiastics, but in the whule theory and government of the church. The old forms of literature had lost their interest, and new ones possessing strength to last and power to develop themselves had not yet appeared. It was im possible, even if the taste for it had survived, to spin out any longer the old themes. The new learning was slowly soaking in ; the discoveries of the navigators of the Iberian peninsula were opening up entirely new regions for specula tion and inquiry; and, above all, the decay of scholasticism was dismissing the most active minds of the time from the eld mill-horse round, and setting them free to speculate, at once with all the ardour of reaction and with the vigour, the acuteness, and the trained logical skill which scholasti cism itself had given them. But all these new forces re quired some time to set to work, and to avail themselves of the tremendous weapon which the press had put into their hands. Even from a strictly material point of view, the horrible devastation occasioned by the English wars required a long time of reparation and recovery. The time actually accorded was not very long, and much of it might have been far better spent than under the influence of such a monarch as Louis XL This period of brief and disturbed repose was, moreover, followed by the Italian wars, in which the French meted to another and weaker nation much the same measure as the English had meted to them. But these wars, little justifiable in themselves, completed the good effect which the equally unjustifiable violence and treachery of Louis XL had begun. They consolidated the nation, they gave it a common hope, object, and spirit; they opened the way to deeds of daring in which it took pride, in place of the indiscriminate, brutal, and irrational savagery which had begun with the Jacquerie, and hardly ended with the quarrels of the Burgundians and Armagnacs. Not only did the lower orders gain in wealth, position, intelligence, and culture, by the disasters of their superiors, but there arose a new chivalry, not indeed more moral than the old, but more polished, more learned, and more disposed to produce and enjoy literature. Under all these circum stances, literature of a varied and vigorous kind became once more possible and indeed necessary, nor did it take long to make its appearance. th 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 cf antiquity and the religious movement produced an outburst of literary developments of the most diverse kinds, which even the fierce and sanguinary civil dissensions to which the Refor mation gave rise did not succeed in checking. While the Renaissance in Italy had mainly exhausted its effects by the beginning of the 16ih century, while m Germany those effects only paved the way for a national literature, and did not themselves greatly contribute thereto, while in England it was not till the extreme end of the period that a great literature was forthcoming, in France almost the whole century was marked by the production of capital works in every branch of literary effort. Not even the 17th century, and certainly no other till our own day, can show such a group of prose writers and poets as is formed by Calvin, St Francis de Sales, Montaigne, Du Vair, Bodin, D Aubigne, the authors of the Satire Menippee, Monluc, Branlome, IX. 82 influence of the