THE CLASSICAL MOVEMENT MALHERBE AND ORDER CHE literature of the Classical Age is distinguished by the three qualities of Order, Sincerity, and Taste. They did not appear all at once or all together, but grew gradually, in correspondence with the mental and social development of the nation. The first to manifest itself was Order. The reign of Henry IV put an end to general chaos. By the time of his death in 1610 there was peace within and without. The news of his murder was received with lamentation because of "the care which this prince had taken to make his people dwell at peace." The calm which Henry and Sully achieved in the state was reflected in the literature of the time. "La littérature, comme la France, se repose," says Lanson. And the herald of this peace was François Malherbe. By character and training he was fitted for his function. A hard-headed, positive-minded Norman, the friend and disciple of the great stoic Du Vair, he had long passed the age of imaginative ferment when he set himself to prune away the exuberances of the Pleiad. He was 50 years old when he came to Paris in 1605. He had written little, but he knew how to write, and he at once took the field as poet and critic. In the year of his arrival he began a not unworthy series of court poems and came into conflict with the last representative of the school of Ronsard, Philippe Desportes. He began with personal insult: "Your soup is better than your psalms," and he went on to acrimonious criticism. Taking a volume of Desportes's poems he filled its margins with remarks of which the facsimiles on pp. 4-6 are specimens, in the style of an irritable dominie. Ronsard fared no better at his hands. He ran his pen through half the lines and then, for fear lest posterity should think that he approved of what was left, he struck out all. His marginal notes and comments form his only body of doctrine, for he issued no manifesto. But they are borne out by the gossip of his pupil Racan, from which we cull some flowers. Order and clearness, simplicity, economy of phrase and propriety of expression-these are his watchwords and the sole tests which he applies to works of the imagination. A poem, said Malherbe, must be written in current language; indeed, it differs from prose solely in the music (nombre) of its periods. There must be no archaisms, no neologisms, no technical or dialectical words, above all no "padding" (bourres, chevilles), in respect of all of which the school of the Pleiad had greatly offended. Nor were Malherbe's strictures confined to language; he was equally severe in the matter of form. He deliberately refused the rich heritage with which the Pleiad had endowed French poetry, and he retained only a very few of the many new metres invented by Ronsard. He laid down rules against enjambement, false rhymes, and wrong caesura, to which 60 years later Boileau readily subscribed, and he himself practised what he taught. His performance, though lacking in the highest qualities of poetry, is by no means despicable, and his contemporaries acknowledged his worth. But it is as a critic and reformer that he lives to-day; he was the first man in France to summon poetry to the bar of Reason and Order, and thus he may be claimed as the forerunner of the classics. By the side of Malherbe and probably influenced by him, although certainly drawing many of his ideas from a work published half a century before1, stands Pierre de Deimier, whose Académie poétique appeared in 1610. His affinity to Malherbe will be seen at a glance. They join their voices to proclaim the need in poetry of clearness, of pure French, of care, of self-control and self-criticism, all of which had been neglected by members of the Pleiad, with the sole exception of Ronsard, and even he corrected his work at a long distance from the original draft. 1 The direct effect of the Art poétique of Jacques Peletier (Lyons, 1555) was probably as slight in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as it is to-day, for it is written in a phonetic style of his own, singularly repellent to the general reader. What Malherbe and Deimier did for French poetry, Guez de Balzac (1594-1654) tried to do for prose. He declared that men must write so as to be understood; to be understood they must be clear, and to be clear they must watch their vocabulary. Unfortunately, he also hankered after ornament, and so he prescribed and practised that pedestrian harmony upon which Malherbe had poured contempt. But although Balzac often wastes his graces of style upon mere commonplaces, he is always admirably clear, nor are his themes invariably trivial. He sometimes strikes a fine patriotic note1 which has its echo in the utterance of many of Corneille's heroes. In the matter of pure French, by which they merely meant the language of the day, the reformers were ably assisted by the grammarian Vaugelas (1585-1650), whose Remarques sur la langue française (1647) recorded the current usage of the court and of polite society. He was under no illusion as to the character of usage. He knew how transient it is apt to be and he gave his rules of speech no more than thirty years of life, but he claimed that his principles were permanent. MALHERBE FRANÇOIS DE MALHERBE (1555–1628) preached and practised selfcriticism and careful workmanship, and in so doing rendered a signal service to the poetry and language of his country. Unfortunately he allowed his temper to get the better of his judgment, and his tongue to run away with him. We must not take too seriously some of his extravagant statements-"poetry a mere pastime; the Port au Foin the true school of diction," etc. But he blinded himself to the real value of the Pleiad, and the effect of his attack upon Ronsard was far-reaching and profound. Not only does Boileau mention Ronsard only to dismiss him in half-a-dozen contemptuous lines of the Art poétique, but Boileau's friend Arnauld, in a letter which Boileau printed with his own Œuvres diverses in 1701, says: “Ç'a été un déshonneur à la France d'avoir fait tant d'estime des pitoyables poëmes de Ronsard." Nor is it until the Romantic revival of the nineteenth century that the lyrical note stifled by Malherbe is heard again, except in spasmodic utterances. 1 Cf. Le Prince, chs. 1, XXI, XXIX. The following are facsimiles of three pages of Malherbe's copy of Desportes's Les premieres œuvres. Paris, 1600. 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