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Nature and the Country in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century French Poetry
Nature and Its Expression in Renaissance French Poetry
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
The statement is often made that the Pléiade sang nature with exuberance and freshness. The feeling for nature, which virtually passed out of French literature when the poésie courtoise finally died with Charles d'Orléans, began to reappear early in the sixteenth century with Jean Le Maire de Belges. This re-ëmergence was at first very slow, and the new feeling did not attain its fullest development until the second half of the century. It is perhaps well to say at the outset that the words “a feeling for nature” applied to the poetry of the sixteenth century are not the equivalent of “a nature poetry,” and must not be taken to mean that the century of the Renaissance in France created a genuine poetry of nature. If we define this as consisting essentially in a sincere love and a spontaneous, as opposed to a conventional, treatment of nature; a concern with nature for its own sake instead of using it merely as an ornament in poetry with a primarily human interest; and a sympathetic interpenetration between the soul of man and the soul of things, we shall not find these conditions fulfilled in the French poetry of this period. In the first part of this paper I shall endeavor to trace the origins of the feeling for nature exhibited in sixteenth-century French poetry, to define its limits, and to explain why the Pléiade did not create a true nature poetry; in the second part I propose to show that the interest in nature was diverted in the last quarter of the century into another channel, to assume the form which may be called the solitude and desert motif, its predominant mode of expression in the next century, and to set forth the causes of this deviation.
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References
Note 1 in page 1005 This definition implies a distinction between nature poetry and descriptive poetry. Victor de Laprade, Le sentiment de la nature chez les modernes, 1868, p. 24, says: “La nature et les divers êtres qui la composent ont une vie propre, une signification propre, une valeur indépendante de l'homme comme l'expression de la vie et de la pensée de Dieu . . . . Oui, la vie et le sentiment sont partout dans l'univers, l'homme n'est pas la seule image de Dieu que renferme la création.” When this conception of nature became translated into poetry nature poetry was born. Victor Hugo, Les Voix intérieures, x, “A Albert Dürer,” offers a good illustration of this interpenetration between the soul of man and the soul of things:
Aux bois, ainsi que toi, je n'ai jamais erré,
Maître, sans qu'en mon coeur l'horreur ait pénétré,
Sans voir tressaillir l'herbe, et, par le vent bercées,
Pendre à tous les rameaux de confuses pensées,
Dieu seul, ce grand témoin des faits mystérieux,
Dieu seul le sait, souvent en de sauvages lieux,
J'ai senti, moi qu'échauffe une secrète flamme,
Comme moi palpiter et vivre avec une âme,
Et rire et se parler dans l'ombre à demi-voix,
Les chênes monstrueux qui remplissent les bois.
Note 2 in page 1007 Contrast with the lines from Renaud de Montauban the opening lines of Berte, which are in the conventional lyric style:
A l'issue d'avril, au tens douc et joli,
Que herbeletes pongnent et pré son reverdi,
Et arbrissel desirent que il fussent parflori,
Tout droit en cel termine que je vous ai di,
A Paris la cité estoie un vendredi . . . .
Note 3 in page 1007 See Gaston Paris, Mélanges de litt. franç. du moyen âge, 1912, pp. 553-554, 556, 597-601.
Note 4 in page 1007 We find a full description of this inevitable vergier or jardin in the Roman de la Rose, 1355 ff.:
Ou vergier ot arbres domesches,
Qui chargoient et coins et pesches,
Chastaignes, nois, pommes et poires,
Nefles, prunes blanches et noires,
Cerises fresches vermeilletes,
Carmes, alies et noisettes.
De haus loriers et de baus pins
Refu tous pueplés li jardins,
Et d'oliviers et de ciprés
Dont il n'a gaires ici prés;
Ormes i ot branchus et fos,
Codres droites, trembles et chesnes,
Erables, haus sapins et fresnes.
Note 5 in page 1008 Karl Bartsch, Rom. et pastourelles franç. des XIIe et XIIIe siècles, 1870, I, 9.
Note 6 in page 1008 Beside this description of dawn the fine passage from Partenopeus de Blois, 10, 576 ff., deserves a place:
Par matin, al aube esclarcie,
Li airs fu purs, l'aure serie:
L'aloete vole en cantant,
Son sa nature Deu louant;
Et fu moult grande la rousée
Sor les erbes verdes montée.
Li praiere crie en volant,
Ses pies contreval estendant;
Cant li quaille par ces blés
Bien samble tans renovelés:
Cascuns oiseaus, nes la crouiere,
Fait cant ou crie en se maniere;
Moult par en est li tans seris,
Par bruelles et par plaiseis . . . . . .
Note 7 in page 1009 Jules Brakelmann, Les plus anciens chansonniers français, 1870-1891, p. 123.
Note 8 in page 1010 Ibid., p. 128.
Note 9 in page 1010 Ibid., p. 166.
Note 10 in page 1012 J. A. Symonds (The Greek Poets, 3d ed. 1893, II, xxi) has excellent remarks in this connection.
Note 11 in page 1012 George S. Farnell, Greek Lyric Poetry, 1891, p. 126
Note 12 in page 1013 A few random examples, among the Greeks, are: Anacreon's Ode to Spring, the description in the Œdipus Coloneus of the grove of the Eumenides, the picture in the Odyssey of the woodland around Calypso's grotto (V, 63 ff.), of the gardens of Alcinoüs (VII, 110 ff.); in Theocritus, “who drew straight from nature,” we find flowers, springs, trees, meadows, babbling brooks, and on occasion he can indulge in description for its own sake, as in VII, 135-146, which is a description of a farm with its trees full of songsters, its springs, and its orchards with their fruit-laden trees, and XXII, 34-43, which describes a spring sheltered with trees and surrounded with fragrant flowers. Among the Latins, the Eclogues and the Georgics of Virgil frequently give snatches of the countryside “with its mossy fountains and grass softer than sleep,” the hue of wild flowers, the shade of the oak, and the gold of the ripening wheat; it was in some rustic spot, in some cool or shady nook, that Tibullus and Propertius placed the scenes of their elegies; the long poem of Ausonius, The Moselle, deserves to be placed in the category of descriptive poetry. Pliny the Younger had a keen sense of the beauties of nature. In his Letters he shows his delight in the hills with their crown of immemorial forests, with the meadows on their slopes brightened with flowers. He dearly loved the scenery of Como, on whose shores he had two villas. His description of the Clitumnus is said to be the best picture of romantic scenery in classical literature. See Letters V, 6; I, 3; IX, 7; VIII, 8; and Samuel Dill, Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius, 1919, pp. 174 ff.
Note 13 in page 1013 J. A. Symonds, op. cit., II, 258: “Humanity was always more present to their minds than to ours. Nothing evoked sympathy from a Greek unless it appeared before him in a human shape, or in connection with some human sentiment. The ancient poets do not describe inanimate nature as such, or attribute a vague spirituality to fields and clouds. That feeling for the beauty of the world which is embodied in such poems as Shelley's Ode to the West Wind gave birth in their imagination to legends, involving some dramatic interest and conflict of passions.”
Note 14 in page 1014 Ibid., II, 257, 258, 259.
Note 15 in page 1015 See also sonnet xxxiii; sonnets xxviii and xxxi show the classical manner.
Note 16 in page 1016 At pp. 43-44 of the Venice 1586 ed.
Note 17 in page 1016 Ibid., p. 255.
Note 18 in page 1017 Vestiges of the Old French poetry are obvious enough in Politian's La Giostra di Giulano de' Medici, for instance. In proof, the last line of I, xliv, which is a direct transposition from the medieval lyric, may be given:
E canta ogni augelletto in suo latino.
Giulano meets his nymph, I, xlvii, under the same circumstances and in the same décor as does the knight in the Old French lyric; in the allegory and personifications of I, lxx-lxxvii, and in the description of the kingdom and the palace of Venus the influence of the Roman de la Rose is evident.
Note 19 in page 1017 The best out of many excellent poems on nature by Charles d'Orléans is probably his rondeau Le Printemps:
Le temps a laissé son manteau
De vent, de froidure et de pluie,
Et s'est vêtu de broderie,
De soleil luisant, clair et beau.
Il n'y a bête ni oiseau
Qu'en son jargon ne chante ou crie
Le temps a laissé . . . . .
Rivière, fontaine et ruisseau
Portent en livrée jolie,
Gouttes d'argent d'orfèvrerie
Chacun s'habille de nouveau
Le temps . . . . .
Note 20 in page 1017 Joseph Vianey, in a review of Léon Séché's edition of the Oeuvres poétiques de Jacques Peletier du Mans (1904), with “Notice biographique,” etc. by Paul Laumonier, says: “M. Laumonier n'a peut-être pas dit assez nettement qu'elles [the odes of Jacques Peletier] marquent une date dans l'histoire de notre poésie: celle de l'apparition du sentiment de la nature” (Revue d'hist. Litt. de la France, XL (1904) 335). This statement seems to need revision.
Note 21 in page 1018 As in the dixains from his Chanson de Galatée, in which the first is in the romanesque style, the second in the classical, and the third is a mingling of the two but the details are not very happily chosen.
Note 22 in page 1020 See also his Dieu vous gard, messagers fidèles, Odes iv, xxiiii.
Note 23 in page 1021 In Theocritus I nature weeps over the death of Daphnis:
When Daphnis died the foxes wailed and the wolves they wailed full sore,
The lion from the greenwood wept when Daphnis was no more,
O many the lusty steers at his feet, and many the heifers slim,
Many the calves and many the kine that made their moan for him.
This is imitated in Virgil, Eclogue v, 27-28:
Daphni, tuum Poenos etiam ingemuisse leones
interitum montesque feri silvaeque loquuntur.
In the same eclogue (56-61) Virgil represents the joy of nature at the deification of Daphnis (i.e. Julius Caesar), and in Eclogue x nature weeping over the death of Gallus.
These quotations are illustrations of the pantheistic doctrine of the “sympathy” between all things in nature, which plays a rôle in the OF epic also. Nature could sympathize with man on more familiar occasions also. Taking nature into one's confidence, and calling upon it as a witness, is common in the classics. Cf. Propertius, I, xviii, 19-20:
vos eritis testes, siquos habet arbor amores,
fagus et Arcadio pinus arnica deo.
The indifference of nature to man is the rule in medieval poetry. Thibaut de Champagne expresses this indifference in these lines:
Feuille ne flors ne vaut riens an chantant
Fors par defaute sans plus de rimoier . . . .
However, exceptions are not hard to find. The earliest illustration is found in the Song of Roland, ll. 814-815: the army of Charlemagne is passing through the defiles which were to be the scene of the death of Roland and the twelve peers; the poet shudders at the thought of the tragedy soon to be enacted there and seeks to infuse his emotion into the gloomy gorge:
Halt sunt li pui e li val tenebrus,
Les roches bises, les destreiz merveillus.
Las! j'ay veu may joyeux et gay
Et si plaisant a tout gent
Que raconter au long ne scay
Le plaisir et esbatement
Qu'avoit en son commandement;
Car Amour en son abbaye,
Le tenoit chief de son convent
Ou temps qu'ay congneu en ma vie.
Thus we find in germ in the poésie courtoise the various conceptions of nature the romantic poets were to develop: consoling nature, hostile or indifferent nature.
Note 24 in page 1023 Belleau's Promethée makes an appeal to the stormy sea, an extremely uncommon note in poetry before the romantic period:
Fleuves, prés, monts et bois, et toy mer courroucée
De mon triste malheur fièrement hérissée:
Flots sur flots entassez, raboteux, pleins d'horreur,
C'est à vous que je parle, escoutez ma douleur.
Note 25 in page 1023 Traces of this sympathy of man with nature may be found in the poetry of the troubadours. Bernard de Ventadour says: “Quand je vois poindre l'herbe verte et la feuille, les fleurs éclore par les champs; quand le rossignol élève sa voix haute et claire et s'émeut à chanter, je suis heureux du rossignol et des fleurs, je suis heureux de moi-même et plus heureux de ma dame. Je suis de toute part enveloppé, pressé de joie; mais joie d'amour passe toutes les autres.” It is plain that Bernard recognized certain analogies between the joy of the flowers and birds in springtime and the joy in his heart, and wished here to express a spiritual oneness with rejuvenated nature.
Note 26 in page 1024 Le Sentiment de la nature en France de J.-J. Rousseau à Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, 1907, p. 255.
Note 27 in page 1025 In Old French désert meant simply, according to Godefroy, un lieu défriché This seems to be the meaning in Girart de Roussillon, 372, (Paul Meyer's translation): “Après avoir quitté le comte Arbert, Begon passa la nuit dans un désert sous le toit d'un saint hermite.” This meaning of an isolated spot in the country was preserved till the end of the sixteenth century. In Heptameron, Prologue, the spot where the personages daily met to relate their stories is called a désert. It is thus described: “Ce beau pré le long de la rivière du Gave, où les arbres sont si foeillez que le soleil ne sçaurait percer l'ombre ny eschauffer la fraîcheur.” However, the term in the Heptameron seems to be elastic enough to take in the monastery (Notre-Dame de Servance) in which Margaret and her companions are guests. In the seventeenth century two new meanings are added to the original meaning. A désert becomes synonymous with convent or monastery (Racan, Bergeries), thus linking back with the meaning implied in the Heptameron; it becomes synonymous also with a country estate. In his Letters, in the one to Lamotte-Aigron, Sept. 4, 1622, Balzac gives a description of his désert. He refers to it also as “cette agréable solitude.” In Cyrano de Bergerac, Letters, Cyrano describes, in letter 11, to a nobleman in Paris, who so many years before left it that he had forgotten how it looked, his solitude, that is his château with its domain. Since the words solitude and désert had now come to mean an habitation or estate, secular or religious, distant from the city, in the second half of the seventeenth century, when the urban and social ideal of life had replaced the rural, these words took on the added meaning of any place, urban or rural, where the graces and refinements of a cultured society were unknown. This is the meaning in Télémaque, XXII, where on his return to Salente Télémaque says: “D'où vient qu'on n'y remarque plus cette magnificence qui éclatait partout avant mon départ? Je ne vois plus ni or ni argent, ni pierres précieuses; les habits sont simples; les bâtiments qu'on fait sont moins vastes et moins ornés; les arts languissent; la ville est devenue une solitude.” The abbé Galiani, when an “exile” in Naples from the eighteenth century Paris salons, where he was a welcome visitor, referred to that city as a désert. The original and derived meanings of the two words were preserved throughout the eighteenth century and even down into the early part of the nineteenth.
Note 28 in page 1026 For instance compare with the secretis . . . . silvis of Tibullus “le secret des bois” in Claude Binet's Chant forestier.
Note 29 in page 1028 See A. Piaget, Romania 1898, pp. 61-65 for a critical edition of Philippe's and Pierre's poems.
Note 30 in page 1028 Eustache Deschamps' chanson: Le vrai bonheur est aux champs, (ed. SATF III, 1) is the most successful imitation of Philippe's and Pierre's poems.
Note 31 in page 1029 See Pietro Toldo, “Le Courtisan dans la littérature française et ses rapports avec l'oeuvre du Castiglione,” in Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Litteraturen, CIV, 75 ff. 313 ff. and CV, 60 ff.
Note 32 in page 1030 So far as I know this idea that the solitary life transforms man into a brute is expressed in French literature for the first time in Maurice Scève's Saulsaye, Eglogue de la vie solitaire (1547):
Et pour ce ceux, qui les villes habitent,
Ou les cités, certes ilz se habilitent
Modestement en marchés, jeux et festes,
Pour estre veuz différer loing des bestes.
Qui fait de soy aux bestes différence,
Aura honneur, et foy en révérence.
Note 33 in page 1031 I, iiii, 4 is entitled “De commendatione solitudinis: ”Quod et dum licuit semper feci et quamcupide nunc faciam vides, solitudo aequidem sancta, simplex, incorrupta vereque purissima rerum est omnium humanarum: cui etenim sese ostentet in sylvis, cui si comat inter vepres? quem praeter pisces hamo, quem praeter feras ac volucres visco fallat aut laqueo? quem cantu, quem gestu mulceat, quem coloribus delectet? cui purpuram explicet, cui oleum vindicet, cui verborum florida ferta contexat? cui demum sese approbet, cui placere studeat, praeter illum cui in intimas solitudines penetranti, solitarium nihil est? neminem illa vult fallere nihil simulat aut dissimulat, nihil ornat, nihil palliat, nihil fingit.“
Note 34 in page 1032 See also Vauquelin de la Fresnaye's sonnet, Ici seul je me plains, ô Fresnayeau-Sauvage, and Ronsard's elegy, Six ans étaient écoulés, et la septième année.
Note 35 in page 1033 See also Belleau's L'ombre; Jacques Bereau's sonnet, Poètes divins et saints, vous suivez la grandeur; Etienne de la Boétie's Ce jourd'hui, du soleil la chaleur attirée; Jean Antoine de Baif's, Déjà l'aurore deux fois et trois fois la lumiére.
Note 36 in page 1034 Robert Garnier's Elégie à Desportes (1585) has an energetic recital of the horrors of civil war:
Les meurtres inhumains se font entre les frères,
Spectacle plein d'horreur!
Et déjà les enfants courent contre leurs pères
D'une avengle fureur;
Le coeur des citoyens se remplit de furies;
Les paysans écartés
Meurent contre une haie; on ne voit que tûries
Par les champs désertés.
Note 37 in page 1035 The copy in the Bibliothèque Nationale is entitled: Les Plaisirs du gentilhomme champêtre. Rapin. In the catalogue it is found under Claude Binet, Les Plaisirs de la vie rustique et solitaire. Being a recueil factice, the title and arrangement vary with the different editions.
Note 38 in page 1036 I have already mentioned Jean de la Taille's Courtisan retiré; we remember that he
Est lui-même sa cour, son seigneur et son roi.
Note 39 in page 1039 Saint-Amant's La Solitude (1617) provoked a poem with the same title from Théophile. Tilley humorously remarks that this poem should have been called Solitude à deux, because the lascivious poet calls on his Corinne to come and share with him in sportive love the gloom of the deep forests and the coolness of their grottos.
Note 40 in page 1040 In all the period when the poets celebrated in chorus the cult of the country, so far as I know, only two discordant notes were heard. The first is Pierre de Laval's Misères et pauvretés de la vie rustique (1576). Pierre de Laval felt a genuine sympathy for the peasant. While seeing the roseate side of life in the country he was much more aware of its gloomy side,—the hardships and oppression that were the peasant's daily lot. He had no patience with those who sought to idealize bucolic life:
Celuy qu'a son ventre soûl et plein
Loue le jeûne et dit bien de la faim,
Ainsi on voit que celuy qui demeure
Autour des rois en tranquilité seure
Vante à credit l'aise du laboureur,
Mais s'il mangeait du pain sec en douleur,
Comme aux champs faict le paysan misérable
Il ne voudrait lui estre en rien semblable.
He thus describes the peasant:
Il a le poil et la barbe mal faicte,
L'oeil enfoncé, la peau seiche et retraite . . . . and he gives an account of his life as gloomy as La Bruyère's, though wholly lacking in its eloquence, concision, and power:
L'âne au moulin porte moudre le grain,
Mais pour cela il n'en menge le pain,
C'est tout ainsi du paysan qui ne cesse
De travailler, mais rien on ne luy laisse,
Car au seigneur la rante il fault porter
Et le froment plus beau luy présenter . . . .
C'est luy qui est chargé de tous subsides,
De l'un, de l'autre. On voit ses granges vuydes
Et sa maison de meuble et autre bien:
Jusqu'à la coite on ne luy laisse rien,
Quant le soldat a passé c'est la raige;
Il ne se trouve oeuf, poule, ni fourmaige . . . .
O misérable et chetif laboureur!
Celuy est bien transporté de fureur
Et plus qu'un fer a les entrailles dures
Qui n'a pitié du mal que tu endures.
Qui ne te void, ou n'a jamais gousté
Le fiel amer de la calamité,
Peut bien vanter d'un stile magnifique
L'aise et le bien de la vie rustique.
Mais celuy-là, qui void que sans repos
Mille accidents le minent jusqu'aux os,
Jugera bien que l'estat d'un forçaire,
Assujéty à l'outrageux corsaire
Est trop meilleur et plus doux mille fois
Que n'est celuy d'un paovre villageois.
See the “Rimes de Pierre de Laval” in Bulletin historique et archéologique du Périgord, XXVIII, 343-348.
The second anti-country document is Berthelot's (Cab. Sat. II, 37). After alluding to Desportes' O bienheureux, Berthelot says:
Mais moy je dis, tout au contraire,
Bien heureux qui se peut distraire
D'habiter les champs et les bois
Et qui peut approcher des rois:
C'est là que les vertus fleurissent,
C'est là que les gueux s'enrichissent;
C'est là, dis-je, que les plaisirs
Souvent surpassent les désirs,
Et tiens que tout homme est sauvage
Qui ne peut gouster ce breuvage.
Note 41 in page 1043 This is the text: “Id agere tecum institueram, ut ostenderem ad evadendum huius vitae mortalitates angustias, attolendoque se altius, primum velati gradum obtinere, meditationem mortis humanaeque miseriae: secundum vero desiderium vehemens studiumque surgendi, quibus exactis, ad id quo nostra suspirat intentio, ascensum facilem pollicebat [i.e. preparation for death and the after life], nisi tibi forte nunc etiam contrarium videretur . . . .”
Note 42 in page 1046 See also Arnauld d'Andilly's Ode sur la solitude, and Gomberville's Sonnet: Sur la solitude.
Note 43 in page 1047 I have had the advantage of discussing some aspects of this paper with Professor Nitze of the University of Chicago, and Professor Cons of Swarthmore College, and I take pleasure in acknowledging my indebtedness to them for their fruitful suggestions.