Aspects and Impressions

THE FOUNDATION OF THE FRENCH ACADEMY

FOR three centuries past there have been frequent discussions as to the possibility of founding an Academy of Letters in England, but it was not until June, 1910, that a modest and partial experiment in this direction was successfully made. After long deliberations between two accredited bodies, the Royal Society of Literature and the Society of Authors, thirty-three persons were nominated to form, within the corporation of the former, an Academic Committee which should attempt to exercise something resembling the functions of the Académie Française. Lord Morley was elected President, and now, without claiming any excessive publicity, this Academic Committee, founded for the protection and encouragement of a pure English style in prose and verse, has occupied a position in letters which gives every evidence of persisting and increasing. It was assailed, as was natural and right, by satire and by caricature, but it has survived the attacks which were directed against it, and there can be little doubt that, with good luck, it may become a prominent feature of our intellectual and social system. Already, although so young, it has received that consecration of death which makes it a part of history. No fewer than eight, that is to say nearly a quarter, of its original members have passed away, and among them those delicate humanists Butcher and Verrall, a poet so philosophical as Alfred Lyall, critics of such fine temper as Andrew Lang and Edward Dowden. Like the Académie Française, the Academic Committee has its parti des ducs, and it mourns the loss of an exquisite amateur, George Wyndham. These men leave to their successors the memory of lives devoted to the purest literature.4

This, then, seems a not inappropriate moment for considering more closely in detail than has commonly been done, the circumstances attending the most successful experiment that the world has seen to create and sustain a public body whose duty it should be to guard the purity of a national language and to insure the permanence of its best literary forms. It will not be necessary here to do more than remind our readers that the Académie Française was not the earliest corporation in Europe, or even in France, which was formed for the purpose of carrying out these difficult and perilous designs. It was simply the most successful and the most durable. As early as about the year 1490, an Academy was founded in Florence in the deepest piety of the Renaissance. Its motives were pathetically Greek. The gardens of the Medicis were to represent Academe; Arno was to be its Cephisus; in the great Plotinist, Marsiglio Ficino, it was to find its incomparable leader, its visible Plato. By the sixteenth century, Italy was full of imitations; there were the Intronati at Siena, the Della Crusca at Florence, the Otiosi at Bologna, the Humoristi and the Fantastici in Rome. In France itself, in 1570, the poets of the Pléiade instituted, under Charles IX, their Académie de Musique et de Poésie, which became in due course the Académie du Palais, and died inglorious during the Civil Wars. Later there was founded, in Savoy, that Académie Florimontane, which flourished for a little while under St. François de Sales. It was in imitation of those vague and ephemeral institutions that, supported by the powerful patronage of Richelieu, the great corporation which still exercises so lively an influence in France came, in the fulness of the seventeenth century, into permanent existence. It is too seldom realized out of what accidental conjunction of circumstances it arose, and how humble and unfavourable were the auspices which attended its birth.

The French Academy came into the world so silently, and was long so inconspicuous, that it is difficult to point to its exact source. But there is no doubt that its inception was due to the hospitable temper and the intellectual curiosity of a young man whose name deserves well of the world. He was not a great writer, nor even a great scholar, but he possessed to an extraordinary degree the gift of literary solidarity. In the year 1629, Valentin Conrart, who was twenty-six years of age, was living in a convenient and agreeable house at the corner of the Rue Saint Martin and the Rue des Vielles-Etuves. About this time his relative, probably his cousin, Antoine Godeau, two years younger than Conrart, came up to Paris from Dreux to seek his fortune. It is thought that he lodged with his cousin; at all events Conrart looked after him in his universally obliging way. Godeau confessed that he wrote verses, and he showed them to Conrart, who adored poetry, and who burned to spread an appreciation of it. He thought his kinsman's verses good, and he invited a few of his literary friends to come and listen to them. No doubt he asked them to dinner, for he had a famous cook; and after dinner the company settled down to listen. The poet was excessively short and preposterously ugly, but he was subtle and agreeable, and he already possessed to a conspicuous degree the art of pleasing.

When the future bishop of Grasse and Vence had recited his poems, which were love-pieces and doubtless of a light description – for he afterwards begged them back from Conrart and burned them – the conversation became general, and the evening passed so pleasantly that the company was unanimous that these instructive and entertaining meetings must be repeated. There were eight of these friends gathered together, all authors or men intimately occupied with literature. They were agreed in determining to keep up their discussions, and first of all it was proposed that they should meet successively in each other's houses. But no one of them was rich, and Conrart's house was far the most comfortably situated; he was anxious to be the perpetual host, and the rest were glad to give way to him. They decided to meet once every week to discuss literature and language in Conrart's house at the corner of the Rue Saint Martin. The names of the eight friends are not equally celebrated in the history of French literature; most of them, indeed, are not celebrated at all; but I must record them here, before I proceed, because of the leading part they took at the inception of the Académie. They were Chapelain, Conrart, Godeau, Gombauld, Philippe Habert, Habert de Cerisy, Sérisay, and Malleville. We must try to form some impression of each of them, though most are but fugitive and phantasmal figures.

Of Valentin Conrart a tolerably clear image can be formed by collating what the memoir-writers have recorded of him. It was much noted that he was no scholar; like Shakespeare he had little Latin and less Greek; indeed it was roundly asserted that he had none of either. But he studied much Italian and Spanish, and he had a fine library exclusively of modern literature. He wrote a great deal in prose and verse, but mainly for his private pleasure; he kept a prudent silence about his works, which were understood to be mediocre. He was always an invalid; already, in his youth, he began to be a sufferer from the gout, which was to torture him for thirty years. But pain did not affect his temper, nor his extraordinary gregariousness. He lived for the small enjoyments of others. He was the confidant of everybody, the healer of all quarrels and disputes. As time went on, and Conrart became absorbed in the duties of perpetual Secretary to the Académie, his qualities may have become exaggerated. His enemies began to say that he was too indulgent, too easy-going with offenders. The super-subtle declared that he had become infatuated with his own friendliness, and that he went through Paris murmuring "Ah! ma belle amitié!" He was a great depositary of secrets, and liked nothing so much as to run about – or rather, poor man! to hobble about – pouring oil upon troubled waters. Tallemant des Réaux, who hated him, says that Conrart had an unpleasant wife, whose face was like a gingerbread nut, but we need not believe all that Tallemant des Réaux says.

Conrart, however, with all his serviceable friendliness, could not have done much without Chapelain, who was really the founder of the Académie. Jean Chapelain was not merely an active man of letters, he was the man of letters pure and simple. He had, in that age of intellectual curiosity, a passion for literature not surpassed, if equalled, by a single contemporary. M. Lanson has shown, what scarcely needed showing, that Chapelain was no artist, but if he was a bad poet, he was intensely interested in the technique of poetry. He has been called the founder of French criticism; he had pertinacity, courage, and a passionate love for the French language. Perhaps he was the inventor of the law of the Three Unities in drama. His influence in French thought lasted until the days of Boileau. In 1629 Chapelain was thirty-five years of age, old enough and dogmatic enough to impress his will and his opinions on his younger companions. Because he was a detestable epic and a ridiculous lyric poet, because we cannot be drawn by wild horses to read the Pucelle or the Ode à Richelieu, we must not overlook the fact that Chapelain was one of the great intellectual forces of his time, although when the meetings began he had scarcely printed anything except the much-discussed Préface de l'Adone (1623). Ceremonious and yet rough, a courtier and yet a sort of astute Diogenes, hating all luxury and ruining himself to buy rare books, a stormy petrel in every literary tempest, Chapelain presents to us the shrewd and violent figure of a captain who steered the youthful Académie through its vicissitudes into safe anchorage.

Among all these young men, there was one old man, and he too, like Chapelain, was an authentic man of letters. This was Jean Ogier, Sieur de Gombauld, who was not less than sixty years of age already. He had been born youngest son in the fourth marriage of a redoubtable Huguenot of Xaintogne, and he came to Paris towards the end of the reign of Henry IV, with a mass of strange MSS. He was very poor, very proud, extravagant and eccentric to the last degree. He managed to appear at Court, and there must have been something striking about him, since his fortune began by Marie de Médicis noticing him at the coronation of Louis XIII. It was said that she saw in him a striking likeness to a man of whom she had been very fond years before in Florence. After the ceremony, the Queen-Mother sent for Gombauld, and he was attached to her Court, where he was called "le Beau Ténébreux," but he remained very shy and helpless. He nourished a frenzied passion for her Majesty, yet was incapable of speech or movement in her presence; during his brief splendour at Court, he wrote the most famous of his works, the romance of Endymion (1624), in which the Queen-Mother appeared as that leading character, "La Lune." There are delightful stories of the gaucherie and pathetic simplicity of this old poet, who was a very fine country gentleman, always carefully dressed, holding his tall, spare figure well upright, and with quantities of real hair pushing out his wig on all sides. Gombauld, in spite of "La Lune," could never feel at his ease in the presence of fine ladies, and sighed for a farmer's daughter. After the death of Richelieu, all the pensions were struck off, and Gombauld grew very poor and wrinkled. He was touched with the mania of persecution, and became rather a terror to his fellow-Academicians, one of whom called him "the most ceremonious and the most mysterious of men." He grew to be very unhappy, but like Tithonus could not die, and he was "a white-haired shadow roaming like a dream" in the world of Molière and Racine. He died, at the age of ninety-six, in 1666, having been born in the lifetime of Ronsard, and out-living the birth of Massillon.

The other four members of the original group have not left so deep a mark on the history of literature. Jacques de Sérisay was accustomed to literary coteries, for he had been a constant attendant on Montaigne's adopted daughter, that enthusiastic and grotesque old maid, Mlle. Marie de Gournay, who loved to collect the wits around her "shadow" and her cat, Donzelle. Sérisay cannot have been a man of letters of much force, since his works, to the end of time, consisted of half a tragedy, which he could never finish. Later on he contrived to read this fragment aloud to Richelieu, who yielded to fatigue before the end of the exercise. This vague person was known as "le délicat Sérisay." Then, there was Claude de Malleville, who had just come back from attending Bassompierre in England. He was a man of considerable originality of character, and afterwards a power in the Académie. He liked the pleasant informality of the meetings at Conrart's house, and objected to their being turned into official sessions. We shall see that he stood alone, a little later, in stout opposition to the proposals of the Cardinal. Malleville was a little wisp of a man, with black locks and dim dark eyes. He translated vaguely and amorously from the Italian, and had a great deal to do with the composition of the Guirlande de Julie. Except for some Ovidian Epistles, which he is said to have published as early as 1620, Malleville's own poems were posthumous. M. Magne says that Malleville was "un faiseur de bibus" (a term of contempt almost beyond the range of translation) "qui frétillait autour des jupes"; but that is because he opposed Boisrobert. Shadows they were, and shadows they pursued.

Most shadowy of all are to us now the two Haberts. Germain Habert, the youngest of the original Academicians, wrote a very affected poem on the metamorphosis of the eyes of Phillis into stars. As he grew older he neglected Phillis to devote himself to good works. Ménage, who was his friend, says he was "un des plus beaux esprits de son temps." But where are the evidences of his wit? His brother, Philippe Habert, is the last of the original coterie and the faintest phantom of them all. He was a soldier in the artillery, and he was killed, in 1637, at the siege of Emery, crushed under a wall that had been accidentally blown up by gunpowder. Just before this melancholy event, Philippe Habert had prophetically published his poem called Le Temple de la Mort, which was very much admired, but is now not easily accessible. He was a cold and solemn young man, reserved in manner, but held to be both brave and friendly.

Such were the eight companions who met, week by week, all innocent and unconscious, to discuss in familiar intercourse every species of subject – business, the news of the day, the movement of letters. If any one of them had written something, as frequently happened, he would read it aloud, and ask for criticism, which would be frankly given. Often their discussions would end in a stroll through the streets, or in a meal prepared by Conrart's really estimable chef. It was a delightful time, and, in after years, when the Académie was celebrated and powerful, the original members looked back wistfully at this happy period of almost pastoral quietude. Pellisson, interviewing the survivors in a later generation, says that "Ils parlent encore aujourd'hui de ce premier âge de l'Académie, comme d'un âge d'or, durant lequel avec toute l'innocence et toute la liberté des premiers siècles, sans bruit et sans pompe, et sans autres lois que celles de l'amitié, ils goûtaient ensemble tout ce que la société des esprits et la vie raisonnable ont de plus doux et de plus charmant."

It is curious and interesting to find that this "little clan," as Keats would call it, contrived to preserve its unity and its privacy for several years. The friends met, as we have seen, with remarkable frequency, yet they did not quarrel, nor grow bored, nor break up through the action of any outward accident. It is, surely, even in much quieter centuries than ours, unusual that a party of this kind should continue to exist, suspended as in a vacuum, not dwindling nor increasing, and unknown to the world outside. In those Valois times, such a collection of persons would be in danger of being accused of political plotting, and so the visitors to Conrart were pledged to an absolute silence. This pledge was first broken by Malleville, who told Nicolas Faret, apparently in 1632. Faret was a young provincial lawyer, lately arrived in Paris from the town of Bourg-en-Bresse. He was still very poor, but ingenious and active; he was a disciple of the great grammarian, Vaugelas, and later the intimate of Molière. He was a jolly man, with chestnut hair and rubicund face; his figure grew massive as the years went by. Faret was consumed with curiosity, and when he had once wormed the secret of the meetings out of Malleville, he gave the latter no peace until he consented to introduce him. Faret had just published a book of some merit and considerable popularity, L'Honnête Homme, a breviary of how a gentleman should behave, a sort of courtier's vade mecum; and he brought an early copy of this with him as a credential. Faret was an active, boisterous person, boon companion of the more gifted poet Saint-Amant. He had no sooner secured a footing in Conrart's house than he made himself very useful to the body, for he was by far the most businesslike of the group. It was Faret who, in 1634, drew up the original scheme for the foundation of the Académie. He did not add much to the glory of the corporation, when once it was formed, for the other members complained that he did not attend the meetings unless there was some practical business on hand, and that then he was apt to be drunk. Faret, who was attached to Henry of Lorraine, the comte d'Harcourt, and served as his go-between with Richelieu, was not a very shining Académicien, but he had his temporary value.

Faret's chief merit was that he brought to the meetings a man of letters who was destined to take a very prominent place, for the time being, both in the French Academy and in literary life – namely, Jean Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin. He was an indefatigable writer, and a man exactly suited to be useful to a group of literary persons, because he had experience of the world, great enthusiasm for the craft of letters, and a wide and humorous outlook on life. Chapelain, glancing back many years later, defined Desmarets as "un des esprits les plus faciles de ce temps," and that is just what he was, an inexhaustible and rapid producer of prose and verse in the spirit and fashion of the age. He was much valued by Richelieu, who forced him, against his will, to collaborate in the composition of tragedies. Desmarets had no dramatic inspiration, but he was able to satisfy the Cardinal. At the time of which we are speaking, probably in 1633, Desmarets was brought to Conrart's house by Faret and received a courteous welcome. It was characteristic of him that, instantly entering into the spirit of the company, he pulled out of his pocket the proof-sheets of his new prose romance Ariane, and asked leave to submit them to discussion.

Desmarets was rich and influential, and he had the true Academic spirit. He became a prominent public character, and Controller-General of the King's Army, but he never lost his close hold upon the Académie, of which he was elected the first Chancellor. In the moment of transition, the dark hour before the dawn, he was eminently useful, for when, in 1633, Conrart married, and it was no longer convenient to meet in his house, Desmarets transferred the whole cluster of bees to a new hive, the sumptuous Hôtel Pellevé, which he had just rebuilt at the corner of the Rue du Roi de Sicile and of the Rue Tison. Then, and not till then, did they begin seriously to think of founding an Academy. Desmarets's numerous writings have stood the test of time very ill. His epic of Clovis was ridiculed by Boileau, and perhaps the only work of his which can be read to-day without boredom is his comedy of Les Visionnaires (1635), a merry piece of literary criticism, in which the various coteries of that day, and the famous salons, are satirized. Nevertheless, it is not beyond the range of possibility that, in these days of revival, somebody may be found to resuscitate Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin.

In that entertaining volume, Le Plaisant Abbé de Boisrobert, the great rival of Desmarets has already found an eloquent resuscitator, M. Magne. François de Metel de Boisrobert is an unedifying figure of a scapegrace priest, whose giggling face is seen peeping round most doors in the scandalous memoirs of the time. No one was more contemptuously insulted, no one more bitterly ridiculed, than Richelieu's supple jackal, the author of Anaxandre et Orazie and of Pyrandre. These heroic works of faded imagination are read no longer, nor the Recueil de Lettres Nouvelles nor Le Sacrifice des Muses. On the other hand, the sarcasms of the epigrammatists and the scandalous tales of contemporaries continue to invest the memory of Boisrobert with a nasty odour. M. Magne, who brings a marvellous erudition to the task, has bravely endeavoured to redeem a talent and a character so deeply compromised. We cannot join in the whole of his white-washing, but we may admit that he has proved the "plaisant abbé" to be neither the dunce nor the blackguard that legend had painted him. Moreover, it is quite certain that he exercised a most useful energy in the foundation of the French Academy.