“ASTRÉE,” THE FIRST FRENCH NOVEL.

THE renaissance of French fiction was later than that of French poetry or of French thought in other fields. A natural result of this is that when it came it was not, as the lyrics of the drama of the Pleiad had been, a classical revival, but it was made up from three main sources, Greek, Spanish, and Italian. The nature of these influences and of their first manifestations in France must be briefly considered before we can rightly estimate the first significant work of literary art in which they were combined, the "Astrée" of Urfé, whose first volumes appeared in the same year as Beroald de Verville's "Moyen de Parvenir” (1610), and from which it is customary and in a sense justifiable to date the beginning of the independent and unbroken evolution of French fiction.

This backward glance at the obscure origins of the "Astrée" has been made clear for us by the admirable, clear, and systematic work of Heinrich Koerting, in his introduction to his "History of the French Novel in the Seventeenth Century." The works that he has examined are in large part unattainable in America, and for the rest intrinsically dreary. I have been glad to rely in large measure on his statements, and have found very little elsewhere with which to supplement them. Indeed, this may be said for the entire period which he has covered, in which he is distinctly superior in knowledge and sagacity to the few Frenchmen who have followed him. Brunetière and Lanson are here less happy than usual, and the monograph of Lebreton on the French novel in the seventeenth century contains little that he might not have learned from his German predecessor, to whom I wish to express once more my constant debt for information and suggestion.

The foreign elements out of which the French ideal pastoral and chivalrous novel was to grow begin to show themselves first in the translation into French of the Spanish

"Amadis of Gaul," which may well have originated in France itself, or even in England, but came back across the Pyrenees in a form that united the objective naïveté of the old epic with at least a foreshadowing of the subjectivity and psychological interest that was to characterize the new fiction, and to make this book, as a German critic (Braunfels) has said, "the progenitor of the modern novel of every tongue." "Amadis" attracted the attention of Francis I. during his captivity at Madrid, and on his return to France he arranged for a translation that began to appear in 1543 and was finished in 1548, to be followed by ten others and countless continuations. It met with an immediate success, and continued to be widely read in France for more than two hundred years. It will be remembered that the wise author of "Don Quixote" excepted the first four books of it from fire; and if we will examine it with patient and unprejudiced eyes, we shall find in it the first model of polished novelistic conversation and of romantic adventure. Modify, then, its realistic treatment of love to adapt it to changed standards of decorum, substitute gallantry for love, and omit nearly all of its magic and demonology, and you have the germs of the seventeenth-century romance.

Now this substitution of gallantry for love-making of a more material type was greatly aided by another and more artificial foreign influence, the revival through translations of the erotic romances of the Greeks, or rather of course of the Alexandrians. Why those extremely involved sensational and artificial tales should have charmed this age is a curious problem in social psychology. Certain it is that what we regard literary virtues were their faults, and our faults their virtues. Certain, too, that Urfé, the Scudérys, and their fellows, learned more of their artistic perversity from this source than from any other. It is to them that we owe the paradoxical notion that the object of the story-teller is to hide the story, as a snake, to use one of their own images, coils his body around his head. To us this is an exasperation; to them it was a charm of which they were wholly conscious. One of the most talented of the French translators

(Amyot) says in a preface that his author "begins in the middle of his story, which causes at first a great surprise to the readers, and begets in them an ardent desire to find out the beginning; and yet he draws them on so well by the ingenious arrangement of his tale that one does not quite understand what one has read at the beginning of the first book until one has reached the end of the fifth. And when one gets there, one has even greater eagerness to see the end than one had at the beginning, so that the mind always remains in suspense until the close, which leaves the reader satisfied"—unless, we may add, he prefers, after this warning, not to begin at all. It is thus to the Greek novel that we owe the pestilent excrescence of the episodes, of which the "Astrée," a fair sample, counts thirty-three, and even "Don Quixote" does not escape the infection.

The Greek novels were done into Italian and Spanish early in the sixteenth century, and first showed their influence there. In France the translations begin with Amyot's "Théagénès and Chariclée," in 1549, and the influence on independent novel-writing does not appear till the next century. Translations, however, were numerous, and had the general effect of diverting the interest from adventure, where it had centered in the older romance, to a sort of decadent toying with love, thus contributing to its transformation into gallantry, to which allusion has been already made. Another element derived from these decadents is a marked aristocratic tone. Urfé and the rest write neither for nor about any one who has anything to do. The convention of shepherd and shepherdess is, as Lanson has excellently said, "a mere transcription into literature of the life of aristocratic society. These shepherds and nymphs are the men and women who have nothing to do, whose peculiar and chief occupation therefore is a product of their social connections. These men and women desire, pursue, avoid one another-in short, they exercise the profession of love." War has just enough place in the novel to mark the nobility of the characters. Urfé's Céladon would not be an ideal lover if he never had a sword in his hand, but he

makes haste to sheathe it. He is a gentleman, not a soldier. This matter is regarded as so important by the authors that they are careful in their introductions to prevent all possible misconstruction. Urfé, in the preface to his first volume, bids his shepherdess reply to a critic, "that thou art not, nor those that follow thee, any of those needy shepherdesses who to gain their livelihood lead their flocks to pasture, but you have adopted this condition only to live more gently and without constraint." Nor must we forget that this pastoral dolce far niente had a peculiar attraction for the France of this generation, oppressed socially and financially, worn out by the wars of the League, and somewhat undeceived in its renascent hopes.

Dr. Koerting would ascribe also to the Greek models the soullessness, not to say the woodenness, of the characters in this pastoral and chivalrous fiction, but it is more probable that both sets of writers paid the same penalty for the same fault. One cannot be deliberately artificial with impunity. Good psychology must have its roots in a more honest realism than these real writers were willing to attempt, or would indeed have thought consistent with their art. And the same will apply to the descriptions. The landscape in the Greek, as in the French, work is conventional, set with no details that might mark a trace of individual feeling. "The ideal of beauty in landscape for both," says Dr. Koerting, "is the well-watered park, the pretty garden; even the vegetable garden, that seems so prosaic to us, arouses their boundless enthusiasm."

The first independent piece of French fiction on these lines is by a certain Martin Fumée, and purports to be translated from the Greek of Athenagoras. Internal evidence betrays the true date of its composition, however, beyond any question. Its title is "Of True and Perfect Love." It was published in 1599, and continued popular for at least half a century, as is shown by a satiric allusion in Sorel's "Polyandre" (V., 301). Almost all the idealistic fiction of the century bears trace of this Hellenic influence, to which also the drama owes at least the names of its characters.

The Précieux, and all who sympathized with them, were naturally drawn to it. It yielded gradually to the realisticsatiric novel, and to the influence of Molière, to reappear again in changed and purified estate in Fénelon's "Télemaque" (1699).

The third important influence from abroad that we note in the French fiction of the seventeenth century is that of the novelas picarescas, or vagabond novels of the Spaniards, beginning with the remarkable "Lazarillo de Tormes," and closing for our purposes with the "Estevanillo Gonzales" of 1646. Very many of those works were translated, and they form the main and undoubted source of the realistic fiction that begins with Barclay's "Euphormio" and continues throughout the century till it merges its current with the realistic comedy. But since this Spanish work influenced almost solely the French realists and left hardly a trace on the ideal romancers, it will be well to defer the consideration of it for the present, and turn to the fourth or pastoral element, in which Italy united with Spain in furnishing admired models to France.

That the mock simplicity of the pastoral, whether in prose or verse, should be sought in periods characterized by a lassitude caused either by overexertion or by too rapid social development, is not unnatural. When men grow weary of the tax that our complex order and the spur of progress lay on them, it is natural that they should turn to a mode of life which in its idealized form seems to unite freedom with stability, a reasonably secure existence with comparatively little effort, but yet enough to preserve one from the troubles of ennui, with leisure to enjoy nature and cultivate the arts, combining thus individual liberty with social security. And then, what is quite as important to the literary treatment of this dreamland, it puts the shepherdess on terms of social equality with the shepherd, and so gives freer scope to the poetic fancy.

It is natural, then, that we should find the pastoral most. eagerly received, as Dr. Koerting observes, in those periods when the real world, stirred by events of uncommon sad