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Allegory in the French Heroic Poem of the Seventeenth Century
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
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Raymond Toinet states that seventeenth-century France produced close to one hundred and twenty-five heroic poems. In reality, however, not quite half of this number may be classified as such, the others having strayed too far even from the loosest definition of the genre. The proverbial dullness of these works has earned for them their merited oblivion, and to resurrect them for the purpose of examining their allegorical element would be quite unnecessary were it not for the fact that an adequate treatment of the question will tend to correct a common misunderstanding in the mind of most students of French literature regarding the attitude of the seventeenth century toward allegory in general.
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References
1 Quelques recherches autour des Poèmes heroïques-épiques français du XVIIe siècle, vols. (Tulle, 1899 and 1907).
2 Preface to the “Moyse sauvé,” in Œuvres de Saint-Amant (Paris, 1855), ii, 146–147.
3 Preface to the Alaric (Paris, 1654).
4 Preface to the Pucelle (Paris, 1656).
5 Prefaces to the Jonas (Paris, 1663), and to the Josué (Paris, 1665).
6 Cours de Littérature (Paris, 1799), iv, 157.
7 Corneille et son temps (Paris, 1873), pp. 373–338.
8 (Paris, 1870), p. 270, note 3.
9 See Georges Longhaye, Histoire de la littérature française au XVII e siècle (Paris, 1895), i, 348; and René Kerviler's study prefixed to the Douze derniers chants du poème de la Pucelle, edited by H. Herluison (Orléans, 1882). In his Un poète protecteur des lettres au XVII e siècle, Jean Chapelain (Paris, 1911), pp. 239–243, Georges Collas has accepted Kerviler's statement that if the characters of the Pucelle show no psychological development, it is only because the poet conceived them as allegorical figures of immutable qualities.
10 Charles Coypel (1695–1752) wrote the two following comedies: Le Triomphe de la Rayson, Comédie allégorique en trois actes, en prose, avec un Prologue, représéntée devant la Relne à Versailles le 17 Juillet 1730; and La Poésie et la Peinture, Comédie allégorique en trois actes, en prose, (no date). In 1738 Riccoboni and Romagnesi wrote for the Théâtre Italien a very successful parody of La Chaussée's Maximien. It was an allegorical literary satire entitled La Conspiration manquée.
11 Discours prefixed to his Poesies Chrestiennes (Paris, 1660), pp. 42–43.
12 Œuvres complètes de Saint-Amant (Paris, 1855), i, xxxiv. Some of the titles of these charts will give an idea of the subject that they treated, and also, whenever possible to identify them, they will show the prominence of their authors: Relation du royaume de coquetterie, (1654), by the Abbé d'Aubignac; Carte du royaume d'Amour, (1654), attributed to Tristan l'Hermite; Carle du pays de Rayson, (1656), by Saint-Amant, now lost; Rivière de Carogne, (before 1658); Carte du royaume des Prétieuses, (before 1664); Carte du Jansenisme, (contra, before 1664), Description de la grande île de Portraiture, attributed to Charles Sorel, (before 1664), Relation de ce qui s'est passé au royaume de Sophie etc. (before 1664), Description de l'empire de la Poesie, (1678), by Fontenelle.
13 Some of them are: La Fureur des Normans contre les Mazarinistes (Paris [Rouen], 1649), L'Enfer, le Purgatoire et le Paradis temporel de la France (Paris, 1649), La France en Travail sans pouvoir accoucher faute de sage femme, par le sieur de Sandricourt (Paris, 1652), Le Censeur du Temps et du Monde portant en main la Clef Promise, par le sieur de Sandricourt (Paris, 1652).
14 Traiano Boccalini, (1556–1613), expressed literary and moral satire in his Ragguagli di Parnasso (1612), and political satire in his Pietra del paragone politico (1613).
15 La Nouvelle Allégorique (Paris, 1659), p. 44, note g.
16 Etudes sur la vie et les œuvres de l'abbé d'Aubignac (Paris, 1887), p. 88.
17 Les Aventures d'Italie, in Aventures burlesques de Dassoucy (Paris, 1858), p. 289.
18 La Guerre des auteurs (Paris, 1671), p. 212.
19 The definitions of the word fable given in Murray, Littré and Hatzfeld-Darmesteter do not contain the word allegory in them at all. The Grande Encyclopédie has two contradictory definitions. Edward E. Nourse, likewise, contradicts himself in what he has to say in the Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics. However, the Jewish Encyclopedia calls the fable a “moral allegory.”
20 Le Bossu finds all fables to be allegorical (cf. his Traité du poème épique (Paris, 1677), p. 39 and passim), and Goujet quotes La Motte's Discours sur la Fable as stating that a fable contains “une instruction déguisée sous l'allégorie d'une action.” Bibliothèque Française (Paris, 1744), iii, 301.
21 Le Pâtre et le Lion, in Fables, livre vi, 1.
22 Maximes et réflexions sur la comédie, in Œuvres de Bossuet évêque de Meaux (Versailles, 1818), xxxvii, 547–548.
23 Traité de la Comédie et des Spectacles selon la tradition de l'Eglise tiré des Conciles des Saints-Pères (Paris, 1666), p. 18.
24 Epistola ad Pisones, V. 333 and 343–344.
25 “Poetry, therefore, is more philosophical and a higher thing than history, for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular.” Poetics, ix, Butcher's translation (London, 1902).
26 Vauquelin de la Fresnaye numbered Tasso along with the greatest of the Ancients.—Art Poetique, Bk. i, Vs. 413–428. Balzac wrote as follows in 1632: “… on peut dire qu'en cet excellent genre Virgile est cause que Tasso n'est pas le premier, et Tasso que Virgile n'est pas le seul.”—Œuvres de J-L. Guez sieur de Balzac (Paris, 1854), i, 331. Mambrunus said that the Gerusalemme was the foremost epic of modern times, and that Homer, Virgil, and Tasso were the three masters of epic poetry.—Dissertatio peripatetica de epico carmine (Paris, 1652), passim. Scudéry relates in the preface of his Alarlc that when he undertook to write his magnum opus, he studied very minutely all the epics that had been written, but especially Homer, Virgil, and Tasso. Finally, we find that in the critical works which Chapelain, Godeau, and Le Moyne added to their poems Homer, Virgil, and Tasso are invoked as the past masters of the epic.
27 Eneide de Virgile (Paris, 1648), pp. 381–383.
28 Connoissance des bons livres (Paris, 1671), Traité ii, Chap. 2.
29 Histoire des poèmes épiques français du XVIIe siècle, passim.
30 For example, they knew the Poeticarum institutionum libri iii (Ingolstadt, 1597), of Jacobus Pontanus, a Dutch Jesuit teaching in Bavaria, and above all the De artis poeticae natura ac constitutione liber (Amsterdam, 1647), of Gerardus Vossius.
31 Tableau des Sciences et des Vertus Morales (Paris, 1679), p. 75.—The Morales du Tasse of Baudoin had first appeared in 1632.
32 Preface of the Alaric (Paris, 1656).
33 Edition of Paris, 1656.
34 The writer has omitted a discussion of the reaction against the influence of Tasso because, generally speaking, it came too late to effect the epic poets. Boileau, the leader of this opposition, did not come out squarely against the clinquant du Tasse until he wrote his Ninth Satire in 1667.