Classical influences

1. Medieval

Knowledge, assimilation, and exploitation of classical literary texts, identified since the 9th c. as the characteristic property of the educated élite of western Europe and functioning as a currency common to linguistically diverse vernacular literatures, constitute one of the most sensitive indicators of fluctuations in literary theory and practice. Like Boccaccio in 14th-c. Italy, French writers towards the end of the Middle Ages invariably defined ‘poetrie’ as fiction, and, more specifically, fictions derived from ancient authors. Vernacular versions of classical fictions were usually the latest in a series of reformulations of the original source. Most commonly, ancient fictions were transmitted through the medium of compilations, in the form of brief synopses arranged in lists, to be abbreviated further and redeployed in new catalogues by a Villon, a Champier, and, later still, a Jean Bouchet. Alternatively, they came by way of paraphrases (sometimes, as in the case of Homer's Iliad, through Latin intermediaries). These were couched in a narrative style where dialogue predominated at the expense of visual effects, as in the 14th-c. Ovide moralisé and its late 15th-c. derivative, the Bible des poètes, which continued the manner well into the 16th c.

Another major factor which distanced latemedieval versions of classical fiction from their originals was the interposition of allegorical interpretations. Characters, objects, and events were transformed into the components of substitute narrations which plotted historical, scientific, moral, and religious ‘truths’ onto the fiction. The Bible des poètes, in editions printed up to 1531, transmitted just such an allegorical reading of the Metamorphoses, combining previous French and Latin retellings of Ovid. Lemaire de Belges, in his Concorde des deux langages (1511) and his Illustrations de Gaule et singularités de Troie (1510-13), set late-medieval French modes of reading classical fictions against an explicitly Italian response to the pagan poets. Lemaire's ‘Italian’ manner is characterized by sheer aesthetic delight in visual mimesis, uninhibited by allegorical displacements and neither diffused by interpolated dialogue nor diminished in reductive summaries.

2. Sixteenth Century

In the first 50 years of the 16th c. French verse translations of Ovid, from the Heroïdes of Octovien de Saint-Gelais at the turn of the century to Clément Marot's two books of the Metamorphoses (1534 and 1543), were symptomatic of a new closeness to the language and the vision of classical texts. But, in the shift in the reception of classical literature which was to be so profoundly influential, translation was of less importance than pedagogical techniques promoted by humanist schoolmasters. By the late 1540s most young French writers had received an education focused exclusively on Latin and, to a lesser extent, Greek texts embracing literature, rhetoric, moral philosophy, and history. They heard these texts read with an explanatory commentary which drew attention to linguistic expressions, rhetorical niceties, and historical context, with cross-references to parallel material: they extrapolated their texts into systematically ordered commonplace books; they wrote Latin prose and verse composition in which they reproduced the ideas and the stylistic mannerisms of their prescribed authors [see Latinity]. This training in the analysis and production of persuasive discourse evolved a canon of model authors and established criteria for evaluating styles of writing.

The standards inculcated in the class-room were applied directly to the vernacular by practitioners and also by theorists, especially Du Bellay and Peletier du Mans. Writers of French set themselves to imitate and emulate classical texts which they had read in their original languages, in their original form, and accompanied by commentaries which explained the historical and literary culture which had produced them. Systematic allegorical interpretation, with its tendency to anachronism now unacceptable to historically minded humanists, was only sporadically imposed; but classical fictions were invariably read as exemplifications of moral truths and, more often than not, as representations of the behaviour of natural phenomena, as well as models of rhetorical artifice and repositories of reusable quotations.

The long-term effects on French literature of the humanist method of teaching classical authors were to downgrade the pre-existing vernacular tradition in favour of contemporary exercises in literary imitation (Du Bellay); to create a literature fully accessible only to an educated élite able to recognize the allusions in which much of its meaning was coded (fully exemplified in the commentary Muret appended to Ronsard's poems in 1553); and to naturalize the concept of a literary culture which spoke a language quite different from that of the prevailing Christian ideology and which could claim its own autonomy (see Ronsard's answers to his Protestant critics in the 1560s). In the short term the most obvious effect was to force a restyling of literary production in order to replicate the genres practised in antiquity. The contrast between the treatises of Sebillet (1548) and Du Bellay (1549) measures the change envisaged.

In practice, experiments in producing epics in the ancient mould foundered (Ronsard's Franciade). However, short narrative mythological poetry in the Ovidian manner was thoroughly acclimatized in French (Ronsard, Baïf, Belleau), as were odes, Pindaric and Horatian (Ronsard, Malherbe), and hymns in the manner of ancient, pagan Greece, mediated by the Latin Marullus (Ronsard). In the absence of a commercial theatre in the second half of the 16th c., drama was largely a literary, even a school, exercise, subject to the procedures of literary imitation, which ensured that it acquired the characteristics of ancient dramatic writing, particularly that of Seneca (Jodelle, Garnier). The rhetorical phraseology of French poetry after 1550, its repertory of figures, and its frame of reference were determined by classical influence, which even prompted attempts to write quantitative metre in French (Baïf's ‘vers mesurés à l'antique’).

Classical influence also in large measure decided that poetry should be the privileged mode in French literature between 1550 and 1600. Antiquity had left few examples of prose fiction to imitate, and certainly no theories of prose fiction to counterbalance Horace, whose precepts for writing poetry (along with those of contemporary Italians) set the agenda for French theoretical writing in the 16th c., or Aristotle, whose influence is discernible, but relatively weak, in French texts before the 17th c. Theoretical discussion of prose writing took the form of rhetorical prescription, closely based on Cicero (Fouquelin, 1555 [see Ramus]; Courcelles, 1557). Montaigne was part of an anti-Ciceronian reaction, but he too was the product of his humanist education, with its moralizing preoccupations and its method of excerpting passages to juxtapose them and then generate discourse by playing them off against each other.

Montaigne had a profound familiarity with Latin literature, but a limited first-hand knowledge of Greek, as was true of most pupils of humanist schools (apart from professional Greek scholars and the writers inspired by Dorat's teaching, notably Ronsard). It was for this reason that, whereas the translation of Latin literature into French was an occupation held in low esteem in the second half of the 16th c. and generally practised by minor figures (Habert for Ovid and Horace, Des Masures for Virgil), translation from Greek had a much higher status. The numerous French translations of Platonic and Neoplatonic texts, Belleau's translation of ‘Anacreon’ (1556), the Iliad begun by Salel and completed by Jamyn (1545-80), and Amyot's Plutarch (1559 and 1572) enriched French literature and gave it new directions.

3. Seventeenth Century

By contrast, in the 1650s and 1660s publishers were making quite an industry out of the translation of Latin literary texts, in response to the much larger market which by then existed for vernacular versions of the best-known Latin authors. By that stage knowledge of classical literature had permeated well beyond the class-room and had become a culture common to the whole of literate and even non-literate society, Latinate or not. But the study of classical texts in their original languages had ceased to be the main agent of transmission, displaced by vernacular literature itself, now predominantly classical in idiom [see Classicism], and by works of reference. In addition, translations and commentaries in French, adjusted to the taste of gentlemen (and lady) amateurs (e.g. the much-reprinted Metamorphoses of Nicolas Renouard, 1606), reached a much wider readership than contemporary Latin scholarship, which was beginning to specialize exclusively in textual and historical criticism. Another primary source of dissemination was through art, in the form of mythological picture-books, painting, sculpture, and decorative motifs.

The appropriation of classical culture by a non-specialist public finds expression in the familiar and even superior tone which 17th-c. authors adopt towards their classical material, from the liberties taken by a Théophile de Viau to burlesque versions of Ovid and Virgil in the 1640s and ironical retellings of mythological fictions. The latter is best exemplified by La Fontaine's Les Amours de Psyché. This slightly sceptical distancing, which only adds charm to the classical make-believe, takes its cue from a momentous change in attitude towards the cultural legacy of humanism. The conviction that ancient literature, and in particular its mythological apparatus, was the vehicle of more-or-less arcane truths was customary in French and Latin commentaries up until the mid-century, and persisted even later in mythological handbooks. But in his criticism of Renaissance schooling (Discours de la méthode), Descartes denied that the classical literature at the core of its curriculum was true in any sense. Under the influence of the Scientific Revolution the language of truth became mathematics. The ‘scientific’ textual and historical criticism of contemporary classical scholars (beginning with Casaubon and Joseph Scaliger) had also tended to divest their texts of their aura of vatic authority. Boileau's Art poétique (1674), still overridingly Horatian, despite his translation of Longinus, affirms the essentially classical stylization of contemporary French literature, but the necessary paraphernalia of mythological reference are no more than ‘ornements reçus’. The one literary genre where this polite scepticism was suspended was tragedy. There Aristotle's Poetics and works derived from it set the grounds for critical discussion and increasingly exercised prescriptive force. Even so, it was perhaps ancient history more often than ancient fiction that provided the plots for French ‘classical’ tragedies.

4. Eighteenth to Twentieth Centuries

The sense of history and historical anachronism, originally fostered by the humanists' investigation of the ancient world, was to be more influential on literary developments than the authority of classically derived theory. In the last 30 years or so of the 17th c. opposition to the cultural hegemony of defunct classical languages and literatures became assertively articulate in the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes. In the 18th c. modern vernacular literature, portraying modern society in modern genres (notably prose fiction) apparently relegated ancient authors to the schoolroom, or at least marginalized ancient culture in its own narrow specialisms and the peripheral areas of occasional verse and decorative embellishment. But in the school-room classical teaching kept alive the possibility of a non-Christian ethic of citizenship; among historians the classical example legitimized speculation about alternative systems of government; and the iconography of the Revolution and the Napoleonic era was Neoclassical.

Elsewhere the study of classical art and literature took an even more revolutionary turn in the late 18th and early 19th c., but in spite of the isolated and inspiring example of André Chenier, it registered only weakly in France's rather etiolated version of Romanticism. It was not until later in the 19th c. that French authors seized vigorously on the prototypes which classical literature provided for figures of genius, visionaries, and poets (Hugo's ‘satyre’, Mallarmé's faun, the early Rimbaud, Valéry in Charmes). Activated by Symbolism, this recovery of ancient mythology invented a metonymical reading of classical fiction which renewed the potency of its figures, making them signify in areas out of reach of cultural and rational discourse: the primitive and the subconscious. But this use of classical prototypes presupposed a classically educated readership, as did the peculiarly French fashion of the inter-war years and just after, when Gide, Cocteau, Giraudoux, Sartre, and Anouilh played on the ironies involved in their modern restylings of Greek fictions to create initial shock and deliver topical messages.

The decline of classical education in the post-war period threatens to impoverish literary communication, but classical literature remains a potent resource. In 1964-5 Barthes had good cause to entitle his seminar on classical rhetoric an ‘aidemémoire’, yet since then the most seminal development in literary theory has been the recovery and reassessment of ancient and Renaissance rhetoric. Classical influences are still present in French literature, but they are harder to uncover. The favourite textual metaphors of modern writers (Foucault, Pinget, Butor) are excavation, commentary, palimpsest.

[Ann Moss]

Bibliography

• J. Seznec, La Survivance des dieux antiques (1940, 2nd edn. 1981)
• R. R. Bolgar, The Classical Heritage and its Beneficiaries: From the Carolingian Age to the End of the Renaissance (1954)
• T. M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (1982)