François de Malherbe

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The French poet François de Malherbe (1555-1628), although not a great poet, succeeded through his works and teaching in assuring the acceptance of basic reforms in French poetry.

François de Malherbe was born at or near Caen. His education took him to Paris, Basel, and Heidelberg. In 1577 he became attached to Henri d'Angoulême, soon to be named governor of Provence. Malherbe remained his secretary until Henri was assassinated in 1586. Of the poet's compositions during this period little of note remains except the Larmes de Saint Pierre, a long poem inspired by the Italian Luigi Tansillo. The work is of interest because of its bombast and its exaggerated images-not uncommon practices in that day but elements that Malherbe would come to censure in others. He completely disavowed the Larmes in later life.

Between 1586 and 1605 Malherbe lived first in Caen and then (1595) returned to Provence. His reputation was growing. The ode written in 1600 to welcome France's new queen, Marie de Médicis, proved decisive for his future. The influential Cardinal Du Perron liked the poem; and when, in 1605, Malherbe went to Paris, it was to profit at last from the prestige he had won with his ode.

Malherbe's reform should be neither over-nor underestimated. Quite independent of Malherbe many French poets in the last quarter of the 16th century, including Pierre de Ronsard, had begun to avoid hiatus and to temper the humanists' use of neologisms, archaisms, erudition, and mythology. Malherbe himself, even in his most mature poems, was not so circumspect as he expected others to be. At the same time, these facts only point out the main source of Malherbe's influence: his dogmatism. Uncompromising in his criticism, he was determined to show that such tendencies away from the excesses of 16th-century verse had to be treated as rules. He succeeded and completed a significant step in France's evolution toward classicism.

Mannered love poems, consolations in the Stoic vein, translations from the Psalms, and encomiastic pièces de circonstance account for Malherbe's best-known works. He strived in the relatively small number of poems he wrote for a distinctive clarity through careful organization, correct syntax, and above all intelligible vocabulary and imagery.

Malherbe knew greatest favor during the regency of Marie de Médicis (1610-1617). His last years were marked by the death of his son in a duel and a decline in poetic production. He died in Paris on Oct. 16, 1628.

Further Reading

The definitive studies on Malherbe to date are in French. An excellent description of the milieu in which he wrote is in Renée Winegarten, French Lyric Poetry in the Age of Malherbe (1954).

Malherbe, François de (1555-1628), reformer of French poetry, was born at Caen, and studied at Basle and Heidelberg. Converted to Catholicism, he went to Aix-en-Provence as secretary to the governor, Henri d'Angoulême; he spent the years 1577-86 and 1595-1605 in Provence, the intervening years in Caen. In 1587 he presented to Henri III ‘Les Larmes de Saint Pierre’, a florid, manneristic poem which he later excluded from the canon of his work. In 1600 he recited his ‘Ode à la reine sur sa bienvenue en France’ at the reception given to Marie de Médicis in Aix; on the strength of this poem, Du Perron drew Henri IV's attention to Malherbe's talent in the courtly heroic vein. Not until 1605, however, was he attached to the court, and, although his position as official poet continued unchallenged during the regency and under Louis XIII, wealth never came his way.

Malherbe's ‘doctrine’—imparted at seminars held in his lodgings—can be reconstituted, chiefly from his caustic annotations on the poetry of Desportes. He demands at the outset coherence and clarity of thought, then a careful adequation of expression to substance, an evenness of tension such that the reader is neither puzzled by complication nor defrauded by superfluity of words. This rhetorical basis is to be complemented by observance of current polite usage. Nor is it enough to avoid cacophony: hiatus and enjambement are proscribed, the caesura must be regular, rhyme must be exact, rich when possible, and facile matchings avoided. The same distrust of facility led Malherbe in his own work (understandably limited in quantity) to avoid long sequences of alexandrines in favour of stanzaic forms, in which he sought above all to adapt the sentence-structure rhythmically to the metre.

Boileau later wrote in his Art poétique: ‘Enfin Malherbe vint.’ Malherbe's ‘reform’, with its insistence on craftsmanship, was in fact the culmination of a process begun long before him. None the less, by sheer impact of personality he gave form and force to what had been only a trend, and the new orthodoxy thus set up proved all the more enduring through its coincidence with a certain stabilization of the French language. Not until the 1620s, though, was his pre-eminence assured, particularly with the publication of the Recueil des plus beaux vers des poètes de ce temps (1627), containing mainly poems of his own or by his acknowledged disciples.

His emphasis on reason and usage made of Malherbe a ‘modern’, and he was brusquely dismissive of Pléiade humanism. Ronsard came to seem aberrant, with his creative freedom and his ambition to bridge the gap between his own world and that of the Greeks. The imprint of Rome, on the other hand, remained indelible on two traditions very influential in Malherbe's time: rhetoric and Neostoic philosophy. His conception of high poetry is essentially rhetorical, and his outlook on life basically Stoic (he translated several works of Seneca). The well-known ‘Consolation à M. du Périer’ argues from the impermanence of life and the demoralizing effect of sentimentality (as distinct from natural feeling) towards a rational assent to the divinely willed order of nature, and a resolution to turn necessity into virtue.

As court poet, Malherbe could not but lend his talent on occasion to furthering the amorous designs of Henri IV among others. But when the monarch is perceived not merely in baroque fashion as a demigod, but as the God-given saviour of a sorely troubled nation, a vein of genuinely patriotic poetry, pro bono publico, opens up. From this angle, Malherbe appears in retrospect as Ronsard's heir in spirit, and even to some extent in form (with his revival of the ten-line lyrical strophe). In the handful of poems he wrote in this vein, of which the ‘Prière pour le roi allant en Limousin’ (1605) is the most impressive, Malherbe reaches the height of his eloquence, drawing on classical, but especially on Old Testament, material to strike a resounding prophetic note.

In another late poem he memorably develops the opening verses of Psalm 145 into a disenchanted dismissal of the vanity of the world, royalty and all. At heart, despite his notorious gruffness and mordant wit, Malherbe was a vulnerable man, as his correspondence reveals, particularly his letter to his wife on the death of their daughter in 1591.

— Alan Steele

Bibliography

• R. Fromilhague, Malherbe: technique et création poétique, and La Vie de Malherbe, 1555-1610 (1954)