Amphion Orator. Michael Taormina

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СКАЧАТЬ with her ancestors’ ideal that governments and powerful persons should patronize artists and humanists,” would probably have dispensed more royal pensions and commissions (Baumgartner 293). With the return of peace in 1598, the crown and political elites could contemplate a return to the traditional arrangements of literary patronage.

      What was unusual, therefore, about Henri IV’s accession was that it marked the end-game to a long and devastating civil war. In the early years of the seventeenth century, Henri IV enjoyed, if not a monopoly over literary patronage, then an unusually broad outpouring of goodwill. Despite isolated Huguenot and LeagueLeaguer opposition, “a kind of unanimity had formed around the idea of celebrating the return to order and peace symbolized by Henri IV” (Chauveau 67). Such strong support for the crown would not be seen again until after the Fronde. If the public and political thrust of the royal odes makes them outliers in the undeniable march toward “the expansion of two parallel realms of personalized discourse: private conversation and secret political counsel” (Shoemaker 22), it is almost certainly because Malherbe was a contemporary of Henri IV and grew up under the same dark clouds of civil conflict. In addition, placed in the clientele of BellegardeBellegarde, Roger de Saint-Lary de Termes, seigneur de, he was invited to stay at courtcourt (royal) when literary patronage had only just recovered and encomiasticencomiumencomiastic poetry speech-making had only just supplanted politicalpolitical oratory. While the outward form of the royal odes—the encomiumencomium—is adapted to the epideicticeloquenceepideictic rhetorical climate instituted by Henri IV in 1603, their impassioned patriotismpatriotism recalls the stirring pleas of royalist pamphlets published in the 1580s and 1590s. Indeed, the eventual divergence of discourse into two personalized realms, reinforced by the vigorous rebirth of patronage culture, may well have doomed the odes to a reception not on their own terms.

      Shoemaker rightly insists that all patronage texts—and this includes Malherbe’s royal odes—exhibit a particularistic rhetoric. “This rhetoric was necessarily ad hominem in that the success or failure of a given performance was not a function of swaying the opinions of a broad public, but rather of seducing a single individual” (Shoemaker 23). This observation, while true on its face, requires some qualification in Malherbe’s case. For instance, Malherbe’s first ode, “À la Reine sur sa bienvenue en France” (1600; 1601), which he read aloud at Marie’s reception in Aix, seems to have gone unnoticed by both Marie and Henri. It was Henri’s de facto poet laureate and close friend, Cardinal Du PerronDu Perron, who noticed and recommended Malherbe to the king in 1601, calling him “the best poet in the kingdom” (Adam, Histoire 27). In 1605, Malherbe travelled to Paris in the entourage of his mentor, the Président Du VairDu Vair, and quite unexpectedly received a commission from Henri to compose an ode on the occasion of his imminent campaign in the Limousin—which Malherbe accepted and, upon the king’s return, presented him with “Prière pour le Roi allant en Limousin” (1605; 1607). Clearly, if Malherbe had not succeeded in fitting the ode to his prospective patron, and if the ode had not made a favorable impression on the soldier-king—despite his alleged untutored tastes and loathing for scholars (FumaroliFumaroli, Marc L’Âge 522)—Henri would not have placed Malherbe in the clientele of BellegardeBellegarde, Roger de Saint-Lary de Termes, seigneur de. But it was the educated humanists at courtcourt (royal), Du PerronDu Perron and Du VairDu Vair, who had a high opinion of Malherbe’s poetry and who prepared the poet’s positive reception by the king.

      With respect to Malherbe’s royal odes, therefore, several caveats must qualify Shoemaker’s “audience of one.” First, Henri IV was in no way qualified to make critical judgments about the quality of Malherbe’s poetry. This was not unusual. The Valois kings were known for their generous patronage of literature and the arts, but neither François I nor Henri II were educated beyond what one would expect of a nobleman of the time. Henri III, it is true, tutored by Pontus de Tyard and Budé, had a broad and deep foundation in classical learning. He created the Académie du Palais, a coterie of poets and scholars devoted to cultivating French eloquenceeloquence, and did not hesitate to harangue ParlementParlement in 1586 (FumaroliFumaroli, Marc, L’Âge 494). The arrival of Henri IV at the Louvre, however, did not bode well for belles-lettres, destroying the “literary bridges” that had been erected between “the elite of the erudite Robenobilityof the robe” and “the high nobilitynobility orbiting around the king” (FumaroliFumaroli, Marc, L’Âge 521). Du VairDu Vair and Du PerronDu Perron (and Malherbe, too) lamented “the pretentious and courtly taste of belated rhetoriqueurs” which the Gascons had brought to the Louvre from the courtcourt (royal) of Nérac (FumaroliFumaroli, Marc, L’Âge 521). Add to this the fashionable Italian and Spanish influences in poetry, courtcourt (royal) spectacle, and humanist scholarship that arrived with Marie de Médicis, and the French courtcourt (royal) in the early years of the seventeenth century became a veritable “dialectical crossroads” without its own language or style (FumaroliFumaroli, Marc, L’Âge 522). In such circumstances, how much could a poet really expect from a patron like Henri IV? Even if the monarch had the last word about engaging the services of writers and poets, his opinion and taste were bound to be influenced by such “experts” as Du VairDu Vair and Du PerronDu Perron—who indeed intervened on Malherbe’s behalf. To Henri’s credit, he listened, and hired Malherbe to shore up his public imageimagepublic image.

      The second caveat is that, even if “the ideal of the orator necessarily became entangled with royal patronage” (Shoemaker 20), the royal courtroyal court was not the only, nor even the most important, social space where eloquenceeloquence was practiced. As Marc FumaroliFumaroli, Marc shows in L’Âge de l’éloquence, the vying of orators to outdo one another in praise of Henri IV was more than a personal competition. It was a competition of caste to determine whether the pulpitpulpit, the ParlementParlement, or the courtcourt (royal) would constitute the epicenter of royaleloquenceroyal eloquenceeloquence. The markedly different rhetorical practices, social and political values, esthetic preferences, and levels of education that characterized these social spaces created a complex dynamic in which distinct conceptions of eloquenceeloquence competed for dominance. To compose, and then to publish, an encomiasticencomiumencomiastic poetry ode for the monarch was to take up the gauntlet in this fierce contest and to challenge all other claimants to the mantle of royaleloquenceroyal eloquenceeloquence. Malherbe’s bid for Henri’s patronage was personal, certainly, as it concerned Malherbe’s employment and it was Henri’s decision to make, but it was public to the extent that the ode as finished product implied the endorsement or the negation of rhetorical positions staked out by other contenders in the nascent French Republic of Letters.

      Third, all rhetoric is particularistic. Whether in public oratory or private conversation, the principle of decorum says that the speaker must adapt himself and his discourse to the particulars of the occasion: time, place, and persons (EdenEden, Kathy, Hermeneutics 26; AristotleAristotle, Rhet.AristotleRhetoric 3.7.1-11; CiceroCicero, De Or.CiceroDe Oratore 3.210-211, OratorCiceroOrator 70-71, 123; QuintilianQuintilian 8.3.11-13). In rhetorical theory, a speech is not less particularistic for being addressed to a broad public. Its arguments and style are more skiagraphic, that is, less polished, rougher (AristotleAristotle, Rhet.AristotleRhetoric 3.12.5; ShugerShuger, Debora K. 15). To be effective, however, it must still succeed in presenting the speaker in terms familiar to the audience. He must appear to be one of them, which is achieved by adapting himself and his discourse to their concerns and values (Rhet.AristotleRhetoric 1.2.4 & 1.8.5). This close familiarity is the function of ethosethos, characterethoscharacter portrayed in and through discourse. Ethosethos is the sort of rhetorical tool that allows a speaker to adapt his own characterethoscharacter to a composite audience or to an individual.

      A rather vague concept in modern parlance, ethosethos is a word of Greek origin, with a long and complex history in politics, ethics, and rhetoric.2 In these pages its primary meaning is “characterethoscharacter” or “kind of person,” with the understanding that the group always already informs the individual. That is to say, an individual’s distinguishing habits, attitudes, beliefs, values, and tastes are to a large extent determined by the social group (or groups) to which he or she belongs (or would like to belong). According to AristotleAristotle, СКАЧАТЬ