Amphion Orator. Michael Taormina

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СКАЧАТЬ as quasi-divine heroes commanding the ship of stateship of state and steering it through the storms of political discord to a new Golden AgeGolden Age, where peace, justicevirtuejustice, and prosperity at home are matched by French hegemony abroad. The major odes in the sequence are well over a hundred lines, and they were, by all accounts, difficult to write and long in the making. Odes were often an easy way to make a splash in the literary world, but Malherbe did not write them simply to get noticed. Rather, the odes themselves, here and there, suggest that they aspire to outdo not just contemporary rivals but ancient models as well. Indeed, and this is the third point, their public occasions, their royal addressees, and their illustrious association with HoraceHorace and Pindar (two of the great models of eloquenceeloquence handed down from antiquity) make the odes a privileged vehicle for the demonstration of la grande éloquence [the grandstylegrand style], the most elevated and powerful genus dicendi [kind of speaking]. This style was so prized by both ancients and early moderns, it was endlessly reinvented by them. Malherbe’s own formulation of the grandstylegrand style would certainly have been credited to the poet’s genius, but showing off the potentialities of the French language would have been even more valuable to the fledgling Bourbon dynasty. The vernacular brought to the height of esthetic perfection in poetry offered an image of the political and moral excellence, and therefore the permanence, to which the French monarchy aspired. Malherbe’s odes strove to set the standard for royaleloquenceroyal eloquenceeloquence in a political and cultural climate where the exact formulation of the style best suited to royal majesty was passionately disputed. 16

      What is more, the royal odes’ attempt to erect a linguistic norm perceived as the perfection of the French language accords with their ambition to foster nationnational coherence and unity. FumaroliFumaroli, Marc justly sees Malherbe’s role at the Bourbon courtcourt (royal) as “the magistrate of the royal language, dictating its grammatical, lexical, and rhetorical use, and crystallizing its laws in the example of his verse” (FumaroliFumaroli, Marc, Précis 95). What FumaroliFumaroli, Marc calls “the only true mission of the poet,” namely “to accord the language with royal grandstylegrandeur” (FumaroliFumaroli, Marc, Précis 95), simultaneously serves the ambition to unite the French nationnation. In La conscience nationale en France pendant les guerres de religion, Myriam YardeniYardeni, Myriam stresses that the French language was a crucial vector of national consciousnessnationnational consciousness: “the language was seen as a basic element of one’s love of country [patrienationla patrie]. Any effort that aimed at its diffusion, its implantation, or its embellishment becomes an act of patriotismpatriotism. This sentiment is not limited to the narrow milieu of the educated and extends far beyond the ivory-tower patriotismpatriotism of scholars and poets. All understand that the language is their national heritage [patrimoine]” (YardeniYardeni, Myriam 43). Malherbe’s proverbial obsession with purity of diction, grammatical correctness, and polished sonorousness, criteria borrowed from CiceroCiceronian AtticismCiceroAtticism (CiceroCicero, De OrCiceroDe Oratore. 3.38. 53-54; BrutusCiceroBrutus 252; OratorCiceroOrator 24-25), parlays the perceived universality of the Tullianus stylus [CiceroCiceronian style] into a national language that seeks to transcend dialects of region, caste, and profession.17

      By far the most compelling reason to reexamine the royal odes, however, is to retrieve their impassioned patriotismpatriotism. To anyone familiar with the prosodic and philological niggling that still surrounds Malherbe’s poetry, the focus on patriotic sentimentpatriotismpatriotic feeling, fervor, sentiment should be a welcome breath of fresh air. Close inspection of the odes invariably reveals a speaker who raises up his voice at a crucial political juncture. The future of France always seems to hang in the balance, and the general welfarecommonwealthgeneral welfare of the nationnation rides on his utterance. Such public and political speech grew out of the political turmoil that prevailed during the Wars of ReligionWars of Religion. “Deliberativeeloquencedeliberative, that is, politicalpolitical eloquenceeloquence,” writes FumaroliFumaroli, Marc, “crept through the whole kingdom, no longer in its discreet form, appropriate to the spirit of courtcourt (royal), or the ‘Council of the Prince,’ but as public harangues in the ‘republican’ style which could claim direct descent from CiceroCicero and Demosthenes” (FumaroliFumaroli, Marc, L’Âge 492). “In the midst of a civil war recalling the Rome of CiceroCicero, CaesarCaesar, Octavian, and Antony, the clergy and the magistracy, by turns, shifted toward a deliberativeeloquencedeliberative eloquenceeloquence foreign to the character and the tradition of the French monarchy” (FumaroliFumaroli, Marc, L’Âge 493). A vigorous pamphlet literature amplified these orations, publicizing the competing ideological claims of ProtestantProtestants and Catholics and politicizing the rhetorical climate. When Henri IV acceded to the throne and politicalpolitical eloquence was no longer welcome, epideicticeloquenceepideictic oratory took up the slack (FumaroliFumaroli, Marc, L’Âge 238). As orators and poets competed “to remake and to perfect national unitynationnational unity around the king, and to secure a dearly won peace” (Chauveau 63), “the art of royal praise became the crucible of a literary language transcending provincial particularisms and caste idioms. Remaining the privileged route for poets to obtain honors, titles, pensions or commissions, this prime vector of literary change between 1600 and 1630 mingled eloquenceeloquence and poetry” (FumaroliFumaroli, Marc, Précis 98). Catapulted to the forefront of emerging literary trends, encomiasticencomiumencomiastic poetry poetry became a natural outlet for the expression of political aspirations.

      Jacques Morel has documented the poetic climate of Malherbe’s early years, finding almost identical rhetorical strategies and political imagery in the work of Bertaut, Du PerronDu Perron, Laugier de Porchères, Rosset, and Vauquelin des Yveteaux. Malherbe shares their use of a current event as a pretext for praising the virtues of Henri IV, their recourse to amplification, their heroic idealization of the king, and their occasional remonstration (Morel, “Henri IV et ses poètes” 214). But Malherbe sets himself apart from this crowded field in several important ways. First, if it need be said, Malherbe distills and clarifies the poetic tendencies of his contemporaries. He does what they do, only better. The prominence given to Malherbe’s poetry in Toussaint du Bray’s anthologies suggests the dominant reputation for eloquenceeloquence that Malherbe enjoyed in poetic circles, while the poet’s love letters and letters of consolation were coveted models of epistolary eloquenceeloquence.18 In Le Secrétaire de la Cour (1625), dedicated to Malherbe, Puget de La Serre declared: “you are the most eloquent of men” (ctd. in Winegarten, p. 18).

      Second, building on Ronsard’s ennoblement of poetry in the 1550 Odes and the political engagement of Les Discours (1560-1584), Malherbe’s royal odes boldly chart a new political course. The kingdom’s leading orators preserved, even cultivated, a sacerdotal aura (FumaroliFumaroli, Marc, L’Âge 489), and this includes a royal magistrate like Guillaume Du VairDu Vair, one of Malherbe’s early mentors. However, despite typical commonplaces invoking Apollo, the Malherbian speaker is less a prophet than a statesman. The reimagination of the national communitynationnational community in the royal odes depends on the construction of a primarily civic relation between the poet and the reader as the crucial step toward reestablishing trust among subjects of the French king. That is why the notion of ethosethos, both moral and rhetorical, is so important. It is not simply a tool of persuasion; rather, its power to produce trust in an audience makes it a cornerstone of political community. The royal odes define it neither by poetic inspiration, nor by some transcendent link to God, but by practical reasonphronēsispractical reason (phronēsisphronēsis), the moral virtuevirtues and, paradoxically, superior craftcraftsmanship. This latter is not as formalist as it might at first appear. If we understand craftcraft to mean artistic persuasion, induced by argument or style, then it has a causal relationship with eunoia [goodwill]ethoseunoia (goodwill), a quality perceived in the speaker but obtained through the production of pleasure and emotionemotion in the audience (GarverGarver, Eugene 110; AristotleAristotle, Rhet.AristotleRhetoric 2.1.5). In the royal odes, feelings of wonderwonder produced by elevated diction, metaphormetaphor, hyperbole, significatiofigures of thoughtsignificatio [suggestion, significatiofigures of thoughtallusion], emphasisfigures of thoughtemphasis [hinting], ratiocinatiofigures of thoughtratiocinatio [inference], etc., and the pleasure afforded by figures of speech, smooth СКАЧАТЬ