'FRENCH LIGHT AND ENGLISH GLOOM.*

Wu have borrowed the title from one of. Mr. Sidney Lee's chapters for the heading of our article upon his most interesting, persuasive, and invaluable book. Like all his work, this volume is thorough and convincing ; and, in addition to these sound qualities, it is lit up by a fine glow of • .2%. Prrnch itinaiNatice in Bniliceed. By Sidney Lee. Oiford: at the scholarship, which is cominnnicated to the reader.. It is • to study these. eloquent and learned pages without acquiring or increasing a zeal for literature -and an enthusiasm for everything that is understood by the term "Renaissance" It used to be thought, too superficially, that England owed everything connected with the Nevi Learning to Italy; that Italian influences prevailed, not only extensively, but excla- , sively, over English culture in the sixteenth century. So.. much so, that the " Italianated Englishman " became . a proverb, Usually for what was bad, or at any rate unpopular..' And it was a commonplace of our text-books on literature, which one compiler re-echoed from another, that French influences only came in with the Restoration, that Dryden- and Pope were understudies of Boileau, and that Our eighteenth Century was an imitation of the Grand Sibele.,;; just as the courts and palaces of all other European Monarchs were intended to be copies of Versailles. Such were the•

. current and superficial views which Mr. Sidney Lee has scattered to' the winds, so far as the sixteenth century is concerned..

The debts of our modern civilisation to Italy can hardly be and England his her full share of them. The' earliest disciples of the New Learning in England, Colet: especially, were inspired directly in Italy, As Chaucer had- been during our abortive Renaissance in the fourteenth' . century; but Mr. Lee's thesis, and he proves it .abundantly,.,_ is that later Renaissance influences of every kind came to ne- through France. He 'describes France, in a happy phrase; as "the agent-general for European culture," and he attributes to the French Renaissance an "active and living 'faith in light and motion'" which not only filled and inspired the French themaelves, but overflowed into duller and more back; ward countries: -Among these 'assuredly' was England at the: close of the fifteenth 'century, and our ancestors in the follow- . ing age. "owed the graces of life to foreign influence, and chiefly to the influence of France." English barbarism, he adds, "is a commonplace in foreign literature," and; allowing" for someexaggeratiOn, the charge is true. "It finds an echo. in Shakespeare's Henry V., where the French officers taunt' the English, not only with excessive devotion to great meals- of beef, but with deficiency in intellectual armour" (Henry III. lir., 158-64 " Sidney Lee has a strong ease, but he does not overstate' it, our are other element's besides France in the structure, of Oar civilisation, and he makes every allowance for them

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"France was only one of the countries whose influence helped to east the nativity '`of Tudor culture: TVere were 'many Otter: Influences at work—classical influences, Italian and Spanish influ=- ences,.and in the sphere of scholarship, art, and theology. German and Flemish influences, Rome, Rhine, Rhone, Greece, Spain, and, Italy,' all-plead for recognition : yet," he goes on to say, "French, culture has a bearing on the development of Tudor culture which neither the classics, nor Italian art and literature, nor German art., and literature can on a broad survey be said to equal." • • French culture affected us in every branch of seholarship and progress, in both of which we were miserably deficient: With printing, Caxton was late in the field, besides being-'. scanty in production, limited in range, and unprovided with,. native authors or material. England can show nothing like- the great hutaanist printers in France, who were themselvea both writers and scholars, among whom the Etienne family is

conspicuous. The single work of genius attributed to an. Engliehman in the early sixteenth century was written abroad:

and in Latin: More's Utopia was appreciated instantly ink., France, while it was ignored in- England. It was traiiskted"

into French before it was turned into English, and it was probably the French 'rendering' that introthiced it to the

general public The first-edition bf the Utopia was`' printed at Louvain, " with the commendations of foreigie.butb. of no English, scholitre-i= "To Budaeus's generous preface the work chiefly owed its Con.. tinental vogue. Edition bfter edition in the brig:ilia Latin came from the Qontinrental .presses.- No English printer handled the' Latin text till the Oxford Fr_tss prodnced an edition in 1663,, nearly 150 years after its first publication."

This is a flagrant example of what Mr. Sidney Lee has proved, and it is typical of his whole demonstration. Everything- intellectual and learned came to us throngh France, either actually in French or in translations which were made from:

the -French; and not from• the original's : all -the Greek and . Latin classics; and all the' great productions of Renaissancl.

Europe; even the single one which is thought to have been contributed to the general stock by an Englishman.

For it is not merely the language and the text of the Utopia that are in question

" More's Utopia came into being as a contribution to European rather than to English literature. The greater part of it was

enned in a foreign country. It was developed after the great Dutch apostle of humanism had delivered his message to its author. In no other work from an English pen is the effect of Erasmus's airy insight, playful sarcasm, and enlightened humanity more clearly visible?'

We welcome this suggestion cordially, because we have long wondered how much of the Utopia was inspired by Erasmus, and how little is due in reality to More. In tane and touch, in spirit and sentiment, it agrees entirely with the Colloquies and The Praise of Folly ; indeed, with everything else that Erasmus preached and practised ; while it has much less

resemblance 'to More's undoubted writings, and it is miserably outraged, by sore of his practice, which might indeed be explained plausibly in another man, but which cannot possibly be excused in Sir Thomas More, if the standards and sentiments of the Utopia be really his own. We must, how- ever, turn away from this interesting problem and pass on to other subjects connected with Mr. Sidney Lee's inquiry.

It might almost be imagined, from the way in which the matter has been treated, that the English people had annexed the Bible among their other discoveries and raids in the six- teenth century. Indeed, the language of some fervid writers could only be justified if the Bible had fallen from the sky, -without any pedigree, like Melchisedek, printed, bound in morocco, with gilt edges and metal clasps, and in the English of the Authorised Version. We are certainly too forgetful of Wyclif's naïve and charming translation, and not half grateful enough to Tyndale; but Mr. Lee reminds us that "France was very early in the field of biblical translation " ; that a French version " was a hundred years older " than the rendering of Wyclif ; that the New Testament from this version was printed at Lyons in 1477, and the whole Bible at Paris in 1487. This was followed by Lefevre's version, which was printed in 1530, and five years later Olivetan's rival Huguenot version was published. Both Tyndale and Cover- dale worked and printed abroad. Matthew's Bible, which united and supplemented their joint work, was published at Antwerp in 1537 ; and The Great Bible itself, the first English official version, was printed at Paris in 1539-40 : "a specimen of fine Parisian typography." And all these English render. ings were indebted, heavily and manifestly, to the earlier French translators.

Mr. Lee pays a just and eloquent tribute to the culture and humanism of the French Huguenots. He shows that :intellectual and educational reform led irresistibly to ecclesiastical reform ; and there is a long catalogue of great French scholars who were connected with the Pro- testant movement; and this connexion was not limited to scholarship. "Palissy the potter, Goujon the sculptor, Goudimel the musician, Remus the lagician, the Etiermes the scholar-printers, Scaliger the Greek critic, were all frank in their avowal of Huguenot or Reformation sympathies." Above all, Mr. Lee is interesting in his homage to Calvin. Whatever Calvinists may have been, or may be now, Calvin himself was a fine humanist and scholar :—

" He rendered French humanism the immense service of first investing French prose with a definitely logical precision. . . . Calvin was austerely purging French prose of the old-fashioned cloudiness of thought and phraseology, and was steadily seeking a logical precision of utterance, which should initiate a style of vernacular writing.new not only to France but to Europe."

And Calvin's Institution Chrectienne is described finely as a philosophic and practical recognition of God's will as the sole director and controller of man's life." Moreover, English Protestantism owes more to Calvin than to Luther. Our Reformation was French, and not Germanic, in its models and inspirations.

Mr. Lee is even more fascinating when he discusses Cl6ment Marot, Ronsard and the Pleriade, Montaigne, and Amyot. Of all these he presents a splendid and living gallery of portraits ' among -which it is good to "linger and profitable to live. In some ways the accounts of L'Hopital and Remus are almost more inspiring, both in contrast with their battling century and as presenting_ ideals of which our own time still falls short. But we must leave them all, merely quoting Amyot's advice about good writing and translating Take heed' and find the words that are fittest to signify the thing of which we mean to speak, choose words which seem the pleasantest, which sound best in our ears, which are customary in the mouths of good talkers, which are honest natives and no foreigners."

Amyot, through North, presented Greek and Roman biography to Englishmen, and not least to Shakespeare. The latter is almost a monopoly of Mr. Sidney Lee, and we will not trespass on his preserves by attempting to summarise what he says. Our readers must go to his book, and they will be well rewarded. In a learned dissertation about poetry and the drama he proves in minute detail how much has been borrowed from the French. Even the phraseology of Shake- speare's sonnets is part of the common stock. This point, which is proved up to the hilt, disposes of many wild and more than dubious theories about the sonnets themselves. The debt of all our Elizabethans to French translators demolishes many of those assertions about Shakespeare's classical learning which figure so largely in the unscholarly writings of the Baconians. But none of the resemblances to, or the borrowings from, earlier French plays explain either that "heavenly alchemy" or that magic English with which Shakespeare and the other " golden-mouthed " Elizabethans have transfused their borrowed material.

There are but few blemishes in Mr. Sidney Lee's volume. The last Medici was not Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino, Michel. angelo's Pensieroso, though be was the last male descendant of the elder line. Really the last Medici was the Electress, sister of John Gaston, who was visited, and is described, by Gray, during his tour with Horace Walpole. " Chateaus " is surely a bad usage. Let us have either châteaux or castles. It is disputable, especially by Wykehamists, that " England gave birth to no architect of genius before the rise of Inigo Jones." St. George's Channel, we have always thought, divides South Wales from Ireland, not England from France. And we think that Mr. Sidney Lee has not read either the latest historians or all the available documents, which go very far towards clearing Catherine de' Medici from the charges which he makes against her.