Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/267

Rh a poetic style distinct in diction and idiom from the language of every day. Malherbe bluntly declared that for poetry, as for prose, the only rule was "proper words in proper places," and that the arbiter of propriety was usage. The "'crocheteurs du port au Foin' were," he said, "his masters in language." Racan reports the saying and Régnier ridicules the doctrine; but both in practice and theory Malherbe admitted the restraining principle of elegance. It was not the usage of the street but of the court which was his norm. Many of Malherbe's other rules, especially his prosody, are an expression of that spirit of order which was soon to become dominant in France, and which already took the form of reverence for rule as rule, which is its greatest vice—the introduction into literary art of the spirit of social etiquette.

To recommend his reforms Malherbe's poetry had, besides correctness, as its most positive excellence, a rich and sonorous versification. The famous lines in the Consolation à Monsieur du Périer sur la Mort de sa Fille—

"Et, rose, elle a vécu ce que vivent les roses,              L'espace d'un matin"—

are the most poetical Malherbe ever wrote. The thought even of his finest laureate poems is commonplace if quite appropriate so far as it goes. One feels that each ode was probably drafted in prose before being elaborated in sonorous verse; for the splendour of the verse is the redeeming