Litterature et Politesse: L'Invention de l'Honnete Homme 1580-1750

Abstract

Reviewed by: Littérature et politesse. L’Invention de l’honnête homme 1580–1750 Robert Mankin Emmanuel Bury, Littérature et politesse. L’Invention de l’honnête homme 1580–1750. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1996. 268 pages. Specialists of seventeenth-century French writing will find Bury’s book a rich development of themes discussed in the works of Marc Fumaroli. In particular, Fumaroli’s masterful L’Age de l’Eloquence is subtitled Rhétorique et “res literaria” de la Renaissance au seuil de l’époque classique; and Bury purposes to lead us over the threshold. His argument, very briefly, holds that rhetoric’s combined practice of aesthetics and morality informs both new conceptions of literature and of an ideal human agent, the “honnête homme.” The latter counts as one of the early vernacular figures in the new world of learning, and its invention is accompanied by universal aspirations. For a variety of reasons, however, this move into the seventeenth century turns out not to be an easy step to take. In part, the humanist model begins to break down or suffer complications. What Bury repeatedly calls “glissements,” evolutionary shifts or slippages away from the original model, are seen to occur. If the “honnête homme” is literature’s creature (127), its double, they undergo increasingly separate fates. By the time of Louis XIV, and the rise of a new ideal of “gentilhomme,” the claim will be made that the “honnête homme” has lost any class specificity (178) whereas the horizons of literature will be more defined than ever. In addition, Bury himself apprehends a more formi-dable threshold as the eighteenth century opens: the rise of sentiment-based philosophy, authors willing to identify themselves as such (the philosophes), and at least one virulent case of writing which sets personalized ingenium above universal memoria and social mores. The reference is to Rousseau. Alongside commentary on major authors from Montaigne to La Bruyère, and erudite presentations of lesser figures like Honoré d’Urfé and Madeleine de Scudéry, Nicolas Faret and the abbé Jean Pic, what specialists may also discover in this book is oddly akin to the experience of a more general readership. For some of the difficulties of approaching seventeenth-century French literature are well known to all English speakers. Despite the fact that the period has attracted some of our best literary translators (Wilbur, Lowell and others), it is probably fair to say we know the period less through its works than through our cultural and linguistic difficulties with it. English is impermeable to nothing French so much as the key concepts in vogue at the time of Richelieu and Louis XIV. We have never been able to translate, and probably admit, the “honnête homme,” the world of “belles lettres,” and the controversial social functions of the “salon,” “les précieuses,” the “grand monde” and the “mondain.” Paul Bénichou may well have spent much of his career at Harvard: the lapidary title of his great work, Morales du Grand Siècle, is honorably parsed but poorly rendered into English as Man and Ethics: Studies in French Classicism. One of the interests of Bury’s work may be to shed light on our inability to say “The Grand Century.” His study of the “honnête homme” becomes, as he [End Page 1206] recognizes, a work about “translittération,” the evolution or incorporation into French culture of humanist ideas which originally derived from the Italian rediscovery of Greek and Roman letters. The translatio studii, the transcoding or conversion of ancient and Italian letters into the highly varied spheres of French writing, involves a literal translation. As one “modern” complains, in reference to the earlier part of the century: “Quand on ouvre un livre de ce temps-là, on a de la peine à juger s’il est Latin, Grec, ou François, & laquelle de ces trois langues est le fond de l’ouvrage, que l’on a brodé des deux autres” (159). It is characteristic of much of the new learning that it must be translated, and translated well. And as Bury recognizes, the problem persists even today, though the goal is no longer...