Poetry & Patronage:
Neo-Latin Verse & the Making of a
Citizen of the
April G. Shelford, American University
Note to
the Reader: I presented this paper
at the March 2003 meeting of the Renaissance Society of America. It was an early go at presenting my research
on how the composition of poetry helped intellectuals create and consolidate
their networks in the Republic of Letters and how an aspiring young
intellectual like Huet could use poetry to advance both his intellectual career
and social prospects. I treat this topic
in much greater detail in my book, Apollo’s Children: Pierre-Daniel Huet and
the Transformation of the Republic of Letters in 17th-Century France
(under contract, University of Rochester Press).
Please do not cite or quote
without my permission.
Decades
later, Johannes Graevius (1632-1703) remembered well his first encounter with
the poetry of Pierre-Daniel Huet. In the
early 1650s, he’d gone to the Musaeum in
I begin with
Graevius’s account because it represents so well many aspects of the
intellectual world I’ll be discussing today.
Through Graevius’s eyes, we participate in a learned gathering, taking
the part of a young scholar aspiring to membership. We witness a typical activity – the
presentation of a Latin poem. We
experience, if only vicariously, an aesthetic and intellectual pleasure long
since disappeared from our scholarly culture.
We are present at the first stirrings toward a lifelong friendship,
precisely the kind of relationship that connected seventeenth-century scholars
in criss-crossing networks and that provided the emotional infrastructure of
the
There’s another
less obvious point – that is, long before Pierre-Daniel Huet had published any
of the erudite works for which he is best known today, he’d done much to establish
a reputation for scholarship largely on the basis of his Latin poetry. Huet has been a rewarding subject for
scholars working in a variety of fields because of his wide interests –
religious, literary, and scientific – and his engagement in many lively debates
– against Spinoza, against Descartes, against the Moderns. But his poetry is rarely noticed;[3]
nor has it been appreciated how, on those little feet, he travelled much of the
distance from
The story is interesting in itself, yet it has wider significance, too. Neo-Latin poetry had a higher profile even in French public life than we might expect during the second half of the seventeenth century, but it’s not drawn much scholarly attention.[4] But today I want to describe some aspects of how the composition and exchange of neo-Latin poetry functioned in the Republic of Letters; I also want to show how, through neo-Latin poetry, the interests of érudits like Huet and the French monarchy briefly converged in a royal propaganda program determined to present the regime as “Augustan.” First, I’ll indicate the general context in which Huet learned to compose Latin poetry; then I’ll trace the circulation pattern of a particular set of his poems in the early 1660s; finally, I’ll explore the politico-cultural significance that Huet’s poetry assumed in the context of royal cultural pretensions.
& & &
Huet’s first
exposure to Latin poetry came at the Jesuit collège
in Caen. Writing neo-Latin poetry
was a standard feature of secondary education everywhere in
In his
autobiography, Huet described how a violent desire to write Latin poetry seized
him in his youth,[9] and his
native
Huet wrote Latin poetry from his teens into his 80s, employing many forms and treating subjects ridiculous and sublime, from an enconium on tea-drinking to lyrics lamenting the decline in learning.[13] They record his interests in natural philosophy – chemistry, anatomy, and cosmology. [14] His poems reveal his gallantry, even flirtatiousness, characteristics absent from the image of the serious, scholarly bishop of his last decades.[15] Proud of his gifts, he wanted posterity to remember them — indeed, his poet’s vanity prompted a vernacular poet to accuse him of an egotism unworthy of a bishop.[16]
When Huet and his learned friends composed Latin poetry, they engaged in far more than school boys’ exercises. The ability to write it or even to savor its pleasures required the skills and discrimination of the humanist scholar. Poetry was a learned recreation, a game that only an intellectual elite could play as it self-consciously continued a tradition that had begun with the Ancients and which had been revived in the Renaissance. The poems that Huet and his friends wrote and exchanged were like so many boundary markers, delineating the tiny realm of the learned from that of the vulgar. Thus, however playful, even ribald some of Huet’s adult productions were, they always had the implicit, serious purpose of defining both an intellectual style, an ethos, and a community.[17]
The poems that Huet and others exchanged took on meanings beyond their explicit subjects. Precisely what a poem meant depended on the relationship — existing or desired — between the person giving and the person receiving. The exchange itself might initiate and define the terms of a relationship; it might continue and confirm them. Huet exchanged poems with former teachers; with individuals he taught; with peers and pals; with social superiors; with younger scholars; with scholars senior in achievement and prestige; and with prospective or established patrons. These categories are a bit too neat, of course. Patrons were also friends, for example, and teachers became friends. However friendly a relationship became, though, a certain inequality continued to characterize its tone, whether the source of that inequality was a difference in social or intellectual status. A poem frequently invited collaborative effort, as giver and recipient traded critical comments about optimal word choice or grammatical fine points. Poems communicated affection, and a particular verse might respond to the recipient’s current circumstances, such as a death in the family or overwork.[18] Laudatory poems prefaced an author’s work; a collection of poems signaled his passing and memorialized his life.[19]
In short, Huet and poets like him employed ancient literary forms and formulas, but they poured into those old and supple skins the new wine of shared delights and worries, both public and private.[20] Their poetic production circulated in larger or smaller fields of exchange, securing abstract benefits such as a sense of communal solidarity, affective benefits such as friendship, scholarly benefits such as assistance with a project, and indirect material benefits such as advantageous positioning for patronage.
& & &
To demonstrate some of these points, let me focus on the exchange of some particular poems during the early 1660s, an important moment in Huet’s career. The diagram I’ve handed out indicates the circulation of three poems over the space of about three to four years: An epistle, and two odes written for Louis XIV, one on the Peace of the Pyrenées and his marriage to a Spanish princess, indicated here as Marriage Ode, and a later ode urging Louis XIV to have poets memorialize his deeds, indicated here as the Athena Ode. It’s difficult to specify chronology in a diagram like this, so I’ve indicated in bold the dates of “first contact,” so to speak. We must keep in mind, too, that Huet and his friends were exchanging many other works, too. Finally, these are only the exchanges I’ve able to document so far; I suspect there were more.
I’ve divided the participants in this network into two main categories: 1) In the light gray boxes, friends of Huet who were acknowledged neo-Latin poets in their own right; 2) In the darker gray boxes, royal functionaries.
First, the friends:
Gilles Ménage
(1613-1692), seventeen years older than Huet, produced important scholarly
works such as an edition of Diogenes Laërtes; he was also very good friends
with influential women such as Madame de Lafayette, whom he tutored in Latin
with a little help from Huet. Huet
thought very well of the poetry of Charles du Perier (d. 1692), who composed a
laudatory poem as a preface to Huet’s short treatise on translation published
in 1661. The Jesuit René Rapin
(1621-1687) is far better known today for his anti-Jansenist writings, but he
was mostly known in Huet’s lifetime for works of literary criticism and the
widely celebrated and translated Hortorum
libri quattri. At this point,
though, he had only published some Latin poetry on religious themes and was
tutor to the sons of the president of the Parlement of Paris. These were the people whose “professional
opinions” Huet sought, and he and his friends frequently sought the opinions of
Moisant de Brieux’s
Now for the royal
functionaries: Jean Chapelain
(1595-1674) and Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619-1683). A member of the
Here we see that
Huet and Ménage exchanged critical comments on the Marriage Ode and the Epistle
in several letters from November 1659 into January 1660; Ménage frequently
included the criticisms of du Perier, too.
Ménage highly regarded both poems, and he was particularly moved that
Huet had dedicated the Epistle to
him. He also volunteered to oversee
publication of the ode, while Huet decided to print the Epistle at
By the end of
January, Huet had sent Ménage several copies of the printed Epistle; Ménage distributed many of them
as directed by Huet, and he also sent a few to scholarly friends in
Once his poems had been thoroughly vetted by his friends, once they’d been printed up, Huet himself sent copies of the Ode and the Epistle to Chapelain in March. Given the interconnections I’ve sketched out here, it’s not surprising that Chapelain had already seen them. In a letter thanking Huet, Chapelain reported that he and du Perier had “admired [the Ode] together, one stanza at a time, rejoicing that you continue to do honor to your virtue and to increase the realm of belles lettres with your works.”[24] If anything, he was even more enthusiastic about the Epistle, lavishing praise on it. In fact, Huet was a little disgruntled by Chapelain’s preference for the Epistle, writing to Ménage: “I worked very hard on the one, and amused myself with the other, and certainly it’s much more difficult to compose a good ode than a good epistle.”[25]
Despite a little
ruffled poetic vanity, Huet’s poems had succeeded brilliantly in securing the
approving attention of people who mattered.
Via slightly different routes Chapelain and Colbert would receive still
more poems in the years to come. Not
coincidentally, Huet figured on the list of candidates for royal gratifications
that Chapelain sent to Colbert in June 1663:
“There is in
& & &
When Huet’s
correspondents praised his poetry, they did so in conventional, if significant
terms. For example, Huet’s idyll had
gained high praise in
But another routine compliment that Huet received brings me to my third and final point today, the politico-cultural significance of Huet’s poetry at a particular moment in Louis XIV’s reign.
When Ménage received Huet’s Epistle, he also responded that “it most felicitously imitated Horace.”[29] Now the choice of Horace as a model would have come quite naturally to Huet. Horace was one of the models for Latin poesy, and he was very important in the development of French vernacular literature, too. Horace’s injunction that poetry should both delight and instruct had become cliché in the seventeenth century, but it was still a goal sincerely sought.[30] Knowledge of his poetry was widespread among the literate, even among women,[31] and scholars like Pierre Gassendi generously sprinkled their correspondence with allusions to his work.[32] Huet’s correspondence with his old teacher Mambrun shows a particular interest in Horace at one point, and, not surprisingly given Mambrun’s vocation, a particular concern with “Christianizing” the pagan aspects of his work.[33]
But Horace had a wider cultural significance as a model of the honnête homme. The terms Huet’s contemporaries used to describe the Roman poet savor of anachronism, but also speak to their social and cultural aspirations. Horace was one of the most honnête men of Antiquity; he was si galant and urbane; he possessed a charmante politesse and an esprit poli; his manner of communicating moral lessons was completely appropriate to the commerce du monde. He was the “only poet to teach the duties of civic life … the only one who could fashion a man both honnête and galant.” Horace’s connection with the emperor Augustus was similarly exemplary. He represented the “court of the second Caesar”; he was a “pillar” of that court.[34] In short, the name Horace carried tremendous cultural weight.
But Huet’s choice of the Horatian ode as a model for his praise of Louis XIV was not just a literary choice. Horace’s relationship to Augustus argued the importance of letters to any ruler who desired to be known as “Augustan.” Thus Huet’s odes argued that, just as Horace had been honored at the court of Augustus, so should poets be honored at that of Louis XIV. Certainly Huet was soliciting patronage. But he proposed to serve the state, not be servile, because the poet brought so much to the table: the priceless gift of representation, not just in the present but to future generations. In his “Epistle to Augustus,” Horace had rather gently suggested the superiority of poetry to communicate true greatness over physical likeness. Huet asserted the same, if anything more boldly, in his second ode to the king. I call it “Athena,” because the goddess herself descends from her father’s aery realm to address Louis as she did Achilles. She demands to know why he trusts monuments and sculpted portraits to transmit his name and glorious deeds to posterity. Time consumes such contrivances rapidly, she warns, just as it destroys all things made by mortal men. Only Calliope, muse of epic poetry, can constrain time. Only she dares unravel what a dark fate has woven. It’s a pretty phrase, and perhaps a bit cheeky. But it echoed conventional wisdom. For example, when Chapelain commented on Colbert’s plans for memorializing the king’s deeds in a letter of 1662, he wrote: “of all the durable symbols of monarchy, poetry is without doubt the best defended against the damage of time – provided only that a great writer is involved in the production of the verses.”[35]
Huet’s two odes were certainly well timed. The personal reign had only just begun; its tenor was ambitious and optimistic. A young king looking to make his mark (and his advisors) would naturally be casting about for worthy ways to distinguish himself. What better way, Huet asked, than poetry? But the question perhaps inevitably arises: What did the new Augustus himself make of all this? Was he even capable of appreciating Huet’s efforts?
The signs were not
good. In the letter acknowledging
receipt of the Ode and Epistle in March 1660, Chapelain
regretted that “our court is not so refined in matters of Latinity as that of
Augustus. [If it were,] you would have
the place of Horace, not only for your lyric genius, but even more for the
epistolary.”[36] And the signs got worse. In a letter dated
In the end, it
probably wouldn’t have mattered much if Louis XIV could read his poems or not
as long as support for this type of civic expression remained strong among
those who advised the King. But kings
and their advisors cannot resist the tug of the cultural currents swirling
around them. The
So Huet never
played Horace to Louis’s Augustus. But
he had not wasted his time. He received
a royal gratification, and he would continue receiving gratifications for many
years to come. When he ran into trouble
getting funds for the printing of his first major scholarly work, an edition of
Origen’s biblical commentaries, his connection with Colbert through Rapin saved
the day. And when the time came to hire
learned and upstanding men to tutor the Dauphin, Huet received the call that
finally brought him to
Rebuffed in
public, the Latin muses increasingly retreated to the scholar’s cabinet and the lower reaches of
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Primary:
Buchler, M.J. Sacrarum profanarumque phrasium poeticarum thesaurus and Reformata poeseos Institutio. London, 1624.
Chapelain, Jean. Lettres inédites de Jean Chapelain à P.-D. Huet. Paris, 1894.
Despautère, J. Artis versificatoriae Compendium. Edinburgh, 1631.
Huet, Pierre-Daniel. Commentarius de rebus ad eum pertinentibus. Venice, 1761.
_____. Poemata, latina et graeca. Utrecht, 1700.
“Carmina
(Cerceau).” Journal des Scavans (
“Carmina (Huet).” Journal
des Scavans (
Poetarum ex Academia Gallica … Carmina. The Hague, 1640.
Lettres inédites de Jean Chapelain à P.-D. Huet. Edited by Léon Pelissier. Paris, 1894.
Ménage, Gilles. Lettres inédites à Pierre-Daniel Huet
(1659-1692).
Moisant de Brieux. Oeuvres choisies. Caen, 1875.
La Motte, Houdar de. Odes. Paris, 1714.
“Ode ad Christum Victorem.” Memoires de Trevoux (January 1705): 447.
Musae reduces:
anthologie de la poésie latine dans l’Europe de la Renaissance.
“Poetarum ex Academia Gallica … Carmina.” Memoires de Trevoux (January 1739): 129134..
Rapin, René. Les Réflexions sur la poétique de ce temps
et sur les ourvrages des poètes anciens et modernes.
Santeul, Jean. Opera poetica. Paris, 1694.
Secondary:
Beugnot, Bernard.
“Débats autour du latin dans la France classique.” Actus
Conventus Neo-Latini Amstelodamensis.
_____. “La Lyre et le précepte: notes sur la réception de l’Art poétique d’Horace.” Rivista de Letterature moderne e comparate 52:3 (July-Sept. 1999): 197-212.
Binns, J.W. The Latin Poetry of English Poets.
Bowditch, Phebe Lowell.
Horace and the Gift Economy of
Patronage.
Castor, Grahame, and Cave, Terence, editors. Neo-Latin
and the Vernacular in Renaissance France.
Dainville, François. La Naissance de l'humanisme, I: Les
jésuites et l'éducation de la société française.
_____. L'Education
des jésuites (XVIe-XVIIIe siècles).
Haan, Estelle. “Milton’s Latin Poetry and Vida.” Humanistica lovaniensia 44 (1995): 282-304.
Hankins, James. “The Latin Poetry of Leonardo Bruni.” Humanistica lovaniensia 39 (1990): 1-39.
Heeksakkers, C.L.
“Two
Jones, Howard. “An Eighteenth-Century Refutation of Epicurean Physics: The Anti-Lucretius of Melchior de Polignac (1747).” Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Torontonensis. (Binghampton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1991.
Kerson, Arnold L.
“Rafael Landívar’s Rusticatio
Mexicana and the Enlightenment in
Kiernan, V.G. Horace: Poetics and Politics.
Jean Marmier. Horace en France, au dix-septième siècle.
Montalant-Bougleux, Louis-Auguste. J.B. Santeul; ou la poésie latine sous Louis XIV. Paris, 1855.
Moss, Ann. “The Counter-Reformation Latin Hymn.” Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Sanctandreani. (Binghampton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1986.
Nellen, Henk, and Rabbie, Edwin. “Grotius’s Fame as a Poet.” Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Torontonensis. (Binghampton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1991.
Pognon,
Rochemonteix, P. Camille de. Un Collège de Jésuites aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles. Le Mans, 1889.
Sabrio, David H.
“George Buchanan’s Secular Latin Poetry and New Historicism.” The
Language and Literature of Early
Spitzer, Leo. “The Problem of Latin Renaissance Poetry.” Studies in the Renaissance 2 (1955): 118-138.
Taussig, Sylvie. “Gassendi lecteur d’Horace, dans les Lettres latines.” Revue des études latines 75 (1997): 241-259.
Tieghem, P. van. “La
Littérature latine de la Renaissance.” Bibliothèque d’humanisme et Renaissance,
IV: 177-418.
Tolmer, Léon. Pierre-Daniel Huet.
Ijsewijn, Jozef. Companion to Neo-Latin Studies.
Vissac, L’Abbé. La Poésie latine en France au siècle du
Louis XIV.
Waquet, Françoise. Le Latin, ou l’empire d’un signe.
Zeeberg, Peter. “Science versus Secular Life: A Central Theme in the Latin Poems of Tycho Brahe.” Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Torontonensis. Binghampton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1991.
NOTES