Romance in revolution Part II
I like the covers for the many editions of my first novel, La Créole, however this work of Frederick Leighton comes nearest to the ideal portrait I have in my mind. From La Créole on, I wrote what I would categorise as 'romantic adventures', which explore real events in history through an enthralling love story. Here is Part II of my 2005 article recounting the history of romance.
The 16th century on, there was every kind of romance you could think of. Adventurous. Fantastical. Historical (and pseudo-historical). Pastoral. And they were written in every form and at every length; some of them were voluminous.
In the seventeenth century, romance was still supreme in England, its greatest admirer being John Milton. Meanwhile in France the next great revolution was occurring in romance. From around 1650 we find one of most extraordinary phenomena in the history of letters -- the career of Madeleine de Scudéry. She was well born, she had a highly successful salon, and her romantic novels sold across Europe in miraculous numbers. In England, Samuel Pepys’s wife reread a Scudéry novel, Le Grand Cyrus, so often that five years later she was still retelling the story to him in the carriage when they went out at night.
The other influence of Mademoiselle de Scudéry was even more profound. She was a précieuse. In those days, as now, if you call someone ‘precious’ you are accusing them of affectation. Worse, the critics of the précieuses called them sentimental. And they were. If you’ve seen a film of Cyrano de Bergerac you’ll remember the heroine going to a poetry salon run by the précieuses, where they read sentimental poetry. Rostand, who wrote the original play, makes ironical fun of them. But he felt their influence powerfully: what could be more contrived, more witty or more gloriously sentimental than the love story of Cyrano de Bergerac?
Linguists will tell you that the précieuses did more than any other group in history to change the French language; and in so doing they changed people’s way of thinking about love. They had a whole vocabulary to explain their ideal -- a version of courtly love, where the man wooed the woman with wit and tenderness. What they proposed was a seductive new interaction between the intellect and the feelings. They turned the word tendre meaning ‘tender’, into a noun -- meaning ‘the tender feelings’. They drew a map of the feelings, la carte de tendre. A beautiful country of the emotions, where you could start at ‘new friendship’ and travel through gentle pastures to the ‘tenderness of gratitude’, the ‘tenderness of affection’, or the ‘tenderness of esteem’. They were dedicated to exploring the sentiments, and they placed a high value on wit and well-chosen language -- a language that seemed bizarre and even shocking to commentators of the time.
The influence of the précieuses on the love story was profound. It touched all the great novelists of the late seventeenth and eighteenth century: writers like Madame de La Fayette, Prévost, Rousseau, Goethe. There is a strong link between their vision and the final literary revolution we’re going to explore -- the Romantic movement. As far as the novel is concerned, this really sprang from the initiatives of Samuel Richardson. He lived in London in the first half of the eighteenth century, and he was a printer. So he was very close to book buyers; he knew what people would pay to read. He also had a lot of young women friends, who used to employ him to write answers to their love letters. He had a ‘garden of ladies’, a coterie of bluestockings, who were the first to hear and make critiques of his work before it was published.
Part III is coming soon! Meanwhile have a look at my covers on the Books page and tell me what you think on Facebook or Instagram (click the icons at the bottom of the page).
