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Title: Avril
Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance
Author: H. Belloc
Release Date: July 16, 2006 [EBook #18839]
Language: English
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AVRIL
BEING
ESSAYS ON THE POETRY OF THE
FRENCH RENAISSANCE
BY
H. BELLOC
"... _Ceux dont la Fantaisie
Sera religieuse et dévote envers Dieu
Tousjours achèveront quelque grant Poésie,
Et dessus leur renom la Parque n'aura lieu._"
LONDON
DUCKWORTH AND CO.
3, HENRIETTA STREET, COVE NT GARDEN, W.C.
1904
CHISWICK PRESS: CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND CO
TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE, LONDON.
Part of this book originally appeared
in "The Pilot," and is here reprinted
by kind permission of the Editor.
CONTENTS
CHARLES OF ORLEANS
VILLON
MAROT
RONSARD
Du BELLAY
MALHERBE
DEDICATION
TO
F.Y. ECCLES
MY DEAR ECCLES,
You will, I know, permit me to address you these essays which are more
the product of your erudition than of my enthusiasm.
With the motives of their appearance you are familiar.
We have wondered together that a society so avid of experience and
enlargement as is ours, should ignore the chief expression of its
closest neighbour, its highest rival and its coheir in Europe: should
ignore, I mean, the literature of the French.
We have laughed together, not without despair, to see the mind of
England, for all its majesty and breadth, informed at the most critical
moments in the policy of France by such residents of Paris as were at
the best fanatical, at the worst (and most ordinary) corrupt.
Seeing around us here a philosophy and method drawn from northern
Germany, a true and subtle sympathy with the Italians, and a perpetual,
just and accurate comment upon the minor nationalities of Europe, a mass
of recorded travel superior by far to that of other countries, we
marvelled that France in particular should have remained unknown.
We were willing, in an earlier youth, to read this riddle in somewhat
crude solutions. I think we have each of us arrived, and in a final
manner, at the sounder conclusion that historical accident is
principally to blame. The chance concurrence of this defeat with that
dynastic influence, the slip by which the common sense of political
simplicity missed footing in England and fell a generation behind, the
marvellous industrial activities of this country, protected by a
tradition of political discipline which will remain unique in History;
the contemporaneous settling down of France into the equilibrium of
power--an equilibrium not established without five hearty civil wars and
perhaps a hundred campaigns--all these so separated the two worlds of
thought as to leave France excusable for her blindness towards the
destinies and nature of England, and England excusable for her continued
emptiness of knowledge upon the energy and genius of France: though
these were increasing daily, immensely, at our very side.
We have assisted at some straining of such barriers. A long peace, the
sterility of Germany, the interesting activities of the Catholic Church,
have perhaps not yet changed, but have at least disturbed the mind of
the north, and ours, a northern people's, with it. The unity, the
passionate patriotism, the close oligarchic polity, the very silence of
the English has arrested the eyes of France. By a law which is universal
where bodies are bound in one system, an extreme of separation has
wrought its own remedy and the return towards a closer union is begun. I
do not refer to such ephemeral and artificial manifestations as a
special and somewhat humiliating need may demand; I consider rather that
large sweep of tendency which was already apparent fifteen years after
the Franco-Prussian War. An approach in taste, manners and expression
well defined during our undergraduate years, has now introduced much of
our inmost life to the French, to us already a hint of their philosophy.
I think you believe, as I do, that the return has begun.
We shall not live to see that fine unity of the west which lent the
latter seventeenth and eighteenth centuries their classical repose. No
common rule of verse or prose will satisfy men's permanent desire for
harmony: no common rule of manners, of honour, of international ethics,
of war. We shall not live to see, though we are young now, a Paris
reading some new Locke or Hume, a London moved to attentive delight in
some latter trinity of Dramatists, some future Voltaire.... The high,
protected class, which moved at ease between the Capitals of the World,
has disappeared; that which should take its place is not yet formed. We
are both of that one Faith which can but regard our Christendom as the
front of mankind and which, therefore, looks forward, as to a necessary
goal, to the re-establishment of its common comprehension. But the
reversion to such stability is slow. We shall not live to see it.
It is none the less our duty (if I may use a word of so unsavoury a
connotation) to advance the accomplishment of this good fatality.
Not indeed that a vulgar cosmopolitan beatitude can inspire an honest
man. To abandon one's patriotism, and to despise a frontier or a flag,
is, we are agreed, the negation of Europe. There are Frenchmen who
forget their battles, and Englishmen to whom a gold mine, a chance
federal theory, a colonial accent, or a map, is more of an inheritance
than the delicate feminine profile of Nelson or the hitherto unbroken
traditions of our political scheme. To such men arms are either
abhorrent, or, what is worse, a very cowardly (and thank God!
unsuccessful) method of acquiring or defending their very base
enjoyments. Let us forget them. It is only as nationalists, and only in
an intense sympathy with the highly individual national unities of
Europe that we may approach the endeavour of which I have spoken.
With us, I fear, that endeavour must take a literary form, but such a
channel is far from ignoble or valueless. He that knows some part of the
letters of a foreign nation, be it but the graces or even the vagaries
of such letters, knows something of that nation's mind. To portray for
the populace one religion welding the west together, to spread a common
philosophy, or to interpret and arrange political terms, would certainly
prove a more lasting labour: but you will agree with me that mere
sympathy in letters is not to be despised.
We have observed together that the balance in this matter is heavily
against the English. M. Jusserand is easily the first authority upon
popular life in England at the close of the middle ages. M. Boutmy has
produced an analysis of our political development which our Universities
have justly recognized. Our friend M. Angellier of the École Normale has
written what is acknowledged by the more learned Scotch to be the
principal existing monograph upon Robert Burns; Mr. Kipling himself has
snatched the attention of M. Chevrillon. You know how many names might
be added to this list to prove the close, applied and penetrating manner
in which French scholars have latterly presented our English writers to
their fellow-citizens.
We have both believed that something of the sort might be attempted in
the converse; that a view could be given--a glimpse at least--of that
vast organism whose foundations are in Rome, Coeval with the spring of
Christianity, and whose last growth seems as vigorous and as fecund as
though it were exempt from any laws of age.
But, I say, we know how heavy is the balance against us.
The Gallic ritual is unrecognized, even by our over-numerous class of
clerical antiquarians. The Carolingian cycle is neglected, save perhaps
for a dozen men who have seen the Song of Roland. The Complaints of
Rusteboeuf, the Fabliaux, all the local legendary poetry, all the
chroniclers (save Froissart--for he wrote of us), the tender simplicity
of Joinville, the hard steel of Villehardouin, no one has handled.
The fifteenth century, the storm of the Renaissance, are not taught.
Why, Rabelais himself might be but an unfamiliar name had not a northern
squire of genius rendered to the life three quarters of his work.
The list is interminable. Even the great Drama of the great century is
but a text for our schools leaving no sort of trace upon the mind: and
as for the French moderns (I have heard it from men of liberal
education) they are denied to have written any poetry at all: so exact,
so subtle, so readily to be missed, are the proportions of their speech.
If you ask me why I should myself approach the matter, I can plead some
inheritance of French blood, comparable, I believe, to your own; and
though I have no sort of claim to that unique and accomplished
scholarship which gives you a mastery of the French tongue unmatched in
England, and a complete familiarity with its history, application and
genius, yet I can put to my credit a year of active, if eccentric,
experience in a French barrack room, and a complete segregation during
those twelve memorable months wherein I could study the very soul of
this sincere, creative, and tenacious people.
Your learning, my singular adventure, have increased in us, it must be
confessed, a permanent and reasoned admiration for this people's
qualities. Such an attitude of mind is rare enough and often dangerous:
it is but a qualification the more for beginning the work. It permits us
to follow the main line of the past of the French, to comprehend and not
to be troubled by the energy of their present, to catch the advancing
omens of their future.
Indeed, if anything of France is to be explained in English and to
people reading English, I could not desire a better alliance than yours
and mine.
But if you ask me why the Renaissance especially--or why in the
Renaissance these six poets alone--should have formed the subject of my
first endeavour, I can only tell you that in so vast a province, whereof
the most ample leisure could not in a lifetime exhaust a tithe, Chance,
that happy Goddess, led me at random to their groves.
Whether it will be possible to continue such interpretation I do not
know, but if it be so possible, I know still less what next may be put
into my hands: Racine, perhaps, may call me, or those forgotten men who
urged the Revolution with phrases of fire.
H. BELLOC.
CHELSEA, _January, 1904._
CHARLES OF ORLEANS.
I put down Charles of Orleans here as the first representative of that
long glory which it is the business of this little book to recall: but
to give him such a place at the threshold requires some apology.
The origins of a literary epoch differ according as that epoch is primal
or derivative. There are those edifices of letters which start up, not
indeed out of nothing, but out of things wholly different. Produced by a
shock or a revelation, as two gases lit will, in a sharp explosion,
unite to form a liquid wholly unlike either, so after a great conquest,
a battle, the sudden preaching of a creed, these primal literatures
appear in an epic or a dithyrambic code of awful law. Their first effort
is their mightiest. They come mature. They are allied to that element of
the catastrophic which the modern world (taking its general philosophy
from its social condition) denies, but which is yet at the limits of all
things separate and themselves; accompanies every birth, and strikes
agony into every transition of death.
Those other much commoner epochs in the history of letters, which may be
called derivative, have this current and obvious quality, that their
beginnings merge into the soil that bred them, also (very often) their
decay will lapse imperceptibly into newer things. They are quite
definite, but also definitely parented. We know their special stuff and
harmony, but we can point out clearly enough the elements which formed
that stuff, the tones which unite in that harmony. We can show with
dates and citations the parts meeting and blending; our difficulty is
not to determine the influences which have mixed to make the general
school, but rather to fix the beginning and the end of its effect upon
men.
In the first of these the leader, sometimes the unique example of the
school, stands out great, but particular and clear, on a background
vague or dark. He is as stupendous, yet as sharp and certain, as a
mountain facing the morning, with only sky behind. In the second the
originator, if there be one, is vague, tentative, perhaps unknown. More
often many minor men together introduce a slow and general transition.
Now the French Renaissance has this peculiar mark, that it holds quite
plainly by one side of it to the first by the other to the second of
these spirits.
It was primal and catastrophic in that it made something completely new.
A new architecture, new cities, a new poetry, almost a new language, a
new kind of government--ultimately the modern world.
It was derivative in that the shock, the revelation, which produced it,
was the return of something allied to the French blood, something rooted
in the French memory. Rome surviving or risen had made that Italy, which
was now beginning to trouble the Alps, and would surely creep in by
every channel of influence, and at last pervade all Europe. Rome, also,
in her full vigour, had once framed and ordered Gaul. The French of the
Renaissance were woken suddenly, but as they started they recognized the
face and the hand of the awakener.
On this account you will find one mind indeed at the very beginning of
the change in letters, but not a dominating mind. There is but one man
who is certainly an origin, but he is not a master. You see an unique
and single personality, distinct but without force, founding no
school--the grave, abiding, kind but covert face of Charles of Orleans.
He, linked to the French Renaissance, is like the figure of a gentle
friend playing in some garden with a child whose manners are new and
pleasing to him, but of whose great destiny he makes no guess. That
child was to be Du Bellay, Brantome, Montaigne a hundred-sided, huge
Rabelais, Ronsard. Or perhaps this metaphor will put it better. To say
that Charles of Orleans's equal and persistent music was like a string
harped on distinctly in a chorus of flutes and hautboys, till one by one
harps from here and there caught up the similar tang of chords and at
last the whole body of sound was harping only.
His life was suited to such difference and such origination. Italy,
still living, filled him. An Italian secretary wrote from his mouth the
most sumptuous of his manuscripts. He banded on Italy as a goal and his
Italian land as a legacy to the French crown--to his own son; till
(years after his death) the soldiers roared through Briançon and broke
the crusted snow of Mont Genèvre. An Italian mother, the most beautiful
of the Viscontis, come out of Italy, rich in her land of Asti and her
half million of pure gold, had borne him in her youth to the King of
France's brother: a man luxurious, over fine, exact in taste, a lover of
magnificence in stories and words, decadent in a dying time, very brave.
Through that father the Valois blood, unjustly hated or still more
unjustly despised according to the varied ignorance of modern times, ran
in him nobly.
Take the Valois strain entire and you will find the pomp or rather the
fantasy of their great palace of St. Paul; turrets and steep blue roofs
of slate, carved woodwork, heavy curtains, and incense and shining
bronze. The Valois were, indeed, the end of the middle ages. Some
cruelty, a fury in battle, intelligence and madness alternately, and
always a sort of keenness which becomes now revenge, now foresight, now
intrigue, now strict and terrible government: at last a wild adventure
out beyond the hills: Fornovo, Pavia.
Their story is like the manuscripts, which beyond all other things they
loved and collected, and which they were the last to possess or to have
made; for while it contains in vivid pictures the noblest and the basest
subjects: (Joan of Arc and also her betrayal, their country dominant and
almost engulfed, Marigano, and then again Pavia) it always glitters with
hard enamelled colours against skies of gold, and is drawn and sharp and
clean as a thing can be.
Such is the whole line, but look at this one Valois and you see all the
qualities of his race toned by a permanent sadness down to a good and
even temper, not hopeful but still delighting in beauty and possessed as
no other Valois had been of charity. Less passionate and therefore much
less eager and useful than most of his race, yet the taint of madness
never showed in him, nor the corresponding evil of cruelty, nor the
uncreative luxury of his immediate ancestry. All the Valois were poets
in their kind; his life by its every accident caused him to write. At
fifteen they wedded him to that lovely child whom Richard II had lifted
in his arms at Windsor as he rode out in fatal pomp for Ireland. Three
years later, when their marriage was real, she died in childbirth, and
it is to her I think that he wrote in his prison the ballad which ends:
Dieu sur tout souverain seigneur
Ordonnez par grace et douceur
De l'ame d'elle tellement
Qu'elle ne soit pas longuement
En peine souci et douleur.
Already, in the quarrel that so nearly wrecked the crown, the
anti-national factions had killed his father. He was planning vengeance,
engraving little mottoes of hate upon his silver, when the wars came on
them all. A boy of twenty-four, well-horsed, much more of a soldier than
he later seemed, he charged, leading the centre of the three tall troops
at Agincourt. In the evening of that disaster they pulled him out from
under a great heap of the ten thousand dead and brought him prisoner
into England, to Windsor then to Pomfret Castle. Chatterton, Cobworth,
at last John Cornwall, of Fanhope, were his guardians. To some one of
these--probably the last--he wrote the farewell:
Mon très bon hôte et ma très douce hôtesse.
For his life as a prisoner, though melancholy, was not undignified; he
paid no allegiance, he met the men of his own rank, nor was he of a kind
to whom poverty, the chief thorn of his misfortune, brought dishonour.
Henry V had left it strictly in his will that Orleans the general and
the head of the French nationals should not return. For twenty-five
years, therefore--all his manhood--he lived under this sky, rhyming and
rhyming: in English a little, in French continually, and during that
isolation there swept past him far off in his own land the defence, the
renewal, the triumph of his own blood: his town relieved, his cousin
crowned at Rheims. His river of Loire, and then the Eure, and then the
Seine, and even the field where he had fallen were reconquered.
Willoughby had lost Paris to Richemont four years before Charles of
Orleans was freed on a ransom of half his mother's fortune. It was not
until the November of 1440 that he saw his country-side again.
The verse formed in that long endurance (a style which he preserved to
the end in the many poems after his release) may seem at a first reading
merely mediæval. There is wholly lacking in it the riot of creation, nor
can one see at first the Renaissance coming in with Charles of Orleans.
Indeed it was laid aside as mediæval, and was wholly forgotten for three
hundred years. No one had even heard of him for all those centuries till
Sallier, that learned priest, pacing, full of his Hebrew and Syriac, the
rooms of the royal library which Louis XV had but lately given him to
govern, found the manuscript of the poems and wrote an essay on them for
the Academy.
The verse is full of allegory; it is repetitive; it might weary one with
the savour of that unhappy fifteenth century when the human mind lay
under oppression, and only the rich could speak their insignificant
words; a foreigner especially might find it all dry bones, but his
judgement would be wrong. Charles of Orleans has a note quite new and
one that after him never failed, but grew in volume and in majesty until
it filled the great chorus of the Pleiade--the Lyrical note of direct
personal expression. Perhaps the wars produced it in him; the lilt of
the marching songs was still spontaneous:
Gentil Duc de Lorraine, vous avez grand renom,
Et votre renommée passe au delà des monts
Et vous et vos gens d'arme, et tous vos compagnons
Au premier coup qu'ils frappent, abattent les Donjons.
Tirez, tirez bombardes, serpentines, Canons!
Whatever the cause, this spontaneity and freshness run through all the
mass of short and similar work which he wrote down.
The spring and sureness, the poise of these light nothings make them a
flight of birds.
See how direct is this:
Dieu! qu'il la fait bon regarder!
La gracieuse, bonne et belle.
or this:
Le lendemain du premier jour de Mai
Dedans mon lit ainsi que je dormoye
Au point du jour advint que je sonjeay.
Everywhere his words make tunes for themselves and everywhere he himself
appears in his own verses, simple, charming, slight, but with memories
of government and of arms.
This style well formed, half his verse written, he returned to his own
place. He was in middle age--a man of fifty. He married soberly enough
Mary of Cleves, ugly and young: he married her in order to cement the
understanding with Burgundy. She did not love him with his shy florid
face, long neck and features and mild eyes. His age for twenty-five
years passed easily, he had reached his "castle of No Care." As late as
1462 his son (Louis XII) was born; his two daughters at long intervals
before. His famous library moved with him as he went from town to town,
and perpetually from himself and round him from his retinue ran the
continual stream of verse which only ended with his death. His very
doctor he compelled to rhyme.
All the singers of the time visited or remained with him--wild Villon
for a moment, and after Villon a crowd of minor men. It was in such a
company that he recited the last ironical but tender song wherein he
talks of his lost youth and vigour and ends by bidding all present a
salute in the name of his old age.
So he sat, half regal, holding a court of song in Blois and Tours, a
forerunner in verse of what the new time was to build in stone along the
Loire. And it was at Amboise that he died.
THE COMPLAINT.
(_The 57th Ballade of those written during his imprisonment._)
There is some dispute in the matter, but I will believe, as I have said,
that this dead Princess, for whose soul he prays, was certainly the wife
of his boyhood, a child whom Richard II had wed just before that
Lancastrian usurpation which is the irreparable disaster of English
history. She was, I say, a child--a widow in name--when Charles of
Orleans, himself in that small royal clique which was isolated and
shrivelling, married her as a mere matter of state. It is probable that
he grew to love her passionately, and perhaps still more her memory when
she had died in child-bed during those first years, even before
Agincourt, "en droicte fleur de jeunesse,"--for even here he is able to
find an exact and sufficient line.
There is surely to be noted in this delicate ballad, something more
native and truthful in its pathos than in the very many complaints he
left by way partly of reminiscence, partly of poetic exercise. For,
though he is restrained, as was the manner of his rank when they
attempted letters, yet you will not read it often without getting in you
a share of its melancholy.
That melancholy you can soon discover to be as permanent a quality in
the verse as it was in the mind of the man who wrote it.
_THE COMPLAINT._
_Las! Mort qui t'a fait si hardie,
De prendre la noble Princesse
Qui estoit mon confort, ma vie,
Mon bien, mon plaisir, ma richesse!
Puis que tu as prins ma maistresse,
Prens moy aussi son serviteur,
Car j'ayme mieulx prouchainement
Mourir que languir en tourment
En paine, soussi et doleur._
_Las! de tous biens estoit garnie
Et en droite fleur de jeunesse!
Je pry à Dieu qu'il te maudie,
Faulse Mort, plaine de rudesse!
Se prise l'eusses en vieillesse,
Ce ne fust pas si grant rigueur;
Mais prise l'as hastivement
Et m'as laissié piteusement
En paine, soussi et doleur._
_Las! je suis seul sans compaignie!
Adieu ma Dame, ma liesse!
Or est nostre amour departie,
Non pour tant, je vous fais promesse
Que de prieres, à largesse,
Morte vous serviray de cueur,
Sans oublier aucunement;
Et vous regretteray souvent
En paine, soussi et doleur._
_ENVOI._
_Dieu, sur tout souverain Seigneur,
Ordonnez, par grace et doulceur,
De l'ame d'elle, tellement
Qu'elle ne soit pas longuement
En paine, soussi et doleur._
THE TWO ROUNDELS OF SPRING.
(_The 41st and 43rd of the "Rondeaux."_)
These two Rondeaux, of which we may also presume, though very vaguely,
that they were written in England (for they are in the manner of his
earlier work), are by far the most famous of the many things he wrote;
and justly, for they have all these qualities.
_First_, they are exact specimens of their style. The Roundel should
interweave, repeat itself, and then recover its original strain, and
these two exactly give such unified diversity.
_Secondly_: they were evidently written in a moment of that unknown
power when words suggest something fuller than their own meaning, and in
which simplicity itself broadens the mind of the reader. So that it is
impossible to put one's finger upon this or that and say this adjective,
that order of the words has given the touch of vividness.
_Thirdly_: they have in them still a living spirit of reality; read them
to-day in Winter, and you feel the Spring. It is this quality perhaps
which most men have seized in them, and which have deservedly made them
immortal.
A further character which has added to their fame, is that, being
perfect lyrics, they are also specimens of an old-fashioned manner and
metre peculiar to the time. They are the resurrection not only of the
Spring, but of a Spring of the fifteenth century. Nor is it too
fantastic to say that one sees in them the last miniatures and the very
dress of a time that was intensely beautiful, and in which Charles of
Orleans alone did not feel death coming.
_THE TWO ROUNDELS OF SPRING._
_Les fourriers d'Esté sont venus
Pour appareillier son logis,
Et ont fait tendre ses tappis,
De fleurs et verdure tissus.
En estandant tappis velus
De verte herbe par le pais,
Les fourriers d'Esté sont venus
Pour appareillier son logis.
Cueurs d'ennuy pieça morfondus,
Dieu merci, sont sains et jolis;
Alez vous en, prenez pais,
Yver vous ne demourrez plus;
Les fourriers d'Esté sont venus._
_Le temps a laissié son manteau
De vent, de froidure et de pluye,
Et s'est vestu de brouderie,
De soleil luyant, cler et beau.
Il n'y a beste, ne oyseau,
Qu'en son jargon ne chant ou crie;
Le temps a laissié son manteau
De vent de froidure et de pluye.
Riviere, fontaine et ruisseau
Portent, en livrée jolie,
Gouttes d'argent d'orfavrerie,
Chascun s'abille de nouveau.
Le temps a laissié son manteau._
HIS LOVE AT MORNING.
(_The 6th of the "Songs"._)
In this delightful little song the spontaneity and freshness which saved
his work, its vigour and its clarity are best preserved.
It does indeed defy death and leaps four centuries: it is young and
perpetual. It thrills with something the failing middle ages had
forgotten: it reaches what they never reached, a climax, for one cannot
put too vividly the flash of the penultimate line, "I am granted a
vision when I think of her."
Yet it was written in later life, and who she was, or whether she lived
at all, no one knows.
_HIS LOVE AT MORNING._
_Dieu qu'il la fait bon regarder
La gracieuse bonne et belle!
Pour les grans biens qui sont en elle,
Chascun est prest de la louer
Qui se pourroit d'elle lasser!
Tousjours sa beaulté renouvelle.
Dieu, qu'il la fait bon regarder,
La gracieuse, bonne et belle!
Par deça, ne delà la mer,
Ne sçay Dame ne Damoiselle
Qui soit en tous biens parfais telle;
C'est un songe que d'y penser.
Dieu, qu'il la fait bon regarder!_
THE FAREWELL.
(_The 310th Roundel._)
Here is the last thing--we may presume--that Charles of Orleans ever
wrote: "Salute me all the company, I pray."
In that "company", not only the Court at Amboise, but the men of the
early wars, his companions, were round him, and the dead friends of his
gentle memory.
He was broken with age; he was already feeling the weight of isolation
from the Royal Family; he was beginning to suffer the insults of the
king. But, beneath all this, his gaiety still ran like a river under
ice, and in the ageing of a poet, humour and physical decline combined
make a good, human thing.
There is an excellent irony in the refrain: "Salute me, all the
company," whose double interpretation must not be missed, though it may
seem far-fetched.
Till the last line it means, without any question, "Salute the company
in my name," but I think there runs through it also, the hint of "Salute
me for my years, all you present who are young," and that this certainly
is the note in the last line of all. It must be remembered of the
French, that they never expand or explain their ironical things, for in
art it is their nature to detest excess.
This last thing of his, then, I say, is the most characteristic of him
and of his Valois blood, and of the national spirit in general to which
he belonged: for he, and it, and they, loved and love contrast, and the
extra-meaning of words.
_THE FAREWELL._
_Saluez moy toute la compaignie
Où à present estes à chiere lie,
Et leur dictes que voulentiers seroye
Avecques eulx, mais estre n'y porroye,
Pour Vieillesse qui m'a en sa baillie.
Au temps passé, Jeunesse si jolie
Me gouvernoit; las! or n'y suis je mye,
Et pour cela pour Dieu, que excusé soye;
Saluez moy toute la compaignie
Où à present estes à chiere lie,
Et leur dictes que voulentiers seroye.
Amoureux fus, or ne le suis je mye,
Et en Paris menoye bonne vie;
Adieu Bon temps ravoir ne vous saroye,
Bien sanglé fus d'une estroite courroye.
Que, par Aige, convient que la deslie.
Saluez moy toute la compaignie._
VILLON.
I have said that in Charles of Orleans the middle ages are at first more
apparent than the advent of the Renaissance. His forms are inherited
from an earlier time, his terminology is that of the long allegories
which had wearied three generations, his themes recall whatever was
theatrical in the empty pageantry of the great war. It is a spirit
deeper and more fundamental than the mere framework of his writing which
attaches him to the coming time. His clarity is new; it proceeds from
natural things; it marks that return to reality which is the beginning
of all beneficent revolutions. But this spirit in him needs examination
and discovery, and the reader is confused between the mediaeval phrases
and the something new and troubling in the voice that utters them.
With Villon, the next in order, a similar confusion might arise. All
about him as he wrote were the middle ages: their grotesque, their
contrast, their disorder. His youth and his activity of blood forbad him
any contact with other than immediate influences. He was wholly
Northern; he had not so much as guessed at what Italy might be. The
decrepit University had given him, as best she could, the dregs of her
palsied philosophy and something of Latin. He grew learned as do those
men who grasp quickly the major lines of their study, but who, in
details, will only be moved by curiosity or by some special affection.
There was nothing patient in him, and nothing applied, and in all this,
in the matter of his scholarship as in his acquirement of it, he is of
the dying middle ages entirely.
His laughter also was theirs: the kind of laughter that saluted the
first Dance of Death which as a boy he had seen in new frescoes round
the waste graveyard of the Innocents. His friends and enemies and heroes
and buffoons were the youth of the narrow tortuous streets, his visions
of height were the turrets of the palaces and the precipitate roofs of
the town. Distance had never inspired him, for in that age its effect
was forgotten. No one straight street displayed the greatness of the
city, no wide and ordered spaces enhanced it. He crossed his native
river upon bridges all shut in with houses, and houses hid the banks
also. The sweep of the Seine no longer existed for his generation, and
largeness of all kinds was hidden under the dust and rubble of decay.
The majestic, which in sharp separate lines of his verse he certainly
possessed, he discovered within his own mind, for no great arch or
cornice, nor no colonnade had lifted him with its splendour.
That he could so discover it, that a solemnity and order should be
apparent in the midst of his raillery whenever he desires to produce an
effect of the grand, leads me to speak of that major quality of his by
which he stands up out of his own time, and is clearly an originator of
the great renewal. I mean his vigour.
It is all round about him, and through him, like a storm in a wood. It
creates, it perceives. It possesses the man himself, and us also as we
read him. By it he launches his influence forward and outward rather
than receives it from the past. To it his successors turn, as to an
ancestry, when they had long despised and thrown aside everything else
that savoured of the Gothic dead. By it he increased in reputation and
meaning from his boyhood on for four hundred years, till now he is
secure among the first lyric poets of Christendom. It led to no excess
of matter, but to an exuberance of attitude and manner, to an
inexhaustibility of special words, to a brilliancy of impression unique
even among his own people.
He was poor; he was amative; he was unsatisfied. This vigour, therefore,
led in his actions to a mere wildness; clothed in this wildness the rare
fragments of his life have descended to us. He professed to teach, but
he haunted taverns, and loved the roaring of songs. He lived at random
from his twentieth year in one den or another along the waterside.
Affection brought him now to his mother, now to his old guardian priest,
but not for long; he returned to adventure--such as it was. He killed a
man, was arrested, condemned, pardoned, exiled; he wandered and again
found Paris, and again--it seems--stumbled down his old lane of violence
and dishonour.
Associated also with this wildness is a curious imperfection in our
knowledge of him. His very name is not his own--or any other man's. His
father, if it were his father, took his name from Mont-Corbier--half
noble. Villon is but a little village over beyond the upper Yonne, near
the division, within a day of the water-parting where the land falls
southward to Burgundy and the sun in what they call "The Slope of Gold."
From this village a priest, William, had come to Paris in 1423. They
gave him a canonry in that little church called "St. Bennets Askew,"
which stood in the midst of the University, near Sorbonne, where the Rue
des Écoles crosses the Rue St. Jacques to-day. Hither, to his house in
the cloister, he brought the boy, a waif whom he had found much at the
time when Willoughby capitulated and the French recaptured the city. He
had him taught, he designed him for the University, he sheltered him in
his vagaries, he gave him asylum. The young man took his name and called
him "more than father." His anxious life led on to 1468, long after the
poet had disappeared.
For it is in 1461, in his thirtieth year, that Villon last writes down a
verse. It is in 1463 that his signature is last discovered. Then not by
death or, if by death, then by some death unrecorded, he leaves history
abruptly--a most astonishing exit!... You may pursue fantastic legends,
you will not find the man himself again. Some say a final quarrel got
him hanged at last--it is improbable: no record or even tradition of it
remains. Rabelais thought him a wanderer in England. Poitou preserves a
story of his later passage through her fields, of how still he drank and
sang with boon companions, and of how, again, he killed a man.... Maybe,
he only ceased to write; took to teaching soberly in the University, and
lived in a decent inheritance to see new splendours growing upon Europe.
It may very well be, for it is in such characters to desire in early
manhood decency, honour, and repose. But for us the man ends with his
last line. His body that was so very real, his personal voice, his
jargon--tangible and audible things--spread outward suddenly a vast
shadow upon nothingness. It was the end, also, of a world. The first
Presses were creaking, Constantinople had fallen, Greek was in Italy,
Leonardo lived, the stepping stones of the Azores were held--in that new
light he disappears.
* * * * *
Of his greatness nothing can be said; it is like the greatness of all
the chief poets, a thing too individual to seize in words. It is
superior and exterior to the man. Genius of that astounding kind has all
the qualities of an extraneous thing. A man is not answerable for it. It
is nothing to his salvation; it is little even to his general character.
It has been known to come and go, to be put off and on like a garment,
to be lent by Heaven and taken away, a capricious gift.
But of the manner of that genius it may be noted that, as his vigour
prepared the flood of new verse, so in another matter his genius made
him an origin. Through him first, the great town--and especially
Paris--appeared and became permanent in letters.
Her local spirit and her special quality had shone fitfully here and
there for a thousand years--you may find it in Julian, in Abbo, in
Joinville. But now, in the fifteenth century, it had been not only a
town but a great town for more than a century--a town, that is, in which
men live entirely, almost ignorant of the fields, observing only other
men, and forgetting the sky. The keen edge of such a life, its
bitterness, the mockery and challenge whereby its evils are borne, its
extended knowledge, the intensity of its spirit--all these are reflected
in Villon, and first reflected in him. Since his pen first wrote, a
shining acerbity like the glint of a sword-edge has never deserted the
literature of the capital.
It was not only the metropolitan, it was the Parisian spirit which
Villon found and fixed. That spirit which is bright over the whole city,
but which is not known in the first village outside; the influence that
makes Paris Athenian.
The ironical Parisian soul has depths in it. It is so lucid that its
luminous profundity escapes one--so with Villon. Religion hangs there.
Humility--fatally divorced from simplicity--pervades it. It laughs at
itself. There are ardent passions of sincerity, repressed and reacting
upon themselves. The virtues, little practised, are commonly
comprehended, always appreciated, for the Faith is there permanent. All
this you will find in Villon, but it is too great a matter for so short
an essay as this.
THE DEAD LADIES.
It is difficult or impossible to compare the masterpieces of the world.
It is easy and natural to take the measure of a particular writer and to
establish a scale of his work.
Villon is certainly in the small first group of the poets. His little
work, like that of Catullus, like that of Gray, is up, high, completed
and permanent. And within that little work this famous Ballade is by far
the greatest thing.
It contains all his qualities: not in the ordinary proportion of his
character, but in that better, exact proportion which existed in him
when his inspiration was most ardent: for the poem has underlying it
somewhere a trace of his irony, it has all his ease and
rapidity--excellent in any poet--and it is carried forward by that
vigour I have named, a force which drives it well upwards and forward to
its foaming in the seventh line of the third verse.
The sound of names was delightful to him, and he loved to use it; he had
also that character of right verse, by which the poet loves to put
little separate pictures like medallions into the body of his writing:
this Villon loved, as I shall show in other examples, and he has it
here.
The end of the middle ages also is strongly in this appeal or confession
of mortality; their legends, their delicacy, their perpetual
contemplation of death.
But of all the Poem's qualities, its run of words is far the finest.
_THE DEAD LADIES._
_Dictes moy où, n'en quel pays
Est Flora la belle Rommaine;
Archipiada, ne Thaïs,
Qui fut sa cousine germaine;
Echo, parlant quand bruyt on maine
Dessus riviere ou sus estan,
Qui beaulté ot trop plus qu'humaine?
Mais où sont les neiges d'antan?_
_Où est la très sage Hellois,
Pour qui fut chastré et puis moyne
Pierre Esbaillart à Saint-Denis?
Pour son amour ot cest essoyne.
Semblablement, où est la royne
Qui commanda que Buridan
Fust gecté en ung sac en Saine?
Mais où sont les neiges d'antan!_
_La Royne Blanche comme un lis,
Qui chantoit à voix de seraine;
Berte au grant pié Bietris, Allis;
Haremburgis qui tint le Maine,
Et Jehanne, la bonne Lorraine,
Qu'Englois brulerent à Rouan;
Où sont elles, Vierge souvraine?
Mais où sont les neiges d'antan!_
_ENVOI._
_Prince, n'enquerez de sepmaine
Où elles sont, ne de cest an,
Que ce reffrain ne vous remaine:
Mais où sont les neiges d'antan!_
AN EXCERPT FROM THE GRANT TESTAMENT.
(_Stanzas 75-79._)
Villon's whole surviving work is in the form of two rhymed wills--one
short, one long: and in the latter, Ballads and Songs are put in each in
their place, as the tenour of the verse suggests them.
Thus the last Ballade, that of the "Dead Ladies," comes after a couple
of strong stanzas upon the necessity of death--and so forth.
One might choose any passage, almost, out of the mass to illustrate the
character of this "Testament" in which the separate poems are imbedded.
I have picked those round about the 800th line, the verses in which he
is perhaps least brilliant and most tender.
_AN EXCERPT FROM THE GRANT TESTAMENT._
LXXV.
_Premier je donne ma povre ame
A la benoiste Trinité,
Et la commande à Nostre Dame
Chambre de la divinité;
Priant toute la charité
Des dignes neuf Ordres des cieulx,
Que par eulx soit ce don porté
Devant le trosne precieux._
LXXVI.
_Item, mon corps je donne et laisse
A notre grant mere la terre;
Les vers n'y trouveront grant gresse:
Trop luy a fait faim dure guerre.
Or luy soit delivré grant erre:
De terre vint, en terre tourne.
Toute chose, se par trop n'erre,
Voulentiers en son lieu retourne;_
LXXVII.
_Item, et à mon plus que pere
Maistre Guillaume de Villon
Qui m'esté a plus doulx que mere,
Enfant eslevé de maillon,
Degeté m'a de maint boullon
Et de cestuy pas ne s'esjoye
Et luy requiers à genoullon
Qu'il n'en laisse toute la joye._
LXXVIII.
_Je luy donne ma Librairie
Et le Romman du Pet au Deable
Lequel Maistre Guy Tabarie
Grossa qui est homs veritable.
Por cayers est soubz une table,
Combien qu'il soit rudement fait
La matiere est si très notable,
Q'elle amende tout le mesfait._
LXXIX.
_Item donne à ma povre mere
Pour saluer nostre Maistresse,
Qui pour moy ot doleur amere
Dieu le scet, et mainte tristesse;
Autre Chastel n'ay ni fortresse
Où me retraye corps et ame
Quand sur moy court malle destresse
Ne ma mere, la povre femme!_
THE BALLADE OF OUR LADY.
(_Written by Villon for his mother._)
The abrupt ending of the last extract, the 79th stanza of the "Grant
Testament"--"I give..." and then no objective (apparently) added--is an
excellent example of the manner in which the whole is conceived and of
the way in which the separate poems are pieced into the general work.
What "he gives..." to his mother is this "Ballade of our Lady," written,
presumably, long before the "will" and put in here and thus after being
carefully led up to.
These thirty-seven lines are more famous in their own country than
abroad. They pour from the well of a religion which has not failed in
the place where Villon wrote, and they present that religion in a manner
peculiar and national.
Apart from its piety and its exquisite tenderness, two qualities of
Villon are to be specially found in this poem: his vivid phrase, such
as:
_"Emperiere des infernaux paluz,"_
(a discovery of which he was so proud that he repeated it elsewhere) or:
_"sa tres chiere jeunesse."_
And secondly the curiously processional effect of the metre and of the
construction of the stanzas--the extra line and the extra foot lend
themselves to a chaunt in their balanced slow rhythm, as any one can
find for himself by reading the lines to some church sing-song as he
goes.
_THE BALLADE OF OUR LADY._
_Dame des cieulx, regente terrienne,
Emperiere des infernaux paluz,
Recevez moy, vostre humble chrestienne,
Que comprinse soye entre vos esleuz,
Ce non obstant qu'oncques rien ne valuz.
Les biens de vous, ma dame et ma maistresse,
Sont trop plus grans que ne suis pecheresse,
Sans lesquelz biens ame ne peut merir
N'avoir les cieulx, je n'en suis jungleresse.
En ceste foi je veuil vivre et mourir._
_A vostre fils dicte que je suis sienne;
De luy soyent mes pechiez aboluz:
Pardonne moy, comme à l'Egipcienne,
Ou comme il feist au clerc Théophilus,
Lequel par vous fut quitte et absoluz,
Combien qu'il eust au Deable fait promesse.
Preservez moy, que ne face jamais ce
Vierge portant, sans rompure encourir
Le sacrement qu'on celebre à la messe.
En ceste foy je veuil vivre et mourir._
_Femme je suis povrette et ancienne
Qui riens ne scay; oncques lettre ne leuz;
Au moustier voy dont suis paroissienne
Paradis faint, où sont harpes et luz,
Et ung enfer où dampnez sont boulluz:
L'ung me fait paour, l'autre joye et liesse.
La joye avoir me fay, haulte Deesse,
A qui pecheurs doivent tous recourir,
Comblez de Foy, sans fainte ne paresse.
En ceste foy je veuil vivre et mourir._
_ENVOI_
_Vous portastes, digne vierge, princesse,
Jesus regnant, qui n'a ne fin ne cesse.
Le Tout Puissant, prenant notre foiblesse,
Laissa les cieulx et nous vint secourir,
Offrit à mort sa tres chiere jeunesse.
Nostre Seigneur tel est, tel le confesse,
En ceste foy je veuil vivre et mourir._
THE DEAD LORDS.
As I have not wished to mix up smaller things with greater I have put
this _ballade_ separate from that of "the Ladies," though it directly
follows it as an after-thought in Villon's own book. For the former is
one of the masterpieces of the world, and this, though very Villon, is
not great.
What it has got is the full latter mediaeval love of odd names and
reminiscences, and also to the full, the humour of the scholarly tavern,
which was the "Mermaid" of that generation: as the startling regret of:
Hélas! et le bon roy d'Espaigne
Duquel je ne sçay pas le nom....
and the addition, after the false exit of "je me désiste".
_Encore fais une question_
He laughed well over it, and was perhaps not thirsty when it was
written.
_THE DEAD LORDS._
_Qui plus? Où est le Tiers Calixte
Dernier decedé de ce nom,
Qui quatre ans tint le papaliste?
Alphonce, le roy d'Arragon,
Le Gracieux Duc de Bourbon,
Et Artus, le Duc de Bretaigne,
Et Charles Septiesme, le Bon?....
Mais où est le preux Charlemaigne!_
_Semblablement le roy Scotiste
Qui demy face ot, ce dit on,
Vermeille comme une amatiste
Depuis le front jusqu'au menton?
Le roy de Chippre, de renom?
Hélas! et le bon roy d'Espaigne
Duquel je ne sçay pas le nom?...
Mais où est le preux Charlemaigne!_
_D'en plus parler je me desiste
Le monde n'est qu'abusion.
Il n'est qui contre mort resiste
Le que treuve provision.
Encor fais une question:
Lancelot, le roy de Behaigne,
Où est il? Où est son tayon?....
Mais où est le preux Charlemaigne!_
_ENVOI._
_Où est Claguin, le bon Breton?
Où le conte daulphin d'Auvergne
Et le bon feu Duc d'Alençon?...
Mais où est le preux Charlemaigne!_
THE DIRGE.
This is the best ending for any set of verses one may choose out of
Villon. It follows and completes the epitaph which in his will he orders
to be written in charcoal--or scratched--above his tomb: the sad,
sardonic octave of "the little scholar and poor." It is a kind of added
dirge to be read by those who pass and to be hummed or chaunted over him
dead. But it is a rondeau.
See how sharp it is with the salt and vinegar of his pressed courageous
smile--and how he cannot run away from his religion or from his power
over sudden and vivid beauty.
"Sire--et clarté perpétuelle"--which last are the best two words that
ever stood in the vulgar for _lux perpetua_.
It is no wonder that as time went on, more and more people learnt these
things by heart.
_RONDEAU._
_Repos éternel, donne à cil,
Sire, et clarté perpétuelle,
Qui vaillant plat ni escuelle
N'eut oncques, n'ung brain de percil.
Il fut rez, chief, barbe et sourcil,
Comme un navet qu'on ret ou pelle.
Repos éternel donne à cil.
Rigueur le transmit en exil
Et luy frappa au cul la pelle,
Non obstant qu'il dit "J'en appelle!"
Qui n'est pas terme trop subtil.
Repos éternel donne à cil._
CLEMENT MAROT.
If in Charles of Orleans the first note of the French Renaissance is
heard, if in Villon you find first its energy appearing above ground,
yet both are forerunners only.
With Marot one is in the full tide of the movement. The discovery of
America had preceded his birth by three or perhaps four years. His early
manhood was filled with all that ferment, all that enormous branching
out of human life, which was connected with the expansion of Spain; he
was in the midst of the scarlet and the gold. A man just of age when
Luther was first condemned, living his active manhood through the
experience of the great battlefields in Italy, wounded (a valet rather
than a soldier) at Pavia, the perpetual chorus of Francis I., privileged
to witness the first stroke of the pickaxe against the mediaeval Louvre,
and to see the first Italian dignity of the great stone houses on the
Loire--being all this, the Renaissance was the stuff on which his life
was worked.
His blood and descent were typical enough of the work he had to do. His
own father was one of the last set rhymers of the dying Middle Ages. All
his boyhood was passed among that multitude of little dry "writers-down
of verse" with which, in Paris, the Middle Ages died; they were not a
swarm, for they were not living; they were a heap of dust. All his early
work is touched with the learned, tedious, unbeautiful industry which
was all that the elder men round Louis XII could bring to letters. By a
happy accident there were mixed in him, however, two vigorous springs of
inspiration, each ready to receive the new forces that were working in
Europe, each destined to take the fullest advantage of the new time.
These springs were first, learned Normandy, quiet, legal, well-founded,
deep in grass, wealthy; and secondly, the arid brilliancy of the South:
Quency and the country round Cahors. His father was a Norman pure bred,
who had come down and married into that sharp land where the summer is
the note of the whole year, and where the traveller chiefly remembers
vineyards, lizards on the walls, short shadows, sleep at noon, and
blinding roads of dust. The first years of his childhood were spent in
the southern town, so that the south entered into him thoroughly. The
language that he never wrote, the Languedoc, was that, perhaps, in which
he thought during all his life. It was his mother's.
It has been noticed by all his modern readers, it will be noticed
probably with peculiar force by English readers, that the fame of Marot
during his lifetime and his historical position as the leader of the
Renaissance has in it something exaggerated and false. One cannot help a
perpetual doubt as to whether the religious quarrel, the influence of
the Court, the strong personal friendships and enmities which surrounded
him had not had more to do with his reputation than his faculty, or even
his genius, for rhyme. Whenever he wanted £100 he asked it of the King
with the grave promise that he would bestow upon him immortality.
From Ronsard, or from Du Bellay, we, here in the north, could understand
that phrase; from Marot it carries a flavour of the grotesque. Ready
song, indeed, and a great power over the material one uses in singing
last indefinitely; they last as long as the sublime or the terrible in
literature, but we forbear to associate with them--perhaps unjustly--the
conception of greatness. If indeed anyone were to maintain that Marot
was not an excellent and admirable poet he would prove himself ignorant
of the language in which Marot wrote, but let the most sympathetic turn
to what is best in his verse, let them turn for instance to that
charming lyric: "A sa Dame Malade" or to "The Ballad of Old Time," or
even to that really large and riotous chorus of the vine, and they will
see that it is the kind of thing which is amplified by music, and which
sometimes demands the aid of music to appear at all. They will see quite
plainly that Marot took pleasure in playing with words and arranged them
well, felt keenly and happily, played a full lyre, but they will doubt
whether poetry was necessarily for him the most serious business of
life.
Why, then, has he taken the place claimed for him, and why is he firmly
secure in the place of master of the ceremonies, as it were, to that
glorious century whose dawn he enjoyed and helped to beautify?
I will explain it.
It is because he is national. He represents not what is most this, or
most that--"highest", "noblest", "truest", "best", and all the rest of
it--in his countrymen, but rather what they have most in common.
Did you meet him to-day in the Strand you would know at once that you
had to do with a Frenchman, and, probably, with a kind of poet.
He was short, square in the shoulders, tending in middle age to fatness.
A dark hair and beard; large brown eyes of the south; a great, rounded,
wrinkled forehead like Verlaine's; a happy mouth, a nose very
insignificant, completed him. When we meet somewhere, under cypress
trees at last, these great poets of a better age, and find Ronsard a
very happy man, Du Bellay, a gentleman; then Malherbe, for all that he
was a northerner, we may mistake, if we find him, for a Catalonian.
Villon, however Parisian, will appear the Bohemian that many cities have
produced; Charles of Orleans may seem at first but one of that very high
nobility remnants of which are still to be discovered in Europe. But
when we see Marot, our first thought will certainly be, as I have said,
that we have come across a Frenchman; and the more French for a touch of
the commonplace.
See how French was the whole career!
Whatever is new attracts him. The reformation attracts him. It was
_chic_ to have to do with these new things. He had the French ignorance
of what was foreign and alien; the French curiosity to meddle with it
because it had come from abroad; the French passion for opposing, for
struggling;--and beneath it all the large French indifference to the
problem of evil (or whatever you like to call it), the changeless French
content in certitude, upon which ease, indeed, as upon a rock, the
Church of Gaul has permanently stood and will continuously repose.
He has been a sore puzzle to the men who have never heard of these
things. Calvin (that appalling exception who had nothing in him of
France except lucidity) could make neither head nor tail of him. Geneva
was glad enough to chaunt through the nose his translations of the
Psalms, but it was woefully puzzled at his salacity, and the town was
very soon too hot to hold him in his exile. And as for the common,
partial, and ignorant histories of France, written in our tongue, they
generally make him a kind of backslider, who might have been a Huguenot
(and--who knows?--have thrown the Sacrament to beasts with the best of
them) save that, unhappily, he did not persevere. Whatever they say of
him (and some have hardly heard of him) one thing is quite certain: that
they do not understand him, and that if they did they would like him
still less than they do.
He was national in the rapidity of the gesture of his mind as in that of
his body: in his being attracted here and there, watching this and that
suddenly, like a bird.
He was national in his power of sharp recovery from any emotion back
into his normal balance.
He was national in that he depended upon companions, and stood for a
crowd, and deplored all isolation. He was national in that he had
nothing strenuous about him, and that he was amiable, and if he had
heard of "earnest" men, he would have laughed at them a little, as
people who did not see the whole of life.
He was especially national (and it is here that the poet returns) in
that most national of all things--a complete sympathy with the
atmosphere of the native tongue. Thus men debate a good deal upon the
poetic value of Wordsworth, but it is certain, when one sees how bathed
he is in the sense of English words, their harmony and balance, that the
man is entirely English, that no other nation could have produced him,
and that he will be most difficult for foreigners to understand. You
will not translate into French or any other language the simplicity of:
"Glimpses that should make me less forlorn."
Nor can you translate, so as to give its own kind of grandeur
"Et arrivoit pour bénistre la vigne."
Apart from his place in letters, see how national he is in what he does!
He buys two bits of land, he talks of them continually, sees to them,
visits them. They are quite little bits of land. He calls one Clément,
and the other Marot! Here is a whimsicality you would not find, I think,
among another people.
He has the hatred of "sprawling" in his particular art which is the
chief aesthetic character of the French; but he has the tendency to
excess in opinion or in general expression which is their chief
political fault.
It is thus, then, that I think he should be regarded and that I would
desire to present him. It is thus, I am sure, that he should be read if
one is to know why he has taken so great a place in the reverence and
the history of the French people.
And it is in this aspect that he may worthily introduce much greater
things, the Pléiade and Ronsard.
OF COURTING LONG AGO.
(_The Eighth of the Roundels._)
This is a fair enough specimen of Marot at his daily gait: an easy
versifier "on a theme" and no more. I have said that it is unjust to
judge him on that level, and I have said why; but I give this to give
the man as he moved domestically to the admiration of the court and of
his friends in a time which missed, for example, the epic character of
the last six lines of "Le Beau Tettin," and which hardly comprehended of
what value his pure lyric enthusiasms would be to a sadder and drier
posterity.
_OF COURTING LONG AGO._
_Au bon vieulx temps un train d'amour regnoit,
Qui sans grand art et dons se démenoit,
Si qu'un boucquet donné d'amour profonde
S'estoit donné toute la terre ronde:
Car seulement au cueur on se prenoit._
_Et si, par cas, à jouyr on venoit,
Sçavez-vous bien comme on s'entretenoit?
Vingt ans, trente ans; cela duroit ung monde
Au bon vieulx temps._
_Or est perdu ce qu'amour ordonnoit,
Rien que pleurs fainctz, rien que changes on n'oyt.
Qui vouldra donc qu'à aymer je me fonde,
Il fault, premier, que l'amour on refonde
Et qu'on la meine ainsi qu'on la menoit
Au bon vieulx temps._
NOËL.
(_The Second of the Chansons._)
But here, upon the contrary, is the spontaneity of his happy mind; it
suggests a song; one can hardly read it without a tune in one's head, so
simple is it and so purely lyrical: there is a touch of the dance in it,
too.
In these little things of Marot, which are neither learned (and he
boasted of learning) nor set and dry (and his friends especially praised
his precision), a great poet certainly appears--in short revelations,
but still appears. Unfortunately there are not enough of them.
That he thought "like a Southerner," as I have maintained and as I shall
show by a further example, is made the more probable from the value he
lends to the feminine e. The excellent rhythm of this poem you will only
get by giving the feminine e the value of a drawn out syllable:
"L'effect
Est faict:
La bel-le
Pucel-le," etc.
So Spaniards, Gascons, Provençaux, Italians, rhyme, and all those of the
south who have retained their glorious "a's" and "o's".
As for the spirit of it--God bless him!--it is a subject for perpetual
merriment to think of such a man's being taken for a true Huguenot and
enmeshed, even for a while, in the nasty cobweb of Geneva. But in the
last thing I shall quote, when he is Bacchic for the vine, you will see
it still more.
_NOËL._
_Une pastourelle gentille
Et ung bergier en ung verger
L'autrhyer en jouant à la bille
S'entredisoient, pour abréger:
Roger
Bergier
Legière
Bergière,
C'est trop à la bille joué;
Chantons Noé, Noé, Noé._
_Te souvient-il plus du prophète
Qui nous dit cas de si hault faict,
Que d'une pucelle parfaicte
Naistroit ung enfant tout parfaict?
L'effect
Est faict:
La belle
Pucelle
A eu ung filz du ciel voué:
Chantons Noé, Noé, Noé._
TWO EPIGRAMS.
(_The 41st of the First Book and the 46th of the Second._)
These two epigrams are again but examples of the readiness, the wit, the
hard surface of Marot, and they needed no more poetry than was in
Voltaire or Swift, but they needed style. It was this absolute and
standard style which his contemporaries chiefly remarked in him: the
marvel was, that being mainly such an epigrammatist and scholar, and
praised and supported only in that guise, he should have carried in him
any, or rather so much, fire.
The first was his reply to a Dixaine the king's sister had sent him. The
second explains itself.
_TWO EPIGRAMS._
_Mes créanciers, qui de dixains n'ont cure,
Ont leu le vostre; et sur ce leur ay dict:
"Sire Michel, sire Bonaventure,
La soeur du Roy a pour moy faict ce dit."
Lors eulx cuydans que fusse en grand crédict,
M'ont appelé monsieur à cry et cor,
Et m'a valu vostre escript aultant qu'or;
Car promis m'ont non seulement d'attendre,
Mais d'en prester, foy de marchant, encor,
Et j'ay promis, foy de Clément, d'en prendre._
_Paris, tu m'as faict maints alarmes,
Jusque à me poursuivre à la mort:
Je n'ay que blasonné tes armes:
Un ver, quand on le presse, il mord!
Encor la coulpe m'en remord.
Ne scay de toy comment sera;
Mais de nous deux le diable emport
Celuy qui recommencera._
TO HIS LADY IN SICKNESS.
(_The 16th Epistle._)
It is the way this is printed that makes some miss its value. It is,
like all the best he wrote, a song; it needs the varying time of human
expression, the effect of tone, the repose and the re-lifting of musical
notes; illuminated thus it greatly charmed, and if any one would know
the order of such a tune, why, it should follow the punctuation: a
cessation at the third line; a rise of rapid accents to the thirteenth,
and then a change; the last three lines of the whole very much fuller
and strong.
So I would hear it sung on a winter evening in an old house in Auvergne,
and re-enter the sixteenth century as I heard.
_TO HIS LADY IN SICKNESS._
_Ma mignonne,
Je vous donne
Le bon jour.
Le séjour,
C'est prison.
Guérison
Recouvrez,
Puis ouvrez
Vostre porte
Et qu'on sorte
Vistement;
Car Clément
Le vous mande.
Va, friande
De ta bouche,
Qui se couche
En danger
Pour manger
Confitures;
Si tu dures
Trop malade,
Couleur fade
Tu prendras
Et perdras
L'embonpoint.
Dieu te doint,
Santé bonne,
Ma mignonne._
THE VINEYARD SONG.
(_The 4th of the Chansons._)
Here is Marot's best--even though many of his native critics will not
admit it so; but to feel it in full one must be exiled from the vines.
It is a tapestry of the Renaissance; the jolly gods of the Renaissance,
the old gods grown Catholic moving across a happier stage. Bacchus in
long robes and with solemnity blessing the vine, Silenus and the
hobbling smith who smithied the Serpe, the Holy Vineyard Knife in
heaven, all these by their diction and their flavour recall the Autumn
in Herault and the grapes under a pure sky, pale at the horizon, and
labourers and their carts in the vineyard, and these set in the frame of
that great time when Saturn did return.
All the poem is wine. It catches its rhymes and weaves them in and in,
and moves rapid and careless in a fugue, like the march from Asia when
the Panthers went before and drew the car. The internal rhythm and pulse
is the clapping of hands in barns at evening and the peasants' feet
dancing freely on the beaten earth. It is a very good song; it remembers
the treading of the grapes and is refreshed by the mists that rise at
evening when the labour is done.
_THE VINEYARD SONG._
_Changeons propos, c'est trop chanté d'amours,
Ce sont clamours, chantons de la Serpette,
Tous vignerons ont à elle recours,
C'est leur secours pour tailler la vignette.
O serpilette, ô la serpilonnette,
La vignolette est par toy mise sus,
Dont les bons vins, tous les ans, sont yssus!_
_Le dieu Vulcain, forgeron des haults dieux,
Forgea aux cieulx la serpe bien taillante,
De fin acier, trempé en bon vin vieulx,
Pour tailler mieulx et estre plus vaillante.
Bacchus le vante et dit qu'elle est séante
Et convenante à Noé le bonshom
Pour en tailler la vigne en la saison._
_Bacchus alors chappeau de treille avoit,
Et arrivoit pour bénistre la vigne;
Avec flascons Silénus le suivoit,
Lequel beuvoit aussi droict qu'une ligne;
Puis il trépigne, et se faict une bigne;
Comme une guigne estoit rouge son nez.
Beaucoup de gens de sa race sont nez._
RONSARD.
If it be true that words create for themselves a special atmosphere, and
that their mere sound calls up vague outer things beyond their strict
meaning, so it is true that the names of the great poets by their mere
sound, by something more than the recollection of their work, produce an
atmosphere corresponding to the quality of each; and the name of Ronsard
throws about itself like an aureole the characters of fecundity, of
leadership, and of fame.
A group of men to which allusion will be made in connection with Du
Bellay set out with a programme, developed a determined school, and
fixed the literary renaissance of France at its highest point. They
steeped themselves in antiquity, and they put to the greatest value it
has ever received the name of poet; they demanded that the poet should
be a kind of king, or seer. Half seriously, half as a product of mere
scholarship, the pagan conception of the muse and of inspiration filled
them.
More than that; in their earnest, and, as it seemed at first, artificial
work, they formed the French language. Some of its most famous and most
familiar words proceed from them--for instance, the word _Patrie_. Some
few of their exotic Greek and Latin adaptations were dropped; the
greater part remained. They have excluded from French--as some think to
the impoverishment of that language--most elements of the Gothic--the
inversion of the adjective, the frequent suppression of the relative,
the irregularity of form, which had survived from the Middle Ages, and
which make the older French poetry so much more sympathetic to the
Englishman than is the new--all these were destroyed by the group of men
of whom I speak. They were called by their contemporaries the Pleiade,
for they were seven stars.
Now, of these, Ronsard was easily the master. He had that power which
our anaemic age can hardly comprehend, of writing, writing, writing,
without fear of exhaustion, without irritability or self-criticism,
without danger of comparing the better with the worse. Five great
volumes of small print, all good--men of that facility never write the
really paltry things--all good, and most of it glorious; some of it on
the level which only the great poets reach here and there. It is in
reading this man who rhymed unceasingly for forty years, who made of
poetry an occupation as well as a glory, and who let it fill the whole
of his life, that one feels how much such creative power has to do with
the value of verse. There is a kind of good humility about it, the
humility of a man who does not look too closely at himself, and the
health of a soul at full stride, going forward. You may open Ronsard at
any page, and find a beauty; you may open any one of the sonnets at
random, and in translating it discover that you are compelled to a fine
English, because he is saying, plainly, great things. And of these
sonnets, note you, he would write thirty at a stretch, and then twenty,
and then a second book, with seventy more. So that as one reads one
cannot help understanding that Italian who said a man was no poet unless
he could rap out a century of sonnets from time to time; and one is
reminded of the general vigour of the age and of the way in which art of
all sorts was mingled up together, when one remembers the tags of
verses, just such verses as these, which are yet to be seen in our
galleries set down doubtfully on the margin of their sketches by the
great artists of Italy.
Ronsard, with these qualities of a leader, unconscious, as all true
leaders are, of the causes of his leadership, and caring, as all true
leaders do, for nothing in leadership save the glory it brings with it,
had also, as have all leaders, chiefly the power of drawing in a
multitude of friends. The peculiar head of his own group, he very soon
became the head of all the movement of his day. He had made letters
really great in the minds of his contemporaries, and having so made
them, appeared before them as a master of those letters. Certainly, as I
shall quote him in a moment when I come to his dying speech, he was
"satiated with glory."
Yet this man did not in his personality convey that largeness which was
his principal mark. His face was narrow, long and aquiline; his health
uneven. It was evidently his soul which made men quickly forget the
ill-matched case which bore it; for almost alone of the great poets he
was consistently happy, and there poured out from him not only this
unceasing torrent of verse, but also advice, sustenance, and a kind of
secondary inspiration for others.
In yet another matter he was a leader, and a leader of the utmost
weight, not the cause, perhaps, but certainly the principal example of
the trend which the mind of the nation was taking as the sixteenth
century drew to a close. I mean in the matter of religion, upon whose
colour every society depends, which is the note even of a national
language, and which seems to be the ultimate influence beyond which no
historical analysis can carry a thinking man.
But even those who will not admit the truth of this should watch the
theory closely, for with the religious trend of France is certainly
bound up, and, as I would maintain, on such an influence is dependent,
that ultimate setting of the French classic, that winding up of the
Renaissance, with which I shall deal in the essay upon Malherbe.
The stream of Catholicism was running true. The nation was tumbling back
after a high and turbulent flood into the channel it had scoured for
itself by the unbroken energies of a thousand years. It is no accident
that Ronsard, that Du Bellay, were churchmen. It is a type. It is a type
of the truth that the cloth admitted poets; of the truth that in the
great battle whose results yet trouble Europe, here, on the soil where
the great questions are fought out, Puritanism was already killed. The
epicurean in them both, glad and ready in Ronsard, sombre and Lucretian
in Du Bellay, jarred indeed in youth against their vows; but that it
should have been tolerated, that it should have led to no excess or
angry revolt, was typical of their moment. It was typical, finally, of
their generation that all this mixture of the Renaissance with the
Church matured at last into its natural fruit, for in the case of
Ronsard we have a noble expression of perfect Christianity at the end.
In the November of 1585 he felt death upon him; he had himself borne to
his home as soon as the Huguenot bands had left it, ravaged and
devastated as it was. He found it burnt and looted, but it reminded him
of childhood and of the first springs of his great river of verse. A
profound sadness took him. He was but in his sixty-second year, his mind
had not felt any chill of age. He could not sleep; poppies and
soporifics failed him. He went now in his coach, now on a litter from
place to place in that country side which he had rendered famous, and
saw the Vendomois for the last time; its cornfields all stubble under a
cold and dreary sky. And in each place he waited for a while.
But death troubled him, and he could not remain. Within a fortnight he
ordered that they should carry him southward to the Loire, to that
priory of which--by a custom of privilege, nobility and royal favour--he
was the nominal head, the priory which is "the eye and delight of
Touraine",--the Isle of St. Cosmo. He sickened as he went. The thirty
miles or so took him three painful days; twice, all his strength failed
him, and he lay half fainting in his carriage; to so much energy and to
so much power of creation these episodes were an awful introduction of
death.
It was upon the 17th of November that he reached the walls wherein he
was Superior; six weeks later, on the second day after Christmas, he
died.
Were I to describe that scene to which he called the monks, all men of
his own birth and training, were I to dwell upon the appearance and the
character of the oldest and the wisest, who was also the most famous
there, I should extend this essay beyond its true limit, as I should
also do were I to write down, even briefly, the account of his just,
resigned, and holy death. It must suffice that I transcribe the chief of
his last deeds; I mean, that declaration wherein he made his last
profession of faith.
The old monk had said to him: "In what resolution do you die?"
He answered, somewhat angrily: "In what did you think? In the religion
which was my father's and his father's, and his father's and his
father's before him--for I am of that kind."
Then he called all the community round him, as though the monastic
simplicity had returned (so vital is the Faith, so simple its primal
energies), and as though he had been the true prior of some early and
fervent house, he told them these things which I will faithfully
translate on account of their beauty. They are printed here, I think,
for the first time in English, and must stand for the end of this essay:
He said: "That he had sinned like other men, and, perhaps, more than
most; that his senses had led him away by their charm, and that he had
not repressed or constrained them as he should; but none the less, he
had always held that Faith which the men of his line had left him, he
had always clasped close the Creed and the unity of the Catholic Church;
that, in fine, he had laid a sure foundation, but he had built thereon
with wood, with hay, with straw. As for that foundation, he was sure it
would stand; as for the light and worthless things he had built upon it
he had trust in the mercy of the Saviour that they would be burnt in the
fire of His love. And now he begged them all to believe hard, as he had
believed; but not to live as he had lived; they must understand that he
had never attempted or plotted against the life or goods of another, nor
ever against any man's honour, but, after all, there was nothing therein
wherewith to glorify one's self before God." When he had wept a little,
he continued, saying, "that the world was a ceaseless turmoil and
torment, and shipwreck after shipwreck all the while, and a whirlpool of
sins, and tears and pain, and that to all these misfortunes there was
but one port, and this port was Death. But, as for him, he carried with
him into that port no desire and no regret for life. That he had tried
every one of its pretended joys, that he had left nothing undone which
could give him the least shadow of pleasure or content, but that at the
end he had found everywhere the oracle of Wisdom, vanity of vanities."
He ended with this magnificent thing, which is, perhaps, the last his
human power conceived, and I will put it down in his own words:--
"Of all those vanities, the loveliest and most praiseworthy is
glory--fame. No one of my time has been so filled with it as I; I have
lived in it, and loved and triumphed in it through time past, and now I
leave it to my country to garner and possess it after I shall die. So do
I go away from my own place as satiated with the glory of this world as
I am hungry and all longing for that of God."
DIALOGUE WITH THE NINE SISTERS.
This is a little Amaboean thing not very well known but very Horatian
and worth setting down here because it is in the manner of so much that
he wrote.
Its manner is admirable. Its gentleness, persistency and increase--are
like those of his own small river the Loir. Its last stanza from the
middle of the first line "_Ceux dont la fantaisie_" to the end, should,
I think be famous; but an English reader can hardly forgive such an
introduction as "_Voilà sagement dit_" to so noble a finale.
_DIALOGUE WITH THE NINE SISTERS._
Ronsard. _Pour avoir trop aimé vostre bande inégale,
Muses, qui defiez (ce dites vous) le temps,
J'ay les yeux tout battus, la face toute pasle,
Le Chef grison et chauve, et je n'ay que trente ans._
Muses. _Au nocher qui sans cesse erre sur la marine
Le teint noir appartient; le soldat n'est point beau
Sans estre tout poudreux; qui courbe la poitrine
Sur nos livres, est laid s'il n'a pasle la peau._
Ronsard. _Mais quelle recompense aurois-je de tant suivre
Vos danses nuict et jour, un laurier sur le front?
Et cependant les ans aux quels je deusse vivre
En plaisirs et en jeux comme poudre s'en vont._
Muses. _Vous aurez, en vivant, une fameuse gloire,
Puis, quand vous serez mort, votre nom fleurira
L'age, de siècle en siècle, aura de vous memoire;
Vostre corps seulement au tombeau pourrira._
Ronsard. _O le gentil loyer! Que sert au viel Homère,
Ores qu'il n'est plus rien, sous la tombe, là-bas,
Et qu'il n'a plus ny chef, ny bras, ny jambe entiere
Si son renom fleurist, ou s'il ne fleurist pas!_
Muses. _Vous estes abusé. Le corps dessous la lame
Pourry ne sent plus rien, aussy ne luy en chaut.
Mais un tel accident n'arrive point à l'ame,
Qui sans matière vist immortelle là haut._
Ronsard. _Bien! Je vous suyvray donc d'une face plaisante,
Dussé-je trespasser de l'estude vaincu,
Et ne fust-ce qu'à fin que la race suyvante
Ne me reproche point qu'oysif j'aye vescu._
Muses. _Vela saigement dit, Ceux dont la fantaisie
Sera religieuse et devote envers Dieu
Tousjours acheveront quelque grand poesie,
Et dessus leur renom la Parque n'aura lieu._
THE EPITAPH ON RABELAIS.
Seven years after Rabelais died, Ronsard wrote this off-hand. I give it,
not for its value, but because it connects these two great names. The
man who wrote it had seen that large and honorable mouth worshipping
wine: he had reverenced that head of laughter which has corrected all
our philosophy. It would be a shame to pass such a name as Ronsard's
signed to an epitaph on such a work as that of Rabelais, poetry or no
poetry.
Ronsard also from a tower at Meudon used to creep out at night and drink
with that fellow-priest, vicar of the Parish, Rabelais: a greater man
than he.
By a memory separate from the rest of his verse, Ronsard was moved to
write this Rabelaisian thing. For he had seen him "full length upon the
grass and singing so."
There is no need of notes, for these great names of Gargantua, Panurge
and Friar John are household to every honest man.
_THE EPITAPH ON RABELAIS._
_Si d'un mort qui pourri repose
Nature engendre quelque chose,
Et si la génération
Se faict de la corruption,
Une vigne prendra naissance
Du bon Rabelais qui boivoit
Tousjours ce pendant qu'il vivoit;_
_Demi me se troussoit les bras
Et se couchoit tout plat à bas
Sur la jonchée entre les tasses
Et parmy les escuelles grasses_
_Il chantait la grande massue
Et la jument de Gargantue,
Le grand Panurge et le jaïs
Des papimanes ébahis,
Leurs loix, leurs façons et demeures
Et Frère Jean des Antonneures.
Et d'Espisteme les combas.
Mais la Mort qui ne boivoit pas
Tira le beuveur de ce monde
Et ores le fait boire de l'onde
Du large fleuve d'Achéron._
"MIGNONNE ALLONS VOIR SI LA ROSE."
(_The 17th Ode of the First Book._)
"In these eighteen lines," says very modernly a principal critic, "lies
Ronsard's fame more surely than in all the remaining mass of his works."
He condemns by implication Ronsard's wide waste of power; but the few
other poems that I have here had room to print, should make the reader
careful of such judgements. It is true that in the great hoard which
Ronsard left his people there are separate and particular jewels set in
the copper and the gold, but the jewels are very numerous: indeed it was
almost impossible to choose so few as I have printed here.
If it be asked why this should have become the most famous, no answer
can be given save the "flavour of language." It is the perfection of his
tongue. Its rhythm reaches the exact limit of change which a simple
metre will tolerate: where it saddens, a lengthy hesitation at the
opening of the seventh line introduces a new cadence, a lengthy
lingering upon the last syllables of the tenth, eleventh and twelfth
closes a grave complaint. So, also by an effect of quantities, the last
six lines rise out of melancholy into their proper character of appeal
and vivacity: an exhortation.
Certainly those who are so unfamiliar with French poetry as not to know
that its whole power depends upon an extreme subtlety of rhythm, may
find here the principal example of the quality they have missed.
Something much less weighty than the stress of English lines, a just
perceptible difference between nearly equal syllables, marks the
excellent from the intolerable in French prosody: and to feel this truth
in the eighteen lines that follow it is necessary to read them virtually
in the modern manner--for the "s" in "vesprée" or "vostre" were
pedantries in the sixteenth century--but one must give the mute "e's"
throughout as full a value as they have in singing. Indeed, reading this
poem, one sees how it must have been composed to some good and simple
air in the man's head.
If the limits of a page permitted it, I would also show how worthy the
thing was of fame from its pure and careful choice of verb--"Tandis que
vostre age _fleuronne_"--but space prevents me, luckily, for all this is
like splitting a diamond.
"_MIGNONNE ALLONS VOIR SI LA ROSE._"
_Mignonne, allons voir si la rose
Qui ce matin avoit desclose
Sa robe de pourpre au soleil
A point perdu ceste vesprée
Les plis de sa robe pourprée
Et son teint au vostre pareil_
_Las! Voyez comme en peu d'espace
Mignonne, elle a dessus la place,
Las! Las! ses beautez laissé cheoir!
O vrayment marastre nature,
Puis qu'une telle fleur ne dure
Que du matin jusques au soir!_
_Donc si vous me croyez, Mignonne,
Tandis que vostre age fleuronne
En sa plus verte nouveauté,
Cuillez, Cuillez vostre jeunesse:
Comme à ceste fleur, la veillesse
Fera ternir vostre beauté._
THE "SONNETS FOR HÉLÈNE"
(_The 42nd and 43rd Sonnets of the Second Book._)
Hélène was very real. A young Maid of Honour to Catherine de Medicis;
Spanish by blood, Italian by breeding, called in France "de Sugères,"
she was the gravest and the wisest, and, for those who loved serenity,
the most beautiful of that high and brilliant school.
The Sonnets began as a task; a task the Queen had set Ronsard, with
Hélène for theme: they ended in the last strong love of Ronsard's life.
A sincere lover of many women, he had come to the turn of his age when
he saw her, like a memory of his own youth. He has permitted to run
through this series, therefore, something of the unique illusion which
distance in time or space can lend to the aspect of beauty. An emotion
so tenuous does not appear in any other part of his work: here alone you
find the chastity or weakness which made something in his mind come near
to the sadder Du Bellay's: his soul is regardant all the while as he
writes: visions rise from her such as never rose from Cassandra; as this
great picture at the opening of the 58th Sonnet of the Second Book:
Seule sans compagnie en une grande salle
Tu logeois l'autre jour pleine de majesté.
These "Sonnets for Hélène" should be common knowledge: they are (with Du
Bellay's) the evident original upon which the author of Shakespeare's
Sonnets modelled his work: they are the late and careful effort of
Ronsard's somewhat spendthrift genius.
Here are two of them. One, the second, most famous, the other, the
first, hardly known: both are admirable.
It is the perfection of their sound which gives them their peculiar
quality. The very first lines lead off with a completed harmony: it is
as thoroughly a winter night as that in Shakespeare's song, but it is
more solemn and, as it were, more "built of stone...."
"La Lune Ocieuse, tourne si lentement son char tout à l'entour", is like
a sleeping statue of marble.
To this character, the second adds a vivid interest of emotion which has
given it its special fame. Even the populace have come to hear of this
sonnet, and it is sung to a lovely tune. It has also what often leads to
permanent reputation in verse, a great simplicity of form. The Sextet is
well divided from the Octave, the climax is clearly underlined. Ronsard
was often (to his hurt) too scholarly to achieve simplicity: when, under
the clear influence of some sharp passion or gaiety he did achieve it,
then he wrote the lines that will always remain:
A fin qu'à tout jamais de siècle en siècle vive,
La Parfaicte amitié que Ronsard la portait.
_THE "SONNETS FOR HÉLÈNE."_
XLII
_Ces longues nuicts d'hyver, où la Lune ocieuse
Tourne si lentement son char tout à l'entour,
Où le Coq si tardif nous annonce le jour,
Où la nuict semble un an à l'ame soucieuse:
Je fusse mort d'ennuy sans ta forme douteuse
Qui vient par une feinte alleger mon amour,
Et faisant toute nue entre mes bras séjour
Me pipe doucement d'une joye menteuse.
Vraye tu es farouche, et fière en cruauté:
De toy fausse on jouyst en toute privauté.
Pres ton mort je m'endors, pres de luy je repose:
Rien ne m'est refusé. Le bon sommeil ainsi
Abuse pour le faux mon amoureux souci.
S'abuser en Amour n'est pas mauvaise chose._
XLIII
_Quand vous serez bien vieille, au Soir à la chandelle,
Assise aupres du feu, dévidant et filant,
Direz chantant mes vers, en vous esmerveillant,
Ronsard me celebroit du temps que j'estois belle.
Lors vous n'aurez servante oyant telle nouvelle
Desia sous le labeur à demy sommeillant
Qui au bruit de mon nom ne s'aille resveillant,
Bénissant vostre nom de louange immortelle._
_Je seray sous la terre et fantôme sans os
Par les ombres myrteux je prendray mon repos.
Vous serez au foyer une veille accroupie,
Regrettant mon amour et vostre fier desdain.
Vivez, si m'en croyez; n'attendez à demain.
Cueillez des aujourdhuy les roses de la vie._
JOACHIM DU BELLAY.
In Du Bellay the literary Renaissance, French but transfigured by Italy,
middle-north of the plains but looking southward to the Mediterranean,
came to one soul and concentrated upon it, as the plastic expression of
the same influence concentrated in Goujon. Very central in time, half
soldier, half priest, all student; traveller and almost adventurer, a
pilgrim throughout of the Idea, everything about him is symbolic of the
generation he adorned.
In its vigour, at least, the Renaissance was a glorious youth--he, Du
Bellay, died at thirty-five. Its leap and soaring were taken from the
firm platform of strong scholarship--he was a scholar beyond the rest.
It fixed special forms--he the French sonnet. It felt the lives of all
things running through it as a young man feels them in the spring
woods--he gathered in the cup of his verse, and retains for us, the
nerve of all that life which is still exultant in the forest beyond his
river. His breeding, his high name, his leisured poverty, his passionate
friendship, his looking forward always to a new thing, a creation--all
this, was the Renaissance in person.
Moreover, the Renaissance had in France its seat where, between rolling
lands whose woods are the walls of gardens, the broad and shallow inland
Loire runs from Orleans, past Blois and Tours and Saumur, and Ancenis,
until near Nantes at last it feels the tide: salt and adventures and the
barbaric sea. This varied sheltered land of aged vineyards and great
wealth has, for the French Renaissance, the one special quality of
beginnings and Edens, namely, that it preserves on to a later time the
outward evidences of an original perfection. This place, the nest or
seed-plot of the new civilisation, still shows its castles--Blois,
Amboise, Chambord. Here Leonardo died, Rabelais, Ronsard himself was
born. Here the kings of the Change built in their fantastic pride, and
founded a France that still endures. It is as truly the soil of the
modern thing as are the provinces north of it (the Isle de France,
Normandy, Picardy and Champagne), the soil of the earlier mediaeval
flower, and of the Gothic which they preserve unique to our own time.
Now, of this district, Du Bellay was more than a native; he was part of
it; he pined away from it; he regretted, as no other man of the time
regretted, his father's land: Anjou and the fields of home. He may be
said, with some exaggeration, to have died in the misfortune of his
separation from the security and sober tradition of his own walls. That
great early experience of his, which I have already written down--his
meeting with Ronsard--had come to him not far from his own hill, south
of the great river. His name, unlike Ronsard's, recalled the gentry of
that countryside up to and beyond the beginning of its history; alone of
the Pleiade he translated the valley of the Loire, its depth, its
delicacy, its rich and subtle loneliness.
Again, the Renaissance lived in France an inspired and an exalted life,
so that there necessarily ran through it a fore-knowledge of sudden
ending. This tragedy repeated itself in the career of Du Bellay.
His name was famous. The three Du Bellays, the councillor, the soldier,
the great Cardinal, were in the first rank of the early sixteenth
century. Rabelais had loved them. Francis I had leaned upon and rewarded
their service. His father (their first-cousin and Governor of Brest) was
a poor noble, who, as is the fashion of nobles, had married a wife to
consolidate a fortune. This wife, the mother of Joachim, was heiress to
the house of Tourmélière in Liré, just by the Loire on the brow that
looks northward over the river to the bridge and Ancenis. In this house
he was born. On his parents' early death he inherited the place, not to
enjoy it, but to wander. An early illness had made him forsake the
career of arms for that of the Church; but Orders were hardly so much as
a cloak to him; it is difficult to remember, as one reads the few
evidences of his life, that he wore the cloth at all: in his verse all
trace of it is entirely absent. He lived still in that lineage which the
reform had not touched. The passionate defence of the Catholic Faith,
the Assault converging on the church throughout Europe, the raising of
the Siege, the Triumph which developed, at last, on the political side
the League, and on the literary the final rigidity of Malherbe, the
noise of all these had not reached his circle, kind, or family.
Of that family the Cardinal seems to have regarded him as the principal
survivor. He had determined to make of the young poet the heir of its
glory. It came to nothing. He accompanied his relative to Rome: but the
diplomacy of the mission ill-suited him. Of the Royal ladies at court
who befriended him, the marriage of one, the death of another,
increased his insecurity. He had inherited, to his bane, another
estate--Gonor--from his elder brother. It was encumbered, the cause
litigious, and he had inherited with it the tutelage of a sickly child.
He never shook off the burden. A tragic error marked his end. He died,
certainly broken-hearted, just when his powerful cousin, by a conversion
perhaps unknown to the poet himself, had rejected calumnies, and had
determined to resign to him the great Archbishopric of Bordeaux.
Eustache Du Bellay, yet another cousin, was Bishop of Paris. He had made
Joachim, on his return from Rome, a Canon of Notre Dame, and in that
capacity the poet, dying in Paris, was buried in the cathedral. The
action of the Chapter in the eighteenth century, when they replaced the
old tombstones by the present pavement, has destroyed the record of his
grave; I believe it to lie in the southern part of the ambulatory.
In this abrupt descent, following upon so fierce an activity of thought,
he prefigured, I say, the close of the Renaissance as his genius
typified its living spirit; for all the while, as you read him, you see
the cloud about his head, and the profound, though proud and constant,
sadness of his eyes.
This, also, was pure Renaissance in him, that the fields in which he
wandered, and which he loved to sing--a man of elegies--were dominated
by the awful ruins of Rome. These it was that lent him his gravity, and
perhaps oppressed him. He sang them also with a comprehension of the
superb.
He was second to Ronsard. Though he was the sharp voice of the Pleiade,
though it was he who published their famous manifesto, though his
scholarship was harder, though his energy could run more fiercely to one
point and shine there more brilliantly in one small climax; yet he was
second. He himself thought it of himself, and called himself a disciple.
All up and down his works you find an astonished admiration directed
towards his greater friend--
... Un amy que les Dieux
Guydent si hault au sentier des plus vieux.
Or again--
Divin Ronsard qui de l'arc a sept cordes
Tiras premier au but de la mémoire
Les traicts ailez de la Françoise gloire.
Everywhere it is his friend rather than he that has touched the mark of
the gods and called up from the tomb the ghost of Rome which all that
company worshipped.
I say he saw himself that he was second. Old Durat saw it clearly in
that little college of poets where he taught the unteachable thing: De
Baif, Belleau--all the comrades would have taken it for granted. Ronsard
led and was chief, because he had the firm largeness, the laughter and
the permanence which are the marks of those who determine the fortunes
of the French in letters or in arms. Ronsard made. His verses, in their
great mass and unfailing level, were but one example of the power that
could produce a school, call up a general enthusiasm, and for forty
years govern the taste of his country. There was in him something
public, in Du Bellay something domestic and attached, as in the
relations of a king and of a herald. Or again, the one was like an
ordered wood with a rich open plain about it, the other was like a
garden. Ronsard was the Beauce; Du Bellay was Anjou. It might be said of
the first that he stood a symbol for the wheat and corn-land of the
Vendômois, and of the second, that he recalled that subtle wine of the
southern Loire to which Chinon gives the most famous label.
Du Bellay was second: nevertheless, when he is well known in this
country it will be difficult to convince Englishmen of that truth. There
is in his mind a facet which exactly corresponds to a facet of our own,
and that is a quality so rare in the French classics that it will
necessarily attract English readers to him: for, of all people, we
nowadays criticise most in letters by the standard of our immediate
emotions, and least by what was once called "reason." He was capable of
that which will always be called "poignancy," and what for the moment we
call "depth." He was less careful than are the majority of his
countrymen to make letters an art, and so to treat his own personality
as a thing apart. On the contrary, he allowed that personality to pierce
through continually, so that simplicity, directness, a certain
individual note as of a human being complaining--a note we know very
well in our own literature--is perpetually discovered.
Thus, in a spirit which all Englishmen will understand, a lightness
almost sardonic lay above the depths of his grief, and the tenderness
which attached to his home played around the things that go with
quietude--his books and animals. I shall quote hereafter the epitaphs he
wrote for his dog and for his cat, this singer of sublime and ruined
things.
Of the dog who--
... allait tousjours suivant
Quelquefois allait devant.
Faisant ne sçay quelle feste
D'un gai branslement de teste.
and of whom he says, in a pretty imitation of Catullus, that he--
... maintenant pourmeine
Parmy cette ombreuse plaine
Dont nul ne revient vers nous.
Or of the cat who was--
... par aventure
Le plus bel oeuvre que nature
Fit onc en matière de chats.
All that delicate side of him we understand very well.
Nor is it to modern Englishmen alone that he will appeal. He powerfully
affected, it may be presumed, the English Renaissance which succeeded
him. Spenser--thirty years after his death--was moved to the translation
of his famous lament for Rome, and no one can read the sonnets to which
he gave their final form without catching the same note in the great
English cycle of the generation after him--the close of the sixteenth
and the opening of the seventeenth centuries.
But his verse read will prove all this and suggest much more.
EXTRACTS FROM THE "ANTIQUITEZ DE ROME."
Of the high series which Rome called forth from Du Bellay during that
bitter diplomatic exile of his, I have chosen these three sonnets,
because they seem best to express the majesty and gloom which haunted
him. It is difficult to choose in a chain of cadences so equal and so
exalted, but perhaps the last, "Telle que dans son char la
Berecynthienne" is the most marvellous. The vision alone of Rome like
the mother of the Gods in her car would have made the sonnet immortal.
He adds to the mere picture a noise of words that is like thunder in the
hills far off on summer afternoons: the words roll and crest themselves
and follow rumbling to the end: he could not have known as he wrote it
how great a thing he was writing. It has all the character of verse that
increases with time and seems superior to its own author's intention.
_THE "ANTIQUITEZ DE ROME."_
III.
_Nouveau venu qui cherches Rome en Rome,
Et rien de Rome en Rome n'apperçois,
Ces vieux palais, ces vieux arcz que tu vois
Et ces vieux Murs, c'est ce que Rome on nomme.
Voy quel orgueil, quelle ruine, et comme
Celle que mist le monde sous ses loix
Pour donter tout, se donta quelquefois,
Et devint proye au temps, qui tout consomme._
_Rome de Rome est le seul monument,
Et Rome Rome a vaincu seulement.
Le Tybre seul, qui vers la mer s'enfuit,
Reste de Rome. O mondaine inconstance!
Ce qui est ferme, est par le temps destruit,
Et se qui fuit, au temps fait résistance._
IV.
_Celle qui de son chef les estoilles passoit,
Et d'un pied sur Thetis, l'autre dessous l'Aurore
D'une main sur le Scythe, et l'autre sur le More,
De la terre, et du Ciel, la rondeur compassoit,
Juppiter ayant peur, si plus elle croissoit
Que l'orgueil des Geans se relevast encore,
L'accabla sous ces monts, ces sept monts qui font ore
Tumbeaux de la grandeur qui le ciel menassoit._
_Il luy meist sur le chef la croppe Saturnale
Puis dessus l'estomac assist le quirinale
Sur le ventre il planta l'antique Palatin,
Mist sur la dextre main la hauteur Celienne,
Sur la senestre assist l'eschine Exquilienne
Viminal sur un pied: sur l'autre L'Aventin._
VI.
_Telle que dans son Char la Berecynthienne
Couronnée de tours, et joyeuse d'avoir
Enfanté tant de Dieux, telle se faisoit voir
En ses jours plus heureux ceste ville ancienne:
Ceste ville qui fust plus que la Phrygienne
Foisonnante en enfants et de qui le pouvoir
Fust le pouvoir du Monde, et ne se peult revoir
Pareille à sa grandeur, grandeur si non la sienne._
_Rome seule pouvoit à Rome ressembler,
Rome seule pouvoit Rome faire trembler:
Aussi n'avoit permis l'ordonnance fatale,
Qu'autre pouvoir humain, tant fust audacieux,
Se vantast d'égaler celle qui fust égale
Sa puissance à la terre, et son courage au cieux._
THE SONNET OF EXILE.
This sonnet dates from the same period at Rome, or possibly from his
return. It has a different note. It is the most personal and passionate
of all his writings, in which so much was inspired by personal regret.
On this account it has a special literary interest as the most _modern_
thing of the Renaissance. It would be far less surprising to find this
written by one of the young republicans under the Second Empire (for
instance) than to find a couplet of Malherbe's straying into our time.
_THE SONNET OF EXILE._
_France, Mère des arts, des armes, et des loix,
Tu m'as nourry long temps du laict de ta mamelle:
Ores, comme un aigneau qui sa nourisse appelle,
Je remplis de ton nom les antres et les bois,
Si tu m'as pour enfant advoué quelquefois
Que ne me respons-tu maintenant, ô cruelle?
France, France, respons à ma triste querelle:
Mais nul, sinon Echo, ne respond à ma voix._
_Entre les loups cruels j'erre parmy la plaine
Je sens venir l'hyver, de qui la froide haleine
D'une tremblante horreur fait hérisser ma peau.
Las! tes autres agneaux n'ont faute de pasture,
Ils ne craignent le loup, le vent, ny la froidure;
Si ne suis-je pourtant le pire du troppeau._
THE SONNET "HEUREUX QUI COMME ULYSSE."
(_The 31st of the "Regrets"_).
It was of a large gray house, moated, a town beside it, yet not far from
woods and standing in rough fields, pure Angevin, Tourmélière, the Manor
house of Liré, his home, that Du Bellay wrote this, the most dignified
and perhaps the last of his sonnets. The sadness which is the permanent,
though sometimes the unrecognized, moderator of his race, which had
pierced through in his latter misfortunes, and which had tortured him to
the cry that has been printed on the preceding page, here reached a
final and a most noble form: something much higher than melancholy, and
more majestic than regret. He turned to his estate, the mould of his
family, a roof, the inheritance of which had formed his original burden
and had at last crushed him; but he turned to it with affection. If one
may use so small a word in connection with a great poet, the gentleman
in him remembered an ancestral repose.
There is very much in the Sonnet to mark that development of French
verse in which Du Bellay played so great a part. The inversion of the
sentence, a trick which gives a special character to all the later
formal drama is prominent: the convention of contrast, the purely
classical allusion, are mixed with a spirit that is still spontaneous
and even naïf. But every word is chosen, and it is especially noteworthy
to discover so early that restraint in epithet which is the charm but
also the danger of what French style has since become. Of this there are
two examples here: the eleventh line and the last, which rhymes with it.
To contrast slate with marble would be impossible prose save for the
exact adjective "_fine_," which puts you at once into Anjou. The last
line, in spite of its exquisite murmur, would be grotesque if the "_air
marin_" were meant for the sea-shore. Coming as it does after the
suggestions of the Octave it gives you suddenly sea-faring: Ulysses,
Jason, his own voyages, the long way to Rome, which he knew; and in the
"_douceur Angevine_" you have for a final foil to such wanderings, not
only in the meaning of the words, but in their very sound, the hearth
and the return.
_THE SONNET "HEUREUX QUI COMME ULYSSE"_
_Heureux qui comme Ulysse a fait un beau voyage
Ou comme cestuy là qui conquit la Toison
Et puis est retourné, plein d'usage et raison,
Vivre entre ses parents le reste de son age!
Quand revoirai-je, hélas, de mon petit village
Fumer la cheminée: et en quelle saison
Revoirai-je le clos de ma pauvre maison,
Qui m'est une province, et beaucoup d'avantage?_
_Plus me plaist le séjour qu'ont basty mes aieux
Que des palais Romains le front audacieux:
Plus que le mabre dur me plaist l'ardoise fine,
Plus mon Loyre gaulois que le Tybre Latin,
Plus mon petit Lyré que le Mont Palatin,
Et plus que l'air marin la doulceur Angevine._
THE WINNOWER'S HYMN TO THE WINDS.
This delicate air of summer, this reminiscence and comfort for men who
no longer see the Eure or the Bievre or any of their northern rivers,
this very mirror of Du Bellay's own exiled mind--was written for an
"exercise." It is a translation--a translation from the Latin of a
forgotten Venetian scholar.
When a man finds in reading such a startling truth, it convinces him
that letters have a power of their own and are greater of themselves
than the things which inspired them: for when, to show his skill in
rendering Latin into French verse, Du Bellay had written this down, he
created and fixed for everybody who was to read him from then onwards
the permanent picture of a field by the side of a small, full river,
with a band of trees far off, and, above, the poplar leaves that are
never still. It runs to a kind of happy croon, and has for a few moments
restored very many who have read it to their own place; and Corot should
have painted it.
_THE WINNOWER'S HYMN TO THE WINDS._
_A vous troppe legere
Qui d'aele passagere
Par le monde volez,
Et d'un sifflant murmure
L'ombrageuse verdure
Doulcement esbranlez,
J'offre ces violettes,
Ces lis et ces fleurettes
Et ces roses ici,
Ces vermeillettes roses
Tout freschement escloses,
Et ces oeilletz aussi.
De vostre doulce haleine
Eventez ceste plaine
Eventez ce séjour,
Ce pendant que j'ahanne
A mon blé que je vanne
A la chaleur du jour._
THE FUNERAL ODES OF THE DOG AND THE CAT.
Here are extracts from those two delightful and tender things to which
allusion has already been made. The epitaphs upon his little dog and his
little cat.
It was a character in this sad man to make little, humble, grotesque,
pleasing images of grief; as it were, little idols of his goddess; and
he fashioned them with an exquisite humour and affection. What animal of
the sixteenth century lives so clearly as these two? None, I think,
except some few in the pictures of the painters of the low countries.
I wish I had space to print both these threnodies in full, but they are
somewhat long, and I must beg my reader to find them in the printed
works of Du Bellay. It is well worth the pains of looking.
_THE DOG._
_Dessous ceste motte verte
De lis et roses couverte
Gist le petit Peloton
De qui le poil foleton
Frisoit d'une toyson blanche
Le doz, le ventre, et la hanche._
_Son exercice ordinaire
Estoit de japper et braire,
Courir en hault et en bas,
Et faire cent mille esbas,
Tous estranges et farouches,
Et n'avoit guerre qu'aux mousches,
Qui luy faisoient maint torment.
Mais Peloton dextrement
Leur rendoit bien la pareille:
Car se couchant sur l'oreille,
Finement il aguignoit
Quand quelqu'une le poingnoit:
Lors d'une habile soupplesse
Happant la mouche traistresse,
La serroit bien fort dedans,
Faisant accorder ses dens_
_Peloton ne caressoit,
Sinon ceulx qu'il cognoissoit,
Et n'eust pas voulu repaistre
D'autre main que de son maistre,
Qu'il alloit tousjours suyvant:
Quelquefois marchoit devant,
Faisant ne scay quelle feste
D'un gay branlement de teste._
_Mon Dieu, quel plaisir c'estoit,
Quand Peloton se grattoit,
Faisant tinter sa sonnette
Avec sa teste folette!
Quel plaisir, quand Peloton
Cheminoit sur un baston,
Ou coifé d'un petit linge,
Assis comme un petit singe,
Se tenoit mignardelet,
D'un maintien damoiselet!_
_Las, mais ce doulx passetemps
Ne nous dura pas long temps:
Car la mort ayant anvie
Sur l'ayse de nostre vie,
Envoya devers Pluton
Nostre petit Peloton,
Qui maintenant se pourmeine
Parmi ceste umbreuse plaine,
Dont nul ne revient vers nous._
_THE CAT_
_Pourquoy je suis tant esperdu
Ce n'est pas pour avoir perdu
Mes anneaux, mon argent, ma bource:
Et pourquoy est ce donc? pource
Que j'ay perdu depuis trois jours
Mon bien, mon plaisir, mes amours:
Et quoy? ô Souvenance greve
A peu que le cueur ne me creve
Quand j'en parle ou quand j'en ecris:
C'est Belaud, mon petit chat gris:
Belaud qui fust, paraventure
Le plus bel oeuvre que nature
Feit onc en matiere de chats:
C'etoit Belaud, la mort au rats
Belaud dont la beauté fut telle
Qu'elle est digne d'estre immortelle._
_Mon-dieu, quel passetemps c'estoit
Quand ce Belaud vire-voltoit
Follastre autour d'une pelote!
Quel plaisir, quand sa teste sotte
Suyvant sa queue en mille tours,
D'un rouet imitoit le cours!
Ou quand assis sur le derriere
Il s'en faisoit une jartiere,
Et monstrant l'estomac velu
De panne blanche crespelu,_
_Sembloit, tant sa trogne estoit bonne,
Quelque docteur de la Sorbonne!
Ou quand alors qu'on l'animoit,
A coups de patte il escrimoit,
Et puis appasoit sa cholere
Tout soudain qu'on luy faisoit chere._
_Belaud estoit mon cher mignon,
Belaud estoit mon compagnon
A la chambre, au lict, à la table,
Belaud estoit plus accointable
Que n'est un petit chien friand,
Et de nuict n'alloit point criand
Comme ces gros marcoux terribles,
En longs miaudemens horribles:
Aussi le petit mitouard
N'entra jamais en matouard:
Et en Belaud, quelle disgrâce!
De Belaud s'est perdue la race.
Que pleust a Dieu, petit Belon,
Qui j'eusse l'esprit assez bon,
De pouvoir en quelque beau style
Blasonner ta grace gentile,
D'un vers aussi mignard que toy:
Belaud, je te promets ma foy,
Que tu vivrois, tant que sur terre
Les chats aux rats feront la guerre._
MALHERBE.
The French Renaissance ended in the Classic. The fate of all that
exuberance was to find order, and that chaos of generation settled down
to the obedience of unchanging laws. This transition, which fixed,
perhaps for ever, the nature of the French tongue, is bound up with the
name of Malherbe.
When what the French have entitled "the great time," when the generation
of Louis XIV looked back to find an origin for its majestic security in
letters, it was in Malherbe that such an origin was discovered; he had
tamed the wildness of the Renaissance, he had bent its vigour to an
arrangement and a frame; by him first were explicitly declared those
rules within which all his successors were content to be narrowed. The
devotion to his memory is nowhere more exalted or more typically
presented than in the famous cry--_enfin Malherbe vint_. His name
carried with it a note of completion and of an end.
When the romantic revival of our own time sought for one mind on which
to lay the burden of its anger, one hard master or pedant who could be
made responsible for the drying up of the wells, Malherbe again was
found. He became the butt of Hugo's splendid ridicule. He was the god of
plaster that could not hear or speak or feel, but which fools had
worshipped; a god easy to break to pieces. His austerity--for them
without fullness--his meagre output, his solemn reiterated code of
"perfect taste," moved them to a facile but intense aggression. He it
was that had turned to fossil stone the living matter of the sixteenth
century: He that had stifled and killed the spirit they attempted to
recall.
This man so praised, so blamed, for such a quality, was yet exactly,
year for year, the contemporary of Shakespeare, born earlier and dying
later. No better example could be discovered of the contrast between the
French and English tempers.
The Romantics, I say, believed that they had destroyed Malherbe and left
the Classic a ruined, antiquated thing. They were in error. Victor Hugo
himself, the leader, who most believed the classic to have become
isolated and past, was yet, in spite of himself, constrained by it.
Lamartine lived in it. After all the fantastic vagaries of mystics and
realists and the rest, it is ruling to-day with increasing power,
returning as indeed the permanent religion, the permanent policy, of the
nation are also returning after a century of astounding adventures: for
the Classic has in it something necessary to the character of the French
people.
Consider what the Classic is and why all mighty civilisations have
demanded and obtained some such hard, permanent and, as it were, sacred
vehicle for the expression of their maturity.
Nations that have a long continuous memory of their own past, nations
especially whose gods have suffered transformation, but never death,
develop the somewhat unelastic wisdom of men in old age. They mistrust
the taste of the moment. They know that things quite fresh and violent
seem at first greater than they are: that such enthusiasm forms no
lasting legacy for posterity. Their very ancient tradition gives them a
thirst for whatever shall certainly remain. The rigid Classic satisfies
that need.
Again, you will discover that those whose energy is too abundant seek
for themselves by an instinct the necessary confines without which such
energy is wasted--and wasted the more from its excess. They canalise for
their own security a torrent which, undisciplined, would serve but to
destroy. Such an instinct is apparent in every department of French
life. To their jurisprudence the French have ever attempted to attach a
code, to their politics the stone walls of a Constitution, or, at the
least, of a fundamental theory. Their theology from Athanasius through
St. Germanus to the modern strict defence against all "liberals" has
glorified the unchanging. Every outburst of the interior fires in the
history of Gaul has been followed by a rapid, plastic action which
reduced to human use what might otherwise have crystallised into an
amorphous lava. So the wild freedom of the twelfth century was captured
to form the Monarchy, the University, the full Gothic of the thirteenth:
so the Revolution permitted Napoleon and produced, not the visionary
unstable grandeur of the Gironde, but the schools and laws and roads and
set government we see to-day. So the spring storms of the Renaissance
settled, I say, into that steady summer of stable form which has now for
three hundred years dominated the literature of the country.
Caught on with this aspect of energy producing the Classic is the truth
that energy alone can dare to be classical. Where the great currents of
the soul run feebly a perpetual acceleration, whether by novelty or by
extravagance, will be demanded; where they run full and heavy, then,
under the restraint of form, they will but run more proudly and more
strong. It is the flickering of life that fears hard rules in verse and
may not feel the level classics of our Europe. Their rigidity is not
that of marble; they are not dead. A human acquaintance with their
sobriety soon fills us as we read. If we lie in the way of the giants
who conceived them (let me say Corneille or the great Dryden),
re-reading and further knowledge--especially a deeper experience of
common life about us--reveal to us the steadfast life of these images;
the eyes open, the lips might almost move; the statue descends and
lives.
The man who imposed design and authority and unity upon the letters of
his country, and who so closed the epoch with which I have been dealing,
was singularly suited to his task. Observant, something of a stoic,
uninspired; courageous, witty, a soldier; lucid, critical of method
only, he corresponded to the movement which, all around him, was
ushering in the Bourbons: the hardening of Goujon's and de l'Orme's
luxuriance into the conventions of the great colonnades and the sombre
immensity of the new palaces; the return of one national faith to a
people weary of so many random quarrels; the mistrust of an ill-ordered
squirearchy; the firm founding of a central government.
He was Norman. Right of that north whence the vigour, though not the
inspiration, of the Renaissance had proceeded, and into which it
returned. Caen gave him birth, and still remembers him. Normans still
edit his works--and dedicate these books to the town which also bred
Corneille. Norman, learned with that restrained but vigorous learning of
the province, he was also of the province in his blood, for he came of
one of those fixed families whose heads held great estates all round
Falaise, and whose cadets branched off into chances abroad: one of the
Boughtons, in Kent, is still "Boughton Malherbe[1]."
[Footnote 1: Not from the Conquest. It is near Charing, originally de
Braose land, but an heiress married a Malherbe in the early twelfth
century.]
He was poor. His father, who held one of those magistracies which the
smaller nobility bought or inherited, had not known where to turn in the
turmoil of the central century. In a moment of distress he called
himself Huguenot when that party seemed to triumph, and Malherbe in
anger against the apostasy went down south, a boy of nineteen, and
fought as a soldier--but chiefly duels; for he loved that sport. He lay
under a kind of protection from the great Catholic houses, though still
poor, till in 1601--he was a man of forty-six--Henri IV heard of him. In
all these years he had worked at the rule of poetry like an artisan,
thinking of nothing else, not even of fame. Those who surrounded him
took it for granted that he was a master critic--a sort of judge without
appeal, but it was a very little provincial circle surrounding a very
unimportant house in Provence. Thus, careless it seems of everything
except that "form of language" which was with him a passion, like the
academic or theological passions, he was astonished on coming to Paris
in 1605 to discover how suited such a pre-occupation was to such a time,
and how rapidly he became the first name in contemporary letters. Of men
who poured out verse the age was satiated; of men who could seize the
language at this turn in its fortune, fix it and give it rules, the age
had no knowledge till he came: the age fastened upon him, and insisted
upon making him a master.
A full twenty years from 1607 he governed the transformation, not of
thought, for that he little changed, but of method and of expression. He
decided what should be called the typical metres, the alternative of
feminine and masculine in verse, the order of emphasis, the proportion
of inversion tolerable, the propriety, the modernity, the archaism of
words. It is a function to our time meaningless and futile: to such a
period as that, indispensable and even noble. He interpreted and
published the national sentiment upon this major thing, the architecture
of letters. The power of his mind, tortured and insufficient in actual
production, was supreme in putting forth clearly and finally that
criticism which ran as an unspoken and obscure current of opinion in the
mind of his age. This was his glory, and it was true.
His dryness was extraordinary. In a life of seventy-two years, during
which he wrote and erased incessantly, he, the poet, wrote just so much
verse as will fill in large type a little pocket volume of 250 pages; to
be accurate, forty-three lines a year. Of this scraping and pumice stone
in the mind a better example than his verse is to be found in his
letters. A number remain. They might seem to be written by two different
men! Half a dozen are models of that language he adored--they cost him,
to our knowledge, many days--the rest are slipshod notes that any man
might write, for he thought they would not survive, and, indeed, the
majority of his editors have had the piety to suppress them.
No one will understand Malherbe who only hears of how, like a dusty
workman, he cut and polished, and so fixed the new jewel of letters. In
our less happy age the academic spirit is necessarily associated with a
lethargic stupidity. In his it was not so. His force, by which this work
was carried through, lay in a character of penetration. His face
expresses it. His very keen and ready eyes, his high lifted brow, his
sharp nose, and the few active lines of his cheek and forehead, the
poise of his head, the disdain of his firm mouth, all build him back
alive for us. His talk, which stammered in its volubility, was incessant
and varied; his temper ready; his bodily command of gesture and
definition perfect in old age: he was of good metal all those years.
Of his intense Toryism, his vivacity, his love of arms, his tenacity of
perception, Racan gives us in his biography an admirable picture. Just
before he died his son was killed in a duel--he, at seventy-two, desired
passionately to kill the adversary. "Gambling," he said, "my pence of
life against the gold of his twenty-five years." He had wit, and he
hated well--hating men after death:
Here richly with ridiculous display
Killed by excess was Wormwood laid away,
While all of his acquaintance sneered and slanged,
I wept: for I had longed to see him hanged.
His zeal for his tongue was real. As he lay upon his death-bed making
his confession after so vigorous a life, he heard his nurse say
something to herself which sounded ungrammatical and, turning round from
the priest, he put her right in a manner most violent and sudden. His
confessor, startled, said: "The time is not relevant". "All times are
relevant!" he answered, sinking back. "I will defend with my last breath
the purity and grandeur of the French tongue."
To such a man the meaning of the solution at which his people had
arrived after a century of civil war lay, above all, in their ancient
religion. On that converged those deeper and more permanent things in
his soul of which even his patriotism and his literary zeal were but the
surface. In the expression of that final solution his verse, which was
hardly that of a poet, rises high into poetry; under the heat and
pressure of his faith, single lines here and there have crystallized
into diamonds. By far the most vigorous of so many frigid odes is the
battle cry addressed by him in old age to Louis XIII setting out against
La Rochelle. He visited that siege, but had the misfortune to die a bare
week before the fall of the city. The most powerful of his sonnets, or
rather the only powerful one, is that in which he calls to Our Lord for
vengeance against the men who killed his son. Catholicism in its every
effect, political and personal, as it were literary too, possessed the
man, so that in ending the types of the French Renaissance with him you
see how the terms in which ultimately the French express themselves are
and will remain religious. The last two lines of his most famous and
most Catholic poem have about them just that sound which saves them, in
spite of their too simple words, from falling into the vulgar
commonplace of vague and creedless men. In writing them down one seems
to be writing down the fate of the great century now tamed, alas! and
ordered, as must be the violence of over-human things:--
Vouloir ce que Dieu veut est la seule Science
Qui nous met en repos.
EXTRACTS.
(_From the "Ode to Louis XIII setting out against La Rochelle,"
and the "Sonnet on his son's death."_)
It has been remarked that Malherbe in his most vigorous years
deliberately employed the strength of his mind to the repression of
emotion in his verse, and used it only to fashion, guide, control, and
at last fix permanently the rules of the language. It is certainly true
that as his bodily vigour declined, a certain unexpected anger and
violence enters into his verse, to the great relief of us moderns: not
to that of his contemporaries.
Of this feature in him, the two following extracts are sufficient proof.
They were written, the first at the close of his seventy-second, the
other at the entry of his seventy-third year. In each, something close
to his heart was at issue, and in each he gives some vent--far more than
had been his wont--to passion.
The first is a cry to Louis XIII to have done with the Huguenot. It was
written to the camp before La Rochelle. I know of nothing in French
literature which more expresses the intense current of national feeling
against the nobility and rich townsmen who had attempted to warp the
national tradition and who had re-introduced into French life the
element which France works perpetually to throw out as un-European,
ill-cultured and evil. Indeed, the reading of it is of more value to the
comprehension of the national attitude than any set history you may
read.
The second is in its way a thing equally religious and equally catholic.
This call for vengeance to God was not only an expression of anger
called forth by his son's death, it was also, and very largely, the
effect of a reaction against the ethics of Geneva: an attack on the
idolatry at once of meekness and of fatality which was to him so
intolerable a corruption of the Christian religion.
There is some doubt as to whether it is his last work. I believe it to
be so; but Blaise, in his excellent edition, prints the dull and
unreadable ode to Lagade later, and ascribes it to the same year.
_ODE TO LOUIS XIII._
_Fais choir en sacrifice au démon de la France
Les fronts trop élevés de ces ames d'enfer;
Et n'épargne contre eux, pour notre délivrance,
Ni le feu ni le fer.
Assez de leurs complots l'infidèle malice
A nourri le désordre et la sédition:
Quitte le nom de Juste, ou fais voir ta justice
En leur punition.
Le centième décembre a les plaines ternies,
Et le centième avril les a peintes de fleurs,
Depuis que parmi nous leurs brutales manies
Ne causent que des pleurs.
Dans toutes les fureurs des siècles de tes pères,
Les monstres les plus noirs firent-ils jamais rien
Que l'inhumanité de ces coeurs de vipères
Ne renouvelle au tien?
Par qui sont aujourd'hui tant de villes désertes,
Tant de grands bâtiments en masures changes,
Et de tant de chardons les campagnes couvertes,
Que par ces enrages?
Marche, va les détruire, éteins-en la semence,
Et suis jusqu'à leur fin ton courroux généreux,
Sans jamais écouter ni pitié ni clémence
Qui te parle pour eux.
Toutes les autres morts n'ont mérite ni marque;
Celle-ci porte seule un éclat radieux,
Qui fait revivre l'homme, et le met de la barque
A la table des dieux._
_SONNET ON HIS SON'S DEATH._
_Que mon fils ait perdu sa dépouille mortelle,
Ce fils qui fut si brave, et que j'aimai si fort,
Je ne l'impute point à l'injure du sort,
Puis que finir à l'homme est chose naturelle.
Mais que de deux marauds la surprise infidèle
Ait terminé ses jours d'une tragique mort,
En cela ma douleur n'a point de réconfort,
Et tous mes sentiments sont d'accord avec elle.
O mon Dieu, mon Sauveur, puisque, par la raison,
Le trouble de mon ame étant sans guérison,
Le voeu de la vengeance est un voeu légitime,
Fais que de ton appui je sois fortifié;
Ta justice t'en prie, et les auteurs du crime
Sont fils de ces bourreaux qui t'ont crucifié._
EXTRACTS FROM THE "CONSOLATION OF DU PERRIER."
These stanzas, which are among the best-known as they are, in the
opinion of many, the dullest, in French literature, serve well to close
this book.
One verse at least (the fourth) is most legitimately famous, though it
is hackneyed from the constant repetition of fools. For the rest a
certain simplicity, a great precision, may or may not atone for their
deliberate coldness.
What is certain is that, poetry or not, they admirably express the
spirit of his pen and its prodigious effect. They express the classical
end of the French Renaissance with as much weight and hardness as the
great blank walls of stone that were beginning to show in the rebuilding
of Paris. It is for this quality that I have printed them here, using
them as the definite term of that long, glorious, and uncertain phase in
European letters.
_THE "CONSOLATION OF DU PERRIER."_
_Ta douleur, du Perrier, sera donc éternelle?
Et les tristes discours
Que te met en l'esprit l'amitié paternelle
L'augmenteront toujours?_
_Le malheur de ta fille au tombeau descendue
Par un commun trépas,
Est-ce quelque dédale où ta raison perdue
Ne se retrouve pas?_
_Je sais de quels appas son enfance étoit pleine,
Et n'ai pas entrepris,
Injurieux ami, de soulager ta peine
Avecque son mépris._
_Mais elle étoit du monde, où les plus belles choses
Ont le pire destin;
Et rose elle a vécu ce que vivent les roses
L'espace d'un matin._
_Puis quand ainsi seroit que, selon ta prière,
Elle auroit obtenu
D'avoir en cheveux blancs terminé sa carrière,
Qu'en fût-il avenu?_
_Penses-tu que, plus vieille, en la maison céleste
Elle eût eu plus d'accueil,
Ou qu'elle eût moins senti la poussière funeste
Et les vers du cercueil?_
_De moi, déja deux fois d'une pareille foudre
Je me suis vu perclus;
Et deux fois la raison m'a si bien fait résoudre,
Qu'il ne m'en souvient plus._
_Non qu'il ne me soit mal que la tombe posséde
Ce qui me fut si cher;
Mais en un accident qui n'a point de reméde,
Il n'en faut point chercher._
_La Mort a des rigueurs à nulle autre pareilles:
On a beau la prier;
La cruelle qu'elle est se bouche les oreilles,
Et nous laisse crier._
_Le pauvre en sa cabane, où le chaume le couvre,
Est sujet à ses lois;
Et la garde qui veille aux barrières du Louvre
N'en défend point nos rois._
_De murmurer contre elle et perdre patience,
Il est mal à propos;
Vouloir ce que Dieu veut est la seule science
Qui nous met en repos._
"_Vouloir ce que Dieu veut est la seule science
Qui nous met en repos._"
NOTES.
CHARLES OF ORLEANS.
THE COMPLAINT.
Line 5. _Prins._ An inaccurate pedantic past participle of _prendre_.
Line 14. _Faulse._ There is to be noted here and elsewhere throughout
these extracts, until the modern spelling at the close of the period,
the redundant "l" in many words. It was an effect of pure pedantry. The
latin "l" had become _u_ in northern French. _Falsa_ made, naturally,
"Fausse." The partial learning of the later middle ages reintroduced an
"l" which was not known to be transformed, but was thought omitted.
Line 24. _Liesse._ One of the commonest words of this epoch, lost to
modern French. It means joy=_laetitia_.
Line 25. Note the gender of "Amour," feminine even in the singular
throughout the middle ages and renaissance--right up to the seventeenth
century.
THE TWO ROUNDELS OF SPRING.
I
Line 1. _Fourriers._ The servants who go before to find lodging. The
term survives in French military terminology. The _Fourriers_ are the
non-commissioned officers and party who go forward and mark the
Billeting of a regiment.
Line 9. _Pieça=il y a pièce_; "lately". _Cf._ _naguère_="_il n'y a
guère...."_
Line 11. _Prenez pais_="take the fields," begone.
Line 19. Note "_Chant_," the regular form of the subjunctive=_Cantet_.
The only latin vowel preserved after the tonic syllable is a=French e
(mute). Thus _contat_="chante" which form has in modern French usurped
the subjunctive.
Line 23. _Livrée_="Liberata," _i.e._, things given out. A term
originally applied not only to clothing, but to the general allowance of
the king's household. Hence our word "livery."
THE FAREWELL.
Line 2. _Chiere lie._ "Happy countenance." _Chiere_ here is the
substantive, _lie_=_laeta_, is the adjective. _Bonne chère_ means "a
good time" where _chère_ is an old word for "head" (Greek: kara).
Line 5. _Baillie_=Bailliwick, "For Age that has me now within her
bounds."
Line 7. _Mye._ "Crumb". "I am not a whit (not a crumb) with her (_Joie_)
to-day."
Line 15. "Well braced," literally "well girthed" (as a horse is).
VILLON.
THE DEAD LADIES.
Stanza 1, line 1. Note the redundant negative; it is characteristic of
mediaeval French, as of all primitive work, that the general suggestion
of doubt is sufficient to justify a redundant negative.
Line 2. _Flora_, etc. It is worth while knowing who these women were.
_Flora_ is Juvenal's Flora (Sat. II. 9), a legend in the university. Of
_Archipiada_ I know nothing. _Thaïs_ was certainly the Egyptian
courtesan turned anchoress and canonized, famous in the middle ages and
revived to-day in the repulsive masterpiece of M. Anatole France.
_Elois_ is, of course, _Heloïse_, and _Esbaillart_ is Abelard. The
queen, who in the legend had Buridan (and many others) drowned, was the
Dowager of Burgundy that lived in the Tour de Nesle, where the Palais
Mazarin is now, and had half the university for a lover: in sober
history she founded that college of Burgundy from which the École de
Médecine is descended; the legend about her is first heard of (save in
this poem) in 1471, from the pen of a German in Leipzig. _Blanche_ may
be Blanche of Castille, but more likely she was a vision of Villon's
own, for what did St. Louis' mother ever sing? _Berte_ is the legendary
mother of Charlemagne in the Epics; _Beatris_ is any Beatrice you
choose, for they have all died. _Allis_ may just possibly be one of the
Troubadour heroines, more likely she is here introduced for rhyme and
metre; _Haremburgis_ is strictly historical: she was the Heiress of
Maine who married Foulque of Anjou in 1110 and died in 1126: an
ancestress, therefore, of the Plantagenets. _Jehanne_ is, of course,
Joan of Arc.
Line 8. _D'Antan_ is _not_ "Yester-year." It is "Ante annum," all time
past before _this_ year. Rossetti's "Yester-year" moreover, is an absurd
and affected neologism; "Antan" is an excellent and living French word.
Stanza II, line 2. Note the pronunciation of "Moyne" to rhyme (more or
less) with "eine": the oi, ai and ei sounds were very similar till the
sixteenth century at earliest. They are interchangeable in many popular
provincialisms and in some words, _e.g._, Fouet, pronounced "Foit" the
same tendency survives. The transition began in the beginning of the
seventeenth century as we learn from Vaugelas: and the influence towards
the modern sound came from the Court.
Stanza III, line 2. _Seraine_="Syren."
Line 5. "_Jehanne_", "_Jehan_", in spite of the classical survival in
their spelling, were monosyllables from the earliest times.
Line 7. The "_elles_" here would not scan but for the elided "e" in
"_souv'raine_" at the end of the line. In some editions "_ils_" is found
and _souveraine_ is spelt normally. _Ils_ and _els_ for a feminine
plural existed in the middle ages.
_Envoi._ The envoi needs careful translation. The "que" of the third
line="sans que" and the whole means, "Do not ask this week or this year
where they are, _without_ letting this refrain haunt you". "Que" might
possibly mean "de peur que", did not the whole sense of the poem forbid
such an interpretation.
AN EXCERPT FROM THE GRANT TESTAMENT.
Stanza 75, line 4. A charming example of those "flashes" which reveal
Villon.
Stanza 76, line 2. Note the spelling of _Grant_ in the feminine without
an _e_. Adjectives of the third declension whose feminine was not
distinguishable in Latin took no "e" in early French. A survival of this
is found in grand' rue, grand' messe, etc.
Line 5. _Grant erre_, "quickly", and the whole line reads: "Let it (my
body) be delivered to it (luy=la terre) quickly," the "erre" here is
from the popular late Latin "_iterare_"="_iter facere_". It survives in
the nautical idiom "reprendre son erre"="to get under weigh again."
Line 7. "_Erre_" here comes, on the contrary, from _errare_, to make a
mistake, to err.
Stanza 77, line 4. _Maillon._ Swaddling clothes.
Line 5. _Boullon_, scrape. The two lines are obscure but seem to read:
"He has got me out of many a scrape which gave him no joy" (_esioye_
from _esjouir_=_rejouir_).
Line 7 and 8. These are obscure but apparently="And beseech him on my
knees not to forsake all joy on that account."
Stanza 78, line 2. "_Le Romman du Pet au Deable_." The Pet au Deable was
a great stone at the door of a private house in the university. The
students took it away and all Paris fought over the matter. The "Roman"
was a set of verses, now lost, which Villon wrote on the quarrel.
Line 3. _Guy Tabarie_ who _grossa_ (wrote out), these verses was a
friend of Villon's: soon hanged.
Line 5. _Soubz._ The "b" is pedantic, the _ou_ indicates of itself the
loss of the _b_. The "z" (and the "s" in the modern _sous_) are due to
the derivation not from _sub_ but _subtus_.
THE BALLAD OF OUR LADY.
Stanza 2, line 3. _Egypcienne._ St. Mary of Egypt.
Line 4. _Theophilus._ This was that clerk who sold his soul to the Devil
and whom Our Lady redeemed. You may find the whole story sculptured on
the Tympanum of the exquisite northern door of Notre Dame in Paris.
Line 8. _Vierge Portant_="Virgin that bore a son".
Stanza 3, line 4. _Luz_="luthus". "S" becomes "z."
The Envoi. Note the Acrostic "Villon" in the first letters of the first
six lines. It is a trick he played more than once.
THE DEAD LORDS.
Stanza 1, line 1. _Calixte._ These names are of less interest. _Calixte_
was Pope Calixtus III, Alphonso Borgia, who died in 1458--in Villon's
twenty-sixth year. _Alphonse_ is Alphonso V of Arragon, who died in that
same year. The _Duc de Bourbon_ is Charles the First of Bourbon, who
died at the end of the year 1456, "gracieux" because his son protected
Villon. _Artus_ (Arthur) of Brittany is that same Richemont who
recaptured Paris from Willoughby. Charles VII is Charles VII. The _Roy
Scotiste_ is James II, who died in 1460: the _Amethyst_ half of his
face was a birthmark. The _King of Cyprus_ is probably John III, who
died in that same fatal year, 1458. Pedants will have it that the _King
of Spain_ is John II of Castille, who died in 1454--but it is a better
joke if it means nobody at all. _Lancelot_ is Vladislas of Bohemia, who
died in 1457. _Cloquin_ is Bertrand de Guesclin who led the reconquest.
_The Count Daulphin_ of Auvergne is doubtful; _Alençon_ is presumably
the Alençon of Joan of Arc's campaign, who still survived, and is called
"feu" half in ridicule, because in 1458 he had lost his title and lands
for treason.
Stanza 2, line 3. _Amatiste_=amethyst.
Stanza 3, line 7. _Tayon_=Ancestor. "_Etallum._" Latin "_Stallio_."
THE DIRGE.
Line 1. _Cil_=celui-ci. The Latin "_ecce illum_."
Line 3. _Escuelle_=bowl. "With neither bowl nor platter."
Line 4. Note again the constant redundant negative of the populace in
this scholar: "Had never, no--not a sprig of parsley."
Line 5. _Rez_=ras, cropped.
MAROT.
OF COURTING LONG AGO.
Line 5. _On se prenoit_, one attacked--"it was but the heart one
sought."
Line 11. _Fainctz_=sham; "_changes_" is simply like the English
"changes": the form survives in the idiom: "donner le change."
Line 13. _Refonde_=recast.
NOËL.
Verse 1, line 3. _L'Autre hyer_=alterum heri, "t'other day."
Line 10. _Noé._ The tendency to drop final letters, especially the _l_,
is very marked in popular patois, and this is, of course, a song based
on popular language. Most French peasants north of the Loire would still
say "Noé" for "Noël." _Noël_ is, of course, _Natalem_ (diem).
Verse 2, line 2. _Cas de si hault faict_=so great a matter.
TWO EPIGRAMS. Epigram 1, line 2. _Vostre._ Marguerite of Navarre. As I
have remarked, in the text, she had sent him a Dixaine (some say he
wrote it himself). This one is written in answer.--_Ay._ Note, till the
verb grew over simple in the classical French of the seventeenth century
there was no more need for the pronoun than in Latin. Thus Montaigne
will omit the pronoun, but Malherbe never.
Line 5. _Cuydans_=thinking (_Cogitare_=_Cogtare_=_Coyde_=_cuider_, the
_oi_ became _ui_ by a common transition; _cf._ noctem, octem, noit,
nuit, huit.) The word is now archaic.
Line 9. _Encor._ Without the final e. This is not archaic but poetic
licence. _Encore_="hanc horam," and a post tonic "am" in Latin always
means a final mute e in French.
Epigram 2, line 1. _Maint_ (now archaic) is a word of Teutonic origin,
our _many_.
Line 6. _Coulpe_=Culpam, of course; a fault.
Line 9. _Emport_. Note the old subjunctive without the final e. _Vide
supra_, on "_Chant_." The modern usage is incorrect. For the first
conjugation making its subjunctive in _em_, should lose the final
syllable in French: a post tonic _em_ always disappears. The modern
habit of putting a final e to all subjunctives is due to a false analogy
with verbs from the third conjugation. These made their subjunctive in
_am_, a termination which properly becomes the mute e of French.
TO HIS LADY IN SICKNESS.
Line 4. _Sejour_=(here) "staying at home."
Line 14, 15. _Friande de la bouche_, glutton.
Line 17. _Danger._ The first meaning of "Danger" is simply "to be in
lordship" (Dominicarium). The modern is the English "Danger." This is
between the two; "held to your hurt."
Line 26. _Doint._ This subjunctive should properly be _don_ (_donem_,
post tonic _em_ is lost). The "oint" is from a false analogy with the
fourth conjugation, as though the Latin had been _doniam_.
THE VINEYARD SONG.
Verse 1, line 2. _Clamours._ See how southern this is, with its
Lanquedoc forms, "clamours" for "_clameurs_."
Line 5. So are these diminutions all made up at random, as southern as
can be, and note the tang of the verse, fit for a snapping of the
fingers to mark the rapid time.
Verse 3, line 2. _Bénistre._ The older form of _bénir_ from
_Benedicere_; the _c_ between vowels at the end of the tonic syllable
becomes _s_: the _t_ is added for euphony, to help one to pronounce the
_s_.
Line 3. _Silenus_ for _Silène_. Because the name was new, the Latin form
is kept. The genius of the French, unlike that of modern English, is to
absorb a foreign name (as we did once). Thus once we said "Anthony"
"Tully": but Montaigne wrote "Cicero"--his descendants say "Ciceron."
Line 4. _Aussi droict qu'une ligne_="right out of the flask." The flask
held above one and the wine poured straight into the mouth. The happy
south still know the way.
Line 5. _Bigne_: a lump, a knock, a bruise.
Line 6. _Guigne_=cherry.
RONSARD.
DIALOGUE WITH THE NINE SISTERS.
Stanza 1, line 3. _Chef grison_=gray head. When he says "trente ans,"
that is all rubbish, he was getting on for forty-three: it was written
in 1567.
Stanza 2, line 1. _Nocher_=pilot; rare but hardly archaic.
Stanza 3, line 3. _Cependant_=meanwhile. The word is now seldom used in
prose, save in the sense of "notwithstanding", "nevertheless".
Stanza 5, line 1. _Loyer_=Condition of tenure.
Line 2. _Ores_=Now that. Should be "_ore_" (horam). The parasitic "s"
probably crept in by false analogy with the adverbs in "s."
Stanza 6, line 1. _Lame_=tombstone. The word is no longer used.
Line 4. See how, even in his lighter or prosaic manner, he cannot avoid
great lines.
Stanza 8, line 1. _Vela_=Voilà. Then follows that fine ending which I
have put on the title-page of this book.
"MIGNONNE ALLONS VOIR SI LA ROSE."
Line 1. _Mignonne_ is, of course, his Cassandre: her personality was
always known through his own verse. She was fifteen when he met her and
her brown eyes: it was in 1546 at Blois, her birthplace, whither he had
gone to visit the Court, during his scholar's life in Paris. He met her
thus young when he himself was but in his twenty-third year, and all
that early, violent, not over-tilled beginning of his poetry was
illumined by her face. But as to who she was, by name I mean, remained
long a matter of doubt. Binet would have it that her true name was
Cassandre, and that its singularity inspired Ronsard. Brantôme called it
"a false name to cover a true." Ronsard himself has written, "false or
true, time conquering all things cannot efface it from the marble."
There need have been no doubt. D'Aubigné's testimony is sufficient. She
was a Mlle de Pie, and such was the vagary of Ronsard's life, that it
was her niece, Diane Salviati de Taley whom in later life he espoused
and nearly wed.
Line 3. Note _Pourpre_, and in line 5 _Pourprée_ so in line 9 _Beautez_,
and in the last line _Beauté_: so little did he fear repetition and so
heartily could his power carry it.
Line 4. _A point_: the language was still in flux. The phrase would
require a negative _n'_ in modern French.
Line 10, 11. _Marastre... puisqu'une..._ There is here an elliptical
construction never found in later French. Harsh stepmother nature (whom
I call harsh) since... etc.
SONNETS FOR HÉLÈNE.
Sonnet XLII, line 1. _Ocieuse_="otiosa," langorous.
Line 5. _Ennuy_, in the sixteenth century meant something fuller than,
and somewhat different from the word "ennui" to-day. It was a weariness
which had in it some permanent chagrin.
Line 8. _Pipe_, "cajoles": a word which (now that it is unusual) mars
the effect of its meaning by its insignificant sound.
Lines 8 and 9. Note _ioye_, _vraye_, a feminine "e" following another
vowel is, since Malherbe, forbidden in the interior of a verse, unless
elided.
Line 11. _Ton mort_, "your ghost."
Sonnet XLIII, line 6. _Desia_=dejà.
Line 7. _De mon nom._ I have printed the line thus because Ronsard
himself wished it so, and so corrected it with his own hand. But the
original form is far finer "_Au bruit de Ronsard._"
DU BELLAY.
THE SONNET "HEUREUX QUI COMME ULYSSE."
Line 3. _Usage._ A most powerful word in this slightly archaic sense:
the experience of long travel: familiar knowledge of things seen.
Line 12. _Loire._ This word has puzzled more than one editor. There are
two rivers: the great river Loire, which is feminine, and the little
Loir, which is masculine. Here Du Bellay spells the name of the great
river, but puts it in the masculine gender. It has been imagined that he
was talking of the smaller river. But he was not. The Loire alone has
any connection with Liré or with his life, and as for the gender,
strained as the interpretation may seem, I believe that Du Bellay
deliberately used it in the parallel with the Tiber and the idea of the
"Fleuve Paternel," to which he alludes so often elsewhere.
Line 13. _Lyré._ The modern Liré, his birthplace, on the left bank of
the Loire, just opposite Ancenis. As you go along the Poitiers road to
the bridge it stands up on your right, just before the river.
THE DOG.
Line 1. _Motte_=a turf.
Line 40. _Damoiselet._ Still used more or less in its old sense of a
young man _armed_: not merely a young page or a cadet of the
gentry,="like a little sentry."
Line 43. _Anvie_=(of course) "envie."
THE CAT.
Line 22. _Rouët_=spinning-wheel.
Line 26. _Panne_=the Italian _Panno_--cloth.
Line 27. _Troigne_=the mouth and face of an animal, the muzzle.
Line 32. _Chere_=(originally) "head" and one of the few old French words
derived from Greek, but the first signification has long been lost. Here
the phrase is equivalent to "faire bonne chere" which has for centuries
been used proverbially for what we call "a good time." _V. supra_ in
"The Farewell" of Charles of Orleans.
MALHERBE.
EXTRACTS FROM THE "ODE TO LOUIS XIII."
Stanza 3, line 1. _Centième._ He dates the Huguenot trouble from a
century. It may be said to have originated in the placards threatening
the defilement of the Sacrament, placards which appeared in the streets
of Paris in 1525.
Stanza 2, line 3. _Le nom de Juste._ Louis XIII had no particular
affectation of that title: it is rather a reminiscence of his distant
collatoral and namesake who closed the fifteenth century.
Last stanza, line 1. _Toutes les autres morts._ He has just been
speaking of death in battle against the factions.
SONNET ON HIS SON'S DEATH.
Line 1. _Mon fils._ The only survivor of his many children, a young man,
just called to the bar at Aix and passionately loved by his father, he
bore the curious name of Marc-Anthony. A M. de Piles killed him in a
duel, having for second his brother-in-law. The whole was an honourable
bit of business, and the death such as men of honour must be prepared to
risk: but Malherbe would see no reason and defamed the adversary.
Line 9. _La Raison._ The idea runs all through Malherbe's work. It is
his distinguishing note, and is the spirit which differentiates him so
powerfully from the sixteenth century, that this stoical balance or
regulator which he calls "La Raison," and which governed France for two
hundred years, is his rule and text for verse and prose as well as for
practical life. Even the grandeur to which it gave rise seemed to him
accidental. He demanded "la raison" only, and felt the necessity of it
in art as acutely as though its absence were something immoral.
EXTRACTS FROM THE "CONSOLATION OF DU PERRIER."
Stanza 1, line 1. _Duperrier._ A critic of sorts and a gentleman, living
in Provence and perhaps of Provençal ancestry. The verses were written
while Malherbe's fame was still local, two years before the king's visit
had lifted him to Paris.
Stanza 2, line 2. _Ta fille._ The child Marguerite. Her name does not
appear in the poem nor in any letter; we have it from Racan.
Stanza 10, line 3. _Et la garde, etc._ These two lines are quoted,
sometimes, not often, by admirers who would prove that Malherbe was not
incapable of colour or of warmth.
End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Avril, by H. Belloc
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