---- par les divins esprits
Qui ont sous toy Hebrieu langage apris,
Nous sont jettés les Pseaumes en lumière
Clairs, et au sens de la forme première.
This royal dedication is more solemn than usual; yet Marot, who was
never grave but in prison, soon recovered from this dedication to the
king, for on turning the leaf we find another, "Aux Dames de France!"
Warton says of Marot, that "He seems anxious to deprecate the raillery
which the new tone of his versification was likely to incur, and is
embarrassed to find an apology for turning saint." His embarrassments,
however, terminate in a highly poetical fancy. When will the golden age
be restored? exclaims this lady's psalmist,
Quand n'aurons plus de cours ni lieu
Les chansons de ce petit Dieu
A qui les peintres font des aisles?
O vous dames et demoiselles
Que Dieu fait pour estre son temple
Et faites, sous mauvais exemple
Retentir et chambres et sales,
De chansons mondaines ou salles, &c.
Knowing, continues the poet, that songs that are silent about love can
never please you, here are some composed by love itself; all here is
love, but more than mortal! Sing these at all times.
Et les convertir et muer
Faisant vos lèvres rémuer,
Et vos doigts sur les espinettes
Pour dire saintes chansonettes.
Marot then breaks forth with that enthusiasm, which perhaps at first
conveyed to the sullen fancy of the austere Calvin the project he so
successfully adopted, and whose influence we are still witnessing.
O bien heureux qui voir pourra
Fleurir le temps, que l'on orra
Le laboureur à sa charrue
Le charretier parmy la rue,
Et l'artisan en sa boutique
Avecques un PSEAUME ou cantique,
En son labeur se soulager;
Heureux qui orra le berger
Et la bergère en bois estans
Faire que rochers et estangs
Après eux chantent la hauteur
Du saint nom de leurs Createur.
Commencez, dames, commencez
Le siecle doré! avancez!
En chantant d'un cueur debonnaire,
Dedans ce saint cancionnaire.
Thrice happy they, who shall behold,
And listen in that age of gold!
As by the plough the labourer strays,
And carman mid the public ways,
And tradesman in his shop shall swell
Their voice in Psalm or Canticle,
Sing to solace toil; again,
From woods shall come a sweeter strain
Shepherd and shepherdess shall vie
In many a tender Psalmody;
And the Creator's name prolong
As rock and stream return their song!
Begin then, ladies fair! begin
The age renew'd that knows no sin!
And with light heart, that wants no wing,
Sing! from this holy song-book, sing![302]
This "holy song-book" for the harpsichord or the voice, was a gay
novelty, and no book was ever more eagerly received by all classes than
Marot's "Psalms." In the fervour of that day, they sold faster than the
printers could take them off their presses; but as they were understood
to be _songs_, and yet were not accompanied by music, every one set them
to favourite tunes, commonly those of popular ballads. Each of the royal
family, and every nobleman, chose a psalm or a song which expressed his
own personal feelings, adapted to his own tune. The Dauphin, afterwards
Henry the Second, a great hunter, when he went to the chase, was singing
_Ainsi qu'on vit le cerf bruyre_. "Like as the hart desireth the
water-brooks." There is a curious portrait of the mistress of Henry, the
famous Diane de Poictiers, recently published, on which is inscribed
this _verse of the Psalm_. On a portrait which exhibits Diane in an
attitude rather unsuitable to so solemn an application, no reason could
be found to account for this discordance; perhaps the painter, or the
lady herself, chose to adopt the favourite psalm of her royal lover,
proudly to designate the object of her love, besides its double allusion
to her name. Diane, however, in the first stage of their mutual
attachment, took _Du fond de ma pensée_, or, "From the depth of my
heart." The queen's favourite was
_Ne veuilles pas, o sire,
Me reprendre en ton ire;_
that is, "Rebuke me not in thy indignation," which she sung to a
fashionable jig. Antony, king of Navarre, sung _Revenge moy prens la
querelle_, or "Stand up, O Lord, to revenge my quarrel," to the air of a
dance of Poitou. We may conceive the ardour with which this novelty was
received, for Francis sent to Charles the Fifth Marot's collection, who
both by promises and presents encouraged the French bard to proceed with
his version, and entreating Marot to send him as soon as possible
_Confitemini Domino quoniam bonus_, because it was his favourite psalm.
And the Spanish as well as French composers hastened to set the Psalms
of Marot to music. The fashion lasted, for Henry the Second set one to
an air of his own composing. Catharine de' Medici had her psalm, and it
seems that every one at court adopted some particular psalm for
themselves, which they often played on lutes and guitars, &c. Singing
psalms in verse was then one of the chief ingredients in the happiness
of social life.
The universal reception of Marot's Psalms induced Theodore Beza to
conclude the collection, and ten thousand copies were immediately
dispersed. But these had the advantage of being set to music, for we are
told they were "admirably fitted to the violin and other musical
instruments." And who was the man who had thus adroitly taken hold of
the public feeling to give it this strong direction? It was the solitary
Thaumaturgus, the ascetic Calvin, who from the depths of his closet at
Geneva had engaged the finest musical composers, who were, no doubt,
warmed by the zeal of propagating his faith to form these simple and
beautiful airs to assist the psalm-singers. At first this was not
discovered, and Catholics as well as Huguenots were solacing themselves
on all occasions with this new music. But when Calvin appointed these
psalms, as set to music, to be sung at his meetings, and Marot's formed
an appendix to the Catechism of Geneva, this put an end to all
psalm-singing for the poor Catholics! Marot himself was forced to fly to
Geneva from the fulminations of the Sorbonne, and psalm-singing became
an open declaration of what the French called "Lutheranisme," when it
became with the reformed a regular part of their religious discipline.
The Cardinal of Lorraine succeeded in persuading the lovely patroness of
the "holy song-book," Diane de Poictiers, who at first was a
psalm-singer and an heretical reader of the Bible, to discountenance
this new fashion. He began by finding fault with the Psalms of David,
and revived the amatory elegances of Horace: at that moment even the
reading of the Bible was symptomatic of Lutheranism; Diane, who had
given way to these novelties, would have a French Bible, because the
queen, Catharine de' Medici, had one, and the Cardinal finding a Bible
on her table, immediately crossed himself, beat his breast, and
otherwise so well acted his part, that "having thrown the Bible down and
condemned it, he remonstrated with the fair penitent, that it was a kind
of reading not adapted for her sex, containing dangerous matters: if she
was uneasy in her mind she should hear two masses instead of one, and
rest contented with her Paternosters and her Primer, which were not only
devotional but ornamented with a variety of elegant forms, from the most
exquisite pencils of France." Such is the story drawn from a curious
letter, written by a Huguenot, and a former friend of Catharine de'
Medici, and by which we may infer that the reformed religion was making
considerable progress in the French Court,--had the Cardinal of Lorraine
not interfered by persuading the mistress, and she the king, and the
king his queen, at once to give up psalm-singing and reading the Bible!
"This infectious frenzy of psalm-singing," as Warton describes it,
"under the Calvinistic preachers, had rapidly propagated itself through
Germany as well as France. It was admirably calculated to kindle the
flame of fanaticism, and frequently served as the trumpet to rebellion.
These energetic hymns of Geneva excited and supported a variety of
popular insurrections in the most flourishing cities of the Low
Countries, and what our poetical antiquary could never forgive,
"fomented the fury which defaced many of the most beautiful and
venerable churches of Flanders."
At length it reached our island at that critical moment when it had
first embraced the Reformation; and here its domestic history was
parallel with its foreign, except, perhaps, in the splendour of its
success. Sternhold, an enthusiast for the Reformation, was much
offended, says Warton, at the lascivious ballads which prevailed among
the courtiers, and, with a laudable design to check these indecencies,
he undertook to be our Marot--without his genius: "thinking thereby,"
says our cynical literary historian, Antony Wood, "that the courtiers
would sing them instead of their sonnets, _but did not_, only some few
excepted." They were practised by the Puritans in the reign of
Elizabeth; for Shakspeare notices the Puritan of his day "singing psalms
to hornpipes,"[303] and more particularly during the protectorate of
Cromwell, on the same plan of accommodating them to popular tunes and
jigs, which one of them said "were too good for the devil." Psalms were
now sang at Lord Mayors' dinners and city feasts; soldiers sung them on
their march and at parade; and few houses, which had windows fronting
the streets, but had their evening psalms; for a story has come down to
us, to record that the hypocritical brotherhood did not always care to
sing unless they were heard![304]