like something in a dead language, "dead, and shut up in reliquaries
of books," or like those relics "one may only see through a little
pane of glass," as one of its recent "liberators" had said. Sure,
apparently, of its own "niche in the temple of Fame," the recognised
poetry of literature had had the [52] pretension to defy or
discredit, as depraved and irredeemably vulgar, the poetic motions in
the living genius of to-day. Yet the genius of to-day, extant and
forcible, the wakeful soul of present time consciously in possession,
would assert its poetic along with all its other rights; and in
regard to the curiosity, the intellectual interest, of Gaston, for
instance, it had of course the advantage of being close at hand, with
the effectiveness of a personal presence. Studious youth, indeed, on
its mettle about "scholarship," though actually of listless humour
among books that certainly stirred the past, makes a docile act of
faith regarding the witchery, the thaumaturgic powers, of Virgil, or
may we say of Shakespeare? Yet how faint and dim, after all, the
sorrows of Dido, of Juliet, the travail of Aeneas, beside quite
recent things felt or done--stories which, floating to us on the
light current of to-day's conversation, leave the soul in a flutter!
At best, poetry of the past could move one with no more directness
than the beautiful faces of antiquity which are not here for us to
see and unaffectedly love them. Gaston's demand (his youth only
conforming to pattern therein) was for a poetry, as veritable, as
intimately near, as corporeal, as the new faces of the hour, the
flowers of the actual season. The poetry of mere literature, like
the dead body, could not bleed, while there was a heart, a poetic
heart, in the living world, which beat, bled, spoke with irresistible
power. Elderly [53] people, Virgil in hand, might assert
professionally that the contemporary age, an age, of course, of
little people and things, deteriorate since the days of their own
youth, must necessarily be unfit for poetic uses. But then youth,
too, had its perpetual part to play, protesting that, after all said,
the sun in the air, and in its own veins, was still found to be hot,
still begetting, upon both alike, flowers and fruit; nay! visibly new
flowers, and fruit richer than ever. Privately, in fact, Gaston had
conceived of a poetry more thaumaturgic than could be anything of
earlier standing than himself. The age renews itself; and in
immediate derivation from it a novel poetry also grows superb and
large, to fill a certain mental situation made ready in advance.
Yes! the acknowledged, and, so to call it, legitimate, poetry of
literature was but a thing he might sip at, like some sophisticated
rarity in the way of wine, for example, pleasing the acquired taste.
It was another sort of poetry, unexpressed, perhaps inexpressible,
certainly not hitherto made known in books, that must drink up and
absorb him, like the joyful air--him, and the earth, with its deeds,
its blossoms, and faces.
In such condition of mind, how deeply, delightfully, must the poetry
of Ronsard and his fellows have moved him, when he became aware, as
from age to age inquisitive youth by good luck does become aware, of
the literature of his own day, confirming--more than confirming--
[54] anticipation! Here was a poetry which boldly assumed the dress,
the words, the habits, the very trick, of contemporary life, and
turned them into gold. It took possession of the lily in one's hand,
and projecting it into a visionary distance, shed upon the body of
the flower the soul of its beauty. Things were become at once more
deeply sensuous and more deeply ideal. As at the touch of a wizard,
something more came into the rose than its own natural blush.
Occupied so closely with the visible, this new poetry had so profound
an intuition of what can only be felt, and maintained that mood in
speaking of such objects as wine, fruit, the plume in the cap, the
ring on the finger. And still that was no dubious or generalised
form it gave to flower or bird, but the exact pressure of the Jay at
the window; you could count the petals,--of the exact natural number;
no expression could be too faithful to the precise texture of things;
words, too, must embroider, be twisted and spun, like silk or golden
hair. Here were real people, in their real, delightful attire, and
you understood how they moved; the visible was more visible than ever
before, just because soul had come to its surface. The juice in the
flowers, when Ronsard named them, was like wine or blood. It was
such a coloured thing; though the grey things also, the cool things,
all the fresher for the contrast--with a freshness, again, that
seemed to touch and cool the soul--found their account [55] there;
the clangorous passage of the birds at night foretokening rain, the
moan of the wind at the door, the wind's self made visible over the
yielding corn.
It was thus Gaston understood the poetry of Ronsard, generously
expanding it to the full measure of its intention. That poetry, too,
lost its thaumaturgic power in turn, and became mere literature in
exchange for life, partly in the natural revolution of poetic taste,
partly for its faults. Faults and all, however, Gaston loyally
accepted it; those faults--the lapse of grace into affectation, of
learning into pedantry, of exotic fineness into a trick--counting
with him as but the proof of faith to its own dominant positions.
They were but characteristics, needing no apology with the initiated,
or welcome even, as savouring of the master's peculiarities of
perfection. He listened, he looked round freely, but always now with
the ear, the eye, of his favourite poet. It had been a lesson, a
doctrine, the communication of an art,--the art of placing the
pleasantly aesthetic, the welcome, elements of life at an advantage,
in one's view of it, till they seemed to occupy the entire surface;
and he was sincerely grateful for an undeniable good service.
And yet the gifted poet seemed but to have spoken what was already in
Gaston's own mind, what he had longed to say, had been just going to
say; so near it came, that it had the charm [56] of a discovery of
one's own. That was an illusion, perhaps; it was because the poet
told one so much about himself, making so free a display of what
though personal was very contagious; of his love-secrets especially,
how love and nothing else filled his mind. He was in truth but
"love's secretary," noting from hour to hour its minutely changing
fortunes. Yes! that was the reason why visible, audible, sensible
things glowed so brightly, why there was such luxury in sounds,
words, rhythms, of the new light come on the world, of that wonderful
freshness. With a masterly appliance of what was near and familiar,
or again in the way of bold innovation, he found new words for
perennially new things, and the novel accent awakened long-slumbering
associations. Never before had words, single words, meant so much.
What expansion, what liberty of heart, in speech: how associable to
music, to singing, the written lines! He sang of the lark, and it
was the lark's voluble self. The physical beauty of humanity lent
itself to every object, animate or inanimate, to the very hours and
lapses and changes of time itself. An almost burdensome fulness of
expression haunted the gestures, the very dress, the personal
ornaments, of the people on the highway. Even Jacques Bonhomme at
his labour, or idling for an hour, borrowed from his love, homely as
it was, a touch of dignity or grace, and some secret of utterance,
which made [57] one think of Italy or Greece. The voice of the
shepherd calling, the chatter of the shepherdess turning her spindle,
seemed to answer, or wait for answer,--to be fragments of love's
ideal and eternal communing.
It was the power of "modernity," as renewed in every successive age
for genial youth, protesting, defiant of all sanction in these
matters, that the true "classic" must be of the present, the force
and patience of present time. He had felt after the thing, and here
it was,--the one irresistible poetry there had ever been, with the
magic word spoken in due time, transforming his own age and the world
about him, presenting its everyday touch, the very trick one knew it
by, as an additional grace, asserting the latent poetic rights of the
transitory, the fugitive, the contingent. Poetry need no longer mask
itself in the habit of a bygone day: Gaston could but pity the people
of bygone days for not being above-ground to read. Here, was a
discovery, a new faculty, a privileged apprehension, to be conveyed
in turn to one and to another, to be propagated for the imaginative
regeneration of the world. It was a manner, a habit of thought,
which would invade ordinary life, and mould that to its intention.
In truth, all the world was already aware, and delighted. The
"school" was soon to pay the penalty of that immediate acceptance,
that intimate fitness to the mind of its own time, by sudden [58] and
profound neglect, as a thing preternaturally tarnished and tame, like
magic youth, or magic beauty, turned in a moment by magic's own last
word into withered age. But then, to the liveliest spirits of that
time it had seemed nothing less than "impeccable," after the manner
of the great sacred products of the past, though in a living tongue.
Nay! to Gaston for one, the power of the old classic poetry itself
was explained by the reflex action of the new, and might seem to
justify its pretensions at last.
From the poem fancy wandered to the poet, and curious youth would
fain see the writer in person,--what a poet was like, with anxious
surmises, this way and that, as to the degree in which the precious
mental particles might be expected to have wrought up the outward
presence to their own high quality. A creature of the eye, in this
case at least, the intellectual hold on him being what it was, Gaston
had no fear of disillusion. His poetic readings had borrowed an
additional relish from the genial, companionable, manner of his life
at this time, taking him into the remotest corners of the vast level
land, and its outer ring of blue up-lands; amid which, as he rode one
day with "the three," towards perfectly new prospects, he had chanced
on some tangible rumour of the great poet's present abode. The hill
they had mounted at leisure, in talk with a village priest, dropped
suddenly upon a vague tract of wood and pasture, [59] with a dark
ridge beyond towards the south-west; and the black notch, which broke
its outline against the mellow space of evening light, was the
steeple of the priory of Croix-val, of which reverend body Pierre de
Ronsard, although a layman, was, by special favour of King Charles,
Superior.
Though a formal peace was come, though the primary movers of war had
taken hands or kissed each other, and were exchanging suspicious
courtesies, yet the unquiet temper of war was still abroad
everywhere, with an after-crop of miserable incidents. The
captainless national and mercenary soldiers were become in large
number thieves or beggars, and the peasant's hand sank back to the
tame labour of the plough reluctantly. Relieved a little by the
sentimental humour of the hour, lending, as Ronsard prompted, a
poetic and always amorous interest to everything around him, poor
Gaston's very human soul was vexed nevertheless at the spectacle of
the increased hardness of human life, with certain misgivings from
time to time at the contrast of his own luxurious tranquillity. The
homeless woman suckling her babe at the roadside, the grey-beard
hasting before the storm, the tattered fortune-teller who, when he
shook his head at her proposal to "read his hand," assured him
(perhaps with some insight into his character) "You do that"--you
shake your head, negatively--"too much!" these, and the like, [60]
might count as fitting human accidents in an impassioned landscape
picture. And his new imaginative culture had taught him to value
"surprises" in nature itself; the quaint, exciting charm of the
mistletoe in the wood, of the blossom before the leaf, the cry of
passing birds at night. Nay! the most familiar details of nature,
its daily routine of light and darkness, beset him now with a kind of
troubled and troubling eloquence. The rain, the first streak of
dawn, the very sullenness of the sky, had a power, only to be
described by saying that they seemed to be moral facts.
On his way at last to gaze on the abode of the new hero or demi-god
of poetry, Gaston perceives increasingly, as another excellence of
his verse, how truthful, how close it is to the minute fact of the
scene around; as there are pleasant wines which, expressing the
peculiar quality of their native soil, lose their special
pleasantness away from home. The physiognomy of the scene was
changed; the plain of La Beauce had ruffled itself into low green
hills and gently winding valleys, with clear, quick water, and
fanciful patches of heath and wood-land. Here and there a secular
oak tree maintained a solitude around it. It was the district of the
"little river Loir"--the Vendomois; and here, in its own country, the
new poetry, notwithstanding its classic elegance, might seem a native
wild flower, modest enough.
[61] He came riding with his companions towards evening along the
road which had suddenly abandoned its day-long straightness for
wanton curves and ascents; and there, as an owl on the wing cried
softly, beyond the tops of the spreading poplars was the west front,
silver-grey, and quiet, inexpressibly quiet, with its worn, late-
gothic "flamings" from top to bottom, as full of reverie to Gaston's
thinking as the enchanted castle in a story-book. The village lay
thinly scattered around the wide, grass-grown space; below was the
high espaliered garden-wall, and within it, visible through the open
doors, a gaunt figure, hook-nosed, like a wizard, at work with the
spade, too busily to turn and look. Or was it that he did not hear
at all the question repeated thrice:--Could one see His Reverence the
Prior, at least in his convent church? "You see him" was the answer,
as a face, all nerve, distressed nerve, turned upon them not
unkindly, the vanity of the great man aware and pleasantly tickled.
The unexpected incident had quickened a prematurely aged pulse, and
in reward for their good service the young travellers were bidden
carry their equipment, not to the village inn, but to the guest-
chamber of the half-empty priory. The eminent man of letters, who
had been always an enthusiastic gardener, though busy just now not
with choice flowers but with salutary kitchen-stuff, working indeed
with much effort, to counteract the gout, was ready enough [62] in
his solitude to make the most of chance visitors, especially youthful
ones. A bell clanged; he laid aside the spade, and casting an eye at
the whirling weather-vanes announced that it would snow. There had
been no "sunset." They had travelled away imperceptibly from genial
afternoon into a world of ashen evening.
The enemies of the lay Prior, satirists literary and religious,
falsely made a priest of him, a priest who should have sacrificed a
goat to pagan Bacchus. And in truth the poet, for a time a soldier,
and all his life a zealous courtier, had always been capable, as a
poet should be, of long-sustained meditation, adapting himself easily
enough to the habits of the "religious," following attentively the
choir-services in their church, of which he was a generous
benefactor, and to which he presently proceeded for vespers. Gaston
and "the three" sat among the Brethren, tempting curious eyes, in the
stalls of the half-lighted choir, while in purple cope and jaunty
biretta the lay Prior "assisted," his confidentiaire, or priestly
substitute, officiating at the altar. The long, sad, Lenten office
over, an invitation to supper followed, for Ronsard still loved, in
his fitful retirements at one or another of his numerous benefices,
to give way to the chance recreation of flattering company, and these
gay lads' enthusiasm for his person was obvious. And as for himself,
the great poet, with his [63] bodily graces and airs of court, had
always possessed the gift of pleasing those who encountered him.
The snow was falling now in big, slow flakes, a great fire blazing
under the chimney with its cipher and enigmatic motto, as they sat
down to the leek-soup, the hard eggs, and the salad grown and
gathered by their host's own hands. The long stone passages through
which they passed from church, with the narrow brown doors of the
monks' dormitories one after another along the white-washed wall,
made the coquetries of the Prior's own distant apartment all the more
reassuring. You remembered that from his ninth year he had been the
pet of princesses, the favourite of kings. Upon the cabinets,
chests, book-cases, around, were ranged the souvenirs received from
various royal persons, including three kings of France, the fair
Queen of Scots, Elizabeth of England; and the conversation fell to,
and was kept going by, the precious contents of the place where they
were sitting, the books printed and bound as they had never been
before--books which meant assiduous study, the theory of poetry with
Ronsard always accompanying its practice--delicate things of art,
which beauty had handled or might handle, the pictured faces on the
walls, in their frames of reeded ebony or jewelled filigree. There
was the Minerva, decreed him at a conference of the elegant, pedantic
"Jeux Floraux," which had proclaimed [64] Pierre de Ronsard "Prince
of Poets." The massive silver image Ronsard had promptly offered to
his patron King Charles; but in vain, for, though so greatly in want
of ready-money that he melted down church ornaments and exacted
"black" contributions from the clergy, one of the things in which
Charles had ever been sincere was a reverence for literature.
So there it stood, doing duty for Our Lady, with gothic crown and a
fresh sprig of consecrated box, bringing the odd, enigmatic
physiognomy, preferred by the art of that day, within the sphere of
religious devotion. The King's manuscript, declining, in verse
really as good as Ronsard's, the honour not meant for him, might be
read, attached to the pedestal. The ladies of his own verse, Marie,
Cassandre, and the rest, idols one after another of a somewhat
artificial and for the most part unrequited love, from the Angevine
maiden--La petite pucelle Angevine--who had vexed his young soul by
her inability to yield him more than a faint Platonic affection, down
to Helen, to whom he had been content to propose no other, gazed,
more impassibly than ever, from the walls.
They might have been sisters, those many successive loves, or one and
the same lady over and over again, in slightly varied humour and
attire perhaps, at the different intervals of some rather lengthy,
mimetic masque of love, to which the theatrical dress of that day was
appropriate; [65] for the mannered Italian, or Italianised, artists,
including the much-prized, native Janet, with his favourite water-
green backgrounds, aware of the poet's predilection, had given to all
alike the same brown eyes and tender eyelids and golden hair and
somewhat ambered paleness, varying only the curious artifices of the
dress--knots, and nets, and golden spider-work, and clear, flat
stones. Dangerous guests in that simple, cloistral place, Sibyls of
the Renaissance on a mission from Italy to France, to Gaston one and
all seemed under the burden of some weighty message concerning a
world unknown to him; the stealthy lines of cheek and brow contriving
to express it, while the lips and eyes only smiled, not quite
honestly. It had been a learned love, with undissembled "hatred of
the vulgar." Three royal Margarets, much-praised pearls of three
succeeding generations (for to the curious in these objects purity is
far from being the only measure of value) asserted charms a thought
more frank, or French, though still gracefully pedantic, with their
quaintly kerchiefed books--books of what?--in their pale hands.
Among the ladies, on the pictured wall as in life, were the poet's
male companions, stirring memories of a more material sort, though
their common interest had been poetry--memories of that "Bohemia,"
which even a prince of court poets had frequented when he was young,
of his cruder youthful vanities. [66] In some cases the date of death
was inscribed below.
One there was among them, the youngest, of whose genial fame to come
this experienced judge of men and books, two years before "St.
Bartholomew's," was confident--a crowned boy, King Charles himself.
Here perhaps was the single entirely disinterested sentiment of the
poet's life, wholly independent of a long list of benefits, or
benefices; for the younger had turned winsomely, appealingly, to the
elder, who, forty years of age, feeling chilly at the thought, had no
son. And of one only of those companions did the memory bring a
passing cloud. It was long ago, on a journey, that he had first
spoken, accidentally, with Joachim du Bellay, whose friendship had
been the great intellectual fortune of his life. For a moment one
saw the encounter at the wayside inn, in the broad, gay morning, a
quarter of a century since; and there was the face--deceased at
thirty-five. Pensive, plaintive, refined by sickness, of exceeding
delicacy, it must from the first have been best suited to the
greyness of an hour like this. To-morrow, where will be the snow?
The leader in that great poetic battle of the Pleiad, their host
himself (he explained the famous device, and named the seven chief
stars in the constellation) was depicted appropriately, in veritable
armour, with antique Roman cuirass of minutely inlaid gold, and
flowered mantle; [67] the crisp, ceremonial, laurel-wreath of the
Roman conqueror lying on the audacious, over-developed brows, above
the great hooked nose of practical enterprise. In spite of his
pretension to the Epicurean conquest of a kingly indifference of
mind, the portrait of twenty years ago betrayed, not less than the
living face with its roving, astonished eyes, the haggard soul of a
haggard generation, whose eagerly-sought refinements had been after
all little more than a theatrical make-believe--an age of wild
people, of insane impulse, of homicidal mania. The sweet-souled
songster had no more than others attained real calm in it. Even in
youth nervous distress had been the chief facial characteristic.
Triumphant, nevertheless, in his battle for Greek beauty--for the
naturalisation of Greek beauty in the brown cloud-lands of the North-
-he might have been thinking, contemptuously, of barking little
Saint-Gelais, or of Monsieur Marot's pack-thread poems. He, for his
part, had always held that poetry should be woven of delicate silk,
or of fine linen, or at least of good home-spun worsted.
To Gaston, yielding himself to its influence, for a moment the scene
around seemed unreal: an exotic, embalming air, escaped from some old
Greek or Roman pleasure-place, had turned the poet's workroom into a
strange kind of private sanctuary, amid these rude conventual
buildings, with the March wind aloud in the chimneys. [68]
Notwithstanding, what with the long day's ride, the keen evening,
they had done justice to the monastic fare, the "little" wine of the
country, the cream, the onions,--fine Camille, and dainty Jasmin, and
the poet turned to talk upon gardening, concerning which he could
tell them a thing or two--of early salads, and those special apples
the king loved to receive from him, mille-fleurs pippins, painted
with a thousand tiny streaks of red, yellow, and green. A dish of
them came to table now, with a bottle, at the right moment, from the
darkest corner of the cellar. And then, in nasal voice, well-trained
to Latin intonation, giving a quite medieval amplitude to the poet's
sonorities of rhythm and vocabulary, the Sub-prior was bidden to
sing, after the notation of Goudimel, the "Elegy of the Rose"; the
author girding cheerily at the clerkly man's assumed ignorance of
such compositions.