In the middle of the sixteenth century, when the spirit of the
Renaissance was everywhere, and people had begun to look back with
distaste on the works of the middle age, the old Gothic manner had still
one chance more, in borrowing something from the rival which was about
to supplant it. In this way there was produced, chiefly in France, a new
and peculiar phase of taste with qualities and a charm of its own,
blending the somewhat attenuated grace of Italian ornament with the
general outlines of Northern design. It produced the Chateau de Gaillon,
as you may still see it in the delicate engravings of Israel
Silvestre--a Gothic donjon veiled faintly by a surface of dainty Italian
traceries--Chenonceaux, Blois, Chambord, and the church of Brou. In
painting, there came from Italy workmen like Maitre Roux and the masters
of the school of Fontainebleau, to have their later Italian
voluptuousness attempered by the naive and silvery qualities of the
native style; and it was characteristic of these painters that they were
most successful in painting on glass, an art so essentially medieval.
Taking it up where the middle age had left it, they found their whole
work among the last subtleties of colour and line; and keeping within
the true limits of their material, they got quite a new order of effects
from it, and felt their way to refinements on colour never dreamed of by
those older workmen, the glass-painters of Chartres or Le Mans. What is
called the Renaissance in France is thus not so much the introduction of
a wholly new taste ready-made from Italy, but rather the finest and
subtlest phase of the middle age itself, its last fleeting splendour and
temperate Saint Martin's summer. In poetry, the Gothic spirit in France
had produced a thousand songs; and in the Renaissance, French poetry too
did but borrow something to blend with a native growth, and the poems of
Ronsard, with their ingenuity, their delicately figured surfaces, their
slightness, their fanciful combinations of rhyme, are but the
correlative of the traceries of the house of Jacques Coeur at Bourges,
or the Maison de Justice at Rouen.
There was indeed something in the native French taste naturally akin to
that Italian finesse. The characteristic of French work had always been
a certain nicety, a remarkable daintiness of hand, une nettete
remarquable d'execution. In the paintings of Francois Clouet, for
example, or rather of the Clouets--for there was a whole family of
them--painters remarkable for their resistance to Italian influences,
there is a silveriness of colour and a clearness of expression which
distinguish them very definitely from their Flemish neighbours, Hemling
or the Van Eycks. And this nicety is not less characteristic of old
French poetry. A light, aerial delicacy, a simple elegance--une nettete
remarquable d'execution:--these are essential characteristics alike of
Villon's poetry, and of the Hours of Anne of Brittany. They are
characteristic too of a hundred French Gothic carvings and traceries.
Alike in the old Gothic cathedrals, and in their counterpart, the old
Gothic chansons de geste, the rough and ponderous mass becomes, as if by
passing for a moment into happier conditions, or through a more gracious
stratum of air, graceful and refined, like the carved ferneries on the
granite church at Folgoat, or the lines which describe the fair priestly
hands of Archbishop Turpin, in the song of Roland; although below both
alike there is a fund of mere Gothic strength, or heaviness.*
*The purely artistic aspects of this subject have been interpreted, in a
work of great taste and learning, by Mrs. Mark Pattison:--The
Renaissance of Art in France.
And Villon's songs and Clouet's paintings are like these. It is the
higher touch making itself felt here and there, betraying itself, like
nobler blood in a lower stock, by a fine line or gesture or expression,
the turn of a wrist, the tapering of a finger. In Ronsard's time that
rougher element seemed likely to predominate. No one can turn over the
pages of Rabelais without feeling how much need there was of softening,
of castigation. To effect this softening is the object of the revolution
in poetry which is connected with Ronsard's name. Casting about for the
means of thus refining upon and saving the character of French
literature, he accepted that influx of Renaissance taste, which, leaving
the buildings, the language, the art, the poetry of France, at bottom,
what they were, old French Gothic still, gilds their surfaces with a
strange, delightful, foreign aspect passing over all that Northern land,
in itself neither deeper nor more permanent than a chance effect of
light. He reinforces, he doubles the French daintiness by Italian
finesse. Thereupon, nearly all the force and all the seriousness of
French work disappear; only the elegance, the aerial touch, the perfect
manner remain. But this elegance, this manner, this daintiness of
execution are consummate, and have an unmistakable aesthetic value.
So the old French chanson, which, like the old Northern Gothic ornament,
though it sometimes refined itself into a sort of weird elegance, was
often, in its essence, something rude and formless, became in the hands
of Ronsard a Pindaric ode. He gave it structure, a sustained system,
strophe and antistrophe, and taught it a changefulness and variety of
metre which keep the curiosity always excited, so that the very aspect
of it, as it lies written on the page, carries the eye lightly onwards,
and of which this is a good instance:--
Avril, la grace, et le ris
De Cypris,
Le flair et la douce haleine;
Avril, le parfum des dieux,
Qui, des cieux,
Sentent l'odeur de la plaine;
C'est toy, courteis et gentil,
Qui, d'exil
Retire ces passageres,
Ces arondelles qui vont,
Et qui sont
Du printemps les messageres.
That is not by Ronsard, but by Remy Belleau, for Ronsard soon came to
have a school. Six other poets threw in their lot with him in his
literary revolution--this Remy Belleau, Antoine de Baif, Pontus de
Tyard, Etienne Jodelle, Jean Daurat, and lastly Joachim du Bellay; and
with that strange love of emblems which is characteristic of the time,
which covered all the works of Francis the First with the salamander,
and all the works of Henry the Second with the double crescent, and all
the works of Anne of Brittany with the knotted cord, they called
themselves the Pleiad; seven in all, although, as happens with the
celestial Pleiad, if you scrutinise this constellation of poets more
carefully you may find there a great number of minor stars.
The first note of this literary revolution was struck by Joachim du
Bellay in a little tract written at the early age of twenty-four, which
coming to us through three centuries seems of yesterday, so full is it
of those delicate critical distinctions which are sometimes supposed
peculiar to modern writers. The piece has for its title La Deffense et
Illustration de la langue Francoyse; and its problem is how to
illustrate or ennoble the French language, to give it lustre. We are
accustomed to speak of the varied critical and creative movement of the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as the Renaissance, and because we
have a single name for it we may sometimes fancy that there was more
unity in the thing itself than there really was. Even the Reformation,
that other great movement of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, had
far less unity, far less of combined action, than is at first sight
supposed; and the Renaissance was infinitely less united, less conscious
of combined action, than the Reformation. But if anywhere the
Renaissance became conscious, as a German philosopher might say, if ever
it was understood as a systematic movement by those who took part in it,
it is in this little book of Joachim du Bellay's, which it is impossible
to read without feeling the excitement, the animation, of change, of
discovery. "It is a remarkable fact," says M. Sainte-Beuve, "and an
inversion of what is true of other languages, that, in French, prose has
always had the precedence over poetry." Du Bellay's prose is perfectly
transparent, flexible, and chaste. In many ways it is a more
characteristic example of the culture of the Pleiad than any of its
verse; and those who love the whole movement of which the Pleiad is a
part, for a weird foreign grace in it, and may be looking about for a
true specimen of it, cannot have a better than Joachim du Bellay and
this little treatise of his.
Du Bellay's object is to adjust the existing French culture to the
rediscovered classical culture; and in discussing this problem, and
developing the theories of the Pleiad, he has lighted upon many
principles of permanent truth and applicability. There were some who
despaired of the French language altogether, who thought it naturally
incapable of the fulness and elegance of Greek and Latin--cette elegance
et copie qui est en la langue Grecque et Romaine--that science could be
adequately discussed, and poetry nobly written, only in the dead
languages. "Those who speak thus," says Du Bellay, "make me think of
those relics which one may only see through a little pane of glass, and
must not touch with one's hands. That is what these people do with all
branches of culture, which they keep shut up in Greek and Latin books,
not permitting one to see them otherwise, or transport them out of dead
words into those which are alive, and wing their way daily through the
months of men." "Languages," he says again, "are not born like plants
and trees, some naturally feeble and sickly, others healthy and strong
and apter to bear the weight of men's conceptions, but all their virtue
is generated in the world of choice and men's freewill concerning them.
Therefore, I cannot blame too strongly the rashness of some of our
countrymen, who being anything rather than Greeks or Latins, depreciate
and reject with more than stoical disdain everything written in French;
nor can I express my surprise at the odd opinion of some learned men who
think that our vulgar tongue is wholly incapable of erudition and good
literature."
It was an age of translations. Du Bellay himself translated two books of
the Aeneid, and other poetry, old and new, and there were some who
thought that the translation of the classical literature was the true
means of ennobling the French language:--strangers are ever favourites
with us--nous favorisons toujours les etrangers. Du Bellay moderates
their expectations. "I do not believe that one can learn the right use
of them"--he is speaking of figures and ornament in language--"from
translations, because it is impossible to reproduce them with the same
grace with which the original author used them. For each language has, I
know not what peculiarity of its own; and if you force yourself to
express the naturalness (le naif) of this, in another language,
observing the law of translation, which is, not to expatiate beyond the
limits of the author himself; your words will be constrained, cold and
ungraceful." Then he fixes the test of all good translation:--"To prove
this, read me Demosthenes and Homer in Latin, Cicero and Virgil in
French, and see whether they produce in you the same affections which
you experience in reading those authors in the original."
In this effort to ennoble the French language, to give it grace, number,
perfection, and as painters do to their pictures, that last, so
desirable, touch--cette derniere main que nous desirons--what Du Bellay
is pleading for is his mother-tongue, the language, that is, in which
one will have the utmost degree of what is moving and passionate. He
recognised of what force the music and dignity of languages are, how
they enter into the inmost part of things; and in pleading for the
cultivation of the French language, he is pleading for no merely
scholastic interest, but for freedom, impulse, reality, not in
literature merely, but in daily communion of speech. After all, it was
impossible to have this impulse in Greek and Latin, dead languages shut
up in books as in reliquaries--peris et mises en reliquaires de livres.
By aid of this starveling stock--pauvre plante et vergette--of the
French language, he must speak delicately, movingly, if he is ever to
speak so at all: that, or none, must be for him the medium of what he
calls, in one of his great phrases, le discours fatal des choses
mondaines--that discourse about affairs which decides men's fates. And
it is his patriotism not to despair of it; he sees it already perfect in
all elegance and beauty of words--parfait en toute elegance et venuste
de paroles.
Du Bellay was born in the disastrous year 1525, the year of the battle
of Pavia, and the captivity of Francis the First. . His parents died
early, and to him, as the younger son, his mother's little estate, ce
petit Lire, the beloved place of his birth, descended. He was brought up
by a brother only a little older than himself; and left to themselves,
the two boys passed their lives in day-dreams of military glory. Their
education was neglected; "The time of my youth," says Du Bellay, "was
lost, like the flower which no shower waters, and no hand cultivates."
He was just twenty years old when the elder brother died, leaving
Joachim to be the guardian of his child. It was with regret, with a
shrinking feeling of incapacity, that he took upon him the burden of
this responsibility. Hitherto he had looked forward to the profession of
a soldier, hereditary in his family. But at this time a sickness
attacked him which brought him cruel sufferings, and seemed likely to be
mortal. It was then for the first time that he read the Greek and Latin
poets. These studies came too late to make him what he so much desired
to be, a trifler in Greek and Latin verse, like so many others of his
time now forgotten; instead, they made him a lover of his own homely
native tongue, that poor starveling stock of the French language. It was
through this fortunate shortcoming in his education that he became
national and modern; and he learned afterwards to look back on that wild
garden of his youth with only a half regret. A certain Cardinal du
Bellay was the successful member of the family, a man often employed in
high official affairs. It was to him that the thoughts of Joachim turned
when it became necessary to choose a profession, and in 1552 he
accompanied the Cardinal to Rome. He remained there nearly five years,
burdened with the weight of affairs, and languishing with home-sickness.
Yet it was under these circumstances that his genius yielded its best
fruits. From Rome, which to most men of an imaginative temperament such
as his would have yielded so many pleasurable sensations, with all the
curiosities of the Renaissance still fresh there, his thoughts went back
painfully, longingly, to the country of the Loire, with its wide
expanses of waving corn, its homely pointed roofs of grey slate, and its
far-off scent of the sea. He reached home at last, but only to die
there, quite suddenly, one wintry day, at the early age of thirty-five.
Much of Du Bellay's poetry illustrates rather the age and school to
which he belonged than his own temper and genius. As with the writings
of Ronsard and the other poets of the Pleiad, its interest depends not
so much on the impress of individual genius upon it, as on the
circumstance that it was once poetry a la mode, that it is part of the
manner of a time--a time which made much of manner, and carried it to a
high degree of perfection. It is one of the decorations of an age which
threw much of its energy into the work of decoration. We feel a pensive
pleasure in seeing these faded decorations, and observing how a group of
actual men and women pleased themselves long ago. Ronsard's poems are a
kind of epitome of his age. Of one side of that age, it is true, of the
strenuous, the progressive, the serious movement, which was then going
on, there is little; but of the catholic side, the losing side, the
forlorn hope, hardly a figure is absent. The Queen of Scots, at whose
desire Ronsard published his odes, reading him in her northern prison,
felt that he was bringing back to her the true flavour of her early days
in the court of Catherine at the Louvre, with its exotic Italian
gaieties. Those who disliked that poetry, disliked it because they found
that age itself distasteful. The poetry of Malherbe came, with its
sustained style and weighty sentiment, but with nothing that set people
singing; and the lovers of such poetry saw in the poetry of the Pleiad
only the latest trumpery of the middle age. But the time came also when
the school of Malherbe had had its day; and the Romanticists, who in
their eagerness for excitement, for strange music and imagery, went back
to the works of the middle age, accepted the Pleiad too with the rest;
and in that new middle age which their genius has evoked, the poetry of
the Pleiad has found its place. At first, with Malherbe, you may find
it, like the architecture, the whole mode of life, the very dresses of
that time, fantastic, faded, rococo. But if you look long enough to
understand it, to conceive its sentiment, you will find that those
wanton lines have a spirit guiding their caprices. For there is style
there; one temper has shaped the whole; and everything that has style,
that has been done as no other man or age could have done it, as it
could never, for all our trying, be done again, has its true value and
interest. Let us dwell upon it for a moment, and try to gather from it
that special flower, ce fleur particulier, which Ronsard himself tells
us every garden has.
It is poetry not for the people, but for a confined circle, for
courtiers, great lords and erudite persons, people who desire to be
humoured, to gratify a certain refined voluptuousness they have in them.
Ronsard loves, or dreams that he loves, a rare and peculiar type of
beauty, la petite pucelle Angevine, with golden hair and dark eyes. But
he has the ambition not only of being a courtier and a lover, but a
great scholar also; he is anxious about orthography, about the letter e
Grecque, the true spelling of Latin names in French writing, and the
restoration of the letter i to its primitive liberty--del' i voyelle en
sa premiere liberte. His poetry is full of quaint, remote learning. He
is just a little pedantic, true always to his own express judgment, that
to be natural is not enough for one who in poetry desires to produce
work worthy of immortality. And therewithal a certain number of Greek
words, which charmed Ronsard and his circle by their gaiety and
daintiness, and a certain air of foreign elegance about them, crept into
the French language: and there were other strange words which the poets
of the Pleiad forged for themselves, and which had only an ephemeral
existence.
With this was mixed the desire to taste a more exquisite and various
music than that of the older French verse, or of the classical poets.
The music of the measured, scanned verse of Latin and Greek poetry is
one thing; the music of the rhymed, unscanned verse of Villon and the
old French poets, la poesie chantee, is another. To unite together these
two kinds of music in a new school of French poetry, to make verse which
should scan and rhyme as well, to search out and harmonise the measure
of every syllable, and unite it to the swift, flitting, swallow-like
motion of rhyme, to penetrate their poetry with a double music--this was
the ambition of the Pleiad. They are insatiable of music, they cannot
have enough of it; they desire a music of greater compass perhaps than
words can possibly yield, to drain out the last drops of sweetness which
a certain note or accent contains.
This eagerness for music is almost the only serious thing in the poetry
of the Pleiad; and it was Goudimel, the severe and protestant Goudimel,
who set Ronsard's songs to music. But except in this matter these poets
seem never quite in earnest. The old Greek and Roman mythology, which
for the great Italians had been a motive so weighty and severe, becomes
with them a mere toy. That "Lord of terrible aspect," Amor, has become
Love, the boy or the babe. They are full of fine railleries; they
delight in diminutives, ondelette, fontelette, doucelette, Cassandrette.
Their loves are only half real, a vain effort to prolong the imaginative
loves of the middle age beyond their natural lifetime. They write
love-poems for hire. Like that party of people who tell the tales in
Boccaccio's Decameron, they form a circle which in an age of great
troubles, losses, anxieties, amuses itself with art, poetry, intrigue.
But they amuse themselves with wonderful elegance; and sometimes their
gaiety becomes satiric, for, as they play, real passions insinuate
themselves, and at least the reality of death; their dejection at the
thought of leaving this fair abode of our common daylight--le beau
sejour du commun jour--is expressed by them with almost wearisome
reiteration. But with this sentiment too they are able to trifle: the
imagery of death serves for delicate ornament, and they weave into the
airy nothingness of their verses their trite reflexions on the vanity of
life; just as the grotesques of the charnel-house nest themselves,
together with birds and flowers and the fancies of the pagan mythology,
in the traceries of the architecture of that time, which wantons in its
delicate arabesques with the images of old age and death.
Ronsard became deaf at sixteen; and it was this circumstance which
finally determined him to be a man of letters instead of a diplomatist,
significantly, one might fancy; of a certain premature agedness, and of
the tranquil, temperate sweetness appropriate to that, in the school of
poetry which he founded. Its charm is that of a thing not vigorous or
original, but full of the grace that comes of long study and reiterated
refinements, and many steps repeated, and many angles worn down, with an
exquisite faintness, une fadeur exquise, a certain tenuity and caducity,
as for those who can bear nothing vehement or strong; for princes weary
of love, like Francis the First, or of pleasure, like Henry the Third,
or of action, like Henry the Fourth. Its merits are those of the
old,--grace and finish, perfect in minute detail. For these people are a
little jaded, and have a constant desire for a subdued and delicate
excitement, to warm their creeping fancy a little. They love a constant
change of rhyme in poetry, and in their houses that strange, fantastic
interweaving of thin, reed-like lines, which are a kind of rhetoric in
architecture.
But the poetry of the Pleiad is true not only to the physiognomy of its
age, but also to its country--ce pays du Vendomois--the names and scenery
of which so often recur in it; the great Loire, with its long spaces of
white sand; the little river Loir; the heathy, upland country, with its
scattered pools of water and waste road-sides, and retired manors, with
their crazy old feudal defences half fallen into decay; La Beauce, the
granary of France, where the vast rolling fields of corn seem to
anticipate the great western sea itself. It is full of the traits of that
country. We see Du Bellay and Ronsard gardening, or hunting with their
dogs, or watch the pastimes of a rainy day; and with this is connected a
domesticity, a homeliness and simple goodness, by which this Northern
country gains upon the South. They have the love of the aged for warmth,
and understand the poetry of winter; for they are not far from the
Atlantic, and the west wind which comes up from it, turning the poplars
white, spares not this new Italy in France. So the fireside often
appears, with the pleasures of winter, about the vast emblazoned chimneys
of the time, and with a bonhomie as of little children, or old people.
It is in Du Bellay's Olive, a collection of sonnets in praise of a
half-imaginary lady, Sonnetz a la louange d'Olive, that these
characteristics are most abundant. Here is a perfectly crystallised
specimen:--
D'amour, de grace, et de haulte valeur
Les feux divins estoient ceinctz et les cieulx
S'estoient vestuz d'un manteau precieux
A raiz ardens di diverse couleur:
Tout estoit plein de beaute, de bonheur,
La mer tranquille, et le vent gracieulx,
Quand celle la nasquit en ces bas lieux
Qui a pille du monde tout l'honneur.
Ell' prist son teint des beux lyz blanchissans,
Son chef de l'or, ses deux levres des rozes,
Et du soleil ses yeux resplandissans:
Le ciel usant de liberalite,
Mist en l'esprit ses semences encloses,
Son nom des Dieux prist l'immortalite.
That he is thus a characteristic specimen of the poetical taste of that
age, is indeed Du Bellay's chief interest. But if his work is to have the
highest sort of interest, if it is to do something more than satisfy
curiosity, if it is to have an aesthetic as distinct from an historical
value, it is not enough for a poet to have been the true child of his
age, to have conformed to its aesthetic conditions, and by so conforming
to have charmed and stimulated that age; it is necessary that there
should be perceptible in his work something individual, inventive,
unique, the impress there of the writer's own temper and personality.
This impress M. Sainte-Beuve thought he found in the Antiquites de Rome,
and the Regrets, which he ranks as what has been called poesie intime,
that intensely modern sort of poetry in which the writer has for his aim
the portraiture of his own most intimate moods, and to take the reader
into his confidence. That generation had other instances of this intimacy
of sentiment: Montaigne's Essays are full of it, the carvings of the
church of Brou are full of it. M. Sainte-Beuve has perhaps exaggerated
the influence of this quality in Du Bellay's Regrets; but the very name
of the book has a touch of Rousseau about it, and reminds one of a whole
generation of self-pitying poets in modern times. It was in the
atmosphere of Rome, to him so strange and mournful, that these pale
flowers grew up; for that journey to Italy, which he deplored as the
greatest misfortune of his life, put him in full possession of his
talent, and brought out all its originality. And in effect you do find
intimacy, intimite, here. The trouble of his life is analysed, and the
sentiment of it conveyed directly to our minds; not a great sorrow or
passion, but only the sense of loss in passing days, the ennui of a
dreamer who has to plunge into the world's affairs, the opposition
between actual life and the ideal, a longing for rest, nostalgia,
home-sickness--that pre-eminently childish, but so suggestive sorrow, as
significant of the final regret of all human creatures for the familiar
earth and limited sky. The feeling for landscape is often described as a
modern one; still more so is that for antiquity, the sentiment of ruins.
Du Bellay has this sentiment. The duration of the hard, sharp outlines of
things is a grief to him, and passing his wearisome days among the ruins
of ancient Rome, he is consoled by the thought that all must one day end,
by the sentiment of the grandeur of nothingness--la grandeur du rien.
With a strange touch of far-off mysticism, he thinks that the great
whole--le grand tout--into which all other things pass and lose
themselves, ought itself sometimes to perish and pass away. Nothing less
can relieve his weariness. From the stately aspects of Rome his thoughts
went back continually to France, to the smoking chimneys of his little
village, the longer twilight of the North, the soft climate of Anjou--la
douceur Angevine; yet not so much to the real France, we may be sure,
with its dark streets and its roofs of rough-hewn slate, as to that other
country, with slenderer towers, and more winding rivers, and trees like
flowers, and with softer sunshine on more gracefully-proportioned fields
and ways, which the fancy of the exile, and the pilgrim, and of the
schoolboy far from home, and of those kept at home unwillingly,
everywhere builds up before or behind them.
He came home at last, through the Grisons, by slow journeys; and there,
in the cooler air of his own country, under its skies of milkier blue,
the sweetest flower of his genius sprang up. There have been poets whose
whole fame has rested on one poem, as Gray's on the Elegy in a Country
Churchyard, or Ronsard's, as many critics have thought, on the eighteen
lines of one famous ode. Du Bellay has almost been the poet of one poem;
and this one poem of his is an Italian thing transplanted into that green
country of Anjou; out of the Latin verses of Andrea Navagero, into
French: but it is a thing in which the matter is almost nothing, and the
form almost everything; and the form of the poem as it stands, written in
old French, is all Du Bellay's own. It is a song which the winnowers are
supposed to sing as they winnow the corn, and they invoke the winds to
lie lightly on the grain.