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 [166] circumstance that it was once poetry à 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 a large part of its
energy into the work of decoration. We feel a pensive pleasure in
gazing on these faded adornments, 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 arrived when
the school of Malherbe also 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 [167] 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
think 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 è 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 première liberté. His poetry
is full of quaint, [168] 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; as there were other strange
words which the poets of the Pleiad forged for themselves, and
which had only an ephemeral existence.
With this was united 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 poésie
chantée, is another. To combine 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.
[169] It was Goudimel, the serious and protestant Goudimel, who
set Ronsard's songs to music; but except in this eagerness for
music the poets of the Pleiad seem never quite in earnest. The
old Greek and Roman mythology, which the great Italians had
found 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, can amuse 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 reflections on the vanity
[170] of life. Just so the grotesque details 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 graceful 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 which
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.
[171] 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, where the vast
rolling fields 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 all this is connected a domesticity, a
homeliness and simple goodness, by which the 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 the frosty season,
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
example:--
[172]
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 de diverse couleur:
Tout estoit plein de beauté, de bonheur,
La mer tranquille, et le vent gracieulx,
Quand celle la nasquit en ces bas lieux
Qui a pillé 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 libéralité,
Mist en l'esprit ses semences encloses,
Son nom des Dieux prist l'immortalité.
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 Antiquités de Rome, and
the Regrets, which he ranks as what has been called poésie
intime, that intensely modern sort of poetry in which the writer
has for his aim the portraiture of his own most intimate moods,
and [173] to take the reader into his confidence. That age 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, intimité, 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 must 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 [174] 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 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 [175] one
famous ode. Du Bellay has almost been the poet of one poem;
and this one poem of his is an Italian product transplanted into
that green country of Anjou; out of the Latin verses of Andrea
Navagero, into French. But it is a composition 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.
D'UN VANNEUR DE BLE AUX VENTS.*
A vous trouppe legère
Qui d'aile passagères
Par le monde volez,
Et d'un sifflant murmure
L'ombrageuse verdure
Doulcement esbranlez.
J'offre ces violettes,
Ces lis & ces fleurettes,
Et ces roses icy,
Ces vermeillettes roses
Sont freschement écloses,
Et ces oelliets aussi.
De vostre doulce haleine
Eventez ceste plaine
Eventez ce sejour;
Ce pendant que j'ahanne
A mon blè que je vanne
A la chaleur du jour.
[176]
That has, in the highest degree, the qualities, the value, of the
whole Pleiad school of poetry, of the whole phase of taste from
which that school derives--a certain silvery grace of fancy, nearly
all the pleasure of which is in the surprise at the happy and
dexterous way in which a thing slight in itself is handled. The
sweetness of it is by no means to be got at by crushing, as you
crush wild herbs to get at their perfume. One seems to hear the
measured motion of the fans, with a child's pleasure on coming
across the incident for the first time, in one of those great barns of
Du Bellay's own country, La Beauce, the granary of France. A
sudden light transfigures some trivial thing, a weather-vane, a
wind-mill, a winnowing fan, the dust in the barn door. A
moment--and the thing has vanished, because it was pure effect;
but it leaves a relish behind it, a longing that the accident may
happen again.
1872.
NOTES
157. *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.
175. *A graceful translation of this and some other poems of the
Pleiad may be found in Ballads and Lyrics of Old France, by Mr.
Andrew Lang.
WINCKELMANN
[177] ET EGO IN ARCADIA FUI
GOETHE'S fragments of art-criticism contain a few pages of
strange pregnancy on the character of Winckelmann. He speaks
of the teacher who had made his career possible, but whom he
had never seen, as of an abstract type of culture, consummate,
tranquil, withdrawn already into the region of ideals, yet retaining
colour from the incidents of a passionate intellectual life.
He classes him with certain works of art, possessing an
inexhaustible gift of suggestion, to which criticism may return
again and again with renewed freshness. Hegel, in his lectures on
the Philosophy of Art, estimating the work of his predecessors,
has also passed a remarkable judgment on Winckelmann's
writings:--"Winckelmann, by contemplation of the ideal works of
the ancients, received a sort of inspiration, through which he
opened a new sense for the study of art. He is to be regarded as
one of those who, in the sphere of art, have known how to initiate
a new organ for the human spirit." That it has [178] given a new
sense, that it has laid open a new organ, is the highest that can be
said of any critical effort. It is interesting then to ask what kind
of man it was who thus laid open a new organ. Under what
conditions was that effected?
Johann Joachim Winckelmann was born at Stendal, in
Brandenburg, in the year 1717. The child of a poor tradesman,
he passed through many struggles in early youth, the memory of
which ever remained in him as a fitful cause of dejection. In
1763, in the full emancipation of his spirit, looking over the
beautiful Roman prospect, he writes--"One gets spoiled here; but
God owed me this; in my youth I suffered too much." Destined
to assert and interpret the charm of the Hellenic spirit, he served
first a painful apprenticeship in the tarnished intellectual world of
Germany in the earlier half of the eighteenth century. Passing out
of that into the happy light of the antique, he had a sense of
exhilaration almost physical. We find him as a child in the dusky
precincts of a German school, hungrily feeding on a few
colourless books. The master of this school grows blind;
Winckelmann becomes his famulus. The old man would have
had him study theology. Winckelmann, free of the master's
library, chooses rather to become familiar with the Greek
classics. Herodotus and Homer win, with their "vowelled"
Greek, his warmest enthusiasm; whole nights of fever are
devoted to them; disturbing dreams of an [179] Odyssey of his
own come to him. "He felt in himself," says Madame de Staël,
"an ardent attraction towards the south. In German imaginations
even now traces are often to be found of that love of the sun, that
weariness of the North (cette fatigue du nord), which carried the
northern peoples away into the countries of the South. A fine sky
brings to birth sentiments not unlike the love of one's
Fatherland."
To most of us, after all our steps towards it, the antique world, in
spite of its intense outlines, its own perfect self-expression, still
remains faint and remote. To him, closely limited except on the
side of the ideal, building for his dark poverty "a house not made
with hands," it early came to seem more real than the present. In
the fantastic plans of foreign travel continually passing through
his mind, to Egypt, for instance, and to France, there seems
always to be rather a wistful sense of something lost to be
regained, than the desire of discovering anything new. Goethe
has told us how, in his eagerness actually to handle the antique,
he became interested in the insignificant vestiges of it which the
neighbourhood of Strasburg afforded. So we hear of
Winckelmann's boyish antiquarian wanderings among the ugly
Brandenburg sandhills. Such a conformity between himself and
Winckelmann, Goethe would have gladly noted.
At twenty-one he enters the University of Halle, to study
theology, as his friends desire; [180] instead, he becomes the
enthusiastic translator of Herodotus. The condition of Greek
learning in German schools and universities had fallen, and there
were no professors at Halle who could satisfy his sharp,
intellectual craving. Of his professional education he always
speaks with scorn, claiming to have been his own teacher from
first to last. His appointed teachers did not perceive that a new
source of culture was within their hands. Homo vagus et
inconstans!--one of them pedantically reports of the future
pilgrim to Rome, unaware on which side his irony was whetted.
When professional education confers nothing but irritation on a
Schiller, no one ought to be surprised; for Schiller, and such as
he, are primarily spiritual adventurers. But that Winckelmann,
the votary of the gravest of intellectual traditions, should get
nothing but an attempt at suppression from the professional
guardians of learning, is what may well surprise us.
In 1743 he became master of a school at Seehausen. This was the
most wearisome period of his life. Notwithstanding a success in
dealing with children, which seems to testify to something simple
and primeval in his nature, he found the work of teaching very
depressing. Engaged in this work, he writes that he still has
within him a longing desire to attain to the knowledge of beauty--
sehnlich wünschte zur Kenntniss des Schönen zu gelangen. He
had to shorten his nights, [181] sleeping only four hours, to gain
time for reading. And here Winckelmann made a step forward in
culture. He multiplied his intellectual force by detaching from it
all flaccid interests. He renounced mathematics and law, in
which his reading had been considerable,--all but the literature of
the arts. Nothing was to enter into his life unpenetrated by its
central enthusiasm. At this time he undergoes the charm of
Voltaire. Voltaire belongs to that flimsier, more artificial,
classical tradition, which Winckelmann was one day to supplant,
by the clear ring, the eternal outline, of the genuine antique. But
it proves the authority of such a gift as Voltaire's that it allures
and wins even those born to supplant it. Voltaire's impression on
Winckelmann was never effaced; and it gave him a consideration
for French literature which contrasts with his contempt for the
literary products of Germany. German literature transformed,
siderealised, as we see it in Goethe, reckons Winckelmann
among its initiators. But Germany at that time presented nothing
in which he could have anticipated Iphigenie, and the formation
of an effective classical tradition in German literature.
Under this purely literary influence, Winckelmann protests
against Christian Wolff and the philosophers. Goethe, in
speaking of this protest, alludes to his own obligations to
Emmanuel Kant. Kant's influence over the [182] culture of
Goethe, which he tells us could not have been resisted by him
without loss, consisted in a severe limitation to the concrete. But
he adds, that in born antiquaries, like Winckelmann, a constant
handling of the antique, with its eternal outline, maintains that
limitation as effectually as a critical philosophy. Plato, however,
saved so often for his redeeming literary manner, is excepted
from Winckelmann's proscription of the philosophers. The
modern student most often meets Plato on that side which seems
to pass beyond Plato into a world no longer pagan, based upon
the conception of a spiritual life. But the element of affinity
which he presents to Winckelmann is that which is wholly Greek,
and alien from the Christian world, represented by that group of
brilliant youths in the Lysis, still uninfected by any spiritual
sickness, finding the end of all endeavour in the aspects of the
human form, the continual stir and motion of a comely human
life.
This new-found interest in Plato's dialogues could not fail to
increase his desire to visit the countries of the classical tradition.
"It is my misfortune," he writes, " that I was not born to great
place, wherein I might have had cultivation, and the opportunity
of following my instinct and forming myself." A visit to Rome
probably was already designed, and he silently preparing for it.
Count Bünau, the author of a historical work then of note, had
collected at Nöthenitz a [183] valuable library, now part of the
library of Dresden. In 1748 Winckelmann wrote to Bünau in
halting French:--He is emboldened, he says, by Bünau's
indulgence for needy men of letters. He desires only to devote
himself to study, having never allowed himself to be dazzled by
favourable prospects in the Church. He hints at his doubtful
position "in a metaphysical age, by which humane literature is
trampled under foot. At present," he goes on, "little value is set
on Greek literature, to which I have devoted myself so far as I
could penetrate, when good books are so scarce and expensive."
Finally, he desires a place in some corner of Bünau's library.
"Perhaps, at some future time, I shall become more useful to the
public, if, drawn from obscurity in whatever way, I can find
means to maintain myself in the capital."