is hardly a maxim to which the genius of the love-song gives willing
ear. Rather is she the _La Belle Dame sans Merci_, or the Elfin Lady
who rode through the forests of ancient France.
My sire is the nightingale,
That sings, making his wail,
In the wild wood, clear;
The mermaid is mother to me,
That sings in the salt sea,
In the ocean mere.
“What,” asks Mr. Brownell hopelessly, “has become of this Celtic strain
in the French nature?”--a strain which found vent in the “_poésie
courtoise_,” playful, amorous, laden with delicate subtleties and fond
conceits. This poesie--once the delight of Christendom--echoes still in
Petrarch’s sonnets and in Shakespeare’s madrigals; but it is difficult
to link its sweet extravagances with the chiselled verse of later days,
and critics forget the past in their careful contemplation of the
present. “French poetry,” says Mr. Zangwill, “has always leant to the
frigid, the academic, the rhetorical,--in a word, to the prosaic. The
spirit of Boileau has ruled it from his cold marble urn.”
But long before Boileau lay in his urn--or in his cradle--the poets of
France, like the poets of Albion, sang with facile grace of love, and
dalliance, and the glory of youth and spring. The fact that Boileau
ignored and despised their song, and taught his obedient followers to
ignore and despise it also, cannot silence those early notes. When he
descended frigidly to his grave, Euterpe tucked up her loosened hair,
and sandalled her bare white feet, and girdled her disordered robes
into decent folds. Perhaps it was high time for these reforms. Nothing
is less seductive in middle age than the careless gayety of youth. But
once France was young, and Euterpe a slip of a girl, and no grim shadow
of that classic urn rested on the golden days when Aucassin--model
of defiant and conquering lovers--followed Nicolette into the deep,
mysterious woods.
Jeunesse sur moy a puissance,
Mais Vieillesse fait son effort
De m’avoir en sa gouvernance,
sang Charles d’Orléans, embodying in three lines the whole history
of man and song. Youth was lusty and folly riotous when Ronsard’s
mistress woke in the morning, and found Apollo waiting patiently to
fill his quiver with arrows from her eyes; or when Jacques Tahureau
watched the stars of heaven grow dim before his lady’s brightness; or
when Vauquelin de la Fresnaye saw Philis sleeping on a bed of lilies,
regardless of discomfort, and surrounded by infant Loves.
J’admirois toutes ces beautez
Égalles à mes loyautez,
Quand l’esprit me dist en l’oreille:
Fol, que fais-tu? Le temps perdu
Souvent est chèrement vendu;
S’on le recouvre, c’est merveille.
Alors, je m’abbaissai tout bas,
Sans bruit je marchai pas à pas,
Et baisai ses lèvres pourprines:
Savourant un tel bien, je dis
Que tel est dans le Paradis
Le plaisir des âmes divines.
With just such sweet absurdities, such pardonable insincerities,
the poets of Elizabeth’s England fill their amorous verse. George
Gascoigne “swims in heaven” if his mistress smiles upon him; John Lyly
unhesitatingly asserts that Daphne’s voice “tunes all the spheres;”
and Lodge exhausts the resources of the vegetable and mineral kingdoms
in searching for comparisons by which to set forth the beauties of
Rosalind. The philosophy of love is alike on both sides of the Channel,
and expressed in much the same terms of soft insistence. _Carpe diem_
is, and has always been, the lover’s maxim; and the irresistible
eloquence of the lyric resolves itself finally into these two words of
warning, whether urged by Celt or Saxon. Herrick is well aware of their
supreme significance when he sings:--
Gather ye rose-buds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying:
And this same flower that smiles to-day,
To-morrow will be dying.
Then be not coy, but use your time,
And while ye may, go marry;
For having lost but once your prime,
You may forever tarry.