Femme, plaisir de demye heure,
Et ennuy qui sans fins demeure,
was perhaps too ungraciously candid. Such things, when said at all,
should be said prettily.
Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more,--
Men were deceivers ever;
One foot in sea, and one on shore,
To one thing constant never.
Gay voices came bubbling with laughter from the happy days that are
dead. Sir John Suckling, whose admirable advice to an overfaithful
young suitor has been the most invigorating of tonics to suitors ever
since, vaunts with pardonable pride his own singleness of heart:--
Out upon it! I have loved
Three whole days together,
And am like to love three more,
If it prove fair weather.
Time shall moult away his wings
Ere he shall discover
In the whole wide world again
Such a constant lover.
Sir John Sedley epitomizes the situation in his praises of that jade,
Phillis, whose smiles win easy pardon for her perfidy:--
She deceiving,
I believing,--
What need lovers wish for more?
And Lovelace, reversing the medal, pleads musically--and not in
vain--for the same gracious indulgence:--
Why shouldst thou sweare I am forsworn,
Since thine I vowed to be?
Lady it is already Morn,
And ’twas last night I swore to thee
That fond impossibility.
Mr. Lang is of the opinion that no Gallic verse has equalled in
audacity this confession of limitations, this “Apologia pro Vita Sua;”
and perhaps its light-heartedness is well out of general reach. But the
French lover, like the English, was made of threats and promises alike
fruitless of fulfilment, and Phillis had many a fair foreign sister, no
whit more worthy of regard. Only, amid the laughter and raillery of a
Latin people, there rings ever an undertone of regret,--not passionate
and heart-breaking, as in Drayton’s bitter cry,--
Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part,
but vague and subtle, linking itself tenderly to some long-ignored and
half-forgotten sentiment, buried deep in the reader’s heart.
Mais où sont les neiges d’antan?
A little sob breaks the smooth sweetness of Belleau’s verse, and
Ronsard’s beautiful lines to his careless young mistress are heavy with
the burden of sighs:--
Quand vous serez bien vieille, au soir, à la chandelle,
Assise auprès du feu, devisant et filant,
Direz, chantant mes vers, en vous esmerveillant:
‘Ronsard me célébroit du temps que j’estois belle.’
The note deepens as we pass into the more conscious art of later years,
but it is always French in its grace and moderation. How endurable is
the regret with which de Musset sings of Juana, who loved him for a
whole year; how musical his farewell to Suzon, whose briefer passion
lasted eight summer days:--
Que notre amour, si tu m’oublies,
Suzon, dure encore un moment;
Comme un bouquet de fleurs pâlies;
Cache-le dans ton sein charmant!
Adieu! le bonheur reste au gîte:
Le souvenir part avec moi:
Je l’emporterai, ma petite,
Bien loin, bien vite,
Toujours à toi.
In Murger’s familiar verses, so pretty and gay and heartsick, in the
finer art of Gautier, in the cloudy lyrics of Verlaine, we catch again
and again this murmur of poignant but subdued regret, this sigh for
the light love that has so swiftly fled. The delicacy of the sentiment
is unmatched in English song. The Saxon can be profoundly sad, and he
can--or at least he could--be ringingly and recklessly gay; but the
mood which is neither sad nor gay, which is fed by refined emotions,
and tranquillized by time’s subduing touch, has been expressed oftener
and better in France. Four hundred and fifty years ago François Villon
touched this exquisite chord in his “Ballade des Dames du Temps
Jadis,” and it has vibrated gently ever since. We hear it echoing with
melancholy grace in these simple lines of Gérard de Nerval:--
Où sont les amoureuses?
Elles sont au tombeau!
Elles sont plus heureuses,
Dans un séjour plus beau.
Nerval, like Villon, had drunk deep of the bitterness of life, but he
never permitted its dregs to pollute the clearness of his song:--
Et vent que l’on soit _triste_ avec sobriété.
In the opinion of many critics, the lyric was not silenced, only
chilled, by the development of the classical spirit in France, and the
corresponding conversion of England. Its flute notes were heard now and
then amid the decorous couplets that delighted well-bred ears. Waller
undertook the reformation of English verse, and accomplished it to his
own and his readers’ radiant satisfaction; yet Waller’s seven-year suit
of Lady Dorothy Sidney is the perfection of that poetic love-making
which does not lead, and is not expected to lead, to anything definite
and tangible. Never were more charming tributes laid at the feet of
indifferent beauty; never was indifference received with less concern.
Sacharissa listened and smiled. The world--the august little world of
rank and distinction--listened and smiled with her, knowing the poems
were written as much for its edification as for hers; and Waller,
well pleased with the audience, nursed his passion tenderly until it
flowered into another delicate blossom of verse. The situation was full
of enjoyment while it lasted; and when the seven years were over, Lady
Dorothy married Henry, Lord Spencer, who never wrote any poetry at
all; while her lover said his last good-bye in the most sparkling and
heart-whole letter ever penned by inconstant man. What would the author
of “The Girdle,” and “Go, Lovely Rose,” have thought of Browning’s
uneasy rapture?
O lyric love, half angel and half bird,
And all a wonder and a wild desire.
He would probably have pointed out the exaggeration of the sentiment,
and the corresponding looseness of the lines. He would certainly have
agreed with the verdict of M. Sévelinges, had that acute critic uttered
it in his day. “It is well,” says M. Sévelinges, “that passionate
love is rare. Its principal effect is to detach men from all their
surroundings, to isolate them, to render them independent of the
relations which they have not formed for themselves; and a civilized
society composed of lovers would return infallibly to misery and
barbarism.”
Here is the French point of view, expressed with that lucidity which
the nation so highly esteems. Who shall gainsay its correctness? But
the Saxon, like the Teuton, is sentimental to his heart’s core, and
finds some illusions better worth cherishing than truth. It was an
Englishman, and one to whom the epithet “cynical” has been applied
oftenest, and with least accuracy, who wrote,--
When he was young as you are young,
When he was young, and lutes were strung,
And love-lamps in the casement hung.