If in Charles of Orleans the first note of the French Renaissance is
heard, if in Villon you find first its energy appearing above ground,
yet both are forerunners only.
With Marot one is in the full tide of the movement. The discovery of
America had preceded his birth by three or perhaps four years. His early
manhood was filled with all that ferment, all that enormous branching
out of human life, which was connected with the expansion of Spain; he
was in the midst of the scarlet and the gold. A man just of age when
Luther was first condemned, living his active manhood through the
experience of the great battlefields in Italy, wounded (a valet rather
than a soldier) at Pavia, the perpetual chorus of Francis I., privileged
to witness the first stroke of the pickaxe against the mediaeval Louvre,
and to see the first Italian dignity of the great stone houses on the
Loire--being all this, the Renaissance was the stuff on which his life
was worked.
His blood and descent were typical enough of the work he had to do. His
own father was one of the last set rhymers of the dying Middle Ages. All
his boyhood was passed among that multitude of little dry "writers-down
of verse" with which, in Paris, the Middle Ages died; they were not a
swarm, for they were not living; they were a heap of dust. All his early
work is touched with the learned, tedious, unbeautiful industry which
was all that the elder men round Louis XII could bring to letters. By a
happy accident there were mixed in him, however, two vigorous springs of
inspiration, each ready to receive the new forces that were working in
Europe, each destined to take the fullest advantage of the new time.
These springs were first, learned Normandy, quiet, legal, well-founded,
deep in grass, wealthy; and secondly, the arid brilliancy of the South:
Quency and the country round Cahors. His father was a Norman pure bred,
who had come down and married into that sharp land where the summer is
the note of the whole year, and where the traveller chiefly remembers
vineyards, lizards on the walls, short shadows, sleep at noon, and
blinding roads of dust. The first years of his childhood were spent in
the southern town, so that the south entered into him thoroughly. The
language that he never wrote, the Languedoc, was that, perhaps, in which
he thought during all his life. It was his mother's.
It has been noticed by all his modern readers, it will be noticed
probably with peculiar force by English readers, that the fame of Marot
during his lifetime and his historical position as the leader of the
Renaissance has in it something exaggerated and false. One cannot help a
perpetual doubt as to whether the religious quarrel, the influence of
the Court, the strong personal friendships and enmities which surrounded
him had not had more to do with his reputation than his faculty, or even
his genius, for rhyme. Whenever he wanted £100 he asked it of the King
with the grave promise that he would bestow upon him immortality.
From Ronsard, or from Du Bellay, we, here in the north, could understand
that phrase; from Marot it carries a flavour of the grotesque. Ready
song, indeed, and a great power over the material one uses in singing
last indefinitely; they last as long as the sublime or the terrible in
literature, but we forbear to associate with them--perhaps unjustly--the
conception of greatness. If indeed anyone were to maintain that Marot
was not an excellent and admirable poet he would prove himself ignorant
of the language in which Marot wrote, but let the most sympathetic turn
to what is best in his verse, let them turn for instance to that
charming lyric: "A sa Dame Malade" or to "The Ballad of Old Time," or
even to that really large and riotous chorus of the vine, and they will
see that it is the kind of thing which is amplified by music, and which
sometimes demands the aid of music to appear at all. They will see quite
plainly that Marot took pleasure in playing with words and arranged them
well, felt keenly and happily, played a full lyre, but they will doubt
whether poetry was necessarily for him the most serious business of
life.
Why, then, has he taken the place claimed for him, and why is he firmly
secure in the place of master of the ceremonies, as it were, to that
glorious century whose dawn he enjoyed and helped to beautify?