It is because he is national. He represents not what is most this, or
most that--"highest", "noblest", "truest", "best", and all the rest of
it--in his countrymen, but rather what they have most in common.
Did you meet him to-day in the Strand you would know at once that you
had to do with a Frenchman, and, probably, with a kind of poet.
He was short, square in the shoulders, tending in middle age to fatness.
A dark hair and beard; large brown eyes of the south; a great, rounded,
wrinkled forehead like Verlaine's; a happy mouth, a nose very
insignificant, completed him. When we meet somewhere, under cypress
trees at last, these great poets of a better age, and find Ronsard a
very happy man, Du Bellay, a gentleman; then Malherbe, for all that he
was a northerner, we may mistake, if we find him, for a Catalonian.
Villon, however Parisian, will appear the Bohemian that many cities have
produced; Charles of Orleans may seem at first but one of that very high
nobility remnants of which are still to be discovered in Europe. But
when we see Marot, our first thought will certainly be, as I have said,
that we have come across a Frenchman; and the more French for a touch of
the commonplace.
See how French was the whole career!
Whatever is new attracts him. The reformation attracts him. It was
_chic_ to have to do with these new things. He had the French ignorance
of what was foreign and alien; the French curiosity to meddle with it
because it had come from abroad; the French passion for opposing, for
struggling;--and beneath it all the large French indifference to the
problem of evil (or whatever you like to call it), the changeless French
content in certitude, upon which ease, indeed, as upon a rock, the
Church of Gaul has permanently stood and will continuously repose.
He has been a sore puzzle to the men who have never heard of these
things. Calvin (that appalling exception who had nothing in him of
France except lucidity) could make neither head nor tail of him. Geneva
was glad enough to chaunt through the nose his translations of the
Psalms, but it was woefully puzzled at his salacity, and the town was
very soon too hot to hold him in his exile. And as for the common,
partial, and ignorant histories of France, written in our tongue, they
generally make him a kind of backslider, who might have been a Huguenot
(and--who knows?--have thrown the Sacrament to beasts with the best of
them) save that, unhappily, he did not persevere. Whatever they say of
him (and some have hardly heard of him) one thing is quite certain: that
they do not understand him, and that if they did they would like him
still less than they do.
He was national in the rapidity of the gesture of his mind as in that of
his body: in his being attracted here and there, watching this and that
suddenly, like a bird.
He was national in his power of sharp recovery from any emotion back
into his normal balance.
He was national in that he depended upon companions, and stood for a
crowd, and deplored all isolation. He was national in that he had
nothing strenuous about him, and that he was amiable, and if he had
heard of "earnest" men, he would have laughed at them a little, as
people who did not see the whole of life.
He was especially national (and it is here that the poet returns) in
that most national of all things--a complete sympathy with the
atmosphere of the native tongue. Thus men debate a good deal upon the
poetic value of Wordsworth, but it is certain, when one sees how bathed
he is in the sense of English words, their harmony and balance, that the
man is entirely English, that no other nation could have produced him,
and that he will be most difficult for foreigners to understand. You
will not translate into French or any other language the simplicity of:
"Glimpses that should make me less forlorn."