In Du Bellay the literary Renaissance, French but transfigured by Italy,
middle-north of the plains but looking southward to the Mediterranean,
came to one soul and concentrated upon it, as the plastic expression of
the same influence concentrated in Goujon. Very central in time, half
soldier, half priest, all student; traveller and almost adventurer, a
pilgrim throughout of the Idea, everything about him is symbolic of the
generation he adorned.
In its vigour, at least, the Renaissance was a glorious youth--he, Du
Bellay, died at thirty-five. Its leap and soaring were taken from the
firm platform of strong scholarship--he was a scholar beyond the rest.
It fixed special forms--he the French sonnet. It felt the lives of all
things running through it as a young man feels them in the spring
woods--he gathered in the cup of his verse, and retains for us, the
nerve of all that life which is still exultant in the forest beyond his
river. His breeding, his high name, his leisured poverty, his passionate
friendship, his looking forward always to a new thing, a creation--all
this, was the Renaissance in person.
Moreover, the Renaissance had in France its seat where, between rolling
lands whose woods are the walls of gardens, the broad and shallow inland
Loire runs from Orleans, past Blois and Tours and Saumur, and Ancenis,
until near Nantes at last it feels the tide: salt and adventures and the
barbaric sea. This varied sheltered land of aged vineyards and great
wealth has, for the French Renaissance, the one special quality of
beginnings and Edens, namely, that it preserves on to a later time the
outward evidences of an original perfection. This place, the nest or
seed-plot of the new civilisation, still shows its castles--Blois,
Amboise, Chambord. Here Leonardo died, Rabelais, Ronsard himself was
born. Here the kings of the Change built in their fantastic pride, and
founded a France that still endures. It is as truly the soil of the
modern thing as are the provinces north of it (the Isle de France,
Normandy, Picardy and Champagne), the soil of the earlier mediaeval
flower, and of the Gothic which they preserve unique to our own time.
Now, of this district, Du Bellay was more than a native; he was part of
it; he pined away from it; he regretted, as no other man of the time
regretted, his father's land: Anjou and the fields of home. He may be
said, with some exaggeration, to have died in the misfortune of his
separation from the security and sober tradition of his own walls. That
great early experience of his, which I have already written down--his
meeting with Ronsard--had come to him not far from his own hill, south
of the great river. His name, unlike Ronsard's, recalled the gentry of
that countryside up to and beyond the beginning of its history; alone of
the Pleiade he translated the valley of the Loire, its depth, its
delicacy, its rich and subtle loneliness.
Again, the Renaissance lived in France an inspired and an exalted life,
so that there necessarily ran through it a fore-knowledge of sudden
ending. This tragedy repeated itself in the career of Du Bellay.
His name was famous. The three Du Bellays, the councillor, the soldier,
the great Cardinal, were in the first rank of the early sixteenth
century. Rabelais had loved them. Francis I had leaned upon and rewarded
their service. His father (their first-cousin and Governor of Brest) was
a poor noble, who, as is the fashion of nobles, had married a wife to
consolidate a fortune. This wife, the mother of Joachim, was heiress to
the house of Tourmélière in Liré, just by the Loire on the brow that
looks northward over the river to the bridge and Ancenis. In this house
he was born. On his parents' early death he inherited the place, not to
enjoy it, but to wander. An early illness had made him forsake the
career of arms for that of the Church; but Orders were hardly so much as
a cloak to him; it is difficult to remember, as one reads the few
evidences of his life, that he wore the cloth at all: in his verse all
trace of it is entirely absent. He lived still in that lineage which the
reform had not touched. The passionate defence of the Catholic Faith,
the Assault converging on the church throughout Europe, the raising of
the Siege, the Triumph which developed, at last, on the political side
the League, and on the literary the final rigidity of Malherbe, the
noise of all these had not reached his circle, kind, or family.
Of that family the Cardinal seems to have regarded him as the principal
survivor. He had determined to make of the young poet the heir of its
glory. It came to nothing. He accompanied his relative to Rome: but the
diplomacy of the mission ill-suited him. Of the Royal ladies at court
who befriended him, the marriage of one, the death of another,
increased his insecurity. He had inherited, to his bane, another
estate--Gonor--from his elder brother. It was encumbered, the cause
litigious, and he had inherited with it the tutelage of a sickly child.
He never shook off the burden. A tragic error marked his end. He died,
certainly broken-hearted, just when his powerful cousin, by a conversion
perhaps unknown to the poet himself, had rejected calumnies, and had
determined to resign to him the great Archbishopric of Bordeaux.
Eustache Du Bellay, yet another cousin, was Bishop of Paris. He had made
Joachim, on his return from Rome, a Canon of Notre Dame, and in that
capacity the poet, dying in Paris, was buried in the cathedral. The
action of the Chapter in the eighteenth century, when they replaced the
old tombstones by the present pavement, has destroyed the record of his
grave; I believe it to lie in the southern part of the ambulatory.
In this abrupt descent, following upon so fierce an activity of thought,
he prefigured, I say, the close of the Renaissance as his genius
typified its living spirit; for all the while, as you read him, you see
the cloud about his head, and the profound, though proud and constant,
sadness of his eyes.
This, also, was pure Renaissance in him, that the fields in which he
wandered, and which he loved to sing--a man of elegies--were dominated
by the awful ruins of Rome. These it was that lent him his gravity, and
perhaps oppressed him. He sang them also with a comprehension of the
superb.
He was second to Ronsard. Though he was the sharp voice of the Pleiade,
though it was he who published their famous manifesto, though his
scholarship was harder, though his energy could run more fiercely to one
point and shine there more brilliantly in one small climax; yet he was
second. He himself thought it of himself, and called himself a disciple.
All up and down his works you find an astonished admiration directed
towards his greater friend--
... Un amy que les Dieux
Guydent si hault au sentier des plus vieux.