Chapter 4

Yet this man did not in his personality convey that largeness which was his principal mark. His face was narrow, long and aquiline; his health uneven. It was evidently his soul which made men quickly forget the ill-matched case which bore it; for almost alone of the great poets he was consistently happy, and there poured out from him not only this unceasing torrent of verse, but also advice, sustenance, and a kind of secondary inspiration for others.

In yet another matter he was a leader, and a leader of the utmost weight, not the cause, perhaps, but certainly the principal example of the trend which the mind of the nation was taking as the sixteenth century drew to a close. I mean in the matter of religion, upon whose colour every society depends, which is the note even of a national language, and which seems to be the ultimate influence beyond which no historical analysis can carry a thinking man.

But even those who will not admit the truth of this should watch the theory closely, for with the religious trend of France is certainly bound up, and, as I would maintain, on such an influence is dependent, that ultimate setting of the French classic, that winding up of the Renaissance, with which I shall deal in the essay upon Malherbe.

The stream of Catholicism was running true. The nation was tumbling back after a high and turbulent flood into the channel it had scoured for itself by the unbroken energies of a thousand years. It is no accident that Ronsard, that Du Bellay, were churchmen. It is a type. It is a type of the truth that the cloth admitted poets; of the truth that in the great battle whose results yet trouble Europe, here, on the soil where the great questions are fought out, Puritanism was already killed. The epicurean in them both, glad and ready in Ronsard, sombre and Lucretian in Du Bellay, jarred indeed in youth against their vows; but that it should have been tolerated, that it should have led to no excess or angry revolt, was typical of their moment. It was typical, finally, of their generation that all this mixture of the Renaissance with the Church matured at last into its natural fruit, for in the case of Ronsard we have a noble expression of perfect Christianity at the end.

In the November of 1585 he felt death upon him; he had himself borne to his home as soon as the Huguenot bands had left it, ravaged and devastated as it was. He found it burnt and looted, but it reminded him of childhood and of the first springs of his great river of verse. A profound sadness took him. He was but in his sixty-second year, his mind had not felt any chill of age. He could not sleep; poppies and soporifics failed him. He went now in his coach, now on a litter from place to place in that country side which he had rendered famous, and saw the Vendomois for the last time; its cornfields all stubble under a cold and dreary sky. And in each place he waited for a while.

But death troubled him, and he could not remain. Within a fortnight he ordered that they should carry him southward to the Loire, to that priory of which--by a custom of privilege, nobility and royal favour--he was the nominal head, the priory which is "the eye and delight of Touraine",--the Isle of St. Cosmo. He sickened as he went. The thirty miles or so took him three painful days; twice, all his strength failed him, and he lay half fainting in his carriage; to so much energy and to so much power of creation these episodes were an awful introduction of death.

It was upon the 17th of November that he reached the walls wherein he was Superior; six weeks later, on the second day after Christmas, he died.

Were I to describe that scene to which he called the monks, all men of his own birth and training, were I to dwell upon the appearance and the character of the oldest and the wisest, who was also the most famous there, I should extend this essay beyond its true limit, as I should also do were I to write down, even briefly, the account of his just, resigned, and holy death. It must suffice that I transcribe the chief of his last deeds; I mean, that declaration wherein he made his last profession of faith.

The old monk had said to him: "In what resolution do you die?"

He answered, somewhat angrily: "In what did you think? In the religion which was my father's and his father's, and his father's and his father's before him--for I am of that kind."

Then he called all the community round him, as though the monastic simplicity had returned (so vital is the Faith, so simple its primal energies), and as though he had been the true prior of some early and fervent house, he told them these things which I will faithfully translate on account of their beauty. They are printed here, I think, for the first time in English, and must stand for the end of this essay:

He said: "That he had sinned like other men, and, perhaps, more than most; that his senses had led him away by their charm, and that he had not repressed or constrained them as he should; but none the less, he had always held that Faith which the men of his line had left him, he had always clasped close the Creed and the unity of the Catholic Church; that, in fine, he had laid a sure foundation, but he had built thereon with wood, with hay, with straw. As for that foundation, he was sure it would stand; as for the light and worthless things he had built upon it he had trust in the mercy of the Saviour that they would be burnt in the fire of His love. And now he begged them all to believe hard, as he had believed; but not to live as he had lived; they must understand that he had never attempted or plotted against the life or goods of another, nor ever against any man's honour, but, after all, there was nothing therein wherewith to glorify one's self before God." When he had wept a little, he continued, saying, "that the world was a ceaseless turmoil and torment, and shipwreck after shipwreck all the while, and a whirlpool of sins, and tears and pain, and that to all these misfortunes there was but one port, and this port was Death. But, as for him, he carried with him into that port no desire and no regret for life. That he had tried every one of its pretended joys, that he had left nothing undone which could give him the least shadow of pleasure or content, but that at the end he had found everywhere the oracle of Wisdom, vanity of vanities."

He ended with this magnificent thing, which is, perhaps, the last his human power conceived, and I will put it down in his own words:--

"Of all those vanities, the loveliest and most praiseworthy is glory--fame. No one of my time has been so filled with it as I; I have lived in it, and loved and triumphed in it through time past, and now I leave it to my country to garner and possess it after I shall die. So do I go away from my own place as satiated with the glory of this world as I am hungry and all longing for that of God."

DIALOGUE WITH THE NINE SISTERS.

This is a little Amaboean thing not very well known but very Horatian and worth setting down here because it is in the manner of so much that he wrote.

Its manner is admirable. Its gentleness, persistency and increase--are like those of his own small river the Loir. Its last stanza from the middle of the first line "_Ceux dont la fantaisie_" to the end, should, I think be famous; but an English reader can hardly forgive such an introduction as "_Voilà sagement dit_" to so noble a finale.

_DIALOGUE WITH THE NINE SISTERS._

Ronsard. _Pour avoir trop aimé vostre bande inégale, Muses, qui defiez (ce dites vous) le temps, J'ay les yeux tout battus, la face toute pasle, Le Chef grison et chauve, et je n'ay que trente ans._

Muses. _Au nocher qui sans cesse erre sur la marine Le teint noir appartient; le soldat n'est point beau Sans estre tout poudreux; qui courbe la poitrine Sur nos livres, est laid s'il n'a pasle la peau._

Ronsard. _Mais quelle recompense aurois-je de tant suivre Vos danses nuict et jour, un laurier sur le front? Et cependant les ans aux quels je deusse vivre En plaisirs et en jeux comme poudre s'en vont._

Muses. _Vous aurez, en vivant, une fameuse gloire, Puis, quand vous serez mort, votre nom fleurira L'age, de siècle en siècle, aura de vous memoire; Vostre corps seulement au tombeau pourrira._

Ronsard. _O le gentil loyer! Que sert au viel Homère, Ores qu'il n'est plus rien, sous la tombe, là-bas, Et qu'il n'a plus ny chef, ny bras, ny jambe entiere Si son renom fleurist, ou s'il ne fleurist pas!_

Muses. _Vous estes abusé. Le corps dessous la lame Pourry ne sent plus rien, aussy ne luy en chaut. Mais un tel accident n'arrive point à l'ame, Qui sans matière vist immortelle là haut._

Ronsard. _Bien! Je vous suyvray donc d'une face plaisante, Dussé-je trespasser de l'estude vaincu, Et ne fust-ce qu'à fin que la race suyvante Ne me reproche point qu'oysif j'aye vescu._

Muses. _Vela saigement dit, Ceux dont la fantaisie Sera religieuse et devote envers Dieu Tousjours acheveront quelque grand poesie, Et dessus leur renom la Parque n'aura lieu._

THE EPITAPH ON RABELAIS.

Seven years after Rabelais died, Ronsard wrote this off-hand. I give it, not for its value, but because it connects these two great names. The man who wrote it had seen that large and honorable mouth worshipping wine: he had reverenced that head of laughter which has corrected all our philosophy. It would be a shame to pass such a name as Ronsard's signed to an epitaph on such a work as that of Rabelais, poetry or no poetry.

Ronsard also from a tower at Meudon used to creep out at night and drink with that fellow-priest, vicar of the Parish, Rabelais: a greater man than he.

By a memory separate from the rest of his verse, Ronsard was moved to write this Rabelaisian thing. For he had seen him "full length upon the grass and singing so."

There is no need of notes, for these great names of Gargantua, Panurge and Friar John are household to every honest man.

_THE EPITAPH ON RABELAIS._

_Si d'un mort qui pourri repose Nature engendre quelque chose, Et si la génération Se faict de la corruption, Une vigne prendra naissance Du bon Rabelais qui boivoit Tousjours ce pendant qu'il vivoit;_

_Demi me se troussoit les bras Et se couchoit tout plat à bas Sur la jonchée entre les tasses Et parmy les escuelles grasses_

_Il chantait la grande massue Et la jument de Gargantue, Le grand Panurge et le jaïs Des papimanes ébahis, Leurs loix, leurs façons et demeures Et Frère Jean des Antonneures. Et d'Espisteme les combas. Mais la Mort qui ne boivoit pas Tira le beuveur de ce monde Et ores le fait boire de l'onde Du large fleuve d'Achéron._

"MIGNONNE ALLONS VOIR SI LA ROSE." (_The 17th Ode of the First Book._)

"In these eighteen lines," says very modernly a principal critic, "lies Ronsard's fame more surely than in all the remaining mass of his works." He condemns by implication Ronsard's wide waste of power; but the few other poems that I have here had room to print, should make the reader careful of such judgements. It is true that in the great hoard which Ronsard left his people there are separate and particular jewels set in the copper and the gold, but the jewels are very numerous: indeed it was almost impossible to choose so few as I have printed here.

If it be asked why this should have become the most famous, no answer can be given save the "flavour of language." It is the perfection of his tongue. Its rhythm reaches the exact limit of change which a simple metre will tolerate: where it saddens, a lengthy hesitation at the opening of the seventh line introduces a new cadence, a lengthy lingering upon the last syllables of the tenth, eleventh and twelfth closes a grave complaint. So, also by an effect of quantities, the last six lines rise out of melancholy into their proper character of appeal and vivacity: an exhortation.

Certainly those who are so unfamiliar with French poetry as not to know that its whole power depends upon an extreme subtlety of rhythm, may find here the principal example of the quality they have missed. Something much less weighty than the stress of English lines, a just perceptible difference between nearly equal syllables, marks the excellent from the intolerable in French prosody: and to feel this truth in the eighteen lines that follow it is necessary to read them virtually in the modern manner--for the "s" in "vesprée" or "vostre" were pedantries in the sixteenth century--but one must give the mute "e's" throughout as full a value as they have in singing. Indeed, reading this poem, one sees how it must have been composed to some good and simple air in the man's head.

If the limits of a page permitted it, I would also show how worthy the thing was of fame from its pure and careful choice of verb--"Tandis que vostre age _fleuronne_"--but space prevents me, luckily, for all this is like splitting a diamond.

"_MIGNONNE ALLONS VOIR SI LA ROSE._"

_Mignonne, allons voir si la rose Qui ce matin avoit desclose Sa robe de pourpre au soleil A point perdu ceste vesprée Les plis de sa robe pourprée Et son teint au vostre pareil_

_Las! Voyez comme en peu d'espace Mignonne, elle a dessus la place, Las! Las! ses beautez laissé cheoir! O vrayment marastre nature, Puis qu'une telle fleur ne dure Que du matin jusques au soir!_

_Donc si vous me croyez, Mignonne, Tandis que vostre age fleuronne En sa plus verte nouveauté, Cuillez, Cuillez vostre jeunesse: Comme à ceste fleur, la veillesse Fera ternir vostre beauté._

THE "SONNETS FOR HÉLÈNE" (_The 42nd and 43rd Sonnets of the Second Book._)

Hélène was very real. A young Maid of Honour to Catherine de Medicis; Spanish by blood, Italian by breeding, called in France "de Sugères," she was the gravest and the wisest, and, for those who loved serenity, the most beautiful of that high and brilliant school.

The Sonnets began as a task; a task the Queen had set Ronsard, with Hélène for theme: they ended in the last strong love of Ronsard's life. A sincere lover of many women, he had come to the turn of his age when he saw her, like a memory of his own youth. He has permitted to run through this series, therefore, something of the unique illusion which distance in time or space can lend to the aspect of beauty. An emotion so tenuous does not appear in any other part of his work: here alone you find the chastity or weakness which made something in his mind come near to the sadder Du Bellay's: his soul is regardant all the while as he writes: visions rise from her such as never rose from Cassandra; as this great picture at the opening of the 58th Sonnet of the Second Book:

Seule sans compagnie en une grande salle Tu logeois l'autre jour pleine de majesté.

These "Sonnets for Hélène" should be common knowledge: they are (with Du Bellay's) the evident original upon which the author of Shakespeare's Sonnets modelled his work: they are the late and careful effort of Ronsard's somewhat spendthrift genius.

Here are two of them. One, the second, most famous, the other, the first, hardly known: both are admirable.

It is the perfection of their sound which gives them their peculiar quality. The very first lines lead off with a completed harmony: it is as thoroughly a winter night as that in Shakespeare's song, but it is more solemn and, as it were, more "built of stone...."

"La Lune Ocieuse, tourne si lentement son char tout à l'entour", is like a sleeping statue of marble.

To this character, the second adds a vivid interest of emotion which has given it its special fame. Even the populace have come to hear of this sonnet, and it is sung to a lovely tune. It has also what often leads to permanent reputation in verse, a great simplicity of form. The Sextet is well divided from the Octave, the climax is clearly underlined. Ronsard was often (to his hurt) too scholarly to achieve simplicity: when, under the clear influence of some sharp passion or gaiety he did achieve it, then he wrote the lines that will always remain:

A fin qu'à tout jamais de siècle en siècle vive, La Parfaicte amitié que Ronsard la portait.

_THE "SONNETS FOR HÉLÈNE."_

XLII

_Ces longues nuicts d'hyver, où la Lune ocieuse Tourne si lentement son char tout à l'entour, Où le Coq si tardif nous annonce le jour, Où la nuict semble un an à l'ame soucieuse: Je fusse mort d'ennuy sans ta forme douteuse Qui vient par une feinte alleger mon amour, Et faisant toute nue entre mes bras séjour Me pipe doucement d'une joye menteuse. Vraye tu es farouche, et fière en cruauté: De toy fausse on jouyst en toute privauté. Pres ton mort je m'endors, pres de luy je repose: Rien ne m'est refusé. Le bon sommeil ainsi Abuse pour le faux mon amoureux souci. S'abuser en Amour n'est pas mauvaise chose._

XLIII

_Quand vous serez bien vieille, au Soir à la chandelle, Assise aupres du feu, dévidant et filant, Direz chantant mes vers, en vous esmerveillant, Ronsard me celebroit du temps que j'estois belle. Lors vous n'aurez servante oyant telle nouvelle Desia sous le labeur à demy sommeillant Qui au bruit de mon nom ne s'aille resveillant, Bénissant vostre nom de louange immortelle._

_Je seray sous la terre et fantôme sans os Par les ombres myrteux je prendray mon repos. Vous serez au foyer une veille accroupie, Regrettant mon amour et vostre fier desdain. Vivez, si m'en croyez; n'attendez à demain. Cueillez des aujourdhuy les roses de la vie._

JOACHIM DU BELLAY.

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.