Chapter 5

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.

Or again--

Divin Ronsard qui de l'arc a sept cordes Tiras premier au but de la mémoire Les traicts ailez de la Françoise gloire.

Everywhere it is his friend rather than he that has touched the mark of the gods and called up from the tomb the ghost of Rome which all that company worshipped.

I say he saw himself that he was second. Old Durat saw it clearly in that little college of poets where he taught the unteachable thing: De Baif, Belleau--all the comrades would have taken it for granted. Ronsard led and was chief, because he had the firm largeness, the laughter and the permanence which are the marks of those who determine the fortunes of the French in letters or in arms. Ronsard made. His verses, in their great mass and unfailing level, were but one example of the power that could produce a school, call up a general enthusiasm, and for forty years govern the taste of his country. There was in him something public, in Du Bellay something domestic and attached, as in the relations of a king and of a herald. Or again, the one was like an ordered wood with a rich open plain about it, the other was like a garden. Ronsard was the Beauce; Du Bellay was Anjou. It might be said of the first that he stood a symbol for the wheat and corn-land of the Vendômois, and of the second, that he recalled that subtle wine of the southern Loire to which Chinon gives the most famous label.

Du Bellay was second: nevertheless, when he is well known in this country it will be difficult to convince Englishmen of that truth. There is in his mind a facet which exactly corresponds to a facet of our own, and that is a quality so rare in the French classics that it will necessarily attract English readers to him: for, of all people, we nowadays criticise most in letters by the standard of our immediate emotions, and least by what was once called "reason." He was capable of that which will always be called "poignancy," and what for the moment we call "depth." He was less careful than are the majority of his countrymen to make letters an art, and so to treat his own personality as a thing apart. On the contrary, he allowed that personality to pierce through continually, so that simplicity, directness, a certain individual note as of a human being complaining--a note we know very well in our own literature--is perpetually discovered.

Thus, in a spirit which all Englishmen will understand, a lightness almost sardonic lay above the depths of his grief, and the tenderness which attached to his home played around the things that go with quietude--his books and animals. I shall quote hereafter the epitaphs he wrote for his dog and for his cat, this singer of sublime and ruined things.

Of the dog who--

... allait tousjours suivant Quelquefois allait devant. Faisant ne sçay quelle feste D'un gai branslement de teste.

and of whom he says, in a pretty imitation of Catullus, that he--

... maintenant pourmeine Parmy cette ombreuse plaine Dont nul ne revient vers nous.

Or of the cat who was--

... par aventure Le plus bel oeuvre que nature Fit onc en matière de chats.

All that delicate side of him we understand very well.

Nor is it to modern Englishmen alone that he will appeal. He powerfully affected, it may be presumed, the English Renaissance which succeeded him. Spenser--thirty years after his death--was moved to the translation of his famous lament for Rome, and no one can read the sonnets to which he gave their final form without catching the same note in the great English cycle of the generation after him--the close of the sixteenth and the opening of the seventeenth centuries.

But his verse read will prove all this and suggest much more.

EXTRACTS FROM THE "ANTIQUITEZ DE ROME."

Of the high series which Rome called forth from Du Bellay during that bitter diplomatic exile of his, I have chosen these three sonnets, because they seem best to express the majesty and gloom which haunted him. It is difficult to choose in a chain of cadences so equal and so exalted, but perhaps the last, "Telle que dans son char la Berecynthienne" is the most marvellous. The vision alone of Rome like the mother of the Gods in her car would have made the sonnet immortal. He adds to the mere picture a noise of words that is like thunder in the hills far off on summer afternoons: the words roll and crest themselves and follow rumbling to the end: he could not have known as he wrote it how great a thing he was writing. It has all the character of verse that increases with time and seems superior to its own author's intention.

_THE "ANTIQUITEZ DE ROME."_

III.

_Nouveau venu qui cherches Rome en Rome, Et rien de Rome en Rome n'apperçois, Ces vieux palais, ces vieux arcz que tu vois Et ces vieux Murs, c'est ce que Rome on nomme. Voy quel orgueil, quelle ruine, et comme Celle que mist le monde sous ses loix Pour donter tout, se donta quelquefois, Et devint proye au temps, qui tout consomme._

_Rome de Rome est le seul monument, Et Rome Rome a vaincu seulement. Le Tybre seul, qui vers la mer s'enfuit, Reste de Rome. O mondaine inconstance! Ce qui est ferme, est par le temps destruit, Et se qui fuit, au temps fait résistance._

IV.

_Celle qui de son chef les estoilles passoit, Et d'un pied sur Thetis, l'autre dessous l'Aurore D'une main sur le Scythe, et l'autre sur le More, De la terre, et du Ciel, la rondeur compassoit, Juppiter ayant peur, si plus elle croissoit Que l'orgueil des Geans se relevast encore, L'accabla sous ces monts, ces sept monts qui font ore Tumbeaux de la grandeur qui le ciel menassoit._

_Il luy meist sur le chef la croppe Saturnale Puis dessus l'estomac assist le quirinale Sur le ventre il planta l'antique Palatin, Mist sur la dextre main la hauteur Celienne, Sur la senestre assist l'eschine Exquilienne Viminal sur un pied: sur l'autre L'Aventin._

VI.

_Telle que dans son Char la Berecynthienne Couronnée de tours, et joyeuse d'avoir Enfanté tant de Dieux, telle se faisoit voir En ses jours plus heureux ceste ville ancienne: Ceste ville qui fust plus que la Phrygienne Foisonnante en enfants et de qui le pouvoir Fust le pouvoir du Monde, et ne se peult revoir Pareille à sa grandeur, grandeur si non la sienne._

_Rome seule pouvoit à Rome ressembler, Rome seule pouvoit Rome faire trembler: Aussi n'avoit permis l'ordonnance fatale, Qu'autre pouvoir humain, tant fust audacieux, Se vantast d'égaler celle qui fust égale Sa puissance à la terre, et son courage au cieux._

THE SONNET OF EXILE.

This sonnet dates from the same period at Rome, or possibly from his return. It has a different note. It is the most personal and passionate of all his writings, in which so much was inspired by personal regret. On this account it has a special literary interest as the most _modern_ thing of the Renaissance. It would be far less surprising to find this written by one of the young republicans under the Second Empire (for instance) than to find a couplet of Malherbe's straying into our time.

_THE SONNET OF EXILE._

_France, Mère des arts, des armes, et des loix, Tu m'as nourry long temps du laict de ta mamelle: Ores, comme un aigneau qui sa nourisse appelle, Je remplis de ton nom les antres et les bois, Si tu m'as pour enfant advoué quelquefois Que ne me respons-tu maintenant, ô cruelle? France, France, respons à ma triste querelle: Mais nul, sinon Echo, ne respond à ma voix._

_Entre les loups cruels j'erre parmy la plaine Je sens venir l'hyver, de qui la froide haleine D'une tremblante horreur fait hérisser ma peau. Las! tes autres agneaux n'ont faute de pasture, Ils ne craignent le loup, le vent, ny la froidure; Si ne suis-je pourtant le pire du troppeau._

THE SONNET "HEUREUX QUI COMME ULYSSE." (_The 31st of the "Regrets"_).

It was of a large gray house, moated, a town beside it, yet not far from woods and standing in rough fields, pure Angevin, Tourmélière, the Manor house of Liré, his home, that Du Bellay wrote this, the most dignified and perhaps the last of his sonnets. The sadness which is the permanent, though sometimes the unrecognized, moderator of his race, which had pierced through in his latter misfortunes, and which had tortured him to the cry that has been printed on the preceding page, here reached a final and a most noble form: something much higher than melancholy, and more majestic than regret. He turned to his estate, the mould of his family, a roof, the inheritance of which had formed his original burden and had at last crushed him; but he turned to it with affection. If one may use so small a word in connection with a great poet, the gentleman in him remembered an ancestral repose.

There is very much in the Sonnet to mark that development of French verse in which Du Bellay played so great a part. The inversion of the sentence, a trick which gives a special character to all the later formal drama is prominent: the convention of contrast, the purely classical allusion, are mixed with a spirit that is still spontaneous and even naïf. But every word is chosen, and it is especially noteworthy to discover so early that restraint in epithet which is the charm but also the danger of what French style has since become. Of this there are two examples here: the eleventh line and the last, which rhymes with it. To contrast slate with marble would be impossible prose save for the exact adjective "_fine_," which puts you at once into Anjou. The last line, in spite of its exquisite murmur, would be grotesque if the "_air marin_" were meant for the sea-shore. Coming as it does after the suggestions of the Octave it gives you suddenly sea-faring: Ulysses, Jason, his own voyages, the long way to Rome, which he knew; and in the "_douceur Angevine_" you have for a final foil to such wanderings, not only in the meaning of the words, but in their very sound, the hearth and the return.

_THE SONNET "HEUREUX QUI COMME ULYSSE"_

_Heureux qui comme Ulysse a fait un beau voyage Ou comme cestuy là qui conquit la Toison Et puis est retourné, plein d'usage et raison, Vivre entre ses parents le reste de son age! Quand revoirai-je, hélas, de mon petit village Fumer la cheminée: et en quelle saison Revoirai-je le clos de ma pauvre maison, Qui m'est une province, et beaucoup d'avantage?_

_Plus me plaist le séjour qu'ont basty mes aieux Que des palais Romains le front audacieux: Plus que le mabre dur me plaist l'ardoise fine, Plus mon Loyre gaulois que le Tybre Latin, Plus mon petit Lyré que le Mont Palatin, Et plus que l'air marin la doulceur Angevine._

THE WINNOWER'S HYMN TO THE WINDS.

This delicate air of summer, this reminiscence and comfort for men who no longer see the Eure or the Bievre or any of their northern rivers, this very mirror of Du Bellay's own exiled mind--was written for an "exercise." It is a translation--a translation from the Latin of a forgotten Venetian scholar.

When a man finds in reading such a startling truth, it convinces him that letters have a power of their own and are greater of themselves than the things which inspired them: for when, to show his skill in rendering Latin into French verse, Du Bellay had written this down, he created and fixed for everybody who was to read him from then onwards the permanent picture of a field by the side of a small, full river, with a band of trees far off, and, above, the poplar leaves that are never still. It runs to a kind of happy croon, and has for a few moments restored very many who have read it to their own place; and Corot should have painted it.

_THE WINNOWER'S HYMN TO THE WINDS._

_A vous troppe legere Qui d'aele passagere Par le monde volez, Et d'un sifflant murmure L'ombrageuse verdure Doulcement esbranlez, J'offre ces violettes, Ces lis et ces fleurettes Et ces roses ici, Ces vermeillettes roses Tout freschement escloses, Et ces oeilletz aussi. De vostre doulce haleine Eventez ceste plaine Eventez ce séjour, Ce pendant que j'ahanne A mon blé que je vanne A la chaleur du jour._

THE FUNERAL ODES OF THE DOG AND THE CAT.

Here are extracts from those two delightful and tender things to which allusion has already been made. The epitaphs upon his little dog and his little cat.

It was a character in this sad man to make little, humble, grotesque, pleasing images of grief; as it were, little idols of his goddess; and he fashioned them with an exquisite humour and affection. What animal of the sixteenth century lives so clearly as these two? None, I think, except some few in the pictures of the painters of the low countries.

I wish I had space to print both these threnodies in full, but they are somewhat long, and I must beg my reader to find them in the printed works of Du Bellay. It is well worth the pains of looking.

_THE DOG._

_Dessous ceste motte verte De lis et roses couverte Gist le petit Peloton De qui le poil foleton Frisoit d'une toyson blanche Le doz, le ventre, et la hanche._

_Son exercice ordinaire Estoit de japper et braire, Courir en hault et en bas, Et faire cent mille esbas, Tous estranges et farouches, Et n'avoit guerre qu'aux mousches, Qui luy faisoient maint torment. Mais Peloton dextrement

Leur rendoit bien la pareille: Car se couchant sur l'oreille, Finement il aguignoit Quand quelqu'une le poingnoit: Lors d'une habile soupplesse Happant la mouche traistresse, La serroit bien fort dedans, Faisant accorder ses dens_

_Peloton ne caressoit, Sinon ceulx qu'il cognoissoit, Et n'eust pas voulu repaistre D'autre main que de son maistre, Qu'il alloit tousjours suyvant: Quelquefois marchoit devant, Faisant ne scay quelle feste D'un gay branlement de teste._

_Mon Dieu, quel plaisir c'estoit, Quand Peloton se grattoit, Faisant tinter sa sonnette Avec sa teste folette! Quel plaisir, quand Peloton Cheminoit sur un baston, Ou coifé d'un petit linge, Assis comme un petit singe, Se tenoit mignardelet, D'un maintien damoiselet!_

_Las, mais ce doulx passetemps Ne nous dura pas long temps: Car la mort ayant anvie Sur l'ayse de nostre vie, Envoya devers Pluton Nostre petit Peloton, Qui maintenant se pourmeine Parmi ceste umbreuse plaine, Dont nul ne revient vers nous._

_THE CAT_

_Pourquoy je suis tant esperdu Ce n'est pas pour avoir perdu Mes anneaux, mon argent, ma bource: Et pourquoy est ce donc? pource Que j'ay perdu depuis trois jours Mon bien, mon plaisir, mes amours: Et quoy? ô Souvenance greve A peu que le cueur ne me creve Quand j'en parle ou quand j'en ecris: C'est Belaud, mon petit chat gris: Belaud qui fust, paraventure Le plus bel oeuvre que nature Feit onc en matiere de chats: C'etoit Belaud, la mort au rats Belaud dont la beauté fut telle Qu'elle est digne d'estre immortelle._

_Mon-dieu, quel passetemps c'estoit Quand ce Belaud vire-voltoit Follastre autour d'une pelote! Quel plaisir, quand sa teste sotte Suyvant sa queue en mille tours, D'un rouet imitoit le cours! Ou quand assis sur le derriere Il s'en faisoit une jartiere, Et monstrant l'estomac velu De panne blanche crespelu,_

_Sembloit, tant sa trogne estoit bonne, Quelque docteur de la Sorbonne! Ou quand alors qu'on l'animoit, A coups de patte il escrimoit, Et puis appasoit sa cholere Tout soudain qu'on luy faisoit chere._

_Belaud estoit mon cher mignon, Belaud estoit mon compagnon A la chambre, au lict, à la table, Belaud estoit plus accointable Que n'est un petit chien friand, Et de nuict n'alloit point criand Comme ces gros marcoux terribles, En longs miaudemens horribles: Aussi le petit mitouard N'entra jamais en matouard: Et en Belaud, quelle disgrâce! De Belaud s'est perdue la race. Que pleust a Dieu, petit Belon, Qui j'eusse l'esprit assez bon, De pouvoir en quelque beau style Blasonner ta grace gentile, D'un vers aussi mignard que toy: Belaud, je te promets ma foy, Que tu vivrois, tant que sur terre Les chats aux rats feront la guerre._

MALHERBE.

The French Renaissance ended in the Classic. The fate of all that exuberance was to find order, and that chaos of generation settled down to the obedience of unchanging laws. This transition, which fixed, perhaps for ever, the nature of the French tongue, is bound up with the name of Malherbe.

When what the French have entitled "the great time," when the generation of Louis XIV looked back to find an origin for its majestic security in letters, it was in Malherbe that such an origin was discovered; he had tamed the wildness of the Renaissance, he had bent its vigour to an arrangement and a frame; by him first were explicitly declared those rules within which all his successors were content to be narrowed. The devotion to his memory is nowhere more exalted or more typically presented than in the famous cry--_enfin Malherbe vint_. His name carried with it a note of completion and of an end.

When the romantic revival of our own time sought for one mind on which to lay the burden of its anger, one hard master or pedant who could be made responsible for the drying up of the wells, Malherbe again was found. He became the butt of Hugo's splendid ridicule. He was the god of plaster that could not hear or speak or feel, but which fools had worshipped; a god easy to break to pieces. His austerity--for them without fullness--his meagre output, his solemn reiterated code of "perfect taste," moved them to a facile but intense aggression. He it was that had turned to fossil stone the living matter of the sixteenth century: He that had stifled and killed the spirit they attempted to recall.

This man so praised, so blamed, for such a quality, was yet exactly, year for year, the contemporary of Shakespeare, born earlier and dying later. No better example could be discovered of the contrast between the French and English tempers.

The Romantics, I say, believed that they had destroyed Malherbe and left the Classic a ruined, antiquated thing. They were in error. Victor Hugo himself, the leader, who most believed the classic to have become isolated and past, was yet, in spite of himself, constrained by it. Lamartine lived in it. After all the fantastic vagaries of mystics and realists and the rest, it is ruling to-day with increasing power, returning as indeed the permanent religion, the permanent policy, of the nation are also returning after a century of astounding adventures: for the Classic has in it something necessary to the character of the French people.

Consider what the Classic is and why all mighty civilisations have demanded and obtained some such hard, permanent and, as it were, sacred vehicle for the expression of their maturity.

Nations that have a long continuous memory of their own past, nations especially whose gods have suffered transformation, but never death, develop the somewhat unelastic wisdom of men in old age. They mistrust the taste of the moment. They know that things quite fresh and violent seem at first greater than they are: that such enthusiasm forms no lasting legacy for posterity. Their very ancient tradition gives them a thirst for whatever shall certainly remain. The rigid Classic satisfies that need.

Again, you will discover that those whose energy is too abundant seek for themselves by an instinct the necessary confines without which such energy is wasted--and wasted the more from its excess. They canalise for their own security a torrent which, undisciplined, would serve but to destroy. Such an instinct is apparent in every department of French life. To their jurisprudence the French have ever attempted to attach a code, to their politics the stone walls of a Constitution, or, at the least, of a fundamental theory. Their theology from Athanasius through St. Germanus to the modern strict defence against all "liberals" has glorified the unchanging. Every outburst of the interior fires in the history of Gaul has been followed by a rapid, plastic action which reduced to human use what might otherwise have crystallised into an amorphous lava. So the wild freedom of the twelfth century was captured to form the Monarchy, the University, the full Gothic of the thirteenth: so the Revolution permitted Napoleon and produced, not the visionary unstable grandeur of the Gironde, but the schools and laws and roads and set government we see to-day. So the spring storms of the Renaissance settled, I say, into that steady summer of stable form which has now for three hundred years dominated the literature of the country.

Caught on with this aspect of energy producing the Classic is the truth that energy alone can dare to be classical. Where the great currents of the soul run feebly a perpetual acceleration, whether by novelty or by extravagance, will be demanded; where they run full and heavy, then, under the restraint of form, they will but run more proudly and more strong. It is the flickering of life that fears hard rules in verse and may not feel the level classics of our Europe. Their rigidity is not that of marble; they are not dead. A human acquaintance with their sobriety soon fills us as we read. If we lie in the way of the giants who conceived them (let me say Corneille or the great Dryden), re-reading and further knowledge--especially a deeper experience of common life about us--reveal to us the steadfast life of these images; the eyes open, the lips might almost move; the statue descends and lives.

The man who imposed design and authority and unity upon the letters of his country, and who so closed the epoch with which I have been dealing, was singularly suited to his task. Observant, something of a stoic, uninspired; courageous, witty, a soldier; lucid, critical of method only, he corresponded to the movement which, all around him, was ushering in the Bourbons: the hardening of Goujon's and de l'Orme's luxuriance into the conventions of the great colonnades and the sombre immensity of the new palaces; the return of one national faith to a people weary of so many random quarrels; the mistrust of an ill-ordered squirearchy; the firm founding of a central government.