Avril Part 6

Va, friande De ta bouche, Qui se couche En danger Pour manger Confitures; Si tu dures Trop malade, Couleur fade Tu prendras Et perdras L'embonpoint.

Dieu te doint, Sante bonne, Ma mignonne._

THE VINEYARD SONG.

(_The 4th of the Chansons._)

Here is Marot's best--even though many of his native critics will not admit it so; but to feel it in full one must be exiled from the vines.

It is a tapestry of the Renaissance; the jolly G.o.ds of the Renaissance, the old G.o.ds grown Catholic moving across a happier stage. Bacchus in long robes and with solemnity blessing the vine, Silenus and the hobbling smith who smithied the Serpe, the Holy Vineyard Knife in heaven, all these by their diction and their flavour recall the Autumn in Herault and the grapes under a pure sky, pale at the horizon, and labourers and their carts in the vineyard, and these set in the frame of that great time when Saturn did return.

All the poem is wine. It catches its rhymes and weaves them in and in, and moves rapid and careless in a fugue, like the march from Asia when the Panthers went before and drew the car. The internal rhythm and pulse is the clapping of hands in barns at evening and the peasants' feet dancing freely on the beaten earth. It is a very good song; it remembers the treading of the grapes and is refreshed by the mists that rise at evening when the labour is done.

_THE VINEYARD SONG._

_Changeons propos, c'est trop chante d'amours, Ce sont clamours, chantons de la Serpette, Tous vignerons ont a elle recours, C'est leur secours pour tailler la vignette.

O serpilette, o la serpilonnette, La vignolette est par toy mise sus, Dont les bons vins, tous les ans, sont yssus!_

_Le dieu Vulcain, forgeron des haults dieux, Forgea aux cieulx la serpe bien taillante, De fin acier, trempe en bon vin vieulx, Pour tailler mieulx et estre plus vaillante.

Bacchus le vante et dit qu'elle est seante Et convenante a Noe le bonshom Pour en tailler la vigne en la saison._

_Bacchus alors chappeau de treille avoit, Et arrivoit pour benistre la vigne; Avec flascons Silenus le suivoit, Lequel beuvoit aussi droict qu'une ligne; Puis il trepigne, et se faict une bigne; Comme une guigne estoit rouge son nez.

Beaucoup de gens de sa race sont nez._

RONSARD.

If it be true that words create for themselves a special atmosphere, and that their mere sound calls up vague outer things beyond their strict meaning, so it is true that the names of the great poets by their mere sound, by something more than the recollection of their work, produce an atmosphere corresponding to the quality of each; and the name of Ronsard throws about itself like an aureole the characters of fecundity, of leadership, and of fame.

A group of men to which allusion will be made in connection with Du Bellay set out with a programme, developed a determined school, and fixed the literary renaissance of France at its highest point. They steeped themselves in antiquity, and they put to the greatest value it has ever received the name of poet; they demanded that the poet should be a kind of king, or seer. Half seriously, half as a product of mere scholarship, the pagan conception of the muse and of inspiration filled them.

More than that; in their earnest, and, as it seemed at first, artificial work, they formed the French language. Some of its most famous and most familiar words proceed from them--for instance, the word _Patrie_. Some few of their exotic Greek and Latin adaptations were dropped; the greater part remained. They have excluded from French--as some think to the impoverishment of that language--most elements of the Gothic--the inversion of the adjective, the frequent suppression of the relative, the irregularity of form, which had survived from the Middle Ages, and which make the older French poetry so much more sympathetic to the Englishman than is the new--all these were destroyed by the group of men of whom I speak. They were called by their contemporaries the Pleiade, for they were seven stars.

Now, of these, Ronsard was easily the master. He had that power which our anaemic age can hardly comprehend, of writing, writing, writing, without fear of exhaustion, without irritability or self-criticism, without danger of comparing the better with the worse. Five great volumes of small print, all good--men of that facility never write the really paltry things--all good, and most of it glorious; some of it on the level which only the great poets reach here and there. It is in reading this man who rhymed unceasingly for forty years, who made of poetry an occupation as well as a glory, and who let it fill the whole of his life, that one feels how much such creative power has to do with the value of verse. There is a kind of good humility about it, the humility of a man who does not look too closely at himself, and the health of a soul at full stride, going forward. You may open Ronsard at any page, and find a beauty; you may open any one of the sonnets at random, and in translating it discover that you are compelled to a fine English, because he is saying, plainly, great things. And of these sonnets, note you, he would write thirty at a stretch, and then twenty, and then a second book, with seventy more. So that as one reads one cannot help understanding that Italian who said a man was no poet unless he could rap out a century of sonnets from time to time; and one is reminded of the general vigour of the age and of the way in which art of all sorts was mingled up together, when one remembers the tags of verses, just such verses as these, which are yet to be seen in our galleries set down doubtfully on the margin of their sketches by the great artists of Italy.

Ronsard, with these qualities of a leader, unconscious, as all true leaders are, of the causes of his leadership, and caring, as all true leaders do, for nothing in leadership save the glory it brings with it, had also, as have all leaders, chiefly the power of drawing in a mult.i.tude of friends. The peculiar head of his own group, he very soon became the head of all the movement of his day. He had made letters really great in the minds of his contemporaries, and having so made them, appeared before them as a master of those letters. Certainly, as I shall quote him in a moment when I come to his dying speech, he was "satiated with glory."

Yet this man did not in his personality convey that largeness which was his princ.i.p.al 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 princ.i.p.al 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 a.n.a.lysis 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 cla.s.sic, 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 n.o.ble 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, n.o.bility 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 G.o.d." 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 G.o.d."

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 "_Voila sagement dit_" to so n.o.ble a finale.

_DIALOGUE WITH THE NINE SISTERS._

Ronsard. _Pour avoir trop aime vostre bande inegale, 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 siecle en siecle, aura de vous memoire; Vostre corps seulement au tombeau pourrira._

Ronsard. _O le gentil loyer! Que sert au viel Homere, Ores qu'il n'est plus rien, sous la tombe, la-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 abuse. Le corps dessous la lame Pourry ne sent plus rien, aussy ne luy en chaut.

Mais un tel accident n'arrive point a l'ame, Qui sans matiere vist immortelle la haut._

Ronsard. _Bien! Je vous suyvray donc d'une face plaisante, Dusse-je trespa.s.ser de l'estude vaincu, Et ne fust-ce qu'a 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._