Avril Part 8

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 pa.s.sionate 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 n.o.ble, who, as is the fashion of n.o.bles, had married a wife to consolidate a fortune. This wife, the mother of Joachim, was heiress to the house of Tourmeliere in Lire, 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 pa.s.sionate defence of the Catholic Faith, the a.s.sault 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 princ.i.p.al 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 enc.u.mbered, 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.

Or again--

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

Everywhere it is his friend rather than he that has touched the mark of the G.o.ds 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 ma.s.s 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 Vendomois, 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 cla.s.sics 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 scay 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 matiere 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 G.o.ds 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'appercois, 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 resistance._

IV.

_Celle qui de son chef les estoilles pa.s.soit, 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 compa.s.soit, 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 mena.s.soit._

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

VI.

_Telle que dans son Char la Berecynthienne Couronnee de tours, et joyeuse d'avoir Enfante 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 a sa grandeur, grandeur si non la sienne._

_Rome seule pouvoit a 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'egaler celle qui fust egale Sa puissance a 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 pa.s.sionate 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.