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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Avril, by H. Belloc
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Avril
+       Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance
+
+Author: H. Belloc
+
+Release Date: July 16, 2006 [EBook #18839]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AVRIL ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Ted Garvin, Rénald Lévesque and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                                   AVRIL
+
+
+                                   BEING
+
+                        ESSAYS ON THE POETRY OF THE
+                             FRENCH RENAISSANCE
+
+                                     BY
+
+                                 H. BELLOC
+
+
+
+                        "... _Ceux dont la Fantaisie
+                 Sera religieuse et dévote envers Dieu
+                 Tousjours achèveront quelque grant Poésie,
+                 Et dessus leur renom la Parque n'aura lieu._"
+
+
+
+                                   LONDON
+                              DUCKWORTH AND CO.
+                 3, HENRIETTA STREET, COVE NT GARDEN, W.C.
+
+                                    1904
+
+
+                CHISWICK PRESS: CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND CO
+                    TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE, LONDON.
+
+
+
+
+    Part of this book originally appeared
+    in "The Pilot," and is here reprinted
+    by kind permission of the Editor.
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+    CHARLES OF ORLEANS
+    VILLON
+    MAROT
+    RONSARD
+    Du BELLAY
+    MALHERBE
+
+
+                                DEDICATION
+
+                                    TO
+                               F.Y. ECCLES
+
+
+MY DEAR ECCLES,
+
+You will, I know, permit me to address you these essays which are more
+the product of your erudition than of my enthusiasm.
+
+With the motives of their appearance you are familiar.
+
+We have wondered together that a society so avid of experience and
+enlargement as is ours, should ignore the chief expression of its
+closest neighbour, its highest rival and its coheir in Europe: should
+ignore, I mean, the literature of the French.
+
+We have laughed together, not without despair, to see the mind of
+England, for all its majesty and breadth, informed at the most critical
+moments in the policy of France by such residents of Paris as were at
+the best fanatical, at the worst (and most ordinary) corrupt.
+
+Seeing around us here a philosophy and method drawn from northern
+Germany, a true and subtle sympathy with the Italians, and a perpetual,
+just and accurate comment upon the minor nationalities of Europe, a mass
+of recorded travel superior by far to that of other countries, we
+marvelled that France in particular should have remained unknown.
+
+We were willing, in an earlier youth, to read this riddle in somewhat
+crude solutions. I think we have each of us arrived, and in a final
+manner, at the sounder conclusion that historical accident is
+principally to blame. The chance concurrence of this defeat with that
+dynastic influence, the slip by which the common sense of political
+simplicity missed footing in England and fell a generation behind, the
+marvellous industrial activities of this country, protected by a
+tradition of political discipline which will remain unique in History;
+the contemporaneous settling down of France into the equilibrium of
+power--an equilibrium not established without five hearty civil wars and
+perhaps a hundred campaigns--all these so separated the two worlds of
+thought as to leave France excusable for her blindness towards the
+destinies and nature of England, and England excusable for her continued
+emptiness of knowledge upon the energy and genius of France: though
+these were increasing daily, immensely, at our very side.
+
+We have assisted at some straining of such barriers. A long peace, the
+sterility of Germany, the interesting activities of the Catholic Church,
+have perhaps not yet changed, but have at least disturbed the mind of
+the north, and ours, a northern people's, with it. The unity, the
+passionate patriotism, the close oligarchic polity, the very silence of
+the English has arrested the eyes of France. By a law which is universal
+where bodies are bound in one system, an extreme of separation has
+wrought its own remedy and the return towards a closer union is begun. I
+do not refer to such ephemeral and artificial manifestations as a
+special and somewhat humiliating need may demand; I consider rather that
+large sweep of tendency which was already apparent fifteen years after
+the Franco-Prussian War. An approach in taste, manners and expression
+well defined during our undergraduate years, has now introduced much of
+our inmost life to the French, to us already a hint of their philosophy.
+
+I think you believe, as I do, that the return has begun.
+
+We shall not live to see that fine unity of the west which lent the
+latter seventeenth and eighteenth centuries their classical repose. No
+common rule of verse or prose will satisfy men's permanent desire for
+harmony: no common rule of manners, of honour, of international ethics,
+of war. We shall not live to see, though we are young now, a Paris
+reading some new Locke or Hume, a London moved to attentive delight in
+some latter trinity of Dramatists, some future Voltaire.... The high,
+protected class, which moved at ease between the Capitals of the World,
+has disappeared; that which should take its place is not yet formed. We
+are both of that one Faith which can but regard our Christendom as the
+front of mankind and which, therefore, looks forward, as to a necessary
+goal, to the re-establishment of its common comprehension. But the
+reversion to such stability is slow. We shall not live to see it.
+
+It is none the less our duty (if I may use a word of so unsavoury a
+connotation) to advance the accomplishment of this good fatality.
+
+Not indeed that a vulgar cosmopolitan beatitude can inspire an honest
+man. To abandon one's patriotism, and to despise a frontier or a flag,
+is, we are agreed, the negation of Europe. There are Frenchmen who
+forget their battles, and Englishmen to whom a gold mine, a chance
+federal theory, a colonial accent, or a map, is more of an inheritance
+than the delicate feminine profile of Nelson or the hitherto unbroken
+traditions of our political scheme. To such men arms are either
+abhorrent, or, what is worse, a very cowardly (and thank God!
+unsuccessful) method of acquiring or defending their very base
+enjoyments. Let us forget them. It is only as nationalists, and only in
+an intense sympathy with the highly individual national unities of
+Europe that we may approach the endeavour of which I have spoken.
+
+With us, I fear, that endeavour must take a literary form, but such a
+channel is far from ignoble or valueless. He that knows some part of the
+letters of a foreign nation, be it but the graces or even the vagaries
+of such letters, knows something of that nation's mind. To portray for
+the populace one religion welding the west together, to spread a common
+philosophy, or to interpret and arrange political terms, would certainly
+prove a more lasting labour: but you will agree with me that mere
+sympathy in letters is not to be despised.
+
+We have observed together that the balance in this matter is heavily
+against the English. M. Jusserand is easily the first authority upon
+popular life in England at the close of the middle ages. M. Boutmy has
+produced an analysis of our political development which our Universities
+have justly recognized. Our friend M. Angellier of the École Normale has
+written what is acknowledged by the more learned Scotch to be the
+principal existing monograph upon Robert Burns; Mr. Kipling himself has
+snatched the attention of M. Chevrillon. You know how many names might
+be added to this list to prove the close, applied and penetrating manner
+in which French scholars have latterly presented our English writers to
+their fellow-citizens.
+
+We have both believed that something of the sort might be attempted in
+the converse; that a view could be given--a glimpse at least--of that
+vast organism whose foundations are in Rome, Coeval with the spring of
+Christianity, and whose last growth seems as vigorous and as fecund as
+though it were exempt from any laws of age.
+
+But, I say, we know how heavy is the balance against us.
+
+The Gallic ritual is unrecognized, even by our over-numerous class of
+clerical antiquarians. The Carolingian cycle is neglected, save perhaps
+for a dozen men who have seen the Song of Roland. The Complaints of
+Rusteboeuf, the Fabliaux, all the local legendary poetry, all the
+chroniclers (save Froissart--for he wrote of us), the tender simplicity
+of Joinville, the hard steel of Villehardouin, no one has handled.
+
+The fifteenth century, the storm of the Renaissance, are not taught.
+Why, Rabelais himself might be but an unfamiliar name had not a northern
+squire of genius rendered to the life three quarters of his work.
+
+The list is interminable. Even the great Drama of the great century is
+but a text for our schools leaving no sort of trace upon the mind: and
+as for the French moderns (I have heard it from men of liberal
+education) they are denied to have written any poetry at all: so exact,
+so subtle, so readily to be missed, are the proportions of their speech.
+
+If you ask me why I should myself approach the matter, I can plead some
+inheritance of French blood, comparable, I believe, to your own; and
+though I have no sort of claim to that unique and accomplished
+scholarship which gives you a mastery of the French tongue unmatched in
+England, and a complete familiarity with its history, application and
+genius, yet I can put to my credit a year of active, if eccentric,
+experience in a French barrack room, and a complete segregation during
+those twelve memorable months wherein I could study the very soul of
+this sincere, creative, and tenacious people.
+
+Your learning, my singular adventure, have increased in us, it must be
+confessed, a permanent and reasoned admiration for this people's
+qualities. Such an attitude of mind is rare enough and often dangerous:
+it is but a qualification the more for beginning the work. It permits us
+to follow the main line of the past of the French, to comprehend and not
+to be troubled by the energy of their present, to catch the advancing
+omens of their future.
+
+Indeed, if anything of France is to be explained in English and to
+people reading English, I could not desire a better alliance than yours
+and mine.
+
+But if you ask me why the Renaissance especially--or why in the
+Renaissance these six poets alone--should have formed the subject of my
+first endeavour, I can only tell you that in so vast a province, whereof
+the most ample leisure could not in a lifetime exhaust a tithe, Chance,
+that happy Goddess, led me at random to their groves.
+
+Whether it will be possible to continue such interpretation I do not
+know, but if it be so possible, I know still less what next may be put
+into my hands: Racine, perhaps, may call me, or those forgotten men who
+urged the Revolution with phrases of fire.
+
+    H. BELLOC.
+    CHELSEA, _January, 1904._
+
+
+
+
+                           CHARLES OF ORLEANS.
+
+
+I put down Charles of Orleans here as the first representative of that
+long glory which it is the business of this little book to recall: but
+to give him such a place at the threshold requires some apology.
+
+The origins of a literary epoch differ according as that epoch is primal
+or derivative. There are those edifices of letters which start up, not
+indeed out of nothing, but out of things wholly different. Produced by a
+shock or a revelation, as two gases lit will, in a sharp explosion,
+unite to form a liquid wholly unlike either, so after a great conquest,
+a battle, the sudden preaching of a creed, these primal literatures
+appear in an epic or a dithyrambic code of awful law. Their first effort
+is their mightiest. They come mature. They are allied to that element of
+the catastrophic which the modern world (taking its general philosophy
+from its social condition) denies, but which is yet at the limits of all
+things separate and themselves; accompanies every birth, and strikes
+agony into every transition of death.
+
+Those other much commoner epochs in the history of letters, which may be
+called derivative, have this current and obvious quality, that their
+beginnings merge into the soil that bred them, also (very often) their
+decay will lapse imperceptibly into newer things. They are quite
+definite, but also definitely parented. We know their special stuff and
+harmony, but we can point out clearly enough the elements which formed
+that stuff, the tones which unite in that harmony. We can show with
+dates and citations the parts meeting and blending; our difficulty is
+not to determine the influences which have mixed to make the general
+school, but rather to fix the beginning and the end of its effect upon
+men.
+
+In the first of these the leader, sometimes the unique example of the
+school, stands out great, but particular and clear, on a background
+vague or dark. He is as stupendous, yet as sharp and certain, as a
+mountain facing the morning, with only sky behind. In the second the
+originator, if there be one, is vague, tentative, perhaps unknown. More
+often many minor men together introduce a slow and general transition.
+
+Now the French Renaissance has this peculiar mark, that it holds quite
+plainly by one side of it to the first by the other to the second of
+these spirits.
+
+It was primal and catastrophic in that it made something completely new.
+A new architecture, new cities, a new poetry, almost a new language, a
+new kind of government--ultimately the modern world.
+
+It was derivative in that the shock, the revelation, which produced it,
+was the return of something allied to the French blood, something rooted
+in the French memory. Rome surviving or risen had made that Italy, which
+was now beginning to trouble the Alps, and would surely creep in by
+every channel of influence, and at last pervade all Europe. Rome, also,
+in her full vigour, had once framed and ordered Gaul. The French of the
+Renaissance were woken suddenly, but as they started they recognized the
+face and the hand of the awakener.
+
+On this account you will find one mind indeed at the very beginning of
+the change in letters, but not a dominating mind. There is but one man
+who is certainly an origin, but he is not a master. You see an unique
+and single personality, distinct but without force, founding no
+school--the grave, abiding, kind but covert face of Charles of Orleans.
+He, linked to the French Renaissance, is like the figure of a gentle
+friend playing in some garden with a child whose manners are new and
+pleasing to him, but of whose great destiny he makes no guess. That
+child was to be Du Bellay, Brantome, Montaigne a hundred-sided, huge
+Rabelais, Ronsard. Or perhaps this metaphor will put it better. To say
+that Charles of Orleans's equal and persistent music was like a string
+harped on distinctly in a chorus of flutes and hautboys, till one by one
+harps from here and there caught up the similar tang of chords and at
+last the whole body of sound was harping only.
+
+His life was suited to such difference and such origination. Italy,
+still living, filled him. An Italian secretary wrote from his mouth the
+most sumptuous of his manuscripts. He banded on Italy as a goal and his
+Italian land as a legacy to the French crown--to his own son; till
+(years after his death) the soldiers roared through Briançon and broke
+the crusted snow of Mont Genèvre. An Italian mother, the most beautiful
+of the Viscontis, come out of Italy, rich in her land of Asti and her
+half million of pure gold, had borne him in her youth to the King of
+France's brother: a man luxurious, over fine, exact in taste, a lover of
+magnificence in stories and words, decadent in a dying time, very brave.
+Through that father the Valois blood, unjustly hated or still more
+unjustly despised according to the varied ignorance of modern times, ran
+in him nobly.
+
+Take the Valois strain entire and you will find the pomp or rather the
+fantasy of their great palace of St. Paul; turrets and steep blue roofs
+of slate, carved woodwork, heavy curtains, and incense and shining
+bronze. The Valois were, indeed, the end of the middle ages. Some
+cruelty, a fury in battle, intelligence and madness alternately, and
+always a sort of keenness which becomes now revenge, now foresight, now
+intrigue, now strict and terrible government: at last a wild adventure
+out beyond the hills: Fornovo, Pavia.
+
+Their story is like the manuscripts, which beyond all other things they
+loved and collected, and which they were the last to possess or to have
+made; for while it contains in vivid pictures the noblest and the basest
+subjects: (Joan of Arc and also her betrayal, their country dominant and
+almost engulfed, Marigano, and then again Pavia) it always glitters with
+hard enamelled colours against skies of gold, and is drawn and sharp and
+clean as a thing can be.
+
+Such is the whole line, but look at this one Valois and you see all the
+qualities of his race toned by a permanent sadness down to a good and
+even temper, not hopeful but still delighting in beauty and possessed as
+no other Valois had been of charity. Less passionate and therefore much
+less eager and useful than most of his race, yet the taint of madness
+never showed in him, nor the corresponding evil of cruelty, nor the
+uncreative luxury of his immediate ancestry. All the Valois were poets
+in their kind; his life by its every accident caused him to write. At
+fifteen they wedded him to that lovely child whom Richard II had lifted
+in his arms at Windsor as he rode out in fatal pomp for Ireland. Three
+years later, when their marriage was real, she died in childbirth, and
+it is to her I think that he wrote in his prison the ballad which ends:
+
+    Dieu sur tout souverain seigneur
+    Ordonnez par grace et douceur
+    De l'ame d'elle tellement
+    Qu'elle ne soit pas longuement
+    En peine souci et douleur.
+
+Already, in the quarrel that so nearly wrecked the crown, the
+anti-national factions had killed his father. He was planning vengeance,
+engraving little mottoes of hate upon his silver, when the wars came on
+them all. A boy of twenty-four, well-horsed, much more of a soldier than
+he later seemed, he charged, leading the centre of the three tall troops
+at Agincourt. In the evening of that disaster they pulled him out from
+under a great heap of the ten thousand dead and brought him prisoner
+into England, to Windsor then to Pomfret Castle. Chatterton, Cobworth,
+at last John Cornwall, of Fanhope, were his guardians. To some one of
+these--probably the last--he wrote the farewell:
+
+    Mon très bon hôte et ma très douce hôtesse.
+
+For his life as a prisoner, though melancholy, was not undignified; he
+paid no allegiance, he met the men of his own rank, nor was he of a kind
+to whom poverty, the chief thorn of his misfortune, brought dishonour.
+
+Henry V had left it strictly in his will that Orleans the general and
+the head of the French nationals should not return. For twenty-five
+years, therefore--all his manhood--he lived under this sky, rhyming and
+rhyming: in English a little, in French continually, and during that
+isolation there swept past him far off in his own land the defence, the
+renewal, the triumph of his own blood: his town relieved, his cousin
+crowned at Rheims. His river of Loire, and then the Eure, and then the
+Seine, and even the field where he had fallen were reconquered.
+Willoughby had lost Paris to Richemont four years before Charles of
+Orleans was freed on a ransom of half his mother's fortune. It was not
+until the November of 1440 that he saw his country-side again.
+
+The verse formed in that long endurance (a style which he preserved to
+the end in the many poems after his release) may seem at a first reading
+merely mediæval. There is wholly lacking in it the riot of creation, nor
+can one see at first the Renaissance coming in with Charles of Orleans.
+
+Indeed it was laid aside as mediæval, and was wholly forgotten for three
+hundred years. No one had even heard of him for all those centuries till
+Sallier, that learned priest, pacing, full of his Hebrew and Syriac, the
+rooms of the royal library which Louis XV had but lately given him to
+govern, found the manuscript of the poems and wrote an essay on them for
+the Academy.
+
+The verse is full of allegory; it is repetitive; it might weary one with
+the savour of that unhappy fifteenth century when the human mind lay
+under oppression, and only the rich could speak their insignificant
+words; a foreigner especially might find it all dry bones, but his
+judgement would be wrong. Charles of Orleans has a note quite new and
+one that after him never failed, but grew in volume and in majesty until
+it filled the great chorus of the Pleiade--the Lyrical note of direct
+personal expression. Perhaps the wars produced it in him; the lilt of
+the marching songs was still spontaneous:
+
+    Gentil Duc de Lorraine, vous avez grand renom,
+    Et votre renommée passe au delà des monts
+    Et vous et vos gens d'arme, et tous vos compagnons
+    Au premier coup qu'ils frappent, abattent les Donjons.
+    Tirez, tirez bombardes, serpentines, Canons!
+
+Whatever the cause, this spontaneity and freshness run through all the
+mass of short and similar work which he wrote down.
+
+The spring and sureness, the poise of these light nothings make them a
+flight of birds.
+
+See how direct is this:
+
+    Dieu! qu'il la fait bon regarder!
+    La gracieuse, bonne et belle.
+
+or this:
+
+    Le lendemain du premier jour de Mai
+    Dedans mon lit ainsi que je dormoye
+    Au point du jour advint que je sonjeay.
+
+Everywhere his words make tunes for themselves and everywhere he himself
+appears in his own verses, simple, charming, slight, but with memories
+of government and of arms.
+
+This style well formed, half his verse written, he returned to his own
+place. He was in middle age--a man of fifty. He married soberly enough
+Mary of Cleves, ugly and young: he married her in order to cement the
+understanding with Burgundy. She did not love him with his shy florid
+face, long neck and features and mild eyes. His age for twenty-five
+years passed easily, he had reached his "castle of No Care." As late as
+1462 his son (Louis XII) was born; his two daughters at long intervals
+before. His famous library moved with him as he went from town to town,
+and perpetually from himself and round him from his retinue ran the
+continual stream of verse which only ended with his death. His very
+doctor he compelled to rhyme.
+
+All the singers of the time visited or remained with him--wild Villon
+for a moment, and after Villon a crowd of minor men. It was in such a
+company that he recited the last ironical but tender song wherein he
+talks of his lost youth and vigour and ends by bidding all present a
+salute in the name of his old age.
+
+So he sat, half regal, holding a court of song in Blois and Tours, a
+forerunner in verse of what the new time was to build in stone along the
+Loire. And it was at Amboise that he died.
+
+
+
+
+                             THE COMPLAINT.
+
+    (_The 57th Ballade of those written during his imprisonment._)
+
+
+There is some dispute in the matter, but I will believe, as I have said,
+that this dead Princess, for whose soul he prays, was certainly the wife
+of his boyhood, a child whom Richard II had wed just before that
+Lancastrian usurpation which is the irreparable disaster of English
+history. She was, I say, a child--a widow in name--when Charles of
+Orleans, himself in that small royal clique which was isolated and
+shrivelling, married her as a mere matter of state. It is probable that
+he grew to love her passionately, and perhaps still more her memory when
+she had died in child-bed during those first years, even before
+Agincourt, "en droicte fleur de jeunesse,"--for even here he is able to
+find an exact and sufficient line.
+
+There is surely to be noted in this delicate ballad, something more
+native and truthful in its pathos than in the very many complaints he
+left by way partly of reminiscence, partly of poetic exercise. For,
+though he is restrained, as was the manner of his rank when they
+attempted letters, yet you will not read it often without getting in you
+a share of its melancholy.
+
+That melancholy you can soon discover to be as permanent a quality in
+the verse as it was in the mind of the man who wrote it.
+
+                            _THE COMPLAINT._
+
+
+      _Las! Mort qui t'a fait si hardie,
+    De prendre la noble Princesse
+    Qui estoit mon confort, ma vie,
+    Mon bien, mon plaisir, ma richesse!
+    Puis que tu as prins ma maistresse,
+    Prens moy aussi son serviteur,
+    Car j'ayme mieulx prouchainement
+    Mourir que languir en tourment
+    En paine, soussi et doleur._
+
+      _Las! de tous biens estoit garnie
+    Et en droite fleur de jeunesse!
+    Je pry à Dieu qu'il te maudie,
+    Faulse Mort, plaine de rudesse!
+    Se prise l'eusses en vieillesse,
+    Ce ne fust pas si grant rigueur;
+    Mais prise l'as hastivement
+    Et m'as laissié piteusement
+    En paine, soussi et doleur._
+
+      _Las! je suis seul sans compaignie!
+    Adieu ma Dame, ma liesse!
+    Or est nostre amour departie,
+    Non pour tant, je vous fais promesse
+    Que de prieres, à largesse,
+    Morte vous serviray de cueur,
+    Sans oublier aucunement;
+    Et vous regretteray souvent
+    En paine, soussi et doleur._
+
+_ENVOI._
+
+    _Dieu, sur tout souverain Seigneur,
+    Ordonnez, par grace et doulceur,
+    De l'ame d'elle, tellement
+    Qu'elle ne soit pas longuement
+    En paine, soussi et doleur._
+
+
+
+                      THE TWO ROUNDELS OF SPRING.
+              (_The 41st and 43rd of the "Rondeaux."_)
+
+
+These two Rondeaux, of which we may also presume, though very vaguely,
+that they were written in England (for they are in the manner of his
+earlier work), are by far the most famous of the many things he wrote;
+and justly, for they have all these qualities.
+
+_First_, they are exact specimens of their style. The Roundel should
+interweave, repeat itself, and then recover its original strain, and
+these two exactly give such unified diversity.
+
+_Secondly_: they were evidently written in a moment of that unknown
+power when words suggest something fuller than their own meaning, and in
+which simplicity itself broadens the mind of the reader. So that it is
+impossible to put one's finger upon this or that and say this adjective,
+that order of the words has given the touch of vividness.
+
+_Thirdly_: they have in them still a living spirit of reality; read them
+to-day in Winter, and you feel the Spring. It is this quality perhaps
+which most men have seized in them, and which have deservedly made them
+immortal.
+
+A further character which has added to their fame, is that, being
+perfect lyrics, they are also specimens of an old-fashioned manner and
+metre peculiar to the time. They are the resurrection not only of the
+Spring, but of a Spring of the fifteenth century. Nor is it too
+fantastic to say that one sees in them the last miniatures and the very
+dress of a time that was intensely beautiful, and in which Charles of
+Orleans alone did not feel death coming.
+
+
+                      _THE TWO ROUNDELS OF SPRING._
+
+
+      _Les fourriers d'Esté sont venus
+    Pour appareillier son logis,
+    Et ont fait tendre ses tappis,
+    De fleurs et verdure tissus.
+      En estandant tappis velus
+    De verte herbe par le pais,
+    Les fourriers d'Esté sont venus
+    Pour appareillier son logis.
+      Cueurs d'ennuy pieça morfondus,
+    Dieu merci, sont sains et jolis;
+    Alez vous en, prenez pais,
+    Yver vous ne demourrez plus;
+    Les fourriers d'Esté sont venus._
+
+      _Le temps a laissié son manteau
+    De vent, de froidure et de pluye,
+    Et s'est vestu de brouderie,
+    De soleil luyant, cler et beau.
+      Il n'y a beste, ne oyseau,
+    Qu'en son jargon ne chant ou crie;
+    Le temps a laissié son manteau
+    De vent de froidure et de pluye.
+      Riviere, fontaine et ruisseau
+    Portent, en livrée jolie,
+    Gouttes d'argent d'orfavrerie,
+    Chascun s'abille de nouveau.
+    Le temps a laissié son manteau._
+
+
+
+                           HIS LOVE AT MORNING.
+                       (_The 6th of the "Songs"._)
+
+
+In this delightful little song the spontaneity and freshness which saved
+his work, its vigour and its clarity are best preserved.
+
+It does indeed defy death and leaps four centuries: it is young and
+perpetual. It thrills with something the failing middle ages had
+forgotten: it reaches what they never reached, a climax, for one cannot
+put too vividly the flash of the penultimate line, "I am granted a
+vision when I think of her."
+
+Yet it was written in later life, and who she was, or whether she lived
+at all, no one knows.
+
+                         _HIS LOVE AT MORNING._
+
+      _Dieu qu'il la fait bon regarder
+    La gracieuse bonne et belle!
+    Pour les grans biens qui sont en elle,
+    Chascun est prest de la louer
+      Qui se pourroit d'elle lasser!
+    Tousjours sa beaulté renouvelle.
+    Dieu, qu'il la fait bon regarder,
+    La gracieuse, bonne et belle!
+      Par deça, ne delà la mer,
+    Ne sçay Dame ne Damoiselle
+    Qui soit en tous biens parfais telle;
+    C'est un songe que d'y penser.
+    Dieu, qu'il la fait bon regarder!_
+
+
+
+                             THE FAREWELL.
+                        (_The 310th Roundel._)
+
+Here is the last thing--we may presume--that Charles of Orleans ever
+wrote: "Salute me all the company, I pray."
+
+In that "company", not only the Court at Amboise, but the men of the
+early wars, his companions, were round him, and the dead friends of his
+gentle memory.
+
+He was broken with age; he was already feeling the weight of isolation
+from the Royal Family; he was beginning to suffer the insults of the
+king. But, beneath all this, his gaiety still ran like a river under
+ice, and in the ageing of a poet, humour and physical decline combined
+make a good, human thing.
+
+There is an excellent irony in the refrain: "Salute me, all the
+company," whose double interpretation must not be missed, though it may
+seem far-fetched.
+
+Till the last line it means, without any question, "Salute the company
+in my name," but I think there runs through it also, the hint of "Salute
+me for my years, all you present who are young," and that this certainly
+is the note in the last line of all. It must be remembered of the
+French, that they never expand or explain their ironical things, for in
+art it is their nature to detest excess.
+
+This last thing of his, then, I say, is the most characteristic of him
+and of his Valois blood, and of the national spirit in general to which
+he belonged: for he, and it, and they, loved and love contrast, and the
+extra-meaning of words.
+
+                             _THE FAREWELL._
+
+
+      _Saluez moy toute la compaignie
+    Où à present estes à chiere lie,
+    Et leur dictes que voulentiers seroye
+    Avecques eulx, mais estre n'y porroye,
+    Pour Vieillesse qui m'a en sa baillie.
+      Au temps passé, Jeunesse si jolie
+    Me gouvernoit; las! or n'y suis je mye,
+    Et pour cela pour Dieu, que excusé soye;
+    Saluez moy toute la compaignie
+    Où à present estes à chiere lie,
+    Et leur dictes que voulentiers seroye.
+      Amoureux fus, or ne le suis je mye,
+    Et en Paris menoye bonne vie;
+    Adieu Bon temps ravoir ne vous saroye,
+    Bien sanglé fus d'une estroite courroye.
+      Que, par Aige, convient que la deslie.
+    Saluez moy toute la compaignie._
+
+
+
+
+                                   VILLON.
+
+I have said that in Charles of Orleans the middle ages are at first more
+apparent than the advent of the Renaissance. His forms are inherited
+from an earlier time, his terminology is that of the long allegories
+which had wearied three generations, his themes recall whatever was
+theatrical in the empty pageantry of the great war. It is a spirit
+deeper and more fundamental than the mere framework of his writing which
+attaches him to the coming time. His clarity is new; it proceeds from
+natural things; it marks that return to reality which is the beginning
+of all beneficent revolutions. But this spirit in him needs examination
+and discovery, and the reader is confused between the mediaeval phrases
+and the something new and troubling in the voice that utters them.
+
+With Villon, the next in order, a similar confusion might arise. All
+about him as he wrote were the middle ages: their grotesque, their
+contrast, their disorder. His youth and his activity of blood forbad him
+any contact with other than immediate influences. He was wholly
+Northern; he had not so much as guessed at what Italy might be. The
+decrepit University had given him, as best she could, the dregs of her
+palsied philosophy and something of Latin. He grew learned as do those
+men who grasp quickly the major lines of their study, but who, in
+details, will only be moved by curiosity or by some special affection.
+There was nothing patient in him, and nothing applied, and in all this,
+in the matter of his scholarship as in his acquirement of it, he is of
+the dying middle ages entirely.
+
+His laughter also was theirs: the kind of laughter that saluted the
+first Dance of Death which as a boy he had seen in new frescoes round
+the waste graveyard of the Innocents. His friends and enemies and heroes
+and buffoons were the youth of the narrow tortuous streets, his visions
+of height were the turrets of the palaces and the precipitate roofs of
+the town. Distance had never inspired him, for in that age its effect
+was forgotten. No one straight street displayed the greatness of the
+city, no wide and ordered spaces enhanced it. He crossed his native
+river upon bridges all shut in with houses, and houses hid the banks
+also. The sweep of the Seine no longer existed for his generation, and
+largeness of all kinds was hidden under the dust and rubble of decay.
+The majestic, which in sharp separate lines of his verse he certainly
+possessed, he discovered within his own mind, for no great arch or
+cornice, nor no colonnade had lifted him with its splendour.
+
+That he could so discover it, that a solemnity and order should be
+apparent in the midst of his raillery whenever he desires to produce an
+effect of the grand, leads me to speak of that major quality of his by
+which he stands up out of his own time, and is clearly an originator of
+the great renewal. I mean his vigour.
+
+It is all round about him, and through him, like a storm in a wood. It
+creates, it perceives. It possesses the man himself, and us also as we
+read him. By it he launches his influence forward and outward rather
+than receives it from the past. To it his successors turn, as to an
+ancestry, when they had long despised and thrown aside everything else
+that savoured of the Gothic dead. By it he increased in reputation and
+meaning from his boyhood on for four hundred years, till now he is
+secure among the first lyric poets of Christendom. It led to no excess
+of matter, but to an exuberance of attitude and manner, to an
+inexhaustibility of special words, to a brilliancy of impression unique
+even among his own people.
+
+He was poor; he was amative; he was unsatisfied. This vigour, therefore,
+led in his actions to a mere wildness; clothed in this wildness the rare
+fragments of his life have descended to us. He professed to teach, but
+he haunted taverns, and loved the roaring of songs. He lived at random
+from his twentieth year in one den or another along the waterside.
+Affection brought him now to his mother, now to his old guardian priest,
+but not for long; he returned to adventure--such as it was. He killed a
+man, was arrested, condemned, pardoned, exiled; he wandered and again
+found Paris, and again--it seems--stumbled down his old lane of violence
+and dishonour.
+
+Associated also with this wildness is a curious imperfection in our
+knowledge of him. His very name is not his own--or any other man's. His
+father, if it were his father, took his name from Mont-Corbier--half
+noble. Villon is but a little village over beyond the upper Yonne, near
+the division, within a day of the water-parting where the land falls
+southward to Burgundy and the sun in what they call "The Slope of Gold."
+From this village a priest, William, had come to Paris in 1423. They
+gave him a canonry in that little church called "St. Bennets Askew,"
+which stood in the midst of the University, near Sorbonne, where the Rue
+des Écoles crosses the Rue St. Jacques to-day. Hither, to his house in
+the cloister, he brought the boy, a waif whom he had found much at the
+time when Willoughby capitulated and the French recaptured the city. He
+had him taught, he designed him for the University, he sheltered him in
+his vagaries, he gave him asylum. The young man took his name and called
+him "more than father." His anxious life led on to 1468, long after the
+poet had disappeared.
+
+For it is in 1461, in his thirtieth year, that Villon last writes down a
+verse. It is in 1463 that his signature is last discovered. Then not by
+death or, if by death, then by some death unrecorded, he leaves history
+abruptly--a most astonishing exit!... You may pursue fantastic legends,
+you will not find the man himself again. Some say a final quarrel got
+him hanged at last--it is improbable: no record or even tradition of it
+remains. Rabelais thought him a wanderer in England. Poitou preserves a
+story of his later passage through her fields, of how still he drank and
+sang with boon companions, and of how, again, he killed a man.... Maybe,
+he only ceased to write; took to teaching soberly in the University, and
+lived in a decent inheritance to see new splendours growing upon Europe.
+It may very well be, for it is in such characters to desire in early
+manhood decency, honour, and repose. But for us the man ends with his
+last line. His body that was so very real, his personal voice, his
+jargon--tangible and audible things--spread outward suddenly a vast
+shadow upon nothingness. It was the end, also, of a world. The first
+Presses were creaking, Constantinople had fallen, Greek was in Italy,
+Leonardo lived, the stepping stones of the Azores were held--in that new
+light he disappears.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Of his greatness nothing can be said; it is like the greatness of all
+the chief poets, a thing too individual to seize in words. It is
+superior and exterior to the man. Genius of that astounding kind has all
+the qualities of an extraneous thing. A man is not answerable for it. It
+is nothing to his salvation; it is little even to his general character.
+It has been known to come and go, to be put off and on like a garment,
+to be lent by Heaven and taken away, a capricious gift.
+
+But of the manner of that genius it may be noted that, as his vigour
+prepared the flood of new verse, so in another matter his genius made
+him an origin. Through him first, the great town--and especially
+Paris--appeared and became permanent in letters.
+
+Her local spirit and her special quality had shone fitfully here and
+there for a thousand years--you may find it in Julian, in Abbo, in
+Joinville. But now, in the fifteenth century, it had been not only a
+town but a great town for more than a century--a town, that is, in which
+men live entirely, almost ignorant of the fields, observing only other
+men, and forgetting the sky. The keen edge of such a life, its
+bitterness, the mockery and challenge whereby its evils are borne, its
+extended knowledge, the intensity of its spirit--all these are reflected
+in Villon, and first reflected in him. Since his pen first wrote, a
+shining acerbity like the glint of a sword-edge has never deserted the
+literature of the capital.
+
+It was not only the metropolitan, it was the Parisian spirit which
+Villon found and fixed. That spirit which is bright over the whole city,
+but which is not known in the first village outside; the influence that
+makes Paris Athenian.
+
+The ironical Parisian soul has depths in it. It is so lucid that its
+luminous profundity escapes one--so with Villon. Religion hangs there.
+Humility--fatally divorced from simplicity--pervades it. It laughs at
+itself. There are ardent passions of sincerity, repressed and reacting
+upon themselves. The virtues, little practised, are commonly
+comprehended, always appreciated, for the Faith is there permanent. All
+this you will find in Villon, but it is too great a matter for so short
+an essay as this.
+
+
+                             THE DEAD LADIES.
+
+It is difficult or impossible to compare the masterpieces of the world.
+It is easy and natural to take the measure of a particular writer and to
+establish a scale of his work.
+
+Villon is certainly in the small first group of the poets. His little
+work, like that of Catullus, like that of Gray, is up, high, completed
+and permanent. And within that little work this famous Ballade is by far
+the greatest thing.
+
+It contains all his qualities: not in the ordinary proportion of his
+character, but in that better, exact proportion which existed in him
+when his inspiration was most ardent: for the poem has underlying it
+somewhere a trace of his irony, it has all his ease and
+rapidity--excellent in any poet--and it is carried forward by that
+vigour I have named, a force which drives it well upwards and forward to
+its foaming in the seventh line of the third verse.
+
+The sound of names was delightful to him, and he loved to use it; he had
+also that character of right verse, by which the poet loves to put
+little separate pictures like medallions into the body of his writing:
+this Villon loved, as I shall show in other examples, and he has it
+here.
+
+The end of the middle ages also is strongly in this appeal or confession
+of mortality; their legends, their delicacy, their perpetual
+contemplation of death.
+
+But of all the Poem's qualities, its run of words is far the finest.
+
+                           _THE DEAD LADIES._
+
+    _Dictes moy où, n'en quel pays
+    Est Flora la belle Rommaine;
+    Archipiada, ne Thaïs,
+    Qui fut sa cousine germaine;
+    Echo, parlant quand bruyt on maine
+    Dessus riviere ou sus estan,
+    Qui beaulté ot trop plus qu'humaine?
+    Mais où sont les neiges d'antan?_
+
+    _Où est la très sage Hellois,
+    Pour qui fut chastré et puis moyne
+    Pierre Esbaillart à Saint-Denis?
+    Pour son amour ot cest essoyne.
+    Semblablement, où est la royne
+    Qui commanda que Buridan
+    Fust gecté en ung sac en Saine?
+    Mais où sont les neiges d'antan!_
+
+    _La Royne Blanche comme un lis,
+    Qui chantoit à voix de seraine;
+    Berte au grant pié Bietris, Allis;
+    Haremburgis qui tint le Maine,
+    Et Jehanne, la bonne Lorraine,
+    Qu'Englois brulerent à Rouan;
+    Où sont elles, Vierge souvraine?
+    Mais où sont les neiges d'antan!_
+
+                 _ENVOI._
+
+    _Prince, n'enquerez de sepmaine
+    Où elles sont, ne de cest an,
+    Que ce reffrain ne vous remaine:
+    Mais où sont les neiges d'antan!_
+
+
+
+                  AN EXCERPT FROM THE GRANT TESTAMENT.
+                          (_Stanzas 75-79._)
+
+
+Villon's whole surviving work is in the form of two rhymed wills--one
+short, one long: and in the latter, Ballads and Songs are put in each in
+their place, as the tenour of the verse suggests them.
+
+Thus the last Ballade, that of the "Dead Ladies," comes after a couple
+of strong stanzas upon the necessity of death--and so forth.
+
+One might choose any passage, almost, out of the mass to illustrate the
+character of this "Testament" in which the separate poems are imbedded.
+I have picked those round about the 800th line, the verses in which he
+is perhaps least brilliant and most tender.
+
+
+                 _AN EXCERPT FROM THE GRANT TESTAMENT._
+
+
+    LXXV.
+
+    _Premier je donne ma povre ame
+    A la benoiste Trinité,
+    Et la commande à Nostre Dame
+    Chambre de la divinité;
+    Priant toute la charité
+    Des dignes neuf Ordres des cieulx,
+    Que par eulx soit ce don porté
+    Devant le trosne precieux._
+
+    LXXVI.
+
+    _Item, mon corps je donne et laisse
+    A notre grant mere la terre;
+    Les vers n'y trouveront grant gresse:
+    Trop luy a fait faim dure guerre.
+    Or luy soit delivré grant erre:
+    De terre vint, en terre tourne.
+    Toute chose, se par trop n'erre,
+    Voulentiers en son lieu retourne;_
+
+    LXXVII.
+
+    _Item, et à mon plus que pere
+    Maistre Guillaume de Villon
+    Qui m'esté a plus doulx que mere,
+    Enfant eslevé de maillon,
+    Degeté m'a de maint boullon
+    Et de cestuy pas ne s'esjoye
+    Et luy requiers à genoullon
+    Qu'il n'en laisse toute la joye._
+
+    LXXVIII.
+
+    _Je luy donne ma Librairie
+    Et le Romman du Pet au Deable
+    Lequel Maistre Guy Tabarie
+    Grossa qui est homs veritable.
+    Por cayers est soubz une table,
+    Combien qu'il soit rudement fait
+    La matiere est si très notable,
+    Q'elle amende tout le mesfait._
+
+    LXXIX.
+
+    _Item donne à ma povre mere
+    Pour saluer nostre Maistresse,
+    Qui pour moy ot doleur amere
+    Dieu le scet, et mainte tristesse;
+    Autre Chastel n'ay ni fortresse
+    Où me retraye corps et ame
+    Quand sur moy court malle destresse
+    Ne ma mere, la povre femme!_
+
+
+
+                         THE BALLADE OF OUR LADY.
+                  (_Written by Villon for his mother._)
+
+
+The abrupt ending of the last extract, the 79th stanza of the "Grant
+Testament"--"I give..." and then no objective (apparently) added--is an
+excellent example of the manner in which the whole is conceived and of
+the way in which the separate poems are pieced into the general work.
+
+What "he gives..." to his mother is this "Ballade of our Lady," written,
+presumably, long before the "will" and put in here and thus after being
+carefully led up to.
+
+These thirty-seven lines are more famous in their own country than
+abroad. They pour from the well of a religion which has not failed in
+the place where Villon wrote, and they present that religion in a manner
+peculiar and national.
+
+Apart from its piety and its exquisite tenderness, two qualities of
+Villon are to be specially found in this poem: his vivid phrase, such
+as:
+
+    _"Emperiere des infernaux paluz,"_
+
+(a discovery of which he was so proud that he repeated it elsewhere) or:
+
+    _"sa tres chiere jeunesse."_
+
+And secondly the curiously processional effect of the metre and of the
+construction of the stanzas--the extra line and the extra foot lend
+themselves to a chaunt in their balanced slow rhythm, as any one can
+find for himself by reading the lines to some church sing-song as he
+goes.
+
+                     _THE BALLADE OF OUR LADY._
+
+    _Dame des cieulx, regente terrienne,
+    Emperiere des infernaux paluz,
+    Recevez moy, vostre humble chrestienne,
+    Que comprinse soye entre vos esleuz,
+    Ce non obstant qu'oncques rien ne valuz.
+    Les biens de vous, ma dame et ma maistresse,
+    Sont trop plus grans que ne suis pecheresse,
+    Sans lesquelz biens ame ne peut merir
+    N'avoir les cieulx, je n'en suis jungleresse.
+    En ceste foi je veuil vivre et mourir._
+
+    _A vostre fils dicte que je suis sienne;
+    De luy soyent mes pechiez aboluz:
+    Pardonne moy, comme à l'Egipcienne,
+    Ou comme il feist au clerc Théophilus,
+    Lequel par vous fut quitte et absoluz,
+    Combien qu'il eust au Deable fait promesse.
+    Preservez moy, que ne face jamais ce
+    Vierge portant, sans rompure encourir
+    Le sacrement qu'on celebre à la messe.
+    En ceste foy je veuil vivre et mourir._
+
+    _Femme je suis povrette et ancienne
+    Qui riens ne scay; oncques lettre ne leuz;
+    Au moustier voy dont suis paroissienne
+    Paradis faint, où sont harpes et luz,
+    Et ung enfer où dampnez sont boulluz:
+    L'ung me fait paour, l'autre joye et liesse.
+    La joye avoir me fay, haulte Deesse,
+    A qui pecheurs doivent tous recourir,
+    Comblez de Foy, sans fainte ne paresse.
+    En ceste foy je veuil vivre et mourir._
+
+                      _ENVOI_
+
+    _Vous portastes, digne vierge, princesse,
+    Jesus regnant, qui n'a ne fin ne cesse.
+    Le Tout Puissant, prenant notre foiblesse,
+    Laissa les cieulx et nous vint secourir,
+    Offrit à mort sa tres chiere jeunesse.
+    Nostre Seigneur tel est, tel le confesse,
+          En ceste foy je veuil vivre et mourir._
+
+
+
+                              THE DEAD LORDS.
+
+As I have not wished to mix up smaller things with greater I have put
+this _ballade_ separate from that of "the Ladies," though it directly
+follows it as an after-thought in Villon's own book. For the former is
+one of the masterpieces of the world, and this, though very Villon, is
+not great.
+
+What it has got is the full latter mediaeval love of odd names and
+reminiscences, and also to the full, the humour of the scholarly tavern,
+which was the "Mermaid" of that generation: as the startling regret of:
+
+    Hélas! et le bon roy d'Espaigne
+    Duquel je ne sçay pas le nom....
+
+and the addition, after the false exit of "je me désiste".
+
+    _Encore fais une question_
+
+He laughed well over it, and was perhaps not thirsty when it was
+written.
+
+
+
+                            _THE DEAD LORDS._
+
+    _Qui plus? Où est le Tiers Calixte
+    Dernier decedé de ce nom,
+    Qui quatre ans tint le papaliste?
+    Alphonce, le roy d'Arragon,
+    Le Gracieux Duc de Bourbon,
+    Et Artus, le Duc de Bretaigne,
+    Et Charles Septiesme, le Bon?....
+    Mais où est le preux Charlemaigne!_
+
+    _Semblablement le roy Scotiste
+    Qui demy face ot, ce dit on,
+    Vermeille comme une amatiste
+    Depuis le front jusqu'au menton?
+    Le roy de Chippre, de renom?
+    Hélas! et le bon roy d'Espaigne
+    Duquel je ne sçay pas le nom?...
+    Mais où est le preux Charlemaigne!_
+
+    _D'en plus parler je me desiste
+    Le monde n'est qu'abusion.
+    Il n'est qui contre mort resiste
+    Le que treuve provision.
+    Encor fais une question:
+    Lancelot, le roy de Behaigne,
+    Où est il? Où est son tayon?....
+    Mais où est le preux Charlemaigne!_
+
+                  _ENVOI._
+
+    _Où est Claguin, le bon Breton?
+    Où le conte daulphin d'Auvergne
+    Et le bon feu Duc d'Alençon?...
+    Mais où est le preux Charlemaigne!_
+
+
+
+                               THE DIRGE.
+
+
+This is the best ending for any set of verses one may choose out of
+Villon. It follows and completes the epitaph which in his will he orders
+to be written in charcoal--or scratched--above his tomb: the sad,
+sardonic octave of "the little scholar and poor." It is a kind of added
+dirge to be read by those who pass and to be hummed or chaunted over him
+dead. But it is a rondeau.
+
+See how sharp it is with the salt and vinegar of his pressed courageous
+smile--and how he cannot run away from his religion or from his power
+over sudden and vivid beauty.
+
+"Sire--et clarté perpétuelle"--which last are the best two words that
+ever stood in the vulgar for _lux perpetua_.
+
+It is no wonder that as time went on, more and more people learnt these
+things by heart.
+
+
+                _RONDEAU._
+
+    _Repos éternel, donne à cil,
+    Sire, et clarté perpétuelle,
+    Qui vaillant plat ni escuelle
+    N'eut oncques, n'ung brain de percil.
+    Il fut rez, chief, barbe et sourcil,
+    Comme un navet qu'on ret ou pelle.
+        Repos éternel donne à cil.
+        Rigueur le transmit en exil
+    Et luy frappa au cul la pelle,
+    Non obstant qu'il dit "J'en appelle!"
+    Qui n'est pas terme trop subtil.
+        Repos éternel donne à cil._
+
+
+
+                              CLEMENT MAROT.
+
+If in Charles of Orleans the first note of the French Renaissance is
+heard, if in Villon you find first its energy appearing above ground,
+yet both are forerunners only.
+
+With Marot one is in the full tide of the movement. The discovery of
+America had preceded his birth by three or perhaps four years. His early
+manhood was filled with all that ferment, all that enormous branching
+out of human life, which was connected with the expansion of Spain; he
+was in the midst of the scarlet and the gold. A man just of age when
+Luther was first condemned, living his active manhood through the
+experience of the great battlefields in Italy, wounded (a valet rather
+than a soldier) at Pavia, the perpetual chorus of Francis I., privileged
+to witness the first stroke of the pickaxe against the mediaeval Louvre,
+and to see the first Italian dignity of the great stone houses on the
+Loire--being all this, the Renaissance was the stuff on which his life
+was worked.
+
+His blood and descent were typical enough of the work he had to do. His
+own father was one of the last set rhymers of the dying Middle Ages. All
+his boyhood was passed among that multitude of little dry "writers-down
+of verse" with which, in Paris, the Middle Ages died; they were not a
+swarm, for they were not living; they were a heap of dust. All his early
+work is touched with the learned, tedious, unbeautiful industry which
+was all that the elder men round Louis XII could bring to letters. By a
+happy accident there were mixed in him, however, two vigorous springs of
+inspiration, each ready to receive the new forces that were working in
+Europe, each destined to take the fullest advantage of the new time.
+These springs were first, learned Normandy, quiet, legal, well-founded,
+deep in grass, wealthy; and secondly, the arid brilliancy of the South:
+Quency and the country round Cahors. His father was a Norman pure bred,
+who had come down and married into that sharp land where the summer is
+the note of the whole year, and where the traveller chiefly remembers
+vineyards, lizards on the walls, short shadows, sleep at noon, and
+blinding roads of dust. The first years of his childhood were spent in
+the southern town, so that the south entered into him thoroughly. The
+language that he never wrote, the Languedoc, was that, perhaps, in which
+he thought during all his life. It was his mother's.
+
+It has been noticed by all his modern readers, it will be noticed
+probably with peculiar force by English readers, that the fame of Marot
+during his lifetime and his historical position as the leader of the
+Renaissance has in it something exaggerated and false. One cannot help a
+perpetual doubt as to whether the religious quarrel, the influence of
+the Court, the strong personal friendships and enmities which surrounded
+him had not had more to do with his reputation than his faculty, or even
+his genius, for rhyme. Whenever he wanted £100 he asked it of the King
+with the grave promise that he would bestow upon him immortality.
+
+From Ronsard, or from Du Bellay, we, here in the north, could understand
+that phrase; from Marot it carries a flavour of the grotesque. Ready
+song, indeed, and a great power over the material one uses in singing
+last indefinitely; they last as long as the sublime or the terrible in
+literature, but we forbear to associate with them--perhaps unjustly--the
+conception of greatness. If indeed anyone were to maintain that Marot
+was not an excellent and admirable poet he would prove himself ignorant
+of the language in which Marot wrote, but let the most sympathetic turn
+to what is best in his verse, let them turn for instance to that
+charming lyric: "A sa Dame Malade" or to "The Ballad of Old Time," or
+even to that really large and riotous chorus of the vine, and they will
+see that it is the kind of thing which is amplified by music, and which
+sometimes demands the aid of music to appear at all. They will see quite
+plainly that Marot took pleasure in playing with words and arranged them
+well, felt keenly and happily, played a full lyre, but they will doubt
+whether poetry was necessarily for him the most serious business of
+life.
+
+Why, then, has he taken the place claimed for him, and why is he firmly
+secure in the place of master of the ceremonies, as it were, to that
+glorious century whose dawn he enjoyed and helped to beautify?
+
+I will explain it.
+
+It is because he is national. He represents not what is most this, or
+most that--"highest", "noblest", "truest", "best", and all the rest of
+it--in his countrymen, but rather what they have most in common.
+
+Did you meet him to-day in the Strand you would know at once that you
+had to do with a Frenchman, and, probably, with a kind of poet.
+
+He was short, square in the shoulders, tending in middle age to fatness.
+A dark hair and beard; large brown eyes of the south; a great, rounded,
+wrinkled forehead like Verlaine's; a happy mouth, a nose very
+insignificant, completed him. When we meet somewhere, under cypress
+trees at last, these great poets of a better age, and find Ronsard a
+very happy man, Du Bellay, a gentleman; then Malherbe, for all that he
+was a northerner, we may mistake, if we find him, for a Catalonian.
+Villon, however Parisian, will appear the Bohemian that many cities have
+produced; Charles of Orleans may seem at first but one of that very high
+nobility remnants of which are still to be discovered in Europe. But
+when we see Marot, our first thought will certainly be, as I have said,
+that we have come across a Frenchman; and the more French for a touch of
+the commonplace.
+
+See how French was the whole career!
+
+Whatever is new attracts him. The reformation attracts him. It was
+_chic_ to have to do with these new things. He had the French ignorance
+of what was foreign and alien; the French curiosity to meddle with it
+because it had come from abroad; the French passion for opposing, for
+struggling;--and beneath it all the large French indifference to the
+problem of evil (or whatever you like to call it), the changeless French
+content in certitude, upon which ease, indeed, as upon a rock, the
+Church of Gaul has permanently stood and will continuously repose.
+
+He has been a sore puzzle to the men who have never heard of these
+things. Calvin (that appalling exception who had nothing in him of
+France except lucidity) could make neither head nor tail of him. Geneva
+was glad enough to chaunt through the nose his translations of the
+Psalms, but it was woefully puzzled at his salacity, and the town was
+very soon too hot to hold him in his exile. And as for the common,
+partial, and ignorant histories of France, written in our tongue, they
+generally make him a kind of backslider, who might have been a Huguenot
+(and--who knows?--have thrown the Sacrament to beasts with the best of
+them) save that, unhappily, he did not persevere. Whatever they say of
+him (and some have hardly heard of him) one thing is quite certain: that
+they do not understand him, and that if they did they would like him
+still less than they do.
+
+He was national in the rapidity of the gesture of his mind as in that of
+his body: in his being attracted here and there, watching this and that
+suddenly, like a bird.
+
+He was national in his power of sharp recovery from any emotion back
+into his normal balance.
+
+He was national in that he depended upon companions, and stood for a
+crowd, and deplored all isolation. He was national in that he had
+nothing strenuous about him, and that he was amiable, and if he had
+heard of "earnest" men, he would have laughed at them a little, as
+people who did not see the whole of life.
+
+He was especially national (and it is here that the poet returns) in
+that most national of all things--a complete sympathy with the
+atmosphere of the native tongue. Thus men debate a good deal upon the
+poetic value of Wordsworth, but it is certain, when one sees how bathed
+he is in the sense of English words, their harmony and balance, that the
+man is entirely English, that no other nation could have produced him,
+and that he will be most difficult for foreigners to understand. You
+will not translate into French or any other language the simplicity of:
+
+    "Glimpses that should make me less forlorn."
+
+Nor can you translate, so as to give its own kind of grandeur
+
+    "Et arrivoit pour bénistre la vigne."
+
+Apart from his place in letters, see how national he is in what he does!
+
+He buys two bits of land, he talks of them continually, sees to them,
+visits them. They are quite little bits of land. He calls one Clément,
+and the other Marot! Here is a whimsicality you would not find, I think,
+among another people.
+
+He has the hatred of "sprawling" in his particular art which is the
+chief aesthetic character of the French; but he has the tendency to
+excess in opinion or in general expression which is their chief
+political fault.
+
+It is thus, then, that I think he should be regarded and that I would
+desire to present him. It is thus, I am sure, that he should be read if
+one is to know why he has taken so great a place in the reverence and
+the history of the French people.
+
+And it is in this aspect that he may worthily introduce much greater
+things, the Pléiade and Ronsard.
+
+
+
+                         OF COURTING LONG AGO.
+                   (_The Eighth of the Roundels._)
+
+This is a fair enough specimen of Marot at his daily gait: an easy
+versifier "on a theme" and no more. I have said that it is unjust to
+judge him on that level, and I have said why; but I give this to give
+the man as he moved domestically to the admiration of the court and of
+his friends in a time which missed, for example, the epic character of
+the last six lines of "Le Beau Tettin," and which hardly comprehended of
+what value his pure lyric enthusiasms would be to a sadder and drier
+posterity.
+
+
+                      _OF COURTING LONG AGO._
+
+      _Au bon vieulx temps un train d'amour regnoit,
+    Qui sans grand art et dons se démenoit,
+    Si qu'un boucquet donné d'amour profonde
+    S'estoit donné toute la terre ronde:
+    Car seulement au cueur on se prenoit._
+
+      _Et si, par cas, à jouyr on venoit,
+    Sçavez-vous bien comme on s'entretenoit?
+    Vingt ans, trente ans; cela duroit ung monde
+            Au bon vieulx temps._
+
+      _Or est perdu ce qu'amour ordonnoit,
+    Rien que pleurs fainctz, rien que changes on n'oyt.
+    Qui vouldra donc qu'à aymer je me fonde,
+    Il fault, premier, que l'amour on refonde
+    Et qu'on la meine ainsi qu'on la menoit
+            Au bon vieulx temps._
+
+
+
+                                 NOËL.
+                    (_The Second of the Chansons._)
+
+
+But here, upon the contrary, is the spontaneity of his happy mind; it
+suggests a song; one can hardly read it without a tune in one's head, so
+simple is it and so purely lyrical: there is a touch of the dance in it,
+too.
+
+In these little things of Marot, which are neither learned (and he
+boasted of learning) nor set and dry (and his friends especially praised
+his precision), a great poet certainly appears--in short revelations,
+but still appears. Unfortunately there are not enough of them.
+
+That he thought "like a Southerner," as I have maintained and as I shall
+show by a further example, is made the more probable from the value he
+lends to the feminine e. The excellent rhythm of this poem you will only
+get by giving the feminine e the value of a drawn out syllable:
+
+                                "L'effect
+                                Est faict:
+                                La bel-le
+                                Pucel-le," etc.
+
+So Spaniards, Gascons, Provençaux, Italians, rhyme, and all those of the
+south who have retained their glorious "a's" and "o's".
+
+As for the spirit of it--God bless him!--it is a subject for perpetual
+merriment to think of such a man's being taken for a true Huguenot and
+enmeshed, even for a while, in the nasty cobweb of Geneva. But in the
+last thing I shall quote, when he is Bacchic for the vine, you will see
+it still more.
+
+                 _NOËL._
+
+      _Une pastourelle gentille
+    Et ung bergier en ung verger
+    L'autrhyer en jouant à la bille
+    S'entredisoient, pour abréger:
+            Roger
+            Bergier
+            Legière
+            Bergière,
+      C'est trop à la bille joué;
+      Chantons Noé, Noé, Noé._
+
+      _Te souvient-il plus du prophète
+    Qui nous dit cas de si hault faict,
+    Que d'une pucelle parfaicte
+    Naistroit ung enfant tout parfaict?
+            L'effect
+            Est faict:
+            La belle
+            Pucelle
+      A eu ung filz du ciel voué:
+      Chantons Noé, Noé, Noé._
+
+
+
+                            TWO EPIGRAMS.
+       (_The 41st of the First Book and the 46th of the Second._)
+
+These two epigrams are again but examples of the readiness, the wit, the
+hard surface of Marot, and they needed no more poetry than was in
+Voltaire or Swift, but they needed style. It was this absolute and
+standard style which his contemporaries chiefly remarked in him: the
+marvel was, that being mainly such an epigrammatist and scholar, and
+praised and supported only in that guise, he should have carried in him
+any, or rather so much, fire.
+
+The first was his reply to a Dixaine the king's sister had sent him. The
+second explains itself.
+
+
+                           _TWO EPIGRAMS._
+
+      _Mes créanciers, qui de dixains n'ont cure,
+    Ont leu le vostre; et sur ce leur ay dict:
+    "Sire Michel, sire Bonaventure,
+    La soeur du Roy a pour moy faict ce dit."
+    Lors eulx cuydans que fusse en grand crédict,
+    M'ont appelé monsieur à cry et cor,
+    Et m'a valu vostre escript aultant qu'or;
+    Car promis m'ont non seulement d'attendre,
+    Mais d'en prester, foy de marchant, encor,
+    Et j'ay promis, foy de Clément, d'en prendre._
+
+
+
+      _Paris, tu m'as faict maints alarmes,
+    Jusque à me poursuivre à la mort:
+    Je n'ay que blasonné tes armes:
+    Un ver, quand on le presse, il mord!
+    Encor la coulpe m'en remord.
+    Ne scay de toy comment sera;
+    Mais de nous deux le diable emport
+    Celuy qui recommencera._
+
+
+
+                         TO HIS LADY IN SICKNESS.
+                          (_The 16th Epistle._)
+
+It is the way this is printed that makes some miss its value. It is,
+like all the best he wrote, a song; it needs the varying time of human
+expression, the effect of tone, the repose and the re-lifting of musical
+notes; illuminated thus it greatly charmed, and if any one would know
+the order of such a tune, why, it should follow the punctuation: a
+cessation at the third line; a rise of rapid accents to the thirteenth,
+and then a change; the last three lines of the whole very much fuller
+and strong.
+
+So I would hear it sung on a winter evening in an old house in Auvergne,
+and re-enter the sixteenth century as I heard.
+
+                        _TO HIS LADY IN SICKNESS._
+
+
+                              _Ma mignonne,
+                              Je vous donne
+                              Le bon jour.
+                              Le séjour,
+                              C'est prison.
+                              Guérison
+                              Recouvrez,
+                              Puis ouvrez
+                              Vostre porte
+                              Et qu'on sorte
+                              Vistement;
+                              Car Clément
+                              Le vous mande.
+                              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,
+                              Santé 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 gods of the Renaissance,
+the old gods 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 chanté d'amours,
+    Ce sont clamours, chantons de la Serpette,
+    Tous vignerons ont à elle recours,
+    C'est leur secours pour tailler la vignette.
+    O serpilette, ô 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, trempé en bon vin vieulx,
+    Pour tailler mieulx et estre plus vaillante.
+    Bacchus le vante et dit qu'elle est séante
+    Et convenante à Noé le bonshom
+    Pour en tailler la vigne en la saison._
+
+      _Bacchus alors chappeau de treille avoit,
+    Et arrivoit pour bénistre la vigne;
+    Avec flascons Silénus le suivoit,
+    Lequel beuvoit aussi droict qu'une ligne;
+    Puis il trépigne, 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
+multitude 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 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.
+
+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.
+
+He was Norman. Right of that north whence the vigour, though not the
+inspiration, of the Renaissance had proceeded, and into which it
+returned. Caen gave him birth, and still remembers him. Normans still
+edit his works--and dedicate these books to the town which also bred
+Corneille. Norman, learned with that restrained but vigorous learning of
+the province, he was also of the province in his blood, for he came of
+one of those fixed families whose heads held great estates all round
+Falaise, and whose cadets branched off into chances abroad: one of the
+Boughtons, in Kent, is still "Boughton Malherbe[1]."
+
+[Footnote 1: Not from the Conquest. It is near Charing, originally de
+Braose land, but an heiress married a Malherbe in the early twelfth
+century.]
+
+He was poor. His father, who held one of those magistracies which the
+smaller nobility bought or inherited, had not known where to turn in the
+turmoil of the central century. In a moment of distress he called
+himself Huguenot when that party seemed to triumph, and Malherbe in
+anger against the apostasy went down south, a boy of nineteen, and
+fought as a soldier--but chiefly duels; for he loved that sport. He lay
+under a kind of protection from the great Catholic houses, though still
+poor, till in 1601--he was a man of forty-six--Henri IV heard of him. In
+all these years he had worked at the rule of poetry like an artisan,
+thinking of nothing else, not even of fame. Those who surrounded him
+took it for granted that he was a master critic--a sort of judge without
+appeal, but it was a very little provincial circle surrounding a very
+unimportant house in Provence. Thus, careless it seems of everything
+except that "form of language" which was with him a passion, like the
+academic or theological passions, he was astonished on coming to Paris
+in 1605 to discover how suited such a pre-occupation was to such a time,
+and how rapidly he became the first name in contemporary letters. Of men
+who poured out verse the age was satiated; of men who could seize the
+language at this turn in its fortune, fix it and give it rules, the age
+had no knowledge till he came: the age fastened upon him, and insisted
+upon making him a master.
+
+A full twenty years from 1607 he governed the transformation, not of
+thought, for that he little changed, but of method and of expression. He
+decided what should be called the typical metres, the alternative of
+feminine and masculine in verse, the order of emphasis, the proportion
+of inversion tolerable, the propriety, the modernity, the archaism of
+words. It is a function to our time meaningless and futile: to such a
+period as that, indispensable and even noble. He interpreted and
+published the national sentiment upon this major thing, the architecture
+of letters. The power of his mind, tortured and insufficient in actual
+production, was supreme in putting forth clearly and finally that
+criticism which ran as an unspoken and obscure current of opinion in the
+mind of his age. This was his glory, and it was true.
+
+His dryness was extraordinary. In a life of seventy-two years, during
+which he wrote and erased incessantly, he, the poet, wrote just so much
+verse as will fill in large type a little pocket volume of 250 pages; to
+be accurate, forty-three lines a year. Of this scraping and pumice stone
+in the mind a better example than his verse is to be found in his
+letters. A number remain. They might seem to be written by two different
+men! Half a dozen are models of that language he adored--they cost him,
+to our knowledge, many days--the rest are slipshod notes that any man
+might write, for he thought they would not survive, and, indeed, the
+majority of his editors have had the piety to suppress them.
+
+No one will understand Malherbe who only hears of how, like a dusty
+workman, he cut and polished, and so fixed the new jewel of letters. In
+our less happy age the academic spirit is necessarily associated with a
+lethargic stupidity. In his it was not so. His force, by which this work
+was carried through, lay in a character of penetration. His face
+expresses it. His very keen and ready eyes, his high lifted brow, his
+sharp nose, and the few active lines of his cheek and forehead, the
+poise of his head, the disdain of his firm mouth, all build him back
+alive for us. His talk, which stammered in its volubility, was incessant
+and varied; his temper ready; his bodily command of gesture and
+definition perfect in old age: he was of good metal all those years.
+
+Of his intense Toryism, his vivacity, his love of arms, his tenacity of
+perception, Racan gives us in his biography an admirable picture. Just
+before he died his son was killed in a duel--he, at seventy-two, desired
+passionately to kill the adversary. "Gambling," he said, "my pence of
+life against the gold of his twenty-five years." He had wit, and he
+hated well--hating men after death:
+
+    Here richly with ridiculous display
+    Killed by excess was Wormwood laid away,
+    While all of his acquaintance sneered and slanged,
+    I wept: for I had longed to see him hanged.
+
+His zeal for his tongue was real. As he lay upon his death-bed making
+his confession after so vigorous a life, he heard his nurse say
+something to herself which sounded ungrammatical and, turning round from
+the priest, he put her right in a manner most violent and sudden. His
+confessor, startled, said: "The time is not relevant". "All times are
+relevant!" he answered, sinking back. "I will defend with my last breath
+the purity and grandeur of the French tongue."
+
+To such a man the meaning of the solution at which his people had
+arrived after a century of civil war lay, above all, in their ancient
+religion. On that converged those deeper and more permanent things in
+his soul of which even his patriotism and his literary zeal were but the
+surface. In the expression of that final solution his verse, which was
+hardly that of a poet, rises high into poetry; under the heat and
+pressure of his faith, single lines here and there have crystallized
+into diamonds. By far the most vigorous of so many frigid odes is the
+battle cry addressed by him in old age to Louis XIII setting out against
+La Rochelle. He visited that siege, but had the misfortune to die a bare
+week before the fall of the city. The most powerful of his sonnets, or
+rather the only powerful one, is that in which he calls to Our Lord for
+vengeance against the men who killed his son. Catholicism in its every
+effect, political and personal, as it were literary too, possessed the
+man, so that in ending the types of the French Renaissance with him you
+see how the terms in which ultimately the French express themselves are
+and will remain religious. The last two lines of his most famous and
+most Catholic poem have about them just that sound which saves them, in
+spite of their too simple words, from falling into the vulgar
+commonplace of vague and creedless men. In writing them down one seems
+to be writing down the fate of the great century now tamed, alas! and
+ordered, as must be the violence of over-human things:--
+
+    Vouloir ce que Dieu veut est la seule Science
+              Qui nous met en repos.
+
+
+
+                                 EXTRACTS.
+
+     (_From the "Ode to Louis XIII setting out against La Rochelle,"
+                and the "Sonnet on his son's death."_)
+
+It has been remarked that Malherbe in his most vigorous years
+deliberately employed the strength of his mind to the repression of
+emotion in his verse, and used it only to fashion, guide, control, and
+at last fix permanently the rules of the language. It is certainly true
+that as his bodily vigour declined, a certain unexpected anger and
+violence enters into his verse, to the great relief of us moderns: not
+to that of his contemporaries.
+
+Of this feature in him, the two following extracts are sufficient proof.
+They were written, the first at the close of his seventy-second, the
+other at the entry of his seventy-third year. In each, something close
+to his heart was at issue, and in each he gives some vent--far more than
+had been his wont--to passion.
+
+The first is a cry to Louis XIII to have done with the Huguenot. It was
+written to the camp before La Rochelle. I know of nothing in French
+literature which more expresses the intense current of national feeling
+against the nobility and rich townsmen who had attempted to warp the
+national tradition and who had re-introduced into French life the
+element which France works perpetually to throw out as un-European,
+ill-cultured and evil. Indeed, the reading of it is of more value to the
+comprehension of the national attitude than any set history you may
+read.
+
+The second is in its way a thing equally religious and equally catholic.
+This call for vengeance to God was not only an expression of anger
+called forth by his son's death, it was also, and very largely, the
+effect of a reaction against the ethics of Geneva: an attack on the
+idolatry at once of meekness and of fatality which was to him so
+intolerable a corruption of the Christian religion.
+
+There is some doubt as to whether it is his last work. I believe it to
+be so; but Blaise, in his excellent edition, prints the dull and
+unreadable ode to Lagade later, and ascribes it to the same year.
+
+                         _ODE TO LOUIS XIII._
+
+    _Fais choir en sacrifice au démon de la France
+    Les fronts trop élevés de ces ames d'enfer;
+    Et n'épargne contre eux, pour notre délivrance,
+              Ni le feu ni le fer.
+
+    Assez de leurs complots l'infidèle malice
+    A nourri le désordre et la sédition:
+    Quitte le nom de Juste, ou fais voir ta justice
+              En leur punition.
+
+    Le centième décembre a les plaines ternies,
+    Et le centième avril les a peintes de fleurs,
+    Depuis que parmi nous leurs brutales manies
+              Ne causent que des pleurs.
+
+    Dans toutes les fureurs des siècles de tes pères,
+    Les monstres les plus noirs firent-ils jamais rien
+    Que l'inhumanité de ces coeurs de vipères
+              Ne renouvelle au tien?
+
+    Par qui sont aujourd'hui tant de villes désertes,
+    Tant de grands bâtiments en masures changes,
+    Et de tant de chardons les campagnes couvertes,
+              Que par ces enrages?
+
+    Marche, va les détruire, éteins-en la semence,
+    Et suis jusqu'à leur fin ton courroux généreux,
+    Sans jamais écouter ni pitié ni clémence
+              Qui te parle pour eux.
+
+    Toutes les autres morts n'ont mérite ni marque;
+    Celle-ci porte seule un éclat radieux,
+    Qui fait revivre l'homme, et le met de la barque
+              A la table des dieux._
+
+
+
+                     _SONNET ON HIS SON'S DEATH._
+
+    _Que mon fils ait perdu sa dépouille mortelle,
+    Ce fils qui fut si brave, et que j'aimai si fort,
+    Je ne l'impute point à l'injure du sort,
+    Puis que finir à l'homme est chose naturelle.
+
+    Mais que de deux marauds la surprise infidèle
+    Ait terminé ses jours d'une tragique mort,
+    En cela ma douleur n'a point de réconfort,
+    Et tous mes sentiments sont d'accord avec elle.
+
+    O mon Dieu, mon Sauveur, puisque, par la raison,
+    Le trouble de mon ame étant sans guérison,
+    Le voeu de la vengeance est un voeu légitime,
+
+    Fais que de ton appui je sois fortifié;
+    Ta justice t'en prie, et les auteurs du crime
+    Sont fils de ces bourreaux qui t'ont crucifié._
+
+
+
+              EXTRACTS FROM THE "CONSOLATION OF DU PERRIER."
+
+These stanzas, which are among the best-known as they are, in the
+opinion of many, the dullest, in French literature, serve well to close
+this book.
+
+One verse at least (the fourth) is most legitimately famous, though it
+is hackneyed from the constant repetition of fools. For the rest a
+certain simplicity, a great precision, may or may not atone for their
+deliberate coldness.
+
+What is certain is that, poetry or not, they admirably express the
+spirit of his pen and its prodigious effect. They express the classical
+end of the French Renaissance with as much weight and hardness as the
+great blank walls of stone that were beginning to show in the rebuilding
+of Paris. It is for this quality that I have printed them here, using
+them as the definite term of that long, glorious, and uncertain phase in
+European letters.
+
+
+                  _THE "CONSOLATION OF DU PERRIER."_
+
+    _Ta douleur, du Perrier, sera donc éternelle?
+      Et les tristes discours
+    Que te met en l'esprit l'amitié paternelle
+      L'augmenteront toujours?_
+
+    _Le malheur de ta fille au tombeau descendue
+      Par un commun trépas,
+    Est-ce quelque dédale où ta raison perdue
+      Ne se retrouve pas?_
+
+    _Je sais de quels appas son enfance étoit pleine,
+      Et n'ai pas entrepris,
+    Injurieux ami, de soulager ta peine
+      Avecque son mépris._
+
+    _Mais elle étoit du monde, où les plus belles choses
+      Ont le pire destin;
+    Et rose elle a vécu ce que vivent les roses
+      L'espace d'un matin._
+
+    _Puis quand ainsi seroit que, selon ta prière,
+      Elle auroit obtenu
+    D'avoir en cheveux blancs terminé sa carrière,
+      Qu'en fût-il avenu?_
+
+    _Penses-tu que, plus vieille, en la maison céleste
+      Elle eût eu plus d'accueil,
+    Ou qu'elle eût moins senti la poussière funeste
+      Et les vers du cercueil?_
+
+    _De moi, déja deux fois d'une pareille foudre
+      Je me suis vu perclus;
+    Et deux fois la raison m'a si bien fait résoudre,
+      Qu'il ne m'en souvient plus._
+
+    _Non qu'il ne me soit mal que la tombe posséde
+      Ce qui me fut si cher;
+    Mais en un accident qui n'a point de reméde,
+      Il n'en faut point chercher._
+
+    _La Mort a des rigueurs à nulle autre pareilles:
+      On a beau la prier;
+    La cruelle qu'elle est se bouche les oreilles,
+      Et nous laisse crier._
+
+    _Le pauvre en sa cabane, où le chaume le couvre,
+      Est sujet à ses lois;
+    Et la garde qui veille aux barrières du Louvre
+      N'en défend point nos rois._
+
+    _De murmurer contre elle et perdre patience,
+      Il est mal à propos;
+    Vouloir ce que Dieu veut est la seule science
+      Qui nous met en repos._
+
+    "_Vouloir ce que Dieu veut est la seule science
+              Qui nous met en repos._"
+
+
+
+
+                                NOTES.
+
+
+                         CHARLES OF ORLEANS.
+
+THE COMPLAINT.
+
+Line 5. _Prins._ An inaccurate pedantic past participle of _prendre_.
+
+Line 14. _Faulse._ There is to be noted here and elsewhere throughout
+these extracts, until the modern spelling at the close of the period,
+the redundant "l" in many words. It was an effect of pure pedantry. The
+latin "l" had become _u_ in northern French. _Falsa_ made, naturally,
+"Fausse." The partial learning of the later middle ages reintroduced an
+"l" which was not known to be transformed, but was thought omitted.
+
+Line 24. _Liesse._ One of the commonest words of this epoch, lost to
+modern French. It means joy=_laetitia_.
+
+Line 25. Note the gender of "Amour," feminine even in the singular
+throughout the middle ages and renaissance--right up to the seventeenth
+century.
+
+THE TWO ROUNDELS OF SPRING.
+
+I
+
+Line 1. _Fourriers._ The servants who go before to find lodging. The
+term survives in French military terminology. The _Fourriers_ are the
+non-commissioned officers and party who go forward and mark the
+Billeting of a regiment.
+
+Line 9. _Pieça=il y a pièce_; "lately". _Cf._ _naguère_="_il n'y a
+guère...."_
+
+Line 11. _Prenez pais_="take the fields," begone.
+
+Line 19. Note "_Chant_," the regular form of the subjunctive=_Cantet_.
+The only latin vowel preserved after the tonic syllable is a=French e
+(mute). Thus _contat_="chante" which form has in modern French usurped
+the subjunctive.
+
+Line 23. _Livrée_="Liberata," _i.e._, things given out. A term
+originally applied not only to clothing, but to the general allowance of
+the king's household. Hence our word "livery."
+
+
+THE FAREWELL.
+
+Line 2. _Chiere lie._ "Happy countenance." _Chiere_ here is the
+substantive, _lie_=_laeta_, is the adjective. _Bonne chère_ means "a
+good time" where _chère_ is an old word for "head" (Greek: kara).
+
+Line 5. _Baillie_=Bailliwick, "For Age that has me now within her
+bounds."
+
+Line 7. _Mye._ "Crumb". "I am not a whit (not a crumb) with her (_Joie_)
+to-day."
+
+Line 15. "Well braced," literally "well girthed" (as a horse is).
+
+
+
+                               VILLON.
+
+THE DEAD LADIES.
+
+Stanza 1, line 1. Note the redundant negative; it is characteristic of
+mediaeval French, as of all primitive work, that the general suggestion
+of doubt is sufficient to justify a redundant negative.
+
+Line 2. _Flora_, etc. It is worth while knowing who these women were.
+_Flora_ is Juvenal's Flora (Sat. II. 9), a legend in the university. Of
+_Archipiada_ I know nothing. _Thaïs_ was certainly the Egyptian
+courtesan turned anchoress and canonized, famous in the middle ages and
+revived to-day in the repulsive masterpiece of M. Anatole France.
+_Elois_ is, of course, _Heloïse_, and _Esbaillart_ is Abelard. The
+queen, who in the legend had Buridan (and many others) drowned, was the
+Dowager of Burgundy that lived in the Tour de Nesle, where the Palais
+Mazarin is now, and had half the university for a lover: in sober
+history she founded that college of Burgundy from which the École de
+Médecine is descended; the legend about her is first heard of (save in
+this poem) in 1471, from the pen of a German in Leipzig. _Blanche_ may
+be Blanche of Castille, but more likely she was a vision of Villon's
+own, for what did St. Louis' mother ever sing? _Berte_ is the legendary
+mother of Charlemagne in the Epics; _Beatris_ is any Beatrice you
+choose, for they have all died. _Allis_ may just possibly be one of the
+Troubadour heroines, more likely she is here introduced for rhyme and
+metre; _Haremburgis_ is strictly historical: she was the Heiress of
+Maine who married Foulque of Anjou in 1110 and died in 1126: an
+ancestress, therefore, of the Plantagenets. _Jehanne_ is, of course,
+Joan of Arc.
+
+Line 8. _D'Antan_ is _not_ "Yester-year." It is "Ante annum," all time
+past before _this_ year. Rossetti's "Yester-year" moreover, is an absurd
+and affected neologism; "Antan" is an excellent and living French word.
+
+Stanza II, line 2. Note the pronunciation of "Moyne" to rhyme (more or
+less) with "eine": the oi, ai and ei sounds were very similar till the
+sixteenth century at earliest. They are interchangeable in many popular
+provincialisms and in some words, _e.g._, Fouet, pronounced "Foit" the
+same tendency survives. The transition began in the beginning of the
+seventeenth century as we learn from Vaugelas: and the influence towards
+the modern sound came from the Court.
+
+Stanza III, line 2. _Seraine_="Syren."
+
+Line 5. "_Jehanne_", "_Jehan_", in spite of the classical survival in
+their spelling, were monosyllables from the earliest times.
+
+Line 7. The "_elles_" here would not scan but for the elided "e" in
+"_souv'raine_" at the end of the line. In some editions "_ils_" is found
+and _souveraine_ is spelt normally. _Ils_ and _els_ for a feminine
+plural existed in the middle ages.
+
+_Envoi._ The envoi needs careful translation. The "que" of the third
+line="sans que" and the whole means, "Do not ask this week or this year
+where they are, _without_ letting this refrain haunt you". "Que" might
+possibly mean "de peur que", did not the whole sense of the poem forbid
+such an interpretation.
+
+AN EXCERPT FROM THE GRANT TESTAMENT.
+
+Stanza 75, line 4. A charming example of those "flashes" which reveal
+Villon.
+
+Stanza 76, line 2. Note the spelling of _Grant_ in the feminine without
+an _e_. Adjectives of the third declension whose feminine was not
+distinguishable in Latin took no "e" in early French. A survival of this
+is found in grand' rue, grand' messe, etc.
+
+Line 5. _Grant erre_, "quickly", and the whole line reads: "Let it (my
+body) be delivered to it (luy=la terre) quickly," the "erre" here is
+from the popular late Latin "_iterare_"="_iter facere_". It survives in
+the nautical idiom "reprendre son erre"="to get under weigh again."
+
+Line 7. "_Erre_" here comes, on the contrary, from _errare_, to make a
+mistake, to err.
+
+Stanza 77, line 4. _Maillon._ Swaddling clothes.
+
+Line 5. _Boullon_, scrape. The two lines are obscure but seem to read:
+"He has got me out of many a scrape which gave him no joy" (_esioye_
+from _esjouir_=_rejouir_).
+
+Line 7 and 8. These are obscure but apparently="And beseech him on my
+knees not to forsake all joy on that account."
+
+Stanza 78, line 2. "_Le Romman du Pet au Deable_." The Pet au Deable was
+a great stone at the door of a private house in the university. The
+students took it away and all Paris fought over the matter. The "Roman"
+was a set of verses, now lost, which Villon wrote on the quarrel.
+
+Line 3. _Guy Tabarie_ who _grossa_ (wrote out), these verses was a
+friend of Villon's: soon hanged.
+
+Line 5. _Soubz._ The "b" is pedantic, the _ou_ indicates of itself the
+loss of the _b_. The "z" (and the "s" in the modern _sous_) are due to
+the derivation not from _sub_ but _subtus_.
+
+THE BALLAD OF OUR LADY.
+
+Stanza 2, line 3. _Egypcienne._ St. Mary of Egypt.
+
+Line 4. _Theophilus._ This was that clerk who sold his soul to the Devil
+and whom Our Lady redeemed. You may find the whole story sculptured on
+the Tympanum of the exquisite northern door of Notre Dame in Paris.
+
+Line 8. _Vierge Portant_="Virgin that bore a son".
+
+Stanza 3, line 4. _Luz_="luthus". "S" becomes "z."
+
+The Envoi. Note the Acrostic "Villon" in the first letters of the first
+six lines. It is a trick he played more than once.
+
+THE DEAD LORDS.
+
+Stanza 1, line 1. _Calixte._ These names are of less interest. _Calixte_
+was Pope Calixtus III, Alphonso Borgia, who died in 1458--in Villon's
+twenty-sixth year. _Alphonse_ is Alphonso V of Arragon, who died in that
+same year. The _Duc de Bourbon_ is Charles the First of Bourbon, who
+died at the end of the year 1456, "gracieux" because his son protected
+Villon. _Artus_ (Arthur) of Brittany is that same Richemont who
+recaptured Paris from Willoughby. Charles VII is Charles VII. The _Roy
+Scotiste_ is James II, who died in 1460: the _Amethyst_ half of his
+face was a birthmark. The _King of Cyprus_ is probably John III, who
+died in that same fatal year, 1458. Pedants will have it that the _King
+of Spain_ is John II of Castille, who died in 1454--but it is a better
+joke if it means nobody at all. _Lancelot_ is Vladislas of Bohemia, who
+died in 1457. _Cloquin_ is Bertrand de Guesclin who led the reconquest.
+_The Count Daulphin_ of Auvergne is doubtful; _Alençon_ is presumably
+the Alençon of Joan of Arc's campaign, who still survived, and is called
+"feu" half in ridicule, because in 1458 he had lost his title and lands
+for treason.
+
+Stanza 2, line 3. _Amatiste_=amethyst.
+
+Stanza 3, line 7. _Tayon_=Ancestor. "_Etallum._" Latin "_Stallio_."
+
+THE DIRGE.
+
+Line 1. _Cil_=celui-ci. The Latin "_ecce illum_."
+
+Line 3. _Escuelle_=bowl. "With neither bowl nor platter."
+
+Line 4. Note again the constant redundant negative of the populace in
+this scholar: "Had never, no--not a sprig of parsley."
+
+Line 5. _Rez_=ras, cropped.
+
+
+
+                                 MAROT.
+
+OF COURTING LONG AGO.
+
+Line 5. _On se prenoit_, one attacked--"it was but the heart one
+sought."
+
+Line 11. _Fainctz_=sham; "_changes_" is simply like the English
+"changes": the form survives in the idiom: "donner le change."
+
+Line 13. _Refonde_=recast.
+
+NOËL.
+
+Verse 1, line 3. _L'Autre hyer_=alterum heri, "t'other day."
+
+Line 10. _Noé._ The tendency to drop final letters, especially the _l_,
+is very marked in popular patois, and this is, of course, a song based
+on popular language. Most French peasants north of the Loire would still
+say "Noé" for "Noël." _Noël_ is, of course, _Natalem_ (diem).
+
+Verse 2, line 2. _Cas de si hault faict_=so great a matter.
+
+
+TWO EPIGRAMS. Epigram 1, line 2. _Vostre._ Marguerite of Navarre. As I
+have remarked, in the text, she had sent him a Dixaine (some say he
+wrote it himself). This one is written in answer.--_Ay._ Note, till the
+verb grew over simple in the classical French of the seventeenth century
+there was no more need for the pronoun than in Latin. Thus Montaigne
+will omit the pronoun, but Malherbe never.
+
+Line 5. _Cuydans_=thinking (_Cogitare_=_Cogtare_=_Coyde_=_cuider_, the
+_oi_ became _ui_ by a common transition; _cf._ noctem, octem, noit,
+nuit, huit.) The word is now archaic.
+
+Line 9. _Encor._ Without the final e. This is not archaic but poetic
+licence. _Encore_="hanc horam," and a post tonic "am" in Latin always
+means a final mute e in French.
+
+Epigram 2, line 1. _Maint_ (now archaic) is a word of Teutonic origin,
+our _many_.
+
+Line 6. _Coulpe_=Culpam, of course; a fault.
+
+Line 9. _Emport_. Note the old subjunctive without the final e. _Vide
+supra_, on "_Chant_." The modern usage is incorrect. For the first
+conjugation making its subjunctive in _em_, should lose the final
+syllable in French: a post tonic _em_ always disappears. The modern
+habit of putting a final e to all subjunctives is due to a false analogy
+with verbs from the third conjugation. These made their subjunctive in
+_am_, a termination which properly becomes the mute e of French.
+
+TO HIS LADY IN SICKNESS.
+
+Line 4. _Sejour_=(here) "staying at home."
+
+Line 14, 15. _Friande de la bouche_, glutton.
+
+Line 17. _Danger._ The first meaning of "Danger" is simply "to be in
+lordship" (Dominicarium). The modern is the English "Danger." This is
+between the two; "held to your hurt."
+
+Line 26. _Doint._ This subjunctive should properly be _don_ (_donem_,
+post tonic _em_ is lost). The "oint" is from a false analogy with the
+fourth conjugation, as though the Latin had been _doniam_.
+
+THE VINEYARD SONG.
+
+Verse 1, line 2. _Clamours._ See how southern this is, with its
+Lanquedoc forms, "clamours" for "_clameurs_."
+
+Line 5. So are these diminutions all made up at random, as southern as
+can be, and note the tang of the verse, fit for a snapping of the
+fingers to mark the rapid time.
+
+Verse 3, line 2. _Bénistre._ The older form of _bénir_ from
+_Benedicere_; the _c_ between vowels at the end of the tonic syllable
+becomes _s_: the _t_ is added for euphony, to help one to pronounce the
+_s_.
+
+Line 3. _Silenus_ for _Silène_. Because the name was new, the Latin form
+is kept. The genius of the French, unlike that of modern English, is to
+absorb a foreign name (as we did once). Thus once we said "Anthony"
+"Tully": but Montaigne wrote "Cicero"--his descendants say "Ciceron."
+
+Line 4. _Aussi droict qu'une ligne_="right out of the flask." The flask
+held above one and the wine poured straight into the mouth. The happy
+south still know the way.
+
+Line 5. _Bigne_: a lump, a knock, a bruise.
+
+Line 6. _Guigne_=cherry.
+
+
+
+                                RONSARD.
+
+DIALOGUE WITH THE NINE SISTERS.
+
+Stanza 1, line 3. _Chef grison_=gray head. When he says "trente ans,"
+that is all rubbish, he was getting on for forty-three: it was written
+in 1567.
+
+Stanza 2, line 1. _Nocher_=pilot; rare but hardly archaic.
+
+Stanza 3, line 3. _Cependant_=meanwhile. The word is now seldom used in
+prose, save in the sense of "notwithstanding", "nevertheless".
+
+Stanza 5, line 1. _Loyer_=Condition of tenure.
+
+Line 2. _Ores_=Now that. Should be "_ore_" (horam). The parasitic "s"
+probably crept in by false analogy with the adverbs in "s."
+
+Stanza 6, line 1. _Lame_=tombstone. The word is no longer used.
+
+Line 4. See how, even in his lighter or prosaic manner, he cannot avoid
+great lines.
+
+Stanza 8, line 1. _Vela_=Voilà. Then follows that fine ending which I
+have put on the title-page of this book.
+
+"MIGNONNE ALLONS VOIR SI LA ROSE."
+
+Line 1. _Mignonne_ is, of course, his Cassandre: her personality was
+always known through his own verse. She was fifteen when he met her and
+her brown eyes: it was in 1546 at Blois, her birthplace, whither he had
+gone to visit the Court, during his scholar's life in Paris. He met her
+thus young when he himself was but in his twenty-third year, and all
+that early, violent, not over-tilled beginning of his poetry was
+illumined by her face. But as to who she was, by name I mean, remained
+long a matter of doubt. Binet would have it that her true name was
+Cassandre, and that its singularity inspired Ronsard. Brantôme called it
+"a false name to cover a true." Ronsard himself has written, "false or
+true, time conquering all things cannot efface it from the marble."
+There need have been no doubt. D'Aubigné's testimony is sufficient. She
+was a Mlle de Pie, and such was the vagary of Ronsard's life, that it
+was her niece, Diane Salviati de Taley whom in later life he espoused
+and nearly wed.
+
+Line 3. Note _Pourpre_, and in line 5 _Pourprée_ so in line 9 _Beautez_,
+and in the last line _Beauté_: so little did he fear repetition and so
+heartily could his power carry it.
+
+Line 4. _A point_: the language was still in flux. The phrase would
+require a negative _n'_ in modern French.
+
+Line 10, 11. _Marastre... puisqu'une..._ There is here an elliptical
+construction never found in later French. Harsh stepmother nature (whom
+I call harsh) since... etc.
+
+SONNETS FOR HÉLÈNE.
+
+Sonnet XLII, line 1. _Ocieuse_="otiosa," langorous.
+
+Line 5. _Ennuy_, in the sixteenth century meant something fuller than,
+and somewhat different from the word "ennui" to-day. It was a weariness
+which had in it some permanent chagrin.
+
+Line 8. _Pipe_, "cajoles": a word which (now that it is unusual) mars
+the effect of its meaning by its insignificant sound.
+
+Lines 8 and 9. Note _ioye_, _vraye_, a feminine "e" following another
+vowel is, since Malherbe, forbidden in the interior of a verse, unless
+elided.
+
+Line 11. _Ton mort_, "your ghost."
+
+Sonnet XLIII, line 6. _Desia_=dejà.
+
+Line 7. _De mon nom._ I have printed the line thus because Ronsard
+himself wished it so, and so corrected it with his own hand. But the
+original form is far finer "_Au bruit de Ronsard._"
+
+
+
+                              DU BELLAY.
+
+THE SONNET "HEUREUX QUI COMME ULYSSE."
+
+Line 3. _Usage._ A most powerful word in this slightly archaic sense:
+the experience of long travel: familiar knowledge of things seen.
+
+Line 12. _Loire._ This word has puzzled more than one editor. There are
+two rivers: the great river Loire, which is feminine, and the little
+Loir, which is masculine. Here Du Bellay spells the name of the great
+river, but puts it in the masculine gender. It has been imagined that he
+was talking of the smaller river. But he was not. The Loire alone has
+any connection with Liré or with his life, and as for the gender,
+strained as the interpretation may seem, I believe that Du Bellay
+deliberately used it in the parallel with the Tiber and the idea of the
+"Fleuve Paternel," to which he alludes so often elsewhere.
+
+Line 13. _Lyré._ The modern Liré, his birthplace, on the left bank of
+the Loire, just opposite Ancenis. As you go along the Poitiers road to
+the bridge it stands up on your right, just before the river.
+
+THE DOG.
+
+Line 1. _Motte_=a turf.
+
+Line 40. _Damoiselet._ Still used more or less in its old sense of a
+young man _armed_: not merely a young page or a cadet of the
+gentry,="like a little sentry."
+
+Line 43. _Anvie_=(of course) "envie."
+
+THE CAT.
+
+Line 22. _Rouët_=spinning-wheel.
+
+Line 26. _Panne_=the Italian _Panno_--cloth.
+
+Line 27. _Troigne_=the mouth and face of an animal, the muzzle.
+
+Line 32. _Chere_=(originally) "head" and one of the few old French words
+derived from Greek, but the first signification has long been lost. Here
+the phrase is equivalent to "faire bonne chere" which has for centuries
+been used proverbially for what we call "a good time." _V. supra_ in
+"The Farewell" of Charles of Orleans.
+
+
+
+                                MALHERBE.
+
+EXTRACTS FROM THE "ODE TO LOUIS XIII."
+
+Stanza 3, line 1. _Centième._ He dates the Huguenot trouble from a
+century. It may be said to have originated in the placards threatening
+the defilement of the Sacrament, placards which appeared in the streets
+of Paris in 1525.
+
+Stanza 2, line 3. _Le nom de Juste._ Louis XIII had no particular
+affectation of that title: it is rather a reminiscence of his distant
+collatoral and namesake who closed the fifteenth century.
+
+Last stanza, line 1. _Toutes les autres morts._ He has just been
+speaking of death in battle against the factions.
+
+SONNET ON HIS SON'S DEATH.
+
+Line 1. _Mon fils._ The only survivor of his many children, a young man,
+just called to the bar at Aix and passionately loved by his father, he
+bore the curious name of Marc-Anthony. A M. de Piles killed him in a
+duel, having for second his brother-in-law. The whole was an honourable
+bit of business, and the death such as men of honour must be prepared to
+risk: but Malherbe would see no reason and defamed the adversary.
+
+Line 9. _La Raison._ The idea runs all through Malherbe's work. It is
+his distinguishing note, and is the spirit which differentiates him so
+powerfully from the sixteenth century, that this stoical balance or
+regulator which he calls "La Raison," and which governed France for two
+hundred years, is his rule and text for verse and prose as well as for
+practical life. Even the grandeur to which it gave rise seemed to him
+accidental. He demanded "la raison" only, and felt the necessity of it
+in art as acutely as though its absence were something immoral.
+
+EXTRACTS FROM THE "CONSOLATION OF DU PERRIER."
+
+Stanza 1, line 1. _Duperrier._ A critic of sorts and a gentleman, living
+in Provence and perhaps of Provençal ancestry. The verses were written
+while Malherbe's fame was still local, two years before the king's visit
+had lifted him to Paris.
+
+Stanza 2, line 2. _Ta fille._ The child Marguerite. Her name does not
+appear in the poem nor in any letter; we have it from Racan.
+
+Stanza 10, line 3. _Et la garde, etc._ These two lines are quoted,
+sometimes, not often, by admirers who would prove that Malherbe was not
+incapable of colour or of warmth.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Avril, by H. Belloc
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