Avril. Essays on the French Renaissance/DuBellay

by Hilaire Belloc

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.