# Studies in the History of the Renaissance/Joachim du Bellay

JOACHIM DU BELLAY.
In the middle of the sixteenth century, when the spirit of the Renaissance was everywhere and people had begun to look back with distaste on the works of the middle age, the old Gothic manner had still one chance more in borrowing something from the rival which was about to supplant it. In this way there was produced, chiefly in France, a new and peculiar phase of taste with qualities and a charm of its own, blending the somewhat attenuated grace of Italian ornament with the general outlines of Northern design. It produced Château Gaillon—as you may still see it in the delicate engravings of Israel Silvestre, a Gothic donjon veiled faintly by a surface of delicate Italian traceries—Chenonceaux, Blois, Chambord and the church of Brou. In painting there came from Italy workmen like Maître Roux and the masters of the school of Fontainebleau, to have their later Italian voluptuousness attempered by the naïve and silvery qualities of the native style; and it was characteristic of these painters that they were most successful in painting on glass, that ​art so essentially mediæval. Taking it up where the middle age had left it, they found their whole work among the last subtleties of colour and line; and keeping within the true limits of their material they got quite a new order of effects from it, and felt their way to refinements on colour never dreamed of by those older workmen, the glass-painters of Chartres or Lemans. What is called the Renaissance in France is thus not so much the introduction of a wholly new taste ready made from Italy, but rather the finest and subtlest phase of the middle age itself, its last fleeting splendour and temperate Saint Martin's summer. In poetry, the Gothic spirit in France had produced a thousand songs; and in the Renaissance French poetry too did but borrow something to blend with a native growth, and the poems of Ronsard, with their ingenuity, their delicately figured surfaces, their slightness, their fanciful combinations of rhyme, are but the correlative of the traceries of the house of Jacques Cœur at Bourges or the 'Maison de Justice' at Rouen.
There was indeed something in the native French taste naturally akin to that Italian finesse. The characteristic of French work had always been a certain nicety, une netteté remarquable d' exécution. In the paintings of François Clouet, for example, or rather of the Clouets, for there was a whole family of ​them, painters remarkable for their resistance to Italian influences, there is a silveriness of colour and a clearness of expression, which distinguish them very definitely from their Flemish neighbours, Hemling or the Van Eycks. And this nicety is not less characteristic of old French poetry. A light, aerial delicacy, a simple elegance, une netteté remarquable d'exécution—these are essential characteristics alike of Villon's poetry, and of the 'Hours of Anne of Brittany.' They are characteristic too of a hundred French Gothic carvings and traceries. Alike in the old Gothic cathedrals and in their counterpart, the old Gothic chansons de geste, the rough and ponderous mass becomes, as if by passing for a moment into happier conditions or through a more gracious stratum of air, graceful and refined, like the carved ferneries on the granite church at Folgoat, or the lines which describe the fair priestly hands of Archbishop Turpin in the song of Roland; although below both alike there is a fund of mere Gothic strength or heaviness.
And Villon's songs and Clouet's painting are like these. It is the higher touch making itself felt here and there, betraying itself, like nobler blood in a lower stock, by a fine line or gesture or expression, the turn of a wrist, the tapering of a finger. In Ronsard's time that rougher element seemed likely ​to predominate. No one can turn over the pages of Rabelais without feeling how much need there was of softening, of castigation. To effect this softening is the object of the revolution in poetry which is connected with Ronsard's name. Casting about for the means of thus refining upon and saving the character of French literature, he accepted that influx of Renaissance taste which, leaving the buildings, the language, the art, the poetry of France, at bottom, what they were, old French Gothic still, gilds their surfaces with a strange delightful foreign aspect, passing over all that Northern land neither deeper nor more permanent than a chance effect of light. He reinforces, he doubles the French netteté by Italian finesse. Thereupon nearly all the force and all the seriousness of French work disappear; only the elegance, the aerial touch, the perfect manner remain. But this elegance, this manner, this netteté d'exécution are consummate, and have an unmistakeable æsthetic value.
So the old French chanson, which, like the old Northern Gothic ornament, though it sometimes refined itself into a sort of weird elegance was often at bottom something rude and formless, became in the hands of Ronsard a Pindaric ode. He gave it structure, a sustained system, strophe and antistrophe, and taught it a changefulness and variety of metre ​which keeps the curiosity always excited, the very aspect of which as it lies written on the page carries the eye lightly onwards, and of which this is a good instance:—
That is not by Ronsard, but by Remy Belleau, for Ronsard soon came to have a school. Six other poets threw in their lot with him in his literary revolution—this Remy Belleau, Antoine de Baif, Pontus de Tyard, Etienne Jodelle, Jean Daurat, and lastly Joachim du Bellay; and with that strange love of emblems which is characteristic of the time, which covered all the works of Francis the First with the salamander, and all the works of Henry the Second with the double crescent, and all the works of Anne of Brittany with the knotted cord, and so on, they called themselves the Pleiad, seven in all, although as happens with the celestial Pleiad, if you scrutinise ​this constellation of poets more carefully you may find there a great number of minor stars.
The first note of this literary revolution was struck by Joachim du Bellay in a pamphlet written at the early age of twenty-four, which coming to us through three centuries seems of yesterday, so full is it of those delicate critical distinctions which are sometimes supposed peculiar to modern writers. The book has for its title La Deffense et Illustration de la Langue Françoyse; and its problem is how to illustrate or ennoble the French language, to give it lustre. We are accustomed to speak of the varied critical and creative movement of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as the Renaissance, and because we have a single name for it we may sometimes fancy that there was more unity in the thing itself than there really was. Even the Reformation, that other great movement of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, had far less unity, far less of combined action, than is at first sight supposed; and the Renaissance was infinitely less united, less conscious of combined action, than the Reformation. But if anywhere the Renaissance became conscious, as a German philosopher might say, if ever it was understood as a systematic movement by those who took part in it, it is in this little book of Joachim du Bellay's, which it is impossible to read without feeling ​the excitement, the animation of change, of discovery. La prose, says M. Sainte-Beuve, chose remarquable et à l'inverse des autres langues, a toujours en le pas chez nous, sur notre poésie. Du Bellay's prose is perfectly transparent, flexible and chaste. In many ways it is a more characteristic example of the culture of the Pleiad than any of its verse; and one who loves the whole movement of which the Pleiad is a part for a weird foreign grace in it, and may be looking about for a true specimen of it, cannot have a better than Joachim du Bellay and this little treatise of his.
Du Bellay's object is to adjust the existing French culture to the rediscovered classical culture; and in discussing this problem and developing the theories of the Pleiad he has lighted upon many principles of permanent truth and applicability. There were some who despaired of the French language altogether, who thought it naturally incapable of the fulness and elegance of Greek and Latin—cette élégance et copie qui est en la langue Greque et Romaine—that science could be adequately discussed and poetry nobly written only in the dead languages. 'Those who speak thus,' says Du Bellay, 'make me think of those relics which one may only see through a little pane of glass and must not touch with one's hands. That is what these people do with all ​branches of culture, which they keep shut up in Greek and Latin books, not permitting one to see them otherwise, or transport them out of dead words into those which are alive, and wing their way daily through the mouths of men.' 'Languages,' he says again, 'are not born like plants and trees, some naturally feeble and sickly, others healthy and strong and apter to bear the weight of men's conceptions, but all their virtue is generated in the world of choice and men's free-will concerning them. Therefore, I cannot blame too strongly the rashness of some of our countrymen, who being anything rather than Greeks or Latins, depreciate and reject with more than stoical disdain everything written in French, nor can I express my surprise at the odd opinion of some learned men who think that our vulgar tongue is wholly incapable of erudition and good literature.'
It was an age of translations. Du Bellay himself translated two books of the Æneid, and other poetry old and new, and there were some who thought that the translation of classical literature was the true means of ennobling the French language—nous favorisons toujours les étrangers. Du Bellay moderates their expectations. 'I do not believe that one can learn the right use of them,'—he is speaking of figures and ornaments in language—'from trans​lations, because it is impossible to reproduce them with the same grace with which the original author used them. For each language has I know not what peculiarity of its own, and if you force yourself to express the naturalness, le naïf, of this in another language, observing the law of translation, which is not to expatiate beyond the limits of the author himself, your words will be constrained, cold and ungraceful;'—then he fixes the test of all good translation,—'To prove this read me Demosthenes and Homer in Latin, Cicero and Virgil in French, and see whether they produce in you the same affections which you experience in reading those authors in the original.'
In this effort to ennoble the French language, to give it grace, number, perfection, and as painters do to their pictures, cette dernière main que nous désirons, what Du Bellay is pleading for is his mother-tongue, the language, that is, in which one will have the utmost degree of what is moving and passionate. He recognised of what force the music and dignity of languages are, how they enter into the inmost part of things; and in pleading for the cultivation of the French language he is pleading for no merely scholastic interest, but for freedom, impulse, reality, not in literature merely, but in daily communion of speech. After all it was im​possible to have this impulse in Greek and Latin, dead languages, péris et mises en reliquaires de livres. By aid of this poor plante et vergette of the French language, he must speak delicately, movingly, if he is ever to speak so at all; that, or none, must be for him the medium of what he calls, in one of his great phrases, le discours fatal des choses mondaines; and it is his patriotism not to despair of it; he sees it already, parfait en toute élégance et venuste de paroles.
Du Bellay was bom in the disastrous year 1525, the year of the battle of Pavia and the captivity of Francis the First. His parents died early, and to him, as the youngest of the family, his mother's little estate on the Loire side, ce petit Lyrè, the beloved place of his birth descended. He was brought up by a brother only a little older than himself; and left to themselves the two boys passed their lives in day-dreams of military glory. Their education was neglected; 'the time of my youth,' says Du Bellay, 'was lost, like the flower which no shower waters, and no hand cultivates.' He was just twenty years old when this brother died, leaving Joachim to be the guardian of his child. It was with regret, with a shrinking feeling of incapacity, that he took upon him the burden of this responsibility. Hitherto he had looked forward to the profession of a soldier, ​hereditary in his family. But at this time a sickness attacked him which brought him cruel sufferings and seemed likely to be mortal. It was then for the first time that he read the Greek and Latin poets. These studies came too late to make him what he so much desired to be, a trifler in Greek and Latin verse, like so many others of his time now forgotten; instead, they made him a lover of his own homely native tongue, that poor plante et vergette of the French language. It was through this fortunate shortcoming in his education that he became national and modern, and he learned afterwards to look back on that wild garden of his youth with only half regret. A certain Cardinal du Bellay was the successful man of the family, a man often employed in high official affairs. It was to him that the thought of Joachim turned when it became necessary to choose a profession, and in 1552 he accompanied the Cardinal to Rome. He remained there nearly five years, burdened with the weight of affairs and languishing with home-sickness. Yet it was under these circumstances that his genius yielded its best fruits. From Rome, which to most men of an imaginative temperament like his would have yielded so many pleasureable sensations, with all the curiosities of the Renaissance still fresh there, his thoughts went back painfully, longingly, to the country of ​the Loire, with its wide expanses of waving corn, its homely pointed roofs of grey slate, and its far-off scent of the sea. He reached home at last, but only to die there, quite suddenly, one wintry day, at the early age of thirty-five.
Much of Du Bellay's poetry illustrates rather the age and school to which he belonged than his own temper and genius. As with the writings of Ronsard and the other poets of the Pleiad, its interest depends not so much on the impress of individual genius upon it, as on the circumstance that it was once poetry à la mode, that it is part of the manner of a time, a time which made much of manner, and carried it to a high degree of perfection. It is one of the decorations of an age which threw much of its energy into the work of decoration. We feel a pensive pleasure in seeing these faded decorations, and observing how a group of actual men and women pleased themselves long ago. Ronsard's poems are a kind of epitome of his age. Of one side of that age, it is true, of the strenuous, the progressive, the serious movement, which was then going on, there is little; but of the catholic side, the losing side, the forlorn hope, hardly a figure is absent. The Queen of Scots, at whose desire Ronsard published his odes, reading him in her northern prison, felt that he was bringing back to her the true flavour of her early days in the ​court of Catherine at the Louvre, with its exotic Italian gaieties. Those who disliked that poetry, disliked it because they found that age itself distasteful. The poetry of Malherbe came, with its sustained style and weighty sentiment, but with nothing that set people singing; and the lovers of that poetry saw in the poetry of the Pleiad only the latest trumpery of the middle age. But the time came when the school of Malherbe too had had its day; and the Romanticists, who in their eagerness for excitement, for strange music and imagery, went back to the works of the middle age, accepted the Pleiad too with the rest; and in that new middle age which their genius has evoked the poetry of the Pleiad has found its place. At first, with Malherbe, you may find it, like the architecture, the whole mode of life, the very dresses of that time,—fantastic, faded, rococo. But if you look long enough to understand it, to conceive its sentiment, you will find that those wanton lines have a spirit guiding their caprices. For there is style there; one temper has shaped the whole; and everything that has style, that has been done as no other man or age could have done it, as it could never for all our trying, be done again, has its true value and interest. Let us dwell upon it for a moment, and try to gather from it that fleur particulier, that special ​flower, which Ronsard himself tells us every garden has.
It is poetry not for the people, but for a confined circle, for courtiers, great lords and erudite persons, people who desire to be humoured, to gratify a certain refined voluptuousness they have in them, like that of the Roman Emperor who would only eat fish far from the sea. Ronsard loves, or dreams that he loves, a rare and peculiar type of beauty, la petite pucelle Angevine, with blond hair and dark eyes. But he has the ambition not only of being a courtier and a lover, but a great scholar also; he is anxious about orthography, the letter è Grecque, the true spelling of Latin names in French writing, and the restoration of the i voyelle en sa première liberté. His poetry is full of quaint remote learning. He is just a little pedantic, true always to his own express judgment that to be natural is not enough for one who in poetry desires to produce work worthy of immortality. And therewithal a certain number of Greek words, which charmed Ronsard and his circle by their gayness and nicety, and a certain air of foreign elegance about them, crept into the French language; and there were other strange words which the poets of the Pleiad forged for themselves, and which had but an ephemeral existence.
With this was mixed the desire to taste a more ​exquisite and various music than that of the older French verse, or of the classical poets. The music of the measured scanned verse of Latin and Greek poetry is one thing; the music of the rhymed, unscanned verse of Villon and the old French poets, the poésie chantee, is another. To unite together these two kinds of music in a new school of French poetry, to make verse which would scan and rhyme as well, to search out and harmonise the measure of every syllable and unite it to the swift, flitting, swallow-like motion of rhyme, to penetrate their poetry with a double music,—this was the ambition of the Pleiad. They are insatiable of music, they cannot have enough of it; they desire a music of greater compass perhaps than words can possibly yield, to drain out the last drops of sweetness which a certain note or accent contains.
This eagerness for music is almost the only serious thing in the poetry of the Pleiad; and it was Goudimel, the severe and protestant Goudimel, who set Ronsard's songs to music. But except in this these poets are never serious. Mythology, which with the great Italians had been a motive so weighty and severe, becomes with them a mere toy. That 'lord of terrible aspect,' Amor, has become the petit enfant Amour. They are full of fine railleries; they delight in diminutives, ondelette, fondelette, ​doucelette, Cassandrette. Their loves are only half real, a vain effort to prolong the imaginative loves of the middle age beyond their natural lifetime. They write love-poems for hire. Like the people in Boccaccio's 'Decameron,' they form a party who in an age of great troubles, losses, anxieties, amuse themselves with art, poetry, intrigue; but they amuse themselves with wonderful elegance, and sometimes their gaiety becomes satiric, for as they play, real passions insinuate themselves, at least the reality of death; their dejection at the thought of leaving le beau sejour du commun jour is expressed by them with almost wearisome reiteration. But with this sentiment too they are able to trifle; the imagery of death serves for a delicate ornament, and they weave into the airy nothingness of their verses their trite reflections on the vanity of life; just as the grotesques of the charnel-house nest themselves together with birds and flowers and the fancies of the pagan mythology in the traceries of the architecture of that time, which wantons in its delicate arabesques with the images of old age and death.
Ronsard became deaf at sixteen, and it was this which finally determined him to be a man of letters instead of a diplomatist; and it was significant, one might fancy, of a certain premature agedness, and of the tranquil temperate sweetness appropriate to that, ​in the school of poetry which he founded. Its charm is that of a thing not vigorous or original, but full of the grace that comes of long study and reiterated refinements, and many steps repeated, and many angles worn down, with an exquisite faintness, a fadeur exquise, a certain tenuity and caducity, as for those who can bear nothing vehement or strong; for princes weary of love, like Francis the First, or of pleasure, like Henry the Third, or of action like Henry the Fourth. Its merits are those of the old, grace and finish, perfect in minute detail. For these people are a little jaded, and have a constant desire for a subdued and delicate excitement, to warm their creeping fancy a little. They love a constant change of rhyme in poetry, and in their houses that strange fantastic interweaving of thin reed-like lines, which are a kind of rhetoric in architecture.
But the poetry of the Pleiad is true not only to the physiognomy of its age, but also to its country, that pays du Vendomois, the names and scenery of which so often occur in it; the great Loire, with its spaces of white sand; the little river Loir; the heathy, upland country, Le Bocage, with its scattered pools of water and waste road-sides; La Beauce, the granary of France, where the vast rolling fields of corn seem to anticipate the great western sea itself. ​It is full of the traits of that country. We see Du Bellay and Ronsard gardening or hunting with their dogs, or watch the pastimes of a rainy day; and with this is connected a domesticity, a homeliness and simple goodness, by which this Northern country gains upon the South. They have the love of the aged for warmth, and understand the poetry of winter; for they are not far from the Atlantic, and the west wind which comes up from it, turning the poplars white, spares not this new Italy in France. So the fireside often appears, with the pleasures of winter, about the vast emblazoned chimneys of the time, and a bonhomie as of little children or old people.
It is in Du Bellay's 'Olive,' a collection of sonnets in praise of a half-imaginary lady, Sonnetz a la louange d'Olive, that these characteristics are most abundant. Here is a perfectly crystallised specimen:—
That he is thus a characteristic specimen of the poetical taste of that age, is indeed Du Bellay's chief interest. But if his work is to have the highest sort of interest, if it is to do something more than satisfy curiosity, if it is to have an æsthetic as distinct from an historic value, it is not enough for a poet to have been the true child of his age, to have conformed to its æsthetic conditions, and by so conforming to have charmed and stimulated that age; it is necessary that there should be perceptible in his work something individual, inventive, unique, the impress there of the writer's own temper and personality. This impress M. Sainte-Beuve thought he found in the 'Antiquités de Rome' and the 'Regrets,' which he ranks as what has been called poésie intime, that intensely modern sort of poetry in which the writer has for his aim the portrayal of his own most intimate moods, to take the reader into his confidence. That generation had other instances of this intimacy of sentiment: Montaigne's Essays are full of it, the carvings of the church of Brou are full of it. M. Sainte-Beuve has perhaps exaggerated the influence of this quality in Du Bellay's 'Regrets'; but the very name of the book has a touch of Rousseau ​about it, and reminds one of a whole generation of self-pitying poets in modern times. It was in the atmosphere of Rome, to him so strange and mournful, that these pale flowers grew up; for that journey to Italy, which he deplored as the greatest misfortune of his life, put him in full possession of his talent, and brought out all its originality. And in effect you do find intimité, intimacy, here. The trouble of his life is analysed, and the sentiment of it conveyed directly to our minds; not a great sorrow or passion, but only the sense of loss in passing days, the ennui of a dreamer who has to plunge into the world's affairs, the opposition between life and the ideal, a longing for rest, nostalgia, homesickness—that preeminently childish, but so suggestive sorrow, as significant of the final regret of all human creatures for the familiar earth and limited sky. The feeling for landscape is often described as a modern one; still more so is that for antiquity, the sentiment of ruins. Du Bellay has this sentiment. The duration of the hard sharp outlines of things is a grief to him, and passing his wearisome days among the ruins of ancient Rome, he is consoled by the thought that all must one day end, by the sentiment of the grandeur of nothingness, la grandeur du rien. With a strange touch of far-off mysticism, he thinks that le grand tout itself, into which all things pass, ought ​itself sometimes to perish and pass away. Nothing less can relieve his weariness. From the stately aspects of Rome his thoughts went back continually to France, to the smoking chimneys of his little village, the longer twilight of the North, la douceur Angevine; yet not so much to the real France, we may be sure, with its dark streets and roofs of rough-hewn slate, as to that other country with slenderer towers, and more winding rivers, and trees like flowers, and softer sunshine on more gracefully-proportioned fields and ways, which the fancy of the exile, and the pilgrim, and of the schoolboy far from home, and of those kept at home unwillingly, everywhere builds up before or behind them.
He came home at last through the Grisons, by slow journeys, and there in the cooler air of his own country, under its skies of milkier blue, the sweetest flower of his genius sprang up. There have been poets whose whole fame has rested on one poem, as Gray's on the 'Elegy in a Country Churchyard,' or Ronsard's, as many critics have thought, on the eighteen lines of one famous ode. Du Bellay has almost been the poet of one poem, and this one poem of his is an Italian thing transplanted into that green country of Anjou; out of the Latin verses of Naugerius, into French; but it is a thing in which the matter is almost nothing, and the form ​almost everything; and the form of the poem as it stands, written in old French, is all Du Bellay's own. It is a song which the winnowers are supposed to sing as they winnow the corn, and they invoke the winds to lie lightly on the grain.
D'UN VANNEUR DE BLE AUX VENTS.
That has in the highest degree the qualities, the value of the whole Pleiad school of poetry, of the ​whole phase of taste from which that school derives, a certain silvery grace of fancy, nearly all the pleasure of which is in the surprise at the happy and dexterous way in which a thing slight in itself is handled. The sweetness of it is by no means to be got at by crushing, as you crush wild herbs to get at their perfume. One seems to hear the measured falling of the fans with a child's pleasure on coming across the incident for the first time in one of those great barns of Du Bellay's own country, La Beauce, the granary of France. A sudden light transfigures a trivial thing, a weather-vane, a wind-mill, a winnowing flail, the dust in the barn door; a moment,—and the thing has vanished, because it was pure effect; but it leaves a relish behind it, a longing that the accident may happen again.