Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (eBook)

JOACHIM DU BELLAY

[155] 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 created the Chateau de Gaillon, as you may still see it in the delicate engravings of Israel Silvestre--a Gothic donjon veiled faintly by a surface of dainty Italian traceries-- Chenonceaux, Blois, Chambord, and the church of Brou.  In painting, there came from Italy workmen like Maitre Roux and the masters of the school of Fontainebleau, to have their later Italian voluptuousness attempered by the naive and silvery qualities of the native style; and it was characteristic of these painters that they were most successful in painting on glass, an art so [156] essentially medieval.  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 Le Mans.  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; so 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 the correlative of the traceries of the house of Jacques Coeur 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, a remarkable daintiness of hand, une nettete remarquable d'execution.  In the paintings of Francois Clouet, for example, or rather of the Clouets--for there was a whole family of them--painters remarkable for [157] 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 nettete remarquable d'execution: 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.*

Now 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 [158] 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, in itself neither deeper nor more permanent than a chance effect of light.  He reinforces, he doubles the French daintiness 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 daintiness of execution are consummate, and have an unmistakable aesthetic 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, in its essence, 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 keep the curiosity always excited, so that the very aspect of it, as it [159] lies written on the page, carries the eye lightly onwards, and of which this is a good instance:--

     Avril, le grace, et le ris

   De Cypris,

Le flair et la douce haleine;

Avril, le parfum des dieux,

   Qui, des cieux,

Sentent l'odeur de la plaine;

     C'est toy, courtois et gentil,

   Qui, d'exil

Retire ces passageres,

Ces arondelles qui vont,

   Et qui sont

Du printemps les messageres.

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, 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 [160] struck by Joachim du Bellay in a little tract 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 piece has for its title La Deffense et Illustration de la langue Francoyse; 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.  "It is a remarkable fact," says M. Sainte-Beuve, "and an inversion of what is true of other languages, that, in French, prose has always had the precedence over poetry."  Du Bellay's prose [161] 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 those who love 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 elegance 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 the 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...