Avril Part 9

_THE SONNET OF EXILE._

_France, Mere 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 advoue quelquefois Que ne me respons-tu maintenant, o cruelle?

France, France, respons a ma triste querelle: Mais nul, sinon Echo, ne respond a 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 herisser 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, Tourmeliere, the Manor house of Lire, 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 n.o.ble 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 cla.s.sical allusion, are mixed with a spirit that is still spontaneous and even naf. 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-sh.o.r.e. 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 la qui conquit la Toison Et puis est retourne, plein d'usage et raison, Vivre entre ses parents le reste de son age!

Quand revoirai-je, helas, de mon pet.i.t village Fumer la cheminee: 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 sejour 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 pet.i.t Lyre 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 pa.s.sagere 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 sejour, Ce pendant que j'ahanne A mon ble 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 G.o.ddess; and he fas.h.i.+oned 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 s.p.a.ce 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 pet.i.t Peloton De qui le poil foleton Frisoit d'une toyson blanche Le doz, le ventre, et la hanche._

_Son exercice ordinaire Estoit de j.a.pper 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 coife d'un pet.i.t linge, a.s.sis comme un pet.i.t singe, Se tenoit mignardelet, D'un maintien damoiselet!_

_Las, mais ce doulx pa.s.setemps Ne nous dura pas long temps: Car la mort ayant anvie Sur l'ayse de nostre vie, Envoya devers Pluton Nostre pet.i.t 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? o Souvenance greve A peu que le cueur ne me creve Quand j'en parle ou quand j'en ecris: C'est Belaud, mon pet.i.t 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 beaute fut telle Qu'elle est digne d'estre immortelle._

_Mon-dieu, quel pa.s.setemps 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 a.s.sis 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, a la table, Belaud estoit plus accointable Que n'est un pet.i.t chien friand, Et de nuict n'alloit point criand Comme ces gros marcoux terribles, En longs miaudemens horribles: Aussi le pet.i.t mitouard N'entra jamais en matouard: Et en Belaud, quelle disgrace!

De Belaud s'est perdue la race.

Que pleust a Dieu, pet.i.t Belon, Qui j'eusse l'esprit a.s.sez 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 Cla.s.sic. 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 ent.i.tled "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 b.u.t.t of Hugo's splendid ridicule. He was the G.o.d of plaster that could not hear or speak or feel, but which fools had wors.h.i.+pped; a G.o.d 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 Cla.s.sic a ruined, antiquated thing. They were in error. Victor Hugo himself, the leader, who most believed the cla.s.sic 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 Cla.s.sic has in it something necessary to the character of the French people.