Hilaire Belloc

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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." ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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! ”