The spirit and substance of these treatises seems to have been caught up and embodied, about the year 1500, in another Rhetoric,[[159]] which became very popular, and was known by such titles as the “Flower” or “Garden of Rhetoric,” but the author of which is only known by one of those agreeably conceited noms de guerre so frequent at the time, as “‘l’Infortunaté’” Its matter appeared, without much alteration or real extension, in the works of Pierre Fabri[[160]] and Gratien du Pont (1539),[[161]] and the actual birth of French criticism proper is postponed, by most if not all historians, till the fifth decade of the century, when Pelletier translated the Ars Poetica of Horace in 1545, while Sibilet wrote an original Art Poétique three years later, and just before Du Bellay’s epoch-making Défense.

There is little possibility of difference of opinion as to the striking critical moment presented to us by the juxtaposition, Sibilet. with but a single twelvemonth between, of Sibilet and Du Bellay. The importance of this movement is increased, not lessened, by the fact that Sibilet himself is by no means such a copyist of Gratien du Pont as Du Pont is of Fabri, and Fabri of the unknown “Unfortunate,” and the “Unfortunate” of all his predecessors to Deschamps. He does repeat the lessons of the Rhetorics as to verse and rhyme, and so forth. He has no doubt about the excellence of that “equivocal” rhyme to which France yet clings, though it has always been unpleasing to an English ear. And (though with an indication that they are passing out of fashion) he admits the most labyrinthine intricacies of the ballade and its group.[[162]]

But he is far indeed from stopping here. He was (and small blame to him) a great admirer of Marot, and he had already learnt to distrust that outrageous “aureation” of French with Greek and Latin words which the rhétoriqueurs had begun, which the intermediate school of Scève and Heroet were continuing,[[163]] and which the Pléiade, though with an atoning touch of elegance and indeed of poetry, was to maintain and increase, in the very act of breaking with other rhétoriqueur traditions. He delights in Marot’s own epigrams, and in the sonnets of Mellin de Saint-Gelais; and he is said to have anticipated Ronsard in the adoption of the term “ode” in French, though his odes are not in the least Pindaric (as for the matter of that Ronsard’s are not). The epistle and the elegy give fresh intimation of his independent following of the classics, and he pays particular attention to the eclogue, dwells on the importance of the “version” (translation from Greek or Latin into French verse), and in the opening of his book is not very far from that half-Platonic, half anti-Platonic, deification of Poetry which is the catch-cry of the true Renaissance critic everywhere. There is not very much real, and probably still less intentional, innovation or revolt in Sibilet; and it is precisely this that makes him so valuable. Fabri and Gratien du Pont are merely of the old: in no important way do the form and pressure of the coming time set their mark on them. Du Bellay is wholly of the new: he is its champion and crusader, full of scorn for the old. Sibilet, between them, shows, uncontentiously, the amount of leaning towards sometimes revised or exotic novelty, and away from immediate and domestic antiquity, which influenced the generation.

The position of the Défense et Illustration de la Langue Française may be said to be in the main assured and uncontested, nor do I think it necessary to make such a curious dictum as that it is “not in any true sense a work of literary criticism at all” the subject of much counter-argument. Du Bellay. In that case most undoubtedly the De Vulgari Eloquio, of which it has been not much less strangely held to be little more than a version adapted to the latitude of Paris, is not such a work either. I think it very likely that Du Bellay knew the De Vulgari, which Trissino had long before published in Italian; but both the circumstances and the purpose of the two books seem to me as entirely different as their position in literary criticism seems to me absolutely secure.

Whether this be so or not, Du Bellay’s circumstances are perfectly well known, and his purpose is sun-clear, alike before him and before his readers. The Défense et Illustration de la Langue Française. He is justifying the vulgar tongue,[[164]] but he is justifying it as Ascham and his friends were doing in England; with the proviso that it shall be reformed upon, strengthened by, and altogether put to school to, the classical languages in the first place, with in the second (and here Ascham would not have agreed) Italian and even Spanish. His dealing is no doubt titularly and ostensibly directed to the language; but his anxieties are wholly concentrated on the language as the organ of literature—and specially of poetry. That he made a mistake in turning his back, with the scorn he shows, on the older language itself, and even on the verse-forms which had so long occupied it, is perfectly true. This is the besetting sin of the Renaissance—its special form of that general sin which, as we said at the outset, doth so easily beset every age. But his scheme for the improvement is far more original; and, except in so far as it may have been faintly suggested by a passage of Quintilian,[[165]] had not, so far as I know, been anticipated by any one in ancient or modern times. Unlike Sibilet, and unlike preceding writers generally, he did not believe so very much in translation—seeing justly that by it you get the matter, but nothing, or at least not much, more.[[166]] He did not believe in the mere “imitation” of the ancients either. I cannot but think that M. Brunetière[[167]] has been rather unjust in upbraiding Du Bellay with the use of this word. He does use it: but he explains it. He wishes the ancients to be imitated in their processes, not merely in their results. His is no Ciceronianism; no “Bembism”; none of that frank advice to “convey” which Vida had given before him, and to which, unluckily, his master Ronsard condescended later. “How,” he asks, “did Greek and Latin become such great literary languages?” Were they always so? Not at all. It was due to culture, to care, to (in the case of Latin at least) ingenious grafting of fresh branches from Greek. So is French to graft from Greek, from Latin, from Italian, from Spanish even—so is the essence of the classics and the other tongues to be converted into the blood and nourishment of French.[[168]]

Is this “not in any pure sense literary criticism at all”? Is this “young” and “pedantic” and “too much praised” by (of Its positive gospel and the value thereof. all Sauls among the prophets!) Désiré Nisard? I have a great respect for Mr Spingarn’s erudition; I have a greater for M. Brunetière’s masterly insight and grasp in criticism; but here I throw down the glove to both. That Du Bellay was absolutely wrong in his scorn for ballade and rondeau and other “épiceries” I am sure; that his master was right in looking at least as much to the old French lexicon as to new constructions or adoptions I am sure. But Du Bellay (half or all unawares, as is the wont of finders and founders) has seized a secret of criticism which is of the most precious, and which—with all politeness be it spoken—I venture to think that M. Brunetière himself rather acknowledges and trembles at, than really ignores. This free trade in language, in forms, in processes,—this resolute determination to convert all the treasures of antiquity and modernity alike into “food” for the literary organism, “blood” for the literary veins, marrow for the literary bones,—is no small thing. It may not be the absolute and sole secret of literary greatness. But we can almost see that Greek, the most perfectly literary of all languages for a time, withered and dwindled because it did not pursue this course; that Latin followed it on too small a scale; above all, that English owes great part of its strength, and life, and splendid flourishing of centuries, to it. Du Bellay preached, perhaps more or less unconsciously, what Shakespeare practised—whether consciously or unconsciously we need neither know nor care, any more than in all probability he knew or cared himself.

No doubt all languages and all literatures have not the digestive strength required to swallow poison and food, bread and stones, almost indiscriminately, assimilating all the good, and dismissing most if not all of the evil. There are not, and never have been in England, wanting people, from the towering head of Swift down to quite creeping things of our own time, who have been distressed by “mob” and by “bamboozle,” by “velleity” and by “meticulous.” No doubt in France the objection has been still greater, and perhaps better founded on reason. But these propositions will not affect, in the slightest degree, the other proposition that Du Bellay, in the Défense, stumbled upon, and perhaps even half-consciously realised, that view of literature, and of language as the instrument of literature, which will have the whole to be mainly un grand peut-être—a vast and endless series of explorations in unknown seas, rather than a mathematical or chemical process of compounding definite formulas and prescriptions, so as to reach results antecedently certain. Very far would it have been from Nisard, who was no doubt bribed by the militant classicism of the Pléiade, to have given his praise had he thought this: I am even prepared to admit that Du Bellay himself would probably not have thanked me for the compliment of my theory. But hatred is often more sagacious than friendship. Malherbe and those about Malherbe knew perfectly well what the real spirit of the Pléiade was. And so does M. Brunetière, who has a scent as keen as that of Malherbe and those about Malherbe, and is very much better read, very much more scientifically equipped, and quite infinitely better provided with intellectual and critical gift.[[169]]

It was unlikely, or rather impossible, that so revolutionary a challenge should lack its answer, which duly appeared a year later under the odd title of Le Quintil Horatien.[[170]] The Quintil Horatien. This used to be attributed to Charles Fontaine, a poet of parts; but it seems that he repudiated it, and it is now handed over to a pedagogue of the name of Aneau. It is a dogged little book, which treats the Défense very much as if it were an impertinent school exercise, and goes through it with the lead pencil in a fashion at once laborious, ineffectual, and suggestive of a vain desire to substitute the birch rod. The author, whoever he was, might have found plenty of things to say against Du Bellay, and he is on fairly solid ground when he indignantly protests that William of Lorris, Chartier, Villon, and others were not the artless clowns, or positive sinners, that this petulant-sparkling star of the Pléiade had looked awry upon. But even here his own ignorance of the still better things before the Rose disabled him: and it is by no means certain that he would have had the wit to appreciate them if he had known them. He thinks the sonnet too “easy,” poor man! condemns the elegy on the absurd ground that it saddens the reader; and (committing the same fault in defence which more modern critics have committed in attack) bases his main, if not his whole, praise of Ballade and Chant Royal, Rondeau and Rondel, on their mere difficulty. But his most unfortunate, if not his most absurd, error was the line which, in common with most respectable persons, both then and since, he takes up against the verbum inusitatum, as shown in the new poetic diction of the Pléiade. This was doubly unlucky: first, because the fifteenth-century poets whom he champions had themselves “aureated” the language in or out of all conscience already; and secondly, because this kind of criticism, whether it be applied to Montaigne or Dryden, to Carlyle or Browning, is always a dangerous delusion. Very classical critics have pecked and mocked at the author of the Quintil Horatien because he black-marks not merely words useful or beautiful, like sinueux, oblivieux, rasséréner, but even such now sterling coin as liquide and patrie. It would be well if they, or those like them, would think twice before condemning, as neologisms, terms which may not impossibly seem as much matter of course to the twenty-fourth century as patrie does to the twentieth. But the author of the Quintil is really of that breed of carping critics which carps itself out of all common-sense. He makes ponderous fun of the initial signature I. D. B. A. (“J. du Bellay Angevin”); objects to the statement that “nature gave us tongues to speak,” because Aristotle, Galen, and Petrus Hispanus agree that palate, throat, lips, and teeth are also necessary to the process; to the use of voix instead of son, where animals are not concerned. The sea would have no voice for him—and doubtless had none.

From such mere “denigration” (the censor permits himself this word as a stone to throw at Du Bellay) no good thing Pelletier’s Art Poétique. could come: and besides, for some generation or more, the brother stars were to fight in their courses for Pléiade criticism as well as for Pléiade poetry. The second Ars Poetica of the French Renaissance—the first in any full modern sense—appeared in 1555 from the hand of Jacques Pelletier, himself a spelling reformer, a professor, and, what is more, a mathematician; but a man of versatile ability and much eagerness to welcome any new good thing, with no small power of starting such things. He was a pleasant poet, full of Pléiade manner before the Pléiade had been formed; nor can even his absurd spelling[[171]] quite hide the beauty of such things as

“Alors que la vermeille Aurore.”