Harsoir en vous couchant vous jurâtes vos yeux
D'être plus tôt que moi ce matin éveillée:
Mais le dormir de l'aube, aux filles gracieux,
Vous tient d'un doux sommeil encor les yeux silléee.
Ça, ça, que je les baise, et votre beau tetin,
Cent fois, pour vous apprendre à vous lever matin.
Ronsard was old and grey—at least, he was old before his time and grey—when he met Hélène de Sorgères, maid of honour to the Queen, and began the third of his grand passions. He lived all the life of a young lover over again. They went to dances together, Hélène in a mask. Hélène gave her poet a crown of myrtle and laurel. They had childish quarrels and swore eternal fidelity. It was for her that Ronsard made the most exquisite of his sonnets: Quand vous serez bien vieille-a sonnet of which Mr. Yeats has written a magical version in English.
It is in referring to the sonnets for Hélène that M. Jusserand calls attention to the realism of Ronsard's poetry. He points out that one seems to see the women Ronsard loves far more clearly than the heroines of many other poets. He notes the same genius of realism again when he is relating how Ronsard, on the eve of his death, as he was transported from priory to priory, in hope of relief in each new place, wrote a poem of farewell to his friends, in which he described the skeleton horrors of his state with a minute carefulness, Ronsard, indeed, showed himself a very personal chronicler throughout his work. "He cannot hide the fact that he likes to sleep on the left side, that he hates cats, dislikes servants 'with slow hands,' believes in omens, adores physical exercises and gardening, and prefers, especially in summer, vegetables to meat." M. Jusserand, I may add, has written the just and scholarly praise of a most winning poet. His book, which appears in the Grands Ecrivains Français series, is not only a good biographical study, but an admirable narrative of literary and national history.
XV
ROSSETTI AND RITUAL
Rossetti's great gift to his time was the gift of beauty, of beauty to be worshipped in the sacred hush of a temple. His work is not richer in the essentials of beauty than Browning's—it is not, indeed, nearly so rich; but, while Browning served beauty joyously, a god in a firmament of gods, Rossetti burned a lonely candle to it as to the only true god. To Browning, the temple of beauty was but a house in a living world; to Rossetti, the world outside the temple was, for the most part, a dead world. Jenny may, seem to stand in vivid contradiction of this. But Jenny was an exceptional excursion into life, and hardly expresses the Rossetti that was a power in art and literature. Him we find best, perhaps, in The Blessed Damozel, written when he was little more than a boy. And this is not surprising, for the arrogant love of beauty, out of which the aesthetic sort of art and literature has been born, is essentially a boy's love. Poets who are sick with this passion must either die young, like Keats, or survive merely to echo their younger selves, like Swinburne. They are splendid in youth, like Aucassin, whose swooning passion for Nicolette is symbolical of their almost painful desire of beauty. In Hand and Soul, Rossetti tells us of Chiaro dell Erma that "he would feel faint in sunsets and at the sight of stately persons." Keats's Odes express the same ecstasy of faintness, and Rossetti himself was obviously a close nineteenth-century counterpart of Chiaro. Even when he troubles about the soul—and he constantly troubles about it—he never seems to be able altogether to escape out of what may be called the higher sensationalism into genuine mysticism. His work is earth-born: it is rich in earthly desire. His symbols were not wings to enable the soul to escape into a divine world of beauty. They were the playthings of a grown man, loved for their owft beauty more than for any beauty they could help the spirit to reach. Rossetti belongs to the ornamental school of poetry. He writes more like a man who has gone into a library than like one who has gone out to Nature, and ornamentalism in poetry is simply the result of seeing life, not directly, but through the coloured glass of literature and the other arts. Rossetti was the forerunner of all those artists and authors of recent times, who, in greater or less degree, looked on art as a weaving of patterns, an arrangement of wonderful words and sounds and colours. Pater in his early writings, William Morris, Oscar Wilde, and all those others who dreamed that it was the artist's province to enrich the world with beautiful furniture—for conduct itself seemed, in the philosophy of these writers, to aspire after the quality of tapestry—are implicit in The Blessed Damozel and Troy Town. It is not that Rossetti could command words like Pater or Wilde. His phrasing, if personal, is curiously empty of the graces. He often does achieve graces of phrase; but some of his most haunting poems owe their power over us to their general pattern, and not to any persistent fine workmanship. How beautiful Troy Town is, for instance, and yet how lacking in beautiful verses! The poet was easily content in his choice of words who could leave a verse like:—
Venus looked on Helen's gift;
(O Troy Town!)
Looked and smiled with subtle drift,
Saw the work of her heart's desire:—
"There thou kneel'st for Love to lift!"
(O Troy's down,
Tall Troy's on fire!)