Book: Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance

W >> Walter Horatio Pater >> Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance




And yet the gifted poet seemed but to have spoken what was already in
Gaston's own mind, what he had longed to say, had been just going to
say; so near it came, that it had the charm [56] of a discovery of
one's own. That was an illusion, perhaps; it was because the poet
told one so much about himself, making so free a display of what
though personal was very contagious; of his love-secrets especially,
how love and nothing else filled his mind. He was in truth but
"love's secretary," noting from hour to hour its minutely changing
fortunes. Yes! that was the reason why visible, audible, sensible
things glowed so brightly, why there was such luxury in sounds,
words, rhythms, of the new light come on the world, of that wonderful
freshness. With a masterly appliance of what was near and familiar,
or again in the way of bold innovation, he found new words for
perennially new things, and the novel accent awakened long-slumbering
associations. Never before had words, single words, meant so much.
What expansion, what liberty of heart, in speech: how associable to
music, to singing, the written lines! He sang of the lark, and it
was the lark's voluble self. The physical beauty of humanity lent
itself to every object, animate or inanimate, to the very hours and
lapses and changes of time itself. An almost burdensome fulness of
expression haunted the gestures, the very dress, the personal
ornaments, of the people on the highway. Even Jacques Bonhomme at
his labour, or idling for an hour, borrowed from his love, homely as
it was, a touch of dignity or grace, and some secret of utterance,
which made [57] one think of Italy or Greece. The voice of the
shepherd calling, the chatter of the shepherdess turning her spindle,
seemed to answer, or wait for answer,--to be fragments of love's
ideal and eternal communing.

It was the power of "modernity," as renewed in every successive age
for genial youth, protesting, defiant of all sanction in these
matters, that the true "classic" must be of the present, the force
and patience of present time. He had felt after the thing, and here
it was,--the one irresistible poetry there had ever been, with the
magic word spoken in due time, transforming his own age and the world
about him, presenting its everyday touch, the very trick one knew it
by, as an additional grace, asserting the latent poetic rights of the
transitory, the fugitive, the contingent. Poetry need no longer mask
itself in the habit of a bygone day: Gaston could but pity the people
of bygone days for not being above-ground to read. Here, was a
discovery, a new faculty, a privileged apprehension, to be conveyed
in turn to one and to another, to be propagated for the imaginative
regeneration of the world. It was a manner, a habit of thought,
which would invade ordinary life, and mould that to its intention.
In truth, all the world was already aware, and delighted. The
"school" was soon to pay the penalty of that immediate acceptance,
that intimate fitness to the mind of its own time, by sudden [58] and
profound neglect, as a thing preternaturally tarnished and tame, like
magic youth, or magic beauty, turned in a moment by magic's own last
word into withered age. But then, to the liveliest spirits of that
time it had seemed nothing less than "impeccable," after the manner
of the great sacred products of the past, though in a living tongue.
Nay! to Gaston for one, the power of the old classic poetry itself
was explained by the reflex action of the new, and might seem to
justify its pretensions at last.

From the poem fancy wandered to the poet, and curious youth would
fain see the writer in person,--what a poet was like, with anxious
surmises, this way and that, as to the degree in which the precious
mental particles might be expected to have wrought up the outward
presence to their own high quality. A creature of the eye, in this
case at least, the intellectual hold on him being what it was, Gaston
had no fear of disillusion. His poetic readings had borrowed an
additional relish from the genial, companionable, manner of his life
at this time, taking him into the remotest corners of the vast level
land, and its outer ring of blue up-lands; amid which, as he rode one
day with "the three," towards perfectly new prospects, he had chanced
on some tangible rumour of the great poet's present abode. The hill
they had mounted at leisure, in talk with a village priest, dropped
suddenly upon a vague tract of wood and pasture, [59] with a dark
ridge beyond towards the south-west; and the black notch, which broke
its outline against the mellow space of evening light, was the
steeple of the priory of Croix-val, of which reverend body Pierre de
Ronsard, although a layman, was, by special favour of King Charles,
Superior.

Though a formal peace was come, though the primary movers of war had
taken hands or kissed each other, and were exchanging suspicious
courtesies, yet the unquiet temper of war was still abroad
everywhere, with an after-crop of miserable incidents. The
captainless national and mercenary soldiers were become in large
number thieves or beggars, and the peasant's hand sank back to the
tame labour of the plough reluctantly. Relieved a little by the
sentimental humour of the hour, lending, as Ronsard prompted, a
poetic and always amorous interest to everything around him, poor
Gaston's very human soul was vexed nevertheless at the spectacle of
the increased hardness of human life, with certain misgivings from
time to time at the contrast of his own luxurious tranquillity. The
homeless woman suckling her babe at the roadside, the grey-beard
hasting before the storm, the tattered fortune-teller who, when he
shook his head at her proposal to "read his hand," assured him
(perhaps with some insight into his character) "You do that"--you
shake your head, negatively--"too much!" these, and the like, [60]
might count as fitting human accidents in an impassioned landscape
picture. And his new imaginative culture had taught him to value
"surprises" in nature itself; the quaint, exciting charm of the
mistletoe in the wood, of the blossom before the leaf, the cry of
passing birds at night. Nay! the most familiar details of nature,
its daily routine of light and darkness, beset him now with a kind of
troubled and troubling eloquence. The rain, the first streak of
dawn, the very sullenness of the sky, had a power, only to be
described by saying that they seemed to be moral facts.

On his way at last to gaze on the abode of the new hero or demi-god
of poetry, Gaston perceives increasingly, as another excellence of
his verse, how truthful, how close it is to the minute fact of the
scene around; as there are pleasant wines which, expressing the
peculiar quality of their native soil, lose their special
pleasantness away from home. The physiognomy of the scene was
changed; the plain of La Beauce had ruffled itself into low green
hills and gently winding valleys, with clear, quick water, and
fanciful patches of heath and wood-land. Here and there a secular
oak tree maintained a solitude around it. It was the district of the
"little river Loir"--the Vendomois; and here, in its own country, the
new poetry, notwithstanding its classic elegance, might seem a native
wild flower, modest enough.

[61] He came riding with his companions towards evening along the
road which had suddenly abandoned its day-long straightness for
wanton curves and ascents; and there, as an owl on the wing cried
softly, beyond the tops of the spreading poplars was the west front,
silver-grey, and quiet, inexpressibly quiet, with its worn, late-
gothic "flamings" from top to bottom, as full of reverie to Gaston's
thinking as the enchanted castle in a story-book. The village lay
thinly scattered around the wide, grass-grown space; below was the
high espaliered garden-wall, and within it, visible through the open
doors, a gaunt figure, hook-nosed, like a wizard, at work with the
spade, too busily to turn and look. Or was it that he did not hear
at all the question repeated thrice:--Could one see His Reverence the
Prior, at least in his convent church? "You see him" was the answer,
as a face, all nerve, distressed nerve, turned upon them not
unkindly, the vanity of the great man aware and pleasantly tickled.
The unexpected incident had quickened a prematurely aged pulse, and
in reward for their good service the young travellers were bidden
carry their equipment, not to the village inn, but to the guest-
chamber of the half-empty priory. The eminent man of letters, who
had been always an enthusiastic gardener, though busy just now not
with choice flowers but with salutary kitchen-stuff, working indeed
with much effort, to counteract the gout, was ready enough [62] in
his solitude to make the most of chance visitors, especially youthful
ones. A bell clanged; he laid aside the spade, and casting an eye at
the whirling weather-vanes announced that it would snow. There had
been no "sunset." They had travelled away imperceptibly from genial
afternoon into a world of ashen evening.

The enemies of the lay Prior, satirists literary and religious,
falsely made a priest of him, a priest who should have sacrificed a
goat to pagan Bacchus. And in truth the poet, for a time a soldier,
and all his life a zealous courtier, had always been capable, as a
poet should be, of long-sustained meditation, adapting himself easily
enough to the habits of the "religious," following attentively the
choir-services in their church, of which he was a generous
benefactor, and to which he presently proceeded for vespers. Gaston
and "the three" sat among the Brethren, tempting curious eyes, in the
stalls of the half-lighted choir, while in purple cope and jaunty
biretta the lay Prior "assisted," his confidentiaire, or priestly
substitute, officiating at the altar. The long, sad, Lenten office
over, an invitation to supper followed, for Ronsard still loved, in
his fitful retirements at one or another of his numerous benefices,
to give way to the chance recreation of flattering company, and these
gay lads' enthusiasm for his person was obvious. And as for himself,
the great poet, with his [63] bodily graces and airs of court, had
always possessed the gift of pleasing those who encountered him.

The snow was falling now in big, slow flakes, a great fire blazing
under the chimney with its cipher and enigmatic motto, as they sat
down to the leek-soup, the hard eggs, and the salad grown and
gathered by their host's own hands. The long stone passages through
which they passed from church, with the narrow brown doors of the
monks' dormitories one after another along the white-washed wall,
made the coquetries of the Prior's own distant apartment all the more
reassuring. You remembered that from his ninth year he had been the
pet of princesses, the favourite of kings. Upon the cabinets,
chests, book-cases, around, were ranged the souvenirs received from
various royal persons, including three kings of France, the fair
Queen of Scots, Elizabeth of England; and the conversation fell to,
and was kept going by, the precious contents of the place where they
were sitting, the books printed and bound as they had never been
before--books which meant assiduous study, the theory of poetry with
Ronsard always accompanying its practice--delicate things of art,
which beauty had handled or might handle, the pictured faces on the
walls, in their frames of reeded ebony or jewelled filigree. There
was the Minerva, decreed him at a conference of the elegant, pedantic
"Jeux Floraux," which had proclaimed [64] Pierre de Ronsard "Prince
of Poets." The massive silver image Ronsard had promptly offered to
his patron King Charles; but in vain, for, though so greatly in want
of ready-money that he melted down church ornaments and exacted
"black" contributions from the clergy, one of the things in which
Charles had ever been sincere was a reverence for literature.

So there it stood, doing duty for Our Lady, with gothic crown and a
fresh sprig of consecrated box, bringing the odd, enigmatic
physiognomy, preferred by the art of that day, within the sphere of
religious devotion. The King's manuscript, declining, in verse
really as good as Ronsard's, the honour not meant for him, might be
read, attached to the pedestal. The ladies of his own verse, Marie,
Cassandre, and the rest, idols one after another of a somewhat
artificial and for the most part unrequited love, from the Angevine
maiden--La petite pucelle Angevine--who had vexed his young soul by
her inability to yield him more than a faint Platonic affection, down
to Helen, to whom he had been content to propose no other, gazed,
more impassibly than ever, from the walls.

They might have been sisters, those many successive loves, or one and
the same lady over and over again, in slightly varied humour and
attire perhaps, at the different intervals of some rather lengthy,
mimetic masque of love, to which the theatrical dress of that day was
appropriate; [65] for the mannered Italian, or Italianised, artists,
including the much-prized, native Janet, with his favourite water-
green backgrounds, aware of the poet's predilection, had given to all
alike the same brown eyes and tender eyelids and golden hair and
somewhat ambered paleness, varying only the curious artifices of the
dress--knots, and nets, and golden spider-work, and clear, flat
stones. Dangerous guests in that simple, cloistral place, Sibyls of
the Renaissance on a mission from Italy to France, to Gaston one and
all seemed under the burden of some weighty message concerning a
world unknown to him; the stealthy lines of cheek and brow contriving
to express it, while the lips and eyes only smiled, not quite
honestly. It had been a learned love, with undissembled "hatred of
the vulgar." Three royal Margarets, much-praised pearls of three
succeeding generations (for to the curious in these objects purity is
far from being the only measure of value) asserted charms a thought
more frank, or French, though still gracefully pedantic, with their
quaintly kerchiefed books--books of what?--in their pale hands.
Among the ladies, on the pictured wall as in life, were the poet's
male companions, stirring memories of a more material sort, though
their common interest had been poetry--memories of that "Bohemia,"
which even a prince of court poets had frequented when he was young,
of his cruder youthful vanities. [66] In some cases the date of death
was inscribed below.

One there was among them, the youngest, of whose genial fame to come
this experienced judge of men and books, two years before "St.
Bartholomew's," was confident--a crowned boy, King Charles himself.
Here perhaps was the single entirely disinterested sentiment of the
poet's life, wholly independent of a long list of benefits, or
benefices; for the younger had turned winsomely, appealingly, to the
elder, who, forty years of age, feeling chilly at the thought, had no
son. And of one only of those companions did the memory bring a
passing cloud. It was long ago, on a journey, that he had first
spoken, accidentally, with Joachim du Bellay, whose friendship had
been the great intellectual fortune of his life. For a moment one
saw the encounter at the wayside inn, in the broad, gay morning, a
quarter of a century since; and there was the face--deceased at
thirty-five. Pensive, plaintive, refined by sickness, of exceeding
delicacy, it must from the first have been best suited to the
greyness of an hour like this. To-morrow, where will be the snow?

The leader in that great poetic battle of the Pleiad, their host
himself (he explained the famous device, and named the seven chief
stars in the constellation) was depicted appropriately, in veritable
armour, with antique Roman cuirass of minutely inlaid gold, and
flowered mantle; [67] the crisp, ceremonial, laurel-wreath of the
Roman conqueror lying on the audacious, over-developed brows, above
the great hooked nose of practical enterprise. In spite of his
pretension to the Epicurean conquest of a kingly indifference of
mind, the portrait of twenty years ago betrayed, not less than the
living face with its roving, astonished eyes, the haggard soul of a
haggard generation, whose eagerly-sought refinements had been after
all little more than a theatrical make-believe--an age of wild
people, of insane impulse, of homicidal mania. The sweet-souled
songster had no more than others attained real calm in it. Even in
youth nervous distress had been the chief facial characteristic.
Triumphant, nevertheless, in his battle for Greek beauty--for the
naturalisation of Greek beauty in the brown cloud-lands of the North-
-he might have been thinking, contemptuously, of barking little
Saint-Gelais, or of Monsieur Marot's pack-thread poems. He, for his
part, had always held that poetry should be woven of delicate silk,
or of fine linen, or at least of good home-spun worsted.

To Gaston, yielding himself to its influence, for a moment the scene
around seemed unreal: an exotic, embalming air, escaped from some old
Greek or Roman pleasure-place, had turned the poet's workroom into a
strange kind of private sanctuary, amid these rude conventual
buildings, with the March wind aloud in the chimneys. [68]
Notwithstanding, what with the long day's ride, the keen evening,
they had done justice to the monastic fare, the "little" wine of the
country, the cream, the onions,--fine Camille, and dainty Jasmin, and
the poet turned to talk upon gardening, concerning which he could
tell them a thing or two--of early salads, and those special apples
the king loved to receive from him, mille-fleurs pippins, painted
with a thousand tiny streaks of red, yellow, and green. A dish of
them came to table now, with a bottle, at the right moment, from the
darkest corner of the cellar. And then, in nasal voice, well-trained
to Latin intonation, giving a quite medieval amplitude to the poet's
sonorities of rhythm and vocabulary, the Sub-prior was bidden to
sing, after the notation of Goudimel, the "Elegy of the Rose"; the
author girding cheerily at the clerkly man's assumed ignorance of
such compositions.

It was but a half-gaiety, in truth, that awoke in the poet even now,
with the singing and the good wine, as the notes echoed windily along
the passages. On his forty-sixth year the unaffected melancholy of
his later life was already gathering. The dead!--he was coming to be
on their side. The fact came home to Gaston that this evocator of
"the eternally youthful" was visibly old before his time; his work
being done, or centered now for the most part on amendments, not
invariably happy, of his earlier [69] verse. The little panelled
drawers were full of them. The poet pulled out one, and as it stood
open for a moment there lay the first book of the Franciade, in
silken cover, white and gold, ready for the king's hands, but never
to be finished.

Gaston, as he turned from that stolen reading of the opening verse in
jerky, feverish, gouty manuscript, to the writer, let out his soul
perhaps; for the poet's face struck fire too, and seeming to detect
on a sudden the legible document of something by no means
conventional below the young man's well-controlled manner and
expression, he became as if paternally anxious for his intellectual
furtherance, and in particular for the addition of "manly power" to a
"grace" of mind, obviously there already in due sufficiency. Would
he presently carry a letter with recommendation of himself to
Monsieur Michel de Montaigne? Linked they were, in the common
friendship of the late Etienne de la Boetie yonder! Monsieur Michel
could tell him much of the great ones--of the Greek and Latin masters
of style. Let his study be in them! With what justice, by the way,
had those Latin poets dealt with winter, and wintry charms, in their
bland Italy! And just then, at the striking of a rickety great bell
of the Middle Age, in the hands of a cowled brother came the
emblazoned grace-cup, with which the Prior de Ronsard had enriched
his "house," and the guests withdrew.

[70] "Yesterday's snow" was nowhere, a surprising sunlight
everywhere; through which, after gratefully bidding adieu to the
great poet, almost on their knees for a blessing, our adventurers
returned home. Gaston, intently pondering as he lingered behind the
others, was aware that this new poetry, which seemed to have
transformed his whole nature into half-sensuous imagination, was the
product not of one or more individual writers, but (it might be in
the way of a response to their challenge) a general direction of
men's minds, a delightful "fashion" of the time. He almost
anticipated our modern idea, or platitude, of the Zeit-geist. A
social instinct was involved in the matter, and loyalty to an
intellectual movement. As its leader had himself been the first to
suggest, the actual authorship belonged not so much to a star as to a
constellation, like that hazy Pleiad he had pointed out in the sky,
or like the swarm of larks abroad this morning over the corn, led by
a common instinct, a large element in which was sympathetic trust in
the instinct of others. Here, truly, was a doctrine to propagate, a
secret open to every one who would learn, towards a new management of
life,--nay! a new religion, or at least a new worship, maintaining
and visibly setting forth a single overpowering apprehension.

The worship of physical beauty a religion, the proper faculty of
which would be the bodily eye! Looked at in this way, some of the
well- [71] marked characteristics of the poetry of the Pleiad assumed
a hieratic, almost an ecclesiastical air. That rigid correctness;
that gracious unction, as of the medieval Latin psalmody; that
aspiring fervour; that jealousy of the profane "vulgar"; the sense,
flattering to one who was in the secret, that this thing, even in its
utmost triumph, could never be really popular:--why were these so
welcome to him but from the continuity of early mental habit? He
might renew the over-grown tonsure, and wait, devoutly, rapturously,
in this goodly sanctuary of earth and sky about him, for the
manifestation, at the moment of his own worthiness, of flawless
humanity, in some undreamed-of depth and perfection of the loveliness
of bodily form.

And therewith came the consciousness, no longer of mere bad-
neighbourship between what was old and new in his life, but of
incompatibility between two rival claimants upon him, of two ideals.
Might that new religion be a religion not altogether of goodness, a
profane religion, in spite of its poetic fervours? There were
"flowers of evil," among the rest. It came in part, avowedly, as a
kind of consecration of evil, and seemed to give it the beauty of
holiness. Rather, good and evil were distinctions inapplicable in
proportion as these new interests made themselves felt. For a
moment, amid casuistical questions as to one's indefeasible right to
liberty of heart, he saw himself, somewhat [72] wearily, very far
gone from the choice, the consecration, of his boyhood. If he could
but be rid of that altogether! Or if that would but speak with
irresistible decision and effect! Was there perhaps somewhere, in
some penetrative mind in this age of novelties, some scheme of truth,
some science about men and things, which might harmonise for him his
earlier and later preference, "the sacred and the profane loves," or,
failing that, establish, to his pacification, the exclusive supremacy
of the latter?



IV. PEACH-BLOSSOM AND WINE

[73] Those searchings of mind brought from time to time cruel starts
from sleep, a sudden shudder at any wide outlook over life and its
issues, draughts of mental east-wind across the hot mornings, into
which the voices of his companions called him, to lose again in long
rambles every thought save that of his own firm, abounding youth.
These rambles were but the last, sweet, wastefully-spent remnants of
a happy season. The letter for Monsieur Michel de Montaigne was to
hand, with preparations for the distant journey which must presently
break up their comradeship. Nevertheless, its actual termination
overtook them at the last as if by surprise: on a sudden that
careless interval of time was over.

The carelessness of "the three" at all events had been entire.
Secure, on the low, warm, level surface of things, they talked, they,
rode, they ate and drank, with no misgivings, mental or moral, no too
curious questions as to the essential nature of their so palpable
well-being, [74] or the rival standards thereof, of origins and
issues. And yet, with all their gaiety, as its last triumphant note
in truth, they were ready to trifle with death, welcoming, by way of
a foil to the easy character of their days, a certain luxurious sense
of danger--the night-alarm, the arquebuse peeping from some quiet
farm-building across their way, the rumoured presence in their
neighbourhood of this or that great military leader--delightful
premonitions of the adventurous life soon to be their own in Paris.
What surmises they had of any vaguer sort of danger, took effect, in
that age of wizardry, as a quaintly practical superstition, the
expectation of cadaverous "churchyard things" and the like, intruding
themselves where they should not be, to be dissipated in turn by
counter-devices of the dark craft which had evoked them. Gaston,
then, as in after years, though he saw no ghosts, could not bear to
trifle with such matters: to his companions it was a delight, as they
supped, to note the indication of nameless terrors, if it were only
in the starts and crackings of the timbers of the old place. To the
turbid spirits of that generation the midnight heaven itself was by
no means a restful companion; and many were the hours wasted by those
young astrophiles in puzzling out the threats, or the enigmatic
promises, of a starry sky.

Copyright (c) 2007. knowncrafts.net. All rights reserved.