Avril | Page 4

its social condition) denies, but which is yet at the limits of all
things separate and themselves; accompanies every birth, and strikes
agony into every transition of death.
Those other much commoner epochs in the history of letters, which
may be called derivative, have this current and obvious quality, that
their beginnings merge into the soil that bred them, also (very often)
their decay will lapse imperceptibly into newer things. They are quite
definite, but also definitely parented. We know their special stuff and
harmony, but we can point out clearly enough the elements which
formed that stuff, the tones which unite in that harmony. We can show
with dates and citations the parts meeting and blending; our difficulty is
not to determine the influences which have mixed to make the general
school, but rather to fix the beginning and the end of its effect upon
men.
In the first of these the leader, sometimes the unique example of the
school, stands out great, but particular and clear, on a background
vague or dark. He is as stupendous, yet as sharp and certain, as a
mountain facing the morning, with only sky behind. In the second the
originator, if there be one, is vague, tentative, perhaps unknown. More

often many minor men together introduce a slow and general transition.
Now the French Renaissance has this peculiar mark, that it holds quite
plainly by one side of it to the first by the other to the second of these
spirits.
It was primal and catastrophic in that it made something completely
new. A new architecture, new cities, a new poetry, almost a new
language, a new kind of government--ultimately the modern world.
It was derivative in that the shock, the revelation, which produced it,
was the return of something allied to the French blood, something
rooted in the French memory. Rome surviving or risen had made that
Italy, which was now beginning to trouble the Alps, and would surely
creep in by every channel of influence, and at last pervade all Europe.
Rome, also, in her full vigour, had once framed and ordered Gaul. The
French of the Renaissance were woken suddenly, but as they started
they recognized the face and the hand of the awakener.
On this account you will find one mind indeed at the very beginning of
the change in letters, but not a dominating mind. There is but one man
who is certainly an origin, but he is not a master. You see an unique
and single personality, distinct but without force, founding no
school--the grave, abiding, kind but covert face of Charles of Orleans.
He, linked to the French Renaissance, is like the figure of a gentle
friend playing in some garden with a child whose manners are new and
pleasing to him, but of whose great destiny he makes no guess. That
child was to be Du Bellay, Brantome, Montaigne a hundred-sided, huge
Rabelais, Ronsard. Or perhaps this metaphor will put it better. To say
that Charles of Orleans's equal and persistent music was like a string
harped on distinctly in a chorus of flutes and hautboys, till one by one
harps from here and there caught up the similar tang of chords and at
last the whole body of sound was harping only.
His life was suited to such difference and such origination. Italy, still
living, filled him. An Italian secretary wrote from his mouth the most
sumptuous of his manuscripts. He banded on Italy as a goal and his
Italian land as a legacy to the French crown--to his own son; till (years

after his death) the soldiers roared through Briançon and broke the
crusted snow of Mont Genèvre. An Italian mother, the most beautiful
of the Viscontis, come out of Italy, rich in her land of Asti and her half
million of pure gold, had borne him in her youth to the King of France's
brother: a man luxurious, over fine, exact in taste, a lover of
magnificence in stories and words, decadent in a dying time, very brave.
Through that father the Valois blood, unjustly hated or still more
unjustly despised according to the varied ignorance of modern times,
ran in him nobly.
Take the Valois strain entire and you will find the pomp or rather the
fantasy of their great palace of St. Paul; turrets and steep blue roofs of
slate, carved woodwork, heavy curtains, and incense and shining
bronze. The Valois were, indeed, the end of the middle ages. Some
cruelty, a fury in battle, intelligence and madness alternately, and
always a sort of keenness which becomes now revenge, now foresight,
now intrigue, now strict and terrible government: at last a wild
adventure out beyond the hills: Fornovo, Pavia.
Their story is like the manuscripts, which beyond all other things they