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By Root 2808 0

to marry knowledge of the classics with the newly mature national tongue and who published, in 1549, the first key work of philology, Defense and Illustration of the French Language, a plea for French poets to write odes and elegies adapted from the classics and to use the new form of the Petrarchan sonnet. His fellow student Pierre de Ronsard (1524–85) published his first odes the following year, and the two men, together with their colleague Jean-Antoine de Baïf (1532–89), who had been born in Venice, the son of the French ambassador, and had absorbed humanism from infancy, constituted a constellation of “new” poets known as the Pléiade. They set the rules for French poetry for nearly three centuries, but they also influenced the drama, for another member of the Pléiade, Étienne Jodelle (1532–88), wrote an epoch-making play, Dido’s Self-Sacrifice, which became the exemplar of French classic theater, thus setting the scene for the glories of the seventeenth century.

These lively spirits created a language that writers could play with indefinitely and in myriad forms. One of the most enduring was the essay, which lives on today in the critical article and the newspaper and magazine feature. Michel de Montaigne (1533–92) was the outstanding product of French humanism, and is still read today all over the world. He was well born, well read, experienced in administration but sufficiently désabusé by the world to devote himself chiefly to letters, which took the form of informal reflections on men, events, customs and beliefs and the common milestones of life—birth, youth, manhood, marriage, sickness and death. He was a Catholic but a skeptic; a practical man but a man of acute feeling too; one who loved the past but was at home in the present and feared not the future. For the first time in European literature, we catch the modern tone, which is easy and conversational, and the willingness to talk about oneself to the reader. The publication of his Essais in 1580 marked the immense distance that the forces of Reformation humanism had now carried the world since the Middle Ages had begun to wane.

The distance traveled in England was equally great, but the route was different. The English language began its own battle for self-discovery at almost the same time as Italian, in the early fourteenth century, when the use of French by the ruling class, at court, in the law and in administration, was finally replaced by the demotic tongue, English, a process given legal force by the Statute of Pleadings. The Hundred Years’ War with France completed the bifurcation, and it is significant that its early stages coincided with the development of England’s first independent style of Gothic architecture, the Perpendicular. Its first masterpiece was Gloucester Abbey, where the entire east end was rebuilt in the new style, crowned with a giant east window, the largest in England, to celebrate the great English victory over France at Crécy (1346).

At about this time was born Geoffrey Chaucer, who was to become the greatest poet of the Middle Ages, after Dante himself, and, like Dante, to adumbrate the salient characteristics of Renaissance literature. He came from a family of Ipswich vintners, who traded with Spain, France and Portugal, and like many vintners’ sons (John Ruskin was another example) developed early a wide international outlook, especially in cultural matters. A spell as page to Lionel, one of Edward III’s sons, introduced him to court life. He served in one of the king’s invading armies in France—a country he visited often—and he then joined Edward’s household, the king using him as a diplomatic envoy more than once. Thus he went to Genoa and again to Flanders, and in 1378 he was in Lombardy as part of a mission negotiating with Bernabo Visconti and the great condottiere Sir John Hawkwood “for certain affairs touching the expedition of the King’s war.” Chaucer had already produced a version of the French Roman de la rose and written poetry on his own account. By learning Italian he opened up for himself the new world of Dante,