AVRIL
BEING
ESSAYS ON THE POETRY OF THE
FRENCH RENAISSANCE
BY
H. BELLOC
... Ceux dont la Fantaisie
Sera religieuse et dévote envers Dieu
Tousjours achèveront quelque grant Poésie,
Et dessus leur renom la Parque n'aura lieu.
LONDON
DUCKWORTH AND CO.
3, HENRIETTA STREET, COVE NT GARDEN, W.C.
1904
CHISWICK PRESS: CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND CO
TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE, LONDON.
Part of this book originally appeared
in "The Pilot," and is here reprinted
by kind permission of the Editor.
CONTENTS
DEDICATION
TO
F.Y. ECCLES
MY DEAR ECCLES,
You will, I know, permit me to address you these essayswhich are more the product of your erudition than of my enthusiasm.
With the motives of their appearance you are familiar.
We have wondered together that a society so avid of experienceand enlargement as is ours, should ignore the chief expression of itsclosest neighbour, its highest rival and its coheir in Europe: shouldignore, I mean, the literature of the French.
We have laughed together, not without despair, to see the mindof England, for all its majesty and breadth, informed at the mostcritical moments in the policy of France by such residents of Paris aswere at the best fanatical, at the worst (and most ordinary) corrupt.
Seeing around us here a philosophy and method drawn from northernGermany, a true and subtle sympathy with the Italians, and aperpetual, just and accurate comment upon the minor nationalitiesof Europe, a mass of recorded travel superior by far to that of othercountries, we marvelled that France in particular should have remainedunknown.
We were willing, in an earlier youth, to read this riddle in somewhatcrude solutions. I think we have each of us arrived, and in afinal manner, at the sounder conclusion that historical accident isprincipally to blame. The chance concurrence of this defeat withthat dynastic influence, the slip by which the common sense ofpolitical simplicity missed footing in England and fell a generationbehind, the marvellous industrial activities of this country, protectedby a tradition of political discipline which will remain unique inHistory; the contemporaneous settling down of France into theequilibrium of power--an equilibrium not established without fivehearty civil wars and perhaps a hundred campaigns--all these soseparated the two worlds of thought as to leave France excusablefor her blindness towards the destinies and nature of England, andEngland excusable for her continued emptiness of knowledge uponthe energy and genius of France: though these were increasingdaily, immensely, at our very side.
We have assisted at some straining of such barriers. A long peace,the sterility of Germany, the interesting activities of the CatholicChurch, have perhaps not yet changed, but have at least disturbedthe mind of the no