Page:Studies in the history of the renaissance (IA studiesinhistor01pategoog).djvu/151

Rh the excitement, the animation of change, of discovery. La prose, says M. Sainte-Beuve, chose remarquable et à l'inverse des autres langues, a toujours en le pas chez nous, sur notre poésie. Du Bellay's prose is perfectly transparent, flexible and chaste. In many ways it is a more characteristic example of the culture of the Pleiad than any of its verse; and one who loves the whole movement of which the Pleiad is a part for a weird foreign grace in it, and may be looking about for a true specimen of it, cannot have a better than Joachim du Bellay and this little treatise of his.

Du Bellay's object is to adjust the existing French culture to the rediscovered classical culture; and in discussing this problem and developing the theories of the Pleiad he has lighted upon many principles of permanent truth and applicability. There were some who despaired of the French language altogether, who thought it naturally incapable of the fulness and elegance of Greek and Latin—cette élégance et copie qui est en la langue Greque et Romaine—that science could be adequately discussed and poetry nobly written only in the dead languages. 'Those who speak thus,' says Du Bellay, 'make me think of those relics which one may only see through a little pane of glass and must not touch with one's hands. That is what these people do with all