FRENCH EPIC POETRY. 625 



select public. Even while, borrowing, as he did, the externals .of 

 the ancient epic, he could have remained original. Milton has 

 proved the possibility by introducing religious sentiment in "hjs. 

 Paradise Lost. Tasso did the same thing by instilling the chival- 

 rous spirit of the Crusades into his Jerusalem Delivered. Kou- 

 sard, however, did nothing of the kind. He neither invented 

 something new, nor did he renovate anything that had outgrown 

 its time. He wrote with the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aineid 

 in front of him, incorporating next to all the episodes of these 

 poems in his Franciade. It should, moreover, not be forgotten 

 that Ronsard had badly chosen his time for the publication of a 

 national epic. It appeared in the days of St. Bartholomew's 

 Night, the horrible days of the noces vermeilles, the "bloody 

 wedding." How could the people be expected to show interest 

 in an epic poem, when they were living in circumstances of such 

 crushing stress, and one half of the nation exterminating the 

 other ? 



And yet this signal failure of the master could not dis- 

 courage the disciples. Only they changed the theme. They 

 realised — what had been overlooked by Ronsard — that where 

 a fierce war was being waged for the faith and for religious free- 

 dom, the mythology of the Iliad and the JEneid must needs 

 appear flat and unendurable. They abandoned Homeric and Vir- 

 gilian paganism to attempt the religious epic. Being Protestants, 

 they did this so much the more readily. The chief of these 

 forerunners of Milton, whose lofty daring spirit we still admire, 

 was Guillaume de Salluste, Seigneur du Bartas. In his youth 

 he had indulged his love of writing sonnets after the model of 

 Petrarch, and odes in the strain of Pindar. As a Calvinist, he 

 had learned to scorn such frivolous writings ; and, burning with 

 the desire of composing something grand, he borrowed his 

 subject-matter from the Holy FJible, and told the tale of the 

 genesis of the world in an epic, the design of which, in his mind, 

 approached the colossal. 



The first week : La premiere divine semaine appeared in 

 1578, and its continuation. La seconde semaine, in 1584. The first 

 semaine takes us on from chaos up to the period of rest after the 

 creation of man. The second semaine, which Du Bartas evidently 

 intended to become a kind of Legende dcs Siecles, was to go 

 from Eden to the final dissolution of our world. Death snatched 

 him away after the completion of the 15th canto of this stupen- 

 dous work. The popularity of this epic poem was immense. 

 Du Bartas was extolled to the skies, and his work was translated 

 into all the languages of Europe. His Protestant co-religionists 

 declared him to be far superior to the master-poet Ronsard, and 

 later on the semaines were sincerely admired and praised by 

 Milton, Byron, Bilderdyk, and Goethe. In Italy Tasso imitated 

 him in a poem on the same subject. I am sorry to state that, for 

 us, it is extremely difficult to share this contemporary and later 

 enthusiasm. We cannot enjoy his laboured and rhetorical 

 descriptions, however gladly we acknowledge that many a 



