and enduring works.



VIII


In France the interest of pastoralism, from our present point of view, is
summed up in the work of one man--Clément Marot. It is he who forms the
central figure on the stage of French poetry between the final collapse of
the medieval tradition and the ceasing of Villon's song earlier, and later
the full burst of the renaissance in the work of the Pléiade. While
belonging ostensibly to the literary circle of Margaret of Navarre, Marot
appears to have combined in his own person a strange number of conflicting
tendencies. His patroness followed the pastoral tradition in her imitation
of Sannazzaro's _Salices_ and her lament on the death of her brother
François I, and rehandled an already favourite theme in her _comédie_ of
human and divine love. Marot, on the other hand, while equally interested
in pastoral, betrayed in his verse little direct influence of the
Italians, and invariably impressed his own individuality upon his subject.
In his early work he continued the tradition of the _Romance of the Rose_;
later he voiced, somewhat crudely may be, the ideals of the renaissance.
By nature an easy-going _bon vivant_, his only real affection appears to
have been for the faithless mistress of his early years, whom a not very
probable tradition identifies with Diane de Poitiers. He had no higher
ambition than to retain unmolested a comfortable post at the court of
Francis. Yet he was destined by a strange irony of fate to pass his days
as a wanderer on the face of the earth, the homeless pilgrim of a cause he
no wise had at heart. He was accused by the Sorbonne, and ultimately
driven into the profession, of the heresy of Calvinism. Expelled from the