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rulers and the ruled-is the text, which . . . is illustrated throughout the Parallel Lives.' It was the text also, which George Wyndham himself illustrated both by doctrine and by example. None knew better than he the obligation of gentleness. Destiny, he thought, had conferred upon him duties as well as privileges, and he esteemed the privileges more lightly than the duties. But who to-day will preach to such a text, whose very meaning is obscured in the welter of party interests, of party feuds, of all the uglinesses, that cloud the sky of politics? If only our statesmen would still remember Plutarch's sound doctrine, enunciated by George Wyndham, of harmony between the rulers and the ruled, the darkest problem which confronts us would be solved, and England would recover at last something of her natural grace.

Thus George Wyndham, living fiercely in the present, sought confirmation and support in the annals of the past. And comparing past and present, he noted a double contrast between the England of his day and the world of Plutarch's heroes. These heroes, said he, extreme in action, were all for compromise in theory. They are ready to seal with their blood such certainty as they can attain.' How different was the character which he gave, with perfect justice, to his own countrymen ! Ever extreme in theory,' he wrote, we are all for compromise in fact; proud on the one score of our sincerity, on the other of our commonsense. We are fanatics, who yet decline to persecute, still less to suffer, for our faith. And this temperance of behaviour, following hard upon the violent utterance of belief, is apt to show something irrational and tame.' With a rare insight, then, he

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discovers the essential contrasts in ancient and modern politics, supplies the analysis and the argument, which he says, truly enough, Plutarch sometimes lacks, and then willingly draws the conclusion from his author's narrative that theories and sentiments are in politics no more than flags and tuckets in a battle.'

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Yet George Wyndham would never frown contemptuously upon flags and tuckets. He loved whatever was sumptuous and decorative in war or in politics as warmly as he loved life itself. So that, if he praised Plutarch as the dramatist in politics,' the 'unrivalled painter of men,' he praised him yet more highly as the painter of battle pieces. The backgrounds of the Lives reminded him of those pictures of a bygone mode, in which 'armies engage, fleets are sunk, towns are sacked, and citadels escaladed.' He applauds the art of Plutarch in selecting the dominant facts: 'the proportion of the two armies and the space between; the sun flashing on the distant shields; the long suspense '; and declares that there have been few between Plutarch and Tolstoi to give the scale and perspective of battle by observing such proportion in the art.' Nor does it escape him that Plutarch could be, when he chose, a very Greek in restraint. He could keep the action off the stage, and employ the artifice of the messenger as skilfully as the best of the tragedians. He could contrive 'the reverberation and not the shock of fate.' As Thackeray showed us Waterloo, not in the field but in Brussels, so Plutarch painted Leuctra, unerringly, in its effect upon Sparta. But nowhere does George Wyndham use the experience which he had won as a soldier in Egypt to better purpose, than in

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his comment upon Plutarch's picture of the Roman soldiers after Pydna. He recognises with the eye and ear of one who has shared the joys and labours of the field, the groups round the camp-fires, the lights crossing and recrossing, the songs of the merry soldiers, and then speaks, as his memory bids him. 'It is hard,' says he, to analyse the art, for the means employed are of the simplest; yet it is certain that they do recall to such as have known, and that they must suggest to others who have not, those sights and sounds and sensations, which combine with a special enchantment about the time of the fall of darkness upon bodies of men who have drunk excitement and borne toil together in the day.' That is sincerely observed and rightly said, and the sincerity and the rightness prove that when a man who has felt the stress of life learns to write he makes discoveries which elude the cloistered craftsman. The merit of George Wyndham's essay on Plutarch owes much to the fact that it is the work of one who was a soldier and a politician as well as a writer, who was not merely a Combatant but an Artist.

V

And all the while George Wyndham was constant to the study of French poetry. The sixteenth century held him as firmly in France as in England, and he turned, by a natural sympathy, to Ronsard and the Pléiade. In this avowed preference he was a pioneer of taste, at any rate among his own countrymen. Ronsard had suffered the same fate which has since overtaken Victor Hugo: he had been buried beneath the vast

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monument of his own majestic verse.
terity, envious always, thinking that he, who was
acclaimed the Horace or the Pindar of his age,
deserved the chastening rod, took a fierce revenge
upon the poet for the generous praise lavished upon
him in his lifetime. To-day Ronsard belongs no
longer to antiquity, but to the present world of men
and poets. The enthusiasm of Barbey d'Aurevilly,
the admiration of Gautier, Banville and Heredia,
the loyal acknowledgment, made by the Disciple
Moréas, of the Master Ronsard, have had their
due effect. In England, not Pater himself has
written with a wiser understanding of the great
French poet than George Wyndham. With careful
appreciation he marks his place in the Pléiade,
discovers his sources, praises his sense of beauty.
With the devotion of a pilgrim he visited the castle
of Ronsard's father, and transcribed the Latin
mottoes incised upon the door. By a fortunate
accident, he happened upon the ruined Priory of
St. Cosme, whither Ronsard, finding his life a con-
tinual death, retired from Court to die, and marked
the Gothic door, through which Ronsard passed,
from which he never emerged. 'A rose-tree grew
up one of the jambs,' wrote George Wyndham, and
a vine had thrown a branch across the grey, worm-
eaten panels. When I returned next year the door,
with its time-worn sculpture, was gone.' What
better illustration could be found than this of
Ronsard's text:

Tout ce qui est de beau ne se garde longtemps
Les roses et les lis ne régnent qu'un printemps'?

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While George Wyndham extols at its proper worth the work of the Pléiade, he sees plainly enough

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whither its rules, too rigidly interpreted, would lead. A chain, though it be woven of roses, is irksome to bear, and perfection itself, solemnly ordained, may be a tyranny. Mallarmé has pointed out that the rules formulated by the successors of the Pléiade would enable anybody to make a verse to which none could object. 'But,' says George Wyndham, that savours of deportment rather than of poesy.' He recognises it as an admirable maxim . . . for the genteel mob of eighteenthcentury couplet-mongers, but a useless counsel and, so, an impertinence to the leader of a revel or a forlorn hope.' Thus he makes plain, in criticising others, his own ambition. He cared not which he led-a revel or a forlorn hope in life or letters. Each of them suited the temper of his mind. He was content to be joyous with those who smiled, or to die in the last ditch for a losing cause. And in Ronsard, I think, he loved the gay valour of the man as much as he loved his sentiment of beauty. He liked to remember his spacious life at the Court, the favour shown him by Elizabeth and Mary Stuart, the silver Minerva, which he won at the Floral Games of Toulouse. But most of all he reverenced him because he was every inch a man, who stood four-square to the whole racket of his day.' It was not for Ronsard, for all his love of roses and lilies, to pass his time idly in an enchanted garden. 'Here,' says George Wyndham, ‘is a citizen and a soldier, a man who takes a side in politics and religion, who argues from the rostrum and pommels in the ring, delighting in all the treasures garnered into the citadel of the past, and ready to die in its defence.' In sketching thus the ideals of Ronsard, George Wyndham sketched his own.

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