Pierre de Ronsard

“ Ronsard had the true sensualist's gift of extracting flavors.
On these home visits he was eagerly sought after by his friends and club fellows, and by the more intelligent among fashionable women. In this latter category shone pre-eminent the widowed Princess Olga Le Beau. Rumor often had it that his next return to the East would be brightened by the wedded companionship of this lady, but each time Rumor hid her face.
The princess had married while yet a schoolgirl. Pierre, her only child, was born within the year of the marriage. ”

“ Then, withal, to bless the hand with the art of expressing the things seen of his heart so others, reading in passing, might know His wonders too, was of a surety to be markedly favored of destiny. Thus it was that our good Abbé made sonnets and madrigals with his master Pierre Ronsard, ballades after the manner of that charming rogue François Villon, and songs quite as exquisite as those of the amorous troubadour, Bernard de Ventadour, whom he admired more for the structure of his verses than the sentiment expressed therein. ”

“ If it be true that words create for themselves a special atmosphere, and that their mere sound calls up vague outer things beyond their strict meaning, so it is true that the names of the great poets by their mere sound, by something more than the recollection of their work, produce an atmosphere corresponding to the quality of each; and the name of Ronsard throws about itself like an aureole the characters of fecundity, of leadership, and of fame. ”

“ No one used with more art than he the graceful diminutives which his school set in fashion. He knew well too how to manage the gorgeous adjectives (" marbrine," “ cinabrine," “ ivoirine" and the like) which were another fancy of the Pléiade, and in his hands they rarely become stiff or cumbrous. In short, Ronsard shows eminently the two great attractions of French 16th-century poetry as compared with that of the two following ages—magnificence of language and imagery and graceful variety of metre.
Bibliography.—The chief separately published works of Ronsard are noted above. ”

“ Indeed, it is precisely because Ronsard lends himself so superbly as an amateur to treatment by the amateur, that any attempt to approach him more closely seems to be tinged with rancour or ingratitude. There is something churlish in the determination to be most on one's guard against the engaging graces of the amateur, a sense that one is behaving like the hero of a Gissing novel; but the choice is not large. One must regard Ronsard either as a charming country gentleman, or as a great historical figure in the development of French poetry, or as a poet ”

“ With the more obvious, and in their way delightful, surprises Ronsard is generous. He can hold the attention longer than any poet of an equal tenuity of matter. Chiefly for two reasons, of which one is hardly capable of further analysis. It is the obvious reality of his own delight in 'Petrarchising.' He is perpetually in love with making; he disports himself with a childlike enthusiasm in his art. There are moments when he seems hardly to have passed beyond the stage of naive wonder that words exist and are manipulable. ”

“ But it is not difficult for an impartial judge to place Ronsard in his true position. His main defects are two: he was too much a poet of malice prepense, and yet he wrote on the whole too fluently. The mass of his work is great, and it is not always, nor perhaps very often, animated by those unmistakable and universal poetical touches which in the long run will alone suffice to induce posterity to keep a writer on its shelf of great poets. Yet these touches are by no means wanting in Ronsard. ”

“ A high court of literary [9] judicature formally decreed to Ronsard the title of The French Poet by eminence. This occurred in the youth of the poet. The wine of success so brilliant turned the young fellow's head. He soon began to play lord paramount of Parnassus, with every air of one born to the purple. The kings of the earth vied with each other to do him honor. Ronsard affected scholarship, and the foremost scholars of his time were proud to place him with Homer and with Virgil on the roll of the poets. ”

“ Ronsard loves, or dreams that he loves, a rare and peculiar type of beauty, la petite pucelle Angevine, with golden hair and dark eyes. But he has the ambition not only of being a courtier and a lover, but a great scholar also; he is anxious about orthography, about the letter e Grecque, the true spelling of Latin names in French writing, and the restoration of the letter i to its primitive liberty—del' i voyelle en sa premiere liberte. His poetry is full of quaint, remote learning. ”

“ As a writer of personal literature, he was one of the bold and original men of his time.
XIV "THE PRINCE OF FRENCH POETS"
It is difficult nowadays to conceive that, within half a century of his death, Ronsard's fame suffered so dark an eclipse that no new edition of his works was called for between 1629 and 1857. When he died, he was, as M. Jusserand reminds us, the most illustrious man of letters in Europe. He seemed, too, to have all those gifts of charm—charm of mood and music—which make immortality certain. ”

“ You may open Ronsard at any page, and find a beauty; you may open any one of the sonnets at random, and in translating it discover that you are compelled to a fine English, because he is saying, plainly, great things. And of these sonnets, note you, he would write thirty at a stretch, and then twenty, and then a second book, with seventy more. So that as one reads one cannot help understanding that Italian who said a man was no poet unless he could rap out a century of sonnets from time to time ”

“ He holds high the banner of the Ronsardian unification of Arts; and while 130insisting that even the ugly may be made interesting, if not beautiful, in the imitation of it, repeats the old cautions about inconsistent and too fantastic admixture of imagery. Among other followings of Ronsard we note the earnest advice to cultivate stately descriptions and abundant ornament. But he does not omit—though it must be allowed he does not observe it over strictly himself—the caution to keep the thread,
“Si tu fais un Sonnet, ou si tu fais une Ode.” ”

“ But it is when Ronsard is viewed from the standpoint of a thoroughly instructed historical criticism that his real greatness appears. It is when we look at the poets that came before him and at those who came after him that we see the immense benefit he conferred upon his successors, and upon the language which those successors illustrated. The result of his classical studies was little less than the introduction of an entirely new rhythm into French poetry: let it be observed that a new rhythm, and not merely new metre, is what is spoken of. ”

“ Castiglione, Baldassare (1478-1529) . “Il Cortegiano,” setting forth the idea of a gentleman, was translated as “The Courtier” by Thomas Hoby in 1561 and was very influential in English life.
Ronsard, Pierre de (1524-1585) , the chief French lyric poet of the sixteenth century, whose sonnets had considerable vogue in England. ”

“ Estienne Jodelle (1532-1573) ; Remy Belleau (1528-1577) ; Jean Dinemandy, usually known as Daurat or Dorat (1508-1588) , Ronsard’s classical teacher in early life; Jean-Antoine de Baïf (1532-1589) ; and Ponthus de Thyard (1521-1605) . Others of Ronsard’s literary allies are often loosely reckoned among the ‘Pléiade.’ These writers include Jean de la Péruse (1529-1554) , Olivier de Magny (1530-1559) , Amadis Jamyn (1538?-1585) , Jean Passerat (1534-1602) , Philippe Desportes (1546-1606) , Estienne Pasquier (1529-1615) , Scévole de Sainte-Marthe (1536-1623) , and Jean Bertaut (1552-1611) . ”

“ It is a type. It is a type of the truth that the cloth admitted poets; of the truth that in the great battle whose results yet trouble Europe, here, on the soil where the great questions are fought out, Puritanism was already killed. The epicurean in them both, glad and ready in Ronsard, sombre and Lucretian in Du Bellay, jarred indeed in youth against their vows ”

“ The nerves, instead of being, if only for a moment, tense and agitated, are steady to a degree that can produce an exasperation in a less well-appointed spectator. He will never let himself down, or give himself away, one feels, until the admiration of an apparent sure restraint passes into the conviction that there is nothing to restrain. All Ronsard the poet is in his poetry, and indeed on the surface of it. ”

“ Our poet, having fallen heir to a fortune, has lately left us, and his lordship would perhaps be good enough to take his place. I found accidentally, in opening a volume of Ronsard’s poems that lay upon the table in his room, a piece of paper with a sonnet written upon it, which must be of his composition, and proves him not unaccustomed to writing in verse. ”

“ His eyes followed the smooth rhythm of Ronsard’s ardent love-songs and stately sonnets, but his thoughts were wandering far afield, and he soon threw the book from him with an impatient gesture, and began slowly unfastening his garments, with the air of a man who is not sleepy, but only goes to bed because he does not know what else to do with himself, and has perhaps a faint hope of forgetting his troubles in the embrace of Morpheus, most blessed of all the gods. The sand runs so slowly in the hour-glass on a dark, stormy night, in a half-ruined castle, ten leagues away from any living soul. ”

“ If France was ever to possess a literature containing something besides fabliaux and farces, the tongue must be enriched and strengthened. This accession of wealth and vigour it received from Ronsard and the Ronsardists. Doubtless they went too far and provoked to some extent the reaction which Malherbe led. Their importations were sometimes unnecessary. It is almost impossible to read the Franciade of Ronsard, and not too easy to read the tragedies of Jodelle and Garnier, fine as the latter are in parts. ”

“ He was a man of evident culture, and his description of the coral-fishing community, their habits and traditions, was both graphic and picturesque.
“Are they all away to-day?” asked the King.
“All the men on this side of The Islands—yes, Sir,” replied Ronsard; “And the women have enough to do inside their houses till their husbands return. With the evening and the moonlight, they will all be out in their fields and gardens, making merry with innocent dance and song, for they are very happy folk—much happier than their neighbours on the mainland.” ”

“ The second cause of his continued power of attraction is doubtless allied to the first; it is a naïveté of a particular kind, which differs from the profound ingenuousness of which we have spoken by the fact that it is employed deliberately. Conscious simplicity is art, and if it is successful art of no mean order, Ronsard's method of admitting us, as it were, to his conversation with himself is definitely his own. ”

“ You cannot sail her in such a night as this!”
“I will adventure!” said Ronsard. “If, as you say, it was the King, I will save him if he can be saved! Once a King’s life was nothing to me; now it is something! The tide veers round these Islands, and the vessel on which they have placed the body of Lotys, can scarcely drift away from the circle till morning, unless the waves are too strong for it—”
“They are too strong!” cried the coral-fisher; “Ronsard, believe me! There is no rain to soften or abate the wind—and the sea grows greater with every breath of the rising gale!” ”

“ Many of the sonnets in which he ‘petrarquizes,’ retain the faded odour of the roses he loved; and his songs have fire and melancholy and a sense as of perfume from ‘a closet long to quiet vowed, with mothed and dropping arras hung.’ Ronsard’s great fame declined when is p. 4Malherbe came to ‘bind the sweet influences of the Pleiad,’ but he has been duly honoured by the newest school of French poetry. ”

“ The man who wrote it had seen that large and honorable mouth worshipping wine: he had reverenced that head of laughter which has corrected all our philosophy. It would be a shame to pass such a name as Ronsard's signed to an epitaph on such a work as that of Rabelais, poetry or no poetry.
Ronsard also from a tower at Meudon used to creep out at night and drink with that fellow-priest, vicar of the Parish, Rabelais: a greater man than he.
By a memory separate from the rest of his verse, Ronsard was moved to write this Rabelaisian thing. ”

“ Although Du Bellay was the originator of the scheme, Ronsard became the director and the acknowledged leader of the band. His accomplishments place him in the first rank of the poets of the world. Reference would be out of place here to the movement which was after his death directed by Malherbe against Ronsard's reputation and fame as a poet and his eventual restoration by the disciples of Sainte Beuve and the followers of Hugo. It is desirable, however, to allude to other great Frenchmen whose labours contributed in other directions to promote the growth of French literature. ”

“ That the language of poetry should be reminiscent of Greece and Rome was a Renaissance postulate.
Ronsard’s early classicism, revolting from prolonged rhétorique, was reminiscent of Vergil and Ovid of course, of Catullus and his imitator Secundus, sometimes of Claudian and Pontano, but mainly of the Odes of Horace. Sometimes he even paraphrases, as when he composes a French Fons Bandusiae; often he adapts phrases; oftenest he follows the Horatian lyric movement. If he occasionally condescends to a medieval form, he gives it classical style. ”