A Short History of French Literature
entered upon court life when he was a boy of ten years old. He visited
Scotland and England in the suite of French ambassadors, and remained
for some considerable time in Great Britain. He was also attached to
embassies in Flanders, Holland, and Germany. But before he was of age he
fell ill, and though he recovered, it was at the cost of permanent
deafness, which incapacitated him for the public service. He threw
himself on literature for a consolation, and under the direction of
Daurat, a scholar of renown, studied for years at the College Coqueret.
Here Du Bellay, Belleau, Baif, were his fellow-students, and the four
with their master, with Etienne Jodelle, and with Pontus de Tyard,
afterwards bishop of Chalon, formed, as has been said, the Pleiade
according to the most orthodox computation. The idea conceived and
carried out in these studious years (by Ronsard himself and Du Bellay
beyond all doubt in the first place) was the reformation of French
language and French literature by study and imitation of the ancients.
In 1549 the manifesto of the society issued, in the shape of Du Bellay's
_Defense et Illustration de la Langue Francaise_, and in 1550 the first
practical illustration of the method was given by Ronsard's _Odes_. The
principles of the _Defense et Illustration_ may be thus summarised. The
author holds that the current forms of literature, dizains, rondeaus,
etc., are altogether too facile and easy, that the language used is too
pedestrian, the treatment wanting in gravity and art. He would have Odes
of the Horatian kind take the place of Chansons, the sonnet, _non moins
docte que plaisante invention Italienne_, of dizains and huitains,
regular tragedy and comedy of moralities and farces, regular satires of
Fatrasies and Coq-a-l'ane. He takes particular pains to demonstrate the
contrary proposition to Wordsworth's, and to prove that merely natural
and ordinary language is not sufficient for him who in poesy wishes to
produce work deserving of immortality. He ridicules the mediaeval
affectations and conceits of some of the writers of his time, who gave
themselves such names as 'Le Banni de Liesse,' 'Le Traverseur des Voies
Perilleuses,' etc. He speaks, indeed, not too respectfully of mediaeval
literature generally, and uses language which probably suggested Gabriel
Harvey's depreciatory remarks about the _Fairy Queen_ forty years later.
In much of this there is exaggeration, and in much more of it mistake.
By turning their backs on the middle ages--though indeed they were not
able to do it thoroughly--the Pleiade lost almost as much in subject and
spirit as they gained in language and formal excellence. The laudation
of the sonnet, while the ballade and chant royal, things of similar
nature and of hardly less capacity, are denounced as _epiceries_,
savours of a rather Philistine preference for mere novelty and foreign
fashions. But, as has been already pointed out, Du Bellay was right in
the main, and it must especially be insisted on that his aim was to
strengthen and reform, not to alter or misguide, the French language.
The peroration of the book in a highly rhetorical style speaks of the
writer and his readers as having 'echappe du milieu des Grecs et par les
escadrons Romains pour entrer jusqu'au sein de la tant desiree France.'
That is to say, the innovators are to carry off what spoils they can
from Greece and Rome, but it is to be for the enrichment and benefit of
the French tongue. Frenchmen are to write French, not Latin and Greek;
but they are to write it not merely in a conversational way, content as
Du Bellay says somewhere else, 'n'avoir dit rien qui vaille aux neuf
premiers vers, pourvu qu'au dixieme il y ait le petit mot pour rire.'
They are to accustom themselves to long and weary studies, 'ear ce sont
les ailes dont les escripts des hommes volent au ciel,' to imitate good
authors, not merely in Greek and Latin, but in Italian, Spanish, or any
other tongue where they may be found. Such was the manifesto of the
Pleiade; and no one who has studied French literature and French
character, who knows the special tendency of the nation to drop from
time to time into a sterile self-admiration, and an easy confidence that
it is the all-sufficient wonder of the world, can doubt its wisdom.
Certainly, whatever may be thought of it in the abstract, it was
justified of its children. The first of these was, as has been said,
Ronsard's _Odes_, published in 1550. These he followed up, in 1552, by
_Les Amours de Cassandre_, in 1553 by a volume of _Hymnes_, as well as
by _Le Bocage Royal_, _Les Amours de Marie_, sonnets, etc., all of
which were, in 1560, republished in a collected edition of four
volumes. From the first Ronsard had been a very popular poet at court,
where, according to a well-known anecdote, Marguerite de Savoie, the
second of the Valois Marguerites, snatched his first volume from Mellin
de Saint Gelais, who was reading it in a designed tone of burlesque, and
reading it herself to her brother Henry II. and the court, obtained a
verdict at once for the young poet. The accession of Charles IX. brought
Ronsard still more into favour, and during the next ten years he
produced many courtly poems of the occasional kind, besides others to
suit his own pleasure. In 1572 the first part of his most ambitious, but
perhaps least successful, work appeared. This was the _Franciade_, a
dull epic. At the death of Charles, Ronsard retired to his native
province, where he had an abbacy, Croix-Val. Here all his poetical
powers returned, and in his last _Amours, Sonnets to Helene_, and other
pieces, some of his very best work is to be found. The year before his
death he produced an edition of his works much altered, but by no means
invariably improved.
There are few poets to whose personal merits there is more unanimity of
trustworthy testimony than there is to those of Ronsard. From the time
of his betaking himself to literary work, he seems to have been wholly
given to study, and to the contemplation of natural beauty. Although
jealous of his own great reputation, and liable to be nettled when it
was imperilled, as it was by Du Bartas, he was as a rule singularly
placable in literary quarrels. The story of his quarrelling with
Rabelais is late, unsupported, and to all appearance fabulous; while, on
the other hand, the passages which have been supposed to reflect on the
Pleiade in the writings of Rabelais can, for chronological reasons, by
no possibility refer to Ronsard or his friends. Lastly, the poet appears
to have had no thought of writing for gain, and though, like all his
contemporaries, he did not scruple to solicit favours from the king, he
was in no way importunate or servile. But while his personal character,
as well as the extraordinary esteem in which he was held by all his
contemporaries, has never been seriously contested, critical estimates
of his literary work have strangely varied. To his own age he was the
'Prince of Poets.' His successor, Malherbe, behaved to him as certain
popes are reported to have behaved to their predecessors,
excommunicating him in the literary sense. Boileau, with his usual
ignorance of French literature before his own day, described his work in
lines which French schoolboys long learnt by heart, and which are as
false in fact as they are imbecile in criticism. Fenelon was almost the
only sincere partisan he had for two centuries. But when the Romantic
movement began Ronsard was for a while almost restored to the position
he held in his lifetime, and his works became a kind of Bible to the
disciples of Sainte-Beuve and the followers of Hugo. The strong
mediaeval revival which accompanied the movement was however
unfavourable to Ronsard, and he has again sunk, though not very low, in
the general estimation of French critics. The history is curious, and as
a literary phenomenon instructive. 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. Many of his sonnets,
especially the famous and universally admired 'Quand vous serez bien
vieille,' not a few of his odes, especially the equally famous
'Mignonne, allons voir si la rose,' rank among those poems of which it
can only be said that they could not be better, and detached passages
innumerable deserve hardly lower praise. 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. Since the disuse of the
half-inarticulate but sweet rhythmical varieties of the mediaeval
pastourelles and romances a great monotony had come upon French poetry.
The fault of the artificial forms of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and
early sixteenth centuries, the _epiceries_ of Du Bellay's scornful
allusion, was that they induced their writers to concentrate their
attention on the arrangement of the rhymes and stanzas, to the neglect
of the individual line, the rhythm of which was but too frequently lame,
stiff, and prosaic in the extreme. With Marot and Saint Gelais the
introduction of less formal patterns, dizains, huitains, etc., had had
the additional drawback of making the individual verse even more prosaic
and pedestrian, though it may be somewhat less stiff. Now the line is,
after all, the unit of poetry, and all reform must start with it. It is
the great glory of Ronsard that his reform did so start. From his time
French poetry reads quite differently. Perhaps this was due to his study
of the Horatian quantity-metres, where every syllable has to give its
quota to the effect of the line as well as every line its quota to the
effect of the stanza. But whether it was this or something else, the
effect is indisputable. To this must be added a liberal, though in
Ronsard's own case not excessive, importation of new words from Greek
and Latin, a bold and striking mode of expression, the retention of many
picturesque old words which the senseless folly of the
seventeenth-century reformers banished, and, above all, a great
indulgence in diminutives, which give a most charming effect to the
lighter verse of Ronsard and his friends, and which also were cut off by
the indiscriminate and 'desperate hook' of Malherbe and Boileau. So
great were the formal changes and improvements thus introduced, that
French poetry takes a new colour from the age of Ronsard, a colour which
in its moments of health it has ever since displayed.
[Sidenote: Du Bellay.]
Next to Ronsard, and perhaps above him, if uniform excellence rather
than bulk and range of work is considered, ranks Joachim du Bellay[195].
He was a connection, though it does not seem quite clear what
connection, of the Cardinal du Bellay to whom Rabelais was so long
attached, and whose house included other illustrious members. Probably
he was a cousin of the cardinal and of his two brothers the memoir
writers. His youth was rendered troublesome by illness and law
difficulties, but at last he was able with Ronsard, whose junior he was