A History of French Literature. Edward Dowden

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СКАЧАТЬ ideas, rather carry on the tradition of Marot than announce the Pléiade. PIERRE DE RONSARD, born at a château a few leagues from Vendôme, in the year 1524, was in the service of the sons of Francis I. as page, was in Scotland with James V., and later had the prospect of a distinguished diplomatic career, when deafness, consequent on a serious malady, closed for him the avenue to public life. He threw himself ardently into the study of letters; in company with the boy Antoine de Baïf he received lessons from an excellent Hellenist, Jean Daurat, soon to be principal of the Collège Coqueret. At the College a group of students—Ronsard, Baïf, Joachim du Bellay, Remi Belleau—gathered about the master. The "Brigade" was formed, which, by-and-by, with the addition of Jodelle and Pontus de Thyard, and including Daurat, became the constellation of the Pléiade. The seven associates read together, translated and imitated the classics; a common doctrine of art banded them in unity; they thought scorn of the vulgar ways of popular verse; poetry for them was an arduous and exquisite toil; its service was a religion. At length, in 1549, they flung out their manifesto—the Défense et Illustration de la Langue Française by Du Bellay, the most important study in literary criticism of the century. With this should be considered, as less important manifestoes, the later Art Poétique of Ronsard, and his prefaces to the Franciade. To formulate principles is not always to the advantage of a movement in literature; but champions need a banner, reformers can hardly dispense with a definite creed. Against the popular conception of the ignorant the Pléiade maintained that poetry was a high and difficult form of art; against the pedantry of humanism they maintained that the native tongue of France admitted of literary art worthy to take its place beside that of Greece or Rome. The French literary vocabulary, they declared, has excellences of its own, but it needs to be enriched by technical terms, by words of local dialects, by prudent adoptions from Greek and Latin, by judicious developments of the existing families of words, by the recovery of words that have fallen into disuse.

      It is unjust to the Pléiade to say that they aimed at overloading poetic diction with neologisms of classical origin; they sought to innovate with discretion; but they unquestionably aimed at the formation of a poetic diction distinct from that of prose; they turned away from simplicity of speech to ingenious periphrasis; they desired a select, aristocratic idiom for the service of verse; they recommended a special syntax in imitation of the Latin; for the elder forms of French poetry they would substitute reproductions or re-creations of classical forms. Rondeaux, ballades, virelais, chants royaux, chansons are to be cast aside as épiceries; and their place is to be taken by odes like those of Pindar or of Horace, by the elegy, satire, epigram, epic, or by newer forms justified by the practice of Italian masters. Rich but not over-curious rhymes are to be cultivated, with in general the alternation of masculine and feminine rhymes; the cæsura is to fall in accordance with the meaning. Ronsard, more liberal than Du Bellay, permits, on the ground of classical example, the gliding from couplet to couplet without a pause. "The alexandrine holds in our language the place of heroic verse among the Greeks and Romans"—in this statement is indicated the chief service rendered to French poetry by Ronsard and the rest of the Pléiade; they it was who, by their teaching and example, imposed on later writers that majestic line, possessing the most varied powers, capable of the finest achievements, which has yielded itself alike to the purposes of Racine and to those of Victor Hugo.

      Ronsard and Du Bellay broke with the tradition of the Middle Ages, and inaugurated the French classical school; it remained for Malherbe, at a later date, to reform the reformation of the Pléiade, and to win for himself the glory which properly belongs to his predecessors. Unfortunately from its origin the French classical school had in it the spirit of an intellectual aristocracy, which removed it from popular sympathies; unfortunately, also, the poets of the Pléiade failed to perceive that the masterpieces of Greece and Rome are admirable, not because they belong to antiquity, but because they are founded on the imitation of nature and on ideas of the reason. They were regarded as authorities equal with nature or independent of it; and thus while the school of Ronsard did much to renew literary art, its teaching involved an error which eventually tended to the sterilisation of art. That error found its correction in the literature of the seventeenth century, and expressly in the doctrine set forth by Boileau; yet under the correction some of the consequences of the error remained. Ronsard and his followers, on the other hand, never made the assumption, common enough in the seventeenth century, that poetry could be manufactured by observance of the rules, nor did they suppose that the total play of emotion must be rationalised by the understanding; they left a place for the instinctive movements of poetic sensibility.

      During forty years Ronsard remained the "Prince of Poets." Tasso sought his advice; the Chancellor Michel de l'Hospital wrote in his praise; Brantôme placed him above Petrarch; Queen Elizabeth and Mary Stuart sent him gifts; Charles IX. on one occasion invited him to sit beside the throne. In his last hours he was still occupied with his art. His death, at the close of 1585, was felt as a national calamity, and pompous honours were awarded to his tomb. Yet Ronsard, though ambitious of literary distinction, did not lose his true self in a noisy fame. His was the delicate nature of an artist; his deafness perhaps added to his timidity and his love of retirement; we think of him in his garden, cultivating his roses as "the priest of Flora."

      His work as a poet falls into four periods. From 1550 to 1554 he was a humanist without discretion or reserve. In the first three books of the Odes he attempted to rival Pindar; in the Amours de Cassandre he emulates the glory of Petrarch. From 1554 to 1560, abandoning his Pindarism, he was in discipleship to Anacreon14 and Horace. It is the period of the less ambitious odes found in the fourth and fifth books, the period of the Amours de Marie and the Hymnes. From 1560 to 1574 he was a poet of the court and of courtly occasions, an eloquent declaimer on public events in the Discours des Misères de ce Temps, and the unfortunate epic poet of his unfinished Franciade. During the last ten years of his life he gave freer expression to his personal feelings, his sadness, his gladness; and to these years belong the admirable sonnets to Hélène de Surgères, his autumnal love.

      Ronsard's genius was lyrical and elegiac, but the tendencies of a time when the great affair was the organisation of social life, and as a consequence the limitation of individual and personal passions, were not favourable to the development of lyrical poetry. In his imitations of Pindar a narrative element checks the flight of song, and there is a certain unreality in the premeditated attempt to reproduce the passionate fluctuations and supposed disorder of his model. The study of Pindar, however, trained Ronsard in the handling of sustained periods of verse, and interested him in complex lyrical combinations. His Anacreontic and Horatian odes are far happier; among these some of his most delightful work is found. If he was deficient in great ideas, he had delicacy of sentiment and an exquisite sense of metrical harmony. The power which he possessed as a narrative poet appears best in episodes or epic fragments. His ambitious attempt to trace the origin of the French monarchy from the imaginary Trojan Francus was unfortunate in its subject, and equally unfortunate in its form—the rhyming decasyllabic verse.

      In pieces which may be called hortatory, the pulpit eloquence, as it were, of a poet addressing his contemporaries on public matters, the utterances of a patriot and a citizen moved by pity for his fellows, such poetry as the Discours des Misères de ce Temps and the Institution pour l'Adolescence du Roi, Charles IX., Ronsard is original and impressive, a forerunner of the orator poets of the seventeenth century. His eclogues show a true feeling for external nature, touched at times by a tender sadness. When he escapes from the curiosities and the strain of his less happy Petrarchism, he is an admirable poet of love in song and sonnet; no more beautiful variation on the theme of "gather the rosebuds while ye may" exists than his sonnet Quand vous serez bien vieille, unless it be his dainty ode Mignonne, allons voir si la Rose. Passionate in the deepest and largest sense Ronsard is not; but it was much to be sincere and tender, to observe just measure, to render a subtle phase of emotion. In the fine melancholy of his elegiac poetry he is almost modern. Before all else he is a master of his instrument, an inventor of new effects and movements of the lyre; in his hands the entire rhythmical system was renewed or was purified. His dexterity in various metres was that of a great virtuoso, and it was not the mere dexterity which conquers difficulties, it was a skill inspired СКАЧАТЬ