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.
A group of men to which allusion will be made in connection with Du
Bellay set out with a programme, developed a determined school, and
fixed the literary renaissance of France at its highest point. They
steeped themselves in antiquity, and they put to the greatest value it
has ever received the name of poet; they demanded that the poet should
be a kind of king, or seer. Half seriously, half as a product of mere
scholarship, the pagan conception of the muse and of inspiration filled
them.
More than that; in their earnest, and, as it seemed at first, artificial
work, they formed the French language. Some of its most famous and most
familiar words proceed from them--for instance, the word _Patrie_. Some
few of their exotic Greek and Latin adaptations were dropped; the
greater part remained. They have excluded from French--as some think to
the impoverishment of that language--most elements of the Gothic--the
inversion of the adjective, the frequent suppression of the relative,
the irregularity of form, which had survived from the Middle Ages, and
which make the older French poetry so much more sympathetic to the
Englishman than is the new--all these were destroyed by the group of men
of whom I speak. They were called by their contemporaries the Pleiade,
for they were seven stars.
Now, of these, Ronsard was easily the master. He had that power which
our anaemic age can hardly comprehend, of writing, writing, writing,
without fear of exhaustion, without irritability or self-criticism,
without danger of comparing the better with the worse. Five great
volumes of small print, all good--men of that facility never write the
really paltry things--all good, and most of it glorious; some of it on
the level which only the great poets reach here and there. It is in
reading this man who rhymed unceasingly for forty years, who made of
poetry an occupation as well as a glory, and who let it fill the whole
of his life, that one feels how much such creative power has to do with
the value of verse. There is a kind of good humility about it, the
humility of a man who does not look too closely at himself, and the
health of a soul at full stride, going forward. 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; and one is
reminded of the general vigour of the age and of the way in which art of
all sorts was mingled up together, when one remembers the tags of
verses, just such verses as these, which are yet to be seen in our
galleries set down doubtfully on the margin of their sketches by the
great artists of Italy.
Ronsard, with these qualities of a leader, unconscious, as all true
leaders are, of the causes of his leadership, and caring, as all true
leaders do, for nothing in leadership save the glory it brings with it,
had also, as have all leaders, chiefly the power of drawing in a
multitude of friends. The peculiar head of his own group, he very soon
became the head of all the movement of his day. He had made letters
really great in the minds of his contemporaries, and having so made
them, appeared before them as a master of those letters. Certainly, as I
shall quote him in a moment when I come to his dying speech, he was
"satiated with glory."
Yet this man did not in his personality convey that largeness which was
his principal mark. His face was narrow, long and aquiline; his health
uneven. It was evidently his soul which made men quickly forget the
ill-matched case which bore it; for almost alone of the great poets he
was consistently happy, and there poured out from him not only this
unceasing torrent of verse, but also advice, sustenance, and a kind of
secondary inspiration for others.
In yet another matter he was a leader, and a leader of the utmost
weight, not the cause, perhaps, but certainly the principal example of
the trend which the mind of the nation was taking as the sixteenth
century drew to a close. I mean in the matter of religion, upon whose
colour every society depends, which is the note even of a national
language, and which seems to be the ultimate influence beyond which no
historical analysis can carry a thinking man.
But even those who will not admit the truth of this should watch the
theory closely, for with the religious trend of France is certainly
bound up, and, as I would maintain, on such an influence is dependent,
that ultimate setting of the French classic, that winding up of the
Renaissance, with which I shall deal in the essay upon Malherbe.
The stream of Catholicism was running true. The nation was tumbling back
after a high and turbulent flood into the channel it had scoured for
itself by the unbroken energies of a thousand years. It is no accident
that Ronsard, that Du Bellay, were churchmen. 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; but that it
should have been tolerated, that it should have led to no excess or
angry revolt, was typical of their moment. It was typical, finally, of
their generation that all this mixture of the Renaissance with the
Church matured at last into its natural fruit, for in the case of
Ronsard we have a noble expression of perfect Christianity at the end.
In the November of 1585 he felt death upon him; he had himself borne to
his home as soon as the Huguenot bands had left it, ravaged and
devastated as it was. He found it burnt and looted, but it reminded him
of childhood and of the first springs of his great river of verse. A
profound sadness took him. He was but in his sixty-second year, his mind
had not felt any chill of age. He could not sleep; poppies and
soporifics failed him. He went now in his coach, now on a litter from
place to place in that country side which he had rendered famous, and
saw the Vendomois for the last time; its cornfields all stubble under a
cold and dreary sky. And in each place he waited for a while.
But death troubled him, and he could not remain. Within a fortnight he
ordered that they should carry him southward to the Loire, to that
priory of which--by a custom of privilege, nobility and royal favour--he
was the nominal head, the priory which is "the eye and delight of
Touraine",--the Isle of St. Cosmo. He sickened as he went. The thirty
miles or so took him three painful days; twice, all his strength failed
him, and he lay half fainting in his carriage; to so much energy and to
so much power of creation these episodes were an awful introduction of
death.
It was upon the 17th of November that he reached the walls wherein he
was Superior; six weeks later, on the second day after Christmas, he
died.
Were I to describe that scene to which he called the monks, all men of
his own birth and training, were I to dwell upon the appearance and the
character of the oldest and the wisest, who was also the most famous
there, I should extend this essay beyond its true limit, as I should
also do were I to write down, even briefly, the account of his just,
resigned, and holy death. It must suffice that I transcribe the chief of
his last deeds; I mean, that declaration wherein he made his last
profession of faith.