Divin Ronsard qui de l'arc a sept cordes
Tiras premier au but de la mémoire
Les traicts ailez de la Françoise gloire.
Everywhere it is his friend rather than he that has touched the mark of
the gods and called up from the tomb the ghost of Rome which all that
company worshipped.
I say he saw himself that he was second. Old Durat saw it clearly in
that little college of poets where he taught the unteachable thing: De
Baif, Belleau--all the comrades would have taken it for granted. Ronsard
led and was chief, because he had the firm largeness, the laughter and
the permanence which are the marks of those who determine the fortunes
of the French in letters or in arms. Ronsard made. His verses, in their
great mass and unfailing level, were but one example of the power that
could produce a school, call up a general enthusiasm, and for forty
years govern the taste of his country. There was in him something
public, in Du Bellay something domestic and attached, as in the
relations of a king and of a herald. Or again, the one was like an
ordered wood with a rich open plain about it, the other was like a
garden. Ronsard was the Beauce; Du Bellay was Anjou. It might be said of
the first that he stood a symbol for the wheat and corn-land of the
Vendômois, and of the second, that he recalled that subtle wine of the
southern Loire to which Chinon gives the most famous label.
Du Bellay was second: nevertheless, when he is well known in this
country it will be difficult to convince Englishmen of that truth. There
is in his mind a facet which exactly corresponds to a facet of our own,
and that is a quality so rare in the French classics that it will
necessarily attract English readers to him: for, of all people, we
nowadays criticise most in letters by the standard of our immediate
emotions, and least by what was once called "reason." He was capable of
that which will always be called "poignancy," and what for the moment we
call "depth." He was less careful than are the majority of his
countrymen to make letters an art, and so to treat his own personality
as a thing apart. On the contrary, he allowed that personality to pierce
through continually, so that simplicity, directness, a certain
individual note as of a human being complaining--a note we know very
well in our own literature--is perpetually discovered.
Thus, in a spirit which all Englishmen will understand, a lightness
almost sardonic lay above the depths of his grief, and the tenderness
which attached to his home played around the things that go with
quietude--his books and animals. I shall quote hereafter the epitaphs he
wrote for his dog and for his cat, this singer of sublime and ruined
things.