Avril. Essays on the French Renaissance/Ronsard

by Hilaire Belloc

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.

The old monk had said to him: "In what resolution do you die?"

He answered, somewhat angrily: "In what did you think? In the religion which was my father's and his father's, and his father's and his father's before him--for I am of that kind."

Then he called all the community round him, as though the monastic simplicity had returned (so vital is the Faith, so simple its primal energies), and as though he had been the true prior of some early and fervent house, he told them these things which I will faithfully translate on account of their beauty. They are printed here, I think, for the first time in English, and must stand for the end of this essay:

He said: "That he had sinned like other men, and, perhaps, more than most; that his senses had led him away by their charm, and that he had not repressed or constrained them as he should; but none the less, he had always held that Faith which the men of his line had left him, he had always clasped close the Creed and the unity of the Catholic Church; that, in fine, he had laid a sure foundation, but he had built thereon with wood, with hay, with straw. As for that foundation, he was sure it would stand; as for the light and worthless things he had built upon it he had trust in the mercy of the Saviour that they would be burnt in the fire of His love. And now he begged them all to believe hard, as he had believed; but not to live as he had lived; they must understand that he had never attempted or plotted against the life or goods of another, nor ever against any man's honour, but, after all, there was nothing therein wherewith to glorify one's self before God." When he had wept a little, he continued, saying, "that the world was a ceaseless turmoil and torment, and shipwreck after shipwreck all the while, and a whirlpool of sins, and tears and pain, and that to all these misfortunes there was but one port, and this port was Death. But, as for him, he carried with him into that port no desire and no regret for life. That he had tried every one of its pretended joys, that he had left nothing undone which could give him the least shadow of pleasure or content, but that at the end he had found everywhere the oracle of Wisdom, vanity of vanities."

He ended with this magnificent thing, which is, perhaps, the last his human power conceived, and I will put it down in his own words:--

"Of all those vanities, the loveliest and most praiseworthy is glory--fame. No one of my time has been so filled with it as I; I have lived in it, and loved and triumphed in it through time past, and now I leave it to my country to garner and possess it after I shall die. So do I go away from my own place as satiated with the glory of this world as I am hungry and all longing for that of God."

DIALOGUE WITH THE NINE SISTERS

This is a little Amaboean thing not very well known but very Horatian and worth setting down here because it is in the manner of so much that he wrote.

Its manner is admirable. Its gentleness, persistency and increase--are like those of his own small river the Loir. Its last stanza from the middle of the first line "Ceux dont la fantaisie" to the end, should, I think be famous; but an English reader can hardly forgive such an introduction as "Voilà sagement dit" to so noble a finale.

DIALOGUE WITH THE NINE SISTERS.

Ronsard. Pour avoir trop aimé vostre bande inégale,
Muses, qui défiez (ce dites vous) le temps,
J'ay les yeux tout battus, la face toute pasle,
Le Chef grison et chauve, et je n'ay que trente ans.
Muses. Au nocher qui sans cesse erre sur la marine
Le teint noir appartient; le soldat n'est point beau
Sans estre tout poudreux; qui courbe la poitrine
Sur nos livres, est laid s'il n'a pasle la peau.
Ronsard. Mais quelle récompense aurois-je de tant suivre
Vos danses nuict et jour, un laurier sur le front?
Et cependant les ans aux quels je deusse vivre
En plaisirs et en jeux comme poudre s'en vont.
Muses. Vous aurez, en vivant, une fameuse gloire,
Puis, quand vous serez mort, votre nom fleurira
L'age, de siècle en siècle, aura de vous mémoire;
Vostre corps seulement au tombeau pourrira.
Ronsard. O le gentil loyer! Que sert au viel Homère,
Ores qu'il n'est plus rien, sous la tombe, là-bas,
Et qu'il n'a plus ny chef, ny bras, ny jambe entière
Si son renom fleurist, ou s'il ne fleurist pas!
Muses. Vous estes abusé. Le corps dessous la lame
Pourry ne sent plus rien, aussy ne luy en chaut.
Mais un tel accident n'arrive point à l'ame,
Qui sans matière vist immortelle là haut.
Ronsard. Bien! Je vous suyvray donc d'une face plaisante,
Dussé-je trespasser de l'estude vaincu,
Et ne fust-ce qu'à fin que la race suyvante
Ne me reproche point qu'oysif j'aye vescu.
Muses. Vela saigement dit, ceux dont la fantaisie
Sera religieuse et dévote envers Dieu
Tousjours achèveront quelque grand poésie,
Et dessus leur renom la Parque n'aura lieu.

THE EPITAPH ON RABELAIS

Seven years after Rabelais died, Ronsard wrote this off-hand. I give it, not for its value, but because it connects these two great names. 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. For he had seen him "full length upon the grass and singing so."

There is no need of notes, for these great names of Gargantua, Panurge and Friar John are household to every honest man.

THE EPITAPH ON RABELAIS.

Si d'un mort qui pourri repose
Nature engendre quelque chose,
Et si la génération
Se faict de la corruption,
Une vigne prendra naissance
Du bon Rabelais qui boivoit
Tousjours ce pendant qu'il vivoit;
Demi me se troussoit les bras
Et se couchoit tout plat à bas
Sur la jonchée entre les tasses
Et parmy les escuelles grasses
Il chantait la grande massue
Et la jument de Gargantue,
Le grand Panurge et le jaïs
Des papimanes ébahis,
Leurs loix, leurs façons et demeures
Et Frère Jean des Antonneures.
Et d'Espisteme les combas.
Mais la Mort qui ne boivoit pas
Tira le beuveur de ce monde
Et ores le fait boire de l'onde
Du large fleuve d'Achéron.

MIGNONNE ALLONS VOIR SI LA ROSE

The 17th Ode of the First Book

"In these eighteen lines," says very modernly a principal critic, "lies Ronsard's fame more surely than in all the remaining mass of his works." He condemns by implication Ronsard's wide waste of power; but the few other poems that I have here had room to print, should make the reader careful of such judgements. It is true that in the great hoard which Ronsard left his people there are separate and particular jewels set in the copper and the gold, but the jewels are very numerous: indeed it was almost impossible to choose so few as I have printed here.

If it be asked why this should have become the most famous, no answer can be given save the "flavour of language." It is the perfection of his tongue. Its rhythm reaches the exact limit of change which a simple metre will tolerate: where it saddens, a lengthy hesitation at the opening of the seventh line introduces a new cadence, a lengthy lingering upon the last syllables of the tenth, eleventh and twelfth closes a grave complaint. So, also by an effect of quantities, the last six lines rise out of melancholy into their proper character of appeal and vivacity: an exhortation.

Certainly those who are so unfamiliar with French poetry as not to know that its whole power depends upon an extreme subtlety of rhythm, may find here the principal example of the quality they have missed. Something much less weighty than the stress of English lines, a just perceptible difference between nearly equal syllables, marks the excellent from the intolerable in French prosody: and to feel this truth in the eighteen lines that follow it is necessary to read them virtually in the modern manner--for the "s" in "vesprée" or "vostre" were pedantries in the sixteenth century--but one must give the mute "e's" throughout as full a value as they have in singing. Indeed, reading this poem, one sees how it must have been composed to some good and simple air in the man's head.

If the limits of a page permitted it, I would also show how worthy the thing was of fame from its pure and careful choice of verb--"Tandis que vostre age fleuronne"--but space prevents me, luckily, for all this is like splitting a diamond.

"MIGNONNE ALLONS VOIR SI LA ROSE."

Mignonne, allons voir si la rose
Qui ce matin avoit desclose
Sa robe de pourpre au soleil
A point perdu ceste vesprée
Les plis de sa robe pourprée
Et son teint au vostre pareil
Las! Voyez comme en peu d'espace
Mignonne, elle a dessus la place,
Las! Las! ses beautez laissé cheoir!
O vrayment marastre nature,
Puis qu'une telle fleur ne dure
Que du matin jusques au soir!
Donc si vous me croyez, Mignonne,
Tandis que vostre age fleuronne
En sa plus verte nouveauté,
Cuillez, Cuillez vostre jeunesse:
Comme à ceste fleur, la veillesse
Fera ternir vostre beauté.

THE "SONNETS FOR HÉLÈNE"

The 42nd and 43rd Sonnets of the Second Book

Hélène was very real. A young Maid of Honour to Catherine de Medicis; Spanish by blood, Italian by breeding, called in France "de Sugères," she was the gravest and the wisest, and, for those who loved serenity, the most beautiful of that high and brilliant school.

The Sonnets began as a task; a task the Queen had set Ronsard, with Hélène for theme: they ended in the last strong love of Ronsard's life. A sincere lover of many women, he had come to the turn of his age when he saw her, like a memory of his own youth. He has permitted to run through this series, therefore, something of the unique illusion which distance in time or space can lend to the aspect of beauty. An emotion so tenuous does not appear in any other part of his work: here alone you find the chastity or weakness which made something in his mind come near to the sadder Du Bellay's: his soul is regardant all the while as he writes: visions rise from her such as never rose from Cassandra; as this great picture at the opening of the 58th Sonnet of the Second Book:

Seule sans compagnie en une grande salle

Tu logeois l'autre jour pleine de majesté.

These "Sonnets for Hélène" should be common knowledge: they are (with Du Bellay's) the evident original upon which the author of Shakespeare's Sonnets modelled his work: they are the late and careful effort of Ronsard's somewhat spendthrift genius.

Here are two of them. One, the second, most famous, the other, the first, hardly known: both are admirable.

It is the perfection of their sound which gives them their peculiar quality. The very first lines lead off with a completed harmony: it is as thoroughly a winter night as that in Shakespeare's song, but it is more solemn and, as it were, more "built of stone...." "La Lune Ocieuse, tourne si lentement son char tout à l'entour," is like a sleeping statue of marble.

To this character, the second adds a vivid interest of emotion which has given it its special fame. Even the populace have come to hear of this sonnet, and it is sung to a lovely tune. It has also what often leads to permanent reputation in verse, a great simplicity of form. The Sextet is well divided from the Octave, the climax is clearly underlined. Ronsard was often (to his hurt) too scholarly to achieve simplicity: when, under the clear influence of some sharp passion or gaiety he did achieve it, then he wrote the lines that will always remain:

A fin qu'à tout jamais de siècle en siècle vive,
La Parfaicte amitié que Ronsard la portait.

THE "SONNETS FOR HÉLÈNE."

XLII

Ces longues nuicts d'hyver, où la Lune ocieuse
Tourne si lentement son char tout à l'entour,
Où le Coq si tardif nous annonce le jour,
Où la nuict semble un an à l'ame soucieuse:
Je fusse mort d'ennuy sans ta forme douteuse
Qui vient par une feinte alleger mon amour,
Et faisant toute nue entre mes bras séjour
Me pipe doucement d'une joye menteuse.
Vraye tu es farouche, et fière en cruauté:
De toy fausse on jouyst en toute privauté.
Pres ton mort je m'endors, pres de luy je repose:
Rien ne m'est refusé. Le bon sommeil ainsi
Abuse pour le faux mon amoureux souci.
S'abuser en Amour n'est pas mauvaise chose.

XLIII

Quand vous serez bien vieille, au Soir à la chandelle,
Assise aupres du feu, dévidant et filant,
Direz chantant mes vers, en vous esmerveillant,
Ronsard me celebroit du temps que j'estois belle.
Lors vous n'aurez servante oyant telle nouvelle
Desia sous le labeur à demy sommeillant
Qui au bruit de mon nom ne s'aille resveillant,
Bénissant vostre nom de louange immortelle.
Je seray sous la terre et fantôme sans os
Par les ombres myrteux je prendray mon repos.
Vous serez au foyer une veille accroupie,
Regrettant mon amour et vostre fier desdain.
Vivez, si m'en croyez; n'attendez à demain.
Cueillez des aujourdhuy les roses de la vie.