THE AGE AND THE MAN

I need not dwell on the age in which they wrote. It is enough for my purpose to say that the age of Ronsard exhibited, in the vigour of their prime, new ideas of monarchy, nationality, and religion, which breaking up, and breaking away from, old ideas of feudalism, the empire, and the papacy, induced an era of gorgeous embassies in the place of local war waged under sordid conditions. The Alps had been levelled for ever' when, on the last day of the year 1494, the army of Charles VIII. entered Rome.' Thenceforward, until the fatal day of Pavia, Italy was the ring in which the Houses of France and Austria wrestled for the headship of Christendom. Italy, the turning-point in the welter of war and diplomacy, became a vortex, sucking in streams of courage and intellect from all Europe. Never had there been such contact between contemporary civilisations. But this wide embrace of the present was not all. Of modern countries Italy remembered most of the classic past; had always remembered it, confusedly, as a man dreaming remembers a day of excitement and success. More than a century before the French invasion Petrarch, though he could not read them, had wept with joy over the codices of Homer and Plato. Since then the texts of antiquity had been recovered and printing-presses established, so that between 1494 and 1515, the invasion of Charles VIII. and the victory of François I. at Marignano, the press of Aldus printed in Venice thirty-three first editions of the classics. It was then and there also, in an Italy which riveted the gaze of every cultured mind, that men, having listened once again to the songs of their loveliness,

turned to unearth and piece together the broken and buried gods of beauty. The revolution in mediæval politics and religion synchronised with the recovery of classic literature and sculpture.

Now Ronsard, the man apart from the poet, is an embodiment of all the forces and confusions of his time. I shall speak first of him and his companions; next, of the sources of their inspiration and the aim of their art; lastly, of their achievement and influence.

Pierre de Ronsard, son of the Seigneur Loys de Ronsard, the High Steward of François Premier's household, was born in 1525, the year of that king's defeat at Pavia, which decided adversely his duel with the House of Austria. The historian De Thou wrote afterwards that his birth made amends to France for even so great a disaster. He lay in the cradle when his father set out with the king's hostages to suffer duress until the royal ransom should be paid. I visited his father's castle, De la Poissonnière, as a reverent pilgrim, some years ago. It stands, beneath a low cliff of white rock overgrown with ivy, in the gentle scenery, elegiac rather than romantic, to which Ronsard's verse ever returns. Above the low cliff are remnants of the Forêt de Gastine; between the castle and the little river Loir, bedecked with fleur de lis, stretch poplarscreened meadows.

The castle is inscribed here and there, indeed everywhere, in the fashion of that day, transitional between Gothic and Renaissance, with Latin mottoes curiously appropriate to Ronsard's temperament and to the alternations of his posthumous fame. Above a door you may read Voluptati et gratiis'; about the windows, ' Veritas filia temporis'

and Respice finem.' Within, beneath his arms and those of France, sculptured on the apex of the great pyramidal chimney-piece in the hall, there runs the confident legend 'Non fallunt futura merentem '; and below, in a deep band, a fence of blossoming roses seems to grow on the surface of the stone. It is a moot point whether he himself added this frieze to symbolise his love for a half-guessed princess, who wore the rose for her emblem, or whether the very nest in which he was born presaged that lovely accident of his art-the marriage of what Pater has called the askesis of stone with the pathetic blossoming and fading of the rose.

But we are not to think that Ronsard, or any of his companions, evaded the conditions of their age to indulge in the languid fallacy of art for art's sake. He was plunged as a child into the unrest of camps and courts, as a youth into travel and diplomacy, and, long years after he had deliberately sought the seclusion of art and study, replunged into the cruel conflicts of religious animosity.

When nine years old he fell ill at the College of Navarre, and was taken by his father to the king's camp at Avignon. There he became page to the Dauphin François, who was poisoned six days later. He found another protector in Charles, Duc d'Orléans, and, at the age of twelve, accompanied Madeleine of France on her journey to wed James of Scotland. Those days were hectic in their precocity.

He passed two years in Edinburgh, and then travelled for six months in England. He could dance and fence well, as was expected, but was given over to solitary wandering and the writing of verses. To prevent such original vagaries the Duc

d'Orléans sent him, in 1540, aged fifteen, on a mission to Flanders and on again to Scotland. He was wrecked on the coast, escaped by swimming, and, returning in the same year to Germany in the suite of the French Ambassador, Lazare de Baïf, travelled thence to Turin with Guillaume de Langey, Seigneur du Bellay. Thus it was that he came to know one of his future comrades in the Pléiade, Antoine de Baïf, and to know of another, and greater, Joachim du Bellay, De Langey's kinsman.

At sixteen he spoke English, Italian, and German, and was conversant, in all those tongues, with affairs of State; but, being stricken by deafness, and so handicapped for a life of action otherwise promising, he turned to letters, learnt Virgil by heart, and read the poetry of Clement Marot and the Roman de la Rose. He acquired the dower of medieval song, the storied legend of Guillaume de Loris and Jehan de Meung, changing from allegorical romance to allegorical sarcasm, and, in Marot, the tired affectations of used formality. The Middle Age, though few felt this, had come to a full close. Ronsard, probably, was conscious of that conclusion, for he had devoured the best of its verse and was still unsatisfied. Then as the way is with precocious youth-two accidents assailed and redirected his life.

The Court, in which he still held a post, was at Blois. Wandering thence as his wont was, on a certain day (21st April 1541), aged sixteen, he met a girl in the forest with fair hair, brown eyes, and smiling lips. He returned a poet to write his Amours in honour of Cassandra, and loved her vainly for seven years. His father, who objected to poetry, being dead in 1544, he began, perhaps because he loved, and love is new, to study Greek,

the new knowledge, stealing off to be taught by the humanist Dorat with De Baïf, his diplomatic companion. Ere long the second accident befell. Wandering with a promising career lost and a froward mistress discovered, he met at some time not long before 1547 another young man, Joachim du Bellay, from whom the high calls of war and diplomacy had also, oddly enough, been muffled by the curtain of early deafness. Both were turning for consolation to the poetry of the ancients. The meeting was memorable. Out of it sprang the association of poets and scholars who called themselves at first 'La Brigade,' and afterwards 'La Pléiade,' in imitation of poets at the court of Ptolemy Philadelphus. With Ronsard, Du Bellay, Dorat, and De Baïf, were Estienne Jodelle, Pontus de Tyard, and Remy Belleau. I must add Olivier de Magny and, later, many others to fill the places of the dead

-Jean Passerat, Gilles Durant, and Philippe des Portes. The original confederacy toiled in secret till Du Bellay brought out, in 1549, their manifesto, La Défense et Illustration de la Langue Française. Each guarded his labours so jealously that, when Du Bellay surreptitiously read the Odes on which Ronsard had been working, nothing but the ardour of youthful friendship averted a quarrel. This incident precipitated the publication of their poetry. Ronsard's first four books of Odes appeared in 1550, and his Amours in 1552; Du Bellay's Olive in 1549, and his Regrets in 1558. I shall not attempt a bibliography of their poetry, amazing in its amount, or a nice discrimination of the ladies by whom it was partly inspired. Louise Labé, the Aspasia of Lyons, who had ridden to war after the Dauphin, accoutred as a captain, who played on many musical