There, he had dictated his last verses L'un meurt en son printemps, l'autre attend la vieillesse, Le vray thresor de l'homme est la verte jeunesse, Le reste de nos ans ne sont que des hyvers. and, again, with his incongruous mingling of Catholic faith and pagan despair Quoy mon âme, dors-tu, engourdie en ta masse ? La trompette a sonné, serre baggage, et va Le chemin déserté que Jésus-Christ trouva. Quand tant mouillé de sang racheta nostre race. This is the religious verse of a man who, against his will, had seen religion confounded with war; who had deplored Un Christ empistolé, tout noirci de fumée ; who almost dreaded that the way of salvation dear to his ancestors was to be obliterated by insurgents against whom he had himself borne arms. 6 But he died in that way. When asked at the point of death, 'De quelle résolution il voulait mourir?' he answered, according to a contemporary, Binet, Assez aigrement, qui vous fait dire cela, mon bon amy? Je veux mourir en la religion Catholique, comme mes ayeulx, bisayeulx, trisayeulx, et comme j'ai tesmoigné assez par mes escrits! He discoursed at length on his life, saying again and again, Je n'ay aucune haine contre personne, ainsi me puisse chacun pardonner.' He dictated two more Christian sonnets, and remained a long while with arms extended towards the sky: at last, like one in his sleep, he rendered his spirit to God, and his hands in falling let those present know the moment of his death. The Priory of St. Cosme was suppressed, and the F only design of Ronsard's shattered monument is par suite d'un vol '-so a French archæologist tells me-now in the Bodleian at Oxford. SOURCES AND AIMS Having touched on the age in which the Pléiade wrote, and dwelt on the personality of their leader, I come to the sources of their inspiration and aim of their art. Here we must walk warily. From this point onward I shall rather invite inquiry than seek to deliver a judgment. There is no final judgment. Conflicting judgments make the work of the Pléiade a matter of interest to-day, especially to students of the Renaissance. The judgment which stood unchallenged in France for two centuries averred that having thrown away the tradition of French poetry, and the French language after it, the Pléiade invented, per saltum, a new language and a new poetry, awkwardly, and all but exclusively, imitated from Greek models. The opposite view, urged tentatively by SainteBeuve in 1828, was emphasised by Pater in his famous essay on Joachim du Bellay, and can best be stated in his words :-'In the Renaissance, French poetry did but borrow something to blend with a native growth, and the poems of Ronsard, with their 'ingenuity, their delicately figured surfaces, their slightness, their fanciful combinations of rhyme, are but the correlatives of the traceries of the house of Jacque Cœur at Bourges, or the Maison de Justice at Rouen.' Their work, he writes, shows a blending of Italian ornament with the general outline of Northern design,' and exhibits the finest and subtlest phase of the Middle Age itself.' The first view makes the Pléiade too Greek and violently prone to innovation; the second, too French and complacently medieval, with but a topdressing of Italian ornament. In truth, their sources were manifold; to a degree in excess of both theories, taken together. They drew their inspiration from every known fountain of poetry and, consequently, aimed in their art at designing elaborate channels, sufficiently definite to contain, yet numerous enough to display, all the flashing waters they had derived from so many a muse-haunted hill. Let me enumerate their sources. In the first place, they valued the best of medieval French verse. They knew their thirteenth century. Ronsard had studied the Roman de la Rose. He knew of the romance-cycle of Charlemagne, for he writes in one of his many 'regrets pour Marie Stuart' : — Que ne vivent encor les palladins de France! Un Roland, un Renaud! ils prendroient sa défence They knew of the Arthurian cycle; Du Bellay, in their manifesto, far from proposing a classical subject for an epic poem, writes, 'choose one of those beautiful old French romances comme un Lancelot, un Tristan, ou autres.' Ronsard, in his preface to his Franciade, when attacking those who sought to write in classic Latin, says, 'Why, it would be better worth your while-comme un bon bourgeois-to make a dictionary of the old words of Artus, Lancelot, and Gawain, or a commentary on the Roman de la Rose.' They revived the Alexandrine verse of twelve syllables from a very early French poem on the legend of Alexander. But if they knew of the Alexandrian cycle, the Carlovingian cycle, the Arthurian cycle, and took delight in the Romance of the Rose, why, then, they enjoyed the heritage of mediæval French verse, which, as Matthew Arnold has truly said, 'took possession of the heart and imagination of Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and taught Chaucer his trade, words, rhyme, and metre.' As Chaucer puts it-with a narrower application which may justly be extended -The note I trowë makëd was in Fraunce.' They derived from that source their 'fluidity of movement' and the Alexandrine verse, but, so far as I know, nothing else. In the second place, coming to French poetry which immediately preceded their own, they knew and appreciated Clement Marot, Mellin de St. Gellais, Heroet, and Maurice Scève. Ronsard praises all four. But there are two things to be noticed. They skip over Charles d'Orléans and Villon, springing from the thirteenth century to their immediate predecessors, and from these select only four as bright exceptions. The rest were Court poetasters, recharging the ballade and rondeau, like old rocket-cases, with a few pinches of dull flattery or indecent wit. The Chant Royal had become the exercise of a drudge. The Blasons were inanities and brutalities, mere gabble of tinkers,' with neither 'wit, manners, nor honesty,' of which it is impossible to speak. Ronsard apostrophises Marot as 'Seule lumière en ses ans de la vulgaire poésie' (Preface to Odes, 1550). Marot's Hero and Leander can be read; his fable of The Lion and the Rat is racy; and some of his rondeaux delightful: yet Ronsard's tribute was generous. He must have raged against such pranks in redoubled rhyme, as for example: La blanche colombelle belle Me jecte un œil friant, riant, etc. etc. We may cry out with Maria, 'What a caterwauling do you keep here!' and acknowledge that the rare art of the Middle Age had declined to ' damnable iteration.' Whilst the Pléiade did not discard the dower of medieval song, or condemn all their immediate predecessors, it cannot be said that they present in the main the last phase of the Middle Age, decorated with Italian ornament. In the third place, having travelled much in Italy, they knew Petrarch by heart, and helped themselves, no doubt freely, to his material. But Du Bellay wrote contre les Petrarquistes'; Ronsard attacked courtiers qui n'admirent qu'un petit sonnet Petrarquisé'; and both were justified in this repudiation. The method of their verse was distinct from the method of Italian verse, and, passing from form to matter, they strike a note of plaintive mystery, which is not to be heard in Petrarch. In the fourth place, besides this direct influence from Italy, they receive an indirect influence already transfigured by the School of Lyons, and notably by Maurice Scève, whose Délie is rather an anagram of l'Idée, the platonic idea of beauty, than a title borrowed from the Delia whom Tibullus loved. Lyons, the city of Grolier, was a centre of sensitive culture where, to quote Brunetière, the naturalism of Italy had become enriched, perhaps even a little over-weighted, by a mystical significance. Platonism, from being a relaxation of the intelligent, and matter to put into a sonnet, had been there 6 |