Créant un bruit à sommeil très propice.
Puis à dresser les tentes célestines
Ont mis leur soin les mignonnes Dryades,
Faisant de bois ombrageuses courtines.
(Concorde des deux langages, p. 243).
But the whole allegorical scheme of that poem is as medieval as Chaucer’s in the Parlement of Foules. For Lemaire still uses mythology not for classical allusion, but medievally as an extension of allegory. Chaos and the Furies, Hymen, Erebus, Mercury, and Janus are listed (pp. 172-173) with the personifications Honor, Grace, Victory, and Discord. The medieval adaptation brings from the Roman de la Rose Bel-Accueil to be a sub-deacon in the temple of Venus (p. 252); for the temple, as in Chaucer, is a church and has relics. Even Hippolytus is a “saint martyr” (p. 223); and the three goddesses at the judgment of Paris are domesticated in Flanders by their “venustes corpulences.” Jean Lemaire was not a forerunner of classicism.
Nor was Clement Marot (1495-1544). He learned the sonnet in Lyon and in Italy without discerning either its distinctive value or its future. For him it was merely one more form of the epigram type seen also in the dizaine. He continued the balade, adapted the rondeau, wrote much encomium without ever proclaiming himself a vates. His epistles, elegies, epigrams, his experiments with Alexandrines, his imitations of Martial, suggest a more normal development than the Pléiade change of both emphasis and direction.[25]
For the new day of the sonnet at Lyon we must look to Louise Labé (about 1520-1566). Bourgeoise of the commercial and literary, French and Italian city of Lyon, composing sometimes in Italian and sometimes in French, she speaks the choice language of culture without parade. Her sonnets[26] are directly and utterly lyric. Their literary derivations may, indeed, be found, but are never put forward. Her few classical allusions are all familiar. The simple mythology of her prose Débat de Folie et d’Amour is handled in the Burgundian fashion of Jean Lemaire. Her verse is Petrarchan as it were inevitably, because that was the prevalent mode of her place and time. To call her a precursor of the Pléiade, then, may be quite misleading; for she suggests neither school nor date.
French humanism had still to attempt a stricter classicism, not adapting but imitating, not domesticating but importing. Ancient gods were to be recalled in the style of Vergil or of Ovid. Odes were to be Horatian, and might be Pindaric. Lyric diction was to be “enriched” by the interweaving of correct allusions in classical phrase. The allusive value would thus be heightened by summoning the hearer’s culture to answer the poet’s. Since poetry would be elevated by becoming learned, poets should be docte. As for readers insufficiently educated, they were not to be considered. Ronsard repeated Horace’s Odi profanum vulgus et arceo. Let the poet seek “fit audience, though few.” This whole theory of poetic allusion seems to our age exploded. It comes to us through that standardized eighteenth-century poetic diction which was repudiated by the romantic revolt. Modern readers, consequently out of tune, must approach many Renaissance lyrics with a resolution of tolerance. Aurora leaving the bed of Tithonus, though mere decoration in Vergil and somewhat faded in the Middle Age, was not yet stale to the increasing audience of the sixteenth century. But if the allusion, far from being stale, were unfamiliar, even recondite? Instead of rejecting classical allusions a priori as hindrances to lyric, we may learn to estimate their value from actual Renaissance experience. That the language of poetry should be reminiscent of Greece and Rome was a Renaissance postulate.