The Défense et Illustration de la Langue Française.
The Défense et Illustration de la Langue Française, which is the manifesto of the school, was written by Joachim du Bellay. It was published in February 1550, according to the modern calendar, but 1549 in the old, which made the year begin on Lady Day. If Boileau, before dismissing Ronsard and his friends so contemptuously, had taken the trouble to read this treatise, he would have learnt that it was not their intention to speak Latin and Greek in French, or to make a new art after their own fashion. Their purpose was very different. It was their aim to write good French, but to use all the resources of the language in order to reproduce the forms of the great classic literatures—the Epic, the Drama, the Satire, the Ode, and the Italian models—the Canzone and the Sonnet. They held, and not unjustly, that the French verse of Marot’s school was poor in rhythm, and “frivolous.” It had come to be satisfied with turning out nine insignificant verses, if it can put “le petit mot pour rire” into the tenth. A sham Middle Age was lingering on—the mere remnants and echo of the Roman de la Rose allegory. Du Bellay speaks of the Roman and of its authors—Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meung—with respect. He was sufficiently an admirer of French mediæval literature to quote the stories of Lancelot as fit to be used for epic. But he insists that the prosaic language used by the school of Marot was not adequate for poetry, and that a new poetic tongue must be formed, which could only be done by the ardent study of Greek and Latin. What the student learnt he was to assimilate and make French. There was nothing in this which was not at once inevitable when the immense influence of the classic literatures in that generation is allowed for, and was not also in itself sound. It was a misfortune that the Pléiade cut itself off so completely from the mediæval tradition; and there is unanswerable force in Sainte-Beuve’s criticism that if Ronsard and his school were looking for épiceries, they had as good cause to condemn the sonnet as the “rondeau” or the “ballade.” Yet it was not the great mediæval literature which they had before them. That was already forgotten. They did a work by which the seventeenth century, while treating them with contempt, profited. If they did not achieve all they aimed at, it was because no one among them—not even Ronsard—was a man of the first rank of poetic genius, not because their principles and method were at fault. And there is this to be said—that if some of their followers fell into extravagances of language (the poets of the Pléiade proper and their contemporaries were not, at least in their earlier years, open to the reproach), they did not impoverish the French tongue. They did not reduce it, when used for literary purposes, to colourless general terms; nor did they tie the Alexandrine into sets of two lines by making a meaningless rule that the sense was never to be carried over into a third. Their revolution was more fruitful, and less merely destructive, than Malherbe’s.
The work of Ronsard.
Although Du Bellay appeared as the spokesman of the school, he was instantly eclipsed by Ronsard. The Odes of the “Prince of Poets” were published in 1550, at about the same time as the Sonnets to Olive (an anagram of Mlle. de Viole) of Du Bellay. He was at once accepted as the poet of his time, and his supremacy endured till his death without question, except for one moment in his later years when it appeared to be shaken by the popularity of Du Bartas. The Amours de Cassandre[90] followed in 1552, with a second edition in the following years, which contains the famous “Mignonne allons voir si la rose.” In 1555 appeared the Hymns, and in 1560 he collected all he had as yet written in a complete edition at the request of Queen Mary, who was his ardent admirer, as was also Queen Elizabeth. Between 1561 and 1574 he was attached to the service of Charles IX., who treated him with kindness, and whose “virtues” he celebrated, even after his death, in terms which sound strange to us. As Court poet he wrote “by command,” which is not a favourable source of inspiration. It was to please the king that he wrote his fragmentary epic, Franciade, which his most sincere admirers have to confess is “dull.” It had the misfortune to be published on the eve of the Saint Bartholomew. Yet his Discours des Misères du Temps (1562) and his Remonstrance au Peuple de France (1563) belong to these years, and they were drawn from him by the shocking miseries of the time. Henri III., though generous to some, was less a favourer of poets than his brother, and Ronsard was free to express himself in the lyrics and melancholy sonnets of his last years. At the very end, when his health was broken down and his mind affected, he made an unfortunate and negligible revision of his work, published in 1584.
His place in poetry.
It is perhaps some excuse for the sweeping condemnation of Ronsard by Malherbe that even the Romantic reaction of this century has not succeeded in regaining favour for the part of the poetry of the chief of the Pléiade for which he was most admired by his contemporaries, and of which he was most proud. In the vigorous sonnet beginning “Ils ont menty, d’Aurat,” written against Du Bartas—or at least against his admirers—Ronsard appealed to his own Francus, and
“Les neuf belles sœurs
Qui trempèrent mes vers dans leurs graves douceurs,”
as witnesses that he was not less than the author of the Semaine. Now it is precisely this part of his poetry, that in which he would be an epic poet, or wear the Pindaric robe, which is dead, and can by no effort be brought to life again. When Malherbe condemned it he passed a sentence which no later admirer of the poetry of the sixteenth century has been able to reverse. The gross error of the later school was that it did not make allowance for the passing and temporary fashion of imitation of the classic models, and did shut its eyes to the fact that, besides Ronsard le Pindarique, there was Ronsard the author of “Mignonne allons voir si la Rose,” and the beautiful sonnet to Hélène, “Quand tu seras bien vieille.” This Ronsard was a very genuine, and elegant, if not very great, poet. That he would not himself have been pleased to know that he was to be admired for these themes, and not for his Franciade and his Pindaric ode to Michel de L’Hospital, is possible. Yet his erroneous estimate of the relative values of different parts of his work does not affect his real glory, which is that he raised French verse from the condition of prose tagged with rhyme, into which it had fallen, gave it a new melody, and breathed into it a new poetic spirit. He did for France what Surrey and Wyatt began, and Spenser and Sidney completed for us, what the Spanish poets of the school of Boscan and Garcilaso attempted for Castilian. He set up a model of sweeter and statelier measures, and he brought the ancient classic inspiration out of pure scholarship into literature. If he had far less power than his English contemporaries, he was infinitely more original than the Spaniards. There is no mere slavish repetition of foreign models in him, but the constant and successful effort to give a genuine French equivalent, which is quite another thing.
Joachim du Bellay.