The followers of “a prince” are inevitably eclipsed by their leader, and that is the more likely to be the case when a body of poets are memorable for their accomplishment, their general poetic spirit, their scholarship—for anything, in short, rather than for power. Power, indeed, is not what can be attributed to the poets of the Pléiade. When it appears among the younger men it is in the verse of the Huguenots Du Bartas and D’Aubigné, in whom there is again less scholarly accomplishment. Among the other poets of Ronsard’s school, from his brother in literature Joachim du Bellay down to his last follower Jean Bertaut (1532-1611), the best is commonly what is melancholy or what is gay and graceful. Joachim du Bellay[91] published his first volume, which contained the Sonnets to Olive, the Musagnæomachie, or “Battle between the Muses and Ignorance,” and some Odes in 1550, a little before Ronsard. The sonnet had already been written in French by Mellin de Saint-Gelais, but Du Bellay claimed, and was allowed, the honour of having first “acclimatised” it. The model adopted and constantly followed in France was the Petrarchan. His most memorable work was born of his new experiences in Italy. It was there that he wrote the Antiquités de Rome—the sonnets translated by Spenser under the name of The Ruins—his Regrets, in which he gives expression to his disgust at the papal capital and his home-sickness, and his Jeux Rustiques, inspired by the Latin poetry of Navagiero, the Venetian who advised Boscan to write in the Italian manner. Du Bellay himself wrote Latin verse. The Jeux Rustiques, published at the same time as the Regrets, 1558, contain his best known pieces, the perfectly gay and graceful Vanneur (“the Winnower”), and the lines to Venus, in which he has done all there was to be done with that very artificial product the pastoral poetry of learned poets. Withal Du Bellay carried beak and claws. He was praised for having put the epigram into the sonnet, and there are certainly few better examples how that can be achieved than in the numbers of the Regrets which contrast the outward courtesy and dignity with the inward treason and meanness of the Roman court. Du Bellay is more uniformly excellent than Ronsard, but the bulk of his work is far smaller and he tried less.
Remi Belleau.
The gentil Belleau was a less strong man than Du Bellay, and it is to the honour of his critical faculty that he recognised the truth. He left the ode, Pindaric or Horatian, alone, and devoted himself either to translation (he translated Anacreon) or to poetry of the style of the Jeux Rustiques. His Bergerie, 1565, and his Deuxième Journée de la Bergerie, 1572, are of this order, while his Amours et Nouveau Eschanges des pierres précieuses vertus et propriétés d’icelles is an imitation, or adaptation, of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the poets of the Greek decadence, based on a book about the properties of precious stones, written by a Bishop of Rennes in the eleventh century. Our own Euphuists must have gone to the same source. The first Bergerie contains the really delightful
“Avril l’honneur et des Bois
Et des Mois,”
which ranks with Du Bellay’s Vanneur as the masterpiece of the style. It is a curious comment on the theory which accounts for literature by the “circumstances” that all this light verse about graceful things belongs to the years of the conspiracy of Amboise, when the streets of that town were, in the vehement words of Regnier de la Planche, tapestried with the corpses of executed Huguenots, and while the wars of Religion, the Saint Bartholomew, and the League were deluging France in blood.
Baïf.
Like Belleau, J. B. de Baïf was a translator. His versions of the Antigone, and of the Eunuchus of Terence, were published in 1565, and other translations of Greek and Latin drama were left unpublished by him at his death, and have been lost. Baïf was also the author of a comedy imitated from Plautus, Le Brave, acted in 1567. His poetry includes the Ravissement d’Europe and Les Amours de Méline, 1552, Les Amours de Francine, 1555—these are sonnet cycles—the Météores of 1567, his Étrennes de Poesie Française, 1574, and the Mimes, 1576. Baïf, who was more scholar than poet, took the lead in an attempt to reform French spelling, which indeed at that time stood in no small need of being reduced to order, and he also was one of a small body of writers who repeated in France the hopeless attempt to force the poetry of modern languages to conform to classic metres. His Academy has already been mentioned. Jean Daurat and Pontus de Thyard are chiefly worth mention because their names are associated with those of more original men. Daurat was a humanist, whose share in producing the poetry of the Pléiade was to direct the reading of his pupils at the college of Coqueret, and to write Greek and Latin verse in praise of them. His French verse is insignificant. Pontus de Thyard could claim to be a forerunner of the Pléiade, for his Erreurs Amoureuses appeared shortly before the first published verse of Ronsard and Du Bellay. But he soon renounced verse for theology and mathematics.[92]
Of most of the poets who followed “the conquering banner” of their Prince, Ronsard, as of the lesser learned poets of Spain, no detailed mention can be made here. The abundance of literary talent which has seldom been wanting in France accounts sufficiently for the “crop of poets” which sprang up “at the summons of Du Bellay, and under the hand of Ronsard.” That time of war, oppression, and conspiracy might have seemed to be “wholly consecrated to the Muses.” Olivier de Magny (d. 1560), Jacques Tahureau (1527-1555), Nicolas Denisot (1515-1559), called “le Comte d’Alsinois” by anagram, Louis le Caron (1536-1617), who called himself Charondas, Estienne de la Boetie (1530-1563), the friend of Montaigne, who indeed saved him from oblivion, and others whom it were tedious to mention, were men of talent, respectable members of the army of minor poets, which in nations of considerable literary faculty, and in times of literary vigour, has never been wanting. One really original poet usually makes many who are accomplished, but who without the example might never have written, and would certainly not have written so well. It was perhaps the necessity for finding a rhyme to haut which induced Boileau to quote, from among all the followers of Ronsard, the names of “Desportes and Bertaut.” His dogmatic assertion that they were made “more restrained” by the fall of Ronsard is perfectly unfounded. Desportes (1546-1606), who in character was a courtier of the baser kind, owed his great popularity at Court to the fact that he was an echo of one part of Ronsard.[93] Bertaut (1552-1611), another courtier, was also another Desportes. Their greater measure was mainly due to the fact that they represented the decadence of their school.
There are, however, three poets of the later sixteenth century in France who stand apart, though all are fairly describable as followers of Ronsard, and to one of them it was given, in the French phrase, to “tell its fact” to the meticulous criticism of Malherbe. They are Du Bartas, Aubigné, and Regnier.