And when, at the age of nearly forty, he wrote his Poetic, nobody could charge him with being a mere theorist. He went heart and soul for the Pléiade ideas, and like Du Bellay and the rest, as indeed was unavoidable, busied himself first of all with the reform of the language. He recommends the formation of a regular poetic diction, and goes so far (I do not say that it is too far) as to approve of retaining double forms, one fully “frenchified,” one simply Latin with a French termination (e.g., repousse and repulse), the first for prosaic, the second for poetic use. The famous Pléiade stumbling-blocks, the compound epithet and the inverted order of words, are no stumbling-blocks for him—he takes them triumphantly in the stride of his revolutionary ardour: and he joins Ronsard also in the safer if not more popular recommendation of archaism, and of adoption of didactic forms at pleasure. No doubt he is not always wise: though the Classical school which followed had lost the right to reproach him with abusing the principle of suiting the sound to the sense. But still there is a great wisdom in him. Himself an excellent rhymer, he has some of the qualms about rhyme which were so frequent in the sixteenth century; but he is sound on the point (in French not admitting of any serious contest) that without rhyme poetry becomes prose, and he is more than lukewarm as to classical metres. It is sad but not surprising that he joins Du Bellay in condemning the delightful if not all-sufficing metrical kinds which had produced such charming things from Lescurel to Villon; and he duly recommends comedy, tragedy, and epic in their place. As he had himself translated the Epistle to the Pisos eleven years earlier, it is not wonderful that he sticks very close to it. Whether, as has been said by some, he does not know Aristotle, may not be quite certain; but it is certain that Aristotelian doctrines make no figure in him: it will be remembered that they had not made much even in Italy at this time. In fact, it seems reasonable to doubt whether, despite their adoration of Greek, the Pléiade writers ever drew much direct inspiration from the Poetics, though, in Italian translations and commentaries at least, it must have influenced them to some extent.

The most interesting figure of Pléiade criticism, however, is, as it should be, Ronsard[[172]] himself. Ronsard: his general importance. The greatness of this really great poet must be injuriously affected, but ought not to be obscured to critical judgment, both by the fact (for which he is to blame) that he tried too many things and wrote too much; and by the other fact (for which he is blameless) that he attempted a new theory and practice of poetry, not, like his younger and more fortunate contemporary Spenser, at the beginning of a great poetic wave in his own country, but at a time when that country’s energies were steadily settling towards prose. Yet he was nothing if not critical. The actual amount of critical expression that he has left us is not large: it is a pity that he did not devote to it some of the time which he might well have spared from his too copious, and sometimes too undistinguished, versemanship. He is, like Dryden (whom he resembles in not a few ways so much that I should be surprised if the parallel has not struck others), somewhat careless of outward consistency in his critical utterances—a carelessness indicative in each case of real critical sincerity, of the fact that the two poets were honestly seeking the way, and had the sense not to persevere in blind alleys when they found them blind. Above all, like the whole of his school, he is distinguished by a critical note, which must be dwelt on in the Interchapter succeeding this book, but which may well be indicated here—the note that they are much more bent on the production of new literature than on the study of old.

But, for all this, he is a remarkable critic, and in his critical aperçus we can ourselves perceive germs, indications, suggestions, which might have resulted in the creation of a much larger body of actual criticism. Indeed these are (as M. Pellissier[[173]] and others have shown) actually responsible for much that is most characteristic, and for most of what is best, in the Classical school of the next century, which affected to despise him, as well as for other things which, if that school had followed them out, would have saved it from its most fatal mistakes and shortcomings.

The main critical loci in Ronsard have been duly pointed out by his editor, M. Prosper Blanchemain. The Abrégé de l’Art Poétique. They are the formal Abrégé de l’Art Poétique of 1565; the prefatory matter to his not too well-starred epic, the Franciade, ten years later and onwards; and the remarkable Caprice au Seigneur Simon Nicolas—a poem written late, and not, it seems, published save posthumously. The “Abridgement”[[174]] answers to its name, for it only fills just twenty Elzevirian pages. It begins in a manner which shows (as so many other things do in Ronsard) the gaps which separated him from, as well as the ties which united him to, the usual thought of the Renaissance, and still more that of the seventeenth century. Although there are of course exceptions, the general drift of Italian criticism had been that poetry, like any other art or science, is a thing teachable and learnable. On no other ground could the “archæolatry,” which we have found almost universal, be maintained for a moment. Now Ronsard, though he dwells again and again on the necessity of study, begins with an apology for writing an Art of Poetry at all. He has had, he says modestly, some experience and practice, and he will do his best to give his correspondent[[175]] the benefit thereof. But poesy is plus mental que traditif, which we may translate “more native to the mind than communicable to it.” He accordingly converts (with an agreeable twist) the stock invocation to the Muses into a real prayer for this mental endowment, and with equal ingenuity freshens up the stale clichés about the divinity of Ancient poets, and about the Muses refusing to lodge save in a virtuous and pious mind. Therefore, too, study of these former favourites of poetry is requisite. But from these generalities he plunges straight into extremely minute details. Greek, Latin, and French—it is probable that he does not mention Italian because his correspondent, Delbène, was of Italian extraction—are to be carefully studied as languages. The rules of French prosody—among which is here for the first time authoritatively included the alternation of masculine and feminine rhymes—are to be carefully observed, and e is to be always elided before a vowel. It is perhaps worth noting that Ronsard uses “cæsura” for “elision,” a catachresis in which he had followers, and which even affected Dryden. Greek and Roman proper names are, where possible, to be frenchified in termination. “The old words of our romances” (this is of the first importance) are not to be ejected, but to be chosen with care and prudence. Terms of art and technical similes are to be sought out with extreme diligence, so as to supply life and nerve to the book. Dialect-words may be used at need; the example of the Greeks being invoked here—perhaps a little rashly. Invention, says Ronsard, is the working of the Imagination; but he seems still inclined to the old limitation of this word to the retailing of images, and reprobates more strongly than is perhaps necessary or desirable ces inventions fantastiques et mélancholiques qui ne se rapportent non plus l’une à l’autre que les songes entrecoupés des frénétiques. There is to be first of all (note the Frenchman) Order and Disposition in poetical devices.

This order and this disposition are to be secured by a happy nature in the first place, and by a careful study of good models in the second. Among these good models, “those who have illustrated our language in the last fifteen years” (i.e., since the Défense) are to be counted in; and (this was added later) foreign modern languages are also to be carefully studied for the enriching of the mother tongue. “Elocution” is nothing else than “a propriety and splendour of words well chosen, and ornamented with grave and short sentences, which make verses shine, like as do precious stones, well mounted, the fingers of some great seignior.”[[176]] The vocabulary must be copious and composed of well-sifted words, with plentiful description and comparison, moulded specially on Homer. The common form of “great” poem-making follows, with reference to Aristotle as well as Horace, with caution against trite and otiose epithets, against epithet-strings à l’Italienne, but with a strong praise of the mot propre. Rhyme is treated rather briefly; and then Ronsard drops to minutiæ of e's and h's, discusses Alexandrines (which, in a later edition, he says he should have employed in the Franciade but for powerful command) and “common” (decasyllabic) verse, and others, passes to some grammatical and orthographical cautions, and ends with the promise, unluckily never fulfilled, of a longer Poetic some day.

It may have been in part payment of this promise that he wrote the Prefatory matter to the Franciade.[[177]] The Prefaces to the Franciade. This, which, as it stands in the modern editions, is triform, consists of a short Preface (or Au Lecteur) in prose, from the master’s own hand, to the original edition; of a verse exordium, or rather Introduction, separate from the poem proper; and, between the two, of a second Preface or Treatise on Heroic Poetry of some length, which we have, not as it left the author’s pen, but arranged and revised (it is said under his direction) by Claude Binet. The critical interest of the verse Proem lies in the enthusiastic glorification of Homer and Virgil (who have shown the whole secret of epic-writing, and whose work the author bids his own “adore on its knees”), and in a spirited reissue of the cardinal doctrine of the Pléiade that French is a fertile soil, all overgrown and untilled, which must be brought under cultivation by the unsparing labour of poets and scholars.

The first Preface begins with the time-honoured comparison, or contrast, between History and Poetry, as dealing, the one with verity, the other with verisimilitude. Hence Ronsard strikes off to set Homer and Virgil far above all others, and to fix a stigma on Ariosto as presenting a body handsome enough in members, but so counterfeit and monstrous as a whole that it is like an unwholesome dream. He has evidently on his mind the objections, perhaps of the ancients, perhaps of some Italians, to the combination of historical poetry, and endeavours to meet the objection that he comes nearer to actual history “than Virgilian art permits” by the rather perilous excuse that Virgil only lived under a second emperor, while he himself lives under the successor of a long line of kings, and that Charles our Lord and King insisted on no invidious preference being shown to some of his ancestors over the others. Indeed Ronsard is too typical a Frenchman for a sense of humour to be exactly his strong point.

He then proceeds to name, as his example, rather “the naïve facility of Homer than the curious diligence of Virgil”: though he ventures to reprehend some excess of improbability in the scheme and details of the Iliad, and ends with some particulars of apology and explanation. The most curious of these are a passage giving reasons (by no means in strict accordance with the sentence referred to above) for rejecting the Alexandrine in favour of the decasyllable, and a pathetic appeal to the reader not to read his poem like an official document,[[178]] but to accommodate his voice to its passion, and especially to raise that voice whenever he comes to a mark of exclamation.

The second, later, longer, and, as we have said, not quite authentic, Preface, addressed to the Lecteur Aprentif, is a discourse on the Heroic Poem in general; and as such is responsible for the specimens of the kind with which the next century was troubled in France, if not for those from the Henriade downwards, which serve as even less cheerful ornaments to the French literature of the eighteenth. We have seen already how carefulness and trouble about this thing had been gathering and growing in Italy, and how it was, in Ronsard’s own days, causing the storm about the Gerusalemme. The “Maronolatry” which France shared with Italy led to it directly; and even the championship of Homer (as in Ronsard’s own case)—the attempt to establish two kings of the Epic Brentford—was certain to conduce to it. Ronsard himself, however, does not at first attempt the general question; indeed it is hardly possible to draw attention too often to the far greater abstinence from general and deductive consideration which at this time characterises the French critics, as compared with the Italians. He begins with a fresh attack (not quite in the best faith, if his own later remarks be pressed, as perhaps they need not be) on the Alexandrine; and, by a deflection more natural in the original than it appears in a summary, goes off to a panegyric of periphrasis, which again was only too docilely received by his successors of all schools for the next two centuries in France. His examples are taken from Virgil—indeed the earlier part of this Preface, at any rate, is as enthusiastically Virgilian as Scaliger himself could desire. Then he puts stress once more on the significant epithet, lays down obiter the delightfully arbitrary dictum that, as the unity of drama is the revolution of a day, so the unity of at least a war-epic is the revolution of a year, dwells largely on his favourite distinction between the poet and the versifier, which he justifies (not too well) by insisting on artful variations of the narrative by speeches, dreams, prophecies, pictures,[[179]] auguries, fantastic visions, and appearances of gods and demons. All this time we have heard nothing of Homer, and indeed have read nearly half a score pages before his name occurs as furnishing Virgil with some of his facts and personages, just as he had drawn his own from older stories, “comme nous faisons des contes de Lancelot, de Tristan, de Gauvain, et d’Artus,” a passage to be noted. The dozen or so which remain are oddly occupied by a sort of jumble of notes and hints to the epic poet, reminding one of that valuable paper of advice which Sir John Hawkins sent to Captain Amyas Leigh, on “all points from the mounting of ordnance to the use of vitriol and limmons against the scurvy.” He must describe splendid palaces and grounds, trace heroes and heroines to gods and nymphs, dress them handsomely, wound them in the right places,[[180]] not invent too much, allow himself enjambement and hiatus, use plentiful comparisons and terms of art, do things handsomely in general, boil his very kettles with a Homeric afflatus,[[180]] be thoroughly careful about study, but, above all, attend to diction, as to which the cautions and licences of the Abrégé are repeated in fuller form, with a special injunction not to Ciceronianise idly, but to faire un lexicon des vieils mots d’Artus, de Lancelot, et de Gauvain.

Ronsard will necessarily give us text for remark on the criticism of the Pléiade in the Interchapter following this Book. His critical gospel. But we must say a little of his critical attitude here. That it is of more interest than positive importance cannot easily be denied. Not only for our purpose, but for its own, it is injured by the very sincerity, practicalness, and common-sense of the writer’s purpose and view. He clearly does not regard the past of French literature with quite such a petulant contempt as that of Pelletier and Du Bellay. But he is even more steadily and thoroughly convinced that something better can, should, and shall be done: and it is on the doing of this, by himself and others, that all his thoughts are fixed. He does not give himself the time—he does not, it is evident, think it in the least worth while—to take a critical survey of the past in any detail, or with any general grouping. It is enough for him that Homer and Virgil are of the greatest, and that their work is also of the greatest; and he wishes Frenchmen to go and do likewise. He almost, if not altogether, accepts the end as a datum; and is only troubled about the means. In regard to some of these means his doctrine, though somewhat ondoyant and even inconsistent, is surprisingly sound and original. If part of it was accepted with advantage by his countrymen in the centuries which followed, other parts were discarded and neglected, with an almost incalculably disastrous result. That “lexicon of the old words of Lancelot and Artus” would have saved French from the drab smug insignificance of its eighteenth-century garb; those cautions about enjambement and the like might almost have done for France what Spenser and Shakespeare did for England.