A Short History of French Literature Part 20

The popularity of Rabelais was immense, and of itself sufficed to protect him against the enmity which his hardly veiled attacks on monachism, and on other fungoid growths of the Church, could not have failed to attract. In such a case imitation was certain, and, long before the genuine series of the Pantagrueline Chronicles was completed, spurious supplements and continuations appeared, all of them without exception worthless. A more legitimate imitation coloured the work of many of the fiction writers of the remaining part of the century, though the tradition of short story writing, on the model of the Fabliaux and of the Italian tales borrowed from them, continued and was only indirectly affected by Rabelais. In this latter cla.s.s one mediocre writer and two of the greatest talent--of talent amounting almost to genius--have to be noticed. In 1535, Nicholas of Troyes, a saddler by trade, produced a book ent.i.tled _Grand Parangon de Nouvelles Nouvelles_, in which he followed rather, as his t.i.tle indicates, the _Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles_ than any other model. His sources seem to have been the _Decameron_ and the _Gesta Romanorum_ princ.i.p.ally, though some of his tales are original. Very different books are the _Contes_ of Marguerite de Navarre, usually termed the 'Heptameron,' and the _Contes et Joyeux Devis_ of her servant Bonaventure des Periers. Neither of these books was published till a considerable period after the death, not merely of Rabelais, but of their authors.

[Sidenote: Bonaventure des Periers.]

There are few persons of the time of whom less is known than of Bonaventure des Periers[183], and, by no means in consequence merely of this mystery, there are few more interesting. He must have been born somewhere about the beginning of the sixteenth century, and his friend Dolet calls him _Aeduum poetam_, which would seem to fix his birth somewhere in the neighbourhood at least of Autun. He was undoubtedly one of the literary courtiers of Marguerite d'Angouleme. Finally, it seems that in the persecution which, during the later years of Francis I.'s reign, came upon the Protestants and freethinkers, and which the influence of Marguerite was powerless to prevent, he committed suicide to escape the clutches of the law. Henri Estienne, however, attributes the act to insanity or delirium. However this may be, there is no doubt that Des Periers was a remarkable example of a humanist. He was certainly a good scholar, and he was also a decided freethinker. He has left poems of some merit, but not great perhaps, some translations and minor prose pieces, but certainly two works of the highest interest, the _Cymbalum Mundi_ (1537) and the _Nouvelles Recreations et Joyeux Devis_ (1558). The _Cymbalum Mundi_ betrays the influence of Lucian, which was also very strong on Rabelais. It is a work in dialogue, satirising the superst.i.tions of antiquity with a hardly dubious reference to the religious beliefs of Des Periers' own day. The _Nouvelles Recreations et Joyeux Devis_ are compact of less perilous stuff, while they exhibit equal and perhaps greater literary skill. They consist of a hundred and twenty-nine short tales, similar in general character to those of the _Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles_ and other collections. Although, however, a great licence of subject is still allowed, the language is far less coa.r.s.e than in the work of Antoine de la Salle, while the literary merits of the style are very much greater. Des Periers was beyond all doubt a great master of half-serious and half-joyous French prose. Nor is his matter much less remarkable than his style. Like Rabelais, but with the difference that his was a more poetical temperament than that of his greater contemporary, he has sudden accesses of seriousness, almost of sentiment. At these times the spirit of the French Renaissance, in its more cultivated and refined representatives, comes out in him very strongly. This spirit may be defined as a kind of cultivated sensuality, ardently enamoured of the beautiful in the world of sense, while fully devoted to intellectual truth, and at the same time always conscious of the nothingness of things, the instant pressure of death, the treacherousness of mortal delights. The rare sentences in which Des Periers gives vent to the expression of this mental att.i.tude are for the most part admirably written, while as a teller of tales, either comic or romantic, he has few equals and fewer superiors.

[Sidenote: The Heptameron.]

The same spirit which has just been described found even fuller expression, with greater advantages of scale and setting, in the _Heptameron_[184] of Marguerite of Navarre. The exact authors.h.i.+p of this celebrated book is something of a literary puzzle. Marguerite was a prolific author, if all the works which were published under her name be unhesitatingly ascribed[185] to her. Besides the poems printed under the pretty t.i.tle of _Les Marguerites de la Marguerite_, she produced many other works, as well as the _Heptameron_ which was not given to the world until after her death (1558). The House of Valois was by no means dest.i.tute of literary talent. But that which seems most likely to be the Queen's genuine work hardly corresponds with the remarkable power shown in the _Heptameron_. On the other hand, Marguerite for years maintained a literary court, in which all the most celebrated men of the time, notably Marot and Bonaventure des Periers, held places. If it were allowable to decide literary questions simply by considerations of probability, there could be little hesitation in a.s.signing the entire _Heptameron_ to Des Periers himself, and then its unfinished condition would be intelligible enough. The general opinion of critics, however, is that it was probably the result of the joint work of the Queen, of Des Periers, and of a good many other men, and probably some women, of letters. The idea and plan of the work are avowedly borrowed from Boccaccio, but the thing is worked out with so much originality that it becomes nothing so little as an imitation. A company of ladies and gentlemen returning from Cauterets are detained by bad weather in an out-of-the-way corner of the Pyrenees, and beguile the time by telling stories. The interludes, however, in which the tale-tellers are brought on the stage in person, are more circ.u.mstantial than those of the Decameron, and the individual characters are much more fully worked out.

Indeed, the mere setting of the book, independently of its seventy-two stories (for the eighth day is begun), makes a very interesting tale, exhibiting not merely those characteristics of the time and its society which have been noticed in connection with the _Contes et Joyeux Devis_, but, in addition, a certain religiosity in which that time and society were also by no means deficient, though it existed side by side with freethinking of a daring kind and with unbridled licentiousness. The head of the party, Dame Oisille, is the chief representative of this religious spirit, though all the party are more or less penetrated by it. The subjects of the tales do not differ much from those of Boccaccio, though they are, as a rule, occupied with a higher cla.s.s of society, and of necessity display a more polished condition of manners.

They are much longer than the anecdotes of the _Contes et Joyeux Devis_, and generally, though not always, deal with something like a connected story instead of with mere isolated traits or apophthegms. The best of them are animated by the same spirit of refined voluptuousness which animates so much of the writing and art of the time, and which may indeed be said to be its chief feature. But this spirit has seldom been presented in a light so attractive as that which it bears in the _Heptameron_.

[Sidenote: Noel du Fail.]

[Sidenote: G. Bouchet.]

[Sidenote: Cholieres.]

The influence of Rabelais on the one hand, of the _Heptameron_ on the other, is observable in almost all the work of the same kind which the second half of the sixteenth century produced. The fantastic buffoonery and the indiscriminate prodigality of learning, which were to the outward eye the distinguis.h.i.+ng characteristics of _Pantagruel_, found however more imitators than the poetical sentiment of the _Heptameron_.

The earliest of the successors of Rabelais was Noel du Fail, a gentleman and magistrate of Britanny, who, five years before the master's death, produced two little books, _Propos Rustiques_[186] and _Baliverneries_, which depict rural life and its incidents with a good deal of vividness and colour. The imitation of Rabelais is very perceptible, and sometimes a little irritating, but the work on the whole has merit, and abounds in curious local traits. The _Propos Rustiques_, too, are interesting because they underwent a singular travesty in the next century, and appeared under a new and misleading t.i.tle. Much later, near forty years afterwards in fact, Du Fail produced the _Contes d'Eutrapel_[187], which are rather critical and satirical dialogues than tales. There is a good deal of dry humour in them. The provinciality to be noticed in Du Fail was still a feature of French literature; and in this particular department it long continued to be prominent, perhaps owing to the example of Rabelais, who, wide as is his range, frequently takes pleasure in mixing up petty local matters with his other materials.

Thus, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, Guillaume Bouchet (to be carefully distinguished from Jean Bouchet, the poet of the early sixteenth century) wrote a large collection of _Serees_[188] (Soirees), containing gossip on a great variety of subjects, mingled with details of Angevin manners; and Tabourot des Accords composed his _Escraignes Dijonnaises_. A singular book, or rather two singular books[189], _Les Matinees_ and _Les Apres-Dinees_, were produced by a person, the Seigneur de Cholieres, of whom little else is known. Cholieres is a bad writer, and a commonplace if not stupid thinker; but he tells some quaint stories, and his book shows us the deep hold which the example of Rabelais had given to the practice of discussing grave subjects in a light tone.

[Sidenote: Apologie pour Herodote.]

[Sidenote: Moyen de Parvenir.]

There remain two books of sufficient importance to be treated separately. The first of these is the _Apologie pour Herodote_[190]

(1566) of the scholar Henri Estienne. In the guise of a serious defence of Herodotus from the charges of untrustworthiness and invention frequently brought against him Estienne indulges in an elaborate indictment against his own and recent times, especially against the Roman Catholic clergy. Much of his book is taken from Rabelais, or from the _Heptameron_; much from the preachers of the fifteenth century. Its literary merit has been a good deal exaggerated, and its extreme desultoriness and absence of coherence make it tedious to read for any length of time, but it is in a way amusing enough. Much later (1610) the last--it may almost be said the first--echo of the genuine spirit of Rabelais was sounded in the _Moyen de Parvenir_[191] of Beroalde de Verville. This eccentric work is perhaps the most perfect example of a _fatrasie_ in existence. In the guise of guests at a banquet the author brings in many celebrated persons of the day and of antiquity, and makes them talk from pillar to post in the strangest possible fas.h.i.+on.

The licence of language and anecdote which Rabelais had permitted himself is equalled and exceeded; but many of the tales are told with consummate art, and, in the midst of the ribaldry and buffoonery, remarks of no small shrewdness are constantly dropped as if by accident.

There seems to have been at the time something not unlike a serious idea that the book was made up from unpublished papers of Rabelais himself.

All external considerations make this in the highest degree unlikely, and the resemblances are obviously those of imitation rather than of identical authors.h.i.+p. But undoubtedly nothing else of the kind comes so near to the excellences of _Gargantua_ and _Pantagruel_.

FOOTNOTES:

[178] Among these may be mentioned the charming story of _Jehan de Paris_ (ed. Montaiglon, Paris, 1874), which M. de Montaiglon has clearly proved to be of the end of the fifteenth century. It is a cross between a Roman d'aventures and a nursery tale, telling how the King of France as 'John of Paris' outwitted the King of England in the suit for the hand of the Infanta of Spain.

[179] Ed. Jannet and Moland. 7 vols. (2nd ed.) Paris, 1873. Also ed.

Marty-Laveaux, vols. 1-4. Paris, 1870-81.

[180] The question has been again discussed since the text was written by M. Paul Lacroix (Paris, 1881), whose facts and arguments fully bear out the view taken here. The other side is taken, though not very decidedly, in the fourth volume of M. Marty-Laveaux' edition. The two contain a tolerably complete survey of the question.

[181] The best general commentary on Rabelais is that of M. J. Fleury. 2 vols. St. Petersburg, 1876-7.

[182] For an excellent account of Folengo, see Symonds' _Renaissance in Italy_, vol. v. chap. 14.

[183] Ed. Lacour. 2 vols. Paris, 1866.

[184] Ed. Leroux de Lincy. 3 vols. Paris, 1855.

[185] She was born in 1492, and was thus two years older than her brother Francis I. She married first the Duke d'Alencon, then Henri d'Albert King of Navarre. Her private character has been most unjustly attacked. She died in 1549. Marguerite is spoken of by four surnames; de Valois from her family; d'Angouleme from her father's t.i.tle; d'Alencon from her first husband's; and de Navarre from that of her second. In literature, to distinguish her from her great-niece, the first wife of Henri IV., Marguerite d'Angouleme is the term most commonly used.

[186] Ed. La Borderie. Paris, 1878. The bibliography of this book is very curious.

[187] Ed. Hippeau. 2 vols. Paris, 1875.

[188] Ed. Roybet. Paris. In course of publication.

[189] Ed. Tricotel. 2 vols. Paris, 1879.

[190] Ed. Ristelhuber. 2 vols. Paris, 1879.

[191] Ed. Jacob. Paris, 1868. It is possibly not Beroalde's.

CHAPTER IV.

THE PLeIADE.

[Sidenote: Character and Effects of the Pleiade Movement.]

Almost exactly at the middle of the sixteenth century a movement took place in French literature which has no parallel in literary history, except the similar movement which took place, also in France, three centuries later. The movement and its chief promoters are indifferently known in literature by the name of the _Pleiade_, a term applied by the cla.s.sical affectation of the time to the group of seven men[192], Ronsard, Du Bellay, Belleau, Baf, Daurat, Jodelle, and Pontus de Tyard, who were most active in promoting it, and who banded themselves together in a strict league or _coterie_ for the attainment of their purposes.

These purposes were the reduction of the French language and French literary forms to a state more comparable, as they thought, to that of the two great cla.s.sical tongues. They had no intention (though such an intention has been falsely attributed to them both at the time and since) of defacing or destroying their mother-tongue. On the contrary, they were animated by the sincerest and, for the most part, the most intelligent love for it. But the intense admiration of the severe beauties of cla.s.sical literature, which was the dominant literary note of the Renaissance, translated itself in their active minds into a determination to make, if it were possible, French itself more able to emulate the triumphs of Greek and of Latin. This desire, even if it had borne no fruit, would have honourably distinguished the French Renaissance from the Italian and German forms of the movement. In Italy the humanists, for the most part, contented themselves with practice in the Latin tongue, and in Germany they did so almost wholly. But no sooner had the literature of antiquity taken root in France than it was made to bear _novas frondes et non sua poma_ of vernacular literature.

There were some absurdities committed by the Pleiade no doubt, as there always are in enthusiastic crusades of any kind: but it must never be forgotten that they had a solid basis of philological truth to go upon.

French, after all, despite a strong Teutonic admixture, was a Latin tongue, and recurrence to Latin, and to the still more majestic and fertile language which had had so much to do in shaping the literary Latin dialect, was natural and germane to its character. In point of fact, the Pleiade made modern French--made it, we may say, twice over; for not only did its original work revolutionise the language in a manner so durable that the reaction of the next century could not wholly undo it, but it was mainly study of the Pleiade that armed the great masters of the Romantic movement, the men of 1830, in their revolt against the cramping rules and impoverished vocabulary of the eighteenth century. The effect of the change indeed was far too universal for it to be possible for any Malherbe or any Boileau to overthrow it. The whole literature of the nation, at a time when it was wonderfully abundant and vigorous, 'Ronsardised' for nearly fifty years, and such practice at such a time never fails to leave its mark. The actual details of the movement cannot better be given than by going through the list of its chief partic.i.p.ators.

[Sidenote: Ronsard.]

[Sidenote: The Defense et Ill.u.s.tration de la Langue Francaise.]

Pierre de Ronsard[193], Prince of Poets[194], was born at La Poissonniere, in the Vendomois, or, as it was then more often called, the Gatinais, on the banks of the river Loir, in 1524. He died in his own country in the year 1585, acknowledged, not merely in France but out of it, as the leader of living poets. His early life, however, was rather that of a man of action than of a poet, and one of the most studious of poets. His father was an old courtier and servant of Francis I., whose companion in captivity he had been, and Ronsard entered upon court life when he was a boy of ten years old. He visited Scotland and England in the suite of French amba.s.sadors, and remained for some considerable time in Great Britain. He was also attached to emba.s.sies in Flanders, Holland, and Germany. But before he was of age he fell ill, and though he recovered, it was at the cost of permanent deafness, which incapacitated him for the public service. He threw himself on literature for a consolation, and under the direction of Daurat, a scholar of renown, studied for years at the College Coqueret.

Here Du Bellay, Belleau, Baf, were his fellow-students, and the four with their master, with etienne Jodelle, and with Pontus de Tyard, afterwards bishop of Chalon, formed, as has been said, the Pleiade according to the most orthodox computation. The idea conceived and carried out in these studious years (by Ronsard himself and Du Bellay beyond all doubt in the first place) was the reformation of French language and French literature by study and imitation of the ancients.

In 1549 the manifesto of the society issued, in the shape of Du Bellay's _Defense et Ill.u.s.tration de la Langue Francaise_, and in 1550 the first practical ill.u.s.tration of the method was given by Ronsard's _Odes_. The principles of the _Defense et Ill.u.s.tration_ may be thus summarised. The author holds that the current forms of literature, dizains, rondeaus, etc., are altogether too facile and easy, that the language used is too pedestrian, the treatment wanting in gravity and art. He would have Odes of the Horatian kind take the place of Chansons, the sonnet, _non moins docte que plaisante invention Italienne_, of dizains and huitains, regular tragedy and comedy of moralities and farces, regular satires of Fatrasies and Coq-a-l'ane. He takes particular pains to demonstrate the contrary proposition to Wordsworth's, and to prove that merely natural and ordinary language is not sufficient for him who in poesy wishes to produce work deserving of immortality. He ridicules the mediaeval affectations and conceits of some of the writers of his time, who gave themselves such names as 'Le Banni de Liesse,' 'Le Traverseur des Voies Perilleuses,' etc. He speaks, indeed, not too respectfully of mediaeval literature generally, and uses language which probably suggested Gabriel Harvey's depreciatory remarks about the _Fairy Queen_ forty years later.

In much of this there is exaggeration, and in much more of it mistake.

By turning their backs on the middle ages--though indeed they were not able to do it thoroughly--the Pleiade lost almost as much in subject and spirit as they gained in language and formal excellence. The laudation of the sonnet, while the ballade and chant royal, things of similar nature and of hardly less capacity, are denounced as _epiceries_, savours of a rather Philistine preference for mere novelty and foreign fas.h.i.+ons. But, as has been already pointed out, Du Bellay was right in the main, and it must especially be insisted on that his aim was to strengthen and reform, not to alter or misguide, the French language.

The peroration of the book in a highly rhetorical style speaks of the writer and his readers as having 'echappe du milieu des Grecs et par les escadrons Romains pour entrer jusqu'au sein de la tant desiree France.'

That is to say, the innovators are to carry off what spoils they can from Greece and Rome, but it is to be for the enrichment and benefit of the French tongue. Frenchmen are to write French, not Latin and Greek; but they are to write it not merely in a conversational way, content as Du Bellay says somewhere else, 'n'avoir dit rien qui vaille aux neuf premiers vers, pourvu qu'au dixieme il y ait le pet.i.t mot pour rire.'

They are to accustom themselves to long and weary studies, 'ear ce sont les ailes dont les escripts des hommes volent au ciel,' to imitate good authors, not merely in Greek and Latin, but in Italian, Spanish, or any other tongue where they may be found. Such was the manifesto of the Pleiade; and no one who has studied French literature and French character, who knows the special tendency of the nation to drop from time to time into a sterile self-admiration, and an easy confidence that it is the all-sufficient wonder of the world, can doubt its wisdom.

Certainly, whatever may be thought of it in the abstract, it was justified of its children. The first of these was, as has been said, Ronsard's _Odes_, published in 1550. These he followed up, in 1552, by _Les Amours de Ca.s.sandre_, in 1553 by a volume of _Hymnes_, as well as by _Le Bocage Royal_, _Les Amours de Marie_, sonnets, etc., all of which were, in 1560, republished in a collected edition of four volumes. From the first Ronsard had been a very popular poet at court, where, according to a well-known anecdote, Marguerite de Savoie, the second of the Valois Marguerites, s.n.a.t.c.hed his first volume from Mellin de Saint Gelais, who was reading it in a designed tone of burlesque, and reading it herself to her brother Henry II. and the court, obtained a verdict at once for the young poet. The accession of Charles IX. brought Ronsard still more into favour, and during the next ten years he produced many courtly poems of the occasional kind, besides others to suit his own pleasure. In 1572 the first part of his most ambitious, but perhaps least successful, work appeared. This was the _Franciade_, a dull epic. At the death of Charles, Ronsard retired to his native province, where he had an abbacy, Croix-Val. Here all his poetical powers returned, and in his last _Amours, Sonnets to Helene_, and other pieces, some of his very best work is to be found. The year before his death he produced an edition of his works much altered, but by no means invariably improved.

There are few poets to whose personal merits there is more unanimity of trustworthy testimony than there is to those of Ronsard. From the time of his betaking himself to literary work, he seems to have been wholly given to study, and to the contemplation of natural beauty. Although jealous of his own great reputation, and liable to be nettled when it was imperilled, as it was by Du Bartas, he was as a rule singularly placable in literary quarrels. The story of his quarrelling with Rabelais is late, unsupported, and to all appearance fabulous; while, on the other hand, the pa.s.sages which have been supposed to reflect on the Pleiade in the writings of Rabelais can, for chronological reasons, by no possibility refer to Ronsard or his friends. Lastly, the poet appears to have had no thought of writing for gain, and though, like all his contemporaries, he did not scruple to solicit favours from the king, he was in no way importunate or servile. But while his personal character, as well as the extraordinary esteem in which he was held by all his contemporaries, has never been seriously contested, critical estimates of his literary work have strangely varied. To his own age he was the 'Prince of Poets.' His successor, Malherbe, behaved to him as certain popes are reported to have behaved to their predecessors, excommunicating him in the literary sense. Boileau, with his usual ignorance of French literature before his own day, described his work in lines which French schoolboys long learnt by heart, and which are as false in fact as they are imbecile in criticism. Fenelon was almost the only sincere partisan he had for two centuries. But when the Romantic movement began Ronsard was for a while almost restored to the position he held in his lifetime, and his works became a kind of Bible to the disciples of Sainte-Beuve and the followers of Hugo. The strong mediaeval revival which accompanied the movement was however unfavourable to Ronsard, and he has again sunk, though not very low, in the general estimation of French critics. The history is curious, and as a literary phenomenon instructive. But it is not difficult for an impartial judge to place Ronsard in his true position. His main defects are two: he was too much a poet of malice prepense, and yet he wrote on the whole too fluently. The ma.s.s of his work is great, and it is not always, nor perhaps very often, animated by those unmistakable and universal poetical touches which in the long run will alone suffice to induce posterity to keep a writer on its shelf of great poets. Yet these touches are by no means wanting in Ronsard. Many of his sonnets, especially the famous and universally admired 'Quand vous serez bien vieille,' not a few of his odes, especially the equally famous 'Mignonne, allons voir si la rose,' rank among those poems of which it can only be said that they could not be better, and detached pa.s.sages innumerable deserve hardly lower praise. But it is when Ronsard is viewed from the standpoint of a thoroughly instructed historical criticism that his real greatness appears. It is when we look at the poets that came before him and at those who came after him that we see the immense benefit he conferred upon his successors, and upon the language which those successors ill.u.s.trated. The result of his cla.s.sical studies was little less than the introduction of an entirely new rhythm into French poetry: let it be observed that a new rhythm, and not merely new metre, is what is spoken of. Since the disuse of the half-inarticulate but sweet rhythmical varieties of the mediaeval pastourelles and romances a great monotony had come upon French poetry.

The fault of the artificial forms of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and early sixteenth centuries, the _epiceries_ of Du Bellay's scornful allusion, was that they induced their writers to concentrate their attention on the arrangement of the rhymes and stanzas, to the neglect of the individual line, the rhythm of which was but too frequently lame, stiff, and prosaic in the extreme. With Marot and Saint Gelais the introduction of less formal patterns, dizains, huitains, etc., had had the additional drawback of making the individual verse even more prosaic and pedestrian, though it may be somewhat less stiff. Now the line is, after all, the unit of poetry, and all reform must start with it. It is the great glory of Ronsard that his reform did so start. From his time French poetry reads quite differently. Perhaps this was due to his study of the Horatian quant.i.ty-metres, where every syllable has to give its quota to the effect of the line as well as every line its quota to the effect of the stanza. But whether it was this or something else, the effect is indisputable. To this must be added a liberal, though in Ronsard's own case not excessive, importation of new words from Greek and Latin, a bold and striking mode of expression, the retention of many picturesque old words which the senseless folly of the seventeenth-century reformers banished, and, above all, a great indulgence in diminutives, which give a most charming effect to the lighter verse of Ronsard and his friends, and which also were cut off by the indiscriminate and 'desperate hook' of Malherbe and Boileau. So great were the formal changes and improvements thus introduced, that French poetry takes a new colour from the age of Ronsard, a colour which in its moments of health it has ever since displayed.

[Sidenote: Du Bellay.]

Next to Ronsard, and perhaps above him, if uniform excellence rather than bulk and range of work is considered, ranks Joachim du Bellay[195].

He was a connection, though it does not seem quite clear what connection, of the Cardinal du Bellay to whom Rabelais was so long attached, and whose house included other ill.u.s.trious members. Probably he was a cousin of the cardinal and of his two brothers the memoir writers. His youth was rendered troublesome by illness and law difficulties, but at last he was able with Ronsard, whose junior he was by a little, to give himself up to study under Daurat. His prose manifesto has already been dealt with, and almost immediately afterwards he in some sort antic.i.p.ated Ronsard's poetical carrying out of his principles by a volume of _Sonnets to Olive_, the anagram of a certain Mademoiselle de Viole. The sonnet, however, was not such an absolute novelty as the ode, having been introduced already by Mellin de Saint Gelais. Shortly afterwards he went to Italy with the Cardinal du Bellay, a proceeding which did not bring him good luck. The intriguing diplomacy of the papal court displeased him, and he soon lost his cousin's favour.

A volume of sonnets ent.i.tled _Regrets_, full of vigour and poetry, dates from this time. But Du Bellay, deprived of the protection of the most powerful member of his family, again fell into difficulties, and finally died in 1560 at the age of thirty-five. His Roman sojourn has given birth to perhaps the finest of his works, _Les Antiquites de Rome_, Englished by Spenser under the slightly altered t.i.tle of 'The Ruins of Rome.' Du Bellay's works are not extensive, and indeed they could hardly be so, considering the shortness of his life and the interruptions of business and study which even that short life underwent. But he is undoubtedly the member of the group whose work keeps at the highest level. Nor is his excellence limited to one or two tones. For grace and simplicity his _Vanneur_, his _epitaphe d'un Chat_, and several others of his _Jeux Rustiques_ challenge comparison. He had a strong vein of satire, which he showed in denouncing fawning poetasters as well as the corrupt and intriguing hangers on of the Papal court. His sonnets to Olive have the finest flavour of the peculiarly cultivated and graceful voluptuousness which has been noted as one of the distinguis.h.i.+ng marks of the French Renaissance. His _Antiquites de Rome_ exhibit even more strongly another of those distinguis.h.i.+ng marks, the melancholy sense of death, destruction, and nothingness; indeed, as the _Heptameron_ is the typical prose work of this period, so Du Bellay's poems may be taken as its typical poetry. He has been called the Apollo of the Pleiade, but he should with justice be called its Mercury as well, for, as he was perhaps its best poet, so he was certainly its best prose writer. It is unlucky that he was less favoured by fate and fortune than any other of the greater writers of the century.