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He had sought permission from the King to remain with Ronsard for the night, and the permission had been readily, almost eagerly granted.
One would imagine from Flaubert's exclamations that Ronsard had a range like Shelley's, whereas, in fact, he was more comparable with the English cavalier poets. He had the cavalier poet's gift of making love seem a profession rather than a passion. He was always very much a gentleman, both in his moods and his philosophy. A great deal of his best poetry is merely a variation on carpe diem.
Meanwhile at your elbow some one tunes up a song, words of Ronsard to a pathetic tremulous air, of how the poet loved his mistress long ago, and pressed on her the flight of time, and told her how white and quiet the dead lay under the stones, and how the boat dipped and pitched as the shades embarked for the passionless land.
"They are too strong!" cried the coral-fisher; "Ronsard, believe me! There is no rain to soften or abate the wind and the sea grows greater with every breath of the rising gale!" "I care nothing!" replied Ronsard; "Let be! If you are afraid, I will go alone!" At these words, the Professor suddenly awoke to the situation. "What would you attempt, Ronsard?" he exclaimed; "You can do nothing!
The leaders of an advancing Thought, and not the leaders of a fixed Government are the real representatives of the People!" Something in this last sentence appeared to strike the King very forcibly. "You are a philosopher, Rene Ronsard," he said rising from his chair, and laying a hand kindly on his shoulder.
I think, too, that some of the lyric measures of the old French Pleiad, of Ronsard and Du Bellay, would be well wedded with the verse of Horace. But perhaps no translator will ever please any one but himself, and of Horace every man must be his own translator.
And then this amazing Fleury falls foul of thine epitaph on Mai'tre Francoys and cries, 'Ronsard a voulu faire des vers mechants; il n'a fait que de mechants vers. More truly saith M. Sainte-Beuve, 'If the good Rabelais had returned to Meudon on the day when this epitaph was made over the wine, he would, methinks, have laughed heartily. But what shall be said of a Professor like the egregious M. Fleury, who holds that Ronsard was despised at Court?
'Thou wilt do well to pick dexterously, he says, in his abridgment of the art of French poetry, 'and adopt to thy work the most expressive words in the dialects of our own France; there is no need to care whether the vocables are Gascon, or Poitevin, or Norman, or Mancese, or Lyonnese, or of other districts, provided that they are good, and properly express what thou wouldst say. Ronsard was too bold in extending his conquests over the classical languages; it was that exuberance of ideas, that effervescence of a genius not sufficiently master over its conceptions, which brought down upon him, in after times, the contempt of the writers who, in the seventeenth century, followed, with more wisdom and taste, the road which he had contributed to open.
For a hundred years France was given over to profane and light literature. Montaigne, Charyon, Ronsard and de Balzac are some of the names of this period. The death of a cat or dog was made the subject of a poem that was no real poetry.
Since Ronsard and Du Bellay have given reputation to our French poesy, every little dabbler, for aught I see, swells his words as high, and makes his cadences very near as harmonious as they: "Plus sonat, quam valet."
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