Pierre de Ronsard, commonly referred to as Ronsard (September 11,
1524 – December, 1585), was a French poet and "prince of poets" (as his own generation in France called him). He was born at the Manoir de la Possonnière, in the village of Couture-sur-Loir,
Loir-et-Cher.
His family is said to have come from the predominantly Romanian provinces to the north of the Danube (provinces with which the Crusades had given France much intercourse) in
the first half of the 14th century. Baudouin de Ronsard or Rossart was the founder of the French branch of the house, and made
his mark in the early stages of the Hundred Years' War. The poet's father was named
Louys de Ronsard, and his mother was Jeanne de Chaudrier, of a family not only noble in itself but well connected. Pierre was the
youngest son. Loys de Ronsard was maître d'hôtel du roi to Francis I, whose
captivity after Pavia had just been softened by treaty, and he had to quit his home shortly after
Pierre's birth.
The future Prince of Poets was educated at home for some years and sent to the Collège de
Navarre in Paris when he was nine years old. When Madeleine of France was
married to James V of Scotland, Ronsard was attached to the king's service, and he
spent three years in Britain. The latter part of this time seems to have been passed in
England, though he had, strictly speaking, no business there. On returning to France in 1540, he
was again taken into the service of the Duke of Orléans.
In this service he had other opportunities of travel, being sent to Flanders and again to
Scotland. After a time a more important employment fell to his lot, and he was attached as
secretary to the suite of Lazare de Baïf, the father of his future colleague in the
Pléiade and his companion on this occasion, Antoine de Baïf, at the diet of Speyer.
Afterwards he was attached in the same way to the suite of the cardinal du Bellay-Langey, and his mythical quarrel with
François Rabelais dates from this period.
His apparently promising diplomatic career was, however, cut short by an attack of deafness which no physician could cure, and
he determined to devote himself to study. The institution which he chose for the purpose among the numerous schools and colleges
of Paris was the Collège Coqueret, the principal of which was Jean Daurat — afterwards the
"dark star" (as he has been called from his silence in French) of the Pléiade, and already an acquaintance of Ronsard's from his
having held the office of tutor in the Baïf household. Antoine de Baïf, Daurat's
pupil, accompanied Ronsard; Belleau shortly followed; Joachim du Bellay, the second of
the seven, joined not much later. Muretus (Marc Antoine de Muret), a great scholar and by means
of his Latin plays a great influence in the creation of French tragedy, was also a student
here.
Ronsard's period of study occupied seven years, and the first manifesto of the new literary movement, which was to apply to
the vernacular the principles of criticism and scholarship learnt from the classics, came not
from him but from Du Bellay. The Defense et illustration de la langue française of the latter appeared in 1549, and the
Pléiade (or Brigade, as it was first called) may be said to have been then launched. It consisted, as its name implies, of seven
writers whose names are sometimes differently enumerated, though the orthodox canon is beyond doubt composed of Ronsard, Du
Bellay, Baïf, Remy Belleau, Pontus de Tyard (a man
of rank and position who had exemplified the principles of the friends earlier), Jodelle
the dramatist, and Daurat. Ronsard's own work came a little later, and a rather idle story is told of a trick of Du Bellay's
which at last determined him to publish. Some single and minor pieces, an epithalamium on
Antoine de Bourbon and Jeanne de Navarre (1550), a "Hymne de la France"
(1549), an "Ode a la Paix," preceded the publication in 1550 of the four first books ("first" is characteristic and
noteworthy) of the Odes of Pierre de Ronsard.
This was followed in 1552 by the publication of his Amours de Cassandre with the fifth book of Odes, dedicated to the
15-year-old Cassandre Salviati, whom he had met at Blois and followed to her father's
Château de Talcy. These books excited a violent literary quarrel. Marot was dead, but be left a numerous school, some of whom saw in the stricter literary critique of the
Pléiade, in its outspoken contempt of merely vernacular and medieval forms, in its strenuous advice to French poetry to "follow
the ancients," and so forth, an insult to the author of the Adolescence Clémentine and his followers.[1]
His popularity in his own time was overwhelming and immediate, and his prosperity was unbroken. He published his Hymns,
dedicated to Margaret de Valois, in 1555; the conclusion of the Amours, addressed to another heroine, in 1556; and then a
collection of Œuvres completes, said to be due to the invitation of Mary
Stuart, queen of Francis II, in 1560; with Elégies, mascarades et
bergeries in 1565. To this same year belongs his most important and interesting Abrégé de l'art poétique français.
The rapid change of sovereigns did Ronsard no harm. Charles IX, King of France,
who succeeded his brother after a very short time, was even better inclined to him than Henry and Francis. He gave him rooms in
the palace; he bestowed upon him divers abbacies and priories; and he called him and regarded him constantly as his master in
poetry. Neither was Charles IX a bad poet. This royal patronage, however, had its disagreeable side. It excited violent dislike
to Ronsard on the part of the Huguenots, who wrote constant pasquinades against him, strove (by a ridiculous exaggeration of the Dionysiac festival at Arcueil, in which
the friends had indulged to celebrate the success of the first French tragedy, Jodelle's Cleopatre) to represent him as a
libertine and an atheist, and (which seems to have annoyed
him more than anything else) set up his follower Du Bartas as his
rival.
According to some words of his own, which are quite credible considering the ways of the time, they were not contented with
this variety of argument, but attempted to have him assassinated. During this period Ronsard's work was considerable but mostly
occasional, and the one work of magnitude upon which Charles put him, the Franciade (1572), has never been ranked, even by
his most devoted admirers, as a chief title to fame. The metre (the decasyllable) which the king chose could not but contrast
unfavourably with the magnificent alexandrines which Du Bartas and Agrippa d'Aubigné were shortly to produce; the general plan is feebly classical, and the very language
has little or nothing of that racy mixture of scholarliness and love of natural beauty which distinguishes the best work of the
Pléiade. The poem could never have had an abiding success, but at its appearance it had the singular bad luck almost to coincide
with the massacre of St Bartholomew, which had occurred about a fortnight
before its publication. One party in the state were certain to look coldly on the work of a minion of the court at such a
juncture, the other had something else to think of.
The death of Charles made, indeed, little difference in the court favour which Ronsard enjoyed, but, combined with his
increasing infirmities, it seems to have determined him to quit court life. During his last days he lived chiefly at a house
which he possessed in Vendôme, the capital of his native province, at his abbey at Croix-Val in
the same neighbourhood, or else at Paris, where he was usually the guest of Jean Galland, well
known as a scholar, at the College de Boncourt. It seems also that he had a town house of his own in the Fauhourg Saint-Marcel.
At any rate his preferments made him in perfectly easy circumstances, and he seems neither to have derived nor wished for any
profit from his books. A half-jocular suggestion that his publishes should give him money to buy "du bois pour se
chauffer" in return for his last revision of his Œuvres complètes is the only trace of any desire of the kind. On the
other hand, he received not merely gifts and endowments from his own sovereign but presents from many others, including
Elizabeth I of England. Mary, queen of Scots, who had known him earlier,
addressed him from her prison; and Tasso consulted him on the Gerusalemme.
His last years were, however, saddened not merely by the death of many of his most intimate friends, but by constant and
increasing ill-health. This did not interfere with his literary work in point of quality, for he was rarely idle, and some of his
latest work is among his best. But he indulged (what few poets have wisely indulged) the temptation of constantly altering his
work, and many of his later alterations are by no means for the better. Towards the end of 1585 his condition of health grew
worse and worse, and he seems to have moved restlessly from one of his houses to another for some months. When the end came,
which, though in great pain, he met in a resolute and religious manner, he was at his priory of Saint-Cosme at Tours, and he was
buried in the church of that name on Friday, December 27.
The character and fortunes of Ronsard's works are among the most remarkable in literary history, and supply in themselves a
kind of illustration of the progress of French literature during the last three centuries. It was long his fortune to be almost
always extravagantly admired or violently attacked. At first, as has been said, the enmity, not altogether unprovoked, of the
friends and followers of Marot fell to his lot, then the still fiercer antagonism of the Huguenot faction, who, happening to
possess a poet of great merit in Du Bartas, were able to attack Ronsard in his tenderest point. But fate had by no means done its
worst with him in his lifetime. After his death the classical reaction set in under the auspices of Malherbe, who seems to have been animated with a sort of personal hatred of Ronsard, though it is
not clear that they ever met. After Malhérbe the rising glory of Corneille and his
contemporaries obscured the tentative and unequal work of the Pléiade, which was, moreover, directly attacked by Boileau himself, the dictator of French criticism in the last half of the 17th century.
Then Ronsard was, except by a few men of taste, like Jean de La Bruyère and
Fénelon, forgotten when he was not sneered at. In this condition he remained during the
whole 18th century and the first quarter of the 19th. The Romantic revival, seeing in him a victim of its special bête
noire Boileau, and attracted by his splendid diction, rich metrical faculty, and combination of classical and medieval
peculiarities, adopted his name as a kind of battle-cry, and for the moment exaggerated his merits somewhat. The critical work,
however, first of Sainte-Beuve in his Tableau de la littérature
francaise au 16ème siècle, and since of others, has established Ronsard pretty securely in his right place, a place which may
be defined in a few sentences.
Ronsard was the acknowledged chief of the Pléiade and its most voluminous poet. He
was probably also its best, though a few isolated pieces of Belleau excel him in airy lightness of touch. Several sonnets of Du
Bellay exhibit what may be called the intense and voluptuous melancholy of the Renaissance more perfectly than anything of his,
and the finest passages of the Tragiques and the Divine Sep'maine surpass his work in command of the alexandrine
and in power of turning it to the purposes of satirical invective and descriptive narration. But that work is, as has been said,
very extensive (we possess at a rough guess not much short of a hundred thousand lines of his), and it is extraordinarily varied
in form. He did not introduce the sonnet into France, but he practised it very soon after its introduction and with admirable
skill--the famous "Quand vous serez bien vieille" being one of the acknowledged gems of French literature.
His odes, which are very numerous, are also very interesting and in their best shape very perfect compositions. He began by
imitating the strophic arrangement of the ancients, but very soon had the wisdom to desert this for a kind of adjustment of the
Horatian ode to rhyme, instead of exact quantitative metre. In this latter kind he devised some exquisitely melodious rhythms of
which, till our own day, the secret died with the 17th century. His more sustained work sometimes displays a bad selection of
measure; and his occasional poetry--epistles, eclogues, elegies, etc.--is injured by its vast
volume. But the preface to the Franciade is a very fine piece of verse, far superior (it is in alexandrines) to the poem
itself. Generally speaking, Ronsard is best in his amatory verse (the long series of sonnets and odes to Cassandre, Marie,
Genévre, Héléne--Héléne de Surgeres, a later and mainly "literary" love--etc.), and in his descriptions of the country (the
famous "Mignonne allons voir si la rose," the "Fontaine Bellerie," the "Forêt de Gastine," and so forth),
which have an extraordinary grace and freshness. No one used with more art than he the graceful diminutives which his school set
in fashion. He knew well too how to manage the gorgeous adjectives ("marbrine," "cinabrine," "ivoirine" and
the like) which were another fancy of the Pléiade, and in his hands they rarely become stiff or cumbrous. In short, Ronsard shows
eminently the two great attractions of French 16th century poetry as compared with that of the two following ages--magnificence
of language and imagery and graceful variety of metre.
Bibliography
The chief separately published works of Ronsard are noted above. He produced, however, during his life a vast number of
separate publications, some of them mere pamphlets or broadsheets, which from time to time he collected, often striking out
others at the same time, in the successive editions of his works. Of these he himself published seven--the first in 1560, the
last in 1584. Between his death and the year 1630 ten more complete editions were published, the most famous of which is the
folio of 1609. A copy of this presented by Sainte-Beuve to
Victor Hugo, and later in the possession of Maxime du
Camp, has a place of its own in French literary history. The work of Claude Binet in 1586,
Discours de la vie de Pierre de Ronsard, is very important for early information, and the author seems to have revised
some of Ronsard's work under the poet's own direction.
From 1630 Ronsard was not again reprinted for more than two centuries. Just before the close of the second, however,
Sainte-Beuve printed a selection of his poems to accompany the above-mentioned Tableau (1828). There are also selections,
Choix de poésies - publiées par A. Noël (in the Collection Didot) and
Becq de Fouquières. In 1857 Prosper
Blanchemain, who had previously published a volume of Œuvres inédites de Ronsard, undertook a complete edition for
the Bibliothéque Elzévirienne, in eight volumes. It is practically complete; a few pieces of a somewhat free character
which are ascribed with some certainty to the poet are, however, excluded. A later and better edition still is that of
Marty-Laveaux (1887-1893), and another that of Benjamin Pifteau(1891).
As for criticism, Sainte-Beuve followed up his early work by articles in the Causeries du lundi, and later critics have
dealt with him.
Notes
- ^ The French court, and indeed all French society, was just then much
interested in literary questions, and a curious story is told of the rivalry that ensued. Mellin de Saint-Gelais, it is said, the chief of the "École Marotique" and a poet of no
small merit, took up Ronsard's book and read part of it in a more or less designedly burlesque fashion before the king. It may be
observed that if he did so it was a distinctly rash and uncourtier-like act, inasmuch as, from Ronsard's father's position in the
royal household, the poet was personally known and liked both by Henry and by his family." At any rate, Marguerite de Valois, the king's sister, afterwards duchess of Savoy, is said to
have snatched the book from Saint-Gelais and insisted on reading it herself, with the result of general applause. Henceforward,
if not before, his acceptance as a poet was not doubtful, and indeed the tradition of his having to fight his way against cabals
is almost entirely unsupported.
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