iterary 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 mass 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 passages
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 illustrated. The result of his classical
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 quantity-metres, where every