tion for so very
long, a considerably shorter time for instance, than any one of the
Elizabethans (excepting Shakespeare) with us. Sainte-Beuve was very
tentative about him until the sixties, when his dubious,
half-patronising air made way for a safe enthusiasm. And, even now, it
can hardly be said that French critical opinion about him has
crystallised; the late George Wyndham's essay shows a more convinced and
better documented appreciation than any that we have read in French,
based as it is on the instinctive sympathy which one landed gentleman
who dabbles in the arts feels towards another who devotes himself to
them--an admiration which does not exclude familiarity.

Indeed, it is precisely because Ronsard lends himself so superbly as an
amateur to treatment by the amateur, that any attempt to approach him
more closely seems to be tinged with rancour or ingratitude. There is
something churlish in the determination to be most on one's guard
against the engaging graces of the amateur, a sense that one is behaving
like the hero of a Gissing novel; but the choice is not large. One must
regard Ronsard either as a charming country gentleman, or as a great
historical figure in the development of French poetry, or as a poet; and
the third aspect has a chance of being the most important.

Ronsard is pre-eminently the poet of a simple mind. There is nothing
mysterious about him or his poetry; there is not even a perceptible
thread of development in either. They are equable, constant
imperturbable, like the bag of a much invited gun, or the innings of a
safe batsman. The accomplishment is akin to an animal endowment. The
nerves, instead of being, if only for a moment, tense and agitated, are
steady to a degree that can produce an exasperation in a less
well-appointed spectator. He will never let himself down, or give
himself away, one feels, until the admiration of an apparent sure
restraint passes into the conviction that there is nothing to restrain.
All Ronsard the poet is in his poetry, and indeed on the surface of it.

Poetry was not therefore, as one is tempted to think sometimes, for
Ronsard a game. There was plenty of game in it; _l'art de bien
petrarquiser_ was all he claimed for himself. But the game would have
wearied any one who was not aware that he could be completely satisfied
and expressed by it. Ronsard was never weary. However much one may tire
of him, the fatigue never is infected by the nausea which is p