[Footnote 9: _Les Amours_. Par Pierre de Ronsard. Texte établi par Ad. van Bever. Two volumes. (Paris: Crès.)]
With the more obvious, and in their way delightful, surprises Ronsard is generous. He can hold the attention longer than any poet of an equal tenuity of matter. Chiefly for two reasons, of which one is hardly capable of further analysis. It is the obvious reality of his own delight in 'Petrarchising.' He is perpetually in love with making; he disports himself with a childlike enthusiasm in his art. There are moments when he seems hardly to have passed beyond the stage of naive wonder that words exist and are manipulable.
'Dous fut le trait, qu'Amour hors de sa trousse Pour me tuer, me tira doucement, Quand je fus pris au dous commencement D'une douceur si doucettement douce....'
Ronsard is here a boy playing knucklebones with language; and some of his characteristic excellences are little more than a development of this aptitude, with its more striking incongruities abated. A modern ear can be intoxicated by the charming jingle of
'Petite Nimfe folastre, Nimfette que j'idolastre....'
One does not pause to think how incredibly naive it is compared with Villon, who had not a fraction of Ronsard's scholarship, or even with Clement Marot; naive both in thought and art. As for the stature of the artist, we are back with Charles of Orleans. It would be idle to speculate what exactly Villon would have made of the atomic theory had he read Lucretius; but we are certain that he would have done something very different from Ronsard's
'Les petits cors, culbutant de travers, Parmi leur cheute en biais vagabonde, Heurtés ensemble ont composé le monde, S'entr'acrochant d'acrochemens divers....'
For this is not grown-up; the cut to simplicity has been too short. So many of Ronsard's verses flow over the mind, without disturbing it; fall charmingly on the ear, and leave no echoes. But for the moment we share his enjoyment.
The second cause of his continued power of attraction is doubtless allied to the first; it is a _naïveté_ of a particular kind, which differs from the profound ingenuousness of which we have spoken by the fact that it is employed deliberately. Conscious simplicity is art, and if it is successful art of no mean order, Ronsard's method of admitting us, as it were, to his conversation with himself is definitely his own. His interruptions of a verse with 'Hà' or 'Hé'; his 'Mon Dieu, que j'aime!' or 'Hé, que ne suis-je puce?' (the difference between Ronsard's flea and Donne's would be worth examination) have in them an element of irresistible _bonhomie_. We feel that he is making us his confidant. He does not have to tear agonies out of himself, so that what he confides has no chance of making explicit any secrets of our own. There is nothing dangerous about him; we know that he is as safe as we are. We are in conversation, not communion. But how effective and engaging it is!