ciples, and his feeling for nature and natural beauty. The passage has already been cited in which he speaks of the heroic poem as entirely of a martial character, and limits its action to the space of one year. It has also been seen that for him, as for the Italians, verisimilitude, and not fact, is the test of poetry. At the same time, the epic poet is to avoid anachronisms and misstatements of fact. Such faults do not disturb the reader so much when the story is remote in point of time; and the poet should therefore always use an argument, the events of which are at least three or four hundred years old. The basis of the work should rest upon some old story of past times and of long-established renown, which has gained the credit of men.1 This notion of the antiquity of the epic fable had been accepted long ago by the Italians. It is stated, for example, in Tasso's Discorsi dell' Arte Poetica, written about 1564, though not published until 1587, fifteen years after Tasso had visited Ronsard in Paris.

Vauquelin de la Fresnaye has the Pléiade veneration for heroic poetry; but he cannot be said to exhibit any more definite conception of its form and function. For him the epic is a vast and magnificent narration, a world in itself, wherein men, things, and thoughts are wondrously mirrored:

"C'est un tableau du monde, un miroir qui raporte Les gestes des mortels en differente sorte.

...

1 Ronsard, iii. 23, 29.

Car toute poësie il contient en soyméme,

Soit tragique ou comique, ou soit autre poëme." 1

With this we may compare what Muzio had said in 1551: :

"Il poema sovrano è una pittura

De l'universo, e però in sè comprende

Ogni stilo, ogni forma, ogni ritratto."

But despite this very vague conception of the epic in the French Renaissance, there was, as has been said, a high veneration for it as a form, and for its masters, Homer and especially Virgil. This accounts for the large number of attempts at epic composition in France during the next century. But beyond the earlier and indefinite notion of heroic poetry the French did not get for a long time to come. Even for Boileau the epic poem was merely the vaste récit d'une longue action.2

1 Vauquelin, Art Poét. i. 471, 503.

2 Boileau, Art Poét. iii. 161.

CHAPTER III

CLASSIC AND ROMANTIC ELEMENTS IN FRENCH CRITICISM DURING THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY

THE principle for which the Pléiade stood was, like that of humanism, the imitation of the classics; and the Pléiade was the first to introduce this as a literary principle into France. This means, as regards French literature, in the first place, the substitution of the classical instead of its own national tradition; and, secondly, the substitution of the imitation of the classics for the imitation of nature itself. In making these vital substitutions, Du Bellay and his school have been accused of creating once and for all the gulf that separates French poetry from the national life.1 This accusation is perhaps unfair to the Pléiade, which insisted on the poet's going directly to nature, which emphasized most strongly the sentiment for natural scenery and beauty, and which first declared the importance of the artisan and the peasant as subjects for poetry. But there can be but little doubt that the separation of poetry from the national life was the logical outcome of the doctrines of the Pléiade. In disregarding the older French poets and the evolution of indigenous poetry, in formu1 Brunetière, i. 45.

lating an ideal of the poet as an unsociable and ascetic character, it separated itself from the natural tendencies of French life and letters, and helped to effect the final separation between poetry and the national development.

I. Classical Elements

It was to Du Bellay (1549) that France owes the introduction of classical ideas into French literature. He was the first to regard the imitation of the classics as a literary principle, and to advise the poet, after the manner of Vida, to purloin all the treasures of Greek and Latin literature for the benefit of French poetry. Moreover, he first formulated the aristocratic conception of the poet held by the Pléiade. The poet was advised to flee from the ignorant people, to bury himself in the solitude of his own chamber, to dream and to ponder, and to content himself with few readers. "Beyond everything," says Du Bellay, "the poet should have one or more learned friends to whom he can show all his verses; he should converse not only with learned men, but with all sorts of workmen, mechanics, artists, and others, in order to learn the technical terms of their arts, for use in beautiful descriptions." This was a favorite theory of the Pléiade, which like some of our own contemporary writers regarded the technical arts as important subjects of inspiration. But the essential point at the bottom of all these discussions is a high 1 Defense, ii. 11.

contempt for the opinion of the vulgar in matters of art.

The Quintil Horatian (1550) represents, as has already been seen, a natural reaction against the foreign and classical innovations of the Pléiade. Du Bellay's advice, "Prens garde que ce poëme soit eslogné du vulgaire," - advice insisted upon by many of the rhetoricians of the Italian Renaissance, receives considerable censure; on the contrary, says the author of the Quintil, the poet must be understood and appreciated by all, unlearned as well as learned, just as Marot was. The Quintil was, in fact, the first work to insist on definiteness and clearness in poetry, as these were afterward insisted on by Malherbe and Boileau. Like Malherbe, and his disciple Deimier, the author of the Académie de l'Art Poétique (1610), in which the influence of the Quintil is fully acknowledged, the author of the Quintil objects to all forms of poetic license, to all useless metaphors that obscure the sense, to all Latinisms and foreign terms and locutions.1 Du Bellay had dwelt on the importance of a knowledge of the classical and Italian tongues, and had strongly advised the French poet to naturalize as many Latin, Greek, and even Spanish and Italian terms as he could. The Quintil is particularly bitter against all such foreign innovations. The poet need not know foreign tongues at all; without this knowledge he can be as good a poet as any of the græcaniseurs, latiniseurs, et italianiseurs en françoys. This protest availed little, and Du

1 Cf. Rucktäschel, p. 10 sq.