Page:Studies in the history of the renaissance (IA studiesinhistor01pategoog).djvu/148

126 to predominate. No one can turn over the pages of Rabelais without feeling how much need there was of softening, of castigation. To effect this softening is the object of the revolution in poetry which is connected with Ronsard's name. Casting about for the means of thus refining upon and saving the character of French literature, he accepted that influx of Renaissance taste which, leaving the buildings, the language, the art, the poetry of France, at bottom, what they were, old French Gothic still, gilds their surfaces with a strange delightful foreign aspect, passing over all that Northern land neither deeper nor more permanent than a chance effect of light. He reinforces, he doubles the French netteté by Italian finesse. Thereupon nearly all the force and all the seriousness of French work disappear; only the elegance, the aerial touch, the perfect manner remain. But this elegance, this manner, this netteté d'exécution are consummate, and have an unmistakeable æsthetic value.

So the old French chanson, which, like the old Northern Gothic ornament, though it sometimes refined itself into a sort of weird elegance was often at bottom something rude and formless, became in the hands of Ronsard a Pindaric ode. He gave it structure, a sustained system, strophe and antistrophe, and taught it a changefulness and variety of metre