Page:Studies in the history of the renaissance (IA studiesinhistor01pategoog).djvu/158

136 flower, which Ronsard himself tells us every garden has.

It is poetry not for the people, but for a confined circle, for courtiers, great lords and erudite persons, people who desire to be humoured, to gratify a certain refined voluptuousness they have in them, like that of the Roman Emperor who would only eat fish far from the sea. Ronsard loves, or dreams that he loves, a rare and peculiar type of beauty, la petite pucelle Angevine, with blond hair and dark eyes. But he has the ambition not only of being a courtier and a lover, but a great scholar also; he is anxious about orthography, the letter è Grecque, the true spelling of Latin names in French writing, and the restoration of the i voyelle en sa première liberté. His poetry is full of quaint remote learning. He is just a little pedantic, true always to his own express judgment that to be natural is not enough for one who in poetry desires to produce work worthy of immortality. And therewithal a certain number of Greek words, which charmed Ronsard and his circle by their gayness and nicety, and a certain air of foreign elegance about them, crept into the French language; and there were other strange words which the poets of the Pleiad forged for themselves, and which had but an ephemeral existence.

With this was mixed the desire to taste a more