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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Ronsard's last considered observation on . the relationship between philosophy and lyric poetry in the preface to the Odes (1587) is implicitly a reaffirmation of Du Bellay's confidence in the philosophic capacities of the French language,1 though expressed in a less exuberant manner: “Tu dois sçavoir que toute sorte de Poesie a l'argument propre & convenable à son subject: ... la Lyrique, l'amour, le vin, les banquets dissolus, les danses, masques, chevaux victorieux, escrime, joustes & tournois, & peu souvent quelque argument de Philosophie” (i, 59). This retrospective program, if one may be forgiven the incongruity of the phrase, had been abundantly realized by Ronsard, in so far as “quelque argument de Philosophie” was concerned, and not only in his lyric poetry. For a moment, it is true, in a variant of 1578 of the ode Du retour de Maclou de la Haie (1550), the poet utters a gay disapproval of philosophers: “Les Philosophes je n'appreuve” (i, 208). But it is clear that Ronsard's intention is to celebrate the return of his friend with brimming cup, and the apparent condemnation of philosophers is nothing more than a warning to the enemies of good wine that their presence at the festivities would be superfluous. In the following edition, that of 1584, “Les Philosophes” became “Ces vieux Medecins.”
1 References unaccompanied by any letters (e.g., xvi, 354) are to Pierre de Ronsard: Œuvres complètes, the critical edition by Paul Laumonier (Paris: Société des Textes Français Modernes, 1914–); those preceded by LL. are to the Laumonier edition (Paris: Lemerre, 1914–19) of the text of 1584.
“Donques si la phylosophie semée par Aristote & Platon au fertile champ Atique etoit replantée en notre pleine Francoyse, ce ne seroit la jeter entre les ronses & epines, ou elle devint sterile: mais ce seroit la faire de loingtaine prochaine, & d'étrangère citadine de notre republique.” Deffence et Illustration de la Langue Francoyse, ed. Henri Chamard (Paris, 1948), p. 61 f. Du Bellay did not reserve for himself the task of transplanting Greek philosophy on French soil. In son. i of the Regrets of 1558 (ed. H. Chamard, ii, 52) he lists the themes that he will renounce in the writing of this sequence of personal sonnets, and incidentally gives a partial description of the subjects of Ronsard's Hymnes:
Je ne veulx point fouiller au sein de la nature,
Je ne veulx point chercher l'esprit de l'univers,
Je ne veulx point sonder les abysmes couvers,
Ny desseigner du ciel la belle architecture.
Note, however, that according to John C. Lapp, “Mythological Imagery in Du Bellay,” SP, lx (April, 1964), Ronsard's fellow-poet does not so much renounce certain themes as enumerate a number of grandiose ones in order to stress his own “simplicity” and “sincerity.”
2 The stars.
3 A possible allusion to “the first philosophy,” Aristotle's name (see 193a36, 194b14, 277b10, 1026a24, etc.) for what came to be known as metaphysics.—In this and in many of the following notes where allusions are made to works of classical antiquity or of later periods, it is not intended that these be taken as definite indications of Ronsard's sources. Cosmological studies began at a very early date in Greece, and in the nature of the case, various hypotheses were repeated frequently and in numerous variations down to the time of Ronsard. The attempt to assign any assertion of the poet to a given one of these sources would be most hazardous. Nevertheless, where clear parallels can be established, these have been pointed out, particularly if they seem to supplement usefully the notes of Laumonier's critical edition.
4 “Au XVIe siècle la philosophie était considérée comme la synthèse des connaissances. Aussi [Ronsard] va-t-il passer en revue, parmi ses domaines, la métaphysique et la demonologie (par où elle touche à la théologie), la cosmologie, la physique, l'océanographie, la géographie, la législation, la morale; il y rattachera même la médecine, la poésie, l'astrologie, la magie.” Note by Laumonier, viii, 86, n. 2.
5 This theme was treated several times by Ronsard: iii, 73 ff., viii, 86 ff., 176 f., x, 102 ff. To the sources mentioned by Laumonier in viii, 87, n. 2, one may add Lucretius i, 70 ff., ii, 1046 f., and pseudo-Aristotle, De Mundo 391a11–18. Cf. also R. M. Jones, “Posidonius and the Flight of the Mind through the Universe,” Classical Philology, XXI (1926), 97–113. Note that according to E. S. Forster, Preface of De Mundo in The Works of Aristotle Translated into English, Vol. iii (Oxford, 1914), most of the doctrines of this treatise have been traced to Posidonius by Wilhelm Capelle in Neue Jahrbücher, XV (1905), 529–568.—Cordial thanks are due to Professor Phillip H. De Lacy of Northwestern University, for most of these references.
6 The verb is intransitive.
7 Published in 1552, but probably written in 1550.
8 John Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy (London, 19304), p. 40; cf. Oxford Classical Dictionary, s.v. Thales.
9 W. D. Ross, The Works of Aristotle Translated into English, Vol. viii, Melaphysica (Oxford, 19282), 983b20–31.—The late Professor Robert V. Merrill, in a communication dated
10 June 1948, pointed out: “Re : J. Burnet, Greek Philosophers (Part i: Thales lo Plato), p. 77, ascribes [the] theory to Anaxagoras.” But Anaxagoras does not, like Thales, specifically associate the “plurality of independent elements which he called ‘seeds‘” (Burnet, loc. cit.), with moisture.—There is a possible allusion in the Tombeau de Marguerite de Valois (1551) to the theory of Thales that the earth rests upon water (iii, 74, vv. 419–420). See Laumonier's note on the passage, which correctly attributes Ronsard's observation to Seneca, Quaest. nat., iii, xiii. But cf. Aristotle, De Caelo, ii, xiii, 294a28–31.
10 For the Amours of 1552 alone, see iv, 84, 86, 117, 119, 136, 138, 139, etc., etc.
11 Cf. ix, 60–61, esp. v. 576.
12 The source may be Pliny, Nat. Hist., ii, 3, rather than iii, 3, as in Henri Busson, Le Rationalisme dans la littérature française de la Renaissance (1533–1601) (Paris, 19572), p. 373, and in Laumonier's note, but with the grosser elements eliminated.
13 H. J. Rose, A Handbook of Greek Mythology (London, 19535), p. 123.—“ . . . ce dieu redoutable et puissant, qui n'a rien d'anacréontique, rien non plus de l'afféterie que les modernes tendent à lui prêter; qu'ont chanté, non seulement Théognis, Sophocle et Euripide, mais Parmenide, Empedocle et Platon; puissance cosmique qui s'insinue au cœur de l'homme et par laquelle il participe à l'élan qui emporte toute vie et l'Univers tout entier.” Pierre-Maxime Schuhl, Essai sur la formation de la pensée grecque (Paris, 1949), p. 235.—See the epitome of the Hesiodic cosmogony in M. P. Nilsson, Greek Piety (Oxford, 1948), p. 3: “Eros . . . may be considered as the motive force of the whole development.”
14 Hugh G. Evelyn-White, Hesiod: The Homeric Hymns and Homerica, with an English translation (London and New York, 1914), p. 87, Theogony, 116–122; cf. A. B. Cook, Zeus (Cambridge, Eng., 1914–40), Vol. ii, Part i, 315, and the numerous references in n. 4.
15 Pierre Grimal, Dictionnaire de la mythologie grecque et romaine (Paris, 1951), s. v. Eros. Cf. numerous passages in Ronsard, in some of which Eros is replaced by Aphrodite or Priapus: i, 151, v, 92, 225 ff., vi, 53 f., vii, 254, xii, 30, 163 ff.
16 Tr. B. Jowett, 178. R. G. Bury, The Symposium of Plato (Cambridge, Eng., 1909), p. 22, gives additional references in Xenophon, Symposium, viii, 1, and in Aristophanes, Birds, 700, concerning the antiquity of Eros.
17 The Lyons edition of 1557, Divini Platonis opera omnia Marsilio Ficino interprete, p. 258, gives Theogonia.
18 Raymond Marcel, Marsile Ficin: Commentaire sur le banquet de Platon (Paris, 1956), pp. 138–139.
19 “A few fragments preserved [of the Orphic poems] show that they contained a cosmogony and an anthropogony and that they were dependent on Hesiod.” OCD, p. 627, col. 2, s.v. Orphic Literature.—“Ces poèmes [les premiers poèmes sacrés de l'orphisme] contenaient avant tout une théogonie qui légitimait les divinités orphiques en les rattachant à la mythologie généralement admise; mais il nous est très difficile de nous en faire idée, car elle ne nous est point parvenue sous sa forme primitive.” Schuhl, p. 232.—For a discussion of the theogonies described in the Orphic fragments and of Eros as a cosmogonic divinity, with an ample treatment of the ancient and modern literature on the subject, see A. B. Cook, Zeus, Vol. ii, Part ii, 1019–54, Appendix G, “Orphic Theogonies and the Cosmogonic Eros.”
20 Le Commentaire de Marsille Ficin sur le Banquet d'amour de Platon faict françoys par Symon Sylvius, dit J. de la Haye . . . (Poitiers, 1546). Ficino's own Italian translation had been published two years earlier: Sopra lo Amore o ver' convito di Platone (Firenze, per Neri Dortelata, 1544).
21 “Je constate que cette traduction fut éditée une seule fois et que les exemplaires en sont extrêmement rares.” Marcel, op. cit., p. 127.
22 See iv, 21, 69, 100, 110; vi, 47, 149 (reference to Diotima); viii, 123, 125, 126; xv, 112, 117, 119, etc. As Laumonier points out in the notes to some of these passages, Ronsard was indebted to the Androgyne (1542) by Antoine Héroët and to Apuleius' De deo Socratis. The Greek text of the Symposium was published by Wechel in 1543 and by G. Morel in 1551, in 1556 Mathurin Héret published his translation, Le Banquet de Platon, Louis Le Roy's translation, Le Sympose, appeared in 1559, and in 1578 Guy Le Fèvre de la Boderie's Discours de l'honneste amour sur le Banquet de Platon, par M. Ficin . . . Traduit du Toscan en Françoys. On
the diffusion of Plato's works and of the commentaries on them in France, see Raymond Lebègue, “Le platonisme en France au XVIe siècle,” in Actes du Congrès de Tours de 1'Assoc. G. Budé (Paris, 1954), pp. 331–351.
23 See my Ronsard and the Greek Epic (St. Louis, Mo., 1961), Chs. xvii and xviii.
24 See my article “Ronsard's Ethical Thought,” BHR, xxiv (1962), 114–117 and 339–346.
25 Ronsard's knowledge of the Orphic cosmology is not of a nature to throw much doubt on either of these hypotheses; cf. iii, 44, vv. 41–52 and 45, n. 1; viii, 246, vv. 1–4 and n. 2.
26 Cf. the ninth verse of the licentious sonnet in the Livret de Folastries (1553): Lance au bout d'or . . . (v, 92), whose derivation from Ficino is far more difficult to conceive than from Hesiod, although it traduces the spirit of both.—Cf. the quatrain quoted in our text with Du Bartas, Prem. Sem., i, vv. 223–262, ed. U. T. Holmes et al., ii, 202–204, a passage which, of course, omits all reference to Eros.
27 A meaning not unknown to Ronsard; cf. Rons. and the Gr. Epic, p. 62, and the critical edition, viii, 119, v. 71, where “mondain” is a synonym of “cosmique,” as Laumonier states in the note.
28 Grimal, s.v. Tellus.
29 See “Ronsard's Ethical Thought,” p. 115, where the first and final versions of the tercets are quoted.
30 Cf. the beginning of the Hymne du Printemps, xii, 27–28.
31 In the passage in question (xv, 100, vv. 405–456), this rôle is described only in vv. 409–410:
Je tien le Monde en parfaite aliance,
Les Elementz connoissent ma puissance
It is not easy to distinguish the Ficinian from the Platonic influence in most of the remaining lines. The relevant pages of Plato's Symposium (in the edition of Estienne) are 178, 195–196, 202, 206–208, and 211; of Ficino's commentary (in the edition of Marcel), pp. 141, 160, 162, 168, 170, 190, 192,
194–196, 200, 221—There are three poems in which Peace is assigned a cosmogonic function: the Ode de la Paix (1550), the Exhortation pour la Paix (1558), and La Paix, au Roy (1559). See iii, 5–7, and ix, 25, 107–108, and cf. viii, 249, vv. 53–68. These poems were composed to celebrate successful peace negotiations, or to promote the aims of impending ones. The second and third are analyzed in James Hutton's “Rhetorical Doctrine and Some Poems of Ronsard,” in The Rhetorical Idiom, Essays . . . presented to Herbert August Wichelns, ed. Donald C. Bryant (Ithaca, N. Y., 1958), pp. 315–334. Cf. the same author's “The ‘Lost’ Cohorlatio Pacificatoria of Jacques Peletier du Mans,” BHR, xxii (1960), 302–319, and “La Poésie classique et les poèmes de la Renaissance sur la paix” (résumé), in Actes du Congrès de Lyon de 1'Assoc. G. Budé (Paris, 1960), pp. 448–450.
32 Timaeus, 30B, 33B; for reff. to the cosmic harmony see Republic, 617B, and cf. pseudo-Aristotle De Mundo, 399a12–18 and De Caelo, ii, ix 290b12–291a26. See also John Burnet's interesting account in Greek Philosophy, Part i, p. 56.—Ronsard refers again to “ce grand animal” in L'Hinne de Bacus, vi, 190, v. 276; cf. J. C. Lapp, The Universe of Pontus de Tyard (Ithaca, N. Y., 1950), p. 158.
33 This is true in 1563 as well; cf. xi, 105, v. 813: “ce grand Dieu qui bastit tout de rien.”—Belief in the Creation of the world ex nihilo is also expressed as an act of faith by the Ronsard who is one of the interlocutors in the first of the Dialogues de Guy de Brués (1557), pp. 47–50 (pp. 122–124 of the crit. ed. published by P. P. Morphos in 1953). The same Ronsard makes a distinction, however, between the original Creation and the perpetuation of created things: “Pour la perpetuation des choses, il est vray, que de rien aucune chose ne peut estre faitte” (p. 49; Morphos, p. 123), an apparent concession to the first principle of Lucretius (i, 149–150) which, of course, is merely a fideist evasion of the issue. This is precisely the position of the Protestant Du Bartas, Prem. Sem., ii, vv. 152–154, ed. cit., ii, p. 228.—If there is no ground for assuming that Guy de Brués systematically represented Ronsard's philosophic positions, there is perhaps even less for believing that he would assign to him points of view uncongenial or hostile to his normal way of thinking. In reality, there is a general correspondence between the attitudes adopted by Ronsard in his writings and those credited to the interlocutor Ronsard in at least the first of the Dialogues of Brués, in which the poet is more prominent than in the other two.
34 Le Rationalisme p. 374.
35 Ernest Renan Averroès et l'averroïsme (Paris, 9th ed., n.d.), pp. 108–111. Cf. Georges Poulet Etudes sur le temps humain (Edinburgh 1949), p. 8: “En vertu du dogme [judéo-] chrétien de la toute-puissance il ne pouvait y avoir du temps que s'il y avait une raison qui s'opposât à ce que l'action divine fit passer sans transition l‘être de la puissance à l'acte. Et cette raison qui exigeait qu'il y eût du temps dans le changement c‘était un certain défaut de la matière.” It is obvious that this reason could not have been operative during the Creation.
36 This belief, it should be noted, was already expressed, with a poet's disregard for logical consistency, in the first version of the Hymne du Ciel, where Ronsard describes the heaven as “Frayant, sans nul repos, une orniere eternelle” (v. 109).
37 Renan, op. cit., p. 112. Cf. Aristotle, Met., xi, ii, 1069b-35: “neither the matter nor the form comes to be” (tr. W. D. Ross).—“Les substances ne peuvent être créées; car, aux yeux d'Aristote, la création n'a aucun sens [cf. De Caclo, 270a12–13, 279b17–18, 281b25–283b22, 288a34–b6]. La matière est éternelle, la forme l'est aussi, et à plus forte raison.” O. Hamelin, Le Système d'Aristote (Paris, 19312), p. 317. Xenophanes had adopted a similar position with regard to the gods themselves: “it was a saying of Xenophanes that to assert that the gods had birth is as impious as to say that they die.” Aristotle, Rhetorica, 1399b6–7 (tr. W. Rhys Roberts). Parmenides (21 A 8, 11, 12) and Empedocles (fragments 30–31) also rejected creation ex nihilo and the possibility of the total destruction of matter (Schuhl, p. 297 and n. 6). Plato had held that the heaven was created and yet eternal (Timaeus, 31).
38 Emphasis supplied. Cf. viii, 160, vv. 241–250, on the eternal life of the stars. Since this passage of the Hymne des Astres, like v. 109 of the Hymne du Ciel, dates from 1555, H. Busson's position would accord more closely with the facts if it asserted that Ronsard's revisions in 1584 confirmed a belief already visible in the earlier period.
39 Ed. of 1623, p. 1047. The passage that Richelet quotes in the immediate sequel from De Caelo ii, iii, 286a10–12 is translated as follows by J. L. Stocks, The Works of Aristotle Translated into English (Oxford, 1922), Vol. ii: “But such is the heaven, viz. a divine body, and for that reason to it is given the circular body whose nature it is to move always in a circle.” Stocks follows the text of Carl Prantl, Aristoteles' Vier Bücher über das Himmelsgebäude (Leipzig, 1857), p. 118, which differs slightly from that of Richelet.
40 The language of Rep., vii, 529D, might have conveyed such an idea to the poet: “The spangled heavens should be used as a pattern [] and with a view to that higher knowledge [of pure intelligibles]” (Tr. B. Jowett).
41 “Plato [Rep., vii, 529A-530B] conceives the subject matter of astronomy to be a mathematical heaven of which the visible heaven is a blurred and imperfect expression in time and space.” Sir Thomas Heath, Aristarchus of Samos, the Ancient Copernicus (Oxford, 1913), p. 138. Richelet, quoted in Laumonier's note on the passage, seems to have sensed the poet's effort to communicate this abstruse idea, for he says, “le monde sensible ne peut estre le moule de soymesme; si ce n'est qu'il veuille dire que le Monde sensible n'est rien autre chose que la forme corporelle du Monde intelligible, et tous deux une mesme chose.” Ronsard's verses may contain a reminiscence of Timaeus, 37; cf. the translation of this passage in Pierre Duhem, Le Système du monde. Histoire des doctrines cosmologiques de Platon à Copernic, 10 vols. (Paris, 1913–59), i, 65: “Le Monde mobile et vivant était formé à l'image des Dieux éternels; le Père qui l'avait créé, en ayant pris connaissance, admira son œuvre et, en sa joie, il conçut le dessein de le rendre plus semblable encore à son modèle.” Ronsard was more successful in expressing the Platonic relationship between the ideal Form and its particular
expression in the sonnet to Hélène, A l'aller, au parler . . . (xvii, 256):
dessus la plus belle
Et plus parfaite idee il traça la modelle
De ton corps
42 Ed. H. Vaganay (Paris, 1923), i, 98.
43 “Du resveur Democrit les invisibles corps:” says Du Bartas, Prem. Sem., i, v. 18, ed. cit., ii, 195, who naturally rejects any theory of the Creation not based on Genesis.
44 De Rerum Natura, ii, 216 ff.—Did Ronsard, toward the end of his life, refuse the name of poet to Lucretius because of his atomic cosmology? One might so infer from a passage in the Preface sur la Franciade, touchant le Poëme Heroïque, published in 1587: “mais parce qu'il a escrit ses frenesies, lesquelles il pensoit estre vrayes selon sa secte ... je luy oste du tout le nom de Poete, encore que quelques vers soient non seulement excellens, mais divins” (xvi, 338).
45 See the discussion of the “swerve” in Cyril Bailey, The Greek Atomists and Epicurus (Oxford, 1928), pp. 316–327. Ronsard's byaiz is Lucretius' clinamen; “ must have been Epicurus' technical term for the ‘swerve‘” (Bailey, p. 317, note from preceding page).
46 Bailey, p. 396; cf. pp. 319 and 385.
47 See Timaeus, 80C for Plato's assertion that a void does not exist.
48 Bailey, pp. 324 ff.
49 An inquiry into Ronsard's experience of external nature, as that expression is commonly understood, that is to say, his sensitivity to the plant and animal life of field and forest, of sea and land and sky, would require a considerable volume by itself. A minor aspect of this subject is treated in my Rons. and the Gr. Epic, Ch. vii, “Nature in Homer and Ronsard.” To the bibliographical references given there may be added Julius Voigt, Das Naturgefühl in der Literatur der französischen Renaissance (Berlin, 1898); Joseph Vianey, “La Nature dans la poésie du XVIe siècle,” in Mélanges Laumonier (Paris, 1935), pp. 171–188; A. Lytton Sells, Animal Poetry in French and English Literature and the Greek Tradition (Bloomington, Indiana, 1955)—the Pléiade is treated on pp. 56–75; D. B. Wilson, Ronsard, Poet of Nature (Manchester, 1961); Hélène Naïs, Les Animaux dans la poésie française de la Renaissance (Paris, 1961), passim.
50 Together with its sister composition (Belle, dont les yeux . . .) it found a more appropriate place among the Odes in 1584 and 1587.
51 “... for this 'Nature,' to whom Pietas [in the Thebaid of Statius] can appeal over the heads of men and gods, is no other than that One in whose light the Olympians are beginning to look pale. She is the Whole (or God, or Nature, or Cosmus) of the Stoics; the of Marcus Aurelius, the Natura of Seneca; the ancestress of Alanus' Natura and Chaucer's Kinde.” C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (Oxford, 1936), p. 58. “Natura, in fact, is a personification of the general order of things, in the largest sense, and has a wider field of action than we should ordinarily attribute to ‘nature’.” Ibid., p. 94.
52 “Cette définition de l'Eternité convient aussi bien à Dieu.” Note by Laumonier, viii, 246, n. 3. Cf. the remark by H. Busson, who, in his discussion of the ideas represented by Ronsard's symbolic personages, says: “Le premier est l'Eternité, que Richelet confond avec Dieu. A tort, ce me semble, bien que certains vers de Ronsard soient assez ambigus.” Le Rationalisme, p. 368.
53 See above, Sec. II.
54 One of these passages is summarized above in Sec. I. Others may be found in iii, 73 ff. and x, 102 ff.
55 See my article on “Pierre de Ronsard: Panegyrist ... of the French Court,” RR, xlv (1954), 89–108.
56 “Naturellement bien doué, d'un esprit pénétrant et vif, il avait reçu une éducation soignée. Son précepteur, Amyot ... lui avait enseigné l'histoire, la morale, la politique. Il parlait couramment plusieurs langues. ... Se plaisant . . . dans l'entourage des clercs, des astrologues, des philosophes, des grammairiens, ou ‘autres personnages fort savants aux lettres grecques et latines’, il dissertait avec eux sur toutes sortes de sujets.” Gaston Dodu, Les Valois, Histoire d'une maison royale (1328–1589) (Paris 1934), pp. 392 f.—We are fortunate to have the testimony of Jacques Amyot himself on the intellectual abilities of Henri III: “Monsieur de Bissy je fus bien aise laultre jour que je receu vostre lettre du 27 d'aoust dentendre lhoneste occupation que prent le Roy de vous ouyr discourir de la constitution & mouvement du ciel & que vous aiez trouvé par experience ce quaultre fois je vous en avois dit touchant la capacite de son entendement laquelle il tient du Roy Francoys son grand pere desireux dapprendre & entendre toutes choses haultes & grandes. Jay eu lhonneur de luy avoir monstré les premieres lettres mais je ne manie [lire: manié] jamais esprit denfant qui me semblast plus propre subject pour en faire quelque jour un bien scavant homme s'il eust continué en la facon destudier que je luy avois commancee car oultre les parties de lentendement qu'il a telles que Ion les scaurois [sic] desirer il a la patience douyr de lire & descrire ce que son grand pere n'avoit pas.” Letter to Pontus de Tyard dated “dAuxerre ce douzieme septembre 1577,” reproduced by Abel Jeandet, Pontus de Tyard (Paris, 1860), pp. 174–177. Cf. E. Frémy, L'Académie des derniers Valois (Paris, 1887), Ch. iv, pp. 115–139, for many other comments by contemporaries on the literary and scientific studies of Henri III.
57 Cf. Du Bartas, Prem. Sem., iii, vv. 765–766, ed. cit., ii, 295); in Prem. Sem., vi, vv. 173–174, ibid., 382–383, one reads the following apostrophe to God: “O Parastre et non Pere, Si tu prenois plaisir à former la vipere.”
58 Ronsard poète lyrique (Paris, 19232), p. 579.
59 Cf. x, 310, vv. 40–48, for a similar accusation made in 1560 on the occasion of the death of André Blondet.
60 Cf. Defence, p. 65, where the same word occurs in a passage of similar meaning; see also pp. 53–54.
61 See vv. 34–36, 85–89, 130–133, 231–232, 253–258, 345–358, 369–370.
62 Cf. Les Dialogues de Guy de Brués (1557), p. 54 (p. 126 of the ed. by Morphos), where the interlocutor Ronsard says: “Il ne s'ensuit pas . . . que la generation ne soit veritablement une mutation et changement de l'ancienne forme substancialle, en une autre forme substancialle.”
63 Cf. xv, 155, vv. 55–64 and 157, vv. 87–104, where the doctrine of the conservation of matter and the mutability of forms is associated with that of metempsychosis.
64 See R. Caisso, “La vente de la forêt de Gâtine à l'époque de Ronsard,” Humanisme et Renaissance, iv (1937), 274–285. Cf. La Vie de P. de Ronsard de Claude Binet, ed. Paul Laumonier (Paris, 1910), pp. 169 f.
65 Cf. Aristotle, Met., xi, i, 1069b24–25, which Duhem, i,
159, translates: “En tout changement, la matière demeure.” In the edition of 1587 (i, 167 f.) some interesting remarks on the sonnet Saincte Gastine, ô douce secretaire (iv, 128, of the critical edition) appeared for the first time under the name of Muret. Since the latter's commentary of the Amours for Cassandre had been prepared for the edition of 1553, since there is no evidence for the inherently improbable assumption that it was Muret who, over a period of more than thirty years, contributed the successive variants of the commentary, and since the tonality, the language, and the ideas of the interpolated remarks are quite in accord with what we know of Ronsard's reactions to the sale of Gâtine, it is a practical certainty that we have in the following observations a gloss from the hand of the poet on the verses here quoted as well as on the sonnet itself. They constitute, moreover, a renewed affirmation of the principles of the conservation of matter and of the essential beneficence of Nature: “Cette forest pour le jourd'huy est demie vendue par le mauvais mesnage des ministres du Prince. Malheureux sont les Princes & les Roys, lesquels pour fournir à leurs folles despenses, vendent en un jour ce que la Nature ne peut produire en mille ans, comme forests, villes & chasteaux, qui ont plus cousté à bastir à coups de marteau (heritages de leurs ayeux acquis sans peine) qu'ils n'en pourroient ce jourd'huy edifier en quatre mille ans. Or selon le cours de nature & les influences celestes & selon le change & rechange qui se fait sous la Lune, & que la matiere appete tousjours nouvelle forme, il ne se faut esbayr, si en cent ans cyviere, & en cent ans baniere, la bonne Nature mere commune d'un chacun, n'est pas tant obligée par serment à laisser tous les biens du monde en un estre, qu'elle vueille plus favoriser les uns que les autres: mais elle veut que chacun à son reng & ordre se sente de sa libéralité. On ne vit jamais race en terre durer en sa splendeur & felicité plus haut de cent ans.” —On the expression “en cent ans cyviere, & en cent ans baniere,” Randle Cotgrave, A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues (London, 1611), s. v. Banniere, says: “the family which at this day is held rich and noble, may within an age become both poore in estate, and meane in account.”
66 Cf. Du Bartas, Prem. Sem., ii, vv. 201–202, ed. cit., ii, p. 229:
Un corps naistre ne peut qu'un autre corps ne meure,
Mais la seule matiere immortelle demeure.
67 Laumonier's note on this ode: “Cette opposition [homme éphémère—nature éternelle] était à peine indiquée chez les anciens,“ overlooks the fact that the image from the annual death and renewal of the forest leaves occurs for the first time in the Iliad (vi, 146 ff.). Ronsard returned to this image several times in the course of his life and in anticipation of his own death. Cf. Rons. and the Gr. Epic, Chap. ix, sec. iv.
68 Cf. Lucretius, ii, 79: “Et quasi cursores vitai lampada tradunt.”