Ronsard is pre-eminently the poet of a simple mind.  There is nothing mysterious about him or his poetry; there is not even a perceptible thread of development in either.  They are equable, constant imperturbable, like the bag of a much invited gun, or the innings of a safe batsman.  The accomplishment is akin to an animal endowment.  The nerves, instead of being, if only for a moment, tense and agitated, are steady to a degree that can produce an exasperation in a less well-appointed spectator.  He will never let himself down, or give himself away, one feels, until the admiration of an apparent sure restraint passes into the conviction that there is nothing to restrain.  All Ronsard the poet is in his poetry, and indeed on the surface of it.

Poetry was not therefore, as one is tempted to think sometimes, for Ronsard a game.  There was plenty of game in it; l’art de bien petrarquiser was all he claimed for himself.  But the game would have wearied any one who was not aware that he could be completely satisfied and expressed by it.  Ronsard was never weary.  However much one may tire of him, the fatigue never is infected by the nausea which is produced by some of the mechanical sonnet sequences of his contemporaries.  No one reading Ronsard ever felt the tedium of mere nullity.  It would be hard to find in the whole of M. van Bever’s exhaustive edition of ’Les Amours’[9] a single piece which has not its sufficient charge of gusto.  When you are tired, it is because you have had enough of that particular kind of man and mind; you know him too well, and can reckon too closely the chances of a shock of surprise.

   [Footnote 9:  Les Amours.  Par Pierre de Ronsard.  Texte etabli par
   Ad. van Bever.  Two volumes. (Paris:  Cres.)]

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