Ronsard’s resources are indeed few.  But he needed few.  His simple mind was at ease in machinery of commonplaces, and he makes the pleasant impression of one to whom commonplaces are real.  He felt them all over again.  One imagines him reading the classics—­the Iliad in three days, or his beloved companion ‘sous le bois amoureux,’ Tibullus—­with an unfailing delight in all the concatenations of phrase which are foisted on to unripe youth nowadays in the pages of a Gradus.  One might almost say that he saw his loves at second-hand, through alien eyes, were it not that he faced them with some directness as physical beings, and that the artificiality implied in the criticism is incongruous with the honesty of such a natural man.  But apart from a few particulars that would find a place in a census paper one would be hard put to it to distinguish Cassandre from Helene.  What charming things Ronsard has to say of either might be said of any charming woman—­’le mignard embonpoint de ce sein,’—­

  ’Petit nombril, que mon penser adore,
  Non pas mon oeil, qui n’eut oncques ce bien ...’

And though he assures Helene that she has turned him from his grave early style, ‘qui pour chanter si bas n’est point ordonne,’ the difference is too hard to detect; one is forced to conclude that it is precisely the difference between a court lady and an inn-keeper’s daughter.  As far as art is concerned the most definite and distinctive thing that Ronsard had to say of any of his ladies is said of one to whom he put forward none of his usually engrossing pretensions.  It was the complexion of Marguerite of Navarre of which he wrote:—­

  ’De vif cinabre estoit faicte sa joue,
  Pareille au teint d’un rougissant oeillet,
  Ou d’une fraize, alors que dans de laict
  Dessus le hault de la cresme se joue.’

That is, whether it belonged to Marguerite or not, a divine complexion.  It is the kind of thing that cannot be said about two ladies; the image is too precise to be interchangeable.  This may be a reason why it was applied to a lady hors concours for Ronsard.

But we need, in fact, seek no reason other than the circumscription of Ronsard’s poetical gifts.  They reduce to only two—­the gift of convinced commonplace, and the gift of simple melody.  His commonplace is genuine commonplace, quite distinct from the tense and pregnant condensation of a lifetime of impassioned experience in Dante or Shakespeare; things that would occur to a bookish country gentleman in after-dinner conversation, the sentiments that such a rare and amiable person would underscore in his Horace. (From a not unimportant angle Ronsard is a minor Horace.) These things are the warp of his poetry; they range from the familiar ‘Le temps s’en va’ to the masterly straightforwardness of

        ’plus heureus celui qui la fera
  Et femme et mere, en lieu d’une pucelle.’

His melody, likewise, is genuine melody; it is irrepressible.  It led him to belie his own professed seriousness.  He could not stop his sonnets from rippling even when he pretended to passionate argument.  Life came easily to him; he was never weary of it, at the most he acknowledged that he was ‘saoul de la vie.’  It is not surprising, therefore, that his remonstrances as the tortured lover have a trick of opening to a delightful tune:—­