The Golden Verses of Pythagoras — with commentary (1917)

Almost the same moment when Ariosto enriched Europe with his new poetry, Camoens wished to naturalize it in Portugal; but the melange of Vergil and Lucan that he essayed to make, betrayed his lack of understanding and he did not succeed. I mention it only that you may observe, Messieurs, that the form adopted by the Portuguese poet is exactly the same as the one which Ariosto, his predecessors and his successors, have followed in Italy: it is that of the troubadours. The poems of each are long ballads, intersected by strophes of eight lines of alternate rhymes which, succeeding one another with the same measure, can be sung from one end to the other, with an appropriate air, and which in fact, as J. J. Rousseau has very well remarked, were sung frequently. In these poems, the essence is in accord with the form, and it is this that makes their regularity. It is not the epopoeia of Homer drawn from the Orphic source, it is the romantic poetry of Ariosto, an issue of the fictions attributed to Archbishop Turpin, which is associated with the verses of the troubadours. These serious subject, which agrees with the sirvente. The poems of Bojardo, of Ariosto, of Tasso, are, as to form, only long ballads. They are poems because of the unity which, notwithstanding the innumerable episodes with which they are filled, constitutes the principal subject.

72 The Golden Verses of Pythagoras verses subjected to rhyme are incapable in any tongue of attaining the sublime heights of Eumolpceia or of Epopoeia.

The French poets soon proved it, when coming to understand the works of Homer and Vergil, they thought themselves able to imitate them by making use of the same poetic forms by which the authors of Perceval or Berihe-au-grandpied had profited. It was all to no purpose that they worked these forms, striking them upon the anvil, polishing them, ■ they remained inflexible.

Ronsard was the first who made the fatal experiment; and after him a crowd of careless persons came to run aground upon the same reef.

These forms always called up the spirit with which they were bom ; the melancholy and unceasing sound, sonorous with their rhymes in couplets or alternate, had something soporific which caused the soul to dream and which allured it in spite of itself, not into the sublime regions of allegory where the genius of Eumolpceia was nourished, but into vague spaces of fictions, where, under a thousand whimsical forms the romantic mind evaporates.

Doubtless one would have been able, in France, to limit the Italian poets, as had been done in Spain and Portugal; but besides, as it would have been necessary to confine itself to the second inspiration in a style already secondary, the spirit of the nation, sufficiently well represented by that of Ronsard, foreseeing from afar its high destinies, wished to command the summit of Parnassus, before having discovered the first paths.

The disasters of the first epic poets did not discourage their successors ; vying with each other they sought to make amends; but instead of seeing the obstacle where it really was, that is to say, in the incompatible alliance of the essence of Epopoeia with the form of romance, they imagined that lack of talent alone had been prejudicial to the success of their predecessors. Consequently they devoted themselves to work with an indefatigable ardour, polishing and repolishing the rhyme, tearing to pieces and revising twenty times their works, and finally bringing the form to

The Essence and Form of Poetry 73 the highest perfection that they were able to attain. The century of Louis XIV., so fertile in able versifiers, in profound rhymers, saw, however, the dawn of Epic poems only as a signal of their failure. Chapelain had, nevertheless, shown talent before his catastrophe; wishing to interest the French nation, he had chosen in its history the sole epic subject which he found there. Why had he not succeeded? This point was considered, and the truth still lacking, they went on to imagine that the fault was inherent in the French tongue, and that it was no longer capable of rising to the heights of Epopoeia: deplorable error, which for a long time has been harmful to the development of a tongue destined to become universal and to carry to future centuries the discoveries of past ones.