Avril | Page 7

living spirit of reality; read them to-day in Winter, and you feel the Spring. It is this quality perhaps which most men have seized in them, and which have deservedly made them immortal.
A further character which has added to their fame, is that, being perfect lyrics, they are also specimens of an old-fashioned manner and metre peculiar to the time. They are the resurrection not only of the Spring, but of a Spring of the fifteenth century. Nor is it too fantastic to say that one sees in them the last miniatures and the very dress of a time that was intensely beautiful, and in which Charles of Orleans alone did not feel death coming.
_THE TWO ROUNDELS OF SPRING._
_Les fourriers d'Esté sont venus?Pour appareillier son logis,?Et ont fait tendre ses tappis,?De fleurs et verdure tissus.?En estandant tappis velus?De verte herbe par le pais,?Les fourriers d'Esté sont venus?Pour appareillier son logis.?Cueurs d'ennuy pie?a morfondus,?Dieu merci, sont sains et jolis;?Alez vous en, prenez pais,?Yver vous ne demourrez plus;?Les fourriers d'Esté sont venus._
_Le temps a laissié son manteau?De vent, de froidure et de pluye,?Et s'est vestu de brouderie,?De soleil luyant, cler et beau.?Il n'y a beste, ne oyseau,?Qu'en son jargon ne chant ou crie;?Le temps a laissié son manteau?De vent de froidure et de pluye.?Riviere, fontaine et ruisseau?Portent, en livrée jolie,?Gouttes d'argent d'orfavrerie,?Chascun s'abille de nouveau.?Le temps a laissié son manteau._
HIS LOVE AT MORNING.
(_The 6th of the "Songs"._)
In this delightful little song the spontaneity and freshness which saved his work, its vigour and its clarity are best preserved.
It does indeed defy death and leaps four centuries: it is young and perpetual. It thrills with something the failing middle ages had forgotten: it reaches what they never reached, a climax, for one cannot put too vividly the flash of the penultimate line, "I am granted a vision when I think of her."
Yet it was written in later life, and who she was, or whether she lived at all, no one knows.
_HIS LOVE AT MORNING._
_Dieu qu'il la fait bon regarder?La gracieuse bonne et belle!?Pour les grans biens qui sont en elle,?Chascun est prest de la louer?Qui se pourroit d'elle lasser!?Tousjours sa beaulté renouvelle.?Dieu, qu'il la fait bon regarder,?La gracieuse, bonne et belle!?Par de?a, ne delà la mer,?Ne s?ay Dame ne Damoiselle?Qui soit en tous biens parfais telle;?C'est un songe que d'y penser.?Dieu, qu'il la fait bon regarder!_
THE FAREWELL.
(_The 310th Roundel._)
Here is the last thing--we may presume--that Charles of Orleans ever wrote: "Salute me all the company, I pray."
In that "company", not only the Court at Amboise, but the men of the early wars, his companions, were round him, and the dead friends of his gentle memory.
He was broken with age; he was already feeling the weight of isolation from the Royal Family; he was beginning to suffer the insults of the king. But, beneath all this, his gaiety still ran like a river under ice, and in the ageing of a poet, humour and physical decline combined make a good, human thing.
There is an excellent irony in the refrain: "Salute me, all the company," whose double interpretation must not be missed, though it may seem far-fetched.
Till the last line it means, without any question, "Salute the company in my name," but I think there runs through it also, the hint of "Salute me for my years, all you present who are young," and that this certainly is the note in the last line of all. It must be remembered of the French, that they never expand or explain their ironical things, for in art it is their nature to detest excess.
This last thing of his, then, I say, is the most characteristic of him and of his Valois blood, and of the national spirit in general to which he belonged: for he, and it, and they, loved and love contrast, and the extra-meaning of words.
_THE FAREWELL._
_Saluez moy toute la compaignie?Où à present estes à chiere lie,?Et leur dictes que voulentiers seroye?Avecques eulx, mais estre n'y porroye,?Pour Vieillesse qui m'a en sa baillie.?Au temps passé, Jeunesse si jolie?Me gouvernoit; las! or n'y suis je mye,?Et pour cela pour Dieu, que excusé soye;?Saluez moy toute la compaignie?Où à present estes à chiere lie,?Et leur