Avril | Page 8

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 dictes que voulentiers seroye.

Amoureux fus, or ne le suis je mye,
Et en Paris menoye bonne vie;

Adieu Bon temps ravoir ne vous saroye,
Bien sanglé fus d'une
estroite courroye.
Que, par Aige, convient que la deslie.
Saluez moy
toute la compaignie._
VILLON.
I have said that in Charles of Orleans the middle ages are at first more
apparent than the advent of the Renaissance. His forms are inherited
from an earlier time, his terminology is that of the long allegories
which had wearied three generations, his themes recall whatever was
theatrical in the empty pageantry of the great war. It is a spirit deeper
and more fundamental than the mere framework of his writing which
attaches him to the coming time. His clarity is new; it proceeds from
natural things; it marks that return to reality which is the beginning of
all beneficent revolutions. But this spirit in him needs examination and
discovery, and the reader is confused between the mediaeval phrases
and the something new and troubling in the voice that utters them.
With Villon, the next in order, a similar confusion might arise. All
about him as he wrote were the middle ages: their grotesque, their
contrast, their disorder. His youth and his activity of blood forbad him
any contact with other than immediate influences. He was wholly
Northern; he had not so much as guessed at what Italy might be. The
decrepit University had given him, as best she could, the dregs of her
palsied philosophy and something of Latin. He grew learned as do
those men who grasp quickly the major lines of their study, but who, in
details, will only be moved by curiosity or by some special affection.
There was nothing patient in him, and nothing applied, and in all this,
in the matter of his scholarship as in his acquirement of it, he is of the
dying middle ages entirely.
His laughter also was theirs: the kind of laughter that saluted the first
Dance of Death which as a boy he had seen in new frescoes round the

waste graveyard of the Innocents. His friends and enemies and heroes
and buffoons were the youth of the narrow tortuous streets, his visions
of height were the turrets of the palaces and the precipitate roofs of the
town. Distance had never inspired him, for in that age its effect was
forgotten. No one straight street displayed the greatness of the city, no
wide and ordered spaces enhanced it. He crossed his native river upon
bridges all shut in with houses, and houses hid the banks also. The
sweep of the Seine no longer existed for his generation, and largeness
of all kinds was hidden under the dust and rubble of decay. The
majestic, which in sharp separate lines of his verse he certainly
possessed, he discovered within his own mind, for no great arch or
cornice, nor no colonnade had lifted him with its splendour.
That he could so discover it, that a solemnity and order should be
apparent in the midst of his raillery whenever he desires to produce an
effect of the grand, leads me to speak of that major quality of his by
which he stands up out of his own time, and is clearly an originator of
the great renewal. I mean his vigour.
It is all round about him, and through him, like a storm in a wood. It
creates, it perceives. It possesses the man himself, and us also as we
read him. By it he launches his influence forward and outward rather
than receives it from the past. To it his successors turn, as to an
ancestry, when they had long despised and thrown aside everything else
that savoured of the Gothic dead. By it he increased in reputation and
meaning from his boyhood on for four hundred years, till now he is
secure among the first lyric poets of Christendom. It led to no excess of
matter, but to an exuberance of