Of this capital achievement and, with it, of Villon’s style in general,
it is here the place to speak. The _Large Testament_ is a hurly-burly of
cynical and sentimental reflections about life, jesting legacies to
friends and enemies, and, interspersed among these many admirable
ballades, both serious and absurd. With so free a design, no thought
that occurred to him would need to be dismissed without expression; and
he could draw at full length the portrait of his own bedevilled soul, and
of the bleak and blackguardly world which was the theatre of his exploits
and sufferings. If the reader can conceive something between the
slap-dash inconsequence of Byron’s _Don Juan_ and the racy humorous
gravity and brief noble touches that distinguish the vernacular poems of
Burns, he will have formed some idea of Villon’s style. To the latter
writer—except in the ballades, which are quite his own, and can be
paralleled from no other language known to me—he bears a particular
resemblance. In common with Burns he has a certain rugged compression, a
brutal vivacity of epithet, a homely vigour, a delight in local
personalities, and an interest in many sides of life, that are often
despised and passed over by more effete and cultured poets. Both also,
in their strong, easy colloquial way, tend to become difficult and
obscure; the obscurity in the case of Villon passing at times into the
absolute darkness of cant language. They are perhaps the only two great
masters of expression who keep sending their readers to a glossary.
“Shall we not dare to say of a thief,” asks Montaigne, “that he has a
handsome leg?” It is a far more serious claim that we have to put
forward in behalf of Villon. Beside that of his contemporaries, his
writing, so full of colour, so eloquent, so picturesque, stands out in an
almost miraculous isolation. If only one or two of the chroniclers could
have taken a leaf out of his book, history would have been a pastime, and
the fifteenth century as present to our minds as the age of Charles
Second. This gallows-bird was the one great writer of his age and
country, and initiated modern literature for France. Boileau, long ago,
in the period of perukes and snuff-boxes, recognised him as the first
articulate poet in the language; and if we measure him, not by priority
of merit, but living duration of influence, not on a comparison with
obscure forerunners, but with great and famous successors, we shall
instal this ragged and disreputable figure in a far higher niche in
glory’s temple than was ever dreamed of by the critic. It is, in itself,
a memorable fact that, before 1542, in the very dawn of printing, and
while modern France was in the making, the works of Villon ran through
seven different editions. Out of him flows much of Rabelais; and through
Rabelais, directly and indirectly, a deep, permanent, and growing
inspiration. Not only his style, but his callous pertinent way of
looking upon the sordid and ugly sides of life, becomes every day a more
specific feature in the literature of France. And only the other year, a
work of some power appeared in Paris, and appeared with infinite scandal,
which owed its whole inner significance and much of its outward form to
the study of our rhyming thief.
The world to which he introduces us is, as before said, blackguardly and
bleak. Paris swarms before us, full of famine, shame, and death; monks
and the servants of great lords hold high wassail upon cakes and pastry;
the poor man licks his lips before the baker’s window; people with
patched eyes sprawl all night under the stalls; chuckling Tabary
transcribes an improper romance; bare-bosomed lasses and ruffling
students swagger in the streets; the drunkard goes stumbling homewards;
the graveyard is full of bones; and away on Montfaucon, Colin de Cayeux
and Montigny hang draggled in the rain. Is there nothing better to be
seen than sordid misery and worthless joys? Only where the poor old
mother of the poet kneels in church below painted windows, and makes
tremulous supplication to the Mother of God.
In our mixed world, full of green fields and happy lovers, where not long
before, Joan of Arc had led one of the highest and noblest lives in the
whole story of mankind, this was all worth chronicling that our poet
could perceive. His eyes were indeed sealed with his own filth. He
dwelt all his life in a pit more noisome than the dungeon at Méun. In
the moral world, also, there are large phenomena not cognisable out of
holes and corners. Loud winds blow, speeding home deep-laden ships and
sweeping rubbish from the earth; the lightning leaps and cleans the face
of heaven; high purposes and brave passions shake and sublimate men’s
spirits; and meanwhile, in the narrow dungeon of his soul, Villon is
mumbling crusts and picking vermin.
Along with this deadly gloom of outlook, we must take another
characteristic of his work: its unrivalled insincerity. I can give no
better similitude of this quality than I have given already: that he
comes up with a whine, and runs away with a whoop and his finger to his
nose. His pathos is that of a professional mendicant who should happen
to be a man of genius; his levity that of a bitter street arab, full of
bread. On a first reading, the pathetic passages preoccupy the reader,
and he is cheated out of an alms in the shape of sympathy. But when the
thing is studied the illusion fades away: in the transitions, above all,
we can detect the evil, ironical temper of the man; and instead of a
flighty work, where many crude but genuine feelings tumble together for
the mastery as in the lists of tournament, we are tempted to think of the
_Large Testament_ as of one long-drawn epical grimace, pulled by a
merry-andrew, who has found a certain despicable eminence over human
respect and human affections by perching himself astride upon the
gallows. Between these two views, at best, all temperate judgments will
be found to fall; and rather, as I imagine, towards the last.
There were two things on which he felt with perfect and, in one case,
even threatening sincerity.
The first of these was an undisguised envy of those richer than himself.
He was for ever drawing a parallel, already exemplified from his own
words, between the happy life of the well-to-do and the miseries of the
poor. Burns, too proud and honest not to work, continued through all
reverses to sing of poverty with a light, defiant note. Béranger waited
till he was himself beyond the reach of want, before writing the _Old
Vagabond_ or _Jacques_. Samuel Johnson, although he was very sorry to be
poor, “was a great arguer for the advantages of poverty” in his ill days.
Thus it is that brave men carry their crosses, and smile with the fox
burrowing in their vitals. But Villon, who had not the courage to be
poor with honesty, now whiningly implores our sympathy, now shows his
teeth upon the dung-heap with an ugly snarl. He envies bitterly, envies
passionately. Poverty, he protests, drives men to steal, as hunger makes
the wolf sally from the forest. The poor, he goes on, will always have a
carping word to say, or, if that outlet be denied, nourish rebellious
thoughts. It is a calumny on the noble army of the poor. Thousands in a
small way of life, ay, and even in the smallest, go through life with
tenfold as much honour and dignity and peace of mind, as the rich
gluttons whose dainties and state-beds awakened Villon’s covetous temper.
And every morning’s sun sees thousands who pass whistling to their toil.
But Villon was the “mauvais pauvre” defined by Victor Hugo, and, in its
English expression, so admirably stereotyped by Dickens. He was the
first wicked sansculotte. He is the man of genius with the moleskin cap.
He is mighty pathetic and beseeching here in the street, but I would not
go down a dark road with him for a large consideration.
The second of the points on which he was genuine and emphatic was common
to the middle ages; a deep and somewhat snivelling conviction of the
transitory nature of this life and the pity and horror of death. Old age
and the grave, with some dark and yet half-sceptical terror of an
after-world—these were ideas that clung about his bones like a disease.
An old ape, as he says, may play all the tricks in its repertory, and
none of them will tickle an audience into good humour. “Tousjours vieil
synge est desplaisant.” It is not the old jester who receives most
recognition at a tavern party, but the young fellow, fresh and handsome,
who knows the new slang, and carries off his vice with a certain air. Of
this, as a tavern jester himself, he would be pointedly conscious. As
for the women with whom he was best acquainted, his reflections on their
old age, in all their harrowing pathos, shall remain in the original for
me. Horace has disgraced himself to something the same tune; but what
Horace throws out with an ill-favoured laugh, Villon dwells on with an
almost maudlin whimper.
It is in death that he finds his truest inspiration in the swift and
sorrowful change that overtakes beauty; in the strange revolution by
which great fortunes and renowns are diminished to a handful of
churchyard dust; and in the utter passing away of what was once lovable
and mighty. It is in this that the mixed texture of his thought enables
him to reach such poignant and terrible effects, and to enchance pity
with ridicule, like a man cutting capers to a funeral march. It is in
this, also, that he rises out of himself into the higher spheres of art.
So, in the ballade by which he is best known, he rings the changes on
names that once stood for beautiful and queenly women, and are now no
more than letters and a legend. “Where are the snows of yester year?”
runs the burden. And so, in another not so famous, he passes in review
the different degrees of bygone men, from the holy Apostles and the
golden Emperor of the East, down to the heralds, pursuivants, and
trumpeters, who also bore their part in the world’s pageantries and ate
greedily at great folks’ tables: all this to the refrain of “So much
carry the winds away!” Probably, there was some melancholy in his mind
for a yet lower grade, and Montigny and Colin de Cayeux clattering their
bones on Paris gibbet. Alas, and with so pitiful an experience of life,
Villon can offer us nothing but terror and lamentation about death! No
one has ever more skilfully communicated his own disenchantment; no one
ever blown a more ear-piercing note of sadness. This unrepentant thief
can attain neither to Christian confidence, nor to the spirit of the
bright Greek saying, that whom the gods love die early. It is a poor
heart, and a poorer age, that cannot accept the conditions of life with
some heroic readiness.
* * * * *
The date of the _Large Testament_ is the last date in the poet’s
biography. After having achieved that admirable and despicable
performance, he disappears into the night from whence he came. How or
when he died, whether decently in bed or trussed up to a gallows, remains
a riddle for foolhardy commentators. It appears his health had suffered
in the pit at Méun; he was thirty years of age and quite bald; with the
notch in his under lip where Sermaise had struck him with the sword, and
what wrinkles the reader may imagine. In default of portraits, this is
all I have been able to piece together, and perhaps even the baldness
should be taken as a figure of his destitution. A sinister dog, in all
likelihood, but with a look in his eye, and the loose flexile mouth that
goes with wit and an overweening sensual temperament. Certainly the
sorriest figure on the rolls of fame.