The futility of Charles’s public life was of a piece throughout. He
never succeeded in any single purpose he set before him; for his
deliverance from England, after twenty-five years of failure and at the
cost of dignity and consistency, it would be ridiculously hyperbolical to
treat as a success. During the first part of his life he was the
stalking horse of Bernard d’Armagnac; during the second, he was the
passive instrument of English diplomatists; and before he was well
entered on the third, he hastened to become the dupe and catspaw of
Burgundian treason. On each of these occasions, a strong and not
dishonourable personal motive determined his behaviour. In 1407 and the
following years, he had his father’s murder uppermost in his mind.
During his English captivity, that thought was displaced by a more
immediate desire for his own liberation. In 1440 a sentiment of
gratitude to Philip of Burgundy blinded him to all else, and led him to
break with the tradition of his party and his own former life. He was
born a great vassal, and he conducted himself like a private gentleman.
He began life in a showy and brilliant enough fashion, by the light of a
petty personal chivalry. He was not without some tincture of patriotism;
but it was resolvable into two parts: a preference for life among his
fellow-countrymen, and a barren point of honour. In England, he could
comfort himself by the reflection that “he had been taken while loyally
doing his devoir,” without any misgiving as to his conduct in the
previous years, when he had prepared the disaster of Agincourt by
wasteful feud. This unconsciousness of the larger interests is perhaps
most happily exampled out of his own mouth. When Alençon stood accused
of betraying Normandy into the hands of the English, Charles made a
speech in his defence, from which I have already quoted more than once.
Alençon, he said, had professed a great love and trust towards him; “yet
did he give no great proof thereof, when he sought to betray Normandy;
whereby he would have made me lose an estate of 10,000 livres a year, and
might have occasioned the destruction of the kingdom and of all us
Frenchmen.” These are the words of one, mark you, against whom
Gloucester warned the English Council because of his “great subtility and
cautelous disposition.” It is not hard to excuse the impatience of Louis
XI., if such stuff was foisted on him by way of political deliberation.
This incapacity to see things with any greatness, this obscure and narrow
view was fundamentally characteristic of the man as well as of the epoch.
It is not even so striking in his public life, where he failed, as in his
poems, where he notably succeeded. For wherever we might expect a poet
to be unintelligent, it certainly would not be in his poetry. And
Charles is unintelligent even there. Of all authors whom a modern may
still read and read over again with pleasure, he has perhaps the least to
say. His poems seem to bear testimony rather to the fashion of rhyming,
which distinguished the age, than to any special vocation in the man
himself. Some of them are drawing-room exercises and the rest seem made
by habit. Great writers are struck with something in nature or society,
with which they become pregnant and longing; they are possessed with an
idea, and cannot be at peace until they have put it outside of them in
some distinct embodiment. But with Charles literature was an object
rather than a mean; he was one who loved bandying words for its own sake;
the rigidity of intricate metrical forms stood him in lieu of precise
thought; instead of communicating truth, he observed the laws of a game;
and when he had no one to challenge at chess or rackets, he made verses
in a wager against himself. From the very idleness of the man’s mind,
and not from intensity of feeling, it happens that all his poems are more
or less autobiographical. But they form an autobiography singularly bald
and uneventful. Little is therein recorded beside sentiments. Thoughts,
in any true sense, he had none to record. And if we can gather that he
had been a prisoner in England, that he had lived in the Orleannese, and
that he hunted and went in parties of pleasure, I believe it is about as
much definite experience as is to be found in all these five hundred
pages of autobiographical verse. Doubtless, we find here and there a
complaint on the progress of the infirmities of age. Doubtless, he feels
the great change of the year, and distinguishes winter from spring;
winter as the time of snow and the fireside; spring as the return of
grass and flowers, the time of St. Valentine’s day and a beating heart.
And he feels love after a fashion. Again and again, we learn that
Charles of Orleans is in love, and hear him ring the changes through the
whole gamut of dainty and tender sentiment. But there is never a spark
of passion; and heaven alone knows whether there was any real woman in
the matter, or the whole thing was an exercise in fancy. If these poems
were indeed inspired by some living mistress, one would think he had
never seen, never heard, and never touched her. There is nothing in any
one of these so numerous love-songs to indicate who or what the lady was.
Was she dark or fair, passionate or gentle like himself, witty or simple?
Was it always one woman? or are there a dozen here immortalised in cold
indistinction? The old English translator mentions gray eyes in his
version of one of the amorous rondels; so far as I remember, he was
driven by some emergency of the verse; but in the absence of all sharp
lines of character and anything specific, we feel for the moment a sort
of surprise, as though the epithet were singularly happy and unusual, or
as though we had made our escape from cloudland into something tangible
and sure. The measure of Charles’s indifference to all that now
preoccupies and excites a poet, is best given by a positive example. If,
besides the coming of spring, any one external circumstance may be said
to have struck his imagination, it was the despatch of _fourriers_, while
on a journey, to prepare the night’s lodging. This seems to be his
favourite image; it reappears like the upas-tree in the early work of
Coleridge: we may judge with what childish eyes he looked upon the world,
if one of the sights which most impressed him was that of a man going to
order dinner.
Although they are not inspired by any deeper motive than the common run
of contemporaneous drawing-room verses, those of Charles of Orleans are
executed with inimitable lightness and delicacy of touch. They deal with
floating and colourless sentiments, and the writer is never greatly
moved, but he seems always genuine. He makes no attempt to set off thin
conceptions with a multiplicity of phrases. His ballades are generally
thin and scanty of import; for the ballade presented too large a canvas,
and he was preoccupied by technical requirements. But in the rondel he
has put himself before all competitors by a happy knack and a prevailing
distinction of manner. He is very much more of a duke in his verses than
in his absurd and inconsequential career as a statesman; and how he shows
himself a duke is precisely by the absence of all pretension, turgidity,
or emphasis. He turns verses, as he would have come into the king’s
presence, with a quiet accomplishment of grace.
Théodore de Banville, the youngest poet of a famous generation now nearly
extinct, and himself a sure and finished artist, knocked off, in his
happiest vein, a few experiments in imitation of Charles of Orleans. I
would recommend these modern rondels to all who care about the old duke,
not only because they are delightful in themselves, but because they
serve as a contrast to throw into relief the peculiarities of their
model. When de Banville revives a forgotten form of verse—and he has
already had the honour of reviving the ballade—he does it in the spirit
of a workman choosing a good tool wherever he can find one, and not at
all in that of the dilettante, who seeks to renew bygone forms of thought
and make historic forgeries. With the ballade this seemed natural
enough; for in connection with ballades the mind recurs to Villon, and
Villon was almost more of a modern than de Banville himself. But in the
case of the rondel, a comparison is challenged with Charles of Orleans,
and the difference between two ages and two literatures is illustrated in
a few poems of thirteen lines. Something, certainly, has been retained
of the old movement; the refrain falls in time like a well-played bass;
and the very brevity of the thing, by hampering and restraining the
greater fecundity of the modern mind, assists the imitation. But de
Banville’s poems are full of form and colour; they smack racily of modern
life, and own small kindred with the verse of other days, when it seems
as if men walked by twilight, seeing little, and that with distracted
eyes, and instead of blood, some thin and spectral fluid circulated in
their veins. They might gird themselves for battle, make love, eat and
drink, and acquit themselves manfully in all the external parts of life;
but of the life that is within, and those processes by which we render
ourselves an intelligent account of what we feel and do, and so represent
experience that we for the first time make it ours, they had only a loose
and troubled possession. They beheld or took part in great events, but
there was no answerable commotion in their reflective being; and they
passed throughout turbulent epochs in a sort of ghostly quiet and
abstraction. Feeling seems to have been strangely disproportioned to the
occasion, and words were laughably trivial and scanty to set forth the
feeling even such as it was. Juvenal des Ursins chronicles calamity
after calamity, with but one comment for them all: that “it was great
pity.” Perhaps, after too much of our florid literature, we find an
adventitious charm in what is so different; and while the big drums are
beaten every day by perspiring editors over the loss of a cock-boat or
the rejection of a clause, and nothing is heard that is not proclaimed
with sound of trumpet, it is not wonderful if we retire with pleasure
into old books, and listen to authors who speak small and clear, as if in
a private conversation. Truly this is so with Charles of Orleans. We
are pleased to find a small man without the buskin, and obvious
sentiments stated without affectation. If the sentiments are obvious,
there is all the more chance we may have experienced the like. As we
turn over the leaves, we may find ourselves in sympathy with some one or
other of these staid joys and smiling sorrows. If we do we shall be
strangely pleased, for there is a genuine pathos in these simple words,
and the lines go with a lilt, and sing themselves to music of their own.