I put down Charles of Orleans here as the first representative of that
long glory which it is the business of this little book to recall: but
to give him such a place at the threshold requires some apology.
The origins of a literary epoch differ according as that epoch is primal
or derivative. There are those edifices of letters which start up, not
indeed out of nothing, but out of things wholly different. Produced by a
shock or a revelation, as two gases lit will, in a sharp explosion,
unite to form a liquid wholly unlike either, so after a great conquest,
a battle, the sudden preaching of a creed, these primal literatures
appear in an epic or a dithyrambic code of awful law. Their first effort
is their mightiest. They come mature. They are allied to that element of
the catastrophic which the modern world (taking its general philosophy
from its social condition) denies, but which is yet at the limits of all
things separate and themselves; accompanies every birth, and strikes
agony into every transition of death.
Those other much commoner epochs in the history of letters, which may be
called derivative, have this current and obvious quality, that their
beginnings merge into the soil that bred them, also (very often) their
decay will lapse imperceptibly into newer things. They are quite
definite, but also definitely parented. We know their special stuff and
harmony, but we can point out clearly enough the elements which formed
that stuff, the tones which unite in that harmony. We can show with
dates and citations the parts meeting and blending; our difficulty is
not to determine the influences which have mixed to make the general
school, but rather to fix the beginning and the end of its effect upon
men.
In the first of these the leader, sometimes the unique example of the
school, stands out great, but particular and clear, on a background
vague or dark. He is as stupendous, yet as sharp and certain, as a
mountain facing the morning, with only sky behind. In the second the
originator, if there be one, is vague, tentative, perhaps unknown. More
often many minor men together introduce a slow and general transition.
Now the French Renaissance has this peculiar mark, that it holds quite
plainly by one side of it to the first by the other to the second of
these spirits.
It was primal and catastrophic in that it made something completely new.
A new architecture, new cities, a new poetry, almost a new language, a
new kind of government--ultimately the modern world.
It was derivative in that the shock, the revelation, which produced it,
was the return of something allied to the French blood, something rooted
in the French memory. Rome surviving or risen had made that Italy, which
was now beginning to trouble the Alps, and would surely creep in by
every channel of influence, and at last pervade all Europe. Rome, also,
in her full vigour, had once framed and ordered Gaul. The French of the
Renaissance were woken suddenly, but as they started they recognized the
face and the hand of the awakener.
On this account you will find one mind indeed at the very beginning of
the change in letters, but not a dominating mind. There is but one man
who is certainly an origin, but he is not a master. You see an unique
and single personality, distinct but without force, founding no
school--the grave, abiding, kind but covert face of Charles of Orleans.
He, linked to the French Renaissance, is like the figure of a gentle
friend playing in some garden with a child whose manners are new and
pleasing to him, but of whose great destiny he makes no guess. That
child was to be Du Bellay, Brantome, Montaigne a hundred-sided, huge
Rabelais, Ronsard. Or perhaps this metaphor will put it better. To say
that Charles of Orleans's equal and persistent music was like a string
harped on distinctly in a chorus of flutes and hautboys, till one by one
harps from here and there caught up the similar tang of chords and at
last the whole body of sound was harping only.
His life was suited to such difference and such origination. Italy,
still living, filled him. An Italian secretary wrote from his mouth the
most sumptuous of his manuscripts. He banded on Italy as a goal and his
Italian land as a legacy to the French crown--to his own son; till
(years after his death) the soldiers roared through Briançon and broke
the crusted snow of Mont Genèvre. An Italian mother, the most beautiful
of the Viscontis, come out of Italy, rich in her land of Asti and her
half million of pure gold, had borne him in her youth to the King of
France's brother: a man luxurious, over fine, exact in taste, a lover of
magnificence in stories and words, decadent in a dying time, very brave.
Through that father the Valois blood, unjustly hated or still more
unjustly despised according to the varied ignorance of modern times, ran
in him nobly.
Take the Valois strain entire and you will find the pomp or rather the
fantasy of their great palace of St. Paul; turrets and steep blue roofs
of slate, carved woodwork, heavy curtains, and incense and shining
bronze. The Valois were, indeed, the end of the middle ages. Some
cruelty, a fury in battle, intelligence and madness alternately, and
always a sort of keenness which becomes now revenge, now foresight, now
intrigue, now strict and terrible government: at last a wild adventure
out beyond the hills: Fornovo, Pavia.
Their story is like the manuscripts, which beyond all other things they
loved and collected, and which they were the last to possess or to have
made; for while it contains in vivid pictures the noblest and the basest
subjects: (Joan of Arc and also her betrayal, their country dominant and
almost engulfed, Marigano, and then again Pavia) it always glitters with
hard enamelled colours against skies of gold, and is drawn and sharp and
clean as a thing can be.
Such is the whole line, but look at this one Valois and you see all the
qualities of his race toned by a permanent sadness down to a good and
even temper, not hopeful but still delighting in beauty and possessed as
no other Valois had been of charity. Less passionate and therefore much
less eager and useful than most of his race, yet the taint of madness
never showed in him, nor the corresponding evil of cruelty, nor the
uncreative luxury of his immediate ancestry. All the Valois were poets
in their kind; his life by its every accident caused him to write. At
fifteen they wedded him to that lovely child whom Richard II had lifted
in his arms at Windsor as he rode out in fatal pomp for Ireland. Three
years later, when their marriage was real, she died in childbirth, and
it is to her I think that he wrote in his prison the ballad which ends:
Dieu sur tout souverain seigneur
Ordonnez par grace et douceur
De l'ame d'elle tellement
Qu'elle ne soit pas longuement
En peine souci et douleur.
Already, in the quarrel that so nearly wrecked the crown, the
anti-national factions had killed his father. He was planning vengeance,
engraving little mottoes of hate upon his silver, when the wars came on
them all. A boy of twenty-four, well-horsed, much more of a soldier than
he later seemed, he charged, leading the centre of the three tall troops
at Agincourt. In the evening of that disaster they pulled him out from
under a great heap of the ten thousand dead and brought him prisoner
into England, to Windsor then to Pomfret Castle. Chatterton, Cobworth,
at last John Cornwall, of Fanhope, were his guardians. To some one of
these--probably the last--he wrote the farewell:
Mon très bon hôte et ma très douce hôtesse.
For his life as a prisoner, though melancholy, was not undignified; he
paid no allegiance, he met the men of his own rank, nor was he of a kind
to whom poverty, the chief thorn of his misfortune, brought dishonour.
Henry V had left it strictly in his will that Orleans the general and
the head of the French nationals should not return. For twenty-five
years, therefore--all his manhood--he lived under this sky, rhyming and
rhyming: in English a little, in French continually, and during that
isolation there swept past him far off in his own land the defence, the
renewal, the triumph of his own blood: his town relieved, his cousin
crowned at Rheims. His river of Loire, and then the Eure, and then the
Seine, and even the field where he had fallen were reconquered.
Willoughby had lost Paris to Richemont four years before Charles of
Orleans was freed on a ransom of half his mother's fortune. It was not
until the November of 1440 that he saw his country-side again.
The verse formed in that long endurance (a style which he preserved to
the end in the many poems after his release) may seem at a first reading
merely mediæval. There is wholly lacking in it the riot of creation, nor
can one see at first the Renaissance coming in with Charles of Orleans.
Indeed it was laid aside as mediæval, and was wholly forgotten for three
hundred years. No one had even heard of him for all those centuries till
Sallier, that learned priest, pacing, full of his Hebrew and Syriac, the
rooms of the royal library which Louis XV had but lately given him to
govern, found the manuscript of the poems and wrote an essay on them for
the Academy.
The verse is full of allegory; it is repetitive; it might weary one with
the savour of that unhappy fifteenth century when the human mind lay
under oppression, and only the rich could speak their insignificant
words; a foreigner especially might find it all dry bones, but his
judgement would be wrong. Charles of Orleans has a note quite new and
one that after him never failed, but grew in volume and in majesty until
it filled the great chorus of the Pleiade--the Lyrical note of direct
personal expression. Perhaps the wars produced it in him; the lilt of
the marching songs was still spontaneous:
Gentil Duc de Lorraine, vous avez grand renom,
Et votre renommée passe au delà des monts
Et vous et vos gens d'arme, et tous vos compagnons
Au premier coup qu'ils frappent, abattent les Donjons.
Tirez, tirez bombardes, serpentines, Canons!
Whatever the cause, this spontaneity and freshness run through all the
mass of short and similar work which he wrote down.
The spring and sureness, the poise of these light nothings make them a
flight of birds.
See how direct is this:
Dieu! qu'il la fait bon regarder!
La gracieuse, bonne et belle.
or this:
Le lendemain du premier jour de Mai
Dedans mon lit ainsi que je dormoye
Au point du jour advint que je sonjeay.
Everywhere his words make tunes for themselves and everywhere he himself
appears in his own verses, simple, charming, slight, but with memories
of government and of arms.
This style well formed, half his verse written, he returned to his own
place. He was in middle age--a man of fifty. He married soberly enough
Mary of Cleves, ugly and young: he married her in order to cement the
understanding with Burgundy. She did not love him with his shy florid
face, long neck and features and mild eyes. His age for twenty-five
years passed easily, he had reached his "castle of No Care." As late as
1462 his son (Louis XII) was born; his two daughters at long intervals
before. His famous library moved with him as he went from town to town,
and perpetually from himself and round him from his retinue ran the
continual stream of verse which only ended with his death. His very
doctor he compelled to rhyme.
All the singers of the time visited or remained with him--wild Villon
for a moment, and after Villon a crowd of minor men. It was in such a
company that he recited the last ironical but tender song wherein he
talks of his lost youth and vigour and ends by bidding all present a
salute in the name of his old age.
So he sat, half regal, holding a court of song in Blois and Tours, a
forerunner in verse of what the new time was to build in stone along the
Loire. And it was at Amboise that he died.