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 attitude and manner, to an
inexhaustibility of special words, to a brilliancy of impression unique
even among his own people.
He was poor; he was amative; he was unsatisfied. This vigour, therefore,
led in his actions to a mere wildness; clothed in this wildness the rare
fragments of his life have descended to us. He professed to teach, but
he haunted taverns, and loved the roaring of songs. He lived at random
from his twentieth year in one den or another along the waterside.
Affection brought him now to his mother, now to his old guardian priest,
but not for long; he returned to adventure--such as it was. He killed a
man, was arrested, condemned, pardoned, exiled; he wandered and again
found Paris, and again--it seems--stumbled down his old lane of violence
and dishonour.
Associated also with this wildness is a curious imperfection in our
knowledge of him. His very name is not his own--or any other man's. His
father, if it were his father, took his name from Mont-Corbier--half
noble. Villon is but a little village over beyond the upper Yonne, near
the division, within a day of the water-parting where the land falls
southward to Burgundy and the sun in what they call "The Slope of Gold."
From this village a priest, William, had come to Paris in 1423. They
gave him a canonry in that little church called "St. Bennets Askew,"
which stood in the midst of the University, near Sorbonne, where the Rue
des Écoles crosses the Rue St. Jacques to-day. Hither, to his house in
the cloister, he brought the boy, a waif whom he had found much at the
time when Willoughby capitulated and the French recaptured the city. He
had him taught, he designed him for the University, he sheltered him in
his vagaries, he gave him asylum. The young man took his name and called
him "more than father." His anxious life led on to 1468, long after the
poet had disappeared.
For it is in 1461, in his thirtieth year, that Villon last writes down a
verse. It is in 1463 that his signature is last discovered. Then not by
death or, if by death, then by some death unrecorded, he leaves history
abruptly--a most astonishing exit!... You may pursue fantastic legends,
you will not find the man himself again. Some say a final quarrel got
him hanged at last--it is improbable: no record or even tradition of it
remains. Rabelais thought him a wanderer in England. Poitou preserves a
story of his later passage through her fields, of how still he drank and
sang with boon companions, and of how, again, he killed a man.... Maybe,
he only ceased to write; took to teaching soberly in the University, and
lived in a decent inheritance to see new splendours growing upon Europe.
It may very well be, for it is in such characters to desire in early
manhood decency, honour, and repose. But for us the man ends with his
last line. His body that was so very real, his personal voice, his
jargon--tangible and audible things--spread outward suddenly a vast
shadow upon nothingness. It was the end, also, of a world. The first
Presses were creaking, Constantinople had fallen, Greek was in Italy,
Leonardo lived, the stepping stones of the Azores were held--in that new
light he disappears.
* * * * *
Of his greatness nothing can be said; it is like the greatness of all
the chief poets, a thing too individual to seize in words. It is
superior and exterior to the man. Genius of that astounding kind has all
the qualities of an extraneous thing. A man is not answerable for it. It
is nothing to his salvation; it is little even to his general character.
It has been known to come and go, to be put off and on like a garment,
to be lent by Heaven and taken away, a capricious gift.
But of the manner of that genius it may be noted that, as his vigour
prepared the flood of new verse, so in another matter his genius made
him an origin. Through him first, the great town--and especially
Paris--appeared and became permanent in letters.
Her local spirit and her special quality had shone fitfully here and
there for a thousand years--you may find it in Julian, in Abbo, in
Joinville. But now, in the fifteenth century, it had been not only a
town but a great town for more than a century--a town, that is, in which
men live entirely, almost ignorant of the fields, observing only other
men, and forgetting the sky. The keen edge of such a life, its
bitterness, the mockery and challenge whereby its evils are borne, its
extended knowledge, the intensity of its spirit--all these are reflected
in Villon, and first reflected in him. Since his pen first wrote, a
shining acerbity like the glint of a sword-edge has never deserted the
literature of the capital.
It was not only the metropolitan, it was the Parisian spirit which
Villon found and fixed. That spirit which is bright over the whole city,
but which is not known in the first village outside; the influence that
makes Paris Athenian.
The ironical Parisian soul has depths in it. It is so lucid that its
luminous profundity escapes one--so with Villon. Religion hangs there.
Humility--fatally divorced from simplicity--pervades it. It laughs at
itself. There are ardent passions of sincerity, repressed and reacting
upon themselves. The virtues, little practised, are commonly
comprehended, always appreciated, for the Faith is there permanent. All
this you will find in Villon, but it is too great a matter for so short
an essay as this.