It is difficult or impossible to compare the masterpieces of the world.
It is easy and natural to take the measure of a particular writer and to
establish a scale of his work.
Villon is certainly in the small first group of the poets. His little
work, like that of Catullus, like that of Gray, is up, high, completed
and permanent. And within that little work this famous Ballade is by far
the greatest thing.
It contains all his qualities: not in the ordinary proportion of his
character, but in that better, exact proportion which existed in him
when his inspiration was most ardent: for the poem has underlying it
somewhere a trace of his irony, it has all his ease and
rapidity--excellent in any poet--and it is carried forward by that
vigour I have named, a force which drives it well upwards and forward to
its foaming in the seventh line of the third verse.
The sound of names was delightful to him, and he loved to use it; he had
also that character of right verse, by which the poet loves to put
little separate pictures like medallions into the body of his writing:
this Villon loved, as I shall show in other examples, and he has it
here.
The end of the middle ages also is strongly in this appeal or confession
of mortality; their legends, their delicacy, their perpetual
contemplation of death.
But of all the Poem's qualities, its run of words is far the finest.
_THE DEAD LADIES._
_Dictes moy où, n'en quel pays
Est Flora la belle Rommaine;
Archipiada, ne Thaïs,
Qui fut sa cousine germaine;
Echo, parlant quand bruyt on maine
Dessus riviere ou sus estan,
Qui beaulté ot trop plus qu'humaine?
Mais où sont les neiges d'antan?_
_Où est la très sage Hellois,
Pour qui fut chastré et puis moyne
Pierre Esbaillart à Saint-Denis?
Pour son amour ot cest essoyne.
Semblablement, où est la royne
Qui commanda que Buridan
Fust gecté en ung sac en Saine?
Mais où sont les neiges d'antan!_
_La Royne Blanche comme un lis,
Qui chantoit à voix de seraine;
Berte au grant pié Bietris, Allis;
Haremburgis qui tint le Maine,
Et Jehanne, la bonne Lorraine,
Qu'Englois brulerent à Rouan;
Où sont elles, Vierge souvraine?
Mais où sont les neiges d'antan!_
_ENVOI._
_Prince, n'enquerez de sepmaine
Où elles sont, ne de cest an,
Que ce reffrain ne vous remaine:
Mais où sont les neiges d'antan!_
AN EXCERPT FROM THE GRANT TESTAMENT.
(_Stanzas 75-79._)
Villon's whole surviving work is in the form of two rhymed wills--one
short, one long: and in the latter, Ballads and Songs are put in each in
their place, as the tenour of the verse suggests them.
Thus the last Ballade, that of the "Dead Ladies," comes after a couple
of strong stanzas upon the necessity of death--and so forth.
One might choose any passage, almost, out of the mass to illustrate the
character of this "Testament" in which the separate poems are imbedded.
I have picked those round about the 800th line, the verses in which he
is perhaps least brilliant and most tender.
_AN EXCERPT FROM THE GRANT TESTAMENT._