Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 9.djvu/684

FRANCE [LITERATURE. poets of the time arc not to be despised. Such are Baude (1430-1490), Martial d Auvergne (1420-1508), and others, many of whom proceeded from the poetical court which Charles d Orleans kept up at Blois after his release. While the serious poetry of the age took this turn, there was no lack of lighter and satirical versa Villon, indeed, were it not for the depth and pathos of his poetical senti ment, might be claimed as a poet of the lighter order, and the patriotic diatribes against the English to which we have alluded easily passed into satira The political quarrels of the latter part of the century also provoked much satirical composition. The disputes of the Bien Public and those between Louis XL and Charles of Burgundy employed many pens. The most remarkable piece of the light litera ture of the first is " Las Anes Volants," a ballad on some of the early favourites of Louis. The battles of France and Burgundy were waged on paper between Gilles des Ormes and George Chastelain, typical representatives of the two styles of 15th century poetry already alluded to DCS Ormes being the lighter and more graceful writer, Chaste- lain a pompous and learned allegorist. The most remark able representative of purely light poetry outside the theatre Coquil- is Guillaume Coquillart, a lawyer of Champagne, who resided lart. for the greater part of his life in Eheims. This city like others suffered from the pitiless tyranny of Louis XL The beginnings of the standing army which Charles VIL had started were extremely unpopular, and the use to which his son put them by no means removed this unpopularity. Coquillart described the military man of the period in his Monologue du Gendarme Casse. Again, when the king entertained the idea of unifying the taxes and laws of the different provinces, Coquillart, who was named commis sioner for this purpose, wrote on the occasion a satire called Les Dmits Nouveaux. A certain kind of satire, much less good -tempered than the earlier satire, became indeed com mon at this epoch. M. Lenient has well pointed out that a new satirical personification dominates this literature. It is no longer Renart with his cynical gaiety, or the curiously travestied and almost amiable Devil of the Middle Ages. Now it is Death as an incident ever present to the imagina tion, celebrated in the thousand repetitions of the Danso Macabre, sculptured all over the buildings of the time, even frequently performed on holidays and in public. All through the century, too, anonymous verse of the lighter kind was written, some of it of great merit. The folk songs already alluded to, published by M. G. Paris, show one side of this composition, and many of the pieces contained in M. de Montaiglon s extensive liecueil des Anciennes Poesies Franyaises exhibit others. The 15th century was perhaps more remarkable for its achievements in prose than in poetry. It produced, indeed, no prose writer of great distinction, except perhaps Comines; but it witnessed serious, if not extremely successful, efforts at prose composition. The invention of printing finally substituted the reader for the listener, and when this sub stitution has been effected, the main inducement to treat unsuitable subjects in verse is gone. The study of the classics at first hand contributed to the same end. As early as 1458 the university of Paris had a Greek professor. But before this time translations in prose had been made. Nicholas Oresme, the tutor of Charles V., gave a version of certain Aristotelian works, which enriched the language with a large number of terms, then strange enough, now familiar. Raoul de Presles turned into French the De Civitate Dei of St Augustine. These writers and Charles himself composed Le Songe du Vergier, an elaborate discus sion of the power of the pope. The famous chancellor, Jean Gerson (1363-1429), to whom the Imitation has among so many others been attributed, spoke constantly and wrote often in the vulgar tongue, Christine de Pisan and Alain Chartier were at least as much prose writers as poets ; and the latter, while he, like Gersou, dealt much with the reform of the church, used in his Quadrttoge Invective really forcible language for the purpose of spurring on the nobles of France to put an end to her sufferings and evils. These moral and didactic treatises were but continua tions of others, which for convenience sake we have hitherto left unnoticed. Though verse was in the centuries prior to the 15th the favourite medium for literary composition, it was by no means the only one ; and moral and educational treatises some referred to above already existed in pedestrian phrase. Certain household books (Livrcs <!? liaison) have been preserved, some of which date as far back as the 13th century, These contain not merely accounts but family chronicles, receipts, and the like. Of the 14th century, we have a Mcnagier de Pan*, intended for the instruction of a young wife, and a large number cf miscellaneous treatises of art, science, and morality, while private letters, mostly as yet unpublished, exist in consider able numbers, and are generally of. the moralizing character ; books of devotion, too, are naturally frequent. But the most important divisions of mediaeval energy in prose composition are the spoken exercises of the pulpit and the bar. The latter has been hitherto somewhat neglected, though the recent history of M. Aubertin devotes special attention to it. The beginnings, however, of French sermons have been much discussed, especially the question whether St Bernard, whose discourses we possess in ancient but doubtfully contemporary French, pronounced them in that language or in Latin. Towards the end of the 1 2th E century, however, the sermons of Maurice de Sully (died sem . 1196) present the first undoubted examples of homiletics w in the vernacular, and they are followed by many others so many indeed that the 13th century alone counts 261 sermon writers, besides a large body of anonymous work. These sermons were, as might indeed be expected, chietly cast in a somewhat scholastic form theme, exordium, de velopment, example, and peroration following in regular order. The 14th century sermons, on the other hand, are little known, probably because no one has yet taken the trouble to investigate the manuscripts. It must, however, be remembered that this age, as the most famous of all for its scholastic illustrations, and for the early vigour of the Dominican and Franciscan orders, ought to yield favourable returns. With the end of the century and the beginning of the 15th, the importance of .the pulpit begins to revive. The early years of the new age have Gerson for their repre sentative, while the end of the century sees the still more famous names of Menot (1450-1518), Maillard (1440- 1502), and Raulin (1443-1514), all remarkable for the practice of a vigorous and homely style of oratory, recoiling before no aid of what we should now-a-days style buf foonery, and manifesting a creditable indifference to the indignation of principalities and powers. Louis XL is said to have threatened to throw Maillard into the Seine, and many instances of the boldness of these preachers and the rough vigour of their oratory have been preserved. Froissart had been followed as a chronicler by Monstrelet, and by the historiographers of the Burgundian court, Chastelain, already mentioned, and Olivier de la Marche. The memoir and chronicle writers, who were to be of so much import ance in French literature, also begin to be numerous at this period. Juvenal des Ursins (1388-1473), an anonymous bourgeois de Paris (two such indeed), and the author of the Chronique Scandaleuse, may be mentioned as presenting the character of minute observation and record which has distinguished the class ever since. But Comines (1445- C in* 1509) is no imitator of Froissart or of any one else The last of the quartette of great French mediaeval historians, he does not yield to any of his three predecessors in originality