the story of Margaret of Scotland’s Kiss, was a writer of a somewhat
similar character. In both Christine and Chartier there is
a great deal of rather heavy moralizing, and a great deal of rather
pedantic erudition. But it is only fair to remember that the
intolerable political and social evils of the day called for a good
deal of moralizing, and that it was the function of the writers
of this time to fill up as well as they could the scantily filled
vessels of medieval science and learning. A very different Charles d’Orléans.
person is Charles d’Orléans (1391–1465), one of the
greatest of grands seigneurs, for he was the father
of a king of France, and heir to the duchies of Orléans
and Milan. Charles, indeed, if not a Roland or a Bayard, was an
admirable poet. He is the best-known and perhaps the best
writer of the graceful poems in which an artificial versification
is strictly observed, and helps by its recurrent lines and modulated
rhymes to give to poetry something of a musical accompaniment
even without the addition of music properly so called. His ballades
are certainly inferior to those of Villon, but his rondels are unequalled.
For fully a century and a half these forms engrossed
the attention of French lyrical poets. Exercises in them were
produced in enormous numbers, and of an excellence which has
only recently obtained full recognition even in France. Charles
d’Orléans is himself sufficient proof of what can be done in them
in the way of elegance, sweetness, and grace which some have
unjustly called effeminacy. But that this effeminacy was no
natural or inevitable fault of the ballades and the rondeaux
was fully proved by the most remarkable literary figure of the
15th century in France. To François Villon (1431–1463?), Villon.
as to other great single writers, no attempt can be
made to do justice in this place. His remarkable
life and character especially lie outside our subject. But he is
universally recognized as the most important single figure of
French literature before the Renaissance. His work is very
strange in form, the undoubtedly genuine part of it consisting
merely of two compositions, known as the great and little
Testament, written in stanzas of eight lines of eight syllables
each, with lyrical compositions in ballade and rondeau form
interspersed. Nothing in old French literature can compare
with the best of these, such as the “Ballade des dames du
temps jadis,” the “Ballade pour sa mère,” “La Grosse Margot,”
“Les Regrets de la belle Heaulmière,” and others; while the
whole composition is full of poetical traits of the most extraordinary
vigour, picturesqueness and pathos. Towards the end
of the century the poetical production of the time became very
large. The artificial measures already alluded to, and others
far more artificial and infinitely less beautiful, were largely
practised. The typical poet of the end of the 15th century is
Guillaume Crétin (d. 1525), who distinguished himself by writing
verses with punning rhymes, verses ending with double or treble
repetitions of the same sound, and many other tasteless absurdities,
in which, as Pasquier remarks, “il perdit toute la grâce et la Crétin.
liberté de la composition.” The other favourite
direction of the poetry of the time was a vein of
allegorical moralizing drawn from the Roman de la rose through
the medium of Chartier and Christine, which produced “Castles
of Love,” “Temples of Honour,” and such like. The combination
of these drifts in verse-writing produced a school known in
literary history, from a happy phrase of the satirist Coquillart
(v. inf.), as the “Grands Rhétoriqueurs.” The chief of these besides
Crétin were Jean Molinet (d. 1507); Jean Meschinot (c. 1420–1491),
author of the Lunettes des princes; Florimond Robertet
(d. 1522); Georges Chastellain (1404–1475), to be mentioned
again; and Octavien de Saint-Gelais (1466–1502), father of a
better poet than himself. Yet some of the minor poets of the
time are not to be despised. Such are Henri Baude (1430–1490), a
less pedantic writer than most, Martial d’Auvergne (1440–1508),
whose principal work is L’Amant rendu cordelier au service de
l’amour, and others, many of whom formed part of the poetical
court which Charles d’Orléans 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 verse. Villon, indeed, were it not for the depth and pathos of his poetical sentiment, 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 satire. 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 XI. and Charles of Burgundy employed many pens. The most remarkable piece of the light literature of the first is “Les Ânes 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 the above-named Georges Chastelain, typical representatives of the two styles of 15th-century poetry already alluded to—Des Ormes being the lighter and more graceful writer, Chastelain a pompous and learned allegorist. The most remarkable representative of purely light poetry outside the Coquillart. theatre is Guillaume Coquillart (1421–1510), a lawyer of Champagne, who resided for the greater part of his life in Reims. This city, like others, suffered from the pitiless tyranny of Louis XI. The beginnings of the standing army which Charles VII. 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 cassé. Again, when the king entertained the idea of unifying the taxes and laws of the different provinces, Coquillart, who was named commissioner for this purpose, wrote on the occasion a satire called Les Droits nouveaux. A certain kind of satire, much less good-tempered than the earlier forms, became indeed common 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 imagination, celebrated in the thousand repetitions of the Danse Macabre, sculptured all over the buildings of the time, even frequently performed on holidays and in public. With the usual tendency to follow pattern, the idea of the “dance” seems to have been extended, and we have a Danse aux aveugles (1464) from Pierre Michaut, where the teachers are fortune, love and death, all blind. 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 Gaston Paris, show one side of this composition, and many of the pieces contained in M. de Montaiglon’s extensive Recueil des anciennes poésies françaises 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 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 substitution 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 long before this time translations in prose had been made. Pierre Bercheure (Bersuire) (1290–1352) had already translated Livy. Nicholas Oresme (c. 1334–1382), 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 (1316–1383) turned into French the De civitate Dei of St Augustine. These writers or others composed Le Songe du vergier, an elaborate discussion of the power of the pope. The famous chancellor, Jean Charlier or Gerson (1363–1429), to whom the Imitation has among so many others been attributed, spoke constantly and wrote often in the vulgar tongue, though he attacked the most famous and popular work in that tongue, the Roman de la rose. Christine de Pisan and Alain Chartier were at least as much prose writers as poets; and the latter, while he, like Gerson, dealt much with the reform of the church, used in his Quadriloge invectif 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 continuations of others, which for convenience sake we have hitherto left unnoticed. Though
