Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 9.djvu/683

FIFTEENTH CENTURY.] FRANCE 647 the trouveres their neighbours, and were very probably models for the creations in poetical form of the 14th cen tury, such as the virelai, the rondel, the rondeau, the ballade, and the chant royal. The beauty and grace of Provencal poetry, and the melancholy fate of the nation which pro duced it, have naturally attracted much interest. But it must be remembered that the Albigensian crusade by no means, as is sometimes held, stamped out the troubadours. They continued for nearly a century after it to be prolific ; and their extinction, though partly traceable to political causes, was in all probability equally owing to the inherent defects of their poetry, especially its lack of range. Soon afterwards Provencal ceased for 300 years to be, except fitfully and at long intervals, a literary language. In our own time a baud of zealous devotees have attempted to revive it in that character, with what permanent success remains to be seen. 15th Century. The 15th century holds a peculiar and somewhat disputed position in the history of French litera ture. It has sometimes been regarded as the final stage of the mediaeval period, sometimes as the earliest of the modern, the influence of the Renaissance in Italy already filtering through. Others again have taken the easy step of marking it as an age of transition. There is as usual truth in all these views. Feudality died with Froissarfc and Eustache Deschamps. The modern spirit can hardly be said to arise before Rabelais and Ronsard. Yet the 15th century, from the point of view of French literature, is much more remarkable than its historians have been wont to confess. It has not the strongly marked and compact originality of some periods, and it furnishes only one name of the highest order of literary interest ; but it abounds in names of the second rank, and the very dif ference which exists between their styles and characters testifies to the existence of a large number of separate forces working in their different manners on different per sons. Its theatre we have already treated by anticipation, and to it we shall afterwards recur. It was the palmy time of the early French stage, and all the dramatic styles which we have enumerated then came to perfection. Of no other kind of literature can the same be said. The century which witnessed the invention of printing naturally devoted itself at first more to the spreading of old literature than to the production of new. Yet as it perfected the early drama, so it produced the prose tale. Nor, as regards individual and single names, can the century of Charles d Orle ans, of Alain Chartier, of Christine de Pisan, of Coquillart, of Comines, and, above all, of Villon, be said to lack illustra tions. First among the poets of the period falls to be mentioned the shadowy personality of Olivier Basselin. Modern criti cism has attacked the identity of the jovial miller, who was once supposed to have written and perhaps invented the songs called vaux de ,vire, and to have also carried on a patriotic warfare against the English. But though Jean le Houx may have written the poems published under Basselin s name two centuries later, it does not seem un likely that an actual Olivier wrote actual vaux de vire at the beginning of the 15th century. About Christine de Pisan (1363-1420) and Alain Chartier (1386-1458) there is no such doubt. Christine was the daughter of an Italian astrologer who was patronized by Charles V. She was born in Italy but brought up in France, and she enriched the literature of her adopted country with much learning, good sense, and patriotism. She wrote history, devotional works, and poetry; and though her literary merit is not of the highest, it is very far from despicable. Alain Chartier, best known to modern readers by 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 re member 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 mediaeval science and learning. A very different person is Charles d Orle ans Charles (1391-1465), one of the greatest of grands seigneurs, for d 0rl<5ans. he was the father of a king of France and heir to the duchies of Orleans and Milan. Charles, indeed, was not exactly a hero ; captured at Agincourt, he endured his English captivity very patiently, and its chief effect on him was to make him write poems in English. He made little effort to secure or recover his Cisalpine heritage from the rough hands of Sforza, and he seems at no time to have exercised much political influence in France. But if he was not a Reland or a Bayard, he 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 accompani ment even without the addition of music properly so called. His ballades are certainly inferior to those of Villon, but his rondels are unequalled. For full 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 re cognition even in France. Charles d Orltians is himself sufficient proof of what can be done in them in the way of elegance, sweetness, and grace. On the other hand, his writings and the exercises to which he was addicted lay him open to a certain charge of effeminacy, which, though it has been much exaggerated, cannot be altogether denied. 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 Frangois Villon (1431-1500), as to other great Villon, 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 inter spersed. 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 Mere," "La Grosse Mar- got," "Les Regrets de la belle Heaulmiere," and others; while the whole composition is full of poetical traits of the most extraordinary vigour, picturesqueness, and pathos. Besides these more remarkable names, a crowd of minor poets hastened to copy the compositions we have described. 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 Cre tin, who distin guished 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 grace et la liberte" de la composition." Cre tin, who had hundreds of imitators, Cretin, was held up by Rabelais to the ridicule of his readers under the name of Rarainagrobis. 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 ; yet some of the minor