ILLON.

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