ompany of
greybeards.

Villon, before any one in French literature, called things by their
names, made poetry as Homer made it, with words that meant facts. He was
a thief and a vagabond who wrote in the 'grand style' by daring to be
sincere to himself, to the aspect under which human things came to him,
to the precise names of precise things. He had a sensitiveness in his
soul which perhaps matched the deftness of his fingers, in their adroit,
forbidden trade: his soul bent easily from his mother praying in the
cloister to the fat Margot drinking in the tavern; he could dream
exquisitely over the dead ladies who had once been young, and who had
gone like last year's snow, and then turn to the account-book of his
satirical malice against the clerks and usurers for whom he was making
the testament of his poverty. He knew winter, 'when the wolves live on
wind,' and how the gallows looks when one stands under it. And he knew
all the secrets of the art of verse-making which courtly poets, like the
King, used for the stringing together of delicate trifles, ornamental
evasions of facts. He was no poet of the people, but a scholar vagabond,
loving the gutter; and so he has the sincerity of the artist as well as
the only half-convincing sincerity of the man. There has been no greater
artist in French verse, as there has been no greater poet; and the main
part of the history of poetry in France is the record of a long
forgetting of all that Villon found out for himself.

1901.

CASANOVA AT DUX: AN UNPUBLISHED CHAPTER OF HISTORY

I

The _Memoirs_ of Casanova, though they have enjoyed the popularity of a
bad reputation, have never had justice done to them by serious students
of literature, of life, and of history. One English writer, indeed, Mr.
Havelock Ellis, has realised that 'there are few more delightful books
in the world,' and he has analysed them in an essay on Casanova,
published in _Affirmations_, with extreme care and remarkable subtlety.
But this essay stands alone, at all events in English, as an attempt to
take Casanova seriously, to show him in his relation to his time, and in
his relation to human problems. And yet these _Memoirs_ are perhaps the
most valuable document which we possess on the society of the eighteenth
century; they are the history of a unique life, a unique personality,
one of the greatest of autobiographies; as a record of adventures, they
are more entertaining than _Gil Blas_, or _M