We are whiles scoured and
soddened
of the rain,
And whiles burnt up and blacke
ed of the sun;
Corbies and pyets have our eyes out-ta’en,
And plucked our beard and hair out one by one.
And whiles burnt up and blacke
ed of the sun;
Corbies and pyets have our eyes out-ta’en,
And plucked our beard and hair out one by one.
Warner - World's Best Literature - v26 to v30 - Tur to Zor and Index
But there
is plenty of heart in the ballad, nor does it appear that all the heart
he had went into his verse. The man who could devote a ballad
to the miseries of chimney-sweeps — Poor chimney-sweeps have toil
enough” (Poures housseurs ont assez peine) — was not without a
flicker of sympathy for a fellow-being; and it is hardly possible to
read in a candid spirit the beautiful ballad to the Virgin Mary,
written at his mother's request, without the conviction that he felt
the strength of that tie which in France, if anywhere, unites mother
and son.
The same ballad, and other noble passages, looked at in
a first-hand way, prove that Villon was capable of no small degree
of religious fervor. We have witnessed within the last decade the
spectacle of a poet in the depths of self-indulgence turning eagerly
to the consolations of religion,- and Paul Verlaine was a true child
of the boulevards. Why assume that there was no sincerity in the
prayers the fifteenth-century poet offered when the bell of the Sor-
bonne, striking the Angelus, bade him set aside for a moment the
writing of the Lesser Testament'? Why attempt to prove, with M.
Longnon, that Villon's three orphans, hungry,” “shoeless,” “naked
as a worm,” whom he harbored and endeavored to provide for in
every way, were after all young people of means, who employed him
as a tutor ? Is it quite safe to condemn in toto that which openly and
repeatedly and permanently criminates itself, — that which like Héloise
has dared call itself impure? On the other hand, M. Longnon's view
(
(
» «
## p. 15396 (#344) ##########################################
15396
FRANÇOIS VILLON
of Villon, and even Mr. Payne's, often seems almost too indulgent;
but the aim set forth in the latter's introduction has been nobly
fulfilled. In his own words, he has set ajar one more door, long
sadly moss-grown and ivy-hidden, into that enchanted wonderland
of French poetry, which glows with such springtide glory of many-
colored bloom, such autumn majesty of matured fruit. ”
Mr. Swinburne's rendering of the famous and ghastly Epitaph'
of Villon, made when he was expecting to be hung with five of his
companions, is simpler and on the whole closer than Mr. Payne's;
with the exception of the line where the image —
More pecked of birds than fruit on garden-wall » –
own
is strangely substituted for the dented thimble” of the original
reproduced by Mr. Payne. The poet Théodore de Banville puts into
the mouth of Pierre Gringoire a Ballade des Pendus' scarcely
yielding in fascination to the familiar “Epitaph of Villon. But the
real poet-rogue of the fifteenth century was not Pierre Gringoire,
as Victor Hugo and Théodore de Banville have led or misled us to
think. A lance at the didactic verse and irreproachable life of the
well-connected moralist Gringoire, makes it difficult to reconcile with
his character the passages that represent him rolling in the mud of
Montmartre or captivated by a pretty face at a window. . Plain facts
can never destroy the inimitable charm of passages that are their
excuse; but an observation attributed to Louis XI. — and it is
not unlikely that he made it - shows that the scapegrace whose
usual signature gave birth to the expression willonnerie bore off the
palm from all other vagabond minstrels. The King declared that he
could not afford to hang Villon; as the kingdom could boast of a
hundred thousand rascals of equal eminence, but not of one other
poet so accomplished in elegant speech and ingenious reasoning.
Undoubtedly the words were uttered at the most miserable mo-
ment in Villon's whole wretched career; when, if ever, he had lit-
erally touched bottom, let down by ropes to lie during the whole
summer of 1461 in a reeking den, or rather ditch, of the castle of
Mehun or Meung-sur-Loire, subjected to torture, and fed only on dry
bread and water. The offense for which Thibault, Archbishop of
Orléans, had caused him to be thus confined and corrected, seems to
have been his implication in the theft of a silver lamp from a church
in his diocese.
It was in this cul-de-basse-fosse that Villon is thought to have com-
posed his Dialogue between the Heart and Body of François Villon,'
a ballad worthy to rank with Shakespeare's sonnet, Poor soul, the
centre of my sinful earth! ' reminding us that Shakespeare and his
Henry V. traditionally passed through a period of wild-oat sowing
that Villon never outgrew. Had we only this ballad, instead of the
## p. 15397 (#345) ##########################################
FRANÇOIS VILLON
15397
considerable body of work he has left, we should hardly see less
clearly into his real state of mind, - his horror and disgust at losing
his moral footing, his sound judgment betrayed and belied by a fatal
weakness of purpose and want of self-control. Certainly the words —
«We poets in our youth begin in gladness,
But thereof comes in the end despondency and madness,
apply at least as well to Villon and Verlaine as to
«Him who walked in glory and in joy,
Following his plow upon the mountain-side. )
Villon's life had begun in 1431 — in the very month (May), it
would seem, when the great soul of Jeanne d'Arc went out; an event
that drew from him the laconic and otherwise characteristic con-
ment:-
“Et lehanne, la bonne Lorraine,
Qu' Englois brulerent à Rouen. »
« The good Lorrainer the English bare
Captive to Rouen and burned her there. "
He had taken the degree of M. A. in the University of Paris. Twice
sentenced to the gallows, he had escaped it only to enter upon a
course of dissipation which confirmed him in the companionship of
sneak-thieves, highwaymen, and women of the most depraved and
abandoned class. He had certainly killed his man,
,- a priest, who
however had dealt the first blow, compelling him to draw in self-
defense, and who made intercession for him with his dying breath.
According to Villon's own asseverations, which must have had
some foundation in fact, his rejection by the only woman he ever
loved had been the beginning of all his troubles. He holds her
responsible for his ruin; but turns her coldness and his chagrin to
account by making them the motif of his (Lesser Testament,' writ-
ten at an earlier period than the “Greater,' and representing him a
martyr to love bequeathing real and imaginary treasures to a motley
crowd of friends and enemies (all of them more or less notorious in
their time), before taking flight from the scene of his disappointment.
The young lady in question, whom Villon calls his rose, but whose
name was Catherine de Vaucelles, is thought to have been a niece of
Guillaume Villon, the canon of the cathedral church of Saint-Bénoit,
who took the boy under his protection, if not into his residence,-
the Hôtel de la Porte Rouge, adjoining the Sorbonne. Whether the
young student adopted the surname of his patron; whether they were
actual relatives, or only fellow-townsmen of the village of Villon, still
existing,- according to M. Longnon it is certain that the older man,
who is known to have been of a gentle disposition, never had the
## p. 15398 (#346) ##########################################
15398
FRANÇOIS VILLON
heart to turn away the younger; but continued to aid him, and to be
more than a father to him, long after his behavior had forfeited all
claim to forgiveness.
In spite of the grave fissures in his character, — in a manner by
reason of them,- he must at one time or another have enjoyed the
favor of many far above him in rank. When the newly crowned
monarch, Louis XI. , passing through the town and stopping at the
castle where Villon had been confined a whole summer, caused him
to be set at liberty, he was only thirty years old. Yet the author of
Il n'est bon bec que de Paris) (There's no right speech out of Paris
town), and other songs afterwards inserted in the Greater Testa-
ment,' already enjoyed a popularity seldom granted a poet in his
lifetime. Hence it is generally believed that the King's appreciation
of good literature, coupled with Villón's apparent claim (whether
founded on distant kinship or otherwise) to the special favor of the
Bourbon family, — disposing them to occasional good offices in his
behalf, — had more to do with his release than had the custom of
pardoning a certain number of criminals immediately after ascend-
ing the throne, - a custom however that Louis followed in many other
instances. Thus the king and the beggar came together for a mo-
ment; — that Villon could beg beautifully in verse is evident from
various ballads petitioning, now for a trifling sum of money, now for
the repeal of a death sentence; and it was a king who less than a
century later caused the complete works of Villon, so far as they
could be recovered, to be collected into a volume. This edition,
which the scholarly discrimination of Francis I. intrusted to the poet
Clément Marot, continued to be widely read till doubly overlaid and
obscured by the triumph of the seventeenth-century writers, succeed-
ing that of the Pléiade' that Ronsard created. Even Scott,- who
allowed few manifestations of genius or types of quaintness to escape
him, — while regretting in the notes to 'Quentin Durward' that it
would have seemed hardly wise to introduce D'Urfé, nowhere intro-
duces Villon. One cannot help thinking that this is precisely what he
would have done in that romance of the time of Louis XI. and the
banks of the Loire, — the very river that gave to the castle where the
poet was confined a portion of its name, - had Villon and his works
come out of their chrysalis a half-century sooner. But Mr. Swinburne
had not then sung of the
«Poor splendid wings, so frayed and soiled and torn ! »
The date of Villon's death is obscure. It seems impossible that he
could long have survived the completion of the Greater Testament,'
at the close of which he bewails his bodily ills, brought on by invet-
erate indulgence at the table no less than by his summer of fasting
## p. 15399 (#347) ##########################################
FRANÇOIS VILLON
15399
in the dungeon of Meung-sur-Loire. His plundering and banqueting
propensities were still further set forth in the Repues Franches,'
- a series of ribald rhymes by an unknown author, written while
the exploits of François Villon were still fresh in the minds of the
people.
Vile as the language and imagery of Villon often are, it is worthy
of note that nearly all his finest ballads are perfectly clean. The
tree bore five or six noble apples. These, rather than the worm-eaten
ones that weigh it to earth, have endeared themselves to modern
readers.
A contradiction to the world, an enigma to himself, declaring in
his despair that he understood all things save himself alone,-
« le congnois tout, fors que moy mesmes ;)
in more than one ballad begging all men coming after him to have
mercy on him; little dreaming how far his experimental methods, in
a century when political disintegration and reunion kept the language
in a state of fermentation, would determine the pitch of modern
poetry,- he might almost have hurled the bitter antistrophe -
a nameless life I lead,
A nameless death I die;
The friend whose lantern lights the mead
Were better mate than I.
And when I'm with my comrades met
Beneath the greenwood bough,
What once we were we all forget,
Nor think what we are now. )
From the Greater Testament
HERE BEGINNETH VILLON TO ENTER UPON MATTER FULL
OF ERUDITION AND OF FAIR KNOWLEDGE
N°
ow it is true that after years
Of anguish and of sorrowing,
Travail and toil and groans and tears,
And many a weary wandering,
Trouble hath wrought in me to bring
To point each shifting sentiment,
Teaching me many another thing
Than Averröes his Comment.
However, at my trials' worst,
When wandering in the desert ways,
## p. 15400 (#348) ##########################################
15400
FRANÇOIS VILLON
God, who the Emmaüs pilgrims erst
Did comfort, as the gospel says,
Showed me a certain resting-place,
And gave me gift of hope no less;
Though vile the sinner be and base,
Nothing he hates save stubbornness.
Sinned have I oft, as well I know;
But God my death doth not require,
But that I turn from sin, and so
Live righteously and shun hell-fire.
Whether one by sincere desire
Or counsel turn unto the Lord,
He sees; and casting off his ire,
Grace to repentance doth accord.
And as of its own motion shows,
Ev'n in the very first of it,
The noble Romaunt of the Rose,
Youth to the young one should remit,
So manhood do mature the wit.
And there, alack! the song says sooth:
They that such snares for me have knit
Would have me die in time of youth.
If for my death the common weal
Might anywise embettered be,
Death my own hand to me should deal
As felon, so God 'stablish me!
But unto none, that I can see,
Hindrance I do, alive or dead;
The hills, for one poor wight, perdie,
Will not be stirred out of their stead.
Whilom, when Alexander reigned,
A man that hight Diomedes
Before the Emperor was arraigned,
Bound hand and foot, like as one sees
A thief. A skimmer of the seas
Of those that course it far and nigh
He was; and so, as one of these,
They brought him to be doomed to die.
The Emperor bespoke him thus:---
"Why art thou a sea-plunderer? »
## p. 15401 (#349) ##########################################
FRANÇOIS VILLON
15401
The other, no wise timorous:-
“Why dost thou call me plunderer, sir ?
«
Is it, perchance, because I ear
Upon so mean a bark the sea ?
Could I but arm me with thy gear,
I would be emperor like to thee.
“What wouldst thou have? From sorry Fate,
That uses me with such despite
As I on no wise can abate,
Arises this my evil plight.
Let me find favor in thy sight
And have in mind the common saw:
In penury is little right;
Necessity knows no man's law. ”
Whenas the Emperor to his suit
Had harkened, much he wondered:
And "I thy fortune will commute
From bad to good,” to him he said;
And did. Thenceforward Diomed
Wronged none, but was a true man aye.
Thus have I in Valerius read,
Of Rome styled Greatest in his day.
If God had granted me to find
A king of like greatheartedness,
That had fair fate to me assigned,
Stooped I thenceforward to excess
Or ill, I would myself confess
Worthy to die by fire at stake.
Necessity makes folks transgress,
And want drives wolven from the brake.
My time of youth I do bewail,
That more than most lived merrily,
Until old age 'gan me assail,
For youth had passed unconsciously.
It wended not afoot from me,
Nor yet on horseback. Ah, how then ?
It fed away all suddenly,
And never will return again.
It's gone, and I am left behind,
Poor both in knowledge and in wit,
## p. 15402 (#350) ##########################################
15402
FRANÇOIS VILLON
Black as a berry, drear and dwined,
Coin, land, and goods, gone every whit;
Whilst those by kindred to me knit,
The due of Nature all forgot,
To disavow me have seen fit,
For lack of pelf to pay the scot.
When I of poverty complain,
Ofttimes my heart to me hath said,
“Man, wherefore murmur thus in vain ?
If thou hast no such plentihead
As had Jacques Caur, be comforted:
Better to live and rags to wear,
Than to have been a lord, and dead,
Rot in a splendid sepulchre. "
-
(Than to have been a lord! I say.
Alas, no longer is he one:
As the Psalm tells of it, -to-day
His place of men is all unknown. )
As for the rest, affair 'tis none
Of mine, that but a sinner be:
To theologians alone
The case belongs, and not to me.
For I am not, as well I know,
An angel's son, that crowned with light
Among the starry heavens doth go:
My sire is dead — God have his spright!
His body's buried out of sight.
I know my mother too must die,-
She knows it too, poor soul, aright, -
And soon her son by her must lie.
I know full well that rich and poor,
Villein and noble, high and low,
Laymen and clerks, gracious and dour,
Wise men and foolish, sweet of show
Or foul of favor, dames that go
Ruffed and rebatoed, great or small,
High-tired or hooded, — Death (I know)
Without exception seizes all.
Paris or Helen though one be, -
Who dies, in pain and drearihead,
## p. 15403 (#351) ##########################################
FRANÇOIS VILLON
15403
For lack of breath and blood dies he,
His gall upon his heart is shed:
Then doth he sweat, God knows how dread
A sweat, and none there is to allay
His ills; child, kinsman, in his stead
None will go bail for him that day.
Death makes him shiver and turn pale,
Sharpens his nose and swells his veins,
Puffs up his throat, makes his flesh fail,
His joints and nerves greatens and strains.
Fair women's bodies, soft as skeins
Of silk, so tender, smooth and rare,
Must you too suffer all these pains ?
Ay, or alive to heaven fare.
BALLAD OF OLD-TIME LADIES
TEL
ELL me where, in what land of shade,
Bides fair Flora of Rome, and where
Are Thaïs and Archipiade,
Cousins-german of beauty rare,
And Echo, more than mortal fair,
That when one calls by the river-flow
Or marish, answers out of the air ?
But what is become of last year's snow ?
Where did the learn'd Heloisa vade,
For whose sake Abelard might not spare
(Such dole for love on him was laid)
Manhood to lose and a cowl to wear ?
And where is the queen who willed whilere
That Buridan, tied in a sack, should go
Floating down Seine from the turret-stair ?
But what is become of last year's snow?
Blanche, too, the lily-white queen, that made
Sweet music as if she a siren were ;
Broad-foot Bertha; and Joan the maid,
The good Lorrainer, the English bare
Captive to Rouen and burned her there;
Beatrix, Eremburge, Alys, - lo!
Where are they, Virgin debonair ?
But what is become of last year's snow ?
## p. 15404 (#352) ##########################################
15404
FRANÇOIS VILLON
ENVOI
Prince, you may question how they fare
This week, or liefer this year, I trow:
Still shall the answer this burden bear,
But what is become of last year's snow?
BALLAD OF OLD-TIME LORLS
No. 1
(Following on the Same Subject)
W"
HERE is Calixtus, third of the name,
That died in the purple whiles ago,
Four years since he to the tiar came?
And the King of Arragon, Alfonso ?
The Duke of Bourbon, sweet of show,
And the Duke Arthur of Brittaine ?
And Charles the Seventh, the Good ? Heigho!
But where is the doughty Charlemaine ?
Likewise the King of Scots, whose shame
Was the half of his face (or folk say so),
Vermeil as amethyst held to the flame,
From chin to forehead all of a glow?
The King of Cyprus, of friend and foe
Renowned; and the gentle King of Spain,
Whose name, God 'ield me, I do not know?
But where is the doughty Charlemaine ?
Of many more might I ask the same,
Who are but dust that the breezes blow;
But I desist, for none may claim
To stand against Death, that lays all low:
Yet one more question before I go,-
Where is Lancelot, King of Behaine ?
And where are his valiant ancestors, trow?
But where is the doughty Charlemaine?
ENVOI
Where is Du Guesclin, the Breton prow?
Where Auvergne's Dauphin, and where again
The late good Duke of Alençon ? Lo!
But where is the doughty Charlemaine?
## p. 15405 (#353) ##########################################
FRANÇOIS VILLON
15405
BALLAD OF OLD-TIME LORDS
No. 2
W"
Here are the holy apostles gone,
Alb-clad and amice-tired and stoled
With the sacred tippet and that alone,
Wherewith, when he waxeth overbold,
The foul fiend's throttle they take and hold ?
All must come to the selfsame bay;
Sons and servants, their daya are told:
The wind carries their like away'.
Where is he now that held the throne
Of Constantine with the hands of gold ?
And the King of France, o'er all kings known
For grace and worship that was extolled,
Who convents and churches manifold
Built for God's service ? ' In their day
What of the honor they had ? Behold,
The wind carries their like away.
Where are the champions every one,
The Dauphins, the counselors young and old ?
The barons of Salins, Dôl, Dijon,
Vienne, Grenoble? They all are cold.
Or take the folk under their banners enrolled, -
Pursuivants, trumpeters, heralds, (hey!
How they fed of the fat, and the Alagon trolled ! ) —
The wind carries their like away.
ENVOI
Princes to death are all foretold,
Even as the humblest of their array:
Whether they sorrow or whether they scold,
The wind carries their like away.
BALLAD OF THE WOMEN OF PARIS
TO
HOUGH folk deem women young and old
Of Venice and Genoa well eno'
Favored with speech, both glib and bold,
To carry messages to and fro;
Savoyards, Florentines less or mo',
## p. 15406 (#354) ##########################################
15406
FRANÇOIS VILLON
Romans and Lombards though folk renown,-
I, at my peril, I say no:
There's no right speech out of Paris town.
The Naples women (so we are told)
Can school all comers in speech and show;
Prussians and Germans were still extolled
For pleasant prattle of friend and foe;
But hail they from Athens or Grand Cairo,
Castile or Hungary, black or brown,
Greeks or Egyptians, high or low,
There's no right speech out of Paris town.
Switzers nor Bretons know how to scold,
Nor Provence nor Gascony women: lo!
Two fishfags in Paris the bridge that hold
Would slang them dumb in a minute or so.
Picardy, England, Lorraine, (heigho!
Enough of places have I set down ? )
Valenciennes, Calais, wherever you go,
There's no right speech out of Paris town.
ENVOI
Prince, to the Paris ladies, I trow,
For pleasant parlance I yield the crown.
They may talk of Italians; but this I know,
There's no right speech out of Paris town.
BALLAD THAT VILLON MADE AT THE REQUEST OF HIS
MOTHER, WHEREWITHAL TO DO HER HOMAGE
TO OUR LADY
L"
ADY of heaven, Regent of the earth,
Empress of all the infernal marshes fell,
Receive me, thy poor Christian, 'spite my dearth,
In the fair midst of thine elect to dwell;
Albeit my lack of grace I know full well:
For that thy grace, my Lady and my Queen,
Aboundeth more than all my misdemean,
Withouten which no soul of all that sigh
May merit heaven. 'Tis sooth I say, for e'en
In this belief. I will to live and die.
Say to thy Son I am his, — that by his birth
And death my sins be all redeemable;
## p. 15407 (#355) ##########################################
FRANÇOIS VILLON
15407
As Mary of Egypt's dole he changed to mirth,
And eke Theophilus, to whom befell
Quittance of thee, albeit (so men tell)
To the foul fiend he had contracted been.
Assoilzie me, that I may have no teen,
Maid that without breach of virginity
Didst bear our Lord that in the Host is seen.
In this belief I will to live and die.
A poor old wife I am, and little worth;
Nothing I know, nor letter aye could spell:
Where in the church to worship I fare forth,
I see heaven limned with harps and lutes, and hell
Where damned folk seethe in fire unquenchable.
One doth me fear, the other joy serene:
Grant I may have the joy, O Virgin clean,
To whom all sinners lift their hands on high,
Made whole in faith through thee their go-between.
In this belief I will to live and die.
ENVOI
Thou didst conceive, Princess most bright of sheen,
Jesus the Lord, that hath nor end nor mean,
Almighty, that, departing heaven's demesne
To succor us, put on our frailty,
Offering to death his sweet of youth and green:
Such as he is, our Lord he is, I ween!
In this belief I will to live and die.
LAY, OR RATHER ROUNDEL
D
EATH, of thy rigor I complain,
That hast my lady torn from me,
And wilt not yet contented be,
Save from me too all strength be ta’en,
For languishment of heart and brain.
What harm did she in life to thee,
Death ?
One heart we had betwixt us twain;
Which being dead, I too must dree
Death, or, like carven saints we see
In choir, sans life to live be fain,
Death!
[End of the Greater Testament. ]
## p. 15408 (#356) ##########################################
15408
FRANÇOIS VILLON
BALLAD OF VILLON IN PRISON
H
AVE pity, friends, have pity now, I pray,
If it so please you, at the least, on me!
I lie in fosse, not under holm or may,
In this duresse, wherein, alas! I dree
Ill fate, as God did thereanent decree.
Lasses and lovers, younglings manifold,
Dancers and montebanks, alert and bold,
Nimble as quarrel from a crossbow shot;
Singers, that troll as clear as bells of gold, -
Will you all leave poor Villon here to rot?
Clerks, that go caroling the livelong day,
Scant-pursed, but glad and frank and full of glee;
Wandering at will along the broad highway,
Harebrained, perchance, but whit-whole too, perdie:
Lo! now I die, whilst that you absent be,
Song-singers, - when poor Villon's days are told,
You will sing psalms for him and candles hold;
Here light nor air nor levin enters not,
Where ramparts thick are round about him rolled.
Will you all leave poor Villon here to rot?
Consider but his piteous array,
High and fair lords, of suit and service free,
That nor to king nor kaiser homage pay,
But straight from God in heaven hold your fee!
Come fast or feast, all days alike fasts he,
Whence are his teeth like rakes' teeth to behold;
No table hath he but the sheer black mold;
After dry bread (not manchets), pot on pot
They empty down his throat of water cold:
Will you all leave poor Villon here to rot?
ENVOI
Princes and lords aforesaid, young and old,
Get me the King his letters sealed and scrolled,
And draw me from this dungeon; for, God wot,
Even swine, when one squeaks in the butcher's fold,
Flock around their fellow and do squeak and scold.
Till
you all leave poor Villon here to rot?
## p. 15409 (#357) ##########################################
FRANÇOIS VILLON
15409
THE EPITAPH IN BALLAD FORM THAT VILLON MADE FOR
HIMSELF AND HIS COMPANIONS, EXPECTING NO BETTER
THAN TO BE HANGED IN THEIR COMPANY
B
ROTHERS, that after us on life remain,
Harden your hearts against us not as stone;
For, if to pity us poor wights you're fain,
God shall the rather grant you benison.
You see us six, the gibbet hereupon:
As for the flesh that we too well have fed,
'Tis all devoured and rotted, shred by shred.
Let none make merry of our piteous case,
Whose crumbling bones the life long since hath Aled:
The rather pray, God grant us of his grace!
Yea, we conjure you, look not with disdain,
Brothers, on us, though we to death were done
By justice. Well you know, the saving grain
Of sense springs not in every mother's son;
Commend us, therefore, now we're dead and gone,
To Christ, the Son of Mary's maidenhead,
That he leave not his grace on us to shed
And save us from the nether torture-place.
Let no one harry us,- forsooth, we're sped:
The rather pray, God grant us of his grace!
We are whiles scoured and soddened of the rain,
And whiles burnt up and blacke
ed of the sun;
Corbies and pyets have our eyes out-ta’en,
And plucked our beard and hair out one by one.
Whether by night or day, rest have we none:
Now here, now there, as the wind shifts its stead,
We swing and creak and rattle overhead,
No thimble dinted like our bird-pecked face.
Brothers, have heed and shun the life we led :
The rather pray, God grant us of his grace!
ENVOI
Prince Jesus, over all empowered,
Let us not fall into the Place of Dread,
But all our reckoning with the Fiend efface.
Folk, mock us not that are forspent and dead:
The rather pray, God grant us of his grace !
XXVI-964
## p. 15410 (#358) ##########################################
15410
FRANÇOIS VILLON
BALLAD OF THINGS KNOWN AND UNKNOWN
F
LIES in the milk I know full well;
I know men by the clothes they wear;
I know the walnut by the shell;
I know the foul sky from the fair;
I know the pear-tree by the pear;
I know the worker from the drone,
And eke the good wheat from the tare:
I know all save myself alone.
I know the pourpoint by the fell,
And by his gown I know the frère;
Master by varlet I can spell;
Nuns by the veils that hide their hair;
I know the sharper and his snare,
And fools that fat on cates have grown;
Wines by the cask I can compare:
I know all save myself alone.
I know how horse from mule to tell;
I know the load that each can bear;
I know both Beatrice and Bell;
I know the hazards, odd and pair;
I know of visions in the air;
I know the power of Peter's throne,
And how misled Bohemians were:
I know all save myself alone.
ENVOI
Prince, I know all things; fat and spare,
Ruddy and pale, to me are known,
And Death that endeth all our care:
I know all save myself alone.
BALLAD AGAINST THOSE WHO MISSAY OF FRANCE
LET
ET him meet beasts that breathe out fiery rain,
Even as did Jason hard by Colchis town;
Or seven years changed into a beast remain,
Nebuchadnezzar-like, to earth bowed down;
Or suffer else such teen and mickle bale
As Helen's rape on Trojans did entail;
Or in Hell's marshes fallen let him fare
Like Tantalus and Proserpine, or bear
## p. 15411 (#359) ##########################################
FRANÇOIS VILLON
15411
A grievouser than Job his sufferance,
Prisoned and pent in Dædalus his snare,-
Who would wish ill unto the realm of France.
Four months within a marish let him plain,
Bittern-like, with the mud against his crown;
Or sell him to the Ottoman, to chain
And harness like an ox, the scurvy clown!
Or thirty years, like Maudlin, without veil
Or vesture, let him his misdeeds bewail;
Or with Narcissus death by drowning share;
Or die like Absalom, hanged by the hair;
Or Simon Magus, by his charms' mischance;
Or Judas, mad with horror and despair,-
Who would wish ill unto the realm of France.
If but Octavian's time might come again,
His molten gold should down his throat be thrown,
Or 'twixt two millstones he should grind for grain,
As did St. Victor; or I'd have him drown
Far out to sea, where help and breath should fail,
Like Jonah in the belly of the whale;
Let him be doomed the sunlight to forswear,
Juno her goods and Venus debonair,
And be of Mars oppressed to utterance,-
As was Antiochus the king, whilere, --
Who would wish ill unto the realm of France.
ENVOI
Prince, may winds bear him to the wastes of air,
Or to the mid-sea woods and sink him there;
Be all his hopes changed to desesperance:
For he deserves not any fortune fair
Who would wish ill unto the realm of France.
BALLAD OF THE DEBATE OF THE HEART AND BODY OF
VILLON
W**"That hold but by a thread for frailty
I hearI I,
;
I have nor force nor substance, all drained dry,
Since thee thus lonely and forlorn I see,
Like a poor cur, curled up all shiveringly. -
How comes it thus ? — Of thine unwise liesse. -
## p. 15412 (#360) ##########################################
15412
FRANÇOIS VILLON
What irks it thee? - I suffer the distress. -
Leave me in peace. - Why? – I will cast about. —
When will that be ? . When I'm past childishness. —
I say no more. - And I can do without.
What deemest thou? - To mend before I die. -
At thirty years ? —'Tis a mule's age, perdie. -
Is't childhood ? — Nay. -'Tis madness, then, doth ply
And grip thee? Where? — By the nape. - Seemeth me
Nothing I know? — Yes, fies in milk, maybe:
I
,
Thou canst tell black from white yet at a press. -
Is't all? - What words can all thy faults express ? -
If it's not enough, we'll have another bout. -
Thou'rt lost. — I'll make a fight for't none the less. —
I say no more. — And I can do without.
Dule have I, pain and misery thou thereby:
If thou wert some poor idiot, happily
Thou mightst have some excuse thy heart anigh.
Lo, foul and fair are all alike to thee.
Or harder is thy head than stone by sea,
Or more than honor likes thee this duresse.
Canst thou say aught in answer ? Come, confess. -
I shall be quit on't when I die, no doubt. -
God! what a comfort 'gainst a present stress!
I say no more. — And I can do without.
Whence comes this evil ? Surely, from on high:
When Saturn made me up my fardel, he
Put all these ills in. —'Tis a foolish lie:
Thou art Fate's master, yet its slave wilt be.
Thereof see Solomon his homily:
The wise, he says, no planets can oppress;
They and their influence own his mightiness. —
Nay, as they've made me, so shall it fall out.
What sayst thou ? — 'Tis the faith that I profess. –
I say no more. —And I can do without.
ENVOI
Wilt thou live long ? So God vouchsafe me, yes. —
Then must thou What ? Repent; forswear idlesse
And study — What? — The lore of righteousness.
I'll not forget. — Forsake the motley rout
And to amendment straightway thee address:
Delay not till thou come to hopelessness.
I say no more. —And I can do without,
## p. 15412 (#361) ##########################################
## p. 15412 (#362) ##########################################
## p. 15413 (#363) ##########################################
15413
VIRGIL
(B. C. 70–19)
BY WILLIAM CRANSTON LAWTON
CM
UBLIUS VERGILIUS MARO, purest, sweetest, gentlest, best be-
loved among all poets since the dawn of civilization, was
Su. born at Andes, a village near Mantua. His birthplace, his
name, perhaps too his wealth of romantic imagination, may indicate
Keltic origin. At any rate, his father was a man of humble station,
some say a potter, who married his master's daughter, Magia. (This
name of Virgil's mother helped on the wild mediæval invention of
Virgil the magician. ) As Transpadanes, the family naturally shared
the general gratitude toward the great Julius, always their especial
champion, who in 49 B. C. conferred full Roman citizenship upon
the provincials. Virgil apparently never had personal relations with
Catullus, Calvus, and their brilliant group of young aristocrats and
anti-Cæsarian poets.
His education was not defective, certainly. He studied both at
Milan and in Rome. A doubtful tradition makes him the fellow-
student of Antony and Augustus. In a youthful poem, perhaps au-
thentic, he takes reluctant farewell of verse, when devoting himself
to philosophy as the pupil of the Epicurean sage Siron :-
« Begone, O Muses: ay, begone,- although
Sweet Muses; for we will the truth confess,
Sweet have ye been! And on my pages look
Ye yet again,– but modestly, nor oft. ”
The undertone of doubt in these words proved doubly prophetic.
Much in the tranquil Epicurean acceptance of life,- and much indeed
of Lucretius's grandest harmonies and large view of nature's eternal
pageant, - the Augustan poet-laureate always retained. Perhaps he
even envies that most fearless and lofty of atheistic philosophers:-
(Happy the man whose steadfast eye surveys
The whole world's truth, its hidden works and ways,-
Happy, who thus beneath his feet has thrown
All fears and fates, and Hell's insatiate moan! »
((Georgics, ii. 490-492, translation of F. W. H. Myers. )
## p. 15414 (#364) ##########################################
15414
VIRGIL
These lines are generally supposed to be a direct tribute to Lucre-
But Virgil's intensely religious and even mystical spirit clung
most anxiously to those two beliefs which Lucretius puts scornfully
behind him: the faith in all-wise, all-powerful Divine beings, and in
the soul's existence after death.
Virgil was certainly no untutored child of the soil, · like Burns.
Even more than his friend Horace, he everywhere reveals the lofti-
est refinement, and lifelong loving familiarity with the best in liter-
ature and art. He turns away, indeed, like Lucretius, and far more
heartily than worldly-minded Horace, from the splendor and the noisy
throng of clients in ministerial palaces, to seek refreshment on
nature's heart.
«Oh, happy beyond all happiness — did they
Their weal but know — those husbandmen obscure,
Whose life, deep hidden from strife of arms away,
The all-righteous earth and kind doth well secure.
What though for them no towering mansion pours
At early morning, forth of its haughty doors
And halls, a surge of courtiers untold,
Gaping on the rich portals, as they pass,
Fair with mosaic of tortoise-shell, the gold
Of broidered vestments and the Corinthian brass ?
“But they are at peace in life, in guile untaught,
And dowered with manifold riches. Theirs the ease
Of acres ample, and many a shady grot,
And slumber of sweetness under sheltering trees,
And living lakes, and the cool of Tempe's valley,
And the lowing of herds are theirs continually;
Theirs are the haunts of game on the wooded hill;
And theirs a hardy youth, unto humble ways
Attempered, and patient in their toil; and still
The old have honor of them, and the gods have praise.
Justice, methinks, when driven from earth away,
Left her last footprint among such as they. ”
('Georgics,' ii. 458-474, version of Harriet Waters Preston. )
There is abundant evidence here (as in the pictures of Carthaginian
splendor in Æneid,' Books i. and iv. ) that Virgil knew the luxury
of courts as thoroughly as he did the better beloved rural peace he
craves. The last phrase just quoted, furthermore, reminds us of the
melancholy tone, the vein of pathos, which all lovers of our poet
remember so well. There was much in the conditions of the time to
justify this; indeed, that sturdy patriot Livy, in his prelude, strikes a
more disconsolate note than any single passage in the epic.
## p. 15415 (#365) ##########################################
VIRGIL
15415
-
In truth, the best stage of the national life had already passed
with the age of the two Africani. The lordship of Italy fully at-
tained, Rome passed on to more fatal successes. She overthrew
Carthage and Corinth in a single year (146 B. C. ); but Cato was more
than half right,- the national character was rapidly undermined by
foreign wealth, and by culture too easily and swiftly won from
without, not bred steadily from within. Doubtless Ennius's historical
poem, or versified chronicle, if ever it shall come again to light, will
seem rugged and inartistic to us, as it certainly did to most of the
later Romans. Yet it was more truly an epic of manly freedom
and patriotic pride than was possible under the early empire.
The empire itself indeed was generally, and rightly, welcomed.
But it was —
“As he who, with distressful breath,
Forth issued from the sea upon the shore,
Turns to the water perilous and gazes. ”
was
on
Augustus's rule came as the only hope of peace and order after a
century full of civic strife, beginning with the death of the generous
far-sighted patrician radical, Tiberius Gracchus, under the clubs of an
aristocratic mob (133 B. C. ).
If ever conditions were such that the stanchest republican, who
a true and wise patriot as well, must welcome “the man
horseback," it was in the year after the great Julius's death (43 B. C. );
when the Roman State,--that is, the civilized world, -already rudely
shaken and drained of its life-blood by previous civil wars, now lay
utterly helpless, and rent asunder between the dissolute rapacity of
Mark Antony, and the impracticable imperious selfishness of wouldbe
reactionists like Cassius and Brutus. Rome and civilization seemed
about to sink together into that rift of civic strife, too wide for any
Curtius to close. It was at this juncture that the cold-hearted, long-
headed boy Octavian- heir to Julius's name and fortune, far more
than heir to his self-control and mastery of other men - came upon
the scene. Pretending to side with the assassins of Julius Cæsar,
he presently threw himself into Antony's arms; perhaps because he
saw that Antony could more easily be first utilized and then dis-
patched.
The next dozen years were to cost the commonwealth much
bloodshed still, in war and peace; many of her noblest lives were
yet to be cut short by the soldier's or the bravo's sword: for we
can hardly set earlier than the decisive battle of Actium (31 B. C. ),
the end of the century of turmoil opened by the death of Tiberius
Gracchus under Nasica's bludgeon. Yet even so, the mighty emperor
Augustus could point to a reign of fully forty-five years, marked by
## p. 15416 (#366) ##########################################
15416
VIRGIL
are
prosperity and union within, and by foreign wars in the main suc-
cessful, when he passed on the firm-held sceptre to his unloved and
unloving kinsman, and took his own place beside Julius among the
deities of Rome. Did the august Augustus ever forget, as we
prone to do, his own identity with the dissolute stripling Octavianus
Cæsar, the murderer of his tutor Cicero? Through this long period,
- this cardinal half-century of the world's life, — the restoration of
civic order, the rebuilding of the city and especially of the temples,
the revival, so far as might be, of popular faith in the national gods,
the glorification of Rome (and of his own house) in art and literature,
were all purposes dear to Augustus's heart, all fused in the steady
central purpose of his life. In all these efforts, Virgil the poet was
as loyal and helpful as Agrippa and Mæcenas the soldier and diplo-
matist; and he met quite as generous appreciation as they, both from
his imperial master and from the Roman people.
Horace never forgot, nor ceased to be proud, that he had led his
battalion in the last hopeless struggle against the incoming despotism.
Nor did he ever wholly surrender his sturdy independence. Those
who love him best may well regret that his life fell in a time when
his genuine manliness and liberty-loving frankness must be so largely
hidden under the courtier's mask and cloak.
Virgil, on the contrary, more largely than any other great poet,
we evidently owe to the sunshine or perhaps more truly, to the
hot-house warmth - of imperial favor. The marvelous charm of his
verse, the exquisite commingling of clear-cut meaning and thousand-
fold haunting suggestion, is indeed the unique and inexplicable gift of
his genius. Yet his languid Theocritean mock-pastorals might have
perished with him, - at best he would probably have remained the
idle singer of a rather ignoble provincial life,— had Mæcenas not sum-
moned him before a far greater audience, and urged him on to more
ambitious themes.
Quite unlike Horace or any other Roman poet down to their
day, Virgil in his first undoubted utterance strikes the note of utmost
servility and adulation.
«Yea, for a god shall he be evermore unto me, and his altar
Often a tender lamb of our fold shall stain with his heart's blood ! »
cries the shepherd Tityrus in the first Eclogue. It is the voice of
Virgil himself, - one of the first to deify the half-reluctant Emperor.
The cause for gratitude was most inadequate. Virgil's little farm
by Mantua, wrongfully wrested from its loyal owner and bestowed
one of Octavian's veterans, had been tardily and reluctantly re-
stored. Moreover there is a tradition of a second expulsion, attended
with danger to the poet's life; and the urgent intercession of three
on
## p. 15417 (#367) ##########################################
VIRGIL
15417
powerful friends,- Varus, Gallus, and Pollio, - as well as Virgil's own
appeal at Rome to the dictator, were required to secure this act of
scanty justice (41 B. C. ). Indeed, some scholars doubt if Virgil ever
returned to his old home. Perhaps Augustus never lost sight of the
gifted and pliant youth whose value he promptly realized.
We cannot hope to find in this timid courtly poet the exultant
manliness and free stride of an Æschylus, an Ennius, or even of a
Dante, unbending in homeless exile, fearless of speech even under
imminent peril of death. More perhaps than any other artist, the
heroic poet needs to breathe the air of freedom. Virgil the man,
like his hero, is always conscious that his actual lot is, at best, but a
second choice. Æneas tells Dido:--
«If fate permitted me to shape my life
To my desire, and freely end my woes,
The precious remnant of my folk, and Troy,
I then would cherish. Priam's halls would rise;
With home-returning band I would have built
Again our citadel,- for vanquished men. ”
This note of mild regret for vanished hopes is so recurrent and con-
stant as to impress every listener at last. It is indeed the tone not
merely of the poet but of his whole race and generation. But sub-
mission to fate, the merging of the individual life in the larger and
more lasting current of destiny, is in all ages a peculiarly Roman
ideal. Perhaps his very limitations have helped Virgil to crystallize
into epic, more than any other artist has ever done, the whole
national life of so many centuries.
Honored and beloved though he was by all, Virgil's own earthly
life hardly seems to have been a happy one. His health was deli-
cate, his nature shy and sensitive, he had the bitterest misgivings as
to his ability to master the high themes assigned him; and his life
ends naturally with that unavailing appeal to his friends to destroy
the uncompleted and unsatisfying national epic on which so many
years of toil had been spent. But indeed the living Virgil is less
real to us than the stately shade, so gladly descried by the Floren-
tine pilgrim in the gloom of the Valley, the
(courteous Mantuan spirit,
Of whom the fame yet in the world endures,
And shall endure eternal as the world. ”
The ten brief pastorals known as the 'Bucolics' or 'Eclogues) were
published at Rome in 37 B. C. They are often mere paraphrases
from the more sincere Greek pastorals of the school of Theocritus.
>
## p. 15418 (#368) ##########################################
15418
VIRGIL
The shepherds' names are Greek; Sicily and Arcadia are often men-
tioned, but commingled with the scenery and life of Lombardy, or
again, with thinly veiled allusions to Roman politics! The allegory
is hopelessly confused with realism, and there is for the most part
no adequate or serious purpose in the poems. These affectionate or
abusive dialogues of Græco-Roman shepherd-courtiers, their responsive
songs or contests for some rustic prize, are, none the less, rich in
beautiful phrases and tender thoughts. Already the hexameter takes
a more delicate and varied cadence than Lucretius or Catullus could
give it. Even the imitation of the Greek originals, though recurrent,
is never slavish. It is, at its closest, such free, joyous, artistic trans-
lation as delights us in Shelley's Homeric Hymns. Some of these
poems date apparently from the earlier time of Virgil's obscurity.
Others allude to passing events in the years 41 to 37 B. C. The tenth
and latest is actually dedicated to Virgil's friend, the soldier-poet
Gallus,- who is a gallant but incongruous figure, lying under the
shadow of an Arcadian rock, among the Hamadryads and piping shep-
herds, Silenus, Pan, and all their company.
The most important among the Eclogues is the fourth, addressed
to Pollio, announcing the recent or approaching birth, in Pollio's
consulate, of a child who shall bring back the golden age. Professor
Sellar thinks the actual child alluded to was the daughter of Augus-
tus, the brilliant and infamous Julia. The imagery of the poem is
often astonishingly like that of the Hebrew prophets. That the wide-
spread expectation of a Messiah may have been known to the schol-
arly poet seems possible. Still there is no single touch in the poem
which points unmistakably to Isaiah's influence. Every image can be
paralleled in earlier Greek or Latin literature.
The next seven years of Virgil's life (37–30 B. C. ) were devoted
to the Georgics. The general purpose of these four books is the
revival of agriculture in Italy; or as Merivale and Conington agree to
put it, the “Glorification of Labor.
is plenty of heart in the ballad, nor does it appear that all the heart
he had went into his verse. The man who could devote a ballad
to the miseries of chimney-sweeps — Poor chimney-sweeps have toil
enough” (Poures housseurs ont assez peine) — was not without a
flicker of sympathy for a fellow-being; and it is hardly possible to
read in a candid spirit the beautiful ballad to the Virgin Mary,
written at his mother's request, without the conviction that he felt
the strength of that tie which in France, if anywhere, unites mother
and son.
The same ballad, and other noble passages, looked at in
a first-hand way, prove that Villon was capable of no small degree
of religious fervor. We have witnessed within the last decade the
spectacle of a poet in the depths of self-indulgence turning eagerly
to the consolations of religion,- and Paul Verlaine was a true child
of the boulevards. Why assume that there was no sincerity in the
prayers the fifteenth-century poet offered when the bell of the Sor-
bonne, striking the Angelus, bade him set aside for a moment the
writing of the Lesser Testament'? Why attempt to prove, with M.
Longnon, that Villon's three orphans, hungry,” “shoeless,” “naked
as a worm,” whom he harbored and endeavored to provide for in
every way, were after all young people of means, who employed him
as a tutor ? Is it quite safe to condemn in toto that which openly and
repeatedly and permanently criminates itself, — that which like Héloise
has dared call itself impure? On the other hand, M. Longnon's view
(
(
» «
## p. 15396 (#344) ##########################################
15396
FRANÇOIS VILLON
of Villon, and even Mr. Payne's, often seems almost too indulgent;
but the aim set forth in the latter's introduction has been nobly
fulfilled. In his own words, he has set ajar one more door, long
sadly moss-grown and ivy-hidden, into that enchanted wonderland
of French poetry, which glows with such springtide glory of many-
colored bloom, such autumn majesty of matured fruit. ”
Mr. Swinburne's rendering of the famous and ghastly Epitaph'
of Villon, made when he was expecting to be hung with five of his
companions, is simpler and on the whole closer than Mr. Payne's;
with the exception of the line where the image —
More pecked of birds than fruit on garden-wall » –
own
is strangely substituted for the dented thimble” of the original
reproduced by Mr. Payne. The poet Théodore de Banville puts into
the mouth of Pierre Gringoire a Ballade des Pendus' scarcely
yielding in fascination to the familiar “Epitaph of Villon. But the
real poet-rogue of the fifteenth century was not Pierre Gringoire,
as Victor Hugo and Théodore de Banville have led or misled us to
think. A lance at the didactic verse and irreproachable life of the
well-connected moralist Gringoire, makes it difficult to reconcile with
his character the passages that represent him rolling in the mud of
Montmartre or captivated by a pretty face at a window. . Plain facts
can never destroy the inimitable charm of passages that are their
excuse; but an observation attributed to Louis XI. — and it is
not unlikely that he made it - shows that the scapegrace whose
usual signature gave birth to the expression willonnerie bore off the
palm from all other vagabond minstrels. The King declared that he
could not afford to hang Villon; as the kingdom could boast of a
hundred thousand rascals of equal eminence, but not of one other
poet so accomplished in elegant speech and ingenious reasoning.
Undoubtedly the words were uttered at the most miserable mo-
ment in Villon's whole wretched career; when, if ever, he had lit-
erally touched bottom, let down by ropes to lie during the whole
summer of 1461 in a reeking den, or rather ditch, of the castle of
Mehun or Meung-sur-Loire, subjected to torture, and fed only on dry
bread and water. The offense for which Thibault, Archbishop of
Orléans, had caused him to be thus confined and corrected, seems to
have been his implication in the theft of a silver lamp from a church
in his diocese.
It was in this cul-de-basse-fosse that Villon is thought to have com-
posed his Dialogue between the Heart and Body of François Villon,'
a ballad worthy to rank with Shakespeare's sonnet, Poor soul, the
centre of my sinful earth! ' reminding us that Shakespeare and his
Henry V. traditionally passed through a period of wild-oat sowing
that Villon never outgrew. Had we only this ballad, instead of the
## p. 15397 (#345) ##########################################
FRANÇOIS VILLON
15397
considerable body of work he has left, we should hardly see less
clearly into his real state of mind, - his horror and disgust at losing
his moral footing, his sound judgment betrayed and belied by a fatal
weakness of purpose and want of self-control. Certainly the words —
«We poets in our youth begin in gladness,
But thereof comes in the end despondency and madness,
apply at least as well to Villon and Verlaine as to
«Him who walked in glory and in joy,
Following his plow upon the mountain-side. )
Villon's life had begun in 1431 — in the very month (May), it
would seem, when the great soul of Jeanne d'Arc went out; an event
that drew from him the laconic and otherwise characteristic con-
ment:-
“Et lehanne, la bonne Lorraine,
Qu' Englois brulerent à Rouen. »
« The good Lorrainer the English bare
Captive to Rouen and burned her there. "
He had taken the degree of M. A. in the University of Paris. Twice
sentenced to the gallows, he had escaped it only to enter upon a
course of dissipation which confirmed him in the companionship of
sneak-thieves, highwaymen, and women of the most depraved and
abandoned class. He had certainly killed his man,
,- a priest, who
however had dealt the first blow, compelling him to draw in self-
defense, and who made intercession for him with his dying breath.
According to Villon's own asseverations, which must have had
some foundation in fact, his rejection by the only woman he ever
loved had been the beginning of all his troubles. He holds her
responsible for his ruin; but turns her coldness and his chagrin to
account by making them the motif of his (Lesser Testament,' writ-
ten at an earlier period than the “Greater,' and representing him a
martyr to love bequeathing real and imaginary treasures to a motley
crowd of friends and enemies (all of them more or less notorious in
their time), before taking flight from the scene of his disappointment.
The young lady in question, whom Villon calls his rose, but whose
name was Catherine de Vaucelles, is thought to have been a niece of
Guillaume Villon, the canon of the cathedral church of Saint-Bénoit,
who took the boy under his protection, if not into his residence,-
the Hôtel de la Porte Rouge, adjoining the Sorbonne. Whether the
young student adopted the surname of his patron; whether they were
actual relatives, or only fellow-townsmen of the village of Villon, still
existing,- according to M. Longnon it is certain that the older man,
who is known to have been of a gentle disposition, never had the
## p. 15398 (#346) ##########################################
15398
FRANÇOIS VILLON
heart to turn away the younger; but continued to aid him, and to be
more than a father to him, long after his behavior had forfeited all
claim to forgiveness.
In spite of the grave fissures in his character, — in a manner by
reason of them,- he must at one time or another have enjoyed the
favor of many far above him in rank. When the newly crowned
monarch, Louis XI. , passing through the town and stopping at the
castle where Villon had been confined a whole summer, caused him
to be set at liberty, he was only thirty years old. Yet the author of
Il n'est bon bec que de Paris) (There's no right speech out of Paris
town), and other songs afterwards inserted in the Greater Testa-
ment,' already enjoyed a popularity seldom granted a poet in his
lifetime. Hence it is generally believed that the King's appreciation
of good literature, coupled with Villón's apparent claim (whether
founded on distant kinship or otherwise) to the special favor of the
Bourbon family, — disposing them to occasional good offices in his
behalf, — had more to do with his release than had the custom of
pardoning a certain number of criminals immediately after ascend-
ing the throne, - a custom however that Louis followed in many other
instances. Thus the king and the beggar came together for a mo-
ment; — that Villon could beg beautifully in verse is evident from
various ballads petitioning, now for a trifling sum of money, now for
the repeal of a death sentence; and it was a king who less than a
century later caused the complete works of Villon, so far as they
could be recovered, to be collected into a volume. This edition,
which the scholarly discrimination of Francis I. intrusted to the poet
Clément Marot, continued to be widely read till doubly overlaid and
obscured by the triumph of the seventeenth-century writers, succeed-
ing that of the Pléiade' that Ronsard created. Even Scott,- who
allowed few manifestations of genius or types of quaintness to escape
him, — while regretting in the notes to 'Quentin Durward' that it
would have seemed hardly wise to introduce D'Urfé, nowhere intro-
duces Villon. One cannot help thinking that this is precisely what he
would have done in that romance of the time of Louis XI. and the
banks of the Loire, — the very river that gave to the castle where the
poet was confined a portion of its name, - had Villon and his works
come out of their chrysalis a half-century sooner. But Mr. Swinburne
had not then sung of the
«Poor splendid wings, so frayed and soiled and torn ! »
The date of Villon's death is obscure. It seems impossible that he
could long have survived the completion of the Greater Testament,'
at the close of which he bewails his bodily ills, brought on by invet-
erate indulgence at the table no less than by his summer of fasting
## p. 15399 (#347) ##########################################
FRANÇOIS VILLON
15399
in the dungeon of Meung-sur-Loire. His plundering and banqueting
propensities were still further set forth in the Repues Franches,'
- a series of ribald rhymes by an unknown author, written while
the exploits of François Villon were still fresh in the minds of the
people.
Vile as the language and imagery of Villon often are, it is worthy
of note that nearly all his finest ballads are perfectly clean. The
tree bore five or six noble apples. These, rather than the worm-eaten
ones that weigh it to earth, have endeared themselves to modern
readers.
A contradiction to the world, an enigma to himself, declaring in
his despair that he understood all things save himself alone,-
« le congnois tout, fors que moy mesmes ;)
in more than one ballad begging all men coming after him to have
mercy on him; little dreaming how far his experimental methods, in
a century when political disintegration and reunion kept the language
in a state of fermentation, would determine the pitch of modern
poetry,- he might almost have hurled the bitter antistrophe -
a nameless life I lead,
A nameless death I die;
The friend whose lantern lights the mead
Were better mate than I.
And when I'm with my comrades met
Beneath the greenwood bough,
What once we were we all forget,
Nor think what we are now. )
From the Greater Testament
HERE BEGINNETH VILLON TO ENTER UPON MATTER FULL
OF ERUDITION AND OF FAIR KNOWLEDGE
N°
ow it is true that after years
Of anguish and of sorrowing,
Travail and toil and groans and tears,
And many a weary wandering,
Trouble hath wrought in me to bring
To point each shifting sentiment,
Teaching me many another thing
Than Averröes his Comment.
However, at my trials' worst,
When wandering in the desert ways,
## p. 15400 (#348) ##########################################
15400
FRANÇOIS VILLON
God, who the Emmaüs pilgrims erst
Did comfort, as the gospel says,
Showed me a certain resting-place,
And gave me gift of hope no less;
Though vile the sinner be and base,
Nothing he hates save stubbornness.
Sinned have I oft, as well I know;
But God my death doth not require,
But that I turn from sin, and so
Live righteously and shun hell-fire.
Whether one by sincere desire
Or counsel turn unto the Lord,
He sees; and casting off his ire,
Grace to repentance doth accord.
And as of its own motion shows,
Ev'n in the very first of it,
The noble Romaunt of the Rose,
Youth to the young one should remit,
So manhood do mature the wit.
And there, alack! the song says sooth:
They that such snares for me have knit
Would have me die in time of youth.
If for my death the common weal
Might anywise embettered be,
Death my own hand to me should deal
As felon, so God 'stablish me!
But unto none, that I can see,
Hindrance I do, alive or dead;
The hills, for one poor wight, perdie,
Will not be stirred out of their stead.
Whilom, when Alexander reigned,
A man that hight Diomedes
Before the Emperor was arraigned,
Bound hand and foot, like as one sees
A thief. A skimmer of the seas
Of those that course it far and nigh
He was; and so, as one of these,
They brought him to be doomed to die.
The Emperor bespoke him thus:---
"Why art thou a sea-plunderer? »
## p. 15401 (#349) ##########################################
FRANÇOIS VILLON
15401
The other, no wise timorous:-
“Why dost thou call me plunderer, sir ?
«
Is it, perchance, because I ear
Upon so mean a bark the sea ?
Could I but arm me with thy gear,
I would be emperor like to thee.
“What wouldst thou have? From sorry Fate,
That uses me with such despite
As I on no wise can abate,
Arises this my evil plight.
Let me find favor in thy sight
And have in mind the common saw:
In penury is little right;
Necessity knows no man's law. ”
Whenas the Emperor to his suit
Had harkened, much he wondered:
And "I thy fortune will commute
From bad to good,” to him he said;
And did. Thenceforward Diomed
Wronged none, but was a true man aye.
Thus have I in Valerius read,
Of Rome styled Greatest in his day.
If God had granted me to find
A king of like greatheartedness,
That had fair fate to me assigned,
Stooped I thenceforward to excess
Or ill, I would myself confess
Worthy to die by fire at stake.
Necessity makes folks transgress,
And want drives wolven from the brake.
My time of youth I do bewail,
That more than most lived merrily,
Until old age 'gan me assail,
For youth had passed unconsciously.
It wended not afoot from me,
Nor yet on horseback. Ah, how then ?
It fed away all suddenly,
And never will return again.
It's gone, and I am left behind,
Poor both in knowledge and in wit,
## p. 15402 (#350) ##########################################
15402
FRANÇOIS VILLON
Black as a berry, drear and dwined,
Coin, land, and goods, gone every whit;
Whilst those by kindred to me knit,
The due of Nature all forgot,
To disavow me have seen fit,
For lack of pelf to pay the scot.
When I of poverty complain,
Ofttimes my heart to me hath said,
“Man, wherefore murmur thus in vain ?
If thou hast no such plentihead
As had Jacques Caur, be comforted:
Better to live and rags to wear,
Than to have been a lord, and dead,
Rot in a splendid sepulchre. "
-
(Than to have been a lord! I say.
Alas, no longer is he one:
As the Psalm tells of it, -to-day
His place of men is all unknown. )
As for the rest, affair 'tis none
Of mine, that but a sinner be:
To theologians alone
The case belongs, and not to me.
For I am not, as well I know,
An angel's son, that crowned with light
Among the starry heavens doth go:
My sire is dead — God have his spright!
His body's buried out of sight.
I know my mother too must die,-
She knows it too, poor soul, aright, -
And soon her son by her must lie.
I know full well that rich and poor,
Villein and noble, high and low,
Laymen and clerks, gracious and dour,
Wise men and foolish, sweet of show
Or foul of favor, dames that go
Ruffed and rebatoed, great or small,
High-tired or hooded, — Death (I know)
Without exception seizes all.
Paris or Helen though one be, -
Who dies, in pain and drearihead,
## p. 15403 (#351) ##########################################
FRANÇOIS VILLON
15403
For lack of breath and blood dies he,
His gall upon his heart is shed:
Then doth he sweat, God knows how dread
A sweat, and none there is to allay
His ills; child, kinsman, in his stead
None will go bail for him that day.
Death makes him shiver and turn pale,
Sharpens his nose and swells his veins,
Puffs up his throat, makes his flesh fail,
His joints and nerves greatens and strains.
Fair women's bodies, soft as skeins
Of silk, so tender, smooth and rare,
Must you too suffer all these pains ?
Ay, or alive to heaven fare.
BALLAD OF OLD-TIME LADIES
TEL
ELL me where, in what land of shade,
Bides fair Flora of Rome, and where
Are Thaïs and Archipiade,
Cousins-german of beauty rare,
And Echo, more than mortal fair,
That when one calls by the river-flow
Or marish, answers out of the air ?
But what is become of last year's snow ?
Where did the learn'd Heloisa vade,
For whose sake Abelard might not spare
(Such dole for love on him was laid)
Manhood to lose and a cowl to wear ?
And where is the queen who willed whilere
That Buridan, tied in a sack, should go
Floating down Seine from the turret-stair ?
But what is become of last year's snow?
Blanche, too, the lily-white queen, that made
Sweet music as if she a siren were ;
Broad-foot Bertha; and Joan the maid,
The good Lorrainer, the English bare
Captive to Rouen and burned her there;
Beatrix, Eremburge, Alys, - lo!
Where are they, Virgin debonair ?
But what is become of last year's snow ?
## p. 15404 (#352) ##########################################
15404
FRANÇOIS VILLON
ENVOI
Prince, you may question how they fare
This week, or liefer this year, I trow:
Still shall the answer this burden bear,
But what is become of last year's snow?
BALLAD OF OLD-TIME LORLS
No. 1
(Following on the Same Subject)
W"
HERE is Calixtus, third of the name,
That died in the purple whiles ago,
Four years since he to the tiar came?
And the King of Arragon, Alfonso ?
The Duke of Bourbon, sweet of show,
And the Duke Arthur of Brittaine ?
And Charles the Seventh, the Good ? Heigho!
But where is the doughty Charlemaine ?
Likewise the King of Scots, whose shame
Was the half of his face (or folk say so),
Vermeil as amethyst held to the flame,
From chin to forehead all of a glow?
The King of Cyprus, of friend and foe
Renowned; and the gentle King of Spain,
Whose name, God 'ield me, I do not know?
But where is the doughty Charlemaine ?
Of many more might I ask the same,
Who are but dust that the breezes blow;
But I desist, for none may claim
To stand against Death, that lays all low:
Yet one more question before I go,-
Where is Lancelot, King of Behaine ?
And where are his valiant ancestors, trow?
But where is the doughty Charlemaine?
ENVOI
Where is Du Guesclin, the Breton prow?
Where Auvergne's Dauphin, and where again
The late good Duke of Alençon ? Lo!
But where is the doughty Charlemaine?
## p. 15405 (#353) ##########################################
FRANÇOIS VILLON
15405
BALLAD OF OLD-TIME LORDS
No. 2
W"
Here are the holy apostles gone,
Alb-clad and amice-tired and stoled
With the sacred tippet and that alone,
Wherewith, when he waxeth overbold,
The foul fiend's throttle they take and hold ?
All must come to the selfsame bay;
Sons and servants, their daya are told:
The wind carries their like away'.
Where is he now that held the throne
Of Constantine with the hands of gold ?
And the King of France, o'er all kings known
For grace and worship that was extolled,
Who convents and churches manifold
Built for God's service ? ' In their day
What of the honor they had ? Behold,
The wind carries their like away.
Where are the champions every one,
The Dauphins, the counselors young and old ?
The barons of Salins, Dôl, Dijon,
Vienne, Grenoble? They all are cold.
Or take the folk under their banners enrolled, -
Pursuivants, trumpeters, heralds, (hey!
How they fed of the fat, and the Alagon trolled ! ) —
The wind carries their like away.
ENVOI
Princes to death are all foretold,
Even as the humblest of their array:
Whether they sorrow or whether they scold,
The wind carries their like away.
BALLAD OF THE WOMEN OF PARIS
TO
HOUGH folk deem women young and old
Of Venice and Genoa well eno'
Favored with speech, both glib and bold,
To carry messages to and fro;
Savoyards, Florentines less or mo',
## p. 15406 (#354) ##########################################
15406
FRANÇOIS VILLON
Romans and Lombards though folk renown,-
I, at my peril, I say no:
There's no right speech out of Paris town.
The Naples women (so we are told)
Can school all comers in speech and show;
Prussians and Germans were still extolled
For pleasant prattle of friend and foe;
But hail they from Athens or Grand Cairo,
Castile or Hungary, black or brown,
Greeks or Egyptians, high or low,
There's no right speech out of Paris town.
Switzers nor Bretons know how to scold,
Nor Provence nor Gascony women: lo!
Two fishfags in Paris the bridge that hold
Would slang them dumb in a minute or so.
Picardy, England, Lorraine, (heigho!
Enough of places have I set down ? )
Valenciennes, Calais, wherever you go,
There's no right speech out of Paris town.
ENVOI
Prince, to the Paris ladies, I trow,
For pleasant parlance I yield the crown.
They may talk of Italians; but this I know,
There's no right speech out of Paris town.
BALLAD THAT VILLON MADE AT THE REQUEST OF HIS
MOTHER, WHEREWITHAL TO DO HER HOMAGE
TO OUR LADY
L"
ADY of heaven, Regent of the earth,
Empress of all the infernal marshes fell,
Receive me, thy poor Christian, 'spite my dearth,
In the fair midst of thine elect to dwell;
Albeit my lack of grace I know full well:
For that thy grace, my Lady and my Queen,
Aboundeth more than all my misdemean,
Withouten which no soul of all that sigh
May merit heaven. 'Tis sooth I say, for e'en
In this belief. I will to live and die.
Say to thy Son I am his, — that by his birth
And death my sins be all redeemable;
## p. 15407 (#355) ##########################################
FRANÇOIS VILLON
15407
As Mary of Egypt's dole he changed to mirth,
And eke Theophilus, to whom befell
Quittance of thee, albeit (so men tell)
To the foul fiend he had contracted been.
Assoilzie me, that I may have no teen,
Maid that without breach of virginity
Didst bear our Lord that in the Host is seen.
In this belief I will to live and die.
A poor old wife I am, and little worth;
Nothing I know, nor letter aye could spell:
Where in the church to worship I fare forth,
I see heaven limned with harps and lutes, and hell
Where damned folk seethe in fire unquenchable.
One doth me fear, the other joy serene:
Grant I may have the joy, O Virgin clean,
To whom all sinners lift their hands on high,
Made whole in faith through thee their go-between.
In this belief I will to live and die.
ENVOI
Thou didst conceive, Princess most bright of sheen,
Jesus the Lord, that hath nor end nor mean,
Almighty, that, departing heaven's demesne
To succor us, put on our frailty,
Offering to death his sweet of youth and green:
Such as he is, our Lord he is, I ween!
In this belief I will to live and die.
LAY, OR RATHER ROUNDEL
D
EATH, of thy rigor I complain,
That hast my lady torn from me,
And wilt not yet contented be,
Save from me too all strength be ta’en,
For languishment of heart and brain.
What harm did she in life to thee,
Death ?
One heart we had betwixt us twain;
Which being dead, I too must dree
Death, or, like carven saints we see
In choir, sans life to live be fain,
Death!
[End of the Greater Testament. ]
## p. 15408 (#356) ##########################################
15408
FRANÇOIS VILLON
BALLAD OF VILLON IN PRISON
H
AVE pity, friends, have pity now, I pray,
If it so please you, at the least, on me!
I lie in fosse, not under holm or may,
In this duresse, wherein, alas! I dree
Ill fate, as God did thereanent decree.
Lasses and lovers, younglings manifold,
Dancers and montebanks, alert and bold,
Nimble as quarrel from a crossbow shot;
Singers, that troll as clear as bells of gold, -
Will you all leave poor Villon here to rot?
Clerks, that go caroling the livelong day,
Scant-pursed, but glad and frank and full of glee;
Wandering at will along the broad highway,
Harebrained, perchance, but whit-whole too, perdie:
Lo! now I die, whilst that you absent be,
Song-singers, - when poor Villon's days are told,
You will sing psalms for him and candles hold;
Here light nor air nor levin enters not,
Where ramparts thick are round about him rolled.
Will you all leave poor Villon here to rot?
Consider but his piteous array,
High and fair lords, of suit and service free,
That nor to king nor kaiser homage pay,
But straight from God in heaven hold your fee!
Come fast or feast, all days alike fasts he,
Whence are his teeth like rakes' teeth to behold;
No table hath he but the sheer black mold;
After dry bread (not manchets), pot on pot
They empty down his throat of water cold:
Will you all leave poor Villon here to rot?
ENVOI
Princes and lords aforesaid, young and old,
Get me the King his letters sealed and scrolled,
And draw me from this dungeon; for, God wot,
Even swine, when one squeaks in the butcher's fold,
Flock around their fellow and do squeak and scold.
Till
you all leave poor Villon here to rot?
## p. 15409 (#357) ##########################################
FRANÇOIS VILLON
15409
THE EPITAPH IN BALLAD FORM THAT VILLON MADE FOR
HIMSELF AND HIS COMPANIONS, EXPECTING NO BETTER
THAN TO BE HANGED IN THEIR COMPANY
B
ROTHERS, that after us on life remain,
Harden your hearts against us not as stone;
For, if to pity us poor wights you're fain,
God shall the rather grant you benison.
You see us six, the gibbet hereupon:
As for the flesh that we too well have fed,
'Tis all devoured and rotted, shred by shred.
Let none make merry of our piteous case,
Whose crumbling bones the life long since hath Aled:
The rather pray, God grant us of his grace!
Yea, we conjure you, look not with disdain,
Brothers, on us, though we to death were done
By justice. Well you know, the saving grain
Of sense springs not in every mother's son;
Commend us, therefore, now we're dead and gone,
To Christ, the Son of Mary's maidenhead,
That he leave not his grace on us to shed
And save us from the nether torture-place.
Let no one harry us,- forsooth, we're sped:
The rather pray, God grant us of his grace!
We are whiles scoured and soddened of the rain,
And whiles burnt up and blacke
ed of the sun;
Corbies and pyets have our eyes out-ta’en,
And plucked our beard and hair out one by one.
Whether by night or day, rest have we none:
Now here, now there, as the wind shifts its stead,
We swing and creak and rattle overhead,
No thimble dinted like our bird-pecked face.
Brothers, have heed and shun the life we led :
The rather pray, God grant us of his grace!
ENVOI
Prince Jesus, over all empowered,
Let us not fall into the Place of Dread,
But all our reckoning with the Fiend efface.
Folk, mock us not that are forspent and dead:
The rather pray, God grant us of his grace !
XXVI-964
## p. 15410 (#358) ##########################################
15410
FRANÇOIS VILLON
BALLAD OF THINGS KNOWN AND UNKNOWN
F
LIES in the milk I know full well;
I know men by the clothes they wear;
I know the walnut by the shell;
I know the foul sky from the fair;
I know the pear-tree by the pear;
I know the worker from the drone,
And eke the good wheat from the tare:
I know all save myself alone.
I know the pourpoint by the fell,
And by his gown I know the frère;
Master by varlet I can spell;
Nuns by the veils that hide their hair;
I know the sharper and his snare,
And fools that fat on cates have grown;
Wines by the cask I can compare:
I know all save myself alone.
I know how horse from mule to tell;
I know the load that each can bear;
I know both Beatrice and Bell;
I know the hazards, odd and pair;
I know of visions in the air;
I know the power of Peter's throne,
And how misled Bohemians were:
I know all save myself alone.
ENVOI
Prince, I know all things; fat and spare,
Ruddy and pale, to me are known,
And Death that endeth all our care:
I know all save myself alone.
BALLAD AGAINST THOSE WHO MISSAY OF FRANCE
LET
ET him meet beasts that breathe out fiery rain,
Even as did Jason hard by Colchis town;
Or seven years changed into a beast remain,
Nebuchadnezzar-like, to earth bowed down;
Or suffer else such teen and mickle bale
As Helen's rape on Trojans did entail;
Or in Hell's marshes fallen let him fare
Like Tantalus and Proserpine, or bear
## p. 15411 (#359) ##########################################
FRANÇOIS VILLON
15411
A grievouser than Job his sufferance,
Prisoned and pent in Dædalus his snare,-
Who would wish ill unto the realm of France.
Four months within a marish let him plain,
Bittern-like, with the mud against his crown;
Or sell him to the Ottoman, to chain
And harness like an ox, the scurvy clown!
Or thirty years, like Maudlin, without veil
Or vesture, let him his misdeeds bewail;
Or with Narcissus death by drowning share;
Or die like Absalom, hanged by the hair;
Or Simon Magus, by his charms' mischance;
Or Judas, mad with horror and despair,-
Who would wish ill unto the realm of France.
If but Octavian's time might come again,
His molten gold should down his throat be thrown,
Or 'twixt two millstones he should grind for grain,
As did St. Victor; or I'd have him drown
Far out to sea, where help and breath should fail,
Like Jonah in the belly of the whale;
Let him be doomed the sunlight to forswear,
Juno her goods and Venus debonair,
And be of Mars oppressed to utterance,-
As was Antiochus the king, whilere, --
Who would wish ill unto the realm of France.
ENVOI
Prince, may winds bear him to the wastes of air,
Or to the mid-sea woods and sink him there;
Be all his hopes changed to desesperance:
For he deserves not any fortune fair
Who would wish ill unto the realm of France.
BALLAD OF THE DEBATE OF THE HEART AND BODY OF
VILLON
W**"That hold but by a thread for frailty
I hearI I,
;
I have nor force nor substance, all drained dry,
Since thee thus lonely and forlorn I see,
Like a poor cur, curled up all shiveringly. -
How comes it thus ? — Of thine unwise liesse. -
## p. 15412 (#360) ##########################################
15412
FRANÇOIS VILLON
What irks it thee? - I suffer the distress. -
Leave me in peace. - Why? – I will cast about. —
When will that be ? . When I'm past childishness. —
I say no more. - And I can do without.
What deemest thou? - To mend before I die. -
At thirty years ? —'Tis a mule's age, perdie. -
Is't childhood ? — Nay. -'Tis madness, then, doth ply
And grip thee? Where? — By the nape. - Seemeth me
Nothing I know? — Yes, fies in milk, maybe:
I
,
Thou canst tell black from white yet at a press. -
Is't all? - What words can all thy faults express ? -
If it's not enough, we'll have another bout. -
Thou'rt lost. — I'll make a fight for't none the less. —
I say no more. — And I can do without.
Dule have I, pain and misery thou thereby:
If thou wert some poor idiot, happily
Thou mightst have some excuse thy heart anigh.
Lo, foul and fair are all alike to thee.
Or harder is thy head than stone by sea,
Or more than honor likes thee this duresse.
Canst thou say aught in answer ? Come, confess. -
I shall be quit on't when I die, no doubt. -
God! what a comfort 'gainst a present stress!
I say no more. — And I can do without.
Whence comes this evil ? Surely, from on high:
When Saturn made me up my fardel, he
Put all these ills in. —'Tis a foolish lie:
Thou art Fate's master, yet its slave wilt be.
Thereof see Solomon his homily:
The wise, he says, no planets can oppress;
They and their influence own his mightiness. —
Nay, as they've made me, so shall it fall out.
What sayst thou ? — 'Tis the faith that I profess. –
I say no more. —And I can do without.
ENVOI
Wilt thou live long ? So God vouchsafe me, yes. —
Then must thou What ? Repent; forswear idlesse
And study — What? — The lore of righteousness.
I'll not forget. — Forsake the motley rout
And to amendment straightway thee address:
Delay not till thou come to hopelessness.
I say no more. —And I can do without,
## p. 15412 (#361) ##########################################
## p. 15412 (#362) ##########################################
## p. 15413 (#363) ##########################################
15413
VIRGIL
(B. C. 70–19)
BY WILLIAM CRANSTON LAWTON
CM
UBLIUS VERGILIUS MARO, purest, sweetest, gentlest, best be-
loved among all poets since the dawn of civilization, was
Su. born at Andes, a village near Mantua. His birthplace, his
name, perhaps too his wealth of romantic imagination, may indicate
Keltic origin. At any rate, his father was a man of humble station,
some say a potter, who married his master's daughter, Magia. (This
name of Virgil's mother helped on the wild mediæval invention of
Virgil the magician. ) As Transpadanes, the family naturally shared
the general gratitude toward the great Julius, always their especial
champion, who in 49 B. C. conferred full Roman citizenship upon
the provincials. Virgil apparently never had personal relations with
Catullus, Calvus, and their brilliant group of young aristocrats and
anti-Cæsarian poets.
His education was not defective, certainly. He studied both at
Milan and in Rome. A doubtful tradition makes him the fellow-
student of Antony and Augustus. In a youthful poem, perhaps au-
thentic, he takes reluctant farewell of verse, when devoting himself
to philosophy as the pupil of the Epicurean sage Siron :-
« Begone, O Muses: ay, begone,- although
Sweet Muses; for we will the truth confess,
Sweet have ye been! And on my pages look
Ye yet again,– but modestly, nor oft. ”
The undertone of doubt in these words proved doubly prophetic.
Much in the tranquil Epicurean acceptance of life,- and much indeed
of Lucretius's grandest harmonies and large view of nature's eternal
pageant, - the Augustan poet-laureate always retained. Perhaps he
even envies that most fearless and lofty of atheistic philosophers:-
(Happy the man whose steadfast eye surveys
The whole world's truth, its hidden works and ways,-
Happy, who thus beneath his feet has thrown
All fears and fates, and Hell's insatiate moan! »
((Georgics, ii. 490-492, translation of F. W. H. Myers. )
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VIRGIL
These lines are generally supposed to be a direct tribute to Lucre-
But Virgil's intensely religious and even mystical spirit clung
most anxiously to those two beliefs which Lucretius puts scornfully
behind him: the faith in all-wise, all-powerful Divine beings, and in
the soul's existence after death.
Virgil was certainly no untutored child of the soil, · like Burns.
Even more than his friend Horace, he everywhere reveals the lofti-
est refinement, and lifelong loving familiarity with the best in liter-
ature and art. He turns away, indeed, like Lucretius, and far more
heartily than worldly-minded Horace, from the splendor and the noisy
throng of clients in ministerial palaces, to seek refreshment on
nature's heart.
«Oh, happy beyond all happiness — did they
Their weal but know — those husbandmen obscure,
Whose life, deep hidden from strife of arms away,
The all-righteous earth and kind doth well secure.
What though for them no towering mansion pours
At early morning, forth of its haughty doors
And halls, a surge of courtiers untold,
Gaping on the rich portals, as they pass,
Fair with mosaic of tortoise-shell, the gold
Of broidered vestments and the Corinthian brass ?
“But they are at peace in life, in guile untaught,
And dowered with manifold riches. Theirs the ease
Of acres ample, and many a shady grot,
And slumber of sweetness under sheltering trees,
And living lakes, and the cool of Tempe's valley,
And the lowing of herds are theirs continually;
Theirs are the haunts of game on the wooded hill;
And theirs a hardy youth, unto humble ways
Attempered, and patient in their toil; and still
The old have honor of them, and the gods have praise.
Justice, methinks, when driven from earth away,
Left her last footprint among such as they. ”
('Georgics,' ii. 458-474, version of Harriet Waters Preston. )
There is abundant evidence here (as in the pictures of Carthaginian
splendor in Æneid,' Books i. and iv. ) that Virgil knew the luxury
of courts as thoroughly as he did the better beloved rural peace he
craves. The last phrase just quoted, furthermore, reminds us of the
melancholy tone, the vein of pathos, which all lovers of our poet
remember so well. There was much in the conditions of the time to
justify this; indeed, that sturdy patriot Livy, in his prelude, strikes a
more disconsolate note than any single passage in the epic.
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VIRGIL
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-
In truth, the best stage of the national life had already passed
with the age of the two Africani. The lordship of Italy fully at-
tained, Rome passed on to more fatal successes. She overthrew
Carthage and Corinth in a single year (146 B. C. ); but Cato was more
than half right,- the national character was rapidly undermined by
foreign wealth, and by culture too easily and swiftly won from
without, not bred steadily from within. Doubtless Ennius's historical
poem, or versified chronicle, if ever it shall come again to light, will
seem rugged and inartistic to us, as it certainly did to most of the
later Romans. Yet it was more truly an epic of manly freedom
and patriotic pride than was possible under the early empire.
The empire itself indeed was generally, and rightly, welcomed.
But it was —
“As he who, with distressful breath,
Forth issued from the sea upon the shore,
Turns to the water perilous and gazes. ”
was
on
Augustus's rule came as the only hope of peace and order after a
century full of civic strife, beginning with the death of the generous
far-sighted patrician radical, Tiberius Gracchus, under the clubs of an
aristocratic mob (133 B. C. ).
If ever conditions were such that the stanchest republican, who
a true and wise patriot as well, must welcome “the man
horseback," it was in the year after the great Julius's death (43 B. C. );
when the Roman State,--that is, the civilized world, -already rudely
shaken and drained of its life-blood by previous civil wars, now lay
utterly helpless, and rent asunder between the dissolute rapacity of
Mark Antony, and the impracticable imperious selfishness of wouldbe
reactionists like Cassius and Brutus. Rome and civilization seemed
about to sink together into that rift of civic strife, too wide for any
Curtius to close. It was at this juncture that the cold-hearted, long-
headed boy Octavian- heir to Julius's name and fortune, far more
than heir to his self-control and mastery of other men - came upon
the scene. Pretending to side with the assassins of Julius Cæsar,
he presently threw himself into Antony's arms; perhaps because he
saw that Antony could more easily be first utilized and then dis-
patched.
The next dozen years were to cost the commonwealth much
bloodshed still, in war and peace; many of her noblest lives were
yet to be cut short by the soldier's or the bravo's sword: for we
can hardly set earlier than the decisive battle of Actium (31 B. C. ),
the end of the century of turmoil opened by the death of Tiberius
Gracchus under Nasica's bludgeon. Yet even so, the mighty emperor
Augustus could point to a reign of fully forty-five years, marked by
## p. 15416 (#366) ##########################################
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VIRGIL
are
prosperity and union within, and by foreign wars in the main suc-
cessful, when he passed on the firm-held sceptre to his unloved and
unloving kinsman, and took his own place beside Julius among the
deities of Rome. Did the august Augustus ever forget, as we
prone to do, his own identity with the dissolute stripling Octavianus
Cæsar, the murderer of his tutor Cicero? Through this long period,
- this cardinal half-century of the world's life, — the restoration of
civic order, the rebuilding of the city and especially of the temples,
the revival, so far as might be, of popular faith in the national gods,
the glorification of Rome (and of his own house) in art and literature,
were all purposes dear to Augustus's heart, all fused in the steady
central purpose of his life. In all these efforts, Virgil the poet was
as loyal and helpful as Agrippa and Mæcenas the soldier and diplo-
matist; and he met quite as generous appreciation as they, both from
his imperial master and from the Roman people.
Horace never forgot, nor ceased to be proud, that he had led his
battalion in the last hopeless struggle against the incoming despotism.
Nor did he ever wholly surrender his sturdy independence. Those
who love him best may well regret that his life fell in a time when
his genuine manliness and liberty-loving frankness must be so largely
hidden under the courtier's mask and cloak.
Virgil, on the contrary, more largely than any other great poet,
we evidently owe to the sunshine or perhaps more truly, to the
hot-house warmth - of imperial favor. The marvelous charm of his
verse, the exquisite commingling of clear-cut meaning and thousand-
fold haunting suggestion, is indeed the unique and inexplicable gift of
his genius. Yet his languid Theocritean mock-pastorals might have
perished with him, - at best he would probably have remained the
idle singer of a rather ignoble provincial life,— had Mæcenas not sum-
moned him before a far greater audience, and urged him on to more
ambitious themes.
Quite unlike Horace or any other Roman poet down to their
day, Virgil in his first undoubted utterance strikes the note of utmost
servility and adulation.
«Yea, for a god shall he be evermore unto me, and his altar
Often a tender lamb of our fold shall stain with his heart's blood ! »
cries the shepherd Tityrus in the first Eclogue. It is the voice of
Virgil himself, - one of the first to deify the half-reluctant Emperor.
The cause for gratitude was most inadequate. Virgil's little farm
by Mantua, wrongfully wrested from its loyal owner and bestowed
one of Octavian's veterans, had been tardily and reluctantly re-
stored. Moreover there is a tradition of a second expulsion, attended
with danger to the poet's life; and the urgent intercession of three
on
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VIRGIL
15417
powerful friends,- Varus, Gallus, and Pollio, - as well as Virgil's own
appeal at Rome to the dictator, were required to secure this act of
scanty justice (41 B. C. ). Indeed, some scholars doubt if Virgil ever
returned to his old home. Perhaps Augustus never lost sight of the
gifted and pliant youth whose value he promptly realized.
We cannot hope to find in this timid courtly poet the exultant
manliness and free stride of an Æschylus, an Ennius, or even of a
Dante, unbending in homeless exile, fearless of speech even under
imminent peril of death. More perhaps than any other artist, the
heroic poet needs to breathe the air of freedom. Virgil the man,
like his hero, is always conscious that his actual lot is, at best, but a
second choice. Æneas tells Dido:--
«If fate permitted me to shape my life
To my desire, and freely end my woes,
The precious remnant of my folk, and Troy,
I then would cherish. Priam's halls would rise;
With home-returning band I would have built
Again our citadel,- for vanquished men. ”
This note of mild regret for vanished hopes is so recurrent and con-
stant as to impress every listener at last. It is indeed the tone not
merely of the poet but of his whole race and generation. But sub-
mission to fate, the merging of the individual life in the larger and
more lasting current of destiny, is in all ages a peculiarly Roman
ideal. Perhaps his very limitations have helped Virgil to crystallize
into epic, more than any other artist has ever done, the whole
national life of so many centuries.
Honored and beloved though he was by all, Virgil's own earthly
life hardly seems to have been a happy one. His health was deli-
cate, his nature shy and sensitive, he had the bitterest misgivings as
to his ability to master the high themes assigned him; and his life
ends naturally with that unavailing appeal to his friends to destroy
the uncompleted and unsatisfying national epic on which so many
years of toil had been spent. But indeed the living Virgil is less
real to us than the stately shade, so gladly descried by the Floren-
tine pilgrim in the gloom of the Valley, the
(courteous Mantuan spirit,
Of whom the fame yet in the world endures,
And shall endure eternal as the world. ”
The ten brief pastorals known as the 'Bucolics' or 'Eclogues) were
published at Rome in 37 B. C. They are often mere paraphrases
from the more sincere Greek pastorals of the school of Theocritus.
>
## p. 15418 (#368) ##########################################
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VIRGIL
The shepherds' names are Greek; Sicily and Arcadia are often men-
tioned, but commingled with the scenery and life of Lombardy, or
again, with thinly veiled allusions to Roman politics! The allegory
is hopelessly confused with realism, and there is for the most part
no adequate or serious purpose in the poems. These affectionate or
abusive dialogues of Græco-Roman shepherd-courtiers, their responsive
songs or contests for some rustic prize, are, none the less, rich in
beautiful phrases and tender thoughts. Already the hexameter takes
a more delicate and varied cadence than Lucretius or Catullus could
give it. Even the imitation of the Greek originals, though recurrent,
is never slavish. It is, at its closest, such free, joyous, artistic trans-
lation as delights us in Shelley's Homeric Hymns. Some of these
poems date apparently from the earlier time of Virgil's obscurity.
Others allude to passing events in the years 41 to 37 B. C. The tenth
and latest is actually dedicated to Virgil's friend, the soldier-poet
Gallus,- who is a gallant but incongruous figure, lying under the
shadow of an Arcadian rock, among the Hamadryads and piping shep-
herds, Silenus, Pan, and all their company.
The most important among the Eclogues is the fourth, addressed
to Pollio, announcing the recent or approaching birth, in Pollio's
consulate, of a child who shall bring back the golden age. Professor
Sellar thinks the actual child alluded to was the daughter of Augus-
tus, the brilliant and infamous Julia. The imagery of the poem is
often astonishingly like that of the Hebrew prophets. That the wide-
spread expectation of a Messiah may have been known to the schol-
arly poet seems possible. Still there is no single touch in the poem
which points unmistakably to Isaiah's influence. Every image can be
paralleled in earlier Greek or Latin literature.
The next seven years of Virgil's life (37–30 B. C. ) were devoted
to the Georgics. The general purpose of these four books is the
revival of agriculture in Italy; or as Merivale and Conington agree to
put it, the “Glorification of Labor.
