BOOK II.
THE RENAISSANCE.
CHAPTER I.
VILLON, COMINES, AND THE LATER FIFTEENTH CENTURY.
The Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
Characteristics of Fifteenth-century Literature.
To determine at what period exactly mediaeval literature ceases in France and modern literature begins, is not one of the easiest problems of literary history. It has sometimes been solved by the obvious expedient of making out of the fifteenth century a period of transition, sometimes by continuing the classification of 'mediaeval' until the time when Marot and Rabelais gave unmistakeable evidence of the presence and working of the modern spirit. Perhaps, however, there may, after all, have been something in the instinct which, in words clumsily enough chosen, made Boileau date modern French poetry from Villon[153], and there can hardly be any doubt that, as far as spirit if not form goes, modern French prose dates from Comines. These two contemporary authors, moreover, have in them the characteristic which perhaps more than any other distinguishes modern from mediaeval literature, the predominance of the personal element. In their works, especially if Villon be taken with the immediately preceding and partially contemporary Charles d'Orléans, a difference of the most striking kind is noticeable at once. It is not that the prince who served the god Nonchaloir so piously is deficient in personal characteristics or personal attractiveness, but that his personality is still, so to speak, generic rather than individual. He is still the Trouvère of the nobler class, dallying with half-imaginary woes in the forms consecrated by tradition to the record of them. Not so the vagabond whose words after four centuries appeal directly to the spirit of the modern reader. That reader is cut off from Charles d'Orléans' world by a gulf across which he can only project himself by a great effort of study or of sympathetic determination. The barriers which separate him from Villon are slight enough, consisting mostly of trifling changes in language and manners which a little exertion easily overcomes.
The latter portion of the fifteenth century, or, to speak more correctly, its last two-thirds, have frequently been described as a 'dead season' in French literature. The description is not wholly just. Even if, according to the plan just explained, we throw Charles d'Orléans and Antoine de la Salle, two names of great importance, back into the mediaeval period, and if we allow most of the chroniclers who preceded Comines to accompany them, there are still left, before the reign of Francis the First witnessed the definite blooming of the Renaissance in France, the two names of consummate importance which stand at the head of this chapter, a few minor writers of interest such as Coquillart, Baude, Martial d'Auvergne, an interesting group of literary or at least oratorical ecclesiastics, and a much larger and, from a literary point of view, more important group of elaborate versifiers, the so-called grands rhétoriqueurs who preceded the Pléiade in endeavouring to Latinise the French tongue, and whose stiff verse produced by a natural rebound the easy grace of Clément Marot. Each of these persons and groups will demand some notice, and the mention of them will bring us to the Renaissance of which the subjects of this chapter were the forerunners.
Villon.