The foreign debt of English literature

by T. G. Tucker

Of Ydoine and of Amadas;

Stories of diverse thinges,

Of princes, prelates and kinges;

Many songes of divers rhyme,

As Engelish, French and Latyne.

Before French literature could make much further advance, it must pass, after that of Italy, under pupilage to the Renaissance. As in England of the fifteenth century, there is first a period of stagnation, and then one during which France is borrowing and assimilating to its utmost lessons in thought and style, in form and substance, from the lately recovered classical masterpieces of Greece and Rome, as well as from the Italian writers who first enjoyed and exploited these treasures. During these stagnant and growing stages of French literature it exercises comparatively little effect upon our own.

The Renaissance naturally reached France before it extended to England, and the Renaissance meant in France what it had meant in Italy, and what it afterwards came to mean in England, namely, the widening of the intellectual and moral horizon, broader knowledge and broader views, a shaking off of old and dry traditions. And therewith it also meant greater variety of subjects in literature and the reign of better models of thought and expression. The effect of the Renaissance on French literature was to draw the thoughts of authors away from the old monotonous round of romances and allegories, and at the same time away from the old monotonous expressions and phrases; to make them attack all interesting subjects of thought, and meanwhile to adapt and polish the instrument of language which expressed them. This it was which the recovery of the Greek and Latin classics accomplished for Italians, Frenchmen, and Englishmen alike, supplying them with new range and scope, with new patterns and principles.

But as in England, so in France, this new birth and literary reformation did not exercise its full effect immediately. In England it gradually culminated in the Elizabethan age, in France it only attained its full development in the seventeenth century. That is to say, it was actually slower of progress in France than in our own literature.

For a time, while the first influences of the Renaissance were being felt, the effect in France was, as in England, a severance from the old subjects and methods, without a full adoption of the classical subjects and principles. The classical influence acts as a solvent before it comes to act as a crystallizing agent. There is, in fact, a transition period, during which writing is left free to attempt various forms. If a man of natural genius arises in such an epoch, he will give us his natural self, and so may create us prose or verse which, despite a deficiency in knowledge, will be immortal through its own truth and strength. If on the other hand at such a transition period men who write are lacking in native power, they will write much worse when they follow no models and adhere to no principles. In England, during the transition from the epoch of Chaucer to the time of Wyatt and Surrey, there appeared no distinguished poetic genius, and, except among Scottish writers like Dunbar, little more than tiresome production. In France, on the contrary, there were two distinguished poets, Villon (fifteenth century) and Marot (early sixteenth). These were stimulated by the new ideas, but were not yet dominated by the new classical models. They were freed from the mediaeval shackles, and not yet fettered in the bonds of misapprehended and misapplied “classical” principles.

François Villon wrote during the latter half of the fifteenth century, and is principally known by his ballads, which were something quite new to French literature, and have, one may venture to say, remained unique therein. From the old artificial romances and allegories he breaks clean away. He is as original and independent as our poet Burns, whom, by the way, he somewhat resembled in personal character. His merit, like that of the Greeks whom he did not know, lies in his truth, in the candid expression of his own personal emotions, in his naive confessions, in his sincere pathos. We all sympathize with emotions and confessions of this nature, and therefore Villon, like Burns, possesses a permanent and a universal value. And not only is he true in sentiment, he is clear and direct in his phrase, and musical in his verse.