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It was not only the metropolitan, it was the Parisian spirit which Villon found and fixed. That spirit which is bright over the whole city, but which is not known in the first village outside; the influence that makes Paris Athenian.

The ironical Parisian soul has depths in it. It is so lucid that its luminous profundity escapes one–so with Villon. Religion hangs there. Humility–fatally divorced from simplicity–pervades it. It laughs at itself. There are ardent passions of sincerity, repressed and reacting upon themselves. The virtues, little practised, are commonly comprehended, always appreciated, for the Faith is there permanent. All this you will find in Villon, but it is too great a matter for so short an essay as this.

THE DEAD LADIES.

It is difficult or impossible to compare the masterpieces of the world. It is easy and natural to take the measure of a particular writer and to establish a scale of his work.

Villon is certainly in the small first group of the poets. His little work, like that of Catullus, like that of Gray, is up, high, completed and permanent. And within that little work this famous Ballade is by far the greatest thing.

It contains all his qualities: not in the ordinary proportion of his character, but in that better, exact proportion which existed in him when his inspiration was most ardent: for the poem has underlying it somewhere a trace of his irony, it has all his ease and rapidity–excellent in any poet–and it is carried forward by that vigour I have named, a force which drives it well upwards and forward to its foaming in the seventh line of the third verse.

The sound of names was delightful to him, and he loved to use it; he had also that character of right verse, by which the poet loves to put little separate pictures like medallions into the body of his writing: this Villon loved, as I shall show in other examples, and he has it here.

The end of the middle ages also is strongly in this appeal or confession of mortality; their legends, their delicacy, their perpetual contemplation of death.

But of all the Poem’s qualities, its run of words is far the finest.

THE DEAD LADIES.

Dictes moy ou, n’en quel pays
Est Flora la belle Rommaine;
Archipiada, ne Thais,
Qui fut sa cousine germaine;
Echo, parlant quand bruyt on maine
Dessus riviere ou sus estan,
Qui beaulte ot trop plus qu’humaine?
Mais ou sont les neiges d’antan?

Ou est la tres sage Hellois,
Pour qui fut chastre et puis moyne
Pierre Esbaillart a Saint-Denis?
Pour son amour ot cest essoyne.
Semblablement, ou est la royne
Qui commanda que Buridan
Fust gecte en ung sac en Saine?
Mais ou sont les neiges d’antan!

La Royne Blanche comme un lis,
Qui chantoit a voix de seraine;
Berte au grant pie Bietris, Allis;
Haremburgis qui tint le Maine,
Et Jehanne, la bonne Lorraine,
Qu’Englois brulerent a Rouan;
Ou sont elles, Vierge souvraine?
Mais ou sont les neiges d’antan!

ENVOI.

Prince, n’enquerez de sepmaine
Ou elles sont, ne de cest an,
Que ce reffrain ne vous remaine:
Mais ou sont les neiges d’antan!

AN EXCERPT FROM THE GRANT TESTAMENT.
(Stanzas 75-79.)

Villon’s whole surviving work is in the form of two rhymed wills–one short, one long: and in the latter, Ballads and Songs are put in each in their place, as the tenour of the verse suggests them.

Thus the last Ballade, that of the “Dead Ladies,” comes after a couple of strong stanzas upon the necessity of death–and so forth.

One might choose any passage, almost, out of the mass to illustrate the character of this “Testament” in which the separate poems are imbedded. I have picked those round about the 800th line, the verses in which he is perhaps least brilliant and most tender.