later in The Two Noble Kinsmen, of one who added the sharp savour of personal suffering to his treatment of materials common to an age when every house was a fortress and every fortress a gaol. For Chaucer's experience was one general in the Middle Age-was the lot of most whose lives were more precious than their deaths could be: of Richard Coeur-de-Lion, troubadour and king; of Enzo of Sardinia, a poet-king, the son of a poet-emperor, yet a prisoner to the Bolognese from his twenty-fifth year to his death, a caitiff for three-and-twenty years; of James I. of Scotland, the sweetest singer in Chaucer's choir; of Charles D'Orléans, the father of a king, taken at Agincourt, a stripling of twentyfive and the first prince in France, to be caged in England until he was fifty; of Jehan Regnier, the precursor of Villon; of Villon, the last great singer of the Middle Age-in whose case the doom was, indeed, for crime, yet for crime only probable in a society shattered by war; of Clement Marot, the sole star in the night between Villon and the Pleiad, carried first with his king a prisoner of war to Spain, and twice afterwards imprisoned at Paris for offences against the law. The poetry of the Middle Age is so much the poetry of the prison that, even if the poet escape, his plot must still be laid between four walls. The Roman de la Rose, translated by Chaucer and copied by all, was a chief and pattern poem. Only the books of Homer have dictated the plan and supplied the poetic material for a greater city of verse: it is a Coliseum out of whose ruins many cities have been quarried. Now in the Roman de la Rose all the allegory is of incarceration and release; and it is an allegory which none ever wearied of repeating. Even as every Arabic poem, on theology or another theme, needs must open with a lament over the wasted camp from which the Beloved has been ravished, so the symbols of medieval verse are all of castles and surprises, of captivity and escape. And the perennial image of Arabic song became an obvious convention; not so the medieval allegory. The tedium of durance, the hope of release, the prospect of ransom, the accident of communication with the world without, were too near to life for that. These had been the personal note of trouvères and troubadours; and, later, they were the personal note of Charles D'Orléans and Villon and many another. I have named Jehan Regnier. Villon borrowed from him freely; and, indeed, he is a poet whose realism and pathos have somehow been overlooked. But, for the moment, I shall consider only the master-theme of his songs, which are to be read in a little volume, intituled Les Fortunes et Adversités de feu noble homme Jehan Regnier.1 He was a Burgundian, and being taken by the King's party in 1431, he was imprisoned at Beauvais. Again and yet again in the current forms of ballade, rondel, lay, he sets forth the actual sorrows of the practical captive: his weariness, his annoy' and disgust; his long parting from his wife; the silence of his friends, the hopes that depart him where he lies, the messenger who returns no more. To turn his pages is still to read 'un autre balade que ledit prisonnier fit'; to find him imploring his wife never to forget, even as he will never forget : 'My princess of the Heart I beg of thee That thou nor I forget not thee nor me, 1 Réimpression textuelle de l'édition originale, par Paul Lacroix; Genève, 1867. Only three copies of the said original are known. But let us ever hearken to our love, And pray to God and to the maid Mary Ma princesse du Cueur je vous supplie Que il nous doint a tous deux pacience ' to hear him thank her for her loyalty: 'Ma douce maitresse Qui m'a donné de sa largesse And she was loyal indeed; for at the end of two years, and after paying two thousand crowns, she won leave to play the hostage with her son, the while her husband travelled to raise the rest of his ransom. To pass the long days and nights of those two years, he wrote ballades for his fellow-prisoners, for his gaolers even. I have said that he was a Burgundian, so that, naturally, among the former were certain Englishmen, allies of his master the duke. For one of these he made a ballade : François parler il ne sçavoit A peine ne mot ne demy Thus to us out of the medieval twilight, rendered as only a Frenchman can render English, comes the cry of a countryman who knew no French. 'God and our Lady help-ë me': the grotesque pathos of it! Regnier could not sleep for the man's complaining: he moaned on through the night over his wounded hands and feet-' my fiet and my handez'-into which the shackles had eaten. He wailed of it ever, and Regnier lay awake, listening:— Oncques je ne dormy Mais son refrain toujours estoit It is the unchanging burden of his lament; Regnier, whose art has a good basis of reality, takes it for his refrain, and knits up his every stave with it. In truth, the prison and its passion were too near to life for Regnier and those others ever to be conventionalised out of reality. Conventions they had : of May mornings, for instance, and the coming of spring. Yet even these were less conventional than they seem. The matter was felt and observed under its traditional phrasing. Where every house was a moated gaol with never a road to it in winter, there needed no contrasts, of turnkeys or besieging trenches, to flush the enlargement brought round by the spring. For then, in the 'golden morning,' men came forth from the half-light of loopholed cells and the stench of rotting rushes, and rode out over the fields in their new apparel, seeing and smelling the fresh flowers, and hearkening to birds singing in the brakes. The year hath flung his cloak away Of sun-gleams brilliant and gay: thus Charles D'Orléans, in one of the most famous of his rondels. And thus, through another, not so famous, he runs a natural and familiar fancy of the coming of summer : 'King Summer's harbingers are come To place his palace in repair, D Laying the green woof of their loom Hearts long benumbed with weary gloom, King Summer's harbingers are come.' It is charming, and-what is as much to the purpose, if not more—it is, as the French say, vécu. But, for all that, it profited its author little. For Charles had long since come to know by experience-none better!-that hearts once benumbed with weary gloom can no more be quite whole, can never be again in perfect accord with the renewing year. He wrote these rondels, I doubt not, at Blois, in the languid liberty of his old age, recalling, with vain regret, those long years of his wasted manhood, wherein the banishment of winter and the release of spring still found him in a northern prison. But they were the toys of his second childhood. His Poème de la Prison, written in England, was the capital piece, even as his imprisonment in England was the chief feature, of his life.. Like Villon's poem, engendered of a kindred misfortune, it is excellent in art; like Villon's, too, it has an interest apart from art. We are often tempted to fix our looks on the lives of the great actors in an age: to exaggerate, within these lives, the salience of certain immortal deeds, and then to stamp a nation, or an epoch, with such same dies of individual worth. To yield to that temptation is to misread history, for the contours of an age may far more surely be traced in the lives of those who |