There are few names in the history of literature over which the shadow has so long and so persistently lain as over that of the father of French poetry. Up to no more distant period than the early part of the year 1877, it was not even known what was his real name, nor were the admirers of his genius in possession of any other facts relative to his personal history than could be gleaned, by a painful process of inference and deduction, from those works of the poet that have been handed down to posterity. The materials that exist for the biography of Shakespeare or Dante are indeed scanty enough, but they present a very harvest of fact and suggestion compared with the pitiable fragments upon which, until the publication of M. [Auguste] Longnon's Etude Biographique sur Francois Villon [1877], we had alone to rely for our personal knowledge of Villon. Even now the facts and dates, that M. Longnon has so valiantly and so ingeniously rescued for us from the vast charnel-house of mediæval history, are in themselves scanty enough; and it is necessary to apply to their connection and elucidation no mean amount of goodwill and faithful labour, before anything like a definite framework of biography can be constructed from them. Such as they are, however, they enable us for the first time to catch a glimpse of the strange mad life and dissolute yet attractive personality of the wild, reckless, unfortunate Parisian poet, whose splendid if erratic verse flames out like a meteor from the somewhat dim twilight of French fifteenth-century literature.

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No work of Villon's, posterior to the Greater Testament, is known to us, nor is there any trace of its existence: indeed, from the date 1461, with which he himself heads his principal work, we entirely lose sight of him; and it may be supposed, in view of the condition of mental and bodily weakness in which we find him at that time, that he did not long survive its completion.

There can be no doubt that Villon was appreciated at something like his real literary value by the people of his time. Little as we know of his life, everything points to the conclusion that his writings were highly popular during his lifetime, not only among those princes and gallants whom he had made his friends, but among that Parisian public of the lower orders with whom he was so intimately identified. Allusions here and there lead us to suppose that his ballads and shorter pieces were known among the people long before they were collected into a final form; and it is probable that they were hawked about in MS. and afterwards printed on broadsheets in black letter, as were such early English poems as the Childe of Bristowe and the History of Tom Thumb. For a hundred years after his death the ballads were always differentiated from the rest in the colophons or descriptive headings of the various editions, in which the printers announce 'The Testament of Villon and his Ballads,' as if the latter had previously been a separate and well-known speciality of the poet; we may even suppose them to have been set to music and sung, as were the odes of Ronsard a hundred years later; and, indeed, many of them seem imperatively to call for such treatment. Who cannot fancy the "Ballad of the Women of Paris," 'Il n'est bon bec que de Paris,' being sung about the streets by the students and gamins, or the orison for Master Cotard's soul being trolled out as a drinking-song by that jolly toper at some jovial reunion of the notaries and 'chicquanous' of his acquaintance?

The twenty-seven editions, still extant, that were published before 1542, are sufficient evidence of the demand (probably for the time unprecedented) that existed for his poems during the seventy or eighty years that followed his death; and it is a significant fact that the greatest poet of the first half of the sixteenth century should have applied himself, at the special request of Francis the First (who is said to have known Villon by heart), to rescue his works from the labyrinth of corruption and misrepresentation into which they had fallen through the carelessness of printers and the insouciance of the public, who seem to have had his verses too well by rote to trouble themselves to protest against misprints and misreadings. Marot's own writings bear evident traces of the care and love with which he had studied the first poet of his time, who, indeed, appears to have given the tone to all the rhymers, Gringoire, Martial d'Auvergne, Cretin, Coquillart, Jean Marot, who continued, though with no great brilliancy, to keep alive the sound and cadence of French song during the latter part of the fifteenth and the first years of the sixteenth centuries. The advent of the poets of the Pleiad, and the deluge of Latin and Greek form and sentiment with which they flooded the poetic literature of France, seem at once to have arrested the popularity of the older poets. Imitations of Horace, Catullus, Anacreon, Pindar, took the place of the more spontaneous and original style of poetry founded upon the innate capacities of the language and that esprit gaulois that represented the national sentiment and tendencies. The memory of Villon, enfant de Paris, child of the Parisian gutter as he was, went down before the new movement, characterised at once by its extreme pursuit of refinement at all hazards and its neglect of those stronger and deeper currents of sympathy and passion for which one must dive deep into the troubled waters of popular life and popular movement. For nearly three centuries the name and fame of the singer of the ladies of old time remained practically forgotten, buried under wave upon wave of literary and political movement, all apparently equally hostile to the tendency and spirit of his work. We find, indeed, the three greatest spirits of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Rabelais, Regnier and La Fontaine, evincing by their works and style, if not by any more explicit declaration, their profound knowledge and sincere appreciation of Villon; but their admiration had no influence whatever upon the universal consent with which the tastes and tendencies of their respective times appear to have agreed upon the complete oblivion of the early poet. The first half of the eighteenth century, indeed, produced three several editions of Villon; but the critics and readers of the age were little likely to prefer the high-flavoured and robust food, that Villon set before them, to the whipped creams, the rose and musk-flavoured confections with which the literary pastry-cooks of the day so liberally supplied them; and it was not till the full development, towards the end of the first half of the present century, of the Romantic movement (a movement whose causes and tendencies bore so great an affinity to that of which Villon in his own time was himself the agent), that he again began to be in some measure restored to his proper place in the hierarchy of French literature. Yet even then we can still remember the compassionate ridicule with which the efforts of Théophile Gautier to revindicate the memory of the great old poet were received, and how even that perfect and noble spirit, in whose catholic and unerring appreciation no spark of true genius or of worthy originality ever failed to light a corresponding flame of enthusiasm, was fain to dissimulate the fervour of his admiration under the translucid mask of partial depreciation, and to provide for his too bold enterprise of rehabilitation a kind of apologetic shelter by classing the first great poet of France with far less worthy writers, under the heading of 'Les Grotesques.' In the country of his birth Villon is still little read, although the illustrious poet Théodore de Banville has done much to facilitate the revival of his fame by regenerating the form in which his greatest triumphs were achieved; and it is perhaps, indeed, in England that his largest public (scanty enough as yet) may be expected to be found.

The vigorous beauty and reckless independence of Villon's style and thought, although a great, has been by no means the only obstacle to his enduring popularity. A hardly less effectual one has always existed in the evanescent nature of the allusions upon which so large a part of his work is founded. In his preface to the edition above referred to, Marot allows it to be inferred that, even at so comparatively early a period as 1533, the greater part of his references to persons and places of his own day had become obscure, if not altogether undecipherable, to all but those few persons of advanced age who may be said to have been almost his contemporaries. Nevertheless, when we have made the fullest possible allowance for obscurity and faded interest, there still remain in Villon's verse treasures of beauty, wit and wisdom, enough to insure the preservation of his memory as a poet as long as the remembrance of French poetry survives.

Villon's spirit and tendency are eminently romantic, in the sense that he employed modern language and modern resources to express and individualise the eternal elements of human interest and human passion as they appeared, moulded into new phases and invested with new colours and characteristics by the shifting impulses and tendencies of his time. He had, indeed, in no ordinary degree, the great qualification of the romantic poet; he understood the splendour of modern things, and knew the conjurations that should compel the coy spirit of contemporary beauty to cast off the rags and tatters of circumstance, the low and debased seeming in which it was enchanted, and tower forth, young, glorious and majestic, as the bewitched princess in the fairy tale puts off the aspect and vesture of hideous and repulsive eld at the magic touch of perfect love. The true son of his time, he rejected at once and for ever, with the unerring judgment of the literary reformer, the quaint formalities of speech, the rhetorical exaggerations and limitations of expression and the Chinese swathing of allegory and conceit that dwarfed the thought and deformed the limbs of the verse of his day and reduced poetry to a kind of Thibetan prayer-wheel, in which the advent of the Spring, the conflict of love and honour, the cry of the lover against the cruelty of his lady and the glorification of the latter by endless comparison to all things fit and unfit, were ground up again and again into a series of kaleidoscopic patterns, wearisome in the sameness of their mannered beauty, and from whose contemplation one rises with dazzled eyes and exhausted sense, longing for some cry of passion, some flower-birth of genuine sentiment, to burst the strangling sheath of affectation and prescription. Before Villon, the language of the poets of the time had become almost as pedantic, although not so restricted and colourless, as that of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By dint of continual employment in the same grooves and in the same formal sense, the most forceful and picturesque words of the language had almost ceased to possess individuality or colour; for the phosphorescence that springs from the continual contact of words with thought and their reconstruction at the stroke of passion was wanting, not to be supplied or replaced by the aptest ingenuity or the most untiring wit. Villon did for French poetic speech that which Rabelais afterwards performed for its prose (and it is a singular coincidence, which I believe has not before been remarked, that the father of French poetry and the father of French prose were, as it were, predestined to the task they accomplished

by the name that was common to both, François or French par excellence). He restored the exhausted literary language of his time to youth and health by infusing into it the healing poisons, the revivifying acids and bitters of the popular speech, disdaining no materials that served his purpose, replacing the defunet forms with new phrases, new shapes wrung from the heart of the spoken tongue, plunging with audacious hand into the slang of the tavern and the bordel, the cant of the highway and the prison, choosing from the wayside heap and the street gutter the neglected pebbles and nodules in which he alone divined the hidden diamonds and rubies of picturesque expression, to be polished and facetted into glory and beauty by the regenerating friction of poetic employment.

Villon was the first great poet of the people: his love of the life of common things, the easy familiarity of the streets and highways, his intimate knowledge of and affection for the home and outdoor life of the merchant, the hawker, the artisan, the mountebank, nay, even the thief, the prostitute and the gipsy of his time, stand out in unmistakable characters from the lineaments of his work. The cry of the people rings out from his verse—that cry of mingled misery and humour, sadness and cheerfulness, which, running through Rabelais and Régnier, was to pass unheeded till it swelled into the judgment-thunder of the Revolution. The sufferings, the oppression, the bonhomic, the gourmandise, the satirical good humour of that French people that has so often been content to starve upon a jesting ballad or a mocking epigram, its gallantry, its perspicacity and its innate lack of reverence for all that symbolises an accepted order of things—all these stand out in their natural colours, drawn to the life and harmonised into a national entity, to which the poet gives the shape and seeming of his own individuality, unconscious that in relating his own hardships, his own sufferings, regrets and aspirations, he was limning for us the typified and foreshortened image and presentment of a nation at a cardinal epoch of national regeneration. 'He builded better than he knew.' His poems are a very album of types and figures of the day: as we read, the narrow, gabled streets, with their graven niches for saint and Virgin and their monumental fountains and gateways stemming the stream of traffic, rise before us, gay with endless movement of fur and satin clad demoiselles, with heart or diamond shaped head-dresses of velvet or brocade, fringed and broidered with gold and silver, sad-coloured burghers, gold-laced archers and jaunty clerks, 'whistling for lustihead,' with the long-peaked hood or liripipe falling over their shoulders and the short brightcoloured walking-cloak letting pass the glittering point of the dirk, shaven down-looking monks, 'breeched and booted like oyster-fishers,' and barefooted friars, purple-gilled with secret and unhallowed debauchery, light o' loves, distinguished by the tall helm or hennin and the gaudily coloured tight-fitting surcoat, square-cut to show the breasts, over the sheath-like petticoat, crossed by the demicinct or châtelaine of silver, followed by their esquires or bullies armed with sword and buckler, artisans in their jerkins of green cloth or russet leather, barons and lords in the midst of their pages and halberdiers, ruffling gallants brave in velvet and orfévrerie, with their boots of soft tan-coloured cordovan falling jauntily over the instep, as they press through a motley crowd of beggars and mountebanks, jugglers with their apes and carpet, culs-dejatte, lepers with clap-dish and wallet, mumpers and chanters, truands and gipsies, jesters, fish-fags, cutpurses and swashbucklers, that rings anon with the shout of 'Noël!' as Charles the Seventh rides past, surrounded by his heralds and pursuivants, or Louis passes, with no attendants save his two dark henchmen, Tristan the Hermit and Oliver the Fiend, and nothing to distinguish him from the burghers with whom he rubs elbows save the row of images in his hat and the eternal menace of his unquiet eye. Anon we see the interior of the cathedral church at vespers, with its kneeling crowd of worshippers and its goldgrounded frescoes of heaven and hell, martyrdom and apotheosis, glittering vaguely from the swart shadow of the aisles; the choir peals out, and the air gathers into a mist with incense, what while an awe-stricken old woman kneels apart before the altar in the Virgin's chapel, praying for that scapegrace son who has caused her such bitter tears and such poignant terrors. Outside, on the church steps, sit the gossips, crouched by twos and threes on the hem of their robes, chattering in that fluent Parisian tongue to which the Parisian poet gives precedence over all others. The night closes in, the dim cressets swing creaking in the wind from the ropes that stretch across the half-deserted streets, while the belated students hurry past to their colleges, with hoods drawn closely over their faces 'and thumbs in girdle-gear,' and the sergeants of the watch pace solemnly by, lantern-pole in one hand, and in the other the halberd wherewith they stir up the shivering wretches crouched for shelter under the deserted stalls of the street-hawkers, or draw across the entrances of the streets the chains that shall break the escape of the nocturnal brawler or the stealthy thief. Thence to the Puppet wineshop, where truand and light o' love, student and soldier, hold high revel, amidst the clink of beakers and the ever-recurring sound of clashing daggers and angry voices; or the more reputable tavern of La Pomme de Pin, where sits Master Jacques Raguyer, swathed in his warm mantle, with his feet to the blaze and his back resting against the piles of faggots that tower in the chimney corner; or the street in front of the Châtelet where we find Villon gazing upon the great flaring cressets that give light over the gateway of the prison with whose interior he was so well acquainted. Anon we come upon him watching, with yearning eyes and watering mouth, through some half-open window or door-chink, the roaring carouses of the debauched monks and nuns, or listening to the talk of La Belle Héaulmière and her companions in old age, as they crouch on the floor, under their curtains spun by the spiders, telling tales of the good times gone by, in the scanty, short-lived flicker of their fire of dried hemp-stalks. Presently Master Jehan Cotard staggers by, stumbling against the projecting stalls and roaring out some ranting catch or jolly drinking song, and the bully of La Grosse Margot hies him, pitcher in hand, to the Tankard Tavern, to fetch wine and victual for his clients. Presently the moon rises, high and calm, over the still churchyard of the Innocents, where the quiet dead lie sleeping soundly in the deserted charnels, ladies and lords, masters and clerks, bishops and water-carriers, all laid low in undistinguished abasement before the equality of Death. Once more the scene changes, and we stand by the thieves' rendezvous in the ruined castle of Bicêtre or by the lonely gibbet of Montfaucon, where the poet wanders in the 'silences of the moon,' watching with a terrified fascination the shrivelled corpses or whitened skeletons of his whilom comrades as they creak sullenly to and fro in the ghastly aureole of the midnight star. All Paris of the fifteenth century relives in the vivid hurry of his verse: one hears in his stanzas the very popular cries and watchwords of the street and the favourite oaths of the gallants and women of the day. We feel that all the world is centred for him in Paris, and that there is no landscape that for him can compare with those 'paysages de métal et de pierre' that he (in common with another ingrain Parisian, Baudelaire) so deeply loved. Much as he must have wandered over France, we find in his verse no hint of natural beauty, no syllable of description of landscape or natural objects. In these things he had indeed no interest: flowers and stars, sun and moon, spring and summer unrolled in vain for him their phantasmagoria of splendour and enchantment over earth and sky: men and women were his flowers, and the crowded streets of the great city the woods and meadows, wherein, after his fashion, he worshipped beauty and did homage to art. Indeed, he was essentially the man of the crowd: his heart throbbed ever in unison with the mass in joy or sadness, crime or passion, lust or patriotism, aspiration or degradation.

It is astonishing, in the midst of the fantastic and artificial rhymers of the time, how quickly the chord of sensibility in our poet vibrates to the broad impulses of humanity—how, untainted by the selfish provincialism of the day, his heart warms towards the great patriot, Jacques Cœur, and sorrows over his unmerited disgrace—how he appreciates the heroism of Jeanne d'Arc, and denounces penalty upon penalty, that remind one of the seventy thousand pains of fire of the Arabian legend, upon the traitors and rebels that should 'wish ill unto the realm of France'—with what largeness of sympathy he anticipates the modern tenderness over the fallen, and demonstrates how 'they were once honest verily,' till love, that befools us all, beguiled them to the first step upon the downward road—with what observant compassion he notes the silent regrets of the old and the poignant remembrances of those for whom all things fair have faded out—glozing with an iron pathos upon the 'nessun maggior dolore' of Dante, in the terrible stanzas that enshrine, in pearls and rubies of tears and blood, the passion and the anguish of La Belle Héaulmière.

The keenness of his pathos and the delicacy of his grace are as supreme as what one of his commentators magnificently calls 'la souveraine rudesse' of his satire. When he complains to his unyielding mistress of her 'hypocrite douceur' and her 'felon charms,' 'la mort d'un pauvre cœur,' and warns her of the inevitable approach of the days when youth and beauty shall no more remain to her, we seem to hear a robuster Ronsard sighing out his 'Cueil-lez, cueillez votre jeunesse'; when he laments for the death of Master Ythier's beloved, 'Two were we, having but one heart,' we must turn to Mariana's wail of wistful yet unreproachful passion for a more perfect lyric of regretful tenderness, a more pathetic dalliance with the simpleness of love; and when he appeals from the dungeon of Meung, or pictures himself and his companions swinging from the gibbet of Montfaucon, the tears that murmur through the fantastic fretwork of the verse are instinct with the salt of blood and the bitterness of death. Where can we look for a more poignant pathos than in his lament for his lost youth, or his picture of the whilom gallants of his early memories that now beg all naked, seeing no crumb of bread but in some windowplace? or a nobler height of contemplation than that to which he rises, as he formulates the unalterable laws that make king and servant, noble and villein, equal in abasement before the unbending majesty of Death? or a sweeter purity of religious exaltation than in the ballad wherein, with the truest instinct of genius, using that mother's voice that cannot but be the surest passport to the Divine compassion, he soars to the very gates of heaven on the star-sown wings of faith and song? He is one more instance of the potentiality of grace and pathos that often lurks in natures distinguished chiefly for strength and passion. 'Out of the strong cometh sweetness,' and in few poets has the pregnant fable of the honeycomb in the lion's mouth been more forcibly illustrated than in Villon.

Humour is with Villon no less pronounced a characteristic than pathos. Unstrained and genuine, it arises mainly from the continual contrast between the abasement of his life and the worthlessness of its possibilities, and the passionate and ardent nature of the man. He would seem to be always in a state of humorous astonishment at his own mad career and the perpetual perplexities into which his folly and recklessness have betrayed him; and this feeling constantly overpowers his underlying remorse and the anguish which he suffers under the pressure of the deplorable circumstances wherein he continually finds himself involved. The Spiel-trieb or sport-impulse, that has been pronounced the highest attribute of genius, stands out with a rare prominence from his character, never to be altogether stifled by the most overwhelming calamities. The most terrible and ghastly surroundings of circumstance cannot avail wholly to arrest the ever-springing fountain of wit and bonhomie that wells up from the inmost nature of the man. In the midst of all his miseries, with his tears yet undried, he mocks at himself and others with an astounding good humour. In the dreary dungeon of the Meung moat, we find him bandying jests with his own personified remorse, and, even whilst awaiting a shameful death, he seeks consolation in the contemplation of the comic aspects of the situation, as he will presently appear, upright in the air, swinging at the wind's will, with face like a thimble for bird-pecks and skin blackened by 'that ill sun that tans a man when he is dead.' It is a foul death to die, says he, yet we must all die some day, and it matters little whether we then find ourselves a lord rotting in a splendid sepulchre or a cutpurse strung up on Montfaucon hill. He laughs at his own rascality and poverty, amorousness and gluttony, with an unequalled naïveté of candour, singularly free from cynicism, yet always manages to conciliate our sympathies and induce our pity rather than our reprobation. 'It is not to poor wretches like us,' he says, 'that are naked as a snake, sad at heart and empty of paunch, that you should preach virtue and temperance—as to us, God give us patience. You would do better to address yourselves to incite great lords and masters to good deeds, who eat and drink of the best every day, and are more open to exhortation than beggars like ourselves that cease never from want.'

His faith in the saving virtues of meat and drink is both droll and touching. One feels, in all his verse, the distant and yearning respect with which the starveling poet regards all manner of victual, as he enumerates its various incarnations in a kind of litany or psalm of adorations in which they resemble the denominations and attributes of saints and martyrs to whom he knelt in unceasing and ineffectual prayer. Wines, hypocras, roast meats, sauces, soups, custards, tarts, eggs, pheasants, partridges, plovers, pigeons, capons, fat geese, pies, cakes, furmenty, creams and pasties and other savoureux et friands morceaux, defile in long and picturesque procession through his verse, like a dissolving view of Paradise, before whose gates he knelt and longed in vain. His ideal of perfect happiness is to 'break bread with both hands,' a potentiality of ecstatic bliss he attributes to the friars of the four Mendicant Orders; no delights of love or pastoral sweetness, 'not all the birds that singen all the way from here to Babylon' (as he says), could induce him to spend one day among the hard lying and sober fare of a country life; and the only enemy whom he refuses to forgive at his last hour is the Bishop of Orleans, who fed him so scurvily a whole summer long upon cold water and dry bread, 'not even manchets,' says he piteously. If he cannot come at his desire in the possession of the dainties for which his soul longs, there is still some sad pleasure for him in caressing in imagination the sacrosanct denominations of that 'bienheureux harnois de gueule' which hovers for him, afar off, in the rosy mists of an apotheosis. In this respect, as in no few others, he forcibly reminds one of another strange and noteworthy figure converted by genius into an eternal type, that 'Neveu de Rameau,' in whom the reductio ad absurdum of the whole sensualist philosophy of the eighteenth century was crystallised by Diderot into so poignant and curious a personality. Like Jean Rameau, the whole mystery of life seems to Villon to have resolved itself into the cabalistic science 'de mettre sous la dent,' that noble and abstract art of providing for 'the reparation of the region below the nose,' of whose alkahest and hermetic essence he so deplorably fell short; and as we make this unavoidable comparison, it is impossible not to be surprised into regret for the absence of some Diderot who might have rescued for us the singular individuality of the Bohemian poet of the fifteenth century.

Looking at the whole course of Villon's life, and the portrait he himself paints for us in such crude and unsparing colours, we can hardly doubt that, under different circumstances, had his life been consecrated by successful love and the hope of those higher things to whose nobility he was so keenly though unpractically sensitive, he might have filled a worthier place in the history of his time and have furnished a more honourable career than that of the careless Bohemian driven into crime, disgrace and ruin, by the double influence of his own unchecked desires and the maddening wistfulness of an unrequited love. However, to quote the words of the greatest critic of the nineteenth century: 'We might perhaps have lost the poet whilst gaining the honest man; and good poets are still rarer than honest folk, although the latter can hardly be said to be too common' [Théophile Gautier].