SOURCE: Introduction to The Complete Works of Francois Villon, Bantam Books, 1964, pp. ix-xv.

[In this essay, Williams cites Villon's intensity and directness as key reasons for continued interest in his work. Williams also delights in finding Villon to be consummately French.]

By a single line of verse in an almost forgotten language, Medieval French, the name of Villon goes on living defiantly; our efforts, as we seem to try to efface it, polish and make it shine the more. What is that secret that has escaped with a mere question, deftly phrased, the profundity of the ages:

Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan?

All that has been forgotten (or, better said, all that would gladly have been forgotten) by the poet Villon in his fifteenth-century France has remained so vividly alive, present in everything we are, that it lives on in answer to that eternal question.

There are no more than three thousand lines to the whole body of his verse, but they keep an intensity of consciousness about them that is not contrived. There is no invention about them. They are a recital about the man's life with the simple question that he permits himself in retrospect.

It is a recital of a tough life as a student of the arts about Paris. His father had died when he was a boy. They were poor. His mother whom he loved by evidence of one of his most poignant ballades must have kept pace with him during his student years; but rid of his father he was faced from the beginning with diaster and thrown on the town, a princely Paris, which, with his imagination raging among the rude splendors of those times, he was obliged to witness right at his back door—with an empty pocket.

A student, like all intelligent and high-spirited students, he must have been inclined to kick over the traces. But without the overt, insistent churchly insistences of his mother he must have wandered the city's shabbier dives whenever he felt the urge to go wherever the fancy took him. But his art, bred of his literary training, was a restraining influence that protected him. A scholar, schooled in the university, hard-headed and protected by a conservatism nothing could move, he had been reared in a tradition of scholarship which kept his head high—nothing could rob him of that pride.

A thief who had killed his man, though his life had been threatened equally, he had had to bear the early stigma of that accusation. No one could have been there to shield him; he was not ducking out. Poor, as he confessed he was in The Legacy, he had nowhere to go but to his attic room where the ink froze in his inkwell. Rather than yield to the bitter pressure of the circumstances he had to write to keep himself warm; his mind required it.

The striking thing is that, as with all such men, he never let a thought enter his head of smudging the surface of his art. The great Cézanne or Van Gogh and many lesser men have been the same—born fools as far as the pristine virtues of their inspiration are concerned.

But Villon was a poet strictly trained in his measures. He could not change the poet's meticulous training, or his view of the world that surrounded him, without giving up the whole game. He must have persisted in it, since everything else had been early lost. He was fixed in his conception of his task; he must, having found a release in his desperation, persist in a certain mode without varying—persist to the end. It was all he knew. His eager mind presented with its problem—the writing of a certain cast of verse, the ballade and the eight line stanzas of The Testament—did not know better than to repeat the pattern over and over, since he could not escape and retain his integrity.

So that his mind was beating about into all crevices of his being—while his invention, anchored in the technique of his craft, was stilled. It was a fixed form, fortunately for him, in which his invention could be released. There it could not contain itself: the minute dilemmas of his words in finding the exact niche for themselves into which they must have fitted to satisfy his spirit. Invention? What the hell are you going to invent, he is certain to have said. The facts are there, properly named if a man has the courage to use them with art enough; and I have the courage and the art—and time to use it.

He was a curiously factual person. A fact is a fact and a name is a name however you or the liars about you seek to hide it. It can be marshalled as in a poem, drilled until it falls into its proper place in the line, but you cannot escape it. Is it not the truth? Everything else is an escape from the truth and by my mother's memory there is nothing sacred but the truth.

“As far as art or the technical part of poetry goes, …”¹ (Then begins a statement typical of some critics, especially some British, who allow their disapproval of the uncompromising candor of Villon's statements to influence their judgments of the man's literary honesty.) “… in this way he was no better than, say, his patron, Charles d'Orléans.” (True enough, I presume, but as subtle an understatement as could be conceived. The true situation, as far as the poet Villon is concerned, is that Charles d'Orléans cannot even be said to exist.)

(The logical figure must now be resolved with the same suavity with which it began; well written, I must say!) “Villon's The Legacy and The Testament are made up of eight-line stanzas of eight-syllabled verses, varied in the case of The Testament by the insertion of ballades and rondeaux of very great beauty and interest, but not formally different in any way from poems of the same kind for more than a century past. What really distinguishes Villon is the intenser quality of his poetical feeling and expression, and what is perhaps arrogantly called the modern character of his subjects and thought. Medieval poetry, with rare exceptions, and, with exceptions not quite so rare, classical poetry, are distinguished by their lack of what is now called the personal note. In Villon this note sounds, struck with singular force and skill. Again, the simple joy of living which distinguishes both periods—the medieval, despite a common opinion, scarcely less than the ancient—has disappeared. Even the riot and rollicking of his earlier days are mentioned with far less relish of remembrance than sense of their vanity. This sense of vanity, indeed, not of the merely religious, but of the purely mundane and even half-pagan kind, is Villon's most prominent characteristic. It tinges his narrative, despite its burlesque bequests, all through; it is the very keynote of his most famous and beautiful piece, the Ballade des dames du temps jadis, with its refrain, ‘Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan?’ as well as of his most daring piece of realism, the other ballade of La Grosse Margot, with its burden of hopeless entanglement in shameless vice. It is nowhere more clearly sounded than in the piece which ranks with these two at the head of his work, the Regrets de la Belle Hëaulmiere, in which a woman, once young and beautiful, now old and withered, laments her lost charms. So it is almost throughout his poems, including the grim Epitaphe, and hardly excluding the very beautiful Ballade pour prier Nostre Dame, with its description of sincere and humble piety. It is in the profound melancholy which the dominance of this note has thrown over Villon's work, and in the suitableness of that melancholy to the temper of all generations since, that his charm and power have consisted, though it is difficult to conceive any time at which his poetical merit could be ignored.”

The man, a young man when he first became known to posterity, must have had a premonition of death from his earliest years which affected him not at all. What is so noteworthy about death that we are called on to give it any heed? But the art of making a distinguished poem is something else again.

He was intensely concerned with his art, but lost all interest after he had made use of it. That protected him from being, in the slightest way, the self-conscious maker of a mode of composition. He was his art and could not be separated from it. His poem by an extension of all its perquisites was himself. He lived in his accounts of even his own mother whom he celebrated in one of the least sentimental ballades. He saw her there before him and so she lives indestructibly.

The singular poem known as The Legacy contains his will, knowing he was a candidate for death from the first! This is a very early work written nonchalantly when he was twenty-five. It is perfect Villon. As a document it may not be as valuable as the later and more detailed and more virulent comment on his times The Testament, but the end with the ink frozen in the inkwell gives a note on his life as a student which can never be ignored.

Villon had only one poetical theme—himself: his life and his sorrows about Paris, the university of which he was very proud, the intellectual life of his times, the life of the streets and of the court. In all of these he had a literary pride without reservations. The life of the court and the life of the streets and the cultured life of the student—as of the poet—were of the same block.

So that when the poet speaks of The Fair Armoress he was speaking of a woman he undoubtedly knew well, making his comments on the details of her life and of how the times have neglected her and himself.

But the pride of the sensitive man, shown in his poetic invention, forces itself directly on the eye in the course of his words. An artist, and the sensitivity of the artist can never have been more inviolately patent, more incontrovertible than in this student poet.

His mode is set. It was a subjective preoccupation; nothing else concerned him. In that narrow range he found his release. Typically French. Nothing could jar him from his track. That gave him all the freedom of invention he required.

But the pride of invention was his own, something that cannot be foretold. Nothing to do but follow the lead of the times which surrounded him, inventing with the sensitive ear with which he had been endowed and to which he clung—his comfort as an artist.

Direct is the word for every word that Villon set down. There was no intermediate field to his address. He was directly concerned in the affairs of his life, took his responsibilities deeply and, as he grew older, bitterly, but saw no reason to seek to avoid them or to confess them. He was a poet, needed no intermediary, secular or sacred. Indeed his first victim in a brawl was a priest. In his poems he speaks frequently of priests and of popes as of men he might well have met about the world, men on an equal footing with himself. He acknowledged no superior.

This direct approach to his material came, most likely, from the small world he inhabited, the Paris of his studenthood.

That directness of a wholly responsible man among his peers entered into the very structure of his verse. When he uses a figure of speech it was not “as if” but coming from himself in one of the “disguises” that the world forces us to wear: prince or pauper, rich man or groveler—except that no one could make him grovel even on the gibbet.

To Villon, any ruse, or indirect approach, even at the excuse of art, savored of the lie. Mallarmé's “beautiful” symbolistic inventions were the antithesis of Villon's nature. Say what you have to say until hell freezes over! When setting down his words, little mattered save for art, save for his art against which he measured the world's devices.

So that when a modern literary critic seeks an approach with which to compare current attitudes, he must think inevitably, most readily of Villon.

The immediacy and impatience with the disguises of history must appeal to a modern reader, making it particularly timely to have a new reading of his poems at the present—especially one that conveys their uncompromising nature and surpassing excellence as art. Nothing like them had ever been written in the past—in spite of his fifteenth-century critics and those who had followed them.

The name of Villon is peculiarly alive in our world today; there is immediacy about it that makes him a contemporary in all our lives. We can still learn from him how to write a poem.

A recent comment by a critic (Hugh Kenner) may be worth noting. Le mot juste had come up for discussion: it was justly stated that if there were the faintest feeling that Villon ever wrote to be effective, it would have destroyed the validity of what he had to say. Le mot juste is the ready word—it has no other significance. This is fundamental. In literature there can be no seeking for words. For a writer to so indulge himself is to tread dangerous ground. But good writing is rare. In Villon, if he had even been conscious of an alternative, if there ever were the faintest sense of his wanting to be effective, the game would have been up. It never occurred.

To him a man was a man. To have called him a “male” would have been completely misleading. The same in his use of the word “woman” … nothing to be confused about that. The term might be interpreted vulgarly, as perhaps in our own day; but Villon used it vulgarly when the necessity called for it.

He was the complete Frenchman in that, as well as the child of his times—the fifteenth century. Every nation of Europe, as well as of the Orient, had its own characteristic bias in its attitude toward woman; but Villon had the French, even the Parisian attitude, which marked him singularly.

The evasion of forthrightness was not found in Villon, it never occurred to him; but that he ignored sensitive sense perception was unthinkable. He was vigorous but not crude; his feelings for words, flooding over his writing (though he never evaluated it) is the quality of beauty, the beauty of his individual lines.

He was French, as French as was Rabelais. Briefly to the point—he was a Parisian much the same as we understand the term today. He was typically French—not French in association with Italian, which the English acquired through their Dante—but more of Chaucer of an earlier day when the English themselves were half French.

The French were, in their own minds, the most advanced people of their world, the most light-hearted, the gayest, most daring. They were Parisians—with Parisians' pride in their city, their city the center of the world and all the world of culture; and, no doubt, of fashion, and as well of the learning that went into its making.

It is important to emphasize that as a poet Villon was a student of the University not of Oxford, not Padua, but of Paris inhabited by the French! His pride in his city was something he could bite into. He was possessed by French devil-may-care, a French sensitivity—in such a song as the famous poem written on the gallows.

Freres humains qui après nous vivez

No one but a Frenchman (and a Parisian) could have written that song! Imagine anyone that would have had the qualities to bring off that song but Villon the Parisian, the young student.

And who but a Frenchman could have had the special feeling for the cocotte, for women, tender but daring; and as informed about them as shown in the ballade of The Fair Armoress. As well for La Grosse Margot: low down as it is, a typical French tart beautifully realized with all a Frenchman's artistry and wit and humor—and design.

Note

1. Quoted passages by courtesy of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.