ballade vanished with the generation after Chaucer, not to reappear there until 1873. When once the poetic guilds of Northern France had codified the requirements for a ballade such as Cyrano improvises, the essential features of that form were no longer a matter of device. A poet who set out to write a ballade had to find a subject which could be treated in a kind of verse distinguished for its rigid and repetitious rhyme scheme. He deliberately limited his range of ideas by his decision to conform to elaborate and definite restrictions. Technique was distinctly his problem. The success of his ballade depended upon his ability to submit his inspiration to an inflexible set of fixed metrical requirements. If Chaucer, Villon, and Swinburne succeeded in producing ballades that are great poetry, it is because they found the form uniquely harmonious with certain ideas which they wished to express. III THE BALLADE IN FRANCE FROM THE END OF THE FOURTEENTH TO THE MIDDLE OF THE SEVEN TEENTH CENTURY It would take a long time and much space merely to enumerate those who wrote ballades in France from the end of the fourteenth to the middle of the seventeenth century. But there are certain conspicuous names connected with the history of the form. In Guillaume de Machault's (1300?-1377) lifetime. the ballade and the rondel established themselves. He is generally considered the founder of the school of poetry that devoted its energies to the fixed forms. His most interesting work, Livre du Voir-dit, a tale told in prose and verse of a disappointing love affair that, as an old man, he had with the young girl, Péronnelle d'Armentières, contains many ballades and rondels. His writings, like those of Deschamps and Froissart, were known to Chaucer, and on all three Chaucer drew freely. As John Livingston Lowes has said: "The Middle Ages . . . had practically no sense whatever of literary property as we conceive it. . . . The works of other men, in fact, stood on practically the same footing to a writer as the works of God." ... Eustache Deschamps (1345?-1405), spoken of generally as a disciple of Machault's, not only holds the record for the number of ballades composed by any one individual, but is also credited with over two hundred rondeaus, not to speak of his tireless exertions in the composition of longer biographical verse and satire. He was the author, too, in 1392, of the earliest Poetics in French, L'Art de Dictier et de fere chançons, balades, virelais, et rondeaulx. Jean Froissart (1338-1404?), like Deschamps and Machault, used verse for autobiographical purposes. He lived as a boy in Valenciennes where every year there was a fête of the puy d'amour, and he was often present, no doubt, as the contending poets submitted their verses to be judged before the court that was in the future to crown his own efforts. When he went to the court of Edward III in England, he took with him letters. of introduction to Queen Philippa. For her court he wrote virelays and ballades. Other ballades of his were written to be laid at the feet of the lady whom he worshipped with all the shifts of courtly love, but who became permanently alienated from him. Froissart's reputation rests on his Chronicles of the wars of his own time, annals of the age of chivalry, rather than on his lyric verse. Christine de Pisan, woman of letters, was, in spite of her name, born in Venice about 1363. She came to France as a youngster, married in due time, and at the age of twenty-five was left a penniless widow with three children. Thereafter she had to earn her living by writing. Besides her serious biographical and philosophical works, she is noted for her delicate love verse cast in the conventional poetic moulds of the late Middle Ages. The most engaging literary figures of the fifteenth century are Charles d'Orléans (1391-1465), the father of Louis XII, and François Villon (1431-1470?), the first a member of the royal house, the second a vagabond. When Charles appeared at Orléans in July, 1460, with his daughter Marie, then three years old, Villon was released from prison in honor of the occasion and wrote a poetic eulogy comparing the little girl to Cassandra, Echo, Judith, Lucrece and Dido. Charles d'Orléans, who spent twenty-five years as a prisoner in England after the battle of Agincourt, returned to France in 1440 and settled at Blois, surrounding himself there with kindred spirits who enjoyed matching wits in the composition of ballades and rondeaus. The writings of Charles were not published till the eighteenth century. The rondeaus, especially the lovely and often translated one, beginning Le temps a laissié son manteau De vent, de froidure et de pluye are works of genius. The conjecture that Villon once sojourned at Blois with the royal poet is based on a ballade, attributed to Villon, the refrain of which is the famous, "I perish of thirst at the fountain brim," a paradox which formed the basis of numerous exercises in the fixed forms in the little court at Blois. Villon, prince of poets, Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts of the University of Paris, spent various periods of his lawless life in prison. The pardon granted him on one such occasion has been mentioned. At the accession of Louis XI he is again one of those benefiting from a proclamation of amnesty. Villon's poetry, especially his Testament, makes the existence of that fermenting underworld that rose to the surface in France at the close of the eighteenth century very real. In Le Testament (1461?), Villon, as he had in his earlier poem Les Lais, bequeaths imaginary satirical legacies to his friends. He relates also his wretched plight in prison before his release by Louis XI and confesses unreservedly spiritual anguish and loneliness as well as physical disabilities. Several of Villon's most beautiful ballades ornament Le Testament, among them the Ballade des Dames du Temps Jadis, and the Ballade pour sa Mère. He wrote his Ballade des Pendus directly after his own very real escape from the gallows. The versifiers of the century of Charles d'Orléans and Villon continued to use the forms that had been bequeathed to them by the medieval puys and poets. But a new school appeared which earned the name of grands rhétoriqueurs, “rhétorique" signifying poetry. If we understand by decadence the phenomenon of overornamentation, then these poets, among whom might be named Jehan Meschinot, Octavien de Saint-Gelais and Jean Marot, were decadents. The tricks of metre and decoration which they practised are described in some detail below. The impulse to the movement is to be discovered in the work of Deschamps and Christine. Jean Marot's son, Clément Marot (1495?-1544) was brought up in the tradition of his father's school. But his expeditions into Italy, his sojourn at the court of Ferrara, his contact with the intellectual current of the Reformation proved liberating forces. He did write some unsavory rondeaus, and a few gracious and beautiful ballades, tainted neither in style nor subject matter. But they were, of course, incidental to his more substantial and characteristic literary preoccupations. His quarrel with François Sagon is mentioned here because of its significance, noted below, in ballade literature. All the notable literary men of the day took a hand in the fight and Sagon seems to have gone down, under the cumulative abuse of Marot and his supporters. Treatises on poetry, called at the time l'arts de seconde rhétorique, were numerously produced in the fifteenth century. They codified the practices of the grands rhétoriqueurs and added new intricacies of rhyme and metre to the old complications prescribed for the ballade and rondeau. With the coming of humanism at the outset of the sixteenth century, the reference to the forms became infrequent and, if the authors of the various arts of poetry refer to them at all, it is with a contemptuous gesture of dismissal. The French poets of the Renaissance, like their contemporaries in other countries, renewed themselves by their study of the languages and literatures of classical antiquity, but they were not inclined for all that to dispense with literature. in the vernacular. One of the leading spirits, Joachim du Bellay, composed the Déffence et Illustration de la Langue Française (1549). Du Bellay belonged to the group of poets, seven in number, who are known as the Pléiade Jean Passerat, inventor of the villanelle, is one of the twenty-odd writers also identified with the group. The period of salons begins about 1618 under the auspices of Mme. de Rambouillet in her Hôtel de Rambouillet. Circles like hers where witty conversation and the composition of literary trifles were in order, multiplied. In these salons developed the preciosity that Molière was later to satirize under slightly differing guises in Les Précieuses Ridicules and Les Femmes Savantes. The salons flourished throughout the seventeenth century. One of the latest of the précieuses was Mme. Deshoulières (1637-1694) who wrote ballades. Indeed the forms had a temporary revival. Vincent |