Doubtless, he feels
the great change of the year, and distinguishes winter from spring;
winter as the time of snow and the fireside; spring as the return of
grass and flowers, the time of St. Valentine's day and a beating heart. And he feels love after a fashion. Again and again we learn that Charles
of Orleans is in love, and hear him ring the changes through the whole
gamut of dainty and tender sentiment. But there is never a spark of
passion; and heaven alone knows whether there was any real woman in the
matter, or the whole thing was an exercise in fancy. If these poems were
indeed inspired by some living mistress, one would think he had never
seen, never heard, and never touched her. There is nothing in any one of
these so numerous love-songs to indicate who or what the lady was. Was
she dark or fair, passionate or gentle like himself, witty or simple? Was it always one woman? or are there a dozen here immortalised in cold
indistinction? The old English translator mentions grey eyes in his
version of one of the amorous rondels; so far as I remember, he was
driven by some emergency of the verse; but in the absence of all sharp
lines of character and anything specific, we feel for the moment a sort
of surprise, as though the epithet were singularly happy and unusual, or
as though we had made our escape from cloudland into something tangible
and sure. The measure of Charles's indifference to all that now
preoccupies and excites a poet is best given by a positive example. If,
besides the coming of spring, any one external circumstance may be said
to have struck his imagination, it was the despatch of _fourriers_,
while on a journey, to prepare the night's lodging. This seems to be his
favourite image; it reappears like the upas-tree in the early work of
Coleridge: we may judge with what childish eyes he looked upon the
world, if one of the sights which most impressed him was that of a man
going to order dinner. Although they are not inspired by any deeper motive than the common run
of contemporaneous drawing-room verses, those of Charles of Orleans are
executed with inimitable lightness and delicacy of touch. They deal with
floating and colourless sentiments, and the writer is never greatly
moved, but he seems always genuine. He makes no attempt to set off thin
conceptions with a multiplicity of phrases. His ballades are generally
thin and scanty of import; for the ballade presented too large a canvas,
and he was preoccupied by technical requirements. But in the rondel he
has put himself before all competitors by a happy knack and a
prevailing distinction of manner. He is very much more of a duke in his
verses than in his absurd and inconsequential career as a statesman; and
how he shows himself a duke is precisely by the absence of all
pretension, turgidity, or emphasis. He turns verses, as he would have
come into the king's presence, with a quiet accomplishment of grace. Théodore de Banville, the youngest poet of a famous generation now
nearly extinct, and himself a sure and finished artist, knocked off, in
his happiest vein, a few experiments in imitation of Charles of Orleans. I would recommend these modern rondels to all who care about the old
duke, not only because they are delightful in themselves, but because
they serve as a contrast to throw into relief the peculiarities of their
model. When de Banville revives a forgotten form of verse--and he has
already had the honour of reviving the ballade--he does it in the spirit
of a workman choosing a good tool wherever he can find one, and not at
all in that of the dilettante, who seeks to renew bygone forms of
thought and make historic forgeries. With the ballade this seemed
natural enough; for in connection with ballades the mind recurs to
Villon, and Villon was almost more of a modern than de Banville himself. But in the case of the rondel, a comparison is challenged with Charles
of Orleans, and the difference between two ages and two literatures is
illustrated in a few poems of thirteen lines. Something, certainly, has
been retained of the old movement; the refrain falls in time like a
well-played bass; and the very brevity of the thing, by hampering and
restraining the greater fecundity of the modern mind, assists the
imitation. But de Banville's poems are full of form and colour; they
smack racily of modern life, and own small kindred with the verse of
other days, when it seems as if men walked by twilight, seeing little,
and that with distracted eyes, and instead of blood, some thin and
spectral fluid circulated in their veins. They might gird themselves for
battle, make love, eat and drink, and acquit themselves manfully in all
the external parts of life; but of the life that is within, and those
processes by which we render ourselves an intelligent account of what we
feel and do, and so represent experience that we for the first time make
it ours, they had only a loose and troubled possession. They beheld or
took part in great events, but there was no answerable commotion in
their reflective being; and they passed throughout turbulent epochs in a
sort of ghostly quiet and abstraction. Feeling seems to have been
strangely disproportioned to the occasion, and words were laughably
trivial and scanty to set forth the feeling even such as it was. Juvenal
des Ursins chronicles calamity after calamity, with but one comment for
them all: that "it was great pity." Perhaps, after too much of our
florid literature, we find an adventitious charm in what is so
different; and while the big drums are beaten every day by perspiring
editors over the loss of a cock-boat or the rejection of a clause, and
nothing is heard that is not proclaimed with sound of trumpet, it is not
wonderful if we retire with pleasure into old books, and listen to
authors who speak small and clear, as if in a private conversation. Truly this is so with Charles of Orleans. We are pleased to find a small
man without the buskin, and obvious sentiments stated without
affectation. If the sentiments are obvious, there is all the more chance
we may have experienced the like. As we turn over the leaves, we may
find ourselves in sympathy with some one or other of these staid joys
and smiling sorrows. If we do we shall be strangely pleased, for there
is a genuine pathos in these simple words, and the lines go with a lilt,
and sing themselves to music of their own. FOOTNOTES:

  [14] Champollion-Figeac's "Louis et Charles d'Orlèans," p. 348. [15] D'Héricault's admirable "Memoir," prefixed to his edition of
    Charles's works, vol. i. p. xi. [16] Vallet de Viriville, "Charles VII. et son Époque," ii. 428,
    note 2. [17] _See_ Lecoy de la Marche, "Le Roi René," i. 167. [18] Vallet, "Charles VII.," ii. 85, 86, note 2. [19] Champollion-Figeac, pp. 193-198. [20] Champollion-Figeac, p. 209.