THE LARGE TESTAMENT.
Of this capital achievement and, with it, of Villon's style
in general, it is here the place to speak. The LARGE
TESTAMENT is a hurly-burly of cynical and sentimental
reflections about life, jesting legacies to friends and
enemies, and, interspersed among these many admirable
ballades, both serious and absurd. With so free a design, no
thought that occurred to him would need to be dismissed
without expression; and he could draw at full length the
portrait of his own bedevilled soul, and of the bleak and
blackguardly world which was the theatre of his exploits and
sufferings. If the reader can conceive something between the
slap-dash inconsequence of Byron's DON JUAN and the racy
humorous gravity and brief noble touches that distinguish the
vernacular poems of Burns, he will have formed some idea of
Villon's style. To the latter writer - except in the
ballades, which are quite his own, and can be paralleled from
no other language known to me - he bears a particular
resemblance. In common with Burns he has a certain rugged
compression, a brutal vivacity of epithet, a homely vigour, a
delight in local personalities, and an interest in many sides
of life, that are often despised and passed over by more
effete and cultured poets. Both also, in their strong, easy
colloquial way, tend to become difficult and obscure; the
obscurity in the case of Villon passing at times into the
absolute darkness of cant language.
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