His eyes
were indeed sealed with his own filth. He dwelt all his life
in a pit more noisome than the dungeon at Meun. In the moral
world, also, there are large phenomena not cognisable out of
holes and corners. Loud winds blow, speeding home deep-laden
ships and sweeping rubbish from the earth; the lightning
leaps and cleans the face of heaven; high purposes and brave
passions shake and sublimate men's spirits; and meanwhile, in
the narrow dungeon of his soul, Villon is mumbling crusts and
picking vermin.
Along with this deadly gloom of outlook, we must take another
characteristic of his work: its unrivalled insincerity. I
can give no better similitude of this quality than I have
given already: that he comes up with a whine, and runs away
with a whoop and his finger to his nose. His pathos is that
of a professional mendicant who should happen to be a man of
genius; his levity that of a bitter street arab, full of
bread. On a first reading, the pathetic passages preoccupy
the reader, and he is cheated out of an alms in the shape of
sympathy. But when the thing is studied the illusion fades
away: in the transitions, above all, we can detect the evil,
ironical temper of the man; and instead of a flighty work,
where many crude but genuine feelings tumble together for the
mastery as in the lists of tournament, we are tempted to
think of the LARGE TESTAMENT as of one long-drawn epical
grimace, pulled by a merry-andrew, who has found a certain
despicable eminence over human respect and human affections
by perching himself astride upon the gallows.
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