"
These are the words of one, mark you, against whom Gloucester
warned the English Council because of his "great subtility
and cautelous disposition." It is not hard to excuse the
impatience of Louis XI., if such stuff was foisted on him by
way of political deliberation.
This incapacity to see things with any greatness, this
obscure and narrow view was fundamentally characteristic of
the man as well as of the epoch. It is not even so striking
in his public life, where he failed, as in his poems, where
he notably succeeded. For wherever we might expect a poet to
be unintelligent, it certainly would not be in his poetry.
And Charles is unintelligent even there. Of all authors whom
a modern may still read and read over again with pleasure, he
has perhaps the least to say. His poems seem to bear
testimony rather to the fashion of rhyming, which
distinguished the age, than to any special vocation in the
man himself. Some of them are drawing-room exercises and the
rest seem made by habit. Great writers are struck with
something in nature or society, with which they become
pregnant and longing; they are possessed with an idea, and
cannot be at peace until they have put it outside of them in
some distinct embodiment. But with Charles literature was an
object rather than a mean; he was one who loved bandying
words for its own sake; the rigidity of intricate metrical
forms stood him in lieu of precise thought; instead of
communicating truth, he observed the laws of a game; and when
he had no one to challenge at chess or rackets, he made
verses in a wager against himself.
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