THE English have lately been charged, officially, with neglecting the study of living languages, with shutting themselves up in insular arrogance, with being content to cast a grudging, transitory eye upon Latin and Greek, and to ignore the splendid achievements of the modern world. Mr Tilley's treatise upon 'The Dawn of the French Renaissance,'1therefore, comes to us at an opportune moment. It is welcome not only for the sound scholarship and admirable taste which it displays, but because it refutes a general and undeserved charge. The French and the English are approaching a mutual understanding by more paths than one. On either side the Channel the universities are proving a wise appreciation of the literature of their neighbours and Allies. And Mr Tilley has played his part well in studying profoundly a little-known period of French art.

In calling his book 'The Dawn of the French Renaissance,' Mr Tilley has accepted perforce the common terminology of the historians. Had he not accepted it, his purpose might have been obscure. But it would have been better for the proper understanding of literature

that the word "Renaissance" had never been used. And, since it has been persistently opposed to the imagined "Dark Ages," it is responsible for a vast deal of error in history and criticism. "The ages are all equal," said William Blake, "but genius is always above its age." There is no wiser clue than that to lead us through the labyrinth of literature. And the term "Renaissance" was especially ill-chosen, because it implies re-birth after death, light out of darkness. The beauty and intelligence of the world did not die, and the darkest age was not without illumination. But happily there are signs to-day of a clearer interpretation. Pater, for instance, admits an earlier Renaissance than that of the fifteenth century, and traces the "outbreak of the human spirit" far into the Middle Age itself. We no longer believe with J. A. Symonds that "the arts and inventions, the knowledge and the books, which suddenly became vital at the time of the Renaissance, had long lain neglected on the shores of the Dead Sea which we call the Middle Ages." That was no Dead Sea upon which Chaucer, and Froissart, and Villon sailed their ships; the arts and in

Tilley, "on se croirait à deux pas de la Renaissance dont on est separé par plus d'un siècle." But how were they separated from the Renaissance, who were already familiar with the works of Aristotle and Plato, of Ovid and Lucan, of Virgil and Terence, of Seneca and Valerius Maximus? These are authors enough upon which to base the claim of humanism, and if there were no enlightened sovereign to take up the work of patronage when Charles V. laid it down, if a period of warfare interrupted the study of letters, those were the accidents of history, and they do not change the spirit and temper of the time.

Moreover, the greatest names mentioned in Mr Tilley's book belong in point of time to what are still called the Middle Ages. Alain Chartier, though he was born before the end of the fourteenth century, is a devout student of the ancients. Seneca was his model, both in the style and in the search after moral commonplaces, and he wrote a prose which is classical in both senses. Nor can we drive into the obscurity of barbarism the witty cynicism of Charles d'Orléans, the gaiety of the 'Cent Nouvelles nouvelles,' or the closely observed reality of that mordant little masterpiece, 'Les Quinze Joyes de Mariage.' Whencever the inspiration of these works came, it did not come from the darkness of ignorance. Their authors loved the light and lived in it. They clamoured from no re-birth, for the seeds of death were not in

them. They had the genius which was above its age.

The poet comes and goes as he chooses, recking little of the "movements" which it is the historian's business to note. Villon disappears from knowledge thirty years before Mr Tilley marks the beginning of the French Renaissance, and yet he belongs not to the Middle Ages but to all time. Villon is a modern of the moderns, because he speaks to us in his own voice of beauty and sincerity. It is true that he knew no Greek, and only such Latin as he might pick up in the University of Paris; but he was no worse off than Keats; and the one recked as little as the other of any movement in history or literature. The flame of genius burned clearly within each of them, and makes them part of the universal inheritance. Had Villon been rich in all the knowledge that was being gathered in his day on the other side of the Alps, he could not have turned to better account the life of the tavern and the prison, as he knew it. That he knew that life better than any other was an accident. What was essential to him was the poet's genius. He had no greater need to learn than had Keats, for being a poet he divined all things. With equal passion and pathos he could write a ballade for his mother, pour prier nostre dame— "Femme je suis povrette et ancienne, Ne riens ne sçay; oneques lettre me

leuz,"

or describe the regrets of La Belle Heaulmiaire

"Ainsi le bon temps regretons
Entre nous, pauvres vieilles sottes,
Assises bas, à croppetons
Tout en ung tas comme pelottes,
A petit feu de chevenottes,
Tost allumées, tost estainctes;
Et jadis fusmes si mignottes !
Ainsi en prend à maintz et maintes."

And it should be remembered that Clement Marot, the first of the poets to win a place in the French Renaissance, was the editor and panegyrist of Villon. The works of Villon, said he, are "of such an art, so full of good doctrine, and so finely painted in a thousand beautiful colours, that time, which effaces all, has not effaced them, and still less shall it efface them presently and hereafter, when the good writings of France shall be better known and collected." This is a noble tribute composed by a poet who has been placed by the historians on the other side of the hedge, and yet urged the young poets of his time to cull Villon's sentences like beautiful flowers.

Truly, the poets who followed Villon may have been nearer to the Renaissance; truly, also, they are farther from poetry. So much is said, not in any opposition to Mr Tilley, but to suggest that too great a burden should not be laid upon a convenient word. Nor can it be said that the Chronicle of Comines was conceived and written in the outer darkness of barbarism. It does not recall to mind the shores of the Dead Sea. In spite of the fact that it belongs to the time which was before Charles VIII.'s visit to Italy, it seems still a

fresh and living book. To dismiss it as "medieval" is to misunderstand its scope and purpose. It is far nearer to our own time and to universal acceptance, for instance, than the Chronicles of Stow and Speed, which it preceded by a century. There is nothing of the spirit of the "big gooseberry" about it. Comines is singularly free from the vice of anecdotage. He is no gossip bent upon whiling away an idle hour. He is a statesman as well as a historian, and it was his intention not only to celebrate the genius of his master, Louis XI., but to set forth a sound method of statecraft. His love of character and his passion for politics separate him sharply from the chroniolers. He sketches, with a keen perception, the kings of his times, and also the countries. He finds that the English are choleric, after the fashion of those who inhabit cold countries, that they hunt fiercely after offices and estates, that with them everything is in extreme, that they lack disoretion and are not so subtle in treaties as the French. notes in the Italians a love of change, jealousy, and avarice. He says that it is in their nature to favour the stronger side, and that the best that may be expected from them is neutrality. Towards men as towards peoples he strives to be just. He spent the greater part of his active life in opposition to the Duke of Burgundy, once his master; and he sketches his character without a hint of malevolence. Even though

He