Page:The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924).djvu/309

Rh Phébus, killed by his father in a fit of anger. Froissart’s soul was a photographic plate. Under the uniform surface of his own style we may discern the qualities of the various storytellers who communicated to him the endless number of his items of news. For example, all that was told him by his travelling companion, the knight Espaing du Lyon, has been admirably rendered.

In short, whenever the literature of the period works by means of direct observation, without conventional trammels, it approaches painting, without however rivalling it. Therefore we should not look for the equivalents of painted landscapes or interiors in literary descriptions of nature. Painting of the fifteenth century produced marvels of perspective, because there the masters could let themselves go, as landscapes were accessory and did not suffer from the same severe restrictions as the principal subject. Notice the contrast between the principal scene and the background of the “Adoration of the Magi” in the “Très riches heures de Chantilly.” The figures in the foreground are affected and bizarre, the scene is overcrowded, whereas the view of Bourges in the distance attains a perfect serenity and harmony.

In literature, on the other hand, the feeling for nature was not free, neither was the manner of expressing it. Love of nature had taken the form of the pastoral and was therefore controlled by sentimental and æsthetic convention. The poems in which the beauty of flowers and the song of birds are sung proceed from an inspiration quite different from that which gave birth to painted landscapes. Literature in describing nature moves on another plane than painting.

Nevertheless it is in the pastoral that we can trace the development of the literary feeling for nature. Side by side with the poems of Alain Chartier, cited above, we may place those of the royal shepherd René singing in a disguised form his love for Jeanne de Laval, in the pastoral poem of Regnault et Jehanneion. There we find ingenuous gaiety and freshness; the king even tried, not without success, to render the effect of night closing in, but all this is far from being great art, like that of the calendars in the breviaries.

The pictures of the months in the calendar of the “Très riches heures de Chantilly” enable us to compare the