Page:The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924).djvu/313

Rh of Limburg assembled all the peculiarities of winter: peasants warming themselves before the hearth, the wash drying, crows on the snow, the sheepfold and beehives, the barrels and the cart, and the wintry landscape in the background with the tranquil village and the solitary house on the hill. All this mass of details is worked into the peaceful harmony of the landscape, and the unity of the picture is perfect. The poet, on the other hand, suffers his gaze to roam at will, but never concentrates it; and there is no framework to compel him to give unity to his work.

In an epoch of pre-eminently visual inspiration, like the fifteenth century, pictorial expression easily surpasses literary expression. Although representing only the visible forms of things, painting nevertheless expresses a profound inner sense, which literature when it limits itself to describing externals wholly fails to do.

The poetry of the fifteenth century often gives us the impression of being almost devoid of new ideas. The inability to invent new fiction is general. The authors rarely go beyond the touching up, embellishing or modernizing of old subject-matter. What may be called a stagnation of thought prevails, as though the mind, exhausted after building up the spiritual fabric of the Middle Ages, had sunk into inertia. The poets themselves are aware of this feeling of fatigue. Deschamps laments:

In the fifteenth century the old romances of chivalry are recast from verse into very prolix prose. This "unrhyming"—"dérimage"—is another sign of the general stagnation of fancy. Nevertheless it marks at the same time an important broadening in the general conception of literature. In the more primitive stages of literature verse is the primary mode of expression. As late as the thirteenth century every subject, even natural history or medicine, seemed to lend itself