Page:The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924).djvu/338

294 if politics lent themselves to allegory. It is no living fancy, of course, which prompts him to imagine these quaint figures, but only reflection. All wear their names written on scrolls: he evidently imagines them as figures on tapestry, or in a picture or a show.

There is not a trace of true inspiration here. It is the pastime of an exhausted mind. Though the authors always place their action in the setting of a dream, their phantasmagorias never resemble real dreams, such as we find in Dante and Shakespeare. They do not even keep up the illusion of real vision: Chastellain naïvely calls himself in one of his poems “the inventor or the imaginer of this vision.”

Only the note of raillery can still make the arid field of allegory flower again, as in these lines of Deschamps:

The different spheres of literary fancy are mixed up regardless of all homogeneity of style. The author of the Pastoralet dresses his political shepherds in a tabard ornamented with fleurs-de-lis and lions rampant; “shepherds in long cassocks” represent the clergy. Molinet muddles up religious, military, heraldic and amorous terms in a proclamation of the Lord to all true lovers:

Therefore the true blazon is described to them: escutcheon argent, chief or with five wounds—and the Church militant