Page:The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924).djvu/339

Rh is given full liberty to take all into her service who want to return to that blazon.

The feats which procured Molinet. the reputation of an excellent “rhétoriqueur” and poet appear to us rather as the extreme degeneration of a literary form nearing its end. He takes pleasure in the most insipid puns: “Et ainsi demoura l’Escluse en paix qui lui fut incluse, car la guerre fut d’elle excluse plus solitaire que rencluse.” In the introduction to his prose version of the Roman de la Rose he plays upon his name, Molinet. “Et affin que je ne perde le froment de ma labeur, et que la farine que en sera molue puisse avoir fleur salutaire, j’ay intencion, se Dieu m’en donne la grace, de tourner et convertir soubz mes rudes meulles le vicieux au vertueux, le corporel en l’espirituel, la mondanité en divinité, et souverainement de la moraliser. Et par ainsi nous tirerons le miel hors de la dure pierre, et la rose vermeille hors de poignans espines, où nous trouverons grain et graine, fruict, fleur et feuille, trés souefve odeur, odorant verdure, verdoyant floriture, florissant nourriture, nourrissant fruict et fructifiant pasture.”

When they do not play upon words, they play upon ideas. Meschinot makes Prudence and Justice the glasses of his Lunettes des Princes, Force the frame and Temperance the nail which keeps the whole together. The poet receives the aforesaid spectacles from Reason with directions how to use them. Sent by Heaven, Reason enters his mind and wants to feast there; but finds nothing “off which to dine well,” for Despair has spoilt all.

Products like these would seem to betray mere decadence and senile decay. Thinking of Italian literature of the same period, the fresh and lovely poetry of the quattrocento, we may perhaps wonder how the form and spirit of the Renais-