Villon and the Victorians: The Influence and the Legend

VILLON AND THE VICTORIANS: THE INFLUENCE AND THE LEGEND Robert E. Morsberger Robert E. Morsberger (B.A., Johns Hopkins University; M.A., Ph.D., University of Iowa) has this fall joined the Language Arts department of California State Polytechnic College, Kellogg-Voorhis, at Pomona. He has taught at Miami University, Utah State University, Michigan University, New Mexico State University, and Eastern Kentucky University. He served for a time as USAID adviser in English at the University of Nigeria and works summers as a ranger-historian at the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. His publications include James Thurber for the Twayne Authors Series, The Language of Composition, Commonsense Grammar and Style, and Essays for Exposition: An International Reader. François Villon became a legendary figure shortly after he disappeared from history about the year 1463 A.D. The poor thief of the College of Navarre was expanded to heroic proportions, the single coquilford was transformed into a king of vagabonds, and various apocryphal stories grew up about his name. Rabelais wrote of him; and he probably served as a model for Panurge. The popularity of Villon's poetry kept pace with the growing legend in those early years, for twenty editions had been printed before Clement Marot did the first critical edition at the order of François I in 1533.x But with the coming of the Pléiade, Villon fell into obscurity, in which he remained during the neo-classic period. Nineteenth-century writers rediscovered Villon, "Scarce risen upon the dusk of dolorous years," as Swinburne wrote, but rediscovered him on their own terms. The renewal of interest in Villon began with Théophile Gautier, who thought he discovered in the medieval poet a kindred spirit. Looking upon Villon as a precursor of the Romantics and the Bohemians, Gautier praised him in the 1830s and 1840s for his supposed defiance of bourgeois values. The revival of Villon in France continued during the 185Os and 1860s, climaxed by the publication in 1873 of Banville's Trente-six Ballades Joyeuses pour Passer les Temps, Composées à la Manière de François Villon. This reached England shortly, and along with Banville's prose writings on Villon influenced Saintsbury, Gosse, Dobson, Lang, Henley, Payne, and Stevenson. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, Villon was practically unknown in England. Andrew Lang wrote, "I think I can remember, in the sixties, hearing Mr. Ruskin ask, 4WhO is Villonr" and certainly lent him the works of that poet, with which he had been unacquainted."2 Yet within a 1D. B. Wyndham Lewis, François Villon (New York, 1928), p. 227. 2Andrew Lang, "At the Sign of the Ship," Longman's Magazine, XXXTV (1899), 95. 190RMMLA BulletinDecember 1969 decade, Villon attained a remarkable vogue in England, became a fad, and appeared in a rash of translations, biographical sketches, and imitations. In fact John Payne observed that in spite of Banville, Villon was little read in France and that his largest public was to be found in England.8 Yet while that public was attracted to Villon, it also frequently misunderstood him. Dante Gabriel Rossetti was the first and most successful English translator of Villon. But unlike later poets of the Decadence, Rossetti was not a Francophile; indeed he was hostile to France. He disliked the decadents' practice of elevating poetic manner above matter and style above subject. Rossetti was more interested in Villon's subject matter, and it is probably this that helps make his translations far more effective than the elegant but insipid versions by later aesthetes. Doubtless Rossetti felt attracted to Villon 's realism and racy defiance of moral conventions, although he did not translate those poems which show the seamy side of Villon's life. Instead, he selected poems that show religious feeling and emotion inspired by the beauty of women. Wyndham Lewis observed that Rossetti and his school put Villon among the lilies and flames and ladies with long awkward necks, among the refined perversities, the decorative but muzzy mysticism, the hand-woven aesthetics and what not of their academy. By what chance Mr. Beerbohm . . . refrained from celebrating the advent of Villon into this select company I cannot tell.« No doubt...