happily we
possess the Memoirs as they left their author's mind. And, though
Commines rather hides than thrusts to view his own personality, every
page betrays the presence of a remarkable intellect. He was no artist
either in imaginative design or literary execution; he was before
all else a thinker, a student of political phenomena, a searcher after
the causes of events, an analyst of motives, a psychologist of
individual character and of the temper of peoples, and, after a
fashion, a moralist in his interpretation of history. He cared little,
or not at all, for the coloured surface of life; his chief concern
is to seize the master motive by which men and events are ruled, to
comprehend the secret springs of action. He is aristocratic in his
politics, monarchical, an advocate for the centralisation of power;
but he would have the monarch enlightened, constitutional, and
pacific. He values solid gains more than showy magnificence; and
knowing the use of astuteness, he knows also the importance of good
faith. He has a sense of the balance of European power, and anticipates
Montesquieu in his theory of the influence of climates on peoples.
There is something of pity, something of irony, in the view which
he takes of the joyless lot of the great ones of the earth. Having
ascertained how few of the combinations of events can be controlled
by the wisest calculation, he takes refuge in a faith in Providence;
he finds God necessary to explain this entangled world; and yet his
morality is in great part that which tries good and evil by the test
of success. By the intensity of his thought Commines sometimes becomes
striking in his expression; occasionally he rises to a grave
eloquence; occasionally his irony is touched by a bitter humour. But
in general he writes with little sentiment and no sense of beauty,
under the control of a dry and circumspect intelligence.

CHAPTER IV
LATEST MEDIAEVAL POETS--THE DRAMA

I
LATEST MEDIAEVAL POETS

The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries form a period of transition
from the true Middle Ages to the Renaissance. The national epopee
was dead; the Arthurian tales were rehandled in prose; under the
influence of the _Roman de la Rose_, allegory was highly popular,
and Jean de Meun had shown how it could be applied to the
secularisation of learning; the middle classes were seeking for
instruction. In lyric poetry the free creative spirit had declined,
but the technique of verse was el