be unintelligent, it certainly would not be in
his poetry. And Charles is unintelligent even there. Of all authors
whom a modern may still read, and read over again with pleasure, he has
perhaps the least to say. His poems seem to bear testimony rather to the
fashion of rhyming, which distinguished the age, than to any special
vocation in the man himself. Some of them are drawing-room exercises,
and the rest seem made by habit. Great writers are struck with something
in nature or society, with which they become pregnant and longing; they
are possessed with an idea, and cannot be at peace until they have put
it outside of them in some distinct embodiment. But with Charles
literature was an object rather than a mean; he was one who loved
bandying words for its own sake; the rigidity of intricate metrical
forms stood him in lieu of precise thought; instead of communicating
truth, he observed the laws of a game; and when he had no one to
challenge at chess or rackets, he made verses in a wager against
himself. From the very idleness of the man's mind, and not from
intensity of feeling, it happens that all his poems are more or less
autobiographical. But they form an autobiography singularly bald and
uneventful. Little is therein recorded beside sentiments. Thoughts, in
any true sense, he had none to record. And if we can gather that he had
been a prisoner in England, that he had lived in the Orleannese, and
that he hunted and went in parties of pleasure, I believe it is about as
much definite experience as is to be found in all these five hundred
pages of autobiographical verse. Doubtless, we find here and there a
complaint on the progress of the infirmities of age. Doubtless, he feels
the great change of the year, and distinguishes winter from spring;
winter as the time of snow and the fireside; spring as the return of
grass and flowers, the time of St. Valentine's day and a beating heart.
And he feels love after a fashion. Again and again we learn that Charles
of Orleans is in love, and hear him ring the changes through the whole
gamut of dainty and tender sentiment. But there is never a spark of
passion; and heaven alone knows whether there was any real woman in the
matter, or the whole thing was an exercise in fancy. If these poems were
indeed inspired by some living mistress, one would think he had never
seen, never heard, and never touched her. There is nothing in any one of
these so numerous love-songs to indicate who