Yet Sainte-Beuve did not quite touch the quick. Even this refrain is no more original than the queries; for it not only echoes a popular phrase, and perhaps is itself nothing more than a communal refrain,[313] but it continues a theme of the mediæval poet even better known than the _ubi sunt_. The real change is not in words or phrase, but in a shifting from the professional to the personal point of view. The poet of the sacred guild could put this fact of mortality either as a question or as an “example,”—witness a thirteenth-century poem,[314] where the prospect of dissolution is fortified by the roasting of St. Lawrence, the beheading of John the Baptist, and the stabbing of Thomas à Becket; while the same manuscript which holds this “example” has a charming little poem of questions, the _Luve Ron_ of Thomas de Hales, often quoted as forerunner of Villon’s ballade. “A maid of Christ,”—and we note this touch of the guild,—“asks me to make her a love-song. I will do it. But the love of this world is a cheat; lovers must die, and men fade all as leaf from bough. Lovers, quotha? _Where, indeed, are Paris and Helen; where Tristram, Ysolde, and the rest; where, too, are Hector and Cæsar?_ As if they had never lived at all!” At first sight this lyric of the guild seems a counterpart to the pagan cry of Villon, as if the latter were a parody of the old formula without the piety and with a vague touch of genius in the refrain; but the difference is more than this. Villon transfers sentiment from the guild to the individual.[315] It is a supreme and triumphant and epoch-making attempt to do what the individual poet had always essayed to do and found impossible,—to leap communal barriers entirely, and tear himself free from the guild. The monk could not doff his cowl; his face is hidden; his song asks the organ, the choir, the general confession, the litany, for a background, even when it seems fairly Wordsworthian:—
Winter wakens all my care! Now these trees are waxing bare, Oft I sigh and mourn full “sair,” When it cometh in my thought Of this earthly joy, how it all goeth to naught.[316]
Not so with Villon. He knows no guild, save that of the jolly beggars; and he can do with ease what even Ronsard does only with difficulty, and leaning on a classical staff:—