27. Regarding the Stars VILLON spat meditatively between his yellow front teeth. He fingered, in the while that he continued his reflections, his scarred and puckered lower lip. Then he confessed that he dissented from a great many of his predecessor’s remarks. “You were impressive. Your life was a competent job, boldly executed, and nobody denies its merits on their own melodramatic plane. Yet it lacked the indispensable touch of tenderness, without which no work of art is of the first class. No: it was I who was truly favored; and I made of my life a flawless poem without dragging in such gaudy accessories as thrones and burning cities and the wasting of a lovely, mother-naked virgin on a mere lion.” And this François Villon went on to speak of the great blessings which had been accorded him. He had been granted irresolution, and lewdness, and poverty, and cowardice, and a large weakness for drink, and an ingrained dishonesty, and a disease-wrecked body, and everything else which was needed to make him a knave as contemptible as any man could hope to be. “I was, in brief, gentlemen, as I have elsewhere remarked, a hog with a voice. And there was no voice like my voice.” For out of the mire that wallowing, lustful and cowardly beast had sung. Now he sang jeeringly, and made fun of the whole world with satire and mockery and invective, and with plain filth-flinging,—which was all quite good art, because it pleases people to see a man superior to his fate. Now he sang piercingly of the great platitude that death conquers and ruins everything: and to that sentiment nobody can ever turn a deaf ear, because it is the only sentiment with a universal personal application. But, above all, he sang of his regret for his past indiscretions, and of his yearning for spiritual cleanliness, and—“soaring,” as Villon now quoted, with admirable complacency, “to the very gates of Heaven upon the star-sown wings of faith and song,”—he had proclaimed his trust in that divine love which, ultimately, would redeem all properly repentant persons from the logical outcome of their doings in this world, and would give to the marred life of every properly repentant person a happy ending in a fair-colored paradise agreeably full of harps and lutes. And people liked that, too, of course, because such a philosophy made everybody feel muggily consoled and, for no especial reason, magnanimous.