Racine does really belong to an order of great writer who, to be at all fairly appreciated, require an uncom mon and sympathetic familiarity with national habits o thought and feeling. There are many in our own litera ture whose essence similarly escapes readers of anothe race who have not passed through a long initiation; not only writers of prose like Bunyan, or Johnson, Charles Lamb, but also great poets, Donne and Bla and even Shelley and Milton. It is no Englishman's fa if he does not hear the music of Racine with Frer ears; but let us beware of confusing a native differe with a demonstrable superiority; and let us be persuad that the ever-new delight we take in this or that majes reach of limpid poetry in Lycidas' or 'Comus' is keener or surer or more authentic than the exaltati with which intensely cultivated Frenchmen still drink such lines as: 'Il faut se croire aimé pour se croire infidèle. . . The effect is not less, and the means by which it is pr duced are not so much unequal as incomparable. The able and for the most part generous appreciati of seven other French poets which we owe to Mr Bail enforces the proposition that, though Racine disappoi us, his country's poetry is yet worth studying. Aft what has been said, it may be unnecessary to add th we prefer another and perhaps less conciliatory stan point. We are not sure that Racine represents absolute the highest flight of the French poetical genius, but v have no doubt that to understand his enchantment co pletely is the crown of a long converse with Fren poetry. For the present we desire to connect what we hav ventured to advance in his favour with some slight surve of another period-our own-a period in which Frenc y, prolific and flourishing as ever, though it has ved nothing that deserves to be preferred to the istan masterpieces or even placed beside them--the poetry of Victor Hugo excepted-has yet a vast tity of distinguished work to its credit. A high of accomplishment is not its only attraction. The aordinary variety of its output, the very incoherence ich may seem to result from the different theories expression alternately prevailing, the revelation of Suspected resources in language, as well as the stubsurvival of some ancient characteristics of French -these things enhance the abundant and curious terest of the French poetical movement in the last decades. The Anthology of M. Walch concentrates in its three umes more than forty years of intense poetical activity. appears to reflect compendiously some hundreds of very erse temperaments and talents; and, crowded as it is th fine things, we can imagine no more delightful npanion for lovers of French verse, no display of its dern graces more likely to allure the foreign reader 10 has neglected this part of literature. But, thanks the notices prefixed to each selection and to the fine eface contributed by the lamented poet Sully-Prudmme, it is a still more valuable guide to the history of e variations which the poetical idea has undergone, ithin a relatively short space of time, in a country there the practice of an art has never been separated om the discussion of its methods and its end. An tremely useful summary of dates, events, and titles is smallest benefit of these notices; they abound in thoritative expressions of opinion on works and schools well-known critics. The editor, with rare self-effacet, has been sparing of his own comments. The ce of examples, of course, is his; and we should be prised if, in the general judgment, M. Walch has not deserved the highest praise of a compiler, and is not allowed to have passed over no name that had serious claims to this sort of distinction. In the earlier part especially he has grasped the opportunity which such a selection offered to guard against injustice a type of genuine and recognised talent which is, so to speak, more engaging in sample than in bulk, Such, among the poets excerpted here, are Joseph Autran, the sea-poet of Marseilles; Soulary, the exquisite Lyonnese sonneteer; the noble Hellenist Ménard (whose Stoïcisme' is one of the gems of the book); Louis Bouilhet, the friend of Flaubert; Albert Glatigny, a vagabond singer of admirable virtuosity; and Armand Silvestre, whose rarely plastic gift of verse is probably less known than his achievements in quite another and more profitable kind. We might add to these perhaps the name of M. Jean Richepin, whose exasperated Romanticism is fatiguing in the vein of revolt, but who has sometimes shown himself a delicate artist; and that of Catulle Mendès, who will be long remembered in French literary history for his friendships and his part in promoting various movements, but survived his reputation as a supple and once uncompromising, if assimilative, poet. The editor may possibly be thought to have incurred the contrary reproach of profuseness and an inexacting standard. Certainly in these volumes there are striking inequalities of merit; and we remark some disproportion in the space allotted to the Parnassian time and to the more recent poets respectively. We do not complain of this, since it is with writers who have flourished since the death of Hugo that we are principally concerned here, though it will be convenient to speak shortly of their immediate predecessors also; but we fancy there are a good many young men making French verses to-day to whom the honours of an anthology have been awarded a little easily, or at least somewhat prematurely. For it is not always a matter of actual worth, but of prejudging a poetical character not yet crystallised. M. Walch takes up the thread of the French poetical development at the moment when a heterogeneous group of poets, some already famous, but most of them young and obscure, became associated in an occasional publication devoted to poetry and called 'Le Parnasse contemporain.' The prime mover of this venture, along with the publisher Lemerre, was M. Xavier de Ricard, a poet and journalist who had been less fortunate in other lines. M. de Ricard has deservedly a place in this collection; and the short account of his changeful life includes some reminiscences of the famous enterprise. They confirm the glimpse which Sully-Prudhomme's introduction gives of a strenuous time, and correct the tommon impression that the contributors to 'Le Parnasse' adhered from the first to the views and aspirations distinguished later as 'Parnassian.' Indeed it is clear from the list of names which figured in the original issue that no thought of founding an exclusive school of poetry could have brought together so motley a companyveterans of the Romantic armies, repentant Romantics like Théophile Gautier, independents and eclectics of all sorts, the gay agility of Banville, the desolate and sinister perfection of Baudelaire, Laprade's grave, homiletic worship, and Leconte de Lisle with his train of ear and austere disciples. It was the last, however, ras to impose a distinct bias for twenty years upon whole poetical movement. No French poet since the uth of Hugo had acquired such authority as Leconte Lisle, for none had illustrated clearer aims by a more masterly performance. To a whole young aristocracy of letters Poèmes antiques' brought the rarest artistic satisfaction; and the disdainful paradoxes of its preface (scarcely attenuated by the preface to 'Poèmes et Poésies) had been accepted at once as a gospel and as manifesto-hardly less important than Du Bellay's Deffence et Illustration' on the eve of Ronsard's triumph, of the preface to Hugo's Cromwell' in the heat of the Romantic battle. ed e an D-dar wark For ་ The poetry of this great leader and his ideas about Woetry are too personal to be contained in a few forlas; but the general tendencies of his school are not Judare. Inheriting the elemental liberties not long card other is col life in art sted from the hands of the effete tyrant called Classi- sions and self-worship were abjured along with religious apostrophe and political satire. Emotion was to reside wholly in things reproduced; art must be as impassive as nature and as exact as science. The result was an admirable efflorescence of faultless verse, with a limited appeal; for the Parnassian inspiration was largely erudite and the Parnassian principles proscribed some eterna sources of lyricism. Mr Bailey devotes to Leconte de Lisle a study whic is well worth reading, and seems to us to lay a jus emphasis on the capital merits of that poet. He comparehim to Walter Landor; and the comparison is apt. Th two men meet, he says, 'in a common love of classica literature, in a common disdain of many things tha filled a large space in the eyes of the world of their day. and in a common capacity for admirable workmanship They meet also, let us add, in a common spirit of fierce aristocratic republicanism, if the term may pass; but what is more important, their work seems to us to have a common quality which has been defined as the beauty of death.' We will temper this remark by saying that the marmorean stillness of Leconte's style does not impress us at all as the reflection of an Oriental indolence or languor. It is possible that his pessimism, and the spell which, among other ancient poems of the world the sacred books and epics of India cast upon him, an the prevalence of a tropical atmosphere in his poems, ar all to be connected with the fact that he was born in an island of the Indian Ocean. But, when Mr Baile suggests that he never really became a European, an calls him an 'intellectual planter in a tropical garden,' h forgets for a minute that the same pen which wrot 'Midi' wrote also, in the middle of the great siege, tha robust, superb, and ferocious 'Sacre de Paris.' Leconte hatred, at any rate-of the Church for instance, and th Middle Ages-was singularly energetic; so was his criti cism, particularly when he spoke his mind about th great, but really languorous, Lamartine; and those wh knew him never thought of him, by all accounts, a apathetic, even in a bodily sense. Un magnifiqu animal humain' is a description of him by a living write whom we have quoted already, and who has also give a luminous definition of the poet. Perhaps his geniu |