h

arde

ch

lege

Leet

snit

his end

bout

hose

fed on a single but inexhaustible idea-the mutability of the forms of the divine.'

It is only a coincidence, but a striking one, that both Leconte de Lisle and two of his foremost disciples, Léon Dierx and Heredia, should have been born in the tropics. The noble achievement of Heredia, which won an immediate triumph at a date when Parnassianism had passed out of fashion, has perhaps been abundantly praised, and not least well and warmly by Mr Bailey, who would even place him above his master. We doubt if the rare talent of M. Dierx-one of the few survivors among the faithful pupils and comrades of Leconte-has even yet been ently recognised. It is essentially a discreet talent, delete and self-contained, and his output is a comparafrely small one; but there have been few more scrupuartists, and few among his contemporaries have lowed more of themselves to pass into a clear unaltering melody than the autumnal and disenchanted but steadfast poet of Soleil couchant,' La Nuit de Juin,' L'Odeur sacrée, Les Filaos,' and the impressive prologue to 'Les Lèvres closes.'

'J'ai voulu vivre sourd aux voix des multitudes,
Comme un aïeul couvert de silence et de nuit,
Et pareil aux sentiers qui vont aux solitudes,
Avoir des songes frais que nul désir ne suit.
Mais le sépulcre en moi laissa filtrer ses rêves,
Et d'ici j'ai tenté d'impossibles efforts.

Les forêts? Leur angoisse a traversé les grèves,
Et j'ai senti passer leurs souffles dans mon corps.'

Of the other fuglemen, two have died since this thology appeared. If neither Sully-Prudhomme nor Pois Coppée was exactly a great poet, it is certain that both combined more than ordinary technical acishments with some real originality of matter. The gentle and melancholy agnostic of 'Les Vaines Teesses, whose figure in French poetry has more than One resemblance to Matthew Arnold's in ours, had a true lyrical instinct and solid philosophical attainments. It was too late in the day for a great philosophical poem; relse he wanted the genius to light spontaneously upon sensible forms for his ideas; but it is something of a feat to have versified agreeably, with so little appearance

of effort, a body of thought which would have claimed attention even in prose. And Coppée, the chosen poet o the decent Paris poor, is a master miniaturist who, fo all the facility of his pathos, never forgot the respect da to his art. In him as in Sully-Prudhomme there are, w fancy, qualities of taste, thought, and feeling which shoul recommend them particularly to English readers; an we are glad to find that Mr R. E. Prothero, in his admi able volume 'The Pleasant Land of France,' has devoti to them some pages of a final chapter on certain moder poets, and has also exemplified their work, in compa with Henri Murger, Banville, and Leconte de Lisle, I some exceptionally happy and dexterous renderings in English verse.

One cannot turn over many pages of this antholog without realising that Parnassianism, with its serenit its hard outlines, its formal exigencies, the stress it lai upon a rigorous detailed fidelity to things seen, it ambition to compete with the painter's brush and th sculptor's chisel, its preference for subjects suggested by ethnology and museums, never absorbed for a momen the entire poetical energy of France. But it was on manifestation of a general drift then affecting the whol of French (and not only French) literature, which turne away for a time from the parade of particular passion and judgments, and, enamoured of precision, reluctant conclude, tended to carry the historical spirit into th kingdom of the imagination. To this spirit Victor Hug himself, whose later works seem so indifferent or superior to changes of taste or the quarrels of literal schools, did homage by the choice of themes increasing objective. He lived long enough to see the tide turn a a new individualism assail the very foundations of Fren poetry, when it appeared to some of the poets who h learned their craft under the Parnassian discipline th in its perfect and hopeless virtuosity lay the threat barrenness; and that, since other imaginative literatu was almost reduced to the vanity of reproducing 'thin as they are,' it was for poetry, now more than ever befo to provide the outlet for whatever is most personal a most intimate in men's souls.

There was a stage when the craving for a fuller se expression, impatience of the majestic and monotono

forms which limit or embarrass it, a scruple of sincerity
which transferred the realistic principle from the notation
of the sensible world to that of our evanescent moods
and our least conscious mental gestures, inspired the
subtlest and at the same time the most ingenuous music
of the century. Paul Verlaine is simply the genius of
absolute familiarity moving freely among traditional
harmonies, who, without shame or apparent effort, lays
bare a puerile, wilful, and almost barbarous nature, but a
nature abundantly gracious and tender, and among in-
nable futilities and worse, tells the one thing he
-the beauty of repentance-with that supreme
artiste cunning which seems to laicise a consecrated art.
Verkine makes music out of hesitation; and what is
sublime in him is most colloquial.

Et vraiment, quand la mort viendra, que reste-t-il?...
Allez, rien n'est meilleur à l'âme

Que de faire une âme moins triste! ...

Oh triste, triste était mon âme

A cause, à cause d'une femme. .

And his very 'poetic' takes the same tone:

Prends l'Éloquence et tors-lui le cou . . .
De la musique avant toute chose

Et tout le reste est littérature!'

The theory is simple, but the practice is unique.
Another stage begins with Jules Laforgue, who died
Tery young, and whose remains in verse wear an
ished air which it is doubtful whether a long life

ld have removed.

un

Laforgue has perhaps been

quite

pied extravagantly; nobody will deny him a al gift of irony which is best seen in his prose. Expressed alternately, or even in the same breath, by T of slang and parody, broken phrases and learned allions, this irony is perhaps only the valiant smile dia overlucid or overburdened intelligence, beneath for a little ordinary happiness. But Laforgue as a poet which we divine the despair of a heart that only asked went far beyond Verlaine in forswearing all the dignity verse and in experiments aiming at what Stéphane Mallarmé called 'le charme certain du vers faux'; and specially he seems to have been the first who con

of

Vol. 211.-No. 420.

L

sciously used words to evoke states of mind bearing no constant or definable relation to the objects the represent or the ideas they define. Almost suddenl symbolism became a literary doctrine; and it matter little whether M. Gustave Kahn or M. Jean Moréas, some other, found the name (so rich in associations of different order) for a common element in the mo diverse efforts to renew the life of poetry. All poet contains an incantation; it fails if its power is bound by the value of words at current exchange; and it is n enough to bring clear pictures before us, or even animate ideas, if a poet has not the art to extract fro sound its emotional virtue and to awaken a distant tra of feeling by playing upon the secret affinities of wor English poetry is rich, perhaps surpassingly rich, in su gestive effects; but in French poetry also this is no ne thing. The classical decadence of the eighteenth century, is true, was content with abstractions; and the incompa able verbal accomplishment of the Parnassians concer trated its effort upon the representation of the visible But this mystical quality ennobles the ballads of Villo and pervades Ronsard's Amours'; it gleams sometime through the sober texture of Racine; it is in Alfred Vigny, in 'Le Cor' and 'La Maison du Berger'; it haun us in Gérard's 'Chimères,' and it is what allures us such a line as this of Victor Hugo's:

'L'ombre était nuptiale, auguste et solennelle.'

For it is not true that French is too pellucid to be sugge tive; or why are the clearest words we can use so oft heavy with associations?

The new symbolism was this and something mor what distinguished it was that it was at once anarchic and tyrannous. It is vain (were it even possible) to co nature; we are the only reality in the world, and th which is most elusive in us is alone worth revealing-n our judgments nor our actions and passions (as with t Romantics), but our dreams, the singular, irrevocak reflection of fugitive appearances upon our consciousnes and the whole world is only a symbol of ourselve From some such propositions the new school started o to banish from poetry that illusion-if illusion it be expressing something equally real to all men, somethin

Ture

use s

utside us and valuable in itself, which had passed hitherto for a condition of artistic sanity; and at the same time it relegated to the background the representative function of words, to employ almost solely that faculty of suggestion or incantation which the greatest had used so sparingly. There is implied in their curious attempt a sort of despair of speech. To be understood by men, we must be willing to use a language which is never quite our own; and to be entirely and exclusively oneself is to be inarticulate. This excessive individualism invaled anarchy; and there was a corresponding anarchy in the treatment of French verse. The symbolists hardly red complete sincerity in art without a continual risation of new forms; but the threatened subverof the old prosody is not to be confused with the desire quite moderate theorists to complete the liberative rems of the Romantics and bring 'the rules' into harmony with the actual pronunciation of the language.

Critics hostile to the symbolistic poetry have conthe nected its obscurity and its strange formal experiments with the number of foreign names in the ranks of the school. Though symbolism is not confined to France, it probably as native there as most of the movements which have modified the course of French literature; but this matter of 'le vers libre' it appears reasonable to stribute its centrifugal instincts to the alien elements. tan hardly be immaterial that M. Émile Verhaeren is Fleming, M. Jean Moréas a Greek, M. Kahn a Hebrew, obe Vielé-Griffin a North American by origin; and these e only the best known among a score of poets who, if French is their native language, seem to reveal vistic predilections in their deviation from traditional ms. The question is too technical to be even summarily bleed here; it is enough to say that there is a party of dical reform and a party of prosodical revolution el divide almost all the talent of the younger generaas between them. The reformers, with the widest irrera posle differences of practice on secondary points, are ted in rejecting certain 'rules' which are, phonetically, our perstitions, and in claiming that the ear and not the eye the sole competent judge of verse on its formal side;

hing

е апага

d. and

unit, of which the measure is determined by the number

are at one also in maintaining the line as a real