FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES Way to No Heroic Time to Come

Home , Leconte de Lisle, Stuart Merrill

Frenc h Literary

Stu di es

§ D S E B R WN T . B . U M O O

P rof essor of R om a nc e L a ngu a ges i n the Uni w‘ rsi ty of Du bli n

N E W Y O R K J O H N LA N E C O M P A N Y

C M ! V I I I M ?

C o nt ent s

T h e Po int of View

‘ M auric e S c eve and the P oetic S c hoo l o f

Ly ons

Ro nsard

The Po ets o f the E ighteenth C entury

Lec onte de Lisle

P aul Verlaine

S tu art M errill

Franc is Vi elé - Grifﬁ n N PREFATORY OTE .

ARTS of the Essays on Stuart Merrill

and Francis Viele- Grifﬁn are re

inn e in printed , by permission , from S F part of the Introductory Essay from the Irish Re vie w some of the translations from Ronsard and Louise Labé and the poem entitled

Pa ste l , in the Essay on The Poets of the Eighteenth

. I Century , from TC .D . have to thank my friend

r Mr . Cyril C eveq uer for innumerable suggestions : he h as t . h read e whole book in MS and in proof , and has helped me far m ore than any formal ac knowledg ment can indicate . The Essay on Verlaine is V almost entirely , his all the translations from erlaine are from his pen , and also the poem quoted at the end of the Essay on The Poets of the Eighteenth 1 t Century . am , however , entirely responsible for he defects of my work .

R - B T . B . . .

FR E NC H LITE R A S TU DI E S

INTRODUCTORY ESSAY .

‘ THE POINT OF VIEW .

1 .

H E poets whose proﬁles 1 shall attempt to catch as they bend over their manuscripts or breathe the scented dawn upon their

thresholds , are alike in one thing only . They loved Art with a love as passionate ' '

a s his . . a lover s for mistress or a mystic s for his God " They had no message and desired none . Did I

Sc é ve s peak otherwise of them , , in some recondite

p aradise or on some lonely mountain top , united at l F du ast with his ernette x Guillet , Ronsard

e nthroned in the Temple of Art , Bertin and Delille conversing decorously with the fair a nd fragile ladies of some Elysian Versailles , L econte de Lisle on the ﬁelds of asphodel , Merrill in

su em al his p Fontainebleau , would stoop and blast me

with their everlasting scorn . And how should I meet ' V ielé - C rifﬁn s passionate eyes averted sorrowfully from ' Helen of the russet hair or Le Cardonnel s lifted t e p ro ac hfully from his breviary ?

James Elroy Flecker was right . The place of t he poet is not leadership : he shows the 6 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES way to no heroic time to come . He may sing of heroes : he does not create them . It is an accident that his record of their prowess is their best monu m ent . True , it is that

if Pindar celebrate Gr at e Hiero , Lord of Syracuse , Ac ra as Or Theron , chief of g , These despots wisely may refuse

Record in unenduring brass .

But it is true only because brass moulders away and ' stone weathers ; while , of old , the poet s words handed

‘ ‘ - rih ted from father to son , and , to day , the p record , perpetually renewed , are more enduring . Pindar celebrated Hiero and Theron because it pleased him

e w to do so , not to stimulat other sovereigns to follo in their footsteps The millenium will not come a day the sooner fo r ' is all the poets in the world . Art for Art s sake just as meaningless a formula as Social Art . The poet is not (to quote the defunct Pioneer) a seer who uses the things of Art for an ulterior purpose . " t h He has no ideal of service . But nei her does e sit aloof in impenetrable glory , making lonely music

r amid the ruin of the world . The poet is no longe

- ae dishevelled , wild eyed , half seer and half m nad , pointing the road to some imagined Heaven ; nor is f he some mad ponti f led in chains , imagining the — people bow to him at the head of the Bacchic pro cession of drunken politicians , thinking to lead them , e like a b jewelled and bedizened sovereign , helpless his t beneath awdry crown . He goes no more in THE POINT OF VIEW 7

- - fancy dress to the dancing hall of life . He has left

" - his halo m the cloak room and lost the ticket . He n judges pigs , edits papers , writes ovels , teaches

French or geography , and makes up prescriptions h like t e most mundane of mortals . He aspires to t u e no apocalyp ic onsla ght on the portals of Heav n , to no spurious demagogic glory : he has forgotten to tear his hair and beat his breast and acclaim

himself the accursed of God . Lamartine and Hugo

have had their day . Prophets and C harlatans are

no more . Chateaubriand and Baudelaire have

come and gone .

I will not even admit that Art is for Life s sake .

At worst , this is the cry of the propagandist . At — best , it only asserts what is perfectly true and quite — meaningless that Art , like everything else , sub i serves the ult mate purpose of the universe .

' t Art has no purpose . Art for Ar s sake , ’ Social Art , and Art for Life s sake are equally

f . untrue For Art is an e fect , not a cause Art is

s . L like a sunset or the ﬂower of the ﬁeld ike them ,

of course , it may produce results , but the results are s incidental and variable . Lover may kiss the sweeter for a sunse t or a meadow of buttercups ; but

the sun does not set nor the ﬂowers grow for them . Nor are the possible results of Art the reason of its being . The sea produces results . Earthquakes pro

no t . duce results . They do seek to produce results They are the expression of the eart h in travail of its e being . No poet , if he was a real poet , ever wrot in order to produce any effect whatever upon any one

- e at all , not even his lady love . Art is an inevitabl 8 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES product of a certain set of circumstances : it is one

s . of the ﬂowers of life , perhap the ﬁnest The only conceivable purpose of existence demands that every unit should come to its full self- re alisa tion . No potential value must be lost . The claim of every individuality must be asserted . Every one

unﬂinc hin l to he . of us must strive , g y , himself There

to is but one unpardonable sin , the refusal accept the — destiny we carry within us the spiritual destiny , of bu t course , for the body is the transient appearance ' of the soul , the passing show of the world s honour and reward but the phantasm o go ria of the relative in which , for the moment , we live . The way to self realisation lies across the chasms of tradition and con vention like the orange pathway spread on the sea between us and the sun . Both are , to everyone of us , unique , moving as we move , ever present . At

the the set of earthly sun , our road of light is lost in G d darkness . But only if o set in our soul is the way

the r d of spirit obscured , leading to the e gates of the ' transcendental dawn ! Like Lord de Tabley s Two " o Ancient Kings , we must g

Heroic hearts , upon our lonely way .

i o r havin ? Which of us has his desire , g it , is satisﬁed

To Leconte de Lisle this meant despair . Horror stricken and projecting himself into the consciousness

of the race , he heard

le long rugissement de la Vie Ete rnelle

s To us , if we would live , life mu t be a pilgrimage , a journey in search of the fulﬁlment of desire only G to be fulﬁlled before the throne of od . All things THE POINT OF VIEW 9 i t . . are , in hem selves , vain No desire can be satisf ed

We make ever for a receding goal . No kiss is worth Bu w us . t the getting . Despair waits upon we kno that through disillusion and only through disillusion can the fulness of life come to us . Only through desire and the vanity of desire fulfilled can we pass to new and nobler desire . The fiery stake and the ﬂam ing crown await us . But were the pyre put out the light of were quenched and deathless Hope \Heaven were dead !

to . The poet , like any of us , seeks become himself l But there is more . Every intense individuality wil express itself . It will seek to realise its approach to " - but self hood , its becoming , not only internally ' externally . The artist s expression is Art . No indi i t v duality can escape this law . If there is no attemp to at external expression , there is a n inward refusal be oneself , a shrinking from life . Poetry is the out ' ward expression of the poet s will to he himself . It is the effect of the causes that go to m ake up the potentiality of the poet : of circumstances in their widest sense , of the epoch in which he lives and by e which h is , to some extent , conditioned : of the past of the particular art in which he seeks expression ; m r but , far ore impo tantly , of the obscure and unde cipherable impulses that constitute his personality in its e to t inmost s nse , of his will be , hat is , of the Drang which pushes him forward on the road of ‘ l t G spiritua evolu ion , on the way towards od . t To check , or attemp to check , this expression of i the poet , as of any other potential ty , is to set back

- also his inward self expression , to commit spiritual ilt murder , to be gu y of sacrilege against God . The IO FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES

' s critic has not to ask if a poet s expres ion , his poetry , is in accordanc e or not with the accepted conventions of the world . His duty is to disengage from the

' ’ poet s work the part of the poet s surroundings , the part of his historical plac e in his art , and , beyond and above these , the part of the man expressing him

. he self The poet , then , expresses himself because must . Incidentally he makes beauty . To the world . " if he says anything , he says : Take it or leave it I t And the world mos ly leaves it , afraid for the little house of cards it calls Society , the refuge of the

Eternal No .

The great epics and much of the best lyt le work of the Middle Ages are anonymous : like the spiring

ha ns n de R la nd the Ca thedrals of France , the C o o ,

Couronnem ent de Louis and most of the love songs and cha nsons de toile are the expression of a common

l e ae aspiration . They are the ﬁne f ow rs of medi val full society . I do not mean that theysprang into being

without an actual author . I mean that we do not know

. who wrote them , and that it matters not who did Even the signed work of individuals is a soc ial rather ﬁ than a personal expression . It is of little signi cance

erthe a ux that Adenet le Roi wrote the romaunt of B

n s ieds é Le gra d p , or that Chr tien de Troyes wrote V - THE , POINT OF IEW I l

e u Che va li r a Lion. If the Middle Ages in love with love itself had written the ﬁrst part of the Rom a unt of the R se o it would not have been different . That Guil laume de Lorris held the pen of the lover is of no m om ent . The dawn and evening songs of the Trouba

tens ns sir entes s o dours , their o , v , complaints and de c rts c n onform rigorously to a common patter , both in form nd a spirit . Th e personal note begins with the Renaissance . h There were no doubt forerunners , dissidents from t e ' d Orlé ns c onvention of their time , like Charles a and Villon ; but they were late and the dawn had almost f begun . For the Sixteenth Century it was su ﬁcient that

v1 sr the poet , putting into words his on of the wo rld , a nd to L doing his homage Our ady Beauty , should ex press himself . The Renaissance was occupied with individual values not with the elaboration of a social

I - s . t u ystem , was a time of break p , of clash and pas

sion and of great personalities . The Dé lie of Maurice S c é ve is not the expression of Lyonese society but of

S c é ve himself Ronsard is Ronsard and no one else .

With the Seventeenth Century Art becomes again ,

t S - i a least in theory , impersonal . ociety was all m

. 1 n3 1 red e p ortant Courtly France p Corneille , Moli re a nd Racine they are the blossoming of a social c o n c e tion p and a social code . The uncomprom ising Alceste would even praise the verses of Oronte if

the King himself expressly required it . Boileau and La

Fontaine urged the poet to be natural and true . But

they meant that he must accept the conventions , for

m al L ! IV . and intrinsic , of the Court of ouis Nature

and Truth were nothing else. Reason dictated suc h c onformity and usage demanded it . The IZ FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES n n it is true , survivors of the sixtee th century , like Trista ' i cl V S - t l H erm te , Theophile e iau , aint Aman , or incor é de rigible individualists like Scarron , or the Abb

rt - t Boisrobe , or Savinien de Cyrano Bergerac wen their own way and incurred the odium of noncon formity The Eighteenth Century accepted the same doc trine . Art was still social ; but society had divided . All that counted in France was not gathered round the Regent or Pompadour or Du Barry ; the third estate was co ming to its own . The Court and the Bour V the geoisie sought divergent expression . oltaire and minor poets are the product of Versailles ; in Diderot l m idd e . the class found a voice There was , however , in Rousseau a strong protest of the individualist doc

R m anti trine and he gained the day . The poets of o ciam expressed only them selves .

III . The distinction of so cial and personal art does no t carry with it a coincident distinction of didactic Art ' and S rt Art for Art s sake . ocial a is not necessarily didactic nor personal art necessarily an end in itself .

Hugo , personal to excess , is a notable example of fi Art trespassing on every eld , moral, political , religious . The best work of the Middle Ages was not: didactic .

The conception of Art as a Teacher arose , no doubt , out of the mnemonic use of verse by the mediaeval

V e e S a n é er moralists . The i d i t L g set a bad example of merely versiﬁed lives of saints and other wo rks of ediﬁc ation broken , it is true , here and there , by a

s really poetic production , uch as the wonderfully har THE POINT OF VIEW I3 m onious Vie de S a int Alexis with its ﬂashes of over i whelming passion , and amid its crud ty , touches and

stanzas o f e . whole t perfect artistic m ast ry An eminent critic in his H a m le t refers to the was popular tendency , which also a Greek and a

Renaissance tendency , to regard Art as having a did As e ac tic function . regards the Renaissanc in France he is certainly in error . Nowhere is the sense of Art in and for itself , as the expression of the ' in poet s being in beauty , more pure of all alloy than the work of the ﬁrst great French poet of the Renais

S ev . d e sance . c e had no didactic purpose Pontus

r Tya d had a visitor one day who , ﬁnding him reading ' Dé l e S c é ve s i , took up the book and threw it down him contemptuously after reading a verse or two . To

Tyard replied that little would Sc eve care, whether ’ fools understood him or not q u aussi se souciait bien peu le seigneur Maurice que Dé lie fﬁt vue u i " m anié e des veaux .

Ronsard , indeed , wrote a series of very noble did actic poems . But Art never stooped to be the hand

: a maid of religion or politics it might assume , as sacred duty , the guidance of nations and of kings .

The Renaissance never lost its nobility of outlook .

r Art could teach , because it stood above all othe t manifestations of the human m ind . It had the righ h . e t e to dictate , because it knew Later writ rs used forms of Art to encompass moral ends because to e them Art was a mean thing , valuable only in virtu of its uses . The high conception the Sixteenth Century held of didactic art may be expressed in the words of the

' Pé re L t é Jesuit emoyne , an a tard of the Renais I4 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES s ance , who wrote the best epic poem of the French in Seventeenth Century . He maintained , the days of

Boileau , a lofty view of Art . He protested against the low conception of didactic art which the mean spirits o f the day opposed to the great conception of the Six , te enth le Century , and declared that the Poet is c du é le o é et ommis Magistrat ternel , Co p rateur ' l Age nt - de Dieu le Pré cepteur des Rois et é des Conqu rants .

S eventeenth Centur For the _ y was pettily didactic , if anything that ministered to the grandiose society t o f the Roi Soleil can be called pet y . The greater

enres— t — z g epic , ragedy , aimed at shaping the citi en The — — lesser comedy , lyric , pastoral either at amusing him with propriety or at developing his social ac c om lish nts p m e . Individual values were of little import w ance compared ith social perfection ; were , indeed , to be strenuously diverted into conformity with the s ocial ideal .

Moll ere might seem to be an exception . His ’ Dorante m the Critiq ue de l Ec o le ( les Fem m es declares t e e hat la r gle de toutes les r gles is to please . But e Moli re , a writer of comedy , does not claim to mould s ociety like tragic and epic poets , but only to amuse with propriety those who already conform to the con d uct and attitude of all decent citizens . To aim at pleasing these is in fact accepting the desirability of A a rt . dapting to the needs of polite society He is , if L ’ w not (in emoyne s ords) , a Parfumeur or a Faiseu r de Ragoﬁts at least little more than a " Bateleur de Ré duits and a Plaisant de Ruelles . H e would have been ineffably shocked at the bare idea that the end of Art could possibly be the expression of

1 6 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES

a gainst the Seventeenth Century doctrine of confor

m ity . In endeavouring to guide and mould the polity o f S c t the tate and the condu of its citizens , Lemoyne expressed himself with so great an individuality of a rtistic utterance as to constitute a sin against the soc ial c onception of Art . The bourgeois school o f the Eighteenth Century was

e xclusively and militantly didactic . Diderot and the

writers of his school were like Monsieur Poirier . He c ould see nothing in a landscape entitled A Summer " ne Evening . Ca dit rien is his criticism and he m i nstances as a perfect exa ple of Art , une gravure

u ré nu au q i rep sente chien bord de la mer , aboyant ﬁ " m t l d evant un chapeau de a e o t . Diderot adored the s entimentality and moral platitudes of Richardson and

Lillo . Greuze was his ideal painter he cared nothing

f or Watteau . Boucher and Fragonard revolted his

b ourgeois soul . He would have wept in contortions of attendrissement before Bu bbles or Christ a nd the B o S ut . y co Rousseau , Bernardin de Saint Pierre ,

t e . P u hough individualists in Art , wer didactic a l et Virginie is perhaps the supreme example of the posi t ivel n y i decent morality of the Eighteenth Century . e D lille , though not a moral sentimentalist like the b s ourgeois writers , insist on parading his professional s tock- in- trade in the very midst of his loveliest pas s ages . The Versailles School was , however , in general, a n ything but didactic . No one could have less d esire to preach than Bertin or Cardinal Bernis . The Rom antic ists revived the grandiose heresy of L m not e oyne . In Hugo the prophet , to say the

c . harlatan , threatened to engulf the poet If Art is a ' ! fl w r o n m t ou g arden of o e s . Hugo s art is too fte a ons r s THE POINT OF VIEW I7 ﬂoral clock or the Royal monogram in tulips or a loyal shall design in red , white and blue (or I rather say in o range , white and green , for Hugo was always a

rebel I) . He was not content that his garden should delight the senses with shape and colour and per fume : he must insist on planting a moral or political ' Dogs Cemetery of genera and species . He is a P rofessor of Botany , not an inspired gardener like

Jasmin who ministered to the Pompadour , nor an Odilon Redon who painted rose s burning like a mid summer noon and larkspurs as blue as the noonday

sky and as light and airy as celestial but terﬂies . t n l Musset had no didactic aim . His S a ces a — Ma libra n the loveliest music in all French poetry — are simply an incomparable Hymn to Beauty .

Musset had no doctrine . He was just a poe t . Gautier began the protest against the Romantic conception of Art which led to the Parnassian school and the work

of Heredia and Leconte de Lisle . Since then French literary art has kept to the true doctrine : the prot a onists g of didacticism have been , happily , entirely devoid of any artistic gifts they couldjehg se or per v ert to their purpose . No school of any account has ' ’ In arisen to dispute the sway of l A rt pour I Art . all the diversity and clash of poetic credos this has t e

- mained the corner stone of the faith . Decadents ,

une e symbolists , the je s have resp cted Art : in every a é c f , in every ivory tower , they have worshipped Our Lady Beauty with unfaltering praise and unconquerable

faith . The other doctrine is left to the Barbarian

the howling without : to the inept , unclean , the m a sq ues dancing their obscene carnival around the still porticos of Art : to Silenus outside the Garden of

the Rose . — II . MAURICE SCEVE AND THE POETIC S L CHOO OF LYONS .

HE Renaissance stood for life m i ts fulness — the cult of nature , the development of the individual and the realization of

- beauty . It was not anti spiritual . All through the manifold web of its activities is woven the subtle thread of a new and wonderful spiritual intensity—that strange neo w all Platonism which , ith the rest , coming

ae from Italy , mingled with the medi val conception " ’ " L Am ou r and of Courtois , found in France , perhaps

its chief exponent in Margaret Queen of Navarre , in ‘ whose Com é die cz q ua tre personnages joué e a u Mont de Marsa n ( I547) the Quee n of the Love of God proclaims the superiority of the nee - Platonic ideal of love over h Calvinism , Cat olicism , and Worldliness . After the imprisonment of the Middle Ages the

Renaissance brought new life to the spirit , a breath of wind searching out all nooks and crannies of scholasticism , and sweeping them clean with the great cleanness of life: It was as if some cataclysm had thrown down the unsc aleable walls of the prison- house and opened a prospect of measureless country beyo nd . Instead of a pleasant valley (as it had seemed) set in the encircling hills of authority , men found themselves

- t on a mountain top , with the world stretching at heir SCEVE AND POETIC SCHOOL OF LYONS I9

feet , virgin and splendid for the adventurous traveller .

Art was the ﬁne ﬂower of this new , more spacious

. e life In the poets of the Renaissanc , in the French — Ronsard , for example this sense of bigness , this Iilt f o the soul , untrammelled now , toward unsuspected

s . glorie , is at its full Their song ﬂoats golden and ' illimitable on the wings of their spirit s freedom . They

m en t are living life to the utmos , men in all their glory

o in of intellect and passion and emotion , no l nger fau ts swaddled in the bands of Church and State and established doctrine !

It is true that if much had been gained , something too had been lo st . Faith save only in themselves had gone . The men of the Renaissance were heretics in

Middle all things . The Ages had placed a veto on all thought that transcended the dogma of the Church and the accepted theories of statec raft . Unable to move beyond a certain narrow range of speculation a speculation in which the conclusion was given as well as the premisses , and only the syllogism left — open , like a journey to one city by many roads the greater minds of the Middle Ages had been forced to concentrate . The Art of the Dark Ages had in i depth and intens ty what it had not in breadth . n Driven inward by the restrictio s of Church and State , conﬁned to a narrow choice of possible subjects , the poet was forced back on new aspects of old passions , new attitudes to old conceptions . There is in the

ae ha ns ns de t ile medi val lyric , in the C o o like

' Vente l ore et Ii raim c rollent ' s entraim ent s ef Qui o dorment . 2 0 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES in the Dawn Songs like C aite de la tor , C ntor ardez e ,

ne haz le Or rien tant com jor ,

Am is , qui me depart de vos .

’ d Orlé ans r or in Charles or Froissa t , every note of pas t o sion and of sereni y , every mo d and experience from the copper glories of passion- laden sunse ts and the hot perfume of still dark meadows on summer nights to the fresh wind of spring sweeping over the cowslips at dawn ; and everything stands out with that strange , clear- cut precision as of enamelled fairy meads and painted roofs which is so much more mysterious and full of suggestion even than mist or twilight or rainy

Auc a ssin e Ni ette— n woods . t col is that o t Art ? Or

a R m a unt the R se the frail be uty of the o of o , ' ' Ou I art d am ors est tote enclose

or the story of Tristram and Iseult . The low sky like a starred canopy and the tapestried backgrounds of mediaeval life may have been unco ngenial to science

s a and philosophy , to tatecr ft in a large sense , to the

attitude of him who , like Faust , in the Second Part ,

a stands before Nature , ein M nn allein , out of accord with the large harmonies and c lear in lines of Greek art , but they were not consistent with the development o f a most

passionate theory o f human relationships , with the "

conception of that Amour Courtois , which , if it did

not break the heavy clouds of the sultry sky , ﬁltered

i a L t nto the he rt and soul of the over a new intensi y , SCEVE AND - POETIC SCHOOL OF LYONS 2 ]

! like dew upon the fresh grass and buttercups of a

- n dawn lighted meadow , giving him i stead of the hard finite expanse of the free Pagan world an interior in finity recking nothing of outward and material trammels which stirred the dying embers of the old n world fire , if ot to the c lear flam e of

spirituality , at least to the red smo ulder of passion .

In the shadow of frail poplars on sunset lawns , the Middle Age poured its concentrated passion between

the prison walls of a narrow world , each line a jewel led facet of intense light blazing with love long- pent a nd restrained desire . T he Renaissance burst the dam . What the R e enaissance gained in fr edom and Iilt , it lost in

concentration . No ﬁxed boundaries subsisting to bar th e way of the adventurous , nothing remained sacred

now but Beauty , that dangerous Beauty the

Middle Ages had so terribly feared , as some S iren insidiously c alling beyond the prison walls and drawing men away from the c o m fortable orderliness of uncontroverted dogma . But

the loss itself is almost a gain . Who can for more ? all r than a mo ment regret it Now was f ee , men

she p ursued Beauty whithersoever led , deserting all f r t a lone o things o her , ravelling al ng perilous roads

t o o r away from roads al ogether , foll wing ever that ' - o Lan strange , new , wonderful fen light , the Jack — thom of Art our Lady Beauty , at whose feet they w t s a , pros rate in adoration , all forms of being and action and Life itself ! And nevermore will this

r t ri a c u lterio ri am r sea ch for Beauty , his p s o cease to L b e a mainspring of life in the atin countries . The ' ’ night of Maurice Sc é ve s Delie ( I544) is strown with its 2 2 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES

ﬁre : i n him spiritual passion and the love of beatrty are m ade one ; and it were a bold critic who would undertake again to separate the worship of the Queen . of the Love of God and the Pagan Goddess Beauty in the work of anyone who came after him in France . There will be times when m e n think they hold the elusive sprite in their nets of rules and canons of W taste , there ill be times when Art becomes a con ' talk sum ing passion and men of Art for Art s sake ,

i ~ r as f A t were not inevitably the ﬂower of life , splen

ae did when life is full , weak and an mic when life I totters and sinks beneath the onslaught of authority or of the powers of evil . But evermore the mysterious and f t t in ine fable touch of hose supernatural ﬁngers , of tha

! c — th deﬁnable vision , which we all Beauty which , in e

e- Griﬂin L l n eyes of Viel became ife itself , H e e of the

— l s russet hair will glorify and destroy , coming , a a , t who u most to hose seek it least , b t all souls being its t tuned to music and stirred , if they will or not , o the quest of the new Graal !

II . Marot rs the faint blush of the dawn : if Art be the touchstone of the Renaissance—I mean the conscious effort to produce Beauty - then

a . Marot is still medi eval He shares , however , to i some extent , the deas of his patron Margaret Queen

e Art of Navarr , but he achieves , like all the poets of

Middle the Ages , outside Provence , only by accident . He loved sincerely- he was not capable of passion and he wro te sincere and moving love po ems to his mistress Anne of Alenc on , niece of Francis I . and of

Margaret . But he had neither the concentration of

2 4 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES

' u splendour of s nset . Into the mould of Seraﬁno s ’ epigram he poured the Dia loghi d am ore of Lé on ’ H é brieu and the A ngoisses et rem edes d a m our of the é ‘ grand Rh toriqueur Jean Bouchet , the intimate friend ' R ns rd of o a s father . He turned the Gather ye roses of his Italian model to the praise of love u n

‘ the dying , but he kept overwrought preciosity of his

master . And to all he added the intensity of a tor

tured and soul sensitive , the keenness of an acute analytical mind and a transcending passion for artistic

form . The love he celebrated and in whose flame his verse is tempered is no t

Ce Cupido aislé

Aveugle , enfant , nud , incertain , volage " ' e Qui tant d amer a son doux ha mesl ,

but the great Love of which Rabelais spoke when he declared that

Amour ha tel effect

u ne eult e foIIe Q 1 1 p estre en co ur de femme , ' ’ " rf i Ains en I e sprit de I homme plus pa a c t .

Sc eve had drunk deep of Margaret of Navarre and of

. Plato , Petrarch and the Italian Platonists He , like w Margaret , had ished

Mon ame perir e t noier Or puisse en ceste douce mer ' ' ' il n D amour , o y a point d amer ; ne Je ne sens corps , ame vie , ' e Sinon amour , t n ay envie SCEVE AND POETIC SCHOOL OF LYONS 2 5

' u i c rainc te De paradis , d enfer , Mais que sans ﬁn je so is e strainc te in et o c te . A mon amy , unye j

The illimitable night of his obscurity is strown with s innumerable stars . Never ha a poet knelt with more passionate worship at the feet of our Lady Beauty

nor stretched more longing hands towards her . And here and there he has succeeded in putting into words of inconceivable fulness and glory the striving of his

incomparable soul . And where the light blazes

through the darkness of his failure , not Ronsard him self has attained the immeasurable brightness of his " t S verse which Love empered in his ﬂame . c eve was

of those who like Petrarch , his master , have had the intolerable vision of God and of Love His ' Minister he saw Love enthro ned in the heart of the cornﬁeld

o and in the depths of the w od ; sunset and sunrise , the daffo dils in the spring dew and the dripping leaves of ' o L the fall t ld him of ove s rule , divine and eternal ,

in Nature as truly as in Revelation . And Love to

him went accompanied by joy and sorrow , both

r ete nal as Life . I5O4 I505 Sc é ve was born in or in Lyons , the Gate

o vem orshi ae of Italy , during the g p of C sar Borgia .

Little is known of his life . Margaret of Navarre turned him to the study of Platonism he had already L found the reputed tomb of aura at Avignon . He was indeed the ﬁrst scholar of Lyons when in | 544 he took his plac e as her most admirable poet by the profonde é q uenc e et mirable facture of his Dé lie o bject de la plus ha ute v ertu (in the Italian 449 sense) , a series of dizains in honour of Pe rnette 2 6 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES du Guillet , his mistress , one of the brilliant group

L s t L of yonese poete ses , hat included ouise Labe, ' é Sc é ve s Cl mence de Bourges and own sisters , Claudine and Sybille . The high imaginings of Sc é ve found France in travail her serious mood accorded with his docte gravité the easy charm of Marot could not i l e f l the aspirations , intellectual and motional , of the

IS44 Cha rle s men of . V . was at the Gates of Paris

: Henry VIII . in Picardy Etienne Dolet , who stands for the individualism of the Renaissance , was in

Sc é ve prison . achieved a universal reputation . il t i Sib e , writing f ve years later , speaks of him as a é lac e classic . D lie took her p beside Beatrice and

Laura .

an m Dé l e It is not easy to give idea of the char of i , of the passionate relations of the poet to Permette du

i . Guillet , of the diff cult perfection of his verse He is stiff and mannered , often obscure , but never careless or facile : he , of all poets who ever wrote , respected his Art , and sought only to express consummately his

é e t m high desire Ie haut d sir qui nuit jour m e eu t .

1545 at 2 5 Pe rnette du Guillet died in the age of ,

R m es e and in the same year appeared her poems , y d the gentille e t ve rtueuse (again in Italian sense) da m e

e o nno ise . the Fernette da Guill t, Ly All she wrote is expression of an intense and unchangeable devotion o to the poet and scholar who , with his golden w rds , had turned her de noire en blanche and ﬁlled the

night of her ignorance with knowledge and freedom . land In La Nuici she tells how , in the of dreams , the

kingdom of silence , she saw the dark ﬁgures of Vain

r . gIo y , Ambition and Shame Dawn breaks and SCEVE AND POETIC SCHOOL OF LYONS 2 7

‘ u is t drives away ceste tourbe n an e . The dawn — S her cher jour is Maurice c é ve . ' ‘ a u lsa e E l ue dc Ia Vie S lita ire a Sc é ve s S y , g og o p ' 4 It' t peare d in I5 7 . is the poet s lamen for his dead be mistress , cast in the form of a Pastoral dialogue

r i rm o tween two Shepherds Antonio and File m o . F Ie

re is too near his sorrow to seek comfort . He will main in his rustic solitude seigneur des boys grans ' es is dis e t pa , despite his friend s urging to seek the

tractions of the town . Next year Sc eve organised the Pageant with which

Lyons welcomed Henri II . He was the undisputed master of the brilliant Lyonese

Labé : school , grouped round Louise Pontus ' T rd Lé H é brieu s Dia l hi de ya , the translator of on og ’ and a writer of Platonic dialogue himself : Tyard s

o f cousin , Guillaume des Autels , the critic the school

Olivier de Magny , the most passionate of Louise ' lovers du Labes many Peletier Mans , the most curi ous of the many- sided ﬁgures of the French Renais

sance , mathematician , phonetician , poet and critic V u Jean de auzelles , the friend and p blisher of Hol

bein : his brother Mathieu , the husband of Claudine

s é ve . c , and many more ' But Sc eve s heart was not in the W orldly glory he d ha won . We know that he left Lyons and travelled

retum in in many countries , g only to write and publish

c ro os I his Mi c m e in 562 . After this there is no trace of him . The most famous poet of his day utterly dis

appears . He took no part in the wars of Religion he a is not mentioned as victim of any of the massacres ,

Huguenot or Catholic , of the next ten years . The date of his death is unknown; 2 8 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES

' tells Pernette s Legend , however , that , after death

Sc é ve tried to live his old life , the life of a great poet h ad and scholar , t e friend and favourite of Kings , the m ired of Lyons and of the world . Fair ladies threw themse lves at his feet and princes vied for his favour .

But it was all in vain . He wandered the world a prey to loneliness and to all the horrors of parting for ever from his only possible Beloved He plumbed the deeps of sorrow , learnt the meaning of nevermore . ll One night , when , weary beyond a belief , broken and

la S ready to die , he y down on a mountain side in yria , and the tropic moon lighted his wan face and white

r h e . hai , slept , not having slept for many days And e Pernette h e r th re came a vision to him , of in all

full Perne tt beauty and of her old Iove , e Iovelier than

love any Helen , and she bade him for of her return L to yons , write the great poem they had planned to gether , and then return on a certain night to this Syrian desert and await her at the foo t of the moun tain . He awoke , and full of new life and wise with new wisdom , he returned to Lyons , and wrote the Mic ro c o sm e m ll , the epitome of all his Iea ing and a his ' im a l m n life s g g and knowledge . Then leaving Lyons l for ever behind him , and a l earthly hope and earthly honour , he returned to the mountain in Syria , and

Perne tte there appeared to him , and they climbed the u mountain together , his arm abo t her , her hair stream th ing in the night air , e light of her eyes illumining the darkness of the Syrian night , for now there was no moon . A shepherd guarding his ﬂock of Syrian goats

s w on the upper pastures , a them pass , and told his master the follo wing day that a young God had passed t him leading his divine bride , and hat they had SCEVE AND POETIC SCH OOL OF LYONS 2 9

walked in brightne ss on the dark slope of the moun his tain , and had then passed on beyond sight round a shoulder of rock , he being stricken with fear and

not daring to follow . And that was the end of Maurice Sc é ve and Pernette

du m o rtal saw . Guillet . No eye them again l Through o ve they did not die .

For Sc é ve was the most passionate Lover of all time .

t was To Dan e Beatrice , as Carducci says , hardly more than a theological virtue . Petrarch in his old age was ﬁlled with shame at the error of his youth ' ' " e i r fr t del mio van gg a vergogna e I u to e I pentirsi . The Lovers of the ancient world and of the Middle Ages ’

had not his spirituality . But Sc eve s love of Pe rnette ! loved well and we know he her not wisely , but too , was transﬁgu red by a wo nderful spiritual passion that has ﬁlled even his most c arnal images and sex itself with beauty and rapture till his m ortal touch of her

' m ortal as body trembles and burns , in his verse in life , t wi h a more than mortal ﬁre and ecstasy . In him the sensuous and the Spiritual are so subtly and wonder

fully interwoven that the frail beauty of a ﬂower , the ’ n ur gree and p ple backs of a celandine s gold petals , not are only a hymn of the spirit to the divine , but a love - song to the rich beauty of some splendid mistress t the ﬁre of whose Iips , the ouch of whose hand ,

re n t a o only the fulﬁlment of desire . but the very

breath of the spirit burning all dross away .

IV .

Sc eve celebrated only Pernette du Guillet : she is

is his r r h and only . He has caught he fast fo ever " ’

a tan le . L L in g of sweet rhymes But ouise abé , Ia 30 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES e ll Be lle Cordi re , was sung by a the poets of the school

L . of yons , and was the mistress of more than one She was younger than Perne tte du Guillet by some six

- years , and outlived her by twenty one . Her legend is quite other than that of the frail and delicate mistress of Maurice S c é ve . Hers is a coarser ﬁbre her verse , ' ' is Sc eve s Pernette du Gu ille t s too , clearer than or , but not so intense or so subtle . She is passionate ; but hers is the red not the white ﬁre : and the Spiritual note is almost absent She was an expert in knightly exercises she is said to have fought at the siege of Perpignan when she was

’ only sixteen . But she fell before another Lord than battle Death , sought other glory than on the ﬁeld of Lo e her golden head was bowed before the Reaper v . and the lance she had borne so proudly was turned ‘

. It against her , poisoned with the venom of Desire is not as

Br d . a m ante r a , ou Ia haute Ma phise

Soeur de Roger .

but that Lyons knew her , as the faithless wife of Ie

A m on the bon Sire y , rope maker , and a woman of

- l ill repute (even if some of the ta es be untrue) . She ' é Am u was a Damn e de I o r. Her poems are the n apologia of her life . Hers is the Ca nzo iere of pas

c arn l l e sion unchecked the strings and goads of a ov , its unceasing and insatiable desire , the cerements and ashes of its ending , these are her matter . Her verse

' ' ' rings golden like Peele s or S outhwell s but it swells w f . e she ith the moan o intolerable pain Like Ph dre ,

s is the victim of Venus Anadyomene , a a proie ‘ " é e Ie Ia attach e f J suis corps , toy meilleure part ,

— S . III . PIERRE DE RON ARD

I .

IERRE DE RONSARD was born at the L e t Castle of a Poissonni re , near Cou ures ,

L 1 r on the 0 , in the Vendomois , on 2 nd I52 5 Saturday , September , He became in 1536 a page to the

' - Dauphin and was present at his death bed . He then passed into the service of the ulé m e f Duke of Ango , now become Duke o 1537 Orleans , the third son of Francis I . In Ronsard ’ S s V s went to cotland page to James . young wife , ‘ r Madeleine , daug ter of F ancis I . H e spent two years in Scotland , with a break of a month or two , and six months in England , ﬁnally returning to France 154 0 . s in He was then sent with the great humani t ,

' i di l m at1 c m 1 s31 n Lazare de Ba f , on a p o o to Germany — to a religious congress at Haguenau . There he heard Calvin speak . When he came back to France 1543 he was ill and became deaf . In he left the ser

o f Charles vice of Valois , who had intended him for

di lom at1 c n as a p career , but remai ed at Court a squire

11 he m of the new Dauphin , afterwards Henri . In t sa e

year , having determined on an ecclesiastical career , he was tonsured at Le Mans by Bishop René du

his - Bellay , the uncle of famous friend and fellow poet i n du . after years , Joachim Bellay His ﬁrst published

the Bea uties he w u ld work , an Horatian ode , Of o desi e in h a - o 4 e r is L dy l ve appeared in 15 7 . M an

while he had been studying Greek at Paris , and in the PIERRE DE RONSARD 33 same year as his ﬁrst poem appeared became a i Master of Arts of the Univers ty of Paris . During the period of his studies he had conceived the idea of grafting the Pindaric Ode as we ll as the Horatian on S c é ve French literature and , after reading , had revised his conception of poetry . Poe try was for him no longer a mec hanical art to be learned from a book of rules

a and precepts , but it was Beauty inc rnate clothing a passionate and intense attitude towards life .

II . ' Four women divide Ronsard s life and his work e s ee . Cassandre , Marie , Gen vre and H l ne Ca sandre

he saw ﬁrst when he was nineteen , and she a child of ﬁfteen with black hair and dark eyes set in an olive

e face . Four years passed before he m t her again , four years for the poet of rich endeavour l n Ieam ing and in

rt a I a , and of somewh t casual courtship of a brune " V nd i t la e 6m o s . e blonde , in his native and at Paris

Meanwhile Cassandre had married Jean de Peigné , ' Pré Lord of , a neighbour of the poet s and he came upon her gathering ﬂowers bareheaded in an autumnal

a meadow . For some time Ronsard saw Cassandre fre t 1552 quen ly . In she visited him at the Chateau of La

e she I il Poissonni re , where for a time ay se riously l . The intimacy that ensued see ms to have made the poet over- bold : for in the same year he was ﬁnally

dismissed by her for too great hardihood in courtship . He did not see her for many years and the old relations were never taken up again ; but for the last ﬁfteen i S years of h s life they often met as old friends . he

survived him twenty years and died in 1605. ' A i né T Ic D ub g courted her niece , Diane de a y , and 34 F RENCH LITERARY STUDIES

du Pré o her daughter , Cassandre , married an ancest r of Alfred de Musset ' t m c Ronsa rd s love for Cassandre was not pla o . That is evident from the sonnets and songs of the

t c arnal . Cassandre sequence . But it was no The it poems addressed to her do not , is true , throb with

‘ mystical pass1 on like those of S c é ve to Dé lie . They are not , on the other hand , a sultry blaze of red roses , '

L e lovers . fullblown , like Louise ab s to her They are

le u like pa eglantine , blown lightly by a Sp ng breeze beneath a high sky with scudding clouds . But Cassandre would have had them like some snow- white

! lily in a convent- garden : candid with passionless l worship . Ronsard was not bloodless enough to p ease her as a love r : for him the dark roses of her cheeks

' were not only the earthly garment of a soul they were also flushed olive flesh warm with the fire of hum an lo ve : her perfect lips spoke not only wisdom and beauty : they were also a chalice wherein he drank the body and bloo d of his beloved Her touch filled him with ineffable fire the Spirit blazed its undeniable

way . burning up the dross of desire : but it was a ﬂame and not the cold light of austere and distant n adoration . He des es like a shower of gold to fall drop by drop into her lap as she sleeps to be a white buII carrying her through the April meadows a Nar cissus and she a pool that he might plunge in its coo l '

ing waters for ever . Cassandre s incomprehension

l n t drove Ronsard , the sul ry summer of

1 1 ntox1 c a tl on his life , nto the heedless of ' Marie s kisses . From the sparkling goblet of a

rare . q ueur he fell to the drunkenness of

wm e la ordinary , and y , rankly and unaspiring , in the PIERRE DE RONSARD 35

o or a c mf t ble assurance of her plebeian embraces . " S - ilenus of the swine herds is his name .

Marie had not the aristocratic beauty of Cassandre . She was the daughter of an innkeeper near Bourgueil ' her cheeks were red aussi vermeille q u une rose de " mai , Ronsard says , and she had curly , chestnut

. am le brown hair Her charms were p , and the poet

so dwells with weari me complacency upon them .

‘ loved When he Cassandre he aspired too high , he

s T ard dec lare to Pontus de y ; now his verse , like his

dé senﬂé e é love , is and se d ment parlant trop

er tu l bassement . We tire of the p pe a Iushness m which the poet wallows we lo ng to get away from these heavy meadows to the heights from Tess of the ' D Urbe rvilles to Senhou se with Sanchia in the star strown night of her last coming . And Cassandre be comes a wonderful might- have- been : the shadow of her re fusal casts long despair upon the work of her ' poet (for her s , in spite of all , he remains) as upon his disoriented life For three years Ronsard remained ' t Sh Marie s slave ; then the a tachment coo led . e had never been faithful to him but in 1558 a very serious ' ri al Charles v appeared in the poet s cousin , de

Pisseleu , Bishop of Condon and Abbot of Bourgueil , with whom Ronsard appears to have shared her i ' 64 favours until h s cousin s death in 15 . Her early

t 1573 e t dea h in , or th reabou s , was the occasion of a very beautiful series of poems . The instancy of his l n e passion had o g since cooled , Gen vre and a shadowy nd S inope , of whom we know nothing , had come a S ee he ld . m all gone , and H l ne the ﬁeld wonder that the poe ms to Marie dead are entirely platonic : she was little more than an idealized memory of a once D 36 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES

’ ‘ R n glad summer . o sard s grief at her loss is the sorrow of an old man who realizes his age and the hopeless

’ decline of his gallant manhood ; she linked him with a past of hope and passion , and her death was the snapping of a chord in his own soul.

- 1 his l e During the summer t me of ov for Marie ,

H m n to Dea th a Ronsard wrote the noble y , a p ean

. soul of victory to the great Redeemer His , steeped in the heavy langour of mortality , sought to burst the dull bonds of the ﬂesh that held him a too acquiescent prisoner in the shackles of earthly desire . But the blazing light of white Anjou is in the rolling periods o f the hymn the ﬁery sap of summer rises irresistibly and each line is like a gold or pu rple grape ripened in

- the mid days of Bourgueil. In a cup of vermilion Ronsard pledges Death the Arch- Beloved and swoon

his ing at her feet , he pours passion before her . He r asks only to est in her arms , at peace; all ardour that no m o rtal Bride can still consummated and assuaged in this immor tal embrace Here Ronsard has left Petrarch and Pindar and the

new- discovered Anacreon and spoken his own passion in his own way

I will go seek some other sacred well , Whence springs an untouched stream that murmurs down Within fair orchards far from men and noise ;

A well the sun has never known , the birds

Of Heaven have left unsullied by their beaks , And whither never shepherd boys have led

Their herds of bulls with trampling feet . There i

this invioIate Will drink my ﬁll of , draught , S PIERRE , DE RON ARD

And then some new song I will sing , a song Whose notes will be perhaps so very sweet That coming centuries will sing them yet

No robber , thieving from the poets old , My song shall be my own and mine alone

My song shall rise to Heaven by a new way , ' t Singing the praise of Death tha s still unsung .

With Genevre Ronsard had reached the hard cynic

u f r ism of the ro é . He cared nothing o her and very little fo r her favours he took them casually and then

they parted . The dreams and aspirations of spring , the achievement and careless enjoyment of summer

w rd . o l were over She was the love of his y autumn . Ronsard was the Court Poet and intimate friend of n I! . Charles , who loaded him with pe sions and bene

ﬁ es . u c He was the most celebrated poet in E rope , prior of Saint- Cosmes - lez- Tours and of Croixval ' (where you may see him in Pater s Gaston dc

t ur - La o ) , Canon of Saint Martin of Tours , Abbot of n Belloza e and incumbent of many cures . e Ronsard met Gen vre bathing in the Seine . Next s t d ay he passed her door and topped to alk to her . She asked him who he was and if he had loved other

: women . He answered I am Ronsard . That is

enough . The whole incident and all that followed (save only this answer) are pedestrian enough : they lived together for a year and then parted most philoso

hic all nt . p y , by mutual agreeme With his love for Helene de Fonsé q ue Ronsard rose ff again and shook o the drag . But he could not put l d . ove H é lene away the insistent sorrow He truly . But

he loved her hopelessly as an old man loves a young girl 38 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES pretending that the bitter reality of an overwhelming a nd despairing love is but the pretty and precious triﬂing of a great poe t playing at love- making with a G c . re t hild y and racked with illness , he knew tha he could not hope to inspire passion in this young beauty

f . s o the Court Her love for him , genuine as far a it w ' h ent , was partly sincere friendship , and for t e rest a compound of affectionate pity and overweening pride

ﬁ t o s at her magni cen conquest . R n ard made the best of the situation : the Master acted his self- assumed part with brave dissimula’tion and she accepted his

s unu der love a he gave it and not as he meant it , n ’ standing of a poet s broken heart .

o Charles Another sorrow , too , had come up n him

had d I! . ied

And they , alive or dead , torture with equal grief

Whether of vain regret or still more hopeless tears ,

For indistinguishably love and death are one ,

r ernn H a sonnet ends , ef g to the living elen and the

dead Charles .

Soon , old and broken , Ronsard retired to his native ' country and his many priories . Charles successor , : Henry King of Poland , had no use for Ronsard he

the - already had his Court poet , time server Desportes ,

who had followed him to Warsaw and back . More ove onsard felt little ympathy o the wor t of all r , R s , f r s ﬂatterer the Kings of France . He was no of m sovereignt y . Finding Henry obdurate to his re on

str nc es , he dared urge the new Chancellor to disobey a " lo se and rule well . It is better , he said , to the ' Be Sovereign s favour than be hissed by the people .

40 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES

his day , devoted above all things to peace and free f the dom of conscience . He could a ford to be just to a Huguenots . But Ronsard , though natur lly moderate and tolerant , detested Calvinist puritanism too ardently to maintain the equable temper of de ' ' t l a I H os ital l H o spi a . Rons rd was not religious , de p

s t wa . Being ﬁrmly convinced of the ruth of Catholic ism he co uld respect the sincere convictions o f others . But Ronsard could not suspect that among the Calvi nists there were really men whose whole being de m ande d a reasonable faith and whose convictions would not allow them to refrain from propaganda , even at the price of martyrdom . He did not and could

e w s not understand Protestantism . H a a Catholic by

‘ tradition and habit , and for him the claim of the Pro testants was nothing but presumption and satanic pride . To go behind the authority of the Church , to oppose the recognised faith of his country were sin t against God and crime agains the State . And to presumption and sedition the Calvinists added icono

lasm . c , puritanism , and petty tyranny The inquisi tional regime of Geneva with its censorship of morals a nd its vigilance committees that made all privacy impossible was utterly detestable to him . Asceticism t and exaggerated aus erity he could not tolerate . To 1560 defend the Catholicism of , still untouched by the

- Counter Reform , was to defend his own way of living n and thinki g , his whole attitude towards life , his Art , and the Paganism he held so dear . And , when by 1563 Civil War had already broken out and France n was plu ged , by the act of the Huguenots , into a t cataclysm of blood and ravage , hen the Catholic ' Church and its supporte rs stood in Ronsard s eyes PIERRE DE RONSARD 4 ] for peace and order and good government ; and the

‘ — CaIV1 n1 sts were rebels and fomenters of discord a

two plague and curse upon France . The year of the Disc ourses o n the m iseries of this tim e and of the second version of the Elegy to Guillaum e des

Aute ls was the year of the massacre of Passy , of e the English seizure of Havre , Rouen and Diepp , of t the seige and fall of Rouen , of the Huguenot a tempt

’ U . pon Paris , and the Catholic victory of Dreux

' Ronsard s attitude towards life is well shown in his

Answer to s m e m inisters a nd rea hers Ge ne a o p c of v , IS63 e published in the spring of , a reply to a numb r

t red of Protestant libels . After reci ing his C o , that of the Catholic Church , he goes on to give an account

a m o rm n of his way of life On w king in the g , be t fore doing anything , I call upon the E ernal, the

of all Father good , praying H 1 m humbly to give me

and t His grace , tha the new day may pass without f o fence to Him then I get up , and when I am dressed , I set myself to study . For four or i k f ve hours I remain at wor , composing or read

. r dl n ing Then weary of too much ea g , I o to leave my b oks and go Church when I come back , ’ t after an hour s pleasan conversation I dine soberly ,

and give thanks to God . The rest of the day I devote " to amusement .

l s — Then he tel s of his amu ements walking , talking

r a slee l n with a f iend , re ding or p g m a garden or by a t stream , or playing ennis , wrestling , fencing , or even

o exchanging good stories with a gay c mpanion , for ,

as he says , 42 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES

]

Too much austerity does not dwell in me . in ll F a y, i When brown n ght has set the stars arow ,

r Encurtaining with veils the ea th and sky , Careless I go to bed and raise my eyes And mouth and heart toward the vault of Heaven "

And make my prayer ,

his s1 m le That is p mode of life . ' And then he compares the poet s love of beauty w ith the sullen fanaticism of the sectarian . He makes no secret of his love of fair women—seeing in it no wrong , provided it be decent and moderate , and he ends his poem with a picture of France ravaged and destroyed by Civil War and expresses his sorrow and indignation at all this waste and horror . But he does t not forget , even in his anger , to do justice to the grea — Protestant family of Coligny his friends and pro tec o f W tors , whom he thinks no evil and to hom he attributes no ill desire toward the realm of France . His earlier poems before the outbreak of Civil War

a had been singularly moderate . Here is a p ssage from the Disc o urse to De Aut ls 156 s e of 0 . He is spea king of the Huguenots For they do wrong and we too are at fault Their fault is wishing to destroy our realm

’ ‘ o e w And f rcibly r sist our sovereign s ill , And in presumption of their proud self- will For a ncient laws to substitute new dreams i ' is s r h ir f thers t Their fault t aym g from t e a oad , To follo w ways of foreign sectaries ;

s Their fault is scattering editious prints , Slanderous and full of insult and contempt PIERRE DE RONSARD 43'

see They think they only , they only live

W li es ell ordered v , while we have strayed from God

- To follow doctrine man made and corrupt .

But then he immediately goes on to castigate the Catholic Church for its abuses—no Pope has preached

beneﬁc e s u n since Gregory the Great , are given to

o educated men , to boys of ﬁfteen , fops , fo ls , and are indi sold to the highest bidder . He is particularly g nant at the young prel‘ates who care nothing for the1 r

e r poor ﬂock , whose wool they take and often th i skin too , and who live in profusion , idleness and debauchery . And he asks What would Saint Paul say to find the Church founded of old in humble ness of soul , in all p atience and obedience , without m one c onsideration y , , , strength or power , poor , naked , an outlaw what would he say to find it to da y

- an - rich , well fed d proud , well provided with coin ,

revenues and lands , its ministers swollen with worldly v wealth and its Popes even clothed in splendid vest m ents of silk and cloth of gold And Ronsard replies He would wish he had never suffered for the

n for Church , never been beaten or stoned or ba ished it . He urges the Catholics to reply to the Huguenots not with cannon and armour but by the pen , where

and by they defend so well their bad cause , which the Catholics as yet use so ill to defend theirs which is just and good . Ronsard evidently does not believe that an exhibition of force can prove the justice of any cause : for him the victories of the spirit can o nlv t be won by the spiri . ' ’ l H OS ital s f nd But when , in spite of de p e forts , seco ed 44 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES

by Ronsard , the Civil War had actually broken out ,

o the poet changed his tone . He had to ch ose his side , t actively now . He even fough for a while with the sword as well as the pen . He apostrophizes the Protestant de Bé ze

No longer preach in France a Gospel armed ,

- A pistolled Christ , with powder blackened face , And mot ioned head and bearing in his hand

A broadsword , dripping with red human blood .

He is convinced tha t the Protestants are responsible for the misery and disaster of the Civil War that is i destroying France . He is f lled with a great pity for the poor and humble who are paying the price of war and with a great indignation against the Huguenot disturbers of the peace . But even now he does not

forget the abuses of the Catholic Church . In the Rem onstra nc e to the P e ople of Fra nce he adjures

the prelates , assembled at the Council of Trent

e Root up ambition and exc ssive wealth ,

Tear from your hearts lascivious youth , and be Sober at meals and sobe r in all you say : And seek the welfa re of your ﬂocks and not

Your own . And again

all Put off your greatness , glories , honours

Be clothed in virtue not in garb of silk ,

Be chaste of body , simple in your souls

And humbly digniﬁed among your ﬂocks ,

Combining gentleness with gravity . t Have no concern with worldly hings , and ﬂee

The ﬁckle favours of the Court of Kings . PIERRE DE RONSARD 45 And Ronsard appeals to both sides in the name of

God

For Christ is not a God of quarrel or ﬁght

love . Christ is just charity , concord and

He even goes so far as to confess to the Protestants that Had they remained simple as of old and been c o ntent - only to seek to reform the Church and put an end to the abuses of a greedy priesthood , he would have followed them , and would not have been the " least of those who would have listened to them .

Ronsard was soon to enter on the winter of his life . I shall not dwell on the bitter paeans of victory he wrote for the Catholic triumphs in the Third Civil

War . For a moment , in exasperation , he forgot all his serenity and rejoiced in a spirit of exultation over — the defeat of his enemies a temporary lapse that we c an readily forgive him when we remember the ruin that they had made of his beloved France and the hope he never lost that a crushing Catholic victory would put a speedy end to the horror that had engulfed

his native land . In later years he returned to his old — ! moderation and exhorted Henry III . alas in vain

to justice and peace , and , in the long war that ended IV o nly with the accession of Henry . , his sympathies L G were , not with the eague and the uises , but with

Henry of Navarre .

e But he did not live to see the victory of H nry IV .

c 585 2 7th 1 . He died on the De ember , He dictated

e two sonnets the day befor he died . They are his own

e epitaph . Here is one of th m 46 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES

I am nothing but bones , I seem a skeleton , ﬂesh

r less , ne veless , without muscles or heart beat , whom the shaft of death has struck without hope of

remission . Apollo , god of medicine , and his son ,

fEsc ula ius p , both great masters , cannot cure me ,

m e a ! their skill has failed ; farewell , pleas nt sun my

eye is blinded , my heart is about to go down where m everything is disintegrated . What friend seeing e s d so stripped as this , does not carry back home a a

and humid eye , consoling me in my bed and kiss and ing my face , wiping my eyes put to sleep by

? c om am ns death Farewell , dear p o , farewell , my dear friends ! I am going first to prepare a place

He did not have his due the little souls of Malherbe and Boileau Iibelled and besmirched him . Ronsard never deigned to be other than himself he could proudly say whether to Genevre or to

Henry III I am Ronsard : that is enough .

ne And he k w that the ladies of his verse , e H é len r Cassandre , Marie , Gen vre , e , despite their ich t beau y , their fresh grace and charm of youth , would t live only in his verse , and tha the kings he honoured with his friendship were less than he was , and that t their glory would only be hat he had sung of them , h d ‘ l ved as of the frail beauties who a o him , with that immortal voice sounding across the centuries from the great Renaissance to our own huckster age .

48 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES

fan I saw her close her coquettishly , t And go with feigned reluc ance down the grass y Between broad parterres edged with yellow box

a And marble satyrs laughed to see them p ss , And many a faun- chased nymph in verdigris t Glinted between the pain ed hollyhocks .

Dim are her patches and her powdered hair ,

the bu c kles And dim lace and of her friend . The ﬂowered gauze upon her silken skirt No longer breathes its faint and precious blend

Of rose and essences and lavender . No lover now shall take the slightest hurt

From her cold breast or from her ivory cheek ,

still The amber witchcraft of her eyes is , The wine of heady kisses Spilt : and he ' Who once had bent her to his lover s will , Has shed his gold brocade and musked perruque In the eternal night of Ninety- Three

The That is the spirit of the Eighteenth Century . poets of whom I shall speak , if they did not all shed

- ll s h d their lives in Ninety Three , at least a e their bro If cade and powder and lost all that . they held dear .

they survived , they lived on only as strangers in an ugly

world , where breeches and wigs were forgotten . With

a the horrid yelp of the C rmagnole around them , they

w lon dreamed , like my friend , of that bright day hen g ago they Spoke with some powdered Beauty in the

- Gardens o f the King , at Versailles or Saint Germain ,

- - - at Sa int Cloud or Ma rIy le Roi . The story of the Eighteenth Century is of the gradual POETS OF EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 49 \ decline of the purely French school before English t and German innova ions . The Revolution and ’ Romanticism are in Rousseau s Confessions and his ' Contra t Socia l. But they are just as much in Diderot s

a . pl ys , and in his dramatic theory Dancourt and Marivaux are French Diderot and Beaumarchais are

English . Richardson , Lillo and Edward Moore win the ba ttle over the successors of Moliere ; Shakespeare e beats Racine . Nature c ases to be the appropriate setting of well- ordered lives : she becomes a Pro

hetess p with dishevelled hair and wild eyes , beckon

ing to an impossible Paradise . Le N6tre

is dispossessed by Kent . And the whole IV system of Louis ! . in life and government decays

as and falls before the democratic ide of England . I do not propose to weary you with the cold and

o u r e o f . . Le pomp s w it rs Odes , J B Rousseau , Franc na H ou da r n de Pompig n , de la Motte , Lebru and the

the t . . ff rest . Even bes of them , J B Rousseau , is sti n and bristles with un ecessary mythology . Pompignan

had , it is true , a lighter and even playful touch when

was he liked , but that not often , unless he was dis

to coursing some fair lady of Nectar and Ambrosia ,

a after some Italian model . Thom s was an honest

man and dull to extinction . He is the Revolution in

and bad verse . His only , that a more than dubious

a . claim , is that L martine pilfered from him Le Brun ,

known as Pindar by his admirers and enemies , is even

duller , inspired no one but Victor Hugo at his worst ,

and was not even an honest man . It is they and their likes that have brought the Eighteen th Century into dis

credit . Nor do I propose to speak of the writers of the

earlier part of the century . The Regency and the 50 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES years that immediately followed it are the decadence o f the Seventeenth Century rather than the ﬂower of the

Eighteenth . The epicureans of Vend6m e wore the full S wig and plumed hat of the eventeenth Century , and they knew not the deep blue velvet and powdered hair o f Pompadour nor the diaphanous rose pink of frivolo us

- bare foot du Barry . Else had I fain dwelt lovingly on , Am fr e Guillaume y de Chaulieu , the millionaire i s Vend6m ntendant of the Prince of e , Abbot of

l t S - Auma e , Poi iers , Chenel and aint Etienne , spiritual ’ and temporal Lord of Saint Georges- en- I Ile ' ' o e V e d l ron , oltaire s mast r and one of the most harmonious of French poets and a student r i ti of the theory of ve s ﬁc a on . And there are so me of later days I have not in my heart to praise so t Fontenelle , whose criticism is much b et er than his p rosaic verse where solemn shepherds make cold love to posturing shepherdesses : Piron who spent his last

years , like Gresset , doing penitence for the work of

is h youth , and who is remembered only for a bad ' et h C comedy , little b ter t an resset s masterpiece , and without the redeeming pendant of the naughty story

- of Ve r Vert the pious parrot . For Piron sleeps and ’ w t — s end rt Gresset is i h God Piron o , Gresset est — - 1750 . tout en Dieu , said Gentil Bernard towards ' d Arnauld And there are dozens more , Dorat , Colar — deau I will not catalogue them . And of course I

shall stop at 1789 . With the Revolution Rousseau and

Diderot came to their own , and David , in painting , b rought the note of austerity proper to Republican t i t virtu e . With Marie An oinette the ga e y and easy grace of the Eighteenth Century went to its death . Nor

. s V t hall I sp eak of oltaire , although the whole Eighteen h POETS OF EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 51 V Century is in him . Whether at ersailles or from Berlin or in his royal state at Ferney he dominates

’ everything : his claim is not disputed . I wish rather u the to interest yo , if I can , in the minor poets of t r the é Le second half of the cen u y , Abb Blanc , Cardinal

G - Bem ard S t- L é Bernis , entil , ain ambert , the Abb e B t Delille , Leonard , the Ch valier er in and Evariste ,

- Vicomte de Parny . They are little known , perhaps , in spite of much perfunctory allusion to their insigniﬁ

all . cance , the least known of French poets No one s t m reads Delille . Bertin , the be t of he all , the author of one or two of the ﬁnest lyrics in French , is not even

dismissed with contempt by Lanson . He is simply N u ea u not mentioned . Le Blanc is not in the o v

ar usse - Bem ard E ti a L o , Bernis and Gentil sell as ro c to i i collectors who , if they ever read their f rst edit ons ,

l L s wi l be grievously disappointed . eonard ha advanced to a cheap selection by an acknowledged authority t but I have editions not men ioned in his bibliography . ' Parny is only known because he was Lam artine s ' - L V ri master , Saint ambert because he was oltaire s val l in ove . You can buy Delille for a penny on the quays . He was once famous and he lived beyond the Revolu tion and proﬁted by the cheap stereotype s and the

is sumptuous editions of the Empire . But Bertin rare . He died with the Old Regime . He is best read

t - 1 8 in the two li tle morocco bound Cazin volumes of 7 5, e and if you can ﬁnd those in any penny dip , be gladd r than if you had found the Lyrical Ballads or the ﬁrst volume of Mr . Yeats . I would not sell mine for a ransom . For I say , advisedly , that if Delille is the r t purest and clea es of French poets since Racine , Bertin has softness and music and colour and passion E FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES more than any before or since . Take the others if

' u L yo will . eave them to their undeserved oblivion , b u t th i give me these two , the classical and e exot c , for they sound between them the gamut of French

I r s . n e ver e Bertin , before Bernardin de Saint Pier ,

is h before Chateaubriand , all t e heat of the South and f t in him it is real he is quite without pose or a fecta ion ,

- i and quite without shame or self consciousness . He s m not steeped , like the , in the sentimentality and sophistries of Rousseau . He is a classic , not a

Romantic .

all are minor , it is true . But God whispers ~ They the His truth to drunken poet sleeping on the highway , as well as to Voltaire on the throne of thought or

Chateaubriand on the ruins of the world . The great

inS l r tl on have not a monopoly of p a .

Perhaps the minor appeal to us more . They have dreamed our dreams and have desired and failed with

: us : their joys are such as we can share their verse ,

0 . with a little good fortune , we may h pe to write The

Seventeenth Century is studded with immortal names .

Pé re L Even a minor poet , such as emoyne , writing Lo his Epic of Saint uis , felt himself the prophet and coadjutor of God . Voltaire spoke to God as to an

whom i l equal . But the poets of shall speak walked on

- dewy eves on dusk enfolded lawns , or hid from mid day under overarching trees , lords of nothing and c aring to be lords of nothing but some elusive or the some ready mistress , glad to rest with them in shade of some cut spindle bower or on the soft turf

s - a of a tatue studded lawn . In the opening or f lling of a rose they saw birth and doom : in the patches and powder of a panniered sweetheart the art of Michel POETS OF EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 53

Angelo and Claude Lorrain . The Eighteenth Century m t is not devoid of poetry . The ovement in pain ing of Watteau and his successors was bound to have its t c ounterpart in verse . While the moralists sough salva tion in sentimentality or in the grave wisdom of anti i own q u ty , the poets , heedless of doctrine , lived their V lives and sang their own emotions . Like oltaire , ’

l Enc los , they had learned wisdom from Ninon , de and had left morals to Rousseau howling in his Swiss desert and Diderot moved to tears at the spectacle of

virtue rewarded . They lived and loved and sang and asked no more from the golden sunset of the old are u regime . They are not great poets , but they tr e

poets , They loved gardens and fair women and the ! ' n delicate broidery of a artiﬁcial life . Their work is

- all in pastel shades there is no riot or profusion , but

s there is taste and reﬁnement . Their feeling is no les real because it is gentlemanly in conception and ex n fi t pressio , a touch or a hint suf cing where a Roman ic would have exhausted the dictionary in violence and T — — crudity . o them the world their world is a garden,

L o and carefully laid out by e N tre , in beds and lawns

hornbeam avenues , every ﬂower in its right place , blending colour and perfume exquisitely With the f th brocade and ta feta of comely Lords and Ladies , e spring or autumn tints of well- groomed trees and

hedges , and noonday or sunset enveloping all in its l appropriate rain of light . They oved Versailles and

are its expression . Patched and powdered are the ladies of their verse : bewigged and musked them

riests di lom atist h selves. Courtly p f p s and soldiers , t ey

are before all gentlemen . They break the Decalogue with an easy grace and a laugh there i s no insistenc e 54 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES

t heir touch , even in their sins , is light . Far from them

is the earnestness in virtue or in wrong- doing of a later d a y or of Rousseau and Diderot in their own . All was

in the manner nothing in the thing itself . Their love was much as lo ve always is ; but they loved without

r or - emorse regret or self analysis . And as they loved

they lived their lives , of which love formed so great a t part , wi hout a backward glance or a fear for the

future , excellently , courageo usly , like men of taste

and honour , unshamed before the grandeurs and pride and great tradition of Versailles and unabashed

in their respectful worship of Louis the Well- Beloved L S . and ouis. the ixteenth Outside , Rousseau and Diderot might howl and weep and the evening sky

grow red with the torches of Revolution . But here , e in Versailles , wer peace and gracious gallantry and

- well ordered repose . I like to place them among the box borders and cut hedges of Versailles , mingling with the nymphs ' and fauns they understood so well on Le N6~tre s L Parterre des Fleurs , or before the abyrinth guarded

t innu m er by Esop and Love , or strolling hrough the able Gods and Heroes of the Petit Parc or along the

Gr — ea t Avenue of the Cloth of Green Bertin , in silk

and gold with sword and plumes , with his Eucharis or his Catilie in flowered brocade of pale rose ; Leonard with his Eglé or his Doris tricked out in the expensive rusticity of the shepherdesses he sang , with beribboned crooks and silken hose and high- heeled red shoes ; Bernard with the bevy of the many ladies of his t Epistles , going from one o the other in polygamous l L ga lantry Daphne , Claudine , Olympe , Corinne , aure

56 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES

Watte aus : he forgets his Art of Love and even his Breviary to perorate from his Chair in the Co llé ge de

a n e Fr c .

1750 . w , the It is The la ns of] the Orangerie against ' background of Mansard s Tuscan masterpiece , are gay t among Iaurels and myr les , with satin and velvet and

- brocade , beneath the more than life size white marble

statue of the Great Louis as a Roman Emperor . There e is Bouch r , in brown velvet , bowing low to Pom

padour herself . He is her Court painter and the dis . L s iple of Watteau , Pater and ancret . Young Baudouin ,

n- i - s s n . oon to be his o law , is with him There too é L , is , the chubby Abb Bernis , Count of yons , the '

Court poet of the King s mistress . He , like no other , c an pay a delicate compliment , make a dimple on a powdered cheek a perfec t masterpiece of m annered C verse , as fragile , as oloured , and as graceful as the work of the poets of the Roman decadence ,

- i n . it B ar Claudian or Rut lia W h him is Gentil em d, d V ' his frien and oltaire s , asking only in witty verse " To please the fancy of great Pompadour .

o he is He lo ks absurdly tall beside t littleAbbé , who like nothing so much as a Cupid in a Pompadour

group , as he fusses along beside Bernard . In all the S alons of the time these two are found together , Bernis ,

the writer of madrigals , and Bernard , the famous

e autho r of an unpublished Art of Lov . Everyone knows his Epistle to Cla udine and his H ym n to a se Ro , and remembered fragments of his masterpiece '

are on everyone s lips .

S - There too is aint Lambert , the poet of a few grace

E enin rnin ful and highly coloured lyrics , v g and Mo g, POETS OF EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 57 and a couple of love poems to his Phyllis . He has newly returned to Paris from the death- bed of his ' du a mistress Madame Ch telet , once Voltaire s friend .

n S ea He has not read Thomso yet , nor written his

s ns . bi o That g fat man is the Abbe Le Blanc , his torio grapher of the Royal Palaces and preceptor to ' Pompadour s brother . He is a discreet admirer of English literature and institution's and has just pub lished e L tte s n n . his r o n E gla d But he is a poet too . Ele ie I His g s of 734 are not yet quite fo rgotten . V oltaire , from Berlin , where Frederick knows not

Pompadour , dominates France . A year or two ago

- in- t he had dominated Versailles , a Iord wai ing , and i the old and int mate friend of Pompadour . Jean Jacques Rousseau is still unknown save for a ’ S ia s A e nue few verses in the manner of the time , ylv v and such like . Diderot is known only as the author of an indecent novel .

Let s G It is 1770 . us tand on the reat Terrace of s S Vers ailles by the four bronze tatues of ilenus ,

e Antinous , Apollo , and Bacchus , and watch thos who pass up and down the grand perron between the vases of white marble and the bronze Loves horseback on S o sé marble phinxes . Du Barry reigns in pink and g ld samer . That o man is Boucher , once Court Painter , i his . now past prime Fragonard is w th him , but

- n t Baudouin is dead . Gentil Bernard is o there ,

Ar e still an though his t of Lov is unpublished . He is old man and insane now . Cardinal Bernis is Ambas

H is sador at Rome . You will not see him here . t worldly success has been complete , al hough he is an honest man . But instead of him you will see the young Chevalier Bertin in the full habillement of a 58 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES

th V Parn soldier , and his friend e icomte de y , a soldier t IS too , both Creoles , both in he spring of life , one , ' I7 tru h of B na the other , and convinced of the t er rd s

' ’ C est a vingt ans qu on a tous les plaisirs .

They at least , never were seen , nor will be

' Pres d une belle assis nonchalamment .

There too is Lé onard , the young diplomatist , a Creole t on like Bertin and Farny , soon o go his mission to the Prince- Bishop of Lié ge . He has written his Moral h Iclylls and is famous . He is talking with t e most é e illustrious poet of the time , the great Abb Delill ' V e r are t ic . himself , the transla or of irgil s G o g s They

G G r. discussing Thomson , oldsmith and essne For the literature of England and Germany is penetrating ’ h Th u h e France . Young s Nig t o g ts have just b en ' translated and Ducis adaptation of H a m let is but a year old . And what is worse , J . J . Rousseau and ' Diderot have made some stir in France ,» Voltaire s royalty is waning at Ferney . Beaumarc hais has

Eu é nie written his g . The moral canvasses of Greuze ,

i Pa ter a m ilia s Villa e Bride t from the earl er f and g , o the

Br en Pitc her Dea d Bird later ok and , where the didactic intention is less obvious , but the suggestion of t t impropriety more bla ant , have attracted much a ten tion in the Salons from I759 to 1776 and latterly in his own private exhibitions . Diderot delighted at the pathos of these sermons in oil has lauded Greuze to the skies at the expense of the far greater Boucher and

Fragonard . Diderot does not understand reserve and repose he mistakes the non- moral of the great painters POETS OF EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 59 of the French school for the immoral , and is blind to ' the real immorality of Greuze s professedly moral sentimentalities . Greuze has a heavy touch : he in ’ Fra n rd s r i sists . That Boucher never did , and go a e ot f c ism is without o fence and as light as air . For they

is are French , and Greuze , like Diderot , a disciple of

li h S - the Eng s school . aint Lambert has become an '

S eas ns . Academician , and has, adapted Thomson s o

too . lost He , , is turning to England He has his light ness and grace . Gone , long since , are the days of du Madame Chatelet and the black eyes of Phyllis . t i Delille is talking o Bertin , who has said to him h s eri latest poem , M dian

The sultry noon is still ,

i r 1 s The a close and warm , ti i e will My Ca l , where You lie and rest to- day ? The cloudy sky is red

With lightning, and the storm

o a Cann t be far aw y . Where shall we ﬁnd our bed ?

' To Delille s young scapegrace he has retorted by a reminder of a little piece of the Abbé ' s own written long ago and almost forgotten

In some dim garden o r dark wood Astray before the point of day I ask : why is she far away ? Upon these velvet lawns we could Lie happily : or I could lead Her through some dusk- enfolded mead " Or coppices at dawn bedewed I 60 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES S3 th It is I7 . The War with England has ended in e

Peace of Versailles . America is free and France vic ri us es to o . The Ga rdens of Delille and the Lov of Bertin are full of the humbling of proud Albion then in process : now Louis i s Conqueror and the Pax Gal lic ana I S balm a upon the world . But , as of old G reece conquered conquered Rome , so now England ' 1 3 V t at ic or her Victor s feet . The material gain is the spiritual loss .

Voltaire is dead and nemesis has overtaken him , S for Ducis , the adaptor of hakespeare , has succeeded Let ur ur him at the Academy , and o ne has published his complete prose translation of the Barbarian . f Ver Wild nature , su ﬁciently sophisticated to please th sailles , is the mood of e day . Ossian has been translated and Gessner . Bernardin de Saint Pierre is t a u n composing his S udies and P l a nd Virgi ia . We t had best cross the Park to Trianon . For at Peti e to Trianon , Marie Antoin tte , a victim Rousseau and

Gessner , spends her days in rustic simplicity , a

! l r panniered and high heeled da ym aid . Here are her

- d farm yard and orchard and vegetable garden , an ew her English Park . Quincunxes and cut box and y are ' no longer the fashion paths winding among forest trees and dewy lawns have taken the place of noble

N tr avenues , and Le 6 e has fallen before Kent . It is

the day of the Idyll . But thank Heaven , enough artiﬁc iality has remained in the c ult of Nature . We need hardly regret the great manner of Pompadour u nor the mincing frivolity of d Barry .

Boucher is dead , and Fragonard reigns in his stead

' u th virtuou Bertin in paint . B t the domesticities of e s ' - Madame Vigé e Lebrun are more to the Queen s taste. POETS OF EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 6 1

u L es Lé Bertin has p blished his ov , onard has returned

El n r from Liege . Farny has loved and lost é o o e . Delille has long been Professor of Latin in the Col lege o f France and an Academician . He has just published his Ga rdens and is the most famous poet in the world . To come here he has crossed the clearing made by the devastation of 1775 : saplings planted

- r English wise replace the g eat trees of the great time . A nd a passage of his Gardens runs in his mind

alas Versailles , the lost charm of your woods

- The master work of Louis and the Gods . ' N r Le 6t e s craft is undone cruelly . Those trees whose tops rose to the amber sky t Of sunset , now lie smi ten by the axe ,

And their once shady branches strew the tracks . ' They shaded Louis laurel - circled brow They saw the pride of Montespan laid low T La V e here sweet alli re to her Royal Lord , L ovely and frail , scarce hoping her reward ,

Whispered her timid secret fearfully .

e Rouc he r B sides , , a disciple of Rousseau , has dared forestall Ga rden o to his s with a turgid , romantic p em

M nths - of the o , after Saint La mbert and Thomson .

a rde ns It is true that it is of little account . The G i ' are gay and smiling in the sunshine of Del lle s art . ' Ro uc her s poem is formless and threatem ng like a cloudy sky over weary uplands and deserted marshes .

he Bertin is still a soldier and a courtier , but is no longer twenty , and his dead Eucharis and faithless Catilie have left a note of melancholy in his voluptu ousness . There is a plaintive undercurrent in some 62 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES

e of his last poems , written since the Lov s were pub lishe d a year or two ago .

The shadows lengthen hasten why be wise

he cries to obdurate Catilie .

For sweet illusion passes with young days And wisdom whispers low

That I have seen the snows of thirty years .

He is reading to Delille a poem addressed to him . rea Both have in common , at least , a l love of Roman é Vi the antiquity , even if the Abb tends to rgil and t soldier to Catullus . Delille is about to s art for Italy and Bertin wishes that he too might see the ruins of that Rome

Where Titus lived , the Darling of the World

At Tibur , still , they say , on summer eves

still - w L Horace , rose cro ned , follows alage " us Who still escapes him on el we feet .

Bertin is the last of the gay and care- free crowd the h t e . t last beautiful trifler of Old Regime He , o the end , ignored the storm without , the old order chang n i g , Rousseau and Diderot howling , and Beauty and

Comeliness dragged in the mire . h He saw , but refused to recognise t e day when all he held dear should be forgotten and

Beneath the share the lilies trampled be .

V — . LECONTE DE LISLE .

ECONTE DE LISLE was undoubtedly a s great ma ter of verse and , within a narrow

range , a very great poet . His limitations

are evident . He was not one of those whose

feet hasten through a fairy ﬁeld ,

Thither , where underneath the rainbow lurk

Spirits of youth , and life , and gold , concealed .

' He missed nine- tenths of the world s meaning he denied all virtue to the Middle Ages he saw no beauty in a Gothic cathedral ; in gray cloisters and h enclosed gardens ; in red roofs among t e tree s . He missed the more delicate and fragile side of things the more intimate and subtle emotions the ete rnal in

: the ﬁnite the spirit informing all matter . His Gods are Gods of light and harmony : but their light is the crudeness of sun on white marble and their harmony has no place for the subtle and dangerous and pene~ tratin g chords of Debussy or Moussorgsky . His colour

ur le : is gold and p p without shading . There are no pastel effects no blues and greens fading o ff into one

e another in the inﬁnite cool vari ty of Nature . But he unflinchingly loved Justice and Freedom and repudi l ated with unswerving purpose al those who , in the LECONTE DE LISLE 65 name of God or of the State , have restricted or attempted to restrict the free development of the indi

‘ - vidual : his inalienable right to freedom of conscience ,

thought and speech , and , within the measure made po ssible by human relations , of action . He followed and honoured Beauty and hated all those who blas

hem ed p or denied her . He refused to bend his knee to any Master high or low —among the Kings of Earth or the Gods imagined in their image . Other Gods had lived , it is true , he

e believed , who had b en each in his time , divine , and ,

L e Ie fi as ouis M nard said , s af rmations successives ' é t d un besoin ernel . He cries not with joy but sorrowfully and pitifully Te voila donc blessé é m comme nous Galil en , te voila se blable a nous . Ta ’ ’ " s é teinte e t splendeur s est les lyres se sont tues , in the words put by James Da rm esteter into the mouths

of the Ancient Gods . And ﬁnally he asserted with the white heat of passion that Art has no purpose but

itself , and refused to debase it to the purposes , high low or , of any propaganda whatever , whether of Truth

or of the passing cant of the day .

II . Baudelaire in his article on Leconte de Lisle made

an unwarrantable assertion and set a bad fashion . The ' fo rmer was to the effect that Leconte de Lisle s work did not betray his Creole origin : the latter was the ’ fashion of singling out for praise the poet s descriptive

verse . Leconte de Lisle owed to his birth and early life in Reunion not only his predilection for Greece and Greek Iife il aima dans Bourbon une terre

Gr e — i h s grecque , la é c e m me h s c onception of t e Ea t 66 FRENCH LITERARYA STUDIES and his leaning towards Buddhism , and his lo ve for the old Earth Gods and the Golden Age when , in some

Edenic Bourbon ,

' s l aurore prem1 ere

La r ﬂi rs jeune Eve , sous les divins gé o e

w ut— i alked in hope and innocence and joy , b what s — more fundam e ntal still the sensuous apperception of life which ﬁlls all his work for he was not a profound t thinker , and he burden of his criticism of his own o day , of m dern civilisation is

N ous avons renié la volupté divine .

The increasing urgency , moreover , of his longing to steep himself in the oblivion of Nirvana , which counter balanced and threatened to eclipse his pantheism and his hellenism was only possible to a mystic steeped in

ri t l u1 tl this sensuous O en a q e sm . Leconte de Lisle ' s merely descriptive poems are not his best . The anthologies , British and German , are f L t de full of them . They may be dismissed i econ e Lisle had not been more than a painter of dogs and

, L , elephants and condors a andseer in verse he. would e have had no mention here . It is true that Lecont de Lisle is a master of description : but only when the e c onc e d scription serves , instead of being , the main p e Manc h tion of the poem , as in the perfect L y which a e no praise can overv lue , one of the most exquisit ’ e o elegies in French , the poet s tribute to the Creol l st ’ his u su re e is Iove of youth : or in L Ill sion p m , h n ostalgic c ry to the land of his birth . LECONTE DE LISLE 67

I might praise his love- poems for despite his

restra int and reserve , the passion of Leconte de Lisle blazes from time to time in such lyrics a s Le Pa rfum

’ m eris a ble e S a ri e l p s and L c ﬁc , and ﬂashes through many other poems like lightning on a dark night over a

troubled sea . But I prefer the exquisite Greek and Latir cameos in the Po é m es Antiq ues and the Eastern lang uor of La Vera nda h with their appeal of Art for and t in itself , withou the least suggestion of doctrine or intention other than such as a potter has in mould

ing the contour of a vase for some God to drink from . In them his passion for the form and colour and beauty for the shapeliness and wonder of lovely material things glows like the love of a grown man for some ’

radiantly lovely girl , like the touch of an artist s ﬁngers o n - - velvet or raw silk , or the smell of a herb garden on

sun- i a baked midday between enclos ng walls . The n air quivers with undying desire and the bright , you g , beautiful Gods walk abroad in the eternal sunshine . Myriad formed they throng holding ambrosial cups to '

the reader s lips . He drinks the heavy opiate and for

c le ar t gets the light of the hills , the eyebrigh on the

mountain meadows , and the coldness of a severe land;

and sinks , willingly , intoxicated , numb , into the L pantheistic dream of econte de Lisle , falling in adora

tion before the immanent Gods of his paganism , rest

- ing , divinely , on rose leaf couches above an orderly

and beautiful world .

III . I do not propose to dwell on Leconte de Lisle ' s

political and social Opinions . He had dreamed a

' dream of a well- ordered world in which each man and F 68 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES a wom n would fulfil an appointed part . His State Socialism does n ot appeal to me we know what ex cesses of tyranny the pretext of the common goo d may ' cover . But in Leconte de Lisle s time the predominant conception of so cial and economic organization was i ’ individualist c . Darwin s theories of the struggle for h existence and the survival of the fittest wit , of course , an implication that the fittest were the best , were eagerly seized and twisted to justify the familiar pro cesses of capitalism .

- th But to day e predominant conception has altered . The masses are exploited in the name of a new shihho leth , the State . The ruling castes have changed their t pretext tha is all . Individualism has been succeeded by Prussianism . L Leconte de isle , protesting against an individualist n t : regime , protested i the name of the Communi y a Leco nte de Lisle of to day would assuredly protest in the name of the Individual against an organized State tyranny . He would repudiate the ideal of service , and say with Thoreau There is nothing so 1 m portant to be done that I would no t leave it to hear this locust

l r . dec e sing He would a , with Royce , Arise then , ’ freeman , stand forth in thy world . It is God s world . It is also thine ! Leconte de Lisle was what the practical man of to t d e d ay would call a fu ile i ealist , an impracticabl dreamer , a maker of Utopias .

We must remember , however , that the ideals , and dreams and Utopias of one generation become the the accepted doctrines and social order of the next , inviolable and imprescriptible truth in the name of which new dreamers and idealists and utopists are LECONTE DE LISLE 69

persecuted , tortured and martyred . It is true that they have become in the process only empty husks void of ' all beauty and truth , as Christ s dream became the

o faith of Hildebrand , of Inn cent the Great , of Alex di i ! ! . th in v ander VI . and John III , as e passionate dualism of the French Revolution became the liberty th to exploit of industrialism , as the dreams of e

- Socialists have beco me the tyranny of State Socialism . Men like Leconte de Lisle are Rebels against the Social order and accepted doctrine of the age in which

: they live they are the leaven of the world , like the religions we profess but do not practice . But if once t i heir ideas win and take a f rm hold on the world , they lose interest in them . They cannot be on the side of the m ajo n ty : for if once an idea has been accepted n by the majority , it must have been wrested a d twisted into some sordid and petty travesty , capable of universal appreciation . Leconte de Lisle found this ut o in the Revolution of 1848 . He cast himself into that , young and enthusiastic , ﬁred by high ideals and

no . ble dreams He soon found that the nation , ready

was th enough to revolt , not ready to carry out e ideas

a and dreams in the n me of which it revolted . — Je te dis que les masses sont stupides he wrote L e e to Louis Menard . a grossi ret de leur sentiments, la platitude et la vulgarité de leurs idé es appalled he him . He would give his life for his ideals : but

i s ul could not sacriﬁce h so . When the Third Republic ended in the tyranny

- e L of Louis Napol on , Leconte de isle ceased to take any part in politics . And he was wise and consistent .

’ i Niobé The part these Rebels play is that , like Qa n or ,

- of eternal and ever recurring protest , in the name of 70 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES

- su fﬁc ienc humanity and of God , against the self y of

o established political , social , m ral and economic

t . yrannies They do not succeed . For spiritual ends cannot be won by material means . They fail and win by failure . They keep the light of the soul alive their blood keeps red the sunset and the lilies are w whiter and purer the ay they have passed .

: They are the blossoming of the race dreamers , poets , teachers , saints and scholars . They withdraw cloistered from a crude age : or go forth carrying

Beauty and the Idea like a torch , lighting an unwilling world and blazm g i n red splendour on their own martyrdom .

é ba té m e O sang myst rieux , O splendide p ,

Vce u S u rem e Leconte de Lisle cried in his p ,

i s - du é é é Pu s é je , aux cris hideux vulgaire h b t

é té rnité ! Entrer , ceint de ta pourpre , en mon

s Leconte de Lisle , unlike the Romantic , did not take his own emotions as the matter of his Art : he took Beauty , Legend and the clash of Races and their

m nieres Gods les a diverses , said Baudelaire , ’ ! suivant lesquelles l homme a adoré Dieu e t " L Lisle t a cherché le beau . econte de regrets h t Vigny , whom he admired as a true poet,had not been able to n ré ent e t se pé né trer 5. so g des s iments des passions " propres aux é poques et aux races disparues . He has no individual heroes unless the monstrous and cynical Raven of Le Corbea u can be considered as one but he too is little else than a mocking spectator

r of the history of the world , playing the pa t of a jeer

72 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES tests against the Huxleyan conception of Nature as the ﬁeld of eternal struggle , of Nature red in tooth and claw With ravine

of Nature careless of the single life . In Dies ! m e he exclaims

du Salut , oubli monde et de la multitude !

- 6 t Reprends nous , Nature , en re tes bras sacré s .

He soon , however , revised his attitude to the Gods of Greece they are

Les divins Amis de la Race choisie ' I Ikh r Les Immortels subtils en qui coulait 6 ,

H é ro ism e é e t é , Beaut , Sagesse Po sie , ' du a Kro nide u Autour gr nd assis a Pavé d Or. He sees in all the Gods that Man has made ’ u I H om m e les Die x morts , anciens songes de the deiﬁed ideals , fears and passions of humanity and these are the deiﬁed ideals of the noblest race t hat

s é ever lived (even if it never lived , a Barr s suggests , ' l outside his own and Louis Menard s imagination ) . In a series of poems Leconte de Lisle has dealt with the ﬁrst comings of Christianity and its clash with

’ Runo a . Le i Greek , Finnish and Celtic ideals tells of the arrival in Finland of Ie Roi des derniers " - tells temps , the last born of the Gods . Christ Waina m o inen the High God of the Finns , that his hour is come . Art thou ready to die , King of the Pole He asks . For the brave , strong barbarism of Finland has declined : she is ready to accept Christianity together LECONTE DE LISLE 73

m i ss with the Russian yoke . He sums up his m n I bring to man in terror of his sin

Contempt for life and beauty and desire .

Through Me , He declares , man will deny his manhood The virgin curse her comeliness and grace and the wise Torn by terriﬁc doubt kneel with bent brows " In shame , ’ ' "

1 d a ir . Honteux d av0 r vé cu , honteux vo pensé

The Old God protests , appealing to Nature ; but Christ retorts

o 0 A du et sa et sa a1 pns 1 ame monde force grace , J " La nature divine est morte sans retour .

The minor Gods of the Finnish Pantheon ranged round their High God fell into Christ ' s burning Hell

' erna Runoi a W a m am oinen himself , the et l , set sail in silence across the darkness of the Polar Sea into the

Unknown , hurling a prophetic deﬁance at Christ Thou too wilt die I

ae Here Christ is identiﬁed with the Medi val Church , ' the object of Leconte de Lisle s most violent and un

alterable hatred . But usually the last of all the is Gods treated with the utmost sympathy . ' e d m r The ﬁgure aux ch veux roux , o b e e t de paix voilé e was to him the last of the bright young beauti ful Gods of Greece born out of his due time a rebel ,

ns e sta too , agai t blished tradition and a marty r who 74 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES died to save the world from the self- complacent ' hypocrisy and the tyranny of Rome s blatant power . Even the old battered Raven who appears to Abbo t

ea u Serapion in Le Corb , telling of the dead Christ on

. the Cross , is certain that He was more than a man

Celui - la n etait point uniquement un homme The obscene bird declares that he had never seen any

one so beautiful among all the x Kings of Earth and the Gods

l et sa e x l é tait jeune beau , t te aux cheveu roux ' l é aule é Dormait paisiblement sur p inclin e , ' Et é é , d un myst rieux sourire illumin e ,

et Sans regrets , sans orgueil , sans trouble sans effort , ' ’ Semblait se rejouir dans l opp robre e t la m ort . Leconte de Lisle loves the dream of the young

Essenian , as he calls him , but he recoils in abhor n ae re ce from the medi val travesty of this dream . In i the Med a val Church , he thinks , one more God had

died and been denied . He sees no hope no new God

' ll bring Love! and Peace and Justice into this Hell

- of industrialism , into this war ridden world of hate

m Where ignorant ar ies clash by night .

and no w G Christ remains our last forgotten od . In La P a ixde s Dieux

Nazareé n Ie Le blond , Christ , Fils de la Vierge ,

s i appears as the la t of all the Gods , immed ately after

s f e é the God o Gre ece . In L Nazar en , Leconte de Lisle a postrophises H im LECONTE DE LISLE

' In ruined Churches Thou can st hear and see

High orgy of the impious herd , ﬂower girt

And wan , run riot , and its laughter mock In obscene insult Thy divine distress ! Thou sittest now between Thine Ancient Peers With russet head against a pure blue sky ;

And souls like swarm s of mystic doves ﬂy up , ’ To drink the divine dew at Thy God s lips .

As in the haughtiest days of Roman Power ,

So in this, sinking and rebellious world

Thou hast not lied while mankind shall endure , Weeping in time and in eternity !

V .

a t he In the awful series of medi eval poems , Church

is the Church of the Inquisition , of the stake , of perse c u tion and torture . It is la Goule

c c Romaine , vampire ivre de sang humain ,

and the pale ﬁgure of Christ appears only to reproa ch some dying Pope with his excesses Regarde mon royaume est plein de tes victimes

I will not dwell on this aspect of Leconte de Lisle ' s work . He did not understand the Middle Ages : the great work of the Church is obscured by the smoke of t the holocaust , the sky of faith lighted only by he " reﬂ e t u t . es E a t a Dia ble sanglant des b chers L s d , la Bé te Ec a rla te H ié ro n m us , y , and the rest are , to me , intensely displeasing . Their violence sins against the restraint of art their prejudice is unworthy of a great In é poet . these centuries of gorgeurs , de laches et 76 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES

L Lisle de brutes others , no less great than econte de , have seen the highest effort and attainment of human ity : the Dark Ages for them have shone with ex c eeding splendour and Saint Thomas Aquinas has t been a new Aristo le . b c onte de Lisle could see nothing of value between the fall of Rome and the

dawn of the Renaissance . Tout c c qui constitue ’ et le l art , la morale , la scienc e é tait mort avec

é . Polyth isme Tout a revé cu a sa renaissance . ’ En m é m e temps que I Aphro dite Anadyomene du Corré e Ie g sort pour la seconde fois de la mer , senti é é ment de la dignit humaine , v ritable base de la t l morale antique , entre en Iutte con re e principe ié h ratique et fé odal . That is the explanation of his t i ha red of the M ddle Ages . The joys and splendours and beauties and virility of the old doctrines and the old life were dead and the new intensity did not com-v pensate him for the loss of the wide horizons of the H pagan world . e could not forgive Christianity for n havi g made little of Brother Ass the Bo dy . He would have Ie so ufﬂe de Platon dans le corps ’ d A hro dit see p e . He could no virtue in renunciation

could not extract beauty from sorrow and sacriﬁce . Desire not Love was his ideal and Christ had given L ove to a sick world , weary of Carnal Beauty and the

Desire of the Flesh . VI .

Leconte de Lisle regarded his own epoc h s carce less disfavour than the Middle Ages .

Oh ! que ne suis- je né dans le saint Arc hipel " e Aux si cles glorieux . P

he é nu e asks in his V s d Milo . LECONTE DE LISLE I I

: The harmony of Greek life is no more Sleep , he calls to Hypatia , the victim of Cyril and his horde of monks , u Do rs l I i mpure laideur est la reine d monde , Et nous avons perdu le chemin de Paros All minds are occupied , he declares in his article on " ' Bé ran e r ﬁé vre I u tile g , with la de , les convoitises ’ n d argent and regard the Ideal with contempt or at ' ff s é tei nent best indi erence . Les imaginations g , les supré m es pressentiments du Beau se dissipent . And in his article on Baudelaire , he

- naively enough , I suppose on the well known principle th that the nearest enemy is e worst , singles out France for especial abuse as a nation routiniere et prude ,

' ’ n é é ennemie é e de l art et de la po sie , d iste , et e t au grivoise moraliste , fort ignare vaniteuse " s e upr me degré . His poems on modern civilisation are not his best like most of the mediaeval series they sin against his o wn canon of art : they show a hatred and contempt too vio lent to be repressed even in the cause of that V Art to which he remained faithful like igny , absorbé par la contemplation des choses im ' é et p rissables , qui s est endormi ﬁdele a la religion du B eau .

It may , indeed , be true that

’ L au l f é idole ventre d or , e Moloch a fam ' S assied au , la pourpre dos , sur la terre avilie ,

but the form of statement suggests a Socialist tract .

Ana them a In the same poem , , however are some of

the loveliest verses in all his works . 8 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES

Nous avous renl e Ia passion divine

he cries in his despair .

' Pour quel dieu dé sormais bruler l orge et le sel ? Sur quel autel dé truit verser les vins mystiques ?

he asks , in words of inﬁnite beauty .

n e But he knows o hope . Never more will the slav of machinery judge his activities by the standard of beauty the practical man has won and ‘ all that makes

life worth living is lost beyond recall . And so he calls upon a new deluge to engulf a futile and an ugly

world . Thus we leave the hollow splendour of Leconte de Lisle : he looked at God and Love and Death throu gh the smoked glass and pestilential fumes of m id - th l n century materialism and agnosticism , and e credulity and foulness of his hopelessly corrupt and selﬁsh epoch blinded him to the hope and glory that w shone upon his path . He looked back ard to a dead

a beauty th t he could not bring to life again , and died he bowed before a memory , when before him , had only eyes to see , Beauty immortal walked the Earth , as

o f Man of old , and the Soul blazed its imprescriptible way despite Kings and Priests to the Heaven of the

e triﬁ ste p and d God he denied .

80 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES Only one thing could have helped him to ﬁght against this inﬂuence maligne , and this was a ’ - woman s subtle and understanding friendship love .

For him Eros of the bandaged eyes held no divinity . He needed a lover who possessed the wise peace e giving qualities he was to attribute to , and ﬁnd lat r e in his M re Marie , and who , at the same time would give him the companionship of sympathetic intellectual feeling ; who was in fact a comrade soul understanding and helping the psychological com

lexit p y of his own spirit . In his youth his cousin

Elisa watched over him lo vingly until she died , and her memory is one of the most beautiful things in an existence in which there were all to o few beautiful h . S m dia al memories of women e was like a e v saint , ’ ae but had none of a medi val saint s rigidity , recognising the wayward loveliness and extraordinary genius of

Verlaine . She paid for the publication of his ﬁrst book of poems .

c ritic al t At a most poin in his life , when the lure of Bohemia seemed most fascinating to him , and when

the evil green viper , absinthe , had already begun to

soul fell feed on his , he in love for the ﬁrst time and

e e marri d Mathilde Maut de Fleurville , who after a o few months of romantic illusi n about her husband , became a second Ophelia to this sorely- tempted and

u rt er temporarily maddened H amlet of the Q a i . Like

L lle tier the Prince of Denmark he had his Horatio . epe gave him as strong a loyalty and affectionate friend

ship as man can give man , and was a square tower

of sanity always ready to shelter and console . But

both Hamlet and Verlaine needed more than Horatio . ' s P A woman like Brutu ortia might have saved either . PAUL VERLAINE 81

Certainly neither Ophelia of the stupid , gentle fawn t e Iike temperamen , nor Mathilde with her ssentially

~ limited bourgeois ou tlook , could help their lovers in the slightest . le Understanding love , this is what pauvre li n all Lé a wept for and sought after , through his

is m life . It true that he found much sympathy a ong temperamentally feminine men , but Rimbaud was é son mauvais g nie , and ultimately played him Lé tinois o false , and Lucien died after a few m nths friendship . It is this intense need of a love that will not return upon itself that makes Verlaine turn to Christ ’ s Virgin — Mother the Rosa Mystic a in whom he found all the qualities he looked for in vain in his cruelly dense — child- wife and his many amies of later life and crouch like a weary child beneath her wondrous blue mantle .

In his wistful penitent moods he loathes sensuality , the terrible beast that would clutch and tear his im m ortal spirit with its ugly claws and over which he i has so little control , and woman was never so div ne to him as when her animal nature was latent and all

- her gentle ﬂower like qualities in evidence . ’ ' L l b nd n amante , he says , doit avoir a a o " paisible de la soeur . He sought only too often the Inﬁnite in the Finite by bitterly bought experience Ieam ing that he could f m ortal ind no woman to give him what he desired ,

‘ Tu rris Ebum ea and only in the , shadowed by the wonderful blue half- lights of the Catholic faith could the poor outworn pilgrim ﬁnd rest for his tired and dust- stained so ul 82 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES Verlaine kneeling before the altar is unfortunately all too often succeeded by Verlaine wallowing in the

lowest depths of debauchery and even crime . He is "

his own Pierrot gamin . Cré ature toujours prete ﬁl A so er chaque appé tit .

As he grew older the charming ga m inerie so de lightful in Pierrot "young became a hard and bitter

cynicism and knowledge of his own utter failure . It is the P ierrot of this period who sadly sings the — Sé ré nade so terrible in its inevitability the song of one who knows so well that satisﬁed desire will e ventually kill his soul and yet who cannot save him w self even if he will . It is this Pierrot ho sighs in S pleen

houx a la feuille vem ie ‘ Du Et du Iuisant buis je suis Ia s Et de la campagne inﬁnie t é ! E de tout , fors de vous , h las

I e a Na ué r n his old ag he is the Pierrot of l dis et g e, a morbid and hollow- eyed caricature of his real self

- Now is the moon struck dreamer vanished quite . He who looked down in painted mimicry From o ' er their stately doors and mockingly , L aughed at our ancestors . Alas ! that bright ’ Flame - dancing mirth like his poor candle s light

- Is dead . To day we glimpse him shadowy

- t And spectre hin . His mouth gapes mournfully ' As r if he wept beneath the worm s c uel rite . PAUL VERLAINE 83

His tunic floats out shroud- like on the cold

Ni - h fold ght wind , its w ite sleeves rustling on Like passing birds seem aimlessly to trace

Vague signs that beckon to the world in vain . His sunken eyes ' cold phosphorescent pain Shi nes i n the deathly pallor of his face

s Last and saddest tage of all , nothing to hope for " now , save the ﬁnal torture of Death . Yet the fauve plané te did not entirely conquer its unfortunate victim , and although his work might have been greater if everything in his life had not conspired so effectively

the to hurry him to worst of which he was capable ,

~ he has left behind him some of the ﬁnest lyric s in

the French language , one volume of which at least m ay be placed beside the Odes of Ronsard and the

best of Alfred de Musset .

His verse is more akin to music than to poetry . He is able with words to express the most subtle and scarcely perceptible moods of both exte rnal nature and his q wn extremely mobile temperament ; moods that treated by any of his Parnassian predecessors would have been like faded and torn butterﬂies crushed beneath heavy jewelled chains of rhetoric .

In his hands words became ﬂexible , harmonious , plastic , each one of them an Ariel to his Pro spero .

Not for him the pompous eloquence of a Hugo , nor the carved and enamelled effects of Gautier and

. did Banville , beautiful though they were He not in the work in precious stones , but most delicate t shades of colour imaginable , colours tha are shadows of colours even as a soft grey- blue and silver twilight

G 84 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES is the shadow of a radiant spring day of green and gold . ' He , too , knew Whistler s secret of impressions

t - s rather han clear cut outlines , and in many of his be t poems , lyrics such as the famous La lune blanche

R m a n a ns Pa r les luit dans les bois and o ces s o , the words and rhythm combine imperceptibly with each other to leave in the reader ' s soul emotions as delicately ephemeral and vaguely elusive as those left

' M us r k by the melodies of a o so gs y or a Ravel . In this subtle inevitability of skilful pastelizing lies the t power of Paul Verlaine . By it he no only avoids the " of impassivity the Parnassians , as I have said , , but also by a certain skill and clearness does not fall into the horror of incoherency of his followers the symbolists . An eminent critic has likened him to a butterﬂy tired of the materialism of cosmos , but

f dull diso rdero f hesitating on the brink o the , aimless " chaos . With Verlaine more than with most poets t he man i and his work are nextricably bound up . His poems " are always the instantaneous notation of himself . Poemes S aturniens is the most objective of all his books as opposed to the intense subjectivity of the ' average beginner s early work , which may or may not develop into later objec tivity . Although young when he wrote this , his ﬁrst volume , even then he realised t the extreme importance of form , wi h which his absorption of Em a uxet Ca m é es and the work of B t Banville and audelaire had much to do , and in hese poems perfection of metrical structure combines with a nu certain youthfulness and freshness of feeling , not touched by the essential melancholy trend of his tem PAUL VERLAINE 5 " n d l eram e t . i ea p Woman is still an to him , a goddess

' in whose cool hands lies all wisdom and understand ing . Nature is wonderful and mysterious to Verlaine

P a sa es Tr stes he r always , but in y g i he draws in her most elusively subtle moo ds . With what lucidity and precision he expresses the most exquisite sensa ! tions , mystical correspondences and mental afﬁnities With what marvellous craftsmanship he recaptures ’ an autumn twilight in L he ure da Berger !

' On the horizon through a mist- wo v n veil The moon hangs glowing red a quivering haze Shrouds drowsy meadows ; through the sedges plays ' l A little breeze bearing a frog s thin wai .

- e Now the pale water lily clos d lies , And the slim ranks of distant poplars seem

Arboreal ghosts seen vaguely as in dream ,

r - s And flickering round the bushes flit fi e flie .

Now bats awake—circling in noiseless ﬂight o he They beat the darkness with str ng leat rn wings .

While Venus , clad in skiey glimmerings , C lides forth , the dazzling courier of Night .

Every mood of nature is seen through the mood of his own temperam ent . In P rom ena de S e ntim enta le it is de grands né nuphars parm i les roseaux gleaming palely in the dusk that seem to respond to him , symbols of a spiritual h0 pe almost lost beneath ' the enshrouding veils of the night of the soul s ’ melancholy ; and in Chanson d Autom ne the 86 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES languorous and long sobbing of the violins seems played on the too sensitive strings of his own person ' ality . Again in the deliciously W atteauesq ue Nuit de Wa lpurgis Classiq ue the poet asks if these dancing s wraiths , the e formes diaphanes of his favourite century Sont- c c donc Ia pensé e

e son Du po te ivre , ou regret , ou son remords Ces spectres agité s en tourbe cadencé e ?

S - c e ré v sseur ont donc , ton remords , 6 a q u invite L horreur , ou ton regret , ou ta pensé e ?

‘ Fé tes Ga la ntes In his second book of poems , , the m use of Verlaine no longer bears the semblance of a slim C hangeling girl , daughter of the dawn and dusk , stealthily stealing through autumn woods like a dryad

fallin listening to the songs of the g leaves , or like a naiad watching the wind ruffling the silver surface of

- and some still , twilight veiled lake ; but masked rouged m dances softly through the gardens of Versailles , so e times pausing behind the high yew hedges to over hear a conversation between Harlequin and '

Columbine , sometimes halting behind a bronze satyr s to f pedestal see a great lady rustling past , sti f in satin and jewelled brocade followed by her little negro page , as in Cortege ; and often at night whe n the gardens are lit with Chinese lanterns , those coloured pasquins

s of the moon , sitting amid the dark sapphire shadow of some Spindle bower weeping at the heart- rending sadness behind all the surface gaiety of this gorgeously is artiﬁcial carnival . The inspiration of these poems , as f Poem es I have said , utterly di ferent from that of

88 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES would otherwise entirely recapture the spirit of

Eighteenth Centurylyricism . That perfect little poem ,

r ar Terre e Am ou p , is impregnated with the sam — vague sadness a mournfulness that seem s to veil so ' In lightly the weary soul s desire for the Inﬁnite .

e Le Fa un , too , beneath its apparently carpe diem subject there is the same restlessness of Spirit .

An aged faun maliciously ' Poised terra- cotta o er the green

Lawns , laughs as if he can foresee Ill- followers of these serene Moments that led us trustfully

- en (As we had sad eyed pilgrims be ) , To this hour that elusively

Whirls to a distant tambourine .

How different is this to the real paganism of Bertin Parn and y , who saw beauty and perfect joy in the fragile glass of golden wine held in a be- ruffled ivory

ﬁn ere d g hand , and death and eternity in the crushing of a daisy beneath the red heel of the mistress of the m ! oment This decadent note of modernity is , how

s ever , so successfully concealed in some of the poem beneath an apparent objectivity that the girl in ’ L a llé e seems to be a Francois Boucher to the life ' - in~ w itin one of the Pompadour s ladies a g , doubtless , her a perfect example of type ,

Like a rouged heroine in a pastoral

Fragile beneath great ribbon knots , she goes ' ’ ' t e r Along h alley , neath the b anches shade

old - w f By grey , moss gro n seats A fectedly PAUL VERLAINE 89

She gestures in a thousand conscious ways

A s if she played with some pet parakeet .

Her long brocaded train is blue . Her fan m (Held lightly in her slender ﬁngers , gem ed

‘ Wi tlr he avy jewels) a pastel fantasy Of strange vague- shadowed dreams at which she

smiles .

- — A gold haired child with delicate nose , and mouth Crimson and pouting in unconscious scorn She is more dainty than the patch that makes

More bright her sparkling eyes vapidity .

And What could be more like a Watteau symphony

Ma nd line silver and blue and rose than o ,

Here , beneath the sighing leaves , Serenaders softly play Faded airs to lovely thieves

Who have stolen their hearts away .

' He re s Aminta and Tirc is

Clitandre With , the evergreen ' Here s the pleading- voiced Damis

Teased by many a cruel queen . Silken coats that brilliantly

Flash , long trains of ﬂowered brocades ,

Patched and powdered gaiety ,

- Dancing azure stained shades . Whirled in dainty madness these ' t Flit wixt rose and grey moonbeams , Towards them on an errant breeze ' Float the mandolines faint dreams . 90 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES

La Bonne Cha nson is composed of poems Written to his wife before marriage . It is a transition from objective descriptive plastic verse to personal expres

soul sion , the confessions of the , and the substitution of one method of art for another . as the result of feel in f A g , loving and su fering . ll his best qualities , r and d li subtlety , tenderness , ha mony e cacy of form unite to make these o c c asional verses a wreath of sun- kissed wind- ﬂowers for the brown - gold hair of his — beloved a necklace of moonbeam- lit jewels for her ivory neck . ' As I have sal d Verlaine s work was always the v1 c t1 m of the vicissitudes through which its author was passing , and when he wrote these poems circum stances combined to bring out the best that was in

. l ved a nd him He o was loved , for as yet no mis understanding had arisen between him and his mis u a tress . He had given p absinthe , the trocious green sorceress , whose wiles were eventually to

’ wreck his character and turn his childlike na iveté e and tenderness into cynicism and brutality , qualiti s that are only too evident in ] a dis et Na gué re and

Pa ra llé lem e nt , although both these books contain many ﬁne poems .

S a esse his one g , greatest book , and of the greatest s book of religious verse in the world , was written

n rs n after his c o ve m in prison at Mons . Verlaine was one of those who entered the King dom of Heaven as a little child , and his mysticism has all the charming simplicity and unconsciousness ’ of a child s religion . That Christ and the Immaculate Virgin are very real personal entities to him is obvious to anyone reading the sonnet cycle beginning Mon PAUL VERLAINE 9 ]

’ ’ ‘ ﬁls il m airner Dieu m a dit , Mon , faut , or that

e ne lus beautiful poem , J veux p aimer que ma " Mere Marie . This boo k is full of a serene and quiet beauty which

is not conﬁned to the obviously religious poems . Verlaine had become ruler of the best in his own soul

during those prison years , and every lyric in

S a e se g s , whatever its subject , is touched with the ﬂaming white light of his ecstatic communion with his

- new found God . Poems such as Le ciel est pardessus le toit and Un grand sommeil noir , are only rivalled in tender ! m usi c al beauty by the verse of Dowson . Huysmans has said that Verlaine was truly him " in self only hospital and in prison . The four grey walls of his cell had protected him and helped him to forget the terrible devils that lay in wait for his soul

as soon as he resumed his old life , and against which

he seemed quite incapable of ﬁghting , his sword of

w1 ll- L power , once bright and sharpened by ove , being dull now and blunted and useless . All that remained to him was a so rrowful memory of the possibilities ul of his own tormented so .

S a esse a dis g was his last great work , although J e t Naguere contains many sonnets and poems u d of great bea ty , elevate philosophy and superb in workmanship . There are this book poems written '

in accordance with each of Verlaine s styles , and some e inﬂu A la mani re de plusieurs , obviously much

’ D owson too b eli eved in Verlaine s c re d o D e la m usiq ue ! ' av ant t ou t e c h ose a nd translated m u c h o f his m aster s W o rk wi th th e s ens ti veness that; only an artist ic tem peram ent of the ’ o a x s am e psyc hologic al fam ily as Verlaine s c uld c hi e e . 92 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES enc ed t L by Hugo , Lecon e de isle and others . Included

Les Uns e t les Autres in it there is a little play , , a ' poetic and graceful lover s quarrel , like an echo of e set a De Musset and Moli re , in scene by Banville , ete a la nte a f g adapted for the stage .

He wrote a great deal in his old age , but mo st of his late work is of no account , being discoloured by a l du l . and mediocre obscenity His greatest poem , " Pa rsi a l f , which seems to me to epitomise all that le Lé lian Pauvre aspired to be , the star of stars of which he never quite lost sight .

va1 nc u Parsifal a les Filles , leur gentil

et la q —e t sa Babil , ure amusante pente Vers la Chair de garc on Vierge que cela tente ' D a im er les é e t c e seins l gers , gentil babil ;

II belle oe subtilr a vaincu la Femme , an c ur , Etalant ses bras frais et sa gorge excitante ' II a vaincu I Enfe r et rentré sons la tente un é é Avec lourd troph e a son bras pu ril ,

Avec Ia lance qui perc a le Flanc supreme !

II é le le Iui- e a gu ri roi , voici roi m me

E ré tr du e - t p e tr s saint Tré sor essentiel . ’ il et En robe d or , adore , gloire symbole , Le vase pur oil resplendit Ie sang ré el ' —Et 6 d enfants , ces voix chantant dans coupole ! VIE— STUART MERRILL .

I .

HE early work of Stuart Merrill belongs to

the Decadence . It is inﬁnitely precious , arabesqued and ﬁligreed excessively overwrought with rare ornament set with

Fé t u a r unwonted jewels . e a P e and Fin de Fé te i n Les Ga m m es have a wistful tenderness : all Versailles dies in them and lives its tragic dream- life

- e of dimly remem bered loves . L s Ga m m es proceed ' from Verlaine s Fé tes Ga la ntes and lead to Comte ' - - Fezenzac s Perle s u es Robert de Montesquiou Ro g , ' e ité e a u M d s E x. and Henri de R gnier s C Only errill ,

- . Fezenza Montesquiou c and Regnier , after Verlaine , have rendered the peculiar charm of Versailles autumn evenings heavy with dangerous memories of exquisite follies and sins become attractive in the faint aroma they have left . These paeonies bleeding in the coppered sunset , these hollyhocks screening the amber sky along avenues where once walked the dainty . carnival of forbidden loves , need a Decadent to catch a nd si their troubled secret p , drop by drop , the perilous

. Les Fa stes wine of their rare vintage In , Merrill , like

L . e ouis II of Bavaria , ﬂ es

Down strange paths lit by an inner moon . \ ' H e rides the insurgent hippogriffs of Moreau s paint h ss ings , and ears the wild gallop of the Valkyries acro ' the mad sky of Wagner s music . 94 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES

Le Centaure au poil rouge et la Licorne blanche clash in heraldic combat in the lists of some faun

haunted forest , and strange nightmares brood on the

e e troubled sleep of a King dethroned . L s P tits ’ P oé m es d Auto m ne are exquisite with the sorrowful m usic of love hopeless and the too red roses of desire , past joy and peace that cannot come .

The poet has plucked from laden trees , holding out

their too delightful fruit , the pomegranates and

nectarines of dream and desire . He has drunk the

: aphrodisiac wine and Love is poisoned . Thought u and will are pl nged in narcotic sleep .

II .

The early Merrill is decadent . But that is a state

ment of attitude , not a criticism .

For why should not a man walk on bye- paths if he will ? God whispers the truth to the dreamer by the

sedge- girt pools equally with the pioneer marching

- head high to victory . One man will sail the seas , another will row leisurely up some forgotten or undis

covered creek . Why should we not cultivate a t m garden , exquisite with fragran and delicate bloo , if we cannot fell trees in some virgin forest ?

well i There are moments when it is that a poet , if t be not his province to seek out the intensity of life in

the very places of death and disease , turning darkness

into light , and casting a glory of beauty over the tur o soul moil of our cities , should lo k in his own and ﬁnd in the dreams born within it some compensation and redemption for the corruption of a shallow and a

hollow world , and averting his eyes from our shame ,

96 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES e scorn . The po tes maudits were adopted e Corbi re , drunken with bizarre beauty , blending the Obscenities of Montmartre and the forecastle in a c torrent of clumsy paradox , through whi h ﬂash the ' i i : V lightn ngs of a t psy splendour Rimbaud , erlaine s

evil genius , brutal , violent , sensual , in whose few ’ ' poems d une qualité peu commune d infam ie et de blaspheme his unrestrained passions were expressed

before he found his life- work as a slave - dealer in ' un S Africa and the East tendhal dé sé quilibre , t mé chant e fé roce . The minor poets of the Decad ence took a ll this seriously and their work is a welter

of strange passions and strange sins , of la luxure de ' ' l e s rit et l intellec tu alism p e de la passion . ' Verlaine s mo st famous sonnet

' Je suis I Em pire a la ﬁn de la Dé cadence

the o which was at most expression of a mo d , was

made the emblem of a school , and nature became an

‘ e - u t eternal apr s midi de septembre , cha de e triste , ' ’ é pandant sa jaune mé lancolie sur I apathie fauve d un " ’ é l paysage languissant de maturit . J aime e mot

é was de d cadence , he reported to have said , tout ' miroitant de pourpres et d ors Le mot suppose ’ des é rafﬁné es d extré m e ne pens es civilisation , u é haute culture litt raire , une ame capable d intensives Il ' é ' volupté s . est fait d un m lange d esprit charnel et de chair triste e t de toutes les splendeurs ' ' - violentes du bas empire . C est l art de mourir "

en beauté . ' In Verlaine s soul the world made havoc and music and he sang because he must but the Decadents made him the mast er of a school and the slightest ripple on the still lake of his soul was hailed as the expression STUART MERRILL 97

o f a credo . The Decadence found its incarnation in

the - Fezenz exquisite Comte de Montesquiou ac , the

- supreme virtuoso of form gone mad , the arch dissector "

of rare emotions and sensations insolites , the in comparable connoisseur of subtle depravity whom

it ‘ Huysmans , is said , took as the model o f the hero Au Re b urs— of o the Duc des Esseintes . The ﬁrst appeal of the French Decadents when I ' made their acquaintance in Le m erre s four volume

anthology was in their unreality , their remoteness they drifted in a world of vague dream and vague

: f velleity they o fered a narcotic , an escape from the

hard North , blighting and withering with sleety East

. i n wind in June I read them , at sunset , the beech

glades of a hollow lane , while the winds passed high over the tree tops bearing the awful purity of snow- topped mountains and the spray of a

l r cleansing sea . I ﬂed from the c ea an of the peaks and the bleakness of the wind

Mallarm é swept uplands , and with some passage of

alam bic ated in my memory , , precious , melting like some over- ripe sun- steeped grape on a far- secluded

n - Ii hted vine , I wandered slowly betwee the copper g green of the young satiny leaves and the gold on the

tall holes of the secular beeches . And to me then , as ’

to Mallarme, the mellowness of Saint Martin s summer u and the dying rays of the setting s n were dear . De m é m e Ia Iitté rature a laquelle mon esprit demande une n e Ia é volupté , Mallarm had said , sera po sie agoni

‘ sante des derniers moments de Rome , tant , cependant , ' ' qu elle ne respire aucunement l approc he rajeunissante des Barbares et ne bé gaie point le latin enfantin des "

premieres proses chré tiennes . 98 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES

I read Claudian and Rutilian and the P ervigilium ' Nerval s S l ie him eres Veneris : Gerard de y v , his C ,

er ré s his V s Do , and his

Il est un air pour qui je donnerais

' e Gautier s Alb rtus : Aloysius Bertrand who , said

- Sainte Beuve , had worn away his youth in chisel m aterial ling , out of a rich , a thousand little cups of ' inﬁnite delicacy I even heard Wagner s Lohe ngrin I copied out pages of Mallarm é in the dusty ﬁles of ' the Na tiona l Observer and Henri de Regnier s

’ H é lé ne de Spa rte (the ﬁrst I had read of him) from the ' Re vue des DeuxMondes : Verlaine s Lecture at ' Bernard s Inn from the S a voy and many of his poems ' in a dozen magazines : I read Do wson s Verses and Dec orations in their ﬁrst editions : all Pater and all

De Tabley . Then I went to France and met Merrill ,

ua tre S a is ns - C now writing his Q o , and Viele rifﬁn of n whom I had as yet known little or othing . I found that the Decadence was over and that Poetry , in

I s et France , had left les y Ianguides les Iointaines princesses , and that , at Marlotte , Merrill breathed the pure air of the forest and drank the wine of sun rise after the strange liquors and miasmic effluvias '

. o Mall r of the stagnant night Now no l nger , at a m é s,

es é Ieur é L rh teurs solennels en st rilité , Trﬁnaient et discutaient la vie impé rieuse !

As Merrill wrote to me once : The ﬁrst work of the Sym bolists consisted in disengaging themselves m from Naturalis . Their reaction was perhaps exc es

100 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES

s tend , like mo t Americans of wealth and fashion , to

Co n uero descend from the . q

t o After dinner , tha evening long ag , we walked through the stillness of the Monceau quarter to some

fé and e t ca on the Boulevards , there M rrill alked to e n t me of his fri nd Oscar Wilde . But it is o with the Rive Drone that m y ‘ m em o rl es of Merrill are bound . saw him a a r em en up . I most often in his pp t t among

the tree - tops of the Quai Bourbon on the quiet Ile n de a . b S int Louis There Verlaine , In ro ze , presided

the ena m el as e and ‘ m terpiec s of Armand Point made

S t talk a et ing for our , while a couple of monstrous

‘ an c I s Persian cats purred pleas t a companiment . He ,

se t c f F to me however , es ntially the poe the orest of ‘

~ Fontal nebleau : no t tourist haunted , ! of Barbizon still

s o le s of Royal F ntainebleau itself , but of Marlotte secluded on the wildest edge of the Forest and Mon i t n the t gny s raggli g with red roofs down to slow Seine .

1 1 1 If I think of him any other setting , the blazing sun " e the light of Provence , her gray oliv groves and red cliffs of her passiona te shores a nd the burnt mountains of her background and the blue sea set with W hite sails

rI frame my m em o es of him .

s : as I was a tramp in those day and it was to me , n l908 he k ew me then , that In , he dedicated his

n s on m lo ge t poem Le Va ga b d . I re ember a meet

in t ' c m g a Cannes . I had ome to lunch with him fro

Gre no ble the - , over snows of Mont Cenis down the awful valleys of Piedmont to Napoleonic Turin ! ausm I n p g Genoa , hard and cruel in its splendour of Renaissance palaces : then along a blaze of blue sea a nd orange groves to the dark go rges o f Vintim ille

and a t eam and n a tumble of f lling s r s , u der bare gray STUART MERRILL IOI

m ountains and hill- perched white towns set in a mantle

o f gray olives to red Agay and fashionable Cannes . A few. weeks before my letters to Merrill had come ’ from Browning s Asolo : from Venetian valleys roll i ng with sunset clouds and pealing with the many voiced Angelus of a hundred villages beneath the red

glow of the Dolomites in their caps of snow . I had a wakened to sunrise far over the plain , stretching with

poplars and cypress , orderly , like the background of

a n Eu ne n early Master , to the blue horizon of the ga a hills : and one day I had walked down the Collino

Asolano , with the blue Adriatic dotted with white

sails below me and the mountains of Istria beyond , and ' h ad come to Venice , silent and frozen on a New Year s

Day . And a few months later I wrote to him from C openhagen , red and comely on her isles and lakes among the green ﬂats of wooded Denmark : from Lund sunk in everlasting peace in the cool shadow

f a t o her Rom n Ca hedral amid the rolling , untidy uplands and ragged c ornﬁelds and dark forests of

S cania .

My letters , Merrill used to say , sprang on him from h t e ends of Europe , and wherever he happened to be

(and he too was a tramp) , he would get a telegram from ﬁve hundred miles away to announce one of my

rare visits . \V v e also met , I remember , in Brussels and in Do er

I sawhim for the last time . I enticed him as far

no t as Canterbury , but further he would go and we

returned to Dover . The last years of his life he spent

at Versailles . I never saw him there some brooding

sorrow I never fathomed had come over him , and the

most I could get was a letter occasionally , and then his 102 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES

tell letters , too , stopped . One of the last was to me of the visit of Lord and Lady Dunsany whom I had sent to him : he had liked them very much . But he would not see me again .

He died , as he had lived , a Poet , and in opinion

(if the opinions of a Poet . matter) a Revolutionary

f lac e : Socialist . He had no tra ﬁc with p or power no ambitions : and when the Wild Asses of the Devil broke loose , he gave no cry of encouragement . Like ' his friend Mo ré as he might have said : Je n ai ’ jamais rien fait qui fﬁt indigne d un poete . But he

e . was , unlike Mor as , totally unassuming He was full of generosity and humanity , hating only those who

o degra ded the function of the Artist , or dishon ured humanity with cant , hypocrisy , greed or violence . t 2 6th 1906 A le ter of his to me , dated December , , may serve to give some idea of his attitude How I feel and understand your desperation

In Industrial Leeds . I felt the same c hill in brain and heart during my ﬁve eternal years spent in New York . Humanity is going through a nightmare . The old Rhine that I have just visited

i n all is spoiled by factories , and fact Germany

industrial is saturated with the spirit . Take

Schweinfurt . It was a quiet and quaint

e ae e . m di val city , with pictur sque ramparts It is now surrounded by factories , the ramparts have been destroyed , nobody knows why , and the moats filled It . o up is now a hide us , melancholy and unwhole some city , with a minority filling their money bags and a maj o rity stupefied by work and drink and voting like sheep for the Socialistic ticket instead of giving what

104 FRENCH ‘ LITERARY STUDIES

oq f é Pour avoir v , 6 mon ame a fol e , ' I a rc - en- Monter vers Dieu par ciel , Tu pleures au fond de la vallé e

we I mean that dreams avail nothing , that

trivial can only advance step by step , that drudgery , cares and little duties are on the way of spiritual

is . regeneration . There no short cut to God

o e Merrill , l oking round him at the masses in bondag i to masters high and low , spiritual and temporal , s

' re lt ﬁlled with passionate vo against Church and State,

The God of the Rulers obsesses him : and he , like

Lisle Leconte de , pours out his hatred of this false

ia The Divinity poems of overwhelming violence . ‘ false so obscured his vision that he could not see the true . In the Church ,

’ ’ Dont l ombre ne 3 é claire ’ des Que trois cierges allumé s a I autel , Devant q u eI Ie pré tre solita ire Murmure Ia supplique é ternelle he cries to his Beloved : Oublie les blasphemes du pré tre

Ce ne sont pas tes ﬁeurs q u II faut

la é des ré t s A f roce idole p re , Mais Ie sacriﬁce de tout ton é tre ’ ' u Ce n est certes pas ici q habite Dieu .

The Mo ther of God is Ia vierge cruelle des

- douleurs , and where VieleGrifﬁn heard a hymn of love and dea th and re surrecti on Merrill heard only the STUART MERRILL 105

er i pr t e q u marmonne ,

e s t Sous les trois ci rges , a Iitanie mono one .

And ye t the spirit of Le s Qua i re S a isons is in the best

‘ a a in u tterl sense Christian the world must be born g , y renouncing its past of shame and sin : and for this end each m an and woman must sacriﬁce all things r t f eely without an after hought . The whole past theory of your life and all c onfo rm I ty to the lives

around you would have to be abandoned . ’ a ~ Let us go on tow rd to morrow s dawn , he cries

Vers la Ville In nnue in co , for only

’ En o ubliant Ie nom de la ville d ounous sommes

n iI Nous apprendro s celui de la ville o nous allons .

’ The hero of Merrill s conte La Rou te dies because

a n e t 5 he turned back . Malheur ceux qui parte t en

! r il ne repentent Quand on est pa ti , faut jamais rega rde r en arrié re, u i regretter les

s jours qui sont a ja mais enfui . Les Poings a la Porte in Les Q ua tre S a isons is the supreme expression of the faith he shared with

William Mo rrI s . th It is winter and midnight . Here e lamp is

a dying wi th my hope . All things have f iled

is . him . The cup of dream empty He hears a knocking at the door . If it be his friends come ' bringing holly to deck his room dont j ai banni Ia

Folie qui me fut trop belle , he will not open his door to the noise of their steps

am e tu es as des h e t des Car , 6 mon , I se c ants danses

Et du rire des violons p armi les tenebres . 106 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES

If it be a tramp of the Forest come begging a crust of stale bread and a jug of sour wine , he will light his will ﬁre that the outcast may warm himself , and he pour him wine and break him bread . For a Dieu fou has smitten him .

e re But if it be the Son of Man Hims lf , come in

t halt splendent white wi h all his train of sick and ,

d c all hI ma men and children , to m

sur la route sans ﬁn ’ ' V Ies ne ers villes qu on voit pas encore a I horizon ,

Ie e u making in the night g ste immense d pardon ,

e then ind ed , he will take his stick and go , happy to believe at last ,

é D truire , pour les rebatir , les remparts trop vieux , Oil se dé ferleront demain les é tendards de Dieu

IV .

' In Me rrill s later work the sacriﬁce of the individual to the world becomes the sacriﬁce of the individual to himself , and the lines

Only by forgetting the name of the town we have left ‘ Shall we learn the name of the town to which we are going

acquire a new meaning , no longer of an ideal of ser

ideal - vice , but of an of self realisation through sacri

ﬁc e .

' Let us go in spite of all toward to- morrow s

108 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES and the moonless mere of sighs lies the fulness of body and soul that we seek . h r It is well , indeed , that Nora Murray in e passionate need for self- realisation should send Ireland

t is to Hell sooner han lose herself , but it necessary t also , to take an example from another Irish play , tha

Michael should forget his bride and follow Kathleen ,

the daughter of sorrows . t First , hen , the message of the Vagabond in song

He turned not back to dream over the old way . A no servant of the future , he was burdened with memories nor remorse " th - Art thou not , cries the poet , e far off child of the Wise Men who followed the star and found C od ? Or art thou not perhaps the unknown prophet leading the peeples through the ages

toward the promised land of orchards and ﬂowers ,

o ne where day , after sorrow without end , lovers em ? 0 braced will sing , giving their lips to one another

vagabond , friend of foxes and hares

a ! t d Messi h or criminal , await me I have unders oo the meaning of your call I have shut my ' door on peace and love without regret Tis not by sleeping in old dwellings that we learn to build

upon the new ways O my mouth , bite deep , at a t till hunger be appeased , the f ir , forbidden frui s of ! O the tree of life Destroy , my ﬁsts , by ﬁre and by s G ds sword , the temples raised to fal e o

0 the and thou , my heart , my heart , be pitiless when

e people , breaking chains and cross s , shall send all priests and soldiers and judges and kings to die on the

f o the ! O sca fold dripping blo d in dawn vagabond , I hear in thy clear loud song the fall of the towers of STUART MERRILL 109

the cities of night and I hear the blare of the red trumpets of revolt and I welcome the banner of gold of that great day of puriﬁcation when

men , leaving blasphemous cities , shall cry loud

to the eternal vault of heaven the pride of life , now free at last from tyrants and from Go ds And so

the poet starts out , his soul ﬁlled with the ﬁerce the Bu t passion of life , to follow Vagabond . he has

disappeared and his song is heard no more . For there is more needed than mere progress to a a glorious goal . The poet must s criﬁce all he ho lds

dear without any certain or deﬁnite promise . without a

leader along the unknown , lonely road .

~ Va abond n O g , having learned the secret meani g

a . of thy Song , I learn now th t of thy silence It is

and h a that I must seek , alone without sinking of e rt . ' the road thou fo llo west toward to - mo rrow s dawn t I must go alone oward the receding goal , the t fair coun ry which I shall never know . I shall go alone whither destiny leads me Old men seated at cottage do ors will hurl insults after w me . Even little children with lovely eyes will follo

s . me , spitting and throwing stone at me And in

s - ummer , as , with dust laden eyelids , I pass like one demented near the wells by the grass banks beside

the road I ﬂee upon , no woman will hold out to me the pail of cool water wherefrom the labourer drinks as he drops his spade and rests from work . Then I shall

the o go toward T wn , whither all roads lead

O rai sm u Vagabond , over tombs and nights , g p

a an o a o o e . my d rk h ds t w rd the dawn , I f ll w th e So for Merrill the procession of life takes the

semblance of a river ﬂowing past cities and gardens . 1 10 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES

- - o o u t worn , once glorious desires , and cast ff splendid Sea ideals , toward the of Godhead , and its further shore ,

where quintessential stands In over- lordship of all mystic lands " The burning essence of divinity .

1 12 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES w d back ar , not knowing that each one of us , like the

- t . race , mus live from day to day What is truth to day

- will be untrue to morrow , not because there is no truth , but because the realisation of the rac e as of

l s i d o urselves progress ve towar s an unknown goal . We cannot sum it up in a complete and ﬁnal selfhoo d

i s a nd . that lasts for ever and , now eternally , satisfying

The fulﬁlment of desire is pale after desire itself . W e must go on to new desire s and break new glitter

s ing gates . The joy 1 in the journey and in the break ing of the gates . And the last gate we break is

e . a D ath E ch time we put behind us our past desire , o u r past gate , and lay down all our former dreams

’ and aspirations . That is the o nly way to live for any

m an . And for the race , it has made and thrown a the o om es side innumerable g of Gods , and who shall sa Go d - da y , even if the of to y grows pale and

ﬁ o ur lls souls no longer , that He was not true and that there i s no truth ? Who shall tell what countless new pantheons shall rise and rule and be adored and fall and pass into nothingness and rot on the rubbish heap

- shall of worn out Gods , nor what the end be , if there

an be end , when the ultimate God emerges and we , with Him , shall have evolved and won to ﬁnal and a bsolute being through the partial revelations and struggles o f unco unted myriads of years ?

That is what Vielé - Grifﬁn knows and what the poets of the mid- nineteenth c entury did not and could n t t o know . On the one side we have the s agnation

o f . despair , on the other the inﬁnite promise of life And Vielé - Grifﬁn has sung the fulness of this in violable hope with a passion and intensity of con v ic tion that has never been eq ualled in all the history FRANCIS VIELE~ GRIFF! N 1 13

f . o verse His is , in a sense that transcends even the more literal if less essentially re al meaning of such i words in the burning soul of Franc s Thompson , a

hymn of love and death and resurrection , glorious

the with tremor and light of invincible belief .

f th e There lies the di ference , essential and unbridge a e ble gulf , b tween the poets of yesterday and tho se of

- . a t to day A spiritual renaiss nce separates hem . Le conte de Lisle sorrowed and denied . Grifﬁn and

o the Merrill believe and rej ice in midst of sorrow , wm kno g its meaning . And if Viele- Grifﬁn sm gs above all of the joy of l a n ife , of the ecstasy of the ultimate revel tion , a d t Merrill sings ra her of the sacriﬁces on the way , of

- the inevitable and irrevocable good byes , both have o o f t c nceived life as a pilgrimage owards a goal , and have read its meaning in terms of an ultimate end .

l l .

At a moment , perhaps the lowest that modern ’ Moc kel s thought has seen , when , in words , la d a rtistis ue é ouleur semblait plus q que la joie , la puret ' ' u n ffr it e d inté ré t le o a gu re , when vice , la maladie , f t la sou france e la mort alone were beautiful , when the supreme effort o f art was to paint moral and physical perversion by the pen of a Rodenbach or a

Huysmans , a new wave of natural feeling swept

o thr ugh p oetry , cleansed all forms of art , and , without d f i — enying either vice , disease , su fer ng or death for these too have their place—turned the artist once m t ore o the glory of life . its It was time . Science , once justiﬁed , like Art , in e search for truth alone , in its wish to see things as th y 1 14 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES

t the are , had begun to forget hat ultimate end of such ’ ’ as o f a Science for Science s sake , Art for Art s sake , could only be a clearer vision and an intenser se nse

i n i ts T of life itself manifold aspects . he means had C become an end , the Holy raal of life had been for ' gotten . The man of science , become , in Renan s

e - on words , a m re looker at the universe savait que le ' ne ue tu monde lui appartenait q comme sujet d é de . His imagination and his sympathy by which alone he could hope to transfo rm fa cts into truth and see t hrough the veil to the reality behind , had been allowed to die out as something unworthy . In Art , similarly , all idea of ultimate value in terms of life ' had been forgotten . The doctrine of Art for Art s sake had had its justiﬁcation in that it could save

- Beauty , and through Beauty , Truth , from the ill con sidered onslaughts of preacher and partisan , who , with no sight beyond the crude unrealities of Sect t or Party , of Factory or Barrack , had sough to prosti

a tute Art to the prop gation , not of a personal vision of Truth , but of prejudices garnered on the rubbish heap of mouldering cants and creeds . But very different from this refusal to serve Fact is the refusal to serve Truth itself , the assertion that Beauty has its roots in dream or form and not in the ebb and ﬂow of life from which it rises to return again , in passion

lov » and ﬁre , in joy and pain and shame and e

Now that truth , no longer the precious vision to be preserved from the false believers and C harlatans of didacticism , of sectarian and secular dogma , of poli was but tical cant and rant , classed as another , if somewhat lesser heresy , to be avoided , like the others .

tr m by the ue artist, now that the Holy Na e was

1 16 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES . is hard and severe , but greater than all things else. ’ ’ La Chevauché e d Ye ldis is one of Vielé - C rifﬁn s Yeldis ﬁnest poems . , daughter of a mysterious gray

Phil r beard , was loved by ﬁve young men , a c h , rich ] ' and of noble birth , learned in all wisdom , Luke ,

a nd - foppish self contained , a drunkard , his brother

- Martial , Claude , pale faced and smiling , loving

Yeldis like a wondering child , and another who tells the story .

One evening , after her father s death , at sunset ,

ldis . Ye set out The ﬁve lovers followed her , across the plains , through strange cities , over rivers and mountains .

Philarc h t and Luke lost courage one day , urned ' Y is their horses heads and wearily went back . eld

s il . m ed and spurred on the faster Claude , at one of

! their halts , sat down to play the ﬂute and sing . He

Yeldi went to sleep and woke no more . s and her ! two remaining lovers started again over the boundless plain . One day as they were drinking at a spring ,

Martial , who knew his mind and dared all things , s poke , saying

ou On my soul I love y ,

And I will die , if it be your will , B " ut tell me whither we go.

Yeldi d s turned and smiled , then , mockingly pointe o nwards .

Martial went up to her and took her hand ,

Like a man and frankly . She bowed her head like a child . FRANCIS VIELE- C RIFFIN

And suddenly , in the full beauty of his youth will And and love ,

Unhesitatingly ,

Calmly , silently , without a cry ,

He took her in his arms .

ff And they rode o together .

Yeldis Martial won , for he alone knew how to give

thro wm himself utterly to her , g down all hopes and dreams before her .

The disappointed lover who was left , faithful and Bu lo st . t gentle , had her from having followed her

Yeldis e — , incarnat Desire , the living Ideal he had won and kept ever"fresh in his soul the joyous emotion and int ensity of life and knew that

La Vie est belle de bel Espoir !

89 This poem belongs to 1 3. The series of poems ’ entitled A u Tom bea u d H é lene ( 189 1) gives another rendering of the same conception . The poet is seek

t . ing Helen . The road is long tha leads to her He regrets

The sorrow and the blasphemy and lie

Of making ever for a receding goal .

e He yearns to see this Helen of the matchless ey s , and towards whom runs , long straight , over the plain , the great road leading through the dusk . With death

‘ less hOpe and invincible faith in his heart he goe s on his lonely journey . n n all At last H ele draws ear . The poet knows that ‘ 1 18 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES

—V love f things but one are vain ain , vain the ine fable

love of our springtime , vain the kiss we dream divine ,

al . vain l poetry and glory All there is , is to worship

Helen in silence ,

a To m ster our dream and keep silence for ever .

Helen appears . But the glory of her form is veiled . The poet knows he shall not see her splendour un z f e veiled , shall not ga e , rapt , at the ine fable Absolut

of God .

I am , she declares , queen of Sparta and queen m of Troy . All life yearns to me . I am Helen who w all poets loved and wise men worshipped . If I thre

o ff my veil that stands between thee and thy desire , the ﬁre of my unveiled form would burn all life " away . For who are Helen and Yeldis but the fulne ss of life for which men live and endure all sorrows and all t in illusions , hat joy ,which beckons them an instant t the eyes of the Beloved , not her , but for the momen dwelling in her ?

- es The touch of glory in the sunset w t ,

indeﬁnable The essential thing , ' halo The poet s dream , the round a God , e The hope upraising man to d ity , fl The fragrance of all owers , and the light

That shines on morning seas , the quietude t Of night , bestrewn with points of ﬁre , he joy

That rises leaping in a living heart ,

The blood within the chalice , and the bread

- re entl —The priest has blessed , vice g y for God All these you are , and you are more than these ,

FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES upon the opening road " Toward the wide green sea . — H e died the irrevocable and irredeemable death in time and eternity , for he refused to be himself , refused to follow life whithersoever it led .

For he who would live , who would be fully him

o f God self , gaze on the naked glory Helen , look on in the face of His light must lay down all old and d ' — used ideals and outworn desires for ever times without number I And that is why Vielé - C rifﬁn has written the stories of Saint julia and Saint Dom inantia and the other

s in virgin martyrs who loved life so well , and o tim a tel y felt its true meaning , that they followed it ,

i n to joyfully , the fulness of love and beauty , even

is death and the burning crown . Not because Life

e nothing to them , as to some sour ascetic brooding lik t the Preacher on the vanity of all hings , blaspheming

is God in the holiest of his works , but because Life all , the only thing that is or can be , and the very t breath of creative energy itself , hey follow it whither f r it leads , and in the ine fable call to martyrdom hea fl s the clarions of hope undying , and beyond the ame

- the goal o f self hood to be won at last . D m in nti t e o a a , daugh er of a king , riding on her whit and palfrey to the court of her betrothed , laughing

she singing as goe s , reaches Saragossa , her ﬁrst halt , the at nightfall . She ﬁnds the town drunken with

o blo d of Christians , victims of Roman justice ; admin istered u by a br tal Praetor . ' and Without a moment s hesitation , young and frail lovely , the Princess rides through the yelling crowd , ‘ FRANCIS VIELE- GRIFFIN IZ I

the past executioners , proudly and calmly , till she '

stops beneath the Praetor s throne , and beseeching t and reproaching by urns , calls on him in the name f God o , in the name of the Roman Peace , to desist t s hreatens , commands , implores , and suddenly stop

short , terriﬁed at her own audacity .

The obscene Praetor , leering and sneering , con

D m inantia as demu s o , penalty for her insult to the i h m . majesty of Rome , to kiss

‘

And as the crowd , brutal like its master , laughing

see a and cheering , crowds to , the Princess , without

word , raising her arm , brings down her riding whip '

full in the Praetor s face , tearing his ﬂesh with its

thong .

She was burned with all her escort at the stake , her is pride and her courage unshaken , and her s oul , it

said , rose to Heaven on a ﬁery charger .

o o f her The st ry Saint Julia, is put in the mouth of

at C artha e o the lover , who , having bought her g fr m t love Vandals , and coming to her day by day with

- off some sweet , sad , far love

t was taking her home on his ship . Her martyrdom a

r C rnos the hands of a band of d unken merchants , at y ,

- on the feast day of Cybele , is told so convincingly and

beautifully that we see her for ever standing ,

Grave , with brown hair ﬂowing

Between the burning torches and the moon .

lover tells t Her the ale to a priest , and , scornfully , asks 12 2 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES

’

You who call upon her on your knees , What do you know o f her ? What did you ever know !!

Only that they killed her like cowards , That she witnessed to Christ beneath the lash

is u Till death ! That enough for yo , For your hymns sung

c To pale , as etic virgins ﬂoating on unsubstantial clouds

saw ! But I , I her live

I kissed the chee k they struck . Do you think I am mad ? Do you think I will praise Christ for her death ?

But let me be a Christian in my way , F or I loved her truly , Day by day and hour by hour I I pray to her and love her without sacrilege " I pray to her and weep .

V I .

This believer , this Catholic , is no less the fervent apostle of passionate life in its intensity of energy and has 1a will , than the atheist Merrill , who cursed " ’ des e fé roce idole pr tres , or Rette who saw , in his u ’ s é unregenerate days , les bra iers nourris d or des glises en ﬂammes . The throb of reality is beneath the arions garments of their thought ; the wind of life blows free behind the arras of their verse , and all , and many others with them , have shaken free from the trapping of death and despair the gorgeous or the wist ful or the burning burden of their song . Conversion ,

Be thle acceptance , faith , heads bowed to the Babe of

| 2 4 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES

v And yet what Socialist could inveigh more fer ently , with more burning eloquence against the hideous squalor and horror of industrialism than this Same

V - C rifﬁn iele who , telling of the suicide of a factory boy , declares

Best die as thou diest , I believe ,

Best turn aside from our shame .

Take death rather , w Kno how to die without fear .

Tremble not , be strong In thy disdain ! And spurn the life they offer , starving child

No revolutionary c ould have thrown more con . tu m ely upon the soc iety of to- day with its venal patriotism of the ba nk , and the e xchange than this

t s reactionary , hi clerical , who with consuming scorn ,

a - tells us that this poor f ctory boy , died for his country

e st -e all mort pour la patri , for the fatherland of

- great spirits , for life itself and God the fountain head of life

ife is For l fair and holy ,

e Lif is joy and pain and mystery ,

o diedst And to die , as th u , without fear , We must lo ve the dream of life The y lied who said life was Only a little mortal bread and wine ;

They killed thee thrice , denying Love and Go d and thy humanity

But if they made thy life according to their shame ,

f n u r Refusing the life they o fer , thou c o q e est them. FRANCIS VIELE- GRIFFIN 12 5 As surely as swords and torches

- Brandished at palace gates , Better than the harvest of hate

- w Corn trampled in the furro ,

Crowds stamped by the feet of the horses , Better than the se a of tears wn Thy death 1 8 a protest , a tremor of da " Rise n over Golgotha still bleeding !

' - the All VieleGriffin s work is a hymn to life , and burden of it all is this

e Croy z, sachez , criez a pleine voix , ’ ' Que l Am our est vainqueur et que l Espoir est roi

1 8 Life a cup , full to the brim , without lees , a

sacramental chalice , ﬁlled with more than mortal

fo r wine . We and all life with us are bound up ever f ’ with God , and we hear , in Gri ﬁn s verse , no longer

r the long roaring of eternal life , no longe despair

and shame and horror , but the paean of hope and

- e victory , and of ultimate self realisation in the absolut

of God .

V .

Vielé ~ Griffin i 1902 I met for the f rst time , in , in ' S Me rrill s t s tuart study , high among the tree 0 p of ! up - L the Ile de Saint ouis . Through the open window came the points of light dancing on the Seine and the

. r all subdued gay hum of the great city , We we e

: f talking our voices rose higher and higher . Gri ﬁn

a lo ne was sitting , in a corner by the window , looking

r es out ove t he town . Perhaps his ey looked on Saint 12 6 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES

D m in nti - o a a in Barcelona , or Saint Julia between the burning torches and the moon . Perhaps lost in the splendour of her tresses his passionate lips were laid ' f e . on Hel n s He was with us , but he was di ferent from any of us . He had no part , even outwardly , in the Symbolist Bohemia . Indeed he rarely appeared h in t e haunts of the poets . Paul Fort might be seen in almost all the café s of the q ua rtier any evening above

Clo serie des Lila s Bu llier all at the opposite , where he his did his best to drown unique genius in bad alcohol ,

e iks Dir . between Mor as and the Norwegian , Merrill had not yet withdrawn from the fellowship . He did not do so at all till 1906 and not altogether till his 19 f l9 second marriage in 08 . But Gri ﬁn already in 02 lived a life apart , in his flat on the Quai de Passy and

ra n in his Chateau near Poitiers . He was a g d se igneur and a manufacturer of motor cars a pillar of the Church and a devoted husband and father . He lived in some mystic sunlit garden : his high serious ness and intensity were attracted by no other intoxica Fo r as tion than that of joy and belief . him , for Franc is Thompson

On Golgotha there grew a thorn

r ﬁ ur Round the long p e g ed Brows .

I ﬁrst read Ye ldis and H e len under the great trees of

the Ile Verte at Grenoble , looking out over the shining r Charteuse iver at the mountains of the Grande , white nd a dazzling in the sunlight , crowned with forests and

bearing in their depths green valleys full of flowers . I took them with me through the infinite fields of

myriad bloom , heavy with the hot perfume of exotic

12 8 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES

o ne who understood me and has remained to this day . — my friend and master was Georges Dum esnil whom I mention with all honour and respect a nd reverence an n the Professor of Philosophy d Education , a Co ser ' ‘ y ative of the best tradition,a fervent and whole - hearted

‘ Catholic , who , walking with me along the inﬁnite

avenues of Grenoble , spoke with sadness unspeakable

‘ o f the rum that had come over France with the ex pulsion o f the monks and the persecution of the n Church , and like ed the brown leaves falling from the trees to the true conception of life leavm g France bare

of all virtue and honour and hOpe . His were a true n heart a d a great soul . I cannot refuse to him the

distinction of. being , amidst a Radical and unbelieving

Faculty , the one man of real understanding and of

u e . nﬂinching conviction and nobility , unabl to stoop o r to dream of stoopingto any act or thought unworthy of what he believed to be the high heritage of the C atholic Church and of the French race .

nd m i s He understood , a yet he knew where I was

t t c onc e tron aken ; he knew hat my p of. life was too m 1909 aterial . He knew , what I did not discover till , ’ fi m rsrea d in Grif n s own country , that I had , in one

e v . ssential feature , the attitude of my fa ourite poet Vielé - Griffin loves life : loves it with 1 ntensity : but the ﬁre that burns his soul is the white ﬁre of the

s pirit , not the red ﬁre of youth aglow with passionate a i cceptance of the blaz ng South . The poems of Viele- Griffin are full of sunlight and

W 1 th the scent of ﬂowers , brimming the Joyous life of

France his mother , overﬂowing with all the loveliness b of her smiling countrysides . The ﬂowers , the urning

noons and nights of France , white roads and forests FRANCIS VIELE- GRIFFIN 12 9 t and sleeping hamlets and mistle oe in the apple trees , songs borne on the night- wind and laughter on the gay — lips of the beloved all that is in them . Whoever has learnt to love the sunlight and the shadow of the n French la ds , the sorrow and joy of their children , will

the Vielé - Griff m s turn ever and again to pages of , o that he may look into the deep eyes of France and see her smiling , sad and distant , under the branches of her che stnut trees .

But that is not all . The life he sings , with which his whole being trembles , is not the uprising of the V1 c to r1 0 us blood under the sun of Provence or Dauphiny in a crude gorgeous setting of asphodel on mountain fields and gentian on white limestone rocks and at night the moon full on peach and pomegranate blossom and the song of the children of joy . I did not understand until I went to Griffin ' s own country and looked on the sunset through the sta ined glass windows of Tours Cathedral and saw the broad Loire , flow towards the west on the plain past a pure t white ci y . I sank myself in the clear spirituality of

- a nd Notre Dame de Nantilly , silent white , amid the peace and austerity of Saumur : and then I knew that for the life which Griffin knew princes would give their crowns and poets their Iaurels and that all beauty and praise of Earth are but offerings cast at the feet of the ineffable and invincible Beauty of the H elen the poet sang .