FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES T. B. RUDMOSE-BROWN GfotneU ItuueraUg 2uhratg Strata, Neui florh BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND THE GIFT OF HENRY W. SAGE 1691 Cornell University Library PQ 139.R91 French literary studies 3 1924 027 188 907 Cornell University Library The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924027188907 French Literary Studies French Literary Studies By T. B. RUDMOSE-BROWN Professor of Romance Languages in the University of Dublin rCBe-tiitaoc-pHEaa j DUBLIN The Talbot Press Ltd. 89 Talbot Street LONDON T. Fisher Unwin Ltd. 1 Adelphi Terrace 1917 LL. m | Co Cyril Cretoequer Contents The Point of View Page 5 Maurice Sceve and the Poetic School of Lyons 18 Ronsard 32 The Poets of the Eighteenth Century 47 Leconte de Lisle 64 Paul Verlaine 79 Stuart Merrill 93 Francis Viele-Griffin 111 PREFATORY NOTE. ARTS of the Essays on " Stuart Merrill " and "Francis Viele-Grimn " are re- printed, by permission, from Sinn Fein: part of the Introductory Essay from the Irish Review : some of the translations from Ronsard and Louise Labe and the poem entitled Pastel, in the Essay on "The Poets of the Eighteenth Century," from T.C.D. I have to thank my friend Mr. Cyril Crevequer for innumerable suggestions : he has read the whole book in MS. and in proof, and has helped me far more than any formal acknowledg- ment can indicate. The Essay on " Verlaine " is almost entirely his : all the translations from Verlaine are from his pen, and also the poem quoted at the end of the Essay on " The Poets of the Eighteenth Century." I am, however, entirely responsible for the defects of my work. T. B. R.-B. FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES INTRODUCTORY ESSAY. THE POINT OF VIEW. I. ; HE poets whose profiles I 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 as a lover's for his mistress or a mystic's for his God. They had no "message" and desired none. Did I speak otherwise of them, Sceve, in some recondite paradise or on some lonely mountain top, united at last ' with his Pernette du Guillet, Ronsard enthroned in the Temple of Art, Bertin and Delille conversing decorously with the fair and fragile ladies of some Elysian Versailles, Leconte de Lisle on the fields of asphodel, Merrill in his supernal Fontainebleau, would stoop and blast me with their everlasting scorn. And how should I meet Viele-Griffin's passionate eyes averted sorrowfully from Helen of the russet hair or Le Cardonnel's lifted re- proachfully from his breviary? James Elroy Flecker was right. The place of the poet is not leadership : he shows the 6 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES way to no heroic time to come. He may sing or heroes : he does not create them. It is an accident that his record of their prowess is their beat monu- ment. True, it is that — " . . . if Pindar celebrate Great Hiero, Lord of Syracuse, Or Theron, chief of Acragas, 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 from father to son, and, to-day, the printed record, perpetually renewed, are more enduring. Pindar celebrated Hiero and Theron because it pleased him to do so, not to stimulate other sovereigns to follow- in their footsteps. The millenium will not come a day the sooner for all the poets in the world. " Art for Art's sake " is 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." He has no "ideal of service." But neither does he sit aloof in impenetrable glory, making lonely music amid the ruin of the world. The poet is no longer dishevelled, wild-eyed, half seer and half maenad, pointing the road to some imagined Heaven; nor is he some mad pontiff led in chains, imagining the people bow to him — at the head of the Bacchic pro- cession of drunken politicians, thinking to lead them, like a bejewelled and bedizened sovereign, helpless beneath his tawdry crown. He goes no more in THE POINT OF VIEW 7 fancy-dress to the dancing-hall of life. He has left his halo in the cloak-room and lost the ticket. He judges pigs, edits papers, writes novels, teaches French or geography, and makes up prescriptions like the most mundane of mortals. He aspires to no apocalyptic onslaught on the portals of Heaven, 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 charlatans 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- serves the ultimate purpose of the universe. Art has no purpose. "Art for Art's sake," " Social Art," and " Art for Life's sake " are equally untrue. For Art is an effect, not a cause. Art is like a sunset or the flowers of the field. Like them, of course, it may produce results, but the results are incidental and variable. Lovers may kiss the sweeter for a sunset 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- duce results. They do not seek to produce results. They are the expression of the earth in travail of its being. No poet, if he was a real poet, ever wrote in order to produce any effect whatever upon any one at all, not even his lady-love. Art is an inevitable 8 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES product of a certain set of circumstances : it is one of the flowers of life, perhaps the finest. The only conceivable purpose of existence demands that every unit should come to its full self-realisa- tion. No potential value must be lost. The claim of every individuality must be asserted. Every one of us must strive, unflinchingly, to be himself. There is but one unpardonable sin, the refusal to accept the destiny we carry within us — the spiritual destiny, of course, for the body is but the transient appearance of the soul, the passing show of the world's honour and reward but the phantasmogoria 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 set of the earthly sun, our road of light is lost in darkness. But only if God set in our soul is the way of the spirit obscured, leading to the red gates of the transcendental dawn ! Like Lord de Tabley's " Two Ancient Kings," we must go — " Heroic hearts, upon our lonely way." "Which of us has his desire, or having 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 Eternelle " To us, if we would live, life must be a pilgrimage, a journey in search of the fulfilment of desire only to be fulfilled before the throne of God. All things THE POINT OF VIEW 9 are, in themselves, vain. No desire can be satisfied. We make ever for a receding goal. No kiss is worth the getting. Despair waits upon us. But we know 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 Heaven were quenched and deathless Hope were dead ! The poet, like any of us, seeks to become himself. But there is more. Every intense individuality will express itself. It will seek to realise its approach to self -hood, its "becoming," not only internally but externally. The artist's expression is Art. No indi- viduality can escape this law. If there is no attempt at external expression, there is an inward refusal to be oneself, a shrinking from life. Poetry is the out- ward expression of the poet's will to be himself. It is the effect of the causes that go to make up the potentiality of the poet : of circumstances in their widest sense, of the epoch in which he lives and by which he is, to some extent, conditioned : of the past of the particular art in which he seeks expression; but, far more importantly, of the obscure and unde- cipherable impulses that constitute his personality in its inmost sense, of his will to be, that is, of the " Drang " which pushes him forward on the road of spiritual evolution, on the way towards God. To check, or attempt to check, this expression of the poet, as of any other potentiality, is to set back also his inward self-expression, to commit spiritual murder, to be gui'ty of sacrilege against God. The 10 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES critic has not to ask if a poet's expression, his poetry, is in accordance 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 place in his art, and, beyond and above these, the part of the man expressing him- self. The poet, then, expresses himself because he must. Incidentally he makes beauty. To the world, if he says anything, he says : " Take it or leave it !" And the world mostly leaves it, afraid for the little house of cards it calls Society, the refuge of the Eternal No. II. The great epics and much of the best lyric work of the Middle Ages are anonymous : like the spiring Cathedrals of France, the Chanson de Roland, the Couronnement de Louis and most of the love songs and chansons de toile are the expression of a common aspiration. They are the fine flowers of mediaeval society. I do not mean that they sprang into full 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 social rather than a personal expression. It is of little significance that Adenet le Roi wrote the romaunt of Berthe aux grands pieds, or that Chretien de Troyes wrote Le THE POINT OF VIEW 1 1 Chevalier au Lion. If the Middle Ages in love with love itself had written the first part of the Romaunt oj ' the Rose it would not have been different. That Guil- laume de Lorris held the pen of the lover is of no moment. The dawn and evening songs of the Trouba- dours, their tensons, sirventes, complaints and descorts conform rigorously to a common pattern, both in form and spirit. The personal note begins with the Renaissance. There were no doubt forerunners, dissidents from the convention of their time, like Charles d'Orleans and Villon; but they were late and the dawn had almost begun. For the Sixteenth Century it was sufficient that the poet, putting into words his vision of the world, and doing his homage to Our Lady Beauty, should ex- press himself. The Renaissance was occupied with individual values : not with the elaboration of a social system. It was a time of break-up, of clash and pas- sion and of great personalities. The Delie of Maurice Sceve is not the expression of Lyonese society but of Sceve himself : Ronsard is Ronsard and no one else. With the Seventeenth Century Art becomes again, at least in theory, impersonal. Society was all-im- portant. Courtly France inspired Corneille, Moliere and Racine : they are the blossoming of a social, con- ception and a social code. The uncompromising 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- mal and intrinsic, of the Court of Louis XIV. Nature and Truth were nothing else. Reason dictated such conformity and usage demanded it. The " libertins, 12 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES it is true, survivors of the sixteenth century, like Tristan l'Hermite, Theophile de Viau, Saint-Amant, or incor- rigible individualists like Scarron, or the Abbe de Boisrobert, or Savinien de Cyrano-Bergerac went 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 coming to its own. The Court and the Bour- geoisie sought divergent expression. Voltaire and the minor poets are the product of Versailles; in Diderot the middle class found a voice. There was, however, in Rousseau a strong protest of the individualist doc- trine : and he gained the day. The poets of Romanti- cism expressed only themselves. III. The distinction of social and personal art does not carry with it a coincident distinction of didactic Art and Art for Art's sake. Social art is not necessarily didactic nor personal art necessarily an end in itself. Hugo, personal to excess, is a notable example of Art trespassing on every field, 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 moralists. The Vie de Saint Liger set a bad example of merely versified lives of saints and other works of edification, broken, it is true, here and there, by a really poetic production, such as the wonderfully har- THE POINT OF VIEW 13 monious Vie de Saint Alexis with its flashes of over- whelming passion, and amid its crudity, touches and whole stanzas of perfect artistic mastery. An eminent critic in his Hamlet refers to " the popular tendency, which was also a Greek and a Renaissance tendency, to regard Art as having a did- actic function. . . .** As regards the Renaissance in France he is certainly in error. Nowhere is the sense of Art in and for itself, as the expression of the poet's being in beauty, more pure of all alloy than in the work of the first great French poet of the Renais- sance. Sceve had no didactic purpose. Pontus de Tyard had a visitor one day who, finding him reading Sceve's Delie, took up the book and threw it down contemptuously after reading a verse or two. To him Tyard replied that little would Sceve care whether fools understood him or not — " qu' aussi se souciait bien peu le seigneur Maurice que Delie ' f fit vue ni maniee des veaux." Ronsard, indeed, wrote a series of very noble did*- actic poems. But Art never stooped to be the hand- maid of religion or politics : it might assume, as a sacred duty, the guidance of nations and of kings. The Renaissance never lost its nobility of outlook. Art could teach, because it stood above all other manifestations of the human mind. It had the right to dictate, because it knew. Later writers used the forms of Art to encompass moral ends because to them Art was a mean thing, valuable only in virtue of its uses. The high conception the Sixteenth Century held of didactic art may be expressed in the words of the Jesuit Pere Lemoyne, an " attard£ " of the Renais- 14 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES sance, who wrote the best epic poem of the French Seventeenth Century. He maintained, in the days of Boileau, a lofty view of Art. He protested against the low conception of didactic art which the mean spirits of the day opposed to the great conception of the Six- teenth Century, and declared that the Poet is " le commis du Magistrat eternel, le Cooperateur et l'Agent de Dieu . . . le Precepteur des Rois et des Conquerants." For the Seventeenth Century was pettily didactic, if anything that ministered to the grandiose society of the Roi Soleil can be called petty. The greater genres — epic, tragedy, — aimed at shaping the citizen. The lesser — comedy, lyric, pastoral — either at amusing him with propriety or at developing his social accom- plishments. Individual values were of little import- ance compared with social perfection; were, indeed, to be strenuously diverted into conformity with the social ideal. Moliere might seem to be an exception. His Dorante in the Critique de I'Ecgle des Femmes declares that " la regie de toutes les regies " is to please. But Moliere, a writer of comedy, does not claim to mould society like tragic and epic poets, but only to amuse with propriety those who already conform to the con- duct and attitude of all decent citizens. To aim at pleasing these is in fact accepting the desirability of adapting Art to the needs of polite society. He is, if not (in Lemoyne's words), a " Parfumeur or a *' Faiseur de Ragouts " at least little more than a " Bateleur de Reduits " and a " Plaisant de Ruelles." He would have been ineffably shocked at the bare idea that the end of Art could possibly be the expression of THE POINT OF VIEW 15 the poet's personality. He agreed with Boileau in laughing to scorn those " dissidents " and " libertins " who preferred to think for themselves, to write for themselves, and to be themselves. Racine was a very great poet. He accepted the Seventeenth Century ideal outwardly; he may even have believed that he accepted it inwardly. But he was too great a poet to act upon it. In his tragedies — which are among the very greatest poems ever written — he did express himself : his vision of the world and his attitude towards God and man and love and death. By the very force of his personality he imposed him- self even on Boileau. But Boileau and the Seventeenth Century with him persisted in misunderstanding him and in accepting him and praising him for qualities of conformity that he did not possess. They took Phedre as a moral lesson — " les moindres fautes severement punies " — and Athalie as an illustration of the Christian doctrine that was the outward and accepted foundation of social order in a century which, if it was not religious in any real sense and did not deeply believe, yet found in the forms of belief and worship a necessary corollary to the monarchic con- stitution of government. Boileau damned Pere Lemoyne in spite of his exposition of the Seventeenth Century doctrine of Art — damned him, we must suppose, because he stated it with such an intensity of conviction and passion that the doctrine, on his lips, became rather a personal ex- pression than the objective exposition of a universally accepted social axiom. Moreover, in spite of Pere Lemoyne's theories, his epic Saint Louis and many of his lyrics come so near being real poetry that they sin 16 ' FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES against the Seventeenth Century doctrine of confor- mity. In endeavouring to guide and mould the polity of the State and the conduct of its citizens, Lemoyne expressed himself with so great an individuality of artistic utterance as to constitute a sin against the social conception of Art. The bourgeois school of the Eighteenth Century was exclusively and militantly didactic. Diderot and the writers of his school were like Monsieur -Poirier. He could see nothing in a landscape entitled " A Summer Evening." " Ca ne dit rien ! " is his criticism : and he instances as a perfect example of Art, " une gravure qui represente un chien au bord de la mer, aboyant devant un chapeau de matelot." Diderot adored the sentimentality and moral platitudes of Richardson and Lillo. Greuze was his ideal painter : he cared nothing for Watteau. Boucher and Fragonard revolted his bourgeois soul. He would have wept in contortions of *' attendrissement " before Bubbles or Christ and the Boy Scout. Rousseau, Bernardin de Saint Pierre, though individualists in Art, were didactic. Paul et Virginie is perhaps the supreme example of the posi- tively indecent morality of the Eighteenth Century. Delille, though not a moral sentimentalist like the bourgeois writers, insists on parading his professional stock-in-trade in the very midst of his loveliest pas- sages. The Versailles School was, however, in general, anything but didactic. No one could have less desire to preach than Bertin or Cardinal Bernis. The Romanticists revived the grandiose heresy of Lemoyne. In Hugo the prophet, not to say the charlatan, threatened to engulf the poet. If Art is a garden of flowers, Hugo's art is too often a monstrous THE POINT OF VIEW 17 floral clock or the Royal monogram in tulips or a loyal design in red, white and blue (or shall I rather say in orange, white and green, for Hugo was always a rebel !). 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 Professor of Botany, not an inspired gardener like Jasmin who ministered to the Pompadour, nor an Odilon Redon who painted roses burning like a mid- summer noon and larkspurs as blue as the noonday sky and as light and airy as celestial butterflies. Musset had no didactic aim. His Stances a la Malibran — the loveliest music in all French poetry — are simply an incomparable Hymn to Beauty. Musset had no doctrine. He was just a poet. 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 prota- gonists of didacticism have been, happily, entirely devoid of any artistic gifts they could debase or per- vert to their purpose. No school of any account has arisen to dispute the sway of " l'Art pour VArt." In all the diversity and clash of poetic credos this has re- mained the corner-stone of the faith. Decadents, symbolists, the jeunes have respected Art : in every caje, in every ivory tower, they have worshipped Our Lady Beauty with unfaltering praise and unconquerable faith. The other doctrine is left to the Barbarian howling without : to the inept, the unclean, the masques dancing their obscene carnival around the still porticos of Art : to Silenus outside the Garden of the Rose. II.— MAURICE SCEVE AND THE POETIC SCHOOL OF LYONS. I. ■■ HE Renaissance stood for life in its 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- Platonism which, with all the rest, coming from Italy, mingled with the mediaeval conception of "L'Amour Courtois," and found in France, perhaps its chief exponent in Margaret Queen of Navarre, in whose Comedie a quatre personnages joule au Mont de Marsan (1547) the Queen of the Love of God proclaims the superiority of the neo-Platonic ideal of love over Calvinism, Catholicism, 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 unscaleable walls of the prison-house and opened a prospect of measureless country beyond. Instead of a pleasant valley (as it had seemed) set in the encircling hills of authority, men found themselves on a mountain-top, with the world stretching at their SCEVE AND POETIC SCHOOL OF LYONS 19 feet, virgin and splendid for the adventurous traveller. Art was the fine flower of this new, more spacious life. In the poets of the Renaissance, in the French Ronsard, for example — this sense of bigness, this lilt of the soul, untrammelled now, toward unsuspected glories, is at its full. Their song floats golden and illimitable on the wings of their spirit's freedom. They are men living life to the utmost, men in all their glory of intellect and passion and emotion, no longer in- fants swaddled in the bands of Church and State and established doctrine ! It is true that if much had been gained, something too had been lost. Faith save only in themselves had gone. The men of the Renaissance were heretics in all things. The Middle Ages had placed a veto on all thought that transcended the dogma of the Church and the accepted theories of statecraft. 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 depth and intensfty what it had not in breadth. Driven inward by the restrictions 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 mediaeval lyric, in the Chansons de toile like Vente Tore et li raim crollent : Qui s'entraiment soef dorment. . . 20 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES in the Dawn Songs like Gaite de la tor, Gardez entor, or Or ne haz rien tant com le jor, Amis, qui me depart de vos. . . or in Charles d'Orleans or Froissart, every note of pas- sion and of serenity, every mood and experience from the copper glories of passion-laden sunsets 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 woods. Aucassin et Nicolete — is that not Art? Or the frail beauty of the Romaunt of the Rose, Ou l'art d'amors 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 uncongenial to science and philosophy, to statecraft in a large sense, to the attitude of him who, like Faust, in the Second Part, stands before Nature, " ein Mann allein," out of accord with the large harmonies and clear lines of Greek art, but they were not in- consistent with the development of a most passionate theory of human relationships, with the conception of that " Amour Courtois," which, if it did not break the heavy clouds of the sultry sky, filtered into the heart and soul of the Lover a new intensity. SCEVE AND POETIC SCHOOL OF LYONS 21 like dew upon the fresh grass and buttercups of a dawn-lighted meadow, giving him instead 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- world fire, if not to the clear flame of spirituality, at least to the red smoulder 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 and restrained desire. The Renaissance burst the dam. What the Renaissance gained in freedom and lilt, it lost in concentration. No fixed boundaries subsisting to bar the way of the adventurous, nothing remained sacred now but Beauty, that dangerous Beauty the Middle Ages had so terribly feared, as some Siren insidiously calling beyond the prison- walls and drawing men away from the com- fortable orderliness of uncontroverted dogma. But the loss itself is almost a gain. Who can for more than a moment regret it? Now all was free, men pursued Beauty whithersoever she led, deserting all things for her, travelling alone along perilous roads or away from roads altogether, following ever that strange, new, wonderful fen-light, the Jack o' Lan- thorn of Art — our Lady Beauty, at whose feet they saw, prostrate in adoration, all forms of being and action and Life itself ! And nevermore will this search for Beauty, this ripae ulterioris amor cease to be a mainspring of life in the Latin countries. The night of Maurice Sceve's Delie (1544) is strown with its 22 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES fire : in him spiritual passion and the love of beauty are made 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 men think they hold the elusive sprite in their nets of rules and" canons of taste, there will be times when Art becomes a con- suming passion and men talk of Art for Art's sake, as if Art were not inevitably the flower of life, splen- did when life is full, weak and anaemic when life totters and sinks beneath the onslaught of authority or of the powers of evil. But evermore the mysterious and ineffable touch of those supernatural fingers, of that in- definable vision, which we call Beauty — which, in the eyes of Viele-Griffin became Life itself, Helen of the russet hair — will glorify and destroy, coming, alas, most to those who seek it least, but all souls being tuned to its music and stirred, if they will or not, to the quest of the new Graal ! II. Marot is the faint blush of the dawn : if Art be the touchstone of the Renaissance — I mean the conscious effort to produce Beauty — then Marot is still mediaeval. He shares, however, to some extent, the ideas of his patron Margaret Queen of Navarre, but he achieves Art, like all the poets of the Middle Ages, outside Provence, only by accident. He loved sincerely — he was not capable of passion — and he wrote sincere and moving love poems to his mistress Anne of Alencon, niece of Francis I. and of Margaret. But he had neither the concentration of SCEVE AND POETIC SCHOOL OF LYONS 23 the Middle Ages nor the new note of spirituality which is the emotional counterpart of the artistic effort of the Renaissance. He had nothing of the carnal passion of the Troubadours nor of that strange new Love that came from Italy, half carnal and half mystic, incarnated by Petrarch in his Laura. His translations of Petrarch have lost the spirit of Petrarch. Here and there, perhaps, its shadow has fallen upon him, but he has not known it. With Mellin de Saint Gelais, he introduced the sonnet into France, but his sonnets are empty : the soul of the sonnet is not in them. His dominant note is unstudied grace and a mournful de- licacy of sentiment — the French word tendresse alone expresses it. " And when I look upon my brown-haired mistress Young, comely, royal-born of godlike Kings Playing the spinet, and her voice and fingers Join in sweet harmony. ..." The mystery of Art is not there : there is no passion nor exaltation. The rival of two Kings in the favours of the cruel Diana of Poitiers and the accepted lover of a Princess, Marot did not rise to the heights of Sceve who loved a courtezan, nor of the two courtezans who loved great poets, Pernette du Guillet and Louise Labe. III. The morning star of the French Renaissance was Maurice Sceve of Lyons. The amethystine wine of , sunrise fills his goblet : he has the grave purity of the dawn just breaking, not the riotous 24 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES splendour of sunset. Into the mould of Serafino's epigram he poured the Dialoghi d'amore of Leon Hebrieu and the Angoisses et remedes d' amour of the grand Rhetoriqueur Jean Bouchet, the intimate friend of Ronsard's father. He turned the '* Gather ye roses " of his Italian model to the praise of love un- dying, but he kept the overwrought preciosity of his master. And to all he added the intensity of a tor- tured and sensitive soul, 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 not " Ce Cupido aisle Aveugle, enfant, nud, incertain, volage Qui tant d'amer a son doux ha mesle," but the great Love of which Rabelais spoke when he declared that : " Amour ha tel effect Qu'il ne peult estre en cceur de folle femme, Ains en l'esprit de l'homme plus parfaict." Sceve had drunk deep of Margaret of Navarre and of Plato, Petrarch and the Italian Platonists. He, like Margaret, had wished : " Mon ame perir et noier Or puisse en ceste douce mer D'amour, ou n'y a point d'amer; Je ne sens corps, ame ne vie, Sinon amour, et n'ay envie SCEVE AND POETIC SCHOOL OF LYONS 25 De paradis, ni d'enfer craincte, Mais que sans fin je sois estraincte A mon amy, unye et joincte." The illimitable night of his obscurity is strown with innumerable stars. Never has 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 verse "which Love tempered in his flame." Sceve was of those who like Petrarch, his master, have had the intolerable vision of God and of Love His Minister : he saw Love enthroned in the heart of the cornfield and in the depths of the wood ; sunset and sunrise, the daffodils in the spring dew and the dripping leaves of the fall told him of Love's rule, divine and eternal, in Nature as truly as in Revelation. And Love to him went accompanied by joy and sorrow, both eternal as Life. Sceve was born in 1504 or 1505 in Lyons, the Gate of Italy, during the governorship of Caesar Borgia. Little is known of his life. Margaret of Navarre turned him to the study of Platonism : he had already found the reputed tomb of Laura at Avignon. He was indeed the first scholar of Lyons when in 1 544 he took his place as her most admirable poet by the " profonde eloquence et mirable facture " of his Delie object de la plus haute vertu (in the Italian sense), a series of 449 dizains in honour of Pernette 26 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES du Guillet, his mistress, one of the brilliant group of Lyonese poetesses, that included Louise Labe, Clemence de Bourges and Sceve's own sisters, Claudine and Sybille. The high imaginings of Sceve found France in travail : her serious mood accorded with his "docte gravite "; the easy charm of Marot could not fill the aspirations, intellectual and emotional, of the men of 1544. Charles V. was at the Gates of Paris : Henry VIII. in Picardy : Etienne Dolet, who stands for the individualism of the Renaissance, was in prison. Sceve achieved a universal reputation. Sibilet, writing five years later, speaks of him as a classic. Delie took her place beside Beatrice and Laura. It is not easy to give an idea of the charm of Dilie, of the passionate relations of the poet to Pernette du Guillet, of the difficult 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 high desire : " le haut desir qui nuit et jour m'emeut." Pernette du Guillet died in 1545 at the age of 25, and in the same year appeared her poems, Rymes de gentille et certueuse (again in the Italian sense) dame Pernette du Guillet, Lyonnoise. All she wrote is the expression of an intense and unchangeable devotion to the poet and scholar who, with his golden words, had turned her " de noire en blanche " and filled the night of her ignorance with knowledge and freedom. In La Nuict she tells how, in the land of dreams, the kingdom of silence, she saw the dark figures of Vain- glory, Ambition and Shame. Dawn breaks and SCEVE AND POETIC SCHOOL OF LYONS 27 drives away " ceste tourbe nuisante." The dawn — her " cher jour " — is Maurice Sceve. Sceve's Saulsaye, Eglogue de la Vie Solitaire ap- peared in 1547. It is the poet's lament for his dead mistress, cast in the form of a Pastoral dialogue be- tween two Shepherds Antonio and Filermo. Filermo is too near his sorrow to seek comfort. He will re- main in his rustic solitude " seigneur des boys grans et espais," despite his friend's urging to seek the dis- tractions of the town. Next year Sceve organised the Pageant with which Lyons welcomed Henri II. He was the undisputed master of the brilliant Lyonese school, grouped round Louise Labe : Pontus de Tyard, the translator of Leon Hebrieu's Dialoghi and a writer of Platonic dialogue himself : Tyard 's cousin, Guillaume des Autels, the critic of the school : Olivier de Magny, the most passionate of Louise Labe's many lovers : Peletier du Mans, the most curi- ous of the many-sided figures of the French Renais- sance, mathematician, phonetician, poet and critic : Jean de Vauzelles, the friend and publisher of Hol- bein : his brother Mathieu, the husband of Claudine Sceve, and. many more. But Sceve's heart was not in the worldly glory he had won. We know that he left Lyons and travelled in many countries, returning only to write and publish his Microcosme in 1562. 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 is not mentioned as a victim of any of the massacres, Huguenot or Catholic, of the next ten years. The date of his death is unknown. 28 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES Legend, however, tells that, after Pernette's death Sceve tried to live his old life, the life of a great poet and scholar, the friend and favourite of Kings, the ad- mired of Lyons and of the world. Fair ladies threw themselves 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. One night, when, weary beyond all belief, broken and ready to die, he lay down on a mountain side in Syria, and the tropic moon lighted his wan face and white hair, he slept, not having slept for many days. And there came a vision to him, of Pernette in all her beauty and full of her old love, Pemette lovelier than any Helen, and she bade him for love of her return to Lyons, 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 foot of the moun- tain. He awoke, and full of new life and wise with new wisdom, he returned to Lyons, and wrote the Microcosme, the epitome of all his learning and all his life's imagining and knowledge. Then leaving Lyons for ever behind him, and all earthly hope and earthly honour, he returned to the mountain in Syria, and there Pernette appeared to him, and they climbed the mountain together, his arm about her, her hair stream- ing in the night air, the 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 on the upper pastures, saw them pass, and told his master the following day that a young God had passed him leading his divine bride, and that they had SCEVE AND POETIC SCHOOL OF LYONS 29 walked in brightness on the dark slope of the moun- tain, and had then passed on beyond his sight round a shoulder of rock, he being stricken with fear and not daring to follow. And that was the end of Maurice Sceve and Pernette du Guillet. No mortal eye saw them again. " Through love they did not die." For Sceve was the most passionate Lover of all time. To Dante Beatrice was, as Carducci says, hardly more than a theological virtue. Petrarch in his old age was filled with shame at the error of his youth : " del mio vaneggiar vergogna e l'frutto e '1 pentirsi." The Lovers of the ancient world and of the Middle Ages had not his spirituality. But Sceve's love of Pernette, and we know he loved her "not wisely, but too well," was transfigured by a wonderful spiritual passion that has filled even his most carnal images and sex itself with beauty and rapture till his mortal touch of her mortal body trembles and burns, in his verse as in life, with 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 green and purple backs of a celandine's gold petals, are not only a hymn of the spirit to the divine, but a love-song to the rich beauty of some splendid mistress : the' fire of whose lips, the touch of whose hand, are not only the fulfilment of desire, but the very breath of the spirit burning all dross away. IV. Sceve celebrated only Pernette du Guillet : she is his and his only. He has caught her " fast for ever in a tangle of sweet rhymes." But Louise Labe, la 30 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES Belle Cordiere, was sung by all the poets of the school of Lyons, and was the mistress of more than one. She was younger than Pernette 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 Sceve. Hers is a coarser fibre : her verse, too, is clearer than Sceve's or Pernette du Guillet's, 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 Death, sought other glory than on the field of battle : her golden head was bowed before the Reaper Love, and the lance she had borne so proudly was turned against her, poisoned with the venom of Desire. It is not as ". . . . Bradamante, ou la haute Marphise Soeur de Roger. . . that Lyons knew her, but as the faithless wife of " le bon Sire Aymon," the rope maker, and a woman of ill-repute (even if some of the tales be untrue). She was a " Damnee de 1' Amour." Her poems are the apologia of her life. Hers is the Canzoniere of pas- sion unchecked : the strings and goads of carnal love, its unceasing and insatiable desire, the cerements and ashes of its ending, these are her matter. Her verse rings golden like Peele's or Southwell's : but it swells with the moan of intolerable pain. Like Phedre, she is the victim of Venus Anadyomene, "a sa proie attachee " " Je suis le corps, toy la meilleure part," SCEVE AND POETIC SCHOOL OF LYONS 31 she cries to her Lover : she knows it well. But like Verlaine or Baudelaire, "Baise m 'encore, rebaise moy et baise " she asks, and will heed no morrow. The veils are torn away : we see her naked agony, burnt by the " mile torches ardentes," of her " estrange et forte passion." She surfers, but does not regret. There is in her no whine of insincere penitence. " Blame me not," rather she cries : — " Others than us, in spite of their high place, Have borne the hardship and distress of love ; Their haughty souls, their beauty and descent Could not preserve them from the servitude Of cruel love : the noblest spirits most Have fallen victims, and most suddenly. Semiramis, a Queen of great renown, Who fought against the Ethiopians And with her armies routed their black hosts, Found love who harassed her so mightily That, conquered, she abandoned arms and rule ! And, O my stricken Babylonian Queen, Where is your courage, noble in the fray. And where the shield, the lance you used so well Before whose edge the bravest was undone? Where have you put the martial crested helm Whose shadow fell upon your head's fair gold? Where is the sword, and where the coat of mail Wherewith you broke the daring of youi foe?" III.— PIERRE DE RONSARD. I. JIERRE DE RONSARD was born at the Castle of La Poissonniere, near Coutures, on the Loir, in the Vendomois, on Saturday, September 2nd, 1525 He became in 1536 a page to the Dauphin and was present at his death-bed. He then passed into the service of the Duke of Angouleme, now become Duke of Orleans, the third son of Francis I. In 1537 Ronsard went to Scotland as page to James V.'s young wife, Madeleine, daughter of Francis I. He spent two years in Scotland, with a break of a month or two, and six months in England, finally returning to France in 1540. He was then sent with the great humanist, Lazare de Bail, on a diplomatic mission to Germany — to a religious congress at Haguenau. There he heard Calvin speak. When he came back to France he was ill and became deaf. In 1543 he left the ser- vice of Charles of Valois, who had intended him for a diplomatic career, but remained at Court as a squire of the new Dauphin, afterwards Henri II. In the same year, having determined on an ecclesiastical career, he was tonsured at Le Mans by Bishop Rene du Bel lay, the uncle of his famous friend and fellow-poet in after years, Joachim du Bellay. His first published work, an Horatian ode, Of the Beauties he would desire in his Lady-love appeared in 1547. Mean- while he had been studying Greek at Paris, and in the PIERRE DE RONSARD 33 same year as his first poem appeared became a Master of Arts of the University of Paris. During the period of his studies he had conceived the idea of grafting the Pindaric Ode as well as the Horatian on French literature and, after reading Sceve, had revised his conception of poetry. Poetry was for him no longer a mechanical art to be learned from a book of rules and precepts, but it was Beauty incarnate clothing a passionate and intense attitude towards life. II. Four women divide Ronsard's life and his work : Cassandre, Marie, Genevre and Helene. Cassandre he saw first when he was nineteen, and she a child of fifteen with black hair and dark eyes set in an olive face. Four years passed before he met her again, four years for the poet of rich endeavour in learning and in art, and of somewhat casual courtship of "la brune et la blonde," in his native Vendomois and at Paris. Meanwhile Cassandre had married Jean de Peigne, Lord of Pre, a neighbour of the poet's : and he came upon her gathering flowers bareheaded in an autumnal meadow. For some time Ronsard saw Cassandre fre- quently. In 1 552 she visited him at the Chateau of La Poissonniere, where for a time she lay seriously ill. The intimacy that ensued seems 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 years of his life they often met as old friends. She survived him twenty years and died in 1605. D'Aubigne courted her niece, Diane de Talcy, and 34 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES her daughter, Cassandre du Pre, married an ancestor of Alfred de Musset. Ronsard's love for Cassandre was not platonic. That is evident from the sonnets and songs of the Cassandre sequence. But it was not carnal. The poems addressed to her do not, it is true, throb with mystical passion like those of Sceve to Delie. They are not, on the other hand, a sultry blaze of red roses, fullblown, like Louise Labe's to her lovers. They are like pale eglantine, blown lightly by a spring 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 worship. Ronsard was not bloodless enough to please her as a lover : 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 human love : her perfect lips spoke not only wisdom and beauty : they were also a chalice wherein he drank the body and blood 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 adoration. He desires like a shower of gold to fall drop by drop into her lap as she sleeps : to be a white bull carrying her through the April meadows : a Nar- cissus and she a pool that he might plunge in its cool- ing waters for ever. Cassandre's incomprehension drove Ronsard, in the sultry summer of his life, into the heedless intoxication of Marie's kisses. From the sparkling goblet of a rare liqueur he fell to the drunkenness of ordinary wine, and lay, rankly and unaspiring, in the PIERRE DE RONSARD 35 comfortable assurance of her plebeian embraces. "Silenus 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 qu'une rose de mai," Ronsard says, and she had curly, chestnut- brown hair. Her charms were ample, and the poet dwells with wearisome complacency upon them. When he loved Cassandre he aspired too high, he declares to Pontus de Tyard; now his verse, like his love, is " desenflee " and " se dement parlant trop bassement." We tire of the perpetual lushness in which the poet wallows : we long to get away from these heavy meadows to the heights : from Tess of the D'Urbervilles to Senhouse with Sanchia in the star- strown night of her last coming. And Cassandre be- comes a wonderful might-have-been : the shadow of her refusal 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 Marie's slave; then the attachment cooled. She had never been faithful to him : but in 1 558 a very serious rival appeared in the poet's cousin, Charles de Pisseleu, Bishop of Condon and Abbot of Bourgueil, with whom Ronsard appears to have shared her favours until his cousin's death in 1564. Her early death in 1573, or thereabouts, was the occasion of a very beautiful series of poems. The instancy of his passion had long since cooled, Genevre and a shadowy Sinope, of whom we know nothing, had come and gone, and Helene held the held. Small wonder that the poems to Marie dead are entirely platonic : she was little more than an, idealized memory of a once D 36 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES glad summer. Ronsard'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. During the summer-time of his love for Marie, Ronsard wrote the noble Hymn to Death, a paean of victory to the great Redeemer. His soul, 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 of the hymn : the fiery sap of summer rises irresistibly and each line is like a gold or purple grape ripened in the mid-days of Bourgueil. In a cup of vermilion Ronsard pledges Death the Arch-Beloved : and swoon- ing at her feet, he pours his passion before her. He asks only to rest in her arms, at peace, all ardour that no mortal Bride can still consummated and assuaged in this immortal 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 Will drink my fill of this inviolate draught, PIERRE DE RONSARD 37 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, Singing the praise of Death that's still unsung." With Genevre Ronsard had reached the hard cynic- ism of the roue. He cared nothing for her and very little for her favours : he took them casually and then they parted. The dreams and aspirations of spring, the achievement and careless enjoyment of summer were over. She was the love of his wordly autumn. Ronsard was the Court Poet and intimate friend of Charles IX., who loaded him with pensions and bene- fices. He was the most celebrated poet in Europe, prior of Saint-Cosmes-lez-Tours and of Croixval (where you may see him in Pater's Gaston de Latour), Canon of Saint-Martin of Tours, Abbot of Bellozane and incumbent of many cures. Ronsard met Genevre bathing in the Seine. Next day he passed her door and stopped to talk 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- phically, by mutual agreement. With his love for Helene de Fonseque Ronsard rose again and shook off the drag. But he could not put away the insistent sorrow. He loved Helene 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 and despairing love is but the pretty and precious trifling of a great poet playing at love-making with a child. Grey and racked with illness, he knew that he could not hope to inspire passion in this young beauty of the Court. Her love for him, genuine as far as it went, was partly sincere friendship, and for the rest a compound of affectionate pity and overweening pride at her magnificent conquest. Ronsard made the best of the situation : the Master acted his self-assumed part with brave dissimulation and she accepted his love as he gave it and not as he meant it, ununder- standing of a poet's broken heart. Another sorrow, too, had come upon him : Charles IX. had died : " 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," a sonnet ends, referring to the living Helen 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 already had his Court poet, the time-server Desportes, who had followed him to Warsaw and back. More- over, Ronsard felt little sympathy for the worst of all the Kings of France. He was no flatterer of sovereignty. Finding Henry obdurate to his remon- strances, he dared urge the new Chancellor to disobey and rule well. " It is better," he said, " to lose the Sovereign's favour than be hissed by the people." Be- PIERRE DE RONSARD 39 fore he died Ronsard learnt bitterly to know that nothing could be hoped from the most Catholic Majesty of Henry III. and from his favourites and flatterers, and the old opponent of the Huguenots turned in despair toward the rising Protestantism of Henry of Bourbon- Vendome, King of Navarre. III. Enough attention has not been paid to the most notable work of Ronsard 's autumn, the series of poli- tical poems inspired by the Wars of Religion. Up till 1550 the Protestant Reformation and the Renaissance had worked side by side. Margaret of Navarre and the School of Lyons had many points of contact with the Reformers. But by 1560, the opposition between the ideals of Calvin and those of the Renaissance was manifest. Calvin was, as the rebellious angel in M. Anatole France's latest novel puts it, a " maniaque froidement furieux, heretique bruleur d'heretiques, le plus feroce ennemi des Graces." There could be nothing in common between him and Ronsard. Pro- testantism was the enemy of the arts — iconoclastic and puritanic; and Ronsard's protest against Calvin and the new sect is the protest of Art against Puritanism. Catholicism stood for all that made life worth living. For Catholicism was still the Catholicism of the Italian Renaissance, the Catholicism we still find to-day in such writers as the French Barbey d'Aurevilly and the Spanish Valle Inclan, picturesque, passionate, and human. Therefore Ronsard went beyond his protector and exemplar, the Chancellor Michel de l'Hospital, from whom he borrowed many of his ideas. Michel de l'Hospital was the greatest statesman of 40 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES his day, devoted above all things to peace and free- dom of conscience. He could afford to be just to the Huguenots. But Ronsard, though naturally moderate and tolerant, detested Calvinist puritanism too ardently to maintain the equable temper of de l'Hospital. Ronsard was not religious, de l'Hospital was. Being firmly convinced of the truth of Catholic- ism he could respect the sincere convictions of others. But Ronsard could not suspect that among the Calvi- nists there were really men whose whole being de- manded 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 not understand Protestantism. He was 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 against God and crime against the State. And to presumption and sedition the Calvinists added icono- clasm, puritanism, and petty tyranny. The inquisi- tional regime of Geneva with its censorship of morals and its " vigilance committees " that made all privacy impossible was utterly detestable to him. Asceticism and exaggerated austerity he could not tolerate. To defend the Catholicism of 1 560, still untouched by the Counter-Reform, was to defend his own way of living and thinking, 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 was plunged, by the act of the Huguenots, into a cataclysm of blood and ravage, then the Catholic Church and its supporters stood in Ronsard's eyes PIERRE DE RONSARD 41 for peace and order and good government; and the Calvinists were rebels and fomenters of discord — a plague and curse upon France. The year of the two Discourses on the miseries of this time and of the second version of the Elegy to Guillaume des Autels was the year of the massacre of Passy, of the English seizure of Havre, Rouen and Dieppe, of the seige and fall of Rouen, of the Huguenot attempt upon Paris, and the Catholic victory of Dreux. Ronsard's attitude towards life is well shown in his i4nsu?er to some ministers and preachers oj Geneva, published in the spring of 1563, a reply to a number of Protestant libels. After reciting his Credo, that of the Catholic Church, he goes on to give an account of his way of life : " On waking in the morning, be- fore doing anything, I call upon the Eternal, the Father of all good, praying Him humbly to give me His grace, and that the new day may pass without offence to Him . . . then I get up, and when I am dressed, I set myself to study. . . . For four or five hours I remain at work, composing or read- ing. . . . Then weary of too much reading, I leave my books and go to Church : when I come back, after an hour's pleasant conversation I dine soberly, and give thanks to God. The rest of the day I devote to amusement." Then he tells of his amusements — walking, talking with a friend, reading or sleeping in a garden or by a stream, or playing tennis, wrestling, fencing, or even exchanging good stories with a gay companion, for, as he says, 42 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES " Too much austerity does not dwell in me." Finally " When brown night has set the stars arow, Encurtaining with veils the earth and sky, Careless I go to bed and raise my eyes And mouth and heart toward the vault of Heaven And make my prayer," That is his simple mode of life. And then he compares the poet's love of beauty with 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 not forget, even in his anger, to do justice to the great Protestant family of Coligny — his friends and protec- tors, of whom he thinks no evil and to whom he attributes no ill desire toward the realm of France. His earlier poems before the outbreak of Civil War had been singularly moderate. Here is a passage from the Discourse to Des Autels of 1560. He is speaking of the Huguenots : " For they do wrong and we too are at fault; Their fault is wishing to destroy our realm And forcibly resist our sovereign's will, And in presumption of their proud self-will For ancient laws to substitute new dreams; Their fault is straying from their fathers* road, To follow ways of foreign sectaries ; Their fault is scattering seditious prints, Slanderous and full of insult and contempt . . PIERRE DE RONSARD 43 They think they only see, they only live Well ordered lives, 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 since Gregory the Great, benefices are given to un- educated men, to boys of fifteen, fops, fools, and are sold to the highest bidder. He is particularly indig- nant at the young prelates who care nothing for their poor flock, " whose wool they take and often their- 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 patience and obedience, without money, consideration, strength or power, poor, naked, an outlaw " what would he say to find it to-day " rich, well-fed and proud, well-provided with coin, revenues and lands, its ministers swollen with worldly wealth and its Popes even clothed in splendid vest- ments of silk and cloth of gold?" And Ronsard replies : *' He would wish he had never suffered for the Church, never been beaten or stoned or banished for it." He urges the Catholics to reply to the Huguenots not with " cannon and armour " but by the pen, where- by they defend so well their bad cause, and 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 only be won by the spirit. But when, in spite of de l'Hospital's efforts, seconded 44 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES by Ronsard, the Civil War had actually broken out, the poet changed his tone. He had to choose his side, actively now. He even fought for a while with the sword as well as the pen. He apostrophizes the Pro.estant de Beze : " No longer preach in France a Gospel armed, A pistolled Christ, with powder-blackened face, And morioned head and bearing in his hand A broadsword, dripping with red human blood." He is convinced that the Protestants are responsible for the misery and disaster of the Civil War that is destroying France. He is filled 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 Remonstrance to the People oj France he adjures the prelates, assembled at the Council of Trent : " Root up ambition and excessive wealth, Tear from your hearts lascivious youth, and be Sober at meals and sober in all you say : And seek the welfare of your flocks and not Your own." And again : "Put off your greatness, glories, honours all; 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. Have no concern with worldly things, 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 : Christ is just charity, concord and love." He even goes so far as to confess to the Protestants that " Had they remained simple as of old and been content 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 can 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 only with the accession of Henry IV., his sympathies were, not with the League and the Guises, but with Henry of Navarre. But he did not live to see the victory of Henry IV. He died on the 27th December, 1585. He dictated two sonnets the day before he died. They are his own epitaph. Here is one of them : 46 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES " I am nothing but bones, I seem a skeleton, flesh- less, nerveless, without muscles or heart beat, whom the shaft of death has struck without hope of remission. Apollo, god of medicine, and his son, /Esculapius, both great masters, cannot cure me, their skill has failed me; farewell, pleasant sun ! my eye is blinded, my heart is about to go down where everything is disintegrated. What friend seeing me so stripped as this, does not carry back home a sad and humid eye, consoling me in my bed and kiss- ing my face, and wiping my eyes put to sleep by death? Farewell, dear companions, farewell, my dear friends ! I am going first to prepare a place for you." He did not have his due : the little souls of Malherbe and Boileau libelled 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." And he knew that the ladies of his verse, Cassandre, Marie, Genevre, Helene, despite their rich beauty, their fresh grace and charm of youth, would live only in his verse, and that the kings he honoured with his friendship were less than he was, and that their glory would only be that he had sung of them, as of the frail beauties who had loved him, with that immortal voice sounding across the centuries from the great Renaissance to our own huckster age. IV.— THE POETS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. ! KNOW a man who has an Eighteenth Cen- tury pastel on his wall over the mantel- piece of his room. On each side is a candlestick bearing a candle which he lights at dusk. He calls it his altar where forgetting the huckster world about him, he makes his offering to the leisurely and graceful Spirit of the Old Regime. He has made a copy of verses on his pastel, and here it is : Pastel. "I lit the candles. Right and left they stand Of Boucher's pastel, and their golden flames Gave life to it. I saw the painted fan Rosy with Cupids on its ivory lames Swing with the motion of a shapely hand. A Cavalier in buckled shoes began (Bent low with tricorne pointed to his toes), His protestations to a powdered Love. He wore a coat of gray and gold brocade And silken breeches and a vest of mauve. The night-breeze rustled her pannier of rose, And swaying hornbeams made their serenade. 48 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES I saw her close her fan coquettishly, And go with feigned reluctance down the grass. Between broad parterres edged with yellow box : And marble satyrs laughed to see them pass, And many a faun-chased nymph in verdigris Glinted between the painted hollyhocks. Dim are her patches and her powdered hair. And dim the lace and buckles 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. The amber witchcraft of her eyes is still, 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 !" That is the spirit of the Eighteenth Century. The poets of whom I shall speak, if they did not all shed their lives in Ninety-Three, at least all shed their bro- cade and powder and lost all that they held dear. If they survived, they lived on only as strangers in an ugly world, where breeches and wigs were forgotten. With the horrid yelp of the Carmagnole around them, they dreamed, like my friend, of that bright day when long ago they spoke with some powdered Beauty in the Gardens of the King, at Versailles or Saint-Germain, at Saint-Cloud or Marly-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 and German innovations. The Revolution and Romanticism are in Rousseau's Conjespions and his Contrat Social. But they are just as much in Diderot's plays, and in his dramatic theory. Dancourt and Marivaux are French : Diderot and Beaumarchais are English. Richardson, Lillo and Edward Moore win the battle over the successors of Moliere ; Shakespeare beats Racine. Nature ceases to be the appropriate setting of well-ordered lives : she becomes a Pro- phetess with dishevelled hair and wild eyes, beckon- ing to an impossible Paradise. Le Notre is dispossessed by Kent. And the whole system of Louis XIV. in life and government decay* and falls before the democratic ideas of England. I do not propose to weary you with the cold and pompous writers of Odes, J. B. Rousseau, Le Franc de Pompignan, Houdar de la Motte, Lebrun and the rest. Even the best of them, J. B. Rousseau, is stiff and bristles with unnecessary mythology. Pompignan had, it is true, a lighter and even playful touch when he liked, but that was not often, unless he was dis- coursing to some fair lady of Nectar and Ambrosia, after some Italian model. Thomas was an honest man and dull to extinction. He' is the Revolution in bad verse. His only, and that a more than dubious claim, is that Lamartine 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 Eighteenth Century jnto 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 of the Seventeenth Century rather than the flower of the Eighteenth. The epicureans of Vendome wore the full wig and plumed hat of the Seventeenth Century, and they knew not the deep blue velvet and powdered hair of Pompadour nor the diaphanous rose pink of frivolous bare-foot du Barry. Else had I fain dwelt lovingly on Guillaume Amfrye de Chaulieu, the millionaire intendant of the Princes of Vendome, Abbot of Aumale, Poitiers, Chenel and Saint-Etienne, spiritual and temporal Lord of Saint Georges-en-l'Ile d'Oleron, Voltaire's master and one of the most harmonious of French poets and a student of the theory of versification. And there are some of later days I have not in my heart to praise : Fontenelle, whose criticism is so much better than his prosaic verse where solemn shepherds make cold love to posturing shepherdesses : Piron who spent his last years, like Gresset, doing penitence for the work of his youth, and who is remembered only for a bad comedy, little better than Cresset's masterpiece, and without the redeeming pendant of the naughty story of Ver-Vert the pious parrot. " For Piron sleeps and Gresset is with God " — Piron s'endort, Gresset est tout en Dieu, — said Gen til-Bernard towards 1750. And there are dozens more : d'Arnauld, 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, brought the note of austerity proper to Republican virtue. With Marie Antoinette the gaiety and easy grace of the Eighteenth Century went to its death. Nor shall I speak of Voltaire, although the whole Eighteenth POETS OF EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 51 Century is in him. Whether at Versailles or from Berlin or in his royal state at Ferney he dominates everything : his claim is not disputed. I wish rather to interest you, if I can, in the minor poets of the second half of the century, the Abbe Le Blanc, Cardinal Bernis, Gentil-Bernard, Saint-Lambert, the Abbe Delille, Leonard, the Chevalier Benin and Evariste, Vicomte de Parny. They are little-known, perhaps, in spite of much perfunctory allusion to their insignifi- cance, the least known of all French poets. No one reads Delille. Bertin, the best of them all, the author of one or two of the finest lyrics in French, is not even dismissed with contempt by Lanson. He is simply not mentioned. Le Blanc is not in the Nouoeau Larousse, Bernis and Gentil-Bernard sell as Erotica to collectors who, if they ever read their first editions, will be grievously disappointed. Leonard has advanced to a cheap selection by an acknowledged authority : but I have editions not mentioned in his bibliography. Parny is only known because he was Lamartine's master, Saint-Lambert because he was Voltaire's rival in love. 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 stereotypes and the sumptuous editions of the Empire. But Bertin is rare. He died with the Old Regime. He is best read in the two little morocco-bound Cazin volumes of 1785, and if you can find those in any penny dip, be gladder 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 purest and clearest of French poets since Racine, Bertin has softness and music and colour and passion E 52 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES more than any before or since. Take the others if you will. Leave them to their undeserved oblivion, but give me these two, the classical and the exotic, for they sound between them the gamut of French verse. In Bertin, before Bernardin de Saint Pierre, before Chateaubriand, is all the heat of the South : and in him it is real : he is quite without pose or affectation, and quite without shame or self -consciousness. He is not steeped, like them, in the sentimentality and sophistries of Rousseau. He is a classic, not a Romantic. They are all minor, it is true. But God whispers His truth to the 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 have not a monopoly of inspiration. 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, with a little good fortune, we may hope to write. The Seventeenth Century is studded with immortal names. Even a minor poet, such as Pere Lemoyne, writing his Epic of Saint Louis, felt himself the prophet and coadjutor of God. Voltaire spoke to God as to an equal. But the poets of whom I shall speak walked on dewy eves on dusk-enfolded lawns, or hid from mid- day under overarching trees, lords of nothing and caring to be lords of nothing but some elusive or some ready mistress, glad to rest with them in the shade of some cut spindle bower or on the soft turf of a statue-studded lawn. In the opening or falling 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 is not devoid of poetry. The movement in painting of Watteau and his successors was bound to have its counterpart in verse. While the moralists sought salva- tion in sentimentality or in the grave wisdom of anti- quity, the poets, heedless of doctrine, lived their own lives and sang their own emotions. Like Voltaire, they had learned wisdom from Ninon de l'Enclos, 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 regime. They are not great poets, but they are true poets. They loved gardens and fair women and the delicate broidery of an artificial life. Their work is all in pastel-shades : there is no riot or profusion, but there is taste and refinement. Their feeling is no less real because it is gentlemanly in conception and ex- pression, a touch or a hint sufficing where a Romantic would have exhausted the dictionary in violence and crudity. To them the world — their world — is a garden; carefully laid out by Le Notre, in beds and lawns and hornbeam avenues, every flower in its right place, blending colour and perfume exquisitely with the brocade and taffeta of comely Lords and Ladies, the spring or autumn tints of well-groomed trees and hedges, and noonday or sunset enveloping all in its appropriate rain of light. They loved Versailles and are its expression. Patched and powdered are the ladies of their verse : bewigged and musked them- selves. Courtly priests, diplomatists and soldiers, they are before all gentlemen. They break the Decalogue with an easy grace and a laugh : there is no insistence : 54 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES their touch, even in their sins, is light. Far from them is the earnestness in virtue or in wrong-doing of a later day or of Rousseau and Diderot in their own. All was in the manner : nothing in the thing itself. Their love was much as love always is; but they loved without remorse or regret or self-analysis. And as they loved they lived their lives, of which love formed so great a part, without a backward glance or a fear for the future, excellently, courageously, 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 and Louis the Sixteenth. Outside, Rousseau and Diderot might howl and weep and the evening sky grow red with the torches of Revolution. But here, in Versailles, were 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 Notre's Parterre des Fleurs, or before the Labyrinth guarded by Esop and Love, or strolling through the innumer- able Gods and Heroes of the Petit Pare or along -the Great 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 Egle 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 Epistles, going from one to the other in polygamous gallantry : Daphne, Claudine, Olympe, Corinne, Laure POETS OF EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 55 and the rest, Delille, in the decent black of his pro- fession, alone, with breviary half-opened in his hand. I like to think of the courtly Abbe walking towards evening in the hornbeam avenues between the formal lawns and beds with their fountains and statues and terms, and quincunxes of spindle and box, saluting fair ladies of the Court, bowing low to the minx du Barry or to Marie Antoinette as he dreams along his way in the glow of some summer evening. Not for him the perfumed cheek of an enshepherded Egle. Bernis, his peccadillos forgotten in the purple of his Cardinal- ate, may pass them by unheeding, but Delille wist- ful of the impossible, sees too well the grace and frailty of these lights of love laughing on their gallants' arms or disconsolately awaiting their faithless lovers. Bertin and Leonard are almost exotic in langour, colour and voluptuousness. Delille is severely classical. His is the charm of perfect mastery and repose ; theirs is the unconscious beauty of a great line thrown at random. He has looked and with severe control re- fused the proferred joy : theirs is the hotter passion of fulfilment. In Bertin the South breathes its enchanted desire : Leonard has, alas, read Gessner and Macpher- son, and their northern mist clouds many a pagan noontide. Delille's besetting sin is characteristic of his cloth. He can write with the purity of Racine, but he cannot resist an exhibition of his encylopaedic knowledge. He does it decently, of course, not with the rankness of a Roucher or the cold science of Saint- Lambert. Yet when he should be whole-heartedly the mundane and slightly quixotic Confessor of frail brocaded ladies, his abominable Professorship will in- continently peer out amid the Fragonards and 56 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES Watteaus : he forgets his" Art of Love and even hi» Breviary to perorate from his Chair in the College de France. It is 1 750. The lawns of the Orangerie, against the background of Mansard's Tuscan masterpiece, are gay among laurels and myrtles, with satin and velvet and brocade, beneath the more than life-size white marble statue of the Great Louis as a Roman Emperor. There is Boucher, in brown velvet, bowing low to Pom- padour herself. He is her Court painter and the dis- ciple of Watteau, Pater and Lancret. Young Baudouin, soon to be his son-in-law, is with him. There too, is, the chubby Abbe Bernis, Count of Lyons, the Court poet of the King's mistress. He, like no other, can pay a delicate compliment, make a dimple on a powdered cheek a perfect masterpiece of mannered verse, as fragile, as coloured, and as graceful as the work of the poets of the Roman decadence, Claudian or Rutilian. With him is Gentil-Bernard, his friend and Voltaire's, asking only in witty verse ' To please the fancy of great Pompadour." He looks absurdly tall beside the little Abbe, who is like nothing so much as a Cupid in a Pompadour group, as he fusses along beside Bernard. In all the Salons of the time these two are found together, Bernis, the writer of madrigals, and Bernard, the famous author of an unpublished Art oj Love. Everyone knows his Epistle to Claudine and his Hymn to a Rose, and remembered fragments of his masterpiece are on everyone's lips. There too is Saint-Lambert, the poet of a few grace- ful and highly coloured lyrics, Evening and Morning, 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 mistress Madame du Chatelet, once Voltaire's friend. He has not read Thomson yet; nor written his Sea- sons. That tig fat man is the Abbe Le Blanc, his- toriographer of the Royal Palaces and preceptor to Pompadour's brother. He is a discreet admirer of English literature and institutions and has just pub- lished his Letters on England. But he is a poet too. His Elegies of 1734 are not yet quite forgotten. Voltaire, from Berlin, where Frederick knows not Pompadour, dominates France. A year or two ago he had dominated Versailles, a lord-in-waiting, and the old and intimate friend of Pompadour. Jean Jacques Rousseau is still unknown save for a few verses in the manner of the time, Sylvia's Avenue and such like. Diderot is known only as the author of an indecent novel. It is 1770. Let us stand on the Great Terrace of Versailles by the four bronze statues of Silenus, Antinous, Apollo, and Bacchus, and watch those who pass up and down the grand perron between the vases of white marble and the bronze Loves horseback on marble Sphinxes. Du Barry reigns in pink and gos- samer. That old man is Boucher, once Court Painter, now past his prime. Fragonard is with him, but Baudouin is dead. Gentil-Bernard is not there, though his Art oj hove is still unpublished. He is an old man and insane now. Cardinal Bernis is Ambas- sador at Rome. You will not see him here. His worldly success has been complete, although he is an honest man. But instead of him you will see the young Chevalier Bertin in the full habillement of a 38 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES soldier, and his friend the Vicomte de Parny, a soldier too, both Creoles, both in the spring of life, one 18, the other 1 7, and convinced of the truth of Bernard's line : " 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 Leonard, the young diplomatist, a Creole like Bertin and Parny, soon to go on his- mission to the Prince-Bishop of Liege. He has written his Moral Idylls and is famous. He is talking with the most illustrious poet of the time, the great Abbe Delille himself, the translator of Virgil's Georgics. They are discussing Thomson, Goldsmith and Gessner. For the literature of England and Germany is penetrating France. Young's Night Thoughts have just been translated and Ducis' adaptation of Hamlet 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. Beaumarchais has written his EugSnie. The moral canvasses of Greuze, from the earlier Paterfamilias and Village Bride, to the later Broken Pitcher and Dead Bird, where the didactic intention is less obvious, but the suggestion of impropriety more blatant, have attracted much atten- tion in the Salons from 1 759 to 1 776 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- sists. That Boucher never did, and Fragonard's eroti- cism is without offence and as light as air. For they are French, and Greuze is, like Diderot, a disciple of the English school. Saint-Lambert has become an Academician, and has adapted Thomson's Seasons. He, too, is turning to England. He has lost his light- ness and grace. Gone, long since, are the days of Madame du Chatelet and the black eyes of Phyllis. Delille is talking to Bertin, who has said to him his latest poem, Meridian : " The sultry noon is still, The air is close and warm, My Catilie, where will You lie and rest to-day? The cloudy sky is red With lightning, and the storm Cannot be far away. Where shall we find our bed?" To Delille's "young scapegrace"! he has retorted by a reminder of a little piece of the Abbe's own written long ago and almost forgotten : " In some dim garden or 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!" 60 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES It is 1 783. The War with England has ended in the Peace of Versailles. America is free and France vic- torious. The Gardens of Delille and the Loves of Bertin are full of the humbling of proud Albion then in process : now Louis is Conqueror and the Pax Gal- licana is a balm upon the world. But, as of old Greece conquered conquered Rome, so now England is victor at her victor's feet. The material gain is the spiritual loss. Voltaire is dead and nemesis has overtaken him, for Ducis, the adaptor of Shakespeare, has succeeded him at the Academy, and Letoumeur has published his complete prose translation of the Barbarian. Wild nature, sufficiently sophisticated to please Ver- sailles, is the mood of the day. Ossian has been translated and Gessner. Bernardin de Saint Pierre is composing his Studies and Paul and Virginia. We had best cross the Park to Trianon. For at Petit Trianon, Marie Antoinette, a victim to Rousseau and Gessner, spends her days in rustic simplicity, a panniered and highsheeled dairymaid. Here are her farm-yard and orchard and vegetable garden, and her English Park. Quincunxes and cut box and yew are no longer the fashion : paths winding among forest trees and dewy lawns have taken the place of noble avenues, and Le Notre has fallen before Kent. It is the day of the Idyll. But thank Heaven, enough artificiality has remained in the cult of Nature. We need hardly regret the great manner of Pompadour nor the mincing frivolity of du Barry. Boucher is dead, and Fragonard reigns in his stead : Bertin in paint. But the domesticities of the virtuous Madame Vigee-Lebrun are more to the Queen's taste. POETS OF EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 61 Bertin has published his Loves, Leonard has returned from Liege. Parny has loved and lost Eleonore. Delille has long been Professor of Latin in the Col- lege of France and an Academician. He has just published his Gardens 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 English-wise replace the great trees of the great time. And a passage of his Gardens runs in his mind : " Versailles, alas ! the lost charm of your woods The master- work of Louis and the Gods. Le Notre* s craft is undone cruelly. Those trees whose tops rose to the amber sky Of sunset, now lie smitten 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 : There sweet La Valliere to her Royal Lord, Lovely and frail, scarce hoping her reward, Whispered her timid secret fearfully." Besides, Roucher, a disciple of Rousseau, has dared to forestall his Gardens with a turgid, romantic poem of the Months, after Saint-Lambert and Thomson. It is true that it is of little account. The Gardens are gay and smiling in the sunshine of Delille's art. Roucher's poem is formless and threatening like a cloudy sky over weary uplands and deserted marshes. Bertin is still a soldier and a courtier, but he 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 of his last poems, written since the Loves were pub- lished 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. Both have in common, at least, a real love of Roman antiquity, even if the Abbe tends to Virgil and the soldier to Catullus. Delille is about to start 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 Horace, still rose-crowned, follows Lalage Who still escapes him on elusive feet." Bertin is the last of the gay and care-free crowd : the last beautiful trifler of the Old Regime. He, to the end, ignored the storm without, the old order chang- ing, Rousseau and Diderot howling, and Beauty and Comeliness dragged in the mire. He saw, but refused to recognise the day when all he held dear should be forgotten and " Beneath the share the lilies trampled be." POETS OF EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 63 For the clouds are gathering. A year ago young Andre Chenier came back to Paris from his regiment at Strassburg, and is about to start for Italy. '89 is approaching, and the sun will go down on Versailles. " The sun has set Blood-red behind the trees. O butterflies Now are your rouge and patches faded lies And dulled your flowered brocade and sarsanet, No longer may you greet in dainty guise The powdered witty gallants that you met, For on each hollow amorous enterprise The sun has set. No longer may grave abbes quite forget Their breviaries — and be only wise To read their graceful penitents' sweet eyes. On Versailles and on Marie Antoinette The sun has set . . V.— LECONTE DE LISLE. I. ECONTE DE LISLE was undoubtedly a great master 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 enclosed gardens; in red roofs among the trees. He missed the more delicate and fragile side of things : the more intimate and subtle emotions : the eternal 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- trating chords of Debussy or Moussorgsky. His colour is gold and purple : without shading. There are no pastel effects : no blues and greens fading off into one another in the infinite cool variety of Nature. But he unflinchingly loved Justice and Freedom and repudi- ated with unswerving purpose all 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 possible by human relations, of action. He followed and honoured Beauty and hated all those who blas- phemed 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 believed, who had been each in his time, divine, and, as Louis Menard said, "les affirmations successives d'un besoin eternel." He cries not with joy but sorrowfully and pitifully: "Te voila done blesse comme nous Galileen, te voila serrblable a nous. Ta splendeur s'est s'eteinte et les lyres se sont tues," in the words put by James Darmesteter 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 or low, 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 former 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 life — " il aima dans Bourbon une terre grecque, la Grece meme " — his conception of the East 66 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES and his leaning towards Buddhism, and his love for the old Earth Gods and the Golden Age when, in some Edenic Bourbon, " a l'aurore premiere La jeune Eve, sous les divins gerofliers " walked in hope and innocence and joy, but — what is more fundamental still — the sensuous apperception of life which fills all his work : for he was not a profound thinker, and the burden of his criticism of his own day, of modern civilisation is " Nous avons renie la volupte 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 this sensuous Oriental quietism. Leconte de Lisle's merely descriptive poems are not his best. The anthologies, British and German, are full of them. They may be dismissed : if Leconte de Lisle had not been more than a painter of dogs and elephants and condors, a Landseer in verse, he would have had no mention here. It is true that Leconte de Lisle is a master of description : but only when the description serves, instead of being, the main concep- tion of the poem, as in the perfect Le Manchy which no praise can overvalue, one of the most exquisite elegies in French, the poet's tribute to the Creole lost- love of his youth : or in L'lllusion suprime, his nostalgic cry to the land of his birth. LECONTE DE LISLE 67 I might praise his love-poems : for despite his restraint and reserve, the passion of Leconte de Lisle blazes from time to time in such lyrics as Le Parjum Imperissable and Le Sacrifice, and flashes through many other poems like lightning on a dark night over a troubled sea. But I prefer the exquisite Greek and La tip cameos in the Poemes Antiques and the Eastern languor of La Verandah with their appeal of Art for and in itself, without 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 on velvet or raw-silk, or the smell of a herb-garden on, a sun-baked midday between enclosing walls. The air quivers with undying desire and the bright, young, 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- gets the clear light of the hills, the eyebright on the mountain meadows, and the coldness of a severe land, and sinks, willingly, intoxicated, numb, into the pantheistic dream of Leconte 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 woman would fulfil an appointed part. His State- Socialism does not appeal to me : we know what ex- cesses of tyranny the pretext of the common good may cover. But in Leconte de Lisle's time the predominant conception of social and economic organization was individualistic. Darwin's theories of the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest with, of course, an implication that the fittest were the best, were eagerly seized and twisted to justify the familiar pro- cesses of capitalism. But to-day the predominant conception has altered. The masses are exploited in the name of a new shibbo- leth, the State. The ruling castes have changed their pretext : that is all. Individualism has been succeeded by " Prussianism." Leconte de Lisle, protesting against an individualist regime, protested in the name of the Community : a Leconte 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 important to be done that I would not leave it to hear this locust sing." He would declare, 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- day would call a futile idealist, an impracticable dreamer, a maker of Utopias. We must remember, however, that the ideals, and dreams and Utopias of one generation become the accepted doctrines and social order of the next, the 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 faith of Hildebrand, of Innocent the Great, of Alex- ander VI. and John XXIII., as the passionate indivi- dualism of the French Revolution became the liberty to exploit of industrialism, as the dreams of the Socialists have become 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 their ideas win and take a firm hold on the world, they lose interest in them. They cannot be on the side of the majority : for if once an idea has been accepted by the majority, it must have been wrested and twisted into some sordid and petty travesty, capable of universal appreciation. Leconte de Lisle, found this out in the Revolution of 1848. He cast himself into that, young and enthusiastic, fired by high ideals and noble dreams. He soon found that the nation, ready enough to revolt, was not ready to carry out the ideas and dreams in the name of which it revolted. * Je te dis que les masses sont stupides " — he wrote to Louis Menard. " La grossierete de leur sentiments, la platitude et la vulgarite de leurs idees " appalled him. He would give his life for his ideals : but he could not sacrifice his soul. When the Third Republic ended in the tyranny of Louis-Napoleon, Leconte de Lisle ceased to take any part in politics. And he was wise and consistent. The part these Rebels play is that, like Qai'n or Niobe, of eternal and ever-recurring protest, in the name of 70 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES humanity and of God, against the self-sufficiency of established political, social, moral and economic tyrannies. 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 whiter and purer the way 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 blazing in red splendour on their own martyrdom. " O sang mysterieux, O splendide bapteme," Leconte de Lisle cried in his Vaeu Supreme, " Puisse-je, aux cris hideux du vulgaire hebete Entrer, ceint de ta pourpre, en mon eternite!" Leconte de Lisle, unlike the Romantics, did not take his own emotions as the matter of his Art : he took Beauty, Legend and the clash of Races and their Gods — " les manieres diverses," said Baudelaire, " suivant lesquelles l'homme a . . . adore Dieu et cherche le beau." Leconte de Lisle regrets that Vigny, whom he admired as a true poet, had not been able to " se penetrer a son gre des sentiments et des passions propres aux epoques et aux races disparues." He has no individual heroes unless the monstrous and cynical Raven of Le Corbeau can be considered as one : but he too is little else than a mocking spectator of the history of the world, playing the part of a jeer- LECONTE DE LISLE 71 ing Chorus in the ludicrous tragi-comedy of man's madness, an obscene counterpart of the noble Khiron in the poem of that name. Helene is the human race, struggling in vain against an overmastering destiny : Paris and Menelaus symbolize "la lutte de deux civil- isations qui se sont dispute l'ame du monde," and her soul is their meeting place. Hypatie is Greece herself. The darkness closes upon her wonderful day. " Le vil Galileen t'a frappee et maudite." Qain is man- kind protesting against " Masters High and Low " : like Racine's Athalie, he cries his defiance to " le sinistre Iahveh " : " Ecrase-moi, sinon, jamais je ne ploirai." In some of his earliest poems the Gods of Olympus are identified with the tyranny and oppression under which men suffer : Helene, forced into the arms of her seducer, denies the deaf and cruel Gods to whom she has prayed in vain. In Niobe the Gods of Olympus are contrasted with the beneficent Earth Gods : — the Giant Gods, Atlas, Hyperion, and him who took Clymene for his bride : And Niobe predicts a day when they will come to their own and " Zeus s'evanouira dans la Nuit inconnue." Leconte de Lisle deifies Nature : protesting against the pseudo-Darwinian conception of Society he pro- 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 Irae he exclaims : " Salut, oubli du monde et de la multitude ! Reprends-nous, 6 Nature, entre tes bras sacres." He soon, however, revised his attitude to the Gods of Greece : they are " Les divins Amis de la Race choisie Les Immortels subtils en qui coulait l'lkhor, Heroisme, Beaute, Sagesse et Poesie, Autour du grand Kronide assis au Pave d'Or." He sees in all the Gods that Man has made — " tous les Dieux morts, anciens songes de l'Homme " — the deified ideals, fears and passions of humanity; and these are the deified ideals of the noblest race that ever lived (even if it never lived, as Barres suggests, 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 Greek, Finnish and Celtic ideals. Le Rundia tells of the arrival in Finland of " le Roi des derniers temps," the last-born of the Gods. Christ tells Wai'na- moinen, 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 with the Russian yoke. He sums up his mission : — " 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," " Honteux d' avoir vecu, honteux d' avoir pense." The Old God protests, appealing to Nature ; but Christ retorts — " J'ai pris lame du monde et sa force et sa grace, . . 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 : Wa'inamoinen himself, the eternal Runoia, set sail in silence across the darkness of the Polar Sea into the Unknown, hurling a prophetic defiance at Christ : " Thou too wilt die ! Here Christ is identified with the Mediaeval Church, the object of Leconte de Lisle's most violent and un- alterable hatred. But usually " the last of all the Gods " is treated with the utmost sympathy. The figure "aux cheveux roux, d'ombre et de paix voilee " was to him the last of the bright young beauti- ful Gods of Greece : born out of his due time : a rebel, too, against established tradition and a martyr 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 Abbot Serapion in Le Corbeau, 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 Kings of Earth and the Gods : " II etait jeune et beau, sa tete aux cheveux roux Dormait paisiblement sur l'epaule inclinee, Et, d'un mysterieux sourire illuminee, Sans regrets, sans orgueil, sans trouble et sans effort, Semblait se rejouir dans l'opprobre et la mort." Leconte de Lisle loves the dream of " the young Essenian," as he calls him, but he recoils in abhor- rence from the mediaeval travesty of this dream. In the Mediaeval Church, he thinks, one more God had died and been denied. He sees no hope : no new God will bring Love and Peace and Justice into this Hell of industrialism, into this war-ridden world of hate "Where ignorant armies clash by night." Christ remains our last and now forgotten God. In La Paix des Dieux " Le blond Nazareen, Christ, le Fils de la Vierge," appears as the last of all the Gods, immediately after the Gods of Greece. In Le Nazareen, Leconte de Lisle apostrophises Him : LECONTE DE LISLE 75 " 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 swarms 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. In the awful series of mediaeval poems, the Church is the Church of the Inquisition, of the stake, of perse- cution and torture. It is " la Goule Romaine, ce vampire ivre de sang humain," and the pale figure of Christ appears only to reproach 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 the holocaust, the sky of faith lighted only by the " reflet sanglant des buchers." Les Etats du Diable, la Bete Ecarlate, Hieronymus, and the rest are, to me, intensely displeasing. Their violence sins against the restraint of art : their prejudice is unworthy of a great poet. In these centuries of " egorgeurs, de laches et 76 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES de brutes " others, no less great than Leconte de Lisle, have seen the highest effort and attainment of human- ity : the Dark Ages for them have shone with ex- ceeding splendour and Saint Thomas Aquinas has been a new Aristotle. Leconte de Lisle could see nothing of value between the fall of Rome and the dawn of the Renaissance. " Tout ce qui constitue l'art, la morale, et la science etait mort avec le Polytheisme. Tout a revecu a sa renaissance. . . En meme temps que l'Aphrodite Anadyomene du Correge sort pour la seconde fois de la mer, le senti- ment de la dignite humaine, veritable base de la morale antique, entre en lutte contre le principe h'eratique et feodal." That is the explanation of his hatred of the Middle 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- pensate him for the loss of the wide horizons of the pagan world. He could not forgive Christianity for having made little of Brother Ass the Body. He would have "le souffle de Platon dans le corps d'Aphrodite." He could see no virtue in renunciation : could not extract beauty from sorrow and sacrifice. Desire not Love was his ideal : and Christ had given Love to a sick world, weary of Carnal Beauty and the Desire of the Flesh. VI. Leconte de Lisle regarded his own epoch with scarce less disfavour than the Middle Ages. " Oh ! que ne suis-je ne dans le saint Archipel Aux siecles glorieux. . . ?" he asks in his Venus de Milo. LECONTE DE LISLE // The harmony of Greek life is no more : " Sleep," he calls to Hypatia, the victim of Cyril and his horde of monks, " Dors! 1' impure laideur est la reine du monde, Et nous avons perdu le chemin de Paros!" All minds are occupied, he declares in his article on Beranger, with "la fievre de 1' utile, les convoitises d'argent" and regard the Ideal with contempt or at best indifference. " Les imaginations s'eteigneht, - . . les supremes pressentiments du Beau se dissipent." And in his article on Baudelaire, he naively enough, I suppose on the well-known principle that the nearest enemy is the worst, singles out France for especial abuse as a nation routiniere et prude, ennemie nee de l'art et de la poesie, deiste, grivoise et moraliste, fort ignare et vaniteuse au supreme degre." His poems on modern civilisation are not his best : like most of the mediaeval series they sin against his own canon of art : they show a hatred and contempt too violent to be repressed even in the cause of that Art to which he remained faithful like Vigny, " absorbe par la contemplation des choses im- perissables, et qui s'est endormi fidele a la religion du Beau." It may, indeed, be true that " L'idole au ventre d'or, le Moloch affame S'assied, la pourpre au dos, sur la terre avilie," but the form of statement suggests a Socialist tract. In the same poem, Anatheme, however are some of the loveliest verses in all his works. 78 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES " Nous avous renie la passion divine " he cries in his despair. "Pour quel dieu desormais bruler 1'orge et le sel? Sur quel autel detruit verser les vins mystiques?" he asks, in words of infinite beauty. But he knows no hope. Never more will the slave 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 through the smoked glass and pestilential fumes of mid-century materialism and agnosticism, and the in- credulity and foulness of his hopelessly corrupt and selfish epoch blinded him to the hope and glory that shone upon his path. He looked backward to a dead beauty that he could not bring to life again, and died bowed before a memory, when before him, had he only eyes to see, Beauty immortal walked the Earth, as of old, and the Soul of Man blazed its imprescriptible way despite Kings and Priests to the Heaven of the " steep and trifid God " he denied. VI.— PAUL VERLAINE. \HR individuality of Paul Verlaine is that of a perverted Pierrot, a " velvet-footed " dancer in the Carnival of Art, whose soul was held in thrall, not by the pale incon- stant loveliness of the moon, but by the baleful and malignant influence of Saturn's dangerous beauty. His melancholy is the melancholy of such a Pierrot. He knew only too well his utter lack of will, knew that he was by nature a feather on the wind, blown this way and that by every little breeze of desire. He could not to his life's end realise that the apparently gorgeous-coloured butterflies of self-in- dulgence and sensuality that he chased so gloriously and joyously in the day time were in reality only little handfuls of grey dust over which he would miserably weep during the long sad night. In him " L'imagination inquiete et debile Vient rendre nul. . . l'effort de la raison." Further on in this same poem, he says of mortals having the ill fortune to be born under Saturn " Tels les Saturniens doivent souffrir et tels Mourir, — en admettant que nous soyons mortels, Leur plan de vie etant dessine ligne a ligne Par la logique d'une influence maligne." 60 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- giving qualities he was to attribute to, and find later in his " Mere 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- plexity of his own spirit. In his youth his cousin Elisa watched over him lovingly until she died, and her memory is one of the most beautiful things in an existence in which there were all too few beautiful memories of women. She was like a mediaeval saint, but had none of a mediaeval saint's rigidity, recognising the wayward loveliness and extraordinary genius of Verlaine. She paid for the publication of his first book of poems. At a most critical point in his life, when the lure of Bohemia seemed most fascinating to him, and when the evil green viper, absinthe, had already begun to feed on his soul, he fell in love for the first time and married Mathilde Maute de Fleurville, who after a few months of romantic illusion about her husband, became a second Ophelia to this sorely-tempted and temporarily maddened Hamlet of the Quartier. Like the Prince of Denmark he had his Horatio. Lepelletier 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. A woman like Brutus' Portia might have saved either. PAUL VERLAINE 81 Certainly neither Ophelia of the stupid, gentle fawn- like temperament, nor Mathilde with her essentially limited bourgeois outlook, could help their lovers in the slightest. Understanding love, this is what " le pauvre Lei i an " wept for and sought after, all through his life. It is true that he found much sympathy among temperamentally feminine men, but Rimbaud was " son mauvais genie," and ultimately played him false, and Lucien Letinois died after a few months 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 Mystica 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- mortal spirit with its ugly claws and over which he has so little control, and woman was never so divine to him as when her animal nature was latent and all her gentle flower-like qualities in evidence. " L'amante," he says, "doit avoir l'abandon paisible de la soeur." He sought only too often the Infinite in the Finite — by bitterly bought experience learning that he could find no mortal woman to give him what he desired, and only in the Turris Eburnea, shadowed by the wonderful blue half-lights of the Catholic faith could the poor out-worn pilgrim find rest for his tired and dust-stained soul 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." " Creature toujours prete A souler chaque appetit." As he grew older the charming gaminerie so de- lightful in Pierrot young became a hard and bitter cynicism and knowledge of his own utter failure. It is the Pierrot of this period who sadly sings the Serenade so terrible in its inevitability — the song of one who knows so well that satisfied desire will eventually kill his soul and yet who cannot save him- self even if he will. It is this Pierrot who sighs in Spleen : " Du houx a la feuille vernie Et du luisant buis je suis las Et de la campagne infinie Et de tout, fors de vous, helas!" In his old age he is the Pierrot of Jadis et Naguere, 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 Laughed at our ancestors. Alas ! that bright Flame-dancing mirth like his poor candle's light Is dead. To-day we glimpse him shadowy And spectre-thin. His mouth gapes mournfully As if he wept beneath the worm's cruelrite. PAUL VERLAINE 63 His tunic floats out shroud-like on the cold Night-wind, its white sleeves rustling fold on fold Like passing birds seem aimlessly to trace Vague signs that beckon to the world in vain. . . . His sunken eyes' cold phosphorescent pain Shines in the deathly pallor of his face." Last and saddest stage of all, nothing to hope for now, save the final torture of Death. Yet the "fauve planete '* 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 to hurry him to the worst of which he was capable, he has left behind him some of the finest lyrics in the French language, one volume of which at least may 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 external nature and his own 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 Prospero. Not for him the pompous eloquence of a Hugo, nor the carved and enamelled effects of Gautier and Banville, beautiful though they were. He did not work in precious stones, but in the most delicate shades of colour imaginable, colours that are shadows of colours even as a soft grey-blue and silver twilight 84 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES is the shadow of a radiant spring day of green and gold. He, too, knew Whistler's secret of impressions rather than clear-cut outlines, and in many of his best poems, lyrics such as the famous " La lune blanche luit dans les bois " and Romances sans Paroles, 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 by the melodies of a Moussorgsky or a Ravel. In this " subtle inevitability of skilful pastelizing " lies the power of Paul Verlaine. By it he not only avoids the "impassivity" of the Parnassians, as I have said, but also by a certain skill and clearness does not fall into the horror of iricoherency of his followers the symbolists. An eminent critic has likened him to " a butterfly tired of the materialism of cosmos, but hesitating on the brink of the dull, aimless disorder of chaos." With Verlaine more than with most poets the man and his work are inextricably bound up. His poems are always " the instantaneous notation of himself." Poemes Saturniens 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 objectivity. Although young when he wrote this, his first volume, even then he realised the extreme importance of form, with which his absorption of Emaux et Camees and the work of Banville and Baudelaire had much to do, and in these poems perfection of metrical structure combines with a certain youthfulness and freshness of feeling, not un- touched by the essential melancholy trend of his tem- PAUL VERLAINE 85 perament. Woman is still an ideal to him, a goddess in whose cool hands lies all wisdom and understand- ing. Nature is wonderful and mysterious to Verlairie always, but in Paysages Tristes he draws her in her most elusively subtle moods. 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'heure du Berger ! " On the horizon through a mist-wov'n veil The moon hangs glowing red : a quivering haze Shrouds drowsy meadows; through the sedges plays A little breeze bearing a frog's thin wail. " Now the pale water-lily closed lies, And the slim ranks of distant poplars seem Arboreal ghosts seen vaguely as in dream, And flickering round the bushes flit fire-flies. " Now bats awake — circling in noiseless flight They beat the darkness with strong leathern wings, While Venus, clad in skiey glimmerings, Glides forth, the dazzling courier of Night." Every mood of nature is seen through the mood of his own temperament. In Promenade Sentimentale it is " de grands nenuphars parmi les roseaux " gleaming palely in the dusk that seem to respond to him, symbols of a spiritual hope almost lost beneath the enshrouding veils of the night of the soul's melancholy; and in Chanson d'Automne 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 Watteauesque Nuit de Walpurgis Classique the poet asks if these dancing wraiths, these "formes diaphanes " of his favourite century . . Sont-ce done la pensee Du poete ivre, ou son regret, ou son remords Ces spectres agites en tourbe cadencee? Sont-ce done, ton remords, 6 revasseur qu'invite L'horreur, ou ton regret, ou ta pensee? In his second book of poems, Fetes Galantes, the muse of Verlaine no longer bears the semblance of a slim changeling girl, daughter of the dawn and dusk, stealthily stealing through autumn woods like a dryad listening to the songs of the falling leaves, or like a naiad watching the wind ruffling the silver surface of some still, twilight-veiled lake; but masked and rouged dances softly through the gardens of Versailles, some- times pausing behind the high yew hedges to over- hear a conversation between Harlequin and Columbine, sometimes halting behind a bronze satyr's pedestal to see a great lady rustling past, stiff in satin and jewelled brocade followed by her little negro page, as in Cortege; and often at night when the gardens are lit with Chinese lanterns, those " coloured pasquins of the moon," sitting amid the dark sapphire shadows of some spindle bower weeping at the heart-rending sadness behind all the surface gaiety of this gorgeously artificial carnival. The inspiration of these poems is, as I have said, utterly different from that of Po&mes PAUL VERLAINE • 87 Saturniens. Mr. Edmond Lepelletier accounts for the extraordinary influence of the Eighteenth Century on the poet at this time by two contemporary events : firstly, the publishing of some literary studies by the Goncourts on that century; and secondly, the opening of the Galerie La Caze to the public. This collection of pictures contained works of Fragonard, Nattier, Watteau, and many other artists of their school, and it is not unlikely that Verlaine's frequent visits there gave him the idea of painting in words and metre " les personnages de Boucher, dans les decors de Watteau." If in Sagesse Verlaine approaches nearest to being a great poet appreciated and acknowledged by the many, in Fetes Galantes he is the delicate- fingered painter of miniatures in pastels adored by the few. In these twenty-two or twenty-three lyrics we find the Versailles of Louis XV. in its entirety, its delicate butterfly beauty and frivolity, its patched and powdered daintiness, its underlying sensuality and putrescence, and above all its charm — the charm of decaying beauty, of autumn, the season that recurs again and again in the verse of Verlaine. " Le soir tombait, un soir equivoque d' automne : Les belles, se pendant reveuses a nos bras Dirent alors des mots si specieux, tout bas Que notre ame depuis ce temps tremble et s'etonne." Here is all the wistfulness of autumn, the soft minor violin note of the poet's subjective vision, his mode of projecting his own temperament into a poem that 88 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES would otherwise entirely recapture the spirit of Eighteenth Century lyricism. That perfect little poem. Amour par Terre, is impregnated with the same vague sadness — a mournfulness that seems to veil so lightly the weary soul's desire for the Infinite. In Le Faune, 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 (As we had sad-eyed pilgrims been), To this hour that elusively Whirls to a distant tambourine." How different is this to the real paganism of Bertin and Parny, who saw beauty and perfect joy in the fragile glass of golden wine held in a be-ruffled ivory- fingered hand, and death and eternity in the crushing of a daisy beneath the red heel of the mistress of the moment ! This decadent note of modernity is, how- ever, so successfully concealed in some of the poems lieneath an apparent objectivity that the girl in L'allee seems to be a Francois Boucher to the life — one of the Pompadour's ladies-in-waiting, doubtless, a perfect example of her type, " Like a rouged heroine in a pastoral Fragile beneath great ribbon knots, she goes Along the alley, 'neath the branches' shade By old grey, moss-grown seats . . Affectedly PAUL VERLAINE 89 She gestures in a thousand conscious ways As if she played with some pet parakeet. Her long brocaded train is blue. Her fan (Held lightly in her slender fingers, gemmed With heavy 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 in silver and blue and rose than Mandoline : " Here, beneath the sighing leaves, Serenaders softly play Faded airs to lovely thieves Who have stolen their hearts away. Here's Aminta and Tircis With Clitandre, 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 Flit 'twixt rose and grey moonbeams, Towards them on an errant breeze Float the mandolines' faint dreams." 90 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES La Bonne Chanson is composed of poems written to his wife before marriage. It is a transition from objective descriptive plastic verse to personal expres- sion, the confessions of the soul; and the substitution of one method of art for another, as the result of feel- ing, loving and suffering. All his best qualities, subtlety, tenderness, harmony and delicacy of form unite to make these " occasional 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 said, Verlaine's work was always the victim 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 him. He loved and was loved, for as yet no mis- understanding had arisen between him and his mis- tress. He had given up absinthe, the " atrocious green sorceress," whose wiles were eventually to wreck his character and turn his childlike naivete and tenderness into cynicism and brutality, qualities that are only too evident in Jadis et Naguere and Parallelement, although both these books contain many fine poems. Sagesse, his greatest book, and one of the greatest books of religious verse in the world, was written after his conversion 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 91 Bleu m'a dit, Mon fils, il faut m'aimer," or that beautiful poem, " Je ne veux plus aimer que ma Mere Marie." This book 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 Sagesse, 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 musical beauty by the verse of Dowson.* Huysmans has said that Verlaine " was truly him- self only in 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 will-power, once bright and sharpened by Love, being now dull and blunted and useless. All that remained to him was a sorrowful memory of the possibilities of his own tormented soul. Sagesse was his last great work, although Jadis et Naguere contains many sonnets and poems of great beauty, elevated philosophy and superb workmanship. There are in this book poems written in accordance with each of Verlaine's styles, and some " A la maniere de plusieurs," obviously much influ- * Dowson too believed in Verlaine's credo " De la musique avant toute chose " and translated much of his masters work with the eens'tiveness that only an artistic temperament of the same psychological family as Verlaine's could achieve. 92 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES enced by Hugo, Leconte de Lisle and others. Included in it there is a little play, Les Uns et les Autres, a poetic and graceful lover's quarrel, " like an echo of De Musset and Moliere, set in a scene by Banville," a fete galante adapted for the stage. He wrote a great deal in his old age, but most of his late work is of no account, being discoloured by a dull and mediocre obscenity. His greatest poem, Parsifal, which seems to me to epitomise all that "le Pauvre Lelian " aspired to be, the star of stars of which he never quite lost sight. "Parsifal a vaincu les Filles, leur gentil Babil, et la luxure amusante — et sa pente Vers la Chair de garcon vierge que cela tente D'aimer les seins legers, et ce gentil babil; II a vaincu la Femme belle, an cceur subtil, Etalant ses bras frais et sa gorge excitante; II a vaincu l'Enfer et rentre sons la tente Avec un lourd trophee a son bras pueril, Avec la lance qui perca le Flanc supreme 1 II a gueri le roi, le voici roi lui-meme, Et pretre du tres-saint Tresor essentiel. En robe d'or, il adore, gloire et symbole, Le vase pur oii resplendit le sang reel — Et, 6 ces voix d'enfants chantant dans le coupole ! VII.— 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 unwonted jewels. Fete au Pare and Fin de Fete in Les Gammes have a wistful tenderness : all Versailles dies in them and lives its tragic dream-life of dimly- remembered loves. Les Gammes proceed from Verlaine's Fefes Galantes and lead to Comte Robert de Montesquiou-Fezenzac's Perles Rouges, and Henri de Regnier's Cite des Eaux. Only Merrill, Montesquiou-Fezenzac 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 their troubled secret and sip, drop by drop, the perilous wine of their rare vintage. In Les Fastes, Merrill, like Louis II. of Bavaria, flees " Down strange paths lit by an inner moon." He rides the insurgent hippogriffs of Moreau's paint- ings, and hears the wild gallop of the Valkyries acros3 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 troubled sleep of a King dethroned. Les Petits Poemes d'Automne are exquisite with the sorrowful music 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 and will are plunged 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 garden, exquisite with fragrant and delicate bloom, if we cannot fell trees in some virgin forest ? There are moments when it is well that a poet, if it 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- moil of our cities, should look in his own soul 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, STUART MERRILL 95 recall us to our destiny and bring us into harmony with eternal things. One poet will take the obvious world of lust and fraud and shame we live in, and shake from its murky folds and wrappings of horror and dismay a golden rain of truth and beauty, seeing God (as James Stephens did) in a charwoman's daughter and eternity in a policeman's uplifted hand. But another will go with his lady beneath the trembling poplars, and in her laughing or her dreaming eyes, her face upturned, her white brow and aureole of hair, he will catch the colour of the fields of heaven arid reflections of the infinite beauty unbeheld by any eye; and from the grass trodden by her white feet, gleaming in the dawn, he will gather the dew of everlasting truth. And which is the greater thing to do? To speak with God upon the highway or to surprise His hidden secrets in a laugh or a sigh or the rustle of an aspen in the night ? Decadence is more an attitude than a school : Symons, Dowson, and Rachel Annand-Taylor have the attitude : but it became almost a school in the eighties and nineties in France under the influence of Mallarme, " le poete las que la vie etiole," who lost in over-subtleties of emotion and expression, achieved nothing but a few disturbing lyrics and a few tortured pages of prose distilling a rare and insidious poison. Baudelaire was accepted as a forerunner. Villiers de l'lsle Adam was hailed as a master : the cynical and contemptuous aristocrat who aspired to the throne of Greece and wrote Tribulat Bonhomet, the Ub a Roi of his time, in which the Gouliards and Lanternois of the Eighties were held up to everlasting 96 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES scorn. The " poetes maudits " were adopted : Corbiere, drunken with bizarre beauty, blending the obscenities of Montmartre and the forecastle in a torrent of clumsy paradox, through which flash the lightnings of a tipsy splendour : Rimbaud, Verlaine's evil genius, brutal, violent, sensual, in whose few poems " d'une qualite peu commune d'infamie et de blaspheme " his unrestrained passions were expressed before he found his life-work as a slave-dealer in Africa and the East : " un Stendhal desequilibre, mechant et feroce." The minor poets of the Decad- ence took all this seriously : and their work is a welter of strange passions and strange sins, of "la luxure de 1'esprit et l'intellectualisme de la passion." Verlaine's most famous sonnet " Je suis l'Empire a la fin de la Decadence ..." which was at most the expression of a mood, was made the emblem of a school, and nature became an eternal " apres-midi de septembre, chaude et tris'te, epandant sa jaune melancolie sur l'apathie fauve d'un paysage languissant de maturite." " J'aime le mot de decadence," he was reported to have said, " tout miroitant de pourpres et d'ors . . . Le mot suppose . . . des pensees rafHnees d'extreme civilisation, une haute culture litteraire, une ame capable d'intensives voluptes. ... II est fait d'un melange d'esprit charnel et de chair triste et de toutes les splendeurs violentes du bas-empire. . . . C'est l'art de mourir en beaute." In Verlaine's soul the world made havoc and music and he sang because he must : but the Decadents made him the master of a school and the slightest ripple on the still lake of his soul was hailed as the expression STUART MERRILL 97 of a credo. The Decadence found its incarnation in the exquisite Comte de Montesquiou-Fezenzac, the supreme virtuoso of form gone mad, the arch-dissector of rare emotions and " sensations insolites," the' in- comparable connoisseur of subtle depravity whom Huysmans, it is said, took as the model of the hero of Au Rebours— the Due des Esseintes. The first appeal of the French Decadents when I made their acquaintance in Lemerre's four volume anthology was in their unreality, their remoteness : they drifted in a world of vague dream and vague velleity : they offered a narcotic, an escape from the hard North, blighting and withering with sleety East- wind in June. I read them, at sunset, in 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 cleansing sea. I fled from the clear air of the peaks and the bleakness of the wind- swept uplands, and with some passage of Mallarme in my memory, alambicated, precious, melting like some over-ripe sun-steeped grape on a far-secluded vine, I wandered slowly between the copper-lighted green of the young satiny leaves and the gold on the tall boles of the secular beeches. And to me then, as to Mallarme, the mellowness of Saint Martin's summer and the dying rays of the setting sun were dear. " De meme la litterature a laquelle mon esprit demande une volupte," Mallarme had said, " sera la poesie agoni- sante des derniers moments de Rome, tant, cependant, qu'elle ne respire aucunement l'approche rajeunissante des Barbares et ne begaie point le latin enfantin des premieres proses chretiennes. 98 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES I read Claudian and Rutilian and the Pervigilium Veneris : Gerard de Nerval's Syloie, his Chimeres, his Vers Doris, and his " II est un air pour qui je donnerais . • . Gautier's Albertus : Aloysius Bertrand who, said Sainte-Beuve, had " worn away his youth in chisel- ling, out of a rich material, a thousand little cups of infinite delicacy" : I even heard Wagner's Lohengrin : I copied out pages of Mallarme in the dusty files of the National Observer and Henri de Regnier's Hilene de Sparte (the first I had read of him) from the Revue des Deux Mondes : Verlaine's Lecture at Bernard's Inn from the Savoy and many of his poems in a dozen magazines : I read Dowson's Verses and Decorations in their first editions : all Pater and all De Tabley. Then I went to France and met Merrill, now writing his Quatre Saisons, and Viele-Griffin of whom I had as yet known little or nothing. I found that the Decadence was over and that Poetry, in France, had left " les lys languides et les lointaines 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 effluviae of the stagnant night. Now no longer, at Mallarme's, " Les rheteurs solennels en leur sterilite, TrSnaient et discutaient la vie imperieuse!" As Merrill wrote to me once : " The first work of the Symbolists consisted in disengaging themselves from Naturalism. Their reaction was perhaps exces- STUART MERRILL 99 sive in the direction of a dreamy mysticism, but it was necessary, and our return to the essential realities of life was the logical conclusion of our first prin- ciples. We loved Truth too much not to hate Reality, when it seemed opposed to Truth. We retired from the world and sought Truth, and some of us think that we have found it in Nature, others in the great anonymous crowd crying for Justice." III. Stuart Fitz-Randolph Merrill has a remote associa- tion with Dublin. His father, seventy years ago, was a student in Trinity College. He was the only American there, and had hard work in defending the abolitionist cause, " as all those scatterbrained Irish- men were for slavery." Like Viele-Grimn's father, General Egbert Louis Viele, he fought on the Northern side in the Civil War. Stuart Merrill was born in Long Island. " Ma patrie, c'est l'Amerique, et je crache dessus ! " he declared at my first meeting with him, in 1902, at the house of Henri Mazel. "Yes, I spit with something more behind ! " And what was behind was his bitter disappointment that the United States, a blend of all nations, and thus, apparently, designed to escape the curse of chauvinism, had deve- loped the disease in a most virulent form. " Ah ! if I could wring the neck of that damned old spread- eagle!" " I am of English, Scots, French and Dutch ancestry," he told me. " On my mother's side I am descended partly from French Huguenots who settled down for a generation in Holland. But I don't attach much importance to these matters, and I don't pre- H 100 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES tend, like most Americans of wealth and fashion, to descend from the Conqueror." After dinner, that evening long ago, we walked through the stillness of the Monceau quarter to some cafe on the Boulevards, and there Merrill talked to me of his friend Oscar Wilde. But it is not with the Rive Droite that my memories of Merrill are bound up. I saw him most often in his appartement among the tree-tops of the Quai Bourbon on the quiet He de Saint Louis. There Verlaine, in bronze, presided : and the enamel masterpieces of Armand Point made a setting for our talk, while a couple of monstrous Persian cats purred pleasant accompaniment. He is, to me, however, essentially the poet of the Forest of Fontainebleau : not of tourist-haunted Barbizon, still less of Royal Fontainebleau itself, but of Marlotte secluded on the wildest edge of the Forest and Mon- tigny straggling with red roofs down to the slow Seine. If I think of him in any other setting, the blazing sun- light of Provence, her gray olive-groves and the red cliffs of her passionate shores and the burnt mountains of her background and the blue sea set with white sails frame my memories of him. I was a tramp in those days : and it was to me, as he knew me then, that in 1908, he dedicated his longest poem Le Vagabond. I remember a meet- ing at Cannes. I had come to lunch with him from Grenoble, over the snows of Mont-Cenis down the awful valleys of Piedmont to Napoleonic Turin : pausing in Genoa, hard and cruel in its splendour of Renaissance palaces : then along a blaze of blue sea and orange groves to the dark gorges of Vintimille and a tumble of falling streams, and under bare gray STUART MERRILL 101 mountains and hill-perched white towns set in a mantle of 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- ing 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 awakened to sunrise far over the plain, stretching with poplars and cypress, orderly, like the background of an early Master, to the blue horizon of the Euganean 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 had come to Venice, silent and frozen on a New Year's Day. And a few months later I wrote to him from Copenhagen, 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 of her Roman Cathedral amid the rolling, untidy uplands and ragged cornfields and dark forests of Scania. My letters, Merrill used to say, sprang on him from the 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. We met also, I remember, in Brussels : and in Dover I saw him for the last time. I enticed him as far as Canterbury, but further he would not 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 letters, too, stopped. One of the last was to tell 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 Socialist. He had no traffic with place or power : no ambitions : and when the Wild Asses of the Devil broke loose,. he gave no cry of encouragement. Like his friend Moreas he might have said : " Je n'ai jamais rien fait qui fut indigne d'un poete." But he was, unlike Moreas, totally unassuming. He was full of generosity and humanity, hating only those who degraded the function of the Artist, or dishonoured humanity with cant, hypocrisy, greed or violence. A letter of his to me, dated December 26th, 1906, may serve to give some idea of his attitude : " How I feel and understand your desperation in industrial Leeds. I felt the same chill in hrain 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 is spoiled by factories, and in fact all Germany is saturated with the industrial spirit. Take Schweinfurt. ... It was a quiet and quaint mediaeval city, with picturesque ramparts. It is now surrounded by factories, the ramparts have been destroyed, nobody knows why, and the moats filled up. It is now a hideous, melancholy and unwhole- some city, with a minority filling their money bags and a majority stupefied by work and drink and voting like sheep for the Socialistic ticket instead of giving what STUART MERRILL 103 is left in their veins of good red blood for the violent betterment of their condition. . . . " The remedies for ugliness, as for all evil, are to be sought in the future, and not in the past. . Socialism is stupid and conservative nowadays (especi- ally in its home, Germany), the different labor parties of the world are vulgar and hopelessly near-sighted, but I see no salvation in the conservative parties. . . . "* I am more and more convinced that what we must fight with all our might and power of hatred is the religious and patriotic spirit. Of course, our chief aids in our work of destruction and renovation will be the vulgar, base, stupid mob. But can't you write a sub- lime poem on a scrap of filthy paper? Are we not ourselves born in blood and uncleanliness ? No, let us not be too dainty, and let us keep true to our Ideal of more Beauty, more Truth, more Charity in this world, even if it seems a sublime lie. " I speak rather strongly on the subject, feeling often that there is no ground for hope and having ninety per cent, of the educated classes against me. But my philosophy helps me much . . . every- thing changes, nothing lasts nor can be fixed a second. And it is in this eternal course and movement of things that I find, strange to say, motives for courage and hope. Regret, remorse, love of the past are the fore- runners of mental decay and death. Let us always strive for the mere love of strife. The world is all wrong to-day. It will be better to-morrow, and prob- ably even worse than now the day after to-morrow. But we have eternity before us. At another time he explained his line3 f04 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES " Pour avoir voulu, 6 mon ame affolee, Monter vers Dieu par l'arc-en-ciel, Tu pleures au fond de la vallee . . . " I mean . . . that dreams avail nothing, that we can only advance step by step, that drudgery, trivial cares and little duties are on the way of spiritual regeneration." There is no short cut to God. Merrill, looking round him at the masses in bondage to masters high and low, spiritual and temporal, it filled with passionate revolt against Church and State. The God of the Rulers obsesses him : and he, like Leconte de Lisle, pours out his hatred of this false Divinity in poems of overwhelming violence. The false so obscured his vision that he could not see the true. In the Church, " Dont l'ombre ne s* eclaire Que des trois cierges allumes a 1'auteL Devant lequel le pretre solitaire Murmure la supplique eternelle " he cries to his Beloved : " Oublie les blasphemes du pretre!" * Ce ne sont pas tes fleurs qu'il faut A la feroce idole des pretres, Mais le sacrifice de tout ton etre . . . Ce n'est certes pas ici qu'habite Dieu." The Mother of God is "la vierge cruelle des douleurs," and where Viele-Griffin heard a hymn of love and death and resurrection Merrill heard only the STUART MERRILL 105 " pretre qui maimonne, Sous les trois cierges, sa litanie monotone." And yet the spirit of Les Quatre Saisons is in the best sense Christian : the world must be born again, utterly renouncing its past of shame and sin : and for this end each man and woman must sacrifice all things freely without an afterthought. ** The whole past theory of your life and all conformity to the lives around you would have to be abandoned." *" Let us go on toward to-morrow's dawn," he cries in Vers la Ville Inconnue, for only " En oubliant le nom de la ville d'ou nous sommes Nous apprendrous celui de la ville ou nous allons." The hero of Merrill's conte La Route dies because he turned back. " Malheur a ceux qui partent et s'en repentent! . . . Quand on est parti, il ne faut jamais regarder en arriere, . . . ni regretter les jours qui sont a jamais enfuis. Les Poings a la Porte in Les Quatre Saisons is the supreme expression of the faith he shared with William Morris. It is winter and midnight. " Here the lamp is dying with my hope. . . " All things have failed him. The cup of dream is empty. He hears a knocking at the door. If it be his friends come bringing holly to deck his room " dont j'ai banni la Folie qui me fut trop belle," he will not open his door to the noise of their steps "" Car, 6 mon ame, tu es lasse des chants et des danses Elt du rire des violons parmi 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 fire that the outcast may warm himself, and he will pour him wine and break him bread. For a " Dieu fou " has smitten him. But if it be the Son of Man Himself, come in re- splendent white with all his train of sick and halt, madmen and children, to call him " sur la route sans fin Vers les villes qu'on ne voit pas encore a rhorizon," making in the night " le geste immense du pardon," then indeed, he will take his stick and go, happy to believe at last, " Detruire, pour les rebatir, les remparts trop vieux, ' Ou se deferleront demain les etendards de Dieu !" IV. In Merrill'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- vice, but of an ideal of self-realisation through sacri- fice. " Let us go in spite of all toward to-morrow's STUART MERRILL 107 dcwn." Merrill's great poem The Vagabond is the most complete expression of this point of view. The poet is enjoying life to the full in his " May- garden, amid the tall trees, raising up as an offering to spring their branches burning with a thousand flames of red and white bloom." Suddenly he sees tramping along the road, biting off the petals of a rose, singing and laughing without cause, a Vagabond. The Vagabond speaks first in song and then in silence. The meaning of his song is life and hope and joy. The meaning of his silence is sacri- fice. Not only is there a world to live in to the full : giving and taking to the utmost all there is to give and take, joy and sorrow, love and pain. This will save neither the poet nor his fellows. The fulness of life is good, but the fulness of life is not the obvious fulness only : it is to be sought also on devious and dark ways of oblivion and sacrifice. While Viele-Grifnn's Helen, her russet hair floating on the wind about her, as she appears between the willows, may symbolize one side of the ideal fulness of life, yet she and all she stands for, joy and passion and pain, were but as the sunset seen across her streaming hair, part and parcel of a dying day, were not the other side of the ideal, the other strand in the web of being, represented by that Son of Man who died to save the world and make God more completely divine, whose wounds are bleeding for ever, and the firmament red with His blood. Through the same agony as His have passed the martyrs and the saints of all confessions, the heroes of all revolutions, the lords of life and joy and love. For only beyond Gethsemane and the Crown of Thorns, beyond Lethe 108 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES and the " moonless mere of sighs " lies the fulness of body and soul that we seek. It is well, indeed, that Nora Murray in her passionate need for self-realisation should send Ireland to Hell sooner than lose herself, but it is necessary also, to take an example from another Irish play, that Michael should forget his bride and follow Kathleen, the daughter of sorrows. First, then, the message of the Vagabond in song : " He turned not back to dream over the old way. A servant of the future, he was burdened with no memories nor remorse . " Art thou not," cries the poet, "the far-off child of the Wise Men who followed the star and found God ? Or art thou not perhaps . the unknown prophet leading the peoples through the ages . toward the promised land of orchards and flowers,, where one day, after sorrow without end, lovers em- braced will sing, giving their lips to one another? O vagabond, friend of foxes and hares . Messiah or criminal, await me I I have understood the meaning of your call ... I have shut my door on peace and love without regret . . . 'Tia not by sleeping in old dwellings that we learn to build upon the new ways . . . O my mouth, bite deep, till hunger be appeased, at the fair, forbidden fruits of the tree of life ! Destroy, O my fists, by fire and by sword, the temples raised to false Gods . . . and thou, my heart, O my heart, be pitiless when the people, breaking chains and crosses, shall send all priests and soldiers and judges and kings to die on the scaffold dripping blood in the dawn! O 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 Gods!" And so the poet starts out, his soul filled with the fierce passion of life, to follow the Vagabond. But he has disappeared and his song is heard no more. For there is more needed than mere progress to a glorious goal. The poet must sacrifice all he holds dear without any certain or definite promise, without a leader along the unknown, lonely road. " O Vagabond, having learned the secret meaning of thy Song, I learn now that of thy silerice. It is that I must seek, alone and without sinking of heart, the road thou followest toward to-morrow's dawn . . . I must go alone toward the receding goal, the fair country which I shall never know. " I shall go alone whither destiny leads me . Old men seated at cottage doors will hurl insults after me. Even little children with lovely eyes will follow me, spitting and throwing stones at me. And in summer, 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 go toward the Town, whither all roads lead . . " O Vagabond, over tombs and nights, raising up my dark hands toward the dawn, I follow thee." So for Merrill the procession of life takes the semblance of a river flowing past cities and gardens. 110 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES out- worn, once glorious desires, and cast-off splendid ideals, toward the Sea of Godhead, and its further shore, " where quintessential stands In over-lordship of all mystic lands The burning essence of divinity." VIII. —FRANCIS VIELE-GRIFFIN. I. ^IELE-GRIFFIN does not deny that our de- sires are unattainable, or being attained, fail to satisfy. His optimism is no irresponsible dream of impossible bliss. But to him Life is a pilgrimage, and poetry is the song of its vicissitudes, of the joy and sorrow of the search, of the triumph and despair of the long journey — joy, triumph, for the journey is a brave, glad journey leading toward God and selfhood, sorrow, despair, for the search is a long one and full of passionate good-byes — farewells said for ever,. " words abhorred of comfortable men." It is a song, and not a wail, because in all the vicissitudes burns the intensity of unconquerable hope, shines the light through the darkness from the throne of God. To Leconte de Lisle the journey of life was along the road to Death, to Viele-Griffin along the road of a fuller Being. The long procession of the Gods man has created, like the pilgrimage of life marked out by cast-off de- sires, left Leconte de Lisle horror-stricken and de- spairing. Is nothing true? Is there no escape but in Nirvana from Maya the eternal illusion? Is there no absolute anywhere? And finding none, the poet yearned back to his own old desires and to the shed beliefs of his race, regretfully, in an eternal looking 1)2 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES backward, not knowing that each one of us, like the race, must 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 race as of ourselves is progressive towards an unknown goal. We cannot sum it up in a complete and final selfhood that lasts for ever and is, now and eternally, satisfying. The fulfilment of desire is pale after desire itself. We must go on to new desires and break new " glitter- ing gates." The joy is in the journey and in the break- ing of the gates. And the last gate we break is Death. Each time we put behind us our past desire, our past gate, and lay down all our former dreams and aspirations. That is the only way to live for any man. And for the race, it has made and thrown aside innumerable theogonies of Gods, and who shall say, even if the God of to-day grows pale and fills our souls no longer, that He was not true and that there is 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 of worn-out Gods, nor what the end shall be, if there be an end, when the ultimate God emerges and we, with Him, shall have evolved and won to final and absolute being through the partial revelations and struggles of uncounted myriads of years? That is what Viele-Griffin knows, and what the poets of the mid-nineteenth century did not and could no't know. On the one side we have the stagnation of despair, on the other the infinite promise of life. And Viele-Griffin has sung the fulness of this in- violable hope with a passion and intensity of con- viction that has never been equalled in all the history FRANCIS VIELE-GRIFFIN 113 of verse. His is, in a sense that transcends even the more literal if less essentially real meaning of such words in the burning soul of Francis Thompson, a hymn of love and death and resurrection, glorious with the tremor and light of invincible belief. There lies the difference, the essential and unbridge- able gulf, between the poets of yesterday and those of to-day. A spiritual renaissance separates them. Leconte de Lisle sorrowed and denied. Griffin and Merrill believe and rejoice in the midst of sorrow, knowing its meaning. And if Viele-Grifhn sings above all of the joy of life, of the ecstasy of the ultimate revelation, and Merrill sings rather of the sacrifices on the way, of the inevitable and irrevocable good-byes, both have conceived of life as a pilgrimage towards a goal, and have read its meaning in terms of an ultimate end. II. At a moment, perhaps the lowest that modern thought has seen, when, in Mockel's words, " la douleur semblait plus artistisque que la joie, la purete n'offrait guere d'interet," when *'le vice, la maladie, la souffrance et la mort " alone were beautiful, when the supreme effort of art was to paint moral and physical perversion by the pen of a Rodenbach or a Huysmans, a new wave of natural feeling swept through poetry, cleansed all forms of art, and, without denying either vice, disease, suffering or death — for these too have their place — turned the artist once more to the glory of life. It was time. Science, once justified, like Art, in its search for truth alone, in its wish to see things as they 114 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES are, had begun to. forget that the ultimate end of such a Science for Science's sake, as of Art for Art's sake, could only be a clearer vision and an intenser sense of life itself in its manifold aspects. The means had become an end, the Holy Craal of life had been for- gotten. The man of science, become, in Renan's words, a mere looker-on at the universe " savait que le monde ne lui appartenait que comme sujet d'etude." His imagination and his sympathy by which alone he could hope to transform facts into truth and see through 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 or Party, of Factory or Barrack, had sought to prosti- tute Art to the propagation, 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 and fire, in joy and pain and shame and love. Now that truth, no longer the precious vision to be preserved from the false believers and charlatans of didacticism, of sectarian and secular dogma, of poli- tical cant and rant, was classed but as another, if somewhat lesser heresy, to be avoided, like the others. by the true artist, now that the Holy Name was FRANCIS VIELE-GRIFFIN 115 blasphemed, it was time, indeed, for Laforgue, that obscure herald of the spring, to arise, crying, almost in spite of himself, like some Saint John the Baptist in the wilderness of the Decadence : " Faites de la vie telle quelle et laissez le reste, vous etes stir de ne pas vous tromper!" It was time that a new generation should kiss life with burning lips and feel at last the unsuspected power of the insistent Force at the core of things, of the God who will not be denied, the life- giver with whom we are bound up for ever, drawing ever nearer to Him. III. Francis Viele-Griffin's was the first great voice to be raised, on the side of life and joy, against the " decadence " that had taken possession of French poetry. It must have come as a note of something almost Messianic to hear his song of hope : " II n'est pas de nuit sous les astres Et toute 1' ombre est en toi," his call to faith — not the faith that denies this life in its mystery and wonder and glory, but the truer faith that exalts it : " Croyez, sachez, criez a pleine voix, Que 1* Amour est vainqueur et que l'Espoir est roi !" The poet of Yeldis, Helen, Welland, and Phocas is no silly optimist of the jingle plus clap-trap order. His is a serious and noble voice speaking to a sick world of a life that is full and splendid, and a joy that I 116 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES is hard and severe, but greater than all things else. La Chevauchee d'Yeldis is one of Viele-Griffin's finest poems. Yeldis, daughter of a mysterious gray- beard, was loved by five young men, Philarch, rich and of noble birth, learned in all wisdom, Luke, foppish and 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, Yeldis set out. The five lovers followed her, across the plains, through strange cities, over rivers and mountains. Philarch and Luke lost courage one day, turned their horses' heads and wearily went back. Yeldis smiled and spurred on the faster. Claude, at one of their halts, sat down to play the flute and sing. He went to sleep and woke no more. Yeldis 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, spoke, saying : ** On my soul I love you, And I will die, if it be your will, But tell me whither we go." Yeldis turned and smiled, then, mockingly pointed onwards. " Martial went up to her and took her hand. Like a man and frankly. She bowed her head like a child. FRANCIS VIELE-GRIFFIN 117 And suddenly, in the full beauty of his youth And will and love, Unhesitatingly , Calmly, silently, without a cry, He took her in his arms." And they rode off together. Martial won Yeldis, for he alone knew how to give himself utterly to her, throwing down all hopes and dreams before her. v The disappointed lover who was left, faithful and gentle, had lost her. But from having followed her — Yeldis, incarnate Desire, the living Ideal — he had won and kept ever fresh in his soul the joyous emotion and intensity of life and knew that La Vie est belle de bel Espoir ! * ' This poem belongs to 1893. The series of poems entitled Au Tombeau d'Helene (1891) gives another rendering of the same conception. The poet is seek- ing Helen. The road is long that leads to her. He regrets "The sorrow and the blasphemy and lie Of making ever for a receding goal." He yearns to see this Helen of the matchless eyes, towards whom runs, long and straight, over the plain, the great road leading through the dusk. With death- less hope and invincible faith in his heart he goes on his lonely journey. At last Helen draws near. The poet knows that all 118 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES things but one are vain — vain love, vain the ineffable love of our springtime, vain the kiss we dream divine, vain all poetry and glory. All there is, is to worship Helen in silence, " To master 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- veiled, shall not gaze, rapt, at the ineffable Absolute of God. " I am," she declares, " queen of Sparta and queen of Troy. All life yearns to me. I am Helen whom all poets loved and wise men worshipped. If I threw off 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 fulness of life for which men live and endure all sorrows and all illusions, that joy ^which beckons them an instant in the eyes of the Beloved, not her, but for the moment dwelling in her? ' The touch of glory in the sunset- west, The indefinable essential thing, The poet's dream, the halo round a God, The hope upraising man to deity, The fragrance of all flowers, and the light That shines on morning seas, the quietude Of night, bestrewn with points of fire, the joy That rises leaping in a living heart, The blood within the chalice, and the bread The priest has blessed, vice-regently for God —All these you are, and you are more than these," FRANCIS VIELE-GRIFFIN 119 says the poet, addressing Helen—" Tis life I seek, " Life, only life, ineffable, unknown, Eternal life that lives when all is dead, Surviving worlds, and men, that princes give Gladly their crowns for, and their place on Earth And all the pomp of their half -God-like throne, And poets give their laurels, casting down The world's praise and all beauty at your feet, And turn divinely to the Orient star That rises in the infinite of your face !" Welland the Smith, in Viele-Griffin's poem of that name, learned to conceive of life as an unceasing search, an unquenchable thirst : " For there is no rest for a soul Drunken with immense desire : No sword wrought in the flame, Nor holy love of a woman, Nor art with its crown of glory, Appease the hunger of life." Phocas the gardener dared not sacrifice his memories and illusions. He would not put aside his past life and break the glittering gate beyond him. A Christian by birth and early associations, he could not make up his mind to renounce a faith he did not believe and accept the life and love offered him by the paganism that he really felt in his heart. Paganism and Thalia on the one hand, death on the other ! He died a martyr to a faith that was not his because he could not like the poet of La Partenza, br. ':e himself to abandon all old things and go unflinching 120 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES " upon the opening road Toward the wide green sea." He died the irrevocable and irredeemable death — in time and eternity, for he refused to be himself, refused to follow life whithersoever it led. JFor he who would live, who would be fully him- self, gaze on the naked glory of Helen, look on God in the face of His light must lay down all old and dis- used ideals and outworn desires for ever — times without number I And that is why Viele-GrifRn has written the stories of Saint Julia and Saint Dominantia and the other virgin martyrs who loved life so well, and so in- timately felt its true meaning, that they followed it, joyfully, in the fulness of love and beauty, even to death and the burning crown. Not because Life is nothing to them, as to some sour ascetic brooding like the Preacher on the vanity of all things, blaspheming God in the holiest of his works, but because Life is all, the only thing that is or can be, and the very breath of creative energy itself, they follow it whither it leads, and in the ineffable call to martyrdom hear the clarions of hope undying, and beyond the flames the goal of self-hood to be won at last. Dominantia, daughter of a king, riding on her white palfrey to the court of her betrothed, laughing and singing as she goes, reaches Saragossa, her first halt, at nightfall. She finds the town drunken with the blood of Christians, victims of Roman justice, admin- istered by a brutal Praetor. Without a moment's hesitation, young and frail and lovely, the Princess rides through the yelling crowd. FRANCIS VIELE-GRIFFIN 121 past the executioners, proudly and calmly, till she stops beneath the Praetor's throne, and beseeching and reproaching by turns, calls on him in the name of God, in the name of the Roman Peace, to desist — threatens, commands, implores, and suddenly stops short, terrified at her own audacity. The obscene Praetor, leering and sneering, con- demns Dominantia, as penalty for her insult to the majesty of Rome, to kiss him. And as the crowd, brutal like its master, laughing and cheering, crowds to see, the Princess, without a 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 pride and her courage unshaken, and her soul, it is said, rose to Heaven on a fiery charger. The story of Saint Julia is put in the mouth of her lover, who, having bought her at Carthage from the Vandals, and coming to love her day by day with " some sweet, sad, far-off love " was taking her home on his ship. Her martyrdom at the hands of a band of drunken merchants, at Cyrnos, 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." Her lover tells the tale to a priest, and, scornfully, asks : 122 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES " You who call upon her on your knees, What do you know of her? What did you ever know? Only that they killed her like cowards, That she witnessed to Christ beneath the lash Till death ! That is enough for you, For your hymns sung To pale, ascetic virgins floating on unsubstantial clouds ; But I, I saw her live ! I kissed the cheek 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, For I loved her truly, Day by day and hour by hour ! I pray to her and love her without sacrilege I pray to her and weep." IV. This " believer," this Catholic, is no less the fervent apostle of passionate life in its intensity of energy and will, than the atheist Merrill, who has cursed " la feroce idole des pretres," or Rette who saw, in his unregenerate days, "les brasiers nourris d'or des eglises en flammes." The throb of reality is beneath the various 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, acceptance, faith, heads bowed to the Babe of Bethle- FRANCIS VIELE-GRIFFIN 123 hem, perhaps, but only in so far as the Babe of Bethlehem is the avatar of that evolving, ever-becom- ing God, with whom we and all life are bound up for ever, growing to birth and being as He, for ever-chang- ing, wins ever nearer to His own ultimate completion in the changeless light of Absolute Being. Viele-Griffin abhors all that is opposed to life in its fulness. While Merrill is called a Socialist and a Free Thinker, Viele-Griffin is a Catholic and a re- actionary. He detests the spurious democracy of the French radicals who blaspheme against all great and noble ideals, " qui te blasphement, O Christ, Dieu de douleur, Dieu supreme." The poet whose heart is " bleeding with the hymn of life and death and resurrection " can, indeed, look with scant sympathy on " the foul, grovelling, blaspheming mob " which, in France, affects the Socialist doctrine. He knows that democracy, with its machinery of representation of fools by knaves, has reaped the harvest it deserves. It has made possible and profitable the appeal to the folly and passion of the Mob — that Mob, gullible in proportion as greed has blunted the little wit it has left after the systematic destruction of all qualities of brain and character which we miscall education, that Mob which is so utterly unlike the People, sanely occupied in the pro- duction of real wealth and humanised by contact with nature, innately loving beauty and justice, to whom Viele-Griffin declares the poet must go, not to teach but to learn. 124 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES And yet what Socialist could inveigh more fervently, with more burning eloquence against the hideous squalor and horror of industrialism than this same Viele-Grimn 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, Know how to die without fear. . Tremble not, be strong In thy disdain And spurn the life they offer, starving child !" No revolutionary could have thrown more con- tumely upon the society of to-day with its venal patriotism of the bank and the exchange than this reactionary, this clerical, who with consuming scorn, tells us that this poor factory-boy, died for his country — " est mort pour la patrie," for the fatherland of all great spirits, for life itself and God the fountain-head of life :— ' For life is fair and holy, Life is joy and pain and mystery, And to die, as thou diedst, without fear, We must love the dream of life : They lied who said life was Only a little mortal bread and wine; They killed thee thrice, denying Love and God and thy humanity ; But if they made thy life according to their shame, Refusing the life they offer, thou conquerest them. FRANCIS VIELE-GRIFFIN 125 " As surely as swords and torches Brandished at palace-gates, Better than the harvest of hate — Corn trampled in the furrow, Crowds stamped by the feet of the horses, Better than the sea of tears . . . Thy death is a protest, a tremor of dawn Risen over Golgotha still bleeding!" All Viele-Grimn's work is a hymn to life, and the burden of it all is this : " Croyez, sachez, criez a pleine voix, Que 1' Amour est vainqueur et que l'Espoir est roi !"* Life is a cup, full to the brim, without lees, a sacramental chalice, filled with more than mortal wine. We and all life with us are bound up for ever with God, and we hear, in Griffin's verse, no longer the " long roaring of eternal life," no longer despair and shame and horror, but the paean of hope and victory, and of ultimate self-realisation in the absolute of God. V. I met Viele-Griffin for the first time, in 1902, in Stuart Merrill's study, high up among the tree tops of the lie de Saint-Louis. Through the open window came the points of light dancing on the Seine and the subdued gay hum of the great city. We were all talking : our voices rose higher and higher. Griffin was sitting alone, in a corner by the window, looking out over the town. Perhaps his eyes looked on Saint- 126 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES Dominantia 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 on Helen's. He was with us, but he was different from any of us. He had no part, even outwardly, in the Syfhbolist Bohemia. Indeed he rarely appeared in the haunts of the poets. Paul Fort might be seen in almost all the cafes of the quartier any evening : above all at the Closerie des Lilas opposite Bullier, where he did his best to drown his unique genius in bad alcohol, between Moreas and the Norwegian, Diriks. Merrill had not yet withdrawn from the fellowship. He did not do so at all till 1906 and not altogether till his second marriage in 1908. But Griffin already in 1902 lived a life apart, in his flat on the Quai de Passy and in his Chateau near Poitiers. He was a grand seigneur 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- tion than that of joy and belief. For him, as for Francis Thompson " On Golgotha there grew a thorn Round the long prefigured Brows." I first read Yeldis and Helen under the great trees of the He Verte at Grenoble, looking out over the shining river at the mountains of the Grande Charteuse, white and 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 FRANCIS VIELE-GRIFFIN 127 spices, along valleys ablaze with peach and pomegranate, and in the darkness of burning nights that set the blood afire. " Rejouis toi et sache croire " I cried, exultingly, as I walked the stony, dusty roads of Dauphiny, sunk in banks of violets and slopes of orchid and asphodel, where I thought every moment to meet the Son of Man as of old in Palestine, and would raise my eyes from the hot fragrance and the insistent passion of the valleys to the high rim of the cold white mountain ridge above the belts of pines, or the rushing torrent of surging peaks that fled like a herd of buffaloes towards Italy, a mile above my head : till I knew not if the body were spirit or the spirit desire. There, in that wonderful South, all life is seared with joy, joy as terrible as grief : the soul may be drunken with sorrow as with wine, and spring to new life in the very joy of pain : passion burns with an ineffable fire. Life is a golden cup, full to the brim, overflowing with intensity. Ready to drink it to the dregs, joy and passion and pain, I found, as I thought, the very image of it in the poems of Griffin. I went with Helen in my soul along the willows by the streams, or 'among the orchids and holly of the hills. I saw her hair unbound float on the night-wind and I steeped myself in the perfume of her breath. I took her even to the examination hall and won my doctorate partly in spite of one of the subjects I had chosen : the poetry of Viele-Griffin, which I expounded to Pro- fessors of Phonetics and French Literature : the only 128 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES one who understood me and has remained to this day my friend and master was Georges Dumesnil — whom I mention with all honour and respect and reverence — the Professor of Philosophy and Education, a Conser- vative of the best tradition, a fervent and whole-hearted Catholic, who, walking with me along the infinite avenues of Grenoble, spoke with sadness unspeakable of the ruin that had come over France with the ex- pulsion of the monks and the persecution of the Church, and likened the brown leaves falling from the trees to the true conception of life leaving France bare of all virtue and honour and hope. His were a true heart and 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 unflinching conviction and nobility, unable to stoop or to dream of stooping to any act or thought unworthy of what he believed to be the high heritage of the Catholic Church and of the French race. He understood, and yet he knew where I was mis- taken; he knew that my conception of life was too material. He knew, what I did not discover till 1909, in Griffin's own country, that I had misread, in one essential feature, the attitude of my favourite poet. Viele-Griffin loves life : loves it with intensity : but the fire that burns his soul is the white fire of the spirit, not the red fire of youth aglow with passionate acceptance of the blazing South. The poems of Viele-Griffin are full of sunlight and the scent of flowers, brimming with the joyous life of France his mother, overflowing with all the loveliness of her smiling countrysides. The flowers, the burning noons and nights of France, white roads and forests FRANCIS VIELE-GRIFFIN 129 and sleeping hamlets and mistletoe 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 French lands, the sorrow and joy of their children, will turn ever and again to the pages of Viele-Grimn, so that he may look into the deep eyes of France and see her smiling, sad and distant, under the branches of her chestnut trees. But that is not all. The life he sings, with which his whole being trembles, is not the uprising of the victorious 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 stained glass windows of Tours Cathedral and saw the broad Loire flow towards the west on the plain past a pure white city. I sank myself in the clear spirituality of Notre-Dame de Nantilly, silent and while, 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 laurels and that all beauty and praise of Earth are but offerings cast at the feet of the ineffable and invincible Beauty of the Helen the poet sang.