BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME FROM THE SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND THE GIFT OF Hettrs m. Sage 1S91 l\..^c^.s.l.5..:8 to\XI 1 1.0.. 9755-2 Cornell University Library PQ 405.B15 Claims of French poetry 3 1924 027 236 573 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/cu31924027236573 THE CLAIMS OF FRENCH POETRY THE CLAIMS OF FRENCH POETRY NINE STUDIES IN THE GREATER FRENCH POETS BY JOHN C- BAILEY AUTHOR OF 'studies IN SOME FAMOUS LETTERS* AND OF ' THE POEMS OF WILLIAM COWPER, EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES* NEW YORK MITCHELL KENNERLEY 1909 Edinburgh : T. and A. Constable, Printers to His Majesty PREFACE The following Essays are partly an appeal against the common neglect of French poetry by English lovers of literature, and partly an attempt at explaining that neglect, and even, to some extent and in some cases, at justifying it. It seems to me that there is in England a widespread opinion that French poetry is merely rhetoric in verse, and I have tried to deal both with the foundation for this opinion and with its limitations ; and in particular have tried to show by examples how partial its application is, and to prove by liberal quotation how much pleasure may be got out of the French poets even by those whose conception of poetry makes them demand of it things far above rhetoric. The studies were written at different times, but those which have appeared before have been revised with a view to this book. I have to thank Mrs. George Cornwallis-West for leave to reprint the essays on English Taste and French Drama and on Ronsard, which were first printed in The Anglo- Saxon Review; Messrs. Macmillan and Co. for the same permission in the case of the essay on La Fontaine, much of which originally appeared in vi THE CLAIMS OF FRENCH POETRY Temple Bar; Messrs. Chapman and Hall for leave to reprint the essay on Heredia, originally published in The Fortnightly Review ; and Messrs. Blackwood and Sons for the same courtesy with regard to the essay on Ch^nier, which first appeared in Black- wood's Magazine. The other essays, as well as additions to these, have been written with a view to the publication of the present volume. CONTENTS INTRODUCTORY PAGE Aim of the book, an English view of some of the French poets 3 The English distaste for the French drama a feeling for which some good reasons can be given ; the English neglect of French poetry as a whole a prejudice which cannot be justified 4 French poetry has the limitations of the Latin genius . 6 Its best prototype is Horace 8 The prose writers may afford the most characteristic expression of the genius of France, but that expres- sion is incomplete without a knowledge of the poets lo And the English poets, even if greater than the French, are no substitute for them I2 So that neither a knowledge of France as a whole, nor a knowledge of poetry as a whole, is possible with- out an acquaintance with French poetry ... 14 And poetry, the most profoundly human of man's activities, always has in it an element of univer- sality, and points to the ultimate unity which lies behind all national diversities : so that the study of it tends to a mutual understanding between nations 15 ENGLISH TASTE AND FRENCH DRAMA English opinion has generally denied the claims of French poetry 21 This is not due to ignorance . . . 22 Nor to mere insular prejudice 22 How is it to be explained ? 22 Lack of the sense of infinity in French poetry . . 23 Especially in the classical drama 25 Which for the present must be taken as representing the supreme poetic achievement of France . . 26 viii THE CLAIMS OF FRENCH POETRY PAGE The French view that Racine, though no Shakespeare, is a poet of the order of Virgil 27 What is that essential quality of the highest poetry which English opinion recognises in Virgil, and denies to Racine ? . . . . .27 In what sense Racine is a classical writer ... 28 A point in which he has an advantage over Shakespeare . 28 The disadvantage of his metre, so lacking in freedom compared with the ancient metres or with English blank verse 29 The narrowness of his imaginative outlook ... 30 Comparison with Dante, Goethe, Sophocles . . 31 His lack of penetrating intimacy . . . . 32 Classical style severe, Racine's cold ■ . ■ ■ 35 His lack of creative power .... -35 His lack of the daring and surprising quality, both of thought and expression, so common in the Greeks and in Shakespeare 36 His lack of interest in nature contrasted with the evident feeling of the Greeks, of Virgil, of Dante, of Milton 38 For these reasons Racine, who is put forward to repre- sent France as Dante represents Italy, or Shake- speare and Milton represent England, cannot be accepted as ranking with these poets ... 40 Yet that is no justification for the common English neglect of French poetry as a whole . . 41 MAROT Two opposite tendencies in French literature as in the French character Marot one of the best examples of the literature of the plain 50 His life and adventures His poetry, the first poetic expression of the Renais- sance while Renaissance and Reformation were still one A master of naturalness and good sense • • ■ 53 His astonishing ease, seen in the letter to Francis I. describing his arrest cr And in that describing his being robbed by his servant and his illness cy 47 50 SO 51 CONTENTS ix PAGE One of the best of epistolary poets 60 His gift of writing epigrams by which he was the Martial of his age . . . . 61 Specimens of his epigrams 62 One with the religious note in it . . . .64 His religion a much more serious thing than has generally been admitted 64 The writer of certain of his poems must have had serious religious convictions 65 And these convictions were of a definitely Protestant cast 65 As may be seen in Le Balladin 67 And in the epistle to Francis i. from Ferrara . . 68 But, after all, it is his poetry, and not his char- acter or his religion, that gives him his interest to-day 69 There, though his supreme gift is his ease and humour, seen in such poems as Frire Lubin, he has also his measure of the finer poetic qualities ... 69 The grace and charm of his best verses no bad picture of the new culture introduced by Francis I. . . 72 His conviction of his poetic calling . . 74 The beauty of some of his Rondeaux .... 75 But these, though his most beautiful, are not his most characteristic, work 76 For that, for the last word about him, one has to go back to such things as Frire Lubin or the Rondeau ' Dedans Paris "... ... 77 Indeed of the sociable and pleasure-loving half of the genius of Paris, he is one of the earliest and best spokesmen . 78 RONSARD The great celebrity Ronsard enjoyed in his life, the complete oblivion in which he was buried in the next century, and the recent revival of his fame . 81 Ronsard a typical voice of the Renaissance in his con- fident enthusiasm, his faith in the classical models, and his scorn for the Middle Ages .... 83 His confidence in himself partly justified ... 85 X THE CLAIMS OF FRENCH POETRY PAGE But, though he has a real touch of the great style in him, he is, like his age, necessarily unripe both in thought and in expression 86 Yet his lack of a serious interpretation of life must not be allowed to obscure the fact that he is a poet of high imagination in whose hands French poetry attains a dignity unknown before .... 88 Specimens of his work 89 A great sonnet 9' The Ode to Michel de I'Hdpital and the Hymn to Night 92 The Renaissance love of nature 94 The prayer to the fountain of Bellerie ... 96 And that to the evening star 97 Both are instances of the element of richness and strangeness in his work . . ... 97 Instances of his Hghtness and grace .... 98 This poetry of fancy, by its lack of serious thought, led not unnaturally to a reaction, in fact to the poetry of common sense which prevailed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries 100 As that again led to another reaction, that of the Romantics loi And this last sent lovers of poetry back to Ronsard and restored his fame ... ... 102 LA FONTAINE V The charm of La Fontaine . . . . 107 The essence of charm . 108 The fable of the Two Pigeons . .112 Its note of self-revelation 113 The Fables no mere nursery book, but a book for all the world 114 The unique historical position of La Fontaine 115 The affection that has always been felt for him . . 115 His character, and the events of his life . . . .116 His fame rests on the Fables, more than on the Contes . 122 Comparison between La Fontaine and Phjedrus . . 123 Another fable of Phsedrus compared ... 126 La Fontaine a born story-teller . . . 129 A master of the art of expression . 130 A master of the metrical art . . . .130 His love of nature and the open air . . .131 CONTENTS His observation of life, so that his poems are a store- house of pictures of the life of his day The humanity of his animals .... His insight into human character, seen in the fable of The Man and the Adder .... His wealth of detail His mastery of the human comedy, as exhibited in La Jeune Veuve His own personality to be found in all his fables His character and peculiarities His permanent place is by the side of Mohfere as one of the greatest pleasure-givers of all time . XI PAGE 132 136 139 141 141 144 ANDRE CHENIER The poetic decay of the eighteenth century . .147 Chenier the poet of the Revolution . . I47 The story of his life 148 His poetic gift not recognised till after his death . . 154 The nature of his poetic task, viz., to appeal from the sham classical tradition to the Greeks themselves . 1 56 The variety of his work .... . . 158 The early political poems, especially \ki&Jeu de Paume ; its metrical originality . . . . I59 The Idylls or BucoUques . . ■ 161 The Elegies ... ... 163 D Invention 164 The Hermes, a typical eighteenth-century poem . . 165 The Odes 167 La Jeune Captive 168 1h.&Iambes 169 Summary of his poetic claims . 172 VICTOR HUGO \^ Hugo the voice of the new world that succeeded the Revolution '77 The largest subject in French literature . . . -177 An Enghshman may put aside the political controversies and the technical questions which occupy so much space in studies of Hugo, and may confine himself to trying to discover Hugo's contribution to the poetry of the world 178 His prodigality of production . . ... 180 xii THE CLAIMS OF FRENCH POETRY PAGE Two drawbacks to his popularity in England . . i8o But his work is quite free from a defect frequently charged against French literature . .182 What should the English reader specially look out for in Hugo's many volumes ? . .183 Love songs • ■ 184 Hugo's work as a poet rather to give musical utterance to very common human feelings than to exhibit originality of thought 185 Yet, though no curious thinker, he has the poet's gift of great intuitions, the dreams or visions of faith . 186 And the poet's gift of giving clearness and beauty to the vague and formless aspirations of ordinary men . 187 More than most poets he is a kind of spokesman of humanity, and in particular of the nineteenth century 189 Perhaps the most universal poet since Shakespeare . 190 Hugo compared with other poets, and, in particular, with Milton . . . . . . 191 And Tennyson 194 Aspects of his work ; the painter of pictures . 195 The Nuits dejuin and other examples . . 196 The Feu du del 198 The dawn in Paradise oi La Ldgende des Siecles 199 Adam and Eve among Les Malheureux .... 201 No mere painter of landscapes .... 202 The imaginative energy with which he represents human action ......... 203 As in the story of Canute ... . 204 And still more in the Vision de Dante . . . 205 But this is not the field in which he is greatest of all . 210 The three masters of his childhood . . . .210 The priest 211 Hugo a convinced believer in a spiritual interpretation of the world .... . . 211 Comparison with Browning . . .213 Hugo's attitude in the great sorrow of his life, his daughter's death 215 His creed . 218 The second master of his childhood— the garden . 218 Hugo a great interpreter of Nature 219 His interpretation based less on knowledge of detail than on sympathetic penetration and faith in an ultimate unity between man and nature . . . 220 CONTENTS xiii 222 223 224 225 227 228 Comparison with Shelley ... . . Man revealed to himself by the help of nature The human imagination in the presence of nature . Evening The sea ... ... The third teacher of his childhood — his mother Hugo's hold on the primary joys and sorrows of humanity . . 228 As on death 229 Or, again, on childhood .... . . 232 But, deeply as he feels the pathos of human things, he is still a poet of inextinguishable faith in life, and in the future of the human race .... 238 A summing up of his characteristics . . . 239 Swinburne's lines, In Time of Mourning, written on his death ... 244 LECONTE DE LISLE v-" Hugo's exile left the field open to Leconte de Lisle . 247 The contrast between the two men .... 248 Leconte de Lisle the poet of intellectual quietism, an artist of serene and indolent landscape . . .251 A picture of dawn 252 The Orientalism and Pantheism of Leconte de Lisle . 253 His Dies Irae, a creed of Nirvana 254 Comparison and contrast with Matthew Arnold . . 256 Tennyson's question, and Leconte de Lisle's answer . 258 His melancholy of thought leads to monotony of verse 259 The three directions in which he succeeds best . . 260 Nature in repose .... 260 Le Sommeil du Condor 261 These fine landscapes are scarcely ever European . 262 La Fontaine aux Lianes 263 L'Aurore . . 264 Midi and Nox .... ... 265 Matthew Arnold again ... ... 268 The sadness of the stoic and the bitterness of the pessi- mist 270 Leconte de Lisle's classical idylls . . . 272 Glaucd 273 Khirdn . 274 INTRODUCTORY INTRODUCTORY The object of this book is, as has already been said in the Preface, to attempt to discover, and then to illustrate, what may be a reasonable attitude for an English lover of poetry to take up with regard to some of the poets of France. It is written from a frankly English point of view. The reader is assumed to be familiar with the English poets, and it is from them that comparisons and contrasts are most often derived. The Greek poets, indeed, are not altogether forgotten, nor their Roman followers : nor, again, some of the Italians and Germans : so that it is hoped the reproach of a standard exclusively English is avoided. For, of course, art in its highest sense is not a national thing at all. That is the last heresy of an age in which racial and national feel- ing has been exalted out of all measure. The fact that a Frenchman is slnwgr to appieciatp Shak- speare than an Englishman, or an Englishman slower to appreciate Moliere than a Frenchman, may be simply the result of .idjective-xuiturej If race and nation open our eyes to some things, they blind them to others. The man whose poetic taste had reached perfect cultivation, and who was as much at home in all literary languages as Porson was in Greek or Gibbon in French, would appreciate all poets at their absolute and true valuation. No 4 THE CLAIMS OF FRENCH POETRY patriotic predilections would bribe his judgment, no national animosity warp it, no difificulty of language or unfamiliarity of atmosphere obstruct it. To deny that this, or something like it, is the direction in which we must look for the ideal final court of literary appeal, to prefer the narrower national con- stitution, is deliberately to place prejudice before truth. So much ought clearly to be recognised. We must know what we mean by the ideal before we can deal with the actual. After that we are entitled to confess that all ideals worth having are things almost out of sight, seen at the end of a long vista of actualities, and that, while we do not forget to refresh or stimulate ourselves by an occasional glance at the distant ideal, we may and must live and work in conditions that are still a long way short of it. The ideal critic is not much easier to meet with than the ideal statesman or the ideal Christian. We have to deal with the facts as they are. ^ew people know foreign languages as well as their own : few are free from national prejudices.^ That being so, and the admission that it is a limita- tion and not a strength, a loss and not a gain, hav- ing been frankly made, we are surely entitled to take facts as we find them,! and to admit that the view we are attempting to take of French poetry is no more than a very far-off approximation to the ideal, being, quite undisguisedly, such a view as an Englishman can present and Englishmen receive. How frankly English it is will be seen in a suc- ceeding essay in which an attempt is made to deal with the difficulties Englishmen find in accepting the claims made by the French on behalf of their great INTRODUCTORY s tragedians. It would have been dishonest as well as futile to attempt to ignore that great stumbling- block which so many generations of Englishmen have found at the threshold of the study of French poetry. How has it ever been possible that the French should rank Racine with Shakspeare or the Greeks ! How have they ever come to fancy that he is one of the half dozen great poets of the world ? A French critic, particularly one of the older sort, would perhaps feel that there is something narrowly English even in such a statement of the question. I can only say that I have honestly tried to deal with it on its merits quite apart from national pre- judices; I have tried to argue the question as if before a judge who was neither French nor English. ')^o doubt we can only try to escape our nationality : escape it absolutely and altogether we never can.x But the problem is one of the most interesting literary problems that can be raised ; and any solu- tion of it that has even a partial truth in it ought to have its use. I have not been ashamed to confess that I do not think it is mere national prejudice which makes us deny to Corneille and Racine what we freely grant to Dante and Goethe; and I have tried to give some reasons for my belief. But let them wait for the moment. If it is right to justify our hesitation or opposition in this matter of French poetic claims so far as they are capable of justifica- tion, what are we to say where they are not? *The English prejudice against French poetry, starting with this dislike of the French classical drama, has gone further. It is, as a rule, not definite or limited ; it is indefinite and general. And that is where the 6 THE CLAIMS OF FRENCH POETRY mistake lies. " It is true, so far as I can judge, that the claim of Racine to rank with Virgil or Corneille with .(Eschylus is one that will not bear examina- tion : but it does not follow from that that French poetry as a whole is a thing we may put aside as not worthy of attention. Every one who wishes to know France as a whole must know her poetry : and every one who wishes to study poetry as a whole must study the poetry of France." A great critic, who was as French in his love of reason as he was the reverse of French in his moral seriousness, spoke of France as 'famed in all great arts, in none supreme ' : and that is true. But no one who cares for the study of sculpture would be content to be unacquainted with the charming work of Jean Goujon or Germain Pilon, or, in our own day, the profound work of Rodin, even though there is no doubt that the sculpture of the French Renaissance never equalled the Italian, and that Rodin, great as he is, is far from equalling the Greeks, or even Michael Angelo. In the same way, there may be nothing in French poetry that can be placed beside Dante or Milton or even Goethe : but there is much that no lover of France and no lover of poetry can afford to ignore. The unique fascination of France is not absent from her poetry. The Latin genius, with its legal, logical habits, its determination to under- stand itself, to measure its words and say exactly what it means, is not compatible, no doubt, with great creative efforts on the scale of King Lear or the Agamemnon. For them the soul, the thing which soars and dreams, has to get a little freer of the mind, the thing which understands and judges, than. INTRODUCTORY 7 perhaps, it ever does in France. But even France has had her free spirits. No one who has not read Villon quite understands the passion of moral rebellion that was always seething under the fair formal crust of the mediaeval Church and Empire. No other country can rival those amazing ballads in which the thing we call Bohemianism, defiance of law, scorn of custom, contempt of morals, for once, and perhaps once only, got itself uttered in fire, and showed what perhaps is not to be seen elsewhere, that freedom, untamed and untameable, has its moments of creation. Then the boundless force that the French Revolution let loose is no- where seen as it is seen in Hugo. Those seventy or eighty volumes, hurrying hot from the press, are the literary counterpart of the rushing armies of the Revolution : and Hugo's inexhaustible fertility and energy know no parallel except that of Napoleon. Still, no doubt, these fiery spirits are not the char- acteristic product of France. For that, if we leave the incomparable urbanity of Moli^re, the fine irony of Pascal, the noble and stately eloquence of Bossuet, the grace and pleasantness of Madame de Sdvign6, the brilliant wit and exquisite lucidity of Voltaire, — if we leave these things, and come to poetry, we must turn, not to men like Villon and Hugo, but to men of more 'even-balanced' temper, men like La Fontaine with his gift of dreaming steadied by his humour, like Charles d'Orl^ans with his freedom of fancy and ease of graceful utterance kept in check by the decorum of a court, to Ronsard or Du Bellay, or again to Ch^nier, with their genuine fire of poetic enthusiasm purified and ennobled and strengthened, 8 THE CLAIMS OF FRENCH POETRY if you like, but still chastened and corrected, by the constant companionship of the great masters of classi- cal antiquity. The main stream of French poetry runs within bounds which it has no wish to over- flow. It belongs to a type of which the immortal and unsurpassed example is Horace. It is seldom, perhaps never, so weighty, of such high and noble utterance, so finally felicitous in phrase, as he is at his best. On the other hand, in lightness, in a kind of exquisite airy gracefulness, which, but for Catullus, we might have thought unattainable in that grave Roman speech, it surpasses him. But, whatever the differences in form, it is essentially of his school in its attitude to life and art. The highest heights and the deepest depths are not so much out of its reach as out of its ken. That sounds fatal at first, especi- ally to ears attuned to Shakspeare. But how many generations, and not least in England, have found it the very opposite of fatal to Horace? It is the business of poetry to adorn life, and not only to search it out. If it cannot enlarge, it may vivify and ennoble. Horace was an accomplished and thoughtful man of the world, who enjoyed the spectacle of human life, and gives it back to us touched with his own dignity and charm. He is no ^schylus, no Job, no Shakspeare, to plunge down into the abyss of human destiny or rise to its fiery heights. He walks the middle way of life, which we all walk : and the point is that we all find it much prettier and much more interesting because he has walked it before us. The return of spring is a thing we could not anyhow have failed to enjoy ; but Solvitur acris hiems and Diffugere nives have for INTRODUCTORY 9 ever quickened our delight. The winter fireside is among the most universal and obvious of pleasures : but it comes back fresher and keener to us as we go through his Dissolve frigus, ligna super foco Large reponens: and we call our friends to the old and innocent pleasures of the table with added cheerful- ness as we remember Thaliarchus. The agony and ecstasy of love are not for every one ; and those who want them must go to Catullus or Shakspeare or Burns, or Goethe or Heine, or, at any rate, not to Horace; but the pathos of life comes to all, and where can they find it better than in Linquenda tellusl Few of us are saints or seers: but all want a wisdom of every day, and all find something of what they want in jiEquam tnemento and Auream quisquis mediocritatem. Those who know least of the awe or of the romance of Nature can feel the pleasantness of this delightful earth of ours : and where is it pleasanter than in fans Bandusice to which Ronsard owed so much ? And, if we do not understand Wordsworth's notion of what it is to be a poet, and are overawed at Milton's, every one who has ever cared for literature has a fellow-feeling with Horace as well as a wondering delight in the beauty of his verse, when the book of the Odes lies open at Quern tu, Melpomene. That is Horace : and that is also the natural genius of France. The mistake has been that the French have so often claimed Virgil as their kindred spirit — Virgil, the mystic, the dream- ing, brooding spirit with a secret of his own which could not get fully uttered, and a passion for strain- ing to catch the secret voice of the universe, which is only to be heard so fitfully and at such distance. lo THE CLAIMS OF FRENCH POETRY Nothing can be less like the central spirit of France. No : it is not Virgil but Horace whom they should look back to as their ancestor. The broad way across the plain of life, not the difficult paths over the mountains; the common joys of every day, not the rare moments that come to rare spirits ; the charm of life and the sorrow and the sympathy, not the ecstasy or the secret : that, in spite of Verlaine and Maeterlinck and the Symbolists, is the stock of French poetry, as it is the note of French life. In both there is the genius of good sense, the worship of the golden mean. The great Revolution itself is hardly more than an apparent exception to this rule : for the very key to it is that its madness was the madness of reason stung to fury by the obstinate irrationality of the Ancien Rigime. It is true that the most characteristic expression of this national temper is to be looked for in the prose writers of France, or at any rate in those poets whose verse, like that of Moli^re, has nothing of poetry about it except the single fact of metre. But that does not alter the fact that there is a way of uttering this temper or attitude which, if not the most characteristic, is the most b^utiful, and that is here, as everywhere, the way of poetry. And it is the object of this book to try to convince English readers that, if French poetry never, perhaps, climbs the highest heights, it still dwells distinctly above the prose levels of the plain, inhabiting upland glades of its own, which are delightful in their fresh- ness, their fragrance, their beauty, their pleasantly varied rise and fall. No prose could hope for a moment to do what La Fontaine does for the life INTRODUCTORY ii of the people : no prose could give the exquisiteness of a Court as Charles d'Orl^ans gives it : no prose could have consoled Du Perier with the Latin grace of Malherbe's Ode, or adorned the life of scholars and soldiers and lovers, or the life of trees and flowers, as Ronsard adorns it. And yet none of these, not even La Fontaine or Ronsard, are at all apt to travel far from the standpoint of ordinary cultivated men with some gift of imagination. They only show what delightful views that standpoint has to offer us. La Fontaine goes deepest into these common things : Ronsard sees most of their colour and their grace. Typically French he is, indeed, perhaps more typical than any one of the old France, with something of its fiery Oriflamme in him, and something also of the simple loveliness of its Fleur de Lys. But even he, for all his high gifts and all his just sense of proclaiming a new world in which civilisation and beauty were to dwell, is still a poet, not of the .^schylean sort which discovers, but of the Horatian sort which adorns. The essays which follow are attempts to study some of the poets who exemplify this general law of French poetry, and one or two of the exceptions. Their object will be attained if they at all increase the number of English readers who pay some atten- tion to French poetry. We all read French prose : it has been my wish to urge that, fine as French prose is, it does not give us, because no prose can, some of the finer qualities of the French race, and that French poetry does give them. We all read, or pretend to read, the English poets. I have not 12 THE CLAIMS OF FRENCH POETRY denied that they are greater than the French. But I suggest that the very fact that these last are French, and not English, is in itself a proof that they have something to say to the lover of poetry which no English poet can say. There are things which are French, and which it is useless to look for in an Englishman. But that is not all. There are also gifts or qualities which might just as well have come to English poets as to French, but have, as a matter of fact, come to French and not to English. We might have had a lyric poet who represented the scholarship of the sixteenth century, the literary fire and enthusiasm of the Renaissance, as Ronsard represents it. But we have not. The English Elizabethan scholars, men like Ben Jonson and Drummond, produced no such poetry as Ron- sard. The greater men did not want to do this particular thing. Shakspeare's mind was too full of bigger things to allow of his being absorbed by the enthusiasm of scholarship, and Spenser's face was always half turned away from his own day to watch the last fading colours of the Middle Age. Ronsard, then, and no Englishman, is the poet who embodies one of the most attractive phases through which the cultivated mind of Europe has passed. Or take a more modern instance. The nineteenth century saw a curious return of that sensitiveness to the religious or philosophic influences of the East which was one of the most striking facts in the Roman world both before and after the coming of Christ, and has been unknown from that day to this. Well, all great poetry is tinged by the thought of the age it belongs to, and the greatest — INTRODUCTORY 13 like that of Dante — is a complete poetic presentation of the mind of its generation. Hugo's peculiarly intellectual gifts, his powers of thinking, were not remarkable enough to enable him to be in this way the speaking mind of his contemporaries. Little as he knew it, he could never meet the great in- tellects of his time on an equal footing, as Sophocles, for instance, or Dante, or Milton, or Goethe, or even Coleridge, could. He is unrivalled as the instru- ment over whose keys every popular movement, every popular emotion, everything of every kind that could become popular, had passed, and made in passing such music as none had imagined was in it. And indeed, except on that incomparable instrument, no such music could have been made. But great thing as it is to be the poetic voice of a people's hopes and fears, it is not the same thing as embodying the mind that, above the people and all unknown to them, is changing their creed or modifying their lives while it lays the unseen foundations of the creed and lives of the generation which is to follow them. That Victor Hugo could not do, and so he is not the Virgil or Dante of his age, though he comes nearer it than any one else. The expression, then, the poetic expression, of the intellectual life of the nineteenth century must be looked for in separate pieces. Well, one of them is that which gives us that Eastern in- fluence of which mention was just now made. The mind, in some respects the highest mind, of the nineteenth century felt a profound attraction for the mystic quietism, the everlasting acquiescence of the East. That would not fit with Hugo's rest- 14 THE CLAIMS OF FRENCH POETRY less hurrying after every new social or political reform. It would not fit with Tennyson's Anglo- Saxon manliness, or with Browning's eager optim- ism and intellectual agility, or even with Arnold's sad stoic endurance. The thing was English as much as French : but here again it so happened that the man who made it poetry was not an Englishman but a Frenchman. It might have been a Frenchman who made the great revelation of Man and Nature : but it was Wordsworth. It might have been an Englishman who made himself the voice of a more than Oriental apathy, who, in- heriting, perhaps, a tropical indolence of soul and body, denied all those pleasures of action and hope in which the life of Europe consists, and turned, not for consolation but for a luxury of despair, to a kind of material Nirvana in which nothing remains of beauty except the memories which it scorns and the verse which describes them : it might have been an Englishman, but it was a Frenchman, Leconte de Lisle. It might have been an Englishman who, in an ' age of drab,' as we have been told, saw the history of the world, perhaps for the last time, as a pageant of splendour and glory : but it was Jos6 Maria de Heredia. And it might have been an Englishman who, in a generation that thinks, perhaps, more of goodness and justice and less of sin and judgment and God than any that has gone before it, gave such utterance to the cry of the sinner in the presence of his Judge and Saviour as recalls the Psalmist and the Publican : but it was Paul Verlaine. These are only instances. Others could be easily INTRODUCTORY 15 given. But they are enough to show that if we disregard French poetry, we are content to be ignorant of some of the things that are best worth knowing about France and about poetry. Well, we have all been awakening during the last year or two to the delightful possibilities that lie in friendship with France. Commercial and political persons are engaged in studying France, and in instructing the rest of us about France. Why may not litera- ture play her part in the alliance? It is not a flourish of rhetoric but a sober and exact truth that a study of a nation's literature is not only one of the best ways of understanding it, but one of the surest ways of acquiring a friendly feeling towards it. No one can give six months of his leisure to French without feeling an increased sym- pathy for France. Here, as in greater matters, perfect knowledge is not far removed from love. To see a man with his own spectacles, to get behind the veil that hides motive and desire, is generally to sympathise with him, at best to love him, at worst to pity him. And it is the same with a people. To know the French, then, we must know their poetry. It is there that for four or five hundred years the soul of France has laid up, not the whole of her hopes and fears, but a very fine frag- ment of them, and the best-preserved of all. And there we can go to see it. Indeed, reading books is just that ; going to see such fragments of them- selves as human beings have been able to give form to, pieces of human clay that have received the shape and colour in which the life of art consists. And the very finest of these fragments are poems. V i6 THE CLAIMS OF FRENCH POETRY at once the profoundest, the most intimate, and the most beautiful, of all written things. Aristotle said that poetry was a greater and more serious thing than history. Well, that is ultimately because it contains more of human life, and human life of a deeper and more permanent quality. No history of the Trojan War could have given us the eternal humanity of the Iliad ; no life of ^Eneas could have revealed the mystery of the human heart, the yearn- ing of a world that had not found rest, as the ^neid reveals them. These and such as these are the supreme achievements of the poets, no doubt : but the law is the same for all. ^Poetry exists only on condition of its humanity. History may be abstract, science may be frankly inhuman, even art may be merely formal ; but poetry must be full of human life.) The poet may give us himself as Milton and" Shelley did, or other people as Homer and Shakspeare, but human beings, human life, human feelings and thoughts, he must give, or he is dead before he is born. He is the voice, not of facts, the most ephemeral of all things, but of faith and desire, of emotions and imaginations, of all those movements of the human mind which are for ever changing but never pass away, by which we recognise each other across the ages and feel ourselves to be members of one spiritual family. That unity is discoverable amid all the diversity of the various members. The diversity is the obvious thing, but the unity is the deeper and truer."^ There is no diversity more obvious than that between the French character and the Eng- lish, or the poetry of France and that of England. INTRODUCTORY 17 Yet the unity is there, hidden only, for the most part, by externals of form and fashion. And the quest of it is the search for the universal and eternal element which is deeper and greater than anything merely national. ENGLISH TASTE AND FRENCH DRAMA ENGLISH TASTE AND FRENCH DRAMA It is recorded of Mr. Gladstone that he confessed to seeing nothing in the masterpieces of Moli^re but third-class plays. This amazing piece of criticism is not merely one more proof of the great Liberal leader's absolute lack of the eye and ear which find their delight in the everlasting human comedy ; it also exhibits, in one who was in so many ways a true representative of his countrymen, an extreme instance of the incapacity of Englishmen to discover great qualities in French verse. 'Except for a moment at the Restoration, English literary opinion has always rather scornfully rejected the claim of French poets to rank among the supreme masters of their art ; and, even at the Restoration, the one voice to whose critical authority we still bow with respect, was again and again raised in bold assertion of the greatness of Shakspeare and Milton, and equally bold denial of French claims on our obedient imitation. Since Wordsworth and the Revolution, English criticism has, in spite of the new birth of Romanticism and all the talent placed at its service, been even more grudging in its admiration. The art of Victor Hugo has had its distinguished en- thusiasts, of course ; but the main current of culti- vated opinion has remained cold, if not contemptuous. 21 22 THE CLAIMS OF FRENCH POETRY And this is not mere ignorance or mere insular arrogance. We know at least as much of French poetry as Frenchmen know of English. Indeed, there is evidence that we know more ; for no one here would think, in writing a book about a French poet, of giving quotations from an English version instead of from the French original, while English poetry can apparently be presented to the French public only in the form of translation, if we may judge by Sainte-Beuve's practice in the Causeries or, to take a more recent instance, that of M. Legouis in his excellent study of Wordsworth, where the Prelude appears in a French dress, as the Task had done before it in Sainte-Beuve. And this seems to be the usual course. The result of this contrast is, of course, that we are in a much better position to judge them than they are to judge us, for no trans- lation of poetry has ever given more than a faint reflection of the original. Nor is our opinion, true or false, the result of our real or imaginary arrogance. The wonderful lucidity of the French intellect, and the great qualities of French prose, with its extraordinary gift for putting things into pointed unforgettable phrases, have nowhere been more unreservedly recognised than in this country. And, if we grant unhesitatingly to Goethe and Heine, to Dante and Ariosto and Leopardi, what we deny to Corneille and Racine, it at least cannot be insular prejudice which grants or denies. What is it, then ? Is it possible for us to explain to a Frenchman, or even to ourselves, what it is which we find wanting in so much of their poetry? To discuss that question fully a whole theory of ENGLISH TASTE AND FRENCH DRAMA 23 poetic art would be necessary. But, without attempt- ing anything of that kind, it may be possible to find some considerations which form an approach to its solution. Infinity is a large word and a vague one ; but, if we refuse to be afraid of it, it will perhaps give us better than any other what seems to an English- man the capital defect of the French poets. / Some one has said that a really great landscape always has an opening in the trees or buildings of its background through which one may gaze over a view distant enough to suggest to the imagination the whole boundless stretch of infinite space. There is just the same law in poetry. The poet in showing the individual must suggest the universal, in speaking of the seen must seem to speak also of the unseen, must deal with time as if he touchea eternity. V There i s— no French poet who does this as Dante and Goethe do it, or as Shakspeare and Milton, x French poetry is too much occupied with saying what it has to say, and saying it with unequalled point and precision. But that is the special business of prose, not of poetry, (it is of the very essence of poetry to suggest a thousand things which it can never say. Its effect, a totally different one to that of the best prose, is produced as much by breathed hints and whispers as by spoken words, as much, one might almost say, by silence as by speech.j It is the weakness of French poetry that it too rarely works in this way : above all it is the weakness of French drama. Whatever idea Corneille and Moliere and Racine set themselves to express is expressed to the full, presented in form after form, looked at from every point of view, — in a word exhausted. And that is almost the same 24 THE CLAIMS OF FRENCH POETRY thing as saying that the ideas of these poets are not in truth, or at any rate not in the highest sense, poetic ideas ; for the highest poetry has always in it something of the infinite, which is that which cannot be exhausted. The French drama leaves on us a sense that the world is a definite comprehensible place, with great events indeed in it, and strong passions, and splendid personalities, but nothing that escapes the reach of the poet's vision. ( The greatest poetry, on the other hand, pictures to us a world which may be a garden of beauty or a desert of sin, but is in either case surrounded by the wonder and mystery of an infinite space into which the keenest eye can penetrate but a very little way.\ The grief of Andromache is great and greatly told as we find it in the verse of Racine. The grief of Lear and Desdemona is beyond all human telling. This can be illustrated in detail. Take, for in- stance, a particular emotion with which many poets have dealt. There are few things more moving to human sympathy than the wish of the dying to be remembered after death. Naturally it has not escaped the great poets. Racine has it in one of the finest and most touching couplets he ever wrote : Parle-lui tous les jours des vertus de son pfere, Et quelquefois aussi parle-lui de sa mfere. So speaks Andromache of Astyanax, believing that she will be dead before many hours are over. Racine rarely produced a line of such intimately human tenderness as the second of these, nor did his art often reach its aim with this consummate simplicity and ease. But hear Shakspeare : ENGLISH TASTE AND FRENCH DRAMA 25 Absent thee from felicity awhile, And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain To tell my story. Is it possible not to feel the difference? Few poets could have given us more of the feelings of Andro- mache than Racine does ; but we have simply no ear for them after listening to Shakspeare. We can think no more of Andromache, for we have heard a voice in which there is an echo of something much deeper, of the whole tragedy of life. The two things are no more comparable than the love of Achilla and Iphigenie is to that of Romeo and Juliet. That is where the difference lies. Infinity, mys- tery, wonder, the unexplained, the inexpl icable, , ' thoughts that do often lie too deep for teai'^;' that is what we find in Homer and the great Greeks, in Dante, Shakspeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Goethe ; and do not find to the same extent in any Frenchman, especially in the classical period^ The poetry of Villon and the Pl^iade is genuine, admirable, delightful ; so is that of La Fontaine ; and so, again, that of Ch^nier in the eighteenth century, and that of Hugo, De Musset, Baudelaire, Heredia, in the nineteenth; but it has never been claimed for any of these, except Ronsard and Hugo, that they should rank with the world-poets, and in Hugo's case, as well as Ronsard's, the claim may only lead to a reaction of quite undeserved oblivion. At any rate, great as Hugo unquestionably is, he is still too near us to be safely accepted as a throned Olympian. The world has never had a poet more certain of immortality than La Fontaine ; but, un- 26 THE CLAIMS OF FRENCH POETRY approachably perfect as he is in his own field, La Fontaine never attempts to rise to the region in- habited by the greatest poets. The claim of France to have given the world a poet of the rank of the eight or ten great men, to whom it is our glory to have contributed two, must at present rest on what it achieved in the classical period. If we put aside Moliere of whom I shall speak presently, the world-poet of France is in fact Corneille or Racine, or it is no one at all. And the question, once put in that form, can only receive one answer from an Englishman, however much pleasure French poetry may have given him. He would almost as soon think of placing Cato or Irene by the side of Macbeth. For it must not be forgotten that we have had a whole series of plays done on the so- called classical lines which have been famous enough in their day, but are now absolutely unread and unreadable. That fate will never overtake the great French tragedies. Their merits are too obvious and of too high an order. Vigour unfailing, inex- haustible eloquence, abundance of dramatic ingen- uity, an unvarying technical perfection such as no Englishman except Milton has ever attained, these are gifts that can never lose their value as long as poetry is a fine art. But assuredly, as long as poetry is a mystery brooding over a mystery, they will not be enough to place their possessor among those mighty men whose feelings after the key to the secret of life have made us think of them as almost divinely inspired. We have something quite different from eloquence or ingenuity in our minds when we think of the ' pii vates et Phoebo digna locuti ' of the great Roman poet. ENGLISH TASTE AND FRENCH DRAMA 27 And that brings me to another point. One can- not quote Virgil in connection with Racine without being reminded that French critics have found a particularly intimate likeness between the two poets. We grant, they say, that Racine cannot ride the whirlwind of life's storms as Shakspeare does, that he is not an original creator on the Shakspearian scale, that we do not find in his plays the whole pellmell of human existence ; but that is not his special task. His place as a world-poet is assured ; but for a parallel to him among his peers in that company we must go, not to the lawless splendours of Shakspeare, not to the grim medisevalism of Dante, but to the classical poets of antiquity, and, above all, to Virgil, the perfect workman, the serene and flawless artist. It may be that Ph^dre will never interest the world as Lady Macbeth does ; but it is equally true that ^neas will not compare with Achilles as a hero. Yet the perfection of Virgil is allowed to atone for his dramatic weak- ness. Why is not the same measure meted to Racine ? This really brings us back to the question of what is the essential quality of poetry claiming to be the very highest. We say that Virgil has it and Racine has not. What is it ? And there is a cognate ques- tion. Is it the fact, as the French think, that the difference between Shakspeare and Racine is the difference between the classical manner and the modern or romantic? What is the fundamental excellence in style of the great Greeks and Romans ? These are not easy questions ; but a word may be said about them. It is obvious that Racine imi- 28 THE CLAIMS OF FRENCH POETRY tated the formal and external features of ancient drama, and that Shakspeare did not. And, in spite of the discredit into which the once famous ' unities ' are now fallen, I think it is certain that Racine stumbled, as it were, half by accident into great advantages by doing so. The unities of time and place are of no importance in themselves ; but they help to bring about the other which is. The most absolute of all conditions of vitality for a work of art, of whatever kind, is unity of action or interest. The picture must have a central subject dominating the canvas, the musical composition a dominant theme, the poem or play a principal personage or train of events to which all else is strictly sub- ordinate. Minor subjects have no place in any art except as heightening the central effect by means of illustration or contrast. Now, Shakspeare often sins in this matter, while Racine never does. And it is one of real importance. Let the Electra of Sophocles, for instance, be read at the same time as Antony and Cleopatra, and no one who has kept himself 'on this side idolatry' about Shakspeare will deny that his art has no chance beside that of Sophocles. In the Electra the reader's attention is never diverted from the business of the play and the people who carry it on. The interest is unflag- ging, because the unity is sustained. In Antony and Cleopatra, on the other hand, we are lost in an incoherent crowd of miscellaneous nobodies, for whose very identity we must be constantly turning back to the list of dramatis persona. This does not happen, it is true, in Shakspeare's greatest tragedies ; in fact, they would not be so great if it did. But ENGLISH TASTE AND FRENCH DRAMA 29 that it is possible for it to happen at all is as serious a drawback to his art as a whole, as the total im- possibility of anything of the kind in Racine's scheme is a real and serious advantage to the French poet. So far Racine really belongs to the company of the great classics and Shakspeare does not. But if we go further? Even in another technical question, that of metre, what can be less like the ease and freedom of the iambic of Sophocles, the mobility of the Homeric hexameter, the subtle and exquisite harmonies of Virgil, than the monotonous beat of the rhymed couplet of Racine? Is it not obvious that as soon as Shak- speare had accepted Marlowe's blank verse as also his, his to develop and perfect, he was in possession of a metre which is as essentially like the great metres of antiquity as the rhymed couplet, whether French or English, is unlike them ? The English blank verse, like the hexameter of Homer, has the myriad lights and motions of the sea. Nothing less can give the infinite variety of human life. Every- thing can be got into it, the lazy serenity of life's summer days, its true peace and its treacherous, the sweep and fury of its storms, the heavy groaning of its after groundswell. What chance does a rhymed couplet, even managed with all Racine's ingenuity, stand by the side of this ? The sea itself would lose all its charm if its waves broke always in pairs of equal sound and weight. The truth is surely that there is a particular purpose for which the rhymed couplet is an admir- able metre, indeed the best of all. But that purpose is neither the epic nor the drama. How is it that 30 THE CLAIMS OF FRENCH POETRY we read Pope's Satires, and Dryden's, and Johnson's, with enthusiasm still, while we never touch Irene and rarely the Conquest of Granada! How is it that Moliere is a poet of all the world, Racine only of the French? Is it not because the metre lives where it is in essential harmony with the poet's subject? The business of satire is wit and point and epigram. There never was a metre which lent itself to this business as Pope's couplet does. The original iambus invented for purposes of satire can never have been comparable with it. A very poor point passes for an epigram when helped out by the rhyme ; while real poetry set into that metre is too often lost sight of in the glitter of the couplet. In this matter of metre, then, it is not with Racine but with Shakspeare that the affinity to the clasgics lies. And when we pass from technical questions to the spiritual part of poetry the English poet has a still clearer advantage. The distinguishing mark of the classical poet, ancient or modern, is that he gives us the impression of being on such an eminence as that his vision takes in the whole of life. His treat- ment of his theme suggests a wider outlook over life's variety, a deeper sympathy penetrating further into life's secret places, above all a more funda- mentally poetic conception of what life means than lesser men, even genuine poets, can attain. In a word, his view of humanity is wide, intimate, poetic. Will any Frenchman be found to say that it is prejudice which asserts that Racine's view of the world is not wide, as Homer's, Goethe's, Shak- speare's, is not intimate as theirs is, is not poetic as theirs? Is it very bold to say that his outlook is ENGLISH TASTE AND FRENCH DRAMA 31 that of a court, his depth that of society, the ' subtle heightening ' which he applies to his subject that of rhetoric rather than that of poetry ? One opens Dante and finds everywhere such things as : Esce di mano a lui che la vagheggia, Prima che sia, a guisa di fanciulla, Che piangendo e ridendo pargoleggia, L' anima semplicetta, che sa nulla, Salvo che, mossa da lieto fattore, Volentier torna a ci6 che la trastulla. One opens Goethe almost at random and comes upon : Dem Herrlichsten, was auch der Geist empfangen, Drangt itnmer fremd und fremder Stoff sich an : Wenn wir zum Guten dieser Welt gelangen, Dann heisst das Bessre Trug and Wahn. Die uns das Leben gaben, herrliche Gefiihle, Erstarren in dem irdischen Gewuhle : One opens Sophocles and he gives us : redv, Zev, bvvaxriv tls avhpSyv virtp^aaLa xardtrp^oi ; Tav ovff vnvos alpet ito6' 6 Trdvr' ayptviov, oijTC 0€a>v OKapaTOi l^^ves, ayi]pa>s fie \p6v