CONTEMPORARY FRENCH POETS. II. DECADENTS AND SYMBOLISTS. There is a sense in which Hugo is the father of modern French poetry, but his descendants have been less dutiful than admiring so that in the last generation he seems rather to bar the current of poetic evolution than to divert or guide it. Hugo's poetic children bear the print of his outward features, but they do not inherit his hopeful courage. Much of their work is of great beauty, and its remarkable variety is of significance in any effort to comprehend the past and to foreshadow the near future of French literary genius, and intellectual life. Yet through all, or almost all, of their writing we may trace beneath the mask of Hugo's rhetoric and prosody the spirit of Sainte-Beuve and Taine. Pessimism, violent, gloomy, sad, or frivolous and hedonistic, is the colored thread that runs through the warp and woof of fin de siècle verse both among the Parnassian artists for art and in the decadent or deliquescent schools of Symbolism. The first lyric expression of Romanticism had been fundamentally egoistic and individualized. This is characteristic of Lamartine, of Hugo, and of de Musset. But as the movement spent its first force two divergent tendencies checked and modified its self-confident liberty. First the socialistic theories that we connect with the names of Fourier and Saint-Simon undermined the political basis of individualism. A discontented or at least a restless mental state succeeded to the hopeful energy of 1830 after the collapse of the Republic of 1848. This generous discontent found its reflection in the sombre, self-centred, yet purposeful poetry of de Vigny. On the other hand the æsthetic liberties of the Romanticists, the wanton gambols of individualism in metre and language led inevitably to a reaction, and the exaggerated appreciation of poetic form found its completest expression in Gautier. These two forces acted together or apart on all forms of literature, but in prose fiction they were for a time dominated by the genius of Balzac and by the scientific determinism or scepticism of Taine and Renan, and in the drama their action is obscured, at least in the strongest work, by the subordination of art to social ethics. The two tendencies appear most plainly in poetry where the traditions of de Vigny are nobly upborne by the Parnassians, while in Banville one can already trace the incipient decadence toward art for artificiality of the school of Gautier, the labored futility of whose poetry Banville best reflects in the substance of his verses, though in outward form and rhyme he illustrates and elaborates the theories of Sainte-Beuve. In a posthumous essay Banville has described himself as a follower of the Graces of old Greece, while the contemporaries of his later years seemed to him worshippers of the newer graces, Absinthe, Nevrose, and Morphine. In claiming this classical affiliation the poet wished to class himself with those Parnassians who took Hugo for their master in prosody and rhetorical form, while in their hedonistic ethics and in their passionless objectivity they followed Gautier. The very titles of his earlier volumes1 suggest their impassive nature. From the very outset he appears as a poet of a disillusioned age, a product of the corroding spirit of determinism in philosophy and the cynical materialism of the Second Empire. He shows no faith save in his senses and the joy they bring, the delight of eye and ear, the harmony of color and sound. He suffered neither anxious thought nor unreasoning passion to ruffle his serene calm. Like Gautier, Banville wrote a great mass of critical but. ephemeral feuilletons, some equally ephemeral dramas and 1 Banville was born 1823 and died 1891. Œuvres, 8 vols., 1873-8, and Dernières poésies, 1893. Chronology of the chief collections: Cariatides,. 1842; Stalactites, 1846; Odelettes, 1856; Odes funambulesques, 1857; Nouvelles odes funambulesques, 1869; Idyles prussiennes, 1871. Dramas: Gringoire, 1866; Socrate et sa femme, 1885. Fiction: Contes féeriques,. an essay on prosody that won him the title "Legislator of Parnassus". He wrote also many prose tales, but the best of these ring false in spite of their melodious warmth, and the laxity of their morals mars the delicate grace of their style, for there is a violation of essential congruity when the characters of the "Comédie Humaine" are dressed in fairy gauze. But it is as a poet alone that Banville survives, and it is his poetry alone that merits special study. We should expect of a poet who schools himself to hide the emotions that survive his philosophy that the lyric note of personal experience would be subordinated to the feelings common to humanity or to descriptive reproductions of nature and legend as they appear in the posthumous poems of de Vigny. But in Banville the substance tends more and more with each succeeding collection to become subordinate to form, more and more rhyme becomes the chosen field for the display of his virtuosity. He revives the artificial stanzas of the fourteenth century, the rondeau, the triolet and the rest, and even betters the instruction, dancing in his "Odes funambulesques", true "Tight-rope Odes", on the wire he has stretched for his muse with an easy assurance that arouses a sort of amused admiration for these trifling odelettes, frivolous and fanciful, yet in their kind of great excellence. It is no small thing in an age sicklied o'er with naturalism to preserve an inexhaustible flow of gaiety, though it be empty, to write, as Lemaitre wittily puts it, with the one idea of expressing no idea. Banville confesses ingenuously that his ambition is to ally the buffoon element to the lyric, while rigorously adhering to the form of the ode, and to obtain, as in a true lyric, his impression, comic or otherwise, by combinations of rhymes and harmonious or peculiar effects of sound. He is convinced that the musical effect of verse can awaken what it will in the reader's mind," and even create that supernatural and divine thing, laughter", Scènes de la vie de Paris, 1859. Criticism: Traité de la poésie française, 1872. Critical articles on Banville: Lemaitre, Contemporains, i., 7, and Nineteenth Century, August, 1891. B as well as "joy, enthusiastic emotion and beauty". Thus he approaches Wagner's theory of a music drama, though our poet is more modest in his aspirations and indeed only carries to its extreme a device practised in all ages of French verse, by Villon as well as Piron, and by none more than by his favorite, Ronsard. The gift of musical speech was his from the first. Several poems of his youthful "Cariatides" sing themselves into the ear with strange melody and others among his satiric verses have a curious metallic quality that foreshadows his future mastery. But the elaboration of many of the later chants royaux and virelais must always be caviare to most readers. In these wrestlings between the subject and the intricate rhyme, the former, even if like Jacob it come off victor, is almost sure to have a sinew shrivelled in the contest. Yet it is interesting to note that while this will-o'-the-wisp rhyme is leading the poet's fancy where it will, the very phantasmagoria that it evokes have their charm. Our curiosity is excited as we watch the poet winding himself out of his own labyrinth; yes, this very difficulty gives a fillip to his own imagination and at times reveals to him unexpected flowers of preciosity. Such an art of poetry is hardly adapted to serious subjects of any kind. His satires are mocking vers de société or laments that pleasures must be bought that should be given. Often his thought takes the form of parody of some popular piece or style, or, perhaps, like some busy bee of humor, he builds an elaborate fabric of formal nonsense where the wit lurks in grotesque juxtapositions, fantastic figures, serious verses upset by some impertinent bit of slang, the promise of wisdom ending in ludicrous commonplace, all clothed in teasing rhymes and lit up with countless puns. Twice only was Banville betrayed into serious emotion, not much to his poetic advantage. Toward the 1 E. g. "Confession" and the second part of the "Songe d'hiver." E. g. the sixth part of "Ceux qui meurent et ceux qui combattent". La Malédiction de Vénus. 3 E. g. 1 close of the Empire the counsellors of Napoleon were made the butts for the poisoned darts of his satire, and during the siege of Paris the bitterness of unreasoning hate overflowed in his "Idylles prussiennes". But in his normal mood Banville much prefers Greek mythology to modern politics and finds his favorite subjects in the Renaissance or in the picturesque aspects of literary and artistic Bohemia. The gaiety of nocturnal Paris tricked out in its gauzy spangles has also its charm for him, and so indeed has anything that is quite aside from the every-day life and duties of Philistia, for which, as for its laureate Scribe, he had a deep and life-long aversion. Here he is most at home, and paints exquisite pictures whose clear-cut outlines rival the brilliancy of their color, whose every phrase thrills with the joy of art and beauty. He is more the artist for art than even Gautier, for he has not a trace of that arrière pensée of death that haunts the mediævalized mind of the author of "Albertus". Indeed, Banville is the most thorough pagan of all the moderns, light-hearted even to his septuagenarian end, and leaving behind him as the sum of his ephemeral wisdom the beneficent lines: La planète est vieille, mais Banville's easy cheerfulness, his unruffled optimism that E. g. La Voie lactée, Clymène, Le Jugement de Paris. The last is the most elaborate, but all are frigid. E. g. among descriptive pieces, L'Exil des dieux, Le Banquet des dieux, Le Sanglier, Le Mort d'amour, La Fleur de sang, La Rose; among the humorous and gay, Eldorado, En habit zinzolin, and the Odelette à Méry; as a model of metrical art the last four lines of Carmen: Il faut à l'hexamètre, ainsi qu'aux purs arceaux Des églises du nord et des palais arabes, Le calme pour pouvoir dérouler les anneaux Noteworthy also are the ten lines that immediately follow, beginning: |