"Prince, let us leave the din, the dust, the spite,
The gloom and glare of towns, the plague, the blight;
Amid the forest leaves and fountain spray
There is the mystic home of our delight,
And through the dim wood Dian thrids her way."
The piece is characteristic of M. De Banville's genius. Through his
throng of operatic nixies and sylphs of the ballet the cold Muse
sometimes passes, strange, but not unfriendly. He, for his part, has
never degraded the beautiful forms of old religion to make the laughing-
stock of fools. His little play, _Diane au Bois_, has grace, and
gravity, and tenderness like the tenderness of Keats, for the failings of
immortals. "The gods are jealous exceedingly if any goddess takes a
mortal man to her paramour, as Demeter chose Iasion." The least that
mortal poets can do is to show the Olympians an example of toleration.
"Les Cariatides" have delayed us too long. They are wonderfully varied,
vigorous, and rich, and full of promise in many ways. The promise has
hardly been kept. There is more seriousness in "Les Stalactites" (1846),
it is true, but then there is less daring. There is one morsel that must
be quoted,--a fragment fashioned on the air and the simple words that
used to waken the musings of George Sand when she was a child, dancing
with the peasant children:
"Nous n'irons plus an bois: les lauries sont coupes,
Les amours des bassins, les naiades en groupe
Voient reluire au soleil, en cristaux decoupes
Les flots silencieux qui coulaient de leur coupe,
Les lauriers sont coupes et le cerf aux abois
Tressaille au son du cor: nous n'irons plus au bois!
Ou des enfants joueurs riait la folle troupe
Parmi les lys d'argent aux pleurs du ciel trempes,
Voici l'herbe qu'on fauche et les lauriers qu'on coupe;
Nous n'irons plus au bois; les lauriers sont coupes."
In these days Banville, like Gerard de Nerval in earlier times,
RONSARDISED. The poem 'A la Font Georges,' full of the memories of
childhood, sweet and rich with the air and the hour of sunset, is written
in a favourite metre of Ronsard's. Thus Ronsard says in his lyrical
version of five famous lines of Homer--
"La gresle ni la neige
N'ont tels lieux pour leur siege
Ne la foudre oncques la
Ne devala."
(The snow, and wind, and hail
May never there prevail,
Nor thunderbolt doth fall,
Nor rain at all.)
De Banville chose this metre, rapid yet melancholy, with its sad emphatic
cadence in the fourth line, as the vehicle of his childish memories:
"O champs pleins de silence,
Ou mon heureuse enfance
Avait des jours encor
Tout files d'or!"
O ma vieille Font Georges,
Vers qui les rouges-gorges
Et le doux rossignol
Prenaient leur vol!
So this poem of the fountain of youth begins, "tout file d'or," and
closes when the dusk is washed with silver--
"A l'heure ou sous leurs voiles
Les tremblantes etoiles
Brodent le ciel changeant
De fleurs d'argent."
The "Stalactites" might detain one long, but we must pass on after
noticing an unnamed poem which is the French counterpart of Keats' "Ode
to a Greek Urn":
"Qu'autour du vase pur, trop beau pour la Bacchante,
La verveine, melee a des feuilles d'acanthe,
Fleurisse, et que plus bas des vierges lentement
S'avancent deux a deux, d'un pas sur et charmant,
Les bras pendants le long de leurs tuniques droites
Et les cheyeux tresses sur leurs tetes etroites."
In the same volume of the definite series of poems come "Les Odelettes,"
charming lyrics, one of which, addressed to Theophile Gautier, was
answered in the well-known verses called "L'Art." If there had been any
rivalry between the writers, M. De Banville would hardly have cared to
print Gautier's "Odelette" beside his own. The tone of it is infinitely
more manly: one seems to hear a deep, decisive voice replying to tones
far less sweet and serious. M. De Banville revenged himself nobly in
later verses addressed to Gautier, verses which criticise the genius of
that workman better, we think, than anything else that has been written
of him in prose or rhyme.
The less serious poems of De Banville are, perhaps, the better known in
this country. His feats of graceful metrical gymnastics have been
admired by every one who cares for skill pure and simple. "Les Odes
Funambulesques" and "Les Occidentales" are like ornamental skating. The
author moves in many circles and cuts a hundred fantastic figures with a
perfect ease and smoothness. At the same time, naturally, he does not
advance nor carry his readers with him in any direction. "Les Odes
Funambulesques" were at first unsigned. They appeared in journals and
magazines, and, as M. de Banville applied the utmost lyrical skill to
light topics of the moment, they were the most popular of "Articles de
Paris." One must admit that they bore the English reader, and by this
time long _scholia_ are necessary for the enlightenment even of the
Parisian student. The verses are, perhaps, the "bird-chorus" of French
life, but they have not the permanent truth and delightfulness of the
"bird-chorus" in Aristophanes. One has easily too much of the Carnival,
the masked ball, the _debardeurs_, and the _pierrots_. The people at
whom M. De Banville laughed are dead and forgotten. There was a certain
M. Paul Limayrac of those days, who barked at the heels of Balzac, and
other great men, in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_. In his honour De
Banville wrote a song which parodied all popular aspirations to be a
flower. M. Limayrac was supposed to have become a blossom:
"Sur les coteaux et dans les landes
Voltigeant comme un oiseleur
Buloz en ferait des guirlandes
Si Limayrac devenait fleur!"
There is more of high spirits than of wit in the lyric, which became as
popular as our modern invocation of Jingo, the god of battles. It
chanced one night that M. Limayrac appeared at a masked ball in the opera-
house. He was recognised by some one in the crowd. The turbulent waltz
stood still, the music was silent, and the dancers of every hue howled at
the critic
"Si Paul Limayrac devenait fleur!"
Fancy a British reviewer, known as such to the British public, and
imagine that public taking a lively interest in the feuds of men of
letters! Paris, to be sure, was more or less of a university town thirty
years ago, and the students were certain to be largely represented at the
ball.
The "Odes Funambulesques" contain many examples of M. De Banville's skill
in reviving old forms of verse--_triolets_, _rondeaux_, _chants royaux_,
and _ballades_. Most of these were composed for the special annoyance of
M. Buloz, M. Limayrac, and a M. Jacquot who called himself De Mirecourt.
The _rondeaux_ are full of puns in the refrain: "Houssaye ou c'est; lyre,
l'ire, lire," and so on, not very exhilarating. The _pantoum_, where
lines recur alternately, was borrowed from the distant Malay; but
primitive _pantoum_, in which the last two lines of each stanza are the
first two of the next, occur in old French folk-song. The popular trick
of repetition, affording a rest to the memory of the singer, is perhaps
the origin of all refrains. De Banville's later satires are directed
against permanent objects of human indignation--the little French
debauchee, the hypocritical friend of reaction, the bloodthirsty
_chauviniste_. Tired of the flashy luxury of the Empire, his memory goes
back to his youth--
"Lorsque la levre de l'aurore
Baisait nos yeux souleves,
Et que nous n'etions pas encore
La France des petits creves."
The poem "Et Tartufe" prolongs the note of a satire always popular in
France--the satire of Scarron, Moliere, La Bruyere, against the clerical
curse of the nation. The Roman Question was Tartufe's stronghold at the
moment. "French interests" demanded that Italy should be headless.
"Et Tartufe? Il nous dit entre deux cremus
Que pour tout bon Francais l'empire est a Rome,
Et qu'ayant pour aieux Romulus et Remus
Nous tetterons la louve a jamais--le pauvre homme."
The new Tartufe worships St. Chassepot, who once, it will not be
forgotten, "wrought miracles"; but he has his doubts as to the morality
of explosive bullets. The nymph of modern warfare is addressed as she
hovers above the Geneva Convention,--
"Quoi, nymphe du canon raye,
Tu montres ces pudeurs risibles
Et ce petit air effraye
Devant les balles exploisibles?"
De Banville was for long almost alone among poets in his freedom from
_Weltschmerz_, from regret and desire for worlds lost or impossible. In
the later and stupider corruption of the Empire, sadness and anger began
to vex even his careless muse. She had piped in her time to much wild
dancing, but could not sing to a waltz of mushroom speculators and
decorated capitalists. "Le Sang de la Coupe" contains a very powerful
poem, "The Curse of Venus," pronounced on Paris, the city of pleasure,
which has become the city of greed. This verse is appropriate to our own
commercial enterprise:
"Vends les bois ou dormaient Viviane et Merlin!
L'Aigle de mont n'est fait que pour ta gibeciere;
La neige vierge est la pour fournir ta glaciere;
Le torrent qui bondit sur le roc sybillin,
Et vole, diamant, neige, ecume et poussiere,
N'est plus bon qu'a tourner tes meules de moulin!"
In the burning indignation of this poem, M. De Banville reaches his
highest mark of attainment. "Les Exiles" is scarcely less impressive.
The outcast gods of Hellas, wandering in a forest of ancient Gaul, remind
one at once of the fallen deities of Heine, the decrepit Olympians of
Bruno, and the large utterance of Keats's "Hyperion." Among great
exiles, Victor Hugo, "le pere la-bas dans l'ile," is not forgotten:
"Et toi qui l'accueillis, sol libre et verdoyant,
Qui prodigues les fleurs sur tes coteaux fertiles,
Et qui sembles sourire a l'ocean bruyant,
Sois benie, ile verte, entre toutes les iles."
The hoarsest note of M. De Banville's lyre is that discordant one struck
in the "Idylles Prussiennes." One would not linger over poetry or prose
composed during the siege, in hours of shame and impotent scorn. The
poet sings how the sword, the flashing Durendal, is rusted and broken,
how victory is to him--
" . . . qui se cela
Dans un trou, sous la terre noire."
He can spare a tender lyric to the memory of a Prussian officer, a lad of
eighteen, shot dead through a volume of Pindar which he carried in his
tunic.
It is impossible to leave the poet of gaiety and good-humour in the mood
of the prisoner in besieged Paris. His "Trente Six Ballades Joyeuses"
make a far more pleasant subject for a last word. There is scarcely a
more delightful little volume in the French language than this collection
of verses in the most difficult of forms, which pour forth, with absolute
ease and fluency, notes of mirth, banter, joy in the spring, in letters,
art, and good-fellowship.
"L'oiselet retourne aux forets;
Je suis un poete lyrique,"--
he cries, with a note like a bird's song. Among the thirty-six every one
will have his favourites. We venture to translate the "Ballad de
Banville":
"AUX ENFANTS PERDUS
"I know Cythera long is desolate;
I know the winds have stripped the garden green.
Alas, my friends! beneath the fierce sun's weight
A barren reef lies where Love's flowers have been,
Nor ever lover on that coast is seen!
So be it, for we seek a fabled shore,
To lull our vague desires with mystic lore,
To wander where Love's labyrinths, beguile;
There let us land, there dream for evermore:
'It may be we shall touch the happy isle.'
"The sea may be our sepulchre. If Fate,
If tempests wreak their wrath on us, serene
We watch the bolt of Heaven, and scorn the hate
Of angry gods that smite us in their spleen.
Perchance the jealous mists are but the screen
That veils the fairy coast we would explore.
Come, though the sea be vexed, and breakers roar,
Come, for the breath of this old world is vile,
Haste we, and toil, and faint not at the oar;
'It may be we shall touch the happy isle.'
"Grey serpents trail in temples desecrate
Where Cypris smiled, the golden maid, the queen,
And ruined is the palace of our state;
But happy loves flit round the mast, and keen
The shrill wind sings the silken cords between.
Heroes are we, with wearied hearts and sore,
Whose flower is faded and whose locks are hoar.
Haste, ye light skiffs, where myrtle thickets smile;
Love's panthers sleep 'mid roses, as of yore:
'It may be we shall touch the happy isle.'