"Prince, where leaves murmur of the May,
A tree of bitter clusters grows;
The bodies of men dead are they!
_This is King Louis' orchard close_!
Poor Gringoire has no sooner committed himself, than he is made to
recognise the terrible king. He pleads that, if he must join the ghastly
army of the dead, he ought, at least, to be allowed to finish his supper.
This the king grants, and in the end, after Gringoire has won the heart
of the heroine, he receives his life and a fair bride with a full dowry.
_Gringoire_ is a play very different from M. De Banville's other dramas,
and it is not included in the pretty volume of "Comedies" which closes
the Lemerre series of his poems. The poet has often declared, with an
iteration which has been parodied by M. Richepin, that "comedy is the
child of the ode," and that a drama without the "lyric" element is
scarcely a drama at all. While comedy retains either the choral ode in
its strict form, or its representative in the shape of lyric enthusiasm
(_le lyrisme_), comedy is complete and living. _Gringoire_, to our mind,
has plenty of lyric enthusiasm; but M. De Banville seems to be of a
different opinion. His republished "Comedies" are more remote from
experience than _Gringoire_, his characters are ideal creatures, familiar
types of the stage, like Scapin and "le beau Leandre," or ethereal
persons, or figures of old mythology, like Diana in _Diane au Bois_, and
Deidamia in the piece which shows Achilles among women. M. De Banville's
dramas have scarcely prose enough in them to suit the modern taste. They
are masques for the delicate diversion of an hour, and it is not in the
nature of things that they should rival the success of blatant
buffooneries. His earliest pieces--_Le Feuilleton d'Aristophane_ (acted
at the Odeon, Dec. 26th, 1852), and _Le Cousin du Roi_ (Odeon, April 4th,
1857)--were written in collaboration with Philoxene Boyer, a generous but
indiscreet patron of singers.
"Dans les salons de Philoxene
Nous etions quatre-vingt rimeurs,"
M. De Banville wrote, parodying the "quatre-vingt ramuers" of Victor
Hugo. The memory of M. Boyer's enthusiasm for poetry and his amiable
hospitality are not unlikely to survive both his compositions and those
in which M. De Banville aided him. The latter poet began to walk alone
as a playwright in _Le Beau Leandre_ (Vaudeville, 1856)--a piece with
scarcely more substance than the French scenes in the old Franco-Italian
drama possess. We are taken into an impossible world of gay
non-morality, where a wicked old bourgeois, Orgon, his daughter
Colombine, a pretty flirt, and her lover Leandre, a light-hearted scamp,
bustle through their little hour. Leandre, who has no notion of being
married, says, "Le ciel n'est pas plus pur que mes intentions." And the
artless Colombine replies, "Alors marions-nous!" To marry Colombine
without a dowry forms, as a modern novelist says, "no part of Leandre's
profligate scheme of pleasure." There is a sort of treble intrigue.
Orgon wants to give away Colombine dowerless, Leandre to escape from the
whole transaction, and Colombine to secure her _dot_ and her husband. The
strength of the piece is the brisk action in the scene when Leandre
protests that he can't rob Orgon of his only daughter, and Orgon insists
that he can refuse nothing except his ducats to so charming a son-in-law.
The play is redeemed from sordidness by the costumes. Leandre is dressed
in the attire of Watteau's "L'Indifferent" in the Louvre, and wears a
diamond-hilted sword. The lady who plays the part of Colombine may
select (delightful privilege!) the prettiest dress in Watteau's
collection.
This love of the glitter of the stage is very characteristic of De
Banville. In his _Deidamie_ (Odeon, Nov. 18th, 1876) the players who
took the roles of Thetis, Achilles, Odysseus, Deidamia, and the rest,
were accoutred in semi-barbaric raiment and armour of the period
immediately preceding the Graeco-Phoenician (about the eighth century
B.C.). Again we notice the touch of pedantry in the poet. As for the
play, the sombre thread in it is lent by the certainty of Achilles' early
death, the fate which drives him from Deidamie's arms, and from the sea
king's isle to the leagues under the fatal walls of Ilion. Of comic
effect there is plenty, for the sisters of Deidamie imitate all the acts
by which Achilles is likely to betray himself--grasp the sword among the
insidious presents of Odysseus, when he seizes the spear, and drink each
one of them a huge beaker of wine to the confusion of the Trojans. {70}
On a Parisian audience the imitations of the tone of the Odyssey must
have been thrown away. For example, here is a passage which is as near
being Homeric as French verse can be. Deidamie is speaking in a
melancholy mood:
"Heureux les epoux rois assis dans leur maison,
Qui voient tranquillement s'enfuir chaque saison--
L'epoux tenant son sceptre, environne de gloire,
Et l'epouse filant sa quenouille d'ivoire!
Mais le jeune heros que, la glaive a son franc!
Court dans le noir combat, les mains teintes de sang,
Laisse sa femme en pleurs dans sa haute demeure."
With the accustomed pedantry, M. De Banville, in the scene of the
banquet, makes the cup-bearer go round dealing out a little wine, with
which libation is made, and then the feast goes on in proper Homeric
fashion. These overwrought details are forgotten in the parting scenes,
where Deidamie takes what she knows to be her last farewell of Achilles,
and girds him with his sword:
"La lame de l'epee, en sa forme divine
Est pareille a la feuille austere du laurier!"
Let it be noted that each of M. De Banville's more serious plays ends
with the same scene, with slight differences. In _Florise_ (never put on
the stage) the wandering actress of Hardy's troupe leaves her lover, the
young noble, and the shelter of his castle, to follow where art and her
genius beckon her. In _Diane au Bois_ the goddess "that leads the
precise life" turns her back on Eros, who has subdued even her, and
passes from the scene as she waves her hand in sign of a farewell
ineffably mournful. Nearer tragedy than this M. De Banville does not
care to go; and if there is any deeper tragedy in scenes of blood and in
stages strewn with corpses, from that he abstains. His _Florise_ is
perhaps too long, perhaps too learned; and certainly we are asked to
believe too much when a kind of etherealised Consuelo is set before us as
the _prima donna_ of old Hardy's troupe:
"Mais Florise n'est pas une femme. Je suis
L'harmonieuse voix que berce vos ennuis;
Je suis la lyre aux sons divers que le poete
Fait resonner et qui sans lui serait muette--
Une comedienne enfin. Je ne suis pas
Une femme."
An actress who was not a woman had little to do in the company of
Scarron's Angelique and Mademoiselle de l'Estoile. Florise, in short, is
somewhat too allegorical and haughty a creature; while Colombine and
Nerine (Vaudeville, June 1864) are rather tricksy imps than women of
flesh and blood. M. De Banville's stage, on the whole, is one of glitter
and fantasy; yet he is too much a Greek for the age that appreciates "la
belle Helene," too much a lyric dramatist to please the contemporaries of
Sardou; he lends too much sentiment and dainty refinement to characters
as flimsy as those of Offenbach's drama.
Like other French poets, M. De Banville has occasionally deigned to write
_feuilletons_ and criticisms. Not many of these scattered leaves are
collected, but one volume, "La Mer de Nice" (Poulet-Malassis et De
Broise, Paris, 1861), may be read with pleasure even by jealous admirers
of Gautier's success as a chronicler of the impressions made by southern
scenery.
To De Banville (he does not conceal it) a journey to a place so far from
Paris as the Riviera was no slight labour. Even from the roses, the
palms, the siren sea, the wells of water under the fronds of maiden-hair
fern, his mind travels back wistfully to the city of his love.
"I am, I have always been, one of those devotees of Paris who visit
Greece only when they gaze on the face, so fair and so terrible, of the
twice-victorious Venus of the Louvre. One of those obstinate adorers of
my town am I, who will never see Italy, save in the glass that reflects
the tawny hair of Titian's Violante, or in that dread isle of Alcinous
where Lionardo shows you the mountain peaks that waver in the blue behind
the mysterious Monna Lisa. But the Faculty of Physicians, which has, I
own, the right to be sceptical, does not believe that neuralgia can be
healed by the high sun which Titian and Veronese have fixed on the
canvas. To me the Faculty prescribes the real sun of nature and of life;
and here am I, condemned to learn in suffering all that passes in the
mind of a poet of Paris exiled from that blessed place where he finds the
Cyclades and the islands blossoming, the vale of Avalon, and all the
heavenly homes of the fairies of experience and desire."
Nice is Tomi to this Ovid, but he makes the best of it, and sends to the
editor of the _Moniteur_ letters much more diverting than the "Tristia."
To tell the truth, he never overcomes his amazement at being out of Paris
streets, and in a glade of the lower Alps he loves to be reminded of his
dear city of pleasure. Only under the olives of Monaco, those solemn and
ancient trees, he feels what surely all men feel who walk at sunset
through their shadow--the memory of a mysterious twilight of agony in an
olive garden.
"Et ceux-ci, les pales oliviers, n'est-ce pas de ces heures desolees ou,
comme torture supreme, le Sauveur acceptait en son ame l'irreparable
misere du doute, n'est-ce pas alors qu'il ont appris de lui a courber le
front sous le poids imperieux des souvenirs?"
The pages which M. De Banville consecrates to the Villa Sardou, where
Rachel died, may disenchant, perhaps, some readers of Mr. Matthew
Arnold's sonnet. The scene of Rachel's death has been spoiled by
"improvements" in too theatrical taste. All these notes, however, were
made many years ago; and visitors of the Riviera, though they will find
the little book charming where it speaks of seas and hills, will learn
that France has greatly changed the city which she has annexed. As a
practical man and a Parisian, De Banville has printed (pp. 179-81) a
recipe for the concoction of the Marseilles dish, _bouillabaisse_, the
mess that Thackeray's ballad made so famous. It takes genius, however,
to cook _bouillabaisse_; and, to parody what De Banville says about his
own recipe for making a mechanical "ballade," "en employment ce moyen, on
est sur de faire une mauvaise, irremediablement mauvaise
_bouillabaisse_." The poet adds the remark that "une bouillabaisse
reussie vaut un sonnet sans defaut."
There remains one field of M. De Banville's activity to be shortly
described. Of his "Emaux Parisiens," short studies of celebrated
writers, we need say no more than that they are written in careful prose.
M. De Banville is not only a poet, but in his "Petit Traite de Poesie
Francaise" (Bibliotheque de l'Echo de la Sorbonne, s.d.) a teacher of the
mechanical part of poetry. He does not, of course, advance a paradox
like that of Baudelaire, "that poetry can be taught in thirty lessons."
He merely instructs his pupil in the material part--the scansion, metres,
and so on--of French poetry. In this little work he introduces these
"traditional forms of verse," which once caused some talk in England: the
_rondel_, _rondeau_, _ballade,_ _villanelle_, and _chant royal_. It may
be worth while to quote his testimony as to the merit of these modes of
expression. "This cluster of forms is one of our most precious
treasures, for each of them forms a rhythmic whole, complete and perfect,
while at the same time they all possess the fresh and unconscious grace
which marks the productions of primitive times." Now, there is some
truth in this criticism; for it is a mark of man's early ingenuity, in
many arts, to seek complexity (where you would expect simplicity), and
yet to lend to that complexity an infantine naturalness. One can see
this phenomenon in early decorative art, and in early law and custom, and
even in the complicated structure of primitive languages. Now, just as
early, and even savage, races are our masters in the decorative use of
colour and of carving, so the nameless master-singers of ancient France
may be our teachers in decorative poetry, the poetry some call _vers de
societe_. Whether it is possible to go beyond this, and adapt the old
French forms to serious modern poetry, it is not for any one but time to
decide. In this matter, as in greater affairs, _securus judicat orbis
terrarum_. For my own part I scarcely believe that the revival would
serve the nobler ends of English poetry. Now let us listen again to De
Banville.
"In the _rondel_, as in the _rondeau_ and the _ballade_, all the art is
to bring in the refrain without effort, naturally, gaily, and each time
with novel effect and with fresh light cast on the central idea." Now,
you can _teach_ no one to do that, and M. De Banville never pretends to
give any recipes for cooking _rondels_ or _ballades_ worth reading.
"Without poetic _vision_ all is mere marquetery and cabinet-maker's work:
that is, so far as poetry is concerned--nothing." It is because he was a
poet, not a mere craftsman, that Villon was and remains the king, the
absolute master, of ballad-land." About the _rondeau_, M. De Banville
avers that it possesses "nimble movement, speed, grace, lightness of
touch, and, as it were, an ancient fragrance of the soil, that must charm
all who love our country and our country's poetry, in its every age." As
for the _villanelle_, M. De Banville declares that it is the fairest
jewel in the casket of the muse Erato; while the _chant royal_ is a kind
of fossil poem, a relic of an age when kings and allegories flourished.
"The kings and the gods are dead," like Pan; or at least we no longer
find them able, by touch royal or divine, to reanimate the magnificent
_chant royal_.
This is M. De Banville's apology in _pro lyra sua_, that light lyre of
many tones, in whose jingle the eternal note of modern sadness is heard
so rarely. If he has a lesson to teach English versifiers, surely it is
a lesson of gaiety. They are only too fond of rue and rosemary, and now
and then prefer the cypress to the bay. M. De Banville's muse is content
to wear roses in her locks, and perhaps may retain, for many years, a
laurel leaf from the ancient laurel tree which once sheltered the poet at
Turbia.