His Nature.
The Muse of M. de Banville was born not naked but in the most elaborate
and sumptuous evening wear that ever muse put on. To him, indeed, there
is no nature so natural as that depicted on the boards, no humanity half
so human as the actor puts on with his paint. For him the flowers grow
plucked and bound into nosegays; passion has no existence outside the
Porte-Saint-Martin; the universe is a place of rhymes and rhythms, the
human heart a supplement to the dictionary. He delights in babbling of
green fields, and Homer, and Shakespeare, and the Eumenides, and the
'_rire enorme_' of the _Frogs_ and the _Lysistrata_. But it is suspected
that he loves these things rather as words than as facts, and that in his
heart of hearts he is better pleased with Cassandra and Columbine than
with Rosalind and Othello, with the studio Hellas of Gautier than with
the living Greece of Sophocles. Heroic objects are all very well in
their way of course: they suggest superb effects in verse, they are of
incomparable merit considered as colours and jewels for well-turned
sentences in prose. But their function is purely verbal; they are the
raw material of the outward form of poesy, and they come into being to
glorify a climax, to adorn a refrain, to sparkle and sound in odelets and
rondels and triolets, to twinkle and tinkle and chime all over the eight-
and-twenty members of a fair ballade.
His Art.
It is natural enough that to a theory of art and life that can be thus
whimsically described we should be indebted for some of the best writing
of modern years. Our poet has very little sympathy with fact, whether
heroic or the reverse, whether essential or accidental; but he is a rare
artist in words and cadences. He writes of 'Pierrot, l'homme subtil,'
and Columbine, and 'le beau Leandre,' and all the marionettes of that
pleasant puppet-show which he mistakes for the world, with the rhetorical
elegance and distinction, the verbal force and glow, the rhythmic beauty
and propriety, of a rare poet; he models a group of flowers in wax as
passionately and cunningly, and with as perfect an interest in the
process and as lofty and august a faith in the result, as if he were
carving the Venus of Milo, or scoring Beethoven's 'Fifth,' or producing
_King Lear_ or the _Ronde de Nuit_. He is profoundly artificial, but he
is simple and even innocent in his artifice; so that he is often
interesting and even affecting. He knows so well what should be done and
so well how to do it that he not seldom succeeds in doing something that
is actually and veritably art: something, that is, in which there is
substance as well as form, in which the matter is equal with the manner,
in which the imagination is human as well as aesthetic and the invention
not merely verbal but emotional and romantic also. The dramatic and
poetic value of such achievements in style as _Florise_ and _Diane au
Bois_ is open to question; but there can be no doubt that _Gringoire_ is
a play. There is an abundance of 'epical ennui' in _le Sang de la Coupe_
and _les Stalactites_; but the 'Nous n'irons plus au bois' and the
charming epigram in which the poet paints a processional frieze of
Hellenic virgins are high-water marks of verse. But, indeed, if Pierrot
and Columbine were all the race, and the footlights might only change
places with the sun, then were M. de Banville by way of being a
Shakespeare.