VI

After three months spent in a sweet seaside resort, where unoccupied men

and ladies whose husbands are abroad happily congregate, I returned to

Paris refreshed.

Marshall and I were no longer on speaking terms, but I saw him daily, in

a new overcoat, of a cut admirably adapted to his figure, sweeping past

the fans and the jet ornaments of the Passage des Panoramas. The coat

interested me, and I remembered that if I had not broken with him I

should have been able to ask him some essential questions concerning it.

Of such trifles as this the sincerest friendships are made; he was as

necessary to me as I to him, and after some demur on his part a

reconciliation was effected.

Then I took an _appartement_ in one of the old houses in Rue de la Tour

des Dames, for windows there overlooked a bit of tangled garden with a

dilapidated statue. It was Marshall of course who undertook the task of

furnishing, and he lavished on the rooms the fancies of an imagination

that suggested the collaboration of a courtesan of high degree and a

fifth-rate artist. Nevertheless, our _salon_ was a pretty

resort--English cretonne of a very happy design--vine leaves, dark green

and golden, broken up by many fluttering jays. The walls were stretched

with this colourful cloth, and the arm-chairs and the couches were to

match. The drawing-room was in cardinal red, hung from the middle of the

ceiling and looped up to give the appearance of a tent; a faun, in

terra-cotta, laughed in the red gloom, and there were Turkish couches

and lamps. In another room you faced an altar, a Buddhist temple, a

statue of the Apollo, and a bust of Shelley. The bedrooms were made

unconventual with cushioned seats and rich canopies; and in picturesque

corners there were censers, great church candlesticks, and palms; then

think of the smell of burning incense and wax and you will have imagined

the sentiment of our apartment in Rue de la Tour des Dames. I bought a

Persian cat, and a python that made a monthly meal off guinea pigs;

Marshall, who did not care for pets, filled his rooms with flowers--he

used to sleep beneath a tree of gardenias in full bloom. We were so,

Henry Marshall and George Moore, when we went to live in 76 Rue de la

Tour des Dames, we hoped for the rest of our lives. He was to paint, I

was to write.

Before leaving for the seaside I had bought some volumes of Hugo and De

Musset; but in pleasant, sunny Boulogne poetry went flat, and it was not

until I got into my new rooms that I began to read seriously. Books are

like individuals; you know at once if they are going to create a sense

within the sense, to fever, to madden you in blood and brain, or if they

will merely leave you indifferent, or irritable, having unpleasantly

disturbed sweet intimate musings as might a draught from an open window.

Many are the reasons for love, but I confess I only love woman or book,

when it is as a voice of conscience, never heard before, heard suddenly,

a voice I am at once endearingly intimate with. This announces feminine

depravities in my affections. I am feminine, morbid, perverse. But above

all perverse, almost everything perverse interests, fascinates me.

Wordsworth is the only simple-minded man I ever loved, if that great

austere mind, chill even as the Cumberland year, can be called simple.

But Hugo is not perverse, nor even personal. Reading him was like being

in church with a strident-voiced preacher shouting from out of a

terribly sonorous pulpit. "Les Orientales...." An East of painted

cardboard, tin daggers, and a military band playing the Turkish patrol

in the Palais Royal.... The verse is grand, noble, tremendous; I liked

it, I admired it, but it did not--I repeat the phrase--awake a voice of

conscience within me; and even the structure of the verse was too much

in the style of public buildings to please me. Of "Les Feuilles

d'Automne" and "Les Chants du Crépuscule" I remember nothing. Ten lines,

fifty lines of "Les Légendes des Siècles," and I always think that it is

the greatest poetry I have ever read, but after a few pages the book is

laid down and forgotten. Having composed more verses than any man that

ever lived, Hugo can only be taken in the smallest doses; if you repeat

any passage to a friend across a _café_ table, you are both appalled by

the splendour of the imagery, by the thunder of the syllables.

"Quel dieu, quel moissonneur de l'éternel été

Avait en s'en allant négligemment jeté

Cette faucille d'or dans les champs des étoiles."

But if I read an entire poem I never escape that sensation of the

_ennui_ which is inherent in the gaud and the glitter of the Italian or

Spanish improvisatore. There never was anything French about Hugo's

genius. Hugo was a cross between an Italian improvisatore and a

metaphysical German student. Take another verse--

"Le clair de lune bleu qui baigne l'horizon."

Without a "like" or an "as," by a mere statement of fact, the picture,

nay more, the impression, is produced. I confess I have a weakness for

the poem which this line concludes--"La fête chez Thérèse"; but

admirable as it is with its picture of mediæval life, there is in it, as

in all Hugo's work, a sense of fabrication that dries up emotion in my

heart. He shouts and raves over poor humanity, while he is gathering

coppers for himself; he goes in for an all-round patronage of the

Almighty in a last stanza; but of the two immortalities he evidently

considers his own the most durable; he does not, however, become really

intolerable until he gets on the subject of little children, he sings

their innocence in great bombast, but he is watching them; the poetry

over, the crowd dispersed, he will entice one of them down a byway.

The first time I read of _une bouche d'ombre_ I was astonished, nor did

the second or third repetition produce a change in my mood of mind; but

sooner or later it was impossible to avoid conviction, that of the two

"the rosy fingers of the dawn," although some three thousand years older

is younger, truer, and more beautiful. Homer's similes can never grow

old; _une bouche d'ombre_ was old the first time it was said. It is the

birthplace and the grave of Hugo's genius.

Of Alfred de Musset I had heard a great deal. Marshall and the Marquise

were in the habit of reading him in moments of relaxation, they had

marked their favourite passages, so he came to me highly recommended.

Nevertheless, I made but little progress in his poetry. His modernisms

were out of tune with the strain of my aspirations at that moment, and I

did not find the unexpected word and the eccentricities of expression

which were, and are still, so dear to me. I am not a purist; an error of

diction is very pardonable if it does not err on the side of the

commonplace; the commonplace, the natural, is constitutionally abhorrent

to me; and I have never been able to read with any very thorough sense

of pleasure even the opening lines of "Rolla," that splendid lyrical

outburst. What I remember of it now are those two odious

_chevilles--marchait et respirait_, and _Astarté fille de l'onde amère_;

nor does the fact that _amère_ rhymes with _mère_ condone the offence,

although it proves that even Musset felt that perhaps the richness of

the rhyme might render tolerable the intolerable. And it is to my credit

that the Spanish love songs moved me not at all; and it was not until I

read that magnificently grotesque poem "La Ballade à la Lune," that I

could be induced to bend the knee and acknowledge Musset a poet.

I still read and spoke of Shelley with a rapture of joy,--he was still

my soul. But this craft, fashioned of mother-o'-pearl, with starlight at

the helm and moonbeams for sails, suddenly ran on a reef and went down,

not out of sight, but out of the agitation of actual life. The reef was

Gautier; I read "Mdlle. de Maupin." The reaction was as violent as it

was sudden. I was weary of spiritual passion, and this great exaltation

of the body above the soul at once conquered and led me captive; this

plain scorn of a world as exemplified in lacerated saints and a

crucified Redeemer opened up to me illimitable prospects of fresh

beliefs, and therefore new joys in things and new revolts against all

that had come to form part and parcel of the commonalty of mankind. Till

now I had not even remotely suspected that a deification of flesh and

fleshly desire was possible, Shelley's teaching had been, while

accepting the body, to dream of the soul as a star, and so preserve our

ideal; but now suddenly I saw, with delightful clearness and with

intoxicating conviction, that by looking without shame and accepting

with love the flesh, I might raise it to as high a place within as

divine a light as even the soul had been set in. The ages were as an

aureole, and I stood as if enchanted before the noble nakedness of the

elder gods: not the infamous nudity that sex has preserved in this

modern world, but the clean pagan nude,--a love of life and beauty, the

broad fair breast of a boy, the long flanks, the head thrown back; the

bold fearless gaze of Venus is lovelier than the lowered glance of the

Virgin, and I cried with my master that the blood that flowed upon Mount

Calvary "_ne m'a jamais baigné dans ses flots_."

I will not turn to the book to find the exact words of this sublime

vindication, for ten years I have not read the Word that has become so

inexpressibly a part of me; and shall I not refrain as Mdlle. de Maupin

refrained, knowing well that the face of love may not be twice seen?

Great was my conversion. None more than I had cherished mystery and

dream: my life until now had been but a mist which revealed as each

cloud wreathed and went out, the red of some strange flower or some tall

peak, blue and snowy and fairylike in lonely moonlight; and now so great

was my conversion that the more brutal the outrage offered to my ancient

ideal, the rarer and keener was my delight. I read almost without fear:

"My dreams were of naked youths riding white horses through mountain

passes, there were no clouds in my dreams, or if there were any, they

were clouds that had been cut out as if in cardboard with scissors."

I had shaken off all belief in Christianity early in life and had

suffered much. Shelley had replaced faith by reason, but I still

suffered: but here was a new creed which proclaimed the divinity of the

body, and for a long time the reconstruction of all my theories of life

on a purely pagan basis occupied my whole attention. The exquisite

outlines of the marvellous castle, the romantic woods, the horses

moving, the lovers leaning to each other's faces enchanted me; and then

the indescribably beautiful description of the performance of _As You

Like It_, and the supreme relief and perfect assuagement it brings to

Rodolph, who then sees Mdlle. de Maupin for the first time in woman's

attire. If she were dangerously beautiful as a man, that beauty is

forgotten in the rapture and praise of her unmatchable woman's

loveliness.

But if "Mdlle. de Maupin" was the highest peak, it was not the entire

mountain. The range was long, and each summit offered to the eye a new

and delightful prospect. There were the numerous tales,--tales as

perfect as the world has ever seen; "La Morte Amoureuse," "Jettatura,"

"Une Nuit de Cléopâtre," etc., and then the very diamonds of the crown,

"Les Emaux et Camées," "La Symphonie en Blanc Majeure," in which the

adjective _blanc_ and _blanche_ is repeated with miraculous felicity in

each stanza. And then Contralto,--

"Mais seulement il se transpose

Et passant de la forme au son,

Trouve dans la métamorphose

La jeune fille et le garçon."

_Transpose_,--a word never before used except in musical application,

and now for the first time applied to material form, and with a

beauty-giving touch that Phidias might be proud of. I know not how I

quote; such is my best memory of the stanza, and here, that is more

important than the stanza itself. And that other stanza, "The

Châtelaine and the Page"; and that other, "The Doves"; and that other,

"Romeo and Juliet," and the exquisite cadence of the line ending

"_balcon_." Novelists have often shown how a love passion brings misery,

despair, death and ruin upon a life, but I know of no story of the good

or evil influence awakened by the chance reading of a book, the chain of

consequences so far-reaching, so intensely dramatic. Never shall I open

these books again, but were I to live for a thousand years, their power

in my soul would remain unshaken. I am what they made me. Belief in

humanity, pity for the poor, hatred of injustice, all that Shelley gave

may never have been very deep or earnest; but I did love, I did believe.

Gautier destroyed these illusions. He taught me that our boasted

progress is but a pitfall into which the race is falling, and I learned

that the correction of form is the highest ideal, and I accepted the

plain, simple conscience of the pagan world as the perfect solution of

the problem that had vexed me so long; I cried, "ave" to it all: lust,

cruelty, slavery, and I would have held down my thumbs in the Colosseum

that a hundred gladiators might die and wash me free of my Christian

soul with their blood.

The study of Baudelaire hurried the course of the disease.[1] No longer

is it the grand barbaric face of Gautier; now it is the clean shaven

face of the mock priest, the slow, cold eyes and the sharp, cunning

sneer of the cynical libertine who will be tempted that he may better

know the worthlessness of temptation. "Les Fleurs du Mal!" beautiful

flowers, beautiful in sublime decay. What a great record is yours, and

were Hell a reality how many souls would we find wreathed with your

poisonous blossoms. The village maiden goes to her Faust; the children

of the nineteenth century go to you, O Baudelaire, and having tasted of

your deadly delight all hope of repentance is vain. Flowers, beautiful

in your sublime decay, I press you to my lips; these northern solitudes,

far from the rank Parisian garden where I gathered you, are full of you,

even as the sea-shell of the sea, and the sun that sets on this wild

moorland evokes the magical verse:--

"Un soir fait de rose et de bleu mystique

Nous échangerons un éclair unique

Comme un long sanglot tout chargé d'adieux."

For months I fed on the mad and morbid literature that the enthusiasm

of 1830 called into existence. The gloomy and sterile little pictures of

"Gaspard de la Nuit," or the elaborate criminality, "Les Contes

Immoraux," laboriously invented lifeless things with creaky joints,

pitiful lay figures that fall to dust as soon as the book is closed, and

in the dust only the figures of the terrible ferryman and the

unfortunate Dora remain. "Madame Potiphar" cost me forty francs, and I

never read more than a few pages.

Like a pike after minnows I pursued the works of Les Jeune France along

the quays and through every _passage_ in Paris. The money spent was

considerable, the waste of time vexatious. One man's solitary work (he

died very young, but he is known to have excelled all in length of his

hair and the redness of his waistcoats) resisted my efforts to capture

it. At last I caught sight of the precious volume in a shop on the Quai

Voltaire. Trembling I asked the price. The man looked at me earnestly

and answered, "A hundred and fifty francs." No doubt it was a great deal

of money, but I paid it and rushed home to read. Many that had gone

before had proved disappointing, and I was obliged to admit had

contributed little towards my intellectual advancement; but this--this

that I had heard about so long--not a queer phrase, not an outrage of

any sort of kind, not even a new blasphemy, it meant nothing to me, that

is to say, nothing but a hundred and fifty francs. Having thus rudely,

and very pikelike, knocked my nose against the bottom--this book was,

most certainly, the bottom of the literature of 1830--I came up to the

surface and began to look around my contemporaries for something to

read.

I have remarked before on the instinctiveness of my likes and dislikes,

on my susceptibility to the sound of and even to the appearance of a

name upon paper. I was repelled by Leconte de Lisle from the first, and

it was only by a very deliberate outrage to my feelings that I bought

and read "Les Poèmes Antiques," and "Les Poèmes Barbares"; I was

deceived in nothing, all I had anticipated I found--long, desolate

boredom. Leconte de Lisle produces on me the effect of a walk through

the new Law Courts, with a steady but not violent draught sweeping from

end to end. Oh, the vile old professor of rhetoric! and when I saw him

the last time I was in Paris, his head--a declaration of righteousness,

a cross between a Cæsar by Gerome, and an archbishop of a provincial

town, set all my natural antipathy instantly on edge. Hugo is often

pompous, shallow, empty, unreal, but he is at least an artist, and when

he thinks of the artist and forgets the prophet, as in "Les Chansons des

Rues et des Bois," his juggling with the verse is magnificent, superb.

"Comme un geai sur l'arbre

Le roi se tient fier;

Son cœur est de marbre,

Son ventre est de chair.

"On a pour sa nuque

Et son front vermeil

Fait une perruque

Avec le soleil.

"Il règne, il végète

Effroyant zéro;

Sur lui se projette

L'ombre du bourreau.

"Son trône est une tombe,

Et sur le pavé

Quelque chose en tombe

Qu'on n'a point lavé."

But how to get the first line of the last stanza into five syllables I

cannot think. If ever I meet with the volume again I will look it out

and see how that _rude dompteur de syllables_ managed it. But stay,

_son trône est la tombe_; that makes the verse, and the generalisation

would be in the "line" of Hugo. Hugo--how impossible it is to speak of

French literature without referring to him. Let these, however, be

concluding words that he thought he could by saying everything, and,

saying everything twenty times over, for ever render impossible the

rehearsal of another great poet. But a work of art is valuable, and

pleasurable in proportion to its rarity; one beautiful book of verses is

better than twenty books of beautiful verses. This is an absolute and

incontestable truth; a child can burlesque this truth--one verse is

better than the whole poem, a word is better than the line, a letter is

better than the word, but the truth is not thereby affected. Hugo never

had the good fortune to write a bad book, nor even a single bad line, so

not having time to read all, the future will read none. What immortality

would be gained by the destruction of one half of his magnificent works,

what oblivion is secured by the publication of these posthumous volumes.

To return to the Leconte de Lisle. See his "Discours de Réception." Is

it possible to imagine anything more absurdly arid? Rhetoric of this

sort, "_des vers d'or sur une éclume d'airain_" and such sententious

platitudes as this (speaking of the realists), "_Les épidémies de cette

nature passent, et le génie demeure_."

Theodore de Banville. At first I thought him cold, infected with the

rhetorical ice of the Leconte de Lisle. He had no new creed to proclaim

nor old creed to denounce, the inherent miseries of human life did not

seem to touch him, nor did he sing the languors and ardours of animal or

spiritual passion. But there is this: a pure, clear song, an

instinctive, incurable and lark-like love of the song. He sings of the

white lily and the red rose, such knowledge of, such observation of

nature is enough for the poet, and he sings and he trills, there is

trilling magic in every song, and the song as it ascends rings, and all

the air quivers with the ever-widening circle of the echoes, sighing and

dying out of the ear until the last faintness is reached, and the glad

rhymes clash and dash forth again on their aerial way. Banville is not

the poet, he is the bard. The great questions that agitate the mind of

man have not troubled him, life, death, and love he perceives only as

stalks whereon he may weave his glittering web of living words.

Whatever his moods may be, he is lyrical. His wit flies out on

clear-cut, swallow-like wings; in speaking of Paul Alexis' book "Le

Besoin d'aimer," he said: "_Vous avez trouvé un titre assez laid pour

faire reculer les divines étoiles_." I know not what instrument to

compare with his verse. I suppose I should say a flute; but it seems to

me more like a marvellously toned piano. His hands pass over the keys

and he produces Chopin-like fluidities.

It is now well known that French verse is not seventy years old. If it

was Hugo who invented French rhyme it was Banville who broke up the

couplet. Hugo had perhaps ventured to place the pause between the

adjective and its noun, but it was not until Banville wrote the line,

"_Elle filait pensivement la blanche laine_" that the cæsura received

its final _coup de grâce_. This verse has been probably more imitated

than any other verse in the French language. _Pensivement_ was replaced

by some similar four-syllable adverb, _Elle tirait nonchalamment les bas

de soie, etc_. It was the beginning of the end.

I read the French poets of the modern school--Coppée, Mendés, Léon Diex,

Verlaine, José Maria Hêrédia, Mallarmé, Richepin, Villiers de l'Isle

Adam. Coppée, as may be imagined, I only was capable of appreciating in

his first manner, when he wrote those exquisite but purely artistic

sonnets "La Tulipe," and "Le Lys." In the latter a room decorated with

daggers, armour, jewellery and china is beautifully described, and it is

only in the last line that the lily, which animates and gives life to

the whole, is introduced. But the exquisite poetic perceptivity Coppée

showed in his modern poems, the certainty with which he raised the

commonest subject, investing it with sufficient dignity for his purpose,

escaped me wholly, and I could not but turn with horror from such poems

as "La Nourrice" and "Le Petit Epicier." How anyone could bring himself

to acknowledge the vulgar details of our vulgar age I could not

understand. The fiery glory of José Maria de Hérédia, on the contrary,

filled me with enthusiasm--ruins and sand, shadow and silhouette of

palms and pillars, negroes, crimson, swords, silence, and arabesques.

Like great copper pans go the clangour of the rhymes.

"Entre le ciel qui brûle et la mer qui moutonne,

Au somnolent soleil d'un midi monotone,

Tu songes, O guerrière, aux vieux conquistadors;

Et dans l'énervement des nuits chaudes et calmes,

Berçant ta gloire éteinte, O cité, tu t'endors

Sous les palmiers, au long frémissement des palmes."

Catulle Mendès, a perfect realisation of his name, with his pale hair,

and his fragile face illuminated with the idealism of a depraved woman.

He takes you by the arm, by the hand, he leans towards you, his words

are caresses, his fervour is delightful, and to hear him is as sweet as

drinking a smooth perfumed yellow wine. All he says is false--the book

he has just read, the play he is writing, the woman who loves him,...he

buys a packet of bonbons in the streets and eats them, and it is false.

An exquisite artist; physically and spiritually he is art; he is the

muse herself, or rather, he is one of the minions of the muse. Passing

from flower to flower he goes, his whole nature pulsing with butterfly

voluptuousness. He has written poems as good as Hugo, as good as Leconte

de Lisle, as good as Banville, as good as Baudelaire, as good as

Gautier, as good as Coppée; he never wrote an ugly line in his life, but

he never wrote a line that some one of his brilliant contemporaries

might not have written. He has produced good work of all kinds "et voilà

tout." Every generation, every country, has its Catulle Mendès. Robert

Buchanan is ours, only in the adaptation Scotch gruel has been

substituted for perfumed yellow wine. No more delightful talker than

Mendès, no more accomplished _littérateur_, no more fluent and

translucid critic. I remember the great moonlights of the _Place

Pigale_, when, on leaving the _café_, he would take me by the arm, and

expound Hugo's or Zola's last book, thinking as he spoke of the Greek

sophists. There were for contrast Mallarmé's Tuesday evenings, a few

friends sitting round the hearth, the lamp on the table. I have met none

whose conversation was more fruitful, but with the exception of his

early verses I cannot say I ever enjoyed his poetry frankly. When I knew

him he had published the celebrated "L'Après Midi d'un Faun": the first

poem written in accordance with the theory of symbolism. But when it was

given to me (this marvellous brochure furnished with strange

illustrations and wonderful tassels), I thought it absurdly obscure.

Since then, however, it has been rendered by force of contrast with the

enigmas the author has since published a marvel of lucidity; I am sure

if I were to read it now I should appreciate its many beauties. It bears

the same relation to the author's later work as _Rienzi_ to _The

Walkyrie_. But what is symbolism? Vulgarly speaking, saying the opposite

to what you mean. For example, you want to say that music which is the

new art, is replacing the old art, which is poetry. First symbol: a

house in which there is a funeral, the pall extends over the furniture.

The house is poetry, poetry is dead. Second symbol: "_notre vieux

grimoire_," _grimoire_ is the parchment, parchment is used for writing,

therefore, _grimoire_ is the symbol for literature, "_d'où s'exaltent

les milliers_," thousands of what? of letters of course. We have heard a

great deal in England of Browning obscurity. The "Red Cotton Nightcap

Country" is a child at play compared to a sonnet by such a determined

symbolist as Mallarmé, or better still his disciple Ghil who has added

to the infirmities of symbolism those of poetic instrumentation. For

according to M. Ghil and his organ _Les Ecrits pour l'Art,_ it would

appear that the syllables of the French language evoke in us the

sensations of different colours; consequently the timbre of the

different instruments. The vowel _u_ corresponds to the colour yellow,

and therefore to the sound of flutes. Arthur Rimbaud was, it is true,

first in the field with these pleasant and genial theories; but M. Ghil

informs us that Rimbaud was mistaken in many things, particularly in

coupling the sound of the vowel _u_ with the colour green instead of

with the colour yellow. M. Ghil has corrected this very stupid blunder

and many others; and his instrumentation in his last volume, "Le Geste

Ingénu," may be considered as complete and definitive. The work is

dedicated to Mallarmé, "Père et seigneur des ors, des pierreries, et des

poisons," and other works are to follow:--the six tomes of "Légendes de

Rêves et de Sang," the innumerable tomes of "La Glose," and the single

tome of "La Loi."

And that man Gustave Kahn, who takes the French language as a violin,

and lets the bow of his emotion run at wild will upon it, producing

strange acute strains, unpremeditated harmonies comparable to nothing

that I know of but some Hungarian rhapsody; verses of seventeen

syllables interwoven with verses of eight, and even nine, masculine

rhymes, seeking strange union with feminine rhymes in the middle of the

line--a music sweet, subtil, and epicene; the half-note, the inflexion,

but not the full tone--as "_se fondre, o souvenir, des lys âcres

délices_."

Se penchant vers les dahlias,

Des paons cabrent des rosaces lunaires

L'assou pissement des branches vénère

Son pâle visage aux mourants dahlias.

Elle écoute au loin les brèves musiques

Nuit claire aux ramures d'accords,

Et la lassitude a bercé son corps

Au rhythme odorant des pures musiques.

Les paons ont dressé la rampe occellée

Pour la descente de ses yeux vers le tapis

De choses et de sens

Qui va vers l'horizon, parure vermiculée

De son corps alangui

En l'âme se tapit

Le flou désir molli de récits et d'encens.

I laughed at these verbal eccentricities, but they were not without

their effect, and that a demoralising one; for in me they aggravated the

fever of the unknown, and whetted my appetite for the strange, abnormal

and unhealthy in art. Hence all pallidities of thought and desire were

eagerly welcomed, and Verlaine became my poet. Never shall I forget the

first enchantment of "Les Fétes Galantes." Here all is twilight.

The royal magnificences of the sunset have passed, the solemn beatitude

of the night is at hand but not yet here; the ways are veiled with

shadow, and lit with dresses, white, that the hour has touched with

blue, yellow, green, mauve, and undecided purple; the voices? strange

contraltos; the forms? not those of men or women, but mystic, hybrid

creatures, with hands nervous and pale, and eyes charged with eager and

fitful light..."_un soir équivoque d'automne_"..."_les belles pendent

rêveuses à nos bras_"...and they whisper "_les mots spéciaux et tout

bas_."

Gautier sang to his antique lyre praise of the flesh and contempt of the

soul; Baudelaire on a mediæval organ chaunted his unbelief in goodness

and truth and his hatred of life. But Verlaine advances one step

further: hate is to him as commonplace as love, unfaith as vulgar as

faith. The world is merely a doll to be attired to-day in a modern ball

dress, to-morrow in aureoles and stars. The Virgin is a pretty thing,

worth a poem, but it would be quite too silly to talk about belief or

unbelief; Christ in wood or plaster we have heard too much of, but

Christ in painted glass amid crosiers and Latin terminations, is an

amusing subject for poetry. And strangely enough, a withdrawing from

all commerce with virtue and vice is, it would seem, a licentiousness

more curiously subtle and penetrating than any other; and the

licentiousness of the verse is equal to that of the emotion; every

natural instinct of the language is violated, and the simple music

native in French metre is replaced by falsetto notes sharp and intense.

The charm is that of an odour of iris exhaled by some ideal tissues, or

of a missal in a gold case, a precious relic of the pomp and ritual of

an archbishop of Persepolis.

Parsifal a vaincu les filles, leur gentil

Babil et la luxure amusante et sa pente

Vers la chair de garçon vierge que cela tente

D'aimer des seins légers et ce gentil babil.

Il a vaincu la femme belle aucœur subtil

Etalant ces bras frais et sa gorge excitante;

Il a vaincu l'enfer, il rentre dans sa tente

Avec un lourd trophée à son bras puéril.

Avec la lance qui perça le flanc suprême

Il a guéri le roi, le voici roi lui-même.

Et prêtre du très-saint trésor essentiel;

En robe d'or il adore, gloire et symbole,

Le vase pur où resplendit le sang réel,

Et, o ces voix d'enfants chantant dans la coupole.

In English there is no sonnet so beautiful, its beauty cannot be worn

away, it is as inexhaustible as a Greek marble. The hiatus in the last

line was at first a little trying, but I have learned to love it. Not in

Baudelaire nor even in Poe is there more beautiful poetry to be found.

Poe, unread and ill-understood in America and England, here, thou art an

integral part of our artistic life.

The Island o' Fay, Silence, Eleonore, were the familiar spirits of an

apartment beautiful with Manets and tapestry; Swinburne and Rossetti

were the English poets I read there; and in a golden bondage, I, a unit

in the generation they have enslaved, clanked my fetters and trailed my

golden chain, a set of stories in many various metres, to be called

"Roses of Midnight." One of the characteristics of the volume was that

daylight was banished from its pages. In the sensual lamplight of yellow

boudoirs, or the wild moonlight of centenarian forests, my fantastic

loves lived out their lives, died with the dawn which was supposed to be

an awakening to consciousness of reality.