Essays in Little Part 4

I wore my bridal robe, and I rivalled its whiteness; Bright gems were in my hair,--how I hated their brightness!

He called me by my name as the bride of another.

Oh, thou hast been the cause of this anguish, my mother!"

In future, when the reformers of marriage have had their way, we shall read:

"The world may think me gay, for I bow to my fate; But thou hast been the cause of my anguish, O State!"

For even when true love is regulated by the County Council or the village community, it will still persist in not running smooth.

Of these pa.s.sions, then, Mr. Bayly could chant; but let us remember that he could also dally with old romance, that he wrote:

"The mistletoe hung in the castle hall, The holly branch shone on the old oak wall."

When the bride unluckily got into the ancient chest,

"It closed with a spring. And, dreadful doom, The bride lay clasped in her living tomb,"

so that her lover "mourned for his fairy bride," and never found out her premature casket. This was true romance as understood when Peel was consul. Mr. Bayly was rarely political; but he commemorated the heroes of Waterloo, our last victory worth mentioning:

"Yet mourn not for them, for in future tradition Their fame shall abide as our tutelar star, _To instil by example the glorious ambition_ _Of falling_, _like them_, _in a glorious war_.

Though tears may be seen in the bright eyes of beauty, One consolation must ever remain: Undaunted they trod in the pathway of duty, Which led them to glory on Waterloo's plain."

Could there be a more simple Tyrtaeus? and who that reads him will not be ambitious of falling in a glorious war? Bayly, indeed, is always simple.

He is "simple, sensuous, and pa.s.sionate," and Milton asked no more from a poet.

"A wreath of orange blossoms, When next we met, she wore.

_The expression of her features_ _Was more thoughtful than before_."

On his own principles Wordsworth should have admired this unaffected statement; but Wordsworth rarely praised his contemporaries, and said that "Guy Mannering" was a respectable effort in the style of Mrs.

Radcliffe. Nor did he even extol, though it is more in his own line,

"Of what is the old man thinking, As he leans on his oaken staff?"

My own favourite among Mr. Bayly's effusions is not a sentimental ode, but the following gush of true natural feeling:--

"Oh, give me new faces, new faces, new faces, I've seen those around me a fortnight and more.

Some people grow weary of things or of places, But persons to me are a much greater bore.

I care not for features, I'm sure to discover Some exquisite trait in the first that you send.

My fondness falls off when the novelty's over; I want a new face for an intimate friend."

This is perfectly candid: we should all prefer a new face, if pretty, every fortnight:

"Come, I pray you, and tell me this, All good fellows whose beards are grey, Did not the fairest of the fair Common grow and wearisome ere Ever a month had pa.s.sed away?"

For once Mr. Bayly uttered in his "New Faces" a sentiment not usually expressed, but universally felt; and now he suffers, as a poet, because he is no longer a new face, because we have welcomed his juniors. To Bayly we shall not return; but he has one rare merit,--he is always perfectly plain-spoken and intelligible.

"Farewell to my Bayly, farewell to the singer Whose tender effusions my aunts used to sing; Farewell, for the fame of the bard does not linger, My favourite minstrel's no longer the thing.

But though on his temples has faded the laurel, Though broken the lute, and though veiled is the crest, My Bayly, at worst, is uncommonly moral, Which is more than some new poets are, at their best."

Farewell to our Bayly, about whose songs we may say, with Mr. Thackeray in "Vanity Fair," that "they contain numberless good-natured, simple appeals to the affections." We are no longer affectionate, good-natured, simple. We are cleverer than Bayly's audience; but are we better fellows?

THEODORE DE BANVILLE

There are literary reputations in France and England which seem, like the fairies, to be unable to cross running water. Dean Swift, according to M. Paul de Saint-Victor, is a great man at Dover, a pigmy at Calais--"Son talent, qui enthousiasme l'Angleterre, n'inspire ailleurs qu'un morne etonnement." M. Paul De Saint-Victor was a fair example of the French critic, and what he says about Swift was possibly true,--for him. There is not much resemblance between the Dean and M. Theodore de Banville, except that the latter too is a poet who has little honour out of his own country. He is a charming singer at Calais; at Dover he inspires _un morne etonnement_ (a bleak perplexity). One has never seen an English attempt to describe or estimate his genius. His unpopularity in England is ill.u.s.trated by the fact that the London Library, that respectable inst.i.tution, does not, or did not, possess a single copy of any one of his books. He is but feebly represented even in the collection of the British Museum. It is not hard to account for our indifference to M. De Banville. He is a poet not only intensely French, but intensely Parisian. He is careful of form, rather than abundant in manner. He has no story to tell, and his sketches in prose, his attempts at criticism, are not very weighty or instructive. With all his limitations, however, he represents, in company with M. Leconte de Lisle, the second of the three generations of poets over whom Victor Hugo reigned.

M. De Banville has been called, by people who do not like, and who apparently have not read him, _un saltimbanque litteraire_ (a literary rope-dancer). Other critics, who do like him, but who have limited their study to a certain portion of his books, compare him to a worker in gold, who carefully chases or embosses dainty processions of fauns and maenads.

He is, in point of fact, something more estimable than a literary rope- dancer, something more serious than a working jeweller in rhymes. He calls himself _un raffine_; but he is not, like many persons who are proud of that t.i.tle, _un indifferent_ in matters of human fortune. His earlier poems, of course, are much concerned with the matter of most early poems--with Lydia and Cynthia and their light loves. The verses of his second period often deal with the most evanescent subjects, and they now retain but a slight petulance and sparkle, as of champagne that has been too long drawn. In a prefatory plea for M. De Banville's poetry one may add that he "has loved our people," and that no poet, no critic, has honoured Shakespeare with brighter words of praise.

Theodore de Banville was born at Moulin, on March 14th 1823, and he is therefore three years younger than the dictionaries of biography would make the world believe. He is the son of a naval officer, and, according to M. Charles Baudelaire, a descendant of the Crusaders. He came much too late into the world to distinguish himself in the noisy exploits of 1830, and the chief event of his youth was the publication of "Les Cariatides" in 1842. This first volume contained a selection from the countless verses which the poet produced between his sixteenth and his nineteenth year. Whatever other merits the songs of minors may possess, they have seldom that of permitting themselves to be read. "Les Cariatides" are exceptional here. They are, above all things, readable.

"On peut les lire a peu de frais," M. De Banville says himself. He admits that his lighter works, the poems called (in England) _vers de societe_, are a sort of intellectual cigarette. M. Emile de Girardin said, in the later days of the Empire, that there were too many cigarettes in the air. Their stale perfume clings to the literature of that time, as the odour of pastilles yet hangs about the verse of Dorat, the designs of Eisen, the work of the Pompadour period. There is more than smoke in M. De Banville's ruling inspiration, his lifelong devotion to letters and to great men of letters--Shakespeare, Moliere, Homer, Victor Hugo. These are his G.o.ds; the memory of them is his muse. His enthusiasm is worthy of one who, though born too late to see and know the n.o.ble wildness of 1830, yet lives on the recollections, and is strengthened by the example, of that revival of letters. Whatever one may say of the _renouveau_, of romanticism, with its affectations, the young men of 1830 were sincere in their devotion to liberty, to poetry, to knowledge. One can hardly find a more brilliant and touching belief in these great causes than that of Edgar Quinet, as displayed in the letters of his youth. De Banville fell on more evil times.

When "Les Cariatides" was published poets had begun to keep an eye on the Bourse, and artists dabbled in finance. The new volume of song in the sordid age was a November primrose, and not unlike the flower of Spring.

There was a singular freshness and hopefulness in the verse, a wonderful "cert.i.tude dans l'expression lyrique," as Sainte-Beuve said. The mastery of musical speech and of various forms of song was already to be recognised as the basis and the note of the talent of De Banville. He had style, without which a man may write very nice verses about heaven and h.e.l.l and other matters, and may please thousands of excellent people, but will write poetry--never. Comparing De Banville's boy's work with the boy's work of Mr. Tennyson, one observes in each--"Les Cariatides" as in "The Hesperides"--the _timbre_ of a new voice. Poetry so fresh seems to make us aware of some want which we had hardly recognised, but now are sensible of, at the moment we find it satisfied.

It is hardly necessary to say that this gratifying and welcome strangeness, this lyric originality, is nearly all that M. De Banville has in common with the English poet whose two priceless volumes were published in the same year as "Les Cariatides?" The melody of Mr.

Tennyson's lines, the cloudy palaces of his imagination, rose

"As Ilion, like a mist rose into towers,"

when Apollo sang. The architecture was floating at first, and confused; while the little theatre of M. De Banville's poetry, where he sat piping to a dance of nixies, was brilliantly lit and elegant with fresh paint and gilding. "The Cariatides" support the pediment and roof of a theatre or temple in the Graeco-French style. The poet proposed to himself

"A cote de Venus et du fils de Latone Peindre la fee et la peri."

The longest poem in the book, and the most serious, "La Voie Lactee,"

reminds one of the "Palace of Art," written before the after-thought, before the "white-eyed corpses" were found lurking in corners. Beginning with Homer, "the Ionian father of the rest,"--

"Ce dieu, pere des dieux qu'adore Ionie,"--

the poet glorifies all the chief names of song. There is a long procession of ill.u.s.trious shadows before Shakespeare comes--Shakespeare, whose genius includes them all.

"Toute creation a laquelle on aspire, Tout reve, toute chose, emanent de Shakespeare."

His mind has lent colour to the flowers and the sky, to

"La fleur qui brode un point sur les manteau des plaines, Les nenuphars penches, et les pales roseaux Qui disent leur chant sombre au murmure des eaux."

One recognises more sincerity in this hymn to all poets, from Orpheus to Heine, than in "Les Baisers de Pierre"--a clever imitation of De Musset's stories in verse. Love of art and of the masters of art, a pa.s.sion for the figures of old mythology, which had returned again after their exile in 1830, gaiety, and a revival of the dexterity of Villon and Marot,--these things are the characteristics of M. De Banville's genius, and all these were displayed in "Les Cariatides." Already, too, his preoccupation with the lighter and more fantastic sort of theatrical amus.e.m.e.nts shows itself in lines like these:

"De son lit a baldaquin Le soleil de son beau globe Avait l'air d'un arlequin Etalant sa garde-robe;

"Et sa soeur au front changeant Mademoiselle la Lune Avec ses grands yeux d'argent Regardait la terre brune."

The verse about "the sun in bed," unconsciously Miltonic, is in a vein of bad taste which has always had seductions for M. De Banville. He mars a fine later poem on Roncevaux and Roland by a similar absurdity. The angel Michael is made to stride down the steps of heaven four at a time, and M. De Banville fancies that this sort of thing is like the simplicity of the ages of faith.

In "Les Cariatides," especially in the poems styled "En Habit Zinzolin,"