Essays in Little Part 6

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 sh.o.r.e, 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 G.o.ds 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 h.o.a.r.

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.'

ENVOI.

"Sad eyes! the blue sea laughs, as heretofore.

All, singing birds, your happy music pour; Ah, poets, leave the sordid earth awhile; Flit to these ancient G.o.ds we still adore: 'It may be we shall touch the happy isle.'"

Alas! the mists that veil the sh.o.r.e of our Cythera are not the summer haze of Watteau, but the smoke and steam of a commercial time.

It is as a lyric poet that we have studied M. De Banville. "Je ne m'entends qu'a la meurique," he says in his ballad on himself; but he can write prose when he pleases.

It is in his drama of _Gringoire_ acted at the Theatre Francais, and familiar in the version of Messrs. Pollock and Besant, that M. De Banville's prose shows to the best advantage. Louis XI. is supping with his bourgeois friends and with the terrible Olivier le Daim. Two beautiful girls are of the company, friends of Pierre Gringoire, the strolling poet. Presently Gringoire himself appears. He is dying of hunger; he does not recognise the king, and he is promised a good supper if he will recite the new satirical "Ballade des Pendus," which he has made at the monarch's expense. Hunger overcomes his timidity, and, addressing himself especially to the king, he enters on this goodly matter:

"Where wide the forest boughs are spread, Where Flora wakes with sylph and fay, Are crowns and garlands of men dead, All golden in the morning gay; Within this ancient garden grey Are cl.u.s.ters such as no mail knows, Where Moor and Soldan bear the sway: _This is King Louis' orchard close_!

"These wretched folk wave overhead, With such strange thoughts as none may say; A moment still, then sudden sped, They swing in a ring and waste away.

The morning smites them with her ray; They toss with every breeze that blows, They dance where fires of dawning play: _This is King Louis' orchard close_!

"All hanged and dead, they've summoned (With h.e.l.l to aid, that hears them pray) New legions of an army dread, Now down the blue sky flames the day; The dew dies off; the foul array Of obscene ravens gathers and goes, With wings that flap and beaks that flay: _This is King Louis' orchard close_!

ENVOI.

"Prince, where leaves murmur of the May, A tree of bitter cl.u.s.ters 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 pa.s.sage which is as near being Homeric as French verse can be. Deidamie is speaking in a melancholy mood:

"Heureux les epoux rois a.s.sis 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 fas.h.i.+on. 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 n.o.ble, and the shelter of his castle, to follow where art and her genius beckon her. In _Diane au Bois_ the G.o.ddess "that leads the precise life" turns her back on Eros, who has subdued even her, and pa.s.ses 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-Mala.s.sis 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 gla.s.s that reflects the tawny hair of t.i.tian'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 t.i.tian 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 pa.s.ses 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 Ma.r.s.eilles 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 "Pet.i.t 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 cl.u.s.ter 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 n.o.bler 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 G.o.ds 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.

HOMER AND THE STUDY OF GREEK

The Greek language is being ousted from education, here, in France, and in America. The speech of the earliest democracies is not democratic enough for modern anarchy. There is nothing to be gained, it is said, by a knowledge of Greek. We have not to fight the battle of life with h.e.l.lenic waiters; and, even if we had, Romaic, or modern Greek, is much more easily learned than the old cla.s.sical tongue. The reason of this comparative ease will be plain to any one who, retaining a vague memory of his Greek grammar, takes up a modern Greek newspaper. He will find that the idioms of the modern newspaper are the idioms of all newspapers, that the grammar is the grammar of modern languages, that the opinions are expressed in barbarous translations of barbarous French and English journalistic _cliches_ or commonplaces. This ugly and undignified mixture of the ancient Greek characters, and of ancient Greek words with modern grammar and idioms, and stereotyped phrases, is extremely distasteful to the scholar. Modern Greek, as it is at present printed, is not the natural spoken language of the peasants. You can read a Greek leading article, though you can hardly make sense of a Greek rural ballad. The peasant speech is a thing of slow development; there is a basis of ancient Greek in it, with large elements of Slavonic, Turkish, Italian, and other imposed or imported languages. Modern literary Greek is a hybrid of revived cla.s.sical words, blended with the idioms of the speeches which have arisen since the fall of the Roman Empire. Thus, thanks to the modern and familiar element in it, modern Greek "as she is writ" is much more easily learned than ancient Greek. Consequently, if any one has need for the speech in business or travel, he can acquire as much of it as most of us have of French, with considerable ease. People therefore argue that ancient Greek is particularly superfluous in schools. Why waste time on it, they ask, which could be expended on science, on modern languages, or any other branch of education? There is a great deal of justice in this position. The generation of men who are now middle-aged bestowed much time and labour on Greek; and in what, it may be asked, are they better for it? Very few of them "keep up their Greek." Say, for example, that one was in a form with fifty boys who began the study--it is odds against five of the survivors still reading Greek books. The worldly advantages of the study are slight: it may lead three of the fifty to a good degree, and one to a fellows.h.i.+p; but good degrees may be taken in other subjects, and fellows.h.i.+ps may be abolished, or "nationalised," with all other forms of property.

Then, why maintain Greek in schools? Only a very minute percentage of the boys who are tormented with it really learn it. Only a still smaller percentage can read it after they are thirty. Only one or two gain any material advantage by it. In very truth, most minds are not framed by nature to excel and to delight in literature, and only to such minds and to schoolmasters is Greek valuable.

This is the case against Greek put as powerfully as one can state it. On the other side, we may say, though the remark may seem absurd at first sight, that to have mastered Greek, even if you forget it, is not to have wasted time. It really is an educational and mental discipline. The study is so severe that it needs the earnest application of the mind. The study is averse to indolent intellectual ways; it will not put up with a "there or thereabouts," any more than mathematical ideas admit of being made to seem "extremely plausible." He who writes, and who may venture to offer himself as an example, is naturally of a most slovenly and slatternly mental habit. It is his constant temptation to "scamp" every kind of work, and to say "it will do well enough." He hates taking trouble and verifying references. And he can honestly confess that nothing in his experience has so helped, in a certain degree, to counteract those tendencies--as the labour of thoroughly learning certain Greek texts--the dramatists, Thucydides, some of the books of Aristotle.