Chapter 5
"With water-weeds twined in their locks of gold The strange cold forest-fairies dance in glee; Sylphs over-timorous and over-bold Haunt the dark hollows where the dwarf may be, The wild red dwarf, the nixies' enemy; Then, 'mid their mirth, and laughter, and affright, The sudden goddess enters, tall and white, With one long sigh for summers passed away; The swift feet tear the ivy nets outright, And through the dim wood Dian thrids her way.
"She gleans her sylvan trophies; down the wold She hears the sobbing of the stags that flee, Mixed with the music of the hunting rolled, But her delight is all in archery, And nought of ruth and pity wotteth she More than the hounds that follow on the flight; The tall nymph draws a golden bow of might, And thick she rains the gentle shafts that slay, She tosses loose her locks upon the night, And Dian through the dim wood thrids her way.
ENVOI.
"Prince, let us leave the din, the dust, the spite, The gloom and glare of towns, the plague, the blight; Amid the forest leaves and fountain spray There is the mystic home of our delight, And through the dim wood Dian thrids her way."
The piece is characteristic of M. De Banville's genius. Through his throng of operatic nixies and sylphs of the ballet the cold Muse sometimes passes, strange, but not unfriendly. He, for his part, has never degraded the beautiful forms of old religion to make the laughing- stock of fools. His little play, _Diane au Bois_, has grace, and gravity, and tenderness like the tenderness of Keats, for the failings of immortals. "The gods are jealous exceedingly if any goddess takes a mortal man to her paramour, as Demeter chose Iasion." The least that mortal poets can do is to show the Olympians an example of toleration.
"Les Cariatides" have delayed us too long. They are wonderfully varied, vigorous, and rich, and full of promise in many ways. The promise has hardly been kept. There is more seriousness in "Les Stalactites" (1846), it is true, but then there is less daring. There is one morsel that must be quoted,--a fragment fashioned on the air and the simple words that used to waken the musings of George Sand when she was a child, dancing with the peasant children:
"Nous n'irons plus an bois: les lauries sont coupes, Les amours des bassins, les naiades en groupe Voient reluire au soleil, en cristaux decoupes Les flots silencieux qui coulaient de leur coupe, Les lauriers sont coupes et le cerf aux abois Tressaille au son du cor: nous n'irons plus au bois! Ou des enfants joueurs riait la folle troupe Parmi les lys d'argent aux pleurs du ciel trempes, Voici l'herbe qu'on fauche et les lauriers qu'on coupe; Nous n'irons plus au bois; les lauriers sont coupes."
In these days Banville, like Gerard de Nerval in earlier times, RONSARDISED. The poem 'A la Font Georges,' full of the memories of childhood, sweet and rich with the air and the hour of sunset, is written in a favourite metre of Ronsard's. Thus Ronsard says in his lyrical version of five famous lines of Homer--
"La gresle ni la neige N'ont tels lieux pour leur siege Ne la foudre oncques la Ne devala."
(The snow, and wind, and hail May never there prevail, Nor thunderbolt doth fall, Nor rain at all.)
De Banville chose this metre, rapid yet melancholy, with its sad emphatic cadence in the fourth line, as the vehicle of his childish memories:
"O champs pleins de silence, Ou mon heureuse enfance Avait des jours encor Tout files d'or!"
O ma vieille Font Georges, Vers qui les rouges-gorges Et le doux rossignol Prenaient leur vol!
So this poem of the fountain of youth begins, "tout file d'or," and closes when the dusk is washed with silver--
"A l'heure ou sous leurs voiles Les tremblantes etoiles Brodent le ciel changeant De fleurs d'argent."
The "Stalactites" might detain one long, but we must pass on after noticing an unnamed poem which is the French counterpart of Keats' "Ode to a Greek Urn":
"Qu'autour du vase pur, trop beau pour la Bacchante, La verveine, melee a des feuilles d'acanthe, Fleurisse, et que plus bas des vierges lentement S'avancent deux a deux, d'un pas sur et charmant, Les bras pendants le long de leurs tuniques droites Et les cheyeux tresses sur leurs tetes etroites."
In the same volume of the definite series of poems come "Les Odelettes," charming lyrics, one of which, addressed to Theophile Gautier, was answered in the well-known verses called "L'Art." If there had been any rivalry between the writers, M. De Banville would hardly have cared to print Gautier's "Odelette" beside his own. The tone of it is infinitely more manly: one seems to hear a deep, decisive voice replying to tones far less sweet and serious. M. De Banville revenged himself nobly in later verses addressed to Gautier, verses which criticise the genius of that workman better, we think, than anything else that has been written of him in prose or rhyme.
The less serious poems of De Banville are, perhaps, the better known in this country. His feats of graceful metrical gymnastics have been admired by every one who cares for skill pure and simple. "Les Odes Funambulesques" and "Les Occidentales" are like ornamental skating. The author moves in many circles and cuts a hundred fantastic figures with a perfect ease and smoothness. At the same time, naturally, he does not advance nor carry his readers with him in any direction. "Les Odes Funambulesques" were at first unsigned. They appeared in journals and magazines, and, as M. de Banville applied the utmost lyrical skill to light topics of the moment, they were the most popular of "Articles de Paris." One must admit that they bore the English reader, and by this time long _scholia_ are necessary for the enlightenment even of the Parisian student. The verses are, perhaps, the "bird-chorus" of French life, but they have not the permanent truth and delightfulness of the "bird-chorus" in Aristophanes. One has easily too much of the Carnival, the masked ball, the _debardeurs_, and the _pierrots_. The people at whom M. De Banville laughed are dead and forgotten. There was a certain M. Paul Limayrac of those days, who barked at the heels of Balzac, and other great men, in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_. In his honour De Banville wrote a song which parodied all popular aspirations to be a flower. M. Limayrac was supposed to have become a blossom:
"Sur les coteaux et dans les landes Voltigeant comme un oiseleur Buloz en ferait des guirlandes Si Limayrac devenait fleur!"
There is more of high spirits than of wit in the lyric, which became as popular as our modern invocation of Jingo, the god of battles. It chanced one night that M. Limayrac appeared at a masked ball in the opera- house. He was recognised by some one in the crowd. The turbulent waltz stood still, the music was silent, and the dancers of every hue howled at the critic
"Si Paul Limayrac devenait fleur!"
Fancy a British reviewer, known as such to the British public, and imagine that public taking a lively interest in the feuds of men of letters! Paris, to be sure, was more or less of a university town thirty years ago, and the students were certain to be largely represented at the ball.
The "Odes Funambulesques" contain many examples of M. De Banville's skill in reviving old forms of verse--_triolets_, _rondeaux_, _chants royaux_, and _ballades_. Most of these were composed for the special annoyance of M. Buloz, M. Limayrac, and a M. Jacquot who called himself De Mirecourt. The _rondeaux_ are full of puns in the refrain: "Houssaye ou c'est; lyre, l'ire, lire," and so on, not very exhilarating. The _pantoum_, where lines recur alternately, was borrowed from the distant Malay; but primitive _pantoum_, in which the last two lines of each stanza are the first two of the next, occur in old French folk-song. The popular trick of repetition, affording a rest to the memory of the singer, is perhaps the origin of all refrains. De Banville's later satires are directed against permanent objects of human indignation--the little French debauchee, the hypocritical friend of reaction, the bloodthirsty _chauviniste_. Tired of the flashy luxury of the Empire, his memory goes back to his youth--
"Lorsque la levre de l'aurore Baisait nos yeux souleves, Et que nous n'etions pas encore La France des petits creves."
The poem "Et Tartufe" prolongs the note of a satire always popular in France--the satire of Scarron, Moliere, La Bruyere, against the clerical curse of the nation. The Roman Question was Tartufe's stronghold at the moment. "French interests" demanded that Italy should be headless.
"Et Tartufe? Il nous dit entre deux cremus Que pour tout bon Francais l'empire est a Rome, Et qu'ayant pour aieux Romulus et Remus Nous tetterons la louve a jamais--le pauvre homme."
The new Tartufe worships St. Chassepot, who once, it will not be forgotten, "wrought miracles"; but he has his doubts as to the morality of explosive bullets. The nymph of modern warfare is addressed as she hovers above the Geneva Convention,--
"Quoi, nymphe du canon raye, Tu montres ces pudeurs risibles Et ce petit air effraye Devant les balles exploisibles?"
De Banville was for long almost alone among poets in his freedom from _Weltschmerz_, from regret and desire for worlds lost or impossible. In the later and stupider corruption of the Empire, sadness and anger began to vex even his careless muse. She had piped in her time to much wild dancing, but could not sing to a waltz of mushroom speculators and decorated capitalists. "Le Sang de la Coupe" contains a very powerful poem, "The Curse of Venus," pronounced on Paris, the city of pleasure, which has become the city of greed. This verse is appropriate to our own commercial enterprise:
"Vends les bois ou dormaient Viviane et Merlin! L'Aigle de mont n'est fait que pour ta gibeciere; La neige vierge est la pour fournir ta glaciere; Le torrent qui bondit sur le roc sybillin, Et vole, diamant, neige, ecume et poussiere, N'est plus bon qu'a tourner tes meules de moulin!"
In the burning indignation of this poem, M. De Banville reaches his highest mark of attainment. "Les Exiles" is scarcely less impressive. The outcast gods of Hellas, wandering in a forest of ancient Gaul, remind one at once of the fallen deities of Heine, the decrepit Olympians of Bruno, and the large utterance of Keats's "Hyperion." Among great exiles, Victor Hugo, "le pere la-bas dans l'ile," is not forgotten:
"Et toi qui l'accueillis, sol libre et verdoyant, Qui prodigues les fleurs sur tes coteaux fertiles, Et qui sembles sourire a l'ocean bruyant, Sois benie, ile verte, entre toutes les iles."
The hoarsest note of M. De Banville's lyre is that discordant one struck in the "Idylles Prussiennes." One would not linger over poetry or prose composed during the siege, in hours of shame and impotent scorn. The poet sings how the sword, the flashing Durendal, is rusted and broken, how victory is to him--
" . . . qui se cela Dans un trou, sous la terre noire."
He can spare a tender lyric to the memory of a Prussian officer, a lad of eighteen, shot dead through a volume of Pindar which he carried in his tunic.
It is impossible to leave the poet of gaiety and good-humour in the mood of the prisoner in besieged Paris. His "Trente Six Ballades Joyeuses" make a far more pleasant subject for a last word. There is scarcely a more delightful little volume in the French language than this collection of verses in the most difficult of forms, which pour forth, with absolute ease and fluency, notes of mirth, banter, joy in the spring, in letters, art, and good-fellowship.
"L'oiselet retourne aux forets; Je suis un poete lyrique,"--
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 shore, 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 gods 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 hoar. 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 gods we still adore: 'It may be we shall touch the happy isle.'"
Alas! the mists that veil the shore 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 clusters 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 Hell 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 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.