Even the eager desire of the Frenchman to be always intelligible (“That which is not lucid is not French”) militates against the perfection of the lyric. So too does his exquisite and inborn sense of proportion. “Measure,” says Mr. Brownell, “is a French passion;” but it is a passion that refuses to lend itself to rapturous sentiment.
Et veut que l’on soit sage avec sobriété
is hardly a maxim to which the genius of the love-song gives willing ear. Rather is she the La Belle Dame sans Merci, or the Elfin Lady who rode through the forests of ancient France.
My sire is the nightingale,
That sings, making his wail,
In the wild wood, clear;
The mermaid is mother to me,
That sings in the salt sea,
In the ocean mere.
“What,” asks Mr. Brownell hopelessly, “has become of this Celtic strain in the French nature?”—a strain which found vent in the “poésie courtoise,” playful, amorous, laden with delicate subtleties and fond conceits. This poesie—once the delight of Christendom—echoes still in Petrarch’s sonnets and in Shakespeare’s madrigals; but it is difficult to link its sweet extravagances with the chiselled verse of later days, and critics forget the past in their careful contemplation of the present. “French poetry,” says Mr. Zangwill, “has always leant to the frigid, the academic, the rhetorical,—in a word, to the prosaic. The spirit of Boileau has ruled it from his cold marble urn.”