The longest poem in the book, and the most serious, “La Voie Lactée,” 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, père des dieux qu’adore Ionie,”—
the poet glorifies all the chief names of song. There is a long procession of illustrious shadows before Shakespeare comes—Shakespeare, whose genius includes them all.
“Toute création à laquelle on aspire,
Tout rêve, toute chose, émanent 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 nénuphars penchés, et les pâles 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 passion 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 amusements shows itself in lines like these:
“De son lit à 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,” M. De Banville revived old measures—the rondeau and the “poor little triolet.” These are forms of verse which it is easy to write badly, and hard indeed to write well. They have knocked at the door of the English muse’s garden—a runaway knock. In “Les Cariatides” they took a subordinate place, and played their pranks in the shadow of the grave figures of mythology, or at the close of the procession of Dionysus and his Mænads. De Banville often recalls Keats in his choice of classical themes. “Les Exilés,” a poem of his maturity, is a French “Hyperion.” “Le Triomphe de Bacchus” reminds one of the song of the Bassarids in “Endymion”—