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,
Où mon heureuse enfance
Avait des jours encor
Tout filés 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 filé d’or,” and closes when the dusk is washed with silver—
“À l’heure où sous leurs voiles
Les tremblantes étoiles
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, mêlée à des feuilles d’acanthe,
Fleurisse, et que plus bas des vierges lentement
S’avancent deux à deux, d’un pas sur et charmant,
Les bras pendants le long de leurs tuniques droites
Et les cheyeux tressés sur leurs têtes étroites.”
In the same volume of the definite series of poems come “Les Odelettes,” charming lyrics, one of which, addressed to Théophile 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 débardeurs, 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 côteaux 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