“La lame de l’épée, en sa forme divine
Est pareille à la feuille austère 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 poëte
Fait résonner et qui sans lui serait muette—
Une comédienne enfin. Je ne suis pas
Une femme.”
An actress who was not a woman had little to do in the company of Scarron’s Angélique and Mademoiselle de l’Estoile. Florise, in short, is somewhat too allegorical and haughty a creature; while Colombine and Nérine (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 Hélène,” 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.
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 glass that reflects the tawny hair of Titian’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 Titian 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 passes 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 pâles oliviers, n’est-ce pas de ces heures désolées où, comme torture suprême, le Sauveur acceptait en son âme l’irrêparable misère du doute, n’est-ce pas alors qu’il ont appris de lui à courber le front sous le poids impérieux 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 Marseilles 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 sûr de faire une mauvaise, irrémédiablement mauvaise bouillabaisse.” The poet adds the remark that “une bouillabaisse réussie vaut un sonnet sans défaut.”