There is a danger—but there is also a fascination—in the instinct which leads us, when we observe literature broadly, to find relations or parallelisms between independent and diverse personalities. In the most striking examples, however, where there has been no actual influence at work, these parallelisms are apt to be very misleading. Where it is impossible not to observe elements of likeness, as between Byron and Musset, we may take them to be actual, and no matters of chance. But the similarity, in certain aspects, between Alfred de Vigny and Thomas Hardy, between André Chénier and Keats, between Crabbe and Verhaeren, must be accidental, and is founded on a comparison between very limited portions of the work of each. Nevertheless, for purposes of illumination, it is sometimes useful—on what we may call the Lamarckian system—to see where the orbits of certain eminent writers of distinctive originality approach nearest to one another.
It is admitted that Leconte de Lisle is pre-eminently gifted among the poets of France in certain clearly defined directions. His poems, which are marked by a concinnity of method which sometimes degenerates into monotony, are distinguished above all others by their haughty concentration of effort, by their purity of outline, and by their extreme precision in the use of definite imagery. They aim, with unflinching consistency, at a realization of beauty so abstract that the forms by which it is interpreted to the imagination are almost wholly sculpturesque. Is there an English poet of whom, at his best, the same language might be used? There is one, and only one, and that is Walter Savage Landor. It cannot but be stimulating to the reader to put side by side, let us say, the opening lines of The Hamadryad and of Khirón, or the dialogue of Niobé and that of Thrasymedes and Eunoë, and to see how closely related is the manner in which the English and the French poet approach their themes. The spirit of pagan beauty broods over Hypatie et Cyrille as it does over the mingled prose and verse of Pericles and Aspasia, and with the same religious desiderium. We shall not find another revelation of the cupuscular magnificence of the farthermost antiquity so striking as Landor's Gebir, unless we seek it in the Kaïn of Leconte de Lisle.
But we should not drive this parallel too far. If the breadth and majesty of vision which draw these two poets together are notable, not less so are their divergencies. Landor, who so often appears to be on the point of uttering something magical which never gets past his lips, is one of the most unequal of writers. He ascends and descends, with disconcerting abruptness, from an exquisite inspiration to the darkest level of hardness. Leconte de Lisle, on the other hand, is the victim of no vicissitudes of style: he floats in the empyrean, borne up apparently without an effort at a uniform height, like his own Condor:
Il dort dans l'air glacé, les ailes toutes grandes.
Many readers—particularly those on whom the romantic heresy has laid its hands with the greatest violence—resent this Olympian imperturbability; and the charge has been frequently brought, and is still occasionally repeated, that Leconte de Lisle is lacking in sensibility, that he dares to be "impassible" in an age when every heart is worn, palpitating, on the sleeve of the impulsive lyrist. He was accused, as the idle world always loves to accuse the visionary, of isolating himself from his kind with a muttered odi profanum vulgus et arceo. Such an opinion is founded on the aspect of reserve which his vast legendary pictures suggest, and on the impersonal and severely objective attitude which he adopts with regard to history and nature. His poems breathe a disdain of life and of the resilience of human appetite (La Mort de Valmiki), a love of solitude (Le Désert), a determination to gaze on spectacles of horror without betraying nervous emotion (Le Massacre de Mona), which seem superhuman and almost inhuman. He was accused, in his dramas—which were perhaps the most wilful, the least spontaneous part of his work—of affecting a Greek frightfulness which outran the early Greeks themselves. Francisque Sarcey said that Leconte de Lisle, in his tragedy of Les Erinnyes, scratched the face of Æschylus, as though he did not find it bloody enough already.
The subjects which Leconte de Lisle prefers are never of a sort to promote sentimentality or even sensibility. He writes of Druids moaning along the edge of hyperborean cliffs, of elephants marching in set column across hot brown stretches of sand, of the black panther crouched among the scarlet cactus-blossoms, of the polar bear lamenting among the rocks, of the Syrian sages whose beards drip with myrrh as they sit in council under the fig-tree of Naboth. He writes of humming-birds and of tigers, of Malay pirates and of the sapphire cup of Bhagavat, of immortal Zeus danced round by the young Oceanides, and of Brahma seeking the origin of things in the cascades of the Sacred River. These are not themes which lend themselves to personal effusion, or on which the poet can be expected to embroider any confessions of his egotism. If Leconte de Lisle chooses to be thus remote from common human interests—that is to say, from the emotions of our vulgar life to-day—his is the responsibility, and it is one which he has fully recognized. But that his genius was not wholly marmoreal, nor of an icy impassibility, the careful study of his works will amply assure us.
It is strange that even very careful critics have been led to overlook the personal note in the poems of Leconte de Lisle: probably because the wail of self-pity is so piercing in most modern verse that it deadens the ear to the discreet murmur of the stoic poet's confession. Hence even Anatole France has been led to declare that the author of Poèmes Barbares has determined to be as obstinately absent from his work as God is from creation; and that he has never breathed a word about himself, his secret wishes, or his personal ideals. But what is such a passage as the following if not a revelation of the soul of the poet in its innermost veracity?
O jeunesse sacrée, irréparable joie,
Félicité perdue, où l'âme en pleurs se noie!
O lumière, ô fratcheur des monts calmes et bleus,
Des coteaux et des bois feuillages onduleux,
Aubes d'un jour divin, chants des mers fortunées,
Florissante vigueur de mes belles années...
Vous vivez, vous chantez, vous palpitez encor,
Saintes réalités, dans vos horizons d'or!
Mais, ô nature, ô ciel, flois sacrés, monts sublimes,
Bois dont les vents amis sont murmurer les cimes,
Formes de l'idéal, magnifiques aux yeux,
Vous avez disparu de mon cœur oublieux!
Et voici que, lassé de voluptés amères,
Haletant du désir de mes mille chimères,
Hélas! j'ai désappris les hymnes d'autrefois,
Et que mes dieux trahis n'entendent plus ma voix.
This is a note more often heard, perhaps, in English than in French poetry. It is the lament of Wordsworth for the "visionary gleam" that has fled, for "the glory and the dream" that fade into the light of common day.
Leconte de Lisle is unsparing with the results of his erudition, and this probably confirms the popular notion of his remoteness. Here, however, returning for a moment to Landor, we may observe that he is never so close-packed and never so cryptic as the author of Chrysaor and Gunlaug. What Leconte de Lisle has to tell us about mysterious Oriental sages and mythical Scandinavian heroes may be unfamiliar to the reader, but is never rendered obscure by his mode of narration. Nothing could be less within our ordinary range of experience than the adventure of Le Barde de Temrah, who arrives at dawn from a palace of the Finns, in a chariot drawn by two white buffaloes; but Leconte de Lisle recounts it voluminously, in clear, loud language which leaves no sense of doubt on the listener's mind as to what exactly happened.