"Un soir fait de rose et de bleu mystique
Nous échangerons un éclair unique
Comme un long sanglot tout chargé d'adieux."
For months I fed on the mad and morbid literature that the enthusiasm of 1830 called into existence. The gloomy and sterile little pictures of "Gaspard de la Nuit," or the elaborate criminality, "Les Contes Immoraux," laboriously invented lifeless things with creaky joints, pitiful lay figures that fall to dust as soon as the book is closed, and in the dust only the figures of the terrible ferryman and the unfortunate Dora remain. "Madame Potiphar" cost me forty francs, and I never read more than a few pages.
Like a pike after minnows, I pursued the works of Les Jeune France along the quays and through every passage in Paris. The money spent was considerable, the waste of time enormous. One man's solitary work (he died very young, but he is known to have excelled all in length of his hair and the redness of his waistcoats) resisted my efforts to capture it. At last I caught sight of the precious volume in a shop on the Quai Voltaire. Trembling I asked the price. The man looked at me earnestly and answered, "A hundred and fifty francs." No doubt it was a great deal of money, but I paid it and rushed home to read. Many that had gone before had proved disappointing, and I was obliged to admit had contributed little towards my intellectual advancement; but this—this that I had heard about so long—not a queer phrase, not an outrage of any sort of kind, not even a new blasphemy, nothing, that is to say, nothing but a hundred and fifty francs. Having thus rudely, and very pikelike, knocked my nose against the bottom—this book was, most assuredly, the bottom of the literature of 1830—I came up to the surface and began to look around my contemporaries for something to read.
I have remarked before on the instinctiveness of my likes and dislikes, on my susceptibility to the sound of and even to the appearance of a name upon paper. I was repelled by Leconte de Lisle from the first, and it was only by a very deliberate outrage to my feelings that I bought and read "Les Poèmes Antiques," and "Les Poèmes Barbares;" I was deceived in nothing, all I had anticipated I found—long, desolate boredom. Leconte de Lisle produces on me the effect of a walk through the new Law Courts, with a steady but not violent draught sweeping from end to end. Oh, the vile old professor of rhetoric! and when I saw him the last time I was in Paris, his head—a declaration of righteousness, a cross between a Caesar by Gerome, and an archbishop of a provincial town, set all my natural antipathy instantly on edge. Hugo is often pompous, shallow, empty, unreal, but he is at least an artist, and when he thinks of the artist and forgets the prophet, as in "Les Chansons des Rues et des Bois," his juggling with the verse is magnificent, superb.
"Comme un geai sur l'arbre
Le roi se tient fier;
Son coeur est de marbre,
Son ventre est de chair.
"On a pour sa nuque
Et son front vermeil
Fait une perruque
Avec le soleil.
"Il règne, il végète
Effroyable zéro;
Sur lui se projette
L'ombre du bourreau.
"Son trône est une tombe,
Et sur le pavé
Quelque chose en tombe
Qu'on n'a point lavé."
But how to get the first line of the last stanza into five syllables I cannot think. If ever I meet with the volume again I will look it out and see how that rude dompteur de syllables managed it. But stay, son trône est la tombe; that makes the verse, and the generalisation would be in the "line" of Hugo. Hugo—how impossible it is to speak of French literature without referring to him. Let these, however, be the concluding words: he thought that by saying everything, and saying everything twenty times over, he would for ever render impossible the advent of another great poet. But a work of art is valuable, and pleasurable in proportion to its rarity; one beautiful book of verses is better than twenty books of beautiful verses. This is an absolute and incontestable truth; a child can burlesque this truth—one verse is better than the whole poem: a word is better than the line; a letter is better than the word; but the truth is not thereby affected. Hugo never had the good fortune to write a bad book, nor even a single bad line, so not having time to read all, the future will read none. What immortality would be gained by the destruction of one half of his magnificent works; what oblivion is secured by the publication of these posthumous volumes.
To return to the Leconte de Lisle. See his "Discours de Réception." Is it possible to imagine anything more absurdly arid? Rhetoric of this sort, "des vers d'or sur une écume d'airain," and such sententious platitudes (speaking of the realists), "Les épidémies de cette nature passent, et le génie demeure."