Confessions of a Young Man

by George Moore

Théodore de Banville. At first I thought him cold, tinged with the rhetorical ice of the Leconte de Lisle. He had no new creed to proclaim nor old creed to denounce, the inherent miseries of human life did not seem to touch him, and of the languors and ardours of animal or spiritual passion there are none. What is there? a pure, clear song, an instinctive, incurable and lark-like love of the song. The lily is white, and the rose is red, such knowledge of, such observation of nature is enough for the poet, and he sings and he trills, there is silver magic in every note, and the song as it ascends rings, and all the air quivers with the everwidening circle of the echoes, sighing and dying out of the ear until the last faintness is reached, and the glad rhymes clash and dash forth again on their aërial way. Banville is not the poet, he is the bard. The great questions that agitate the mind of man have not troubled him, life, death, and love he only perceives as stalks whereon he may weave his glittering web of living words. Whatever his moods may be, he is lyrical. His wit flies out on clear-cut, swallow-like wings as when he said, in speaking of Paul Alexis' book "Le Besoin d'aimer," "Vous avez trouvez un titre assez laid pour faire reculer les divines étoiles." I know not what instrument to compare with his verse. I suppose I should say a flute; but it seems to me more like a marvellously toned piano. His hands pass over the keys, and he produces Chopin-like music.

It is now well known that French verse is not seventy years old. If it was Hugo who invented French rhyme it was Banville who broke up the couplet. Hugo had perhaps ventured to place the pause between the adjective and its noun, but it was not until Banville wrote the line, "Elle filait pensivement la blanche laine" that the caesura received its final coup de grâce. This verse has been probably more imitated than any other verse in the French language. Pensivement was replaced by some similar four-syllable adverb, Elle tirait nonchalamment les bas de soie, etc. It was the beginning of the end.

I read the French poets of the modern school—Coppée, Mendès, Léon Diex, Verlaine, José Maria Heredia, Mallarmé, Rechepin, Villiers de l'Isle Adam. Coppée, as may be imagined, I only was capable of appreciating in his first manner, when he wrote those exquisite but purely artistic sonnets "La Tulipe" and "Le Lys." In the latter a room decorated with daggers, armour, jewellery and china is beautifully described, and it is only in the last line that the lily which animates and gives life to the whole is introduced. But the exquisite poetic perceptivity Coppée showed in his modern poems, the certainty with which he raised the commonest subject, investing it with sufficient dignity for his purpose, escaped me wholly, and I could not but turn with horror from such poems as "La Nourrice" and "Le Petit Epicier." How anyone could bring himself to acknowledge the vulgar details of our vulgar age I could not understand. The fiery glory of José Maria de Heredia, on the contrary, filled me with enthusiasm—ruins and sand, shadow and silhouette of palms and pillars, negroes, crimson, swords, silence, and arabesques. As great copper pans go the clangour of the rhymes.

"Entre le ciel qui brûle et la mer qui moutonne,
Au somnolent soleil d'un midi monotone,
Tu songes, O guerrière, aux vieux conquistadors;
Et dans l'énervement des nuits chaudes et calmes,
Berçant ta gloire éteinte, O cité, tu t'endors
Sous les palmiers, au long frémissement des palmes."

Catulle Mendès, a perfect realisation of his name, of his pale hair, of his fragile face illuminated with the idealism of a depraved woman. He takes you by the arm, by the hand, he leans towards you, his words are caresses, his fervour is delightful, and listening to him is as sweet as drinking a fair perfumed white wine. All he says is false—the book he has just read, the play he is writing, the woman who loves him,… he buys a packet of bonbons in the streets and eats them, and it is false. An exquisite artist; physically and spiritually he is art; he is the muse herself, or rather, he is one of the minions of the muse. Passing from flower to flower he goes, his whole nature pulsing with butterfly voluptuousness. He has written poems as good as Hugo, as good as Leconte de Lisle, as good as Banville, as good as Baudelaire, as good as Gautier, as good as Coppée; he never wrote an ugly line in his life, but he never wrote a line that some one of his brilliant contemporaries might not have written. He has produced good work of all kinds "et voilà tout." Every generation, every country, has its Catulle Mendès. Robert Buchanan is ours, only in the adaptation Scotch gruel has been substituted for perfumed white wine. No more delightful talker than Mendès, no more accomplished littérateur, no more fluent and translucid critic. I remember the great moonlights of the Place Pigale, when, on leaving the café, he would take me by the arm, and expound Hugo's or Zola's last book, thinking as he spoke of the Greek sophists. There were for contrast Mallarmé's Tuesday evenings, a few friends sitting round the hearth, the lamp on the table. I have met none whose conversation was more fruitful, but with the exception of his early verses I cannot say I ever frankly enjoyed his poetry. When I knew him he had published the celebrated "L'Après Midi d'un Faun:" the first poem written in accordance with the theory of symbolism. But when it was given to me (this marvellous brochure furnished with strange illustrations and wonderful tassels), I thought it absurdly obscure. Since then, however, it has been rendered by force of contrast with the brain-curdling enigmas the author has since published a marvel of lucidity; and were I to read it now I should appreciate its many beauties. It bears the same relation to the author's later work as Rienzi to The Walkyrie. But what is symbolism? Vulgarly speaking, saying the opposite to what you mean. For example, you want to say that music which is the new art, is replacing the old art, which is poetry. First symbol: a house in which there is a funeral, the pall extends over the furniture. The house is poetry, poetry is dead. Second symbol: "notre vieux grimoire," grimoire is the parchment, parchment is used for writing, therefore, grimoire is the symbol for literature, "d'où s'exaltent les milliers," thousands of what? of letters of course. We have heard a great deal in England of Browning obscurity. The "Red Cotton Nightcap Country" is child's play compared to a sonnet by a determined symbolist such as Mallarmé, or better still his disciple Ghil who has added to the difficulties of symbolism those of poetic instrumentation. For according to M. Ghil and his organ Les Ecrits pour l'Art, it would appear that the syllables of the French language evoke in us the sensations of different colours; consequently the timbre of the different instruments. The vowel u corresponds to the colour yellow, and therefore to the sound of flutes.

Arthur Rimbaud was, it is true, first in the field with these pleasant and genial theories; but M. Ghil informs us that Rimbaud was mistaken in many things, particularly in coupling the sound of the vowel u with the colour green instead of with the colour yellow. M. Ghil has corrected this very stupid blunder and many others; and his instrumentation in his last volume, "Le Geste Ingénu," may be considered as complete and definitive. The work is dedicated to Mallarmé, "Père et seigneur des ors, des pierreries, et des poissons," and other works are to follow:—the six tomes of "Légendes de Rêves et de Sangs," the innumerable tomes of "La Glose," and the single tome of "La Loi."

And that man Gustave Kahn, who takes the French language as a violin, and lets the bow of his emotion run at wild will upon it producing strange acute strains, unpremeditated harmonies comparable to nothing that I know of but some Hungarian rhapsody; verses of seventeen syllables interwoven with verses of eight, and even nine, masculine rhymes, seeking strange union with feminine rhymes in the middle of the line—a music sweet, subtil, and epicene; the half-note, the inflexion, but not the full tone—as "se fondre, o souvenir, des lys âcres délices."

Se penchant vers les dahlias,
Des paons cabrient dès rosace lunaire
L'assoupissement des branches vénère
Son pale visage aux mourants dahlias.

Elle écoute au loin les brèves musiques
Nuit claire aux ramures d'accords,
Et la lassitude a bercé son corps
Au rhythme odorant des pures musiques.

Les paons out dressé la rampe occellée
Pour la descente de ses yeux vers le tapis
De choses et de sens
Qui va vers l'horizon, parure vemiculée
De son corps alangui
En âme se tapit
Le flou désir molli de récits et d'encens.