Part 8

In "Les Cariatides," especially in the poems styled "En Habit Zinzolin," M. De Banville revived old measures--the rondeau and the "poor little triolet." These are forms of verse which it is easy to write badly, and hard indeed to write well. They have knocked at the door of the English muse's garden--a runaway knock. In "Les Cariatides" they took a subordinate place, and played their pranks in the shadow of the grave figures of mythology, or at the close of the procession of Dionysus and his Maenads. De Banville often recalls Keats in his choice of classical themes. "Les Exiles," a poem of his maturity, is a French "Hyperion." "Le Triomphe de Bacchus" reminds one of the song of the Bassarids in "Endymion"--

"So many, and so many, and so gay."

There is a pretty touch of the pedant (who exists, says M. De Banville, in the heart of the poet) in this verse:

"Il reve a Cama, l'amour aux cinq fleches fleuries, Qui, lorsque soupire au milieu des roses prairies La douce Vasanta, parmi les bosquets de santal, Envoie aux cinq sens les fleches du carquois fatal."

The Bacchus of Titian has none of this Oriental languor, no memories of perfumed places where "the throne of Indian Cama slowly sails." One cannot help admiring the fancy which saw the conquering god still steeped in Asiatic ease, still unawakened to more vigorous passion by the fresh wind blowing from Thrace. Of all the Olympians, Diana has been most often hymned by M. De Banville: his imagination is haunted by the figure of the goddess. Now she is manifest in her Hellenic aspect, as Homer beheld her, "taking her pastime in the chase of boars and swift deer; and with her the wild wood-nymphs are sporting the daughters of Zeus; and Leto is glad at heart, for her child towers over them all, and is easy to be known where all are fair" (Odyssey, vi.). Again, Artemis appears more thoughtful, as in the sculpture of Jean Goujon, touched with the sadness of moonlight. Yet again, she is the weary and exiled spirit that haunts the forest of Fontainebleau, and is a stranger among the woodland folk, the fades and nixies. To this goddess, "being triple in her divided deity," M. De Banville has written his hymn in the characteristic form of the old French ballade. The translator may borrow Chaucer's apology--

"And eke to me it is a grete penaunce, Syth rhyme in English hath such scarsete To folowe, word by word, the curiosite Of Banville, flower of them that make in France."

"BALLADE SUR LES HOTES MYSTERIEUX DE LA FORET

"Still sing the mocking fairies, as of old, Beneath the shade of thorn and holly tree; The west wind breathes upon them pure and cold, And still wolves dread Diana roving free, In secret woodland with her company. Tis thought the peasants' hovels know her rite When now the wolds are bathed in silver light, And first the moonrise breaks the dusky grey, Then down the dells, with blown soft hair and bright, And through the dim wood Dian thrids her way.

"With water-weeds twined in their locks of gold The strange cold forest-fairies dance in glee; Sylphs over-timorous and over-bold Haunt the dark hollows where the dwarf may be, The wild red dwarf, the nixies' enemy; Then, 'mid their mirth, and laughter, and affright, The sudden goddess enters, tall and white, With one long sigh for summers passed away; The swift feet tear the ivy nets outright, And through the dim wood Dian thrids her way.

"She gleans her sylvan trophies; down the wold She hears the sobbing of the stags that flee, Mixed with the music of the hunting rolled, But her delight is all in archery, And nought of ruth and pity wotteth she More than the hounds that follow on the flight; The tall nymph draws a golden bow of might, And thick she rains the gentle shafts that slay, She tosses loose her locks upon the night, And Dian through the dim wood thrids her way.

ENVOI.

"Prince, let us leave the din, the dust, the spite, The gloom and glare of towns, the plague, the blight; Amid the forest leaves and fountain spray There is the mystic home of our delight, And through the dim wood Dian thrids her way."

The piece is characteristic of M. De Banville's genius. Through his throng of operatic nixies and sylphs of the ballet the cold Muse sometimes passes, strange, but not unfriendly. He, for his part, has never degraded the beautiful forms of old religion to make the laughing- stock of fools. His little play, Diane au Bois, has grace, and gravity, and tenderness like the tenderness of Keats, for the failings of immortals. "The gods are jealous exceedingly if any goddess takes a mortal man to her paramour, as Demeter chose Iasion." The least that mortal poets can do is to show the Olympians an example of toleration.

"Les Cariatides" have delayed us too long. They are wonderfully varied, vigorous, and rich, and full of promise in many ways. The promise has hardly been kept. There is more seriousness in "Les Stalactites" (1846), it is true, but then there is less daring. There is one morsel that must be quoted,--a fragment fashioned on the air and the simple words that used to waken the musings of George Sand when she was a child, dancing with the peasant children:

"Nous n'irons plus an bois: les lauries sont coupes, Les amours des bassins, les naiades en groupe Voient reluire au soleil, en cristaux decoupes Les flots silencieux qui coulaient de leur coupe, Les lauriers sont coupes et le cerf aux abois Tressaille au son du cor: nous n'irons plus au bois! Ou des enfants joueurs riait la folle troupe Parmi les lys d'argent aux pleurs du ciel trempes, Voici l'herbe qu'on fauche et les lauriers qu'on coupe; Nous n'irons plus au bois; les lauriers sont coupes."

In these days Banville, like Gerard de Nerval in earlier times, RONSARDISED. The poem 'A la Font Georges,' full of the memories of childhood, sweet and rich with the air and the hour of sunset, is written in a favourite metre of Ronsard's. Thus Ronsard says in his lyrical version of five famous lines of Homer--

"La gresle ni la neige N'ont tels lieux pour leur siege Ne la foudre oncques la Ne devala."

(The snow, and wind, and hail May never there prevail, Nor thunderbolt doth fall, Nor rain at all.)

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, Ou mon heureuse enfance Avait des jours encor Tout files 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 file d'or," and closes when the dusk is washed with silver--

"A l'heure ou sous leurs voiles Les tremblantes etoiles 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, melee a des feuilles d'acanthe, Fleurisse, et que plus bas des vierges lentement S'avancent deux a deux, d'un pas sur et charmant, Les bras pendants le long de leurs tuniques droites Et les cheyeux tresses sur leurs tetes etroites."

In the same volume of the definite series of poems come "Les Odelettes," charming lyrics, one of which, addressed to Theophile 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 debardeurs, 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 coteaux et dans les landes Voltigeant comme un oiseleur Buloz en ferait des guirlandes Si Limayrac devenait fleur!"