as Verlaine grimly calls them, represents a countess in prison holding in her lap the head of her husband, whom she has killed in a fit of jealousy while he was in mortal sin. The head speaks to tell her that he loves her still, and gasps: "Damn thyself that we be not parted." "Pity, pity, my God!" she shrieks, and by that prayer is torn from her lover to paradise, to discover, like another of these incarnations of passion, that "hell is absence." An instance of Such conceptions are the sign of an unbalanced mind, of which many traces can be found in other poems whose rhythm has the capricious beauty of a hashish dream and, like our English "Kubla-Khan,” defies the analysis of the rhetorician. this is afforded by his "Art poétique," which has a double interest because it both illustrates and characterizes the aspirations of the decadent school, though they write their best poetry when they are recreant to it. It may not be without interest, therefore, to translate as well as may be the sense, or what seems to be the sense, of a few stanzas, laboring to be literal, though with the certainty of remaining obscure: "Music before everything; therefore choose the unequal, more vague, more soluble in air, with nothing in it that has weight or pose. Then, too, you must not go choose your words too cautiously. the gray song, where the indefinite joins the precise . . . For shade is still our desire, - not color, only shade. Oh, shade, sole reliance! Dream to the dream, and flute to the horn." 1 Nothing is dearer than 1 De la musique avant toute chose, What this last line may mean I cannot conjecture, nor perhaps Verlaine either, for a little later he adds this counsel: "Let thy verse be good luck scattered on the crisped wind of the morning that reeks of mint and thyme . . . And all the rest is literature." 1 Which is merely Verlaine's recognition of the fact that to him words are more than ideas, style more than matter; and though this is contrary to any true symbolism in poetry, it is true in a large measure of the verses of many decadents who have allowed themselves to be called Symbolists though they have been more appropriately described by Verlaine himself as "Cymbalists." Of this group the men who have attracted the most attention are the Greek Moréas, the Americans Merrill and Vielé-Griffin, the Belgian dramatist Mæterlinck, and the Frenchmen Ghil, Mallarmé, and, probably most talented of them all, De Regnier. These poets undertake, or profess to undertake, to express essentially poetic sentiments indirectly by farfetched metaphors, or even by the sound of words and letters quite independently of their received signification. Thus Ghil tells us that "a is black, e white, i blue, o red, and u yellow;" while another theorist of onomatopoeia, Rimbaud, indignantly avers that any decadent ought to know that “i is red, o blue, and u green." Not content with this, they have discovered a pre-established harmony between vowel sounds and musical instruments: "a is the organ, e the harp, i the violin, o the trumpet, and u the flute." Or, again, "a is monotony, e serenity, i passion and prayer, o glory, and u the ingenuous smile," though not because that is what might naturally end such an ars poetica, for the diphthongs have their significance also, and even combinations of vowel and consonant are not neglected in Rimbaud's Symbolist "Gradus ad Parnassum." 1 Verlaine does not go to these extremes, nor do any but the mountebanks among the Symbolists follow this will-o'-the-wisp except to attract attention or show their virtuosity. But Verlaine is always a poet of impulse or instinct, and is only just to himself when he asserts 2 that verse is to him a spontaneous expression of feeling, conscious of no literary tradition and developing no consecutive thought. Hence comes his indifference to the consecrated literary usages of words. They have not the same meaning for him that they would have to a poet of literary training, and yet his ear delights in them. As Lemaître suggests, it is as though he had entered the Parnassian Cénacle, had listened to those tuneful disciples of art for art, and then had left their company "intoxicated by the music of their words, but by their music alone." The same writer concludes his delicate, sympathetic, yet searching diagnosis of this morbid spirit with the antitheti 1 Cp. Rimbaud, Traité du verbe, and Brunetière, Poésie lyrique, ii. 243. 2 Cp. Huret, L'Enquête littéraire. cally balanced judgment: "Verlaine has the senses of a sick man, but the soul of a child; he has a naïve charm in his unhealthy languor; he is a decadent who has in him most of the primitive man." Like Baudelaire and like Banville, Verlaine and the decadents more or less closely related to him suffer from a morbid singularity, the overstimulation of individualism inherited from the bankruptcy of Romanticism. Hence the line of their development would naturally be lyric poetry. But to those who are anxiously watching the signs in the literary heavens there seems small promise in this school of any permanent advance in the art or mechanism of song. They stand for reaction from the coldly formal objectivity of the Parnassians, and their value to the next generation will probably seem to be that they reasserted the rightful place in lyric poetry of individuality and idealism. For this they will be remembered, while their licenses in language and rhythm will sooner be forgotten than forgiven. CHAPTER X. THE EVOLUTION OF THE DRAMA.1 THE drama of modern France is not a development of the Romantic movement, still less a reversion to the classical type as it was understood by Ponsard and his School of Good Sense. It owes much to Diderot and the dramatic reformers of the eighteenth century, and more than it is always willing to confess, to Scribe, who, while the psychological comedy of social satire was awaiting its development, transfigured the humble vaudeville into the legitimate drama. During the generation that separates the first from the third Napoleon Scribe was without a rival in popular favor, and the fertility and rapidity of his production seemed to leave no demand unsatisfied. 2 Perhaps no other playwright has ever enjoyed so long an undisputed pre-eminence or reaped such rich rewards. But the cause of his success is also the cause of the shade of mocking contempt with which it is now the literary 1 For the statistics of the modern stage Soubies, La Comédie-Française depuis l'époque romantique, 1824-1895, is invaluable. All the dramatists named in this chapter and many others are discussed in Lemaître, Impressions de théâtre, 8 vols. 2 Scribe was born in 1791, and died in 1861. Some four hundred of his pieces have been collected in seventy-six volumes. For critical appreciations see Lanson, p. 966; Brunetière, Époques du théâtre, p. 349; Sainte-Beuve, Portraits contemporains, ii. 91 and 589; Weiss, Le théâtre et les mœurs, p. 3. |