la THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES G A L L I C A AND OTHER ESSAYS BY THE SAME AUTHOR THE IDYLLS OF THEOCRITUS Translated into English Verse 4to. 6s. 6d. LONDON AND NEW YORK : LONGMANS, GREEN, AND Co. AND OTHER ESSAYS BY JAMES HEN T RY MALLARD M.A. OXON. LECTURER ON FRENCH IN UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, LIVERPOOL TRANSLATOR OF THEOCRITUS ' Difficile est proprie communia dicere ' HORACE, Ars Poetica LONDON LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. AND NEW YORK 1895 All rights reserved TO THE MEMORY OF MATTHEW ARNOLD THESE ESSAYS ARE GRATEFULLY DEDICATED 1844150 ' PREFACE THESE essays were written at various times and in various moods during the last ten years. They do not pretend to form any unity except in so far that the larger set concerns topics of French literature. Most of them have already seen the light of ephemeral publication; some were read before the Speculative Society of Edinburgh, and one or two now come before the world for the first time. On looking over them, I am painfully conscious that some of the earlier ones (earlier, I mean, in point of time, not in point of place) show marked traces of immaturity and of imitation. These faults are almost unavoidable by a youthful critic, and may, perhaps, be pardoned on the score of enthusiasm; but if I have failed to show some fresh aspects of the sub- jects which I treat, then indeed I merit censure for daring to 'hold a farthing candle to the sun.' viii PREFACE My best thanks are due to that excellent French scholar, Mr. J. A. L. Kunz, for kindly consenting to revise the first part of these essays, and for giving me hints on some points. I have also to thank my friend, Mr. P. H. Pritchard, for lavish care bestowed on my proof-sheets. J. H. H. EDINBURGH, May 1895. CONTENTS GALLICA PAGE SOME REASONS FOR LEARNING FRENCH, .... 3 CORNEILLE, 18 RACINE, .......... 40 THE POETRY OF ALFRED DE MUSSET, 95 PAUL BOURGET, HO OTHER ESSAYS THE POETRY OF KEATS, . 1 19 THE POETRY OF MR. SWINBURNE, 128 THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF SOLOMON MAIMON, . . .143 GALLICA SOME REASONS FOR LEARNING FRENCH IT is much to be feared that the study of Greek will, despite Professor Jebb's optimistic belief to the contrary, eventually all but die out from the educational curricula of this country. In France it has practically done so already. It no longer forms a necessary part of the Baccalaurtat degree ; and there are not wanting signs to show that in this country, too, Greek will one day cease being an obligatory subject in the Arts' degree of our Universities. Whether this is a matter for regret or rejoicing, is perhaps an open question. One may be a devoted Hellenist, and yet fail to see why all who aspire to University success should be forced to acquire the ' beggarly elements ' of Greek. There will always remain a cultured minority who will see to it that the study of the most beautiful language and literature that the world has ever known shall not die out. But, for the majority of educated men, some substitute for the language and literature of ancient Hellas must be found. And, with all deference to the Teutonically-disposed among us, that substitute is to be found in the study of French. Why this is so, it shall be the purpose of this essay to illustrate. We all know what the leading characteristics of the Greek genius at its best were lightness, delicacy, moderation, 3 4 SOME REASONS FOR LEARNING FRENCH charm. Others could be named, but these were on the whole the distinguishing features. Now, it is largely to these very qualities that French owes its European vogue ; for, after all, in spite of Germany's military prestige and her pre-eminence in music, the civilised nations of the Continent still turn to France for their literature. The average Englishman of the homme sensuel moyen type, which is everywhere as a rule cynically disposed, would maintain that the reason for this vogue is not so far to seek. And no doubt he would have something to say for himself. But I am not here referring to the success enjoyed by the great and grimy Monsieur Zola that curious mixture, in the person of a brave bourgeois, of the poet, the man of science, the moralist, and well, the ' philis- tine.' Doubtless he owes his popularity in large measure and nowhere more than amongst ourselves to the very qualities which the disinterested lover of literature rather deprecates. But I am here referring to the beautiful works of literary art which France has just ceased if indeed she has quite ceased to lavish on the world. French novels of the best type, French essays, French memoirs, French plays, where are to be found better than these ? ' True,' my critic may say, ' but these are the lighter forms of literature. What about the more serious ? Can France be said to lead the world in science, philosophy, art ? ' Well, perhaps not ; but it still remains true that any book whose author desires a Euro- pean vogue for it, must be translated into French. French is still the great mediating language of Europe. All, or almost all, cultured people in other countries read French as a second language. This is not true of German, or of any other Euro- SOME REASONS FOR LEARNING FRENCH 5 pean tongue. In fact, French may be said to hold the same position with regard to other languages as Greek at one time did. But the analogy must not be pressed too far. Still, just as an educated Roman in the days of Cicero read Greek, so do educated Englishmen, Germans or Russians, read French. It may very well be that French is not the best language for some things, but it is unquestionably the best language for most things. It is bright and vivacious, and is therefore par excellence the language of conversation. It is logical and lucid, and is therefore the best language for science. It is subtle, and therefore the best language for psychology. And surely conversation, novels, and science are considerable agents in life. For poetry, it is not so well adapted as English, but it is not so ill adapted as most Englishmen fancy. It requires a very intimate knowledge of French, however, to understand the charm of French poetry. An Englishman always boggles at the words of Latin origin, which are also English words, and for which we have simpler Saxon equivalents. In a later essay I shall go into this question of French poetic diction. At present I wish to write a plea for the study of French in general. The French have a saying, which naturally we do not accept, that French is the language of men, English the language of birds. They also add that Italian is the language of women, and German the language of horses. With these two last appreciations we shall not concern ourselves ; but why should English be regarded as the language of birds ? We are accustomed to think of our native tongue as a manly one com- pared with French ; yet the Frenchman talks of the gazouille- ment, the ' twittering,' of the English language. How should 6 SOME REASONS FOR LEARNING FRENCH this be ? Well, the reason is not so very far to seek. English is full to excess of sibilant sounds s and ch abound in it. French, on the other hand, is full of sonorous, nasal sounds, like on, en, etc., which give to the language a kind of metallic clang. Thdophile Gautier it is, I think, who compares the sound of French to the rippling of chain-armour. There can be no doubt that French is the more sonorous, the more masculine language of the two. What it lacks is the whis- pering sweetness of English, that sound as of wind through a reed-bed. This is given to English by its sibilants and its indefinite vowel-sounds. In French all is clear and hard-cut : there are no vague sounds in it. Even the famous shibboleth grenouille is not really a vague set of sounds. It is simplicity itself when compared with (say) the apparently simple English word hair. Try to explain to an intelligent Frenchman the exact way to pronounce fair, and you will find that you must modify your opinion about the simplicity and strength of the English tongue. But this is a digression. It is with the matter, not with the sound, of the French language that we wish to deal. What are the reasons that make one assert that French is the proper language to take the place of Greek in the education of those to whom Greek is to be denied ? Well, in the first place, French is essentially the language of pure intelligence, just as Greek was. As Voltaire says, ' Tout ce qui n'est pas clair nest pas franfais.' German has, doubtless, many advantages. It has endless ways of expressing itself. It is the most pliable of tongues, but it lacks that logical, clear-cut exactitude of phrase which makes French so much better a vehicle for the SOME REASONS FOR LEARNING FRENCH 7 intelligence. We all remember Mark Twain's humorous chapter on the German language, and have all more or less sympathised with his criticism. German is rather a helpless language for some purposes. None but the great writers seem able to write it simply and clearly et encore, as the French say. English also has many advantages ; but it has the dis- advantage of being our native tongue. Moreover, it has practically no grammar. Now, an invertebrate language has many obvious practical merits ; but, as an instrument of mental discipline, it cannot be compared with a synthetic or partially synthetic language. Severity of syntax is another feature rather wanting in English, and this French has in a less degree only than Latin, which must ever remain the best educational language for Europeans. Nothing can conceivably take the place of Latin in the educational curriculum of our schools ; but French can make a very passable substitute for Greek. It possesses, as we have seen, logical clearness. It has also brightness, lightness, grace. These qualities are by universal consent allowed it. It has also universality. In spite of Prince Bismarck's gruff refusal to treat with M. Thiers in French, French is likely to endure as the language of diplomacy. It is the language of courtesy, of urbanity. It is the least barbarous of modern languages. It is the most fixed and polished. Paris is still the centre of Europe from the intellec- tual point of view. The graceful essayist and fine poet to whose memory these pages are dedicated has spoken of ' France, famed for all great arts, in none supreme ' ; and although this criticism seems to me strangely to under state the truth with regard to different arts at different times, 8 SOME REASONS FOR LEARNING FRENCH yet it is precisely this all-round excellence that makes Paris so eminently the central city of Europe, the mile de lumitre. Still, there is one art in which the French must surely be reckoned first first, that is to say, of modern nations and that is the dramatic art. The dramatic art of the Greeks stands apart, aloft, while Shakespeare's art is as nowhere compared with his poetical genius. But as playwrights, and, it might be added, as play-actors, who can equal the nation that has given us a Eacine, a Moliere, a Victor Hugo ; or, again, a Talma, a Rachel, a Coquelin, a Bernhardt? No doubt we have our own praiseworthy little modern dramatists, and our own praiseworthy little modern plays ; but one of the penalties one has to endure for knowing superior work is the discontent one feels with the inferior. Many excellent, and even intelligent people take great pleasure in such suburban 'moralities' as 'The Second Mrs. Tanqueray' to name a late notorious in- stance. To one familiar with French plays, such a taste must naturally appear crude. With the exception, perhaps, of Mr Wilde's plays, and a very few others, which have some- what redeemed English drama of the last decade from hopeless dulness and sordid vulgarity, what has there been of native growth worth a serious thought from a serious man ? Did I say decade ? Make it a century, and with doubtful exceptions here and there, the statement still remains true. Our last dramatic writer of eminence was Sheridan; but in France, Victor Hugo died but a few years ago. and Sardou still lives and writes, as do also other remark- able playwrights, fortunately for our stage. No, there can be no serious comparison between our modern theatre and the SOME REASONS FOR LEARNING FRENCH 9 French. Our poets do not write plays, and our playwrights do not write poetry. Prose, and unliterary prose, has been our dramatic medium for long. Then, as to our actors. With the exception of a wayward genius, a man of talent or tempera- ment here and there, and a few rather more than meritorious mediocrities, who is there on our stage that can compare with the artists of the Comtdie frangaisel As for the rank and file of our actors, some of them young men of good birth, breeding and education, they are, well, where are they? I have seen better all-round acting in a provincial German playhouse than is usually to be found in many London theatres. This is a simple and humiliating fact. Perhaps, when French ideas have permeated the nation more, we shall have a State- supported theatre and something in the way of training analogous to the Conservatoire. Till then, we must remain in thraldom to that bright particular ' star ' the actor-manager, and until some men of genuine literary ability take to play- writing, we shall have an endless succession of 'Mrs. Tan- querays' and 'Dancing Girls.' Then in fiction. Putting aside Scott, whom have we had this century that can stand beside Balzac, Dumas, Victor Hugo, George Sand? Surely not Thackeray, surely not George Eliot. Nothing, to my thinking, more denotes the insular mind than the belief that Thackeray or George Eliot are writers of the first order of genius Thackeray, with what Mr. Henley, in his bold, bright little book Views and Reviews, so well calls his ' club-room window aspect of life ' ; with his parti pris that if one is clever one is most likely to be a knave, and that if one is good one is nearly io SOME REASONS FOR LEARNING FRENCH certain to be a fool, his genuine yet shallow cynicism, his want of charm ; George Eliot with her terrible moral earnest- ness about trifles, and her still more terrible, because more obtruded, learnedness. When I think of the poetic energy and flow, of the large mild comprehension of life, of the artistic charm of George Sand, I feel that our George Eliot is not in the same world. It seems difficult to us now to understand how people should have puzzled over the question as to whether George Eliot was a man or a woman. We have all grown so familiar now with the manner of the lady-novelist, that such dubiety could not arise, for all our women-writers, with perhaps the exception of the Brontes, betray their sex. But George Sand is a male writer ; or, perhaps, it would be truer to say that she almost alone of her sex in fiction has been able to reach a plane of art where there is neither male nor female. The number of women who have done this could be counted on the fingers of one hand. From Sappho the Lesbian to Emily Bronte, the list is but a small one. As these essays are merely of a literary order, it would not come within my scope to speak of French as a vehicle for philosophical or scientific writing. Suffice it to say that French acts as a sieve in winnowing the wheat from the chaff, when learned works are translated into it. It is intolerant of obscurity, slovenliness, carelessness, either in thought or ex- pression. This was once brought clearly home to me. I read a book which, I believe, made some noise in its day in this country among half-educated people. It was called Natural Law in the Spiritual World, and I read it in a French trans- lation. The medium was a fatal one to choose, for the radical SOME REASONS FOR LEARNING FRENCH n and inherent inadequacy of the argument was most strikingly brought out. That is the worst of French. It is like the sun- light, and no intellectual vapour can subsist in it. This dry, bright quality makes it prove fatal to our misleaders in things of the mind. Books like the one I have mentioned and we have lately had many of the type could never have much success in France, that land of clear thought and incisive speech. No; it is quite certain that if a knowledge of French became general, our clever pseudo-men-of-science would cease to command popularity. What would happen to the works of the Duke of Argyll, that nobleman who devotes his declining years to refuting the facts of nature and cultivating the pedestrian muse, it is woeful to conjecture. And where would the voluminous but unconvincing writings of Mr. Gladstone be, his essays on obsolete questions in theology, and his mistranslations of Horace's love-odes, alas ! alas ! where indeed? The unabashed phalanx of those whom Mr. Huxley terms ' the Reconcilers ' would sink into silence. In fact, the ' cuckoo-cloudland ' of our speculation would vanish away. What a gain in clear thinking our nation would acquire if everybody had a knowledge of French ! The compromising type of mind that is quite prepared to accept one set of miracles and not another, the divided mind that keeps its theology in this compartment of the brain, and its science in that, all the many forms of mental confusion that flourish so freely among us would be dissipated. Men would learn to face the facts of nature and of life with more freedom, more frankness. Our insular pruderies and mawkishness, and our 12 SOME REASONS FOR LEARNING FRENCH equally insular ' plain speaking,' would have to go. Ugliness and untruth would find a puissant foe in the study of French, for, be it noted, the French mind is in some ways a more serious mind than ours. It hates error with a more intense hatred ; it is not so tolerant of the inadequate as ours. Our sense of humour, supposed by us to be a peculiarly British sense, is a great bar to our mental growth; for it is that sense which in its effects is most inimical to passion, to conviction, to the truth of logical extremes. A really humorous man is apt to have a deficient sense of beauty and a kindly tolerance for stupidity, ugliness, error. What he dislikes most is reasoned conviction; for the conviction born of prejudice he has much sympathy. He has a contempt for the poetry of passion, and the passion of poetry. Devotion, fervour, inten- sity, are his bugbears. Now, this humorous attitude of mind is not common in French literature. Not that it is altogether absent. Moliere has a vein of genuine humour in him. Indeed, some genealo- gists maintain that he was of Scottish extraction, which, with deference to Sydney Smith, might perhaps account for it. But as a rule, the sense of humour is conspicuously absent from French literature. This is one of the reasons why that litera- ture would prove so useful to us. It would stimulate and strengthen our unexacting mentality, and make it acquire grit, virility. French is the virile tongue of Europe. French literature is the virile literature : it is the literature of power, passion and clear thinking. It is also most emphatically the language of criticism. What have we done in literary criticism which can for one moment compare with the colossal work of SOME REASONS FOR LEARNING FRENCH 13 Sainte-Beuve ? Where else shall we find that buoyant charm, that loving minuteness, that delicate grace, that large sanity, that loving appreciation of what is excellent ? Nowhere in our literature, and perhaps nowhere in any literature. The Saxon and Teutonic minds are too violent, too wanting in subtlety, too impatient of fine distinctions for this art of criticism. We either hate our author or we love him, and in either case we are indiscriminating. Not so the French mind. It sifts, examines, appreciates ; it neither loves nor hates en bloc. Yes, the study of French, if made general and obligatory, would work miracles. We should begin to question many of our opinions, manners and institutions so seriously, that perhaps in time we might improve some of them. The diligent study of the Code NapoUon, for example, would make us wonder whether, after all, our own system of jurisprudence is as good as it might be. We should certainly put marks of interroga- tion after some of our statutes, and ask whether, in view of the fact that the most civilised of nations has no statutes of the kind on its lawbook, we are justified in conserving such relics of the Middle Ages. All kinds of burning questions would be looked at from other points of view. In fact, humaner ideas concern- ing human relations would infallibly be quickened in us. In matters educational, too, how much might we learn ! Our venerable institution of the clerical headmaster, with his narrow outlook on life, his stunted sense of most things that make for perfection, his subservience to the average opinion of the people who support his school, his semi-savage, serni- bourgeois notions of morals, his belief in the birch as one of the few agencies not himself that make for righteousness, his i 4 SOME REASONS FOR LEARNING FRENCH inability to apprehend the finer strands of character, his episco- pal scholarship, his archi-episcopal sense of respectability, his general woodenness, that institution, too, might have to dis- appear from the ideal vision of our ' purged, considerate minds ' not to be replaced, let us hope, by that of the robustious or of the terribly-in-earnest layman. In fact, there would be no end to the new ideas that would assail us on every side. "We might question the most hoary institutions in Church and State. Most of us have done that in our time, however, and some of us have ceased seeing all things in Radicalism. But it is conceivable that we should ask our- selves with greater insistance, why wealth is so unequally dis- tributed in Britain, and why we allow our population to increase so far beyond the bounds of decent subsistence. We might come to inquire why Scottish Universities delight to confer the degree of LL.D. on local nobodies. We might ask why the title of Professor is by law allowed to be defamed by every charlatan. We should wonder why all that the State can and ought to do is not done. We might even come not to feel ashamed at having refused to read the Heavenly Dodo, and The Yellow Twins. But to return to my main contention, that French is the proper language to take the place of Greek in the education of those to whom Greek is to be denied. Naturally, nothing can really take the place of Homer this must be granted, of course, and it is a pity that those boys, ' fortunati nimium sua si bona norint/ who are to learn Greek, should not read little else in that language but Homer till they are sixteen or seventeen, for no amount of Attic Greek can compensate for ignorance of him. SOME REASONS FOR LEARNING FRENCH 15 He is the first Greek writer boys really like, just as Horace is the first Latin one. But a course of Eacine, Moliere, Michelet, and Taine could quite conceivably have almost as good an effect on a boy's mental culture as Euripides, Aristophanes, Hero- dotus and Xenophon. Indeed, in the case of most boys, such a course would have more effect, as they would read more of the French than of the Greek, and bulk counts for a good deal. In reading the writers I have mentioned, they would have the sense of a long historical continuity which no amount of German reading could give them. They would feel that they were in the main stream of European literature ; at least their teachers would be bound to make them feel that. The sense for what is classical, in the best meaning of the word, would be quickened in them the sense for what is artistic in style. This is where, it seems to me, one of the chief reasons for studying French can be urged. Style, the artistic use of words, the quality which, above all others, gives permanence to a work of art, that is what we find so conspicuous in French, as in Greek literature ; and the best French style, like the best Greek style, seems natural, spontaneous. Yet, if you examine into it you find that it is not really so, that it is an exquisitely cultivated thing, and that its spontaneity is the spontaneity of a musician, who has with much labour conquered the diffi- culties of his instrument. This beautiful quality of style is one so often lacking in our prose writing, that it is very desirable a young student should read a literature in which it is con- spicuously present. Even if he only read French newspapers, he would acquire an insight into the use of words which all the ' leaders ' in The Times for years would fail to give him. 16 SOME REASONS FOR LEARNING FRENCH Our press is business-like in tone, the French press is artistic that is the difference. We think it of vast importance (as it really is not) that we should have red-hot articles on the events of each day. The French press is more leisurely, and gives one an artistic little essay some days after date. This is as it should be. We do not really want that is to say, intelligent people do not really want to have an editor's hastily-formed opinion thrust down our throats. It is a brutal proceeding, and the sensitive mind resents it. It may be that the French nation is doomed to extinction, and that the future is for the Anglo-Saxon. The doctrine of the survival of the fittest is possibly true, but it is not a cheering one for the lover of perfection, for fitness seems mainly to mean physiological fitness, and what Walt Whit- man calls 'the divine average.' I like Walt Whitman, but I do not like the 'divine average.' What does the 'divine average' know of, or care for, artistic perfection, or, indeed, any fine excellence ? Nothing ! To the ' divine average ' the crude reproduction in literature of its own uninteresting features will ever prove more acceptable than the vision of the 'faculty divine.' In fiction it will have its realists, in religion its Reconcilers, in philosophy its charlatans, and in the drama an endless succession of suburban moralities. The disappearance of the French nation would mean the disappearance of the one nation that has, as a nation, a vital feeling for art. That would surely be a loss, for which the unlimited spread of the Anglo-Saxon race could not com- pensate. Still, I am not optimistic enough to believe that this is not what the Fates have in store for us. SOME REASONS FOR LEARNING FRENCH 17 The best French literature, like the best Greek, has an artistic charm, a lightness and delicacy, which are to be found in no other. It has also distinction, that great quality which is so fast dying out of our literature. Intellectually, the French are the Greeks of the modern world; mentally, they are even defter, subtler, clearer. Their literature has many affinities to Greek literature, and the qualities which constitute those affinities are precisely those which our British youth most requires. CORNEILLE WHICH is the better standard to apply to a work of literary art, that afforded by an historical survey of the particular literary form in question, or that of perfection as derived from a comparison with other finished productions in the same field at different epochs and in different countries ? Of these the former is of easier, though in some cases, where intermediate links are lacking, of impossible application. It is a matter of less difficulty to trace the steps by which a work of art has been evolved, and to note growth or decay in the process, than to pronounce a judgment on its merits compared with those of others in respect of perfection. For to do this implies that we share in what Aristotle calls the op0o? Xo7oue aussi bien que mortelle,' etc. Act i. Scene 10. Here we have a very sweet and pathetic, if perhaps somewhat conventional, expression of the struggle between filial duty and amorous passion. It was not, however, in delineation of the tender passion that Corneille excelled. His strength lay in expressing in strong, sonorous language the sentiments of honour, patriotism and virtue. For what the French term belles tirades he stands unrivalled. Who can read without being moved, or rather who can hear declaimed, as only French actors know how to declaim, that magnificent soliloquy of Don Diegue, delivered immediately after he has been insulted by Don Gomes ' rage ! d&espoir ! vieillesse ennemie ! N'ai-je done tant vdcu que pour cette infamie, Et ne suis-je blanchi dans les travaux guerriers Que pour voir en un jour ftetrir tant de lauriers,' etc. Act i. Scene 8. This is what the French mean when they talk of the grand style. They do not mean the deepest emotions of the heart 30 CORNEILLE poured forth in imaginative verse. They mean the noblest moral sentiments expressed in exalted and impressive lines. Addison's ' Cato ' comes nearer to what the French mean by grand style or style soutenu than any play of Shakespeare's. But of literary criticism anon. Let us in the meantime examine another play. Next in order of production comes 'Horace.' The plot of this play is founded on that famous fight between the Horatii and the Curiatii, of which Livy gives such a thrilling account. Here Corneille was on fresh ground. No writer had ever attempted to dramatise this splendid tale. And it was a theme peculiarly adapted to his genius. The ardent patriotism of the man who slays his sister for lamenting an enemy of Eome had, in its very ferocity, something not altogether alien to Corneille's own disposition. With all his generosity of feel- ing, there was a certain harshness about him which greatly increased as he grew older, and caused him to select the most repellent subjects for his plots. In the play which we are now considering there is an unnecessary feature which gives addi- tional cruelty to the action of Horatius. Corneille, without any warrant of history, makes his hero the husband of an Alban woman. We should therefore look for a little more forbearance from him; but, as if foreseeing this objection, Corneille has put into the mouth of Camilla, the sister of Horatius, one of the bitterest invectives ever penned : ' Rome, 1'unique objet de mon ressentiment ! Rome,' qui vient ton bras d'immoler mon amant ! Rome, qui t'a vu naitre, et que ton cceur adore ! Rome en fin, que je hais parce qu'elle t'honore !' Act iv. Scene 5. CORNEILLE 31 and thus renders intelligible the sudden outburst of fury which causes the brother to slay her. The character of the old Horatius is conceived in Corneille's ruling spirit. We are presented with a type of the antique Bornan as tradition and fable had depicted him stern, implacable, an ardent lover of his country, and ready to sacrifice all for her welfare. When the choice of Kome falls on his three sons he restrains all natural tears, and exhorts his daughter-in-law Sabina to do likewise. News having been brought him that two of his sons are slain and that the third is fleeing before the Curiatii, his wrath and indignation know no bounds, and he threatens to slay him with his own hands should he escape. His fierce retort, ' Qu 'il mourut,' when Julia asks him what his son was to have done alone against three foes, is one of the most often quoted of Corneille's utterances. With all its lofty patriotism and heroic spirit there is a harshness about this play which makes it repellent to us in some ways. We miss the lacrimce rerum, the pathos of life and death which we find in Sophocles or Shakespeare. We cannot imagine, either in real life or in the highest dramatic art, a character of so fierce a strain as that of Horatius. In one passage he actually glories in the fact that he and his brothers have to encounter three brothers who are so nearly and dearly related to him as are the Curiatii one being his sister's lover, and another his own wife's brother. He thinks this close relationship will lend all the higher lustre to his self-sacrifice. Now, such a savage exulta- tion transcends the bounds of human nature and tragedy alike. Aristotle, in his terse and vigorous way, would have termed it We all know the upshot of the tale how Horatius 32 CORNEILLE was first condemned by the decemvirs and then acquitted by the people. Corneille varies Livy's account of the trial, and makes the king Tullus Hostilius sole arbiter. This was pro- bably a concession to the monarchical spirit of the age. Next in order of production comes 'Cinna.' This much- praised play turns upon the plot formed by Cinna against the life of Augustus, and the clemency of the latter in pardoning the conspirator. Emilie, whose father, Turanius, had been the Emperor's guardian, and had been put to death during the proscriptions, had vowed to be avenged on her father's murderer, and had persuaded Cinna to attempt the assassination, her love being the prize. Through the treason of one of his fellow-conspirators Cinna's plot is made known to Augustus, and instead of punishing the would-be assassin, the Emperor forgives him. The character of Cinna as depicted by Corneille is not calculated to excite admiration or sym- pathy. He is simply a miserable self-seeking intriguer, ready to sacrifice the life of his friend and benefactor to gratify the blood-thirsty hatred of his mistress. He has no real patriotism at heart, for in one scene he actually urges Augustus, who is consulting him as to whether it would not be better for Rome that he should resign his throne, not to do so, but to retain his sovereignty as a thing necessary to his people's safety and happiness. Indeed, we are almost led to infer from hints casually dropped that Cinna coveted the throne for himself. Altogether, we cannot but feel a cordial dislike for him. His very wavering and hesitation to commit the crime strike one as being the effect rather of cowardice than of natural compunction, and we are sorry that the Emperor's CORNEILLE 33 clemency should fall on so unworthy an object. No less unpleasing, but more admirable on the whole, is the character of Emilie. She, at least, has a tangible grievance ; and when we are tempted to think harshly of this adorable furie, as she has been called, we should bear in mind Cinna's words, ' Que la vengeance est douce a 1'esprit d'une femme!' Augustus is represented as already failing in strength of will and worn out by the long toils of empire, the miseries of his family life, and the intrigues of his enemies. He is no longer the proud victor of Actium. Weary of bloodshed and perceiving the futility of crushing one of the hydra-heads of conspiracy, he allows himself to be persuaded by his wife, Livie, to spare the guilty Cinna. This he does, and in a speech full of magnanimous and touching expression he assures Cinna of his forgiveness and favour. The closing words of this speech, ' Soyons amis, Cinna, c'est moi qui t'en convie,' are among the most famous of Corneillian quotations. The last of Corneille's tragedies to be examined here in detail is that of 'Polyeucte.' This play possesses a singular interest for the student, as it is the first, since the days of the MysUres, into which a Christian martyr is introduced. Corneille was, doubtless, led to this line of thought by the religious spirit of his time, as displayed by the Jansenist movement. This is not the place to enter into a disquisition on that remarkable back-swirl of thought which followed the Eenaissance in France, but it will be interesting to see how and to what extent Corneille came under its influence. To any one who has studied the best religious life of that time, as exemplified by the Port-Eoyalists, the spiritual kinship of 34 CORNEILLE Corneille with those grave and austere ' Solitaries,' such as Saint-Cyran, Singlin and Arnaud, is apparent. He was a Catholic and a Christian in the severer sense of the terms. The spirit of the Eenaissance seems to have touched him only by its preference for antiquity in matters of dramatic art. And of the Reformation he only felt the purifying influence in life and conduct through the Jansenist movement, which was intellectually in antagonism with that Reformation. The subject of this play, as has been already said, is taken from the martyrology. Polyeuctes was a young man of noble family, who lived in Armenia in the days of the Emperor Decius. He had married Paulina, the daughter of the governor Felix, and had distinguished himself in war. His bosom friend, Nearchus, had become a Christian, and endea- voured to win Polyeuctes over to his faith, which he at last succeeded in accomplishing. On the occasion of a great public festival, Polyeuctes and Nearchus go to the Temple of Jupiter and fling down the statues in presence of all the people. For this they are both condemned to death by Felix. Nearchus is executed at once, but Polyeuctes is given a chance of recantation, which he rejects. Not even the prayers and entreaties of his wife avail to move him, and he is led away, rejoicing to be found worthy to die for the name of Christ. Paulina beholds his death, and is so much touched by his heroic constancy that she suddenly feels herself con- strained to become a Christian too, and her sudden conversion brings about that of her father also. Of all Corneille's plays, this is the one which most appeals to the heart. The character of Pauline is a very interesting CORNEILLE 35 one. Before she married Polyeucte (which she only did at her father's behest) she had been in love with a Roman knight called SeVere. At the time of Polyeucte's martyrdom, her former lover had come to Armenia after a victorious cam- paign which he had been waging against the Scythians. He is still ignorant of her marriage and hopes to make her his bride. His grief on learning that she is already a wife is for a moment lightened by the thought that her husband will have to pay the penalty of his impiety. But his better nature and Pauline's entreaties prevail, and being enabled, in virtue of his personal credit with the Emperor, to obtain a pardon for Polyeucte, he resolves to exercise the power. But Felix, the governor, had been beforehand with him, and his clemency came too late to save his rival. Pauline, though still having in her heart traces of her old passion for SeVere, had learned to love her husband and to admire his lofty nature, and so, while the sudden appearance of the former caused her no slight emotion, it yet caused her no uneasiness so far as she herself was concerned. Her only dread was for her husband. When Corneille read this play for the first time at the Hotel de Rambouillet in presence of that illustrious literary circle, the subject of his play was condemned. The Christian element gave great offence, martyrs not being in vogue at the time, and the episode of the overthrowing of the idols scandalised a reverend bishop who happened to be present. But the public hailed the piece with enthusiasm. It now remains to attempt to sum up Corneille's claims to our interest and admiration. He no longer bulks so largely 36 CORNEILLE in the eyes of the world as he once did. His day of ascend- ency is long since over. Even Frenchmen find it difficult nowadays to feel for him half the admiration their fathers felt. The indiscriminate laudation of the critics at the beginning of this century raised against them the voice of William Augustus Schlegel, and from his onslaught upon French dramatic art the defenders of the old regime never fully recovered. He showed with admirable penetration and force the insufficiency of the French conception of tragic art, and demolished convention- alities with, for a German, really sparkling wit. It is for us nowadays rather to consider what real merit lay at the bottom of the system which he so bitterly attacked, and to attain to a more impartial judgment. In the first place, we must remember that of modern European nations the French is that which has most loved dramatic art and possesses the greatest aptitude for it. Both as actors and as playwrights they reign supreme. Is it to be believed, then, that their grandfathers were so dull as fondly to admire what was utterly unworthy of admiration? This surely is hardly credible, and the more we examine certain aspects of the French drama, the more are we struck by its admirable adaptability to stage- representation. Viewed under this light, it will stand com- parison with any in the world, except perhaps that of Sophocles. As a mere playwright, it is perhaps doubtful if Shakespeare really holds the exalted rank which is usually assigned to him in this country. That very imagination which constitutes his supreme poetic gift, renders him at times too lavish of his wealth. Again, his plots are often confused by the host of subsidiary characters introduced. The charge of CORNEILLE 37 barbarism brought against him by Voltaire is not altogether without foundation. If we could imagine Sophocles and Corneille spiritually present at a performance of ' Hamlet,' and able to understand the drift of the play, would the verdict of those two great writers be altogether such as we should relish? Both would be inexpressibly shocked by the desperate slaughters which are enacted coram populo, and both would complain of the inordinate length of the piece. On these two points, at least, both Greek and Frenchman would agree, how- ever much they might differ on others. We in this country are too prone to think that dramatic action consists in things actually performed before our eyes. We have an intolerance of what appeals only to the feelings and the imagination. We want something that strikes the eye. Hence the elaborate scenery which a well-known English actor-manager introduces on his stage, sometimes almost to the overwhelming of the play itself It is a grave question whether all this care for externals does not diminish heedfulness of the one thing needful, that is, acting. Whatever, therefore, may be the limitations of Corneille's art, we must always bear in mind that he wrote plays which scored a world- wide fame in his lifetime, and are still con- stantly performed before the most critical audience in the world. If, however, we regard him in the light of a poet and inter- preter of the human heart, his inferiority to Shakespeare is manifest. For human nature as a whole he seems to have had little or uo sympathy. Only when it culminated in heroic lives could he admire and understand it. His genius was 38 CORNEILLE at home in describing the stern virtues of Eoraan patriots, or the chivalry of Spanish nobles. Then he waxed eloquent, and his diction 'burned with noble fire.' Only a century like the last could dare to place Corneille on the lofty level where Sophocles and Shakespeare are. Man's end and destiny, the problems of the soul, his hopes and fears of a hereafter, his infinite yearnings and divine despair, were not within the compass of his genius. Neither shall one find in him the Spdo-avri Tradelv of old Greek tragedy, the dread of avenging deities and the awful, inevitable imminence of fate. He who has once breathed the keen dark air of ^Eschylus or the clear and delicate ether of Sophocles, will feel oppressed in the courtly atmosphere of Corneille. Nature, with all the stars and sea-winds in her raiment, never breaks in upon us here. We are never laid in the cool flowery lap of earth and suffered there to be refreshed for a season. No one ever babbles of green fields or holds converse with the running brooks. We live among the great ones of the world, in palaces, and never escape thence into the light of common day. No finer single pieces of rhetoric could be found than those I have already quoted. The lines seem to leap all armed from the furnace of the poet's thought, and clash sonorously in our ears. But when it falls to his lot to describe the gentler pas- sions, the loves of men and women, then he appears stiff and awkward and harsh. His heroines may be ' adorable furies ' sometimes, but adorable women they never are. They are too self-conscious, their love is too much of the head and too little of the heart. They all protest too much. One feels that had they been born in a later age and in altered circumstances, CORNEILLE 39 they would have been of the number of those wild ladies whose battle-cry is ' woman's rights.' We feel that this might have been so, and think regretfully of Juliet, of Eosalind, and Imogen. Yet, let us not underrate Corneille. His work in part will remain an imperishable monument of literary glory. Much of it, no doubt, has been stricken by the dusk of oblivion, but there will ever shine a radiance as of sunset around the 'Cid' and 'Polyeucte' and 'Horace.' He is one of the earlier gods, dethroned but not deceased, a Saturn with 'realmless' but still regal eyes, and he will abide for ever in the Pantheon of dead authors, a stately presence lit with a mellow twilight of renown. RACINE Difficile est proprie communia dicere It is hard to be original on a hackneyed theme. How much easier it is to write an essay on some fresh production in the world of letters than on some hackneyed theme which has been turned this way and that, and has already been looked at from almost every pos- sible point of view ! And if this is true of any famous pre- nineteenth century name, it is in a special sense true of the subject of this essay. What new thing can one find to say about Racine ? His name has been a shuttlecock of wordy warfare for centuries, and even his own countrymen are getting tired of keeping up the game. Since Victor Hugo began his magnificent reaction against the classicists, and Sainte-Beuve constituted himself the champion of the new faith in the field of literary criticism, the star of Racine's ascendency has waned. Indeed, in England one may truly say that it has long since been extinct. The number of Englishmen living at this moment who could conscientiously say that they had read more than one play of Racine's through, must, I think, be small. In fact, it is questionable if a taste for Racine ever genuinely existed in the land of Shakespeare. That moderation of tone and colouring which is so eminently a quality of Racine's genius is neither appreciated nor understood on this side of 40 RACINE 41 the Channel. But there was a time when he had many pro- fessed admirers in this country imitators, even. The drama of the Eestoration was largely borrowed from French models; and, even in the days of Addison, the beaux esprits would have con- sidered that they laid themselves open to the charge of barbarism had they failed to praise Racine. This tone prevailed till the reaction from the ideas of the French Revolution brought about a reaction in literary judgment also. From this reaction we are only now slowly recovering, and for this very reason are perhaps in a better position for determining the place that should be awarded to Racine than were the critics of the eighteenth century. Among those who, by their writings, have helped to bring about this modification of ideas if we can indeed say that it has been brought about Matthew Arnold was perhaps the most considerable, at least in the literary sphere. Thanks to his penetrating insight and charming style, we have learned, or rather relearned, to admire what we had hitherto reviled or despised. But even Matthew Arnold confesses himself unable to appreciate the merit of Racine and of French dramatic literature generally. Nor is the reason of this far to seek. Arnold was brought up on the old classical lines, and thus learned early to love those masters of the ancient theatre ^Eschylus, Sophocles, Euripides. If, too, as we must suppose, Arnold read Shakespeare when a boy, the difficulty of appre- ciating Racine must have been doubled to him. Corneille might have found more favour in his eyes, for in him the atmosphere, though that of a court, is still that of a court heroic in its simplicity, whereas that of Racine breathes of the 42 RACINE galant court of Louis xiv. In place of the stern virtues of Eoman patriots and the fiery chivalry of Spanish nobles, we have the tearful sensibility of a Be're'nice, and the chastened, if unchaste, passion of a Phedre. In dealing with Racine, we must always bear in mind that we are dealing with a 'Decadent.' The contemporaries of the elder poet so considered him, and Corneille himself called him a 'Doucereux.' Now, between 'As You Like It ' and ' Be're'nice ' there is a great gulf, and it is not to be wondered at if even so nimble-minded a critic as Arnold failed to cross it Added to these there is another reason, which probably pre- vented Arnold, as it has prevented many another Englishman, from appreciating French poetry ; and that is the fact of French possessing practically only one language, whereas English pos- sesses two. We all know that in the best English poetry there is a preponderance of Saxon words over Latin, which is due to the fact that the former are, as a rule, much more simple and sensuous than the latter, and as such are fitter for poetic use. The words of Latin origin are more abstract, and are apt to seem stilted; but the French poet has no choice. The words he employs are, for the most part, necessarily Latin. To French ears, however, these words do not sound pedantic. They are the natural symbols of thought and feeling. But when we read them, we cannot help remembering that we have in English much simpler synonyms, and are affected with a sensation of irritation at what we conceive to be the aridity and pomposity of the diction. This is a continual stumbling- block to English readers. We are unable to feel those Latin words for which we have simpler equivalents in the way that RACINE 43 a Frenchman feels them. So, for us, the finest passages in French poetry are spoilt by the mere fact of the superior richness of the English tongue. Eightly to understand a telling speech out of Racine, one should translate it into English, carefully elimin- ating all the distinctively Latin words, and substituting, as far as possible, Saxon words. A few lines from 'Athalie ' will illustrate what I mean. Take, for example, the following fine distich : ' Mais un trouble importun vient depuis quelques jours De mes prospe"rits interrompre le cours.' Now an Englishman, on reading this, involuntarily translates it to himself thus : ' But an importunate trouble has for these last few days been interrupting the course of my prosperities,' which is neither more nor less than bombast. But suppose one translates : ' But a haunting dread has for these last few days dashed all my happiness,' one has an inkling of the drift of the passage. It is, no doubt, very hard to forget the con- notation of those Latinised words in English. They are too like ours in sound, not to suggest at once their English de- rivatives. This would not be the case, however, if we heard the same words in their Latin form. Eoughly translated into metre, those lines might run as follows : ' Rumpere me curaruin avet importuna mearum Turba diu ; prosper desiit ire dies.' Here we have the same words as in French, but our ears are not offended by them. They do not immediately suggest their English equivalents. Enough, however, of this side-issue. There are two French writers, whom to appreciate, one must, I think, have French blood in one's veins, and they are, on the 44 RACINE one hand, Racine, and, on the other, Alfred de Musset. (La Fon- taine might also, I think, be added to the number.) One seldom meets a Briton who cordially likes either ; and yet, as Racine was the poet of predilection of seventeenth-century France, so Musset is really the most intimately loved poet of France to-day. And, just as their grandfathers openly admitted the superiority of Corneille and secretly gave Racine the palm, so Frenchmen of to-day, while professing a greater admiration for Victor Hugo, often in their heart of hearts cherish a warmer feeling for Musset. Both Racine and Musset are essentially French, and owe their popularity to qualities which are almost antipathetic to Englishmen. Sensibility is the dominant quality in both poets. In both, too, do we find that purity of idiom which we miss in writers like Corneille and Victor Hugo. The French is native and uncorrupted. There is no inter- mixture of foreign terms and expressions. The ideas are French ideas. Thought, feeling and style are, as they would say, tout ce qidl y a de plus fran$ais. Now, generally speaking, one may be nearly certain that a play, poem, or picture which possesses to the fullest degree the characteristic quality of a people will not be that one which will appeal to the foreigner at first. It is only after long study, and wjien his mind has gained in flexibility and sympathy, that he will come to feel the charm which is felt by the artist's countrymen. This is eminently true of a literary artist like Racine, whose whole tone is so completely and consistently French. The very fact that in his choice of subjects he has avoided all native tragic themes, makes the Frenchness of his method of treatment only the more apparent. RACINE 45 It would lead us too far from our present subject to inquire into the reason which induced the French to select the subjects of their tragedy rather from the ancient histories of Greece and Eome than from their own national history fertile enough, one would have thought, in horrors and commanding figures. Probably the spirit of imitation, more than anything else, brought this about ; but perhaps also a feeling of the dignity of the ancient models, combined with an ignorance of their own annals. At any rate, Eacine found the traditions of the French stage too strong for him, and never attempted, except in the cases of ' Esther,' ' Bajazet ' and ' Athalie,' to depart from the classical models. And in the case of 'Esther' and of 'Athalie' he could have quoted the great Corneille as an authority for the employment of sacred history in his plays. These two last-mentioned plays recall an interesting fact in the life of the poet. Brought up, as he had been, in the austere disci- pline of Port-Eoyal, and throughout his life a sincere believer, he had, for many years, and those the brightest of his fame, lived an entirely mundane and somewhat dissipated life. His old friends and guides, the ' Solitaires ' of Port-Eoyal, had long since given him up as a hopeless pervert to the spirit of the world. The favourite poet of a gay and youthful court, he had become the spoilt child of Fortune, and had basked in the warm rays of the ' sun ' of Louis XIV. But, at length, his unclouded prosperity and success had given rise to envy and jealousy, and a shameless cabal was formed against him. On the occasion of the production of 'Phedre,' which is perhaps his masterpiece, an unworthy rival, Pradon, all but won the palm for a production utterly inferior to Eacine's in the eyes of all 46 RACINE competent judges. This blow apparently opened his eyes to the vanity of earthly things. At any rate, he at once relin- quished the stage, and devoted himself to the care of his household and the upbringing of his children. This life of unvarying domesticity lasted ten years, during which no pro- fane work came from his pen. Then, yielding to the entreaties of Madame de Maintenon, he consented to write a religious play for her young noblewomen of St.-Cyr. ' Esther ' was the result of his renewed efforts in the play-making line. Shortly afterwards was produced ' Athalie,' his last, and, as many con- sider, his finest play. After 'Athalie' we hear no more of Racine, except as a historiographer and favourite reader of the king. He apparently possessed a sweet and pleasant voice, which made him a frequent and distinguished attendant at the king's bedside. And so he continued till the fatal misunder- standing with his royal master, which, they say, hastened his end. What caused the quarrel is not definitely known, but it is supposed that Racine had dared to intercede for his old friends, the ' Solitaires ' of Port-Royal, who were now being persecuted at the instigation of their enemies, the Jesuits. If this be so (a conclusion hardly warranted by the tone of his two letters to Nicole), it does honour to the loyalty of the man who ventured to champion the cause of his early teachers in opposition to the set purpose of a king whose frown meant no less than social extinction. It is hard for us to realise how completely the ascendency of Louis xiv. imposed itself on the mind of all who approached him. Veneration and admiration seem but feeble words to apply to the feeling which animated his courtiers. Adoration RACINE 47 as of an almost divine being is more what expresses it, and this feeling was quite sincere. Louis xiv., in spite of all his shortcomings, must have been cast in a larger mould than the majority of men, and possessed commanding qualities of mind and character. It was not merely a matter of periwig and shoe-buckles, as Thackeray would have us think. One quality he certainly possessed, and that was the faculty of discrimina- tion. He had a good eye for a man, and knew how to use him to the best advantage. Though having nothing of the poet in himself ('Votre Majestd a voulu faire de me'chants vers, et elle a re"ussi '), he was, nevertheless, quite aware what lustre poetry can cast on a king's reign. Eacine was his especial favourite. The two men had this in common that they both were devout Catholics, both atoned for a youth of gaiety and gal- lantry by an old age of strictness and austerity, and both had an innate preference for the dignified in sentiment. Eacine, too, unlike his more original and less pliant con- temporary, Corneille, had a facile, sensitive nature that could be moulded to serve the king's ends, and easily took the impress of the court, an impress noticeable in all he wrote. The first play which he produced was 'Les Freres Ennemis,' a feeble and ill-written drama, whose gross faults of arrangement and language are occasionally relieved by felicities of ex- pression. It has no merit sufficient to detain us in a survey of his works. Much the same may be said of his second play, 'Alexandre,' which does, however, show progress in style. Some of the speeches, more especially those of Porus, are ably written ; but the general drift of the piece is very weak. Eacine had not yet found his line. He was still under the 48 RACINE influence of Corneille, whose Auguste in the play of ' Cinna ' is evidently the model taken by Eacine for his ' Alexandre.' His two female characters, Cle'ofile and Axiane, are more in the style of the Corneillian heroines, whose love is of the head, not of the heart. The next in order of production, ' Androinaque,' marks an era in the annals of the French stage. It bears the same relation to the other plays of Eacine that the ' Cid ' bears to those of Corneille. In both, the distinctive pre-eminence of their authors comes out. As Eodrigue may be taken as a type of chivalry, so Androinaque may be taken as a type of wifely and motherly affection. And as the elder poet strove to excite, and succeeded in exciting, admiration, so Eacine stirred pity. In this respect he approaches nearer to the Greek conception of tragedy as defined by Aristotle, who says that the aim of tragedy is to excite pity and fear. Now fear, at least in the sense of <}>6f3os, which implies a fear of aveng- ing deities and a dread of retribution for violation of moral law, is quite alien to the French dramatists. Both Corneille and Eacine allow perfect spontaneity to their characters, unfettered by the sins of their ancestors. This vital distinction cannot be too strongly insisted on, and we shall see presently, in the case of Phedre, what a difference it makes in our con- ception of the character. The basis of ' Andromaque ' is to be found in two plays of Euripides, and a passage of Virgil. Eacine, unlike the vast majority of his contemporaries, was an excellent Greek and Latin scholar, and was quite familiar with the originals, so a remark he makes in his preface to ' Andromaque,' is rendered RACINE 49 inexcusable. He says, 'My personages are so famous in antiquity that however slightly one is acquainted with it, one can easily see that I have rendered them as the ancient poets have given them to us tels que les anciens poetes nous les ont donneV Now let us see how the ancient poets have given us those personages. The plot of Euripides' ' Andromache ' is briefly as follows : Andromache, widow of Hector and captive of Neoptolemus, the son of Achilles, has taken refuge in the Temple of Thetis to escape from the persecution of Hermione, whom Neoptolemus (or Pyrrhus, as he is also called) has wedded. She had been obliged to submit to the passion of her master, according to the barbarous usage of the times, and had given birth to a SOD called Molossus. During the absence of her lord, the jealous Hermione, in concert with her father, Menelaus, has determined to destroy both mother and child. A Phrygian slave-girl comes to tell Andromache that Molossus has been discovered and that Menelaus has obtained possession of him. She promises to go to Pharsalus to warn Peleus of the danger threatening his great-grandson. Hermione then comes in and threatens Andromache that if she refuses to leave the sanctuary, her son will be put to death. Next Menelaus appears with the young Molossus. He declares that he will slay him if she does not yield. This Andromache at last does, and both she and her son are dragged off to the palace. When they appear again, they are being led to death. Suddenly, however, Peleus arrives, and bids the execution cease. Mene- laus confronts him, and there is a scene of violent altercation. Finally, Menelaus is obliged to yield, and departs to Lacedaemon. D 50 RACINE Peleus then releases Andromache and her son. Thus ends the first and most interesting part of the play. The second part, which forms in reality another drama, begins with the appear- ance of Hermione's nurse, who announces that her mistress, terrified at the idea of punishment that probably awaits her at her husband's hands on account of her wicked attempt, wishes to commit suicide. Orestes then comes in, on his way to Dodona, and desirous to have news of his cousin Hermione. The latter flings herself at his feet and entreats him to deliver her from her husband's vengeance. Orestes tells her that he had heard of her husband's bad behaviour, and has come with the purpose of rescuing her and making her his wife, in accord- ance with an original promise made him by her father Menelaus. He also announces that he has devised a secret plot in Delphi for the destruction of Neoptolemus. Hermione gives silent consent to her husband's death and follows her preserver. Peleus, warned of the danger threatening his grandson, reappears on the scene. Soon a messenger comes and relates the story of the slaying of Pyrrhus. Then the body of Pyrrhus is brought upon the stage, and whilst the old man is lamenting over it, the goddess Thetis appears and comforts him. It is arranged that Andromache shall wed Helenus, a Trojan who, like herself, had been a slave of Pyrrhus, and her son Molossus shall rule over the Molossians. Peleus shall receive immortality at the hands of the goddess who honoured him with her love, and shall dwell for ever in the islands of the blessed beside his son Achilles. The identity of the names excepted, and also the general features of the characters of Orestes and Andromache, nothing RACINE 51 more dissimilar to the play of Eacine could well be imagined. To begin with, he had to avoid representing his heroine as she appears in the old play. No French audience of that day would have tolerated an Andromache who had borne a child in slavery. They would have considered such a condition of affairs as revolting. Moreover, as Eacine says, everybody knew of Andromache as the mother of Astyanax no one had ever heard of Molossus. In his second preface to the play he rightly remarks, ' J'ai cru en cela me conformer a I'ide'e que nous avons maintenant de cette princesse.' This is quite a fair statement of the case, and it should therefore be borne in mind that when we are dealing with 'Andromaque.' and indeed with Eacine's plays generally, we are dealing with representations of character, not as they historically were, or as they appeared to the Greek dramatists, but as they appeared through a French medium. This view of the subject sufficiently refutes Schlegel's criticism on that score. After all, art is nature seen through a temperament, and every dramatic writer has surely licence to adopt the way of thinking of his countrymen. Indeed, he can scarcely, except by an archaeological effort incompatible with free artistic activity, fling himself into the life of a bygone age and reproduce it as it really was. This is rather the office of the historian or of the epic poet than of the dramatist. Let us see, then, what Eacine has made of this famous old- world tragedy. Following the indication of Virgil, he has laid the scene in Epirus, and not in Thessaly. In the first act, we have the meeting of Pylade and Oreste at the court of Pyrrhus. Oreste tells his friend that the real object of his visit is to 52 RACINE seek the hand of Hermione, his cousin, who had been de- spatched by her father Menelaus to Pyrrhus, as Pyrrhus' bride-elect. Here we have at once the most un-Greek situation conceivable. What would a Greek have thought of the presence of an unwedded maid, accompanied only by a confidente, in the court of a king to whom she had been betrothed ? One can at once perceive how impossible such a state of matters would have appeared to him. Oreste gives as the ostensible reason of his presence, that he has been sent as an ambassador to the Grecian States to demand the surrender of Astyanax, the son of Hector and Andromaque. The Greeks are angry that the offspring of their great enemy should be suffered to live, and they desire his death. Pylade tells his friend that Pyrrhus, far from wishing to wed Hermione, is desperately in love with Andromaque, and he advises him to excite opposi- tion in the mind of Pyrrhus by urging him to deliver up Astyanax, and so increase his ardour for Andromaque. 'Pressez, demandez tout, pour ne rien obtenir,' he says, and Oreste takes his advice. He makes use of arguments with Pyrrhus which are only calculated to make him more stubborn and unyielding, and less inclined than ever to deliver up Astyanax and marry Hermione. Andromaque then enters on her way to pay her daily visit to her son. Pylade informs her of the demand of the Greeks, and warns her that unless she consents to his flame, her son shall be delivered up. She goes out after hinting that she will die along with her boy. In the second act, Hermione and her confidente Cle"one talk over the arrival of Oreste. Cle'one urges her mistress to flee with Oreste. Hermione, out of rage at the infidelity of Pyrrhus, gives a half RACINE 53 consent, and in the next scene we have a very pretty piece of coquetry and love-making between Oreste and Hermione, at the end of which she promises to follow her cousin if Pyrrhus refuses to give up Astyanax. In the next scene Pyrrhus, following the advice of his old friend and guide, Phoenix, announces a change in his plans. He will deliver up Astyanax, and wed Hermione. At this news, naturally, Oreste is plunged into despair. In the third act he expresses his determination to carry off Hermione in spite of Pyrrhus. She, apprised of the change in Pyrrhus' resolution, is overjoyed at the prospect of his returning to her feet. Andromaque is distraught with grief at the prospect of losing her son, and beseeches Hermione to try and move Pyrrhus to pity, but only meets with a cutting refusal. She next flings herself at the knees of Pyrrhus him- self, and, by a touching appeal, again causes him to change his purpose. He promises to save her son and to drive away Hermione, if Andromaque will consent to become his wife. In the fourth act she determines to yield to his suit, and, after having made him swear to protect her son, to stab herself the moment the marriage rites are over. Hermione next appears. She has sent her confidente for Oreste, and he soon arrives. She is furious, naturally, at the new turn in Pyrrhus' resolve, and urges Oreste to slay Pyrrhus at the altar, offering herself as the price of the murder. Oreste reluctantly promises to accomplish her vengeance. In the beginning of the fifth act we have a description given by Cle'one to Hermione of the marriage festival. Then Oreste comes in and tells her Pyrrhus has met his death at the hands of the enraged Greeks. He himself had not been able to put in a blow. Suddenly Her- 54 RACINE ruione turns on him, furiously upbraids him for taking her at her word, and rushes off. Pylade soon after comes in and tells Oreste that Hermione has flung and stabbed herself on the dead body of Pyrrhus, that Andromaque is being acclaimed by the soldiers of Epirus and is giving orders to take ven- geance on the Greeks. He therefore urges his friend to flee at once. Then comes the final scene of all. Oreste, maddened by the crime he has committed and the loss of Hermione, is assailed by the Furies, whom he fancies he beholds with snakes entwined in their hair. He is hurriedly carried off by Pylade and his attendants. Comparing the two plots, one cannot fail to be struck by the simplicity of the Greek and the complexity of the French. On the one hand, we have the motherly love of Andromache as the sole motive of the play, and a motherly love dissociated from any exalted feeling for the father of her son. Like the women of the heroic age, Andromache accepts the changes ard chances of life as they occur. Hector is dead, so is Astyanax. She has been allotted as a captive to Pyrrhus and bears him a son. This son she loves better than her life. But on the news of Pyrrhus' death, she is quite ready to become the wife of Helenus, her fellow-slave and fellow-Trojan, and the brother of Hector. How completely different this is from the French Andromaque ! The latter is, as it were, Christian- ised. She refuses the advances of Pyrrhus, and there is no word of Helenus. That is, she regards the marriage-tie with Hector as sacred and indissoluble, so that in her we have not only the loving mother, but also the widow faithful to her dead husband's memory. Hermione, in like manner, is not RACINE 55 the jealous wife. She is the passionate lover who takes vengeance on the object of her unrequited love, and then, rejecting the man who aided in perpetrating the crime for her sake, commits suicide. In fact, love, in the modern sense of the word, forms the most important part of the French tragedy love, as it has been deepened and intensified and spiritualised by Christianity and chivalry. Orestes in the Greek play is not really in love with Hermione. He is angry that she should have been taken from him after she had been promised to him by her father that is all. Taking everything into consideration, we may say that Euripides excels in pathos, and Racine in interest. Interest that is what the French imperatively require in a drama. Caesar's criticism of the Gauls as novarum rerum semper cupidi applies not only in the political, but also in the literary sphere. They want rapidity of action and sustained dramatic interest. This the ' Andromaque ' of Racine possesses to an eminent degree. From beginning to end we are breathlessly eager to know what will happen to Astyanax, and how the crossing love-affairs will turn out. Observe how they are interwoven. Oreste loves Hermione ; Hermione loves Pyrrhus; Pyrrhus loves Andromaque ; and Andromaque loves her son Astyanax. All this is immensely exciting, and our sympathies are keenly aroused for all the personages. We are glad that Andromaque is left mistress of the situation, but we also feel extremely sorry for the unhappy lovers. In the Greek play, Orestes and Hermione are somewhat contemptible characters ; and as for Pyrrhus, the fact of his not appearing on the stage prevents our having any very strong feeling for his fate. 56 RACINE What one does miss on the French stage are those beautiful choral songs that, as it were, divide the acts of the Greek play, and are so rich in poetry ; and also the actual appearance of Andromaque's son. Euripides was too great a master of the pathetic to miss so powerful a means of exciting our sympathy, and he has accordingly given the most touching and beautiful dialogue to the mother and child as they are being led away to death. Let us now examine the play a little more in detail. The first scene between Oreste and Pylade puts us at once in possession of the state of affairs at the court of Pyrrhus. We are even led to perceive the last terrible outburst of Oreste's madness the divine punishment for his mother's murder ' Surtout je redoutais cette m^lancolie Oil j'ai vu si longtemps votre ame ensevelie.' The entry of Andromaque is very touching and effective : ' Je passais jusqu'aux lieux oil Ton garde mon fils. Puisqu'une fois le jour vous souffrez que je voie Le seul bien qui me reste et d'Hector et de Troie, J'allais, Seigneur, pleurer un moment avec lui Je ne 1'ai point encore embrass6 d'aujourd'hui.' There is a limpidity and sweetness in these lines (at least to French ears) which are quite admirable. The last words of this scene and act are well chosen to rivet the interest of the spectator. Pyrrhus has vainly endeavoured to make Andro- maque listen to his suit. She has turned a deaf ear. He then holds out the threat of giving up Astyanax should she con- tinue obstinate ' Madame, en 1'embrassant songez a le sauver.' RACINE 57 We are thrilled with anticipant fear, and we wonder what Andromaque will do. In the second act, we have Hermione and her confidente Cle'one talking about the arrival of Oreste. Hermione is fret- ting with impatience at the conduct of Pyrrhus, and the spretce injuria formce is stirring up her angriest feelings. At the same time, she betrays her unconquerable love for her faithless wooer in a speech in which she vacillates between the deter- mination to welcome Oreste as a suitor and the hope that Pyrrhus' affection will yet veer round. Her character is throughout impetuous, headstrong and changeable. She flatters Oreste with the hope of her hand, and at the same time lets him see but too well how she loves his rival. Pyrrhus is in a hard case. On the one hand, the Greeks insist on his delivering up Astyanax, and on the other, he is passionately in love with Andromaque. Is he to sacrifice his love or his crown ? He shows himself quite ready to risk the latter, but is driven to the cruel determination to surrender Astyanax by the obdurate scorn of Andromaque. His old friend Phoenix (whose speeches are even more prosaic and commonplace than the speeches of confidents usually are) con- fines himself for the most part to urging Pyrrhus to give up Astyanax and to marry Hermione. Oreste, throughout the play, is in an almost febrile state. Such a lover was never beheld on the old Greek stage. Even Hsemon, the wooer of Antigone, is cold and tame compared with him. Oreste is ready to sacrifice both life and honour for his beloved. He offers to devastate Epirus, to slay Pyrrhus, to violate all laws, human and divine, for her. To account for this reckless state of mind, 58 RACINE we have to remember that he is the innocent victim of the anger of the gods. His mother's murder was enjoined on him by a divine oracle, and yet he is still pursued by the Furies. Such injustice of heaven drives him to revolt against the gods. He confides his feelings to Pylade : ' Mon innocence enfin commence t\ me peser. Je ne sals de tout temps quelle injuste puissance Laisse le crime en paix et poursuit 1'innocence. De quelque part sur moi que je tourne les yeux Je ne vois que inal hours qui condamnent les dieux. Me"ritons leur courroux, justifions leur haine, Et que le fruit du crime en precede la peine.' This is the language of revolt, but of a revolt that wins our sympathy. How far we are from the Orestes of Euripides ! He utters no reproach against Apollo, and his murder of Pyrrhus is regarded as merely a retributive vengeance on the man who has spared a public enemy in Andromache, and has violated private friendship by marrying a woman promised to another. It should be remarked in passing that the character of Oreste in Racine's play is based, not on the Orestes of the 'Andromache' of Euripides, but on the Orestes of the play which bears his name. In the former play, Orestes merely appears as a selfish and revengeful character. In the latter, he is the melancholy and unhappy victim of the Furies' wrath. To this Racine added the passionateness of chivalrous love, and thus transformed Orestes into a modern hero. One word must be said concerning the confidents and con- fidentes of French tragedy. On all hands they are regarded as undesirable nonentities. Necessary evils is the most indulgent criticism that can be accorded them. They are the lineal sue- RACINE 59 cessors of two personages in the old Greek play the rpofos and the chorus. Unfortunately, the courtly grandeur of French tragedy quite precluded the representation of so humble a person as a nurse, and the chorus had long since been abolished as a useless appendage. The loss entailed by these excisions is immense. On the one hand, we lose the naturalness and homeliness of the relation between the nurse and the object of her care, which brings home to us so vividly the pathos of the situation; and on the other, we lose the charm of lyric poetry which, coming in, as it were, in the pauses of the action, reposes and refreshes the mind without absolutely cutting off our interest in the action, as the modern drop-curtain does. These confidents and confidentes, then, are generally noble personages, who give good advice or bad, as the case may be, to the main characters. Their own action in the piece is insignificant. One cannot, therefore, but see that they are a clumsy expedient. They constitute the roles ingrats of the French stage. The next play which we have to consider is ' Les Plaideurs.' This is Racine's one comedy, and a most brilliant little piece of fooling it certainly is. Moliere must have trembled for his laurels when he read it. It is full of sparkling wit from beginning to end, and though confessedly based on the ' Wasps ' of Aristophanes, it is even a more original produc- tion than his tragedies. Compared with its Greek rival, it easily wins the palm for wit. Aristophanes' play is rather a dull ^and spiritless performance, which towards the finish degenerates into mere coarse buffoonery. No doubt, there are capital jokes here and there, and Racine has incorporated 60 RACINE some of them in his play, notably that about the killing of the cock which the would-be judge accuses of having been bribed by a defendant not to wake him early enough to appear in court. One fine sally of the Greek comedian Eacine has neglected. Old Philocleon, we are told by his son, keeps up a private beach (aiyia\bv rptyei,) in order that he may never lack voting pebbles ! Just as the Attic poet attacked the litigiousness of the Athenians, so Eacine holds up to ridicule the same vice in the people of Normandy. Monsieur Dandin, the judge, is kept under lock and key by his son, Le'andre, but is always managing to escape. He will go and judge. 'You are ill,' says his son. 'I will be ill,' answers his father 'je veux etre malade.' To all Leandre's remonstrances he lends a deaf ear, and suddenly turns the tables on his son by accusing him of foppery and extravagance. ' Each of your ribbons cost me a sentence,' he says. What a delicious satire on the venality of the courts ! Then we have the great scene between Chicaneau and the Countess of Pimbeche. They have both come to plead their case before Dandin, and are refused admittance by the porter, Petit-Jean. They condole with each other, and mutually confide their respective grievances. Chicaneau has a long story about a neighbour's donkey that had strayed into his field and done a trifling damage. The Countess unfolds a series of lawsuits which she has been prosecuting against her father, her husband and her son. Chicaneau is very sympathetic, and advises her to persevere. The Countess is delighted with this counsel and asks him what steps she should take. Chicaneau begins to tell her, but RACINE 61 is always interrupted by the Countess, and finally both lose their temper and revile one another in the fiercest and funniest way. Old Dandin, hearing the noise, and succeeding in eluding the vigilance of his son, pops his head out at a hole in the roof of the house, and requests Chicaneau and the Countess to plead. They both attempt to do so at one and the same time, and each offers a bribe to the judge. Suddenly the head disappears. Old Dandin has been dragged in by his son. But a few minutes later the head appears again at a grating at the basement of the house, and the litigation proceeds once more. Finally Chicaneau, in his eagerness, tumbles down beside Dandin into the cellar, leaving the Countess lamenting and complaining that Chicaneau will thus succeed in prejudicing Dandin's mind against her. But the last act is the funniest of all. A mock trial is got up by Le'andre in order to please his father, and the dog of the household is arraigned for stealing a capon. A friend of Leandre, called L'lntime", and Petit- Jean are the advocates for and against. Poor Petit-Jean has a prompter to help him on, but he only flounders about in the most amusing way. His exordium is a model of bombastic eloquence, much in vogue at the time. He takes a survey of universal history and astronomy : ' Quand je vois les Cesars, quand je vois leur fortune, Quand je vois le soleil, et quand je vois la lune. . . .' Then, forgetting what he had been told to say, he splutters out in a breath that the dog had stolen a capon, and the next time he caught him at it he would murder him. Then L'lntime" rises and begins an oration in a squeaking falsetto, which makes Dandin furious. Next, he adopts a large and 62 RACINE parliamentary utterance, interspersing his harangue with Latin quotations. This pleases Dandin immensely, but, beginning to cite irrelevant classical authorities, he is called to order, where- upon he at once rattles out at a great rate the bald facts of the case 'the dog was hungry and the capon was nicely dressed.' Then in a vehement tone he pronounces a panegyric on the previous good character of the dog, and after parodying several masters of forensic eloquence & la mode, he concludes by bringing forward a litter of puppies, and in the most heartrending tones asks commiseration for the famille dtsoUe. There is a thin thread of romance running through the play, but it is entirely subordinated to the comic business. Moliere never wrote a wittier piece in a short compass, and it is to be regretted that Eacine did not make another trial in the same field. After this short excursion into the domain of comedy, Racine returned once more to the solemnities of the tragic muse. His next play was ' Britannicus.' Reserving detailed analysis of plot for plays which have been borrowed from the ancients, and which may be compared with theirs, let us try to form a general idea of the merits and defects of this his- torical drama. This time we have to deal, not with the beautiful legends of ancient Hellas, but with the dreadful reality and the grim horror of the court of Nero. Tacitus is now the guide whom Racine had to follow. That stern page of the 'Annals,' in which the early crimes of the implacable beautiful tyrant are recorded in blood-red letters, and whose incisive energy and latent fire of fierce indignation make the reader's heart beat slow with RACINE 63 expectant awe, had doubtless often been conned by the French dramatist. The turgid and passionate adolescence of the future scourge of the Christians, his deliberate renunciation of virtue, and his choice of evil as his good, his chafing impatience under the pedantic tutelage of Seneca and the impotent dulness of Burrhus, his growing hatred and jealousy of his mother, Agrippina, and his half-brother, Britannicus, ending in the murder of both, all combined to make Nero a magnificent subject for a great drama. Again, the character of Agrippina had the fascination which belongs to the splendid luxuriance of evil in a strong and ambitious soul. The woman who poisoned the aged Emperor, her husband, who encouraged her son in the wildest excesses of his passion, and stood not aghast at incest of the strangest sort, if so she might secure that ascendency which was slipping from her grasp, stands alone in the lurid light of a fiendish age. An imperious and dominating spirit, she formed a fitting subject for the trage- dian's art. But Racine was all too weak for such an argument. His gentle and sensitive spirit shrank from the crude atrocities of his subject, and, while striving to render to the full the overweening ambition of Agrippina and the jealous haughti- ness of Nero, he left in the background, or at least mitigated as much as possible, the more revolting traits. That prince of critics, Sainte-Beuve, has brought this out well in an essay devoted to Racine. He compares the vivid and energetic phrases of Tacitus with the mollified expressions of Racine. He quotes the Roman annalist's words about Agrippina ' cunctis malae dominationis cupidinibus flagrans ' and asks where in Racine we find that concentrated lust of empire. 64 RACINE Again, Nero appears as a romantic lover of the nobly-born Junie, and as such the rival of Britannicus. There is no word of Acte ; and what are we to say of the denouement, Junie taking refuge among the Vestals, and placed under the pro- tection of the people, as if the people could protect anybody in the days of Nero ? But above all, where is that horrible feast at which the crowning crime is committed ? Tacitus lets us see the whole scene. Britannicus is seated at the board, a cup is handed him, one of the attendant slaves first tastes it, but the wine is too hot ; it must be cooled, and in the cold water which is poured into it Locusta's deadly drug has been infused. The victim almost immediately expires. All these details, which are given by Tacitus with such 'concision eclatante/ as Sainte-Beuve calls it, are omitted by Kacine. We are merely told that Britannicus has been poisoned at a banquet, and our imagination is left to supply the rest. It has often been remarked that the age of Louis xrv. was the age of the influence of women, and one cannot but feel that Racine underwent this influence, for in almost all his plays the dominating rdle is given to a woman. ' Britannicus ' is a case in point. In spite of the fact that Nero's crime is the main argument, Agrippina's ambition really stands forth more prominently. It is she who claims our chief interest, and she who has the longest speeches. But if this be true of ' Britannicus,' how much truer it is of ' Phedre ' ! Here a woman dominates the scene from beginning to end. The whole action centres in and proceeds from her. So much is this the case that an eminent French critic, Monsieur Paul Albert, has gone so far as to say that the reason of this RACINE 65 supremacy of one role is to be found in the overwhelming ascendency of one figure in the French Court, namely Louis xiv. himself; and that, as all the courtiers of Versailles humbled themselves and fell on their knees before the Master, so in like manner the characters of Eacine grouped themselves in a merely subordinate way round the principal personage. There may be something in this idea, but we must also bear in mind that unity of action was always aimed at by Racine, and that unity of action is intensified when concentrated in one individual. ' Be're'nice ' was Racine's next venture. An air of romance hangs about this touching and charming little play. Henriette, the sister-in-law of the king, had in former years been pas- sionately attached to him, and he to her. But, as Voltaire says, 'le danger de cette passion, la crainte de mettre le trouble dans la famille royale, les noms de beau-frere et de belle-sceur mirent un frein & leurs de*sirs ; mais il resta toujours dans leurs cceurs une inclination secrete toujours chere a 1'un et a 1'autre.' Wishing to see these sentiments put into a dramatic form, she pledged both Corneille and Racine to write a piece on the parting of Titus and Berenice. Neither poet was aware that he had a rival, and their plays were produced simultane- ously in 1670. Racine's was performed at the Hotel de Bourgogne, and Corneille's at the Palais-Royal. As might have been expected, Racine utterly defeated the elder poet. The idyllic nature of the subject made it one quite unsuited to the genius of Corneille. His piece fell flat. Racine's had thirty consecutive representations. And yet the argument of the play is of an extreme simplicity. In the words of the E 66 RACINE ancient writer which Racine has put at the head of his play, 'Titus reginam Berenicen cui etiam nuptias pollicitus fere- batur statim ab urbe dimisit invitus invitam.' A lover's farewell, that is the whole matter. But, as he very truly says further on, if the tale of the parting of Dido and ./Eneas is sufficient to fill a whole canto of an epic poem in which the action lasts several days, surely it is sufficient to form the stuff of a tragedy. One cannot but admire the ingenuity with which Racine has spun out the slender plot. The interest can never be said to flag, and from beginning to end we feel that tristesse majestueuse which Racine characteristically pronounces to be the reason of the pleasure we take in tragedy. It must be said, however, that the parting of Dido and ^neas is a much more heartbreaking and terrible event than that of Titus and Be're'nice. The sword and the funeral pyre are alike absent in the latter case. Be're'nice will not die. She will languish and grow pale in exile. Perhaps she will return to her land of Palestine and there meet with some disciple of the Apostles, who will point out to her the way of the Cross. Space forbids to enter into the details of the action. The r6le ingrat of the piece is that of Antiochus, who surely is a type of what a submissive lover ought to be, ' . . . Je me suis tu cinq ans, Madame, et vais encor me taire plus longtemps.' Poor Antiochus ! Yet he was sorely stricken too, and he had known the pangs of separation from his beloved. 'Dans 1'orient d&sert quel devint mon ennui!' Perhaps one of the most affecting lines in the play is that RACINE 67 in which Berenice entreats Titus to show her more love and less honour ' Voyez-moi plus souvent et ne ine donnez rien.' These words, pronounced in the silver tones of La Champmesle, must have thrilled Racine himself to the core. As Sainte-Beuve happily remarks, ' " Berenice " peut etre dite une charmante et melodieuse faiblesse dans 1'oeuvre de Racine comme La Champ- mesle* le fut dans sa vie.' In the next century we find La Harpe applying the beautiful and famous phrase, ' des larmes dans la voix,' to the elocution of Mile. Gaussin in the role of Be're'nice. But enough of this elegiac and slighter production of Racine's art. We have ' Phedre ' and ' Iphige'nie ' and ' Athalie ' before us, and must not dwell too long on minor works. ' Bajazet ' is a bold departure from the conventional subject- ground of French tragedy. One would have thought that the Turks, of all people, were the least suitable for dramatic pur- poses; but Racine thought otherwise, and in his preface he attempts a justification of the play. (It may be remarked, in passing, that these little prefaces are models of elegant writing and sound sense.) He says, ' On peut dire que le respect que Ton a pour les he*ros augmente a mesure qu'ils s'eloignent de nous. Major e longinquo reverentia. L'e'loignement des pays re*pare en quelque sorte la trop grande proximit6 des temps, car le peuple ne met guere de difference entre ce qui est, si j'ose ainsi parler, a mille ans de lui, et ce qui en est a mille lieues.' He also goes on to plead the example of JEschylus, who, in the case of the ' Persae/ gave a representation of contemporary life in a foreign land. There is a good deal to be said on both sides of the question. 68 RACINE It may be true enough that the heroes of tragedy should be removed from the sphere of our common-place existence, and placed in the atmosphere of an ideal world. But surely that ideal atmosphere should be one above, rather than below, the environment of the writer. Now, the manners and customs of the Turkish seraglio were certainly not on so high a plane as the manners and customs of the court of Louis xiv., whereas in the case of the ' Persae ' the discrepancy is not so glaring. The Persians were a noble, warlike people, and foemen worthy of the steel of the Greeks who fought with them at Marathon and Salamis. In a word, their ethical code was scarcely inferior to that of their enemies. Altogether, Eacine's argument rather falls to the ground ; but it is curious to observe that the pre- cedent which he set in ' Bajazet ' was afterwards adopted by Voltaire, who took the Chinese under his dramatic patronage, just as Racine had taken the Turks. The plot of ' Bajazet ' is not interesting. Yet Roxane, the Sultana, is a vividly conceived embodiment of fierce Oriental passion and violent hate. Her manner of making love to Bajazet has suggested the acute criticism of M. Paul Albert, that throughout Racine's plays, in which love forms the chief motive, it is almost always the woman who pays court to the man. Thus, Phedre entreats Hippolyte, Hermione en- deavours to attract Pyrrhus. Here, again, the spectacle of the female rivalries for the king's favour has its counterpart in Racine's plays. Bajazet himself is a mean intriguer, who quite fails to win one's sympathy. Either he should have consented to wed Roxane, or else he should have given up his pretensions RACINE 69 to the empire. His wavering conduct meets its merited pun- ishment, and we shed no tears over his fate. Eoxane stirs our admiration rather than our pity. She, at any rate, knows what she wants, and does her best to get it. Schlegel calls her a 'disgusting' character, but this shows a somewhat narrow view. She is Oriental that is all. This is more than Atalide can be called. She is thoroughly Frenchified and Christian : so much so, that the aged Corneille, who was present at the first representation of the piece, said it would not do the personages were too French. ' Mithridate ' belongs, like ' Bajazet,' to the secondary rank among Eacine's works. The central motive of the play is not a tragic one. It very nearly approaches the borderland of comedy. Mithridate and his two sons, Xiphares and Phar- nace, are in love with the same woman, Monime. During the absence of their father, who they think is dead, the two sons quarrel about the fair lady. Suddenly Mithridate appears upon the scene, much to the discomfiture of the two amoureux. As Schlegel says, their alarm is like that of a couple of school- boys conscious of some impropriety, on the unexpected entrance of their master. There is, however, a rugged grandeur about Mithridate himself which redeems the play. His implacable hatred of the Eomans, and his scathing wrath at his sons' treachery, remind one more of the Corneillian hero. Naturally, there is the invariable Eacinian note present, he is desperately in love. In his next play Eacine deals with that thrilling legend of the Trojan war, the sacrifice of Iphigenia. Here, again, Euri- pides had anticipated him, but Eacine has materially altered 70 RACINE Euripides' plot. Following an indication of Pausanias, he has introduced the personage of Eriphile, the child of Theseus and Helen. She has been brought as a captive from Lesbos by Achilles, and it is she who is sacrificed, or, rather, who sacrifices herself, in accordance with the oracle of Calchas. There is no substi- tution of a fawn for a maiden, as in the Greek poet. The whole tone of Racine's play is, as in the case of ' Phedre ' and 'Andromaque,' profoundly different from that of Euripides' play. Romantic passion was, as we know, not often bestowed on women by the Greeks, but was reserved for friendship betwixt man and youth. There is something almost akin to the ludicrous in the idea of Achilles sighing as the tender lover of Iphigenia. The Briseis episode in the Iliad is a frankly sensual affair, and the romance of his life lies in his passionate friendship for Patro- clus. A wife in the heroic age was a chattel bought like a cow or a horse. Here, as in the case of 'Andromaque,' we must bear in mind Heine's saying about Racine's plays, that they are a ' piquante mascarade.' Voltaire regarded the 'Iphigenie' as Racine's masterpiece, but modern criticism would be more disposed to give preced- ence to 'Athalie' or 'Phedre.' Passion runs higher in both these latter. They are more intensely dramatic, especially ' Phedre.' But there are superb passages in ' Iphige*nie,' and a rare thing in French dramatic literature lines that linger in the memory, lines that are exquisite poetry in themselves. Take, for example, the last words of the speech in which Ulysses talks of the future success of the Trojan expedition : ' Et ce triomphe heureux qui s'en va devenir LV-ternel entretien des siecles a venir.' RACINE 71 Such lines are all too rare in French dramatic poetry. The diction is apt to be arid and conventional. But Racine was a poet, and he has lines of pure poetic quality. Wherein lies the charm of such lines as I have cited, it would be difficult (though perhaps not impossible) to say; but any one who has read much poetry would be bound to feel that such lines are classical in the best, the only real, sense of the word." Euripides was a poet also, and a greater poet than Racine, and he, too, has lines of that supreme quality in his play : ' TrpwTJj o-' fKa\eables.' Here Mathan really gives himself away, so to speak. Kichard m., in Shakespeare's play, is also made the spokes- man of the dramatist's coloured conception of the character. He says, as we all remember : ' As I am subtle, false and treacherous.' This is very questionable art. It is a form of playing to the gallery, as we say. To the popular imagination in the days of Elizabeth, the Hunchback had become a sort of ogre, denaturalised, dehumanised. And in like manner, to the pious court of Versailles the High Priest of a Pagan faith was merely a monster. The quality of imaginative sympathy, which Arnold called the distinguishing feature of our times, was unknown in the seventeenth century. The opening lines of the play are among the finest in dramatic literature. They strike the keynote of the play at once, but yet not too loudly. ' Oui, je viens dans son temple adorer 1'Eternel. Je viens, selon 1'usage antique et solennel, Cetebrer avec vous la fameuse journee, Oil sur le mont Sina la loi nous fut donru'e/ Everyone knows the famous 'Songe d'Athalie,' and so it is RACINE 91 hardly necessary to quote it. What a master of language Kacine shows himself here ! ' Ma mere Jezabel devant moi s'est inontree Comme au jour de sa mort pompeusement pare"e.' And yet how apt these words would be to fail of their charm to an English ear, from the mere fact that the word pompeuse- ment would instantly suggest ' pompously ' in all its ludicrous connotation ! (What a tragedy there is in the degradation of words ! The French language is not without examples of this. The word ennui once meant ' sorrow,' but now it only means ' boredom,' at least, in ordinary speech. It is still used in the older sense in poetry.) It has been well said that the grand role of the play is really that of Jehovah. One feels that the human personages are merely puppets moving on to appointed ends, and that the moving spirit of the play comes from between the cherubim. God's vengeance on the wicked is the real argument. In Greek tragedy the oracle of Delphi occasionally plays a somewhat similar rdle, but not with the same insistent presence and impressiveness. We only hear echoes from the rock of the Pythoness' cave ; but in ' Athalie ' the very voice of Sinai speaks through Joad. ' L'arche sainte est muette efc ne rend plus d'oracles,' says Abner, and Joad replies : ' Et quel temps fut jamais si fertile en miracles ? Quand Dieu par plus d'effets montra-t-il son pouvoir ? Auras-tu done toujours des yeux pour ne point voir, Peuple ingrat ? Quoi, toujours les plus grandes merveilles Sans e'branler ton coeur frapperont tes oreilles ? , Faut-il, Abner, faut-il vous rappeler le cours Des prodiges fameux accomplis en nos jours ? 92 RACINE Des Tyrans d'lsrael les celebres disgraces, Et Dieu trouve fiddle en toutes ses menaces ; L'impie Achab ddtruit, et de son sang trempe Le champ que par le meurtre il avait usurpe* ; Pres de ce champ fatal Jdzabel immole'e, Sous les pieds des chevaux cette Reine fouled ; Dans son sang inhumain les chiens desalt(5res, Et de son corps hideux les membres dechiris ; Des Prophetes menteurs la troupe confondue, Et la flamme du Oiel sur 1'autcl descendue ? ' ' Esther ' must have been a revelation to the poet himself. He had been asked by Madame de Maiutenon to write a sacred play for her young noblewomen at St. Cyr, who were anxious, apparently, to have some private theatricals. One can imagine the delight with which a piece like this must have been welcomed. Pieces d 'occasion are not apt to be successes ; but tais one, like Milton's ' Comus,' was a permanent addition to the literary trophies of the age. It aroused the interest of the king, who insisted upon witnessing a performance. He was delighted with it. All the characters were taken by the girls, and they had musical choruses to aid the general effect. Some of the best writing in the play is contained in these choruses, e.g. ' rives du Jourdain ! champs aimes des Cieux ! ' Or again ' Tel qu'un ruisseau docile Obe"it a la main qui detourne son cours, Et, laissant de ses eaux partager le secours, Va rendre tout un champ fertile.' Happy, indeed, the boarding-school which is in such a case, which has a Racine for dramatic poet, a Madame de Main- RACINE 93 tenon as Principal, and where, when acting is forward, the Court of France is audience ! It now remains for me to attempt to sum up the impression made on one by a comparative study of Eacine and other drama- tists. It would almost seem that in what I have said I had a fixed determination to contrast Eacine unfavourably with the Greeks. Such, however, has not been my intention so much as to show how Eacine breathed another spirit into the fair dead limbs of the Greek drama. He did not seek to reproduce (he could not if he had tried) the free, frank life of Hellas. Christianity, chivalry and feudalism had passed over the world, and had quickened much and destroyed much. Life did not look the same in the reign of Louis xiv. as in the archonship of Pericles. All dramatic art centred in the Court of Louis xiv., and Bossuet was one of the spectators to be reckoned with. But what was open to Eacine he took advantage of with the most beautiful result. He adopted the famous personages of the ancient world, and fusing their characters in the alembic of his mind, he reproduced them in a new and fascinating aspect, and one which could appeal to his fellow-countrymen. As has already been said, Heine, in the course of one of his invec- tives against Schlegel, accuses him of critical incapacity for not perceiving that Eacine's plays are, as he phrases it, a 'piquante mascarade,' not an imitation of the Greek originals. It is sometimes interesting, but often misleading, to take an analogy from the arts of painting or music when one is talkino about literature. Were one to hazard such an analogy here, one might perhaps say that Eacine is in literature what Claude 94 RACINE is in painting. Clear outline, mellow tone, harmony, softness, these are all qualities common to the artist and the poet. Turner, on the other hand, with his wild magnificence of colouring, and defiant boldness of form, where yet supreme ordering governs all, might be a fitting artist to compare with Shakespeare. Side by side in the National Gallery hang two pictures, both representing the building of Carthage the one all calm and clear, the other all pomp and pageantry and glowing lights, typical each of the nationality of its painter. Or again, in the sphere of Music, we might say that Shake- speare finds an analogy in Beethoven or Wagner, Racine in Mozart. But, after all, such analogies are fanciful, and if pushed to the conclusion, false. THE POETRY OF ALFRED DE MUSSET NOTHING, perhaps, more puzzles the literary Englishman than the decided preference which most Frenchmen give to Alfred de Musset over Victor Hugo. How to account for a taste which, in Mr. Ruskin's words, 'sets the gleaming euphrasy above the dark branches of Dodona ' ? Very possibly the answer to the problem is to be found in that rule of laziness which is a law of popular taste, no less certainly than of etymology. Victor Hugo is to many Frenchmen, what Browning is, though for other and more excusable reasons, to most Englishmen, a sublime incomprehensible. The mental effort required to enjoy him is more than the homme sensuel moyen feels inclined to bestow. We should remember Gilead P. Beck's laudable efforts to master our jerky bard and his lack of success, and apply the same principle and extend the same indulgence to the Gilead P. Becks of France. Only those to whom Melpomene has granted a more benignant smile at birth have sufficient love of poetry to make efforts. Let us take another familiar example from our own litera- ture. How many thousands are there who read Mr. Lewis Morris, compared with the few who read Rossetti ? To many, no doubt, the ' Epic of Hades,' with its facile versification and 95 96 THE POETRY OF ALFRED DE MUSSET obvious meanings and morals, is the masterpiece of the nine- teenth century, precisely as, to myriads of Americans, ' Evange- line ' or ' Miles Standish ' is the noblest poem ever penned, and 'The Psalm of Life' the profoundest utterance of the human soul. By which considerations we must not be led to imagine that Alfred de Musset occupies merely the level of an imitative poet whose ear is thronged with echoes from the heights of song around him. Alfred de Musset has in him a distinct vein of originality and charm, which he owes to none but Dame Nature. ' Mon verre n'est pas grand, mais je bois dans mon verre,' he says of himself to those who accuse him of being an imitator of Byron, and his poems bear him out. He has a far truer, subtler, keener insight into beauty than the magnificent rhetorician whom he so greatly admired. Byron was as incapable of writing a piece of delicate and purely sensuous verse, such as the introduction to ' Rolla,' or the address to the evening star in ' Le Saule,' as was Musset of writing the description of the storm in 'Don Juan.' Such lines as ' Etoile qui descends sur la verte colline, Triste larme d'argent du manteau de la nuit, Toi que regarde au loin le patre qui chemine Tandis que pas a pas son long tronpeau le suit,' have in their quality something of that which gives charm to the Eclogues of Virgil or the pictures of Millet. There is in them a tender grace which one might read all that Byron ever wrote without finding, a feeling for beauty for beauty's sake, which is akin to the genius of Keats. The French poet is an 97 authentic child of Apollo and the Muse, whereas, were re- cherches de paternitd allowed in such a case, we might perhaps say that Byron was begotten on her in some wild moment by a wandering demi-god. De Musset's early poems, 'Contes d'Espagne et d'ltalie,' have a rollicking recklessness of inspiration about them that reminds one of Boccaccio. The ' Lays of Lawless Love ' they might well be entitled. One and all are concerned with the tender passion in more or less questionable shape. The ' mad, sad, bad, glad' 'Ballade a la Lune' is perhaps the most grievous offender against the decencies, and the poem which, more than others, incurred the anathemas of the stricter sect. The Legis- lators of Parnassus had also a word to say about its audacious contempt of received rules of style. To compare the moon hanging over a steeple to a dot on an ' i ' was a licence not to be tolerated. And then, the strange sights that the virgin Phoebe beheld! But, naturally, since the days of Endymion she had grown less coy. Heretical as these early poems are, most of them have a sad and tragic ending, by which de Musset did not, by any means, wish to point a moral, but only to adorn a tale. The sadness is but the luxury of grief which young poets affect. He felt, like Edgar Allan Poe, that love and death are the two most poetical things that be, and so he makes his lovers come to dust at the end. Poison or a dagger is their favourite means of making away with themselves. Thus, in ' Dom Paez ' the hero seeks out an old witch, who brews him a love-philtre which first acts as a fierce aphrodisiac and then as a deadly poison. Having drunk this, he goes to see his faithless lady G 98 THE POETRY OF ALFRED DE MUSSET for the last time, and, after a night of wild and frantic orgy, he stabs her and expires. (It may be remarked by the way how true that saying of Heine is, that the French are in all things too serious. A sense of humour would have prevented an English poet from making his hero drink an excitant and then visit his mistress. To the French mind there is nothing necessarily ludicrous here only a heightening of intensity.) The last lines of the poem are an utterance of the poet himself, which recalls the sad serenity and solemnity of a Greek chorus. ' Pour moi, j'estime qu'une tombe Est un asile sur ou 1'esperance tombe, Oil pour I'4ternit6 Ton croise les deux bras Et dont les endormis ne se reVeillent pas.' In 'Les Marrons du Feu' we are introduced to a most engaging young rake called Rafael, who, in one form or another, is constantly appearing in de Musset's work. He is one of the avatars of Don Juan a character which seems to have possessed an extreme fascination for the poet. Whether he be called Rafael, or Etur, or Mardoche, or Dalti, it is always the same man, TTO\\WV ovofjidrmv fiop^rj fua, In ' Portia ' we have the tale of a young Venetian fisher-lad, who makes a lucky hit at a gambling-table, comes to Rome, and is loved by a married lady of noble family. Her husband is an elderly man, a Florentine, who is terribly jealous of his young wife. He surprises the two lovers at a rendez-vous, and falls beneath Dalti's rapier. Then Dalti confesses to Portia that he is a ruined man, and that nothing remains to him but his fishing-boat. Will she abide by him or not ? She hesitates, but finally chooses to remain with him. We do not hear of the THE POETRY OF ALFRED DE MUSSET 99 sequel. The idea of the high-born lady sinking to the level of one of those ' rough wives that scream against the gulls ' is not an agreeable one. For the palm of gently-graceful, graceless cynicism 'Mar- doche' and 'Namouna' rival one another. Neither can be held to have any special plot or purpose, except to portray two different phases of the fascinating, easy-going Don Juan- esque character. Mardoche, with his inability to grasp the all too official piety of his worthy uncle the cure, and his light and airy confidence in a Voltairian Ion Dieu, who rather favours amorous escapades than otherwise, and the cure" himself, with his half-hearted protests against the naughtiness of his pet nephew, and his real sympathy, which goes so far as to make him lend his ownpresbytere as a shelter for the intrigue, form such a roguish pair as we must think Menander would have loved to deal with. Then the serio-comic denouement, in which the irate husband appears as an inopportune deus ex machind and orders his wife off to a nunnery, while Mardoche leaps out of the window and sprains his ankle in his fall, has the same laughter-moving quality as the unsuccessful exploits of Sir John Falstaff. ' Namouna,' which is the longest and most desultory of all the Don Juanesque poems, is also the one in which the Byronic influence is perhaps most perceptible. There is so far from being any definite plot, that the one bit of action in the poem does not take place till the last verses of the last canto. The whole poem might be styled a study in Orientalism. The first stanza introduces us to a lazy, lounging, Turkified Frenchman, called Hassan, lying naked ioo THE POETRY OF ALFRED DE MUSSET on a sofa. Thereafter to the end of the poem, we have nothing but humorous, witty, sarcastic disquisitions on matters literary, artistic, and ethical. The point of the whole story lies in this, that the hero of it gets brought to him at the beginning of every month two beautiful girls, whom he dis- misses at the end of it. Once, however, a young Spanish maiden called Namouna, who had been pirated from Cadiz and sold to a Jewish slave-owner, Hassan's purveyor in this kind, falls in love with her new master, and, after having been sent away at the month's end, finds a means of being brought back to Hassan's harem. What ultimately happens is left unsaid. On this slender thread some scores of brilliant, irrelevant verses have been strung, all written with a graceful, careless facility that wins admiration from one in spite of one's self. 'La Coupe et les Levres' is the most ambitious in scope of all the early poems. There is something of the dignity of tragedy in the conception of the young huntsman Frank, who, goaded by ambition and want of success in the chase, refuses all offers of help and kindness from his companions, and, after cursing his father's house, departs into the world and wave of men. He meets on the way Belcolore and her squire Stranio. He slays the latter and rides off with Belcolore, with whom he lives for a time ; but, discovering her mercenary nature, he leaves her and joins a band of soldiers, whose captain he becomes. One day he tries their allegiance by giving out that he is dead; then, disguised as a monk, he makes his own funeral oration, in which he declares all his evil deeds, thereby rousing the fury of the soldiers against their late THE POETRY OF ALFRED DE MUSSET 101 leader. Then Belcolore comes upon the scene, and laments over the bier. The monk tries to cheer her by representing to her that Frank had been no such hero. Then he tempts her by laying piles of jewellery and gold pieces on the empty coffin. Belcolore is on the point of yielding to his suit, when Frank declares himself, and drives her away with curses. Thereafter he returns home and betrothes himself to a maid who had long loved him, called Deidamia. On their wedding- night Belcolore appears at a window of the hut and contrives to stab Deidamia to the heart, and so the tragedy ends. ' A Quoi Revent les Jeunes Filles ' is a piece of brilliant and charming nonsense, which takes a high rank among de Musset's early works. Ninon and Ninette are two romantic girls who, as their father the Duke Laerte says, dream of lovers that serenade them and climb up to their bedroom windows on silken rope-ladders, sword in hand and a mantle over their eyes. Like Lydia Languish, they are averse to hum-drum notions of courtship and marriage, and their father, wishing to humour them, prepares a little surprise for them. He induces the lover of Ninon, Silvio by name, to join him in making a nocturnal attack on his daughter's apartments, in which is also involved the duke's nephew, Irus, a senseless fop, who is also a suitor for the hand of Ninon. Things end very happily by Silvio marrying Ninon, and Irus donning a new costume. But for the afore-cited verses to the evening star, 'Le Saule ' is one of the least successful of the early poems. The sentimentality is too flaccid, and the tale of woe too vague and unsatisfactory. Besides, how can one sympathise with a heroine who is called Miss Smolen ? 102 THE POETRY OF ALFRED DE MUSSET One little lyrical gem must be quoted from a set of verses ' A Juana ' : ' Le temps emporte sur son aile Et le printemps et 1'hirondelle, Et la vie et les jours perdus. Tout s'en va comme la fume, L'espe"rance et la renomme'e, Et nioi qui vous ai tant aimee, Et toi qui ne t'en souviens plus.' When compared with the youthful lyrics of our own greater Alfred Tennyson, how much more pure and graceful these lines appear than all the ' airy, fairy Lilian ' twaddle ! It is a pity there are not more of them. We could well have spared many 'Suzons' for one or two such bright bursts of song as ' Le Lever ' and ' Venise.' The first-mentioned poem is a hideous mixture of Italian Renascence lust and cruelty, and all unworthy to be told in such admirable verse. The motive is obscene and horrible, and should have been deemed beneath a poet's choice. This completes a more or less full survey of de Musset's early poems. According to Mr. Swinburne, we have now done with his best work, and have nothing but partial successes and dead failures before us. Heine said of the poet, that he was ' un jeune homme avec un tres beau passeY Mr. Swinburne approves of the sarcasm, but it is much to be doubted if French criticism would admit that the second sheaf of poems is inferior to the first. The reverse would be the more likely verdict. Much had happened meanwhile to the poet to deepen and sadden his feelings about life. His famous liaison and THE POETRY OF ALFRED DE MUSSET 103 rupture with George Sand had taken place, and all his after- poetry was affected by it. This is not the place for a disquisition on the rights and wrongs of that cause cdtibre. Much is to be said for Mr. Swinburne's view of their life in Venice, that she was a man and he was a woman in that kingdom by the sea, and that if Elfrida did not behave like a lady, certainly George did not behave like a gentleman. This is probably a very just view, for there was more of the man in George Sand, that woman tnasculce libidinis masculique ingenii, than in Alfred de Musset, and he had all a woman's sensitiveness and caprice. 'Rolla,' the first poem of the second series, is, whatever else we may think of it, a most noteworthy production. Its opening lines are among the finest in all French literature- Full, strong, rich and harmonious, they once for all refute the prevalent English notion that French harmony is necessarily thin and poor. To translate them adequately would be indeed a hard task, but their meaning, if not their music, may be rendered thus: ' Dost yearn for days when heaven's Divinities Moved 'mid a godlike folk in mortal guise, When virgin Venus, child of bitter seas, Scattered her mother's tear-drops to the breeze, And sleeked her tresses till the whole world teemed? Dost yearn for days when nymphs' bright shoulders gleamed And glided 'mid the lilies of the lake The while with petulant laugh they strove to wake The lazy fauns that couched among the sedge? When still the fair youth kissed the water's edge, Young Hercules still ranged the world in might, Quelling all wrong with even-handed right, 104 THE POETRY OF ALFRED DE MUSSET His manhood mantled in a lion's fell ; And mocking sylvans swung in every dell Upon the springy branches of the oak, And whistled back the songs of passing folk ? ' It has been bitterly said of this poem, that in it de Musset flings the dregs of ' Rolla's ' absinthe into the face of Voltaire. The fine apostrophe beginning ' Dors-tu content, Voltaire ? ' with its fierce irony and broken-hearted reproach, however unjust to the memory of a great man, and however inconse- quent in its deductions from his teaching, forms a magnificent piece of declamatory rhetoric. There was a time in life when some of us perhaps imagined that ' Rolla ' was the wickedest, saddest, most deeply touching poetry ever penned, a time when one mistook one's own shadow for the very pit of hell. But a few years on, how shrunk and changed it all seemed ! The growing frivolity of age makes one take less seriously what long ago seemed so serious. The vulgarity of the 'Eollas' of real life makes one so incredulous of the Eolla of fiction. Still, there are passages of such exquisite poetry in it that, false and mawkish as the poem is as a whole, we must admit that it constitutes one of the poet's gravest claims to renown. ' Une Bonne Fortune ' is, of all de Musset's poems, the most amiable and sweet in tone and inspiration. It tells how the poet, finding himself short of cash in Baden-Baden, gave his last franc to a little boy who was walking with his nurse, and who was weeping because he had nothing to give to the beggars. He afterwards meets the little boy's mother, who is an Englishwoman. She thanks the poet most graciously. THE POETRY OF ALFRED DE MUSSET 105 He had, by this time, received money from home, and one night he staked a few coins at the gaming-table upon the number which the lady pointed out to him. As luck would have it, he won a heap of gold, and that was the end of his bonne fortune. ' Lucie ' is perhaps one of the most popular of de Musset's poems, because it is short, and because its sentiment is very sentimental and simple, and also because the verses are most musical. We are all familiar with the picture of the maiden seated at the organ, and the long-haired aesthetic youth at her side gazing at her with eager eyes. The picture has com- pletely caught the spirit of the poem. There is an insipidity about both which renders them inferior art, but both have their charm. One beautiful line redeems the poem, and gives the picture its raison d'etre: ' Fille de la douleur, Hannonie, Harmonie ! ' The stanzas to 'La Malibran' are often considered to be among the best things of the poet. Fine they undoubtedly are, and one especially fine stanza may perhaps be quoted ' Maria-Felicia, le peintre et le poete Laissent en expirant d'immortels h^ritiers ; Jamais 1'affreuse nuit ne les prend tout entiers ; A d^faut d'action leur grande ame inquiete De la mort et du temps entreprend la conquete, Et frappds dans la lutte ils tombent en guerriers.' As a tribute from a poet to an actress, they must take a higher rank than Matthew Arnold's Sonnets to Rachel. Indeed, the first stanzas can take the very highest rank among elegiac io6 THE POETRY OF ALFRED DE MUSSET poems. The rest of the poem shows rather a falling off. Here and there, there are beautiful lines, e.g. : ' Ou faut-il croire, he"las, ce que disaient nos peres, Que lorsqu'on meurt si jeune on est aim6 des dieux! ' But, on the whole, the falling off continues to the close, except, perhaps, the concluding lines : 'Meurs done; ta mort est douce et ta tache est remplie. Ce que 1'homme ici-bas appelle le ge"nie C'est le besoin d'aimer ; hors de la tout est vain. Et puisque tot ou tard 1'amour humain s'oublie, II est d'une grande ame et d'un heureux destin D'expirer comme toi pour un amour divin.' On the whole, 'Les Nuits' must be pronounced de Musset's masterpiece, and with a few words about them, this essay closes. Taken together, they form his most considerable poetical venture, and they are the most mature fruits of his genius. They are more sustained in quality, more chastened, more perfect than his other long poems. From that night in May, when the Muse comes to the poet and bends lovingly over him, and, harp in hand, strives to move him from his heavy sorrow; through the drear night in December, when the spirit of solitude, in the likeness of a sable-clad youth 'qui lui res- semblait comme un frere,' makes itself known to him ; through that wild night in August, when the poet passionately rejects the remonstrance of his Muse, and vows that, untaught by suffering, he will love till love slay him ; on to that calmer night in October, when, his mistress' treason all forgot, he dedicates himself once more to poetry and bursts forth into lyric rapture, there are no false notes, no faltering. Each night has its own colouring and tone; the night in May, THE POETRY OF ALFRED DE MUSSET 107 tender, sweet, a delicate breath of spring moving everywhere; the December night, sad, funereal, spectre-haunted; the August evening, with its hot breath and withered flowers, and wild pulsations in the blood; and the night in October, subdued, russet-coloured and calm, with keen air bracing slack resolves to courage and the firm pursuit of art. The May night excels in breadth and sweetness and majesty; the December night in sombre intensity; the August night in passion, and the October night in grave beauty. No finer piece of descriptive verse was ever written, than that which tells about the love of the pelican for its young, the pelicanus plus of sacred symbol- ism. May one dare attempt to transmute the golden French into silver, or rather copper, English? ' When, weary with far flight, the pelican 'Mid mists of evening gets him to his reeds, His hungry bantlings seeing him afar Swoop on the waters, scud along the shore, In eager race to tear the dainty prey ; And fluttering round their sire with screams of joy Shake their ungainly pouches. He, with slow, Sad steps, ascends a lofty rock, and thence, (Shelt'ring his brood with drooping wing the while) A melancholy fisher, scans the sky. Blood flows in streams from his gashed bosom. Vain Was all his quest ; the ocean depths were void, Barren the beach ; naught but his heart he brings. Sombre and silent, stretched upon the stone, He doles his entrails to his offspring, love Divine quite conquering pain. He sees the flow Of life-blood from his breast, and, trembling, sinks Dizzy with intense pleasure, horror and joy. But sometimes, ere the sacrifice accomplished, Being loath to die thus slowly, and afraid His children leave him living, he arises, 108 THE POETRY OF ALFRED DE MUSSET And spreading forth his wide wings to the wind, And striking at his heart with savage cry, He wails to the night such terrible farewell That sea-birds quit the shore, and far away The traveller belated, feeling death Pass on the breeze, commends himself to God.' And, for exquisite and poignant lyrical utterance, could aught excel the concluding lines of the poem? ' Mais j'ai souffert un dur martyre, Et le moins que j'en pourrais dire, Si je 1'essayais sur ma lyre, La briserait comme un roseau.' Among all the ' cloudy trophies ' of the melancholy Muse, the December night must take a mournful eminence. Sad, unutterably sad, but sweet though in sadness, its ever-recur- ring line, ' Qui me ressemblait comme un frere,' falls on the ear like the persistent, muffled throb of a passing-bell. The night in August, with its hot breath searing the vervain on the window-sill, and the sad Muse leaning her weary head upon the door-post of her loved poet, entreating him to return to her and to forget his earthly love, and the wild OeXca 0e\o) pavrivai (' apres avoir aim il faut aimer toujours '), with which the poem ends, is indeed a memorable night, but less memor- able, perhaps, and assuredly less welcome, than the night in October, when, old sorrows healed, the poet recounts to the Muse his sad experience and ' all his hourly varied anodynes,' and receives from her forgiveness and inspiration renewed. Forgoing sorrow is the condition of joy, she tells him 'la joie a pour symbole une plante brisde ' the heavenly powers THE POETRY OF ALFRED DE MUSSET 109 make themselves known only to those who have watered their couch with their tears. It would take too much space to speak of the concluding poems of this series, gem-like and beautiful as some of them are, notably that sweet song of Fortunio, 'Si vous croyez que je vais dire Qui j'ose aimer?' or that other to ' Mimi Pinson,' or the adieu to ' Suzon ' with its plaintive refrain, 'bien loin, bien vite.' Unrivalled for gracefulness and delicacy, those little poems of his have an enduring quality which will save them when many more ambitious works have gone to the deeps of oblivion. De Musset, if not one of the great poets of the century (and a place can hardly be allotted him where Tennyson and Hugo stand), yet remains one of the sweetest and most graceful of all time. PAUL BOURGET 1 M. PAUL BOUEGET is the inventor or thereabouts of what is called ' la psychologic contemporaine.' A few years back to be ' psychological ' was to be everything in fiction. To turn round and 'approve your science of anthropometry' dis- passionately on your contemporaries was to be superior, and to win the marrowless but refined applause of your peers. And thus it fell out that M. Paul Bourget was hailed of all superior France as a ' penseur distingue*,' ' un psychologue de premier ordre,' and all the amazing rest. Has he now arrived ? Was ' Le Disciple ' his long-foreseen and long-ambitioned goal? To some, perchance, this novel might appear (in a figure) as a sort of half-way house : a pike- keeper's hut, as it were, and not in any sense a Temple of Fame. But such dullards would but show that they underestimate the craving of a semi-educated public for a farrago of ' passionel ' detail and pseudo-scientific treatment. It is otherwise chez nous. We have got no further than the disintegration of 1 This essay originally appeared in the 'Modern Men' series of the National Observer when that review was under the spirited direction of Mr. Henley. Accord- ing to his editorial custom he heightened my poor efforts with strong expressions of individual opinion ; so that should this paper ever come under M. Bourget's famous monocle that distinguished writer will know whom to blame. 110 PAUL BOURGET in religious belief and the hesitations and heart-reachings of saintly susceptible curates. But then, we are full three- quarters of a century behind. They got over that sort of thing in France somewhere about the fifties ; and for all their Zolas and their Bonnetains, the appearance (or the recrudesence) of another George Sand would create a public scandal. Paint- ing and literature are ' quick-change artistes ' there ; and phase succeeds to phase like figures in a kaleidoscope or (to use a nobler metaphor) the political views of statesmen out of place. French poetry has rushed at express speed through the several regions known as Komantisme, Parnassie"nisme, Decadence, Symbolisme, Incoherence, Deliquescence, and looks as if its future were in the hands of any Bedlamitish group that cares to take on the responsibility of being more lunatical than those that went before. French painting and French fiction have proceeded on much the same frantic lines. And were it not that the peculiar excellence of the French mind is that it will pursue its ideas to the bitter end, man's comfort in France were small indeed. But it is ever her way to work herself out in a given direction, and violently revert to something else. So that M. Zola is probably the grandfather malgr& lui of another Mme. Cottin, M. Bourget the unconscious true-begetter of another Alexandre Dumas. As for ' Le Disciple,' it is obviously the work of a man able enough to master more or less the ideas of men like Schopen- hauer, Hegel, and Herbert Spencer, in short, a very superior person, who, further, being a Frenchman and the subject of a rigorous literary training, could not but write well. Not from M. Bourget need one look for the vapid, slipshod style of ii2 PAUL BOURGET many English writers whose insular renown is vast. His writing, as Arnold would have said, is ' of the centre.' It is often affected, sometimes mawkish, generally sentimental ; but it is never provincial, never ' gushing,' never vulgar. By his diction, moreover, he is in the direct line of Moliere and Musset. He writes French, that is; and if he condescend upon neologisms and the technology of philosophy and science, it is that he is a superior person, and cannot help it. In ' Le Disciple,' he tells you how a nice young man (not unlike M. Paul Bourget : so he confesses in his preface) goes rather badly wrong, and, being shot by the heroine's brother, is left a corpse in the street. The idea (for of course it is a novel with a purpose) is to show that philosophic and scientific teaching may very likely undermine the morals of ingenuous and re- ceptive youth; and who shall say that M. Bourget has not discovered a real danger ? Here, for example, is an aged sage with irreproachable habits and a tremendous power of philo- sophic synthesis a sort of latter-day Spinoza whose works are devoured by a neurotic young man of a speculative turn and a fascinating address. Now, the neurotic young man, being tutor in a noble family, falls in love with the lovely daughter of the house and deliberately sets about her seduction; fancies, in brief, that he is ' une ame de proie,' and proceeds to behave as such. Marriage is out of the question, for she is noble and he is bourgeois ; and in the end the young lady finds herself under the necessity of taking poison. He is suspected of murder ; and in prison he pens a long confession to his master, which fills that good gentleman with consternation. Could such faultless philosophy lead to such faulty living? PAUL BOURGET 113 How dreadful ! Had it been a married woman well, well ! But une jeune fille ! 0, horrible, and horrible once more, and again most horrible ! As for an elopement pour le bon motif, such a breach of decorum is to the average French mind far more bewildering than any amount of adultery, and so correct a young man as M. Paul Bourget (a young man, too, whose admirers boast of his countless sweeps aupres des dames) could never -dream of anything so underbred. On the other hand, it is a matter for regret that so very distinguished a thinker as M. Bourget should have made his leader of thought a man whose writings read like Herbert Spencer gone daft. But, to do him justice, he knows exactly how to ' fetch ' the semi-educated public in France, just as our writers of theological romances know how to ' fetch ' the semi-educated of these islands. Ourselves prefer a hero whose faith in the Thirty-nine Articles is beginning to waver, or who has doubts about Eternal Punishment, but whose morals are of the ice-brook's temper till the end. They must have a young man whose notions of a deity are fading into thin air, and whose sense of moral restraint is thereby logically (it would seem) loosened. Perhaps, when all is said, it rather depends on the kind of young man. One might be a voluptuary under any regime, and of a monkish chastity under none. But what is wanted in French fiction is an analysis of the process of going wrong ; and as Schopenhauer and Co. are in the air just now, it is fair that they should be adapted to the novel-reader's needs, and take their place as ' fictive influences ' with the rest. M. Bourget may be described as a mixture of Stendhal and Musset. From the former he gets his very subtle analysis of H ii4 PAUL BOURGET motives and his admirable turn for dulness ; from the latter his maudlin sensibility as regards ' la Femme.' So limited is his knowledge of life, so beggarly his theory of art, that he never can believe that people may sometimes act from a single and spontaneous emotion. But since the ' Maxims ' of la Roche- foucauld it has been difficult for the literary Frenchman to believe in purely altruistic impulses; and a fin-de-si&cle novelist who has read his philosophers finds it practically impossible. Also, at any cost, he must be of a serious turn and more or less afflicted with erotic neurosis. Moreover, he must have conned his Howells diligently, and have learned from him how every ' geste de pense'e ' (as Gyp has said) can be seriously dissected and formally chronicled. Add to all this a skimming acquaintance with Poe, Swinburne, Shelley and Rossetti (to quote from whom is to witch our good friends and patrons, the Anglo-maniacs) and you will have no bad idea of the equipment of a successful writer of ' high- toned ' French fiction. M. Bourget has more solidity than may seem implied in all this ; but he knows his public too well to take it into his confidence. He knows the exact dose of science, of psychology, of literature and of art, that its case demands ; and he gives that dose. No doubt the science is sciolistic, the psychology questionable, the literature, like the art, no better than mere dilettantism. But what does it matter 1 Nobody knows ; and if anybody did, it pays. Like the Scotsman of the adage, M. Bourget never seems to feel at home unless he is abroad. Not long ago he gave the world a book of Italian travels which has a dreary, Pateresque kind of charm about the descriptions. Wit he eschews, and PAUL BOURGET 115 of humour he is void ; but he is a powerful thinker, and has discerned that the great charm of foreign travel is that it takes one ' loin de la femme qu'on aime.' Which of his books is the most or the least worth reading it would be hard, as it were labour lost, to say. ' Le Disciple ' has a European vogue ; ' Cruelle Enigme ' was a great success in France ; the new one has doubtless its admirers, for there is a class of mind to which there is nothing so suggestive and improving as the dulness of a clever man. The several numbers in his gallery of contem- porary celebrities are marked by a subtlety of insight that makes them rather good reading. Some of his newspaper articles, too, have been highly commended by those that know : one, more especially, on the high, inspiring theme of Stays. But thus far his chief claim on our regard is that he once inspired the admirable Gyp to take up her pen and make fun of him. OTHER ESSAYS THE POETRY OF KEATS ' Till the future dares Forget the past, his fate and fame shall be An echo and a light unto eternity.' SHELLEY, Adonai*. IN these words did Shelley prophesy an undying reputation for his dead friend and brother poet ; and to-day, in the minds of all who love poetry, the name of John Keats is as securely enshrined as Shelley's own. But the literary world of the year 1817 little imagined that there was moving in its midst a poet whose genius would one day outshine the fame of a Leigh Hunt, and even make that of a Shelley or a Byron seem less bright. Yet, had they had minds to understand, they would have felt, after reading the first sheaf of poems which was offered to the public, that in them they had the promise of a harvest of song diverse, indeed, but not less opulent than theirs. Mr. Swinburne, in his article on Keats in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, deals rather harshly with those early poems. Eaw, crude, and sometimes mawkish they undoubtedly were; but from time to time a line of transcendent beauty starts away from its baser fellows, thrilling the inward sense with delight. Several such might easily be culled from those interesting poems poems which, at the moment of their appearance, 119 120 THE POETRY OF KEATS were not deemed worthy of any notice, favourable or un- favourable, by the critics of the day. What Arnold calls ' the Celtic vein ' the sense of the magic and wonder of nature is often observable in them, as, indeed, in all Keats' work. By virtue of it he penetrates deeper into the mysterious loveliness of flowers than any poet either before or since. He seems to live with their life and rejoice in it. This faculty of spiritual projection, as one may term it, reminds one of what Amiel says of himself in his ' Journal Intime ' that he could at times so completely throw himself into the vegetable life around him that he literally felt himself to be a tree or a plant. So is it with Keats. He was ' made one with Nature/ not only when his body was given to Italian earth, and his soul (as Shelley sings) had passed into the life of the world to be ' a voice in all her music, a presence felt in every herb and stone,' but also, and more especially when, at the height of his inspiration, by virtue of a supreme sympathy sinking himself into the life around him, he became for a space a portion of the loveliness of nature, and, rose-like, mingled with the roses. This intense sympathy with nature constitutes his inalienable poetic gift, for we may say with the distinguished critic and noble poet to whose memory these essays are dedicated, that poetry has two spheres of interpre- tation, the ethical and the natural on the one hand, the sphere of man's thought and action, and, on the other, the sphere of the phenomena animate and inanimate presented to our senses. Now, of these Keats leaves the former, the sphere of man's thought and action, almost unexplored. Nor can we wonder at this, for he died at the age of twenty-six, THE POETRY OF KEATS 121 before his mind was matured, and before he had sufficient knowledge of life. That the many-coloured ways of men were not a matter of indifference to him, however, is shown by his composition of ' Otho the Great,' a drama which contains lines that Shakespeare himself might have penned, and which, written as it was towards the close of his brief career, gave promise of better things to come. But in the sphere of the interpretation of nature he reigns supreme. Love of nature was with him a consuming passion, a fervent instinct, passing into the white heat of spiritual emotion. Unlike his great predecessor Wordsworth, it was not nature viewed in its relation to man that moved him, but nature viewed simply and solely in the light of its own loveliness. Added, moreover, to this unique intensity of feeling for nature, he possessed, latterly at least, a power of wielding words artistically, not surpassed by Tennyson. Let any one who doubts this read his ' Ode to a Nightingale ' and doubt no more. Consummate use of words and mellowness of perfect speech can go no further. For such absolute charm we must turn to the fragmentary poems, more golden than gold, of Sappho the Lesbian, to the songs of Catullus and of Burns, or to the later lyrics of Tennyson. Only in these and in the poems of Heine shall we find, wedded to flawless expression, a depth and intensity of passion which make all other passions of lesser poets seem pale. These are the merum nectar of the vintage of song. The ' Hymn to Aphrodite ' of Sappho, the ' Acme and Septimus' of Catullus, Burns' passionate lays, the incidental songs in the ' Princess,' the odes of Keats, and the love-poems of Heine, are the supreme flowers of European lyric poetry. 122 THE POETRY OF KEATS Keats' second publication, * Endymion,' a more ambitious work, was composed during the course of a summer and autumn spent by the poet in the Isle of Wight; and, from beginning to end, it breathes of the verdure and waving woodland of that delightful island. We wander on and on through a fragrant wilderness of flowers, lost in mazes of luxuriant and odorous undergrowth. Here the willow trails its delicate amber, there fresh-blown musk roses fling their sweets upon the summer ; all the air is filled with the delicate scents of dewy blossoms, the sky is purely, tenderly blue, and clouds of whitest fleeciness float over us. It is an enchanted land, where comes no ruder sound than the ' moan of doves in immemorial elms and murmur of innumerable bees.' A happy sense of soothing comes over us as we read ; the world and all its fret and stir is far away ; we utterly forget our old sad life, or only remember it to heighten the luxury of the present. Influences benign and balmy rain on us from every side, and our foreheads are fanned to coolness by gentlest breezes of dew-laden winds. It would take too much space to follow the meanderings of this sweet, rambling poem ; the plot is too diffuse, too inverte- brate, so to speak, to lend itself readily to analysis. In the first book the finest passage is probably the hymn to Pan. If ever words breathed the spirit of nature-worship and the profound charm of mere and woodland, then these do : ' thou, whose mighty palace-roof doth hang From jagged trunks, and overshadoweth Eternal whispers, glooms, the birth, life, death Of unseen flowers in heavy peacefulness THE POETRY OF KEATS 123 Who lovest to see the hamadryads dress Their ruffled locks where meeting hazels darken ; And through whole solemn hours dost sit and hearken The dreary melody of bedded reads In desolate places where dank moisture breeds The pipy hemlock to strange overgrowth, Bethinking thee how melancholy loth Thou wast to lose fair Syrinx do thou now, By thy love's milky brow, By all the trembling mazes that she ran, Hear us, great Pan ! ' Perhaps, however, the following lines from the Indian girl's song are the finest passage in the whole poem : ' And as I sat, over the light blue hills There came a noise of revellers, the rills Into the wide stream came of purple hue : 'Twas Bacchus and his crew. . . . Like to a moving vintage down they came, Crown'd with green leaves, and faces all on flame.' That much in this truly dazzling work should have offended the narrow criticism of the day was inevitable ; that much in it is still bound to offend even the most enlightened criticism, it is worse than useless to deny. As Keats himself says in his preface to the poem, ' the reader must soon perceive in it great inexperience and immaturity, and every error denoting a feverish attempt rather than a deed accomplished.' This is true enough, and it is well to concede the fact at once. But, all deductions made, what a splendid residue of treasure re- mains! It is questionable if a young poet ever put forth so much ore of poetry in one mass. Shelley wrote his ' Laon and Cythna ' in friendly rivalry with Keats' ' Endymion,' but, wonderful poem as it is, it does not show the lavish opulence 124 THE POETRY OF KEATS of imagination displayed in the latter. Both are highly charac- teristic of their authors, Shelley's being inflamed with all his wild hatred of tyrants, and impelled by the passion of impetuous rhythm, Keats' rich in gorgeous imagery, full of the enjoyment of natural beauty, and moving onwards untumultuously. Per- haps it would be interesting to look at a few of the criticisms that were bestowed on ' Endymion ' at its appearance. In the Quarterly Review for April 1818 there is a short article on ' Endymion,' written by the then editor, Gifford. This is the famous article which was said to have killed Keats by its virulence, a story utterly false, but unfortunately perpetuated by Byron's sneering verse in ' Don Juan ' and Shelley's noble threnody, the ' Adonais.' As is amply proven by Lord Hough- ton in his Memoir of the poet, Keats was not the man to be ' snuffed out by an article.' There was, as Arnold says, plenty of flint and iron in his composition, as well as sensi- bility ; and, besides, he had so lofty a conception of his art that the criticism of a Gifford was as nothing compared with his self-criticism. His own words will make this manifest. 'Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic of his own works. My own self-criticism has given me pain without comparison beyond what Blackwood or the Quarterly could possibly inflict.' This is evidently not the sort of man to be killed by a review. Some of Gifford's strictures ran as follows : ' Mr. Keats,' he says, ' is a disciple of the new school of what has been called " Cockney poetry," which may be defined to consist of the most incongruous ideas in the most uncouth THE POETRY OF KEATS 125 language. This author is a copyist of Mr. Leigh Hunt, but he is more unintelligible, almost as rugged, twice as diffuse, and ten times more absurd than his prototype . . . ' and so on, and so on. A few of his criticisms are just enough, as, for example, when he finds fault with some words of Keats' own coinage, such as ' gordianed,' ' refreshfully,' etc. Let us now turn to Keats' second and third volumes of verse. In them are contained those poems which will secure him a place among the greatest English poets ' Lamia,' ' The Eve of St. Agnes,' ' Isabella, or the Pot of Basil,' * Hyperion ' and the 'Odes.' These are so many clear titles to a place among the highest on the golden scroll. In ' Lamia ' we can trace a decided advance in style. From first to last there is no faltering nor weakness. All is supremely ordered, and the words are chosen with an unerring instinct. Once only, perhaps, there is a touch of something like vulgarity. That luckless line and a half * There is not such a treat among them all ... As a real woman.' make one shudder and involuntarily remember that Keats a Greek in soul if ever there was one was, after all, nurtured in Cockney dom. What are often mentioned as Cockneyisms in Keats' rhymes can only be so regarded by Scotsmen or by those who trust to their eyes rather than to their ears. There is no real objection to such rhymes as ' fire ' and ' tiar,' ' morn ' and ' dawn,' ' higher ' and ' Thalia.' To English ears there is an absolute similarity of sound between the first two words, and an almost absolute similarity between the two latter pairs. And 126 THE POETRY OF KEATS surely there is no harm in pushing the principle of rhyme to the verge of assonance. In ' Lamia ' there are touches of sprightly cleverness which are the more delightful that they are somewhat rare in this great artist's work, such lines as ' Not one hour old, yet of sciential brain To unperplex bliss from its neighbour pain ; . . . As tho' in Cupid's college she had spent Sweet days, a lovely graduate still unshent, And kept his rosy terms in idle languishment.' (Is it lawful to ask here whether Tennyson derived his ' Sweet girl graduates in their golden hair ' from this source ?). And again, ' Philosophy will clip an angel's wings.' The light and airy manner is one not often affected by Keats, and he is not always successful in it. Witness, for example, the 'Cap and Bells.' His genius is essentially serious and sensuous. Elegant trifling is not in his way. Neither has he that ethereal quality which makes the poems of Shelley so lovely and yet so intangible. The beauty of the material world is his sphere, not the spiritual dreamland of aspiration ; yet he is not always very far from it either. In such a poem, for example, as 'La Belle Dame sans Merci/ we leave the world of concrete things and pass into the realm of fairy romance. The Celtic element is here uppermost. This last- named poem is one of the most perfect things of the poet, but it is too short to be maimed by quotation. Two poems by other poets may fitly be compared with it, the ' Christabel ' of Coleridge, and the ' Rose-Mary ' of Rossetti. In all these, THE POETRY OF KEATS 127 the Celtic sense of wizardry and mystery in nature makes itself felt. They are, so to speak, haunted, and leave an eerie, weird impression on the mind. 'Hyperion' is of all Keats' poems the greatest and the grandest. It is only a fragment, but, like the fragments of the ' marble fairness of old Greece,' excels all second-rate com- pletion whatsoever. Here we listen to the large utterance of the early gods, who had been silent since the days of ^Eschylus. How Keats, who knew the genius of the Greeks only through Latin and English, should have seized the spirit of old Hellenic legend with such majestic result, will remain an unsolved problem for ever. Such accents had not sounded in human ears before or since Prometheus defied Zeus on Caucasus. Hesiod, in his description of the battle between the Titans and Zeus, has a passage of magnificent power and splendour ; and he has, moreover, the ' surge and thunder ' of the hexameter at his command. But yet it may be doubted whether he produces so sonorous an effect as Keats. ^Eschylus, and ^Eschylus alone, can match the English poet. THE POETRY OF MR. SWINBURNE MR. SWINBURNE is now a poet of mature years, and has doubt- less laid aside many of youth's follies, for the fancies and fiery imaginings of youth have ceased, or all but ceased, to goad his genius to the utterance of the lyric cry. The days of ' Poems and Ballads ' (first series) are long since over, and nothing now proceeds from his pen more stirring than an occasional onslaught on a czar or other public character. Quantum mutatus ! What plague is it that so often seems to seize our English men of letters, and drive them headlong from the pleasant fields of literature down into the abyss of politics or the seething whirlpool of socialistic propagandism ? Mark a William Morris and marvel at the sight ! It is a far cry from the earthly paradise of romance to the earthly paradise of social democracy, and yet this exuberant artist has lapsed from the one into the other. Some, no doubt, will rejoice at it as a sign of the helpful energy of the man ; others will regret that all Pan's labour in the making of a poet should be rendered vain. Why should the finest-tempered minds wantonly attack the rugged problems of politics or sociology, and be laughed at by the coarser spirits whom they oppose, pitied by those whom they seek to aid, and bewailed by the 128 THE POETRY OF MR. SWINBURNE 129 children of art as lost leaders and infatuate ? Let them rather dwell in a land of clear colours and stories, under the warm heaven of art's imminent wings, and not stray beyond these pleasant bounds. Mr. Swinburne was once a denizen of this bright and happy country, in the days when the beauty of women and the multitudinous laughter of ocean were more to him than the cursing of many czars, more even than a babe's pink toes days when the daughters of dreams and of stories were desir- able and adored, and when the wind's feet shone along the sea. Now the inevitable back-sweep of the pendulum has come, as it came to the French poet Eacine, who lived to renounce the stage and all its works, and wrote second-class hymns instead, and to the Eussian novelist Tolstoi, who now regards his former brilliant achievements in the sphere of fiction as anathema, and sums up his theory of life and litera- ture in that woeful work, the ' Kreutzer Sonata.' Such is the irony of fate. Unlike other poets, Mr. Swinburne gave the world his best first. With the exception of one or two stray pieces here and there in later works, none of his poems approach the perfec- tion and dazzling audacity of those early ones, those that came to him dreaming in class-time. Since Keats put forth his ' Endymion ' volume, what young poet has produced such firstlings of his genius ? Think of the weak airy trash that preceded the masterpieces of the late Laureate, and then com- pare them with the poems of Mr. Swinburne that leapt forth in faultless panoply of artistic form from the glowing furnace of his adolescent imagination. Compare, for example, the I 130 THE POETRY OF MR. SWINBURNE clear outline of 'Faustine' with the vapid vagueness of ' Lilian.' The former is, indeed, stamped in Eoman gold ; the latter fades away in a dreamland of drivel. With Mr. Swinburne a new spirit came over English poetry. What that spirit is, whence it came, and what it accomplished, it is the purpose of this paper to attempt to tell. To the poetry of revolt, as typified by Byron, had succeeded the poetry of acquiescence, as typified by Wordsworth, and in a later day by Tennyson. People had grown accustomed to the thought that, after all, Byron's revolt against the constitution of things had been half impious, half unreal, and that perhaps the world, if not ' le meilleur des mondes possible,' was at least a very tolerable place ; that if Christianity was not exactly true in the narrower sense of the term, still enough remained to give dignity to life and certitude to conduct ; that a belief in hell was to be discouraged, and a belief in heaven promoted, and that generally a comfortable bourgeois theory of existence was the thing to be cultivated. Into the midst of this pleasant state of things down came Mr. Swinburne's book of ' Poems and Ballads ' like a bolt from the blue, and fluttered all the dovecots of contemporary criticism. Here, in Protestant church-going England, a bud of questionable shape and odour had burst into strange and sinister blossom. The seven deadly sins were stalking naked and not ashamed through our streets, and, in the emphatic words of a popular preacher, the land was witnessing the recrudescence of stark paganism. Such startling boldness of diction had not fallen on English ears since the days of Marlowe. There was something jaunty and provocative, too, about some of those poems that seemed THE POETRY OF MR. SWINBURNE 131 almost to challenge the censor. And a most vindictive one they found in the person of Mr. Robert Buchanan, who felt it incumbent on him to chastise the new school of what he termed ' fleshly poetry ' by assailing, not so much Mr. Swin- burne, however, as Rossetti, whom he considered the primal offender. But little did he dream of the vengeance which was to overtake him. In a pamphlet entitled ' Under the Micro- scope,' which is a little masterpiece of vituperative criticism, Mr. Buchanan is, so to speak, put in the mortar of the poet's wrath, and there pestled and pommelled to a powder. Not since Milton's flaying of Salmasius had anything so drastic and severe been done. When the genus irritdbile is thoroughly aroused, it can sting to some purpose. But what had caused all the pother about Mr. Swinburne's book ? A decadent had appeared in England. The spirit which had inspired writers like The'ophile Gautier and Charles Baudelaire had shown itself in the literature of a land where, since the avowed libertinage of the Restoration times, the written speech of men had been on the whole decent and decorous, and in which the worship of beauty had mainly been conspicuous by its absence. Keats is a noteworthy exception in the latter particular, but in him this worship is a joyous and innocent emotion. He revels and luxuriates in the love- liness of nature, and leaves all other ideals aside, seems, indeed, unconscious of them. Not so with the decadents. They have felt the import of other aspects of life besides the worship of beauty, and at the same time, perceiving on what shaky foundations much that is called morality rests, they have revolted against the dictates of the common conscience 132 THE POETRY OF MR. SWINBURNE and are exasperated with themselves and others. There is always a tinge of bitterness in the spirit of decadents. They are angels who have fallen from what they consider a fool's paradise, and yet are sad and disconsolate. They feel that they are regarded as outcasts, and take their revenge by mocking the commonplace notions on art and morality accepted by the bourgeois and the Philistine. This spirit of rebellion against the average feeling of one's countrymen is one which Mr. Swinburne had no doubt largely derived from his French inspirers. The school of the ' Parnassiens ' was marked by an unconventional attitude with regard to morals. But if reverence for Mrs. Grundy was at a low figure, reverence for Art was apotheosed into a religion whose shib- boleth was 'Art for Art's sake.' Perfect, flawless execution was demanded with a rigour which even in France was unheard of before, and consummate workmanship was the only passport for poems whose subject-matter might be as slight and as fantastic as the writer chose. No vague spiritualism, no vapid sentiment, no misty idealism was allowed. Poems were to have the hard outline of carved ivory and the splendour of chased gold. They were to resemble gems, jewels and statues, miracles of craftsman's art. All metres and forms were permitted, but severe and rigorous adherence to the mould chosen was prescribed. There was to be no looseness of phrase, no faltering of rhyme or rhythm. A poem should be a perfect chrysolite. Such stringent limi- tations of the poetic art had never been known in England, where a severe sense of the beauty of form was never so common as a love of warm and glowing sentiment. The THE POETRY OF MR. SWINBURNE 133 theme, therefore, of such artist-poets was uncongenial to English minds. Statues, jewels, and above all, the human body, and that not treated with a reverent and draped idealism, but nakedly and plastically, were distasteful subjects to the reading classes of this country. Imagine, then, the effect of the appearance of a poet who joined to the artistic sense of form, which he had learnt from the French and from the Greeks, a vehemence and earnestness of feeling Semitic in their intensity, and dedicated to themes of a decadent order ! an Ovid writing ' Amores ' with the fervour of a Jeremiah! No such phenomenon had appeared on the horizon of English letters. Separately, each tendency (Ovid's and Jeremiah's) had been developed to the full. What was novel was the combination. One might have thought that a sense of humour would have kept these seemingly disparate elements asunder, but here the syncope was so dashing and complete that poor humour was literally knocked into nothing- ness by the shock. Wit there is in sparkling plenty in these poems. ' Dolores ' is perhaps one of the wittiest poems in any language, if we can allow the title of witty to what is not necessarily amusing or ludicrous. The only other poem that can be put beside it is Byron's 'Don Juan'; the wit in that poem is infinitely less refined and artistic than the wit in ' Dolores/ though, doubtless, it is more generally intelligible. The mention of ' Dolores ' brings one to the consideration of the 'Trilogy' (for such it may be called), of which that poem forms the opening drama, and the ' Garden of Proserpine ' and ' Hesperia ' the sequel. They must be read in the above order to be understood and appreciated; for they then form an 134 THE POETRY OF MR. SWINBURNE allegory of a soul, a sinful soul, passing through the stages of revolt, apathy and regeneration. 'Dolores' is the poetic presentment of the spirit of desire, the lust of the flesh, the p6wr}fj,a a-apicos. She is the witching strange woman that ensnares the soul of youth, and holds youth spellbound by the lure of her deadly love. And the victim, in mocking soliloquy, upbraids the fair temptress for her cruelty, deaf as the fire, her mouth like a venomous flower, her beautiful passionate body that never has ached with a heart; and recounts in a torrent of anapaests all her sins of old times, when her will stung the world into strife, and when Rome lay red from her rods: ' When, with Same all round him aspirant, Stood flushed as a harp-player stands The implacable beautiful tyrant Rose- crowned, having death in his hands; And a sound as the sound of loud water Smote far through the flight of the fires, And mixed with the lightning of slaughter A thunder of lyres.' But her limbs are as melodies yet, and, though bitter the core, the rind is still sweet, and her kisses still rain on the lips and the limbs of her lovers. It may be that the old world is broken; that old poets outsing and outlove us; that a goddess new-born has come out of Dindymus, a mother, a mortal, a maiden; that the high places of Dolores have been wasted with fire; that our loves and our longings are twain. But they, too, the gods and the priests that are pure, shall pass, while she shall live until evil be slain. After death, who knows, perhaps the joys of her shall be seventy times seven. THE POETRY OF MR. SWINBURNE 135 To this feverish dithyramb in praise of desire succeeds the listless quiet of the ' Garden of Proserpine/ where all trouble seems dead winds' and spent waves' riot. The pleasure-seeker is now tired of tears and laughter, and of everything but sleep. He is lying beside pale beds of blowing rushes and poppy- flowers whereout Proserpine is crushing for dead men deadly wine. Here she awaits all men born, gathering all things mortal with cold immortal hands, and hither come all withered loves, all things disastrous, all red strays of ruined springs. Only death and the deep joy of death remain : ' From too much love of living, From hope and fear set free, We thank with brief thanksgiving Whatever gods may be, That no life lives for ever, That dead men rise up never, That even the weariest river Winds somewhere safe to sea.' The sun shines not here by day nor the moon by night, and naught remains in this forgotten and forgetful land but sleep eternal in an eternal darkness: ' Secures latices et longa oblivia potant.' Suddenly, as with the jubilant acclaim of all the clarions of joy, Hesperia, the spirit of health and hope, springs forth on the rapid onrush of triumphant anapaests Hesperia, the girl beloved in early youth, who had been cast aside for the bitter delights of Dolores, our Lady of Pain, and whose radiant image 136 THE POETRY OF MR. SWINBURNE now rises in the poet's soul as a day-spring from on high. ' Come,' he cries ' Out of the golden remote wild west, where the sea without shore is Full of the sunset, and sad, if at all, with the fulness of joy: From the bountiful infinite west, from the happy memorial places, Full of the stately repose and the lordly delight of the dead, Where the fortunate islands are lit with the light of ineffable faces, And the sound of a sea without wind is about them, and sunset is red ! Come back to redeem and release me from love that recalls and represses, That cleaves to my flesh as a flame till the serpent has eaten her fill; From the bitter delights of the dark and the fervent and furtive caresses That murder the youth in a man or ever his heart have its will.' Forth they ride into the wild night together, and gallop for dear life with unslackening rein, till the dawn shall have risen and all the hours of the darkness shall have sunk far behind them : ' love, shall we win at the last?' As we have said, these poems form a trilogy. First, the frenzied revolt, the delirious pleasure-hunt, the relapses and reluctances of desire, the bitter mockeries, all the