Envoi
The piece is characteristic of M. De Banville’s genius. Through his throng of operatic nixies and sylphs of the ballet the cold Muse sometimes passes, strange, but not unfriendly. He, for his part, has never degraded the beautiful forms of old religion to make the laughingstock of fools. His little play, Diane au Bois, has grace, and gravity, and tenderness like the tenderness of Keats, for the failings of immortals. “The gods are jealous exceedingly if any goddess takes a mortal man to her paramour, as Demeter chose Iasion.” The least that mortal poets can do is to show the Olympians an example of toleration.
“Les Cariatides” have delayed us too long. They are wonderfully varied, vigorous, and rich, and full of promise in many ways. The promise has hardly been kept. There is more seriousness in “Les Stalactites” (1846), it is true, but then there is less daring. There is one morsel that must be quoted,—a fragment fashioned on the air and the simple words that used to waken the musings of George Sand when she was a child, dancing with the peasant children:
In these days Banville, like Gerard de Nerval in earlier times, RONSARDISED. The poem ‘A la Font Georges,’ full of the memories of childhood, sweet and rich with the air and the hour of sunset, is written in a favourite metre of Ronsard’s. Thus Ronsard says in his lyrical version of five famous lines of Homer—
De Banville chose this metre, rapid yet melancholy, with its sad emphatic cadence in the fourth line, as the vehicle of his childish memories:
So this poem of the fountain of youth begins, “tout file d’or,” and closes when the dusk is washed with silver—
The “Stalactites” might detain one long, but we must pass on after noticing an unnamed poem which is the French counterpart of Keats’ “Ode to a Greek Urn”:
In the same volume of the definite series of poems come “Les Odelettes,” charming lyrics, one of which, addressed to Theophile Gautier, was answered in the well-known verses called “L’Art.” If there had been any rivalry between the writers, M. De Banville would hardly have cared to print Gautier’s “Odelette” beside his own. The tone of it is infinitely more manly: one seems to hear a deep, decisive voice replying to tones far less sweet and serious. M. De Banville revenged himself nobly in later verses addressed to Gautier, verses which criticise the genius of that workman better, we think, than anything else that has been written of him in prose or rhyme.
The less serious poems of De Banville are, perhaps, the better known in this country. His feats of graceful metrical gymnastics have been admired by every one who cares for skill pure and simple. “Les Odes Funambulesques” and “Les Occidentales” are like ornamental skating. The author moves in many circles and cuts a hundred fantastic figures with a perfect ease and smoothness. At the same time, naturally, he does not advance nor carry his readers with him in any direction. “Les Odes Funambulesques” were at first unsigned. They appeared in journals and magazines, and, as M. de Banville applied the utmost lyrical skill to light topics of the moment, they were the most popular of “Articles de Paris.” One must admit that they bore the English reader, and by this time long scholia are necessary for the enlightenment even of the Parisian student. The verses are, perhaps, the “bird-chorus” of French life, but they have not the permanent truth and delightfulness of the “bird-chorus” in Aristophanes. One has easily too much of the Carnival, the masked ball, the debardeurs, and the pierrots. The people at whom M. De Banville laughed are dead and forgotten. There was a certain M. Paul Limayrac of those days, who barked at the heels of Balzac, and other great men, in the Revue des Deux Mondes. In his honour De Banville wrote a song which parodied all popular aspirations to be a flower. M. Limayrac was supposed to have become a blossom:
There is more of high spirits than of wit in the lyric, which became as popular as our modern invocation of Jingo, the god of battles. It chanced one night that M. Limayrac appeared at a masked ball in the operahouse. He was recognised by some one in the crowd. The turbulent waltz stood still, the music was silent, and the dancers of every hue howled at the critic
“Si Paul Limayrac devenait fleur!”
Fancy a British reviewer, known as such to the British public, and imagine that public taking a lively interest in the feuds of men of letters! Paris, to be sure, was more or less of a university town thirty years ago, and the students were certain to be largely represented at the ball.
The “Odes Funambulesques” contain many examples of M. De Banville’s skill in reviving old forms of verse—triolets, rondeaux, chants royaux, and ballades. Most of these were composed for the special annoyance of M. Buloz, M. Limayrac, and a M. Jacquot who called himself De Mirecourt. The rondeaux are full of puns in the refrain: “Houssaye ou c’est; lyre, l’ire, lire,” and so on, not very exhilarating. The pantoum, where lines recur alternately, was borrowed from the distant Malay; but primitive pantoum, in which the last two lines of each stanza are the first two of the next, occur in old French folk-song. The popular trick of repetition, affording a rest to the memory of the singer, is perhaps the origin of all refrains. De Banville’s later satires are directed against permanent objects of human indignation—the little French debauchee, the hypocritical friend of reaction, the bloodthirsty chauviniste. Tired of the flashy luxury of the Empire, his memory goes back to his youth—
The poem “Et Tartufe” prolongs the note of a satire always popular in France—the satire of Scarron, Moliere, La Bruyere, against the clerical curse of the nation. The Roman Question was Tartufe’s stronghold at the moment. “French interests” demanded that Italy should be headless.
The new Tartufe worships St. Chassepot, who once, it will not be forgotten, “wrought miracles”; but he has his doubts as to the morality of explosive bullets. The nymph of modern warfare is addressed as she hovers above the Geneva Convention,—
De Banville was for long almost alone among poets in his freedom from Weltschmerz, from regret and desire for worlds lost or impossible. In the later and stupider corruption of the Empire, sadness and anger began to vex even his careless muse. She had piped in her time to much wild dancing, but could not sing to a waltz of mushroom speculators and decorated capitalists. “Le Sang de la Coupe” contains a very powerful poem, “The Curse of Venus,” pronounced on Paris, the city of pleasure, which has become the city of greed. This verse is appropriate to our own commercial enterprise:
In the burning indignation of this poem, M. De Banville reaches his highest mark of attainment. “Les Exiles” is scarcely less impressive. The outcast gods of Hellas, wandering in a forest of ancient Gaul, remind one at once of the fallen deities of Heine, the decrepit Olympians of Bruno, and the large utterance of Keats’s “Hyperion.” Among great exiles, Victor Hugo, “le pere la-bas dans l’ile,” is not forgotten:
The hoarsest note of M. De Banville’s lyre is that discordant one struck in the “Idylles Prussiennes.” One would not linger over poetry or prose composed during the siege, in hours of shame and impotent scorn. The poet sings how the sword, the flashing Durendal, is rusted and broken, how victory is to him—
He can spare a tender lyric to the memory of a Prussian officer, a lad of eighteen, shot dead through a volume of Pindar which he carried in his tunic.
It is impossible to leave the poet of gaiety and good-humour in the mood of the prisoner in besieged Paris. His “Trente Six Ballades Joyeuses” make a far more pleasant subject for a last word. There is scarcely a more delightful little volume in the French language than this collection of verses in the most difficult of forms, which pour forth, with absolute ease and fluency, notes of mirth, banter, joy in the spring, in letters, art, and good-fellowship.
he cries, with a note like a bird’s song. Among the thirty-six every one will have his favourites. We venture to translate the “Ballad de Banville”: