Confessions of a Young Man Part 3

Then I took an _appartement_ in one of the old houses in Rue de la Tour des Dames, for windows there overlooked a bit of tangled garden with a dilapidated statue. It was Marshall of course who undertook the task of furnis.h.i.+ng, and he lavished on the rooms the fancies of an imagination that suggested the collaboration of a courtesan of high degree and a fifth-rate artist. Nevertheless, our _salon_ was a pretty resort--English cretonne of a very happy design--vine leaves, dark green and golden, broken up by many fluttering jays. The walls were stretched with this colourful cloth, and the arm-chairs and the couches were to match. The drawing-room was in cardinal red, hung from the middle of the ceiling and looped up to give the appearance of a tent; a faun, in terra-cotta, laughed in the red gloom, and there were Turkish couches and lamps. In another room you faced an altar, a Buddhist temple, a statue of the Apollo, and a bust of Sh.e.l.ley. The bedrooms were made unconventual with cus.h.i.+oned seats and rich canopies; and in picturesque corners there were censers, great church candlesticks, and palms; then think of the smell of burning incense and wax and you will have imagined the sentiment of our apartment in Rue de la Tour des Dames. I bought a Persian cat, and a python that made a monthly meal off guinea pigs; Marshall, who did not care for pets, filled his rooms with flowers--he used to sleep beneath a tree of gardenias in full bloom. We were so, Henry Marshall and George Moore, when we went to live in 76 Rue de la Tour des Dames, we hoped for the rest of our lives. He was to paint, I was to write.

Before leaving for the seaside I had bought some volumes of Hugo and De Musset; but in pleasant, sunny Boulogne poetry went flat, and it was not until I got into my new rooms that I began to read seriously. Books are like individuals; you know at once if they are going to create a sense within the sense, to fever, to madden you in blood and brain, or if they will merely leave you indifferent, or irritable, having unpleasantly disturbed sweet intimate musings as might a draught from an open window.

Many are the reasons for love, but I confess I only love woman or book, when it is as a voice of conscience, never heard before, heard suddenly, a voice I am at once endearingly intimate with. This announces feminine depravities in my affections. I am feminine, morbid, perverse. But above all perverse, almost everything perverse interests, fascinates me.

Wordsworth is the only simple-minded man I ever loved, if that great austere mind, chill even as the c.u.mberland year, can be called simple.

But Hugo is not perverse, nor even personal. Reading him was like being in church with a strident-voiced preacher shouting from out of a terribly sonorous pulpit. "Les Orientales...." An East of painted cardboard, tin daggers, and a military band playing the Turkish patrol in the Palais Royal.... The verse is grand, n.o.ble, tremendous; I liked it, I admired it, but it did not--I repeat the phrase--awake a voice of conscience within me; and even the structure of the verse was too much in the style of public buildings to please me. Of "Les Feuilles d'Automne" and "Les Chants du Crepuscule" I remember nothing. Ten lines, fifty lines of "Les Legendes des Siecles," and I always think that it is the greatest poetry I have ever read, but after a few pages the book is laid down and forgotten. Having composed more verses than any man that ever lived, Hugo can only be taken in the smallest doses; if you repeat any pa.s.sage to a friend across a _cafe_ table, you are both appalled by the splendour of the imagery, by the thunder of the syllables.

"Quel dieu, quel moissonneur de l'eternel ete Avait en s'en allant negligemment jete Cette faucille d'or dans les champs des etoiles."

But if I read an entire poem I never escape that sensation of the _ennui_ which is inherent in the gaud and the glitter of the Italian or Spanish improvisatore. There never was anything French about Hugo's genius. Hugo was a cross between an Italian improvisatore and a metaphysical German student. Take another verse--

"Le clair de lune bleu qui baigne l'horizon."

Without a "like" or an "as," by a mere statement of fact, the picture, nay more, the impression, is produced. I confess I have a weakness for the poem which this line concludes--"La fete chez Therese"; but admirable as it is with its picture of mediaeval life, there is in it, as in all Hugo's work, a sense of fabrication that dries up emotion in my heart. He shouts and raves over poor humanity, while he is gathering coppers for himself; he goes in for an all-round patronage of the Almighty in a last stanza; but of the two immortalities he evidently considers his own the most durable; he does not, however, become really intolerable until he gets on the subject of little children, he sings their innocence in great bombast, but he is watching them; the poetry over, the crowd dispersed, he will entice one of them down a byway.

The first time I read of _une bouche d'ombre_ I was astonished, nor did the second or third repet.i.tion produce a change in my mood of mind; but sooner or later it was impossible to avoid conviction, that of the two "the rosy fingers of the dawn," although some three thousand years older is younger, truer, and more beautiful. Homer's similes can never grow old; _une bouche d'ombre_ was old the first time it was said. It is the birthplace and the grave of Hugo's genius.

Of Alfred de Musset I had heard a great deal. Marshall and the Marquise were in the habit of reading him in moments of relaxation, they had marked their favourite pa.s.sages, so he came to me highly recommended.

Nevertheless, I made but little progress in his poetry. His modernisms were out of tune with the strain of my aspirations at that moment, and I did not find the unexpected word and the eccentricities of expression which were, and are still, so dear to me. I am not a purist; an error of diction is very pardonable if it does not err on the side of the commonplace; the commonplace, the natural, is const.i.tutionally abhorrent to me; and I have never been able to read with any very thorough sense of pleasure even the opening lines of "Rolla," that splendid lyrical outburst. What I remember of it now are those two odious _chevilles--marchait et respirait_, and _Astarte fille de l'onde amere_; nor does the fact that _amere_ rhymes with _mere_ condone the offence, although it proves that even Musset felt that perhaps the richness of the rhyme might render tolerable the intolerable. And it is to my credit that the Spanish love songs moved me not at all; and it was not until I read that magnificently grotesque poem "La Ballade a la Lune," that I could be induced to bend the knee and acknowledge Musset a poet.

I still read and spoke of Sh.e.l.ley with a rapture of joy,--he was still my soul. But this craft, fas.h.i.+oned of mother-o'-pearl, with starlight at the helm and moonbeams for sails, suddenly ran on a reef and went down, not out of sight, but out of the agitation of actual life. The reef was Gautier; I read "Mdlle. de Maupin." The reaction was as violent as it was sudden. I was weary of spiritual pa.s.sion, and this great exaltation of the body above the soul at once conquered and led me captive; this plain scorn of a world as exemplified in lacerated saints and a crucified Redeemer opened up to me illimitable prospects of fresh beliefs, and therefore new joys in things and new revolts against all that had come to form part and parcel of the commonalty of mankind. Till now I had not even remotely suspected that a deification of flesh and fleshly desire was possible, Sh.e.l.ley's teaching had been, while accepting the body, to dream of the soul as a star, and so preserve our ideal; but now suddenly I saw, with delightful clearness and with intoxicating conviction, that by looking without shame and accepting with love the flesh, I might raise it to as high a place within as divine a light as even the soul had been set in. The ages were as an aureole, and I stood as if enchanted before the n.o.ble nakedness of the elder G.o.ds: not the infamous nudity that s.e.x has preserved in this modern world, but the clean pagan nude,--a love of life and beauty, the broad fair breast of a boy, the long flanks, the head thrown back; the bold fearless gaze of Venus is lovelier than the lowered glance of the Virgin, and I cried with my master that the blood that flowed upon Mount Calvary "_ne m'a jamais baigne dans ses flots_."

I will not turn to the book to find the exact words of this sublime vindication, for ten years I have not read the Word that has become so inexpressibly a part of me; and shall I not refrain as Mdlle. de Maupin refrained, knowing well that the face of love may not be twice seen?

Great was my conversion. None more than I had cherished mystery and dream: my life until now had been but a mist which revealed as each cloud wreathed and went out, the red of some strange flower or some tall peak, blue and snowy and fairylike in lonely moonlight; and now so great was my conversion that the more brutal the outrage offered to my ancient ideal, the rarer and keener was my delight. I read almost without fear: "My dreams were of naked youths riding white horses through mountain pa.s.ses, there were no clouds in my dreams, or if there were any, they were clouds that had been cut out as if in cardboard with scissors."

I had shaken off all belief in Christianity early in life and had suffered much. Sh.e.l.ley had replaced faith by reason, but I still suffered: but here was a new creed which proclaimed the divinity of the body, and for a long time the reconstruction of all my theories of life on a purely pagan basis occupied my whole attention. The exquisite outlines of the marvellous castle, the romantic woods, the horses moving, the lovers leaning to each other's faces enchanted me; and then the indescribably beautiful description of the performance of _As You Like It_, and the supreme relief and perfect a.s.suagement it brings to Rodolph, who then sees Mdlle. de Maupin for the first time in woman's attire. If she were dangerously beautiful as a man, that beauty is forgotten in the rapture and praise of her unmatchable woman's loveliness.

But if "Mdlle. de Maupin" was the highest peak, it was not the entire mountain. The range was long, and each summit offered to the eye a new and delightful prospect. There were the numerous tales,--tales as perfect as the world has ever seen; "La Morte Amoureuse," "Jettatura,"

"Une Nuit de Cleopatre," etc., and then the very diamonds of the crown, "Les Emaux et Camees," "La Symphonie en Blanc Majeure," in which the adjective _blanc_ and _blanche_ is repeated with miraculous felicity in each stanza. And then Contralto,--

"Mais seulement il se transpose Et pa.s.sant de la forme au son, Trouve dans la metamorphose La jeune fille et le garcon."

_Transpose_,--a word never before used except in musical application, and now for the first time applied to material form, and with a beauty-giving touch that Phidias might be proud of. I know not how I quote; such is my best memory of the stanza, and here, that is more important than the stanza itself. And that other stanza, "The Chatelaine and the Page"; and that other, "The Doves"; and that other, "Romeo and Juliet," and the exquisite cadence of the line ending "_balcon_." Novelists have often shown how a love pa.s.sion brings misery, despair, death and ruin upon a life, but I know of no story of the good or evil influence awakened by the chance reading of a book, the chain of consequences so far-reaching, so intensely dramatic. Never shall I open these books again, but were I to live for a thousand years, their power in my soul would remain unshaken. I am what they made me. Belief in humanity, pity for the poor, hatred of injustice, all that Sh.e.l.ley gave may never have been very deep or earnest; but I did love, I did believe.

Gautier destroyed these illusions. He taught me that our boasted progress is but a pitfall into which the race is falling, and I learned that the correction of form is the highest ideal, and I accepted the plain, simple conscience of the pagan world as the perfect solution of the problem that had vexed me so long; I cried, "ave" to it all: l.u.s.t, cruelty, slavery, and I would have held down my thumbs in the Colosseum that a hundred gladiators might die and wash me free of my Christian soul with their blood.

The study of Baudelaire hurried the course of the disease.[1] No longer is it the grand barbaric face of Gautier; now it is the clean shaven face of the mock priest, the slow, cold eyes and the sharp, cunning sneer of the cynical libertine who will be tempted that he may better know the worthlessness of temptation. "Les Fleurs du Mal!" beautiful flowers, beautiful in sublime decay. What a great record is yours, and were h.e.l.l a reality how many souls would we find wreathed with your poisonous blossoms. The village maiden goes to her Faust; the children of the nineteenth century go to you, O Baudelaire, and having tasted of your deadly delight all hope of repentance is vain. Flowers, beautiful in your sublime decay, I press you to my lips; these northern solitudes, far from the rank Parisian garden where I gathered you, are full of you, even as the sea-sh.e.l.l of the sea, and the sun that sets on this wild moorland evokes the magical verse:--

"Un soir fait de rose et de bleu mystique Nous echangerons un eclair unique Comme un long sanglot tout charge d'adieux."

For months I fed on the mad and morbid literature that the enthusiasm of 1830 called into existence. The gloomy and sterile little pictures of "Gaspard de la Nuit," or the elaborate criminality, "Les Contes Immoraux," laboriously invented lifeless things with creaky joints, pitiful lay figures that fall to dust as soon as the book is closed, and in the dust only the figures of the terrible ferryman and the unfortunate Dora remain. "Madame Potiphar" cost me forty francs, and I never read more than a few pages.

Like a pike after minnows I pursued the works of Les Jeune France along the quays and through every _pa.s.sage_ in Paris. The money spent was considerable, the waste of time vexatious. One man's solitary work (he died very young, but he is known to have excelled all in length of his hair and the redness of his waistcoats) resisted my efforts to capture it. At last I caught sight of the precious volume in a shop on the Quai Voltaire. Trembling I asked the price. The man looked at me earnestly and answered, "A hundred and fifty francs." No doubt it was a great deal of money, but I paid it and rushed home to read. Many that had gone before had proved disappointing, and I was obliged to admit had contributed little towards my intellectual advancement; but this--this that I had heard about so long--not a queer phrase, not an outrage of any sort of kind, not even a new blasphemy, it meant nothing to me, that is to say, nothing but a hundred and fifty francs. Having thus rudely, and very pikelike, knocked my nose against the bottom--this book was, most certainly, the bottom of the literature of 1830--I came up to the surface and began to look around my contemporaries for something to read.

I have remarked before on the instinctiveness of my likes and dislikes, on my susceptibility to the sound of and even to the appearance of a name upon paper. I was repelled by Leconte de Lisle from the first, and it was only by a very deliberate outrage to my feelings that I bought and read "Les Poemes Antiques," and "Les Poemes Barbares"; I was deceived in nothing, all I had antic.i.p.ated I found--long, desolate boredom. Leconte de Lisle produces on me the effect of a walk through the new Law Courts, with a steady but not violent draught sweeping from end to end. Oh, the vile old professor of rhetoric! and when I saw him the last time I was in Paris, his head--a declaration of righteousness, a cross between a Caesar by Gerome, and an archbishop of a provincial town, set all my natural antipathy instantly on edge. Hugo is often pompous, shallow, empty, unreal, but he is at least an artist, and when he thinks of the artist and forgets the prophet, as in "Les Chansons des Rues et des Bois," his juggling with the verse is magnificent, superb.

"Comme un geai sur l'arbre Le roi se tient fier; Son cur est de marbre, Son ventre est de chair.

"On a pour sa nuque Et son front vermeil Fait une perruque Avec le soleil.

"Il regne, il vegete Effroyant zero; Sur lui se projette L'ombre du bourreau.

"Son trone est une tombe, Et sur le pave Quelque chose en tombe Qu'on n'a point lave."

But how to get the first line of the last stanza into five syllables I cannot think. If ever I meet with the volume again I will look it out and see how that _rude dompteur de syllables_ managed it. But stay, _son trone est la tombe_; that makes the verse, and the generalisation would be in the "line" of Hugo. Hugo--how impossible it is to speak of French literature without referring to him. Let these, however, be concluding words that he thought he could by saying everything, and, saying everything twenty times over, for ever render impossible the rehearsal of another great poet. But a work of art is valuable, and pleasurable in proportion to its rarity; one beautiful book of verses is better than twenty books of beautiful verses. This is an absolute and incontestable truth; a child can burlesque this truth--one verse is better than the whole poem, a word is better than the line, a letter is better than the word, but the truth is not thereby affected. Hugo never had the good fortune to write a bad book, nor even a single bad line, so not having time to read all, the future will read none. What immortality would be gained by the destruction of one half of his magnificent works, what oblivion is secured by the publication of these posthumous volumes.

To return to the Leconte de Lisle. See his "Discours de Reception." Is it possible to imagine anything more absurdly arid? Rhetoric of this sort, "_des vers d'or sur une eclume d'airain_" and such sententious plat.i.tudes as this (speaking of the realists), "_Les epidemies de cette nature pa.s.sent, et le genie demeure_."

Theodore de Banville. At first I thought him cold, infected with the rhetorical ice of the Leconte de Lisle. He had no new creed to proclaim nor old creed to denounce, the inherent miseries of human life did not seem to touch him, nor did he sing the languors and ardours of animal or spiritual pa.s.sion. But there is this: a pure, clear song, an instinctive, incurable and lark-like love of the song. He sings of the white lily and the red rose, such knowledge of, such observation of nature is enough for the poet, and he sings and he trills, there is trilling magic in every song, and the song as it ascends rings, and all the air quivers with the ever-widening circle of the echoes, sighing and dying out of the ear until the last faintness is reached, and the glad rhymes clash and dash forth again on their aerial way. Banville is not the poet, he is the bard. The great questions that agitate the mind of man have not troubled him, life, death, and love he perceives only as stalks whereon he may weave his glittering web of living words.

Whatever his moods may be, he is lyrical. His wit flies out on clear-cut, swallow-like wings; in speaking of Paul Alexis' book "Le Besoin d'aimer," he said: "_Vous avez trouve un t.i.tre a.s.sez laid pour faire reculer les divines etoiles_." I know not what instrument to compare with his verse. I suppose I should say a flute; but it seems to me more like a marvellously toned piano. His hands pa.s.s over the keys and he produces Chopin-like fluidities.

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

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

Like great copper pans go the clangour of the rhymes.

"Entre le ciel qui brule et la mer qui moutonne, Au somnolent soleil d'un midi monotone, Tu songes, O guerriere, aux vieux conquistadors; Et dans l'enervement des nuits chaudes et calmes, Bercant ta gloire eteinte, O cite, tu t'endors Sous les palmiers, au long fremiss.e.m.e.nt des palmes."

Catulle Mendes, a perfect realisation of his name, with his pale hair, and his fragile face illuminated with the idealism of a depraved woman.

He takes you by the arm, by the hand, he leans towards you, his words are caresses, his fervour is delightful, and to hear him is as sweet as drinking a smooth perfumed yellow wine. All he says is false--the book he has just read, the play he is writing, the woman who loves him,...he buys a packet of bonbons in the streets and eats them, and it is false.

An exquisite artist; physically and spiritually he is art; he is the muse herself, or rather, he is one of the minions of the muse. Pa.s.sing from flower to flower he goes, his whole nature pulsing with b.u.t.terfly voluptuousness. He has written poems as good as Hugo, as good as Leconte de Lisle, as good as Banville, as good as Baudelaire, as good as Gautier, as good as Coppee; he never wrote an ugly line in his life, but he never wrote a line that some one of his brilliant contemporaries might not have written. He has produced good work of all kinds "et voila tout." Every generation, every country, has its Catulle Mendes. Robert Buchanan is ours, only in the adaptation Scotch gruel has been subst.i.tuted for perfumed yellow wine. No more delightful talker than Mendes, no more accomplished _litterateur_, no more fluent and translucid critic. I remember the great moonlights of the _Place Pigale_, when, on leaving the _cafe_, he would take me by the arm, and expound Hugo's or Zola's last book, thinking as he spoke of the Greek sophists. There were for contrast Mallarme's Tuesday evenings, a few friends sitting round the hearth, the lamp on the table. I have met none whose conversation was more fruitful, but with the exception of his early verses I cannot say I ever enjoyed his poetry frankly. When I knew him he had published the celebrated "L'Apres Midi d'un Faun": the first poem written in accordance with the theory of symbolism. But when it was given to me (this marvellous brochure furnished with strange ill.u.s.trations and wonderful ta.s.sels), I thought it absurdly obscure.

Since then, however, it has been rendered by force of contrast with the enigmas the author has since published a marvel of lucidity; I am sure if I were to read it now I should appreciate its many beauties. It bears the same relation to the author's later work as _Rienzi_ to _The Walkyrie_. But what is symbolism? Vulgarly speaking, saying the opposite to what you mean. For example, you want to say that music which is the new art, is replacing the old art, which is poetry. First symbol: a house in which there is a funeral, the pall extends over the furniture.

The house is poetry, poetry is dead. Second symbol: "_notre vieux grimoire_," _grimoire_ is the parchment, parchment is used for writing, therefore, _grimoire_ is the symbol for literature, "_d'ou s'exaltent les milliers_," thousands of what? of letters of course. We have heard a great deal in England of Browning obscurity. The "Red Cotton Nightcap Country" is a child at play compared to a sonnet by such a determined symbolist as Mallarme, or better still his disciple Ghil who has added to the infirmities of symbolism those of poetic instrumentation. For according to M. Ghil and his organ _Les Ecrits pour l'Art,_ it would appear that the syllables of the French language evoke in us the sensations of different colours; consequently the timbre of the different instruments. The vowel _u_ corresponds to the colour yellow, and therefore to the sound of flutes. Arthur Rimbaud was, it is true, first in the field with these pleasant and genial theories; but M. Ghil informs us that Rimbaud was mistaken in many things, particularly in coupling the sound of the vowel _u_ with the colour green instead of with the colour yellow. M. Ghil has corrected this very stupid blunder and many others; and his instrumentation in his last volume, "Le Geste Ingenu," may be considered as complete and definitive. The work is dedicated to Mallarme, "Pere et seigneur des ors, des pierreries, et des poisons," and other works are to follow:--the six tomes of "Legendes de Reves et de Sang," the innumerable tomes of "La Glose," and the single tome of "La Loi."

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

Se penchant vers les dahlias, Des paons cabrent des rosaces lunaires L'a.s.sou p.i.s.s.e.m.e.nt des branches venere Son pale visage aux mourants dahlias.

Elle ecoute au loin les breves musiques Nuit claire aux ramures d'accords, Et la la.s.situde a berce son corps Au rhythme odorant des pures musiques.

Les paons ont dresse la rampe occellee Pour la descente de ses yeux vers le tapis De choses et de sens Qui va vers l'horizon, parure vermiculee De son corps alangui En l'ame se tapit Le flou desir molli de recits et d'encens.

I laughed at these verbal eccentricities, but they were not without their effect, and that a demoralising one; for in me they aggravated the fever of the unknown, and whetted my appet.i.te for the strange, abnormal and unhealthy in art. Hence all pallidities of thought and desire were eagerly welcomed, and Verlaine became my poet. Never shall I forget the first enchantment of "Les Fetes Galantes." Here all is twilight.

The royal magnificences of the sunset have pa.s.sed, the solemn beat.i.tude of the night is at hand but not yet here; the ways are veiled with shadow, and lit with dresses, white, that the hour has touched with blue, yellow, green, mauve, and undecided purple; the voices? strange contraltos; the forms? not those of men or women, but mystic, hybrid creatures, with hands nervous and pale, and eyes charged with eager and fitful light..."_un soir equivoque d'automne_"..."_les belles pendent reveuses a nos bras_"...and they whisper "_les mots speciaux et tout bas_."

Gautier sang to his antique lyre praise of the flesh and contempt of the soul; Baudelaire on a mediaeval organ chaunted his unbelief in goodness and truth and his hatred of life. But Verlaine advances one step further: hate is to him as commonplace as love, unfaith as vulgar as faith. The world is merely a doll to be attired to-day in a modern ball dress, to-morrow in aureoles and stars. The Virgin is a pretty thing, worth a poem, but it would be quite too silly to talk about belief or unbelief; Christ in wood or plaster we have heard too much of, but Christ in painted gla.s.s amid crosiers and Latin terminations, is an amusing subject for poetry. And strangely enough, a withdrawing from all commerce with virtue and vice is, it would seem, a licentiousness more curiously subtle and penetrating than any other; and the licentiousness of the verse is equal to that of the emotion; every natural instinct of the language is violated, and the simple music native in French metre is replaced by falsetto notes sharp and intense.

The charm is that of an odour of iris exhaled by some ideal tissues, or of a missal in a gold case, a precious relic of the pomp and ritual of an archbishop of Persepolis.

Parsifal a vaincu les filles, leur gentil Babil et la luxure amusante et sa pente Vers la chair de garcon vierge que cela tente D'aimer des seins legers et ce gentil babil.

Il a vaincu la femme belle aucur subtil Etalant ces bras frais et sa gorge excitante; Il a vaincu l'enfer, il rentre dans sa tente Avec un lourd trophee a son bras pueril.

Avec la lance qui perca le flanc supreme Il a gueri le roi, le voici roi lui-meme.

Et pretre du tres-saint tresor essentiel;

En robe d'or il adore, gloire et symbole, Le vase pur ou resplendit le sang reel, Et, o ces voix d'enfants chantant dans la coupole.

In English there is no sonnet so beautiful, its beauty cannot be worn away, it is as inexhaustible as a Greek marble. The hiatus in the last line was at first a little trying, but I have learned to love it. Not in Baudelaire nor even in Poe is there more beautiful poetry to be found.

Poe, unread and ill-understood in America and England, here, thou art an integral part of our artistic life.