ent individual from the polite, caustic, stoically desponding Mérimée, whom Renan gives as a type of a period. The "Unknown was merely the recipient of those confidences which every mind has an irrepressible tendency to unfold; but that alone is no proof of amorous affection. Proud as he was, Mérimée doubtless selected her as the fittest person to preserve his secrets; and perhaps another deception might be added to the others, could he know that even this trust has been betrayed. Howbeit, the Inconnue was no more than a confidante. She might perchance have been more had she liked; and her own letters to Mérimée would show if she is responsible for preventing a very distinguished man from seeing clearly through his mistakes, and reconciling himself with his fellow-creatures.

This, however, is merely speculation, and one should only reason by facts on such delicate ground. What facts we have, lead us to point to Mérimée as the most unhappy of men. In the tumult of court life, amidst the uproar of the gayest society, he was more forlorn than in the solitude of a desert. His heart was dry to the core; the eventualities of daily existence were to him as the phases of a nightmare, in which he was forced into playing a part although convinced of its vanity. He must, indeed, have longed to cast off the clay as well as his official gear. His death was in unison with the mournfulness of his life; it occurred shortly after the overthrow of the Second Empire. France was going to pieces; no one thought of a single individual in this whirling tempest, and Mérimée's demise was not more noticed than a simple soldier's. He expired in the arms of two faithful English friends. Two hours before breathing his last he wrote the note which closes the second volume of his correspondence. He was borne silently to the grave, momentarily forgotten. No doubt he would have approved of this oblivion and indif

ference.

46

JULES JANIN.

BY EDMOND ABOUT.

THE death of Jules Janin, and the commotion it has caused, not in France only, but also, and in even a greater degree, abroad, put me in mind of an Italian proverb, Chi dura, vince," "To endure is to conquer," or to put it more familiarly, for the word vincere has two senses, "To endure is to win the game." Happy the writer who reaches seventy; whatever faults he may have been guilty of, whatever the inconsistencies of his life and the changes of his politics and criticisms, even if he has had the misfortune to outlive his talents, he can say, on quitting the scene, "Victory! I have won the game." His opponents, his seconds, his judges, are dead, or routed, or worn out. The generation that buries him has read only fragments of his writings; its acquaintance with him is founded on a small number of anecdotes; it knows little of him but his name, and as the name has made some stir in the world, the world pronounces it with a certain respect. It is little short of a miracle if, among the crowd, a single person, more impartial or less prejudiced than the rest, takes the trouble to weigh the merits of the happy defunct. Why seek for the truth or tell it? Is not the public, like other sovereigns, indifferent to justice and truth? It prefers of all its advisers those who say it is right and applaud even its errors. It sometimes approves of the critic who is sufficiently bold to attack openly a living and working demigod. Such ebullitions please it, because they help to console the mediocre majority, who feel humiliated by the fame more or less legitimate of some few persons. But when a demigod is dead and buried, when his bust is placed in the national atrium, inter signa majorum, it is not only impiety, but the height of imprudence, to demand that his bust should be removed to the garrets. Why make the collection less complete? The dead have no enemies, they make nobody jealous, they are even useful at times, for their reputation, henceforth unquestioned, may serve to diminish the merits of the living. I should, then, have the best possible grounds for singing the praises

of the old Academician who has just done dying. If I prefer to tell you frankly what I think of him, it is because in an age of Free Trade and International Coinage, it seems to me dishonest to give foreigners a copper-güt counter for a twenty-franc piece. Dame Europa, who is over fond of pitying us, and finds it to her interest to do so, is already purchasing immortelles, and I hear her cry, with arrogant compassion, "Poor France! After so many disasters, only this was wanting, that she should lose Jules Janin." Many thanks for your pity, my dear camarades de pension; but really it is a misfortune of no consequence: a child's balloon, which has broken its string, and got spiked on the garden railings. The explosion took you by surprise. Calm yourselves and resume your usual pursuits, as we did ours on the very day of the accident.

The originality of Jules Janin and his chief merit can be explained in a few words. He was the first journalist who introduced bavardage into criticism. Thrown by a stroke of good luck among distinguished writers who were fastidious, correct, and dull, who used to weigh_tragedies and, if need be, vaudevilles in the scales of Eacus and Rhadamanthus, he took a gay view of the sacred profes sion, gave reins to his fancy, and put into his feuilletons everything that came into his head. This game astonished the public without offending it, and people acquired a taste for rambling articles, which were one series of parentheses, where the topics that ought to have been subordinate were the ruin of the principal theme, and the subject was lost among a heap of paroles touffues. Like those talkers of the salons who shine at small cost because they pick neither words nor ideas, he achieved by a stratagem the character of a wit. He used and he abused his reputation, for good, for bad, encouraging and discouraging true merit, exalting the true and the false, according to the wind that blew. His eulogiums, which few readers took seriously, were greatly sought after by artists, for he borrowed from the Journal des Débats some portion of its great and legitimate influence. For over thirty years, Janin talked sense and nonsense, quite at his ease, before the most select public of France and of foreign countries. He spoke about everything under the sun, apropos of the stage, caressed his friends, worried his foes, told all his little affairs, even his marriage, with great minuteness, quoted Horace in season and out of season, and took liberties with the Latin tongue, his knowledge of which was but indifferent. Thanks to all of this, he could proclaim himself the prince of critics without exciting any great storm. Fortune smiled on the naïve vanity which had entire possession of him. This great spoilt child to whom all was forgiven was one of the happiest men of the day. His importance puffed him out visibly like La Fontaine's frog. To the last year of his life, he reigned absolute: he received embassies, he perused petitions and supplications, as he lay on the sofa to which gout and obesity had nailed him. Authors journeyed to Passy to read him their pieces, actors to spout their parts before him. The French Academy came to seek him in 1870, after having long and justly closed its door to him. The indulgence of the public allowed him to criticise new works, without quitting his villa, upon the reports of certain aides-de-camp whom he used to send to the theatre. It was only last year that the editor of the Débats put him on the retired list, in consequence of the unanimous remonstrances of the subscribers. The most patient gave up deciphering that senile drivel.

even

The true critic does not wholly die-witness SainteBeuve, who has left strong and lasting work. And the poet, too, who like Théophile Gautier, has abandoned his true vocation and writes a dramatic feuilleton, still leaves some undying pages which outlive the men and works whom he criticises. But what survives of bavardage, the most happy, the most admired, the most famous? The echo of a name. The heirs of the name of Janin are quite rich enough to reprint the thousands of feuilletons that he scribbled; they cannot get them read. Even his books and God knows he published dozens will not be reperused, for they are not written.

One owes the truth to the dead, and the whole truth. I will therefore not conclude this sincere and severe judgment without doing homage to the qualities of the man. This critic without capacity, this writer without style, was a man of letters to the tips of his fingers, and that in the most noble sense of the word. He loved reading, he adored books, he had a passion for les choses de l'esprit, he toiled without ceasing, like a man to whom literature is all in all. If he was led astray, and even got into the mire at times by meddling with politics, he acted from entirely disinterested motives, and he had a profound contempt for places, pensions, and sinecures. His likings were sincere, his hatreds no less so. He did good and evil indiscriminately, but ever conscientiously. All who enjoyed his intimacy, mourn in him the best of men and the most devoted of friends. His door was ever open to the young. He encouraged Ponsard and aided him during his life, took him to his house and comforted him to the day of his death. If he created a false school of writing, and leaves in his two hundred volumes only models to be avoided, it is none the less true that his life did honor to our profession.

MAURICE BOUCHOR.

BY WALTER BESANT.

THE new French Poet: the latest candidate for the post of national singer. Great is the ambition of him who aims at the rank and title of poet, because the value of the prize is incalculable. It is the affection of a people, perhaps of the world, forever. Statesmen may confer greater benefits, but they are not necessarily loved therefor; gratitude is a cold feeling; the obligation conferred is divided among so many; he who will, may repay by enthusiasm: and Belisarius is not the only great man whose reward has been neglect. But the poet is different: he interprets thought, and suggests it. He gives words to feelings which would otherwise die away inarticulate; in showing a little more of the soul than others can see, he seems to lay bare the whole; he detects new analogies between mind and matter; he is the true metaphysician, who teaches more in a couplet than all the philosophers with all their books; he pours sunshine upon the clouded and colorless life; he decks out joy in fitting words, and clothes sorrow in a garb that is beautiful as well as appropriate. A great work, indeed; but of this crown, above all others, it may be said that many there are who run, and but one receiveth the prize.

the senses.

If I were to train a boy expressly for the divine mystery of verse, I should be careful to educate him through He should be able, like Solomon, to tell all the flowers of the field and every bird in the air. He should be admonished to notice what goes on round him, just as Robert Houdin trained his son in that special faculty of observation which seems only developed at present among entomologists, finders of old coins, and ladies who watch how other ladies dress. He should be taught that perfectly neglected art, the science of smell, so as to detect the delicate nuances of perfumes, how they may be classified, and brought to bear in proper order upon the things of life: fancy what an immense stride in civilization it would be if we could persuade each other that the smell of roast-meat in a house is really injurious to the finer perceptions! He should be taught the due gradations of color: half the world, as was demonstrated by Liebig, are partially color-blind, for want of early training. He should be taught to feel the influence of form; he should learn to paint and draw, so as to be humble at the feet of Nature; and he should be able to play at least one instrument, so as to appreciate the art which is to some a fuller poetry. Added to this, so much of science as to make him reverent before the Divine order; so much of literature as to make him respect the great men of old; and then, if we take care that he be healthy, strong, and active, the education of our poet would be complete.

After all, he would most likely turn out to be no poet, while some young fellow with no education to speak of, or only the kind of thing you may pick up anywhere, writes the world a dozen ballads which make him a joy forever. I believe that the late Lord Lytton was carefully trained in everything that a man has time to learn; he became a great novelist, but no one reads his poems. There is a new poet in France, as I first learned from M. Edmund About, in the Athenæum. He is young; so young as to make his volume a literary curiosity; he is original, in so far as he is unlike the versifiers who spring up as the flowers of the hedge, and are as short-lived and as like each other; he is full of spirits and gayety, which would be remarkable in a young English poet, but is much more remarkable in a young Frenchman, and of the present unhappy time; and he has steeped his soul with Shakespeare, as well as with those glorious old French writers whom we in England are just beginning to read, and in France they are beginning to imitate. I feel much obliged, personally, to M. About for introducing me to the volume of M. Maurice Bouchor's verse, and I hope that I may be allowed to interest others in what has been to me an extremely interesting study the first-fruits of a young man's mind.

I know nothing at all about M. Bouchor save what M. About tells me, that he is only eighteen. Eighteen! At that age Clément Marot was beginning his career with a "Ballade de soy mesmes; at eighteen Keats, at Edmonton, was reading Spenser's "Faery Queen; at eighteen Byron had only begun the "Hours of Idleness; at eighteen poor Chatterton's work was ended; at eighteen most young men keep their verses in their desks, guarding them with a sacred jealousy; and at eighteen Maurice Bouchor presents himself a full-blown poet, asking with so confident an air to be heard, that we must needs stand and listen while gray-haired men await their turn.

To me the book, as the work of a boy of eighteen, is little short of a literary phenomenon. It has ease, freedom, grace; it shows a large reading; it has command of language; and above all, it has the promise that only the presence of real poetic feeling can give.

Can the author be really only eighteen? If so, when did he begin his work? For he manifests in this single volume three distinct and separate mental stages. He is as full of sentiment in one as the lover of Maud; in the second he plays on a rural oaten pipe, not unskilfully, variations on the lines that he borrows from Shakespeare; in the third he is carried in a divine rapture to that time it is a time past, present, and future with the true Gaul when all joys, all gayety, wit, gladness, and joy of life seem granted to those who drink. This, his third stage, is apparently the latest, because it comes last and gives its name to the volume.

He may, perhaps, be more than eighteen, but he is assuredly a very young man. The signs of youth lie thick on every page; you can see the beardless cheek and the lip just touched with down behind the mask in which he plays his sighing lover, his cold and hardened sceptic, and his jolly red-nosed toper. For if he loves, it is that abstraction of womanhood beautiful, gentle, ethereal whose features are ever shifting, whose eyes have no expression in their brightness, whose voice we hear not. She is Egeria, Chloe, anything you please; but she has no personality, and in sighing for her the poet proves at once his youth and his healthy manhood, in that he feels the yearning after the completion of life, and only dimly guesses in what manner it may be completed. He has not, again, unlike the poet of my scheme of education, learned yet to observe. He loves Nature as a poet should. The lilac's perfume, the sobbing of the brook, the lawn bordered with forget-me-nots, the swallow in its flight - all these things give life and inspiration to his thoughts; but as yet he feels them largely and generally, just as a youth.

And then, as another proof of his youth, he has parted with his creed. Arms folded, resolute, sorrowful, he gives up the religion that he learned at his mother's knees. Many young men of great promise have done the same,

dreaming that they may have made great and original discoveries, at which the spirits of Berkeley, Whately, and the crowd of Christian advocates, back through all the centuries, will fly shrieking into Limbo. As the world still goes on its course undisturbed, and their challenge meets no opponent, they mostly subside into the ordinary channels of human faith, and are forgiven their rebellion. M. Bouchor first throws the stone and then drops his tear. I fancy the stone-throwing, with which he opens his volume, must have been written last. We find it in the Introduction, which seems to me singularly graceful in form and expression. I venture to put this, as well as most of the extracts which follow, into English rhymes of my own. Those who are discontented with them may blame the translator as much as they will, but are requested to reserve their judgment as regards the poet.

I.

The gods of Greece, like those who made
Their names and laws, were stern and grim;
Yet on Olympus, cloud-wrapped, dim,
Blithe lives they lived, great mirth they had.

And so the bards in worship meet

Clashed golden cups of honeyed wine,

And laughed, and harped their hymns divine, These gods of all the joys to greet.

Sleep, buried Past, in yon bright clime;

Live, changeful Present that is ours; But let us mourn the songs and flowers That sprang to life in that old time.

II.

From Syria came a bank of cloud,

With winds that made the sunlight wan; And lo! the yearning face of man, Upturned, was wet with tears of blood.

Fled, fled the laughter bold and free,

That showed the joyous heart below: Thou, Last of Prophets, tell us how All hearts received thy blood and thee.

And age by age, and drop by drop,

This blood chills youth and passions hot; And now we know the cost, and what The world has paid for fear and hope.

III.

Go, shaveling, hollow-eyed and worn,
Let tortured manhood cease for thee:
For us the happy heavens are free;
On wings of love we meet the morn,

And like the swallows in the spring,
Swift in their sunshine and their mirth,
High in the soft airs o'er the earth,
With mighty sweep and rush of wing,

Eyes lighted by the belt of gold
Lying in yonder west we fly,
Unless wings flag and purpose die,
To know all joys the world doth hold.

After this preamble he plunges "into the forest" -a wild tangled wood, full of soft breezes and sweet flowers, where he wanders with his love, the shadow of a love, in imaginary glades, lying under the great trees, and watching the sun through the tissue of luminous leaves, where Vacillant dans les ivresses du sommeil

Notre âme par l'azur fait d'étranges voyages. |

As, for instance, when his love passes through the wood.

For her, my queen, the sap is stirred
In sluggish trunks of oak and yew:
She is my dream, she is my bird,
She turns to tears love's longing dew.

And so on, and so on; a sweet idyl, meaning nothing, with no real passion, and no real object, and no real scenery, but just the poet's Garden of Delight; his love meanwhile as vague and as shadowy as the Rose of Guillaume de Lor ris. It ends, the charm is broken, because the young poet has poured out all the sweet things he has to say. Only the memory of his shadowy goddess will, we trust, remain with him, to purify and gladden the after life.

Au nom de ce dernier baiser,
Au revoir, pas adieu, mignonne.

The second part of the poem consists, as I have said, of verses suggested by Shakespeare. Ariel, the dainty Ariel, liberated and free, is the theme of one 66 variation;" the "Midsummer-Night's Dream" of another :

"Fassent les dieux qu'à mon réveil,

Près de moi, dans les hautes herbes,
Une Athénienne au soleil

Entr'ouvre ses yeux bleus superbes.

The "Rosalindage" proves to his poetical credit that he can feel the sweet creations in "As You Like It." Of Falstaff he takes the view which would most naturally suggest itself to him :

Une figure qui flamboie:
Ton large rire et tes gros yeux
Portent écrit ce mot: La Joie.

He reads the great witch scene in " Macbeth," and straightway a strange fancy seizes him. The soldiers vanish; Macbeth is alone; and he is himself Macbeth. He will feel what it is to be a king - a king at any cost.

I.

Athwart the sward, in sombre groups, Blood-reddened by the crimson west, Macbeth, returning with his troops, Rides as the sun goes down to rest.

All joyously the clarions sound, Freely the banners float abroad, And no man in the gathering round But thinks himself a demi-god.

The sisters three, gray-bearded all,
With streaming locks, in fluttering shrouds,
Are seated in the grasses tall,

Pointing lean fingers to the clouds.

I have no fear; I dare the worst ;

Spectres of night, your names I know ;
What names the angels called you first,
By what they call on you below.

You, shrinking prey of ruthless flames,
In Edenland once lived and sung;
Love, Joy, and Youth, your angel names,
And you were fair, and you were young.

Thou, withered hag, who once wast Youth,
To such as this thy charms are brought;
Sinister seer of evil truth,

Thy name is changed, for thou art Though

Thou, whilom Joy, with once glad brow, Set are thy lips, thine eyes are sad; Black Melancholy art thou now,

And all thy dreams are dark and bad.·

And thou, O Love, with all that sense Can feel of pleasure, pain, and praise, Lo! thy new name- -Indifference

Lives in thy heedless, shifting gaze.

With these, then, Joy turned to Melancholy, Youth to Thought-in the old allegory the companion to Love was Doux Penser-and Love itself changed to Indifference, the future king-poet joins the infernal orgy. All the past, with its love, joy, remembrance, regret, and shame, is cast into the caldron. Free of these, the poet remains a king indeed, for he knows no laws that bind him. Duty and honor rest on the foundations of respect, sympathy, love. He is the only king who dares to cut away the chains that bind us each to each. Cold, isolated, and alone, he whom these three graces of earth, sunk now into age, debasement, and decrepitude, can crown a king, must first have stripped himself of all that makes men happy, while it makes them

feeble.

Pour que tous baisent ma main droite,

je tuerai ma conscience,

A coups de poignard dans le cœur."

The strange thing is that the young poet thinks this a variation of Shakespeare. Of course it is not. Macbeth's downward course, traced step by step in weakness and in strength, shows the hand of fate upon the doomed man. M. Bouchor, seeing the three hags upon the heath, and the figure of the chieftain before them, takes his place, and leaves Macbeth far enough away in his new flight. The imagination that could picture the scene I have tried to translate is at least rich, and full of promise. And surely the conception, with such execution as that I have tried to indicate, is remarkable in a boy of eighteen.

Then there is his third face; for this poet is richer than Janus. In the "Chansons Joyeuses" we see him rollicking at the cabaret, the fumes of the wine being like the clouds of the magician that rise between the present and the visionary world, and, rolling away, show the scenes that only the poet can see. Those who have read in French literature- their numbers are increasing, but they are all too few well know how rich it is in drinking songs. The French are a temperate race, which is one reason, perhaps, why their convivial songs should be so good. For the northern peoples want small inducement to drink, and when men are well drunken, it matters little what they sing. It is the courtly old Froissart who sings,

Rabelais is as full of wine as any tippling_reader can desire; he has a thirst that is insatiable. "By Noah," says Panurge, "it is Beaune, better than ever was tipped over tongue, or may ninety and sixteen devils swallow me! Oh that, to keep its taste the longer, we gentlemen topers had but necks some three cubits long or so." Saint Amant could not sing at all, unless in or of a cabaret; and the illustrious Piron and his friends were only really happy when they were bawling together round the table loaded with bottles. There is good drinking even so late as Béranger; but since then the art of writing songs in praise of Bacchus seems to have died out. M. Bouchor, by a jovial anachronism, revives it. It is not a real revival, because his songs belong to no club or circle, and are only written in imitation; but it is refreshing to get high spirits and the quaint, careless, dare-devil air of the past once more seeming to come to life. Listen to the song of the Spirit of Wine from the "Confession."

Spirit divine of mighty wine,

Thy friend am I, a sorcerer great; Quicker than music I untwine

The cords of pain, the bonds of fate.

Glou glou! I pass with every glass,
And sob and throb through vein and limb;
Hear low among the shouts my song,

Mark 'mid the horns my carol dim.

Glou glou! I reign o'er head and brain,
And drive away in rushing streams
Those fond regrets of amourettes,
Which sadden all your days and dreams.

Glou glou! my father is the sun,

See! at a touch I light your eyes; The thoughts that made them droop in shade Are gone and vanished phantom-wise.

Transformed by me your sight shall see The young world clothed in forest green, When all the earth was clad in mirth,

And in its buxom youth was seen.

Glou glou! I touch thine ear, and then

Changes the image at a stroke; Hushed is the young earth's laugh, but men Hear songs froin leafy elm and oak.

Glou glou! I flow thy lips below,

Those lips whose longings mad and great, So hotly burned, so deeply yearned, With kisses still insatiate.

Henceforth, in place of form and face, Sparing of kisses and delight,

Le nez, quand les yeux se sont alourdis,
Porte le flambeau sacré de la vie ;

Et le grand soleil des brûlants midis
Devant cette pourpre est pâle d'envie.

He plays upon the fancy, neither a pretty nor a new one, with a persistency which almost carries with it the convic tion of earnestness. He will marry a Flemish cabaretière, all to improve the quality of this beau nez, touched with rubies full of the sun; he will drink all the night, and in the morning he will sit down to an "enormous dish of sourkrout " and so on, and so on: Quo me, Bacche, rapis?

This is how he addresses a friend, whom he elsewhere congratulates, all in his buoyant, unreal way, on already, in his twentieth year, possessing a rotundity worthy of an alderman. There is here a touch of impatience, which somehow does strike one as real :

Oh! thou that standest in this boundless world
Alone, with nought to dull life's bitterness;
Thou who canst rail and laugh at all distress;
Blessed art thou, strangest of mortals known!
Drunk as a Templar, glad as a lark in the sky,
Bearing thy lofty forehead in the light;
I love thine eyes, so joyous, frank, and bright,
I love thy round nose like the dot on the i.

Raoul Ponchon, poet with the long black locks,
Which should be lying o'er the orthodox
Old Roman tunic, brother, thee I greet.

The goddess Joy, thee, pagan subject, keeps; I hate to death this age which always weeps; More humane is thy laugh, thy smile more sweet. Then he will die like the toper; that is, as the top might picture his end to himself at the outset of his care before his miserable old legs have grown shaky, his do dering lips tremulous, his brain soft, and before his app hensions of death and the hereafter have begun to sh more vivid, more real, more dreadful after every nigh debauch. But Bauchor is only a toper in imagination. Ce sera par un beau matin,

Quand je serai soûl de la vie ; Quand j'aurai le regard éteint,

Et le cœur mort à toute envie ;

Alas! 'tis a pity; your sorrow

Those soft eyes have reddened with pain; You may weep, child, to-day; for to-morrow New love will bring laughter again.

I fly with the breezes; I go

Go whither? Ah! you may forebode? But never more, child, this I know,

With your smile will you lighten my load.

In the lanes which the wild blossoms bless
A sweeter wild rose will I seek;
Whiter fingers than thine may caress,

And breathe on a better loved cheek.

And to-morrow, all finished and done,
If my youth is as fresh and as gay,
I will open my heart for the sun

To heal up the wounds of to-day. There are many sweet things and dainty thoughts in the olume that I have not touched on, and there are also many faults of taste and judgment which might also be noticed. But it is absurd to criticise seriously the work of one who has but just left school. If he is going to be a genuine poet the faults of taste will disappear, purpose will take the place of imitation, reality of falseness, tenderness of a mere animal longing for enjoyment. There is this promise about M. Bouchor, that he already shows signs of that sympathy which is the characteristic of the best French poets - a sympathy which sometimes errs in excess, and drops into maudlin weakness, but which is always there. See it in these lines of Bouchor, in which he addresses "certain great poets":—

. jainais rien d'humain ne bat dans vos poitrines;
Jamais l'air libre et bleu ne remplit vos poumons:
Et jamais éblouis de clarté purpurine,
Vous n'avez salué l'aurore sur les monts.

L'amour ne vous a pas tendu son large verre, Le vin n'empourpre pas vos fronts décolorés; Dans un air étouffant votre muse sévère D'huile rance imprégna vos vers élaborés. Even this we have heard before; for the book before us is little but the re-dressing of ideas which he has gathered here and there, and brooded over till he has made them