surpass Vigny. The verse in "Ka'in" is so factitious,
so little possessed of vital vigor, that the strength it
has seems that of a great bronze manikin. In effects
of mere size, massiveness and expanse, he is unap-
proached by any of his confreres^ — always excepting,
of course, Victor Hugo.
But it is to the quality of elegance that Leconte de
Lisle gives greatest heed in his style. His style prop-
erly partakes of his artistic and barbaric temperament,
and gives us displays of profuse gorgeousness rather
than examples of finely discriminating choice and its
refined chariness — that is to say, heaviness and stolidity
32 French Essays and Profiles
of adornment rather than deHcacy, grace and variety.
His rhetorical elegance, therefore, means especially a
beautiful appearance, signifying that language is
selected, as far as possible, for its richness of look
and sound. And he succeeds perfectly in this wealth of
enameled rime and glazed galore, as in the poem
"La Verandah" and many other poesies, where costly
splendors reign in amazing realms of sumptuous glory.
To turn an instant to his Hellenic world, It seems
impossible to imagine a deeper crust of decorative
Greek beauty laid on verse than in "Le Vase." In
this domain of polychrome luster, Leconte de Lisle
surpasses all French poets. Here lies his distinguish-
ing triumph of style. His elegance would offset any
disagreeable effect of the stereotyped processes of his
lyric verse, and of the declamatory pose, stilted gesture,
and empty colloquy which so freely haunt his epopees.
His glazed art consists of the attachment to a set of
rimes of a comely or gorgeous vocabulary which dis-
plays its uniform variety like a kaleidoscope.
We have all along referred to his language as enam-
eled. This best describes the peculiar temper of his
poetry taken as a whole, and especially of his lyric
verse. His rime is usually spoken of as marmorean
or bronze. It appears too scintillating and highly col-
ored for bronze like that in "Les Destinees" of Vigny;
nor does it suggest the light, clicking, marble blocks
of Gautier's stanzas. But on the vases and paintings
in the museum at Sevres, one may trace out and feast
his eyes on the glamored sceneries of Leconte de Lisle.
His pages possess the glaze and radiance of enameled
Poetic Legacy of Leconte De Lisle 33
porcelain. They are somehow inspissated and not
translucent — they appear covered with an impermeable
gloss. This corresponds to the concreteness of the
sculpturesque style of Gautier — concreteness of style
being a Parnassian trait. And there seems something
peculiarly fitting in this firing process of verse-making
when the theme is the burning East.
The decorative, ornate feature which dominates
every other element of style in Leconte de Lisle is, then,
substituted for those living, vivid, vital, powerful quali-
ties which are the glory of Hugo. Words that burn
the lips and thrill with keen life, verse that is a "living
body," and all the highest-typed rhetorical gifts which
distinguish the greatest poetry, are foreign as a whole
to the art of Leconte de Lisle. His words in courting
beauty court emptiness — a truly barbaric vacancy of
look and hoUowness of sound. Instinctive grace, flexi-
bility, airiness, swiftness and the charm of the sudden
and unexpected, as well as the great inspired Hugo-
esque qualities, are not native to the pen of Leconte de
Lisle. His verse is static rather than in motion, dense
not fragile, opaque not pellucid, vitreous or vitrified not
ethereal, and seems incapable of a mellowing patina.
His great and unique gift to the French language is
seen, however, when we pose this question: Who before
his day would ever have imagined that the French
idiom could be made to reflect, with such wealth of
broad, daring glare, the immense brilliancy and flaming
prismatic colorations of the tropics? The "Barbares"
are mirific pages of enameled magnificence, with here
and there a heavy sign of a colossal life underneath.
34 French Essays and Profiles
CONCLUDING COMMENT
Looking at the poetic talent of Leconte de Lisle in
its totality, one easily remarks how it is based on,
and is a direct outgrowth of, the characteristics of the
Romantic school. His East is a continuation of the
oriental phase of Romanticism, and his dominating
love of Nature is born of Victor Hugo. His Buddhism
is a natural feature of his East, and is a pantheistic
admiration of the impassible immensities of Space,
quite akin to Hugo's commanding pantheistic admira-
tion of the calm Firmament, but with the substitution
of peace in Nirvana, as the ultimate expression of
Space, for Hugo's peace on the bosom of God, as the
ultimate expression of the Firmament. The inner and
physical sensibilities and imagination of Leconte de
Lisle, as displayed in that certain fraction of his poetry
where he really gives the true force and glory to his
East, are Hugo's own offspring in all that there is of
native love of immensity, of fondness for huge beasts,
and of other natural features. He continues the
Romantic cult of environment, and exaggerates it to
an extreme, since he confines himself almost wholly to
it. His adoration of externals, of the universe, of the
outward, and his comparative disregard of the inner
world, are but duplications of Hugo's gifts for Nature,
for contours, for that which is without, rather than for
the study and portrayal of character, the penetration
of the inward life, the conception of interesting and
masterly personages. In all these latter phases Hugo
Poetic Legacy of Leconte De Lisle 35
was weak, yet at the same time he loved and wor-
shiped Man as well as Nature.
The point of departure of Leconte de Lisle from
Romanticism, and the basis of his poetic art, lie funda-
mentally in his hate of Man and of the living sensi-
bilities, and in his corresponding love of the artistic
for its own impassible sake and domain. The key of
his philosophy and Parnassianism is to be found in
his famous "Midi": "Man, if you believe in and love
the luxuries of joys and sorrows, flee the blazing noon,
for Nature is empty and the Sun consumes — nothing
lives here, nothing is sad or joyous. But if you are
undeceived as to the vanities of life, and thirst to forget
this agitated world, and wish, knowing neither how to
pardon nor to curse, to taste a supreme and dejected
voluptuousness, come and seek the Sun's blaze, for He
will speak to you in sublime words. Absorb yourself
in His implacable flamings!"
Thus as Hugo, in his tender love and pity of hu-
manity, softens his pages with twilights, with evenings,
with night and its starry firmament and the more re-
clusive, gentle, God-inspiring aspects and phases of
Nature, as the fit accompaniment to the human joys and
fears which fill his verse, so Leconte de Lisle, in his
disdain of humankind, pours upon his poems the open,
fierce, relentless blaze of the tropical sun, whose effect
he rarely relieves and makes tender by dusks and
shadows. This he converted into Parnassianism, to
wit: the love of the eternal forms of beauty that do not
fade, and the love of toil over the perfecting of elegant
36 French Essays and Profiles
verse. "La forme est tout, le fond n'est rien" — the
form is everything, the content nothing — was a formula
which, it is said, Leconte de Lisle often repeated; and
herein he, for his part, illustrated a return from the
Romantic, which was exotic to France, to the French
love and talent for form and the artistic.
Again, he has shown how poetry can be a science as
well as an art, and why a versemaker should be a man
of culture and erudition, thus opposing the Romantic
idea that poets should be children of Nature, depend-
ing on their own impulses and inspirations. He illus-
trates, in some thirty of his poems, the quite evenly
balanced combination of living sensibilities and imagina-
tion on one hand and, on the other, purely artistic sensi-
bilities and the severe mechanics of verse — truly a not-
able, a unique, performance, and one fraught with
great benefits.
Furthermore, his poetry, which followed in the main
the only new course left open after the Romantics, has
exercised a strong and, in a way, very wholesome reac-
tion against that Romanticism which drifted into hyper-
esthesia and loathsome Realism. And at the same time
he displayed a brutality (excused in a measure by his
elegant striving for the artistic) as pronounced as that
of Baudelaire and the Realists.
We have merely tried in these pages to outline some
of the reasons why the name of Leconte de Lisle is to
be regarded as the most momentous one in the evolu-
tion of French poetry since the epoch that gave flight to
the genius of Hugo, Lamartine and Musset — a name
that stands for the Parnassian school as Hugo's stands
Poetic Legacy of Leconte De Lisle 37
for the Romantic. It has not been the purpose here to
attempt to expand the merits and revel in the glories
of this Parnassianism; nor to show how this neutral
conception of the poetic art, as a business of "regular
toil," tends, with its almost exclusive regard for ex-
ternals, to drag the poetic Muse down to artificial, imi-
tative and non-individualistic processes.
We have noted how imitative Leconte de Lisle was.
He partook freely of Hugo; found his ideas in his com-
panion poets; came after Gautier in his theory and
practice of the artistic and the love of the beautiful;
paraphrased the Greek and Latin poets; and boldly
imitated any one — even the unique powers of Baude-
laire. His lines which are patterned after the fashion
of Hugo are countless, and his style in a very general
way finds a striking precedent in Vigny. In a word,
as one who belongs to the Occident naturally conceives
of all the sphere of grand poetry with its peerless peaks
and ranges of human interest, he would seem justified
in saying that the poetic product of Leconte de Lisle
is to be compared with the total output of verse as is
the art of porcelain painting with that of Rembrandt
and Velazquez.
But if at times you weary of the fatigues and sor-
rows of being a mortal, and, following the precept of
the "Midi," can barbarize yourself sufliciently to be-
come buried for a time in a realm of Eastern and lone-
some splendor whose very imperturbation and empti-
ness are a proud solace, bathe yourself for a half day
in the tropical sun and strength of these calm pages of
spacious verse, and, forgetting the agitations and sen-
;5
38 French Essays and Profiles
sitiveness of weak human life and its petty ambitions,
defeats, vanities, contemplate, in these exotic monoto-
nies of immobile sky and desert, the glory of that
which is implacably beautiful and does not suffer nor
pass away. You will then have tasted a truly barbaric
mood and a genuine poetic and esthetic pleasure. You
will then have experienced something of the impassible
and sumptuous absorption into the extinction of
Nirvana.
ii. The Daughter of the French Romantics
THE DAUGHTER OF THE FRENCH
ROMANTICS
MADAME MARIE MENNESSIER-NODIER
THE one great, soul-stirring date in the history
of French letters is February 25, 1830. A
brother of Hamlet and Faust was then born
to France at the Theatre Fran^ais — Hernani ! At last
emotion and imagination (which had given poetry to
England and music to Germany) had seized the canvas
of French literature and from their depths and heights
of Mystery, of the Impossible and the pitifully Mortal,
were massing and contrasting immense protrusions, per-
spectives and chiaroscuros of sentiment, tenderness and
fantasy, where all had largely been grisailles, or hue-
less level surfaces decorated with a faultless and chilled
technic.
The echoing horn of Hernani announced to the races
of earth that French belles-lettres were now to inspire
an interest magnificently human rather than mental and
artistic. The young men and women of 1830, «who,
as M. Legouve remarks, had a particular cachet as
had the revolutionists of '89, are the first group of
people in the Parisian humanities to step bodily out of
their books, grasp us by the hand and say, "We too
are of flesh and blood." They are not effaced per-
41
42 French Essays and Profiles
sonages eclipsed from their pages into imponderable,
griseous, neutral entities, but are our own real brothers
and sisters upon whom the word French does not
inexorably stamp a nameless, alien meaning. For the
volumes from their pens are our passing selves.
Youth burns in them and Death trails his horror. Their
stanzas and paragraphs sigh and cry out with frailty
and sin. In them, illusion nurses longings for the un-
heard-of, and fancy paints the distant and exotic. In
them, too, the sun shines, flowers breathe forth their
perfumes, storms rage, and all nature, life, love, lib-
erty, individuality stand forth in tremendous or in com-
passionate action. We do not approach these living
authors merely to admire and acquire, for we cherish
them with a vivifying affection because we are conscious
that they suffered and died.
Thus the literary Anglo-American sojourner in
France comes in time to feel for that famous old even-
ing of Hernani a personal affection like that which
always haunted the melancholy Gautier. It was then
that Parisian literature became affianced, for a time
at least, to our own, and throbbed with a heart that
is our heart. Not only is it the one notable national
date in late French letters: it is also the one notable
international literary event, whose signification may
not be fully interpreted until a century or more shall
have passed.
But the Theatre Frangals was only the scene of the
denouement. It is by no means there that the belated
Romantic in Paris should love to linger for associations.
His "chateau de souvenir" is not where Hernani fought
Daughter of the French Romantics 43
his fight in public, but it should be, specifically, the
room where the revolutionary bandit of Victor Hugo
was cradled in infancy and trained to grandiose ado-
lescence. This room was the nursery of the French
Romantics for six years, and their home for two dec-
ades, or until about 1844, when their reign had begun
to close. It was the salon of Charles Nodier, and sur-
passes, for the value of its literary career and influence,
perhaps any other French salon. Here was, in reality,
"the grand cetiacle." Doubtless no room anywhere
exists that can be compared with the Nodier parlor
both for the number and fame of its literary friends
and for its colossal impulse to letters and art. Here
the Romantic French novel and conte found their first
and most faithful devotees, and this was true also of
the French Romantic Theater and school of painting
and school of music with its Henri Reber and his Ger-
manic melodies. Here, too, the modern French love
for Gothic architecture was bred. And here modern
French poetry soared in its fledgling flights.
It is quite surprising that this great salon is unheard
of in America. While many books and essays are writ-
ten by Americans on the French salons of previous
centuries, none is penned on the salon of Charles No-
dier in the second quarter of the nineteenth century.
Yet more about it can be known, for Parisian authors
have paid tribute to it in scores of enthusiastic and
lovely pages of verse and prose. It seems desirable, in
consequence, that an attempt be made to remedy in
part this lapse in our literary history.
So, if you wish to idle for a summer's day in this
44 French Essays and Profiles
Parisian domain of Romanticism, let us set off on a
morning's quest of the Nodier parlor in its ancient
quarter of Paris, and, leaving behind the rude noise
and bustle of the boulevards, slip into the footsteps of
its memories, and dream, in its haunts, of a glorious
past. To find the room, we must hunt the rue de Sully
— a certain lonely little street that lies between the
Bastille and the eastern point of the He St. Louis. Its
southern side is flanked by the monotonous facade of
the grim-visaged Arsenal, an almost forgotten pile of
the sixteenth centur}'. Old fashioned bas-reliefs of
angry-mouthed artillery pieces scowl at us from above
its doors and carve their Latin inscriptions into our
notice. Through the leafy tree-tops along the rear
of the edifice, one catches glimpses of richly hewn mor-
tars lining the heights of the cornice and belching forth
their wealth of sculptured flame in a sumptuous display
that recalls the ornate Renaissance front of the Hotel
de la Valette hard by.
The west pavilion of the Arsenal is regal because
of Its role in the life of Henry IV and Sully; for within
it were restored, not many years ago, the king's cabinet
and bedchamber known traditionally as the "cabinet
of Sully." This apartment, where Henry loved to steal
in peace from the din of his court, is of the most elab-
orate ornamentation, and is said to be perhaps the com-
pletest and finest specimen extant of the French interior
decorative art of the seventeenth century. But we have
not come to search a prince's nook, nor view a seat of
royal games and acts, nor read the precious volumes
of Henry's love letters to "Mon cher coeur" which he
Daughter of the French Romantics 45
carefully indited in his best hand with here and there
an honest blot to show how, like some ardent school-
boy, he had screwed down over his pretty task. Nor
have we strayed hither to see the old, bethumbed psalter
of St. Louis, or the Terence of the due de Berry, or the
Bible of Charles V, or to visit the great yellow-volumed
library of the Arsenal (the second largest bibliotheque
in France) with its pungent smell of leather and its
ten or fifteen habitues browsing drowsily over antique
tomes.
We have come. Instead, to open the fourth door of
the fagade, mount six steps, and then an ancient, aban-
doned stairway whose plain, forlorn majesty sweeps
the dust of its oblivion Into our clothes and thoughts
at every turn. At the end of Its first flight we open
the door, walk in, and find ourselves in the quondam
abode of the Nodler family.
We cannot do better than trace out the rooms and
locate their former appointments with the aid of
Amaury Duval, who was one of the most devoted
guests here during all those years. Let us quote from
his description of the Nodler soirees and comment as
we edge along, so that we may have the former scene
fully before our eyes.
"After traversing a rather narrow antechamber," one
entered the large dining room. It was lighted by a
little lamp placed on the stove." •
This room Is almost empty now. It faces north on
the rue de Sully. Its walls are of wood carved In a
kind of Louis XIV style, and were latterly painted
a yellowish brown. Entering from the east, we see on
46 French Essays and Profiles
the opposite side the chimney recess where the stove
stood. A bust of some abbe of local and modern note
adorns the spot, for the rooms at present serve the
needs of the Arsenal library. "It is here by the stove
on a table near the wall that the guests left their hats,
mantles, overcoats and umbrellas. Few of us could
afford the luxury of a cab; but neither rain nor snow
could keep away the charming young girls and their
intrepid dancers." From the south side of the dining
room "the guest walked through a little passage, came
to the door of the salon, turned the knob as if he were
at home — and entered." Here indeed is the selfsame
corridor — small, dark, forsaken. We find the door
knob and we, too, pass into the famous room.
At our right on the north side of the salon, on the
panel that faced the windows, was placed above a can-
opy the portrait of Nodier by Guerin. In the north-
west corner stood the statue of Henri IV as a child,
molded after the original of Bosio. On the west side
was the fireplace, with the fauteull of baron Taylor,
the founder of the Societe des artistes, at the north
end, and at the south end the armchair of Nodier, just
in front of which was the "eternal card table." Then
came the door to the chamber of Nodier, on the other
side of which was his study adjoined in turn by a little
room where books and various domestic things were
stored. On the south side of the salon were the two
immense windows reaching to the floor. They opened
on a small iron balcony which looked out upon an arm
of the Seine and the He Louvier. The wall between
the windows was relieved by a Scottish landscape from
Daughter of the French Romantics 47
the brush of Regnier, a friend of the household. Un-
derneath It was stationed a console supporting a plas-
ter bust of Victor Hugo. Those who spun a conte, or
distilled from their lips the dewy fervor of their verse,
usually stood before the console, rubbing their backs
unconsciously against the bust so that In time Its nose
became black. This discolored member was one of
the familiar themes of amusement of the family and
Its Intimates.
On the'east side of the salon, and next to one of the
windows, there was a door which opened Into a kind
of anteroom whence one entered the chamber of
Madame Nodler. In the middle of the east wall there
was the large recess which harbored the old-fashioned
square piano. "The two paintings — the Regnier and
the Guerin — were, together with a clock In the style
of 1820, the only ornaments of this room. Its ancient
and sculptured woodwork was painted white. The ap-
paratus for lighting the room was as simple as the
rest: two lamps on the chimney mantel and two Ar-
gand lamps flanking the Nodier portrait. I may add
that these two Argands often gave Marie, the charm-
ing daughter of the house, occasion to mount lightly
on a chair in the attempt to correct their capricious
flames at the risk of disengaging a pretty foot to view."
The upholstery of the six fauteulls and of the canopy
was red casslmere, and the twilled, or double-miiled,
curtains of calico at the windows were also red. Thus
the defiant color of Romanticism was contrasted against
the peaceful, domestic background of the white walls.
Nowadays the apartment presents a wholly different
48 French Essays and Profiles
appearance. The walls are hidden by deep shelvings
filled with volumes, and in the center there is an enor-
mous, improvised stand, or table, whereon books and
manuscripts lie strewn about. For, the room is now a
part of the Arsenal Library proper, and is only known
to the employees and to them very little. The apart-
ment is about twenty-five feet square and the ceiling
is some thirty feet high. The ceiling was much lower
in the epoch of the Nodiers, for a false floor then cut
the room horizontally into two unequal parts in order
to form of the upper a mezzanine having chambers for
Mademoiselle Marie and the servants. There remain
to-day the white woodwork sculptured in Louis XV,
the chimney place, and the polished old oak floor so
intimately known for years to the feet of countless great
personages.
The recess has disappeared, and with it, of course,
the famous piano which Liszt was the first to open for
Marie. All the furniture has long since strayed from
these haunts. Some of it is still in the possession of
the Mennessier family. They have, too, the Guerin
portrait of Nodier. It is painted in the English style
of this master's Chateaubriand and of the Lamartine
of Decaisne, as if the subjects were Englishmen rather
than Frenchmen. The six chairs and the bergere have
been lost to trace, but the family have preserved un-
altered the six fauteuils, and indulgently had one of
them brought down one day from the attic to gratify
my curiosity. It was an oak chair in the cut of the
Empire, maintaining its imperial air despite dust and
neglect. Its dark red upholstery was trimmed around
Daughter of the French Romantics 49
the borders with yellow stripes which were half torn
off and dangling.
Through the windows of the Nodier salon we may-
saunter on the balcony where the melancholy Nodier
used to sit and watch the sunsets bathe the neighboring
towers of Notre Dame, The little branch of the Seine,
the row of poplars along its bank, and the He Louvier
have vanished, and now a spacious though quiet boule-
vard sweeps by. Beyond, through the trees, one spies
extensive wood and coal yards. All this forms at presr
ent as lonesome a quarter as in the time of the Nodiers,
but the scene was more poetic then. In those decades
the mark of the country was upon the spot. Frogs
croaked of summer evenings, the humid fragrance of
idle water diffused a lazy dreaminess, and the surround-