The Muse of M. de Banville was born not naked but in the most elaborate and sumptuous evening wear that ever muse put on. To him, indeed, there is no nature so natural as that depicted on the boards, no humanity half so human as the actor puts on with his paint. For him the flowers grow plucked and bound into nosegays; passion has no existence outside the Porte-Saint-Martin; the universe is a place of rhymes and rhythms, the human heart a supplement to the dictionary. He delights in babbling of green fields, and Homer, and Shakespeare, and the Eumenides, and the ‘rire Énorme’ of the Frogs and the Lysistrata. But it is suspected that he loves these things rather as words than as facts, and that in his heart of hearts he is better pleased with Cassandra and Columbine than with Rosalind and Othello, with the studio Hellas of Gautier than with the living Greece of Sophocles. Heroic objects are all very well in their way of course: they suggest superb effects in verse, they are of incomparable merit considered as colours and jewels for well-turned sentences in prose. But their function is His Art.It is natural enough that to a theory of art and life that can be thus whimsically described we should be indebted for some of the best writing of modern years. Our poet has very little sympathy with fact, whether heroic or the reverse, whether essential or accidental; but he is a rare artist in words and cadences. He writes of ‘Pierrot, l’homme subtil,’ and Columbine, and ‘le beau LÉandre,’ and all the marionettes of that pleasant puppet-show which he mistakes for the world, with the rhetorical elegance and distinction, the verbal force and glow, the rhythmic beauty and propriety, of a rare poet; he models a group of flowers in wax as passionately and cunningly, and with as perfect an interest in the process and as lofty and august a faith in the result, as if he were carving the Venus of Milo, or scoring Beethoven’s ‘Fifth,’ or producing King Lear or the Ronde de Nuit. He is profoundly artificial, but he is simple and even |