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The Centenary Of Leconte De Lisle |
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Title: The Centenary Of Leconte De Lisle Author: Edmund Gosse [More Titles by Gosse] Many English lovers of French poetry would have been sorry, though none could have been surprised, if public opinion in France had been too much agitated by the stupendous events of the War to spare a thought for one of the greatest of modern poets on the occasion of his hundredth birthday. But it was not so; on the eighteenth of October, 1918, when the fighting had approached its culminating point, and when all the fortunes of the world seemed hanging in the balance, the serenity of French criticism found room, between the bulletins of battle, for a word of reminder that the author of Poèmes Antiques and Poèmes Barbares was born a century before in the tropic island of La Réunion. The recognition was not very copious, nor was it universally diffused, but in no circumstances would it have been either the one or the other. Leconte de Lisle has never been, and will never be, a "popular" writer. He appeals to a select group, a limited circle, which neither expands nor contracts. His fame has never been excessive, and it will never disappear. It is modest, reserved, and durable. He was commonly described as a Creole. His father, an army surgeon--exiled by the service to what used to be called the Ile Bourbon--was a pure Breton. Charles Marie René Leconte de Lisle, after several excursions to India, which left strong traces on his poetry, arrived still young in France, and ultimately settled in Paris. Thus he lived for half a century, in great simplicity and uniformity, surrounded by adoring friends, but little known to the public. In middle life he became a librarian at the Luxembourg; as old age was approaching, he found himself elected to succeed Victor Hugo at the French Academy. If he was not exactly poor, his means were strictly moderate; and the most unpleasant event of his whole life was the discovery, at the fall of the Empire, that, although his opinions were republican, he had been receiving a pension from the government of Napoleon III. Nothing could be more ridiculous than the outcry then raised against him; for he was a poet hidden in the light of thought, and no politician. It was an honour to any government, and no shame to the austerest poet, that modest public help should enable a man like Leconte de Lisle to exist without anxiety. There can hardly be said to have been any other event in this dignified and blameless career. There is a danger--but there is also a fascination--in the instinct which leads us, when we observe literature broadly, to find relations or parallelisms between independent and diverse personalities. In the most striking examples, however, where there has been no actual influence at work, these parallelisms are apt to be very misleading. Where it is impossible not to observe elements of likeness, as between Byron and Musset, we may take them to be actual, and no matters of chance. But the similarity, in certain aspects, between Alfred de Vigny and Thomas Hardy, between André Chénier and Keats, between Crabbe and Verhaeren, must be accidental, and is founded on a comparison between very limited portions of the work of each. Nevertheless, for purposes of illumination, it is sometimes useful--on what we may call the Lamarckian system--to see where the orbits of certain eminent writers of distinctive originality approach nearest to one another. It is admitted that Leconte de Lisle is pre-eminently gifted among the poets of France in certain clearly defined directions. His poems, which are marked by a concinnity of method which sometimes degenerates into monotony, are distinguished above all others by their haughty concentration of effort, by their purity of outline, and by their extreme precision in the use of definite imagery. They aim, with unflinching consistency, at a realization of beauty so abstract that the forms by which it is interpreted to the imagination are almost wholly sculpturesque. Is there an English poet of whom, at his best, the same language might be used? There is one, and only one, and that is Walter Savage Landor. It cannot but be stimulating to the reader to put side by side, let us say, the opening lines of The Hamadryad and of Khirón, or the dialogue of Niobé and that of Thrasymedes and Eunoë, and to see how closely related is the manner in which the English and the French poet approach their themes. The spirit of pagan beauty broods over Hypatie et Cyrille as it does over the mingled prose and verse of Pericles and Aspasia, and with the same religious desiderium. We shall not find another revelation of the cupuscular magnificence of the farthermost antiquity so striking as Landor's Gebir, unless we seek it in the Kaïn of Leconte de Lisle. But we should not drive this parallel too far. If the breadth and majesty of vision which draw these two poets together are notable, not less so are their divergencies. Landor, who so often appears to be on the point of uttering something magical which never gets past his lips, is one of the most unequal of writers. He ascends and descends, with disconcerting abruptness, from an exquisite inspiration to the darkest level of hardness. Leconte de Lisle, on the other hand, is the victim of no vicissitudes of style: he floats in the empyrean, borne up apparently without an effort at a uniform height, like his own Condor: Il dort dans l'air glacé, les ailes toutes grandes. Many readers--particularly those on whom the romantic heresy has laid its hands with the greatest violence--resent this Olympian imperturbability; and the charge has been frequently brought, and is still occasionally repeated, that Leconte de Lisle is lacking in sensibility, that he dares to be "impassible" in an age when every heart is worn, palpitating, on the sleeve of the impulsive lyrist. He was accused, as the idle world always loves to accuse the visionary, of isolating himself from his kind with a muttered odi profanum vulgus et arceo. Such an opinion is founded on the aspect of reserve which his vast legendary pictures suggest, and on the impersonal and severely objective attitude which he adopts with regard to history and nature. His poems breathe a disdain of life and of the resilience of human appetite (La Mort de Valmiki), a love of solitude (Le Désert), a determination to gaze on spectacles of horror without betraying nervous emotion (Le Massacre de Mona), which seem superhuman and almost inhuman. He was accused, in his dramas--which were perhaps the most wilful, the least spontaneous part of his work--of affecting a Greek frightfulness which outran the early Greeks themselves. Francisque Sarcey said that Leconte de Lisle, in his tragedy of Les Erinnyes, scratched the face of Æschylus, as though he did not find it bloody enough already. The subjects which Leconte de Lisle prefers are never of a sort to promote sentimentality or even sensibility. He writes of Druids moaning along the edge of hyperborean cliffs, of elephants marching in set column across hot brown stretches of sand, of the black panther crouched among the scarlet cactus-blossoms, of the polar bear lamenting among the rocks, of the Syrian sages whose beards drip with myrrh as they sit in council under the fig-tree of Naboth. He writes of humming-birds and of tigers, of Malay pirates and of the sapphire cup of Bhagavat, of immortal Zeus danced round by the young Oceanides, and of Brahma seeking the origin of things in the cascades of the Sacred River. These are not themes which lend themselves to personal effusion, or on which the poet can be expected to embroider any confessions of his egotism. If Leconte de Lisle chooses to be thus remote from common human interests--that is to say, from the emotions of our vulgar life to-day--his is the responsibility, and it is one which he has fully recognized. But that his genius was not wholly marmoreal, nor of an icy impassibility, the careful study of his works will amply assure us. It is strange that even very careful critics have been led to overlook the personal note in the poems of Leconte de Lisle: probably because the wail of self-pity is so piercing in most modern verse that it deadens the ear to the discreet murmur of the stoic poet's confession. Hence even Anatole France has been led to declare that the author of Poèmes Barbares has determined to be as obstinately absent from his work as God is from creation; and that he has never breathed a word about himself, his secret wishes, or his personal ideals. But what is such a passage as the following if not a revelation of the soul of the poet in its innermost veracity?
Leconte de Lisle is unsparing with the results of his erudition, and this probably confirms the popular notion of his remoteness. Here, however, returning for a moment to Landor, we may observe that he is never so close-packed and never so cryptic as the author of Chrysaor and Gunlaug. What Leconte de Lisle has to tell us about mysterious Oriental sages and mythical Scandinavian heroes may be unfamiliar to the reader, but is never rendered obscure by his mode of narration. Nothing could be less within our ordinary range of experience than the adventure of Le Barde de Temrah, who arrives at dawn from a palace of the Finns, in a chariot drawn by two white buffaloes; but Leconte de Lisle recounts it voluminously, in clear, loud language which leaves no sense of doubt on the listener's mind as to what exactly happened. His Indian studies became less precise in the Poèmes Barbares than they had been in the early Poèmes Antiques; perhaps under the stress of greater knowledge. But he had been from early youth personally acquainted with the Indian landscapes which he describes. With the ancient Sanscrit literature, I suppose he had mainly an acquaintance through translations, of which those by Burnouf may have inspired him most. Whether, if he had lived to read Professor Jacobi's proof that Valmiki was a historical character, and the author in its original form of the earliest and greatest epic of India, the Ramayana, Leconte de Lisle would have been annoyed to remember that he had treated Valmiki as a mythical person, symbolically devoured by white ants, it is impossible to say. Probably not, for he only chose these ancient instances to illustrate from the contemplative serenity of Brahmanism his own calm devotion to the eternal principle of beauty.
The harmony and sonorous fullness of the verse of Leconte de Lisle were noted from the first, even by those who had least sympathy with the subjects of it. He achieved the extreme--we may almost say the excessive--purity of his language by a tireless study of the Greeks and of the great French poets of the seventeenth century, with whom he had a remarkable sympathy at a time when they were generally in disfavour. His passion for the art of Racine may be compared with the close attention which Keats gave to the versification of Dryden. He greatly venerated the genius of Victor Hugo, who was perhaps the only contemporary poet of France who exercised any influence over the style of Leconte de Lisle. It is difficult to define in what that influence consisted; the two men had essentially as little resemblance as Reims Cathedral has to the Parthenon, Victor Hugo being as extravagantly Gothic as Leconte de Lisle was Attic. But the younger poet was undoubtedly fascinated by the tumultuous cadences of his more various, and, we must admit, more prodigious predecessor. They agreed, moreover, in appealing to the ear rather than to the eye. Verlaine has described Leconte de Lisle's insistence on the vocal harmonies of verse, and he adds: "When he recited his own poems, a lofty emotion seemed to vibrate through his whole noble figure, and his auditors were drawn to him by an irresistible sympathy." It must have been a wonderful experience to hear him, for instance, chant the iron terze rime of Le Jugement de Konor, or the voluptuous languor of Nourmahal. Much has been said about the sculpturesque character of Leconte de Lisle's poems. But a comparison of them to friezes of figures carved out of white marble scarcely does justice to their colour, though it may indicate the stability of their form. It would be more accurate to compare them to the shapes covered with thin ivory and ornamented with gold and jewels, in which the Greeks, and even Pheidias himself, delighted. The Poèmes Antiques are, in fact, chryselephantine. But Leconte de Lisle was a painter also, and perhaps the chief difference to be observed between the early compositions and the Poèmes Barbares consists in the pictorial abundance of the latter. His descriptions have the character of broadly-brushed cartoons of scenes which are usually exotic, as of some Puvis de Chavannes who had made a leisurely voyage in Orient seas. Leconte de Lisle floods his canvas with light, and his favourite colours are white and golden yellow; even his fiercest tragedies are luminous. India he sees not as prosaic travellers have seen it, but in a blaze of dazzling splendour:
The person of Leconte de Lisle is described to us as characteristic of his work. He was very handsome, with a haughty carriage of the head on a neck "as pure and as solid as a column of marble." A monocle, which never left his right eye, gave a modern touch to an aspect which might else have been too rigorously antique. A droll little pseudo-anecdote, set by Théodore de Banville in his inimitable amalgam of wit and fancy, illuminates the effect which Leconte de Lisle produced upon his contemporaries. I take it from that delicious volume, too little remembered to-day, the Camées Parisiens, of 1873: Leconte de Lisle was walking with Æschylus one day, in the ideal fatherland of tragedy, when, while he was conversing with the old hero of Salamis and of Platea, he suddenly observed that his companion was so bald that a tortoise might easily mistake his skull for a polished rock. Not wishing, therefore, to humiliate the titanic genius, and yet not able without regret to give up an ornament the indispensable beauty of which was obvious, he made up his mind to be totally bald in front, while retaining on the back of his head the silken and curly wealth of an Apollonian chevelure. It was perhaps in the course of these walks with Æschylus that Leconte de Lisle formed the habit of spelling Clytemnestre "Klytaimnestra." The austerities of his orthography attracted a great deal of attention, and cannot be said to have succeeded in remoulding French or spelling. People continue to write "Cain," although the poet insisted on "Kaïn," and even, in his sternest moments, on "Qaïn." He believed that his text gained picturesqueness, and even exactitude of impression, by those curious archaisms. They are, at least, characteristic of the movement of his mind, and the reader who is offended by them must have come to the reading with a determination to be displeased. His vocabulary is more difficult; and sometimes, it must be confessed, more questionable. He uses, without explanation or introduction, the most extraordinary terms. Ancient Roman emperors are said to have shown their largess by putting real pearls into the dishes which they set before their guests. This was generous; but the guest who broke his tooth upon a gift must have wished that the pearl had been more conventionally bestowed upon him. So the reader of Leconte de Lisle may be excused if he resents the sudden apparition of such strange words as "bobres," "bigaylles," and "pennbaz" in the text of this charming poet. In spite of these eccentricities, which are in fact quite superficial, and in spite of a suspicion of pedantry which occasionally holds the reader's attention at arm's length, there is no French poet of our day more worthy of the attention of a serious English student. Leconte de Lisle cultivated the art of poetry with the most strenuous dignity and impersonality. He had a great reverence for the French language, and not a little of the zeal of the classic writers of the seventeenth century who aimed at the technical perfection of literature. He is lucid and direct almost beyond parallel. In England, among those who approach French literature with more enthusiasm than judgment, there is a tendency to plunge at once into what is fashionable for the moment on the Boulevard Saint Michel. We have seen British girls and boys affecting to appreciate Verlaine, and even Mallarmé, without having the smallest acquaintance with Racine or Alfred de Vigny. It is pure snobisme to pretend to admire Prose pour Des Esseintes when you are unable to construe Montaigne. For all such foreign folly, the rigorous versification, the pure and lucid language, and the luminous fancy of Leconte de Lisle may be recommended as a medicine. [The end] GO TO TOP OF SCREEN |