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but has perhaps been touched by the one poet who in recent years has been accepted by a circle of élite readers as a master, and who is certainly the creator of a style -Leconte de Lisle. In real life a spirituel irony suffices to protect his heart; in his verse, if once and again a cry for escape from the turmoil of existence into the irrevocable peace, the great night and silence of death, forms itself upon his lips, for the most part they are closed with stoical compression against all utterance of personal feeling, while with an enforced calm he proceeds to make his imaginative studies of thoughts and things.

It is noted by Charles Baudelaire that upon the one side Gautier continued the great school of melancholy created by Chateaubriand, and upon the other side “he . introduced into poetry a new element, which may be named 'consolation by means of the arts.' From Gautier's latest poetry the melancholy has almost disappeared; the genius of art has subdued the demon of pain. Thus an escape was effected by him from la maladie du siècle. Gautier's nature was indeed one framed for a rich enjoyment of life, but such a nature is not out of the reach of a nameless enervating sadness. Gautier, however, possessed an amulet virtuous to repel the invasion of despondency. If happiness is nowhere else to be found, it is to be found unfailingly in the presence, and still more in the creation, of beauty. the world go its way, and the kings and the peoples strive, and the priests and philosophers wrangle, at least to make a perfect verse is to be out of time, master of all change, and free of every creed. Though Gautier's

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was a very positive imagination, there is something almost of the mystic's passion in this devotion to art. It includes the infinite and absolute of plastic perfection, of flawless workmanship, which, if endlessly pursued and never attained, leaves the heart as empty and yearning as was that of Lamartine in his religious musings. The combat with rebellious matter, the struggle to impose upon its shapeless anarchy the pure idea of the imagination, has the glory of a combat à outrance. To pursue an outline and never wrong its delicate, immortal beauty is a kind of religious service; to be the guardian of pure contour is to purchase to oneself a good degree. In the contemplation of a curve, as in the contemplation of a dogma, it is possible to find oneself at the last led up to an O altitudo!

Still this devotion to beauty, to beauty alone, or if not alone yet above all else, was a part of the movement of concentration. It was a kind of hedonist asceticism. A cloistered monk engaged in his round of devotions and mortifications is not more remote from the ideal of sane and complete manhood than was the cultured master of the school of art for art, who could isolate himself from the fears and hopes of his country in her hour of extreme peril to fuse his enamels and cut his cameos. It is certainly well, in a period from which great ideas and large ardours are absent that the aesthetic faculty should keep itself alive, even if not conscious of its highest functions, by the pursuit of beauty out of all relation to conscience, to religion, or the needs and aspirations of a people. And unquestionably by limiting his range an artist can more readily approach to a miniature perfection,

and can push certain qualities of his work to a higher degree of development. But the century succeeding the French Revolution, the century in which science rejoices as a young man to run a race, is not an age of Byzantine effeteness and sterility. Persons who do not receive an exquisite thrill from curious beauty and flawless workmanship have not a right to speak scornfully of these: things; but it is possible for one who does receive such exquisite excitement to refuse himself, for the sake of better, larger, wiser things to come, some of these moments of refined delight.

The shelves are. crowded with perfumes; I breathe the fragrance myself, and know it, and like it ; The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.

An artist who should fling himself abroad upon the great hopes and fears, the great strivings and sorrows, the great deeds and thoughts, of our century might indeed suffer as an artist; his work might come forth as faulty as that of the early Christian painters, with other and less engaging tokens of immaturity than their naïve innocence and childlike trustfulness; but his work, like theirs, might prove a prophecy; and if the name of art were denied to it, such work might yet be a wind in our lips, a light in our eyes, more precious for our needs than anything which in our time can be brought to complete and flawless form by the plastic imagination.

The counter-tendencies which a young poet meets in Paris of the Revolution, which contains within it the Paris of "art for art," are amusingly illustrated in a recent prose confession of æsthetic faith by M. Raoul

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Lafagette.* The young poet arrived from the provinces bearing letters of introduction to some great persons, among others to Eugène Pelletan and Théophile Gautier. On hearing of manuscript verses, the democratic deputy favoured his visitor with a résumé of his views on human progress, which reads like a chapter from the "Profession de Foi du XIXe Siècle." Why do you write in verse? No one cares for it now. It is little read, and not at all sold. It is a hieratic form destined to disappear. In the childhood of humanity verse had its raison d'être. . . The first songs are hymns, outbursts of terror or of enthusiasm. . . . But in our age of sceptical maturity and republican independence verse is a superannuated form. We prefer prose, which, by virtue of its freedom of movement, accords more truly with the instincts of democracy." Whereupon followed a demonstration of the same principles from the spectacle of external nature, in which the crystal is type of the strophe, and "the masterpiece which dominates this hierarchy"-woman

with her undulating grace, is the analogue of prose. M. Lafagette, enlightened but unconvinced, did not tear up his manuscripts, but carried them a few days afterwards, with a letter of introduction from George Sand, to the house of Gautier.

The exquisite jeweller of the "Émaux et Camées" received the young man with almost paternal kindness, but, when he had read the two pieces of verse submitted to him by the neophyte, spoke as follows:-"Your verses are forty years older than yourself. They are too old, therefore—that is to say, too young. Poets sang in this

"La Poésie: son Passé, son Présent, son Avenir" (1877). M. Lafagette's introduction to Gautier and Gautier's daughter is also described in verse in his "Chants d'un Montagnard.”

manner in 1830. Nowadays we desire a more compressed, more concrete, kind of poetry. Lamartine is a sublime bard, but his vague effusions are no longer to our taste. Musset is a great poet, but an exceedingly bad model. Read Hugo much, who is the true master. Read Leconte de Lisle and Théodore de Banville." "And

Théophile Gautier ?" timidly murmured the visitor. "And me too a little, if you please to do so,” replied Gautier, smiling. "You see," he went on," the arithmetic is in existence: we have not to invent it; we have only to learn it. One must learn to be at home in fugue and counterpoint, and render one's talent supple and limber by the gymnastic of words. Words have an individual and a relative value. They should be chosen before being placed in position. This word is a mere pebble, that a fine pearl or an amethyst. Do you read the dictionary? It is the most fruitful and interesting of books. In art the handicraft is almost everything. Inspiration-yes, inspiration is a very pretty thing, but a little banale; it is so universal. Every bourgeois is more or less affected by a sunrise or sunset. He has a certain measure of inspiration. The absolute distinction of the artist is not so much his capacity to feel nature as his power of rendering it. This power is a gift, but also a conquest. In genius there is as much of science as of instinct. Your verses are full of imagination and of sentiment, but they are deficient in composition. You are a poet, and must not abandon poetry. Only I advise you to make three or four thousand verses, and, before you publish anything, burn them."

It is impossible to refuse a certain tribute of admiration to a workman so loyal to his craft. One must needs sympathise with the ascetic of beauty as well as with the ascetic of holiness. Would it not be lamentable to see the author of the "Imitation" losing himself in a bustling philanthropy, or endeavouring, for the sake of wider culture, to acquire connoisseurship in the fine arts? And should we not have had cause to grieve if Gautier had taken to the politician's stump or the moralist's chair? When a man possesses a rare faculty, we like to see him jealously preserving it. It is good husbandry for the world to let a poet make verses, and to let a

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