French poetry

“ First, fairy tales—then ballads of adventure, love, and war—then a new tinge of foreign thought and feeling, generally French, as it was with the English nation in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries—then elegiac and reflective poetry—then classic art begins to influence our ripening youth, as it did the youth of our nation in the sixteenth century, and delight in dramatic poetry follows as a natural consequence—and last, but not least, as the fruit of all these changes, a vigorous and matured prose. For indeed, as elocution is the highest melody, so is true prose the highest poetry. ”

“ It is a question whether, if they foresaw they were about to make the discovery, at the very point of projection as it were, they would not turn their backs upon it, and leave it to shift for itself; or obstinately refuse to take the last step, or give up the pursuit, in mere dread and nervous apprehension lest they should not succeed. Poetry is also their undeniable element; for the essence of poetry is will and passion, ‘and it alone is highly fantastical.’ French poetry is verbiage or dry detail. ”

“ The merely scholarly poet, the poet of a hothouse refinement, the poet who went to work at the craftsmanship of poetry as if he were carving arabesques in verse, could not have the imaginative insight into the mind and heart of the French-Canadian peasant and the sympathy with him that would make it possible for such a poet, with kindly, playful humor, to express the elemental feelings and thoughts—the real humanity—of the habitant. ”

“ They do not seem made for it, he says. This admirable critic knew, indeed, the radical inadequacy of French poetry. It is to English poetry that he resorts in order to find his term of comparison, and to award the praise which to French poetry he refuses. “Since you are fond of the poets,” he writes to a friend, “I should like to see you read and look for poets in another language, in English for instance. ”

“ The French suffer from the excessive development of the logical faculty in them. This same definite quality in the French language, whilst delighting both my ear and my intelligence, rightly or wrongly prevents French poetry from making any appeal to me; it is too bright and sparkling, there is no mystery possible in so clear-cut a medium, added to which, every syllable in French having an equal value, no rhythm is possible, and French poetry has to rely on rhyme alone. ”

“ Poets are in general bad prose-writers, because their images, though fine in themselves, are not to the purpose, and do not carry on the argument. The French poetry wants the forms of the imagination. It is didactic more than dramatic. And some of our own poetry, which has been most admired, is only poetry in the rhyme, and in the studied use of poetic diction. ”

“ But there is more than the subject in our "Heroic Ballads" or our "Romances of the Round Table": there is the sentiment of the subject; and nothing, to tell the truth, is lacking to them but the sentiment of form and art. I cannot devote less than three lectures to the French poetry of the Middle Ages. ”

“ They bear the impress of a personal quality, a profound+ expressiveness, what the French call intimité, by which is meant some subtler sense of originality—the seal on a man's work of what is most inward and peculiar in his moods, and manner of apprehension: it is what we call expression, carried to its highest intensity of degree. ”

“ Revolution in Poetry.—The strict limit which the French dramatists marked out with regard to unity of action, time and place, construction of style, verse and sentence, selection of words and ideas, was a school as important as that of counterpoint and fugue in the development of modern music or that of the Gorgianic figures in Greek oratory. ”

“ But real criticism immediately suggests that prose has its place in painting as in literature. In literature we do not insist even that the poets be poetic. Poetic is not the epithet that would be applied, for instance, to French classic verse or the English verse of the eighteenth century, compared with the poetry, French or English, which we mean when we speak of poetry. ”

“ Take for example, the Elizabethan love-lyric. Here is a single human passion, expressing itself in the moods and lyric forms of one brief generation of our literature. Yet what variety of personal accent, what kaleidoscopic shiftings of mind and imagination, what range of lyric beauty! Or take the passion for the wider interests of Humanity, expressed in the lyrics of Schiller and Burns, running deep and turbid through Revolutionary and Romantic verse, and still coloring—perhaps now more strongly than ever—the stream of twentieth-century poetry. ”

“ Almost all the arts have in their turns experienced that disgust and love of change which is natural to mankind. But I don't know that any one of them has felt it more than Poetry; which in some ages has been exalted to a triumphal heighth, in others neglected, discouraged and despised. About sixty years ago, under the administration of one of the greatest geniuses that ever France produced, poetry found itself amongst us at its highest pitch of glory. Those who cultivated the muses were regarded with particular favour: this art was the road to fortune and dignified stations. ”

“ What constitutes the charm—partly a perilous charm—of French literature is, before all else, its incomparable clearness, its precision, its neatness, its point; then, added to this, its lightness of touch, its sureness of aim; its vivacity, sparkle, life; its inexhaustible gayety; its impulsion toward wit,—impulsion so strong as often to land it in mockery; the sense of release that it breathes and inspires; its freedom from prick to the conscience; its exquisite study and choice of effect; its deference paid to decorum,—decorum, we mean, in taste, as distinguished from morals ”

“ So that the most rapt and imaginative of men, if artists, utilize the whole realm of knowledge, and diffuse it, and perpetuate it in artistic forms. But real poets are rare, even if there are many who glory in the jingle of language and the structure of rhyme. Poetry, to live, must have a soul, and it must combine rare things,—art, music, genius, original thought, wisdom made still richer by learning, and, above all, a power of appealing to inner sentiments, which all feel, yet are reluctant to express. ”

“ Of their absolute genuineness there can be no question. They have all the internal evidence in their construction and language, the simplicity and abruptness of thought, the imperfection of utterance combined with untaught eloquence and strength, the occasional vulgarity by the side of an equally great delicacy, the simple and powerful melody, and all the characteristics of popular poetry, which are as unmistakable as the perfumes of the flowers of the field. ”

“ I have attempted to symbol the course of a Poet's mind from a state wherein thought is disordered, barren and uncultivated, to that which is ordered and swayed by the true Spirit of Poetry, and holds its perfect creed. ”

“ The poets of the eighteenth century derived their conception of the nature of poetry from their own practice. As their own poetry, their own language, was not a natural product, but the result of labour and the observance of certain rules respecting elegance of expression, choice of similes, and employment of mythology, they naturally believed that language and thought originated independently of each other. ”

“ It is hardly too much to say that in modern English literature there are but two poems which fulfill the conditions of the ancient ballads in their simplicity, directness, and originality of language, their power upon the mind and heart through the ear, and the indefinable flavor of primitive emotion, and those very different in style, subject, and form of expression. ”

“ What was the form of verse but an exotic curiously trained and tended, in which an artificial sentiment imported from Italy gave perfume and colour to the flower?
And yet, in this as in other forms, the poetry of the time, which possesses an enduring vitality, was not commonly caught out of the air, but—however large the conventional element in it may have been—was born of the union of heart and imagination; in it real feelings and real experience, submitting to the poetical fashions of the day, were raised to an ideal expression. ”

“ Looking at poetry, then, in its abstract and absolute character, looking at what we may call the spirit of poetry as it exists, not incarnated in this or that particular composition, but as a genial power which enlightens the intellect and the heart both of the poet himself and of those who listen to his strains; looking at poetry under this point of view, I ask, putting the question in the form of a bold, brief, and strong antithesis, Does man make poetry, or does poetry make man? Is the human mind the original source to which poetry may be traced as to its fountainhead? ”

“ But as one inspired by a heaven-born Muse, he echoes the chorus of the Angelic Song, when on the utterance of the first fiat the Morning Stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy. Hence we argue, that Poetry is not only prior to prose, but that language, its intellectual and emotional embodiment, is heaven-conceived, and heaven-born. ”

“ Let Poetry then pass, if it will, into music and rhyme. That is the form which itself puts on. We do not enclose watches in wooden, but in crystal cases, and rhyme is the transparent frame that allows almost the pure architecture of thought to become visible to the mental eye. Substance is much, but so are mode and form much. The poet, like a delighted boy, brings you heaps of rainbow bubbles, opaline, air-borne, spherical as the world, instead of a few drops of soap and water. ”

“ In France as in other countries the disturbance in religious thought may undoubtedly claim the glory of having repaired this disgrace of the vulgar tongue, and of having fitted and taught it to express whatever thoughts the theologian, the historian, the philosopher, the politician and the savant had occasion to utter. But the use of prose as a vehicle for lighter themes was more continuous with the literature that preceded, and serves as a natural transition from poetry and the drama to history and science. ”

“ And while the language of the Muses thus defines the poet's aim, when awakened from a rude shepherd-life to the devout service of inspired song, it implies, rather than asserts, a censure of the kinds of poetry which admit of an easier and freer range of fancy. ”

“ Under the dictation of none but her own genius, she had as a child selected the heroic masterpieces of the early French tragedians, as the mouth-piece of her genius, and in an age when Romanticism, extravagance, and rhodomontade were at their height, the young priestess stepped forth, and lit the sacred fire on altars grown dim and cold, bringing Frenchmen's hearts back to the worship of what is truest and best in their country's literature. ”

“ Poetic form rouses the whole being to sympathetic action by its rhythm; it delights the ear by its melodious tone; the logic of its coherent harmonic structure satisfies the mind; its word-images stimulate the imagination by their power of evocation. So poetry adds to fact its intellectual worth and all the emotional value inhering in it. ”

“ If we are right in defining art as the manifestation of the human spirit to man by man in beautiful form, poetry, more incontestably than any other art, fulfils this definition and enables us to gauge its accuracy. For words are the spirit, manifested to itself in symbols with no sensual alloy. Poetry is therefore the presentation, through words, of life and all that life implies. Perception, emotion, thought, action, find in descriptive, lyrical, reflective, dramatic, and epical poetry their immediate apocalypse. ”

“ But the art par excellence, that which surpasses all others, because it is incomparably the most expressive, is poetry.
Speech is the instrument of poetry; poetry fashions it to its use, and idealizes it, in order to make it express ideal beauty.{176} Poetry gives to it the charm and power of measure; it makes of it something intermediary between the ordinary voice and music, something at once material and immaterial, finite, clear, and precise, like contours and forms the most definite, living and animated like color, pathetic and infinite like sound. ”

“ The ten years from 1580 to 1590 present a set of critical essays, giving a picture of English poetry of which, though there are gleams of a better hope, and praise is specially bestowed on a "new poet," the general character is feebleness, fantastic absurdity, affectation and bad taste. Force, and passion, and simple truth, and powerful thoughts of the world and man, are rare; and poetical reformers appear maundering about miserable attempts at English hexameters and sapphics. ”

“ To give the body of the time the form and pressure of individual feeling, of individual artistic mastery of the language of one's race and epoch;—this, no less than the other, is the task and the opportunity of the lyric poet. ”

“ But in spite of this discredit, which was more of a personal literary quarrel than a critical attack upon the quality of the poetry itself, its value was at once instinctively recognized as a new and original revelation, as an appeal to sensibilities in human nature which had been stifled by the narrow and dry reasoning of English and Continental poetry at the time, and as a breath from the wide air of nature itself. ”

“ Consequently if we take a survey of the various channels through which the genius of poetry has been accustomed to diffuse itself, it will be found, that, during this half century, every province had its cultivators; that poems epic and dramatic, historic and didactic, lyric and romantic, that satires, pastorals, and sonnets, songs, madrigals, and epigrams, together with a multitude of translations, brightened and embellished its progress. ”