BOOKS.
FRENCH POETRY.*
Nosufficiently complete anthology of French verse has ever been published in England. Two volumes, Professor Saintsbury's French Lyrics and The Oxford Book of French Verse, have attained a wide popularity; but both these examples, for all their undeniable charm, are inadequate and lacking in that catholicity of taste which is as exclusive as it is comprehensive. Professor Saintsbury, for instance, excludes all sonnets from his collection "because the number and excellence of them in French is so great as to make selection difficult, and because they are, at least in some persons' opinions, not properly lyrics." It may be thought pedantic to refer to Professor Saintsbury's grammar, but it would show a lack of appre- ciation if we did not remark upon his ingenuousness, more especially as be continues : "I have admitted no pieces exclu- sively composed of Alexandrines, except a very few arranged in quatrains and tercets ; arrangements which are regarded as lyrical in every language." We confess that our own mind is not flexible enough to reconcile the opposed principles of these two statements ; and it seems to us a parely arbitrary choice which selects Gautier's La Chimera and excludes Ronsard's sonnet " Quand vous serez bien vieille, an soir, a la chandelle." Mr. St. John Lucas, in The Oxford Book of French Verse, did not limit himself to lyrical pieces; his book was planned on a larger scale; but he has only given us a. single specimen of thirteenth-century verse, an anonymous pastourelle, which shows traces of Provençal influence. The great names of l'cfcole vovencalisante, Conon de Bethune, Chrestien de Troyes, Thibaut de Champagne, Gace Brill& and Gui Conci, Mr. Lucas only mentions in his introduction; and yet we may say of their work what the late Mr. A. J. Butler said of the Guyenne and Languedoc poetry, that it possesses "a richness of melody and a variety of rhythm such as perhaps have never since been surpassed."
La Lyre &Amour, an anthology of French love poems, selected and annotated by Mr. C. B. Lewis, though it has, of course, an independent aim, is intended rather to supplement than to rival earlier collections. At least it is in this sense that we understand Mr. Lewis when he says : " I have no excuse for adding one more to the many anthologies of French verse unless, perhaps, it be the inherent beauty of the poems, some of which even nowadays are all too little known in England." Naturally Mr. Lewis has not been able to avoid including in his volume many poems which have become the commonplaces of anthologists ; at the same time his instinct for what is fine, coupled with, but not vitiated by, his pre- ference for what is unfamiliar, has enabled him to make a very charming and interesting selection. He, too, has omitted Ronsard's wonderful sonnet, which is certainly one of the most exquisite love poems that have ever been written ; and, on the other hand, he has included Hugo's Guitars, which is scarcely a love poem at all; we can only use the term here in the same sense as we might use it to describe Rossetti's Sister Helen. The difficulties of choice, however, have been increased by the narrow limits of Mr. Lewis's volume, and we need not dwell on them. We are grateful to him for having included examples from the work of the thirteenth-century Provençal school in France. The work of this school has not usually been treated as it deserves, and even Mr. Lewis speaks of " the fetters of Provençal conventions." We refuse absolutely to acquiesce in this verdict. If poetry is to be rejected when it is conventional in form and in matter, and for no other reason, we should have to reject our own Tudor sonneteers, including Shakespeare, and remove one of the most gorgeous pages in English poetry. It is not because poetry follows a rigid and formal convention, or because its matter reflects the con- ventions of a particular age, that we should reject it. The theme of all great poetry is drawn from the three great com- monplaces of our existence—love, separation, and death. To this extent form and matter are alike merely the vessels ; the vital qualities are the personal emotion, the personal ex- perience, whether actual or subjective, which they contain and reveal; or, to put it in another way, love, death, and separation may seem to us the mere commonplaces of existence until • Le Lyra irk/were as Anthology of Wench Lose Poem. Selected and annotated by C. B. Lewis, I.-ea-L. London : Chatto and Windns. [5a net.] or they touch us personally, and that moment the individual becomes the protagonist of humanity; he has realized some- thing which had remained for him until then an abstraction. We might say that the interest all imaginative art compels in us derives its force from the fact that, even when everything else is known and appreciated by us, there remains the incal- culable element in each individual character, and this is a principle which we can apply to the slightest lyric as well as to the greatest dramatic or epic poems. It is because the lyrical poetry of resole provenpalisante survives this test, because each song of the crusades differs in some subtle way from all the others, because even a passion expressed through the convention of I' amour courtois has its own individuality that this poetry survives for us. It is when we turn from the lyrical poetry of the thirteenth to that of the seven- teenth century, from instinct to intellect, that the incalculable element vanishes from our sight, and with it our interest. But we must remember that, though the lyrical poetry of the classical age in France was poor, the poetic genius of the French was expressing itself through another form, and we must seek for it in Racine—a consummate master in the psychology of love—in such complete expressions as Andromache, .Phicire, and Athalie, or in such lines as " Dana des ruisseaux de sang Troia ardente pion& "I
" La rive an loin emit blanchissante d'ecurae " ; " C'est Venus tout (artier° h sa proie attaches."
Perhaps it is in such clear and perfect lines, so admirable in their simplicity and force, that the final complete expression of the French genius is to be found. We do not wish, how- ever, to be numbered among those who find a "lyrical deficiency" in French poetry, whether they ascribe it to the national character or to an " iambic tendency." We should not commit ourselves further than to say that perhaps the ideal of French poetry has been to make language definitely expressive, while with us the ideal has been to make it indefinitely suggestive. Such distinctions are, however, nearly always artificial. To have shown us some of the per- manent and universal qualities in French poetry is Mr. Lewis's claim upon our gratitude. We might express a hope that his work has been as pleasant and as profitable to himself as to us.
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