The Last of the Great Poets of France

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB.

AT the burial of Leconte de Lisle in the Paris cemetery of Montparnasse, on Saturday, July 21 of this year, French letters seemed to be mourning the century’s end. The poet had died four days before, in the house of Meyerbeer’s niece, for whose gracefully feminine hook (La Yoie Douloureuse, signed “Jean Dornis ”) he had written his last words to the world of letters in a preface full of his line Olympian disdain for the romance of realism. The names of those who walked in procession to do him a last honor, or who had heaped his funeral car with flowers, reached from the veteran poet and politician Auguste Vacquerie, who was of the household of Victor Hugo, and Judith Gautier, to the daintiest of the new generation, like Stephen Liégeard and Paul Hervieu. President Casimir-Perier trampled once more on the protocole which prescribes what the head of the French state shall and shall not do ceremonially, by sending his own special representative to this non-offieial funeral train. The Minister of Public Instruction (M. Leygues, who is also a “ young" poet) came forward to make one of the customary discourses at the tomb, “ in the name of the government.” In a happy epigram he gave the dead man’s place in French literature : “ Scarcely known to his contemporaries, he dies immortal.”

In the name of the French Academy, where eight years before Leconte de Lisle had taken the seat, of Victor Hugo, his champion and friend, M. Gaston Boissier uttered the melancholy of a passing age : “Before its end, the century sees disappearing, one after the other, all those who made its glory. Shall they be worthily replaced ? and what is in store for us in the century which is soon to begin ? Who can say ? ”

Yet more pronounced in the same sense was the third brief panegyric, by M. de Heredia, the latest successful French poet, though not the youngest either in matter or in form : “ France has lost the last of her great poets. None shall take up the sceptre which he received from the failing hands of Victor Hugo.”

Perhaps only the Olympians become immortal in the after-life of literary fame. Certainly, nothing could have been more remote from the doings of the every-day world than the career of Leconte de Lisle. Born and reared in an island of the southern seas, there was no creole softness of human sympathy manifest in him. Once only has he confided something of himself to his hewn and chiseled cyclopeau verse. It is, very briefly, that one whom he had seen passing down the mountain side in the sweet mornings of his own youth —

now lies sleeping beneath the wild grass that grows along the arid sands by the sea, far away at La Réunion.

A lifetime in Paris had not destroyed this charm of early dreams that came in a land where no great city was, and few dwellers to break outwardly the solitude which resounded interiorly with the mighty echoes of Homer. Those who can appreciate, to their own satisfaction, the qualities of a poet only when they can label them diversely make out Leconte de Lisle at once a pessimist and a Buddhist. But remembering his enchanted youth and the rude independence of character he had inherited from his Breton ancestors, it is not necessary to seek for names before understanding the threefold quality of his work.

His youth was scarcely over when he was first confronted with the great world. Sainte-Beuve, to whom he had a favorable introduction, invited him to dine, and recite some of his verses before two of the literary celebrities of the day, now utterly forgotten. One of these, an old man forgetful of his cue, surprised the young poet, who had not yet published a line, by greeting him effusively, —* “ Happy to press the hand that has written such beautiful things ! ” In spite of his revolt at such manifest insincerity, Leconte do Lisle went through his part, and, with the dessert, recited his first, and, as time has proved, his most famous piece, “ Midi, roi des étés épandu sur la plaine ! ”

The noonday splendor of snch verse at least won the sincere admiration of the great critic, and Sainte-Beuve’s Causerie of the next Monday was given over to the new poet. The praise passed unheeded by a generation that was everywhere drunk with the revolutionary wine of 1848.

“On what did you live, master,” asked a disciple, when the poet, after many years of waiting, had become a chef d’école, “ between your twentieth and fortieth year ? ”

“ On privations and Greek roots,” was the grim reply.

It should, perhaps, be noted that, in these later years of comparative fame, Leconte de Lisle could never hear without a quiver of revulsion that first piece, which even young ladies had now learned to recite as a compliment to his presence. The climax was reached when Alexandre Dumas fils, who had been appointed to receive him into the French Academy, found nothing better in his work wherewith to adorn the solemn discourse of reception.

From disappointment and grinding poverty, and a sad irony that often goes along with such timidity as made the poet almost fiercely haughty at first approach, came the pessimism which astonishes in so uneventful a life.

This disposition, as his verso had but just recounted, arises in the spirit of the man who, “ held by weariness, turns pensive back toward the forgotten days.” And the Buddhism, if such it be, can spring only from the yet earlier days, when life and death and all things that do but seem were contemplated in the solitude and under the sun of the tropics, where the universal light makes the individual to pale and fade.

But it must have been that early and almost exclusive reading of Homer which gave to Leconte de Lisle’s verse its savagely classical character. He remitted never an iota in the strictest rules of French versification, and the resonant roll of his alexandrines would have pleased the severest classicist of them all. “ Marmorean verse ” was his own special praise of what he admired in Victor Hugo, whose romanticism was not carried into the form of his best lines. Leconte de Lisle could not endure the fantastic meddling of the younger school with French prosody. Yet his own language had an Oriental richness under all its Greek emphasis ; and Theodore de Banville said truly that “ he forged gold in his workshop.”

Fortune and popular fame could never come to such a poet. But something better happened to him. A choice circle of disciples gathered round him in the seventies, and from them came the last renaissance of poetry in France, Three of them are already consecrated by the Academy, — François Coppée, Sully-Prudhomme, and De Heredia. Catulle Mendès and Verlaine were of the number. There were yet others who were not poets, such as Anatole France, who, with Alexandre Dumas pere and Leconte de Lisle, once perpetrated a — Dictionnaire de Cuisine ! and two years ago refused, lovingly, to fight a duel with the fiery old poet. All these were Parnassiens it is their master who has died.