Le Roman de Louis XL Par Paul Fort. (Le Mercure
de France, Paris.)—M. Paul Fort is a young man of excellent wit and of indubitable talent. But he is possessed by a thecny, which threatens to ruin his best effects. To quote his own confession, be has aimed "at a style which can pass, according to the emotion, from prose to verse and from verse to prose." But he presents his verse as prose, and allows it to follow the elisions of the language. Worse still, his narrative is often expressed in alexandrines. Now, the first result of this mixed method, which, so far as we can see, has no msthetic value, is that the reader is driven to look for the alexandrines carefully embedded in the solid prose. Of course, this search for needles in a haystack is wearisome, and we can wish M. Paul Fort no better fortune than that he should renounce his unprofitable theory. For in bis Louis IL he has completely realised his ambition " to write a book of good humour." His own phrase precisely de- scribes the book. It is good-humoured both in its ironic appre- ciation of the King, and in the frank criticism, wantonly interspersed, of his own contemporaries. Moreover, it is composed without a plan, and without any regard to such troublesome scruples as probability. The author discourses freely with his hero, while his friends expound their views to the Etats Generaux. But the book is never dull, never pedantic, never the slave of history, and if it tells us as much of M. Paul Fort as of Louis XI., the reader has no cause to grumble, since, in spite of the half-concealed alexandrines, the good humour never flags.
Previous page
