BOOKS.

SULLY PRUDHOMME.*

FRENCH verse is undoubtedly alien to English ears, perhaps from some physical diversity of testhetic sense, as of historical association which has apparently increased since Lamartine, Victor Hugo, and Musset forced a hearing from the world. They belong to a past dimmed by the gloom of national disaster, and it is time that we should recognise in Sully Prudhomme's poetry of the present, the skill of language, the scientific thought, hereditary in the France of Descartes and of Voltaire, while in direct spiritual and poetical ancestry the poet can claim descent from Pascal and Andr4 Chenier. The first of living French poets, his song is in the key of Mr. M. Arnold, but, as we think, tenderer, more sincere, and wider in its reach. He is not con- tent to suggest the problems that are most urgent in our conduct of the larger life ; he faces them with the courage of one who leads a forlorn but undying hope in the siege of many-towered Truth. He recognises, but escapes from, the pessimism which saturates modern thought. and of which the note was sounded in literature by Werther, Rene, and Manfred, and since elaborated in full chord by so many lesser heroes. His sense of solitude in the evolution of forces outside himself, is deeper than theirs by all the century which seems to have cost us so many of the ideals on which we had relied.

M. Sully Prudhomme, in his prose work on "Expression in the Fine Arts," and in his elaborate preface to the translation of the first book of De Natura Rerun, has written what are probably the most brilliant essays of philosophic thought which modern France has produced, essays that justify his right to teach in poetry the reconciliation of material fact and conscious aspiration, which is the object of his endeavour. To analyse the internal not less than the outward experiences of man; to seize on their relations in all the phases of life as in the historical sequence of philosophies and creeds ; to link art and the material being of man ; to find noble poetry in the prismatic changes of the simplest human life ; to unify man and his environment, of which he is the only measure conceivable to our consciousness, with rare analysis and perfection of poetry,—is M. Sully Prudhomme's title to the love and praise of his fellow-thinkers, if not to the applause of the street. His genius and training, perhaps, tend to a too logical analysis, but his verse so abounds in imagery, and his rhythm is so perfected, that by every right he is singer ; and science but strengthens his flight into the tether he loves. Few poets have so deeply probed, and with so fine an instrument, the tragedy of our race, though not its individual tragedies. While it attains more physical comfort, it appears to suffer as never before by selfish egotism and blindness to the lights by which our fathers found their way. The poet's effort to escape the tyranny of laws beyond his grasp, and to stay the strife of man and circumstance, is perhaps all the finer because he has no ark of dogma in the deluge of cosmic forces. There is a religion, the mother of all creeds, the religion which confesses a power from which man would sometimes hide, but cannot conjure. In his keen consciousness of it, and his sensitiveness to the cry of those who are orphaned of the divine Father, M. Sully Prudhomme is the most modern of those whose office it is to make music alike for the intellect as for the senses.

He was born in 1839, and early lost his father ; and his mother's health was too feeble to admit of her largely influencing his youth, except by her strongly religious impressions, which have at all times remained sacred to him, even since he has lost his early enthusiasm for Christian dogma. He went to school while still a child, and suffered so much from isolation and repression, that sadness became the habit of his thought. He was brilliantly successful in classics ; but at fifteen he elected mathematics rather than literature for his course of study in preparation for the Ecole Polytechnique. For three years and a half he devoted himself to science, and always ranked among the first of his class, in company with M. Carnot, his con- temporary. An ailment of the eyes checked his study, but he took his degree in both science and classics. At college he had made a. friend in the son of M. Schneider, the head of " the great firm at Creusot, and he accepted a place in its office, where he eagerly studied mechanics. But the commercial side • Bully Prudhomme : Ouvree. Paris : A. Lemerre, of business did not please him, and he returned to Paris to study law in a notary's office. Whatever his work, however, the poet wrote poetry. He joined a society of rising young men, and made friends with Gambetta ; but what is infinitely more im- portant, he read some of his verses to his comrades, and dis- covered his gift of song. The first volume, Stances et Po6meP, earned Sainte-Beuve's admiration, and at twenty-five Sally Prudhomme produced some of his loveliest sonnets. His finished and tender lyric, "Le Vase Brise," became at once so popular, that it partly obscured the more serious poems which were in the same volume. Familiar as it is, we give a as an example of slight fancy, expressing pain from which many have suffered, and of the perfected linguistic form which is seldom wanting to whatever height, and under whatever stress of thought the master attained in his longer poems :—

" Le vase oil meurt cette verveine Dun coup d'eventail frit fele ; Le coup dut eflieurer peine : Aucim bruit ne l's revel& Mais la legere meurtrissure, Mordant is mistal cheque jour, D'une marche invisible et sfire En a fait lentement le tour.

Son eau fraiche a fui goutte a goutte.

Le sue des fleurs s'est epuise ; Personne encore ne s'en doute ; N'y touches pas, il eat brise.

Souvent anssi la main qu'on aime Effleurant le cceur, le meurtrit ; Pais le co3ur se fend de lui meme, La flour de son amour pent; Tonjours intact aux yeux du monde, 11 sent crottre et pleurer tout bas Sa blessure fine et profonde ; 11 eat brise, n'y touches pas."

Few of us appreciate the finish to which French writers had brought the art of versification before the decadente school ravaged the fair vineyard, and called their license freedom.. In a small treatise published this year, M. Sully Prudhomme expounds the real source and end of rhythm and rhyme as based on purely physical laws. It might be a chapter in his greater work on "Expression in Fine Art," a careful study of which is necessary to full appreciation of his aesthetic- standards. The emission of the breath, the quickening of utterance under emotion, the laws of proportionate numbtr which govern vibration through the senses, excite our percep- tion of far-reaching order. Centuries of elaboration have adapted French rhythm to French ears. We are not judges of it, except to feel its exact proportions and the repose gained by its simpler accents,—repose, which is the essential end of art, and art which is none the less noble because it more- easily satisfies the sensuous memory, and because its surprises are ordered as are the lines of a French rather than of an. English garden. M. Sully Prudhomme claims for his poetry that it can treat of all human interests. He holds with Pascal that he who knows most loves best, and therefore sings best.. In one of his early poems he says of the modern poet :—

" Sea chants pour matiere, N'ont-ils pas la science aux severes beautes, Touts l'histoire humaine et In nature entiere ?"

All attracts him :— " Le vrai par sea incurs, Pinconnu par sea voiles."

Science and art equally beckon him on to the ideal which haunts him.

He has himself partly lifted the veil of his early love for a girl who withdrew from her engagement to him, in the group of poems entitled " Jeunes Mlles," touched with delicate passion and sincere intensity, worthy of Mrs. Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese. "Le meilleur moment des amours" is, he proclaims, the

" heure de In tendresse exquise Ofi lea respects sent des avenx."

There is the brevity of bitter regret in the lines which tell how the vision of his future wife was lost to him :— " Un jour, male je sais trop cc qua reprenve en wilts-, cm u In voir Bur mon chemin, Et j'ai dit, 'C'est bien Tons.' Je me trompais Bans donte, Car elle a retire sa main.

Depuis lore je me tais. . ."

The haunting sweetness of his first passion echoes through- out the five volumes of M. Sully Prudhomme's poetry, not as a grief, but as the dominant note of a self-sacrificing life. Only in one or two sonnets does he touch on the lower influences of women., and let us hasten to say that he is pure in imagination, in purpose, and in expression, as ever Wordsworth was.

In diction he uses no tricks of alliteration; words are to him rather symbolic than expressive of particular sounds; but he is keenly alive to the nobleness that words possess by association. It is difficult to overestimate the ease and finish of his style.

His has the good sense and clearness of Boileau's rule; and his rhymes, if they are not a perpetual surprise, never influence his exactness of thought. He writes of the latest discoveries in biology and mechanics with scientific accuracy, yet in noble words, illustrated in every line by an imagination fed on truth.

While he was still attached to the Creuzot factory, he began his versified translation of the first book of Lucretius. The treatise prefixed explains the poet's mind, and it accounts for his not continuing his task. It attests his analytic power, as does his preface to his fine poem, "La Justice," and his essay on aasthetic science. The more salient of its points is that man must remain the measure of the beauty he conceives. To think adequately of the poet, his prose should be studied ; and it will go far to justify that reading of his own emotions into his environment, which has been, called the pathetic fallacy. In philosophy he inclines to Kant as his master ; but as a poet he cannot content himself with the Deity offered by Kant :—

" Comme avec ace image on console nu enfant."

In him, as he says of Pascal, his faith is-

" qu'une agonie etrange,

On croirait voir lutter Jacob avec son ange.'

Meantime, M. Sully Prudhomme has given his great poetic gift to the reconciliation of that modern mental struggle in- duced by the pressure of natural forces and recognition of the still supreme human consciousness. He seeks for the concord of fact and aspiration. He beats his wings against human limitations, but he refuses religions dogma ; yet his is not despairing complaint, and it may be that a nobler, certainly a more tragic intensity, rings in his poetry than could be attained by one who does not "beat his music out." He passes by pessimism in the concluding lines of "Lea Destins," published in 1878 :—

" Ne mesurant jamais sur ma fortune infime, Ni le bien, ni le mat dans mon etroit sentier,

J'irai mime, et je voue, atome dans rabime, Mon humble part de force a ton chef d'ceuvre entier."

We cannot pause to praise the many sonnets, probably the best in a language which is so well trained to chiselled thought and exact prosody. We pass by " Vaines Tendresses," grace- ful but enduring as the lace-work of the Taj Mahal, and the " Epreuves " of Doubt and Love and Dream and Action which are at the threshold of a man's career. In his verses written before the war of 1870, there is sometimes an over-strain of sentiment, as in the "Rendezvous," musical as it is. The pain of solitude has often in it a tinge of sick self-love ; but the disaster of that year roused in him a more serious effort to confront the problems of life. Notwithstanding delicate health, M. Sully Prudhomme served with distinction as a Mobile during the siege of Paris. He manfully accepted the lesson, and sums up the claims of Fatherland with a faith that is not brag :—

" La patrie impose et n'offre pas sea nceuds ;

Elle eat la terre en nous malgre nous incarnee Par l'immemorial et severe hymenee, D'une race et d'un champ qui se sont faits tons deux."

He hopes that his nation, even in its suffering, is still in the forefront of human advance :—

" Comme eat sorti le ble, des broussailles epaisses, Comme l'hom me eat sorti du combat des especes, Le supreme cite se petrie dans ton sang."

The " Ecuries d'Augias " has the same note of ideal duty. It is a noble rendering of the Greek myth, with somewhat of modern meaning ; but we can but quote one or two lines as examples of concise description. What is finer than the rush from his lair of "Le ganglier lance comme un roeher qui mule" ?

or the frightened bat, which

"Sons le toit en criant trace de noire eclairs " ?

If only by this poem, M. Sully Prudhomme gains the right to rebuke Musset for the waste of his genius and his life, as he

does in an eloquent apostrophe.

It was the suffering of France which begot the fine poem of "La Justice. Not able to find the personal God, the poet takes Justice as a power revealed to conscience, by which during the past she has been slowly evolved, and can alone be perfected by a faller sympathy of mutual good-will. The sincerity of the long debate between hope and discourage- ment, aspiration and perplexed doubt, is as austere in form as are Dante's cantos. We wish we had apace to quote the sonnet of the fifth "Watch," of which there are ten, each complete in question and answer.

"La Justice" would be the finest of modern "questionings," if in 1888 "lie Bonheur" had not been published. It is the sum of the ideas which from the first inspired M. Sully Prud-

homme. In admirable poetry, he declares that as justice is a, sublimated love of our neighbour, so in this perfect charity is happiness. Faustus and Stella, who loved each other but had not been united on earth, awake in a paradise wherein

human life and its powers are perfectly satisfied. In a pro- cession, graceful as one in a Greek frieze, the triumphs of art, the teachers of philosophies old and new, and the heroes of science, masterpieces of drawing and epithet, are marshalled as discoverers of all known truth. We can give but the transition from Epicurean to Christian thought :— " Soudain, quand la joyeuse et miserable troupe Ne as soutenait plus pour se passer la coupe,

17ne perk: y tombs, plus rouge que le vin—

Bs leverent lea yeux : eette sanglante larme D'un flane ouvert coulait, et par un tendre charme Allait rouvir le caeur au sentiment divin."

In the summary of modern science, perhaps the finest passage is the description of the sun as our life-sustaining star. While Faustus learns the limitations of knowledge, he hears the lamentations that rise from the planet he has left, which pene- trate the universe with their faint clamour. That sense of ideal justice of which M. Sully Prudhomme is the prophet, impels Faustus, after a fine discussion with Stella, who unites her fate with his, to invoke Death,—

" la force qui fraye aux Ames leur chemin,

Et lea entraine an but que l'Esperance indique."

Death replaced them on the painful Earth, but there had been no sense of the lapse of time in Paradise, and the race of man had passed away to rise or fall elsewhere.

But having willed their sacrifice and proved their sympathy, Faustus and Stella are again rapt by Death to the highest heaven. There are few, if any, passages of greater beauty than the concluding lines of this fine poem. They describe a beatitude worthy of Dante's vision when Faustus and Stella.

arrive—

"Au port d'embarquement, a la source du Monde."

Pain and death and love can alone open its gates and dis- cover its secrets. And M. Sully Prudhomme leads us through all the mazes of intelligence to the foot of the Christian Cross, while refusing the Christian creed. His

life illustrates his doctrines by its labour, its kindness, its purity of aim and nobleness of emotion. His fine achieve- ment is the sincere reflection of himself, and his advanced post in the vanguard of modern thought should win for him, not only the honour due to a fine poet, but the admiration of all men of good-will, and perhaps most of those who, like the pelerin de l'id,eal, have been scared from the old paths by the clashing machinery of dogma.