Chapter III: Part 3

It is necessary at first, that I repeat a truth which I have already said: that intellectual nature is always one and the same, whereas physical nature varies, changes unceasingly with time and place, and is modified in a thousand ways according to circumstances. Now, it is this latter nature which gives the form, that is to say, which renders sentient and particular that which the former gives to it as universal and intelligible; so that its aptitude more or less great, in receiving and in working upon the intelligence, can make the things which are more homogeneous in their principle appear more dissimilar in their effect. I will give a proof. Whilst the most profound obscurity covered Europe, whilst ignorance spread on all sides its baleful veils, there were found, however, at long intervals, certain privileged men, who, raising themselves above these thick vapours, came to grasp certain faint glimmerings of the light shining always above them. These men possessors of such rare gifts, would have indeed wished to communicate them to their contemporaries, but if they imprudently opened their mouths, the blind and fanatic horde which surrounded them cried out forthwith against the heretic, the magician, the sorcerer, and conducted them to torture as the price of their lessons.[181] After several sorry examples, these men, having become prudent, assumed the part of silence by retiring into monasteries or hermitages, studying Nature there in quietude, and profiting alone by their discoveries. If certain ones still dared to speak, it was by borrowing the style of religion, or history, diverting from the ordinary sense certain ideas received, explaining themselves by enigmas, or by figures, which, when necessary, they were able to explain as they wished.

Among this number was a man of strong imagination and of a genius really poetic, who, having grasped certain truths of nature, and judging it proper not to divulge them, took the expedient of enclosing them in a book which he entitled: _Les Faits et Gestes de Charles-Magne_. This extraordinary man who has, in these modern times, obtained an ascendancy greater than one could ever have imagined, since he is the vital source whence have come all the orders, all the institutions of chivalry with which Europe has been inundated; this man, I say, was a monk of _Saint-André de Vienne_, living from the tenth to the eleventh century and perhaps a little before.[182] The book that he composed had a success as much the more prodigious as it was misunderstood, and such was the ignorance not only of the people, but even of the clergy, that the most palpable fictions were taken for realities. There are historians even who pretend that the council of Rheims, celebrated in 1119, declared this work authentic[183]; and thence came the habit of attributing it to Archbishop Turpin. However that may be, it is to the allegorical history of Charlemagne, to that of his twelve paladins, called peers of France, to that of the four sons of Aymon and of Chevalier Bayard, to that of Renaud, Roland, Richard, and the other heroes of the _bibliothèque bleue_, for a long time our only _bibliotheca_, that we owe a new style of poetry, called Romanesque, on account of the Romance tongue in which it had birth.[184] This style is to the _eumolpique_ style, as a wild offshoot, growing laboriously in an arid and bramble-covered land, is to a cultivated tree which rises majestically in the heart of a fertile country.

It was with the chivalrous ideas, inspired by the book of the monk of Saint André, that the first poetic ideas were brought forth in France. The Oscan troubadours seizing these first glimmerings of genius, threw themselves with enthusiasm into a career which offered at the same time pleasures, glory, and the gifts of fortune.[185] They sang of the fair, of gallants and of kings; but their verses, monotonous enough when a real passion did not animate them, hardly reached above eulogy or satire. But little capable of feeling the moral beauties of poetry, they stopped at form. The rhyme for them was everything. For them the supreme talent was only rhyming much and with difficulty. One could not imagine to what lengths they went in this style. Not content with restricting themselves to follow the same rhyme throughout the entire course of the poem, they sometimes doubled it at the end of each verse, rhyming by echo, or else they made an initial rhyme.[186] These obstacles becoming multiplied stifled their muse in its cradle. All that art owed to these first modern poets was limited to a sort of song, gay and sprightly, ordinarily a parody upon a more serious subject, and which, because it was quite frequently sung with an air of the dance accompanied by the _vielle_ or _hurdy-gurdy_, their favourite instrument, was called _vau-de-vielle_, or as is pronounced today, vaudeville.[187]

The Italians and Spaniards, who received from the Oscan troubadours their first impulse toward poetry, would have been perhaps as limited as they, to composing amorous sonnets, madrigals or, at the most, certain vehement _sylves_,[188] if the Greeks, driven from their country by the conquests of Mohammed II., had not brought them the works of the ancients as I have already said. These works, explained in the _chaire publique_, due to the munificence of the Medicis, struck particularly the Italians: not however by exciting their poets to take them as models; the turn of their mind and the form of their poetry, similar in everything to that of the troubadours, were opposed too obviously here; but by giving them that sort of emulation which, without copying the others, makes one strive to equal them. At this epoch the book of the monk of St. André, attributed as I have said to Archbishop Turpin, already more than four centuries old, was known by all Europe, whether by itself, or whether by the numberless imitations of which it had been the subject. Not only France, Spain, Italy, but also England and Germany were inundated with a mass of romances and ballads, wherein were pictured the knights of the court of Charlemagne and those of the Round Table.[1189] All these works were written in verse, and the greater part, particularly those composed by the troubadours or their disciples, intended to be sung, were cut into strophes. Those of the imitator poets, who had had the force to go back to the allegorical sense of their model, had only developed and enriched it with their own knowledge; the others, following their various methods of considering it, had chosen subjects real and historical, or indeed had followed ingenuously without aim or plan, the impulse of their vagabond imagination. In France could be seen represented by the side of the stories of Tristan, of Lancelot, of the Grail, and of Ogier-le-Danois, that of Alexander the Great and of the Bible, that of the Seven Sages and of Judas Maccabeus, that of the History of the Normands and the Bretons, and finally that of the Rose, the most famous of all. A certain Guilhaume had published a philosophical romance upon the nature of beasts.[190]

Already the Italian poets, after having received from the troubadours the form of their verses and that of their works, had surpassed their masters and had caused them to be forgotten. Petrarch in the sonnet and Dante in the _sirvente_ assumed all the glory of their models, and left not any for the successors[191]; already even Bojardo and some others had attempted, with the example of Homer, to bring back to the unity of epopœia, the incongruous and fantastic scenes of the romance, when Ariosto appeared. This man, gifted with a keen and brilliant imagination, and possessor of a matchless talent, executed what no one else had been able to do before him; he was neither inspired by Homer, nor by Vergil; he copied no one. He learned from them only to raise himself to the poetic source, to see it where it was and to draw from it his genius. Then he received a first inspiration and became the creator of a particular style of poetry which may be called romantic. Undoubtedly this style is greatly inferior to epopœia; but after all it is original: its beauties as well as its faults belong to him.

Almost the same moment when Ariosto enriched Europe with his new poetry, Camoëns wished to naturalize it in Portugal; but the _mélange_ of Vergil and Lucan that he essayed to make, betrayed his lack of understanding and he did not succeed. I mention it only that you may observe, _Messieurs_, that the form adopted by the Portuguese poet is exactly the same as the one which Ariosto, his predecessors and his successors, have followed in Italy: it is that of the troubadours. The poems of each are long ballads, intersected by strophes of eight lines of alternate rhymes which, succeeding one another with the same measure, can be sung from one end to the other, with an appropriate air, and which in fact, as J. J. Rousseau has very well remarked, were sung frequently. In these poems, the essence is in accord with the form, and it is this that makes their regularity. It is not the epopœia of Homer drawn from the Orphic source, it is the romantic poetry of Ariosto, an issue of the fictions attributed to Archbishop Turpin, which is associated with the verses of the troubadours. These verses subjected to rhyme are incapable in any tongue of attaining the sublime heights of Eumolpœia or of Epopœia.

The French poets soon proved it, when coming to understand the works of Homer and Vergil, they thought themselves able to imitate them by making use of the same poetic forms by which the authors of _Perceval_ or _Berthe-au-grand-pied_ had profited. It was all to no purpose that they worked these forms, striking them upon the anvil, polishing them, they remained inflexible. Ronsard was the first who made the fatal experiment; and after him a crowd of careless persons came to run aground upon the same reef. These forms always called up the spirit with which they were born; the melancholy and unceasing sound, sonorous with their rhymes in couplets or alternate, had something soporific which caused the soul to dream and which allured it in spite of itself, not into the sublime regions of allegory where the genius of Eumolpœia was nourished, but into vague spaces of fictions, where, under a thousand whimsical forms the romantic mind evaporates. Doubtless one would have been able, in France, to limit the Italian poets, as had been done in Spain and Portugal; but besides, as it would have been necessary to confine itself to the second inspiration in a style already secondary, the spirit of the nation, sufficiently well represented by that of Ronsard, foreseeing from afar its high destinies, wished to command the summit of Parnassus, before having discovered the first paths.

The disasters of the first epic poets did not discourage their successors; vying with each other they sought to make amends; but instead of seeing the obstacle where it really was, that is to say, in the incompatible alliance of the essence of Epopœia with the form of romance, they imagined that lack of talent alone had been prejudicial to the success of their predecessors. Consequently they devoted themselves to work with an indefatigable ardour, polishing and repolishing the rhyme, tearing to pieces and revising twenty times their works, and finally bringing the form to the highest perfection that they were able to attain. The century of Louis XIV., so fertile in able versifiers, in profound rhymers, saw, however, the dawn of Epic poems only as a signal of their failure. Chapelain had, nevertheless, shown talent before his catastrophe; wishing to interest the French nation, he had chosen in its history the sole epic subject which he found there. Why had he not succeeded? This point was considered, and the truth still lacking, they went on to imagine that the fault was inherent in the French tongue, and that it was no longer capable of rising to the heights of Epopœia: deplorable error, which for a long time has been harmful to the development of a tongue destined to become universal and to carry to future centuries the discoveries of past ones.

Ronsard had felt the difficulty most. Accustomed as he was to read Greek and Latin works in the original, he had seen clearly that what prevented the French tongue from following their poetic movement was particularly the restraint of the rhyme; he had even sought to free it from this servitude, endeavouring to make the French verses scan according to the ancient rhythm; but, in another way he had not appreciated the genius of that tongue which refused to follow this rhythm. Jodelle, Baïf, Passerat, Desportes, Henri-Etienne, and certain other savants, have made at different times the same attempt, and always without results.[192] Each tongue has its own character which it is necessary to know; ours has not at all the musical prosody of the Greek and Latin; its syllables are not determined, long and short, by the simple duration of time, but by the different accentuation and inflection of the voice. Among our writers the one who has best understood the nature of this prosody is certainly the abbé d’Olivet: he declared firstly that he did not believe it possible to make French verses measured by rhythm; and secondly, that even in the case where this might be possible, he did not see how this rhythm could be conformable to that of the Greeks and Latins.[193]

I am absolutely of his opinion on these two points; I am furthermore, _en partie_, on what he says of the rhyme. I know as he, that it is not an invention of the barbarous ages; I know even more, that it is the luxurious production of a very enlightened age; I must say that it has brought forth thousands of beautiful verses, that it is often to the poet like a strange genius which comes to the assistance of his own.[194] God forbid that I pretend to separate it from French verse of which it is a charm. Rhyme is necessary, even indispensable, to romantic poetry and to all that is derived from it; and songs, ballads, vaudevilles, sylves of whatever sort they may be, whatever form, whatever length they may have, cannot pass away. It adds an infinite grace to all that is sung or recited with the chivalrous sentiment. Even the lyric style receives from it a romantic harmony which accords with it. All the secondary styles admit of this. It can, up to a certain point, embellish descriptive verse, soften didactic verse, add to the melancholy of the elegy, to the grace of the idyl; it can at last become the ornament of dramatic art such as we possess――that is to say, chivalrous and impassioned; but as to real Eumolpœia and Epopœia――that is to say, as to what concerns intellectual and rational poetry, pure or mingled with the enthusiasm of the passions; prophetic verses or hymns, emanated from the Divinity or destined to be raised to it; philosophical verse adapted to the nature of things and developing the diverse moral and physical systems; epic verses uniting talent to allegorical genius and joining together the intelligible world to the sentient world; with all these, rhyme is incompatible. As much as it delights in works of the mind just so much is it rejected by genius. Fiction harmonizes with it, allegory is opposed to it. It is chivalrous and not heroic; agreeable, brilliant, clever, melancholy, sentimental, but it could never be either profound or sublime.

Let us clear this up with the light of experience, and now that we can do it to good purpose, let us make a rapid survey of the poetic condition of the principal nations of the earth.

§ VI

The Greeks and the Romans, as guilty of ingratitude as of injustice, have styled Asia barbarous, without thinking that they thus outraged their Mother, the one from whom both had their origin and their first instructions. Europe, more impartial today, begins to feel as she should toward this ancient and noble country, and rendering to her venerable scars a filial respect, does not judge her according to her present weakness, but according to the vigour that she possessed in the age of her strength, and of which her magnificent productions still bear the imprint. A philosophical observer, academician of Calcutta, turning an investigating eye upon that part of the terrestrial continent, has recognized there five principal nations, among which that of the Indians holds the first rank; the others are those of the Chinese, Tartars, Persians, and Arabs.[195] According to this able writer, primitive India should be considered as a sort of luminous focus which, concentrating at a very remote epoch the learning acquired by an earlier people, has reflected it, and has dispersed the rays upon the neighbouring nations.[196] She has been the source of Egyptian, Greek, and Latin theogony; she has furnished the philosophical dogmas with which the first poets of Thrace and Ionia have adorned the beauties of Eumolpœia and Epopœia; it is she who has polished the Persians, Chaldeans, Arabs, and Ethiopians; and who by her numerous colonies has entertained relations with the Chinese, Japanese, Scandinavians, Celts, Etruscans, and even with the Peruvians of the other hemisphere.[197]

If one listens to the discourse of those who have been much inclined to study the savant language of the Indians, Sanskrit, he will be persuaded that it is the most perfect language that man has ever spoken. Nothing, according to them, can surpass its riches, its fertility, its admirable structure; it is the source of the most poetic conceptions and the mother of all the dialects which are in use from the Persian Gulf to the waters of China.[198] It is certain that if anything can prove to the eyes of savants the maternal rights that this tongue claims over all the others, it is the astonishing variety of its poetry: what other peoples possess in detail, it possesses _in toto_. It is there that Eumolpœia, Epopœia, and Dramatic Art shine with native _éclat_: it is there that poetry divine and rational, poetry allegorical and passionate, poetry stirring and even romantic, find their cradle. There, all forms are admitted, all kinds of verse received. The _Vedas_, pre-eminently sacred books, are, like the Koran of Mohammed, written in cadenced prose.[199] The _Pouranas_, which contain the theosophy and philosophy of the Brahmans, their system concerning Nature, their ideas upon morals and upon natural philosophy, are composed in philosophical verse not rhymed; they are attributed to Vyasa, the Orpheus of the Indians. Valmiki, who is their Homer, has displayed in the _Ramayana_ an epopœia magnificent and sublime to the highest degree; the dramas, which they call Nataks, are, according to their style, rhymed and not rhymed: Bheret is considered as their inventor; Kalidasa as their perfecter.[200] The other kinds of poetry are all rhymed; their number is immense; their variety infinite. Nothing equals the industry and delicacy of the Indian rhymers in this style. The Arabs all skilful as they were, the Oscan troubadours whose rhyme was their sole merit, have never approached their models.[201] Thus, not only does one find among the Indians the measured verse of the Greeks and Romans, not only does one see there rhythms unknown to these two peoples, but one recognizes also there our rhyme with combinations of which we have no idea.

I ought to make an important observation here: it is, that whereas India, mistress of Asia, held the sceptre of the earth, she still recognized only the eumolpœia of the _Vedas_ and the _Pouranas_, only the epopœia of _Maha-Bharata_ and the _Ramayana_; her poetry was the language of the gods and she gave herself the name of _Ponya-Rhoumi_, Land of Virtues. It was only when a long prosperity had enervated her, that the love for novelty, the caprice of fashion and perhaps, as it happened in Greece, the deviation of the theatre, caused her to seek for beauties foreign to veritable poetry. It is not a rare thing to pass the point of perfection when one has attained it. The astonishing flexibility of Sanskrit, the abundance of its final consonants opens a double means for corruption. Poets multiplied words believing to multiply ideas; they doubled rhymes; they tripled them in the same verse believing to increase proportionably its harmony. Their imagination bending before an inspiring genius became vagabond; they thought to rise to the sublime, and fell into the bombastic. At last, knowing no longer how to give emphasis and importance to their extravagant thoughts, they created words of such length that, in order to contain them, it was necessary to forge verses of four _cæsuras_ of nineteen syllables each.[202]

It was, therefore, at the epoch of the decadence of the Indian Empire, that rhyme usurped poetry. It would be difficult today to say whether it was an innovation or a simple renovation. However it may be, it is probable that it passed rapidly from the ruling nation to subject nations where it was diversely welcomed according to the language and particular mind of each people.

If one can believe the annals of the Indians, China was one of their colonies for a long time schismatic and rebellious.[203] If one can lend faith to the most ancient tradition of the Chinese, they form from time immemorial a body of autochthonous people.[204] The discussion of this historic difficulty would be out of place here. Suffice it to say, that the Chinese having commenced by having rhymed verses, and preserving by character and by religion, with an inviolable respect, the ancient usages, have never had but a mediocre poetry, absolutely foreign to epopœia.[205] Their principal sacred books, called _Kings_, are composed of symbolic or hieroglyphic characters, forming by groups sorts of tableaux, of profound and often sublime conception, but bereft of what we would call eloquence of language. These are mute images, incommunicable by means of the voice, and which the reader must consider with the eyes and meditate long upon in order to comprehend them.

The Tartars who reign today in China and who are distinguished from the others by the epithet of Manchus, although possessors of a formed tongue whose richness certain authors praise,[206] have not any kind of poetry as I have already remarked.[207] The other Tartars were hardly more advanced before being placed by their conquests within reach of the learning of the vanquished people. The Turks had no alphabetical characters. The Huns were ignorant even of its existence. The proud vanquisher of Asia, Genghis Khan did not find, according to the best historians, a single man among the Mongolians capable of writing his despatches. The alphabet of fourteen letters that the Uïgurian Tartars possess, appears to have been given them by the ancient Persians,[208] from whom they also received the little that they knew of poetry.

These Persians, today imitators of the Arabs, were in very remote times disciples of the Indians. Their sacred tongue then called Zend, in which are written the fragments that remain to us of Zoroaster, was a dialect of Sanskrit.[209] These fragments that we owe to the indefatigable zeal of Anquetil Duperron, appear to be written, as the Vedas, or as all the sacred books of India, in cadenced prose. After the _Zend-Avesta_, the most famous book among the Parsees is the _Boun-Dehesh_, written in Pehlevi, and containing the cosmogony of Zoroaster. Pehlevi, which is derived from Chaldaic Nabatæan, indicates a translation,[210] and testifies that Persia had already passed from under the dominion of India to that of Assyria. But when, thanks to the conquests of Cyrus, Persia had become free and mistress of Asia, Pehlevi, which recalled its ancient servitude, was banished from the court by Bahman-Espandiar, whom we call Artaxerxes Longimanus.[211] The Parsee replaced it; this last dialect, modified by Greek under the successors of Alexander, mixed with many Tartar words under the Parthian kings, polished by the Sassanidæ, usurped at last by the Arabs and subjected to the intolerant influence of Islamism, had no longer its own character: it has taken, in the modern Persian, all the movements of the Arabic, notwithstanding its slight analogy with it[212]; following its example, it has concentrated all the beauties of poetry in rhyme and since then it has had neither Eumolpœia nor Epopœia.

As to the Arab, no one is ignorant of the degree to which he is a slave to rhyme. Already, by a sufficiently happy conjecture, a French writer had made the first use of rhyme in France coincide with the irruption of the Moors into Europe at the beginning of the eighth century.[213] He has said that Provence had been the door by which this novelty was introduced into France. However difficult it may appear of proving rigorously this assertion, lacking monuments, it cannot, however, be denied that it may be very probable, above all considering what influence the Arabs exercised upon the sciences and arts in the south of France after they had penetrated through Spain. Now, there is no country on earth where the poetry that I have called romantic has been cultivated with more constancy and success than in Arabia; rhyme, if she has received it from India, was naturalized there by long usage, in such a way as to appear to have had birth there. If it must be said, the Arab tongue seems more apt at receiving it than the Sanskrit. Rhyme seems more requisite to poetry there, on account of the great quantity and inflexibility of the monosyllables, which joining together only with much difficulty to form the numerous and rhythmic combinations, had need of its assistance to soften their harshness and to supply the harmony which they lacked.

Neverthless, whatever may be the pretension of Arabia to the invention of rhyme, and even to that of romantic poetry, one cannot be prevented, when one possesses without prejudice and to a certain extent the distinguishing character of the Asiatic languages, from seeing that there are proofs in the Arabic itself which give evidence in favour of India. Such is, for example, the word _Diwan_,[214] by which the Arabs designate the collection of their ancient poetries.[215] This word, which is attached to the Sanskrit expression _Dewa_ or _Diwa_, designates all that is divine, celestial; all that emanates from the Universal Intelligence[216]: it is the poetry of the Greeks, the language of the gods, or the voice of the Universal Being of the Egyptians and the Phœnicians.

However, the Arabic _Diwan_――that is to say, the poetic collection of that nation, goes back to most ancient times. One finds in it verses attributed to the first Hebrew patriarchs and even to Adam[217]; for since the introduction of Islamism, the cosmogony of Moses has become that of the Mussulmans, as it has been ours since the establishment of Christianity. It is there, in this _diwan_, that the most authentic traditions are preserved: they are all in verse and resemble greatly, as to form and doubtless as to substance, that which the monk of St. André has transmitted to us through the court of Charlemagne. It is the same chivalrous spirit and the same romantic fictions. The Persian poet Firdausi appears to have followed similar traditions concerning the ancient kings of Iran, in his famous poem entitled _Shah-Namah_.[218] The wonders which reign in these traditions have been transmitted no doubt by the Arabs, with the artifice of rhyme: both have the same spirit. The protecting fairies of the knights, the giant persecutors of ladies, the enchanters, the magic, and all those illusions are the fruits of that brilliant and dreamy imagination which characterizes the modern Orientals. We have enthusiastically enjoyed them in the depths of the barbarity where we were plunged; we have allowed ourselves to be drawn by the charms of rhyme, like children in the cradle, whom their nurses put to sleep by the monotonous sound of a lullaby. Escaped from that state of languor, and struck at last with a gleam of real intelligence, we have compared Greece and Arabia, the songs of epopœia and those of the ballads; we have blushed at our choice; we have wished to change it; but owing to the captivating form always more or less the substance, we have only succeeded in making mixtures more or less happy, according to the secondary mode that we follow.

Rhyme, brought into Europe by the Arabs more than a thousand years ago, spread by degrees among all nations, in such a way that when one wishes to examine its origin with accuracy, one no longer knows whether it is indigenous there or exotic. One finds on all sides only rhymed verses. The Spanish, Portuguese, Italians, French, Germans of all dialects, Hollanders, Danes, Swedes and Norwegians, all rhyme.[219] The modern Greeks themselves have forgotten their ancient rhythm in order to assume our style.[220] If anything could, however, make one doubt that rhyme may be natural to Europe, it is that ancient Scandinavian, in which are written the precious fragments which have come down to us concerning the mythological cult of the Celts, our ancestors, does not rhyme; also it rises often to the sublimity of Eumolpœia.[221] This observation, which makes us reject Arabia, will take us back to India, if we consider that there is plausible presumption in believing that the Phœnicians and the Egyptians who had so much intercourse with the Arabs, did not rhyme, since the sacred book of the Hebrews, the _Sepher_, that we call the _Bible_, and which appears to have issued from the Egyptian sanctuaries, is written in cadenced rhyme, as the _Zend-Avesta_ of the Parsees and the _Vedas_ of the Indians.[222]

The outline that I have just sketched confirms, _Messieurs_, what I have wished to prove to you and which is the subject of this discourse, the distinction that should be made between the essence and the form of poetry, and the reciprocal influence that should be recognized between these two parts of the science. You have seen that wherever rhyme has dominated exclusively, as in Asia among the Chinese, Arabians, Persians; as in Europe among all the modern peoples, it has excluded epopœia and has replaced allegorical genius by the spirit of romantic fictions; you have seen that wherever eumolpique poetry has wished to appear, whether moral or rational, theosophical or philosophical, it has been obliged to have recourse to a particular prose, when the form of poetry has resisted it, as has happened in China for the _Kings_, in Persia for the _Zend-Avesta_, in Arabia for the _Koran_; you have seen that wherever poetry has been preserved purely rhythmical, as in Greece and with the Romans, it has admitted eumolpœia and epopœia without mixture; and finally, that wherever the two forms meet each other with all their modifications, as in India, it gives way in turn to all the different kinds, intellectual and rational, epic, dramatic, and romantic.

Now, what Hindustan was for Asia, France should be for Europe. The French tongue, as the Sanskrit, should tend towards universality; it should be enriched with all the learning acquired in the past centuries, so as to transmit it to future generations. Destined to float upon the _débris_ of a hundred different dialects, it ought to be able to save from the shipwreck of time all their beauties and all their remarkable productions. Nevertheless, how will it be done, if its poetic forms are not open to the spirit of all the poetries, if its movement, arrested by obstacles cannot equal that of the tongues which have preceded it in the same career? By what means, I ask you, will it succeed to the universal dominion of Sanskrit, if, dragging always after it the frivolous jingling of Arabic sounds, it cannot even succeed to the partial domination of Greek or Latin? Must it be necessary then that it betray its high destinies, and that the providential decree which founds the European empire, exempt it from the glory which it promises to the French name?

I have told you, _Messieurs_, in beginning this discourse, that it was in the interest of science alone, that I entered this career: it is assuredly not by my poor poetic talent that I have aspired to the honour of occupying your attention; but by a generous instinct, which, making me ignore many of the considerations which might have arrested me, has persuaded me that I could be useful. I have dared to conceive the possibility of composing, in French, eumolpique verse, which might neither be measured by musical rhythm foreign to our tongue, nor enchained by rhyme opposed to all intellectual and rational movement, and which however might have neither the harshness, nor the discord of that which has been called, up to this time, blank verse.

Many French writers have tried to make verse deprived of rhyme. Some have sought to imitate the measures of the ancients, others have satisfied themselves with copying certain moderns who do not rhyme. Each of them has misunderstood the essential character of his tongue. Vossius alone appears to have foreseen the principles without developing them, when he has said that French verse might be considered as having only one foot.[223] This is exactly true in examining rhythm only in itself, and giving to each hemistich the name of time: but if one considers this one foot, whether hexameter or pentameter, as formed of two times equal or unequal, it is perceived that it participates, through its final, in two natures: the one strong and forceful, that we name masculine; the other soft and languid, that we call feminine. Therefore, French verse having but one rhythmic foot, differs, however, in the style of this foot and can be considered in two relations. Let us take for example the hexameter verse. The rhythmic foot which constitutes it is composed of two equal times distinguished by the cæsura, the last of which is masculine or feminine: Masculine, as in:

Rome, l’unique objet de mon ressentiment!
Rome, à qui vient ton bras d’immoler mon amant!

Feminine, as in:

Rome qui t’a vu naître et que ton cœur adore!
Rome enfin que je hais parce qu’elle t’honore!

In rhymed verses, such as these I have just cited, two feet of the same kind are obliged to follow one another on account of the rhyme which links them; they then form but one whole and, proceeding abreast without being separated, they injure by their forced mass the rapidity of expression and flight of thought. If a third foot of the same kind occur with the other two feet, rhyming together, it would have to rhyme with them to prevent an insupportable discordance, which is not tolerated; a fourth or a fifth foot would submit to the same law, so that, if the poet wished to fill his piece with masculine verses alone, it would be necessary that he should make them proceed upon a single rhyme, as the Arabs do today and as our early troubadours did, following their example. The French poet can vary his rhyme only by varying the style of his verses and by mingling alternately together the masculine and feminine finals.

As these two kinds of finals are dissimilar without being opposed, they may be brought together without the need of rhyming; their meeting, far from being disagreeable is, on the contrary, only pleasing; two finals of the same kind, whether masculine or feminine, can never clash without causing the same sound――that is, without rhyming; but it is not thus with the finals of different kinds, since the rhyme is impossible in this case. So that, to make what I call eumolpique verses, it suffices to avoid the meeting of finals of the same kind, whose impact necessitates the rhyme, by making one kind succeed another continually, and opposing alternately the masculine and feminine, the mingling of which is irrelevant to eumolpœia. Here is all the mechanism of my verses: they are fluent as to form; as to the essence which is expedient for them――that is another thing: for it is rarely encountered.

Those who have made blank verse in French have spoken justly of it with the greatest contempt; these verses, miserable as to substance, without poetic fire, written as the flattest prose, lacking movement and grace, had, furthermore, the insupportable fault of not recognizing the genius of the French tongue, by making finals of the same kind clash constantly, and by not distinguishing that which is called rhyme from that which repels it.

Now that I have made as clear as possible my motives and my means, there remains only, _Messieurs_, for me to submit to your judgment the translation that I have made, in eumolpique verse, of the piece of Greek poetry which comprises the doctrine of Pythagoras in seventy-one lines called, _par excellence_, Golden Verses. This piece, venerable by its antiquity and by the celebrated philosopher whose name it bears, belonging to eumolpœia, without any mixture of passion, is sufficiently known to savants so that I need not speak about what concerns its particular merit. This would mean, moreover, a matter of some explanations. At any rate, I believe it advisable before passing to this final subject, to give you certain examples of the use of my verses as applied to epopœia, so that you may judge, since they are in hands as incapable as mine, what they might become when used by men of superior genius and talent. I will choose, for this purpose, the exposition and invocation of the principal epic poems of Europe, in order to have a fixed subject for comparison. I will translate line by line, and will imitate, as well as is possible for me, the movement and harmony of the poet that I may have before me. This labour, which I hope will not be without some interest for the illustrious academicians whom I am addressing, will furnish me the occasion of showing by certain characteristic traits the genius of the language and poetry of the different modern peoples of Europe; and I will terminate thus the outline that I have sketched touching the poetic conditions of the principal nations of the earth.

§ VII

I am beginning with the creator of epopœia, with Homer. It is easy to see by the manner in which this divine man blends, from the opening lines of the _Iliad_, the exposition and invocation, that, full of a celestial inspiration that he was the first to receive, he seeks to pour forth the superabundant fire which consumes him, and to throw into the soul of his hearer the impassioned enthusiasm which masters and controls his own. The following lines will suffice to make known the subject of a work which fills twenty-four cantos.

Déesse! viens chanter la colère d’Achille,
Fatale, et pour les Grecs si fertile en malheurs,
Qui, d’avance, aux enfers, précipitant en foule
Les âmes des héros, livra leurs corps sanglants
Aux dogues affamés: ainsi Jupiter même
Le voulut, quand la haine eut divisé les cœurs
Du roi des rois Atride et du divin Achille.
Lequel des Immortels provoqua ce courroux?
Apollon irrité, qui, pour punir Atride,
Ravagea son armée: et les peuples mourraient!

O Goddess! sing the wrath of Peleus’ son,
Achilles; sing the deadly wrath that brought
Woes numberless upon the Greeks, and swept
To Hades many a valiant soul, and gave
Their limbs a prey to dogs and birds of air,――
For so had Jove appointed,――from the time
When the two chiefs, Atrides, King of men,
And great Achilles, parted first as foes.
Which of the gods put strife between the chiefs,
That they should thus contend? Latona’s son
And Jove’s. Incensed against the king, he bade
A deadly pestilence appear among
The army, and the men were perishing.
BRYANT.

Μῆνιν ἄειδε, θεὰ, Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος,
οὐλομένην, ἣ μυρί’ Ἀχαιοῖς ἄλγε’ ἔθηκεν,
πολλὰς δ’ ἰφθίμους ψυχὰς Ἄϊδι προΐαψεν
ἡρώων, αὐτοὺς δὲ ἑλώρια τεῦχε κύνεσσιν
οἰωνοῖσί τε πᾶσι (Διὸς δ’ ἐτελείετο βουλή),
ἐξ οὗ δὴ τὰ πρῶτα διαστήτην ἐρίσαντε
Ἀτρείδης τε, ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν, καὶ δῖος Ἀχιλλεύς.
Τίς τ’ ἄρ σφωε θεῶν ἔριδι ξυνέηκε μάχεσθαι;
Λητοῦς καὶ Διὸς υἱός. Ὁ γὰρ βασιλῆϊ χολωθεὶς
νοῦσον ἀνὰ στρατὸν ὦρσε κακὴν, ὀλέκοντο δὲ λαοὶ.

I dispense with making any reflection upon the charm of the original verses and upon the admirable sentiment which terminates them. It would be a very strange thing not to be impressed by the beauties of this poetry. Let us pass on to Vergil.

Even though I should not say it, it would suffice now to compare the Greek poet with the Latin poet, in order to perceive that the latter received only a second inspiration, transmitted by the inspiring power of the former. Vergil, less ardent, more tender, more correct, admits at once the luminous distinction; far from blending the exposition and invocation, he separates them, affects a tone more simple, promises little, exposes with timidity the subject of his poem, summons his Muse, and seems to persuade it, even less than the reader, to be favourable to him. He employs these lines:

Je chante les combats, et ce Héros troyen,
Qui, fuyant Ilion aborda l’Italie
Le premier: sur la terre errant, et sur les mers,
En butte aux traits cruels de Junon irritée,
Il souffrit mille maux; avant qu’il établît
Ses Dieux chez les Latins, et fondât une ville,
Berceau d’Albe, de Rome et de ses hauts remparts.
Muse! rappelle-moi quels motifs de vengeance
Excitaient la Déesse, et pourquoi son courroux
S’obstinait à poursuive un Héros magnanime?
Tant de haine entre-t-elle au cœur des Immortels!

Arms and the man I sing, who first,
By fate of Ilium realm amerced,
To fair Italia onward bore,
And landed on Lavinium’s shore:――
Long tossing earth and ocean o’er,
By violence of heaven, to sate
Fell Juno’s unforgetting hate:
Much laboured too in battle-field,
Striving his city’s walls to build,
And give his Gods a home:
Thence come the hardy Latin brood,
The ancient sires of Alba’s blood,
And lofty-rampired Rome.
Say, Muse, for godhead how disdained,
Or wherefore worth, Heaven’s queen constrained
That soul of piety so long
To turn the wheel, to cope with wrong.
Can heavenly natures nourish hate
So fierce, so blindly passionate?
CONINGTON.

Arma virumque cano, Trojæ qui primus ab oris
Italiam, fato profugus, Lavinaque venit
Litora, multum ille et terris jactatus et alto
Vi superûm, sævæ memorem Junonis ob iram,
Multa quoque et bello passus, dum conderet urbem
Inferretque deos Latio: genus unde Latinum,
Albanique patres atque altæ mœnia Romæ.
Musa, mihi causas memora, quo numine læso,
Quidve dolens, regina deûm tot volvere casus
Insignem pietate virum, tot adire labores
Impulerit. Tantæne animis cœlestibus iræ?

It can be observed that Vergil, although he places himself foremost and although he says, _I sing_, begins nevertheless in a manner much less animated, much less sure than the Greek poet, who, transported beyond himself, seems to impose upon his Muse the subject of his songs, interrogates her, and then inspired by her, responds. The Latin poet finishes, like his model, with a sentence; but it is easy to feel that this apostrophe,

Can heavenly natures nourish hate
So fierce, so blindly passionate?

although very beautiful, contains less depth, less feeling, and holds less intimately to the subject than this sublime reflection:

... and the men were perishing!

Someone has said that Vergil had imitated in his exposition the commencement of the _Odyssey_ of Homer; this is a mistake. One finds always in the exposition of the _Odyssey_ the real character of a first inspiration blended with the invocation, although more calm and less alluring than in the _Iliad_. Here is the translation:

Du plus sage Héros, Muse, dis les traverses
Sans nombre, après qu’il eut triomphé d’Ilion:
Rapelle les cités, les peuples, les usages,
Qu’il connut, et les mers où longtemps il erra:
À quels soins dévorants, à quels maux l’exposèrent
L’amour de la patrie et noble désir
D’y mener ses guerriers! Vain désir: ils osèrent,
Insensés! du Soleil dévorer les troupeaux;
Et ce Dieu, du retour leur ravit la journée.
Fais-nous part de ces faits, fille de Jupiter.

Tell me, O Muse, of that sagacious man
Who, having overthrown the sacred town
Of Ilium, wandered far and visited
The capitals of many nations, learned
The customs of their dwellers and endured
Great suffering on the deep; his life was oft
In peril, as he laboured to bring back
His comrades to their homes. He saved them not,
Though earnestly he strove; they perished all,
Through their own folly; for they banqueted,
Madmen! upon the oxen of the Sun,――
The all-o’erlooking Sun, who cut them off
From their return. O Goddess, virgin-child
Of Jove, relate some part of this to me.
BRYANT.

Ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλὰ
πλάγχθη, ἐπεὶ Τροίης ἱερὸν πτολίεθρον ἔπερσεν,
πολλῶν δ’ἀνθρώπων ἴδεν ἄστεα καὶ νόον ἔγνω·
πολλὰ δ’ ὅ γ’ ἐν πόντῳ πάθεν ἄλγεα ὃν κατὰ θυμόν,
ἀρνύμενος ἥν τε ψυχὴν καὶ νόστον ἑταίρων.
ἀλλ’ οὐδ’ ὧς ἑτάρους ἐρρύσατο ἱέμενός περ·
αὐτῶν γὰρ σφετέρῃσιν ἀτασθαλίῃσιν ὄλοντο,
νήπιοι, οἳ κατὰ βοῦς Ὑπερίονος Ἠελίοιο
ἤσθιον· αὐτὰρ ὁ τοῖσιν ἀφείλετο νόστιμον ἦμαρ.
τῶν ἁμόθεν γε, θεὰ θύγατερ Διός, εἰπὲ καὶ ἡμῖν.

The talent of Homer shows itself completely in the _Odyssey_; it dominates the genius there, so to speak, as much as the genius had dominated it in the _Iliad_. The fire which animates the _Iliad_ has been, with reason, compared to that of the sun arrived at the height of its course, and the splendour which shines in the _Odyssey_ to that with which the occident is coloured on the evening of a fine day. Perhaps if we had his _Thebaid_, we would see those brilliant lights which accompany the aurora, developed there, and then we would possess in all its shades this immortal genius who depicted all nature.

There are people who, feeling by a sort of intuition that Homer had been created the poetic incentive of Europe, even as I have said, and judging on the other hand that Ariosto had made an epic poem, are convinced that the Italian poet had copied the Greek; but this is not so. Ariosto, who has made only a romanesque poem, has not received the inspiration of Homer; he has simply followed the fictions attributed to Archbishop Turpin and clothing them with forms borrowed from the Arabs by the troubadours makes himself creator in this secondary style. The rhyme is as essential to it as it is harmful to veritable epopœia; this is why the eumolpique verses never conform to it in the slightest degree. To apply them to it, is to make serious what is by nature gay, it is to give a character of force and of truth to what is only light, airy, and fantastic. I am about, however, to translate the beginning of his poem, in order to furnish, by the shocking disparity which exists between the romantic essence of his poetry and the epic form that I here adapt, a new proof of what I have said.

Je veux chanter les Dames, les Guerriers,
L’amour, l’honneur, et les jeux et les armes,
Durant ces temps où les fiers Sarrasins,
Des mers d’Afrique, abordèrent en France,
Pour seconder les fureurs d’Agramant,
Le jeune roi, dont l’orgueilleuse audace
Pensait venger la mort du vieux Trojan,
Sur l’empereur des Romains, Charlemagne.

Je veux aussi raconter de Roland,
Chose inouïe, autant en vers qu’en prose;
Dire l’amour qui rendit furieux
Ce paladin, auparavant si sage;
Si toutefois celle qui m’a charmé,
Qui va minant ma raison d’heure en heure,
M’en laisse assez pour remplir dignement
Mon entreprise et tenir ma promesse.

Of Loves and Ladies, Knights and Arms, I sing,
Of Courtesies, and many a Daring Feat;
And from those ancient days my story bring,
When Moors from Afric passed in hostile fleet,
And ravaged France, with Agramant their King,
Flushed with his youthful rage and furious heat;
Who on King Charles’, the Roman emperor’s head
Had vowed due vengeance for Troyano dead.

In the same strain of Roland will I tell
Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme,
On whom strange madness and rank fury fell,
A man esteemed so wise in former time;
If she, who to like cruel pass has well
Nigh brought my feeble wit which fain would climb
And hourly wastes my sense, concede me skill
And strength my daring promise to fulfil.
W. R. ROSE.

Le donne, i cavalier, l’arme, gl’amori
Le cortesíe, l’audaci imprese io canto,
Che furo al tempo che passaro i Mori
D’Africa il mare, e in Francia nocquer tanto,
Seguendo l’ire e i giovenil furori
D’Agramante lor re, che si diè vanto
Di vendicar la morte di Troiano
Sopra re Carlo imperator romano.

Dirò d’Orlando in un medesmo tratto
Cosa non detta in prosa mai, nè in rima;
Che per amor venne in furore e matto,
D’uom che si saggio era stimato prima:
Se da colei che tal quasi m’ha fatto
Che’l poco ingegno ad or ad or mi lima,
Me ne sarà però tanto concesso,
Che mi basti a finir quanto ho promesso.

It is very easy to see, in reading these two strophes, that there exists in the exposition no sort of resemblance either with that of Homer, or with that of Vergil. It is a third style, wholly foreign to the other two. Homer mingling the exposition and the invocation, commands his Muse to sing what she inspires in him; Vergil distinguishing one from the other, prays his Muse to acquaint him with what he is about to sing; whereas Ariosto, announcing simply the subject of his songs, makes no invocation. It is evident that he relies upon himself, and that in the style that he adopts he understands very well that he has no other Muse, no other guide than his imagination. His subject is in accord with his manner of treating it. If one wishes to reflect upon this decisive point, one will feel and realize, for the first time perhaps, why in the opinion of all the world concerning two works from the same hand, _La Pucelle_ and _La Henriade_, the one is a poem, whereas the other, composed with a far greater pretension, is not. Voltaire, in imitating Ariosto in a subject that he has rendered romanesque and frivolous, has received the second inspiration; but in imitating Lucan in an historic subject he received nothing, for Lucan, creator of a mixed style, had no inspiration that he could communicate.

I have said what I thought of Camoens: it is useless to quote the exposition of his poem that has nothing remarkable, particularly since Tasso has so far surpassed him.

Tasso was worthy of receiving a veritable inspiration. His lofty genius, his pure and brilliant imagination brought him nearer to Vergil than to Ariosto; and if he had been inspired even through the Latin poet, he would have shown Europe what the magnetic power of Homer was, although acting only in its third degree. But the prejudices of education working in him even without his knowledge, and the influence that chivalresque poetry had attained in Italy, did not permit him either to forsake entirely the chronicles of Archbishop Turpin, or above all, to make any changes in the consecrated form. All that he could do in a most grave and serious historical subject was to mix a little allegorical genius with a great deal of romanesque fiction; so that, becoming inspired at the same time with Ariosto, Lucan, and Vergil, he made a mixed work, which, under the form of a lengthy song, contained the essence of epopœia, of history, and of romance. This work is one of the most entertaining poems that one can read; the only one perhaps which a translation in prose can harm but little. The inequality of its texture takes away nothing from the interest that it inspires. It pleases, but it does not instruct. If the eumolpique lines were applied to it throughout, it would not sustain them; for it is in substance only a very beautiful ballad; nevertheless, here and there are found parts which could become sublime. His exposition, imitating Vergil, reveals them very well. They are as follows:

Je chante les combats pieux, et le Guerrier
Qui délivra du Christ la tombe renommée.
Combien il déploya de génie et d’ardeur!
Combien il supporta de maux dans cette guerre!
Vainement les enfers s’armèrent; vainement
Les peuples de l’Asie aux Africains s’unirent:
Favorisé du Ciel, sous ses drapeaux sacrés,
Vainqueur, il ramena ses compagnons fidèles.

Divine Muse! ô toi dont le front radieux
Ne ceint point sur le Pinde un laurier périssable,
Mais qui, parmi les chœurs des habitants du Ciel,
Chantes, le front orné d’étoiles immortelles,
Viens, inspire à mon sein tes célestes ardeurs;
Fais briller dans mes vers tes clartés, et pardonne
Si, parant quelquefois l’austère vérité,
Je mêle à tes attraits des grâces étrangères.

I sing the pious arms and Chief, who freed
The Sepulchre of Christ from thrall profane:
Much did he toil in thought, and much in deed;
Much in the glorious enterprise sustain;
And Hell in vain opposed him; and in vain
Afric and Asia to the rescue pour’d
Their mingled tribes;――Heaven recompensed his pain,
And from all fruitless sallies of the sword,
True to the Red-Cross flag his wandering friends restored.

O thou, the Muse, that not with fading palms
Circlest thy brows on Pindus, but among
The Angels warbling their celestial psalms,
Hast for the coronal a golden throng
Of everlasting stars! make thou my song
Lucid and pure; breathe thou the flame divine
Into my bosom; and forgive the wrong,
If with grave truth light fiction I combine,
And sometimes grace my page with other flowers than thine!
WIFFEN.