Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 129.djvu/12

4 reverse. The monotonous regularity of the Alexandrine verse, the heavy and rigid cadence of the perpetual couplet, have upon ourselves individually a stupefying effect which it is almost impossible to surmount. The ear is so filled with this trick of sound, bewildering, deadening as the hammering of machinery, that it is only with a powerful effort that we are able to rouse ourselves to the sentiment which it conveys. From the beginning; we find ourselves involved in a struggle to separate the meaning and poetic soul of the verse from its outward form—a struggle which is as hard as all other struggles to keep body and soul apart, and to understand the heavenly without, or in spite of, the earthly. Something of the same sentiment, in a reverse sense, affects us with some Italian verse, in which we are so apt to be carried away by the melody at once liquid and sonorous of the mere words, that the soul has a tendency to escape us in sheer delight of the ear, as with a piece of music. Some of our own poets—notably, for example, Shelley—have a similar effect upon us, the combination of words being so exquisite as to steal away our interest in the subject. But the effect of French poetical composition is to deaden the mind, not by satisfying, but by irritating the ear. The waves on the seashore are no doubt as regular in their ebb and flow as are all the other processes of nature; but how different from their wild, interrupted, and broken harmonies would be the regular and crisp accentuation of a succession of short waves always the same, balanced to a nicety, and ruled to one correct line by some authority more potent than that of Canute! Poetry, to our thinking, can triumph more easily over an imperfect medium, winning an additional charm from the very simplicity of her tools, than she can overcome the disadvantage of a too perfect tongue, a mode of expression which permits no self-forgetfulness. Thus the very qualities which make French prose so exquisite, and which give to French conversation a brilliancy and grace which no other language approaches, conspire to weaken their poetry, and repress the genius which would naturally express itself in that way. The French writer who makes des vers is at once distinguished, by the very term he employs to identify his work, from the poet in other languages. His lines, according as they approach perfection, become more and more like a succession of crystals, shining each with its own individual and carefully polished facets. They form, if you will, a chaplet, a rosary, a necklace of pearls and diamonds beautifully linked into decorative but artificial unity, yet possessing no common life, forming no "thing of beauty," and capable of dropping into pieces at any moment. The sharp if often sweet, and sometimes resounding and sonorous ring with which one polished bead falls after another, as you drop them through your fingers, is opposed to all passionate expression, and admits of no absolute continuity. No man can be transported out of himself, can be carried away by that divine impulse which transforms language, and rules it with absolute sway, so long as he has to pick his way daintily among the inexorable words which command his attention in the first place, and to which he is compelled to adopt his meaning, not them to it, but it to them. The French poet is thus more or less in the position of a librettist of the opera. Scarcely less tremendous than the bondage of the music to which that humblest of literary functionaries has to supply words of sentiment or passion, is the bondage of the vers. If in the fervour of his inspiration he breaks upon the serried lines, ventures a novel phrase, an unreceived metre, the Academy from Olympian heights frowns ruin upon the audacious rebel; and the most curious part of all is that he himself bows to this bondage, and that the laws of literature are perhaps the only laws, and the despotism of the Academy the only monarchy, against which France has never shown any symptoms of rebellious feeling.

There was a time when England also was bound in the terrible fetters of the vers—a time to which many still look as the golden age, the Augustan period of literature—and which was no doubt made illustrious by such names as those of Dryden and Pope, though it produced