François Coppée

“ A LIFE of home; very quiet, very retired ; no Bohemianism ” ( Une vie en famille ; très calme, très retirée ; aucune bohème), — so does M. Coppée epitomize the story of his younger days ; and the words might also, it seems to me, serve fittingly for a motto to a critical study of his works, or more fittingly still, perhaps, for a starting-point.

And a strange starting-point, too, although the statement itself may seem strange. Cne vie en famille, aucune bohème,—such would constitute no exceptional commencement to the career of an American or English man of letters. But it unquestionably strikes an exceptional keynote in the life of a French littérateur. For the French journalist, or novel-writer, or poet, generally comes to Paris at an early age. His home lies far away in the sunny south, or by the mist-haunted western shores, or in the rich central plains. The ties that bind him to it are very loose. He is rather proud of their looseness. He throws himself into the whirl of the great city with all the zest and eagerness of his youth, and with such talent as may be in him. There is first the Bohemianism of the student, that motley life of the Quartier Latin that has been described so often and so well ; a life of gay poverty, and noisy pleasures, and shifty expedients, and ephemeral loose loves, — loves that Alfred de Musset has idealized, and Gavarni caricatured. Then, with a few added years and some beginnings of success, he pusses into the adjacent Bohemianism of literature and art. Here there is, perhaps, a little less noise, a little more money to spend, and in the loves a greater affectation of passion and sentiment. Otherwise, in this real essence, things remain much as they were, until that moment, retarded as long as may be, when the author “ranges himself.” But such a late return to the ordinary bourgeois ways scarcely avails to recolor his views of life or revivify his art. The influences of early manhood cannot thus be eliminated. They have become bone of bone and flesh of flesh.

Quite other were the influences that went to the moulding of M. Coppée’s character. He has himself told us, in a graceful letter which the Gaulois published a few months ago, the story of his earlier years. “ I was born in Paris in 1842,” he writes, “ my parents being Parisians. My father was a humble clerk in the war office. The family was numerous,” — numerous, that is, according to French ideas, — “ and we were not rich ; but there is the more love when the space is small, and all have to live very close together. My father had a dreamer’s nature, and was passionately fond of letters. He taught me to love them, too, and from my first school-days I laid together lines of unequal length, with a rhyme at the end. That was at the Lycée Saint-Louis, where I was only a day scholar. At night I wrote my exercises near the only lamp, on the table round which all the family were gathered. ... I was a delicate child, an idle scholar, but there were verses on the margins of my copy-books. ... I was still very young when one of my sisters married; then another died; then my father died, too, and I was left alone with my mother and my eldest sister. To be the head of a family at twenty, that was at once hard and sweet. I had in turn become a clerk in the war office, and, like my father, brought home my salary at the end of each month, to help keep matters going. Meanwhile I was always writing things of all kinds, — stories, plays, verse especially. The whole has long since been condemned. ... It was only at the age of twenty-three that I began to think that some of my poems might perhaps deserve publication. I was encouraged by the poetical brotherhood presided over by Catulle Mendès, to which I had just been admitted. I owe an infinite debt of gratitude to Mendès : without him I should never have taken confidence in myself. The Reliquaire, my first volume, appeared in 1860 ; the Intimités in 1867. . . . But I remained in complete obscurity; a few literary men, a few poets, had read my verses, and that was all. The success of the Passant, in 1869, changed the whole tenor of my life. . . . That was fifteen years ago, and now my works—poetry and dramas — form six volumes, more than five thousand lines. It is not for me to speak of them, to enumerate them, even. ... As to my private life, it is entirely devoid of interest A poet’s existence is made up of dreams and sheets of blackened paper. I have never married, and live with my eldest sister, my dear Annette, who has also remained single, and has taken the place of my mother, who died a few years ago. I live in a retired part of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, in a quiet house, surrounded by books and flowers. As I am still not rich, I leave home to fulfill my duties as librarian to the Théâtre FranÇois, and to be present at the first performances of new plays, which I critjeise in the columns of the Patrie, And now what more can I tell you ? That I have gone somewhat into society, but do so no longer, the working hours of life being too precious; . . . that the red ribbon of the Legion of Honor was given me in 1876 ; and that I am a candidate lor the Academy. I wish you could add to this biography that I shall be elected. If such were your prophecy, it would be a very imprudent one. My chances, I am assured, are slight, albeit I have been excellently received by all the Immortals. The great obstacle, as one of them assured me with much kindness, is that I am paradoxically young; and yet, alas, I shall so soon be forty.”

Fortunately, M. Coppée’s youth has not prevailed against him, and he is now, as we all know, one of the Immortals, and occupies a place among the gods on the sunny peaks of the Academical Olympus. There may he, by all means, “ live happy ever afterwards.” But my object in quoting these autobiographical passages has not been to lead to that climax of the old-fashioned novel. Still less has it been to pander to the taste for personal detail, the very gossip of literature, which is invading genuine criticism ever more and more. What I have wished to do is to show, as it were, the foundation of M. Coppée’s art. Let us see to what extent the superstructure may accord with it.

Born in Paris, of Parisian parents, a Parisian of the Parisians, no wonder that M. Coppée loves Paris. He loves it in its every aspect, as a lover the face of his mistress. I don’t mean that he loves it with an affection altogether exclusive. To go through the world having no eye whatever for the great aspects of nature was possible even for a real poet, in the days of Villon. It can scarcely be possible in this nineteenth century of ours. And so M. Coppée is to be only half believed when he exclaims,—

or again, —

What ? A suburb ringing to the shouts of childhood, some forgotten field in which clothes have been hung out to dry, old leprous walls covered with halftorn advertisements. Yes, M. Coppée is to be only half believed when he expresses his admiration for these things as if he admired nothing else. Indeed, it seems scarcely possible altogether to acquit his enthusiasm for some of them of a slight suspicion of affectation. But be that as it may, he certainly admires other things, too,— the sea, for example. Still, unquestionably, the scenery to which his thought turns most habitually, lovingly, caressingly, is that of the incomparable city. There he is happy and at home. There he chooses the best colors of his palette.

And not the scenery only, the mere inanimate nature of Paris, does he linger over with affection, He loves all the innumerable scenes from the drama of life that are ever being enacted there. The streets are to him as a stage in a theatre that is always open, and there the performances range from the deepest tragedy to the lightest farce. How interesting it all is ! What a jumble of characters and situations! Here the hale pensioner, sturdy on his wooden leg, traces the plan of some battle for the benefit of our open-mouthed recruit. Here, in the half - deserted Faubourg Saint-Germain, a discreet abbé leads homeward from mass a hoy marquis, and seems to be seeking for admissible terms in which to describe the young gentleman’s ancestors of the time of the Ligue. Here a little motherly atom — in mourning, alas!—conducts a smaller atom to school, and (for M. Coppée recoils from no humblest detail) wipes the smaller atom’s tiny nose. Here a noisy band of students and grisettes, bent on some river expedition, fills the station with song and strident laughter. Here, in the evening quiet of the Luxembourg gardens, a young soldier, haled unwillingly from the plough, and a servant from the same far village mingle their memories of home, and speak their simple loves. Here the drunkard, sitting sodden at his table, traces with unsteady finger a woman’s name in the drippings from his wine-can.

Yes, for the seeing eye and the sympathetic spirit, how full of interest is that ever-changing kaleidoscope of life ! A seeing eye M. Coppée unquestionably has, and in a most marked degree a sympathetic spirit. At this point I place my hand upon the main-spring, the motive power, of his art. I touch one of its chief peculiarities. For upwards of sixty years or so the bourgeois has been the object of gibe and insult on the part of nearly all in France who hold pen or brush. Gavarni would not unwillingly have asphyxiated him with the mingled odors of punch, patchouli, and cigars. There was one other fiery and homicidal gentleman of the romantic school who expressed a cannibal desire to feed upon him. From such cravings of hate M. Coppée is free. The environment of his early days has given him the kindliest capacity of insight into homely joys and sorrows. He knows how much of courage and patient effort and unostentatious self-devotion lies hidden in lives to outward seeming quite commonplace and mean. He is seldom happier than when he can cull some dainty flower from soil that looks unpromising and barren. He has tears for those tragedies that are not really less pathetic because they occur in humble existences. The Humble, — that is the titie of one of his hooks. It opens with the story of a peasant girl ill married to a village prodigal,— one of those marriages in which, as he says,

Then comes the baby; and the woman’s husband, having by that time spent all her savings, insists on her going to Paris as a nurse. Of course he promises to see that the child is well taken care of meanwhile, and equally of course he villainously neglects it, and it dies. When she comes back, after weary weeks of absence, yearning with all her mother-heart for the tiny creature whom she expects to see prospering and well, she finds, instead, a broken cradle, dirty and cobwebbed. I take another of these poems. It is entitled A Son. and tells of a boy’s school career, promising, brilliant, with all its boundless hopes and possibilities, but suddenly shadowed and blighted by the revelation of his mother’s shame and his own illegitimacy. He devotes his changed life to her, tends her through the long querulous years of age and infirmity, and when she dies is left a poor, broken, prematurely old little government clerk. A similar story, though told for the nonce in prose (M. Coppée being ambidextrous in the use of prose and verse), is the story of another government clerk, a man famed for his thews and sinews, his hulk and brawn, his autobiographical anecdotes of midnight victory over the footpad and assassin, of wild and perilous adventure in war and love, and yet discovered to be the gentlest of kindly creatures, whose evening hours, so terribly depicted by himself, are really spent in ministering to an aged mother.

I will not affirm that there is not some faint suspicion of affectation in a few of M. Coppée’s presentments of humble life: the grocer, for instance. I am prepared to sympathize to the utmost with his domestic sorrows, the coldness and ill-nature of his wife, his childlessness ; with the feeling that prompts him, like Miss Mattie in Mrs. Gaskell’s delicately beautiful story of Cranford, to sell lollipops for nothing to the little curly-headed purchasers. But when I am asked to drop the tear of sensibility over the elegiac melancholy with which he chops his sugar, why, then I begin to doubt whether I am being treated quite seriously. Nor cun I stifle the same suspicion when, through many lines of very good verse, the poet moralizes over

One does not like to be so reminded, and yet one is reminded of Sterne, and his remarks on the ramshackle old carriage in the vineyard at Dessein’s ; yes, and of Thackeray’s somewhat uncomplimentary comment on that sentimental performance.

But still, after making every deduction, there is no doubt that in his sympathetic delineation of humble life, his kindly thought for those who are trodden down in the great battle, M. Coppée has given proof of a very distinctive talent and nature. The vein is not one that French poetry has worked to any great purpose. A few poems by Victor Hugo are all that I at present remember as being at all remarkable. For Sainte-Beuve, as a poet, was by no means in the first rank ; and his earlier work, which bears most affinity in subject with this work of M. Coppée, is moreover without M. Coppée’s tenderness and peculiar moral elevation of tone and ready accessibility to noble and generous ideas.

Here again I lay my hand, as it were, on one of the most essential characteristics of M. Coppée’s art. Here the education of his earlier years has stood him in good stead. We have all lately heard much about that great goddess Lubricity, whose image fell, not perhaps from Jupiter, but from some inferior and foul deity, and whom France in general, and Paris in particular, is supposed to worship with a very special veneration. We can imagine her votaries — M. Zola in chief — clamoring round Mr. Matthew Arnold, as the Ephesians of old clamored round St. Paul; and, sooth to say, her rites occupy a place all too prominent and hideous in contemporary French literature. If we accepted the pictures of life which the “ naturalist ” novelists offer to us as true, or as being in any sense the whole truth, we might indeed despair of the country ; weeping for the decay of a race to which in past times—aye, and in the present — mankind has ever owed and owes so much. Some French novelists have a good purpose in view, and M. Alphonse Daudet unquestionably wished to convey a weighty and terrible message when he wrote his Sapho; but there is a kind of acceptance of vice as the normal condition of men, a persistent dwelling upon it, that are in the last degree morbid and unhealthy. But these pictures of French life are incomplete and unfaithful. For all their braggart claims to scientilic exactitude, and the noisy advertising of what they are pleased to call human documents,” M. Zola and his friends are only topsyturvy idealists, with mud for ideal. Behind the France of the French novelwriter, a France which we know only too well, is a France of toil and selfsacrifice and generous deeds and noble aspirations, of kindly domestic pieties and pure, true love, and even of faith and prayer. This France is far less known to us. We catch a glimpse of it now and again. We hear its voice occasionally. But it never flaunts itself much, nor does it cry its virtues from the housetops.

Of this France M. Coppée may fittingly be called the laureate. I cannot attempt to enumerate the poems, or stories, or plays of his which may be regarded as a setting to some elevated, kindly thought, which present this poor human stuff of ours in one of its nobler, better shapes. The catalogue would be too long.

Do I want a tale of Christ-like forgiveness for the most terrible of injuries ? There is the poem of Irène de Gramlfief, who sets herself to tend a wounded German officer, and discovers from his talk that he has killed her lover, somewhere near Metz, in midnight ambush, and yet, through a long night of agony that silvers the hair round her young forehead, she supplies at the stated times the medicine on which the frail life of her sick foe depends. Do I want a story of self-devotion? There is the poem that tells of two prisoners, during the Reign of Terror, both bearing the same name; and how the younger, who is unmarried and childless, accepts the guillotine in the place of the other. Again, there are poems that deal with self-sacrifice, not in some high and tragic moment, when every impulse is strung to highest pitch, but carried out heroically through the long hours of life, — youth, health, love itself, being given up to duty.

Scarcely one of M. Coppée’s prose contes fails to have a moral motive. They are very various in subject, of course, yet nearly all have, if not exactly a purpose, still an animating soul of goodness and elevated thought. We know pretty well by this time in what terms the average French littérateur is likely to speak of love, and how much of mere sensuality will enter into his view of the relations between men and women. It is by contrast that Alfred de Musset’s beautiful poem, Une Bonne Fortune, shines so silvery pure. It seems like a rift in a cloudy sky, through which he had caught a glimpse of a purer, better heaven. We get the same impression again from the story of the actor, who receives a letter of assignation from a girl, almost a child, foolish and stage-struck, and suddenly bethinks himself that he might have a daughter of that age, and dismisses her with warning and kindly words,—yes, and with a superb and patriarchal blessing; for even when an actor does the good and the right thing, he still can hardly help doing it with an eye to imaginary footlights.

I have said that many of the stories have for obvious motive a kindly and elevated thought, and seem to exhale a fresh perfume of rectitude and disinterestedness. Was Captain Mercadier a perfect personage ? Scarcely that,

I fear. “ He was not a saint,” we are told, and there appeared every probability, when he took his pension and retired to live thereon in his native town, that the local café would absorb most of his slender means. From this, from a life of selfish, brutal old-bachelorhood, he is rescued by the hand of a child, a little lame foundling, who becomes to him as a daughter. Foreground, background, middle distance, figures, and accessories, all are different, and yet one is vaguely reminded of Silas Marner. Poor Leture, too, —a sad story, possibly a true one: the gutter child, the reformatory, the branded life, the jail, the honest effort to mend, and then the devoted friendship for a young country mason, who gradually deteriorates in the tainted moral atmosphere of Paris, turns thief to feed his pleasures, and allows innocent Leturc to assume the responsibility for the crime and accept transportation for life. And Annette de Cardaillan, whose heart has been broken by the unworthiness of a young roué to whom she was engaged, and who has become a sister of charity ; and who, as she goes her way through Paris in an omnibus, is moved by a workingwoman’s homely story of her child’s sickness, and gives to the little one the last memorial she has kept of the world and of her love, — a medal blessed by the Pope; whereupon the conductor, who is an old soldier and a subscriber to the Intransigeant, and regards “clericalism ” as the “ enemy,” feels inclined to raise his testimony ; but seeing that the mother is moved, he contents himself, out of pity for the weaker sex, with smiling the smile of superiority. For that smile, I fear M. Coppée has not all the respect that might be wished; and yet it possesses an attraction even for the greatest among Frenchmen. Has not M. Renan confessed that long study of religious questions has produced in him at last the same mind that was in Victor Hugo’s Gavroche and Flaubert’s M. Homais ? But M. Coppée’s stage of religious development is not so advanced, He still sees that the older faiths produced flowers too beautiful and delicate for ridicule.

Am I doing his art any wrong by dwelling at such length upon its ethical side? I scarcely think so. I do not believe that M. Coppée himself would think so, if these lines were ever to fall under his eye. A noble purpose, however, is not everything. Good intentions alone will not save a poet. He must be an artist as well as a moralist, or he is a failure. It behooves us, therefore, to inquire what is the value of M. Coppée’s gilt as a maker of prose and verse.

I myself set it very high. The stories contained in the Contes en Prose and the Vingt Contes Nouveaux are gracefully and artistically told. They are short, and naturally slight; some indeed incline rather to the essay than to the story, but each has a sufficiency of interest to justify its existence, and nearly all have much more than this. M. Coppée possesses preëminently the gift of presenting concrete fact rather than abstraction, — the gift, it may be remembered, which M. Taine thought so noticeable in Thackeray; the gift, by the way, which belongs more specially to the literature of the nineteenth century as compared with that of the eighteenth. We seem to know his personages, to have met them and seen them among just such surroundings as the writer has considered essential. Small as is the canvas, the picture is finished ; and yet it remains what it should be, in those proportions, a sketch. A sketch, also, is M. Coppée’s one novel, Une Idylle pendant le Siège. That is the fault of it. For in a novel we require stronger characterization, greater grasp of character, and, I was going to add, a more searching dissection of motive and impulse; but dissection is scarcely the right image, for dissection implies death, whereas the art of the novelist consists rather in vivisection, and should show us the human heart and intellect in full play and activity. This tale of love, with the siege of Paris for running accompaniment, is not one of my favorites among M. Coppée’s works. I do not feel, when I have read it, that I know the hero and heroine particularly well, or that I have enlarged my knowledge of character, or deepened my insight into life. Loves belonging so essentially to the commonplace of French literature scarcely seem to require for their enacting such a tremendous theatre as the great siege, with its background of famine and blood and fire. There is an incongruity about the whole thing, a want of keeping. Nor is this feeling removed by the fact that the male lover, at least, appears occasionally to share it too, and to be dimly conscious that his philandering is not quite opportune. “ Blood and iron,” — the times rang to other music than the love-notes in the human voice.

However, it is not as a prose-writer that M. Coppée is mainly known, or deserves to be known. So I will not linger for quotation and comment. The ampler, finer field of his poetry calls me onward.

It is a field which he has cultivated to various purposes. There are plays, real plays, plays to be acted; not plays written as an English or an American poet would probably have written them, simply for “ the closet,” but plays that have stood the glare of the footlights, with pelf and applause for result. Was it not after the performance of one of these, the Passant, by Madame Sarah Bernhardt and Mademoiselle Agar that he awoke, like Byron, famous, and crowned with a night’s green growth of laurel leaves ? As interludes to the plays, there are “occasional ” theatrical pieces, written for the fiftieth anniversary of the performance of Hernani, or the two hundredth anniversary of the foundation of the Comédie FranÇaise.

Besides these theatrical pieces, of which the most important, and I think the best, is Severo Torelli, produced not so long since at the Odéon, — besides these, M. Coppée has written a very considerable number of miscellaneous poems, which have appeared in a very considerable number of dainty little volumes: and the dainty little volumes have from time to time been compressed into volumes that are thicker, though still dainty, — for M. Lemerre, the publisher, publishes all things well, — and the result is a goodly show of verse. But perhaps a little cataloguing may not be amiss. For French poetry does not win its way very rapidly into other lands, and though there are doubtless some of my readers who know a great deal more about M. Coppée than I do, yet it would not perhaps be quite safe for me, on any grounds, to assume that all stand to me in that relationship. So for those who are not so advanced in knowledge, I may as well be categorical. M. Coppée’s opus No. 1, then, — or rather, perhaps, opusculus, as it contains but very few pages, — was the Reliquaire, published in 1864, twenty years ago, and, we are told, at the poet’s own expense. At these first ventures of literature, what winds of hope belly their sails, and how do the reefs and quicksands gnash at. them with white teeth, and the deeps of oblivion wait for them as for a prey ! M. Coppée was among those more fortunate traffickers whose argosies arrive safely at the desired haven. The book had but a small sale, no doubt, but it “ numbered good intellects.”The fit and few knew that another real poet was born ; and their knowledge acquired greater certainty in 1867, when the Intimités appeared, to be followed, not long after, by the Poëmes Modernes, which opens with the pathetic story of Angelus, the little foundling loved to death by an old priest and an old soldier; and followed again by two of M. Coppée’s noblest poems, the Bénédiction and the Grève des Forgerons.

Here the poet was giving the full measure of his genius, — for I think that great word is admissible, He was using, and to fine purpose, the more tragic stops in this human nature of ours. La Bénédiction is a story of the siege of Saragossa. It purports to be told by an old trooper, whose most familiar form of speech was an oath, but whose memory is yet filled with horror as he goes over the incidents of the last day of the siege. After the walls were taken each house became a citadel, each house had to be carried by storm. The priests were known to have been the soul of the defense. When one was seen among the combatants, he was shot down gayly. At last one of the attacking columns came before a convent chapel, and found some of their comrades struggling with a group of monks on the threshold. A volley mowed the monks down. “ Then,” says the trooper, “ when the dense smoke had slowly rolled away, we saw from underneath the pent heap of the dead long streams of blood veining the steps, and behind the immense dim interior of the church. Tapers starred the gloom with points of gold ; incense filled the place with the languor of its perfume ; and right at the end, with his face turned towards the altar in the choir, a very tall, whitehaired priest was quietly finishing the mass, as if he had not heard the sound of the battle.

“ The evil scene is so present to my memory that, as I speak, I almost think I see it, still, — the old convent with its Moorish front, the great brown corpses of the monks, the sun making the red blood steam upon the pavement, and in the black frame of the portal that priest and that altar sparkling like a reliquary, and ourselves struck dumb for the moment and awed. . . . ‘ Fire ! ’ cried an officer. No one moved. The priest certainly heard, but showed no sign, and faced us with the consecrated host, for he had now come to that part of the service when the priest turns towards the faithful and blesses them. His uplifted arms looked like wings outstretched, and all recoiled as he made the sign of the cross in the air with the remonstrance ; and we could see that he trembled no more than before a congregation of pious women, and heard his fine voice slowly chanting forth, ‘ Benedicat vos omnipotens Deus.’ ‘ Fire,’ repeated the savage voice, ‘or I lose my temper ! ’ Then one of our men, a soldier, but a coward, lifted his gun and fired. The old man grew very pale, but without lowering his eyes, that shone with a stern, high courage, he added,

’Pater et Filius.’ What frenzy, what veil of blood maddening a human brain, caused another shot to ring from our ranks I know not. Nevertheless that deed was done. The monk, leaning with one hand on the altar, and striving to bless us once more, lifted again the heavy monstrance of gold. For the third time he traced in the air the sign of pardon, and in a voice very low, but still quite audible, for all sounds had hushed, he said, with his eyes closed, ‘ Et Spiritus Sanctus,’ and then fell dead, having finished his prayer.

“ The monstrance rebounded three times from the pavement; and as we were all, even the oldest troopers, standing with grounded arms, awed and horror-struck at the sight of a murder so foul and a martyrdom so heroic,’Amen ! cried a drummer-boy, and burst out laughing.”

There is a certain melancholy pleasure in seeing how inadequately one’s prose renders a poem of this kind. But it is a pleasure which may easily pall, and I shall not translate any portion of the Grève des Forgerons. That, again, is a dramatic monologue, such as Mr. Browning has accustomed us to, and deals with incidents equally tragic. The story, too, is told with equal power. An old iron-worker recounts to his judges the tale of the strike : how his grandchildren were starving; how he appealed to the committee to let him go back to work; how one of the club orators, living on the general subscriptions, gibed at his misery; and how he struck him down with his hammer. To deal with themes like these in fully adequate verse is to be a poet of high quality.

After the Grève des Forgerons came Les Humbles, to which I have already referred ; and a few pieces written in 1870, during the siege of Paris; pieces, with the exception of the Lettre d ‘un Mobile Breton, by no means remarkable. Then followed a very characteristic volume of Promenades et Intérieurs. Its title may indicate the contents. This was succeeded by Le Cahier Rouge, a collection of disconnected pieces. This brings us to 1874. Les Récits et les Elégies appeared in 1878. It contains a number of miscellaneous poems; a series which is called Les Mois; another entitled Jeunes Filles; the story of Irène de Grandfief ; and several Récits Epiques, of the kind inaugurated by Victor Hugo in the Légendes des Siècles. Of these the finest— though several are fine — is, in my opinion, La Tête de la Sultane, which is as full of Oriental color and as tragic as a picture by Henri Régnault.

Lastly, after the Récits et les Elégies, came Contes en Vers and Poésies Diverses, whereof the two most notable are La Marchande de Journaux and L’Enfant de la Balle : the first being one of those stories of humble life in which M. Coppée excels, — an old newspaper seller, to whom the rise and fall of political interests mean only the more or less of comfort for her little weakling grandson ; and the second, the story of a child born in the theatre and bred among the footlights, who achieves upon the boards a success phenomenal in every sense, and dies a martyr to her triumph.

All these several volumes represent a large body of verse ; love poems in considerable number, stories of history and legend, stories of every-day life, “ occasional ” verses not a few, sonnets in profusion, a few dainty vers de société, and a small quantity of songs. The field has yielded a large and varied crop. What is to be said as to the quality of the grain ?

Of the moral quality of M. Coppée’s work I have already spoken. As to the literary quality, a few words are necessary. First I would say of M. Coppée’s verse that it possesses the gift of spontaneity. It is not " art manufacture. Does that seem small praise and merely negative commendation ? Such is far from being my view. Take, by way of contrast, the poems of M. Leconte de Lisle. M. Leconte de Lisle has learning, industry, an artist’s real desire of perfection. But all his work “ is full of labor; man cannot utter it.” The sense of effort chills the reader’s pleasure. There is none of the seemingly careless excellence of absolute mastery, Every line bears the marks of the hammer and the anvil. With M. Coppée it is quite different. Here every poem seems to have sprung from a genuine inspiration. It has taken root one does not quite know how, and effloresces naturally. Of course this may not be really so. M. Coppée may produce with great difficulty, possibly with even more real pain than M. Leconte de Lisle ; but so far as the result is concerned,—and in all such matters one is concerned only with results, — the younger alone is a spontaneous poet.

Closely allied to this gift of spontaneity is a gift of interest. Does that, too, seem a slight thing ? I fancy not, to those who are under any sort of professional compulsion to read even a small part of the thoroughly unreadable verse which is produced annually. If poets would only realize that one of the essential conditions of saying something is having something to say ; that a necessary preliminary to all poetry is some thought, passion, emotion, that is worthy of poetry’s brocaded vesture, some scene from the great drama of life that is fit to keep the stage! M. Coppée does not fall into the mistake of supposing that gossamer can be made imperishable. He takes care to weave with silk of sufficient substance. When he sings, it is because he has something to sing about; and the result is, as I have intimated. that his poetry is nearly always interesting. Moreover, he respects the limits of his art; for while his friend and contemporary, M. Sully-Prudhomme, goes astray only too habitually in philosophical speculation, and his immortal senior, Victor Hugo, often declaims, if one may venture reverently to say so, in a manner which is tedious, M. Coppée sticks rigorously to what may be called the proper regions of poetry. When he falls into prose, as he very occasionally does, it is not because he has wandered out of the right path, but because he has faltered. Such lapses are rare. Habitually his step is as sure as it is easy and light.

“ L’art pour l’art! ” Does that mean that art is to exist for artists alone, and only those qualities in a work of art are to be considered which appeal to the artist’s fellow craftsmen ? If so, surely the message of art were singularly impoverished. Let art exist for artists, by all means. Let every technical excellence have full weight and value. It is scarcely possible to exaggerate the superb importance of workmanship. But beyond the artist lies the great mass of men. To them the technical side of art appeals only in a modified degree. They feel its insufficiency or absence. A sure and right instinct tells them, as I have already said, that if the poet is not an artist, he has scant reason of existence, whatever may be the worth of the message he has to deliver. Still, when this has been granted to the full, it remains that to the mass of men the message and its worth are the objects of chief attraction. Surely I am not contending that some direct ethical purpose should be the motive of every work of art. Far from it. The motive may be one of thought, or passion, or feeling, or fancy, or imagination,— may, in fact, be of almost any kind. But it must be there. Nor, maugre M. Zola and his school, will sane and healthy ethics mar either the message or the form of its delivery. So long as we are men, and not beasts, the human, not the bestial, must be the best stimulants, must answer best to our needs. To these remarks M. Coppée’s works, in their sum and totality, may most fittingly serve for illustration. He is an artist, and an admirable one. He possesses most fully the technique of French poetry. He plays upon his instrument with all power and grace. But he is no mere virtuoso. There is something in him beyond the executant. Of Malibran Alfred de Musset says, most beautifully, that she had that “ voice of the heart which alone has power to reach the heart.” Here, also, behind the skillful player on language, the deft manipulator of rhyme and rhythm, the learned disposer of pause and cæsura, one feels the beating of a human heart. One feels that the artist has himself felt. One feels that he is giving us personal impressions of life and its joys and sorrows, that his imagination is powerful because it is genuinely his own, that the flowers of his fancy spring spontaneously from the soil. Nor can I regard it as aught but an added grace that the strings of that instrument of his should vibrate so readily to what is beautiful and unselfish and delicate in human feeling.

Frank T. Marzials.