Les Jeunes Revues

— It is known that the average French youth who goes in for literature, before he settles down to a prosaic sheephood, tries bleating like a lamb in verse. It is a puzzle to those who are not behind the scenes how he gets his verses published. Usually a few like himself put their slender purses together and bring out a new review, which may not pay for itself, but in which each one can see himself in print. By way of exception, La Plume, founded in 1889, and applying itself especially to the newer art, had a clear surplus of two thousand dollars in 1893 ; while the dinners which it gave, ostentatiously, to older writers supposed to detest one another have proved a yet greater success. The Revue Blanche, dating from 1890, and numbering among its contributors half a dozen founders of schools (all under thirty), has this year taken on the air of a serious review. But, for the most part, these “young reviews” appear and disappear under the arcades of the Odeon Theatre, where the literature of the Latin Quarter is sold, like the short-lived snows of the Parisian winter.

A deal of French literary history is bound up with the personalities behind these reviews. The Décadents have been made much of in England and America. They form but one set, already past, in a series comprising Parnassians, symbolists, instrumentists, and evolutives, and the Romanesques who follow that Parisian Greek, Jean Moréas, and have nothing to do with the Romanticists of Victor Hugo’s early day. It is hardly worth while speaking of minute schisms, though the “hydropaths”and “hirsutes” were made up of men like Maurice Bouchor, who is now a mystic poet of marionettes, and Jean Richepin, who is under a slow process of conversion from the “ tramp ” songs that landed him in prison.

All these young reviews began in 1863 with the Revue Fantaisiste of Catulle Mendfes, then a boy scarcely out of his teens. lie is a Judeo-Greek of Marseilles, where his father was a judge, and his mother the most beautiful woman of her time. The elder Mend&s had paid out sixty thousand francs on his young hopeful’s Parisian venture, without any likelihood of returns, when, one day, Catulle was lugged off to prison. It was the period when Louis Napoleon’s Empire lost no occasion to badger and repress the young republican pamphleteers of the Latin Quarter. The alleged offense was a comedy printed in the review.

The poet’s friends were in the court when he was tried, to lend him countenance. Among the younger men like himself were Alphonse Daudet, who had not yet made a success of his novels, and Sully-Prudhomme, whose poetry, now that he has become an Academician, has proved a startingpoint for the symbolists. Among the older men, already famous across the river, along the Boulevard, were, Aurélien Scholl, who is now the last of his boulevardier tribe, and still correct behind his single eyeglass and irreproachable cravat ; Théodore de Banville, a greater though scarcely a readier rhymer than Catulle Mendès has turned out to be ; and Baudelaire, fresh from singing the Flowers of Evil. Baudelaire had before this been up before the court. The public prosecutor took advantage of his presence to exclaim, with dramatic gesture, “What can you expect of a young man whose intimates are old offenders, already sentenced by their country’s justice ! ” Baudelaire was beside himself with rage, and his friends iiad difficulty in leading him from the courtroom, where he was on the point of being guilty of grave contempt. Mendfes was sentenced to a fine of live hundred francs and a month’s imprisonment. His review did not survive the sentence.

After the coming of the republic in 1870, Catulle Mendès started another review, called La Rèpublique des Lettres. To it belongs the honor of furnishing the first regular output of both Parnassian verse and naturalist fiction. When the weekly paper which was publishing Zola’s L’Assommoir grew frightened, and refused longer to print it, the remainder of the novel was given hospitality in this review. Mendès soon joined it with another, devoted to art, and edited by a certain Ricard, who now, in his demure age, works at a provincial paper and a project for “federalizing” the various Protestant religious denominations. The new review was called Le Parnasse Contemporain, and it paid for the poetry of as great men as Leconte de Lisle. This gave origin to the name Parnasaiens. Those to whom it was applied, unlike their descendants, were quite correct and clear in their writing of verses. Paul Verlaine was then a youth, and had not yet begun his experience in prisons and hospitals with rum àa l’eau. At his mother’s house such Parnassians met as François Coppée, Sully-Prudhomme, and Josd Maria de Hérédia, — all three now of the Academy. The Decadents descend more directly from Verlaine himself.

Bohemianism was, perhaps, in the blood of Catulle Mendes. After a temporary marriage with Judith Gautier (Tlieophile’s daughter, who writes notable historical romances under her maiden name), he went through the dueling age with only less credit than Auréien Scholl, and finally subsided into his present position as writer of erotic verse and stories, with an occasional success at the Thdatre Français which tells what he might have been.

In 1881 appeared the publication which has had the most to do with the later poets, La Revue Indépendante. Its editor in chief was hatchet-faced Félix Fénéon, who was tried as an anarchist a few months ago. He was acquitted, though dynamite caps were found concealed in his desk at the Ministry of War (where he was a government employee), and it was known that he was intimate with Cohen, the Dutch anarchist, who got a living by translating Ibsen and Gerhard Hauptmann. One of the ultra-æsthetic writers whom Fénéon gathered round him was Laurent Tailhade, who, at a public supper, just after Vaillant’s bomb had been thrown, gave utterance to a sentiment of refined anarchy : “ What matters the deed if the doing be beautiful (si le geste est beau) ! ” By an uncommon instance of poetic justice another anarchist bomb blew his own cheek open, some weeks later. It was in the Revue Indépendante that the symbolists, from whom all the latest schools are derived, first showed themselves definitely in the writings of Moréas, Verlaine, and Stéphane Mallarmé. Here, too, young Maurice Barits began a career that may reach to any height by his “ cult of the Ego.”