It is now well known that French verse is not seventy years old.  If it was Hugo who invented French rhyme it was Banville who broke up the couplet.  Hugo had perhaps ventured to place the pause between the adjective and its noun, but it was not until Banville wrote the line, “Elle filait pensivement la blanche laine” that the caesura received its final coup de grace.  This verse has been probably more imitated than any other verse in the French language. Pensivement was replaced by some similar four-syllable adverb, Elle tirait nonchalamment les bas de soie, etc.  It was the beginning of the end.

I read the French poets of the modern school—­Coppee, Mendes, Leon Diex, Verlaine, Jose Maria Heredia, Mallarme, Rechepin, Villiers de l’Isle Adam.  Coppee, as may be imagined, I only was capable of appreciating in his first manner, when he wrote those exquisite but purely artistic sonnets “La Tulipe” and “Le Lys.”  In the latter a room decorated with daggers, armour, jewellery and china is beautifully described, and it is only in the last line that the lily which animates and gives life to the whole is introduced.  But the exquisite poetic perceptivity Coppee showed in his modern poems, the certainty with which he raised the commonest subject, investing it with sufficient dignity for his purpose, escaped me wholly, and I could not but turn with horror from such poems as “La Nourrice” and “Le Petit Epicier.”  How anyone could bring himself to acknowledge the vulgar details of our vulgar age I could not understand.  The fiery glory of Jose Maria de Heredia, on the contrary, filled me with enthusiasm—­ruins and sand, shadow and silhouette of palms and pillars, negroes, crimson, swords, silence, and arabesques.  As great copper pans go the clangour of the rhymes.

    “Entre le ciel qui brule et la mer qui moutonne,
    Au somnolent soleil d’un midi monotone,
    Tu songes, O guerriere, aux vieux conquistadors;
    Et dans l’enervement des nuits chaudes et calmes,
    Bercant ta gloire eteinte, O cite, tu t’endors
    Sous les palmiers, au long fremissement des palmes.”

Catulle Mendes, a perfect realisation of his name, of his pale hair, of his fragile face illuminated with the idealism of a depraved woman.  He takes you by the arm, by the hand, he leans towards you, his words are caresses, his fervour is delightful, and listening to him is as sweet as drinking a fair perfumed white wine.  All he says is false—­the book he has just read, the play he is writing, the woman who loves him,... he buys a packet of bonbons in the streets and eats them, and it is false.  An exquisite artist; physically and spiritually he is art; he is the muse herself, or rather, he is one of the minions of the muse.  Passing from flower to flower he goes, his whole nature pulsing with butterfly voluptuousness.  He has written poems as good as Hugo, as good as Leconte de Lisle, as good as Banville,