r, but her graver mood has no more of
violence or mawkishness than has her gallant roguery (or enchanting
archness) of viciousness or spite. Best of all, she is her poet's very
own. You may woo her and pursue her as you will; but the end is
invariable. 'I follow, follow still, but I shall never see her face.'
Even as in her master's finest song.

BANVILLE

His Nature.

The Muse of M. de Banville was born not naked but in the most elaborate
and sumptuous evening wear that ever muse put on. To him, indeed, there
is no nature so natural as that depicted on the boards, no humanity half
so human as the actor puts on with his paint. For him the flowers grow
plucked and bound into nosegays; passion has no existence outside the
Porte-Saint-Martin; the universe is a place of rhymes and rhythms, the
human heart a supplement to the dictionary. He delights in babbling of
green fields, and Homer, and Shakespeare, and the Eumenides, and the
'_rire enorme_' of the _Frogs_ and the _Lysistrata_. But it is suspected
that he loves these things rather as words than as facts, and that in his
heart of hearts he is better pleased with Cassandra and Columbine than
with Rosalind and Othello, with the studio Hellas of Gautier than with
the living Greece of Sophocles. Heroic objects are all very well in
their way of course: they suggest superb effects in verse, they are of
incomparable merit considered as colours and jewels for well-turned
sentences in prose. But their function is purely verbal; they are the
raw material of the outward form of poesy, and they come into being to
glorify a climax, to adorn a refrain, to sparkle and sound in odelets and
rondels and triolets, to twinkle and tinkle and chime all over the eight-
and-twenty members of a fair ballade.

His Art.

It is natural enough that to a theory of art and life that can be thus
whimsically described we should be indebted for some of the best writing
of modern years. Our poet has very little sympathy with fact, whether
heroic or the reverse, whether essential or accidental; but he is a rare
artist in words and cadences. He writes of 'Pierrot, l'homme subtil,'
and Columbine, and 'le beau Leandre,' and all the marionettes of that
pleasant puppet-show which he mistakes for the world, with the rhetorical
elegance and distinction, the verbal force and glow, the rhythmic beauty
and propriety, of a rare poet; he models a group of flowers in wax as
passionatel