INSTANT

Une étoile fleurit, pâle dans le ciel bleu ;

De l’infini, légère et vague, la nuit pleut.

Sur le fleuve, là-bas, dans la brume sereine Un bateau longuement fait pleurer sa sirène.

Un pas doux va et vient dans la chambre à côté,

C’est elle, l’àme élue et la sœur de bonté.

Je travaille, je suis sans regret, sans ennui.

Il fait triste, il fait doux. Rien de plus. C’est la vie '.

This, at first, seems to be a Dutch picture, secluded and refined, a dimly lighted chamber with a window opened on the deep country, — a Rien de plus. » But the poet adds, three words, « C’est la vie. » How much more profound does the impression then become! In the fleeting moment the aspect of eternity is found. The soul during this moment has recognized the taste of life, the essential savor that is always distilled for the soul from the limitless diversity of experiences. Consecjuently the picture unites the two extreme notes ot particularity and universality ; it becomes symbolic, and this is the last stage, in which description and sentiment blend with each other in a uniijueand homogeneous form. Nature for the Romanticists was a frame in which were sumptuously enclosed the different attitudes of consciousness ; they set it up as a picturesque decoration in which was played tlie drama of their passion ; and the more the decoration and the passion contrasted, the more powerfully were both accentuated. Sometimes when agra-

t. Gregb, La Beauté de vivre, p. lf>o. The landscapes also of Vièlé- Grifïin (Poèmes et Poésies) are generally the revelation of life in the soul of the poet.

ÉTUDES LITTÉRAIRES

phic description became representative of the interior thought, it retained its objective reality, and it was only after having stamped upon us the intrinsic character of things, that the poet in a commentary told us the ideal meaningh The Parnassians, who did not allow themselves these commentaries, and could not prevent their personal feelings from filtering through their impersonal work, were setting out involuntarily towards symbolic poetry k Baudelaire turned towards it knowingly ; he gave the formula and the example of a symbolic interpretation of nature :

La nature est un temple où de vivants piliers Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles;

L’homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles Qui l’observent avec des regards singuliers L

This is the Evangel of the new poetry ; the process of the symbol, until now exceptional, becomes the fundamental type ol poetic composition. Even the poeLs vision becomes symbolical : the forms of things are to him the hieroglyphics ot the ideas, and ideas have no longer the need of being formulated except in pictures.

Déjà, pour nos regards émerveillés, des plaines Gisent dans la splendeur matinale et sa joie,

Sous le ciel tendre que la brume pâle noie De son rêve ; et vers nous une rumeur d’baleines Parmi des brandies monte, et l’horizon déploie Au loin l’immensité vaporeuse des plaines .

It is thus that the symbolist express the standpoint of the youth discovering with intoxication this new and magnificent life.

By integrating the idea in the picture, the symbol is other than a process of composition. It translates or produces an original fashion of treating the inner life as poetic material.

From the time of Rousseau and of Chateaubriand, it

t. Vidor Hugo, La Vache (Voix intérieures); La Caravane (Châtiments); Vigny, La Mort du Loup; La bouteille à la mer.