La Beauté de vivre, p

2. Ibid., p. 1(38. — See Viélé-Griffin, La Lepeade de Wieland le for~ geron, the meaning of which is identical.

3. See the substantial and somewhat severe pages of Brunot, Histoire de la Littérature française, published under the direction of M. Petit de Julleville, vol. VII. p. 791, ff.

THE NEW POETRï IN FRANCE

defiance the Academy and the magisterial word of the Parnassians, and the literary cant ol the bourgeois, approached poetical style to the inorganic fluidity of the spoken phrase, and gave free play in their poetry to all the incorrect and undignified slang, all the jovial and coarse vocabulary of the faubourgs and the taverns. But the others, Mallarmé René Ghil, and Peladan, who looked with scorn at Coppee and Musset, and despised the « langue omnibus du fait divers » in the novels of M. Zola, desired to separate tlie language of art from the rude spoken speech, and the aesthetic word from the everyday locution. The point ot coïncidence between these two doctrines was the principle ot the individuality of their style ; the suppression of all stereotyped rules and traditions, the right ot the artist to break through mere convention and public opinion (Verlaine) as through grammatical customs (Mallarmé) ; the liberty to compose tor himself in his own way the style which alone expresses him, and expresses him exactly.

Hence away with all scruples ! All vocabularies are good,

• — those of the sciences, those of business, that of the street, the most modern slang, and the most Gothic archaism, — the Latin, the Greek, or English^ word. The poet wall diauv from all vocabularies, and outside of these he w ill forge the word wdiich gives the dreamed of caress to his nerves.

These innovations w'ere accepted more easily in tlie vocabulary than in syntax, because the syntax of a language reflects the century long habits of a people’s thought, the very structui-e of its mind.

« War on rhetoric and peace to syntax », cried that cautious revolutionist, Victor Hugo. The symbolists have overturned syntax. The place of the adjective, the construction of the verbs, use of moods, prepositions, and conjunctions, the order of the w-ords, — - everything was turned upside down in the venerable French grammar. The result was, first of all, an inexpressible rigmarole, over which it was easy to make merry.