simism with the passion, the imagination, and
the formal beauty that only live in magnificent verse. He is the Swift
of poetry. His vision is black and terrible. Some of his descriptions
are even more disgusting than those of Swift, and most of his pages are
no fit reading for the young and ignorant. But the wise reader will find
in this lurid poetry elements of profundity and power which are rare
indeed. Above all, he will find in it a quality not common in French
poetry--a passionate imagination which clothes the thought with
splendour, and lifts the strange words of this unhappy mortal into the
deathless regions of the sublime.

CONCLUSION

With the death of Flaubert in 1880, French literature entered upon a new
phase--a phase which, in its essential qualities, has lasted till
to-day, and which forms a suitable point for the conclusion of the
present sketch.

This last phase has been dominated by two men of genius. In prose,
MAUPASSANT carried on the work of Flaubert with a sharper manner and
more vivid style, though with a narrower range. He abandoned the exotic
and the historical visions of his predecessor, and devoted himself
entirely, in his brilliant novels and yet more brilliant short stories,
to an almost fiendishly realistic treatment of modern life. A precisely
contrary tendency marks the poetry of VERLAINE. While Maupassant
completely disengaged prose from every alien element of poetry and
imagination, pushing it as far as it could go in the direction of
incisive realism, Verlaine and his fellow-workers in verse attempted to
make poetry more truly poetical than it had ever been before, to
introduce into it the vagueness and dreaminess of individual moods and
spiritual fluctuations, to turn it away from definite fact and bring it
near to music.

It was with Verlaine and his successors that French verse completely
broke away from the control of those classical rules, the infallibility
of which had been first attacked by the Romantics. In order to express
the delicate, shifting, and indecisive feelings which he loved so well,
Verlaine abolished the last shreds of rhythmical regularity, making his
verse a perfectly fluid substance, which he could pour at will into the
subtle mould of his feeling and his thought. The result justified the
means. Verlaine's poetry exhales an exquisite perfume--strange,
indistinct, and yet, after the manner of perfume, unforgettable.
Listening to his enchanting, poigna