M. De Banville says himself. He
admits that his lighter works, the poems called (in England) _vers de
societe_, are a sort of intellectual cigarette. M. Emile de Girardin
said, in the later days of the Empire, that there were too many
cigarettes in the air. Their stale perfume clings to the literature of
that time, as the odour of pastilles yet hangs about the verse of Dorat,
the designs of Eisen, the work of the Pompadour period. There is more
than smoke in M. De Banville's ruling inspiration, his lifelong devotion
to letters and to great men of letters--Shakespeare, Moliere, Homer,
Victor Hugo. These are his gods; the memory of them is his muse. His
enthusiasm is worthy of one who, though born too late to see and know the
noble wildness of 1830, yet lives on the recollections, and is
strengthened by the example, of that revival of letters. Whatever one
may say of the _renouveau_, of romanticism, with its affectations, the
young men of 1830 were sincere in their devotion to liberty, to poetry,
to knowledge. One can hardly find a more brilliant and touching belief
in these great causes than that of Edgar Quinet, as displayed in the
letters of his youth. De Banville fell on more evil times.

When "Les Cariatides" was published poets had begun to keep an eye on the
Bourse, and artists dabbled in finance. The new volume of song in the
sordid age was a November primrose, and not unlike the flower of Spring.
There was a singular freshness and hopefulness in the verse, a wonderful
"certitude dans l'expression lyrique," as Sainte-Beuve said. The mastery
of musical speech and of various forms of song was already to be
recognised as the basis and the note of the talent of De Banville. He
had style, without which a man may write very nice verses about heaven
and hell and other matters, and may please thousands of excellent people,
but will write poetry--never. Comparing De Banville's boy's work with
the boy's work of Mr. Tennyson, one observes in each--"Les Cariatides" as
in "The Hesperides"--the _timbre_ of a new voice. Poetry so fresh seems
to make us aware of some want which we had hardly recognised, but now are
sensible of, at the moment we find it satisfied.

It is hardly necessary to say that this gratifying and welcome
strangeness, this lyric originality, is nearly all that M. De Banville
has in common with the English poet whose two priceless volumes were
published in the same year as "Les Cariatides?" The