Some Diversions of a Man of Letters | Page 3

who enjoy without analysing their
enjoyment. In 1880, to have questioned that Sully-Prudhomme was a
very noble poet would have been like challenging Tennyson in 1870, or
Cowley in 1660. Jules Lemaître claimed that he was the greatest artist
in symbols that France had ever produced. Brunetière, so seldom
moved by modern literature, celebrated with ardour the author of Les
Vaines Tendresses as having succeeded better than any other writer
who had ever lived in translating into perfect language the dawn and
the twilight of emotion. That Gaston Paris and M. Anatole France
competed in lofty praise of the lyrics of Sully-Prudhomme, is perhaps
less remarkable than that Paul Verlaine, whom all the younger schools
still look upon as their apostle and guide, declared, in reviewing Les
Ecuries d'Augias, that the force of style of Sully-Prudhomme was
excelled only by the beauty of his detail. It is needless to multiply
examples of the unanimous praise given by the divers schools of
criticism to Sully-Prudhomme up to about 1890. His was, perhaps, the

least contested literary glory of France.
His death startlingly reminded us that this state of things had to be
entirely reversed. It is true that the peculiar talent of Sully-Prudhomme,
being almost exclusively lyrical, scarcely survived his youth, and that
he cumbered his moon of sands with two huge and clumsy wrecks, La
Justice (1878) and Le Bonheur (1898), round which the feet of the
fairies could hardly be expected to trip. One must be an academician
and hopelessly famous before one dares to inflict two elephantine
didactic epics on one's admirers. Unfortunately, too, the poet undertook
to teach the art of verse in his Réflexions (1892) and his Testament
Poétique (1901), brochures which greatly irritated the young. It is
probably wise for academicians, whether poets or the reverse, to sit
beside their nectar, and not to hurl bolts down into the valley. But,
behind these errors of judgment, there they remain--those early
volumes, which seemed to us all so full of exquisite little masterpieces.
Why is it that nobody, except a few elderly persons, any longer delights
in them? The notices which Sully-Prudhomme's death awakened in the
Paris Press were either stamped with the mark of old contemporary
affection, or else, when they were not abusive, were as frigid as the
tomb itself. "Ses tendresses sucrées, sirupeuses, sont vaines en effet,"
said a critic of importance! Indeed, it would appear so; and where are
the laurels of yester-year?
To those who were young when Sully-Prudhomme entered into his
immortality it seems impossible to realise that the glory has already
departed. Gaston Paris celebrated "the penetrating sincerity and the
exquisite expression of feeling" which distinguished Sully-Prudhomme
above all other poets. He was the bard of the inner life, sincere and
dignified, full of melancholy reverie. A great critic compared La Vote
Lactic and Les Stalactites with the far-off sound of bells heard down
some lovely valley in a golden afternoon. Yet the images and the
language were precise; Sully-Prudhomme was a mathematician, and if
he was reproached with anything like a fault, it was that his style was
slightly geometrical. It would be otiose to collect any more tributes to
his genius, as it appeared to all Frenchmen, cultivated or
semi-cultivated, about the year 1880. With an analysis of

Sully-Prudhomme's poetry I am not here concerned, but with the
question of why it is that such an authority as Rémy de Gourmont
could, in 1907, without awakening any protest among persons under
fifty say that it was a "sort of social crime" to impose such balderdash
as the verse of Sully-Prudhomme on the public.
It is not needful to quote other living critics, who may think such
prolongation of their severities ungraceful. But a single contrast will
suffice. When, in 1881, Sully-Prudhomme was elected to the French
Academy, expert opinion throughout the Press was unanimous in
admitting that this was an honour deservedly given to the best lyric
poet of the age. In 1906, when a literary journal sent out this question,
"Who is the poet you love best?" and was answered by more than two
hundred writers of verse, the diversity of opinion was indeed excessive;
such poets as Sainte-Beuve, as Brizeux, as Rodenbach, received votes,
all the great masters received many. But Sully-Prudhomme, alone,
received not one vote. A new generation had arisen, and one of its
leaders, with cruel wit, transferred to the reputation of the author his
own most famous line:--"N'y touchez pas, il est brisé."
It is necessary to recollect that we are not dealing with the phenomenon
of the inability of very astute literary people to recognise at once a
startling new sort of beauty. When Robert Browning lent the best
poems of Keats to Mrs. Carlyle, she read them and returned them with