It is hard to resist the temptation to quote Retté's verses; even to transcribe them is a pleasure; this chanson du Pauvre :

Thulé des Brumes, par tes grèves,
C'est un Pauvre qui chante et rêve:

Un soir léger bleuit sous les sapins
Pareils à des Vieux taciturnes ;
Voici passer, portant des urnes,
Les vierges noires du Destin.
Quelqu'une suit, aux yeux trop doux,
Qui cueillit les fruits défendus
Gardés par des monstres jaloux :

La Folle des chemins perdus.

C'était naguère et c'est encor ce soir,
Une impératrice exilée.

Voyez flotter par les allées
Des vapeurs vagues d'encensoirs.-
Cheveux où saignent des corolles,
Yeux trop purs, lèvres sans paroles,
Gestes d'une qui ne sait plus :
La Folle des chemins perdus.

Le soir frissonne sous les branches —
Elle erre pâle, en robe blanche,
Et les lis baisent ses pieds nus. . . .
Yeux trop noirs, ô trop belle Dame,
C'est mon âme, dis-je, mon âme :
La Folle des chemins perdus.

M. Henri Degron, an excellent critic, said once that Retté was the most marvellously endowed poet of this generation. I do not quarrel with that statement. Retté's work is only begun his first book dates from 1889. I would, however, supplement M. Degron's praise by saying that no poet is so much a man of his generation, so intimately a part of the intellectual life of the day. He is the poet and the soldier of the Ideal:

Je ris, je suis l'éphèbe et le prince de Mai,
Je cueille des glaïeuls, des fraises ou des lèvres,
J'étoile de mes vers l'ombre et le sein pâmé
De la Belle par qui, brûlé des bonnes fièvres,
Je goûte le Printemps comme un fruit parfumé.

He has touched every side of life and explored every line of thought. His culture is broad and deep. He is indifferent to no æsthetic mode. It is true that he has been mainly influenced by Whitman and Wagner these giants of the century. And here I might say that Wagner's influence on French literature has been very great. It is from him that Retté took the thematic repetitions those Homeric recurrences of motifs and epithets that bind his poems into one splendid and varied whole. There are many other influences, more essentially Latin, that one may trace in his work. He has carried the red flag with Jean Grave. has the Latin love for joy, beauty, wisdom and revolt.

He

God has given your soul brave wings, my poet.

Henri de Régnier, Stuart Merrill

and Vielé-Griffin

Il est debout, épée au flanc et fleur aux doigts;
Les chausses de satin étroites au plus juste
Moulent la jambe fine et la cuisse robuste
À la mode du siècle et des seconds Valois.

Joyeux des crocs d'Amboise et des gibets de Blois,
Nourrisson de Pétrone et client de Locuste!
Le court manteau plissé accroît l'ampleur du buste
Et la cuirasse aiguë est en cosse de pois.

Une fraise à godrons l'engonce. Il vous regarde
D'un œil fourbe, et sa bouche amoureuse, que farde
Un onguent, va sourire ou mordre ou minauder,

Et deux perles de lait, l'une à l'autre pareille,
Semblent, tirant le lobe et prêtes à tomber,
Une goutte d'amour qui pend à chaque oreille.

In this little sonnet one might fancy that Henri de Régnier had sketched his own portrait, for he is a suckling of Petronius and has a simpering mouth. His verse is pretty, academic, pompous, even distinguished. The poet of gold and death, Rémy de Gourmont has called him; the poet, one might add, of gold curiously carved and of death in a perfumed chamber of the old régime. You may read

his poems by the hour. They are pearls cunningly strung on a silver thread. They are daintily and knowingly made. They recall all that is most charming in the anthologies of seventeenth century verse. They have a pretty and disdainful negligence for the natural emotion.

("And still he smiled and talked ;
And as the soldiers bore dead bodies by,
He called them untaught knaves, unmannerly,
To bring a slovenly, unhandsome corse
Betwixt the wind and his nobility.")

There is no lyric autobiography in his poems; there is only a fanciful dilettantism that plays with the antique and accepted emotions and rhymes again the faded rhymes of the old poets. At once coquettish and erudite, M. de Régnier is a type of the poet who is made. He is a poet as he might have been a courtier or a gentleman-rider. In giving way to his feelings-in crying aloud-in paltering with those mad jades, the emotions-he would see a measure of ill-breeding. He is so habitually well-bred that he would never dream of obtruding a slovenly, unhandsome corse upon anyone. And so, with perfect self-possession and the modish society accent, he sings of dawn, and sad waters, of dusk and scented ladies and asphodels, of or and mort. And with what an air he takes life! He and not Axel might have said: "Live? Our lackeys will do that for us!"