Reviens nous! Et, fidèle au rêve familier, D'un chant simple et nouveau comme le bruit des feuilles. Are they not charming verses? Were you to ask me to define their charm, I should say, I fancy, that it lies in the delicious purity of expression. Once after a stormy Wagner night I went into Schiller's room in Weimar town. I sent away the old caretaker, and sat down at Schiller's harpsichord and played in the darkness-played, very gently, little tinkling sonatas of Scarlatti and faded Italian minuets. And now, when I read Severin's verses, that night comes back to me, with all its faded artifice and faded charm. The Last of the Parnassians Catulle Mendès "Twas the soul of Catulle Mendès, It dreamed of gray Judea, Of Parsifal and gnomes, And passing the gates of Judith, It dreamed of Augusta Holmes. The soul of Catulle Mendès Paused waiting for the dead. With hot, incessant eyes, They beckoned and whimpered and nodded And women of rose and amber Streamed past him like blown clouds, For the women walked in shrouds. All dead and damned they walked there- And the soul of Mendès softened, And called them name by name. B It was strange there on Montmartre, Talk with the sheeted dead. ELIEVE me, it was very strange. Hour after hour we had walked the silent streets, the streets immitigably gray. It was not Hugo's Paris-city of light-it was a sad Paris, a Paris neither splendid nor horrible, a Paris inert and monstrous under linen cloths of fog. We wandered. At my side, step for step, went the Soul of Catulle Mendès. It spread its arms abroad and cried aloud -to the winter air and the gray night. And the voice was as the voice of Job what time he sat upon a dunghill and scratched himself wi' a broken pot. "I am old," cried the Soul of Mendès, "and faded and fat. For others are the songs that came unbidden, the gracile girls who were eager for kisses, the flowers and laughter of life! Ah! the old skies and the lust of life, men and the nostrils of women, the verses of Michael Angelo, lilies and the little breasts of Mary Magdalene, the music of silver flutes, the ankles of Herodias and the roses of Elizabeth of Hungary, the sighs of Cordelia and the sighs of Desdemona, the purple splendor of the robe of Marcus Aurelius and the robe of Louis of Bavaria. Oh! vale of Tempe, lake of Starnberg! -white swan of Lohengrin, lilies and candor and elohim, eternity!" And the days when Catulle Mendès was "the wickedest man in Paris" have passed forever. (One cannot be at once fat and wicked; growth of the waist-line is coincident with increase in virtue and Daniel Lambert is the good man's ideal.) Youth passes; and for Catulle Mendès-as for the rest of us-all that is left is a little flirting with the ghosts of old days, a little visionary mourning for dead sins and faded sensations. He is old and fat and the flagons of life reek with stale beer. Once then he was a poet. He had long, golden hair and a blond beard, like a young rabbi. He had youth and beauty and subtle talent. He was so sleek, so gentle, so bright and gay and cynical, this Catulle Mendès. He wrote rare rhymes, ecstatic, voluptuous, deliriously wicked for there was in him a brutal streak of original sin; he wrote in strange metres, in old rhythms culled from Ronsard; he wrote Lesbian sonnets, with interlacing rhymes; he foreshadowed the mysticism, obscure and pagan, of the poets of to-day. He sang of kisses, and breasts- - always kisses, as one might read a bill of fare instead of dining! The literary eunuchs, to whom decadence is as impossible as growth, talk smugly of the decadents and much folly is said and printed; but the young Catulle Mendès was the true decadent, as Callimachus was, as Claudian was and Luxorius. All the beauty of the formal, the external, was at his beck and call. And this damned him And this damned him- he sold his soul for the beautiful phrase. But what cleverness was his, immense, amazing, diabolical! He imitated Heine's little songs so perfectly that one might fancy one were reading the "Intermezzo"; he wrote "Hesperus," and the voice was the voice of Catulle, the son of Tibulle Mendès, but the hands were those of Leconte de Lisle. He wrote "Contes Épiques," and the thunder was that of Hugo, pealing grandiosely in the "Légende des Siècles." How completely he had the trick of literature! He juggled so expertly that he almost persuaded one generation that literature was all sleight of hand. Have you read "Pour Lire au Bain" and "Pour Lire au Couvent"? Then you know him, full of science and artifice, with wise graces, a martyr to the sophisticated sensuality of phrase. He was handsome in those days, with that blond, pathetic head of Christ- the irony of it!-and those calm, piercing eyes, the red, feminine mouth smiling contemptuously through the yellow beard. He had little Hebraic gestures; he was restless as a panther; he would stroke your coat-sleeve as he whispered in your ear Satanic things, witty, impossible, nocturnal things. It was Baudelaire, the professor emeritus of literary corruption, who said of him: "I love this young man - he has all the |