With
the ballade this seemed natural enough; for in connection
with ballades the mind recurs to Villon, and Villon was
almost more of a modern than de Banville himself. But in the
case of the rondel, a comparison is challenged with Charles
of Orleans, and the difference between two ages and two
literatures is illustrated in a few poems of thirteen lines.
Something, certainly, has been retained of the old movement;
the refrain falls in time like a well-played bass; and the
very brevity of the thing, by hampering and restraining the
greater fecundity of the modern mind, assists the imitation.
But de Banville's poems are full of form and colour; they
smack racily of modern life, and own small kindred with the
verse of other days, when it seems as if men walked by
twilight, seeing little, and that with distracted eyes, and
instead of blood, some thin and spectral fluid circulated in
their veins. They might gird themselves for battle, make
love, eat and drink, and acquit themselves manfully in all
the external parts of life; but of the life that is within,
and those processes by which we render ourselves an
intelligent account of what we feel and do, and so represent
experience that we for the first time make it ours, they had
only a loose and troubled possession. They beheld or took
part in great events, but there was no answerable commotion
in their reflective being; and they passed throughout
turbulent epochs in a sort of ghostly quiet and abstraction.
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