ples, and the revolution of 1848 had | against their own selfish interests, but found him in the forefront of its ranks. the greater part rebelled, still Leconte The Club des clubs" had even sent de Lisle in some way managed to exhim to electioneer in Brittany. He tort permission to write his eloquent was arrested and cast into prison, letter to the Assembly. In acting thus, where, instead of cursing the author- the poet must have calculated the risk ities, he continued translating Homer. he ran from the wrath of his relations, Brought thus face to face with the who were living at the beautiful St. masses, his ideas suffered considerable Paul, in the Ile Bourbon. His brother change. It was inevitable that a man was administering the paternal estate, such as he was, with his intellectual and hearing a rumor of Charles's conparts so highly developed, should suffer duct, wrote hastily for a denial of it. when brought into contact with the To forward the abolition of slavery was illiterate and easily swayed multitudes, to forward the ruin of the colonists, whose manner of life had not yet it was therefore impossible that the raised them above the platform of self- younger brother should have done this ishness. In such an atmosphere it is thing. The poet wrote back as elodifficult for a poet to reconcile sordid quently to his brother as he had done reality with his noblest ideal. So the to the Assembly. "Whenever I have young Leconte de Lisle exclaims in a to decide between personal interests letter to a friend : and justice, I shall choose justice." After this no more remittances from How intensely stupid are the people; the family estates for the poet, but only they are a race of eternal slaves who cannot live except under the yoke. Let us not fight for them, but for our sacred ideal. Let the people, this easily deceived multitude, strive if so they will, for they soon mean to turn and massacre their best friends. You see I have become a furious Communist; but, all the same, this does not prevent me from living on intellectual heights in the serene contemplation of things divine. There is chaos on the lower level of my brain, but the higher regions know nothing of it. Apart from this fine and impatient language, the young poet was ready to take the right road when the day of trial came. The Assembly voted the abolition of slavery in the colonial possessions of France, and Leconte de Lisle, remembering the cry of the oppressed slaves, immediately assembled his Creole countrymen, harangued them, and overpowering them by his eloquence, tried to instil into their selfish souls true principles of liberty and equality. "This law," he said to them, "doubtless means ruin for us and for our families, but it is a law of justice and humanity. It is therefore our duty to offer our congratulations to the Assembly for having passed it." The power of speech is great; some of the weaker brethren were convinced a long, hard struggle with poverty, oftentimes with hunger. As we know, Napoleon III. seized the power from a short-lived republic, and the young spirits who, so full of hope, had floated the ship of liberty, were forced to subside into hopeless apathy, little understanding the continuity of all work, nor yet believing in that faith which removes empires and emperors. Henceforth Leconte de Lisle was to leave altogether the lower platform of tumultuous action for the superior life of intellectual thought, and, as we see in nearly all great writers and thinkers, he was to view with more and more dislike and distaste the sphere of politics. "Homer's work," writes the future translator of so many classics, "will count for more in the sum of moral efforts that have been made for humanity, than all those of a Blanqui." A great contempt not wise but natural-followed the 1848 burst of enthusiasm, and his next declaration of faith includes this sentence : Let us give our life for social and political ideas, if you will, but do not let us sacrifice to them our intellect, which is of far higher value than life and death. Thanks to it we are able to shake the dust from our feet, and to soar forever into the | neither did that bring him riches. He glory of a life among the stars. So be it. was often under obligation to a friend He still believed in the principles of for the very roof which sheltered him, the revolution, however, but not in the but as years slowly moved on, things workers of these principles. "I can- bettered themselves. Through female not live with them," he says, "they influence the emperor was persuaded are too stupid and too ignorant, which to give him a pension from his privy does not prevent me from being very purse. Being no longer a politician, the revolutionary, and devoted to the fu- poet was able to accept this £144 a year, ture and superior reorganization of refusing the condition first imposed of European society, I mean the new dedicating his translation of the classics theocracy." By this "new theocracy" to the young prince imperial. Much he meant an intellectual aristocracy, not stupid and not ignorant, but living in an ideal world far from vulgar ambition, and from the folly of easily swayed crowds. Art for him was eternal, whatever he might think of humanity. now later on, the Academy recognizing his merit, he joined the forty immortals, having already, as we have said, accepted the modest post of sub-librarian to the Senate. Such was his life of uneventful poverty, of tardy recognition, and of still With Leconte de Lisle the creed of more lagging fame, but we know that beauty was no mere shibboleth. Even he habitually lived in realms far rehis name being unknown to most moved from those regions where dwell Englishmen - he cannot be called a the seekers after gold and after advanceworld-famous poet; but in France, ment. In "Poèmes Barbares," life's after the publication of many poems, fitful fever has abated, and there is no he was known to even fewer of his own more doubt as to the vocation of the countrymen. What did that matter? prophet. "Cain," the opening poem, He had tasted the fruit of the tree of is extremely fine, though it is hopeless perfection, and from his heart he de- to analyze it or adequately to quote spised what smaller minds so earnestly from it. It ends with a description of sought. To a true friend, he writes, the flood, of which, were it not too long, "You say no one reads your verses. we would fain give the whole. Good gracious! who then has read mine? You and De Flotte; but what does that matter to the verses? Is all lost, because for three or four years no one will pay us any attention? despair of anything so natural and so Toute droites heurtaient les monts vercommonplace, is to complain of not being able to detach the stars." To And yet at this very moment the poet himself was almost starving, and would | remain in this condition for twenty years more. His first book of verse "Poèmes Antiques," which appeared in 1852, merely saw the light because a careless publisher lost the manuscript of his translation of the Iliad. Though Leconte de Lisle did not earn money by it, he had not, as is usual with young poets, to pay for the pleasure of seeing himself in print. Sainte-Beuve made his name known, then came his prize from the Academy for his poem on "Le Chemin de la Croix," but La Mer, avec sa chevelure De flots blêmes, hurlait en sortant de son lit. Elle venait, croissant d'heure en heure, et ses lames tigineux, Où, projetant leur courbe immense audessus d'eux, Rejaillissaient d'en bas vers la nuée en flammes, Comme de longs serpents qui déroulent leurs nœuds. "Le Sommeil du condor" is another reader as being full of marvellous impoem which strikes even an English agination. Le vaste Oiseau, tout plein d'une morne indolence, Regarde l'Amérique et l'espace en silence. The whole short poem seems to speak in parable of the poet's own existence on a plane far above the agitated | have achieved even partial success, and world. this success we think Leconte de Lisle His mind was may certainly claim. Dans un cri rauque il monte où n'atteint pas le vent, Of naturally classical, a rare distinction Et, loin du globe noir, loin de l'astre vivant, among modern French authors. Il dort dans l'air glacé, les ailes toutes many which we might pick out, no one grandes. will deny the beauty, though it is not In "La fontaine aux Lianes," "Le quite a literal translation, of the wellthe Prometheus, Bernica," and "Le Manchy," we have known line from early recollections of his tropical home," Sourire infini des flots marins," TOVrecollections which always influenced τίων τε κυμάτων ἀνήριθμον γέλασμα. him and his poetry. "Le Manchy" is the creole name for the cane litter on which the ladies of the Bourbon were carried by their slaves. The time has not yet come to write a full and complete life of Leconte de Lisle. We have but tried in this study to indicate what were his views of life, and how best we can learn to under Tu t'en venais ainsi, par ces matins si doux stand his special cast of mind, and his De la montagne à la grand'messe, Dans ta grâce naïve et ta rose jeunesse, Au pas rhythmé de tes Hindous. Maintenant, dans le sable aride de nos grèves Sous les chiendents, au bruit des mers, special genius. Without any parade and without pride he lived his life of beautiful thoughts, but the younger men pressed round him, giving him unsolicited the title he would never have Tu reposes parmi les morts qui me sont claimed of Le Maître. We cannot do chers, O charme de mes premiers rêves! nor must we close better than to quote again the words of For all of us, for Coppée, Sully Prud- for myself the least of them, but not the Besides four volumes of collected poems, Leconte de Lisle wrote "Les Erinnyes," a classical drama, acted at the Odéon, and the lyric drama of "L'Apollonide this study without a few words about his translation of the classics; Homer, Eschylus, Hesiod, Sophocles, Euripides, Horace, Virgil were in turn given to France in French. Some have called them rough though poetical, some have appreciated them above his poems, and others have said that the translations possessed "extraordinary sympathetic literalness." His scholarship is not faultless, but to us it seems that France must always owe him a debt of gratitude for having thus used his talent. We all know how impossible it is to translate Greek satisfactorily into any foreign language, and still to retain all those qualities which charm the souls of students, but French is a tongue which, more than any other, refuses to be poured into a foreign mould. In this attempt, only a great poet could shelter. Can a poet have a more glorious epitaph than this that he loved beauty, and that he loved his fellow-men? On July 17th, 1894, Charles Leconte de Lisle found his Nirvâna, and Nature, whom he had sung so faithfully, cradled him in her arms, whilst Divine Death laid him in the silent tomb, where, as the poet had said, man at last finds ESME STUART. From The Leisure Hour. "FORMOSA, BY A NATIVE OF THAT ISLAND." brains of those who had not been permitted to land on its shores. And with what fruitful result they have been AMONG accepted phrases, "The un- scraped we are beginning to realize. changing East" is in the way of being Japan has become not only the land of somewhat discredited by the amazing the tourist rather than of the traveller, energy with which Japan has stepped but an Eastern nation (a mixture not out of a period of obscurity into the less strange than sudden) with Western full blaze of modern life. Among, ideas and modern equipment. It looks however, the manifold records of its as if, during those two centuries and past and pictures of its present state, more in which she withdrew into her sufficient prominence is perhaps not tent, Japan had been accumulating given to that parenthesis in its history ability to make a fresh national dewhich followed the expulsion of the parture, and, as the net of the sleepJesuits in 1638. They had lived and ing fisherman is filled, been silently taught there with such success for furnished with a store of new life. nearly one hundred years (their work Whether her long incubation involved was begun in 1549) that, according to a conscious forecast or not (I doubt if authentic records, before their teachers a sitting hen ever thinks much, howwere banished, some fifty thousand ever meditative she may seem to be), souls were put to death for professing there must have been some eggs of Christianity. Then for a while no thought sat upon in her seclusion, or recognition of a visitor was permitted Japan could not have so promptly unless he consented to trample on the recognized the brood of enterprising crucifix or cross. This was to prove chickens which issued from her nest as that he was not a convert of the soon as the foreigner had broken their Jesuits, who were charged with pro- shells. Anyhow, they grew into gamefessing allegiance to an alien power, cocks at a pace equal to that seen in a and thus endangering Japanese inde- poultry-yard, beginning to put on spurs pendence. This result was so feared as well as to crow directly they felt that not only were they expelled, their feet and made their way out of but immediately afterwards all foreign the fowl-house. The Japanese, howvessels were excluded from Japanese ever, had long been accustomed to the ports, and not allowed to touch at them under any pretence whatever. Then began a period of national eclipse which was not terminated till 1853. Up to that date the Japanese, having driven out the Christians, lived, as one says, "like frogs in a well." But their isolation was at last rudely broken by Commodore Perry steaming into the harbor of Yokohama with a squadron of United States warships. Then, all at once, the policy of exclusiveness was thrown to the winds. Treaty after treaty followed that extorted by the United States, and, after a period of stubborn sulkiness which had lasted two hundred and sixteen years, Japan opened its gates to the world. It not only invited commerce, but in 1860 sent an embassy forth to visit other nations in turn, and so scrape the use of arms, though the pictures of complicated strife and slaughter with which we are familiar in their colored prints seem to represent their warriors as slaying only one another. They have now faced the world, for the display of military ardor which they have just made is notable not so much in an attack on China as in their challenge of the West to be reckoned formidable in war as well as forward in commerce. This is a chief feature of their newborn energy, after a long withdrawal from the family of nations. They are prepared to fight, and not merely trade with them, if need should be. And their aversion to the presence of Christians has been followed, not by a tolerance of missionaries alone, but (with marked reversal of sentiment) by an employment of artificers and in structors from Christian nations to help | forgery; but such was the credulousthem in building warships and drilling their troops. ness of the public, and its eagerness to learn anything about Japan or its belongings, that this fraudulent author became a prominent literary lion of the day, though his real name and nation But though Japan withdrew from the eyes of the world for a while, there was small abatement of general curiosity as to what she was about during ality were concealed. The success of her national eclipse. Western nations this impostor seems to suggest that well remembered her fierce activity, there has long been a latent insatiable shown in the expulsion of the Jesuits appetite for Japanese information, as and the slaughter of the converts they if, however temporarily hidden from had made, and the civilized world was the general eye, Japan was destined to ready to hear and believe anything told play a conspicuous part in the doings them concerning her. An amazing of the world. Its mysterious secreproof of this credulity was given by its tiveness, after having been widely acceptance of a book written during talked of (the killing of fifty thousand the period of Japanese obscuration, Christians could not be done in a and professing to reveal their whole corner), would naturally provoke wideeconomy and procedure with a minute-spread curiosity; and when a plausible ness which defied suspicion of its au- and erudite (assumed) native of "Forthority. It not only gave detailed mosa, an island subject to the Emaccounts of Formosan legislation, reli-peror of Japan," wrote a description of gious worship, and domestic life, but it in Latin (that before me is a popular contained a printed explanation of the English translation), it was swallowed Formosan alphabet; for, with a curi-at once as an invaluable contribution to ously unwitting forecast of Japanese the authentic literature of the world as claims, this production did not deal being full of learned information about directly with their central customs so what every one was eager to know. much as with those which prevailed in And yet the book, whose dedication one of their dependencies. flattered the then Bishop of London, and whose author was publicly honored by his lordship, was, root and branch, an audacious forgery. The book is entitled (it lies open before me) "An Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa, an Island subject to the Emperor of Japan, giving an account of the Religion, Customs, Manners, etc., of the Inhabitants, together with a Relation of what happened to the Author in his travels, particularly his Conference with the Jesuits and others in several parts of Europe. By George Psalmanaazar, a Native of the said Island, now in London." Then follow the names of the author's publishers in Fleet Street and Cornhill, with the price of the book, "Six shillings." My copy (second edition, 1705) is dedicated in fulsome obsequious language, "To the Right Honorable and Right Reverend Father in God, Henry, by Divine Providence Ld. Bishop of London, and one of her Majesty's most honorable Privy Council." It is difficult to realize that this whole production was an impudent It came from the audacity of youth. The records which exist of the socalled "Psalmanaazaar "(his name is thus spelt in the English translation of the book authorized by him) state that he was born about the year 1680. And as the date of the copy before me is 1705, he must have been precociously young when he realized the idea of imposing on the world. Indeed, in his "Description of Formosa," he says he was but nineteen when he left that island. This statement led some critics to question its truth, on the ground that so young a man could not have become so fully acquainted with the details of his assumed country's condition as would appear from his account of it. But his cool self-reliance was equal to this charge, for in “the second preface" of the volume I am quoting from he pleads: "If you im |