FRENCH POETRY.

“Every body,” says sturdy Johnson, “has a right to say what he likes, and every body has a right to knock him down for it;”—a canon of criticism, of which the disputants of our days have not been slow to avail themselves. As far, at least, as a virtual and constructive knock-down blow is concerned, it is the favourite syllogism of reviewers, pamphleteers, and parliamentary orators. For my own part, I have always said what I liked, and I have been knocked down for it pretty often, from Pontius to Pilate; that is, from Gifford to Croly. I am rather popular, I flatter myself, in France; and yet the French have never pardoned my scepticism with respect to the unrivalled poetical merits of Racine; and they have not always sparred with the gloves on, in their application of the Johnsonian maxim to my case. Still I say, that Racine is no poet, according to our northern ideas of poetry. The French are too apt to mistake rhymes and rhetoric for poetry. A French gentleman, in speaking of a young Parisian Sappho, said to me, the other day, “Elle fait des vers comme un ange!”⁠[50] Making verses, however, is not writing poetry; and the very phraseology demonstrates a rooted difference in the ideas of the two nations on the subject.

Generally speaking, French poetry is but metrical prose. Stripped of its rhymes, and released from the ties of measure, there is little in it of that imagery, in which we imagine poetry to consist. I should say, in my ignorance, that Beranger is the truest living poet of his country. His writings are in character with the genius, and language, and temperament of his nation, which is essentially witty, intellectual, full of philosophy and thought; and I would rather have written one verse of one of his delightful patriotic songs, than a whole volume of Henriades and Jardins.

It is no bad compliment to a nation, to say that it is not poetical. The finest poets have flourished in the most barbarous times. When the people know nothing, they are thrown upon the exaggerations of fancy; and the poverty of a language is among the most pregnant occasions of poetical diction. Homer, Hesiod, David, Ossian, Dante, Chaucer, are among the greatest poets extant; yet, in what times did they write! The structure of the French language, also, with its mute vowels, surrounds the mere fabric of verse with such difficulties, as are only to be conquered by a laborious study. The nation, therefore, is more struck by the merit of style, than of matter; and the habits of the Parisians are so alien from all acquaintance with nature—so tied down to conventional notions and feelings, that a Schiller or a Shakspeare would not be understood by them. Above all, the dread of ridicule, the predominant vice of the French morale, effectually prevents an indulgence in those élans of sentiment, without which genuine poetry, in the English sense of the word, cannot exist. The fact is, that the standard of excellence is not the same in London and Paris; and international criticism is pretty much the dispute of the two knights, respecting the colour of the shield, of which they did not see the same side.