to an almost fiendishly realistic treatment of modern life. A precisely
contrary tendency marks the poetry of VERLAINE. While Maupassant
completely disengaged prose from every alien element of poetry and
imagination, pushing it as far as it could go in the direction of
incisive realism, Verlaine and his fellow-workers in verse attempted to
make poetry more truly poetical than it had ever been before, to
introduce into it the vagueness and dreaminess of individual moods and
spiritual fluctuations, to turn it away from definite fact and bring it
near to music.

It was with Verlaine and his successors that French verse completely
broke away from the control of those classical rules, the infallibility
of which had been first attacked by the Romantics. In order to express
the delicate, shifting, and indecisive feelings which he loved so well,
Verlaine abolished the last shreds of rhythmical regularity, making his
verse a perfectly fluid substance, which he could pour at will into the
subtle mould of his feeling and his thought. The result justified the
means. Verlaine's poetry exhales an exquisite perfume--strange,
indistinct, and yet, after the manner of perfume, unforgettable.
Listening to his enchanting, poignant music, we hear the trembling voice
of a soul. This last sad singer carries us back across the ages, and,
mingling his sweet strain with the distant melancholy of Villon,
symbolizes for us at once the living flower and the unchanging root of
the great literature of France.

* * * * *

We have now traced the main outlines of that literature from its dim
beginnings in the Dark Ages up to the threshold of the present time.
Looking back over the long line of writers, the first impression that