EVOLUTION LITTERAIRE.

There was a capital attendance of French residents, with a sprinkling of English people, at M. Marcel Deslouis's lecture at the School of Arts, last night. M. Henri Kowalski, in introducing the lecturer, alluded to the position occupied by him as a clever Conservatoire student, whose volume of fugitive verse and frequent contributions to the press placed him in the very heart of the literary coteries of Paris—a fact which would give particular value to the lecture he would deliver that evening. M. Marcel Deslouis who has a singularly easy and conversational method as a lecturer chose for his subject the literary evolution of the day in Paris. He described it as a very accentuated artistic movement which during the past few years, had profoundly modified French literature, completely transmuting its form and changing its spirit. He divided the young protagonists of the movement into— 1, Decadents, who occupied themselves with the inmost phases of the soul in all its nuances ; 2, Symbolists, for whom all Nature is but the material sign of an abstract entity; 3, Mystics who, from the tour d'ivoire of their dreams, expressed their ideas as succinctly as possible; 4, the Neo-Christians and the Neo-Greeks, and yet others up to those who wrote vers de societe—a profitless Utopia which turned poesy into a work-tool and twanged the lyre at anarchist meetings. It was because all these various bands joined in the desire for artistic renovation that it was possible to group them under one title as Literary Evolutionists. It was to be noted that the word "revolution" was not employed because there was no question of destroying the past. Thus the works of the great masters remained impregnably fortressed in their beauty, even against those who rejected them as models.

Having thus cleared the ground for a survey of the situation, M. Deslouis defended the new school against the charge of pessimism and of inventing new words to the verge of incomprehensibility. The employment of the English word "remembrance," which had been so bitterly attacked, he defended on the ground of its felicitous sonority, and, more than that succeeded in tracing its use to the 12th century, and to the classic pages of "La Fontaine " Warming to his subject, the lecturer quoted Emile Bergerat's agreeable raillery at the minor versifiers and false poets who brought the new school into discredit, and in support of the liberty of form which he advocated, he advanced the dictum of Theodore de Banville, the most lyrical poet of the day who said in his " Traite de Poesie "—" Poetic license ? There is none." De Banville allows the true poet to break the most sacred rule whenever taste or sentiment demand it, with the assurance that such a course will lead to nothing that is either ugly or false. As examples of the new style M. Deslouis read with a great deal of feeling De Regnier's "Twilight Scenes" and Camille Mauclair's " Appassionata," and gave instances of Verlaine's vivid yet sensitive style.

smh 17/5/1894,