The total absence
in him of playfulness, simplicity, familiarity, is a great defect. De
Laprade is to the ancients as the French tragedy is to that of
Euripides, or as the wig of Louis XIV. to the locks of Apollo. His
majestic airs are wearisome and factitious. If there is not exactly
affectation in them, there is at least a kind of theatrical and
sacerdotal posing, a sort of professional attitudinizing. Truth is not
as fine as this, but it is more living, more pathetic, more varied.
Marble images are cold. Was it not Musset who said, "If De Laprade is a
poet, then I am not one?"
February 27, 1880.--I have finished translating twelve or fourteen
little poems by Petoefi. They have a strange kind of savor. There is
something of the Steppe, of the East, of Mazeppa, of madness, in these
songs, which seem to go to the beat of a riding-whip. What force and
passion, what savage brilliancy, what wild and grandiose images, there
are in them! One feels that the Magyar is a kind of Centaur, and that he
is only Christian and European by accident. The Hun in him tends toward
the Arab.
March 20, 1880.--I have been reading "La Banniere Bleue"--a history of
the world at the time of Genghis Khan, under the form of memoirs. It is
a Turk, Ouigour, who tells the story. He shows us civilization from the
wrong side, or the other side, and the Asiatic nomads appear as the
scavengers of its corruptions.
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