[In the following excerpt, Ince provides a brief survey of the themes and styles which characterized the Parnassian movement.]

Le Parnasse contemporain, recueil de vers nouveaux was not to make its first appearance until 1866 but the tastes and tendencies that were eventually to achieve prominence through that publication were taking shape many years earlier in various reviews and gatherings of poets. The first, and very short-lived, of these publications worth our notice was the Revue fantaisiste, begun in 1861 by Catulle Mendès. This enthusiastic poet of eighteen years was encouraged by older and greater poets like Gautier, Baudelaire and Banville; many of those who were to become Parnassiens, like Albert Glatigny, Sully Prudhomme or Louis Bouilhet, contributed poems to it. The Revue française, founded in 1861 by Adolphe Amat, eschewed politics and encouraged young writers eager to publish; some of its contributors were inherited from the defunct Revue fantaisiste, like Mendès himself and Glatigny, but there were others whose names became better known as the Parnassian movement was formed: Georges Lafenestre, Léon Dierx, Emmanuel des Essarts and Heredia himself, who published there in 1863 five sonnets—'Le Triomphe d'Iacchos', 'Pan', the diptych 'Le Lis' and 'Vœu'—which he later stigmatized as libertins, that is, irregular, and four of which he excluded from Les Trophées in 1893.⁸ In 1864, it was the turn of the Revue de Paris to publish three of Heredia's sonnets, one new, 'La Mort de l'aigle', and two—'L'Héliotrope' and 'Mer montante'—which had already appeared, as has been noted, in the yearbooks of La Conférence La Bruyère. Other contributors were Gautier, Banville, Emmanuel des Essarts, Louis Bouilhet and Léon Cladel. Another publication of some importance in these early years was the Revue du progrès, founded in 1863 by Louis-Xavier de Ricard, which published, pseudonymously, Verlaine's first poems. Ricard and Mendès were leaders of a sort and entertained their young poet friends in their own homes and took them to each other's: Mendès received on Wednesdays, Ricard—or perhaps more properly, his mother, la marquise de Ricard—on Fridays. These meetings of enthusiastic young artists were lively, sometimes noisy, as they discussed and recited poetry, often intoxicated enough by their commitment to poetry to need no stronger drink than tea. Another salon, gayer still and more extravagant than those of Mendès and Ricard, was Nina de Villard's, where open table was kept for all comers and Madame Villard's musical talents were regularly required. But all these gatherings were eclipsed by the crucial, culminating reception of the week, on Saturdays, at Leconte de Lisle's small flat on the fifth floor at 8 Boulevard des Invalides. Up the narrow stairway that led to this sanctum there climbed many of the poets who were to be associated with the new poetic movement: Mendès, Banville, Ménard, Coppée, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Dierx, Silvestre, Prudhomme, Lafenestre and Heredia. Though the conversation could be animated in Leconte de Lisle's salon and the tone heated, not least when Leconte de Lisle himself was delivering some energetic diatribe, the young disciples regarded with unanimous veneration the Master who by the force of his example in his Poèmes antiques (1852) and Poèmes barbares (1862), as well as by the force of his teaching and presence in his salon, represented for them all a summit of poetic achievement. Of all these young poets, Heredia was to become by far the closest friend of the Master and perhaps the nearest to him in the artistic aims he was to embody in Les Trophées. In 1894, by then a member of the Académie française which he was representing at the funeral service of Leconte de Lisle, Heredia looked back over three decades of close friendship and collaboration to sum up the older poet's influence:

Illustre avant d'être célèbre, il n'a pas cherché le succès, il a conquis la gloire. L'influence de son noble génie fut salutaire. Durant trente années il fut, pour les jeunes poètes, un éducateur, un modèle incomparable. Il avait l'âme tendre et fière, un esprit profond et charmant. Tous ceux qui l'ont connu, l'aimaient autant qu'ils le vénéraient. Il a été pour nous le vrai maître, un maître amical et fraternel.⁹

The events immediately preceding the appearance in 1866 of Le Parnasse contemporain, recueil de vers nouveaux are now as legendary as the formation of the Pléiade in the sixteenth century or, in the nineteenth, the triumph of Romantic drama at the bataille d'Hernani. Alphonse Lemerre was the owner of a bookshop at 47 passage Choiseul, whose principal clients were buyers of prayerbooks and other works suitable for pious people. Lemerre was thinking of bringing out an edition of the poets of the Pléiade when he was asked to publish the poems of Xavier de Ricard (Ciel, rue et foyer, 1865) and later of other young poets. In the early days, publication was at the poets' expense! Lemerre also took over the journal L'Art which had been started elsewhere by the same Xavier de Ricard. The young poets who had assembled in the premises where L 'Art had been first published transferred themselves to Lemerre's bookshop in the passage Choiseul and they were joined there by others at what became, from 1865, regular daily meetings. The noise and long-haired appearance of these young men risked disturbing more sedate customers; Lemerre was led therefore to give his young poets a back-room on the mezzanine floor, reached by a spiral staircase. This was to be the much celebrated Entresol du Parnasse, an area sometimes so crowded that late-comers had to sit on the stairs, where from four to seven every afternoon the future Parnassians recited their own poems and others' and passionately discussed all aspects of poetry. The mood was serious and light-hearted by turns, usually good-tempered and sometimes uproarious. The memoirs written later in the century about these golden days of the 1860s often mention the ebullient presence of the young Heredia, impeccably dressed—unlike some of his companions—and usually very much to the fore and in the thick of discussion and activity. Many of the regular attenders at Lemerre's entresol were poets who also frequented the salons of Mendès, Ricard, Villard and Leconte de Lisle. Gabriel Marc's poem 'L'Entresol du Parnasse' became a much quoted evocation of the figures seen at Lemerre's, of whom the most notable were Dierx, Armand Renaud, Coppée, Glatigny, Sully Prudhomme, Henry Cazalis, Armand Silvestre, Mendès, Emmanuel des Essarts, Anatole France, Xavier de Ricard and Heredia. José-Maria's presence was well captured:

Tout tremble: c'est Heredia
A la voix farouche et vibrante,
Qu'en vain Barbey parodia.¹⁰
Tout tremble: c'est Heredia,
Heredia qu'incendia
Un rayon de mil huit cent trente!¹¹
Tout tremble: c'est Heredia
A la voix farouche et vibrante.
(Sonnets parisiens, 1875)

Older members, with settled reputations, such as Leconte de Lisle, Gautier and Banville, also joined the young zealots.

The term Parnassien was not of course to be applied to these poets until 1866 and later; it was at first a rather derisive label, coined from the title, Le Parnasse contemporain (which seems to have owed its name to Le Parnasse satyrique of the seventeenth-century poet, Théophile de Viau), but it was soon adopted by the poets themselves. Some later denied that they formed a school or movement. Groupe was the most cohesive term that, for instance, Catulle Mendès would allow to describe them, in his Légende du 'Parnasse contemporain' (1884). At the Saturday meetings in his salon, Leconte de Lisle gave much advice that was respectfully absorbed and often observed by his neophytes; he heard and corrected poems that were submitted to his judgement. But there were no interdictions and there was no party line. Each Parnassian poet was free to develop his own talent and express what was unique to him. Thus Leconte de Lisle's own poetry usually has a philosophic background, a high seriousness and a contained impersonal strength of feeling which stamp it as quite different from the poetry of Théodore de Banville, equally enamoured of ancient Greece but mostly lighter in tone and more playfully experimental than that of the Master. What united this group of poets was a certain number of attitudes and tendencies. A new generation is often best defined by its opposition to its predecessors or at least by its differences. The poet who received the scantest respect from the Parnassians was Alfred de Musset (though not all despised him and Heredia himself respected his work). Musset and, to some extent, Lamartine represented for our poets an over-personalized, insipid, sentimental vague à l'âme which offended their desire for more objective, controlled and compact writing. The sonnet was to become a favoured verse-form because more than any other it aided and patently embodied this ideal. In his poem 'A Ronsard' (Les Vignes folles, 1860), the young Albert Glatigny spoke for many when he conveyed his disgust for the sentimental, formless poetry which had been produced by some Romantic poets and which, following the example of Musset and Lamartine, was still popular in the middle of the nineteenth century:

Moi, que tout ce pathos ennuie
A l'égal de la froide pluie,
Je veux, rimeur aventureux,
Lire encor, Muse inviolée,
Quelque belle strophe étoilée
Au rythme doux et savoureux;

Un fier sonnet, rubis, topaze,
Ciselé de même qu'un vase
De Benvenuto Cellini.

Distaste for effusiveness or even for too directly personal revelation was allied with a rejection of what were thought to be the facile values of the man-in-the-street and of the contemporary society that could not appreciate good art in any form. The Latin poet Horace's theme of odi profanum vulgus was given its most proud and fiercely contemptuous expression by Leconte de Lisle in, significantly, a sonnet:

Tel qu'un morne animal, meurtri, plein de
poussière, La chaîne au cou, hurlant au chaud soleil d'été,

Promène qui voudra son cœur ensanglanté
Sur ton pavé cynique, ô plèbe carnassière!

Pour mettre un feu stérile en ton œil hébété,
Pour mendier ton rire ou ta pitié grossière,
Déchire qui voudra la robe de lumière
De la pudeur divine et de la volupté.

Dans mon orgueil muet, dans ma tombe sans gloire,
Dussé-je m'engloutir pour l'éternité noire,
Je ne te vendrai pas mon ivresse ou mon mal,

Je ne livrerai pas ma vie à tes huées,
Je ne danserai pas sur ton tréteau banal
Avec tes histrions et tes prostituées.

'Les Montreurs' (Poèmes antiques, 1852)

The Parnassian poets were to achieve fame and good sales of their poems before the end of the 1860s but they were never truly popular, particularly in the early days of the decade, and they were proud to be in this position; it mirrored their ambition to purify their art, to give it the dignity and even isolation which, in their eyes, it necessarily entailed. 'L'idéal du vrai poète a été et sera toujours le contraire de celui du public', wrote Léon Dierx in the preface to his collection of poems Les Lèvres closes (1871).

The preoccupation of the Parnassians with what is vaguely called 'form' is a major factor for our understanding of them. Before the term Parnassien became consecrated by usage, other short-lived labels crystallized this aspect of their endeavours: as well as impassibles they were called stylistes and formistes. In negative terms, their concern for form is a reaction against what they saw as loose, careless, flabby writing by earlier poets. For the Parnassians, forme was not just a secondary consideration, a way of describing the means whereby a poet communicated the more important fond or ideas he had. Ideas as such were not the particular domain of poetry. Form was as important as content, form was indeed a part of content: the inseparability of forme and fond was their way of purifying poetry of its more prosaic elements. For them, the best poet was the subtle, conscious manipulator of language. So-called 'inspired' composition risked degenerating into flatulent, over-sincere prolixity. In practice, considerations of form for many Parnassians therefore involved the need for careful, ordered composition, French that was correct as well as being lyrical, good rhymes, preferably 'rich', and language that was both evocative and precise. The mot juste becomes both a kind of rallying-cry and a widespread practice—the practice never stronger than in Heredia himself. All these aspirations of Parnassian poetry are brilliantly summed up by the young Verlaine in the first flush of his enthusiasm for the ideals he shares (and which

he will not fully exemplify even in his early poetry and will later quite abandon):

Ah! l'Inspiration superbe et souveraine,
L'Egérie aux regards lumineux et profonds,
Le Genium commode et l'Erato soudaine,
L'Ange des vieux tableaux avec des ors au fond [ … ]

La Colombe, le Saint-Esprit, le saint délire,
Les Troubles opportuns, les Transports complaisants,
Gabriel et son luth, Apollon et sa lyre,
Ah! l'Inspiration, on l'invoque à seize ans!

Ce qu'il nous faut à nous, les Suprêmes Poètes
Qui vénérons les Dieux et qui n'y croyons pas,
A nous dont nul rayon n'auréola les têtes,
Dont nulle Béatrix n'a dirigé les pas,

A nous qui ciselons les mots comme des coupes
Et qui faisons des vers émus trés froidement,
A nous qu'on ne voit point les soirs aller par groupes
Harmonieux au bord des lacs et nous pâmant,¹²

Ce qu'il nous faut, à nous, c'est, aux lueurs des lampes,
La science conquise et le sommeil dompté,
C'est le front dans les mains du vieux Faust des estampes,
C'est l'Obstination et c'est la Volonté! [ … ]

Libre à nos Inspirés, cœrs qu'une œillade enflamme,
D'abandonner leur être aux vents comme un bouleau:
Pauvres gens! l'Art n'est pas d'éparpiller son âme;
Est-elle en marbre, ou non, la Vénus de Milo?

Nous donc, sculptons avec le ciseau des Pensées
Le bloc vierge du Beau, Paros immaculé,
Et faisons-en surgir sous nos mains empressées
Quelque pure statue au péplos étoilé [ … ]

(from 'Epilogue', in Poèmes saturniens, 1866)

But poets, even Parnassian poets, do not live by form alone, still less by pronouncements about it, however eloquent and well turned. If we look at the themes of the Parnassians' poems, we are struck by their fondness for all manifestations of beauty and particularly for pictorial effects as well as for those arts which make a predominantly visual appeal. Poets are repeatedly seen as emulating the painter or sculptor. The images used by Verlaine in the stanzas just quoted of the poet 'chiselling' and 'sculpting' words and ideas are typical and directly descended from Gautier's famous poem 'L'Art' in the 1858 edition of Emaux et camées where the peremptory injunction to the poet is

Sculpte, lime, cisèle;
Que ton rêve flottant
Se scelle
Dans le bloc résistant!

The transposition d'art—expression of one art's aims or ideals in the medium of another—was the most striking representation of this aesthetic ideal and most successfully exploited by Gautier and Heredia. The Parnassian poets tend in their poetry to turn away from contemporary society, disgusted by its ugliness and stupid materialism, disheartened by its naïve, muddled and self-seeking politics. Many turn to the past, to an imagined age, especially that of classical Greece, when beauty and harmony were duly honoured by both artists and society. Leconte de Lisle's Poèmes antiques (1852) gave powerful impetus to this tendency, but, though the most important, Leconte de Lisle was only one of many.

I have suggested that the Parnassians can perhaps be best understood, at least initially, in the light of their opposition to certain Romantic poets such as Musset and Lamartine and to those poets—and they were legion—who wrote in their manner without their genius. But no creation comes ex nihilo, poetic or other, and the Parnassians can just as cogently be seen as continuing and extending the example set by other Romantic poets, since the term Romanticism covers diverse poets and emphases. To some extent, Hugo influenced every poet in the nineteenth century, if only by his liberating example in the field of vocabulary, rhythm and versification. The Hugo who was to influence the Parnassians was not the humanitarian idealist and visionary but the author of Les Orientales (1829), those vivid verbal pictures of the languor and implicit ferocity of the East in poems that were in the 1830s to be a dazzling revelation to poets then young, like Leconte de Lisle, for their striking imagery and rhythms—author, too, of the first series of La Légende des siècles (1859), epic scenes from man's spiritual and historical evolution. Théophile Gautier, 'le bon Théo', was to die in 1872 but however diminished by the 1860s in terms of his personal presence, he attended the meetings of the young Parnassians and encouraged their efforts; his past writings both as poet, above all in Emaux et camées (1852), and as prosewriter and theorist of l'art pour l'art which he propounded in the 1830s—cf. his seminal preface to his novel Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835)—formed a direct link with the principles and practice of the new poets. Gautier was a bridge between Romanticism and Le Parnasse. In 1856, in L'Artiste,¹³ Gautier is enunciating ideas that recall the preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin. They are Parnassian avant la lettre and very much foreshadow what Heredia will accomplish in many sonnets:

Après avoir vu, notre plus grand plaisir a été de transporter dans notre art à nous nos monuments, fresques, tableaux, statues, bas-reliefs, au risque souvent de forcer la langue et de changer le dictionnaire en palette [ … ] L'art pour nous n'est pas le moyen, mais le but [ … ] Une belle forme est une belle idée, car que serait-ce qu'une belle forme qui n'exprimerait rien.

Before the end of the 1840s there had begun a strong revival of Hellenic and Roman values in both the theatre and poetry, of which noteworthy examples were: Edgar Quinet's verse drama Prométhée (1838), Ponsard's classical tragedy Lucrèce (1843) and his short comedy Horace et Lydie (1850), Augier's plays La Ciguë (1844) and Le Joueur de flûte (1845), the prose poem by Maurice de Guénn Le Centaure (1840) and Victor de Laprade's narrative poem Psyché (1841). Théodore de Banville's poems Les Cariatides (1842) helped to diffuse the Grecian ideal that was to be more magnificently displayed in Leconte de Lisle's Poèmes antiques (1852). And behind the work of poets and writers lay the philosophic, historical, archaeological and other scientific researches into the past that would cause Hippolye Taine, for example, and, later, Paul Bourget, to celebrate the marriage of science and art. The immediate predecessors in poetry or theatre exemplified traits that were in some degree to be characteristic of all the Parnassians: impersonality, compact, well-planned composition, correctness if not perfection of form, exoticism, return to much earlier or classical times and a general fusion of art and historical interest.

Such, in brief outline, was the background and context for all the poets who assembled in the Entresol du Parnasse at Lemerre's bookshop. The first livraison of the Parnasse contemporain appeared on 3 March 1866. Seventeen more instalments were to appear between then and June. Later in 1866 the eighteen instalments were published together in book form. The direction of the enterprise was in the hands of Catulle Mendès and Xavier de Ricard, and this included decisions concerning the contributors, of whom there were thirty-seven, ranging from the older Gautier, Banville, Leconte de Lisle and Baudelaire to some twenty relatively young poets like Verlaine, Mallarmé, Coppée and, with several sonnets, Heredia. A measure of Heredia's growing stature was that he served on the committee in charge of the second Parnasse contemporain, due to appear in 1869 but, owing to the Franco-Prussian war, not published until 1871; it was here that Heredia published the epic poem that was to be included in the edition of Les Trophées in 1893: 'La Détresse d'Atahuallpa. Prologue: Les Conquérants de l'or.' This prologue was as far as he got. The full poem was never completed. Heredia also served on the committee responsible for the third and last Parnasse contemporain of 1876, in which he published twenty-five 'sonnets héroïques'. The decade between the first and third Parnasse contemporain thus saw the emergence of Heredia as a leading Parnassian poet and a recognized master of the sonnet form, and of sonnets that by theme and style, with all the influences that were at work on him, bore his individual mark….

Notes

…..

⁸ See Heredia's preface to the Voyage en Patagonie (Hachette, 1901) by the comte Henry de la Vaulx where he recalls that

quelques jeunes hommes se rencontraient deux ou trois fois la semaine dans un petit rez-de-chaussée obscur et bas de la rue d'Amsterdam. C'était le bureau de rédaction de La Revue française [ … ] C'est là dans ce lieu sans lumière, que, pour la première fois, j'entendis le beau poète Armand Silvestre réciter ses premiers Sonnets païens, magnifiques et voluptueux. Jules Clarétie y fit ses premières armes de plume. Quant à moi, je confesse y avoir publié quelques médiocres sonnets, mal venus et mal bâtis, à rimes incorrectement entrecroisées, dont Théophile Gautier, avec sa bonhomie gouailleuse, paternelle et magistrale, daigna me dire: '—Comment! Si jeune, et tu fais déjà des sonnets libertins!'—Et c'est pourquoi je n'en fis et je n'en ferai plus jamais de tels.

⁹ 'Discours prononcé le 21 juillet 1894 aux funérailles de Leconte de Lisle', Institut de France, Académie française, Firmin-Didot, 1894, p. 8. Cf. Mendès: 'La seule discipline qu'il imposât,—c'était la bonne,—consistait dans la vénération de l'art, dans le dédain des succès faciles. Il était le bon conseiller des probités littéraires; sans gêner jamais l'élan personnel de nos aspirations divines, il fut, il est encore notre conscience poétique elle-même [ … ] Il condamne ou absout et nous sommes soumis' (La Légende du 'Parnasse contemporain', Bruxelles, Brancart, 1884, p.226). Cf. also Maurice Barrès: 'C'était une sorte de prêtre, qui dénonçait le siècle au nom du Beau éternel' ('Discours de réception à L'Académie française', Firmin-Didot, 1907, p. 12).

¹⁰ It was Barbey d'Aurevilly's scathing comments, in November 1866 in the Nain jaune, which did much to bring the Parnassian poets to the attention of a wide public.

¹¹ Heredia is seen as recapturing some of the militant glory of the literary battles fought by the Romantics at the end of the 1820s.

¹² A dig at Lamartine's famous poem 'Le Lac' (Méditations poétiques, 1820).

¹³ Quoted by U.-V. Châtclain, 'José-Maria de Heredia, sa vie et son milieu', Cahiers des études littéraires françaises, fascicule no. 2, undated, p. 6.