Oeuvres poetiques completes. Tome I, Les Cariatides (review)

Banville, Théodore de. Œuvres poétiques complètes. Édition critique. Publiée sous la direction de Peter J. Edwards. Tome I. Les Cariatides. Textes établis, Notices, Variantes et Notes par Peter S. Hambly. Avec une préface à l'édition critique par Edgard Pich. Paris: Honoré Champion, éditeur, 2000. Pp. xvi + 595. ISBN 2-7453-0352-X (Tome I); ISBN 2-85203-342-9 (édition complète). [Illustrations hors-texte.]

The publication of the critical edition of Théodore de Banville's Œuvres poétiques complètes is approaching completion. Volume I completes the publication of Ban-ville's collected poetry, amply supplemented by variant readings, poems removed, and others never included. Still coming is an eighth volume of uncollected poetry and two volumes of prose (miscellaneous pieces and a new edition with variants of the Petit traité de versification française). In this volume, Edgard Pich's "Préface" serves as a brief, but substantial appreciation of Banville's place in the "école de 1857" (ix). Pich sees Banville as a more productive and varied poet than Baudelaire and Leconte de Lisle. He presents him as an "homme du juste milieu," fond of satire and caricature, but sharing with Nerval tendencies to depression and the temptation of suicide (vii). Pich makes an interesting point that Banville, rather than being a practitioner of the "vers libre," chose the "vers en liberté" (ix), in the sense that he did not link metrical conventions as closely to syntactical structuration as did other poets.

Banville was born on March 14, 1823, almost two years after Baudelaire. He was nineteen years old when the first edition of Les Cariatides appeared in late October 1842. The selection of reviews and critical articles on this first volume contains a number of interesting remarks. If M. Banville were forty years old, opined La Revue Indépendante (Dec. 10, 1842), it would be necessary to say "il y a là un grand poëte perdu" but, since the poet was only a youth, one could say "il y a là un grand poëte à naître" (361). Jules Janin felt that Banville had slid downhill from his imitation of Virgil, Ovid, and La Fontaine to a level a bit lower than M. Parny (363). Writing much later (1923), G. Jean-Aubry underscores Banville's entry on the literary scene as a remarkable "instrumentiste du vers": "à l'époque même où Baudelaire, son aîné de deux ans, rime péniblement encore les strophes chevillées de 'L'Albatros', la science prosodique de Banville est complète" (373). Jean-Aubry suggests that Banville was working under the influence of Sainte-Beuve as well as that of Hugo, Gautier, and Musset (377). He saw Les Cariatides as a "témoignage délicieux d'une précocité à peu près sans rivale, non seulement même parce que ce recueil contient des pièces qui peuvent compter parmi les meilleures de son œuvre, mais encore parce qu'elles en sont la clef" (378). In his "notice" for this first volume, Peter S. Hambly recalls the significant place accorded Banville by Édouard Maynial in his Anthologie des poètes du XIXe siècle (1935). Hambly stresses the respect major contemporary poets (Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarmé) had for Banville (349-50). Recently, I found it striking that Rimbaud, for example, had known "La Voie lactée" well enough to have alluded to it in his "Ophélie." Banville's themes derive much more from classical poets and from mythology than from contemporary events - he did not yet have Napoléon III or Thiers to provoke his mordant satirical vein.

Among the elements of the ample scholarly apparatus, I would note the interesting list of "Pièces des Cariatides mises en musique" (569). Debussy set a number of poems to music and Georges Auric a smaller number, along with Th. Dubois, Ernest Cabaner, Rachel Pitt-Rivers, and Alfred Vernet.

As stated in...