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Tu ne me réponds pas? Je n'entends pas ton souffle...

Et tes genoux fléchissent.... Viens, viens,

n'attendons pas

Que l'aurore envieuse tende ses pièges d'or

Par les chemins d'azur qui mènent au bonheur.

That is perfectly regular twelve-syllable verse with the exception of the second line, where the final ent of fléchissent is slurred. Twelve-syllable unrhymed verse is almost as disconcerting and unknown in English as in French, but it has been used, with splendid effect, by Blake, and it is a metre of infinite possibilities. The metre of Ariane et Barbe-Bleue (as Maeterlinck has finally decided to call it) is vaguer and more capricious; some of it is in twelve-syllable verse, some in irregular verse, and some in what can not be called verse at all. Take, for instance:—

Il parait qu'on pleurait dans les rues.—Pourquoi est-elle venue? On m'a dit qu'elle avait son idée. Il n'aura pas celle-ci.

The form in French is not, to our ears, successfully achieved; it seems to take a hesitating step upon the road which Paul Fort, in his Ballades Françaises has tramped along so vigorously, but in so doubtful a direction. Fort has published several volumes, which have been much praised by many of the younger critics, in which verse is printed as verse—verse which is sometimes rhymed and sometimes unrhymed, sometimes regular and sometimes irregular; and along with this verse there is a great deal of merely rhythmical prose, which is not more like verse than any page of Salammbo, or À Rebours, or L'Étui de Nacre. Now it seems to us that this indiscriminate mingling of prose and verse is for the good neither of prose nor of verse. It is a breaking down of limits without any conquest of new country. The mere printing of verse as prose, which Maeterlinck has favored, seems to us a travesty unworthy of a writer of beautiful prose or of beautiful verse.