No More Learning

He was writing rhymed vers libre in 1903', possibly stimulated by translations in a volume called "Poesie Arabe. " Thisbookhasanextremelyinterestingpreface. I have forgotten the name of the translator, but in ex- cusing the simplicity of Arab songs he says : "The young girl in Germany educated in philosophy in Kant and Hegel, when love comes to her, at once exclaims 'In- finite ! ', and allies her vocabulary with the transcendental.
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The little girl in the tents 'ne savait comparer fors que sa gourmandise. ' " In Klingsor for 1903, I find
Croise tes jambes fines et nues
Dans ton lit,
Frotte de tes mignonnes mains menues
Le bout de ton nez;
Frotte de tes doigts poteles et jolis,
Les deux violettes de tes yeux cernes,
Et reve.
Du haut du minaret arabe s'echappe
La melopee triste et breve
De I'indiscret muezzin
Qui nasillonne et qui eternue,
Et toi tu bailies comme une petite chatte, Tu bailies d'amour brisee,
Et tu songes au passant d'Ormuz ou d'Endor Qui t'a quittee ce matin
En te laissant sa legere bourse d'or
Et les marques bleues de ses baisers.
Later he turns to Max Elkskamp, addressing him as if he, Klingsor, at last had "found Jesus":
Je viens vers vous, mon cher Elkskamp JComme un pauvre varlet de coeur et de joie
Vient vers le beau seigneur qui campe Sous sa tente d'azur et de soie.
However I believe Moreas was a real poet, and, being stubborn, I have still an idea which got imbedded in my head some years ago: I mean that Klingsor is a poet.
? A STUDY IN FRENCH POETS 65
As for the Elkskamp phase and cult, I do not make much of it. Jean de Bosschere has written a book upon Elkskamp, and he assures me that Elkskamp is a great and important poet, and some day, perhaps, I may un- derstand it. De Bosschere seems to me to see or to feel perhaps more keenly than any one else certain phases of modern mechanical civilization: the ant-like madness of men bailing out little boats they never will sail in, shoeing horses they never will ride, making chairs they never will sit on, and all with a frenzied intentness. I may get my conviction as much from his drawings as from his poems. I am not yet clear in my mind about it. His opinion of Max Elkskamp can not be too lightly passedover. Videinfra"DeBosschereonElkskamp. "
OF OUR DECADE
Early in 1912 L'Effort, since called L'Effort Libre, published an excellent selection of poems mostly by men born since 1880: Arcos, Chenneviere, Duhamel, Spire, Vildrac, and Jules Romains, with some of Leon Bazal- gette's translations from Whitman.
SPIRE (born 1868)
Andre Spire, writing in the style of the generation which has succeeded him, is well represented in this col- lectionbyhis"DamesAnciennes. " Thecontentsofhis volumes are of very uneven value: Zionist propaganda, addresses, and a certain number of well-written poems.
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INSTIGATIONS
DAMES ANCIENNES
En hiver, dans la chambre claire, Tout en haut de la maison,
Le poele de faience blanche,
Cercle de cuivre, provincial, doux, Chauffait mes doigts et mes livres. Et le peuplier mandarine,
Dans le soir d'argent dedore, Dressait, en silence, ses branches, Devant ma fenetre close.
--Mere, le printemps aux doigts tiedes A souleve I'espagnolette
De mes fenetres sans rideaux.
Faites taire toutes ces voix qui montent Jusqu'a ma table de travail.
--Ce sent les amies de ma mere Et de la mere de ton pere,
Qui causent de leurs maris morts, Et de leurs fils partis.
--Avec, au coin de leurs levres,
Ces moustaches de cafe au lait?
Et dans leurs mains ces tartines? Dans leurs bouches ces Kouguelofs?
--Ce sont des cavales anciennes
Qui machonnent le peu d'herbe douce Que Dieu veut bien leur laisser.
--Mere, les maitres sensibles Lachent les juments inutiles
!
? A STUDY IN FRENCH POETS dy Dans les pres, non dans mon jardin!
--Sois tranquille, mon fils, sois tranquille, Elles ne brouteront pas tes fleurs.
--Mere, que n'y occupent-elles leurs levres, Et leurs trop courtes dents trop blanches De porcelaine trop fragile!
--Mon fils, fermez votre fenetre. Mon fils, vous n'etes pas chretien
VILDRAC
ViLDRAc's "Gloire" is in a way commentary on Remains' Ode to the Crowd ; a critique of part, at least, of unanimism.
II avait su gagner a lui Beaucoup d'hommes ensemble.
Et son bonheur etait de croire, Quand il avait quitte la foule. Que chacun des hommes I'aimait Et que sa presence durait Innombrable et puissante en eux.
Or un jour il en suivit un
Qui retournait chez soi, tout seul,
Et il vit son regard s'eteindre
Des qu'il fut un peu loin des autres.
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(The full text of this appeared in Poetry Aug. , 1913. ) Vildrac's two best-known poems are "Une Auberge" and "Visite" ; the first a forlorn scene, not too unlike a Van Gogh, though not done with \^an Gogh's vigor.
C'est seulement parce qu'on a soif qu'on entre y boire C'est parce qu'on se sent tomber qu'on va s'y asseoir. On n'y est jamais a la fois qu'un oii deux
Et Ton n'est pas force d'y raconter son histoire.
Celui qui entre
mange lentement son pain
Parce que ses dents sont usees;
Et il boit avec beaucoup de mal Parce qu'il a de peine plein sa gorge.
Quand il a fini,
II hesite, puis timide Va s'asseoir un- peu A cote du feu.
Ses mains crevassees epousent
Les bosselures dures de ses genoux.
Then of the other man in the story:
"qui n'etait pas des notres. . . .
"Mais comme il avait I'air cependant d'etre des notres
The story or incident in "Visite" is that of a man stir-
! "
? A STUDY IN FRENCH POETS 69
ring himself out of his evening comfort to visit some pathetic dull friends.
Ces gens helas, ne croyaient pas
Qu'il ftit venu a I'improviste Sitard,desiloin,parlaneige. . .
Et ils attendaient I'un et I'autre
Que brusquement et d'un haleine il exposat La grave raison de sa venue.
Only when he gets up to go, "ils oserent comprendre"
II leur promit de revenir.
Mais avant de gagner la porte
II fixa bien dans sa memoire
Le lieu ou s'abritait leur vie.
II regarda bien chaque objet
Et puis aussi I'homme et la femme, Tant il craignait au fond de lui
De ne plus jamais revenir.
The relation of Vildrac's verse narratives to the short story form is most interesting.
JULES ROMAINS
The reader vi^ho has gone through Spire, Romains, and Vildrac, will have a fair idea of the poetry written by this group of men. Romains has always seemed to me, and is, I think, generally recognized as, the nerve-centre, the dynamic centre of the group.
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Les marchands sont assis aux portes des boutiques lis regardent. Les toits joignent la rue au del Et les paves semblent feconds sous le soleil
Comme un champ de mais.
Les marchands ont laisse dormir pres du comptoir
Ee desir de gagner qui travaille des I'aube.
On dirait que, malgre leur ame habituelle,
Une autre ame s'avance et vient au seuil d'eux-memes Comme ils viennent au seuil de leurs boutiques noires.
We are regaining for cities a little of what savage man has for the forest. We live by instinct; receive news by instinct; have conquered machinery as primi- tive man conquered the jungle. Remains feels this, though his phrases may not be ours. Wyndham Lewis on giants is nearer Remains than anjrthing else in Eng- lish, but vorticism is, in the realm of biology, the hy- pothesis of the dominant cell. Lewis on giants comes perhaps nearer Remains than did the original talks about the Vortex. There is in inferior minds a passion for unity, that is, for a confusion and melting together of things which a good mind will want kept distinct. Un- informed-English criticism has treated Unanimism as if it were a vague general propaganda, and this criticism has cited some of our worst and stupidest versifiers as a corresponding manifestation in England. One can only account for such error by the very plausible hy- pothesis that the erring critics have not read "Puissances de Paris. "
Remains is net to be understood by extracts and frag- ments. He has felt this general replunge of mind into instinct, or this development of instinct to cope with a metropolis, and with metropolitan conditions; in so far
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as he has expressed the emotions of this consciousness he is poet; he has, aside from that, tried to formulate this new consciousness, and in so far as such formulation is dogmatic, debatable, intellectual, hyJ)othetical, he is opentoargumentanddispute; thatistosayheisphilos- opher, and his philosophy is definite and defined. Vil- drac's statement "II a change la pathetique" is perfectly true. Many people will prefer the traditional and fa- miliar and recognizable poetry of writers like Klingsor. I am not dictating people's likes and dislikes. Romains has made a new kind of poetry. Since the scrapping of the Aquinian, Dantescan system, he is perhaps the first person who had dared put up so definite a philo- sophical frame-work for his emotions.
I do not mean, by this, that I agree with Jules Romains; I am prepared to go no further than my opening sentence of this section, concerning our grow- ing, or returning, or perhaps only newly-noticed, sensi- tization to crowd feeling; to the metropolis and its peculiar sensations. Turn to Romains
Je croyais les murs de ma chambre impermeables. Or ils laissent passer une tiede bruine
Qui s'epaissit et qui m'empeche de me voir, Lepapierafleursbleuesluicede. IIfaitlebruit Du sable et du cresson qu'une source traverse. L'air qui touche mes nerfs est extremement lourd. Ce n'est pas comme avant le pur milieu de vie Ou montait de la solitude sublimee.
Voila que par osmose
Toute I'immensite d'alentour le sature.
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II charge mes poumons, il empoisse les choses, II separe mon corps des meubles familiers,
Les forces du dehors s'enroulent a mes mains.
In "Puissances de Paris" he states that there are beingsmore"realthantheindividual. " Here,Icanbut touch upon salients.
Rien ne cesse d'etre interieur.
La rue est plus intime a cause de la brume.
Lines like Romains', so well packed with thought, so careful that you will get the idea, can not be poured out by the bushel like those of contemporary rhetoricians, like those of Claudel and Fort. The best poetry has always a content, it may not be an intellectual content; in Romains the intellectual statement is necessary to keep the new emotional content coherent.
The opposite of Lewis's giant appears in
Je suis I'esclave heureux des hommes dont I'haleine Flotte ici. Leur vouloirs s'ecoule dans mes nerfs; Ce qui est moi commence a fondre.
This statement has the perfectly simple order of words. Itisthesimplestatementofamansayingthings for the first time, whose chief concern is that he shall speak clearly. His work is perhaps the fullest statement of the poetic consciousness of our time, or the scope of that consciousness. I am not saying he is the most poignant poet; simply that in him we have the fullest
poetic exposition.
You can get the feel of Laforgue or even of Corbiere
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from a few poems; Romains is a subject for study. I do not say this as praise, I am simply trying to define him. His "Un Etre en Marche" is the narrative of a girls' school, of the "crocodile" or procession going out for its orderly walk, its collective sensations and adven-
, tures.
Troupes and herds appear in his earlier work:
Le troupeau marche, avec ses chiens et son berger, II a peur. Qk et la des reverberes brulent,
II tremble d'etre poursuivi par les etoiles.
La foule traine une ecume d'ombrelles blanches
La grande ville s'evapore,
Et pleut a verse sur la plaine
Qu'elle sature.
His style is not a "model," it has the freshness of grass, not of new furniture polish. In his work many nouns meet their verbs for the first time, as, perhaps, in the'lastlinesabovequoted. Heneeds,asarule,about a hundred pages to turn round in. One can not give these poems in quotation ; one wants about five volumes of Romains. In so far as I am writing "criticism," I must say that his prose is just as interesting as his verse. But then his verse is just as interesting as his prose. Part of his method is to show his subject in a series of successive phases, thus in L'Individu
'V .
Je suis un habitant de ma ville, un de ceux
Qui s'assoient au theatre et qui vont par les rues
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INSTIGATIONS
VI
Je cesse lentement d'etre moi. Ma personne Semble s'aneantir chaque jour un peu plus C'est a peine si je le sens et m'en etonne.
His poetry is not of single and startling emotions, but--for better or worse--of progressive states of con- sciousness. It is as useless for the disciple to try and imitate Romains, without having as much thought of his own, as it is for the tyro in words to try imitations of Jules Laforgue. The limitation of Romains' work, as of a deal of Browning's, is that, having once understood it, one may not need or care to re-read it. This restric- tion applies also in a wholly different way to "En- dymion" ; having once filled the mind with Keats' color, or the beauty of things described, one gets no new thrill from the re-reading of them in not very well-written verse. This limitation applies to all poetry that is not implicit in its own medium, that is, which is not indis- solubly bound in with the actual words, word music, the fineness and firmness of the actual writing, as in Villon, or in "Collis O Heliconii. "
ButonecannotleaveRomainsunread. Hisinterest is more than a prose interest, he has verse technique, rhyme, terminal syzygy, but that is not what I mean. He is poetry in:
On ne m'a pas donne de lettres, ces jours-ci Personne n'a songe, dans la ville, a m'ecrire.
Oh! je n'esperais rien; je sais vivre et penser Tout seul, et mon esprit, pour faire une flambee, N'attend pas qu'on lui jette une feuille noircie.
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Mais je sens qu'il me manque un plaisir familier,
J'ai du bonheur aux mains quand j'ouvre une enveloppe;
But such statements as: TENTATION
1
Je me plais beaucoup trop a rester dans les gares Accoude sur le bois anguleux des barrieres,
Je regarde les trains s'emplir de voyageurs.
and:
would not be important unless they were followed by exposition. The point is that they are followed by ex- position, to which they form a necessary introduction, defining Romains' angle of attack; and as a result the forceofRemainsiscumulative. Hisearlybooksgather meaning as one reads through the later ones.
And I think if one opens him almost anywhere one can discern the authentic accent of a'man saying some- thing, not the desultory impagination of rehash.
Charles Vildrac is an interesting companion figure to his brilliant friend Romains. He conserves himself, he is never carried away by Romains' theories. He ad- mires, differs, and occasionally formulates a corrective or corollary as in "Gloire. "
Mon esprit solitaire est une goutte d'huile Sur la pensee et sur le songe de la villa
Qui me laissent flotter et ne m'absorbent pas.
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Compare this poem with Remains' "Ode to the Crowd Here Present" and you get the two angles of vision.
Henry Spiess, a Genevan lawyer, has written an in- teresting series of sketches of the court-room. He is a more or less isolated figure. I have seen amusing and indecorous poems by George Fourest, but it is quite probable that they amuse because one is unfamiliar with their genre ; still "La Blonde Negresse" (the heroine of his title), his satire of the symbolo-rhapsodicoes in the series of poems about her: "La negresse blonde, la blonde negresse," gathering into its sound all the swish and woggle of the sound-over-sensists ; the poem on the beautiful blue-behinded baboon; that on the gentle- man "qui ne craignait ni la verole ni dieu"; "Les pianos du Casino au bord de la mer" (Laforgue plus the four- hour touch), are an egregious and diverting guffaw.
(I do not think the book is available to the public. J. G. Fletcher once lent me a copy, but the edition was limited and the work seems rather unknown. )
Romains is my chief concern. I can not give a full exposition of Unanimism on a page or two. Among all the younger writers and groups in Paris, the group cen- tering in Romains is the only one which seems to me to have an energy comparable to that of the Blast group in London,'" the only group in which the writers for Blast can be expected to take very much interest.
Romains in the flesh does not seem so energetic as Lewis in the flesh, but then I have seen Romains only onceandIamwellacquaintedwithLewis. Romainsis, in his writing, more placid, the thought seems more passive, less impetuous. As for those who will not have Lewis "at any price," there remains to them no other course than the acceptance of Romains, for these
* Statement dated Feb. , 1918.
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two men hold the two tenable, positions : the Mountain and the Multitude.
It might be fairer to Rpmains to say simply he has chosen, or specialized in, the collected multitude as a subject matter, and that he is quite well on a mountain of his own.
My general conclusions, redoing and reviewing this period of French poetry, are (after my paw-over of some sixty new volumes as mentioned, and after re-reading most of what I had read before) :
1. As stated in my opening, that mediocre poetry is about the same in all countries ; that France has as much drivel, gas, mush, etc. , poured into verse, as has any other nation.
2. That it is impossible "to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear," or poetry out of nothing; that all attempts to "expand" a subject into poetry are futile, funda- mentally; that the subject matter must be coterminous with the expression. Tasso, Spenser, Ariosto, prose poems, diffuse forms of all sorts are all a preciosity; a parlor-game, and dilutations go to the scrap heap.
3. That Corbiere, Rimbaud, Laforgue are permanent; that probably some of De Gourmont's and Tailhade's poems are permanent, or at least reasonably durable; that Romains is indispensable, for the present at any rate; thatpeoplewhosaythey"don'tlikeFrenchpoetry" are possibly matoids, and certainly ignorant of the scope and variety of French work. In the same way people are ignorant of the qualities of French people; ignorant that if they do not feel at home in Amiens (as I do not),
thefe are other places in France; in the Charente if you walk across country you meet people exactly like the nicest people you can meet in the American country and they are not "foreign! '
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All France is not to be found in Paris. The adjective "French" is current in America with a dozen erroneous or stupid connotations. If it means, as it did in the mouth of my contemporary, "talcum powder" and sur- face neatness, the selection of poems I have given here would almost show the need of, or at least a reason for, French Parnassienism ; for it shows the French poets violent, whether with the violent words of Corbiere, or the quiet violence of the irony of Laforgue, the sudden annihilations of his "turn-back" on the subject. People
forget that the incision of Voltaire is no more all of French Literature than is the robustezza of Brantome. (Burton of the "Anatomy" is our only writer who can match him. ) They forget the two distinct finenesses of the Latin French and of the French "Gothic," that is of the eighteenth century, of Bernard (if one take a writer of no great importance to illustrate a definite quality), or of D'Orleans and of Froissart in verse. From this delicacy, if they can not be doing with it, they may turn easily to Villon or Basselin. Only a general distaste for
literature can be operative against all of these writers.
UNANIMISME
The English translation of Remains' "Mort de Quelqu'un" has provoked various English and American essays and reviews. His published works are "L'Ame des Hommes," 1904; "Le Bourg Regenere," 1906; "La Vie Unanime," 1908; "Premier Livre de Prieres," 1909; "La Foule qui est Ici," 1909 ; in 1910 and 191 1 "Un Etre en Marche," "Deux Poemes," "Manuel de Deification," "L'armee dans la Ville," "Puissances de Paris," and "Mort de Quelqu'un," employing the three excellent pub- lishing houses of the Mercure, Figuiere and Sansot.
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His "Reflexions" at the end of "Puissances de Paris" are so good a formulation of the Unanimiste Aesthetic, or "Pathetique," that quotation of them will do more to disabuse readers misled by stupid English criticism than would any amount of talk about Romains. I let him speak for himself
REFLEXIONS
"Many people are . now ready to recognize that there are in the world beings more real than man. We admit the life of entities greater than our own bodies. Society is not merely an arithmetical total, or a collective desig- nation. We even credit the existence of groups inter- mediate between the individual and the state. But these opinions are put forth by abstract deduction or by ex- perimentation of reason.
"People employ them to complete a system of things and with the complacencies of analogy. If they do not follow a serious study of social data, they are at least the most meritorious results of observations ; they justify the method, and uphold the laws of a science which struggles manfully to be scientific.
"These fashions of knowing would seem both costly and tenuous. Man did not wait for physiology to give him a notion of his body, in which lack of patience he was intelligent, for physiology has given him but analytic and exterior information concerning things he had long known from within. He had been conscious of his organs long before he had specified their modes of ac- tivity.
As spirals of smoke from village chimneys, the profound senses of each organ had mounted toward him joy, sorrow, all the emotions are deeds more fully of consciousness than are the thoughts of man's reason.
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Reason makes a concept of man, but the heart perceives the flesh of his body.
"In like manner we must know the groups that englobe us, not by observation from without, but by an organic consciousness. And it is by no means sure that the rhythms will make their nodes in us, if we be not the centresofgroups. Wehavebuttobecomesuch. Dig deep enough in our being, emptying it of individual rev- eries, dig enough little canals so that the souls of the groups will flow of necessity into us.
"I have attempted nothing else in this book. Various groups have come here into consciousness. They are still rudimentary, and their spirit is but a perfume in the air. Beings with as little consistence as la Rue du Havre, and la Place de la Bastile, ephemeral as the com- pany of people in an omnibus, or the audience at L'Opera Comique, can not have complex organism or thoughts greatly elaborate. People will think it superfluous that I should unravel such shreds in place of re-carding once more the enormous heap of the individual soul.
"Yet I think the groups are in the most agitated stage of their evolution. Future groups will perhaps deserve less affection, and we shall conceal the basis of things more effectively. Now the incomplete and unstable con- tours have not yet learned to stifle any tendency (aiiy inclination). Every impact sets them floating. They do not coat the infantile matter with a hard or impact- ingenvelope. Asuperiorplanthasrealizedbutfewof the possibilities swarming in fructificatory mould. A mushroom leads one more directly to the essential life quality than do the complexities of the oak tree.
"Thus the groups prepare more future than is strictly required. Thus we have the considerable happiness of watching the commencement of reign, the beginning of
? A STUDY IN FRENCH POETS 8i
an organic series which will last as did others, for a thousand ages, before the cooling of the earth. This is not a progression, it is a creation, the first leap-out of a different series. Groups will not continue the activi- tiesofanimals,norofmen; theywillstartthingsafresh according to their own need, and as the consciousness of their substance increases they will refashion the image of the world.
"The men who henceforth can draw tlie souls of groups to converge within themselves, will give forth the com- ing dream, and will gather, to boot, certain intuitions of human habit. Our ideas of the being will undergo a correction; will hesitate rather more in finding a dis- tinction between the existent and non-existent. In pass- ing successively from the Place de I'Europe to the Place des Vosges, and then to a gang of navvies, one perceives that there are numerous shades of difference between nothingandsomething. Beforeresortingtogroupsone is sure of discerning a being of a simple idea. One knows that a dog exists, that he has an interior and independent unity ; one knows that a table or a mountain does not exist; nothing but our manner of speech cuts it off from the universal non-existing. But streets de- mand all shades of verbal expression (from the non- existing up to the autonomous creature).
"One ceases to believe that a definite limit is the indis- pensable means of existence. Where does la Place de la Trinite begin ? The streets mingle their bodies. The squares isolate themselves with great difificulty. The crowd at the theatre takes on no contour until it has lived for some time, and with vigor. A being (etre) has a centre, or centres in harmony, but a being is not compelled to have limits. He exists a great deal in one place, rather less in others, and, further on, a second
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being commences before the first has left off. Every being has, somewhere in space, it^ maximum. Only ancestored individuals possess affirmative contours, a skin which cuts them off from the infinite.
"Spaceisnoone'spossession. Nobeinghassucceeded in appropriating one scrap of space and saturating it withhisownuniqueexistence. Everythingover-crosses, coincides, and cohabits. Every point is a perch for a thousand birds. Paris, the rue Montmartre, a crowd, a man, a protoplasm are on the same spot of pavement. A thousand existences are concentric. We see a little of some of them.
"How can we go on thinking that an individual is a solitary thing which is born, grows, reproduces itself and dies? This is a superior and inveterate manner of being an individual. But groups are not truly born. Their life makes and unmakes itself like an unstable state of matter, a condensation which does not endure. They show us that life, at its origin, is a provisory atti- tude, a moment of exception, an intensity between two relaxations, not continuity, nothing decisive. The first entireties take life by a sort of slow success, and extin- guish themselves without catastrophe, the single elements do not perish because the whole is disrupted.
"The crowd before the Baraque Foraine starts to live little by little, as water in a kettle begins to sing and evaporate. The passages of the Odeon do not live by night,eachdaytheyarereal,afewhours. Atthestart life seems the affair of a moment, then it becomes inter- mittent. To be durable; to become a development and a destiny; to be defined and finished off at each end by birth and death, it needs a deal of accustomedness.
"The primitive forms are not coequal. There is a natural hierarchy among groups. Streets have no set
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middle, no veritable limitations; they hold a long vacil- lating sort of life which night flattens out almost to nothingness. Cross-roadsandsquarestakeoncontour, andgatherupthenodesoftheirrhythms. Othergroups have a fashioned body, they endure but a little space, buttheyhavelearned,almost,todie; theyevenresurrect themselves as by a jerk or dry spasm, they begin the habit of being, they strive toward it, and this puts them out of breath.
"I have not yet met a group fully divine. None has had a real consciousness, none has addressed me, saying: I exist. The day when the first group shall take its soul in its hands, as one lifts up a child in order to look in its face, that day there will be a new god upon earth. This is the god I await, with my labor of annunciation. "
This excerpt from Romains gives the tone of his thought. In so far as he writes in the present tense he carries conviction. He broaches truly a "new," or at leastcontemporary"pathetique. " Heutters,inoriginal vein, phases of consciousness whereinto we are more or less drifting, in measure of our proper sensibility.
I retain, however, my full suspicion of agglomerates.
DE BOSSCHERE'S STUDY OF ELSKAMP *
I CONFESSED in my February essay my inability to make anything of Max Elskamp's poetry, and I have tacitly confessed my inability to find any formula for hawking De Bosschere's own verge to any public of my
acquaintance; De Bosschere's study of Elskamp, how- ever, requires no advocacy; I do not think it even re-
* "Max Elskamp"; essai par lean De Bosscfi^re. Bibliothique de I'Occident, 17 rue Ehli, Paris, fr. 3. 50.
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quires to be a study of Max Elskamp ; it drifts as quiet canal water; the protagonist may or not be a real man.
"Ici, la solitude est plus accentuee: souvent, pendant de longues minutes, les rues sont desertes. . . . Les portes ne semblent pas, ainsi que dans les grandes villes, s'ouvrir sur un poumon de vie, et etre une cellule vivante de la rue. Au contraire, toutes sont fetmees. Aussi bien, les facades de ce quartier sont pareilles aux murs borgnes. Unmincerubandecielrouxetgris,apeine' bleu au printemps, decoupe les pignons, se tend sur le marche desert et sur le puits profond des cours. "
From this Antwerp, De Bosschere derives his subject, as Gautier his "Albertus" from
Un vieux bourg flamand tel que peint Teniers; trfces bathing in water.
"Son univers etait limite par : 'le grand peuplier' ; une statue de Pomone, 'le grand rocher,' et 'la grand grenouille' ; ceci etait un coin touffu ovi il y avait de I'eau et oil il ne vit jamais qu'une seule grenouille, qu'il croyait immortelle. " DeBosschere'snextvisionofElskampis when his subject is pointed out as "le poete decadent," for no apparent reason save that he read Mallarme at a time when Antwerp did not. The study breaks into a cheerful grin when Elskamp tells of Mallarme's one appearance in the sea-port:
"Le bruit et les cris qui furent pousses pendant la conference de Mallarme, I'arreterent plusieurs fois. L'opinion du public sur sa causerie est contenue en ces quelques mots, dits par un general retraite, grand joueur de billard, et qui du reste ne fit qu'une courte absence de la salle de jeu, pour ecouter quelques phrases du poete. 'Get homme est ivre ou fou,' dit il fort haut, en quittant la salle, ou son jugement fit loi. Anvers, malgre un leger masque de snobisme, qui pourrait
"
? A STUDY IN FRENCH POETS 85
tromper, n'a pas change depuis. Mallarme, meme pour les avertis, est toujours rhomme ivre ou fou. "
The billiard player is the one modern touch in the book; for the rest Elskamp sails with sea-captains, ap- parently in sailing ships to Constantinople, or perhaps one should call it Byzantium. He reads Juan de la Cruz and Young's Night Thoughts, and volumes of de- monology, in the properly dim library of his maternal grandfather, "Sa passion en rhetorique fut pour Long- fellow, il traduisait 'Song of (sic) Hiawatots. '
The further one penetrates into De Bosschere's de- lightful narrative the less real is the hero; the less he needs to be real. A phantom has been called out of De Foe's period, delightful phantom, taking on the reality of the fictitious; in the end the author has created a charming figure, but I am as far as ever from making head or tail of the verses attributed to this creation. I have had a few hours' delightful reading, I have loitered along slow canals, behind a small window sits Elskamp doing something I do not in the least understand.
II
So was I at the end of the first division "Sur la Vie" de Max Elskamp. The second division, concerned with "Oeuvre et Vie," but raised again the questions that had faced me in reading Elskamp's printed work. He has an undercurrent, an element everywhere present, differentiating his poems from other men's poems. De Bosschere scarcely helps me to name it. The third divi- sion of the book, at first reading, nearly quenched the curiosity and the interest aroused by the first two-thirds. On second reading I thought better of it. Elskamp, plunged in the middle ages, in what seems almost an
;
? 86 INSTIGATIONS
atrophy, as much as an atavism, becomes a little more plausible. (For what it is worth, I read the chapter upon a day of almost complete exhaustion. )
"Or, quand la vision lache comme une proie videe le saint, il demeure avec les hommes. "
"Entre le voyant et ceux qui le sanctifient il y a un precipice insondatle. Seul I'individu est beatific par sa croyance; mais il ne pent I'utiliser au temporel ni la partager avec les hommes, et c'est peut-etre la forme unique de la justice sur terre. "
The two sentences give us perhaps the tone of De Boss- chere's critique "Sur le Mysticisme" of Elskamp.
It is, however, not in De Bosschere, but in La Wallome that I found the clue to this author:
CONSOLATRICE DES AFFLIGES
Et I'hiver m'a donne la main,
J'ai la main d'Hiver dans les mains,
et dans ma tete, au loin, il brule
les vieux etes de canicule ;
et dans mes yeux, en candeurs lentes, tres blanchement il fait des tentes,
dans mes yeux il fait des Sicile, puis des lies, encore des iles.
Et c'est tout un voyage en rond trop vite pour la guerison
a tons les pays oti Ton meurt
au long cours des mers et des heures
? A STUDY IN FRENCH POETS 87
et c'est tout un voyage au vent sur les vaisseaux de mes lits blancs
qui houlent avec des etoilcs
a I'entour de toutes les voiles.
or j'ai le gout de mer aux levres comme une rancoeur de genievre
bu pour la tres mauvaise orgie des departs dans les tabagies;
puis ce pays encore me vient: un pays de neiges sans fin. . . .
Marie des bonnes couvertures, faites-y la neige moins dure
et courir moins comme des lieres
mes mains sur mes draps blancs de fievre.
--Max Elskamp in "La Wallonie," 1892.
The poem appears in Van Bever and Leautaud's an- thology and there rhay be no reason for my not having thence received it; but there is, for all that, a certain value in finding a man among his native surroundings, and in finding Elskamp at home, among his contem- poraries, I gained first the advantage of comprehension.
ALBERT MOCKEL AND "LA WALLONIE" *
I recently received a letter from Albert Mockel, written with a graciousness not often employed by Eng- lish and American writers in communication to their
* Utile Review, Oct. , 1918.
? 88 INSTIGATIONS
juniors. Indeed, the present elder generation of Ameri- can "respectable" authors having all their lives ap- proached so nearly to death, have always been rather annoyed that American letters did not die utterly in their personal desiccations. Signs of vitality; signs of inter- est in, or cognizance of other sections of this troubled planet have been steadily and papier-macheedly depre- cated. The rubbish bins of Harper's and the Century have opened their lids not to new movements but only to the diluted imitations of new movers, etc.
La Wallonie, beginning as L'Elan Litteraire in 1885, endured seven years. It announced for a full year on its covers that its seventh year was its last. Albert Meckel has been gracious enough to call it "Notre Little Review a nous," and to commend the motto on our cover, in the letter here following:
109, Avenue de Paris 8 mai, 1918 La MaJmaison Ruejl
Monsieur et cher confrere,
Merci de votre amiable envoi. La Little Review m'est sympathique a I'extreme. En la feuilletant j'ai cru voir renaitre ce temps dore de ferveur et de belle confiance oil, adolescent encore, et tatonnant un peu dans les neuves regions de I'Art, je fondai a Liege notre Little Review a nous. La Wallonie. Je retrouve justement quelques livraisons de cette revue et je vous les envoie; elles ont tout au moins le merite de la rarete.
Vous mon cher confrere, deja ne marchez plus a tatons mais je vous soupQonne de n'etre pas aussi terriblement, aussi criminellement jeune que je I'etais a cette epoque- la. Et puis trente ans ont passe sur la litterature, et c'est de la folie d'hier qu'est faite la sagesse d'aujourd'- hui. Alors le Symbolisme naissait ; grace a la coUabora-
? A STUDY IN FRENCH POETS 89
tion de mes amis, grace a Henri de Regnier et Pierre M. Olin qui dirigerent la revue avec moi, La Wallonie en fut I'un des premiers foyers. Tout etait remis en ques- tion. On aspirait a plus de liberte a une forme plus intense et plus complete plus musicale et plus souple, a une expression nouvelle de reternelle beaute. On s'inge- niait on cherchait . . Tatonnementse? Certes et ils etaient inevitables. Mais vif et ardent effort, desinteres- sement absolu, foi juvenile et surtout "No compromise with the public taste" . . . N'y a-t-il point la quelques traits de ressemblance avec I'ceuvre que vous tentez au- jourd'hui en Amerique, et, a trente annees d'intervale, une sorte de cousinage? C'est pourquoi mon cher con- frere, j'ai lu avec tant de plaisir la Little Review dont vous avec eu la gentillesse de m'adresser la collection. Croyez-moi sympathiquement votre,
Albert Mockel.
With a native mistrust of la belle phrase; of "temps dorel' "ferveur," "belle confiance," etc. , and with an equally native superiority to any publication not printed LARGE, I opened La Wallonie. The gropings, "ta- tonnements," to which M. Mockel so modestly refers, appear to have included some of the best work of Mallarme, of Stuart Merrill, of Max Elskamp and Emile Verhaeren. Verlaine contributed to La Wallonie, De Regnier was one of its editors . . . Men of since popu-
lar fame--Bourget, Pierre Louys, Maeterlinck--ap- peared with the rarer spirits.
If ever the "amateur magazine" in the sense of maga- zine by lovers of art and letters, for lovers of art and letters, in contempt of the commerce of letters, has vin- dicated itself, that vindication was La Wallonie. Ver- haeren's "Les Pauvres" first appeared there as the sec-
:
? 90 INSTIGATIONS
oncl part of the series : "Chansons des Carrefours" (Jan. , '92) . . . The Elskamp I have just quoted appeared there with other poems of Max Elskamp. Mallarme is represented by the exquisite
SONNET
Ses purs ongles tres haut dediant leur onyx, L'Angoisse ce minuit, soutient, lampadophore, Maint reve vesperal brule par le phenix
Que ne recueille pas de cineraire amphore
Sur les credences, au salon vide : nul ptyx, Aboli bibelot d'inanite sonore,
(Car le maitre est alle puiser des pleurs au Styx Avec ce seul objet dont le Neant s'honore. )
Mais proche la croisee au nord vacante, un or Agonise selon peut-etre le decor
Des licornes ruant du feu contre une nixe,
EUe, defunte nue en le miroir encor
Que, dans I'oubli ferme par le cadre, se fixe De scintillations sitot le septuor.
--Mallarme in "La WcMonie," Jan. , 1889.
An era of Franco-Anglo-American intercourse is marked by his address to:
THE WHIRLWIND
Pas les rafales a propos
De rien comme occuper la rue
? A STUDY IN FRENCH POE'lb gi
Sujette au noir vol des chapeaux; Mais une danseuse apparue
Tourbillon de mousseline ou Fureur eparses en ecumes Que souleve par son genou Celle meme dont nous vecumes
Pour tout, hormis lui, rebattu Spirituelle, ivre, immobile Foudroyer avec le tutu,
Sans se faire autrement de bile
Sinon rieur que puisse I'air De sa jupe eventer Whistler.
--Mallarme in "Wallonie" Nov. , 1890.
If I owe Albert Mockel a great debt in having illumi- nated my eye for Elskamp I owe him no less the pleasure of one of Merrill's most delicate triumphs in the open- ing of
BALLET
Pour Gustck/e Moreau En casque de cristal rose les baladines,
Dont les pas mesures aux cordes des kinnors Tintent sous les tissus de tulle roidis d'ors, Exultent de leurs yeux pales de xaladines.
Toisons fauves sur leurs levres incarnadines. Bras lourds de bracelets barbares, en essors Moelleux vers la lueur lunaire des decors, Elles murmurent en malveillantes sourdines:
? 92 INSTIGATIONS
"Nous sommes, 6 mortels, danseuses du Desir,
Salomes dont les corps tordus par le plaisir
Leurrent vos heurs d'amour vers nos pervers arcanes.
Prosternez-vous avec des hosannas, ces soirs! Car, surgissant dans des aurores d'encensoirs, Sur nos cymbales nous ferons tonner vos cranes. "
--Stuart Merrill in "La Wallonie," July, '98.
The period was "glauque" and "nacre," it had its pet and too-petted adjectives, the handles for parody; but it had also a fine care for sound, for sound fine-virrought, not mere swish and resonant rumble, not
"Dolores, O hobble and kobble Dolores. O perfect obstruction on track. "
The particular sort of fine workmanship shown in this sonnet of Merrill's has of late been too much let go by the board. One may do worse than compare it with the Syrian syncopation of Aiwva and 'khuv iv in Bion's Adonis.
Hanton is gently didactic
LE BON GRAIN
"Deja peinent maints moissonneurs dont la memoire est destinee a vivre. "
--Celestin Demblon.
Amants des rythmes en des strophes cadencees, Des rimes rares aux splendeurs evocatoires, Laissant en eux comme un echo de leurs pensees, Comme un parfum de leurs symboles en histoires:
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? A STUDY IN FRENCH POETS
93
Tels les poetes vont cherchant en vrais glaneurs Les blonds epis qui formeront leur riche ecrin. lis choisirpnt, comme feraient les bons vanneurs, Parmi les bles passes au crible, le beau grain.
Et germera cette semence bien choisie, Entre les roses et les lys, pour devenir Riche moisson de la fertile fantaisie.
L'ardent soleil de Messidor fera jaunir Les tiges souples d'une forte poesie
Qui dresseront leurs fiers epis vers I'avenir!
--Edmond Hanton in "La Wallonie,'' July, '88.
Delaroche is, at least in parts, utterly incomprehen- sible, but there is an interesting experiment in sound- sequence which begins
SONNETS SYMPHONIQUES
En la langueur accidentelle
de ta dentelle
oii meurt mon coeur
Un profil pleure et se voit tel
en le pastel
du divin leurre
Qu'or vegetal de lys s'enlise au froid santal
? 94
INSTIGATIONS
Si n'agonise occidental qui s'adonise.
--Achille Delairoche in "La Wallonie," Feb. , '89.
I do not know that we will now be carried away by Albert Saint-Paul's chinoiserie, or that she-devils are so much in fashion as when Jules Bois expended, certainly, some undeniable emotion in addressing them:
PETALES DE NACRE
En sa robe ou s'immobilisent les oiseaux,
Une emerge des fleurs comme une fleur plus grande.