I do not wish to say that Vïelé-Griffin is a joyous poet; nevertheless, he is the poet of joy. With him, we share the pleasures of a normal, simple life, the certitude of beauty, the invincible youthfulness of nature. He is neither violent, sumptuous nor sweet: he is calm. Though very subjective, or because of this, for to think of oneself is to think of oneself completely, he is religious. Like Emerson he is bound to see "images of the most ancient religion" in nature, and to think, again like Emerson: "It seems that a day has not been entirely profane, in which some attention has been given to the things of nature." One by one he knows and loves the elements of the forest, from the "great gentle ash trees" to the "million young plants," and it is his very own forest, his personal and original forest:
Sous ma forêt de Mai fleure tout chèvrefeuille,Le soleil goutte en or par l'ombre grasse,Un chevreuil bruit dans les feuilles qu'il cueille,La brise en la frise des bouleaux passe,De feuille en feuille.Par ma plaine de mai toute herbe s'argente,Le soleil y luit comme au jeu des épées,Une abeille vibre aux muguets de la senteDes hautes fleurs vers le ru groupées.La brise en la frise des frênes chante....(Tr. 11)
But he knows other flowers than those which are common to glades; he knows the flower-that-sings, she who sings, lavendar, sweet marjoram or fay, in the old garden of ballads and tales. The popular songs have left refrains in his memory which he blends in little poems, and which are their commentary or fancy:
Où est la Marguerite,O gué, ô gué,Où est la Marguerite?Elle est dans son château, coeur las et fatigué,Elle est dans son hameau, coeur enfantile et gai,Elle est dans son tombeau, semons-y du muguet,O gué, la Marguerite.(Tr. 12)
And this is almost as pure as Gerard de Nerval'sCydalises:
Où sont nos amoureuses?Elles sont su tombeau;Elles sont plus heureusesDans un séjour plus beau....(Tr. 13)
And almost as innocently cruel as this round which the little girls sing and dance to:
La beauté, a quoi sert-elle?Elle sert à aller en terre,Être mangée par les vers,Être mangée par les vers....(Tr. 14)
Vielé-Griffin has used the popular poetry discreetly—that poetry of such little art that it seems increate—but he would have been less discreet had he misused it, for he has the sentiment and respect for it. Other poets, unfortunately, have been less prudent and have collected the rose-that-talks with such clumsy or rough hands that we wish an eternal silence had been conjured around a treasure now sullied and vilified.
Like the forest, the sea enchants and intoxicates Vielé-Griffin; he has called it all things in his earliest verses, that already remoteCueille d'Avril; the insatiable devouring sea, abyss and tomb, the savage sea with triumphal haughty swell, the sea wantoning after voluptuous voids, the furious sea, the heedless sea, the stubborn, dumb sea, the envious sea painting its face with stars or suns, dawns or midnights—and the poet reproaches it for its flown glory:
Ne sens-tu pas en toi l'opulence de n'êtreQue pour toi seule belle, ô Mer, et d'être toi?(Tr. 15)
then he proclaims his pride at not having followed the sea's example, at not having sued glory with happy reminiscences or bold plagiarisms. It must be recognized that Vielé-Griffin, who before did not lie, has since kept his word. He has indeed remained himself, truly free, truly proud and truly wild. His forest is not limitless, but it is not a banal forest, it is a domain. I do not speak of the very important part he has had in the difficult conquest of free verse; my impression is more general and deeper and concerns itself not only with the form, but with the essence of his art. Through Francis Vielé-Griffin there is something new in French poetry.
With Verlaine, Stéphane Mallarmé is the poet who has had the most direct influence on the poets of today. Both were Parnassians and first Baudelairians.
Per me si va tra la perduta gente.(Tr. 16)
With them one descends along the gloomy mountain to the doleful city ofFleurs du Mal. All the present literature and especially that which is called symbolistic, is Baudelairian, not doubtless by its external technique, but by its internal and spiritual technique, by the sense of mystery, by the anxious care to hear what things say, by the desire to harmonize, from soul to soul, with the obscure thought diffused in the night of the world, according to those so often quoted and repeated verses:
La nature est un temple où de vivants piliersLaissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles;L'homme y passe à travers des forêts de symbolesQui l'observent avec des regards familiers.Comme de longs échos qui de loin se confondentDans une ténébreuse et profonde unité,Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarté,Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent.(Tr. 17)
Baudelaire had read the first poems of Mallarmé before dying. He was troubled; poets do not like to leave a brother or son behind them. They would like to be alone and have their genius perish with their brain. But Mallarmé was Baudelairian only by filiation. His so precious originality quickly asserted itself. HisProses, hisAprès-midi d'un Faune, hisSonnets, came, at too long intervals, to tell of the marvelous subtlety of his patient, disdainful, imperiously gentle genius. Having voluntarily killed in him the spontaneity of being impressionable, the gifts of the artist by degrees replaced the gifts of the poet. He loved words more for their possible sense than for their true sense, and combined them in mosaics of a refined simplicity. It has been well said of him that, like Perseus or Martial, he was a difficult author. Yes, and like Anderson's man who wove invisible threads, Mallarmé assembles gems colored by his dreams, whose richness our care does not always succeed in divining. But it would be absurd to suppose that he is incomprehensible. The trick of quoting certain verses, obscure by their isolation, is not loyal, for, even in fragments, Mallarmé's poetry, when good, is incomparably so, and if later in a corroded book we only find these debris:
La chair est triste, hélas! et j'ai lu tous les livres.Fuir! là-bas fuir! Je sens que des oiseaux sont ivresD'être parmi l'écume inconnue et les cieux....Un automne jonché de taches de rousseur....Et tu fis la blancheur sanglotante des lys....Je t'apporte l'enfant d'une nuit d'Idumée....Tout son col secouera cette blanche agonie....(Tr. 18)
we must attribute them to a poet who was an artist to the highest degree. Oh! that sonnet of the swan (of which the last verse quoted above is the ninth) where all the words are white as snow!
But everything possible has been written on this beloved poet. I end with this comment.
Recently a question, something like this, was asked:
"Who, in the admiration of the young poets, will replace Verlaine, who had replaced Leconte de Lisle?"
Few of those questioned answered. Two-thirds of those who abstained were influenced by the ridiculous appearance of such an ultimatum. How in short could it be that a young poet should admire, "exclusively and successively," three "masters" so different as those two and Mallarmé—incontestably chosen? Thus, many were silent because of scruples—but I now vote, saying: Greatly loving and admiring Stéphane Mallarmé, I do not see that Verlaine's death is a decent reason for loving and admiring him more today than yesterday.
Nevertheless, since it is a strict duty ever to sacrifice the dead to the living and to give the living, by an increase of glory, an increase of energy, the result of the vote pleases me, and we, who were silent, would have been bound to speak. What a pity if too much abstention had perverted the truth! For, informed by a circular, the press in this item has found a motive the more for laughing and pitying us, as long as, riding on the inky waves of the sea of intellectual night, but subduer of shipwreckers, the name of Mallarmé, at last written on the ironic elegance of a racing cutter, sails and now defies the emptiness and the bitter-sweet foam of the hoax.
When they know by heart what is pure in Verlaine, the young women of today and tomorrow set out to dreamAu Jardin de l'Infante. With all that he owes to the author ofFêtes Galantes(he owes him less than one might suppose), Albert Samain is one of the most original and charming poets, the sweetest and most delicate of poets:
En robe héliotrope, et sa pensée au doigts,Le rêve passe, la ceinture dénouée,Frôlant les âmes de sa traîne de nuée,Au rhytme éteint d'une musique d'autrefois....(Tr. 19)
One must read the whole little poem which commences thus:
Dans la lente douceur d'un soir des derniers jours....(Tr. 20)
It is pure and beautiful as any poem in the French language, and its art has the simplicity of works deeply felt and long pondered over. Free verse, new poetry! Here are verses which make us understand the vanity of prosodists and the awkwardness of the too clever players on the zither. A soul is there.
Samain's sincerity is wonderful. I think he would be ashamed to give variations on sensations unexplored by his experience. Sincerity here does not mean candor, nor simplicity gaucherie. He is sincere, not because he avows all his thoughts, but because he thinks of all his avowals. And he is simple because he has studied his art until he knows its last secrets and effortlessly gives forth these secrets with an unconscious mastery:
Les roses du couchant s'effeuillent sur le fleuve;Et, dans l'émotion pâle du soir tombant,S'évoque un parc d'automne où rêve sur un bancMa jeunesse déjà grave comme une veuve....(Tr. 21)
This is, it seems, like a Vigny made tender and consenting to the humility of a melancholy quite simple and stripped of scarves.
He is not only softened. He is tender, and what passion and sensuality, but so delicate!
Tu marchais chaste dans la robe de ton âme,Que le désir suivait comme un faune dompté,Je respirais parmi le soir, ô pureté,Mon rêve enveloppé dans tes voiles de femme.(Tr. 22)
A delicate sensuality, which is really the impression his verses should give to conform to his poetics, where he dreams
De vers blonds où le sens fluide se délieComme sous l'eau la chevelure d'Ophélie,De vers silencieux, et sans rythme et sans trame,Où la rime sans bruit glisse comme une rame,De vers d'une ancienne étoffe exténuée,Impalpable comme le son et la nuée,De vers de soirs d'automne ensorcelant les heuresAu rite féminin des syllabes mineures,De vers de soirs d'amours énervés de verveine,Où l'âme sente, exquise, une caresse à peine....(Tr. 23)
But, this poet who would only love nuance, Verlainian nuance, could on some occasions be a violent colorist or a vigorous hewer of marble. This other Samain, older and not less genuine, is revealed in parts of his collection calledEvocations. It is a Parnassian Samain, but always personal, even in grandiloquence. The two sonnets entitledCléopâtrehave a beauty not only of expression but of ideas; it is neither pure music nor pure plastic art. The poem is complete and alive, a strange, disconcerting marble; yes, a living marble whose life stirs and fertilizes the very desert sands, around the momentarily enamoured Sphinx.
Such is this poet: powerfully delicious in the art of making all the bells and all the souls vibrate in harmony. All souls are in love with this "child in robes of state."
It was in the already far-off and perhaps heroic times of the Art Theatre; we were brought to hear and seela Fille aux Mains coupées: To me there remains a most pleasant, complete and perfect memory of a play that truly gave the exquisite and keen sensation of the definitive. That hardly endured an hour; of it remains verses which makes a poem with difficulty forgotten.
Pierre Quillard has reunited his early poetic writings under a title which for more than one will be presumptuous:La Gloire du Verbe. To dare this, is to be sure of oneself; to have the consciousness of mastery; to affirm, more or less, that coming after Leconte de Lisle and De Heredia, one will not flag in a craft demanding, along with splendor of imagination, a singular sureness of hand. He has not lied; a very skillful setter, he truly glorifies the multiple jewels of the word. He makes the water of pearls smile and the rainbow of decomposed diamonds laugh.
Captain of a galley filled with precious; slaves, he sails among the tempting perils of purple archipelagos (as the Greek isles are said to appear at certain hours), and when the night comes he seeks the sandy shore of a violet gulf,
Dans la splendeur des clairs de lune violets.(Tr. 24)
And he stays for the divine apparition:
Alors des profondeurs et des ténèbres saintesComme un jeune soleil sort des gouffres marins,Blanche, laissant couler des épaules aux reinsSes cheveux où nageaient de pâles hyacinthes,Une femme surgit....(Tr. 25)
whose eyes are gulfs of joy, love and terror, and where one sees reflected the whole world of things from grass to the infinity of seas. And she speaks: "Poet who, amidst life, exhibits astonishments and desires and loves, you appear moved by sensual joys and you suffer, for these joys you feel are truly vain, but
Si tu n'étreins que des chimères, si tu boisL'enivrement de vins illusoires, qu'importe!Le soleil meurt, la foule imaginaire est morteMais le monde subsiste en ta seule âme: vois!Les jours se sont fanées comme des roses brèves,Mais ton Verbe a créé le mirage où tu vis....(Tr. 26)
and my beauty, you give it form and gesture; I am your creation, I exist because you think of me and because you evoke me."
Such is the leading idea of thatGloire du Verbe, one of the rare poems of that time, where the idea and word march in harmonious rhythm.
At sunrise the galley again set sail: Pierre Quillard departed for distant countries.
His is a pagan soul, or which would like to be pagan, for if his eyes eagerly seek sensible beauty, his dream lingers, wishing to force the portal behind which sleeps the beauty enclosed in things. He is truly the more disturbed that he deigns not to mention it, and the glance of the captives disturbs him with more than a shudder. As he knows all the théogonies and all literatures,
J'ai connu tous les dieux du ciel et de la terre,(Tr. 27)
as he has drunk at all sources, he knows more than one way to get intoxicated: dilettante of a superior kind, when he will have worn out the joy of sailing, when he will have chosen his residence (doubtless near an old, holy fountain), having collected much, having sown many noble seeds, he will see himself master of a royal garden and of a people odorous with flowers,
Fleurs éternelles, fleurs égales aux dieux!(Tr. 28)
The danger of free verse is that it remains amorphous, that its rhythm, too little accentuated, gives it some of the characteristics of prose. The finest verse truly remains, it seems to me, the verse formed of a regular number of full or accented syllables and in which the position of the accents is evident and not left to the choice of the reader or declaimer; not only poets read verse, and it is imprudent to place reliance on the chance of interpretations. One rightly supposes that I would not amuse myself by quoting such verses as seemed to me wretched; and above all I would not go to seek them in the poems of Herold, to whom the preference would be unmerited. Not that Herold possesses the gift of rhythm to a high point, but he has it sufficiently to give his poetry the grace of a living thing, sweetly and languidly living. He is a poet of gentleness; his poetry is blond, with pearls in its blond, pure hair, and necklaces and rings, elegant, fine gems, on neck and fingers. This word is the beloved word of the poet; his heroines are flowered with gems as much as his gardens are flowered with lillies.
La blonde, la blanche, la belle Dames des Lys.(Tr. 29)
He loved her, but what others, what queens and saints! Reader of forgotten books, he finds precious legends there which he transposes to short poems, often of a sonnet's length. He alone knows these queens, Marozie, Anfelize, Bazine, Paryze, Orable or Aelis, and those saints, Nonita, Bertilla, Richardis—Gemma! She is the first he has thought of; her he gives the most attractive place in the stained glass window, happy again to write that word whose charm he feels.
Herold is one of the most objective of the new poets; he hardly tells of himself; he requires themes that are foreign to his life, and he even chooses those that seem foreign to his beliefs: his queens are not less charming for that, nor his saints less pure. One finds these panels and church windows in the collection entitledChevaleries sentimentales,the most important and most characteristic of his works. It is a truly pleasant reading and one passes sweet hours among those ladies, lilies, gems, and autumn roses.
Les roses d'automne s'étiolent,Les roses qui fleurissaient les tombes;Lentement s'effeuillent les corollesEt le sol froid est jonché de pétales qui tombent.(Tr. 30)
Has not this a quite gentle melancholy? And this:
Il y a des maisons qui pleurent sur le port,Il y a des glas qui sonnent dans les clochers,Où tintent des cloches vagues:Vers quels fleuves de mortLes vierges ont-elles marché,Les vierges qui avaient aux doigts de blondes bagues?(Tr. 31)
Thus, without forcing his talent to an impassioned expression of life, an effort at which he doubtless would be unskillful, without laying claim to gifts he lacks, Herold has created for his pleasure a poetry of grace, purety, tenderness and sweetness.
If we demanded everything of the same poet, who would answer? The essential thing is to have a garden, to work there with the spade and sow seeds; the flowers that will shoot forth, carnations, peonies or violets, will have their value and their charm, according to the hour and the season.
By its fecundity in poets, the day we live in and which has already lasted ten years, can hardly be compared with any of the vanished days, even those richest in sunshine and flowers. There were fair morning excursions in the dew, following the footsteps of Ronsard; there was a lovely afternoon when Theophile's weary viol sighed, heard between the oboes and the bass-trombones; there was the stormy romantic day, sombre and royal, interrupted towards evening by the cry of a woman whom Baudelaire was strangling; there was the Parnassian moonlight, and the Verlainian sun rose—and we are there in full noon, in the midst of a wide country provided with everything necessary for the making of verse: plants, flowers, streams, rivulets, woods, caves and young women so fresh that one would say their thoughts were newly hatched from an ingenuous brain.
The wide country is quite full of poets who walk, no longer in troops as in Ronsard's time, but alone and with a slightly sullen air; they greet each other from afar with brief gestures. Not all have names and several of them never will have any. How shall we call them? Let them play on while this person overtakes us and tells us something of his dream.
He is Adolphe Retté.
He is recognizable among them all by his dissolute and almost wild appearance. He crushes the flowers, if he does not gather them, and with reeds he makes rafts, throwing them to the tide, towards peril, towards the morrow. But he smiles and grows languid when young girls pass.Une belle dame passa... and he spoke:
Dame des lys amoureux et pâmés,Dames des lys languissants et fanés,Triste aux yeux de belladone—Dame d'un rêve de roses royales,Dame des sombres roses nuptiales,Frêle comme une madone—Dame de ciel et de ravissement,Dame d'extase et de renoncement,Chaste étoile très lointaine—Dame d'enfer, ton sourire farouche,Dame du diable, un baiser de ta bouche,C'est le feu des mauvaises fontainesEt je brûle si je te touche.(Tr. 32)
The fair lady passed, but without being affected by the final imprecation, which she doubtless attributed to excess of love. She passed, giving the poet smile for smile.
This idyll had an admirable plaint for its first epilogue,
Mon âme, il me semble que vous êtes un jardin ...(Tr. 33)
a garden where one sees, hanging on the hedges, in the evening mist, shreds of the veil
De la Dame qui est passée.(Tr. 34)
Sometime after this adventure, we learned that Retté, returned from a voyage to theArchipel en fleurs, had enriched himself with a new collection of dreams. He will yet again enrich himself. His talent is a living shoot grafted on a stout wild stock of glorious viridity. A poet, Adolphe Retté has only the sense of rhythm and the passion for words. He loves ideas and he loves them when they are new and even excessive. He wishes to be freed of all the old prejudices and he would equally like to free his brothers in social bondage. His last books,la Forêt bruissanteandSimilitudes, affirm this tendency. The one is a lyrical poem; the other, a dramatic poem in prose, very simple, very curious and very extraordinary by the mixture there seen of the sweet dreams of a tender poet and the somewhat rigid and naive fancies of the Utopian anarchist. But without naivete, that is to say, without freshness of soul, would poets exist?
Some take pleasure, an awkward testimony of a piously troubled admiration, in saying and even in basing a paradoxical study on the saying: "Villiers de L' Isle-Adam was neither of his country nor time." This seems preposterous, for a superior man, a great writer is, in fine, by his very genius, one of the syntheses of his race and epoch, the representative of a momentary humanity, the brain and mouth of a whole tribe and not a fugitive monster. Like Chateaubriand, his brother in race and fame, Villiers was the man of the moment, and of a solemn moment. Both, with differing views and under diverse appearances, recreated the soul of the choice spirits of a period; from one arose romantic Catholicism and that respect for the old traditional stones; and from the other, the idealistic dream and that cult of antique interior beauty. But the one was yet the proud ancestor of our savage individualism; and the other taught us that the life around is the only clay to be shaped. Villiers belonged to his time to such a degree that all his masterpieces are dreams solidly based on science and modern metaphysics, likel'Ève FutureorTribulat Bonhomet, that enormous, admirable and tragic piece of buffoonery, where all the gifts of the dreamer, ironist and philosopher come to converge, so as to form perhaps the most original creation of the century.
This point cleared, we declare that Villiers, being of prodigious complexity, naturally lends himself to contradictory interpretations. He was everything, a new Goethe, but if less conscious and less perfect, keener, more artful, more mysterious, more human, and more familiar. He is always among us and in us, by his work and by the influence of his work, which exultantly goes through the best of the writers and artists of the actual hour. He has reopened the gates of the beyond, closed with what a crash we remember, and through these gates a whole generation was hurled to infinity. The ecclesiastic hierarchy numbers among her clerks, by the side of the exorcists, the porters, they who must open the door of the sanctuary to all the well-intentioned. Villiers exercised these two functions for us: he was the exorcist of the real arid the porter of the ideal.
Complex, but we may see a double spirit in him. There were two essentially dissimilar writers in him, the romanticist and the ironist. The romanticist was the first to come to birth and the last to die:ElenandMorgane; AkedysserilandAxel.Villiers, the ironist, author ofTribulat Bonhomet, is intermediate between these two romantic phases;l'Ève futureshould be described as a mixture of these two so diverse elements, for the book with its overwhelming irony is also a book of love.
Villiers at once realized himself by fancy and irony, making his fancy ironic, when life disgusted him even with fancy. No one has been more subjective. His characters are created with particles of his soul, raised, in the same way as a mystery, to the state of authentic, complete souls. If it is a dialogue, he will cause a certain character to utter philosophies quite above his normal understanding of things. InAxel, the abbess speaks of hell as Villiers might have spoken of Hegelianism, whose deceptions he learned towards the end, after having accepted its large certitudes in the beginning: "It is done! the child already experiences the ravishment and intoxications of Hell!" He experienced them: as a Baudelairian, he loved blasphemy for its occult effects, the immense risk of a pleasure taken at the expense of God himself. Sacrilege is in acts, blasphemy in words. He believed in words more than in realities, which are but the tangible shadows of words, for it is quite evident, and by a very simple syllogism, that if there is no thought in the absence of words, no more is there matter in the absence of thought. He believed in the power of words to the point of superstition. The only visible corrections of the second over the first text of Axel, for example, consist in the adjunction of words of a special ending, as when, to evoke an ecclesiastic and conventual society, he usesproditoire, prémonitoire, satisfactoire, andfruition, collaudation, etc. This very sense of the mystic powers of syllabic articulation stimulates him towards the quest of names as strange asle Desservant de l'office des Morts, a church function which never existed unless at the monastery of Saint Apollodora; orl'Homme-qui-marche-sous-terre, a name no Indian carried outside of the scenes of theNouveau-Monde.
In a very old rough draft of a page belonging perhaps tol'Ève futurehe has thus defined thereal:
"Now I say that the Real has its degrees of being. A thing is so much more or less real for us as it interests us more or less, since a thing that interested us not at all would for us be as if it were not—that is to say, much less, though physical, than an unreal thing that interested us.
"The Real for us, then, is only what touches the senses or the mind; and according to the degree of intensity with which this solereal, which we can judge and name, affects us, we class in our mind the degree of being more or less rich in content as it seems to strike us, and it is consequentlyy legitimate to say that it is realized.
"Theideais the only control we have ofreality."
Again:
"And on the top of a distant pine, solitary in the midst of a far-off glade, I heard the nightingale—unique voice of that silence....
"'Poetic' landscapes almost invariably leave me quite cold, seeing that for every serious man the most suggestive medium for ideas really poetic is no other than four walls, a table and silence. Those who do not carry within them the soul of everything the world can show them, will do well to watch it: they will not recognize it, each thing being beautiful only according to the thought of him who gazes at it and reflects it in himself. Faith is essential in poetry as in religion, and faith has no need of seeing with corporeal eyes to contemplate that which it recognizes much better in itself...."
Such ideas were many times, under multiple forms, always new, expressed by Villiers de L'Isle-Adam in his works. Without going as far as Berkeley's pure negations, which nevertheless are but the extreme logic of subjective idealism, he admitted in his conception of life, on the same plan, the Interior and the Exterior, Spirit and Matter, with a very visible tendency to give the first term domination over the second. For him the idea ofprogresswas never anything but a subject for jest, together with the nonsense of the humanitarian positivists who teach, reversed mythology, that terrestrial paradise, a superstition if we assign it the past, becomes the sole legitimate hope if we place it in the future.
On the contrary, he makes a protagonist (Edison doubtless) say in a short fragment of an old manuscript ofl'Ève future:
"We are in the ripe age of Humanity, that is all I Soon will come the senility and decrepitude of this strange polyp, and the evolution accomplished, his mortal return to the mysterious laboratory where all the Ghosts eternally work their experiments, by grace ofsome unquestionable necessity."
And in this last word, Villiers mocks his belief in God. Was he Christian? He became one towards the end of his life: thus he knew all the forms of intellectual intoxication.
Individualism, which in literature gives us such agreeable baskets of new flowers, often finds itself made sterile by the introduction of the evil weeds of arrogance. One sees young persons, quite puffed up with a monstrous infatuation, declare their intention, not only to produce their work, but at the same the Work, to produce the unique flower, after which the exhausted intelligence must cease being fecund and collect itself in the slow dim task of the reorganization of strength. Even in Paris there are two or three "machines of glory" which have arrogated to themselves alone the right to pronounce this word, which they have banished from the dictionary. That matters little, for the spirit blows where it lists, and when it blows under the skin of frogs and makes them huge, it is for its own amusement, for the world is sad.
Tailhade has none of the grotesque defects of pride; no one has more simply pursued a more simple craft, that of the man of letters. The Romans used a word "rhetorician", and this signified he who speaks, subdues words and subjects them to the yoke of thought; he governs, prompts and stimulates them to the point of imposing, in the very hour of his imaginative work, the hardest, newest, and most dangerous of tasks. Latin by race and tastes, Tailhade has the right to this fine name of rhetorician at which the incompetence of pedants takes offence. He is a rhetorician like Petronius, master equally in prose and poetry.
Here, taken from the rareDomain de Sonnets, is one of them:
HÉLÈNE(Le laboratoire de Faust à Wittemberg)Des âges évolus j'ai remonté le fleuve,Et le coeur enivré de sublimes desseins,Déserté le Hadès et les ombrages saints,Où l'âme d'une paix ineffable s'abreuve.Le Temps n'a pu fléchir la courbe de mes seins.Je suis toujours debout et forte dans l'épreuve,Moi, l'éternelle vierge et l'éternelle veuve,Gloire d'Hellas, parmi la guerre aux noirs tocsins.O Faust, je viens à toi, quittant le sein des Mères!Pour toi, j'abandonnai, sur l'aile des chimères,L'ombre pâle où les dieux gisent, ensevelis.J'apporte à ton amour, de fond des deux antiques,Ma gorge dont le Temps n'a pas vaincu les lysEt ma voix assouplie aux rythmes prophétiques.(Tr. 35)
Having written this andVitraux, poems which a disdainful mysticism oddly seasons, and thatTerre latine, prose of such affecting beauty, perfect and unique pages of an almost sorrowful purity of style, Tailhade suddenly made himself famed and feared by the cruel and excessive satires which he called, as a souvenir and witness of a voyage we all make without profit,Au pays du Mufle. The ignominy of the age exasperates the Latin, charmed with sunshine and perfumes, lovely phrases and comely gestures, and for whom money is the joy we throw, like flowers, under the steps of women and not the productive seed which we bury that it may sprout. There he reveals himself the haughty executioner of hypocricies and greeds, of false glories and real turpitudes, of money and success, of the parvenu of the Bourse and the parvenu ofthe feuilleton.Harshly and even unjustly he lashes his own aversions. For him, as for all the satirists, the particular enemy becomes the public enemy, but what beautiful language at once traditional and new, and what grand insolence!
Ce que j'écris n'est pas pour ces charognes!
No more are Tailhade's ballads destined to make dream the handsome ladies who fan themselves with peacock plumes. It is difficult to quote even one of the verses. This one is not very bad:
Bourget, Maupassant et Loti,Se trouvent dans toutes les garesOn les offre avec le rôti,Bourget, Maupassant et Loti.De ces auteurs soyez lotiEn même temps que de cigares:Bourget, Maupassant et LotiSe trouvent dans toutes les gares.(Tr. 36)
TheQuatorzain d'Étécan be given in full and it is even good to know it by heart, for it is a marvel of subtlety and a little genre picture to care for and preserve. The epigraph, that verse of Rimbaud, in thePremières Communions,
Elle fait la victime et la petite épouse,(Tr. 37)
gives the tone of the frame:
Certes, monsieur Benoist approuve les gens quiOnt lu Voltaire et sont aux Jésuites adverses.Il pense. Il est idoine aux longues controverses,Il adsperne le moine et le thériaki.Même il fut orateur d'une loge écossaise.Toutefois—car sa légitime croit en Dieu—La Petite Benoist, voiles blancs, ruban bleu,Communia. Ca fait qu'on boit maint litre à seize.Chez le bistro, parmi les bancs empouacrés,Le billard somnolent et les garçons vautrés,Rougit la pucelette aux gants de filoselle.Or, Benoist, qui s'émèche et tourne au calotin,Montre quelque plaisir d'avoir vu, ce matin.L'hymen du Fils unique et de sa demoiselle.(Tr. 38)
So, with much less wit, Sidonius Appollinaris scoffed the Barbarians among whom the unkindness of the times forced him to live, and like the Bishop of Clermont, it is not in vain that Laurent Tailhade scoffs and chaffs them, for his epigrams will pass beyond the actual time. Meanwhile, I regard him as one of the most authentic glories of the present French letters.
Man rises early and walks through deserted roads and lanes; he fears neither dew nor brambles, nor the action of the branches of hedges. He gazes, listens, smells, pursues the birds, the wind, flowers, images. Without haste, but nevertheless anxiously, for she has a delicate ear, he seeks nature, whom he would surprise in her refuge; he finds her, she is there; then, the twigs gently brushed away, he contemplates her in the blue shadow of her retreat and, without having wakened her, closing the curtain, he returns to his home. Before falling asleep, he counts his images: "gently they are reborn at the beck of memory."
Jules Renard has given himself this name: the hunter of images. He is a singularly fortunate and privileged hunter, for alone among his colleagues, he only captures, beasts or little creatures, unpublished prey. He scorns the known, or knows it not; his collection is only of the rare and even unique heads, but which he is in no trouble to put under lock, for they belong to him in such wise that a thief would purloin them in vain. So penetrating and attested a personality has something disconcerting, irritating and, according to some envious persons, extravagant. "Do then as we do, take the old accumulated metaphors from the common treasury; we go swiftly and it is very convenient." But Jules Renard disbelieves in going swiftly. Though unusually industrious, he produces little, and especially little at a time, like those patient engravers who carve steel with geologic slowness.
When studying a writer, one loves (it is an inveterate habit bequeathed us by Sainte-Beuve) to discern his spiritual family, enumerate his ancestors, establish learned connections, and note, at the very least, the souvenirs of long readings, traces of influence and the mark of the hand placed an instant on the shoulder. To whoever has traveled much among books and ideas, this task is simple enough and often easy to the point that it is necessary rather to refrain from it, not to vex the ingenious arrangement of acquired originalities. I have not had this scruple with Renard, but have wished to draw a sketch book; but the odd animal is shown alone, and the leaves only contain, among the arabesques, empty medallions.
To be begotten quite alone, to owe his mind only to himself, to write (since it is a question of writing) with the certitude of achieving the true new wine, of an unexpected, original and inimitable flavor, that is what must be, to the author ofl'Écornifleura legitimate motive of joy and a very weighty reason for being less troubled than others about posthumous reputation. Already, hisPoil-de-Carotte, that so curious type of the intelligent, artful, fatalistic child, has entered into the very form of speech. The "Poil-de-Carotte, you must shut the hens in each evening" equals the most famous words of the celebrated como dies in burlesque truth, and he is at once Cyrano and Molière and will not be robbed of this claim.
Originality being undeniably established, other merits of Jules Renard are distinctness, precision, freshness; his pictures of life, Parisian or rural, have the appearance of dry-point work, occasionally a little thin, but well circumscribed, clear and alive. Certain fragments, more shaded off and ample, are marvels of art, as for instance,Une Famille d'Arbres.
"It is after having traversed a sun-parched plain that I meet them."Because of the noise, they do not stand by the road's edge. They inhabit the unploughed fields, near a fountain, like lone birds."From afar they seem inscrutable. When I approach, their trunks relax. They discreetly welcome me. I can repose and refresh myself, but I divine that they observe and mistrust me."They live together, the oldest in the center, and the little ones, whose first leaves have just appeared, almost everywhere, without ever dispersing."They take long to die, and they protect the standing dead until they fall to dust."They caress each other with their long branches to be assured that they are all there, like the blind. They gesticulate with rage, if the wind puts itself out of breath trying to uproot them. But among themselves, no dispute. They only murmur agreement."I feel that they should be my real family. I will forget the other. These trees by degrees will adopt me, and to merit this, I understand what must be known."Already I know how to gaze at passing clouds."I know, too, how to rest in a spot."And I almost know how to be silent."
"It is after having traversed a sun-parched plain that I meet them.
"Because of the noise, they do not stand by the road's edge. They inhabit the unploughed fields, near a fountain, like lone birds.
"From afar they seem inscrutable. When I approach, their trunks relax. They discreetly welcome me. I can repose and refresh myself, but I divine that they observe and mistrust me.
"They live together, the oldest in the center, and the little ones, whose first leaves have just appeared, almost everywhere, without ever dispersing.
"They take long to die, and they protect the standing dead until they fall to dust.
"They caress each other with their long branches to be assured that they are all there, like the blind. They gesticulate with rage, if the wind puts itself out of breath trying to uproot them. But among themselves, no dispute. They only murmur agreement.
"I feel that they should be my real family. I will forget the other. These trees by degrees will adopt me, and to merit this, I understand what must be known.
"Already I know how to gaze at passing clouds.
"I know, too, how to rest in a spot.
"And I almost know how to be silent."
When the anthologies will hail this page, they will hardly have an irony so fine and a poetry so true.