At this moment there is a little movement of neo-paganism, of sensual naturalism and erotism at once mystic and materialistic, a springtime of those purely carnal religions where woman is adored even for the very ugliness of her sex, for by means of metaphors we can idealize the imperfect and deify the illusive. A novel of Marcel Batilliat, a young unknown man, is, despite its serious faults, perhaps the most curious specimen of this erotic religiosity which zealous hearts are cultivating as dreams or ideals. But there is a famous manifestation, theAphroditeof Pierre Louys, whose success, doubtless, henceforth will stifle as under roses, all other claims of sexual romanticism.
It is not, although its appearance has deceived young and old critics, a historical novel, such asSalammbôor evenThaïs.The perfect knowledge which Pierre Louys possesses of Alexandrian religions and customs has allowed him to clothe his personages with names and garbs veraciously ancient, but the book must be read divested of those precautions which are not there, just as in more than one eighteenth century novel, where the customs, gestures and desires of an incontestable today are at play behind the embroidered screen work of hieratic phallophores.
By the vulgarizing of art, love finally has returned to us naked. It is in the epoch of the flowering of Calvinism that the nude began to be banned from manners and that it sought refuge in art, which alone treasured the tradition of it. Formerly, and even in the time of Charles the Fifth, there were no public celebrations without speculations regarding lovely nude women; the nude was so little dreaded that adulterous women were driven stark naked through the towns. It is beyond a doubt that, in the mysteries, such roles as Adam and Eve were acted by persons free of fleshings,—monstrous display. To love the nude, and first of all femininity with its graces and insolences, is traditional in those races which hard reform has not altogether terrorized. The idea of the nude being admitted, costume can be modified to take in floating loose robe, manners can be softened, and something of splendor illume the gloom of our hypocricies. By its vogue,Aphroditehas signalled the possible return to manners where there will be a bit of freedom; coming from that period, this book has the value of an antidote.
But how fallacious is such a literature. All these women, all this flesh, the cries, the luxury so animal, so empty and so cruel! The females gnaw at the brains; thought flies horror-stricken; woman's soul oozes away as by the action of rain, and all these copulations engender nothingness, disgust and death.
Pierre Louys has felt that his fleshly book logically must end in death:Aphroditecloses in a scene of death, with obsequies.
It is the end ofAtala(Chateaubriand invisibly hovers over our whole literature), but gracefully refashioned and renewed with art and tenderness,—so well that the idea of death comes to join itself with the idea of beauty; the two images, entwined like two courtisans, slowly fades into the night.
Sincerity, what an enormous unreasonable demand, if it is a question of woman! Those most praised for their candor were nevertheless comedians, like the weeping Marceline, an actress moreover who wept through her life, as in a role, with the consciousness which the plaudits of the public give. Since women have written, not one has had the good faith to speak and confess themselves in bold humility, and the only ideas of feminine psychology known to literature must be sought in the literature of men. There is more to learn of women inLady Roxannathan in the complete works of George Sand. It is not perhaps a question of untruthfulness; it is rather a natural incapacity to think for herself, to take cognizance of herself in her own brain, and not in the eyes and in the lips of others; even when they ingenuously write into little secret diaries, women think of the unknown god reading—perhaps—over their shoulders. With a similar nature, a woman, to be placed in the first ranks of men, would require even a higher genius than that of the highest man; that is why, if the conspicuous works of men are often superior to the men themselves, the finest works of women are always inferior to the worth of the women who produced them.
This incapacity is not personal; it is generic and absolute. It is needful, then, to compare women exclusively with themselves, and not scorn them for whatever of egoism or personality is lacking: this fault, outside of literature and art, is generally estimated as equal to a positive virtue.
Whether they essay their charms in perversity or candor, women will better succeed in living than in playing their comedy; they are made for life, for the flesh, for materiality,—and they will joyfully realize their most romantic dreams if they do not find themselves arrested by the indifference of man whose more sensitive nerves suffer from vibrating in the void. There is an evident contradiction between art and life; we have hardly ever seen a man live in action and dream at the same time, transposing in writing the gestures that first were real: the equivalence of sensations is certain and the horrors of fear can better be described by whosoever imagines them than by the man that experiences them. On the contrary, the predominance in a temperament of tendencies to live, dulls the sharpness of the imaginative faculties. With the more intelligent women, those best gifted for cerebral pursuits, the impelling motivation will most easily be translated into acts than into art. It is a physiological fact, a state of nature it would be as absurd to reproach women with as to blame men for the smallness of their breasts or the shortness of their hair. Moreover, if it is a question of art, the discussion, which touches such a small number of creatures, has for humanity, like all purely intellectual questions, but an interest of the steeple or the street corner.
All this, then, being admitted, and it also being admitted thatl'Animaleis Rachilde's most singular book (although not the most ambiguous) and thatle Démon de l'Absurdeis the best, I will willingly add, not for the sole pleasure of contradicting myself and destroying the virtue of the preceding pages, that this collection of tales and imaginative dialogue proves to me a realized effort at true artistic sincerity. Pages likela Panthèreorles Vendanges de Sodomshow that a woman can have phases of virility, to write, careless of necessary coquetteries or customary attitudes, make art with nothing but an idea and from words, create.
"Le Romanée and Chambertin, Clos-Vougeot and Corton made the abbatial pomps, princely fetes, opulences of vestments figured in gold, aglow with light, pass before him. The Clos-Vougeot especially dazzled him. To him that wine seemed the syrup of great dignitaries. The etiquette glittered before his eyes, like glories surrounded by beams, placed in churches, behind the occiput of Virgins."
The writer who in 1881, in the midst of the naturalistic morass, had, before a name read on a wine list, such a vision, although ironic, of evoked splendors, must have puzzled his friends and made them suspect an approaching defection. In fact, several years later, the unexpectedA Reboursappeared, and it was not a point of departure, but the consecration of a new literature. No longer was it so much a question of forcing a brutal externality to enter the domains of Art by representation, as of drawing from this very representation motives for dreams and interior revaluations.En Radefurther developed this system whose fruitfulness is limitless,—while the naturalistic method proved itself still more sterile than even its enemies had dared hope,—a system of strictest logic and of such marvelous suppleness that it permits, without forfeiting anything to likelihood, to intercalate in exact scenes of rustic life, pages like "Esther" or like the "voyage sélénien."
The architecture ofLà-Basis based on an analogous plan, but the license profitably finds itself restrained by the unity of subject, which remains absolute beneath its multiple faces: the Christ of Gunewald, in his extreme mystic violence, his startling and consoling hideousness, is not a fugue without line, nor are the demoniac forest of Tiffauges, the cruel Black Mass, or any of the "fragments" displaced or inharmonious; nevertheless, before the freedom of the novel, they had been criticized, not in themselves, but as not rigorously necessary to the advance of the book. Fortunately the novel is finally free, and to say more, the novel, as still conceived by Zola or Bourget, to us appears a conception as superannuated as the epic poem or the tragedy. Only, the old frame is still able to serve; it sometimes is necessary to entice the public to very arduous subjects, to simulate vague romantic intrigues, which the author unravels at his own will, after he has said all he wished to say. But the essential of yesterday is become the accessory, and an accessory more and more scorned: quite rare at the present hour are those writers who are clever or strong enough to confine themselves to a demolished genre, to spur the fatigued cavalry of sentimentalities and adulteries.
Moreover, aesthetics tends to specialization in as many forms as there are talents: among many vanities are admissible arrogances to which we cannot refuse the right to create into normal characters. Huysmans is of those; he no longer writes novels, he makes books, and he plans them according to an original arrangement; I believe that is one of the reasons why some persons still take issue with his literature and find it immoral. This last point is easy to explain by a single word: for the non-artist, art is always immoral. As soon as one wishes, for example, to translate sexual relations into a new language, he is immoral because he discloses, fatally, acts which, treated by ordinary procedures, would remain unperceived, lost in the mist of common things. Thus it is that an artist, not at all erotic, can be accused of stupid outrages by the foolish or the mischievous, before the public. It, nevertheless, does not seem that the facts of love or rather of aberration related inLà-Basat all entice the simplicity of virginal ignorance. This book rather gives disgust or horror of sensuality in that it does not invite to foolish experiences or even to permissible unions. Will not immorality, if we behold it from a particular and peculiarly religious point of view, consist, on the contrary, in the insistence upon the exquisiteness of carnal love and the vaunting of the delights of legitimate copulation?
The Middle Age knew not: our hypocrisies. It was not at all ignorant of the eternal turpitudes, but it knew how to hate them. It had no use for our conduct, nor for our refinements; it published the vices, sculped them on its cathedral portals and spread them in the verses of its poets. It had less regard for refraining from terrifying the fears of mummied souls than for tearing apart the robes and revealing the man, and showing to man, so as to make him ashamed, all the ugliness of his low animality. But it did not make the brute wallow in his vice; it placed him on his knees and made him lift his head. Huysmans has understood all this, and it was difficult to conquer. After the horrors of the satanic debauch, before the earthly punishment, he has, like the noble weeping people he evokes, forgiven even the most frightful slayers of infants, the basest sadist, the most monstrous fool that ever was.
Having absolved such a man, he could without pharisaism absolve himself, and with the aid of God, some more humble and quite brotherly succor, of helpful reading, visitations to gentle conventual chapels, Huysmans one day found himself converted to mysticism, and wroteEn Route, that book which is like a statue of stone that suddenly begins to weep. It is a mysticism a little raucous and hard, but like his phrases, his epithets, Huysmans is hard. Mysticism first came to him through the eyes rather than through the soul. He observed religious facts with the fear of being their dupe and the hope that they would be absurd; he was caught in the very meshes of thecredo-quia-absurdum,—happy victim of his curiosity.
Now, fatigued at having watched men's hypocritical faces, he watches the stones, preparing a supreme book on "The Cathedral." There, if it is a question of feeling and understanding, is it especially a question of sight. He will see as no other person has seen, for no one other person has seen, no one ever was gifted with a glance so sharp, so boring, so frank and so skilled in insinuating himself into the very wrinkles of faces, rose-windows and masks.
Huysmans is an eye.
In theFleurs de bonne Volontéis a little complaint, like the others, calledDimanches:
Le ciel pleut sans but, sans que rien l'émeuve,Il pleut, il pleut, bergère! sur le fleuve....Le fleuve a son repos dominical;Pas un chaland, en amont, en aval.Les vêpres carillonnent sur la ville,Les berges sont désertes, sans une île.Passe un pensionnat, ô pauvres chairs!Plusieurs out déjà leurs manchons d'hiver.Une qui n'a ni manchon ni fourrureFait tout en gris une bien pauvre figure;Et la voilà qui s'échappe des rangsEt court: ô mon Dieu, qu'est-ce qui lui prend?Elle va se jeter dans le fleuve.Pas un batelier, pas un chien de Terre-Neuve....(Tr. 46)
And there we have, prophesized, the sudden absurd death, the life of Laforgue. His heart was too cold; he departed.
His was a mind gifted with all the gifts and rich with important acquisitions. With his natural genius made up of sensibility, irony, imagination and clairvoyance, he had wished to nourish it with positive knowledge, all the philosophies, all the literatures, all the images of nature and art; and even the latest views of science seemed to have been familiar to him. He had an ornate flamboyant genius, ready to construct architectural works infinitely diverse and fair, to rear new ogives and unfamiliar domes; but he had forgotten his winter muff and died one snowy day of cold.
That is why his work, already magnificent, is only the prelude of an oratorio ended in silence.
Many of his verses are as though reddened by a glacial affectation of naiveté; they speak of the too dearly cherished child, of the young girl hearkened to—but a sign of a true need of affection and of a pure gentleness of heart,—adolescent of genius who would still have wished to place on the knees of his mother, his "equatorial brow, greenhouse of anomalies." But many have the beauty of purified topazes, the melancholy of opals, the freshness of moon-stones, and some pages, like that which commences thus:
Noire bise, averse glapissanteEt fleuve noir, et maisons closes....(Tr. 47)
have a sad, consoling grace, with eternal avowals: forever on the same subject, Laforgue retells it in such fashion that it seems dreamed and confessed for the first time. And I think that what we must demand of the translator of dreams is, not to wish to fix forever the fugacity of a thought or air, but to sing the song of the present hour with such frank force that it seems the only one we could hear, the only one we could understand. In the end, perhaps, it is necessary to become reasonable and delight us with the present and with new flowers, indifferent, except as a botanist, to the faded fields. Every epoch of thought, art or sentiment should take a deep delight in itself and go down from the world with the egoism and languor of a superb lake which, smiling upon the old streams, receives them, calms them, and absorbs them.
There was no present for Laforgue, except among a group of friends. He died just as hisMoralités Légendaireswas coming to birth, but still offered to a minority, and he had just learned from some mouths that these pages consecrated him to live the life of glory among those whom the gods created in their image, they, too, gods and creators. It is a literature entirely new and disconcertingly unexpected, giving the curious sensation (specially rare) that we have never read anything like it; the grape with all its velvet hues in the morning light, but with curious reflections and an air as if the seeds within had become frozen by a breath of ironic wind come from some place farther than the pole.
On a copy ofl'Imitation de Notre-Dame la Lune, offered to Bourget (and since thrown among old papers in the quay) Laforgue wrote: "This is only aninter-mezzo.I pray you to wait yet awhile, and give me until my next book";—but he was of those who ever look forward to finding themselves in their next work, the noble unsatisfied who have too much to say ever to believe that they have said other things than prolegomenae and prefaces. If his interrupted work is but a preface, it belongs to those which counterbalance a finished work.
Raymond de la Tailhède thus exalts Moréas:
Tout un silence d'or vibrant s'est abattu,Près des sources que des satyres ont troublées,Claire merveille éclose au profond des vallées,Si l'oiselet chanteur du bocage s'est tu.Oubli de flûte, heures de rêves sans alarmes,Où tu as su trouver pour ton sang amoureuxLa douceur d'habiter un séjour odoreuxDe roses dont les dieux sylvains te font des armesLà tu vas composant ces beaux livres, honneurDu langage français et de la noble Athènes.(Tr. 48)
These verses are romances, that is, of a poet to whom the romantic period is but a witch's night where unreal sonorous gnomes stir, of a poet (this one has talent) who concentrates his efforts to imitate the Greeks of the Anthology through Ronsard, and to steal from Ronsard the secret of his laborious phrase, his botanical epithets, and his sickly rhythm. As for what is exquisite in Ronsard, since that little has passed into tradition and memory, the Romantic school had to neglect it on pain of quickly losing what alone constitutes its originality. There is I know not what of provincialism, of steps against life's current, of the loiterer, in this care for imitation and restoration. Somewhere Moréas sings praise
De ce Sophocle, honneur de la Ferté-Milon,(Tr. 49)
and it is just that: the Romantic school always has the air of coming from Ferté-Milon.
But Jean Moréas, who has met his friends on the road, started from somewhere farther away, introduces himself more proudly.
Arrived in Paris like any other Wallachian or Eastern student, and already full of love for the French language, Moréas betook himself to the school of the old poets and frequented the society of Jacot de Forest and Benoit de Sainte-Maure. He wished to take the road to which every clever youth should vow himself who is ambitious to become a good harper; he swore to accomplish the complete pilgrimage: At this hour, having set out from theChanson de Saint-Léger, he has, it is said, reached the seventeenth century, and this in less than ten years. It is not as discouraging as one supposes. And now that texts are more familiar, the road shortens: from now on less halts. Moréas will camp under the old Hugo oak, and, if he perseveres, we shall see him achieve the aim of his voyage, which doubtless is to catch up with himself. Then, casting aside the staff, often changed and cut from such diverse copses, he will lean on his own genius and we will be able to judge him, if that be our whim, with a certain security.
All that today can be said is that Moréas passionately loves the French language and poetry, and that the two proud-hearted sisters have smiled upon him more than once, satisfied to see near their steps a pilgrim so patient, a cavalier armed with such good-will.
Cavalcando l'altrjer per un cammino,Pensoso dell andar che mi sgradia,Trovai Amor in mezzo della viaIn abito legger di pellegrino.(Tr. 50)
Thus Moréas goes, quite attentive, quite in love, and in the light robe of a pilgrim. When he called one of his poemsle Pèlerin passionné, he gave an excellent idea and a very sane symbolism of himself, his role and his playings among us.
There are fine things in thatPèlerin, and also inles Syrtes; there are admirable and delicious touches and which (for my part) I shall always joyfully reread, inles Cantilènes,but inasmuch as Moréas, having changed his manner, repudiates these primitive works, I shall not insist. There remainsÉriphyle, a delicate collection formed of a poem of four "sylvae", all in the taste of the Renaissance and destined to be the book of examples where the young "Romans", spurred on by the somewhat intemperate invectives of Charles Maurras, must study the classic art of composing facile verses laboriously. Here is a page:
Astre brillant, Phébé aux ailes étendues,O flamme de la nuit qui croîs et diminues,Favorise la route et les sombres forêtsOù mon ami errant porte ses pas discrets!Dans la grotte au vain bruit dont l'entrée est tout lierre,Sur la roche pointue aux chèvres familière,Sur le lac, sur l'étang, sur leurs tranquilles eaux,Sur les bords émaillés où plaignent les roseaux.Dans le cristal rompu des ruisselets obliques,Il aime à voir trembler tes feux mélancoliques.
* * * * *
Phébé, ô Cynthia, dès sa saison première,Mon ami fut épris de ta belle lumière;Dans leur cercle observant tes visages divers,Sous ta douce influence il composait ses vers.Par dessus Nice, Eryx, Seyre et la sablonneuseIoclos, le Tmolus et la grande Epidaure,Et la verte Cydon, sa piété honoreCe rocher de Latmos où tu fus amoureuse.(Tr. 51)
Moréas, like his Phoebe, has tried to put on many diverse countenances and even to cover his face with masks. We always recognize him from his brothers: he is a poet.
The logic of an amateur of literature is offended upon his discovering that his admirations disagree with those of the public; but he is not surprised, knowing that there are the elect of the last hour. The public's attitude is less benignant when it learns the disaccord which is noticeable between it, obscure master of glories, and the opinion of the small oligarchic number. Accustomed to couple these two ideas, renown and talent, it shows a repugnance in disjoining them; it does not admit, for it has a secret sense of justice or logic, that an illustrious author might be so by chance alone, or that an unknown author merits recognition. Here is a misunderstanding, doubtless old as the six thousand years ascribed by La Bruyère to human thought, and this misunderstanding, based on very logical and solid reasoning, sets at defiance from the height of its pedestal all attempts at conciliation. To end it, it is needful to limit oneself to the timid insinuations of science and to ask if we truly know the "thing in itself," if there is not a certain inevitable little difference between the object of knowledge and the knowledge of the object. On this ground, as one will be less understood, agreement will be easier and then the legitimate difference of opinions will be voluntarily admitted, since it is not a question of captivating Truth—that reflection of a moon in a well—but to measure by approximation, as is done with stars, the distance or the difference existing between the genius of a poet and the idea we have of it.
Were it necessary, which is quite useless, to express oneself more clearly, it might be said that, according to several persons whose opinion perhaps is worth that of many others, all the literary history, as written by professors according to educational views, is but a mass of judgments nearly all reversed, and that, in particular, the histories of French literature is but the banal cataloguing of the plaudits and crowns fallen to the cleverest or most fortunate. Perhaps it is time to adopt another method and to give, among the celebrated persons, a place to those who could have attained it—if the snow had not fallen on the day they announced the glory of the new spring.
Stuart Merrill and Saint-Pol-Roux are of those whom the snow gainsaid. If the public knows their names less than some others, it is not that they have less merit, it is that they had less good fortune.
The poet ofFastes, by the mere choice of this word, bespeaks the fair frankness of a rich soul and a generous talent. His verses, a little gilded, a little clamorous, truly burst forth and peal for the holidays and gorgeous parades, and when the play of sunshine has passed, behold the torches illumined in the night for the sumptuous procession of supernatural women. Poems or women, they doubtless are bedecked with too many rings and rubies and their robes are embroidered with too much gold; they are royal courtisans rather than princesses, but we love their cruel eyes and russet hair.
After such splendid trumpets, thePetits Poèmes d'Automne, the noise of the spuming wheel, a sound of a bell, an air of a flute in tone of moonlight: it is the drowsiness and dreaming saddened by the silence of things, the incertitude of the hours:
C'est le vent d'automne dans l'allée,Soeur, écoute, et la chute sur l'eauDes feuilles du saule et du bouleau,Et c'est le givre dans la vallée,Dénoue—il est l'heure—tes cheveauxPlus blonds que le chanvre que tu files....Et viens, pareille à ces châtelainesDolentes à qui tu fais songer,Dans le silence où meurt ton légerRouet, ô ma soeur des marjolaines!(Tr. 52)
Thus, in Stuart Merrill we discover the contrast and struggle of a spirited temperament and a very gentle heart, and according as one of the two natures prevails, we hear the violence of brasses or the murmurings of viols. Similarly does his technique oscillate fromGammesto his latest poems, from the Parnassian stiffness to theverso sueltoof the new schools, which only the senators of art do not recognize. Vers libre, which is favorable to original talent, and which is a reef of danger to others, could not help winning over so gifted a poet, and so intelligent an innovator. This is how he understands it:
Venez avec des couronnes de primevères dans vos mains,O fillettes qui pleurez la soeur morte à l'aurore.Les cloches de la vallée sonnent la fin d'un sort,Et l'on voit luire des pelles au soleil du matin.Venez avec des corbeilles de violettes, ô fillettesQui hésitez un peu dans le chemin des hêtres,Par crainte des paroles solennelles du prêtre.Venez, le ciel est tout sonore d'invisibles alouettes....C'est la fête de la mort, et l'on dirait dimanche,Tant les cloches sonnent, douces au fond de la vallée;Les garçons se sont cachés dans les petites allées;Vous seules devez prier au pied de la tombe blanche....Quelque année, les garçons qui se cachent aujourd'huiViendront vous dire à toutes la douce douleur d'aimer,Et l'on vous entendra, autour du mât de mai,Chanter des rondes d'enfance pour saluer la nuit.(Tr. 53)
Stuart Merrill did not embark in vain, the day he desired to cross the Atlantic, to come and woo the proud French poetry, and place one of her flowers in his hair.
One of the most fruitful and astonishing inventors of images and metaphors. To find new expressions, Huysmans materializes the spiritual and the intellectual spheres, thus giving his style a precision somewhat heavy and a lucidity rather unnatural:rotten souls(like teeth) andcracked hearts(like an old wall); it is picturesque and nothing else. The inverse operation is more conformable to the old taste of men for endowing vague sentiments and a dim consciousness to objects. It remains faithful to the pantheistic and animistic tradition without which neither art nor poetry would be possible. It is the deep source from which all the others are formed, pure water transformed by the slightest ray of sunshine into jewels sparkling like fairy collars. Other "metaphorists" like Jules Renard, venture to seek the image either in a reforming vision, a detail separated from the whole becoming the thing itself, or in a transposition and exaggeration of metaphors in usage; finally, there is the analogic method by which, without our voluntary aid, the meaning of ordinary words change daily. Saint-Pol-Roux blends these methods and makes them all contribute to the manufacture of images which, if they are all new, are not all beautiful. From them a catalogue or a dictionary could be drawn up:
Wise-Woman of lightmeansthe cock.Morrow of the caterpillar in balldress—butterfly.Sin that sucks—natural child.Living distaff—mutton.Fin of the plow—plowshare.Wasp with the whip sting—diligence.Breast of crystal—flagon.Crab of the hand—open hand.Letter announcement—magpie.Cemetery with wings—a flight of crows.Romance for the nostrils—perfume of flowers.To tame the carious jawboneof bemol of a modern tarask—to play the piano.Surly gewgaw of the doorway—watchdog.Blaspheming limousine—wagoner.To chant a bronze alexandrine—to peal midnight.Cognac of Father Adam—the broad, pure air.Imagery only seen with closed eyes—dreams.Leaves of living salad—frogs.Green chatterers—frogs.Sonorous wild-poppy—cock-crow.
The most heedless person, having read this last, will decide that Saint-Pol-Roux is gifted with an imagination and with an equally exuberant wretched taste. If all these images, some of which are ingenious, followed one after another towardsles Reposoirs de la Processionwhere the poet guides them, the reading of such a work would be difficult and the smile would often temper the aesthetic emotion; but strewn here and there, they but form stains and do not always break the harmony of richly colored, ingenious and grave poems.Le Pèlerinage de Sainte-Anne, written almost entirely in images, is free of all impurity and the metaphors, as Théophile Gautier would have wished, unfold themselves in profusion, but logically and knit together; it is the type and marvel of the prose poem, with rhythm and assonance. In the same volume, theNocturnededicated to Huysmans is but a vain chaplet of incoherent catachreses: the ideas there are devoured by a frightful troop of beasts. Butl'Autopsie de la Vieille fille, despite a fault of tone, butCalvaire immémorial, butl'Ame saisissableare masterpieces. Saint-Pol-Roux plays on a zither whose strings sometimes are too tightly drawn: a turn of the key would suffice for our ears ever to be deeply gladdened.
Upon the first appearance of hisChauves-Sourisin violet velvet, the question was seriously put whether de Montesquiou was a poet or an amateur of poetry, and whether the fashionable world could be harmonized with the cult of the Nine Sisters, or of any one of them, for nine women are a lot. But to discourse in such fashion is to confess one's unfamiliarity with that logical operation called the dissociation of ideas, for it seems elementary logic separately to evaluate the worth or beauty of the tree and its fruit, of man and his works. Whether jewel or pebble, the book will be judged in itself, disregarding the source, the quarry or the stream from which it comes, and the diamond will not change its name, whether hailing from the Cape or from Golconda. To criticism the social life of a poet matters as little as to Polymnia herself, who indifferently welcomes into her circle the peasant Burns and the partician Byron, Villon the purse-snatcher and Frederick II, the king: Art's book of heraldry and that of Hozier are not written in the same style.
So we will not disturb ourselves with unraveling the flax from the distaff, or ascertaining what of illusiveness de Montesquiou and his status of a man of fashion have been able to add to the renown of the poet.
The poet, here, is "a précieuse".
Were those women really so ridiculous, who, to place themselves in the tone of some fine and gallant poets, imagined new ways of speech, and, through a hatred of the common, affected a singularity of mind, costume and gesture? Their crime, after all, was in not wishing to conform with the world, and it seems that they paid dearly for this, they—and the entire French poetry which, for a century and a half, truly feared ridicule too much. Poets at last are freed from such horrors; in fact they are now allowed to avow their originality; far from forbidding them to go naked, criticism encourages them to assume the free easy dress of the gymnosophist. But some of them are tattooed.
And that is really the true quarrel with de Montesquiou: his originality is excessively tattooed. Its beauty recalls, not without melancholy, the complicated figurations with which the old Australian chieftains were wont to ornament themselves; there is even an odd refinement in the nuances, the design, and the amusing audacities of tone and lines. He achieves the arabesque better than the figure, and sensation better than thought. If he thinks, it is through ideographic signs, like the Japanese:
Poisson, grue, aigle, fleur, bambou qu'un oiseau ploie,Tortue, iris, pivoine, anémone et moineaux.(Tr. 54)
He loves these juxtapositions of words, and when he chooses them, like those above, soft and vivid, the landscape he seeks is quite pleasantly evoked, but often one sees, relieved against an artificial sky, hard unfamiliar forms, processions of carnival larvae—Or rather, women, girls, birds,—baubles deformed by a too Oriental fancy; baubles and trinkets:
Je voudrais que ce vers fût un bibelot d'art,(Tr. 55)
is the aesthetics of de Montesquiou, but the bauble is no more than an amusing fragile thing to be placed under a glass case or closet,—yes, preferably in a closet. Then, disburdened of all this grotto work, all this lacquer, all this delicate paste, and as he himself wittily says, all these "shelves of infusoria," the poet's museum would become an agreeable gallery, where one would pleasantly muse before the many metamorphoses of a soul anxious to give a new nuance-laden grace to beauty. With the half of theHortensias bleusone could make a book, still quite thick, which would be almost entirely composed of fine or proud or delicate poetry. The author ofAncilla,ofMortuis ignotis, and ofTables viveswould appear what he truly is, excluding all travesty,—a good poet.
Here is a part of theTables vives, whose title is obscure, but whose verses have beautiful clarity, despite the too familiar sound of some too Parnassian rimes and some verbal incertitudes:
... Apprenez à l'enfant à prier les flots bleus,Car c'est le ciel d'en bas dont la nue est l'écume,Le reflet du soleil qui sur la mer s'allumeEst plus doux à fixer pour nos yeux nébuleux.Apprenez à l'enfant à prier le ciel pur,C'est l'océan d'en haut dont la vague est nuage.L'ombre d'une tempête abondante en naufragePour nos coeurs est moins triste à suivre dans l'azur.Apprenez à l'enfant à prier toutes choses:L'abeille de l'esprit compose un miel de jourSur les vivantsavedu rosaire des roses,Chapelet de parfums aux dizaines d'amour....(Tr. 56)
In short, de Montesquiou exists: blue hortensia, green rose or white peony, he is of those flowers one curiously gazes upon in a bed of flowers, whose name one asks and whose memory one cherishes.
Domaine De Fée, a Song of Songs recited by one lone voice, very charming and very amorous, in a Verlainian setting,—O eternal Verlaine!
O bel avril épanoui,Qu'importe ta chanson franche,Tes lilas blancs, tes aubépines et l'or fleuriDe ton soleil par les branches,Si loin de moi la bien-aiméeDans les brumes du nord est restée.(Tr. 57)
That is the tone. It is very simple, very delicate, very pure and sometimes biblical:
J'étais allé jusu'au fond du jardin,Quand dans la nuit une invisible mainMe terrassa plus forte que moi—Une voix me dit: C'est pour ta joie.(Tr. 58)
Dilectus meus descendit in hortum... but here the poet, as chaste, is less sensual: The Orient has thrown a surplice over an Occidental soul, and if he still cultivates large white lilies in his enclosed garden, he has learned the pleasure of escaping, by secret paths known to fairies, "in the forest noiselessly laughing", as they gather bindweed, broom,
Et les fleurettes aventurières le long des haies.(Tr. 59)
This poem of twenty-four leaves is doubtless the most delicious little book of love verses given us since theFêtes Galantes, and with theChansons d'amantare perhaps the only verses of these last years where sentiment dare confess in utter frankness, with the perfect and touching grace of divine sincerity. If, in some of these pages, there still remains a touch of rhetoric, it is because Kahn, even at the feet of the Sulamite, has not renounced the pleasure of surprising by the ever novel deftness of the jongleur and virtuoso, and if he sometimes treats the French language tyrannically, it is that for him she has always had the affectionate yieldings of a slave. He abuses his power a little, giving some words meanings that hang on the skirts of others, making phrases yield to a too summary syntax, but these are mischievous habits not exclusively personal to him. His science of rhythm and mastery in wielding free verse, he borrows from no one.
Was Kahn the first? To whom do we owe free verse? To Rimbaud, whoseIlluminationsappeared inVoguein 1886, to Laforgue, who at the same period, in the same precious little review,—conducted by Kahn—publishedLégendeandSolo de lune, and, finally, to Kahn himself; at that time he wrote:
Void l'allégresse des âmes d'automne,La Ville s'évapore en illusions proches,Void se voiler de violet et d'orangé les porchesDe la nuit sans lunePrincesse, qu'as tu fait de ta tiare orfévrée?(Tr. 60)
—and particularly to Walt Whitman, whose majestic license was then beginning to be appreciated.
How joyfully this tinyVogue, which today sells at the price of miniature parchments, was read under the galleries of the Odéon by timid youths drunk with the odor of novelty which these pale little pages exhaled.
Kahn's last collection,la Pluie et le Beau temps, has not changed our opinion of his talent and originality: he remains equal to himself with his two tendencies, here less in harmony, towards sentiment and the picturesque, quite apparent if one compares withImage, that so mournful hymn,
O Jésus couronné de ronces,Qui saigne en tous coeurs meurtris,(Tr. 61)
theDialogue de Zélanae,
Bonjour mynher, bonjour myffrau,(Tr. 62)
as pretty and sweet as some old almanac print. Here, in the middle tone, is a truly faultless lied:
L'heure du nuage blanc s'est fondue sur la plaineEn reflets de sang, en flocons de laine,O bruyères roses, ô ciel couleur de sang.L'heure du nuage d'or a pâli sur la plaine,Et tombent des voiles lents et longs de blanche laineO bruyères mauves—ô ciel couleur de sang.L'heure du nuage d'or a crevé sur la plaine,Les roseaux chantaient doux sous le vent de haine,O bruyères rouges—ô ciel couleur de sang.L'heure du nuage d'or a passé sur la plaineEphémèrement: sa splendeur est lointaine,O bruyère d'or—ô ciel couleur de sang.(Tr. 63)
Words, words! Doubtless, but well selected and artistically blended. Kahn is before everything else an artist: sometimes he is more.