THE COUNTESS DE NOAILLES

Yearsand years ago—five-and-twenty years ago—I used sometimes to spend my Thursday afternoons with a Russian friend; more than once on these occasions our pleasure was heightened by the musical talent of her little cousins, the young daughters of the Princess Brancovan. In my mind’s eye I still see the two children seated on the long piano-stool; I contemplate their fervent shoulders, their four thick dark plaits, bobbing from side to side, and the small eager right hand of one, and the left hand of her sister, flying up and down the keyboard as they interpret, four-handed, some difficult page of Beethoven.

My friend died; years passed; I saw no more of the young musicians. They grew up; they married. And then one day, in 1901, a new book of poems burst—yes, literallyburst—upon the world of letters; and I learnt with pleasure and curiosity that its author, the Countess Mathieu de Noailles, was the Princess Anna de Brancovan. Like all Paris, I read her poems.

Have you ever seen, in Switzerland or in Auvergne (in some mountain country), the spring meadows, at Eastertime, when the young foals, the lambs, and especially the little calves (born in the dusk of the stable in February) make their first irruptioninto a world of sunshine, of tender and fresh green grass stretching illimitably in all directions? If not, and if you would none the less realise the extreme of joy, of young delight in mere existence, take down from the shelfLe Cœur Innombrable, or indeed any of the early poems of Madame de Noailles.

Madame de Noailles resembles no living poet or poetess. There is none among them who gives us so absolutely the sense of inspiration—the poet’s frenzy with its flights and its fervours—and also the flagging, drifting laxness of the verse when suddenly that inspiration fail. Yet, even in that wandering delirium, we feel (as in the diviner poetry of Shelley) no less than the poet’s weakness, the strength and the ardour of the afflatus. On the frontispiece of her second book (Les Éblouissements, 1907), Mme de Noailles has inscribed a sentence from Plato’sBanquet: ‘My heart beats more tumultuously than the pulse of the priests of Cybele.’ And indeed the dance, the extravagant fury, the κoρυβαντιασμός, of the Phrygian festival are echoed in the strophes of this daughter of Hellas, married into the house of Noailles. But the young Mænad (strayed from Parnassus into France) is never more to my liking than when suddenly she interrupts her corybantic song to idle in her walled fruit-garden, making friends with her pears and apples, praising the brave, bright splashes of red on the ranks of her scarlet-runners, or counting the gathered peaches ranged among straw on the shelvesof the fragrant fruitery, while a wasp whizzes out his soul of rage against the dusty window-pane:—

‘Ô peuple parfumé des fruits,Vous que le chaud été composeDe cieux bleus et de terre rose,Vous, sève dense, sucre mol,Nés des jeux de l’air et du sol,Vous qui vivez dans une crèche,Petits dieux de la paille fraîche,Compagnons de l’arrosoir vert.Des hottes, des bêches, de fer,Gardez-moi dans la douce rondeQue forme votre odeur profonde!’

There is in Madame de Noailles something of Pindar—and something of Herrick. I like her best in Herrick’s vein, singing the homely things we know with a penetrating, new, and yet familiar sweetness:—

‘Bien plus que pour Bagdad dont le seul nom étonne,Que pour Constantinople, ineffable Houri,Je m’émeus quand je vois dans un matin d’automneLe clocher de Corbeil ou de Château-Thierry.’

But that other self of hers—the Phrygian pythoness—is no less worthy of our attention. Every page of this volume bears the imprint of her image, ardent, wasted, joyous, excited, full of a mingled asperityand sweetness. Her voice rings out intoxicated with the wonder of the universe, the mystery of life, the terror of death. None of the poets of our generation has expressed so keenly the mortal pang caused by the impact of a beauty which is eternal on a system of nerves which is the cobweb of an hour:—

‘Je n’ai fait résonner que mes nerfs sur ma lyre.’

It is true there is little of deep emotion and little of pure thought in these earlier poems of Madame de Noailles; but all that the sense can receive of the outer world is exquisitely rendered. So alive is the poetess to the magic and glory of the visible world that she is jealous of that inner, personal realm which engrosses us so much. Constantly she regrets those years of childhood, which were objective, calm, free from the tumult of the heart:—

‘Enfants, regardez bien toutes les plaines rondes,La capucine avec ses abeilles autour,Regardez bien l’étang, les champs, avant l’amour;—Car après l’on ne voit plus jamais rien du monde.‘Après l’on ne voit plus que son cœur devant soi,On ne voit plus qu’un peu de flamme sur sa route,On n’entend rien, on ne sait rien, et l’on écouteLes pieds du triste Amour qui court ou qui s’assoit.’

‘Enfants, regardez bien toutes les plaines rondes,La capucine avec ses abeilles autour,Regardez bien l’étang, les champs, avant l’amour;—Car après l’on ne voit plus jamais rien du monde.

‘Après l’on ne voit plus que son cœur devant soi,On ne voit plus qu’un peu de flamme sur sa route,On n’entend rien, on ne sait rien, et l’on écouteLes pieds du triste Amour qui court ou qui s’assoit.’

But passion is not the only power which contends with our faculty for absorbing the imperishable quality of the Cosmos. There is another, yet more terrible, which splits the glass in our hands, even as we raise it to our lips:—

‘Ô beauté de toute la terre,Visage innombrable des jours,Voyez avec quel sombre amourMon cœur en vous se désaltère.‘Et pourtant il faudra nous en aller d’iciQuitter les jours luisants, les jardins où noussommes,Cesser d’être du sang, des yeux, des mains, des hommes,Descendre dans la nuit avec un front noirci.‘Descendre par l’étroite, l’horizontale porte,Où l’on passe étendu, voilé, silencieux;Ne plus jamais vous voir, Ô Lumière des cieux!Hélas! je n’étais pas faite pour être morte.’

‘Ô beauté de toute la terre,Visage innombrable des jours,Voyez avec quel sombre amourMon cœur en vous se désaltère.

‘Et pourtant il faudra nous en aller d’iciQuitter les jours luisants, les jardins où noussommes,Cesser d’être du sang, des yeux, des mains, des hommes,Descendre dans la nuit avec un front noirci.

‘Descendre par l’étroite, l’horizontale porte,Où l’on passe étendu, voilé, silencieux;Ne plus jamais vous voir, Ô Lumière des cieux!Hélas! je n’étais pas faite pour être morte.’

These verses, and many others no less beautiful—for one of the characteristics of Madame de Noailles is her abundance—could leave no doubt on my mind of the quality of the poetess, and I remember writing, when her second book appeared:—

‘There are four lyric poets—there are at least four lyric poets—writing to-day in France. If we glance over the land in a sort of bird’s eye view, we see, down by the river, like a faun in the reedsand rushes, M. Francis Jammes piping on his Pan’s pipe a sweet irregular and broken music. His is an elfin spirit, familiar with green things and shy wild animal life; his patrons are St Francis and Ariel. Where the bee sucks, there lurks he; and yet he is not wholly natural. Something quaint, furtive, and precious in his style reminds us of a constant artifice in his simplicity.

‘Let us now lift our gaze towards the busier haunts of men; there, in an inspired attitude, stands M. Fernand Gregh, his hand lifted towards the visionary lyre of Victor Hugo, which, like the dagger of Macbeth, hovers before him, just out of reach; yet, though he never wholly grasps it, sometimes the poet snatches a fine strain of music from the strings. A little higher, among the ruins of antiquity, meditates in music M. Henri de Régnier. But who is this who rushes past (her eye in a fine frenzy rolling), singing in an incoherent passion of delight, like the wild shepherdess—La Ravie de l’Amour de Dieu—in the Queen of Navarre’s delightful pastoral, soaring sunwards in a corybantic ecstasy—who is this lyric muse, half siren and half bird?

“And all a wonder and a wild desire.”’

(In those days I had not read the odes of M. Paul Claudel. And, after all, can one call a poet ‘lyric,’ if he choose to write his rhapsodies in prose?)

A year or two later, our poetess gave us, one after the other, three books in prose—a strange beautiful Oriental prose, charged with colour as the draperies of a Russian ballet, full of a crude barbarian charm. First she produced (I think her best prose book)La Nouvelle Espérance.

The novels of Madame de Noailles all tell more or less the same story. They show us a woman of passionate and eager temperament, a soul of suffering ardour, fevered with a sort of avid languor, of fierce tenderness whose cold fit is a sudden revolt of indifference or pride: a woman who reminds us sometimes of Mademoiselle de Lespinasse and sometimes of Phædra! Need we say that this self-centred and sensual being is unhappy? Yet she is full of poetry, of passion, of charm, half a spoiled child, half an inspired Muse. But she seeks in sentiment and in sensation an Absolute which does not exist on earth. Thus, imprisoned in the tyrannous circle of her own personality, she turns round upon herself, like a squirrel in its cage. So at least we see her in this first novel and in the last:La Domination.

Between the two the poetess has placed a sort of pastel, a sort of fairy-tale, exquisite in its refinement and impossible grace,Le Visage Emerveillé, where, if the features are the same, the colour and the lighting are so softened that we greet with a smile what, in the other volumes seemed, in all cruel sincerity, the terrible image of hysterical passion.

And then, in the summer of 1913, she produced, after so long a silence of the Muse, her finest poems. Ah! here she is her real self—she whom Melchior de Voguë used to call, briefly, emphatically, ‘le grand poète,’ distinguishing her thus among her contemporaries. The Countess de Noailles is really a great poet—the greatest that the Twentieth Century has as yet produced in France, perhaps in Europe. In her the romantic Nineteenth Century has its last echo: her ardent magnificence, her sense of the wild beauty of natural things, her lyric cries, her vast horizons magically evoked, her summits and her tempests, and then her sudden bursts of simple, friendly homeliness, recall the genius of Victor Hugo.

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