Part 1

INSTIGATIONS

OF

EZRA POUND

TOGETHER WITH

AN ESSAY ON THE CHINESE WRITTEN CHARACTER

BY

ERNEST FENOLLOSA

BONI AND LIVERIGHT

PUBLISHERS NEW YORK

1920

TO

MY FATHER

HOMER L. POUND

TABLE OF CONTENTS

I. A STUDY IN FRENCH POETS

Narration Jules Laforgue Tristan Corbière Arthur Rimbaud Remy de Gourmont De Régnier Emile Verhaeren Vielé-Griffin Stuart Merril Laurent Tailhade Francis Jammes Moréas Spire Vildrac Jules Romains Unanimisme De Bosschère's study of Elskamp Albert Mockel and "La Wallonie"

II. HENRY JAMES

III. REMY DE GOURMONT, a Distinction followed by notes

IV. IN THE VORTEX

Eliot Joyce Lewis An Historical Essayist The New Poetry Breviora

PART SECOND

V. OUR TETRARCHAL PRECIEUSE A divagation from Jules Laforgue

VI. GENESIS, or the first book in the Bible

VII. ARNAUT DANIEL

VIII. TRANSLATORS OF GREEK

IX. An essay on THE CHINESE WRITTEN CHARACTER by the late ERNEST FENOLLOSA, edited by Ezra Pound

INSTIGATIONS

I

A STUDY IN FRENCH POETS

The time when the intellectual affairs of America could be conducted on a monolingual basis is over. It has been irksome for long. The intellectual life of London is dependent on people who understand the French language about as well as their own. America's part in contemporary culture is based chiefly upon two men familiar with Paris: Whistler and Henry James. It is something in the nature of a national disgrace that a New Zealand paper, "The Triad," should be more alert to, and have better regular criticism of, contemporary French publications than any American periodical has yet had.

I had wished to give but a brief anthology[1] of French poems, interposing no comment of my own between author and reader; confining my criticism to selection. But that plan was not feasible. I was indebted to MM. Davray and Valette for cordial semi-permissions to quote the "Mercure" publications.

Certain delicate wines will not travel; they are not always the best wines. Foreign criticism may sometimes correct the criticism _du cru_. I cannot pretend to give the reader a summary of contemporary French opinion, but certain French poets have qualities strong enough to be perceptible to me, that is, to at least one alien reader; certain things are translatable from one language to another, a tale or an image will "translate"; music will, practically, never translate; and if a work be taken abroad in the original tongue, certain properties seem to become less apparent, or less important. Fancy styles, questions of local "taste," lose importance. Even though I know the overwhelming importance of technique, technicalities in a foreign tongue cannot have for me the importance they have to a man writing in that tongue; almost the only technique perceptible to a foreigner is the presentation of content as free as possible from the clutteration of dead technicalities, fustian a la Louis XV; and from timidities of workmanship. This is perhaps the only technique that ever matters, the only _mæstria_.

Mediocre poetry is, I think, the same everywhere; there is not the slightest need to import it; we search foreign tongues for _mæstria_ and for discoveries not yet revealed in the home product. The critic of a foreign literature must know a reasonable amount of the bad poetry of the nation he studies if he is to attain any sense of proportion.

He will never be as sensitive to fine shades of language as the native; he has, however, a chance of being less bound, less allied to some group of writers. It would be politic for me to praise as many living French-men as possible, and thereby to increase the number of my chances for congenial acquaintance on my next trip to Paris, and to have a large number of current French books sent to me to review.

But these rather broad and general temptations can scarcely lead me to praise one man instead of another.

If I have thrown over current French opinion, I must urge that foreign opinion has at times been a corrective. England has never accepted the continental opinion of Byron; the right estimate lies perhaps between the two. Heine is, I have heard, better read outside Germany than within. The continent has never accepted the idiotic British adulation of Milton; on the other hand, the idiotic neglect of Landor has never been rectified by the continent.

Foreign criticism, if honest, can never be quite the same as home criticism: it may be better or worse; it may have a value similar to that of a different decade or century and has at least some chance of escaping whims and stampedes of opinion.

I do not "aim at completeness." I believe that the American-English reader has heard in a general way of Baudelaire and Verlaine and Mallarmé; that Mallarmé, perhaps unread, is apt to be slightly overestimated; that Gautier's reputation, despite its greatness, is not yet as great as it should be.

After a man has lived a reasonable time with the two volumes of Gautier's poetry, he might pleasantly venture upon the authors whom I indicate in this essay; and he might have, I think, a fair chance of seeing them in proper perspective. I omit certain nebulous writers because I think their work bad; I omit the Parnassiens, Samain and Heredia, firstly because their work seems to me to show little that was not already implicit in Gautier; secondly, because America has had enough Parnassienism--perhaps second rate, but still enough. (The verses of La Comtesse de Noailles in the "Revue des Deux Mondes," and those of John Vance Cheney in "The Atlantic" once gave me an almost identical pleasure.) I do not mean that all the poems here to be quoted are better than Samain's "Mon âme est une infante...." or his "Cléopatre."

We may take it that Gautier achieved hardness in _Emaux et Camées_; his earlier work did in France very much what remained for the men of "the nineties" to accomplish in England. Gautier's work done in "the thirties" shows a similar beauty, a similar sort of technique. If the Parnassiens were following Gautier they fell short of his merit. Heredia was perhaps the best of them. He tried to make his individual statements more "poetic"; but his whole, for all this, becomes frigid.

Samain followed him and began to go "soft"; there is in him just a suggestion of muzziness. Heredia is "hard," but there or thereabouts he ends. Gautier is intent on being "hard"; is intent on conveying a certain verity of feeling, and he ends by being truly poetic. Heredia wants to be poetic _and_ hard; the hardness appears to him as a virtue in the poetic. And one tends to conclude, from this, that all attempts to be poetic in some manner or other, defeat their own end; whereas an intentness on the quality of the emotion to be conveyed makes for poetry.

I intend here a qualitative analysis. The work of Gautier, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Mallarmé, Samain, Heredia, and of the authors I quote here should give an idea of the sort of poetry that has been written in France during the last half century, or at least during the last forty years. If I am successful in my choice, I will indicate most of the best and even some of the half-good. Bever and Léautaud's anthology contains samples of some forty or fifty more poets.[2]

After Gautier, France produced, as nearly as I can understand, three chief and admirable poets: Tristan Corbière, perhaps the most poignant writer since Villon; Rimbaud, a vivid and indubitable genius; and Laforgue--a slighter, but in some ways a finer "artist" than either of the others. I do not mean that he "writes better" than Rimbaud; and Eliot has pointed out the wrongness of Symons's phrase, "Laforgue the eternal adult, Rimbaud the eternal child." Rimbaud's effects seem often to come as the beauty of certain silver crystals produced by chemical means. Laforgue always knows what he is at; Rimbaud, the "genius" in the narrowest and deepest sense of the term, the "most modern," seems, almost without knowing it, to hit on the various ways in which the best writers were to follow him, slowly. Laforgue is the "last word":--out of infinite knowledge of all the ways of saying a thing he finds the right way. Rimbaud, when right, is so because he cannot be bothered to exist in any other modality.

JULES LAFORGUE

(1860-'87)

Laforgue was the "end of a period"; that is to say, he summed up and summarized and dismissed nineteenth-century French literature, its foibles and fashions, as Flaubert in "Bouvard and Pécuchet" summed up nineteenth-century general civilization. He satirized Flaubert's heavy "Salammbô" manner inimitably, and he manages to be more than a critic, for in process of this ironic summary he conveys himself, _il raconte lui-même en racontant son âge et ses mœurs_, he delivers the moods and the passion of a rare and sophisticated personality: "point ce 'gaillard-là' ni le Superbe ... mais au fond distinguée et franche comme une herbe"!

Oh! laissez-moi seulement reprendre haleine, Et vous aurez un livre enfin de bonne foi.

En attendant, ayez pitié de ma misère! Que je vous sois à tous un être bienvenu! Et que je sois absous pour mon âme sincère, Comme le fut Phryné pour son sincère nu.

He is one of the poets whom it is practically impossible to "select." Almost any other six poems would be quite as "representative" as the six I am quoting.

PIERROTS

(_On a des principes_)

Elle disait, de son air vain fondamental: "Je t'aime pour toi seul!"--Oh! là, là, grêle histoire; Oui, comme l'art! Du calme, ô salaire illusoire Du capitaliste Idéal!

Elle faisait: "J'attends, me voici, je sais pas"... Le regard pris de ces larges candeurs des lunes; --Oh! là, là, ce n'est pas peut-être pour des prunes, Qu'on a fait ses classes ici-bas? Mais voici qu'un beau soir, infortunée à point, Elle meurt!--Oh! là, là; bon, changement de thème! On sait que tu dois ressusciter le troisième Jour, sinon en personne, du moins Dans l'odeur, les verdures, les eaux des beaux mois! Et tu iras, levant encore bien plus de dupes Vers le Zaïmph de la Joconde, vers la Jupe! Il se pourra même que j'en sois.

PIERROTS

III

Comme ils vont molester, la nuit, Au profond des parcs, les statues, Mais n'offrant qu'au moins dévêtues Leur bras et tout ce qui s'ensuit,

En tête-à-tête avec la femme Ils ont toujours l'air d'être un tiers, Confondent demain avec hier, Et demandent _Rien_ avec âme!

Jurent "je t'aime" l'air là-bas, D'une voix sans timbre, en extase, Et concluent aux plus folles phrases Par des: "Mon Dieu, n'insistons pas?"

Jusqu'à ce qu'ivre, Elle s'oublie, Prise d'on ne sait quel besoin De lune? dans leurs bras, fort loin Des convenances établies.

COMPLAINTE DES CONSOLATIONS

_Quia voluit consolari_

Ses yeux ne me voient pas, son corps serait jaloux; Elle m'a dit: "monsieur ..." en m'enterrant d'un geste; Elle est Tout, l'univers moderne et le céleste. Soit, draguons donc Paris, et ravitaillons-nous, Tant bien que mal, du reste.

Les Landes sans espoir de ses regards brûlés, Semblaient parfois des paons prêts à mettre à la voile ... Sans chercher à me consoler vers les étoiles, Ah! Je trouverai bien deux yeux aussi sans clés, Au Louvre, en quelque toile!

Oh! qu'incultes, ses airs, rêvant dans la prison D'un _cant_ sur le qui-vive au travers de nos hontes! Mais, en m'appliquant bien, moi dont la foi démonte Les jours, les ciels, les nuits, dans les quatre saisons Je trouverai mon compte.

Sa bouche! à moi, ce pli pudiquement martyr Où s'aigrissent des nostalgies de nostalgies! Eh bien, j'irai parfois, très sincère vigie, Du haut de Notre-Dame aider l'aube, au sortir, De passables orgies.

Mais, Tout va la reprendre!--Alors Tout m'en absout Mais, Elle est ton bonheur!--Non! je suis trop immense, Trop chose. Comment donc! mais ma seule présence Ici-bas, vraie à s'y mirer, est l'air de Tout: De la Femme au Silence.

LOCUTIONS DES PIERROTS

VI

Je te vas dire: moi, quand j'aime, C'est d'un cœur, au fond sans apprêts, Mais dignement élaboré Dans nos plus singuliers problèmes.

Ainsi, pour mes mœurs et mon art, C'est la période védique Qui seule a bon droit revendique Ce que j'en "attelle à ton char."

Comme c'est notre Bible hindoue Qui, tiens, m'amène à caresser, Avec ces yeux de cétacé, Ainsi, bien sans but, ta joue.

This sort of thing will drive many bull-moose readers to the perilous borders of apoplexy, but it may give pleasure to those who believe that man is incomplete without a certain amount of mentality. Laforgue is an angel with whom our modern poetic Jacob must struggle.

COMPLAINTE DES PRINTEMPS

Permettez, ô sirène, Voici que votre haleine Embaume la verveine; C'est l'printemps qui s'amène!

--Ce système, en effet, ramène le printemps, Avec son impudent cortège d'excitants.

Otez donc ces mitaines; Et n'ayez, inhumaine, Que mes soupirs pour traîne: Ous'qu'il y a de la gêne ...

--Ah! yeux bleus méditant sur l'ennui de leur art! Et vous, jeunes divins, aux soirs crus de hasard!

Du géant à la naine, Vois, tout bon sire entraîne Quelque contemporaine, Prendre l'air, par hygiène ...

--Mais vous saignez ainsi pour l'amour de l'exil! Pour l'amour de l'Amour! D'ailleurs, ainsi soit-il.

T'ai-je fait de la peine? Oh! viens vers les fontaines Où tournent les phalènes Des Nuits Elyséennes!

--Pimbêche aux yeux vaincus, bellâtre aux beaux jarrets. Donnez votre fumier à la fleur du Regret.

Voilà que son haleine N'embaum' plus la verveine! Drôle de phénomène ... Hein, à l'année prochaine?

--Vierges d'hier, ce soir traîneuses de fœtus, A genoux! voici l'heure où se plaint l'Angélus.

Nous n'irons plus au bois, Les pins sont eternels, Les cors ont des appels!... Neiges des pâles mois, Vous serez mon missel! --Jusqu'au jour de dégel.

COMPLAINTE DES PIANOS

_Qu'on attend dans les Quartiers Aisés_

Menez l'âme que les Lettres ont bien nourrie, Les pianos, les pianos, dans les quartiers aisés! Premiers soirs, sans pardessus, chaste flânerie, Aux complaintes des nerfs incompris ou brisés.

Ces enfants, à quoi rêvent-elles, Dans les ennuis des ritournelles?

--"Préaux des soirs, Christs des dortoirs!

"Tu t'en vas et tu nous laisses, Tu nous laiss's et tu t'en vas, Défaire et refaire ses tresses, Broder d'éternels canevas."

Jolie ou vague? triste ou sage? encore pure? O jours, tout m'est egal? ou, monde, moi je veux? Et si vierge, du moins, de la bonne blessure, Sachant quels gras couchants ont les plus blancs aveux

Mon Dieu, a quoi done rêvent-elles? A des Roland, à des dentelles?

--"Cœurs en prison, Lentes saisons!

"Tu t'en vas et tu nous quittes, Tu nous quitt's et tu t'en vas! Couvents gris, chœurs de Sulamites, Sur nos seins nuls croisons nos bras."

Fatales clés de l'être un beau jour apparues; Psitt! aux hérédités en ponctuels ferments, Dans le bal incessant de nos étranges rues; Ah! pensionnats, théâtres, journaux, romans!

Allez, stériles ritournelles, La vie est vraie et criminelle.

--"Rideaux tirés, Peut-on entrer?

"Tu t'en vas et tu nous laisses, Tu nous laiss's et tu t'en vas, La source des frais rosiers baisse. Vraiment! Et lui qui ne vient pas...."

Il viendra! Vous serez les pauvres cœurs en faute, Fiancés au remords comme aux essais sans fond, Et les suffisants cœurs cossus, n'ayant d'autre hôte Qu'un train-train pavoisé d'estime et de chiffons

Mourir? peut-être brodent-elles, Pour un oncle à dot, des bretelles?

--"Jamais! Jamais! Si tu savais!

Tu t'en vas et tu nous quittes, Tu nous quitt's et tu t'en vas, Mais tu nous reviendras bien vite Guérir mon beau mal, n'est-ce pas?"

Et c'est vrai! l'Idéal les fait divaguer toutes; Vigne bohème, même en ces quartiers aisés. La vie est là; le pur flacon des vives gouttes Sera, _comme il convient_, d'eau propre baptisé.

Aussi, bientôt, se joueront-elles De plus exactes ritournelles.

"--Seul oreiller! Mur familier!

"Tu t'en vas et tu nous laisses, Tu nous laiss's et tu t'en vas, Que ne suis-je morte à la messe! O mois, ô linges, ô repas!"

The journalist and his papers exist by reason of their "protective coloring." They must think as their readers think at a given moment.

It is impossible that Jules Laforgue should have written his poems in America in "the eighties." He was born in 1860, died in 1887 of _la misère_, of consumption and abject poverty in Paris. The vaunted sensitiveness of French perception, and the fact that he knew a reasonable number of wealthy and influential people, did nothing to prevent this. He had published two small volumes, one edition of each. The seventh edition of his collected poems is dated 1913, and doubtless they have been reprinted since then with increasing celerity.

Un couchant des Cosmogonies! Ah! que la Vie est quotidienne....

Et, du plus vrai qu'on se souvienne, Comme on fut piètre et sans génie....

What is the man in the street to make of this, or of the _Complainte des Bons Ménages_!

L'Art sans poitrine m'a trop longtemps bercé dupe. Si ses labours sont fiers, que ses blés décevants! Tiens, laisse-moi bêler tout aux plis de ta jupe Qui fleure le couvent.

Delicate irony, the citadel of the intelligent, has a curious effect on these people. They wish always to be exhorted, at all times no matter how incongruous and unsuitable, to do those things which almost any one will and does do whenever suitable opportunity is presented. As Henry James has said, "It was a period when writers besought the deep blue sea 'to roll.'"

The ironist is one who suggests that the reader should think, and this process being unnatural to the majority of mankind, the way of the ironical is beset with snares and with furze-bushes.

Laforgue was a purge and a critic. He laughed out the errors of Flaubert, i.e., the clogging and cumbrous historical detail. He left _Cœur Simple, L'Education, Madame Bovary, Bouvard_. His _Salome_ makes game of the rest. The short story has become vapid because sixty thousand story writers have all set themselves to imitating De Maupassant, perhaps a thousand from the original.

Laforgue implies definitely that certain things in prose were at an end, and I think he marks the next phase after Gautier in French poetry. It seems to me that without a familiarity with Laforgue one can not appreciate--i.e., determine the value of--certain positives and certain negatives in French poetry since 1890.

He deals for the most part with literary poses and _clichés_, yet he makes them a vehicle for the expression of his own very personal emotions; of his own unperturbed sincerity.

Je ne suis pas "ce gaillard-là!" ni Le Superbe! Mais mon âme, qu'un cri un peu cru exacerbe, Est au fond distinguée et franche comme une herbe.

This is not the strident and satiric voice of Corbière, calling Hugo "_Garde National épique_," and Lamartine "_Lacrymatoire d'abonnés_." It is not Tailhade drawing with rough strokes the people he sees daily in Paris, and bursting with guffaws over the Japanese in their mackintoshes, the West Indian mulatto behind the bar in the Quartier. It is not Georges Fourest burlesquing in a café; Fourest's guffaw is magnificent, he is hardly satirical. Tailhade draws from life and indulges in occasional squabbles.

Laforgue was a better artist than any of these men save Corbière. He was not in the least of their sort.

Beardsley's "Under the Hill" was until recently the only successful attempt to produce "anything like Laforgue" in our tongue. "Under the Hill" was issued in a limited edition. Laforgue's _Moralités Légendaires_ was issued in England by the Ricketts and Hacon press in a limited edition, and there the thing has remained. Laforgue can never become a popular cult because tyros can not imitate him.

One may discriminate between Laforgue's tone and that of his contemporary French satirists. He is the finest wrought; he is most "verbalist." Bad verbalism is rhetoric, or the use of _cliché_ unconsciously, or a mere playing with phrases. But there is good verbalism, distinct from lyricism or imagism, and in this Laforgue is a master. He writes not the popular language of any country, but an international tongue common to the excessively cultivated, and to those more or less familiar with French literature of the first three-fourths of the nineteenth century.

He has done, sketchily and brilliantly, for French literature a work not incomparable to what Flaubert was doing for "France" in _Bouvard and Pécuchet_, if one may compare the flight of the butterfly with the progress of an ox, both proceeding toward the same point of the compass. He has dipped his wings in the dye of scientific terminology. Pierrot _imberbe_ has

Un air d'hydrocéphale asperge.

The tyro can not play about with such things. Verbalism demands a set form used with irreproachable skill. Satire needs, usually, the form of cutting rhymes to drive it home.

Chautauquas, Mrs. Eddy, Dr. Dowies, Comstocks, Societies for the Prevention of All Human Activities, are impossible in the wake of Laforgue. And he is therefore an exquisite poet, a deliverer of the nations, a Numa Pompilius, a father of light. And to many people this mystery, the mystery why such force should reside in so fragile a book, why such power should coincide with so great a nonchalance of manner, will remain forever a mystery.

Que loin l'âme type Qui m'a dit adieu Parce que mes yeux Manquaient de principes!

Elle, en ce moment. Elle, si pain tendre, Oh! peut-être engendre Quelque garnement.

Car on l'a unie Avec un monsieur, Ce qu'il y a de mieux, Mais pauvre en génie.

Laforgue is incontrovertible. The "strong silent man" of the kinema has not monopolized all the certitudes.

TRISTAN CORBIERE

(1841-1875)

Corbière seems to me the greatest poet of the period. "La Rapsode Foraine et le Pardon de Sainte-Anne" is, to my mind, beyond all comment. He first published in '73, remained practically unknown until Verlaine's essay in '84, and was hardly known to "the public" until the Messein edition of his work in '91.

LA RAPSODE FORAINE ET LE PARDON DE SAINTE-ANNE

La Palud, 27 août, jour du Pardon.

Bénite est l'infertile plage Où, comme la mer, tout est nud. Sainte est la chapelle sauvage De Sainte-Anne-de-la-Palud....

De la Bonne Femme Sainte Anne, Grand'tante du petit Jésus, En bois pourri dans sa soutane Riche ... plus riche que Crésus!

Contre elle la petite Vierge, Fuseau frêle, attend l'_Angélus_; Au coin, Joseph, tenant son cierge, Niche, en saint qu'on ne fête plus...

C'est le Pardon.--Liesse et mystères-- Déjà l'herbe rase a des poux.... _Sainte Anne, Onguent des belles-mères!_ _Consolation des époux!_

Des paroisses environnantes: De Plougastel et Loc-Tudy, Ils viennent tous planter leurs tentes, Trois nuits, trois jours,--jusqu'au lundi.

Trois jours, trois nuits, la palud grogne, Selon l'antique rituel, --Chœur séraphique et chant d'ivrogne-- LE CANTIQUE SPIRITUEL.