Part 7

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 amoureux La douceur d'habiter un séjour odoreux De roses dont les dieux sylvains te font des armes

Là tu vas composant ces beaux livres, honneur Du 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. 40)

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 the _Chanson 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 via In 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 poems _le 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 that _Pèlerin_, and also in _les Syrtes_; there are admirable and delicious touches and which (for my part) I shall always joyfully reread, in _les Cantilènes,_ but inasmuch as Moréas, having changed his manner, repudiates these primitive works, I shall not insist. There remains _Ériphyle_, 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 forêts Où 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 sablonneuse Ioclos, le Tmolus et la grande Epidaure, Et la verte Cydon, sa piété honore Ce 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.

STUART MERRILL

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 of _Fastes_, 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, the _Petits 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'eau Des feuilles du saule et du bouleau, Et c'est le givre dans la vallée,

Dénoue--il est l'heure--tes cheveaux Plus blonds que le chanvre que tu files....

Et viens, pareille à ces châtelaines Dolentes à qui tu fais songer, Dans le silence où meurt ton léger Rouet, 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 from _Gammes_ to his latest poems, from the Parnassian stiffness to the _verso suelto_ of 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 fillettes Qui 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'hui Viendront 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.

SAINT-POL-ROUX

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) and _cracked 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 light means the 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 jawbone of 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 towards _les Reposoirs de la Procession_ where 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, the _Nocturne_ dedicated to Huysmans is but a vain chaplet of incoherent catachreses: the ideas there are devoured by a frightful troop of beasts. But _l'Autopsie de la Vieille fille_, despite a fault of tone, but _Calvaire immémorial_, but _l'Ame saisissable_ are 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.

ROBERT DE MONTESQUIOU

Upon the first appearance of his _Chauves-Souris_ in 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 the _Hortensias bleus_ one could make a book, still quite thick, which would be almost entirely composed of fine or proud or delicate poetry. The author of _Ancilla,_ of _Mortuis ignotis_, and of _Tables vives_ would appear what he truly is, excluding all travesty,--a good poet.

Here is a part of the _Tables 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'allume Est 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 naufrage Pour 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 jour Sur les vivants _ave_ du 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.

GUSTAVE KAHN

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 fleuri De ton soleil par les branches, Si loin de moi la bien-aimée Dans 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 main Me 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 the _Fêtes Galantes_, and with the _Chansons d'amant_ are 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, whose _Illuminations_ appeared in _Vogue_ in 1886, to Laforgue, who at the same period, in the same precious little review,--conducted by Kahn--published _Légende_ and _Solo 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 porches De la nuit sans lune Princesse, 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 tiny _Vogue_, 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 with _Image_, that so mournful hymn,

O Jésus couronné de ronces, Qui saigne en tous coeurs meurtris,

(Tr. 61)

the _Dialogue 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 plaine En 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 laine O 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 plaine Ephémèrement: 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.

PAUL VERLAINE

Gaston Boissier, in crowning (touching custom) a fifty-year-old poet, congratulated him for never having innovated, for having expressed ordinary ideas in a facile style, for having scrupulously conformed to the traditional laws of French poetics.

Might not a history of our literature be written by neglecting the innovators? Ronsard would be replaced by Ponthus de Thyard, Corneille by his brother, Racine by Campistron, Lamartine by de Laprade, Victor Hugo by Ponsard, and Verlaine by Aicard; it would be more encouraging, more academic and perhaps more fashionable, for genius in France always seems slightly ridiculous.