CORNELL UNIVERSITY * JJBRARY '■% - BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND GIVEN IN 1 89 1 BY HENRY WILLIAMS SAGE Cornell University Library PQ 1170.E6L67 ^ jfpets of modern France 3 1924 027 266 604 Cornell University Library The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924027266604 The POETS of MODERN FRANCE The POETS of MODERN FRANCE by LUDWIG LEWISOHN A. M., LITT. D. PROFESSOR AT THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY NEW YORK B. W. HUEBSCH MCMXVIII COPYRIGHT, 1918. BY B. W, HUEBSCH PRINTED IN U. S. A. PREFACE It is time that the art of translation, of which we have many beautiful examples in English, should be strictly distinguished from the trade. Like acting or the playing of music, it is an art of inter- pretation, more difficult than either in this respect : that you must interpret your original in a medium never contemplated by its author. It requires, at its best, an exacting and imaginative scholarship, for you must understand your text in its fullest and most living sense; it requires a power over the instrument of your own language no less com- plete than the virtuoso's over the pianoforte, than the actor's over the expression of his voice or the gestures of his body. Its aim, too, is identical with the aims of those sister arts of interpretation : to give a clear voice to beauty that would else be dumb or quite muffled. For even to intelligent lovers of the arts a subtle or intricate poem v in a language not their own is as lifeless as a page of Beethoven which they have not heard played. What now should be the aim of the translator of poetry? For it is with poetry that I am here concerned. It should be clearly, first of all, to produce a beautiful poem. If he has not done that he may have served the cause of information, of language study. In art he has committed a plain ineptitude. If he has produced a beautiful poem, much should be forgiven him, although a beautiful poem may not, necessarily, be a beau- tiful translation. To be that it must sustain cer- tain relations to its original. It must, to begin with, be faithful — not pedantically, but essen- tially, not only to the general content of the or- iginal poem but to its specific means of embodying that content. There should be as little definite alteration, addition or omission as possible. In the translations in this volume there will not be found, I think, more than a dozen words that were not in the texts, or more than half a dozen actual verbal substitutions. The associative values of two different linguistic media should, vi of course, be sensitively borne in mind. One idiom must be made not only to copy but rightly to interpret the other. It is better, however, to risk a slight obscurity which time and the growth of new artistic insights may remove than to substi- tute an easy meaning for your author's trouble- some one. The second relation which the translated poem must sustain to its original concerns the far more difficult and exacting matter of form. The lan- guage involved will, of course, modify the charac- ter of the translator's problem. If he is dealing with languages that have practically the same pro- sodic system, any two Germanic languages for in- stance, he must scrupulously preserve the music, the exact cadences of his original. If he is trans- lating from a language that has a quite different prosody, such as the French, he must interpret the original forms by analogous forms. Thus I have rendered all poems written wholly in alex- andrines into English heroic verse, but I have sought to make that verse as fluid and as various in movement as the types of alexandrine in my originals. When the prosodic contour of a poem, vii however, depended definitely upon the contrast of alexandrines with longer or shorter verses, I have preserved the exact syllabic lengths. In lyrical measures the aim must be, of course, to hear the characteristic music, to transfer this and to follow its modulations from line to line and stanza to stanza. But these are only the external properties of form. What characterises a poet, above all else, is the way he uses his medium, his precise and unique method of moulding his language — in re- spect both of diction and rhythm — for the expres- sion of his personal sense of life. It is here that the translator comes upon his hardest task. For he should try, hopeless as that may seem, to use his medium of speech in a given translation even as the original poet used his own. The translated poem, in brief, should be such as the original poet would have written if the translator's language had been his native one. I am quite aware that, in the sixty translated poems in this volume, I have not always even ap- proached my own ideal of what a translation of viu poetry should be. But to have attempted the task upon such principles may, of itself, not be without service to the practice of the art. For my critical introduction on the poets of modern France I have no such apology to make. Critics of power and place have told me repeatedly how wrong-headed my critical method is. Let me remind them, who know it so much better than I, of the history of literature and of criticism. For if that history makes but one thing admirably and indisputably clear it is this: In every age the New Poetry and the New Criticism have prevailed in so far as they produced excellent work accord- ing to their own intentions and in harmony with their own aims. In every age the critical conser- vatives have protested in the name of eternal prin- ciples which, alas, are not eternal at all. And generally, for such is human nature, the innova- tors in art and thought of one generation, of one decade at times, have become the conservatives of the next. In another ten or fifteen years I may myself be frowning upon a still newer criticism, a: still newer art. . . . But today I am in the right, IX not of my own desert, but through the ways of the World Spirit. . . . Ludwig Lewisohn. New York City, January, 1918. J CONTENTS Preface, v INTRODUCTION I The Sources of the New Poetry, i II Forerunners and Founders of Symbolism, 10. Vrf^» ix in small towns, 82 £mile Verhaeren x the mill, 83 XI NOVEMBER, 85. XII THE POOR, 88 XIII LIFE, 90 Jean Moreas XIV LITTLE FAIRIES . . . , 92 XV A YOUNG GIRL SPEAKS, 93 XVI STANZAS, 94 Jules Laforgue XVII ANOTHER BOOK . . . , 96 Henri de Regnier XVIII THE FAIR HANDS, 97 XIX SCENE AT DUSK, 99 XX A LESSER ODE, 101 XXI INSCRIPTION FOR A CITY'S GATE OF WARRIORS, 103 XXII ON THE SHORE, 105 XXIII THE FOREST, 106 XXIV CHRYSILLA, 108 Francis Viel£-Griffin XXV OTHERS WILL COME, 109 XXVI 'TIS TIME FOR US TO SAY GOOD NIGHT, 1 10 [Xii] gustave kahn xxvii song, 111 xxviii provence, 112 Stuart Merrill xxix against thy knees ...,114 xxx the promise of the year, 1 16 Maurice Maeterlinck xxxi the seven daughters of orlamonde, ll8 xxxii i have sought . . . , 1 19 Remy De Gourmont xxxiii the snow, 120 xxxiv the exile of beauty, 121 Albert Samain xxxv evening, 123 xxxvi pannyre of the golden heels, i24 Edmond Rostand xxxvii the drummer, 125 Francis Jammes xxxviii that thou art poor . . . , 127 xxxix the trained ass, 129 xl the child reads an almanac, i30 xli in autumn, 131 Charles Guerin xlii bright hair, 133 Henry Bataille xliii the wet month, 134 Paul Fort xliv the dead girl, 135 xlv images of our dreams, 136 xlvi idyll, i37 xlvii bell of dawn, i39 XLViii horizons, 141 [xiii] Pierre Louys xlix pegasus, i42 Camille Mauclair l presences, 143 li the minute, 144 Henri Barbusse lii the letter, 145 Fernand Gregh liii doubt, 146 Paul Souchon liv elegy at noon, i48 Henry Spiess lv hands, 149 Maurice Magre lvi the coquetry of men, 1£1 Leo Larguier lvh when i am old . . . , i53 Charles Vildrac lvhi if one were to keep . . . , 1$$ Georges Duhamel lix annunciation, 158 Emile Despax lx ultima, 159 General Bibliography, 163 Biographical and Bibliographical Notes on the Thirty Poets, 169 Index of First Lines in French and English, 195 [xiv] INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION I THE SOURCES OF THE NEW POETRY Le Poete doit etre le maitre absolu des formes de la Vie, et non en etre Fesclave comme les Realistes et les Naturalistes. Stuart Merrill The struggle of man, however blind and stum- bling, however checked by tribal rage and tribal terror, is toward self -hood. This truth is super- ficially assented to, it has become a glib common- place to the sociologist: it has" really penetrated only a few rare and lonely minds. The majority, simple and learned, talks of individualism and cries out upon the plainest implications of its own doctrine. Not only in life, but also in art. Yet the history of literature, and especially of poetry, illustrates nothing in the history of the mind more [ij clearly than this : the pang of beauty, the exalta- tion in truth, the vision of the tragedy of life arise, in the fullest sense, only when the individual lib- erates himself from the tribe and faces the uni- verse alone. Tribal lays, still largely communal in diction and metre, receive — as in the Odyssey or the Nibelungenlied — an immortal accent from the voice of a nameless personal redactor and the rude legends of the Latian tribe from the melan- choly beauty of Vergil's soul. The metrical ro- mances of the Middle Ages, on the contrary, are scarcely distinguishable one from the other, and even so cultivated an age as the Renaissance illus- trates in its faded sonnet-cycles the dominance of a tribal convention. Such verse becomes strangely hushed and inarticulate in the course of time. We listen for the voice of a man and hear the murmur of the tribe. . . . It is, in poetry, chiefly a matter of form, of music. The tribal verse-chant is rigid in charac- ter and the minstrels are more than nameless, they are, in the personal sense, voiceless. The philo- logist's speculations in regard to authorship re- main mere speculations. There is very little of [2] the personal note in the older poetry of Europe, North or South. Even when notable personali- ties gradually emerge — Dante, Walther von der Vogelweide, Chaucer, Villon — the humbler sing- ers still remain the voices of the folk. The sec- ond stage of poetical form, the stage illustrated by all the great historic literatures, presents tradition modified by personality. The forms are limited in number and in character. But into each form the individual poet pours or tries to pour the unique music of his soul. That union of fixed form and personal accent is illustrated by the his- tory of the hexameter in Latin, the alexandrine in French, the Spenserian stanza, blank verse and the heroic couplet in English pOetry. And the con- servative forces in modern poetry and criticism still point to this method — the traditional form modified by the personal accent — as the only sound and noble method of poetical creation. Such, in effect, is the essential view of the critic who will not look at "free verse" not because it is poor, but because it is "free," who, in another field, condemns the imaginative creations of a great dramatist for not being in a fixed and traditional [3] sense — plays. The echoes of this critic are all about us: "It's beautiful, but it isn't poetry!" "It's powerful, but it isn't a play !" As though, in some quite transcendental sense, there were a divine, Platonic, arch-typal idea of poetry, of drama, which it is the duty of the artist to seek, at least, to approach. In art, as in morals, as in state-craft, the timorous Absolutist clings to his Idea, his formula, as the permanent and abiding element in the flux of concrete things. He does not see that the abiding is in the trend to finer types, to freer and more personal kinds of self- realisation, is, in fact, in that dark angel of his dreams, man's will to change. The last stage in the development of poetic form comes when, under the stress of the modern world, the poet's struggle toward the realisation of his self-hood becomes so keen that he cannot use the traditional forms any more at all. He must find his own form: his impulse is so new and strange that it must create its own music or be silent. Not because he does not love and revere the forms of the masters. But he cannot express himself through them; he cannot, to speak in a homely [4] way, turn around in them. They come trailing so much glory. And the glory is alien to his very urgent and immediate business. The very splen- dor of their associations, the throb of the music of a thousand voices, nobler, perhaps, than his, par- alyse him. He is like a stripling running a race in the brocades of an ancient king. . . . Yet he must be himself or he is nothing or, at most, an echo. Such is the sound and legitimate reason . for those experiments in free verse, in rhythmic and rimed prose, which have arisen in every fully equipped modern literature within the past twen- ty-five years. I must not say that thus a new and personal kind of truth in beauty has yet been quite achieved. But the impulse is right and neces- sary, and the aim the only one left to the modern poet. Hence while official criticism sits, as every- where and always, amid the wreckage of its commandments and its prophecies, the poets of the modern world have gone forth in search of a new freedom and a new music. I have spoken of the preceptist critic, the abso- lutist in criticism with his laws and formulae ante- cedent to experience and to art which grows out of experience. But another kind of critic has ap- peared and has been heard. And one such, the late M. Remy de Gourmont, has admirably summed up the whole matter: "The only excuse that a man has for writing is that he express his own self, that he reveal to others the kind of world that is reflected in his individual mirror : his only excuse is that he be original: he must say things not said before and say them in a form not formu- lated before. He must create his own esthetic, — and we must admit as many aesthetics as there are original minds and judge them according to what they are and not according to what they are not." In France, as elsewhere, the new poetry and the new criticism sprang from very deep sources in the life of the mind and corresponded with the larger tendencies of the new age. For the epoch since the Revolution may almost be divided — if every formula were not insufficient and a little empty — into three periods of struggle for the three kinds of liberty that we must attain: political, intellec- tual, moral. And in the history of French poetry [6] three schools interpret closely and in right succes- sion these three phases. To the Romantics of France, as to the Romantics of England (except Shelley) freedom was primarily an outer thing concerned with votes and governmental action : to the Parnassiens it was the right to observe the present and historic world objectively and let the reason draw its own sombre conclusions from that vision; to the Symbolists, the moderns, it is more; it is the right to complete realisation of one's self- hood — which includes and demands economic jus- tice — in action and in art. It is that new idealism which, to quote Gourmont again, "means the free and personal development of the intellectual in- dividual in the intellectual series." These movements are general and European. One need adduce no external influence to account for their appearance in any of the great literary nations, least of all in the self-contained and self- sufficient intellectual life of France. Yet it seems very certain that the modern movement in French poetry drew a good deal of its deeper guidance from the one literature in which Romanticism had shown little if any interest in political liberty, but [7] very much in that of personal conduct, of specula- tion and of art. Here I may let M. de Gourmont speak once more : "In relation to man, the thinking subject, the world, all that is external to the I, exists only according to the idea of it which he shapes for himself. We know only phenomena, we reason only concerning appearances: all truth in itself escapes us : the essence is unapproachable. It is this fact which Schopenhauer has popularised in his very clear and simple formula : the world is my representation." The French Symbolists, in other words, drew their doctrine of freedom in life and art partly, at least, from the doctrine of the post-Kantian idealists. The creative self that projects the vision of the universe stands above it and need not be bound by the shadows it has itself evoked. The inner realities became the supreme realities : Maeterlinck translated the Fragments of Novalis; Verhaeren declared that the "immediate end of the poet is to express himself." The em- phasis placed upon the unique and creative self might possibly be attributed to the Flemish and hence Germanic temper of the Belgian poets. But during the crucial years of the Symbolist [8] movement the same view was shared by the most purely Latin poets who used the French tongue. In his excellent monograph on Henri de Regnier, M. Jean de Gourmont speaks of this matter in unmistakable terms : " Symbolism was not, at first, a revolution, but an evolution called forth by the infiltration of new philosophical ideas. The theories of Kant, of Schopenhauer, of Hegel and Hartmann began to spread in France: the poets were fairly intoxicated by them." It is cu- rious to note, in this connection, the omission of Fichte's name. But the young men of eighteen hundred and eighty-five were not exact students and thinkers. They simply found in the philoso- phy of a definite school and age a vision which ac- corded with their own innermost feeling concern- ing the new freedom that must be won for life and for its close and intimate expression in the art of poetry. [9] n FORERUNNERS AND FOUNDERS OF SYMBOLISM "En verite il n'y a pas de prose : il y a Falphabet, et puis des vers plus ou moins serres, plus ou moins diffus." Stephane Mallarme "Le vers libre, au lieu d'etre, comme l'ancien vers, des lines de prose coupees par des rimes regulieres, doit exister en lui-meme par des alliterations de voyelles et de consonnes parentes." Gustave Kahv The young men of eighteen hundred and eighty- five began, as was natural, by an energetic rebel- lion against the dominant school of poetry. That school, the Parnassien, cultivated, as everyone knows, objectivity of vision, sculpturesque full- ness and perfection of form, a completely imper- sonal attitude. It had been practically if not officially founded when Gautier published his [io] Emaux et Catnees in 1850, it had shown remark- able power of endurance ; it was unshaken by the incomparable notes of pure lyricism with which Verlaine, since 1868, had modified his partial ac- ceptance of its own technical standards. It counted among its adherents every first-rate talent that had come to maturity toward the middle of the nineteenth century, even, again with certain modifications, that of Charles Baudelaire. Its representative poet was Lec onte deJ Lisle. And Leconte de Lisle was a great poet. It is easier to see that now than it was, perhaps, twenty years ago. The rich, sonorous verses of the Formes-an- tiques and the Poemes—b&Fbares seem still to march as with the ringing mail of an undefeated army. And in every mind that he has once im- pressed remain as permanent possessions those images in stone or bronze under skies of agate or drenched in radiance which he embodied in the clang and thunder of his verse. But there was little personal, little of his own mind, except that one proud and imperturbable gesture ; his art was, after all, decoration, even though it raised the decorative to heroic dimensions. . . . The [11] younger generation that wanted intimate, con- crete truth, subtle and personal, not large and gen- eral, that wanted, in a word, not eloquence but lyricism, inevitably arose against him and his fel- lows — against the rather timid naturalism of Francois Coppee, against the glittering dexterity of Teodore de Banville, the expounder in prac- tice and criticism of the Parnassien technique. The young poets of the time turned, among the men of their own land and speech, to one dead and two living writers : to Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine and Stephane Mallarme. It is true that in Les Fleurs du Mai (1857) Baudelaire's verse is as firmly and precisely moulded as any Parnassien's, his rimes are as so- norous, his stanzaic structure as exact. Only in the sweep and passionate speed of perhaps two pieces, Le Balcon and Harmonie du soir: "Voici venir les temps ou vibrant sur sa tige Chaque fleur s'evapore ainsi qu'un encensoir . .." 1 is there a new cadence. His influence upon the iLord Alfred Douglas translates happily if freely: "This is the hour when swinging in the breeze, Each flower like a censor sheds its sweet . . ." [12] future was due to his substance: to the merciless revelation of himself, his stubborn assertion of his strange and morbid soul, his harsh summons to others to cast aside their masks of moral idealism and confess themselves his equals and his kin : "Hypocrite lecteur — mon semblable — mon frere." 1 It was due to hisjpelief in the unexplored wealth of beauty and horror of the subjective self: "Homme, nul n'a sonde le fond de tes abtmes . . ." 2 And that is, in a very real sense, what the Symbo- lists, the moderns, set out to do. Finally, by some strange prevision, or else in a moment of imagina- tive caprice, he struck off in a single sonnet, Cor- respondances (which has been quoted again and again,) the subtlest doctrine of the Symbolists: "La nature est un temple oii de vivants piliers Laissent parfois sortir des confuses paroles ; L'homme y passe a travers des forets de symboles Qui l'observent avec des regards familiers . . ." s 1 "Hypocritical reader — my fellow — my brother !" 2 "Man, no one has sounded the bottom of thy abysses." s Nature is a temple wherein living colmuns sometimes let con- fused words escape; man wanders there across forests of symbols which observe him with familiar glances." [13] To capture these obscure but revealing hints — that, too, was part of the symbolist programme. But the influence of^BajidfiLaire-Hpon the living poets of France was slight compared to that ex- erted by one far stranger and far greater than him- self, bvJEajiLMaifiL.C 1844-1896). For Ver- laine was not only almost their contemporary — the wayward, childlike, mystical creature, giving them, as on a memorable occasion he did to George Moore, some divine sonnet scribbled in bed in a fetid slum: he was also the purest lyrical singer that France had ever known. The most musical songs of the Romantics have a touch of self-con- sciousness and eloquence compared to his. Per- haps an infusion of Northern blood (he was born at Metz) gave him the soul of a minstrel and a child; it left him Latin enough to be, with all his unrestrained lyricism, a subtle, accomplished and even learned technician. He mastered the Par- nassien method in his youth and used it exquis- itely. But even in the early and correct Poemes saturniens (1866) there is the unforgettable Chanson d'Automne with its strange sob, with that note of the ineffable, the beyond in human longing Missing Page Missing Page cannot be said to have introduced any fundamen- tal change. Yet everywhere among the modern poets is heard the music of those pale vowels of his, those trembling verses, as in the lines called Men- uet which made the reputation of M. Fernand Gregh because they were mistaken for Verlaine's : "Chanson frele du clavecin, Notes greles, fuyant essaim Qui s'efface . . . " l The direct master of the moderns, however, and the acknowledged founder of the Symbolist school was Stephane Mallarme ( 1842-1808). a man of a very thin though very fine vein of authentic gen- ius. His power over the younger men of his day was due not wholly, not even primarily, to his sheaf of mystical and undulating verse. He had reflected closely and deeply upon the sources of poetry and upon the nature of the poetic imagina- tion; he communicated the results of his thought not only in his critical fragments but in exquisite monologues during those famous Tuesday eve- nings of his in the Rue de Rome which became an 1 "Fragile song of the harpsichord, pale, sharp notes, a fleeing swarm that fades away . . ." [17] institution in the middle eighties. There gath- ered to be with him "in that drawing room faintly lit to which the shadowy corners gave the aspect of a temple and an oratory," and to hear his "se- ductive and lofty doctrine on poetry and art" Kahn and Ghil and Laforgue, Viele-Griffin and Regnier, Stuart Merrill and Louys and Mauclair, John Payne and Arthur Symons and a group of lesser talents. "We passed unforgettable hours there," writes M. Albert Mockel, "the best, doubt- less, that we shall ever know. . . . And he who made us welcome there was the absolute type of poet, the heart tha|Tcan love, the brow that can understand, inferior to nothing, yet disdaining nothing, for he discerned in each thing a secret teaching or an image of Beauty." The tributes of the younger men who heard him thus form a small body of very beautiful writing and include noble verses of memorial or praise by Viele-Grif- fin, by Louys and by Regnier. The latter de- scribes in the fine dedicatory sonnet to La Cite des Eaux the external aims of other poets and then turns to Mallarme : [18] "Mais vous, Maitre, certain que toute gloire est nue, Vous marchiez dans la vie et dans la verite Vers l'invisible etoile en vous-meme apparue." 1 I have tried elsewhere to give a close interpreta- tion of the symbolist doctrine 2 which is perma- nently connected with the name of Mallarme and has shaped not only the work of the maturer of the living poets of France but even that of the youngest among them. It comes, in plainest terms, to thisrj that the poet js, fn " gp **"* ^"«""1g ^ the phenomenaiworld exclusively as symbols of that inner or spiritual reality which it is his aim to proj ect in art. In this there is, of course, nothing absolutely new. Poets, especially lyrical poets, have, as a matter of fact, always done that quite instinctively. Images drawn from the world which the senses perceive are our only means of communicating the nameless things of the inner life. What was and is relatively new in the doc- trine and the practice of the Symbolists is their 1 "But you, Master, assured that all glory is bare, you trod the ways of life and truth toward that invisible star arisen in your- self." 2 Vide: Lewisohn. The Modern Drama (Second Edition). Chapter V. [19] subtle and conscious cultivation of this method, their rejecti on (in the heat of the reaction against the Parnassiens) of t he objective as utterly devoi d of significance , of truth, even of existenc e, their search for the^slrange kndQnysteriou^ the unob- served and unheard of in the shifting visions of the world. . . . But I shall let Mallarme speak briefly for himself: "To name an object is to sup- press three-fourths of the delight of a poem which consists of the happiness of divining little by lit - tle; poetic vi sion arises from sugges tion (le sug- gerer voilale reve). It is the perfect use of th is myster y which constitutes the symbol, to evoke little by little an object in order to show a state of soul, or, inversely, to disengage from it a state o f soul by a series of decipherings." To this may be added a passage from the famous manifesto which Jean Moreas, in his symbolist days, published in Le Figaro (September 18, 1886) : "Symbolist poetry seeks to clothe the idea in a sensible form which, nevertheless, shall not be its final end and aim, but shall merely serve to express the idea which remains subjective." In this sentence ap- [20] pears very clearly, so clearly as perhaps nowhere else, the Symbolist's reaction against naturalism in both art and thought, against the "heavy and the weary weight" of an objective world, its insist- ence upon the freedom of the creative soul /. . . Mallarme's personal teaching and practice was, of course, more esoteric. He dreamed, like Wagner, whom Verlaine and all the Symbolists adored, of a synthes is of the arts . A poem was to partake of music, of the plastic arts, of philosophic thought. To each of his verses, in the excellent interpreta- tion of M. Teodore de Wyzewa, "he sought to at- tach several superimposed senses." Each was to be an image, a though t, a note of music — a frag- ment of that largp and mystir harmony in which the thinker and the w orld he thinks are one. . . . * It w as all essentially, I r epeat, a liberation from the scientific, the obiective, the leleullebb le alrty of earth to jvvhic ii^iiilhe. doctrine of the Natural- lSts- Qhir souls are in bondagfl ; it was a re action of personality , Q f the freedom and sp lendor of the inner self, it was, as I said in starting, the modern striving toward self-hood. The new spirit of poetry demanded a new form. To the discovery of this new form Mallarme had contributed rather less than even Verlaine. Both used, with whatever new cadences within the verse, with whatever new lightness and brightness of rime, the traditional methods of French prosody : an identical number of syllables in the corre- sponding lines of a given poem, the rigid alterna- tion of masculine and femine rimes, a rather strict limitation in the number and character of stan- .zaic forms. From this description it is clear that the vers libre invented and cultivated by the Sym- bolists did not mean any extraordinary liberty of versification from the point of view of any pros- ody but that of France. To the poets of Eng- land and Germany an arbitrary or personal varia- tion of line length, as in the Pindarics from Cowley on, entire freedom of riming, the building of qua- trains on a single rime had been immemorial pos- sessions. They had, in truth, long gone beyond the earliest innovations of the Symbolists. For neither Kahn, Laf orgue nor Viele-GrifSn ever dis- carded rime wholly. But that had been done, to go back no farther, by Southey and Shelley, by [22] Goethe and Novalis, by Heine and Matthew Ar- nold. The early vers libre, then, was simply a flexible and rather undulating form of lyric or odic verse, following in its cadences the development, the rise and fall, of the poet's mood, furnishing in its swaying harmonies an orchestration to thought and passion. Lyrical pieces of this char- acter are Verhaeren's November (xi), Regnier's Scene at Dusk (xix), Kahn's Provence (xxvm), and Gourmont's The Exile of Beauty, (xxxiv). "To whom, then," asks M. Remy de Gourmont, "do we owe vers libre?" And he answers: "To Rimbaud whose Illuminations appeared in La Vogue in 1886, to Jules Laforgue who at the same period and in the same precious little review — which M. Kahn was editing — printed Legende and Solo de Lune, and, finally, to M. Kahn himself." It would seem, as a matter of fact, that the inno- vations of Rimbaud were slight and that Laforgue knew of M. Kahn's theories for many years. The latter's Les Palais Nomades (1887) was, in addi- tion, the first actually published volume of vers libre; it made a great stir in both France and Bel- [23] gium and was directly responsible for the prosodic development that continued with Viele-Griffin's Joies (1889), with its significant preface, Regn- ier's Poemes anciens et romanesques (1890), and Verhaeren's A u bord de la route ( 1 89 1 ) . No further innovations in French versification were made until quite recently, except by M. de Regnier when he almost though not quite abandoned rime in the charming Odelettes of his volume Les Jeux rustiques et divins (1897). There is available, at least at present, no evi- dence of any direct foreign influence upon the rise of free verse in French poetry. Nor, were there such evidence, would I be willing to attach any sig- nificance to it. A great many sins have been com- mitted by the scholarly search for influences. A saner and more philosophic view of the history of literature regards the appearance of new sources of inspiration and new forms of expression as out- growths of those larger spiritual forces that are wont to affect at the same time or almost at the same time groups of people that have reached a like stage of development. The modern emer- gence of the free personality from the merely po-/ [24] litical individual — the voter who in his day suc- ceeded the tribesman and the slave — accounts for the change in the passions and the forms of poetry in Goethe and in Shelley, in Whitman and Henley, in Richard Dehmel and in Henri de Regnier. Thus, too, it is interesting rather than important when M. Kahn says : "I am persuaded and certain, as far as I am concerned, that the influence of mu- sic led us to the perception of a poetic form at once more fluid and precise, and that the musical sensations of our youth (not only Wagner, but Beethoven and Schubert) had their influence upon my conception of verse when I was capable of ut- tering a personal song." "A personal song" — that ambition is the secret of the age and the move- ment. "The poet shall obey his personal rhythm," M. Viele-Griffin repeats. "The poet's only guide is rhythm ; not a rhythm that has been learned, that is crippled by a thousand rules which ■ others have invented, but a personal rhythm that he must find within himself." Thus M. Adolph Rette summed up the matter so early as 1893 in the Mercure de France. Thus only, one may add, did these poets hope to achieve that "personal [25] art" which, according to Gourmont, "is the only art." In the works of the earliest practitioners of free verse, gifted poets as they all are, the new form had, at times, a timbre that was merely quaint or an air of conscious violence. The personal rhythm, especially in the structure of the stanza — or, rather, verse-paragraph — was apt, in the days of protest and polemic, to be more personaLjhan rj^thqjic. In the hands of those members of the school, however, who were capable of a notable inner development, the new vers libre became an instrument of poetic expression that gave not only a new freedom but an ampler and more spiritual music to French verse : an instrument at once plan- gent and sonorous, capable of both subtle grace and large majesty. It has survived the reactions and new experiments to be chronicled later; it is used by so recent a poet as M. Fernand Gregh as the vehicle of what is, perhaps, his most admirable single poem Je vis. . . . : "Mais a mon tour j'aurai connu le gout chaud de la vie: J'aurai mire dans ma prunelle, Petite minute eblouie, [26] La grande lumiere eternelle : Mais j'aurai bonne joie au grand festin sacre; Que voudrais-je de plus? J'aurai vecu . . . Et je mourrai." x That has neither the stormy power of Verhaeren's La Foule nor the noble melancholy of Regnier's Le Vase. But any one sensitive to the music of the language in which it is written must feel its native and unforced beauty, the liquid pathos of its lingering cadences. 1 "But in my turn I shall have known the warm taste of life: I shall have mirrored in my eye-ball, a brief and dazzling minute, the great eternal light; but I shall have a goodly joy in the great, sacred feast; what more would I have wished? I shall have lived . . . And I shall die." [27] Ill THE TRIUMPH OF SYMBOLISM "La nature parait sculpter Un visage nouveau a son eternite ; Tout bouge — et Ton dirait les horizons en marche." Emile Verhaeren "... Elle me dit; Sculpte la pierre Selon la forme de mon corps en tes pensees, Et fais sourire au bloc ma face claire ..." Henri de Regnier The movement was founded; the instrument of expression was forged. There arose from it two poets of high and memorable character, the two I have already named: Emile Verhaeren (1855— 1915) and Henri de Regnier (b. 1864). Though M. Verhaeren died but, as it were, the other day, and M. de Regnier is just arriving at the ripest period of his own genius, there can be no reason- able doubt that these two, at least, of the French [28] poets who started as Symbolists have permanently enriched the literature of the world. They resemble each other in nothing but in the language they use and in certain new liberties of external form. As men and as artists they are deeply divided. Verhaeren is a man of the North, of wild cries and mystic raptures, of boundless ex- altations and agonies. There is a touch of fever in his visions both of his Flemish country-side and of the turbulent modern cities that he loved. He sought finally to release his tortured soul from the bondage of self by sinking it, merging it — not like the Germanic mystics of old in God or nature, but in that vast brotherhood of pain and effort that bears the burden and the heat of an industrial civ- ilisation. He was, as M. Leon Balzalgette, one of his most intelligent biographers, says, "a bar- barian whom fate doomed to paint his visions by the help of a language made rather to translate the delicate and refined sensations of extreme civ- ilisation." He had no sense of "measure," "tra- dition," "good taste." He is "with his poetical powers a man of the North, just as truly as Car- lyle. ..." That is well and tellingly put. [29] From Verhaeren's work there arises finally the vi- sion of a universe in tumult, not wholly free from chaos, midway between formlessness and form; against a black and desolate background flare the silver visions of the soul and the scarlet fires of steel furnaces. In this universe the poet wanders seeking rest, union, finding it at last in an act of complete acceptance, of utter oneness with the forces that shape the world. . . . His style is, necessarily, wholly alien to the tra- dition of the Latins. There is a constant strain- ing to express the inexpressible vastness of vision and passion, to put into speech that which tran- scends it. Thus, almost throughout his work, there is an abundance, sometimes too great an abun- dance, of strong words. Things are to him "enor- mous," "formidable," "mad," "anguished," "bru- tal," ferocious," "bitter," "fevered." The titles of some of his books are instructive in this respect : The Black Torches (Les Flambeaux noirs), The Hallucinated Country Sides (Les Campagnes ha- lucinees), The Tumultuous Forces (Les Forces tumultueuses), The Multple Splendor ( La Mul- tiple Splendeur) . Everywhere one shares his own [30] impassioned sense of the inadequacy of language, of the weakness of imagery which he strives to overcome by the use of sharp contrasts and of di- rect and forceful verbs : "Visages d'encre et d'or trouant l'ombre et la brume." 1 In other words, one never loses sight of Ver- haeren's racial kinship. He is a Fleming, a de- scendant of the men whom Rembrandt painted — a full-bodied, insatiable, Germanic folk. He was profoundly conscious of this fact and gloried in it: "Je suis le fils de cette race, Dont les cerveaux plus que les dents Sont solides et sont ardents Et sont voraces. Je suis le fils de cette race Tenace, Qui veut, apres avoir voulu Encore, encore et encore plus !" 2 One feels in such verses almost the march and ac- cent of Germanic versification. And Verhaeren 1 "Faces of ink and gold boring the shade and fog." 2 "I am a son of that race whose brains, more than their teeth, are solid and are ardent and voracious. I am a son of that tenacious race that desires, after having desired the more, more yet and ever more!" f3i] raises this impulse of his blood and race into a phil- osophic vision and a principle of conduct : "Et je criais : La force est sainte. II faut que l'homme imprime son empreinte Violemment, sur ses desseins hardis; Elle est celle qui tient les clefs des paradis Et dont le large poing en fait tourner les portes." 1 It is evident that the style and rhythm of such a poet will not seek, first of all, after beauty but after power, that in its failure it will touch vio- lence, in its success sublimity. And that is lit- erally true of Verhaeren's style. The development of his mind and art is im- portant not only for the student of his verse. Its nature is such that he becomes, by virtue of it, al- most symbolical of the pain and hope of his age. In his early volumes (Les Flammandes, Les Moines), he works evidently in the tradition of Rubens: he sets down a large, strong vision of large, strong things. Only in that vision there is already, despite all health and vigor, a deepening 1 "And 1 cried out : 'Force itself is sacred. Man must vio- lently stamp -his imprint upon his bold designs: it is force that holds the keys of all paradises and whose large hand makes their gates swing open.' " [32] melancholy, a mystical and subjective gloom. There followed a period of acute mental and phys- ical distress (1887-1890), bordering at times upon the pathological, in which he exalts pain itself with an almost savage note. Gradually he re- covered. Love helped him and gentle memories and, at times, exquisite visions such as that of Saint George, the symbol to him of spiritual valor : "J'ai mis, en sa pale main fiere, Les fleurs tristes de ma douleur." * But the liberating experience, since he could find peace in no form of personal idealism, religious or philosophic, came to him about 1892 through his identification with the Socialist movement. It meant far more to him than a humanitarian hope, though it was that, too: it meant now the possi- bility of accepting the modern world in its entirety, identifying himself with it, casting off the burden of self. In that inner urgency lay, of course, his weakness. But the process, too, clarified his thinking magnificently and freed him from many of the common and futile causes of moral pain : 1 " 'I laid into his proud, pale hand the sad flowers of my pain.' " t33] "Les droits et les devoirs'? Reves divers que fait Devant chaque espoir neuf, la jeunesse du monde !" l He now established in his visions and his verse that contrast between the past and future of civili- sation, symbolised for him by the country and the city and the latter's encroachment on the former: "L'esprit de campagnes etait l'esprit de Dieu . . . L'usine rouge eclat ou seuls brillaient les champs, La fumee a flots noirs rase les toits d'eglise." 2 Again and again, as in the turbidly yet greatly imaginative Les Cordiers, he compares the long ago with the burning present : "Jadis — c'etait la vie ardente, evocatoire; La Croix blanche de ciel, la Croix rouge d'enfer Marchaient, a la clarte des armures de fer, Chacune a travers sang, vers son ciel de victoire . . . Voici — c'est une usine; et la matiere intense Et rouge y roule et vibre, en des caveaux, Ou se forgent d'ahan les miracles nouveaux Qui absorbent la nuit, le temps et le distance." s 1 "Rights and duties? They are varied dreams that the world's youth dreams in the face of each new hope." 2 "The spirit of the country-sides was the spirit of God. . . . The factory flares where once the lonely fields shone; the smoke in black waves grazes the roofs of the church." * "Once on a time — life was all ardor and full of visions : The [34] But he drew his profoundest inspiration from the crowd (La Foule) of great cities. Here, in this universal, laboring heart he found the mean- ing of life, the hope for the future, liberation for his own soul. In these cities and crowds, he cried : "Je sens grandir et s'exalter en moi Et fermenter, soudain, mon coeur multiplie." * He saw the cities with all the accustomed fevered ardor of his vision. But in them he found his ul- timate hope : "Un vaste espoir, venu de l'inconnu deplace L'equilibre ancien dont les ames sont lasses." 2 And not only hope, it must be repeated, but free- dom. For he found here that "great hour in which the aspects of the world change, wherein that seems strange which once was just and holy, white Cross of heaven, the red Cross of hell marched, in the shining of iron armor, each across blood, toward its victorious sky. . . ." "To-day — yonder is a factory; matter, intense and red, rolls and vibrates there in the vaults wherein are forged with bitter labor those new miracles that swallow night and time and distance." 1 1 feel my multiplied heart suddenly grow great and seethe and exalt itself within me. 2 "A vast hope arisen from the unknown displaces the ancient equilibrium of which men's souls are weary." [35] wherein man ascends towards the summits of an- other faith, where madness itself, in the storms, forges a new truth !" With this blind communal birth of new truth and new law he strove to be at one: "Engouffre-toi, Mon coeur, en ces foules . . J" 1 His passion and his vision grew in apocalyptic fervor on this note. He alone among the greater modern poets dedicated himself utterly to the ex- tremest form of democratic faith — faith in the prophetic and creative power of the mere mass : "Mets en accord ta forces avec les destinees Que la foule, sans le savoir Promulgue, en cette nuit d'angoisse illuminee. Ce que sera demain, le droit et le devoir, Seule, elle en a l'instinct profond, Et l'univers total s'attelle et collabore Avec ses milliers de causes qu'on ignore A chaque effort vers le futur, qu'elle elabore, Rouge et tragique, a l'horizon." 2 1 "Engulf thyself, my heart, in these crowds . . ." 2 "Place thy strength in harmony with those destinies which, without knowing it, the crowd promulgates in this night lit by agonies. Of what the morrow will bring forth of right and duty the crowd alone has the deep instinct. And the whole uni- [36] That is very fervent and very noble writing. Yet one feels, I think, throughout such passages, a sense not of the highest strength — nothing of quiet power. He fled from his too troubled and in- sistent self to this extreme faith because he could not clarify that self or calm it; because he failed to be, in the deeper and serener sense, the master of his soul. A man and a poet almost but never wholly great. . . . To pass from Verhaeren to Regnier is to recall, involuntarily, Taine's old theory of the effect of climate on literature. For can any one be, more than Verhaeren, the creature of a fog-bound coast, a storm-beaten plain, a group of rain-swept cities % And then that golden-winged Muse (La Muse aux ailes d'or) of Henri de Regnier — does she not move in luminous gardens under a temperate but radiant sky, does she not hear the murmur of clear waters on the wooded slopes, does she not sing her austere dream of beauty in a calm and starry even- fall . . . ? No one could be more Latin than verse puts itself in harness and with its thousand causes of which we know nothing labors at each effort toward the future which the mass draws broadly, red and tragic, upon the horizon." [37] Regnier. Modern as he is, exquisite practitioner of free verse, mystical lover of beauty, he has the " divine elegance" of Vergil, the lovely suavitas, the discreet but piercing melancholy. He attains these qualities, of course, at the price of large and definite exclusions. The harsh cries, the tragic questions of the modern world, never break in upon the walled garden of his imaginings. He lives, as M. Jean de Gourmont has said, "in royal land- scapes, palaces of gold and marble which are noth- ing in reality but the setting in which the poet has chosen to place his dream." I would not have him otherwise. The world sets our hearts and brains on fire. Here, in the poetry of Regnier, is a place of ease and rest and noble solitude like that "great, good place" in Henry James' story, here beauty, though with so new a grace, goes through her eternal gesture and lays her hand upon the fever of our eyes. I would have him always in that attitude of his Discours en Face de la Nuit: "Je parlerai, debout et du fond de mon songe. . . erect [38] 1 "I shall speak standing erect and from the depth of my dream." And I would have his liquid voice die on the ear "Avec l'aube qui rit aux larmes des fontaines, Avec le soir qui pleure aux rires des ruisseaux." x His style is unique, both in its diction and its imagery, for an extraordinary blending of mod- ern sensitiveness with classic clearness and frugal- ity. Constantly, after his earliest symbolist poems, he employs the traditional Hellenic myths and legends to body forth his vision; he does so even in the freest of modern verse and so adds to those myths and legends a new freshness and a more troubling grace. The Latin in him is uncon- querable, the immemorial tradition absorbed him, until quite recently, more and more. As early as 1896 he wrote lines which would startle no one if found on some page of the Greek Anthology or of Tibullus. There is the same frugal restraint in sadness and in beauty. "Et mes yeux qui t'ont vu sont las d'avoir pleure L'inexorable absence ou tu t'es retire Loin de mes bras pieux et de ma bouche triste . . ." * 1 "With dawn that laughs with the tears of the fountains, with evening that weeps to the laughter of the rivulets." 2 "And my eyes which have seen thee are weary of having [39] One recalls, I think, those other verses — as tender and as full of longing — of the Roman elegist: "Te spectem suprema mihi cum venerit hora, Te teneam moriens deficiente manu." x H is growing preoccupation with beauty in its antique forms may be studied in the admirable ti- tles of his later volumes : Games Rustic and Di- vine (Les Jeux rustiques et divins), The Medals of Clay (Les Medailles d'Argile), The Winged Sandal (La Sandale ailee.) It would be doing him a grave wrong, however, to imagine that he takes up again any Neo-classic tradition; his inspi- ration and its sources are as alien as possible to either the method of the Renaissance or of the Sev- enteenth Century. He has chosen the imagery of the ancients because he has seen and felt it anew, for himself, and has deliberately used it in that vibrant, ultra-modern verse of his: "Un jour, encor, Entre les feuilles d'ocre et d'or wept over the inexorable absence to which thou hast withdrawn, far from my pious arms and my sad mouth.'' 1 "May I see thee when my supreme hour shall have come, may I, dying, hold thee with my failing hand." [40] Du bois, je vis, avec ses jambes de poil jaune, Danser un faune." * He finds the timelessness of beauty best inter- preted thus. "For Poetry," he writes, "has nei- ther yesterday nor to-morrow, nor to-day. It is the same everywhere. What it desires is to see itself beautiful and is indifferent, if only its beauty be reflected, whether the glass is the natural spring of the forest or some mirror in which a subtle ar- tifice shows unto it its divine countenance in the crystal limpidness of a fictive and imaginary wa- ter." One may assent to that theory or one may not. It is by the light of such thought, at all events, that M. de Regnier has written the most beautiful French verses of his age. He does not, of course, deny his modernity, his origin in time. He was a pupil of Verlaine and heard Mallarme in his youth and wrote : "II neige dans mon coeur des souffrances cachees. . . ." 2 with its obvious reminiscence of Verlaine's fa- mous: 1 "Again, one day, amid the forest's leaves of ochre and of gold I saw a faun dance with his yellow haired legs." 2 "It snows in my heart with hidden sufferings . . ." [41] "II pleure dans mon coeur Comme il pleut sur la ville. . . ." 1 He wrote : "O mon ime, le soir est triste sur hier. . . ." 2 And he proclaimed in those years : "La Terre douloureuse a bu le sang des Reves. . . ." s And his versification is as wavering and as untra- ditional in his last volume 'as in his first. The truth is that he took refuge in the antique vision of beauty from the excessive sensitiveness of his own temper, from the over-delicacy of his own pride. Life had to o great a power to woundhim _andsohe turned, i n poetry, to those objects of con- t emplation and those images that have no pang but the pang of beaut y : "Car la forme, l'odeur et la beaute des choses Sont le seul souvenir dont on ne souffre pas." 4 1 "It weeps in my heart as it rains on the town . . ." 2 "O my soul, the evening is sad over yesterday . . ." 3 "The anguished earth has drunk the blood of dreams." * "For the form, the fragrance and the beauty of things are the only memory from which one does not suffer." [42] In his last volume there is directer and more naked speech as in the powerful passion of Le Reproche, the grave and elevated frankness of L'Accueil, the remarkable avowal of La Foret. And he may continue upon this path. The marvellous beauty of the work of his middle years, however, will re- main in its union of classic grace and modern sub- tlety. That union was founded upon a personal inter- pretation of the post-Kantian idealism which came to France in the early days of the Symbolist move- ment. "I have feigned," says M. de Regnier, "that gods have spoken with me. ..." "Lis- ten: there is someone behind the echo, erect amid the universal life who bears the double arch and the double torch and who is divinely identical with us." That spirit of universal beauty who is at one with the All and at one with us arises out of that divine union in an hundred shadows of him- self and these shadows of the "invisible Face" the poet has sought to grave upon medals "soft and silvery as the pale dawn, of gold as ardent as the sun, of brass as sombre as the night — of every [43] metal that sounds clear as joy or deep as glory or love or death." And he has made the loveliest "of lovely clay, fragile and dry." And men have come to him and smiled and counted the medals and said: "He is skilful," and have passed on smiling : "Aucun de vous n'a done vu Que mes mains tremblaient de tendresse, Que tout le grand songe terrestre Vivait en moi pour vivre en eux Que je gravais aux metaux pieux Mes Dieux, Et qu'ils etaient le visage vivant De ce que nous avons senti des roses, De l'eau, du vent, De la foret et de la mer, De toutes choses En notre chair Et qu'ils sont nous divinement." 1 That passage completes the statement of the phil- osophical background of Regnier's poetry. It 1 "Did not but one of you then see that my hands trembled with tenderness, that all the great terrestrial dream lived in me to live again in them whom I engraved on pious metals — those gods of mine, — and that they were the living countenance of all that we have felt of roses, of water and the wind, of the forest and the sea, of all things in our flesh, and that, in some divine way, they are ourselves." [44] may also serve to illustrate the flexibility, the ex- pressiveness and range of his free verse music, even though it has not the ampler cadences of Le Vase. But indeed, M. de Regnier's versification is always — at least to a foreigner's ear — mere perfection. His music is usually grave and slow and deep, rarely very energetic, but of a sweetness that never cloys. He has used rime and assonance, he has denied himself no measure of freedom and variety, but he has also taken the alexandrine and drawn from it a note of profound spiritual grace and a more inner music. It is difficult to choose among the other poets who proceeded from Symbolism. They are many and there is hardly one of them who has not writ- ten memorably at times. But this is not a history of the modern poetry of France and it will suffice to speak briefly of Jean Moreas, of MM. Francis IViele-Griffin and Stuart Merrill, of the late Al- bert Samain and Remy de Gourmont and, still more briefly, of those younger men who carry the symbolist inspiration and method into the imme- diate present. Jean Moreas (1856-1910) a notably gifted and flexible Greek threw himself early and ar- dently into the Symbolist movement. But, by 1891, in his Le Pelerin Passione, he attempted to create a diversion, to found a new school, the briefly famous Ecole romane. He was concerned largely with the question of poetic diction and, through it, of poetic vision. He desired to bring about a "communion of the French Middle Ages and Renaissance with the principle of the modern soul," by using a selection from the archaic words of the Pleiade and even of the Roman de la Rose. Hence M. Anatole France promptly called him the Ronsard of Symbolism. And the lyrics of the Pelerin passione have, no doubt, a certain old- world sweetness wherever the obvious archaisms do not give them a somewhat obscure and artificial grace. His earlier symbolist verse, in which he took some very quaint and charming liberties of versification and poetic manner — ("Parmi les marroniers, parmi les Lilas blancs, les lilas violets. . . . ") 1 < 1 "Among the chestnut tree9, among the white lilacs, the violet lilacs . . ." [46] — are of the stuff of dreams and have a dreamy ca- dence : "Voix qui revenez, bercez-nous, berceuses voix. . . ." 1 Finally he left behind him both Symbolism and his own Ecole romane. "These things concern me no longer," he confessed in his middle age and, withdrawing into solitude, he wrote his last work: Les Stances (1901-1905). In these poems he returns to the traditional verse, to the traditional stanzaic forms. They have an extraordinary pu- rity of poetic outline, a notable dignity of speech and imagination, a just and proud perfection. It was the Hellenic soul in him, one must suppose, that made his last work so memorable an example of the classical spirit in modern poetry. His changes of mood and manner and theory were not without their influence upon the younger poets and no less a man that M. Paul Fort has written : I Ce que je dois a Moreas ne peut etre dit en paroles.'' The American, M. Francis Viele-GrifBn (b. 1864) was one of the very active founders of the 1 "O voices that return, cradle us, cradling voices . . ." 2 "What I owe to Moreas cannot be expressed in words." [47] Symbolist school and has remained true to it ever since. A poet of rare lyrical gift, he has always been concerned with his "interior vision" and has continued to hold that "conviction, common to Shelley, Wagner and Mallarme, that reality is a creation of the soul and art a superimposed crea- tion." With him, as with so many of the poets of modern France — Jewish, Greek, Flemish, An- glo-Saxon, Alemanic Swiss — one is tempted, wrongly perhaps, to attribute certain qualities of thought and style to racial origin. It is a fact, at all events, that M. Viele-Griffin is often haunt- ingly lyrical in a sense that is not characteristic- ally Latin and that in his mingling of verses of seven and eight syllables one seems to detect the introduction of an English cadence: "N'est-il une chose au Monde, Chere, a. la face du ciel — Un rire, un reve, une ronde, Un rayon d'aurore ou de miel. . >W. He is a poet who rarely touches the imaginatio: without also touching the heart, whose music 1 "Is there a thing in the world, dear, in the face of the sky — a laugh, a dream, a song, a beam of the dawn or of honey." [48] ranges from a lyrical lift to the fullness and grave- ness of the elegy. The other American who has become a modern French poet is M. Stuart Merrill (b. 1868). His general character as a man and an artist is at once evident from a correct interpretation of his own words : "Modern society is a badly written poem which one must be active in correcting. A poet, in the etymological sense, remains a poet every- where and it is his duty to bring back some love- liness upon the earth." Accordingly, M. Merrill, a revolutionary S ocialis t, has given unstintingly both of himself and of his fortune to his chosen cause. In art, on the other hand, he has been pre- occupied with beauty alone. His poems are woven upon the loom of • dreams ; they have a visionary magnificence, a glint as of shadows upon gold. Once at least in Les Poings a la Porte he has come near sublimity. His music has often a slow and lingering quality and he has used, with notable success, lines — so rare in French — that are longer than the alexandrine : "L'Amour entrera toujours comme un ami dans notre maison, [49] 'T'ai-je repondu, ecoutant le bruit des feuiUes qui tom- bent." * In turning to Albert Samain (1858-1900) we come once more upon the unmistakably Latin tem- perament. The first of his two celebrated vol- umes Au Jar din de TJ Infante (1893) is purely symbolist in inspiration and quality; in the second Aux Flancs du Vase ( 1898) he turns again to the beauty of the visible world, of the immor- tal gesture held fast as in the plastic arts which is, after all, perhaps the most characteristic method of French poetry. His verse here is still free and flowing and trembling; the pictures are sculptured or painted, and poetry adds nothing to this art except the element of motion before the final and memorable gesture is achieved. All his best poems follow this method and so he attains the white, sculptural beauty of Xanthis, the ruddy, flame-like glow of Pannyre aux Talons d'Or (xxxvr). i 1 The chief quality of the late M. Remy de Gour- mont's (1858-1915) character was an extreme 1 "Love will enter always like a friend into our house, I an- »wered thee while listening to the noise of leaves that fall." [50] subtlety — subtlety of mind and subtlety of the senses. The first made him a critic of the highest order even in a country of great critics. He car- ried far beyond Jules Lemaitre what is rather fool- ishly known as the impressionist method in criti- cism: the plain and sensible belief, namely, that a work of art is precious not through the tribal or social elements in it, but through the personal, that art knows no ought-ness of convention or precedent and that the test of beauty, different in that respect from truth, is a pragmatic one. . . . His poetry, of which he did not write a great deal, addresses itself to the nerves, to the finer senses. It is keen and strange and pale and, at its best, of a very individual music though always adhering to the prosody of the Symbolists. The younger members of the school, the late Charles Guerin (1873-1907), M. Camille Mau- clair (who is also a critic of distinction), M. Henry Bataille (the well-known playwright), M. Henri Barbusse (who recently achieved interna- tional fame with Le Feu), M. Henri Spiess and M. Fernand Gregh, have all continued the now familiar methods of modern French poetry. Each [51J has contributed his personal vision and his per- sonal note. But he has contributed these to a kind of poetry now firmly established and well recognisable: poetry that lives in the dawn and dusk of the mind, that sees its visions in the state of revery and projects its own shadows upon the face of the world — whose voice is a wavering music, the notes of a flute upon the breeze. . . . [52] IV THE LATER FORCES IN FRENCH POETRY "II dit je ne sais quoi de triste, bon et pur." Francis Jammes "La terre est le soleil en moi sont en cadence, et toute la nature est entree dans mon cceur." Paul Fort There has been no reaction against Symbolism in France. I am not at all sure that the very young- est group, with some exaggerations in prosodic matters, has not merely returned to the essential taste and method of the early eighteen hundred and nineties. In the meantime, however, there have appeared two powerful talents who, a rare thing in France, stand aside and alone, members of no group, no school, no cenacle: MM. Francis Jammes (b. 1868) and Paul Fort (b. 1872). Charles Guerin, in a set of very pure and very touching verses addressed to M. Jammes calls that [53] poet a "son of Vergil." The saying has been re- peated because M. Jammes, unlike the average French man of letters, lives in the country (at Orthez in the Hautes-Pyrenees) and writes about country matters which he understands admirably. Thus he recalls, in a superficial way, the poet of the Georgics. But one quotation, and a hack- neyed one, from those magnificent poems and one brief confession from M. Jammes will show the absurdity of the comparison and also define the French poet's character. Everyone knows the Vergilian lines : - "Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas. . . " 1 M. Jammes prefaced his first collection of poems with these words : "My God, you have called me among men. Here I am. I suffer and I love. I have spoken with the voice which you have given me. I have written with the words which you taught my father and my mother who transmitted them to me. I pass along the road like a burdened ass at whom children laugh and who droops his 1 "Happy he who has been able to understand the causes of things." [54] head. I shall go when you would have me, whither you would have me go. . . . The angelus rings." There is nothing here of the sad intel- lectual valor of the Augustans. It is the note of Saint Francis, (he humble brother of the birds and beasts. ... In a word, M. Jammes is a Catholic. So wholly a Catholic that one need not speak of intellectual submission in his case. He was born with the light of faith as his only guide and sees life with the wide-eyed reverential wonder of a little child or a great saint. He has the child's and the saint's simple-hearted fa- miliarity with divine things : "Ce n'est pas vous, mon Dieu, qui, sur les joues en roses, posez la mort bleue." 1 and the tender and vivid sense of the human ele- ments in his divinities : "Rappelez-vous, mon Dieu, devant l'enf ant qui meurt, que vous vivez toujours aupres de votre Mere." 2 So, too, as an artist, he is like the nameless sculp- 1 "It is not you, my God, who on the rosy cheeks will lay the blue of death." 2 "Recall, my God, before the dying child, that you live always near your own mother." tors who adorned the Medieval cathedrals, an humble craftsman in the light of God's glory, de- siring nothing for himself: "Et, comme un adroit ouvrier tient sa truelle alourdie de mortier, je veux, d'un coup, a chaque fois porter du bon ouvrage au mur de ma chaumiere." x He is aware, of course, of the life of his own age. He has read, as he says, "novels and verses made in Paris by men of talent." But these men and their works seem very forlorn and sad to him. He would have them come to his own country-side; for it is in the stillness of the fields and farms that the peace of God is to be found : "Alors ils souriront en fumant dans leur pipe, et, s'ils souffrent encore, car les hommes sont tristes, ils gueriront beaucoup en ecoutant les cris des eperviers pointus sur quelque metairie." 2 His own happiness is untroubled, his own submis- sion to the divine will complete. Like Saint 1 "And as a skilful workman holds his trowel, heavy with mortar, I would, at once, each time add some goodly work to the wall of my cottage." 2 "Then they will smile while smoking their pipes, and, if they suffer still, for men are sad, they will be greatly cured by hearing the cries of the slim sparrow-hawks over the farmlands." [56] Francis he has grasped the uttermost meaning of the Christian virtue of humility and prays to pass into Paradise with the asses : ". . . et faites que, penche dans ce sejour des ames sur vos divines eaux, je sois pareil aux ins qui mireront leur humble et douce pauvrete a la limpidite de l'amour eternel." 1 These quotations, fragmentary and brief as they are, will already have made clear some of the qualities of this extraordinary poet. The saint- like simplicity of his vision has really, on the purely descriptive side, made him a naturalist. For he is no burning mystic, no St. John of the Cross or Richard Crashaw, but a humble child of the Church who sees the immediate things of this world very soberly and clearly as they appear in their objective nature: "II y a aussi le chien malade regardant tristement, couche dans les salades venir la grande mort qu'il ne comprendra pas." 2 1 "Leaning over your divine waters in that sojourning place of souls, cause me to be like to the asses who will mirror their humble and gentle poverty in the limpidity of the eternal love." 2 "There is also the sick dog sadly watching, where he lies amid the lettuce, great death approach which he will not under- stand." [57] But he is always conscious of the relations which these things, according to his faith, sustain to the divine. And so, when his own dog dies, he ex- claims : "Ah! faites, mon Dieu, si vous me donnez la grace de Vous voir face a. Face aux jours d'fiternite, faites qu'un pauvre chien contemple face a face celui qui fut son dieu parmi l'humanite." x As becomes his spiritual character, M. Jammes has discarded all the vain pomp and splendor of verse, even the subtler and quieter graces of the Symbolists. His tone is conversational, almost casual; his sentences have the structure of prose. He uses rime or assonance or suddenly fails to rime at all. He seems merely bent on telling the simple and beautiful things in his heart as quietly as possible. What constitutes his eminence, his very high eminence, as an artist is the fact that his prosaic simplicity of manner, his naive matter-of- factness, his apparently (but only apparently) slovenly technique are so used as to make for a 1 "Ah, my God, if you grant me the grace of seeing you face to face in the days of Eternity, then let a poor dog contemplate face to face him who was his god among men." [58] new style in French poetry — a naturalistic style that rises constantly to a high and noble elevation of speech, and rises to that elevation, as Words- worth sought to do, by using the simplest words in the simplest order. Briefly, he does not adorn things until they become poetical; he sees them poetically. His imagination and his heart trans- form them, not his diction or his figures of speech. Is that not the highest aim of poetry"? And yet it were thrusting aside some very elementary and obvious considerations to call M. Jammes a great poet. A great artist he is — but not a great poet. For, except on the purely pictorial side, his sub- ject matter, the intellectual content of his work is, necessarily, without significance or permanent validity. It has subjective truth only. So, it may be said, has the substance of most modern verse. True ! But a subjectivity that finds har- monious echoes in a thousand souls achieves, after all, the only kind of objectivity, of reality that we know. That kind of reality and therefore sig- nificance M. Jammes, as a Catholic in the twenti- eth century, has largely denied himself. To his fellow-villagers at Orthez, who share his faith, he [59] will seem merely curious as a writer: to the in- tellectual world of the present and the future he will seem a little curious — however admirably and highly gifted — as a man. The fame of M. Paul Fort has attached, so far, mainly to the new kind of writing which he is said to have invented. He himself has pro- tested against this, and it is but natural that he should. It is equally natural for the public to fix its attention upon the startling innovations of which he is the author. But I must hasten to add that the revolutionary character of these innova- tions has been greatly exaggerated. In matters strictly prosodic M. Fort employs, as a rule, a principle which is conservative enough in its na- ture. And yet his style of writing is new, and not only new but charmingly successful and he him- self one of the most remarkable and delightful poets of our time. He writes and prints his verse as prose. In- stead of stanzas, the eye is given paragraphs, now long, now short. But I must emphasise the fact that the length and rhythmic character of the [60] paragraphs in any given poem is, nearly always, the same. Thus the one essential characteristic of verse (in the narrower sense), the recurrence of rhythm-groups that are felt to be equal in time, is preserved. If now one begins to analyse these paragraphs it will be found that, with definite but not very numerous exceptions, they resolve them- selves into lesser equal rhythm-groups or — lines. And these lines are, granting many exceptions again, verses of eight, ten or twelve syllables. Here is an example of two octosyllabic verses printed as prose : "Pourquoi renouer l'amourette? C'est-y bien la peine d'aimer"?" 1 And here of two deccasyllabic verses : "Ah! que de joie, la flute et la musette troublent nos cceurs de leurs accords charmants. . . ." 2 It is in the use of the twelve-syllabled verse, of the alexandrine, that M. Fort is most original. The rhythmic unit that he uses is in reality the 1 "Why knot again our broken love ? Is the sorrow of love worth while?" 2 "Ah, what delight, the flute and the bagpipe trouble our hearts with their charming harmonies . . ." [61] hemistich or stave of six syllables without, how- ever, letting the full movement of the alexandrine ever escape the ear entirely. Thus he can con- stantly use internal rime or assonance and also un- rimed end syllables. To illustrate this manner of his fully I shall quote a rather long verse-para- graph, italicising the syllables that have assonance or rime. And I use a paragraph in which M. Fort, who is rather irresponsible in this respect, allows their full, traditional value to all the mute e's but two: "O grave, austere pluie, oii monte Tame des pierres et qui portez en vous une f roide lumiere, glacez mon ame en ieu, rendez mon coeur severe, imposez la faa.ich.eur aux mains que je vous tends! L'averse tombe un peu . . . elle tombe . . . j' attends . . . Quoi! la lune se leve? Quoi! l'orage est passes? Quoi! tout le del en Reurs? et l'air sent, par bonifies, l'oeillet, la tvbtreuse, la rose et la poussiere?" Une etoile d' amour sur le Louvre a glis.se'.