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U N I V
E R S A L
L I B R
A R Y
U N I V E
R S A L
L I B R A
R Y
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The POETS of
M O D E R N F R A N C E
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The POETS ofMODERN FRANCE
byLUDWIG LEWISOHN
A . M . , L I T T . D .
P R O F E S S O R A T T H E O H I O S T A T E U N I V E R S I T Y
N E W Y O R K B . W . H U E B S C H M C M X I X
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C O P Y R I G H T , 1 9 1 8 . B Y
B . W . H U E B S C H
First printing, April , 1918
Second printing, February, 1919
P R I N T E D I N U . S . A .
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P R E F A C E
IT is time that the art of translation, of which we
have many beautiful examples in English, shouldbe st ri ct ly distinguished fr om the trade. L ike
acting or the p lay ing of music, ji t is an ar t of inter
pretat ion, more di ff icul t than either in this respect:
that you must interpret your original in a medium
never contemplated by its author. It requires, atits 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, thanthe actor's over the expression of his voice or the
gestures of his body . I t s a im , too, is iden tica l
with the aims of those sister arts of interpretation:
to give a clear voice to beauty that would else be
du mb or quite muffled. For even to in te ll ig en tlovers of the arts a subtle or intricate poem
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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 translatorof poetry'? For it is w i t h poe try that I am here
concerned. It shou ld be clearly, fi rs t of a l l , to
produce a beauti fu l poem. If he has not done
that he may have served the cause of information,
of language study. In ar t he has co mmit ted ap la in inep titude. If he has produced a be aut ifu l
poem, much should be forgiven him, although a
beautiful poem may not, necessarily, be a beau
t i f u l trans lat ion . To be tha t it must sustain cer
ta in relations to its or ig in al. 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 shou ld be as l i t t l e definite
al terat ion, addit io n or omission as possible. In
the translations in this vo lum e there w i l l no t 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,
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of course, be sensitive ly borne in m i n d . One
id iom must be made no t only to copy bu t r i g h t l y to
in terpre t the other. It is better, however, to risk
a slight obscurity which time and the growth ofnew 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 moredif ficult and exacting matter of fo rm . Th e lan
guage involved w i l l , of course, modify the charac
ter of the translator's prob lem. If he is deal ing
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 o r ig ina l . If he is trans
lating from a language that has a quite different
prosody, such as the French, he must interpret
the or ig ina l 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
or ig inals . W h e n the prosodic contour of a poem,
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however, depended definitely upon the contrast of
alexandrines with longer or shorter verses, I have
preserved the exact sy llabic lengths. In ly r ic a l
measures the aim must be, of course, to hear thecharacteristic 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
fo rm . W h a t characterises a poet, above a l l 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 o f l i f e . I t is here th at
the trans la tor comes upo n 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 ori g in a l poet used his o w n . 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
V l l l
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poetry should be. B u t to have at tem pted 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 ofmodern France I have no such apology to make.
Cr itics of power and place have to l d me repeatedly
how wrong-headed my cr it ic al metho d is. L e t
me re min d them , who kno w 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
N e w Poetry and the N ew Cr iti ci sm have preva iled
in so far as they produced excellent work accord
ing to their own intentions and in harmony with
their ow n aims. In every age the cr i t ica l conser
vatives have protested in the name of eternal prin
ciples w h ic h , alas, are no t eternal at a l l . A n d
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
s t i l l newer ar t. . . . B u t today I am in the ri gh t ,
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CONTENTS
PREFACE, V
I N T R O D U C T I O NI T H E SOURCES OF T H E N E W POETRY, I
I I FORERUNNERS AN D FOUNDERS OF SY M BO LI SM , IO
a) Charles Baudelaireb) Paul Verlainec) Stephane Mallarmed) Gustave Kahn
I I I T H E T R I U M P H O F S Y M B OL I SM , 2 8
a) E mile Vcrhaerenb) Henri de Regnierc) Jean Moreas—Francis Viele-Griffin—Stuart
Merrill—Albert Samain—Remy de Gour-mont
d) The Minors
I V T H E LA TER FORCES I N F RE NC H POETRY, 5 3a) Francis Jammesb) Paul Fortc) Late Romantics and Naturalistsd) The Youngest Groupe) Conclusion
T H E P O E T S O F M O D E R N F R A N C E
S TE PH A N E M A L L A R M E
. I APPAR ITI ON, 73
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P A U L V E R L A I N E
I I M Y F A M I L I A R D R E A M , 7 4
I I I S E N T I M E N T A L D IA L O G U E , 7 5
I V T H E G O O DL Y S O N G , 7 7
V A S O NG W I T H O U T W O R D S , 7 8
V I A N O T H E R S O N G W I T H O U T W O R D S, 7 9V I I L A T E W I S D O M , 8 0
A R T H U R R I M B A U D
V I I I T H E S L E EP ER I N T H E V A L L E Y , 8 1
G E O R G E S R O D E N B A C H
I X I N S M A L L T O W N S , 8 2
E M I L E V E R H A E R E N
x T H E M I L L , 8 3
X I N O V E M B E R , 8 5 .
X I I T H E POOR, 8 8
X I I I L I F E , 9 0
J E A N M O R E A S
X I V O L I T T L E F A I R I E S . . . , 9 2
X V A Y O U N G G I R L S PE A K S, 9 3
X V I STANZAS, 9 4
J U L E S L A F O R G U E
X V I I A N O T H E R B OO K . • . , 9 6
H E N R I D E R E G N I E R
X V I I I T H E F A I R H A N D S , 9 7
X I X SCENE A T DUSK, 99X X A LESSER ODE, I O I
X X I I N S C R I P T I O N F O R A C I T Y ' S G A TE O F W A R R I O R S ,
103X X I I O N T H E S H O R E , I O 5
X X I I I T H E F O R E S T , 1 0 6
X X I V C H R Y S I L L A , 1 0 8
F R A N C I S V I E L E - G R I F F I N
X X V O T H E R S W I L L C O M E , 1 0 9
X X V I ' T I S T I M E FO R U S T O SAY GOOD N I G H T , 1 1 0
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G U S T A V E K A H N
X X V I I S O NG , 1 1 1
X X V I I I P R O V E N C E , 1 1 2
S T U A R T M E R R I L L
X X I X A G A I N ST T H Y K N E E S . . . , 1 1 4X X X T H E P R OM I S E O F T H E Y E A R , l l 6
M A U R I C E M A E T E R L I N C K
X X X I T H E S E V E N D A U G H T E R S O F O R L A M O N D E , 1 1 8
X X X I I I H A V E S O U G H T . . . , 1 1 9
R E M Y D E G O U R M O N T
X X X I I I T H E S N O W , 1 2 0
X X X I V T H E E X I L E O F B E A U T Y , 1 2 1
A L B E R T S A M A I N
X X X V E V E N I N G , 1 2 3
X X X V I P A N N Y R E O F T H E G O L D E N H E E L S , 1 2 4
E D M O N D R O S T A N D
X X X V I I T H E D R U M M E R , 1 2 5
F R A N C I S J A M M E S
X X X V I I I T H A T T H O U A RT POOR . . . , 1 2 7
X X X I X T H E T R A I N E D ASS, 1 2 9
X L T H E C H I L D RE ADS A N A L M A N A C , 1 3 0
X L I . I N A U T U M N , 1 3 1
C H A R L E S G U E R I N
X L I I B R I G H T H A I R , I 3 3
H E N R Y B A T A I L L E
X H I I T H E W E T M O N T H , I 3 4
P A U L F O R T
X L I V T H E D E A D G I R L , 1 3 5
X L V I M A G E S O F O U R D R E A M S, I 3 6
X L V I I D Y L L , I 3 7
X L V I I B E L L O F D A W N , I 3 9
X L V I I I H O R I Z O N S , 1 4 1
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P I E R R E L O U Y S
X L I X P EG A S U S , 142
C A M I L L E M A U C L A I R
L PRESENCES, I 4 3
L I T H E M I N U T E , 1 4 4
H E N R I B A R B U S S E
L I I T H E L E TT E R, 1 4 5
F E R N A N D G R E G H
L I U D O U B T , 1 4 6
P A U L S O U C H O N
L I V E LE GY A T N O O N , I 4 8
HENRY SPIESS
L V H A N D S , 149
M A U R I C E M A G R E
L V I T H E C OQ U ET RY O F M E N , 1 ^1
L E O L A R G U I E R
L V I I W H E N I A M O L D . . . , 1 5 3
C H A R L E S V I L D R A C
L V I I I I F O N E W E R E TO K E E P . . . , 1 5 5
G EORG ES D U H A M E L
L I X A N N U N C I A T I O N , 1 5 8
E M I L E D E S P A XL X U L T I M A , 1 5 9
G E N E R A L B I B L I O G R A P H Y , 163
B I O G R A P H I C A L A N D B I B L I O G R A P H I C A L N O T E S O N
T H E T H I R T Y P O ET S , 169
I N D E X O F FI R S T L I N E S I N F R E N C H A N D E N G L I S H ,
195
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I N T R O D U C T I O N
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INTRODUCTION
I
T H E SO U R C E S O F T H E N E W P O E T R Y
Le Poete doit etre le maltre
absolu des formes de la Vie, et non
en etre l'esclave comme les Realistes
et les Naturalistes.
S T U A R T M E R R I L L
T H E struggle o f man, however b l i nd and stum
bling, however checked by tribal rage and tribal
terror, is toward self-hood. Th is t ru th is super
ficially assented to, it has become a glib common
place to the sociologist: it has really penetratedonly a few rare and lone ly minds. Th e ma jo ri ty ,
simple and learned, talks of individualism and
cries out upon the plainest implications of its own
doctrine. N o t on ly in l if e , bu t also in art . Y e t
the history of literature, and especially of poetry,
illustrates nothing in the history of the mind more
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the personal note in the older poetry of Europe,
N o r t h or South. Ev en when notable personali
ties gradually emerge—Dante, Walther von der
Vogelweide, Chaucer, V i l l o n — the hum bler singers s t i l l remain the voices of the fo lk . The sec
ond stage of poetical form, the stage illustrated by
all the great historic literatures, presents tradition
modified by personality . The forms are l im i ted
in number and in character. But in to each fo rmthe individual poet pours or tries to pour the
unique music of his soul. Th a t uni on 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 En gl ish poe try . A n d 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 w i l l 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
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sense—plays. The echoes of this cr it ic are a l l
about us: "It 's beautiful, but it isn't poetry!"
"I t ' s powe rfu l, bu t it isn't a p l a y ! " As though,
in some quite transcendental sense, there were adivine, Platonic, arch-typal idea of poetry, of
drama, which it is the duty of the artist to seek, at
least, to approach. In ar t, as in morals, as in
state-craft, the timorous Absolutist clings to his
Idea, his formula, as the permanent and abidingelement in the f lux of concrete th ings . 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 w i l l 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
tr ad it iona l forms any more at a l l . H e must find
his own form: his impulse is so new and strange
that it must create its o w n music or be silent. N o t
because he does not love and revere the forms of
the masters. B u t he cannot express himself
through them; he cannot, to speak in a homely
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experience. B u t another k ind of cri ti c has ap
peared and has been heard. A n d one such, the
late M. Remy de Gourmont, has admirably
summed up the whole matter: "The only excusethat 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 formulated before. He must create his own aesthetic,
—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
fo rm ul a were no t insufficient and a l i t t l e em pt y—
into three periods of struggle for the three kinds
of liberty that we must attain: political, intellec
tu a l, mor al . A n d in the histo ry of French poetry
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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 thingconcerned 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
ti ce— 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
d iv idua l in the in te lle ctua l 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 in te ll ec tual l i f e of France. Y e t it seems
very certain that the modern movement in French
poetry drew a good deal of its deeper guidance
fr om the one lite ratu re in wh ic h Roma ntic ism had
shown little if any interest in political liberty, but
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very much in that of personal conduct, of specula
t io n and of art. H er e I may let M . de Gourmont
speak once more: " I n re lat ion to ma n, the th ink ing
subject, the world, all that is external to theI, 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 popularisedin 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
po st -K an tian idealists. The creative self th at
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
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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 matterin unmistakable terms: " Sym bolism 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 f a i r l y in tox icated by them ." It is cu
rious to note, in this connection, the omission of
Fichte's name. B u t the young men of eighteen
hundred and eighty-five were not exact students
and thinke rs. They simp ly fo un d 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.
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II
FORERUNNERS AND FOUNDERS OF SYMBOLISM
"En vcrite il n'y a pas de prose: il y a
l'alphabet, et puis des vers plus ou moins
serres, plus ou moins diffus."
S T I P H A N E M A L L A R M E "
"Le vers libre, au lieu d'etre, comme
rancien 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 K A H N
T H E 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[10]
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Emaux et Camees 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 acceptance of it s ow n technical standards. I t
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 Baudela ire. It srepresentative poet was Leconte de Lis le . A n d
Leconte de Lisle was a great poet. It is easier to
see that now than it was, perhaps, twenty years
ago. Th e rich, sonorous verses of the Poemes an
tiques and the Poemes barbares seem still to
march as with the ringing mail of an undefeated
arm y. A n d in every m in d that he has once i m
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 an d thunder of his verse. B u t there was
l i t t l e personal, l i t t l e of his ow n m ind , except tha t
one proud and imperturbable gesture; his art was,
after all, decoration, even though it raised the
decorat ive to heroic dimensions. . . . T h e
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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 fellows—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 themen 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 preciselymoulded as any Parnassien's, his rimes are as so
norous, his stanzaic structure as exact. O n l y in
the sweep and passionate speed of perhaps two
pieces, he Bale on and Harmonie du soir:
"Voici venir les temps ou vibrant sur sa tige
C haqu e fleu r s'evapore ainsi qu'u n encensoir . . . " 1
is there a new cadence. H i s influence upon the
1 L ord A lf r ed Douglas translates happ ily if freely:
"This is the hour when swinging in the breezesEach flower like a censor sheds its sweet . . . "
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future was due to his substance: to the merciless
reve lat ion of himself , his stubborn assertion of his
strange and morbid soul, his harsh summons to
others to cast aside their masks of moral idealismand confess themselves his equals and his k i n :
"Hypocrite lecteur—mon semblable—mon f rere ." 1
It was due to his belief in the unexplored wealth
of beauty and ho rror of the subjective se lf :
"Homme, nul n'a sonde le fond de tes abimes . . ." 2
And that is, in a very real sense, what the Symbo
lists, the moderns, set out to do . F in a l l y , by some
strange prev ision, or else in a mom ent of im ag inative caprice, he struck off in a single sonnet, Cor-
respondanccs (which has been quoted again and
again,) the subtlest doctrine of the Symbolists:
"La nature est un temple ou de vivants piliers
Laissent parfois sortir des confuses paroles;
L'homme y passe a travers des forets de symboles
Qui i'observent avec des regards familiers . . ." 3
1 "Hypocritical reader—my fellow—my brother!"2 " M a n , no one has sounded the bottom of thy abysses."
3 N at ur e is a temp le wh er ei n l iv i n g colmuns sometimes let con
fused words escape; man wanders there across forests of symbols
which observe him with familiar glances,"
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To capture these obscure but revealing hints—
that, too, was part of the symbolist programme.
But the influence of Baudelaire upon the living
poets of France was slight compared to that exerted by one far stranger and far greater than him
self, by Pa ul V erlaine ( 18 4 4 -18 96 ) . Fo r Ver-
laine was not only almost their contemporary—
the wayward, childlike, mystical creature, giving
them, as on a memorable occasion he did to GeorgeMoore, some divine sonnet scribbled in bed in a
fetid slum: he was also the purest lyrical singer
th at 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 M e t z ) gave h im the soul of a minst re l and a
c h i l d ; i t l e f t h i m L a t i n e n o u g h t o b e , w i t h a l l h i s
unrestrained lyricism, a subtle, accomplished and
even learned technician. He mastered the Par-
nassien method in his youth and used it exquis
i t e ly . B u t even in the ear ly 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 lon gin g
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and regret which French poetry had never, or
never, at least, so simply and piercingly heard.
Eight years later had come the Romances sans
Paroles, the highest point, probably, in Verlaine'slyrical achievement, and again seven years later
Sages se. But even in the days of his declining
power, in the collections published when the mod
ern movement was fully under way— Am our
( 1888) , Farallelement (1889)—he kept the marvellous gift of suddenly lifting the hearer of his
verse into an infinite of imaginative pathos:
" M o n pau vre enfan t, ta voix dans le Bois de B ou
logne . . . " 1
or of imaginative splendor:
"Et, o ces voix d'enfants chantant dans la coupole." 2
The in fin it e . . . ! In that w ord lies the secret
of Verlaine, of his difference from all the past of
French poetry, of his power over its present and
fu tu re . H e does not exhaust his subject w i t h the
glowing but appeasable passion of the Romantics;
he does not paint his vision in the hard, luminous
1
"My poor child, thy voice in the Bois de Boulogne . . ."2 "And, O those children's voices singing in the cupola."
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colors of the Parnassiens; he strikes a discreet and
troubling note that leaves its vibrations in the
heart and in the nerves forever. H i s poet ry , as he
was well aware, withdrew deliberately from anyrelation to the plastic arts; it is full of images ad
dressed to the ear; it seeks magic rather than
beauty; it asks our tears rather than our admira
t ion . Words whic h the Parnassiens had used like
the brilliant stone fragments of an Italian enam-eller were to Verlaine notes in the music of thought
and passion; it is in this sense that he called his
finest volume: Songs Without Words. A l l this
is, of course, merely saying that Verlaine is a lyri
cal poet of the type of Shelley or H eine . B u t as
such his achievement was quite new and revolu
tionary in the literature of France.
Less revolutionary was his influence upon form.
He was bitter against the wrongs done by the Par
nassiens in the name of rime; he protested against
their sonorousness as he did against their brilliance
—"pas de couleur, rien que la nuance" —he used
the "rythmes impairs" verses of seven, eleven and
thirteen syllables; he strove to make the music of
verse subtler, more duct ile, more qu iver ing. He
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cannot be said to have introduced any fundamen
ta l change. Y e t everywhere among the modern
poets is heard the music of those pale vowels of his,
those trembling verses, as in the lines called Men-uct which made the reputation of M. Fernand
Gregh because they were mistaken for Verlaine's:
"Chanson fre le du c lavec in ,
Notes greles, fuyant essaim
Qui s'efface . . . " 1
The direct master of the moderns, however, and
the acknowledged founder of the Symbolist school
was Stephane Mallarme (1842—1898), a man of
a very thin though very fine vein of authentic gen
ius. H i s power over the younger men of his day
was due not wholly, not even primarily, to his
sheaf of mys tica l and undula t in g verse. H e had
reflected closely and deeply upon the sources of
poetry and upon the nature of the poetic imagination; 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 "Frag ile song of the harpsichord, pale, sharp notes, a fleeingswarm that fades away . . ."
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in st it ut io n in the middl e eighties. There gath
ered to be w i t h h i m " i n that dr aw ing room fa in tl y
lit to which the shadowy corners gave the aspect
of a temple and an oratory," and to hear his "seductive and lofty doctrine on poetry and art"
K a h n a n d G h i l a n d L a f o r g u e , V i e l e - G r i f f i n a n d
Regnier, Stuart M e r r i l l and Louys and M aucl air ,
John Payne and Arthur Symons and a group of
lesser talents. " W e passed unforget table hoursthere," 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 than can 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 Bea uty ." 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. Th e la tt er de
scribes in the fine dedicatory sonnet to La Cite des
Eaux the external aims of other poets and then
turns to M a l l a rm e :
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" M a i s v ous , M a i t r e , c e r ta i n que to ute g l o i r e est nue ,
Vous marchiez dans la v ie et dans la ver i te
V e r s l ' i nv i s i b l e e to i l e e n v o us- me me a ppa r ue ." 1
I have tried elsewhere to give a close interpretation 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 this: that the poet is to use the details of
the phenomenal world exclusively as symbols of
that inner or sp ir it ua l rea lit y which it is his aim to
project in ar t. In this there is, of course, no th ing
absolutely new. Poets, especially ly r i c a l poets,
have, as a matter of fact, always done that quite
ins tinc tively . Images dr aw n from the w o r l d
which the senses perceive are our only means of
communicating the nameless things of the inner
l i fe . W h a t was and is re la tive ly 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 theways of life and truth toward that invisible star arisen in yourself."
2 Vide:
L E W I S O H N . The Modern Drama
(Second Edition).Chapter V.
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subtle and conscious cultivation of this method,
their rejection (in the heat of the reaction against
the Parnassiens) of the objective as utterly devoid
of significance, of truth, even of existence, their
search for the strange and mysterious, 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 del ig ht of a poem which
consists of the happiness o f d i v i n i n g l i t t l e by l i t -
tle; poetic vision arises from suggestion (le sug-
gerer voila le reve). It is the perfect use of this
mystery which constitutes the symbol, to evokelittle by little an object in order to show a state of
soul, or, inversely, to disengage from it a state of
soul by a series of decipherings." To th is 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-
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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, l ike Wagner,
whom Verlaine and all the Symbolists adored, of a
synthesis 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 tobe an image, a thought, a note of music—a frag
ment of that large and mystic harmony in which
the th inker and the w o r l d he th inks are one. . . .
It was all essentially, I repeat, a liberation from
the scientific, the objective, the relentless realityof earth to which—in the doctrine of the Natural
ists—our souls are in bondage; it was a reaction of
personality, of the freedom and splendor of the
inner self, it was, as I said in starting, the modern
st ri vi ng tow ar d self-hood.
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The new spirit of poetry demanded a new form.
To the discovery of this new form Mallarme had
contributed rather less than even Verlaine . Bo th
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 strictlimitation 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 t ru th , long gone beyond
the earliest innovations of the Symbolists . For
neither Kahn, Laforgue nor Viele-Griffln ever dis
carded rime w ho l ly . B u t th at had been done, to
go back no farther, by Southey and Shelley, by
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Goethe and Novalis, by Heine and Matthew Ar
no ld . Th e early vers libre, then, was simply a
flexib le and rather un dul a ti ng fo rm of lyr ic 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. L y r i c a l pieces of this char
acter are Verhaeren's November ( x i ) , Regnier's
Scene at Dusk ( x i x ) , K a h n ' s Provence(xxv in) , and Gourmont ' s The Exile of Beauty,
( x x x i v ) .
"To whom, then," asks M. Remy de Gourmont,
"do we owe vers libre?" A n d he answers: " T o
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 Lcgende 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 fo r 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 Rel-
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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 rotnanesques (1890) ,and Verhaeren's A u bord de la route ( 18 91 ). 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 Jeuxrustiques 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, w o u ld I be w i l l i n g to attach any sig
nificance to i t . A great many sins have been com
m i t t e d by the scholarly search fo r 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
l ik e stage of development. The modern emer
gence of the free personality from the merely po-
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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 W h i t m a n and H en ley,in Richard Dehmel and in Henri de Regnier.
Thus, too, it is interesting rather than important
when M . K a h n says: " I a m persuaded and certain,
as far as I am concerned, that the influence of mu
sic led us to the perception of a poetic form atonce 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
te ri ng a personal song." "A personal song"—
that ambition is the secret of the age and the move
ment. "The poet shall obey his personal
r h y t h m , " M . V iel e-G rif fin repeats. "Th e 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 f ind w i t h i n himself ." Thus M . A do lp h
Ret te summed up the mat te r so ea rly as 1893 in
the Mercure de France. Thus on ly , one may add,
did these poets hope to achieve that "personal
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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 formhad, 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 personal thanrhythmic. 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 su rv ived 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,
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La grande lumiere eternelle:
M a i s j 'a u r a i bonne joie au gr an d festin sacrc;
Que voudrais-je de plus*?
J'aurai vecu . . .
Et je mourrai." l
That has neither the stormy power of Verhaeren's
La Foule nor the noble melancholy of Regnier's
Le Vase. B u t any one sensitive to the music of
the language in which it is written must feel itsnative and unforced beauty, the liquid pathos of
its li ngerin g cadences.
4 x "But in my turn I shall have known the w ar m taste of li fe :
I shall have mirrored in my eye-ball, a brief and dazzlingminute, the great eternal light; but I shall have a goodly joy in
the great, sacred feast; wh at more would I have wished? Ishall have lived . . . And I shall die."
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Ill
T H E T R I U M P H O F S Y M B O L I S M
"La nature parait sculpterUn visage nouveau a son eternite;
T o u t bouge—et Ton d ir ai t les horizons en march e."
E M I L E V E R H A E R E N
" . . . Elle me dit; Sculpte la pierre
Selon la forme de mon corps en tes pensees,E t fai s sourire au bloc m a face c la ire . . . "
H E N R I D E R E G N I E R
T H E movement was fou nd ed ; the instrument o f
expression was forged . Th ere arose f rom it tw o
poets of high and memorable character, the twoI have already named: Emile Verhaeren (1855—
1915) and H e n r i de Regnier ( b . 186 4) . Th o ugh
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
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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 ofexterna l fo rm . As men and as artists they are
deeply divide d. Verhaeren is a man of the N o r t h ,
of w i l d cries and mys tic raptures, of boundless ex
al ta tions and agonies. There is a touch of fever
in his visions both of his Flemish country-side andof the tu rb ul ent modern cities that he loved. H e
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
il is at io n. H e was, as M . Le on Balza lgette, 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
i l i sa t ion ." H e ha d no sense of "measure," " tr a
d i t i o n , " "good taste." H e is " w i t h his poetical
powers a man of the North, just as truly as Car-
l y l e . . . . " T h a t i s w e l l a n d t e l l i n g l y p u t .
[29] .
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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 thesilver 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 th at shape the w o r ld . . . .His style is, necessarily, wholly alien to the tra
d i t i o n of the Lat in s. The re is a constant stra in
ing to express the inexpressible vastness of vision
and passion, to put into speech that which tran
scends i t . Thu s, almost th roughout his wor k, there
is an abundance, sometimes too great an abun
dance, of strong words. Thin gs are to h im "enor
mous," "formidable," "mad," "anguished," "bru
t a l , " ferocious," "b it te r, " "fevered." T he tit les
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 Mult pie Splendor ( La Mul
tiple Splendeur). Ever yw he re one shares his ow n
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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 Tombre et la brume." 1
In other words, one never loses sight of Ver
haeren's racia l kinship- He is a F lem in g, a de
scendant of the men whom Rembrandt painted
— a fu ll-b od ied , insatiable, Germanic fo lk . He
was profoundly conscious of this fact and gloried
in i t :
"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. A n d 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!"
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raises this impulse of his blood and race in to a p h i l
osophic vision and a principle of conduct:
" E t je c ri a is : L a force est sainte.
I I faut que l 'homme imprime son empreinte
Violemment, sur ses desseins hardis;
Elle est relle 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 w i l l not seek, f i rs t of all, after beauty but
after power, that in its failure it will touch vio
lence, in its success sublimity. A n d tha t is l i t -
erally true of Verhaeren's style.
The development of his mind and art is im
por ta nt not on ly fo r the student of his verse. I t s
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 . O n l y in that vis ion there is
already, despite all health and vigor, a deepening
1 " A n d I cri ed out : 'Force itself is sacred. M a n must v io -
lently stamp his imprint upon his bold designs: it is force that
holds the keys of all paradises and whose large hand makesthei r gates s w ing open.' "
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melancholy, a mystical and subjective gloom.
There fo ll owed a per iod of acute mental and phys
ica l distress (1 8 8 7 - 1 8 9 0 ) , border ing at times upon
the pathological, in which he exalts pain itselfw i t h an almost savage note. Gradua ll y he re
covered. Lov e helped h i m and gentle memories
and, at times, exquisite visions such as that of Saint
George, the sym bol to h im of sp ir itu al va lo r :
"J'ai mis, en sa pale main fiere,
Les fleurs tristes de ma douleur." 1
But the liberating experience, since he could find
peace in no form of personal idealism, religious or
philosophic, came to him about 1892 through hisiden tificat ion w i t h the Socialist movement. I t
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,
id en ti fy in g himself w i t h i t , casting off the burdenof self. In tha t inner urgency lay , of course, his
weakness. B u t the process, too, cl ar if ied 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 mypain.'"
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"Les droits et les devoirs? Reves divers que fa i t
Devant chaque espoir neuf, la jeunesse du monde!" 1
He now established in his visions and his verse
that contrast between the past and future of civilisation, 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." 3
1 "Rights and duties? They are varied dreams that theworld'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."3 "Once on a time—life was all ardor and full of visions: The
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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 forhis ow n soul . In these cities and crowds, he c r ied :
"Je sens grandir et s'exalter en moi
Et fermenter, soudain, mon coeur multiplied" 1
He saw the cities with all the accustomed feveredardor of his vis ion. B u t in them he foun d his u l
timate hope:
" U n vaste espoir, ve n u de i' inc on nu deplace
L'equilibre ancien dont les ames sont lasses." 2
And not only hope, it must be repeated, but free
do m . F o r he found here th at "grea t 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 theshining of iron armor, each across blood, toward its victorioussky. . . ." "To-day—yonder is a factory; matter, intense andred, rolls and vibrates there in the vaults wherein are forged withbitter labor those new miracles that swallow night and time anddistance."
1 I feel my multiplied heart suddenly grow great and seethe
and exalt itself within me.2
"A vast hope arisen from the unknown displaces the ancientequilibrium of which men's souls are weary."
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wherein man ascends towards the summits of an
other faith, where madness itself, in the storms,
forges a new t r u t h ! " W i t h th is b l i n d communal
birth of new truth and new law he strove to beat one:
"Engouffre-toi,
M o n coeur, en ces foules . . ." 1
His passion and his vision grew in apocalypticfe rv or on th is note. He alone am ong 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'eile elabore,
Rouge et tragique, a Thorizon." 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 w il l bring forth of right andduty the crowd alone has the deep instinct. And the whole uni-
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T h a t is very fervent and very noble wri ting . Y e t
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 m an and a poet almost but never
wholl y great. . . .
To pass from Verhaeren to Regnier is to recall,
involuntarily, Taine's old theory of the effect of
climate on li terature . 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 H e n r i 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-
f a l l . . . ? No one could be more L a t i n than
verse puts itself in harness and with its thousand causes of
-which we know nothing labors at each effort toward the futurewhich the mass draws broadly, red and tragic, upon the horizon.''
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Regnier. M o de rn as he is, exquisite prac tit ion er
of free verse, mystical lover of beauty, he has the
" divine elegance" of V e rg il , the lo ve ly suavitas,
the discreet bu t pi ercing me lancho ly. He attainsthese qualities, of course, at the price of large and
definite exclusions. T h e harsh cries, the tragic
questions of the modern world, never break in upon
the wa ll ed garden of his imaginings . He lives, as
M. Jean de Gourmont has said, "in royal landscapes, 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 w o u ld no t have
h i m otherwise. T he w o r l d sets our hearts and
brains on fire . Here , in the poet ry 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 w o u ld have h i m always in
that attitude of his Discours en Face de la
Nuit:
"Je parlerai, debout et du fond de mon songe. . . . " 1
1 "I shall speak standing erect and from the depth of mydream."
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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." 1
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 tr ad it io na l He ll en ic myth sand 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 tr oub li ng grace. T he L a t i n in h i m is uncon
querable, the immemorial tradition absorbed him,u n t i l quite recently, more and more. As ear ly as
1896 he wrote lines which would startle no one if
found on some page of the Greek Anthology or of
T ib u l lu s . The re is the same fr ug al 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 . . ." 2
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
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One recalls, I think, those other verses—as tender
and as f u l l of lo n gi ng — of the Rom an elegist:
"Te spectem suprema mihi cum venerit hora,
Te teneam moriens deficiente manu." 1
His growing preoccupation with beauty in i ts
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 Medalsof Clay (Les Med ail les d'Argile), The Winged
Sandal (La San dale ailce.) It would be doing
him a grave wrong, however, to imagine that he
takes up again any Neo-ciassic tradition; his inspi
ration and its sources are as alien as possible toeither the method of the Renaissance or of the Sev
enteenth Cen tu ry . 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, mayI, dying, hold thee with my failing hand."
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Du bois, je vis, avec ses jambes de poil jaune,
Danser un faune." 1
He finds the timelessness of beauty best inter
preted thus. "F o r Po et ry ," he wri tes, "has neither yesterday no r to-morrow, nor to-day. It is
the same everywhere. W h a t it desires is to see
it se lf be au ti fu l and is indifferent, if on ly 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
te r." One may assent to that theory or one may
no t. It is by the l i g h t o f such though t, a t a l l
events, that M. de Regnier has written the most
beautiful French verses of his age.
He does not, of course, deny his modernity, his
or ig in in time . He was a pup i l of Ver laine and
heard M a ll a r m e in his yo ut h and w ro te :
" I I 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 . . ."
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" I I pleure dans mon coeur
Comme il pleut sur la vi ll e. . ." 1
He wrote :
"O mon ame, le soir est triste sur hier. . . ." 2
A n d he pr oc la im ed in those years:
"La Terre douloureuse a bu le sang des Reves. . . ."
And his versification is as wavering and as untra-
di t iona l in his last volum e 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 ownprid e. L i f e had too great a powe r to w ou nd h i m
and so he tu rn ed , in poetry, to those objects of con
te m pla ti on and those images th a t have no pang bu t
the pang of beauty:
"Car la forme, Todeur 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."
4
"For the form, the fragrance and the beauty of things are theonly memory from which one does not suffer."
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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. A n d he maycontinue up on this pa th . T he marvellous beauty
of the w o rk of his m id d le years, however, w i l l re
main in its union of classic grace and modern sub
tlety.
That union was founded upon a personal inter
preta tion of the po st -K an ti an idealism whic h came
to France in the early days of the Symbolist move
ment. " I have fe igned ," says M . d e Regnier,
" tha t gods have spoken w i t h me. . . . " "L i s ten: there is someone behind the echo, erect amid
the universal life who bears the double arch and
the double torch and wh o is di vi ne ly identica l w i t h
us." T h a t sp ir it of universal beauty w ho is at
one w i t h the A l l and at one w i t h 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
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metal that sounds clear as joy or deep as glory or
lov e or de ath. " A n d he has made the lovelie st
" o f lov ely clay, fragile and d r y . " A n d me n have
come to him and smiled and counted the medalsand sa id : " H e is s k i l f u l , " and have passed on
s m i l i n g :
"Aucun de vous n'a done vu
Que mes mains tremblaient de tendresse,
Que tout le grand songe terrestreVivait 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 philosophical background o f Regnier's poetry. I t
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 divineway, they are ourselves."
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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 f rom Symbol ism . T he y are many
and there is hardly one of them who has not writ
ten memorab ly at times. B u t this is no t a history
of the modern poetry of France and i t w i l l suffice
to speak brief ly o f Jean Moreas, of M M . Francis
Viele-Grif f in and Stuar t M e r r i l l , of the la te A l
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.
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Jean Moreas (1856-1910) a notably gifted
and flexible Greek threw himself early and ar
de nt ly in to the Symbolist movement. B u t , by
1891, in his Le Pelerin Passtone:
, he attemptedto create a diversion, to found a new school, the
briefly famous Ecole romane. He was concerned
largely with the question of poetic diction and,
th roug h i t , o f poetic vis ion . He desired to b ri ng
about a "communion of the French Middle Agesand 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 Sym bol ism . A n d the lyrics of thePelerin passione have, no doubt, a certain old-
world sweetness wherever the obvious archaisms
do not give them a somewhat obscure and artificial
grace. H i s ear lier symbolist verse, in whic h he
took some very quaint and charming liberties of
versification and poetic manner—
("Parmi les marroniers, parmi les
Lilas Wanes, les li las violets. . . . ") 1
1
"Among the chestnut trees, among the white lilacs, the violetlilacs . • ."
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—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 (1 9 0 1 - 1 9 0 5 ) . In these poems hereturns to the traditional verse, to the traditional
stanzaic forms. They have an ex traord ina ry pu
rity of poetic outline, a notable dignity of speech
and imag ina tio n, a jus t and pr ou d perfec tion. It
was the Hellenic soul in him, one must suppose,that made his last work so memorable an example
of the classical sp i ri t in modern poe try . H i s
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:
"Ce que je dois a Moreas ne peut etre dit en paroles." 2
The American, M. Francis Viele-Griffin (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."
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Symbolist school and has remained true to it ever
since. A poet of rare l y r i c a l g i f t , he has always
been concerned with his "interior vision" and has
continued to hold that "conviction, common toShelley, Wagner and Mallarme, that reali ty is a
creation of the soul and art a superimposed crea
t i o n . " W i t h h im , as w i t h 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
thou gh t and style to racial o r ig in . 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
— U n rire, un reve, une ronde,
Un rayon d'aurore ou de miel. . . " 1
He is a poet who rarely touches the imagination
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.''
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ranges f r o m a l y r i c a l l i f t to the fullness and grave-
ness of the elegy.
The other American who has become a modern
French poet is M . Stuart M e r r i l l (b . 18 68) . H i sgeneral character as a man and an artist is at once
evident from a correct interpretation of his own
wo rd s: " M o d e r n society is a bad ly w r it te n poem
w hic h one must be active in correcting. A poet,
in the etymological sense, remains a poet everywhere and it is his duty to bring back some love
liness upon the earth." Acco rdingly , M . M e r r i l l ,
a revolutionary Socialist , has given unstintingly
both of himself and of his fortune to his chosen
cause. In ar t, on the other hand, he has been pre
occupied w i t h beauty alone. H i s poems are
woven upon the loom of dreams; they have a
vi sionary magnificence, a g l i n t as of shadows up on
go ld . Once at least in Les Poings a la Porte he
has come near sub l im i ty . H i s music has of ten 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 notremaison,
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T'ai-je repondu, ccoutant le bruit des feuilles qui tom-
bent." 1
In turning to Albert Samain (1858-1900) we
come once more upon the unmistakably Latin tem
perament. T h e first of his tw o celebrated v o l
umes Au Jar din de V Infante (1893) is purely
symbolist in inspiration and quali ty; in the
second Aux Flanes 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 poet ry . H i s verse here is s t i l l 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. A l l his best
poems follow this method and so he attains the
white, sculptural beauty of Xanth is , the ruddy,
flame-like g lo w of Pannyre aux Talons d'Or
( x x x v i ) .
T he chief qua li ty o f the late M . Re m y de Gour-
mont's (1858-1915) character was an extreme
1
"Love w i l l enter always like a friend into our house, I answered thee while listening to the noise of leaves that fall."
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subtlety—subtlety of mind and subtlety of the
senses. The first made h i m a cr it ic of the highest
order even in a co un try of great cri tic s. He car
ried far beyond Jules Lemaitre what is rather foolishly 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 orprecedent 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
Char les Guer in (1873-1907) , M. Camil le Mau-
clair (who i s also a critic of distinction), M.
H en ry Bata i l le ( the wel l -know n p la y w ri g ht ) , M .
Henri Barbusse (who recently achieved interna
t ional fame with Le Feu), M. Henri Spiess and
M. Fernand Gregh, have all continued the now
fam il ia r methods of modern French poe try. Each
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has contributed his personal vision and his per
sonal note. B u t he has co nt ribu ted these to a
kind of poetry now firmly established and well
recognisable: poetry that lives in the dawn anddusk of the mind, that sees its visions in the state
of re very 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. . . .
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IV
T H E LA TE R FORCES I N F R E N C H POE TR Y
" I I dit je ne sais quoi de triste, bon et pur."F R A N C I S J A M M E S
"La terre est le soleil en moi sont en cadence,
et toute la nature est entree dans mon cceur."
P A U L F O R T
T H E R E has been no reaction against Symbolism inFrance. I am not at a l l sure th at 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, therehave appeared two powerful talents who, a rare
thing in France, stand aside and alone, members
of no group, no school, no cenacle: M M . Francis
Jammes ( b . 18 6 8 ) and Pa ul Fo rt ( b. 1 8 7 2 ) .
Charles Guerin, in a set of very pure and verytouching verses addressed to M. Jammes calls that
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poet a "son of V e r g i l . " The say ing 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 aboutcountry matters which he understands admirably.
Thus he recalls, in a superficial way, the poet of
the Georgics. B u t one quotation , and a hack
neyed one, from those magnificent poems and one
b r i e f confession f r o m M . Jammes w i l l show theabsurdity of the comparison and also define the
French poet's character. Everyone knows the
V erg il ia n lines :
"Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas. . . ." 1
M. Jammes prefaced his first collection of poems
w i t h these wor ds : " M y God , yo u 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 w r i t t e n w i t h the words whi ch yo u
taught my father and my mother who transmitted
them to me. I pass alo ng the road l ike a burdened
ass at whom children laugh and who droops his
1 "Happy he who has been able to understand the causes of
things."
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head. I sha ll go wh en yo u w o u l d have me,
whither you w o u l d have me go. . . . T h e angelus
rin gs ." Th ere is no th in g here of the sad in te l
lec tual val or of the Augustans. It is the note ofSaint Francis, the humble brother of the birds
and beasts. . . . I n a w or d, M . Jammes i s a
Ca tho lic . So w h o l l y a Ca tho lic th at one need
not speak of intellectual submission in his case.
H e w a s b o r n w i t h t h e l i g h t o f f a i t h a s h i s on l yguide and sees l i f e w i t h the wide-eyed reverential
wonder of a l i t t l e ch i ld or a great saint. He has
the child's and the saint's simple-hearted fa
miliari ty 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 v i v i d sense of the human ele
ments in his d iv in it ie s :
"Rappelez-vous, mon Die u , devant I'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."
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tors who adorned the Mediaeval cathedrals, an
humble craftsman in the light of God's glory, de
sir ing no th in g for him sel f :
"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." 1
He is aware, of course, of the life of his own age.
He has read, as he says, "novels and verses madein Paris by men of ta le n t. " B u t these men an d
their works seem very fo r lo rn and sad to h i m . 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:
"Alois 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 submission 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 tothe 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 byhearing the cries of the slim sparrow-hawks over the farmlands."
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Francis he has grasped the uttermost meaning of
the Ch ris tian v ir tu e of h u m i l i t y and prays to pass
in to Paradise w i t h the asses:
". . . et faites que, penche dans ce sejour des ames
sur vos divines eaux, je sois pareil aux ans
qui mireront leur humble et douce pauvrete
a la limpidite de Tamour eternel." 1
These quotations, fra gm en tary and b ri e f as the y
are, w i l l already have made clear some of the
qualities of this ex traord ina ry poet. T h e 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:
" I I y a aussi le chien maladeregardant 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 wi l l mirror theirhumble 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 understand."
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But he is always conscious of the relations which
these things, according to his faith, sustain to the
div in e . A n d so, when his ow n dog dies, he ex
cla ims :
" A h ! 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 I'humanite." 1
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
Symbolis ts. H i s tone is conversationa l, almosi
casual; his sentences have the structure of prose.
He uses rime or assonance or suddenly fails to
rim e at a l l . He seems mere ly ben t on t e l l i n g the
simple and beautiful things in his heart as quietly
as possible. W h a t constitutes his eminence, his
very high eminence, as an artist is the fact that hisprosaic 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 contemplateface to face him who was his god among men."
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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 inthe simplest order. Brie fly , he does no t adorn
things u n t i l they become poetical; he sees them
poeti ca lly . H i s imag inati on and his heart trans
form them, not his diction or his figures of speech.
Is that not the highest aim of poetry? A n d yetit were thrusting aside some very elementary and
obvious considerations to call M. Jammes a great
poet. A great ar tis t he is—bu t not a great poet.
For, except on the purely pictorial side, his sub
ject matter, the in te llectual content of his w ork
is, necessarily, without significance or permanent
v a l i d i t y . It has subjective t r u th onl y. So, it
may be said, has the substance of most modern
verse. T r u e ! B u t a subjec tiv ity tha t finds har
monious echoes in a thousand souls achieves, after
all , the only kind of objectivity, of reali ty that
we kn ow . T h a t k i n d of real ity and therefore sig
nificance M. Jammes, as a Catholic in the twenti
eth centu ry, has la rgely denied himse lf. To his
fellow-villagers at Orthez, who share his faith, he
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w i l l seem merely curious as a writer: to the in
tellectual world of the present and the future he
will seem a l i t t