Chapter II: Part 2

It is embroidery à la Charles D'Orléans; one must take it or leave it.

STUART MERRIL

I know that I have seen somewhere a beautiful and effective ballad of Merril's. His "Chambre D'Amour" would be more interesting if Samain had not written "L'Infante," but Merril's painting is perhaps interesting as comparison. It begins:

Dans la chambre qui fleure un peu la bergamote,
Ce soir, lasse, la voix de l'ancien clavecin
Chevrote des refrains enfantins de gavotte.

There is a great mass of this poetry full of highly cultured house furnishing; I think Catulle Mendès also wrote it. Merril's "Nocturne" illustrates a mode of symbolistic writing which has been since played out and parodied:

La blême lune allume en la mare qui luit,
Miroir des gloires d'or, un émoi d'incendie.
Tout dort. Seul, à mi-mort, un rossignol de nuit
Module en mal d'amour sa molle mélodie.
Plus ne vibrent les vents en le mystère vert
Des ramures. La lune a tu leurs voix nocturnes:
Mais à travers le deuil du feuillage entr'ouvert
Pleuvent les bleus baisers des astres taciturnes.

* * * * * * * *

There is no need to take this sort of tongue-twisting too seriously, though it undoubtedly was so taken in Paris during the late eighties and early nineties. He is better illustrated in "La Wallonie," vide infra.

LAURENT TAILHADE

1854-1919

Tailhade's satires seem rough if one come upon them straight from reading Laforgue; and Laforgue will seem, and is presumably, the greatly finer artist; but one should not fail to note certain definite differences. Laforgue is criticizing, and conveying a mood. He is more or less literary, playing with words. Tailhade is painting contemporary Paris, with verve. His eye is on the thing itself. He has, au fond, not very much in common with Laforgue. He was born six years before Laforgue and in the same year as Rimbaud. Their temperaments are by no means identical. I do not know whether Tailhade wrote "Hydrotherapie" before Rimbaud had done "Les Chercheuses." Rimbaud in that poem identifies himself more or less with the child and its feeling. Tailhade is detached. I do not say this as praise of either one or the other. I am only trying to keep things distinct.

HYDROTHERAPIE

Le vieux monsieur, pour prendre une douche ascendante,
A couronné son chef d'un casque d'hidalgo
Qui, malgré sa bedaine ample et son lumbago,
Lui donne un certain air de famine avec Dante.

Ainsi ses membres gourds et sa vertebre à point
Traversent l'appareil des tuyaux et des lances,
Tandis que des masseurs, tout gonflés d'insolences,
Frottent au gant de crin son dos où l'acné point.

Oh! l'eau froide! la bonne et rare panacée
Qui, seule, raffermit la charpente lassée
Et le protoplasma des sénateurs pesants!

Voici que, dans la rue, au sortir de sa douche,
Le vieux monsieur qu'on sait un magistrat farouche
Tient des propos grivois aux filles de douze ans.

QUARTIER LATIN

Dans le bar où jamais le parfum des brévas
Ne dissipa l'odeur de vomi qui la navre
Triomphent les appas de la mère Cadavre
Dont le nom est fameux jusque chez les Howas.

Brune, elle fut jadis vantée entre les brunes,
Tant que son souvenir au Vaux-Hall est resté.
Et c'est toujours avec beaucoup de dignité
Qu'elle rince le zinc et détaille les prunes.

A ces causes, son cabaret s'emplit le soir,
De futurs avoués, trop heureux de surseoir
Quelque temps à l'étude inepte des _Digestes_,

Des Valaques, des riverains du fleuve Amoor
S'acoquinent avec des potards indigestes
Qui s'y viennent former aux choses de l'amour.

RUS

Ce qui fait que l'ancien bandagiste renie
Le comptoir dont le faste alléchait les passants,
C'est son jardin d'Auteuil où, veufs de tout encens,
Les zinnias ont l'air d'être en tôle vernie.

C'est là qu'il vient, le soir, goûter l'air aromal
Et, dans sa rocking-chair, en veston de flanelle,
Aspirer les senteurs qu'épanchent sur Grenelle
Les fabriques de suif et de noir animal.

Bien que libre-penseur et franc-maçon, il juge
Le dieu propice qui lui donna ce refuge
Où se meurt un cyprin emmy la pièce d'eau,
Où, dans la tour mauresque aux lanternes chinoises,
--Tout en lui préparant du sirop de framboises--
Sa "demoiselle" chante un couplet de Nadaud.

From this beneficent treatment of the amiable burgess; from this perfectly poetic inclusion of modernity, this unrhetorical inclusion of the factories in the vicinity of Grenelle (inclusion quite different from the allegorical presentation of workmen's trousers in sculpture, and the grandiloquent theorizing about the socialistic up-lift or down-pull of smoke and machinery), Tailhade can move to personal satire, a personal satire impersonalized by its glaze and its finish.

RONDEL

Dans les cafés d'adolescents
Moréas cause avec Frémine:
L'un, d'un parfait cuistre a la mine,
L'autre beugle des contre-sens.

Rien ne sort moins de chez Classens
Que le linge de ces bramines.
Dans les cafés d'adolescents,
Moréas cause avec Frémine.

Désagrégeant son albumine,
La Tailhède offre quelque encens:
Maurras leur invente Commine
Et ça fait roter les passants,
Dans les cafés d'adolescents.

But perhaps the most characteristic phase of Tailhade is in his pictures of the bourgeoisie. Here is one depicted with all Tailhadian serenity. Note also the opulence of his vocables.

DINER CHAMPETRE

Entre les sièges ou des garçons volontaires
Entassent leurs chalants parmi les boulingrins,
La famille Feyssard, avec des airs sereins,
Discute longuement les tables solitaires.

La demoiselle a mis un chapeau rouge vif
Dont s'honore le bon faiseur de sa commune,
Et madame Feyssard, un peu hommasse et brune,
Porte une robe loutre avec des reflets d'if.

Enfin ils sont assis! Or le père commande
Des écrevisses, du potage au lait d'amande,
Toutes choses dont il rêvait depuis longtemps.

Et, dans le ciel couleur de turquoises fanées,
Il voit les songes bleus qu'en ses esprits flottant
A fait naître l'ampleur des truites saumonées.

All through this introduction I am giving the sort of French poem least likely to have been worn smooth for us; I mean the kind of poem least represented in English. Landor and Swinburne have, I think, forestalled Tailhade's hellenic poems in our affections. There are also his ballades to be considered.

FRANCIS JAMMES

(born 1868)

The bulk of Jammes' unsparable poetry is perhaps larger than that of any man still living in France. The three first books of poems, and "Le Triomphe de la Vie" containing "Existences," the more than "Spoon River" of France, must contain about six hundred pages worth reading. "Existences" can not be rendered in snippets. It is not a series of poems, but the canvass of a whole small town or half city, unique, inimitable and "to the life," full of verve. Only those who have read it and "L'Angelus de l'Aube," can appreciate the full tragedy of Jammes' débâcle. Paul Fort had what his friends boasted as "tone," and he has diluted himself with topicalities; in Jammes' case it is more charitable to suppose some organic malady, some definite softening of the brain, for he seems perfectly simple and naive in his débâcle. It may be, in both cases, that the organisms have broken beneath the strain of modern existence. But the artist has no business to break.

Let us begin with Jammes' earlier work:

J'aime l'âne si doux
marchant le long des houx.
Il prend garde aux abeilles
et bouge ses oreilles;
et il porte les pauvres
et des sacs remplis d'orge.
Il va, près des fosses
d'un petit pas cassé.
Mon amie le croit bête
parce qu'il est poète.
Il réfléchit toujours,
Ses yeux sont en velours.
Jeune fille au doux cœur
tu n'as pas sa douceur.

* * * * * *

The fault is the fault, or danger, which Dante has labeled "muliebria"; of its excess Jammes has since perished. But the poem to the donkey can, in certain moods, please one. In other moods the playful simplicity, at least in excess, is almost infuriating. He runs so close to sentimentalizing--when he does not fall into that puddle--that there are numerous excuses for those who refuse him altogether. "J'allai à Lourdes" has pathos. Compare it with Corbière's "St. Anne" and the decadence is apparent; it is indeed a sort of half-way house between the barbaric Breton religion and the ultimate deliquescence of French Catholicism in Claudel, who (as I think it is James Stephens has said) "is merely lying on his back kicking his heels in it."

J' ALLAI A LOURDES

J'allai à Lourdes par le chemin de fer,
le long du gave qui est bleu comme l'air.

Au soleil les montagnes semblaient d'étain.
Et l'on chantait: sauvez! sauvez! dans le train,

Il y avait un monde fou, exalté,
plein de poussière et du soleil d'été.

Des malheureux avec le ventre en avant
étendaient leurs bras, priaient en les tordant.

Et dans une chaire où était du drap bleu,
un prêtre disait: "un chapelet à Dieu!"

Et un groupe de femmes, parfois, passait,
qui chantait: sauvez! sauvez! sauvez! sauvez!

Et la procession chantait. Les drapeaux
se penchaient avec leurs devises en or.

Le soleil était blanc sur les escaliers
dans l'air bleu, sur les cloches déchiquetées.

Mais sur un brancard, portée par ses parents,
son pauvre père tête nue et priant,

et ses frères qui disaient: "ainsi soit-il,"
une jeune fille sur le point de mourir.

Oh! qu'elle était belle! elle avait dix-huit ans
et elle souriait; elle était en blanc.

Et la procession chantait. Des drapeaux
se penchaient avec leurs devises en or.

Moi je serrais les dents pour ne pas pleurer,
et cette fille, je me sentais l'aimer.

Oh! elle m'a regardé un grand moment,
une rose blanche en main, souriant.

Mais maintenant où es-tu? dis, où es-tu,
Es-tu morte? je t'aime, toi qui m'as vu.

Si tu existes, Dieu, ne la tue pas,
elle avait des mains blanches, de minces bras.

Dieu ne la tue pas!--et ne serait-ce que
pour son père nu-tête qui priait Dieu.

Jammes goes to pieces on such adjectives as "pauvre" and "petite," just as De Régnier slips on "cher," "aimée" and "tiède"; and in their train flock the herd whose ad jectival centre appears to waver from "nue" to "frémis sante." And there is, in many French poets, a fatal proclivity to fuss just a little too much over their subjects. Jammes has also the furniture tendency, and to it we owe several of his quite charming poems. However the strongest impression I get to-day, reading his work in inverse order (i.e. "Jean de Noarrieu" before these earlier poems), is of the very great stylistic advance made in that poem over his earlier work.

But he is very successful in saying all there was to be said in:--

LA JEUNE FILLE

La jeune fille est blanche,
elle a des veines vertes
au poignets, dans ses manches
ouvertes.
On ne sait pas pourquoi
elle rit. Par moments
elle crie et cela
est percant.
Est-ce qu'elle se doute
qu'elle vous prend le cœur
en cueillant sur la route
des fleurs.
On dirait quelquefois
qu'elle comprend des choses.
Pas toujours. Elle cause
tout bas
"Oh! ma chère! oh! là, là ...
... Figure-toi ... mardi
je l'ai vu ... j'ai ri"--Elle dit
comme ça.
Quand un jeune homme souffre,
d'abord elle se tait:
elle ne rit plus, tout
étonnée.
Dans les petits chemins
elle remplit ses mains
de piquants de bruyères
de fougères.
Elle est grande, elle est blanche,
elle a des bras très doux,
Elle est très droite et penche
le cou.

The poem beginning:

Tu seras nue dans le salon aux vieilles choses,
fine comme un fuseau de roseau de lumière
et, les jambes croisées, auprès du feu rose
tu écouteras l'hiver

loses, perhaps, or gains little by comparison with that of Heinrich von Morungen, beginning:

Oh weh, soll mir nun nimmermehr
hell leuchten durch die Nacht
noch weisser denn ein Schnee
ihr Leib so wohl gemacht?
Der trog die Augen mein,
ich wähnt, es sollte sein
des lichten Monden Schein,
da tagte es.

Morungen had had no occasion to say "Je pense à Jean-Jacques," and it is foolish, to expect exactly the same charm of a twentieth-century poet that we find in a thirteenth-century poet. Still it is not necessary to be Jammes-crazy to feel

IL VA NEIGER....

Il va neiger dans quelques jours. Je me souviens
de l'an dernier. Je me souviens de mes tristesses
au coin du feu. Si l'on m'avait demandé: qu'est-ce?
j'aurais dit: laissez-moi tranquille. Ce n'est rien.
J'ai bien réfléchi, l'année avant, dans ma chambre,
pendant que la neige lourde tombait dehors.
J'ai réfléchi pour rien. A présent comme alors
je fume une pipe en bois avec un bout d'ambre.

Ma vieille commode en chêne sent toujours bon.
Mais moi j'étais bête parce que ces choses
ne pouvaient pas changer et que c'est une pose
de vouloir chasser les choses que nous savons.

Pourquoi donc pensons-nous et parlons-nous? C'est drôle;
nos larmes et nos baisers, eux, ne parlent pas,
et cependant nous les comprenons, et les pas
d'un ami sont plus doux que de douces paroles.

* * * * * * * *

If I at all rightly understand the words "vouloir chasser les choses que nous savons" they are an excellent warning against the pose of simplicity over-done that has been the end of Maeterlinck, and of how many other poets whose poetic machinery consists in so great part of pretending to know less than they do.

Jammes' poems are well represented in Miss Lowell's dilutation on _Six French Poets_, especially by the well-known "Amsterdam" and "Madame de Warens," which are also in Van Bever and Léautaud. He reaches, as I have said, his greatest verve in "Existences" in the volume "Le Triomphe de la Vie."

I do not wish to speak in superlatives, but "Existences," if not Jammes' best work, and if not the most important single volume by any living French poet, either of which it well may be, is at any rate indispensable. It is one of the first half dozen books that a man wanting to know contemporary French work must in-dulge in. One can _not_ represent it in snippets. Still I quote "Le Poète" (his remarks at a provincial soirée):

Cest drôle.... Cette petite sera bête
comme ces gens-là, comme son père et sa mère.
Et cependant elle a une grâce infinie.
Il y a en elle l'lntelligence de la beauté.
C'est délicieux, son corsage qui n'existe pas,
son derrière et ses pieds. Mais elle sera bête
comme une oie dans deux ans d'ici. Elle va jouer.

_(Benette joue la valse des elfes)_

In an earlier scene we have a good example of his rapidity in narrative.

_La Servante_

Il y a quelqu'un qui veut parler à monsieur.

_Le Poète_

Qui est-ce?

_La Servante_

Je ne sais pas.

_Le Poète_

Un homme ou une femme?

_La Servante_

Un homme.

_Poète_

Un commis-voyageur, Vous me le foutez belle!

_La Servante_

Je ne sais pas, monsieur.

_Poète_

Faites entrer au salon.
Laissez-moi achever d'achever ces cerises.

_(Next Scene)_

_Le Poète (dans son salon)_

A qui ai-je l'honneur de parler, monsieur?

_Le Monsieur_

Monsieur, je suis le cousin de votre ancienne maîtresse.

_Le Poète_

De quelle maîtresse? Je ne vous connais pas.
Et puis qu'est-ce que vous voulez?

_Le Monsieur_

Monsieur, ecoutez-moi.
On m'a dit que vous êtes bon.

_Poète_

Ce n'est pas vrai.

_La Pipe du Poète_

Il me bourre avec une telle agitation
que je ne vais jamais pourvoir tirer de l'air.

_Poète_

D'abord, de quelle maîtresse me parlez-vous?
De qui, pretendez-vous? Non. Vous pretendez de
qui j'ai été l'amant?

_Le Monsieur_

De Néomie.

_Poète_

De Néomie,

_Le Monsieur_

Oui, monsieur.

_Poète_

Où habitez-vous?

_Le Monsieur_

J'habite les environs de Mont-de-Marsan.

_Poète_

Enfin que voulez-vous?

_Le Monsieur_

Savoir si monsieur serait
assez complaisant pour me donner quelque chose.

_Poète_

Et si je ne vous donne le pas, qu'est-ce que vous ferez?

_Le Monsieur_

Oh! Rien monsieur. Je ne vous ferai rien. Non....

_Le Poète_

Tenez, voila dix francs, et foutez-moi la paix.

(_Le monsieur s'en va, puis le poète sort._)

The troubles of the Larribeau family, Larribeau and the _bonne_, the visit of the "Comtese de Pentacosa," who is also staved off with ten francs, are all worth quoting. The whole small town is "Spoon-Rivered" with equal verve. "Existences" was written in 1900.

MOREAS

It must not be thought that these very "modern" poets owe their modernity merely to some magic chemical present in the Parisian milieu. Moréas was born in 1856, the year after Verhaeren, but his Madeline-aux-serpents might be William Morris on Rapunzel:

Et votre chevelure comme des grappes d'ombres,
Et ses bandelettes à vos tempes,
Et la kabbale de vos yeux latents,--
Madeline-aux-serpents, Madeline.
Madeline, Madeline,
Pourquoi vos lèvres à mon cou, ah, pourquoi
Vos lèvres entre les coups du hache du roi!
Madeline, et les cordaces et les flûtes,
Les flûtes, les pas d'amour, les flûtes, vous les voulûtes,
Hélas! Madeline, la fête, Madeline,
Ne berce plus les flots au bord de l'île,
Et mes bouffons ne crèvent plus des cerceaux
Au bord de l'île, pauvres bouffons.
Pauvres bouffons que couronne la sauge!
Et mes litières s'effeuillent aux ornières, toutes mes
litières à grand pans
De nonchaloir, Madeline-aux-serpents....

A difference with Morris might have arisen, of course, over the now long-discussed question of vers libre, but who are we to dig up that Babylon? The schoolboys' papers of Toulouse had learnt all about it before the old gentlemen of _The Century_ and _Harper's_ had discovered that such things exist.

One will not have understood the French poetry of the last half-century unless one makes allowance for what they call the Gothic as well as the Roman or classic influence. We should probably call it (their "Gothic") "medievalism," its tone is that of their XIII century poets, Crestien de Troies, Marie de France, or perhaps even D'Orléans (as we noticed in the quotation from Vielé-Griffin). Tailhade in his "Hymne Antique" displays what we would call Swinburnism (Greekish). Tristan Klingsor (a nom de plume showing definite tendencies) exhibits these things a generation nearer to us:

Dans son rêve le vieux Prince de Touraine
voit passer en robe verte à longue traîne
Yeldis aux yeux charmeurs de douce reine.
* * * * * * * *

or

Au verger où sifflent les sylphes d'automne
mignonne Isabelle est venue de Venise
et veut cueillir des cerises et des pommes.
* * * * * * * *

He was writing rhymed vers libre in 1903, possibly stimulated by translations in a volume called "Poésie Arabe." This book has an extremely interesting preface. I have forgotten the name of the translator, but in excusing the simplicity of Arab songs he says: "The young girl in Germany educated in philosophy in Kant and Hegel, when love comes to her, at once exclaims 'Infinite!', and allies her vocabulary with the transcendental. The little girl in the tents 'ne savait comparer fors que sa gourmandise.'" In Klingsor for 1903, I find:

Croise tes jambes fines et nues
Dans ton lit,
Frotte de tes mignonnes mains menues
Le bout de ton nez;
Frotte de tes doigts potelés et jolis,
Les deux violettes de tes yeux cernés,
Et rêve.
Du haut du minaret arabe s'échappe
La mélopée triste et brève
De l'indiscret muezzin
Qui nasillonne et qui éternue,
Et toi tu bâilles comme une petite chatte,
Tu bâilles d'amour brisée,
Et tu songes au passant d'Ormuz ou d'Endor
Qui t'a quittée ce matin
En te laissant sa légère bourse d'or
Et les marques bleues de ses baisers.

Later he turns to Max Elskamp, addressing him as if he, Klingsor, at last had "found Jesus":

Je viens vers vous, mon cher Elskamp
Comme un pauvre varlet de cœur et de joie
Vient vers le beau seigneur qui campe
Sous sa tente d'azur et de soie.
* * * * * * * *

However I believe Moréas was a real poet, and, being stubborn, I have still an idea which gor embedded in my head some years ago: I mean that Klingsor is a poet. As for the Elskamp phase and cult, I do not make much of it. Jean de Bosschère has written a book upon Elskamp, and he assures me that Elskamp is a great and important poet, and some day, perhaps, I may understand it. De Bosschère seems to me to see or to feel perhaps more keenly than any one else certain phases of modern mechanical civilization: the ant-like madness of men bailing out little boats they never will sail in, shoeing horses they never will ride, making chairs they never will sit on, and all with a frenzied intentness. I may get my conviction as much from his drawings as from his poems. I am not yet clear in my mind about it. His opinion of Max Elskamp can not be too lightly passed over. Vide infra "De Bosschère on Elskamp."

OF OUR DECADE

Early in 1912 _L'Effort_, since called _L'Effort Libre,_ published an excellent selection of poems mostly by men born since 1880: Arcos, Chennevière, Duhamel, Spire, Vildrac, and Jules Romains, with some of Léon Bazalgette's translations from Whitman.

SPIRE

(born 1868)

André Spire, writing in the style of the generation which has succeeded him, is well represented in this collection by his "Dames Anciennes." The contents of his volumes are of very uneven value: Zionist propaganda, addresses, and a certain number of well-written poems.

DAMES ANCIENNES

En hiver, dans la chambre claire,
Tout en haut de la maison,
Le poêle de faïence blanche,
Cerclé de cuivre, provincial, doux,
Chauffait mes doigts et mes livres.
Et le peuplier mandarine,
Dans le soir d'argent dédoré,
Dressait, en silence, ses branches,
Devant ma fenêtre close.

--Mère, le printemps aux doigts tièdes
A soulevé l'espagnolette
De mes fenêtres sans rideaux.
Faites taire toutes ces voix qui montent
Jusqu'à ma table de travail.

--Ce sont les amies de ma mère
Et de la mère de ton père,
Qui causent de leurs maris morts,
Et de leurs fils partis.

--Avec, au coin de leurs lèvres,
Ces moustaches de café au lait?
Et dans leurs mains ces tartines?
Dans leurs bouches ces Kouguelofs?

--Ce sont des cavales anciennes
Qui mâchonnent le peu d'herbe douce
Que Dieu veut bien leur laisser.

--Mère, les maîtres sensibles
Lâchent les juments inutiles
Dans les prés, non dans mon jardin!

--Sois tranquille, mon fils, sois tranquille,
Elles ne brouteront pas tes fleurs.

--Mère, que n'y occupent-elles leurs lèvres,
Et leurs trop courtes dents trop blanches
De porcelaine trop fragile!

--Mon fils, fermez votre fenêtre.
Mon fils, vous n'êtes pas chrétien!

VILDRAC

Vildrac's "Gloire" is in a way commentary on Romains' Ode to the Crowd; a critique of part, at least, of unanimism.

Il avait su gagner à lui
Beaucoup d'hommes ensemble,

* * * * *

Et son bonheur était de croire,
Quand il avait quitté la foule,
Que chacun des hommes l'aimait
Et que sa présence durait
Innombrable et puissante en eux,

* * * * *

Or un jour il en suivit un
Qui retournait chez soi, tout seul,
Et il vit son regard s'éteindre
Dès qu'il fut un peu loin des autres.

* * * * *

(The full text of this appeared in _Poetry_ Aug., 1913.) Vildrac's two best-known poems are "Une Auberge" and "Visite"; the first a forlorn scene, not too unlike a Van Gogh, though not done with Van Gogh's vigor.

C'est seulement parce qu'on a soif qu'on entre y boire;
C'est parce qu'on se sent tomber qu'on va s'y asseoir.
On n'y est jamais à la fois qu'un ou deux
Et l'on n'est pas forcé d'y raconter son histoire.

* * * * * * *
Celui qui entre....

* * * * * * *
mange lentement son pain
Parce que ses dents sont usées;
Et il boit avec beaucoup de mal
Parce qu'il a de peine plein sa gorge.

Quand il a fini,
Il hésite, puis timide
Va s'asseoir un peu
A côté du feu.

Ses mains crevassées épousent
Les bosselures dures de ses genoux.

Then of the other man in the story:

"qui n'était pas des nôtres....
"Mais comme il avait l'air cependant d'être des nôtres!"

The story or incident in "Visite" is that of a man stirring himself out of his evening comfort to visit some pathetic dull friends.

* * * * * *
Ces gens hélas, ne croyaient pas
Qu'il fut venu a l'improviste
Si tard, de si loin, par la neige ...
Et ils attendaient l'un et l'autre
Que brusquement et d'un haleine il exposat
La grave raison de sa venue.

Only when he gets up to go, "ils osèrent comprendre"

* * * * * *
Il leur promit de revenir.

* * * * * *
Mais avant de gagner la porte
Il fixa bien dans sa mémoire
Le lieu ou s'abritait leur vie.
Il regarda bien chaque objet
Et puis aussi l'homme et la femme,
Tant il craignait au fond de lui
De ne plus jamais revenir.

The relation of Vildrac's verse narratives to the short story form is most interesting.

JULES ROMAINS

The reader who has gone through Spire, Romains, and Vildrac, will have a fair idea of the poetry written by this group of men. Romains has always seemed to me, and is, I think, generally recognized as, the nerve-centre, the dynamic centre of the group,

Les marchands sont assis aux portes des boutiques;
Ils regardent. Les toits joignent la rue au ciel
Et les pavés semblent féconds sous le soleil
Comme un champ de maïs.
Les marchands ont laissé dormir près du comptoir
Le désir de gagner qui travaille dès l'aube.
On dirait que, malgré leur âme habituelle,
Une autre âme s'avance et vient au seuil d'eux-mêmes
Comme ils viennent au seuil de leurs boutiques noires.

We are regaining for cities a little of what savage man has for the forest. We live by instinct; receive news by instinct; have conquered machinery as primitive man conquered the jungle. Romains feels this, though his phrases may not be ours. Wyndham Lewis on giants is nearer Romains than anything else in English, but vorticism is, in the realm of biology, the hypothesis of the dominant cell. Lewis on giants comes perhaps nearer Romains than did the original talks about the Vortex. There is in inferior minds a passion for unity, that is, for a confusion and melting together of things which a good mind will want kept distinct. Uninformed English criticism has treated Unanimism as if it were a vague general propaganda, and this criticism has cited some of our worst and stupidest versifiers as a corresponding manifestation in England. One can only account for such error by the very plausible hypothesis that the erring critics have not read "Puissances de Paris."

Romains is not to be understood by extracts and fragments. He has felt this general replunge of mind into instinct, or this development of instinct to cope with a metropolis, and with metropolitan conditions; in so far as he has expressed the emotions of this consciousness he is poet; he has, aside from that, tried to formulate this new consciousness, and in so far as such formulation is dogmatic, debatable, intellectual, hypothetical, he is open to argument and dispute; that is to say he is philosopher, and his philosophy is definite and defined. Vildrac's statement "Il a changé la pathétique" is perfectly true. Many people will prefer the traditional and familiar and recognizable poetry of writers like Klingsor. I am not dictating people's likes and dislikes. Romains has made a new kind of poetry. Since the scrapping of the Aquinian, Dantescan system, he is perhaps the first person who had dared put up so definite a philosophical frame-work for his emotions.

I do not mean, by this, that I agree with Jules Romains; I am prepared to go no further than my opening sentence of this section, concerning our growing, or returning, or perhaps only newly-noticed, sensitization to crowd feeling; to the metropolis and its peculiar sensations. Turn to Romains:

Je croyais les murs de ma chambre imperméables.
Or ils laissent passer une tiède bruine
Qui s'épaissit et qui m'empêche de me voir,
Le papier à fleurs bleues lui cède. Il fait le bruit
Du sable et du cresson qu'une source traverse.
L'air qui touche mes nerfs est extrêmement lourd.
Ce n'est pas comme avant le pur milieu de vie
Ou montait de la solitude sublimée.

Voilà que par osmose
Toute l'immensité d'alentour le sature.

* * * * * * *
Il charge mes poumons, il empoisse les choses,
Il sépare mon corps des meubles familiers,

* * * * * * *
Les forces du dehors s'enroulent à mes mains.

In "Puissances de Paris" he states that there are beings more "real than the individual." Here, I can but touch upon salients.

Rien ne cesse d'être intérieur.
La rue est plus intime à cause de la brume.

Lines like Romains', so well packed with thought, so careful that you will get the idea, can not be poured out by the bushel like those of contemporary rhetoricians, like those of Claudel and Fort. The best poetry has always a content, it may not be an intellectual content; in Romains the intellectual statement is necessary to keep the new emotional content coherent.

The opposite of Lewis's giant appears in:

Je suis l'esclave heureux des hommes dont l'haleine
Flotte ici. Leur vouloirs s'écoule dans mes nerfs;
Ce qui est moi commence à fondre.

This statement has the perfectly simple order of words. It is the simple statement of a man saying things for the first time, whose chief concern is that he shall speak clearly. His work is perhaps the fullest statement of the poetic consciousness of our time, or the scope of that consciousness. I am not saying he is the most poignant poet; simply that in him we have the fullest poetic exposition.

You can get the feel of Laforgue or even of Corbière from a few poems; Romains is a subject for study. I do not say this as praise, I am simply trying to define him. His "Un Etre en Marche" is the narrative of a girls' school, of the "crocodile" or procession going out for its orderly walk, its collective sensations and adventures.

Troupes and herds appear in his earlier work:

Le troupeau marche, avec ses chiens et son berger,
Il a peur. Çà et là des réverbères brûlent,
Il tremble d'être poursuivi par les étoiles.
* * * * * * *
La foule traine une écume d'ombrelles blanches
* * * * * * *
La grande ville s'évapore,
Et pleut à verse sur la plaine
Qu'elle sature.

His style is not a "model," it has the freshness of grass, not of new furniture polish. In his work many nouns meet their verbs for the first time, as, perhaps, in the last lines above quoted. He needs, as a rule, about a hundred pages to turn round in. One can not give these poems in quotation; one wants about five volumes of Romains. In so far as I am writing "criticism," I must say that his prose is just as interesting as his verse. But then his verse is just as interesting as his prose. Part of his method is to show his subject in a series of successive phases, thus in L'Individu:

V

Je suis un habitant de ma ville, un de ceux
Qui s'assoient au théâtre et qui vont par les rues
* * * * * * * *

VI

Je cesse lentement d'être moi. Ma personne
Semble s'anéantir chaque jour un peu plus
C'est à peine si je le sens et m'en étonne.

His poetry is not of single and startling emotions, but--for better or worse--of progressive states of consciousness. It is as useless for the disciple to try and imitate Romains, without having as much thought of his own, as it is for the tyro in words to try imitations of Jules Laforgue. The limitation of Romains' work, as of a deal of Browning's, is that, having once understood it, one may not need or care to re-read it. This restriction applies also in a wholly different way to "Endymion"; having once filled the mind with Keats' color, or the beauty of things described, one gets no new thrill from the re-reading of them in not very well-written verse. This limitation applies to all poetry that is not implicit in its own medium, that is, which is not indissolubly bound in with the actual words, word music, the fineness and firmness of the actual writing, as in Villon, or in "Collis O Heliconii."

But one can not leave Romains unread. His interest is more than a prose interest, he has verse technique, rhyme, terminal syzygy, but that is not what I mean. He is poetry in:

On ne m'a pas donné de lettres, ces jours-ci;
Personne n'a songé, dans la ville, à m'écrire,
Oh! je n'espérais rien; je sais vivre et penser
Tout seul, et mon esprit, pour faire une flambée,
N'attend pas qu'on lui jette une feuille noircie.
Mais je sens qu'il me manque un plaisir familier,
J'ai du bonheur aux mains quand j'ouvre une enveloppe;
* * * * * * * *

But such statements as:

TENTATION

Je me plais beaucoup trop à rester dans les gares;
Accoude sur le bois anguleux des barrières,
Je regarde les trains s'emplir de voyageurs.
* * * * * * * *

and:

Mon esprit solitaire est une goutte d'huile
Sur la pensée et sur le songe de la ville
Qui me laissent flotter et ne m'absorbent pas.
* * * * * * * *

would not be important unless they were followed by exposition. The point is that they are followed by exposition, to which they form a necessary introduction, defining Romains' angle of attack; and as a result the force of Romains is cumulative. His early books gather meaning as one reads through the later ones.

And I think if one opens him almost anywhere one can discern the authentic accent of a man saying something, not the desultory impagination of rehash.

Charles Vildrac is an interesting companion figure to his brilliant friend Romains. He conserves himself, he is never carried away by Romains' theories. He admires, differs, and occasionally formulates a corrective or corollary as in "Gloire."

Compare this poem with Romains' "Ode to the Crowd Here Present" and you get the two angles of vision.

Henry Spiess, a Genevan lawyer, has written an interesting series of sketches of the court-room. He is a more or less isolated figure. I have seen amusing and indecorous poems by George Fourest, but it is quite probable that they amuse because one is unfamiliar with their genre; still "La Blonde Négresse" (the heroine of his title), his satire of the symbolo-rhapsodicoes in the series of poems about her: "La négresse blonde, la blonde négresse," gathering into its sound all the swish and woggle of the sound-over-sensists; the poem on the beautiful blue-behinded baboon; that on the gentleman "qui ne craignait ni la vérole ni dieu"; "Les pianos du Casino au bord de la mer" (Laforgue plus the four-hour touch), are an egregious and diverting guffaw. (I do not think the book is available to the public. J.G. Fletcher once lent me a copy, but the edition was limited and the work seems rather unknown.)

Romains is my chief concern. I can not give a full exposition of Unanimism on a page or two. Among all the younger writers and groups in Paris, the group centering in Romains is the only one which seems to me to have an energy comparable to that of the _Blast_ group in London,[3] the only group in which the writers for _Blast_ can be expected to take very much interest.

Romains in the flesh does not seem so energetic as Lewis in the flesh, but then I have seen Romains only once and I am well acquainted with Lewis. Romains is, in his writing, more placid, the thought seems more passive, less impetuous. As for those who will not have Lewis "at any price," there remains to them no other course than the acceptance of Romains, for these two men hold the two tenable, positions: the Mountain and the Multitude.

It might be fairer to Romains to say simply he has chosen, or specialized in, the collected multitude as a subject matter, and that he is quite well on a mountain of his own.

My general conclusions, redoing and reviewing this period of French poetry, are (after my paw-over of some sixty new volumes as mentioned, and after re-reading most of what I had read before):

1. As stated in my opening, that mediocre poetry is about the same in all countries; that France has as much drivel, gas, mush, etc., poured into verse, as has any other nation.

2. That it is impossible "to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear," or poetry out of nothing; that all attempts to "expand" a subject into poetry are futile, fundamentally; that the subject matter must be coterminous with the expression. Tasso, Spenser, Ariosto, prose poems, diffuse forms of all sorts are all a preciosity; a parlor-game, and dilutations go to the scrap heap.

3. That Corbière, Rimbaud, Laforgue are permanent; that probably some of De Gourmont's and Tailhade's poems are permanent, or at least reasonably durable; that Romains is indispensable, for the present at any rate; that people who say they "don't like French poetry" are possibly matoids, and certainly ignorant of the scope and variety of French work. In the same way people are ignorant of the qualities of French people; ignorant that if they do not feel at home in Amiens (as I do not), there are other places in France; in the Charente if you walk across country you meet people exactly like the nicest people you can meet in the American country and _they are not "foreign."_

All France is not to be found in Paris. The adjective "French" is current in America with a dozen erroneous or stupid connotations. If it means, as it did in the mouth of my contemporary, "talcum powder" and surface neatness, the selection of poems I have given here would almost show the need of, or at least a reason for, French Parnassienism; for it shows the French poets violent, whether with the violent words of Corbière, or the quiet violence of the irony of Laforgue, the sudden annihilations of his "turn-back" on the subject. People forget that the incision of Voltaire is no more all of French Literature than is the _robustezza_ of Brantôme. (Burton of the "Anatomy" is our only writer who can match him.) They forget the two distinct finenesses of the Latin French and of the French "Gothic," that is of the eighteenth century, of Bernard (if one take a writer of no great importance to illustrate a definite quality), or of D'Orléans and of Froissart in verse. From this delicacy, if they can not be doing with it, they may turn easily to Villon or Basselin. Only a general distaste for literature can be operative against all of these writers.

UNANIMISME

The English translation of Romains' "Mort de Quelqu'un" has provoked various English and American essays and reviews. His published works are "L'Ame des Hommes," 1904; "Le Bourg Régénéré," 1906; "La Vie Unanime," 1908; "Premier Livre de Prières," 1909; "La Foule qui est Ici," 1909; in 1910 and 1911 "Un Etre en Marche," "Deux Poèmes," "Manuel de Deification," "L'armée dans la Ville," "Puissances de Paris," and "Mort de Quelqu'un," employing the three excellent publishing houses of the _Mercure_, Figuiere and Sansot.

His "Reflexions" at the end of "Puissances de Paris" are so good a formulation of the Unanimiste Aesthetic, or "_Pathétique_," that quotation of them will do more to disabuse readers misled by stupid English criticism than would any amount of talk about Romains. I let him speak for himself:

REFLEXIONS

"Many people are now ready to recognize that there are in the world beings more real than man. We admit the life of entities greater than our own bodies. Society is not merely an arithmetical total, or a collective designation. We even credit the existence of groups intermediate between the individual and the state. But these opinions are put forth by abstract deduction or by experimentation of reason.

"People employ them to complete a system of things and with the complacencies of analogy. If they do not follow a serious study of social data, they are at least the most meritorious results of observations; they justify the method, and uphold the laws of a science which struggles manfully to be scientific.

"These fashions of knowing would seem both costly and tenuous. Man did not wait for physiology to give him a notion of his body, in which lack of patience he was intelligent, for physiology has given him but analytic and exterior information concerning things he had long known from within. He had been conscious of his organs long before he had specified their modes of activity. As spirals of smoke from village chimneys, the profound senses of each organ had mounted toward him; joy, sorrow, all the emotions are deeds more fully of consciousness than are the thoughts of man's reason. Reason makes a concept of man, but the heart perceives the flesh of his body.

"In like manner we must know the groups that englobe us, not by observation from without, but by an organic consciousness. And it is by no means sure that the rhythms will make their nodes in us, if we be not the centres of groups. We have but to become such. Dig deep enough in our being, emptying it of individual reveries, dig enough little canals so that the souls of the groups will flow of necessity into us.

"I have attempted nothing else in this book. Various groups have come here into consciousness. They are still rudimentary, and their spirit is but a perfume in the air. Beings with as little consistence as la Rue du Havre, and la Place de la Bastile, ephemeral as the company of people in an omnibus, or the audience at L'Opéra Comique, can not have complex organism or thoughts greatly elaborate. People will think it superfluous that I should unravel such shreds in place of re-carding once more the enormous heap of the individual soul.

"Yet I think the groups are in the most agitated stage of their evolution. Future groups will perhaps deserve less affection, and we shall conceal the basis of things more effectively. Now the incomplete and unstable contours have not yet learned to stifle any tendency (any inclination). Every impact sets them floating. They do not coat the infantile matter with a hard or impacting envelope. A superior plant has realized but few of the possibilities swarming in fructificatory mould. A mushroom leads one more directly to the essential life quality than do the complexities of the oak tree.

"Thus the groups prepare more future than is strictly required. Thus we have the considerable happiness of watching the commencement of reign, the beginning of an organic series which will last as did others, for a thousand ages, before the cooling of the earth. This is not a progression, it is a creation, the first leap-out of a different series. Groups will not continue the activities of animals, nor of men; they will start things afresh according to their own need, and as the consciousness of their substance increases they will refashion the image of the world.

"The men who henceforth can draw the souls of groups to converge within themselves, will give forth the coming dream, and will gather, to boot, certain intuitions of human habit. Our ideas of the being will undergo a correction; will hesitate rather more in finding a distinction between the existent and non-existent. In passing successively from the Place de l'Europe to the Place des Vosges, and then to a gang of navvies, one perceives that there are numerous shades of difference between nothing and something. Before resorting to groups one is sure of discerning a being of a simple idea. One knows that a dog exists, that he has an interior and independent unity; one knows that a table or a mountain does not exist; nothing but our manner of speech cuts it off from the universal non-existing. But streets demand all shades of verbal expression (from the non-existing up to the autonomous creature).

"One ceases to believe that a definite limit is the indispensable means of existence. Where does la Place de la Trinité begin? The streets mingle their bodies. The squares isolate themselves with great difficulty. The crowd at the theatre takes on no contour until it has lived for some time, and with vigor. A being _(être)_ has a centre, or centres in harmony, but a being is not compelled to have limits. He exists a great deal in one place, rather less in others, and, further on, a second being commences before the first has left off. Every being has, somewhere in space, its maximum. Only ancestored individuals possess affirmative contours, a skin which cuts them off from the infinite.

"Space is no one's possession. No being has succeeded in appropriating one scrap of space and saturating it with his own unique existence. Everything over-crosses, coincides, and cohabits. Every point is a perch for a thousand birds. Paris, the rue Montmartre, a crowd, a man, a protoplasm are on the same spot of pavement. A thousand existences are concentric. We see a little of some of them.

"How can we go on thinking that an individual is a solitary thing which is born, grows, reproduces itself and dies? This is a superior and inveterate manner of being an individual. But groups are not truly born. Their life makes and unmakes itself like an unstable state of matter, a condensation which does not endure. They show us that life, at its origin, is a provisory attitude, a moment of exception, an intensity between two relaxations, not continuity, nothing decisive. The first entireties take life by a sort of slow success, and extinguish themselves without catastrophe, the single elements do not perish because the whole is disrupted.

"The crowd before the Baraque Foraine starts to live little by little, as water in a kettle begins to sing and evaporate. The passages of the Odeon do not live by night, each day they are real, a few hours. At the start life seems the affair of a moment, then it becomes intermittent. To be durable; to become a development and a destiny; to be defined and finished off at each end by birth and death, it needs a deal of accustomedness.

"The primitive forms are not coequal. There is a natural hierarchy among groups. Streets have no set middle, no veritable limitations; they hold a long vacillating sort of life which night flattens out almost to nothingness. Cross-roads and squares take on contour, and gather up the nodes of their rhythms. Other groups have a fashioned body, they endure but a little space, but they have learned, almost, to die; they even resurrect themselves as by a jerk or dry spasm, they begin the habit of being, they strive toward it, and this puts them out of breath.

"I have not yet met a group fully divine. None has had a real consciousness, none has addressed me, saying: I exist. The day when the first group shall take its soul in its hands, as one lifts up a child in order to look in its face, that day there will be a new god upon earth. This is the god I await, with my labor of annunciation."

This excerpt from Romains gives the tone of his thought. In so far as he writes in the present tense he carries conviction. He broaches truly a "new," or at least contemporary "_pathétique_." He utters, in original vein, phases of consciousness whereinto we are more or less drifting, in measure of our proper sensibility.

I retain, however, my full suspicion of agglomerates.

DE BOSSCHÈRE'S STUDY OF ELSKAMP[4]

I confessed in my February essay my inability to make anything of Max Elskamp's poetry, and I have tacitly confessed my inability to find any formula for hawking De Bosschère's own verse to any public of my acquaintance; De Bosschère's study of Elskamp, however, requires no advocacy; I do not think it even requires to be a study of Max Elskamp; it drifts as quiet canal water; the protagonist may or not be a real man.

"Ici, la solitude est plus accentuée: souvent, pendant de longues minutes, les rues sont desertes.... Les portes ne semblent pas, ainsi que dans les grandes villes, s'ouvrir sur un poumon de vie, et être une cellule vivante de la rue. Au contraire, toutes sont fermées. Aussi bien, les façades de ce quartier sont pareilles aux murs borgnes. Un mince ruban de ciel roux et gris, à peine bleu au printemps, découpe les pignons, se tend sur le marché désert et sur le puits profond des cours."

From this Antwerp, De Bosschère derives his subject, as Gautier his "Albertus" from

Un vieux bourg flamand tel que peint Teniers;

trees bathing in water.

"Son univers était limité par: 'le grand peuplier'; une statue de Pomone, 'le grand rocher,' et 'la grand grenouille'; ceci était un coin touffu où il y avait de l'eau et où il ne vit jamais qu'une seule grenouille, qu'il croyait immortelle." De Bosschère's next vision of Elskamp is when his subject is pointed out as "le poète décadent," for no apparent reason save that he read Mallarmé at a time when Antwerp did not. The study breaks into a cheerful grin when Elskamp tells of Mallarmé's one appearance in the sea-port:

"Le bruit et les cris qui furent poussés pendant la conférence de Mallarmé, l'arrêtèrent plusieurs fois. L'opinion du public sur sa causerie est contenue en ces quelques mots, dits par un général retraité, grand joueur de billard, et qui du reste ne fit qu'une courte absence de la salle de jeu, pour écouter quelques phrases du poète. 'Cet homme est îvre ou fou,' dit il fort haut, on quittant la salle, où son jugement fit loi. Anvers, malgré un léger masque de snobisme, qui pourrait tromper, n'a pas changé depuis. Mallarmé, même pour les _avertis_, est toujours l'homme îvre ou fou."

The billiard player is the one modern touch in the book; for the rest Elskamp sails with sea-captains, apparently in sailing ships to Constantinople, or perhaps one should call it Byzantium. He reads Juan de la Cruz and Young's Night Thoughts, and volumes of demonology, in the properly dim library of his maternal grandfather, "Sa passion en rhétorique fut pour Longfellow, il traduisait 'Song of (sic) Hiawatots.'"

The further one penetrates into De Bosschère's delightful narrative the less real is the hero; the less he needs to be real. A phantom has been called out of De Foe's period, delightful phantom, taking on the reality of the fictitious; in the end the author has created a charming figure, but I am as far as ever from making head or tail of the verses attributed to this creation. I have had a few hours' delightful reading, I have loitered along slow canals, behind a small window sits Elskamp doing something I do not in the least understand.

II

So was I at the end of the first division "Sur la Vie" de Max Elskamp. The second division, concerned with "Oeuvre et Vie," but raised again the questions that had faced me in reading Elskamp's printed work. He has an undercurrent, an element everywhere present, differentiating his poems from other men's poems. De Bosschère scarcely helps me to name it. The third division of the book, at first reading, nearly quenched the curiosity and the interest aroused by the first two-thirds. On second reading I thought better of it. Elskamp, plunged in the middle ages, in what seems almost an atrophy, as much as an atavism, becomes a little more plausible. (For what it is worth, I read the chapter upon a day of almost complete exhaustion.)

"Or, quand la vision lâche comme une proie vidée le saint, il demeure avec les hommes."

"Entre le voyant et ceux qui le sanctifient il y a un précipice insondable. Seul l'individu est béatifié par sa croyance; mais il ne peut _l'utiliser_ au temporel ni la partager avec les hommes, et c'est peut-être la forme unique de la justice sur terre."

The two sentences give us perhaps the tone of De Bosschère's critique "Sur le Mysticisme" of Elskamp.

It is, however, not in De Bosschère, but in _La Wallonie_ that I found the clue to this author:

CONSOLATRICE DES AFFLIGÉS

Et l'hiver m'a donné la main,
J'ai la main d'Hiver dans les mains,

et dans ma tête, au loin, il brûle
les vieux étés de canicule;

et dans mes yeux, en candeurs lentes,
très blanchement il fait des tentes,

dans mes yeux il fait des Sicile,
puis des îles, encore des îles.

Et c'est tout un voyage en rond
trop vite pour la guérison

à tous les pays ou l'on meurt
au long cours des mers et des heures;

et c'est tout un voyage au vent
sur les vaisseaux de mes lits blancs

qui houlent avec des étoiles
à l'entour de toutes les voiles,

or j'ai le goût de mer aux lèvres
comme une rancœur de genièvre

bu pour la très mauvaise orgie
des départs dans les tabagies;

puis ce pays encore me vient:
un pays de neiges sans fin....

Marie des bonnes couvertures,
faites-y la neige moins dure

et courir moins comme des lières
mes mains sur mes draps blancs de fièvre.

_--Max Elskamp in "La Wallonie_," 1892.