Chapter III: Part 3

"Bohemian of the Ocean--picaresque and tramp--breaking down, concise, driving his verse with a whip--strident as the cry of gulls, and like them never wearied--without aestheticism--nothing of poetry or verse, hardly of literature--sensual, he never reveals the flesh--a blackguard and Byronic creature--alway the crisp word--there is not another artist in verse more freed of poetic language--he has a trade without plastic interest--the interest, the effect is in the whip stroke, the dry-point, the pun, the friskiness, the romantic abruptness-- he wishes to be indefinable, uncataloguable, to be neither loved nor hated; in short, declassed from every latitude, every custom hither and beyond the Pyrenees."

This doubtless is the truth: Corbière all his life was dominated and led by the demon of contradiction. He supposed that one must be differentiated from men by thoughts and acts exactly contrary to the thoughts and acts of the mass of men; there is much of the willful in his originality; he labored at it as women labor over their complexion during long afternoons between sky and earth, and when he disembarked, it was to draw broadsides of stupefaction. Dandyism à la Baudelaire.

But a nature cannot be developed except in the sense of its instincts and inclinations. Corbière had inherently to be something of what he became, the Don Juan of singularity; it is the only woman he loves; he mocks the other with the clever phrase "the eterna madame."

Corbière has much wit, wit at the same time of the Montmartre wine-shop and of the blade of past times. His talent is formed of the braggart spirit, uncouth and humbug, of a bad impudent taste, of genius thrusts. He has the drunken air, but he is only laboriously clumsy; to make absurd chaplets, he shapes from miraculous, rolled pebbles works of a secular patience, but in the dizaine he leaves the little stone of the sea quite naked and rough, because at bottom he loves the sea with a great naiveté and because his folly for paradoxical things gives way, from time to time, to an intoxication of poetry and beauty.

Among the never ordinary verses of _Amours jaunes_, are many that are admirable, but admirable with an air so equivocal, so specious, that we do not always enjoy them at the first meeting; then we judge that Tristan Corbière is, like Laforgue, a little his disciple, one of those undeniable, unclassable talents which are strange and precious exceptions in the history of literature--singular even in a gallery of oddities.

Here are two little poems of Tristan Corbière, forgotten even by the last publisher of the _Amours jaunes_:

PARIS NOCTURNE

C'est la mer;--calme plat--Et la grande marée
Avec un grondement lointain s'est retirée....
Le flot va revenir se roulant dans son bruit.
Entendez-vous gratter les crabes de la nuit.

C'est le Styx asséché: le chiffonier Diogène,
La lanterne à la main, s'en vient avec sans-gêne.
Le long du ruisseau noir, les poètes pervers
Pêchent: leur crâne creux leur sert de boîte à vers.

C'est le champ: pour glaner les impures charpies
S'abat le vol tournant des hideuses harpies;
Le lapin de gouttière, à l'affût des rongeurs.
Fuit les fils de Bondy, nocturnes vendangeurs.

C'est la mort: la police gît.--En haut l'amour
Fait sa sieste, en tétant la viande d'un bras lourd
Oû le baiser éteint laisse sa plaque rouge.
L'heure est seule. Écoutez. Pas un rêve ne bouge.

C'est la vie: écoutez, la source vive chante
L'éternelle chanson sur la tête gluante
D'un dieu marin tirant ses membres nus et verts
Sur le lit de la Morgue ... et les yeux grands ouverts.

PARIS DIURNE

Vois aux deux le grand rond de cuivre rouge luire,
Immense casserole où le bon Dieu fait cuire
La manne, l'arlequin, l'éternel plat du jour.
C'est trempé de sueur et c'est trempé d'amour.

Les laridons en cercle attendent prés du four,
On entend vaguement la chair rance bruire,
Et les soiffards aussi sont là, tendant leur buire,
Les marmiteux grelotte en attendant son tour.

Crois-tu que le soleil frit donc pour tout le monde
Ces gras graillons grouillants qu'un torrent d'or inonde?
Non, le bouillon de chien tombe sur nous du ciel.

Eux sont sous le rayon et nous sous la gouttière.
A nous le pot au noir qui froidit sans lumière.
Notre substance à nous, c'est notre poche à fiel.

(Tr. 41)

Born at Morlaix in 1845, Tristan returned there in 1875 to die of inflammation of the lungs. He was the son (others say the nephew) of the sea romancer, Edouard Corbière, author of _Négrier_, whose violent love for the things of the sea had such a strong influence upon the poet. This _Négrier_, by Edouard Corbière, captain on a long-voyage vessel, 1832, 2 vol. in-8, is a quite interesting tale of maritime adventures. The fourth chapter of the first part, entitled _Prisons d'Angleterre_, (the convict ships) contains the most curious details about the habits of the prisoners, about the loves of the _corvettes_ with the "_forts-a-bras_"--in one place, the author says, where "there was only one sex." The preface of this novel reveals a spirit that is very proud and very disdainful of the public: the same spirit with some talent and a sharper nervousness,--you have Tristan Corbière.

ARTHUR RIMBAUD

Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud was born at Charleville, October 20, 1854, and from the most tender age showed traits of the most insupportable blackguardism. His brief stay in Paris was in 1870-71. He followed Verlaine in England, then in Belgium. After the little misunderstanding which separated them, Rimbaud roved through the world, followed the most diverse trades, a soldier in the army of Holland, ticket taker at Stockholm in the Loisset circus, contractor in the Isle of Cyprus, trader at Harrar, then at Cape Guardafui, in Africa, where a friend of M. Vittorio Pico saw him, applying himself to the fur trade. It is likely that, scorning all that lacks brutal gratification, savage adventure, the violent life, this poet, singular among all, willingly renounced poetry. None of the authentic pieces of _Reliquaire_ seem more recent than 1873; although he did not die before the end of 1891. The verses of his extreme youth are weak, but from the age of seventeen Rimbaud acquired originality, and his work will endure, at least by virtue of phenomena. He is often obscure, bizarre and absurd. Of sincerity nothing, with a woman's character, a girl's, inherently wicked and even savage, Rimbaud has that kind of talent which interests without pleasing. In his works are pages which give the impression of beauty one feels before a pustulous toad, a good-looking syphillitic woman, or the Chateau-Rouge at eleven o'clock in the evening. _Les Pauvres â l'èglise, les Premières Communions_ possess an uncommon quality of infamy and blasphemy. _Les Assis_ and _le Bateau ivre_,--there we have the excellent Rimbaud, and I detest neither _Oraison du soir_ nor _les Chercheuses de Poux._ He was somebody after all, since genius ennobles even baseness. He was a poet. Some verses of his have remained living almost in the state of ordinary speech:

Avec l'assentiment des grands héliotropes.

(Tr. 42)

Some stanzas of _Bateau ivre_ belong to true and great poetry:

Et dès lors je me suis baigné dans le poème
De la mer, infusé d'astres et latescent,
Dévorant les azurs verts où, flottaison blême
Et ravie, un noyé pensif parfois descend,
Où, teignant tout à coup les bleuités, délires
Et rythmes lents sous les rutilements du jour,
Plus fortes que l'alcool, plus vastes que vos lyres,
Fermentent les rousseurs amères de l'amour.

(Tr. 43)

The whole poem marches: all of Rimbaud's poems march, and in _les Illuminations_ there are marvelous belly dances.

It is a pity that his life, so poorly known, was not the true _vita abscondita_; what is known disgusts from what can be understood of it. Rimbaud was like those women whom we are not surprised to learn have taken to religion in some house of shame; but what revolts still more is that he seems to have been a jealous and passionate mistress: here the aberration becomes debauched, being sentimental. Senancour, the man who has spoken most freely of love, says of these inharmonious liaisons where the female falls so low that she has no name except in the dirtiest slang:

"When in a very particular situation, the need results in a minute of misconduct, we can perhaps pardon men totally vulgar, or at least banish its memory; but how understand that which becomes a habit, an attachment? The fault may have been accidental; but that which is joined to this act of brutality, that which is not unforseen, becomes ignoble. If even a passion capable of troubling the head and almost of depriving one of liberty, has often left an ineffaceable stain, what disgust will not a consent given in cold-blood inspire? Intimacy in this manner, that is the height of shame, the irremediable infamy."

But the intelligence, conscious or unconscious, though not having all rights, has the right of all absolutions.

... Qui sait si le genie
N'est pas une de vos vertus,

(Tr. 44)

monsters, whether you are called Rimbaud,--or Verlaine?

FRANCIS POICTEVIN

Like all writers who have achieved an understanding of life, Francis Poictevin, though a born novelist, promptly renounced the novel. He knows that everything happens, that a fact in itself is not more interesting than another fact and that the manners of expression alone have significance.

I recall something to this effect reported by Sarcey apropos of the lamentable Murger: "About gave him a subject for a novel; he made nothing of it. He was decidedly a sluggard." It is very difficult to persuade certain old men--old or young--that there are no _subjects_; there is only a _subject_ in literature, and that he who writes, and all literature, that is to say all philosophy, can arise equally from the cry of a run-over dog as from Faust's exclamations as he questions Nature: "Where seize thee, O infinite Nature? And thou, Breasts?"

The author of _Tout Bas_ and of _Presque,_ like any other person, could have arranged his meditations in dialogues, order his sentiments into chapters divided at random, insinuate through pseudo-living characters a bit of gesticulating life and have them express, by the act of kneeling on the flag-stones of some familiar church, the virtue of an unrecognized creed: in short, write "the novel of mysticism" and popularize the practice of mental prayer for the "literary journals." By this means his books would have gained him a popularity which certainly he now lacks, for few writers among those whose talent is evident are so little esteemed, less known and less discussed. Poictevin disdains all artifice save the artifice of style, a snare into which we are content to fall. Whether he notes the delicacies of a flower, a little girl's attitude, the grace of a madonna, or the cold and quite hard purity of Catherine de Gênes, he wins us with sure strokes, by that very preciosity with which some clumsily reproach him. This preciosity is rigorously personal. Apart from all groups, as remote from Huysmans as from Mallarmé, the author of _Tout Bas_ works, one would say, in a cell, an ideal cell he carries with him while traveling; and there, standing, often kneeling, he pours out his poems and prayers in phrases that have the unique musical quality of a Byzantine organ. Less phrases than vibrations, vibrations so peculiar that few souls find themselves attuned. Music of Gregorian plain-chant, such as one listens to in a sumptuous Flemish church, with sudden fugues of exalted prayer that soar aloft towards the high lines and hurl themselves against the painted vaults, kindling old stained-glass windows, illuming the lines of the darkened cross with love. The mystic monk, the true mystic, Fra Angelico, and Bonaventura a little, live again in the pages of _Presque_ with its chatoyant spirituality, more than in all the pseudo-mystic literature of our time. Would not the author of _Recordare sanctae crucis_ find more satisfaction in this prayer than in the patronizing and fructiferous deductions; "Here below the Christ appears the most adorable, most absorbed figure of the eternal substance, scented with all virtues; a figure with dulcet blues, the burning clear yellows of topaz or chrysanthemum, the blood-red hues of future glories. And despite my daily relapses, I compel myself, according to Jesus' word to the Samaritan, to adoration in spirit and in truth," Poictevin has entered the "Garden of all the flowerings" of which Saint Bonaventura sang,

(Crux deliciarum hortus
In quo florent omnia....)

(Tr. 45)

and kneeling, he has kissed the heart of roses whose rosary is of blood,--the blood of the great torment. While Morning, fair-haired youth, delivers moist adolescence to folly-driven women, he goes towards a priestly peace, to masses of solitude, and one of the graces gathered is that his soul becomes impregnated with the "interior light, _claritas caritas_."

It is the essential point. Mere phrases, yes; but the phrases are no more than the attire and reserve of his art. He has felt, dreamed or thought before speaking; especially has he loved: and some of his, metaphors leap like a fervent prayer, like one of the cries of Saint Theresa.

He strives clearly to reach the bottom, to penetrate even the vital center of the hortensia's umbel. Everywhere he seeks--and finds--the soul. No one is less a rhetorician than this stylist, for the rhetorician is he who clothes the solid common things with garments fit to sustain all the vulgarity of bedizenings, while Poictevin ever diaphanizes a phantom, a rainbow, an illusion, an azalea flower, thus: "Would a hand of a consumptive in the contraction of its quasi-diaphaneity, leaning, not lazily, but which no longer is conscious, seem to warn, less exalted than before and indulgently returned?"

Yes, how subtle it is!--and why not write "like everybody"?

Alas! that is forbidden him,--because he is a mystic, because he feels new rapports between man and God, and because, veiled in the dolorous perfection of a form where grace becomes pearled in minutiae, Poictevin is a spontaneous writer. How many things, doubtless, has he never transcribed, afraid of not having discovered the exact expression, the unique and very rare, the unedited!

Everything, indeed, in a work of art should be unedited,--and even the words, by the manner of grouping them, of shaping them to new meanings,--and one often regrets having an alphabet familiar to too many half-lettered persons.

Disciple of Goncourt, from whom he further sharpened his precious style of writing, Francis Poictevin by degrees refined himself to immateriality. And that is just his genius, the expression of the immaterial and the inexpressible: he invented the mysticism of style.

ANDRÉ GIDE

In 1891 I wrote as follows apropos of the _Cahiers d'André Walter_, an anonymous work: "The diary is a form of good literature and perhaps the best for some extremely subjective minds. De Maupassant would make nothing of it. For him the world is like the cover of a billiard table; he notes the meetings of the balls and stops when the balls stop, for if there is no further material movement to be perceived, there is nothing more to be said, The subjective soul feeds on itself through the reserve of its stored sensations; and, by an occult chemistry, by unconscious combinations whose numbers approach infinity, those sensations, often of a faraway past time, become changed and are multiplied in ideas. Then are narrated, not anecdotes, but the very anecdotes of oneself, the only kind that can often be retold, if one has the talent and gift to vary their appearances. In this way has the author of these copy books worked and thus will he work again. His is a romantic and philosophic mind, of the lineage of Goethe. One of these years, when he will have recognized the helplessness of thought against the onward course of things, its social uselessness, the scorn it inspires in that mass of corpuscles named society, indignation will seize him, and since action, though illusive, is forever closed to him, he will wake armed with irony. This oddly enough, is a writer's finishing touch; it is the co-efficient of his soul's worth. The theory of the novel, stated in a note of page 120 is of more than mediocre interest; we must hope that the author upon occasion will recollect it. As for the present book, it is ingenuous and delicate, the revealer of a fine intelligence. It seems the condensation of a whole youth of study, dreams and sentiment, of a tortuous, timorous youth. This reflection (p. 142) rather well sums up André Walter's state of mind: 'O, the emotion when one is quite near to happiness, when one has but to touch it,--and passes on.'"

There is a certain pleasure in not having been deceived in one's first judgment of the first book of an unknown person. Now that André Gide has, after several intelligent works, become one of the most luminous of the Church's Levites, with the flames of intelligence and grace quite visible around his brow and in his eyes, the time nears when bold discoverers will discuss his genius, and, since he fares forth and advances, sound the trumpets of the advancing column. He deserves the glory, if anyone merits it (glory is always unjust) since to the originality of talent the master of minds willed that in this singular being should be joined an originality of soul. It is a gift rare enough to justify speaking of it.

A writer's talent is often nothing but the terrible faculty of retelling, in phrases that seem beautiful, the eternal clamors of mediocre humanity. Even gigantic geniuses, like Victor Hugo or Adam de Saint-Victor were destined to utter an admirable music whose grandeur consists in concealing the immense emptiness of the deserts: their soul is like the formless docile soul of deserts and crowds; they love, think, and desire the loves, thoughts, desires of all men and of all beasts; poets, they magnificently declaim what is not worth the trouble of being thought.

The human species, doubtless, in its entire aspect of a hive or colony, is only superior to the bison species or the king-fisher, because we are a part of it; here and there man is a sorry automaton; but his superiority lies in his ability to attain consciousness; a small number reach this stage. To acquire the full consciousness of self is to know oneself so different from others that one no longer feels allied with men except by purely animal contacts: nevertheless, among souls of this degree, there is an ideal fraternity based on differences,--while social fraternity is based on resemblances.

The full consciousness of self can be called originality of soul,--and all this is said only to point out the group of rare beings to which André Gide belongs.

The misfortune of these beings, when they wish to express themselves, is that they do it with such odd gestures that men fear to approach them; their life of social contacts must often revolve in the brief circle of ideal fraternities; or, when the mob consents to admit such souls, it is as curiosities or museum objects. Their glory is, finally, to be loved from afar and almost understood, as parchments are seen and read above sealed glass cases.

But all this is related in _Paludes_, a story, as is known, "of animals living in dusky caverns, and which lose their sight through never being used"; it is also, with a more intimate charm than in the _Voyage d' Urien_, the ingenuous story of a very complicated, very intellectual and very original soul.

PIERRE LOUYS

At this moment there is a little movement of neo-paganism, of sensual naturalism and erotism at once mystic and materialistic, a springtime of those purely carnal religions where woman is adored even for the very ugliness of her sex, for by means of metaphors we can idealize the imperfect and deify the illusive. A novel of Marcel Batilliat, a young unknown man, is, despite its serious faults, perhaps the most curious specimen of this erotic religiosity which zealous hearts are cultivating as dreams or ideals. But there is a famous manifestation, the _Aphrodite_ of Pierre Louys, whose success, doubtless, henceforth will stifle as under roses, all other claims of sexual romanticism.

It is not, although its appearance has deceived young and old critics, a historical novel, such as _Salammbô_ or even _Thaïs._ The perfect knowledge which Pierre Louys possesses of Alexandrian religions and customs has allowed him to clothe his personages with names and garbs veraciously ancient, but the book must be read divested of those precautions which are not there, just as in more than one eighteenth century novel, where the customs, gestures and desires of an incontestable today are at play behind the embroidered screen work of hieratic phallophores.

By the vulgarizing of art, love finally has returned to us naked. It is in the epoch of the flowering of Calvinism that the nude began to be banned from manners and that it sought refuge in art, which alone treasured the tradition of it. Formerly, and even in the time of Charles the Fifth, there were no public celebrations without speculations regarding lovely nude women; the nude was so little dreaded that adulterous women were driven stark naked through the towns. It is beyond a doubt that, in the mysteries, such roles as Adam and Eve were acted by persons free of fleshings,--monstrous display. To love the nude, and first of all femininity with its graces and insolences, is traditional in those races which hard reform has not altogether terrorized. The idea of the nude being admitted, costume can be modified to take in floating loose robe, manners can be softened, and something of splendor illume the gloom of our hypocricies. By its vogue, _Aphrodite_ has signalled the possible return to manners where there will be a bit of freedom; coming from that period, this book has the value of an antidote.

But how fallacious is such a literature. All these women, all this flesh, the cries, the luxury so animal, so empty and so cruel! The females gnaw at the brains; thought flies horror-stricken; woman's soul oozes away as by the action of rain, and all these copulations engender nothingness, disgust and death.

Pierre Louys has felt that his fleshly book logically must end in death: _Aphrodite_ closes in a scene of death, with obsequies.

It is the end of _Atala_ (Chateaubriand invisibly hovers over our whole literature), but gracefully refashioned and renewed with art and tenderness,--so well that the idea of death comes to join itself with the idea of beauty; the two images, entwined like two courtisans, slowly fades into the night.

RACHILDE

Sincerity, what an enormous unreasonable demand, if it is a question of woman! Those most praised for their candor were nevertheless comedians, like the weeping Marceline, an actress moreover who wept through her life, as in a role, with the consciousness which the plaudits of the public give. Since women have written, not one has had the good faith to speak and confess themselves in bold humility, and the only ideas of feminine psychology known to literature must be sought in the literature of men. There is more to learn of women in _Lady Roxanna_ than in the complete works of George Sand. It is not perhaps a question of untruthfulness; it is rather a natural incapacity to think for herself, to take cognizance of herself in her own brain, and not in the eyes and in the lips of others; even when they ingenuously write into little secret diaries, women think of the unknown god reading--perhaps--over their shoulders. With a similar nature, a woman, to be placed in the first ranks of men, would require even a higher genius than that of the highest man; that is why, if the conspicuous works of men are often superior to the men themselves, the finest works of women are always inferior to the worth of the women who produced them.

This incapacity is not personal; it is generic and absolute. It is needful, then, to compare women exclusively with themselves, and not scorn them for whatever of egoism or personality is lacking: this fault, outside of literature and art, is generally estimated as equal to a positive virtue.

Whether they essay their charms in perversity or candor, women will better succeed in living than in playing their comedy; they are made for life, for the flesh, for materiality,--and they will joyfully realize their most romantic dreams if they do not find themselves arrested by the indifference of man whose more sensitive nerves suffer from vibrating in the void. There is an evident contradiction between art and life; we have hardly ever seen a man live in action and dream at the same time, transposing in writing the gestures that first were real: the equivalence of sensations is certain and the horrors of fear can better be described by whosoever imagines them than by the man that experiences them. On the contrary, the predominance in a temperament of tendencies to live, dulls the sharpness of the imaginative faculties. With the more intelligent women, those best gifted for cerebral pursuits, the impelling motivation will most easily be translated into acts than into art. It is a physiological fact, a state of nature it would be as absurd to reproach women with as to blame men for the smallness of their breasts or the shortness of their hair. Moreover, if it is a question of art, the discussion, which touches such a small number of creatures, has for humanity, like all purely intellectual questions, but an interest of the steeple or the street corner.

All this, then, being admitted, and it also being admitted that _l'Animale_ is Rachilde's most singular book (although not the most ambiguous) and that _le Démon de l'Absurde_ is the best, I will willingly add, not for the sole pleasure of contradicting myself and destroying the virtue of the preceding pages, that this collection of tales and imaginative dialogue proves to me a realized effort at true artistic sincerity. Pages like _la Panthère_ or _les Vendanges de Sodom_ show that a woman can have phases of virility, to write, careless of necessary coquetteries or customary attitudes, make art with nothing but an idea and from words, create.

J. K. HUYSMANS

"Le Romanée and Chambertin, Clos-Vougeot and Corton made the abbatial pomps, princely fetes, opulences of vestments figured in gold, aglow with light, pass before him. The Clos-Vougeot especially dazzled him. To him that wine seemed the syrup of great dignitaries. The etiquette glittered before his eyes, like glories surrounded by beams, placed in churches, behind the occiput of Virgins."

The writer who in 1881, in the midst of the naturalistic morass, had, before a name read on a wine list, such a vision, although ironic, of evoked splendors, must have puzzled his friends and made them suspect an approaching defection. In fact, several years later, the unexpected _A Rebours_ appeared, and it was not a point of departure, but the consecration of a new literature. No longer was it so much a question of forcing a brutal externality to enter the domains of Art by representation, as of drawing from this very representation motives for dreams and interior revaluations. _En Rade_ further developed this system whose fruitfulness is limitless,--while the naturalistic method proved itself still more sterile than even its enemies had dared hope,--a system of strictest logic and of such marvelous suppleness that it permits, without forfeiting anything to likelihood, to intercalate in exact scenes of rustic life, pages like "Esther" or like the "_voyage sélénien_."

The architecture of _Là-Bas_ is based on an analogous plan, but the license profitably finds itself restrained by the unity of subject, which remains absolute beneath its multiple faces: the Christ of Gunewald, in his extreme mystic violence, his startling and consoling hideousness, is not a fugue without line, nor are the demoniac forest of Tiffauges, the cruel Black Mass, or any of the "fragments" displaced or inharmonious; nevertheless, before the freedom of the novel, they had been criticized, not in themselves, but as not rigorously necessary to the advance of the book. Fortunately the novel is finally free, and to say more, the novel, as still conceived by Zola or Bourget, to us appears a conception as superannuated as the epic poem or the tragedy. Only, the old frame is still able to serve; it sometimes is necessary to entice the public to very arduous subjects, to simulate vague romantic intrigues, which the author unravels at his own will, after he has said all he wished to say. But the essential of yesterday is become the accessory, and an accessory more and more scorned: quite rare at the present hour are those writers who are clever or strong enough to confine themselves to a demolished genre, to spur the fatigued cavalry of sentimentalities and adulteries.

Moreover, aesthetics tends to specialization in as many forms as there are talents: among many vanities are admissible arrogances to which we cannot refuse the right to create into normal characters. Huysmans is of those; he no longer writes novels, he makes books, and he plans them according to an original arrangement; I believe that is one of the reasons why some persons still take issue with his literature and find it immoral. This last point is easy to explain by a single word: for the non-artist, art is always immoral. As soon as one wishes, for example, to translate sexual relations into a new language, he is immoral because he discloses, fatally, acts which, treated by ordinary procedures, would remain unperceived, lost in the mist of common things. Thus it is that an artist, not at all erotic, can be accused of stupid outrages by the foolish or the mischievous, before the public. It, nevertheless, does not seem that the facts of love or rather of aberration related in _Là-Bas_ at all entice the simplicity of virginal ignorance. This book rather gives disgust or horror of sensuality in that it does not invite to foolish experiences or even to permissible unions. Will not immorality, if we behold it from a particular and peculiarly religious point of view, consist, on the contrary, in the insistence upon the exquisiteness of carnal love and the vaunting of the delights of legitimate copulation?

The Middle Age knew not: our hypocrisies. It was not at all ignorant of the eternal turpitudes, but it knew how to hate them. It had no use for our conduct, nor for our refinements; it published the vices, sculped them on its cathedral portals and spread them in the verses of its poets. It had less regard for refraining from terrifying the fears of mummied souls than for tearing apart the robes and revealing the man, and showing to man, so as to make him ashamed, all the ugliness of his low animality. But it did not make the brute wallow in his vice; it placed him on his knees and made him lift his head. Huysmans has understood all this, and it was difficult to conquer. After the horrors of the satanic debauch, before the earthly punishment, he has, like the noble weeping people he evokes, forgiven even the most frightful slayers of infants, the basest sadist, the most monstrous fool that ever was.

Having absolved such a man, he could without pharisaism absolve himself, and with the aid of God, some more humble and quite brotherly succor, of helpful reading, visitations to gentle conventual chapels, Huysmans one day found himself converted to mysticism, and wrote _En Route_, that book which is like a statue of stone that suddenly begins to weep. It is a mysticism a little raucous and hard, but like his phrases, his epithets, Huysmans is hard. Mysticism first came to him through the eyes rather than through the soul. He observed religious facts with the fear of being their dupe and the hope that they would be absurd; he was caught in the very meshes of the _credo-quia-absurdum_,--happy victim of his curiosity.

Now, fatigued at having watched men's hypocritical faces, he watches the stones, preparing a supreme book on "The Cathedral." There, if it is a question of feeling and understanding, is it especially a question of sight. He will see as no other person has seen, for no one other person has seen, no one ever was gifted with a glance so sharp, so boring, so frank and so skilled in insinuating himself into the very wrinkles of faces, rose-windows and masks.

Huysmans is an eye.

JULES LAFORGUE

In the _Fleurs de bonne Volonté_ is a little complaint, like the others, called _Dimanches_:

Le ciel pleut sans but, sans que rien l'émeuve,
Il pleut, il pleut, bergère! sur le fleuve....

Le fleuve a son repos dominical;
Pas un chaland, en amont, en aval.

Les vêpres carillonnent sur la ville,
Les berges sont désertes, sans une île.

Passe un pensionnat, ô pauvres chairs!
Plusieurs out déjà leurs manchons d'hiver.

Une qui n'a ni manchon ni fourrure
Fait tout en gris une bien pauvre figure;

Et la voilà qui s'échappe des rangs
Et court: ô mon Dieu, qu'est-ce qui lui prend?

Elle va se jeter dans le fleuve.
Pas un batelier, pas un chien de Terre-Neuve....

(Tr. 46)

And there we have, prophesized, the sudden absurd death, the life of Laforgue. His heart was too cold; he departed.

His was a mind gifted with all the gifts and rich with important acquisitions. With his natural genius made up of sensibility, irony, imagination and clairvoyance, he had wished to nourish it with positive knowledge, all the philosophies, all the literatures, all the images of nature and art; and even the latest views of science seemed to have been familiar to him. He had an ornate flamboyant genius, ready to construct architectural works infinitely diverse and fair, to rear new ogives and unfamiliar domes; but he had forgotten his winter muff and died one snowy day of cold.

That is why his work, already magnificent, is only the prelude of an oratorio ended in silence.

Many of his verses are as though reddened by a glacial affectation of naiveté; they speak of the too dearly cherished child, of the young girl hearkened to--but a sign of a true need of affection and of a pure gentleness of heart,--adolescent of genius who would still have wished to place on the knees of his mother, his "equatorial brow, greenhouse of anomalies." But many have the beauty of purified topazes, the melancholy of opals, the freshness of moon-stones, and some pages, like that which commences thus:

Noire bise, averse glapissante
Et fleuve noir, et maisons closes....

(Tr. 47)

have a sad, consoling grace, with eternal avowals: forever on the same subject, Laforgue retells it in such fashion that it seems dreamed and confessed for the first time. And I think that what we must demand of the translator of dreams is, not to wish to fix forever the fugacity of a thought or air, but to sing the song of the present hour with such frank force that it seems the only one we could hear, the only one we could understand. In the end, perhaps, it is necessary to become reasonable and delight us with the present and with new flowers, indifferent, except as a botanist, to the faded fields. Every epoch of thought, art or sentiment should take a deep delight in itself and go down from the world with the egoism and languor of a superb lake which, smiling upon the old streams, receives them, calms them, and absorbs them.

There was no present for Laforgue, except among a group of friends. He died just as his _Moralités Légendaires_ was coming to birth, but still offered to a minority, and he had just learned from some mouths that these pages consecrated him to live the life of glory among those whom the gods created in their image, they, too, gods and creators. It is a literature entirely new and disconcertingly unexpected, giving the curious sensation (specially rare) that we have never read anything like it; the grape with all its velvet hues in the morning light, but with curious reflections and an air as if the seeds within had become frozen by a breath of ironic wind come from some place farther than the pole.

On a copy of _l'Imitation de Notre-Dame la Lune_, offered to Bourget (and since thrown among old papers in the quay) Laforgue wrote: "This is only an _inter-mezzo._ I pray you to wait yet awhile, and give me until my next book";--but he was of those who ever look forward to finding themselves in their next work, the noble unsatisfied who have too much to say ever to believe that they have said other things than prolegomenae and prefaces. If his interrupted work is but a preface, it belongs to those which counterbalance a finished work.

JEAN MORÉAS

Raymond de la Tailhède thus exalts Moréas:

Tout un silence d'or vibrant s'est abattu,
Près des sources que des satyres ont troublées,
Claire merveille éclose au profond des vallées,
Si l'oiselet chanteur du bocage s'est tu.

Oubli de flûte, heures de rêves sans alarmes,
Où tu as su trouver pour ton sang amoureux
La douceur d'habiter un séjour odoreux
De roses dont les dieux sylvains te font des armes

Là tu vas composant ces beaux livres, honneur
Du langage français et de la noble Athènes.

(Tr. 48)

These verses are romances, that is, of a poet to whom the romantic period is but a witch's night where unreal sonorous gnomes stir, of a poet (this one has talent) who concentrates his efforts to imitate the Greeks of the Anthology through Ronsard, and to steal from Ronsard the secret of his laborious phrase, his botanical epithets, and his sickly rhythm. As for what is exquisite in Ronsard, since that little has passed into tradition and memory, the Romantic school had to neglect it on pain of quickly losing what alone constitutes its originality. There is I know not what of provincialism, of steps against life's current, of the loiterer, in this care for imitation and restoration. Somewhere Moréas sings praise

De ce Sophocle, honneur de la Ferté-Milon,

(Tr. 40)

and it is just that: the Romantic school always has the air of coming from Ferté-Milon.

But Jean Moréas, who has met his friends on the road, started from somewhere farther away, introduces himself more proudly.

Arrived in Paris like any other Wallachian or Eastern student, and already full of love for the French language, Moréas betook himself to the school of the old poets and frequented the society of Jacot de Forest and Benoit de Sainte-Maure. He wished to take the road to which every clever youth should vow himself who is ambitious to become a good harper; he swore to accomplish the complete pilgrimage: At this hour, having set out from the _Chanson de Saint-Léger_, he has, it is said, reached the seventeenth century, and this in less than ten years. It is not as discouraging as one supposes. And now that texts are more familiar, the road shortens: from now on less halts. Moréas will camp under the old Hugo oak, and, if he perseveres, we shall see him achieve the aim of his voyage, which doubtless is to catch up with himself. Then, casting aside the staff, often changed and cut from such diverse copses, he will lean on his own genius and we will be able to judge him, if that be our whim, with a certain security.

All that today can be said is that Moréas passionately loves the French language and poetry, and that the two proud-hearted sisters have smiled upon him more than once, satisfied to see near their steps a pilgrim so patient, a cavalier armed with such good-will.

Cavalcando l'altrjer per un cammino,
Pensoso dell andar che mi sgradia,
Trovai Amor in mezzo della via
In abito legger di pellegrino.

(Tr. 50)

Thus Moréas goes, quite attentive, quite in love, and in the light robe of a pilgrim. When he called one of his poems _le Pèlerin passionné_, he gave an excellent idea and a very sane symbolism of himself, his role and his playings among us.

There are fine things in that _Pèlerin_, and also in _les Syrtes_; there are admirable and delicious touches and which (for my part) I shall always joyfully reread, in _les Cantilènes,_ but inasmuch as Moréas, having changed his manner, repudiates these primitive works, I shall not insist. There remains _Ériphyle_, a delicate collection formed of a poem of four "sylvae", all in the taste of the Renaissance and destined to be the book of examples where the young "Romans", spurred on by the somewhat intemperate invectives of Charles Maurras, must study the classic art of composing facile verses laboriously. Here is a page:

Astre brillant, Phébé aux ailes étendues,
O flamme de la nuit qui croîs et diminues,
Favorise la route et les sombres forêts
Où mon ami errant porte ses pas discrets!
Dans la grotte au vain bruit dont l'entrée est tout lierre,
Sur la roche pointue aux chèvres familière,
Sur le lac, sur l'étang, sur leurs tranquilles eaux,
Sur les bords émaillés où plaignent les roseaux.
Dans le cristal rompu des ruisselets obliques,
Il aime à voir trembler tes feux mélancoliques.
* * * * *
Phébé, ô Cynthia, dès sa saison première,
Mon ami fut épris de ta belle lumière;
Dans leur cercle observant tes visages divers,
Sous ta douce influence il composait ses vers.
Par dessus Nice, Eryx, Seyre et la sablonneuse
Ioclos, le Tmolus et la grande Epidaure,
Et la verte Cydon, sa piété honore
Ce rocher de Latmos où tu fus amoureuse.

(Tr. 51)

Moréas, like his Phoebe, has tried to put on many diverse countenances and even to cover his face with masks. We always recognize him from his brothers: he is a poet.

STUART MERRILL

The logic of an amateur of literature is offended upon his discovering that his admirations disagree with those of the public; but he is not surprised, knowing that there are the elect of the last hour. The public's attitude is less benignant when it learns the disaccord which is noticeable between it, obscure master of glories, and the opinion of the small oligarchic number. Accustomed to couple these two ideas, renown and talent, it shows a repugnance in disjoining them; it does not admit, for it has a secret sense of justice or logic, that an illustrious author might be so by chance alone, or that an unknown author merits recognition. Here is a misunderstanding, doubtless old as the six thousand years ascribed by La Bruyère to human thought, and this misunderstanding, based on very logical and solid reasoning, sets at defiance from the height of its pedestal all attempts at conciliation. To end it, it is needful to limit oneself to the timid insinuations of science and to ask if we truly know the "thing in itself," if there is not a certain inevitable little difference between the object of knowledge and the knowledge of the object. On this ground, as one will be less understood, agreement will be easier and then the legitimate difference of opinions will be voluntarily admitted, since it is not a question of captivating Truth--that reflection of a moon in a well--but to measure by approximation, as is done with stars, the distance or the difference existing between the genius of a poet and the idea we have of it.

Were it necessary, which is quite useless, to express oneself more clearly, it might be said that, according to several persons whose opinion perhaps is worth that of many others, all the literary history, as written by professors according to educational views, is but a mass of judgments nearly all reversed, and that, in particular, the histories of French literature is but the banal cataloguing of the plaudits and crowns fallen to the cleverest or most fortunate. Perhaps it is time to adopt another method and to give, among the celebrated persons, a place to those who could have attained it--if the snow had not fallen on the day they announced the glory of the new spring.

Stuart Merrill and Saint-Pol-Roux are of those whom the snow gainsaid. If the public knows their names less than some others, it is not that they have less merit, it is that they had less good fortune.

The poet of _Fastes_, by the mere choice of this word, bespeaks the fair frankness of a rich soul and a generous talent. His verses, a little gilded, a little clamorous, truly burst forth and peal for the holidays and gorgeous parades, and when the play of sunshine has passed, behold the torches illumined in the night for the sumptuous procession of supernatural women. Poems or women, they doubtless are bedecked with too many rings and rubies and their robes are embroidered with too much gold; they are royal courtisans rather than princesses, but we love their cruel eyes and russet hair.

After such splendid trumpets, the _Petits Poèmes d'Automne_, the noise of the spuming wheel, a sound of a bell, an air of a flute in tone of moonlight: it is the drowsiness and dreaming saddened by the silence of things, the incertitude of the hours:

C'est le vent d'automne dans l'allée,
Soeur, écoute, et la chute sur l'eau
Des feuilles du saule et du bouleau,
Et c'est le givre dans la vallée,

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

Et viens, pareille à ces châtelaines
Dolentes à qui tu fais songer,
Dans le silence où meurt ton léger
Rouet, ô ma soeur des marjolaines!

(Tr. 52)

Thus, in Stuart Merrill we discover the contrast and struggle of a spirited temperament and a very gentle heart, and according as one of the two natures prevails, we hear the violence of brasses or the murmurings of viols. Similarly does his technique oscillate from _Gammes_ to his latest poems, from the Parnassian stiffness to the _verso suelto_ of the new schools, which only the senators of art do not recognize. Vers libre, which is favorable to original talent, and which is a reef of danger to others, could not help winning over so gifted a poet, and so intelligent an innovator. This is how he understands it:

Venez avec des couronnes de primevères dans vos mains,
O fillettes qui pleurez la soeur morte à l'aurore.
Les cloches de la vallée sonnent la fin d'un sort,
Et l'on voit luire des pelles au soleil du matin.

Venez avec des corbeilles de violettes, ô fillettes
Qui hésitez un peu dans le chemin des hêtres,
Par crainte des paroles solennelles du prêtre.
Venez, le ciel est tout sonore d'invisibles alouettes....

C'est la fête de la mort, et l'on dirait dimanche,
Tant les cloches sonnent, douces au fond de la vallée;
Les garçons se sont cachés dans les petites allées;
Vous seules devez prier au pied de la tombe blanche....

Quelque année, les garçons qui se cachent aujourd'hui
Viendront vous dire à toutes la douce douleur d'aimer,
Et l'on vous entendra, autour du mât de mai,
Chanter des rondes d'enfance pour saluer la nuit.

(Tr. 53)

Stuart Merrill did not embark in vain, the day he desired to cross the Atlantic, to come and woo the proud French poetry, and place one of her flowers in his hair.

SAINT-POL-ROUX

One of the most fruitful and astonishing inventors of images and metaphors. To find new expressions, Huysmans materializes the spiritual and the intellectual spheres, thus giving his style a precision somewhat heavy and a lucidity rather unnatural: _rotten souls_ (like teeth) and _cracked hearts_ (like an old wall); it is picturesque and nothing else. The inverse operation is more conformable to the old taste of men for endowing vague sentiments and a dim consciousness to objects. It remains faithful to the pantheistic and animistic tradition without which neither art nor poetry would be possible. It is the deep source from which all the others are formed, pure water transformed by the slightest ray of sunshine into jewels sparkling like fairy collars. Other "metaphorists" like Jules Renard, venture to seek the image either in a reforming vision, a detail separated from the whole becoming the thing itself, or in a transposition and exaggeration of metaphors in usage; finally, there is the analogic method by which, without our voluntary aid, the meaning of ordinary words change daily. Saint-Pol-Roux blends these methods and makes them all contribute to the manufacture of images which, if they are all new, are not all beautiful. From them a catalogue or a dictionary could be drawn up:

Wise-Woman of light means the cock.
Morrow of the caterpillar in balldress -- butterfly.
Sin that sucks -- natural child.
Living distaff -- mutton.
Fin of the plow -- plowshare.
Wasp with the whip sting -- diligence.
Breast of crystal -- flagon.
Crab of the hand -- open hand.
Letter announcement -- magpie.
Cemetery with wings -- a flight of crows.
Romance for the nostrils -- perfume of flowers.
To tame the carious jawbone
of bemol of a modern tarask -- to play the piano.
Surly gewgaw of the doorway -- watchdog.
Blaspheming limousine -- wagoner.
To chant a bronze alexandrine -- to peal midnight.
Cognac of Father Adam -- the broad, pure air.
Imagery only seen with closed eyes -- dreams.
Leaves of living salad -- frogs.
Green chatterers -- frogs.
Sonorous wild-poppy -- cock-crow.

The most heedless person, having read this last, will decide that Saint-Pol-Roux is gifted with an imagination and with an equally exuberant wretched taste. If all these images, some of which are ingenious, followed one after another towards _les Reposoirs de la Procession_ where the poet guides them, the reading of such a work would be difficult and the smile would often temper the aesthetic emotion; but strewn here and there, they but form stains and do not always break the harmony of richly colored, ingenious and grave poems. _Le Pèlerinage de Sainte-Anne_, written almost entirely in images, is free of all impurity and the metaphors, as Théophile Gautier would have wished, unfold themselves in profusion, but logically and knit together; it is the type and marvel of the prose poem, with rhythm and assonance. In the same volume, the _Nocturne_ dedicated to Huysmans is but a vain chaplet of incoherent catachreses: the ideas there are devoured by a frightful troop of beasts. But _l'Autopsie de la Vieille fille_, despite a fault of tone, but _Calvaire immémorial_, but _l'Ame saisissable_ are masterpieces. Saint-Pol-Roux plays on a zither whose strings sometimes are too tightly drawn: a turn of the key would suffice for our ears ever to be deeply gladdened.

ROBERT DE MONTESQUIOU

Upon the first appearance of his _Chauves-Souris_ in violet velvet, the question was seriously put whether de Montesquiou was a poet or an amateur of poetry, and whether the fashionable world could be harmonized with the cult of the Nine Sisters, or of any one of them, for nine women are a lot. But to discourse in such fashion is to confess one's unfamiliarity with that logical operation called the dissociation of ideas, for it seems elementary logic separately to evaluate the worth or beauty of the tree and its fruit, of man and his works. Whether jewel or pebble, the book will be judged in itself, disregarding the source, the quarry or the stream from which it comes, and the diamond will not change its name, whether hailing from the Cape or from Golconda. To criticism the social life of a poet matters as little as to Polymnia herself, who indifferently welcomes into her circle the peasant Burns and the partician Byron, Villon the purse-snatcher and Frederick II, the king: Art's book of heraldry and that of Hozier are not written in the same style.

So we will not disturb ourselves with unraveling the flax from the distaff, or ascertaining what of illusiveness de Montesquiou and his status of a man of fashion have been able to add to the renown of the poet.

The poet, here, is "a précieuse".

Were those women really so ridiculous, who, to place themselves in the tone of some fine and gallant poets, imagined new ways of speech, and, through a hatred of the common, affected a singularity of mind, costume and gesture? Their crime, after all, was in not wishing to conform with the world, and it seems that they paid dearly for this, they--and the entire French poetry which, for a century and a half, truly feared ridicule too much. Poets at last are freed from such horrors; in fact they are now allowed to avow their originality; far from forbidding them to go naked, criticism encourages them to assume the free easy dress of the gymnosophist. But some of them are tattooed.

And that is really the true quarrel with de Montesquiou: his originality is excessively tattooed. Its beauty recalls, not without melancholy, the complicated figurations with which the old Australian chieftains were wont to ornament themselves; there is even an odd refinement in the nuances, the design, and the amusing audacities of tone and lines. He achieves the arabesque better than the figure, and sensation better than thought. If he thinks, it is through ideographic signs, like the Japanese:

Poisson, grue, aigle, fleur, bambou qu'un oiseau ploie,
Tortue, iris, pivoine, anémone et moineaux.

(Tr. 54)