THE BOOK OF MASKS

BY

REMY DE GOURMONT

Translated by

JACK LEWIS

Introduction by

LUDWIG LEWISOHN

JOHN W. LUCE AND COMPANY

BOSTON

MCMXXI

Illustrations are the 30 masks by Félix Valloton, from the original French edition of this book Le livre des masques, vol. 1 — also available at **http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/16886**

[CONTENTS]

[TRANSLATIONS FROM THE TEXT]

[INTRODUCTION]

To take critical questions seriously, even passionately, is one of the marks of a genuinely civilized society. It points to both personal disinterestedness and to an imaginative absorption in fundamentals. The American who watches eagerly some tilt in that great critical battle which has gone on for ages and has now reached our shores, is released from his slavery to the immediate and the parochial; he has ceased to flinch at the free exercise of thought; he has begun to examine his mind as his fathers examined only their conscience; he is a little less concerned for speed and a little more for direction; he is almost a philosopher and has risen from mere heated gregariousness to voluntary co-operation in a spiritual order. His equipment is, as a rule, still meagre, and so his partisanship is not always an instructed one. He may be overwhelmed by the formidable philosophical apparatus of one critic or merely irritated by the political whims of another. Hence nothing could well be more helpful to him than an introduction to a foreign critic who is at once a stringent thinker and a charming writer, who permitted his insight to be obscured by neither moral nor political prejudices, who is both urbane and incisive, catholic and discriminating.

Remy de Gourmont, like all the very great critics—Goethe, Ste. Beuve, Hazlitt, Jules Lemaitre—knew the creative instinct and exercised the creative faculty. Hence he understood, what the mere academician, the mere scholar, can never grasp, that literature is life grown flame-like and articulate; that, therefore, like life itself, it varies in aim and character, in form and color and savor and is the memorable record of and commentary upon each stage in that great process of change that we call the world. To write like the Greeks or the Elizabethans or the French classics is precisely what we must not do. It would be both presumptuous and futile. All that we have to contribute to mankind, what is it but just—our selves? If we were duplicates of our great-grandfathers we would be littering the narrow earth to no enriching purpose; all we have to contribute to literature is, again, our selves. This moment, this sensation, this pang, this thought—this little that is intimately our own is all we have of the unique and precious and incomparable. Let us express it beautifully, individually, memorably and it is all we can do; it is all that the classics did in their day. To imitate the classics—be one! That is to say, live widely, intensely, unsparingly and record your experience in some timeless form. This, in brief, is the critical theory of Gourmont, this is the background of that startling and yet, upon reflection, so clear and necessary saying of his "The only excuse a man has for writing is that he express himself, that he reveal to others the kind of world reflected in the mirror of his soul; his only excuse is that he be original".

Gourmont, like the Symbolists whom he describes in this volume, founded his theory of the arts upon a metaphysical speculation. He learned from the German idealists, primarily the Post-Kantians and Schopenhauer, that the world is only our representation, only our individual vision and that, since there is no criterion of the existence or the character of an external reality, that vision is, of course, all we actually have to express in art. But to accept his critical theory it is not necessary to accept his metaphysical views. The variety of human experience remains equally infinite and equally fascinating on account of its very infiniteness, whatever its objective content may or may not be. We can dismiss that antecedent and insoluble question and still agree that the best thing a man can give in art as in life is his own self. What kind of a self? One hears at once the hot and angry question of the conservative critic. A disciplined one, by all means, an infinitely and subtly cultivated one. But not one shaped after some given pattern, not a replica, not a herd-animal, but a human personality. But achieving such personalities, the reply comes, people fall into error. Well, this is an imperfect universe and the world-spirit, as Goethe said, is more tolerant than people think.

It is clear that criticism conceived of in this fashion, can do little with the old methods of harsh valuing and stiff classification. If, as Jules, Lemaitre put it, a poem, a play, a novel, "exists" at all, if it has that fundamental veracity of experience and energy of expression which raise it to the level of literary discussion, a critic like Gourmont cannot and will not pass a classifying judgment on it at all. For such judgments involve the assumption that there exists a fixed scale of objective values. And for such a scale we search both the world and the mind in vain. Hence, too—and this is a point of the last importance—we are done with arbitrary exclusions, exclusions by transitory conventions or by tribal habits lifted to the plane of eternal laws. All experience, the whole soul of man—nothing less than that is now our province. And no one has done more to bring us that critical and creative freedom and enlargement of scope than Remy de Gourmont.

In the volume before us, for instance, he discusses writers of very varied moods and interests. Dr. Samuel Johnson or, for that matter, a modern preceptist critic, speaking of these very poets, would have told us how some of them were noble and some ignoble and certain ones moral and others no better than they should be. And both of these good and learned and arrogant men would have instructed Verlaine in what to conceal, and Gustave Kahn in how to build verses and Régnier in how to enlarge the range of his imagery. Thus they would have missed the special beauty and thrill that each of these poets has brought into the world. For they read—as all their kind reads—not with peace in their hearts but with a bludgeon in their hands. But if we watch Gourmont who had, by the way, an intellect of matchless energy, we find that he read his poets with that wise passiveness which Wordsworth wanted men to cultivate before the stars and hills. He is uniformly sensitive; he lets his poets play upon him; he is the lute upon which their spirits breathe. And then that lute itself begins to sound and to utter a music of its own which swells and interprets and clarifies the music of his poets and brings nearer to us the wisdom and the loveliness which they and he have brought into the world.

Thus it is, first of all, as one of the earliest and finest examples of the New Criticism that this English version of the "Book of Masks" is to be welcomed. For the New Criticism is the chief phenomenon in that movement toward spiritual and moral tolerance which the world so sorely needs. But the book is also to be welcomed and valued for the sake of its specific subject matter. One movement in the entire range of modern poetry and only one surpasses the movement of the French Symbolists in clearness of beauty, depth of feeling, wealth and variety of music. This Symbolist movement arose in France as a protest against the naturalistic, the objective in substance and against the rigid and sonorous in form. Eloquence had so long, even during the romantic period, dominated French poetry that profound inwardness of inspiration and lyrical fluidity of expression were regarded as essential by the literary reformers of the later eighteen hundred and eighties. It was in the service of these ends that Stéphane Mallarmé taught the Symbolist system Of poetics: to name no things except as symbols of unseen realities, to use the external world merely as a means of communicating mood and revery and reflection. The doctrine and the verse of Mallarmé spoke to a Europe that was under the sway of a similar reaction and the work of poets as diverse as Arthur Symons, William Butler Yeats and Hugo von Hofmannsthal is unthinkable without the pervasive influence of the French master. Mallarmé and his doctrine are, indeed, the starting point of all modern lyrical poetry. Whatever has been written since, in free verse or fixed, betrays through conformity or re-action, the mark of that doctrine and the resultant movement.

The actual poets of the movement are little known among us. Verlaine's name is already almost a classical one and the exquisite versions of many of his poems by Arthur Symons are accessible; Verhaeren was lifted into a brief notoriety some years ago. But who really reads the stormy and passionate verses of the Flemish master? Nor are there many who have entered the suave and golden glow that radiates from Régnier, chief of the living poets of France, or who have vibrated to the melancholy of Samain or the inner music of Francis Vielé-Griffin. The other poets, less copious and less applauded, are not greatly inferior in the quality of their best work. There is not a poet in Gourmont's book who has not written some verses that add permanently to the world's store of living beauty. Nor is it true that a slightly more recent development in French poetry has surpassed the works of the Symbolists. M. Francis Jammes writes with a charming simplicity and M. Paul Fort with a large rhythmic line, with freshness and with grace and the very young "unanimiste" poets are intellectual and tolerant and sane. But they are all, in the essentials of poetry, children of the Symbolists whose work remains the great modern contribution of France to poetical literature.
LUDWIG LEWISOHN.

[PREFACE]

It is difficult to characterize a literary evolution in the hour when the fruits are still uncertain and the very blossoming in the orchard unconsummated. Precocious trees, slow-developing and dubious trees which one would not care, however, to call sterile: the orchard is very diverse and rich, too rich. The thickness of the leaves brings shadow, and the shadow discolors the flowers and dulls the hues of the fruit.

We will stroll through this rich, dark orchard and sit down for a moment at the foot of the strongest, fairest, and most agreeable trees.

Literary evolutions receive a name when they merit it by importance, necessity and fitness. Quite often, this name has no precise meaning, but is useful in serving as a rallying sign to all who accept it, and as the aiming point for those who attack it. Thus the battle is fought around a purely verbal labarum. What is the meaning of Romanticism? It is easier to feel than to explain it. What is the meaning of Symbolism? Practically nothing, if we adhere to the narrow etymological sense. If we pass beyond, it may mean individualism in literature, liberty in art, abandonment of taught formulas, tendencies towards the new and strange, or even towards the bizarre. It may also mean idealism, a contempt for the social anecdote, anti-naturalism, a propensity to seize only the characteristic details of life, to emphasize only those acts that distinguish one man from another, to strive to achieve essentials; finally, for the poets symbolism seems allied to free verse, that is, to unswathed verse whose young body may frolic at ease, liberated from embarrassments of swaddling clothes and straps.

But all this has little affinity with the syllables of the word, for we must not let it be insinuated that symbolism is only the transformation of the old allegory or of the art of personifying an idea in a human being, a landscape, or a narrative. Such an art is the whole of art, art primordial and eternal, and a literature freed from this necessity would be unmentionable. It would be null, with as much aesthetic significance as the clucking of the hocco or the braying of the wild ass.

Literature, indeed, is nothing more than the artistic development of the idea, the imaginary heroes. Heroes, or men (for every man in his sphere is a hero), are only sketched by life; it is art which perfects them by giving them, in exchange for their poor sick souls, the treasure of an immortal idea, and the humblest, if chosen by a great poet, may be called to this participation. Who so humble as that Aeneas whom Virgil burdens with all the weight of being the idea of Roman force, and who so humble as that Don Quixote on whom Cervantes imposes the tremendous load of being at once Roland, the four sons Aymon, Amadis, Palmerin, Tristan and all the knights of the Round Table! The history of symbolism would be the history of man himself, since man can only assimilate a symbolized idea. Needless to insist on this, for one might think that the young devotees of symbolism are unaware of the Vita Nuova and the character Beatrice, whose frail, pure shoulders nevertheless keep erect under the complex weight of symbols with which the poet overwhelms her.

Whence, then, came the illusion that symbolizing of the idea was a novelty?

In these last years, we had a very serious attempt of literature based on a scorn of the idea, a disdain of the symbol. We are acquainted with its theory, which seems culinary: take a slice of life, etc. Zola, having invented the recipe, forgot to serve it. His "slices of life" are heavy poems of a miry, tumultuous lyricism, popular romanticism, democratic symbolism, but ever full of an idea, always pregnant with allegoric meaning. The idealistic revolt, then, did not rear itself against the works (unless against the despicable works) of naturalism, but against its theory, or rather against its pretension; returning to the eternal, antecedent necessities of art, the rebels presumed to express new and even surprising truths in professing their wish to reinstate the idea in literature; they only relighted the torch; they also lighted, all around, many small candles.

There is, nevertheless, a new truth, which has recently entered literature and art, a truth quite metaphysical and quite a priori (in appearance), quite young, since it is only a century old, and truly new, since it has not yet served in the aesthetic order. This evangelical and marvelous truth, liberating and renovating, is the principle the world's ideality. With reference to th thinking subject, man, the world, everything that is external, only exists according to the idea he forms of it. We only know phenomena, we only reason from appearances; all truth in itself escapes us; the essence is unassailable. It is what Schopenhauer has popularized under this so simple and clear formula: the world is my representation. I do not see that which is; that which is, is what I see. As many thinking men, so many diverse and perhaps dissimilar worlds. This doctrine, which Kant left on the way to be flung to the rescue of the castaway morality, is so fine and supple that one transposes it from theory to practice without clashing with logic, even the most exigent. It is a universal principle of emancipation for every man capable of understanding. It has only revolutionized aesthetics, but here it is a question only of aesthetics.

Definitions of the beautiful are still given in manuals; they go farther; formulas are given by which artists attain the expression of the beautiful. There are institutes for teaching these formulas, which are but the average and epitome of ideas or of preceding appreciations. Theories in aesthetics generally being obscure, the ideal paragon, the model, is joined to them. In those institutes (and the civilized world is but a vast Institute) all novelty is held blasphemous, all personal affirmation becomes an act of madness. Nordau, who has read, with bizarre patience, all contemporary literature, propagated this idea, basely destructive of all individualism, that "nonconformity" is the capital crime of a writer. We violently differ in opinion. A writer's capital crime is conformity, imitativeness, submission to rules and precepts. A writer's work should be not only the reflection, but the magnified reflection of his personality. The only excuse a man has for writing, is to express himself, to reveal to others the world reflected in his individual mirror; his only excuse is to be original. He should say things not yet said, and say them in a form not yet formulated. He should create his own aesthetics, and we should admit as many aesthetics as there are original minds, judging them according to what they are not.

Let us then admit that symbolism, though excessive, unseasonable and pretentious, is the expression of individualism in art.

This too simple but clear definition will suffice provisionally. In the course of the following portraits, or later, we doubtless will have occasion to complete it. Its principle will, nevertheless, serve to guide us, by inciting us to investigate, not what the new writers should have done, according to monstrous rules and tyrannical traditions, but what they wished to do. Aesthetics has also become a personal talent; no one has the right to impose it upon others. An artist can be compared with himself alone, but there is profit and justice in noting dissimilarities. We will try to mark, not how the "newcomers" resemble each other, but how they differ, that is to say in what way they exist, for to exist is to be different.

This is not written to pretend that among most of them are no evident similarities of thought and technique, an inevitable fact, but so inevitable that it is without interest. No more do we insinuate that this flowering is spontaneous; before the flower comes the seed, itself fallen from a flower. These young people have fathers and masters: Baudelaire, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Verlaine, Mallarmé, and others. They love them dead or alive, they read them, they listen to them. What stupidity to think that we disdain those of yesterday! Who then has a more admired and affectionate court than Stéphane Mallarmé? And is Villiers forgotten? And Verlaine forsaken?

Now, we must warn that the order of these portraits, without being altogether arbitrary, implies no classification of prize-lists. There are, even, outside of the gallery, absent personages, whom we will bring back on occasion. There are empty frames and also bare places. As for the portraits themselves, if any one judges them incomplete and too brief, we reply that we wished them so, having the intention only to give indications, only to show, with the gesture of an arm, the way.

Lastly, to join today with yesterday, we have intercalated familiar faces among the new figures: and then, instead of rewriting a physiognomy known to many, we have tried to bring to light some obscure point, rather than the whole.

[MAURICE MAETERLINCK]

Of the life lived by sad beings who stir in the mystery of a night. They know nothing save to smile, to suffer, to love; when they wish to understand, the effort of their disquietude grows to anguish, their revolt vanishes in sobbings. To mount, forever to mount the mournful steps of Calvary and beat the brow against an iron door: so mounts Sister Ygraine, so mounts and beats against the cruel iron gate each of the poor creatures whose simple and pure tragedies Maeterlinck reveals to us.

In other times the meaning of life was known; then men were not ignorant of the essential; since they knew the end of their journey, and in what last inn they would find the bed of repose. When, by science itself, this elementary science had been taken from them, some rejoiced, believing themselves delivered of a burden; others grieved, feeling clearly that above all the other burdens on their shoulders, one had been thrown, itself heavier than all the rest: the burden of Doubt.

A whole literature has been begotten of this sensation, a literature of grief, revolt against the burden, blasphemies against the mute God. But, after the fury of their cries and interrogations, there was a remission, and this was the literature of sadness, uneasiness and anguish; revolt has been declared useless and imprecation puerile. Made wise by vain struggles, humanity slowly resigns itself to knowing nothing, comprehending nothing, fearing nothing, hoping for nothing—except the very remote.

There is an island somewhere in the mists, and in the island is a château, and in the château is a great room lit by a little lamp, and in the great room people are waiting. What do they await? They know not. They are expecting someone to knock at the door, they expect the lamp to go out, they expect Death. They converse; yes, they speak words which for an instant trouble the silence. Then they listen again, leaving their phrases unended and their gestures interrupted. They listen, they wait. She will perhaps not come? Oh! she will come. She always comes. It is late, she will perhaps not come till the morrow. And the people gathered in the great room beneath the little lamp begin to laugh and go on hoping. Someone knocks. And that is all; it is a whole life; it is the whole of life.

In this sense, Maeterlinck's dramas, so deliciously unreal, are deeply alive and true; his characters, with the appearance of phantoms, are steeped with life, like those seemingly inert balls, which, when charged with electricity, grow fulgent at the contact of a point; they are not abstractions but syntheses; they are states of soul or, better still, states of humanity, moments, minutes which shall be eternal. In short, they are real, by dint of their unreality.

A like kind of art was formerly practiced, after the Roman de la Rose, by the pious romancers who, in little books of pretentious clumsiness, made symbols and abstractions revolve. Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, Le Voyage Spirituel, by the Spaniard Palafox, le Palais de l'Amour divin, by an unknown person, are not altogether contemptible works, but things there are truly too explicit and the characters bear names that are truly too evident. Does one, in any free theater, see a drama played by beings called Courage, Hate, Joy, Silence, Care, Longing, Fear, Anger, and Shame? The hour of such amusement has passed or has not returned: do not re-read le Palais de l'Amour divin; read la Mort de Tintagiles, for it is of the new work that we must ask for these aesthetic pleasures, if we desire them complete, poignant and enveloping. Maeterlinck, truly, takes, pierces and entwines us in Octupi formed of the delicate hair of young sleeping princesses, and in the midst of them the troubled sleep of the little child, "sad as a young king". He entwines and bears us where he pleases, to the very depths of the abyss where whirls "the decomposed corpse of Alladin's lamb", and farther, to the pure dark regions where lovers say: "Kiss me gravely. Close not the eyes when I kiss you so. I want to see the kisses that tremble in your heart; and the dew that mounts from your soul.... We shall not find more kisses like these....—Evermore, evermore!...—No, no: one does not kiss twice on the heart of death." Before such delicate sighings, all objection grows mute; one is silent at having felt a new way of loving and expressing love. New, truly. Maeterlinck is very much himself, and to remain entirely personal he can be a monochord; but he has sown, steeped and scutched the hemp for this one cord, and it sings gently, sadly, uniquely under his drooping hands. He has achieved a true work; he has found an unheard muffled cry, a kind of lamentation, coldly mystical.

The word mysticism during these last years has taken such diverse and even divergent meanings that it must be clearly and newly defined each time one writes it. Certain persons give it a significance which would draw it to that other word which seems clear, individualism. It is certain that it touches the other, since mysticism may be called the state in which a soul, abandoning the physical world and scornful of its shocks and accidents, gives its mind only to relations and direct intimacies with the infinite. But, if the infinite is changeless and one, souls are changing and many. A soul has not the same communications with God as has his sister, and God, though changeless and one, is modified by the desire of each of his creatures and does not tell one what he has told another. Liberty is the privilege of the soul raised to mysticism. The body itself is but a neighbor to whom the soul scarcely gives the friendly counsel of silence, but if the body speaks, she hears it only as through a wall, and if the body acts, she sees it act through a mask. Another name has been historically given to such a state of life: quietism. This sentence of Maeterlinck is altogether that of a quietist who shows us God smiling "at our most serious faults as one smiles at the play of little dogs on a rug". This is serious but true if we think how tiny a thing a fact is, how a fact is caused, how we all are led by the endless chain of action, and how little we really participate in our most decisive and best considered acts. Such an ethics, leaving the care of useless judgments to wretched human laws, snatches from life its very essence and transports it to the upper regions where it blossoms, sheltered from contingencies and from the humiliations which social contingencies are. Mystic morality ignores everything not marked at the same time with the double seal of the human and divine. Wherefore, it was always feared by clergy and magistrates, for in denying every hierarchy of appearance, it denies, to the point of abstention, all social order. A mystic can consent to all bondages, except that of being a citizen. Maeterlinck sees the time drawing near when men will understand each other, soul to soul, in the same way that the mystic's soul communes with God. Is it true? Will men one day be men, proud, free beings who admit no other judgments than God's judgments? Maeterlinck perceives this dawn, because he gazes within himself and is himself a dawn, but if he watched external humanity, he would only see the impure, socialistic appetite of troughs and stables. The humble, for whom he has divinely written, will not read his book, and if they did read it they would see in it but a mockery, for they have learned that the ideal is a manger, and they know that their masters would flog them if they lifted their eyes to God.

So le Trésor des Humbles, that book of liberation and love, makes me think bitterly of the unhappy condition of man today—and doubtless in all possible times,

Magnifique mais qui sans espoir se délivre
Pour n'avoir pas chanté la region où vivre
Quand du stérile hiver a resplendi l'ennui.
[(Tr. 1)]

And it will be in vain that

Tout son col secouera cette blanche agonie.
[(Tr. 2)]

the hour of deliverance will be past and only a few will have heard it sound.

Nevertheless, what means of hope in these pages where Maeterlinck, disciple of Ruysbroeck, Novalis, Emerson and Hello, only asking of these superior spirits (whose two lesser had intuitions of genius) the sign of the hand that stimulates mysterious voyages! The generality of men, and the more conscious, who have so many hours of indifference, would find here encouragement to enjoy the simplicity of days and muffled murmurs of deep life. They would learn the meaning of very humble gestures and very futile words, and that an infant's laugh or a woman's prattle equals, by what it holds of soul and mystery, the most resplendent words of sages. For Maeterlinck, with his air of being a sage, and quite wise, confidently narrates unusual thoughts with a frankness quite disrespectful of psychological tradition, and with a boldness quite contemptuous of mental habits, assumes the courage only to attribute to things the importance they will have in an ultimate world. Thus, sensuality is altogether absent in his meditations. He knows the importance, but also the insignificance of the stir of blood and nerves, storms that precede or follow, but never accompany thought. And if he speaks of women who are nothing but soul, it is to inquire into "the mysterious salt which forever conserves the memory of the touch of two lips".

Maeterlinck's literature, poems or philosophy, comes in an hour when we have most need to be fortified and strengthened, in an hour when it is not immaterial to learn that the supreme end of life is "to keep open the highways that lead from the visible to the invisible." Maeterlinck has not only kept open the highways frequented by so many good-intentioned souls, and where great-minded men here and there open their arms like oases. It rather seems that he has increased to infinity the extent of these highways; he has said "such specious words in low tones" that the brambles have made way of themselves, the trees have pruned themselves spontaneously, a step beyond is possible, and the gaze today travels farther than it did yesterday.

Others doubtless have or have had a richer language, a more fertile imagination, a clearer gift of observation, more fancy, faculties better fitted to trumpet the music of words. Granted; but with a timid and poor language, childish dramatic combinations, an almost enervating system of repetition in phraseology, with these awkwardnesses, with all his awkwardnesses, Maurice Maeterlinck works at books and booklets that have a certain originality, a novelty so truly new that it will long disconcert the lamentable troop of people who pardon audacity if there be a precedent—as in the protocol—but who hold in scorn genius, which is the perpetual audacity.

[ÉMILE VERHAEREN]

Of all the poets of today, narcissi along the river, Verhaeren is the least obliging in allowing himself to be admired. He is rude, violent, unskillful. Busied for twenty years in forging a strange and magical tool, he remains in a mountain cavern, hammering the reddened irons, radiant in the fire's reflection, haloed with sparks. Thus it is we should picture him, a forger who,

Comme s'il travaillait l'acier des âmes,
Martèle à grands coups pleins, les lames
Immenses de la patience et du silence.
[(Tr. 3)]

If we discover his dwelling and question him, he replies with a parable whose every word seems scanned on the forge, and, to conclude, he delivers a tremendous blow of his heavy hammer.

When he is not laboring at his forge, he goes forth through the fields, head and arms bare, and the Flemish fields tell him secrets they have not yet told anyone. He beholds miraculous things and is not astonished at them. Singular beings pass before him, beings whom everybody jostles without being aware, visible alone to him. He has met the November Wind:

Le vent sauvage de novembre.
Le vent,
L'avez-vous rencontré, le vent
Au carrefour des trois cents routes...?
[(Tr. 4)]

He has seen Death, and more than once; he has seen Fear; he has seen Silence

S'asseoir immensément du côté de la nuit.
[(Tr. 5)]

The characteristic word of Verhaeren's poetry is halluciné. The word leaps from page to page. An entire collection, the Campagnes hallucinées has not freed him from this obsession. Exorcism was not possible, for it is the nature and very essence of Verhaeren to be the hallucinated poet. "Sensations," Taine said, "are true hallucinations." But where does truth begin or end? Who shall dare circumscribe it? The poet, with no psychological scruples, wastes no time over troubling himself to divide hallucinations into truths or untruths. For him they are all true if they are sharp and strong, and he recounts them frankly—and when the recitation is made by Verhaeren, it is very lovely. Beauty in art is a relative result which is achieved by the mixture of very different elements, often the most unexpected. Of these elements, one alone is stable and permanent, and ought to be found in all combinations: that is novelty. A work of art must be new, and we recognize it as such quite simply by the fact that it gives a sensation not yet experienced.

If it does not give this, a work, perfect though it be adjudged, is everything that is contemptible. It is useless and ugly, since nothing is more absolutely useful than beauty. With Verhaeren, beauty is made of novelty and strength. This poet is a strong man and, since those Villes tentaculaires which surged with the violence of a telluric upheaval, no one dares to deny him the state and glory of a great poet. Perhaps he has not yet quite finished the magic instrument which for twenty years he has been forging. Perhaps he is not yet master of his language. He is unequal; he lets his most beautiful pages grow heavy with inopportune epithets, and his finest poems become entangled in what was once called prosaism. Nevertheless, the impression of power and grandeur remains, and yes: he is a great poet. Listen to this fragment from Cathédrales:

* * * * *

—O ces foules, ces foules
Et la misère et la détresse qui les foulent
Comme des houles!
Les ostensoirs, ornés de soie,
Vers les villes échafaudées,
En toits de verre et de cristal,
Du haut du choeur sacerdotal,
Tendent la croix des gothiques idées.
Ils s'imposent dans l'or des clairs dimanches
—Toussaint, Noël, Pâques et Pentecôtes blanches.
Ils s'imposent dans l'or et dans l'encens et dans la fête
Du grand orgue battant du vol de ses tempêtes
Les chapiteaux rouges et les voûtes vermeilles,
Ils sont une âme, en du soldi,
Qui vit de vieux décor et d'antique mystère
Autoritaire.
Pourtant, dès que s'éteignent le cantique
Et l'antienne naïve et prismatique,
Un deuil d'encens évaporé s'empreint
Sur les trépieds d'argent et les autels d'airain,
Et les vitraux, grands de siècles agenouillés
Devant le Christ, avec leurs papes immobiles
Et leurs martyrs et leurs héros, semblent trembler
Au bruit d'un train hautain que passe sur la ville.
[(Tr. 6)]

Verhaeren appears a direct son of Victor Hugo, especially in his earliest works. Even after his evolution towards a poetry more freely feverish, he still remains romantic. Here, to explain this, are four verses evoking the days of former times.

Jadis—c'était la vie errante et somnambule,
A travers les matins et les soirs fabuleux,
Quand la droite de Dieu vers les Chanaans bleus
Traçait la route d'or au fond des crépuscules.
Jadis—c'était la vie énorme, exaspérée,
Sauvagement pendue aux crins des étalons,
Soudaine, avec de grands éclairs à ses talons
Et vers l'espace immense immensément cabrée.
Jadis—c'était la vie ardent, évocatoire;
La Croix blanche de ciel, la Croix rouge d'enfer
Marchaient, à la clarté des armures de fer,
Chacune à travers sang, vers son ciel de victoire.
Jadis—c'était la vie écumante et livide,
Vécue et morte, à coups de crime et de tocsins,
Bataille entre eux, de proscripteurs et d'assassins,
Avec, au-dessus d'eux, la mort folle et splendid.
[(Tr. 7)]

These verses are drawn from Villages illusoires, written almost exclusively in assonant free verse, divided by means of a gasping rhythm, but Verhaeren, master of free verse, is also master of romantic verse, to which he can force, without being dashed to pieces, the unbridled, terrible gallop of his thought, drunk with images, phantoms and future visions.

[HENRI DE RÉGNIER]

He lives in an old Italian palace where emblems and figures are written on walls. He muses, passing from room to room. Towards evening he descends the marble stairs and goes into gardens flagged like streams, to dream of his life among fountain basins and ponds, while the black swans grow alarmed in their nests, and a peacock, alone like a king, seems to drink superbly the dying pride of a golden twilight. De Régnier is a melancholy, sumptuous poet. The two words which most often break forth in his verses are or and mort (gold and death) and there are poems where the insistence of this royal and autumnal rhyme returns and even induces fear. In the collection of his last works we could doubtless count more than fifty verses ending thus: golden birds, golden swans, golden basins, golden flowers, and dead lake, dead day, dead dream, dead autumn. It is a very curious obsession and symptomatic, not of a possible verbal poverty, rather the contrary, but of a confessed liking for a particularly rich colour and of a sad richness like that of a setting sun, a richness turning into the darkness of night.

Words obtrude themselves upon him when he wants to paint his impressions and the color of his dreams; words also obtrude themselves upon whoever would define him, and first this one, already written but inevitably recurring: richness. De Régnier is the rich poet par excellence—rich in images. He has coffers full of them, caves full of them, vaults full of them, and unendingly a file of slaves bring him opulent baskets which he disdainfully empties on the dazzling steps of his marble stairs, rainbow-hued cascades that go gushingly, then peacefully to form pools and illuminated lakes. All are not new. To the fittest and fairest metaphors that came before, Verhaeren prefers those he himself creates, though awkward and formless. De Régnier does not disdain metaphors that came before, but he refashions them and converts them to his own use by modifying their setting, imposing new proximities on them, meanings still unknown. If among these reworked images some of virgin matter are found, the impression such poetry gives will none the less be altogether original. In working thus, the bizarre and the obscure are avoided; the reader is not rudely thrown into a labyrinthine forest; he recovers his path, and his joy in gathering new flowers is doubled by the joy of gathering familiar ones.

Le temps triste a fleuri ses heures en fleurs mortes,
L'An qui passe a jauni ses jours en feuilles sèches.
L'Aube pâle s'est vue à des eaux mornes
Et les faces du soir ont saigné sous les flèches
Du vent mystérieux qui rit et qui sanglote.
[(Tr. 8)]

Such a poetry certainly charms.

De Régnier in verse can tell everything he wishes, his subtlety is infinite; he notes indefinable nuances of dreams, imperceptible apparitions, fugitive decorations. A naked hand, slightly shriveled, that leans upon a marble table; fruit that swings in the wind and drops; an abandoned pool—such nothings suffice, and the poem springs forth, perfect and pure. His verse is very evocative; in several syllables he forces his vision on us.

Je sais de tristes eaux en qui meurent les soirs;
Des fleurs que nul n'y cueille y tombent une à une....
[(Tr. 9)]

Different again in this from Verhaeren, he is absolute master of his language. Whether his poems are the result of long or brief labor, they bear no mark of effort, and it is not without amazement, nor even without admiration, that we follow the straight, noble progress of his fair verses, white ambling nags harnessed in gold that sinks into the glory of evenings.

Rich and fine, de Régnier's poetry is never purely lyrical; he encloses an idea in the engarlanded circle of his metaphors, and no matter how vague or general this idea may be, it suffices to strengthen the necklace; the pearls are held by a thread, invisible sometime, but always solid, as in these few verses:

L'Aube fut si pâle hier
Sur les doux prés et sur les prêles,
Qu'au matin clair
Un enfant vint parmi les herbes,
Penchant sur elles
Ses mains pures qui y cueillaient des asphodèles.
Midi fut lourd d'orage et morne de soleil
Au jardin mort de gloire en son sommeil
Léthargique de fleurs et d'arbres,
L'eau était dure à l'oeil comme du marbre,
Le marbre tiède et clair comme de l'eau,
Et l'enfant qui vint était beau,
Vêtu de pourpre et lauré d'or,
Et longtemps on voyait de tige en tige encor,
Une à une, saigner les pivoines leur sang
De pétales au passage du bel Enfant.
L'Enfant qui vint ce soir était nu,
Il cueillait des roses dans l'ombre,
Il sanglotait d'être venu,
Il reculait devant son ombre,
C'est en lui nu
Que mon Destin s'est reconnu.
[(Tr. 10)]

Simple episode of a longer poem, itself a fragment of a book, this little triptych has several meanings and tells different things as one leaves it in its place or isolates it; here, an image of a particular destiny; there, a general image of life, while yet again, one may there see an example of free verse truly perfect and shaped by a master.

[FRANCIS VIELÉ-GRIFFIN]

I do not wish to say that Vïelé-Griffin is a joyous poet; nevertheless, he is the poet of joy. With him, we share the pleasures of a normal, simple life, the certitude of beauty, the invincible youthfulness of nature. He is neither violent, sumptuous nor sweet: he is calm. Though very subjective, or because of this, for to think of oneself is to think of oneself completely, he is religious. Like Emerson he is bound to see "images of the most ancient religion" in nature, and to think, again like Emerson: "It seems that a day has not been entirely profane, in which some attention has been given to the things of nature." One by one he knows and loves the elements of the forest, from the "great gentle ash trees" to the "million young plants," and it is his very own forest, his personal and original forest:

Sous ma forêt de Mai fleure tout chèvrefeuille,
Le soleil goutte en or par l'ombre grasse,
Un chevreuil bruit dans les feuilles qu'il cueille,
La brise en la frise des bouleaux passe,
De feuille en feuille.
Par ma plaine de mai toute herbe s'argente,
Le soleil y luit comme au jeu des épées,
Une abeille vibre aux muguets de la sente
Des hautes fleurs vers le ru groupées.
La brise en la frise des frênes chante....
[(Tr. 11)]

But he knows other flowers than those which are common to glades; he knows the flower-that-sings, she who sings, lavendar, sweet marjoram or fay, in the old garden of ballads and tales. The popular songs have left refrains in his memory which he blends in little poems, and which are their commentary or fancy:

Où est la Marguerite,
O gué, ô gué,
Où est la Marguerite?
Elle est dans son château, coeur las et fatigué,
Elle est dans son hameau, coeur enfantile et gai,
Elle est dans son tombeau, semons-y du muguet,
O gué, la Marguerite.
[(Tr. 12)]

And this is almost as pure as Gerard de Nerval's Cydalises:

Où sont nos amoureuses?
Elles sont su tombeau;
Elles sont plus heureuses
Dans un séjour plus beau....
[(Tr. 13)]

And almost as innocently cruel as this round which the little girls sing and dance to:

La beauté, a quoi sert-elle?
Elle sert à aller en terre,
Être mangée par les vers,
Être mangée par les vers....
[(Tr. 14)]

Vielé-Griffin has used the popular poetry discreetly—that poetry of such little art that it seems increate—but he would have been less discreet had he misused it, for he has the sentiment and respect for it. Other poets, unfortunately, have been less prudent and have collected the rose-that-talks with such clumsy or rough hands that we wish an eternal silence had been conjured around a treasure now sullied and vilified.

Like the forest, the sea enchants and intoxicates Vielé-Griffin; he has called it all things in his earliest verses, that already remote Cueille d'Avril; the insatiable devouring sea, abyss and tomb, the savage sea with triumphal haughty swell, the sea wantoning after voluptuous voids, the furious sea, the heedless sea, the stubborn, dumb sea, the envious sea painting its face with stars or suns, dawns or midnights—and the poet reproaches it for its flown glory:

Ne sens-tu pas en toi l'opulence de n'être
Que pour toi seule belle, ô Mer, et d'être toi?
[(Tr. 15)]

then he proclaims his pride at not having followed the sea's example, at not having sued glory with happy reminiscences or bold plagiarisms. It must be recognized that Vielé-Griffin, who before did not lie, has since kept his word. He has indeed remained himself, truly free, truly proud and truly wild. His forest is not limitless, but it is not a banal forest, it is a domain. I do not speak of the very important part he has had in the difficult conquest of free verse; my impression is more general and deeper and concerns itself not only with the form, but with the essence of his art. Through Francis Vielé-Griffin there is something new in French poetry.

[STÉPHANE MALLARMÉ]

With Verlaine, Stéphane Mallarmé is the poet who has had the most direct influence on the poets of today. Both were Parnassians and first Baudelairians.

Per me si va tra la perduta gente.
[(Tr. 16)]

With them one descends along the gloomy mountain to the doleful city of Fleurs du Mal. All the present literature and especially that which is called symbolistic, is Baudelairian, not doubtless by its external technique, but by its internal and spiritual technique, by the sense of mystery, by the anxious care to hear what things say, by the desire to harmonize, from soul to soul, with the obscure thought diffused in the night of the world, according to those so often quoted and repeated verses:

La nature est un temple où de vivants piliers
Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles;
L'homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles
Qui l'observent avec des regards familiers.
Comme de longs échos qui de loin se confondent
Dans une ténébreuse et profonde unité,
Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarté,
Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent.
[(Tr. 17)]

Baudelaire had read the first poems of Mallarmé before dying. He was troubled; poets do not like to leave a brother or son behind them. They would like to be alone and have their genius perish with their brain. But Mallarmé was Baudelairian only by filiation. His so precious originality quickly asserted itself. His Proses, his Après-midi d'un Faune, his Sonnets, came, at too long intervals, to tell of the marvelous subtlety of his patient, disdainful, imperiously gentle genius. Having voluntarily killed in him the spontaneity of being impressionable, the gifts of the artist by degrees replaced the gifts of the poet. He loved words more for their possible sense than for their true sense, and combined them in mosaics of a refined simplicity. It has been well said of him that, like Perseus or Martial, he was a difficult author. Yes, and like Anderson's man who wove invisible threads, Mallarmé assembles gems colored by his dreams, whose richness our care does not always succeed in divining. But it would be absurd to suppose that he is incomprehensible. The trick of quoting certain verses, obscure by their isolation, is not loyal, for, even in fragments, Mallarmé's poetry, when good, is incomparably so, and if later in a corroded book we only find these debris:

La chair est triste, hélas! et j'ai lu tous les livres.
Fuir! là-bas fuir! Je sens que des oiseaux sont ivres
D'être parmi l'écume inconnue et les cieux....
Un automne jonché de taches de rousseur....
Et tu fis la blancheur sanglotante des lys....
Je t'apporte l'enfant d'une nuit d'Idumée....
Tout son col secouera cette blanche agonie....
[(Tr. 18)]

we must attribute them to a poet who was an artist to the highest degree. Oh! that sonnet of the swan (of which the last verse quoted above is the ninth) where all the words are white as snow!

But everything possible has been written on this beloved poet. I end with this comment.

Recently a question, something like this, was asked:

"Who, in the admiration of the young poets, will replace Verlaine, who had replaced Leconte de Lisle?"

Few of those questioned answered. Two-thirds of those who abstained were influenced by the ridiculous appearance of such an ultimatum. How in short could it be that a young poet should admire, "exclusively and successively," three "masters" so different as those two and Mallarmé—incontestably chosen? Thus, many were silent because of scruples—but I now vote, saying: Greatly loving and admiring Stéphane Mallarmé, I do not see that Verlaine's death is a decent reason for loving and admiring him more today than yesterday.

Nevertheless, since it is a strict duty ever to sacrifice the dead to the living and to give the living, by an increase of glory, an increase of energy, the result of the vote pleases me, and we, who were silent, would have been bound to speak. What a pity if too much abstention had perverted the truth! For, informed by a circular, the press in this item has found a motive the more for laughing and pitying us, as long as, riding on the inky waves of the sea of intellectual night, but subduer of shipwreckers, the name of Mallarmé, at last written on the ironic elegance of a racing cutter, sails and now defies the emptiness and the bitter-sweet foam of the hoax.

[ALBERT SAMAIN]

When they know by heart what is pure in Verlaine, the young women of today and tomorrow set out to dream Au Jardin de l'Infante. With all that he owes to the author of Fêtes Galantes (he owes him less than one might suppose), Albert Samain is one of the most original and charming poets, the sweetest and most delicate of poets:

En robe héliotrope, et sa pensée au doigts,
Le rêve passe, la ceinture dénouée,
Frôlant les âmes de sa traîne de nuée,
Au rhytme éteint d'une musique d'autrefois....
[(Tr. 19)]

One must read the whole little poem which commences thus:

Dans la lente douceur d'un soir des derniers jours....
[(Tr. 20)]

It is pure and beautiful as any poem in the French language, and its art has the simplicity of works deeply felt and long pondered over. Free verse, new poetry! Here are verses which make us understand the vanity of prosodists and the awkwardness of the too clever players on the zither. A soul is there.

Samain's sincerity is wonderful. I think he would be ashamed to give variations on sensations unexplored by his experience. Sincerity here does not mean candor, nor simplicity gaucherie. He is sincere, not because he avows all his thoughts, but because he thinks of all his avowals. And he is simple because he has studied his art until he knows its last secrets and effortlessly gives forth these secrets with an unconscious mastery:

Les roses du couchant s'effeuillent sur le fleuve;
Et, dans l'émotion pâle du soir tombant,
S'évoque un parc d'automne où rêve sur un banc
Ma jeunesse déjà grave comme une veuve....
[(Tr. 21)]

This is, it seems, like a Vigny made tender and consenting to the humility of a melancholy quite simple and stripped of scarves.

He is not only softened. He is tender, and what passion and sensuality, but so delicate!

Tu marchais chaste dans la robe de ton âme,
Que le désir suivait comme un faune dompté,
Je respirais parmi le soir, ô pureté,
Mon rêve enveloppé dans tes voiles de femme.
[(Tr. 22)]

A delicate sensuality, which is really the impression his verses should give to conform to his poetics, where he dreams

De vers blonds où le sens fluide se délie
Comme sous l'eau la chevelure d'Ophélie,
De vers silencieux, et sans rythme et sans trame,
Où la rime sans bruit glisse comme une rame,
De vers d'une ancienne étoffe exténuée,
Impalpable comme le son et la nuée,
De vers de soirs d'automne ensorcelant les heures
Au rite féminin des syllabes mineures,
De vers de soirs d'amours énervés de verveine,
Où l'âme sente, exquise, une caresse à peine....
[(Tr. 23)]

But, this poet who would only love nuance, Verlainian nuance, could on some occasions be a violent colorist or a vigorous hewer of marble. This other Samain, older and not less genuine, is revealed in parts of his collection called Evocations. It is a Parnassian Samain, but always personal, even in grandiloquence. The two sonnets entitled Cléopâtre have a beauty not only of expression but of ideas; it is neither pure music nor pure plastic art. The poem is complete and alive, a strange, disconcerting marble; yes, a living marble whose life stirs and fertilizes the very desert sands, around the momentarily enamoured Sphinx.

Such is this poet: powerfully delicious in the art of making all the bells and all the souls vibrate in harmony. All souls are in love with this "child in robes of state."

[PIERRE QUILLARD]

It was in the already far-off and perhaps heroic times of the Art Theatre; we were brought to hear and see la Fille aux Mains coupées: To me there remains a most pleasant, complete and perfect memory of a play that truly gave the exquisite and keen sensation of the definitive. That hardly endured an hour; of it remains verses which makes a poem with difficulty forgotten.

Pierre Quillard has reunited his early poetic writings under a title which for more than one will be presumptuous: La Gloire du Verbe. To dare this, is to be sure of oneself; to have the consciousness of mastery; to affirm, more or less, that coming after Leconte de Lisle and De Heredia, one will not flag in a craft demanding, along with splendor of imagination, a singular sureness of hand. He has not lied; a very skillful setter, he truly glorifies the multiple jewels of the word. He makes the water of pearls smile and the rainbow of decomposed diamonds laugh.

Captain of a galley filled with precious; slaves, he sails among the tempting perils of purple archipelagos (as the Greek isles are said to appear at certain hours), and when the night comes he seeks the sandy shore of a violet gulf,

Dans la splendeur des clairs de lune violets.
[(Tr. 24)]

And he stays for the divine apparition:

Alors des profondeurs et des ténèbres saintes
Comme un jeune soleil sort des gouffres marins,
Blanche, laissant couler des épaules aux reins
Ses cheveux où nageaient de pâles hyacinthes,
Une femme surgit....
[(Tr. 25)]

whose eyes are gulfs of joy, love and terror, and where one sees reflected the whole world of things from grass to the infinity of seas. And she speaks: "Poet who, amidst life, exhibits astonishments and desires and loves, you appear moved by sensual joys and you suffer, for these joys you feel are truly vain, but

Si tu n'étreins que des chimères, si tu bois
L'enivrement de vins illusoires, qu'importe!
Le soleil meurt, la foule imaginaire est morte
Mais le monde subsiste en ta seule âme: vois!
Les jours se sont fanées comme des roses brèves,
Mais ton Verbe a créé le mirage où tu vis....
[(Tr. 26)]

and my beauty, you give it form and gesture; I am your creation, I exist because you think of me and because you evoke me."

Such is the leading idea of that Gloire du Verbe, one of the rare poems of that time, where the idea and word march in harmonious rhythm.

At sunrise the galley again set sail: Pierre Quillard departed for distant countries.

His is a pagan soul, or which would like to be pagan, for if his eyes eagerly seek sensible beauty, his dream lingers, wishing to force the portal behind which sleeps the beauty enclosed in things. He is truly the more disturbed that he deigns not to mention it, and the glance of the captives disturbs him with more than a shudder. As he knows all the théogonies and all literatures,

J'ai connu tous les dieux du ciel et de la terre,
[(Tr. 27)]

as he has drunk at all sources, he knows more than one way to get intoxicated: dilettante of a superior kind, when he will have worn out the joy of sailing, when he will have chosen his residence (doubtless near an old, holy fountain), having collected much, having sown many noble seeds, he will see himself master of a royal garden and of a people odorous with flowers,

Fleurs éternelles, fleurs égales aux dieux!
[(Tr. 28)]

[A. FERDINAND HEROLD]

The danger of free verse is that it remains amorphous, that its rhythm, too little accentuated, gives it some of the characteristics of prose. The finest verse truly remains, it seems to me, the verse formed of a regular number of full or accented syllables and in which the position of the accents is evident and not left to the choice of the reader or declaimer; not only poets read verse, and it is imprudent to place reliance on the chance of interpretations. One rightly supposes that I would not amuse myself by quoting such verses as seemed to me wretched; and above all I would not go to seek them in the poems of Herold, to whom the preference would be unmerited. Not that Herold possesses the gift of rhythm to a high point, but he has it sufficiently to give his poetry the grace of a living thing, sweetly and languidly living. He is a poet of gentleness; his poetry is blond, with pearls in its blond, pure hair, and necklaces and rings, elegant, fine gems, on neck and fingers. This word is the beloved word of the poet; his heroines are flowered with gems as much as his gardens are flowered with lillies.

La blonde, la blanche, la belle Dames des Lys.
[(Tr. 29)]

He loved her, but what others, what queens and saints! Reader of forgotten books, he finds precious legends there which he transposes to short poems, often of a sonnet's length. He alone knows these queens, Marozie, Anfelize, Bazine, Paryze, Orable or Aelis, and those saints, Nonita, Bertilla, Richardis—Gemma! She is the first he has thought of; her he gives the most attractive place in the stained glass window, happy again to write that word whose charm he feels.

Herold is one of the most objective of the new poets; he hardly tells of himself; he requires themes that are foreign to his life, and he even chooses those that seem foreign to his beliefs: his queens are not less charming for that, nor his saints less pure. One finds these panels and church windows in the collection entitled Chevaleries sentimentales, the most important and most characteristic of his works. It is a truly pleasant reading and one passes sweet hours among those ladies, lilies, gems, and autumn roses.

Les roses d'automne s'étiolent,
Les roses qui fleurissaient les tombes;
Lentement s'effeuillent les corolles
Et le sol froid est jonché de pétales qui tombent.
[(Tr. 30)]

Has not this a quite gentle melancholy? And this:

Il y a des maisons qui pleurent sur le port,
Il y a des glas qui sonnent dans les clochers,
Où tintent des cloches vagues:
Vers quels fleuves de mort
Les vierges ont-elles marché,
Les vierges qui avaient aux doigts de blondes bagues?
[(Tr. 31)]

Thus, without forcing his talent to an impassioned expression of life, an effort at which he doubtless would be unskillful, without laying claim to gifts he lacks, Herold has created for his pleasure a poetry of grace, purety, tenderness and sweetness.

If we demanded everything of the same poet, who would answer? The essential thing is to have a garden, to work there with the spade and sow seeds; the flowers that will shoot forth, carnations, peonies or violets, will have their value and their charm, according to the hour and the season.

[ADOLPH RETTÉ]

By its fecundity in poets, the day we live in and which has already lasted ten years, can hardly be compared with any of the vanished days, even those richest in sunshine and flowers. There were fair morning excursions in the dew, following the footsteps of Ronsard; there was a lovely afternoon when Theophile's weary viol sighed, heard between the oboes and the bass-trombones; there was the stormy romantic day, sombre and royal, interrupted towards evening by the cry of a woman whom Baudelaire was strangling; there was the Parnassian moonlight, and the Verlainian sun rose—and we are there in full noon, in the midst of a wide country provided with everything necessary for the making of verse: plants, flowers, streams, rivulets, woods, caves and young women so fresh that one would say their thoughts were newly hatched from an ingenuous brain.

The wide country is quite full of poets who walk, no longer in troops as in Ronsard's time, but alone and with a slightly sullen air; they greet each other from afar with brief gestures. Not all have names and several of them never will have any. How shall we call them? Let them play on while this person overtakes us and tells us something of his dream.

He is Adolphe Retté.

He is recognizable among them all by his dissolute and almost wild appearance. He crushes the flowers, if he does not gather them, and with reeds he makes rafts, throwing them to the tide, towards peril, towards the morrow. But he smiles and grows languid when young girls pass. Une belle dame passa ... and he spoke:

Dame des lys amoureux et pâmés,
Dames des lys languissants et fanés,
Triste aux yeux de belladone—
Dame d'un rêve de roses royales,
Dame des sombres roses nuptiales,
Frêle comme une madone—
Dame de ciel et de ravissement,
Dame d'extase et de renoncement,
Chaste étoile très lointaine—
Dame d'enfer, ton sourire farouche,
Dame du diable, un baiser de ta bouche,
C'est le feu des mauvaises fontaines
Et je brûle si je te touche.
[(Tr. 32)]

The fair lady passed, but without being affected by the final imprecation, which she doubtless attributed to excess of love. She passed, giving the poet smile for smile.

This idyll had an admirable plaint for its first epilogue,

Mon âme, il me semble que vous êtes un jardin ...
[(Tr. 33)]

a garden where one sees, hanging on the hedges, in the evening mist, shreds of the veil

De la Dame qui est passée.
[(Tr. 34)]

Sometime after this adventure, we learned that Retté, returned from a voyage to the Archipel en fleurs, had enriched himself with a new collection of dreams. He will yet again enrich himself. His talent is a living shoot grafted on a stout wild stock of glorious viridity. A poet, Adolphe Retté has only the sense of rhythm and the passion for words. He loves ideas and he loves them when they are new and even excessive. He wishes to be freed of all the old prejudices and he would equally like to free his brothers in social bondage. His last books, la Forêt bruissante and Similitudes, affirm this tendency. The one is a lyrical poem; the other, a dramatic poem in prose, very simple, very curious and very extraordinary by the mixture there seen of the sweet dreams of a tender poet and the somewhat rigid and naive fancies of the Utopian anarchist. But without naivete, that is to say, without freshness of soul, would poets exist?

[VILLIERS DE L'ISLE-ADAM.]

Some take pleasure, an awkward testimony of a piously troubled admiration, in saying and even in basing a paradoxical study on the saying: "Villiers de L' Isle-Adam was neither of his country nor time." This seems preposterous, for a superior man, a great writer is, in fine, by his very genius, one of the syntheses of his race and epoch, the representative of a momentary humanity, the brain and mouth of a whole tribe and not a fugitive monster. Like Chateaubriand, his brother in race and fame, Villiers was the man of the moment, and of a solemn moment. Both, with differing views and under diverse appearances, recreated the soul of the choice spirits of a period; from one arose romantic Catholicism and that respect for the old traditional stones; and from the other, the idealistic dream and that cult of antique interior beauty. But the one was yet the proud ancestor of our savage individualism; and the other taught us that the life around is the only clay to be shaped. Villiers belonged to his time to such a degree that all his masterpieces are dreams solidly based on science and modern metaphysics, like l'Ève Future or Tribulat Bonhomet, that enormous, admirable and tragic piece of buffoonery, where all the gifts of the dreamer, ironist and philosopher come to converge, so as to form perhaps the most original creation of the century.

This point cleared, we declare that Villiers, being of prodigious complexity, naturally lends himself to contradictory interpretations. He was everything, a new Goethe, but if less conscious and less perfect, keener, more artful, more mysterious, more human, and more familiar. He is always among us and in us, by his work and by the influence of his work, which exultantly goes through the best of the writers and artists of the actual hour. He has reopened the gates of the beyond, closed with what a crash we remember, and through these gates a whole generation was hurled to infinity. The ecclesiastic hierarchy numbers among her clerks, by the side of the exorcists, the porters, they who must open the door of the sanctuary to all the well-intentioned. Villiers exercised these two functions for us: he was the exorcist of the real arid the porter of the ideal.

Complex, but we may see a double spirit in him. There were two essentially dissimilar writers in him, the romanticist and the ironist. The romanticist was the first to come to birth and the last to die: Elen and Morgane; Akedysseril and Axel. Villiers, the ironist, author of Tribulat Bonhomet, is intermediate between these two romantic phases; l'Ève future should be described as a mixture of these two so diverse elements, for the book with its overwhelming irony is also a book of love.

Villiers at once realized himself by fancy and irony, making his fancy ironic, when life disgusted him even with fancy. No one has been more subjective. His characters are created with particles of his soul, raised, in the same way as a mystery, to the state of authentic, complete souls. If it is a dialogue, he will cause a certain character to utter philosophies quite above his normal understanding of things. In Axel, the abbess speaks of hell as Villiers might have spoken of Hegelianism, whose deceptions he learned towards the end, after having accepted its large certitudes in the beginning: "It is done! the child already experiences the ravishment and intoxications of Hell!" He experienced them: as a Baudelairian, he loved blasphemy for its occult effects, the immense risk of a pleasure taken at the expense of God himself. Sacrilege is in acts, blasphemy in words. He believed in words more than in realities, which are but the tangible shadows of words, for it is quite evident, and by a very simple syllogism, that if there is no thought in the absence of words, no more is there matter in the absence of thought. He believed in the power of words to the point of superstition. The only visible corrections of the second over the first text of Axel, for example, consist in the adjunction of words of a special ending, as when, to evoke an ecclesiastic and conventual society, he uses proditoire, prémonitoire, satisfactoire, and fruition, collaudation, etc. This very sense of the mystic powers of syllabic articulation stimulates him towards the quest of names as strange as le Desservant de l'office des Morts, a church function which never existed unless at the monastery of Saint Apollodora; or l'Homme-qui-marche-sous-terre, a name no Indian carried outside of the scenes of the Nouveau-Monde.

In a very old rough draft of a page belonging perhaps to l'Ève future he has thus defined the real:

"Now I say that the Real has its degrees of being. A thing is so much more or less real for us as it interests us more or less, since a thing that interested us not at all would for us be as if it were not—that is to say, much less, though physical, than an unreal thing that interested us.

"The Real for us, then, is only what touches the senses or the mind; and according to the degree of intensity with which this sole real, which we can judge and name, affects us, we class in our mind the degree of being more or less rich in content as it seems to strike us, and it is consequentlyy legitimate to say that it is realized.

"The idea is the only control we have of reality."

Again:

"And on the top of a distant pine, solitary in the midst of a far-off glade, I heard the nightingale—unique voice of that silence....

"'Poetic' landscapes almost invariably leave me quite cold, seeing that for every serious man the most suggestive medium for ideas really poetic is no other than four walls, a table and silence. Those who do not carry within them the soul of everything the world can show them, will do well to watch it: they will not recognize it, each thing being beautiful only according to the thought of him who gazes at it and reflects it in himself. Faith is essential in poetry as in religion, and faith has no need of seeing with corporeal eyes to contemplate that which it recognizes much better in itself...."

Such ideas were many times, under multiple forms, always new, expressed by Villiers de L'Isle-Adam in his works. Without going as far as Berkeley's pure negations, which nevertheless are but the extreme logic of subjective idealism, he admitted in his conception of life, on the same plan, the Interior and the Exterior, Spirit and Matter, with a very visible tendency to give the first term domination over the second. For him the idea of progress was never anything but a subject for jest, together with the nonsense of the humanitarian positivists who teach, reversed mythology, that terrestrial paradise, a superstition if we assign it the past, becomes the sole legitimate hope if we place it in the future.

On the contrary, he makes a protagonist (Edison doubtless) say in a short fragment of an old manuscript of l'Ève future:

"We are in the ripe age of Humanity, that is all I Soon will come the senility and decrepitude of this strange polyp, and the evolution accomplished, his mortal return to the mysterious laboratory where all the Ghosts eternally work their experiments, by grace of some unquestionable necessity."

And in this last word, Villiers mocks his belief in God. Was he Christian? He became one towards the end of his life: thus he knew all the forms of intellectual intoxication.

[LAURENT TAILHADE]

Individualism, which in literature gives us such agreeable baskets of new flowers, often finds itself made sterile by the introduction of the evil weeds of arrogance. One sees young persons, quite puffed up with a monstrous infatuation, declare their intention, not only to produce their work, but at the same the Work, to produce the unique flower, after which the exhausted intelligence must cease being fecund and collect itself in the slow dim task of the reorganization of strength. Even in Paris there are two or three "machines of glory" which have arrogated to themselves alone the right to pronounce this word, which they have banished from the dictionary. That matters little, for the spirit blows where it lists, and when it blows under the skin of frogs and makes them huge, it is for its own amusement, for the world is sad.

Tailhade has none of the grotesque defects of pride; no one has more simply pursued a more simple craft, that of the man of letters. The Romans used a word "rhetorician", and this signified he who speaks, subdues words and subjects them to the yoke of thought; he governs, prompts and stimulates them to the point of imposing, in the very hour of his imaginative work, the hardest, newest, and most dangerous of tasks. Latin by race and tastes, Tailhade has the right to this fine name of rhetorician at which the incompetence of pedants takes offence. He is a rhetorician like Petronius, master equally in prose and poetry.

Here, taken from the rare Domain de Sonnets, is one of them:

HÉLÈNE
(Le laboratoire de Faust à Wittemberg)
Des âges évolus j'ai remonté le fleuve,
Et le coeur enivré de sublimes desseins,
Déserté le Hadès et les ombrages saints,
Où l'âme d'une paix ineffable s'abreuve.
Le Temps n'a pu fléchir la courbe de mes seins.
Je suis toujours debout et forte dans l'épreuve,
Moi, l'éternelle vierge et l'éternelle veuve,
Gloire d'Hellas, parmi la guerre aux noirs tocsins.
O Faust, je viens à toi, quittant le sein des Mères!
Pour toi, j'abandonnai, sur l'aile des chimères,
L'ombre pâle où les dieux gisent, ensevelis.
J'apporte à ton amour, de fond des deux antiques,
Ma gorge dont le Temps n'a pas vaincu les lys
Et ma voix assouplie aux rythmes prophétiques.
[(Tr. 35)]

Having written this and Vitraux, poems which a disdainful mysticism oddly seasons, and that Terre latine, prose of such affecting beauty, perfect and unique pages of an almost sorrowful purity of style, Tailhade suddenly made himself famed and feared by the cruel and excessive satires which he called, as a souvenir and witness of a voyage we all make without profit, Au pays du Mufle. The ignominy of the age exasperates the Latin, charmed with sunshine and perfumes, lovely phrases and comely gestures, and for whom money is the joy we throw, like flowers, under the steps of women and not the productive seed which we bury that it may sprout. There he reveals himself the haughty executioner of hypocricies and greeds, of false glories and real turpitudes, of money and success, of the parvenu of the Bourse and the parvenu of the feuilleton. Harshly and even unjustly he lashes his own aversions. For him, as for all the satirists, the particular enemy becomes the public enemy, but what beautiful language at once traditional and new, and what grand insolence!

Ce que j'écris n'est pas pour ces charognes!

No more are Tailhade's ballads destined to make dream the handsome ladies who fan themselves with peacock plumes. It is difficult to quote even one of the verses. This one is not very bad:

Bourget, Maupassant et Loti,
Se trouvent dans toutes les gares
On les offre avec le rôti,
Bourget, Maupassant et Loti.
De ces auteurs soyez loti
En même temps que de cigares:
Bourget, Maupassant et Loti
Se trouvent dans toutes les gares.
[(Tr. 36)]

The Quatorzain d'Été can be given in full and it is even good to know it by heart, for it is a marvel of subtlety and a little genre picture to care for and preserve. The epigraph, that verse of Rimbaud, in the Premières Communions,

Elle fait la victime et la petite épouse,
[(Tr. 37)]

gives the tone of the frame:

Certes, monsieur Benoist approuve les gens qui
Ont lu Voltaire et sont aux Jésuites adverses.
Il pense. Il est idoine aux longues controverses,
Il adsperne le moine et le thériaki.
Même il fut orateur d'une loge écossaise.
Toutefois—car sa légitime croit en Dieu—
La Petite Benoist, voiles blancs, ruban bleu,
Communia. Ca fait qu'on boit maint litre à seize.
Chez le bistro, parmi les bancs empouacrés,
Le billard somnolent et les garçons vautrés,
Rougit la pucelette aux gants de filoselle.
Or, Benoist, qui s'émèche et tourne au calotin,
Montre quelque plaisir d'avoir vu, ce matin.
L'hymen du Fils unique et de sa demoiselle.
[(Tr. 38)]

So, with much less wit, Sidonius Appollinaris scoffed the Barbarians among whom the unkindness of the times forced him to live, and like the Bishop of Clermont, it is not in vain that Laurent Tailhade scoffs and chaffs them, for his epigrams will pass beyond the actual time. Meanwhile, I regard him as one of the most authentic glories of the present French letters.

[JULES RENARD]

Man rises early and walks through deserted roads and lanes; he fears neither dew nor brambles, nor the action of the branches of hedges. He gazes, listens, smells, pursues the birds, the wind, flowers, images. Without haste, but nevertheless anxiously, for she has a delicate ear, he seeks nature, whom he would surprise in her refuge; he finds her, she is there; then, the twigs gently brushed away, he contemplates her in the blue shadow of her retreat and, without having wakened her, closing the curtain, he returns to his home. Before falling asleep, he counts his images: "gently they are reborn at the beck of memory."

Jules Renard has given himself this name: the hunter of images. He is a singularly fortunate and privileged hunter, for alone among his colleagues, he only captures, beasts or little creatures, unpublished prey. He scorns the known, or knows it not; his collection is only of the rare and even unique heads, but which he is in no trouble to put under lock, for they belong to him in such wise that a thief would purloin them in vain. So penetrating and attested a personality has something disconcerting, irritating and, according to some envious persons, extravagant. "Do then as we do, take the old accumulated metaphors from the common treasury; we go swiftly and it is very convenient." But Jules Renard disbelieves in going swiftly. Though unusually industrious, he produces little, and especially little at a time, like those patient engravers who carve steel with geologic slowness.

When studying a writer, one loves (it is an inveterate habit bequeathed us by Sainte-Beuve) to discern his spiritual family, enumerate his ancestors, establish learned connections, and note, at the very least, the souvenirs of long readings, traces of influence and the mark of the hand placed an instant on the shoulder. To whoever has traveled much among books and ideas, this task is simple enough and often easy to the point that it is necessary rather to refrain from it, not to vex the ingenious arrangement of acquired originalities. I have not had this scruple with Renard, but have wished to draw a sketch book; but the odd animal is shown alone, and the leaves only contain, among the arabesques, empty medallions.

To be begotten quite alone, to owe his mind only to himself, to write (since it is a question of writing) with the certitude of achieving the true new wine, of an unexpected, original and inimitable flavor, that is what must be, to the author of l'Écornifleur a legitimate motive of joy and a very weighty reason for being less troubled than others about posthumous reputation. Already, his Poil-de-Carotte, that so curious type of the intelligent, artful, fatalistic child, has entered into the very form of speech. The "Poil-de-Carotte, you must shut the hens in each evening" equals the most famous words of the celebrated como dies in burlesque truth, and he is at once Cyrano and Molière and will not be robbed of this claim.

Originality being undeniably established, other merits of Jules Renard are distinctness, precision, freshness; his pictures of life, Parisian or rural, have the appearance of dry-point work, occasionally a little thin, but well circumscribed, clear and alive. Certain fragments, more shaded off and ample, are marvels of art, as for instance, Une Famille d'Arbres.

"It is after having traversed a sun-parched plain that I meet them.

"Because of the noise, they do not stand by the road's edge. They inhabit the unploughed fields, near a fountain, like lone birds.

"From afar they seem inscrutable. When I approach, their trunks relax. They discreetly welcome me. I can repose and refresh myself, but I divine that they observe and mistrust me.

"They live together, the oldest in the center, and the little ones, whose first leaves have just appeared, almost everywhere, without ever dispersing.

"They take long to die, and they protect the standing dead until they fall to dust.

"They caress each other with their long branches to be assured that they are all there, like the blind. They gesticulate with rage, if the wind puts itself out of breath trying to uproot them. But among themselves, no dispute. They only murmur agreement.

"I feel that they should be my real family. I will forget the other. These trees by degrees will adopt me, and to merit this, I understand what must be known.

"Already I know how to gaze at passing clouds.

"I know, too, how to rest in a spot.

"And I almost know how to be silent."

When the anthologies will hail this page, they will hardly have an irony so fine and a poetry so true.

[LOUIS DUMUR.]

To be the representative of logic among an assembly of poets is a difficult role and has its inconveniences. There is the risk of being taken too seriously and consequently of feeling bound to treat literature in grave tones. Gravity is not necessary for the expression of what we believe is truth; irony agreeably seasons the moral decoction; pepper is needed in this camomile. Scornfully to affirm is a sure enough way of not being the dupe of even one's own affirmations. This is practicable in literature, for here all is uncertain and art itself doubtless is but a game where we philosophically deceive each other. That is why it is good to smile.

Louis Dumur rarely smiles. But if, having now gained more indulgence and some rights to real bitterness, he wished to smile so as to excuse and amuse himself, it seems that the whole assembly of poets would protest, astonished and perhaps scandalized. So, by habit and logic, he remains grave.

He is logic itself. He can observe, combine, deduce; his novels, dramas, poems are of a solid construction whose balanced architecture delights by the skillful symmetry of curves, everything directed towards a central dome whither the eye is severely drawn. He is clever and strong enough, when charmed with error, not to abandon it except after having driven it to a corner, with its extremest consequences, and sufficiently master of himself not to confess his error, but even to defend it with all the ingenuities of argument. Such is his system of French verse based on tonic accent; it is true that the result, often deficient, for languages themselves have a quite imperious logic, was occasionally felicitous and unexpected, with hexameters like this.

L'orgueilleuse paresse des nuits, des parfums et des seins.
[(Tr. 39)]

It is towards the theater that Dumur seems definitely to have turned his intellectual activity. The first pages of his plays cut (I do not speak of Rembrandt, a purely dramatic history, in the grand style and with vast unfolding), and one is surprised by a renovated setting, retouched words, and a light of conventional realism, an arrangement of things and beings under a new cloak and fresh varnish,—but as we go on, the author affirms that in this sad scenic landscape, valid speech will be heard and that a puff of wind turning to tempest will ruin the planting.

The screen, with its new cloth, is so arranged that, its banality destroyed by degrees, beings and things stripped by a caprice of lightning, nothing is left standing but the idea, naked or veiled in its sole, essential mysteriousness.

This old-new setting, then, is the simplest and most available, where the neutral imagination of a throng of eyewitnesses can, with the least effort, place a mental combat whose arms are the accessories of the theater.

A man journeys through the world bearing with him a coffer that contains free natal earth; he carries his love. But a day falls when he is crushed by his love. In the hour of this catastrophe, another man understands, he takes from him the woman who is breaking his arms. To love is to saddle oneself with an imperious burden up to the very moment when, ceasing to be free, one ceases to be strong. La Motte de terre explains this lucidly and forcefully. It is the work of a writer thoroughly master of his natural gifts, shaping them with an ease and that air of domination which easily subdues ideas. It happens that a work may be superior to the man and to his very intelligence, but by very little. Though it be little and an innocent untruth, it is a humiliating spectacle and provokes scorn more than the written avowal of the most frightful and complete mediocrity in the brain that gave it birth. The man of worth is always superior to his creation, for his desire is too vast ever to be filled, his love too miraculous ever to be met.

La Nébuleuse is a poem of lovely and deep perspective, where, symbolized by artless beings, are seen the successive generations of men following each other uncomprehendingly, almost undiscerningly, so different are their souls, and always summed up, to the moment of their decline, by the child, the future, the "nebula," whose birth, finally confirmed, brings death, under its morning clearness, to the faded smiles of the aged stars. And, the vision ended, it is urged that this morrow, which is becoming today, will be altogether like its dead brothers, and that in short there is nothing new in the spectacle which amuses the dead years leaning

Sur les balcons du Ciel en robes surannées.
[(Tr. 40)]

But this "nothingness" has no importance for the human atoms that form and determine it; it is the delightful newness that we breathe and of which we live. The new! The new! And let each intelligence, though short-lived, affirm his will to exist, and to be dissimilar to all antecedent or surrounding manifestations, and let each nebula aspire to the character of a star whose light shall be distinct and clear among other lights.

All this I have read in the text and in the silences of the dialogue, for when the work of art is the development of an idea, the very spaces between lines answer whoever can question them.

Dumur is disposed to create a philosophical theater, a theater of ideas, and also to renew the roman à these, for Pauline ou la Liberté de l'amour is a serious work, arranged with skill, thought out in an original manner and implying a rare intellectual worth.

[GEORGES EEKHOUD]

There are few dramatists among the newcomers, I mean fervent observers of the human drama, endowed with that large sympathy which urges the writer to fraternize with all modes and forms of life. To some the people's actions seem unimportant, perhaps because they lack that spirit of philosophic generalization which elevates the humblest happenings to the height of a tragedy. Others have and confess the tendency to simplify everything. They observe and compare facts only to extract summaries and quintessences from them; they have qualms and shame at narrating the mechanisms so often described: they set up soul portraits, keeping of physical anatomy only the materiality necessary to hold the play of colors. Such an art, beside having the disadvantage of being disliked by the reading public (which desires that it be told stories, and which demands it of the newcomer) is the sign of an evident and too disdainful absence of passion. But the dramatist is an impassioned being, a mad lover of life and of the present life, not the things of yesterday, dead representations whose faded decorations are recognizable in lead coffins, but beings of today with all their beauty and animal grossness, their mysterious souls, their true blood that will flow from a heart and not from a swollen bladder, if stabbed in the fifth act.

Georges Eekhoud is a dramatist, a passionate soul, a quaffer of life and of blood.

His sympathies are multifarious and diverse; he loves everything. "Nourish thyself with all that has life." Obeying the biblical word, he gathers strength from all the repasts the world offers him, he assimilates the tender or the harsh wildness of peasants or sailors with as much sureness as the most deliberate and hypocritical psychology of creatures drunk with civilization, the disquieting infamy of eccentric loves and the nobility of consecrated passions, the brutal sport of clumsy popular customs and the delicate perversion of certain adolescent souls. He makes no choice, but understands everything because he loves everything.

Nevertheless, whether voluntarily or whether fixed to the natal soil by social necessities, he has limited the field of his fantastic pursuits to the very limits of old Flanders. This agrees marvelously with his genius, which is Flemish, excessive in his sentimental raptures as in his debauches, Phillippe de Champaigne or Jordaens, drawing out lean faces dramatized by the eyes of the fixed idea or displaying all the red irruptions of joyous flesh. Eekhoud, then, is a representative writer of a race, or of a moment of this race. This is important to assure permanence to a work, and a place in the literary histories.

Cycle patibulaire and Mes communions seem the two books of Eekhoud where this impassioned man cries his charities, angers, compassions, scorns and loves most clearly and loudly, he himself the third book of that marvelous trilogy whose two first have for title, Maeterlinck and Verhaeren.

Playing a little on the word, I have called him "dramatist," in defiance of the etymologies and usages, although he has never written for the theater; but we divine a genius essentially dramatic by the way in which his narratives are planned and as though miraculously balanced to the sudden changes, the return to their true nature of characters maddened by passion.

He has the genius for sudden changes. A character: then life presses down and the character bends; a new weight straightens and sets him up according to his original truth. It is the very essence of psychological drama, and if the setting shares in the human modifications, the work assumes an air of finality and plenitude, giving an impression of unforseen art by the accepted logic of natural simplicities. This might be a system of composition (not however deficient), but not here: the whisperings of the instinct are hearkened to and welcomed; the necessity of the catastrophe is thrust upon this lucid mind (who has not dulled his mirror by breathing upon it), and he clearly relates the consequences of the seismic movement of the human soul. There are good examples of this art in the tales of Balzac: El Verdugo is only a succession of sudden changes, but too concise: Eekhoud's le Coq Rouge, just as dramatic, has a much deeper analysis and then is unveiled with grandeur, like a lovely land-scape' effortlessly transformed by the play of clouds and the luminous space.

Equally grand, though with a cruel beauty, is the tragic story simply called Une mauvaise rencontre where is seen the heroic transfiguration of the piteous soul of a weak vagrant, overpowered by the strength of a gesture of love and, under the imperious magnetism of the word, blossomed martyr, a stream of pure blood rushing miraculously from the putrefied veins of the social carrion. Later on Mauxgraves enjoys and dies of the terror of having beheld his words realized to their very supreme convulsion, and the red cravat of the predestined become the steel garrote which cuts the white neck in two.

In a novel of Balzac is a rapid, confused episode, which will recall this tragedy to genealogists of ideas. Through hatred of humanity, M. de Grandville has given a note for a thousand francs to a ragpicker, so as to turn him into a drunkard, an idler, a thief; when he returns to his home, he learns that his natural son has just been arrested for theft; it is only romantic. This same anecdote, minus the conclusion, is found in A Rebours where des Esseintes acts, but on a young blackguard, nearly like M. de Grandville and through a motive of malignant scepticism. Here is a possible tree of Jesse, but which I declare unauthentic, for the tragic perversity of Eekhoud, chimera or screech-owl, is an original and sincere monster.

If sincerity is a merit, it is doubtless not an absolute literary merit. Art is well pleased with falsehood and no one is particular to confess either his "communions" or his repulsions; but by sincerity I here understand the artistic disinterestedness which acts so that the writer, unafraid of terrifying the average brain or of vexing certain friends or masters, disrobes his thought with the calm wantonness of the extreme innocence of perfect vice—or of passion. Eekhoud's "communions" are impassioned; he eagerly sits down to table and having nourished himself on charity, anger, pity and scorn, having tasted all the love elixirs piously formed by his hate, he rises, drunks but not fed, with the future joys.

[PAUL ADAM]

The author of Mystère des Foules strongly recalls Balzac; he has his power and dispersive force. Like Balzac, but to a much smaller extent, he wrote, while very young, execrable books where no one could have forseen the future genius of an intelligence truly cyclical; la Force du mal is no more in the germ in le Thé chez Miranda than le Pere Goriot in Jane la Pâle or le Vicaire des Ardennes. Paul Adam, nevertheless, is a precocious person, but there are limits to precocity especially in a writer destined to narrate life exactly as he sees and feels it. It was needful that the education of the senses should have had time to mature and that experience should have fortified the mind in the art of comparisons and choice, the association and disassociation of ideas. A novelist still needs a large erudition and all kinds of ideas that are solidly acquired, but slowly and by chance, by the good will of things and the favorableness of events.

Today Paul Adam is in all his radiance and on the very eve of glory. Each of his gestures, each pace of his brings him nearer to the bomb-ketch ready to explode, and if he withstands the qualing from the thunderclap, he will be king and master. By this bomb-ketch, I do not mean the great mob, but that large public, already selected, which, insensible to pure art, nevertheless demands that its romantic emotions be served enrobed in true literary style, original, strongly perfumed, of long dough cleverly kneaded, and in a form new enough to surprise and charm. This was Balzac's public; it is the public which Paul Adam seems on the point of reconquering. The novel of maimers (I omit three or four masters whom I have not to judge here) is fallen lower than ever since the century and a half when it was brought from England. Neglecting observation, style, imagination and especially ideas, which were rather general than particular, the fictionists who took up the trade of telling stories, have brought fiction to such a point of disrepute that an intelligent man, mindful of employing his leisure in a manner worthy of his intelligence, no longer dares open one of these books, which even the quay book-stalls rebel against and dam up against the yellow current. Paul Adam certainly has suffered through this convulsion of scorn: the lettered men and women, badly informed, have long supposed that his books were like all the rest. They are different.

First by style: Paul Adam uses a language that is vigorous, concise, full of images; new to the point of inaugurating syntactic forms. By observation: his keen glance pierces like a wasp sting through things and souls; like the new photography, he reads through skins and caskets. By the imagination, which permits him to evoke and vivify the most diverse, characteristic and personal beings, he has, like Balzac, the genius not only of giving life to his characters, but personality, of making them true individuals, all well-endowed with an individual soul: in la Force du Mal, a young girl is placed so sharply under our eyes that she becomes unforgettable; her character, unfortunately, too abruptly summed up, wavers at the end. By fecundity, finally: fecundity not only linear and of the nature of cleared fields, but of works whose slightest are still works.

He has undertaken two great romantic epopees which his ardent bold spirit will perfect to the condition of monuments, l'Epoque and les Volontés merveilleuses. He works alone, like a swarm, and at the first ray of sunshine, the bee ideas rush tumultously forth and disperse across the vast fields of life.

Paul Adam is a magnificient spectacle.

[LAUTRÉAMONT]

He was a young man of savage and unexpected originality, a diseased genius and, quite frankly, a mad genius. Imbeciles grow insane and in their insanity the imbecility remains stagnant or agitated; in the madness of a man of genius some genius often remains: the form and not the quality of the intelligence has been affected; the fruit has been bruised in the fall, but has preserved all its perfume and all the savor of its pulp, hardly too ripe.

Such was the adventure of the amazing stranger, self-adorned with this romantic pseudonym: Comte de Lautréamont. He was born at Montevideo in April, 1846, and died at the age of twenty-eight, having published the Chants de Maldoror and Poésies, a collection of thoughts and critical notes of a literature less exasperated and even, here and there, too wise. We know nothing of his brief life: he seems to have had no literary connection, the numerous friends apostrophized in his dedications bearing names that have remained secrets.

The Chants de Maldoror is a long poem in prose whose six first chants only were written. It is probable that Lautréamont, though living, would not have continued them. We feel, in proportion as we finish the reading of the volume, that consciousness is going, going—and when it returns to him, several months before his death, he composes the Poésies, where, among very curious passages, is revealed the state of mind of a dying man who repeats, while disfiguring them in fever, his most distant memories, that is to say, for this infant, the teachings of his professors!

A motive the more why these chants surprise. It was a magnificent, almost inexplicable stroke of genius. Unique this book will remain, and henceforth it remains added to the list of works which, to the exclusion of all classicism, forms the scanty library and the sole literature admissible to those minds, oddly amiss, that are denied the joys, less rare, of common things and conventional morality.

The worth of the Chants de Maldoror is not in pure imagination: fierce, demoniac, disordered or exasperated with arrogance in crazy visions, it terrifies rather than charms; then, even in unconsciousness, there are influences that can be determined. "O Nights of Young," the author exclaims in his verses, "what sleep you have cost me!" And here and there he is swayed by the romantic extravagances of such English fictionists as were still read in his time, Anne Radcliffe and Maturin (whom Balzac esteemed), Byron, also by the medical reports on eroticism, and finally by the bible. He certainly had read widely, and the only author he never quotes, Flaubert, must never have been far from his reach.

This worth I would like to make known, consists, I believe, in the novelty and originality of the images and metaphors, by their abundance, the sequence logically arranged like a poem, as in the magnificent description of a shipwreck, where all the verses (although no typographie artifice betokens them) end thus: "The ship in distress fires cannon shots of alarm; but it founders slowly ... majestically." So, too, the litanies of the Ancient Ocean: "Ancient Ocean, your waters are bitter. I greet you, Ancient Ocean. Ancient Ocean, O great celibate, when you course the solemn solitudes of your phlegmatic realms ... I greet you, Ancient Ocean." Here are other images: "like a corner, as far as the eye can reach, where shivering cranes deliberate much, and soar sturdily in winter athwart the silence." And this terrifying invocation: silk-eyed octopus. To describe men he uses expressions of a Homeric suggestiveness: narrow-shouldered men, ugly-headed men, lousy-haired men, the man with pupils of jasper, red-shanked men. Others have a violence magnificently obscene: "He returns to his terrified attitude and continues to watch, with a nervous trembling, the male hunt, and the great lips of the vagina of gloom, whence ceaselessly flow, like a river, immense dark spermatazoae which take their flight in the desolate ether, concealing entire nature with the vast unfolding of their bat wings, and the solitary legions of octopuses, saturnine and doleful at watching these hollow inexpressible fulgurations." (1868: so that one cannot class them as phrases fancied from some print of Odilon Redon). But what a theme, on the other hand, what a story for the master of retrograde forms, of fear and the amorphous stirrings of beings that are near—and what a book, written, we might say, to tempt him!

Here is a passage, at once quite characteristic of Lautréamont's talent and of his mental malady:

"With slow steps the brother of the blood-sucker (Maldoror) marched through the forest.... Then he cried: 'Man, when you come upon a dead dog, pressed against a milldam so as to prevent it from issuing, go not like the others, and take with your hands the worms that flow from his swollen belly, considering it with astonishment, opening a knife, and then cutting a great number of them from the body, as you repeat that you too will be no more than this dog. What mystery seek you? Neither I nor the four fins of the sea bear of the Northern Seas have succeeded in solving the problem of life.... Who is this being, near the horizon, that fearlessly approaches, with troubled oblique bounds? And what majesty blended with serene gentleness! His gaze, though kind, is piercing. His enormous eyelids play with the breeze and appear alive. He is unknown to me. My body trembles as he fixes his monstrous eyes on me. Something like a dazzling aureole of light plays around him.... How fair he is.... You should be powerful, for you have a form more than human, sad as the universe, beautiful as suicide.... How! ... it is you, toad!... great toad ... unfortunate toad!... Pardon!... What do you on this earth where are the accursed? But what have you done with your viscous fetid pustules to have such a sweet air? I saw you when you descended from above, poor toad! I was thinking of infinity, and at the same time of my weakness.... Since then you have appeared to me monarch of the ponds and marshes! Covered with a glory which belongs only to God, you have departed thence, leaving me consoled, but my staggering reason founders before such grandeur.... Fold your white wings and gaze not from on high with those troubled eyes." The toad rests on its hind legs (which resemble those of a man) and, while the slugs, woodles, and snails flee at the sight of their mortal enemy, gives utterance to those words: "Hearken, Maldoror. Notice my figure, calm as a mirror.... I am but a simple dweller of the reeds, 'tis true, but thanks to your own contact, taking of good only what is in yourself, my reason has grown and I can converse with you.... As for myself, I should prefer to have protruding eyes, my body lacking feet and hands, to have killed a man, than to be as you are. For I hate you! Adieu, then, hope not to find again the toad in your passage. You have been the cause of my death. I leave for eternity, to implore pardon for you."

Alienists, had they studied this book, would have classified the author among those aspiring to pass for persecuted persons: in the world he only sees himself and God—and God thwarts him. But we might also inquire whether Lautréamont is not a superior ironist, a man forced by a precious scorn for mankind to feign a madness whose incoherence is wiser and more beautiful than the average reason. There is the madness of pride; there is the delirium of mediocrity. How many balanced and honest pages, of good and clear literature, would I not give for this, for these words and phrases under which he seems to have wished to inter reason herself! The following is taken from the singular Poésies:

"The perturbations, anxieties, depravations, deaths, exceptions in the physical or moral order, spirit of negation, brutishness, hallucinations fostered by the will, torments, destruction, confusions, tears, insatiabilities, servitudes, delving imaginations, novels, the unexpected, the forbidden, the chemical singularities of the mysterious vulture which lies in wait for the carrion of some dead illusion, precocious and abortive experiences, the darkness of the mailed bug, the terrible monomania of pride, the innoculation of deep stupor, funeral orations, desires, betrayals, tyrannies, impieties, irritations, acrimonies, aggressive insults, madness, temper, reasoned terrors, strange inquietudes which the reader would prefer not to experience, cants, nervous disorders, bleeding ordeals that drive logic at bay, exaggerations, the absence of sincerity, bores, platitudes, the somber, the lugubrious, childbirths worse than murders, passions, romancers at the Courts of Assize, tragedies, odes, melodramas, extremes forever presented, reason hissed at with impunity, odor of hens steeped in water, nausea, frogs, devil-fish, sharks, simoom of the deserts, that which is somnambulistic, squint-eyed, nocturnal, somniferous, noctambulistic, viscous, equivocal, consumptive, spasmodic, aphrodisiac, anaemic, one-eyed, hermaphroditic, bastard, albino, pédéraste, phenomena of the aquarium and the bearded woman, hours surfeited with gloomy discouragement, fantasies, acrimonies, monsters, demoralizing syllogisms, ordure, that which does not think like a child, desolation, the intellectual manchineel trees, perfumed cankers, stalks of the camelias, the guilt of a writer rolling down the slope of nothingness and scorning himself with joyous cries, remorse, hypocrisies, vague vistas that grind one in their imperceptible gearing, the serious spittles on inviolate maxims, vermin and their insinuating titillations, stupid prefaces like those of Cromwell, Mademoiselle de Maupin and Dumas fils, decaying, helplessness, blasphemies, suffocation, stifling, mania,—before these unclean charnel houses, which I blush to name, it is at last time to react against whatever disgusts us and bows us down." Maldoror (or Lautréamont) seems to have judged himself in making himself apostrophised thus by his enigmatic Toad: "Your spirit is so diseased that it perceives nothing; and you deem it natural each time there issues from your mouth words that are senseless, though full of an infernal grandeur."

[TRISTAN CORBIÈRE]

Laforge, in the course of a reading, sketched some notes regarding Corbière which, though not printed, are nevertheless definitive, as for instance:

"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?