EZRA POUND TOGETHER WITH AN ESSAY ON THE CHINESE WRITTEN CHARACTER BY ERNEST FENOLLOSA BONI AND LIVERIGHT PUBLISHERS NEW YORK 1920 TO MY FATHER HOMER L. POUND

TABLE OF CONTENTS
I. A STUDY IN FRENCH POETS
Narration
Jules Laforgue
Tristan CorbiÈre
Arthur Rimbaud
Remy de Gourmont
De RÉgnier
Emile Verhaeren
VielÉ-Griffin
Stuart Merril
Laurent Tailhade
Francis Jammes
MorÉas
Spire
Vildrac
Jules Romains
Unanimisme
De BosschÈre's study of Elskamp
Albert Mockel and "La Wallonie"
II. HENRY JAMES
III. REMY DE GOURMONT, a Distinction followed by notes
IV. IN THE VORTEX
Eliot
Joyce
Lewis
An Historical Essayist
The New Poetry
Breviora
PART SECOND
V. OUR TETRARCHAL PRECIEUSE
A divagation from Jules Laforgue
VI. GENESIS, or the first book in the Bible
VII. ARNAUT DANIEL
VIII. TRANSLATORS OF GREEK
IX. An essay on THE CHINESE WRITTEN CHARACTER
by the late ERNEST FENOLLOSA,
edited by Ezra Pound

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INSTIGATIONS

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I

A STUDY IN FRENCH POETS

The time when the intellectual affairs of America could be conducted on a monolingual basis is over. It has been irksome for long. The intellectual life of London is dependent on people who understand the French language about as well as their own. America's part in contemporary culture is based chiefly upon two men familiar with Paris: Whistler and Henry James. It is something in the nature of a national disgrace that a New Zealand paper, "The Triad," should be more alert to, and have better regular criticism of, contemporary French publications than any American periodical has yet had.

I had wished to give but a brief anthology[1] of French poems, interposing no comment of my own between author and reader; confining my criticism to selection. But that plan was not feasible. I was indebted to MM. Davray and Valette for cordial semi-permissions to quote the "Mercure" publications.

Certain delicate wines will not travel; they are not always the best wines. Foreign criticism may sometimes correct the criticism du cru. I cannot pretend to give the reader a summary of contemporary French opinion, but certain French poets have qualities strong enough to be perceptible to me, that is, to at least one alien reader; certain things are translatable from one language to another, a tale or an image will "translate"; music will, practically, never translate; and if a work be taken abroad in the original tongue, certain properties seem to become less apparent, or less important. Fancy styles, questions of local "taste," lose importance. Even though I know the overwhelming importance of technique, technicalities in a foreign tongue cannot have for me the importance they have to a man writing in that tongue; almost the only technique perceptible to a foreigner is the presentation of content as free as possible from the clutteration of dead technicalities, fustian a la Louis XV; and from timidities of workmanship. This is perhaps the only technique that ever matters, the only mÆstria.

Mediocre poetry is, I think, the same everywhere; there is not the slightest need to import it; we search foreign tongues for mÆstria and for discoveries not yet revealed in the home product. The critic of a foreign literature must know a reasonable amount of the bad poetry of the nation he studies if he is to attain any sense of proportion.

He will never be as sensitive to fine shades of language as the native; he has, however, a chance of being less bound, less allied to some group of writers. It would be politic for me to praise as many living French-men as possible, and thereby to increase the number of my chances for congenial acquaintance on my next trip to Paris, and to have a large number of current French books sent to me to review.

But these rather broad and general temptations can scarcely lead me to praise one man instead of another.

If I have thrown over current French opinion, I must urge that foreign opinion has at times been a corrective. England has never accepted the continental opinion of Byron; the right estimate lies perhaps between the two. Heine is, I have heard, better read outside Germany than within. The continent has never accepted the idiotic British adulation of Milton; on the other hand, the idiotic neglect of Landor has never been rectified by the continent.

Foreign criticism, if honest, can never be quite the same as home criticism: it may be better or worse; it may have a value similar to that of a different decade or century and has at least some chance of escaping whims and stampedes of opinion.

I do not "aim at completeness." I believe that the American-English reader has heard in a general way of Baudelaire and Verlaine and MallarmÉ; that MallarmÉ, perhaps unread, is apt to be slightly overestimated; that Gautier's reputation, despite its greatness, is not yet as great as it should be.

After a man has lived a reasonable time with the two volumes of Gautier's poetry, he might pleasantly venture upon the authors whom I indicate in this essay; and he might have, I think, a fair chance of seeing them in proper perspective. I omit certain nebulous writers because I think their work bad; I omit the Parnassiens, Samain and Heredia, firstly because their work seems to me to show little that was not already implicit in Gautier; secondly, because America has had enough Parnassienism—perhaps second rate, but still enough. (The verses of La Comtesse de Noailles in the "Revue des Deux Mondes," and those of John Vance Cheney in "The Atlantic" once gave me an almost identical pleasure.) I do not mean that all the poems here to be quoted are better than Samain's "Mon Âme est une infante...." or his "ClÉopatre."

We may take it that Gautier achieved hardness in Emaux et CamÉes; his earlier work did in France very much what remained for the men of "the nineties" to accomplish in England. Gautier's work done in "the thirties" shows a similar beauty, a similar sort of technique. If the Parnassiens were following Gautier they fell short of his merit. Heredia was perhaps the best of them. He tried to make his individual statements more "poetic"; but his whole, for all this, becomes frigid.

Samain followed him and began to go "soft"; there is in him just a suggestion of muzziness. Heredia is "hard," but there or thereabouts he ends. Gautier is intent on being "hard"; is intent on conveying a certain verity of feeling, and he ends by being truly poetic. Heredia wants to be poetic and hard; the hardness appears to him as a virtue in the poetic. And one tends to conclude, from this, that all attempts to be poetic in some manner or other, defeat their own end; whereas an intentness on the quality of the emotion to be conveyed makes for poetry.

I intend here a qualitative analysis. The work of Gautier, Baudelaire, Verlaine, MallarmÉ, Samain, Heredia, and of the authors I quote here should give an idea of the sort of poetry that has been written in France during the last half century, or at least during the last forty years. If I am successful in my choice, I will indicate most of the best and even some of the half-good. Bever and LÉautaud's anthology contains samples of some forty or fifty more poets.[2]

After Gautier, France produced, as nearly as I can understand, three chief and admirable poets: Tristan CorbiÈre, perhaps the most poignant writer since Villon; Rimbaud, a vivid and indubitable genius; and Laforgue—a slighter, but in some ways a finer "artist" than either of the others. I do not mean that he "writes better" than Rimbaud; and Eliot has pointed out the wrongness of Symons's phrase, "Laforgue the eternal adult, Rimbaud the eternal child." Rimbaud's effects seem often to come as the beauty of certain silver crystals produced by chemical means. Laforgue always knows what he is at; Rimbaud, the "genius" in the narrowest and deepest sense of the term, the "most modern," seems, almost without knowing it, to hit on the various ways in which the best writers were to follow him, slowly. Laforgue is the "last word":—out of infinite knowledge of all the ways of saying a thing he finds the right way. Rimbaud, when right, is so because he cannot be bothered to exist in any other modality.

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JULES LAFORGUE

(1860-'87)

Laforgue was the "end of a period"; that is to say, he summed up and summarized and dismissed nineteenth-century French literature, its foibles and fashions, as Flaubert in "Bouvard and PÉcuchet" summed up nineteenth-century general civilization. He satirized Flaubert's heavy "SalammbÔ" manner inimitably, and he manages to be more than a critic, for in process of this ironic summary he conveys himself, il raconte lui-mÊme en racontant son Âge et ses moeurs, he delivers the moods and the passion of a rare and sophisticated personality: "point ce 'gaillard-lÀ' ni le Superbe ... mais au fond distinguÉe et franche comme une herbe"!

Oh! laissez-moi seulement reprendre haleine,
Et vous aurez un livre enfin de bonne foi.
En attendant, ayez pitiÉ de ma misÈre!
Que je vous sois À tous un Être bienvenu!
Et que je sois absous pour mon Âme sincÈre,
Comme le fut PhrynÉ pour son sincÈre nu.

He is one of the poets whom it is practically impossible to "select." Almost any other six poems would be quite as "representative" as the six I am quoting.

PIERROTS
(On a des principes)
Elle disait, de son air vain fondamental:
"Je t'aime pour toi seul!"—Oh! lÀ, lÀ, grÊle histoire;
Oui, comme l'art! Du calme, Ô salaire illusoire
Du capitaliste IdÉal!
Elle faisait: "J'attends, me voici, je sais pas"...
Le regard pris de ces larges candeurs des lunes;
—Oh! lÀ, lÀ, ce n'est pas peut-Être pour des prunes,
Qu'on a fait ses classes ici-bas?
Mais voici qu'un beau soir, infortunÉe À point,
Elle meurt!—Oh! lÀ, lÀ; bon, changement de thÈme!
On sait que tu dois ressusciter le troisiÈme
Jour, sinon en personne, du moins
Dans l'odeur, les verdures, les eaux des beaux mois!
Et tu iras, levant encore bien plus de dupes
Vers le ZaÏmph de la Joconde, vers la Jupe!
Il se pourra mÊme que j'en sois.

PIERROTS
III
Comme ils vont molester, la nuit,
Au profond des parcs, les statues,
Mais n'offrant qu'au moins dÉvÊtues
Leur bras et tout ce qui s'ensuit,
En tÊte-À-tÊte avec la femme
Ils ont toujours l'air d'Être un tiers,
Confondent demain avec hier,
Et demandent Rien avec Âme!
Jurent "je t'aime" l'air lÀ-bas,
D'une voix sans timbre, en extase,
Et concluent aux plus folles phrases
Par des: "Mon Dieu, n'insistons pas?"
Jusqu'À ce qu'ivre, Elle s'oublie,
Prise d'on ne sait quel besoin
De lune? dans leurs bras, fort loin
Des convenances Établies.

COMPLAINTE DES CONSOLATIONS
Quia voluit consolari
Ses yeux ne me voient pas, son corps serait jaloux;
Elle m'a dit: "monsieur ..." en m'enterrant d'un geste;
Elle est Tout, l'univers moderne et le cÉleste.
Soit, draguons donc Paris, et ravitaillons-nous,
Tant bien que mal, du reste.
Les Landes sans espoir de ses regards brÛlÉs,
Semblaient parfois des paons prÊts À mettre À la voile ...
Sans chercher À me consoler vers les Étoiles,
Ah! Je trouverai bien deux yeux aussi sans clÉs,
Au Louvre, en quelque toile!
Oh! qu'incultes, ses airs, rÊvant dans la prison
D'un cant sur le qui-vive au travers de nos hontes!
Mais, en m'appliquant bien, moi dont la foi dÉmonte
Les jours, les ciels, les nuits, dans les quatre saisons
Je trouverai mon compte.
Sa bouche! À moi, ce pli pudiquement martyr
OÙ s'aigrissent des nostalgies de nostalgies!
Eh bien, j'irai parfois, trÈs sincÈre vigie,
Du haut de Notre-Dame aider l'aube, au sortir,
De passables orgies.
Mais, Tout va la reprendre!—Alors Tout m'en absout
Mais, Elle est ton bonheur!—Non! je suis trop immense,
Trop chose. Comment donc! mais ma seule prÉsence
Ici-bas, vraie À s'y mirer, est l'air de Tout:
De la Femme au Silence.

LOCUTIONS DES PIERROTS
VI
Je te vas dire: moi, quand j'aime,
C'est d'un coeur, au fond sans apprÊts,
Mais dignement ÉlaborÉ
Dans nos plus singuliers problÈmes.
Ainsi, pour mes moeurs et mon art,
C'est la pÉriode vÉdique
Qui seule a bon droit revendique
Ce que j'en "attelle À ton char."
Comme c'est notre Bible hindoue
Qui, tiens, m'amÈne À caresser,
Avec ces yeux de cÉtacÉ,
Ainsi, bien sans but, ta joue.

This sort of thing will drive many bull-moose readers to the perilous borders of apoplexy, but it may give pleasure to those who believe that man is incomplete without a certain amount of mentality. Laforgue is an angel with whom our modern poetic Jacob must struggle.

COMPLAINTE DES PRINTEMPS
Permettez, Ô sirÈne,
Voici que votre haleine
Embaume la verveine;
C'est l'printemps qui s'amÈne!
—Ce systÈme, en effet, ramÈne le printemps,
Avec son impudent cortÈge d'excitants.
Otez donc ces mitaines;
Et n'ayez, inhumaine,
Que mes soupirs pour traÎne:
Ous'qu'il y a de la gÊne ...
—Ah! yeux bleus mÉditant sur l'ennui de leur art!
Et vous, jeunes divins, aux soirs crus de hasard!
Du gÉant À la naine,
Vois, tout bon sire entraÎne
Quelque contemporaine,
Prendre l'air, par hygiÈne ...
—Mais vous saignez ainsi pour l'amour de l'exil!
Pour l'amour de l'Amour! D'ailleurs, ainsi soit-il.
T'ai-je fait de la peine?
Oh! viens vers les fontaines
OÙ tournent les phalÈnes
Des Nuits ElysÉennes!
—PimbÊche aux yeux vaincus, bellÂtre aux beaux jarrets.
Donnez votre fumier À la fleur du Regret.
VoilÀ que son haleine
N'embaum' plus la verveine!
DrÔle de phÉnomÈne ...
Hein, À l'annÉe prochaine?
—Vierges d'hier, ce soir traÎneuses de foetus,
A genoux! voici l'heure oÙ se plaint l'AngÉlus.
Nous n'irons plus au bois,
Les pins sont eternels,
Les cors ont des appels!...
Neiges des pÂles mois,
Vous serez mon missel!
—Jusqu'au jour de dÉgel.

COMPLAINTE DES PIANOS
Qu'on attend dans les Quartiers AisÉs
Menez l'Âme que les Lettres ont bien nourrie,
Les pianos, les pianos, dans les quartiers aisÉs!
Premiers soirs, sans pardessus, chaste flÂnerie,
Aux complaintes des nerfs incompris ou brisÉs.
Ces enfants, À quoi rÊvent-elles,
Dans les ennuis des ritournelles?
—"PrÉaux des soirs,
Christs des dortoirs!
"Tu t'en vas et tu nous laisses,
Tu nous laiss's et tu t'en vas,
DÉfaire et refaire ses tresses,
Broder d'Éternels canevas."
Jolie ou vague? triste ou sage? encore pure?
O jours, tout m'est egal? ou, monde, moi je veux?
Et si vierge, du moins, de la bonne blessure,
Sachant quels gras couchants ont les plus blancs aveux
Mon Dieu, a quoi done rÊvent-elles?
A des Roland, À des dentelles?
—"Coeurs en prison,
Lentes saisons!
"Tu t'en vas et tu nous quittes,
Tu nous quitt's et tu t'en vas!
Couvents gris, choeurs de Sulamites,
Sur nos seins nuls croisons nos bras."
Fatales clÉs de l'Être un beau jour apparues;
Psitt! aux hÉrÉditÉs en ponctuels ferments,
Dans le bal incessant de nos Étranges rues;
Ah! pensionnats, thÉÂtres, journaux, romans!
Allez, stÉriles ritournelles,
La vie est vraie et criminelle.
—"Rideaux tirÉs,
Peut-on entrer?
"Tu t'en vas et tu nous laisses,
Tu nous laiss's et tu t'en vas,
La source des frais rosiers baisse.
Vraiment! Et lui qui ne vient pas...."
Il viendra! Vous serez les pauvres coeurs en faute,
FiancÉs au remords comme aux essais sans fond,
Et les suffisants coeurs cossus, n'ayant d'autre hÔte
Qu'un train-train pavoisÉ d'estime et de chiffons
Mourir? peut-Être brodent-elles,
Pour un oncle À dot, des bretelles?
—"Jamais! Jamais!
Si tu savais!
Tu t'en vas et tu nous quittes,
Tu nous quitt's et tu t'en vas,
Mais tu nous reviendras bien vite
GuÉrir mon beau mal, n'est-ce pas?"
Et c'est vrai! l'IdÉal les fait divaguer toutes;
Vigne bohÈme, mÊme en ces quartiers aisÉs.
La vie est lÀ; le pur flacon des vives gouttes
Sera, comme il convient, d'eau propre baptisÉ.
Aussi, bientÔt, se joueront-elles
De plus exactes ritournelles.
"—Seul oreiller!
Mur familier!
"Tu t'en vas et tu nous laisses,
Tu nous laiss's et tu t'en vas,
Que ne suis-je morte À la messe!
O mois, Ô linges, Ô repas!"

The journalist and his papers exist by reason of their "protective coloring." They must think as their readers think at a given moment.

It is impossible that Jules Laforgue should have written his poems in America in "the eighties." He was born in 1860, died in 1887 of la misÈre, of consumption and abject poverty in Paris. The vaunted sensitiveness of French perception, and the fact that he knew a reasonable number of wealthy and influential people, did nothing to prevent this. He had published two small volumes, one edition of each. The seventh edition of his collected poems is dated 1913, and doubtless they have been reprinted since then with increasing celerity.

Un couchant des Cosmogonies!
Ah! que la Vie est quotidienne....
Et, du plus vrai qu'on se souvienne,
Comme on fut piÈtre et sans gÉnie....

What is the man in the street to make of this, or of the Complainte des Bons MÉnages!

L'Art sans poitrine m'a trop longtemps bercÉ dupe.
Si ses labours sont fiers, que ses blÉs dÉcevants!
Tiens, laisse-moi bÊler tout aux plis de ta jupe
Qui fleure le couvent.

Delicate irony, the citadel of the intelligent, has a curious effect on these people. They wish always to be exhorted, at all times no matter how incongruous and unsuitable, to do those things which almost any one will and does do whenever suitable opportunity is presented. As Henry James has said, "It was a period when writers besought the deep blue sea 'to roll.'"

The ironist is one who suggests that the reader should think, and this process being unnatural to the majority of mankind, the way of the ironical is beset with snares and with furze-bushes.

Laforgue was a purge and a critic. He laughed out the errors of Flaubert, i.e., the clogging and cumbrous historical detail. He left Coeur Simple, L'Education, Madame Bovary, Bouvard. His Salome makes game of the rest. The short story has become vapid because sixty thousand story writers have all set themselves to imitating De Maupassant, perhaps a thousand from the original.

Laforgue implies definitely that certain things in prose were at an end, and I think he marks the next phase after Gautier in French poetry. It seems to me that without a familiarity with Laforgue one can not appreciate—i.e., determine the value of—certain positives and certain negatives in French poetry since 1890.

He deals for the most part with literary poses and clichÉs, yet he makes them a vehicle for the expression of his own very personal emotions; of his own unperturbed sincerity.

Je ne suis pas "ce gaillard-lÀ!" ni Le Superbe!
Mais mon Âme, qu'un cri un peu cru exacerbe,
Est au fond distinguÉe et franche comme une herbe.

This is not the strident and satiric voice of CorbiÈre, calling Hugo "Garde National Épique," and Lamartine "Lacrymatoire d'abonnÉs." It is not Tailhade drawing with rough strokes the people he sees daily in Paris, and bursting with guffaws over the Japanese in their mackintoshes, the West Indian mulatto behind the bar in the Quartier. It is not Georges Fourest burlesquing in a cafÉ; Fourest's guffaw is magnificent, he is hardly satirical. Tailhade draws from life and indulges in occasional squabbles.

Laforgue was a better artist than any of these men save CorbiÈre. He was not in the least of their sort.

Beardsley's "Under the Hill" was until recently the only successful attempt to produce "anything like Laforgue" in our tongue. "Under the Hill" was issued in a limited edition. Laforgue's MoralitÉs LÉgendaires was issued in England by the Ricketts and Hacon press in a limited edition, and there the thing has remained. Laforgue can never become a popular cult because tyros can not imitate him.

One may discriminate between Laforgue's tone and that of his contemporary French satirists. He is the finest wrought; he is most "verbalist." Bad verbalism is rhetoric, or the use of clichÉ unconsciously, or a mere playing with phrases. But there is good verbalism, distinct from lyricism or imagism, and in this Laforgue is a master. He writes not the popular language of any country, but an international tongue common to the excessively cultivated, and to those more or less familiar with French literature of the first three-fourths of the nineteenth century.

He has done, sketchily and brilliantly, for French literature a work not incomparable to what Flaubert was doing for "France" in Bouvard and PÉcuchet, if one may compare the flight of the butterfly with the progress of an ox, both proceeding toward the same point of the compass. He has dipped his wings in the dye of scientific terminology. Pierrot imberbe has

Un air d'hydrocÉphale asperge.

The tyro can not play about with such things. Verbalism demands a set form used with irreproachable skill. Satire needs, usually, the form of cutting rhymes to drive it home.

Chautauquas, Mrs. Eddy, Dr. Dowies, Comstocks, Societies for the Prevention of All Human Activities, are impossible in the wake of Laforgue. And he is therefore an exquisite poet, a deliverer of the nations, a Numa Pompilius, a father of light. And to many people this mystery, the mystery why such force should reside in so fragile a book, why such power should coincide with so great a nonchalance of manner, will remain forever a mystery.

Que loin l'Âme type
Qui m'a dit adieu
Parce que mes yeux
Manquaient de principes!
Elle, en ce moment.
Elle, si pain tendre,
Oh! peut-Être engendre
Quelque garnement.
Car on l'a unie
Avec un monsieur,
Ce qu'il y a de mieux,
Mais pauvre en gÉnie.

Laforgue is incontrovertible. The "strong silent man" of the kinema has not monopolized all the certitudes.

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TRISTAN CORBIERE

(1841-1875)

CorbiÈre seems to me the greatest poet of the period. "La Rapsode Foraine et le Pardon de Sainte-Anne" is, to my mind, beyond all comment. He first published in '73, remained practically unknown until Verlaine's essay in '84, and was hardly known to "the public" until the Messein edition of his work in '91.

LA RAPSODE FORAINE ET LE PARDON DE SAINTE-ANNE
La Palud, 27 aoÛt, jour du Pardon.
BÉnite est l'infertile plage
OÙ, comme la mer, tout est nud.
Sainte est la chapelle sauvage
De Sainte-Anne-de-la-Palud....
De la Bonne Femme Sainte Anne,
Grand'tante du petit JÉsus,
En bois pourri dans sa soutane
Riche ... plus riche que CrÉsus!
Contre elle la petite Vierge,
Fuseau frÊle, attend l'AngÉlus;
Au coin, Joseph, tenant son cierge,
Niche, en saint qu'on ne fÊte plus...
C'est le Pardon.—Liesse et mystÈres—
DÉjÀ l'herbe rase a des poux....
Sainte Anne, Onguent des belles-mÈres!
Consolation des Époux!
Des paroisses environnantes:
De Plougastel et Loc-Tudy,
Ils viennent tous planter leurs tentes,
Trois nuits, trois jours,—jusqu'au lundi.
Trois jours, trois nuits, la palud grogne,
Selon l'antique rituel,
—Choeur sÉraphique et chant d'ivrogne—
LE CANTIQUE SPIRITUEL.
MÈre taillÉe À coups de hache,
Tout coeur de chÊne dur et bon;
Sous l'or de ta robe se cache
L'Âme en piÈce d'un franc Breton!
—Vieille verte À la face usÉe
Comme la pierre du torrent,
Par des larmes d'amour creusÉe,
SÉchÉe avec des pleurs de sang ...
—Toi, dont la mamelle tarie
S'est refait, pour avoir portÉ
La VirginitÉ de Marie,
Une mÂle virginitÉ!
—Servante-maÎtresse altiÈre,
TrÈs haute devant le TrÈs-Haut;
Au pauvre monde, pas fiÈre,
Dame pleine de comme-il-faut!
—BÂton des aveugles! BÉquille
Des vieilles! Bras des nouveau-nÉs!
MÈre de madame ta fille!
Parente des abandonnÉs!
—O Fleur de la pucelle neuve!
Fruit de l'Épouse au sein grossi!
Reposoir de la femme veuve ...
Et du veuf Dame-de-merci!
—Arche de Joachim! AÏeule!
MÉdaille de cuivre effacÉ!
Gui sacrÉ! TrÈfle quatre-feuille!
Mont d'Horeb! Souche de JessÉ!
—O toi qui recouvrais la cendre,
Qui filais comme on fait chez nous,
Quand le soir venait À descendre,
Tenant l'ENFANT sur tes genoux;
Toi qui fus lÀ, seule, pour faire
Son maillot À BethlÉem,
Et lÀ, pour coudre son suaire
Douloureux, À JÉrusalem!...
Des croix profondes sont tes rides,
Tes cheveux sont blancs comme fils....
—PrÉserve des regards arides
Le berceau de nos petits-fils....
Fais venir et conserve en joie
Ceux À naÎtre et ceux qui sont nÉs,
Et verse, sans que Dieu te voie,
L'eau de tes yeux sur les damnÉs!
Reprends dans leur chemise blanche
Les petits qui sont en langueur....
Rappelle À l'Éternel Dimanche
Les vieux qui traÎnent en longueur:
—Dragon-gardien de la Vierge,
Garde la crÈche sous ton oeil.
Que, prÈs de toi, Joseph-concierge
Garde la propretÉ du seuil!
Prends pitiÉ de la fille-mÈre,
Du petit au bord du chemin....
Si quelqu'un leur jette la pierre,
Que la pierre se change en pain!
—Dame bonne en mer et sur terre,
Montre-nous le ciel et le port,
Dans la tempÊte ou dans la guerre....
O Fanal de la bonne mort!
Humble: À tes pieds n'as point d'Étoile,
Humble ... et brave pour protÉger!
Dans la nue apparaÎt ton voile,
PÂle aurÉole du danger.
—Aux perdus dont la vie est grise,
(—Sauf respect—perdus de boisson)
Montre le clocher de l'Église
Et le chemin de la maison.
PrÊte ta douce et chaste flamme
Aux chrÉtiens qui sont ici....
Ton remÈde de bonne femme
Pour tes bÊtes-À-corne aussi!
Montre À nos femmes et servantes
L'ouvrage et la fÉconditÉ....
—Le bonjour aux Âmes parentes
Qui sont bien dans l'ÉternitÉ!
—Nous mettrons un cordon de cire,
De cire-vierge jaune autour
De ta chapelle et ferons dire
Ta messe basse au point du jour.
PrÉserve notre cheminÉe
Des sorts et du monde malin....
A PÂques te sera donnÉe
Une quenouille avec du lin.
Si nos corps sont puants sur terre,
Ta grÂce est un bain de santÉ;
RÉpands sur nous, au cimetiÈre,
Ta bonne odeur de saintetÉ.
—A l'an prochain!—Voici ton cierge:
(C'est deux livres qu'il a coÛtÉ)
.... Respects À Madame la Vierge,
Sans oublier la TrinitÉ.
... Et les fidÈles, en chemise,
Sainte Anne, ayez pitiÉ de nous!
Font trois fois le tour de l'Église
En se traÎnant sur leurs genoux,
Et boivent l'eau miraculeuse
OÙ les Job teigneux ont lavÉ
Leur nuditÉ contagieuse....
Allez: la Foi vous a sauvÉ!
C'est lÀ que tiennent leurs cÉnacles
Les pauvres, frÈres de JÉsus.
—Ce n'est pas la cour des miracles,
Les trous sont vrais: Vide latus!
Sont-ils pas divins sur leurs claies
Qu'aurÉole un nimbe vermeil
Ces propriÉtaires de plaies,
Rubis vivants sous le soleil!...
En aboyant, un rachitique
Secoue un moignon dÉsossÉ,
Coudoyant un Épileptique
Qui travaille dans un fossÉ.
LÀ, ce tronc d'homme oÙ croit l'ulcÈre,
Contre un tronc d'arbre oÙ croÎt le gui,
Ici, c'est la fille et la mÈre
Dansant la danse de Saint-Guy.
Cet autre pare le cautÈre
De son petit enfant malsain:
—L'enfant se doit a son vieux pÈre....
—Et le chancre est un gagne-pain!
LÀ, c'est l'idiot de naissance,
Un visitÉ par Gabriel,
Dans l'extase de l'innocence....
—L'innocent est (tout) prÈs du ciel!—
—Tiens, passant, regarde: tout passe.
L'oeil de l'idiot est restÉ.
Car il est en État de grÂce....
—Et la GrÂce est l'Eternite!—
Parmi les autres, aprÈs vÊpre,
Qui sont d'eau bÉnite arrosÉs,
Un cadavre, vivant de lÈpre,
Fleurit, souvenir des croisÉs....
Puis tous ceux que les Rois de France
GuÉrissaient d'un toucher de doigts....
—Mais la France n'a plus de Rois,
Et leur dieu suspend sa clÉmence.
* * * * * * *
Une forme humaine qui beugle
Contre le calvaire se tient;
C'est comme une moitiÉ d'aveugle:
Elle est borgne et n'a pas de chien....
C'est une rapsode foraine
Qui donne aux gens pour un liard
L' Istoyre de la Magdalayne,
Du Juif Errant ou d'Abaylar.
Elle hÂle comme une plainte,
Comme une plainte de la faim.
Et, longue comme un jour sans pain,
Lamentablement, sa complainte....
—Ça chante comme Ça respire,
Triste oiseau sans plume et sans nid
Vaguant oÙ son instinct l'attire:
Autour des Bon-Dieu de granit....
Ça peut parler aussi, sans doute,
Ça peut penser comme Ça voit:
Toujours devant soi la grand'route....
—Et, quand c'a deux sous, Ça les boit.
—Femme: on dirait, hÉlas!—sa nippe
Lui pend, ficelÉe en jupon;
Sa dent noire serre une pipe
Eteinte.... Oh, la vie a du bon!—
Son nom.... Ça se nomme MisÈre.
Ça s'est trouvÉ nÉ par hasard.
Ça sera trouvÉ mort par terre....
La mÊme chose—quelque part.
Si tu la rencontres, PoÈte,
Avec son vieux sac de soldat:
C'est notre soeur.... donne—c'est fÊte—
Pour sa pipe, un peu de tabac!...
Tu verras dans sa face creuse
Se creuser, comme dans du bois,
Un sourire; et sa main galeuse
Te faire un vrai signe de croix.
(Les Amours Jaunes.)

It is not long since a "strong, silent" American, who had been spending a year or so in Paris, complained to me that "all French poetry smelt of talcum powder." He did not specifically mention CorbiÈre; who, with perhaps a few dozen other French poets, may have been outside the scope of his research. CorbiÈre came also to "Paris."

I
BÂtard de CrÉole et Breton,
Il vint aussi lÀ—fourmiliÈre,
Bazar oÙ rien n'est en pierre,
OÙ le soleil manque de ton.
—Courage! On fait queue.... Un planton
Vous pousse À la chaÎne—derriÈre!—
—Incendie Éteint, sans lumiÈre;
Des seaux passent, vides ou non.—
LÀ, sa pauvre Muse pucelle
Fit le trottoir en demoiselle.
Ils disaient: Qu'est-ce qu'elle vend?
—Rien.—Elle restait lÀ, stupide,
N'entendant pas sonner le vide
Et regardant passer le vent....
II
LÀ: vivre À coups de fouet!—passer
En fiacre, en correctionnelle;
Repasser À la ritournelle,
Se dÉpasser, et trÉpasser!—
—Non, petit, il faut commencer
Par Être grand—simple ficelle—
Pauvre: remuer l'or À la pelle;
Obscur: un nom À tout casser!...
Le coller chez les mastroquets,
Et l'apprendre À des perroquets
Qui le chantent ou qui le sifflent—
—Musique!—C'est le paradis
Des mahomets ou des houris,
Des dieux souteneurs qui se giflent!

People, at least some of them, think more highly of his Breton subjects than of the Parisian, but I can not see that he loses force on leaving the sea-board; for example, his "FrÈre et Soeur Jumeaux" seems to me "by the same hand" and rather better than his "Roscoff." His language does not need any particular subject matter, or prefer one to another. "Mannequin idÉal, tÊte-de-turc du leurre," "Fille de marbre, en rut!", "Je voudrais Être chien À une fille publique" are all, with a constant emission of equally vigorous phrases, to be found in the city poems. At his weakest he is touched with the style of his time, i.e., he falls into a phrase À la Hugo,—but seldom. And he is conscious of the will to break from this manner, and is the first, I think, to satirize it, or at least the first to hurl anything as apt and violent as "garde nationale Épique" or "inventeur de la larme Écrite" at the Romantico-rhetorico and the sentimento-romantico of Hugo and Lamartine. His nearest kinships in our period are to Gautier and Laforgue, though it is Villon whom most by life and temperament he must be said to resemble.

Laforgue was, for four or five years, "reader" to the ex-Kaiser's mama; he escaped and died of la misÈre. CorbiÈre had, I believe, but one level of poverty.

Un beau jour—quel mÉtier!—je faisais, comme Ça
Ma croisiÈre.—MÉtier!....—Enfin. Elle passa.
—Elle qui,—La Passante! Elle, avec son ombrelle!
Vrai valet de bourreau, je la frÔlai....—mais Elle
Me regarda tout bas, souriant en dessous,
Et—me tendit sa main, et....
m'a donnÉ deux sous.

---

ARTHUR RIMBAUD

(1854-1891)

Rimbaud's first book appeared in '73. His complete poems with a preface by Verlaine in '95. Laforgue conveys his content by comment, CorbiÈre by ejaculation, as if the words were wrenched and knocked out of him by fatality; by the violence of his feeling, Rimbaud presents a thick suave color, firm, even.

Cinq heures du soir
AU CABARET VERT
Depuis huit jours, j'avais dÉchirÉ mes bottines
Aux cailloux des chemins. J'entrais À Charleroi,
—Au Cabaret Vert: je demandai des tartines
De beurre et du jambon qui fÛt À moitiÉ froid.
Bienheureux, j'allongeai les jambes sous la table
Verte: je contemplai les sujets trÈs naÏfs
De la tapisserie.—Et ce fut adorable,
Quand la fille aux tÉtons Énormes, aux yeux vifs,
—Celle-lÀ, ce n'est pas un baiser qui l'Épeure!—
Rieuse, m'apporta des tartines de beurre,
Du jambon tiÈde, dans un plat coloriÉ,
Du jambon rose et blanc parfumÉ d'une gousse
D'ail,—et m'emplit la chope immense, avec sa mousse
Que dorait un rayon de soleil arriÉrÉ.

The actual writing of poetry has advanced little or not at all since Rimbaud. CÉzanne was the first to paint, as Rimbaud had written,—in, for example, "Les Assis":

Ils ont greffÉ dans des amours epileptiques
Leur fantasque ossature aux grands squelettes noirs
De leurs chaises; leurs pieds aux barreaux rachitiques
S'entrelacent pour les matins et pour les soirs
Ces vieillards ont toujours fait tresse avec leurs siÈges.

or in the octave of

VENUS ANADYOMENE
Comme d'un cercueil vert en fer-blanc, une tÊte
De femme À cheveux bruns fortement pommadÉs
D'une vieille baignoire Émerge, lente et bÊte,
Montrant des dÉficits assez mal ravaudÉs;
Puis le col gras et gris, les larges omoplates
Qui saillent; le dos court qui rentre et qui ressort,
—La graisse sous la peau paraÎt en feuilles plates
Et les rondeurs des reins semble prendre l'essor.

Tailhade has painted his "Vieilles Actrices" at greater length, but smiling; Rimbaud does not endanger his intensity by a chuckle. He is serious as CÉzanne is serious. Comparisons across an art are always vague and inexact, and there are no real parallels; still it is possible to think of CorbiÈre a little as one thinks of Goya, without Goya's Spanish, with infinite differences, but with a macabre intensity, and a modernity that we have not yet surpassed. There are possible grounds for comparisons of like sort between Rimbaud and CÉzanne.

Tailhade and Rimbaud were both born in '54; there is not a question of priority in date, I do not know who hit first on the form, but Rimbaud's "Chercheuses" is a very good example of a mould not unlike that into which Tailhade has cast his best poems.

LES CHERCHEUSES DE POUX
Quand le front de l'enfant plein de rouges tourmentes,
Implore l'essaim blanc des rÊves indistincts,
Il vient prÈs de son lit deux grandes soeurs charmantes
Avec de frÊles doigts aux ongles argentins.
Elles asseoient l'enfant auprÈs d'une croisÉe
Grande ouverte oÙ l'air bleu baigne un fouillis de fleurs,
Et, dans ses lourds cheveux oÙ tombe la rosÉe,
PromÈnent leurs doigts fins, terribles et charmeurs.
Il Écoute chanter leurs haleines craintives
Qui fleurent de longs miels vÉgÉtaux et rosÉs
Et qu'interrompt parfois un sifflement, salives
Reprises sur la lÈvre ou dÉsirs de baisers.
Il entend leurs cils noirs battant sous les silences
ParfumÉs; et leurs doigts Électriques et doux
Font crÉpiter, parmi ses grises indolences,
Sous leurs ongles royaux la mort des petits poux.
VoilÀ que monte en lui le vin de la Paresse,
Soupir d'harmonica qui pourrait dÉlirer;
L'enfant se sent, selon la lenteur des caresses,
Sourdre et mourir sans cesse un dÉsir de pleurer.

The poem is "not really" like Tailhade's, but the comparison is worth while. Many readers will be unable to "see over" the subject matter and consider the virtues of the style, but we are, let us hope, serious people; besides, Rimbaud's mastery is not confined to "the unpleasant"; "Roman" begins:

I
On n'est pas sÉrieux, quand on a dix-sept ans.
—Un beau soir, foin des bocks et de la limonade,
Des cafÉs tapageurs aux lustres Éclatants!
—On va sous les tilleuls verts de la promenade.
Les tilleuls sentent bon dans les bons soirs de juin!
L'air est parfois si doux, qu'on ferme la paupiÈre;
Le vent chargÉ de bruits,—la ville n'est pas loin—
A des parfums de vigne et des parfums de biÈre....

The sixth line is worthy of To-em-mei. But Rimbaud has not exhausted his idyllic moods or capacities in one poem. Witness:

COMEDIE EN TROIS BAISERS
Elle Était fort dÉshabillÉe,
Et de grands arbres indiscrets
Aux vitres penchaient leur feuillÉe
Malinement, tout prÈs, tout prÈs.
Assise sur ma grande chaise.
Mi-nue elle joignait les mains.
Sur le plancher frissonnaient d'aise
Ses petits pieds si fins, si fins.
—Je regardai, couleur de cire
Un petit rayon buissonnier
Papillonner, comme un sourire
Sur son beau sein, mouche au rosier.
—Je baisai ses fines chevilles.
Elle eut un long rire trÈs mal
Qui s'Égrenait en claires trilles,
Une risure de cristal....
Les petits pieds sous la chemise
Se sauvÈrent: "Veux-tu finir!"
—La premiÈre audace permise,
Le rire feignait de punir!
—Pauvrets palpitant sous ma lÈvre,
Je baisai doucement ses yeux:
—Elle jeta sa tÊte miÈvre
En arriÈre: "Oh! c'est encor mieux!...
"Monsieur, j'ai deux mots À te dire...."
—Je lui jetai le reste au sein
Dans un baiser, qui la fit rire
D'un bon rire qui voulait bien....
—Elle Était fort dÉshabillÉe
Et de grands arbres indiscrets,
Aux vitres penchaient leur feuillÉe
Malinement, tout prÈs, tout prÈs.

The subject matter is older than Ovid, and how many poems has it led to every silliness, every vulgarity! One has no instant of doubt here, nor, I think, in any line of any poem of Rimbaud's. How much I might have learned from the printed page that I have learned slowly from actualities. Or perhaps we never do learn from the page; but are only capable of recognizing the page after we have learned from actuality.

I do not know whether or no Rimbaud "started" the furniture poetry with "Le Buffet"; it probably comes, most of it, from the beginning of Gautier's "Albertus." I cannot see that the "Bateau Ivre" rises above the general level of his work, though many people seem to know of this poem (and of the sonnet on the vowels) who do not know the rest of his work. Both of these poems are in Van Bever and LÉautaud. I wonder in what other poet will we find such firmness of coloring and such certitude.

---

TABLE
Laforgue 1860-1887; published 1885
CorbiÈre 1840-1875; published 1873 and 1891
Rimbaud 1854-1891; published 1873
Remy de Gourmont 1858-1915
Merril 1868-1915
Tailhade 1854-1919
Verhaeren 1855-1916
MorÉas 1856-1911
Living:
VielÉ-Griffin 1864
Jammes 1868
De RÉgnier 1864
Spire 1868
Younger Men:
Klingsor, Romains, Vildrac
Other Dates:
Verlaine 1844-1896
MallarmÉ 1842-1898
Samain 1858-1900
Elskamp, born 1862

---

REMY DE GOURMONT

(1858-1915)

As in prose, Remy de Gourmont found his own form, so also in poetry, influenced presumably by the medieval sequaires and particularly by Goddeschalk's quoted in his (de Gourmont's) work on "Le Latin Mystique," he recreated the "litanies." It was one of the great gifts of "symbolisme," of the doctrine that one should "suggest" not "present"; it is, in his hand, an effective indirectness. The procession of all beautiful women moves before one in the "Litanies de la Rose"; and the rhythm is incomparable. It is not a poem to lie on the page, it must come to life in audition, or in the finer audition which one may have in imagining sound. One must "hear" it, in one way or another, and out of that intoxication comes beauty. One does no injustice to De Gourmont by giving this poem alone. The "Litany of the Trees" is of equal or almost equal beauty. The Sonnets in prose are different; they rise out of natural speech, out of conversation. Paul Fort perhaps began or rebegan the use of conversational speech in rhyming prose paragraphs, at times charmingly.

LITANIES DE LA ROSE
A Henry de Groux.

Fleur hypocrite,

Fleur du silence.

Rose couleur de cuivre, plus frauduleuse que nos joies, rose couleur de cuivre, embaume-nous dans tes mensonges, fleur hypocrite, fleur du silence.

Rose au visage peint comme une fille d'amour, rose au coeur prostitue, rose au visage peint, fais semblant d'Être pitoyable, fleur hypocrite, fleur du silence.

Rose À la joue puÉrile, Ô vierges des futures trahisons, rose À la joue puÉrile, innocente et rouge, ouvre les rets de tes yeux clairs, fleur hypocrite, fleur du silence.

Rose aux yeux noirs, miroir de ton nÉant, rose aux yeux noirs, fais-nous croire au mystÈre, fleur hypocrite, fleur du silence.

Rose couleur d'or pur, Ô coffre-fort de l'idÉal, rose couleur d'or pur, donne-nous la clef de ton ventre, fleur hypocrite, fleur du silence.

Rose couleur d'argent, encensoir de nos rÊves, rose couleur d'argent prends notre coeur et fais-en de la fumÉe, fleur hypocrite, fleur du silence.

Rose au regard saphique, plus pÂle que les lys, rose au regard saphique, offre-nous le parfum de ton illusoire virginitÉ, fleur hypocrite, fleur du silence.

Rose au front pourpre, colÈre des femmes dÉdaignÉes, rose au front pourpre dis-nous le secret de ton orgueil, fleur hypocrite, fleur du silence.

Rose au front d'ivoire jaune, amante de toi-mÊme, rose au front d'ivoire jaune, dis-nous le secret de tes nuits virginales, fleur hypocrite, fleur du silence.

Rose aux lÈvres de sang, Ô mangeuse de chair, rose aux lÈvres de sang, si tu veux notre sang, qu'en ferions-nous? bois-le, fleur hypocrite, fleur du silence.

Rose couleur de soufre, enfer des dÉsirs vains, rose couleur de soufre, allume le bÛcher oÙ tu planes, Âme et flamme, fleur hypocrite, fleur du silence.

Rose couleur de pÊche, fruit veloutÉ de fard, rose sournoise, rose couleur de pÊche, empoisonne nos dents, fleur hypocrite, fleur du silence.

Rose couleur de chair, dÉesse de la bonne volontÉ, rose couleur de chair, fais-nous baiser la tristesse de ta peau fraÎche et fade, fleur hypocrite, fleur du silence.

Rose vineuse, fleur des tonnelles et des caves, rose vineuse, les alcools fous gambadent dans ton haleine: souffle-nous l'horreur de l'amour, fleur hypocrite, fleur du silence.

Rose violette, Ô modestie des rillettes perverses, rose violette, tes yeux sont plus grands que le reste, fleur hypocrite, fleur du silence.

Rose rose, pucelle au coeur dÉsordonnÉ, rose rose, robe de mousseline, entr'ouvre tes ailes fausses, ange, fleur hypocrite, fleur du silence.

Rose en papier de soie, simulacre adorable des grÂces incrÉÉes, rose en papier de soie, n'es-tu pas la vraie rose, fleur du silence.

Rose couleur d'aurore, couleur du temps, couleur de rien, Ô sourire du Sphinx, rose couleur d'aurore, sourire ouvert sur le nÉant, nous t'aimerons, car tu mens, fleur hypocrite, fleur du silence.

Rose blonde, lÉger manteau de chrÔme sur des Épaules frÊles, Ô rose blonde, femelle plus forte que les mÂles, fleur hypocrite, fleur du silence!

Rose en forme de coupe, vase rouge oÙ mordent les dents quand la bouche y vient boire, rose en forme de coupe, nos morsures te font sourire et nos baisers te font pleurer, fleur hypocrite, fleur du silence.

Rose toute blanche, innocente et couleur de lait, rose toute blanche, tant de candeur nous Épouvante, fleur hypocrite, fleur du silence.

Rose couleur de bronze, pÂte cuite au soleil, rose couleur de bronze, les plus durs javelots s'Émoussent sur ta peau, fleur hypocrite fleur du silence.

Rose couleur de feu, creuset spÉcial pour les chairs rÉfractaires, rose couleur de feu, Ô providence des ligueurs en enfance, fleur hypocrite, fleur du silence.

Rose incarnate, rose stupide et pleine de santÉ, rose incarnate, tu nous abreuves et tu nous leurres d'un vin trÈs rouge et trÈs bÉnin, fleur hypocrite, fleur du silence.

Rose en satin cÉrise, munificence exquise des lÈvres triomphales, rose en satin cÉrise, ta bouche enluminÉe a posÉ sur nos chairs le sceau de pourpre de son mirage, fleur hypocrite, fleur du silence.

Rose au coeur virginal, Ô louche et rose adolescence qui n'a pas encore parlÉ, rose au coeur virginal, tu n'as rien À nous dire, fleur hypocrite, fleur du silence.

Rose groseille, honte et rougeur des pÉchÉs ridicules, rose groseille, on a trop chiffonnÉ ta robe, fleur hypocrite, fleur du silence.

Rose couleur du soir, demi-morte d'ennui, fumÉe crÉpusculaire, rose couleur du soir, tu meurs d'amour en baisant tes mains lasses, fleur hypocrite, fleur du silence.

Rose bleue, rose iridine, monstre couleur des yeux de la ChimÈre, rose bleue, lÈve un peu tes paupiÈres: as-tu peur qu-on te regarde, les yeux dans les yeux, ChimÈre, fleur hypocrite, fleur du silence!

Rose verte, rose couleur de mer, Ô nombril des, sirÈnes, rose verte, gemme ondoyante et fabuleuse, tu n'es plus que de l'eau dÈs qu'un doigt t'a touchÉe, fleur hypocrite, fleur du silence.

Rose escarboucle, rose fleurie au front noir du dragon, rose escarboucle, tu n'es plus qu'une boucle de ceinture, fleur hypocrite, fleur du silence.

Rose couleur de vermilion, bergÈre ÉnamourÉe couchÉe dans les sillons, rose couleur de vermilion, le berger te respire et le bouc t'a broutÉe, fleur hypocrite, fleur du silence.

Rose des tombes, fraicheur ÉmanÉe des charognes, rose des tombes, toute mignonne et rose, adorable parfum des fines pourritures, tu fais semblant de vivre, fleur hypocrite, fleur du silence.

Rose brune, couleur des mornes acajous, rose brune, plaisirs permis, sagesse, prudence et prÉvoyance, tu nous regardes avec des yeux rogues, fleur hypocrite, fleur du silence.

Rose ponceau, ruban des fillettes modÈles, rose ponceau, gloire des petites poupÉes, es-tu niaise ou sournoise, joujou des petits frÈres, fleur hypocrite, fleur du silence.

Rose rouge et noire, rose insolente et secrÈte, rose rouge et noire, ton insolence et ton rouge ont pÂli parmi les compromis qu'invente la vertu, fleur hypocrite, fleur du silence.

Rose ardoise, grisaille des vertus vaporeuses, rose ardoise, tu grimpes et tu fleuris autour des vieux bancs solitaires, rose du soir, fleur hypocrite, fleur du silence.

Rose pivoine, modeste vanitÉ des jardins plantureux, rose pivoine, le vent n'a retroussÉ tes feuilles que par hasard, et tu n'en fus pas mÉcontente, fleur hypocrite, fleur du silence.

Rose neigeuse, couleur de la neige et des plumes du cygne, rose neigeuse, tu sais que la neige est fragile et tu n'ouvres tes plumes de cygne qu'aux plus insignes, fleur hypocrite, fleur du silence.

Rose hyaline, couleur des sources claires jaillies d'entre les herbes, rose hyaline, Hylas est mort d'avoir aimÉ tes yeux, fleur hypocrite, fleur du silence.

Rose opale, Ô sultane endormie dans l'odeur du harem, rose opale, langueur des constantes caresses, ton coeur connait la paix profonde des vices satisfaits, fleur hypocrite, fleur du silence.

Rose amÉthyste, Étoile matinale, tendresse Épiscopale, rose amÉthyste, tu dors sur des poitrines dÉvotes et douillettes, gemme offerte À Marie, Ô gemme sacristine, fleur hypocrite, fleur du silence.

Rose cardinale, rose couleur du sang de l'Eglise romaine, rose cardinale, tu fais rever les grands yeux des mignons et plus d'un t'Épingla au noeud de sa jarretiÈre, fleur hypocrite, fleur du silence.

Rose papale, rose arrosÉe des mains qui bÉnissent le monde, rose papale, ton coeur d'or est en cuivre, et les larmes qui perlent sur ta vaine corolle, ce sont les pleurs du Christ, fleur hypocrite, fleur du silence.

Fleur hypocrite,

Fleur du silence.

---

DE REGNIER

(born 1864)

De RÉgnier is counted a successor to the Parnassiens, and has indeed written much of gods and of marble fountains, as much perhaps of the marble decor, as have other contemporaries of late renaissance and of more modern house furniture. His "J'ai feint que les dieux m'aient parlÉ" opens charmingly. He has in the "Odelettes" made two darts into vers libre which are perhaps worth many more orderly pages, and show lyric sweetness.

ODELETTE
Si j'ai parlÉ
De mon amour, c'est À l'eau lente
Qui m'Écoute quand je me penche
Sur elle; si j'ai parlÉ
De mon amour, c'est au vent
Qui rit et cuchote entre les branches;
Si j'ai parlÉ de mon amour, c'est À l'oiseau
Qui passe et chante
Avec le vent;
Si j'ai parlÈ
C'est a l'Écho.
Si j'ai aimÉ de grand amour,
Triste ou joyeux,
Ce sont tes yeux;
Si j'ai aimÉ de grand amour,
Ce fut ta bouche grave et douce,
Ce fut ta bouche;
Si j'ai aimÉ de grand amour,
Ce furent ta chair tiÈde et tes mains fraÎches,
Et c'est ton ombre que je cherche.

He has joined himself to the painters of contemporary things in:

L'ACCUEIL
Tous deux Étaient beaux de corps et de visages,
L'air francs et sages
Avec un clair sourire dans les yeux,
Et, devant eux,
Debout en leur jeunesse svelte et prompte,
Je me sentais courbÉ et j'avais presque honte
D'Être si vieux.
Les ans
Sont lourds aux Épaules et pÈsent
Aux plus fortes
De tout le poids des heures mortes,
Les ans
Sont durs, et brÈve
La vie et l'on a vite des cheveux blancs;
Et j'ai dÉjÀ vÉcu beaucoup de jours.
Les ans sont lourds....
Et tous deux me regardaient, surpris de voir
Celui qu'ils croyaient autre en leur pensÉe
Se lever pour les recevoir
VÊtu de bure et le front nu
Et non pas, comme en leur pensÉe,
DrapÉ de pourpre et laurÉ d'or.
Et je leur dis: "Soyez tous deux les bienvenus."
Ce fut alors
Que je leur dis:
"Mes fils, quoi, vous avez montÉ la cÔte
Sous ce soleil cuisant d'aoÛt
Jusqu'À ma maison haute,
O vous
Qu'attend lÀ-bas peut-Être, au terme du chemin
Le salut amoureux de quelque blanche main!
Si vous avez pour moi allongÉ votre route
Peut-Être, au moins mes chants vous auront-ils aidÉs,
De leurs rythmes prÉsents en vos mÉmoires,
A marcher d'un jeune pas scandÉ
Je n'ai jamais dÉsirÉ d'autre gloire
Sinon que les vers du poÈte
Plussent À la voix qui les rÉpÈte.
Si les miens vous ont plu: merci,
Car c'est pour cela que, chantant
Mon rÊve, aprÈs l'avoir conÇu en mon esprit,
Depuis vingt ans,
J'habite ici."
Et, d'un geste, je leur montrai la chambre vide
Avec son mur de pierre et sa lampe d'argile
Et le lit oÙ je dors et le sol oÙ, du pied,
Je frappe pour apprendre au vers estropiÉ
A marcher droit, et le calame de roseau
Dont la pointe subtile aide À fixer le mot
Sur la tablette lisse et couverte de cire
Dont la divine odeur la retient et l'attire
Et le fait, dans la strophe en fleurs qu'il ensoleille,
MystÉrieusement vibrer comme une abeille.
Et je repris:
"Mes fils,
Les ans
Sont lourds aux Épaules et pÈsent
Aux plus fortes
De tout le poids des heures mortes.
Les ans
Sont durs, la vie est brÈve
Et l'on a vite des cheveux blancs,
Si quelque jour,
En revenant d'oÙ vous allez,
Vous rencontriez sur cette mÊme route,
Entre les orges et les blÉs,
Des gens en troupe
Montant ici avec des palmes À la main,
Dites-vous bien
Que si vous les suiviez vous ne me verriez pas
Comme aujourd'hui debout en ma robe de laine
Qui se troue a l'Épaule et se dÉchire au bras,
Mais drapÉ de pourpre hautaine
Peut-Être—et mort
Et laurÉ d'or!"
Je leur ai dit cela, pour qu'ils le sachent,
Car ils sont beaux tous deux de corps et de visages,
L'air francs et sages
Avec un clair sourire aux yeux,
Parce qu'en eux
Peut-Être vit quelque dÉsir de gloire,
Je leur ai parlÉ ainsi pour qu'ils sachent
Ce qu'est la gloire,
Ce qu'elle donne,
Ce qu'il faut croire
De son vain jeu,
Et que son dur laurier ne pose sa couronne
Que sur le front inerte et qui n'est plus qu'un peu
DÉjÀ d'argile humaine oÙ vient de vivre un Dieu.

Here we have the modern tone in De RÉgnier. My own feeling at the moment is that his hellenics, his verse on classical and ancient subjects, is likely to be overshadowed by that of Samain and Heredia. I have doubts whether his books will hold against the ClÉopatra sonnets, or if he has equaled, in this vein, the poem beginning "Mon Âme est une infante en robe de parade." But in the lyric odelette, and in this last given poem in particular, we find him leading perhaps onward toward Vildrac, and toward a style which might be the basis for a certain manner F.M. Hueffer has used in English vers libre, rather than remembering the Parnassiens.

---

EMILE VERHAEREN

Verhaeren has been so well introduced to America by his obituary notices that I can scarcely hope to compete with them in this limited space. One can hardly represent him better than by the well known:

LES PAUVRES
Il est ainsi de pauvres coeurs
avec en eux, des lacs de pleurs,
qui sont pÂles, comme les pierres
d'un cimetiÈre.
Il est ainsi de pauvres dos
plus lourds de peine et de fardeaux
que les toits des cassines brunes,
parmi les dunes.
Il est ainsi de pauvres mains,
comme feuilles sur les chemins,
comme feuilles jaunes et mortes,
devant la porte.
Il est ainsi de pauvres yeux
humbles et bons et soucieux
et plus tristes que ceux des bÊtes,
sous la tempÊte.
Il est ainsi de pauvres gens,
aux gestes las et indulgents
sur qui s'acharne la misÈre,
au long des plaines de la terre.

---

VIELÉ-GRIFFIN

Two men, half-Americans, VielÉ-Griffin and Stuart Merril, won for themselves places among the recent French poets. VielÉ-Griffin's poem for the death of MallarmÉ is among his better known works:

IN MEMORIAM STEPHANE MALLARMÉ
Si l'on te disait: MaÎtre!
Le jour se lÈve;
Voici une aube encore, la mÊme, pÂle;
MaÎtre, j'ai ouvert la fenÊtre,
L'aurore s'en vient encor du seuil oriental,
Un jour va naÎtre!
—Je croirais t'entendre dire: Je rÊve.
Si l'on te disait: MaÎtre, nous sommes lÀ,
Vivants et forts,
Comme ce soir d'hier, devant ta porte;
Nous sommes venus en riant, nous sommes lÀ,
Guettant le sourire et l'Étreinte forte,
—On nous rÉpondrait: Le MaÎtre est mort.
Des fleurs de ma terrasse,
Des fleurs comme au feuillet d'un livre,
Des fleurs, pourquoi?
Voici un peu de nous, la chanson basse
Qui tourne et tombe,
—Comme ces feuilles-ci tombent et tournoient—
Voici la honte et la colÈre de vivre
Et de parler des mots—contre ta tombe.

His curious and, perhaps not in the bad sense, old-fashioned melodic quality shows again in the poem beginning:

LÂche comme le froid et la pluie,
Brutal et sourd comme le vent,
Louche et faux comme le ciel bas,
L'Automne rÔde par ici,
Son bÂton heurte aux contrevents;
Ouvre la porte, car il est lÀ.
Ouvre la porte et fais-lui honte,
Son manteau s'emloche et traine,
Ses pieds sont alourdis de boue;
Jette-lui des pierres, quoi qu'il te conte,
Ne crains pas ses paroles de haine:
C'est toujours un rÔle qu'il joue.
* * * * * * *

It is embroidery À la Charles D'OrlÉans; one must take it or leave it.

---

STUART MERRIL

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

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

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

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

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

---

LAURENT TAILHADE

1854-1919

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

HYDROTHERAPIE
Le vieux monsieur, pour prendre une douche ascendante,
A couronnÉ son chef d'un casque d'hidalgo
Qui, malgrÉ sa bedaine ample et son lumbago,
Lui donne un certain air de famine avec Dante.
Ainsi ses membres gourds et sa vertebre À point
Traversent l'appareil des tuyaux et des lances,
Tandis que des masseurs, tout gonflÉs d'insolences,
Frottent au gant de crin son dos oÙ l'acnÉ point.
Oh! l'eau froide! la bonne et rare panacÉe
Qui, seule, raffermit la charpente lassÉe
Et le protoplasma des sÉnateurs pesants!
Voici que, dans la rue, au sortir de sa douche,
Le vieux monsieur qu'on sait un magistrat farouche
Tient des propos grivois aux filles de douze ans.

QUARTIER LATIN
Dans le bar oÙ jamais le parfum des brÉvas
Ne dissipa l'odeur de vomi qui la navre
Triomphent les appas de la mÈre Cadavre
Dont le nom est fameux jusque chez les Howas.
Brune, elle fut jadis vantÉe entre les brunes,
Tant que son souvenir au Vaux-Hall est restÉ.
Et c'est toujours avec beaucoup de dignitÉ
Qu'elle rince le zinc et dÉtaille les prunes.
A ces causes, son cabaret s'emplit le soir,
De futurs avouÉs, trop heureux de surseoir
Quelque temps À l'Étude inepte des Digestes,
Des Valaques, des riverains du fleuve Amoor
S'acoquinent avec des potards indigestes
Qui s'y viennent former aux choses de l'amour.

RUS
Ce qui fait que l'ancien bandagiste renie
Le comptoir dont le faste allÉchait les passants,
C'est son jardin d'Auteuil oÙ, veufs de tout encens,
Les zinnias ont l'air d'Être en tÔle vernie.
C'est lÀ qu'il vient, le soir, goÛter l'air aromal
Et, dans sa rocking-chair, en veston de flanelle,
Aspirer les senteurs qu'Épanchent sur Grenelle
Les fabriques de suif et de noir animal.
Bien que libre-penseur et franc-maÇon, il juge
Le dieu propice qui lui donna ce refuge
OÙ se meurt un cyprin emmy la piÈce d'eau,
OÙ, dans la tour mauresque aux lanternes chinoises,
—Tout en lui prÉparant du sirop de framboises—
Sa "demoiselle" chante un couplet de Nadaud.

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

RONDEL
Dans les cafÉs d'adolescents
MorÉas cause avec FrÉmine:
L'un, d'un parfait cuistre a la mine,
L'autre beugle des contre-sens.
Rien ne sort moins de chez Classens
Que le linge de ces bramines.
Dans les cafÉs d'adolescents,
MorÉas cause avec FrÉmine.
DÉsagrÉgeant son albumine,
La TailhÈde offre quelque encens:
Maurras leur invente Commine
Et Ça fait roter les passants,
Dans les cafÉs d'adolescents.

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

DINER CHAMPETRE
Entre les siÈges ou des garÇons volontaires
Entassent leurs chalants parmi les boulingrins,
La famille Feyssard, avec des airs sereins,
Discute longuement les tables solitaires.
La demoiselle a mis un chapeau rouge vif
Dont s'honore le bon faiseur de sa commune,
Et madame Feyssard, un peu hommasse et brune,
Porte une robe loutre avec des reflets d'if.
Enfin ils sont assis! Or le pÈre commande
Des Écrevisses, du potage au lait d'amande,
Toutes choses dont il rÊvait depuis longtemps.
Et, dans le ciel couleur de turquoises fanÉes,
Il voit les songes bleus qu'en ses esprits flottant
A fait naÎtre l'ampleur des truites saumonÉes.

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

---

FRANCIS JAMMES

(born 1868)

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

Let us begin with Jammes' earlier work:

J'aime l'Âne si doux
marchant le long des houx.
Il prend garde aux abeilles
et bouge ses oreilles;
et il porte les pauvres
et des sacs remplis d'orge.
Il va, prÈs des fosses
d'un petit pas cassÉ.
Mon amie le croit bÊte
parce qu'il est poÈte.
Il rÉflÉchit toujours,
Ses yeux sont en velours.
Jeune fille au doux coeur
tu n'as pas sa douceur.
* * * * * *

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

J' ALLAI A LOURDES
J'allai À Lourdes par le chemin de fer,
le long du gave qui est bleu comme l'air.
Au soleil les montagnes semblaient d'Étain.
Et l'on chantait: sauvez! sauvez! dans le train,
Il y avait un monde fou, exaltÉ,
plein de poussiÈre et du soleil d'ÉtÉ.
Des malheureux avec le ventre en avant
Étendaient leurs bras, priaient en les tordant.
Et dans une chaire oÙ Était du drap bleu,
un prÊtre disait: "un chapelet À Dieu!"
Et un groupe de femmes, parfois, passait,
qui chantait: sauvez! sauvez! sauvez! sauvez!
Et la procession chantait. Les drapeaux
se penchaient avec leurs devises en or.
Le soleil Était blanc sur les escaliers
dans l'air bleu, sur les cloches dÉchiquetÉes.
Mais sur un brancard, portÉe par ses parents,
son pauvre pÈre tÊte nue et priant,
et ses frÈres qui disaient: "ainsi soit-il,"
une jeune fille sur le point de mourir.
Oh! qu'elle Était belle! elle avait dix-huit ans
et elle souriait; elle Était en blanc.
Et la procession chantait. Des drapeaux
se penchaient avec leurs devises en or.
Moi je serrais les dents pour ne pas pleurer,
et cette fille, je me sentais l'aimer.
Oh! elle m'a regardÉ un grand moment,
une rose blanche en main, souriant.
Mais maintenant oÙ es-tu? dis, oÙ es-tu,
Es-tu morte? je t'aime, toi qui m'as vu.
Si tu existes, Dieu, ne la tue pas,
elle avait des mains blanches, de minces bras.
Dieu ne la tue pas!—et ne serait-ce que
pour son pÈre nu-tÊte qui priait Dieu.

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

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

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

The poem beginning:

Tu seras nue dans le salon aux vieilles choses,
fine comme un fuseau de roseau de lumiÈre
et, les jambes croisÉes, auprÈs du feu rose
tu Écouteras l'hiver

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

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

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

IL VA NEIGER....
Il va neiger dans quelques jours. Je me souviens
de l'an dernier. Je me souviens de mes tristesses
au coin du feu. Si l'on m'avait demandÉ: qu'est-ce?
j'aurais dit: laissez-moi tranquille. Ce n'est rien.
J'ai bien rÉflÉchi, l'annÉe avant, dans ma chambre,
pendant que la neige lourde tombait dehors.
J'ai rÉflÉchi pour rien. A prÉsent comme alors
je fume une pipe en bois avec un bout d'ambre.
Ma vieille commode en chÊne sent toujours bon.
Mais moi j'Étais bÊte parce que ces choses
ne pouvaient pas changer et que c'est une pose
de vouloir chasser les choses que nous savons.
Pourquoi donc pensons-nous et parlons-nous? C'est drÔle;
nos larmes et nos baisers, eux, ne parlent pas,
et cependant nous les comprenons, et les pas
d'un ami sont plus doux que de douces paroles.
* * * * * * * *

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

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

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

Cest drÔle.... Cette petite sera bÊte
comme ces gens-lÀ, comme son pÈre et sa mÈre.
Et cependant elle a une grÂce infinie.
Il y a en elle l'lntelligence de la beautÉ.
C'est dÉlicieux, son corsage qui n'existe pas,
son derriÈre et ses pieds. Mais elle sera bÊte
comme une oie dans deux ans d'ici. Elle va jouer.
(Benette joue la valse des elfes)

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

La Servante
Il y a quelqu'un qui veut parler À monsieur.
Le PoÈte
Qui est-ce?
La Servante
Je ne sais pas.
Le PoÈte
Un homme ou une femme?
La Servante
Un homme.
PoÈte
Un commis-voyageur, Vous me le foutez belle!
La Servante
Je ne sais pas, monsieur.
PoÈte
Faites entrer au salon.
Laissez-moi achever d'achever ces cerises.
(Next Scene)
Le PoÈte (dans son salon)
A qui ai-je l'honneur de parler, monsieur?
Le Monsieur
Monsieur, je suis le cousin de votre ancienne maÎtresse.
Le PoÈte
De quelle maÎtresse? Je ne vous connais pas.
Et puis qu'est-ce que vous voulez?
Le Monsieur
Monsieur, ecoutez-moi.
On m'a dit que vous Êtes bon.
PoÈte
Ce n'est pas vrai.
La Pipe du PoÈte
Il me bourre avec une telle agitation
que je ne vais jamais pourvoir tirer de l'air.
PoÈte
D'abord, de quelle maÎtresse me parlez-vous?
De qui, pretendez-vous? Non. Vous pretendez de
qui j'ai ÉtÉ l'amant?
Le Monsieur
De NÉomie.
PoÈte
De NÉomie,
Le Monsieur
Oui, monsieur.
PoÈte
OÙ habitez-vous?
Le Monsieur
J'habite les environs de Mont-de-Marsan.
PoÈte
Enfin que voulez-vous?
Le Monsieur
Savoir si monsieur serait
assez complaisant pour me donner quelque chose.
PoÈte
Et si je ne vous donne le pas, qu'est-ce que vous ferez?
Le Monsieur
Oh! Rien monsieur. Je ne vous ferai rien. Non....
Le PoÈte
Tenez, voila dix francs, et foutez-moi la paix.
(Le monsieur s'en va, puis le poÈte sort.)

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

---

MOREAS

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

Et votre chevelure comme des grappes d'ombres,
Et ses bandelettes À vos tempes,
Et la kabbale de vos yeux latents,—
Madeline-aux-serpents, Madeline.
Madeline, Madeline,
Pourquoi vos lÈvres À mon cou, ah, pourquoi
Vos lÈvres entre les coups du hache du roi!
Madeline, et les cordaces et les flÛtes,
Les flÛtes, les pas d'amour, les flÛtes, vous les voulÛtes,
HÉlas! Madeline, la fÊte, Madeline,
Ne berce plus les flots au bord de l'Île,
Et mes bouffons ne crÈvent plus des cerceaux
Au bord de l'Île, pauvres bouffons.
Pauvres bouffons que couronne la sauge!
Et mes litiÈres s'effeuillent aux orniÈres, toutes mes
litiÈres À grand pans
De nonchaloir, Madeline-aux-serpents....

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

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

Dans son rÊve le vieux Prince de Touraine
voit passer en robe verte À longue traÎne
Yeldis aux yeux charmeurs de douce reine.
* * * * * * * *

or

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

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

Croise tes jambes fines et nues
Dans ton lit,
Frotte de tes mignonnes mains menues
Le bout de ton nez;
Frotte de tes doigts potelÉs et jolis,
Les deux violettes de tes yeux cernÉs,
Et rÊve.
Du haut du minaret arabe s'Échappe
La mÉlopÉe triste et brÈve
De l'indiscret muezzin
Qui nasillonne et qui Éternue,
Et toi tu bÂilles comme une petite chatte,
Tu bÂilles d'amour brisÉe,
Et tu songes au passant d'Ormuz ou d'Endor
Qui t'a quittÉe ce matin
En te laissant sa lÉgÈre bourse d'or
Et les marques bleues de ses baisers.

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

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

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

---

OF OUR DECADE

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

SPIRE

(born 1868)

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

DAMES ANCIENNES
En hiver, dans la chambre claire,
Tout en haut de la maison,
Le poÊle de faÏence blanche,
CerclÉ de cuivre, provincial, doux,
Chauffait mes doigts et mes livres.
Et le peuplier mandarine,
Dans le soir d'argent dÉdorÉ,
Dressait, en silence, ses branches,
Devant ma fenÊtre close.
—MÈre, le printemps aux doigts tiÈdes
A soulevÉ l'espagnolette
De mes fenÊtres sans rideaux.
Faites taire toutes ces voix qui montent
Jusqu'À ma table de travail.
—Ce sont les amies de ma mÈre
Et de la mÈre de ton pÈre,
Qui causent de leurs maris morts,
Et de leurs fils partis.
—Avec, au coin de leurs lÈvres,
Ces moustaches de cafÉ au lait?
Et dans leurs mains ces tartines?
Dans leurs bouches ces Kouguelofs?
—Ce sont des cavales anciennes
Qui mÂchonnent le peu d'herbe douce
Que Dieu veut bien leur laisser.
—MÈre, les maÎtres sensibles
LÂchent les juments inutiles
Dans les prÉs, non dans mon jardin!
—Sois tranquille, mon fils, sois tranquille,
Elles ne brouteront pas tes fleurs.
—MÈre, que n'y occupent-elles leurs lÈvres,
Et leurs trop courtes dents trop blanches
De porcelaine trop fragile!
—Mon fils, fermez votre fenÊtre.
Mon fils, vous n'Êtes pas chrÉtien!

VILDRAC

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

Il avait su gagner À lui
Beaucoup d'hommes ensemble,
* * * * *
Et son bonheur Était de croire,
Quand il avait quittÉ la foule,
Que chacun des hommes l'aimait
Et que sa prÉsence durait
Innombrable et puissante en eux,
* * * * *
Or un jour il en suivit un
Qui retournait chez soi, tout seul,
Et il vit son regard s'Éteindre
DÈs qu'il fut un peu loin des autres.
* * * * *

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

C'est seulement parce qu'on a soif qu'on entre y boire;
C'est parce qu'on se sent tomber qu'on va s'y asseoir.
On n'y est jamais À la fois qu'un ou deux
Et l'on n'est pas forcÉ d'y raconter son histoire.
* * * * * * *
Celui qui entre....
* * * * * * *
mange lentement son pain
Parce que ses dents sont usÉes;
Et il boit avec beaucoup de mal
Parce qu'il a de peine plein sa gorge.
Quand il a fini,
Il hÉsite, puis timide
Va s'asseoir un peu
A cÔtÉ du feu.
Ses mains crevassÉes Épousent
Les bosselures dures de ses genoux.

Then of the other man in the story:

"qui n'Était pas des nÔtres....
"Mais comme il avait l'air cependant d'Être des nÔtres!"

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

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

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

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

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

---

JULES ROMAINS

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

Les marchands sont assis aux portes des boutiques;
Ils regardent. Les toits joignent la rue au ciel
Et les pavÉs semblent fÉconds sous le soleil
Comme un champ de maÏs.
Les marchands ont laissÉ dormir prÈs du comptoir
Le dÉsir de gagner qui travaille dÈs l'aube.
On dirait que, malgrÉ leur Âme habituelle,
Une autre Âme s'avance et vient au seuil d'eux-mÊmes
Comme ils viennent au seuil de leurs boutiques noires.

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

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

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

Je croyais les murs de ma chambre impermÉables.
Or ils laissent passer une tiÈde bruine
Qui s'Épaissit et qui m'empÊche de me voir,
Le papier À fleurs bleues lui cÈde. Il fait le bruit
Du sable et du cresson qu'une source traverse.
L'air qui touche mes nerfs est extrÊmement lourd.
Ce n'est pas comme avant le pur milieu de vie
Ou montait de la solitude sublimÉe.
VoilÀ que par osmose
Toute l'immensitÉ d'alentour le sature.
* * * * * * *
Il charge mes poumons, il empoisse les choses,
Il sÉpare mon corps des meubles familiers,
* * * * * * *
Les forces du dehors s'enroulent À mes mains.

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

Rien ne cesse d'Être intÉrieur.
La rue est plus intime À cause de la brume.

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

The opposite of Lewis's giant appears in:

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

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

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

Troupes and herds appear in his earlier work:

Le troupeau marche, avec ses chiens et son berger,
Il a peur. ÇÀ et lÀ des rÉverbÈres brÛlent,
Il tremble d'Être poursuivi par les Étoiles.
* * * * * * *
La foule traine une Écume d'ombrelles blanches
* * * * * * *
La grande ville s'Évapore,
Et pleut À verse sur la plaine
Qu'elle sature.

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

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

VI
Je cesse lentement d'Être moi. Ma personne
Semble s'anÉantir chaque jour un peu plus
C'est À peine si je le sens et m'en Étonne.

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

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

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

But such statements as:

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

and:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

UNANIMISME

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

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

---

REFLEXIONS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I retain, however, my full suspicion of agglomerates.

---

DE BOSSCHÈRE'S STUDY OF ELSKAMP

[4]

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

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

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

Un vieux bourg flamand tel que peint Teniers;
trees bathing in water.

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

"Le bruit et les cris qui furent poussÉs pendant la confÉrence de MallarmÉ, l'arrÊtÈrent plusieurs fois. L'opinion du public sur sa causerie est contenue en ces quelques mots, dits par un gÉnÉral retraitÉ, grand joueur de billard, et qui du reste ne fit qu'une courte absence de la salle de jeu, pour Écouter quelques phrases du poÈte. 'Cet homme est Îvre ou fou,' dit il fort haut, on quittant la salle, oÙ son jugement fit loi. Anvers, malgrÉ un lÉger masque de snobisme, qui pourrait tromper, n'a pas changÉ depuis. MallarmÉ, mÊme pour les avertis, est toujours l'homme Îvre ou fou."

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

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

II

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

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

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

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

It is, however, not in De BosschÈre, but in La Wallonie that I found the clue to this author:

CONSOLATRICE DES AFFLIGÉS
Et l'hiver m'a donnÉ la main,
J'ai la main d'Hiver dans les mains,
et dans ma tÊte, au loin, il brÛle
les vieux ÉtÉs de canicule;
et dans mes yeux, en candeurs lentes,
trÈs blanchement il fait des tentes,
dans mes yeux il fait des Sicile,
puis des Îles, encore des Îles.
Et c'est tout un voyage en rond
trop vite pour la guÉrison
À tous les pays ou l'on meurt
au long cours des mers et des heures;
et c'est tout un voyage au vent
sur les vaisseaux de mes lits blancs
qui houlent avec des Étoiles
À l'entour de toutes les voiles,
or j'ai le goÛt de mer aux lÈvres
comme une rancoeur de geniÈvre
bu pour la trÈs mauvaise orgie
des dÉparts dans les tabagies;
puis ce pays encore me vient:
un pays de neiges sans fin....
Marie des bonnes couvertures,
faites-y la neige moins dure
et courir moins comme des liÈres
mes mains sur mes draps blancs de fiÈvre.
—Max Elskamp in "La Wallonie," 1892.

The poem appears in Van Bever and LÉautaud's anthology and there may be no reason for my not having thence received it; but there is, for all that, a certain value in finding a man among his native surroundings, and in finding Elskamp at home, among his contemporaries, I gained first the advantage of comprehension.

---

ALBERT MOCKEL AND "LA WALLONIE"

[5]

I recently received a letter from Albert Mockel, written with a graciousness not often employed by English and American writers in communication to their juniors. Indeed, the present elder generation of American "respectable" authors having all their lives approached so nearly to death, have always been rather annoyed that American letters did not die utterly in their personal desiccations. Signs of vitality; signs of interest in, or cognizance of other sections of this troubled planet have been steadily and papier-mÂchÉedly deprecated. The rubbish bins of Harper's and the Century have opened their lids not to new movements but only to the diluted imitations of new movers, etc.

La Wallonie, beginning as L'Elan LittÉraire in 1885, endured seven years. It announced for a full year on its covers that its seventh year was its last. Albert Mockel has been gracious enough to call it "Notre Little Review À nous," and to commend the motto on our cover, in the letter here following:

8 mai, 1918
109, Avenue de Paris
La Malmaison Rueil
Monsieur et cher confrÈre,

Merci de votre amiable envoi. La Little Review m'est sympathique À l'extrÈme. En la feuilletant j'ai cru voir renaÎtre ce temps dorÉ de ferveur et de belle confiance oÙ, adolescent encore, et tÂtonnant un peu dans les neuves rÉgions de l'Art, je fondai À LiÈge notre Little Review À nous, La Wallonie. Je retrouve justement quelques livraisons de cette revue et je vous les envoie; elles ont tout au moins le mÉrite de la raretÉ.

Vous mon cher confrÈre, dÉjÀ ne marchez plus À tÂtons mais je vous soupÇonne de n'Être pas aussi terriblement, aussi criminellement jeune que je l'Étais À cette Époque-lÀ. Et puis trente ans ont passÉ sur la littÉrature, et c'est de la folie d'hier qu'est faite la sagesse d'aujourd'hui. Alors le Symbolisme naissait; grÂce À la collaboration de mes amis, grace À Henri de RÉgnier et Pierre M. Olin qui dirigÈrent la revue avec moi, La Wallonie en fut l'un des premiers foyers. Tout Était remis en question. On aspirait È plus de libertÉ À une forme plus intense et plus complÈte plus musicale et plus souple, À une expression nouvelle de l'Éternelle beautÉ. On s'ingeniait on cherchait.... TÂtonnements? Certes et ils Étaient inÉvitables. Mais vif et ardent effort, dÉsintÉressement absolu, foi juvÉnile et surtout "No compromise with the public taste".... N'y a-t-il point la quelques traits de ressemblance avec l'oeuvre que vous tentez aujourd'hui en AmÉrique, et, À trente annÉes d'intervale, une sorte de cousinage? C'est pourquoi mon cher confrÈre, j'ai lu avec tant de plaisir la Little Review dont vous avez eu la gentillesse de m'adresser la collection.

Croyez-moi sympathiquement vÔtre,
ALBERT MOCKEL.

With a native mistrust of la belle phrase; of "temps dorÉ," "ferveur," "belle confiance", etc., and with an equally native superiority to any publication not printed LARGE, I opened La Wallonie. The gropings, "tÂtonnements," to which M. Mockel so modestly refers, appear to have included some of the best work of MallarmÉ, of Stuart Merrill, of Max Elskamp and Emile Verhaeren. Verlaine contributed to La Wallonie, De RÉgnier was one of its editors.... Men of since popular fame—Bourget, Pierre Louys, Maeterlinck—appeared with the rarer spirits.

If ever the "amateur magazine" in the sense of magazine by lovers of art and letters, for lovers of art and letters, in contempt of the commerce of letters, has vindicated itself, that vindication was La Wallonie. Verhaeren's "Les Pauvres" first appeared there as the second part of the series: "Chansons des Carrefours" (Jan., '92).... The Elskamp I have just quoted appeared there with other poems of Max Elskamp. MallarmÉ is represented by the exquisite:

SONNET
Ses purs ongles trÈs haut dÉdiant leur onyx,
L'Angoisse ce minuit, soutient, lampadophore,
Maint rÊve vespÉral brÛle par le phÉnix
Que ne recueille pas de cinÉraire amphore
Sur les crÉdences, au salon vide: nul ptyx,
Aboli bibelot d'inanitÉ sonore,
(Car le maÎtre est allÉ puiser des pleurs au Styx
Avec ce seul objet dont le NÉant s'honore.)
Mais proche la croisÉe au nord vacante, un or
Agonise selon peut-Être le dÉcor
Des licornes ruant du feu contre une nixe,
Elle, dÉfunte nue en le miroir encor
Que, dans l'oubli fermÉ par le cadre, se fixe
De scintillations sitÔt le septuor.
—MallarmÉ in "La Wallonie," Jan.,1889.

An era of Franco-Anglo-American intercourse is marked by his address to:

THE WHIRLWIND
Pas les rafales À propos
De rien comme occuper la rue
Sujette au noir vol des chapeaux;
Mais une danseuse apparue
Tourbillon de mousseline ou
Fureur Éparses en Écumes
Que soulÈve par son genou
Celle mÊme dont nous vÉcÛmes
Pour tout, hormis lui, rebattu
Spirituelle, ivre, immobile
Foudroyer avec le tutu,
Sans se faire autrement de bile
Sinon rieur que puisse l'air
De sa jupe Éventer Whistler.
—MallarmÉ in "Wallonie" Nov., 1890.

If I owe Albert Mockel a great debt in having illuminated my eye for Elskamp I owe him no less the pleasure of one of Merrill's most delicate triumphs in the opening of

BALLET
Pour Gustave Moreau
En casque de cristal rose les baladines,
Dont les pas mesurÉs aux cordes des kinnors
Tintent sous les tissus de tulle roidis d'ors,
Exultent de leurs yeux pÂles de xaladines.
Toisons fauves sur leurs lÈvres incarnadines,
Bras lourds de bracelets barbares, en essors
Moelleux vers la lueur lunaire des dÉcors,
Elles murmurent en malveillantes sourdines:
"Nous sommes, Ô mortels, danseuses du DÉsir,
SalomÉs dont les corps tordus par le plaisir
Leurrent vos heurs d'amour vers nos pervers arcanes.
Prosternez-vous avec des hosannas, ces soirs!
Car, surgissant dans des aurores d'encensoirs,
Sur nos cymbales nous ferons tonner vos crÂnes."
—Stuart Merrill in "La Wallonie," July, '98.

The period was "glauque" and "nacre," it had its pet and too-petted adjectives, the handles for parody; but it had also a fine care for sound, for sound fine-wrought, not mere swish and resonant rumble, not

"Dolores, O hobble and kobble Dolores.
O perfect obstruction on track."

The particular sort of fine workmanship shown in this sonnet of Merrill's has of late been too much let go by the board. One may do worse than compare it with the Syrian syncopation of ????a and '?d?? ?? in Bion's Adonis.

Hanton is gently didactic:

LE BON GRAIN
"DÉjÀ peinent maints moissonneurs dont
la mÉmoire est destinÉe À vivre."
—CÉlestin Demblon.
Amants des rythmes en des strophes cadencÉes,
Des rimes rares aux splendeurs Évocatoires,
Laissant en eux comme un Écho de leurs pensÉes,
Comme un parfum de leurs symboles en histoires:
Tels les poÈtes vont cherchant en vrais glaneurs
Les blonds Épis qui formeront leur riche Écrin.
Ils choisiront, comme feraient les bons vanneurs,
Parmi les blÉs passÉs au crible, le beau grain.
Et germera cette semence bien choisie,
Entre les roses et les lys, pour devenir
Riche moisson de la fertile fantaisie.
L'ardent soleil de Messidor fera jaunir
Les tiges souples d'une forte poÉsie
Qui dresseront leurs fiers Épis vers l'avenir!
—Edmond Hanton in "La Wallonie," July,'88.

Delaroche is, at least in parts, utterly incomprehensible, but there is an interesting experiment in sound-sequence which begins:

SONNETS SYMPHONIQUES
En la langueur
accidentelle
de ta dentelle
oÙ meurt mon coeur
Un profil pleure
et se voit tel
en le pastel
du divin leurre
Qu'or vÉgÉtal
de lys s'enlise
au froid santal
Si n'agonise
occidental
qui s'adonise.
—Achille Delaroche in "La Wallonie" Feb., '89.

I do not know that we will now be carried away by Albert Saint-Paul's chinoiserie, or that she-devils are so much in fashion as when Jules Bois expended, certainly, some undeniable emotion in addressing them:

PETALES DE NACRE
En sa robe oÙ s'immobilisent les oiseaux,
Une Émerge des fleurs comme une fleur plus grande.
Comme une fleur penchÉe au sourire de l'eau,
Ses mains viennent tresser la traÎnante guirlande
Pour enchaÎner le Dragon vert—et de lÉgende!
Qui de ses griffes d'or dÉchire les roseaux,
Les faisceaux de roseaux: banderolles et lances.
Et quand le soir empourprera le fier silence
De la forÊt enjÔleuse de la Douleur,
Ses doigts, fuseaux filant au rouet des murmures
Les beaux anneaux fleuris liant les fleurs aux fleurs,
Ses doigts n'auront saignÉ qu'aux Épines peu dures.
—Albert Saint-Paul in "La Wallonie," Jan.,'91.

POUR LA DEMONE
Un soir de joie, un soir d'ivresse, un soir de fÊte,
—Et quelle fÊte, et quelle ivresse, et quelle joie!—
Tu vins. L'impÉrial ennui sacrait ta tÊte;
Et tu marchais dans un bruit d'armure et de soie.
Tu dÉdaignas tous les bijoux et l'oripeau
De ruban, de dentelle et d'ÉphÉmÈre fleur....
HermÉtique,[6] ta robe emprisonnait ta peau.
Oui, la fourrure seule autour de ta pÂleur.
Tu parus. Sous tes yeux que le kh'ol abomine,
Le bal fut la lugubre et dÉrisoire histoire.
Les hommes des pantins qu'un vice mÈne et mine.
Les femmes, coeurs et corps fanÉs,—et quel dÉboire!

POUR LA DEMONE
V.
Elle est folle, c'est sÛr, elle est folle la chÈre;
Elle m'aime À n'en pas douter, mais elle est folle,
Elle m'aime et, compatissez À ma misÈre,
Avec tous, avec toutes, elle batifole.
Un passe.... Elle s'Élance À lui, coeur prÉsumÉ....
Elle s'offre et le provoque, puis elle fuit
Vers ailleurs.... si fidÈle encore au seul-aimÉ,
Mais elle est folle et je m'Éplore dans la nuit.
Pour quelque amie aux dÉlicatesses fÉlines,
Elle glisse vers les caresses trop profondes.
... "Tu vas, folle, oublier mes rancoeurs orphelines."
Mais sa lÈvre pensive hÉsite aux toisons blondes.
—Jules Bois in "La Wallonie," Sept., '90.

In part we must take our reading of La Wallonie as a study of the state of symbolism from 1885 to '92.

Rodenbach displays the other leaf of the diptych: the genre, the homely Wallon landscape, more familiar to the outer world in Verhaeren, but not, I think, better painted.

PAYSAGES SOUFFRANTS
II.
A Emilie Verhaeren.
LÀ-bas, tant de petits hameaux sous l'avalanche
De la neige qui tombe adoucissante et blanche,
Tant de villages, tant de chaumines qui sont
Pour le reste d'un soir doucement assoupies,
Car le neige s'Étend en de molles charpies
Sur les blessures des vieilles briques qui n'ont
Rien senti d'une Soeur sur leur rougeur qui saigne!
Mais, Ô neige, c'est toi la Soeur au halo blanc
Qui consoles les murs malades qu'on dÉdaigne
Et mets un peu d'ouate aux pierres s'Éraflant.
Las! rien ne guÉrira les chaumines—aÏeules
Qui meurent de l'hiver et meurent d'Être seules....
Et leurs Âmes bientÔt, au grÉ des vents du nord.
Dans la fumÉe aux lents dÉparts, seront parties
Cependant que la neige, À l'heure de leur mort,
Leur apporte ses refraÎchissantes hosties!
—Georges Rodenbach in "La Wallonie," Jan.,'88.

Rodenbach is authentic.

VielÉ-Griffin, who, as Stuart Merrill, has always been known in France as "an American," contributed largely to La Wallonie. His "Au Tombeau d'HÉlÈne" ends:

HELENE
Me voici:
J'Étais lÀ dÈs hier, et dÈs sa veille,
Ailleurs, ici;
Toute chair, a parÉ, un soir, mon Âme vieille
Comme l'ÉternitÉ du dÉsir que tu vÊts.
La nuit est claire au firmament....
Regarde avec tes yeux levÉs:
Voici—comme un tissu de pÂle feu fatal
Qui fait Épanouir la fleur pour la flÉtrir—
Monvoile oÙ transparaÎt tout assouvissement
Qui t'appelle À la vie et qui t'en fait mourir.
La nuit est claire au firmament vital....
Mes mythes, tu les sais:
Je suis fille du Cygne,
Je suis la lune dont s'exubÈrent les mers
Qui montent, tombent, se soulÈvent;
Et c'est le flot de vie exultante et prostrÉe,
le flot des rÊves,
le flot des chairs,
le flux et le reflux de la vaste marÉe.
Mon doute—on dit l'Espoir—fait l'action insigne:
Je suis reine de Sparte et celle-lÀ de Troie,
Par moi, la douloureuse existence guerroie
Je meus toute inertie aux leurres de ma joie,
HÉlÈne, SÉlÉnÉ, flottant de phase en phase,
Je suis l'InaccÉdÉe et la tierce Hypostase
Et si je rejetais, dÉsir qui m'y convies,
Mon voile qui promet et refuse l'extase,
Ma nuditÉ de feu rÉsorberait les Vies....
—VielÉ-Griffin in "La Wallonie," Dec., '91.
(Complete number devoted to his poems.)

Mockel is represented by several poems rather too long to quote,—"Chantefable un peu naive," "L'AntithÈse," suggestive of the Gourmont litany; by prose comment, by work over various pseudonyms. "A Clair Matin" is a suitable length to quote, and it is better perhaps to represent him here by it than by fragments which I had first intended to cut from his longer poems.

A CLAIR MATIN
La nuit au loin s'est effacÉe
comme les lignes tremblantes d'un rÊve;
la nuit s'est fondue au courant du PassÉ
et le jour attendu se lÈve.
Regardez! en les courbes molles des rideaux
une heure attendue se rÉvÈle
et ma fenÊtre enfin s'Éclaire,
cristalline du gÎvre oÙ se rit la lumiÈre.
Une parure enfantine de neiges
habille lÀ-bas d'immobiles eaux
et c'est les cortÈges des fÉes nouvelles
À tire d'ailes, À tire d'ailes
du grand lointain qui toutes reviennent
aux flocons de ce jour en neiges qui s'ÉpÈle.
Des courbes de mes rideaux clairs
—voici! c'est un parfum de ciel!—
blanc des guirlandes de l'hiver
le jeune matin m'est apparu
avec un visage de fiancÉe.
Des fÉes
(ah je ne sais quelles mortelles fÉes)
jadis elles vinrent toucher la paupiÈre
d'un Être enfantin qui mourut.
Son Âme, oÙ se jouait en songes la lumiÈre,
diaphane corolle Épanouie au jour
son Âme Était vive de toute lumiÈre!
Lui, comme un frÈre il suivait ma course
et nous allions en confiants de la montagne À la vallÉe
par les forÊts des chÊnes, des hÊtres
—car eux, les ancÊtres, ils ont le front grave
ils virent maints rÊves des autres Âges
et nous parlent, trÈs doucement, comme nos PÈres.
Mais voyez! À mes rideaux pÂles
le matin glisse des sourires;
car la FiancÉe est venue
car la FiancÉe est venue
avec un simple et trÈs doux visage,
avec des mots qu'on n'entend pas,
en silence la FiancÉe est apparue
comme une grande soeur de l'enfant qui mourut;
et les hÊtres, les chÊnes royaux des forÊts
par douce vocalise Égrenant leur parure,
les voix ressuscitÉes en la plaine sonore
et toute la forÊt d'aurore
quand elle secoue du crÉpuscule sa chevelure,
tout chante, bruit, pÉtille et rayonne
car la cÉleste Joie que la clartÉ dÉlivre
d'un hymne rÉpercute aux miroirs du futur
le front pÂle oÙ scintille en Étoiles le givre.
—Albert Mockel in "La Wallonie," Dernier fascicule, '92.

I have left Gide and Van Lerberghe unquoted, unmentioned, but I have, I dare say, given poems enough to indicate the quality and the scope of the poetry in La Wallonie.

In prose their cousinage is perhaps more quickly apparent. Almost the first sentence I come upon (I suspect it is Mockel's) runs as follows:

"La Revue des deux Mondes publie un roman de Georges Ohnet ce qui ne surprendra personne."

This is the proper tone to use when dealing with elderly muttonheads; with the Harpers of yester year. La Wallonie found it out in the eighties. The symboliste movement flourished on it. American letters did not flourish, partly perhaps for the lack of it, and for the lack of unbridled uncompromising magazines run by young men who did not care for reputations surfaites, for elderly stodge and stupidity.

If we turn to Mockel's death notice for Jules Laforgue we will find La Wallonie in '87 awake to the value of contemporary achievement:

---

JULES LAFORGUE

Nous apprenons avec une vive tristesse, la mort de Jules Laforgue, l'un des plus curieux poÈtes de la littÉrature aux visÉes nouvelles. Nous l'avons dÉsignÉ, jÀ deux mois: un Tristan CorbiÈre plus argentin, moins Âpre.... Et telle est bien sa caractÉristique. Sans le moindre soupÇon d'imitation ou de rÉminiscences, Jules Laforgue a sauvegardÉ une originalitÉ vivace. Seulement, cette originalitÉ, par bien des saillies, touche À celle de Tristan CorbiÈre. C'est une mÊme raillerie de la Vie et du Monde; mais plus de sombre et virile amertume Émouvait en l'auteur des Amours Jaunes, dont cette piÈce donnera quelque idÉe:

LE CRAPAUD
Un chant dans une nuit sans air....
—La lune plaque en mÉtal clair
Les dÉcoupures du vert sombre.
... Un chant; comme un Écho, tout vif
EnterrÉ, lÀ, sous le massif....
—Ça se tait; viens, c'est lÀ, dans l'ombre....
Un crapaud!
—Pourquoi cette peur,
PrÈs de moi, ton soldat fidÈle!
Vois-le, poÈte tondu, sans aile,
Rossignol de la boue....
—Horreur!—
...Il chante.—Horreur!!—Horreur pourquoi?
Vois-tu pas son oeil de lumiÈre....
Non, il s'en va, froid, sous sa pierre.
* * * * * *
Bonsoir—ce crapaud-lÀ c'est moi.

Chez Laforgue, il y a plus de gai sans-souci, de coups de batte de pierrot donnÉs À toutes choses, plus de "vaille-que-vaille la vie," dit d'un air de moqueuse rÉsignation. Sa rancoeur n'est pas qui encombrante. Il Était un peu l'enfant indisciplinÉ que rit À travers les gronderies, et fait la moue À sa fantaisie; mais son haussement d'Épaules gamin, et ses "AprÈs tout?" qu'il jette comme une chiquenaude au visage du Temps, cachent toujours au fond de son coeur un lac mÉlancolique, un lac de tristesse et d'amours flÉtris, oÙ vient se reflÉter sa claire imagination. TÉmoins ces fragments pris aux Complaintes: Mon coeur est une urne oÙ j'ai mis certains dÉfunts, Oh! chut, refrains de leurs berceaux! et vous, parfums.

* * * * * * *
Mon coeur est un NÉron, enfant gÂtÉ d'Asie,
Qui d'empires de rÊve en vain se rassasie.
Mon coeur est un noyÉ vidÉ d'Âme et d'essors,
Qu'Étreint la pieuvre Spleen en ses ventouses d'or.
C'est un feu d'artifice, hÉlas! qu'avant la fÊte,
A noyÉ sans retour l'averse qui s'embÊte.
Mon coeur est le terrestre Histoire-Corbillard
Que traÎnent au nÉant l'instinct et le hazard
Mon coeur est une horloge oubliÉe À demeure
Qui, me sachant dÉfunt, s'obstine À marquer l'heure.
* * * * * * *
Et toujours mon coeur ayant ainsi dÉclamÉ,
En revient À sa complainte: Aimer, Être aimÉ!

Et cette piÈce, d'une ironie concentrÉe:

COMPLAINTE DES BONS MENAGES
L'Art sans poitrine m'a trop longtemps bercÉ dupe.
Si ses labours sont fiers, que ses bles dÉcevants!
Tiens, laisse-moi bÊler tout aux plis de ta jupe
Qui fleure le couvent.
La GÉnie avec moi, serf, a fait des maniÈres;
Toi, jupe, fais frou-frou, sans t'inquiÈter pourquoi....
* * * * * * *
Mais l'Art, c'est l'Inconnu! qu'on y dorme et s'y vautre,
On ne peut pas l'avoir constamment sur les bras!
Et bien, mÉnage au vent! Soyons Lui, Elle et l'Autre.
Et puis n'insistons pas.

Et puis? et puis encore un pied de nez mÉlancolique À la destinÉe:

Qui m'aima jamais? Je m'entÊte
Sur ce refrain bien impuissant
Sans songer que je suis bien bÊte
De me faire du mauvais sang:

Jules Laforgue a publiÉ outre les Complaintes, un livret de vers dÉgingandÉs, d'une raillerie splÉnÉtique, À froid, comme celle qui sied aux hommes du Nord. Mais il a su y ajouter ce sans-faÇon de choses dites À l'aventure, et tout un parfum de lumiÈre argentine, comme les rayons de Notre-Dame la Lune qu'il cÉlÈbre. Le manque de place nous prive d'en citer quelques pages. Nous avons lu aussi cette Étrange Nuit d'Etoiles: le Conseil FÉerique, un assez court poÈme ÉditÉ par la "Vogue"; divers articles de revue, entre lesquels cette page ensoleillÉe, parue dans la Revue IndÉpendante: Pan et la Syrinx. Enfin un nouveau livre Était annoncÉ: de la PitiÉ, de la PitiÉ!, dÉjÀ prÉparÉ par l'une des Invocations du volume prÉcÉdent, et dont nous croyons voir l'idÉe en ces vers des Complaintes:

Vendange chez les Arts enfantins; sois en fÊte
D'une fugue, d'un mot, d'un ton, d'un air de tÊte.
* * * * * *
Vivre et peser selon le Beau, le Bien, le Vrai?
O parfums, Ô regards, Ô fois! soit, j'essaierai.
* * * * * *
... Va, que ta seule Étude
Soit de vivre sans but, fou de mansuÉtude—
—Albert Mockel in "La Wallonie", 1887.

I have quoted but sparingly, and I have thought quotation better than comment, but despite the double meagreness I think I have given evidence that La Wallonie was worth editing.

It began as L'Elan LittÉraire with 16 pages, and an edition of 200 copies; it should convince any but the most stupid that size is not the criterion of permanent value, and that a small magazine may outlast much bulkier printings.

After turning the pages of La Wallonie, perhaps after reading even this so brief excerpt, one is ready to see some sense in even so lyric a phrase as "temps dorÉ, de ferveur et de belle confiance."

In their seven years' run these editors, one at least beginning in his "teens," had published a good deal of the best of Verhaeren, had published work by Elskamp, Merrill, Griffin, Louys, Maeterlinck, Verlaine Van Lerberghe, Gustave Kahn, MorÉas, Quillard, AndrÉ Gide; had been joined in their editing board by De RÉgnier (remember that they edited in LiÈge, not in Paris; they were not at the hub of the universe, but in the heart of French Belgium); they had not made any compromise. Permanent literature, and the seeds of permanent literature, had gone through proof-sheets in their office.

There is perhaps no greater pleasure in life, and there certainly can have been no greater enthusiasm than to have been young and to have been part of such a group of writers working in fellowship at the beginning of such a course, of such a series of courses as were implicated in La Wallonie.

If the date is insufficiently indicated by MallarmÉ's allusion to Whistler, we may turn to the art notes:

"eaux-fortes de Mlle Mary Cassatt ... Lucien Pissaro, Sisley ... lithographies de Fantin-Latour ... Odillon Redon."

"J'ai ÉtÉ un peu À Paris, voir Burne Jones, Moreau, Delacroix ... la danse du ventre, et les adorables Javanaises. C'est mon meilleur souvenir, ces filles "trÈs parÉes" dans l'Étrange demi-jour de leur case et qui tournent lentement dans la stridente musique avec de si Énigmatique inflexions de mains et de si souriantes poursuites les yeux dans les yeux."

Prose poetry, that doubtful connection, appears at times even to advantage:

"SÉlÉnÉ, toi l'essence et le regard des infinis, ton mal nous serait la fÉlicitÉ suprÊme. O viens À nous; Tanit, Vierge Tanit, fleur mÉtallique Épanouie aux plaines cÉlestes!"—Mockel.

---

II

HENRY JAMES

This essay on James is a dull grind of an affair, a Baedecker to a continent.

I set out to explain, not why Henry James is less read than formerly—I do not know that he is. I tried to set down a few reasons why he ought to be, or at least might be, more read.

Some may say that his work was over, well over, finely completed; there is mass of that work, heavy for one man's shoulders to have borne up, labor enough for two life-times; still we would have had a few more years of his writing. Perhaps the grasp was relaxing, perhaps we should have had no strongly-planned book; but we should have had paragraphs here and there, and we should have had, at least, conversation, wonderful conversation; even if we did not hear it ourselves, we should have known that it was going on somewhere. The massive head, the slow uplift of the hand, gli occhi onesti e tardi, the long sentences piling themselves up in elaborate phrase after phrase, the lightning incision, the pauses, the slightly shaking admonitory gesture with its "wu-a-wait a little, wait a little, something will come;" blague and benignity and the weight of so many years' careful, incessant labor of minute observation always there to enrich the talk. I had heard it but seldom, yet it was all unforgettable.

The man had this curious power of founding-affection in those who had scarcely seen him and even in many who had not, who but knew him at second hand.

No man who has not lived on both sides of the Atlantic can well appraise Henry James; his death marks the end of a period. The Times says: "The Americans will understand his changing his nationality," or something of that sort. The "Americans" will understand nothing whatsoever about it. They have understood nothing about it. They do not even know what they lost. They have not stopped for eight minutes to consider the meaning of his last public act. After a year of ceaseless labor, of letter writing, of argument, of striving in every way to bring in America on the side of civilization, he died of apoplexy. On the side of civilization—civilization against barbarism, civilization, not Utopia, not a country or countries where the right always prevails in six weeks! After a life-time spent in trying to make two continents understand each other, in trying, and only his thoughtful readers can have any conception of how he had tried, to make three nations intelligible one to another. I am tired of hearing pettiness talked about Henry James's style. The subject has been discussed enough in all conscience, along with the minor James. Yet I have heard no word of the major James, of the hater of tyranny; book after early book against oppression, against all the sordid petty personal crushing oppression, the domination of modern life; not worked out in the diagrams of Greek tragedy, not labeled "epos" or "Aeschylus." The outbursts in The Tragic Muse, the whole of The Turn of the Screw, human liberty, personal liberty, the rights of the individual against all sorts of intangible bondage![1] The passion of it, the continual passion of it in this man who, fools said, didn't "feel." I have never yet found a man of emotion against whom idiots didn't raise this cry.

And the great labor, this labor of translation, of making America intelligible, of making it possible for individuals to meet across national borders. I think half the American idiom is recorded in Henry James's writing, and whole decades of American life that otherwise would have been utterly lost, wasted, rotting in the unhermetic jars of bad writing, of inaccurate writing. No English reader will ever know how good are his New York and his New England; no one who does not see his grandmother's friends in the pages of the American books. The whole great assaying and weighing, the research for the significance of nationality, French, English, American.

"An extraordinary old woman, one of the few people who is really doing anything good." There were the cobwebs about connoisseurship, etc., but what do they matter? Some yokel writes in the village paper, as Henley had written before, "James's stuff was not worth doing." Henley has gone pretty completely. America has not yet realized that never in history had one of her great men abandoned his citizenship out of shame. It was the last act—the last thing left. He had worked all his life for the nation and for a year he had labored for the national honor. No other American was of sufficient importance for his change of allegiance to have constituted an international act; no other American would have been welcome in the same public manner. America passes over these things, but the thoughtful cannot pass over them.

Armageddon, the conflict? I turn to James's A Bundle of Letters; a letter from "Dr. Rudolph Staub" in Paris, ending:

"You will, I think, hold me warranted in believing that between precipitate decay and internecine enmities, the English-speaking family is destined to consume itself and that with its decline the prospect of general pervasiveness to which I alluded above, will brighten for the deep-lunged children of the fatherland!"

We have heard a great deal of this sort of thing since; it sounds very natural. My edition of the volume containing these letters was printed in '83, and the imaginary letters were written somewhat before that. I do not know that this calls for comment. Henry James's perception came thirty years before Armageddon. That is all I wish to point out. Flaubert said of the War of 1870: "If they had read my Education Sentimentale, this sort of thing wouldn't have happened." Artists are the antennÆ of the race, but the bullet-headed many will never learn to trust their great artists. If it is the business of the artist to make humanity aware of itself; here the thing was done, the pages of diagnosis. The multitude of wearisome fools will not learn their right hand from their left or seek out a meaning.

It is always easy for people to object to what they have not tried to understand.

I am not here to write a full volume of detailed criticism, but two things I do claim which I have not seen in reviewers' essays. First, that there was emotional greatness in Henry James's hatred of tyranny; secondly, that there was titanic volume, weight, in the masses he sets in opposition within his work. He uses forces no whit less specifically powerful than the proverbial "doom of the house,"—Destiny, Deus ex machina,—of great traditional art. His art was great art as opposed to over-elaborate or over-refined art by virtue of the major conflicts which he portrays. In his books he showed race against race, immutable; the essential Americanness, or Englishness or Frenchness—in The American, the difference between one nation and another; not flag-waving and treaties, not the machinery of government, but "why" there is always misunderstanding, why men of different race are not the same.

We have ceased to believe that we conquer anything by having Alexander the Great make a gigantic "joy-ride" through India. We know that conquests are made in the laboratory, that Curie with his minute fragments of things seen clearly in test tubes in curious apparatus, makes conquests. So, too, in these novels, the essential qualities which make up the national qualities, are found and set working, the fundamental oppositions made clear. This is no contemptible labor. No other writer had so essayed three great nations or even thought of attempting it.

Peace comes of communication. No man of our time has so labored to create means of communication as did the late Henry James. The whole of great art is a struggle for communication. All things that oppose this are evil, whether they be silly scoffing or obstructive tariffs.

And this communication is not a leveling, it is not an elimination of differences. It is a recognition of differences, of the right of differences to exist, of interest in finding things different. Kultur is an abomination; philology is an abomination, all repressive uniforming education is an evil.

---

A SHAKE DOWN

I have forgotten the moment of lunar imbecility in which I conceived the idea of a "Henry James" number.[2] The pile of typescript on my floor can but annoyingly and too palpably testify that the madness has raged for some weeks.

Henry James was aware of the spherical form of the planet, and susceptible to a given situation, and to the tone and tonality of persons as perhaps no other author in all literature. The victim and the votary of the "scene," he had no very great narrative sense, or at the least, he attained the narrative faculty but per aspera, through very great striving.

It is impossible to speak accurately of "his style," for he passed through several styles which differ greatly one from another; but in his last, his most complicated and elaborate, he is capable of great concision; and if, in it, the single sentence is apt to turn and perform evolutions for almost pages at a time, he nevertheless manages to say on one page more than many a more "direct" author would convey only in the course of a chapter.

His plots and incidents are often but adumbrations or symbols of the quality of his "people," illustrations invented, contrived, often factitiously and almost transparently, to show what acts, what situations, what contingencies would befit or display certain characters. We are hardly asked to accept them as happening.

He did not begin his career with any theory of art for art's sake, and a lack of this theory may have damaged his earlier work.

If we take "French Poets and Novelists" as indication of his then (1878) opinions, and novels of the nineties showing a later bias, we might contend that our subject began his career with a desire to square all things to the ethical standards of a Salem mid-week Unitarian prayer meeting, and that to almost the end of his course he greatly desired to fit the world into the social exigencies of Mrs. Humphry Ward's characters.

Out of the unfortunate cobwebs he emerged into his greatness, I think, by two causes: first by reason of his hatred of personal intimate tyrannies working at close range; and secondly, in later life, because the actual mechanism of his scriptorial processes became so bulky, became so huge a contrivance for record and depiction, that the old man simply couldn't remember or keep his mind on or animadvert on anything but the authenticity of his impression.

I take it as the supreme reward for an artist; the supreme return that his artistic conscience can make him after years spent in its service, that the momentum of his art, the sheer bulk of his processes, the (si licet) size of his fly-wheel, should heave him out of himself, out of his personal limitations, out of the tangles of heredity and of environment, out of the bias of early training, of early predilections, whether of Florence, A.D. 1300, or of Back Bay of 1872, and leave him simply the great true recorder.

And this reward came to Henry James in the ripeness of his talents; even further perhaps it entered his life and his conversation. The stages of his emergence are marked quite clearly in his work. He displays himself in French Poets and Novelists, constantly balancing over the question of whether or no the characters presented in their works are, or are not, fit persons to be received in the James family back-parlor.

In The Tragic Muse he is still didactic quite openly. The things he believes still leap out nakedly among the people and things he is portraying; the parable is not yet wholly incarnate in the narrative.

To lay all his faults on the table, we may begin with his self-confessed limitation, that "he never went down town." He displayed in fact a passion for high life comparable only to that supposed to inhere in the readers of a magazine called Forget-me-not.

Hardy, with his eye on the Greek tragedians, has produced an epic tonality, and The Mayor of Casterbridge is perhaps more easily comparable to the Grettir Saga than to the novels of Mr. Hardy's contemporaries. Hardy is, on his other side, a contemporary of Sir Walter Scott.

Balzac gains what force his crude writing permits him by representing his people under the ?????? of modernity, cash necessity; James, by leaving cash necessity nearly always out of the story, sacrifices, or rather fails to attain, certain intensities.

He never manages the classic, I mean as Flaubert gives us in each main character: Everyman. One may conceivably be bored by certain pages in Flaubert, but one takes from him a solid and concrete memory, a property. Emma Bovary and Frederic and M. Arnoux are respectively every woman and every man of their period. Maupassant's Bel Ami is not. Neither are Henry James's people. They are always, or nearly always, the bibelots.

But he does, nevertheless, treat of major forces, even of epic forces, and in a way all his own. If Balzac tried to give a whole civilization, a whole humanity, James was not content with a rough sketch of one country.

As Armageddon has only too clearly shown, national qualities are the great gods of the present and Henry James spent himself from the beginning in an analysis of these potent chemicals; trying to determine from the given microscopic slide the nature of the Frenchness, Englishness, Germanness, Americanness, which chemicals too little regarded, have in our time exploded for want of watching. They are the permanent and fundamental hostilities and incompatibles. We may rest our claim for his greatness in the magnitude of his protagonists, in the magnitude of the forces he analyzed and portrayed. This is not the bare matter of a number of titled people, a few duchesses and a few butlers.

Whatever Flaubert may have said about his Education Sentimentale as a potential preventive of the dÉbÂcle of 1870, if people had read it, and whatever Gautier's friend may have said about Emaux et CamÉes as the last resistance to the Prussians, from Dr. Rudolph Staub's paragraph in The Bundle of Letters to the last and almost only public act of his life, James displayed a steady perception and a steady consideration of the qualities of different western races, whose consequences none of us can escape.

And these forces, in precisely that they are not political and executive and therefore transient, factitious, but in precisely that they are the forces of race temperaments, are major forces and are indeed as great protagonists as any author could have chosen. They are firmer ground than Flaubert's when he chooses public events as in the opening of the third part of Education Sentimentale.

The portrayal of these forces, to seize a term from philology, may be said to constitute "original research"—to be Henry James's own addendum; not that this greatly matters. He saw, analyzed, and presented them. He had most assuredly a greater awareness than was granted to Balzac or to Mr. Charles Dickens or to M. Victor Hugo who composed the LÉgende des SiÈcles.

His statement that he never went down town has been urged greatly against him. A butler is a servant, tempered with upper-class contacts. Mr. Newman, the American, has emerged from the making of wash-tubs; the family in The Pupil can scarcely be termed upper-class, however, and the factor of money, Balzac's, ??????, scarcely enters his stories.

We may leave Hardy writing Sagas. We may admit that there is a greater robustezza in Balzac's messiness, simply because he is perpetually concerned, inaccurately, with the factor of money, of earning one's exiguous living.

We may admit the shadowy nature of some of James's writing, and agree whimsically with R.H.C. (in the New Age) that James will be quite comfortable after death, as he had been dealing with ghosts all his life.

James's third donation is perhaps a less sweeping affair and of more concern to his compatriots than to any one who might conceivably translate him into an alien tongue, or even to those who publish his writings in England.

He has written history of a personal sort, social history well documented and incomplete, and he has put America on the map both in memoir and fiction, giving to her a reality such as is attained only by scenes recorded in the arts and in the writing of masters. Mr. Eliot has written, and I daresay most other American admirers have written or will write, that, whatever any one else thinks of Henry James, no one but an American can ever know, really know, how good he is at the bottom, how good his "America" is.

No Englishman can, and in less degree can any continental, or in fact any one whose family was not living on, say, West 23rd Street in the old set-back, two-story-porched red brick vine-covered houses, etc., when Henry James was being a small boy on East 23rd Street; no one whose ancestors had not been presidents or professors or founders of Ha'avwd College or something of that sort, or had not heard of a time when people lived on 14th Street, or had known of some one living in Lexington or Newton "Old Place" or somewhere of that sort in New England, or had heard of the New York that produced "Fanny," New York the jocular and uncritical, or of people who danced with General Grant or something of that sort, would quite know Washington Square or The Europeans to be so autochthonous, so authentic to the conditions. They might believe the things to be "real," but they would not know how closely they corresponded to an external reality.

Perhaps only an exile from these things will get the range of the other half of James's presentations! Europe to the Transpontine, New York of brown stone that he detested, the old and the new New York in Crapey Cornelia and in The American Scene, which more than any other volumes give us our peculiar heritage, an America with an interest, with a tone of time not overstrained, not jejunely over-sentimentalized, which is not a redoing of school histories or the laying out of a fabulous period; and which is in relief, if you like, from Dickens or from Mark Twain's Mississippi. He was not without sympathy for his compatriots as is amply attested by Mr. and Mrs. B.D. Hayes of New York (vide The Birthplace) with whom he succeeds, I think, rather better than with most of his princely continentals. They are, at any rate, his bow to the Happy Genius of his country—as distinct from the gentleman who displayed the "back of a banker and a patriot," or the person whose aggregate features could be designated only as a "mug."

In his presentation of America he is greatly attentive, and, save for the people in Coeur Simple, I doubt if any writer has done more of "this sort of thing" for his country, this portrayal of the typical thing in timbre and quality—balanced, of course, by the array of spittoons in the Capitol ("The Point of View").

Still if one is seeking a Spiritual Fatherland, if one feels the exposure of what he would not have scrupled to call, two clauses later, such a wind-shield, "The American Scene" greatly provides it. It has a mermaid note, almost to outvie the warning, the sort of nickelplate warning which is hurled at one in the saloon of any great transatlantic boat; the awfulness that engulfs one when one comes, for the first time unexpectedly on a pile of all the Murkhn Magazines laid, shingle-wise on a brass-studded, screwed-into-place, baize-covered steamer table. The first glitter of the national weapons for driving off quiet and all closer signs of intelligence.[3]

Attempting to view the jungle of the work as a whole, one notes that, despite whatever cosmopolitan upbringing Henry James may have had, as witness "A Small Boy's Memoirs" and "Notes of Son and Brother," he nevertheless began in "French Poets and Novelists" with a provincial attitude that it took him a long time to work free of. Secondly we see various phases of the "style" of his presentation or circumambiance.

There is a small amount of prentice work. Let us say "Roderick Hudson," "Casamassima." There are lucky first steps in "The American" and "Europeans," a precocity of result, for certainly some of his early work is as permanent as some of the ripest, and more so than a deal of the intervening. We find (for in the case before us criticism must be in large part a weeding-out) that his first subject matter provides him with a number of good books and stories: "The American," "The Europeans," "Eugene Pickering," "Daisy Miller," "The Pupil," "Brooksmith," "A Bundle of Letters," "Washington Square," "The Portrait of a Lady," before 1880, and rather later, "Pandora," "The Four Meetings," perhaps "Louisa Pallant." He ran out of his first material.

We next note a contact with the "Yellow Book," a dip into "cleverness," into the epigrammatic genre, the bare epigrammatic style. It was no better than other writers, not so successful as Wilde. We observe him to be not so hard and fine a satirist as is George S. Street.

We come then to the period of allegories ("The Real Thing," "Dominick Ferrand," "The Liar"). There ensues a growing discontent with the short sentence, epigram, etc., in which he does not at this time attain distinction; the clarity is not satisfactory, was not satisfactory to the author, his donnÉ being radically different from that of his contemporaries. The "story" not being really what he is after, he starts to build up his medium; a thickening, a chiaroscuro is needed, the long sentence; he wanders, seeks to add a needed opacity, he overdoes it, produces the cobwebby novel, emerges or justifies himself in "Maisie" and manages his long-sought form in "The Awkward Age." He comes out the triumphant stylist in the "American Scene" and in all the items of "The Finer Grain" collection and in the posthumous "Middle Years."

This is not to damn incontinent all that intervenes, but I think the chief question addressed to me by people of good-will who do not, but are yet ready and willing to, read James, is: Where the deuce shall I begin? One cannot take even the twenty-four volumes, more or less selected volumes of the Macmillan edition all at once, and it is, alas, but too easy to get so started and entoiled as never to finish this author or even come to the best of him.

The laziness of an uncritical period can be nowhere more blatant than in the inherited habit of talking about authors as a whole. It is perhaps the sediment from an age daft over great figures or a way of displaying social gush, the desire for a celebrity at all costs, rather than a care of letters.

To talk in any other way demands an acquaintance with the work of an author, a price few conversationalists care to pay, ma che! It is the man with inherited opinions who talks about "Shelley," making no distinction between the author of the Fifth Act of "The Cenci" and of the "Sensitive Plant." Not but what there may be a personal virtu in an author—appraised, however, from the best of his work when, that is, it is correctly appraised. People ask me what James to read. He is a very uneven author; not all of his collected edition has marks of permanence.

One can but make one's own suggestion:—

"The American," "French Poets and Novelists," "The Europeans," "Daisy Miller," "Eugene Pickering," "Washington Square," "A Bundle of Letters," "Portrait of a Lady," "Pandora," "The Pupil," "Brooksmith," "What Maisie Knew," and "The Awkward Age" (if one is "doing it all"), "Europe," "Four Meetings," "The Ambassadors," "The American Scene," "The Finer Grain" (all the volume, i.e., "The Velvet Glove," "Mona Montravers," "Round of Visits," "Crapey Cornelia," "Bench of Desolation"), "The Middle Years" (posthumous) and "The Ivory Tower" (notes first).

I "go easy" on the more cobwebby volumes; the most Jamesian are indubitably "The Wings of a Dove" and "The Golden Bowl"; upon them devotees will fasten, but the potential devotee may as well find his aptitude in the stories of "The Finer Grain" volume where certain exquisite titillations will come to him as readily as anywhere else. If he is to bask in Jamesian tickle, nothing will restrain him and no other author will to any such extent afford him equal gratifications.

If, however, the reader does not find delectation in the list given above, I think it fairly useless for him to embark on the rest.

Part of James is a caviare, part I must reject according to my lights as bad writing; another part is a spÉcialitÉ, a pleasure for certain temperaments only; the part I have set together above seems to me maintainable as literature. One can definitely say: "this is good"; hold the argumentative field, suffer comparison with other writers; with, say, the De Goncourt, or De Maupassant. I am not impertinently throwing books on the scrap-heap; there are certain valid objections to James; there are certain standards which one may believe in, and having stated them, one is free to state that any author does not comply with them; granting always that there may be other standards with which he complies, or over which he charmingly or brilliantly triumphs.

James does not "feel" as solid as Flaubert; he does not give us "Everyman," but on the other hand, he was aware of things which Flaubert was not aware of, and in certain things supersedes the author of "Madame Bovary."

He appears at times to write around and around a thing and not always to emerge from the "amorous plan" of what he wanted to present, into definite presentation.

He does not seem to me at all times evenly skillful in catching the intonations of speech. He recalls the New England "a" in the "Lady's" small brothers "Ha-ard" (Haahr-d) but only if one is familiar with the phonetics described; but (vide the beginning of "The Birthplace") one is not convinced that he really knows (by any sure instinct) how people's voices would sound. Some remarks are in key, some obviously factitious.

He gives us more of his characters by description than he can by any attribution of conversation, save perhaps by the isolated and discreet remarks of Brooksmith.

His emotional centre is in being sensitive to the feel of the place or to the tonality of the person.

It is with his own so beautiful talk, his ability to hear his own voice in the rounded paragraph, that he is aptest to charm one. I find it often though not universally hard to "hear" his characters speaking. I have noted various places where the character notably stops speaking and the author interpolates words of his own; sentences that no one but Henry James could in any circumstances have made use of. Beyond which statements I see no great concision or any clarity to be gained by rearranging my perhaps too elliptical comments on individual books.

Honest criticism, as I conceive it, cannot get much further than saying to one's reader exactly what one would say to the friend who approaches one's bookshelf asking: "What the deuce shall I read?" Beyond this there is the "parlor game," the polite essay, and there is the official pronouncement, with neither of which we are concerned.

Of all exquisite writers James is the most colloquial, yet in the first edition of his "French Poets and Novelists," his style, save for a few scattered phrases, is so little unusual that most of the book seems, superficially, as if it might have been written by almost any one. It contains some surprising lapses ... as bad as any in Mr. Hueffer or even in Mr. Mencken. It is interesting largely in that it shows us what our subject had to escape from.

Let us grant at once that his novels show him, all through his life, possessed of the worst possible taste in pictures, of an almost unpunctured ignorance of painting, of almost as great a lack of taste as that which he attributes to the hack-work and newspaper critiques of ThÉophile Gautier. Let us admit that "painting" to Henry James probably meant, to the end of his life, the worst possible late Renaissance conglomerations.

Let us admit that in 1876, or whenever it was, his taste in poetry inclined to the swish of De Musset, that it very likely never got any further. By "poetry" he very possibly meant the "high-falutin" and he eschewed it in certain forms; himself taking still higher falutes in a to-be-developed mode of his own.

I doubt if he ever wholly outgrew that conception of the (by him so often invoked) Daughters of Memory. He arrived truly at a point from which he could look back upon people who "besought the deep blue sea to roll." Poetry to him began, perhaps, fullfledged, springing Minerva-like from the forehead of George Gordon, Lord Byron, and went pretty much to the bad in Charles Baudelaire; it did not require much divination by 1914 ("The Middle Years") to note that he had found Tennyson rather vacuous and that there "was something in" Browning.

James was so thoroughly a recorder of people, of their atmospheres, society, personality, setting; so wholly the artist of this particular genre, that it was impossible for him ever to hold a critical opinion of art out of key with the opinion about him—except possibly in so far as he might have ambitions for the novel, for his own particular mÉtier. His critical opinions were simply an extension of his being in key with the nice people who "impressed" themselves on his gelatine "plate." (This is a theoretical generalization and must be taken cum grano.)

We may, perhaps, take his adjectives on De Musset as a desperate attempt to do "justice" to a man with whom he knew it impossible for him to sympathize. There is, however, nothing to hinder our supposing that he saw in De Musset's "gush" something for him impossible and that he wished to acknowledge it. Side by side with this are the shreds of Back Bay or Buffalo, the mid-week-prayer-meeting point of view.

His most egregious slip is in the essay on Baudelaire, the sentence quoted by Hueffer.[4] Notwithstanding this, he does effectively put his nippers on Baudelaire's weakness:—

"A good way to embrace Baudelaire at a glance is to say that he was, in his treatment of evil, exactly what Hawthorne was not—Hawthorne, who felt the thing at its source, deep in the human consciousness. Baudelaire's infinitely slighter volume of genius apart, he was a sort of Hawthorne reversed. It is the absence of this metaphysical quality in his treatment of his favorite subjects (Poe was his metaphysician, and his devotion sustained him through a translation of 'Eureka!') that exposes him to that class of accusations of which M. Edmond Scherer's accusation of feeding upon pourriture is an example; and, in fact, in his pages we never know with what we are dealing. We encounter an inextricable confusion of sad emotions and vile things, and we are at a loss to know whether the subject pretends to appeal to our conscience or—we were going to say—to our olfactories. 'Le Mal?' we exclaim; 'you do yourself too much honor. This is not Evil; it is not the wrong; it is simply the nasty!' Our impatience is of the same order as that which we should feel if a poet, pretending to pluck 'the flowers of good,' should come and present us, as specimens, a rhapsody on plum-cake and eau de Cologne."

Here as elsewhere his perception, apart from the readability of the work, is worthy of notice.

Hueffer says[5] that James belauds Balzac. I cannot see it. I can but perceive Henry James wiping the floor with the author of "EugÉnie Grandet," pointing out all his qualities, but almightily wiping the floor with him. He complains that Gautier is lacking in a concern about supernatural hocus-pocus and that Flaubert is lacking. If Balzac takes him to any great extent in, James with his inherited Swedenborgianism is perhaps thereby laid open to Balzac.

It was natural that James should write more about the bulky author of "La ComÉdie Humaine" than about the others; here was his richest quarry, here was there most to note and to emend and to apply so emended to processes of his own. From De Maupassant, De Goncourt or Baudelaire there was nothing for him to acquire.

His dam'd fuss about furniture is foreshadowed in Balzac, and all the paragraphs on Balzac's house-furnishing propensities are of interest in proportion to our interest in, or our boredom with, this part of Henry James's work.

What, indeed, could he have written of the De Goncourts save that they were a little dull but tremendously right in their aim? Indeed, but for these almost autobiographical details pointing to his growth out of Balzac, all James would seem but a corollary to one passage in a De Goncourt preface:—

"Le jour oÙ l'analyse cruelle que mon ami, M. Zola, et peut-Être moi-mÊme avons apportÉe dans la peinture du bas de la sociÉtÉ sera reprise par un Écrivain de talent, et employÉe À la reproduction des hommes et des femmes du monde, dans les milieux d'Éducation et de distinction—ce jour-lÀ seulement le classicisme et sa queue seront tuÉs....

"Le RÉalisme n'a pas en effet l'unique mission de dÉcrire ce qui est bas, ce qui est rÉpugnant....

"Nous avons commencÉ, nous, par la canaille, parce que la femme et l'homme du peuple, plus rapprochÉs de la nature et de la sauvagerie, sont des crÉatures simples et peu compliquÉes, tandis que le Parisien et la Parisienne de la sociÉtÉ, ces civilisÉs excessifs, dont l'originalitÉ tranchÉe est faite toute de nuances, toute de demi-teintes, toute de ces riens insaisissables, pareils aux riens coquets et neutres avec lesquels se faÇonne le caractÈre d'une toilette distinguÉe de femme, demandent des annÉes pour qu'on les perce, pour qu'on les sache, pour qu'on les attrape—et le romancier du plus grand gÉnie, croyez-le bien, ne les devinera jamais ces gens de salon, avec les racontars d'amis qui vont pour lui À la dÉcouverte dans le monde....

"Ce projet de roman qui devait se passer dans le grand monde, dans le monde le plus quintessenciÉ, et dont nous rassemblions lentement et minutieusement les ÉlÉments dÉlicats et fugaces, je l'abandonnais aprÈs la mort de mon frÈre, convaincu de l'impossibilitÉ de le rÉussir tout seul."

But this particular paragraph could have had little to do with the matter. "French Poets and Novelists" was published in '78 and Edmond De Goncourt signed the preface to "Les FrÈres Zemganno" in '79. The paragraphs quoted are interesting, however, as showing De Goncourt's state of mind in that year. He had probably been preaching in this vein long before setting the words on paper, before getting them printed.

If ever one man's career was foreshadowed in a few sentences of another, Henry James's is to be found in this paragraph.

It is very much as if he said: I will not be a megatherium botcher like Balzac; there is nothing to be said about these De Goncourts, but one must try to be rather more interesting than they are in, let us say, "Madame Gervaisais."[6]

Proceeding with the volume of criticism, we find that "Le Jeune H." simply didn't "get" Flaubert; that he was much alive to the solid parts of Turgenev. He shows himself very apt, as we said above, to judge the merits of a novelist on the ground that the people portrayed by the said novelist are or are not suited to reception into the household of Henry James senior; whether, in short, Emma Bovary or Frederic or M. Arnoux would have spoiled the so delicate atmosphere, have juggled the so fine susceptibilities of a refined 23rd Street family it the time of the Philadelphia "Centennial."

I find the book not so much a sign that Henry James was "disappointed," as Hueffer puts it, as that he was simply and horribly shocked by the literature of his continental forebears and contemporaries.

It is only when he gets to the ThÉÂtre FranÇais that he finds something which really suits him. Here there is order, tradition, perhaps a slight fustiness (but a quite pardonable fustiness, an arranged and suitable fustiness having its recompense in a sort of spiritual quiet); here, at any rate, was something decorous, something not to be found in Concord or in Albany. And it is easy to imagine the young James, not illuminated by De Goncourt's possible conversation or writing, not even following the hint given in his essay on Balzac and Balzacian furniture, but sitting before Madame Nathalie in "Le Village" and resolving to be the ThÉÂtre FranÇais of the novel.

A resolution which he may be said to have carried out to the great enrichment of letters.

---

II

Strictures on the work of this period are no great detraction. "French Poets and Novelists" gives us a point from which to measure Henry James's advance. Genius showed itself partly in the escape from some of his original limitations, partly in acquirements. His art at length became "second nature," became perhaps half unconscious; or in part wholly unconscious; in other parts perhaps too highly conscious. At any rate in sunnier circumstances he talked exactly as he wrote, the same elaborate paragraph beautifully attaining its climax; the same sudden incision when a brief statement could dispose of a matter.

Be it said for his style: he is seldom or never involved when a direct bald statement will accurately convey his own meaning, all of it. He is not usually, for all his wide leisure, verbose. He may be highly and bewilderingly figurative in his language (vide Mr. Hueffer's remarks on this question)

Style apart, I take it that the hatred of tyrannies was as great a motive as any we can ascribe to Galileo or Leonardo or to any other great figure, to any other mythic Prometheus; for this driving force we may well overlook personal foibles, the early Bostonese bias, the heritage from his father's concern in commenting Swedenborg, the later fusses about social caution and conservation of furniture. Hueffer rather boasts about Henry James's innocence of the classics. It is nothing to brag of, even if a man struggling against natural medievalism have entrenched himself in impressionist theory. If James had read his classics, the better Latins especially, he would not have so excessively cobwebbed, fussed, blathered, worried about minor mundanities. We may conspuer with all our vigor Henry James's concern with furniture, the Spoils of Poynton, connoisseurship, Mrs. Ward's tea-party atmosphere, the young Bostonian of the immature works. We may relegate these things mentally to the same realm as the author's pyjamas and collar buttons, to his intellectual instead of his physical valeting. There remains the capacious intelligence, the searching analysis of things that cannot be so relegated to the scrap-heap and to the wash-basket.

Let us say that English freedom legally and traditionally has its basis in property. Let us say, À la Balzac, that most modern existence is governed by, or at least interfered with by, the necessity to earn money; let us also say that a Frenchman is not an Englishman or a German or an American, and that despite the remark that the aristocracies of all people, the upper classes, are the same everywhere, racial differences are au fond differences; they are likewise major subjects.

Writing, as I am, for the reader of good-will, for the bewildered person who wants to know where to begin, I need not apologize for the following elliptical notes. James, in his prefaces, has written explanation to death (with sometimes a very pleasant necrography). Leaving the "French Poets and Novelists," I take the novels and stories as nearly as possible in their order of publication (as distinct from their order as rearranged and partially weeded out in the collected edition).

1875. (U.S.A.) "A Passionate Pilgrim and other Tales." "Eugene Pickering" is the best of this lot and most indicative of the future James. Contains also the title story and "Madame de Mauves." Other stories inferior.

1876. (U.S.A.) "Roderick Hudson," prentice work. First novel not up to the level of "Pickering."

1877. "The American"; essential James, part of the permanent work. "Watch and Ward," discarded by the author.

1878. "French Poets and Novelists," already discussed.

1878. "Daisy Miller." (The big hit and one of his best.) "An International Episode," "Four Meetings," good work.

1879. Short stories first printed in England with additions, but no important ones.

1880. "Confidence," not important.

1881. "Washington Square," one of his best, "putting America on the map," giving us a real past, a real background. "Pension Beaurepas" and "Bundle of Letters," especially the girls' letters, excellent, already mentioned.

1881. "The Portrait of a Lady," one of his best. Charming Venetian preface in the collected edition.

1884. "Tales of Three Cities," stories dropped from the collected edition, save "Lady Barbarina."

1884. "Lady Barbarina," a study in English blankness comparable to that exposed in the letters of the English young lady in "A Bundle of Letters." There is also New York of the period. "But if there was one thing Lady Barb disliked more than another it was describing Pasterns. She had always lived with people who knew of themselves what such a place would be, without demanding these pictorial effects, proper only, as she vaguely felt, to persons belonging to the classes whose trade was the arts of expression. Lady Barb of course had never gone into it; but she knew that in her own class the business was not to express but to enjoy, not to represent but to be represented."

"Mrs. Lemon's recognition of this river, I should say, was all it need have been; she held the Hudson existed for the purpose of supplying New Yorkers with poetical feelings, helping them to face comfortably occasions like the present, and in general, meet foreigners with confidence...."

"He believed, or tried to believe, the salon now possible in New York on condition of its being reserved entirely for adults; and in having taken a wife out of a country in which social traditions were rich and ancient he had done something toward qualifying his own house—so splendidly qualified in all strictly material respects.... to be the scene of such an effort. A charming woman accustomed only to the best on each side, as Lady Beauchemin said, what mightn't she achieve by being at home—always to adults only—in an easy early inspiring comprehensive way and on the evening of the seven, when worldly engagements were least numerous? He laid this philosophy before Lady Barb in pursuance of a theory that if she disliked New York on a short acquaintance she couldn't fail to like it on a long. Jackson believed in the New York mind—not so much indeed in its literary, artistic, philosophic or political achievements as in its general quickness and nascent adaptability. He clung to this belief, for it was an indispensable neat block in the structure he was attempting to rear. The New York mind would throw its glamour over Lady Barb if she would only give it a chance; for it was thoroughly bright, responsive and sympathetic. If she would only set up by the turn of her hand a blest social centre, a temple of interesting talk in which this charming organ might expand and where she might inhale its fragrance in the most convenient and luxurious way, without, as it was, getting up from her chair; if she would only just try this graceful good-natured experiment—which would make every one like her so much too—he was sure all the wrinkles in the gilded scroll of his fate would be smoothed out. But Lady Barb didn't rise at all to his conception and hadn't the least curiosity about the New York mind. She thought it would be extremely disagreeable to have a lot of people tumbling in on Sunday evening without being invited, and altogether her husband's sketch of the Anglo-American salon seemed to her to suggest crude familiarity, high vociferation—she had already made a remark to him about 'screeching women'—and random extravagant laughter. She didn't tell him —for this somehow it wasn't in her power to express and, strangely enough, he never completely guessed it—that she was singularly deficient in any natural, or indeed, acquired understanding of what a salon might be. She had never seen or dreamed of one—and for the most part was incapable of imagining a thing she hadn't seen. She had seen great dinners and balls and meets and runs and races; she had seen garden-parties and bunches of people, mainly women—who, however, didn't screech—at dull stuffy teas, and distinguished companies collected in splendid castles; but all this gave her no clew to a train of conversation, to any idea of a social agreement that the interest of talk, its continuity, its accumulations from season to season shouldn't be lost. Conversation, in Lady Barb's experience, had never been continuous; in such a case it would surely have been a bore. It had been occasional and fragmentary, a trifle jerky, with allusions that were never explained; it had a dread of detail—it seldom pursued anything very far or kept hold of it very long."

1885. "Stories Revived," adding to earlier tales "The Author of Beltraffio," which opens with excess of the treading-on-eggs manner, too much to be borne for twenty-four volumes. The pretense of extent of "people" interested in art and letters, sic: "It was the most complete presentation that had yet been made of the gospel of art; it was a kind of Æsthetic war cry. 'People' had endeavored to sail nearer "to truth," etc."

He implies too much of art smeared on limited multitudes. One wonders if the eighties did in any great aggregate gush up to this extent. Doesn't he try to spread the special case out too wide?

The thinking is magnificently done from this passage up to page sixteen or twenty, stated with great concision. Compare it with "Madame Gervaisais" and we find Henry James much more interesting when on the upper reaches. Compare his expressiveness, the expressiveness of his indirectness with that of constatation. The two methods are curiously mixed in the opening of "Beltraffio." Such sentences as (page 30) "He said the most interesting and inspiring things" are, however, pure waste, pure "leaving the thing undone," unconcrete, unimagined; just simply bad writing or bad novelisting. As for his special case he does say a deal about the author or express a deal by him, but one is bothered by the fact that Pater, Burton, Hardy, Meredith were not, in mere history, bundled into one; that Burton had been to the East and the others had not; that no English novelist of that era would have taken the least notice of anything going on in foreign countries, presumably European, as does the supreme author of "Beltraffio."

Doubtless he is in many ways the author Henry James would have liked to meet and more illustrative of certain English tones and limitations than any historical portrait might have been. Still Henry James does lay it on ... more, I think, than the story absolutely requires. In "Beltraffio" he certainly does present (not that he does not comment to advantage) the two damn'd women appended to the gentlemanly hero of the tale. The most violent post-Strindbergian school would perhaps have called them bitches tout bonnement, but this word did not belong to Henry James's vocabulary and besides it is of too great an indistinctness. Author, same "bloody" (in the English sense) author with his passion for "form" appears in "Lesson of Master," and most of H.J.'s stories of literary milieux. Perpetual Grandisonism or Grandisonizing of this author with the passion for form, all of 'em have it. Ma chÉ! There is, however, great intensity in these same "be-deared" and be-"poor-old"-ed pages. He has really got a main theme, a great theme, he chooses to do it in silver point rather than in the garish colors of,—well, of Cherbuliez, or the terms of a religious maniac with three-foot long carving knife.

Novel of the gilded pill, an Æsthetic or artistic message, dogma, no better than a moral or ethic one, novel a cumbrous camouflage substitute not for "that parlor game"[7] the polite essay, but for the impolite essay or conveyance of ideas; novel to do this should completely incarnate the abstraction.

Finish of "Beltraffio" not perhaps up to the rest of it. Not that one at all knows how else....

Gush on page 42[8] from both conversationalists. Still an adumbration of the search for the just word emerges on pages 43-44, real cut at barbarism and bigotry on the bottom of page 45 (of course not labeled by these monstrous and rhetorical brands, scorched on to their hides and rump sides). "Will it be a sin to make the most of that one too, so bad for the dear old novel?" Butler and James on the same side really chucking out the fake; Butler focused on Church of England; opposed to him the fakers booming the Bible "as literature" in a sort of last stand, a last ditch; seeing it pretty well had to go as history, cosmogony, etc., or the old tribal Daddy-slap-'em-with-slab of the Jews as anything like an ideal:—

"He told me more about his wife before we arrived at the gate of home, and if he be judged to have aired overmuch his grievance I'm afraid I must admit that he had some of the foibles as well as the gifts of the artistic temperament; adding, however, instantly that hitherto, to the best of my belief, he had rarely let this particular cat out of the bag. 'She thinks me immoral—that's the long and short of it,' he said, as we paused outside a moment and his hand rested on one of the bars of his gate; while his conscious, expressive, perceptive eyes—the eyes of a foreigner, I had begun to account them, much more than of the usual Englishman—viewing me now evidently as quite a familiar friend, took part in the declaration. 'It's very strange when one thinks it all over, and there's a grand comicality in it that I should like to bring out. She's a very nice woman, extraordinarily well-behaved, upright and clever and with a tremendous lot of good sense about a good many matters. Yet her conception of a novel—she has explained it to me once or twice, and she doesn't do it badly as exposition—is a thing so false that it makes me blush. It's a thing so hollow, so dishonest, so lying, in which life is so blinked and blinded, so dodged and disfigured, that it makes my ears burn. It's two different ways of looking at the whole affair,' he repeated, pushing open the gate. 'And they're irreconcilable!' he added with a sigh. We went forward to the house, but on the walk, half-way to the door, he stopped and said to me: 'If you're going into this kind of thing there's a fact you should know beforehand; it may save you some disappointment. There's a hatred of art, there's a hatred of literature—I mean of the genuine kinds. Oh, the shams—those they'll swallow by the bucket!' I looked up at the charming house, with its genial color and crookedness, and I answered with a smile that those evil passions might exist, but that I should never have expected to find them there. 'Ah, it doesn't matter, after all,' he a bit nervously laughed; which I was glad to hear, for I was reproaching myself with having worked him up."

Really literature in the XIXth and the beginning of the XXth centuries is where science was in the days of Galileo and the Inquisition. Henry James not blinking it, neither can we. "Poor dears" and "dear olds" always a little too plentiful.

1885. (continued) "Pandora," of the best. Let it pass as a sop to America's virginal charm; as counter-weight to "Daisy Miller," or to the lady of "The Portrait." Henry James alert to the German.

"The process of enquiry had already begun for him, in spite of his having as yet spoken to none of his fellow passengers; the case being that Vogelstein enquired not only with his tongue, but with his eyes—that is with his spectacles—with his ears, with his nose, with his palate, with all his senses and organs. He was a highly upright young man, whose only fault was that his sense of comedy, or of the humor of things, had never been specifically disengaged, from his several other senses. He vaguely felt that something should be done about this, and in a general manner proposed to do it, for he was on his way to explore a society abounding in comic aspects. This consciousness of a missing measure gave him a certain mistrust of what might be said of him; and if circumspection is the essence of diplomacy our young aspirant promised well. His mind contained several millions of facts, packed too closely together for the light breeze of the imagination to draw through the mass. He was impatient to report himself to his superior in Washington, and the loss of time in an English port could only incommode him, inasmuch as the study of English institutions was no part of his mission. On the other hand the day was charming; the blue sea, in Southampton Water, pricked all over with light, had no movement but that of its infinite shimmer. Moreover, he was by no means sure that he should be happy in the United States, where doubtless he should find himself soon enough disembarked. He knew that this was not an important question and that happiness was an unscientific term, such as a man of his education should be ashamed to use even in the silence of his thoughts. Lost none the less in the inconsiderate crowd and feeling himself neither in his own country nor in that to which he was in a manner accredited, he was reduced to his mere personality; so that during the hour, to save his importance, he cultivated such ground as lay in sight for a judgment of this delay to which the German steamer was subjected in English waters. Mightn't it be proved, facts, figures and documents—or at least watch—in hand, considerably greater than the occasion demanded?

"Count Vogelstein was still young enough in diplomacy to think it necessary to have opinions. He had a good many, indeed, which had been formed without difficulty; they had been received ready-made from a line of ancestors who knew what they liked. This was of course—and under pressure, being candid, he would have admitted it—an unscientific way of furnishing one's mind. Our young man was a stiff conservative, a Junker of Junkers; he thought modern democracy a temporary phase and expected to find many arguments against it in the great Republic. In regard to these things it was a pleasure to him to feel that, with his complete training, he had been taught thoroughly to appreciate the nature of evidence. The ship was heavily laden with German emigrants, whose mission in the United States differed considerably from Count Otto's. They hung over the bulwarks, densely grouped; they leaned forward on their elbows for hours, their shoulders kept on a level with their ears: the men in furred caps, smoking long-bowled pipes, the women with babies hidden in remarkably ugly shawls. Some were yellow Germans and some were black, and all looked greasy and matted with the sea-damp. They were destined to swell still further the huge current of the Western democracy; and Count Vogelstein doubtless said to himself that they wouldn't improve its quality. Their numbers, however, were striking, and I know not what he thought of the nature of this particular evidence."

For further style in vignette:

"He could see for himself that Mr. and Mrs. Day had not at all her grand air. They were fat plain serious people who sat side by side on the deck for hours and looked straight before them. Mrs. Day had a white face, large cheeks and small eyes; her forehead was surrounded with a multitude of little tight black curls; her lips moved as if she had always a lozenge in her mouth. She wore entwined about her head an article which Mrs. DangËrfield spoke of as a "nuby," a knitted pink scarf concealing her hair, encircling her neck and having among its convolutions a hole for her perfectly expressionless face. Her hands were folded on her stomach, and in her still, swathed figure her bead-like eyes, which occasionally changed their direction, alone represented life. Her husband had a stiff gray beard on his chin and a bare spacious upper lip, to which constant shaving had imparted a hard glaze. His eyebrows were thick and his nostrils wide, and when he was uncovered, in the saloon, it was visible that his grizzled hair was dense and perpendicular. He might have looked rather grim and truculent hadn't it been for the mild familiar accommodating gaze with which his large light-colored pupils—the leisurely eyes of a silent man—appeared to consider surrounding objects. He was evidently more friendly than fierce, but he was more diffident than friendly. He liked to have you in sight, but wouldn't have pretended to understand you much or to classify you, and would have been sorry it should put you under an obligation. He and his wife spoke sometimes, but seldom talked, and there was something vague and patient about them as if they had become victims of a wrought spell. The spell, however, was of no sinister cast; it was the fascination of prosperity, the confidence of security, which sometimes makes people arrogant, but which had had such a different effect on this simple satisfied pair, in whom further development of every kind appeared to have been happily arrested."

Pandora's approach to her parents:

"These little offices were usually performed deftly, rapidly, with the minimum of words, and when their daughter drew near them, Mr. and Mrs. Day closed their eyes after the fashion of a pair of household dogs who expect to be scratched."

The tale is another synthesis of some of the million reasons why Germany will never conquer the world, why the Hun is impossible, why "boche" is merely "bursch." The imbecility of a certain Wellsian journalist in treating this gem is again proof that it is written for the relatively-developed American, not for the island ÉcaillÈre. If Henry James, as Ford Madox Hueffer says, set out to civilize the United States, it is at least an easier job than raising British Suburbia to a bearable level. From that milieu at least we have nothing of value to learn; we shall not take our tonality from that niveau.

In describing "Pandora's" success as "purely personal," Henry James has hit on the secret of the Quattrocento. 1450 to 1550, the vital part of the Renaissance. Aristocracy decays when it ceases to be selective, when the basis of selection is not personal. It is a critical acuteness, not a snobbism, which last is selection on some other principle than that of a personal quality. It is servility to rule-of-thumb criteria, and a dullness of perception, a timidity in acceptance. The whole force of the Renaissance was in the personality of its selection.

There is no faking the amount of perceptive energy concentrated in Henry James's vignettes in such phrases as that on the parents like domestic dogs waiting to be scratched, or in the ten thousand phrases of this sort which abound in his writings. If we were back in the time of BruyÈre, we could easily make a whole book of "Characters" from Henry James's vignettes.[9] The vein holds from beginning to end of his work; from this writing of the eighties to "The Ivory Tower." As for example, Gussie Braddon:

"Rosanna waited facing her, noting her extraordinary perfection of neatness, of elegance, of arrangement, of which it couldn't be said whether they most handed over to you, as on some polished salver, the clear truth of her essential commonness or transposed it into an element that could please, that could even fascinate, as a supreme attestation of care. 'Take her as an advertisement of all the latest knowledges of how to "treat" every inch of the human surface and where to "get" every scrap of the personal envelope, so far as she is enveloped, and she does achieve an effect sublime in itself and thereby absolute in a wavering world.'"

We note no inconsiderable progress in the actual writing, in mÎstria, when we reach the ultimate volumes.

1886. "Bostonians." Other stories in this collection mostly rejected from collected edition.

"Princess Casamassima" inferior continuation of "Roderick Hudson." His original subject matter is beginning to go thin.

1888. "The Reverberator," process of fantasia beginning.

Fantasia of Americans vs. the "old aristocracy," "The American" with the sexes reversed. Possibly the theme shows as well in "Les Transatlantiques," the two methods, give one at least a certain pleasure of contrast.

1888. "Aspern Papers," inferior. "Louisa Pallant," a study in the maternal or abysmal relation, good James. "Modern Warning," rejected from collected edition.

1889. "A London Life." "The Patagonia."

"The Patagonia," not a masterpiece. Slow in opening, excellent in parts, but the sense of the finale intrudes all along. It seems true but there is no alternative ending. One doubts whether a story is really constructed with any mastery when the end, for the purpose of making it a story, is so unescapable. The effect of reality is produced, of course, by the reality of the people in the opening scene; there is no doubt about that part being "to the life."

"The Liar" is superb in its way, perhaps the best of the allegories, of the plots invented purely to be an exposition of impression. It is magnificent in its presentation of the people, both the old man and the Liar, who is masterly.

"Mrs. Temperly" is another such excellent delineation and shows James as an excellent hater, but G.S. Street expresses a concentration of annoyance with a greater polish and suavity in method; and neither explains, theorizes, nor comments.

James never has De Maupassant's reality. His (H.J.'s) people almost always convince, i.e., we believe implicitly that they exist. We also think that Henry James has made up some sort of story as an excuse for writing his impression of the people.

One sees the slight vacancy of the stories of this period, the short clear sentence, the dallying with jeu d'esprit, with epigram no better than, though not inferior to, the run of epigram in the nineties. It all explains James's need of opacity, his reaching out for a chiaroscuro to distinguish himself from his contemporaries and in which he could put the whole of his much more complex apperception.

Then comes, roughly, the period of cobwebs and of excessive cobwebs and of furniture, finally justified in "The Finer Grain," a book of tales with no mis-fire, and the style so vindicated in the triumphs of the various books of Memoirs and "The American Scene."

Fantasias: "Dominic Ferrand," "Nona Vincent" (tales obviously aimed at the "Yellow Book," but seem to have missed it, a detour in James's career). All artists who discover anything make such detours and must, in the course of things (as in the cobwebs), push certain experiments beyond the right curve of their art. This is not so much the doom as the function of all "revolutionary" or experimental art, and I think masterwork is usually the result of the return from such excess. One does not know, simply does not know, the true curve until one has pushed one's method beyond it. Until then it is merely a frontier, not a chosen route. It is an open question, and there is no dogmatic answer, whether an artist should write and rewrite the same story (À la Flaubert) or whether he should take a new canvas.

"The Papers," a fantasia, diverting; "The Birthplace," fairy-godmother element mentioned above, excellent. "Edmund Orme," inferior; "Yellow Book" tale, not accepted by that periodical.

1889-1893. Period of this entoilment in the "Yellow Book," short sentences, the epigrammatic. He reacts from this into the allegorical. In general the work of this period is not up to the mark. "The Chaperon," "The Real Thing," fantasias of "wit." By fantasias I mean sketches in which the people are "real" or convince one of their verity, but where the story is utterly unconvincing, is not intended to convince, is merely a sort of exaggeration of the fitting situation or the situation which ought to result in order to display some type at its apogee. "The Real Thing" rather better than other stories in this volume.

Thus the lady and gentleman model in "The Real Thing." London society is finely ladled in "The Chaperon," which is almost as a story, romanticism.

"Greville Fane" is a scandalous photograph from the life about which the great blagueur scandalously lies in his preface (collected edition). I have been too diverted comparing it with an original to give a sane view of its art.

1890. "The Tragic Muse," uneven, full of good things but showing Henry James in the didactic role a little too openly. He preaches, he also displays fine perception of the parochialism of the British political career. It is a readable novel with tracts interpolated. (Excellent and commendable tracts arguing certainly for the right thing, enjoyable, etc.) Excellent text-book for young men with ambitions, etc.

1892. "Lesson of the Master" (cobweb). "The Pupil," a masterpiece, one of his best and keenest studies. "Brooksmith" of the best.

1893. "The Private Life." Title story, waste verbiage at the start, ridiculous to put all this camouflage over something au fond merely an idea. Not life, not people, allegory, dated to "Yellow Book" era. Won't hold against "Candide." H.J.'s tilting against the vacuity of the public figure is, naturally, pleasing, i.e., it is pleasing that he should tilt, but the amusement partakes of the nature of seeing cocoanuts hurled at an aunt sally.

There are other stories, good enough to be carried by H.J.'s best work, not detrimental, but not enough to have "made him": "Europe" (Hawthorny), "Paste," "The Middle Years," "Broken Wings," etc. Part of the great man's work can perhaps only be criticized as "etc."

1895. "Terminations, Coxon Fund," perhaps best of this lot, a disquisition, but entertaining, perhaps the germ of Galsworthy to be found in it (to no glory of either author) as perhaps a residuum of Dickens in Maisie's Mrs. Wix. Verbalism, but delightful verbalism in Coxon affair, sic:

"Already, at hungry twenty-six, Gravener looked as blank and parliamentary as if he were fifty and popular,"

or

"a deeply wronged, justly resentful, quite irreproachable and insufferable person"

or (for the whole type)

"put such ignorance into her cleverness?"

Miss Anvoy's echo concerning "a crystal" is excellently introduced, but is possibly in the nature of a sleight of hand trick (contemporary with "Lady Windemere's Fan"). Does H.J.'s "politics" remind one of Dizzy's scribbling, just a little?" Confidence, under the new Ministry, was understood to be reviving," etc.

Perhaps one covers the ground by saying that the James of this period is "light literature," entertaining if one have nothing better to do. Neither "Terminations" nor (1896) "Embarrassments" would have founded a reputation.

1896-97. Improvement through "Other House" and "Spoils of Poynton." I leave the appreciation of these, to me, detestable works to Mr. Hueffer. They seem to me full of a good deal of needless fuss, though I do not mean to deny any art that may be in them.

1897. The emergence in "What Maisie Knew." Problem of the adolescent female. Carried on in:

1899. "The Awkward Age," fairy godmother and spotless lamb and all the rest of it. Only real thing the impression of people, not observation or real knowledge. Action only to give reader the tone, symbolizing the tone of the people. Opening tour de force, a study in punks, a cheese soufflÉ of the leprous crust of society done to a turn and a niceness save where he puts on the dulcissimo, vox humana, stop. James was the dispassionate observer. He started with the moral obsession; before he had worked clear of it he was entoiled in the obsession of social tone. He has pages of clear depiction, even of satire, but the sentimentalist is always lurking just round the corner. This softens his edges. He has not the clear hardness, the cold satiric justness that G.S. Street has displayed in treating situations, certain struggles between certain idiocies and certain vulgarities. This book is a spÉcialitÉ of local interest. It is an Étude in ephemera. If it contained any revelation in 1899, it no longer contains it. His characters are reduced to the status of voyeurs, elaborate analysis of the much too special cases, a bundle of swine and asses who cannot mind their own business, who do not know enough to mind their own business. James's lamentable lack of the classics is perhaps responsible for his absorption in bagatelles.... He has no real series of backgrounds of moeurs du passÉ, only the "sweet dim faded lavender" tune and in opposition to modernity, plush nickel-plated, to the disparagement, naturally, of the latter.

Kipling's "Bigod, now-I-know-all-about-this manner," is an annoyance, but one wonders if parts of Kipling by the sheer force of content, of tale to tell, will not outlast most of James's cobwebs. There is no substitute for narrative-sense, however many different and entrancing charms may be spread before us.

"The Awkward Age" might have been done, from one point of view, as satire, in one-fourth the space. On the other hand, James does give us the subtly graded atmospheres of his different houses most excellently. And indeed, this may be regarded as his subject.

If one were advocate instead of critic, one would definitely claim that these atmospheres, nuances, impressions of personal tone and quality are his subject; that in these he gets certain things that almost no one else had done before him. These timbres and tonalities are his stronghold, he is ignorant of nearly everything else. It is all very well to say that modern life is largely made up of velleities, atmospheres, timbres, nuances, etc., but if people really spent as much time fussing, to the extent of the Jamesian fuss about such normal trifling, age-old affairs, as slight inclinations to adultery, slight disinclinations to marry, to refrain from marrying, etc., etc., life would scarcely be worth the bother of keeping on with it. It is also contendable that one must depict such mush in order to abolish it.[10]

The main feeling in "The Awkward Age" is satiric. The dashes of sentiment do not help the work as literature. The acute observer is often referred to:

Page 131. "The ingenious observer just now suggested might even have detected...."

Page 133. "And it might have been apparent still to our sharp spectator...."

Page 310. "But the acute observer we are constantly taking for granted would perhaps have detected...."

Page 323. "A supposititious spectator would certainly have imagined...." (This also occurs in "Ivory Tower." Page 196.)

This scrutinous person wastes a great deal of time in pretending to conceal his contempt for Mrs. Brook, Vanderbank, the other punks, and lays it on so thick when presenting his old sentimentalist Longdon, who at the one critical moment behaves with a stupidity, with a lack of delicacy, since we are dealing with these refinements. Of course neither this stupidity of his action nor the tone of the other characters has anything to do with the question of mÆstria, if they were dispassionately or impartially rendered. The book is weak because all through it James is so manifestly carrying on a long tenzone so fiercely and loudly, a long argument for the old lavender. There is also the constant implication that Vanderbank ought to want Nanda, though why the devil he should be supposed to be even mildly under this obligation, is not made clear. A basis in the classics, castor oil, even Stevenson's "Virginibus Puerisque" might have helped matters. One's complaint is not that people of this sort don't exist, that they aren't like everything else a subject for literature, but that James doesn't anywhere in the book get down to bed-rock. It is too much as if he were depicting stage scenery not as stage scenery, but as nature.

All this critique is very possibly an exaggeration. Take it at half its strength; I do not intend to defend it.

Epigrammatic manner in opening, compare Kipling; compare De Maupassant, superb ideas, verity, fantasia, fantasia group, reality, charming stories, poppycock. "Yellow Book" touches in "The Real Thing," general statements about their souls, near to bad writing, perfectly lucid.

"Nona Vincent," he writes like an adolescent, might be a person of eighteen doing first story.

Page 201. "Public interest in spiritual life of the army." ("The Real Thing.")

Page 201. German Invasion.

Loathsome prigs, stiff conventions, editor of cheap magazines ladled in Sir Wots-his-name.

1893. In the interim he had brought out "In the Cage," excellent opening sentence, matter too much talked around and around, and "The Two Magics." This last a Freudian affair which seems to me to have attracted undue interest, i.e., interest out of proportion to the importance as literature and as part of Henry James's own work, because of this subject matter. The obscenity of "The Turn of the Screw" has given it undue prominence. People now "drawn" to obscene as were people of Milton's period by an equally disgusting bigotry; one unconscious on author's part; the other, a surgical treatment of a disease. Thus much for progress on part of authors if public has not progressed. The point of my remarks is that an extraneous criterion comes in. One must keep to the question of literature, not of irrelevancies. Galdos' "Lo Prohibido" does Freud long before the sex crank got to it. Kipling really does the psychic, ghosts, etc., to say nothing of his having the "sense of story."

1900. "The Soft Side," collection containing: "The Abasement of the Northmores," good; again the motif of the vacuity of the public man, the "figure"; he has tried it again in "The Private Life," which, however, falls into the allegorical. A rotten fall it is too, and Henry James at his worst in it, i.e., the allegorical. "Fordham's Castle" appears in the collected edition only—it may belong to this period but is probably earlier, comedietta, excellently, perhaps flawlessly done. Here, as so often, the circumstances are mostly a description of the character of the personal tone of the "sitters"; for his people are so much more, or so much more often, "sitters" than actors. Protagonists it may be. When they act, they are apt to stage-act, which reduces their action again to being a mere attempt at description. ("The Liar," for example.) Compare Maupassant's "Toine" for treatment of case similar to "Fordham Castle."

1902-05. "The Sacred Fount," "Wings of a Dove," "Golden Bowl" period.

"Dove" and "Bowl" certainly not models for other writers, a caviare not part of the canon (metaphors be hanged for the moment).

Henry James is certainly not a model for narrative novelists, for young writers of fiction; perhaps not even a subject of study till they have attained some sublimity of the critical sense or are at least ready to be constantly alert, constantly on guard.

I cannot see that he will harm a critic or a describer of places, a recorder of impressions, whether they be people, places, music.

1903. "Better Sort," mildish.

1903. "The Ambassadors," rather clearer than the other work. Etude of Paris vs. Woollett. Exhortation to the idle, well-to-do, to leave home.

1907. "The American Scene," triumph of the author's long practice. A creation of America. A book no "serious American" will neglect. How many Americans make any attempt toward a realization of that country is of course beyond our power to compute. The desire to see the national face in a mirror may be in itself an exotic. I know of no such grave record, of no such attempt at faithful portrayal, as "The American Scene." Thus America is to the careful observer; this volume and the American scenes in the fiction and memoirs, in "The Europeans," "The Patagonia," "Washington Square," etc., bulk large in the very small amount of writing which can be counted as history of moeurs contemporaines, of national habit of our time and of the two or three generations preceding us. Newport, the standardized face, the Capitol, Independence Hall, the absence of penetralia, innocence, essential vagueness, etc., language "only definable as not in intention Yiddish," the tabernacle of Grant's ashes, the public collapse of the individual, the St. Gaudens statue. There is nothing to be gained by making excerpts; the volume is large, but one should in time drift through it. I mean any American with pretenses to an intellectual life should drift through it. It is not enough to have perused "The Constitution" and to have "heerd tell" of the national founders.

1910. "The Finer Grain," collection of short stories without a slip. "The Velvet Glove," "Mona Montravers," "A Round of Visits" (the old New York versus the new), "Crapey Cornelia," "The Bench of Desolation."

It is by beginning on this collection, or perhaps taking it after such stories as "The Pupil" and "Brooksmith," that the general literate reader will best come to James, must in brief be convinced of him and can tell whether or not the "marginal" James is for him. Whether or no the involutions of the "Golden Bowl" will titillate his arcane sensibilities. If the reader does not "get" "The Finer Grain" there is no sense in his trying the more elaborate "Wings of a Dove," "Sacred Fount," "Golden Bowl." If, on the contrary, he does feel the peculiar, unclassic attraction of the author he may or may not enjoy the uncanonical books.

1911. "The Outcry," a relapse. Connoisseurship fad again, inferior work.

1913. "A Small Boy and Others," the beginning of the memoirs. Beginning of this volume disgusting. First three pages enough to put one off Henry James once and for all, damn badly written, atrocious vocabulary. Page 33, a few lines of good writing. Reader might start about here, any reader, that is, to whom New York of that period is of interest. New York of the fifties is significant, in so far as it is typical of what a hundred smaller American cities have been since. The tone of the work shows in excerpts:

"The special shade of its identity was thus that it was not conscious—really not conscious of anything in the world; or was conscious of so few possibilities at least, and these so immediate and so a matter of course, that it came almost to the same thing. That was the testimony that the slight subjects in question strike me as having borne to their surrounding medium—the fact that their unconsciousnes could be so preserved...."

Or later, when dealing with a pre-Y.-M.-C.-A. America.

"Infinitely queer and quaint, almost incongruously droll, the sense somehow begotten in ourselves, as very young persons, of our being surrounded by a slightly remote, yet dimly rich, outer and quite kindred circle of the tipsy. I remember how, once, as a very small boy, after meeting in the hall a most amiable and irreproachable gentleman, all but closely consanguineous, who had come to call on my mother, I anticipated his further entrance by slipping in to report to that parent that I thought he must be tipsy. And I was to recall perfectly afterwards the impression I so made on her—in which the general proposition that the gentlemen of a certain group or connection might on occasion be best described by the term I had used, sought to destroy the particular presumption that our visitor wouldn't, by his ordinary measure, show himself for one of these. He didn't to all appearance, for I was afterwards disappointed at the lapse of lurid evidence: that memory remained with me, as well as a considerable subsequent wonder at my having leaped to so baseless a view...."

"The grim little generalization remained, none the less, and I may speak of it—since I speak of everything—as still standing: the striking evidence that scarce aught but disaster could, in that so unformed and unseasoned society, overtake young men who were in the least exposed. Not to have been immediately launched in business of a rigorous sort was to be exposed—in the absence, I mean, of some fairly abnormal predisposition to virtue; since it was a world so simply constituted that whatever wasn't business, or exactly an office or a "store," places in which people sat close and made money, was just simply pleasure, sought, and sought only, in places in which people got tipsy. There was clearly no mean, least of all the golden one, for it was just the ready, even when the moderate, possession of gold that determined, that hurried on disaster. There were whole sets and groups, there were 'sympathetic,' though too susceptible, races, that seemed scarce to recognize or to find possible any practical application of moneyed, that is, of transmitted ease, however limited, but to go more or less rapidly to the bad with it—which meant even then going as often as possible to Paris...."

"The field was strictly covered, to my young eyes, I make out, by three classes, the busy, the tipsy, and Daniel Webster...."

"It has carried me far from my rather evident proposition that if we saw the 'natural' so happily embodied about us—and in female maturity, or comparative maturity, scarce less than in female adolescence—this was because the artificial, or in other words the complicated, was so little there to threaten it...."

On page 72 he quotes his father on "flagrant morality." In Chapter X we have a remarkable portrayal of a character by almost nothing save vacuums, "timorous philistine in a world of dangers." Our author notes the "finer civility" but does not see that it is a thing of no period. It is the property of a few individuals, personally transmitted. Henry James had a mania for setting these things in an era or a "faubourg," despite the continued testimony that the worst manners have constantly impinged upon the most brilliant societies; that decent detail of conduct is a personal talent.

The production of "Il Corteggiano" proves perhaps nothing more than the degree in which Castiglione's contemporaries "needed to be told." On page 236 ("Small Boy and Others") the phrase "presence without type." On page 286, the people "who cultivated for years the highest instructional, social and moral possibilities of Geneva." Page 283, "discussion of a work of art mainly hung in those days on that issue of the producible name." Page 304, "For even in those days some Americans were rich and several sophisticated." Page 313, The real give away of W.J. Page 341, Scarification of Ste-Beuve. Page 179, Crystal Palace. Page 214, Social relativity.

One is impatient for Henry James to do people.

A LITTLE TOUR IN FRANCE. The disadvantage of giving impressions of real instead of imaginary places is that they conflict with other people's impressions. I do not see AngoulÊme via Balzac, nor do I feel Henry James's contacts with the places where our tracks have crossed very remarkable. I dare say it is a good enough guide for people more meagrely furnished with associations or perceptions. Allow me my piÉton's shrug for the man who has gone only by train.

Henry James is not very deep in ancient associations. The American's enjoyment of England in "The Passionate Pilgrim" is more searching than anything continental. Windy generality in "Tour in France," and perhaps indication of how little Henry James's tentacles penetrated into any era before 1600, or perhaps before 1780.

Vignette bottom of page 337-8 ("Passionate Pilgrim") "full of glimpses and responses, of deserts and desolations." "His perceptions would be fine and his opinions pathetic." Commiseration of Searle vs. detachment, in "Four Meetings."

Of the posthumous work, "The Middle Years" is perhaps the most charming. "The Ivory Tower," full of accumulated perceptions, swift illuminating phrases, perhaps part of a masterpiece. "The Sense of the Past," less important. I leave my comment of "The Middle Years" as I wrote it, but have recast the analysis of notes to "The Ivory Tower."

Flaubert is in six volumes, four or five of which every literate man must at one time or another assault. James is strewn over about forty—part of which must go into desuetude, have perhaps done so already.

I have not in these notes attempted the Paterine art of appreciation, e.g., as in taking the perhaps sole readable paragraph of Pico Mirandola and writing an empurpled descant.

The problem—discussion of which is about as "artistic" as a street map—is: can we conceive a five or six volume edition of James so selected as to hold its own internationally? My contention is for this possibility.

My notes are no more than a tentative suggestion, to wit: that some such compact edition might be, to advantage, tried on the less patient public. I have been, alas, no more fortunate than our subject in keeping out irrelevant, non-esthetic, non-literary, non-technical vistas and strictures.

---

"THE MIDDLE YEARS"

The Middle Years is a tale of the great adventure; for, putting aside a few simple adventures, sentimental, phallic, Nimrodic, the remaining great adventure is precisely the approach to the Metropolis; for the provincial of our race the specific approach to London, and no subject surely could more heighten the pitch of writing than that the treated approach should be that of the greatest writer of our time and own particular language. We may, I think, set aside Thomas Hardy as of an age not our own; of perhaps Walter Scott's or of L'AbbÉ PrÉvost's, but remote from us and things familiarly under our hand; and we skip over the next few crops of writers as lacking in any comparative interest, interest in a writer being primarily in his degree of sensitization; and on this count we may throw out the whole Wells-Bennett period, for what interest can we take in instruments which must of nature miss two-thirds of the vibrations in any conceivable situation? In James the maximum sensibility compatible with efficient writing was present. Indeed, in reading these pages one can but despair over the inadequacy of one's own literary sensitization, one's so utterly inferior state of awareness; even allowing for what the author himself allows: his not really, perhaps, having felt at twenty-six, all that at seventy he more or less read into the memory of his feeling. The point is that with the exception of exceptional moments in Hueffer, we find no trace of such degree of awareness in the next lot of writers, or until the first novels of Lewis and Joyce, whose awareness is, without saying, of a nature greatly different in kind.

It is not the book for any reader to tackle who has not read a good deal of James, or who has not, in default of that reading, been endowed with a natural Jamesian sensibility (a case almost negligible by any likelihood); neither is it a book of memoirs, I mean one does not turn to it seeking information about Victorian worthies; any more than one did, when the old man himself was talking, want to be told anything; there are encyclopedias in sufficiency, and statistics, and human mines of information, boring sufficiency; one asked and isks only that the slow voice should continue—evaluating, or perhaps only tying up the strands of a sentence: "And how my old friend.... Howells...." etc.

The effects of H.J.'s first breakfasts in Liverpool, invited upstairs at Half Moon Street, are of infinitely more value than any anecdotes of the Laureate (even though H.J.'s inability not to see all through the Laureate is compensated by a quip melting one's personal objection to anything Tennyson touched, by making him merely an old gentleman whatsoever with a gleam of fun in his make-up).

All comers to the contrary, and the proportionate sale of his works, and statistics whatsoever to the contrary, only an American who has come abroad will ever draw all the succulence from Henry James's writings; the denizen of Manchester or Wellington may know what it feels like to reach London, the Londoner born will not be able quite to reconstruct even this part of the book; and if for intimacy H.J. might have stayed at the same hotel on the same day as one's grandfather; and if the same American names had part in one's own inceptions in London, one's own so wholly different and less padded inceptions; one has perhaps a purely personal, selfish, unliterary sense of intimacy: with, in my own case, the vast unbridgeable difference of settling-in and escape.

The essence of James is that he is always "settling-in," it is the ground-tone of his genius.

Apart from the state of James's sensibility on arrival nothing else matters, the "mildness of the critical air," the fatuity of George Eliot's husband, the illustrational and accomplished lady, even the faculty for a portrait in a paragraph, not to be matched by contemporary effects in half-metric, are indeed all subordinate to one's curiosity as to what Henry James knew, and what he did not know on landing. The portrait of the author on the cover showing him bearded, and looking rather like a cross between a bishop and a Cape Cod longshoreman, is an incident gratuitous, interesting, but in no way connected with the young man of the text.

The England of a still rather whiskered age, never looking inward, in short, the Victorian, is exquisitely embalmed, and "mounted," as is, I think, the term for microscopy. The book is just the right length as a volume, but one mourns there not being twenty more, for here is the unfinished work ... not in "The Sense of the Past," for there the pen was weary, as it had been in "The Outcry," and the talent that was never most worth its own while when gone off on connoisseurship, was, conceivably, finished; but here in his depiction of his earlier self the verve returned in full vigor.

---

THE NOTES TO "THE IVORY TOWER"

[11]

The great artists among men of letters have occasionally and by tradition burst into an Ars Poetica or an Arte nuevo de hacer Comedias, and it should come as no surprise that Henry James has left us some sort of treatise on novel-writing—no surprise, that is, to the discriminating reader who is not, for the most part, a writer of English novels. Various reviewers have hinted obscurely that some such treatise is either adumbrated or concealed in the Notes for "The Ivory Tower" and for "The Sense of the Past"; they have said, indeed, that novelists will "profit greatly," etc., but no one has set forth the gist or the generalities which are to be found in these notes.

Divested of its fine verbiage, of its clichÉs, of its provincialisms of American phrase, and of the special details relating to the particular book in his mind, the formula for building a novel (any novel, not merely any "psychological" novel); the things to have clearly in mind before starting to write it are enumerated in "The Ivory Tower" notes somewhat as follows:—

1. Choice of names for characters; names that will "fit" their owners, and that will not "joggle" or be cacophonie when in juxtaposition on the page.

2. Exposition of one group of characters and of the "situation." (In "The Ivory Tower" this was to be done in three subdivisions. "Book I" was to give the "Immediate Facts.")

3. One character at least is hitched to his "characteristic." We are to have one character's impression on another.

4. (Book III.) Various reactions and interactions of characters.

5. The character, i.e., the main character, is "faced with the situation."

6. For "The Ivory Tower" and probably for any novel, there is now need to show clearly and definitely the "antecedents," i.e., anything that had happened before the story started. And we find Henry James making up his mind which characters have interacted before this story opens, and which things are to be due to fresh impacts of one character on another.

7. Particular consideration of the special case in hand. The working-free from incongruities inherent in the first vague preconceptions of the plot. Thus:

(a) The hinge of the thing is not to be the effect of A. on B. or of B. on A.; nor of A. on C. or of C. on B.; but is to be due to an effect all round, of A. and B. and C. working on each other.

(b) James's care not to repeat figures from earlier novels. Not a categoric prohibition, but a caution not to sail too near the wind in this matter.

(c) A care not to get too many "personally remarkable" people, and not enough stupid ones into the story.

(d) Care for the relative "weight" as well as the varied "tone" of the characters.

(We observe, in all this, the peculiarly American passion for "art"; for having a system in things, cf. Whistler.)

(e) Consideration how far one character "faces" the problem of another character's "character."

(This and section "d" continue the preoccupation with "moral values" shown in James's early criticism in "French Poets and Novelists.")

8. Definite "joints"; or relations of one character to another finally fitted and settled.

This brings us again to point 5. The character, i.e., the main character definitely "faced" with the situation.

9. The consequences.

10. (a) Further consideration of the state of character C. before contact with B., etc.

(b) The effect of further characters on the mind, and thence on the action of A.

(c) Considerations of the effect of a fourth main character; of introducing a subsidiary character, and its effect, i.e., that of having an extra character for a particular function.

11. The great "coup" foreshadowed.

(In this case the mild Othello, more and more drifting consciously into the grip of the mild Iago—I use the terms "Othello" and "Iago" merely to avoid, if not "hero," at least "villain"; the sensitive temperament allowing the rapacious temperament to become effective.)

(a) The main character in perplexity as to how far he shall combat the drift of things.

(b) The opposed character's perception of this.

(These sub-sections are, of course, sub-sections for a psychological novel; one would have different but equivalent "joints" in a novel of action.)

(c) Effect of all this on third character. (In this case female, attracted to "man-of-action" quality).

(d) A.'s general perception of these things and his weighing of values, a phase solely for the psychological novel.

(e) Weighing of how much A.'s perception of the relations between B. and C. is to be dÉnouement, and how much, more or less, known.

12. Main character's "solution" or vision of what course he will take.

13. The fourth character's "break into" things, or into a perception of things,

(a) Actions of an auxiliary character, of what would have been low life in old Spanish or Elizabethan drama. This character affects the main action (as sometimes a "gracioso" [servant, buffoon, Sancho Panza] affects the main action in a play, for example, of Lope de Vega's).

(b) Caution not to let author's interest in fascinating auxiliary character run away with his whole plan and design.

(This kind of restraint is precisely what leaves a reader "wanting more"; which gives a novel the "feel" of being full of life; convinces the reader of an abundant energy, an abundant sense of life in an author.)

14. Effects of course of the action on fourth main character and on the others. The scale being kept by the relation here not being between main character and one antagonist, but with a group of three people, relations "different" though their "point" is the same; cf. a main character vs. a Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern, or "attendant lords." James always has half an eye on play construction; the scene.

(a) The second auxiliary character brought out more definitely. (This is accidental. It might happen at any suitable point in a story wherever needed.)

(b) Act of this auxiliary person reaches through to main action.

15. We see the author determining just how bad a case he is going to make his villain.

(a) Further determination of his hero. (In this case an absolute non-producer, non-accumulator.)

(b) Care not to get an unmixed "bad" in his "villain," but to keep a right balance, a dependency, in this case, on the main character's weakness or easiness.

(c) Decision how the main "coup" or transfer shall slide through.

16. Effect upon C. Effect upon main characters' relations to D., E. and F.

At this point, in the consideration of eight of the ten "books" of his novel, we see the author most intent on his composition or architecture, most anxious to get all the sections fitted in with the greatest economy, a sort of crux of his excitement and anxiety, a fullness of his perception that the thing must be so tightly packed that no sentence can afford to be out of place.

17. Climax. The Deus or, in this case, Dea, ex machina. Devices for prolonging climax. The fourth main character having been, as it were, held back for a sort of weight or balance here, and as a "resolution" of the tangles.

Finis.

18. Author's final considerations of time scheme, i.e., fitting the action into time not too great for unity, and great enough to allow for needed complexity. Slighter consideration of place scheme; where final scenes shall be laid, etc.

Here in a few paragraphs are the bare bones of the plan described in eighty of Henry James's pages. The detailed thoroughness of this plan, the complicated consciousness displayed in it, gives us the measure of this author's superiority, as conscious artist, over the "normal" British novelist, i.e., over the sort of person who tells you that when he did his first book he "just sat down and wrote the first paragraph," and then found he "couldn't stop." This he tells you in a manner clearly implying that, from that humble beginning to the shining hour of the present, he has given the matter no further thought, and that his succeeding works were all knocked off with equal simplicity.

I give this outline with such fullness because it is a landmark in the history of the novel, as written in English. It is inconceivable that Fielding or Richardson should have left, or that Thomas Hardy should leave, such testimony to a comprehension of the novel as a "form." The Notes are, on the other hand, quite distinct from the voluminous, prefaces which so many French poets write before they have done anything else. James, we note, wrote no prefaces until there were twenty-four volumes of his novels and stories waiting to be collected and republished. The Notes are simply the accumulation of his craftsman's knowledge, they are, in all their length, the summary of the things he would have, as a matter of habit, in his mind before embarking on composition.

I take it rather as a sign of editorial woodenheadedness that these Notes are printed at the end of "The Ivory Tower"; if one have sense enough to suspect that the typical mentality of the elderly heavy reviewer has been shown, one will for oneself reverse the order; read the notes with interest and turn to the text already with the excitement of the sport or with the zest to see if, with this chance of creating the masterpiece so outlined, the distinguished author is going to make good. If on the other hand one reads the unfinished text, there is no escaping the boredom of re-reading in skeleton, with tentative and confusing names, the bare statement of what has been, in the text, more fully set before us.

The text is attestation of the rich, banked-up perception of the author. I dare say the snap and rattle of the fun, or much of it, will be only half perceptible to those who do not know both banks of the Atlantic; but enough remains to show the author at his best; despite the fact that occasionally he puts in the mouths of his characters sentences or phrases that no one but he himself could have used. I cannot attribute this to the unfinished state of the manuscript. These oversights are few, but they are the kind of slip which occurs in his earlier work. We note also that his novel is a descriptive novel, not a novel that simply depicts people speaking and moving. There is a constant dissertation going on, and in it is our major enjoyment. The Notes to "The Sense of the Past" are not so fine a specimen of method, as they are the plan not of a whole book, but only of the latter section. The editor is quite right to print them at the end of the volume.

Of the actual writing in the three posthumous books, far the most charming is to be found in "The Middle Years." Here again one is not much concerned with Mr. James's mildly ironic reminiscences of Tennyson and the Victorians, but rather with James's own temperament, and with his recording of inn-rooms, breakfasts, butlers, etc., very much as he had done in his fiction. There is no need for its being "memoirs" at all; call the protagonist Mr. Ponsonby or Mr. Hampton, obliterate the known names of celebrities and half celebrities, and the whole thing becomes a James novel, and, so far as it goes, a mate to the best of them.

Retaining the name of the author, any faithful reader of James, or at any rate the attentive student, finds a good deal of amusement in deciphering the young James, his temperament as mellowed by recollection and here recorded forty years later, and then in contrasting it with the young James as revealed or even "betrayed" in his own early criticisms, "French Poets and Novelists," a much cruder and more savagely puritanical and plainly New England product with, however, certain permanent traits of his character already in evidence, and with a critical faculty keen enough to hit on certain weaknesses in the authors analyzed, often with profundity, and with often a "rightness" in his mistakes. I mean that apparent errors are at times only an excess of zeal and overshooting of his mark, which was to make for an improvement, by him, of certain defects.

[1] This holds, despite anything that may be said of his fuss about social order, social tone. I naturally do not drag in political connotations, from which H.J. was, we believe, wholly exempt. What he fights is "influence", the impinging of family pressure, the impinging of one personality on another; all of them in highest degree damn'd, loathsome and detestable. Respect for the peripheries of the individual may be, however, a discovery of our generation; I doubt it, but it seems to have been at low ebb in some districts (not rural) for some time.