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.