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
* * * * * * * *