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.