_Il n'y a de livres que ceux où un écrivain s'est raconté
lui-même en racontant les mœurs de ses contemporains--leurs
rêves, leurs vanités, leurs amours, et leurs folies_.--
Remy de Gourmont.
De Gourmont uses this sentence in writing of the incontestable
superiority of "Madame Bovary," "L'Éducation Sentimentale" and "Bouvard
et Pécuchet" to "Salammbô" and "La Tentation de St. Antoine." A casual
thought convinces one that it is true for all prose. Is it true also for
poetry? One may give latitude to the interpretation of _rêves_; the
gross public would have the poet write little else, but De Gourmont
keeps a proportion. The vision should have its place in due setting if
we are to believe its reality.
The few poems which Mr. Eliot has given us maintain this proportion, as
they maintain other proportions of art. After much contemporary work
that is merely factitious, much that is good in intention but impotently
unfinished and incomplete; much whose flaws are due to sheer ignorance
which a year's study or thought might have remedied, it is a comfort to
come upon complete art, naïve despite its intellectual subtlety, lacking
all pretense.
It is quite safe to compare Mr. Eliot's work with anything written in
French, English or American since the death of Jules Laforgue. The
reader will find nothing better, and he will be extremely fortunate if
he finds much half as good.
The necessity, or at least the advisability of comparing English or
American work with French work is not readily granted by the usual
English or American writer. If you suggest it, the Englishman answers
that he has not thought about it--he does not see why he should bother
himself about what goes on south of the channel; the American replies by
stating that you are "no longer American." This is the bitterest jibe in
his vocabulary. The net result is that it is extremely difficult to read
one's contemporaries. After a time one tires of "promise."
I should like the reader to note how complete is Mr. Eliot's depiction
of our contemporary condition. He has not confined himself to genre nor
to society portraiture. His
lonely men in shirt-sleeves leaning out of windows
are as real as his ladies who
come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.