Impressionistic writing requires the union of several qualities; and to
possess all these qualities except one, no matter which, is to fail in
impressionistic writing. The first thing is to see, and with an eye
which sees all, and as if one's only business were to see; and then to
write, from a selecting memory, and as if one's only business were to
write. It is the interesting heresy of a particular kind of art to seek
truth before beauty; but in an impressionistic art concerned, as the art
of painting is, with the revelation, the re-creation, of a colored and
harmonious world, which (they tell us) owes its very existence to the
eyes which see it, truth is a quality which can be attained only by him
who seeks beauty before truth. The truth impressionist may be imagined
as saying: "Suppose I wish to give you an impression of the Luxembourg
Gardens, as I see them when I look out of my window, will it help to
call up in your mind the impression of those glimmering alleys and the
naked darkness of the trees, if I begin by telling you that I can count
seven cabs, half another at one end, and a horse's head at the other, in
the space between the corner of the Odéon and the houses on the
opposite side of the street; that there are four trees and three
lamp-posts on the pavement; and that I can read the words 'Chocolat
Menier,' in white letters, on a blue ground, upon the circular black
kiosk by the side of the second lamppost? I see those things, no doubt,
unconsciously, before my eye travels as far as the railings of the
garden; but are they any essential part of my memory of the scene
afterward?"
I have turned over page after page of clever, ingenious summarizing of
separate detail in a certain book, but I have found nowhere a page of
pure beauty; all is broken, jagged, troubled, in this restless search
after the broken and jagged outlines of things. It is all little bits of
the world seen without atmosphere, and, in spite of many passages which
endeavor to draw a moral from clouds, gas, flowers and darkness, seen
without sentiment. When the writer describes to us "the old gold and
scarlet of hanging meat; the metallic green of mature cabbages; the
wavering russet of piled potatoes; the sharp white of fly-bills, pasted
all awry;" we can not doubt that he has seen exactly what he describes,
exactly as he describes it, and, to a certain extent, we too see what he
describes to us. But he does not, as Huysmans does in the _Croquis
Parisiens_, absolutely force the sight of it upon us, so that we see it,
perhaps with horror, but in spite of ourselves we see it. Nor does he,
when some vague encounter on the road has called up in him a "sense of
the ruthless nullity of life, of the futile deception of effort, of
bitter revolt against the extinction of death, a yearning after faith in
a vague survival beyond," convey to us the impression which he has felt
in such a way that we, too, feel it, and feel it to be the revelation of
the inner meaning of just that landscape, just that significant moment.
He has but painted a landscape, set an inexpressive figure in the
background, and ticketed the frame with a motto which has nothing to do
with the composition.
In this book the writer has not, it seems to me, succeeded in his
intention; but I have a further fault to find with the intention itself.
It is one of the discreditable signs of the haste and heedlessness of
our time that artists are coming to content themselves, more and more,
with but sketching out their pictures, instead of devoting themselves to
the patient labor of painting them; and that they are anxious to invent
an excuse for their idleness by proclaiming the superiority of the
unfinished, instinctive first draught over the elaborated, scarcely
spontaneous work of finished art. A fine composition may, in the most
subtle and delicate sense, be slight: a picture of Whistler, for
example, a poem of Verlaine. To be slight, as Whistler, as Verlaine, is
slight, is to have refined away, by a process of ardent, often of
arduous, craftsmanship, all but what is most essential in outward form,
in intellectual substance. It is because a painter, a poet of this kind,
is able to fill every line, every word, with so intense a life, that he
can afford to dispense with that amplification, that reiterance, which
an artist of less passionate vitality must needs expend upon the
substance of his art. But it is so easy to be brief without being
concise; to leave one's work unfinished, simply because one has not the
energy to finish it! This book, like most experiments in writing prose
as if one were writing sonnets, is but a collection of notes, whose only
value is that they may some day be worked into the substance of a story
or an essay. It has not yet been proved--in spite of the many
interesting attempts which have been made, chiefly in France, in spite
of _Gaspard de la Nuit_, Baudelaire's _Petits Poèmes en Prose_, and
Mallarmé's jeweled fragments--that prose can, quite legitimately, be
written in this detached, poetic way, as if one were writing sonnets. It
seems to me that prose, just because it is prose, and not poetry--an art
of vaguer, more indeterminate form, of more wandering cadences--can
never restrict itself within those limits which give the precision of
its charm to verse, without losing charm, precision, and all the finer
qualities of its own freedom.
In France, as in England, there are two kinds of poetical reputation,
and in France these two kinds may be defined as the reputation of the
Latin Quarter and the reputation of the boulevards. In England a writer
like Francis Thompson was, after all, known to only a very narrow
circle, even though many, in that circle, looked on him as the most
really poetical poet of his generation. In France, Vielé-Griffin is
greatly admired by the younger men, quite as much, perhaps, as De
Régnier, but he is not read by the larger outside public which has, at
all events, heard of De Régnier. These fine shades of reputation are
not easily recognized by the foreigner; they have, indeed, nothing to do
with the question of actual merit; but they have, all the same, their
interest, if only as an indication of the condition and tendency of
public opinion.
If we go further, and try to compare the actual merit of the younger
French and English poets, we shall find some difficulty in coming to any
very definite conclusion. To certain enthusiasts for exotic things, it
has seemed as if the mere fact of a poem being written in French gives
it an interest which it could not have had if it had been written in
English. When the poem was written by Verlaine or by Mallarmé, yes; but
now that Verlaine and Mallarmé are gone? Well, there is still something
which gives, or seems to give, French verse an advantage over English.
The movement which began with Baudelaire, and culminated in Verlaine,
has provided, for every young man who is now writing French verse, a
very helpful kind of tradition, which leaves him singularly free within
certain definite artistic limits. It shows him, not a fixed model, but
the suggestion of innumerable ways in which to be himself. All modern
French verse is an attempt to speak straight, and at the same time to
speak beautifully. "_L'art, mes enfants, c'est d'être absolument
soi-même,_" said Verlaine, and all these poets who are writing vers
libre, and even those who are not writing _vers libre_, are content to
be absolutely themselves, and to leave externalities perhaps even too
much alone. What we see in England is exactly the contrary. We have had
our traditions, and we have worn them out, without discovering a new
form for ourselves. When we try to be personal in verse, the personal
emotion has to mold anew every means of expression, every time; and it
is rarely that we succeed in so difficult a task. For the most part we
write poems for the sake of writing poems, choosing something outside
ourselves to write about, and bringing it into permanent relation with
ourselves. Our English verse-writers offer us a ballad, a sonnet, an
eclogue; and it is a flower without a root, springing from no deep soil
in the soul. The verse is sometimes excellent verse, but it is not a
personal utterance; it is not a mood of a temperament, but something
outside a temperament. In France, it is true, we often get the
temperament and nothing else. And, in France, all these temperaments
seem stationary; they neither change nor develop; they remain
self-centered, and in time we become weary of seeing their pale
reflections of themselves. Here, we become weary of poets who see
everything in the world but themselves, and who have no personal hold
upon the universe without. Between the too narrowly personal and a too
generalized impersonality, there remains, in France and in England, a
little exquisite work, which is poetry. Is it important, or even
possible, to decide whether there is a little more of it to be found in
the books of English or of French poets?