of _Merlette_, and, just as in his scientific writings he is more
profoundly scientific than the men of science, so in his works of
this period he carried to their uttermost limits the doctrines of
the symbolists. In his critical work the historian must look for the
manifestoes and polemics of the group that gathered in Mallarmé’s
rooms in the Rue de Rome. The theories are in _Idéalisme_, published
in 1893, and in such essays as his defence of Mallarmé, written
in 1898, and included in the _Promenades Littéraires_. Of their
practice he supplies plenty of examples. “Nommer un objet, c’est
supprimer les trois quarts de la jouissance du poème qui est faite du
bonheur de deviner peu à peu; le suggérer voilà le rêve.” Mallarmé
wrote that in 1891, and during the ’nineties Remy de Gourmont was
publishing mysterious little books of poetry and prose, of which
small limited editions were issued on rare paper, in curious covers,
with lithographed decorations as reticent as the writing. There is
the _Histoire tragique de la Princesse Phénissa expliquée en quatre
épisodes_, a play whose action might be seen through seven veils, a
play whose motive, never stated directly, is, perhaps, the destruction
of the future for the sake of the present. There is _Le Fantôme_, the
story of a _liaison_ between a man and a woman if you will, between the
intellect and the flesh if you will, that begins with such an anthem
as might have been sung by some of those strange beings whom Poe took
“into the starry meadows beyond Orion, where, for pansies and violets
and heartsease, are the beds of the triplicate and triple-tinted suns.”
The man--is it a man?--who tells the story, ends with a regret for
something too real to be visible, something that is seen because it is
not visible: “Je me sentais froid, j’avais peur--car je la voyais, sans
pouvoir m’opposer à cette transformation doloureuse--je la voyais s’en
aller rejoindre le groupe des femmes indécises d’où mon amour l’avait
tirée--je la voyais redevenir le fantôme qu’elles sont toutes.” There
is _Le Livre des Litanies_, with its elaborate incantation, from which
I take the beginning and end:
“Fleur hypocrite,
“Fleur du silence.
“Rose couleur de cuivre, plus frauduleuse que nos joies, rose
couleur de cuivre, embaume-nous dans tes mensonges, fleur
hypocrite, fleur du silence.
* * * * *
“Rose améthyste, étoile matinale, tendresse épiscopale, rose
améthyste, tu dors sur des poitrines dévotes et douillettes, gemme
offerte à Marie, ô gemme sacristine, fleur hypocrite, fleur du
silence.
“Rose cardinale, rose couleur du sang de l’Eglise romaine, rose
cardinale, tu fais rêver les grands yeux des mignons et plus d’un
t’épingla au nœud de sa jarretière, fleur hypocrite, fleur du
silence.
“Rose papale, rose arrosée des mains qui bénissent le monde, rose
papale, ton cœur d’or est en cuivre, et les larmes qui perlent sur
ta vaine corolle, ce sont les pleurs du Christ, fleur hypocrite,
fleur du silence.
“Fleur hypocrite,
“Fleur du silence.”
III
These, and other things like them, made it possible for M. de Gourmont
to proceed in the discovery of himself. He drank his mood to the dregs,
leaving no untried experiment to clog his mind with a regret as he
moved on. “I have always been excessive,” he says; “I do not like to
stop half-way.” He follows each impulse as far as it will take him,
lest, by chance, he should leave some flower untasted in a bypath he
has seen but not explored. Unlike most authors, he never has to copy
himself, and does not feel bound, because he has written one book whose
prose is malachite green, to produce another of the same colour. “Un
artiste,” said Wilde, “ne recommence jamais deux fois la même chose
... ou bien c’est qu’il n’avait pas réussi.” The surest way to fail in
an experiment is to make it with a faint heart. M. de Gourmont always
burns his boats.
Some preoccupations, however boldly attacked, are not to be conquered
at a blow. The preoccupation of sex is unlike that of a theory of
art. Conquered again and again by expression, it returns with a new
face, a new mystery, a new power of building the intellect, a new
Gorgon to be seen in the mirror of art and decapitated. As the man
changes so does Medusa vary her attack, and so must he vary the manner
of her death. Now he will write a _Physique de l’Amour_, and, like
Schopenhauer, relieve himself of the problem of sex by reducing it to
its lowest terms. Now he will conquer it by the lyrical and concrete
expression of a novel or a poem. Sex continually disturbs him, but
the disturbance of the flesh is always, sooner or later, pacified by
the mind. All his later novels are, like _Sixtine_, “romans de la vie
cérébrale.” _Sixtine_ is the story of a writer’s courtship of a woman
no more subtle than himself, but far more ready with her subtlety. It
displays the workings of a man’s mind and the states of emotion through
which he passes, by including in the text, as they were written, the
stories and poems composed under the influence of the events. The man
is intensely analytic, afterwards. Emotion blurs the windows of his
brain, and cleans hers to a greater lucidity. He always knows what
he ought to have done. “Nul n’avait à un plus haut degré la présence
d’esprit du bas de l’escalier.” More than once the woman was his, if
he had known it before he left her. Finally, she is carried off by a
rival whose method he has himself suggested. The book is a tragedy
of self-consciousness, whose self-conscious heroine is a prize for
the only man who is ignorant of himself, and, in the blindness of
that ignorance, is able to act. But there is no need to analyse the
frameworks of M. de Gourmont’s novels. Frameworks matter very little.
They are all vitalised by an almost impatient knowledge of the subtlety
of a woman’s mind in moments of pursuit or flight, and the impotence of
a man whose brain seeks to be an honest mediator between itself and his
flesh. His men do not love like the heroes of ordinary books, and are
not in the least likely to suggest impossible ideals to maidens. They
are unfaithful in the flesh nearly always. They use one experience
as an anaesthetic for the pain they are undergoing in another. They
seek to be masters of themselves by knowledge, and are unhappy without
thinking of suicide on that account. Unhappiness no less than joy is
a thing to be known. They fail, not getting what they want, and are
victorious in understanding, with smiling lips, their non-success.
IV
One afternoon, in the Rue des Saints-Pères, M. de Gourmont confirmed
the impression already given me by his books and his eyebrows. “I
have always been both _romanesque_ and _critique_.” Side by side he
has built separate piles of books. While writing the curiosities
of symbolism that are collected in _Le Pèlerin du Silence_, he was
preparing the _Livres des Masques_, two series of short critical
portraits of the writers of his time, which, in the case of those
who survive, are as true to-day as when they were written. It has
been so throughout. In the one pile are little volumes of poetry like
_Les Saintes du Paradis_, and such romances as those we have been
discussing; in the other are works of science like the _Physique de
l’Amour_, books benevolently polemical like _Le Problème du Style_, and
collections of criticism in which an agile intelligence collaborates
with a wakeful sense of beauty.
In this critical work, as in what is more easily recognised as
creative, M. de Gourmont builds for freedom. He will be bound
neither by his own preoccupations nor by other men’s thoughts. It is
characteristic of him that his most personal essays in criticism are
“Dissociations of Ideas.” The dissociation of ideas is a method of
thought that separates the ideas put into double harness by tradition,
just as the chemist turns water into hydrogen and oxygen, with which,
severally, he can make other compounds. This, like most questions of
thought, is a question of words. Words are the liberators of ideas,
since without them ideas cannot escape from the flux of feeling into
independent life. They are also their gaolers, since they are terribly
cohesive, and married words cling together, binding in a lover’s
knot the ideas they represent. All men using words in combination
abet these marriages, though in doing so they are making bars of
iron for the prisons in which they speculate on the torn fragment of
sky that their window lets them perceive. Nothing is easier than,
by taking words and their associations as they are commonly used,
to strengthen the adherence of ideas to each other. Nothing needs a
more awakened intelligence than to weaken the bonds of such ideas
by separating the words that bind them. That is the method of M. de
Gourmont. He separates, for example, the idea of Stéphane Mallarmé
and that of “decadence,” the idea of glory and that of immortality,
the idea of success and that of beauty. It is, too, a dissociation of
ideas when he inquires into the value of education, these two ideas of
worth and knowledge being commonly allied. The method, or rather the
consciousness of the method, is fruitful in material for discussion,
though this advantage cannot weigh much with M. de Gourmont, whose
brain lacks neither motive power nor grist to grind. It is, for him, no
more than a recurrent cleaning of the glasses through which he looks at
the subjects of his speculation.
He speculates continually, and, if questions are insoluble, is not
content until he has so posed them as to show the reason of their
insolubility. He prefers a calm question mark to the more emotional
mark of exclamation, and is always happy when he can turn the second
into the first. He is extraordinarily thorough, moving always in mass
and taking everything with him, so that he has no footsteps to retrace
in order to pick up baggage left behind. Unlike Theseus, he unrolls no
clue of thread when he enters the cavern of Minotaur. He will come out
by a different way or not at all. The most powerful Minotaur of our
day does not dismay him. Confident in his own probity, he will walk
calmly among the men of science and bring an _Esthétique de la langue
française_, or a _Physique de l’Amour_, meat of unaccustomed richness,
to lay before their husk-fed deity.
In criticism, as in creation, he does not like things half-done. The
story of the origin of one of these books is the story of them all.
There is a foolish little work by M. Albalat, which professes to teach
style in twenty-seven lessons. M. de Gourmont read it and smiled; he
wrote an article, and still found something to smile at; he wrote a
book, _Le Problème du Style_, in which, mocking M. Albalat through a
hundred and fifty-two courteous pages, he showed, besides many other
things, that style is not to be taught in twenty-seven lessons, and,
indeed, is not to be taught at all. Then he felt free to smile at
something else.
M. de Gourmont is careful to say that he brought to the _Esthétique de
la langue française_, “ni lois, ni règles, ni principes peut-être; je
n’apporte rien qu’un sentiment esthétique assez violent et quelques
notions historiques: voilà ce que je jette au hasard dans la grande
cuve où fermente la langue de demain.” An aesthetic feeling and some
historical notions were sufficiently needed in the fermenting vat
where the old French language, in which there is hardly any Greek, is
being horribly adulterated with brainless translations of good French
made by Hellenists of the dictionary. M. de Gourmont is in love with
his language, but knows that she is rather vain and ready to wear all
kinds of borrowed plumes, whether or not they suit her. He would take
from her her imitation ostrich feathers, and would hide also all
ribbons from the London market, unless she first dye them until they
fall without discord into the scheme of colour that centuries have made
her own. Why write “high life,” for example, or “five o’clock,” or
“sleeping”? Why shock French and English alike by writing “Le Club de
Rugby” on a gate in Tours? A kingfisher in England flies very happily
as martin-pêcheur in France, and the language is not so sterile as to
be unable to breed words from its own stock for whatever needs a name.
_Physique de l’Amour; Essai sur l’instinct sexuel_, “qui n’est qu’un
essai, parce que la matière de son idée est immense, représente
pourtant une ambition: on voudrait agrandir la psychologie générale de
l’amour, la faire commencer au commencement même de l’activité mâle
et femelle, situer la vie sexuelle de l’homme dans le plan unique de
la sexualité universelle.” It is a book full of illustration, a vast
collection of facts, and throws into another fermenting vat than that
of language some sufficiently valuable ideas. It lessens the pride
of man, and, at the same time, gives him a desperate courage, as it
shows him that even in the eccentricities of his love-making he is not
alone, that the modesty of his women is a faint hesitation beside the
terrified flight of the she-mole, that his own superiority is but an
accident, and that he must hold himself fortunate in that nature does
not treat him like the male bee, and toss his mangled body disdainfully
to earth as soon as he has done her work. M. de Gourmont’s books do not
flatter humanity. They clear the eyes of the strong, and anger the weak
who cannot bear to listen to unpalatable truths.
V
M. de Gourmont’s most obvious quality is versatility, and though, as I
have tried to point out, it is not difficult to find a unity of cause
or intention in his most various expressions, his lofty and careless
pursuit of his inclinations, his life of thought for its own sake, has
probably cost him a wide and immediate recognition. That loss is not
his, but is borne by those who depend for their reading on the names
that float upward from the crowd. Even his admirers complain: some
that he has not given them more poems; others that his _Physique de
l’Amour_ stands alone on its shelf; others that a critic such as he
should have spent time on romances; others, again, that a writer of
such romances should have used any of his magnificent power in what
they cannot see to be creative work. M. de Gourmont is indifferent to
all alike, and sits aloft in the Rue des Saints-Pères, indulging his
mind with free and harmonious play.
In one of his books, far more than in the others, two at least of
his apparently opposite activities have come to work in unison.
All his romances, after and including _Sixtine_, are vitalised by
a never-sleeping intellect; but one in particular is a book whose
essence is both critical and romantic, a book of thought coloured like
a poem and moving with a delicate grace of narrative. _Une Nuit au
Luxembourg_[11] was published in 1906, and is the book that opens most
vistas in M. de Gourmont’s work. A god walks in the gardens behind the
Odéon, and a winter’s night is a summer’s morning, on which the young
journalist who has dared to say “My friend” to the luminous unknown in
the church of Saint-Sulpice, hears him proclaim the forgotten truth
that in one age his mother has been Mary, and in another Latona, and
the new truth that the gods are not immortal though their lives are
long. Flowers are in bloom where they walk, and three beautiful girls
greet them with divine amity. Most of the book is written in dialogue,
and in this ancient form, never filled with subtler essences, doubts
are born and become beliefs, beliefs become doubts and die, while
the sun shines, flowers are sweet, and girls’ lips soft to kiss.
Where there is God he will not have Love absent, and where Love is he
finds the most stimulating exercise for his brain. Ideas not new but
gathered from all the philosophers are given an aesthetic rather than a
scientific value, and are used like the tints on a palette. Indeed, the
book is a balanced composition in which each colour has its complement.
Epicurus, Lucretius, St. Paul, Christianity, the replenishment of the
earth by the Jews; it is impossible to close the book at any page
without finding the mind as it were upon a springboard and ready to
launch itself in delightful flight. There are many books that give a
specious sensation of intellectual business while we read them. There
are very few that leave, long after they are laid aside, stimuli to
independent activity.
VI
“Il ne faut pas chercher la vérité; mais devant un homme comprendre
quelle est sa vérité.” We must not seek in a man’s work for the truth,
since there are as many truths as brains; but it is worth while to
define an answer here and an answer there out of the many. What is the
answer of Remy de Gourmont? _Quelle est sa vérité?_ Of what kind is his
truth? Does he bring rosemary for remembrance or poppy for oblivion?
Not in what he says, but in the point from which he says it, we must
look for our indications. His life, like _Sixtine_, is a “roman de la
vie cérébrale.” It is the spectacle of a man whose conquests are won
by understanding. For him the escape of mysticism was inadequate, and
an invitation to cowardice. He would not abdicate, but, since those
empires are unstable whose boundaries are fixed, conquer continually.
The conquests of the mind are not won by neglect. It is not sufficient
to refuse to see. The conqueror must see so clearly that life blushes
before his sober eyes, and, understood, no longer dominates. Remy de
Gourmont has suffered and conquered his suffering in understanding
it. He would extend this dominion. He would realise all that happens
to him, books, a chance visitor, a meeting in the street, the liquid
bars of light across the muddy Seine. He would transmute all into the
mercurial matter of thought, until, at last impregnable, he should
see life from above, having trained his digestive powers to the same
perfection as his powers of reception. Although one of the Symbolists,
he has moved far from the starting-point assigned to that school by
Mr. Symons. His books are not “escapes from the thought of death.” The
thought of death is to him like any other thought, a rude playfellow
to be mastered and trained to fitness for that free and harmonious
game. The life of the brain, the noblest of all battles, that of a mind
against the universe which it creates, has come to seem more important
to him than the curiosities of beauty of which he was once enamoured.
It has, perhaps, made him more of a thinker than an artist. In his
desire to conquer his obsessions he has sometimes lost sight of the
unity that is essential to art, a happy accident in thought. His later
books have been the by-products of a more intimate labour. He has left
them by the road whose end he has not hoped to reach, whose pursuit
suffices him. They wake in the reader a desire which has nothing to
do with art. This desire--a desire for intellectual honesty--and with
that, perhaps, for intellectual gaiety, is the characteristic gift of
his work. It is never offered alone. He accompanies it with criticism,
with witty epilogues, serious dissertations, and licentious little
stories; but it is not so much for the sake of these things as for the
stimulus of that desire that we turn, and seldom in vain, to M. de
Gourmont’s books.
1911.
THE POETRY OF YONE NOGUCHI
THE POETRY OF YONE NOGUCHI
So-shi, a Chinese philosopher, dreamed that he was a butterfly, and, in
the moment of waking, asked himself: “Are you So-shi who has dreamed
that he was a butterfly, or are you a butterfly who is dreaming that he
is So-shi?” That question is continually repeated in the works of Yone
Noguchi, who seems, indeed, to have the freedom of two worlds, and to
find reality as often in one as in the other. Noguchi is for ever in
doubt of his own existence, suspicious of appearances, and searching
for the reality in things beyond touch or description. “My soul,” he
writes:
“My soul, like a chilly winged fly, roams about the sadness-walled
body, hunting for a casement to fly out.
Lo, suddenly, an inspired bird flies upright into the atom-eyed sky!
Alas, his reflection sinks far down into the mileless bottom of the
mirrory rivulet!
Is this world the solid being?--or a shadowy nothing?
Is the form that flies up the real bird? or the figure that sinks
down?”
And again:
“The world is not my residence to the end!
Alas, the moon has lost her way, harassed among the leaf-fellows on
the darkling hill-top!
Isn’t there chance for my flying out?”
The world is not too much with this poet of Japan who writes in our
language, and it is interesting to compare this symbolist of a nation
of conscious symbolists with the few men who in France and England have
turned an unconscious but almost universal practice into a theory of
poetry.[12]
But I must not, in my care for his work, pretend that the poet is the
immaterial floating fairy that he almost seems to be. “I have cast the
world,” he says, “and think me as nothing,
“Yet I feel cold on snow-falling day,
And happy on flower day.”
Let me, before saying more, set down such facts as I know about his
physical existence.
Yone Noguchi was born in Japan about 1876. He was in America before
he was twenty, and, in company with a few other Japanese students,
suffered extreme poverty, and the starvation which those who have not
tried it consider so efficacious a stimulant to the soul. He made some
friends among American writers, and stayed for a time with Joaquin
Miller. In 1897 he published _Seen and Unseen: or Monologues of a
Homeless Snail_, and in the next year _The Voice of the Valley_, a
little book inspired by a stay in the Yosemite. In 1902 he came to
England, and lived with Mr. Yoshio Markino (who had not then realised
himself and London in his water-colours) in poor lodgings in the
Brixton Road. From these lodgings he issued a sixteen-page pamphlet of
verse printed on brown paper, which drew such notice that the Unicorn
Press (an unfortunate little firm that published some very good books,
some bad ones, and died) produced a volume, called, like the pamphlet,
_From the Eastern Sea_, and containing, besides those sixteen pages
of poetry, other verses from the American books and a number of new
pieces. The cover of this edition was designed by Mr. Yoshio Markino.
I knew Noguchi at this time, and often walked with him along the
Embankment in the evenings, or under those “lamp-lights of web-like
streets bathed in the opiate mists,” that he and Yoshio Markino have
used so delicately in their several arts. I remember him as a small
man, though perhaps not noticeably small by Japanese standards, with
black hair less orderly and geometrical in growth than most Japanese
hair, and a face of extraordinary sensitiveness, high-browed but with
broadly set eyes, and a mouth like a woman’s, like that of a woman
controlling some almost tearful emotion. Even in the handling of a
cigarette, whose end he stripped of its paper so that the tobacco might
serve in the making of another (we were almost penniless in those
days), there was a delicacy that made it impossible not to recognise
that he was a man who lived more finely than most. His conversations
were of poetry, of the principles of the particular poetry he held
that it was his to write, and of the works of those English poets he
had read. “I hate your Longfellow,” he said, “and I love your Keats,”
and in contrasting the two he was, perhaps, defining to himself an
important tendency of his own.
He left London in 1903, and went to New York and then to Japan. He had
some difficulties there, difficulties, I believe, of misunderstanding
on the part of his own countrymen. He crossed to the mainland and
travelled in China for a year, and perhaps longer. In 1906 he published
_The Summer Cloud_ in Tokio, and, in June last year, he sent me a
two-volume book in a blue case with small ivory fastenings, printed by
the Valley Press in Kamakura. This book, _The Pilgrimage_, has been
issued in England by Mr. Elkin Mathews.
These five books do not contain a large body of verse, but they contain
verse whose interest for us is not concentrated in the nationality of
the writer. The title of the brown-paper pamphlet published in the
Brixton Road is _From the Eastern Sea_, “by Yone Noguchi (_Japanese_),”
but though that word aroused a careless curiosity, the curiosity was
turned into something more valuable by qualities less incidental. The
imagery of Noguchi’s verse is Japanese in feeling, just as the imagery
in Synge’s plays is Irish, and that of Verlaine’s poetry French, but
the imagery in any one of these three cases would have been worthless
if the man who used it had been merely Japanese, Irish, or French, and
not a man of genius with the gift of setting words free with living
breath. Our concern is not with the nationality of this writer, but
with his conception of the poet, and with his poetry.
Noguchi wrote his first book in 1896, and so had not read Mr. Arthur
Symons’ _The Symbolist Movement in Literature_, which was issued three
years later. He would have found there an account of poets not unlike
himself, and of a poetry nearer than Keats’ to his own, and further
removed than Keats’ from that of the hated Longfellow.
Symons, writing of Verlaine, says: “Is not his whole art a delicate
waiting upon moods, with that perfect confidence in them as they
are, which is a large part of ordinary education to discourage in us,
and a large part of experience to repress? But to Verlaine, happily,
experience taught nothing; or rather it taught him only to cling the
more closely to those moods in whose succession lies the more intimate
part of our spiritual life.” Noguchi lives almost continuously in those
moods; experience with him is momentary rather than cumulative; and his
aim, expressed more than once in his verse, is only to keep himself a
vessel as clear as possible for the unsullied transference of those
moments from the bowl of life to that of art. It will not be difficult
to make from his verses a portrait of his ideal poet, and, in writing
of a man not yet very widely known, I believe I shall best be doing my
duty by him in quoting his own words as often as I can. In _The Poet_
he says:
“The roses live by the eating of their own beauty and then die.
His song is the funeral chant for his own death of every moment.”
And again, of himself:
“I sing the song of my heart-strings, alone in the eternal muteness,
in the face of God.”
And again: