To take critical questions seriously, even passionately, is one of the
marks of a genuinely civilized society. It points to both personal
disinterestedness and to an imaginative absorption in fundamentals.
The American who watches eagerly some tilt in that great critical
battle which has gone on for ages and has now reached our shores, is
released from his slavery to the immediate and the parochial; he has
ceased to flinch at the free exercise of thought; he has begun to
examine his mind as his fathers examined only their conscience; he is
a little less concerned for speed and a little more for direction; he
is almost a philosopher and has risen from mere heated gregariousness
to voluntary co-operation in a spiritual order. His equipment is, as a
rule, still meagre, and so his partisanship is not always an instructed
one. He may be overwhelmed by the formidable philosophical apparatus
of one critic or merely irritated by the political whims of another.
Hence nothing could well be more helpful to him than an introduction
to a foreign critic who is at once a stringent thinker and a charming
writer, who permitted his insight to be obscured by neither moral nor
political prejudices, who is both urbane and incisive, catholic and
discriminating.
Remy de Gourmont, like all the very great critics--Goethe, Ste. Beuve,
Hazlitt, Jules Lemaitre--knew the creative instinct and exercised the
creative faculty. Hence he understood, what the mere academician, the
mere scholar, can never grasp, that literature is life grown flame-like
and articulate; that, therefore, like life itself, it varies in aim
and character, in form and color and savor and is the memorable record
of and commentary upon each stage in that great process of change
that we call the world. To write like the Greeks or the Elizabethans
or the French classics is precisely what we must not do. It would
be both presumptuous and futile. All that we have to contribute to
mankind, what is it but just--our selves? If we were duplicates of
our great-grandfathers we would be littering the narrow earth to no
enriching purpose; all we have to contribute to literature is, again,
our selves. This moment, this sensation, this pang, this thought--this
little that is intimately our own is all we have of the unique and
precious and incomparable. Let us express it beautifully, individually,
memorably and it is all we can do; it is all that the classics did
in their day. To imitate the classics--be one! That is to say, live
widely, intensely, unsparingly and record your experience in some
timeless form. This, in brief, is the critical theory of Gourmont, this
is the background of that startling and yet, upon reflection, so clear
and necessary saying of his "The only excuse a man has for writing is
that he express himself, that he reveal to others the kind of world
reflected in the mirror of his soul; his only excuse is that he be
original".
Gourmont, like the Symbolists whom he describes in this volume, founded
his theory of the arts upon a metaphysical speculation. He learned from
the German idealists, primarily the Post-Kantians and Schopenhauer,
that the world is only our representation, only our individual
vision and that, since there is no criterion of the existence or the
character of an external reality, that vision is, of course, all we
actually have to express in art. But to accept his critical theory
it is not necessary to accept his metaphysical views. The variety of
human experience remains equally infinite and equally fascinating on
account of its very infiniteness, whatever its objective content may
or may not be. We can dismiss that antecedent and insoluble question
and still agree that the best thing a man can give in art as in life
is his own self. What kind of a self? One hears at once the hot and
angry question of the conservative critic. A disciplined one, by all
means, an infinitely and subtly cultivated one. But not one shaped
after some given pattern, not a replica, not a herd-animal, but a
human personality. But achieving such personalities, the reply comes,
people fall into error. Well, this is an imperfect universe and the
world-spirit, as Goethe said, is more tolerant than people think.
It is clear that criticism conceived of in this fashion, can do little
with the old methods of harsh valuing and stiff classification. If, as
Jules, Lemaitre put it, a poem, a play, a novel, "exists" at all, if it
has that fundamental veracity of experience and energy of expression
which raise it to the level of literary discussion, a critic like
Gourmont cannot and will not pass a classifying judgment on it at all.
For such judgments involve the assumption that there exists a fixed
scale of objective values. And for such a scale we search both the
world and the mind in vain. Hence, too--and this is a point of the
last importance--we are done with arbitrary exclusions, exclusions
by transitory conventions or by tribal habits lifted to the plane of
eternal laws. All experience, the whole soul of man--nothing less than
that is now our province. And no one has done more to bring us that
critical and creative freedom and enlargement of scope than Remy de
Gourmont.
In the volume before us, for instance, he discusses writers of very
varied moods and interests. Dr. Samuel Johnson or, for that matter,
a modern preceptist critic, speaking of these very poets, would have
told us how some of them were noble and some ignoble and certain ones
moral and others no better than they should be. And both of these good
and learned and arrogant men would have instructed Verlaine in what to
conceal, and Gustave Kahn in how to build verses and Régnier in how
to enlarge the range of his imagery. Thus they would have missed the
special beauty and thrill that each of these poets has brought into the
world. For they read--as all their kind reads--not with peace in their
hearts but with a bludgeon in their hands. But if we watch Gourmont
who had, by the way, an intellect of matchless energy, we find that he
read his poets with that wise passiveness which Wordsworth wanted men
to cultivate before the stars and hills. He is uniformly sensitive; he
lets his poets play upon him; he is the lute upon which their spirits
breathe. And then that lute itself begins to sound and to utter a music
of its own which swells and interprets and clarifies the music of his
poets and brings nearer to us the wisdom and the loveliness which they
and he have brought into the world.
Thus it is, first of all, as one of the earliest and finest examples
of the New Criticism that this English version of the "Book of Masks"
is to be welcomed. For the New Criticism is the chief phenomenon in
that movement toward spiritual and moral tolerance which the world
so sorely needs. But the book is also to be welcomed and valued for
the sake of its specific subject matter. One movement in the entire
range of modern poetry and only one surpasses the movement of the
French Symbolists in clearness of beauty, depth of feeling, wealth and
variety of music. This Symbolist movement arose in France as a protest
against the naturalistic, the objective in substance and against the
rigid and sonorous in form. Eloquence had so long, even during the
romantic period, dominated French poetry that profound inwardness
of inspiration and lyrical fluidity of expression were regarded as
essential by the literary reformers of the later eighteen hundred and
eighties. It was in the service of these ends that Stéphane Mallarmé
taught the Symbolist system Of poetics: to name no things except as
symbols of unseen realities, to use the external world merely as a
means of communicating mood and revery and reflection. The doctrine
and the verse of Mallarmé spoke to a Europe that was under the sway of
a similar reaction and the work of poets as diverse as Arthur Symons,
William Butler Yeats and Hugo von Hofmannsthal is unthinkable without
the pervasive influence of the French master. Mallarmé and his doctrine
are, indeed, the starting point of all modern lyrical poetry. Whatever
has been written since, in free verse or fixed, betrays through
conformity or re-action, the mark of that doctrine and the resultant
movement.
The actual poets of the movement are little known among us. Verlaine's
name is already almost a classical one and the exquisite versions
of many of his poems by Arthur Symons are accessible; Verhaeren was
lifted into a brief notoriety some years ago. But who really reads
the stormy and passionate verses of the Flemish master? Nor are there
many who have entered the suave and golden glow that radiates from
Régnier, chief of the living poets of France, or who have vibrated to
the melancholy of Samain or the inner music of Francis Vielé-Griffin.
The other poets, less copious and less applauded, are not greatly
inferior in the quality of their best work. There is not a poet in
Gourmont's book who has not written some verses that add permanently
to the world's store of living beauty. Nor is it true that a slightly
more recent development in French poetry has surpassed the works of the
Symbolists. M. Francis Jammes writes with a charming simplicity and M.
Paul Fort with a large rhythmic line, with freshness and with grace and
the very young "unanimiste" poets are intellectual and tolerant and
sane. But they are all, in the essentials of poetry, children of the
Symbolists whose work remains the great modern contribution of France
to poetical literature. LUDWIG LEWISOHN.