Individualism, which in literature gives us such agreeable baskets of
new flowers, often finds itself made sterile by the introduction of the
evil weeds of arrogance. One sees young persons, quite puffed up with
a monstrous infatuation, declare their intention, not only to produce
their work, but at the same the Work, to produce the unique flower,
after which the exhausted intelligence must cease being fecund and
collect itself in the slow dim task of the reorganization of strength.
Even in Paris there are two or three "machines of glory" which have
arrogated to themselves alone the right to pronounce this word, which
they have banished from the dictionary. That matters little, for the
spirit blows where it lists, and when it blows under the skin of frogs
and makes them huge, it is for its own amusement, for the world is sad.
Tailhade has none of the grotesque defects of pride; no one has more
simply pursued a more simple craft, that of the man of letters. The
Romans used a word "rhetorician", and this signified he who speaks,
subdues words and subjects them to the yoke of thought; he governs,
prompts and stimulates them to the point of imposing, in the very hour
of his imaginative work, the hardest, newest, and most dangerous of
tasks. Latin by race and tastes, Tailhade has the right to this fine
name of rhetorician at which the incompetence of pedants takes offence.
He is a rhetorician like Petronius, master equally in prose and poetry.
Here, taken from the rare _Domain de Sonnets_, is one of them: