To be the representative of logic among an assembly of poets is a
difficult role and has its inconveniences. There is the risk of
being taken too seriously and consequently of feeling bound to treat
literature in grave tones. Gravity is not necessary for the expression
of what we believe is truth; irony agreeably seasons the moral
decoction; pepper is needed in this camomile. Scornfully to affirm is a
sure enough way of not being the dupe of even one's own affirmations.
This is practicable in literature, for here all is uncertain and art
itself doubtless is but a game where we philosophically deceive each
other. That is why it is good to smile.
Louis Dumur rarely smiles. But if, having now gained more indulgence
and some rights to real bitterness, he wished to smile so as to excuse
and amuse himself, it seems that the whole assembly of poets would
protest, astonished and perhaps scandalized. So, by habit and logic, he
remains grave.
He is logic itself. He can observe, combine, deduce; his novels,
dramas, poems are of a solid construction whose balanced architecture
delights by the skillful symmetry of curves, everything directed
towards a central dome whither the eye is severely drawn. He is clever
and strong enough, when charmed with error, not to abandon it except
after having driven it to a corner, with its extremest consequences,
and sufficiently master of himself not to confess his error, but even
to defend it with all the ingenuities of argument. Such is his system
of French verse based on tonic accent; it is true that the result,
often deficient, for languages themselves have a quite imperious logic,
was occasionally felicitous and unexpected, with hexameters like this.
L'orgueilleuse paresse des nuits, des parfums et des seins.
(Tr. 39)
It is towards the theater that Dumur seems definitely to have turned
his intellectual activity. The first pages of his plays cut (I do not
speak of _Rembrandt_, a purely dramatic history, in the grand style
and with vast unfolding), and one is surprised by a renovated setting,
retouched words, and a light of conventional realism, an arrangement of
things and beings under a new cloak and fresh varnish,--but as we go
on, the author affirms that in this sad scenic landscape, valid speech
will be heard and that a puff of wind turning to tempest will ruin the
planting.
The screen, with its new cloth, is so arranged that, its banality
destroyed by degrees, beings and things stripped by a caprice of
lightning, nothing is left standing but the idea, naked or veiled in
its sole, essential mysteriousness.
This old-new setting, then, is the simplest and most available, where
the neutral imagination of a throng of eyewitnesses can, with the least
effort, place a mental combat whose arms are the accessories of the
theater.
A man journeys through the world bearing with him a coffer that
contains free natal earth; he carries his love. But a day falls when
he is crushed by his love. In the hour of this catastrophe, another
man understands, he takes from him the woman who is breaking his arms.
To love is to saddle oneself with an imperious burden up to the very
moment when, ceasing to be free, one ceases to be strong. _La Motte de
terre_ explains this lucidly and forcefully. It is the work of a writer
thoroughly master of his natural gifts, shaping them with an ease and
that air of domination which easily subdues ideas. It happens that
a work may be superior to the man and to his very intelligence, but
by very little. Though it be little and an innocent untruth, it is a
humiliating spectacle and provokes scorn more than the written avowal
of the most frightful and complete mediocrity in the brain that gave
it birth. The man of worth is always superior to his creation, for his
desire is too vast ever to be filled, his love too miraculous ever to
be met.
_La Nébuleuse_ is a poem of lovely and deep perspective, where,
symbolized by artless beings, are seen the successive generations of
men following each other uncomprehendingly, almost undiscerningly,
so different are their souls, and always summed up, to the moment of
their decline, by the child, the future, the "nebula," whose birth,
finally confirmed, brings death, under its morning clearness, to the
faded smiles of the aged stars. And, the vision ended, it is urged that
this morrow, which is becoming today, will be altogether like its dead
brothers, and that in short there is nothing new in the spectacle which
amuses the dead years leaning
Sur les balcons du Ciel en robes surannées.
(Tr. 40)
But this "nothingness" has no importance for the human atoms that form
and determine it; it is the delightful newness that we breathe and of
which we live. The new! The new! And let each intelligence, though
short-lived, affirm his will to exist, and to be dissimilar to all
antecedent or surrounding manifestations, and let each nebula aspire to
the character of a star whose light shall be distinct and clear among
other lights.
All this I have read in the text and in the silences of the dialogue,
for when the work of art is the development of an idea, the very spaces
between lines answer whoever can question them.
Dumur is disposed to create a philosophical theater, a theater of
ideas, and also to renew the _roman à these_, for _Pauline ou la
Liberté de l'amour_ is a serious work, arranged with skill, thought out
in an original manner and implying a rare intellectual worth.