One of the most fruitful and astonishing inventors of images and
metaphors. To find new expressions, Huysmans materializes the spiritual
and the intellectual spheres, thus giving his style a precision
somewhat heavy and a lucidity rather unnatural: _rotten souls_ (like
teeth) and _cracked hearts_ (like an old wall); it is picturesque and
nothing else. The inverse operation is more conformable to the old
taste of men for endowing vague sentiments and a dim consciousness to
objects. It remains faithful to the pantheistic and animistic tradition
without which neither art nor poetry would be possible. It is the deep
source from which all the others are formed, pure water transformed
by the slightest ray of sunshine into jewels sparkling like fairy
collars. Other "metaphorists" like Jules Renard, venture to seek the
image either in a reforming vision, a detail separated from the whole
becoming the thing itself, or in a transposition and exaggeration of
metaphors in usage; finally, there is the analogic method by which,
without our voluntary aid, the meaning of ordinary words change daily.
Saint-Pol-Roux blends these methods and makes them all contribute to
the manufacture of images which, if they are all new, are not all
beautiful. From them a catalogue or a dictionary could be drawn up:
Wise-Woman of light means the cock.
Morrow of the caterpillar in balldress -- butterfly.
Sin that sucks -- natural child.
Living distaff -- mutton.
Fin of the plow -- plowshare.
Wasp with the whip sting -- diligence.
Breast of crystal -- flagon.
Crab of the hand -- open hand.
Letter announcement -- magpie.
Cemetery with wings -- a flight of crows.
Romance for the nostrils -- perfume of flowers.
To tame the carious jawbone
of bemol of a modern tarask -- to play the piano.
Surly gewgaw of the doorway -- watchdog.
Blaspheming limousine -- wagoner.
To chant a bronze alexandrine -- to peal midnight.
Cognac of Father Adam -- the broad, pure air.
Imagery only seen with closed eyes -- dreams.
Leaves of living salad -- frogs.
Green chatterers -- frogs.
Sonorous wild-poppy -- cock-crow.
The most heedless person, having read this last, will decide that
Saint-Pol-Roux is gifted with an imagination and with an equally
exuberant wretched taste. If all these images, some of which are
ingenious, followed one after another towards _les Reposoirs de la
Procession_ where the poet guides them, the reading of such a work
would be difficult and the smile would often temper the aesthetic
emotion; but strewn here and there, they but form stains and do not
always break the harmony of richly colored, ingenious and grave poems.
_Le Pèlerinage de Sainte-Anne_, written almost entirely in images, is
free of all impurity and the metaphors, as Théophile Gautier would
have wished, unfold themselves in profusion, but logically and knit
together; it is the type and marvel of the prose poem, with rhythm and
assonance. In the same volume, the _Nocturne_ dedicated to Huysmans
is but a vain chaplet of incoherent catachreses: the ideas there are
devoured by a frightful troop of beasts. But _l'Autopsie de la Vieille
fille_, despite a fault of tone, but _Calvaire immémorial_, but _l'Ame
saisissable_ are masterpieces. Saint-Pol-Roux plays on a zither whose
strings sometimes are too tightly drawn: a turn of the key would
suffice for our ears ever to be deeply gladdened.