It is now some time since I wrote, somewhat vaguely (with reference
to one of d’Annunzio’s books) that a novel is a poem and should be
conceived and executed as such if it is to prove of worth.
At that time I said:
“The novel is based upon the same esthetic as the poem; the original
novel was composed in verse: for example, the Odyssey, a novel of
adventure; the Aeneid, a chivalrous romance; the first French novels,
as everybody knows, were poems, and it is only at a fairly late day
that they were transposed into prose to adapt them to the indolence and
the ignorance of a larger reading public. From this origin the novel
inherits the possibility of a certain nobility, and any genuine writer,
if he concerns himself with it, will restore that nobility to the form:
whom would one wish to convince that _Don Quixote_ is not a poem, that
_Pantagruel_ is not a poem, that _Salammbo_ is not a poem? The novel is
a poem; the novel that is not a poem does not exist.”
Flaubert had not yet taught me, through the letters that narrate the
arduous composition of _Madame Bovary_, that one must “endow prose
with the rhyme of verse (leaving to it, however, its distinctly
prosaic character) and write to ordinary life as one writes history or
epic.” Upon thinking this over I found that Flaubert carried a bit too
far the idea that we must achieve a literary prose whose beauty may be
fashioned only of words and rhythm, the rhythm being primordial. The
method that he prescribed for the novel I believe suited likewise to
the play, the tale, even when it is but an anecdote--almost all form of
composition--even the simple article done for the morning-paper. There
is no inferior art. An article may be a poem from the moment one has
assigned to it the rhythm against which it will dance its brief pavan.
Once the rhythm has been found, all is found, for the idea incorporates
itself into the tempo, and the ball of yarn or silk is formed almost
without the intervention of any consciousness of a task.
The tale, it seems to me, demands a special condition: in order to
write it one must possess the illusion, no matter how fleeting, of
being happy; a merry afternoon is enough. And this relates it more
closely to the poem than any reasoned-out theory could do. To be
happy--that is to say, to have enjoyed a flower, the flower of one’s
choice, or the bright glance of certain eyes: then one becomes
interested in the games of others. In fact, when one is happy, or
almost so, one can no longer stay inside, where one sees well only
through desire. A tale is a stroll.
Almost all the stories that you are about to read were written in a
single breath, save the polishing touches, the expansion of too slender
parts, and excisions. Thus there comes, at certain times, a moment when
the breath runs short. One lays the work aside for the following day,
and this is a pity, for dreams trouble one’s days.
I do not write all this to instruct in a method a public that cares
very little for methods. The stream of these notes flowed one evening
in a few moments on to a stray sheet of paper.
I clarified it, at first for my own pleasure, and then in an attempt
to solve a problem. Take this poet who now overflows in novels, even
in feuilletons, in all the petty tasks of a man of letters--do you
really think him unfaithful to his first muse? Yes, doubtless, often.
Not always. As long as rhythm sings within him, he is faithful.
His downfall does not begin until that day when the harmony of the
phrase is utterly sacrificed to reason--to what persons without any
beyond in their spirits call truth. The true poet and the true
sage can always, like Goethe, conciliate Poesy and Reality, and all
the more easily since Poesy is the daughter of Reality. I remember
hearing M. Quinton express surprise that Pasteur should have written
a tragedy. Beyond doubt it was very bad (not worse than those in
which M. Claretie’s abilities as régisseur excel), but this exercise
attests an original sense of rhythm. His beautiful experiments were,
in the days that followed, rhythmed like poems, like the marbles of
his compatriots Hugo, Rude, Clésinger. The _Satyre_ who scales the
mountain of mysteries, the _Bacchante au Thyrse_, who rushes into
voluptuousness, the game of chemical retorts which prove that life
arises only from life--these are the gestures of genius animated by
one and the same rhythm. One likes to recall that Descartes composed a
ballet to pleasure the great Christine; one is fond of remembering that
Montesquieu rhythmed the games of his young imagination, that Pascal
composed a symphony upon the Passions of love, that Nietzsche caused
the forests to resound with the superhuman laughter of Zarathustra,
that Flaubert rhythmed like Homeric verses the quotidian words of that
Stupidity to whom he played Hercules.
It is rhythm that lends beauty to the poor ballerina who seems draped
only in her chemise. May it lend a little to those women who, in their
rushing adventures, dance too madly perhaps, each in one of the rays of
light resolved by the naïve prism of their desire.--R. G.
July 30, 1908.