CROSS-CURRENTS IN MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE
I
They order certain things better in France than elsewhere; I mean
such teasing and unsatisfactory forms of book-making known as
Inquiries ("Enquete," which is not fair to translate into the
lugubrious literalism, "Inquest"), Anthologies, and books that
masquerade as books, as Charles Lamb hath it. Without a trace of
pedantry or dogmatism, such works appear from time to time in Paris
and are delightful reminders of the good breeding and suppleness of
Gallic criticism. To turn to favour and prettiness a dusty
department of literature is no mean feat.
What precisely is the condition of French letters since Catulle
Mendes published his magisterial work on The French Poetic Movement
from 1867 to 1900? (Paris, 1903.) Nothing so exhaustive has appeared
since, though a half-dozen Inquiries, Anthologies, and Symposiums
are in existence.
The most comprehensive recently is Florian-Parmentier's Contemporary
History of French Letters from 1885 to 1914. The author is a poet,
one of les Jeunes, and an expert swimmer in the multifarious
cross-currents of the day. His book is a bird's-eye view of the map
of literary France as far as the beginning of the war. He is quite
frank in his likes and dislikes, and always has his reasons for his
major idolatries and minor detestations.
As a corrective to his enthusiasm and hatreds there are several new
Anthologies at hand which aid us to form our own opinion of the
younger men's prose and verse. And, finally, there is the
significant Inquiry of Emile Henriot: "A Quoi Revent les Jeunes
Gens?" (1913); of which more anon.
M. Florian-Parmentier is a native of Valenciennes, a writer whose
versatility and fecundity are noteworthy in a far from barren
literary epoch. He has, with the facility of a lettered young
Frenchman, tried his hand at every form. All themes, so they be
human, are welcome to him, from art criticism to playwriting. He is
seemingly fair to his colleagues. Perhaps they may not admit this;
but the question may be answered in the affirmative: Is he a safe
critical guide in the labyrinth of latter-day French letters?
He notes, with an unaccustomed sense of humour in a critical
barometer, the tendency of youthful poets, prose penmen, and others
to form schools, to create cenacles, to begin fighting before they
have any defined ideal. It leads to a lot of noisy, explosive
manifestoes, declarations, and challenges, most of them rather in
the air; though it cannot be denied that these ebullitions of gusty
temperaments do clear that same air, murky with theories and
traversed by an occasional flash of genius.
After paying his respects to the daily Parisian press, which he
belabours as venal, cynical, and impure, our critic evokes a picture
of the condition of literary men; not a reassuring one. Indeed, we
wonder how young people can dream of embracing such a profession,
with its heartaches, disappointments, inevitable poverty. Unless
these aspiring chaps have a private income, how do they contrive to
live?
The answer is, they don't live, unless they write twaddle for the
Grand Old Public, which must be tickled with fluff and flattery. You
say to yourself, after all Paris is not vastly different in this
respect from benighted New York. Detective stories, melodrama, the
glorification of the stale triangle in fiction and drama, the
apotheosis of the Apache--what are all these but slight variants of
the artistic pabulum furnished by our native merchants in
mediocrity? Consoled, because your mental and emotional climate is
not as inartistic as it is painted, you return to Florian-Parmentier
and his divagations. He has much to say. Some of it is not as tender
as tripe, but none is salted with absurdity.
Then you make a discovery. There is in France a distinct class, the
Intellectuals, who control artistic opinion because of its superior
claims; a class to which there is no analogy either in England or in
America. (The French Academy is not particularly referred to just
now.) Poets, journalists, wealthy amateurs, bohemians, and
professors--all may belong to it if they have the necessary
credentials: brains, talent, enthusiasm. It is the latter quality
that floats out on the sea of speculation many adventuring barks.
Each sports a tiny pennant proclaiming its ideals. Each is steered
by some dreamer of proud, impossible dreams. But they float, do
these frail boats, laden with visions and captained by noble
ambitions.
Or, another image; a long, narrow street, on either side houses of
manifold styles--fantastic or sensible, castellated or commonplace,
baroque, stately, turreted, spired, and lofty, these eclectic
architectures reflect the souls of the dwellers within. The ivory
tower is not missing, though a half-century ago it was more in
evidence; the church is there, though sadly dwarfed--France is still
spiritually crippled and flying on one wing (this means previous to
1914); and a host of other strange and familiar houses that Jack the
poet built.
On the doors of each is a legend; it may be Neo-Symbolism,
Neo-Classicism, Free-Verse, Sincerism, Intenseism, Spiritualists,
Floralism or the School of Grace, Dramatism and Simultanism,
Imperialism, Dynamism, Futurism, Regionalism, Pluralism, Sereneism,
Vivantism, Magism, Totalism, Subsequentism, Argonauts, Wolves,
Visionarism, and, most discussed of all, Unanimism, headed by that
fiery propagandist and poet, Jules Romains.
Now, every one of these cults in miniature has its following, its
programmes, sometimes its special reviews, monthly or weekly. They
are the numerous progeny of the elder Romantic, Realistic, and
Symbolistic schools, long dead and gathered to their fathers.
Charles Baudelaire, from whose sonnet Correspondences the Symbolists
dated; Baudelaire, the precursor of so much modern, is to-day
chiefly studied in his prose writings, critical and aesthetic. His
Little Poems in Prose are a breviary for the youths who are turning
out an amorphous prose, which they call Free. Paul Verlaine's
influence is still marked, for he is a maker of Debussy-like music;
moonlit, vapourish, intangible, subtle, and perverse. The very
quintessence of poetry haunts the vague terrain of his verse; but
his ideas, his morbidities, these are negligible, indeed, abhorred.
The new schools, whether belonging to the Extreme Right or Extreme
Left, are idealistic in their aim and practice; that or nothing. The
brutalities of Zola and the Naturalistic School, the frigid
perfection and metallic impassibility of the Parnassians are over
and done with. Cynical cinders no longer blind the eye of the
ideal. There is a renaissance of sensibility. The universe is become
pluralistic, sentimental pantheism is in the air. Irony has ceased
to be a potent weapon in the armoury of poets and prosateurs. It is
replaced by an ardent love of humanity, by a socialism that weeps on
the shoulder of one's neighbour, by a horror of egoism--whether
masquerading as a philosophy such as Nietzsche's, or a poesy such as
the Parnassians. For these poetlings issues are cosmical.
Coeval with this revival of sentiment is a decided leaning toward
religion; not the "white soul of the Middle Ages," as Huysmans would
say; not the mediaeval curiosities of Hugo, Gautier, Lamartine; but
the carrying aloft of the banner of belief; the opposition to
sterile agnosticism by the burning tongues of the holy spirit. No
dilettante movement this return to Roman Catholicism. The time came
for many of these neophytes when they had to choose at the
cross-roads. Either--Or? The Button-Moulder was lying in wait for
such adolescent Peer Gynts, and, outraged and nauseated by the gross
license of their day and hour, by the ostentation of evil instincts,
they turned to the right--some, not all of them. The others no
longer cry aloud their pagan admiration of the nymph's flesh in the
brake, of the seven deadly arts and their sister sins.
In a word, since 1905 a fresher, a more tonic air has been blowing
across the housetops of French art and literature. Science is too
positive. Every monad has had its day. Pictorial impressionism is
without skeleton. Mysticism is coming into fashion again; only, the
youngsters wear theirs with a difference. Even the Cubists are
working for formal severity, despite their geometrical fanaticism.
Youth will have its fling, and joys in esoteric garb, in flaring
colours, and those doors in the narrow street called "Perhaps," do
but prove the eternal need of the new and the astounding. Man cannot
live on manna alone. He must, to keep from volplaning to the
infinite, go down and gnaw his daily bone. The forked human radish
with the head fantastically carved has underpinnings also; else his
chamber of dreams might overflow into reality, and then we should be
converted in a trice to angels, pin-feathers and all.
What were the controlling factors in young French literature up
to the greatest marking date of modern history, 1914? The philosophy
of Henri Bergson is one; that philosophy, full of poetic impulsion,
graceful phrasing, and charming evocations; a feminine, nervous,
fleshless philosophy, though deriving, as it does, from an
intellectual giant, Emile Boutroux. Maurice Barres is another
name to conjure with; once the incarnation of a philosophical
and slightly cruel egoism; then the herald of regionalism,
replacing the flinty determinism of Taine with the watch-words:
Patriotism, reverence for the dead--a reverence perilously near
ancestor-worship--the prose-master Barres went into the political
arena, and became, notwithstanding his rather aggressive
"modernism," an idealistic reactionary.
He is more subtle in his intellectual processes than his one-time
master, Paul Bourget, from whom his psychology stemmed, and, if his
patriotism occasionally becomes chauvinistic, his sincerity cannot
be challenged. That sincerest form of insincerity--"moral
earnestness," so called--has never been his. He is no more a sower
of sand on the bleak and barren shore of negation. Little wonder he
is accepted as a vital teacher.
Other names occur as generators of present schools. Stendhal,
Mallarme, Georges Rodenbach, Rimbaud--that stepfather of symbolism
--Emil Verhaeren--who is truly an elemental and disquieting
force--Paul Adam, Maeterlinck, the late Remy de Gourmont--who
contributed so much to contemporary thought in the making--Francis
Jammes, Villiers de l'Isle Adam, Renard, Samain, Saint-Georges de
Bouhelier, Jules Laforgue--and how many others, to be found in the
pages of Vance Thompson's French Portraits, which valuable study
dates back to the middle of the roaring nineties.
II
When we are confronted by a litany of strange names, by the
intricate polyphony of literary sects and cenacles, the American
lover of earlier French poets is bewildered, so swiftly does the
whirligig of time bring new talents. Already the generation of 1900
has jostled from their place the "elders" of a decade previous: you
read of Paul-Napoleon Roinard, Maurice Beaubourg, Hans Ryner--a
remarkable writer--Andre Gide, Charles-Louis Philippe, of Paul Fort,
Paul Claudel, Andre Suares, Stephane Servant, Andre Spire, Phileas
Lebesgue, Georges Polti (whose Thirty-six Dramatic Situations
deserves an English garb), and you recall some of them as potent
creators of values.
But if London, a few hours from Paris, only hears of these men
through a few critical intermediaries, such as Arthur Symons, Edmund
Gosse, and other cultivated and cosmopolitan spirits, what may we
not say of America, a week away from the scene of action? As a
matter of fact, we are proud of our provincialism, and for those who
"create"--as the jargon goes--that same provincialism is a
windshield against the draughts of too tempting imitation; but for
our criticism there is no excuse. A critic will never be a catholic
critic of his native literature or art if he doesn't know the
literatures and arts of other lands, paradoxical as this may sound.
We lack aesthetic curiosity. Because of our uncritical parochialism
America is comparable to a cemetery of cliches.
Nevertheless, those of us who went as far as the portraits by Vance
Thompson and Amy Lowell must feel a trifle strange in the long,
narrow street of Florian-Parmentier, with its alternations of
Septentrional mists and the blazing blue sky of the Midi. This
critic, by the way, is a staunch upholder of the Gaul. He will have
no admixture of Latin influence. He employs what has jocosely been
called the "Woad" argument; he goes back not to the early Britons,
but to Celticism. He is a sturdy Kymrist, and believes not in
literatures transalpine or transpyrenean. He loathes the "pastiche,"
the purveyors of "canned" classics, the chilly rhetoricians who set
too much store on conventional learning. A Frank, a northerner, and
the originator of Impulsionism is Florian-Parmentier. In his
auscultation of genius, La Physiologie Morale du Poete (1904), may
be found the germs of his doctrine. This doctrine seems familiar
enough now, as does the flux of Heraclitus and the Becoming of
Renan, in the teachings of Bergson. Unanimism has had some
influence. M. Florian-Parmentier does not admire this movement or
its prophet, Jules Romains. Unanimism. Ah! the puissant magic of the
word for these budding poets and philosophers. It ought to warm the
cockles of the heart of critics.
And then the generation of 1900--Alexander Mercereau, Henri
Hertz, Sebastien Voirol, Pierre Jaudon, Jacques Nayral, Fernand
Divoire, Tancrede Visan, Strentz, Giraudoux, Mandin, Guillaume
Apollinaire--all workers in the vast inane, dwellers on the
threshold of the future. The past and present bearings of the
Academy Goncourt are carefully indicated. Thus far nothing
extraordinary has come from it. Balzac is still the mighty one in
fiction. Thus far the names of Anatole France, Paul Adam, the
brothers Rosny, Pierre Mille--a brilliant, versatile man--still
maintain their primacy.
Thus far, among the essayists, Remy de Gourmont, Camille Mauclair,
Maeterlinck, Romain Rolland, J. H. Fabre, Jules Bois--now sojourning
in America and a thinker of verve and originality--and Henry
Houssaye, hold their own against the younger generation.
In the theatre there are numerous and vexing tendencies:
Maeterlinck, loyally acknowledging his indebtedness to gentle
Charles van Lerburghe, created a spiritual drama and has disciples;
but the theatre is the theatre and resists innovation. Ibsen, who
had his day in Paris, and Antoine of the Free Theatre were accepted
not because of their novelty, but in spite of it. They both were men
of the theatre. There is a school of Ideo-realism, and there are
Curel, Bataille, Porto-Riche, Maeterlinck, Trarieux, and Marie
Leneru; but the technique of the drama is immutable.
In the domain of philosophy and experimental science we find Emile
Boutroux, and such collective psychologists as Durckheim, Gustave
le Bon, and Gabriel Tarde; names such as Binet, Ribot, Michel
Savigny, Alfred Fouillee, and the eminent mathematician, Henri
Poincare--who finally became sceptical of his favourite logic,
philosophy, and mathematics. This intellectual volte-face caused
endless discussion. The truth is that intuition, the instinctive
vs. intellectualism--what William James called "vicious
intellectualism"--is swaying the younger French thinkers and poets.
There is, if one is to judge by the anthologies, far too much of
metaphysics in contemporary poetry. Poetry is in danger of
suffocating in a misty mid-region of metaphysics. The vital impulse,
intuitionalism, and rhythmic flow of time in Bergson caught the
fancy of the poets. Naturally enough. Literary dogmatism had
prevailed too long in academic centres. Now it is the deliquescence
of formal verse that is to be feared. Vers-libre, which began with
such initiators as that astonishing prodigy, Arthur Rimbaud, has run
the gamut from esoteric illuminism to sonorous yawping from the
terrace of the brasseries. Have frogs wings? we are tempted to ask.
Voices they have, but not bird-like voices.
That fascinating philosopher and friend of Remy de Gourmont--who
practically introduced him--must not be overlooked, for he had
genuine influence. I refer to brilliant Jules Gaultier, who evolved
from Flaubert's Madame Bovary the idea of his Bovarysme--which,
succinctly stated, is the instinct in mankind to appear other than
it is; from the philosopher to the snob, from the priest to the
actor, from the duchess to the prostitute.
Of the influence of politics upon art and literature--which happily
are no cloistered virtues in France--we need not speak here. M.
Florian-Parmentier does so in his admirable and bulky book, of which
we have only exposed the high lights.
Since Jules Huret's Enquete sur l'Evolution Litteraire (1890),
followed by similar works of Vellay, Jean Muller, and Gaston Picard
(1913), we recall no such pamphlet as Emile Henriot's, mentioned
above. He put the questions: "Where are we? Where are we going?" in
_Le Temps_ of Paris, June, 1912, to a number of representative
thinkers and poets, and reprinted between covers their answers in
1913.
The result is rather confusing, a cloud of contradictory witnesses
are assembled, and what one affirms the other denies. There are no
schools! Yes, there are groups! We are going to the devil headlong!
The sky is full of rainbows and the humming of harps celestial!
Better the extravagances of the decayed Romanticists than the
debasing realism of the modern novel, cry the Symbolists. A plague
on all your houses! say the Unanimists. One fierce Wolf (Loup)
admitted that at the banquets of his cenacle he and his fellow poets
always ate in effigy the classic writers. Or was it at the
Symbolists'? Does it much matter? The gesture counts alone with
these youthful "Fumistes"--as Leconte de Lisle had christened their
predecessors.
Verlaine, in his waggish mood, persisted in spelling as "Cymbalists"
the Symbolists, his own followers. Gongs would have been a better
word. A punster speaks of Theists as those who love "le bon Dieu and
tea." The new critical school, at its head Charles Maurras, do not
conceal their contempt for all these "arrivistes" and revolutionary
groups, believing that only a classic renaissance will save Young
France. Barnums, the entire lot! pronounces in faded accents the
ultra-academic group. Three critics of wide-reaching influence are
dead since the war began: Emile Faguet, Jules Lemaitre, and Remy de
Gourmont. They leave no successors worthy of their mettle.
III
The three volumes of anthology of French Contemporary Poets from
1866 to 1916 have been supplemented by a fourth entitled Poets of
Yesterday and To-day (1916). Edited by the painstaking M. G. Walch,
it comprises the verse of poets born as late as 1886. Among the
rest is the gifted Charles Dumas, who fell in battle, 1914. As
epigraph to the new collection the editor has used a line from this
poet's testament: "Ce desir d'etre tout que j'appelle mon ame!"
Another anthology of the new poets is prefaced by M. Gustave Lanson,
but the Walch collection reveals more promising talents, or else the
poems are more representative.
Signor Marinetti, who is bilingual, is eccentrically amusing. But
are his contortions on the tripod art? The auto and aeroplane are
celebrated, also steam, speed, mist, and the destruction of all art
prior to 1900. The new schools are wary of rhetoric, thus following
Paul Verlaine's injunction: Take Eloquence by the neck and wring it!
Imagists abound, but they are in an aristocratic minority. The
watchword is: sobriety in thinking and expression.
Strangely enough, two names emerge victoriously from the confusing
lyric symphony and they are those of Belgian-born poets--Emile
Verhaeren, whose tragic death last year was a loss to literature,
and Maurice Maeterlinck. What living lyric poet has the incomparable
power of that epical Verhaeren, unless it be that of the more
sophisticated Gabriele d'Annunzio, or the sumptuous decorative verse
of Henri de Regnier, whose polished art is the antithesis of the
exuberant, lawless, resonant reverberations of Verhaeren?
What thinker and dramatist is known like Maeterlinck, except it be
the magical Gerhart Hauptmann? Rough to brutality--for Verhaeren at
one time emulated Walt Whitman (variously spelled as "Walth" and
"Withman"); with the names of foreigners Paris has ever been
careless in its orthography, witness "Litz" and "Edgard Poe"; he can
boast the divine afflatus. His personality is of the centrifugal
order. He has a tumultuous rhythmic undertow that sweeps one
irresistibly with him. But his genius is disintegrating, rather than
constructive.
Of what French poet among the younger group dare we say the same?
Grace, lyric sweetness, subtlety in ideas, facile technique--all
these, yes, but not the power of saying great things greatly.
As for Maeterlinck, he owes something to Emerson; but his mellow
wisdom and clairvoyance are his own. He is a seer, and his
crepuscular pages are pools of glimmering incertitudes, whereas of
Verhaeren we may say, as Carlyle said of Landor's prose: "The sound
of it is like the ring of Roman swords on the helmets of
barbarians."
Henry James tells a story of an argument between Zola, Flaubert, and
Turgenev, the Russian novelist declaring that for him Chateaubriand
was not the Ultima Thule of prose perfection. This insensibility to
the finer nuances of the language angered and astounded Zola and
Flaubert. They set it down to the fact that none but a Frenchman
can quite penetrate the inner sanctuary of his own language; which
may be true, though I believe that for Turgenev the author of Atala
was temperamentally distasteful.
Therefore, when an American makes the statement that the two
Belgians are superior to the living Frenchmen it may be classed as a
purely personal judgment. But the proposition first mooted by a
distinguished critic, Remy de Gourmont, that Maeterlinck and
Verhaeren be elected to the French Academy, was not a bizarre one.
The war has effaced many artistic frontiers. The majority of the
little circles that once pullulated in Paris no longer exist. Both
Verhaeren and Maeterlinck are now Frenchmen of the French. Their
inclusion in the Academy would have honoured that venerable and too
august body as much as the Belgian poets.
As to the war's influence on French letters, that question is for
soothsayers to decide, not for the present writer. After 1870
certain psychiatrists pretended that a degeneration of body and soul
had blighted artistic and literary Europe. Well, we can only wish
for the new France of 1920 and later such a galaxy of talents and
genius as the shining groups from 1875 to 1914. No need to finger
the chaplet of their names and achievements. Such books as those by
Catulle Mendes, Florian-Parmentier, Lanson, and Walch prove our
contention.