with the writing of verse), M. Duhamel indicates the few essential
outlines which bring into living relief the poor lads to whom he
ministers: the Zouave who thought himself so strong when his spine
was touched with paralysis; Léglise, of whom his country claimed the
double sacrifice of his two legs and who yet found life worth living;
Boucheutore--but why enumerate the cases? It is not the cases that
matter, it is the souls that animate these tortured and shattered
bodies, which M. Duhamel knows how to make, as it were, transparent to
our gaze. There is in these studies (as there was in the eyes of Béal)
‘une lumière, une douceur une tristesse extrêmes.’ We have heard of the
religion of human suffering--and here it wells from a deep and loving
nature, full of spiritual richness, and yet totally devoid of mysticism
or piety.
I like _La Vie des Martyrs_ better than _Civilisation_ which followed
it in 1918 and was awarded the Prix Goncourt last December. This
latter book inclines to the theories of M. Barbusse: Oh, Civilisation,
what crimes are committed in thy name! The setting is the same; the
personages are still the wounded soldiers, but also the M.O.’s and
great visiting Surgeons, sanitary inspectors, and in these latter
sketches M. Duhamel reveals an admirable talent for caricature. There
is something of Daumier’s biting wit in his portraits of medical
‘big-wigs.’
Here is a writer with great gifts, a master of tears and laughter. His
sketches are admirable. But has he the gift of organic construction?
Will he (as the draughtsman Boz became the painter Dickens) go on from
strength to strength?
Time will show.
THE COUNTESS DE NOAILLES
Years and years ago--five-and-twenty years ago--I used sometimes to
spend my Thursday afternoons with a Russian friend; more than once on
these occasions our pleasure was heightened by the musical talent of
her little cousins, the young daughters of the Princess Brancovan.
In my mind’s eye I still see the two children seated on the long
piano-stool; I contemplate their fervent shoulders, their four thick
dark plaits, bobbing from side to side, and the small eager right
hand of one, and the left hand of her sister, flying up and down
the keyboard as they interpret, four-handed, some difficult page of
Beethoven.
My friend died; years passed; I saw no more of the young musicians.
They grew up; they married. And then one day, in 1901, a new book of
poems burst--yes, literally _burst_--upon the world of letters; and
I learnt with pleasure and curiosity that its author, the Countess
Mathieu de Noailles, was the Princess Anna de Brancovan. Like all
Paris, I read her poems.
Have you ever seen, in Switzerland or in Auvergne (in some mountain
country), the spring meadows, at Eastertime, when the young foals, the
lambs, and especially the little calves (born in the dusk of the stable
in February) make their first irruption into a world of sunshine, of
tender and fresh green grass stretching illimitably in all directions?
If not, and if you would none the less realise the extreme of joy, of
young delight in mere existence, take down from the shelf _Le Cœur
Innombrable_, or indeed any of the early poems of Madame de Noailles.
Madame de Noailles resembles no living poet or poetess. There is none
among them who gives us so absolutely the sense of inspiration--the
poet’s frenzy with its flights and its fervours--and also the flagging,
drifting laxness of the verse when suddenly that inspiration fail. Yet,
even in that wandering delirium, we feel (as in the diviner poetry
of Shelley) no less than the poet’s weakness, the strength and the
ardour of the afflatus. On the frontispiece of her second book (_Les
Éblouissements_, 1907), Mme de Noailles has inscribed a sentence from
Plato’s _Banquet_: ‘My heart beats more tumultuously than the pulse of
the priests of Cybele.’ And indeed the dance, the extravagant fury, the
κoρυβαντιασμός, of the Phrygian festival are echoed in the strophes
of this daughter of Hellas, married into the house of Noailles. But
the young Mænad (strayed from Parnassus into France) is never more to
my liking than when suddenly she interrupts her corybantic song to
idle in her walled fruit-garden, making friends with her pears and
apples, praising the brave, bright splashes of red on the ranks of her
scarlet-runners, or counting the gathered peaches ranged among straw on
the shelves of the fragrant fruitery, while a wasp whizzes out his soul
of rage against the dusty window-pane:--
‘Ô peuple parfumé des fruits,
Vous que le chaud été compose
De cieux bleus et de terre rose,
Vous, sève dense, sucre mol,
Nés des jeux de l’air et du sol,
Vous qui vivez dans une crèche,
Petits dieux de la paille fraîche,
Compagnons de l’arrosoir vert.
Des hottes, des bêches, de fer,
Gardez-moi dans la douce ronde
Que forme votre odeur profonde!’
There is in Madame de Noailles something of Pindar--and something of
Herrick. I like her best in Herrick’s vein, singing the homely things
we know with a penetrating, new, and yet familiar sweetness:--
‘Bien plus que pour Bagdad dont le seul nom étonne,
Que pour Constantinople, ineffable Houri,
Je m’émeus quand je vois dans un matin d’automne
Le clocher de Corbeil ou de Château-Thierry.’
But that other self of hers--the Phrygian pythoness--is no less worthy
of our attention. Every page of this volume bears the imprint of her
image, ardent, wasted, joyous, excited, full of a mingled asperity
and sweetness. Her voice rings out intoxicated with the wonder of the
universe, the mystery of life, the terror of death. None of the poets
of our generation has expressed so keenly the mortal pang caused by the
impact of a beauty which is eternal on a system of nerves which is the
cobweb of an hour:--
‘Je n’ai fait résonner que mes nerfs sur ma lyre.’
It is true there is little of deep emotion and little of pure thought
in these earlier poems of Madame de Noailles; but all that the sense
can receive of the outer world is exquisitely rendered. So alive is the
poetess to the magic and glory of the visible world that she is jealous
of that inner, personal realm which engrosses us so much. Constantly
she regrets those years of childhood, which were objective, calm, free
from the tumult of the heart:--
‘Enfants, regardez bien toutes les plaines rondes,
La capucine avec ses abeilles autour,
Regardez bien l’étang, les champs, avant l’amour;--
Car après l’on ne voit plus jamais rien du monde.
‘Après l’on ne voit plus que son cœur devant soi,
On ne voit plus qu’un peu de flamme sur sa route,
On n’entend rien, on ne sait rien, et l’on écoute
Les pieds du triste Amour qui court ou qui s’assoit.’
But passion is not the only power which contends with our faculty for
absorbing the imperishable quality of the Cosmos. There is another, yet
more terrible, which splits the glass in our hands, even as we raise it
to our lips:--
‘Ô beauté de toute la terre,
Visage innombrable des jours,
Voyez avec quel sombre amour
Mon cœur en vous se désaltère.
‘Et pourtant il faudra nous en aller d’ici
Quitter les jours luisants, les jardins où noussommes,
Cesser d’être du sang, des yeux, des mains, des hommes,
Descendre dans la nuit avec un front noirci.
‘Descendre par l’étroite, l’horizontale porte,
Où l’on passe étendu, voilé, silencieux;
Ne plus jamais vous voir, Ô Lumière des cieux!
Hélas! je n’étais pas faite pour être morte.’
These verses, and many others no less beautiful--for one of the
characteristics of Madame de Noailles is her abundance--could leave no
doubt on my mind of the quality of the poetess, and I remember writing,
when her second book appeared:--
‘There are four lyric poets--there are at least four lyric
poets--writing to-day in France. If we glance over the land in a sort
of bird’s eye view, we see, down by the river, like a faun in the
reeds and rushes, M. Francis Jammes piping on his Pan’s pipe a sweet
irregular and broken music. His is an elfin spirit, familiar with green
things and shy wild animal life; his patrons are St Francis and Ariel.
Where the bee sucks, there lurks he; and yet he is not wholly natural.
Something quaint, furtive, and precious in his style reminds us of a
constant artifice in his simplicity.
‘Let us now lift our gaze towards the busier haunts of men; there, in
an inspired attitude, stands M. Fernand Gregh, his hand lifted towards
the visionary lyre of Victor Hugo, which, like the dagger of Macbeth,
hovers before him, just out of reach; yet, though he never wholly
grasps it, sometimes the poet snatches a fine strain of music from the
strings. A little higher, among the ruins of antiquity, meditates in
music M. Henri de Régnier. But who is this who rushes past (her eye in
a fine frenzy rolling), singing in an incoherent passion of delight,
like the wild shepherdess--_La Ravie de l’Amour de Dieu_--in the Queen
of Navarre’s delightful pastoral, soaring sunwards in a corybantic
ecstasy--who is this lyric muse, half siren and half bird?
“And all a wonder and a wild desire.”’
(In those days I had not read the odes of M. Paul Claudel. And, after
all, can one call a poet ‘lyric,’ if he choose to write his rhapsodies
in prose?)
A year or two later, our poetess gave us, one after the other, three
books in prose--a strange beautiful Oriental prose, charged with
colour as the draperies of a Russian ballet, full of a crude barbarian
charm. First she produced (I think her best prose book) _La Nouvelle
Espérance_.
The novels of Madame de Noailles all tell more or less the same story.
They show us a woman of passionate and eager temperament, a soul of
suffering ardour, fevered with a sort of avid languor, of fierce
tenderness whose cold fit is a sudden revolt of indifference or pride:
a woman who reminds us sometimes of Mademoiselle de Lespinasse and
sometimes of Phædra! Need we say that this self-centred and sensual
being is unhappy? Yet she is full of poetry, of passion, of charm, half
a spoiled child, half an inspired Muse. But she seeks in sentiment
and in sensation an Absolute which does not exist on earth. Thus,
imprisoned in the tyrannous circle of her own personality, she turns
round upon herself, like a squirrel in its cage. So at least we see her
in this first novel and in the last: _La Domination_.
Between the two the poetess has placed a sort of pastel, a sort of
fairy-tale, exquisite in its refinement and impossible grace, _Le
Visage Emerveillé_, where, if the features are the same, the colour and
the lighting are so softened that we greet with a smile what, in the
other volumes seemed, in all cruel sincerity, the terrible image of
hysterical passion.
And then, in the summer of 1913, she produced, after so long a silence
of the Muse, her finest poems. Ah! here she is her real self--she
whom Melchior de Voguë used to call, briefly, emphatically, ‘le grand
poète,’ distinguishing her thus among her contemporaries. The Countess
de Noailles is really a great poet--the greatest that the Twentieth
Century has as yet produced in France, perhaps in Europe. In her the
romantic Nineteenth Century has its last echo: her ardent magnificence,
her sense of the wild beauty of natural things, her lyric cries, her
vast horizons magically evoked, her summits and her tempests, and then
her sudden bursts of simple, friendly homeliness, recall the genius of
Victor Hugo.
_Photo: Dormac_ _To face p. 184_
[Illustration: =The Countess de Noailles=]
But in this new volume the Bacchante, the Undine, of her earlier
poems comes back to us in tears. Like Prince Gautama when he left
his palace, she has encountered love and sickness and death. She has
learned that to live is to suffer; she has discovered that man (and
especially woman) has a heart to feel, as well as eyes to see with;
that our destiny is always mysterious and generally sad. This is
no longer the vine-crowned Bacchante, irresponsible as a young and
graceful tiger-cub, whose sole desire was to satisfy her instinct. This
is not she who, in her tamer moments, tuned her flute in the sunny
kitchen-garden under the warm south wall, hung with espaliers, smiling
as she sang: ‘Yon ripe pear is my heart!’
People will read those earlier poems as long as they love gardens
and the frisky joy of flocks, and the swift upsoaring flight of the
eagle above the mountain-tops, and all the innumerable many-twinkling
smile of Nature. For so I should have called her first volume: not
the _Innumerable Heart_ (she had not yet grown a heart) but the
_Innumerable Smile_, ‘ανἠριθμoν γελασμα. That something mad, and
fierce, and glad, and living, can never come again, nor that heroic
impatience of mortality--and morality. Our Muse is no longer twenty.
Like Thekla she has ‘geliebt und gelebet’; she has discovered that
inner universe which has no common measure with the material world; she
has loved and parted; she has loved and lost; she has looked on the
icy face of Death and trembled; she has stood on the pale verge of the
unknown abyss.
As we read these lyrics for their splendid music we gradually perceive
the motives of the symphony. There is more here than beauty. There is
a secret story intricately involved, as in Shakespeare’s sonnets or
Elizabeth Browning’s. The first poems confess the end of a passion,
still deep, and quick, but full of quarrels and combats; we feel the
inevitable rupture close at hand, and the disenchantment which notes
the death of a sentiment that our muse had believed immortal:--
‘Te souviens-tu du temps où, les regards tendus
Vers l’espace, ma main entre tes mains gisante,
J’exigeai de régner sur la mer de Lépante,
Dans quelque baie heureuse, aux parfums suspendus,
Où l’orgueil et l’amour halcettent confundus?
‘À présent, épuisée, immobile ou errante,
J’abdique sans effort le destin qui m’est dû.
Quel faste comblerait une âme indifferente?
‘Je n’ai besoin de rien puisque je t’ai perdu.’
The lovers separate. The meeting had seemed a prodigy. But the Muse,
in a cloud of poetry, has declared to her votaress her jealousy of a
mortal lover:--
‘On n’est pas à la fois enivrée et heureuse,
L’univers dans vos bras n’aura pas de rival.’
and the great poet (who has also the misfortune to be a young and
beautiful woman) bids her lover farewell, much as the immortal Diana
may have dismissed Endymion:--
‘Allez vers votre simple et calme destinée;
Et, comme la lueur d’un phare diligent
Suit longtemps sur la mer les barques étonnées.
Je verserai sur vous ma lumière d’argent.’
In vain he protests and begs her to consider how void and out of shape
her days will hang, bereft of the substance of so rare an affection. A
dreary isolation, a self-centred ambition, are surely less propitious
to poetry than a sympathy communicated, not only between two hearts,
but between two minds? (The man’s part of the dialogue we must more or
less supply.) The fact is, she is tired of him, or rather of the storm
and stress of passion, and she replies with an absent look:--
‘Je n’avais plus besoin de vous pour vous aimer....’
‘Mon amour, je ne puis t’aimer! Le jour éclate
Comme un blanc incendie, au mont des aromates!
Le gazon, telle une eau, fraîchit au fond des bois;
Un délire sacré m’entraîne loin de toi.’
She is relentless, and all the more relentless that she forgets nothing
of their old delights. Since Sappho has any woman uttered such a burst
of passion as she pours out in shameless reminiscence in the marvellous
lyric entitled ‘T’aimer. Et quand le jour timide ...?’ (the day may
enjoy as much timidity as it pleases; the poetess leaves all her share
untouched). Here are the accents of desire, the voice of nature naked
and unashamed; but it is the evocation of a love consumed and finished.
The remembered flame is now a handful of ashes:--
‘Ô cher pâtre, inquiet et désormais terni,
J’ai vécu pour cela, qui est déjà fini!
Is there any happiness to equal our anticipation of happiness? Only in
listening to music can the wearied beauty still believe: ‘Qu’il existe
un bonheur qui ressemble au désir,’ and then the melody of Schumann
seems to ring with a reproach, a warning, a presentiment, a final
certainty:--
‘Je vois, là-bas, dans l’ombre dépouillée
Du jardin où le vent d’automne vient gémir,
Les trahisons, les pleurs, les âmes tenaillées,
Le vieillesse, la mort, la terre entre-bâillée.’
At this point we lose the clue, and wander a while in the Pindaric
labyrinth of lyrics. A new love, fresh, kind, and young, appears
(we think) on the horizon. Mindful of her ancient rigours, our muse
hesitates:--
‘Je porte un vague amour, plus grave et plus ancien,
Qui t’avait précédé et ne peut pas te suivre.’
Yet she does follow her mortal lover. And again she feels that Nature
rejects her, thrusts her, with a flaming sword, forth from her Paradise
into a disordered world of souls and bodies:--
‘Tu n’es plus cette enfant, libre comme la flamme,
Qui montait comme un jet de bourgeons et d’odeurs.’
This new love is of a different sort, turned towards eternity, and
sometimes, as in the song called _Un Abondant Amour_ and also _Je ne
puis pas comprendre, encore que tu sois né_, we feel that it is perhaps
the love for a child. In any case, her passion is for some creature
still innocent and tender. And this new feeling--the point of departure
for the eternal life--does really estrange the poetess from her
frenzied pantheism.
‘Je ne regarde plus
Avec la même ardeur un monde qui m’a plu.
Mon esprit tient captifs des oiseaux éternels....
Je songe au noble éclat des nuits platoniciennes.’
But Fate intervenes to separate the two lovers. A lyrical intermezzo
drags the pageant of a broken heart through all the miracles of Italy.
The universe has avenged itself upon the woman; she is no longer the
child of the sun, the sister of the winds, but an unhappy mortal
everywhere estranged. And in this desolation, this fast in the desert,
there dawns upon her the mystic apprehension of the spiritual world. A
series of poems, entitled _Les Élévations_, enshrines, this experience
of our eternity:--
‘Mon Dieu, je ne sais rien, mais je sais que je souffre
Au delà de l’appui et du secours humain,
Et puisque tous les ponts sont rompus sur le gouffre,
Je vous nommerai Dieu, et je vous tends la main....
‘Les lumineux climats d’où sont venus mes pères
Ne me préparaient pas à m’approcher de vous,
Mais on est votre enfant dès que l’on désespère
Et quand l’intelligence à plier se résout....
‘Comme vous accablez vos préférés, Seigneur
Il semble que votre ample et salubre courage
Veuille assainir en nous quelque obscur marécage,
Tant vous nous arrachez, par des sueurs de sang,
L’âcre ferment vivant, orgueilleux et puissant.
On pense qu’on mourra du mal que vous nous faites,
Et puis, c’est tout à coup la fin de la tempête.’
But once again a flaming sword waves before her eyes and drives her
forth from the common experience of humanity; even as Nature and genius
banished her from love, so the cold hand of death shuts her out from
religion. Her beloved dies; and she has looked on his waxen face, and
seen the leaden coffin go down into the grave.
This terrible moment--which has driven many in a panic of anguish from
the despair of this world to the desperate hope of a Beyond, as a stag
harried and hunted to the extreme edge of a cliff will spring into the
sea--this ‘sombre accident quotidien de la mort’ immures our poetess in
the prison of a stoical grief, where sometimes (but very rarely) rustle
the wings of that angel who led Peter out of his captivity. In that
austere infrangible house of mourning she remains, aloof from life and
Nature, choosing this living death rather than the treason of a life
renewed and fruitful, though bereaved. There she sits still, forgetting
the spring and the summer, and looks in a white agony upon the face
of Truth. And in verse as firm and full as that of Emily Brontë, she
recites the sterile lesson she has learned:--
‘Je m’emplis d’une vaste et rude connaissance,
Que j’acquiers d’heure en heure, ainsi qu’un noir trésor,
Qui me dispense une âpre et totale science;
Je sais que tu es mort.’
MADAME COLETTE
Imagine a young girl in the country, very young, very fresh, sensitive
to the finest degree, upright, credulous, and doubtless dainty as a
daisy; imagine her in the flower of her youth married and carried
off to Paris--to the decadent Paris of the nineties--by a man of the
world, who is also a man of letters and a man of science, intelligent,
corrupt, and cynical as Mephistopheles himself. No, I am not telling
you over again the story of ‘Madeleine Jeune femme’; I am telling the
history of Madame Colette, and it ends differently.
There is, it seems, an amusement in elaborating the sentimental
education of a young bride, in complicating it with excursions into
vice and into art; brief, the gifted and immoral author who chooses to
be known as ‘Willy’ was pleased to make over his wife in his own image.
She was an artist to the ends of her finger-tips, and they wrote books
together--the famous series of _Claudine_--hailed with delight by all
that is least strait-laced in Paris (and, in those days especially,
there was very little screwing about the moral waist of one sort of
Paris!). For Colette Willy realised a personage, always charming to the
man about town in its candid perversity, that of the innocent wanton,
or (to quote the title of one of her stories) _L’Ingénue Libertine_.
One day I bought one of these Claudine books; it was called _Claudine
en Ménage_. I opened it and thought it delightful. What an admirable
style, firm and free, full of nature, full of grace, and the character
of the girl, at once shrewd and naïve, pleased me immensely ... and
then I began to wonder.... And then I did not know what to do with the
book! I would not place it on my shelf, I could not leave it lying on
the table. Finally, remembering a certain lyric of Robert Browning’s,
I took it out into the forest and dropped it deep in the hollow trunk
of a tree. There, among the pale wood-lice, and the centipedes, and the
fungus, Claudine in her seclusion, finds audience fit though few.
One day it must have dawned on Madame Colette Willy that all men were
not made on the same pattern--that there was fresh air somewhere in
the world even for a married woman--that a man might be a support,
and a comfort, and an example--or perhaps, more simply, that one
might do without one altogether. Anyhow, Madame Colette Willy became
Madame Colette; she divorced her collaborator and began her ascent
out of Avernus. She was, in these new conditions, obliged to earn her
living, and, mindful of the prices paid for even a successful book, she
complicated her profession as woman of letters with the career of a
Variety Artist.
That is to say, she went on the music hall stage and was immensely
applauded; and I am sure she is a splendid variety artist--just as
I am sure that Marguerite Audoux must have had a lovely ‘cut’--just
as I know (and as any one who goes to the Place des Vosges can see)
that a great cabinet-maker was spoiled in Victor Hugo.... The music
hall feeds its flock. After a few years Madame Colette returned to
literature--returned, I mean, to the exclusive practice of literature,
which she had never really abandoned--henceforth independent.
A Paris music hall may appear a strange place of purification, but it
all depends on what one is used to. The courage, the indefatigable
industry, the gentleness, the charity and kindliness of her new
companions impressed Madame Colette; and she admired the relative
pureness of their lives. We see her, in our fancy (like Roumanille
when he contemplated the lambs frisking in the meadows), gazing on the
clowns, and the quick-change artists, and the circus-riders, and the
dancers, and the leaders of performing dogs, as she murmurs:--
‘Coume fan ben tout ço que fan!
Et l’innoucénço, coum es bello!’
And gradually her novels showed the influence of a healthier
environment. It is true that at first she wrote _Les Vrilles de la
Vigne_. But her last three volumes possess (with rare literary beauty)
a freedom of soul and a sensitiveness which at least, to my thinking,
go far to compensate a little colour-blindness as to morality.
Experience has rendered her wise and sad, indulgent and serene; it has
shown her how to organise her impressions, so that her art--simple as
it is and apparently facile--has some of the qualities of a philosophy.
In the terms of a metaphor dear to Mr Henry James, her novels
henceforth are, not a slice of life, but an extract, an elixir.