The hazards of indiscriminate rummaging in bookshops have introduced me
to two volumes of verse which seem to me (though I am ordinarily very
sceptical of those grandiose generalizations about racial and national
characteristics, so beloved of a certain class of literary people) to
illustrate very clearly some of the differences between the French and
English mind. The first is a little book published some few months back
and entitled _Les Baisers_.... The publisher says of it in one of those
exquisitely literary puffs which are the glory of the Paris book trade:
“Un volume de vers? Non pas! Simplement des baisers mis en vers, des
baisers variés comme l’heure qui passe, inconstants comme l’Amour
lui-même.... Baisers, baisers, c’est toute leur troublante musique qui
chante dans ces rimes.” The other volume hails from the antipodes and is
called _Songs of Love and Life_. No publisher’s puff accompanies it; but
a coloured picture on the dust-wrapper represents a nymph frantically
clutching at a coy shepherd. A portrait of the authoress serves as a
frontispiece. Both books are erotic in character, and both are very
indifferent in poetical quality. They are only interesting as
illustrations, the more vivid because of their very second-rateness, of
the two characteristic methods of approach, French and English, to the
theme of physical passion.
The author of _Les Baisers_ approaches his amorous experiences with the
detached manner of a psychologist interested in the mental reactions of
certain corporeal pleasures whose mechanism he has previously studied in
his capacity of physiological observer. His attitude is the same as that
of the writers of those comedies of manners which hold the stage in the
theatres of the boulevards. It is dry, precise, matter-of-fact and
almost scientific. The comedian of the boulevards does not concern
himself with trying to find some sort of metaphysical justification for
the raptures of physical passion, nor is he in any way a propagandist of
sensuality. He is simply an analyst of facts, whose business it is to
get all the wit that is possible out of an equivocal situation.
Similarly, the author of these poems is far too highly sophisticated to
imagine that
every spirit as it is most pure,
And hath in it the more of heavenly light,
So it the fairer body doth procure
To habit in, and it more fairly dight
With cheerful grace and amiable sight.
For of the soul the body form doth take;
For soul is form and doth the body make.
He does not try to make us believe that physical pleasures have a divine
justification. Neither has he any wish to “make us grovel, hand and foot
in Belial’s gripe.” He is merely engaged in remembering “des heures et
des entretiens” which were extremely pleasant—hours which strike for
every one, conversations and meetings which are taking place in all
parts of the world and at every moment.
This attitude towards _volupté_ is sufficiently old in France to have
made possible the evolution of a very precise and definite vocabulary in
which to describe its phenomena. This language is as exact as the
technical jargon of a trade, and as elegant as the Latin of Petronius.
It is a language of which we have no equivalent in our English
literature. It is impossible in English to describe _volupté_ elegantly;
it is hardly possible to write of it without being gross. To begin with,
we do not even possess a word equivalent to _volupté_. “Voluptuousness”
is feeble and almost meaningless; “pleasure” is hopelessly inadequate.
From the first the English writer is at a loss; he cannot even name
precisely the thing he proposes to describe and analyze. But for the
most part he has not much use for such a language. His approach to the
subject is not dispassionate and scientific, and he has no need for
technicalities. The English amorist is inclined to approach the subject
rapturously, passionately, philosophically—almost in any way that is not
the wittily matter-of-fact French way.
In our rich Australian _Songs of Love and Life_ we see the
rapturous-philosophic approach reduced to something that is very nearly
the absurd. Overcome with the intensities of connubial bliss, the
authoress feels it necessary to find a sort of justification for them by
relating them in some way with the cosmos. God, we are told,
looking through His hills on you and me,
Feeds Heaven upon the flame of our desire.
Or again:
Our passions breathe their own wild harmony,
And pour out music at a clinging kiss.
Sing on, O Soul, our lyric of desire,
For God Himself is in the melody.
Meanwhile the author of _Les Baisers_, always elegantly _terre-à-terre_,
formulates his more concrete desires in an Alexandrine worthy of Racine:
Viens. Je veux dégrafer moi-même ton corsage.
The desire to involve the cosmos in our emotions is by no means confined
to the poetess of _Songs of Love and Life_. In certain cases we are all
apt to invoke the universe in an attempt to explain and account for
emotions whose intensity seems almost inexplicable. This is particularly
true of the emotions aroused in us by the contemplation of beauty. Why
we should feel so strongly when confronted with certain forms and
colours, certain sounds, certain verbal suggestions of form and
harmony—why the thing which we call beauty should move us at
all—goodness only knows. In order to explain the phenomenon, poets have
involved the universe in the matter, asserting that they are moved by
the contemplation of physical beauty because it is the symbol of the
divine. The intensities of physical passion have presented the same
problem. Ashamed of admitting that such feelings can have a purely
sublunary cause, we affirm, like the Australian poetess, that “God
Himself is in the melody.” That, we argue, can be the only explanation
for the violence of the emotion. This view of the matter is particularly
common in a country with fundamental puritanic traditions like England,
where the dry, matter-of-fact attitude of the French seems almost
shocking. The puritan feels bound to justify the facts of beauty and
_volupté_. They must be in some way made moral before he can accept
them. The French unpuritanic mind accepts the facts as they are tendered
to it by experience, at their face value.