Instigations Part 12

mange lentement son pain Parce que ses dents sont usees; Et il boit avec beaucoup de mal Parce qu'il a de peine plein sa gorge.

Quand il a fini, Il hesite, puis timide Va s'a.s.seoir un peu A cote du feu.

Ses mains creva.s.sees epousent Les bosselures dures de ses genoux.

Then of the other man in the story:

"qui n'etait pas des notres....

"Mais comme il avait l'air cependant d'etre des notres!"

The story or incident in "Visite" is that of a man stirring himself out of his evening comfort to visit some pathetic dull friends.

Ces gens helas, ne croyaient pas Qu'il fut venu a l'improviste Si tard, de si loin, par la neige ...

Et ils attendaient l'un et l'autre Que brusquement et d'un haleine il exposat La grave raison de sa venue.

Only when he gets up to go, "ils oserent comprendre"

Il leur promit de revenir.

Mais avant de gagner la porte Il fixa bien dans sa memoire Le lieu ou s'abritait leur vie.

Il regarda bien chaque objet Et puis aussi l'homme et la femme, Tant il craignait au fond de lui De ne plus jamais revenir.

The relation of Vildrac's verse narratives to the short story form is most interesting.

JULES ROMAINS

The reader who has gone through Spire, Romains, and Vildrac, will have a fair idea of the poetry written by this group of men. Romains has always seemed to me, and is, I think, generally recognized as, the nerve-centre, the dynamic centre of the group,

Les marchands sont a.s.sis aux portes des boutiques; Ils regardent. Les toits joignent la rue au ciel Et les paves semblent feconds sous le soleil Comme un champ de mas.

Les marchands ont laisse dormir pres du comptoir Le desir de gagner qui travaille des l'aube.

On dirait que, malgre leur ame habituelle, Une autre ame s'avance et vient au seuil d'eux-memes Comme ils viennent au seuil de leurs boutiques noires.

We are regaining for cities a little of what savage man has for the forest. We live by instinct; receive news by instinct; have conquered machinery as primitive man conquered the jungle. Romains feels this, though his phrases may not be ours. Wyndham Lewis on giants is nearer Romains than anything else in English, but vorticism is, in the realm of biology, the hypothesis of the dominant cell. Lewis on giants comes perhaps nearer Romains than did the original talks about the Vortex.

There is in inferior minds a pa.s.sion for unity, that is, for a confusion and melting together of things which a good mind will want kept distinct. Uninformed English criticism has treated Unanimism as if it were a vague general propaganda, and this criticism has cited some of our worst and stupidest versifiers as a corresponding manifestation in England. One can only account for such error by the very plausible hypothesis that the erring critics have not read "Puissances de Paris."

Romains is not to be understood by extracts and fragments. He has felt this general replunge of mind into instinct, or this development of instinct to cope with a metropolis, and with metropolitan conditions; in so far as he has expressed the emotions of this consciousness he is poet; he has, aside from that, tried to formulate this new consciousness, and in so far as such formulation is dogmatic, debatable, intellectual, hypothetical, he is open to argument and dispute; that is to say he is philosopher, and his philosophy is definite and defined.

Vildrac's statement "Il a change la pathetique" is perfectly true. Many people will prefer the traditional and familiar and recognizable poetry of writers like Klingsor. I am not dictating people's likes and dislikes. Romains has made a new kind of poetry. Since the sc.r.a.pping of the Aquinian, Dantescan system, he is perhaps the first person who had dared put up so definite a philosophical frame-work for his emotions.

I do not mean, by this, that I agree with Jules Romains; I am prepared to go no further than my opening sentence of this section, concerning our growing, or returning, or perhaps only newly-noticed, sensitization to crowd feeling; to the metropolis and its peculiar sensations. Turn to Romains:

Je croyais les murs de ma chambre impermeables.

Or ils laissent pa.s.ser une tiede bruine Qui s'epaissit et qui m'empeche de me voir, Le papier a fleurs bleues lui cede. Il fait le bruit Du sable et du cresson qu'une source traverse.

L'air qui touche mes nerfs est extremement lourd.

Ce n'est pas comme avant le pur milieu de vie Ou montait de la solitude sublimee.

Voila que par osmose Toute l'immensite d'alentour le sature.

Il charge mes poumons, il empoisse les choses, Il separe mon corps des meubles familiers,

Les forces du dehors s'enroulent a mes mains.

In "Puissances de Paris" he states that there are beings more "real than the individual." Here, I can but touch upon salients.

Rien ne cesse d'etre interieur.

La rue est plus intime a cause de la brume.

Lines like Romains', so well packed with thought, so careful that you will get the idea, can not be poured out by the bushel like those of contemporary rhetoricians, like those of Claudel and Fort. The best poetry has always a content, it may not be an intellectual content; in Romains the intellectual statement is necessary to keep the new emotional content coherent.

The opposite of Lewis's giant appears in:

Je suis l'esclave heureux des hommes dont l'haleine Flotte ici. Leur vouloirs s'ecoule dans mes nerfs; Ce qui est moi commence a fondre.

This statement has the perfectly simple order of words. It is the simple statement of a man saying things for the first time, whose chief concern is that he shall speak clearly. His work is perhaps the fullest statement of the poetic consciousness of our time, or the scope of that consciousness. I am not saying he is the most poignant poet; simply that in him we have the fullest poetic exposition.

You can get the feel of Laforgue or even of Corbiere from a few poems; Romains is a subject for study. I do not say this as praise, I am simply trying to define him. His "Un Etre en Marche" is the narrative of a girls' school, of the "crocodile" or procession going out for its orderly walk, its collective sensations and adventures.

Troupes and herds appear in his earlier work:

Le troupeau marche, avec ses chiens et son berger, Il a peur. ca et la des reverberes brlent, Il tremble d'etre poursuivi par les etoiles.

La foule traine une ec.u.me d'ombrelles blanches * * * * * * *

La grande ville s'evapore, Et pleut a verse sur la plaine Qu'elle sature.

His style is not a "model," it has the freshness of gra.s.s, not of new furniture polish. In his work many nouns meet their verbs for the first time, as, perhaps, in the last lines above quoted. He needs, as a rule, about a hundred pages to turn round in. One can not give these poems in quotation; one wants about five volumes of Romains. In so far as I am writing "criticism," I must say that his prose is just as interesting as his verse. But then his verse is just as interesting as his prose. Part of his method is to show his subject in a series of successive phases, thus in L'Individu:

V

Je suis un habitant de ma ville, un de ceux Qui s'a.s.soient au theatre et qui vont par les rues * * * * * * * *

VI

Je cesse lentement d'etre moi. Ma personne Semble s'aneantir chaque jour un peu plus C'est a peine si je le sens et m'en etonne.

His poetry is not of single and startling emotions, but--for better or worse--of progressive states of consciousness. It is as useless for the disciple to try and imitate Romains, without having as much thought of his own, as it is for the tyro in words to try imitations of Jules Laforgue. The limitation of Romains' work, as of a deal of Browning's, is that, having once understood it, one may not need or care to re-read it. This restriction applies also in a wholly different way to "Endymion"; having once filled the mind with Keats' color, or the beauty of things described, one gets no new thrill from the re-reading of them in not very well-written verse. This limitation applies to all poetry that is not implicit in its own medium, that is, which is not indissolubly bound in with the actual words, word music, the fineness and firmness of the actual writing, as in Villon, or in "Collis O Heliconii."