Unicorns Part 13

CHAPTER XXV

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 rea.s.suring 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 cla.s.s, the Intellectuals, who control artistic opinion because of its superior claims; a cla.s.s to which there is no a.n.a.logy 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 n.o.ble 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-Cla.s.sicism, 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 impa.s.sibility of the Parna.s.sians 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 Parna.s.sians. 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 b.u.t.ton-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 sh.o.r.e 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 st.u.r.dy Kymrist, and believes not in literatures transalpine or transpyrenean. He loathes the "pastiche,"

the purveyors of "canned" cla.s.sics, 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 Herac.l.i.tus 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 c.o.c.kles 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 bra.s.series. 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 sn.o.b, from the priest to the actor, from the d.u.c.h.ess to the prost.i.tute.

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 a.s.sembled, 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 cla.s.sic 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 cla.s.sic renaissance will save Young France. Barnums, the entire lot! p.r.o.nounces in faded accents the ultra-academic group. Three critics of wide-reaching influence are dead since the war began: Emile f.a.guet, 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 ent.i.tled 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 ant.i.thesis 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.