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
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.’