THE FRENCH POETRY OF TO-DAY
Paris, December, 1919
FRENCH poetry has not been renewed since the Symbolist Movement by any new and powerfully original poet. Besides, the Symbolist Movement is not finished, and it is in its spirit, in its influence, in its metric, that our poetry still lives to-day. The majority of the best French poets have passed the age of forty and come from Symbolist circles. The influence of the four Symbolist masters, of after 1870, Rimbaud, Laforgue, Mallarmé, and Verlaine, is still visible. A sleeper, like Wells's character, who fell asleep in 1898 and woke up twenty years afterwards, would find poetry much as he left it and with the same essential names.
He would see only that a reign has ended and that another head wears the crown on the coinage; but this by itself is not in the ordinary way a capital event. In his time the name of the prince of the poets was Mallarmé. To-day his name is Paul Fort; and it is very obvious that there is hardly any resemblance between the two. But our sleeper would very well remember having known Paul Fort at the Thursdays in the rue de Rome and in the Mercure, and having once read five or six volumes of Ballades, among them what was perhaps the poet's masterpiece, the astonishing Roman de Louis XI. The prince has nothing absolutely novel to show except his crown.
The sleeper would then ask news of the prince who reigned in his time, and would learn that in the year when he closed his eyes for twenty years Mallarmé closed them for ever.
One of the numerous surprises of the war was the sudden return of the purest and most authentic of the disciples of Mallarmé, M. Paul Valéry, to the poetry which he had abandoned for twenty years. M. Valéry then produced that admirable pendant to Mallarmé's Hérodiade which is called La Jeune Parque, and he published in reviews a few poems that connoisseurs cut out and keep jealously as once they did the sonnets of Hérédia. The volume, which will doubtless appear in a short time, will be published by the Nouvelle Revue Française, and will be a jewel of the same kind as the poems of Mallarmé, and will make the second peak of a double snow-covered Parnassus. Another disciple of Mallarmé, M. Jean Royère, has published a collection of poems, Par la lumière peints, that the master of Valvins would have loved. One finds in them a curious contrast between a somewhat cold and Parnassian form and a beautiful mobility of images which change without ceasing one into the other.
The sleeper, happy to see that the spirit of Mallarmé is still alive, would ask news of the two poets who were in 1898 the leaders of the Symbolist school, M. Henri de Régnier and M. Viélé Griffin. "They still make an honourable figure," we should answer, "but the twenty years during which you have been asleep have not added much to what is essential to their work. In 1898 they had already written all their most beautiful verses, those that your generation knew by heart, which made indeed two original visions of the world."
"I remember, also," the sleeper would continue, "two other poets who were frequently named together and who, if they did not resemble one another in their inspirations, resembled one another in their life apart and their solitary work. One of them lived in a little town of the Pyrenees, and painted there with a naive fervour like that of Francis of Assisi, and also with the irony of a shrewd observer, the things and the faces of his quiet life, the animals and the people of his small countryside. This was Francis Jammes. The other had made at the age of eighteen or twenty two tragic masks shining with genius, Tête d'or and La Ville. Then he went as consul to China and elsewhere. We received sometimes from him strange things, printed at Fou-Tcheou by a widow named Rosario. This was Paul Claudel. Are they still of this world?" "Of this poetical world and of another world still: these are to-day our two great Catholic poets. These in the last twenty years have, all the same, produced new works that you could not have looked for in 1898. But they also belong to the generation that you knew, and all of Claudel was already potentially in Tête d'or, as all of Jammes was potentially in the trilogy of the Poète."
"Am I myself," the sleeper will ask, "an image of this poetry? Has it, like me, been asleep for twenty years or repeating itself indefinitely?" "Not altogether, but it has added nothing essential, except this little in Claudel and Jammes, to what was germinating or flourishing in the garden of 1898." "I understand. You must have been for twenty years one of these happy people who have no history. France has lived peaceful days. And this united and undisturbed life has proved favourable to the continuity of the poetic routine?" "Not at all, O Epimenides. You went to sleep precisely when France was beginning the Dreyfus affair, which was a famous earthquake, and you wake at the moment when we are emerging from a world-wide war which has killed a dozen million men on our planet, and which has given to Europe the appearance you can see here, on the wall, on this map." "And all this has not yet produced any new poets? And, in 1919, when my eyes open again to the light, you send me back where I was in 1898, you give me again all my old poets and none but them, and the great news is that Mallarmé's workshop is open again, that the attention of the poetical world is hung on the new Hérodiade, which M. Valéry is exhibiting there! That is a stupefying thing which is enough to wake up a sleeper, which might even wake up a dead man!"
"Well, my dear sir, poetry has its own logic. The war has, we know, been favourable for those who trade in iron; learn also that it has been an age of gold for those who trade in diamonds. It has pleased us to hold in our hands the diamonds of former times. But be reassured. The war has sometimes brought into the poetic light a kind of iron which is not without beauty. We have had true war poets. The Hymns of Joachim Gasquet make a superb book. He is certainly not attached to the Symbolist Movement. Gasquet is a southerner, a classic, a man with sonorous lungs, with an unquenchable abundance of oratory. The book of this poet from Aix seems as though it were written by a Mirabeau of the trenches."
"But in 1898 I knew Gasquet pretty well, I read his verses. They resembled most closely those of Emmanuel Signoret, and they were very beautiful. Can you only quote to me these ghosts of my own time? Are there, then, no young men?"
"Here are the poems of Henri Ghéon, delicate in their harmony, pure in their emotion, Foi en la France."
"I remember Ghéon very well."
"The devil! I forgot that he also was of the group of 1898. All the same, here are some that will be new to you. Here is Europe, by Jules Romains, in which we find again the powerful and vigorous poet of the Vie Unanime.
"Here is a charming little book which Louis de Gonzague-Frick wrote in pencil on his military postcards: it is called Sous le Bélier de Mars. In that book we find again the succulence and verve of Laurent Tailhade. And you will find them again, in a different form, in Fernand Fleuret's Falourdin. It is a pity that Georges Duhamel has written nothing during the war except some admirable books of prose; but that will not prevent me reminding you of his earlier, beautiful poems in Compagnons. You would also like Charles Vildrac's Livre d'Amour. You should certainly also read the poems, sometimes rather awkward but very original and robust, that Jules Supervieille wrote in South America. And as dessert I will keep for you that exquisite confection L'Appartement des Jeunes Filles, by Roger Allard. Together these make a charming bouquet, but I grant you it is a small one."
Here I end this dialogue, designed to show French poetry stationary in the positions of twenty years ago. We may end by saying that in thus remaining alive and healthy, in thriving for a longer period than the Parnassian movement, French symbolism has made a place for itself which will deserve the respect of posterity. The poetic form which will take its place is not yet in sight. But that form will surely appear when the generation of our sleeper has gone down, to the last man, into slumber irrevocable.
ALBERT THIBAUDET