‘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.”’