In poetry the relation between freedom of expression and freedom of thought is a very intimate one. The search for fresh forms and the thinking of fresh thoughts are very apt to go together. Furthermore, there would seem to be some subtle affinity between the releasing of verse from its fetters and the enfranchisement of humanity from its bondage. It would be puerile to lay any stress on the fact that both Henry and Vaillant wrote verses for the revues des jeunes, since this may well have been a mere coincidence. But it is certain that the agitation for the vers libre in France these latter years has been one of the manifestations of the prevalent revolutionary spirit.
True, Verlaine and Mallarmé, though sufficiently revolutionary as regards form, were quite the reverse of revolutionary in their thinking; and plenty of similar instances might be cited. On the other hand, a large majority of the poets who have fought the battle for the recognition of the rights of the vers libre have been imbued, or at least touched, with revolutionary ideas; and Verlaine, Mallarmé, and the other poets who remained loyal to the old society, all in discarding the old verse, were on terms of closest intimacy with the revolutionists, and were for a long time mainly encouraged (not to say “boomed”) by them.
Adolphe Retté and Gustave Kahn are unblushing anarchists. The former, who has had in his time more than one misunderstanding with the law, says of himself and his opinions: “I fenced, in the revues, against scholastics of every sort, maintaining that the artist (by the very fact of his being an artist) should translate his emotions by an individual rhythm, and not according to fixed forms.... I set myself to interrogate all the unfortunates whom I elbowed in this hell [the hospital], worse than that of Dante.... It was shocking.... And I understood solidarity.
“Before entering the hospital, I was a theoretical anarchist. On leaving it, I was the militant which I hope I have never ceased to be. I deny and I revolt.”
All the members of the revolutionary Endehors group were advocates of untrammelled verse; and a goodly portion—among whom Pierre Quillard, Francis Vielé-Griffin, and Henri de Regnier may be mentioned—were exponents of it.
Quillard is now a militant anarchist at home, and has displayed on several occasions a chivalrous and more than platonic enthusiasm for emancipating movements abroad. Vielé-Griffin is mildly anarchistic. He says:—
“My æsthetic convictions, which are founded on the axiom, Art is individualist and normal (that is to say, an artist worthy of the name carries in his consciousness the necessary rules of the expression for which he was born, and all dogmas are by just so much detrimental to art), led me to consider whether the anarchist doctrines might not have some connection with these convictions. I am far from having elucidated all the points which have occupied me up to this moment; but my philosophy, essentially theistic, welcomes without effort a sort of normal anarchism, which I am about to discover, perhaps, in the divers anarchistic works I am consulting.”
M. de Regnier, recognised in the most reputable quarters, has practically ceased his commerce with revolutionary spirits. But this fact does not in the least impair the significance of the other fact that he found this commerce conducive, necessary even, to his proper development in the earlier stages of his career. Emile Verhaeren, Georges Eekhoud, and several other Belgians whose art is intimately associated with Paris are, or have been, poets of revolt.
The Décadents[127] and Néo-Décadents, Symbolistes and Néo-Symbolistes, Instrumentistes, Déliquescents, and Brutalistes,[128] most of the sets of poets, in fact, who have made a stir in the French world of letters since the disappearance—as a coterie—of the Parnassiens, have included many revolutionists, mostly of anarchistic bent, protesters as well against the oppressions of politics and the conventions of society as against the obsession of stereotyped poetic forms.[129]
“The greater part,” writes one of their number, “flaunted proudly their disdain of current prejudices, current morals, and current institutions.... Some attacked property, religion, family; others ridiculed marriage and extolled l’union libre; others vaunted the blessings of cosmopolitanism and of universal association.... With some, it is true, the antagonism was only apparent,—simple love of paradox, inordinate desire to get themselves talked about by uttering eccentric phrases. But this state of mind existed. If all did not detest sincerely our bourgeois society, each one lashed it with violent diatribes, each one had a vague intuition of something better.”