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 reassuring 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 class, the Intellectuals, who control artistic opinion because of its superior claims; a class to which there is no analogy 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 noble 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-Classicism, 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 æsthetic. 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 impassibility of the Parnassians 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 Parnassians. 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 mediæval 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 Button-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.