In the theatre there are numerous and vexing tendencies: Maeterlinck, loyally acknowledging his indebtedness to gentle Charles van Lerburghe, created a spiritual drama and has disciples; but the theatre is the theatre and resists innovation. Ibsen, who had his day in Paris, and Antoine of the Free Theatre were accepted not because of their novelty, but in spite of it. They both were men of the theatre. There is a school of Ideo-realism, and there are Curel, Bataille, Porto-Riche, Maeterlinck, Trarieux, and Marie Leneru; but the technique of the drama is immutable.
In the domain of philosophy and experimental science we find Emile Boutroux, and such collective psychologists as Durckheim, Gustave le Bon, and Gabriel Tarde; names such as Binet, Ribot, Michel Savigny, Alfred Fouillée, and the eminent mathematician, Henri Poincaré—who finally became sceptical of his favourite logic, philosophy, and mathematics. This intellectual volte-face caused endless discussion. The truth is that intuition, the instinctive vs. intellectualism—what William James called "vicious intellectualism"—is swaying the younger French thinkers and poets.
There is, if one is to judge by the anthologies, far too much of metaphysics in contemporary poetry. Poetry is in danger of suffocating in a misty mid-region of metaphysics. The vital impulse, intuitionalism, and rhythmic flow of time in Bergson caught the fancy of the poets. Naturally enough. Literary dogmatism had prevailed too long in academic centres. Now it is the deliquescence of formal verse that is to be feared. Vers-libre, which began with such initiators as that astonishing prodigy, Arthur Rimbaud, has run the gamut from esoteric illuminism to sonorous yawping from the terrace of the brasseries. Have frogs wings? we are tempted to ask. Voices they have, but not bird-like voices.
That fascinating philosopher and friend of Remy de Gourmont—who practically introduced him—must not be overlooked, for he had genuine influence. I refer to brilliant Jules Gaultier, who evolved from Flaubert's Madame Bovary the idea of his Bovarysme—which, succinctly stated, is the instinct in mankind to appear other than it is; from the philosopher to the snob, from the priest to the actor, from the duchess to the prostitute.
Of the influence of politics upon art and literature—which happily are no cloistered virtues in France—we need not speak here. M. Florian-Parmentier does so in his admirable and bulky book, of which we have only exposed the high lights.
Since Jules Huret's Enquête sur l'Evolution Littéraire (1890), followed by similar works of Vellay, Jean Muller, and Gaston Picard (1913), we recall no such pamphlet as Emile Henriot's, mentioned above. He put the questions: "Where are we? Where are we going?" in Le Temps of Paris, June, 1912, to a number of representative thinkers and poets, and reprinted between covers their answers in 1913.
The result is rather confusing, a cloud of contradictory witnesses are assembled, and what one affirms the other denies. There are no schools! Yes, there are groups! We are going to the devil headlong! The sky is full of rainbows and the humming of harps celestial! Better the extravagances of the decayed Romanticists than the debasing realism of the modern novel, cry the Symbolists. A plague on all your houses! say the Unanimists. One fierce Wolf (Loup) admitted that at the banquets of his cénacle he and his fellow poets always ate in effigy the classic writers. Or was it at the Symbolists'? Does it much matter? The gesture counts alone with these youthful "Fumistes"—as Leconte de Lisle had christened their predecessors.
Verlaine, in his waggish mood, persisted in spelling as "Cymbalists" the Symbolists, his own followers. Gongs would have been a better word. A punster speaks of Theists as those who love "le bon Dieu and tea." The new critical school, at its head Charles Maurras, do not conceal their contempt for all these "arrivistes" and revolutionary groups, believing that only a classic renaissance will save Young France. Barnums, the entire lot! pronounces in faded accents the ultra-academic group. Three critics of wide-reaching influence are dead since the war began: Emile Faguet, Jules Lemaître, and Remy de Gourmont. They leave no successors worthy of their mettle.
III
The three volumes of anthology of French Contemporary Poets from 1866 to 1916 have been supplemented by a fourth entitled Poets of Yesterday and To-day (1916). Edited by the painstaking M. G. Walch, it comprises the verse of poets born as late as 1886. Among the rest is the gifted Charles Dumas, who fell in battle, 1914. As epigraph to the new collection the editor has used a line from this poet's testament: "Ce désir d'être tout que j'appelle mon âme!" Another anthology of the new poets is prefaced by M. Gustave Lanson, but the Walch collection reveals more promising talents, or else the poems are more representative.