Signor Marinetti, who is bilingual, is eccentrically amusing. But are his contortions on the tripod art? The auto and aeroplane are celebrated, also steam, speed, mist, and the destruction of all art prior to 1900. The new schools are wary of rhetoric, thus following Paul Verlaine's injunction: Take Eloquence by the neck and wring it! Imagists abound, but they are in an aristocratic minority. The watchword is: sobriety in thinking and expression.
Strangely enough, two names emerge victoriously from the confusing lyric symphony and they are those of Belgian-born poets—Emile Verhaeren, whose tragic death last year was a loss to literature, and Maurice Maeterlinck. What living lyric poet has the incomparable power of that epical Verhaeren, unless it be that of the more sophisticated Gabriele d'Annunzio, or the sumptuous decorative verse of Henri de Régnier, whose polished art is the antithesis of the exuberant, lawless, resonant reverberations of Verhaeren?
What thinker and dramatist is known like Maeterlinck, except it be the magical Gerhart Hauptmann? Rough to brutality—for Verhaeren at one time emulated Walt Whitman (variously spelled as "Walth" and "Withman"); with the names of foreigners Paris has ever been careless in its orthography, witness "Litz" and "Edgard Poë"; he can boast the divine afflatus. His personality is of the centrifugal order. He has a tumultuous rhythmic undertow that sweeps one irresistibly with him. But his genius is disintegrating, rather than constructive.
Of what French poet among the younger group dare we say the same? Grace, lyric sweetness, subtlety in ideas, facile technique—all these, yes, but not the power of saying great things greatly.
As for Maeterlinck, he owes something to Emerson; but his mellow wisdom and clairvoyance are his own. He is a seer, and his crepuscular pages are pools of glimmering incertitudes, whereas of Verhaeren we may say, as Carlyle said of Landor's prose: "The sound of it is like the ring of Roman swords on the helmets of barbarians."
Henry James tells a story of an argument between Zola, Flaubert, and Turgenev, the Russian novelist declaring that for him Châteaubriand was not the Ultima Thule of prose perfection. This insensibility to the finer nuances of the language angered and astounded Zola and Flaubert. They set it down to the fact that none but a Frenchman can quite penetrate the inner sanctuary of his own language; which may be true, though I believe that for Turgenev the author of Atala was temperamentally distasteful.
Therefore, when an American makes the statement that the two Belgians are superior to the living Frenchmen it may be classed as a purely personal judgment. But the proposition first mooted by a distinguished critic, Remy de Gourmont, that Maeterlinck and Verhaeren be elected to the French Academy, was not a bizarre one. The war has effaced many artistic frontiers. The majority of the little circles that once pullulated in Paris no longer exist. Both Verhaeren and Maeterlinck are now Frenchmen of the French. Their inclusion in the Academy would have honoured that venerable and too august body as much as the Belgian poets.
As to the war's influence on French letters, that question is for soothsayers to decide, not for the present writer. After 1870 certain psychiatrists pretended that a degeneration of body and soul had blighted artistic and literary Europe. Well, we can only wish for the new France of 1920 and later such a galaxy of talents and genius as the shining groups from 1875 to 1914. No need to finger the chaplet of their names and achievements. Such books as those by Catulle Mendès, Florian-Parmentier, Lanson, and Walch prove our contention.