Moréas, like his Phoebe, has tried to put on many diverse countenances and even to cover his face with masks. We always recognize him from his brothers: he is a poet.
[STUART MERRILL]
The logic of an amateur of literature is offended upon his discovering that his admirations disagree with those of the public; but he is not surprised, knowing that there are the elect of the last hour. The public's attitude is less benignant when it learns the disaccord which is noticeable between it, obscure master of glories, and the opinion of the small oligarchic number. Accustomed to couple these two ideas, renown and talent, it shows a repugnance in disjoining them; it does not admit, for it has a secret sense of justice or logic, that an illustrious author might be so by chance alone, or that an unknown author merits recognition. Here is a misunderstanding, doubtless old as the six thousand years ascribed by La Bruyère to human thought, and this misunderstanding, based on very logical and solid reasoning, sets at defiance from the height of its pedestal all attempts at conciliation. To end it, it is needful to limit oneself to the timid insinuations of science and to ask if we truly know the "thing in itself," if there is not a certain inevitable little difference between the object of knowledge and the knowledge of the object. On this ground, as one will be less understood, agreement will be easier and then the legitimate difference of opinions will be voluntarily admitted, since it is not a question of captivating Truth—that reflection of a moon in a well—but to measure by approximation, as is done with stars, the distance or the difference existing between the genius of a poet and the idea we have of it.
Were it necessary, which is quite useless, to express oneself more clearly, it might be said that, according to several persons whose opinion perhaps is worth that of many others, all the literary history, as written by professors according to educational views, is but a mass of judgments nearly all reversed, and that, in particular, the histories of French literature is but the banal cataloguing of the plaudits and crowns fallen to the cleverest or most fortunate. Perhaps it is time to adopt another method and to give, among the celebrated persons, a place to those who could have attained it—if the snow had not fallen on the day they announced the glory of the new spring.
Stuart Merrill and Saint-Pol-Roux are of those whom the snow gainsaid. If the public knows their names less than some others, it is not that they have less merit, it is that they had less good fortune.
The poet of Fastes, by the mere choice of this word, bespeaks the fair frankness of a rich soul and a generous talent. His verses, a little gilded, a little clamorous, truly burst forth and peal for the holidays and gorgeous parades, and when the play of sunshine has passed, behold the torches illumined in the night for the sumptuous procession of supernatural women. Poems or women, they doubtless are bedecked with too many rings and rubies and their robes are embroidered with too much gold; they are royal courtisans rather than princesses, but we love their cruel eyes and russet hair.
After such splendid trumpets, the Petits Poèmes d'Automne, the noise of the spuming wheel, a sound of a bell, an air of a flute in tone of moonlight: it is the drowsiness and dreaming saddened by the silence of things, the incertitude of the hours:
C'est le vent d'automne dans l'allée,
Soeur, écoute, et la chute sur l'eau
Des feuilles du saule et du bouleau,
Et c'est le givre dans la vallée,
Dénoue—il est l'heure—tes cheveaux
Plus blonds que le chanvre que tu files....
Et viens, pareille à ces châtelaines
Dolentes à qui tu fais songer,
Dans le silence où meurt ton léger
Rouet, ô ma soeur des marjolaines!
[(Tr. 52)]