Albert Mockel is one of those very rare cases in which a good critic is at the same time a good poet. As a critic[12] he has probably no rival except Remy de Gourmont. His hall-mark is subtlety; but his learning, too, makes one gasp. (He might, no doubt, have been a professor if he had not been so brilliant). His poetry is philosophy; and the wonderful thing is that it should be such poetry. It is as light as a breeze, and like a deep river that shows its pebbles. He has in preparation a book of verse, La Flamme Immortelle, which will be a magnificent realization of his doctrine of Aspiration. Verhaeren interprets the outer world, Mockel the inner world as reflected in the outer world: for existence is double, form and shadow. Mockel has written, too, a child's story-book, Contes pour les enfants d'hier[13] which should not be given to children.
Paul Gérardy is a well-known German poet as well as a French one. He belongs to the school of Stefan George.
In Georges Marlow's poetry the prevailing note is refinement. He has written little, but what he has written is of the first water. Some of the verse in his collection L'Ame en Exil is like Brussels lace:
Aline, au fil de l'eau tremblante
Où les tourelles réflétées
Parlent d'une ville noyée,
Pourquoi baigner tes mains dolentes!
Princesse trop frêle surgie
D'un recueil de miniatures,
Gracile fée aux lèvres pures
Du vain prestige des magies,
Ta peine étrange quelle est-elle
Pour qu'en cette onde puérile
Mirant ta candeur infantile
Tu songes aux fleurs immortelles
Du jardin vague où les éphèbes
Nimbés d'équivoques lueurs,
Sur l'autel d'or de la langueur
Immolent l'ange de leurs rêves?
Fernand Séverin, who is lecturer in French literature at the University of Ghent, is a poet of great charm. His diction is apparently that of Racine, but in substance he is essentially modern. "Virginal" is the epithet the French critics apply to him, and it describes his chaste, transparent poetry very well. "Tout y est en nuances, mystérieusement fuyantes et fondues" (Victor Kinon). He dreams:
"les mains pleines de roses
Et le cur enlacé de longs rameaux de lys."
He is full of languor:
"Car mes rêves sont las comme de blancs oiseaux
En qui verse l'ennui de l'azur et des eaux
Le suprême désir de dormir sur les grèves."
Isi-Collin's La Vallée heureuse is full of fine things. In such a poem as La Mort d'Ophélie the influence of pre-Raphaelite paintings may be discerned. There is Wordsworthianism in his verse (especially Le Pâtre), as there is in Severin's; not a voluntary absorption into the outer world, but a passing reflection of it in the inner being; no direct message, but a statement of a state.
The only poetess in our collection is Jean Dominique. Besides L'Anémone des Mers she has published La Gaule Blanche and L'Aile Mouillée (Mercure de France, 1903 and 1909). Her verse is exquisitely feminine, shimmering like shot silk, intimately personal, and perfect in form. "She notes the very shadow that roses cast on her soul." She has written poems which are worthy of Sappho, as that which begins: