The Studio has just issued a special number dealing with modern woodcuts and lithographs—British and French. This is the first attempt to collect representative work of modern artists who practise wood-cutting. The revival of the woodcut in book illustration demands special discussion. This will form the subject of next month's Notes à propos of the Studio Woodcut Number.
A LETTER FROM FRANCE
THE FRENCH POETRY OF TO-DAY
Paris, December, 1919
FRENCH poetry has not been renewed since the Symbolist Movement by any new and powerfully original poet. Besides, the Symbolist Movement is not finished, and it is in its spirit, in its influence, in its metric, that our poetry still lives to-day. The majority of the best French poets have passed the age of forty and come from Symbolist circles. The influence of the four Symbolist masters, of after 1870, Rimbaud, Laforgue, Mallarmé, and Verlaine, is still visible. A sleeper, like Wells's character, who fell asleep in 1898 and woke up twenty years afterwards, would find poetry much as he left it and with the same essential names.
He would see only that a reign has ended and that another head wears the crown on the coinage; but this by itself is not in the ordinary way a capital event. In his time the name of the prince of the poets was Mallarmé. To-day his name is Paul Fort; and it is very obvious that there is hardly any resemblance between the two. But our sleeper would very well remember having known Paul Fort at the Thursdays in the rue de Rome and in the Mercure, and having once read five or six volumes of Ballades, among them what was perhaps the poet's masterpiece, the astonishing Roman de Louis XI. The prince has nothing absolutely novel to show except his crown.
The sleeper would then ask news of the prince who reigned in his time, and would learn that in the year when he closed his eyes for twenty years Mallarmé closed them for ever.
One of the numerous surprises of the war was the sudden return of the purest and most authentic of the disciples of Mallarmé, M. Paul Valéry, to the poetry which he had abandoned for twenty years. M. Valéry then produced that admirable pendant to Mallarmé's Hérodiade which is called La Jeune Parque, and he published in reviews a few poems that connoisseurs cut out and keep jealously as once they did the sonnets of Hérédia. The volume, which will doubtless appear in a short time, will be published by the Nouvelle Revue Française, and will be a jewel of the same kind as the poems of Mallarmé, and will make the second peak of a double snow-covered Parnassus. Another disciple of Mallarmé, M. Jean Royère, has published a collection of poems, Par la lumière peints, that the master of Valvins would have loved. One finds in them a curious contrast between a somewhat cold and Parnassian form and a beautiful mobility of images which change without ceasing one into the other.