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Harvard College
Library

raOM THE FUND OP

HARRIET J. G. DENNY

OP BOSTON

MY FATHER
HOMER L. POUND

INSTIGATIONS

. OF

EZRA POUND

TOGETHEK WITH

AN ESSAY
ON THE
CHINESE
WRITTEN
CHARACTER

ERNEST FENOLLOSA

BONI AND LIVERIGHT

Publishers New York

Li 3S'=i-<9d

FAINTED IN TRK UNflXO 8TATB8 OV AKEUCA

^^^

TABLE OF CONTENTS

I. A STUDY OF FRENCH POETS M«l 3 . _ ..J^

Narration 3 - ' ^

Jules Laforgue 74.- ^

Tristan Corbie 19

Arthur Rimbaud 39

Remy de Gourmont 35

De R^gnier 40

Emile Verhaeren 45

Viel6-Griffin 46

Stuart Merril 47

Laurent Tailhade 48

Francis Jammes 53

Mor^ 63

Spire 65

Vildrac 67 .#

Jtties Remains 69 ( '

Unanimisme 78 ^ ^

De Bossch^re's study o£ Elskamp 83 - ^. s ^ '

Albert Mockel and " La WaUonie " 87

IL HENRY JAMES 106 \,

in. REMY DE GOURMONT, a Distinction foUowed

by notes 168

L^'

viu TABLE OF CONTENTS

I K IV. IN THE VORTEX 196

Eliot 196

Joyce 203

Lewis 213

An Historical Essayist 224

"" The New Poetry 235

Breviora 246

PART SECOND

V. OUR TETRARCHAL PRECIEUSE
A divagation from Jules Laforgue

VL GENESIS, or the first book in the Bible

Vn. ARNAUT DANIEL

VIII. TRANSLATORS OF GREEK

'"!.

266

a86\/

3"t.

IX. An essay on THE CHINESE WRITTEN CHAR- 1 v
ACTER by the late ERNEST FENOLLOSA,
edited by Ezra Pound. 357

A STUDY IN FRENCH POETS

INSTIGATIONS

A STUDY IN FRENCH POETS

The time when the intellectual affairs of America
could be conducted on a monolingual basis is over. It
has been irksome for long. The intellectual life of
Lx)ndon is dependent on people who understand the
French language about as well as their own. America's
part in contemporary culture is based chiefly upon two
men familiar with Paris : Whistler and Henry James. It
is something in the nature of a national disgrace that
a New Zealand paper, "The Triad," should be more
alert to, and have better regular criticism of, contem-
porary French publications than any American period-
ical has yet had.

I had wished to give but a brief anthology * of French
poems, interposing no comment of my own between
author and reader; confining my criticism to selection.
But that plan was not feasible. I was indebted to MM.
Davray and Valette for cordial semi-permissions to quote
the "Mercure" publications. ^ \ivv>

Certain delicate wines will not'trkvel; they are not
always the best wines. Foreign criticism may some-
times correct the criticism du cru. I cannot pretend to

♦ The Little Review, February, 191a

4 INSTIGATIONS

give the reader a* summary of contemporary French
opinion, but certain French poets have qualities strong
enough to be perceptible to me, that is, to at least one
alien reader; certain things are translatable from one
language to another, a tale or an image will "translate" ;
music will, practically, never translate} and if a work
be taken abroad in the original tongue, certain proper-
ties seem to become less apparent, or less important.
Fancy styles, questions of local "taste/' lose importance.
Even though I know the overwhelming importance of
technique, technicalities in a foreign tongue cannot have
for me the importance they have to a man writing in
that tongue; almost the only technique perceptible to a
foreigner is the presentation of content as free as pos-
sible from the clutteration of dead technicalities, fustian
a la Louis XV; and from timidities of workmanship.
This is perhaps the only technique that ever matters, the
only ffKBstria,

Mediocre poetry is, I think, the same everywhere;
there is not the slightest need to import it; we search
foreign tongues for mcestria and for discoveries not yet
revealed in the home product. The critic of a foreign
literature must know a reasonable amount of the bad
poetry of the nation he studies if he is to attain any
sense of proportion.

He will never be as sensitive to fine shades of lan-
guage as the native; he has, however, a chance of being
less bound, less allied to some group of writers. It
would be politic for me to praise as many living French-
men as possible, and thereby to increase the number of
my chances for congenial acquaintance on my next trip
to Paris, and to have a large number of current French
books sent to me to review.

But these rather broad and general temptations can

A STUDY IN FRENCH POETS 5

scarcely lead me to praise one man instead of another.

If I have thrown over current French opinion, I must
urge that foreign opinion has at times been a corrective.
England has never accepted the continental opinion of
Byron; the right estimate lies perhaps between the two.
Heine is, I have heard, better read outside Germany than
within. The continent has never accepted the idiotic
British adulation of Milton; on the other hand, the
idiotic neglect of Landor has never been rectified by the
continent.

Foreign criticism, if honest, can never be quite the
same as home criticism: it may be better or worse; it
may have a value similar to that of a different decade
or century and has at least some chance of escaping
whims and stampedes of opinion.

I do not "aim at completeness." I believe that the
American-English reader has heard in a general way of
Baudelaire and Verlaine and Mallarmi; that Mallarmi,
perhaps unread, is apt to be slightly overestimated ; that
Gautier's reputation, despite its greatness, is not yet as
great as it should be.

After a man has lived a reasonable time with the two
volumes of Gautier's poetry, he might pleasantly venture
upon the authors whom I indicate in this essay; and he
might have, I think, a fair chance of seeing them in
proper perspedtive. I omit certain nebulous writers
because I think their work bad ; I omit the Pamassiens,
Samain and Heredia, firstly because their work seems
to me to show little that was not already implicit in
Gautier ; secondly, because America has had enough Par-
nassienism — perhaps second rate, but still enough. (The
verses of La Comtesse de Noailles in the "Revue d^^
Deux Mondes," and those of John Vance Cheney in "The
Atlantic" once gave me an almost identical pleasure.)

6 INSTIGATIONS

I do not mean that all the poems here to be quoted are
better than Samain's "Mon ame est une infante . . ."
or his "Cldopatre."

We may take it that Gautier achieved hardness in
Emaux et Camies; his earlier work did in France very
much what remained for the men of "the nineties" to
accomplish in England. Gautier's work done in "the
thirties" shows a similar beauty, a similar sort of tech-
nique. If the Pamassiens were following Gautier they
fell short of his merit. Heredia was perhaps the best
of them. He tried to make his individual statements
more "poetic" ; but his whole, for all this, becomes frigid.

Samain followed him and began to go "soft" ; there is
in him just a suggestion of muzziness. Heredia is
"hard," but there or thereabouts he ends. Gautier is
intent on being "hard" ; is intent on conveying a certain
verity of feeling, and he ends by being truly poetic.
Heredia wants to be poetic and hard; the hardness ap-
pears to him as a virtue in the poetic. And one tends
to conclude, from this, that all attempts to be poetic in
some manner or other, defeat their own end; whereas
an intentness on the quality of the emotion to be con-
veyed makes for poetry.

I intend here a qualitative analysis. The work of
Gautier, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Mallarme, Samain, Here-
dia, and of the authors I quote here should give an idea
of the sort of poetry that has been written in France
during the last half century, or at least during the last
forty years. If I am successful in my choice, I will indi-
cate most of the best and even some of the half-good.
Bever and Leautaud's anthology contains samples of
some forty or fifty more poets.*

* A testimony to the effect of anthologies, and to the prestige
of Van Bever and Leautaud in forming French taste, and at the

A STUDY IN FRENCH POETS 7

After Gautier, France produced, as nearly as I can
understand, three chief and admirable poets: Tristan
Corbiere, perhaps the most poignant writer since Villon ;
Rimbaud, a vivid and indubitable genius ; and Laforgue —
a slighter, but in some ways a finer "artist" than either
of the others. I do not mean that he "writes better"
than Rimbaud ; and Eliot has pointed out the wrongness
of Symons's phrase, "Laforgue the eternal adult, Rim-
baud the eternal child/' Rimbaud's effects seem often to
come as the beauty of certain silver crystals produced
by chemical means. Laforgue always knows what he is
at; Rimbaud, the "genius" in the narrowest and deepest
sense of the term, the "most modem," seems, almost
without knowing it, to hit on the various ways in which
the best writers were to follow him, slowly. Laforgue
is the "last word" : — out of infinite knowledge of all the
ways of saying a thing he finds the right way. Rimbaud,
when right, is so because he cannot be bothered to exist
in any other modality.

JULES LAFORGUE
(i86(>-'87)

Laforgue was the "end of a period"; that is to say,

same time the most amazing response to my French number
of the Little Review, was contained in a letter from one of the
very poets I had chosen to praise:

Je vous remercie de m'avoir r^v^le Laforgue que je connais-
sais seulement par les extraits publies dans la premiere An-
thologie en i volume par Van Bever et Leautaud."

This is also a reply to those who solemnly assured me that
any foreigner attempting to criticize French poetry would meet
nothing but ridicule from French authors.

I am free to say that Van B. and L's selections would have
led me neither to Laforgue nor to Rimbaud. They were,
however, my approach to many of the other poets, and their
two volume anthology is invaluable.

8 INSTIGATIONS

he summed up and summarized and dismissed nineteenlli-
century French literature, its foibles and fashions, as
Flaubert in "Bouvard and Pecudiet" summed up nine-
teenth-century general civilization. He satirized Flau-
bert's heavy "Salammbo" manner inimitably, and he man-
ages to be more than a critic, for in process of this ironic
summary he conveys himself, il raconte lui-meme en
racontant son &ge et ses moeurs, he delivers the moods
and the passion of a rare and sophisticated personality:
"point ce 'gaillard-la' ni le Superbe . . . mais au fond
distingu^ et franche comme une herbe'M

Oh! laissez-moi seulement reprendre haleine,
Et vous aurez un livre enfin de bonne foi.

En attendant, ayez p\ti6 de ma misire !
Que je vous sois i tons un etre bienvenu !
Et que je sois absous pour mon ame sincere,
Comine le fut Phryne pour son sincere nu.

He is one of the poets whom it is practically impossible
to "select." Almost any other six poems would be quite
as "representative" as the six I am quoting.

PIERROTS
{On a des principes)

Elle disait, de son air vain fondamental :

" Je t'aime pour toi seul !" — Oh ! li, li, grele histoire ;

Oui, comme I'art ! Du calme, 6 salaire illusoire

Du capitaliste Id&il! }

Elle faisait : "J'attends, me voici, je sais pas" . . .
Le regard pris de ces larges candeurs des lunes ;

A STUDY IN FRENCH POETS 9

—Oh ! li, li, cc n'est pas pcut-etrc pour des prunes,

Qu'on a fait ses classes ici-bas ?
Mais void qu'un beau soir, infortunee i point,
Elle meurt! — Oh! la, la; bon, changement de theme!
On sait que tu dois ressusciter le troisiime

Jour, sinon en personne, du moins
Dans I'odeur, les verdures, les eaux des beaux mois I
Et tu iras, levant encore bien plus de dupes
Vers le Zaimph de la Joconde, vers la Jupc !

II se pourra meme que j'en sois.

PIERROTS

III

Com ME ils vont molester, la nuit,
Au profond des pares, les statues,
Mais n'offrant qu'au moins devetues
Leur bras et tout ce qui s'ensuit,

En tete-4-tete avec la femme
Ils ont toujours Tair d'etre un tiers,
Confondent demain avec hier,
Et demandent Rien avec ame I

Jurent "je t'aime" I'air la-bas,
D'une voix sans timbre, en extase,
Et concluent aux plus folles phrases
Par des: "Mon Dieu, n*insistons pas?*'

Jusqu'a ce qu'ivre, Elle s'oublie.
Prise d'on ne sait quel besoin
De lune? dans leurs bras, fort loin
Des convenances ^tablies.

lo INSTIGATIONS

COMPLAINTE DES CONSOLATIONS

Quia voluit consalari

Ses yeux ne me voient pas, son corps serait jaloux ;
Elle m'a dit: "monsieur ..." en m'enterrant d'un

geste;
Elle est Tout, Tunivers modeme et le celeste.
Soit, draguons done Paris, et ravitaillons-nous,
Tant bien que mal, du reste.

Les Landes sans espoir de ses regards bruits,
Semblaient parfois de3 paons prets i mettre i la voile . . .
Sans chercher i me consoler vers les ^toiles,
Ah ! Je trouverai bien deux yeux aussi sans cles,
Au Louvre, en quelque toile I

Oh I qu'incultes, ses airs, revant dans la prison
D'un cant sur le qui-vive au travers de nos hontes !
Mais, en m'appliquant bien, moi dont la foi ddmonte
Les jours, les ciels, les nuits, dans les quatre saisons
Je trouverai mon compte.

Sa bouche I i moi, ce pli pudiquement martyr
Ou s'aigrissent des nostalgies de nostalgies !
Eh bien, j'irai parfois, tres sincere vigie,
Du haut de Notre-Dame aider Taube, au sortir,
De passables orgies.

Mais, Tout va la reprendre ! — Alors Tout m'en absout
Mais, Elle est ton bonheur I — Non I je suis trop immense,
Trop chose. Comment done t mais ma seule presence
Ici-bas, vraie a s'y mirer, est I'air de Tout :
De la Femme au Silence.

A STUDY IN FRENCH POETS n

LOCUTIONS DES PIERROTS

Je te vas dire: moi, quand j'aime,
C'est d'un coeur, au fond sans apprets,
Mais dignement 61abore
Dans nos plus singuliers probl^es.

Ainsi, pour mes moeurs et mon art,
C'est la p^riode v6dique
Qui seule a bon droit revendique
Cc que j'cn "attcllc i ton char.'

Comme c'est notre Bible hindoue
Qui, tiens, m'amene i, caresser,
Avec CCS yeux de cetac^,
Ainsi, bien sans but, ta joue.

This sort of thing will drive many bull-moose readers
to the perilous borders of apoplexy, but it may give
pleasure to those who believe that man is incomplete
without a certain amount of mentality. Laforgue is an
angel with whom our modem poetic Jacob must struggle.

COMPLAINTE DES PRINTEMPS

Permettez, 6 sir^e, ,

Void que votrc haleine

Embaume la verveine ;

C'est rprintemps qui s'amenet

12 INSTIGATIONS

systeme, en effet, ram^ne le printemps,
Avec son impudent cortege d'excitants.

Otez done ces mitaines;
Et n'ayez, inhumaine,
Que mes soupirs pour traine :
Ous'qu'il y a de la gene . . .

— Ah I yeux bleus meditant sur Tennui de leur art !
Et vous, jeunes divins, aux soirs crus de hasard !

Du geant a la naine,
Vois, tout bon sire entraine
Quelque contemporaine.
Prendre I'air, par hygiene . . .

— Mais vous saignez ainsi pour I'amour de I'exil!
Pour ramouf de TAmour ! D'ailleurs, ainsi soit-il . . .

T'ai-je fait de la peine?
Oh ! viens vers les f ontaines
Ou tournent les phalenes
Des Nuits Elyseennes!

— PiiTibeche aux yeux vaincus, bellatre aux beaux jarrets.
Donnez votre fumier a la fleur du Regret.

Voila que son haleine
N'embaum' plus la verveine!
Drole de ph^nomene . . .
Hein, a I'annee prochaine?

— Vierges d'hier, ce soir traineuses de foetus,
A genoux ! voici Theure ou se plaint I'Angelus.

A STUDY IN FRENCH POETS 13

Nous n'irons plus au bbis,
Les pins sont 6temels,
Les cors ont des appels ! . . .
Neiges des pales mois,
Vous serez mon missel !
— ^Jusqu'au jour de d^el.

COMPLAINTE DES PIANOS

Qu'on efUend dans les Quartiers Aisis

Menez Tame que les Lettres ont bien nourrie,
Les pianos, les pianos, dans les quartiers aises I
Premiers soirs, sans pardessus, chaste flanerie,
Aux complaintes des nerfs incompris ou bris&.

Ces en f ants, a quoi revent-elles,
Dans les ennuis des ritoumelles?

— "Pr&iux des soirs,
Christs des dortoirst

"Tu t'en vas et tu nous laisses,
Tu nous laiss's et tu t'en vas,
D^faire et refaire ses tresses,
Broder d'6ternels canevas."

Jolie ou vague? triste ou sage? encore pure?
O jours, tout m'est ^1? ou, monde, moi je veux?
Et si vierge, du moins, de la bonne blessure,
Sachant quels gras couchants ont les plus blancs aveux?

Mon Dieu, k quoi done revent-elles?
A des Roland, k des dentelles?

14 INSTIGATIONS

— "Cocurs en prison,
Lentes saisonst

*Tu t'en vas et tu nous quittes,
Tu nous quitt's et tu t'en vas I
Convents gris, choeurs de Sulamites,
Sur nos seins nuls croisons nos bras/'

Fatales clis de Tetre un beau jour apparues;
PsittI aux h^r^it^s en ponctuels ferments,
Dans le bal incessant de nos dtranges rues ;
Ah! pensionnats, theatres, journaux, romans!

AUez, st6riles ritournclles,
La vie est vraie et criminelle.

— "Rideaux tires,
Peut-on entrer?

'Tu t'en vas et tu nous laisses,
Tu nous laiss's et tu t'en vas.
La source des frais rosiers baisse,
Vraiment ! Et lui qui ne vient pas . . ."

II viendra ! Vous serez les pauvres coeurs en f ante,
Fiances au remords comme aux essais sans fond,
Et les suffisants coeurs cossus, n'ayant d'autre hote
Qu'un train-train pavois^ d'estime et de chiffons

Mourir? peut-etre brodent-elles,
Pour un oncle i dot, des bretelles ?

— "J^maAs ! Jamais !
Si tu savais t

A STUDY IN FRENCH POETS iS

Tu t'en vas et tu nous quittes,
Tu nous quitt's et tu t'en vas,
Mais tu nous reviendras bien vite
Gu^rir mon beau mal, n'est-ce pas T*

Et c'est vrai ! Tldeal les fait divaguer toutes ;
Vigne boheme, meme en ces quartiers ais£s.
La vie est la ; le pur flacon des vives gouttes
Sera, comme it convient, d'eau propre baptist.

Aussi, bientot, se joueront-elles
De plus exactes ritoumelles.

— Seul oreiller I
Mur familierl

"Tu t'en vas et tu nous laisses,
Tu nous laiss's et tu t'en vas.
Que ne suis-je morte i, la messe I
O mois, o linges, 6 repas I"

The journalist and his papers exist by reason of their
"protective coloring." They must think as their readers
think at a given moment.

It is impossible that Jules Laforgue should have writ-
ten his poems in America in "the eighties/' He wis
bom in i860, died in 1887 of la misire, of consumption
and abject poverty in Paris. The vaunted sensitiveness
of French perception, and the fact that he knew a reason-
able number of wealthy and influential people, did noth-
ing to prevent this. He had published two small volumes,
one edition of each. The seventh edition of his collected
poems is dated 1913, and doubtless they have been re-
printed since then with increasing celerity.

i6 INSTIGATIONS

Un couchant des Cosmogonies!
Ah! que la Vie est quotidienne . . .

Et, du plus vrai qu'on se souvienne,
Comme on fut pietre et sans g6nie. . . .

What is the man in the street to make of this, or of the
Comphinte des Bons Minages!

L'Art sans poitrine m'a trop longtemps berce dupe.
Si ses labours sont fiers, que ses bl6s d&evants I
Tiens, laisse-moi beler tout aux plis de ta jupe
Qui fleure le convent

Delicate irony, the citadel of the intelligent, has a curi-
ous effect on these people. They wish always to be ex-
horted, at all times no matter how incongruous and un-
suitable, to do those things which almost any one will
and does do whenever suitable opportunity is presented.
As Henry James has said, "It was a period when writers
besought the deep blue sea 'to roll.' "

The ironist is one who suggests that the reader should
Think, and this process being unnatural to the majority of
mankind, the way of the ironical is beset with snares and
with furze-bushes.

Laforgue was a purge and a critic. He laughed out
the errors of Flaubert, i.e., the clogging and ctunbrous
historical detail. He left Coeur Simple, UEducation,
Madame Bovary, Bouvard. His Salome makes game of
the rest The short story has become vapid because sixty
thousand story writers have all set themselves to imi-
tating De Maupassant, perhaps a thousand from the
original.

Laforgue implies definitely that certain things in prose
were at an end, and I think he marks the next phase
after Gautier in French poetry. It seems to me that

A STUDY IN FRENCH POETS 17

without a familiarity with Laforgue one can not appre-
ciate — ^i. e., determine the value of — certain positives and
certain negatives in French poetry since 1890.

He deals for the most part with literary poses and
ctichis, yet he makes them a vehicle for the expression
of his own very personal emotions, of his own unper-
turbed sincerity.

Je ne suis pas "ce gaillard-li I" ni Le Superbel
Mais mon ame, qu'un cri un peu cm exacerbe,
Est au fond distingufe et f ranche comme une herbe.

This is not the strident and satiric voice of Corbiere,
calling Hugo "Garde National {pique," and Lamartine
"Lacrymatoire d'abonnes/' It is not Tailhade drawing
with rough strokes the people he sees daily in Paris, and
bursting with guffaws over the Japanese in their mackin^
toshes, the West Indian mulatto behind the bar in the
Quartier. It is not Georges Fourest burlesquing in a
cafe ; Fourest's guffaw is magnificent, he is hardly satir-
ical. Tailhade draws from life and indulges in occa-
sional squabbles.

Laforgue was a better artist than any of these men
save Corbiere. He was not in the least of their sort

Beardsley's "Under the Hill" was until recently the
only successful attempt to produce "anything like La-
forgue" in our tongue. "Under the Hill" was bsued in
a limited edition. Laforgue's Moraliiis Ltgendaires was
issued in England by the Ricketts and Hacon press in
a limited edition, and there the thing has remained.
Laforgue can never become a popular cult because tyros
can not imitate him.

One may discriminate between Laforgue's tone and
that of his contemporary French satirists. He is the

i8 INSTIGATIONS

finest wrought ; he is most "verbalist." Bad verbalism is
rhetoric, or the use of clichi unconsciously, or a mere
playing with phrases. But there is good verbalism, dis-
tinct from lyricism or imagism, and* in this Laforgue is
a master. He writes not the popular language of any
country, but an international tongue conmion to the ex-
cessively cultivated,, and to those more or less familiar
with French literature of the first three-fourths of the
nineteenth century.

He hais done, sketchily and brilliantly, for French lit-
erature a work not incomparable to what Flaubert was
doing for "France" in Bouvard and Phuchet, if one
may compare the flight of the butterfly with the progress
of an ox, both proceeding toward the same point of the
compass. He has dipped his wings in the dye of scien-
tific terminology. Pierrot itnberbe has

Un air d'hydroc6phale asperge.

4The tyro can not play about with such things. Verbal-
ism demandis a set form used with irreproachable skill.
Satire needs, usually, the form of cutting rhymes to drive
it home.

Chautauquas, Mrs. Eddy, Dr. Dowies, Comstocks, So-
cieties for the Prevention of All Human Activities, are
impossible in the wake of Laforgue. And he is there-
fore an exquisite poet, a deliverer of the nations, a
Numa Pompilius, a father of light. And to many people
this mystery, the mystery why such force should reside
in so fragile a book, why such power should coincide
with so great a nonchalance of manner, will remain for-
ever a mystery.

A STUDY IN FRENCH POETS 19

Que loin Tame type
Qui m'a dit adieu
Parce que mes yeux
Manquaieiit de principes !

Elle, en ce moment.
Elle, si pain tendre,
Oh ! peut-ctre engendre
Quelque garaement.

Qtr on Ta unie
Avec un monsieur,
Ce qu'il y a de mieux,
Mais pauvre en g6nie.

Laforgue is incontrovertible. The "strong silent man"
of the kinema has not monopolized all the certitudes.

TRISTAN CORBIERE
(1841-1875)

Corbiere seems to me the greatest poet of the period.*
"La Rapsode Foraine et le Pardon de Sainte-Anne" is,
to my mind, beyond all comment. He first published in
'73, remained practically unknown until Verlaine's essay
in '84, and was hardly known to "the public'' until the
Messein edition of his work in '91.

LA RAPSODE FORAINE ET LE PARDON DE

SAINTE-ANNE

La Palud, 27 aout, jour du Pardon.

B6nite est I'infertile plage •

Ou, comme la mer, tout est nud.

20 INSTIGATIONS

Sainte est la chapelle sauvage
De Sainte-Anne-de-la-Palud . . .

De la Bonne Fenune Sainte Anne,
Grand'tante du petit Jesus,
En bois pourri dans sa soutane
Riche . . . plus riche que Cr6sus I

Contre elle la petite Vierge,
Fuseau f rele, attend VAngelus;
Au coin, Joseph, tenant son cierge.
Niche, en saint qu'on ne fete plus . . .

C'est le Pardon. — Liesse et mysteres —
D6ja I'herbe rase a des poux . . .
Sainte Anne, Onguent des belles-m^es!
Consoiatiofi des ipoux! . . .

Des paroisses environnantes :
I De Plougastel et Loc-Tudy,

lis viennent tons planter leurs tentes,
Trois nuits, trois jours, — jusqu'au lundi.

Trois jours, trois nuits, la palud grogne,
Selon I'antique rituel,
— Choeur s^raphjque et chant d'ivrogn
Le Cantique spirituel.

Mire taUlie d coups de hache,
Tout coeur de chine dur et ban;
Sous for de ta robe se cache
L'&me en piice d'un franc Breton I

— Vieille verte d la face usie
Comme la pierre du torrent,

A STUDY IN FRENCH POETS 21

Par des larmes d'amour creuste,
Sichie twee des pleurs di sang ...

— Toi, dont la tnamiUe tari$
S'est refait, pour avoir portt
La Virgimtt de Marii,
Une mdte znrginitfl

— Servante-fnaitresse altiire,
Tris haute devant le Trks-Haut;
Au pauvre monde, pas /lire,
Dame pleine de comme-U-fautl

— Baton des aveuglesl BiquiUe
Des vieillesl Bras des nouveau-nisl
Mire de tnadame ta fiUel
Parente des abandonnisi

— O Fleur de la puceUe neuvel
Fruit de tifouse au sein grossil
Reposoir de la femine veuve . . .
Et du veuf Dame'de-mercil

— Arc he de Joachim/ AleuUl
Midaille de cuiure effacil
Gui sacril TrMe quatre-feuiUel
Mont d'Horebl Souche de Jessil

— O toi qui recouvrais la cendre,
Qui filais comme on fait ches nous,
Quand le soir venait i descendre,
Tenant f Enfant sur tes genoux;

22 INSTIGATIONS

Toi qui fus Id, seule, pour fain
Son maillot d Bethliem,
Et li, pour coudre son suaire
Douloureux, d JirusaUm! . . .

Des croix profondes sont tes rides,
Tes cheveux sont blancs comme His
— Prherve des regards arides
Le berceau de nos petits-fits . . .

Pais venir et conserve en joie
Ceux i naitre et ceux qui sont nis,
Et verse, sans que Dieu te voie,
L'eau de tes yeux sur les damnfs!

Reprends dafis leur chemise blanche
Les petits qui sont en langueur . . .
Rappelle A fiternel Dimanche
Les vieux qui trainent en longueur.

— Dragon-gardien de la Vierge,
Garde la criche sous ton oeiL
Que, pris de toi, Joseph-concierge
Garde la propretS du seuilt

Prends pitii de la fille-mire,
Du petit au bord du chemin . . .
Si quelqu'un leur jette la pierre.
Que la pierre se change en pain!

— Dame bonne en mer et sur terre,
Montre-nous le del et le port,
Dans la tempete ou dans la guerre . ,
O Fanal de la bonne mortl

A STUDY IN FRENCH POETS 23

Humble: d tes pieds n'as point d'itoUe,
Humble . , . et brave pour protigerl
Dans la nue dpporait ton voile,
PSU auriole du danger,

— Aux perdus dont la vie est grise,
( — Sauf respect — perdui de boisson)
Montre le docker de Ffglise
Et le chemin de la maison,

Prete ta douce et chaste flamme
Aux ckrHiens qui sont ici . . .
Ton remide de bonne femme
Pour tes bites-d-corne aussif

Montre d nos femmes et servantes
Vouvrage et la ficondiii . . .
— Le bonjour aux imes parentes
Qui sont bien dans Vtternitil

— Nous mettrons un cordon de cire,
De cire-vierge jaune autour
De ta chapelle et ferons dire
Ta messe basse au point du jour:

Priserve notre cheminfie
Des sorts et du monde malin . . .
A Piques te sera donnie
Une quenouille avec du Un,

Si nos corps sont puants sur terre,
Ta grice est un bain de santt;
Ripands sur nous, au cimetiire,
Ta bonne odeur de sainteti.

24 INSTIGATIONS

— A tan prochainl — Voici ton ciergg:
(C'est deux livres qu'il a couti)
. . . Respects d Madame la Vierge,
Sans oublier la Trinity,

. . . Et les fideles, en chemise,
Sainte Anne, ayeM pitii de nousl
Font trois fois le tour de I'^glise
En se trainant sur leurs genoux,

Et boivent I'eau miraculeuse
Ou les Job teigneux ont lav6
Leur nudit6 contagieuse . . .
Allez: la Foi vous a sauvit

C'est \k que tiennent leurs c^nacles
Les pauvres, f reres de Jesus.
— Ce n'est pas la cour des miracles,
Les trous sont vrais : Vide latusl

Sont-ils pas divins sur leurs claies
Qu'aur6ole un nimbe vermeil
Ces propriitaires de plaies,
Rubis vivants sous le soleil I . . .

En aboyant, un rachitique
Secoue un moignon d^ss6,
Coudoyant un ipileptique
Qui travaille dans un foss6.

Ui, ce tronc d'homme ou croit Tulcire,
Contre un tronc d'arbre ou croit le gui,
Ici, c'est la fiUe et la m&re
Dansant la danse de Saint-Guy.

A STUDY IN FRENCH POETS 25

Cet autre pare le cautire

De son petit enfant malsain:

— L'enfant se doit i son vieux p^re . . .

— Et le chancre est un gagne-pain I

La, c'est I'ldiot de naissance,

Un visiti par GabrUl,

Dans Textase de Tinnocence . . .

— Uinnocent est (tout) pris du del I—

— ^Tiens, passant, regarde: tout passe.
L'oeil de I'idiot est resti.
Car il est en ^tat de grace . . .
— Et la Grace est TEtemiti! —

Parmi les autres, apr^ vepre,
Qui sont d'eau b^nite arroses,
Un cadavre, vivant de lepre,
Fleurit, souvenir des crois^s . . .

Puis tons ceux que les Rois de France
Gu£rissaient d'un toucher de doigts • • .
— Mais la France n'a plus de Rois,
Et leur dieu suspend sa cl6nence.
• •••••

Une forme humaine qui beugle
Contre le calvaire se tient ;
C'est comme une moitie d'aveugle :
EUe est borgne et n'a pas de chien . . .

C'est une rapsode foraine
Qui donne aux gens pour un liard
L' Istoyre de la Magdalayne,
Du Juif Errant ou d'Abaylar,

26 INSTIGATIONS

Elle hale comme une plainte,
Comine une plainte de la faim,
Et, loitgue comme un jour sans pain,
Lamentablement, sa complainte . . .

*a chante conune ga respire,
Triste oiseau sans plume et sans nid
Vaguant ou son instinct I'attire:
Autour des Bon-Dieu de granit . . .

Qa peut parler aussi, sans doute,
Qa peut penser comme qa voit:
Toujours devant soi la grand'route . . .
~r-Et, quand g'a deux sous, q^, les boit.

— Femme : on dirait, helas ! — sa nippe
Lui pend, ficelee en jupon ;
Sa dent noire serre une pipe
Eteinte . . . Oh, la vie a du bon ! —

Son nom . . . gase nonune Misere.
^a s'est trouve ne par hasard.
Qa sera trouve mort par terre . . .
La meme chose~-quelque part.

Si tu la rencontres, Po^te,

Avec son vieux sac de soldat :

C'est notre soeur . . . donne — c'est fete —

Pour sa pipe, un peu de tabac ! . . .

Tu verras dans sa face creuse
Se creuser, comme dans du bois,
Un sourire; et sa main galeuse
Te faire un vrai signe de croix.

(Les Amours Jaunes.)

A STUDY IN FRENCH POETS 27

It is not long since a "strong, silent" American, who
had been spending a year or so in Paris, complained to
me that "all French poetry smelt of talcum powder." He
did not specifically mention Corbi^re, who, with perhaps
a few dozen other French poets, may have been outside
the scope of his research. Corbiire came also to "Paris."

Batard de Creole et Breton,
II vint aussi 14 — fourmiliere.
Bazar ou rien n'est en pierre,
Ou le soleil manque de ton.

— Courage! On fait queue . . . Un planton
Vous pousse 4 la chaine— derriire I —
— Incendie eteint, sans lumiere;
Des seaux passent, vides ou non. —

lA, sa pauvre Muse pucelle
Fit le trottoir en demoiseUe.
lis disaient: Qu'est-ce qu^elle vend?

— Rien. — Elle restait la, stupide,
N'entendant pas sonner le vide
Et regardant passer le vent . . .

lA : vivre i coups de f ouet I — passer
En fiacre, en correctionnelle ;
Repasser i la ritournelle,
Se d^asser, et trepasser! —

— Non, petit, il faut commencer
Par etre grand — simple ficelle —

28 INSTIGATIONS

Pauvrc : remuer Tor i la pelle ;
Obscur : un nom i tout casser ! . . .

Le coller chez les mastroquets,
Et Tapprendre a des perroquets
Qui le chantent ou qui le sifflent —

— Musique! — Cest le paradis
Des mahomets ou des houris,
Des dieux souteneurs qui se giflent !

People, at least some of them, think more highly of his
Breton subjects than of the Parisian, but I can not see
that he loses force on leaving the sea-board ; for example,
his "Frere et Soeur Jumeaux" seems to me "by the same
hand" and rather better than his "Roscoff." His lan-
guage does not need any particular subject matter, or
prefer one to another. "Mannequin ideal, tete-de-turc
du leurre," "Fille de marbre, en rut !", "Je voudrais ctre
chien a une fille publique" are all, with a constant emis-
sion of equally vigorous phrases, to be found in the city
poems. At his weakest he is touched with the style of
his time, i. e., he falls into a phrase A la Hugo, — but sel^
dom. And he is conscious of the will to break from
this manner, and is the first, I think, to satirize it, or at
least the first to hurl anything as apt and violent as
"garde nationale epique" or "inveiiteur de la larme
ecrite" at the Romantico-rhetorico and the sentimento-
romantico of Hugo and Lamartine. His nearest kinships
in our period are to Gautier and Laforgue, though it is
Villon whom most by life and temperament he must be
said to resemble.

Laforgue was, for four or five years,' "reader" to the

A STUDY IN FRENCH POETS 29

ex-Kaiser's mama; he escaped and died of la misire.
Corbiire had, I believe, but one level of poverty :

Un beau jour — quel metier I — je faisais, comme ca
Ma croisiere. — Metier I . . . — Enfin. Elle passa.
— Elle qui, — La Passante ! Elle, avec son ombrelle I
Vrai valet de bourreau, je la frolai . . . — mais Elle
Me regarda tout bas, souriant en dessous,

Et — me teodit sa main, et

m'a donn£ deux sous.

ARTHUR RIMBAUD
(1854-1891)

Rimbaud's first book appeared in '73. His complete
poems with a preface by Verlaine in '95. Laforgue con-
veys his content by comment, Corbiere by ejaculation, as
if the words were wrenched and knocked out of him by
fatality ; by the violence of his feeling, Rimbaud presents
a thick suave color, firm, even.

Cinq heures du soir

AU CABARET VERT

Depuis huit jours, j'avais dechir£ mes bottines
Aux cailloux aes chemins. J'entrais 4 Charleroi,
— Au Cabaret Vert: je demandai des tartines
De beurre et du jambon qui fut a moitie froid.

Bienheureux, j'allongeai les jambes sous la table

Verte : je contemplai les sujets tr^ naif s

De la tapisserie. — Et ce fut adorable,

Quand la fille aux t^tons 6iormes, aux yeux vifs.

30 INSTIGATIONS

— Celle-I4, ce n'est pas un baiser qui I'ipeure ! —
Rieuse, m'apporta des tartines de beurre,
Du jambon tiede, dans un plat colorie,

Du jambon rose et blanc parfume d'une gousse
D'ail, — et m'emplit la chope immense, avec sa mousse
Que dorait un rayon de soleil arri6r6.

The actual writing of poetry has advanced little or not
at all since Rimbaud. Cezanne was the first to paint, as^^jf
Rimbaud had written, — in, for example, "Les Assis" :

lis ont greflFe dans des amours epileptiques
Leur fantasque ossature aux grands squelettes noirs
De leurs chaises ; leurs pieds aux barreaux rachitiques
S'entrelacent pour les matins et pour les soirs

Ces vieillards ont toujours fait tresse avec leurs sieges.

or in the octave of

VENUS ANADYOMENE

Comme d*un ccrcueil vert en fer-blanc, une tete
De f emme a cheveux bruns forlement pommad^s
D'une vieille baignoire Emerge, lente et bete,
Montrant des deficits assez mal ravaudes;

Puis le col gras et gris, les larges omoplates
Qui saillent ; le dos court qui rentre et qui ressort,
— La graisse sous la peau parait en f euilles plates
Et les rondeurs des reins semble prendre I'essor.

Tailhade has painted his "Vieillcs Actrices" at greater

A STUDY IN FRENCH POETS 31

length, but smiling; Rimbaud does not endanger his in-
tensity by a chuckle. He is serious as Cezanne is serious.
Comparisons across an art are always vague and inexact,
and there are no real parallels ; still it is possible to think
of Corbiere a little as one thinks of Goya, without Goya's
Spanish, with infinite differences, but with a macabre in-
tensity, and a modernity that we have not yet surpassed.
There are possible grounds for comparisons of like sort
between Rimbaud and Cezanne.

Tailhade and Rimbaud were both born in '54; there
is not a question of priority in date, I do not know who
hit first on the form, but Rimbaud's "Chercheuses" is
a very good example of a mould not unlike that into
which Tailhade has cast his best poems.

LES CHERCHEUSES DE POUX

Quand le front de I'enfant plein de rouges tourmentes.
Implore I'essaim blanc des reves indistincts,
II vient pres de son lit deux grandes soeurs charmantes
Avec de freles doigts aux ongles argentins.

Elles asseoient I'enfant aupres d'une croisee
Grande ouverte ou I'air bleu baigne un fouillis de fleurs,
Et, dans ses lourds cheveux ou tombe la rosee,
Promenent leurs doigts fins, terribles et charmeurs.

II ecoute chanter leurs haleines craintives
Qui fleurent de longs miels vegetaux et ros£s
Et qu'interrompt parfois un sifflement, salives
Reprises sur la levre ou desirs de baisers.

II entend leurs cils noirs battant sous les silences
Parfumes; et leurs doigts 61ectriques et doux

32 INSTIGATIONS

Font cr^piter, parmi ses grises indolences,

Sous leurs ongles royaux la mort des petits poux.

Voili que monte en lui le vin de la Paresse,
Soupir d'harmonica qui pourrait d^lirer ;
L'enfant se sent, selon la lenteur des caresses,
Sourdre et mourir sans cesse un desir de pleurer.

The poem is "not really" like Tailhade's, but the com-
parison is worth while. Many readers will be unable to
"see over" the subject matter and consider the virtues
of the style, but we are, let us hope, serious people;
besides, Rimbaud's mastery is not confined to "the un-
pleasant" ; "Roman" begins :

On n'est pas serieux, quand on a dix-sept ans.
— Un beau soir, foin des bocks et de la limonade,
Des cafes tapageurs aux lustres eclatants I
— On va sous les tilleuls verts de la promenade.

Les tilleuls sentent bon dans les bons soirs de juini
U air est parfois si doux, qu'on f erme la paupiere ;
Le vent charge de bruits, — la ville n'est pas loin —
A des parfums de vigne et des parfums de biire . . .

|U The sixth line is worthy a( To-em-mei. But Rimbaud
has not exhausted his idylHc moods or capacities in one
poem. Witness :

A STUDY IN FRENCH POETS 33

COMEDIE EN TROIS BAISERS

Elle 6tait fort d&habillie,
Et de grands arbre^ indiscrets
Aux vitres penchaient leur feuillfe
Malinement, tout pres, tout pr&s.

Assise sur ma grande chaise.
Mi-nue elle joignait les mains.
Sur le plancher frissonnaient d'aise
Ses petits pieds si fins, si fins.

— Je regardai, couleur de cire
Un petit rayon buissonnier
Papillonner, comme un sourire
Sur son beau sein, mouche au rosier.

— Je baisai ses fines cheviUes.
Elle eut un long rire tr^ mal
Qui s'egrenait en claires trilles,
Une risure de cristal. . . .

Les petits pieds sous la chemise
Se sauverent: "Veux-tu finirl"
— La premiere audace permise,
Le rire f eignait de punir !

— Pauvrets palpitant sous ma livre,

Je baisai doucement ses yeux :

— Elle jet a sa tete mievre

En arriere : "Oh ! c'est encor mieux ! . . .

»$

"Monsieur, j'ai deux mots i te dire. . . ."
— Je lui jetai le reste au sein

34 INSTIGATIONS

Dans un baiser, qui la fit rire
D'un bon rire qui voulait bien . . .

— Elle etait fort deshabille
Et de grands arbres indiscrets,
Aux vitres penchaient leur feuillee
Malinement, tout pres, tout pres.

The subject matter is older than Ovid, and how many
poems has it led to every silliness, every vulgarity ! One
has no instant pf^doubt^ here, nor, I think, in any line
of any poem of Rimbaud's. How much I might haveh

learned from the printed page that I have learned slowly
from actualities. Or perhaps we never do learn from the
page ; but are only capable of recognizing the page after
we have learned from actuality. I

I do not know whether or no Rimbaud "started" the
furniture poetry with "Le Buffet"; it probably comes,
most of it, from the beginning of Gautier's "Albertus."
I cannot see that the "Bateau Ivre" rises above the gen-
eral level of his work, though many people seem to know
of this poem (and of the sonnet on the vowels) who
do not know the rest of his work. Both of these poems
are in Van Bever and Leautaud. I wonder in what
other poet will we find such firmness of coloring and such
certitude.

TABLE

Laforgue 1860-1887; published 1885
Corbiere 1840-1875; published 1873 and 1891
Rimbaud 1854- 1891 ; published 1873
Remy de Gourmont 1858-1915
Merril iS^-iqis

A STUDY IN FRENCH POETS 35

Tailhade 1854-1919 '

Verhacren 1855-1916

Moreas 1856-1911
Living:

Vicle-Griffin 1864

Jamtnes 1868

De R^gnier 1864

Spire 1868
Younger Men :

Klingsor, Remains, Vildrac
Other Dates:

Verlaine 1844- 1896

Mallamie 1842-1898

Samain 1858-1900

Elskamp, bom 1862

REMY DE GOURMONT

(1858-1915)

As in prose, Remy de Gourmont found his own form,
so also in poetry, influenced presumably by the medieval
sequaires and particularly by Goddeschalk's quoted in
his (De Gourmont's) work on "Le Latin Mystique,"
he recreated the "litanies." It was one of the* great
gifts of "symbolisme," of the doctrine that one should
"suggest" not "present"; it is, in his hand, an effective
indirectness. The procession of all beautiful women
moves before one in the "Litanies de la Rose" ; and the
rhythm is incomparable. It is not a poem to lie on the
page, it must come to life in audition, or in the finer
audition which one may have in imagining sound. One
must "hear" it, in one way or another, and out of that

36 INSTIGATIONS

intoxication comes beauty. One does no injustice to
De Gourmont by giving this poem alone. The "Litany
of the Trees" is of equal or almost equal beauty. The
Sonnets in prose are different; they rise out of natural
speech, out of conversation. Paul Fort perhaps began

.' or rebegan the use of conversational speech in rhyming

' prose paragraphs, at times charmingly.

LITANIES DE LA ROSE

A Henry de Groux,

Fleur hypocrite,

Fleur du silence.

Rose couleur de cuivre, plus frauduleuse que nos joies,
rose couleur de cuivre, emhaume-nous dans tes men-
songes, fleur hypocrite, fleur du silence.

Rose au visage peint comme une iille d'amour, rose au
coeur prostitue, rose au visage peint, fais semblant d'etre
pitoyable, fleur hypocrite, fleur du silence.

Rose i la joue puerile, d vierges des futures trahisons,
rose k la joue puerile, innocente et rouge, ouvre les rets
de tes yeux clairs, fleur hypocrite, fleur du silence.

Rose aux yeux noirs, miroir de ton neant, rose aux
yeux noirs, fais-nous croire au mystere, fleur hypocrite,
fleur du silence.

Rose couleur d'or pur, 6 coffre-fort de Tideal, rose
couleur d'or pur, donne-nous la clef de ton ventre, fleur
hypocrite, fleur du silence.

Rose couleur d'argent, encensoir de nos reves, rose
couleur d'argent prends notre coeur et fais-en de la
fumde, fleur hypocrite, fleur du silence.

Rose au regard saphique, plus pale que les lys, rose au
regard saphique, oifre-nous le parfum de ton illusoire
virginiti, fleur hypocrite, fleur du silence.

A STUDY IN FRENCH POETS 37

Rose au front pourpre, colere des femmes dedaignees,
rose au front pourpre dis-nous le secret de ton orgueil,
fleur hypocrite, fleur du silence.

Rose au front d'ivoire jaune, amante de toi-meme, rose
au front d'ivoire jaune, dis-nous le secret de tes nuits
virginales, fleur hypocrite, fleur du silence.

Rose aux levres de sang, o mangeuse de chair, rose aux
levres de sang, si tu veux notre sang, qu'en ferions-
nous? bois-le, fleur hypocrite, fleur du silence.

Rose couleur de soufre, enfer des desirs vains, rose
couleur de soufre, allume le bucher ou tu planes, ame et
flamnie, fleur hypocrite, fleur du silence.

Rose couleur de peche, fruit veloute de fard, rose
sournoise, rose couleur de peche, empoisonne nos dents,
fleur hypocrite, fleur du silence.

Rose couleur de chair, deesse de la bonne volonte, rose
couleur de chair, fais-nous baiser la tristesse de ta peau
fraiche et fade, fleur hypocrite, fleur du silence.

Rose vineuse, fleur des tonnelles et des caves, rose
vineuse, les alcools fous gambadent dans ton haleine:
souffle-nous Thorreur de I'ainour, fleur hypocrite, fleur
du silence.

Rose violette, 6 modestie des fillettes pcrverses, rose
violette, tes yeux sont plus grands que le restc, fleur
hypocrite, fleur du silence.

Rose rose, pucelle au coeur desordonne, rose rose, robe
de mousseline, entr'ouvre tes ailes fausses, ange, fleur
hypocrite, fleur du silence.

Rose en papier de sole, simulacre adorable des graces
increees, rose en papier de soie, n'es-tu pas la vraic rose,
fleur du silence.

Rose couleur d'aurore, couleur du temps, couleur de
rien, 6 sourire du Sphinx, rose couleur d'aurore, sourire

38 INSTIGATIONS

ouvert sur le neant, nous t'aimerons, car tu mens, fleur
hypocrite, fleur du silence.

Rose blonde, leger manteau de chrome sur des epaules
freles, 6 rose blonde, femelle plus forte que les males,
fleur hypocrite, fleur du silence!

Rose en forme de coupe, vase rouge ou mordent les
dents quand la bouche y vient boire, rose en forme de
coupe, nos morsures te font sourire et nos baisers te
font pleurer, fleur hypocrite, fleur du silence.

Rose toute blanche, innocente et couleur de lait, rose
toute blanche, tant de candeur nous epouvante, fleur
hypocrite, fleur du silence.

Rose couleur de bronze, pate cuite au soleil, rose
couleur de bronze, les plus durs javelots s'emoussent sur
ta peau, fleur hypocrite fleur du silence.

Rose couleur de feu, creuset special pour les chairs
refractaires, rose couleur de feu, 6 providence des
ligueurs en enfance, fleur hypocrite, fleur du silence.

Rose incarnate, rose stupide et pleme de sante, rose
incarnate, tu nous abreuves et tu nous leurres d'un vin
tres rouge et tres benin, fleur hypocrite, fleur du silence.

Rose en satin cerise, muniflcence exquise des levres
triomphales, rose en satin cerise, ta bouche enluminee a
pose sur nos chairs le sceati de pourpre de son mirage,
fleur hypocrite, fleur du silence.

Rose au cceur virginal, 6 louche et rose adolescence qui
n'a pas encore parle, rose au cceur virginal, tu n'as rien
a nous dire, fleur hypocrite, fleur du silence.

Rose groseille, honte et rongeur des p^ches ridicules,
rose groseille, on a trop chiffonne ta robe, fleur hypocrite,
fleur du silence.

Rose couleur du soir, demi-morte d'ennui, fumee
cr^pusculaire, rose couleur du soir, tu meurs d'amour

A STUDY m FRENCH POETS 39

en baisant tes mains lasses, fleur hypocrite, fleur du
silence.

Rose bleue, rose iridine, monstre couleur des yeux de
la Chimere, rose bleue, leve un peu tes paupieres: as-tu
peur qu-on te regarde, les yeux dans les yeux, Chim^re,
fleur hypocrite, fleur du silence!

Rose verte, rose couleur de mer, 6 nombril des sirenes,
rose verte, gemme ondoyante et fabuleuse, tu n'es plus
que de I'eau des qu'un doigt t'a touchee, fleur hypocrite,
fleur du silence.

Rose escarboucle, rose fleurie au front noir du dragon,
rose escarboucle, tu n'es plus qu'une boucle de ceinture,
fleur hypocrite, fleur du silence.

Rose couleur de vermilion, bergere enamouree couchee
dans les sillons, rose couleur de vermilion, le berger te
respire et le bouc t'a brout6e, fleur hypocrite, fleur du
silence.

Rose des tonibes, fraicheur emanee des charognes,
rose des tombes, toute mignonne et rose, adorable parfum
des fines pourritures, tu fais semblant de vivre, fleur
hypocrite, fleur du silence.

Rose brune, couleur des mornes acajous, rose brune,
plaisirs permis, sagesse, prudence et prevoyance, tu nous
regardes avec des yeux rogues, fleur hypocrite, fleur
du silence.

Rose ponceau, ruban des fillettes models, rose pon-
ceau, gloire des petites poupees, es-tu niaise ou sournoise,
joujou des petits frires, fleur hypocrite, fleur du silence.

Rose rouge et noire, rose insolente et secrete, rose
rouge et noire, ton insolence et ton rouge ont pali parmi
les compromis qu'invente la vertu, fleur hypocrite, fleur
du silence.

Rose ardoise, grisaille des vertus vaporeuses, rose
ardoise, tu grimpes et tu fleuris autour des vieux bancs

40 INSTIGATIONS

solitaires, rose du soir, fleur hypocrite, fleur du silence.
Rose pivoine, modeste vanite des jardins plantureux,
rose pivoine, le vent n'a retrousse tes feuilles que par
hasard, et tu n'en fus pas mecontente, fleur hypocrite,
fleur du silence.

Rose neigeuse, couleur de la neige et des plumes du
cygne, rose neigeuse, tu sais que la neige est fragile et
tu n'ouvres tes plumes de cygne qu'aux plus insignes,
fleur hypocrite, fleur du silence.

Rose hyaline, couleur des sources claires jaillies
d'entre les herbes, rose hyaline, Hylas est mort d'avoir
aim6 tes yeux, fleur hypocrite, fleur du silence.

Rose opale, 6 sultane endormie dans I'odeur du harem,
rose opale, langueur des constantes caresses, ton coeur
connait la paix profonde des vices satisfaits, fleur hypo-
crite, fleur du silence.

Rose amethyste, etoile matinale, tendresse episcopate,
rose amethyste, tu dors sur des poitrines devotes et
douillettes, gemme oiferte a Marie, o gemme sacristine,
fleur hypocrite, fleur du silence.

Rose cardinale, rose couleur du sang de TEglise
romaine, rose cardinale, tu fais rever les grands yeux
des mignons et plus d'un t'epingla au noeud de sa
jarretiere, fleur hypocrite, fleur du silence.

Rose papale, rose arrosee des mains qui benissent le
monde, rose papale, ton coeur d'or est en cuivre, et les
larmes qui perlent sur ta vaine corolle, ce sont les pleurs
du Christ, fleur hypocrite, fleur du silence.

Fleur hypocrite,

Fleur du silence.

DE REGNIER
(bom 1864)

De R^gnier is counted a successor to the Parnassiens,

A STUDY IN FRENCH POETS 41

and has indeed written much of gods and of marble
fountains, as much perhaps of the marble decor, as have
other contemporaries of late renaissance and of more
modem house furniture. His "yBi feint que les dieux
m'aient parle" opens charmingly. He has in the
"Odelettes" made two darts intoyers libre which are
perhaps worth many more orderly pages, and show lyric
sweetness.

ODELETTE

Si j'ai parte

De mon amour, c'est i Teau lente

Qui m'6coute quand je me penche

Sur e]le; si j'ai parle

De mon amour, c'est au vent

Qui rit et cuchote entre les branches ;

Si j'ai parle de mon amour, c'est & Toiseau

Qui passe et chante

Avec le vent;

Si j'ai parle

C'est i I'echo.

Si j'ai aime de grand amour,

Triste ou joyeux,

Ce sont tes yeux;

Si j'ai aime de grand amour,

Ce f ut ta bouche grave et douce,

Ce f ut ta bouche ;

Si j'ai aim6 de grand amour,

Ce f urent ta chair tiede et tes mains f raiches,

Et c'est ton ombre que je cherche.

He has joined himself to the painters of contemporary
things in :

42 INSTIGATIONS

L'ACCUEIL

Tous deux etaient beaux de corps et de visages,

Uair francs et sages

Avec un clair sourire dans les yeux,

Et, devant eux,

Debout en leur jeunesse svelte et prompte,

Je me sentais courb6 et j'avais presque honte

D'etre si vieux.

Les ans

Sont lourds aux 6paules et pesent

Aux plus fortes

De tout le poids des heures mortes,

Les ans

Sont durs, et br^ve

La vie et Ton a vite des cheveux blancs;

Et j'ai deji vecu beaucoup de jours.

Les ans sont lourds. . . .

Et tous deux me regardaient, surpris de voir
Celui qu'ils croyaient autre en leur pens6e
* Se lever pour les recevoir
Vetu de bure et le front nu
Et non pas, comme en leur pens6e,
Drape de pourpre et lauri d'or

Et je leur dis: "Soyez tous deux les bienvenus.

Ce fut alors

Que je leur dis :

"Mes ills, quoi, vous avez monte la cote

Sous ce soleil cuisant d'aout

Jusqu'a ma maison haute,

A STUDY IN FRENCH POETS 43

O vous

Qu'attend la-bas peut-etre, au terme du chetnin

Le salut amoureux de quelque blanche main!

Si vous avez pour moi allonge votre route

Peut-etre, au moins mes chants vous auront-ils aid6s,

De leurs rythmes prints en vos nii^oires,

A marcher d'un jeune pas scand6

Je n'ai jamais desire d'autre gloire ) ( ri f -^ *

Sinon que les vers du poete ( ' / I * h

Plussent i la voix qui les repete. ./ ^,V •" ^"^ '''

Si les miens vous ont plu: merci,

Car c'est pour cela que, chantant

Mon reve, apres I'avoir congu en mon esprit,

Depuis vingt ans,

J'habite ici."

Et, d'un geste, je leur montrai la chambre vide

Avec son mur de pierre et sa lampe d'argile

Et le lit ou je dors et le sol ou, du pied,

Je frappe pour apprendre au vers estropii

A marcher droit, et le calame de roseau

Dont la pointe subtile aide i fixer le mot

Sur la tablette lisse et couverte de cire

Dont la divine odeur la retient et I'attire

Et le fait, dans la strophe en fleurs qu'il ensoleille,

Mysterieusement vibrer comme une abeille.

Et je repris:

"Mes fils,

Les ans

Sont lourds aux epaules et pesent

Aux plus fortes

De tout le poids des heures mortes.

Les ans

44 INSTIGATIONS

Sont durs, la vie est breve

£t I'on a vite des cheveux blancs,

Si quelque jour,

En revenant d'ou vous allez,

Vous rencontriez sur cette meme route,

Entre les orges et les bles,

Des gens en troupe

Montant ici avec des palmes a la main,

Dites-vous bien

Que si vous les suiviez vous ne me verriez pas

Comme aujourd'hui debout en ma robe de laine

Qui se troue i Tepaule et se dechire au bras,

Mais drap6 de pourpre hautaine

Peut-etre — et mort

Et laure d'or I"

Je leur ai dit cela, pour qu'its le sachent,

Car ils sont beaux tous deux de corps et de visages,

L'air francs et sages

Avec un clair sourire aux yeux,

Parcc qu'en eux

Peut-etre vit quelque desir de gloire,

Je leur ai parle ainsi pour qu'ils sachent

Ce qu'est la gloire,

Ce qu'elle donne,

Ce qu'il faut croire

De son vain jeu,

Et que son dur laurier ne pose sa couronne

Que sur le front inerte et qui n'est plus qu'un peu

Deji d'argile humaine oil vient de vivre un Dieu.

Here we have the modem tone in De R^gnier. My
own feeling at the moment is that his hellenics, his verse
on classical and ancient subjects, is likely to be over-

A STUDY IN FRENCH POETS 45

shadowed by that of Samain and Heredia. I have
doubts whether his books will hold against the Cleopatra
sonnets, or if he has equaled, in this vein, the poem
beginning "Mon ame est une infante en robe de parade."
But in the lyric odelette, and in this last given poem
in particular, we find him leading perhaps onward toward
Vildrac, and toward a style which might be the basis for /
a certain manner F. M. Hueffer has used in English vers /
libre, rather than remembering the Parnassiens.

EMILE VERHAEREN

Verhaeren has been so well introduced to America
by his obituary notices that I can scarcely hope to com-
pete with them in this limited space. One can hardly
represent him better than by the well known:

LES PAUVRES

II est ainsi de pauvres coeurs
avec en eux, des lacs de pleurs,
qui sont pales, comme les pierres
d'un cimetiere.

II est ainsi de pauvres dos
plus lourds de peine et de fardeaux
que les toits des cassines brunes,
parmi les dunes.

II est ainsi de pauvres mains,
comme feuilles sur les chemins,
comme feuilles jaunes et mortes,
devant la porte.

46 INSTIGATIONS

li est ainsi de pauvres yeux
humbles et bons et soucieux
et plus tristes que ceux des betes,
sous ia tetnpete.

II est ainsi de pauvres gens,
aux gestes las et indulgents
sur qui s'acharne la misere,
au long des plaines de la terre.

VIELEGRIFFIN

Two men, half-Americans, Viele-Griffin and Stuart
Merril, won for themselves places among the recent
French poets. Viel6-Griffin's poem for the death of
Mallarme is among his better known works :

IN MEMORIAM STEPHANE MALLARMfi

Si Ton te disait : Maitre !

Le jour se l^ve;

Voici une aube encore, la meme, pale ;

Maitre, j'ai ouvert la fenetre,

L'aurore s'en vient encor du seuil oriental,

Un jour va naitre !

— Je croirais t'entendre dire : Je reve.

Si Ton te disait: Maitre, nous sommes la,

Vivants et forts,

Comme ce soir d'hier, devant ta porte ;

Nous sommes venus en riant, nous sommes la,

Guettant le sourire et I'etreinte forte,

— On nous r^pondrait: Le Maitre est mort.

A STUDY IN FRENCH POETS 47

Des ileurs de ma terrasse,

Des ileurs comtne au feuillet d'un livre,

Des fleurs, pourquoi?

Void un peu de nous, la chanson basse

Qui tourne et tombe,

— Comme ces feuilles-d tombent et toumoient —

Void la honte et la colore de vivre

Et de parler des mots — contre ta tombe.

His curious and, perhaps not in the bad sense, old-
fashioned melodic quality shows again in the poem be-
ginning :

Lache comme le froid et la pluie,
Brutal et sourd comme le vent,
Louche et faux comme le del bas, /

L'Automne rode par id.
Son baton heurte aux contrevents ;
Ouvre la porte, car il est li,
Ouvre la porte et fais-lui honte.
Son manteau s'effiloche et traine,
Ses pieds sont alourdis de boue ;
Jctte-lui des pierres, quoi qu'il te conte,
Ne crains pas ses paroles de haine :
Ccst toujours un role qu'il joue.

It is embroidery a la Charles D'Orl&ins; one must
take it or leave it

STUART MERRIL

I know that I have seen somewhere a beautiful and
effective ballad of Merril's. His "Chambre D' Amour"

48 INSTIGATIONS

would be more interesting if Samain had not written
"Ulnfante," but Merril's painting is perhaps interesting
as comparison. It begins:

Dans la chambre qui fleure un peu la bergamote,
Ce soir, lasse, la voix de I'ancien clavecin
Chevrote des refrains enfantins de gavotte.

There is a g^eat mass of this poetry full of highly
cultured house furnishing; I think Catulle Mendes also
wrote it. Merril's "Nocturne" illustrates a mode of
symbolistic writing which has been since played out and
parocfied :

La bleme lune allume en la mare qui luit,
Miroir des gloires d'or, un imoi d'incendie.
Tout dort. Seul, a mi-mort, un rossignol de nuit
Module en mal d'amour sa molle melodie.
Plus ne vibrent les vents en le mystere vert
Des ramures. La lune a tu leurs voix nocturnes :
Mais a travers le deuil du feuillage entr'ouvert
Pleuvent les bleus baisers des astres tacitumes.
• •••••

There is no need to take this sort of tongue-twisting
too seriously, though it undoubtedly was so taken in
Paris during the late eighties and early nineties. He is
better illustrated in "La Wallonie," vide infra.

LAURENT TAILHADE

1854-1919

Tailhade's satires seem rough if one come upon them
straight from reading Laforgue ; and Laf orgue will seem,
and is presumably, the greatly finer artist; but one

A STUDY IN FRENCH POETS 49

should not fail to note certain definite differences.
Laforgue is criticizing, and conveying a mood. He is
more or less literary, playing with words. Tailhade is
painting contemporary Paris, with verve. His eye is
on the thing itself. He has, au fond, not very much
in common with Laforgue. He was bom six years be-
fore Laforgue and in the same year as Rimbaud. Their
temperaments are by no means identical. I do not
know whether Tailhade wrote "Hydrotherapie" before
Rimbaud had done "Les Chercheuses." Rimbaud in
that poem identifies himself more or less with the child
and its feeling. Tailhade is detached. I do not say
this as praise of either one or the other. I am only
trying to keep things distinct.

HYDROTHERAPIE

Le vieux monsieur, pour prendre une douche ascendante^
A couronne son chef d'un casque d'hidalgo
Qui, malgre sa bedaine ample et son lumbago,
Lui donne un certain air de famille avec Dante.

Ainsi ses membres gourds et sa vertebre i point
Traversent Tappareil des tuyaux et des lances,
Tandis que des masseurs, tout gonfles d'insolences,
Frottent au gant de crin son dos ou Tacne point.

Oh! Teau froide! la bonne et rare panacee
Qui, seule, raffermit la charpente lassee
Et le protoplasma des senateurs gesants !

Voici que, dans la rue, au sortir de sa douche,

Le vieux monsieur qu'on sait un magistrat farouche

Tient des propos grivois aux filles de douze ans.

50 INSTIGATIONS

QUARTIER LATIN

Dans le bar ou jamais le parfum des brevas
Ne dissipa Todeur de vomi qui la navre
Triotnphent les appas de la mere Cadavre
Dont le nom est fameux j usque chez les Howas.

Brune, elle fut jadis vantee entre les brunes,
Tant que son souvenir au Vaux-Hall est reste.
Et c'est toujours avec beaucoup de dignite
Qu'elle rince le zinc et d^taille les prunes.

A ces causes, son cabaret s'emplit le soir,
De futurs avou^s, trop heureux de surseoir
Quelque temps a I'etude inepte des Digestes,

Des Valaques, des riverains du fleuve Amoor
S'acoquinent avec des potards indigestes
Qui s'y viennent former aux choses de I'amour.

RUS

Ce qui fait que I'ancien bandagiste renie
Le comptoir dont le. faste allechait les passants,
Cest son jardin d'Auteuil ou, veufs de tout encens,
Les zinnias ont Tair d'etre en tole vernie.

Cest la qu'il vient, le soir, gouter Tair aromal
Et, dans sa rocking-chair, en veston de flanelle,
Aspirer les senteurs qu'epanchent sur Crenelle
Les fabriques de suit et de noir animal.

A STUDY IN FRENCH POETS 5^

Bien que Hbre-penseur et franc-ma^on, il juge
Le dieu propice qui lui donna ce refuge
Ou se meurt un cyprin emmy la piece d'eau,
Ou, dans la tour mauresque aux lantemes chinoises,
— Tout en lui preparant du sirop de f ramboises —
Sa "demoiselle" chante un couplet de Nadaud.

From this beneficent treatment of the amiable burgess ;
from this perfectly poetic inclusion of modernity, this
unrhetorical inclusion of the factories in the vicinity of
Crenelle (inclusion quite different from the allegorical
presentation of workmen's trousers in sculpture, and the
grandiloquent theorizing about the socialistic up-lift or
down-pull of smoke and machinery), Tailhade can move
to personal satire, a personal satire impersonalized by
its glaze and its finish.

RONDEL

Dans les cafes d'adolescents
Moreas cause avec Fremine:
L'un, d'un parfait cuistre a la mine,
L'autre beugle des contre-sens.

Rien ne sort moins de chez Qassens
Que le linge de ces bramines.
Dans les cafes d'adolescents,
Mordas cause avec Fremine.

Desagregeant son albumine.

La Tailhede off re quelque encens :

Maurras leur invente Commine

52 INSTIGATIONS

Et ^ fait roter les passants,
Dans les caf6s d'adolescents.

But perhaps the most characteristic phase of Tailhade
is in his pictures of the bourgeoisie. Here is one de-
picted with all Tailhadian serenity. Note also the opu-
lence of his vocables.

DINER CHAMPETRE

Entre les sieges ou des garqons volontaires
Entassent leurs chalants parmi les boulingrins,
La famille Feyssard, avec des airs sereins,
Discute longuement les tables solitaires.

La demoiselle a mis un chapeau rouge vif
Dont s'honore le bon faiseur de sa commune,
Et madame Feyssard, un peu hommasse et brune,
Porte une robe loutre avec des reflets d'if.

Enfin ils sont assist Or le pere commande
Des ecrevisses, du potage au lait d'amande,
Toutes choses dont il revait depuis longtemps.

Et, dans le ciel couleur de turquoises fan6es,
II voit les songes bleus qu'en ses esprits flottant
A fait naitre I'ampleur des truites saumonees.

All through this introduction I am giving the sort of
French poem least likely to have been worn smooth for
us; I mean the kind of poem least represented in Eng-
lish. Landor and Swinburne have, I think, forestalled
Tailhade's hellenic poems in our affections. There are
also his ballades to be considered.

A STUDY IN FRENCH POETS 53

FRANCIS JAMMES
(born 1868)

The bulk of Jammes' unsparable poetry is perhaps
larger than that of any man still living in France. The
three first books of poems, and "Le Triomphe de la Vie**
containing "Existences," the more than "Spoon River"
of France, must contain about six hundred pages worth
reading. "Existences" can not be rendered in snippets.
It is not a series of poems, but the canvass of a whole
small town or half city, unique, inimitable and "to the
life," full of verve. Only those who have read it and
"L'Angelus de TAube," can appreciate the full tragedy
of Jammes' debacle. Paul Fort had what his friends
boasted as "tone/' and he has diluted himself with
topicalities ; in Jammes' case it is more charitable to sup-
pose some organic malady, some definite softening of the
brain, for he seems perfectly simple and naive in his
debacle. It may be, in both cases, that the organisms
have broken beneath the strain of modem existence.
But the artist has no business to break.

Let us begin with Jammes' earlier work:

J'aime Tane si doux
marchant le long des houx.
II prend garde aux abeilles
et bouge ses oreilles;
et il porte les pauvres
et des sacs remplis d'orge.
II va, pres des foss&
d'un petit pas cslssL
Mon amie le croit bete

54 INSTIGATIONS

parce qu'il est poete.
II reflechit toujours,
Ses yeux sont en velours.
Jeune fille au doux coeur
tu n'as pas sa douceur.

The fault is the fault, or danger, which Dante has
labeled ''muliebria" ; of its excess Jammes has since
perished. But the poem to the donkey can, in certain
moods, please one. In other moods the playful sim-
plicity, at least in excess, is almost infuriating. He runs
so close to sentimentalizing — when he does not fall into
that puddle — that there are numerous excuses for those
who refuse him altogether. "J'allai a Lourdes" has
pathos. Compare it with CorbiJre's "St. Anne" and the
decadence is apparent; it is indeed a sort of half-way
house between the barbaric Breton religion and the ulti-
mate deliquescence of French Catholicism in Claudel,
who (as I think it is James Stephens has said) "is
merely lying on h»s back kicking his heels in it."

J' ALLAI A LOURDES

J'aliai k Lourdes par le chemin de fer,
le long du gave qui est bleu comme Tair.

<
Au soleil les montagnes semblaient d'^tain.
Et Ton chantait : sauvez ! sauvez I dans le train,

II y avait un mon^e fou, exalte,
plein de poussiere et du soleil d'ete.

A STUDY IN FRENCH POETS 55

Des malheureux avec le ventre en avant
etendaient leurs bras, priaient en les tordant.

Et dans une chaire ou etait du drap bleu,
un pretre disait: "un chapelet i Dieul"

Et un groupe de femmes, parfois, passait,

qui chantait : sauvez I sauvez ! sauvez ! sauvez !

Et la procession chantait. Les drapeaux
se penchaient avec leurs devises en or.

Le soleil etait blanc sur les escaliers

dans Tair bleu, sur les cloches dechiquetees.

Mais sur un brancard, portee par ses parents,
son pauvre p^re tete nue et priant,

et ses freres qui disaient: "ainsi soit-il,"
une jeune fille sur le point de mourir.

Oh I qu'elle 6tait belle ! elle avait dix-huit ans,
et elle souriait ; elle etait en blanc.

Et la procession chantait. Des drapeaux
se penchaient avec leurs devises en or.

Moi je serrais les dents pour ne pas pleurer,
et cette fille, je me sentais I'aimer.

Oh I elle m'a regarde un g^and moment,
une rose blanche en main, souriant.

Mais maintenant ou es-tu? dis, oil es-tu,
Es-tu morte ? je t'aime, toi qui m'as vu.

56 INSTIGATIONS

Si tu existes, Dieu, ne la tue pas.

elle avait des mains blanches, de minces bras.

Dieu ne la tue pas ! — et ne serait-ce que
pour son p^re nu-tete qui priait Dieu.

Jammes goes to pieces on such adjectives as "pauvre
and "petite," just as DeRignier slips on "cher," "aim£e
and "tiede" ; and in their train flock the herd whose ad-
jectival centre appears to waver from *'nue" to "fremis-
sante." And there is, in many French poets, a fatal
proclivity to fuss just a little too much over their sub-
jects. Jammes has also the furniture tendency, and to
it we owe several of his quite charming poems. How-
ever the strongest impression I get to-day, reading his
work in inverse order (i. e. "Jean de Noarrieu" before
these earlier poems), is of the very g^eat stylistic ad-
vance made in that poem over his earlier work.

But he is very successful in saying all there was to be
said in: —

LA JEUNE FILLE

La jeune fille est blanche,

elle a des veines veites

au poignets, dans ses manches

ouvertes.
On ne sait pas pourquoi
elle,rit. Par moments
elle crie et cela

est per^ant.
Est-ce qu'elle se doute
qu'elle vous prend le cceur
en cueillant sur la route

des fleurs.

A STUDY IN FRENCH POETS $7

On dirait quelquefois
qu'elle comprend des choses.
Pas toujours. Elle cause

tout bas
"Oh ! ma chere I oh I la, li . . .
. . . Figure-toi . . . tnardi
je Tai vu . . . j'ai ri" — Elle dit

comme qa.
Quand un jeune homme souffre,
d'abord elle se tait:
elle ne rit plus, toutc

etonn^.
Dans les petits chemins
elle remplit ses mains
de piquants de bruyeres

de fougires.
Elle est g^ande, elle est blanche,
elle a des bras tres doux,
Elle est tres droite et penche

le cou.

The poem beginning:

Tu seras nue dans le salon aux vieilles choses,
fine comme un fuseau de roseau de lumi^re
et, les jambes croisees, aupres du feu rose
tu ^outeras I'hiver

loses, perhaps, or gains little by comparison with that of
Heinrich von Morungen, beginning:

Oh weh, soil mir nun nimmermehr
hell leuchten durch die Nacht
noch weisser denn ein Schnee

■ •<

• i •

■.I ^

58 INSTIGATIONS

ihr Leib so wohl gemacht?
Der trog die Augen mein,
ich wahnty es soUte sein
des lichten Monden Schein,
da tagte es.

Moningen had had no occasion to say "J^ pense i
Jean- Jacques/' and it is foolish to expect exactly the
same charm of a twentieth-century poet that we find in
a thirteenth-century poet. Still it is not necessary to be
Jammes-crazy to feel

IL VA NEIGER . . .

II va neiger dans quelques jours. Je me souviens
de I'an dernier. Je me souviens de mes tristesses
au coin du feu. Si Ton m'avait demand^ : qu'est-ce ?
j'aurais dit : laissez-moi tranquille. Ce n'est rien.
J'ai bien r6flechi, Tannee avant, dans ma chambre,
pendant que la neige lourde tombait dehors.
J'ai r6fl6chi pour rien. A present comme alors
je fume une pipe en bois avec un bout d'ambre.

Ma vieille commode en chene sent tou jours bon.
Mais moi j'^tais bete parce que ces choses
ne pouvaient pas changer et que c'est une pose
de vouloir chasser les choses que nous savons.

' Pourquoi done pensons-nous et parlons-nous I C'est

drole ;
i nos larmes et nos baisers, eux, ne parlent pas,
' et cependant nous les comprenons, et les pas
d'un ami sont plus doux que de douces paroles.

A STUDY IN FRENCH POETS 59

If I at all rightly understand the words ''vouloir
chasser les choses que nous savons" they are an excellent
warning against the pose of simplicity over-done that
has been the end of Maeterlinck, and of how many other
poets whose poetic machinery consists in so g^eat part
of pretending to know less than they do.

Jammes* poems are well represented in Miss Lowell's
dilutation on Six French Poets, especially by the well-
known "Amsterdam" and "Madame de Warens," which
are also in Van Bever and Leautaud. He reaches, as
I have said, his greatest verve in "Existences" in the
volume "Le Triomphe de la Vie."

I do not wish to speak in superlatives, but "Exist-
ences," if not Jammes' best work, and if not the most
important single volume by any living French poet,
either of which it well may be, is at any rate indispen-
sable. It is one of the first half dozen books that a man
wanting to know Contemporary French work must in-
dulge in. One can fwt represent it in snippets. Still I
quote "Le Poete" (his remarks at a provincial soirie) :

Cest drole . . . Cette petite sera bete

comme ces gens-li, conmie son pere et sa m^e.

Et cependant elle a une grace infinie.

II y a en elle Tintelligence de la beaute.

Cest delicieux, son corsage qui n'existe pas,

son derriere et ses pieds. Mais elle sera bete

comme une oie dans deux ans d'ici. Elle va jouer.

{Benette joue la valse des elfes)

In an earlier scene we have a good example of his
rapidity in narrative.

6o INSTIGATIONS

La Sen/ante
II y a quelqu'un qui veut parler i monsieur.

Le Poite
Qui est-ce?

La Servante
Je ne sais pas.

Le Poite

Un homme ou une femme?

La Servante
Un homme.

Poite
Un commis-voyageur, Vous me le f outez belle !

La Servante
Je ne sais pas, monsieur.

Poite

Faites entrer au salon.
Laissez-moi achever d'achever ces cerises.

(Next Scene)

Le Poite (dans son salon)
A qui ai-je I'honneur de parler, monsieur?

Le Monsieur
Monsieur, je suis le cousin de votre ancienne
maitresse.

Le Poite
De quelle maitresse? Je ne vous connais pas.
Et puis qu'est-ce que vous voulez?

Le Monsieur

Monsieur, 6coutez-moi.
On m'a dit que vous etes bon.

Poite

Ce n'est pas vrai.

A STUDY IN FRENCH POETS , 6i

La Pipe du Pokte
II me bourre avec une telle agitation
que je ne vais jamais pourvoir tirer de Tair.

Poite
D'abord, de quelle maitresse me parlez-vous?
De qui, pretendez-vous ? Non. Vous pritcndez de
qui j'ai hi I'amant?

Le Monsieur
De Neomie.
Poite

De Nfomie,
Le Monsieur
Oui, monsieur.

Poite
Oil habitez- vous ?
Le Monsieur
J'habite les environs de Mont-de-Marsan.

Poite
Enfin que voulez-vous?

Le Monsieur

Savoir si monsieur serait
assez complaisant pour me donner quelque chose.

Poite
Et si je ne vous donne le pas, qu'est-ce que vous
f erez ?

Le Monsieur
Oh 1 Rien monsieur. Je ne vous f erai rien. Non . , .

Le Poite

Tenez, voila dix francs, et foutez-moi la paix.

{Le $nonsieur s'en va, puis le poite sort,)

The troubles of the Larribeau family, Larribeau and
the bonne, the visit of the "Comtese de Pentacosa," who
is also staved off with ten francs, are all worth quoting.

INSTIGATIONS

The whole small town is "Spoon-Rivered" with eqtial
verve. "Existences'* was written in 1900.

MOREAS

It must not be thought that these very "modem" poets
owe their modernity merely to some magic chemical
present in the Parisian milieu. Mor6as was bom in
1856, the year after Verhaeren, but his Madeline-aux-
serpents might be William Morris on Rapunzel :

Et votre chevelure comme des grappes d'ombrcs,
Et ses bandelettes i vos tempes,
Et la kabbale de vos yeux latents, —
Madeline-aux-serpents, Madeline.

Madeline, Madeline,
Pourquoi vos levres a mon cou, ah, pourquoi
Vos levres entre les coups du hache du roi!
Madeline, et les cordaces et les flutes,
Les flutes, les pas d'amour, les fltites, vous les

voulutes,
H£lasl Madeline, la. fete, Madeline,
Ne berce plus les flots au bord de Tile,
Et mes bouffons ne crevent plus des cerceaux
Au bord de I'lle, pauvres bouffons.
Pauvres bouffons que couronne la sauge!
Et mes litieres s'effeuillent aux omieres, toutes mes

litieres a grand pans
De nonchaloir, Madeline-aux-serpents . . .

A difference with Morris might have arisen, of course,
I over the now long-discussed question of vers libre, but
I who are we to dig up that Babylon? The school-boys'
( papers of Toulouse had leamt all about it before the old

A STUDY IN FRENCH POETS 63

gentlemen of The Century and Harper^s had discovered
that such things exist.

One will not have understood the French poetry of
the last half -century unless one makes allowance for
what they call the Gothic as well as the Roman or classic
influence. We should probably call it (their "Gothic")
"medievalism," its tone is that of their XIII century
poets, Crestien de Troies, Marie de France, or perhaps
even D'Orleans (as we noticed in the quotation from
Viele-Griffin). Tailhade in his "Hymne Antique" dis-
plays what we would call Swinbumism (Greekish).
Tristan Klingsor (a nom de plume showing definite ten-
dencies) exhibits these things a generation nearer to us:

Dans son reve le vieux Prince de Touraine
voit passer en robe verte k longue traine
Yeldis aux yeux charmeurs de douce reine.

. or
Au verger ou sifHent les sylphes d'automne
mignonne Isabelle est venue de Venise
et veut cueillir des cerises et des pommes.

He was writing rhymed vers libre in 1903, possibly
stimulated by translations in a volume called "Poesie
Arabe." This book has an extremely interesting preface.
I have forgotten the name of the translator, but in ex-
cusing the simplicity of Arab songs he says : "The young
girl in Germany educated in philosophy in Kant and
Hegel, when love comes to her, at once exclaims 'In-
finite !', and alli<;s J[ier vocabulary with the transcendental

64 INSTIGATIONS

The little girl in the tents 'ne savait comparer fors que
sa gourmandise.' " In Klingsor for 1903, I find :

Croise tes jambes fines et nues
Dans ton lit,

Frotte de tes mignonnes mains menues
Le bout de ton nez;
Frotte de tes doigts poteles et jolis,
Les deux violettes de tes yeux cernes,
Et reve.

Du haut du minaret arabe s'echappe
La melopee triste et breve
De I'indiscret muezzin
^Qui nasillonne et qui eternue,
Et toi tu bailies comme une petite chatte,
Tu bailies d'amour bris6e,
Et tu songes au passant d'Ormuz ou d'Endor
Qui t'a quitt^e ce matin
En te laissant sa legere bourse d'or
Et les marques bleues de ses baisers.

Later he turns to Max Elkskamp, addressing him as
if he, Klingsor, at last had "found Jesus":

Je viens vers vous, mon cher Elkskamp
Comme un pauvre varlet de coeur et de joie
Vient vers le beau seigneur qui campe
Sous sa tente d'azur et de soie.

However I believe Mor^as was a real poet, and, being
stubborn, I have still an idea which got imbedded in my
head some years ago: I mean that Klingsor is a poet.

A STUDY IN FRENCH POETS 65

As for the Elkskamp phase and cult, I do not make much
of it Jean de Bosschere has written a book upon
Elkskamp, and he assures me that Elkskamp is a great
and important poet, and some day, perhaps, I may un-
derstand it. De Bosschere seems to me to see or to feel
perhaps more keenly than any one else certain phases
of modern mechanical civilization: the ant-like madness
of men bailing out little boats they never will sail in,
shoeing horses they never will ride, making chairs they
never will sit on, and all with a frenzied intentness. I
may get my conviction as much from his drawings as
from his poems. I am not yet clear in my mind about
it. His opinion of Max Elkskamp can not be too lightly
passed over. Vide infra "De Bosschere on Elkskamp."

OF OUR DECADE

Early in 191 2 L' Effort, since called L' Effort Libre,
published an excellent selection of poems mostly by men
born since 1880: Arcos, Chenneviere, Duhamel, Spire,
Vildrac, and Jules Romains, with some of Leon Bazal-
gette's translations from Whitman.

SPIRE

(born 1868)

Andre Spire, writing in the style of the generation
which has succeeded him, is well represented in this col-
lection by his "Dames Anciennes." The contents of his
volumes are of very uneven value: Zionist propaganda,
addresses, and a certain number of well-written poems.

66 INSTIGATIONS

DAMES ANaENNES

En hiver, dans la chambre claire,
Tout en haut de la maison,
Le poele de faience blanche,
Cercle de cuivre, provincial, doux,
Chauffait mes doigts et mes livres.
Et le peuplier mandarine,
Dans le soir d'argent dedor6,
Dressait, en silence, ses branches,
Devant ma fenetre close.

— Mere, le printemps aux doigts tiedes

A souleve I'espagnolette

De mes fenetres sans rideaux.

Faites taire toutes ces voix qui montent

Jusqu'a ma table de travail.

— Ce sont les amies de ma mere
Et de la mere de ton pere.
Qui causent de leurs maris morts,
Et de leurs fils partis.

— Avec, au coin de leyrs levres,
Ces moustaches de caf6 au lait?
Et dans leurs mains ces tartines?
Dans leurs bouches ces Kouguelofs?

— Ce sont des cavales anciennes
Qui machonnent le peu d'herbe douce
Que Dieu veut bien leur laisser.

— Mere, les maitres sensibles
Lachent les juments inutiles

A STUDY IN FRENCH POETS 67

Dans les pr6s, non dans mon jardini

— Sois tranquille, mon fits, sois tranquille,
EUes ne brouteront pas tes ileurs.

— Mire, que n'y occupent-elles leurs levres,
Et leurs trop courtes dents trop blanches
De porcelaine trop fragile I

— Mon fils, fermez votre fenetre.
Mon fils, vous n'etes pas chr^ticnl

VILDRAC

ViLDRAc's "Gloire" is in a way commentary on
Romains' Ode to the Crowd ; a critique of part, at least,
of unanimism.

II avait su gagner i lui
Beaucoup d'hommes ensemble.

Et son bonheur etait de croire,
Quand il avait quitte la foule.
Que chacun des hommes Taimait
Et que sa presence durait
Innombrable et puissante en eux.

Or un jour il en suivit un

Qui retoumait chez soi, tout seul,

Et il vit son regard s'eteindre

Des qu'il fut un peu loin des autres.

I»

68 INSTIGATIONS

(The full text of this appeared in Poetry Aug., 1913.)
Vildrac's two best-known poems are "Une Aubergc
and "Visite" ; the first a forlorn scene, not too unlike a
Van Gogh, though not done with Van Gogh's vigor.

Cest seulement parce qu'on a soif qu'on entre y boire ;
Cest parce qu'on se sent tomber qu'on va s'y asseoir.
On n'y est jamais a la fois qu'un ou deux
Et Ton n'est pas forc6 d'y raconter son histoire.

Celui qui entre . .

mange lentement son pain
Parce que ses dents sont usees;
Et il boit avec beaucoup de mal
Parce qu'il a de peine plein sa gorge.

Quand il a fini,
II hesite, puis timide
Va s'asseoir un peu
A coti du feu.

Ses mains crevassees epousent

Les bosselures dures de ses genoux.

Then of the other man in the story :

'qui n'etait pas des notres. . . .

'Mais comme il avait I'air cependant d'etre des notres !'

The story or incident in "Visite" is that of a man stir-

A STUDY IN FRENCH POETS 69

ring himself out of his evening comfort to visit some
pathetic dull friends.

Ces gens helas, ne croyaient pas

Qu'il fut venu i I'improviste

Si tard, de si loin, par la neige ...

Et ils attendaient Tun et I'autre

Que brusquement et d'un haleine il exposat

La grave raison de sa venue.

f»

Only when he gets up to go, "ils oscrent comprendre

II leur promit de revenir.

• •••••

Mais avant de gagner la porte
II fixa bien dans sa memoire
Le lieu ou s'abritait leur vie.
II regarda bien chaque objet
Et puis aussi Thomme et la femnie,
Tant il craignait au fond de lui
De ne plus jamais revenir.

The relation of Vildrac's verse narratives to the short
story form is most interesting.

JULES ROMAINS

The reader who has gone through Spire, Romains, and
Vildrac, will have a fair idea of the poetry written by
this group of men. Romains has always seemed to me,
and is, I think, generally recognized as, the nerve-centre,
the dynamic centre of the group.

JO INSTIGATIONS

■

Les tnarchands sont assis aux portes des boutiques ;
lis regardent. Les toits joignent la rue au del
Et les paves semblent f econds sous le soleil

Coipme un champ de mats.
Les marchands ont laiss6 dormir pr^s du comptoir
Ce d6sir de gagner qui travaille d^ I'aube.
On dirait que, malgre leur ame habituelle,
Une autre ame s'avance et vient au seuil d'eux-memes
Comme ils viennent au seuil de leurs boutiques noires.

•

We are regaining for cities a little of what savage
man has for the forest. We live by instinct; receive
news by instinct; have conquered machinery as primi-
tive man conquered the jungle. Romains feels this,
though his phrases may not be ours. Wyndham Lewis
on giants is nearer Romains than anything else in Eng-
lish, but vorticism is, in the realm of biology, the hy-
pothesis of the dominant cell. Lewis on giants comes
perhaps nearer Romains than did the original talks about
the Vortex. There is in inferior minds a passion for
unity, that is, for a confusion and melting together of
things which a good mind will want kept distinct. Un-
informed English criticism has treated Unanimism as if
it were a vague general propaganda, and this criticism
has cited some of our worst and stupidest versifiers as
a corresponding manifestation in England. One can
only account for such error by the very plausible hy-
pothesis that the erring critics have not read ''Puissances
de Paris."

Romains is not to be understood by extracts and frag-
ments. He has felt this general replunge of mind into
instinct, or this development of instinct to cope with a
metropolis, and with metropolitan conditions; in so far

A STUDY IN FRENCH POETS 71

as he has expressed the emotions of this consciousness
he is poet; he has, aside from that, tried to formulate
this new consciousness, and in so far as such formulation
is dogmatic, debatable, intellectual, hypothetical, he is
open to argument and dispute ; that is to say he is philos-
opher, and his philosophy is definite and defined. Vil-
drac's statement "II a chang6 la path6tique" is perfectly
true. Many people will prefer the traditional and fa-
miliar and recognizable poetry of writers like Klingsor.
I am not dictating people's likes and dislikes. Romains
has made a new kind of poetry. Since the scrapping
of the Aquinian, Dantescan 3ystem, he is perhaps the
first person who had dared put up so definite a philo-
sophical frame-work for his emotions.

I do not mean, by this, that I agree with Jules
Romains; I am prepared to go no further than my
opening sentence of this section, concerning our grow-
ing, or returning, or perhaps only newly-noticed, sensi-
tization to crowd feeling; to the metropolis and its
peculiar sensations. Turn to Romains:

Je croyais les murs de ma chambre imperm^ables.
Or ils laissent passer une tiede bruine
Qui s'epaissit et qui m'empeche de me voir,
Le papier a fleurs bleues lui cede. II fait le bruit
Du sable et du cresson qu'une source traverse.
L'air qui touche mes nerf s est extremement lourd.
Ce n'est pas comme avant le pur milieu de vie
Ou montait de la solitude sublim^.

Voila que par osmose

Toute rimmensite d'alentour le sature.

^2 INSTIGATIONS

II charge mes poumons, il empoisse les choses,
II separe mon corps des meubles familiers,

Les forces du dehors s'enroulent a mes mains.

In "Puissances de Paris" he states that there are
beings more **real than the individual." Here, I can but
touch upon salients.

•

Rien ne cesse d'etre intirieur.

La rue est plus intime a cause de la brume.

Lines like Romains', so well packed with thought, so
careful that you will get the idea, can not be poured out
by the bushel like those of contemporary rhetoricians,
like those of Claudel and Fort. The best poetry has
always a content, it may not be an intellectual content;
in Romains the intellectual statement is necessary to keep
the new emotional content coherent

The opposite of Lewis's giant appears in : .

Je suis I'esclave heureux des hommes dont I'haleine
Flotte ici. Leur vouloirs s'ecoule dans mes nerf s ;
Ce qui est moi commence i fondre.

This statement has the perfectly simple order of

, words. It is the simple statement of a man saying things

I for the first time, whose chief concern is that he shall

' speak clearly. His work is perhaps the fullest statement

of the poetic consciousness of our time, or the scope of

that consciousness. I am not saying he is the most

poignant poet; simply that in him we have the fullest

poetic exposition.

You can get the feel of Laforgue or even of Corbiire

A STUDY IN FRENCH POETS 73

from a few poems; Romains is a subject for study. I
do not say this as praise, I am simply trying to define
him. His "Un Etre en Marche" is the narrative of a
girls' school, of the "crocodile" or procession going out
for its orderly walk, its collective sensations and adven-
tures.

Troupes and herds appear in his earlier work :

Le troupeau marche, avec ses chiens et son berger,
II a peur. Q4 et li des reverberes brulent,
11 tremble d'etre poursuivi par les 6toiles.

• •••••

La foule traine une 6cume d'ombrelles blanches

La grande ville s'evapore,
Et pleut a verse sur la plaine
Qu'elle sature.

His style is not a "model," it has the freshness of
grass, not of new furniture polish. In his work manyl
nouns meet their verbs for the first time, as, perhaps, in I
the last lines above quoted. He needs, as a rule, about
a hundred pages to turn round in. One can not give
these poems in quotation ; one wants about five volumes
of Romains. In so far as I am writing "criticism," I
must say that his prose is just as interesting as his verse.
But then his verse is just as interesting as his prose.
Part of his method is to show his subject in a series of
successive phases, thus in L'Individu :

Je suis un habitant de ma ville, un de ceux
Qui s'assoient au theatre et qui vont par les rues

74 INSTIGATIONS

Je cesse lentement d'etre moi. Ma personne
Semble s'an6antir chaque jour un peu plus
Cest a peine si je le sens et m'en itonne.

His poetry is not of single and startling emotions,
but — for better or worse — of progressive states of con-
sciousness. It is as useless for the disciple to try and
imitate Romains, without having as much thought of his
own, as it is for the tyro in words to try imitations of
Jules Laforgue. The limitation of Homains' work, as
of a deal of Browning's, is that, having once understood
it, one may not need or care to re-read it. This restric-
tion applies also in a wholly different way to "En-
dymion" ; having once filled the mind with Keats' color,
or the beauty of things described, one gets no new thrill
\from the re-reading of them in not very well-written
verse. This limitation applies to all poetry that is not
implicit in its own medium, that is, which is not indis-
/solubly bound in with the actual words, word music, the
fineness and firmness of the actual writing, as in Villon,
or in "ColHs O Heliconii."

But one can not leave Romains unread. His interest
is more than a prose interest, he has verse technique,
rhyme, terminal syzygy, but that is not what I ^ mean.
He is poetry in:

On ne m'a pas donne de lettres, ces jours-ci ;
Personne n'a songe, dans la ville, a m'icrire.
Oh I je n'esperais rien; je sais vivre et penser
Tout seul, et mon esprit, pour faire une flambee,
N'attend pas qu'on lui jette une feuille noircie.

A STUDY IN FRENCH POETS 73

Mais je sens qu'il me manque un plaisir familier,

J'ai du bonheur aux mains quand j'ouvre une enveloppe;

But such statements as:

TENTATION

Je me plais beaucoup trop a rester dans les gares ;
Accoude sur le hois anguleux des barrieres,
Je regarde les trains s'emplir de voyageurs.

and:

Mon esprit solitaire est une goutte d'huile
Sur la pensee et sur le songe de la ville
Qui me laissent Hotter et ne m'absorbent pas.

would not be important unless they were followed by
exposition. The point is that they are followed by ex-
position, to which they form a necessary introduction,
defining Romains' angle of attack; and as a result the
force of Romains is cumulative. His early books gather
meaning as one reads through the later one^.

And I think if one opens him almost anywhere one
can discern the authentic accent of a man saying. some-
thing, not the desultory imi>agination of rehash.

Charles Vildrac is an interesting companion figure to
his brilliant friend Romains. He conserves himself, he
is never carried away by Romains' theories. He ad-
mires, differs, and occasionally formulates a corrective
or corollary as in "Gloire."

76 INSTIGATIONS

Compare this poem with Romains' "Ode to the Crowd
Here Present" and you get the two angles of vision.

Henry Spiess, a Genevan lawyer, has written an in-
teresting series of sketches of the court-room. He is a
more or less isolated figure. I have seen amusing and
indecorous poems by George Fourest, but it is quite
probable that they amuse because one is unfamiliar with
their genre; still "La Blonde Negresse" (the heroine of
his title), his satire of the symbolo-rhapsodicoes in the
series of poems about her: "La negresse blonde, la
blonde negresse," gathering into its sound all the swish
and woggle of the sound-over-sensists ; the poem on
the beautiful blue-behinded baboon; that on the gentle-
man "qui ne craignait ni la verole ni dieu" ; "Les pianos
du Casino au bord de la mer" (Laforgue plus the four-
hour touch), are an egregious ami diverting guffaw.
(I do not think the book is available to the public. J. G.
Fletcher once lent me a copy, but the edition was limited
and the work seems rather unknown.)

Romains is my chief concern. I can not give a full
exposition of Unanimism on a page or two. Among all
the younger writers and groups in Paris, the group cen-
tering in Romains is the only one which seems to me
to have an energy comparable to that of the Blast group
in London,* the only group in which the writers for Blast
can be expected to take very much interest.

Romains in the flesh does not seem so energetic as
Lewis in the flesh, but then I have seen Romains only
once and I am well acquainted with Lewis. Romains is,
in his writing, more placid, the thought seems more
passive, less impetuous. As for those who will not
have Lewis "at any price," there remains to them no
other course than the acceptance of Romains, for these

* Statement dated Feb., 1918.

A STUDY IN FRENCH POETS 71

twb men hold the two tenable positions: the Mountain
and the Multitude;

It might be fairer to Rpmains to say simply he has
chosen, or specialized in/ the collected multitude as a
subject matter, and that he is quite well on a mountain
of his own.

My general conclusions, redoing and reviewing this
period of French poetry, are (after my paw-over of some
sixty new volumes as mentioned, and after re-reading
most of what I had read before) :

1. As stated in my opening, that mediocre poetry is
about the same in all countries ; that France has as much
drivel, gas, mush, etc., poured into verse, as has any
other nation.

2. That it is impossible "to make a silk purse out of
a sow's ear," or poetry out of nothing ; that all attempts
to "expand" a subject into poetry are futile, funda-
mentally; that the subject matter must_be^ coterminous
with the expression. Tasso, Spenser, Ariosto, prose
poems, diffuse forms of all sorts are all a preciosity, a
parlor-game, and dilutations go to the scrap heap.

3. That Corbiere, Rimbaud, Laforgue are permanent;
that probably some of De Gourmont's and Tailhade's
poems are permanent, or at least reasonably durable;
that Romains is indispensable, for the present at any
rate ; that people who say they "don't like French poetry"
are possibly matoids, and certainly ignorant of the scope
and variety of French work. In the same way people
are ignorant of the qualities of French people; ignorant
that if they do not feel at home in Amiens (as I do not),
there are other places in France ; in the Charente if you
walk across country you meet people exactly like the
nicest people you can meet in the American country
and ihey are not "foreign."

78 INSTIGATIONS

All France is not to be found in Paris. The adjective
"French" is current in America with a dozen erroneous
or stupid connotations. If it means, as it did in the
mouth of my contemporary, "talcum powder" and sur-
face neatness, the selection of poems I have given here
would almost show the need of, or at least a reason for,
French Pamassienism ; for it shows the French poets
violent, whether with the violent words of Corbicre, or
the quiet violence .of the irony of Laforgue, the sudden
annihilations of his "turn-back" on the subject. People
forget that the incision of Voltaire is no more all of
French Literature than is the robustezza of Brantome.
(Burton of the "Anatomy" is our only writer who can
match him.) They forget the two distinct finenesses of
the Latin French and of the French "Gothic," that is of
the eighteenth century, of Bernard (if one take a writer
of no great importance to illustrate a definite quality),
or of D'Orleans and of Froissart in verse. From this
delicacy, if they can not be doing with it, they may turn
easily to Villon or Basselin. Only a general distaste for
literature can be operative against all of these writers.

UNANIMISME

The English translation of Romains' "Mort de
Quelqu'un" has provoked various English and American
essays and reviews. His published works are "L'Ame
des Hommes," 1904; "Le Bourg Regen^re," 1906; "La
Vie Unanime," 1908; "Premier Livre de Priires," 1909;
"La Foule qui est Ici," 1909; in 1910 and 191 1 "Un Etre
en Marche," "Deux Poemes," "Manuel de Deification,"
"L'armee dans la Ville," "Puissances de Paris," and
"Mort de Quelqu'un," employing the three excellent pub-
lishing houses of the Mercure, Figuiere and Sansot.

A STUDY IN FRENCH POETS 79

His "Reflexions" at the end of "Puissances de Paris"
are so good a formulation of the Unanimiste Aesthetic,
or "Pathetique," that quotation of them will do more to
disabuse readers misled by stui>id English criticism than
would any amount of talk about Romsuns. I let him
speak for himself:

REFLEXIONS

"Many people are now ready to recognize that there
are in the world beings more real than man. We admit
the life of entities greater than our own bodies. Society
is not merely an arithmetical total, or a collective desig-
nation. We even credit the existence of groups inter- ».
mediate between the individual and the state. But these )
opinions are put forth by abstract deduction or by ex- f
perimentation of reason.

"People employ them to complete a system of things W
and with the complacencies of analogy. If they do not
follow a serious study of social data, they are at least
the most meritorious results of observations ; they justify
the method, and uphold the laws of a science which
struggles manfully to be scientific.

"These fashions of knowing would seem both costly
and tenuous. Man did not wait for physiology to give
him a notion of his body, in which lack of patience he
was intelligent, for physiology has given him but analytic
and exterior information concerning things he had long
known from within. He had been conscious of his
organs long before he had specified their modes of ac-
tivity. As spirals of smoke from village chimneys, the
profound senses of each organ had mounted toward him ;
joy, sorrow, all the emotions are deeds more fully of
consciousness than are the thoughts of man's reason.

8o INSTIGATIONS

Reason makes a concept of man, but the heart perceives
the flesh of his body.

"In like manner we must know the groups that englobc
us, not by observation from without, but by an organic
consciousness. And it is by no means sure that the
rhythms will make their nodes in us, if we be not the
centres of groups. We have but to become such. Dig
deep enough in our being, emptying it of individual rev-
eries, dig enough little canals so that the souls of the
groups will flow of necessity into us.

**I have attempted nothing else in this book. Various
groups have come here into consciousness. They are
still rudimentary, and their spirit is but a perfume in the
air. Beings with as little consistence as la Rue du
Havre, and la Place de la Bastile, ephemeral as the com-
pany of people in an omnibus, or the audience at UOpera
Comique, can not have complex organism or thoughts
greatly elaborate. People will think it superfluous that
I should unravel such shreds in place of re-carding once
more the enormous heap of the individual soul.

"Yet I think the groups are in the most agitated stage
of their evolution. Future groups will perhaps deserve
less affection, and we shall conceal the basis of things
more effectively. Now the incomplete and unstable con-
tours have not yet learned to stifle any tendency (any
inclination). Every impact sets them floating. They
do not coat the infantile matter with a hard or impact-
ing envelope. A superior plant has realized but few of
the possibilities swarming in fructiflcatory mould. A
mushroom leads one more directly to the essential life
quality than do the complexities of the oak tree.

"Thus the groups prepare more future than is strictly
required. Thus we have the considerable happiness of
watching the commencement of reign, the beginning of

A STUDY IN FRENCH POETS 8i

an organic series which will last as did others, for a
thousand ages, before the cooling of the earth. This
is not a progression, it is a creation, the first leap-out of
a different series. Groups will not continue the activi-
ties of animals, nor of men; they will start things afresh
according to their own need, and as the consciousness
of their substance indreases they will refashion the
image of the world.

"The men who henceforth can draw the souls of groups
to converge within themselves, will give forth the com-
ing dream, and will gather, to boot, certain intuitions of
human habit. Our ideas of the being will undergo a
correction; will hesitate rather more in finding a dis-
tinction between the existent and non-existent. In pass-
ing successively from the Place de TEurope to the Place
des Vosges, and then to a gang of navvies, one perceives
that there are numerous shades of difference between
nothing and something. Before resorting to groups one
is sure of discerning a being of a simple idea. One
knows that a dog exists, that he has an interior and
independent unity ; one knows that a table or a mountain
does not exist; nothing but our manner of speech cuts
it off from the universal non-existing. But streets de-
mand all shades of verbal expression (from the non-
existing up to the autonomous creature).

"One ceases to believe that a definite limit is the indis-
pensable means of existence. Where does la Place de -^
la Trinity begin ? The streets mingle their bodies. The
squares isolate themselves with great difiiculty. The
crowd at the theatre takes on no contour until it has
lived for some time, and with vigor. A being (elre)
has a centre, or centres in harmony, but aj>cing is not
compelled to have limits. He exists a great deal in one
place, rather" less in others, and, further on, a second

82 INSTIGATIONS

being commences before the first has left off. Every

j being has, somewhere in space, its maximum. Only

H >l/^ / / ancestored individuals possess affirmative contours, a

/ 1 v/'//' si^in which cuts them off from the infinite.

I "Space is no one's possession. No being has succeeded

in appropriating one scrap of space and saturating it

with his own unique existence. Everything over-crosses,

coincides, and cohabits. Every point is a perch for a

thousand birds. Paris, the rue Montmartre, a crowd, a

man, a protoplasm are on the same spot of pavement.

A thousand, existences are concentric. We see a little

of some of them.

"How can we go on thinking that an individual is a
solitary thing which is born, grows, reproduces itself
and dies? This is a superior and inveterate manner of
being an individual. But groups are not truly bom.
Their life makes and unmakes itself like an unstable
state of matter, a condensation which does not endure.
They show us that life, at its origin, is a provisory atti-
tude, a moment of exception, an intensity between two
relaxations, not continuity, nothing decisive. The first
entireties take life by a sort of slow success, and extin-
guish themselves without catastrophe, the single elements
do not perish because the whole is disrupted.

"The crowd before the Baraque Foraine starts to live
little by little, as water in a kettle begins to sing and
evaporate. The passages of the Odeon do not live by
night, each day they are real, a few hours. At the start
life seems the affair of a moment, then it becomes inter-
mittent. To be durable; to ^become a development and
a destiny; to be defined" and finished off at each end
by birth and death, it needs a deal of accustomedness.
f "The primitive forms are not coequal. There Is a
• natural hierarchy among groups. Streets have no set

A STUDY IN FRENCH POETS 83

middle, no veritable limitations; they hold a long vacil-
lating sort of life which night flattens out almost to
nothingness. Cross-roads and squares take on contour,
and gather up the node^ of their rhythms. Other groups
have a fashioned body, they endure but a little space,
but they have learned, almost, to die ; they even resurrect
themselves as by a jerk or dry spasm, they begin the
habit of being, they strive toward it, and this puts them
out of breath.

"I have not yet met a group fully divine. None has
had a real consciousness, none has addressed me, saying :
1 exist. The day when the first group shall take its
soul in its hands, as one lifts up a child in order to look
in its face, that day there will be a new god upon earth.
This is the god I await, with my labor of annunciation."

This excerpt from Romains gives the tone of his
thought. In so far as he writes in the present tense he
carries conviction. He broaches truly a "new," of at
least contemporary "pathitique." He utters, in original
vein, phases of consciousness whereinto we are more or
less drifting, in measure of our proper sensibility.

I retain, however, my full suspicion of agglomerates.

DE BOSSCHERE'S STUDY OF ELSKAMP ♦

I CONFESSED in my February essay my inability to
make anything of Max Elskamp's poetry, and I have
tacitly confessed my inability to find any formula for
hawking De Bosschere's own ver^e to any public of my
acquaintance; De Bosschere's study of Elskamp, how-
ever, requires no advocacy; I do not think it even rc-

* "Max Elskamp"; essai par Jean De Basse hire, BibUathique
de VOccideni, 17 rue Ebli, Paris, fr, 3.50.

84 INSTIGATIONS

quires to be a study of Max Elskamp ; it drifts as qqiet
canal water ; the protagonist may or not be a real man.

"Ici, la solitude est plus accentuee : souvent, pendant
de longues minutes, les rues sont desertes. . . . Les
portes ne semblent pas, ainsi que dans les grandes villes,
s'ouvrir sur un poumon de vie, et etre une cellule vivante
de la rue. Au contraire, toutes sont ferm^es. Aussi
bien, les fagades de ce quartier sont pareilles aux murs
borgnes. Un mince ruban de ciel roux et gris, k peine
bleu au printemps, decoupe les pignons, se tend sur le
marche desert et sur le puits profond des cours."

From this Antwerp, De Bosschere derives his subject,
as Gautier his "Albertus" from

Un vieux bourg flamand tel que peint T^niers ;
trees bathing in water.

"Son univers etait limite par: *le grand peuplier'; une
statue de Pomone, Me grand rocher,' et *la grand
grenouille' ; ceci etait un coin touffu ou il y avait de Teau
et oil il ne vit jamais qu'une seule grenouille, qu'il croyait
immortelle." De Bosschere's next vision of Ebkamp is
when his subject is pointed out as "le poete dfeadent,"
for no apparent reason save that he read Mallarm6 at a
time when Antwerp did not. The study breaks into a
cheerful grin when Elskamp tells of Mallarm^'s one
appearance in the sea-port:

"Le bruit et les cris qui furent pouss^s pendant la
conference de Mallarme, Tarretirent plusieurs fois.
L'opinion du public sur sa causerie est contenue en ces
quelques mots, dits par un general retrait^, grand joueur
de billard, et qui du reste ne fit qu'une courte absence
de la salle de jeu, pour ecouter quelques phrases du
po^te. 'Get homme est ivre ou fou/ dit il fort haut,
en quittant la salle, ou son jugement fit loi. Anvers,
malgre un l^ger masque de snobisme, qui pourrait

A STUDY IN FRENCH POETS 85

tromper, n'a pas change depuis. Mallarme, tneme pour
Ics avertis, est toujours Thomme ivre ou fou."

The billiard player is the one modern touch in the
book; for the rest Elskamp sails with sea-captains, ap-
parently in sailing ships to Constantinople, or perhaps
one should call it Byzantium. He reads Juan de la
Cruz and Young's Night Thoughts, and volumes of de-
monology, in the properly dim library of his maternal
grandfather, "Sa passion en rhetorique fut pour Long-
fellow, il traduisait *Song of (sic) Hiawatots/"

The further one penetrates into De Bosschere's de-
lightful narrative the less real is the hero; the less he
needs to be real. A phantom has been called out of
De Foe's period, delightful phantom, taking on the reality
of the fictitious; in the end the author has created a
charming figure, but I am as far as ever from making
head or tail of the verses attributed to this creation. I
have had a few hours' delightful reading, I have loitered
along slow canals, behind a small window sits Elskamp
doing something I do not in the least understand.

So was I at the end of the first division '^Sur la Vie"
de Max Elskamp. The second division, concerned with
"Oeuvre et Vie," but raised again the questions that
had faced me in reading Elskamp's printed work. He
has an undercurrent, an element everywhere present,
differentiating his poems 'from other men's poemsi De
Bosschere scarcely helps me to name it. The third divi-
sion of the book, at first reading, nearly quenched the
curiosity and the interest aroused by the first two-thirds.
On second reading I thought better of it. Elskamp,
plunged in the middle ages, in what seems almost an

86 INSTIGATIONS

atrophy, as much as an atavism, becomes a little more
plausible. (For what it is worth, I read the chapter
upon a day of almost complete exhaustion.)

"Or, quand la vision lache comme une proie vid6e le
saint, il demeure avec les hommes."

"Entre le voyant et ceux qui le sanctifient il y a un
precipice insondable. Seul Tindividu est beatifie par sa
croyance; mais il ne peut Futiliser au temporel ni la
partager avec les hommes, et c'est peut-etre la forme
unique de la justice sur terre."

The two sentences give us perhaps the tone of De Boss-
chere's critique "Sur le Mysticisme" of Ebkamp.

It is, however, not in De Bosschere, but in La Wallonie
that I found the clue to this author:

CONSOLATRICE DES AFFLIGES

Et I'hiver m'a donne la main,

J'ai la main d'Hiver dans les mains,

et dans ma tete, au loin, il brule
les vieux etes de canicule;

et dans mes yeux, en candeurs lentes,
tr^s blanchement il fait des tentes,

dans mes yeux il fait des Sicile,
puis des lies, encore des iles.

Et c'est tout un voyage en rond
trop vite pour la gu^rison

a tous les pays ou Ton meurt

au long cours des mers et des heures ;

A STUDY' IN FRENCH POETS 87

et c'est tout un voyage au vent
sur les vaisseaux de mes Hts blancs

qui houlent avec des etoiles
i Tentour de toutes les voiles.

or j'ai le gout de mer aux livres
comme une rancoeur de geniivre

bu pour la tres mauvaise orgie
des d^arts dans les tabagies;

puis ce pays encore me vient:
un pays de neiges sans fin. . . .

Marie des bonnes couvertures,
faites-y la neige moins dure

et courir moins comme des lieres
mes mains sur mes draps blancs de fievre.
—Max Elskamp in "La WaUonie," 1892.

The poem appears in Van Bever and L^utaud's an-
thology and there may be no reason for my not having
thence received it; but there is, for all that, a certain
value in finding a man among his native surroundings,
and in finding Elskamp at home, among his contem-
poraries, 1 gained first the advantage of comprehension.

ALBERT MOCKEL AND "LA WALLONIE" ♦

I recently received a letter from Albert Mockel,
written with a graciousness not often employed by Eng-
lish and American writers in communication to their

* Uttle Review, Oct., 191a

88 INSTIGATIONS

juniors. Indeed, the present elder generation of Ameri-
can ''respectable" authors having all their lives ap-
proached so nearly to death, have always been rather
annoyed that American letters did not die utterly in their
personal desiccations. Signs of vitality; signs of inter-
est in, or cognizance of other sections of this troubled
planet have been steadily and papier-macheedly depre-
cated. The rubbish bins of Harper^s and the Century
have opened their lids not to new movements but only
to the diluted imitations of new movers, etc.

La Wallonie, beginning as L'Elan Littiraire in 1885,
endured seven years. It announced for a full year on
its covers that its seventh year was its last. Albert
Mockel has been gracious enough to call it "Notre Little
Revieiv a nous," and to commend the motto on our
cover, in the letter here following:

109, Avenue de Paris 8 mai, 1918

La Malmaison Rueil
Monsieur et cher confrere,

Merci de votre amiable envoi. La Little Review m'est
sympathique a Textreme. En la feuilletant j'ai cru voir
renaitre ce temps dore de fei'veur et de belle confiance
ou, adolescent encore, et tatonnant un peu dans les
neuves regions de I'Art, je fondai a Liege notre Little
Review k nous. La Wallonie, Je retrouve justement
quelques livraisons de cette revue et je vous les envoie;
elles ont tout au moins le m^rite de la rarete.

Vous mon cher confrere, Ai]k ne marchez plus k tatons
mais je vous soupqonne de n'etre pas aussi terriblement,
aussi criminellement jeune que je Tetais a cette epoque-
la. Et puis trente ans ont passe sur la littdrature, et
c'est de la folic d'hier qu'est faite la sagesse d'aujourd'-
hui. Alors le Symbolisme naissait ; grace k la collabora-

A STUDY IN FRENCH POETS 89

tion de mes amis, grace a Henri de R^gnier et Pierre M.
Olin qui dirigerent la revue avec moi, La Wallonie en
fut Tun des premiers foyers. Tout etait remis en ques^
tion. On aspirait i plus de liberti a une forme plus
intense et plus complete plus musicale et plus souple, a
une expression nouvclle.jde I'cternelle beauti. On s'inge-
niait on cherchait . . ♦ Tatonnementse ? Certes et ils
etaient inevitables. Mais vif et ardent effort, d6sint6res-
sement absolu, foi juvenile et surtout "No compromise
with the public taste" . . . N'y a-t-il point 14 quelques '
traits de ressemblance avec Toeuvre que vous tentez au-
jourd'hui en Ameriquc, et, i trente annees d'intervale,
une sorte de cousinage? C'est pourquoi mon cher con-
frere, j'ai lu avec tant de plaisir la Little Review dont
vous avec eu la gentillesse de m'adresser la collection.
Croyez-moi sympathiquement votre,

Albert Mockel.

With a native mistrust of la belle phrase; of "temps
dori," "ferveur," "belle confiance," etc., and with an
equally native superiority to any publication not printed
LARGE, I opened La Wallonie. The gropings, "ta-
tonnements," to which M. Mockel so modestly refers,
appear to have included some of the best work of
Mallarm^, of Stuart Merrill, of Max Elskamp and Emile
Verhaeren. Verlaine contributed to La Wallonie, De
Regnier was one of its editors . . . Men of since popu-
lar fame — Bourget, Pierre Louys, Maeterlinck — ap-
peared with the rarer spirits.

If ever the "amateur magazine" in the sense of maga-
zine by lovers of art and letters, for lovers of art and
letters, in contempt of the commerce of letters, has vin-
dicated itself, that vindication was La Wallonie. Ver-
haeren's "Les Pauvres" first appeared there as the sec-

90 INSTIGATIONS

oncl part of the series : "Chansons des Carrefours" (Jan.,
'92) . . . The Elskamp I have just quoted appeared
there with other poems of Max Elskamp. Mallarme is
represented by the exquisite:

SONNET

Ses purs ongles tres haut didiant leur onyx,
L'Angoisse ce minuit, soutient, lampadophore,
Maint reve vesperal brule par le ph^nix
Que ne recueille pas de cin^raire amphore

Sur les credences, au salon vide : nul ptyx,
Aboli bibelot d'inanite sonore,
(Car le maitre est alle puiser des pleurs au Styx
Avec ce seul objet dont le Neant s'honore.)

Mais proche la croisee au nord vacante, un or

Agonise selon peut-etre le d6cor

Des licornes ruant du feu contre une nixe,

Elle, d6funte nue en le miroir encor

Que, dans I'oubli ferme par le cadre, se fixe

De scintillations sitot le septuor.

—Mallarmi in "La Waltonier Jan., 1889.

An era of Franco-Anglo-American intercourse is
marked by his address to:

THE WHIRLWIND

Pas les rafales i propos

De rien comme occuper la rue

A STUDY IN FRENCH POEIS 91

Sujette au noir vol des chapeaux;
Mais une danseuse apparue

Tourbillon de mousseline ou
Fureur ^parses en 6cutnes
Que soulive par son genou
Celle meme dont nous v^umes

Pour tout, hormis lui, rebattu
Spirituelle, ivre, immobile
Foudtoyer avec Ic tutu.
Sans se faire autrement de bile

Sinon rieur que puisse I'air
De sa jupe ^venter Whistler.

—Mallarmc in "Wallonie," Nov., 1890.

If I owe Albert Mockel a great debt in having illumi-
nated my eye for Elskamp I owe him no less the pleasure
of one of Merrill's most delicate triumphs in the open-
ing of

BALLET

Pour Gustave Moreau,
En casque de cristal rose les baladines,
Dont les pas mesures aux cordes des kinnors
Tintent sous les tissus de tulle roidis d'ors,
Exultent de leurs yeux pales de xaladines.

Toisons fauves sur leurs levres incarnadines,
Bras lourds de bracelets barbares, en essors
Moelleux vers la lueur lunaire des decors,
Elles murmurent en malveillantes sourdines:

92 INSTIGATIONS

"Nous somnies, 6 mortels, danseuses du Desir,

Salomes dont les corps tordus par le plaisir

Leurrcnt vos heurs d'amour vers nos pervers arcanes.

Prosternez-vous avec des hosannas, ces soirs!
Car, surgissant dans des aurores d'encensoirs,
Sur nos cymbales nous f erons tonner vos cranes."

—Stiuirt MerrUl in ''La JVallonie," July, '98.

The period was "glauque" and "nacre," it had its pet
and too-petted adjectives, the handles for parody; but
it had also a fine care for sound, for sound fine-wrought,
not mere swish and resonant rumble, not

"Dolores, O hobble and kobble Dolores.
O perfect obstruction on track."

The particular sort of fine workmanship shown in
this sonnet of Merrill's has of late been too much let
go by the board. One may do worse than compare it
with the Syrian syncopation of Ai(S>va and "Adiav if in
Bion's Adonis.

Hanton is gently didactic:

LE BON GRAIN

"Deja peinent maints moissonncurs dont
la memoire est destinee a vivre."
— Celestin Dcmblon.

Amants des rythlnes en des strophes cadencees,
Des rimes rares aux splendeurs evocatoires,
I^issant en eux comme un echo de leurs pensees,
Comme un parfum de leurs symboles en histoires:

A STUDY IN FRENCH POETS 9J

Tels les poetes vont cherchant en vrais glaneurs
Les blonds epis qui formeront leur riche ecrin.
lis choisiront, comme feraient les bons vanneurs,
Parmi les bles. passes au crible, le beau grain.

Et germera cette semence bien choisie,
Entre les roses et les lys, pour devenir
Riche moisson de la fertile fantaisie.

L'ardent soleil de Messidor fera jaunir

Les tiges souples d'une forte poesie

Qui dresseront leurs fiers epis vers I'avenir!

—Edmond HatUon in "La IVallonie/' July, '88.

Delaroche is, at least in parts, utterly incomprehen-
sible, but there is an interesting experiment in sound-
sequence which begins:

SONNETS SYMPHONIQUES

En la langueur

accidentelle

de ta dentelle

ou meurt mon coeur

Un profil pleure
et se voit tel
en le pastel
du divin leurre

Qu'or vegetal
de lys s'enlise
au froid santal

94 INSTIGATIONS

Si n'agonise
occidental
qui s'adonise.
—AchiUe Delaroche in "La WaOonie," Feb., '89.

I do not know that we will now be carried away by
Albert Saint-Paul's chinoTserie, or that she-devils are so
much in fashion as when Jules Bois expended, certainly,
some undeniable emotion in addressing them:

PETALES DE NACRE

En sa robe ou s'immobilisent les oiseaux,

Une dmerge des fleurs comme une fleur plus grande.

Comme une fleur pench^ au sourire de I'eau,

Ses mains viennent tresser la trainante guirlande
Pour enchainer le Dragon vert — et de legende!
Qui de ses griffes d'or d^chire les roseaux,

Les faisceaux de roseaux: banderoUes et lances.

Et quand le soir empourprera le fier silence
De la foret enjoleuse de la Douleur,
Ses doigts, fuseaux filant au rouet des murmures
I^s beaux anneaux fleuris liant les fleurs aux fleurs,

Ses doigts n'auront saigne qu'aux epines peu dures.
— Albert Saint-Paul in "La Wallonie," Jan., '91.

POUR LA DEMONE

Un soir de joie, un soir d'ivresse, un soir de fete,
— Et quelle fete, et quelle ivresse, et quelle joiel—

^ •-'

A STUDY IN FRENCH POETS 95

Tu vins. L'imperial ennui sacrait ta tete;

Et tu marchais dans un bruit d'armure et de soie.

Tu d^aignas tous les bijoux et Toripeau
De ruban, de dentelle et d'^h&nire fleur.
Herm^tique,* ta robe emprisonnait ta peau.
Out, la fourrure seule autour de ta paleur.

Tu parus. Sous tes yeux que le kh'ol abomine»
Le bal fut la lugubre et d^risoire histoire.
Les hommes des pantins qu'un vice m^ne et mine.
Les femmes, coeurs et corps fan^, et quel d^boire !

POUR LA DEMONE

EUe est foUe, c'est sur, elle est folle la chire ;
Elle m'aime i n'en pas douter, mais elle est folle,
Elle m'aime et, compatissez a ma mis^re,
Avec tous, avec toutes, elle batifole.

Un passe. . . . Elle s'elance i lui, coeur pr^sum^. . . .
Elle s'offre et le provoque, puis elle fuit
Vers ailleurs ... si fidele encore au seul-aim6,
Mais elle est folle et je m'^plore dans la nuit.

Pour quelque amie aux d^licatesses felines,

Elle glisse vers les caresses trop profondes.

. . . "Tu vas, folle, oublier mes rancoeurs orphelines.

Mais sa livre pensive h^site aux toisons blondes.

—Jules Bois in "La IValhme/' Sept,, '90.
♦ Laforguef

t»

96 INSTIGATIONS

In part we must take our reading of La Wallonic as a
study of the state of symbolism from 1885 to '92.

Rodenbach displays the other leaf of the diptych: the
genre, the homely Wallon landscape, more familiar to the
outer world in Verhaeren, but not, I think, better
painted.

PAYSAGES SOUFFRANTS

II.

A Emilie Verhaeren.
La-bas, tant de petits hameaux sous Tavalanche
De la neige qui tombe adoucissante et blanche,
Tant de villages, tant de chaumines qui sont
Pour le reste d'un soir doucement assoupies.
Car le neige s'^tend en de molles charpies
Sur les blessures des vieilles briques qui n'ont
Rien senti d'une Soeur sur leur rongeur qui saigne !
Mais, o neige, c'est toi la Soeur au halo blanc
Qui consoles les murs malades qu'on dedaigne
Et mets un peu d'ouate aux pierres s'eraflant.

Las I rien ne guerira les chaumines — aieules
Qui meurent de I'hiver et meurent d'etre seules. . . .
Et leurs ames bientot, au gre des vents du nord.
Dans la fumee aux lents departs, seront parties
Cependant que la neige, a I'heure de leur mort,
Leur apporte ses refraichissantes hostiesi

— Georges Rodenbach in **La IVallonie,'* Jan,, '88.

Rodenbach is authentic.

Viele-Griffin, who, as Stuart Merrill, has always been

A STUDY IN FRENCH POETS 97

known in France ^ "an American/' contributed largely
to La Wallonie, His "Au Tombeau d'Heline" ends:

HELENE

Me voici:

J'etais li des hier, et d^s sa veille,

Ailleurs, ici;

Toute chair, a pare, tin soir, mon ame vieille

Comme Tetemite du desir que tu vets.

La nuit est claire au firmament . . .

Regarde avec tes yeux lev&:

Voici — comme un tissu de pale feu fatal

Qui fait epanouir la fleur pour la fl6trir —

Mon voile ou transparait tout assouvissement

Qui t'appelle a la vie et qui t'en fait mourir.

La nuit est claire au firmament vital . ^ .

Mes mythes, tu les sais:

Je suis fillc du Cygne,

Je suis la lune dont s'exuberent les mers

Qui montenty tombent, se soulevent;

Et c'est le flot de vie exultante et prostree,

le flot des reyes,

le flot des chairs,

le flux et le reflux de la vaste maree.

Mon doute — on dit TEspoir — fait Taction insigne:
Je suis reine de Sparte et celle-14 de Troie,
Par moi, la douloureuse existence guerroie
Je meus toute inertie aux leurres de ma joie,
Hel^ne, Sclent, flottant de phase en phase,
Je suis rinaccWee et la tierce Hypostase
Et si je rejetais, d6sir qui m'y convies,

98 INSTIGATIONS

Mon voile qui promet et refuse Textase,
Ma nudit£ de feu resorberait les Vies. . . .

—Viele-GrifRn in "La Wallonie/' Dec,, '91.
(Complete number devoted to his poems.)

Mockel is represented by several poems rather too long
to quote, — "Chantefable un peu naive," "L'Antithise,"
suggestive of the Gourmont litany; by prose comment,
by work over various pseudonyms. "A Clair Matin" is
a suitable length to quote, and it is better perhaps to
represent him here by it than by fragments which I had
first intended to cut from his longer poems.

A CLAIR MATIN

La nuit au loin s'est effacee
comme les lignes tremblantes d'un reve;
la nuit s'est fondue au courant du Passe
et le jour attendu se leve.

RegardezI en les courbes molles des rideaux

une heure attendue se revele

et ma fenetre eniin s'6claire,

cristalline du givre ou se rit la lumiere.

Une parure enfantine de neiges

habille li-bas d'immobiles eaux

et c'est les corteges des fees nouvellcs

a tire d'ailes, k tire d'ailes

du grand lointain qui toutes reviennent

aux flocons de ce jour en neiges qui s'^ele.

Des courbes de mes rideaux dairs
— voici! c'est un parfum de del! —

A STUDY IN FRENCH POETS 99

blanc des guirlandes de Thiver
le jeune matin m'est apparu
avec un visage de fiancee.

Des fees

(ah je ne sais quelles mortelles f^)

jadis elles vinrent toucher la paupiere

d'un etre enfantin qui mourut.

Son ame, oil se jouait en songes la lumiire,

diaphane corolle 6panouie au jour

son ame etait vtve de toute lumiere!

Lui, comme un frere il sutvait ma course

et nous allions en confiants de la montagne a la vall^

par les forets des chenes, des hetres

— car eux, les ancetres, ils ont le front grave

ils virent maints reves des autres ages

et nous parlent, tres doucement, comme nos Pires.

Mais voyez! a mes rideaux pales

le matin glisse des sourires;

car la Fiancee est venue

car la Fiancde est venue

avec un simple et tres doux visage,

avec des mots qu'on n'entend pas,

en silence la Fianc^ est apparue

comme une grande soeur de I'enfant qui mourut;

et les hetres, les chenes royaux des forets

par douce vocalise egrenant leur parure,

les voix ressuscitees en la plaine sonore

et toute la foret d'aurore

quand elle secoue du crepuscule sa chevelure.

tout chante, bruit, p^tille et rayonne

car la celeste Joie que la clarte delivre

d'un hymne repercute aux miroirs du futur

100 INSTIGATIONS

le front pale ou scintille en ^toiles le givre.

— Albert Meckel in ''La Wallonie," Dernier fascicule,

•92.

I have left Gide and Van Lerbcrghe unquoted, un-
mentioned, but I have, I dare say, given poems enough
to indicate the quality and the scope of the poetry in
La Wallonie,

In prose their cousinage is perhaps more quickly ap-
parent. Almost the iirst sentence I come upon (I sus-
pect it IS Mockel's) runs as follows:

La Revue des deux Mandes publie un roman de Georges
Ohnet ce qui ne surprendra personne."

This is the proper tone to use when dealing with elderly
muttonheads ; with the Harpers of yester year. La Wal-
lonie found it out in the eighties. The symboliste move-
ment flourished on it. American letters did not flour-
ish, partly perhaps for the lack of it, and for the lack
of unbridled uncompromising magazines run by young
men who did not care for reputations surfaites, for
elderly stodge and stupidity.

If we turn to Mockel's death notice for Jules Laforgue
we will find La Wallonie in '87 awake to the value of
contemporary achievement:

JULES LAFORGUE

Nous apprenons avec une vive tristesse, la mort de
Jules Laforgue, Tun des plus curieux poetes de la lit-
terature aux vis6es nouvelles. Nous Tavons design6,
ja deux mois: un Tristan Corbiere plus argentin, moins
apre . . . Et telle est bien sa caract^ristique. Sans le

A STUDY IN FRENCH POETS loi

moindre soup^on d'imitation ou de reminiscences, Jules
Laforgue a sauvegarde une originality vivace. Seule-
inenty cette originality, par bien des saillies, touche 4
celle de Tristan Corbiere. C'est une meme raillerie de la
Vie et du Monde; mais plus de sombre et virile amer-
tume emouvait en I'auteur des Amours Jaunes, dont cette
piice donnera quelque idee:

LE CRAPAUD

Un chant dans une nuit sans air . . .

— La lune plaque en m6tal clair

Les d&oupures du vert sombre.

. . . Un chant; comme un echo, tout vif

Enterre, li, sous le massif . . .

— ^a se tait ; viens, c est la, dans Tombre . . .

Un crapaudi

— Pourquoi cette peur,
Pres de moi, ton soldat fidele!
Vois-le, poete tondu, sans aile,
Rossignol de la boue . . .

— Horreur ! —
... 11 chante. — Horreur!! — Horreur pourquoi?
VoiS'tu pas son oeil de lumiire . . .
Non, il s'en va, froid, sous sa pierre.

• • • • • •

Bonsoir — ce crapaud-la c'est moi.

Chez Laforgue, il y a plus de gai sans-souci, de coups
de batte de pierrot donnes a toutes choses, plus de "vaille-
que-vaille la vie," dit d'un air de moqueuse resignation.
Sa rancoeur n'est pas qui encombrante. II etait un peu
I'enfant indiscipline que rit i travers les gronderies, et
fait la moue a sa fantaisie ; mais son haussement d'epaules

I02 INSTIGATIONS

gamin, et ses "Apres tout?" qu'il jette comme une
chiquenaude au visage du Temps, cachent toujours au
fond de son coeur un lac melancolique, un lac de tristesse
et d'amours fletris, ou vient se refl6ter sa claire imagina-
tion. T6moins ces fragments pris aux Complaintes:
Mon coeur est une ume ou j'ai mis certains d^funts,
Oh! chut, refrains de leurs berceauxl et vous, parfums.

• •••••
Mon coeur est un Ncron, enfant gate d'Asie,

Qui d'empires de reve en vain se rassasie.
Mon coeur est un noye vide d'ame et d'essors,
Qu'etreint la pieuvre Spleen en ses ventouses d'or.
Cest un feu d'artifice, helas! qu'avant la fete,
A noyi sans retour I'averse qui s'embete.
Mon coeur est le terrestre Histoire-Corbillard
Que trainent au neant Tinstinct et le hazard
Mon coeur est ime horloge oubliee i demeure
Qui, me sachant defunt, s'obstine a marquer I'heure.

• •••••
Et toujours mon coeur ayant ainsi declame.

En revient a sa complainte: Aimer, etre aime!

Et cette piece, d'une ironie concentree:

COMPLAINTE DES BONS MENACES

L*Art sans poitrine ni'a trop longtemps bercjc dupe.
Si ses labours sont iiers, que ses bles decevants!
Tiens, laisse-moi beler tout aux plis de ta jupe

Qui fleure le convent.
La Genie avec moi, serf, a fait des manieres;

Toi, jupe, fais frou-frou, sans t'inquieter pourquoi . . .

• • • ' • • •

Mais I'Art, c'est I'lnconnu ! qu'on y dorme et s'y vautre.
On ne pent pas I'avoir constamment sur les bras!

A STUDY IN jREi.CH POETS 103

Et bien, menage au vent! Soyons Lui, Elle et 1' Autre.

Et puis n'insistons pas.
Et puis? et puis encore un pied de nez melancolique
a la destinee:

Qui m'aima jamais ? Je m'entete
Sur ce refrain bien impuissant
Sans songer que je suis bien bete
De me faire du mauvais sang:
Jules I^forgue a public outre les Complaintes, un
livret de vers degingandes, d'une raillerie splenetique, i
f roidy comme celle qui sied aux hommes du Nord. Mais
il a su y ajouter ce sans- f agon de choses dites a I'aven-
ture, et tout uir parfum de lumiere argentine, conune
les rayons de Notre-Dame la Lune qu'il c6Kbre. Le
manque de place nous prive d'en citer quelques pages.
Nous avons lu aussi cette etrange Nuit d'Etoiles : le Con-
seil Feeriquc, un assez court poeme edite par la "Vogue" ;
divers articles de revue, entre lesquels cette page en-
soleillee, parue dans la Revue Independante : Pan et la
Syrinx. EnHn un nouveau livre etait annonce: de la
Pitii, de la Pitiil, deja prepare par Tune des Invoca-
tions du volume precedent, et dont nous croyons voir
I'idee en ces vers des Complaintes:

Vendange chez les Arts enfantins; sois en fete
D'une fugue, d'un mot, d'un ton, d'un air de tcte.

• • . • ^ • •
Vivre et peser selon le Beau, le Bien, le Vrai?
O parf ums, 6 regards, 6 fois I soit, j'essaierai.

• ••••*
. . . Va, que ta seule etude

Soit de vivre sans but, fou de mansu^ude —

—Albert Meckel in "La WaUonie," 1887.

■*

104 INSTIGATIONS .

I have quoted but sparingly, and I have thought quo-
tation better than comment, but despite the double mea-
greness I think I have given evidence that La WaUonie
was worth editing.

It began as L'Elan LUtiraire with i6 pages, and an
edition of 200 copies ; it should convince any but the most
stupid that size is not the criterion of permanent value,
and that a small magazine may outlast much bulkier
printings.

After turning the pages of La WaUonie, perhaps after
reading even this so brief excerpt, one is ready to see
some sense in even so lyric a phrase as "temps dor6,
de ferveur et de belle confiance."

In their seven years' run these editors, one at least
beginning in his "teens," had published a good deal of
the best of Verhaeren, had published work by Elskamp,
Merrill, Griffin, Louys, Maeterlinck, Verlaine Van Ler-
berghe, Gustave Kahn, Mordas, Quillard,. Andre Gide;
had been joined in their editing board by De Regnier
(remember that they edited in Li^ge, not in Paris; they
were not at the hub of the universe, but in the heart of
French Belgium) ; they had not made any compromise.
Permanent literature, and the seeds of permanent litera-
ture, had gone through proof-sheets in their office.

There is perhaps no greater pleasure in life, and there
certainly can have been no greater enthusiasm than to
have been young and to have been part of such a group
of writers working in fellowship at the beginning of
such a course, of such a series of courses as were impli-
cated in La Wallonie.

If the date is insufficiently indicated by Mallarm6's
allusion to Whistler, we may turn to the art notes :

"eaux-fortes de Mile Mary Cassatt . . . Lucien Pis-

A STUDY IN FRENCH POETS 105

saro, Sisley . . . lithographies de Fantin-Latour . . .
OdilJI^n Redon."

"J'ai etc un peu a Paris, voir Bume Jones, Moreau,
Delacroix ... la danse du ventre, et les adorables Java-
naises. C'est mon meilleur souvenir, ces filles 'tres
parees' dans Tetrange demi-jour de leur case et qui tour-
nent lentement dans la stridente musique avec de si ^ig*
matique inflexions de mains et de si souriantes pour-
suites les yeux dans les yeux."

Prose poetry, that doubtful connection, appears at
times even to advantage :

"Selene, toi Tessence et le regard des infinis, ton mal
nous serait la felicite supreme. O viens a nous, Tanit,
Vierge Tanit, fleur m^tallique ^anouie aux plaines
celestes !" — Mockel.

HENRY JAMES

This essay on James is a dull grind of an affair, a
Baedecker to a continent.

I set out to explain, not why Henry James is less
read than formerly — I do not know that he is. I tried
to set down a few reasons why he ought to be, or at least
might be, more read.

Some may say that his work was over, well over, finely
completed; there is mass of that work, heavy for one
man's shoulders to have borne up, labor enough for
two life-times; still we would have had a few more years
of his writing. Perhaps the grasp was relaxing, per-
haps we should have had no strongly-planned book; but
we should have had paragraphs here and there, and we
should have had, at least, conversation, wonderful con-
versation ; even if we did not hear it ourselves, we should
have known that it was going on somewhere. The mas-
sive head, the slow uplift of the hand, gli occhi onesti
e tardi, the long sentences piling themselves up in elab-
orate phrase after phrase, the lightning incision, the
pauses, the slightly shaking admonitory gesture with its
"wu-a-wait a little, wait a little, something will come;"
blague and benignity and the weight of so many years'
careful, incessant labor of minute observation always

io6

HENRY JAMES 107

there to enrich the talk. I had heard it but seldom, yet
it was all unforgettable.

The man had this curious power of founding affection
in those who had scarcely seen him and even in many
who had not, who but knew him at second hand.

No man who has not lived on both sides of the Atlan-
tic can well appraise Henry James ; his death marks the
end of a period. The Times says: "The Americans
will understand his changing his nationality/' or some-
thing of that sort. The "Americans" will understand
nothing whatsoever about it. They have understood
nothing about it. They do not even know what they
lost. They have not stopped for eight minutes to con-
sider the meaning of his last public act. After a year
of ceaseless labor, of letter writing, of argument, of
striving in every way to bring in America on the side
of civilization, he died of apoplexy. On the side of
civilization — civilization against barbarism, civilization,
not Utopia, not a country or countries where the right
always prevails in six weeks I After a life-time spent
in trying to make two continents understand each other,
in trying, and only his thoughtful readers can have any
conception of how he had tried, to make three nations
intelligible one to another. I am tired of hearing petti-
ness talked about Henry James's style. The subject
has been discussed enough in all conscience, along with
the minor James. Yet I have heard no word of the
major James, of the hater of tyranny ; book after early
book against oppression, against all the sordid petty
personal crushing oppression, the domination of modem
life; not worked out in the diagrams of Greek tragedy,
not labeled "epos" or "Aeschylus." The outbursts in
The Tragic Muse, the whole of The Turn of the Screw,

io8 INSTIGATIONS

human liberty, personal liberty, the rights of the indi-
vidual against all sorts of intangible bondage I * The
passion of it, the continual passion of it in this man
who, fools said, didn't "feel." I have never yet found
a man of emotion against whom idiots didn't raise this
cry.

And the great labor, this labor of translation, of mak>
ing America intelligible, of making it possible for indi-
viduals to meet across national borders. I think half
the American idiom is recorded in Henry James's writ-
ing, and whole decades of American life that otherwise
would have been utterly lost, wasted, rotting in the un-
hermetic jars of bad writing, of inaccurate writing. No
English reader will ever know how good are his New
York and his New England; no one who does not see
his grandmother's friends in the pages of the American
books. The whole great assaying and weighing, the re-
search for the significance of nationality, French, Eng-
lish, American.

"An extraordinary old woman, one of the few people
who is really doing anything good." There were the
cobwebs about connoisseurship, etc., but what do they
matter ? Some yokel writes in the village paper, as Hen-
ley had written before, "James's stuff was not worth
doing." Henley has gone pretty completely. America
has not yet realized that never in history had one of her

* This holds, despite anything that may be said of his fuss
about social order, social tone. I naturally do not drag in po-
litical connotations, from which H. J. was, we believe, wholly
exempt. What he fights is "influence", the impinging of family
pressure, the impinging of one personality on another; all of
them in highest degree damn'd, loathsome and detestable. Re-
spect for the peripheries of the individual may be, however, a
discovery of our generation; I doubt it, but it seems to have
been at low ebb in some districts (not rural) for some time.

HENRY JAMES 109

great men abandoned his citizenship out of shame* It
was the last act — the last thing left. He had worked all
his life for the nation and for a year he had labored
for the national honor. No other American was of suffi-
cient importance for his change of allegiance to have
constituted an international act; no other American
would have been welcome in the same public manner.
America passes over these things, but the thoughtful
cannot pass over them.

Armageddon, the conflict ? I turn to James's A Bundle
of Letters; a letter from "Dr. Rudolph Staub" in Paris,
ending :

"You will, I think, hold me warranted in believing
that between precipitate decay and internecine enmities,
the English-speaking family is destined to consume it-
self and that with its decline the prospect of general
pervasiveness to which I alluded above, will brighten
for the deep-lunged children of the fatherland !"

We have heard a great deal of this sort of thing
since; it sounds very natural. My edition of the volume
containing these letters was printed in '83, and the imag-
inary letters were written somewhat before that. I do
not know that this calls for comment. Henry James's
perception came thirty years before Armageddon. That
is all I wish to point out. Flaubert said of the War of
1870: "If they had read my Education Sentimeniale,
this sort of thing wouldn't have happened." Artistsjgf c •
the antennse of the race, but the bullet-headed many will /
liever learn to trust their great artists. If it is the busi-
ness of the artist to make humanity aware of itself;
here the thing was done, the pages of diagnosis. The
multitude of wearisome fools will not learn their right
hand from their left or seek out a meaning.

no INSTIGATIONS .

It is always easy for people to object to what they
have not tried to understand.

I am not here to write a full volume of detailed criti-
cism, but two things I do claim which I have not seen in
reviewers' essays. First, that there was emotional great-
ness in Henry James's hatred of tyranny ; secondly, that
there was titanic vQlume, weight, in the masses he sets
in opposition within his work. He uses forces no whit
less specifically powerful than the proverbial "doom of
the house," — Destiny, Deus ex machina, — of great tra-
ditional art. His art was great art as opposed to over-
elaborate or over-refined art by virtue of the major
conflicts which he portrays. In his books he showed race
against race, immutable; the essential Americanness, or
Englishness or Frenchness — in The Afnerican, the dif-
ference between one nation and another ; not flag-waving
and treaties, not the machinery of government, but
"why" there is always misunderstanding, why men of
different race are not the same.

We have ceased to believe that we conquer anything
by having Alexander the Great make a gigantic "joy-
ride" through India. We know that conquests are made
in the laboratory, that Curie with his minute fragments
of things seen clearly in test tubes in curious apparatus,
makes conquests. So, too, in these novels, the essential
qualities which make up the national qualities, are found
and set working, the fundamental oppositions made clear.
This is no contemptible labor. No other writer had so
essayed three great nations or even thought of attempt-
ing it.

Peace comes of communication. No man of our time
has so labored to create means of conununication as did
the late Henry James. The whole of great art is a Strug-

HENRY JAMES in

gle for communication. All things that oppose this are
evil, whether they be silly scoffing or obstructive tariffs.

And this communication is not a leveling, it is not kn
elimination of differences. It is a recognition of differ-
ences, of the right of differences to exist, of interest in
finding things different. Kultur is an abomination ; phi-
lology is an abomination, all repressive uniforming edu-
cation is an evil.

A SHAKE DOWN

I have forgotten the moment of lunar imbecility in
which I conceived the idea of a "Henry James" num-
ber.* The pile of typescript on my floor can but annoy-
ingly and too palpably testify that the madness has raged
for some weeks.

Henry James was aware of the spherical form of the
planet, and susceptible to a given situation, and to the
tone and tonality of persons as perhaps no other author
in all literature. The victim and the votary of the ^
"scene," he had no very great narrative sense, or at !
the least, he attained the narrative faculty but per aspera, ;
through very great striving.

It is impossible to speak accurately of "his style," for
he passed through several styles which differ greatly one
from another; but in his last, his most complicated and
elaborate, he is capable of great concision; and if, in it,
the single sentence is apt to turn and perform evolutions
for almost pages at a time, he nevertheless manages to
say on one page more than many a more "direct" author
would convey only in the course of a chapter.

♦ Little Review, Aug., 1918.

112 INSTIGATIONS

His plots and incidents are often but adumbrations
or symbols of the quality of his "people," illustrations
invented, contrived, often factitiously and almost trans-
parently, to show what acts, what situations, what con-
tingencies would befit or display certain characters. We
are hardly asked to accept them as happening.

He did not begin his career with any theory of art
for art's sake, and a lack of this theory may have dam-
aged his earlier work.

If we take "French Poets and Novelists" as indication
of his then (1878) opinions, and novels of the nineties
showing a later bias, we might contend that our sub-
ject began his career with a desire to square all things
to the ethical standards of a Salem mid-week Unitarian
prayer meeting, and that to almost the end of his course
he greatly desired to fit the world into the social exigen-
cies of Mrs. Humphry Ward's characters.

Out of the unfortunate cobwebs he emerged into his
greatness, I think, by two causes: first by reason of
his hatred of personal intimate tyrannies working at
close range; and secondly, in later life, because the actual
mechanism of his scriptorial processes became so bulky,
became so huge a contrivance for record and depiction,
that the old man simply couldn't remember or keep his
mind on or animadvert on anything but the authenticity
of his impression.

I take it as the supreme reward for an artist; the
supreme return that his artistic conscience can make
him after years spent in its service, that the momentum
of his art, the sheer bulk of his processes, the (si licet)
size of his fly-wheel, should heave him out of himself,
out of his personal limitations, out of the tangles of
heredity and of environment, out of the bias of early
training, of early predilections, whether of Florence,

HENRY JAMES 113

A. D. 1300, or of Back Bay of 1872, and leave him
simply the great true recorder.

And this reward came to Henry James in the ripeness
of his talents; even further perhaps it entered his life
and his conversation. The stages of his emergence are
marked quite clearly in his work. He displays himself
in French Poets and Novelists, constantly balancing over
the question of whether or no the characters presented
in their works are, or are not, fit persons to be received
in the James family back-parlor.

In The Traffic Muse hh is still didactic quite Openly.,
The things he believes still leap out nakedly among the
people and things he is portraying ; the parable is not
yet wholly incarnate in the narrative.

To lay all his faults on the table, we may begin with
his self-confessed limitation, that "he never went down
town." He displayed in fact a passion for high life
comparable only to that supposed to inhere in the read-
ers of a magazine called Forget-me-not.

Hardy, with his eye on the Greek tragedians, has pro-
duced an epic tonality, and The Mayor of Casterbridge
is perhaps more easily comparable to the Grettir Saga
than to the novels of Mr. Hardy's contemporaries.
Hardy is, on his other side, a contemporary of Sir Wal-
ter Scott.

Balzac gains what force his crude writing permits
him by representing his people under the dyd7jci| of
modernity, cash necessity ; James, by leaving cash neces-
sity nearly always out of the story, sacrifices, or rather
fails to attain, certain intensities.

He never manages the classic, I mean as Flaubert gives
us in each main character: Everyman. One may con-
ceivably be bored by certain pages in Flaubert, but one
takes from him a solid and concrete memory, a prop-

114 INSTIGATIONS

erty. Emma Bovary and Frederic and M. Amoux are
respectively every woman and every man of their period.
Maupassant's Bel Ami is not. Neither are Henry
James's people. They are always, or nearly always, the
bibelots.

But he does, nevertheless, treat of major forces, even
of epic forces, and in a way all his own. If Balzac tried
to give a whole civilization, a whole humanity, James was
not content with a rough sketch of one country.

As Armageddon has only too clearly shown, national
qualiti.es are the great gods of the present and Henry
James spent himself from the beginning in an analysis
of thes^ potent chemicals ; trying to determine from the
given microscopic slide the nature of the Frenchness,
Englishness, Germanness, Americanness, which chemi-
cals too little regarded, have in our time exploded for
want of watching. They are the permanent and fun-
damental hostilities and incompatibles. We may rest
our claim for his greatness in the magnitude of his pro-
tagonists, in the magnitude of the forces he analyzed
and portrayed. This is not the bare matter of a number
of titled people, a few duchesses and a few butlers.

Whatever Flaubert may have said about his Educa-
tion Sentimentale as a potential preventive of the debacle
of 1870, if people had read it, and whatever Gautier's
friend may have said about Emaux et Camies as the last
resistance to the Prussians, from Dr. Rudolph Staub's
paragraph in The Bundle of Letters to the last and al-
most only public act of his life, James displayed a steady
perception and a steady consideration of the qualities of
different western races, whose consequences none of us
can escape.

And these forces, in precisely that they are not polit-
ical and executive and therefore transient, factitious.

HENRY JAMES 115

but in precisely that they are the forces of race temper-
aments, are major forces and are indeed as great pro-
tagonists as any author could have chosen. They are
firmer ground than Flaubert's wheg he chooses public
events as in the opening of the third part of Education
SentimetUale.

The portrayal of these forces, to seize a term from
philology, may be said to constitute "original research"
— to be Henry James's own addendum; not that this
greatly matters. He saw, analyzed, and presented them.
He had most assuredly a greater awareness than was
granted to Balzac or to Mr. Charles Dickens or to M.
Victor Hugo who composed the Ligende des Siicles.

His statement that he never went down town has been
urged greatly against him. A butler is a servant, tem-
pered with upper-class contacts. Mr. Newman, the
American, has emerged from the making of wash-tubs;
the family in The Pupil can scarcely be termed upper-
class, however, and the factor of money, Balzac's,
&vd7jci|, scarcely enters his stories.

We may leave Hardy writing Sagas. Wc may admit
that there is a greater robustezza in Balzac*s messiness,
simply because he is perpetually concerned, inaccurately,
with the factor of money, of earning one's exiguous
living.

We may admit the shadowy nature of some of James's
writing, and agree whimsically with R. H. C (in the
New Age) that James will be quite comfortable after
death, as he had been dealing with ghosts all his life.

James's third donation is perhaps a less sweeping
affair and of more concern to his compatriots than to
any one who might conceivably translate him into an
alien tongue, or even to those who publish his writings in
England.

ii6 INSTIGATIONS

He has written history of a personal sort, social his-
tory well documented and incomplete, and he has put
America on the map both in memoir and fiction, giving
to her a reality such as is attained only by scenes re-
corded in the arts and in the writing of masters. Mr.
Eliot has written, and I daresay most other American
admirers have written or will write, that, whatever any
one else thinks of Henry James, no one but an American
can ever know, really know, how good he is at the bot-
tom, how good his "America" is. .

No Englishman can, and in less degree can any con-
tinental, or in fact any one whose family was not living
on, say. West 23rd Street in the old set-back, two-story-
porched red brick vine-covered houses, etc., when Henry
James was being a small boy on East 23rd Street; no
one whose ancestors had not been presidents or profes-
sors or founders of Ha'avwd College or something of
that sort, or had not heard of a time when people lived
on 14th Street, or had known of some one living in
Lexington or Newton "Old Place" or somewhere of
that sort in New England, or had heard of the«New York
that produced "Fanny," New York the jocular and un-
critical, or of people who danced with General Grant
or something of that sort, would quite know Washing-
ton Square or The Europeans to be so autochthonous,
so authentic to the conditions. They might believe the
things to be "real," but they would not know how closely
they corresponded to an external reality.
' Perhaps only an exile from these things will get the
range of the other half of James's presentations!
Europe to the Transpontine, New York of brown stone
that he detested, the old and the new New York in
Crapey Cornelia and in The American Scene, which
more than any other volumes give us our peculiar heri-

HENRY JAMES 117

tage, an America with an interest, with a tone of time
not overstrained, not jejunely over-sentimentalized,
which is not a redoing of school histories or the laying
out of a fabulous period; and which is in relief, if you
like, from Dickens or from Mark Twain's Mississippi.
He was not without sympathy for his compatriots as
is amply attested by Mr. and Mrs. B. D. Hayes of New
York (vide The Birthplace) with whom he succeeds,
I think, rather better than with most of his princely con-
tinentals. They are, at any rate, his bow to the Happy
Genius of his country — ^as distinct from the gentleman
who displayed the "back of a banker and a patriot," or
the person whose aggregate features could be designated
only as a "mug."

In his presentation of America he is greatly atten-
tive, and, save for the people in Coeur Simple, I doubt
if any writer has done more of "this sort of tning" for
his country, this portrayal of the typical thing in timbre
and quality — balanced, of course, by the array of spit-
toons in the Capitol ("The Point of View").

Still if one is seeking a Spiritual Fatherland, if one
feels the exposure of what he would not have scrupled
to call, two clauses later, such a wind-shield, "The
American Scene" greatly provides it. It has a mermaid
note, almost to outvie the warning, the sort of nickel-
plate warning which is hurled at one in the saloon of
any great transatlantic boat; the aw fulness that engulfs
one when one comes, for the first time unexpectedly on
a pile of all the Murkhn Magazines laid, shingle-wise
on a brass-studded, screwed-intd-place, baize-covered
steamer table. The first glitter of the national weapons
for driving off quiet and all closer signs of intelligence.*

* I diflfer, beyond that point, with our author. I enjoy ascent
as much as I loathe descent in an elevator. I do not mind the

ii8 INSTIGATIONS

Attempting to view the jungle of the work as a whole,
one notes that, despite whatever cosmopolitan upbringing
Henry James may have had, as witness "A Small Boy's
Memoirs" and "Notes of Son and Brother," he neverthe-
less began in "French Poets and Novelists" with a pro-
vincial attitude that it took him a long time to work free
of. Secondly we see various phages of the "style" of
his presentation or circumambiance.

There is a small amount of prentice work. Let us say
"Roderick Hudson," "Casamassima." There arc lucky
first steps in "The American" and "Europeans," a pre-
cocity of result, for certainly some of his early work
is as permanent as some of the ripest, and more so than
a deal of the intervening. We find (for in the case be-
fore us criticism must be in large part a weeding-out)
that his first subject matter provides him with a number
of good books and stories : "The American," "The Euro-
peans," "Eugene Pickering," "Daisy Miller," "The' Pu-
pil," "Brooksmith," "A Bundle of Letters," "Washing-
ton Square," "The Portrait of a Lady," before 1880, and
rather later, "Pandora," "The Four Meetings," perhaps
"Louisa Pallant." He ran out of his first material.

We next note a contact with the "Yellow Book," a dip
into "cleverness," into the epigrammatic genre, the bare
epigrammatic style. It was no better than other writers,
not so successful as Wilde. We observe him to be not
so hard and fine a satirist as is George S. Street.

We come then to the period of allegories ("The Real
Thing," "Dominick Ferrand," "The Liar"). There en-
click of brass doors. I had indeed for my earliest toy, if I
was not brought up in it, the rather slow and well-behaved
elevator in a quiet and quietly bright huge sanatoriuni. The
height of high buildings, the chasms of New York are delecta-
ble; but this is beside the point; one is not asked to share the
views and tastes of a writer.

HENRY JAMES , 119

sues a growing discontent with the short sentence, epi-
gram, etc., in which he does not at this time attain dis-
tinction ; the clarity is not satisfactory, was not satisfac-
tory to the author, his domii being radically different
from that of his contemporaries. The "story" not be-
ing really what he is after, he starts to build up his me-
dium; a thickening, a chiaroscuro is needed, the long
sentence; he wanders, seeks to add a needed opacity,
he overdoes it, produces the cobwebby novel, emerges or
justifies himself in "Maisie" and manages his long-
sought form in "The Awkward Age." He comes out
the triumphant stylist in the "American Scene" and in
all the items of "The Finer Grain" collection and in the
posthumous "Middle Years."

This is not to damn incontinent all that intervenes, but
I think the chief question addressed to me by people of
good-will who do not, but are yet ready and willing to,
read James, is: Where the deuce shall I begin? One
cannot take even the twenty- four volumes, more or less
selected volumes of the Macmillan edition all at once,
and it is, alas, but too easy to get so started and entoiled
as never to finish this author or even come to the best
of him.

The laziness of an uncritical period can be nowhere
more blatant than in the inherited habit of talking about
authors as a whole. It is perhaps the sediment from an
age daft over great figures or a way of displaying social
gush, the desire for a celebrity at all costs, rather than
a care of letters.

To talk in any other way demands kn acquaintance
with the work of an author, a price few conversation-
alists care to pay, ma chel It is the man with inherited
opinions who talks about "Shelley," making no distinc-
tion between the author of the Fifth Act of "The Ccnci"

I20 INSTIGATIONS

and of the "Sensitive Plant." Not but what there may
be a personal virtu in an author — ^appraised, however,
from the best of his work when, that is, it is correctly
appraised. People ask me what James to read. He is a
very uneven author; not all of his collected edition has
marks of permanence.

One can but make one's own suggestion: —

"The American," "French Poets and Novelists," "The
Europeans," "Daisy Miller," "Eugene Pickering,"
"Washington Square," "A Bundle of Letters," "Portrait
of a Lady," "Pandora," "The Pupil," "Brooksmith,"
"What Maisie Knew," and "The Awkward Age" (if
one is "doing it all"), "Europe," "Four Meetings," "The
Ambassadors," "The American Scene," "The Finer
Grain" (all the volume, i.e., "The Velvet Glove," "Mona
Montravers," "Round of Visits," "Crapey Cornelia,"
"Bench of Desolation"), "The Middle Years" (post-
humous) and "The Ivory Tower" (notes first).

I "go easy" on the more cobwebby volumes; the most
Jamesian are indubitably "The Wings of a Dove" and
"The Golden Bowl"; upon them devotees will fasten,
but the potential devotee may as well find his aptitude
in the stories of "The Finer Grain" volume where cer-
tain exquisite titillations will come to him as readily as
anywhere else. If he is to bask in Jamesian tickle, noth-
ing will restrain him and no other author will to any
such extent afford him equal gratifications.

If, however, the reader does not find delectation in
the list given above, I think it fairly useless for him to
embark on the rest.

Part of James is a caviare, part I must reject accord-
ing to my lights as bad writing; another part is a spe-
cialite, a pleasure for certain temperaments only; the
part I have set together above seems to me maintain-

HENRY JAMES 121

able as literature. One can definitely say : "this is good" ;
hold the argumentative field, suffer comparison with
other writers; with, say, the De Goncourt, or De Mau-
passant. I am not impertinently throwing books on the
scrap-jheap; there are certain valid objections to James;
there fire certain standards which one may believe in, and
having stated them, one is free to state that any author
does not comply with them; granting always that there
may be other standards with which he complies, or over
which he charmingly or brilliantly triumphs.

James does not "feel" as solid as Flaubert; he does
not give us "Everyman," but on the other hand, he was
aware of things which Flaubert was not aware of, and
in certain things supersedes the author of "Madame
Bovary."

He appears at times to write around and around a
thing and not always to emerge from the "amorous plan"
of what he wanted to present, into definite presentation.

He does not seem to me at all times evenly skillful in
catching the intonations of speech. He recalls the New
England "a" in the "Lady's" small brothers "Ha-ard"
(Haahr-d) but only if one is familiar with the phonetics
described; but (vide the beginning of "The Birthplace")
one is not convinced that he really knows (by any sure
instinct) how people's voices would sound. Some re-
marks are in key, some obviously factitious.

He gives us more of his characters by description
than he can by any attribution of conversation, save
perhaps by the isolated and discreet remarks of Bi:ook-
smith.

His emotional centre is in being sensitive to the feel
of the place or to the tonality of the person.

It is with his own so beautiful talk, his ability to hear
his own voice in the rounded paragraph, that he is aptest

122 INSTIGATIONS

to charm one. I find it often though not universally
hard to "hear" his characters speaking. I have noted
various places where the character notably stops speak-
ing and the author interpolates words of his own; sen-
tences that no one but Henry James could in any cir-
ctunstances have made use of. Beyond which state-
ments I see no great concision or any clarity to be gained
by rearranging my perhaps too elliptical comments on
individual books.

Honest criticism, as I conceive it, cannot get much
further than saying to one's reader exactly what one
would say to the friend who approaches one's bookshelf
asking: "What the deuce shall I read?" Beyond this
there is the "parlor game," the polite essay, and there
is the official pronouncement, with neither of which we
are concerned.

Of all exquisite writers James is the most colloquial,
yet in the first edition of his "French Poets and Novel-
ists," his style, save for a few scattered phrases, is so
little unusual that most of the book seems, superficially,
as if it might have been written by almost any one. It
contains some surprising lapses ... as bad as any in
Mr. Hueffer or even in Mr. Mencken. It is interesting
largely in that it shows us what our subject had to
escape from.

Let us g^ant at once that his novels show him, all
through his life, possessed of the worst possible taste
in pictures, of an almost unpunctured ignorance of
painting, of almost as great a lack of taste as that which
he attributes to the hack-work and newspaper critiques
of Theophile Gautier. Let us admit that "painting" to
Henry James probably meant, to the end of his life, the
worst possible late Renaissance conglomerations.

Let us admit that in 1876, or whenever it was, his

HENRY JAMES 123

taste in poetry inclined to the swish of De Musset, that
it very likely never got any further. By "poetry" he
very possibly meant the "high-falutin" and he eschewed
it in certain forms; himself taking still higher falutes
in a to-be-developed mode of his own.

I doubt if he ever wholly outgrew that conception of
the (by him so often invoked) Daughters of Memory.
He arrived truly at a point from which he could look
back upon people who "besought the deep blue sea to
roll." Poetry to him began, perhaps, fuUfledged, spring-
ing Minerva-like from the forehead of George Gordon,
Lord Byron, and went pretty much to the bad in Charles
Baudelaire; it did not require much divination by 1914
("The Middle Years") to note that he had found Tenny-
son rather vacuous and that there "was something in"
Browning.

James was so thoroughly a recorder of people, of their
atmospheres, society, personality, setting; so wholly the
artist of this particular genre, that it was impossible for
him ever to hold a critical opinion of art out of key with
the opinion about him — except possibly in so far as he
might have ambitions for the novel, for his own partic-
ular metier. His critical opinions were simply an ex-
tension of his being in key with the nice people who
"impressed" themselves on his gelatine "plate." (This
is a theoretical generalization and must be taken cum
grano.)

We may, perhaps, take his adjectives on De Musset as
a desperate attempt to do "justice" to a man with whom
he knew it impossible for him to sympathize. There is,
however, nothing to hinder our supposing that he saw
in De Musset's "gush" something for him impossible
and that he wished to acknowledge it. Side by side

(

124 INSTIGATIONS

with this are the shreds of Back Bay or Buffalo, the
mid-week-prayer-meeting point of view.

His most egregious slip is in the essay on Baudelaire,
the sentence quoted by Hueffer.* Notwithstanding this,
he does effectively put his nippers on Baudelaire's weak-
ness : —

"A good way to embrace Baudelaire at a glance is to
say that he was, in his treatment of evil, exactly what
Hawthorne was not — Hawthorne, who felt the thing at
its source, deep in the human consciousness. Baude-
laire's infinitely slighter volume of genius apart, he was
a sort of Hawthorne reversed. It is the absence of
this metaphysical quality in his treatment of his favorite
subjects (Poe was his metaphysician, and his devotion
sustained him through a translation of 'Eureka I') that
exposes him to that class of accusations of which M.
Edmond Scherer's accusation of feeding upon pourriture
is an example ; and, in fact, in his pages we never know
with what we are dealing. We encounter an inextricable
confusion of sad emotions and vile things, and we are at
a loss to know whether the subject pretends to appeal to
our conscience or — we were going to say — to our olfac-
tories. 'Le Mai ?' we exclaim ; 'you do yourself too much
honor. This is not Evil ; it is not the wrong ; it is simply
the nasty !' Our impatience is of the same order as that
which we should feel if a poet, pretending to pluck 'the
flowers of good,' should come and present us, as speci-
mens, a rhapsody on plum-cake and eau de Cologne."

Here as elsewhere his perception, apart from the read-
ability of the work, is worthy of notice.

*"For a poet to be realist is of course nonsense", and, as
HueflFer says, such a sentence from such a source is enough to
make one despair of human nature.

HENRY JAMES 125

Hueffer says * that James belauds Balzac. I cannot
see It. I can but perceive Henry James wiping the floor
with the author of "Eugenie Grandet," pointing out all
his qualities, but almightily wiping the floor with him.
He complains that Gautier is lacking in a concern about
sttpernatural hocus-pocus and that Flaubert is lacking.
If Balzac takes him to any great extent in, James with
his inherited Swedenborgianism is perhaps thereby laid
open to Balzac.

It was natural that James should write more about
the bulky author of "La Comedie Humaine" than about
the others; here was his richest quarry, here was there
most to note and to emend and to apply so emended to
processes of his own. From De Maupassant, De Gon-
court or Baudelaire there was nothing for him to ac-
quire.

His dam'd fuss about furniture is foreshadowed in
Balzac, and all the paragraphs on Balzac's house-fur-
nishing propensities are of interest in proportion to our
interest in, or our boredom with, this part of Henry
James's work.

What, indeed, could he have written of the De Gon-
courts save that they were a little dull but tremendously
right in their aim? Indeed, but for these almost auto-
biographical details pointing to his growth out of Balzac,
all James would seem but a corollary to one passage in a
De Goncourt preface: —

"Le jour ou Tanalyse cruelle que mon ami, M. Zola,
et peutetre moi-meme avons apportee dans la peinture
du bas de la societe sera reprise par un ecrivain de talent,
et employee a la reproduction des hommes et des f emmes
du monde, dans les milieux d'education et de distinction

♦ Ford Madox HucflFcr's volume on Henry James.

126 INSTIGATIONS

jour-li seulement le classicisme et sa queue seront

tu^s.

"Le Realisme n'a pas en effet Tunique mission de
decrire ce qui est bas, ce qui est repugnant. . . .

"Nous avons commence, nous, par la canaille, parce
que la femme et Thomme du peuple, plus rapproches de
la nature et de la sauvagerie, sont des creatures simples
et peu compliquees, tandis que le Parisien et la Parisienne
de la societe, ces civilises excessifs, dont I'originalite
tranchee pst faite toute de nuances, toute de demi-teintes,
toute de ces riens insaisissables, pareils aux riens coquets
et neutres avec lesquels se fagonne le caractere d'une
toilette distinguee de femme, demandent des annees pour
qu'on les perce, pour qu'on les sache, pour qu'on les
attrape — et le romancier du plus grand genie, croyez-
le bien, ne les devinera jamais ces gens de salon, avec
les racontars d*amis qui vont pour lui a la decouverte
dans le monde. . . .

"Ce pro jet de roman qui devait se passer dans le
grand monde, dans le monde le plus quintessenci^, et
dont nous rassemblions lentement et minutieusement les
Elements delicats et fugaces, je Tabandonnais apres la
mort de mon frere, convaincu de I'impossibilit^ de le
reussir tout seul."

But this particular paragraph could have had little
to do with the matter. "French Poets and Novelists"
was published in '78 and Edmond De Goncourt signed
the preface to "Les Freres Zemganno" in '79. The para-
graphs quoted are interesting, however, as showing De
Goncourt's state of mind in that year. He had prob-
ably been preaching in this vein long before setting
the words on paper, before getting them printed.

If ever one man's career was foreshadowed in a few

HENRY JAMES 127

sentences of another, Henry James's is to be found in
this paragraph.

It is very much as if he said: I will not be a mega-
therium botcher like Balzac; there is nothing to be said
about these De Goncourts, but one must try to be rather
more interesting than they are in, let us say, "Madame
Gervaisais." ♦

Proceeding with the volume of criticism, we find that
"Le Jeime H." simply didn't "get" Flaubert; that he was
much alive to the solid parts of Turgenev. He shows
himself very apt, as we said above, to judge the merits
of a novelist on the ground that the people portrayed
by the said novelist are or are not suited to reception
into the household of Henry James senior; whether,
in short, Emma Bovary or Frederic or M. Arnoux would
have spoiled the so delicate atmosphere, have juggled
the so fine susceptibilities of a refined 23rd Street family
at the time of the Philadelphia "Centennial."

I find the book not so much a sign that Henry James
was "disappointed," as Hueffer puts it, as that he was
simply and horribly shocked by the literature of his con-
tinental forebears and contemporaries.

It is only when he gets to the Theatre Frangais that
he finds something which really suits him. Here there
is order, tradition, perhaps a slight fustiness (but a quite
pardonable fustiness, an arranged and suitable fustiness
having its recompense in a sort of spiritual quiet) ; here,
at any rate, was something decorous, something not
to be found in Concord or in Albany. And it is easy
to imagine the young James, not illuminated by De

* It is my persona] feeling at the moment that La FilU Elisa
is worth so much more than all Balzac that the things are as
out of scale as a sapphire and a plum pudding, and that Elisa,
despite the dull section, is worth most of James's writing. This
is, however, aside from the question we are discussing.

128 INSTIGATIONS

Goncourt's possible conversation or writing, not even
following the hint given in his essay on Balzac and
Balzacian furniture, but sitting before Madame Nathalie
in "Le Village" and resolving to be the Theatre Frangais
of the novel.

A resolution which he may be said to have carried out
to the great enrichment of letters.

Strictures on the work of this period are no great
detraction. "French Poets and Novelists" gives us a
point from which to measure Henry James's advance.
Genius showed itself partly in the escape from some of
his original limitations, partly in acquirements. His art
at length became "second nature," became perhaps half
unconscious; or in part wholly unconscious; in other
parts perhaps too highly conscious. At any rate in sun-
nier circumstances hetalked^exactly -as -lie—wrote, the
same elaborate paragraph beautifully attaining its cli-
max; the same sudden incision when a brief statement
could dispose of a matter.

Be it said for his style : he is seldom or never involved
when a direct bald statement will accurately convey his
own meaning, all of it. He is not usually, for all his
wide leisure, verbose. He may be highly and bewilder-
ingly figurative in his language (vide Mr. Hueffer's re-
•\ marks on this question).

Style apart, I take it that the hatred of tyrannies was
as great a motive as any we can ascribe to Galileo or
Leonardo or to any other great figure, to any other mythic
Prometheus ; for this driving force we may well overlook
personal foibles, the early Bostonese bias, the heritage
from his father's concern in commenting Swedenborg,

HENRY JAMES 129

the later fusses about social caution and conservation of
furniture. HueflFer rather boasts about Henry James's
innocence of the classics. It is nothing to brag of, even
if a man struggling against natural medievalism have
entrenched himself in impressionist theory. K James
had read his classics, the better Latins especially, he
would not have so excessively cobwebbed, fussed, blath-
ered, worried about minor mundanities. We may con-
spuer with all our vigor Henry James's concern with 7
furniture, the Spoils of Poynton, connoisseurship, Mrs.
Ward's tea-party atmosphere, the young Bostonian of
the immature works. We may relegate these things men-
tally to the same realm as the author's pyjamas and col-
lar buttons, to his. intellectual instead of his physical
valeting. There remains thiTcapacious intelligence, the
searching analysis of things that cannot be so relegated
to the scrap-heap and to the wash-basket.

Let us say that English freedom Legally and tradition-
ally has its basis in property. Let us say, a la Balzac,
that most modern existence is governed by, or at least
interfered with by, the necessity to earn money; let us
also say that a Frenchman is not an Englishman or a
German or an American, and that despite the remark
that the aristocracies of all people, the upper classes, are
the same everywhere, racial differences are au fond dif-
ferences; they are likewise major subjects.

Writing, as I am, for the reader of good-will, for the
bewildered person who wants to know where to begin,
I need not apologize for the following elliptical notes.
James, in his prefaces, has written explanation to death
(with sometimes a very pleasant necrography). Leav-
ing the "French Poets and Novelists," I take the novels
and stories as nearly as possible in their order of publi-

130 INSTIGATIONS

cation (as distinct from their order as rearranged and
partially weeded out in the collected edition).

1875. (U. S. A.) "A Passionate Pilgrim and other
Tales." "Eugene Pickering" i3 the best of this lot and
most indicative of the future James. Contains also the
title story and "Madame de Mauves." Other stories
inferior.

1876. (U. S. A.) "Roderick Hudson," prentice work.
First novel not up to the level of "Pickering."

1877. "The American"; essential James, part of the
permanent work. "Watch and Ward," discarded by the
author.

1878. "French Poets and Novelists," already dis-
cussed.

1878. "Daisy Miller." (The big hit and one of his
best.) "An International Episode," "Four Meetings,"
good work.

1874. Short stories first printed in England with
additions, but no important ones.

1880. "Confidence," not important.

1881. "Washington Square," one of his best, "putting
America on the map," giving us a real past, a real back-
ground. "Pension Beaurepas" and "Bundle of Letters,"

^ especially the girls' letters, excellent, already mentioned.

1881. "The Portrait of a Lady," one of his best.
Charming Venetian preface in the collected edition.

1884. "Tales of Three Cities," stories dropped from
the collected edition, save "Lady Barbarina."

1884. "Lady Barbarina," a study in English blank-
ness comparable to that exposed in the letters of the
English young lady in "A Bundle of Letters." There
is also New York of the period. "But if there was one
thing Lady Barb disliked more than another it was de-
scribing Pasterns. She had always lived with people

HENRY JAMES 131

who knew of themselves what such a place would be,
without demanding these pictorial effects, proper only,
as she vaguely felt, to persons belonging to the classes
whose trade was the arts of expression. Lady Barb of
course had never gone into it; but she knew that in her
own class the business was not to express but to enjoy,
not to represent but to be represented."

"Mrs. Lemon's recognition of this river, I should say,
was all it need have been ; she held the Hudson existed
for the purpose of supplying New Yorkers with poetical
feelings, helping them to face comfortably occasions like
the present, and in general, meet foreigners with confi-
dence. . . ."

"He believed, or tried to believe, the salon now pos-
sible in New York on condition of its being reserved en-
tirely for adults; and in having taken a wife out of a
country in which social traditions were rich and ancient
he had done something toward qualifying his own house —
so splendidly qualified in all strictly material respects . . .
to be the scene of such an effort. A charming woman
accustomed only to the best on each side, as Lady Beau-
chemin said, what mightn't she achieve by being at home
— always to adults only — in an easy early inspiring com-
prehensive way and on the evening of the seven, when
worldly engagements were least numerous ? He laid this
philosophy before Lady Barb in pursuance of a theory
that if she disliked New York on a short acquaintance
she couldn't fail to like it on a long. Jackson believed
in the New York mind — not so much indeed in its lit-
erary, artistic, philosophic or political achievements as
in its general quickness and nascent adaptability. He
clung to this belief, for it was an indispenss^ble neat block
in the structure he was attempting to rear. The New
York mind would throw its glamour over Lady Barb if

132 INSTIGATIONS

she would only give it a chance; for it was thoroughly
bright, responsive and sympathetic. If she would only
set up by the tum of her hand a blest social centre, a
temple of interesting talk in which this charming organ
might expand and where she might inhale its fragrance
in the most convenient and luxurious way, without, as it
was, getting up from her chair; if she would only just
try this graceful good-natured experiment — which would
make every one like her so much too — he was sure all
the wrinkles in the gilded scroll of his fate would be
smoothed out. But Lady Barb didn't rise at all to his
conception and hadn't the least curiosity about the New
York mind. She thought it would be extremely disagree-
able to have a lot of people tumbling in on Sunday eve-
ning without being invited, and altogether her husband's
sketch of the Anglo-American salon seemed to her to
suggest crude familiarity, high vociferation — she had al-
ready made a remark to him about 'screeching women'
— and random extravagant laughter. She didn't tell him
— for this somehow it wasn't in her power to express
and, strangely enough, he never completely guessed it —
that she was singularly deficient in any natural, or in-
deed, acquired understanding of what a salon might be.
She had never seen or dreamed of one — and for the
most part was incapable of imagining a thing she hadn't
seen. She had seen great dinners and balls and meets
and runs and races; she had seen garden-parties and
bunches of people, mainly women— who, however, didn't
screech — at dull stuffy teas, and distinguished companies
collected in splendid castles ; but all this gave her no clew
to a train of conversation, to any idea of a social agree-
ment that the interest of talk, its continuity, its accu-
mulations from season to season shouldn't be lost. Con-
versation, in Lady Barb's experience, had never been

HENRY JAMES 133

continuous; in such a case it would surely have been a
bore. It had been occasional and fragmentary, a trifle
jerky, with allusions that were never explained; it had
a dread of detail — it seldom pursued anything very far
or kept hold of it very long."

1885. "Stories Revived," adding to earlier tales "The
Author of Beltraffio," which opens with excess of the
treading-on-eggs manner, too much to be borne for twen-
ty-four volumes. The pretense of extent of "people" in-
terested in art and letters, sic : "It was the most complete
presentation that had yet been made of the gospel of art;
it was a kind of aesthetic war cry. 'People' had endeav-
ored to sail nearer 'to truth,' etc."

He implies too much of art smeared on limited multi-
tudes. One wonders if the eighties did in any great
aggregate gush up to this extent. Doesn't he try to
spread the special case out too wide?

The thinking is magnificently done from this passage
up to page sixteen or twenty, stated with great concision.
Compare it with "Madame Gervaisais" and we find
Henry James much more interesting when on the upper
reaches. Compare his expressiveness, the expressiveness
of his indirectness with that of constatation. The two
methods are curiously mixed in the opening of "Beltraf-
fio." Such sentences as (page 30) "He said the most
interesting and inspiring things" are, however, pure
waste, pure "leaving the thing undone," unconcrete, un-
imagined; just simply bad writing or bad novelisting.
As for his special case he does say a deal about the au-
thor or express a deal by him, but one is bothered by the
fact that Pater, Burton, Hardy, Meredith were not, in
mere history, bundled into one ; that Burton had been to
the East and the others had not ; that no English novel-
ist of that era would have taken the least notice of any-

134 INSTIGATIONS

thing going on in foreign countries, presumably Euro-
pean, as does the supreme author of "Beltraffio."

Doubtless he is in many ways the author Henry James
would have liked to meet and more illustrative of certain
English tones and limitations than any historical portrait
might have been. Still Henry James does lay it on . . .
more, I think, than the story absolutely requires. In
"Beltraffio" he certainly does present (not that he does
not comment to advantage) the two damn'd women ap-
pended to the gentlemanly hero of the tale. The most
violent post-Strindbergian school would perhaps have
called them bitches tout bonnement, but this word did
not belong to Henry James's vocabulary and besides it
is of too great an indistinctness. Author, same "bloody"
(in the English sense) author with his passion for
"form" appears in "Lesson of Master," and most of H.
J.'s stories of literary milieux. Perpetual Grandisonism
or Grandisonizing of this author with the passion for
form, all of 'em have it. Ma chil There is, however,
great intensity in these same "be-deared" and be-"poor-
old"-ed pages. He has really got a main theme, a great
theme, he chooses to do it in silver point rather than in
the garish colors of, — well, of Qierbuliez, or the terms
of a religious maniac with three-foot long carving knife.
Novel of the gilded pill, an aesthetic or artistic message,
dogma, no better than a moral or ethic one, novel a
cumbrous camouflage substitute not for "that parlor
game" ♦ the polite essay, but for the impolite essay or
conveyance of ideas ; novel to do this should completely
incarnate the abstraction.

Finish of "Beltraffio" not perhaps up to the rest of it.
Not that one at all knows how else . . .

♦T. S. Eliot.

HENRY JAMES 135

Gush on page 42 * from both conversationalists. Still
an adumbration of the search for the just word emerges
on pages 43-44, real cut at barbarism and bigotry on the
bottom of page 45 (of course not labeled by these mon-
strous and rhetorical brands, scorched on to their hides
and rump sides). "Will it be a sin to make the most
of that one too, so bad for the dear old novel?" Butler
and James on the same side really chucking out the
fake; Butler focused on Church of England; opposed
to him the fakers booming the Bible "as literature" in a
sort of last stand, a last ditch ; seeing it pretty well had
to go as history, cosmogony, etc., or the old tribal Daddy-
slap-'em-with-slab of the Jews as anything like an
ideal : —

"He told me more about his wife before we arrived
at the gate of home, and if he be judged to have aired
overmuch his grievance I'm afraid I must admit that he
had some of the foibles as well as the gifts of the artistic
temperament ; adding, however, instantly that hitherto, to
the best of my belief, he had rarely let this particular
cat out of the bag. 'She thinks me immoral — that's the
long and short of it,' he said, as we paused outside a
moment and his hand rested on one of the bars of his
gate; while his conscious, expressive, perceptive eyes —
the eyes of a foreigner, I had begun to account them,
much more than of the usual Englishman — viewing me
now evidently as quite a familiar friend, took part in
the declaration. 'It's very strange when one thinks it
all over, and there's a grand comicality in it that I should
like to bring out. She's a very nice woman, extraordi-
narily well-behaved, upright and clever and with a tre-
mendous lot of good sense about a good many matters.
Yet her conception of a novel — she has explained it to
'* Page numbers in Collected Edition.

r36 INSTIGATIONS

me once or twice, and she doesn't do it badly as exposi-
tion — is a thing so false that it makes me blush. It's a
thing so hollow, so dishonest, so lying, in which life is
so blinked and blinded, so dodged and disfigured, that it
makes my ears burn. It's two different ways of looking
at the whole affair,' he repeated, pushing open the gate.
'And they're irreconcilable!' he added with a sigh. We
went forward to the house, but on the walk, halfway
to the door, he stopped and said to me : 'If you're going
into this kind of thing there's a fact you should know
beforehand; it may save you some disappointment.
There's a hatred of art, there's a hatred of literature — I
mean of the genuine kinds. Oh, the shams — those they'll
swallow by the bucket!' I looked up at the charm-
ing house, with its genial color and crookedness, and I
answered with a smile that those evil passions might
exist, but that I should never have expected to find
them there. 'Ah, it doesn't matter, after all,' he a bit
nervously laughed ; which I was glad to hear, for I was
reproaching myself with having worked him up."

Really literature in the XlXth and the beginning of
the XXth centuries is where science was in the days of
Galileo and the Inquisition. Henry James not blinking
it, neither can we. '*Poor dears" and *'dear olds" always
a little too plentiful.

1885. (continued) "Pandora," of the best. Let it
pass as a sop to America's virginal charm; as counter-
weight to "Daisy Miller," or to the lady of 'The Por-
trait." Henry James alert to the German.

"The process of enquiry had already begun for him,
in spite of his having as yet spoken to none of his fellow
passengers; the case being that Vogelstein enquired not
only with his tongue, but with his eyes — that is with his
spectacles — with his ears, with his nose, with his palate.

HENRY JAMES 137

with all his senses and organs. He was a highly upright
young man, whose only fault was that his sense of
comedy, or of the humor of things, had never been spe-
cifically disengaged from his several other senses. He
vaguely felt that something should be done about this,
and in a general manner proposed to do it, for he was on
his way to explore a society abounding in comic aspects.
This consciousness of a missing measure gave him a
certain mistrust of what might be said of him; and if
circumspection is the essence of diplomacy our young
aspirant promised well. His mind contained several
^nillions of facts, packed too closely together for the light
breeze of the imagination to draw through the mass.
He was impatient to report himself to his superior in
Washington, and the loss of time in an English port
could only incommode him, inasmuch as the study of
English institutions was no part of his mission. On the
other hand the day was charming; the blue sea, in
Southampton Water, pricked all over with light, had no
movement but that of its infinite shimmer. Moreover,
he was by no means sure that he should be happy in the
United States, where doubtless he should find himself
soon enough disembarked. He knew that this was not
an important question and that happiness was an un-
scientific term, such as a man of his education should be
ashamed to use even in the silence of his thoughts.
Lost none the less in the inconsiderate crowd and feeling
himself neither in his own country nor in that to which
he was in a manner accredited, he was reduced to his
mere personality; so that during the hour, to save his
importance, he cultivated such ground as lay in sight
for a judgment of this delay to which the German
steamer was subjected in English waters. Mightn't it
be proved, facts, figures and documents— or at least

138 * INSTIGATIONS

watch — in hand, considerably greater than the occasion
demanded ?

"Count Vogelstein was still young enough in diplomacy
to think it necessary to have opinions. He had a good
many, indeed, which had been formed without difficulty;
they had been received ready-made from a line of an-
cestors who knew what they liked. This was of course
— and under pressure, being candid, he would have ad-
mitted it — an unscientific way of furnishing one's mind.
Our young man was a stiff conservative, a Junker of
Junkers; he thought modern democracy a temporary
phase and expected to find many arguments against it in
the great Republic. In regard to these things it was a
pleasure to him to feel that, with his complete training,
he had been taught thoroughly to appreciate the nature
of evidence. The ship was heavily laden with German
emigrants, whose mission in the United States differed
considerably from Count Otto's. They hung over the
bulwarks, densely grouped; they leaned forward on
their elbows for hours, their shoulders kept on a level
with their ears: the men in furred caps, smoking long-
bowled pipes, the women with babies hidden in remark-
ably ugly shawls. Some were yellow Germans and some
were black, and all looked greasy and matted with the
sea-damp. They were destined to swell still further
the huge current of the Western democracy; and Count
Vogelstein doubtless said to himself that they wouldn't
improve its quality. Their numbers, however, were
striking, and I know not what he thought of the nature
of this particular evidence."

For further style in vignette :

"He could see for himself that Mr. and Mrs. Day had
not at all her grand air. They were fat plain serious

HENRY JAMES 139

people who sat side by side on the deck for hours and
looked straight before them. Mrs. Day had a white
face, large cheeks and small eyes ; her forehead was sur-
rounded with a multitude of little tight black curls; her
lips moved as if she had always a lozenge in hef mouth.
She wore entwined about her head an article which Mrs.
Dangerfield spoke of as a 'nuby/ a knitted pink scarf
concealing her hair, encircling her neck and having
among its convolutions a hole for her perfectly expres-
sionless face. Her hands were folded on her stomach,
and in her still, swathed figure her bead-like eyes, which
occasionally changed their direction, alone represented
life. Her husband had a stiff gray beard on his chin
and a bare spacious upper lip, to which constant shaving
had imparted a bard glaze. His eyebrows were thick
and his nostrils wide, and when he was uncovered, in
the saloon, it was visible that his grizzled hair was dense
and perpendicular. He might have looked rather grim
and truculent hadn't it been for the mild familiar ac-
commodating gaze with which his large light-colored
pupils — the leisurely eyes of a silent man — appeared to
consider surrounding objects. He was evidently more
friendly than fierce, but he was more diffident than
friendly. He liked to have you in sight, but wouldn't
have pretended to understand you much or to classify
you, and would have been sorry it should put you under
an obligation. He and his wife spoke sometimes, but
seldom talked, and there was something vague and pa-
tient about them as if they had become victims of a
wrought spell The spell, however, was of no sinister
cast ; it was the fascination of prosperity, the confidence
of security, which sometimes makes people arrogant,
but which had had such a different effect on this simple

I40 INSTIGATIONS

satisfied pair, in whom further development of every
kind appeared to have been happily arrested."

Pandora's approach to her parents :

"These little offices were usually performed deftly,
rapidly, with the minimum of words, and when their
daughter drew near them, Mr. and Mrs. Day closed their
eyes after the fashion of a pair of household dogs who
expect to be scratched."

The tale is another synthesis of some of the million
reasons why Germany will never conquer the world, why
the Hun is impossible, why **boche" is merely '*bursch.**
The imbecility of a certain Wellsian journalist in treat-
ing this gem is again proof that it is written for the
relatively-developed American, not for the island
ecaillere. If Henry James, as Ford Madox Hueifer
says, set out to civilize the United States, it is at least
an easier job than raising British Suburbia to a bearable
level. From that milieu at least we have nothing of
value to learn; we shall not take our tonality from that
niveau.

In describing **Pandora*s" success as ''purely personal,"
Henry James has hit on the secret of the Quattrocento,
1450 to 1550, the vital part of the Renaissance. Aris-
tocracy decays when it ceases to be selective, when the
basis of selection is not personal. It is a critical acute-
ness, not a snobbism, which last is selection on some
other principle than that of a personal quality. It is
servility to rule-of-thumb criteria, and a dullness of per-
ception, a timidity in acceptance. The whole force of
the Renaissance was in the personality of its selection.

There is no faking the amount of perceptive energy
concentrated in Henry James's vignettes in such phrases

HENRY JAMES 141

as that on the parents like domestic dogs waiting to be
scratched, or in the ten thousand phrases of this sort
which abound in his writings. If we were back in the
time of Bruyerc, we could easily make a whole book of
"Characters" from Henry James's vignettes.* The
vein holds from beginning to end of his work; from
this writing of the eighties to "The Ivory Tower." As
for example, Gussie Braddon:

"Rosanna waited facing her, noting her extraordinary
perfection of neatness, of elegance, of arrangement, of
which it couldn't be said whether they most handed over
to you, as on some polished salver, the clear truth of her
essential commonness or transposed it into an element
that could please, that could even fascinate, as a supreme
attestation of care. 'Take her as an advertisement of all
the latest knowledges of how to "treat" every inch of
the human surface and where to "get" every scrap of
the personal envelope, so far as she w enveloped, and
she does achieve an effect sublime in itself and thereby
absolute in a wavering world.' "

We note no inconsiderable progress in the actual writ-
ing, in m<iestria, when we reach the ultimate volumes.

1886. "Bostonians." Other stories in this collection
mostly rejected from collected edition.

"Princess Casamassima," inferior continuation of
"Roderick Hudson." His original subject matter is be-
ginning to go thin.

* Since writing the above I find that some such compilation
has been attempted ; had indeed been planned by the anthologist,
and, in plan, approved by H. J.: "Pictures and Passages from
Henry James" selected by Ruth Head (Chatto and Windus,
1916), if not exactly the book to convince the rising generation
of H. J.'s powers of survival, is at any rate a most charming
tribute to our subject from one who had begun to read him
in "the eighties'*.

14^ INSTIGATIONS

1888. "The Reverberator," process of fantasia begin-
ning.

Fantasia of Americans vs. the "old aristocracy," "The
American" with tlie sexes reversed. Possibly the theme
shows as well in "Les Transatlantiques," the two meth-
ods, give one at least a cenain pleasure of contrast.

1888. "Aspern Papers." inferior. "Louisa Pallant." a
\^ study in the maternal or abysmal relation, good James.

"Modern Warning," rejected from collected edition.

1889. "A London Life."- "The Patagonia."
"The Patagonia," not a masterpiece. Slow in opening,

excellent in parts, but the sense of the finale intrudes all
along. It seems true but there is no alternative ending.
One doubts whether a story is really constructed with
any mastery when the end, for the purpose of making it
a story, is so unescapable. The effect of reality is pro-
duced, of course, by the reality of the people in the
opening scene; there is no doubt about that part being
"to the life."

"The Liar" is superb in its way, perhaps the best of the
allegories, of the plots invented purely to be an expo-
sition of impression. It is magnificent in its presenta-
tion of the people, both the old man and the Liar, who is
masterly.

"Mrs. Temperly" is another such excellent delineation
and shows James as an excellent hater, but G. S. Street
expresses a concentration of annoyance with a greater
polish and suavity in method ; and neither explains,
theorizes, nor comments.

James never has De Maupassant's reality. His
(H. J.'s) people almost always convince, i.e., we believe
implicitly that they exist. We also think that Henry
James has made up some sort of story as an excuse for
writing his impression of the people.

HENRY JAMES 143

One sees the slight vacancy of the stories of this
period, the short clear sentence, the dallying with jeu
d'esprit, with epigram no better than, though not inferior
to, the run of epigram in the nineties. It all explains
James's need of opacity, his reaching out for a chiaro-
scuro to distinguish himself from his contemporaries and
in which he could put the whole of his much more com-
plex apperception.

Then comes, roughly, the period of cobwebs and of
excessive cobwebs and of furniture, finally justified in
"The Finer Grain," a book of tales with no mis-fire, and
the style so vindicated in the triumphs of the various
books of Memoirs and "The American Scene."

Fantasias : "Dominic Ferrand," "Nona Vincent" (tales
obviously aimed at the "Yellow Book/' but seem to have
missed it, a detour in James's career). All artists who
discover anything make such detours and must, in the
course of things (as in the cobwebs), push certain ex-
periments beyond the right curve of their art. This is
not so much the doom as the function of all "revolu-
tionary" or experimental art, and I think masterwork
is usually the result of the return from such excess.
One does not know, simply does not know, the true curve
until one has pushed one's method beyond it. Until then
it is merely a frontier, not a chosen route. It is an
open question, and there is no dogmatic answer, whether
an artist should write and rewrite the same story (i la
Flaubert) or whether he should take a new canvas.

"The Papers," a fantasia, diverting ; "The Birthplace,"
fairy-godmother element mentioned above, excellent.
"Edmund Orme," inferior; "Yellow Book" tale, not ac-
cepted by that periodical.

1889-1893. Period of this entoilment in the "Yellow

144 INSTIGATIONS

Book," short sentences, the epigrammatic. He reacts
from this into the allegorical. In general the work of
this period is not up to the mark. "The Chaperon," "Tlie
Real Thing," fantasias of 'Vit." By fantasias I mean
sketches in which the people are "real" or convince one
of their verity, but where the story is utterly unconvinc-
ing, IS not intended to convince, is merely a sort of exag-
geration of the fitting situation or the situation which
ought to result in order to display some type at its apo-
gee. "The Real Thing" rather better than other stories
in this volume.

Thus the lady and gentleman model in "The Real
Thing." London society is finely ladled in "The Chape-
ron," which is almost as a story, romanticism.

"Greville Fane" is a scandalous photograph from the
life about which the great blagueur scandalously lies in
his preface (collected edition). I have been too diverted
comparing it with an original to give a sane view of
its art.

1890. "The Tragic Muse," uneven, full of good
things but showing Henry James in the didactic role a
little too openly. He preaches, he also displays fine per-
ception of the parochialism of the British political ca-
reer. It is a readable novel with tracts interpolated.
( Excellent and commendable tracts arguing certainly for
the right thing, enjoyable, etc.) Excellent text-book for
young men with ambitions, etc.

1892. "Lesson of the Master" (cobweb). "The Pu-
f- pil," a masterpiece, one of his best and keenest studies.

"Brooksmith" of the best.

1893. "The Private Life." Title story, waste verbiage
at the start, ridiculous to put all this camouflage over
something au fond merely an idea. Not life, not peo-
ple, allegory, dated to "Yellow Book" era. Won't hold

HENRY JAMES 145

against "Candide." H. J/s tilting against the vacuity of
the public figure is, naturally, pleasing, i. e., it is pleasing
that he should tilt, but the amusement partakes of the
nature of seeing cocoanuts hurled at an aunt sally.

There are other stories, good enough to be carried by
H. J/s best work, not detrimental, but not enough to have
"made him": "Europe" (Hawthorny), 'Taste/' "The
Middle Years," "Broken Wings," etc. Part of the great
man's work can perhaps only be criticized as "etc."

1895. "Terminations, Coxon Fund," j)erhaps best of
this lot, a disquisition, but entertaining, perhaps the germ
of Galsworthy to be found in it (to no glory of either
author) as perhaps a residuum of Dickens in Maisie's
Mrs. Wix. Verbalism, but delightful verbalism in
Coxon affair, sic:

"Already, at hungry twenty-six, Gravener looked as
blank and parliamentary as if he were fifty and popular,"

"a deeply wronged, justly resentful, quite irreproach-
able and insufferable person"

or (for the whole type)

"put such ignorance into her cleverness ?"

Miss Anvoy's echo concerning "a crystal" is excel-
lently introduced, but is possibly in the nature of a sleight
of hand trick (contemporary with "Lady Windemere's
Fan"). Does H. J.'s "politics" remind one of Dizzy's
scribbling, just a little? "Confidence, under the new
Ministry, was understood to be reviving/' etc

Perhaps one covers the ground by saying that the
James of this period is "light literature/' entertaining if
one have nothing better to do. Neither "Terminations"
nor (1896) "Embarrassments" would have founded a
reputation.

1896-97. Improvement through "Other House" and

146 INSTIGATIONS

"Spoils of Poynton." I leave the appreciation of these,
to me, detestable works to Mr. Hueifer. They seem to
me full of a good deal of needless fuss, though I do not
mean to deny any art that may be in them.

1897. The emergence in "What Maisie Knew." Prob-
lem of the adolescent female. Carried on in:

1899. "The Awkward Age," fairy godmother and spot-
less lamb and all the rest of it. Only real thing the im-
pression of people, not observation or real knowledge.
Action only to give reader the tone, symbolizing the tone
of the people. Opening tour de force, a study in punks,
a cheese souMe of the leprous crust of society done to
a turn and a niceness save where he puts on the dulcis-
simo, vox humana, stop. James was the dispassionate
observer. He started with the moral obsession; before
he had worked clear of it he was entoiled in the ob-
session of social tone. He has pages of clear depiction,
even of satire, but the sentimentalist is always lurking
just round the corner. This softens his edges. He has
not the clear hardness, the cold satiric justness that
G. S. Street has displayed in treating situations, certain
struggles between certain idiocies and certain vulgarities.
This book is a specialite of local interest. It is an £tude
in ephemera. If it contained any revelation in 1899, it
no longer contains it. His characters are reduced to
the status of voyeurs, elaborate analysis of the much too
special cases, a bundle of swine and asses who cannot
mind their own business, who do not know enough to
mind their own business. James's lamentable lack of
the classics is perhaps responsible for his absorption in
bagatelles. . . . He has no real series of backgrounds of
moeurs du passi, only the ''sweet dim faded lavender"
tune and in opposition to modernity, plush nickel-plated,
to the disparagement, naturally, of the latter.

HENRY JAMES 147

Kipling's "Bigod, now-I-know-all-about-this manner,"
is an annoyance, but one wonders if parts of Kipling
by the sheer force of content, of. tale to tell, will not
outlast most of James's cobwebs. There is no substitute
for narrative-sense, however many different and en-
trancing charms may be spread before us.

"The Awkward Age" might have been done, from one
point of view, as satire, in one- fourth the space. On the
other hand, James does give us the subtly graded atmos-
pheres of his different houses most excellently. And
indeed, this may be regarded as his subject.

If one were advocate instead of critic, one would
definitely claim that these atmospheres, nuances, im-
pressions of personal tone and quality are his subject;
that in these he gets certain things that almost no one
else had done before him. These timbres and tonalities
are his stronghold, he is ignorant of nearly everything
else. It is all very well to say that modern life is largely
made up of velleities, atmospheres, timbres, nuances, etc.,
but if people really spent as much time fussing, to the
extent of the Jamesian fuss about such normal trifling,
age-old affairs, as slight inclinations to adultery, slight
disinclinations to marry, to refrain from marrying, etc.,
etc., life would scarcely be >yorth the bother of keeping
on with it. It is also contendable that one must depict
such mush in order to abolish it.*

* Most good prose arises, perhaps, from an instinct of nega-
tion; is the detailed, convincing analysis of something detesta-
ble; of something which one wants to eliminate. Poetry is the
assertibn of a positive, 1. e., of desire, and endures for a longer
period. Poetic satire is only an assertion of this positive, in-
versely, I. e,, as of an opposite hatred.

This is a highly untechnical, unimpressionist, in fact almost
theological manner of statement; but is perhaps the root differ-
ence between the two arts of literature.

Most good poetry asserts something to be worth while, or

148 INSTIGATIONS

The main feeling in "The Awkward Age" is satiric.
The dashes of sentiment do not help the work as liter-
ature. The acute observer is often referred to:

Page 131. "The ingenious observer just now sug-
gested might even have detected . . ."

Page 133. "And it might have been apparent still to
our sharp spectator . . ."

Page 310. "But the acute observer we are constantly
taking for granted would perhaps have detected . . ."

Page 323. "A supposititious spectator would cer-
tainly have imagined . . .*' (This also occurs in "Ivory
Tower." Page 196.)

This scrutinous person wastes a great deal of time in
pretending to conceal his contempt for Mrs. Brook,
Vanderbank, the other punks, and lays it on so thick
when presenting his old sentimentalist Longdon, who
at the one critical moment behaves 7vith a stupidity,

damns a contrary; at any jrate asserts emotional values. The
best prose is, has been a presentation (complicated and elabo-
rate as you like) of circumstances, of conditions, for the most
part abominable, or at the mildest, amendable. This assertion
of the more or less objectionable only becomes doctrinaire and
rotten art when the narrator mis-states from dogmatic bias,
and when he suggests some quack remedy (prohibition, (Chris-
tianity, social theory of one sort or another), the only cure
being that humanity should display more intelligence and good-
will than humanity is capable of displaying.

Poetry = Emotional synthesis, quite as real, quite as realist
as any prose (or intellectual) analysis.

Neither prose nor drama can attain poetic intensity save by
construction, almost by scenario; by so arranging the circum-
stance that some perfectly simple speech, perception, dogmatic
statement appears in abnormal vigor. Thus when Frederic in
UEducation observes Mme. Amoux's shoe-laces as she is de-
scending the stair; or in Turgenev the statement, quotation of a
Russian proverb about the "heart of another^, or "Nothing but
death is irrevocable" toward the end of Nick 4s i« GentHs-
hommts.

HENRY JAMES 149

with a lack of delicacy, since we ane dealing with these
refinements. Of course neither this stupidity of his
action nor the tone of the other characters has anything
to do with the question of tnaestria, if they wer^ dis-
passionately or impartially rendered. The book is weak
because all through it James is so manifestly carrying
on a long teneone so fiercely and loudly, a long argument
for the old lavender. There is also the constant impli-
cation that Vanderbank ought to want Nanda, though
why the devil he should be supposed to be even mildly
under this obligation, is not made clear. A basis in
the classics, castor oil, even Stevenson's "Virginibus
Puerisque" might have helped matters. One's complaint
is not that people of this sort don't exist, that they aren't
like everything else a subject for literature, but that
James doesn't anywhere in the book get down to bed-
rock. It is too much as if he were depicting stage
scenery not as stage scenery, but as nature.

All this critique is very possibly an exaggeration.
Take it at half its strength ; I do not intend to defend it.

Epigrammatic manner in opening, compare Kipling;
compare De Maupassant, superb ideas, verity, fantasia,
fantasia group, reality; charming stories, poppycock.
"Yellow Book" touches in 'The Real Thing," general
statements about their souls, near to bad writing, per-
fectly lucid.

"Nona Vincent." he writes like an adolescent, i^ight
be a person of eighteen doing first story.

Page 201. "Public interest in spiritual life of the
army." ("The Real Thing.")

Page 201. German Invasion.

Loathsome prigs, stiff conventions, editor of cheap
magazines ladled in Sir Wots-his-name.

1893. Tn the interim he had brought out "In the

-•^

'X.

'^ -

150 INSTIGATIONS

Cage," excellent opening sentence, matter too much
talked around and around, and 'The Two Magics." This
last a Freudian affair which seems to me to have attract-
ed undue interest, i.e., interest out of proportion to the
importance as literature and as part of Henry James's
own work, because of this subject matter. The obscen-
ity of "The Turn of the Screw" has given it undue prom-
inence. People now "drawn" to obscene as were people
of Milton's period by an equally disgusting bigotry ; one
unconscious on author's part ; the other, a surgical treat-
ment of a disease. Thus much for progress on part of
authors if public has not progressed. The point of my
remarks is that an extraneous criterion comes in. One
must keep to the question of literature, not of irrelevan-
cies. Galdos' "Lo Prohibido" does Freud long before the
sex crank got to it. Kipling really does the psychic,
ghosts, etc., to say nothing of his having the "sense of
story." '

1900. "The Soft Side," collection containing: "The
Abasement of the Northmores," good; again the motif
of the vacuity of the public man, the "figure"; he has
tried it again in **The Private Life," which, however, falls
into the allegorical. A rotten fall it is too, and Henry
James at his worst in it, i.e., the allegorical. "Fordham's
Castle" appears in the collected edition only — it may be-
long to this period but is probably earlier, comedietta,
excellently, perhaps flawlessly done. Here, as so often,
the circumstances are mostly a description of the char-
acter of the personal tone of the "sitters" ; for his people
are so much more, or so much more often, "sitters" than
actors. Protagonists it may be. When they act, they
are apt to stage-act, which reduces their action again to
being a mere attempt at description. ("The Liar," for

■•. .1

»■ •*

-^ji

HENRY JAMES 151

example.) Compare Maupassant's "Toine" for treat-
ment of case similar to "Fordham Castle."

1902-05. "The Sacred Fount," "Wings of a Dove,"
"Golden Bowl*' period.

"Dove" and "Bowl" certainly not models for other
writers, a caviare not part of the canon (metaphors be
hanged for the moment).

Henry James is certainly not a model for narrative
novelists, for young writers of fiction; perhaps not even
a subject of study till they have attained some sublimity
of the critical sense or are at least ready to be constantly
alert, constantly on guard.

I cannot see that he will harm a critic or a describer
of places, a recorder of impressions, whether they be
people, places, music.

1903. "Better Sort/' mildish.

1903. "The Ambassadors," rather clearer than the
other work. Etude of Paris vs. Woollett. Exhortation
to the idle, well-to-do. to leave home.

1907. "The American Scene," triumph of the author's i
long practice. A creation of America. A book no
"serious American" will neglect. How many Americans
make any attempt toward a realization of that country
is of course beyond our power to compute. The desire
to see the national face in a mirror may be in itself an
exotic. I know of no such grave record, of no such
attempt at faithful portrayal, as "The American Scene."
Thus America is to the careful observer; this volume
and the American scenes in the fiction and memoirs, in
"The Europeans," "The Patagonia," "Washington
Square," etc., bulk large in the very small amount of
writing which can be counted as history of ftioeurs con-
temporaines, of national habit of our time and of the

152 INSTIGATIONS

two or three generations preceding us. Newport, the
standardized face, the Capitol, Independence Hall, the
absence of penetralia, innocence, essential vagueness,
etc., language ''only definable as not in intention Yid-
dish," the tabernacle of Grant's ashes, the public colbpse
of the individual, the St. Gaudens statue. There is noth-
ing to be gained by making excerpts ; the volume is large,
but one should in time drift through it. I mean any
American with pretenses to an intellectual life should
drift through it. It is not enough to have perused ''The
Constitution" and to have "heerd tell" of the national
founders.

1910. "The Finer Grain," collection of short stories
without a slip. **The Velvet .Glove," **Mona Mon-
travers," *'A Round of Visits" (the old New York versus
the new), "Crapey Cornelia," "The Bench of Desolation."

It is by beginning on this collection, or perhaps taking
it after such stories as *The Pupil" and "Brooksmith,"
that the general literate reader will best come to James,
must in brief be convinced of him and can tell whether
or not the "marginal" James is for him. Whether or no
the involutions of the "Golden Bowl" will titillate his ar-
cane sensibilities. If the reader does not "get" "The
Finer Grain" there is no sense in his trying the more
elaborate "Winjjs of a Dove," "Sacred Fount," "Golden
Rowl." If, on the contrary, he does feel the peculiar,
iinclassic attraction of the author he may or may not
enjoy the uncanonical books.

191 1. "The Outcry," a relapse. Connoisseurship fad
again, inferior work.

1913. "A Small Boy and Others," the beginning of
the memoirs. Beginning of this volume disgusting.
First three pages enough to put one off Henry James
once and for all, damn badly written, atrocious vocabu-

HENRY JAMES ^ 153

lary. Page 33, a few lines of good writing. Reader
might start about here, any reader, that is, to whom
New York of that period is of interest. New York of
the fifties is significant, in so far as it is typical of what a
hundred smaller American cities have been since. The
tone of the work shows in excerpts :

"The special shade of its identity was thus that it was
not conscious — really not conscious of anything in the
world; or was conscious of so few possibilities at least,
and these so immediate and so a matter of course, that it
came almost to the same thing. That was the testimony
that the slight subjects in question strike me as having
borne to their surrounding medium — the fact that their
unconsciousnes could be so preserved . . ."

Or later, when dealing with a pre-Y.-M.-C-A.
America.

"Infinitely queer and quaint, almost incongruously
droll, the sense somehow begotten in ourselves, as very
young persons, of our being surrounded by a slightly
remote, yet dimly rich, outer and quite kindred circle of
the tipsy. I remember how, once, as a very small boy,
after meeting in the hall a most amiable and irreproach-
able gentleman, all but closely consanguineous, who
had come to call on my mother, I anticipated his further
entrance by slipping in to report to that parent that I
thought he must be tipsy. And I was to recall per-
fectly afterwards the impression I so made on her — in
which the general proposition that the gentlemen of a
certain group or connection might on occasion be best
described by the term I had used, sought to destroy the
particular presumption that our visitor wouldn't, by his
ordinary measure, show himself for one of these. He
didn't to all appearance, for I was afterwards disap-
pointed at the lapse of lurid evidence: that memory

IS4 INSTIGATIONS

remained with me, as well as a considerable subsequent
wonder at my having leaped to so baseless a view . . ."

"The grim little generalization remained, none the less,
and I may speak of it — since I speak of everything — as
still standing : the striking evidence that scarce aught but
disaster could, in that so unformed and unseasoned
society, overtake young men who were in the least ex-
posed. Not to have been immediately launched in busi-
ness of a rigorous sort was to be exposed — in the ab-
sence, I mean, of some fairly abnormal predisposition
to virtue; since it was a world so simply constituted
that whatever wasn't business, or exactly an office or a
''store," places in which people sat close and made
money, was just simply pleasure, sought, and sought
only, in places in which people got tipsy. There was
clearly no mean, least of all the golden one, for it was
just the ready, even when the moderate, possession of
gold that determined, that hurried on disaster. There
were whole sets and groups, there were 'sympathetic,'
though too susceptible, races, tliat seemed scarce to
recognize or to find possible any practical application of
moneyed, that is, of transmitted ease, however limited,
but to go more or less rapidly to the bad with it —
which meant even then going as often as possible to
Paris . . ."

"The field was strictly covered, to my young eyes, I
make out, by three classes, the busy, the tipsy, and
Daniel Webster. . . ."

"It has carried me far from my rather evident propo-
sition that if we saw the 'natural' so happily embodied
about us — and in female maturity, or comparative ma-
turity, scarce less than in female adolescence — this was
because the artificial, or in other words the complicated,
was so little there to threaten it. . . ."

HENRY JAMES 155

On page 72 he quotes his father on "flagrant morality."
In Chapter X we have a remarkable portrayal of a
character by almost nothing save vacuums, "timorous
philistine in a world of dangers/' Our author notes the
"finer civility" but does not see that it is a thing of no
period. It is the property of a few individuals, per-
sonally transmitted. Henry Jame^ had a mania for
setting these things in an era or a "faubourg," despite
the continued testimony that the worst manners have
constantly impinged upon the most brilliant societies;
that decent detail of conduct is a personal talent.

Tlie production of "II Corteggiano" proves perhaps
nothing more than the degree in which Castiglione's
contemporaries "needed to be told." On page 236
("Small Boy and Others") the phrase "presence without
type." On page 286, the people "who cultivated for
years the highest instructional, social and moral possi-
bilities of Geneva." Page 283, "discussion of a work
of art mainly hung in those days on that issue of the
producible name." Page 304, "For even in those days
some Americans were rich and several sophisticated."
Page 313, The real give away of W. J. Page 341,
Scarification of Ste-Beuve. Page 179, Crystal Palace.
Page 214, Social relativity.

One is impatient for Henry James to do people.

A Little Tour in France. The disadvantage of giv-
ing impressions of real instead of imaginary places is
that they conflict with other people's impressions. I do
not see Angouleme via Balzac, nor do I feel Henry
James's contacts with the places where our tracks have
crossed very remarkable. I dare say it is a good enough
guide for people more meagrely furnished with asso-
ciations or perceptions. Allow me my piiton's shrug for
the man who has gone only by train.

156 INSTIGATIONS

Henry James is not very deep in ancient associations.
The American's enjoyment of England in "The Passion-
ate Pilgrim" is more searching than anything continental.
Windy generality in "Tour in France," and perhaps indi-
cation of how little Henry James's tentacles penetrated
into any era before 1600, or perhaps before 1780.

Vignette bottom of page 337-8 ("Passionate Pilgrim")
"full of glimpses and responses, of deserts and desola-
tions." "His perceptions would be fine and his opinions
pathetic." Commiseration of Searle vs. detachment, in
**Four Meetings."

Of the posthumous work, "The Middle Years" is per-
haps the most charming. "The Ivory Tower," full of
accumulated perceptions, swift illuminating phrases,
perhaps part of a masterpiece. "The Sense of the Past,"
less important. I leave my comment of "The Middle
Years" as I wrote it, but have recast the analysis of
notes to "The Ivory Tower."

Flaubert is in six volumes, four or five of which every
literate man must at one time or another assault. James
is strewn over about forty — part of which must go into
desuetude, have perhaps done so already.

I have not in these notes attempted the Paterine art
of appreciation, e.g., as in taking the perhaps sole read-
able paragraph of Pico Mirandola and writing an em-
purpled descant.

The problem — discussion of which is about as "artis-
tic" as a street map — is: can we conceive a five or six
volume edition of James so selected as to hold its own
internationally? My contention is for this possibility.

My notes are no more than a tentative suggestion, to
wit: that some such compact edition might be, to ad-
vantage, tried on the less patient public. I have been,
alas, no more fortunate than our subject in keeping out

HENRY JAMES 157

irrelevant, non-csthetic, non-literary, non-technical vistas
and strictures.

•THE MIDDLE YEARS"

The Middle Years is a tale of the great adventure;
for, putting aside a few simple adventures, sentimental,
phallic, Nimrodic, the remaining great adventure is pre-
cisely the approach to the Metropolis ; for the provincial
of our race the specific approach to London, and no
subject surely could more heighten the pitch of writing
than that the treated approach should be that of the
greatest writer of our time and own particular language.
We may, I think, set aside Thomas Hardy as of an
age not our own ; of perhaps Walter Scott's or of L'Abbe
Prcvost's, btit remote from us and things familiarly
under our hand ; and we skip over the next few crops of
writers as lacking in any comparative interest, interest
in a writer being primarily in his degree of sensitiza-
tion; and on this count we may throw out the whole
Wells-Bennett period, for what interest can we take in
instruments which must of nature miss two-thirds of
the vibrations in any conceivable situation? In James
the maximum sensibility compatible with efficient writ-
ing was present. Indeed, in reading these pages 'one
can but despair over the inadequacy of one's own literary
sensitization, one's so utterly inferior state of aware-
ness ; even allowing for what the author himself allows :
his not really, perhaps, having felt at twenty-six, all that
at seventy he more or less read into the memory of his
feeling. The point is that with the exception of excep-
tional moments in Hueffer, we find no trace of such
degree of awareness in the next lot of writers, or until
the first novels of Lewis and Joyce, whose awareness
is, without saying, of a nature greatly different in kind.

158 INSTIGATIONS

It is not the book for any reader to tackle who has
not read a good deal of James, or who has not, in
default of that reading, been endowed with a natural
Jamesian sensibility (a case almost negligible by any
likelihood) ; neither is it a book of memoirs, I mean
one does not turn to it seeking information about Vic-
torian worthies; any more than one did, when the old
man himself was talking, want to be told anything; there
are encyclopedias in sufficiency, and statistics, and human
mines of information, boring sufficiency; one asked and
asks only that the slow voice should continue — evaluat-
ing, or perhaps only tying up the strands of a sentence :
"And how my old friend . . . Howells . . ." etc

The eflFects of H. J.'s' first breakfasts in Liverpool,
invited upstairs at Half Moon Street, are of infinitely
more value than any anecdotes of the Laureate (even
though H. J,'s inability not to see all through the Laure-
ate is compensated by a quip melting one's personal
objection to anything Tennyson touched, by making him
merely an old gentleman whatsoever with a gleam of fun
in his make-up).

All comers to the contrary, and the proportionate sale
of his works, and statistics whatsoever to the contrary,
only an American who has come abroad will ever draw
all the succulence from Henry James's writings; the
denizen of Manchester or Wellington may know what
it feels like to reach London, the Londoner bom will
not be able quite to reconstruct even this part of the
book; and if for intimacy H. J. might have stayed at
the same hotel on the same day as one's grandfather;
and if the same American names had part in one's own
inceptions in London, one's own so wholly different and
less padded inceptions; one has perhaps a purely per-
sonal, selfish, unliterary sense of intimacy: with, in my

HENRY JAMES 159

Own case, the vast unbridgeable difference of settling-in
and escape.

The essence of James is that he is always "settling-in,"
it is the ground-tone of his genius.

Apart from the state of James's sensibility on arrival
nothing else matters, the "mildness of the critical air/'
the fatuity of George Eliot's husband, the illustrational
and accomplished lady, even the faculty for a portrait
in a paragraph, not to be matched by contemporary
effects in half-metric, are indeed all subordinate to one's
curiosity as to what Henry James knew, and what he
did not know on landing. The portrait of the author on
the cover showing him bearded, and looking rather like
a cross between a bishop and a Cape Cod longshoreman,
is an incident gratuitous, interesting, but in no way con-
nected witli the young man of the text.

The England of a still rather whiskered age, never
looking inward, in short, the Victorian, is exquisitely em-
balmed, and "mounted," as is, I think, the term for
microscopy. The book is just the right length as a
volume, but one mourns there not being twenty more,
for here is the unfinished work . . . not in "The Sense
of the Past," for there the pen was weary, as it had
been in "The Outcry," and the talent that was never most
worth its own while when gone off on connoisseurship,
was, conceivably, finished; but here in his depiction of
his earlier self the verve returned in full vigor.

THE NOTES TO "THE IVORY TOWER" ♦

The great artists among men of letters have occasion^
ally and by tradition burst into an Ars Poetica or an
Arte nuevo de hacer Comedias, and it should come as no

* Recast from an article in Thg Future,

i6o INSTIGATIONS

surprise that Henry James has left us some sort of
treatise on novel-writing — no surprise, that is, to the
discriminating reader who is not, for the most part, a
writer of English novels. Various reviewers have
hinted obscurely that some such treatise is either adum-
brated or concealed in the Notes for "The Ivory Tower"
and for "The Sense of the Past"; they have said, in-
deed, that novelists will "profit greatly," etc., but no one
has set forth the gist or the generalities which are to be
found in these notes.

Divested of its fine verbiage, of its cliches, of its pro-
vincialisms of American phrase, and of the special de-
tails relating to the particular book in his mind, the
formula for building a novel (any novel, not merely any
"psychological" novel) ; the things to have clearly in
mind before starting to write it are enumerated in "The
Ivory Tower" notes somewhat as follows : —

1. Choice of names for characters; names that will
"fit" their owners, and that will not "joggle" or be
cacophonic when in juxtaposition on the page.

2. Exposition of one group of characters and of the
"situation." (In "The Ivory Tower" this was to be done
in three subdivisions. "Book I" was to give the "Im-
mediate Facts.")

3. One character at least is hitched to his "character-
istic." We are to have one character's impression on
another.

4. (Book III.) Various reactions and interactions of
characters.

5. The character, i.e., the main character, is "faced
with the situation."

6. For "The Ivory Tower" and probably for any novel,
there is now need to show clearly and definitely the
"antecedents," i.e., anything that had happened before

HENRY JAMES i6i

the story started. And we find Henry James making
up his mind which characters have interacted before this
story opens, and which things are to be due to fresh
impacts of one character on another.

7. Particular consideration of the special case in hand.
The working-free from incongruities inherent in the first
vague preconceptions of the plot. Thus:

(a) The hinge of the thing is not to be the effect of

A. on B. or of B. on A.; nor of A. on C or
of C. on B. ; but is to be due to an effect all
round, of A. and B. and C. working on each
other.

(b) James's care not to repeat figures from earlier

novels. Not a categoric prohibition, but a cau-
tion not to sail too near the wind in this matter.

able" people, and not enough stupid ones into
the story.

(d) Care for the relative "weight" as well as the

varied "tone" of the characters.
(We observe, in all this, the peculiarly American pas-
sion for "art"; for having a system in things, cf.
Whistler.)

(e) Consideration how far one character "faces" the

problem of another character's "character."
(This and section "d" continue the preoccupation with
"moral values" shown in James's early criticism in
"French Poets and Novelists.")

8. Definite '* joint/'; or relations of one character to
another finally fitted and settled.

This brings us again to point 5. The character, i.e.,
the main character definitely "faced" with the situation.

9. The consequences.

i62 INSTIGATIONS

10. (sr) Further consideration of the state of char-

acter C. before contact with B., etc
(b) The effect of further characters on the mind,

and thence on the action of A.
(c) Considerations of the effect of a fourth main
character; of introducing a subsidiary char-
acter, and its effect, i.e., that of having an
extra character for a particular function.

11. The great "coup" foreshadowed.

(In this case the mild Othello, more and more drifting
consciously into the grip of the mild lago — ^I use the
terms "Othello" and "lago" merely to avoid, if not
"hero," at least "villain"; the sensitive temperament al-
lowing the rapacious temperament to become effective.)

(a) The main character in perplexity as to how far

he shall combat the drift of things.

(b) The opposed character's perception of this.
(These sub-sections are, of course, sub-sections for

a psychological novel; one .would have different but
equivalent "joints" in a novel of action.)

ity).

(d) A.'s general perception of these things and his

weighing of values, a phase solely for the psy-
chological novel.

(e) Weighing of how much A.'s perception of the

relations between B. and C. is to be denouement,
and how much, more or less, known.

12. Main character's "solution" or vision of what
course he will take.

13. The fourth character's "break into" things, or

into a perception of things,
(a) Actions of an auxiliary character, of what would

HENRY JAMES 163

have been low life in old Spanish or Elizabethan
drama. This character affects the main action
(as sometimes a "gracioso" [servant, buffoon,
Saiicho Panza] affects the main action in a
play, for example, of Lope de Vega's),
(b) Caution not to let author's interest in fascinat-
ing auxiliary character run away with his whole
plan and design.
(This kind of restraint is precisely what leaves a
reader "wanting more"; which gives a novel the "feel"
of being full of life ; convinces the reader of an abundant
energy, an abundant sense of life in an author.)

14. Effects of course of the action on fourth main
character and on the others. The scale being kept by
the relation here not being between main character and
one antagonist, but with a group of three people, rela-
tions "different" though their "point" is the same; cf,
a main character vs. a Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern, or
"attendant lords." James always has half an eye on
play construction ; the scene.

(a) The second auxiliary character brought out more

definitely. (This is accidental. It might hap-
pen at any suitable point in a story wherever
needed.)

(b) Act of this auxiliary person reaches through to

main action.

15. We see the author determining just how bad a
case he is going to make his villain.

(a) Further determination of his hero. (In this
case an absolute non-producer, non-accumu-
lator.)
(b) Care not to get an unmixed "bad" in his "villain,"
but to keep a right balance, a dependency, in

i64 INSTIGATIONS

this case, on the main character's weakness or
easiness,
(c) Decision how the main "coup" or transfer shall

slide through.
i6. Effect upon C. Effect upon main characters' re-
lations to D., E. and F.

At this point, in the consideration of eight of the ten
"books" of his novel, we see the author most intent on
his composition or architecture, most anxious to get all
the sections fitted in with the greatest economy, a sort
of crux of his excitement and anxiety, a fullness of his
perception that the thing must be so tightly packed that
no sentence can afford to be out of place.

17. Climax. The Deus or, in this case, Dea, ex
mac/iina. . Devices for prolonging climax. The fourth
main character having been, as it were, held back for a
sort of weight or balance here, and as a "resolution" of
the tangles.

Finis.

18. Author's final considerations of time scheme, i.e.,
fitting the action into time not too great for unity, and
great enough to allow for needed complexity. Slighter
consideration of place scheme; where final scenes shall
he laid, etc.

Here in a few paragraphs are the bare bones of the
plan described in eighty of Henry James's pages. The
detailed thoroughness of this plan, the complicated con-
sciousness displayed in it, gives us the measure of this
author's superiority, as conscious artist, over the "nor-
mal" British novelist, i.e., over the sort of person who
tells you that when he did his first book he "just sat
down and wrote the first paragraph," and then found he
"couldn't stop." This he tells you in a manner clearly
implying that, from that humble beginning to the shining

HENRY JAMES 165

hour of the present, he has given the matter no further
thought, and that his succeeding works were all knocked
off with equal simplicity.

I give this outline with such fullness because it is a
landmark in the history of the novel as written in Eng-
lish. It is inconceivable that Fielding or Richardson
should have left, or that Thomas Hardy should leave,
such testimony to a comprehension of the novel as a
"form." The Notes are, on the other hand, quite dis-
tinct from the voluminous prefaces which so many
French poets write before they have done anything else.
James, we note, wrote no prefaces until there were
twenty- four volumes of his novels and stories waiting
to be collected and republished. The Notes are simply
the accumulation of his craftsman's knowledge, they are,
in all their length, the summary of the things he would
have, as a matter of habit, in his mind before embark-
ing on composition.

I take it rather as a sign of editorial woodenheaded-
iiess that these Notes are printed at the end of "Tlie
Ivory Tower" ; if one have sense enough to suspect that
the typical mentality of the elderly heavy reviewer has
been shown, one will for oneself reverse the order; read
the notes with interest and turn to the text already with
the excitement of the sport or with the zest to see if, with
this chance of creating the masterpiece so outlined, the
distinguished author is going to make good. If on the
other hand one reads the unfinished text, there is no
escaping the boredom of re-reading in skeleton, with
tentative and confusing names, the bare statement of
what has been, in the text, more fully set before us.

The text is attestation of the rich, banked-up per-
ception of the author. I dare say the snap and rattle of
the fun, or much of it, will be only half perceptible to

i66 INSTIGATIONS

those who do not know both banks of the Atlantic; but
enough remains to show the author at his best; despite
the fact that occasionally he puts in the mouths of his
characters sentences or phrases that no one but he him-
self could have used. I cannot attribute this to the
unfinished state of the manuscript. These oversights
are few, but they are the kind of slip which occurs in
his earlier work. We note also that his novel is a
descriptive novel, not a novel that simply depicts people
speaking and moving. There is a constant dissertation
going on, and in it is our major enjoyment. The Notes
to "The Sense of the Past'' are not so fine a specimen of
method, as they are the plan not of a whole book, but
only of the latter section. The editor is quite right to
print them at the end of the volume.

Of the actual writing in the three posthumous books,
far the most charming is to be found in 'The Middle
Years." Here again one is not much concerned with
Mr. James's mildly ironic reminiscences of Tennyson and
the Victorians, but rather with James's own tempera-
ment, and with his recording of inn-rooms, breakfasts,
butlers, etc., very much as he had done in his fiction.
There is no need for its being "memoirs" at all ; call the
protagonist Mr. Ponsonby or Mr. Hampton, obliterate
the known names of celebrities and half celebrities, and
the whole thing becomes a James novel, and, so far as it
goes, a mate to the best of them.

Retaining the name of the author, any faithful reader
of James, or at any rate the attentive student, finds a
good deal of amusement in deciphering the young James,
his temperament as mellowed by recollection and here
recorded forty years later, and then in contrasting it
with the young James as revealed or even "betrayed" in
his own early criticisms, "French Poets and Novelists,"

HENRY JAMES 167

a much cruder and more savagely puritanical and plainly
New England product with, however, certain permanent
traits of his character already in evidence, and with a
critical faculty keen enough to hit on certain weaknesses
in the authors analyzed, often with profundity, and
with often a "rightness" in his mistakes. I mean that
apparent errors are at times only an excess of zeal and
overshooting of his mark, which was to make for an
improvement, by him, of certain defects.

Ill

REMY DE GOURMONT

A DISTINCTION
followed by notes

The mind of Remy de Gourmont was less like the
mind of Henry James than any contemporary mind I
can think of. James' drawing of mceurs contemporaines
was so circumstantial, so concerned with the setting, with
detail, nuance, social aroma, that his transcripts were
"out of date" almost before his books had gone into a
second edition ; out of date that is, in the sense that his
interpretations of society could never serve as a guide to
such supposititious, utilitarian members of the next gen-
eration as might so desire to use them.

He has left his scene and his characters, unalterable as
the little paper flowers permanently visible inside the
lumpy glass paperweights. He was a great man of
letters, a great artist in portrayal ; he was concerned with
mental temperatures, circumvolvulous social pressures,
the clash of contending conventions, as Hogarth with
the cut of contemporary coats.

On no occasion would any man of my generation have
broached an intimate idea to H. J., or to Thomas Hardy,
O.M., or, years since, to Swinburne, or even to Mr.
Yeats with any feeling that the said idea was likely to
be received, grasped, comprehended. However much

1 68

REMY DE GOURMONT • 169

one may have admired Yeats' poetry ; however much one
may have been admonished by Henry James* prose
works, one has never thought of agreeing with either.

You could, on the other hand, .have said to De Gour-
mont anything that came into your head ; you could have
sent him anything you had written with a reasonable
assurance that he would have known what you were
driving at. If this distinction is purely my own, and
subjective, and even if it be wholly untrue, one will be
very hard pressed to find any other man born in the
"fifties" of whom it is even suggestible.

De Gourmont prepared our era; behind him there
stretches a limitless darkness; there was the counter-
reformation, still extant in the English printer; there
was the restoration of the Inquisition by the Catholic
Roman Church, holy and apostolic, in the year of grace
1824; there was the Mephistopheles period, morals of
the opera left over from the Spanish XVIIth century
plays of "capa y espada"; Don Juan for subject mat-
ter, etc. ; there was the period of English Christian big-
otry, Saml. Smiles, exhibition of '51 ("Centennial of
'76"), machine-made building "ornament," etc., enduring
in the people who did not read Saml. Butler; there was
the Emerson-Tennysonian plus optimism period; there
was the "aesthetic" era during which people "wrought"
as the impeccable Beerbohm has noted; there was the
period of funny symboliste trappings, "sin," satanism,
rosy cross, heavy lilies, Jersey Lilies, etc.,

"Ch'hanno perduto il ben del intelletto"
alflhese periods had mislaid the light of the XVIIIth
century; though in the symbolistes Gourmont had his
beginning.

I70 INSTIGATIONS

II.

In contradiction to, in wholly antipodal distinction
from, Henry James, Dc Gourmont was an artist of the
nude. He was an intelligence almost more than an ar-
tist ; when he portrays, he is concerned with hardly more
than the permanent human elements. His people are
only by accident of any particular era. He is poet, more
by possessing a certain quality of mind than by virtue
of having written fine poems; you could scarcely con-
tend that he was a novelist.

He was intensely aware of the differences of emo-
tional timbre; and as a man's message is precisely his
fagon de tmr, his modality of apperception, this particu-
lar awareness was his "message."

Where James is concerned with the social tone of his
subjects, with their entourage, with their superstes of
dogmatized "form," ethic, etc., De Gourmont is con-
cerned with their modality and resonance in emotion.

Mauve, Fanette, Neobelle, La Vierge aux Platres, are
all studies in different permanent kinds of people; they
are not the results of environments or of "social causes,"
their circtunstance is an accident and is on the whole
scarcely alluded to. Gourmont differentiates his charac-
ters by the modes of their sensibility, not by sub-degrees
of their state of civilization.

He recognizes the right of individuals to feel differ-
ently. Confucian, Epicurean, a considerer and enter-
tainer of ideas, this complicated sensuous wisdom is al-
most the one ubiquitous element, the "self" which keeps
his superficially heterogeneous work vaguely "unified."

The study of emotion does not follow a set chrono-
logical arc; it extends from the "Physique de I'Amour"

REMY DE GOURMONT 171

.to "Le Latin Mystique"; from the condensation of
Fabre's knowledge of insects to

"Amas ut facias pulchram"

in the Sequaire of Goddeschalk
(in "Le Latin Mystique").

He had passed the point where people take abstract
statement of dogma for "enlightenment." An "idea" has
tittle value apart from the modality of the mind which
receives it. It is a railway from one state to another,
and as dull as steel rails in a desert.

The emotions are equal before the aesthetic judgment.
He does not grant the duality of body and soul, or at
least suggests that this mediaeval duality is unsatisfac-
tory;, there is an interpenetration, an osmosis of body
and soul, at least for hypothesis. "My words are the un-
spoken words of my body."

And in all his exquisite treatment of all emotion he
will satisfy many whom August Strindberg, for egre-
gious example, will not. From the studies of insects to
Christine evoked from the thoughts of Diomede, sex is
not a monstrosity or an exclusively German study.* And
the entire race is not bound to the habits of the mantis
6r of other insects equally melodramatic. Sex, in so far
as it is not a purely physiological reproductive mechan-
ism, lies in the domain of aesthetics, the junction of tactile
and magnetic senses ; as some people have accurate ears
both for rhythm and for pitch, and as some are tone deaf,
some impervious to rhythmic subtlety and variety, so in
this other field of the senses some desire the trivial, some
the processional, the stately, the master-work.

As some people are good judges of music, and insen-
sible to painting and sculpture, so the fineness ot one

♦ "A German study," Hobson ; "A German study," Tarr.

172 INSTIGATIONS

sense entails no corresponding fineness in another, or at
least no corresponding critical perception of differences.

III.

Emotions to Henry James were more or less things
that other people had and that one didn't go into ; at any
rate not in drawing rooms. The gods had not visited
James, and the Muse, whom he so frequently mentions,
appeared doubtless in corsage, the narrow waist, the
sleeves puffed at the shoulders, a la mode 1890-2.

De Gourmont is interested in hardly anything save
emotions, and the ideas that will go into them, or take
life in emotional application. (Apperceptive rather than
active.)

One reads Les Chcvaux de Diom^e (1897) as one
would have listened to incense in the old Imperial court.
There are many spirits incapable. De Gourmont calls
it a "romance of possible adventures" ; it might be called
equally an aroma, the fragrance of roses and poplars,
the savor of wisdoms, not part of the canon of literature,
a book like "Daphnis and Chloe" or like Marcel
j Schwob's "Livre de Monelle" ; not a solidarity like Flau-
bert; but an osmosis, a pervasion.

"My true life is in the unspoken words of my body."

In "Une Nuit au Luxembourg," the characters talk
at more length, and the movement is less convincing.
"Diomede" was De Gourmont's own favorite and we
may take it as the best of his art, as the most complete
expression of his particular "faqon d'apercevoir" ; if,
even in it, the characters do little but talk philosophy, or
rather drift into philosophic expression out of a haze of
images, they are for all that very real. It is the climax

REMY DE GOURMONT 173

of his method of presenting characters differentiated by
emotional timbre, a process which had begun in "His-
ToiRES Maciques" (1895); and in "D'uN Pays Loin-
tain" (published 1898, in reprint from periodicals of
1892-4).

"SoNGE d'une Femme" (1899) is a novel of modern
life, De Gourmont's sexual intelligence, as contrasted to
Strindberg's sexual stupidity well in evidence. The work
is untranslatable into English, but should be used before
30 by young men who have been during their undergrad-
uate days too deeply inebriated with the Vita Nuova.

"Tout ce qui se passe dans la vie, c'est de la mauvaise
litterature."

"La vraie terre natale est celle ou on a eu sa premiere
emotion forte."

"La virginite n'est pas une vertu, c'est un etat; c'est
une sous-division des couleurs."

Livres de chevet for those whom the Strindbergian
school will always leave aloof.

"Les imbeciles ont choisi le beau comme les oiseaux
choisissent ce qui est gras. La betise leur sert de comes."
"CoEUR Virginal" (1907) is a light novel, amusing,
and accurate in its psychology.

I do not think it possible to overemphasize Gourmont's
sense of beauty. The mist clings to the lacquer. His
spirit was the spirit of Omakitsu; his pays natal was
near to the peach-blossom- fountain of the untranslatable
poem. If the life of Diomede is overdone and done
badly in modem Paris, the wisdom of the book is not
thereby invalidated. It may be that Paris has need of
some more Spartan corrective, but for the descendants
of witch-burners DiomMe is a needful communication.

174 INSTIGATIONS

IV.

As Voltaire was a needed light in the i8th cen-
tury, so in our time Fabre and Frazer have been essen-
tials in the mental furnishings of any contemporary mind
qualified to write of ethics or philosophy or that mixed
molasses religion. ^'The Golden Bough" has supplied
the data which Voltaire's incisions had shown to be lack-
ing. It has been a positive succeeding his negative. It
is not necessary perhaps to read Fabre and Frazer en-
tire, but one must be aware of them; people unaware
of them invalidate all their own writing by simple igno-
rance, and their work goes ultimately to the scrap heap.

"Physique de l'Amour" (1903) should be used as a
text book of biology. Between this biological basis in
instinct, and the "Sequaire of Goddeschalk" in "Le Latin
Mystique" (1892) stretch Gourmont's studies of amour
and aesthetics. If in Diomede we find an Epicurean
receptivity, a certain aloofness, an observation of con-
tacts and auditions, in contrast to the Propertian atti-
tude:

Ingenium nobis ipsa puella facit,

this is perhaps balanced by

"Sans vous, je crois bien que je n'aimerais plus beau-
coup et que je n'aurais plus une extreme confiance ni
dans la vie ni moi-meme." (In "Lettres k TAma-
zone.")

But there is nothing more unsatisfactory than saying
that De Gourmont "had such and such ideas" or held
"such and such views," the thing is that he held ideas, in-

REMY DE GOURMONT 175

tuitions, perceptions in a certain personal exquisite man-
ner. In a criticism of him, "criticism" being an over
violent word, in, let us say, an indication of him, one
wants merely to show that one has oneself made certain
dissociations; as here, between the esthetic receptivity
of tactile and magnetic values, of the perception of
beauty in these relationships, and the conception of love,
passion, emotion as an intellectual instigation; such as
Propertius claims it; such as we find it declared in the
King of Navarre's

"De fine amor vient science et l)eautc" ;

and constantly in the troubadours.

(I cannot repeat too often that there was a profound
psychological knowledge in mediaeval Provence, how-
ever Gothic its expression; that men, concentrated on
certain validities, attaining an exact and diversified ter-
minology, have there displayed considerable penetration ;
that this was carried into early Italian poetry ; and faded
from it when metaphors became decorative instead of
interpretative; and that the age of Aquinas would not
have tolerated sloppy expression of psychology concur-
rent with the exact expression of "mysticism." There
is also great wisdom in Ovid. Passans!)

De Gourmont's wisdom is not wholly unlike the wis-
dom which those ignorant of Latin may, if the gods
favor their understanding, derive from Golding's "Met-
amorphoses."

Barbarian ethics proceed by general taboos. Gour-
mont's essays collected into various volumes, "Prome-
nades," "Epilogues," etc., are perhaps the best intro-

176 INSTIGATIONS

duct ion to the ideas of our time that any unfortunate,
suddenly emerging from Peru, Peoria, Oshkosh, Ice-
land, Kochin, or other out-of-the-way lost continent could
desire. A set of Landor's collected works will go fur-
ther towards civilizing a man than any university educa-
tion now on the market. Montaigne condensed Renais-
sance awareness. Even so small a collection as Lionel
Johnson's "Post Liminium" might save a man from utter
barbarity.

But if, for example, a raw graduate were contemplat-
ing a burst into intellectual company, he would be less
likely to utter unutterable betifses, gaffes, etc., after read-
ing Gourmont than before. One cannot of course cre-
ate intelligence in a numbskull.

Needless to say, Gourmont's essays are of uneven
value as the necessary subject matter is of uneven value.
Taken together, proportionately placed in his work, they
are a portrait of the civilized mind. I incline to think
them the best portrait available, the best record that is,
of the civilized mind from 1885-1915.

There are plenty of people who do not know what the
civilized mind is like, just as there were plenty of mules
in England who did not read Landor contemporaneously,
or who did not in his day read Montaigne. Civilization
is individual.

Gourmont arouses the senses of the imagination, pre-
paring the mind for receptivities. His wisdom, if not
of the senses, is at any rate via the senses. We base our
"science" on perceptions, but our ethics have not yet at-
tained this palpable basis.

In 1898, "Pays Lointain" (reprinted from magazine
publication of 1892-4), De Gourmont was beginning his
method :

REMY DE GOURMONT 177

"Douze crimes pour Thonneur dc rinfini."

He treats the special case, cases as special as any of
Jaines\ but segregated on different demarcative lines.
His style had attained the vividness of

"Sa vocation etait de paraitre malheureuse, de passer
dans la vie comme une ombre gdmissante, d'inspirer de
la pitie, du doute et de Tinquietude. EUe avait toujours
Tair de porter des fleurs vers une tombe abandonn6e/'
La Femme en Noir.

In "HisToiRES Magiques" ( 1894) : "La Robe
Blanche," "Yeux d'eau," "Marguerite Rouge," "Soeur de
Sylvie," "Danaette," are all of them special cases, already
showing his perception of nevrosis, of hyperaesthesia.
His mind is still running on tonal variations in "Les
Litanies de la Rose."

Pourtant il y a des yeux au bout des doigts."
Femmes, conservatrices des traditions milesiennes."

"Epilogues" (1895-98). Pleasant rereading, a book
to leave lying about, to look back into at odd half hours.
A book of accumulations. Full of meat as a good
walnut.

Heterogeneous as the following paragraphs:
"Ni la croyance en un seul Dieu, ni la morale ne sont
les fondements vrais de la religion. Une religion, meme
le Christianisme, n'eut jamais sur les moeurs qu'une in-
fluence dilatoire, Tinfluence d'un bras leve; ellc doit re-
commencer son preche, non pas seulement avec chaque
generation humaine, mais avec chaque phase d'une vie
' individuelle. N'apportant pas des verit& evidentes en
soi, son enseignement oublie, elle ne laisse rien dans les

178 INSTIGATIONS

ames que I'effroi du peut-etre et la honte d'etre asservi a
une peur ou a une esperance dont les chaines f antomales
entravent non pas nos actes mais nos d^sirs.

• •••••

"L'essence d'une religion, c'est sa litt^rature. Or la
litterature religieuse est morte." Religions,

"]e veux bien que Ton me protege contre des ennemis
inconnus, Tescarpe ou le cambrioleur, — ^mais contre moi-
meme, vices ou passions, non." Madame Boulton,

"Si .le cosmopolitisme litteraire gagnait encore et qu'il
r^ussit a eteindre ce que les differences de race ont
allum^ de haine de sang parmi les hommes, j'y verrais un
gain pour la civilisation et pour Thumanite tout entiire."
Cosmopolitisme,

"Augier! Tous les lucratifs reves de la bourgeoise
econome ; tous les soupirs des vierges conf ortables ; toutes
les reticences des consciences soignees; toutes les joies
permises aux ventres prudents; toutes les veuleries des
bourses craintives; tous les siphons conjugaux; toutes les
envies de la robe montante contre les epaules nues ; toutes
les haines du waterproof contre la grace et contre la
beaut^ ! Augier, crinoline, parapluie, bec-de-corbin, bon-
net grec ..." Augier,

"Dieu aime la melodie gregorienne, mais avec modera-
tion. II a soin de varier le programme quotidien des con-
certs celestes, dont le fond reste le plain-chant lithur-
gique, par des auditions de Bach, Mozart, Haendel,
Haydn, *et meme Gounod.' Dieu ignore Wagner, mais
il aime la varifte." Le Dieu des Beiges,

"La propriete n'est pas sacree ; elle n'est qu'un fait ac-
ceptable comme necessaire au developpement de la liberte
individuelle ...

L'abominable loi des cinquantes ans — contre laquelle

REMY DE GOURMONT 179

Proudhon lutta en vain si courageusement — conunence i
faire sentir sa tyrannie. La veuve de M. Dumas a fait
interdire la reprise d'Antony. Motif: son bon plaisir.
Des caprices d'heritiers peuvent d'un jour i Tautre nous
priver pendant cinquante ans de toute une oeuvre.

• •••••
"Demain les ocuvres de Renan, de Taine, de Verlaine,

de Villiers peuvent appartenir a un cur£ fanatique ou i
une devote stupide." La Propriiti Littiraire,

'*M. Desjardins, plus modeste, inaugure la morale ar-
tistique et murale, seconde par Texcellent M. Puvis de
Chavannes qui n'y comprend rien, mais s'avoue tout de
meme bien content de figurer sur les murs." U, P. A. M.

"Les auteurs, 'avertis par le Public . . .' II y a dans
ces mots toute une esthetique, non seulement dramatique,
mais democratique. Plus d'insucces. Plus de fours. Ad-
mirable invention par laquelle, sans doute, le peuple trou-
vera enfin Tart quilui convient etles auteurs qu'il merite/*
Conscience Littiraire.

"Le citoyen est une variete de Thomme ; variete degen-
eree ou primitive il est i Thomme ce que le chat de gou-
tiere est au chat sauvage.

• •••••
"Comme toutes les creations vraiment belles et noble-

ment utiles, la sociologie fut Toeuvre d'un honmie de
genie, M. Herbert Spencer, et le principe de sa gloire.
• • • • • •

"La saine Sociologie traite de revolution a travers les
ages d'un groupe de metaphores, Famille, Patrie, Etat,
Soci^te, etc. Ces mots sont de ceux que Ton dit coUec-
tifs et qui n'ont en soi aucune signification, I'histoire les a
employes de tons temps, mais la Sociologie, par d'astu-
cieuses definitions precise leur nisLtit tout en propageant
leur culte.

i8o INSTIGATIONS

"Car tout mot collectif , et d'abord ceux du vocabulaire
sociologique sont Tobjet d'un culte. A la Famille, i la
Patrie, k I'Etat, a la Societe, on sacrifie des citoyens
males et des citoyens f emelles ; les males' en plus grand
nombre ; ce n'est que par interm^de, en temps de gr^ve
ou d'emeute, pour essayer un nouveau fusil que Ton
perf ore des f emelles ; elles ofFrent au coup une cible moins
d^fiante et plus plaisante; ce sont \i d'inevitables petits
incidents de la vie politique. Le male est I'hostie ordi-
naire.

• • • • • •

"Le caractere fondamental du citoyen est done le de-
vouementy la resignation et la stupidite; il exerce princi-
palement ces qualites selon trois fonctions physiologiques,
comme animal reproducteur, comme animal Electoral,
comme animal contribuable.

• • • • • •
"Devenu animal electoral, le citoyen n'est pas depourvu

de subtilite. Ayant flaire, il distingue hardiment entre
un opportuniste et un radical. Son ing^niosite va
jusqu'i la m^fiance : le mot Liberte le fait aboyer, tel un
chien perdu. A I'idee qu'on va le laisser seul dans les
t^^bres de sa volont6, il pleure, il appelle sa mere, la
R^publique, son pere, TEtat.

• • • . • •

"Du fond de sa grange ou de son atelier, il entretient
volontiers ceux qui le protegent contre lui-meme.

• • • ...

"Et puis songe : si tu te revoltais, il n'y aurait plus de
lois, et quand tu voudrais mourir, comment ferais-tu, si
le r^stre n'etait plus la pour accueillir ton nome?"
Paradoxes sur le Citoyen.

"Si Ton est porte a souhaiter un deraillement, il faut
parler, il faut &rire, il faut sourire, il faut s'abstenir —

REMY DE GOURMONT i8i

c'est le grand point de toute vie civique. Les actuelles
organisations sociales ont cette tare fondamentale que
I'abstention legale et silencieuse les rend inermes et
ridicules. II faut empoisonner TAutorite, lentement, en
jouant. C'est si charmant de jouer et si utile au bon
fonctionnement humainl II faut se moquer. II faut
passer, I'ironie dans les yeux, a travers les mailles des
lois anti-liberales, et quand on promene i travers nos
vignes, gens de France, I'idole gouvernementale, gardez-
vous d'aucun acte vilain, des gros mots, des violences —
rentrez chez vous, et mettez les volets. Sans avoir rien
fait que de tres simple et de tres innocent vous vous
reveillerez plus libres le lendemain." Les Faiseurs de
Statues,

^'Charmant Tzar, tu la verras chez toi, la Revolution,
stupide comme le peuple et f eroce comme la bourgeoisie ;
tu la verras, depassant en animalite et en rapacity san-
glante tout ce qu'on t'a permis de lire dans les tomes ex-
purges qui firent ton education." Le Dilire Russe.

"Or un ecrivain, un poete, un philosophe, un Homme
des regions intellectuelles n'a qu'une patrie: sa langue."
Querelles de Belgique.

"II faut encore, pour en revenir aux assassins, noter
que le crime, sauf en des rares cas passionnels, est le
moyen et non le but." Crimes,

"Le vers traditionnel est patriotique et national ; le vers
nouveau est anarchiste et sans patrie. II semble que la
rime riche f asse partie vraiment de la richesse nationale :
on vole quelquechose a TEtat en adoucissant la sonorit6
des ronrons: *La France, Messieurs, manque de con-
sonnes d*appui!* D'autre part, I'emploi de Tassonnance
a quelquechose de retrograde qui froisse les vrais dfeio-
crates.

i82 INSTIGATIONS

"II est amusant de voir des gens qui ne doivent leur
6tat 'd'hommes modemes' qu'a la fauchaison brutale
de toutes les traditions Fran^aises, protester aussi sotte-
ment contre des innovations non seulement logiques, mais
inevitables. Ce qui donne quelque valeur a leur acri-
monie, c'est qu'ils ignorent tout de cette question si com-
plexe; de \k leur liberte critique, n'ayant lu ni Gastqp
Paris, ni Darmesteter, ni aucun des dcrivains recents qui
etudi^rent avec prudence tant de points obscurs de la
phonetique et de la rythmique, ils tirent une autoriti 6vi-
dente de leur incompetence meme." Le Vers Libre et les
Prochaines Elections,

"Pelerin du Silence" (1896) contains "Fleurs de
Jadis" (1893), "Chateau Singulier" (1894), "Livres des
Litanies," "Litanie de la Rose"* (1892), Theatre
Muet, "Le Fantome" (1893).

"LivRE DES Masques" (1896), not particularly impor-
tant, though the preface contains a good reformulation:
as, for example,

"Le crime capital pour un ecrivain, c'est le confor-
misme, I'imitativite, la soumission aux regies et aux en-
scignements. L'oeuvre d'un ecrivain doit etre non seule-
ment le reflet, mais le reflet grossi de sa personnalite. La
seule excuse qu'un homme ait d'ecrire c'est de s'ecrire lui-
meme, de devoiler aux autres la sort de monde qui se
mire en son miroir individuel ; Sa seule excuse est d'etre
original; il doit dire des choses non encore dites, et les
dire en une forme non encore formulee. II doit se crfer
sa propre esthetique — et nous devrons admettre autant
d'esthetiques qu'il y a d'esprits originaux et les juger
d'apres ce qu'elles sont, et non d'apres ce qu'elles ne sont

pas.

• ••••«

♦Quoted in L. /?., February, 1918,

REMY DE GOURMONT 183

"L'esthetique est devenue elle aussi, un talent person-
nel." ♦ Priface.

"Comme tous les ecrivains qui sont parvenus a com-
prendre la vie, c'est-a-dire son inutilite immediate, M.
Francis Poictevin, bien que ne romancier, a promptement
renonce au roman.

• •••••

"II est tres difficile de persuader a de certains vieillards
— vieux ou jeunes — qu'il n'y a pas de sujets ; il n'y a en
litterature qu'un sujet, celui qui ecrit, et toute la littera-
ture, c'est-i-dire toute la philosophie, pent surgir aussi
bien a Tappel d'un cbien ecras6 qu'aux acclamations de
Faust interpellant la Nature : 'Ou te saisir, 6 Nature in-
finie ? Et vous, mamelles ?' " Francis Poictevin,

This book is of the 'gps, of temporary interest, judg-
ment in mid-career, less interesting now that the com-
plete works of the subjects are available, or have faded
from interest. This sort of criticism is a duty imposed
on a man by his intelligence. The doing it a duty, a
price exacted for his possession of intelligence.

In places the careless phrase, phrases careless of sense,
in places the thing bien dit as in Verlaine. Here and
there a sharp sentence, as

"M. Moreas ne comprendra jamais combien il est ridi-
cule d'appeler Racine le Sophocle de la Ferte Milon."
or:

"Parti de la chanson de Saint Leger, il en est, dit-on,
arrive au XVIIeme. siede, et cela en moins de dix an-
nees; ce n'est pas si decourageant qu'on Ta cru. Et
maintenant que les textes se font plus familiers, la route
s'abrege; d'ici peu de haltes, M. Mor^ campera sous le
vieux chene Hugo et, s'il pers6vire, nous le verrons at-

* Each of the senses has its own particular eunuchs.

i84 INSTIGATIONS

teindre le but de son voyage, qui est sans doute de se re-
joindre lui-meme." Jean Morias.

This first "Livre dcs Masques" is of historical interest,
as a list of men interesting at their time. It is work done
in establishing good work, a necessary scaffolding, the
debt to De Gourmont, because of it, is ethical rather than
artistic. It is a worthy thing to have done. One should
not reproach flaws, even if it appears that the author
wastes time in this criticism, although this particular sort
of half energy probably wouldn't have been any use for
more creative or even more formulative writing. It is
not a carving of statues, but only holding a torch for the
public; ancillary writing. Local and temporal, introduc-
ing some men now better known and some, thank
Heaven, unknown or forgotten.

"DeuxiAme Livre des Masques" (1898), rather more
important, longer essays, subjects apparently chosen
more freely, leaves one perhaps more eager to read Al-
fred Valette's "Le Vierge" than any other book men-
tioned.

"Etre nul arrets dans son d^veloppement vers une
nuUiti dquilibrie."

We find typical Gourmont in the essay on Rictus :

"Ici c'est ridee de la resignation qui trouble le Pauvre ;
comme tant d'autres, il la confond avec Tid^ bouddhiste
de non-activite. Cela n'a pas d'autre importance en un
temps ou Ton confond tout, et ou un cerveau capable
d'associer et de dissocier logiquement les idees doit etre
consid^re comme une production miraculeuse de la
Nature.

"Or Tart ne joue pas ; il est grave, meme quand il rit,
meme quand il danse. II faut encore comprendre qu'en

REMY DE GOURMONT 185

art tout ce qui n'est pas necessaire est inutile ; et tout ce
qui est inutile est mauvais." Jchan Rictus.
He almost convinces one of Ephraim Mikhail's poetry,
by his skillful leading up to quotation of:

"Mais 1e ciel gris est plein de tristesse caline
Ineffablenient douce aux coeurs charges d'ennuis."
The essay on the Goncourt is important, and we find in
it typical dissociation.

"Avec de la patience, on atteint quelquefois Texacti-
lude, et avec de la conscience, la veracite; ce sont les
qualites fondamentales de Thistoire.

• •••••

"Quand on a goute a ce vin on ne veut plus boire Tordi-
naire vinasse des bas litterateurs. Si les Goncourt
etaient devenus populaires, si la notion du style pouvait
penetrer dans les cerveaux moyensi On dit que le peu-
ple d'Athene avait cette notion.

* » r."* i

Et surtout quel memorable desinteressement 1 En
tout autre temps nul n'aurait songe a louer Ekimond de
Goncourt pour ce dedain de Targent et de la basse popu-
larite, car Tamour est exclusif et celui qui aime Tart
n'aime que Tart: mais apres les exemples de toutes les
avidites qui nous ont et6 donnes depuis vingt ans par les
boursiers des lettres, par la coulisse de la litterature, il
est juste et necessaire de glorifier, en face de ceux qui
vivent pour Targent, ceux qui vecurent pour I'idec et
pour Tart.

• •••••

"La place des Goncourt dans Thistoire litteraire de ce
siecle sera peut-etre meme aussi grande que celle de
Flaubert, et ils la devront a leur souci si nouveau, si
scandaleux, en une litterature alors encore toute rh^ori-
cienne, de la 'non-imitation'; cela a revolutionn^ le

i86 INSTIGATIONS

monde de Tdcriture. Flaubert devait beaucoup i Cha-
teaubriand: il serait difficile de nominer le maitre des
Goncourt. lis conquirent pour eux, ensuite pour tous les
talents, le droit k la personnalite stricte, le droit pour un
dcrivain de s'avouer tel quel, et rien qu'ainsi, sans s'in-
quieter des modeles, des regies, de tout le p^dantisme
universitaire et c6naculaire, le droit de se mettre face-iL-
face avec la vie, avec la sensation, avec le reve, avec
rid6e, de order sa phrase — et meme, dans les limites du
genie de la langue, sa syntaxe." Les Goncourt.

One is rather glad M. Hello' is dead. Ghil is men-
tionable, and the introductory note on Felix Fendon is of
interest.

Small reviews are praised in the notes on Dujardins
and Alfred Vallette.

"II n'y a rien de plus utile que ces revues speciales dont
le public elu parmi les vrais fideles admet les discussions
minutieuses, les admirations franches." On Edouard
Dujardins.

"II arrive dans I'ordre litteraire qu'une revue fondee
avec quinze louis a plus d'influence sur la marche des
id6es et par consequent, sur la marche du monde (et peut-
etre sur la rotation des planetes) que les orgueilleux re-
cueils de capitaux academiques et de dissertations com-
merciales." On Alfred Vallette.

"Promenades Philosophiques" (1905-S). One can-
not brief such work as the Promenades. The sole result
is a series of aphorisms, excellent perhaps, but without
cohesion; a dozen or so will show an intelligence, but
convey neither style nor personality of the author :

"Sans doute la religion n'est pas vraie, mais Tanti-re-
ligion n'est pas vraie non plus: la v6rite reside dans un
6tat parfait d'indiffdrence.

REMY DE GOURMONT 187

"Peu importe qu'on me sollicite par des &rits ou par
des paroles; le mal ne commence qu'au moment oil on
m'y pHe par la force." Autre Point de Vue.

ttr ».

'L'argent est le signe de la libert6» Maudire Targent,
c'est maudire la liberte, c'est maudire la vie qui est nuUe
si elle n'est libre." UArgent,

''Quaiid on voudra definir la philosophie du XlX^e
siecle, on s'apercevra qu'il n'a fait que de la th&)logie.

• •••••
"Apprendre ix>ur apprendre est peut-etre aussi grossier

que manger pour manger.

• •••••

"C'est singulier fen litterature, quand la forme n'est pas
nouvelle, le fond ne Test pas non plus.

• •••••

"Le nu de Tart contemporain est un nu d*hydroth6rapie.

L art doit etre a la mode ou creer la mode.

"Les paciiistes, de braves gens a genoux, pres d'une
balance et priant le ciel qu'elle s'incline, non pas selon les
lois de la pesanteur, mais selon leurs voeux.

• •»•••

"La propriete est necessaire, mais il ne Test pas qu'elle
reste toujours dans les memes mains.

• •.•••

"II y a une simulation de Tintelligence comme il y a
une simulation de la vertu.

"Le romam historique. II y a aussi la peinture his-

i88 INSTIGATIONS

torique, Tarchitecture historique, et, i la mi-careme, le
costume historique.

"Etre impersonnel c'est etre personnel scion un mode
particulier: Voyez Flaubert. On dirait en jargon: Tob-
jectif est une des formes du subjectif.

• »••••

"La maternite, c'est beau, tant qu'on n'y fait pas atten-
tion. Cest vulgaire des qu'on admire.

• » • a • •

"L'excuse du christianisme, Qa a et^ son impuissance
sur la rdalite. II a corrompu I'esprit bien plus que la vie.

"Je ne garantis pas qu'aucune de ces notes ne se trouve
deji dans un de mes ecrits, ou qu'elle ne figurera pas
dans un &:rit futur. On les retrouvera peut-etre meme
dans des ecrits qui ne seront pas les miens." Des Pas sur
le Sable.

Those interested in the subject will take "Le Prob-
L&ME DU Style" ( 1902) entire ; the general position may
perhaps be indicated very vaguely by the following quo-
tations :

"Quant a la peur de se gater le style, c'est bon pour un
Bemho, qui use d'une langue factice. Le style peut se
f atiguer comme I'homme meme ; il vieillira de meme que
I'intelligence et la sensibility dont il est le signe ; mais pas
plus que I'individu, il ne changera de personnalit6, a
moins d'un cataclysme psychologique. Le r^me ali-
jnentaire, le s6jour a la campagne ou a Paris, les occupa-
tions sentimentales et leurs suites, les maladies ont bien
plus d'influence sur un style vrai que les mauvaises lec-
tures. Le style est un produit physiologique, et I'un des
plus constants; quoique dans la dependance des diverses
fonctions vitales.

• ■••••

"Les Etats-Unis tomberaient en langueur, sans les

REMY DE GOURMONT 189

voyages en Europe de leur aristocratie, sans la diversite
extreme des climats, des sols et par consequent des races
en evolution dans ce vaste empire. Les Changes entre
peuples sont aussi necessaires k la revigoration de chaque
peuple que le commerce social k I'exaltation de I'energie
individuelle. On n'a pas pris garde k cette necessite
quand on parle avec regret de Tinfluence des litteratures
etrangires sur notre litt^rature.

• •••••

"Aujourd'hui Tinfluence d'Euripide pourrait encore de-
terminer en un esprit original d'interessantes oeuvres;
rimitateur de Racine depasserait k peine le comique in-
volontaire. L'6tude de Racine ne deviendra profitable
que dans plusieurs siecles et seulement a condition que,
completement oublie, il semble enti^rement nouveau, en-
tierement etranger, tel que le sont devenus pour le public
d'aujourd'hui Adenes li Rois ou Jean de Meung. Euri-
pide etait nouveau au XVIIeme siecle. Th^ocrite T^tait
alors que Chenier le transposait. 'Quand je fais des
vers, insinuait Racine, je songe toujours k dire ce qui ne
s'est point encore dit dans notre langue.' Andre Chenier
a voulu exprimer celi aussi dans une phrase maladroite ;
et s'il ne Ta dit il Ta fait. Horace a bafou6 les serviles
imitateurs ; il n'imitait pas les Grecs, il les etudiait

« ('

Le style est Thomme meme' est un propos de natural-
iste, qui sait que le chant des oiseaux est d£termin6 par
la forme de leur bee, Tattache de leur langue, le diametre
de leur gorge, la capacity de leurs poumons.

"Le style, c'est de sentir, de voir, de penser, et rien plus.
• •••••

"Le style est une specialisation de la sensibilite.

I90 INSTIGATIONS

"Une idee n'est qu'une sensation def raichie, une image
effac6e.

"La vie est un depouillement. Le but de Tactivite
propre d'un homme est de nettoyer sa personnalit^, de la
laver de toutes les souillures qu'y d^posa T^ducation, de
la d^gager de toutes les empreintes qu'y laisserent nos
admirations adolescentes.

• •••••

"Depuis un siecle et demi, les connaissances scien-
tiiiques ont augment^ enormement ; I'esprit scientifique a
retrograde; il n'y a plus de contact immediat entre ceux
qui lisent et ceux qui creent la science, et (je cite pour
• la seconde fois la reflexion capitale de BufFon) : 'On
n'acquiert aucune connaissance transmissible qu'en
voyant par soi-meme' : Les ouvrages de seconde main
amusent Tintelligence et ne stimulent pas son activity.

• •••••

"Rien ne pousse a la concision comme Tabondance des
idees/' Le Problime du Style, 1902.

Christianity lends itself to fanaticism. Barbarian
ethics proceed by general taboos. The relation of two
individuals in relation is so complex that no third person
can pass judgment upon it. Civilization is individual.
The truth is the individual. The light of the Renais-
sance shines in Varchi when he declines to pass judgment
on Lorenzaccio.

One might make an index of, but one cannot write an
essay upon, the dozen volumes. of Gourmont's collected
discussions. There was weariness towards the end of
his life. It shows in even the leisurely charm of "Lettres
i TAmazone." There was a final flash in his drawing of
M. Croquant.

REMY DE GOURMONT 191

The list of his chief works published by the Mercure
de France, 26 Rue de Cond6, Paris, is as follows :
"Sixtine."

"U P^lerin du Silence."
"Les Chevaux de DiomMe.''
"D'un Pays Lointain."
"Le Songe d'une Femme."
"Lilith, suivi de Thfedat/'
"Une Nuit au Luxembourg."
"Un Coeur Virginal/'

'Couleurs, suivi de Choses Ancienncs."

'Histoires Magiques.'

'L<5ttres d'un Satyre."

"Le Chat de Mis^re.
"Simone."

Critique

"Le Latin Mystique."

"Le Livre des Masques" (ler, et Heme).

"La Culture des Idees."

"Le Chemin de Velours."

"Le Probleme du Style."

"Physique de TAmour."

"Epilogues."

"Esthetique de la Langue Frangaise."

"Promenades Litteraires."

"Promenades Philosophiques."

"Dialogue des Amateurs sur les Choses du Temps."

"Nouveaux Dialogues des Amateurs sur les Choses du

Temps."
"Dante, Beatrice et la Poisie Amoureuse."
"Pendant I'Orage.'

»»

192 INSTIGATIONS

De Gourmont's readiness to cooperate in my first plans
for establishing some sort of periodical to maintain com-
munications between New York, London and Paris, was
graciously shown in the following (post-mark June 13,

'15):

Difnanche,
Cher Monsieur:

J'ai lu avec plaisir votre longue lettre, qui m'expose si
clairement la necessite d'une revue unissant les efforts des
Americains, des Anglais, et des Fran^ais. Pour cela, je
vous servirai autant qu'il sera en mon pouvoir. Je ne
crois pas que je puisse beaucoup. J'ai une mauvaise
sante et je suis extremement fatigue ; je ne pourrai vous
donner que des choses tres courtes, des indications d'idees
plutot que des pages accomplies, mais je ferai de mon
mieux. J'espire que vous reussirez a mettre debout cette
petite affaire litt^raire et que vous trouverez parmi nous
des concours utiles. Evidemment si nous pourions amc-
ner les Americains a mieux sentir la vraie litterature f ran-
qaise et surtout k ne pas la confondre avec tant d'oeuvres
courantes si m^diocres, cela serait un r^sultat tr^s heu-
reux. Sont-ils capables d'assez de liberte d'esprit pour
lire, sans etre choques, mes livres par example, elle est
bien douteux et il faudrait pour cela un long travail de
preparation. Mais pourquoi ne pas I'entreprendre ? En
tous les pays, il y a un noyau de bons esprits, d'esprits
libres, il faut leur donner quelque chose qui les change
de la fadeur des magazines, quelque chose qui leur donne
confiance en eux-memes et leur soit un point d'appui.
Comme vous le dites, il faudra pour commencer les
amener k respecter Tindividualisme frangais, le sens de
la liberty que quelques uns d'entre nous possedent k un
si haut point. lis comprennent cela en thdologie. Pour-
quoi ne le comprendraient-ils pas en art, en po6sie, en

REMY DE GOURMONT 193

litt^rature, en philosophie. II faut leur faire voir — s'ib
ne le voient pas d^jiL— que rindividualisme fran^is peut,
quand il le faut/se plier aux plus dures disciplines.

G>nqu6rir TAmericain n'est pas sans doute votre seul
but. Le but du Mercure a 6t6 de pcrmettre k ceux qui
en valcnt la peine d'&rire franchement ce qu'il pense —
seul plaisir d'un ^rivain. Cela doit aussi etre le votre.

Votre bien dcvoue,

Remy de Gourmont.

"The aim of the Mercure has been to permit any man,
who is worth it, to write down his thought frankly —
this is a writer's sole pleasure. And this aim should be
yours."

"Are they capable of enough mental liberty to read my
books, for example, without being horrified? I think
this very doubtful, and it will need long preparation.
But why not try it ? There are in all countries knots of
intelligent people, open-minded ; one must give something
to relieve them from the staleness of magazines, some-
thing which will give them confidence in themselves and
serve as a rallying point. As you say, one must begin by
getting them to respect French individualism ; the sense
of liberty which some of us have in so great degree.
They understand this in theology, why should they not
understand it in art, poetry, literature ?*'

If only my great correspondent could have seen letters
I received about this time from English alleged intellec-
tuals 1 1 ! I ! I ! The incredible stupidity, the ingrained re-
fusal of thought III!! Of which more anon, if I can
bring myself to it. Or let it pass? Let us say simply
that De Gourmont's words form an interesting contrast
with the methods employed by the British literary epis-

194 INSTIGATIONS

copacy to keep one from writing what one thinks, or to
punish one (financially) for having done so.

Perhaps as a warning to young writers who can not
afford the loss, one would be justified in printing the
following:

Soa. Albermarle Street, London W,
22 October, '14.
Dear Mr. Pound:

Many thanks for your letter of the other day. I am
afraid I must say frankly that I do not think I can open
the columns of the Q. /?. — at any rate, at present — to any
one associated publicly with such a publication as Blast.
It stamps a man too disadvantageously.

Yours truly,

G. W. Prothero.
Of course, having accepted your paper on the Noh, I
could not refrain from publishing it. But other things
would be in a different category.

I need scarcely say that The Quarterly Review is one
of the most profitable periodicals in England, and one of
one's best "connections," or sources of income. It has,
of course, a tradition.

''It is not that Mr. Keats (if that be his real name, for
we almost doubt that any man in his senses would put
his real name to such a rhapsody)" —

write their GiflFord of Keats' "Endymion." My only com-
ment is that the Quarterly has done it again. Their Mr.
A. Waugh is a lineal descendant of Gifford, by way of
mentality. A century has not taught them manners. In
the eighteen forties they were still defending the review

REMY DE GOURMONT . 19S

of Keats. And more recently Waugh has lifted up his
senile slobber against Mr. Eliot It is indeed time that
the functions of both English and American literature
were taken over by younger and better men.

As for their laying the birch on my pocket. I compute
that my support of Lewis and Brzeska has cost me at the
lowest estimate about I20 per year, from one source
alone since that regrettable occurrence, since I dared to
discern a great sculptor and a great painter in the midst
of England's artistic desolation. ("European and Asiatic
papers please copy.")

Young men, desirous of finding before all things
smooth berths and elderly consolations, are cautioned to
behave more circumspectly.

The generation that preceded us does not care much
whether we understand French individualism, or the
difference between the good and bad in French literature.
Nor is it conceivable that any of them would write to a
foreigner: "indications of ideas, rather than work ac-
complished, but I will send you my best."

De Gourmont's next communication to me was an in-
quiry about Gaudier-Brzeska's sculpture.

IV
IN THE VORTEX

Eliot

Joyce

Lewis

An historical essayist

The new poetry

Breviora

T. S. ELIOT

// n'y a de livres que ceux oA un icrivain s^est raconti
lui-meme en racontant les moeurs de ses contemporains —
leurs rives, leurs vanith, leurs amours, et leurs folies. —
Rcmy de Gourmont.

De Gourmont uses this sentence in writing of the in-
contestable superiority of "Madame Bovary/' "L'fiduca-
tion Sentimentale*' and ''Bouvard et Pecuchet" to *'Sa-
lammbo** and "La Tentation de St. Antoine." A casual
thought convinces one that it is true for all prose. Is it
true also for poetry? One may give latitude to the in-
terpretation of reves; the gross public would have the
poet write little else, but De Gourmont keeps a propor-
tion. The vision should have its place in due setting if
we are to believe its reality.

*Prufrock and Other Observations, by T. S. Eliot. The
Egoist, London. Essay first published in Poetry, 191 7.

,96 ^ j/o^^^j.^'''^-^1^

IN THE VORTEX 197

The few poems which Mr. Eliot has given us maintain
this proportion, as they maintain other proportions of art.
After much contemporary work that is merely factitious,
much that is good in intention but impotently unfinished
and incomplete ; much whose flaws are due to sheer igno-
rance which a year's study or thought might have reme-
died, it is a comfort to come upon complete art, naive
despite its intellectual subtlety, lacking all pretense.

It is quite safe to compare Mr. Eliot's work with any-
thing written in French, English or American since the
death of Jules Laforgue. The reader will find nothing
better, and he will be extremely fortunate if he finds
much half as good.

The necessity, or at l^ast the advisability of comparing
English or American work with French work is not
readily granted by the usual English or American writer.
If you suggest it, the Englishman answers that he has
not thought about it — he does not see why he should
bother himself about what goes on south of the channel ;
the American replies by stating that you are "no longer
American." This is the bitterest jibe in his vocabulary.
The net result is that it is extremely diflicult to read one's
contemporaries. After a time one tires of "promise."

I should like the reader to note how complete is Mr.
Eliot's depiction of our contemporary condition. He has
not confined himself to genre nor to society portraiture.
His

lonely men in shirt-sleeves leaning out of windows
are as real as his ladies who

come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

His "one night cheap hotels" are as much "there" as are
his

-V

igS INSTIGATIONS

four wax candles in the darkened room,
Four rings of light upon the ceiling overhead,
An atmosphere of Juliet's tomb.

And, above all, there is no rhetoric, although there is
Elizabethan reading in the background. Were I a French
critic, skilled in their elaborate art of writing books about
books, I should probably go to some length discussing
Mr. Eliot's two sorts of metaphor: his wholly unrealiz-
able, always apt, half ironic suggestion, and his precise
realizable picture. It would be possible to point out his
method of conveying a whole situation and half a char-
acter by three words of a quoted phrase; his constant
aliveness, his mingling of very subtle observation with
the unexpectedness of a backhanded cliche. It is, how-
ever, extremely dangerous to point out such devices. The
method is Mr. Eliot's own, but as soon as one has re-
duced even a fragment of it to formula, some one else,
not Mr. Eliot, some one else wholly lacking in his apti-
tudes, will at once try to make poetry by mimicking his
external procedure. And this indefinite "some one" will,
needless to say, make a botch of it.

For what the statement is worth, Mr. Eliot's work in-
terests me more than that of any other poet now writing
in English.* The most interesting poems in Victorian
English are Browning's "Men and Women," or, if that
statement is too absolute, let me contend that the form
of these poems is the most vital form of that period of
English, and that the poems written in that form are the
least like each other in content. Antiquity gave us Ovid's
"Heroides" and Theocritus' woman using magic. The
form of Browning's "Men and Women" is more alive

♦A. D. 1917.

IN THE VORTEX 199

than the epistolary form of the "Hcroides." Browning
included a certain amount of ratiocination and of purely
intellectual comment, and in just that proportion he lost
intensity. Since Browning there have been very few good
poems of this sort. Mr. Eliot has made two notable ad-
ditions to the list. And he has placed his people in con-
temporary settings, which is much more difficult than to
render them with mediaeval romantic trappings. If it
is permitted to make comparison with a different art, let .
me say that he has used contemporary detail very much
as Velasquez used contemporary detail in "Las Meninas" ;
the cold gray-green tones of the Spanish painter have, it
seems to me, an emotional value not unlike the emotional
value of Mr. Eliot's rhythms, and of his vocabulary.

James Joyce has written the best novel of my decade,
and perhaps the best criticism of it has come from a Bel-
gian who said, "All this is as true of my cotmtry as of
Ireland." Eliot has a like ubiquity of application. Art
does not avoid universals, it strikes at them all the harder
in that it strikes through particulars. Eliot's work rests
apart from that of the many new writers who have used
the present freedoms to no advantage, who have gained
no new precisions of language, and no variety in their
cadence. His men in shirt-sleeves, and his society ladies,
are not a local manifestation; they ar6 the stuiF of our
modern world, and true of more countries than one. I
would praise the work for its fine tone, its humanity, and
its realism ; for all good art is realism of one sort or an-
other.

It is complained that Eliot is lacking in emotion. "La
Figlia che Piange" is an adequate confutation.

If the reader wishes mastery of "regular form," the
"Conversation Galante" is sufficient to show that symmet-
rical form is within Mr. Eliot's grasp. You will hardly

200 INSTIGATIONS

find such neatness save in F;-ance ; such modern neatness,
save in Laforgue.

De Gourmont's phrase to the contrary notwithstanding,
the supreme test of a book is that we should feel some
unusual intelligence working behind the words. By this
test various other new bobks, that I have, or might have,
beside me, go to pieces. The barrels of sham poetry that
every decade and school and fashion produce, go to
pieces. It is sometimes extremely difficult to find any
other particular reason for their being so unsatisfactory.
I have expressly written here not "intellect" but "intelli-
gence." There is no intelligence without emotion. The
emotion may be anterior or concurrent. There may be
emotion without much intelligence, but that does not con-
cern us.

Versification:

A conviction as to the rightness or wrongness of vers
libre is no guarantee of a poet. I doubt if there is much
use trying to classify the various kinds of vers libre, but
there is an anarchy which may be vastly overdone; and
there is a monotony of bad usage as tiresome as any
typical eighteenth or nineteenth century flatness.

In a recent article Mr. Eliot contended, or seemed to
contend, that good vers libre was little more than a skilful
evasion of the better known English metres. His article
was defective in that he omitted all consideration of
metres depending on quantity, alliteration, etc.; in fact,
he wrote as if metres were measured by accent. This
may have been tactful on his part, it may have brought
his article nearer to the comprehension of his readers
(that is, those of the "New Statesman," people chiefly
concerned with sociology of the "button" and "unit" vari-
ety). But he came nearer the fact when he wrote else-

IN THE VORTEX 201

where : "No vers is libre for the man who wants to do a
good job." ^^

Alexandrine and other grammarians have made cubby-
holes for various groupings of syllables; they have put
names upon them, and have given various labels to
"metres" consisting of combinations of these different
groups. Thus it would be hard to escape contact with
some group or other ; only an encyclopedist could ever be
half sure he had done so. The known categories would
allow a fair liberty to the most conscientious traditional-
ist. The most fanatical vers-librist will escape them
with difficulty. However, I do not think there is any cry-
ing need for verse with absolutely no rhythmical basis.

On the other hand, I do not believe that Chopin wrote
to a metronome. There is undoubtedly a sense of music
that takes count of the "shape" of the rhythm in a mel-
ody rather than of bar divisions, which came rather late
in the history of written music and were certainly not
the first or most important thing that musicians attempted
to record. The creation of such shapes is part of the-
matic invention. Some musicians have the faculty of in-
vention, rhythmic, melodic. Likewise some poets.

Treatises full of musical notes and of long and short
marks have never been convincingly useful. Find a
man with thematic invention and all he can say is that
he gets what the Celts call a "chune" in his head, and that
the words "go into it," or when they don't "go into it"
they "stick out and worry him."

You can not force a person to play a musical master-
piece correctly, even by having the notes "correctly"
printed on the paper before him; neither can you force
a person to feel the movement of poetry, be the metre
"regular" or "irregular." I have heard Mr. Yeats try-
ing to read Burns, struggling in vain to fit the "Birks o'

>«..

202 INSTIGATIONS

Aberfeldy" and "Bonnie Alexander" into the mournful
keen of the **Wind among the Reeds.*' Even in regular
metres there are incompatible systems of music.

I have heard the best orchestral conductor in England
read poems in free verse, poems in which the rhythm was
so faint as to be almost imperceptible. He read them
with the author's cadence, with flawless correctness. A
distinguished statesman read from the same book, with
the intonations of a legal document, paying no attention to
the movement inherent in the words before him. Ihave
heard a celebrated Dante scholar and mediaeval enthusi-
ast read the sonnets of the "Vita Nuova" as if they were
not only prose, but the ignominious prose of a man de-
void of emotions : an utter castration.

The leader of orchestra said to me, "There is more for
a musician in a few lines with something rough or un-
even, such as Byron's

There be none of Beauty's daughters
With a magic like thee;
than in whole pages of regular poetry."

Unless a man can put some thematic invention into
vers litre, he would perhaps do well to stick to "regular"
metres, which have certain chances of being musical from
their form, and certain other chances of being musical
through his failure in fitting the form. In vers libre his
musical chances are but in sensitivity and invention.

Mr. Eliot is one of the very few who have given a
personal rhythm, an identifiable quality of sound as well
as of style. And at any rate, his book is the best thing
in poetry since . . . (for the sake of peace I will leave
that date to the imagination). I have read most of the
poems many times ; I last read the whole book at break-
fast time and from flimsy proof-sheets: I believe these
are "test conditions." And, "confound it, the fellow can
write."

IN THE VORTEX 203

JOYCE ♦

Despite the War, despite the paper shortage, and de-
spite those old-established publishers whose god is their
belly and whose god- father was the late F. T. Palgravc,
there is a new edition of James Joyce's "A Portrait of
the Artist as a Young Man." t It is extremely gratifying
that this book should have "reached its fourth thousand,"
and the fact is significant in just so far as it marks the
beginning of a new phase of English publishing, a phase
comparable to that started in France some years ago by
the Mercure.

The old houses, even those, or even more those, which
once had a literary tradition, or at least literary preten-
sions, having ceased to care a damn about literature, the
lovers of good writing have "struck"; have sufficiently
banded themselves together to get a few good books into
print, and even into circulation. The actual output is
small in bulk, a few brochures of translations, Eliot's
"Prufrock," Joyce's "A Portrait," and Wyndham Lewis'
"Tarr," but I have it on good authority that at least one
other periodical will start publishing its authors after the
War, so there are new rods in pickle for the old fat-stom-
ached contingent and for the cardboard generation.

Joyce's "A Portrait" is literature ; it has become almost
the prose bible of a few people, and I think I have en-
countered at least three hundred admirers of the book,
certainly that number of people who, whether they "like"
it or not, are wholly convinced of its merits.

Mr. Wells I have encountered in print, where he says
that Joyce has a cloacal obsession, but he also says- that
Mr. Joyce writes literature and that his book is to be
ranked with the works of Sterne and of Swift.

* The Future, May, 1918.

t "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.'* Egoist, Ltd.
London. Huebsch, New York.

204 INSTIGATIONS

Weils is no man to babble of obsessions, but let it
stand to his honor that he came out with a fine burst of
admiration for a younger and half -known writer.

From England and America there has come a finer
volume of praise for this novel than for any that I can
remember. There has also come impotent spitting and
objurgation from the back-woods and from Mr. Dent's
office boy, and, as offset, interesting comment in modem
(ireek, French and Italian.

Joyce's poems have been reprinted by Elkin Mathews,
his short stories re-issued, and a second novel started in
"The Little Review."

For all the book's being so familiar, it is pleasant to
take up "A Portrait" in its new exiguous form, and one
enters many speculations, perhaps more than when one
read it initially. It is not that one can open to a forgot-
ten page so much as that wherever one opens there is
always a place to start; some sentence like —

"Stephen looked down coldly on the oblong skull be-
neath him overgrown with tangled twine-colored hair";
or

"Frowsy girls sat along the curbstones before their
baskets"; or

"He drained his third cup of watery tea to the dregs
and set to chewing the crusts of fried bread that were
scattered near him, staring into the dark pool of the jar.
The yellow dripping had been scooped out like a boghole,
and the pool under it brought back to his memory the
dark turf -colored water of the bath in Clongowes. The
box of pawntickets at his elbow had just been rifled, and
he took up idly one after another in his greasy fingers the
blue and white dockets, scrawled and sanded and creased
and bearing the name of the pledger as Daly or MacEvoy.

"I Pair Buskins, &c."

IN THE VORTEX 205

I do not mean to imply that a novel is necessarily a
bad novel because one can pick it up without being in
this manner caup^ht and dragged into reading; but I do
indicate the curiously seductive interest of the clear-cut
and definite sentences.

Neither, emphatically, is it to be supposed that Joyce's
writing is merely a depiction of the sordid. The sordid
is there in all conscience as you would find it in De Gon-
court, but Joyce's power is in his scope. The reach of
his writing is from the fried breadcrusts and from the
fig-seeds in Cranley's teeth to the casual discussion of
Aquinas :

"He wrote a hymn for Maundy Thursday. It begins
with the words Pange lingua gloriosi. They say it is the
highest glory of the hymnal. It is an intricate and sooth-
ing hymn. I like it ; but there is no hymn that can be put
beside that mournful and majestic processional song, the
Vexilla Regis of Venantius Fortunatus.

"Lynch began to sing softly and solemnly in a deep
bass voice :

'Impleta sunt quae concinit
David fideli carmine . . . .'

"They turned into Lower Mount Street. A few steps
from the corner a fat young man, wearing a silk neck-
cloth, &c."

On almost every page of Joyce you will find just such
swift alternation of subjective beauty and external shab-
biness, squalor, and sordidness. It is the bass and treble
of his method. And he has his scope beyond that of the
novelists his contemporaries, in just so far as whole
stretches of his keyboard are utterly out of their com-
pass.

The conclusion or moral termination from all of which
is that the great writers of any period must be the re-

2o6 INSTIGATIONS

markable minds of that period ; they must know the ex-
tremes of their time; they must not represent a social
status; they cannot be the "Grocer" or the "Dilettante"
with the egregious and capital letter, nor yet the profes-
sor or the professing wearer of Jaeger or professional
eater of herbs.

In the three hundred pages of "A Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man" there is no omission; there is
nothing in life so beautiful that Joyce cannot touch it
without profanation — without, above all, the profana-
tions of sentiment and sentimentality — and there is
nothing so sordid that he cannot treat it with his metal-
lic exactitude.

I think there are few people who can read Shaw, Wells,
Bennett, or even Conrad (who is in a category apart)
without feeling that there are values and tonalities to
which these authors are wholly insensitive. I do not
imply that there cannot be excellent art within quite dis-
tinct limitations, but the artist cannot afford to be or to
appear ignorant of such limitations; he cannot afford a
pretense of such ignorance. He must almost choose his
lifnitations. If he paints a snuff-box or a stage scene he
mVist not be ignorant of the fact, he must not think he is
painting a lapdscape, three feet by two feet, in oils.

I think that what tires me more than anything else in
the writers now past middle age is that they always seem
to imply that they are giving us all modern life, the whole
social panorama, all the instruments of the orchestra.
Joyce is of another donation.

His earlier book, "Dubliners," contained several well-
constructed stories, several sketches rather tacking in
form. It was a definite promise of what was to come.
There is very little to be said in praise of it which would
not apply with greater force to "A Portrait." I find that

IN THE VORTEX 207

whoever reads one book inevitably sets out in search of
the other.

The quality and distinction of the poems in the first
half of Mr. Joyce's "Chamber Music" (new edition, pub-
lished by Elkin Mathews, 4A, Cork Street, W.i, at is,
3d.) is due in part to their author's strict musical train-
ing. We have here the lyric in some of its best tradi-
tions, and one pardons certain trifling inversions, much
against the taste of the moment, for the sake of the clean-
cut ivory finish, and for the interest of the rhythms, the
cross run of the beat and the word, as of a stiff wind
cutting the ripple-tops of bright water.

The wording is Elizabethan, the metres at times sug-
gesting Herrick, but in no case have I been able to
find a poem which is not in some way Joyce's own, even
though he would seem, and that most markedly, to shun
apparent originality, as in:

Who goes amid the green wood

With springtide all adorning her? • •-

Who goes amid the merry green woqd
To make it merrier? ^

Who passes in the sunlight

By ways that know the light footfall ?

Who passes in the sweet sunlight
With mien so virginal ?

The ways of all the woodland

Gleam with a soft and golden fire —

For whom does all the sunny woodland
Carry so brave attire ?

2o8 INSTIGATIONS

O, it is for my true love

The woods their rich apparel wear —
O, it is for my true love,

That is so young and fair.

Here, as in nearly every poem, the motif is so slight
that the poem scarcely exists until one thinks of it as set
to music ; and the workmanship is so delicate that out of
twenty readers scarce one will notice its fineness. If
Henry Lawes were alive again he might make the suit-
able music, for the cadence is here worthy of his cun-
ning:

O, it is for my true love.
That is so young and fair.

The musician's work is very nearly done for him, and
yet how few song-setters could be trusted to finish it and
to fill in an accompaniment.

The tone of the book deepens with the poem begin-
ning:

O sweetheart, hear you

Your lover's tale;
A man shall have sorrow

When friends him fail.

For he shall know then

Friends be untrue;
And a little ashes

Their words come to.

The collection comes to its end and climax in two pro-
foundly emotional poems; quite different in tonality and

IN THE VORTEX 209

in rhythm-quality from the lyrics in the first part of the
book : —

All day I hear the noise of waters

Making moan,
Sad as the sea-bird is, when going

Forth alone,
He hears the wind cry to the waters'

Monotone.

The gray winds, the cold winds are blowing

Where I go.
I hear the noise of many waters

Far below.
All day, all night, I hear them flowing

To and fro.

The third and fifth lines should not be read with an
end stop. I think the rush of the words will escape the
notice of scarcely any one. The phantom hearing in this
poem is coupled, in the next poem, to phantom vision,
and to a robustezza of expression :

I hear an army charging upon the land,
And the thunder of horses plunging, foam about their
knees ;
Arrogant, in black armour, behind them stand.

Disdaining the reins, with fluttering whips, the chari-
oteers.

They cry unto the night their battle-name ;

I moan in sleep when I hear afar their whirling laugh-
ter;
They cleave the gloom of dreams, a blinding flame.

Clanging, clanging upon the heart as upon an anvil.

2IO INSTIGATIONS

They come shaking in triumph their long green hair ;
They come out of the sea and run shouting by the
shore :
My heart, have you no wisdom thus to despair ?

My love, my love, my love, why have you left me
alone ?

In both these poems we have a strength and a fibrous-
ness of sound which almost prohibits the thought of their
being "set to music," or to any music but that which is in
them when spoken; but we notice a similarity of the
technique to that of the earlier poems, in so far as the
beauty of movement is produced by a very skilful, or per-
haps we should say a deeply intuitive, interruption of
metric mechanical regularity. It is the irregularity which
has shown always in the best periods.

The book is an excellent antidote for those who find
Mr. Joyce's prose "disagreeable" and who at once fly to
conclusions about Mr. Joyce's "cloacal obsessions." I
have yet to find in Joyce's published works a violent or
malodorous phrase which does not justify itself not only
by its verity, but by its heightening of some opposite ef-
fect, by the poignancy which it imparts to some emotion
or to some thwarted desire for beauty. Disgust with the
sordid is but another expression of a sensitiveness to the
finer thing. There is no perception of beauty without a
corresponding disgust. If the price for such artists as
James Joyce is exceeding heavy, it is the artist himself
who pays, and if Armageddon has taught us anything it
should have taught us to abominate the half-truth, and
the tellers of the half-truth in literature.

ULYSSES

Incomplete as I write this. His profoundest work,

IN THE VORTEX 211

most significant — "Exiles" was a side-step, necessary ka-
tharsis, clearance of mind from continental contempo-
rary thought — "Ulysses," obscure, even obscene, as life
itself is obscene in places, but an impassioned meditation
on life.

He has done what Flaubert set out to do in "Bouvard
and Pecuchet/* done it better, more succinct. An epitome.

"Bloom" answers the query that people made after
"The Portrait.*' Joyce has created his second charac-
ter; he has moved from autobiography to the creation
of the complimentary figure. Bloom on life, death, res-
urrection, immortality. Bloom and the Venus de Milo.

Bloom brings life into the book. All Bloom is vital.
Talk of the other characters, cryptic, perhaps too partic-
ular, incomprehensible save to people who know Dublin,
at least by hearsay, and who have university education
plus medisevalism. But unavoidable or almost unavoid-
able, given the subject and the place of the subject.

Note: 1 am tired of rewriting the arguments for the reatist
novel ; besides there is nothing to add. The Brothers de Goncourt
said the thing once and for all, but despite the lapse of time
their work is still insufficiently known to the American reader.
The program in the preface to "Germinie Lacerteux" states the
case and the whole case for realism; one can not improve the
statement. 1 therefore give it entire, ad majoram Dei gloriam.

"PREFACE
De la premiere idition

II nous faut demander pardon au public de lui donner
ce livre, et Tavertir de ce qu'il y trouvera.

Le public aime les romans faux: ce roman est un ro-
man vrai.

II aime les livres qui font semblant d'aller dans le
monde ; ce livre vient de la me.

212 INSTIGATIONS

II aime les petites oeuvres polissonnes, les m^moires
de filles, les confessions d'alcoves, les saletes Pratiques,
le scandale qui se retrousse dans une image aux devan-
tures des libraires, ce qu'il va lire est severe et pur.
Qu'il ne s'attende point i la photographie decolletee du
plaisir : I'etude qui suit est la clinique de I'Amour.

Le public aime encore les lectures anodines et conso-
lantes, les aventures qui finissent bien, les imaginations
qui ne derangent ni sa digestion ni sa serenite: ce livre,
avec sa triste et violente distraction, est fait pour con-
trarier ses habitudes et nuire a son hygiene.

Pourquoi done Tavons-nous 6crit? Est-ce simple-
ment pour choquer le public et scandaliser ses gouts?

Non.

Vivant au dix-neuvieme siecle, dans un temps de suf-
frage universel, de democratie, de liberalisme, nous nous
sommes demande si ce qu'on appelle "les basses classes"
n'avait pas droit au roman ; si ce monde sous un monde,
le peuple, devait rester sous le coup de I'interdit litter-
aire et des dedains d'auteurs qui ont fait jusqu'ici le
silence sur Tame et le coeur qu'il pent avoir. Nous
nous sommes demande s'il y avait encore, pour I'^crivain
et pour le lecteur, en ces annees d'egalite ou nous sonunes,
des classes indignes, des malheurs trop bas, des drames
trop mal embouches, des catastrophes d'une terreur trop
peu noble. II nous est venu la curiosite de savoir si
cette forme conventionnelle d'une litterature oubli^e et
d'une societe disparue, la Tragedie, etait definitivement
morte; si, dans un pas sans caste et sans aristocratie
legale, les miseres des petits et des pauvres parleraient
a I'interet, a I'emotion, a la piti6 aussi haut que les
miseres des grands et des riches; si, en un mot, les
larmes qu'on pleure en bas pourraient faire pleurer
comme celles qu'on pleure en haut.

IN THE VORTEX 213

Ces pensees nous avaient fait oser Thumble rotnan de
*Soeur Philomene/ en 1861 ; elles nous font publier
aujourd'hui 'Gemiinie Lacerteux/

Maintenant, que ce livre soit calomni^ : peu lui importe.
Aujourd'hui que le Roman s'elargit et grandit, qu'il
commence a etre la grande forme serieuse, passionnee,
vivante, de I'etude litteraire et de I'enquete sociale, qu'il
devient, par I'analyse et par la recherche psychologique,
THistoire morale contemporaine, aujourd'hui que le
Roman s'est impose les etudes et les devoirs de la science,
il pent en revendiquer les libertes et les franchises. Et
qu'il cherche I'Art et la Verite; qu'il montre des misires
bonnes i ne pas laisser oublier aux heureux de Paris ; qu'il
fasse voir aux gens du monde ce que les dames de
charite ont le courage de voir, ce que les reines d'autre-
fois faisaient toucher de Toeil a leurs enfants dans les
hospices: la souff ranee humaine, presentc et toute vive,
qui apprend la charite; que le Roman ait cette religion
que le siecle passe appelait de ce large et vaste nom:
Humaniii; il lui suffit de cette conscience: son droit
est 14.

/?. et /. de G."

WYNDHAM LEWIS

The signal omission from my critical papers is an
adequate book on Wyndham Lewis; my excuses, apart
from the limitations of time, must be that Mr. Lewis is
alive and quite able to speak for himself, secondly, that
one may print half-tone reproductions of sculpture, for
however unsatisfactory they be, they pretend to be only
half-tones, and could not show more than they do; but
the reproduction of drawings and painting invites all
sorts of expensive process impracticable during the

214 INSTIGATIONS

years of war. When the public or the "publishers" arc
ready for a volume of Lewis, suitably illustrated, I am
ready to write in the letterpress, though Mr. Lewis
would do it better than. I could.

He will rank among the great instigators and great
inventors of design; there is mastery in his use of vari-
ous media (my own interest in his work centres largely
in the "drawing" completed with inks, water-color,
chalk, etc.). His name is constantly bracketed with
that of Gaudier, Piccasso, Joyce, but these are fortuitous
couplings. Lewis' painting is further from the public
than were the carving^ of Gaudier ; Lewis is an older
artist, maturer, fuller of greater variety and invention.
His work is almost unknown to the public. His name
is wholly familiar, BLAST is familiar, the "Timon"
portfolio has been seen.

I had known him for seven years, known him as an
artist, but I had no idea of his scope until he began mak-
ing his preparations to go into the army ; so careless had
he been of any public or private approval. The "work"
lay in piles on the floor of an attic; and from it we
gathered most of the hundred or hundred and twenty
drawings which now form the bases of the Quinn col-
lection and of the Baker collection, (now in the South
Kensington museum).

As very few people have seen all of these pictures very
few people are in any position to contradict me. There
are three of his works in this room and I can attest
their wearing capacity; as I can attest the duration of
my regret for the Red drawing now in the Quinn col-
lection which hung here for some months waiting ship-
ment; as I can attest the energy and vitality that filled
this place while forty drawings of the Quinn assortment
stood here waiting also; a demonstration of the differ-

IN THE VORTEX 215

ence between "cubism," nature-morte-istn and the vortex
of Lewis: sun, energy, sombre emotion, clean-drawing,
disgust, penetrating analysis from the qualities finding
literary expression in *Tarr" to the stasis of the Red
Duet, from the metallic gleam of the "Timon" portfolio
to the velvet-suavity of the later "Timon" of the Baker
collection.

The animality and the animal satire, the dynamic and
metallic properties, the social satire, on the one hand,
the sunlight, the utter cleanness of the Red Duet, are
all points in an astounding circumference; which will,
until the work is adequately reproduced, have more or
less to be taken on trust by the "wider" public.

The novel "Tarr" is in print and no one need bother
to read my critiques of it. It contains much that Joyce's
work does not contain, but differentiations between the
two authors are to the detriment of neither, one tries
solely to discriminate qualities : hardness, fullness, abun-
dance, weight, finish, all terms used sometimes with
derogatory and sometimes with laudative intonation, or
at any rate valued by one auditor and depreciated by
another. The English prose fiction of my decade is the
work of this pair of authors.

"TARR," BY WYNDHAM LEWIS*

"Tarr" is the most vigorous and volcanic English novel
of our time. Lewis is the rarest of phenomena, an Eng-
lishman who has achieved the triumph of being also a
European. He is the only English writer who can be
compared with Dostoievsky, and he is more rapid than
Dostoievsky, his mind travels with greater celerity, with
more unexpectedness, but he loses none of Dostoievsky's
effect of mass and of weight.

* Little Review,

2i6 INSTIGATIONS

Tarr is a man of genius surrounded by the heavy stu-
pidities of the half -cultured latin quarter; the book de-
lineates his explosions in this oleaginous milieu; as well
as the debacle of the unintelligent emotion-dominated
Kreisler. They are the two titanic characters in con-
temporary Elnglish fiction. Wells's clerks, Bennett's
"cards" and even Conrad's Russian villains do not "bulk
up" against them.

Only in James Joyce's "Stephen Dedalus" does one find
an equal intensity, and Joyce is, by comparison, cold and
meticulous, where Lewis is, if uncouth, at any rate brim-
ming with energy, the man with a leaping mind.

Despite its demonstrable faults I do not propose to
attack this novel.'*' It is a serious work, it is definitely
an attempt to express, and very largely a success in ex-
pressing, something. The "average novel," the average
successful commercial proposition at 6^. per 300 to 600
pages is nothing of the sort; it is merely a third-rate
mind's imitation of a perfectly well-known type-novel;
of let us say Dickens, or Balzac, or Sir A. Conan-Doyle,
or Hardy, or Mr. Wells, or Mrs. Ward, or some other
and less laudable proto- or necro-type.

• A certain commercial interest attaches to the sale of
these mimicries and a certain purely technical or trade
or clique interest may attach to the closeness or "skill"
of the aping, or to the "application" of a formula. The
"work," the opus, has a purely narcotic value, it serves
to soothe the tired mind of the reader, to take said
"mind" off its "business" (whether that business be lofty,
"intellectual," humanitarian, sordid, acquisitive, or
other). There is only one contemporary English work

* Egoist, Ltd., 23, Adelphi Terrace House, Robert Street,
W. C 2. 6s. net. Knopf, New York, $1.50. Reviewed in
The Future,

IN THE VORTEX 217

with which "Tarr" can be compared, namely James
Joyce's utterly different "Portrait of the Artist" The
appearance of either of these novels would be a recog-
nized literary event had it occurred in any other country
in Europe.

Joyce's novel is a triumph of actual writing. The
actual arrangement of the words is worth any author's
study., Lewis on the contrary, is, in the actual writing,
faulty. His expression is as bad as that of Meredith's
floppy sickliness. In place of Meredith's mincing we
have something active and "disagreeable." But we have
at any rate the percussions of a highly energized mind.

In both Joyce and Lewis we have the insistent utter-
ance of men who are once for all through with the par-
ticular inanities of Shavian-Bennett, and with the par-
ticular oleosities of the Wellsian genre.

The faults of Mr. Lewis' writing can be examined in
the first twenty-five pages. Kreisler is the creation of

the book He is roundly and objectively set before us.

Tarr is less clekriy detached from his creator. The au-
thor has evident^ suspected this, for he has felt the
need of disclaiming Tarr in a preface.

Tarr, like his /author, is a man with an energized
mind. Wlien Tarr talks at length; when Tarr gets
things off his chest, we suspect that the author also is
getting them oft his own chest. Herein the technique is
defective. It is also defective in that it proceeds by
general descriptive statements in many cases where the
objective presentment of single and definite acts would
be more effective, more convincing.

It differs from the general descriptiveness of cheap
fiction in that these general statements are often a very
profound reach for the expression of verity. In brief,
the author is trying to get the truth and not merely play-

2i8 * INSTIGATIONS

ing baby-battledore among phrases. When Tarr talks
little essays and makes aphorisms they are often of in-
trinsic interest, are even unforgettable. Likewise, when
the author conmients upon Tarr, he has the gift of
phrase, vivid, biting, pregnant, full of suggestion.

The engaging if unpleasant character, Tarr, is placed
in an unpleasant milieu, a milieu very vividly ''done."
The reader retains no doubts concerning the verity and
existence of this milieu (Paris or London is no matter,
though the scene is, nominally, in Paris). It is the
existence where:

"Art' is the smell of oil paint, Henri Murger's Vie de
Boheme, corduroy trousers, the operatic Italian model
. . . quarter given up to Art. — Letters and other things
are round the corner.

"... permanent tableaux of the place, disheartening
as a Tussaud's of The Flood."

Tarr's first impact is with "Hobson," whose "dastardly
face attempted to portray delicacies of common sense,
and gossamer-like back-slidings into the Inane, that
would have puzzled a bile-specialist. He would occa-
sionally exploit his blackguardly appearance and black-
smith's muscles for a short time ... his strong pierc-
ing laugh threw A.B.C waitresses into confusion."

This person wonders if Tarr is a "sound bird." Tarr
is not a sound bird. His conversational attack on Hob-
son proceeds by a brandishing of false dilemma, but
neither Hobson nor his clan, nor indeed any of the critics
of the novel (to date) have observed that this is Tarr's
faulty weapon. Tarr's contempt for Hobson is as ade-
quate as it is justifiable.

"Hobson, he considered, was "a crowd. — You could
not say he was an individual. — He was a set. He sat
there a cultivated audience. — He had the aplomb and

IN THE VORTEX laip

absence of self-consciousness of numbers, of the herd —
of those who know they are not alone. ...

"For distinguishing feature Hobson possessed a dis-
tinguished absence of personality. . . . Hobson was an
humble investor."

.Tarr addresses him with some frankness on the sub-
ject :

"As an off-set for your prying, scurvy way of peeping
into my affairs you must offer your own guts, such as
they are. . . .

"You have joined yourself to those who hush their
voices to hear what other people are saying. . . .

"Your plumes are not meant to fly with, but merely to
slouch and skip along the surface of the earth. — ^You
wear the livery of a ridiculous set, you are a cunning
and sleek domestic. No thought can come out of your
head before it has slipped on its uniform. All your
instincts are drugged with a malicious languor, an arm,
a respectability, invented by a set of old women and
mean, cadaverous little boys."

Hobson opened his mouth, had a movement of the
body to speak. But he relapsed.

"Yoii reply, 'What is all this fuss about? I have done
the best for myself.' — I am not suited for any heroic
station, like yours. I live sensibly, cultivating my vege-
table ideas, and also my roses and Victorian lilies. — I
do no harm to anybody."

"That is not quite the case. That is a little inexact.
Your proceedings possess a herdesque astuteness ; in the
scale against the individual weighing less than the Yellow
Press, yet being a closer and meaner attack. Also you
are essentially spies, in a scurvy, safe and well-paid
service, as I told you before. You are disguised to look
like the thing it is your function to betray — What is your

220 INSTIGATIONS

position? — You have bought for eight hundred pounds
at an aristocratic educational establishment a complete
mental outfit, a program of manners. For four years
you trained with other riecruits. You are now a per-
fectly disciplined social unit, with a profound esprit de
corps. The Cambridge set that you represent is an
average specimen, a cross between a Quaker, a Pederast,
and a Chelsea artist. — Your Oxford brothers, dating
from the Wilde decade, are a stronger body. The Chel-
sea artists are much less flimsy. The Quakers are
powerful rascals. You represent, my Hobson, the dregs
of Anglo-Saxon civilization! There is nothing softer
on earth. — ^Your flabby potion is a mixture of the lees of
Liberalism, the poor froth blown off the decadent nine-
ties, the wardrobe-leavings of a vulgar Bohemianism
with its headquarters in Chelsea!

"You are concentrated, systematic slop. — There is
nothing in the universe to be said for you. . . .

"A breed of mild pervasive cabbages, has set up a
wide and creeping rot in the West of Europe. — ^They
make it indirectly a peril and a tribulation for live things
to remain in the neighborhood. You are a systematiz-
ing and vulgarizing of the individual. — You are not an
individual. . . ."

and later:

"You are libeling the Artist, by your idleness." Also,
"Your pseudo-neediness is a sentimental indulgence."

All this swish and clatter of insult reminds one a little
of Papa Karamazoff. Its outrageousness is more Rus-
sian than Anglo- Victorian, but Lewis is not a mere echo
of Dostoievsky. He hustles his reader, jolts him, snarls
at him, in contra-distinction to Dostoievsky, who merely

IN THE VORTEX 221

surrounds him with an enveloping dreariness, and im-
parts his characters by long-drawn osmosis.

Hobson is a minor character in the book, he and
Lowndes are little more than a prologue, a dusty avenue
of approach to the real business of the book: Bertha,
"high standard Aryan female, in good condition, superbly
made; of the succulent, obedient, clear peasant
type. . . ."

Kreisler, the main character in the book, a "powerful"
study in sheer obsessed emotionality, the chief foil to
Tarr who has, over and above his sombre emotional
spawn-bed, a smouldering sort of intelligence, combusti-
ble into brilliant talk, and brilliant invective.

Anastasya, a sort of super-Bertha, designated by the
author as "swagger sex."

These four figures move, lit by the flare of restau-
rants and cafes, against the frowsy background of
"Bourgeois Bohemia," more or less Bloomsbury. There
are probably such Bloomsburys in Paris and in every
large city.

This sort of catalogue is not well designed to interest
the general reader. What matters is the handling, the
vigor, even the violence, of the handling.

The book's interest is not due to the "style" in so
far as "style" is generally taken to mean "smoothness
of finish," orderly arrangement of sentences, coherence
to the Flaubertian method.

It is due to the fact that we have here a highly-ener-
gized mind performing a huge act of scavenging; clean-
ing up a great lot of rubbish, cultural, Bohemian,
romantico-Tennysonish, arty, societish, gutterish.

It is not an attack on the Spicier. It is an attack on
a sort of super-Spicier desiccation. It is by no means a
tract. If Hobson is so drawn as to disgust one with the

• -

222 INSTIGATIONS

"stuffed-shirt/' Kreisler is equally a sign-post pointing
to the advisability of some sort of intellectual or at least
conunonsense management of the emotions.

Tarr, and even Kreisler, is very nearly justified by the
depiction of the Bourgeois Bohemian fustiness: Frau-
lein Lippmann, Fraulein Fogs, etc.

What we are blessedly free from is the red-plush
Wellsian illusionism, and the click of Mr. Bennett's cash-
register finish. The book does not skim over the sur-
face. If it does not satisfy the mannequin demand for
"beauty" it at least refuses to accept margarine substi-
tutes. It will not be praised by Katherine Tynan, nor
by Mr. Chesterton, and Mrs. Meynell. It will not receive
the sanction of Dr. Sir Robertson Nicoll, nor of his
despicable paper "The Bookman."

(There will be perhaps some hope for the British
reading public, when said paper is no longer to be found
in the Public Libraries of the Island, and when Clement
Shorter shall cease from animadverting.) "Tarr" does
not appeal to these people nor to the audience which
they have swaddled. Neither, of course, did Samuel
Butler to their equivalents in past decades.

"Bertha and Tarr took a flat in the Boulevard Port
Royal, not far from the Jardin des Plantes. They gave
a party to which Fraulein Lippmann and a good many
other people came. He maintained the rule of four to
seven, roughly, for Bertha, with the uttermost punctili-
ousness. Anastasya and Bertha did not meet.

"Bertha's child came, and absorbed her energies for
upwards of a year. It bore some resemblance to Tarr.
Tarr's afternoon visits became less frequent. He lived
now publicly with his illicit and splendid bride.

"Two years after the birth of the child. Bertha
divorced Tarr. She then married an eye-doctor, and

IN THE VORTEX 22^

lived with a brooding severity in his company, and that
of her only child.

"Tarr and Anastasya did not marry. They had no
children. Tarr, however, had three children by a Lady
of the name of Rose Fav.cett, who consoled him even-
tually for the splendors of his 'perfect woman.' But yet
beyond the dim though sordid figure of Rose Fawcett,
another rises. This one represents the swing-back of
the pendulum once more to the swagger side. The
cheerless and stodgy absurdity of Rose Fawcett re-
quired the painted, fine and inquiring face of Prism
Dirkes."

Neither this well-writen conclusion, nor the opening
tirade I have quoted, give the full impression of the
book's vital quality, but they may perhaps draw the
explorative reader.

"Tarr" finds sex a monstrosity, he finds it "a German
study": "Sex, Hobson, is a German study. A German
study."

At that we may leave it. "Tarr" "had no social ma-
chinery, but the cumbrous one of the intellect. . . .
When he tried to be amiable he usually only succeeded
in being ominous."

"Tarr" really gets at something in his last long dis-
cussion with Anastasya, when he says that art "has no
inside." This is a condition of art, "to have no inside,
nothing you cannot see. It is not something impelled
like a machine by a little egoistic inside."

"Deadness, in the limited sense in which we use that
word, is the first condition of art. The second is absence
of soul, in the sentimental human sense. The lines and
masses of a statue are its souL"

Joyce says something of the sort very differently, he
is full of technical scholastic terms : "stasis, kinesis," etc.

224 INSTIGATIONS

Any careful statement of this sort is bound to be baffoui,
and fumbled over, but this ability to come to a hard
definition of anything is one of Lewis' qualities lying at
the base of his ability to irritate the mediocre intelli-
gence. The book was written before 1914, but the de-
piction of the German was not a piece of war propa-
ganda.

AN HISTORICAL ESSAYIST

LYTTON STRACHEY ON LEFT-OVER

CELEBRITY

Mr. Strachey, acting as funeral director for a group
of bloated reputations, is a welcome addition to the
small group of men who continue what Samuel Butler
began. The howls going up in the Times Lit. Sup. from
the descendants of the ossements are but one curl more
of incense to the new author.

His book is a series of epitomes, even the illustrations,
from the peculiar expression of Mr. Gladstone's rascally
face to the differently, but equally, peculiar expression
of Newman's and the petrified settled fanatic will-to-
power in Cardinal Manning's, are epitomes.

Whatever else we may be sure of, we may be sure that
no age with any intellectual under-pinnings would have
made so much fuss over these "figures." For most of
us, the odor of defunct Victoriania is so unpleasant and
the personal benefits to be derived from a study of the
period so small that we are content to leave the past
where we find it, or to groan at its leavings as they are,
week by week, tossed up in the Conservative papers.
The Victorian era is like a stuffy alley-way which we
can, for the most part, avoid. We do not agitate for its

IN THE VORTEX 225

destruction, because it does not greatly concern us; at
least, we have no feeling of responsibility, we are glad
to have moved on toward the open, or at least toward
the patescent, or to have found solace in the classics or
in eighteenth century liberations.

Mr. Strachey, with perhaps the onus of feeling that
the "Spectator" was somewhere in his immediate family,
has been driven into patient exposition. The heavy gas
of the past decades cannot be dispersed by mere
"BLASTS" and explosions. Mr. Strachey has under-
taken a chemical dispersal of residues.

At the age of nine Manning devoured the Apocalypse.
He read Paley at Harrow, and he never got over it.
Impeded in a political career, he was told that the King-
dom of Heaven was open to him. VHeavenly ambitions"
were suggested. The "Oxford Movement" was, in a
minor way. almost as bad as the Italian Counter-
Reformation. Zeal was prized more than experience.
Manning was the child of his age, the enfant prodigue of
it, who could take advantage of all its blessings. A
fury of "religion" appears to have blazed through the
period. This fury must be carefully distinguished from
theology, which latter is an elaborate intellectual exer-
cise, and can in its finest developments be used for
sharpening the wits, developing the rational faculties
(vide Aquinas). Theology, straying from the en-
closures of religion, enters the purlieus of philosophy,
and in some cases exacts stiff definitions.

Froude, Newman and Keble were part of an unfor-
tunate retrogression, or, as Mr. Strachey has written,
"Christianity had become entangled in a series of un-
fortunate circumstances from which it was the plain duty
of Newman and his friends to rescue it." Keble de-
sired an England "more superstitious, more bigoted.

226 INSTIGATIONS

more gloomy, more fierce in its religion." Tracts for
the Times were published. Pusey imagined that people
practised fasting. It was a curious period. One should
take it at length from Mr. Strachey.

The contemporary mind may well fail to note a dif-
ference between these retrogradists and the earlier
nuisance John Calvin, who conceived the floors of hell
paved with unbaptized infants half a span long. Mr.
Strachey's patient exposition will put them right in the
matter.

We have forgotten how bad it was, the ideas of the
Oxford movement have faded out of our class, or at least
the free moving men of letters meet no one still em-
bedded in these left-overs. Intent on some system of
thought interesting to themselves and their friends, they
"lose touch with the public." And the "public," as soon
as it is of any size, is full of these left-overs, full of the
taste of F. T. Palgrave, of Keble's and Pusey's religion.

To ascertain the under-side of popular opinion, or I
had better say popular assumption, one may do worse
than read books of a period just old enough to appear
intolerable.

(For example, if you wish to understand the taste
displayed in the official literature of the last administra-
tion you must read anthologies printed between 1785
and 1837.)

Mr. Strachey's study of Manning is particularly valu-
able in a time when people still persist in not under-
\ standing the Papal church as a political organization ex-

ploiting a religion ; its force, doubtless, has come, through
the centuries, from men like Manning, balked in political
careers, suffering from a "complex" of power-lust.

Among Strachey's "Eminent" we find one conmion
characteristic, a sort of mulish persistence in any course,

IN THE VORTEX 227

however stupid. One might develop the proposition
that Nietzsche in his will-to-power "philosophy" was no
more than the sentimental, inefficient German of the
"old type" expressing an idolization of the British Vic-
torian character.

Still it is hard to see how any people save those

che hanno perduto U ben del intelletto

could have swallowed such shell-game propositions as
those of Manning's, quoted on p. 98, concerning response
to prayer.

The next essay is a very different matter. Mr.
Strachey, without abandoning the acridity of his style,
exposes Florence Nightingale as a great constructor of
civilization. Her achievement remains, early victim of
Christian voodooism, surrounded mainly by cads and
imbeciles, it is a wonder her temper was not a great
deal worse. She may well be pardoned a few hysterias,
a few metaphysical bees in her cap. Even in meta-
physics, if she was unable to improve on Confucius and
Epicurus, she seems to have been quite as intelligent as
many of her celebrated contemporaries who had no
more solid basis for reputation than their "philosophic"
writing. Our author has so branded Lord Stratford de
Redcliffe and the physican Hall that no amount of
apologia will reinstate them. Panmure is left as a goose,
and Hawes as a goose with a touch of malevolence.

Queen Victoria appears several times in this essay,
and effectively:

" 'It will be a very great satisfaction to me,' Her
Majesty added, 'to make the acquaintance of one who
has set so bright an example to our sex.'

"The brooch, which was designed by the Prince Con-

22S INSTIGATIONS

sort, bore a St. George's cross in red enamel, and the
Royal cypher surmounted by diamonds. The whole was
encircled by the inscription, 'Blessed are the Merciful.* "

Dr. Arnold of Rugby, to be as brief as possible with
a none too pleasant subject, ''substituted character for
intellect in the training of British youth."

The nineteenth century had a "letch'' for unifications,
it believed that, in general, "all is one"; when this doc-
trine failed of a sort of pragmatic sanction fit rem, it
tried to reduce things to the least possible number.
True, in the physical world, it did not attempt to use
steam and dynamite interchangeably, but, in affairs of
the mind, such was the indubitable tendency.

It is, however, a folly to "substitute" character for
intelligence and one would rather have been at the
Grammar-School of Ash ford, in Kent, in 1759, under
Stephen Barrett, A.M., than at Rugby, in 1830, under
Dr. Arnold, or, later, under any of his successors. And
I give thanks to Ztns6ais iror' ialv, that being an Ameri-
can, I have escaped the British public school. Mrs.
Ward is at liberty to write to the Times as much as she
likes, I do not envy her Dr. Arnold for grandfather, v

Arnold stands pre-eminent as an "educator," and from
him the term has gradually taken its present meaning:
"a man with no intellectual interests."

Mr. Strachey completes his volume with a study of that
extraordinary crank. General Gordon. It takes him two
lines to blast the reputation of Lord Elgin. He does it
quietly, but Elgin's name will stink in the memory of
the reader. It is difficult to attribute this wholly to the
author, for the facts are in connivance with him. But
if his irony at times descends to sarcasm, one must
balance that with the general quietude of his style. One
can but hope that this book will not be his last ; one would

IN THE VORTEX 2:19

welcome a treatment, by him, of The Members of the
British Academic Committee, British Publishers, The
Asquith Administration.

The religion of Tien Wang mentioned on p. 221 ap-
pears to have been as intelligent as any other form of
Christianity, and to have had much the same active ef-
fects. However, Gordon was appointed to oppose it.
Throughout the rest of his life he seems to have been
obsessed by the curious mediaeval fallacy that the world
is vanity and the body but ashes and dust. He fell vic-
tim to the exaggerated monotheism of his era. But he
had the sense to follow his instinct in a period when
instincts were not thought quite respectable; this made
him an historic figure; it also must have lent him great
charm (with perhaps rather picturesque drawbacks).
This valuable quality, charm, must have been singularly
lacking in Mr. Gladstone.

It is, indeed, difficult to restrain one's growing con-
viction that Mr. Gladstone was not all his party had
hoped for. Gordon was "difficult," at the time of his
last expedition he was perhaps little better than a lunatic,
but Gladstone was decidedly unpleasant.

In all of the eminent was the quality of a singularly
uncritical era. It was a time when a prominent man
could form himself on a single volume handed to him by
"tradition"; when illiteracy, in the profounder sense of
that term, was no drawback to a vast public career. (An
era, of course, happily closed.)

I do not know that there is much use enquiring into
the causes of the Victorian era, or any good to be got
from speculations. Its disease might seem to have been
an aggravated form of provincialism. Professor Sir
Henry Newbolt has recently pointed out that the English

230 INSTIGATIONS

public IS "interested in politics rather than literature";
this may be a lingering symptom.

If one sought, not perhaps to exonerate, but to explain
the Victorian era one might find some contributory cause
in Napoleon. That is to say, the Napoleonic wars had
made Europe unpleasant, England was sensibly glad to
be insular. Geography leaked over into mentality.
Eighteenth century thought had indeed got rid of the
Bourbons, but later events had shown that eighteenth
century thought might be dangerous. England cut off
her intellectual communications with the Continent. An
era of bigotry supervened. We have so thoroughly for-
gotten, if we ever knew, the mental conditions preced-
ing the Victorian era, save perhaps as they appear in
the scribblings of, let us say. Lady Blessington, that we
cannot tell whether the mentality of the Victorian reign
was an advance or an appalling retrogression. In any
case we are glad to be out of it . . . irregardless of what
we may be into ; irregardless of whether the communica-
tions among intelligent people are but the mirage of a
minute Thebaid seen from a chaos wholly insuperable.^

A LIST OF BOOKS

When circumstances have permitted me to lift up my
prayer to the gods, of whom there are several, and
whose multiplicity has only been forgotten during the
less felicitous periods, I have requested for contem-
porary use, some system of delayed book reviewing,
some system whereby the critic of current things is per-
mitted to state that a few books read with pleasure five
or six years ago can still be with pleasure perused, and

♦ **Etiiiiiciit Victorians/* by Lytton Strachey.

IN THE VORTEX 231

that tlieir claims to status as literature have not been
obliterated by half or all of a decade.

GEORGE S. STREET

There was in the nineties, the late nineties and dur-
ing the early years of this century, and still is, a writer
named George S. Street. He has written some of the
best things that have been thought concerning Lord
Byron, he has written them not as a romanticist, not
as a Presbyterian, but as a man of good sense. They
are worthy of commendation. He has written charm-
ingly in criticism of eighteenth century writers, and of
the ghosts of an earlier Piccadilly. He has written tales
of contemporary life with a suavity, wherefrom the
present writer at least has learned a good deal, even
if he has not yet put it into scriptorial practice. (I
haste to state this indebtedness.)

The writers of moeurs caittetfiporcUnes are so few, or
rather there are so few of them who can be treated under
the heading "literature," that the discovery or circula-
tion of any such writer is no mean critical action. Mr.
Street is "quite as amusing as Stockton," with the infinite
difference tliat Mr. Street has made literature. Essays
upon him are not infrequent in volumes of English
essays dealing with contemporary authors. My impres-
sion is that he is not widely read in America (his pub-
lishers will doubtless put me right if this impression is
erroneous) ; I can only conclude that the possession of
a style, the use of a suave and pellucid English has
erected some sort of barrier.

"The Trials of the Bantocks," "The Wise and the
Wayward," "The Ghosts of Piccadilly," "Books of
Elssays," "The Autobiography of a Boy," "Quales Ego,"

232 INSTIGATIONS

"Miniatures and Moods," are among his works, and in
them the rare but intelligent reader may take refuge
from the imbecilities of the multitude.

FREDERIC MANNING

In 1910 Mr. Manning published, with the almost de-
funct and wholly uncommendable firm of John Murray,
"Scenes and Portraits," the opening paragraph of which
I can still, I believe, quote from memory.

"When Merodach, King of Uruk, sat down to his
meals, he made his enemies his footstool, for be-
neath his table he kept an hundred kings with their
thumbs and great toes cut off, as signs of his power
and clemency. When Merodach had finished eating
he shook the crumbs from his napkin, and the
kings fed themselves with two fingers, and when
Merodach observed how painful and difficult this
operation was, he praised God for having given
thumbs to man.

" 'It is by the absence of things,' he said, 'that
we learn their use. Thus if we deprive a man of
his eyes we deprive him of sight, and in this man-
ner we learn that sight is the function of the eyes.'

"Thus spake Merodach, for he had a scientific
mind and was curious of God's handiwork. And
when he had finished speaking, his courtiers ap-
plauded him."

Adam is afterwards discovered trespassing in Mero-
dach's garden or paradise. The characters of Bagoas,
Merodach's high priest, Adam, Eve and the Princess
Candace are all admirably presented. The book is
divided in six parts: the incident of the Kingdom of

IN THE VORTEX 233

Uruk, a conversation at the house of Euripides, "A
Friend of Paul/' a conversation between St. Francis
and the Pope, another between Thomas Cromwell and
Macchiavelli, and a final encounter between Leo XIII
and Renan in Paradise.

This book is not to be neglected by the intelligent
reader (atns rarissitna, and in what minute ratio to the
population I am still unable to discern).

"Others" Anthology for 191 7. This last gives, I
think, the first adequate presentation of Mina Loy and
Marianne Moore, who have, without exaggerated
"nationalism," without waving of banners and general
phrases about Columbia gem of the ocean, succeeded in,
or fallen into, producing something distinctly American
in quality, not merely distinguishable as American by
reason of current national faults.

Their work is neither simple, sensuous nor passionate,
but as we are no longer governed by the North American
Review we need not condemn poems merely because they
do not fit some stock phrase or rhetorical criticism.

(For example, an infinitely greater artist than Tenny-
son uses six "s's" and one "z" in a single line. It is one
of the most musical lines in Provencal and opens a poem
especially commended by Dante. Let us leave the realm
of promoted typists who quote the stock phrases of
text-books.)

In the verse of Marianne Moore I detect traces of
emotion ; in that of Mina Loy I detect no emotion what-
ever. Both of these women are, possibly in unconscious-
ness, among the followers of Jules Laforgue* (whose
work shows a great deal of emotion). Or perhaps Ren^
Ghil is the "influence" in Miss Moore's case. It is pos-
sible, as I have written, or intended to write elsewhere, to

234 INSTIGATIONS

divide poetry into three sorts: (i) melopoeia, to wit,
poetry which moves by its music, whether it be a music'
in 'words or an aptitude for, or suggestion of, accom-
panying music; (2) imagism, or poetry wherein the
feelings of painting and sculpture are predominant (cer-
tain men move in phantasmagoria; the images of their
gods, whole countrysides, stretches of hill land and forest,
travel with them) ; and there is, thirdly, logopoeia, or
poetry that is akin to nothing but language which is a
dance of the intelligence among words and ideas and
modifications of ideas and characters. Pope and the
eighteenth-century writers had in this medium a certain
limited range. The intelligence of Laforgue ran through
the whole gamut of his time. T. S. Eliot has gone on
with it. Browning wrote a condensed form of drama,
full of things of the senses, scarcely ever pure logopoeia.

One wonders what the devil any one will make of
this sort of thing who has not in their wit all the clues.
It has none of the stupidity beloved of the "lyric" en-
thusiast and the writer and reader who take refuge in
scenery, description of nature, because they are unable to
cope with the human. These two contributors to the
"Others" Anthology write logopoeia. It is, in their
case, the utterance of clever people in despair, or hover-
ing upon the brink of that precipice. It is of those who
have acceded with Renan "La betise humaine est la seule
chose qui donne une idee de Tinfini." It is a mind cry,"^
more than a heart cry. "Take the world if thou wilt but
leave me an asylum for my affection," is not their
lamentation, but rather "In the midst of this desolation,
give me at least one intelligence to converse with."

The arid clarity, not without its own beauty, of U
tempirafnent de VAmericaine, is in the poems of these,
I think, graduates or post-graduates. If they have not

IN THE VORTEX 235

received B.A.'s or M.A.'s or B.Sc's they do not need
them.

The point of my praise, for I intend this as praise,
even if I do not burst into the phrases of Victor Hugo,
is that without any pretences and without clamors about
nationality, these girls have written a distinctly national
product, they have written something which would not
have come out of any other country, and (while I have
before now seen a deal of rubbish by both of them)
they are, as selected by Mr. Kreymborg, interesting and
readable (by me, that is. I am aware that even the
poems before me would drive numerous not wholly un-
intelligent readers into a fury of rage-out-of-purzle-
ment.) Both these poet rise have said a number of
things not to be found in the current numbers of Every-
body's, the Century or McClure's. "The Effectual Mar-
riage," "French Peacock," "My Apish Cousins," have
each in its way given me pleasure. Miss Moore has
already prewritten her counterblast to my criticism in
her poem "to a Steam Roller."

The anthology displays also Mr. Williams' praise-
worthy opacity.

THE NEW POETRY

English and French literature have stood in constant
need of each other, and it is interesting to note, as con-
current but in no way dependent upon the present alli-
ance, a new French vitality among our younger writers
of poetry. As some of these latter are too new to
presuppose the reader's familiarity with them, I quote
a few ^ poems before venturing to open a discussion.
T. S. Eliot is the most finished, the most composed of
these poets; let us observe his poem "The Hippopota-
mus," as it appears in The Little Review,

236 INSTIGATIONS

The Hippopotamus

The broad backed hippopotamus
Rests on his belly in the mud;
Although he seems so firm to us. . . .
Yet he is merely flesh and blood.

Flesh-and-blood is weak and frail,
Susceptible to nervous shock;
While the True Church can never fail
For it is based upon a rock.

The hippo's feeble steps may err
In compassing material ends.
While the True Church need never stir
To gather in its dividends.

The potamus can never reach
The mango on the mango-tree,
But fruits of pomegranate and peach
Refresh the Church from over sea.

At mating time the hippo's voice
Betrays inflexions hoarse and odd,
But every week we hear rejoice
The Church, at being one with God.

The hippopotamus's day
Is past in sleep; at night he hunts;
God works in a mysterious way —
The Church can sleep and feed at once

IN THE VORTEX 237

I saw the potamus take wing
Ascending from the damp savannas,
And quiring angels round him sing
The praise of God, in loud hosannas.

Blood of the Lamb shall wash him clean
And him shall heavenly arms enfold,
Among the saints he shall be seen
Performing on a harp of gold.

He shall be washed as white as snow,
By all the martyr'd virgins kist.
While the True Church remains below
Wrapt in the old miasmal mist.

This cold sardonic statement is definitely of the school
of Theophile Gautier ; as definitely as Eliot's "Conversa-
tion Galante" is in the manner of Jules Laforgue.
There is a great deal in the rest of Mr. Eliot's poetry
which is personal, and inino wise derivative either from
the French or from Webster and Tourneur ; just as there
is in "The Hippopotamus" a great deal which is not
Theophile Gautier. I quote the two present poems sim-
ply to emphasize a certain lineage and certain French
virtues and qualities, which are, to put it most mildly,
a great and blessed relief after the official dullness and
Wordsworthian lignification of the "Georgian" Antholo-
gies and their descendants and derivatives as upheld by
The Neiv Statestnan, that nadir of the planet of hebe-
tude, that apogee of the kulturesque.

Conversation Galante*

I observe: "Our sentimental friend the moon!
Or possibly (fantastic, I confess)

♦From "Pnifrock." By T. S. Eliot Egoist, Ltd.

238 INSTIGATIONS \

It may be Prester John's balloon
Or an old battered lantern hung aloft
To light poor travelers to their distress."
She then: "How you digress T

And I then : "Some one frames upon the keys
That exquisite nocturne, with which we explain
The night and moonshine, music which we seize
To body forth our own vacuity."
She then: "Does this refer to me?"
"Oh no, it is I who am inane."

"You, madam, are the eternal humorist,

The eternal enemy of the absolute,

Giving our vagrant moods the slightest twist I

With your air indifferent and imperious

At a stroke our mad poetics to confute "

And : "Are we then so serious?"

Laforgue's influence or Ghil's or some kindred ten-
dency is present in the whimsicalities of Marianne
Moore, and of Mina Loy. A verbalism less finished
than Eliot's appears in Miss Moore's verses called —

Pedantic Literalist

Prince Rupert's drop, paper muslin ghost.
White torch "with power to say unkind
Things with kindness and the most
Irritating things in the midst of love and
Tears," you invite destruction.

You are like the meditative man
With the perfunctory heart; its

IN THE VORTEX 239

Carved cordiality ran

To and fro at first, like an inlaid and royal
Immutable production;

Then afterward "neglected to be
Painful" and "deluded him with
Loitering formality,

Doing its duty as if it did not/'
Presenting an obstruction

To the motive that it served. What stood
Erect in you has withered. A
Little "palmtree of turned wood"

Informs your once spontaneous core in its
Immutable reduction.

The reader accustomed only to glutinous imitations
of Keats, diaphanous dilutations of Shelley, woolly
Wordsworthian paraphrases, or swishful Swinbumiania
will doubtless dart back appalled by Miss Moore's de-
partures from custom; custom, that is, as the male or
female devotee of Palgravian insularity understands that
highly elastic term. The Palgravian will then with dis-
appointment discover that his favorite and conventional
whine is inapplicable. Miss Moore "rhymes in places."
Her versification does not fit in with preconceived
notions of vers libre. It possesses a strophic structure.
The elderly Newboltian groans. The all-wool un-
bleached Georgian sighs ominously. Another author has
been reading French poets, and using words for the
communication of thought. Alas, times will not stay
anchored.

Mina Loy has been equally subject to something like
international influence; there are lines in her "Ineffectual

240 INSTIGATIONS

Marriage" perhaps better written than anything I have
found in Miss Moore, as, for example: —

"So here we might dispense with her
Gina being a female .
But she was more than that
Being an incipience a correlative

an instigation to the reaction of man
From the palpable to the transcendent
Mollescent irritant of his fantasy

Gina had her use Being useful

contentedly conscious

She flowered in Empyrean

From which no well-mated woman ever returns

Sundays a warm light in the parlor

From the g^tty road on the white wall

anybody could see it
Shimmered a composite effigy
Madonna crinolined a man

hidden beneath her hoop.

Patience said Gina is an attribute

And she learned at any hour to offer

The dish appropriately delectable

What had Miovanni made of his ego

In his library

What had Gina wondered among the pots and

pans
One never asked the other."

IN THE VORTEX 241

These lines are not written as Henry Davray said re-
cently in the "Mercure de France," that the last "Geor-
gian Anthology" poems are written, i.e., in search for
"sentiments pour les accommoder a leur vocabulaire/'
Miss Loy's are distinctly the opposite, they are words set
down to convey a definite meaning, and words accom-
modated to that meaning, even if they do not copy the
mannerisms of the five or six by no means impeccable
nineteenth century poets whom the British Poetry
Society has decided to imitate.

All this is very pleasing, or very displeasing, accord-
ing to the taste of the reader ; according to his freedom
from, or his bondage to, custom.

Distinct and as different as possible from the orderly
statements of Eliot, and from the slightly acid whimsi-
calities of these ladies, are the po^ms of Carlos Williams.
If the sinuosities and mental quii^s of Misses Moore
and Loy are difficult to follow I dd not know what is to
be said for some of Mr. Williams' ramifications and
abruptnesses. I do not pretend to follow all of his
volts, jerks, sulks, balks, outblurts and jump-overs; but
for all his roughness there remains with me the con-
viction that there is nothing meaningless in his book, "AI
que quiere," not a line. There is whimsicality as we
found it in his earlier poems. "The Tempers" (pub-
lished by Elkin Mathews), in the verse to "The Coro-
ner's Children," for example. There is distinctness and
color, as was shown in his "Postlude," in "Des Im-
agistes" ; but there is beyond these qualities the absolute
conviction of a man with his feet on the soil, on a soil
personally and peculiarly his own. He is rooted. He
is at times almost inarticulate, but he is never dry, never
without sap in abundance. His course may be well
indicated by the change of the last few years ; we found

242 INSTIGATIONS

him six years ago in "The Postlude/' full of a thick and
opaque color, full of emotional richness, with a maxi-
mum of subjective reality:

Postlude

Now that I have cooled to you

Let there be gold of tarnished masonry,

Temples soothed by the sun to ruin

That sleep utterly.

Give me hand for the dances.

Ripples at Philae, in and out.

And lips, my Lesbian,

Wall flowers that once were flame.

Your hair is my Carthage
And my arms the bow,
And our words the arrows
To shoot the stars.
Who from that misty sea
Swarm to destroy us.

But you there beside me —

Oh ! how shall I defy you,

Who wound me in the night

With breasts shining like Venus and like Mars ?

The night that is shouting Jason

When the loud eaves rattle

As with waves above me.

Blue at the prow of my desire.

O prayers in the dark I
O incense to Poseidon!
Calm in Atlantis.

IN THE VORTEX 243

From this he has, as some would say, "turned" to a
sort of maximum objective reality in

The Old Men

Old men who have studied

every leg show

in the city

Old men cut from touch

by the perfumed music —

polished or fleeced skulls

that stand before

the whole theatre

in silent attitudes

of attention, —

old men who have taken precedence

over young men

and even over dark- faced

husbands whose minds

are a street with arc-lights.

Solitary old men

for whom we find no excuses . . .

This is less savage than "Lcs Assis." His "Portrait
of a Woman in Bed" incites me to a comparison with
Rimbaud's picture of an old actress in her "loge." Not
to Rimbaud's disadvantage. I don't know that any,
save the wholly initiated into the cult of anti-exoticism,
would take Williams' poem for an exotic, but there is
no accounting for what may occur in such cases.

Portrait of a Woman in Bed

There's my things
drying in the comer;

244 INSTIGATIONS

that blue skirt

joined to the gray shirt —

I'm sick of trouble!

Lift the covers

if you want me

and you'll see

the rest of my clothes —

though it would be cold

lying with nothing on !

I won't work
and I've got no cash.
What are you going to do
about it?

^and no jewelry

(the crazy fools).

But I've my two eyes

and a smooth face

and here's this! look!

it's high !

There's brains and blood

in there —

my name's Robitza!

Corsets

can go to the devil —

and drawers along with them !

What do I care!

My two boys?
— ^they're keen!
Let the rich lady
care for them —

IN THE VORTEX 245

they'll beat the school

let them go to the gutter —

that ends trouble.

This house is empty
isn't it?
Then it's mine
because I need it.
Oh, I won't starve
while there's the Bible
to make them feed me.

Try to help me
if you want trouble
or leave me alone —
that ends trouble.

The county physician
is a damned fool
and you
can go to hell!

You could have closed the door
when you came in;
do it when you go out
I'm tired.

This is not a little sermon on slums. It conveys
more than two dozen or two hundred magazine stories
about the comedy of slum-work. As the memoir of a
physician, it is keener than Spiess' notes of an advocate
in the Genevan law courts. It is more compact than
Vildrac's "Auberge," and has not Vildrac's tendency to

246 INSTIGATIONS

sentiment. It is a poem that could be translated into
French or any other modern language and hold its own
with the conteniporary product of whatever country one
chose.

A DISTINCTION

A journalist has said to me: "We, i.e. we journalists,
are like mediums. People go to a spiritist seance and
hear what they want to hear. It is the same with a
leading article: we write so that the reader will find
what he wants to find."

That is the root of the matter ; there is good journal-
ism and bad journalism, and journalism that "looks"
like "literature" and literature etc. . . .

But the root of the difference is that in journalism
the reader finds what he is looking for, whereas in liter-
ature he must find at least a part of what the author
intended.

That is why "the first impression of a work of genius"
is "nearly always disagreeable." The public loathe the
violence done to their self-conceit whenever any one
conveys to them an idea that is his, not their own.

This difference is lasting and profound. Even in the
vaguest of poetry, or the vaguest music, where the re-
ceiver may, or must make half the beauty he is to receive,
there is always something of the author or composer
which must be transmitted.

In journalism or the "bad art," there is no such strain
on the public.

THE CLASSICS "ESCAPE"

It is well that the citizen should be acquainted with
the laws of his country. In earlier times the laws of a

IN THE VORTEX 247

nation were graven upon tablets and set up in the market
place. I myself have seen a sign: "Bohemians are not
permitted within the precincts of this commune"; but
the laws of a great republic are too complex and arcane
to permit of this simple treatment. I confess to having
been a bad citizen, to just the extent of having been
ignorant that at any moment my works might be classed
in law's eye with the inventions of the late Dr. Condom.
It is possible that others with only a mild interest in
literature may be equally ignorant ; I quote therefore the
law:

Section 211 of the United States Criminal Code pro-
vides :

"Every obscene, lewd, or lascivious, and every filthy
book, pamphlet, picture, paper, letter, writing, print, or
other publication of an indecent character and every arti-
cle or thing designed, adapted, or intended for preventing
conception or producing abortion, or for any indecent or
in)moral use; and every article, instrument, substance,
drug, medicine, or thing which is advertised or described
in a manner calculated to lead another to use or apply
it for preventing conception or producing abortion, or
for any indecent or immoral purpose ; and every written
or printed card, letter, circular, book, pamphlet, adver-
tisement, or notice of any kind giving information
directly or indirectly, where, or how, or from whom, or
by what means any of* the hereinbeforementioned mat-
ters, articles, or things may be obtained or made, or
where or by whom any act or operation of any kind for
the procuring or producing of abortion will be done or
performed, or how or by what means conception may be
prevented or abortion produced, whether sealed or un-
sealed; and every letter, packet, or package, or other

248 INSTIGATIONS

mail matter containing any filthy, vile or indecent thing,
device, or substance ; any -and every paper, writing, ad-
vertisement, or representation that any article, instru-
ment, substance, drug, medicine, or thing may, or can, be
used or applied for preventing conception or producing
abortion or for any indecent or immoral purpose; and
every description calculated to induce or incite a person
to so use or apply any such article, instnmient, sub-
stance, drug, medicine, or thing, is hereby declared to
be non-mailable matter and shall not be conveyed in the
mails or delivered from any post-office or by any letter
carrier. Whoever shall knowingly deposit, or cause to
be deposited for mailing or delivery, anything declared
by this section to be non-mailable, or shall knowingly
take, or cause the same to be taken, from the mails for
the purpose of circulating or disposing thereof, or of
aiding in the circulation or disposition thereof, shall be
fined not more than five thousand dollars, or imprisoned
not more than five years, or both."

It is well that the citizens of a country should be
aware of its laws.

It is not for me to promulgate obiter dicta ; to say that
whatever the cloudiness of its phrasing, this law was
obviously designed to prevent the circulation of immoral
advertisements, propaganda for secret cures, and slips of
paper that are part of the bawdy house business; that
it was not designed to prevent the mailing of Dante,
Villon, and Catullus. Whatever the subjective attitude
of the framers of this legislation, we have fortunately a
decision from a learned judge to guide us in its working.

"I have little doubt that numerous really great writ-
ings would come under the ban if tests that are fre-
quently current were applied, and these approved pub-
lications doubtless at times escape only because they

IN THE VORTEX 249

come within the term "classics/' which means, for the
ptirpose of the application of the statute, that they are
ordinarily immune from interference, because they have
the sanction of age and fame and USUALLY APPEAL
TO A COMPARATIVELY LIMITED NUMBER OF
READERS."
The capitals are my own.

The gentle reader will picture to himself the state of
America IF the classics were widely read; IF these
books which in the beginning lifted mankind from sav-
agery, and which from A. D. 1400 onward have gradually
redeemed us from the darkness of medievalism, should
be read by the millions who now consume Mr. Hearst
and the Ladies' Home Journal! I ! ! ! I

Also there are to be no additions. No living man is
to contribute or to attempt to contribute to the classics.
Obviously even though he acquire fame before publish-
ing, he can not have the sanction of "age."

Our literature does not fall under an inquisition; it
does not bow to an index arranged by a council. It is
subject to the taste of one individual.

Our hundred and twenty millions of inhabitants desire
their literature sifted for them by one individual selected
without any examination of his literary qualificatons.

I can not write of this thing in heat. It is a far too
serious matter.

The classics "escape." They are "immune" "ordinar-
ily." I can but close with the cadences of that blessed
little Brother of Christ, San Francesco d'Assisi:

250 INSTIGATIONS

CANTICO DEL SOLE

The thought of what America would be like
If the classics had a wide circulation

Troubles my sleep,
The thought of what America,
The thougfit of what America,
The thought of what America would be like
If the classics had a wide circulation

Troubles my sleep,
Nunc dimittis. Now lettest thou thy servant.
Now lettest thou thy servant

Depart in peace.
The thought of what America,
The thought of what America,
The thought of what America would be like
If the classics had a wide circulation . . .

Oh well !

It troubles my sleep.

Oravimus

PART SECOND

OUR TETRARCHAL PRECIEUSE

(A divagation from Jules Laforgue)

There arose, as from a great ossified sponge, the
comic-opera, Florence-Nightingale light-house, with
junks beneath it clicking in vesperal meretricious mono-
tony ; behind them the great cliff obtruded solitary into
the oily, poluphloisbious ocean, lifting its confection of
pylons; the poplar rows, sunk yards, Luna Parks, etc.,
of the Tetrarchal Palace polished jasper and basalt,
funereal undertakerial, lugubrious, blistering in the high-
lights under a pale esoteric sun-beat; encrusted, bespat-
tered and damascened with cynocephali, sphinxes,
winged bulls, bulbuls, and other sculptural by-laws. The
screech-owls from the jungle could only look out upon
the shadowed parts of the sea, which they did without
optic inconvenience, so deep was the obscured contagion
of their afforested blackness.

The two extraneous princes went up toward the stable-
yard, gaped at the effulgence of peacocks, glared at the
derisive gestures of the horse-cleaners, adumbrated in-
sults, sought vainly for a footman or any one to take
up their cards.

The tetrarch appeared on a terrace, removing his cere-
monial gloves.

The water, sprinkled in the streets in anticipation of
the day's parade, dried in little circles of dust The

«53

254 INSTIGATIONS

tetrarch puffed at his hookah with an exaggeration of
dignity; he was disturbed at the presence of princes, he
was disturbed by the presence of Jao; he desired to
observe his own ruin, the slow deliquescence of his posi-
tion, with a fitting detachment and lassitude. Jao had
distributed pamphlets, the language was incomprehen-
sible ; Jao had been stored in the cellarage, his following
distributed pamphlets.

In the twentieth century of his era the house of Emer-
aud Archytypas was about to have its prize bit of fire-
works: a war with the other world . . . after so many
ages of purely esoteric culture !

Jao had declined both the poisoned coffee and the
sacred sword of the Samurai, courtesies offered, in this
case, to an incomprehensible foreigner. Even now, with
a superlation of form, the sacred kriss had been sent to
the court executioner, it was no mere every-day imple-
ment. The princep arrived (at this juncture. There
sounded from the back alleys the preparatory chirping
of choral societies, and the wailing of pink-lemonade
sellers. To-morrow the galley would be gone.

Leaning over the syrupy clematis, Emeraud crumbled
brioches for the fishes, reminding himself that he had
not yet collected the remains of his wits. There was no
galvanization known to art, science, industry or the
ministrations of sister-souls that would rouse his long
since respectable carcass.

Yet at his birth a great tempest had burst above the
dynastic manor; credible persons had noticed the light-
nings scrolling Alpha and Omega above it ; and nothing
had happened. He had given up flagellation. He
walked daily to the family necropolis : a cool place in the
summer. He summoned the Arranger of Inanities.

OUR TETRARCHAL PRECIEUSE 255

Strapped, pomaded, gloved, laced; with patulous
beards, with their hair parted at the backs of their heads ;
with their cork-screw curls pulled back from their fore-
heads to give themselves tone on their medallions; with
helmets against one hip ; twirling the musk-balls of their
sabres with their disengaged restless fingers, the hyper-
borean royalties were admitted. And the great people
received them, in due order: chief mandarins in clump,
the librarian of the palace (Conde de las Navas), the
Arbiter Elegantium, the Curator major of Symbols, the
Examiner of the High Schools, the Supernumerary
priest of the Snow Cult, the Administrator of Death, and
the Chief Attendant Collector of Death-duties.

Their Highnesses bowed and addressed the Tetrarch:
". . . felicitous wind . . . day so excessively glorious
. . .wafted . . . these isles . . . notwithstanding not
also whereof . . . basilica far exceeding .. . . Ind,
Ormus . . . Miltonesco . . . etc. ... to say nothing of
the seven-stopped barbary organ and the Tedium lauda-
mus . . . etc. . . ."

(Lunch was brought in.)

Kallipagous artichokes, a light collation of tunny-fish,
asparagus served on pink reeds, eels pearl-gray and dove-
gray, gamut and series of compotes and various wines
(without alcohol).

Under impulsion of the Arranger of Inanities the
pomaded princes next began their inspection of the build-
ings. A pneumatic lift hove them upward to the outer
rooms of Salome's suite. The lift door clicked on its
gilt-brass double expansion-clamps; the procession ad-
vanced between rows of wall-facing negresses whose
naked shoulder-blades shone like a bronze of oily opacity.

256 INSTIGATIONS

They entered the hall of majolica, very yellow with thick
blue incrustations, glazed images, with flushed and pro-
tuberant faces; in the third atrium they came upon a
basin of joined ivory, a white bath-sponge, rather large,
a pair of very pink slippers. The next room was littered
with books bound in white vellum and pink satin; the
next with mathematical instruments, hydrostats, sextants,
astrolabial discs, the model of a gasolene motor, a nickel-
plated donkey engine. . . . They proceeded up metal
stairs to the balcony, from which a rustling and swaying
and melodiously enmousselined figure, jonquil-colored
and delicate, preceded or rather predescended them by
dumb-waiter, a route which they were not ready to fol-
low. The machine worked for five floors : usage private
and not ceremonial.

The pomaded princes stood to attention, bowed with
deference and with gallantry. The Arranger ignored
the whole incident, ascended the next flight of stairs and
began on the telescope:

"Grand equatorial, 22 yards inner tube length, revolv-
able cupola (frescoes in water-tight paint) weight
200,089 kilos, circulating on fourteen steel castors in a
groove of chloride of magnesium, 2 minutes for com-
plete revolution. The princess can turn it herself."

The princes allowed their attention to wander, they
noted their ship beneath in the harbor, and calculated
the drop, they then compared themselves with the bro-
caded and depilated denizens of the escort, after which
they felt safer. They were led passively into the Small
Hall of Perfumes, presented with protochlorine of mer-
cury, bismuth regenerators, cantharides, lustral waters
guaranteed free from hydrated lead. Were conducted
thence to the hanging garden, where the form her-
metically enmousselined, the jonquil-colored gauze with

: V

OUR TETRARCHAL PRECIEUSE 257

the pea-sized dark spots on it, disappeared from the
opposite slope. Molossian hounds yapping and romping
about her.

The trees lifted their skinned-salmon trunks, the heavy
blackness was broken with a steely, metallic sunshine. A
sea wind purred through the elongated forest like an
express-train in a tunnel. Polychrome statues obtruded
themselves from odd corners. An elephant swayed ab-
sentniindedly, the zoo was loose all over the place. The
keeper of the aquarium moralized for an hour upon the
calm life of his fishes. From beneath the dark tanks
the hareem sent up a decomposed odor, and a melancholy
slave chantey saturated the corridors, a low droning
osmosis. They advanced to the cemetery, wanting all
the time to see Jao.

This exhibit came at last in its turn. They were let
down in a sling-rope through a musty nitrated grill, ob-
serving in this descent the ill-starred European in his
bath-robe, his nose in a great fatras of papers over-
scrawled with illegible pot-hooks.

He rose at their hefty salutation; readjusted his spec-
tacles,* blinked ; and then it came over him : These damn
pustulent princes! Here! and at last! Memory over-
whelmed him. How many, on how many rotten De-
cember and November evenings had he stopped, had he
not stopped in the drizzle, in the front line of workmen,
his nose crushed against a policeman, and craning his
scraggy neck to see them getting out of their state ba-
rouche, going up the interminable front stairway to the
big-windowed rococo palace; he muttering that the
"Times" were at hand.

And now the revolution was accomplished. The prole-
tariat had deputed them. They were here to howk
him out of quod ; a magnificent action, a grace of royal

' )

258 INSTIGATIONS

humility, performed at the will of the people, the new era
had come into being. He saluted them automatically,
searching for some phrase European, historic, fraternal,
of course, but still noble.

The Royal Nephew, an oldish military man with a
bald-spot, ubiquitarian humorist, joking with every one
in season and out (like Napoleon), hating all doctri-
naires (like Napoleon), was however the first to break
silence: "Huk, heh, old sour bean, bastard of Jean
Jacques Rousseau, is this where you've come to be
hanged ? Eh ? Tm damned if it ain't a good thing."

The unfortunate publicist stiffened.

"Idealogue !" said the Nephew.

The general strike had been unsuccessful. Jao bent
with emotion. Tears showed in his watery eyes, slid
down his worn cheek, trickled into his scraggy beard.
There was then a sudden change in his attitude. He
began to murmur caresses in the gentlest of European
diminutives.

They started. There was a tinkle of keys, and through
a small opposite doorway they discerned the last flash
of the mousseline, the pale, jonquil-colored, blackspotted.

The Nephew readjusted his collar. A subdued cortege
reascended.

Ill

I'he ivory orchestra lost itself in gay fatalistic impro-
visation; the opulence of two hundred over- fed tetrarchal
Dining-Companions swished in the Evening salon, and
overflowed coruscated couches. They slithered through
their genuflections to the throne. The princes puffed out
their elbows, simultaneously attempting to disentangle
their Collars-of-the-Fleece in the idea that these would

OUR TETRARCHAL PRECIEUSE 259

be a suitable present for their entertainer. Neither suc-
ceeded ; suddenly in the midst of the so elaborate setting
they perceived the aesthetic nullity of the ornament, its
connotations were too complex to go into.

The tetrarchal children (superb productions, in the
strictly esoteric sense) were led in over the jonquil-col-
ored reed-matting. A water-jet shot up from the centre
of the great table, and fell plashing above on the red and
white rubber aWning. A worn entertainment beset the
diminutive music-hall stage : acrobats, flowter-dancers,
contortionists, comic wrestlers, to save the guests con-
versation. A trick skater was brought in on real ice, did
the split, engraved a gothic cathedral. The Virgin Ser-
pent as she was called, entered singing "Biblis, Biblis";
she was followed by a symbolic Mask of the Graces;
which gave place to trapeze virtuosi.

An horizontal geyser of petals was shot over the audi- *
torium. The hookahs were brought in. Jao presumably
heard all this over his head. The diners' talk became
general, the princes supporting the army, authority, re-
ligion a bulwark of the state, international arbitration,
the perfectibility of the race; the mandarins of the pal-
ace held for the neutralization of contacts, initiated cen-
acles, frugality and segregation.

The music alone carried on the esoteric undertone, si-
lence spread with great feathers, poised hawk-wise. Sa-
lome appeared on the high landing, descended the twisted
stair, still stiff in her sheath of mousseline ; a small ebony
lyre dangled by a gilt cord from her wrist; she nodded
to her parent ; paused before the Alcazar curtain, balanc-
ing, swaying on her anaemic pigeon-toed little feet — until
every one had had a good look at her. She looked at no
one in particular; her hair dusty with exiguous pollens
curled down over her narrow shoulders, ruffled over her

26o INSTIGATIONS

forehead, with steins of yellow flowers twisted into it.
From the dorsal joist of her bodice, from a sort of pearl
matrix socket there rose a peacock tail, moire, azure,
glittering with shot emerald: an halo for her marble-
white face.

Superior, g^ciously careless, conscious of her unique-
ness, of her autochthonous entity, her head cocked to the
left, her eyes fermented with the interplay of contradic-
tory expiations, her lips a pale circonflex, her teeth with-
still paler gums showing their super-crucified half-smile.
An exquisite recluse, formed in the island aesthetic, there
alone comprehended. Hermetically enmousselined, the
black spots in the fabric appeared so many punctures in
the soft brightness of her sheath. Her arms of angelic
nudity, the two breasts like two minute almonds, the scarf
twined just above the adorable umbilical groove (nature
desires that nude woman should be adorned with a
girdle) composed in a cup-shaped embrace of the hips.
Behind her the peacock halo, her pale pigeon-toed feet
covered only by the watered-yellow fringe and by the
bright-yellow anklet. She balanced, a little budding
messiah; her head over-weighted; not knowing what to
do with her hands ; her petticoat so simple, art long, very
long, and life so very inextensive; so obviously ready for
the cosy-corner, for little talks in conservatories . . .

And she was going to speak . . .

The Tetrarch bulged in his cushions, as if she had
already said something. His attention compelled that
of the princes; he brushed aside the purveyor of pine-
apples.

She cleared her throat, laughing, as if not to be taken
too seriously; the sexless, timbreless voicelet, like that
of a sick child asking for medicine, began to the lyre
accompaniment :

OUR TETRARCHAL PRECIEUSE 261

"Canaan, excellent nothingness ; nothingness-latent,
circumambient, about to be the day after to-morrow, in-
cipient, estimable, absolving, coexistent . . /'

The princes were puzzled. "Concessions by the five
senses to an all-inscribing affective insanity; latitudes,
altitudes, nebulae. Medusae of gentle water, affinities of
the ineradicable, passages over earth so eminently iden-
tical with incalculably numerous duplicates, alone in in-
definite infinite. Do you take me? I mean that the
pragmatic essence attracted self -ward dynamically but
more or less in its own volition, whistling in the bag-
pipes of the soul without termination. — But to be nat-
ural passives, to enter into the cosmos of harmonics. —
Hydrocephalic theosophies, act it, aromas of populace,
phenomena without stable order, contaminated with pru-
dence. — Fatal Jordans, abysmal Ganges — to an end with
'em — insubmersible sidereal currents — nurse-maid cos-
mogonies."

She pushed back her hair dusty with pollens, the soft
handclapping began; her eyelids drooped slightly, her
faintly-suggested breasts lifted slightly, showed more
rosy through the almond-shaped eyelets of her corsage.
She was still fingering the ebony lyre.

"Bis, bis, brava !" cried her audience.

Still she waited.

"Go on ! You shall have whatever you like. Go on,
my dear," said the Tetrarch; "we are all so damned
bored. Go on, Salome, you shall have any blamed thing
you like: the Great- Seal, the priesthood of the Snow
Cult, a job in the University, even to half of my oil stock.
But inoculate us with . . . eh . . . with the gracious
salve of this cosmoconception, with this parthenospotless-

ness."

The company in his wake exhaled an inedited bore-

262 INSTIGATIONS

dom. They were all afraid of each other. Tiaras nod-
ded, but no one confessed to any difficulty in following
the thread of her argument. They were, racially, so
very correct.

Salome wound on in summary rejection of theogonies,
theodicies, comparative wisdoms of nations (short shift,
tone of recitative). Nothing for nothing, perhaps one
measure of nothing. She continued her mystic loquac-
ity: "O tides, lunar oboes, avenues, lawns of twilight,
winds losing caste in November, haymakings, vocations
manquees, expressions of animals, chances."

Jonquil colored mousselines with black spots, eyes fer-
mented, smiles crucified, adorable umbilici, peacock aure-
oles, fallen carnations, inconsequent fugues. One felt
reborn, reinitiate and rejuvenate, the soul expiring sys-
tematically in spirals across indubitable definitive show-
ers, for the good of earth, understood everywhere, palp
of Varuna, air omniversal, assured if one were but ready.

Salome continued insistently: "The pure state, I tell
you, sectaries of the consciousness, why this convention
of separations, individuals by mere etiquette, indivisible?
Breathe upon the thistle-down of these sciences, as you
call them, in the orient of my pole-star. Is it life to per-
sist in putting oneself au courant with oneself, constantly
to inspect oneself, and then query at each step: am I
wrong? Species! Categories! and kingdoms, bah I!
Nothing is lost, nothing added, it is all reclaimed in ad-
vance. There is no ticket to the confessional for the
heir of the prodigies. Not expedients and expiations,
but vintages of the infinite, not experimental but in fa-
tality."

The little yellow vocalist with the black funereal spots
broke the lyre over her knee, and regained her dignity.
The intoxicated crowd mopped their foreheads. An em-

OUR TETRARCHAL PRECIEUSE 263

barrassing silence. The hyperboreans looked at each
other: "What time will they put her to bed?" But
neither ventured articulation; they did not even inspect
their watches. It couldn't have been later than six.
The slender voice once more aroused them:

"And now, father, I wish you to send me the head of
Jao Kanan, on any saucer you like. I am going upstairs.
T expect it."

"But . . . but . . . my dear . . . this . . . this . . ."
However — the hall was vigorously of the opinion that
the Tiara should accomplish the will of Salome.

Emeraud glanced at the princes, who gave sign neither
of approbation nor of disapprobation. The cage-birds
again began shrieking. The matter was none of their
business.

Decide !

The Tetrarch threw his seal to the Administrator of
Death. The guests were already up, changing the con-
versation on their way to the evening tepidarium.

With her elbows on the observatory railing, Salome,
disliking popular fetes, listened to her familiar polu-
phloisbious ocean. Calm evening.

Stars out in full company, eternities of zeniths of em-
bers. Why go into exile ?

Salome, milk-sister to the Via I^ctea, seldom lost her-
self in constellations. Thanks to photo-spectrum analy-
sis the stars could be classified as to color and magni-
tudes; she had commanded a set of diamonds in the
proportionate sizes to adorn nocturnally her hair and her
person, over mousseline of deep mourning-violet with
gold dots in the surface. Stars below the sixteenth mag-

264 INSTIGATIONS

nitude were not, were not in her world, she envisaged her
twenty-four millions of subjects.

Isolated nebulous matrices, not the formed nebulae,
were her passion; she ruled out planetiform discs and
sought but the unformed, perforated, tentacular. Orion's
gaseous fog was the Brother Benjamin of her galaxy.
But she was no more the "little" Salome, this night
brought a change of relations, exorcised from her vir-
ginity of tissue she felt peer to these matrices, fecund
as they in gyratory evolutions. Yet this fatal sacrifice
to the cult (still happy in getting out of so discreetly)
had obliged her in order to get rid of her initiator, to
undertake a step (grave perhaps), perhaps homicide; —
finally to assure silence, cool water to contingent people,
— elixir of an hundred nights' distillation. It must serve.

Ah, well, such was her life. She was a specialty, a
minute specialite.

There on a cushion among the debris of her black
ebony lyre, lay Jao's head, like Orpheus' head in the old
days, gleaming, encrusted with phosphorus, washed,
anointed, barbered, grinning at the 24 million stars.

As soon as she had got it, Salome, inspired by the
true spirit of research, had commenced the renowned ex-
periments after decollation; of which we have heard so
much. She awaited. The electric passes of her hyp-
notic manual brought from it nothing but inconsequential
grimaces.

She had an idea, however.

She perhaps lowered her eyes, out of respect to Orion,
stiffening herself to gaze upon the nebulae of her puber-
ties . . . for ten minutes. What nights, what nights in
the. future! Who will have the last word about it?
Choral societies, fire-crackers down there in the city.

Finally Salome shook herself, like a sensible person,

OUR TETRARCHAL PRECIEUSE 265

reset, readjusted her fichu, took off the gray gold-spotted
symbol-jewel of Orion, placed it between Jao's lips as
an host, kissed the lips pityingly and hermetically, sealed
them with corrosive wax (a very speedy procedure).

Then with a "Bah !" mutinous, disappointed, she seized
the genial boko of the late Jao Kanan, in delicate fem-
inine hands.

As she wished the head to land plumb in the sea with-
out bounding upon the cliffs, she gave a good swing in
turning. The fragment described a sufficient and phos-
phorescent parabola, a noble parabola. But unfortu-
nately the little astronomer had terribly miscalculated her
impetus, and tripping over the parapet with a cry finally
human she hurtled from crag to crag, to fall, shattered,
into the picturesque anfractuosities of the breakers, far
from the noise of the national festival, lacerated and
naked, her skull shivered, paralyzed with a vertigo, in
short, gone to the bad, to suffer for nearly an hour.

She had not even the viaticum of seeing the phospho-
rescent star, the floating head of Jao on the water. And
the heights of heaven were distant.

• •••••

Thus died Salome of the Isles (of the White Esoteric
Isles, in especial) less from uncultured misventure than
from trying to fabricate some distinction between herself
and every one else ; like the rest of us.

GENESIS, OR, THE FIRST BOOK IN THE

BIBLE *

("Subject to Authority")

The sacred author of this work. Genesis, complied
with the ideas acceptable to his era ; it was almost neces-
sary; for without this condescension he would not have
been understood. There remain for us merely a few re-
flections on the physics of those remote times. As for
the theology of the book : we respect it, we believe it most
firmly, we would not risk the faintest touch to its surface.

"In the beginning God created heaven and earth."
That is the way they translate it, yet there is scarcely
any one so ignorant as not to know that the original reads
"the gods created heaven and earth" ; which reading con-
forms to the Phoenician idea that God employed lesser
divinities to untangle chaos. The Phoenicians had been
long established when the Hebrews broke into some few
provinces of their land. It was quite natural that these
latter should have learned their language and borrowed
their ideas of the cosmos.

Did the ancient Phoenician philosophers in "the time
of Moses" know enough to regard the earth as a point
in relation to the multitude of globes which God has
placed in immensity? The very ancient and false idea

* Translated from an eighteenth-century author.

266

GENESIS 267

that heaven was made for the earth has nearly always
prevailed among ignorant peoples. It is scarcely pos-
sible that such good navigators as the Phoenicians should
not have had a few decent astronomers, but the old preju-
dices were quite strong, and were gently handled by the
author of Genesis, who wrote to teach us God's ways and
not to instruct us in physics.

"The earth was all tohu bohu and void, darkness was
over the face of the deep, the spirit of God was borne on
the waters."

"Tohu bohu" means precisely chaos, disorder. The
earth was not yet formed as it is at present. Matter ex-
isted, the divine power had only to straighten things out.
The "spirit of God" is literally the "breath" or "wind"
which stirred up the waters. This idea is found in frag-
ments of the Phoenician author, Sanchoniathon. The
Phoenicians, like all the other peoples of antiquity, be-
lieved matter eternal. There is not one author of all
those times who ever said that one could make something
of nothing. Even in the Bible there is no passage which
claims that matter was made out of nothing, not but what
this creation from nothing is true, but its verity was un-
known to the carnal Jews.

Men have been always divided on the eternity of the
world, but never on the eternity of matter.

"Gigni de nihilo nihilum, et in nihilum nil posse re-
verti," writes Persius, and all antiquity shared his opin-
ion. God said, "Let there be light," and there was light,
and he saw that the light was good, and he divided the
light from darkness, and he called the light day and the
darkness night, and this was the evening and the morning
of the first day. And God also said that the firmament,
etc., the second day . . . saw that it was good.

Let us begin by seeing wliether the bisliop of Av-

268 INSTIGATIONS

ranches Huet, Leclerc, etc., are right, against those who
claim that this is a sublime piece of eloquence.
• •••••

The Jewish author lumps in the light with the other
objects of creation; he uses the same turn of phrase,
"saw that it was good." The sublime should lift itself
above the average. Light is no better treated than any-
thing else in this passage. It was another respected
opinion that light did not come from the sun. Men saw
it spread through the air before sunrise and after sunset ;
they thought the sun served merely to reinforce it. The
author of Genesis conforms to popular error : he has the
sun and moon made four days after the light. It is un-
likely that there was a morning and evening before the
sun came into being, but the inspired author bows to the
vague and stupid prejudice of his nation. It seems prob-
able that God was not attempting to educate the Jews in
philosophy or cosmogony. He could lift their spirits
straight into truth, but he preferred to descend to their
level. One can not repeat this answer too often.

The separation of the light from the darkness is not
part of another physical theory ; it seems that night and
day were mixed up like two kinds of grain ; and that they
were sifted out of each other. It is sufficiently well es-
tablished that darkness is nothing but the deprivation of
light, and that there is light only in so far as our eyes
receive the sensation, but no one had thought of this at
that time.

The idea of the firmament is also of respectable an-
tiquity. People imagined the skies very solid, because
the same set of things always happened there. The skies
circulated over our heads, they must therefore be very
strong. The means of calculating how many exhalations
of the earth and how many seas would be needed to keep

GENESIS 269

the clouds full of water? There was then no Halley to
write out the equations. There were tanks of water in
heaven. These tanks were held up on a good steady
dome ; but one could see through the dome ; it must have
been made out of crystal. In order that the water could
be poured over the earth there had to be doors, sluices,
cataracts which could be opened, turned on. Such was
the current astronomy, and one was writing for Jews ; it
was quite necessary to take up their silly ideas, which
they had borrowed from other peoples only a little less
stupid.

"God made two great lights, one to preside over the
day, the other the night, and he made also the stars."

True, this shows the same continuous ignorance of na-
ture. The Jews did not know that the moonlight is
merely reflection. The author speaks of the stars as
luminous points, which they look like, although they are
at times suns with planets swinging about them. But
holy spirit harmonized with the mind of the time. If he
had said that the sun is a million times as large as the
earth, and the moon fifty times smaller, no one would
have understood him. They appear to be two stars of
sizes not very unequal.

"God said also : let us make man in our image, let him
rule over the fishes, etc."

What did the Jews mean by "in our image"? They
meant, like all antiquity:

Finxit in eiKgiem moderantum cuncta deorum.

One can not make "images" save of bodies. No na-
tion then imagined a bodiless god, and it is impossible to
picture him as such. One might indeed say "god is noth-
ing of anything we know," but then one would not have
any idea what he is. The Jews constantly believed god
corporal, as did all the rest of the nations. All the first

270 INSTIGATIONS

fathers of the church also believed god corporal, until
they had swallowed Plato's ideas, or rather until the
lights of Christianity had grown purer.

"He created them male and female."
If God or the secondary gods created man male and fe*
male in their resemblance, it would seem that the Jews
believed God and the Gods were male and female. One
searches to see whether the author meant to say that man
was at the start ambisextrous or if he means that God
made Adam and Eve the same day. The most natural
interpretation would be that god made Adam and Eve
at the same time, but this is absolutely contradicted by
the formation of woman from the rib, a long time after
the first seven days.

"And he rested the seventh day."
The Phoenicians, Chaldeans, and Indians say that God
made the world in six periods, which Zoroaster calls the
six gahambars, as celebrated among Persians.

It is incontestable that all these people had a theogony
long before the Jews got to Horeb and Sinai, and before
they could have had writers. Several savants think it
likely that the allegory of the six days is imitated from
the six periods. God might have permitted great na-
tions to have this idea before he inspired the Jews, just
as he had permitted other people to discover the arts
l>efore the Jews had attained any.

"The place of delight shall be a river which waters a
garden, and from it shall flow four rivers, Phison . . .
Ciehon . . ., etc., Tigris. Euphrates . . ."

According to this version the terrestrial paradise would
have containeit about a third of Asia and Africa. The
Euphrates and Tigris have the«r sources sixty miles apart
in hideous mountains which do not look the least like a
garden. The river which borders Ethiopia can be only

GENESIS 271

the Nile, whose source is a little over a thousand miles
from those of the Tigris and the Euphrates ; and if Phi-
son is the Phase, it is curious to start a Scythian river
from the fount of a river of Africa. One must look
further afield for the meaning of all these rivers. Every
commentator makes his own Eden.

Some one has said that the Garden was like the gar-
dens of Eden at Saana in Arabia Felix celebrated in an-
tiquity, and that the parvenu Hebrews might have been
an Arab tribe taking to themselves credit for the prettiest
thing in the best canton of Arabia, as they have always
taken to themselves the traditions of all the great peoples
who enslaved them. But in any case they Were led by
the Lord.

"The Lord took man and set him in the midst of the
garden, to tend it." It was all very well saying "tend
it," "cultivate the garden," but it would have been very
difficult for Adam to cultivate a garden 3,000 miles long.
Perhaps he had helpers. It is another chance for the
commentators to exercise their gifts of divination . . .
as they do with the rivers.

"Eat. not of the fruit of the knowledge of good and
evil." It is difficult to think that there was a tree which
taught good and evil ; as there are pear trees and peach
trees. One asks why God did not wish man to' know
good from evil. Would not the opposite wish (if one
dare say so) appear more worthy of God, and much more
needful to man? It seems to our poor reason that God
might have ordered him to eat a good deal of this fruit,
but one must submit one's reason and conclude that obe-
dience to God is the proper course for us.

"If you eat of the fruit you shall die."
Yet Adam ate, and did not die in the least ; they say he
lived another nine centuries. Several "Fathers" have

272 INSTIGATIONS

considered all this as an allegory. Indeed, one may say
that other animals do not know that they die, but that
man knows it through his reason. This reason is the
tree of knowledge which makes him foresee his finish.
This explanation may be more reasonable, but we do not
dare to pronounce on it.

"The Lord said also: It is not good that man should
be alone, let us make him an helpmate like to him." One
expects that the Lord is going to give him a woman, but
first he brings up all the beasts. This may be the trans-
position of some copyist.

"And the name which Adam gave to each animal is its
real name." An animal's real name would be one which
designated all the qualifications of its species, or at least
the principal traits, but this does not exist in any Ian*
guage. There are certain imitative words, cock and
cuckoo, and alali in Greek, etc. Moreover, if Adam had
known the real names and therefore the properties of
the animals, he must have already eaten of the tree of
knowledge; or else it would seem that God need not
have forbidden him the tree, since he already knew more
than the Royal Society, or the Academy.

Observe that this is the first time Adam is named in
Genesis. The first man according to the Brahmins was
Adimo, son of the earth. Adam and Eve mean the same
thing in Phoenician, another indication that the holy spirit
fell in with the received ideas.

"When Adam was asleep, etc., . . . rib . . . made a
woman." The Lord, in the preceding chapter, had al-
ready created them male and female ; why should he take
a rib out of the man to make a woman already existing?
We are told that the author announces in one place
what he explains in another. We are told that this alle-
gory shows woman submitted to her husband. Many

GENESIS 273

people have believed on the strength of these verses
that men have one rib less than women, but this is an
heresy and anatomy shows us that a woman is no better
provided with ribs than her husband.

"Now the serpent was the most subtle of beasts," etc.,
"he said to the woman," etc.

There is nowhere the least mention of the devil or a
devil. All is physical. The serpent was considered not
only the subtlest of all beasts by all oriental nations ; he
was also believed immortal. The Chaldeans had a fable
about a fight between God and a serpent ; it is preserved
by Pherecides. Origen cites it in his sixth book against
Celsus. They carried snakes in the feasts of Bacchus.
The Egyptians attributed a sort of divinity to the ser-
pent, as Eusebius tells us in his "Evangelical Prepara'
tions," book I, chapter X. In India and Arabia, and in
China, the serpent was the symbol of life; the Chinese
emperors before Moses wore the serpent sign on their
breasts.

Eve is not surprised at the serpent's talking to her.
Animals are always talking in the old stories ; thus when
Pilpai and Locman make animals talk no one is ever
surprised.

All this tale seems physical and denuded of allegory.
It even tells us the reason why the serpent who ramped
before this now crawls on its belly, and why we always
try to destroy it (at least so they say) ; precisely as we
are told in all ancient metamorphoses why the crow, who
was white, is now black, why the owl stays at home in the
da3rtime, etc. But the "Fathers" have believed it an alle-
gory manifest and respectable, and it is safest to believe
them.

"I will multiply your griefs and your pregnancies, ye
shall bring forth children with grief, ye shall be beneath

274 INSTIGATIONS

the power of the man and he shall rule over you." One
asks why the multiplication of pregnancies is a punish-
ment. It was on the contrary a very great blessing, and
especially for the Jews. The pains of childbirth are
alarming only for delicate women; those accustomed to
work are brought to bed very easily, especially in hot cli-
mates. On the other hand, animals sometimes suffer in
littering, and even die of it. As for the superiority of
man over woman, this is the quite natural result of his
bodily and intellectual forces. The male organs are gen-
erally more capable of consecutive effort, more fit for
manual and intellectual tasks. But when the woman has
fist or wit stronger than those of her husband she rules
the roost, and the man is submitted to woman. This is
true, but before the original sin there may have been
neither pain nor submission.

"God made them tunics of skin."
This passage proves very nicely that the Jews believed in
a corporal god. A Rabbi named Eliezer has written
that God covered Adam and Eve with the skin of the
tempter serpent; Origen claims that the "tunic of skin"
was a new flesh, a new body which God made for man,
but one should have more respect for the text.

"And the Lord said 'Behold Adam, who is becom'^ like
one of us.' " It seems that the Jews at first admired sev-
eral gods. It is considerably more difficult to make out
what they mean by the word God, Eloim. Several com-
mentators state that this phrase, "one of us," means the
Trinity, but there is no question of the Trinity in the
Bible.*

* The reader will remember in Landor's Chinese dialogues,
when the returned mandarin is telling the Emperor's children
about England, there is one place where they burst into giggles
"because they had been taught some arithmetic"

GENESIS 275

The Trinity is not a composite of several gods, it is the
same god tripled ; the Jews never heard tell of a god in
three persons. By these words "like unto us" it is prob-
able that the Jews meant angels, Eloim. For this reason
various rash men of learning have thought that the book
was not written until a time when the Jews had adopted
a belief in inferior gods, but this view is condemned.*

"The Lord set him outside the garden of delights, that
he might dig in the earth." Yet some say that God had
put him in the garden, in order that he might cultivate it.
If gardener Adam merely became laborer Adam, he was
not so much the worse off. This solution of the diffi-
culty does not seem to us sufficiently serious. It would
be better to say that God punished Adam's disobedience
by banishing him from his birthplace.

Certain over- temerarious commentators say that the
whole of the story refers to an idea once common to all
men, i.e., that past times were better than present. Peo-
ple have always bragged of the past in order to run down
the present. Men overburdened with work have imag-
ined that pleasure is idleness, not having had wit enough
to conceive that man is never worse off than when he has
nothing to do. Men seeing themselves not infrequently
miserable forged an idea of a time when all men were
happy. It is as if they had said, once upon a time no tree
withered, no beast fell sick, no animal devoured another,
the spiders did not catch flies. Hence the ideal of the
Golden Age, of the egg of Arimana, of the serpent who
stole the secret of eternal life from the donkey, of the
combat of Typhon and Osiris, of Ophionee and the gods,
of Pandora's casket, and all these other old stories, some-
times very ingenious and nev^r, in the least way, instruc-

♦ The reader is referred to our heading : "Subject to au-
thority".

276 INSTIGATIONS

tive. But we should believe that the fables of other na-
tions are imitation of Hebrew history, since we still have
the Hebrew history and the history of other savage peo-
ples is for the most part destroyed. Moreover, the wit-
nesses in favor of Genesis are quite irrefutable.

"And he set before the garden of delight a cherubin
with a turning and flaming sword to keep guard over the
gateway to the tree of life." The word "kerub" means
bullock. A bullock with a burning sword is an odd sight
at a doorway. But the Jews have represented angels as
bulls and as sparrow hawks, despite the prohibition to
make graven images. Obviously they got these bulls and
hawks from Egyptians who imitated all sorts of things,
and who worshipped the bull as the symbol of agriculture
and the hawk as the symbol of winds. Probably the tale
is an allegory, a Jewish allegory, the kerub means "na-
ture." A symbol made of a bull's body, a man's head and
a hawk's wings.

"The Lord put his mark upon Cain."
"What a Lord !" say the incredulous. He accepts Abel's
offering, rejects that of the elder brother, without giving
any trace of a reason. The Lord provided the cause of
the first brotherly enmity. This is a moral instruction,
most truly, a lesson to be learned from all ancient fables,
to wit, that scarcely had the race come into existence
before one brother assassinated another, but what ap-
pears to the wise of this world, contrary to all justice,
contrary to all the common sense principles, is that God
has eternally damned the whole human race, and has
slaughtered his own son, quite uselessly, for an apple,
and that he has pardoned a fratricide. Did I say "par-
doned"? He takes the criminal under his own protec-
tion. He declares that any one who avenges the murder
of Abel shall be punished with seven fold the punishment

GENESIS 277

inflicted on Cain. He puts on him his sign as a safe-
guard. The impious call the story both execrable and
absurd. It is the delirium of some unfortunate Israelite,
who wrote these inept infamies in imitation of stories so
abundant among the neighboring Syrians. This insen-
sate Hebrew attributed his atrocious invention to Moses,
at a time when nothing was rarer than books. Destiny,
which disposes of all things, has preserved his work till
our day ; scoundrels have praised it, and idiots have be-
lieved. Thus say the horde of theists, who while ador-
ing God, have been so rash as to condemn the Lord God
of Israel, and who judge the actions of the Eternal Be-
ing by the rules of our imperfect ethics, and our errone-
ous justice. They admit a god but submit god to our
laws. Let us guard against such temerity, and let us
once again learn to respect what lies beyond our compre-
hension. Let us cry out "O Altitudol" with all our
strength.

"The Gods, Eloim, seeing that the daughters of men
were fair, took for spouses those whom they chose."
This flight of imagination is also common to all the na-
tions. There is no race, except perhaps the Chinese,*
which has not recorded gods getting young girls with
child. Corporeal gods come down to look at their do-
main, they see our young ladies and take the best for
themselves ; children produced in this way are better than
other folks' children; thus Genesis does not omit to say

* In Fenollosa's notes on Kutsugen*s ode to "Sir in the
Clouds," 1 am unable to make out whether the girl is more than
a priestess. She batlies in hot water made fragrant by boiling
orchids in it, she washes her hair and binds iris into it she puts
on the dress of flowery colors, and the god illimitable in his
brilliance descends; she continues her attention to her toilet, in
very reverent manner. P.

278 INSTIGATIONS

that this commerce bred giants. Once again the book is
in key with vulgar opinion.

"And I will pour the water floods over the earth."
I would note here that St. Augustin (City of God, No.
8) says, "Maximum illud diluvium graeca nee laiina navU
historia." Neither Greek nor Latin history takes note of
this very great flood. In truth, they knew only Deu-
calion's and Ogyges' in Greece. These were regarded as
universal in the fables collected by Ovid, but were totally
unknown in Eastern Asia. St. Augustin is not in error
when he says history makes no mention thereof.

"God said to Noah: I will make an agreement with
you and with your seed after you, and with all the ani-
mals." God make an agreement with animals ! The un-
believers will exclaim: "What a contract!" But if he
make an alliance with man, why not with the animals?
What nice feeling, there is something quite as divine in
this sentiment as in the most metaphysical thought.
Moreover, animals feel better than most men think. It
is apparently in virtue of this agreement that St. Francis
of Assisi, the founder of the seraphic order, said to the
grasshoppers, and hares, ''Sing, sister hoppergrass, brouse
brother rabbit." But what were the terms of the treaty?
'i1iat all the animals should devour each other ; that they
should live on our flesh ; and we on theirs ; that after hav-
ing eaten all we can we should exterminate all the rest,
and that we should only omit the devouring of men stran-
gled with our own hands. If there was any such pact it
was presumably made with the devil.

Probably this passage is only intended to show that
God is in equal degree master of all things that breathe.
This pact could only have been a command; it is called
"alliance" merely by an "extension of the word's mean-
ing." One should not quibble over mere terminology,

GENESIS 279

but worship the spirit, and go back to the time when they
wrote this work which is scandal to the weak, but quite
edifying to the strong.

"And I will put my bow in the sky, and it shall be a
sign of our pact/' Note that the author does not say
"I have put" but "I will put my bow"; this shows that
in common opinion the bow had not always existed. It
is a phenomenon of necessity caused by the rain, and
they give it as a supernatural manifestation that the
world shall never more be covered with water. It is odd
that they should choose a sign of rain as a promise that
one shall not be drowned. But one may reply to this:
when in danger of inundations we may be reassured by
seeing a rainbow.

"Now the Lord went down to see the city which the
children of Adam had builded, and he said, behold a
people with only one speech. They have begun this
and won't quit until it is finished. Let us go down and
confound their language, so that no man may understand
his neighbor." Note merely that the sacred author still
conforms to vulgar opinion. He always speaks of God
as of a man who informs himself of what is going on,
who wants to see with his eyes what is being done on his
estate, and who calls his people together to determine a
course of action.

"And Abraham, having arrayed his people (there
were of them three hundred and eighteen), fell upon the
five kings and slew them and pursued them even to Hoba
on the left side of, Damas." From the south side of the
lake of Sodom to Damas is 24 leagues, and they still
had to cross Liban and anti-Liban. Unbelievers exult
over such tremendous exaggeration. But since the Lord
favored Abraham there is no exaggeration.

"And that evening two angels came into Sodom, etc."

28o INSTIGATIONS

The history of the two angels whom the Sodomites
wanted to ravish is perhaps the most extraordinary
which antiquity has produced. But we must remember
that all Asia believed in incubi and succubae demons, and
that moreover these angels were creatures more perfect
than man, and that they were probably much better look-
ing, and lit more desires in a jaded, corrupt race than
common men would have excited. Perhaps this part
of the story is only a figure of rhetoric to express the
horrible lewdness of Sodom and of Gomorrah. We
offer this solution to savants with the most profound
self -mistrust.

As for Lot who offered his two daughters to the
Sodomites in lieu of the angels, and Lot's wife metamor-
phosed into the saline image, and all the rest of the story,
what can one say of it? The ancient fable of Cinyra
and Myrrha has some relation to Lot's incest with his
daughters, the adventure of Philemon and Baucis is
not without its points of comparison with that of the
two angels appearing to Lot and his wife. As for the
pillar of salt, I do not know what it compares with,
perhaps with the story of Orpheus and Eurydice?

A number of savants think with Newton and the
learned Leclerc that the Pentateuch was written by
Samuel when the Jews had learned reading and writing,
and that all these tales are imitation of Syrian fable.

But it is sufficient for us that it is all Holy Scripture ;
we therefore revere it without searching in it for any-
thing that is not the work of the Holy Spirit. We
should remember, at all times, that these times are not
our times, and we should not fail to add our word to
that of so many great men who have declared that the
Old Testament is true history, and that everything in-
vented by all the rest of the universe is mere fable.

GENESIS 281

Some savants have pretended that one should remove
from the canonical books all incredible matters which
might be a stumbling block to the feeble, but it is said
that these savants were men of corrupt heart and that
they ought to be burned, and that it is impossible to be
an honest man unless you believe that the Sodomites
desired to ravish the angels. This is the reasoning of a
species of monster who wishes to rule over wits.

It is true that several celebrated church fathers have
had the prudence to turn all these tales into allegory,
like the Jews, and Philo in especial. Popes still more
prudent desired to prevent the translation of these books
into the everyday tongue, for fear men should be led to
pass judgment on what was upheld for their adoration.

One ought sufely to conclude that those who perfectly
understand this work should tolerate those who do not
understand it, for if these latter do not understand it,
it is not their fault ; also those who do not understand it
should tolerate those who understand it most fully.

Savants, too full of their knowledge, have claimed
that Moses could not possibly have written the book of
Genesis. One of their reasons is that in the story of
Abraham, the patriarch pays for his wife's funeral plot
in coined money, and that the king of Gerare gives a
thousand pieces of silver to Sarah when he returns her,
after having stolen her for her beauty in the seventy-
fifth year of her age. They say that, having consulted
authorities, they find that there was no coined money in
those days. But it is quite clear that this is pure chicane
on their part, since the Church has always believed
most firmly that Moses did write the Pentateuch. They
strengthen all the doubts raised by the disciples of Aben-
Hesra and Baruch Spinoza. The physician Astruc,
father-in-law of the comptroller-general Silhouette, in

282 INSTIGATIONS

his book, now very rare, entitled "Conjectures on Gene-
sis," adds new objections, unsolvable to human wisdom;
but not to humble submissive piety. The savants dare
to contradict every line, the simple revere every line.
Guard against falling into tlie misfortune of trusting our
human reason, be contrite in heart and in spirit.

"And Abraham said that Sarah was his sister, and the
king of Gerare took her to him." We confess, as we have
said in our essay on Abraham, that Sarah was then
ninety years old; that she had already been kidnapped
by one King of Egypt; and that a king of this same
desert Gerare later kidnapped the wife of Abraham's
son Isaac. We have also spoken of the servant Agar, by
whom Abraham had a son, and of how Abraham treated
them both. One knows what delight unbelievers take in
these stories; with what supercilious smiles they con-
sider them ; how they set the story of Abimelech and this
same wife of Abraham's (Sarah) whom he passed off as
his sister, above the "looi nights" and also that of an-
other Abimelech in love with Rebecca, whom Isaac also
passed off as his sister. One can not too often reiterate
that the fault of all these studious critics lies in their
persistent endeavour to bring all these things into accord
with our feeble reason and to judge ancient Arabs as
they would judge the French court or the English.

"The soul of Sichem, son of King Hemor, cleaved to
the soul of Dinah, and he charmed his sadness with her
tender caresses, and he went to Hemor his father, and
said unto him : Give me this woman for wife." Here the
savants are even more refractory. What! a king's son
marry a vagabond's daughter, Jacob her father loaded
with presents! The king receives into his city these
wandering robbers, called patriarchs ; he has the incredi-
ble and incomprehensible kindness to get himself circum-

GENESIS 283

cised, he and his son, his court and his people, in order
to condescend to the superstition of this little tribe which
did not own a half league of land! And what reward
do our holy patriarchs make htm for such astonishing
kindness? They wait the day when the wound of cir-
cumcision ordinarily produces a fever. Then Simeon
and Levi run throughout the city, daggers in hand ; they
massacre the king, the prince, his son, and all the in-
habitants. The horror of this St. Bartholemew is only
diminished by its impossibility. It is a shocking romance
but it is obviously a ridiculous romance : It is impossible
that two men could have killed a whole nation. One
might suffer some inconvenience from one's excerpted
foreskin, but one would defend oneself against two
scoundrels, one would assemble, surround them, finish
them off as they deserved.

But there is one more impossible statement: by an
exact supputation of date, we And that Dinah, daughter
of Jacob, was at this time no more than three years of
age; even if one tries to accommodate the chronology,
she could not have been more than five: it is this that
causes complaint. People say: What sort of a book
is this ? The book of a. reprobate people, a book for so
long unknown to all the earth, a book where right, rea-
son and decent custom are outraged on every page, and
which we have presented us as irrefutable, holy, dictated
by God himself ? Is it not an impiety to believe it ? Is
it not the dementia of cannibals to persecute sensible,
modest men who do not believe it?

To which we reply: The Church says she believes it.

Copyists may have introduced revolting absurdities into

reverend stories. Only the Holy Church can be judge

of such matters. The profane should be led by her

.wisdom. These absurdities, these pretended horrors do

284 INSTIGATIONS

not affect the basis of our religion. Where would men
be if the cult of virtue depended on what happened long
ago to Sichem and little Dinah?

"Behold the Kings who reigned in the land of Edom,
before the children of Israel had a king."

Behold another famous passage, another stone which
doth hinder our feet. It is this passage which deter-
mined the great Newton, the pious and sage Samuel
Clarke, the deeply philosophical Bolingbroke, the learned
Leclerc, the savant Freret, and a great number of other
scholars to argue that Moses could not have been the
author of Genesis.

We do indeed confess that these words could only
have been written at a time when the Jews had kings.

It is chiefly this verse which determined Astruc to
upset the whole book of Genesis, and to hypothecate
memories on which the real author had drawn. His
work is ingenious, exact, but rash. A council would
scarcely have dared to undertake it. And to what end
has it served, this ungrateful, dangerous work of this
Astruc? To redouble the darkness which he set out to
enlighten. This is ever the fruit of that tree of knowl-
edge whereof we all wish to eat. Why should it be
necessary that the fruits of the tree of ignorance should
be more nourishing and more easy to manage ?

But what matter to us, after all, whether this verse,
or this chapter, was written by Moses, or by Samuel or
by the priest from Samaria, or by Esdras, or by any one
else? In what way can our government, our laws, our
fortunes, our morafs, our well being, be tied up with the
ignorant chiefs of an unfortunate barbarous country,
called Edom or Idumea, always peopled by thieves?
Alas, these poor shirtless Arabs never ask about our
existence, they pillage caravans and eat barley bread.

GENESIS 285

and we torment ourselves trying to find out whether
there were kinglets in one canton of Arabia Petra before
they appeared in the neighboring canton to the west of
lake Sodom.
O miseras hominium mentest O pectora caecal*

* Our author's treatment of Ezekiel merits equal attention.

VII

ARNAUT DANIEL
RAZO

En Ar. Daniel was of Ribeyrac in Perigord, under
Lcmosi, near to Hautefort, and he was the best fashioner
of songs in the Provengal, as Dante has said of him in
his Purgatorio (XXVI, 140), and Tasso says it was he
wrote "Lancillotto," but this is not known for certain,
but Dante says only "proze di romanzi." Nor is it
known if Benvenuto da Imola speaks for certain when
he says En Amaut went in his age to a monastery and
sent a poem to the princes, nor if he wrote a satire on
Boniface Castillane; but here are some of his canzos,
the best that are left us; and he was very cunning in his
imitation of birds, as in the poem "Autet," where he
stops in the middle of his singing, crying: "Cadahus, en
son us," as a bird cries, and rhyming on it cleverly, witli
no room to turn about on the words, "Mas pel us, estauc
clus," and in the other versets. And in "L'aura amara,"
he cries as the birds in the autumn, and there is some of
this also in his best poem, "Doutz brais e critz."

And in "Breu brisaral," he imitates, maybe, the rough
singing of the joglar engles, from whom he learnt "Ac
et no I'ac"; and though some read this "escomes,'' not
"engles," it is likely enough that in the court of En
Richart there might have been an English joglar, for En

286

ARNAUT DANIEL 287

Beitrans calls Richart's brother "joven re Engles/' so
why should there not be a joglar of the same, knowing
alliterations? And he may, in the ending "piula/' have
had in mind some sort of Arabic singing; for he knew
well letters, in Langue d'Oc and in Latin, and he knew
Ovid, of whom he takes Atalanta; and may be Virgil;
and he talks of the Palux Lerna, though most copyers
have writ this "Uzerna," not knowing the place he
spoke of. So it is as like as not he knew Arabic music,
and perhaps had heard, if he not understood the mean-
ing, some song in rough Saxon letters.

And by making song in rimas escarsas he let into
Provencal poetry many words that are not found else-
where and maybe some words half Latin^ and he uses
many more sounds on the rhyme, for, as Canello or
Lavaud has written, he uses ninety-eight rhyme sounds
in seventeen canzos, and Peire Vidal makes use of but
fifty-eight in fifty-four canzos and Folquet of thirty-
three in twenty-two poems, and Raimbaut Orenga uses
129 rhymes in thirty- four poems, a lower proportion
than Arnaut's. And the songs of En Arnaut are in some
versets wholly free and uneven the whole length of
the verset, then the other five versets follow in the track
of the first, for the same tune must be sung in them
all, or sung with very slight or orderly changes. But
after the earlier poems he does not rhyme often inside
the stanza. And in all he is very cunning, and has many
uneven and beautiful rhythms, so that if a man try to
read him like English iambic he will very often go
wrong; though En Arnaut made the first piece of
"Blank Verse" in the seven opening lines of the "Sols
sui"; and he, maybe, in thinning out the rhymes and
having but six repetitions to a canzone, made way for
Dante who sang his long poem in threes. But this much

288 INSTIGATIONS

is certain, he does not use the rhyme -atage and many
other common rhymes of the Provencal, whereby so
many canzos are all made alike and monotonous on one
sound or two sounds to the end from the beginning.

Nor is there much gap from "Lancan vei f ueill' " or
"D'autra guiza" to the form of the sonnet, or to the
receipt for the Italian strophes of canzoni, for we have
both the repetition and the unrepeating sound in the
verset. And in two versets the rhymes run abab cde
abab cde; in one, and in the other abba cde abba cde;
while in sonnets the rhymes run abab abab cde cde; or
abba abba cde cde. And this is no very great difference.
A sonetto would be the third of a son.

And I do not give "Ac et no I'ac/' for it is plainly told
us that he learnt this song from a jongleur, and he says
as much in his coda:

Miells-de-ben ren
Sit pren

Chanssos grazida
C'Amautz non oblida.

"Give thanks my song, to Miells-de-ben that Amaut has
not forgotten thee." And the matter went as a joke,
and the song was given to Arnaut to sing in his reper-
toire "E fo donatz lo cantar an Ar Daniel, qui et aysi
trobaretz en sa obra." And I do not give the tenzon
with Trues Malecs for reasons clear to all who have
read it; nor do I translate the sestina, for it is a poor
one, but maybe it is interesting to think if the music
will not go through its permutation as the end words
change their places in order, though the first line has only
eight syllables.

ARNAUT DANIEL 389

And En Amaut was the best artist among the Proven-
gals, trying the speech in new fashions, and bringing
new words into writing, and making new blendings of
words, so that he taught much to Messire Dante
Alighieri as you will see if you study En Amaut and the
"De Vulgari Eloquio"; and when Dante was older and
had well thought the thing over he said simply, "il mi-
glior fabbro." And long before Francesco Petrarca,
he, Arnaut, had thought of the catch about Laura, laura,
I'aura, and the rest of it, which is no great thing to his
credit. But no man in Provencal has written as he
writes in "Doutz brais": "E quel remir" and the rest
of it, though Ovid, where he recounts Atalanta's flight
from Hippomenes in the tenth book, had written:

"cum super atria velum
Candida purpureum simulatas infidt umbras."

And in Dante we have much in the style of:

"Que jes Rozers per aiga que Tengrois."

And Dante learned much from his rhyming, and follows
him in agro and Meleagro, but more in a comprehension,
and Dante has learned also of Ovid: "in Metamor-
phoseos" :

"Velut ales, ab alto
"Quae teneram prolem produxit in aera nido,''

although he talks so much of Virgil.

I had thought once of the mantle of indigo as of a
thing seen in a vision, but I have now only fancy to

290 INSTIGATIONS

support this. It is like that men slandered Amaut for
Dante's putting him in his Purgatorio, but the Trues
Malecs poem is against this.

En Arnaut often ends a canzone with a verset in
different tone from the rest, as markedly in "Si fos
Amors." In "Breu brisaral" the music is very curious,
but is lost for us, for there are only two pieces of his
music, and those in Milan, at the Ambrosiana (in R 71
superiore).

And at the end of "Doutz brais,'' is a verset like the
verset of a sirvente, and this is what he wrote as a
message, not making a whole sirvente, nor, so far as we
know, dabbling in politics or writing of it, as Bertrans de
Born has; only in this one place is all that is left us.
And he was a joglar, perhaps for his living, and only
composed when he would, and could not to order, as is
shown in the story of his remembering the joglar's can-
zone when he had laid a wager to make one of his own.

"Can chai la fueilla" is more like a sea song or an
estatnpida, though the editors call it a canzone, and
"Amors e jois/' and some others were so little thought
of, that only two writers have copied them out in the
manuscripts; and the songs are all different one from
another, and their value nothing like even. Dante took
note of the best ones, omitting "Doutz brais," which is
for us perhaps the finest of all, though having some
lines out of strict pertinence. But "Can chai la fueilla'*
is very cleverly made with five, six, and four and seven.
And in "Sols sui" and in other canzos verse is syllabic,
and made on the number of syllables, not by stresses, and
the making by syllables cannot be understood by those of
Petramala, who imagine the language they speak was
that spoken by Adam, and that one system of metric was

ARNAUT DANIEL 291

made in the world's beginning, and has since existed
without change. And some think if the stress fall not
on every second beat, or the third, that they must have
right before Constantine. And the art of En Ar. Daniel
is not literature but the art of fitting words well with
music, well nigh a lost art, and if one will look to the
music of "Chansson doil motz," or to the movement of
"Can chai la fueilla/' one will see part of that which I
mean, and if one will look to the falling of the rhymes
in other poems, and the blending and lengthening of the
sounds, and their sequence, one will learn more of this.
And En Arnaut wrote between 1180 and 1200 of the
era, as nearly as we can make out, when the Provenqal
was growing weary, and it was to be seen if it courd last,
and he tried to make almost a new language, or at least
to enlarge the Langue d'Oc, and make new things possi-
ble. And this scarcely happened till Guinicello, and
Guido Cavalcanti and Dante; Peire Cardinal went to
realism and made satirical poems. But the art of sing-
ing to music went well nigh out of the words, for
Metastasio has left a few catches, and so has Lorenzo di
Medici, but in Bel Canto in the times of Durante, and
Piccini, Paradeis, Vivaldi, Caldara and Benedetto Mar-
cello, the music turns the words out of doors and strews '
them and distorts them to the tune, out of all recogni-
tion ; and the philosophic canzoni of Dante and his times-
men are not understandable if they are sung, and in '
their time music and poetry parted company; the can-
zone's tune becoming a sonata without singing. And
the ballad is a shorter form, and the Elizabethan lyrics
are but scraps and bits of canzoni much as in the
"nineties" men wrote scraps of Swinburne.
Charles d'Orleans made good roundels and songs, as

292 INSTIGATIONS

in "Dieu qui la fait" and in "Quand j'oie la tambourine,
as did also Jean Froissart before him in :

Reviens, ami ; trop longue est ta demeure :
Elle me fait avoir peine et doulour.
Mon esperit te demande a toute heure.
Reviens, ami ; trop longue est ta demeure.

Car il n'est nui, fors toi, qui me sequerre,
Ne secourra, jusques i ton retour.
RevienSy ami; trop longue est ta demeure:
Elle me fait avoir peine et doulour.

And in:

Le corps s'en va, mais le coeur vous demeure.
And in:

On doit le temps ainsi prendre qu'il vient :
Tout dit que pas ne dure la fortune.
Un temps se part, et puis Tautre revient:
On doit le temps ainsi prendre qu'il vient.

Je me comforte en ce qu'il me souvient
Que tons les mois avons nouvelle lune:
On doit le temps ainsi prendre qu'il vient :
Tout dit que pas ne dure la fortune.

Which is much what Bernart de Ventadour has sung:

Per dieUy dona, pauc esplecham d'amor
Va sen lo temps e perdem lo melhor."

ARNAUT DANIEL 293

And Campion was the last, but in none of the later men
is there the care and thought of Eln Amaut Daniel for
the blending of words sung out; and none of them all
succeeded, as indeed he had not succeeded in reviving
and making permanent a poetry that could be sung. But
none of them ail had thought so of the sound of the
words with the music, all in sequence and set together
as had En Amaut of Ribeyrac, nor had, I think, even
Dante Alighicri when he wrote "De Eloquio."

And we find in Provence beautiful poems, as by Vidal
when he sings:

"Ab Talen tir vas me Taire,"

And by the Viscount of St. Antoni :

"Lo clar temps vei brunezir
E'ls auzeletz esperdutz,
Que'l fregz ten destregz e mutz
E ses conort de jauzir.
Done eu que de cor sospir
Per la gensor re qu'anc fos.
Tan joios
Son, qu'ades m'es vis
Que folh' e flor s'espandis.
D'amor son tug miei cossir . . ."

and by Bertrans de Born in "Dompna puois di me/'
but these people sang not so many diverse kinds of music
as En Arnaut, nor made so many good poems in differ-
ent fashions, nor thought them so carefully, though En
Bertrans sings with more vigor, it may be, and in the
others, in Cerclamon, Amaut of Marvoil, in de Venta-
dour, there are beautiful passages. And if the art,
now in France, of saying a song — disia sons, we find

294 INSTIGATIONS

written of more than one troubadour — is like the art of
En Amaut, it has no such care for the words, nor such
ear for hearing their consonance.

Nor among the Provencals was there any one, nor had
Dante thought out an aesthetic of sound ; of clear sounds
and opaque sounds, such as in "Sols sui/' an opaque
sound like Swinburne at his best; and in "Doutz brais"
and in "L'aura amara" a clear sound, with staccato;
and of heavy beats and of running and light beats, as
very heavy in "Can chai la fueilla." Nor do we enough
notice how with his drollery he is in places nearer to
Chaucer than to the Italians, and indeed the Provencal
is usually nearer the English in sound and in feeling,
than it is to the Italian, having a softer humor, not a
bitter tongue, as have the Italians in ridicule.

Nor have any yet among students taken note enough
of the terms, both of love terms, and of terms of the
singing; though theology was precise in its terms, and
we should see clearly enough in Dante's treatise when
he uses such words as pexa, hirsuta, lubrica, combed, and
shaggy and oily to put his words into categories, that
he is thinking exactly. Would the Age of Aquinas have
been content with anything less? And so with the love
terms, and so, as I have said in my Guido, with meta-
phors and the exposition of passion. Cossir, solatz,
plazers, have in them the beginning of the Italian philo-
sophic precisions, and amors qu'ine el cor tni plou is not
a vague decoration. By the time of Petrarca the analy-
sis had come to an end, only the vague decorations were
left. And if Arnaut is long before Cavalcanti,

Pensar de lieis m'es repaus

E traigom ams los huoills cranes,

S'a lieis vezer nols estuich.

ARNAUT DANIEL 295

leads toward "E gli occhi orbati fa vedcre scorto,"
though the music in Arnaut is not, in this place, quickly
apprehended. And those who fear to take a bold line
in their interpretation of "Cill de Doma," might do worse
than re-read:

"Una figura de la donna mia"

and what follows it. And for the rest any man who
would read Arnaut and the troubadours owes great
thanks to Emil Levy of Freiburg i/b for his long work
and his little dictionary (Petit Dictionaire Provengal-
Fran<;ais, Karl Winter's Universitatsbuchhandlung, Hei-
delberg), and to U. A. Canello, the first editor of Arnaut,
who has shown, I think, great profundity in his arrange-
ment of the poems in their order, and has really hit
upon their sequence of composition, and the develop-
ments of En Amaut's trobar; and lastly to Rtni Lavaud
for his new Tolosan edition.

The twenty- three students of Provencal and the seven
people seriously interested in the technic and aesthetic
of verse may communicate with me in person. I give
here only enough to illustrate the points of the rcuo, that
is to say, as much as, and probably more than, the general
reader can be bothered with. The translations are a make-
shift ; it is not to be expected that I can do in ten years
what it took two hundred troubadours a century and a
half to accomplish; for the full understanding of Ar-

296 INSTIGATIONS

naut's system of echoes and blending there is no substi-
tute for the original ; but in extenuation of the language of
my verses, I would point out that the Provencals were not
constrained by the modem literary sense. Their restraints
were the tune and rhyme-scheme, they were not con-
strained by a need for certain qualities of writing, with-
out which no modern poem is complete or satisfactory.
They were not competing with De Maupassant's prose.
Their triumph is, as I have said, in an art between liter-
ature and music ; if I have succeeded in indicating some
of the properties of the latter I have also let the former
go by the board. It is quite possible that if the trouba-
dours had been bothered about "style," they would not
have brought their blend of word and tune to so elaborate
a completion.

"Can chai la fueilla" is interesting for its rhythm, for
the sea-chantey swing produced by simple device of
caesuras:

Can chai la fueilla

dels ausors entrecims.
El freitz s'ergueilla

don sechal vais' el vims,
Dels dous refrims

vei sordezir la brueilla;
Mas ieu soi prims

d'amor, qui que s'en tueilla.

The poem does not keep the same rhyme throughout, and
the only reason for giving the whole of it in my English
dither is that one can not get the effect of the thumping
and iterate foot-beat from one or two strophes alone.

ARNAUT DANIEL 297

CAN CHAI LA FUEILLA

When sere leaf falleth

from the high forkM tips.
And cold appalleth

dry osier^ haws and hips,
Coppice he strips

of bird, that now none calleth.
Fordel ♦ my lips

in love have, though he galletli.

Though all things freeze here,

I can naught feel the cold.
For new love sees, herfc .

my heart's new leaf unfold;
So am I rolled

and lapped against the breeze here:
Love who doth mould

my force, force guarantees here.

Aye, life's a high thing,

where joy's his maintenance.
Who cries 'tis wry thing

hath danced never my dance,
I can advance

no blame against fate's tithing
For lot and chance

have deemed the best thing my thing.

Of love's wayfaring

I know no part to blame,

♦ Preeminence.

298 INSTIGATIONS

All other paring,

compared, is put to shame,
Man can acclaim

no second for comparing
With her, no dame

but hath the meaner bearing.

rid ne'er entangle

% my heart with other fere,
Although I mangle

my joy by staying here
I have no fear

that ever at Pontrangle
You'll find her peer

or one that's worth a wrangle.

She'd ne'er destroy

her man with cruelty
'Twixt here 'n' Savoy

there feeds no fairer she,
Than pleaseth me

till Paris had ne'er joy
In such degree

from Helena in Troy.

She's so the rarest

who holdeth me thus gay.
The thirty fairest

can not contest her sway ;
Tis right, par fay,

thou know, O song that wearest
Such bright array,

whose quality thou sharest.

ARNAUT DANIEL 299

ChatiQon, nor stay

till to her thou declarest :
"Arnaut would say

me not, wert thou not fairest."

"Lancan son passat" shows the simple and presum-
ably early style of Arnaut, with the kind of reversal
from more or less trochaic to more or less iambic move-
ment in fifth and eighth lines, a kind of rhythm taken
over by Elizabethan lyricists. Terms trochaic and iam-
bic are, however, utterly inaccurate when applied to
syllabic metres set to a particular melody:

Lancan son passat li giure
E noi reman puois ni comba,
Et el verdier la flors trembia
Sus el entrecim on poma,

La flors e li chan eil clar quil
Ab la sazon doussa e coigna
M'enseignon c'ab joi m'apoigna,

Sai al temps de I'intran d'April.

LANCAN SON PASSAT LI GIURE

When the frosts are gone and over,
And are stripped from hill and hollow.
When in close the blossom blinketh
From the spray where the fruit cometh,

The flower and song and the clarion
Of the gay season and merry
Bid me with high joy to bear me

Through days while April's coming on.

300 INSTIGATIONS

Though joy's right hard to discover,
Such sly ways doth false Love follow,
Only sure he never drinketh
At the fount where true faith hometh;

A thousand girls, but two or one
Of her falsehoods over chary.
Stabbing whom vows make unwary

Their tenderness is vilely done.

The most wise runs drunkest lover,
Sans pint-pot or wine to swallow,
If a whim her locks unlinketh.
One stray hair his noose becometh.

When evasion's fairest shown,
Then the sly puss purrs most near ye.
Innocents at heart beware ye,

When she seems colder than a nun.

See, I thought so highly of her!
Trusted, but the game is hollow.
Not one won piece soundly clinketh;
All the cardinals that Rome hath.

Yea, they all were put upon.
Her device is "Slyly Wary."
Cunning are the snares they carry,

Yet while they watched they'd be undone.

Whom Love makes so mad a rover,
'LI take a cuckoo for a swallow.
If she say so, sooth I he thinketh
There's a plain where Puy-de-Dome is.

Till his eyes and nails are gone,
He'll throw dice and follow fairly

ARNAUT DANIEL 301

— Sure as old talcs never vary —

For his fond heart he is foredone.

Well I knowy sans writing's cover,
What a plain is, what's a hollow.
I know well whose honor sinketh,
And who 'tis that shame consumeth.

They meet. I lose reception.
'Gainst this cheating I'd not parry
Nor amid such false speech tarry,

But from her lordship will be gone.

Coda

Sir Bertran,* sure no pleasure's won
Like this freedom naught so merry
'Twixt Nile 'n' where the suns miscarry
To where the rain falls from the sun.

The fifth poem in Canello's arrangement, "Lanquan
vei f ueiir e flor e f rug," has strophes in the form :

When I see leaf, and flower and fruit

Come forth upon light lynd and bough.
And hear the frogs in rillet bruit,

And birds quhitter in forest now,
Love inkirlie doth leaf and flower and bear.
And trick my night from me, and stealing waste it,
Whilst other wight in rest and sleep sojoumeth.

•

The sixth is in the following pattern, and the third
strophe translates:

* Presumably De Bom.

302 INSTIGATIONS

Hath a man rights at love ? No grain.

Yet gowks think they've some legal lien.

But she'll blame you with heart serene

That, ships for Bari sink, mid-main.

Or cause the French don't come from Gascony

And for such crimes I am nigh in my shroud,

Since, by the Girist, I do such crimes or none.

"Autet e bas" is interesting for the way in which
Arnaut breaks the flow of the poem to imitate the bird
call in "Cadahus en son us," and the repetitions of this
sound in the succeeding strophes, highly treble, presum-
ably, Neis Jhezus, Mas pel us, etc.

Autet e bas entrels prims fuoills
Son nou de flors li ram eil renc
E noi ten mut bee ni gola
Nuills auzels, anz braia e chanta
Cadahus
En son us;

Per joi qu'ai d'els e del temps
Chant, mas amors mi asauta
Quils motz ab lo son acorda.

AUTET E BAS ENTRELS PRIMS FUOILLS

"Cadahus En son us."

Now high and low, where leaves renew.
Come buds on bough and spalliard pleach
And no beak nor throat is muted;
Auzel each in tune contrasted
Letteth loose
Wriblis * spruce.
♦ Wriblis = warblings.

ARNAUT DANIEL

Joy for them and spring would set

Song on me, but Love assaileth

Me and sets my words t' his dancing.

I thank my God and mine eyes too.

Since through them the perceptions reach.

Porters of joys that have refuted

Every ache and shame I've tasted;

They reduce

Pains, and noose

Me in Amor's corded net.

Her beauty in me prevaileth

Till bonds seem but joy's advancing.

My thanks. Amor, that I win through;
Thy long delays I naught impeach ;
Though flame's in my marrow rooted
I'd not quench it, well 't hath lasted,
Bums profuse.
Held recluse

Lest knaves know our hearts are met,
Murrain on the mouth that aileth,
So he finds her not entrancing.

He doth in Love's book misconstrue.
And from that book none can him teach,
Who saith ne'er's in speech recruited
Aught, whereby the heart is dasted.
Words' abuse
Doth traduce

Worth, but I run no such debt.
Right 'tis in man over-raileth
He tear tongue on tooth mischancing.*
* 1'his is nearly ai bad in the original.

304 INSTIGATIONS

That I love her, is pride, is true,
But my fast secret knows no breach.
Since Paul's writ was executed
Or the forty days first fasted,
Not Cristus
Could produce

Her similar, where one can get
Charms total, for no charm faileth
Her who's memory's enhancing.

Grace and valor, the keep of you

She is, who holds me, each to each.

She sole, I sole, so fast suited.

Other women's lures are wasted.

And no truce

But misuse

Have I for them, they're not let

To my heart, where she regaleth
Me with delights I'm not chancing.

Arnaut loves, and ne'er will fret

Love with o'er-speech, his throat quaileth.

Braggart voust is naught t' his fancy.

In the next poem we have the chatter of birds in au-
tumn, the onomatopoeia obviously depends upon the
"-utjs, -etz, -ences and -or/jer" of the rhyme scheme, 17
of the 68 syllables of each strophe therein included. I
was able to keep the English in the same sound as the
Cadahus, but I have not been able to make more than
map of the relative positions in this canzos.

L'aura amara

Fals bruoilss brancutz

Clarzir

ARNAUT DANIEL 305

Quel doutz espeissa ab f uoills,

Els letz

Bees

Dels auzels ramencs

Ten balps e mutz,

Pars

E non-pars;

Per qu'eu m'esfortz

De far e dir

Plazers

A mains per liei

Que m'a virat has d'aut,

Don tern morir

Sils afans no m'asoma.

The bitter air

Strips panoply

From trees

Where softer winds set leaves,

And glad

Beaks

Now in brakes are coy.

Scarce peep the wee

Mates

And un-mates.

What gaud's the work?

What good the glees?
What curse
I strive to shake I
Me hath she cast from high,
In fell disease
I lie, and deathly fearing.

3o6 INSTIGATIONS

So clear the flare

That first lit me

To seize

Her whom my soul believes;

If cad

Sneaks,

Blabs, slanders, my joy

Counts little fee

Baits

And their hates.
I scorn their perk
And preen, at ease.

Disburse

Can she, and wake

Such firm delights, that I

Am hers, froth, lees

Bigod ! from toe to earring.

Ill

Amor, look yare!

Know certainly

The keys:

How she thy suit receives;

Nor add

Piques,

'Twere folly to annoy.

I'm true, so dree

Fates ;

No debates

Shake me, nor jerk.

My verities

ARNAUT DANIEL

Turn terse,

And yet I ache ;

Her lips, not snows that fly

Have potencies

To slake, to cool my searing.

Behold my prayer,

(Or company

Of these)

Seeks whom such height achieves;

Well clad

Seeks

Her, and would not cloy.

Heart apertly

States

Thought. Hope waits

'Gainst death to irk :

False hrevities
And worse I
To her I raik .•
Sole her ; alt others' dry
Felicities
I count not worth the leering.

Ah, visage, where
Each quality
But frees

One pride-shaft mc
Me; mad frieks
lik ^ hitle prcctpitite.

3o8 INSTIGATIONS

(O' thy beck) destroy,

And mockery

Baits

Me, and rates.

Yet I not shirk

Thy velleities,
Averse

Me not, nor slake
Desire. God draws not nigh
To Dome,* with pleas
Wherein's so little veering.

Now chant prepare.

And melody

To please

The king, who'll judge thy sheaves.

Worth, sad.

Sneaks

Here; double employ

Hath there. Get thee

Plates

Full, and cates,

Gifts, go I Nor lurk

Here till decrees
Reverse,

And ring thou take.
Straight t' Arago I'd ply
Cross the wide seas
But "Rome" disturbs my hearing.

^Our Lady of Poi de Dome? No definite lolution of thii
reference yet found.

ARNAUT DANIEL 309

Coda.

At midnight mirk.

In secrecies

I nurse

My served make *

In heart ; nor try

My melodies

At other's door nor mearing.f

The eleventh canzo is mainly interesting for the open-
ing bass onomatopoeia of the wind rowting in the au-
tumn branches. Arnaut may have caught his alliteration
from the joglar engles, a possible hrimm-hramm-hruffer,
though the device dates at least from Naevius.

En breu brisaral temps braus,
Eill bisa busina els brancs
Qui s'entreseignon trastuich
De sobreclaus rams de f uoilla ;

Car noi chanta auzels ni piula
M' enseign' Amors qu'ieu fassa adonc
Chan que non er segons ni tertz
Ans prims d'afrancar cor agre.

The rhythm is too tricky to be caught at the first
reading, or even at the fifth reading; there is only part
of it in my copy.

Briefly bursteth season brisk,
Blasty north breeze racketh branch,
Branches rasp each branch on each

* Make «» mate, fere, companion.

t Dante cites this poem in the second book of De Vulgmri
Eloquio with poems of his own, De Born's, and Cno Piitoija's,

3IO INSTIGATIONS

Tearing twig and tearing leafage,

Chirms now no bird nor cries querulous;

So Love demands I make outright

A song that no song shall surpass
For freeing the heart of sorrow.

Love is glory's garden close,
And is a pool of prowess staunch
Whence get ye many a goodly fruit
If true man come but to gather.

Dies none frost bit nor yet snowily,
For true sap keepeth off the blight
Unless knave or dolt there pass. . . .

The second point of interest is the lengthening out of
the rhyme in piula, niula, etc. In the fourth strophe
we find :

The gracious thinking and the frank
Clear and quick perceiving heart
Have led me to the fort of love.
Finer she is, and I more loyal
Than were Atlanta and Meleager.

Then the quiet conclusion, after the noise of the
opening, Pcnsar de lieis m'es repaus:

To think of her is my rest
And both of my eyes are strained wry
When she stands not in their sight.
Believe not the heart turns from her.

For nor prayers nor games nor violing
Can move me from her a reed's-breadth.

The most beautiful passages of Arnaut are in the
canzo beginning:

ARNAUT DANIEL 311

Doutz brais e critz,

Lais e cantars e voutas

Aug dels auzels qu'en lor latins fant precs

Quecs ab sa par, atressi cum nos fam

A las amigas en cui entendem;

E doncas ieu qu'en la genssor entendi

Dei far chansson sobre totz de bell' obra

Que noi aia mot fals ni rima estrampa.

GLAMOUR AND INDIGO

Sweet cries and cracks

and lays and chants inflected
By auzels who, In their Latin belikes,
Chirm each to each, even as you and I
Pipe toward those girls on whom our thoughts attract;
Are but more cause that I, whose overweening
Search is toward the Noblest, set in cluster
Lines where no word pulls wry, no rhyme breaks gauges.

No culs de sacs

nor false ways me deflected
When first I pierced tier fort within its dykes.
Hers, for whom my hungry insistency
Passes the gnaw whereby was Vivien wracked ; *
Day-long I stretch, all times, like a bird preening.
And yawn for her, who hath o'er others thrust her
As high as true joy is o'er ire and rages.

Welcome not lax,

and my words were protected
Not blabbed to other, when I set my likes

312 INSTIGATIONS

On her. Not brass but gold was 'neath the die.
That day we kissed, and after it she flacked
O'er me her cloak of indigo, for screening
Me from all culvertz' eyes, whose blathered bluster
Can set such spites abroad; win jibes for wages.

God who did tax

not Longus' sin,* respected
That blind centurion beneath the spikes
And him forgave, grant that we two shall lie
Within one room, and seal therein our pact.
Yes, that she kiss me in the half-light, leaning
To me, and laugh and strip and stand forth in the lustre
Where lamp-light with light limb but half engages.

The flowers wax

with buds but half perfected;
Tremble on twig that shakes when the bird strikes —
But not more fresh than she I No empery.
Though Rome and Palestine were one compact.
Would lure me from her ; and with hands convening
I give me to her. But if kings could muster
In homage similar, you'd count them sages.

Mouth, now what knacks I

What folly hath infected
Thee? Gifts, that th' Emperor of the Salonikes
Or Lord of Rome were greatly honored by.
Or Syria's lord, thou dost from me distract;
O fool I ami to hope for intervening
From Love that shields not love ! Yea, it were juster
To call him mad, who 'gainst his joy engages.

* Longus, centurion in the crucifixion legend.

ARNAUT DANIEL 313

Political Postscript

The slimy jacks

with adders' tongues bisected,
I fear no whit, nor have ; and if these tykes

Have led Galicia's king to villeiny ♦

His cousin in pilgrimage hath' he attacked —
We know — Raimon the Count's son — my meaning
Stands without screen. The royal filibuster
Redeems not honor till he unbar the cages.

Coda

I should have seen it, but I was on such affair,
Seeing the true king crown'd here in Estampa.f

Arnaut's tendency to lengthen the latter lines of the
strophe after the diesis shows in : Er vei vermeils, vertz,
blaus, blancs, gruocs, the strophe form being :

Vermeil, green, blue, peirs, white, cobalt,
Close orchards, hewis, holts, hows, vales.
And the bird-song that whirls and turns
Morning and late with sweet accord.
Bestir my heart to put my song in sheen
T'equal that flower which hath such properties,
It seeds in joy, bears love, and pain ameises.

^King of the Galicians, Ferdinand II, King of Galicta, 1157-
88, son of Berangere, sister of Raimon Bercnger IV ("quattro
figlie ebbc/' etc.) of Aragon, Count of Barcelona. His second
son, Lieutenant of Provence, 1168.

t King crowned at Etampe, Phillipe August, crowned May
29, 1 180, at age of 16. This poem might date Arnaut's birth as
early as 115a

314 INSTIGATIONS

The last cryptic allusion is to the quasi-allegorical
descriptions of the tree of love in some long poem like
the Romaunt of the Rose.

Dante takes the next poem as a model of canzo con-
struction; and he learned much from its melody:

Sols sui qui sai lo sobrefan quem sortz
Al cor d'amor sofren per sobramar,
Car mos volers es tant ferms et entiers
Cane no s'esduis de celliei ni s'estors
Cui encubric al prim vezer e puois:
Qu'ades ses lieis die a lieis cochos motz,
Pois quan la vei non sai, tant I'ai, que dire.

We note the soft suave sound as against the staccato of
"L'aura amara."

Canjson.

I only, and who elrische pain support

Know out love's heart o'er borne by overlove,

For my desire that is so firm and straight

And unchanged since I found her in my sight

And unturned since she came within my glance,

That far from her my speech springs up aflame;

Near her comes not. So press the words to arrest it.

I am blind to others, and their retort

I hear not. In her alone, I see, move,

Wonder. . . . And jest not. And the words dilate

Not truth ; but mouth speaks not the heart outright :

I could not walk roads, flats, dales, hills, by chance,

To find charm's sum within one single frame

As God hath set in her t'assay and test it.

ARNAUT DANIEL 315

And I have passed in many a goodly court

To find in hers more charm than rumor thereof. . . .

In solely hers. Measure and sense to mate.

Youth and beauty learned in all delight,

Gentrice did nurse her up, and so advance

Her fair beyond all reach of evil name.

To clear her worth, no shadow hath oppresst it.

Her contact flats not out, falls not off short . . .

Let her, I pray, guess out the sense hereof

For never will it stand in open prate

Until my inner heart stand in daylight.

So that heart pools him when her eyes entrance,

As never doth the Rhone, fulled and untame,

Pool, where the freshets tumult hurl to crest it.

Flimsy another's joy, false and distort,

No paregale that she springs not above . . .

Her love-touch by none other mensurate.

To have it not? Alas! Though the pains bite

Deep, torture is but galzeardy and dance,

For in my thought my lust hath touched his aim.

God I Shall I get no more I No fact to best it !

No delight I, from now, in dance or sport,
Nor will these toys a tinkle of pleasure prove,
Compared to her, whom no loud profligate
Shall leak abroad how much she makes my right.
Is this too much? If she count not mischance
What I have said, then no. But if she blame,
Then tear ye out the tongue that hath expresst it.

The song begs you : Count not this speech ill chance,
But if you count the song worth your acclaim,
Afnaut cares lyt who praise or who contest it.

3i6 INSTIGATIONS

The XVIth canto goes on with the much discussed and
much too emphasized cryptogram of the ox and the hare.
I am content with the reading which gives us a classic
allusion in the palux Laema. The lengthening of the
verse in the last three lines of the strophe is, I think,
typically Arnaut's. I leave the translation solely for the
sake of one strophe.

Ere the winter recommences

And the leaf from bough is wrested,

On Love's mandate will I render

A brief end to long prolusion:

So well have I been taught his steps and paces

That I can stop thje )tidal-sea's inflowing.

My stot outruns the hare; his speed amazes.

Me he bade without pretences

That I go not, though requested;

That I make no whit surrender

Nor abandon our seclusion :

"Differ from violets, whose fear effaces

Their hue ere winter; behold the glowing

Laurel stays, stay thou. Year long the genet blazes."

"You who commit no offences

'Gainst constancy; have not quested;

Assent not ! Though a maid send her

Suit to thee. Think you confusion

Will come to her who shall track out your traces?

And give your enemies a chance for boasts and crowing?

No! After God, see that she have your praises."

Coward, shall I trust not defences I
Faint ere the suit be tested?

ARNAUT DANIEL 31;

Follow! till she extend her

Favour. Keep on, try conclusion

For if I get in this naught but disgraces,

Then must I pilgrimage past Ebro's flowing

And seek for luck amid the Lemian mazes.

If I've passed bridge-rails and fences.

Think you then that I am bested ?

No, for with no food or slender

Ration, I'd have joy's profusion

To hold her kissed, and there are never spaces

Wide to keep me from her, but she'd be showing

In my heart, and stand forth before his gazes.

Lovelier maid from Nile to Sences

Is not vested nor divested.

So great is her bodily splendor

That you would think it illusion.

Amor, if she but hold me in her embraces,

I shall not feel cold hail nor winter's blowing

Nor break for all the pain in fever's dazes.

Arnaut hers from foot to face is.

He would not have Lucerne, without her, owing

Him, nor lord the land whereon the Ebro grazes.

The feminine rhyming throughout and the shorter
opening lines keep the strophe much lighter and more
melodic than that of the canzo which Canello prints last
of all.

3i8 INSTIGATIONS

SIM FOS AMORS DE JOI DONAR TANT LARGA

"Ingenium nobis ipsa puella facit"

Propertius II, i.

Sim fos Amors de joi donar tant larga
Cum ieu vas lieis d'aver fin cor e franc,
Ja per gran ben nom calgp:^ far embarc
Qu'er am tant aut quel pes mi poia em tomba ;
Mas quand m' albir cum es de pretz al som
Mout m'en am mais car anc Tausiei voler,
Caras sai ieu que mos cors e mos sens
Mi farant far lor grat rica conquesta.

Had Love as little need to be exhorted

To give me joy, as I to keep a frank

And ready heart toward her, never he'd blast

My hope, whose very height hath high exalted.

And cast me down ... to think on my default,

And her great worth; yet thinking what I dare.

More love myself, and know my heart and sense

Shall lead me to high conquest, unmolested.

I am, spite long delay, pooled and contorted
And whirled with all my streams 'neath such a bank
Of promise, that her fair words hold me fast
In joy, and will, until in tomb I am halted.
As I'm not one to change hard gold for spalt.
And no alloy's in her, that debonaire
Shall hold my faith and mine obedience
Till, by her accolade, I am invested.

Long waiting hath brought in and hath extorted
The fragrance of desire; throat and flank

ARNAUT DANIEL 319

The longing takes me . . . and with pain surpassed
By her great beauty. Seemeth it hath vaulted
O'er all the rest . . . them doth it set in fault
So that whoever sees her anywhere
Must see how charm and every excellence
Hold sway in her, untaint, and uncontested.

Since she is such ; longing no wise detorted

Is in me . . . and plays not the mountebank,

For all my sense is her, and is compassed

Solely in her; and no man is assaulted

(By God his dove !) by such desires as vault

In me, to have great excellence. My care

On her so stark, I can show tolerance

To jacks whose joy 's to see fine loves uncrested.

Miels-de-Ben, have not your heart distorted
Against me now; your love has left me blank.
Void, empty of power or will to turn or cast
Desire from me . . . not brittle,* nor defaulted.
Asleep, awake, to thee do I exalt
And offer me. No less, when I lie bare *

Or wake, my will to thee, think not turns thence, ^
For breast and throat and head hath it attested.

Pouch-mouthed blubberers, culrouns and aborted,
May flame bite in your gullets, sore eyes and rank
T' the lot of you, you've got my horse, my last
Shilling, too; and you'd see love dried and salted.
God blast you all that you can't call a hah I
God's itch to you, chit-cracks that overbear

^ "Brighter than glass, and yet as glass is, brittle." The com-
parisons to glass went out of poetry when glass ceased to be
a rare, precious substance. (C/. Passionate Pilgrim, III.)

320 INSTIGATIONS

And spoil good men, ill luck your impotence ! I

More told, the more you've wits smeared and congested.

Coda

Amaut has borne delay and long defence
And will wait long to see his hopes well nested.

[In De Vulgari Eloquio II, 13, Dante calls for freedom
in the rhyme order within the strophe, and cites this
canzo of Amaut's as an example of poem where there
is no rhyme within the single strophe. Dante's ''Rithi-
morum quoque relationi vacemus" implies no careless-
ness concerning the blending of rhyme sounds, for we
find him at the end of the chapter "et tertio rithimorum
asperitas, nisi forte sit lenitati permista: nam lenium
asperorumque rithimorum mixtura ipsa tragoedia nite-
scit," as he had before demanded a mixture of shag^
and harsh words with the softer words of a poem.
"Nimo scilicet eiusdem rithimi repercussio, nisi forte
novum aliquid atque intentatum artis hoc sibi praeroget"
The De Eloquio is ever excellent testimony of the way
in which a great artist approaches the detail of mdtier.]

VIII
TRANSLATORS OF GREEK

EARLY TRANSLATORS OF HOMER
I. HUGHES SALEL

The dilection of Greek poets has waned during the
last pestilent century, and this decline has, I think, kept
pace with a decline in the use of Latin cribs to Greek
authors. The classics have more and more become a
baton exclusively for the cudgelling of schoolboys, and
less and less a diversion for the mature.

I do not imagine I am the sole creature who has been
well taught his Latin and very ill-taught his Greek (be-
ginning at the age, say, of twelve, when one is unready ^
to discriminate matters of style, and when the economy
of the adjective cannot be wholly absiorbing). A child
may be bulldozed into learning almost anything, but man
accustomed to some degree of freedom is loath to ap-
proach a masterpiece through five hundred pages of
grammar. Even a scholar like Porson may confer with
former translators.

We have drifted out of touch with the Latin authors
as well, and we have mislaid the fine English versions:
Golding's Metamorphoses; Gavin Douglas' Mneids;
Marlowe's Eclogues from Ovid, in each of which books
a great poet has compensated, by his own skill, any loss

321

322 INSTIGATIONS

in transition ; a new beauty has in each case been created.
Greek in English remains almost wholly unsuccessful,
or rather, there are glorious passages but no long or
whole satisfaction. Chapman remains the best English
"Homer/' marred though he may be by excess of added
ornament, and rather more marred by parentheses and
inversions, to the point of being hard to read in many
places.

And if one turn to Chapman for almost any favorite
passage one is almost sure to be disappointed; on the
other hand I think no one will excel him in the plainer
passages of narrative, as of Priam's going to Achilles
in the XXIVth Iliad. Yet he breaks down in Priam's
prayer at just the point where the language should be
the simplest and austerest.

Pope is easier reading, and, out of fashion though he
is, he has at least the merit of translating Homer into
something. The nadir of Homeric translation is reached
by the Leaf-Lang prose; Victorian faddism having per-
suaded these gentlemen to a belief in King James
fustian; their alleged prose has neither the concision of
verse nor the virtues of direct motion. In their preface
they grumble about Chapman's "mannerisms," yet their
version is full of "Now behold I" and "yea even as" and
"even as when," tushery possible only to an affected age
bent on propaganda. For, having, despite the exclusion
of the Dictionnaire Philosophique from the island, finally
found that the Bible couldn't be retained either as his-
tory or as private Renter from J'hvh's Hebrew Press
bureau, the Victorians tried to boom it, and even its
wilfully bowdlerized translations, as literature.

"So spake he, and roused Athene that already was set

TRANSLATORS OF GREEK 323

thereon. . . . Even as the son of . . . even in such

guise. . . ."

perhaps no worse than

"With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving"*
but bad enough anyway.

Of Homer two qualities remain untranslated: the
magnificent onomatopoeia, as of the rush of the waves
on the sea-beach and their recession in:

irapd $lva iroXu0Xo(<r/3oco Oakiunnis

untranslated and untranslatable; and, secondly, the au-
thentic cadence of speech; the absolute conviction that
the words used, let us say by Achilles to the "dog-faced"
chicken-hearted Agamemnon, are in the actual swing of
words spoken. This quality of actual speaking is not
untranslatable. Note how Pope fails to translate it:

There sat the seniors of the Trojan race

(Old Priam's chiefs, and most in Priam's grace) :

The king, the first ; Thymoetes at his side ;

Lampus and Cly tins, long in counsel try'd ;

Panthus and Hicetaon, once the strong;

And next, the wisest of the reverend throng,

Antenor grave, and sage Ucalegon,

Lean'd on the walls, and bask'd before the sun.

Chiefs, who no more in bloody fights engage,

But wise through time, and narrative with age,

In summer days like grasshoppers rejoice,

A bloodless race, that send a feeble voice.

These, when the Spartan queen approach'd the tower.

In secret own'd resistless. beauty's power:

* Milton, of course, whom my detractors say I condemn with-
out due circumspection.

324 INSTIGATIONS

They cried, No wonder, such celestial charms
For nine long years have set the world in arms I
What winning graces ! What majestic mien I
She moves a goddess, and she looks a queen I
Yet hence, oh Heaven, convey that fatal face,
And from destruction save the Trojan race.

This is anything but the "surge and thunder," but it is,
on the other hand, a definite idiom, within the limits of
the rhymed pentameter couplet it is even musical in
parts; there is imbecility in the antithesis, and bathos in
"she looks a queen," but there is fine accomplishment in :

"Wise through time, and narrative with age,"

Mr. Pope's own invention, and excellent. What we
definitely can not hear is the voice of the old men speak-
ing. The simile of the grasshoppers is well rendered, but
the old voices do not ring in the ear.

Homer (iii. 156-160) reports their conversation :

06 vkfuciSf Tpii)as Kal kvKP^fiidas Axaio^s

Toi^B d/i^l ywaucl toXvv xfi^^^^ &X7€a irdcrxciv*

AUJn 60aviLTjj<n $€^ c(f &ra touc€v.

'AXXd Kal C^, Tolfi r€p covs', kv viivcl vtkffBd)'

'bifid* ijfAlv TeKk€c<ri r* 'otIccu) Trifia XixoiTO.

Which is given in Sam. Clark's ad verbum translation:
"Non est indigne ferendum, Trojanos et bene-ocreatos
Archivos
Tali de muliere longum tempus dolores pati :
Omnino immortalibus deabus ad vultum similis est.
Sed et sic, talis quamvis sit, in navibus redeat,
Neque nobis liberisque in posterum detrimentum
relinquatur."

TRANSLATORS OF GREEK 325

Mr. Pope has given six short lines for five long ones,
but he has added "fatal" to face (or perhaps only lifted
it from pkfucis), he has added "winning graces/' "ma^
jestic," "looks a queen." As for owning beauty's resist-
less power secretly or in the open, the Greek is :

Toloi &pa Tpcixuv ih^^ropcs ^vr* krl iri)py<^,
Ot i Cn ohp tlho¥ '£X^n;i^ krl whpyop toucaPf
*Hica irp6f AXXi^Xouf liyca vr€p6€¥r* kybpwov'

and Sam. Gark as follows:

"Tales utique Trojanorum proceres sedebant in turri.
Hi autem ut viderunt Helenam ad turrim venientem,
Submisse inter se verbis alatis dixerunt ;"

*Hica is an adjective of sound, it is purely objective,
even suhmisse* is an addition; though *VLxa might, by
a slight strain, be taken to mean that the speech of the
old men came little by little, a phrase from each of the
elders. Still it would be purely objective. It does not
even say they spoke humbly or with resignation.

Chapman is no closer than his successor. He is so
galant in fact, that I thought I had found his description
in Rochefort. The passage is splendid, but splendidly
unhomeric :

"All grave old men, and soldiers they had been, but for
age

Now left the wars; yet counsellors they were exceed-
ingly sage.

And as in well-grown woods, on trees, cold spiny grass-
hoppers

♦/. e. Clark is "correct," but the words shade differently.
Hm means low, quiet, with a secondary meaning of "little by
little." Submisse means low, quiet, with a secondary meaning
of modesty, humbly.

326 INSTIGATIONS

Sit chirping, and send voices out, that scarce can pierce

our ears
For softness, and their weak faint sounds; so, talking

on the tow'r,
These seniors of the people sat; who when they saw

the pow'r
Of beauty, in the queen, ascend, ev'n those cold-spirited

peers,
Those wise and almost wither'd men, found this heat

in their years.
That they were forc'd (though whispering) to say:

'What man can blame
The Greeks and Trojans to endure, for so admir'd a

dame,
So^ many mis'ries, and so long? In her sweet

count'nance shine
Looks like the Goddesses. And yet (though never so

divine)
Before we boast, unjustly still, of her enforced prise,
And justly suffer for her sake, with all our progenies,
Labor and ruin, let her go ; the profit of our land
Must pass the beauty.' Thus, though these could bear

so fit a hand
On their affections, yet, when all their gravest powers

were us'd.
They could not choose but welcome her, and rather they

accus'd
The Gods than beauty; for thus spake the most-fam'd

king of Troy :"
The last sentence representing mostly *Qs &p h^a in the
line:

"Sic dixerunt: Priamus autem Helenam vocavit voce,"

TRANSLATORS OF GREEK 327

Chapman is nearer Swinburne's ballad with:

But those three following men/' etc.

than to his alleged original.

Rochefort is as follows (Iliade, Livre iii, M. de
Roche fort, 1772) :

"Helene a ce discours sentit naitre en son ame
Un doux ressouvcnir de sa premiere flamme;
Le desir de revoir les lieux qu'elle a quittes
Jette un trouble inconnu dans ses sens agites.
Tremblante elle se leve et les yeux pleins de larmes,
D'un voile ^blouissant elle couvre ses charmes ;
De deux femmes suivie elle vole aux remparts.
La s'etaient assembles ces illustres vieillards
Qui courbes sous le faix des travaux et de Tage
N'alloient plus au combat signaler leur courage,
Mais qui, pres de leur Roi, par de sages avis,
Mieux qu'en leurs jeunes ans d^fendoient leur pais.
Dans leurs doux entretiens, leur voix toujours 6gale
Ressembloit aux accents que forme la cigale,
Lorsqu'aux longs jours d'ete cachee en un buisson,
Elle vient dans les champs annoncer la moisson.
Une tendre surprise enflamma leurs visages ;
Frappes de ses appas, ils se disoient entre eux :
'Qui pourroit s'etonner que tant de Rois fameux,
Depuis neuf ans entiers aient combattu pour elle ?
Sur le trone des cieux Venus n'est pas plus belle.
HKlais quelque soit Tamour qu'inspirent ses attraits,
Puisse Illion enfin la perdre pour jamais,
Puisse-t-elle bientot i son epoux rendue,
Conjurer Tinfortune en ces lieux attendue.' "

328 INSTIGATIONS

Hugues Salel (1545), praised by Ronsard, is more
pleasing:

"Le Roi Priam, et auec luy bon nombre
De grandz Seigneurs estoient a I'ombre
Sur les Crenaulx, Tymoetes et Panthus,
Lampus, Clytus, excellentz en vertus,
Hictaon renomme en bataille,
Ucalegon iadis de fort taille,
Et Antenor aux armes nompareil
Mais pour alors ne seruantz qu'en conseil.

La, ces Vieillards assis de peur du Hasle
Causoyent ensemble ainsi que la Ctgnalle
Ou deux ou trois, entre les vertes fueilles,
En temps d'Este gazouillant a merveilles;
Lesquelz voyans la diuine Gregeoise,
Disoient entre eux que si la grande noise
De ces deux camps duroit longe saision,
Certainement ce n'estoit sans raision:
Veu la Beaulte, et plus que humain outrage,
Qui reluysoit en son diuin visaige.
Ce neantmoins il vauldrait mieulx la rendre,
(Ce disoyent ilz) sans gu^res plus attendre.
Pour eviter le mal qui peult venir,
Qui la voudra encores retenir."

Salel is a most delightful approach to the Iliads; he
is still absorbed in the subject-matter, as Douglas and
Golding were absorbed in their subject-matter. Note
how exact he is in the rendering of the old men's mental
attitude. Note also that he is right in his era. I mean
simply that Homer is a little rustre, a little, or perhaps
a good deal, mediaeval, he has not the dovetailing of
Ovid. He has onomatopoeia, as of poetry sung out; he

TRANSLATORS OF GREEK 329

has authenticity of conversation as would be demanded
by an intelligent audience not yet laminated with
aesthetics; capable of recognizing reality. He has the
repetitions of the chanson de geste. Of all the French
and English versions I think Salel alone gives any hint
of some of these characteristics. Too obviously he is not
onomatopoeic, no. But he is charming, and readable,
and "Briseis Fleur des Demoiselles" has her reality.

Nicolo Valla is, for him who runs, closer:

"Consili virtus, summis de rebus habebant
Sermones, et multa inter se et magna loquentes,
Arboribus quales gracili stridere cicadae
Saepe solent cantu, postquam sub moenibus altis
Tyndarida aspiciunt, procerum tum quisque fremebat,
Mutuasque exorsi, Decuit tot funera Teucros
Argolicasque pati, longique in tempore helium
Tantus in ore decor cui non mortalis in artus
Est honor et vultu divina efflagrat imago.
Diva licet facies, Danauum cum classe recedat
Longius excido ne nos aut nostra fatiget
Pignora sic illi tantis de rebus agebant."

This hexameter is rather heavily accented. It shows,
perhaps, the source of various "ornaments" in later Eng-
lish and French translations. It has indubitable sonority
even though monotonous.

It is the earliest Latin verse rendering I have yet come
upon, and is bound in with Raphael of Volterra's first
two Iliads, and some further renderings by Obsopeo.

Odyssea (Liber primus) (1573).

"Die mihi musa uirum ca4>tae post tempora Troiae
Qui mores hominum multorum uidit et urbes

330 INSTIGATIONS

Multa quoque et ponto passus dum naufragus errat

Ut sibi turn sociis uitam seruaret in alto

Non tamen hos cupens f ato deprompsit acerbo

Ob scelus admissum extinctos ausumque malignum

Qui fame compulsu solis rapuere iuvencos

Stulti ex quo reditum ad patrias deus abstulit oras.

Honim itaque exitium memora mihi musa canentt."

Odyssea (Lib. sec.) (1573).

"Cumprimum eifulsit roseis aurora quadrigis
Continuo e stratis proles consurgit Ulyxis
Induit et uestes humerosque adcomodat ensem
Molia denin pedibus formosis uincula nectit
Parque deo egrediens thalamo praeconibus omnis
Concilio cognant extemplo mandat Achaeos
Ipse quoque ingentem properabat ad aedibus hastam
Corripiens : gemenique canes comitantor euntem
Quumque illi mirum Pallas veneranda decorem
Preberer populus venientem suspicit omnis
Inque throno patrio ueteres cessere sedenti."

The charm of Salel is continued in the following ex-
cerpts. They do not cry out for comment. I leave
Ogilby's English and the lines of Latin to serve as con-
trast or cross-light.

Iliade (Livre I). Hugues Salel (1545).*

THE IRE

"Je te supply Deesse gracieuse,
Vouloir chanter I'lre pemicieuse,

* Later continued by l'Abb6 de St. Ch^rroiL

»»

TRANSLATORS OF GREEK 331

Dotit Achille fut tellement espris,
Que par icelle, ung grand nombre d'espritz
Des Princes Grecs, par dangereux encombres,
Feit lors descente aux infernales Umbres.
£t leurs beaulx Corps privez de S^ulture
Furent aux chiens et aux oiseaulx pasture.'

Iliade (Lib. III). John Ogilby (1660).

HELEN

"Who in this chamber, sumpteously adomd
Sits on your ivory bed, nor could you say,
By his rich habit, he had fought to-day :
A reveller or masker so comes drest.
From splendid sports returning to his rest.
Thus did love's Queen warmer desires prepare.
But when she saw her neck so heavenly faire.
Her lovely bosome and celestial eyes.
Amazed, to the Goddess, she replies:
Why wilt thou happless me once more betray,
And to another wealthy town convey.
Where some new favourite must, as now at Troy
With utter loss of honour me enjoy."

Iliade (Livre VI). Salel.

GLAUCUS RESPOND A DIOMfiDE

"Adouc Glaucus, auec grace et audace,
Luy respondit: T'enquiers tu de ma race?
Le genre humain est fragile et muable
Commc la fueille et aussi peu durable.

332 INSTIGATIONS

Car tout ainsi qu'on uoit les branches uertes
Sur le printemps de f ueilles bien couuertes
Qui par les uents d'automne et la froidure
Tombent de Tarbre et perdent leur uerdure
Puis de rechef la gel6e pass6e,
II en reuient k la place laiss^e :
Ne plus ne moins est du lignage humain:
Tel est buy uif qui sera mort demain.
S'il en meurt ung, ung autre reuint naistre.
Voyli comment se conserue leur estre.' "

Iliade (Lib. VI). As in Virgil, Dante, and others.

"Quasim gente rogas ? Quibus et natalibus ortus ?
Persimile est foliis hominum genus omne cadudis
Quae nunc nata uides, pulchrisque, uirescere sylvis
Automno ueniente cadunt, simul ilia perurens
Incubuit Boreas: quaedam sub uerna renasci
Tempora, sic nice perpetua succrescere lapsis,
Semper item nova, sic alliis obeuntibus, ultro
Succedunt alii luuenes aetatc grauatis.
Quod si forte iuvat te qua sit quisque suorum
Stirpe satus, si natales cognoscere quaeris
Forte meos, referam, quae sunt notissima multis.

Iliade (Livre IX). Sale!.

CALYDON

"En Calydon regnoit
Oen^us, ung bon Roy qui donnoit
De ses beaulx Fruictz chascun an les Primices
Aux Immortelz, leur faisant Sacrifices.

»*

TRANSLATORS OF GREEK 333

Or il aduint (ou bieti par son uouloir,

Ou par oubly) qu'il meit 4 nonchalloir

Diane chaste, et ne luy feit offrande,

Dont elle print Indignation grande

Encontre luy, et pour bien le punir

Feit ung Sanglier dedans ses Champs uenir

Horrible et fier qui luy feit grand dommage

Tuant les Gens et gastant le Fruictage.

Maintz beaulx Pomiers, maintz Arbres reuestuz

De Fleur et Fruict, en furent abattuz,

Et de la Dent aguisee et poinctue,

Le Bled gaste et la Vigne tortue.

Melcager, le Filz de ce bon Roy,

Voyant ainsi le piteux Desarroy

De son Pays et de sa Gent trouble

Proposa lors de faire une Assemblee

De bons Veneurs et Leutiers pour chasser

L'horrible Beste et sa Mort pourchasser.

Ce qui f ut faict. Maintes Gens Ty trouvirent

Qui contre luy ses Forces cprouvcrent;

Mais k la fin le Sanglier inhumain

Recent la Mort de sa Royale Main.

Estant occis, deux grandes Nations

Pour la D^pouille eurent Contentions

Les Curetois disoient la meriter,

Ceulx d'Etolie en uouloient heriter."

I Hade (Livre X). Salel.

THE BATHERS

"Quand Ulysses fut en la riche tente
Du compaignon, alors il diligente

.334 INSTIGATIONS

De bien Her ses cheuaulx et les loge
Soigneusement dedans la tneme loge
Et au rang meme ou la belle monture
Du fort Gregeois mangeoit pain et pasture
Quand aux habitz de Dolon, il les pose
Dedans la nef, sur la poupe et propose
En faire ung jour a Pallas sacrifice,
Et luy offrir k jamais son seruice
Bien tost apr^s, ces deux Grecs de ualeur
Se cognoissant oppress6z de chaleur,
Et de sueur, dedans la mer entr^rent
Pour se lauer, et tres bien so froterent
Le col, le dos, les jambes et les cuisses,
Ostant du corps toutes les immondices,
Estans ainsi refreichiz et bien netz,
Dedans des baingz souefs bien ordonnez,
S'en sont entrez, et quand leurs corps
Ont est6 oinctz d'huyle par le dehors.
Puis sont allez inanger prians Minerue
Qu'en tous leurs faictz les dirige et conserue
En respandant du uin i pleine tasse,
(pour sacrifice) au milieu de la place."

II. ANDREAS DIVUS

In the year of grace 1906, '08, or '10 I picked from
the Paris quais a Latin version of the Odyssey by An-
dreas Divus Justinopolitanus (Parisiis, In officina Chris-
tiani Wecheli, M,D, XXXVIII), the volume containing
also the Batrachomyomachia, by Aldus Manutius, and
the "Hymni Deorum" rendered by Georgius Dartona
Cretensis. I lost a Latin Ilicuis for the economy of four
francs, these coins being at that time scarcer with me

I
TRANSLATORS OF GREEK 335

than they ever should be with any man of my tastes
and abilities.

In 191 1 the Italian savant, Signore E. Teza, published
his note, "Quale fosse la Casata di Andreas Divus Jus-
tinopolitanus ?" This question I am unable to answer,
nor do I greatly care by what name Andreas was known
in the privacy of his life: Signore Dio, Signore Divino,
or even Mijnheer van Gott may have served him as
patronymic. Sannazaro, author of De Partu Virginis,
and also of the epigram ending hanc et sugere, trans-
lated himself as Sanctus Nazarenus; I am myself known
as Signore Sterlina to James Joyce's children, while the
phonetic translation of my name into the Japanese tongue
IS so indecorous that I am seriously advised not to use
it, lest it do me harm in Nippon. (Rendered back ad
verbum into our maternal speech it gives for its mean-
ing, "This picture of a phallus costs ten yen." There is
no surety in shifting personal names from one idiom
to another.)

Justinopolis is identified as Capodistria; what matters
is Divus* text. We find for the "Nekuia" (Odys, xi) :
"At postquam ad navem descendimu^, et mare,
Nauem quidem primum deduximus in mare diuum,
Et malum posuimus et vela in navi nigra:
Intro autem oues accipientes ire fecimus, intro et ipsi
luimus dolentes, huberes lachrymas fundentes:
Nobis autem a tergo navis nigrae prorae
Prosperum ventum imisit pandentem velum bonum

amicum
Circe benecomata gravis Dea altiloqua.
Nos autem arma singula expedientes in navi
Sedebamus: hanc autem ventusque gubematorque
dirigebat :

336 INSTIGATIONS

Huius at per totum diem extensa stint vela pontum

transientis :
Occidit tunc Sol, ombratae sunt omnes viae:
Haec autem in fines pervenit profundi Oceani :
lUic autem Cimmeriorum virorum populusque civi-

tasque,
Caligine et nebula cooperti, neque unquam ipsos
Sol lucidus aspicit radiis,
Neque quando tendit ad coelum stellatum,
Neque quando retro in terram a coelo vertitur :
Sed nox pemitiosa extenditur miseris hominibus:
Navem quidem illuc venientes traximus, extra autem

oves
Accepimus : ipsi autem rursus apud fluxum Oceani
luimus, ut in locum perveniremus quem dixit Circe:
Hie sacra quidem Perimedes Eurylochusque
Faciebant : ego autem ensem acutum trahens a f oemore,
Foveam f odi quantum cubiti mensura hinc et inde :
Circum ipsam autem libamina fundimus omnibus mor-

tuis ;
Primum mulso, postea autem dulci vino:
Tertio rursus aqua, et farinas albas miscui :
Multum autem oravi mortuorum infirma capita:
Profectus in Ithicam, sterilem bovem, quae optima

esset,
Sacrificare in domibus, pyramque implere bonis:
Tiresiae autem seorsum ovem sacrificare vovi
Totam nigram, quae ovibus antecellat nostris:
Has autem postquam votis precationibusque gentes

mortuorum
Precatus sum, oves autem accipiens obtruncavi:
In fossam fluebat autem sanguis niger, congregataeque

sunt
Animae ex Erebo cadaverum mortuorum,

TRANSLATORS OF GREEK 337

Nytnphaeque iuvenesque et multa passi senes,

Virginesque tenerae, nuper flebilem animum habentes,

Multi autem vulnerati aereis lanceis

Viri in bello necati, cruenta arma habentes,

Qui multi drcum foveam veniebant aliunde alius

Magno clamore, me autem pallidus timor cepit.

lam postea socios hortans iussi

Pecora, quae iam iacebant iugulata saevo acre,

Excoriantes combuere : supplicare autem Diis,

Fortique Plutoni, et laudatae Proserpinae.

At ego ensem acutum trahens a foemore,

Sedi, neque permisi mortuorum impotentia capita

Sanguinem prope ire, antequam Tiresiam audirem:

Prima autem anima Elpenoris venit socii:

Nondum enim sepultus erat sub terra lata.

Corpus enim in domo Circes reliquimus nos

Infletum et insepultum, quoniam labor alius urgebat:

Hunc quidem ego lachrymatus sum videns, misertusque

sum aio,
Et ipsum clamando verba velocia allocutus sum :

Elpenor, quomodo venisti sub caliginem obscuram:
Praevenisti pedes existens quam ego in navi nigra?
Sic dixi: hie autem mini lugens respondit verbo:
Nobilis Laertiade, prudens Ulysse,
Nocuit mihi dei fatum malum, et multum vinum:
Circes autem in domo dormiens, non animadverti
Me retrogradum descendere eundo per scalam longam,
Sed contra munun cecidi ast autem mihi cervix
Nervorum fracta est, anima autem in infemum

descendit :
Nunc autem his qui venturi sunt postea precor non

praesentibus
Per uxorem et patrem, qui educavit parvum existentem,
Telemachiunque quem solum in domibus reliquisti.

338 INSTIGATIONS

•

Scio enim quod hinc iens dome ex inferni

Insulam in .£aeam impellens benefabricatam navim:

Tunc te postea Rex iubeo recordari mei

Ne me infletum, insepultum, abiens retro, relinquas

Separatus, ne deorum ira fiam

Sed me combure con armis quaecunque mihi sunt,

Sepulchramque mihi accumula cani in litore maris,

Viri infelicis, et cuius apud posteros fama sit:

Haecque mihi perfice, figeque in sepulchro remum.

Quo et vivus remigabam existens cum meis sociis.

Sic dixit : at ego ipsum, respondens, allocutus sum :
Haec tibi inf elix perficiamque et f aciam :
Nos quidem sic verbis respondentes molestis
Sedebamus: ego quidem seperatim supra sang^uinem

ensem tenebam:
Idolum autem ex altera parte socii multa loquebatur :
Venit autem insuper anima matris mortuae
Autolyci (ilia magnanimi Anticlea,
Quam vivam dereliqui iens ad Ilium sacrum,
Hac quidem ego lachrymatus sum videns miseratusque

sum aio:
Sed neque sic sivi priorem licet valde dolens
Sanguinem prope ire, antequam Tiresiam audirem:
Venit autem insuper anima Thebani Tiresiae,
Aureum sceptrum tenens, me autem novit et allocuta

est:
Cur iterum o infelix linquens lumen Solis
Venisti, ut videas mortuos, et iniucundam regionem?
Sed recede a fossa, remove autem ensem acutum,
Sanguinem ut bibam, et tibi vera dicam.

Sic dixi: ego autem retrocedens, ensem argenteum
Vagina inclusi: hie autem postquam bibit sanguinem

nigrum, •

Et tunc iam me verbis allocutus est vates verus:

TRANSLATORS OF GREEK 339

Reditum qtiaeris dulcem illustris Ulysse:
Hanc autem tibi difficilem faciet Deus, non enim

puto
Latere Neptunum, quam iram imposuit animo
Iratus, quern ei filium dilectum excaecasti:
Sed tamen et sic mala licet passi pervenientis,
Si volveris tuum animum continere et sociorum."

The meaning of the passage is, with a few abbrevia-
tions, as I have interpolated it in my Third Canto.

"And then went down to the ship, set keel to breakers,
Forth on the godly sea,
We set up mast and sail on the swart ship.
Sheep bore we aboard her, and our bodies also.
Heavy with weeping ; and winds from stemward
Bore us out onward with bellying canvas,
Circe's this craft, the trim-coifed goddess.
Then sat we amidships — wind jamming the tiller —
Thus with stretched sail we went over sea till day's end.
Sun to his slumber, shadows o'er all the ocean,
Came we then to the bounds of deepest water,
To the Kimmerian lands and peopled cities
Covered with close-webbed mist, unpierced ever
With glitter of sun-rays.

Nor with stars stretched, nor looking back from heaven,
Swartest night stretched over wretched men there,

•

The ocean flowing backward, came we then to the place

Aforesaid by Circe.

Here did they rites, Perimedes and Eurylochus,

And drawing sword from my hip

I dug the ell-square pitkin.

Poured we libations unto each the dead.

340 INSTIGATIONS

First mead and then sweet wine, water mixed with

white flour,
Then prayed I many a prayer to the sickly deadi's-

heads,
As set in Ithaca, sterile bulls of the best
For sacrffice, heaping the pyre with goods.
Sheep, to Tiresias only; black and a bell sheep.
Dark blood flowed in the fosse,
Souls out of Erebus, cadaverous dead,
Of brides, of youths, and of much-bearing old ;
Virgins tender, souls stained with recent tears.
Many men mauled with bronze lance-heads.
Battle spoil, bearing yet dreary arms.
These many crowded about me.
With shouting, pallor upon me, cried to my men for

more beasts.
Slaughtered the herds, sheep slain of bronze.
Poured ointment, cried to the gods,
To Pluto the strong, and praised Proserpine,
Unsheathed the narrow sword,
I sat to keep off the impetuous, impotent dead
Till I should hear Tiresias.
But first Elpenor came, our friend Elpenor,
Unburied, cast on the wide earth,
Limbs that we left in the house of Circe,
Unwept, unwrapped in sepulchre, since toik urged

other.
Pitiful spirit, and I cried in hurried speech:
'Elpenor, how art thou come to this dark coast?
Cam'st thou a- foot, outstripping seamen?*

And he in heavy speech:
'111 fate and abundant wine I I slept in Circe's ingle.
Going down the long ladder unguarded, I fell against

the buttress,

TRANSLATORS OF GREEK 341

Shattered the nape-nerve, the soul sought Avemus.
But thou, O King, I bid remember me, unwept, un-

buried,
Heap up mine arms, be tomb by sea-board, and in-
scribed :
"A man of no fortune and with a name to come*'
And set my oar up, that I swung mid fellows/
Came then another ghost, whom I beat off, Anticlea,
And then Tiresias, Theban,

Holding his golden wand, knew me and spoke first:
'Man of ill hour, why come a second time.
Leaving the sunlight, facing the sunless dead, and this

joyless region?
Stand from the fosse, n^ove back, leave me my bloody

bcver.
And I will speak you true speeches.'

And I stepped back.
Sheathing the yellow sword. Dark blood he drank

then.
And spoke: 'Lustrous Odysseus

Shalt return through spiteful Neptune, over dark seas.
Lose all companions.' Foretold me the ways and the

signs.
Came then Anticlea, to whom I answered:
'Fate drives me on through these deeps. I sought

Tiresias,'
Told her the news of Troy. And thrice her shadow
Faded in my embrace."

It takes no more Latin than I have to know that Divus'
Latin is not the Latin of Catullus and Ovid; that it is
Ulepidus to chuck Latin nominative participles about in
such profusion ; that Romans did not use habentes as the
Greeks used txf^Tts, etc. And nos in line 53 is un-

342 INSTIGATIONS

necessary. Divus' Latin has, despite these wems, its
quality ; it is even singable, there are constant suggestions
of the poetic motion; it is very simple Latin, after all,
and a crib of this sort may make just the difference of
permitting a man to read fast enough to get the swing
and mood of the subject, instead ojF losing both in a
dictionary.

Even habentes when one has made up one's mind to
it, together with less obvious exoticisms, does not upset
one as

"the steep of Delphos leaving."

One is, of necessity, more sensitive to botches in one's
own tongue than to botches in another, however care-
fully learned.

For all the fuss about Divus' errors of elegance
Samuelis Qarkius and Jo. Augustus Exnestus do not
seem to have gone him much better — with two hundred
years extra Hellenic scholarship at their disposal.

The first Aldine^ Greek Iliads appeared I think in
1504, Odyssey possibly later.* My edition of Divus is
of 1538, and as it contains Aldus' own translation of the
Frog-fight, it may indicate that Divus was in touch with
Aldus in Italy, or quite possibly the French edition is
pirated from an earlier Italian printing. A Latin
Odyssey in some sort of verse was at that time in-
finitely worth doing.

Raphael of Volterra had done a prose Odyssey with
the opening lines of several books and a few other brief

^ My impression is that I saw an Iliad by Andreas Divus on
the Quais in Paris, at the time I found his version of the Odys-
sey, but an impression of this sort is, after eight years, un-
trustworthy, it may have been only a Latin Iliad in similar
binding.

TRANSLATORS OF GREEK 343

passages in verse. This was printed with Laurenzo
Valla's prose Iliads as early as 1502. He begins:

"Die mihi musa virum captse post tempora Troiae
Qui mores hominum multorum vidit et urbes
Multa quoque et ponto passus dum naufragus errat
Ut sibi turn sotiis (sociis) vitam servaret in alto
Non tamen hos cupiens fato deprompsit acerbo/'

Probably the source of "Master Watson's" English
quantitative couplet, but obviously not copied by Divus:

"Virum mihi die musa multiscium qui valde multum
Erravit ex quo Troiae sacram urbem depopulatus est:
Multorum autem virorum vidit urbes et mentem
cognovit :
Multos autem hie in* mare passus est dolores, suo in
animOy
Liberans suamque animam et reditum sodorum.''

On the other hand, it is nearly impossible to believe
that Clark and Ernestus were unfamiliar with Divus.
Clark calls his Latin crib a composite "non elegantem
utique et venustam, sed ita Romanam, ut verbis verba."
A good deal of Divus' z^enustas has departed. Qark's
hyphenated compounds are, I think, no more Roman
than are some of Divus' coinage; they may be a trifle
more explanatory, but if we read a shade more of color
into A^^a^arof olvot than we can into anultum xrinum,
it is not restored to us in Qark's copiosum xHnum, nor
does terra spatiosa improve upon terra lata, c6pii^(i|t
being (if anything more than lata) : "with wide ways or
streets/' the wide ways of the world, traversable, open
to wanderers. The participles remain in Qark-Emestus,

344 INSTIGATIONS

many of the coined words remain unchanged. Georgius
Dartona gives, in the opening of the second hymn to
Aphrodite :

"Venerandam auream coronam habentem pulchram

Venerem
Canam, quae totius Cypri munimenta sortita est
Maritimae ubi illam zephyri vis molliter spirantis
Suscitavit per undam multisoni maris,
Spuma in moUi: banc autem auricurae Horae
Suscej>erunt hilariter, immortales autem vestes in-

dtiere :
Capite vero super immortali coronam bene constnic-

tam posuere
Pulchram, auream : tribus autem ansis
Donum orichalchi aurique honorabilis:
Collum autem moUe, ac pectora argentea
Monilibus aureis omabant . . /' etc.

Emestus, adding by himself the appendices to the Epics,
gives us :

"Venerandam auream coronam habentem pulchram

Venerem
Canam, quae totius Cypri munimenta sortita est
Maritimae, ubi illam zephyri vis molliter spirantis
Tulit per undam multisoni maris
Spuma in molli: banc autem auro comam rdigatae

Horae
Susceperunt hilariter, immortales autem vestes in-

duere :
Caput autem super immortale coronam bene construc-

tam posuere

TRANSLATORS OF GREEK 345

Pulchram, auream, perforatis autem auriculis
Donum orichalci preciosi:
Collum autem molle ac pectora Candida*
Monilibus aureis ornabant . . ." etc

"Which things since they are so" lead us to feel that
we would have had no less respect for Messrs. Clarkius
and Ernestus if they had deigned to mention the names
of their predecessors. They have not done this in their
prefaces, and if any mention is made of the sixteenth-
century scholars, it is very effectually buried somewhere
in the voluminous Latin notes, which I have not gone
through in toto. Their edition (Glasgow, 1814) is, how-
ever, most serviceable.

TRANSLATION OF AESCHYLUS

A SEARCH for Aeschylus in English is deadly, ac-
cursed, mind-rending. Browning has "done" the Aga-
memnon, or "done the Agamemnon in the eye" as the
critic may choose to consider. He has written a modest
and an apparently intelligent preface:

"I should hardly look for an impossible transmission
of the reputed magniloquence and sonority of the Greek;
and this with the less regret, inasmuch as there is abun-
dant musicality elsewhere, but nowhere else than in his
poem the ideas of the poet."

He quotes Matthew Arnold on the Greeks : "their ex-
pression is so excellent, because it is so simple and so
well subordinated, because it draws its force directly
from the pregnancy of the matter which it conveys • . .
not a word wasted, not a sentiment capriciously thrown
in, stroke on stroke." *

* Reading ipyv^it^ip, variant dfyvpk9*wip, offered in footnote.
In any case argeniia ii closer than Candida.

346 INSTIGATIONS

He is reasonable about the Greek spelling. He points
out that ySvov Ud>v KdWicrov h»h(Mv sounds very poorly
as "Seeing her son the fairest of men" but is out-
shouted in "Remirando il figliuolo bellissimo degli
uomini/' and protests his fidelity to the meaning of
Aeschylus.

His weakness in this work is where it essentially lay
in all of his expression, it rests in the term "ideas" —
"Thought" as Browning understood it — ^"ideas" as the
term is current, are poor two dimensional stuff, a scant,
scratch covering. "Damn ideas, anyhow." An idea is
only an imperfect induction from fact.

The solid, the "last atom of force verging off into the
first atom of matter" is the force, the emotion, the ob-
jective sight of the poet. In the Agamemnon it is the
whole rush of the action, the whole wildness of Kassan-
dra's continual shrieking, the flash of the beacon fires
burning unstinted wood, the outburst of

Tpoidv Axaui^y o&o'ay,
or the later

Tpolav 'Axacot t^6* Ixova' kv ifrkpa.

"Troy is the greeks*." Even Rossetti has it better than
Browning: "Troy's down, tall Troy's on fire," anything,
literally anything that can be shouted, that can be
shouted uncontrolledly and hysterically. "Troy is the
Greeks' " is an ambiguity for the ear. "Know that our
men are in Ilion."

Anything but a stilted unsayable jargon. Yet with
Browning we have

l«

TRANSLATORS OF GREEK 347

Troia the Achaioi hold/' and later,

Troia do the Achaioi hold," followed by :

"this same day
I think a noise — no mixture — reigns i' the dty
Sour wine and unguent pour thou in one vessel "

And it does not end here. In fact it reaches the nadir of
its bathos in a later speech of Klutaimnestra in the line

"The perfect man his home perambulating I"

We may add several exclamation points to the one which
Mr. Browning has provided. But then all translation
is a thankless, or is at least most apt to be a thankless
and desolate undertaking.

What Browning had not got into his sometimes ex-
cellent top-knot was the patent, or what should be the
patent fact that inversions of sentence order in an unin-
flected language like English are not, simply and utterly
are ftot any sort of equivalent for inversions and per-
turbations of order in a language inflected as Greek
and Latin are inflected. That is the chief source of his
error. In these inflected languages order has other cur-
rents than simple sequence of subject, predicate, object;
and all sorts of departures from this Franco-English
natural position are in Greek and Latin neither confus-
ing nor delaying ; they may be both simple and emphatic,
they do not obstruct one's apperception of the verbal
relations.

Obscurities not inherent in the matter, obscurities due
not to the thing but to the wording, are a botch, and are

348 INSTIGATIONS

not worth preserving in a translation. The work, lives
not by them but despite them.

Rossetti is in this matter sounder than Browning,
when he says that the only thing worth bringing over is
the beauty of the original; and despite Rossetti's pur-
ple plush and molasses trimmings he meant by "beaut/'
something fairly near what we mean by the "emotional
intensity" of his original.

Obscurities (inherent in the thing occur when the
author is piercing, or trying to pierce into, uncharted
regions; when he is trying to express things not yet
current, not yet worn into phrase; when he is ahead of
the emotional, or philosophic sense (as a painter might
be ahead of the color-sense) of his contemporaries.

As for the word-sense and phrase-sense, we still hear
workmen and peasants and metropolitan bus-riders re-
peating the simplest sentences three and four times,
back and forth between interlocutors: trying to get the
sense "I sez to Bill, I'm goin' to 'Arrow" or some other
such subtlety from one occiput into another.

"You sez to Bill, etc."

"Yus, I sez . . . etc."

"O !"

The first day's search at the Museum reveals
"Aeschylus" printed by Aldus in 1518; by Stephanus in
1557, no English translation before 1777, a couple in the
1820's, more in the middle of the century, since 1880
past counting, and no promising names in the list,
Sophocles falls to Jebb and does not appear satisfactory.

From which welter one returns thankfully to the
Thomas Stanley Greek and Latin edition, with Sand.
Butler's notes, Cambridge, "typis ac sumptibus acade-
micis," 181 1 — once a guinea or half a guinea per vol-
ume, half leather, but now mercifully, since people no

TRANSLATORS OF GREEK 349

longer read Latin, picked up at 2s. for the set (eight
volumes in all), rather less than the price of their
postage. Quartos in excellent type.

Browning shows himself poet in such phrases as "dust,
mud's thirsty brother," which is easy, perhaps, but is
English, even Browning's own particular English, as
"dust, of mud brother thirsty," would not be English
at all; and if I have been extremely harsh in dealing
with the first passage quoted it is still undisputable that
I have read Browning off and on for .seventeen years
with no small pleasure and admiration, and am one of
the few people who know anything about his Sordello,
and have never read his Agamemnon, have not even
now when it falls into a special study been able to get
through his Agamemnon.

Take another test passage :

n6ait, y€Kp6t 6k r$a5c 5c(iat x^P^
"Efiyop ducalyas riKTovot. TA3' ^ tx^i, 14^5

"Hicce est Agamemnon, maritus
Mens, hac dextra mortuus,
Facinus justae artificis. Haec ita se habent."

We turn to Browning and find:

" — this man is Agamemnon,
My husband, dead, the work of this right hand here,
Aye, of a just artificer : so things are."

To the infinite advantage of the Latin, and the com-
plete explanation of why Browning's Aeschylus, to say
nothing of forty other translations of Aeschylus, is un-
readable.

350 INSTIGATIONS

Any bungling translation:

'This is Agamemnon,
My husbsmd.
Dead by this hand,
And a good job. These, gentlemen, are the facts/'

No, that is extreme, but the point is that any natural
wording, anything which keeps the mind off theatricals
and on Klutaimnestra actual, dealing with an actual
situation, and not pestering the reader with frills and
festoons of language, is worth all the convoluted tush-
ery that the Victorians can heap together.

I can conceive no improvement on the Latin, it saves
by dextra for ht^w x^P^t it loses a few letters in "se
habent," but it has the same drive as the Greek.

The Latin can be a whole commentary on the Greek,
or at least it can give one the whole parsing and order,
and let one proceed at a comforable rate with but the
most rudimentary knowledge of the original language.
And I do not think this a trifle; it would be an ill day
if men again let the classics go by the board ; we should
fall into something worse than, or as bad as, the counter-
reformation: a welter of gum-shoes, and cocoa, and
Y. M. C. A. and Webbs, and social theorizing conunit-
tees, and the general hell of a groggy doctrinaire ob-
fuscation; and the very disagreeablizing of the classics,
every pedagogy which puts the masterwork further from
us, either by obstructing the schoolboy, or breeding af-
fectation in dilettante readers, works toward such a
detestable end. I do not know that strict logic will
cover all of the matter, or that I can formulate anything
beyond a belief that we test a translation by the feel,
and particularly by the feel of being in contact with

TRANSLATORS OF GREEK 351

the force of a great original, and it does not seem to
me that one can open this Latin text of the Agamemnon
without getting such sense of contact :

"Mox sciemus lampadum luciferarum 498

Signorumque per faces et ignis vices,
An vere sint, an somniorum instar,
Gratum veniens illud lumen eluserit animum nostrum.
Praeconem hunc a littore video obumbratum
Ramis olivae : testatur autem haec mihi f rater
Luti socius aridus pulvis,
Quod neque mutus, neque accendens facem
Materiae montanae signa dabit per fumum ignis/'

"Apollo, Apollo! 1095

Agyieu Apollo mi I
Ah I quo me tandem duxisti ? ad qualem domum ?

• •••••

"Heu, heu, ecce, ecce, cohibe a vacca 1134

Taurum: vestibus involens
Nigricornem machina
Percutit; cadit vero in aquali vase.
Insidiosi lebetis casum ut intelligas velim.

• .••••
Heu, heu, argutae lusciniae fatum mUU tribuis:

Heu nuptiae, nuptiae Paridis exitiales 1165

AmicisI eheu Scamandri patria undal"

All this howling of Kassandra comes at one from the
page, and the grimness also of the Iambics:

"Ohime! lethali intus percussus sum vuhiere." 1352
"Tace: quis clamat vuinus lethaliter vulneratus?"

052 INSTIGATIONS

"Ohime! iterum secundo ictu sauciatus."

"Patrari fadnus mihi videtur regis ex ejulatu. 1355

"At tuta communicemus consilia." .

"Ego quidem vobis meam dico sententiam/' etc

Here or in the opening of the play, or where you
like in this Latin, we are at once in contact with the
action, something real is going on, we are keen and
curious on the instant, but I cannot get any such impact
from any part of the Browning.

"In helium nuptam,
Auctricem que contentionum, Helenam : 695

Quippe quae congruenter

Perditrix navium, perditrix virorum, perditrix urbium,
E delicatis

Thalami omamentis navigavit
Zephyri terrigenae aura.
Et numerosi scutiferi,
Venatores secundum vestigia,
Remorum inapparentia
Appulerunt ad Simoentis ripas
Foliis abundantes
Ob jurgium cruentum."

"War-wed, author of strife.
Fitly Helen, destroyer of ships, of men,
Destroyer of cities,
From delicate-curtained room
Sped by land breezes.

"Swift the shields on your track.
Oars on the unseen traces.
And leafy Simois

TRANSLATORS OF GREEK 353

Gone red with blood." *

Q)ntested Helen, 'AM^iMuc^.

"War-wed, contested,
(Fitly) Helen, destroycir of ships; of men;
Destroyer of cities,

"From the delicate-curtained room
Sped by land breezes.

"Swift on the shields on your track,
Oars on the unseen traces.

"Red leaves in Simois!"

"Rank flower of love, for Troy."

"Quippe leonem educavit . . . 726

Mansuetum, pueris amabilem . . .
. . . divinitus sacerdos Ates (i.e. Paris)
In aedibus enutritus est.

"Statim igitur venit 746

Ad urbem Ilii,
Ut ita dicam, animus
Tranquillae serenitatis, pladdum
Divitiarum ornamentum
Blandum oculourum telum,

*"H. D.'s" translations from Euripides should be mentioned
either here or in connection with "The New Poetrjr^; she has
obtained beautiful strophes for First Chorus of Iphigenia in
Aulis, 1-4 and 9, and for the first of the second chorus. Else-
where she retains certain needless locutions, and her rersifica-
tion permits too many dead stops in its current

354 INSTIGATIONS

Animum pungens flos atnoris

(Helena) accubitura. Per fecit autem

Nuptiarum acerbos exitus,

Mala vidna, mafaque socia,

Irruens in Priamidas,

Ductu Jovis Hospitalis,

Erinnys luctuosa sponsis."

It seems to me that English translators have gone wide
in two ways, first in trying to keep every adjective, when
obviously many adjectives in the original have only
melodic value, secondly they have been deaved with syn-
tax; have wasted time, involved their English, trying
first to evolve a definite logical structure for the Greek
and secondly to preserve it, and all its grammatical re-
lations, in English.

One might almost say that Aeschylus' Greek is agglu-
tinative, that his general drive, especially in choruses, is
merely to remind the audience of the events of the Tro-
jan war; that syntax is subordinate, and duly subordi-
nated, left out, that he is not austere, but often even ver-
bose after a fashion (not Euripides' fashion).

A reading version might omit various things which
would be of true service only if the English were actually
to be sung on a stage, or chanted to the movements of
the choric dance or procession.

Above suggestions should not be followed with intem-
perance. But certainly more sense and less syntax (good
or bad) in translations of Aeschylus might be a relief.

Chor. Anapest:

"O iniquam Helenam, una quae multas, 1464

Multas admodum animas

Perdidisti ad Trojam!

Nunc vero nobilem memorabilem (Agam. animam).

TRANSLATORS OF GREEK 355

Deflorasti per caedem inexpiabilem.
" Talis erat tunc in aedibus
Eris viri domitrix aerumna."

Clytemnestra :
Nequaquam mortis sortem exopta 1470

Hisce gravatus ;

Neque in Helenam iram convertas,
Tanquam viriperdam, ac si una multorum
Virorum aniinas Graecorum perdens,
Intolerabilem dolorem cffecerit."

Clytemnestra :

"Mortem baud indignam arbitrar 1530

Huic contigisse:

Neque enim ille insidiosam dadem

Aedibus intulit; sed meum ex ipso

Germen sublatum, multum defletam

Iphigeniam cum indigne affecerit,

Digna passus est, nihil in inferno

Glorietur, gladio inflicta

Morte luens quae prior perpetravit."

"Death not unearned, nor yet a novelty in this house ;
Let him make talk in hell concerning IphigeniaJ

ffi

(If we allow the last as ironic equivalent of the literal
let him not boast in hell.")

He gets but a thrust once given (by him)
Back-pay, for Iphigenia/'

One can further condense the English but at the cost of
obscurity.

356 INSTIGATIONS

Morshead is bearable in Clytemnestra's description of
the beacons.

"From Ida's top Hephaestos, Lord of fire,
Sent forth his sign, and on, and ever on.
Beacon to beacon sped the courier-flame
From Ida to the crag, that Hermes loves
On Lemnos ; thence into the steep sublime
Of Athos, throne of Zeus, the broad blaze flared.
Thence, raised aloft to shoot across the sea
The moving light, rejoicing in its strength
Sped from the pyre of pine, and urged its way.
In golden glory, like some strange new sun.
Onward and reached Macistus' watching heights."

THE CHINESE WRITTEN CHARACTER
AS A MEDIUM FOR POETRY

BY ERNEST FENOLLOSA

[This essay was practically finished by the late Ernest Fenol-
losa; I have done little more than remove a few repetitions and
shape a few sentences.

We have here not a bare philological discussion, but a study of ^
the fundamentals of all esthetics. In his search through un- t
known art Fenollosa, coming upon unknown motives and prin-
ciples unrecogniMed in the West, was already led into many
modes of thought since fruitful in "vuvd* western pai$^ing and •
poetry. He was a forerunner xvithout knowing it and without
being knowft as such.

He discerned principles of writing which he had scarcely time
to put into practice. In Japan he restored, or greatly helped to
restore, a respect for the native art. In America and Europe
he cannot be looked upon as a mere searcher after exotics.
His mind was constantly filled with parallels and comparisons
between eastern and western art. To him the exotic was always
a means of fructification. He looked to an American renais-
sance. The vitality of his outlook can be judged from the fad
thai although this essay was written some time before his death
. in 1908 / have not had to change the allusions to western con-
ditions. The later movements in art have corroborated his
theories. — Ezra Pounr]

This twentieth century not only turns a new page in
the book of the world, but opens another and a startling
chapter. Vistas of strange futures unfold for man, of
world-embracing cultures half weaned from Europe, of
hitherto undreamed responsibilities for nations and races.

357

358 INSTIGATIONS

The Chinese problem alone is so vast that no nation
can afford to ignore it. We in America, especially, must
face it across the Pacific, and master it or it will master
us. And the only way to master it is to strive with pa-
tient sympathy to understand the best, the most hopeful
and the most human elements in it.

It is unfortunate that England and America have so
long ignored or mistaken the deeper problems of Ori-
ental culture. We have misconceived the Chinese for
a materialistic people, for a debased and worn-out race.
We have belittled the Japanese as a nation of copyists.
We have sttipidly assumed that Chinese history affords
no glimpse of change in social evolution, no salient epoch
of moral and spiritual crisis. We have denied the. es-
sential humanity of these peoples; and we have toyed
with their ideals as if they were no better than comic
songs in an "opera bouffe."

The duty that faces us is not to batter down their forts
or to exploit their markets, but to study and to come to
sympathize with their humanity and their generous as-
pirations. Their type of cultivation has been high.
Their harvest of recorded experience doubles our own.
The Chinese have been idealists, and experimenters in
the making of great principles; their history opens a
world of lofty aim and achievement, parallel to that of
the ancient Mediterranean peoples. We need their best
ideals to supplement our own — ideals enshrined in their
art, in their literature and in the tragedies of their lives.

We have already seen proof of the vitality and practi-
cal value of oriental painting for ourselves and as a key
to the eastern soul. It may be worth while to approach
their literature, the intensest part of it, their poetry, even
in an imperfect manner.

rnE CHINESK WRITTEN CHARACTER 359

I feel that I should perhaps apologize * for presuming
to follow that series of brilliant scholars, Davis, L^ge,
St. Denys and Giles, who have treated the subject of
Chinese poetry with a wealth of erudition to which I
can proffer no claim. It is not as a professional linguist
nor as a sinologue that I humbly put forward what I
have to say. As an enthusiastic student of beauty in
Oriental culture, having spent a large portion of my
years in close relation with Orientals, I could not but
breathe in something of the poetry incarnated in their f

lives.

I have been for the most part moved to my temerity
by personal considerations. An unfortunate belief has
spread both in England and in America that Chinese and
Japanese poetry are hardly more than an amusement,
trivial, childish, and not to be reckoned in the world's
serious literary performance. I have heard well-known
sinologues state that, save for the purposes of profes-
sional linguistic scholarship, these branches of poetry are
fields too barren to repay the toil necessary for their cul-
tivation.

Now my own impression has been so radically and di-
ametrically opposed to such a conclusion, that a sheer en-
thusiasm of generosity has driven me to wish to share
with other Occidentals my newly discovered joy. Either
I am pleasingly self-deceived in my positive delight, or
else there must be some lack of aesthetic syn^thy and
of poetic feeling in the accepted methods of presenting
the poetry of China. I submit my causes of joy.

Failure or success in presenting any alien poetry in
English must depend largely upon poetic workmanship
in the chosen medium. It was perhaps too much to

♦ [The apology xvas unnecessary, but Professor FenoUosa saw
at to make ii, and I therefore transcribe his words. — £. P.]

360 INSTIGATIONS

^> / expect that aged scholars who had spent their youth in
\<V 1 gladiatorial combats with the refractory Chinese charac-
\ ters should succeed also as poets. Even Greek verse
might have fared equally ill had its purveyors been per-
force content with provincial standards of English rhym-
Iing. Sinologues should remember that the purpose of
poetical translation is the poetry, not the verbal defini-
tions in dictionaries.

One modest merit I may, perhaps, claim for my work :
it represents for the first time ajaganese school o f_study
]1 m Chinese culture. Hitherto Europeans have~Eeen some-
• wfisiTaTthe mercy of contemporary Chinese scholarship.
! Several centuries ago China lost much of her creative
self, and of her insight into the causes of her own life,
, but her original spirit still lives, grows, interprets, trans-
; f erred to Japan in all its original freshness. The Japa-
. nese to-day represent a stage of culture roughly (Corre-
sponding to that of China under the Sung dynasty. I
have been fortunate in studying for many years as a pri-
vate pupil under Professor Kainan Mori, who is prob-
ably the greatest living authority on Chinese poetry. He
has recently been called to a chair in the Imperial Uni-
versity of Tokio.

My subject is poetry, not language, yet the roots of
poetry are in language. In the study of a language so
alien in form to ours as is Chinese in its written charac-
ter, it is necessary to inquire how those universal ele-
ments of form which constitute poetics can derive appro-
^priate nutriment.

In what sense can verse, written in terms of visible
hieroglyphics, be reckoned true poetry? It might seem
that poetry, which like music is a time art, weaving its
unities out of successive impressions of sound, could

THE CHINESE WRITTEN CHARACTER 361

with difficulty assimilate a verbal medium consisting
largely of semi-pictorial appeals to the eye.
Contrast, for example, Gray's line:

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day
with the Chinese line :

Moon

^^ J%

Rays Like

Moon rays like pure snow.

Snow

Unless the sound of the latter be given, what have they
in common ? It is not enough to adduce that each con-
tains a certain body of prosaic meaning; for the ques-
tion is, how can the C hinese line imply, as form, the very
element that distinguishes poetry Trbm t)rose?

On second glance, it is seen that the Chinese words,
though visible, occur in just as necessary an order as
the phonetic symbols of Gray. All that poetic form re-
quires is a regular and flexible sequence, as plastic as
thought itself. The characters may be seen and read
silently by the eye, one after the other:

Moon rays like pure snow.

Perhaps we do not always sufficiently consider that \
thoug:h^ is successive, not through some acddcnt^piLweak- ^
ne§s of our subjective operatiohs'liiFBecause the opera-
Jions of nature are successive. The transferences of
force from agent to object which constitute natural phe-
nomena, occupy time. Therefore, a reproduction of \
them in imagination requires the same temporal order.*

* [Style, that is to say, limpidity, as opposed to rhetoric —

E. P.] /

362 INSTIGATIONS

Suppose that we look out of a window and watch a
man. Suddenly he turns his head and actively fixes his
attention upon something. We look ourselves and see
that his vision has been focussed upon a horse. We saw«
first, the man before he acted; second, while he acted;
third, the object toward which his action was directed.
In speech we split up the rapid continuity of this action
and of its picture into its three essential parts or joints
in the right order, and say :

Man sees horse.

It is clear that these three joints, or words, are only
three phonetic symbols, which stand for the three terms
of a natural process. But we could quite as easily de-
note these three stages of our thought by symbols equally
arbitrary, which had no basis in sound; for example, by
three Chinese characters :

Man Sees Horse

If we all knew what division of this mental horse-
picture each of these signs stood for, we could communi-
cate continuous thought to one another as easily by draw-
ing them as by speaking words. We habitually employ
the visible language of gesture in much this same man-
ner.

I But Chinese notation is something much more than
(arbitrary symbols. It is based upon a vivid shorthand
'.picture of the operations of nature. In the algebraic
figure and in the spoken word there is no natural con-
nection between thing and sign: all depends upon sheer

THE CHINESE WRITTEN CHARACTER 363

convention. But the Chine6e.-inethod_follows natural
suggestion. First'sFands the man on his two legs. Sec-
ond, his eye moves through space: a bold figure repre-
sented by running legs under an eye, a modified picture
of an eye, a modified picture of running legs but unfor-
gettable once you have seen it. Third stands the horse
on his four legs.

The thought picture is not only called up by these signs
as well as by words but far more vividly and concretely.
Legs belong to all three characters : they are alive. The
group holds something of the quality of a continuous
moving picture.

The untruth of a painting or a photograph is that, in
spite of its concreteness, it drops the element of natural
succession.

Contrast the Laocoon statue with Browning's lines:

"I sprang to the saddle, and Jorris, and he
And into the midnight we galloped abreast."

\ One superiority.-of-verbaLpoetry.-as-an-art -rests. in its !

I getting back to the fundamental rezVLtyjit time. Chinese
poetry has the unique advantage of combining both ele- /
I ments. It speaks at once with th^vividne^^of painting, J y/t^
and with the mbbllify^of^ounds. It is, in some sense,
more objective'tHan either", more dramatic. In reading
Chinese we do not seem to be juggling mental counters,
but to^ be w atching things work out t heir own fa te.

Leaving for a moment the"form ot the sentence, let •
us look more closely at this quality of vividness in the
structure of detached Chinese words. The earlier forms
of these characters were pictorial, and their hold upon
the imagination is little shaken, even in later conventional

..')
V)^'"

364 INSTIGATIONS

modifiaflions. It is not so well known, perhaps, that
the great number of these ideographic roots carry in
them a ver,bdideajip action. It might be thought that a
picture is naturally the picture of a thing, and that there-
fore the root ideas of Chinese are what grammar caUs
nouns.

But examination shows that a large number of the
primitive Chinese characters, even the so-called radicals,
are shorthand pictures of actions or processes.

For exSffiple, tneideograph meanmg"'"to speak** is a
mouth with two words and a flame coming out of it.
The sign meaning "to grow up with difficulty** is grass
with a twisted root. But this concrete verb quality, both
in nature and in the Chinese signs, becomes far more
^yN. f^' \;» striking and poetic when we pass from such simple, orig-
'^ ^^ 1?^' J'^^l pictures to compotmds. In this process of com-
V >^ pounding, two things added together do not produce a

third thing but suggest some fundamental relation be-
tween them. For example, the ideograph for a "mess-
mate" is a man and a fire.

A true noun, an isolated thing, does not exist in na-
ture. Things are only the terminal points, or rather the
meeting points of actions, cross-sections cut through ac-
tions, snap-shots. Neither can a pure verb, an abstract
motion, be possible in nature. The eye sees noun and
verb as one: things in jpQtiony-pf^^Hnn yn thfpgq and so
the Chinese conception, tends .tajspr esent them.

The sun underlying the bursting forth of plants =
spring.

The sun sign tangled in the branches of the tree sign =
east.

"Rice-field" plus "struggle" = male.

"Boat" plus "water." boat-water, a ripple.

Let us return to the form of the sentence and see what

(
4

THE CHINESE WRITTEN CHARACTER 365

power it adds to the verbal units from Which.it builds.
I wonder how many people have asked themselves why
the sentence form exists at all, why it seems so univer*
sally necessary in all languagesf Why must all possess
it, and what is the normal type of it? If it be so univer-
sal it ought to correspond to some primary law of nature.

I fancy the professional grammarians have given but
a lame response to this inquiry. Their definitions fall
into two types: one, that a sentence expresses a "com-
plete thought"; the other, that in it we bring about a
union of subject and predicate.'

The former has the advantage of trying for some nat-
ural objective standard, since it is evident that a thought
can not be the test of its own completeness. But Jn na-
ture there isjio completeness. On the one hand, prac-
ticar completeness may "Be expressed by a mere inter-
jection, as "Hi I there !", or "Scat !", or even by shaking
one's fist No sentence is needed to make one's mean-
ing more clear. On the other hand, no full sentence
really completes a thought The man who sees and the
horse which is seen will not stand still. The man was
planning a ride before he looked. The horse kicked
when the man tried to catch him. The truth is that acts
are successive, even continuous ; one causes or passes into
another. And though we may string never so many
clauses into a single compound sentence, motion leaks
ever)rwhere, like electricity from an exposed wire. All
processes in nature are inter-related ; and thus there could
be no complete sentence (according to this definition)
save one which it would take all time to pronounce.

In the second definition of the sentence, as ''uniting
a subject and a predicate," the grammarian falls back on
pure subjectivity. We do it all ; it is a little private jug-
gling between our right and left hands. The subject is

366 INSTIGATIONS

that about which / am going to talk ; the predicate is that
which / am going to say about it. The sentence accord-
ing to this definition is not an attribute of nature but an
accident of man as a conversational animal.

If it were really so, then there could be no possible
test of the truth of a sentence. Falsehood would be as
specious as verity. Speech would carry no conviction.

Of course this view of the grammarians springs from
the discredited, or rather the useless, logic of the middle
ages. Accord ing to this log ic^^thought,. deals. with ab-
stractions^concepts drawn out of things by a sifting
process. These logicians never inquired libw the "qual-
itieF'^which they pulled out of things came to be there.
The truth of all their little checker-board juggling de-
pended upon the natural order by which these powers or
properties or qualities were folded in concrete things,
yet they despised the "thing" as a mere "particular," or
pawn. It was as if Botany should reason from the leaf-
patterns woven into our table-cloths. Valid scientific
thought consists in following as closely as may be the
actual and entangled lines of forces as they pulse through
things. ThoughL,xleals..jyith,JlQ^bloodk6s concepts but
watches thinosjnove under its mic roscope.

The setitence fprin.y^^s forced upon primitive men by
nature itself. It was not we who made it; it wa^ a. re-
flection qf^thetemporal orde r in ca usation. All truth
has to be expressed in sentences because all truth is the
transference of power. The type of sentence in nature
is a flash of lightning. It passes between two terms, a
cloud and the earth. No unit of natural process can be
less than this. All natural processes are, in their units,
as much as this. Light, heat, gravity, chemical affinity,
human will have this in common, that they redistribute
force. Their unit of process can be Yepf escnlea"'as :

THE CHINESE WRITTEN CHARACTER 367

term

transference

term

from

which

•

force

which

If we regard this transference as the conscious or un-
conscious act of an agent we can translate the diagram
into:

agent act . object

In this the act is the very substance of the fact denoted.
The agent and the object are only limiting terms.

It seems to me that the normal and typical sentence
in English as well as in Chinese expresses just this unit
of natural process. It consists of three necessary words ;
the first denoting the agent or subject from which the
act starts ; the second embodying the very stroke of the
act; the third pointing to the object, the receiver of the
impact. Thus :

Farmer pounds rice.

The form of the Chinese transitive sentence, and of the
English (omitting particles) exactl v correspon ds, tO-ihis
uniygrsaj^form of action in natu re. This brings lan-
guage_close to things, and in its stronglrdiance upon
verbs it erects all speech into a kind of dramatic poetry.
A different sentence order is frequent in inflected lan-
guages like Latin, German or Japanese. This is because
they are inflected, i.e., they have little tags and word-end-
ings, or labels to show which is the agent, the object, etc.
In uninflected languages, like English and Chinese, there
is nothing but the order of the words to distinguish their
functions. And this order would be no sufficient indi-

368 INSTIGATI6nS

cation, were it not the naturQ t ordar — that is, the order
of cause an"3^ffect.

It is true that there are, in language, intransitive and
passive forms, sentences built out of the verb "to be,"
and, finally, negative forms. To grammarians and logi-
cians these have seemed more primitive than the* transi-
tive, or at least exceptions to the transitive. I had long
suspected that these apparently exceptional forms had
grown from the transitive or worn away from it by
alteration or modification. This view is confirmed by
Chinese examples, wherein it is still possible to watch the
transformation going on.

The intransitive form derives from the transitive by
dropping a generalized, customary, reflexive or cognate
object. "He rims (a race)." "The sky reddens (it-
^ ,yself)." "We breathe (air)." Th us we get w eak and
P^^' incomplete sentences which suspend thejugture-^nd lead

•^.^

A» ^A \ us to think~6f^some yerbs as denoting sta tes rather than

J^ ^^ ^ acts. Outside grammar IthiTwVfd' "state" would hardly

^ ^^jr\ 6e recognized as scientific. Who can doubt that when

. ^ we say, **Ih e_wall shines," _y e mean that it actively re-

^ ^ fleets light to our eye ? """

^"^ I The beauty of Chinese verbs is that they are all tran-

^^ c^ I sitive or intransitive at pleasure. There is no such

j thing as a naturally intransitive verb. The passive form
is evidently a correlative sentence, which turns about and
makes the object into a subject. That the object is not
in itself passive, but contributes some positive force of
its own to the action, is in harmony both with scientific
law and with ordinary experience. The English passive
voice with "is" seemed at first an obstacle to this hy-
pothesis, but one suspected that the true form was a gen-
eralized transitive verb meaning something like "re-

THE CHINESE WRITTEN CHARACTER 369

ceive/' which had degenerated into an auxiliary. It was
a delight to find this the case in Chinese.

In nature there are no negations, no possible transfers
of negative force. The presence of negative sentences
in language would seem to corroborate the logicians' view
that assertion is an arbitrary subjective act. We can /
assert a negation, though nature can not. But here
again science conies to our aid against the logician: all
apparently negative or disruptive movements bring into
play other positive forces. It requires great effort to
annihilate. Therefore we should suspect that, if we
could follow back the history of all negative particles, we
should find that they also are sprung from transitive
verbs. It is too late to demonstrate such derivations in
the Aryan languages, the clue has been lost, but in Chi-
nese we can still watch positive verbal conceptions pass-
ing over into so-called negatives. Thus in Chinese the
sign meaning "to be lost in the forest" relates to a state
of non-existence. English "not" = the Sanskrit na,
which may come from the root na, to be lost, to perish.

Lastly comes the infinitive which substitutes for a spe-
cific colored verb the universal copula "is," followed by
a noun or an adjective. We do not say a tree "greens
itself," but "the tree is green ;" not that "monkeys bring
forth live young," but that "the monkey is a mammaL"
This is an ultimate weakness of language. It has come
from generalizing all intransitive words into one. As
"live," "see," "walk," "breathe," are gencraHzed into f)"
states by dropping their objects, so these weak verbs nre
in »nr" ^•^^^"^^^"'^^M'y^-t^Mra^fst «ffaT^ ^m^T^amf^yj
bare existence.

There is in reality no such verb as a pure copula, no
such original conception, our very word exist means ''to
stand forth," to show oneself by a definite act. "Is"

370

INSTIGATIONS

comes from the Aryan root as, to breathe. "Be" is from
bhu, to grow.

In Chinese the chief verb for "is" not only means
actively "to have," but shows by its derivation that it
expresses something even more concrete, namely^ "to
snatch from the moon with the hand." Here the bald-
est symbol of prosaic analysis is transformed by magic
into a splendid flash of concrete poetry.

I shall not have entered vainly into this long analysis
of the sentence if I have succeeded in showing how po-
etical is the Chinese form^nd how^osejo^nature. In
translating Chinese, verse especially, we must hold as
closely as possible to the concrete force of the original,
eschewing adjectives, nouns and intransitive forms
whei-ever we can, and seeking instead strong and indi-
vidual verbs.

Lastly we notice that the likeness of form between
Chinese and English sentences renders translation from
one to the other exceptionally easy. The genius of the
two is much the same. Frequently it is possible by
omitting English particles to make a literal word-for-
word translation which will be not only intelligible in
English, but even the strongest and most poetical Eng-
lish. Here, however, one must follow closely what is
said, not merely what is abstractly meant.

Let us go back from the Chinese sentence to the indi-
vidual written word. How are such words to be classi-
fied? Are some of them nouns by nature, some verbs
and some adjectives? Are there pronouns and preposi-
tions and conjunctions in Chinese as in good Christian
languages ?

One is led to suspect from an analysis of the Aryan
languages that such differences are not natural, and that
they have been unfortunately invented by grammarians

THE CHINESE WRITTEN CHARACTER 371

to confuse the simple poetic outlook on life. All nations
have written their strongest and most vivid literature be-
fore they invented a grammar. Moreover, all Aryan
etymology points back to roots which are the equivalents
of simple Sanskrit verbs, such as we find tabulated at the
back of our Skeat Nature herself has no grammar.*
Fancy picking up a man and telling him that he is a
noun, a dead thing rather than a bundle of functions I A
"part of speech" is only what it does. Frequently our
lines of cleavage fail, one part of speech acts for an-
other. They act for one another because they were orig-
inally one and the same.

Few of us realize that in our own language these very
differences once grew up in living articulation ; that they
still retain life. It is only when the difficulty of placing
some odd term arises or when we are forced to translate
into some very different language, that we attain for a
moment the inner heat of thought, a heat which melts
down the parts of speech to recast them at will.

One of the most interesting facts about the Chinese
language is that in it we can see, not only the forms of
sentences, but literally the parts of speech growing up«
budding forth one from another. Like nature, the Chinese t I
words are alive and plastic, because thinff and action are
not^fonnaHy. separated. The Chinese language naturally
knows no grammar. It is only lately that foreigners,
European and Japanese, have begun to torture this vital
speech by forcing it to fit the bed of their definitions.

* Even Latin, living Latin had not the networic of rules they
foist upon unfortunate school-children. These are borrowed
sometimes from Greek grammarians, even as I have seen Eng-
lish grammars borrowing oblicjue cases from Latin grammars.
Sometimes they sprang from the grammatizing or categorizing
passion of pedants. Living Latin had only the feel of the cases:
the ablative and dative emotion. — £. P.

37*

INSTIGATIONS

We import into our reading of Chinese all the weakness
of our own formalisms. This is especially sad in poetry,
because the one necessity, even in our own poetry, is to
keep words as flexible as possible , as full of the sap of
nature. ^

CcTus go further with our example. In English we
call "to shine" a verb in the infinitive, because it gives
the abstract meaning of the verb without conditions. If
we want a corresponding adjective we take a different
word, "bright." If we need a noun we say "luminosity,"
which is abstract, being derived from an adjective.* To
get a tolerably concrete noun, we have to leave behind the
verb and adjective roots, and light upon a thing arbi-
trarily cut off from its power of action, say "the sun" or
"the moon." Of course there is nothing in nature so cut
off, and therefore thi s nounizin g is i tself an a bstraction.
' Even if we did have a common wordlinderlying at once
the verb "shine," the adjective "bright" and the noun
"sun," we should probably call it an "infinitive of the
infinitive." According to our ideas, it should be some-
thing extremely abstract, too intangible for use.

The Chinese have one word, nUng or mei. Its ideo-
graph is the sign of the sun together with the sign of the
moon. It serves as verb, noun, adjective. Thus you
write literally, "the sun and moon of the cup" for "the
cup's brightness." Placed as a verb, you write "the cup
sun-and-moons," actually "cup sun-and-moon," or in a
wea kened thought. "isJ ikc-sun^Le^^-shines. "Sui?3niSP
moon cup" is naturally a bright cup. There is no pos-
sible confusion of the real meaning, though a stupid

*[A good writer would use "shine" (i. c., to shine), shining,
and "the shine" or "sheen", possibly thinking of the German
"schone^ and Schonheit" ; but this does not invalidate Prof.
Fenollosa's next contention. — £. P.]

THE CHINESE WRITTEN CHARACTER 373

scholar may spend a week trying to decide what ''part of
speech'' he should use in translating a very simple and
direct thought from Chinese to English.

The fact is that almost every written Chinese word is
properly just^uch-an underlying wordyjind yet it^is not
abstract. It is n ot excl usive of parts of speech^ jbut com-
prehensive ; not something which is neither a noun, verb,
or adjective, but something which is all of them at once
and at all times. Usage may incline the full meaning '
now a little more to one side, now to another, according
to the point of view, but through all cases the poet is
free to deal with it richly and concretely, as does nature.

In the derivation of nouns from verbs, the Chinese lan-
guage is forestalled by the Aryan. Almost all the San-
skrit roots, which seem to underlie European languages, (
are primitive verbs, which express characteristic actions t
of visible nature. Thej^erbjnustbe the primary fact of
nat ure, sin ce motion and change are all that we can tec-
ognize. in^her. In the pnmitive transitive sentence, such
as "Farmer potmds rice," the agent and the object are
nouns only in so far as they limit a unit of action.
"Farmer" and "rice" are mere hard terms which define
the extremes of the pounding. But in themselves, apart
from this sentence- function, they_are_jiaturally.-verbs.
The farmer is one who tills the ground, and the rice is a
plant which grows in*^ a special "way. —This is indicated
in the Chinese characters. And this probably exempli-
fies the ordinary derivation of nouns from verbs. In all
languages, Chinese included, a noim i s originally "that
ythich^dges something," that which performs the verbal
action. Thus the moon comes from the root ma, and
means "tKe measurer." The sun means that which be-
gets.

The derivation of adjectives from the verb need hardly

374 INSTIGATIONS

be exemplified. Even with us, to-day, we can still watch
participles passing over into adjectives. In Japanese the
adjective is frankly part of the inflection of the verb, a
special mood, so that every verb is also an adjective.
This brings us close to nature, because everywhere the
I quality is only a power of action regarded as having an
» abstract inherence. Greenisjonly a certain rapidity of
vibration, hardness a degree of tensenSs ' In cohcHngT
In Chinese the adjective always retains a substratum of
/ verbal meaning. We should try to render this in trans-
lation, not be content with some bloodless adjectival ab-
straction plus "is."
I Still more interesting are the Chinese "prepositions,"
j they are often post-positions. Prepositions are so im-
) [ portant, so pivotal in European speech only because we
I have weakly yielded up the force of o'lir intransitive
! verbs. We have to add small supernumerary words to
bffhg back the original power. We still say "I see a
horse," but with the weak verb "look," we have to add
the directive particle "at" before we can restore the
natural transitiveness."^

Prepositions represent a few simple ways in which in-
complete verbs complete themselves. Pointing toward
nouns as a limit they bring force to bear upon them.
That is to say, they are naturally verbs, of generalized
or condensed use. In Aryan languages it is often difE-
cult to trace the verbal origins of simple prepositions.
Only in "off" do we see a fragment of the thought "to
1 throw off." In Chinese the preposition is frankly a
; verb, specially used in a generalized sense. These verbs

* FThis is a bad example. We can say "I look a fool",
"look", transitive, now means resemble. The main contention
is however correct. We tend to abandon specific words like
resemble and substitute, for them, vague verbs with prepo-
sitional directors, or riders. — E. P.]

THE CHINESE WRITTEN CHARACTER 375

are often used in their specially verbal sense, and it !
greatly weakens an English translation if they are sys- ,
tematically rendered by colorless prepositions.

Thus in Chinese : By = to cause ; to = to fall toward ;
in = to remain, to dwell ; from = to follow ; and so on.

Conjunctions are similarly derivative, they usually
serve to mediate actions between verbs, and therefore
they are necessarily themselves actions. Thus in Chi-
nese : Because = to use ; and = to be included under one ;
another form of "and" = to be parallel ; or = to par-
take ; if = to let one do, to permit. The same is true of
a host of other particles, no longer traceable in the Aryan
tongues.

Pronouns appear a thorn in our evolution theory, since |
they have been taken as unanalyzable expressions of per-
sonality. In Chinese even they yield up their striking I
secrets of verbal metaphor. They are a constant source
of weakness if colorlessly translated. Take, for exam-
ple, the five forms of "I." There is the sign of a "spear
in the hand" = a very emphatic I ; five and a mouth = a
weak and defensive I, holding off a crowd by speaking;
to conceal = a selfish and private I; self (the cocoon
sign) and a mouth = an egoistic I, one who takes pleas-
ure in his own speaking; the self presented is used only
when one is speaking to one's self.

I trust that this digression concerning parts of speech
may have justified itself. It proves, first, the enormous
interest of the Chinese language injthrQKingJight upon
our forgotten mental processes. ji ^_thus furn ishes a new
chapter, in the philosophy of -language. Secondly, it is
indispensable for understanding the poetical raw mate-
rial which the Chinese language affords. Poetry differs \
from prose in the concrete colors of its diction. It is I
not enough for it to furnish a meaning to philosophers.

(

376 INSTIGATIONS

It must appeal to emotions with the charm of direct im-
pression, flashing through regions where the intellect can
I only grope.* Poetry must render what is said, not what
I is merely meant. Abstract meaning gives litde vividness,
and fullnes s of imag inaKonjgives all. "Chinese poetry
demands that we abandon our narrow grammatical cate-
gories, that we follow the original text with a wealth of
concrete verbs.

But this is only the beginning of the matter. So far
we have exhibited the Chinese characters and the Chinese

t sentence chiefly as vivid shorthand pictures of actions
and processes in nature. These embody true poetry as

I far as they go. Such actions are seen, but Chinese would

! be a poor language and Chinese poetry but a narrow art,
could they not go on to represent also_\yhat is unseen.
The best poetry deals not only with natural images but
with lofty thoughts, spiritual suggestions and obscure re-
lations. The greater part of natural truth is hidden in
processes too minute for vision and in harmonies too
large, in vibrations, cohesions and in aflinities. The Chi-
nese compass these also, and with great power and beauty.

/ You will ask, how could the Chinese have built up a
; great intellectual fabric from mere picture writing? To
the ordinary western mind, which believes that thought
is concerned with logical categories and which rather
condemns the faculty of direct imagination, this feat
seems quite impossible. Yet the Chinese language with
its peculiar materials has passed over from the seen to
the unseen by exactly the same process which all ancient
races employed. This process is nieta£hor, the use of
material images to suggest immaterial relations.!

* ICf, principle of Primary apparition, "Spirit of Romance". —

E. PJ —

^ t [Compare Aristotle's Poetics, — E. P.]

THE CHINESE WRITTEN CHARACTER 377

The ^hole delicate substance of speech is built upon
substrata of metaphor. Abstract terms, pressed by ety-
mology, reveal their ancient roots still embedded in di-
rect action. But the primitive metaphors do not spring
from arbitrary subjective processes. They are possible
only because they follow objective lines of relations in
nature herself. Rel ations are ^xnore-xeaLand more im-
portant than the things which they relate. The forces
which produce the branch-angles of an oak lay potent in
thor acorn. Similar lines of resistance, half curbing the
out-pressing vitalities, goverii the branching of rivers and
of nations. Thus a nerve, a wire, a roadway, and a
clearing-house are only varying channek which conmiu-
nication forces for itself. This is more than analogy, it
is identity of structure. Nature furnishes her own clues.

\ Had the world not been full of homologies, sympathies,
and identities, thought would have been starved and
language chained to the obvious. There would have been
no bridge whereby to cross from the minor truth of the
seen to the major truth of the unseen. Not more than a
few hundred roots out of our large vocabularies could
have dealt directly with physical processes. These we
can fairly well identify in primitive Sanskrit. They are,
almost without exception, vivid verbs. The wealth of
European speech grew, following slowly the intricate
maze of nature's suggestions and affinities. Metaphor
was piled upon metaphor in quasi-geological strata.

I Metaphor, thfc revealer of nature, is the very substance
of poetry. The known interprets the obscure, the uni-
verse is alive witBTnyt!ir*"The beauty and-freedom of the
observed world furnish a model, and life is pregnant
with art. It is a mistake to suppose, with some phik>s-
ophers of aesthetics, that art and poetry aim to deal with
the general and the abstract. This misconception has

I «

378 i INSTIGATIONS

been foisted upon us by mediaeval logic. Art and poetry
deal with the concrete of nature, not with rows of sep-
arate "particulars," for such rows do not exist Poetry
is finer than prose because it gives us more concrete
truth in the same compass of words. Metaphor, its chief
device, is at once the substance of nature and of lan-
guage. Poetry only does consciously* what the prim-
itive races did unconsciously. The chief work of liter-
ary men in dealing with language, and of poets especially,
lies in feeling back along the ancient lines of advance.t
He must do this so that he may keep_Jiis y^ords enriched
by all their stn)lle'mi3e?tpnes of meaning. The original
metaphofs^sland as a kind of luminous background, giv-
ing color and vitality, forcing them closer to the concrete-
ness of natural processes. Shakespeare everywhere
teems with examples. For these reasons poetry was the
earliest of the world arts ; poetry, language and the care
of myth grew up together.

I have alleged all this because it enables me to show

clearly why I believe that the Chinese written language

has not only absorbed the poetic substance of nature and

I built with it a second world of metaphor, but has, through

i its very pictorial visibility, been able to retain its original

' creative poetry with far more vigor and vividness than

• any phonetic tongue. Let us first see how near it is to

the heart of nature in its metaphors. We can watch it

passing from the seen to the unseen, as we saw it pass-

* [Vide also an article on "Vorticism" in the Fortnightly Re-
xnew for September, 1914. 'The language of exploration" now
in my "Gaudier-Brzeska." — E. P.]

t [I would submit in all humility that this applies in the
rendering of ancient texts. The poet in dealing with his own
time, must also see to it that language does not petrify on his
hands. He must prepare for new advances along the lines of
true metaphor that is interpretative metaphor, or image, as dia-
metrically opposed to untrue, or ornamental metaphor. — ^E. P.]

THE CHINESE WRITTEN CHARACTER 379

ing from verb to pronoun. It retains the primitive sap,
it is not cut and dried like a walking-stick. We have
been told that these people are cold, practical, mechani-
cal, literal, and without a trace of imaginative genius.
That is nonsense.

Our ancestors built the accumulations of metaphor
into structures of language and into systems of thought.
Languages to-day are thin and cold because we think {
less and less into them. We are forced, for the sake of ' J
quickness and sharpness, to file down each word to its
narrowest edge of meaning. Nature would seem to have
become less like a paradise and more and more like a
factory. We are content to accept the vulgar misuse of
the moment. A late stage of decay is arrested and em-
balmed in the dictionary. Only scholars and poets feel
painfully back along the thread of our etymologies and
piece together our diction, as best they may, from for-
gotten fragments. This anemia of modern speech is
only too well encouraged by the feeble cohesive force of
our phonetic symbols. There is little or nothing in a
phonetic word to exhibit the embryonic stages of its
growth. It does notligarJts^ metaph or on its face. We
forget that personality once meant, not the soul, but the
soul's mask. This is the sort of thing one can not pos-
sibly forget in using the Chinese symbols.

In this Chinese shows its advantage. Its etymology
is constantly visible. It retains the creative impulse
and process, visible and at work. After thousands of
years the lines of metaphoric advance are still shown,
and in many cases actually retained in the meaning.
Thus a word, instead of growing gradually poorer and
poorer as with us, becomes richer and still more rich
from age to age, almost consciously luminous. Its uses
in national philosophy and history, in biography and in

380 INSTIGATIONS

poetry, thrqw^^bo^tjL-? nimbus, pf meanings. These
centre about the graphic symbol. The memory can hold
them and use them. The very soil of Chinese life seems
entangled in the roots of its speech. The manifold il-
lustrations which crowd its annals of personal experi-
ence, the lines of tendency which converge upon a tragic
climax, moral character as the very core of the principle
— ^all these are flashed at once on the mind as reinforc-
ing values with an accumulation of meaning which a
phonetic language can hardly hope to attain.f*"Their ideo-
graphs are like blood-stained battle flags to an old cam-
paigner. With us, the poet is the only one for whom
the accumulated treasures of the race-words are real and
active. Poetic language is always vibrant with fold on
fold of overtones, and with natural aflinities, but in Chi-
nese the visibility of the metaphor tends to raise this
quality to its intensest power. 1

I have mentioned the tyranny of mediaeval logic. Ac-
cording to this European logic thought is a kind of brick-
yard. It is baked into little hard units or concepts.
These are piled in rows according to size and then labeled
with words for future use. This use consists in picking
out a few bricks, each by its convenient label, and stick-
ing them together into a sort of wall called a sentence by
the use either of white mortar for the positive copula
"is," or of black mortar for the negative copula "is not.'*
In this way we produce such admirable propositions as
"A ring-tailed baboon is not a constitutional assembly."

Let us consider a row of cherry trees. From each of
these in turn we proceed to take an "abstract/' as the
phrase is, a certain common lump of qualities which we
may express together by the name cherry or cherry-ness.
Next we place in a second table several such character-
istic concepts: cherry, rose, sunset, iron-rust, flamingo.

THE CHINESE WRITTEN CHARACTER 381

From these we abstract some further common quality,
dilutation or mediocrity, and label it "red'' or "redness."
It is evident that this process of abstraction may be car-
ried on indefinitely and with all sorts of material. We
may go on forever building pyramids of attenuated con-
cept until we reach the apex "being."

But we have done enough to illustrate the character-
istic process. At the base of the pyramid lie things, but
stunned, as it were. They can never know themselves
for things until they pass up and down among the layers
of the pyramids. The way of passing up and down the
pyramid may be exemplified as follows : We take a con-
cept of lower attenuation, such as "cherry" ; we see that
it is contained under one higher, such as "redness." Then
we are permitted to say in sentence form, "Cherryness is
contained under redness," or for short, "(the) cherry is
red." If, on the other hand, we do not find our chosen
subject under a given predicate we use the black copula
and say, for example, "(The) cherry is not liquid."

From this point we might go on to the theory of the
syllogism, but we refrain. It is enough to note that the
practised logician finds it convenient to store his mind
with long lists of nouns and adjectives, for these are nat-
urally the names of classes. Most text-books on lan-
guage begin with such lists. The study of verbs is
meagre, for in such a system there is only one real work-
ing verb, to-wit, the quasi-verb "is." All other verbs can
be transformed into participles and gerunds. For ex-
ample, "to run" practically becomes a case of "running."
Instead of thinking directly, "The man runs/' our logi-
cian makes two subjective equations, namely: The indi-
vidual in question is contained under the class "man";
and the class "man" is contained under the class of "nm-
ning things."

382 INSTIGATIONS

The sheer loss and weakness of this method is appar-
ent and flagrant. Even in its own sphere it can not think
half of what it wants to think. It has no way of bring-
ing together any two concepts which do not happen to
stand one under the other and in the same pyramid. It
is impossible J o rep resent change in this system or any
kind of growth, ^is is pr6bably"why*the conception
^ of evolution came so late in Europe. // could not mak0
way until it was prepared to destroy the inveterate logic
of classification.

Far worse than this, such logic can not deal with any
kin d of interaction or with any mul tiplicity of function.
According to it, the function of my muscles is as isolated
from the function of my nerves, as from an earthquake
in the moon. For it the poor neglected things at the
bases of the pyramids are only so many particulars or
pawns.

Science fought till she got at the things. All her work
has been done from the base of the pyramids, not from
the apex. She has discovered how functions cohere in
things. She expresses her results in grouped sentences
which embody no nouns or adjectives but verbs of spe-
cial character. The true formula for thought is: The
cherry tree is all that it does. Its correlated verbs com-
pose it. At bottom these verbs are transitive. Such
verbs may be almost infinite in number.

In diction and in grammatical form science is utterly

opposed to logic. Primitive men who created language

t ^^ i agreed with science and not with logic. Logic has abused

-Jif the language which they left to her mercy. Poetry

. agrees with science and not with logic.

The moment we use the copula, the moment we express

subjective inclusions, poetry evaporates. The more con-

"^ cretely and vividly we express the interactions of things

THE CHINESE WRITTEN CHARACTER 383

the better the poetry. We need in poetry thousands of
active words, each doing its utmost to show forth the
motive and vital forces. We can not exhibit the wealth
of nature by mere summation, by the piling of sentences.
Poetic thought works by su ggestion, crowding maximum
meanm^fOK"«ngI^^ and

luminous from withinl " -—

In Chinese character each work accumulated this sort (
of energy in itself. ^

Should we pass formally to the study of Chinese
poetry, we should warn ourselves against logicianized
pitfalls. We should beware of modern narrow utilita-
rian meanings ascribed to the words in commercial dic-
tionaries. We should try to preserve the metaphoric
overtones. We should beware of English grammar, its
hard parts of speech, and its lazy satisfaction with nouns
and adjectives. We should seek and at least bear in
mind the verbal undertone of each noun. We should
avoid "is" and bring in a wealth of neglected English
verbs. Most of the existing translations violate all of
these rules.*

The development of the normal transitive sentence
rests upon the fact that one action in nature promotes
another ; thus the agent and the object are secretly verbs.
For example, our sentence, "Reading promotes writing,"
would be expressed in Chinese by three full verbs. Such
a form is the equivalent of three expanded clauses and
can be drawn out into adjectival, participial, infinitive,
relative or conditional members. One of many possible
examples is, "If one reads it teaches him how to write.'
Another is, "One who reads becomes one who writes.'

■
99

If-

♦ [These precautions should be broadly conceived. It is not | ^ h
so much their letter, as the underlying feeling of objectifica-
lion and activity, that matters. — £. P.]

384

INSTIGATIONS

»' I

But in the first condensed form a Chinese would write^
"Read promote write." The dominance of the verb
and its power to obliterate all other parts of speech give
us the model of terse fine style.

I have seldom seen our rhetoricians dwell on the fact
that the great strength of our language lies in its splendid
array of transitive verbs, drawn both from Anglo-Saxon
and from Latin sources. These give us the most indi-
vidual characterizations of force. Their power lies in
their recognition of nature as a vast storehouse of forces.
We do not say in English that things seem, or appear, or
eventuate, or even that they are ; but that they do. Will
is the foundation of our speech.* We catch the Demi-
urge in the act I had to discover for myself why
Shakespeare's English was so immeasurably superior to
all others. I found that it was his persistent, natural,
and magnificent use of hundreds of transitive verbs.
Rarely will you find an "is" in his sentences. "Is"
weakly lends itself to the uses of our rhythm, in the un-
accented syllables; yet he sternly discards it. A study
of Shakespeare's verbs should underlie all exercises in
style.

We find in poetical Chinese a wealth of transitive
verbs, in some way greater even than in the English of
Shakespeare. This springs from their power of combin-
ing several pictorial elements in a single character. We
have in English no yerb for what tw9 things, say the sun
and iQQQn^^both do together. Prefixes and affixes merely
direct and qualijpy. In Chinese the verb can be more
minutely qualified. We find a hundred variants cluster-
ing about a single idea. Thus "to sail a boat for pur-
poses of pleasure" would be an entirely different verb

* [Compare Dante's definition of "rectitudo" as the direction
of the will, probably taken from Aquinas. — E. P.]

THE CHINESE WRITTEN CHARACTER 385

from "to sail for purposes of commerce." Dozens of
Chinese verbs express various shades of grieving, yet in
English translations they are usually reduced to one
mediocrity. Many of them can be expressed only by
periphrasis, but what right has the translator to neglect
the overtones? There are subtle shadings. We should
strain our resources in English.

It is true that the pictorial clue of many Chinese ideo-
graphs can not now be traced, and even Chinese lexicog-
raphers admit that combinations frequently contribute
only a phonetic value. But I find it incredible that any
such minute subdivision of the idea could have ever ex-
isted alone as abstract sound without the concrete char-
acter. It contradicts the law of evolution. Complex
ideas arise only gradually, as the power of holding them
together arises. The paucity of Chinese sound could
not so hold them. Neither is it conceivable that the
whole list was made at once, as conunerdal codes of
cipher are compiled. Therefore we must believe that I J
the phonetic theory is in large part unsound. The meta- 1
phor once existed in many cases where we can not now/
trace it. Many of our own etymologies have been lost.
It is futile to take the ignorance of the Han dynasty for
omniscience.* It is not true, as Legge said, that the f

* [Professor Fenollosa is well borne out by chance eridence.
The vorticist sculptor Gaudier-Brzeska sat in my room be-
fore he went off to the war. He was able to read the Chi-
nese radicals and many compound signs almost at pleas-
ure. He was of course, used to consider all life and na-
ture in the terms of planes and of bounding lines. Neverthe-
less he had spent only a fortnight in the museum studying the
Chinese characters. He was amazed at the stupidity of lexi-
cographers who could not discern for all their learning the
pictorial values which were to him perfectly obrious and ap-
parent Curiously enough, a few weeks later Edmond Dulac,
who is of a totally different tradition, sat here, giving an im-

386 INSTIGATIONS

) original picture characters could never have gone far in
'\ building up abstract thought. This is a vital mistake.
We have seen that our own languages have all sprung
from a few hundred vivid phonetic verbs by figurative
O derivation. A fabric more vast could have been built
up in Chinese by metaphorical composition. No attenu-
ated idea exists which it might not have reached more
vividly and more permanently than we could have been
expected to reach with phonetic roots. Such a pictorial
method, whether the Chinese exemplified it or not, would
be the ideal language of the world.

Still, is it not enough to show that Chinese poetry
gets back near to the processes of nature by means of
its vivid figure, its wealth of such figure? If we attempt
to follow it in English we must use words highly charged,
words^whose vital, suggestion shall interplay as nature
interplays. Sentences must be like the mingling of the
fringes of feathered banners, or as the colors of many
flowers blended into the single sheen of a meadow.

The poet can never see too much or feel too much.
His metaphors are only ways of getting rid of the dead
white plaster of the copula. He resolves its indiffer-
ence into a thousand tints of verb. His figures flood
things with jets of various light, like the sudden up-blaze
of fountains. The prehistoric poets who created lan-
guage discovered the whole harmonious framework of
nature, they sang out her processes in their hymns. And

promptu panegyric on the elements of Chinese art, on the
•units of composition, drawn from the written characters. He
did not use Professor Fenollosa's own words, he said "bam*
boo" instead of 'rice". He said the essence of the bamboo
is in a certain way it grows, they have this in their sign for
bamboo, all designs of bamboo proceed from it Then he went
on rather to disparage vorticism, on the grounds that it could
not hope to do for the Occident, in one life-time, what had
required centuries of development in China. — E. P.]

THE CHINESE WRITTEN CHARACTER 387

this diffused poetry which they created, Shakespeare has
condensed into a more tangible substance. Thus in all
poetry a word is like a sun, with its corona and chro-
mosphere; words crowd upon words, and enwrap each
other in their luminous envelopes until sentences become
clear, continuous light-bands.

Now we are in condition to appreciate the full splen-
dor of certain lines of Chinese verse. Poetry surpasses
prose especially in that the poet selects for juxtaposition
those words whose overtones blend into a delicate and
lucid harmony. All arts follow the same law; refin ed
harmony lies in the delicate balance of overtones. In
music the whole possibility and theory of harmony is
based on the overtones. In this sense poetry seems a
more difficult art.

How shall we determine the metaphorical overtones of
neighboring words? We can avoid flagrant breaches
like mixed metaphor. We can find the concord or har-
monizing at its intensest, as in Romeo's speech over the
dead Juliet.

Here also the Chinese ideography has its advantage,
in even a simple line, for example, "The sun rises in the
east."

The overtones vibrate against the eye. The wealth of
composition in characters makes possible a choice of
words in which a single dominant overtone colors every
plane of meaning. That is perhaps the most conspicu-
ous quality of Chinese poetry. Let us examine our line.

Sun Rises (in the) East

388 INSTIGATIONS

The sun, the shining, on one side, on the other the sign
of the east, which is the sun entangled in the branches
of a tree. And in the middle sign, the verb "rise," we
have further homology; the sun is above the horizon,
but beyond that the single upright line is like the grow-
ing trunk-line of the tree sign. This is but a beginning,
but it points a way to the method, and to the method of
intelligent reading.

This preservation photocopy was made and hand bound at

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Natural, which exceeds ANSI

Standard Z39.48-1984.

1993

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