The inspiration

I shall not stop to tell of what influences, tow ards 1883, urged so many of the younger generation to conceive the ambitious hope of creating a new form of poetry, Naturalism w-as struggling in its last throes*, and with it the Parnassian poetry, its contemporary and ally. Science seemed to have done in literature all that it w as capable of doing ; we w^ere weary of it. Idealism was springing up once more. The soul and the mysterious Avere all the fashion. Against the living masters of literature, they invoked the dead, eccentrics, or foreigners. Lamartine, Vigny, Baudelaire, Villiers de IMsle-Adam, — all had their chapels ; Tolstoï, Ibsen, Bjornson, and, later, Nietzsche, Avere confusedlv, frantically applauded. We became enamored of artists avIio by relief or color desired to give other than the real and earthly ; Puvis de Chavannes, GustaA'C Moreau, Rodin, Burne-Jones, the Pre-Raphaelites. We reverenced Ruskin ; Ave applauded the painters avIio endeavored to render by more subtle characters whatever Avas more variable, intangible, and well-night immaterial in the life of nature, — the independents and impressionists. Wagner Avas deified

1. It was in 1887 that M. Zola was disowned in a resounding manifesto by a certain numlier of young novelists, among them M. Paul Margueritte.

THE NEW POETRY IN FRANCE

as the great musician of the soul and of the ideal, and also because the « bourgeois » had not yet become resigned to him. In a word, one part of the younger generation needed something different from the official literature which was enthroned in the Academy, which was decorated by tlie government, and which sold at an advantageous rate. Shaken by an inner need, and excited by inlluences from without, the men of the younger generation who felt within them the inclination to write in verse rejected all the poetry of the time in its form and inmost content.

To tell the truth, it was not easy to remodel the very basis of lyric poetry, which is, and can only be, the reaction of an individual consciousness against the universe and against life, the manifestation of the fundamental problems of the universe and of life in the original vibrations of a soul. There are differences of intensity and quality in lyric inspiration, but the source is everywhere and always the same.

The Romanticists had fully understood this : they had all sounded the mystery of human existence in writing the journal of their own life ; they had all told of human suffering in their own suffering. All the particular accidents of their humor and of their existence were grouped around eternal ideas, — God and nature, love and death, humanity and progress.

The Parnassians had not really placed lyricism upon new ground. That there w as in Leconte de Lisle a deeply bruised sensibility in relation with a personal conception of the universe and of life; that there w^as in Sully Prudhomme an original sentimentality, a subjective perception of the relations betw^een man and things, — no longer needs demonstration. As for the third star in the Parnassian PI eiades, M. Coppée, he escapes personality only by the commonplace ; and because his soul is that of every man, is the reason he does not appear to reveal it in his poetry .

Rut the Parnassians had desired to work in a direction exactly opposed to that of Romanticism. If they had not been able to dry up within themselves the personal source, wdthout which there is no lyricism, they liindered it from llo-

ÉTUDES LITTÉRAIRES

wing forth in their poetry into the broad light of day; they made it to run in underground rivulets. Impressed by the positive and critical minds of the middle of the century, the contemporaries of Taine and of Flaubert, they desired to create an objective poetry, picturesque or philosophical, which should rellect natural or historical realities and rational truths. Scenes from the past, landscapes, popular customs, psychological analyses, ethical exposition, — they put all the sensible and all the intelligible world into their works ; they sought, with liaughty impassiveness or methodical abstraction or personal vulgarity, to put everything into their art, except themselves.

It was against this doctrine, after it had produced the best works that it contained, that the symbolists reated. Supported by two Romanticists of a later time, — by Banville, a capricious juggler with rhythm, without rule or reason for his fantasy, and by Baudelaire, an exasperated pessimist, absorbed in the culture of an abnormal sensibility, — but pursuing, in reality, an entirely different aim from Banville and Baudelaire, they rebelled against the Parnassian school and reestablished the reign of the soul in poetry. They reopened it to the subjective affirmations of the absolute and the unknowable.

M. Cliarles Morice, in attributing to Edgar Allan Poe the « lyric sense of science », explains himself thus ; « Art will touch Science with her foot, that she may feel in her certainty of a solid foundation, and, then, with a bound, wall leap over her upon the wings of Intuition. » ‘ — « Poets and thinkers », he exclaims in another connection, « we hear the wdnds of mystery w hich pour forth from the heart of phenomena, and we move towards light, towards lite... To some this joy (of enthusiasm) wall come as an intuition of genius before the face of Nature ; they let the simple and sumptuous law' of Forms and eternal Emotions sing in their work; to others all the ressources ol human wdsdoni : ... will he necessary, and the latter, more particularly the servants of the Évangel of harmo-

1. Littéi dture de tout à I heure, p. ‘203. See, us to this question my essay enlilled « La Littérature et la Science » in « Hommes et Livres ».

THE jNEW poetry IN FRANCE

nious relations and the laws of Analogy, will give in vast syntheses, according to the strengh of their minds and their heart’s good faith, a melodious and luminous explanation of the mysteries that are glorified in the reality of Fiction*. »

M. Moréas by offering to the reader in his poems « a sentimental ideology M. Gustave Kahn, ratlier more obscurely, by assigning to the « great subjects » the office of « celebrating the fundamental rites of Life and of tlie Intelligence » ® ; M. Mallarmé by giving to verse, that « evocation art par excellence », the power of illuminating the « pure of ourselves borne by ourselves, always ready to . burst forth on occasion, but which in existence or outside ol art never attains to an adequate expression » ; M. René Ghil by urging « the lyric and meditative poet » to extract « the Idea which is alone important » from the « ordinary tliousand visions in wliich it, the Immortal, is disseminated », to revise from negligible realities « the holy lines » of which he will compose « the only worthy vision, tlie real and suggestive Symbol » ^ — all these, in their many ways, promulgate the same doctrine.

M. Jules Lemaitre®, after having quoted the oracular lines of René Ghil, added, « But does it not seem to you that we have a slight suspicion of these things already ? » Assuredly we have, but assuredly also many acted as if they did not. The symbolists retold an old truth, but the Parnassians had rendered it necessary to retell it. Poetry, for a long time, had entered into competition with the arts which copied, and with the sciences which analyzed exterior things, such as they were outside of the soul and without union with the soul. It busied itself with painting, with sculpture, with history, with the novel of manners, with the physical and the pliilosophical. Now it returned to the expression of ideal realities and of the interior life. All na-