Revue Bleue, June

ÉTUDES LITTÉRAIRES

turc, all history, all life, were new only occasions for the poet to show his true being, its most peculiar and its most invisible modifications. All their images were but projections of tbe soul.

Soul, everywhere Soul ! But this decadent and symbolistic soul, how far removed was it from the old ego, the solid and square ego, which thrusts back the non-ego, and which the non-ego circumscribes. xArnalgamating the newest hypotheses of certain physiologists with the pseudosciences of the supersensuous and with the reveries of dreamer and seer, mingling liypnotism. telepathy, spiritism, occultism, and mysticism, — symbolism transforms the traditional representation of the relations between nature and man; it gives birth to a strange, intense, and aweinspiring perception. The universe penetrates the soul and the soul is diffused thoughout the universe; vague and impossible to determine is the limit which separates the two. By inconceivable correspondences nature and the ego are bound together; far beyond this arises common sensation ; and tbe brutal contour of things is enveloped in a mist of harmonic impressions. The life and the spirit melt into each other ; there are insensible and manifold passages from the object to the subject, from the material to the spiritual, from tbe conscious to tbe unconscious. Nowhere discontinuity, limit, or stop ; nothing is distinct nor remains fixed. The world ot the intelligence and of the sense is but the superficial level, tlie moving reflection of the invisible world, where life is. There is no other reality than the ideal forms in which the soul both attains to the essence of things and realizes its own essence : both being otherwise unattainable. This turn of the mind evidently obliged the symbolist poet to describe nature in an entirely diflerent way from his predecessors.

For a century poetry had tended towards making its descriptions more and more truthful and local. Victor Hugo and 1 heophile (lautier had passed Irom an imaginary landscape lo the landscape as they saw it ; even in Lamartine the evolution bad been made from the attenuated locality of the « Méditations » to the more carefully defined locality of « Jocelyn ». The Parnassian school had ofl'ered us a splen-

THE NEW POETRY IN FRANCE

did collection of historical, ethnograpliical, and geographical paintings ; every image was a precise fact, and all proper accidents for characterizing time and place were strongly accentuated. In the new poetry the indefinite was the law. No detail of the landscape might give it time or place. It is a moment, somewhere ; an extract from the complexity, a summing up of the multiplicity of the real ; it was made up of the universal elements of nature and things.

Formerly painters of interiors and landscape took tor subjects particular and finished things, and endeavored by exact portrayal to make a solid and distinct reality stand forth ; to-day, real objects, means rather than ends, serve to render sensible the manifold accidents of air and light. It is all the divine poem of air and light that the modern painter proposes to celebrate. Poetry has followed the evolution of painting. It emphasizes less the precise contours and local circumstances which make up the real object, than the eternal properties peculiar to the material of which the object is a casual example, and than the everlasting laws of lite which write themselves for a moment in the woods and flelds and mountains Viélé-Grifïin did not perceive Touraine or Tuscany hut the hour and the season, the mobile picture laid upon things by eternal time. The sea of M. de Régnier^ is not the sea of Jersey or of Gascony ; it is the Sea, the circuit of innumerable billows, in which is expressed an incomprehensible fluidity, — the universal essence of the water. The moment and the movement, this is what the symbolist painter translates. He shows life in things rather than the things themselves. He is the painter of the eternal continuity through fleeting forms, and this is the first period of the transformation in the poetical landscape.

Now comes the second. ITie artist who expressed the individual stability of things separated them from himself just in the proportion that he distinguished them among themselves. The poet who sees in the universe the conti-

t. See Cueille cV Avril, Joies, Les Cygnes. 2. Médailles d’Argile, Apparition, p. 114.

ÉTUDES LITTÉRAIRES

nual unfolding of (lie elementary nature, does not abstract himself from the universal life. It penetrates his soul and is reflected in it. He sees things in himself;

Debout, appuyé d’une main A quelque pierre des temps anciens,

Je sentais cette vie en moi.

Et que je créais tout cela —

La ville, le lac, les faîtes blancs —

Du grand regard de mes vingt ans L

And these things are the poet himself. He throws his whole self into his feeling of them. « Have you not understood », asked M. de Régnier of his readers, « that these medallions that I model are not the frivolous play of my fantasy ? »

Que tout le grand songe terrestre Vivait en moi pour vivre en eux.

Que je gravais aux métaux pieux Mes Dieux,

Et qu’ils étaient le visage vivant De ce que nous avons senti des roses,

De l’eau, du vent,

De la forêt et de la mer,

De toutes choses En notre chair, —

Et qu’ils sont nous divinement ^ ?

From this cornes the flowing lightness, the hazy transparency of the symbolist descriptions, in which thinos assume an ideal appearance, and have the air of things in'^a dream, impalpable, impondérable.

A third period is soon passed over. It things are in us, are ourselves, what need lor the description to the objectively complete and consistent? The poet’s aim is not to construct the universe. It matters little to him to illumine only incoherent fragments of exterior reality, if it is only in these fragments that the life of his soul is passed.

Here we lay hold upon the principle of the desultory

Eossojeur), Poè7nes