Baudelaire, Fleurs du Mal (Correspondances

■4. Viélé-Grifïin, Poèmes et Poésies (Cueille d’Avril), p. 72.

THE NEW POETRY IN FRANCE

has been acknowledged that the ego was the source of lyric poetry; they had caused it to spring forth by telling of themselves. The Romanticists used all forms, poetry, drama, the novel, and history in whicli to confess themselves and express their intimate thoughts. Thus a critic could speak of the immodesty and naiveté essential to the modern lyric; immodesty in telling the secrets of the heart, naiveté in believing yourself the privileged of misfortune. The Parnassians had repressed this frenzied ostentation of self. « I will not sell you my intoxication and my misfortune, » said Leconte de Lisle to the public : —

Je ne te vendrai pas mon ivresse et mon mal,

Je ne livrerai pas ma vie à tes huées.

Je ne danserai pas sur ton tréteau banal Avec tes histrions et tes prostituées*.

These lines were the safeguards of the « Jeunes ». They did not wish to be « exhibitors ». They pretended to express themselves without making themselves known, to give the revelation of the life which went on within themselves without betraying tbeir life’s confidence. Tbe very « Meditations » of Lamartine are an exact autobiography beside the veiled characters that are given us by Henri de Régnier, Viélé-Griffîn, Verbaeren, and Gregh. Tbe latter separate sentiment from fact, gather up the emotion of their soul, while detaching this emotion trom the object and tbe occasion which have given it birth. But as the concrete and the actual are necessary in order to realize modes of sensibility, nature has lent her forms and phenomens. Thus, recent poets tell ol themselves through the woods, the waters, the wind, and the light. Through the subtle play of harmonies, they symbolize their life in order not to relate it. They tell only what they have felt of life without telling wat has made them feel it so. Their poetry, consequently, could remain pure poetry without being turned into oratorical or philosophical discourse. The problemas ot life were presented in vibrations of awe, not in discussions, and the philosophy of the poet, without being explicitly

■1. Poèmes barbares (Les Montreurs).

ÉTUDES LITTÉRAIRES

formulated, is as though in dissolution in the waves which mount up from the bottom of his soul.

At one time it might have been thought that general conceptions would be wanting in the new' art. The decadents and symbolists had somewhat the appearance of being merely the apes of Banville and of Baudelaire ; they had the air of being maniacs or copyists, proudly developing, in the frenzied dance of their rhythms and in the foolish arabesques of their images, all the abnormal perceptions or eccentric fantasies which rose in their brain. But Verlaine pointed out a pathway. His « Sagesse » is the journal of a penitent soul ; it is the crisis of the conversion of the sinner, the song — one of the most beautiful that there is — ol the soul, both bruised and joyful before the life whose mystery a ray of God has illumined. In the collection which lollo’wed « Sagesse' », pious verse alternated with sensual, the effusions of contrite humility and pure faith with slightly veiled images of the sins of the flesh. Verlaine was nol, I beleive, insensible to the rhythmic grace of this alternation. But through tliese contradictions he only became more largely the representative of religious humanity, eternally torn between God who commands, and tlie flesh which refuses to obey. So, with him, poetry, taking once more the path of the « Meditations » and the « Contemplations » was filled with metaphysical anguish ; it returned to its duty of expressing the absolute and the universal, or rather its individual dream of the absolute and the universal.

If IS necessary to he the old de^ol that \ erlaine was, in order to find a new inspiration in the philosophy of the « petit catéchisme ». The younger generation, wdio would not, or could not, return to the old faith, w ould have been occasionally embarrassed to in\'ent a general conception of life. It is because the philosophies along with religion were departing, — humanitarianism, deism, Kantisni, idealism, scientific materialism, the pessimism ot Schopenhauer, all the great systems, which for a century have furnislied an intellectual armature for poetry, — had had their day, and

1. Le Bonheur, Parallèlement, Chansons pour Elle, Liturgies intimes.

THE NEW POETRY IN FRANCE

had not yet been replaced. A more subtle philosophy, at once less abstract and more scientific than the old, fond of precision, and in love with life, was being elaborated. Without a system’s being imposed, a tendency was taking shape among the poets.

Poetry since Chateaubriand had been of a sad cast. Cbritians, spiritualists, and materialists bad vied with one another in crying out against the wounds, betrayals, and wickedness of human life. With Leconte de Lisle, Ackermann, and Richepin, pessimism had been installed as lord. To condemn God and curse Nature seemed the natural function of poetry. The Christian illusion, even in retreating from souls, long time soothed by immense hopes, bad left in them a distaste for the mean and fleetingrealities of life. They revolted against the incomplete in its process of eternal dissolution, against the eternal and ever unfinished becoming of life ; life was irredeemably bad.

Rut in good time the idea sprang up among the « Jeunes » that Art should be one with Joy. ft was sufficient to dispel the aspirations for Nirvana, the apostroplies to Nature as a cruel stepmother, — all tlie rhetoric of blasphemous pessimism. R no longer seemed foolish to feel a love for lite. Poetry was still sad, but it was no longer desperate, except among certain Belgians ‘ with an imagination too deeply tinctured with Catholicism. There was a gentleness in its sadness ; an inclination was shown to accept life just as it is, in its misery, in its fleeting character, in its inachievement; to love it because it is, and because nothing can exist save in it and by it, — the universe, truth, beauty.

From the Christian point of view, which makes life appear wicked by directing us to the beyond, to eternity, poetry returned to the Greek point view, which embraces life in all its nakedness, — rich in evil and in good, and filled with this sweet and clear charm of being.

With M. de Régnier, with Viélé-Griffin, the insufficiency of the real is denounced with an affectionate assent. « All things are eternal and vain », says M. de Régnier^, and he