| EDMUND GOSSE. FOUR POETS - M. PAUL FORT |
Page 5 of 5 M. PAUL FORT The instinct which impels every energetic talent to emancipate itself as far as possible from the bondage of tradition is a natural one, and it is even not so dangerous as we suppose. For, if there is a centrifugal force ever driving the ambition of youth away from the conven- tional idea of beauty, this is easily reversed by the inherent attraction of purity and nobihty in form. The artist makes a bold flight and wheels away into the distance, but he returns ; he is true, like Wordsworth's skylark, to the kindred points of heaven and home. In a writer, therefore, who starts in open rebellion to the tradition of style, we have but to wait and see whether the talent itself is durable. It is only pre- sumptuous Icarus, whose waxen wings melt in the sun, and who topples into the sea. It is only the writer who makes eccentricity the mantle to hide his poverty of imagination and absence of thought who disappears. To the young man of violent idiosyncrasies and genuine talent two things always happen — he impresses his charm upon our unwilling senses, and he is himself drawn back, unconsciously and imperceptibly, into the main current of the stream of style. While M. Paul Fort was merely an eccentric experi- mentalist, it did not seem worth while to present him to an English audience. The earhest of his pubhshed volumes, the Ballades Frangaises of 1897, was a pure mystification to most readers. It was printed, and apparently written, as prose. It asserted the superiority of rhythm over the artifice of prosody, which is precisely what Walt Whitman did. The French conceive poetry, however, very rigidly in its essential distinction from prose. There are rules for writing French verse which are categorical, and these must be taken en bloc. It is far more difficult in French to imagine a thing which could represent, at the same moment, poetry and prose, than it would be in English. But M. Paul Fort deter- mined to create this entirely new thing, and when one read his effusions first it is only fair to admit that one was bewildered. Here, for instance, is, in its entirety, one of the Ballades Frangaises : — " litre ne page et brave vielleur d'amour, en la gentille cour d'un prince de jadis, chanter une princesse foUe- ment aimee, au nom si doux que bruit de roses essaimees, a qui offrir, un jour, en lui offrant la main pour la marche a descendre avant le lac d'hymen, I'odorant coffret d'or sous ses chaines de lys, plein de bleus hyalins es anneaux de soleil et d'oiselets de Chypre ardents pour embaumer, a qui donner aux sons des fifres et des vielles, pour notre traversce en la barque d'hymen, le frele rosier d'or k tenir en sa main ! " The only way to make anything of this is to read it aloud, and it may be said in parenthesis that M. Fort is a writer who appeals entirely to the ear, not to the eye. Spoken, or murmured in accordance with Mr. Yeats's new method, the piece of overladen prose disengages itself, floats out into filaments of silken verse, hke a bunch of dry seaweed restored to its element. In this so-called ballad the alexandrine dominates, but with elisions, assonances, irregularities of every description. It is therefore best to allow the author himself to define his method. He says in the preface to a later poem, Le Roman de Louis XI. : — " J'ai cherche un style pouvant passer, au gre de I'emotion, de la prose au vers et du vers a la prose : la prose rythmee fournit la transition. Le vers suit les elisions naturelles du langage. II se presente comme prose, toute gene d' elision disparaissant sous cette forme." In short, we have heard much about " free verse " in France, but here at last we have an author who has had the daring to consider prose and verse as parts of one graduated instrument, and to take the current pronunciation of the French language as the only law of a general and normal rhythm. It is a curious experi- ment, and we shall have to see what he will ultimately make of it. But one is bound to admit that he has made a good deal of it already. He has become an author whom we cannot affect or afford to ignore. Born so lately as 1872, M. Paul Fort is in some respects the most notable, as he is certainly the most abundant, imaginative author of his age in France. The book which lies before us, a romance of Parisian life of to-day in verse, is the sixth of the volumes which M. Fort has brought out in less than six years, all curiously consistent in manner, all independent of external literary influences, and all full of exuberant, fresh and vivid impressions of nature. The eccentricities of his form lay him open, of course, to theoretical objections which I should never think unreasonable, and which I am conservative enough to share. But these do not affect his ardour in the con- templation of nature, his high gust of being. I scarcely know where to point in any recent literature to an author so full of the joy of life. He does not philosophise or analyse, he affects no airs of priest or prophet; his attitude is extraordinarily simple, but is charged with the ecstasy of appreciation. In two of his collections of lyrics in rhythm, in particular, we find this ardour, this enchantment, predominating; these are Montague, 1898, and L' Amour Marin, 1900, in which he sings, or chants, the forest and the sea. In Paris Sentimental M. Paul Fort has written a novel in his pecuHar and favourite form. We have had many examples of the dangers and difficulties which attend the specious adventure of writing modern fiction in metrical shape. Neither Aurora Leigh nor Lucile nor The Inn Album is entirely encouraging as more than the experiment of a capricious though splendidly accom- plished artist. Yet Paris Sentimental is more nearly related to these than to any French poem that I happen to recollect. There is, indeed, as it seems to me, some- thing English in M. Fort's habit of mind. His novel, however, is much less elaborate than either of the English poems I have mentioned, and certainly much less strenuous than the first and third. It is a chain of lyrical rhapsodies in which a very plain tale of love and disappointment in the Paris of to-day is made the excuse for a poetical assimilation of all the charming things which Paris contains, and which have hitherto evaded the skill of the poets, such as the turf in the Square Monge, and the colour of an autumn shower on the Boulevard Scbastopol, and the Tziganes singing by moonlight at the Exposition. Here is an example of how it is done : — " Le couchant violet tremble au fond du jour rouge. Lc Luxembourg exhale une odeur d'oranger, et Manon s'arrete a mon bras; plus rien ne bouge, les arbres, les passants, ce nuage eloigne. . . . " Et le jet d'eau s'est tu : c'est la rosee qui chante, la-bas, dans les gazons, ou r6vent les statues, et pour rendre, 6 sens-tu ? la nuit plus defaillante, les Grangers en fleurs ont enivre la nue." It would be an easy exercise to search for the metre here, as we used to hunt for blank verse in the Leaves of Grass. But M. Paul Fort is less revolutionary than Whitman, and more of an artist. Although he clings to his theories, in each of his volumes he seems to be less negligent of form, less provocative, than he was in the last. The force of his talent is wheeling him back into the inevitable tradition ; he is being forced by the music in his veins to content himself with cadences that were good enough for Racine and Hugo and Baudelaire. And, therefore, in the last quotation which I offer from Paris Sentimental, I take the liberty of disregarding the typographical whims of the author, and print his Unes as verse : — " Par les nuits d'ete bleues ou chantent les cigales, Dieu verse sur la France une coupe d'etoiles. Le vent porte a ma levre un gout du ciel d'ete ! Je veux boire a I'espace fraichement argente. L'air du soir est pour moi le bord de la coupe froide Ou, les yeux mi-fermes et la bouche goulue, Je bois, comme le jus presse d'une grenade, La fraicheur etoilee qui se repand des nues. Couche sur un gazon dont I'herbe est encore chaude De s'etre prelassee sous I'haleine du jour, Oh ! que je viderais, ce soir, avec amour, La coupe immense bleue ou le firmament rode ! " 1902. |