SCORPION

THE LATER FORCES IN FRENCH POETRY

"II dit je ne sais quoi de triste, bon et pur."

Francis Jammes

"La terre est le soleil en moi sont en cadence,
et toute la nature est entree dans mon cceur."

Paul Fort

There has been no reaction against Symbolism in
France. I am not at all sure that the very young-
est group, with some exaggerations in prosodic
matters, has not merely returned to the essential
taste and method of the early eighteen hundred
and nineties. In the meantime, however, there
have appeared two powerful talents who, a rare
thing in France, stand aside and alone, members
of no group, no school, no cenacle: MM. Francis
Jammes (b. 1868) and Paul Fort (b. 1872).

Charles Guerin, in a set of very pure and very
touching verses addressed to M. Jammes calls that
poet a "son of Vergil." The saying has been re-
peated because M. Jammes, unlike the average
French man of letters, lives in the country (at
Orthez in the Hautes-Pyrenees) and writes about
country matters which he understands admirably.
Thus he recalls, in a superficial way, the poet of
the Georgics. But one quotation, and a hack-
neyed one, from those magnificent poems and one
brief confession from M. Jammes will show the
absurdity of the comparison and also define the
French poet's character. Everyone knows the
Vergilian lines : -

"Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas. . . " 1

M. Jammes prefaced his first collection of poems
with these words : "My God, you have called me
among men. Here I am. I suffer and I love. I
have spoken with the voice which you have given
me. I have written with the words which you
taught my father and my mother who transmitted
them to me. I pass along the road like a burdened
ass at whom children laugh and who droops his

1 "Happy he who has been able to understand the causes of
things."

head. I shall go when you would have me,
whither you would have me go. . . . The angelus
rings." There is nothing here of the sad intel-
lectual valor of the Augustans. It is the note of
Saint Francis, (he humble brother of the birds
and beasts. ... In a word, M. Jammes is a
Catholic. So wholly a Catholic that one need
not speak of intellectual submission in his case.
He was born with the light of faith as his only
guide and sees life with the wide-eyed reverential
wonder of a little child or a great saint. He has
the child's and the saint's simple-hearted fa-
miliarity with divine things :

"Ce n'est pas vous, mon Dieu,
qui, sur les joues en roses, posez la mort bleue." 1

and the tender and vivid sense of the human ele-
ments in his divinities :

"Rappelez-vous, mon Dieu, devant l'enf ant qui meurt,
que vous vivez toujours aupres de votre Mere." 2

So, too, as an artist, he is like the nameless sculp-

1 "It is not you, my God, who on the rosy cheeks will lay the
blue of death."

2 "Recall, my God, before the dying child, that you live always
near your own mother."

tors who adorned the Medieval cathedrals, an
humble craftsman in the light of God's glory, de-
siring nothing for himself:

"Et, comme un adroit ouvrier
tient sa truelle alourdie de mortier,
je veux, d'un coup, a chaque fois porter
du bon ouvrage au mur de ma chaumiere." x

He is aware, of course, of the life of his own age.
He has read, as he says, "novels and verses made
in Paris by men of talent." But these men and
their works seem very forlorn and sad to him. He
would have them come to his own country-side;
for it is in the stillness of the fields and farms that
the peace of God is to be found :

"Alors ils souriront en fumant dans leur pipe,
et, s'ils souffrent encore, car les hommes sont tristes,
ils gueriront beaucoup en ecoutant les cris
des eperviers pointus sur quelque metairie." 2

His own happiness is untroubled, his own submis-
sion to the divine will complete. Like Saint

1 "And as a skilful workman holds his trowel, heavy with
mortar, I would, at once, each time add some goodly work to
the wall of my cottage."

2 "Then they will smile while smoking their pipes, and, if
they suffer still, for men are sad, they will be greatly cured by
hearing the cries of the slim sparrow-hawks over the farmlands."

Francis he has grasped the uttermost meaning of
the Christian virtue of humility and prays to pass
into Paradise with the asses :

". . . et faites que, penche dans ce sejour des ames
sur vos divines eaux, je sois pareil aux ins
qui mireront leur humble et douce pauvrete
a la limpidite de l'amour eternel." 1

These quotations, fragmentary and brief as they
are, will already have made clear some of the
qualities of this extraordinary poet. The saint-
like simplicity of his vision has really, on the
purely descriptive side, made him a naturalist.
For he is no burning mystic, no St. John of the
Cross or Richard Crashaw, but a humble child of
the Church who sees the immediate things of this
world very soberly and clearly as they appear in
their objective nature:

"II y a aussi le chien malade
regardant tristement, couche dans les salades
venir la grande mort qu'il ne comprendra pas." 2

1 "Leaning over your divine waters in that sojourning place of
souls, cause me to be like to the asses who will mirror their
humble and gentle poverty in the limpidity of the eternal love."

2 "There is also the sick dog sadly watching, where he lies
amid the lettuce, great death approach which he will not under-
stand."

But he is always conscious of the relations which
these things, according to his faith, sustain to the
divine. And so, when his own dog dies, he ex-
claims :

"Ah! faites, mon Dieu, si vous me donnez la grace
de Vous voir face a. Face aux jours d'fiternite,
faites qu'un pauvre chien contemple face a face
celui qui fut son dieu parmi l'humanite." x

As becomes his spiritual character, M. Jammes
has discarded all the vain pomp and splendor of
verse, even the subtler and quieter graces of the
Symbolists. His tone is conversational, almost
casual; his sentences have the structure of prose.
He uses rime or assonance or suddenly fails to
rime at all. He seems merely bent on telling the
simple and beautiful things in his heart as quietly
as possible. What constitutes his eminence, his
very high eminence, as an artist is the fact that his
prosaic simplicity of manner, his naive matter-of-
factness, his apparently (but only apparently)
slovenly technique are so used as to make for a

1 "Ah, my God, if you grant me the grace of seeing you face to
face in the days of Eternity, then let a poor dog contemplate
face to face him who was his god among men."

new style in French poetry — a naturalistic style
that rises constantly to a high and noble elevation
of speech, and rises to that elevation, as Words-
worth sought to do, by using the simplest words in
the simplest order. Briefly, he does not adorn
things until they become poetical; he sees them
poetically. His imagination and his heart trans-
form them, not his diction or his figures of speech.
Is that not the highest aim of poetry"? And yet
it were thrusting aside some very elementary and
obvious considerations to call M. Jammes a great
poet. A great artist he is — but not a great poet.
For, except on the purely pictorial side, his sub-
ject matter, the intellectual content of his work
is, necessarily, without significance or permanent
validity. It has subjective truth only. So, it
may be said, has the substance of most modern
verse. True ! But a subjectivity that finds har-
monious echoes in a thousand souls achieves, after
all, the only kind of objectivity, of reality that
we know. That kind of reality and therefore sig-
nificance M. Jammes, as a Catholic in the twenti-
eth century, has largely denied himself. To his
fellow-villagers at Orthez, who share his faith, he
will seem merely curious as a writer: to the in-
tellectual world of the present and the future he
will seem a little curious — however admirably
and highly gifted — as a man.

The fame of M. Paul Fort has attached, so
far, mainly to the new kind of writing which he
is said to have invented. He himself has pro-
tested against this, and it is but natural that he
should. It is equally natural for the public to
fix its attention upon the startling innovations of
which he is the author. But I must hasten to add
that the revolutionary character of these innova-
tions has been greatly exaggerated. In matters
strictly prosodic M. Fort employs, as a rule, a
principle which is conservative enough in its na-
ture. And yet his style of writing is new, and not
only new but charmingly successful and he him-
self one of the most remarkable and delightful
poets of our time.

He writes and prints his verse as prose. In-
stead of stanzas, the eye is given paragraphs, now
long, now short. But I must emphasise the fact
that the length and rhythmic character of the
paragraphs in any given poem is, nearly always,
the same. Thus the one essential characteristic
of verse (in the narrower sense), the recurrence of
rhythm-groups that are felt to be equal in time, is
preserved. If now one begins to analyse these
paragraphs it will be found that, with definite but
not very numerous exceptions, they resolve them-
selves into lesser equal rhythm-groups or — lines.
And these lines are, granting many exceptions
again, verses of eight, ten or twelve syllables.
Here is an example of two octosyllabic verses
printed as prose :

"Pourquoi renouer l'amourette? C'est-y bien la peine
d'aimer"?" 1

And here of two deccasyllabic verses :

"Ah! que de joie, la flute et la musette troublent nos
cceurs de leurs accords charmants. . . ." 2

It is in the use of the twelve-syllabled verse, of
the alexandrine, that M. Fort is most original.
The rhythmic unit that he uses is in reality the

1 "Why knot again our broken love ? Is the sorrow of love
worth while?"

2 "Ah, what delight, the flute and the bagpipe trouble our
hearts with their charming harmonies . . ."

hemistich or stave of six syllables without, how-
ever, letting the full movement of the alexandrine
ever escape the ear entirely. Thus he can con-
stantly use internal rime or assonance and also un-
rimed end syllables. To illustrate this manner
of his fully I shall quote a rather long verse-para-
graph, italicising the syllables that have assonance
or rime. And I use a paragraph in which M. Fort,
who is rather irresponsible in this respect, allows
their full, traditional value to all the mute e's but
two:

"O grave, austere pluie, oii monte Tame des pierres et
qui portez en vous une f roide lumiere, glacez mon ame en
ieu, rendez mon coeur severe, imposez la faa.ich.eur aux
mains que je vous tends! L'averse tombe un peu . . .
elle tombe . . . j' attends . . . Quoi! la lune se leve?
Quoi! l'orage est passes? Quoi! tout le del en Reurs? et
l'air sent, par bonifies, l'oeillet, la tvbtreuse, la rose et
la poussiere?" Une etoile d' amour sur le Louvre a glis.se'.<?
J'achete des bouquets/ quoi! je suis insen.ye<? Et je ris
de mon coeur, et je cours chez Manow, des roses plein les
bras, implorer mon pardon?"' 1

1 "O grave, austere rain into which has risen the soul of
jewels and who carry in yourself a cold light, frost over
my soul on fire, make my heart severe, lay freshness on
the hands that I stretch out to you ! The shower falls for a
little ... it falls ... I wait . . . What! does the moon arise?

This exceedingly beautiful paragraph, closely-
studied, will be seen to consist in reality of twelve
alexandrine verses. But the middle caesura is so
sharp that the individual music of the hemistich
is constantly stressed. Of these twelve alexan-
drines the first, second and third rime (though not
quite purely, perhaps), the fourth and fifth, the
sixth and seventh. The eighth is blank though
I am rather sure that M. Fort means us to feel
poussiere as echoing the earlier severe and lu-
miere; the ninth rimes with both the first and
second hemistich of the tenth, a device which ac-
celerates the movement of the verse, and the elev-
enth and twelfth rime again quite regularly. In
addition there is, I am equally sure, a not wholly
unconscious element of assonance in the stave end-
ings : feu, fralcheur, peu, fleurs, tubereuse.

If this verse-paragraph be accepted as fairly
representative of M. Fort's manner of writing, and
if my analysis of it be correct, it is obviously

What! has the storm gone by? What? Does the sky burst
into flowers? and the air smells, by gusts, of the carnation and
the tuberose, of roses and of dust? Has a star of love glided
over the Louvre? I buy posies! How! am I beside myself?
And I laugh from my heart, and I run to Manon, my arms full
of roses, to implore my forgiveness?"

wrong to regard him as primarily a writer of very
free verse or of mere poetic prose with an occa-
sional rime. And so the question arises : Is his
typographical form a mere crotchet? It is not.
One need but read once more the paragraph I have
quoted — read it quite naturally and simply now
without any thought of its prosodic method — to
feel that here is a new poetic style in French, in-
comparable in its ease, its grace, its fluidity, fol-
lowing and never doing violence to the emotion,
modulated to the very tones of the human voice.
Or, more specifically, M. Fort's manner of writing
and printing gives him these advantages: The
sentences are not broken by prosodic divisions but
flow on freely. Yet the verse music is never lost.
The diction can be as natural, as unpoetical (in
the older sense) as he pleases. Yet it is never
felt to jar through its contrast with the associa-
tions of traditional verse. He can restrict or mul-
tiply his rimes at will and unobtrusively and hence
use them to express the color and tone of the im-
mediate poetic mood and moment. So he
achieves, I must use the words once more, an ease,
a grace, a fluidity of poetic movement which are
as new as they are beautiful.

His manner of writing grew naturally from his
character as a man and a poet. Whether upon
some reasoned philosophic view or not, M. Fort is
satisfied with the appearances of things. The
beauty, the charm, the quaintness, the light and
shade of the visible world — whether in nature or
in the gestures of present and historic man or in
the colorful and significant events in his own life
— these suffice him. He thrills with the beauty
and interest, the play and manifoldness of the
visible. He keeps himself passive and lets the
beauty of the world strike endless music from
him. He hesitates to cut and shape and pattern
the music of the world's beauty which, like the
melody of Wagner, is without pause or end.
Long ago, in his earlier Ballades frangaises he
wrote :

"taisse ordonner le ciel a tes yeux, sans comprendre,
et cree de ton silence la musique des nuits." x

1 "Let the sky order (things) for thine eyes, without under-
standing them, and create with thy silence the music of the
nights."

And more recently and directly in the really mag-
nificent Vision harmonieuse de la Terre of his
Hymns de Feu:

"Et ne vous voyez pas que les hommes seraient dieux,
s'ils voulaient m'ecouter, laisser vivre leurs sens, dans le
vent, sur la terre, en plein ciel, et loin d'eux ! Ah, que n'y
mettent ils un peu de complaisance ! Tout l'univers alors
(recompense adorable!) serait leur ame eparse, leur coeur
inepuisable. Et que dis-je ? Ils ont tous le moyen d'etre
heureux. 'Laisse penser ton sens, homme, et tu es ton
Dieu.' " i

If there is danger in so complete a surrender to the
sensible and the visible, that danger has not
touched M. Fort or troubled the health of his soul.
He is the serenest and most joyous of modern
poets, though he can be deeply grave and tender.
His verse has something of the blowing of the
winds of spring, of the ripple and flow of the
earth's waters. It communicates to us a sense of
the undying delight that is in his own heart.

1 "And do you not see that men would be gods, if they would
but hear me, would but let their senses live in the wind, upon
earth, in the full sky, and far from them? Ah, why do they
not strive to yield a little there! All the universe (adorable re-
ward) would be their dispersed soul, their inexhaustible heart.
And, what do I say? They all have the means of being happy.
'Let thy senses think for thee, O man, and thou art thy God.' "

Among the slightly older or younger contem-
poraries of M. Fort various poetic methods and
kinds have been cultivated. M. Pierre Louys
(b. 1870) may be called a Neo-Parnassien. His
work is chiseled and lustrous, but a little conscious
and hard. M. Edmond Rostand's (b. 1868)
genius shows to less advantage in his personal
lyrics and ballads than in the glow and abundance
of his famous plays. He is, of course, in the
strictly French sense, a Neo-Romantic, a de-
scendant of Lamartine and Hugo. So also is M.
Leo Larguier (b. 1878) who clings to the roman-
tic alexandrine, but whose admirable talent per-
suades the ear as well as the emotions. MM.
Paul Souchon (b. 1874) and Maurice Magre
(b. 1878) have cultivated an intelligent and
agreeable naturalism which one would like to see
flourish in the French poetry of to-day more than
it does.

I pass on, quite briefly, to the latest movement,
the youngest group. The aims of these poets are
not yet very clearly denned; their names are
scarcely known beyond certain circles in France.
One may mention MM. Andre Spire, Leon Deu-
bel, Rene Arcos, Jules Romains, Charles Vildrac
and Georges Duhamel. Several of them, notably
MM. Spire and Duhamel, are cultivating free
verse not in the symbolist sense but in the con-
temporary American sense of Miss Amy Lowell
and Mr. Edgar Lee Masters. What effects of
permanent importance or beauty can be thus
achieved in the very fluid medium of French re-
mains to be seen. The longer lines, as in the
third paragraph of M. DuhamePs Annunciation
(lix) tend to approach the alexandrine rhythm;
the shorter lines, as in the last paragraph of the
same poem, seem often about to fall into some
verse pattern dimly present in the poet's mind.
Whether using any such pattern or not, all these
poets have thrown off the last restraints of the
older French prosody and strive after a larger,
subtler, more intellectual music. Their under-
standing of this whole matter has been set down
very clearly and acutely by MM. Vildrac and Du-
hamel in their Notes sur la Technique poetique
(1910). According to this little treatise a ten-
able theory of versification must be "based upon
the inner (subjective) metric and phonetic rela-
tions." These relations seem to demand, in every
verse or line, a constant element or rhythmic unit
—either the first or second stave. If both parts
or staves of the line conform to this norm, the
verse is regular or traditional. If the rhythmic
unit be represented but once in each line, if, in
other words, each line consist of a rhythmic con-
stant plus a rhythmic variable, the verse is free.
Some close observation of modern verse of dif-
ferent types will, I think, convince any compe-
tent reader that this theory is far more sensible
and helpful than such statements of prosodic prin-
ciple are apt to be. It is too soon, of course, to
offer a definite critical interpretation of these, the
youngest poets of France. But one may say that,
like the Symbolists, though with even larger liber-
ties of form, they deal with their subjective vision
of things, that they, too, have a tendency to with-
draw from the dust and heat of the race into the
twilit chambers of the soul. . . .

That withdrawal characterises, with exceptions
more apparent than real, all the poets of modern
Trance. Verhaej-en seems an exception, but we
must remember that he was not a Frenchman at
all; M. Jammes seems another, but he has with-
drawn from the life of thought as truly as the
others have from the life of fact. In practically
all the modern poetry of France the substance of
literature has been transmuted into the stuff of
dreams, transposed into the regions of revery.
The subjectivity of this poetry is so high that it
has absorbed the world into itself. After cen-
turies of a literary life in which the social, the
general, the typical, the objective employed all the
creative energies of France, these poets could not
go beyond the discovery of the world within, the
simple finding of their self-hood. But there has
been among them hitherto no personality so bal-
anced, so fully self-achieved as to grapple with
reality, interpreting or transforming it by the
power of the creative intellect, of the creative
imagination. That, I take it, should be the next
step, the next development in the poetry of France.
A movement that brought forth such personalities
would give to French literature a poetry more
bracing, even though less charming, not quite so
beautiful but more valorous and severe.