Instigations Part 1

Instigations.

by Ezra Pound and Ernest Fenollosa.

I

A STUDY IN FRENCH POETS

The time when the intellectual affairs of America could be conducted on a monolingual basis is over. It has been irksome for long. The intellectual life of London is dependent on people who understand the French language about as well as their own. America's part in contemporary culture is based chiefly upon two men familiar with Paris: Whistler and Henry James. It is something in the nature of a national disgrace that a New Zealand paper, "The Triad," should be more alert to, and have better regular criticism of, contemporary French publications than any American periodical has yet had.

I had wished to give but a brief anthology[1] of French poems, interposing no comment of my own between author and reader; confining my criticism to selection. But that plan was not feasible. I was indebted to MM. Davray and Valette for cordial semi-permissions to quote the "Mercure" publications.

Certain delicate wines will not travel; they are not always the best wines. Foreign criticism may sometimes correct the criticism _du cru_. I cannot pretend to give the reader a summary of contemporary French opinion, but certain French poets have qualities strong enough to be perceptible to me, that is, to at least one alien reader; certain things are translatable from one language to another, a tale or an image will "translate"; music will, practically, never translate; and if a work be taken abroad in the original tongue, certain properties seem to become less apparent, or less important. Fancy styles, questions of local "taste," lose importance. Even though I know the overwhelming importance of technique, technicalities in a foreign tongue cannot have for me the importance they have to a man writing in that tongue; almost the only technique perceptible to a foreigner is the presentation of content as free as possible from the clutteration of dead technicalities, fustian a la Louis XV; and from timidities of workmans.h.i.+p. This is perhaps the only technique that ever matters, the only _maestria_.

Mediocre poetry is, I think, the same everywhere; there is not the slightest need to import it; we search foreign tongues for _maestria_ and for discoveries not yet revealed in the home product. The critic of a foreign literature must know a reasonable amount of the bad poetry of the nation he studies if he is to attain any sense of proportion.

He will never be as sensitive to fine shades of language as the native; he has, however, a chance of being less bound, less allied to some group of writers. It would be politic for me to praise as many living French-men as possible, and thereby to increase the number of my chances for congenial acquaintance on my next trip to Paris, and to have a large number of current French books sent to me to review.

But these rather broad and general temptations can scarcely lead me to praise one man instead of another.

If I have thrown over current French opinion, I must urge that foreign opinion has at times been a corrective. England has never accepted the continental opinion of Byron; the right estimate lies perhaps between the two. Heine is, I have heard, better read outside Germany than within. The continent has never accepted the idiotic British adulation of Milton; on the other hand, the idiotic neglect of Landor has never been rectified by the continent.

Foreign criticism, if honest, can never be quite the same as home criticism: it may be better or worse; it may have a value similar to that of a different decade or century and has at least some chance of escaping whims and stampedes of opinion.

I do not "aim at completeness." I believe that the American-English reader has heard in a general way of Baudelaire and Verlaine and Mallarme; that Mallarme, perhaps unread, is apt to be slightly overestimated; that Gautier's reputation, despite its greatness, is not yet as great as it should be.

After a man has lived a reasonable time with the two volumes of Gautier's poetry, he might pleasantly venture upon the authors whom I indicate in this essay; and he might have, I think, a fair chance of seeing them in proper perspective. I omit certain nebulous writers because I think their work bad; I omit the Parna.s.siens, Samain and Heredia, firstly because their work seems to me to show little that was not already implicit in Gautier; secondly, because America has had enough Parna.s.sienism--perhaps second rate, but still enough. (The verses of La Comtesse de Noailles in the "Revue des Deux Mondes," and those of John Vance Cheney in "The Atlantic" once gave me an almost identical pleasure.) I do not mean that all the poems here to be quoted are better than Samain's "Mon ame est une infante...." or his "Cleopatre."

We may take it that Gautier achieved hardness in _Emaux et Camees_; his earlier work did in France very much what remained for the men of "the nineties" to accomplish in England. Gautier's work done in "the thirties" shows a similar beauty, a similar sort of technique. If the Parna.s.siens were following Gautier they fell short of his merit. Heredia was perhaps the best of them. He tried to make his individual statements more "poetic"; but his whole, for all this, becomes frigid.

Samain followed him and began to go "soft"; there is in him just a suggestion of muzziness. Heredia is "hard," but there or thereabouts he ends. Gautier is intent on being "hard"; is intent on conveying a certain verity of feeling, and he ends by being truly poetic. Heredia wants to be poetic _and_ hard; the hardness appears to him as a virtue in the poetic. And one tends to conclude, from this, that all attempts to be poetic in some manner or other, defeat their own end; whereas an intentness on the quality of the emotion to be conveyed makes for poetry.

I intend here a qualitative a.n.a.lysis. The work of Gautier, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Mallarme, Samain, Heredia, and of the authors I quote here should give an idea of the sort of poetry that has been written in France during the last half century, or at least during the last forty years. If I am successful in my choice, I will indicate most of the best and even some of the half-good. Bever and Leautaud's anthology contains samples of some forty or fifty more poets.[2]

After Gautier, France produced, as nearly as I can understand, three chief and admirable poets: Tristan Corbiere, perhaps the most poignant writer since Villon; Rimbaud, a vivid and indubitable genius; and Laforgue--a slighter, but in some ways a finer "artist" than either of the others. I do not mean that he "writes better" than Rimbaud; and Eliot has pointed out the wrongness of Symons's phrase, "Laforgue the eternal adult, Rimbaud the eternal child." Rimbaud's effects seem often to come as the beauty of certain silver crystals produced by chemical means. Laforgue always knows what he is at; Rimbaud, the "genius" in the narrowest and deepest sense of the term, the "most modern," seems, almost without knowing it, to hit on the various ways in which the best writers were to follow him, slowly. Laforgue is the "last word":--out of infinite knowledge of all the ways of saying a thing he finds the right way. Rimbaud, when right, is so because he cannot be bothered to exist in any other modality.

JULES LAFORGUE

(1860-'87)

Laforgue was the "end of a period"; that is to say, he summed up and summarized and dismissed nineteenth-century French literature, its foibles and fas.h.i.+ons, as Flaubert in "Bouvard and Pecuchet" summed up nineteenth-century general civilization. He satirized Flaubert's heavy "Salammbo" manner inimitably, and he manages to be more than a critic, for in process of this ironic summary he conveys himself, _il raconte lui-meme en racontant son age et ses murs_, he delivers the moods and the pa.s.sion of a rare and sophisticated personality: "point ce 'gaillard-la' ni le Superbe ... mais au fond distinguee et franche comme une herbe"!

Oh! laissez-moi seulement reprendre haleine, Et vous aurez un livre enfin de bonne foi.

En attendant, ayez pitie de ma misere!

Que je vous sois a tous un etre bienvenu!

Et que je sois absous pour mon ame sincere, Comme le fut Phryne pour son sincere nu.

He is one of the poets whom it is practically impossible to "select."

Almost any other six poems would be quite as "representative" as the six I am quoting.

PIERROTS

(_On a des principes_)

Elle disait, de son air vain fondamental: "Je t'aime pour toi seul!"--Oh! la, la, grele histoire; Oui, comme l'art! Du calme, o salaire illusoire Du capitaliste Ideal!

Elle faisait: "J'attends, me voici, je sais pas"...

Le regard pris de ces larges candeurs des lunes; --Oh! la, la, ce n'est pas peut-etre pour des prunes, Qu'on a fait ses cla.s.ses ici-bas?

Mais voici qu'un beau soir, infortunee a point, Elle meurt!--Oh! la, la; bon, changement de theme!

On sait que tu dois ressusciter le troisieme Jour, sinon en personne, du moins Dans l'odeur, les verdures, les eaux des beaux mois!

Et tu iras, levant encore bien plus de dupes Vers le Zamph de la Joconde, vers la Jupe!

Il se pourra meme que j'en sois.

PIERROTS

III

Comme ils vont molester, la nuit, Au profond des parcs, les statues, Mais n'offrant qu'au moins devetues Leur bras et tout ce qui s'ensuit,

En tete-a-tete avec la femme Ils ont toujours l'air d'etre un tiers, Confondent demain avec hier, Et demandent _Rien_ avec ame!

Jurent "je t'aime" l'air la-bas, D'une voix sans timbre, en extase, Et concluent aux plus folles phrases Par des: "Mon Dieu, n'insistons pas?"

Jusqu'a ce qu'ivre, Elle s...o...b..ie, Prise d'on ne sait quel besoin De lune? dans leurs bras, fort loin Des convenances etablies.

COMPLAINTE DES CONSOLATIONS

_Quia voluit consolari_

Ses yeux ne me voient pas, son corps serait jaloux; Elle m'a dit: "monsieur ..." en m'enterrant d'un geste; Elle est Tout, l'univers moderne et le celeste.

Soit, draguons donc Paris, et ravitaillons-nous, Tant bien que mal, du reste.

Les Landes sans espoir de ses regards brles, Semblaient parfois des paons prets a mettre a la voile ...

Sans chercher a me consoler vers les etoiles, Ah! Je trouverai bien deux yeux aussi sans cles, Au Louvre, en quelque toile!

Oh! qu'incultes, ses airs, revant dans la prison D'un _cant_ sur le qui-vive au travers de nos hontes!

Mais, en m'appliquant bien, moi dont la foi demonte Les jours, les ciels, les nuits, dans les quatre saisons Je trouverai mon compte.

Sa bouche! a moi, ce pli pudiquement martyr Ou s'aigrissent des nostalgies de nostalgies!