Text: Charles Du Bos, “Poe and the French Mind (part II),” Athenaeum (London, UK), whole no. 4733, January 14, 1920, pp. 54-55

[page 54, column 1, continued:]

FOR whereas a Keats, a Shelley, a Coleridge never sought originality, but were content with supremely achieving it, in accord with the beautiful words of Keats himself in his

letter to John Hamilton Reynolds (February 3, 1818): “ Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject. How beautiful are the retired flowers! How would they lose their beauty were they to throng into the highway, crying out, ‘Admire me, I am a violet! Dote upon me, I am a primrose!” — the position of the French poet is very different: to achieve greatness he is, so to say, condemned to originality, and as time elapses he will always become more so. The reasons of his predicament are numerous, and they belong to different orders. They lie primarily in the medium with which he has to deal. He is handicapped at the outset by the relative scarcity of the vocabulary at his command — a scarcity which lends even to his most glorious trophies of expression that indefinable air of having been fastidiously picked and chosen from which the work of his more happily situated brother is so singularly free. To the great French poet how often might not be applied Landor's famous line on Dryden: He wrestles with and conquers Time.

But even this scarcity of vocabulary is far less prejudicial than two other properties that seem inherent to the French language: the sharply defined outline of each word, and the strict and universally accepted meaning which is attached to it. Most English words possess, around the hard central core, an aura, what one might term a plastic, ductile zone — and in that zone the poet may freely exercise his modelling faculty without ever conveying a sense of undue violence. The French poet is face to face with the following dilemma: either he accepts the language as he finds it, and then commonplace and conventionality lie near at hand; or if he be appointed to greatness, he instils into each of the customary words those few drops from the personal elixir which give to every word when used by a master just that deflection from the ordinary sense, and that inflection as of a new voice, which constitute perhaps the most mysterious triumph of the art of writing. For the French poet, such triumphs are hardly won; and in French verse the form of originality perhaps the most arduous of all to achieve is th one in which both the deflection and the inflection alike remain almost invisible, the form commemorated in Boileau's saying about Racine: “Je lui ai appris à faire difficilement des vers faciles.” Racine, La Fontaine, André Chénier, how few the names of those who really succeed! The obstacles that lie in the medium are further complicated by historical causes: my readers will have noticed that the movement towards “la poésie pure’ began very late in France — in the [column 2:] middle of the nineteenth century, with Baudelaire. Now, up to that time, not only was no line drawn between the sphere of lyrical poetry and that of eloquence, but both were considered so closely allied — and it must be confessed that so many works showed the alliance — that such an historian “des genres littéraires” as Brunetiére was never weary of calling attention to their affinities without having once been struck by the confusion upon which the so-called affinities rested. We were far indeed, at the beginning of last century, from Verlaine's

and by a very unhappy conjuncture most of the great poets wrote and flourished before the separation between lyrical poetry and eloquence took place. The result was doubly unfortunate: first, in so far that a great deal of their work is drowned in verbose and irrelevant considerations; secondly, because they used an enormous number of poetical themes which, when at last appeared the men able to apply to them the best treatment, had already lost something of their freshness and of their bloom. The difficulties with which a Baudelaire — later a Mallarmé — to-day a Valéry — had, or have, to contend are tremendous. More and more, as the poetical themes go on exhausting themselves, will the great French poet be condemned to originality; and to the dicta of an Edgar Poe, from which a Keats would have quietly turned away, he gives and, in a sense, is bound to give an attentive hearing — especially as he himself has thought so much, and to such good purpose, on the matter.

Of course, I do not mean for a moment to insinuate that men of the critical flair and sharpness of Baudelaire, Mallarmé and M. Paul Valéry should ever have taken the “Philosophy of Composition” otherwise than cum grano salis — though Baudelaire, for a long period, was truly a Poe-intoxicated man, and it speaks volumes for the soaring autonomy of his poetical genius that, given the intoxication, “Les Fleurs du Mal” should, on the whole, be so free from any taint of Poe's mannerisms; yet I, for my part, should readily understand if the ‘Philosophy of Composition,’ the infinitely more valuable essay on the Poetic Principle and the vivid “Marginalia” had engaged their interest, and arrested their attention, even more than they did. For Poe's mind represents almost exactly what would become of the working of a certain type of French mind — well trained and of a high order — if it were suddenly severed from the background of preferences and traditions, the background of an anonymous taste upon which it all instinctively, yet all unwittingly, falls back. Such a mind, prompted by a native, half-freakish playfulness, combined with sheer intellectual zest, has an irresistible tendency to push an idea just as far as it can possibly go — to see what may come out of it, not in the least brought down, but rather exhilarated, by what Mr. Berenson calls somewhere ‘the idea's logical bitter end.’”’ Add to this the natural bent of the-born mechanic who takes at least as much pleasure a démonter la machine qu’a la construive, and here again what does Poe say ? (he is, indeed, a forerunner!) “ It is the curse of a certain order of mind that it can never rest satisfied with the consciousness of its ability to do a thing. Not even is it content with doing it. It must both know and show how it was done.” La fabrication, or what M. Valéry — carrying on the delicate tradition of the Frenchman of the older type who always understates when he alludes to his own aims — insists on calling, in familiar talk, la vecette, excites the curiosity of such an order of mind to a point that amounts to a sort of fascination. And it is here that, deprived of the safeguard of an ingrained taste, Poe's danger looms large. “ Poe's taste was never very sure’; Mr. Gosse himself admits as much, and I am glad to feel backed here by such an admirer of his poetry. It belonged to that sort of taste which is essentially an accomplishment, rather than the result of a slow inner flowering; under their lawless surface such tastes preserve a certain hardness, and exquisite though they appear and, in a sense, are, they yet remain liable to occasional lapses — as can be seen even in the case’of a taste that was a much finer and subtler instrument than Poe's, in the case of Whistler. Poe's taste is, so to speak, entirely absorbed in the working out of each separate poem, and, in the intervals, nothing remains to temper and control the play of the mind as such. To take an example: if there is one thing which Poe thought that he always knew, it was where and when to stop. As far [page 55:] as the poems are concerned he knew it very often indeed, though not always; but he did not know it at all as regards his own thought, and here his ignorance might be construed as legitimate: for the mind, as such, has not to stop; to taste, and to taste only, does it belong to impose upon the mind the time to stop; and it is here precisely that, backed by the infallible tact of the race in such matters, the French come out so great.

But there is still another trait, and perhaps the most characteristic of all, which Poe has in common with a certain type of French mind: I mean an attitude that retains something mechanical, one would almost say physical, in its dealings with things spiritual, in particular with the feeling of mystery. All the best English and American critics have been struck by the fact, and it did not escape the notice of M. André Suarés, who, whenever he chooses to exercise the gift, shows himself such an independent and penetrating judge of literature. In a remarkable essay, “Idées sur Edgar Poe,” which is to be found in the second series of “Sur la Vie,” he says: “Son intelligence ne s’arréte pas au mystére; elle s’y applique, mais toujours charnellement.” The want of that very spirituality which he always invokes, and almost drags in — such seems to be the most serious flaw in Edgar Poe's equipment. Now the pure Frenchman, so profusely endowed with mental and artistic gifts, is not, by nature, spiritual, and is therefore far less liable than anybody else to suffer from that want of true spirituality. Those few attributes which perpetually recur in Poe's work, which he considers as the adequate vehicles of the feeling of mystery, but in which that feeling is materialized to such a degree that they sometimes strike us as mere “accessoires de théatre,” do not disconcert some French minds because they view them simply as the proper tools and implements of an artist. But all this would probably be admitted by Mr. Gosse himself, who says that “the best of Poe's poems are those in which he deals less boisterously with the sentiment of mystery.”

CHARLES DU BOS.

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 26:]

* The first part of this Letter appeared in THE ATHENÆUM for January 7.