The Book of Masks
The Book of MasksINTRODUCTIONPREFACEMAURICE MAETERLINCKÉMILE VERHAERENHENRI DE RÉGNIERFRANCIS VIELÉ-GRIFFINSTÉPHANE MALLARMÉALBERT SAMAINPIERRE QUILLARDA. FERDINAND HEROLDADOLPH RETTÉVILLIERS DE L'ISLE-ADAM.LAURENT TAILHADEJULES RENARDLOUIS DUMUR.GEORGES EEKHOUDPAUL ADAMLAUTRÉAMONTTRISTAN CORBIÈREARTHUR RIMBAUDFRANCIS POICTEVINANDRÉ GIDEPIERRE LOUYSRACHILDEJ. K. HUYSMANSJULES LAFORGUEJEAN MORÉASSTUART MERRILLSAINT-POL-ROUXROBERT DE MONTESQUIOUGUSTAVE KAHNPAUL VERLAINETRANSLATIONS FROM THE TEXTCopyright
The Book of Masks
Remy de Gourmont
INTRODUCTION
To take critical questions seriously, even passionately, is
one of the marks of a genuinely civilized society. It points to
both personal disinterestedness and to an imaginative absorption in
fundamentals. The American who watches eagerly some tilt in that
great critical battle which has gone on for ages and has now
reached our shores, is released from his slavery to the immediate
and the parochial; he has ceased to flinch at the free exercise of
thought; he has begun to examine his mind as his fathers examined
only their conscience; he is a little less concerned for speed and
a little more for direction; he is almost a philosopher and has
risen from mere heated gregariousness to voluntary co-operation in
a spiritual order. His equipment is, as a rule, still meagre, and
so his partisanship is not always an instructed one. He may be
overwhelmed by the formidable philosophical apparatus of one critic
or merely irritated by the political whims of another. Hence
nothing could well be more helpful to him than an introduction to a
foreign critic who is at once a stringent thinker and a charming
writer, who permitted his insight to be obscured by neither moral
nor political prejudices, who is both urbane and incisive, catholic
and discriminating.Remy de Gourmont, like all the very great critics—Goethe,
Ste. Beuve, Hazlitt, Jules Lemaitre—knew the creative instinct and
exercised the creative faculty. Hence he understood, what the mere
academician, the mere scholar, can never grasp, that literature is
life grown flame-like and articulate; that, therefore, like life
itself, it varies in aim and character, in form and color and savor
and is the memorable record of and commentary upon each stage in
that great process of change that we call the world. To write like
the Greeks or the Elizabethans or the French classics is precisely
what we must not do. It would be both presumptuous and futile. All
that we have to contribute to mankind, what is it but just—our
selves? If we were duplicates of our great-grandfathers we would be
littering the narrow earth to no enriching purpose; all we have to
contribute to literature is, again, our selves. This moment, this
sensation, this pang, this thought—this little that is intimately
our own is all we have of the unique and precious and incomparable.
Let us express it beautifully, individually, memorably and it is
all we can do; it is all that the classics did in their day. To
imitate the classics—be one! That is to say, live widely,
intensely, unsparingly and record your experience in some timeless
form. This, in brief, is the critical theory of Gourmont, this is
the background of that startling and yet, upon reflection, so clear
and necessary saying of his "The only excuse a man has for writing
is that he express himself, that he reveal to others the kind of
world reflected in the mirror of his soul; his only excuse is that
he be original".Gourmont, like the Symbolists whom he describes in this
volume, founded his theory of the arts upon a metaphysical
speculation. He learned from the German idealists, primarily the
Post-Kantians and Schopenhauer, that the world is only our
representation, only our individual vision and that, since there is
no criterion of the existence or the character of an external
reality, that vision is, of course, all we actually have to express
in art. But to accept his critical theory it is not necessary to
accept his metaphysical views. The variety of human experience
remains equally infinite and equally fascinating on account of its
very infiniteness, whatever its objective content may or may not
be. We can dismiss that antecedent and insoluble question and still
agree that the best thing a man can give in art as in life is his
own self. What kind of a self? One hears at once the hot and angry
question of the conservative critic. A disciplined one, by all
means, an infinitely and subtly cultivated one. But not one shaped
after some given pattern, not a replica, not a herd-animal, but a
human personality. But achieving such personalities, the reply
comes, people fall into error. Well, this is an imperfect universe
and the world-spirit, as Goethe said, is more tolerant than people
think.It is clear that criticism conceived of in this fashion, can
do little with the old methods of harsh valuing and stiff
classification. If, as Jules, Lemaitre put it, a poem, a play, a
novel, "exists" at all, if it has that fundamental veracity of
experience and energy of expression which raise it to the level of
literary discussion, a critic like Gourmont cannot and will not
pass a classifying judgment on it at all. For such judgments
involve the assumption that there exists a fixed scale of objective
values. And for such a scale we search both the world and the mind
in vain. Hence, too—and this is a point of the last importance—we
are done with arbitrary exclusions, exclusions by transitory
conventions or by tribal habits lifted to the plane of eternal
laws. All experience, the whole soul of man—nothing less than that
is now our province. And no one has done more to bring us that
critical and creative freedom and enlargement of scope than Remy de
Gourmont.In the volume before us, for instance, he discusses writers
of very varied moods and interests. Dr. Samuel Johnson or, for that
matter, a modern preceptist critic, speaking of these very poets,
would have told us how some of them were noble and some ignoble and
certain ones moral and others no better than they should be. And
both of these good and learned and arrogant men would have
instructed Verlaine in what to conceal, and Gustave Kahn in how to
build verses and Régnier in how to enlarge the range of his
imagery. Thus they would have missed the special beauty and thrill
that each of these poets has brought into the world. For they
read—as all their kind reads—not with peace in their hearts but
with a bludgeon in their hands. But if we watch Gourmont who had,
by the way, an intellect of matchless energy, we find that he read
his poets with that wise passiveness which Wordsworth wanted men to
cultivate before the stars and hills. He is uniformly sensitive; he
lets his poets play upon him; he is the lute upon which their
spirits breathe. And then that lute itself begins to sound and to
utter a music of its own which swells and interprets and clarifies
the music of his poets and brings nearer to us the wisdom and the
loveliness which they and he have brought into the
world.Thus it is, first of all, as one of the earliest and finest
examples of the New Criticism that this English version of the
"Book of Masks" is to be welcomed. For the New Criticism is the
chief phenomenon in that movement toward spiritual and moral
tolerance which the world so sorely needs. But the book is also to
be welcomed and valued for the sake of its specific subject matter.
One movement in the entire range of modern poetry and only one
surpasses the movement of the French Symbolists in clearness of
beauty, depth of feeling, wealth and variety of music. This
Symbolist movement arose in France as a protest against the
naturalistic, the objective in substance and against the rigid and
sonorous in form. Eloquence had so long, even during the romantic
period, dominated French poetry that profound inwardness of
inspiration and lyrical fluidity of expression were regarded as
essential by the literary reformers of the later eighteen hundred
and eighties. It was in the service of these ends that Stéphane
Mallarmé taught the Symbolist system Of poetics: to name no things
except as symbols of unseen realities, to use the external world
merely as a means of communicating mood and revery and reflection.
The doctrine and the verse of Mallarmé spoke to a Europe that was
under the sway of a similar reaction and the work of poets as
diverse as Arthur Symons, William Butler Yeats and Hugo von
Hofmannsthal is unthinkable without the pervasive influence of the
French master. Mallarmé and his doctrine are, indeed, the starting
point of all modern lyrical poetry. Whatever has been written
since, in free verse or fixed, betrays through conformity or
re-action, the mark of that doctrine and the resultant
movement.The actual poets of the movement are little known among us.
Verlaine's name is already almost a classical one and the exquisite
versions of many of his poems by Arthur Symons are accessible;
Verhaeren was lifted into a brief notoriety some years ago. But who
really reads the stormy and passionate verses of the Flemish
master? Nor are there many who have entered the suave and golden
glow that radiates from Régnier, chief of the living poets of
France, or who have vibrated to the melancholy of Samain or the
inner music of Francis Vielé-Griffin. The other poets, less copious
and less applauded, are not greatly inferior in the quality of
their best work. There is not a poet in Gourmont's book who has not
written some verses that add permanently to the world's store of
living beauty. Nor is it true that a slightly more recent
development in French poetry has surpassed the works of the
Symbolists. M. Francis Jammes writes with a charming simplicity and
M. Paul Fort with a large rhythmic line, with freshness and with
grace and the very young "unanimiste" poets are intellectual and
tolerant and sane. But they are all, in the essentials of poetry,
children of the Symbolists whose work remains the great modern
contribution of France to poetical literature.LUDWIG LEWISOHN.
PREFACE
It is difficult to characterize a literary evolution in the
hour when the fruits are still uncertain and the very blossoming in
the orchard unconsummated. Precocioustrees, slow-developing and dubious
trees which one would not care, however, to call sterile: the
orchard is very diverse and rich, too rich. The thickness of the
leaves brings shadow, and the shadow discolors the flowers and
dulls the hues of the fruit.We will stroll through this rich, dark orchard and sit down
for a moment at the foot of the strongest, fairest, and most
agreeable trees.Literary evolutions receive a name when they merit it by
importance, necessity and fitness. Quite often, this name has no
precise meaning, but is useful in serving as a rallying sign to all
who accept it, and as the aiming point for those who attack it.
Thus the battle is fought around a purely verbal labarum. What is
the meaning ofRomanticism?It
is easier to feel than to explain it. What is the meaning ofSymbolism?Practically nothing, if we
adhere to the narrow etymological sense. If we pass beyond, it may
mean individualism in literature, liberty in art, abandonment of
taught formulas, tendencies towards the new and strange, or even
towards the bizarre. It may also mean idealism, a contempt for the
social anecdote, anti-naturalism, a propensity to seize only the
characteristic details of life, to emphasize only those acts that
distinguish one man from another, to strive to achieve essentials;
finally, for the poets symbolism seems allied to free verse, that
is, to unswathed verse whose young body may frolic at ease,
liberated from embarrassments of swaddling clothes and
straps.But all this has little affinity with the syllables of the
word, for we must not let it be insinuated that symbolism is only
the transformation of the old allegory or of the art of
personifying an idea in a human being, a landscape, or a narrative.
Such an art is the whole of art, art primordial and eternal, and a
literature freed from this necessity would be unmentionable. It
would be null, with as much aesthetic significance as the clucking
of the hocco or the braying of the wild ass.Literature, indeed, is nothing more than the artistic
development of the idea, the imaginary heroes. Heroes, or men (for
every man in his sphere is a hero), are only sketched by life; it
is art which perfects them by giving them, in exchange for their
poor sick souls, the treasure of an immortal idea, and the
humblest, if chosen by a great poet, may be called to this
participation. Who so humble as that Aeneas whom Virgil burdens
with all the weight of being the idea of Roman force, and who so
humble as that Don Quixote on whom Cervantes imposes the tremendous
load of being at once Roland, the four sons Aymon, Amadis,
Palmerin, Tristan and all the knights of the Round Table! The
history of symbolism would be the history of man himself, since man
can only assimilate a symbolized idea. Needless to insist on this,
for one might think that the young devotees of symbolism are
unaware of theVita Nuovaand
the character Beatrice, whose frail, pure shoulders nevertheless
keep erect under the complex weight of symbols with which the poet
overwhelms her.Whence, then, came the illusion that symbolizing of the idea
was a novelty?In these last years, we had a very serious attempt of
literature based on a scorn of the idea, a disdain of the symbol.
We are acquainted with its theory, which seems culinary: take a
slice of life, etc. Zola, having invented the recipe, forgot to
serve it. His "slices of life" are heavy poems of a miry,
tumultuous lyricism, popular romanticism, democratic symbolism, but
ever full of an idea, always pregnant with allegoric meaning. The
idealistic revolt, then, did not rear itself against the works
(unless against the despicable works) of naturalism, but against
its theory, or rather against its pretension; returning to the
eternal, antecedent necessities of art, the rebels presumed to
express new and even surprising truths in professing their wish to
reinstate the idea in literature; they only relighted the torch;
they also lighted, all around, many small candles.There is, nevertheless, a new truth, which has recently
entered literature and art, a truth quite metaphysical and
quitea priori(in appearance),
quite young, since it is only a century old, and truly new, since
it has not yet served in the aesthetic order. This evangelical and
marvelous truth, liberating and renovating, is the principle the
world's ideality. With reference to th thinking subject, man, the
world, everything that is external, only exists according to the
idea he forms of it. We only know phenomena, we only reason from
appearances; all truth in itself escapes us; the essence is
unassailable. It is what Schopenhauer has popularized under this so
simple and clear formula: the world is my representation. I do not
see that which is; that which is, is what I see. As many thinking
men, so many diverse and perhaps dissimilar worlds. This doctrine,
which Kant left on the way to be flung to the rescue of the
castaway morality, is so fine and supple that one transposes it
from theory to practice without clashing with logic, even the most
exigent. It is a universal principle of emancipation for every man
capable of understanding. It has only revolutionized aesthetics,
but here it is a question only of aesthetics.Definitions of the beautiful are still given in manuals; they
go farther; formulas are given by which artists attain the
expression of the beautiful. There are institutes for teaching
these formulas, which are but the average and epitome of ideas or
of preceding appreciations. Theories in aesthetics generally being
obscure, the ideal paragon, the model, is joined to them. In those
institutes (and the civilized world is but a vast Institute) all
novelty is held blasphemous, all personal affirmation becomes an
act of madness. Nordau, who has read, with bizarre patience, all
contemporary literature, propagated this idea, basely destructive
of all individualism, that "nonconformity" is the capital crime of
a writer. We violently differ in opinion. A writer's capital crime
is conformity, imitativeness, submission to rules and precepts. A
writer's work should be not only the reflection, but the magnified
reflection of his personality. The only excuse a man has for
writing, is to express himself, to reveal to others the world
reflected in his individual mirror; his only excuse is to be
original. He should say things not yet said, and say them in a form
not yet formulated. He should create his own aesthetics, and we
should admit as many aesthetics as there are original minds,
judging them according to what they are not.Let us then admit that symbolism, though excessive,
unseasonable and pretentious, is the expression of individualism in
art.This too simple but clear definition will suffice
provisionally. In the course of the following portraits, or later,
we doubtless will have occasion to complete it. Its principle will,
nevertheless, serve to guide us, by inciting us to investigate, not
what the new writers should have done, according to monstrous rules
and tyrannical traditions, but what they wished to do. Aesthetics
has also become a personal talent; no one has the right to impose
it upon others. An artist can be compared with himself alone, but
there is profit and justice in noting dissimilarities. We will try
to mark, not how the "newcomers" resemble each other, but how they
differ, that is to say in what way they exist, for to exist is to
be different.This is not written to pretend that among most of them are no
evident similarities of thought and technique, an inevitable fact,
but so inevitable that it is without interest. No more do we
insinuate that this flowering is spontaneous; before the flower
comes the seed, itself fallen from a flower. These young people
have fathers and masters: Baudelaire, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam,
Verlaine, Mallarmé, and others. They love them dead or alive, they
read them, they listen to them. What stupidity to think that we
disdain those of yesterday! Who then has a more admired and
affectionate court than Stéphane Mallarmé? And is Villiers
forgotten? And Verlaine forsaken?