Léon Hennique Novel

           René Ghil (1862–1925)
           Photographer unknown

This is the first English translation of René Ghil’s De la Poésie Scientifique (Paris: Gastein-Serge, Éditeur, 1909), a foundational text in the history of late 19th-century French poetry and early modernist poetics.

René Ghil (1862–1925) stands as one of the most ambitious yet unjustly neglected figures of the late nineteenth-century French avant-garde. In this book — part manifesto, part memoir, part philosophical treatise — Ghil articulates his lifelong project of “Scientific Poetry,” a revolutionary synthesis of evolutionary science, metaphysical idealism, and radical prosodic innovation.

The work opens with a polemical survey of contemporary French poetry, defending Ghil’s vision against the “reaction” of least-effort and championing the law of Greater-Effort as the true principle of art and life. Ghil traces the origins of modern poetry through the twin movements of Symbolism (inaugurated by Mallarmé) and his own Scientific Poetry, providing invaluable first-hand testimony of the Symbolist circle in the 1880s and candid assessments of figures like Verlaine, Verhaeren, Vielé-Griffin, and Gustave Kahn.

The book’s theoretical core expounds Ghil’s doctrine of “Verbal Instrumentation” — a sophisticated theory treating vowels and consonants as vocal timbres to be orchestrated like musical instruments, and proposing an “Evolving Rhythm” rooted in the physiological reality of breath and the vibratory durations of speech sounds. Ghil grounds this poetics in a comprehensive evolutionary metaphysics: Matter striving toward consciousness through sensation, instinct, and thought; the poet as the site where the Universe achieves self-awareness; poetry as “impassioned Metaphysics,” uniting scientific knowledge with emotional intensity.

In an age where the divide between scientific and humanistic cultures seems entrenched, Ghil’s vision of a poetry informed by — rather than opposed to — scientific understanding feels strikingly contemporary. His insistence that the poet must embrace complexity, pursue knowledge relentlessly, and serve the collective evolution of consciousness speaks to enduring questions about art’s purpose and poetry’s place in modern intellectual life.

This translation aims to make Ghil’s challenging but rewarding prose accessible to English readers for the first time, preserving both his philosophical rigour and his rhetorical force. The text includes explanatory notes where Ghil’s dense argumentation or historical references require clarification.

Whether one accepts Ghil’s metaphysical commitments or not, De la Poésie Scientifique remains essential reading for anyone interested in French Symbolism, modernist poetics, or the intellectual ferment of the Belle Époque — a moment when poets dared to reimagine their art as cosmically significant.

On Scientific Poetry

Some Words on Contemporary Poetry

The reproach — delivered more or less kindly — has often been addressed to me, and regrets frequently voiced, that my work was not conceived and written with closer regard for a wider public. These regrets carried their insinuation: that I might well have tempered somewhat my regenerative ideal; and they ventured to assure me that, at the price of a few concessions and a measure of compromise, the greatest renown and swiftest influence would have been mine for the taking.¹

I did not pause before the temptation. Indeed, toward 1889, in the very heat of struggle, I dared to write: “I have time, and my time will come.”² I hold that the creator must stand as one with his work, for that work ought to spring from his achieved unity. The poetic contribution now consecrated under the name “Scientific Poetry” represents — from philosophical principle down to prosodic and rhythmic technique — one continuous Doctrine. I have simply applied to myself the moral law flowing from this doctrine: to have striven, with all the heightened powers of culture within me, toward the most complex and complete art, bound together in the firmest unity achievable through uttermost will and uttermost effort.

What seems perhaps most strange is that one should need to proclaim such a conception — which proceeds, as we shall see, from natural law — yet proclaim it we must in this present hour, when a poetic “reaction” against both the “Symbolist” movement and the influence of “Scientific Poetry” has been organised in the name of least effort. “The measure of verse is prescribed by the law of least effort” — thus wrote the principal, though often concealed, organiser of this regression, a regression patronised alike by universities and fashionable society³: Sully-Prudhomme.

Without any fear of contradicting himself, he declared moreover that “poetics is perfectible,” whilst assuring us a few lines further that “there is reason to think the technique of poetic language now complete.”⁴

Reasoning whose logic appeared by no means impoverished to the Doumics, Faguets, Ernest-Charleses, Brissons, and so many others from the Reviews of thinking mediocrity, nor to the newly arrived or belated poets lured by their praises and prizes, duly labelled Neo-Romantics, Neo-Parnassians, Pastoralists. The same men from whom — doubtless disdaining his role as precursor along the philosophical path, as we have often said⁵ — the poet of Justice and Bonheur desired with strange fierceness to “regenerate languishing inspiration and combat the enterprises of innovators.”

We have had, then, and still possess, a poetic “reaction” whose signs, vague enough still, could doubtless be traced to the Congress of Poets — which thus remains a landmark — in May 1901.⁶ Since then we have witnessed certain audacities, and no small measure of duplicity. Long in disarray, those representatives of Criticism we have named — whose spontaneous response to the preceding generation had been insult, sarcasm, and the mutilation of ideas — rallied themselves, together with certain ageing poets uncertain, no doubt, of their work’s enduring necessity. They perceived, with some intelligence, that the mediocrity and want of will in many of the newer poets were such that these might be manipulated and rewarded.

Through vigorous appeals, tendentious eulogies, and prizes, a reaction came into being — a “Romantic and Parnassian renaissance.” Yet since one could not after all suppress the vital achievements of that twofold movement we have recalled — “Symbolist” on one hand, “Scientific” on the other — there arose, by tacit compact between guardians of dogma and various new or belated poets, what seemed a discussion of the theories advanced, chiefly technical ones, though without actually expounding them; conducted adroitly enough to create, from this confusion, the greatest uncertainty in uninformed minds — thereby diminishing, denaturing, scattering them all, if such were possible. Reasoning proceeded beside the point; there was also borrowing — we shall say so euphemistically — borrowing from the theories and works of Forerunners. Certain ideas were appropriated and presented as novel, with seeming innocence; somewhat denatured, without perceiving the incoherence, without heeding that Yesterday still held fast to Dates and Facts. And then came loud applause: behold what was now deemed reasonable!

It was assuredly the advocated law of least energy. But for certain men, it would reign nearly supreme at this present hour, when discussion itself has ceased, when most are too ignorant even of yesterday to suspect as much. We have returned to Romanticism’s themes, to sentimental egotistic anecdote, expressed in the most conveniently classical verse whose melodious chant gratifies the ear so directly — the ear elected by Sully-Prudhomme as supreme arbiter — that one scarcely need listen any longer to hear: the last word of least effort.

And M. Catulle Mendès exclaims: “What an admirable France, ceasing not to produce poets, still more poets!” All resembling one another, he might add, to heighten this national exaltation — inopportunely, however, for if foreigners everywhere study, translate, comment upon French poets and submit to their influence, it is those of yesterday. Those of the present hour they ignore or despise — this we know. Alas, the contentment of M. Catulle Mendès, which has swelled magnificently, began that evening in 1897 when, under the patronage of Stéphane Mallarmé, Sully-Prudhomme, François Coppée, and Hérédia — present and strangely reconciled — a Banquet in his honour gathered beneath his Parnassian smile the majority of “Symbolism’s” pacified poets. And the triumph was not theirs, who thus set the example of regression and all but sanctioned the reaction beforehand.⁷

That said, without labouring the point: from this “reaction” — organised and not exempt from moral pettiness — emerges this: the artifices, disguised and incoherent borrowings, half-assertions, all openly or covertly patronised by men of narrow philosophical and artistic vision (who therefore still dogmatically maintain Energy’s persistence in identical modes, or its return to anterior states), have merely demonstrated that the ideas and works of Forerunners remain viable and necessary — since thus one awkwardly confesses oneself their prisoner, incapable of personal contribution. Or, taking nothing from them, one cannot escape save by regressing into wearisome imitation of the past.

But we are eager now to name certain poets — among the principal — who have appeared these past ten years or so, whatever their tendencies, and who through uncommon worth and love of art, some indeed passionate and tormented by it, honour this hour as sources of hope, as established figures, or as newly revealed:

Mesdames Delarue-Mardrus and Valentine de Saint-Point, whose powerful temperaments bear the mark of scientific conviction. The former possesses a disquieting, quasi psycho-physiological inspiration. Mme de Saint-Point rises sumptuously to philosophical thought, approaching that “impassioned Metaphysics” — the expression with which we summed our thought in an article recalled by two other poets in Declarations prefacing their first books, declaring plainly for “Scientific Poetry”: Messrs. Georges Duhamel and René Arcos.

Mesdames de Noailles, Mendès, and C. Perrin. Though belonging to the preceding generation, M. Sébastien-C. Leconte, who in his Preface to Le Sang de Méduse advocates union with Science and its philosophy, further supporting what I say by recalling Oriental tradition.

M. Abel Pelletier, evolutionist poet of our generation, who after long silence has resumed publication. We name his superb verse Drama (first of a Trilogy), Titane, of psychic and verbal intensity, creating an atmosphere of mystery wherein the theme of ancient Fatality resurges in modern form. M. Savarit, likewise of yesterday, now publishing a series of interrelated books; poems of which the first, Comme la Sulamite, is a song of urgent emotional sweetness rising on evolutionist thought toward altruistic philosophy.

M. Fernand Gregh, who with Romantic talent carries faint reflections of various Forerunners. Yet his ideas on “Humanism” reduce to an over-simple exaltation of life, without philosophical precision — a vague, sentimental spiritualism.

M. Francis Jammes, charming in naturalness despite a certain smallness of inspiration and affectation. Léo Larguier, a Romantic, whose repudiation in his second volume of the mere “collection of verses” in favour of the unity of poem and book we commend.

M. John-Antoine Nau: his verbal and rhythmic art, subtly spontaneous yet learned, his evocative and suggestive power, in Les Hiers bleus.

Messrs. Georges Duhamel and Arcos, declaring themselves scientific — a claim their books often magnificently sustain: Des Légendes, des batailles (Duhamel) and La Tragédie des Espaces (Arcos). With them, M. Jules Romains. His Vie unanime, harmoniously composed, places him through both general thought and technique among “scientific” poets. Attaching themselves to this group: M. Alexandre Mercereau (Eshmèr-Valdor), of subtle utterance and highly sensitive, sonorous rhythmics, and M. Charles Vildrac, of broad, simple emotion possessing moral worth.

Near this group, another in which M. Théo Varlet’s name predominates, and where one must distinguish Messrs. Paul Castiaux and Pierre-J. Jouve: luxuriances of universally perceived life, orgiastic and sacred sense of life, plenitude of sensation rendered in musicality and spontaneity of Rhythm. A philosophical tendency.

M. John-L. Charpentier, a singular personality, scientific poet and critic of unique value in the rising generation. Of literary and scientific education, his ideal formed through critical examination of poetic history, he moves toward “a poetry no longer merely illuminated from without by Science intermittently, but radiating from within outward, as though itself a Science. The poet must contribute through his work to preparing the future — a future conceived by freeing mankind progressively from the fetters of old hopes and fears that unconscious humanity drags behind.” His forthcoming book: L’Âme délivrée.

M. Jean Ott: his first volume, L’Effort des Races, of evolutionist tendency (including an admirable, austere verse drama, La Mort de Zoroastre), attests the most lofty and assured philosophical thought in a vigorous poetic temperament.

M. Florian-Parmentier, whose Physiologie morale du poète deserves reading. His philosophical deductions, proceeding from the acknowledged necessity of knowledge in poetry — knowledge that in no way kills spontaneity, the primary emotional “impulse” — merit attention.

M. Robert Randau, poet of Autour des Feux dans la Brousse (author with M. Sadia Levy of Les Onze Journées en Force): a temperament of amassed, explosive energies, robust in utterance and rhythm, “where the finest psychology would be of phenomenon’s terrors, would be worldwide.” M. Sadia Levy: the quasi-sacred torment of Word and Rhythm, their essence and mystery in the emotional interpenetration of Forms — this marvel-filled poet embodies and expresses them intensely. M. Ricciotto Canudo, like the preceding a prose poet of evolutionist direction, of grand philosophical and metaphysical flights wherein many passages (Livre de la Genèse, Livre de l’Évolution) meet our thought.

M. Pierre Fons, meditation-filled, evocative in the evolutionist sense.

Others, Symbolists with philosophical tendencies: Messrs. Jean Royère, Paul Drouot, André Ibels.

I have said, when necessary — I who am accustomed to speaking under the authority of dates and documents⁸ — that no more complete will than mine opened modern poetic struggle, initiating it broadly, then traversing various Schools which it repudiated even whilst they assimilated aspects of it, desiring only to proceed to the uttermost of its designs. Striving toward the loftiest and doubtless most distant generalisations — harmonic summations of the relations binding human intelligence to universal evolution — thus attempting a philosophical unity releasing its emotion, an impassioned Metaphysics, whilst expressing its sensitive complexity interpenetrated: Analysis and Synthesis.

I have known this would not create a Work immediately touching the great multitude.⁹ But logically it must, bearing the requisite powers, reach the creators themselves, the Poets, and those who through intellectual acquisition, intuition, and sensitivity nearly equal them — Readers who are likewise re-creators of works. Thereby would it determine, at the very sources, without intermediary or loss, the poetic direction we had preconceived: the only one, we maintain, lying in the general sense of evolution.

I have therefore struggled, not in vain, to struggle still: for my work’s development, still far from its term, is a development of struggle.

Origins of Modern Poetry

Reading the extraordinary jumble of names and theories which authors of Studies on Contemporary Poetry still occasionally dare present, ostensibly for purposes of classification, one wonders whether assembling precise documentation of its origins and evolution is truly so difficult.

Yes, parallel to the new poetic orientations, the criticism they elicited almost despite themselves — from literarily dogmatic Reviews and the daily press — resisted their advent with all its power. Its harshness betrayed, all the more astonishingly, its unfitness for the vigorous ideas working through the world; its responses from the very first hour were sarcasm, insult, the mutilation and adulteration of ideas advanced — when not artful silence. We have given in our Foreword some examples of current methods, drawn however from more recent dates.

One finds no documentation there, nor in volumes emanating from the same sources.

As for the few books of criticism emanating from “Symbolist” poets — collections lacking compositional unity, of articles published at various moments — these possess scarcely greater value, and serious study, impartiality, and historical truth are hardly their hallmarks. The majority of those originally drawn together around three men whose names we shall see — men who then more or less embodied the Dream those poets knew or recognised in them — moved away in departures forming Schools, and the bitterness of struggle brought forth interested denials. Above all they employed silence — yet a silence truly too naïvely pregnant with the men and works they would fain suppress.¹⁰

Evidently no other documents were to hand — and this but yesterday — for the interesting and sincere critic M. Stéphane Servant, whom we warned of grave errors after his first article on the origins of the poetic movement, by producing dates and works. He then exclaimed: “What we called grammatical reform would have Mallarmé as its starting point, and scientific reform, M. René Ghil. It is indeed a question of dates and documentation. If M. René Ghil’s view is correct — as this concerns a movement currently in full triumph, and as I have read entire volumes where his name is scarcely cited — I come to suspect in this ‘omission’ one of those fine injustices that enliven history.”¹¹ M. Servant must have read chiefly the collections of “Symbolist” criticism.¹² An “injustice” one would be wrong to take seriously. M. Servant, pursuing more extended and laborious documentation, has satisfied himself that we have received vigorous and certain compensations, and that the doctrine of Scientific Poetry, depending only upon itself, existed before and during the interested silences, and exists after them.

To assemble precise documentation on the origins and evolution of the modern poetic movement, as we were saying, requires — as one sees — rather lengthy preparatory labour: reading the Works and Reviews serving as organs of the various Schools; exact noting of dates; comparison of documents; methodical research into Studies and Articles.

It is nevertheless easy, in my view, with the aid of such documentation (but no one took the trouble),¹³ to determine clearly the principle — twofold, giving birth to a twofold evolution.

Through Stéphane Mallarmé the movement of “Symbolist poetry” was created, destined, as we shall see, to express itself in diverse modes when extended more or less in meaning under the impetus of new, personal, and powerful temperaments.

The other poetic determination proceeds from myself, creating “Scientific Poetry” — that is, proceeding from scientific data both for its guiding thought and its technique. It represents an entire doctrine, with philosophical, sociological, and ethical development, sustaining a metaphysics.

In 1885, around Mallarmé, in the little salon on the rue de Rome where he thenceforth received visitors on Tuesday evenings, the first grouping took shape, before any Schools. The charm, the vitally gentle ascendancy emanating from the man — near at hand yet distant in dream — from his harmonious and subtle speech, ineffably seduced us and materialised an atmosphere of stillness. Mallarmé then spoke of the “Symbol’s” essence, persuading us of it as total expression and the supreme manner of art for evoking, through analogies upon analogies, the “Idea enclosed in every spectacle” — his concepts borrowed from Plato, Fichte, Hegel. I found there, among the first to arrive at the new word, Henri de Régnier, Francis Vielé-Griffin, Barrès, Fénéon, and later Gustave Kahn, along with others who had yet published only a few verses or prose pieces in obscure reviews, without having defined any direction for themselves.

I owed the thoroughly cordial welcome Mallarmé accorded me to the publication, in December 1884, of my first book of verse — a book of essays whose explicit Introduction contained, along with initial indications of my future Work’s plan, the clear declarations which, reworked and developed, would determine the movement of “Scientific Poetry.”

Mallarmé had written to me: “Few youthful works are the product of a mind as much in the vanguard as yours. What I praise above all is this attempt to lay, from life’s very outset, the first foundation of a labour whose architecture is henceforth known to you, and not to produce at random. There is reason to take enormous interest in your effort at written orchestration.”¹⁴

That revolutionary Introduction demonstrated, then, the necessity henceforth for poetry to proceed from scientific data and be moved by modern ideas. The Life my will wished to exalt must be complex, of universal meaning. I summoned poets to cosmogonic and ethnic poems, to sing beyond egotism the new energies. I opened thenceforth into the poetic domain “the poetry of modern environments, cities, fields,” working-class activities: factories, trains across horizons, labours with mechanical souls, the work of fields, and Banks and Gold…¹⁵

The same year, 1885, the first version of my Traité du Verbe (later to become En Méthode à l’Œuvre) appeared in two reviews¹⁶ and in volume form in 1886.¹⁷ It brought the theory of a new poetic technique, “Verbal Instrumentation,” whose 1887 edition made precise, through notes and an appendix, the data verifying the intuitive portion: the researches of Helmholtz and Kratzenstein on harmonics, of which Poetry thus spoke for the first time.

The philosophical portion, concurrently with the complete plan of the Work, was then developed under the title placing it at the Work’s head: En Méthode à l’Œuvre, in the editions of ’88 and ’91. In 1904 appeared a final edition, entirely revised, augmented, and settled.¹⁸

I may say, after others indeed, that the theory of Verbal Instrumentation, first in date, then oriented the generality of new poets toward their researches into verbal music and expressive Rhythmics, and exercised initial influence upon various subsequent theories.¹⁹

And there we have the two initial inspirations, most precisely defined, according to which two increasingly divergent movements would develop and affirm themselves, each in its own fashion, for more than fifteen years.

This is what, near the sources still (in November 1886, as M. G. Walch recalls in his Anthologie des Poètes de 1866 à 1906), an article in the Figaro distinguished, where Auguste Marcade brought most accurately to the general public’s notice a first history of the nascent Schools: “The three leaders of this movement are Messrs. Paul Verlaine, Stéphane Mallarmé, and René Ghil.” The extraordinary stir — anger, irony, enthusiasm — aroused by the Traité du Verbe, “with which the entire European press concerned itself,” as M. Walch reports, among others, and Messrs. Van Bever and Léautaud in their Poètes d’Aujourd’hui — this stir permitted the linking of my name with those of Verlaine and Mallarmé, my seniors by twenty years.

Judiciously, the article’s author pointed out among the new promoters, and foremost among them, Paul Verlaine.

Verlaine has taken his place among the “Symbolist” poets.

If he belongs to it through certain qualities, he was nevertheless too much a creature of instinct to conceive a general manner of art, and it is rather fitting to regard him, outside any School, as exercising almost unconsciously yet necessarily, at the very dawn of these new times, an imprecise, diffuse influence — naturally persuasive, one might say — upon several newly arrived poets.

A line from his short poem “Art poétique,” published in a review of 1882, a line tossed off almost negligently and mischievously in conclusion, seems to me the word of deliverance that chaotic anxieties had long awaited:

Et tout le reste est littérature.

Literature — that is to say, if you will, the moment when the merely grandiloquent phrase, or one liquidly devoid of vigour, believes itself the Word; when traditional cadence serves in place of Rhythm; and when one thinks only through the thought of the past. Through this single line, which might contain his entire simplistic theory, Verlaine spontaneously became the herald of a return to the exact notion that nothing is in the mind which was not first in the senses. This notion of controlling old atavistically literary thought through a new sincerity of sensation — that was it — Verlaine’s entire work proclaims and is characterised by it.

Whilst from the prosodic viewpoint, his teaching to “prefer the Uneven” — that is, to use, following his example, irregular metres — through spontaneous and instinctive discovery unbalanced the illogic of the old metrics, from which he released his hitherto unheard melody: supple, picturesque, and moving.

Mallarmé and Verlaine: the impatience of new arrivals had spontaneously rediscovered them, almost disdained by Parnassus. They brought these newcomers the tumultuous emotion of sudden glory. And it is fitting to record here a precious observation of Messrs. Gaston and Jules Couturat (Gaston Moreilhon and Georges Bonnamour). In the very heat of struggle, bringing me the aid of their talent and ardent spirit, they responded to attacks: “Who knows whether the poetic school that will kill idealist stupidity and its Symbolist revival may not emerge from M. René Ghil? In all epochs, and especially for a century past, alongside the moment’s triumphant figures, there has always been found a diminished one, a disdained one, even a mocked one, from whom the following generation proceeded. It is Diderot under King Voltaire and the neo-Christian Jean-Jacques. It is Balzac amid the Romantic clamour. It is Verlaine and Mallarmé among the Parnassians. It is Villiers among the Naturalists.”²⁰

Symbolism and its Schools

The struggles were to begin in 1888 and grow more pronounced, provoked by the action of more or less powerful personalities arising successively in the course of that fervent and populous adventure of keen spirits toward all the points of sensibility, intuition, and knowledge. The Symbolist Schools would struggle amongst themselves — not over ideas, for these amounted to scarcely more than subtleties of the Word veiling a rather simplistic concept — but over prosodic and rhythmic contributions, whilst “Scientific Poetry” stood opposed to them all; though its doctrine, as we have seen, often penetrates and impresses them, it was destined to pass through them without contact, for itself alone.

M. Jean Moréas brought to the “Symbol’s” idea a first variant. But what, then, was this original idea of Mallarmé’s?

He himself sums it up in a few lines from M. Jules Huret’s resounding “Enquête” on literary evolution, in 1891: “To name an object,” says Stéphane Mallarmé, “is to suppress three-quarters of the poem’s enjoyment, which is made of the happiness of divining little by little: to suggest it, there lies the dream. It is the perfect use of this mystery that constitutes the Symbol: to evoke an object little by little in order to show a state of soul, or, inversely, to choose an object and draw from it a state of soul through a series of decipherings.”

That is to say, Mallarmé, rightly forbidding descriptive and purely external art access to the poem, exclusively consecrates an art that evokes, that suggests through images ever more spiritualised and of very close analogical values, such thoughts as are chosen according to primary relations of emotivity. This is, rendered conscious and logical, the habitual procedure of images and comparisons, and one could say that Symbolism has existed at all times in all true poetry.

But the characteristic novelty is that the succession of images, according to Mallarmé, is no longer heterogeneous and haphazard, and that in very close analogical values — let us repeat it — the images, most closely associated, rise logically from the sensation causing emotivity, conspiring to suggest rather than describe the ideas in view.

The ideas chosen by “Symbolism” derive from poetry’s general theme at the hazard of individual emotion: this is still, in its supreme flowering, an egotistic poetry. Symbolism presents itself, then, not as the creator of a new poetic thought, but as the victorious recognition of a necessary manner of art for understanding and working poetically, outside which the true poetic sense no longer expresses itself.

One realises, then, that devoid of a guiding idea concretising it in philosophical and social concepts, “Symbolism,” by its entirely emotive essence, should have split into as many modes — all equally incapable of generalisations — as vibrant temperaments imposed upon it. And is it not generally through contributions of technique that these poets emerged, of capital value?

The first dissident interpretation came, we say, from M. Jean Moréas, as early as 1886. In Moréas’s art at that hour, there came felicitously together both Verlaine’s prosodic manner — which in him grew more complex and more precisely defined — and Mallarmé’s thought, along with echoes of Baudelaire, from whom Mallarmé himself had also initially proceeded. Moréas paraphrased thus: “The idea must not allow itself to be seen deprived of external analogies; for the essential character of Symbolist art consists in never going so far as conceiving the idea in itself.” This was to repeat that the idea must remain at the value of an image.

Like Verlaine’s art, that of M. Jean Moréas, whilst breaking with it, conceived for Rhythm no other measure than “the old metrics, quickened,” as he put it: “a disorder learnedly ordered; rhyme iridescent and hammered alongside rhyme with abstruse fluidities; the alexandrine with multiple and mobile pauses; the employment of certain uneven numbers.” Thus, through Mallarmé and Verlaine, and Ronsard, Moréas seems to me to have prepared the way for “Free Verse,” of which M. Gustave Kahn would be the theoretician.

Two new poets had appeared at Mallarmé’s side. We shall speak later of one of them, M. Francis Vielé-Griffin, alongside M. Émile Verhaeren — the two most powerful poets of “Symbolism,” Vielé-Griffin being highly personal.

M. Henri de Régnier made his début in 1885 with a collection of poems of sensibility and elegance. He subsequently acquired from Mallarmé, certainly, that sure science of the Symbol, expressed in graces and melancholy sumptuosities contained within the purest metrics. If he uses “Free Verse” in the manner of Kahn and Vielé-Griffin, he seems rather to be making a reluctant concession, for his art, despite everything, remains near to Parnassus — and far from modern life, which he regards with some fear of its jolts, delighting instead in “antique and romantic” poems.

In 1887 M. Gustave Kahn published a first collection of notable poems applying his prosodic theory — a theory which, under the name “Free Verse,” has remained Symbolism’s most secure and most general prosodic acquisition, though it was not born of his own spontaneous invention. This theory, which M. Kahn subsequently sketched out in 1888 in articles for the Revue Indépendante, is said by Messrs. Van Bever and Léautaud in their Anthology to have been suggested, in principle, by Jules Laforgue, that restless poet who himself appears to have been touched by the sensibility of that other great and uneven poet of disenchantment affecting irony, Tristan Corbière. In 1897 M. Gustave Kahn gave his views more precise form in the Foreword to the reissue of his early Poems.

It is true that in the final months of 1885, when M. Kahn returned to Paris from Algeria, whence he had been absent four years, he brought back only a few alexandrine verses, highly classical and of that monotony he retained despite everything, along with several unpublished poems by his friend Jules Laforgue.

He was also much drawn toward the prose poem.

But just as M. Jules Huret immediately remarked in his Enquiry of 1891, M. Kahn’s theory revealed, amid the general current of ideas, obvious affinities at several points with my theory of “Verbal Instrumentation,” which had occupied all poetic minds since 1885.²¹

In muted echo of certain propositions of “Instrumentation,” for example, M. Kahn declared that Free Verse “must exist in itself through alliterations of kindred vowels and consonants” — deriving from my values of vocal timbres. “The evolution of the strophe’s generative idea creates the particular poem or verse chapter of a poem in verse,” he said further. I had expressed, moreover, that the idea must pursue its evolution throughout the entire book and, from book to book, throughout the entire work. He was departing, without doubt, from “Verbal Instrumentation,” exaggerating it by seeking impossibly to reach predetermined values of semi-tones and quarter-tones and the scale. But he diverged from it in suppressing the alexandrine’s measure which, whilst creating an evolving Rhythmics, we retained as the measure of unity.

No matter: so-called “free verse” is M. Gustave Kahn’s achievement, though it was M. Vielé-Griffin who subsequently brought to this verse “rhythmic force and a more assured and continuous harmony” — what M. Albert Mockel had desired from Gustave Kahn’s poems.

This theory, however nuanced, still belongs to the metrical domain where ancient Rhythm depends essentially upon the number of accented beats at equal distances. But with his most alert prosodic science, M. Kahn pushed to the extreme the researches of Becq de Fouquières, multiplying and refining the “accelerations and retardations” the latter said could be introduced into the poem. Nevertheless, the contradiction remained — so often remarked — that two verses of identical measures are not, however, of the same duration.^t/n1 We shall speak of this again.

On the other hand, by suppressing the alexandrine’s general measure — the unit of measure, as “Verbal Instrumentation” demonstrates, through which the various durations evolve — M. Gustave Kahn created an evident rhythmic indeterminacy which, among others, M. Albert Mockel perceived.

It has been said of “Symbolism” that it lacks a modern and general sense of Life.

Well-founded regarding most “Symbolists” — and the most prominent among them, those in whom the pursuit of music and rhythm left no room for preoccupations with Idea, and whose works present themselves as illustrations of their research into prosody and Symbolist analogy — this reproach falls away as soon as one speaks of Verhaeren and Vielé-Griffin.

Our senior by nearly ten years — to all of us then arriving — M. Émile Verhaeren had published two collections of verse in 1883 and 1886. Nothing in them indicates an intuition, nor, in the second volume, any approach to the great poetic movement just born. But there is in these poems, even then, a rough and powerful temperament which, though still seeking its way, expresses itself in robust visions of nature, as though consecrated by some ineffable total mystical emotion sprung from deep ancestral sources. The language was of Romantic impulse, weighted with grave sonorities. This would remain the double characteristic of Verhaeren’s superb talent.

This essential emotion would create later, throughout his entire work, that hallucinated, hallucinating atmosphere with which his most modern and most active evocations are impregnated. Whilst his Romantic art, even when more synthetic, would retain its amplitude as the primary sound to which all the echoes he gathered from the surrounding poetic world would come to harmonise.

In 1887, in a new volume of poems, M. Émile Verhaeren shows himself won over to Stéphane Mallarmé’s synthetic and suggestive art. And, with penetrating comprehension, his language is wrought musically according to “Verbal Instrumentation.” Three admirable collections appear.

He was also persuaded by me of that necessity, declared in 1884 and put into practice, of singing the new energies of the anxious countryside, intimately troubled, and of the monstrous and intelligent mechanism of factories throughout the cities, of the world’s Stock Exchanges’ tragic and occult traffic, and, beyond egotism, of producing the complex soul and work of social man.²²

Moreover, he was merely the first to respond to my appeal in this direction, from which many poets since have drawn more or less inspiration. (Let us say in passing, too, that precept and example have had their effect through my unified Work, leading poets away from haphazard collections toward composing and ordering the book of verse, or at least toward desiring for it an almost-unity through its parts.)

M. Émile Verhaeren’s latest poems attest still, in places, that he approaches the universal sense as “Scientific Poetry” contains it, seeking to express the relations of man and universe according to science, whilst in the meantime he became most evidently indebted to M. Francis Vielé-Griffin’s rhythmic expression.

Now, from all this — of which with such intuitive sureness he knew to take only what suited his temperament — M. Émile Verhaeren has re-created it so intensely, developing it through his own direct, unnuanced verbal genius and through his enormity of vision, that his work is nevertheless powerfully homogeneous.

My admiration, conscious of an exceptional contained energy, goes also to M. Francis Vielé-Griffin.

The sense of nature and of Life henceforth considered under its legendary aspect, the emotivity of his first book in 1886, shows itself sustained by this, whilst at the same time a brief foreword claims complete liberty for verse in order to contribute to harmonic phrases. It is therefore through logical evolution that he encounters Gustave Kahn’s “Free Verse,” takes it up, elucidates its theory further, and renders it supple, as though muscularly.

Of more philosophical concept whilst at the same time instinctively moved, and of more picturesque and supple language than Verhaeren, Vielé-Griffin will nevertheless not wholly emerge from the egotistic sense to express himself in a general sense of life. But whilst remaining a Symbolist, his thought and art will proceed to discover and magnify general significations of Life — which must henceforth be the Poet’s necessary thought.

Thus, unable to contain his intensity within the individualist matrix wherein the other Symbolists were bound to restrict themselves, it is toward the sense of Legend that he broadens the Symbol through the Wagnerian example. It is in Legend — resuscitated or created by his spirit touching upon the essence of things and of the word — that he has known how to enclose the emotivity of eternal truths, sentiments, and ideas. Thus he too, by another path his own, has arrived at the universal sense. His latest book reveals this, as it shows that alone with Verhaeren among the Symbolists, he continues his evolution — and with increased power.

Beside Mallarmé, M. Francis Vielé-Griffin is the great and fierce figure of “Symbolism,” remaining in force, we say, at a time when the creative action of this School of diverse modes is virtually ended, when the majority of those still working poetically are repeating themselves, some even in the process of regression.

Besides the names of capital influence by which we have marked the Symbolist evolution, let us simply recall others which will remain in the history of this time: Stuart Merrill, E. Mikhaël, J. Laforgue, Pierre Quillard, Max Elskamp, Laurent Tailhade, Rodenbach, Van Lerberghe, Maeterlinck, Albert Samain, André Fontainas, Gabriel Mourey, Bataille, Ferdinand Hérold, C. Mauclair, Mockel, Roinard, Claudel, Robert de Souza — whose researches into prosody and rhythmics deserve attention alongside the contributions of Kahn and Vielé-Griffin.²³

ON SCIENTIFIC POETRY

I

On Intuition and Science in Poetry

If we hold to the common and moreover original acceptance of the word “inspiration” to characterise the supreme, full, and as it were impersonal instant of fervent poetic labour, we find it expresses a sort of vaticinatory disorder still attributed to genius, a supernatural enthusiasm, and a kind of sacred horror of divine Visitation. But if, delivering it from the erroneous sense that imaginative tradition has transmitted to us regarding the poet and poetic art, we enter into its simple reality, we shall see that the word “inspiration” is merely the inexact metaphorical rendering of the word “intuition,”^t/n2 in the same philosophical-scientific sense we have intended it.

Both, therefore, will express the palpitating moment when the poet’s cerebrality unites suddenly, in a shock of certainty, with the very essence of things lying under his meditation.

But it is prudent still to make precise what we have understood, poetically, by “Intuition,” and to say that, necessary and motive though it be, it cannot however satisfy us in its sudden and spaced apperceptions^t/n3, nor that it is possible to attain it by successive approaches.

And yet we know not — outside the speculative habit of philosophical minds (but what superstition still seeks to separate itself from this very word!) — what idea it yet evokes of the supernatural and divine, of prescience and illuminating revelation of which the human Self, as though passively, would not itself be the cause. Thus, very often one may observe the confusion between cause and effect, between means and end.²⁴

Now, however far we exalt our adventure toward the eternal nostalgias of Metaphysics, without concern for scholastic divisions and their hindering and valueless delimitations, we wish to rediscover its sense in the reality of Substance, in this: “that spiritualism — that is to say for me, the greatest consciousness taken of the Whole — emanates perpetually from matter in evolution.”²⁵

And what, then, is Intuition at the outset, if not the point of a synthesis so rapid that the mind has not been able to seize its immediate analytical terms? For with the aid of profound meditation whose vibratory intensity awakens, wave upon wave, other associated vibrations, suddenly increased in diverse localisations of the brain, all at once, by coordinative energy alone, the resultants have precipitated themselves, producing as it were that lightning-flash with which our entire cerebrality resounds.

But further still, we shall now say that the energy, ever more tense and motive, of our conscious thought has penetrated into that enormous part of shadow prolonging our realised Self, which is the Subconscious. And suddenly it will have set into co-vibration the potential accumulations of obscure perceptions which, step by step, according to the determining shock, will order themselves into an apperception of broad and surprising commotion.

Of what shall we say this Subconsciousness is the product?

First — and here is the part nearest our agglomerated self — among all the sensations continually assailing us, all those which since our coming to individual life have penetrated us and link us harmoniously to the universe enfolding us: is not the portion we perceive, which has become conscious in us, precarious, riddled with lacunae?

Nevertheless, these innumerable lacunae do not exist: every shock from without has left its imprint upon us, however slight. And in our brain, from the Unconscious to the Conscious, through association all holds together and continues. Therefore, at the instant of intense thought when all the sensibility and all the intellectualised being concur, every idea — the product of perceived and reflected sensations — can, by simple mechanism of associations, awaken elements of the same order which we do not know to exist and evolve in the obscure prolongations of our Self, and reveal to us more of this Self. And as it is, entirely, both conscious and unconscious, in communion with the Whole, more of the Whole will therefore at the same time be brought to our knowledge.

But from a more shadowy part, though more vertiginously vital and universal, our Subconscious is still the survival of heredities and atavisms, the sum of innumerable “selves” whose obscure, resistant populace descends animally to the “instinctive” origin. And as we have said, all holds together and continues and associates and summons: our Self is a unity-which-becomes.^t/n4

It is here that our “intuitive” energy, from vibrations to vibrations in the texture of our present and of the pasts obscurely inhabiting us, can bring back enormously from there the certainty of Instinct — a certainty become highly cerebral, of having touched suddenly upon some point of the essential being of things.

But, we were saying, Intuition cannot however satisfy us in its sudden and spaced apperceptions. For if it bursts forth in a desperate cry of possession, it can possess the universe’s essential truth only in fragments. Yet the mission we have wished to assign to Poetry is to re-create consciously an impassioned harmony of this universe. And it is here that we have called for the intervention — the necessary and fulfilling aid — of Science.

A moment ago, intuition suddenly established swift communion between our Self and the primal emotivity of Substance. Whilst perhaps losing something of its panting terror, it will enlarge itself immensely in Emotion and in Beauty as, rediscovering through scientific method the greatest possible number of relations uniting the world’s total Being, it becomes the determining force of a more or less extensive Synthesis, and further, of a more or less suggestive Hypothesis, wherein a little of universal harmony may be known.

Yes, following scientific evidence, we shall understand Instinct as the most primitive form of emotion — primitive, yet of immense significance, for it represents the first glimmer of energy becoming aware of itself across all eternity. It is the emotion toward which even the chemical affinities of matter have fiercely striven. And when we look past Matter’s surface phenomena to grasp it purely as directed energy — as energetic Destiny — we perceive that all its seemingly diverse affinities are in truth expressions of a single underlying Unity: a Unity eternally manifesting the stages of its own growing self-awareness.^t/n5

Thus meditation upon scientific evidence leads us to metaphysical understanding: if we follow Being’s evolutionary process, we come to feel progressively — with the emotion of recognising our continual participation in the Universal — that matter evolving through animal consciousness into human thought represents one unbroken striving of the Universe to know itself and contemplate itself in harmony. The greater our knowledge, the greater our being.^t/n6

Now, the true poetic gift — the gift which existed when the poets of the Sacred Books enclosed beneath theogonic creations what was conscious in them of the nature of Things, the gift which a renovated conception of Poetry will restore, we hope, uniquely tomorrow — this is, it seems to me, that of penetrating intuitively, with immense pain and voluptuousness, the utmost of the mystery of our Self and of the Whole at once. And once this certainty has been acquired — at whatever point of contact — a certainty born from the identification of Self and Whole, the Poet acts. From each such point, as from vibratory centres, he will strive in thought to evoke and harmonise new relations of the Universe in their evolutionary sequence. And constantly, he will be able and ought to suggest its innumerable presence and its laws, and to make emotionally manifest^t/n7 every particular thing in relation, therefore, with the total Signification.

II

Verbal Instrumentation. Evolving Rhythm

Summarising the essential thought of “Scientific Poetry,” we shall say that, to be valid, the work of our mind should awaken, through logical associations of ideas, an impassioned consciousness of universal Laws and Rhythms. Therefore, to be adequate to this work, poetic expression had to be traced back to the very origins of the Word, where it begins as a guttural emotion of instinct. We had to restore to the Word its phonetic value concurrently with its ideographic value, and return to it movement in measures of emotion — that is to say, true Rhythm.

In theory and practice, classical, Romantic, and Parnassian prosody defines Rhythm as the sensation of regular and equidistant recurrence of a numerical division. Verse is therefore for it the resultant of numerical quantities, marked and divided by the regular and anticipated return of tonic accent, with no attention whatever to the quantitative and qualitative values of Sounds. Rhythmically, it is a quasi-mechanical succession of weak and strong beats into which the Idea must confine itself — the idea which, patiently, mutilating itself or not, must enter this rigidly determined frame outside its own laws.

We have, in final conclusion, expressed Rhythm as “the movement of Thought conscious and representative of natural and harmonious Forces.”²⁶ And in Poetry, if we recall that in our “instrumental” theory Rhythm depends indissolubly upon both Idea and Word, concomitant; if we note that language comprises three elements — of instinctive emotivity; of imitation of phenomena, phonetic, graphic, and coloured; and of sentiment and thought; and if we insist that the origin of articulated Sound is emotive, in directly phonetic expression — we shall say (and this is contained in our general definition) that by its essential and quasi-physiological nature, Rhythm is representative of the emotion the Idea releases, an emotion inseparable from it.

Emotion declares itself mutely through gesture: every emotion repeats itself in movements appreciably similar and equal. Originally, it expressed itself in breaking silence through the guttural sound as a kind of sonorous gesture: phonetic expression is therefore a phenomenon of movement and duration, measured in vibrations. Emotion produced phonetic expression, itself imitative of external phenomena, in graphic form and in colouring — consonants and vowels. Memory has preserved, reproduced, and traditionalised phonetic expression, ceaselessly nuancing it. This complex sensitive vibration, representative of diverse universal phenomena and their relations with the Being moved by them, when it transformed itself in consciousness into sentiment and thought, simplified and abstracted itself into the schematic images of the Idea. Language became phonetic and ideographic, the ideogram being concurrently a simplification of phonetic complexity, which nevertheless remains in emotive potency within it.

Therefore, in return, every impassioned thought, every idea evoked to resound suggestively within the being — and there should be no others in poetry — will necessarily release around itself all the complexly vibrant atmosphere of which it remains potentially capable, awakening into movement all the emotive succession from which it has issued. Participating in the gesture of emotion which through tradition and repetition has become rhythmic, and in the primordial cry of the same essence as the gesture, the Word-ideogram which will fully express this thought and its emotion must also, necessarily, resume its phonetic value — that is to say, its diverse and emotive durations of vibration.

And immediately, it will complete itself with its other element of imitative value: graphic design and coloured intensities. Thus the Idea — nothing in the mind which is not first in sensation — and the Word, originally gesture and cry of emotivity, are indissolubly united in their common instinctive origin. Expressions of vibratory waves which the Word externalises under the sway of consciousness, they are a sequence of movements measured in diverse emotive durations, thereby producing for themselves Rhythm.^t/n8

It would be too lengthy to summarise likewise my complex technique of Verse and Evolving-Rhythm, nor all that “Verbal Instrumentation” further comprises: harmonic construction of the period substituted for the strophe, of the poem, of the book, of the work; succession and recall of motifs, etc. One must necessarily have recourse to En Méthode.

It is fitting, however, to report certain points.

Originally a series of emotive cries, language has as its essential expressive values the Vowels — vibratory durations of diverse and variable pitch and intensity, of which the Consonants are modifications.

The researches of Helmholtz and Kratzenstein on harmonics have demonstrated that Vowels must be considered as vocal timbres.^t/n9

Thus words reveal themselves as elements of manifold flexibility, supple and modifiable for composing an extensive Verbal-Symphony under the impassioned Idea’s evolving domination. The poet must therefore embrace poetic language in its double yet unique aspect, phonetic and ideographic, the customary sense and the emotive value of the sound of words being required simultaneously, in concordance with the poem’s guiding ideas. (“The passions have with sounds a powerful and secret bond,” wrote Jean-Jacques Rousseau. “Thought, which belongs to light, expresses itself through speech, which belongs to sound,” said Balzac in passing.)

Therefore, in the selection — spontaneous — by the poet possessed of Emotion, in the selection of words for the best concordant ideographic and phonic expression, the vocal timbres — Vowel-sounds completed or modalised by Consonants — either sound their pure and distinct value, or act upon one another to yield all nuances of tonality, whilst a general tonality of the poem will nevertheless exist. And they will be able, if the thought demands it, to sustain monotonously, slowly or rapidly, a phrase by repeating themselves in the same sound at the same pitch and intensity. Or, through reiterated passages — inverted, harmonically or inharmonically distant — from all their sounding points, they will express an ideal undulation of thought and speech participating in the waves of the universe. Thought and its speech: same principle and same destination of Rhythm, conscious and emotive unity demanded by our general concept that “every poetic work has value only insofar as it prolongs itself in suggestion of the laws which order and unite the total Being of the world.”²⁷

Poetically, every idea must be impassioned — that is to say, it must expressively restore, within emotive ambiance, the three elements of origin.

I have therefore determined the most general and constant relations between the diverse series of emotional and critical elements of the human mind, and the diverse groups of timbres or vocal instruments — Vowels and Consonants — by which words, as sonorous entities, are diversely characterised.

For sound — the cry of emotion — was originally, we have said, the equivalent of a gesture, a vibratory release of greater or lesser intensity and duration. Under the expansive powers of the Idea expressing itself emotively through the dramatic sequence of vocal timbres, Rhythm therefore marks and measures itself essentially in their vibratory values, in a continuous and variable design of sound-waves of all lengths and all intensities. (The recent experiments of Dr Marage and M. Marichelle on the photography of speech lend me here new and valuable support.)

At each of its phases or their nuances, the Idea marks its tonic accent at diverse pitches and intensities of concordant emotional sounds. The Idea in its evolution expresses itself by creating its own Evolving-Rhythm — Rhythm which is essentially externalised emotion, setting into vibration again the sensitive causes which produced it.

(One understands now why verses of the same metrical measure can nevertheless be swifter than one another. It is because, outside syllabic number, these “accelerations and retardations” of which Becq de Fouquières speaks depend upon the diverse and nuanced vibratory duration of vocal timbres, and upon them alone — he saw merely that the poet can at will divide numerical measures, but in vain: he will be constantly betrayed by the slowness or rapidity proper, first of all, to verbal sounds themselves.)

This scientific Rhythm, evolving from thought’s very evolution, nonetheless measures itself metrically. That is to say, in the Verse, the diverse rhythmic divisions propelled by the idea, whilst marking and sustaining themselves upon sounds of such or such vibratory quantity, also come to be measured syllabically — measures eurythmic or dissonant, according as the metrical combinations proceed from the multiplication or addition of the numbers two and three.

The measure of the alexandrine is retained as the continuous presence of the unit of measure. For the measure of twelve feet is held by us as necessary, organic: it has its equivalent in all primary metrics, ancient and modern. The explanation is evidently physiological: this metre is the measure of the time necessary for the expiration of breath.

Its divisions also have organic validity, because within the time of total expiration, emotion, sentiment, and idea inscribe accentuated intervals.

But it was not previously observed that two reasons oppose equal divisions, equidistant intervals such as the caesuras once were. On the one hand, thought, as we have seen, creates beyond all preconception its own and diverse Rhythm. And on the other hand, the properties of pitch, intensity, and length of sounds or vocal timbres, which are integral parts of this Rhythm — through fragments and unequal durations — determine, with the idea and through it, the placement of marked beats throughout the total expiration.

Thus “Verbal Instrumentation” gives poetic speech its complete and necessary sense by restoring to it its primordial element of phonality. It is graphic and plastic through the morphological determination of Rhythm, and through the harmonious unity of the poem within the book, of the books within the unified and composed work. It is pictorial, since a colouring of vocal timbres is acknowledged and likewise determined. Through its Rhythm measuring itself in vibrations evoked by the Idea, it communicates as it were with the world’s molecular movements.

It therefore synthesises all the manners of art, expressing with dramatic energy, in the sense of impassioned and moving action, “the movement of thought conscious and representative of natural and harmonious Forces.”²⁸ ^t/n10

III

Metaphysics and Philosophy

The generative thought of Scientific Poetry rests upon Evolutionist theories and proceeds from them.²⁹

We said in our preliminary pages on “Intuition and Science in Poetry” that we believed we could determine, proceeding from evolutive data potent with supremely synthetic emotion, a scientific Metaphysics.

I have therefore reduced phenomena of all orders to two laws, or rather to one law with double action: the law of condensation and expansion.

It is through these two essential movements of Matter that universal creation has been assured from all eternity, as has Matter’s very conservation, since from condensation are reborn the explosive energies setting it in motion again. It is, on the other hand, through this double law that man’s growth and decline are governed. And upon the same law of concentration — here plethoric, of heavy amassing of vitalities followed by deliverance — depends the two-poled volition which engenders and preserves the race, and improves the species in a third movement of evolution.

I have expressed the first two movements and the third, their resultant, by the geometric sign of the Ellipse. It is known that the Italian Vico schematised by the “circle” his conception of the Whole in movement, whilst Goethe sees it as a “spiral.” An excellent figuration, in that it reveals the truth of the evolution of Matter and of animate beings in accord with evolutionist theories — but the “spiral,” if it accounts for the movement of expansion, does not simultaneously suggest the movement of condensation which is its necessary sequel, and which cannot be denied in the natural or anthropological order. A movement necessary to progress, which nevertheless, after maintaining the unstable equilibrium proper to mutations, brings about in all things the slowing and relative immobility, the decline and death — an inertia which new states will yet awaken in their native expansions.

All becomes according to an elliptical Rhythm.

Matter, being eternal and unlimited, is represented virtually by the Circle which, however greatly it enlarges, remains unlimited, of matter’s very nature. Thus it would enlarge eternally under the necessity of remaining in the same movement: Matter moving according to the Circle would neither evolve nor progress.

But if it moves elliptically, through the Ellipse it eternally escapes, unlimited, from the Circle’s primordial necessity: it evolves with progress.

And since, virtually, the Circle is without limits, unlimited will be the ellipse’s opening toward the straight line, the term of evolution; and eternally, without being able to resolve itself, Matter evolves and tends toward a More, toward a Better.

What, then, sets Matter in movement according to this ellipse?

“Evolutionist” theory has proposed as law the “struggle for life.” But if we examine this proposition essentially, it is a misconception we reject, whether it comes from Darwin or from Spencer and Nietzsche’s deductions, and from all who after them have committed it knowingly or unknowingly — seeing there a Goal of vital evolution. It is only a Means of this evolution, to arrive at greater harmony and balanced energy. Therefore, it is a law of procreative love with which Matter is permeated, and procreative of the Better, since it is tendency toward harmony.

Love, its inherent Force — that is to say, its propensity toward the harmony of all universal parts, and toward equilibrium — Love, taken in the sense of chemical affinity, moves Matter.

Matter from all eternity is a Synthetic unity, but not conscious of itself. Through the succession of its diverse phenomena it tends eternally to take consciousness of all its elements and all its properties. It continually operates its own Analysis; it develops itself to know itself, and at the diverse degrees of the vital process feels itself, experiences itself, thinks itself, re-creates itself conscious.

Now, Love implies two desires, two poles: to know itself — we shall say metaphysically — they enter into action, and the resultant of this action is the third movement born from it, which determines the emergence from non-knowledge, from non-consciousness. That is to say, it determines Evolution, the third movement of the trinary unity we have represented by the Ellipse, sign of the evolving Universe.

Henceforth Matter evolves in taking knowledge of itself through sensation, instinct, thought. Its science continually produces its Consciousness: to know is to be.

But the Ellipse emerges painfully and by intermittences, through the vicissitudes inherent in the conditions of partial durations, from this primordial Circle by which we suggest unique Matter. Fatally the Ellipse, by periods, shortens by gravity’s own law toward the original design — that is to say, evolution is not continually in expansion. To this correspond the periods of decadence in nature and in beings.

By this double law, according to this double geometric evocation, are possessed the stars of heaven, which have radiated and are mineralising, and whose elliptical course is shortening. By it are possessed the lives of peoples and empires, and our own lives, natural and intellectual, and our daily energies themselves. Upon it depend, as we have said above, the generative virtues.

Before saying what human sanction emerges from these principles, we shall remark in passing that they can resolve the old and long Western quarrel between Materialism and Spiritualism — avatar of the ancient antagonism of Evil and Good, of Night and Light — the double direction of the human spirit which came from India since Vyasa’s meditation and Kapila’s general hold, which contains modern evolutionist thought. In our thought the two terms unite and the antinomy resolves itself: for spiritualism — that is to say for me, the greatest consciousness taken of the Whole — emerges perpetually from evolving Matter. This new idealism is rational and immanent to the very matter of the Universe.^t/n11

“The cosmogonic dream of M. René Ghil, from which flows the principle of Philosophy that supports with its framework the entire work, scaffolds itself with the splendour and delicate charm of ideality of an Indian theogony.” Gaston and Jules Couturat, René Ghil (Revue Indépendante, August 1891).

IV

Philosophy and Ethics. Social Morality

Therefore, the phenomenal universe contains and eternally develops its own Finality. That is to say, Matter, total-unity — but a totality which has no consciousness of itself and desires it — goes toward this consciousness through the diverse phenomena of its evolution. Analytical, it develops itself to know itself, and at the diverse degrees of the vital process feels itself, experiences itself, and thinks itself, tending toward its Synthesis wherein to re-create itself conscious of itself.

Thus, when meditating upon the greatest number of relations existing between himself and the universe, and taking knowledge and consciousness of them, Man strives toward his unity, thereby re-creating the unity of the World which joyfully thinks itself and knows itself in him.

Philosophically, man will therefore be in the universal sense by assuming the greatest knowledge, whence the greatest consciousness of himself and the universe. To come to know is to come to be — that is to say, to tend to re-create in oneself the unity becoming the conscious-Unity. Man has therefore as his moral law, in accord with the universe, the law of Greater-Effort.

We are in the world to tend toward our thinking and moral unity.

This age, it is true — an age possessed quite sufficiently of all the impudences — often dares to cover its impotence and its cowardices, and its careerism, with a so-called scientific law: the law of least effort.

Miserable thought! For if, in the universal phenomenon, in the vital process, we observe that every organism tends, through adaptation, to accomplish its act with the least possible resistance — does one wish simultaneously to conceive what long, what patient, what tenacious and total effort this adaptation has demanded? And does one wish also not to mistake for the law the result thus momentarily acquired, that impossible moment of arrest and equilibrium which this result is, whilst all evolves around the organism we are considering — which immediately will have to evolve itself as well in new instability, under penalty of diminution and death, and stretch forth its effort again, its greater-effort?

The law of the world, the law of thought, is the evolutive law of Greater-Effort. And in morality, and in sociology, as in art, it behoves us to repeat this with all our intelligence and all our soul: for this amoral theory of least effort, if it should come venomously to prevail, would mean the sneering perdition of the individual and the putrid ruin of societies.

We thus measure individual human value:

Matter, Life, tend to preserve themselves — the Instinct of preservation. This is the primordial and necessary instinct, rediscovered in the most complex phenomena.

This law of Life incites it to attempt to know itself ever more and ceaselessly — Evolution — to perpetuate itself toward the Better.

In concordance with the Whole, every man must therefore exert himself in greater-effort to know the universe and himself, and tend toward his Synthesis — that is to say, to re-create in himself consciously a little of the Unity, thus become conscious.

Therefore, his greater science — whence his greater consciousness — creates his greater intellectual and moral worth.

Whence our principle: “To Become in Knowing is to Become in Being.”³⁰

Sociologically, the greater science acquired — that is to say, consciousness — confers the greater Right. But in immediate correction, it entails the notion and acknowledged necessity of Duty, toward the past and toward the future.

Since all individual knowledge depends also upon atavistic knowledges, man owes gratitude and love to the Past which dominates him, penetrates him, haunts him. We have seen that the necessity of effort holds eternally to the first Fatality of “non-consciousness.”

And he owes himself to the Future. Therefore, he must tend, if his moral worth is greater, to draw other men to share his Knowledge — according to a true “altruistic” dogma, here a scientific necessity, no longer either an impulse of sentiment or a duty of charity, for charity implies sacrifice.

This Altruism we do not separate from Egoism, which is only a mode of the instinct of preservation, as we have said, natural and necessary. But we reduce the antinomy still further: covered by a law of natural order, only when the Individual has acquired for himself the security of organic and moral life does he owe himself to others and to their effort.

I arrive, in Politics, at an intellectual power under scientific law, impersonal and evolving. A providential power over and within the will toward the better of peoples consciously and necessarily assenting.^t/n12

V

The Work

We have just summarised, as though in the nakedness of axioms at times, the principles and their complements which govern the Work for which my unified effort has been amassed.

What we have here is not, as has been seen, a simple poetics: my poetic and philosophical doctrine, ordered and complex, is one. Based scientifically and from the same starting point, the generative Idea and the technical Expression are adequate and inseparable. Moreover, the Method and the Work are co-existent: neither preceded the other; they came to life simultaneously in my mind. The Work is the development of the Method, in the special and as yet untried emotion which must result from a new thought continually associating the Human with the Universal, in such manner that, as we have said somewhere, “the essence of Poetry be an impassioned Metaphysics of Life known through Science, and the poet a poet-philosopher.”

For the first time since the cosmic epics of Mexico and Asia and Lucretius’s great work, Poetry returns to visionary speculation — now animated by the profound emotion of scientific certainties and their hypotheses — envisaging man’s destiny in union with universal destiny. If I, if others tomorrow who advance along the same path, possess the will and the thinking energy, we shall write also books newly sacred, amid the ever-widening flashes of Science!

It is not possible to examine this Work in detail — a unified and harmoniously composed work whose every part, every book, every poem interlocks with the rest. It comprises twelve to fifteen volumes coming in their preconceived order, of which about one third has now appeared: the entire first part (of which a new edition, revised and brought to the exact plan of expression, has just been published³¹), and the first two books of the second part.

Under the generic title WORK, in three parts (Dire du Mieux, Dire des Sangs, Dire de la Loi), it grounds itself in the soul and modern milieu of the Individual, Societies, and Races, then — taking up everything as though from the world’s very roots — ascends to cosmic genesis and unfolds the song of Evolution, prehistoric and historic, through successive theogonies on the one hand; whilst on the other, it extends toward suggestions of a morally and sociologically scientific becoming.

From the origins onward, it expresses the emotion of evolved Life: through intuitions of the past, characterisations of the present, and deductions and presciences regarding the future. Poetry has thus reclaimed its foundations as the ancient intuitive ages felt and expressed them: it becomes, with science’s aid, both Synthesis and Hypothesis.

We have swept away the sentimentality and narrow egotistic vision that exploited ingeniously observed analogies from nature merely for self-expression — the poet clinging to the naïve and presumptuous notion of a universe created for man.

We have dispersed this, toward Knowledge and toward Beauty conscious through it, which both reveal or suggest total harmony. And we desire, at the hour of final Syntheses in the final books, a song for Man’s intellectual utterance: that he may feel himself becoming, with us, the very place where the world’s Unity achieves its impassioned consciousness.

Thus I had to break from egotistic poetry and renew distant yet newly human traditions — to embrace, as far as my powers allowed, all humanity and the complete vision of a work pursuing this threefold orientation. A Work wherein, with evolutionist thought everywhere present and alive, there are established no longer mere analogies but essential relations — between all cosmic acts from origins to ends, and from these to human acts. Every detail refers continually to the whole, and every natural or human phenomenon, through successive relations, connects itself — through progressive enlargement into universal meaning — to the diverse evolutionary sequences. So that every fragment may be like the shards of the broken mirror, which still reflect the single expanse of heaven. “There is a universal sense in every character,” said Goethe.

This is the universal sense of “Scientific Poetry” as it presents itself: an impersonal principle serving as point of departure for the most personal and distantly evolving paths, for poets convinced that Poetry must become the supreme emotion of human knowledge and consciousness.

The very history of “Scientific Poetry” has naturally led me to observe the influence which various parts of its Method, or various of my books, have exercised primarily upon the opposing Schools in general, and upon certain individuals more particularly.

This influence has persisted: some, taking my thought as their point of departure, have found it persuasive and potent with poetic possibilities.

Others have awkwardly sought to conceal this influence — those who have undergone it, or who have mined it for elements to lend them originality, without perceiving that this rendered them incoherent. Is it not nevertheless a pleasure to have, with latent energy, so penetrated even my deniers that they speak my own words?³² I shall retain only, without misplaced insistence, this general observation placed at the head of a penetrating and informed Study — a notable one — by M. John Charpentier,³³ whom we have been pleased to cite: a young poet of clear critical merit, all qualities which render his judgment precious. “For quite some time already, among the majority of poets a scientific tendency has been asserting itself, growing more pronounced with each passing year.” He meant here not only technique, but more especially my philosophical vision.

Although one of the particularly unfortunate champions of the borrowing or denying poets of the moment, M. Ernest Charles, has ironised — “M. René Ghil proclaims that he has determined all the contemporary movements of poetry, if not of literature entire” — we believe we have indeed determined certain things, and that something new has been born from my work.

(In the scientific domain itself, whilst this aspect was studied only exceptionally before, does not the multiplied study of “coloured hearing” — in France, England, Germany, Italy — date from the contribution of “Verbal Instrumentation,” this phenomenon now appearing normal? And above all, does not the increasingly sustained study of graphophony — wherein Messrs. Marage and Marichelle currently distinguish themselves in France — arise from this, resuming the work of Helmholtz and others?)

Yes, with slow energy working as though beneath conscious thought, penetrating minds almost subconsciously, something has emerged — so that after all its transformations, Brunetière should have said this, so perfectly summarising: “If there is a tendency asserting itself in our time, it is the understanding that man is not the measure of all things, but on the contrary is merely a point upon the planet, which is itself only a point in space.”³⁴

We have noted briefly in our Foreword, among the principal poets of uncommon worth and character — well-known or still too newly arrived — during the past decade or so, those who orient themselves fully, partially, or in tendency alone according to the principles of Scientific Poetry, drawing from their works and their statements.³⁵

We shall say no more, desiring that not even a word should weigh as a burden upon their shoulders.

Beyond France and the French language, where my Method has been so extensively expounded, reproduced, and commented upon since its first appearance, and continues to be so — meriting the attention and meditation of men who work more earnestly than we — let us salute the fervent response of their authors by recording two poetic declarations and exalting their significance.

In Russia, where two great names command contemporary poetry — those of Constantin Balmont and Valery Brussov — M. Valery Brussov has gradually departed from the proud, illuminating, and imposing flights of intuition and imagery of his elder toward the necessity of philosophical thought in Poetry expressed through methodical verbal music and adequate Rhythmics.

M. Valery Brussov, who has behind him numerous volumes — poems, criticism, novels, translations — stands among the best informed regarding yesterday’s movement. He has cherished, translated, and studied the Symbolist poets, whilst simultaneously encountering the doctrine of Scientific Poetry, which harmonised with a spirit whose gravely meditative evolution must naturally lead him to proclaim that poetry must possess knowledge and thought in order to express anew its emotion and lyricism, and thus to create according to his own vigorous personality.

He honoured me profoundly by writing, with his great sincerity of soul, in 1907: “The more I study your work, the more I admire its grandeur and universal scope. Having already published five volumes of verse and several of prose, I find myself approaching the frontiers of your Scientific Poetry. Its principles seem to me increasingly unshakeable.”

Here, then, is a contribution to “Scientific Poetry” whose worth is doubled by the great renown of the poet.

Moved likewise by this universal sense which engages the Russian poet, a parallel development occurred in England. In 1905 — twenty years after my first pronouncements — a poet who had worked with remarkable talent in the conventional mode, M. John Davidson, proclaimed in his turn his own principles of Scientific Poetry as “henceforth alone admissible.” His conclusions prove identical to mine: “poetry must be the complex and essential poem of the Universe conscious of itself.”³⁶

Such responses from foreign thought, converging with observations of a progressive tendency and more or less distinct realisations in France, perhaps herald a confirming judgment. Indeed, only yesterday in his reception address at the Academy, M. Poincaré spoke of scientific poetry, both as scholar and as poet.

For “Scientific Poetry” has emerged necessarily, in harmony with the evolution of things, when we thus assumed the responsibility of leading poetry away from its exhausted paths of egotism, and of linking what we hold to be tomorrow’s conscious Beauty with the intuitive Beauty enshrined in the great legendary books which contained at once dogma and ethics, emotion and essential knowledge.

Permit me now to let two poets conclude. One from yesterday — as will be remembered — M. Gaston Moreilhon, who withdrew into silence after poems and a critical campaign whose entire worth endures, in the Revue Indépendante (1889 to 1893), but who emerged from it once more as admirable poet and critic when Écrits pour l’Art reappeared for a year (1905–1906) — and from which, we ardently hope for art’s sake, he will emerge again, with all that he has meditated and written. The other, from the rising generation, M. John Charpentier, of whom we have spoken in the course of these pages. And this will afford the occasion to thank them with emotion, along with all those who likewise honoured me with their friendship and their aid.

“One can say of René Ghil what was said of the great Romantic precursor: He has renewed the imagination, the poetic matter of France.

“He is the epic and lyric poet of Cosmism, of the Flow of Things, of the great indivisible Beings — stellar and telluric — of Species, of Humanity, of Races, of Peoples, of Morals, of Systems, of ameliorating Sociologies.

“He is the bard of science, the aesthete of knowledge, the sibylline evoker of lofty Monist construction, open to all the winds of the infinite. His profound originality has transferred poetic feeling to the universality of facts, grouped within the harmonious ensemble of the laws of human knowledge.

“M. Ghil is a creator — essentially original. Whether celebrated or little recognised, his work exists and will endure. It will never pass unnoticed, and be assured that sooner or later it will prove the source of a new and expansive form of poetry.” (Study in Écrits pour l’Art, June 1905.)

“M. René Ghil, copying no one with any intent of comparison, has oriented poetry along the path where it is summoned to the most marvellous of rejuvenations. I know not whether his work, which allies the most vigorous health to the most refined Byzantinism, will ever be celebrated, but I wager that our grandchildren will have to take it into account later, when they seek the sources of their inspiration. He has renewed lyric inspiration.” (Les Temps nouveaux, May 1901 and 1908.)

I reread this, with the reader, not to take pride — for alas, I know how to measure the distance between dream and realisation — but if I do not fear to assume the burden which some thus impose upon me, which I passionately imposed upon myself, it is to stretch forth my effort anew at this hour when, the first Part of my work republished with corrections, I return to the continuation of the second — discovery and emotion of natural truths beneath Humanity’s primal Myths — and to meditation upon the final part and its Syntheses.

February, 1909.

Author’s Notes

1. The opinion, among others, of M. R. de Gourmont (see Le Livre des Masques).

2. “M. René Ghil has a good twenty years of public derision to endure,” prophesied M. Emile Verhaeren in 1887 (L’Art moderne, Brussels).

3. We have no intention whatever of extending the term “university” in any general sense, knowing full well that there exists an entirely new and individually thinking portion of the University which sincerely desires to inform itself — this we know. And amongst its masters there are those whose attentiveness and conscientiousness have broken the silence— such a one is M. G. Lanson, who in his Histoire de la Littérature has given a place, unhappily too narrow and with imprecise or erroneous documentation, to the poetic Schools of yesterday. And with deliberate intention and emphasis he has not hesitated to discern in the old poet Gautier de Metz a distant and intuitive scientific precursor.

4. Testament poétique. And Preface to the Anthology of M. G. Walch (Delagrave, publisher, Paris).

5. We should like, by the way, to recall other precursors of our doctrine of Scientific Poetry down through the centuries— and without going back as far as India — in a tradition of rare representatives who, without becoming conscious of it so as to generalise it, emerged from egotism as the habitual measure of their inspiring emotion by rising to philosophical concept. We have mentioned Lucretius, Du Bartas, Hugo of La Légende des Siècles, Goethe, Shelley, Leconte de Lisle, Sully-Prudhomme reproaching himself for “wallowing in personal poetry.” Leconte de Lisle had expressed the wish, in the Preface to his early Poèmes antiques, that the Poet should resume his ancient role as educator of humanity. “Poetry will one day have to reckon with Science,” wrote Zola. Spencer, holding up Goethe as an example, had envisaged this alliance. Taine foresaw the possibility of a modern metaphysics. “It will be recognised that the vast evolutionary system was bound in its turn to be interpreted aesthetically, and that there comes in its hour, as the present conception of the world, the poem of M. René Ghil” (G. and J. Couturat, Revue indépendante, August 1891). Brunetière, after having written against Evolutionism in 1893, called for a literature, a poetry, deriving from Darwin and Haeckel. At the same time as myself, a critic informed or reminded him that such a poetry already existed (Article in La Justice, January 1893).

6. “The Congress of Poets held in Paris,” says M. G. Walch in his Anthology, “where M. René Ghil proudly claimed, in a sensational address, the genesis and development, within his own work, of virtually all the poetic preoccupations inscribed upon the programme.”

7. We shall have to speak presently of the “Symbolist” Schools. But has not one of the most notable among them, M. Gustave Kahn, declared in his volume Symbolistes et Décadents that Symbolism is less an innovation than the extreme development of Romanticism and of Parnassianism? And M. Mauclair (L’Art en Silence): “Their movement is a movement of form, rather than of ideas.”

8. Thus, in the present volume, there will be found certain quotations and extracts, deliberately chosen to support what I say and to illuminate the historical record, and often drawn from the very ground of my adversaries.

9. “Lazy and routineer minds love to hear what they heard yesterday,” wrote Alfred de Vigny, “the same ideas, the same expressions, the same sounds: everything new seems to them ridiculous, everything unaccustomed, barbarous.”

10. Mallarmé himself, won over, knew how in his Divagations, when he speaks of the various poetic techniques, deliberately to omit the first in date and the most active — the very one he had hailed.

11. Stéphane Servant. Revue Intellectuelle. February 1907.

12. M. Servant ought not, however, to have been ignorant, at the very least, of the Anthologies of Messrs. Van Bever and Léautaud, and of M. G. Walch, which would have informed him.

13. Thus it is a pleasure to read the recent little book of M. Étienne Bellot (Notes sur le Symbolisme, 1908), which brings welcome clarifications and documentation made precise by dates. It is only to be regretted that the unfortunate placement of a short chapter and an inadvertence leave one to believe that the author conceives as “Decadent” the poets who gathered around Mallarmé. But all is explained afterwards. “Decadent” was merely a journalist’s word.

14. Letter published, for the first time and in its entirety, in a Study on me by the Russian poet Valery Bryusov. Viessy (La Balance), Moscow, December 1904.

15. “His first book, Légende d’Âmes et de Sangs, which revealed a poet proceeding from no master, and whose preface, wherein he gave the broad outlines of the work he was meditating, allowed one to foresee the theories of music which the Traité du Verbe was to spread abroad with brilliance— this at a stroke drew attention upon him. In reviewing this first book, M. Edouard Rod then wrote: ‘M. René Ghil will never be commonplace.’” (Ad. van Bever and Paul Léautaud — Poètes d’Aujourd’hui, 1900).

16. In May and subsequent months, in the Brussels review La Basoche, where the excitement is so great, its director writes to me, that two literary parties, for and against, have been created. And afterwards, with developments, in the Paris review La Pléiade.

17. Giraud, publisher, Paris. With an “Avant-dire” by Mallarmé, which he asks me to write for this edition.

18. En Méthode à l’Œuvre (Messein, publisher, 1904).

19. It is interesting to note this, merely as a matter of observing this influence upon “Symbolism,” through two authoritative critics belonging more especially to that art. M. Pierre Quillard, speaking of M. Louis Le Cardonnel, says: “It appears also that, like Messrs. Émile Verhaeren, Stuart Merrill, Albert Mockel, and others, he has been touched by the instrumental theories of M. René Ghil.” Le Mercure, July 1904.

M. Jean de Gourmont writes: “M. René Ghil has had a real influence upon Symbolism, more through his ‘instrumentalist’ theories than through his realised work, which he continues to realise methodically.” Le Mercure, March 1905.

20. Revue Indépendante, November 1892.

21. M. Gustave Kahn is therefore mistaken — let us say so in passing, without needlessly dwelling on other lapses of memory — when he declares in his volume (a collection of articles, Symbolistes et Décadents) that “what emerges as the tangible result of the year 1886 is the establishment of Free Verse.” There had been no question of it, and he himself was still seeking his artistic expression.

Moreover, even in 1887, when my review Écrits pour l’Art appeared (January 1887) — which for six months upheld equally the art of Mallarmé, of Régnier, and of Vielé-Griffin, since Mallarmé’s idea of the Symbol was not yet representative of any School — the future “Symbolists” at the Mercure de France knew only this Mallarméan art and the instrumental theory, “that harmonic association of verse which M. René Ghil achieves through his most complete system of Instrumentation” (Écrits pour l’Art, article by Henri de Régnier, March 1887). Stuart Merrill dedicated his first book, that same year, “To René Ghil, master of Verbal Music.”

(Around 1888, the Symbol having become the principle of a School and of Schools, I am seen to break away, in order to keep intact the thought of “Scientific Poetry,” which no longer had contact with them save through the influence which its thought had exercised initially and would continue to exercise upon the whole.)

22. “If criticism believes it has the right to admire the talent of Émile Verhaeren and sometimes of Mallarmé, of G. Kahn, of Vielé-Griffin, and of others whose technique has undergone the influence of René Ghil, must one turn away from the latter because his intensity is greater and his scientific aim more elevated?” (Edgar Baes, Fédération artistique, Brussels, February 1907.)

“Verhaeren breaks his verse, which had grown heavy with ancient disciplines, and he retempers his aspiration towards materialism, towards belief in the scientific ideal and in the necessity of effort. Manifestly, it is to M. René Ghil that he is here indebted. To the Work of M. René Ghil, which optimistically exalts science, Verhaeren owed his experiencing— through his fierce temperament and his heroic and tragic imagination — all the beauty there could be in celebrating human pride setting forth in conquest, towards menacing unknowns, and in celebrating it in independent and supple rhythms. Such, at least, is the impression one draws from his book Les Forces tumultueuses (1902), which I do not hesitate to declare, if not the best, at least the most significant of all those he has given.” (John-L. Charpentier, Les Temps nouveaux, April 1908)

23. As for certain present-day poets, unspecified, who call themselves “neo-Symbolists” (everyone is neo-something nowadays), one should be grateful to them for resisting the “reaction,” but they possess neither the technical science of their models nor their musical emotion. Some also, following the vague sort of spiritualism of Symbolism, would bring it to a Christian sentimentalism, and every incoherence presents itself: one has seen some of these, yet wishful nonetheless of intellectual substance, attempting to fit my evolutionist concept of the poet-philosopher to their themes! A pious imposture.

24. In En Méthode we have shown, for example, how the principle of “struggle for existence” must not be taken as the ultimate goal of cosmic energy [TN: the ultimate purpose and highest expression of evolutionary force], whereas it is only a Means [TN: a mechanism or process (Means/Moyen) through which evolution operates. So struggle is a stage in evolution, not its goal. Evolution moves through struggle toward higher consciousness and unity.] — whence our non-acceptance of the conclusions of Spencer and Nietzsche.

25. En Méthode à l’Œuvre

26. I might avail myself, as a valuable introduction to my Rhythmics, of this general statement by Spencer in First Principles: that Rhythm, which is universal, “proceeds from successive accentuations of the undulatory movement habitually generated by feeling when it discharges itself in the being.”

27. En Méthode à l’Œuvre.

28. En Méthode à l’Œuvre.

29. It would seem to me idle to insist further upon a definition of “Scientific Poetry.” We are no longer in the days when ignoramuses, or jesters of greater or lesser probity, asked ingenuously whether we were putting natural history into verse! If such still exist, it is to the detriment of their own intelligence.

30. En Méthode à l’Œuvre.

31. A. Messein, éditeur, Paris.

32. With obstinate resolve, ignoring the sometimes-witless mockery of his official critics and paying no heed even to friendly objections, he pursued his labour. Meanwhile certain of his ideas made their way into currency — where others, more deft than he, transmuted and distorted them for consumption by the French bourgeoisie.

33. John L. Charpentier. Revue Hebdomadaire, oct. 1906.

34. La Littérature Contemporaine (Survey by Messrs. G. Le Cardonnel and Charles Vellay, 1905).

35. “The poems of M. René Ghil have convinced the young School of the necessity of enriching literary inspiration with science.” Marius-Ary Leblond, L’Idéal du XIX siècle (1908).

36. John Davidson, The Theatrocrat, Introduction (E. Grant Richards, publisher, London, 1905). (See a remarkable Study on this volume by M. Laurence Jerrold, Écrits pour l’Art, January 1906.)

It may not be without interest here to provide on this subject the following extract from the English press, which, as is well known, is most sparing with its esteem: “M. René Ghil occupies a place apart among French poets. His aim has been to produce in adequate poetic expression the most recent results obtained by science, and in particular by biological science.

He is an ardent opponent of the Symbolist School, and has taken a predominant part in the literary controversies of recent years.

It will doubtless be of interest to English readers to learn that he is one of the very few French poets whose works are acquired, as soon as they appear, by the Library of the British Museum.” (Daily Chronicle, London, March 1897.)

Translator’s Notes

^t/n1 Ghil is pointing to a fundamental paradox in traditional French prosody that had long troubled theorists and practitioners alike. The “contradiction” he identifies is this: according to classical metrical theory, two verses sharing the same syllabic count — say, two alexandrines of twelve syllables each — should theoretically be equivalent in duration and rhythmic weight. They are, after all, metrically identical.

However, in actual poetic practice and auditory experience, these two verses are not of equal temporal length when spoken or heard. Various factors contribute to this disparity: the phonetic quality of the syllables themselves (some vowels and consonant clusters simply take longer to articulate than others), the semantic weight and syntactic structure of the line (which affects natural pauses and emphases), the emotional or rhetorical intensity (which may slow or quicken delivery), and the interplay of accent, caesura, and enjambment.

Thus, the metrical system — based purely on syllable-counting — fails to account for the actual rhythmic duration of verse as performed or experienced. This is the contradiction Kahn’s theory, like others before it, attempted to address through concepts of “accelerations and retardations,” but which, Ghil suggests, Kahn never fully resolved because he remained bound to the metrical paradigm rather than embracing a truly temporal or musical conception of rhythm.

^t/n2 Ghil is saying that the word “inspiration” is an inadequate or inexact metaphorical substitute for what he believes is the more scientifically accurate term “intuition.” “Improperly figurative” (improprement imagé) means that “inspiration” is a figurative expression (imagé = based on imagery, metaphorical) but it’s improper or inadequate (improprement) because it carries misleading connotations —it suggests divine visitation, supernatural forces, passive reception of genius from outside the self. Whereas “intuition,” in Ghil’s philosophical-scientific framework, describes the actual psychological-physiological process: a moment of cerebral synthesis where the poet’s mind suddenly grasps the essence of things through accumulated perception and subconscious associations. So “inspiration” is figurative language (poetic, metaphorical) when what we really need is precise scientific terminology.

^t/n3 Apperception: in Ghil’s usage, a unified conscious grasp or synthetic awareness that emerges when previously unconscious or subconscious elements are suddenly brought together into coherent perception, that is, as a meaningful whole.

^t/n4 Une-unité-qui-devient (literally “a-unity-which-becomes”): Ghil’s coinage emphasises the Self as simultaneously unified and in constant process of becoming. The hyphens stress the paradoxical nature of identity as both stable integration and perpetual transformation.

^t/n5 Starting from scientific/evolutionary data, Ghil proposes this progression:

1. Instinct is the most primitive form of emotion — it’s the very first “feeling” that matter has as energy becomes aware of itself. It’s rudimentary but also enormous because it represents the beginning of all consciousness across eternity.

2. Chemical affinities (why certain elements bond with others) are really primitive “desires” or “orientations” — matter is already “reaching toward” something, even at the molecular level.

3. If we strip away all the surface appearances of matter (its “phenomena”) and think of it purely as energy with inherent direction (“energetic Fatality”), we see that what looks like multiplicity and difference (all the various chemical affinities, attractions, forces) is actually one underlying Unity expressing itself in many forms.

4. This Unity is eternally counting out, cataloguing, enumerating its own process of becoming conscious of itself.

Following scientific evidence, we understand Instinct as the earliest form of emotion — primitive, yet vast in significance, being the first glimmer of energy becoming aware of itself across all time. Even chemical affinities represent this primal emotional orientation of matter. When we look past matter’s surface phenomena to grasp it as pure directed energy, we see that all its seemingly diverse attractions and affinities are really expressions of a single Unity perpetually unfolding into consciousness of itself.

^t/n6 This meditation on scientific data leads us to a metaphysical conclusion:

1. Evolution isn’t just physical — it’s consciousness progressively awakening to itself

2. We can trace this progression: unconscious matter → animal consciousness → human thought

3. All of it is the same energy/being striving to know itself, contemplate itself, understand itself harmoniously

4. More knowledge = more being — consciousness and existence are the same thing intensifying

5. When we grasp this, we feel ourselves emotionally connected to the Universal process (we are not separate observers; we are the Universe becoming aware of itself)

Thus, meditation on scientific facts leads us to metaphysical insight: following evolution’s trajectory, we recognise matter evolving through animal consciousness into human thought as one continuous process — the Universe striving without limit to know and contemplate itself. In this recognition, we feel ourselves emotionally participant in the Universal, not separate from it. The growth of knowledge is the growth of being itself.

^t/n7 “Signify emotively” (signifier émotivement): Ghil distinguishes between intellectual/rational signification —describing or explaining through logical discourse, scientific prose, or philosophical argument — and emotive signification, which conveys meaning through felt experience, sensory impression, and aesthetic impact. This distinction is central to his “Scientific Poetry” project: science provides the structural knowledge (the relations, evolutionary laws, cosmic unity), while poetry provides the emotional realisation, making those truths felt, experienced, lived rather than merely understood intellectually. The poet must render universal truths not through abstract explanation but through visceral aesthetic experience — creating verbal music, rhythmic patterns, and symbolic imagery that allow the reader to experience cosmic interconnection emotively. A more natural English phrasing might be “to make emotionally manifest” or “to convey emotionally,” though we have retained Ghil’s own formulation for authenticity.

^t/n8 Ghil’s theory of “Verbal Instrumentation” rests on a psycho-physiological account of language origins and poetic expression. His argument proceeds thus:

Traditional French prosody (classical, Romantic, Parnassian) treats rhythm as purely mechanical — a regular, predictable pattern of numerical syllable-counts and tonic accents into which ideas must be forced, regardless of their natural emotional movement. Ghil rejects this: authentic Rhythm, he insists, must be “the movement of Thought conscious and representative of natural and harmonious Forces” — that is, rhythm should organically embody the emotion inseparable from the idea itself.

To achieve this, Ghil traces language back to its origins: before words became abstract symbols (ideograms), they were sounds — phonetic expressions of emotion. Primitive humans expressed feeling through guttural cries and bodily gestures; these sounds were imitative of external phenomena (onomatopoeia) and carried emotional colouring through their phonetic qualities (the physical vibrations of different vowels and consonants). Over time, these complex phonetic utterances simplified into abstract ideas and conventional words, but the original emotive phonetic power remains latent within them.

Therefore, the poet must restore both dimensions of language: the ideographic (meaning, concept) and the phonetic (sound, vibration, emotional duration). When a thought genuinely moves us in poetry, it necessarily reawakens its entire “emotive succession” — the complex sensory and phonetic atmosphere from which it emerged. Poetic rhythm, then, is not imposed externally through metrical rules, but arises organically from the emotion inherent in the idea, expressed through the varying durations and qualities of vocal sounds.

In practice, “Verbal Instrumentation” means orchestrating vowel and consonant sounds for their sensory-emotional effects (what Ghil calls their “diverse and emotive durations of vibration”), allowing rhythm to evolve naturally from the thought-emotion unity rather than forcing ideas into predetermined metrical frames. This is Ghil’s “Evolving Rhythm” (Rythme évoluant) — rhythm as living process rather than mechanical pattern.

^t/n9 Timbre: the distinctive quality or “colour” of a sound that allows us to distinguish one voice or instrument from another even when they’re producing the same pitch and volume. In acoustics, timbre results from the unique pattern of overtones (harmonics) accompanying a fundamental frequency.

Ghil applies this concept to vowels and consonants, treating them as “vocal timbres” — each vowel and consonant having its own distinctive acoustic “colour” based on its harmonic structure. Drawing on Helmholtz’s research into acoustic harmonics, Ghil argues that vowels function like musical instruments in an orchestra, each with its characteristic tonal quality. When he speaks of “vocal-timbres” or “sound-timbres,” he means the specific phonetic quality and colouring of speech sounds, not merely their duration or pitch.

This is fundamental to “Verbal Instrumentation”: the poet orchestrates these vocal timbres (vowel and consonant colours) much as a composer orchestrates instrumental timbres, creating harmonic or dissonant effects through their combinations, repetitions, and variations. The “timbre” of a sound carries emotive and suggestive power beyond its semantic meaning.

^t/n10 This passage may seem paradoxical: after rejecting mechanical prosody, Ghil now retains the alexandrine (12-syllable line) and syllabic measurement. The apparent contradiction resolves when we grasp his distinction between rigid metrical pattern (which he rejects) and organic metrical framework (which he retains).

Ghil rejects the traditional alexandrine’s rigid internal divisions — the fixed caesuras (pauses) at predictable intervals that force ideas into predetermined rhythmic molds. But he retains the 12-syllable measure itself as a physiological constant: the natural duration of a breath’s expiration. This is “organic” measurement, rooted in the body rather than abstract convention.

Within this 12-syllable unit, however, rhythm becomes fluid. Instead of mechanically equal divisions (6+6, or 4+4+4), the placement of accented beats varies according to: (1) the evolving shape of the thought itself, and (2) the actual phonetic duration of the vocal sounds (vowel and consonant timbres). Different sounds have different vibratory lengths —some syllables simply take longer to say than others, regardless of metrical counting.

Thus Ghil’s verse measures itself both syllabically (12 syllables per line) and vibrationally (varying durations of vocal sounds within those syllables). The syllabic count provides structural unity; the vibratory durations provide organic, evolving rhythm. His “Evolving Rhythm” is therefore measured (it has the alexandrine as framework) but not mechanically patterned (the internal rhythm flows naturally from thought and sound).

The measures can be “eurythmic” (harmonious) or “dissonant” depending on how the internal divisions relate mathematically. Eurythmic divisions arise from multiplying the base numbers 2 and 3 (yielding measures of 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 9, 12— numbers that divide evenly and create harmonic proportions within the 12-syllable frame). Dissonant divisions arise from adding 2 and 3 (yielding 5, 7, 11 — prime or irregular numbers that create asymmetry and tension). Thus a 12-syllable line might divide harmoniously as 6+6 or 4+4+4, or asymmetrically as 7+5 or 5+4+3, allowing for both consonance and productive rhythmic tension within the overall alexandrine framework.

^t/n11 This section presents the philosophical foundation of Ghil’s “Scientific Poetry” — a cosmology synthesising evolutionary science with metaphysical idealism.

The Geometric Symbols:

Ghil critiques two traditional ways of representing cosmic process: Vico’s Circle (suggesting eternal recurrence without progress) and Goethe’s Spiral (suggesting continuous expansion but ignoring contraction). He proposes instead the Ellipse as the true form of universal evolution. The ellipse combines both expansion and condensation in a single movement, accounting for growth and decline, progress and periodic regression. Crucially, because the “virtual Circle” of infinite Matter has no limits, the ellipse can “open” perpetually toward the straight line (the theoretical endpoint of complete evolution) without ever fully resolving — thus Matter evolves eternally toward “a More, a Better” without final closure. This elegant geometric figure captures both cyclical and progressive dimensions of evolution.

Love, Not Struggle:

Rejecting Darwin, Spencer, and Nietzsche, Ghil insists that “struggle for existence” is merely a means of evolution, not its goal. The fundamental force is Love (understood as chemical affinity, attraction, the propensity toward harmony)— Matter’s inherent drive toward equilibrium and conscious self-knowledge. Evolution is driven by creative union, not competitive violence.

Reconciling Materialism and Spiritualism:

Ghil’s central metaphysical claim: Matter is eternally a “Synthetic unity” unconscious of itself, which through evolution (sensation → instinct → thought) progressively achieves self-consciousness. “Spiritualism” — the highest consciousness of the Whole — is not opposed to Matter but emerges perpetually from evolving Matter. Thus the ancient Western opposition between materialism and spiritualism dissolves: consciousness is immanent to material evolution itself. This reconciliation, Ghil suggests, aligns with Indian philosophy, particularly the thought of Vyasa (legendary compiler of the Vedas and author of the Mahabharata) and Kapila (founder of Samkhya philosophy, one of the earliest systematic evolutionary cosmologies).

The Elliptical Rhythm:

Just as cosmic Matter evolves through alternating expansion and contraction, so too do stars (radiating then mineralising), civilisations (rising and declining), human lives, and even daily energies. All phenomena follow this “elliptical Rhythm” — periods of creative expansion followed by consolidation, decline, and renewal.

^t/n12 This section derives a complete moral, social, and political philosophy from Ghil’s evolutionary metaphysics. His argument proceeds thus:

The Moral Law:

If Matter evolves toward consciousness, and human beings represent the Universe achieving self-awareness, then our fundamental moral obligation is to continue this evolutionary trajectory. We fulfil cosmic purpose by maximising knowledge (science) and consciousness — both of ourselves and of the Universe. “To come to know is to come to be” means that consciousness and existence intensify together: greater knowledge makes us more real, more fully participant in cosmic Unity.

Against Least-Effort:

Ghil launches a fierce polemic against the “law of least-effort” — a principle sometimes derived from thermodynamics or evolutionary economy, suggesting organisms (and humans) naturally minimise energy expenditure. He dismisses this as either wilful misunderstanding or moral cowardice masquerading as science. True, organisms eventually adapt to perform acts efficiently — but this efficiency is the result of immense prior effort, struggle, and adaptation. Moreover, because everything evolves, no equilibrium is stable: the organism must continually exert new effort or face diminution and death. The genuine law is Greater-Effort — perpetual striving toward increased consciousness, complexity, and unity. To embrace “least-effort” (intellectual laziness, moral mediocrity, artistic compromise) is individual degradation and social decay.

Individual Worth:

Human value is measured by the degree of conscious knowledge achieved. Greater science (understanding) produces greater consciousness, which creates greater intellectual and moral worth. This is not elitism but evolutionary fact: those who know more are more, because consciousness is being itself intensifying.

Rights and Duties:

Knowledge confers Rights — but immediately entails Duties. Because our individual knowledge depends on inherited (atavistic) knowledge from the Past, we owe gratitude to ancestral accumulation. And because we participate in ongoing evolution toward the Future, we owe effort to help others achieve knowledge. This generates Ghil’s “Altruism” — not sentimental charity (which implies condescending sacrifice) but scientific necessity: sharing knowledge advances universal consciousness.

Reconciling Egoism and Altruism:

Another antinomy dissolved: Egoism (self-preservation, self-development) is natural and necessary — the primordial evolutionary instinct. Only when the individual has secured “organic and moral life” (basic material and intellectual stability) does the duty to others arise. Self-cultivation and social solidarity are not opposed but sequential: you must become conscious before you can help others toward consciousness.

Political Implications:

Ghil envisions rule by “intellectual power under scientific law” — government by those possessing greatest knowledge/consciousness, but constrained by impersonal, evolving scientific principles rather than arbitrary will. This “providential power” governs with the conscious assent of the people (not autocratically), guiding them toward collective betterment. This appears to be a technocratic vision tempered by democratic participation — meritocracy of consciousness serving universal evolution.

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