René Ghil (1862–1925)
Photographer unknown
The essay here presented in English for the first time is one of the most substantial critical studies devoted to the poet and theorist René Ghil (1862–1925) during his own lifetime. Published in La Revue Indépendante in August 1891 — that distinguished Parisian monthly which had already served as a platform for Mallarmé, Huysmans, and the leading voices of the Symbolist movement — it occupies pages 178 to 251 of that number: a span that speaks for itself. Its author, George Bonnamour (1866–1954), journalist, critic, and novelist, was among the more perceptive and combative literary intelligences of the younger generation — a writer capable of sustained polemic as readily as of fine aesthetic discrimination.
The article arrives at a moment of particular significance in Ghil’s career: the appearance of the fourth and definitive edition of his Traité du Verbe, retitled En méthode à l’œuvre, the theoretical cornerstone of his vast projected poem Nature in eleven books. Bonnamour seizes the occasion to offer something considerably more ambitious than a review: a full critical reckoning with a poet he considered scandalously neglected, and a systematic exposition of a body of thought he found genuinely original. The essay opens with a spirited — indeed gleefully combative — survey of the Parisian literary scene, settling scores with Moréas, Morice, Lemaître, and the critical establishment with equal relish, before proceeding to its proper business: a lucid account of Ghil’s cosmogonic and evolutionary philosophy, his sociological ethics, and above all his celebrated theory of Instrumentation — the doctrine of verbal music, grounded in the acoustic researches of Helmholtz, whereby vowels and consonants are systematically correlated with orchestral instruments, emotional registers, and even colours. A third section examines the prosodic consequences of these theories — the defence of the alexandrine against the rising tide of free verse, the dissolution of the strophe, the bold treatment of syntax and vocabulary — before the essay’s long concluding movement offers close paraphrase and commentary on the first three published books of Ghil’s work: Le Meilleur Devenir, Le Geste Ingénu, and La Preuve Égoïste. The article closes with the rhetorical peroration already familiar to readers of this site from our earlier translated excerpt.
As a document of 1891, the essay captures a precise and unrepeatable moment — the fin-de-siècle quarrel between positivism and mysticism, between scientific ambition and Symbolist dream — and does so from inside the fray, with all the energy and partiality that implies. It is not a disinterested assessment; it is an act of critical advocacy and should be read as such. What it preserves, beyond advocacy, is an exceptionally detailed and intelligent account of one of the most singular — and most persistently marginalised — poetic projects of the age.
M. RENÉ GHIL
I
Now that the intellectual bankruptcy of rhymers — indecently cried up by puff-merchants and crowned as school-masters by journalists of the thickest understanding — stands nakedly exposed, the moment is doubly ripe to speak of that rare and gifted trouveur, poet as finder rather than mere maker, René Ghil. There is an injustice to repair: the long, culpable silence that has closed around his name. And there is an occasion to mark: the appearance, under the ne varietur title En méthode à l’œuvre, of a fourth and definitive edition of the Traité du Verbe — the elaborately wrought, imperious Preface to his poem in eleven books, NATURE. He himself declares it, in that precious, hammered, singing prose which is entirely his own:
“Before the Work foretold of pride and humility which is my will, and essentially expounding it, the present book, in argument, is my method and my manner of Art.”
In the current chaos of French poetry, this poet stands quite apart — proudly, uncompromisingly apart — ignored with equal indifference by the daily press and the tub-thumping votaries of fashionable Symbolism alike.
The silence has been broken, however — by a few. Among them: that Lamartinian tear-vessel, that hirsute hewer of oxblood melodramas, M. Charles Morice. This prosodist, whose perpetually announced and never actually published verses betray their author’s grocer’s aesthetic and sheepish taste in their very title — Vingthuit jours d’un poète — saw fit to deposit into that receptacle of literary tittle-tattle, that phonograph of the pen-pushing Homais, the tall, bony, hollow Swiss Jules Huret, the following:
“Let us say to M. René Ghil: You are playing a tambourine — a Belgian one, at that — and you are playing it badly.”
To which we, in our turn, say to M. Charles Morice:
— Swallow, O father-by-collaboration of Chérubin, the poisons and the sabres of your fifth-act dénouements; be train-bearer to Sardou, incense-swinger to Scribe — and then, somewhere around your sixtieth year, delivered at last from the inextricable verbalism of La Littérature de tout à l’heure, favour us with a slim volume in which even the most indulgent critic might catch the ghost of an idea. — And so we pass on.
The scattered sneers aimed at M. Ghil by sundry other of these Left Bank brasserie Berkeleyans are, in any case, hardly cause for alarm. For if it is well known that he never strikes first, the readiness of the polemicist behind Les Écrits pour l’Art to strike back is no less well known.
Hated, but feared, by the recyclers of literary cast-offs — the decadents — M. René Ghil fares no better with the great press: that enormous stupidity with a bull’s brow. Ah, that so-called fourth estate, which the clowns and credulous revolutionaries will, unhappily, never succeed in strangling! It dispenses its praise and discussion through the authorised mouthpiece of that counterfeit Hellenist, M. France — lending its columns to the green-faced palikare whom Cohl’s caricaturist pencil has so memorably fixed: M. Jean Moréas. M. Baüer, meanwhile — to write in the classical tongue of M. Lemaître is, one confesses, rather agreeable — M. Baüer espouses, and how warmly, the fatuous quarrels of M. Auguste Germain, who professes the scantiest esteem for J.-H. Rosny. And to spite the Théâtre Libre, and because that ham Antoine had the effrontery to snub a journalist, the scribbling tribe of the dailies throws its weight behind the Théâtre d’Art and a Symbolist aesthetic for which it plainly does not care one jot. Of M. René Ghil — alone exempt from puffery, his proud isolation bent in honest labour while others lucubrate a single line across three months — of M. René Ghil, not one word.
There was a time, however, when they had condescended to mock. The colouring of vowels furnished, for a brief season, a precious topic of dissertation to those hack article-writers whose lucrative trade is to pronounce, without discernment, upon everything and nothing.
M. Sarcey expressed his astonishment — once again — and once again understood nothing of verses that set their words like jewels in settings not of the French tongue; “and it appears,” he ventured, “that it is music.”
The simian M. Jules Lemaître — ranked by the pen of that defunct schoolroom usher Jules Tellier alongside George Ohnet — announced to the city and to the world that he would avenge old national common sense, the lucid genius of our race, by having a fragment of Le Geste Ingénu declaimed upon the stage in a piece entitled Un salon.
But for this project of vengeance to come to anything, M. Lemaître would find himself under the cruel necessity of repudiating his innate and thoroughly leporine instincts as a trembler. This, one may safely affirm, he will not do — nor will he profit by the omission, for we know of bold vituperators who stand ready to make of the author of Sérénus the mocked and well-flogged hero of a rather raw Aristophanic entertainment, the intention being generally held to be as good as the deed.
While that particular chastisement of one of their own remains pending, Journalism lowers over M. Ghil a sealed bell jar — and pumps out the air.
The appearance of his books passes almost unnoted. No honest critic troubles himself to read them, let alone to judge them — and this suffocation of a writer’s ideas, a writer whom one may certainly dispute and dislike, but whose qualities as innovator and seeker cannot be dismissed without a flat denial of justice, becomes all the more odious when set against the incessant bass-drum thumping on behalf of vaporous phrase-spinners and counterfeit system-builders that still assails our ears.
Who among the young men of letters has more plainly set out his intention, more boldly pressed his speculative daring, more clearly indicated his goal? To proclaim that one is renovating a literature is not, in itself, enough. One must say how the evolution — or the revolution — is to be accomplished; one must point, however roughly, towards the road into unexplored territory. The Symbolists’ incapacity to construct any such system is, by now, too well established to require argument. To explain his own technique, still less to formulate his artistic ideal, is simply beyond M. Moréas. How very differently M. Ghil has revealed himself: a considered theorist enamoured of the rare and the new, a trouveur of ideas and philosophical methods, possessed of an aesthetic at once delicious and subtle, whose very abundance of thought contrasts so brutally with the intellectual penury of his adversaries.
His concept of the poet stands apart — lofty, uncompromising, altogether outside the common run of literature. Done with Parnassian knick-knackery; enough of the endless accumulation of sonnets and fragmentary trifles, bearing no relation to one another beyond the accident of being bundled pell-mell between the same covers. What is demanded henceforth is the effort of genuine thought and construction — the broadly conceived design, the chain of ideas linked to ideas, poems to poems, books to books.
And at twenty-three, repudiating the common way of making, M. Ghil carved out for himself the labour of a lifetime: a work that is single and composed, rational, complex, immense, oriented by a personal philosophical principle, and unfolding, in a verbal music created by him and for him alone, his INSTRUMENTATION — unfolding the synthesis of past and present from which the laws of the future are to be drawn.
A chimera? Perhaps. But a dream of magnificent ambition; and by his silent, stubborn driving against this harsh labour, by the profound literary probity that compels him to ceaselessly revise and complete his books in pursuit of an ever-retreating ideal of perfection, by the disdainful pride with which he spurns every solicitation of publicity and cleaves to his isolation, M. Ghil has earned the sympathies of those sterner spirits who refuse all servitude and prefer, to programmes that boast and promise and lie, the thing itself: works.
Symbolism, which its own promoters readily concede to be as old as the world, is loudly declared by those same promoters to be a movement of protest against the schools that preceded it: Parnassianism and Naturalism. The sheer brutishness of this antithesis is, on the face of it, absurd and ridiculous, smacking of donkey-headed wilfulness and critical bad faith. What puerility it is to seek the new by mere mechanical inversion of what one’s predecessors did, without pausing to ask whether those predecessors did not add something to the common treasury of literature, whether nothing of their experience is worth keeping. M. Ghil, for his part, though his ambition is to press forward as a pioneer breaking virgin ground, is in fact the only one among his contemporaries who fully continues the century’s tradition of genuine innovation. This alone is the best answer to the cowardly quibbling of the old rhetoricians who insist that his theories are, and must always remain, outside the pale of legitimate aesthetics. That this is a gross error, the De rerum natura and Du Bartas’s poem of the Creation prove beyond all reasonable doubt. M. René Ghil claims descent from Lucretius and Du Bartas both, and to these two one must add the Hugo of La Légende des siècles, whose progressive philosophy and governing idea Ghil was the first to champion, however vague and spiritualist that philosophy remained, at a time when sneering at the great artist was considered perfectly good form among the very people who today intone: Victor Hugo and ourselves.
And then there are those divine, visionary beyond-seekers of the North, whose imperious dream, enamoured of vast expanses and the immeasurable, finds its sharpest foil in the elegant but finally rather earthbound precision of the meridional poets, those prudent Latin and Provençal practitioners of the safe middle way. Does not something of that ardent bard of adorable naturism, of iconoclastic daring and universal goodness — the Shelley of Prometheus Unbound — seem to palpitate in the long periods of Le Geste Ingénu and La Preuve égoïste, breathing through them in so large a current of altruism — that great thing, and fine word, which Auguste Comte gave to the world?
Closer to our own time: he who first brought the findings of experimental philosophy into a Poetry still saturated with the Jean-Jacques spiritualism of the three romantic demi-gods — that Leconte de Lisle, whose critical bias against Messrs. Zola, Bourget and Mallarmé sits so unworthy of his high genius — will he recall having wished, in his preface to the first Poèmes antiques, that the Poet should henceforth resume his ancient office of educator of humanity? Well then: to raise poetry to a universal teaching, and to clothe in the beauty of lyricism the secrets wrested at last from the unveiled Isis — is this not precisely the virile effort and noble objective of M. René Ghil, whose opening pages of En méthode à l’œuvre sing with serene assurance in periods that are prose in name alone:
“To the poets of the past, who fulfilled their duty in epochs when sensation, faith and unknowing were all that men possessed — to them, gratitude. Their duty was equal to their age. Ours is different.
“Our duty is to think and to know: to follow first the thought and knowledge of the scientist who has put the world to experiment — and then, when that scientist’s findings have long since scattered and dispersed into the common air, to move faster and further still; to gather, by an act of genius, laws and governing law and subsidiary laws into a single node, and authenticate them in a language at once multiple and logically ordered, a verbal music — sealing in that language the present moment and as much of the future as synthesis can hold.
“Poetry, coming after music and after the knowledge of the scientist, shall henceforth stand first among the arts — or it shall not stand at all. It must be learned and philosophically experimental, spoken in a language that is itself experimentally multi-sounding; otherwise, it forfeits its right to exist.
“And the proof of this — to be exalted by a poet drawing on the full reach of modern knowledge, partial though any single voice must be, yet pointing towards a unanimous truth — that proof awaits its monument: an immense and simple Work, yet to come — nothing less than the philosophy of Matter in evolutionary movement.”
In this epidemic of mysticism, this mania for idealist verbalism, this gust of fashionable mystery that threatens to blow the close of the century clean off its feet, the scientific and positivist tradition of its earlier years will be carried forward by this poet and by a group of poets who will pit, against the Jouffroys, Caros and Vacherots of the spiritualist camp, the tenacious counter-authority of Laplace, Lamarck, Darwin, Haeckel, Taine and Ribot.
“Poetry will one day have to reckon with Science,” wrote M. Zola in his Documents Littéraires; and Spencer, citing Goethe as his example, has called for precisely this renewal.
M. Sully Prudhomme, in the closing sections of Justice, and M. Jean Richepin in certain pieces of La Mer, did indeed labour, as one might say, in this ardent hope. But will they press on? Whatever the answer, in both cases the effort appears exceptional — subordinated, at all events, to other artistic concerns — whereas rationalism and scientific synthesis constitute the very marrow of M. Ghil’s Work, assuming proportions therein undreamed of until now, and investing the poet with a kind of civic magistracy: the solemn office of formulating the ideals of an ameliorating sociocracy.
Before unfolding the theories that will reveal his full originality, it has seemed necessary to establish this writer’s connections with the past — the more so since he is widely regarded as strangely subversive, bizarre, impossible. Those connections are real: the cult of knowledge, the pursuit of truth, the faith in human betterment — tempered, it is true, by that uncompromising preoccupation with individual apartness which is the distinguishing mark of the serious artist of this epoch.
To open poetry to this rational, scientific path — is that not, on any honest reckoning, rather more worth doing than pastiching Rutebeuf, reinstating the vocabulary of the thirteenth century, cataloguing the mournful plaints of courtly knights and the vapid cooings of courts of love — such being M. Moréas’s peculiar ambition? Or, in the manner of Wagner, conjuring legend from the wings, daubing the same sumptuous backdrops, and haunting the shadowy silhouettes of castellan figures — such being the peculiar ambition of M. de Régnier?
II
M. Ghil’s cosmogonic dream — from which flows the philosophical principle that underpins the entire architecture of his Work — rises with the splendour and delicate ideality of a Hindu theogony. Even were it to forfeit, despite being built from the materials of experimental science and transformism, all claim to reality — as the Platonic reveries have forfeited it, as the Divine Comedy has — it would still stand, and stand high: a delicious speculation of superb imaginative flight, a troubling vision of the Cosmos that has no peer in contemporary literature save that strange prose poem Eureka, by the divine Edgar Poe. The most vigorous, perhaps, of living French thinkers — he in whom M. Paul Bourget recognises, alongside an exceptional gift for analysis and a formidable power of induction and deduction, the broad qualities of a poet — M. Taine wrote, in the closing pages of his Intelligence:
“Mathematicians admit today that real quantity is a particular case of imaginary quantity — a singular case, in which the elements of imaginary quantity present certain conditions absent from all other cases.”
“That being granted, might one not seek out these elements and these conditions? Here we stand on the threshold of metaphysics. We do not cross it; our subject was knowledge alone; we wished only to point upward — well above our heads, and well beyond our present reach — to the probable point where the keystone of the whole edifice is to be found.”
If M. Taine foresaw the possibility of a modern metaphysics, it must be acknowledged that M. René Ghil has known how to draw from the data of evolutionary thought a most remarkable hypothesis. Those who ask of a book of verse nothing beyond poetry are perfectly free to regard it as a pure poem constructed from scientific materials; the positivist and the materialist may, on the contrary, find in it the concrete realisation and ingenious narrative clothing of ideas dear to them and of theories they hold as demonstrated. But if one accepts that the great poetries of antiquity and of the modern age have always taken it upon themselves to distil — confusedly mingled with the dreams, emotions and sensations of man — the religious and ethical conceptions, the theology, the metaphysics and the knowledge proper to each successive phase of history, then one must recognise that the vast evolutionist system was bound, in its turn, to receive its aesthetic interpretation, and that M. Ghil’s poem arrives precisely at its appointed hour, as the reigning conception of the world demands. This concept is developed at length in the Traité du Verbe; but as a short article by the poet has recently set out its broad lines, it has seemed preferable to reproduce that article here in full.
“Setting out from experimental data alone, I have repudiated almost the whole of received Philosophy — virtually everything built on a priori foundations. A clean slate, after scientific synthesis.
“Matter does not simply exist: in the perpetual diversity of its manifestations, which is movement — from eternity, for eternity, across the unlimited — it becomes.
“But according to what geometrical movement does it become?
“The superficial have declared that the same events recur periodically: that all moves in a circle.
“This is error. Everything appears to move in a circle; but pause to examine the matter, and one sees that the same phases return with an imperceptible, continuous, eccentric deviation — tracing, in fact, an elliptical path.
“Revising the circular and spiral models of Vico and Goethe alike, I hold that everything is Elliptical: from the movement of nebulae and stars to the gesture of a single human being, passing through the movements of peoples, generations, and individuals across their vital span.
“My point of departure had therefore to be geometrical — and a philosophy had to arise to give it meaning.
“Matter, being eternal and unlimited, is virtually represented by the circle — which, however vastly it expands, remains, by virtue of that very limitlessness, bound to expand eternally while remaining identically itself. Matter moving in a circle would never evolve, never progress. But let it move elliptically: and eternally, infinitely, it escapes through the ellipse the fatality of the circle; it evolves, it advances — moving ever towards the eternal and infinite liberation represented by the straight line, towards which the ellipse ceaselessly elongates.
“Since the circle is virtually infinite, the ellipse will be infinite also; and Matter progresses eternally, without resolution, towards the Better.
“But what sets Matter in motion along this ellipse?
“The study of the sciences — chemistry first, with its affinities — has revealed to me the essential law: procreative Love, procreative of the Better.
“Love, as the inherent Force of Matter, drives it forward, and Love desires to know itself. Love implies two desires: had these two amorous desires consented to love each other in mutual ignorance, Matter would merely be — and the circle would indeed be its true symbol. But Love wishes to know itself, and can possess itself only through self-knowledge; it is through the desire for a fruit born of the two creative desires — a fruit in which Love defines itself — that this knowledge will be achieved. And it is this third desire that drives Matter out of the circle and into elliptical movement. That knowledge will unfold through sensation, through instinct, through thought.
“From that first moment of our solar genesis — the primordial condensation, the formation of the Earth — through the whole succession of evolutions and phenomena, everything is nothing but Matter’s progressive self-manifestation towards its goal: amative self-knowledge. The first cause, which all previous philosophy enshrined as dogma, proves to be not at the origin but at the Goal — not religion, but absolute Science.
“It will be observed that this evolutionary Philosophy quietly closes and dissolves the ancient, prolix and thoroughly puerile quarrel between Materialism and Idealism: for it unites them, the latter issuing eternally from the former. This philosophy is, at last, a rational idealism — an idealism immanent in Matter from all eternity, unconsciously; one which, through evolution, disengages itself from Matter ever more consciously, pressing always towards the Better.”
What M. Ghil’s verses will unfold, then, is the legend of Matter — whose eternal becoming is figured by a self-transforming ellipse, driven by an infinite fatality that can know no end, condemned to the ceaseless effort towards the Better as the only means of knowing itself whole. And through these verses there drifts, in their singing periods, something like a troubling reflection of nebulae in torment across the ouranos — a palpitation of the mysterious Infinite in whose depths, beneath the dream of the Mothers, worlds are being elaborated. The thread of unity is found at last: the thread that will bind together the various books of the Work, this history of things and beings ascending towards ever-greater complexity. Yet the cosmogony alone does not suffice; a new vision of the universe demands a new ethics. That ethics is altruism — which will come into its own when the past of the individual and of human collectivities must be gathered into synthesis; and it will be the endlessly receding goal of the Better, of Love arriving finally at self-knowledge.
Theoretical implacability, the ferocity of despair, the logic of negation, a pessimism enamoured of darkness — this strain in the modern poets and novelists who were the first in this century to revive the ancient atomist theories and adopt the conclusions of transformism has never been sufficiently remarked upon. From the nihilist Flaubert there emanates a bitter impiety, a painful sense of futility, a weary shrug before useless revolt against the atrocities and hideousness of life. Only from the pure legend of Saint Julien l’Hospitalier does one feel, faintly, a sob of tenderness and consolation rising. Leconte de Lisle is no less bitter. The inanity of human effort, the sterile and Penelopean evolution of this infinitesimal corner of the nebula — these are haughtily mocked across many passages of the Poèmes Barbares et Tragiques; and the relativist of Sacra Fames, the determinist of Qaïn, makes plain the puerility of all our conventions. M. Richepin’s Marches Touraniennes, with an impetuosity, harshness and virtuosity without equal, defy every notion of the absolute, treating good and evil, truth and beauty alike as scientifically indifferent phenomena, beyond qualification.
In sum, modern materialism has proved above all a demolisher, pressing the logic of its inductions to the limit — and this is comprehensible enough, even excusable, in the heat of the first battles waged against hollow entities and pure verbalist abstractions. Let us note, however, in the interest of precision: in Leconte de Lisle, a proud confidence in the Science of the future, in the belated discovery of nature’s laws, in a Fatality known at last and gentle to man — ferocious only “to the tamed God”; in M. Jean Richepin, a virile and profound tenderness for the wretched and the outcast, a noble instinct for revolt, a dogged and courageous pursuit of earthly Happiness.
But where others demolished, M. René Ghil has striven to reconstruct. He has repudiated above all the crude “Struggle for life” — invoked at every turn in this age to excuse every atrocity — and it is here that he parts ways decisively with Darwin and Spencer, whose harsh condemnation of the poor and the weak is well enough known. Wishing to see in human selection nothing but a peaceful contest from which all may profit, the poet has aligned himself with the altruistic thought of Auguste Comte and his cult of Humanity.
It is in these terms that he lays the foundations of his sociological poetry:
“What principle of sociocracy, then, follows from this evolutionary philosophy? Not Right, but Duty — the positive sanction of the coming into life and continuance of beings, of which Right is merely the negative expression. Duty: for no one, as a product of the Past to which he owes gratitude, possesses rights. Before the engendering, provident Past, one has duties only — and all beings, as sons of the same evolutions and generations, are mutually indebted to one another.
“Yet Equality is a snare.
“If Matter, eternally and infinitely, drives male and female to effort in order to produce the fruit through which she will know herself more fully — then this rational Principle, extending over All, implies the perpetual inequality of beings; and it is precisely through that Inequality that the perpetuity of the Better is secured.
“Throughout the evolutions, natural Inequality thus reasserts itself — natural, because the Better issues perpetually from the Less Good. Yet collective life moves, ever more surely, towards a harmonic Equality, achieved through moral and intelligent work.
“Inequality, therefore, that is forever becoming Equality — from eternity, for eternity, across the unlimited.
“And no one is left broken by the way: for the universal idea of mutual Duty stands over all, rendering every being truly equal in Work — that work which is the common treasure wrought by all and for all, in altruistic and rational emulation towards the general moral and intelligent Better.”
M. René Ghil does not stop there. Like Plato and Aristotle before him, he has his Politics — nobly chimerical for the present, and as yet barely sketched in the June number of Les Écrits pour l’Art:
“… The State must not be confined to a governing head set over the nation. The State must be the nation entire. This will be achieved by abolishing the vain and exploitative machinery of Parliamentarism and replacing it, on rational foundations of scientific experimentation, with a system of progressive autonomies ascending from the hamlet to a supreme Department: a Court of Accounts and a legislative Court of philosophers, economists and jurists, open in succession to every capable intelligence. These Courts would stand not apart from the Nation, not enthroned in capitals, but in living communion with all the autonomous bodies beneath them, through a continuous and mutual referendum — by means of which the Nation as a whole will institute and correct its Laws. All Laws flowing logically from the one evolutionary Law rationally established, that Law alone sovereign over all.
“As for universal suffrage — so basely prostituted in our time — it must rationally belong to Capital and Labour alone, both directed towards the general Better.”
These principles, then, form the skeleton — the framework by which the poet orients himself in his synthesis of knowledge and his vision of the future. Even so, one will have grasped as yet only the barest outline of this still-unfolding Work, which, in the austere and hopeful bareness of its titles alone — generic, sectional, voluminal — stands summarily thus:
I. DIRE DU MIEUX — Utterance of the Better
1. LE MEILLEUR DEVENIR — The Better Becoming 2. LE GESTE INGÉNU — The Ingenuous Gesture 3. LA PREUVE — The Proof 4. LE VŒU DE VIVRE — The Wish to Live 5. LE VOULOIR ALTRUISTE — The Altruistic Will
II. DIRE DU DEVOIR — Utterance of Duty
1. LE MILLIER — The Thousand 2. LES GÉNITURES — The Begettings 3. LA NEUVE ÉVOLUTION — The New Evolution 4. LE MONDE MORTEL — The Mortal World 5. LE DEVENIR — The Becoming
III. DIRE DE LA LOI — Utterance of the Law
1. LA LOI — The Law
Once the theories have been set out, the final section of this study will show — through analysis of the first three published volumes — what charm and beauty this conception of a new poetry is capable of yielding. But certain aesthetic considerations must first be addressed.
In the ages of our versifying history — ages of sensation and sentiment alone — Poetry has been, after the manner of the other arts, nothing but metaphorical notation at the omnipotent whim of the moment, whether of voluptuousness or pain: the intuitive, egoistic expression of nakedly gifted personalities. So says En méthode à l’œuvre.
And it is true that poetic works have been rather sensational and emotive than idea-driven, drawing from the living springs of naturist invention, reflecting delicate or haughty states of soul, registering the shivers and disturbances of the heart. Rational poetry — that which would clothe thoughts and facts in sentiment and beauty — strikes most readers as repulsive by definition: barbaric in conception, anti-aesthetic, all dryness and severe verist demonstration. Happily, there is nothing to fear on that score. M. René Ghil, as we have seen, is an exquisite and wide-ranging speculative intelligence — a positivist Plato of sorts, a reasoning poet; and where others dream of powerful scenic backdrops, suggestive landscapes, extreme impressions, humanity perceived at the pitch of magnification, he dreams the large ideas, the concepts of ethics and causality. Who shall say that his dreams are any less splendid or stirring than an ideal journey through vanished theogonies and threadbare, antiquated legends?
For between M. René Ghil and the merely didactic poets there is a capital distinction: the latter confine themselves to rigorous exactitude of description, cleaving with technical dryness to the plain exposition of facts; the former takes it upon himself to poeticise and vivify truth itself — to evoke rather than to demonstrate. It is here, above all, that he innovates.
In his Problèmes de l’Esthétique contemporaine, M. Guyau claimed for things good, useful and agreeable the power to arouse genuine artistic emotion. M. Emile Hennequin endeavoured to refute this by demonstrating that useful and good things arouse aesthetic emotion only when they happen to be beautiful into the bargain — and that such aesthetic emotion is quite distinct from the satisfaction the good thing yields simply as good. So be it. And yet: has not the true — philosophical truth above all — its own poetry and beauty? Did not ancient and especially modern aesthetics turn away, quite deliberately, from all scientific demonstration, from all elevated utilitarianism, from all socialist moralising? That every useful fact is beautiful — certainly not. But it is equally far from the truth that art cannot disengage from the true and the good their latent element of sentiment and dream. Hennequin himself acknowledges as much when he turns to the aesthetic analysis of didactic works:
“For such works, the emotion produced derives from the ideas they express only in the case of books of metaphysics, whether in prose or verse; for here the author elects, according to his own temperament, the postulate from which he proceeds — by deduction, by intuition, by enthusiasm, by reasoning, with transport, with bitterness, or impassively — employing a dialectic and principles which may, in certain specially gifted souls, arouse profound aesthetic emotions… One would do well to attend most closely to those passages where the author, abandoning the plain observation of facts, gives himself over to speculation, to hypothesis, to metaphysics — that is to say, to passionate reasoning.”
And if every landscape is a state of soul, if things have value only through the eyes that contemplate them, then to posit that everything has — or may have — its elements of beauty is hardly absurd. For modern experimental positivism, which concerns itself not at all with the absolute, the relativity of the Beautiful is beyond dispute. Did not Hennequin himself observe that Man took six thousand years to discover nature, and that it was poets and artists — those trouveurs — who taught the multitudes that there are ineffable splendours in the undulation of great wheat fields under the sun, in the murmur of winds, and in the broad melancholy of evenings?
The unsuspected aspect, the hidden soul, of cities, places and monuments daily inhabited, haunted or merely passed — it was above all the signal merit of the naturalist novelists to reveal these to contemporaries who cannot or will not see through the film clouding their feeble eyes; the artist being, before all others, he who “has eyes to see and for whom the external world exists.” This granted, would it be illogical to suggest that the poetry of the true remains as yet undiscovered, and that the present or the future may yet reveal it?
As it stands, M. René Ghil’s aesthetic is assuredly an enlarged one — reaching out to assimilate elements hitherto ignored or disdained, refusing to confine itself to the pure humanity of the passions, raising itself instead to an integral Humanity that satisfies its passion for beauty in the pursuit of knowledge, in the construction of ideal systems, in dreams of justice and happiness, in the supreme pride of bringing all its knowledge into unity.
Why should the poetic evocation of the hypotheses of Laplace and Lamarck be inferior in splendour, in the shiver it communicates, in the joy it imparts to the soul, to the antique idyll of Adam and Eve — or to its modern renewal in Serge and Albine, amid the trembling of foliage and the floral luxuriance of the Paradou? For it bears repeating: the essential and governing quality of M. Ghil’s rational poetry is its vivifying power — the gift of emotional evocation that sets him decisively apart from his objective and didactic predecessors.
Having spoken of the content, we must now address the form; after the idea, the prosody. Who at this late hour still disputes the importance of form? To endow the pure concept of the True — whose splendour is now manifest — with that delicious trembling of the heart, that mystery of words laden to the utmost with meaning, of which M. Taine spoke, towards this end the poet has advanced theories no less remarkable, and Instrumentation is not the least inspired of his inventions.
III
To give to the idea, the vision, the fact set forth and described the utmost intensity — this has always been the sole object of modern metrics; and poetic form, pictorial, plastic and rhythmic at once, whose superiority over the other arts is no longer seriously contested, achieves in its highest moments a synthesis of them all.
The massing of images, the illumination, the qualities of relief and contrast, the great accumulations of vocables in Victor Hugo; the statuary solidity, the polish, the slow unrolling of Gautier’s measured periods — this powerful and delicate mastery of form will in all probability never be surpassed. And yet: can one deny that until now the musical element of French verse has been persistently neglected? The Hugolian alexandrine, for all its massive solidity and its darkly prolonged resonances, presents itself above all as a convenient mould — a simplistic mnemonic device. The Parnassians, it is true, hammered it into new shape, quickened it with a reverberant sonority, broke its cadence with enjambements and rejets1; but here again the observance of rules too restrictive, the unvarying practice of the orthodox caesura, gave to its high and grave harmony the monotony of a cantilena — the fatigue of the too familiar. It is the laudable preoccupation with rhythmic surprise and the fitting of form to feeling that has provoked the current boldness and the innovations of which the most exquisitely subtle is unquestionably Instrumentation.
It may be defined as follows: a language-music; a verbal music at once ideal and real; an intimate concordance between the phonetic properties of our speech — with all its dry written notations — and the troubling voices of the orchestra, voices whose sonorities the verse will multiply or set in opposition, so that the mind lingers upon them and comes to associate each class of sounds with a corresponding order of sentiments and ideas.
The theory of Instrumentation, which rests on the scientific findings of Helmholtz, M. René Ghil has welded directly to his evolutionary theory:
“Matter does not simply exist: in the perpetual diversity of its manifestations, which is movement — from eternity, for eternity, across the unlimited — it becomes.
“Diverse and perpetual: these are the essential qualities of Matter in movement. The art form demanded by such a vision must itself be movement. Of all the arts, instrumental music alone has fully attested this quality of perpetual, diversified movement — through the splendour of its instruments, whose waves possess height, length and mode, follow their own proper measure, and pass through phases of intensity that vary even a single sustained note. Instrumental music has been, for this reason, the supreme art.
“And yet it is not truly supreme. For it interprets only the inert, the sensitive, the sentimental — it imitates and suggests, but it does not signify. This limitation went unrecognised for so long only because the true nature of the spoken word had been forgotten: that the word is the most multiple of all instruments — one that, as the ideal manifestation of Matter, at once imitates, suggests, and signifies in its plurality.”
Is the idea not inspired? To take our spoken language — our words, those phantoms and signs standing for groups of observed and accumulated facts — and clothe them in that charm of intense mystery, that delicious disturbance, that withdrawal into a realm of infinite emotion which is the most poetic of all arts: Music. To create, in this way, a verbal Instrumentation that stands above instrumental music itself — for it suggests and imitates, vibrating infinitely and speaking directly to the heart, and yet adds to those tremulations of vague and powerful feeling the precision of the Idea. It signifies. The poet’s insight here is genuinely astonishing, and the chain of his inductions holds the mind. Every musical instrument possesses its own harmonics, whose particular grouping distinguishes it from every other. But the human voice — what is it if not the most essential and most perfect of instruments, and at the same time the most multiple, by virtue of the diverse vowels it produces? Each vowel may be regarded as an instrument in its own right, with its own characteristic grouping of harmonics.
And why should speech, in its sonorities, not be essentially bound to the idea?
Was it not precisely at the moment when thought arose that language was born? Just as between the gesture and the sentiment, between the outward bearing of a being and the phases of its inner life — overwhelmed or joyful — an undeniable analogy declares itself, so the sensation of pleasure or pain, of stupor or quietude, will inevitably correspond with that wholly particular kind of gesture: the uttered cry, which is speech.
An unmistakable bond linked, in the terrible nights of prehistory — those nights crawling with terrors — the deep gutturals of an anthropoid’s howl to the bristling of its hair, the shuddering of its skin, the tragic dread of its primitive soul at the moment of some mortal danger. When it became necessary to find the word — the phonetic sign to designate a felt experience such as horror or anguish — there can be no doubt that the harshness and hardness of the sound, the more or less adequate onomatopoeia, was stamped directly upon the anguish of the memory. And the greater the part one assigns to instinct in this slow and adventitious formation of words, the more fully the theory of Instrumentation will find itself vindicated by the unconscious artistry of determinism.
Hence:
“There can be no doubt that speech, essentially and in its sonorities, is bound to the idea — and through the idea to sensation and sentiment. Logical, nothing left to chance: the only words to be chosen are those in which the common meaning and the sonority carry the same ideal value.
“So much truth has resided in hope — and issues now from a supreme meditation.”
Having established the bond between polyphony and emotion, it remained to demonstrate the manifest similarity between the various instruments of music and those of the human voice — so that the poet, freed from the arbitrary chances of conventional poetic vocabulary, might elect those words in which the desired instrumental vowel multiplies itself most richly.
Every rustling, stridency, murmur and sound heard in nature may be uttered and imitated by man through six vocal “voices,” supported and modified by consonants that register in turn the qualities of murmur — spirant, susurrant, explosive, hammering, strident. It is through systematic analysis, then, that the concordances between vowels and instruments are to be discovered. The order of essential vowels, ascending from the rarest and most muffled to the multiple and high harmonics, stands as follows:
oû ou|ô o|â a|eû eu û u|e è é|î i
and with the essential diphthongs, graduating the shades between:
oû, ou, iou, oui|ô, o, io, oi|â, a, ai|eû, eu, ieu, eui, û, u, iu, ui|e, è, é, ei|ie, iè, ié, î, i
“To this integral order the semi-vowels stand evidently as an open question — isolated by their very nature:
m, n, gn,
though a doubt arising from their slowness and massiveness, which renders them in effect natural mutes.” But how are these to be grouped “in such a manner that the groupings of instruments and of vowels be most equivalent?”
No one who listens, without preconception and with scrupulous attention, to musical instruments playing in alternation will be able to deny that the most general and most apt onomatopoeia of the long flutes yields ou; that of the bright-calling, thin and shrill voices — in some measure feminine, corresponding to sopranos and counter-altos — yields a; that of the powerful tumult of the brass, the harsh rumours, the long vibrant cries of low male voices and baritones, ô; that of the brilliant vibration prolonged as if in echoes by the horns, eu, eur; that of the thin ululations of the small flutes, û; while the abrupt clashes and bow-leaps on the stringed instruments modulate é, è — the crying, tormented song of the violins — and the precipitate high vibrations of i, ié, iè; and the long slow plucking of a guitar, its resonance fading gradually into silence, imitates the mute e, slightly muffled.
If, moreover, one notes of these essential musical instruments the qualities of murmur that singularise the sound — spirant, susurrant, explosive, hammering, strident — then, “in its evident truth, the following synthesis will henceforth hold good:
oû, ou, iou, oui, f, l, s: the long primitive flutes.
ô, o, io, oi, p, r, s: the grave series of the Sax.
â, a, ai, r, s: the high series of the Sax.
eû, eu, ieu, eui, l, r, s, z: the horns, bassoons and oboes
û, u, iu, ui, f, l, r, s, z: the trumpets, clarinets, fifes and small flutes.
e, è, é, ei, d, g, h, l, p, q, r, t, x: the violins by pizzicati, guitars and harps.
ie, iè, ié, î, i, ll, r, s, v, z: the double-bass, bass, viola and violin.
To mark in his verse the bond between instruments and vowels with full force, the poet must no longer confine himself to the search for the brilliant and beautiful word alone; he must choose, pair, and where necessary create words in which the desired vocal quality multiplies itself.
It remains to attach to each group of sounds its corresponding order of sentiments and ideas.
Just as the musician, to render the glorious brutalities of triumph and the exasperated explosions of anger, will reach for the harshness and hard sumptuousness of the brass rather than the warblings of flutes and fifes — or, for an amorous solo, will deploy the thin voice of a coryphée leading the dance and returning the leitmotiv to the bright calls and highest registers of the saxes — so the poet, in the first case, will employ the hard, high vowels sustained by deep gutturals: the o, au, oi, driven home by the roughness of r, p, s; and in the second, the soft fluidities of a, ou, or the melancholy simplicity of u:
FIRST EXAMPLE
The heavy dread of nights opens to drifting flights:
an immense weeping rattles: and — death-knell of wings,
while far along the horizon persists a black flight of rooks,
clanging hoarseness to the dread of words
when to the half-dead goes the mournful call,
beyond the long evenings, through the meadows
and the malevolent meadows —
the heavy dread of nights opens to drifting flights,
a belated knell beyond the fortunate years,
a knell of weary hammers falling
from the height of their tumult...
(La Preuve égoïste)
SECOND EXAMPLE
...But (at slow going pace go the newlyweds)
we shall long dedicate our gestures to the moon
So long (at slow going pace go the newlyweds)
as one same venture moves in offering, through gentle Stars...
...Who will tell me when he shall see her, ah! shall see her,
my laughing happiness free of winter and of widowings,
the dawn of the dawn where my sorrow will die.
(Le Geste ingénu)
Each artist will doubtless show some individual divergence in his perceptions and choices of sonority — in the voices he finds most adequate to his own sensibility; but these divergences will never be so great as to prevent one from formulating, in broad terms, the law governing these general correspondences, as it asserts itself in the final synthesis of Instrumentation:
the various instruments muffled by
m, n, gn
the Organ
moving nights of
sensations, sentiments and ideas —
oû, ou, iou, oui, f, l, s: the long primitive flutes.
monotony, doubt, simplicity — Instinct of being, of living. Contemplation.
ô, o, io, oi, p, r, s: the grave series of the Sax.
domination, glory, certainty — Instinct to prevail, to establish. Meditation, Will, Firmness.
â, a, ai, r, s: the high series of the Sax.
tumults, glories, ovation — Instinct to destroy, to triumph. Meditation, Will.
eû, eu, ieu, eui, l, r, s, z: the horns, bassoons and oboes
tenderness, love and their uncertainties — Instinct to love altruistically, to multiply. Contemplation, Meditation, Will, Order.
û, u, iu, ui, f, l, r, s, z: the trumpets, clarinets, fifes and small flutes.
ingenuousness, tenderness, joy, laughter — Instinct to love egoistically. Contemplation, Will.
e, è, é, ei, d, g, h, l, p, q, r, t, x: the violins by pizzicati, guitars and harps.
serenity, renunciation, mourning — Instinct to venerate, to love humanitarianly. Meditation, Will, Order, Firmness.
ie, iè, ié, î, i, ll, r, s, v, z: the double-bass, bass, viola and violin.
Love, passion, sorrow — Instinct to devote oneself. Contemplation, Meditation, Will, Firmness.
The Corollary of Instrumentation — the theory of vowel colouration, based on pathological observations that cannot unfortunately be generalised, and developed at length in the earlier editions of the Traité du Verbe — M. Ghil appears today to have, if not abandoned, at least held in reserve. That a future refinement of human sensory capacity will one day extend to all mankind the exceptional faculty which certain acutely sensitive neuropaths already possess — the perception of coloured sounds — a parenthesis in En Méthode à l’Œuvre declares this hope.
“But before the hour of conclusion, and in the name of universality: since, yes — however slowly, however infinitely — by the law and for the law, thought grows ever more luxuriant; and the so-called pathological case multiplies itself into the normal; and hearing, in our own time, is already transmuting itself into light, and sounds are seen as singularly luminous — sounds, and through the vowels, words themselves! — before that concluding hour, and in the name of universality, over the vowels and diphthongs there will shimmer, vaguely, their own proper degrees of light drawn from the elementary prism (a vision deduced from the multitude of investigations, unrolling in an unbroken prismatic moiré — save only for e, the most nuanced of sounds, the most varied, and therefore, in its way, a summation: the hesitant light resolves into unity).”
Here follows the table of coloured vowels:
oû, ou, iou, oui: blacks to russets.
ô, o, io, oi: reds.
â, a, ai: vermilions.
eû, eu, ieu, eui: roses to pale golds.
û, u, iu, ui: golds.
e, è, é, ei: whites to azure golds.
ie, iè, ié, î, i: azures.
To conclude this account of the Instrumentist theories, it is worth noting that they were dimly anticipated — transmitted, one might say, through long ages of intuition — in formulations that possessed a genuine and unrecognised aptness:
“a and o, and m, for grandeur, for fullness and amplitude;
é and i, for the expression of the delicate, the rare, the fine, the sharp, and of grief and sorrow;
a and r, s and x, for the great passions, for roughness and impetuosity and harshness;
u and n, for the expression of the veiled and of doubt; and
e, alone uncommitted, is the most nuanced of sounds, the most varied, and thus a summation of all.”
Of all the elements of M. Ghil’s form, Instrumentation is the most emotional and the most original; but the poetisation of thought demands equal attention in another quarter: vocabulary and syntax — style itself. Of the three general modes of expression — description, suggestion and symbol — which will the poet inevitably elect? The answer is not difficult to find. To set out facts in logical order, to develop clear and dry positive notations, to accumulate detail with convincing exactitude, is above all to give the reader something to conceive — to produce a work of technique, of science, of analysis; and Spencer observes, rightly, that analysis diminishes feeling considerably. Description is the elocutive mode proper to the naturalist novelists and admirably suited to the rendering of real life. Suggestion, on the other hand — the attempt at integral evocation, the broad overall vision seen as if from a height — this is the capacity to move; it is the mode of synthesis, particular to lyric poets. When an object is shown in profile, in its aspect of mystery and indefinition, the contemplating mind associates it with its own ideality, mingles it with confused memories, and no longer perceives it solely in its familiar aspect — stripped of all possibility of discovery and surprise.
Poetism is synthesis as prosaism is analysis — the latter realist, the former idealist; and it is suggestion, consequently, that has determined M. Ghil’s choice. For this gift of suggestive power, so rare, is the most precious a poet can possess — in that it lends to the real a prodigious prolongation of dream, a charm of the unseen and the strange. “If aesthetic emotion,” says the author of the Critique scientifique, “is a general excitation; if emotion is the diffuse disturbance that accompanies the formation of an idea; if it is an inadequate idea — the vivid form of a nascent state of soul — then the considerable emotional power of suggestive means of expression will be readily intelligible. Suggestive modes — allusion, allegory, the tachist procedure of certain painters (that is, the deliberately incomplete and indefinite), Wagner’s infinite melody, the unfinished in composition, and so forth — share the essential quality of being means of expression that are minimally representative, containing the fewest possible express images. These means, quite apart from the fact that, being sketches, they may be completed according to the reader’s own fancy, provoke in the mind or senses — charged with extracting a defined image — an effort, an excitation, a pleasure of divination and composition: a diffuse disturbance which is already the beginning of emotion, all the more aesthetic for being entirely free of any coefficient of pain or pleasure. As one requires more energy,” says Dumont (Théorie scientifique de la sensibilité), “to recover an object through an indirect sign than through a direct one, one furnishes the understanding with occasion to deploy more of its available force — and consequently more pleasure.”
Every rational poet, one would think, will employ suggestion almost exclusively, if he is not to sink into mere technique and cliché. It is, we believe, precisely through an exclusive reliance on realist description that M. de Strada, in the transformist exposition of his Genèse Universelle, and M. Richepin, in many a passage of La Gloire de l’Eau, could not escape a certain dryness and emotional inertness. Where these paint full-face, in worked and detailed line, M. Ghil blurs the real as if into dream — sees it from above, and in broad strokes sketches and condenses vast landscapes, clusters of ideas and sentiments. It is thus that in the remoteness of obscure millennia — far back beyond the depths of time, amid the spattering of primordial seas and volcanic eruptions — the warm and monstrous exuberance of ancient flora rises, infinitely broad and troubling, in this brief tableau:
Torrentielles, quand en les stipes, les eaux
Terrestres multiplement des monts vont et vaguent:
Haut véhémentement vers la ventée et des
ustions d'air et des longueurs nûment perdantes,
Tressaillantes d'autres et ardents errements
la végétation monte de mouvements…
et d'agitations et grand pleuvant ruptiles
de pétales:
parmi les heurts d'éruptions
à sursauts magnétiques soustraits! et pendantes
d'instants, et droites là de sinistre mouvant —
inhument leur ondant horizon de grand vent.
Les masses végétant en orages…
[Torrential, where through the stems the waters
move and wander down from the multiplying mountains:
High and vehemently toward the windward blast, and the
scorchings of air and the distances nakedly lost,
Trembling with wanderings, other and ardent —
vegetation rises in movements…
and in agitations, and the great rupturing rain
of petals:
amid the shocks of eruptions
wrested from magnetic starts! and hanging
in instants, erect there in sinister motion —
they bury their undulating horizon in great wind.
The masses vegetating in storms...]
In the ceaselessly mounting pressure of evolution — beyond the primordial sea, through slow transformation — the first animals’ conquest of the air resounds in these lines:
Mais ouïs! ouïs haut et lors un doux et vaste
éploiement viateur ouvrant; qui vinrent là
de qui planaient (vent et vent et vent et ventées)
aléatoirement ailés de nuits doigtées
Tirent d'aile avivant diaphanéités
de nouvecaux Advenus:
et par l'instant qu'alluma
(ouïs! ouïs haut ou au loin d'eaux) le départ;
une luisante erreur et de vent et de plume
va droit! et vire issante en aventure du
gré silent d'aller droit, et vire.
Un laps palpite
et plane, qui porte le doute de limite.
[But hear! hear high and then a gentle and vast
wayfaring unfolding opening; who came there
from those who glided (wind and wind and wind and gusts)
randomly winged from fingered nights —
Drew from the wing quickening diaphanities
of new Arrivals:
and in the instant that lit
(hear! hear high or far across waters) the departure;
a shining wandering of wind and feather
goes straight! and wheels issuing into the venture of
the silent will to go straight, and wheels.
A span palpitates
and glides, bearing the doubt of limit.]
These two examples will give the measure of this suggestive art — one that allies incomparable sobriety to a grandeur of the indefinite and mysterious, while at the same time revealing a constant preoccupation with verbal music as a further mode of suggestion. This reasoned, carefully limited selection of characteristic facts — disposed so as to provoke elevated reverie — has led M. Ghil to seek what must be called not obscurity (which implies inexperience in the handling of words) but half-light: chiaroscuro, crepuscular nuance. A deliberate imprecision, certainly — yet one that flows naturally from synthesis and suggestion, and that is necessary, as an element of poetisation, whenever scientific facts are being set forth that have been elected not for their beauty but for their veracity.
Does a landscape or a face we know well speak to the soul as it did on the day we first beheld it? Night, or the veil, or the blurring of outline — these restore the original charm, the mysterious quality such things once possessed. Hence the magic of shadowed figures, divined rather than clearly seen, and of nocturnes. The Bourse, the Parisian thoroughfares, the iron workshops — these take on in M. Ghil’s work a fateful, unsettling, troubling and seductive quality of overall vision that stands in sharp contrast to the indifferent gaze of daily habit.
But this seductive power of the imprecise and the surprising M. Ghil pursues by yet another means: through the quest for the rare word — neologism or archaism — through the charming looseness and deliberate negligence of ellipsis, through the boldness of inversions, all of which drive from his language and his verse every vulgarity of necessarily prosaic elocution, as well as every scrap of rhetorical frippery, necessarily repulsive. That words — those word-images of common idiom — have become nothing more than counterfeit tokens, worn and crude medals whose effigy has been rubbed smooth by constant use, mere signs stripped of image: this is what the purists and the schoolroom pedants refuse to hear — those in whom all breadth of idea and taste has been extinguished by classical idolatry and fetishistic reverence. The artist alone understands the importance of varying one’s turns and tones, of renewing vocabulary, syntactic forms, terminologies. And indeed — between the French of common usage and the French of a Gautier, a Flaubert, a Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, is there not the same distance that separates Prakrit2 from Sanskrit?
The idiom of the lettered moves ever further from the idiom of the multitude — the one demanding nothing beyond precision and concision, the other requiring all the pictorial and musical subtleties, all the rarest exquisitenesses of perception. Why, then, restrict the freedom of the stylist? Why refuse him the right to enrich, modify, work and circumvent his language, with no concern beyond the realisation of his ideal of plastic beauty? The mandarin will understand the precious writer; and the general public — if indeed it can be brought to love art and poetry in this age of Americanism — will raise itself slowly to his level.
To the reasons that argue in M. Ghil’s favour — a poet with a pronounced appetite for complex turns of phrase and newly minted words — one further necessity may be added: his need to elect those vocables that most richly multiply and oppose the instrumentally desired vowels.
As for syntax: in hatred of monotony and in pursuit of surprise, the poet has turned the admirable suppleness of his language to full account — employing the adjective adverbially by attaching it directly to the verb, often preferring the intransitive verb to the reflexive, displacing subjects and attributes in the Latin and Germanic manner. Thus:
Tonnent levantes les ardeurs et luxurient,
Tonnent;
est dans un moins pesant apaisement.
Tiède et neuve la mer de vagues générales.
[Thunder rising the ardours and they luxuriate,
Thunder;
is in a less heavy appeasement.
Warm and new the sea of general waves.]3
Or:
..... c'est, qui palpite allante
immensément par monts et la mer hasardante
quand divergeant en diurne et long glissement
d'aridités mouvantes qui des nuits déduisent,
c'est une aurore lourde de nuits et d'eaux…
[ .....it is, which palpitates going
immensely through mountains and the adventuring sea
when diverging in diurnal and long gliding
of moving aridities that deduce from nights,
it is a dawn heavy with nights and waters…]
The richness, the variety, the unexpectedness of turn; the extraordinary abundance, the impetuosity and fury of accumulated subjects and verbs; the good humour, the playfulness, the lyricism, the cynicism and the gravity of tone — all the formal splendour of that marvellous artist Rabelais fully justifies the linguistic boldnesses of M. Ghil, who doubtless troubles himself not at all over the astonishment and protests of the pedants — those for whom the meagre, dry and uniform syntax of the eighteenth century is an object of infinite delectation.
Instrumentation, vocabulary and construction having been examined, the study of form will be completed by the technique of verse. And first: “to what measures must one subject the sounding, variegated and ideal quantity of words?”
En méthode à l’œuvre answers as follows:
“The alexandrine — that twelve-foot line — is the measure of poetic instrumentation; and not by accident. It is formed from the prime numbers two and three: those same numbers which, in the most felicitous ordering, virtually express an evolutionary mathematics declaring that being is two, and becomes three through its definition in the fruit — an elliptical mathematics made audible. For when the values two and three are multiplied, eurythmy results; when merely added, dissonance.
“The alexandrine is thus self-sufficient: like every prolongation beyond itself, it is mathematically the repetition of one or more of its own measures, and is, in this sense, manifestly a verse doubled upon itself; any diminution would be an essential privation4.
“The point of rest that arrests the alexandrine is rhyme. But two sisterly rhymes are not there for the sake of mere chance sonority: they are there so that, through the multitude of their diverse sisters dispersed across the poem, the book and the work, the general tonality and degree of light may be established — and suggestion or idea awakened through their kinship.
“The strophe dissolves, as if against its own nature: its long and unnecessary transitions live in silence within the larger or smaller spacing between lines, unspoken. Throughout the poem, the book and the work, it is thought alone that enumerates and phrases its values — moving through the order of innumerable motifs that mingle and lose themselves, pass again, dominate and escape, each orienting the verbal melody and harmony in its turn. The persistent alexandrine, within which all these diverse rhythms move, stands as rhythm itself, as synthesis. Thought alone.”5
Outside the alexandrine, M. Ghil forbids himself all the usual metres. The rhythmic practice of Messrs. Gustave Kahn and Vielé-Griffin is uncongenial to him: free verse — that old classical thing, modernised by the addition of nine, eleven and fifteen-syllable lines, and beyond. But the variety of time and cadence that this unequal metre procures — this music adequate to the gravity or the joyful, curtailed skipping of an idea — can one not find it equally well, or better, in the alexandrine with its mobile caesuras, its infinite fracturing, its repeated cuts, its multiplied enjambements? Does not the alexandrine itself have this further advantage: that bipartite and dissonant, even and odd at once, its rigorous syllabic measure provides a muffled, underlying accompaniment — preserving, despite all its complexity and variety, a unity of pace — and that the rhythmic design, the spacing and play of tonic or rapid syllables, are more readily perceptible within it?
The metrics of M. G. Kahn are well enough known: rhythm is in everything; a prosodic phrase subdivides itself into groupings of words presenting a restricted but sufficient intelligibility to allow the full sense to be suspended by a brief pause. From these verbal groups, linked by assonances, the suspended psalmody — cut by pauses — constitutes free rhythm. But to weld these cadenced fragments into a line, short or long, M. Kahn has no law beyond his own caprice: for logic demands either a new line for each verbal group, or the continuous flow of prose.
On the contrary: this alexandrine from Le Geste ingénu —
Un veuvage | de minuit | dans lui pleure — en cendre
— possesses all the variety and adequation of free verse, since it may be transposed thus:
Un veuvage
De minuit
Dans lui pleure en cendre.
And while the similarity of its framework with the neighbouring hexameters recalls the identical beat of measure, it contrasts with them through the grouping of its components — and this fixity of number marks powerfully the relationship of the parts to one another, the bond of the rhythmic factors and their interplay within the whole.
Does not all the charm of this verse reside in the clashing combination of seven and five within the governing number twelve: in the opposition of its first part of seven feet — where the penultimate tonic of veuvage places a sigh after the fourth — against the second part of five feet, so enlivening and skipping, suspended an instant on the word pleure?
Un veuvage — de minuit | dans lui pleure — en cendre
1 2 3 4 — 1 2 3 | 1 2 3 — 1 2
Is this rapport — so readily graspable within a bounded metre — equally perceptible in free verse? The reader may exercise his own sagacity on this line of M. Moréas:
Et mes litières s’effeuillent aux ornières, toutes mes litières à grands pans.
The constant and exclusive use of fixed verse has a further advantage: it preserves the riches accumulated over the course of this century in statuary and draughtsmanship. Musical research must not be allowed to damage the great sculptural folds of poems; and the free verse of Messrs. Kahn and Vielé-Griffin has indeed lost all nobility of graphic aspect. Yet the beauty and slow deployment of the line, its abrupt flights, its fine fractures, the soaring quality lent to it by bird-like rejets and enjambements — all this, as much as music and colour, is bound up with the feeling and impression of the thing expressed. To strip verse of its statuary would be to diminish the intensity of its rendering.
If M. René Ghil has suppressed the arbitrary strophe and the initial capital of Latin invention, the massiveness of his hexameter periods preserves nonetheless a sumptuous plastic bearing. Separated by frequent paragraph breaks that mark each transition of idea or sensation, they are superimposed in marmoreal blocks that seem ready to fit together and raise an alabaster, imperious wall. One stands at last not before that convenient and conventional mould — the dull, monotonous, simple classical verse — but before speech quintessentialised, superior, wrought and worked, informed by a music infinite, renewed and complex: rhythmed, rhymed, cut, sculpted, painted, architectural.
To make this speech truly living — to rid it of the aspect of dry graphic notation, of mere transposition into mute signs — the poet suppresses the comma wherever possible, retaining it only when strictly necessary or when the design of the verse demands it. Moreover, certain initial consonants of words not placed at the beginning of a sentence are capitalised: this always amounts to a kind of musical forte, a highlighting that reinforces the strident, susurrant or explosive quality of the sound.
As for the caesura — the sudden jolt of cadence, the measured liaison of vocables moving within the alexandrine — M. René Ghil has followed the ultra-liberal precept of Théodore de Banville in his Petit Traité de Poésie française: the poet cuts his verse as he sees fit. No one has permitted himself more heterodox breaks, with no concern beyond the making of music and a horror of monotony. It is evident that to locate instantaneously, in reading, the mobile caesuras of these hexameters, a high prosodic education is required; but M. Ghil’s poems are intelligible to poets and men of letters alone. Such as they are — and with that grandiose unity that chains book to book — they unroll from their verses the broad, folded pleating of rhythmic waves, in which palpitate the phantom of the too-distant nebulae overhead, the obscure memory of the legend of Gaia, the mysterious adventure of Man: his beginning, his past, his present, his ideals and his dreams. And other waves, beyond, move past the horizon towards the future.
In this broad rustling of musical tides, insidious recurrences suddenly break forth at the close of a new melody; verses glimpsed before at the shore reappear on the crest of the waves, then sink and fade — only to sing again presently, in a grave and distant andante, in a magnificent verbal orchestration.
IV
The philosophical and ethical theories, the broad outlines of the plan and the method of art having been set out with as much lucidity as possible of this original and powerful Work, it remains to offer a paraphrase of the published books: the first three of the first part, DIRE DU MIEUX — Le Meilleur Devenir, Le Geste Ingénu and La Preuve Égoïste.
Each of M. Ghil’s poems opens with a broad “Ouverture” that develops the motif, the plan or the synthesis of the work, and closes with a “finale” that concludes, summarises and prepares the advent of the book to follow.
Le Meilleur Devenir — its title is sufficiently indicative — is the transformist evocation, the lyrical interpretation of the “solar legend”: the evolution of “matter from the magnetic Ether to Instinct and Intelligence in the first human families”.
This scientific dream of Lamarck and Darwin — glimpsed by Diderot in an hour of superhuman prescience — who could deny its terrible strangeness, its marvellous realism, its high beauty? Who would not prefer it to the crude and vain anthropomorphism of the theogonies? No Hindu or Greek genesis surpasses in sombre religious splendour the harsh ascent of the fierce and sorrowful ancestors towards the luminous altitudes of life; and this seems in truth a fantasy of the real.
Ex abrupto the epic begins — with the blazing of whirlwinds and the vertiginous gyration of the solar nebula filling the space where the miserable flock of planets now turns on its leash. The vision of Laplace rises, confusedly splendid:
Lent issante en lueurs et lueurs aux tourmentes
en Torrents de lueurs d'aigus heurts et Torrents,
appertement devient l'unité d'une Loi.
[Slowly issuing in glimmers amid the storms, in torrents of light and sharp collision, the unity of a Law becomes manifest.]
and this Law is that of
Amour — germe dans lui de lui germant. — Amour,
De lui:
ô d'autres stellements ordre qui lent allume!
continue et devant adhésion
qui n'a point, et l'Avent et le Terme, et n'est lentes
qu'œuvres d'événements en l'immense et l'augment;
vœu de Transport lent immanent à un volume:
Amour-germe dans lui de lui germant — Amour…
[Love — germ within itself, germinating from itself. From itself: the ordering of other stellar formations slowly kindled! A continuous, forward adhesion that knows neither Advent nor Term, whose only works are events unfolding in the immense and the ever-augmenting; a wish for slow Transport immanent in a single volume: Love-germ within itself, germinating from itself — Love…]
Then, in fourteen rapid tableaux — half-veiled in nightmarish stupor — the obscure and forgotten ages pass, roughly sketched. Through energetic and suggestive foreshortening, in broad strokes of outline, in verses of hard sonority and learned severity, the poet vivifies and animates the frightful forms and half-glimpsed landscapes that move and lengthen enigmatically in an infinite prolongation of dream. The enormous, molten globe, wheeling its monstrous mass of igneous agglomerates, surges thus:
Depuis l'œuvre d'agrégats:
En des monts et vallons aux lueurs minérals
en vain d'ignition plus ouvrante d'ardeurs
dévastés de heurts grands de sinistres splendeurs
intérieures —
En des monts et vallons aux lueurs minérales
griève d'apports, qui dans heurts illimités
Terraqués! mêlent muantes des âpretés:
qui du Temps est exempte et durant des nuits noie
et qui n'éteigne la lueur en les méats
La pluie illuminante et lourde dégénère.
[Since the first work of aggregation: mountains and valleys lit by mineral glimmers, scorched by ever-intensifying ardours, devastated by vast collisions of sinister interior splendour — mountains and valleys in mineral light, burdened by accretions that in their unlimited clashing, terraqueous, mingle their shifting harshnesses; exempt from Time, drowning through the nights, never extinguishing the glimmer in the interstices — the illuminating, heavy rain degenerates.]
The profound strangeness of the first and last lines is beyond paraphrase; and does it not seem that the entangling of propositions, the raucous clashes of syllables and the abrupt starts of rhythm correspond to the confused struggles of the microcosm in labour?
The fulguration of black clouds, the magnetic cracklings, the thick sea — under the abstruse form and the generality of the images — show their sinister silhouette. But nothing yet but “heavy dawns of nights and waters”:
Tonnent, dirompant la stagnation, ouvrantes
en vain d'ignition plus ouvrantes d'ardeurs.
Tonnent levantes les ardeurs, et luxurient.
[Thunder, breaking apart the stagnation, opening vainly of ignition more opening of ardours. Thunder rising the ardours, and they luxuriate.]
Heavy, the air and the sea move their ponderous masses; but now the stony deposits of the first strata are forming; less heavy moves the air, less heavy the sea:
des terrains vont longs et nus au loins luisants et,
vaste
nuée humidement et que le vent dévaste
haut, une lueur d'instants adustes
est là.
[Long bare terrains stretch towards a shining distance; vast cloud hangs moistly, laid waste by the wind above; high up, a glimmer of scorched instants — it is there.]
Now living moisture, in its questing, multiplies; and in the long verdure rising from the wave, behold — O continuation of the living trembling — behold the primitive formless beast appear: plant and animal at once, the bathybius, “the Animated which is none other.” And:
il appert qu'un monde palpité d'être augmente
Qu'anima l'Animé — qui n'est autre girant.
[A world palpitating with being grows and augments — animated by the Animated, which is none other, gyrating.]
Under the influence of environment and the struggle for existence, harsh selection accomplishes itself; and amid the heavy sea, the scattering skies, the slow trailing rain, the terrifying vegetations from which petals rain down, in the storm and the gusts — in its general and chosen elements — the history of animality unfolds, “straining slowly towards the light”, and the terrible sketch of the living form takes shape.
In spite of defeats, gropings and chances, sea, air and earth are invaded and conquered:
Tout le Moment est un sanglot d'épais pétales
couvrant d'aromes houleux et de ventements
la population en des sourdonnements
d'Antérieur, quadrupédante.
[The whole Moment is a sob of thick petals, covering with heaving aromas and gusts of wind the four-footed population, rumbling with the deep murmur of the Anterior.]
At last — the last effort of the bloody and tumultuous mêlée — the rudimentary and brutal ancestors, the mysterious anthropoids, surge forth:
..... d'autres vont ordinaires et droits
et nouveaux quant aux pieds dont non prenants leurs doigts.
[Others move upright and unremarkable, new in their feet whose toes no longer grasp.]
They raise high their heads, their eyes alive with intelligent anguish; and in the rattling depths of the tragic forests, these are their brutal and touching loves:
et puissantes et voulantes parmi l'altesse
des grands stipes, apertement érigent et
ouvrent une rupture ensanglantée en l'âpre
et garant poil que le diurne vent diapre
les volontés de génitoires et vulve!
et
(en suite du vivant Tressaillement, en suite)
apertement devient l'unité d'une Loi.
[Powerful and willing amid the towering height of the great stems, they openly erect and open a blood-red rupture in the rough protecting fur that the daylight wind dapples — the will of genitals and vulva! And (in continuation of the living Trembling, in continuation) the unity of a Law becomes manifest.]
In the broad, imperious song of the finale, triumph already asserts itself in the first human families — the pride of having conquered the world:
Au vallon de la Vie où le millier agite:
Dans l'âge des natures longues! cet Astre et
les Astres illimités de nuit, et de nues
nuaient les Yeux: et dénoués ont amples et
environnants erré les gestes d'immortelle
hauteur, longtemps averant l'Homme!
[In the valley of Life where the thousand stirs: in the age of long natures, this Star and the unlimited Stars of night, and clouds shaded the Eyes; and unbound, the gestures of immortal height wandered wide and encompassing — long attesting Man!]
But what a strange faculty of evocation and life! How the virile breadth of the image — so sober — and the surprise of form give an impression of the genuinely “new”; and how little this resembles the familiar epic! No poet in our literature possesses this quality of apartness, unless it be the singular and extreme Victor Hugo of the grandiosely dark nightmares and the sibylline word. One should note further, in M. René Ghil, the preoccupation with restoring to verse the romantic movement and warmth that have been lost in the Parnassian hexameters —”di sasso”, of stone.
The tragic terror of the primitives at the death of the sun is rendered with equal force:
Ils adorent la sûreté de l'Astre grand:
Hésitants,
(car la mort, quand meurt d'être ardent l'astre
à leurs yeux, et qu'en mouvement naissant mourant
luit la nuit de lueurs, ah! qui met en mémoire
d'autres morts d'où naissaient de reptants végétaux),
Hésitants sous le doute horizontal, cri d'être
et d'ire!
et pleins de plainte et sursautant en peurs
(et la mort et la mort et la mort et la mort)
de ne plus voir de leurs Têtes élévatoire
ardre et monter le générateur:
longtemps des mêmes Yeux muets qu'aux animaux
inquiets, ils avaient loin douté.
Mais qui de haut survivait au mâle désastre:
l'Astre! l'Astre!
ils adorent la sûreté de l'Astre grand.
[They worship the sureness of the great Star — hesitant, for when the ardent star dies to their eyes, and in its nascent dying movement the night glimmers, ah, it calls to memory other deaths from which creeping plants were born — hesitant beneath the horizontal doubt, a cry of being and of rage! Full of lament and starting up in fear — and the death and the death and the death and the death — of no longer seeing from their upraised Heads the life-giver blaze and rise: long with the same mute Eyes as troubled animals, they had doubted from afar. But who from on high survived the virile disaster: the Star! the Star! — they worship the sureness of the great Star.]
And there appear the first vestiges of art: roughly sculpted bones in which the generating star symbolises the sexual act. The festival of the sun and of life, the fetishistic enthusiasm for this first God — “old friend of the ancient singers,” as Leconte de Lisle has said — all this vibrates through a brief hymn of adoration. And the poem closes on these lines that prepare the book to follow:
Un vent lent et vagueur et qui n'est et ne ride
loin émet la nouvelle évidente qui stride
que le Mieux monte et interroge...
Déhérents!
ils montent déhérents de la nuit qui perpètre
la masse des appétits lourde d'ire et d'être.
[A slow and wandering wind that barely stirs, that barely ripples, sends far off the strident, evident news that the Better rises and questions... Disengaged — they rise, disengaged from the night that perpetrates the mass of appetites, heavy with rage and with being.]
Such, in its entirety, is this vigorous and beautiful composition — a broad and sober fresco in which the poet has subjected himself rigorously to a succinct generalisation of Lamarckist theory, confining himself to the demonstration of a marvellous power of creation and troubling vision. In the second book, freed from so tight a constraint, he will abandon himself in full liberty to his charming talent as a speculative thinker, displaying qualities of lyricism, reverie and art of the rarest kind.
With Le Geste Ingénu, the evolution of the human Collectivity is suspended — to be resumed in the second part of the work — the first part, having exposed the solar and animal genesis, now turning exclusively to the individual. The poem is, in a landscape of dream, the evocation of modern Adolescence: the imminent triumph of altruism over egoism, the pure ideality of the Man and Woman of duty whose active role on the one hand, and contemplative and helpful role on the other, will harmonise for the moral order of the future.
The “Ouverture” gently recalls the closing lines of the preceding book:
En vent lent et vagueur et qui n'est et ne ride
loin émet la nouvelle évidente qui stride
Que le Mieux monte et interroge...
... Spontanée une vie en hasards vient à Mieux.
[A slow and wandering wind, that barely stirs, that barely ripples, sends far off the strident, evident news that the Better rises and questions... Spontaneously, a life moving through the hazards of chance comes to the Better.]
And there, in a chimerical nature — more suggested than described, yet sensed as humming with ecstasy — in some ineffable place of dream, a young couple takes shape, placed there by the poet to embody his altruistic and ethical thesis:
et là légendaires par grand Astre et par lune
du maternel giron d'où vaguaient leurs regards
aux lumières d'étangs éventés de hasards
vont gemmés d'or ventral: deux qui soient l'UN et l'UNE.
[And there, legendary beneath the great Star and the moon, from the maternal lap from which their gazes wandered out across the light of ponds fanned by chance, they move, gemmed with the gold of the belly — two who are the ONE and the OTHER.]
They will pass and fade through the work, voicing its hopes, its struggles and its wrongs, pointing towards and finally attaining the ideal goal:
Heureux multiplieront les appels dont l'âme erre
claire et d'or pur par les Terres, en vœux ailés;
car, d'un agitement doux vers une même ère,
il est vrai que des deux le geste aux doigts mêlés
avère l'avenir des Triomphes zélés.
[Joyfully the calls multiply, the soul wandering clear and of pure gold across the Lands in winged wishes; for, in a gentle stirring towards a shared era, it is true that the gesture of the two with intertwined fingers attests the future of zealous Triumphs.]
And the poem deploys its clashing images, its visions, its landscapes and the chimeras of ideal beings who lose themselves and reappear without transition — for they are only subsidiary, lending the fleeting charm of their form to the governing idea, which is the only true character, always on stage.
In the imprecise nature where “wanderings of a vast and great order ordain the adventure of life and wind”:
C'est adelphiques et parents, éveils d'aurore
Familiale qui naïvement adore.
[It is brotherly and kindred — the dawning awakenings of a Family that worships in all innocence.]
That it may also be the slow soaring of the human spirit before the Law:
or — du repos longtemps utile qu'on émeuve
(yeux revenus et doigts aggripant le réel,)
la mémoire dormante en l'immémoire veuve;
[Now — from the long and useful rest, let one be moved — eyes returned, fingers gripping the real — the sleeping memory stirring in the widowed depths of immemory.]
and in the strangeness of this conceptual world:
Maintes naïves mains d'amour et de splendeur
lèvent parmi l'Astre le geste qui vénère:
culte, par naïves mains heureuses rendu
Triplement et nûment: en amour et peur du
Dieu haut! et à mère aux saints Yeux et, mutuelles
les mains, de l'une à l'autre en vol
comme des ailes:
[Many innocent hands of love and splendour raise amid the Star the gesture of veneration: worship rendered by innocent and joyful hands, triply and nakedly — in love and fear of God on high, and to the mother of holy Eyes, and hand to hand in flight like wings.]
Yet a dissonance in this hymn:
ouïe en travail l'œuvre en chœur perpétuel
mais que de vœux en lui hélant, qui plus ne peuvent
croire...
[Heard at work, the work in perpetual chorus — but how many wishes calling out within it, that can no longer believe...]
— for life is so often atrocious to these hopes of happiness and justice.
But the pure ideas and holy abstractions — the allegorical virgins who personify the receding days of peace and wisdom, carnal beings too, whose roles are entirely of love and consolation in the future — are enraptured beneath the waves of wind and through the song of the waters:
Filiales et nuptiales et de mère!
En rêve qui pressent un devoir agité
parmi la pleine paix de l'ingénuité —
indulgentes longtemps rêvent les vierges qu'aime
un midi de lumière et d'antiques rameaux:
et leurs doigts almes et longs et lumière même
calmeront d'air passant le mutisme des maux
qui désespèrent et pleure l'heure.
[Filial and nuptial and maternal! In a dream that senses a duty stirring amid the full peace of innocence — long indulgent, the virgins dream, beloved of a noon of light and ancient branches; and their nourishing, long fingers, themselves light, will calm with passing air the muteness of the ills that despair and weep the hour.]
Brusquely the soul of the “Mother of holy eyes” has been transfigured; a darkness has fallen upon the luminous landscape. Now the sea appears — “the sea risen in great movements of sinister light” — and “a glorious regret of star lies in the hostile cloud, heavy with storm, full of derogatory night.”
Ah — the cry of pleasure-seeking flesh, the base passions heedless of the altruistic path: the dreaming virgins are saddened by it:
et qui pensent étrangement
(cieux éparrants!)
Toutes ingénuités ont vu dans guirlande
de leurs mains désertes d'œuvre, égoïstement
là un Amant venir et venir une Amante —
chant dans les lèvres illuminatives!
C'est
vertige, quand en mal est vu par le pur rêve
ah! monter l'age égoïste...
[lost in strange thought — scattering skies! All innocences have seen, in the garland of their hands empty of work, egoistically, a Lover come and a Beloved come — song on the illuminating lips! It is vertigo, when pure dream sees it rising in all its evil — ah, the egoistic age...]
Yet no word of despair is fitting:
Virilement: exempt de pensée inquiète.
[Virile: free of anxious thought.]
What do the gropings, falls and failings of the present moment matter? Eternally Matter will seek to know itself, drawing the Better forward in its elliptical soaring:
au songe où le seul air promène un pur doigter
Très lent l'adulte ira d'un allure inquiète;
[In the dream where the air alone moves with a pure fingering, very slowly the adult will go with a restless bearing;]
and from the obscure soul of things that sense the future, a vague encouraging murmur rises:
Tant vrai que l'Allant en la détresse en arguë
c'est le rêve des eaux
ou le vol en midi d'un air long d'aile aiguë.
[So true that the Pressing-On is honed by distress — it is the dream of the waters, or the flight at noon of a long-winged air sharp as a blade.]
In contrast to this sensuality without love stands the divine dream of the ideal Eve, who senses
un devoir agité
parmi la pleine paix de l'ingénuité
de
(car il est des pleurs d'une nature amère)
calmer, qui désespère et pleure l'heure: mains
Filiales et nuptiales et de mère.
[a duty stirring amid the full peace of innocence (for there are tears of a bitter nature) of calming those who despair and weep the hour — hands filial and nuptial and maternal.]
Here it is in verses of exquisite fluidity:
C'est qu'une aurore hésite aux rameaux doux de larmes
riantes:
et luisants gestes exempts d'alarmes
plus et plus délivrant en regards
(clair et lent
couler d'eau) l'ondement d'étangs de la mémoire
c'est la vierge éveillée en ondoiement de moire
coulante d'eau dormante...
O enveloppement
multiple et radieux de ramilles nuées
aux ventements de vivre gardant de huées
ma lumière d'émoi glissante en lent moment!
Ma volonté dans vous murmure en onde nue
et primitive ma langueur lent ingénue
Très auguste irradie en l'élan de lis longs
ma louange égoïste et naïve aux vallons.
Aviendrait-il vraiment qu'au loin de plants agrestes:
Dût monter à l'égal de droits et ouverts gestes
une voix en le vent végétal m'appelant
nuptiale éveillée au Matin:
cœur! à l'heure de l'heur, éveille-Toi:
cœur!...
c'est l'aurore
de l'heur nuptial: c'est l'heure
où vient, où vient qui t'adore —
m'appelant.
[A dawn hesitates among the gentle branches of laughing tears; and shining gestures free of alarm, more and more releasing in their gaze — clear and slow, the flowing of water — the undulation of the ponds of memory: it is the virgin awakened in the shimmering of flowing moiré of sleeping water... O multiple and radiant envelopment of clouded twigs, in the winds of living keeping from clamour my light of emotion gliding in slow moment! My will murmurs within you in a naked wave; and my languor — slow, primitive, innocent — radiates with great augustness in the impulse of long lilies: my egoistic and naive praise to the valleys. Would it truly come to pass that from afar, among the rustic plants, there should rise, equal to open and upright gestures, a voice in the vegetal wind calling me — nuptial, awakened in the Morning: heart! at the hour of joy, awaken — heart!... it is the dawn of nuptial joy: it is the hour when comes, when comes the one who adores you — calling me.]
But alas! in this evil and negating vesper, treacherous of joy, in this “egoistic and null age of the demented vulva6“, the great living duty that pants will not be understood; and alone a painful adult emotion of former times groans aloud, pursuing in vain the cherished illusion:
Vient-elle! la priée en pliant le genou:
ouïe au pur désert qui palpite de lune —
(et les doigts impollus longs en ramilles, ou
un rêve de sanglots ivre des heures ou
mortellement qui plaint un doute ardent de prendre)
Haute et alme en le los: qui ne veut pas de morts
vient-elle! vers la nuit qui pleure et gémit d'une
angoisse...
et les deux ils iraient riants dehors
vers la vanité d'eaux erratiles de lune...
Mais loin avérant que le doux rêve lui ment
voilà que pleut la nuit lourde, plus largement.
[Does she come — she who is prayed to, on bended knee, heard in the pure desert palpitating with moonlight — (and the undefiled fingers long among the branches, or a dream of sobs drunk on the hours, or one who mortally laments an ardent doubt of taking) — lofty and life-giving in her praise, she who will have no deaths: does she come! towards the night that weeps and groans with anguish... and the two of them would go out laughing into the vanity of wandering, moonlit waters... But far off, attesting that the sweet dream has lied to him — now the heavy night rains down, more widely still.]
To this lofty visionary faculty — its charm hovering on the edge of the immaterial — to this gift of vivification and troubling propulsion into the beyond, M. René Ghil joins a noble and tender cult of the lowly origins of life: menstruation, coupling, birth. This reverence for physical love, through which the torch of life is passed from hand to hand —
Et quasi cursores vitaï lampada tradunt
[And like runners they pass on the torch of life —]
— this idealisation of the carnal act, stupidly debased by Christianity and associated by the foolish prudishness of the moderns with nothing better than ignoble and degrading pleasure, M. René Ghil owes in no small part to M. Emile Zola, of whom he proclaimed himself, in the preface to Les Légendes d’âmes et de sang, a fervent admirer. This renaissance of paganism — magnifying nature and venerating wise voluptuousness — asserts itself with something close to religious feeling in this serene page:
Automnale
c'est l'heure des végétaux mûre.
C'est gloire dans l'air d'or limpide, et vers l'eau
(clair
couler de grandes roses) les pétales girent
et des ailes et des ailes en sang par l'air...
et germinative quand les lunes agirent
d'après l'ordre qui veut amour en meilleur sort —
la loi d'un sang qui parvenait à vertu, sort
à sanglots d'épouvante et de gloire vitale
pour loin épandre:
c'est l'heure des vertus mûre.
Dans l'heure de l'Astre auguste, les vierges à
lent aller vont en vouant leurs gestes par là…
chœur mûrement qui multiplie en le murmure:
Tout leur orgueil donnant meuvent: les vents grands
des Terres alentis en repos murmurants
de lumière, la rumeur de leur virginale
gestation:
et de peur et de vœu quand il
est vague ou droit ainsi que lourd ou vainqueur, d'elles
au devant de l'Ami qui vient doux et viril
le geste dans l'air d'or palpite
comme d'ailes.
[Autumnal — it is the ripe hour of the plants. Glory fills the limpid golden air, and towards the water (clear, the flowing of great roses) the petals gyrate, and wings and wings of blood through the air... and generative when the moons acted according to the order that wills love towards a better fate — the law of a blood that attained virtue issues in sobs of terror and vital glory, to spread far: it is the ripe hour of virtues. In the hour of the august Star, the virgins go with slow bearing, dedicating their gestures there... a chorus ripely multiplying in the murmur: giving all their pride they move — the great winds of the Lands slowed in murmuring repose of light, the murmur of their virginal gestation: and in fear and in wish, the gesture — whether vague or upright, heavy or conquering — palpitates in the golden air like wings before the Friend who comes gentle and virile.]
Then, slow and ceremonial, the procession through the ages of the lamentable lovers files past — those who prepared and announced the coming of the future consolatrix through whom the lofty family, obscurely dreamed of, will at last be constituted:
Que venaient de longtemps des amantes de deuil
Belles et parmi quelque vœu d'un apogée
qui monte irradiant en veuvage et orgueil
de l'ampleur de grands lis en leurs mains érigée:
Divulguez-le (ce vient des Temps évanouis)
O lumières à aigus sanglots de mémoire
vivant dans l'aventure auguste des minuits.
[That there had come from long ago lovers of mourning, beautiful and amid some wish of an apogee rising irradiant in widowhood and pride, in the amplitude of great lilies erected in their hands: proclaim it — (this comes from the vanished Ages) — O lights of sharp sobbing memory living in the august adventure of midnights.]
The hieratic and troubling magic that gives these enigmatic figures the disquieting bearing of the noble dreamers of Puvis! And the divine suggestion of the last two lines — the sobbing lights keeping vigil in the black horror of the past — and the delicious recurrence that weeps:
Que venait en levant la vertu de lis droits
cet aller augural environné de gloire
Divulguez-le (ce vient des temps évanouis)
O lumières à aigus sanglots de mémoire
vivant dans l'aventure auguste des minuits.
[That there came, raising the virtue of upright lilies, this augural procession surrounded by glory: proclaim it — (this comes from the vanished ages) — O lights of sharp sobbing memory living in the august adventure of midnights.]
The lofty prayer of the Virgins wishing for the Bridegroom:
Mes yeux qui des grands lis élargissent l'adage
rêvent, et mes vouloirs vont me donner à lui
ô,
cet unique en qui vivons exemptes d'âge;
[My eyes, which draw out the full meaning of the great lilies, dream; and my wishes will give me to him — O, that singular one in whom we live exempt from age;]
Their revolt before the terrible brutalities of the real; the indifference of the adult lost in dreams of the beyond, then his sudden reversals of regret and his belated coming to the duty of the future — all rendered with the same musical mastery. And here at last is the nuptial air that through the thousand branches of the world
la mémoire des mers murmure indulgemment:
Dis
qu'au rêve végétal de nids et de midis
(l'une et l'un là voulus et haïs de nulle ire):
qu'au rêve végétal de nids et de midis
en vous voilant de vos longs doigts que l'anneau voue
vous venez alentir en rêve d'univers
à ma parole amante qui vraiment me noue!
et nous vivons vainqueurs plus doux que les oiseaux
(l'une et l'un là voulus et haïs de nulle ire)
et le long d'eaux longtemps veillantes de roseaux
évanouissent loin et loin évanouissent
notre angoisse et le doute et la nuit qui languissent
et nous ne vivons plus et nous ne vivons plus
l'une et l'un douloureux de vouloir, et ne dire
(ardant l'azur muet de sanglots impollus).
[the memory of the seas murmurs indulgently: Say that in the vegetal dream of nests and noons — (the one and the other there willed and hated by no anger) — that in the vegetal dream of nests and noons, veiling yourselves with your long fingers pledged by the ring, you come to slow yourselves in the dream of the universe to my loving word that truly binds me! And we live victorious, gentler than the birds — (the one and the other there willed and hated by no anger) — and along the waters long watched over by reeds, far off they vanish and vanish far off, our anguish and the doubt and the night that languishes; and we live no longer and we live no longer, the one and the other aching with wanting and not saying (the mute azure blazing with undefiled sobs).]
And in the ecstasy of the consented kiss:
Il avait parmi l'Angle et la nuit sainte d'Elle
multiplié de la mémoire de splendeurs
Toute l'humaine amour du vêpre qui ruisselle;
[He had, in the hallowed recess of Her holy night, multiplied from the memory of splendours all the human love of the streaming vesper;]
the poem closes on a divine finale where the tenderness of the couple and their dream of duty breathes itself out:
(lui)
Autant loin qu'il n'est vêpre, ma mémoire errante
dans le pur âge des matins est avérante
qu'elle vous eut parmi le vouloir diapré
comme la pareille de lis inacré —
désert et grand dans la vallée de la Terre.
[(he) As far off as there is no vesper, my wandering memory through the pure dawn of ages attests that she had you amid the will shot through with colour, like the likeness of unlustred lily — solitary and great in the valley of the Earth.]
(elle)
et là vers Toi,
comme vraiment involontaire
est la montée de mes yeux où l'aveu luit
inaveuglé du vent d'haleines et de nuit,
Autant loin qu'il n'est vêpre, ma mémoire errante
dans le pur âge des matins est avérante,
que nous nous vimes dans des Temps, doux végétants
et dont après départ mutuel est longtemps,
comme douleur d'un heurt déserte en les mémoires.
[(she) And there towards You, as if truly involuntary is the rising of my eyes where the avowal shines unblinded by the wind of breaths and night — as far off as there is no vesper, my wandering memory through the pure dawn of ages attests that we saw each other in Times, gently vegetating, those Times from which, after our mutual parting, long ages lie between — like the pain of a collision deserted in the memories.]
And the dialogue expires on her broad andante:
Oh! peuvent-elles, mes vagues velléités
de pur avoir par une loi de puretés —
croire:
Quand est là l'œuvre de Tous, dans la grande
adoption du saint Travail, générateur:
Tutélaire à Toi qui m'aimes, est en guirlande
mon vœu le plus rêveur de en heureuses mains
calmer qui désespère et pleure l'heure amère —
Filiales et nuptiales et de mère.
[Oh — can they dare to believe, my half-formed wishes for all that is purely had and purely given: when All are joined in the great consecration of holy, life-giving Work: watching over You who love me, my most dreaming wish is to calm, in happy hands garlanded, those who despair and weep the bitter hour — filial and nuptial and maternal.]
Would it be hazardous to say that in this fin de siècle Le Geste Ingénu stands entirely apart — by the freshness of its rational idyllism, the strangeness of its subtle poetry, its exquisite subjectivity — and that the fluidity, the warblings, the ineffable orchestration of its verses have until now never been surpassed? This rapid analysis has shown the novel charm of the composition: the constant use of allegory, the transposition of landscapes into states of soul, the exposition of events without transition. It is something of Dante’s imaginative procedure — but without the Latin objectivity, without precision, without the linking of episode to episode: unity asserting itself in the governing idea alone, not in the architecture of plot.
All brass and stridency, the strong and lofty song of La Preuve égoïste deploys the contrast of the harsh struggles of the modern world — speaking of the beauties and errors of the worker-man in the hell of cities and workshops, his sorrows and rancours in the dissolving world of chance loves.
From the very opening, the disquieting silhouette of the devourer of energy and force sketches itself — “the metallic tower of iron ardent with light” — figuring the colossal labour of this age; and in its shadow, black phantoms of smiths hammering drift and dissolve, in broad lamentations over the harshness of their tasks, full of the threat of imminent revolt before the ever-growing hardship wrought by the advance of machinery:
Métallurgique elle est vainquante! la Vapeur
vertigineuse de volants et de courroies
Transversalement, silents et puissants.
[Metallurgic, she is conquering! — the Steam, vertiginous with flywheels and drive-belts, transversally, silent and powerful.]
How many arms now rendered useless — and perhaps tomorrow, of these lamentable pariahs:
... le dernier apprendra l'exil long
et sinistre et sinistre et sinistre des ires
et pleurs: et dans les Yeux il aura vers le loin
le désespoir muet de la main vide d'œuvre —
[... the last will learn the long and sinister and sinister and sinister exile of rages and tears: and in his Eyes turned towards the distance he will carry the mute despair of the hand empty of work —]
And in this profound uncertainty of the morrow, in the horror of approaching black misery, no consoling voice, no friend with comforting embrace — save:
celle Toute à tous, en hâtes
Fatales d'amours niant Travail et Demains.
[she who is All to all, in the fatal haste of loves that deny Work and Tomorrows.]
On this darkened fresco the poem opens with the broad exposition of man’s departure from the fields; and through the lofty suggestion of its images, the virility of its language, the unheard-of sonority of its orchestration, countryside, trains, crepuscular skies, ideas and sentiments, beings and things evoked are all endowed with fateful strangeness and disquieting grandeur. The modern world appears deformed and terrible, seen through a dream of terror and pessimism. Thus this train, fantastically drawn against the sad evening:
le train qui longtemps stoppa mut
le stagnant ordre du métal où l'âme existe
tintamarrant pour le départ loin alarmiste
de ses vastes phares exagérant la nuit
et le temps, où sourdonnante et stridente luit
sa durée...
Epandant en départs de la lumière veuve:
il partit sursautant et plaquant, dans l'erreur
parallèle et normale...
véhémentement et sans ventée: et muante
la nuit le prend, et au loin monte la houlante
fumée, avant diluement lent qui parut
épandre en départs seuls de la lumière veuve
comme de nuages à peine, que ne meuve
ventée, en la nuit.
[The train that had long stood still set in motion the stagnant order of metal in which the soul exists — clanging its alarmist departure into the distance, its vast headlamps exaggerating the night and time, where its duration glows, muffledly rumbling and strident... Spreading in departures of widowed light: it left with starts and lurches, on its parallel and normal error*... vehemently and without wind: and the transforming night takes it, and far off the swelling smoke rises, before a slow dilution that spread the last solitary departures of widowed light — like clouds barely stirred by any wind, in the night.]
* The word "error" here is deliberately unsettling, the train's straight mechanical course rendered as a kind of existential mistake.
In the tenderness of familiar places, “the man of the villages” has departed:
il s'en allait, lui grand parmi les plus valides
visage aux nuits, et seul! et les pas lourd emplis —
[He was going, tall among the strongest, his face turned to the nights, and alone! — his steps heavy and laden —]
This landscape that he leaves — delicious, and when will he see it again? Things themselves become a regret:
et l'arrière-saison
d'avril germant et d'août mûrissant la moisson
chante l'immortel los:
[et en août houleront au loin d'aoûteurs, les doutes
des Trompes appelant au retour par les routes…]
... Il s'en allait plein d'ire: et, le soleil aux ormes!
c'est gloire dans l'air d'or limpide, et vers le noir
une avalaison gire en pétales énormes
chus au mat des eaux, qui paraît ramentevoir.
... Il s'en allait, puissant; et moins haut, et en rêve
calmement éperdu — l'horizon glorieux
chantepleure, et
c'est dans le grand vêpre pieux
comme aux lilas et au printemps quand le vent lève!
[And the late season — April germinating and August ripening the harvest — sings the immortal praise: [and in August the harvest workers' doubts will surge far off, the Horns calling the return along the roads...] ... He was going, full of rage: and the sun in the elms! — glory in the limpid golden air, and towards the dark a cascade of enormous petals gyrates, fallen on the dull surface of the waters, as if the whole scene were stirring memory back to life... He was going, powerful; and less lofty, and in dream calmly lost — the glorious horizon sings and weeps, and it is in the great pious vesper like the lilacs and the spring when the wind rises!]
Now that the train carries him away — like a dream taking life — he follows long with his eyes this country that recalls the names of buried Ancestors. And this nocturne in two lines:
Derrière, au loin de la nuit veuve:
mi levée en des monts et vallons de stupeur
c'est la Terre…
[Behind, far off in the widowed night: half-risen amid mountains and valleys of stupor — it is the Earth...]
No doubt he is gripped by doubt and the feeling of the unknown; too late:
Il s'en va. — Le noir vit, et dans les gaulis erre
si multiple en douleur que nul ne le rêva!
un inouï soupir: et, d'une voix qu'on n'a
que lorsqu'on sent la mort, quelqu'un se désespère:
—... un de plus, un de plus, un de plus qui s'en va?
[He is gone. — The darkness lives, and through the young woodland wanders something so manifold in pain that no one ever dreamed it! an unheard sigh: and, in a voice one only has when one feels death approaching, someone despairs: —... one more, one more, one more who goes?]
He wanders now through the labyrinthine streets of the enormous City, seeking work and already uneasy in his isolation among the crowd:
Les Temps sont durs:
et le vent des volants, hostile
chasse l'Homme-ouvrier dont vaquent les mains, et
est égoïste la multitude en les voies
droites d'où l'on voit loin la métallique Tour
de Fer:
et, loin d'air de végétaux pulsatile,
et, loin d'air de végétaux inquiet
en renouveaux et morts et renouveaux, la Ville
est de pierre au passant de la Vie où l'on est
pour l'œuvre méritoire en nous qui palpitait.
[The Times are hard: and the wind of the flywheels, hostile, drives out the worker-man whose hands are idle; and the multitude is egoistic in the straight roads from which one sees far off the metallic Tower of Iron: and, far from the pulsating air of plants, far from the restless air of plants in their renewals and deaths and renewals, the City is of stone to the passer-by of Life where one exists for the meritorious work that once palpitated within us.]
Here now, in the flaring of the gas-lamps, the mirage of evenings, the uproar of revelries, the horror of rutting, the sheep-like drift of pleasure-hunters after the heat of the day. The man of the fields, lost in the city of stone, already weary of solitude amid these floods of the living, feels rising within him a vague and infinite need for tenderness:
c'est doux parmi le monde hostile qu'elle lève
à l'épaule d'Amie, ô rendre lourd
(couleurs
qui vont lent s'éteignant) le dormir des douleurs
de la Tête qui meut en éparres ouvertes.
[How sweet, amid the hostile world, to rest the head on a Friend's shoulder — O to make heavy, in the slowly fading colours, the sleeping of sorrows, the Head that moves in open, scattered disarray.]
But this thirst for sad and mutual love — can he slake it among:
Celles hors de Famille et qui sont du dehors
les passantes au plus ouvert giron…
Mais, Celles!
c'est, à qui pleurerait plus longtemps
en perdant notion de devoir et printemps
qui ne sont qu'ouverture en pétales de l'heure
des demains mûre par les travaux,
c'est le leurre!
Elles ont doux menti, Celles! et leur voix d'heurs.
[Those beyond the pale of Family, women of the streets — the passers-by of the most open lap... But, Those Women! it is, for one who would weep longer, losing all notion of duty and of spring — which are nothing but the opening in petals of the hour of tomorrows ripened by labour — it is the lure! They have sweetly lied, Those Women! and their voice of joys.]
No doubt in former times they dreamed, like the Ideal of Le Geste Ingénu, of free disposal of themselves and the gift of their bodies to the being of their choice; but the fatalism of circumstance, the muffled pressure of instinct, the harshness of appetites have lamentably burst the primitive dream:
Tentations! Tentations — vous vintes, et
de multiples mains d'hommes ardant du délire
crispent de loin le dol de vierges, et qui sait
qui doit ou ne doit pas
choir!
[Temptations! Temptations — you came, and the many hands of men burning with delirium clench from afar the corruption of virgins — and who knows who must or must not fall!]
The enormous human agglomerate pursues its ravage of decomposition — the hunt of ferocious needs, the crushing of the weak, the pitilessness of crowds trampling the sacrificed:
un vent de luxe et de luxure, et mille vents
de roues roulantes ainsi qu'en
crierie
de mort et de rut éploient, et luxurie
véhémentement quel air, ah! de vertige et
de mal qui du devoir saint enlève — et qui sait
qui doit ou ne doit pas
Choir!
Mais,
cet air, ah! de vertige et de mal la prend:
et, rêves et virginités — quand il la rend
comme meurtris ils saignent en pétales, heure
morte de fleurs! meurtris ils saignent dans les vents...
La Ville est grande de désastres!
La Ville d'heurs, la Ville est grande de désastres.
[A wind of luxury and lust, and a thousand winds of rolling wheels — as in a clamour of death and rutting — deploy and luxuriate vehemently: what air, ah! of vertigo and evil that lifts one from holy duty — and who knows who must or must not Fall! But this air, ah! of vertigo and evil takes her: and dreams and virginities — when it renders them back, bruised they bleed in petals, dead hour of flowers! bruised they bleed in the winds... The City is great with disasters! The City of joys — the City is great with disasters.]
He has nonetheless followed the seller of love:
La nuit ainsi que métallique qu'advint la
chose,
comme astre étrange et, mort parmi le moindre
ciel muet, la lune énorme paraissait poindre
sur la ville:
[The night as if metallic when the thing came to pass — like a strange star, dead in the smallest gap of the mute sky, the enormous moon seemed to rise over the city:]
and the verses sob over the hateful and brutal coupling:
Oh!
ils perdaient mémoire: et, du stupre orde et pâle
Traître égoïste au Travail saint, il ne peut lors
rêver que, les deux ils iraient riants dehors
vers la vanité d'eaux erratiles de lune:
Voilà que pleut la nuit lourde, plus lourdement
... et plus d'elle il n'est! le ventre à gloire vitale…
... Ils se prennent en rire et désespoir,
— cri âpre!
[Oh! they were losing memory: and, from the foul and pale debauchery — egoistic traitor to holy Work — he can no longer dream that the two of them would go out laughing towards the vanity of wandering moonlit waters: now the heavy night rains down, more heavily still… and she is no more — the womb of vital glory... They take each other in laughter and despair — a harsh cry!]
and in contrast to these bought and endured caresses, the evocation of the long consoling and desired kiss:
... c'est parmi quel mutisme natal
couler lent d'été immortel qui les pénètre
et qu'ils se sentent! quand lent emportés seul être
aux doux allers d'une grande eau doux palpités
d'instants élus,
(instants qu'emporteraient des ailes!
en végétant doux emportés
aux doux allers d'une grande eau que lente pleure —
chère, lente et limpide! l'heur de leurs lents Yeux
clos...
[...it is amid what primal muteness — the slow flowing of an immortal summer that penetrates them and makes them feel each other! when slowly carried, a single being, in the sweet goings of a great water, sweetly palpitating with chosen instants — instants fit for wings to carry! sweetly vegetating, carried in the sweet goings of a great water that slowly weeps — dear, slow and limpid! the joy of their slow Eyes closed...]
To these dark vignettes of the heartaches and ugliness of intimate life succeeds the splendidly frightening vision of the broad and powerful iron workshops. A breath of epic moves through it, prolonging the feeling of unease and surprise provoked by the suggestive chiaroscuro of the image and the poet’s grand vision. In the stormy light filtered through the great heavy glazings, in the high smoke and metal dust, enlarged by the penumbra of the forge hall, rough and dark workers take on the fantastic and superb bearing of the Titans beneath Etna:
Cent ils sont, o torses nus que hâle
Fumée de houille et de limaille! marteaux
virants de l'elliptique vol en d'un heurt même
martelant longtemps les lourdes ustions, et
c'est ainsi que d'astres désastre d'aventure
heurtée, et qui loin irradierait.
Exhaussés!
cent ils sont, o torses grands! et dans l'erratique
Jour pareil à nuit de lune et nuages, aux
divers noirs endroits, ah! multivoques marteaux
ahanent-ils, et solidairement ahanent
devant l'étau puissant et planté lourd — assez
c'est à nulle heure:
(c'est en grand martelant qu'on apprend la pratique)
et passent en mêlée et vont
illuminant des nuits énergiques qui planent
les éparres et heurts des marteaux au vol long.
[A hundred they are, O bare torsos scorched by coal smoke and iron filings! — hammers wheeling in elliptical flight, all in a single shock hammering long the heavy burnings; and it is as the disaster of stars in collision, radiating far. Raised high! a hundred they are, O great torsos! and in the erratic Day like a night of moon and clouds, in the various dark places, ah! — the multivocal hammers labour, and in solidarity labour before the powerful bench vice planted heavily — enough, it is beyond all hours: (it is in great hammering that one learns the practice) and they pass in mêlée and go, illuminating charged nights over which hover the scattered sparks and clashes of the hammers in long flight.]
The verse acquires a blazing clangour, lit by the tawny gleams of this Vulcanian labour; tableaux of incomparable breadth; sober metaphors of prolonged effect; marvellous accords of syllables: it is the real clothed in dream:
Cent ils sont: mais Ô les Virants! n'allaient-ils mille
du même heurt sonnant et splendissant, et dur
Tonnant, qui paraissaient en nudité virile
de primitive horde en soleils et azur
Brandie haut! aller, aux strideurs et des cuivres
courts et des airains rauques à sanglots,
à la
conquête ardente pour le Mieux...
Ils allaient mille
et quelques: mais en glas hélant ailleurs et là
à plus seules, seules! à plus seules volées
les Marteaux grands ont dû du haut de leurs mêlées
choir!
[A hundred they are: but O the Wheeling Ones! did they not go as a thousand, all in the same sounding and splendidly shining shock, hard Thundering — who seemed in the virile nakedness of a primitive horde, in suns and azure, Brandished high! to go, to the stridencies of the short brasses and the raucous bronzes sobbing, to the ardent conquest for the Better... They went a thousand and some: but in a knell calling here and there to ever more solitary, solitary! to ever more solitary flights — the great Hammers had to fall from the height of their mêlées!]
The great Hammers have fallen; unemployment for many, hardship for all — for silent above their heads, gliding and wheeling as if on night winds, the vertiginous steam runs on and conquers:
Mais ne dis, ah! dont l'ire voudrait.
Feux et mitrailles là ouvrant d'un heurt ultime
un soleil de révolte et d'horreur, et de
crime:
que c'est la guerre au loin des soirs, et vaste issant
Flammale et huant nûment en ondulatoires
cris au loin, de haine meurtrie et meurtrissant.
Comprends plus haut:
Elle est vainquante! mais par elle
part morne et matérielle Tu n'es plus, et
Tu la dompteras, Toi esprit! et la querelle
entre vous deux, o l'Avenir qui n'est muet
en murmure solution d'une Loi même
et altruiste, et à ta gloire en dévouement...
[But do not say, ah! what rage would wish. Fires and grapeshot bursting there in one ultimate shock a sun of revolt and horror and crime: war far off in the evenings, vast and issuing — All Flame, howling nakedly in undulating cries far off, of bruised and bruising hatred. Understand at a higher level: She (TN: the Steam.) is conquering! but through her the dull and material part of you is no more — and you will tame her, You spirit! (TN: So the full movement of the passage is: Steam conquers and destroys the material conditions of the worker's life — but in doing so she paradoxically liberates the spirit, which will ultimately master her.) and the quarrel between you two, O the Future that is not mute, murmurs its solution: a single Law, altruistic, and in devotion to your glory. …]
But let this era of justice and happiness come swiftly, for:
— Ouverte!
il importe qu'en un vite ordre rédempteur
soit la loi solidaire et logique, et de
cœur.
[— Open! it matters that in a swift redemptive order the law of solidarity be logical, and of the heart.]
After the fierce beauty of the enormous workshop — the hideousness of Semitic or Christian plutocracy, of stock-jobbing, of the abject spirit of lucre!
Tumultuous with multivocal voices, issuing all around into a single voice, and in demented gesture evoking the Treasures that do not exist:
c'est le Temple égoïste qui ment —
la Bourse.
Argent, qu'il soit ou n'existe qu'en rêve (car
ce seul rêve, qu'il est sans doute quelque part!
n'est inutile). — Argent produit Argent au vaste
Jeu de là, pour qui mieux le sait; et s'il dévaste
(Argent produit Argent)
quelque modeste appoint
candide et prime ainsi que l'aurore qui point:
c'est, ah! qu'il aime mieux qui mieux le sait, le vaste
Jeu d'argent...
Argent produit Argent, mais il n'est
simple et pur, que s'il représente ce qui naît
et mûrit par travaux de la Terre meilleure...
[It is the egoistic Temple that lies — the Bourse. Money, whether it exists or exists only in dream (for even the dream of it — the mere belief that it exists somewhere — is not without its purpose). — Money produces Money in the vast Game there, for those who know it best; and if it lays waste — (Money produces Money) — some modest, candid contribution, fresh as the first aurora: ah — the vast Game of money rewards most those who play it best... Money produces Money, but it is simple and pure only if it represents what is born and ripens through the labours of the better Earth...]
And on these last lines a delicious parenthesis opens, in which the poet evokes, in the hieratic bearing of an Arcadian idyll, a labourer prolonging the work of the Day under the troubling clarity of the moon:
et l'Homme plein de veilles
suit et guide parmi les dolentes merveilles
le pas lent des Taureaux en un ordre muet,
[and the Man full of vigils follows and guides amid the doleful marvels the slow step of the Bulls in a mute order,]
Then a period of false calm and menacing expectation hovers over two rapid songs of the poem: the labourer gathers himself inwardly, full of a muffled revolt against the stupid horror of the existence made for him, and increasingly embittered by his isolation. The memory of his too brief loves exacerbates him, and his contempt for woman deepens within him:
Haine
de leurs baisers d'antan qu'ils ne savent, et dont
vient à l'Homme surtout, étreignant val et mont
de Celle au ventre en deuil de vertu vivipare —
quelle envie irritée et qui met près d'aimer
Tuer!
[Hatred of their kisses of former times that they no longer know; and from those kisses there comes to Man above all — gripping valley and mountain, from She of the womb in mourning of viviparous virtue — an irritated desire that brings one close, through love, to Kill!]
One sad evening finds him hesitant and repentant at the departure of trains:
doux à voir
épandre dans une suite luisante à perte
Fumée et saluts longs vers l'azur...
[Sweet to watch spreading in a shining succession beyond sight — Smoke and long farewells towards the azure...]
And now he hears a confused and mysterious distant voice that stirs him wholly with regret and tenderness:
c'est elle
captivante et qui parle à l'ingrat! immortelle
c'est elle, des terroirs et plaines la Voix d'heur...
[It is she — captivating, speaking to the ingrate! Immortal — it is she, the Voice of felicity of the native soils and plains...]
A hymn then bursts forth — multi-sounding and joyful, the triumphal canticle of harvests and annual renewal, of an exquisite verbal music:
Luxurie et nous honore
la nuit, la nuit mouvante où monte et luit mouvant
ce qui doit dans l'aurore agitée au doux vent
Brûler de maturité d'or, et
c'est l'aurore
d'épis mûrs, et en gloire ondulante lendore
champs d'épis, ondorements vainqueurs d'épis!
levant
(et en août houleront au loin d'aoûteurs, les doutes
des Trompes appelant au retour par les routes)
levant de nos gestes allant en nos vallons
vallons de la patrie, vallons!
[It luxuriates and honours us — the night, the moving night where rises and shines, moving, what must in the dawn stirred by the gentle wind burn with golden ripeness — and it is the dawn of ripe ears of grain, and in undulating glory lulling to sleep — fields of grain, victorious undulations of grain! rising — (and in August the harvest workers' doubts will surge far off, the Horns calling the return along the roads) — rising from our gestures as we go through our valleys, valleys of the homeland, valleys!]
But the cruelty of the mirage dissipates; he feels, a worker without work wandering through the great City, that were he to return to the villages he would be the man driven from the looms and millstones to the city from which he came.
Now it is the strike: ardent, feverish verses, leaping with anger and rage, full of harsh and hard syllabic splendours:
et la Ville est en
Feux!
et des Tours et Tours, et lourd! et grand! longtemps
Tonitrue ululant — et lourd! et grand! le Temps
d'épouvante qui presse: car la Ville est en
Feux!
Ils vont, et leurs poings puissants maitrisent d'armes
la nuit venante aux plis de leurs drapeaux d'alarmes.
[And the City is in Flames! and Towers and Towers, heavy! and great! long Thundering and ululating — heavy! and great! the Time of terror that presses: for the City is in Flames! They go, and their powerful fists close around their weapons in the coming night amid the folds of their flags of alarm.]
Stupor and unease among the governors; terror in the party of order; cries of repression from the frightened:
la peine seule dans leurs lois est dite
quand préventives elles devraient en limite
d'altruisme arrêter les Devoirs: et leurs lois
ce n'est que l'intérêt égoïste en les droits
de quelques vains porteurs de vains mandats sophistes
que souvent extorqués! à d'autres égoïstes
et d'autres ignorants —
[Punishment alone is spoken of in their laws, when those laws should preventively, within the bounds of altruism, uphold Duties: and their laws are nothing but egoistic interest in the rights of a few vain bearers of vain sophistic mandates — often extorted! from other egoists and other ignorants —]
And it is in the name of dogma and law that they give the order to march — to the Army, devoted to patriotic perils alone.
Hideous bourgeoisisme7 counts one more success:
et l’ordre est au mutisme de mort de la Ville…
[And order returns to the deathly muteness of the City…]
The vanquished man and the prostituted woman, in the sad and slow finale, have evoked the distant day when their chimera of high life and happiness still flowered — the serene ideality unrolled in the verses of the preceding poem:
Jour:
Jour où ne passaient nuages alarmants
Fait d'almes vérités et de doux errements
dans le pur âge des matins, quand ils parurent
de leur geste ingénu étreignant le dehors
capturer au long d'eaux limpides qui murmurent
un diptère au pur vol générateur des ors:
[Day: a Day where no alarming clouds passed — made of nourishing truths and gentle wanderings, in the pure age of mornings, when they appeared in their ingenuous gesture reaching out to capture, along the limpid murmuring waters, a winged insect in its pure flight generating the golds:]
Ah! why did they fail to recognise this dream of solidarity and duty:
car, ils ne donnèrent d’eux-mêmes qu’une preuve égoïste…
[for they gave of themselves nothing but an egoistic proof…]
But the future is heavy with hope:
et voilà qu'Elle et Lui hors de l'Humanité
comme presque hors la Vie, en viduité
d'avenir gestateur d'une œuvre méritoire
ont vu luire l'instant qui palpite! un meilleur
Jour, auguste et vrai dans le Futur:
Rédempteur
de Famille et Patrie et d'Humanité mêmes
hors d'intérêts et de dogmes et d'anathèmes
c'est, des Terres et des mers et du
cerveau du monde, un puissant geste qui haut sort
rationnel, et vrai rêvant en meilleur sort:
et de Mère
qui est de la nature: celle Vierge et Mère
qui porte la géniture la moins amère:
c'est elle, l'Humanité vraie! elle qui sort
d'après l'ordre qui veut amour en meilleur sort —
au long des Ages, Vierge! en portant les portées
du ventre ou de l'esprit d'Avenir agitées.
[And behold — She and He, outside of Humanity, as if almost outside Life itself, bereft of the future that gestates a meritorious work, have seen the palpitating instant gleam! a better Day, august and true in the Future: Redeemer of Family and Homeland and Humanity itself, beyond interests and dogmas and anathemas — it is, from the Lands and the seas and the brain of the world, a powerful gesture that rises high, rational and truly dreaming towards a better fate: and of the Mother who is of nature — that Virgin and Mother who bears the least bitter offspring: it is she, true Humanity! she who issues according to the order that wills love towards a better fate — through the length of the Ages, Virgin! bearing the broods stirred in the womb or the spirit of the Future.]
Built with power and elevation upon a foundation of scientific knowledge, conceived on a scale at once vast and philosophically, sociologically, and poetically comprehensive; employing a method at once logical and arrestingly original, one that gathers up past and present in order to lay down the laws of the future; at once objective and subjective, realist and idealist — the Work unfolds, and will continue to unfold, in a manner epic and untamed, intricate and exquisite, vigorously masculine and thoroughly modern, draping its unwavering rationalism and its ethical conceptions in the vesture of subtle dreams and a fierce, almost ungovernable grandeur; charged throughout with thought, with passion, and with fact; nobly musical, nobly plastic.
Whatever one’s taste, whatever one’s quarrel with the theories, the ideas, the aesthetic or the manner of M. René Ghil, no one can deny the magnitude of his endeavour, the beauty of his aspirations, the originality of his conceptions. This study will have served its purpose if it succeeds in showing that among all the younger schools no writer affords stronger evidence of intellectual force, of tenacity, of sustained labour and artistic conscience — and if it wins for him the sympathy, or at the very least the attention, of those who follow the life of letters with curiosity, and of those who hold in respect the man who pursues new art and new thought.
Gaston and Jules COUTURAT
August 1891.
Translator’s Notes:
1 the fragment of sense spilt onto the following line.
2 The Prakrits were a family of vernacular languages spoken across the Indian subcontinent from roughly the fifth century BCE to the twelfth century CE. Their relationship to Sanskrit has long been a matter of debate. The prevailing view among Western linguists holds that Prakrit represented the living speech of ordinary people — unregulated by grammatical refinement — while Sanskrit existed alongside it as an elevated, consciously cultivated register of the same linguistic stock. On this reading, the very name prākṛta signals naturalness and common usage, in implicit contrast to the studied artifice of Sanskrit.
3 The Couturats have just explained that Ghil, in hatred of monotony and in pursuit of surprise, does three characteristic things: 1. employs the adjective adverbially, attaching it directly to the verb; 2. prefers the intransitive verb to the reflexive; 3. displaces subjects and attributes in the Latin and Germanic manner.
The verse “Tonnent levantes les ardeurs et luxurient” is a perfect demonstration of all three at once.
In normal French prose this would read something like: “les ardeurs se lèvent en tonnant et luxurient” — the ardours rise thundering and luxuriate. But Ghil has:
- Made “levantes” (rising) function as an adjectival-adverbial modifier attached directly to the verb “tonnent” rather than to the subject in the expected way — the rising quality colours the thundering rather than simply describing the subject
- Used “tonnent” and “luxurient” as straight intransitive verbs rather than reflexive constructions
- Placed the subject “les ardeurs” after the verb — Latin word order — so the thundering precedes and seems to generate the subject rather than the other way around
The effect is that the action comes first and the thing acting seems to emerge from it — we hear the thunder before we know what thunders. The syntax enacts the very sensation it describes: sound preceding source, movement preceding form. Which is, of course, precisely what Instrumentation theory demands.
4 The alexandrine, being built on the repetition of its own internal measures — two times six, or three times four, or two times three times two — already contains within itself the principle of repetition that would generate a second verse. In other words, the line is not an arbitrary unit but a self-sufficient mathematical entity whose internal structure already implies and contains its own prolongation. To add a second verse is therefore not an external addition but a natural unfolding of what is already mathematically present within the first.
The converse follows logically: a diminution — cutting the line short, reducing it below its full twelve syllables — is not merely an aesthetic imperfection but an “essential privation,” a violation of the mathematical completeness that makes the alexandrine what it is. You are not merely shortening a line; you are depriving it of something intrinsic to its nature.
It is, in short, an argument for the mathematical necessity and self-sufficiency of the alexandrine — not as convention or tradition, but as the one metre whose internal structure mirrors the evolutionary mathematics of two and three. Any other line length is either redundant repetition or essential privation.
5 Ghil’s argument here, dense as it is, rests on a characteristically elegant fusion of his evolutionary philosophy with classical French prosody. The prime numbers two and three are not chosen arbitrarily: in his system, two represents the fundamental duality of Matter — the male and female principles whose interaction drives evolution — while three represents the fruit of their union, the third term that determines the elliptical movement beyond the circle. The alexandrine, built on six plus six syllables (two times three, or three times two, or two times two times three), is therefore not merely a convenient metre but a mathematical expression of the evolutionary principle itself — its structure enacting in sound the very cosmogony Ghil is constructing in verse. The alexandrine is therefore not chosen but discovered: it is the one metre whose internal arithmetic mirrors the structure of existence itself. When the values two and three are multiplied (six), eurythmy results — the harmonious, flowing movement of the well-made line; when merely added (five), dissonance — an asymmetrical, restless quality foreign to his purposes.
Rhyme, for Ghil, is not ornament but function: the point of rest — the musical term point d’orgue is deliberate — at which the line resolves, and through which, accumulated across an entire work, a general tonality is established, much as a key signature governs a musical composition.
The dissolution of the strophe is equally purposeful. Rather than the fixed, recurring stanza — which imposes an artificial external structure — Ghil proposes a continuous, self-organising flow of motifs, analogous to the development sections of a symphony, in which themes emerge, interweave, recede and return without the artificial punctuation of stanzaic division. The alexandrine, persistent throughout, provides the underlying rhythmic unity — the cantus firmus, so to speak — while thought alone, moving freely within and across lines, determines the larger architecture.
6 the age of mindless sexuality without altruistic purpose — the antithesis of Ghil’s ethical ideal.
7 a Ghilian neologism. It extends bourgeois into an abstract philosophical/sociological concept — roughly, the ideology or worldview of the bourgeoisie as a systemic force.
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