Léon Hennique Novel

As M. Mallarmé observes, books of verse are always perfectly splendid—how could they be anything less? The spell of ordered number and ever-enriching Rhyme redeems all. Yet surely one ought never to produce “books of verse”. Would you, without being a musician, presume to touch the harp in a drawing-room? You know full well that your fumbling fingers would nevertheless draw forth sounds that, taken individually, would each be harmonious. That’s not how it works, though. If you cannot “play a proper tune”, leave the harp alone. Books of verse can be perfectly splendid, to be sure, except when they turn out TO BE SOMETHING ELSE ALTOGETHER…

Laurent Tailhade is a mystical pagan, a sensualist who spiritualises the flesh. His lineage runs from M. de Banville and M. Armand Silvestre, from the sun itself and sacred hymns. One might initially place him among the Parnassians rather than the new generation. Yet in his hands, the Parnassian jewel-work strikes a different note entirely, beginning with dazzlement before shifting into something more unsettling. Here are mysticisms both dubious and overdressed, a madonna fit for Baudelaire’s devotions, but infinitely darker for having forgotten her darkness, infinitely sadder for that particular smile. A species of sacrilegious piety. The poet’s dream barely knows what to do except toy with sacred vessels, prop itself on missals, throw copes over surplices. It is by way of this mysticism that sensuality attains its most exquisite refinements. Such magnificent décor treats the Gospel as though it were merely a pretext for beauty, offering not the beauty of constraint but a sumptuous accompaniment to every indulgence. The sun glinting off all this squandered gold has dissolved the creeds, paring them down until nothing remains but their irreducible elements: love, life, and nature. The beloved, that beautiful creature destined to die, is worshipped in the celestial halo where love yearns to rise, yearns to

Usurp with laughter the divine tributes ¹⁰⁷

and lay them at her feet. Is this not the truth of it? Let us look at:

Dans le nimbe ajouré des vierges byzantines,
Sous l’auréole et la chasuble de drap d’or
Où s’irisent les clairs saphirs du Labrador,
Je veux emprisonner vos grâces enfantines.
Vases myrrhins! trépieds de Cumes ou d’Endor!
Maître-autel qu’ont fleuri les roses de matines!
Coupe lustrale des ivresses libertines!
Vos yeux sont un ciel calme où le désir s’endort.
Des lis! Des lis! Des lis! Ô pâleurs inhumaines!
Lin des étoles! chant des froids catéchumènes!
Inviolable hostie offerte à nos espoirs!
Mon amour devant toi se prosterne et t’admire,
Et s’exhale avec la vapeur des encensoirs,
Dans un parfum de nard, de cinname et de myrrhe!¹⁰⁸

[Within the filigreed haloes of Byzantine virgins,
Beneath the aureole and chasuble of cloth-of-gold
Where Labrador’s clear sapphires play with light,
I long to capture your childlike graces.
Myrrhine vessels! Tripods from Cumae or Endor!
High altar where the roses of matins have bloomed!
Lustral cup of libertine ecstasies!
Your eyes—a tranquil heaven where desire sleeps.
Lilies! Lilies! Lilies! O inhuman pallors!
Linen of stoles! Chant of chill catechumens!
Inviolate host offered up to our hopes!
My love prostrates itself before you in wonder,
And rises with the incense smoke,
In perfumes of nard, of cinnamon and myrrh!]

Who could wonder that the celebrant at this particular altar should sing, in fraternal spirit, of ancient ephebes? Of great-hearted Narcissus who perished from self-love?

What makes Laurent Tailhade truly of our time is principally the colouring of his inspiration—this mystical and sensual lyricism which, at such fever-pitch, could only belong to this century. I admire his form, purely lyrical at heart, for preserving the integrity of living Verse in its authentic rhythm—that flash of exaltation, that golden arrow, to borrow Glatigny’s expression. Yet this unrelenting lyric verse, sustained without respite through an entire volume, makes for an exhausting read that must perforce be fragmented differently than the work’s internal logic would prefer. It does away with countless moments of rest and building tension, those transitional beats that might have permitted the exaltation to strike effectively without draining us, and through which the golden arrow would have struck true more dependably. Even those religious ceremonies Tailhade so rightly cherishes play out, like all human endeavours that reach towards the sacred, not through such unremitting tension of the whole being, but through swells that gather and build successively, through rhythmic alternations of silence, gesture and speech—certain parts spoken aloud, others given over to singing—so that the Mystical Ballet choreographs itself to the turning points of the Mystical Drama, and by orchestrating these silences with the whole creates a work of consummate effect that never grows monotonous.

Edmond Haraucourt remains faithful to a form already consecrated by certain pages of Baudelaire and Leconte de Lisle. Though his spirit offers no particularly original thoughts and professes no religion, it nonetheless arrives at a peculiar mysticism that combines melancholy with power whilst remaining stubbornly materialist. With lucid consciousness of his project and clear-sighted vision of his aims and methods, he orients himself toward the future without quite belonging to it, whilst coloured by the past most notably in places where, through sustained and perhaps excessive exercise of rational faculties, his vision reached forward to anticipate the moment in which we find ourselves. Indeed, in his novel¹⁰⁹ more than in his verse¹¹⁰, this materialist betrays a renewed inclination toward the classical and spiritual working-out of thought. This tendency is neither insignificant nor antiquated, for such rediscoveries of what came before are exactly how successive generations win permission to innovate daringly.

Haraucourt shows himself first and foremost as a moralist rather constrained in articulating the grounds of his moral philosophy. Yet he remains an assured and vigorous prose stylist with thorough command of the language. How intriguing it is to observe this collapse of sensualism in a man who would bristle at being called ‘suggestive’ and who would sooner snap the points of delicate needles than handle them. Yet here he is, charging bull-like into the chasm of mysticism, and sentimental mysticism no less, simply because he threw himself into the pursuit of the physical absolute too far. What follows from such a pursuit keeps the poet trapped in sorrowful contemplation. A less spiritual temperament would doubtless transgress these boundaries repeatedly in pursuit of sensuous joy. Such was the original impulse. Yet knowledge of our limited span, with the heartache that attends such knowledge, inserted itself into the equation, and the poet has not overcome them, keeping himself hostage to the perpetual meditation of a sensualist whom one indelible moment brought round to believing in his own soul. These are the sentiments of our time, if not of the immediate moment, and it is these that have earned Edmond Haraucourt his place in this book.

Jean Moréas is Greek. This heritage helps us understand numerous aspects of his talent, particularly the central guiding influence he took in, that of Théophile Gautier, sovereign of opulent Asia. Moréas commands nearly the full complement of romantic qualities whilst possessing none of the classical virtues. He is a painter in song. Through his remarkable gifts as a formalist and his profound sensibility as a musical colourist, he takes his place amongst the practitioners of the New Art. When he makes his occasional raids upon metaphysics, I would rather await his return amongst the splendid gestures—made rhythmic by means of splendid songs—of his intensely vivid medieval fantasies. His melancholy puzzles me, for I discern less substance in his emotions than in their magnificent vestments of syllables. I wonder at and lament these eyes, drunk with chromatic joy, feeling themselves obliged to weep.

In place of these inhospitable Syrtes (as his epigraph would have it), these Cantilènes straining after languor, and all these Funérailles, I have hopes that this singer will give us verses of joy, triumph, and festivity to which I shall extend my applause. With him, questions of formal artistry assume paramount importance. With regard to language, Moréas draws ever more frequently upon our thirteenth- and fourteenth-century poets. Between the Cantilènes and the Iconostases, he has bound together numerous sheaves of ancient words, giving them fresh currency. Such precious terms he scatters with generous abandon. And why should he not? He stands mercifully distant now from those glacial nights when journalists bandied them about amongst themselves, from gazette to gazette. What an age ago that was!

Rhythm matters more here, and the true originality of what Moréas accomplished lies in the rich variety of rhythms he introduced. This still-slender œuvre reveals transformations already sharply defined. Gautier’s influence encounters Verlaine’s and yields before it. The latter, having made visible to the young poet an unexplored way forward, walks away from him midway to venture further alone. The verse—unshackled by Victor Hugo, then brought to order by Gautier and the Parnassians—keeps faith with the liberties it has secured for itself, whilst Verlaine lets it loose from both ancient and modern fetters, managing all the same to hold fast to what makes it fundamentally French verse. Moréas and other poets of this generation represent, as they themselves see it, the ultimate logical extension of the Verlainian principle. By endowing prosody with a flexibility previously unknown, this principle renders it capable of expressing subtleties earlier ages paid no heed to.¹¹¹

In Moréas’s hands, verse becomes pure musical notation from which he conjures remarkable effects. Take this stanza from the poem of Agnès:

« Sœur, douce amie, » lui disais-tu douce amie,
Les étoiles peuvent s’obscurcir et les amaranthes avoir été,
Que ma raison ne cessera mie
De radoter de votre beauté.

Car Cupidon ravive sa torche endormie
A vos yeux, à leur clarté
Et votre regarder, « lui disais-tu », est seul Mire
De mon cœur atramenté.

[“Sister, sweet companion,” thus you’d speak, sweet companion,
Though stars may darken and amaranths vanish quite,
Yet never shall my reason abandon
Its fond obsession with your beauty bright.

For Cupid at your eyes rekindles passion’s
Torch, once dormant, at their light,
And your gaze alone, thus you’d tell her, fashions
The mirror for my ink-stained heart’s plight.]

Surely no one would question that we are in the presence of literature here, of exquisite music given visible shape? And in this, more than elsewhere, I discern an unerring instinct for synthetic art. As literature gravitates towards music and painting, so prose aspires to verse and strives to merge with it. Moréas has grasped this principle, though undoubtedly it is prose that emerges the richer.

Here likewise, prose peels away certain rhymes from the chanson, giving rise to pure rhythm:

Vous avec vos yeux, avec tes yeux,
Dans la bastille que tu hantes
Celui qui dormait s’est éveillé
Au tocsin des heures beuglantes.

Il prendra sans doute
Son bâton de route
Dans ses mains aux paumes sanglantes.

Il ira, du tournoi au combat,
A la défaite réciproque
Qu’il fende heaumes beaux et si clairs,
Son pennon, qu’il ventèle, est loque.

Le haubert qui lace
Sa poitrine lasse,
Si léger, il fait qu’il suffoque.

Ah, que de tes jeux, que de tes pleurs
Aux rémissions tu l’exhortes,
Ah laisse: tout l’orage a passé
Sur les lys, sur les roses fortes.

Comme un feu de flamme,
Ton âme et son âme,
Toutes deux vos âmes sont mortes! ¹¹²

[You with your eyes, with your eyes there,
In that fortress you make haunted ground—
The sleeper has awakened where
The hours bellow their alarum sound.

No doubt he’ll seize
His pilgrim’s staff with ease
Though blood stains both his palms around.

From tournament to battle he’ll ride
To meet defeat reciprocal and stark;
Though he cleave bright helms on every side,
His pennon waves a tattered mark.

The mail-coat binding
His breast, so grinding
Light, yet suffocates him in the dark.

Ah, through your games, through all your tears,
How you exhort him to reprieve!
Ah, let it be—the tempest clears
O’er lilies, o’er roses that won’t grieve.

Like blazing fire,
Your soul, his soul entire—
Both souls are dead and cannot live!]

Furthermore, even while recognising, as we have seen, that verses arrange themselves in stanzas whose liberties are held in check by the principle of symmetry, Moréas sustains his reverential attitude toward the fixed poetic forms which his beloved Middle Ages employed with such grace.

Jules Laforgue occupies a singular position not merely amongst his generation but in the whole of literature. He appears to have experienced every desire that the boldest, the most reckless perhaps, might venture to pursue, and to have transmuted them all into extravagant smiles that feign restraint, sweeping gestures arrested mid-flight, verses and prose delivered in a register that is earnest—rather than solemn—at the same time expressing thoughts at once wild, refined, and profound. Here was a wounded soul of impeccable “breeding” who, with no healing to be found for her white-hot griefs, had made up her mind to present them as jests. Yet the poet does voice his complaints, and these ring out with peculiar shrillness:

Ah! que la vie est quotidienne
[Ah! how dismally daily is life]

or again:

Je suis trop jeune, ou trop agonisant.
[I am too young, or else too near my end.]

Yet what he typically prefers, even when the subject is himself, is to sustain that exquisite irony which belongs to him alone in French poetry, which he does in fact command with a refinement and penetrating acuity unparalleled in any literature. The irony here amounts to recognising two things simultaneously: on one hand, our keen awareness of how thoroughly and irreparably insufficient are those from whom we seek happiness; on the other, the equally thorough and unconquerable sincerity that drives us to keep seeking it anyway. Such is the cry of that affliction peculiar to modernity known as Consciousness, crying out with full awareness of its own absurdity. Here and there in Laforgue’s work, this perpetually vigilant consciousness outdoes both the modern and the human soul by becoming the vast, dispassionate consciousness of nature itself, that is to say universal life as it observes its own destined course. We see this at work in “Pan et la Syrinx”, one of the masterworks contained in Moralités légendaires. Still, we should not imagine the matter is philosophically so uncomplicated. Even the consciousness of nature, itself being one highly specific manifestation of the expectant soul, turns the same mockery upon itself for embodying what that soul takes to be so deeply meaningful.

L’Autre sexe! l’Autre sexe!
Oh! toute la petite Eve
Qui s’avance, ravie de son rôle,
Avec ses yeux illuminés
D’hyménée,
Et tous ses cheveux sur les épaules,
Dans le saint soleil qui se lève!

Un corps, une âme
Amis d’enfance!
Toute ma femme
De naissance!

— O Syrinx! Voyez et comprenez la Terre et la merveille de cette matinée et la circulation de la vie.

Oh, vous là et moi, ici! Oh, vous! Oh, moi! Tout est dans Tout!

[The Other sex! The Other sex!
Oh! little Eve entire
Who comes forth, enchanted with her part,
Her eyes ablaze
With nuptial fire,
All her tresses on her shoulders spread
In the sacred dawning sun’s rays!

One body, one soul—
Since childhood whole!
My wife complete
From birth’s first beat!

— O Syrinx! Behold and comprehend the Earth, this morning’s miracle, life’s circulation!

Oh, you there and I here! Oh, you! Oh, I! All is contained in All!]

Nowhere do I find psychological insight more penetrating yet more poetic—exact in detail yet sweeping in range—than in these Moralités Légendaires, treasures that prove superior even to the verses of the Complaintes and L’Imitation de Notre-Dame-la-Lune. To be sure, this means coming at matters by way of their contradictions and their triviality, and one would struggle to find anything quite so heartbreaking, quite so harrowing, as this form of psychological theatrics. But to appreciate Jules Laforgue properly, we must set aside conventional standards. He was exceptional in everything, not least in the very form of his art. He too had arrived at that point where verse became pure musical notation. In his Complaintes, he too had admitted prose into the realm of rhyme, taking freedoms that all worked to reinforce that note of melancholy levity: the rhyming of singular with plural, the casual addition or dropping of mute ‘e‘s, and the treatment of syllable counts with sublime indifference. Greater reserve is required of us than of most in dissecting this young man dead ahead of his time, a loss that counts among the most grievous this afflicted generation has had to bear. His work, be it the songs that ring out in solitude or the caricatural strokes that mark him as so quintessentially artistic a spirit, bears witness to a sentimental sceptic: possessed of force, to be sure, yet wanting in that wise irrationality that goes by the name of hope. It resembles the smile on that enchanting face none shall forget, the smile through which everything was understood.

Gustave Kahn, whom we should scarcely separate from his departed friend, stands amongst the most sophisticated practitioners of their art in our time. His is fundamentally a symbolic art with synthetic ambitions. The very title of his collection, Les Palais Nomades, serves as a declaration of his intellectual trajectory and the structural logic that will govern his compositions. The idea of “wandering voices” seems to get at the heart of what he envisions when he speaks of these “nomad palaces”. Voices rise from every quarter and occasionally meet in unison, though they tend to remain distinct, alternating between sorrowful whims and whimsical inevitabilities. To render these phenomena audible, he has singled out airs and phrases born of the musical potential embedded in syllables themselves, and I rather suspect he attends to their meaning only through their sound, wilfully shutting his eyes that he might give himself over to pure acts of listening. In orchestrating the movements of his theme and its variations, he has deferred to no authority save feeling itself. This accounts for the freedom that becomes his guiding principle, a freedom visible in verses that refuse to fall into regimented lines but move forward with a seemingly unforced rhythm, so that a line of seventeen syllables might be placed beside a line of two, following the ebb and flow of sentiment as it swells into utterance or retreats beneath the surface. Musical notation proves once more to be governed by the psychological currents of passion, as verse and prose weigh themselves against each other and begin to intermingle. Prose perhaps stands to gain, whereas verse appears decidedly the worse for it. The drive to unshackle poetic form from arbitrary formal constraints has much to recommend it, yet we would do well to remember that certain laws are grounded in nature. Or to be more exact, there is one master law that subsumes the rest: verse is a single human breath given voice, and as such it reaches its natural conclusion where the breath itself runs out. Whatever abides within these natural limits can rightly be termed Verse, but once those limits are exceeded, we find ourselves in the territory of Prose. The Greeks held to this principle, as did the Romans, as have the Germans. Yet what matters here is not only the results themselves but also the intentions at work and the underlying causes that inform them. Gustave Kahn has come to understand that neither prose nor verse on its own will serve the essential purposes he has in mind. He brings them together into a single form, and although we might reasonably question whether such fusion ought to be attempted, what he achieves through it is beyond any reproach. There is real discernment in his approach, and he handles the balance between strong and weak elements with admirable skill. Even so, he keeps himself too firmly planted in the thin air of pure lyricism, an atmosphere in which anything prosaic strikes an off note. He does, in fairness, indicate these prosaic intrusions by dispensing with initial capitals, yet he appears to take back this concession by doing away with punctuation marks entirely. Thus:

On mourait, au fond d’or des basiliques amples
des tourmentes d’odeurs douces s’exhalaient de tes rampes
aux faîtes des tours des attentes de langueur
les haltes florissaient en larges reposoirs
où des gaines de velours des couteaux dormaient en tes soirs
Et sur l’âme des pierres planait un regard lourd.

[They were dying in the golden depths of vast basilicas
tempests of sweet fragrances rose from your ramparts
at tower peaks expectations of languor
pauses blossomed into broad sanctuaries
where knives in velvet sheaths lay sleeping in your evenings
And upon the stones’ soul there brooded a heavy gaze.]

And again, from the same Nuit sur la Lande:

Rien ne m’est plus que ta présence
et les courbes souveraines de ta face
et les portiques de ta voix
Rien ne m’est plus que ton attente.
La halte inutile du temps
avant le frisson qui m’attend
et le charme de mes mains sur tes seins
Rien ne m’est plus que ta présence
De tes beaux yeux la paix descend comme un grand soir
et des pans de tentes lentes descendent gemmées de pierreries
tissés de rais lointains et de lunes inconnues
des jardins enchantés fleurissent à ma poitrine
cependant que mon rêve se clôt entre tes doigts
à ta voix de péri la lente incantation fleurit
imprégné d’antérieurs parfums inconnus
mon être grisé s’apaise à ta poitrine
et mes passés s’en vont défaillir à tes doigts.

[Nothing matters more than your presence
and your face’s sovereign curves
and your voice’s porticoes
Nothing matters more than your expectation.
Time’s futile pause
before the tremor that awaits me
and the spell of my hands upon your breasts
Nothing matters more than your presence
From your lovely eyes peace descends like a vast evening
and swathes of slow pavilions descend jewelled with gems
woven from distant rays and unknown moons
enchanted gardens bloom upon my breast
whilst my dream closes between your fingers
at your fairy voice the slow incantation blooms
steeped in anterior perfumes unknown
my intoxicated being calms upon your breast
and my former selves dissolve beneath your fingers.]

Jean Moréas is Greek by birth, Jules Laforgue has spent years under the spell of English and German verse, and Gustave Kahn’s roots lie in Semitic soil. Their foreign backgrounds, I would argue, account for their indifference to the French genius, to that Latin sensibility which cannot help but recoil from such calculated transgressions against nature’s laws.

Louis Dumur, of mixed Swiss and Italian heritage, composes his verse according to what appears to be a new poetics, though it might be better described as one revived from traditions both foreign to France and rooted in classical antiquity. In the foreword to Lassitudes, he sets out his system in clear terms: “Tonic accent, which exists in French quite as much as elsewhere, falls upon the last syllable of masculine-ending words and upon the second-to-last syllable of feminine endings:

Exquis, léger, subtil, ténu, suave, clair.

Words exceeding two syllables bear a secondary accent on the first:

Symbole d’idéal jamais atteint, jamais.

Monosyllables are theoretically accented, yet within the phrase they cluster into groups where accents distribute themselves according to semantic weight and position, obeying an instinct that seeks, wherever possible, to prevent one accent from immediately preceding or following another. In verse, monosyllables invariably conform to the rhythmic design established by polysyllabic words:

La nuit, le jour, à l’heure où le croissant s’argente.

Following this principle of rhythmic conformity and positional rules, a trisyllabic word may shed the accent from its initial syllable:

Cependant, nous pensâmes toujours

Que le rêve irréel des poètes…

A word exceeding three syllables may transpose its initial accent:

L’horreur silencieuse et rude du vieux chêne,

Whilst a word surpassing four syllables may assume a third:

S’émeuvent lentement et généalogiques.

Having embraced this principle of tonic cadence, I deploy it to construct feet in the English, German, and Russian manner—particularly iambic and anapaestic feet, being those most congenial to French.

L’ennui détient ma tête lasse et monotone

forms an iambic hexameter.

Délace de mon cou tes bras.

Tes poses molles, fille impure

comprise two iambic tetrameters.

J’ai pleuré de le voir disparaître si vite

constitutes an anapaestic tetrameter.”

Louis Dumur has held onto rhyme until now and quite often, as the examples here make plain, clothes his accentual verse in something that looks rather like syllabic metre. Rhyme will undoubtedly fall away before long, though, and even now we can see the alexandrine beginning to break apart now and then:

Marchons, les chers mirages ne durèrent que trop peu!
Un jour viendra, je pense, où las de ce cuisant rivage,
Mes pieds trébucheront au roc: c’est là l’ultime vœu!
Qui bornera mon ironique course et l’esclavage.

[March on—those cherished mirages endured too brief a span!
A day will come, I think, when sick of this scorching strand,
My feet shall falter on the rock: there lies the final vow!
That bounds my bitter course and bondage both.]

Without according Louis Dumur’s system either more or less credence than the sundry other new poetics whose innovation lies in dismembering the venerable French line, I note his endeavour and inscribe it amongst the most unmistakable portents of that genuine Renewal whose advent hovers in our midst. Louis Dumur is the author of a psychological novel, Albert, which strikes one as completely modern. It emerges from the vision of a disenchanted moralist for whom anything that claims the title of Happiness stays perpetually out of reach, undone by an overabundance of desire in an age and a world far too restrictive to satisfy such yearnings.

René Ghil, who remains something of a foreigner¹¹³, maintains his allegiance to the old prosody, following M. Mallarmé’s example in this regard. But René Ghil offsets this simplicity by pursuing obscurity with some determination, having taken to heart M. Mallarmé’s dictum that clarity is but a secondary grace. Indeed, René Ghil was once taken for M. Mallarmé’s official disciple, and among the ill-informed he is still taken for one today. Yet that poet has opened no school. Whilst all of us stand, to a certain extent, under the influence of his thinking, no one has gotten it more spectacularly wrong than René Ghil. With him alone let us be unsparing, for he has done everything in his power to compromise the very art he supposed he was advancing the cause of. While his sincerity cannot be called into question, he moved with unseemly haste, avid for a title and for the kind of publicity in the press through which talent tends to bring about its own ruin. That said, I do know some fine verses of his, in his Légendes d’âme et de sang, such as this:

Nu du nu grandiose et pudique des roses.

[Bare with the grand and chaste bareness of roses.]

To be blunt about it, René Ghil’s wrong turns originated in an intuition that was simultaneously confused and acutely sensitive to what would truly come to pass. Once more, he was led astray by acting precipitously and by indulging in the sort of opportunism to which ambitious youth is prone.

“Take note of the sovereignties at work: white is the province of Harps, blue that of Violins, whose sound is often mellowed by phosphorescence so as to heighten the paroxysms. When Ovations reach their fullness, brass erupts in red. Flutes resonate in yellow, modulating the astonishment of the ingénue at the shimmering play across lips. Then come the Organs, uniformly black, which serve as the subdued voice of Earth and Flesh, nothing but a synthesis of the elementary instruments when taken by themselves, sending forth their plaint.“¹¹⁴

And so forth!

René Ghil’s cardinal error was to take Arthur Rimbaud’s sonnet of the Voyelles at face value, with touching naïvety. The journalists all did likewise—and what sport they made of it! How they lampooned the great poet:

A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu…

[A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue…]

Little did these journalists suspect what roars of laughter the absent one would have unleashed had he heard them! For these worthy souls had walked straight into the trap that the poker-faced wag—who didn’t always lie dormant in the genius poet—had thought to lay for them one merry day. It’s not that sounds somehow escape the operations of a chromatic law, given that all nature submits to it and that sounds and colours represent twin and symmetrical emanations of light. Yet this law is far from absolute; it remains necessarily personal. Consequently, the celebrated sonnet’s sole genuine meaning lies in what it reveals about Arthur Rimbaud himself, particularly in the way this law found expression through his individual temperament. Nothing proves quite so delicious, therefore, as witnessing René Ghil’s treatment of this personal testament as though it were an assertion of objective truth. He busies himself with identifying errors in it, declaring his own preference—I blue, O red, U yellow—before going so far as to replace the colours themselves with freshly tinted musical instruments of his choosing: “A, the organs; E, the harps; I, the violins; O, the brass; U, the flutes.”

Two Swiss writers, Charles Vignier and Mathias Morhardt, had each offered up in their youth essays in a distinctly personal poetry—the former possessing a more spiritual and musical temper, the latter inclined towards the sentimental and pictorial. No artist I know possesses quite the aristocratic feeling for art that Vignier does.

Dans une coupe de Thulé
Où vient pâlir l’attrait de l’heure
Dort le sénile et dolent leurre
De l’ultime rêve adulé. ¹¹⁵

[In a cup of Thule
Where the hour’s allure fades pale
Lies the senile, mournful snare
Of the last adored ideal]

Without any major works to his name—his verses being, as their title admits, barely more than skillful pastiches—he nonetheless understands. He may have pulled back from the tremendous sacrifices the High Rite demands of all who dare come near. But on what grounds can we make such a conjecture? Unless it’s because seeing such a worthy artist consumed—alas!—by the demands of journalism might allow those of us who understand (and we are so few) to hope that he might yet win back his liberty? And here are further verses from Vignier, rendered in that accent distinctly his own—mock-innocent yet bitingly gay—perhaps representing what has become, at this late stage, the poets’ lyrical and romantic “farewell to the lyre.”

Mon triste angelot
Aux ailes lassées
Viens je sais un lot,
Lot de panacées.
Là bas c’est trop loin,
Pauvre libellule,
Reste dans ton coin
Et prends des pillules.
Sois Edmond About
Et d’humeur coulante,
Sois un marabout
Du Jardin des plantes

[My sorry cherub
With worn-out wings
Come, I’ve a batch,
A batch of remedies.
That place is too far,
Poor dragonfly,
Keep to your corner
And swallow your pills.
Be an Edmond About
Of easy temper,
Be a marabou stork
From the Jardin des Plantes]

Mathias Morhardt, too, has a poet’s soul—one trapped in the exhausting machinery of journalism. He has fashioned magnificent verses with a strange metallic hardness to them, dressed in grand, inflexible language—with a clear preference for adverbs and verbs—that bestow upon the page a rigid bearing all its own. He is a Platonist of the most obstinate sort, as indeed one must be. His is that splendid rhythmic utterance:

“It is nature, within me, that passes whilst I remain”¹¹⁶

Yet he is just as much a sentimentalist, but one whose sincerity, piercing insight, and depth of feeling matter more than delicacy. As for his versification, he follows, generally speaking, those earlier liberties that allowed plurals to rhyme with singulars, all while maintaining both an understanding of and devotion to the grand alexandrine, as evidenced by:

C’est les vieux empereurs germains, au geste lent
Montrant la tiare d’or sur des coussins sanglants
Cortège impérial qui revient d’Italie.

[Those old Germanic emperors, with measured gesture
Displaying the golden tiara upon blood-soaked cushions—
Imperial cortège returning from Italy.]

What he strives for is a powerful central thought radiating outward through expressions of sensuality rendered sentimental—which is to say, an ideal grounded in synthesis.

Few figures illustrate more compellingly than Ernest Aubert the arduous passage that so many poets of this age have had no choice but to undertake. Despite having fallen initially beneath the spell of writers belonging to the generation prior to our own, the very moment the new ideal revealed itself to him, he progressed toward it with something like instinctive necessity. Now, following the path of every consequential artist of our age, his determination to render the unnameable has led him to forsake definiteness and minute particularity in pursuit of the unified impression to be summoned—permitting things to fade into a soft indistinctness, gesturing toward ideas by means of the painterly and melodic qualities inherent in feelings and sensory perceptions. Yet he has kept faith with the noble ancient rhythms, simply liberated from those pointless shackles that would compromise the symbol. This poet may want for sensuality, but he commands both intelligence and imagination in remarkable supply:

Sur la plus haute tour d’un palais renaissance,
Fleur de pierre immobile au bord du flot qui bouge,
Une vierge aux longs yeux où sourit l’innocence,
Une vierge apparaît, blanche sur le fond rouge.

[Upon the loftiest tower of a Renaissance palace,
Stone flower motionless beside the shifting tide,
A virgin with elongated eyes where innocence finds solace,
A virgin appears, white against the crimson wide.]

Et sur la balustrade étendant sa main lente,
Elle contemple longuement, la vierge blanche,
La gloire du soleil dans la mer rutilante,
Et rêve, et son front haut sous son rêve se penche.

[And resting her languid hand upon the balustrade,
She gazes long, this virgin white and pure,
Upon the sun’s glory in the glittering sea displayed,
And dreams, her noble brow bending to reverie’s allure.]

Reine captive ou fée au pouvoir des génies,
Regarde-t-elle au ciel changeant les silhouettes
Des Rois libérateurs dont les armes bénies
Pressent à l’horizon leurs batailles muettes?

[Captive queen or fairy bound by genii’s might,
Does she watch the shifting heavens for the forms
Of liberating Kings whose blessed arms invite
Their silent battles pressing at horizon’s storms?]

Dans l’éblouissement des chimériques flammes
Où l’avenir ouvert à ses yeux étincelle,
Voit-elle, déroulé pour les épithalames,
Le cortège du bel Élu qui vient vers elle?

[In the dazzlement of chimeric flames
Where the open future sparkles to her sight,
Does she see, unfurled for wedding hymns’ acclaim,
The cortège of the fair Elect approaching in his might?]

Ou, Rosa Mysticissima, l’Immaculée
Cherche-t-elle parmi l’embrasement des nues
La face de son Dieu doucement dévoilée
À l’extase de ses prières ingénues?

[Or, Rosa Mysticissima, the Immaculate Maid,
Does she seek amidst the blazing clouds above
Her God’s face gently unveiled and displayed
To the ecstasy of her artless prayers of love?] ¹¹⁷

Louis Le Cardonnel, as we find ourselves obliged to admit, belongs no longer to Poetry. The poet has taken sacred vows. Did young Literature need to prove the sincerity behind its mysticism in such a manner? Only time will show if the Church proves capable of celebrating its life force or simply records its own death—by either letting the supremely pure poet (who has not yet been dissolved into the supremely pious Levite) give voice to his faith in imperishable art, or by silencing both the art and the one who creates it. Therefore, if only as a memorial to the poet he might have become, I record here these verses by Louis Le Cardonnel:

LE RÊVE DE LA REINE

La Reine aux cheveux d’ambre, à la bouche sanglante,
Tient de sa dextre longue ouvert le vitrail d’or,
Pensant que l’heure coule ainsi qu’une eau trop lente.
En ses yeux le reflet d’une tristesse dort,
Et sur sa robe, où sont des fleurs bizarres d’or,
Elle laisse dormir son autre main si froide
Que dans un sombre jour de chapelle qui dort
De moins rigides mains portent la palme roide!
Soudain, quelle moiteur à sa peau fine et froide!
A son front lisse perle une sourde langueur,
Et son corsage en dur brocart semble moins roide:
Est-ce toi, si longtemps immobile, son cœur,
Qui pourras la savoir chasser, cette langueur,
Et faire étinceler enfin la somnolence
De ses yeux, si longtemps glacés comme son cœur,
Qui la feras tomber, l’armure du silence?
O crépuscule, dans ta grande somnolence
Un bois à l’horizon s’étage noir et bleu;
Haut, le croissant émerge et s’argente en silence:
L’Hippogriffe attendait dans le couchant de feu
Et la reine, égarant son regard noir et bleu
Maudit l’heure qui coule ainsi qu’une eau trop lente,
Et sous le dur brocart sentant sa gorge en feu
Mord son exsangue main de sa bouche sanglante!

[THE QUEEN’S DREAM

The Queen with amber hair, with bloodied mouth,
Holds open with her slender hand the golden pane,
Thinking how time flows like water far too slow.
Within her eyes the shadow of a sorrow sleeps,
And on her gown, where strange gold flowers bloom,
She lets her other hand lie sleeping, cold—
So cold that in the sombre light of drowsing chapel halls
Less rigid hands would bear the stiffened palm!
Then suddenly, what dampness on her fine, chill skin!
Upon her smooth brow beads a muted languor,
And her bodice of hard brocade seems somehow softer:
Is it you, so long unmoving, her heart,
That might dispel at last this languor,
And kindle finally the somnolence
Within her eyes, so long as frozen as her heart,
That might let fall the armour of her silence?
O twilight, in your vast somnolence
A wood spreads black and blue upon the horizon;
Above, the crescent moon emerges, silvering in silence—
The Hippogriff awaited in the sunset’s fire
And the queen, her black-blue gaze gone wild,
Curses the hour that flows like water far too slow,
And beneath hard brocade, feeling her breast aflame,
Bites her bloodless hand with her bloodied mouth!]

As a poet, Édouard Dubus seemed an unlikely champion of naturalism and anecdotal precision. That contradiction resolved itself quickly enough when his poetic instincts carried him straight into idealism. His song carries the melancholy of a pleasure-seeker who catches himself mid-dream, regretting with touching sincerity that life fails to match his vision. But the dream itself is life, and your dream becomes joy if you but know how to will it! From this current juncture, neither here nor there, this flowering born of grief:

Le ciel est envahi d’une tristesse grise
Où frissonne un reflet mourant de soleil froid;
La brise au fond du parc gémit, peur s’accroît,
Le marbre triomphal, blanc de givre, se brise.
Le rêve est désolé de brume toujours grise,
Le souvenir y laisse à peine un rayon froid.
Dans les âmes d’hiver dont la neige s’accroît
L’orgueil d’un cher empire évanoui se brise.
Pleuré longtemps par les rameaux crispés de froid,
Dans les bosquets voilés d’une dentelle grise
Un funèbre tapis de pourpre et d’or s’accroît.
Au glas du vent, la fleur d’illusion se brise.
Et, comme elle se meurt, dans l’atmosphère grise
Des yeux mystérieux luisent d’un soleil froid.

[The sky is invaded by a grey sadness
Where trembles a dying reflection of cold sun;
The breeze at the park’s depths moans, fear grows,
The triumphal marble, white with frost, breaks.
The dream is desolate with mist forever grey,
Memory leaves there scarcely a cold ray.
In winter souls whose snow increases
The pride of a dear vanished empire breaks.
Long wept by branches crisped with cold,
In the groves veiled with a grey lace
A funereal carpet of purple and gold grows.
At the wind’s death-knell, the flower of illusion breaks.
And, as it dies, in the grey atmosphere
Mysterious eyes shine with a cold sun.] ¹¹⁸

Jean Court:

… Par la nuit violette et d’étoiles lamée,
Vers le sphinx immortel tu lèveras les bras,
Implorant le secret de sa bouche fermée.
L’impitoyable sphinx ne te répondra pas
Et tu continueras ta route aventureuse
Sans retrouver jamais le chemin de Damas.
Tu t’assiéras alors sous le porche du Temple
Où viennent les Elus prier chaque matin.
Mais nulle voix d’en haut n’ordonnera Contemple!
Car tu ne saurais plus, ployant les deux genoux,
Des fidèles courbés suivre le bon exemple.
Au fond de l’abside où l’ombre creuse les trous,
A travers un éclat fabuleux de miracle,
Fulgureront pourtant dans un courroux d’or roux
Les portes saintes de l’éternel tabernacle,
Mais leurs rayons fougueux flagelleront en vain
Ton zèle moribond qui malgré toi renâcle.
Et tandis qu’aux Croyants qui s’enivrent du vin,
Du Vin fameux qui ruisselle au fond du calice,
Se révèleront les splendeurs de l’ART DIVIN,
Tu mourras lentement et d’un très long supplice,
Dans le regret de n’avoir pu franchir le seuil
Pour t’être libéré trop tôt du dur calice.
Laisse pleurer ton âme et vêts ton cœur de deuil.

[… Through the violet night spangled with stars,
Towards the immortal sphinx you will raise your arms,
Imploring the secret of its closed mouth.
The pitiless sphinx will not answer you
And you will continue your adventurous road
Without ever finding again the road to Damascus.
You will sit then beneath the Temple’s porch
Where the Elect come to pray each morning.
But no voice from above will command: Behold!
For you would no longer know, bending both knees,
How to follow the good example of the bowed faithful.
In the depths of the apse where shadow hollows out voids,
Through a fabulous burst of miracle,
Will blaze forth nevertheless in a wrath of reddish gold
The holy doors of the eternal tabernacle,
But their fierce rays will scourge in vain
Your moribund zeal which despite yourself recoils.
And while to the Believers who intoxicate themselves with wine,
With that famous Wine which streams in the chalice’s depths,
The splendours of DIVINE ART will be revealed,
You will die slowly and of a very long torment,
In regret at not having been able to cross the threshold
For having freed yourself too soon from the harsh ordeal.
Let your soul weep and clothe your heart in mourning.] ¹¹⁹

These verses certainly haven’t reached artistic mastery. Still, there’s no mistaking that their author, young as he is, possesses genuine poetic gifts. I’m delighted by his use of that old allegory comparing Art to a temple. What saves this from being merely conventional is the poet’s own intuition of Beauty as something grand and real, something both religious and modern, something that exists for its own sake, sufficient unto itself. With his sense of mystery, his mystical hunger for the absolute, a poet who brings such qualities to his work can hardly be said to want for much.

Much the same could be said of Fernand Mazade. One need only consider his Hamlet:

La branche de verveine et votre pureté,
De la délicatesse avec de l’ancolie,
N’avez-vous pas offert à sa mélancolie
Ce qu’avaient de plus doux la lande et votre cœur?
Oh! l’homme taciturne et pourtant si flatté!
Vous plaçâtes en vain sur sa tête pâlie
La plume longue et blanche, ô dernière Ophélie!
Et plus de grâce encor qu’il n’avait de langueur.
Mais sa plaie étant telle et mortelle sans doute,
Et mortelle parce qu’il l’aimait et que toute
Sa veille et tout son rêve étaient à l’élargir,
Ce devait être peu d’une bouche ravie,
Trop peu, vraiment! de vos caresses pour tarir
La fontaine de sang qui coulait sur sa vie.

[The branch of verbena and your purity,
Delicacy together with columbine,
Did you not offer to his melancholy
What was sweetest in the moorland and your heart?
Oh! the taciturn man and yet so flattered!
You placed in vain upon his pallid head
The long white feather, O last Ophelia!
And more grace still than he had languor.
But his wound being such and mortal without doubt,
And mortal because he loved it and because all
His vigil and all his dream were to widen it,
It must have been too little from a ravished mouth,
Too little, truly! of your caresses to stanch
The fountain of blood that flowed over his life.

Through lyrical expression and youthful vitality that occasionally pretends to be spent, Henri de Régnier embodies our contemporary artistic ambitions. Embodiment and achievement, however, aren’t always identical. With a kind of sovereign disdain for everything but Song itself, without planning any grand edifice, he plucks his finest thoughts and feelings like melodious blooms, those most deserving of verse’s immortal crown. His poetry, both remarkably young and remarkably accomplished, displays—as I observed of Laurent Tailhade’s work—a lyrical momentum that imperils the book’s coherence, each line standing alone rather than dwelling amongst its fellow strophes and odes. But this poet’s mysticism has moved beyond the gospels to drink directly from the wellsprings of human passion and dream, scattered at his pleasure throughout the natural world. His verse, which here too remains quintessentially Verse, stands nonetheless amongst the most distinctive ever penned. Nobly flexible, summoning through its very music all that is distant and enchanting, with its marked predilection for certain words—H. de Régnier could hardly compose thirty lines without at least once deploying that word “or”, itself as dazzling as the gold it names—with languors broken by force, force gentled by flow, this verse embodies youth whilst honouring tradition:

La Terre douloureuse a bu le sang des rêves!
Le vol évanoui des ailes a passé
Et le flux de la Mer a ce soir effacé
Le mystère des pas sur le sable des grèves:
Au Delta débordant son onde de massacre
Pierre à pierre ont croulé le temple et la cité
Et sous le flot rayonne un éclair irrité
D’or barbare frisant au front d’un simulacre;
Vers la Forêt néfaste vibre un cri de mort,
Dans l’ombre où son passage a hurlé gronde encor
La disparition d’une horde farouche,
Et le masque du Sphinx muet où nul n’explique
L’énigme qui crispait la ligne de sa bouche,
Rit dans la pourpre en sang de ce coucher tragique!

[The sorrowful Earth has drunk the blood of dreams!
The vanished flight of wings has passed
And the Sea’s tide has this evening erased
The mystery of footsteps on the sand of shores:
At the Delta overflowing its wave of massacre
Stone by stone have crumbled the temple and the city
And beneath the flood shines an irritated gleam
Of barbarous gold curling on the brow of an idol;
Towards the baneful Forest vibrates a cry of death,
In the shadow where its passage howled still rumbles
The disappearance of a savage horde,
And the mask of the mute Sphinx where none explains
The enigma that twisted the line of its mouth,
Laughs in the blood-purple of this tragic sunset!] ¹²⁰

And these opening lines from a Prelude:

Parfums d’algues, calme des soirs, chansons des rames,
Prestige évanoui dont s’éveille l’encor!
Et l’arôme des mers roses où nous voguâmes
A la bonne Fortune et vers l’Etoile d’or;
Echo d’une autre vie où vécurent nos âmes.
La mémoire d’alors et de tous les jadis
Où notre rêve aventura ses destinées
Aux hasards des matins, des soirs et des midis;
Et le mal de savoir que des aubes sont nées
Plus belles sous des cieux à jamais interdits.
Le songe d’un passé de choses fabuleuses
Propage son regret en notre âme qui dort.
Souvenir exhalé des ardeurs langoureuses
Qu’une Floride en fleurs épand sous les soirs d’or
Où les clartés des Étoiles sont merveilleuses.

[Perfumes of seaweed, calm of evenings, songs of oars,
Vanished prestige whose echo still awakens!
And the aroma of rose seas where we sailed
To good Fortune and towards the golden Star;
Echo of another life where our souls lived.
The memory of then and of all the yesterdays
Where our dream ventured its destinies
To the chances of mornings, evenings and noons;
And the pain of knowing that dawns were born
More beautiful beneath skies forever forbidden.
The dream of a past of fabulous things
Spreads its regret in our soul that sleeps.
Memory exhaled from languorous ardours
That a flowering Florida pours forth beneath golden evenings
Where the lights of Stars are marvellous.]

Alber Jhouney, whose spirit by its very nature seeks only absolute realities, is supremely the Poet for whom Beauty springs from Truth alone. A mystic, yes—and more: a devotee of those Most High Sciences which fashionable ignorance delights in scorning without understanding. Where so many search in vain for certainty and peace, Jhouney found both in these ancient teachings. He sought¹²¹ Wisdom and Light at the wellspring of all modern thought, in shadows shot through with the only true illumination, in the doctrines of the most ancient Sages, in that surest reflection of the Absolute ever to quicken man’s dim consciousness, the immemorial philosophy of the Initiates. From this crucible of truth, this most obscure poet—yet one of those of whom Villiers de l’Isle-Adam speaks, who bear their glory within their own breast—has drawn forth beauties both radiant and unprecedented. Occultists and Magi—let the mockers have their sport! Mockery is but Doubt’s defence against Faith, the reflex of a scepticism that cannot bear to die. Yet beneath every sneer sounds a note of lament; the sob betrays itself through the grimace. And humanity truly does weep—that vast, craven portion of humanity that has forfeited its claim to the Absolute and now cannot bear to hear it mentioned. Little wonder they turn deaf ears to the true poets, for poets speak nothing but the Absolute, strive towards nothing but the Absolute: Absolute in Thought, Absolute in Fiction, Absolute in Expression. This radiant Trinity—none shall possess it perfectly, I know. Yet it remains Man’s birthright, were he but what he ought to be. Let some few at least bear witness that they cannot be reconciled to their dispossession. This noble lament of the poets, these sentinels keeping watch through the world’s long night, stands as an indictment of our somnolent age. The world knows this well enough. It answers with contempt calculated to hurt us, yet heavy matter lacks the power to rise by itself. In reality, people are nowhere near as comfortable as they make themselves out to be. A dim awareness flickers in them. The Solitary Spirit’s work, the Poet’s soul and craft, endangers the social arrangement they have chosen for themselves. Never mind that this work is the only thing conferring human dignity whilst the crowd wallows in brutish stupidity. Should genius ever attain its perfect realisation, its advent into the Absolute, this union of Man with God would so intoxicate humanity with revulsion for life outside the divine that all appearances would collapse into the Real. Alber Jhouney has given this marvellous expression in a poem I would gladly quote entire—a work that reads like a luminous gloss on certain passages in Séraphita. The human soul, the Queen, burning for the Absolute, suffers tempters to whisper enticements toward every relative pleasure: Archangels, Knights, Kings, Scholars, Poets, Demons—all have pleaded their suits in vain. The Queen remains unmoved. Even the Mage,

Pale and beautiful as Apollonius of Tyana,

master of heaven’s and hell’s secrets yet confounding them in an egoistic pride where Hell holds sway—even he murmurs his temptation:

Si tu veux être Lucifer et sa victime,
La tentatrice et la séduite, laisse-moi
Éveiller en ton sein que mon souffle envenime
Un désir, non pas riche et dévorant, mais froid
Comme la volonté d’une raison perverse
Qui, pour toi, me rendra moins dangereux que toi.
Voici le chant secret, l’eau morte que je verse
En l’urne taciturne et dure, dans ton cœur,
Eau corrosive qui le mord et qui le perce;
Eau qui change en bronze informe l’airain vainqueur
Et l’urne orgueilleuse en vase des Danaïdes
Toujours vide et rongé de soif et de rancœur.
Les parfums ténébreux et les parfums splendides
Émanés de nos corps nous environneront
D’Archanges monstrueux et de Démons candides.
…………………………………..
La Reine répond: Seul le silence me touche
D’Elohim dont le cœur reste mystérieux……

[If you wish to be Lucifer and his victim,
The temptress and the seduced, let me
Awaken in your breast which my breath envenoms
A desire, not rich and devouring, but cold
Like the will of a perverse reason
Which, for you, will make me less dangerous than you.
Here is the secret song, the dead water that I pour
Into the taciturn and hard urn, into your heart,
Corrosive water that bites it and pierces it;
Water that changes triumphant brass into shapeless bronze
And the proud urn into the vessel of the Danaïdes
Always empty and gnawed by thirst and rancour.
The tenebrous perfumes and the splendid perfumes
Emanated from our bodies will surround us
With monstrous Archangels and candid Demons.
…………………………………..
The Queen responds: Only the silence touches me
Of Elohim whose heart remains mysterious……]

But Elohim withholds his revelation; the Queen must die.

Grands découragements qui tombez des étoiles
Comme d'énormes voix d'ombre et de désaveu,
Voix froides qui chantez l'isolement de Dieu,
Vous triomphez: je ferme humblement mes paupières.

[Great discouragements falling from the stars
Like vast voices of shadow and denial,
Cold voices singing God's aloneness—
You triumph: I close my eyes in humility.]

And she expires,

Alone in her genius and her death.

Yet her death annihilates the very life of the indifferent; her passing plunges the world into God:

Et des voix ont chanté que cette âme profonde,
La première depuis que les êtres sont nés,
Retourne à Dieu sans rien avoir voulu du monde.
Voici par son exemple et sa mort entraînés,
Pris de son âpre ivresse, accablés de leur vide,
Sûrs du néant de leurs délires obstinés,
Les êtres ont compris que le monde stupide
Recommence toujours le même avortement
Et que vivre hors Dieu n’est qu’un long suicide.
Ils sentent que l’esprit de la nature ment
Et les trompe par les désirs qui les épreignent
Et tous ont faim et soif de l’engloutissement.
………………………………….
Et la création sombre dans l’Absolu.

[And voices have sung that this profound soul,
The first since beings were born,
Returns to God without having wanted anything from the world.
Behold, drawn by its example and its death,
Seized by its harsh intoxication, overwhelmed by their void,
Sure of the nothingness of their obstinate deliriums,
Beings have understood that the stupid world
Always begins again the same abortion
And that to live outside God is only a long suicide.
They feel that the spirit of nature lies
And deceives them through the desires that grip them
And all hunger and thirst for engulfment.
………………………………….
And creation sinks into the Absolute.]