THE AFTER-WAR SPIRIT
IN LITERATURE
A General Introduction by
SAMUEL PUTNAM
stiamo uccidendo il Presente
per mettere in trono il Futuro
THE AFTER-WAR SPIRIT
IN LITERATURE
I
That literature, the practitioners of which are often vaguely referred to as "the young," which has sprung up in Europe since the War, and which has not been without its effect upon America, presents to the casual beholder a bewildering set of facets. That there is an after-the-War literature sufficiently distinct for critical demarcation, no one is likely to deny. There is, even, a readily recognizable after-the-War mode of writing; and behind this mode of writing there must lie a mode or modes of thought and feeling, a view of and an attitude toward life and the world that would not, conceivably, have been the same if the War had not occurred. What is that view, that attitude; what are those intellective, emotional and, it may be added, volitional modes which, if not directly produced by the Great Struggle, certainly have left their indelible impress upon the decade that followed it?
Looking about him and reading the works of les jeunes, one's first impression is that of a greater or less degree of anarchy;[1] but does this creative-aesthetic anarchy, and in how far, represent an anarchy upon the moral plane? That there has been a wide-reaching and deep-searching revaluation of values is not to be doubted; and this revaluation has been and is being accomplished, not so much by those who were close up to the rain of shells,—too frequently, these were left with little more than a sense of blind and furious impotence,—but more by that generation which immediately followed the fighters. The older men, most of them now in their forties, had, it is true, something like a foreshadowing of the new spirit, a sense at least of the imminence of a new order, as in those lines of the Italian soldier-poet, Oxilia, quoted above: "The Past is dead, and we are slaying the Present with bayonets, to put the Future on its throne." Before he fell, Oxilia left the refrain: Viva, viva la vita! Viva! The men in the trenches died thirsting for life; the new generation is doing its utmost to find life, in literature and in life.[2]
It has seemed to many that the War struck at the very bases of civilization, and that the superstructure is today tottering, if not fallen.[3] This, with the young has produced an intellectual crisis. The older ones might go on; they might go back and pick up where they had left off in 1914; they might go back to the rear-guard of Symbolism or the advance-guard of a prematurely slain Imagism; they might, like M. Paul Claudel, write charming introductions to Rimbaud—but the younger man will tell you[4] that it is a hopeless bourgeois vulgarity to make any further reference to the "bateau ivre!" The young demand certitude,—the certitude, in any event, of the uncertain,—and certitude is another name for faith; the smiling, the "elegant," the "pretty" and the indifferent scepticism of an Anatole France is not for them. But certitude? Where is it to be found in the world left by the War? In this world, an utter disorientation would appear to be the keynote. Jean Cocteau, facing a cosmos of unclassifiable bric-à-brac, takes refuge in the Church;[5] and whatever the refuge, whether a haven be sought or disdained, it is in a manner a universe of bric-à-brac which the writer who has come up, say, since 1920 (Cocteau, of course, dates from much further back) looks out upon and endeavors to portray, when he does endeavor to portray it—he is, as a rule, little concerned with setting it to rights.
There is, then, something "in the air." There is a vast unrest and a vast despair, but one for which it is extremely difficult to discover a common denominator.[6] There is, for one thing, a tremendous appetite, which, with the widening of the field of choice, brings on its own paralysis. How choose from amid all the infinite possibilities of doing, knowing and feeling,—the seemingly boundless possibilities of freedom? (Compare William James' "possible Me's,") How resign one's self to the arduous necessity of choice, a necessity, as with André Gide of an older generation, that is implied in action, action becoming thus a limitation? Others feel anything but a sense of freedom. To the young Frenchman, the habit of freedom, become a memory, causes the American by contrast to appear a free being. The result is, if he cannot have freedom, he would conquer the illusion, an illusion of freedom and of power. The thing for which he is looking is a way out; his one desire is evasion, escape, a sort of Huysmansesque "hors du monde, n'importe où." This will explain the passion, one which the average American or the normal-going citizen anywhere will find difficult to understand, for the "acte gratuit," some action which shall assert one's power of doing, of choosing, as when, in the Caves du Vatican, Gide's Lafcadio, for no other reason, pushes an innocent victim out the door of a railway carriage.
Impotence, one way or another, it is that. The German Remarque has given a revealing interview. A combatant who knew only the last years of fighting, he confesses that he merely has transferred his own feeling of impotence in confrontation with life to the subject of war; in which respect, he stands in some contrast with the objective Renn. What we have is a certain apotheosis of unrest, as an end in itself, or, according to Marcel Arland, author of a three-volume war novel, a new mal du siècle.[7] This new mal du siècle, however, is not precisely the same as the one that Baudelaire knew; it differs from that of either the Romantics or the Decadents, although its victims, if anything, are more akin to the latter than to the former. A plausible attempt has been made to connect the new Weltschmerz with an older Sturm und Drang, and to trace the whole back to early German philosophic idealism. Signor Francesco Flora, for one, has[6] made the effort; but there still remains a difference between the two. The new is anti-lyrical; it lacks the Romantic's release of tears; it is, in short, marked by what the French term sécheresse. Any one who would get the difference has but to read such a book as Drieu La Rochelle's Le Jeune Européen and contrast the author's attitude with that of Lord Byron or Alfred de Musset.
How is one to bring some kind of critical order out of this apparent chaos? The modern attitude is always a complex and often in appearance, an incoherent one. Is there some logical concatenation of tendencies, one reflective of what might be called the collective soul of the epoch? A case in point is that auctorial "unintelligibility" which is one of the most persistent of the reproaches hurled at the young writer of today. A business man is to be heard speaking disdainfully of a volume "parts of which even the most erudite persons find it impossible to understand." Is there something that can bring such a reader to see the reason for this? What is wanted is not one of the patented quick guides to culture, but a sincere attempt at a rapprochement.[8] The difficulty is, the young writer is inclined to scorn any such unbending, superciliousness being a part of his attitude, if not of his creed. Such a gesture from the extreme Left is, it may be, a trifle too much to expect; but there is a certain middle ground, however much the inexorable Left may contemn it, from which something at once intelligent and intelligible may be said; and it is from this "extreme center," as he describes it, that M. André Berge addresses us in his L'Esprit de la Litterature moderne,[9] which is, perhaps, the first wholly sympathetic and satisfactory effort to gather up the manifold tangled threads of after-the-War modernity as embodied in the art of writing.[10]
II
Everything depends upon the critic and his approach. Les Jeunes, for the most part, decline to hold any brief for themselves. They are even content to let their "sincerity" be challenged, and to bear the reproach of "cynicism" or any other that may be tossed in their direction. To them, the old judicial criticism simply cannot be made to apply. Let the critic don the robes of a judge, and he will heat no evidence. But this criticism is rapidly passing, if it is not already a thing of the past, even though we do hear M. Henri Massis calling for a return to the ermine, and for the restitution of "reason" and the "level head."[11] The newer type of critic, like M. Berge, is not a judge but a confidant; he is one who looks beneath the wilful cynical veneer and discovers a "purity," in the form of a fundamental intellectual honesty. He knows that, with the young, tendency is more important than accomplishment, what they mean to do or would like to do than what they may be doing or may have done.[12] Not only that, he is willing to permit the young to lay down their own laws; and one of those laws, according to Massimo Bontempelli, leader of the Italian Novecentisti, or Twentieth Century Group, is that there is no law in judging artistic results; each work of art, like each individual, is to be judged in itself; in which is to be seen an aftermath of Croce.[13]
There could be no better plea for understanding than that made by a before-the-War leader of the young, one who died in hospital the day before the Armistice was signed, Guillaume Apollinaire:
A ceux qui jurent la perfection de l'ordre.
Nous qui quêtons partout l'aventure,
Nous ne sommes pas vos ennemis.
Nous voulons vous donner de vastes et d'étranges domaines
Où le mystere en fleur s'offre à qui veut le cueillir.
Il y a la des jeux nouveaux des couleurs jamais vues
Mille phantasmes impondérables
Auxquels il jaut donner de la réalité.
Nous voulons explorer la beauté contrée énorme où tout se tait.
Il y a aussi le temps qu'on peut chasser et faire revenir.
Pitié pour nous qui combattons toujours aux frontières
De l'illimité et de l'avenir
Pitié pour nos erreurs, pitié pour nos péchés.[14]
With those who were the perfection of order.
We who everywhere seek adventure,
We are not your enemies.
We would give you vast and strange domains
Where flowering mystery waits for him would pluck it.
There are new flames and colors never glimpsed
A myriad bodiless phantoms
On which we must confer reality.
We would explore beauty, enormous silent land.
There is a season for the hunt and for the huntsman's return.
Have compassion on us who are always fighting on the frontiers
Of the boundless future,
Compassion for our errors, compassion for our sins.
Apollinaire, somewhat unfortunately, is no longer the fashion; he is no longer "chic;"[15] and indeed, he has fallen into profane hands. Nevertheless,—the August, 1914, number (significant date!) of Les Soirées de Paris lies open before me—he was the animating spirit of that modernity which, transformed by the War, he might have difficulty at times in recognizing. Was it not he who coined the word Surréalisme (following Huysmans' Supranaturisme; see the second chapter of Là-Bas)? But where, and this is the difference in generations, Apollinaire pleaded for toleration, the after-the-War youth scorns the plea. He must be understood, if understood at all, in spite of himself; and this is very much the feat that M. Berge has performed.
It was some years ago that the writer last mentioned, as the editor of Les Cashiers du Mois, conducted one of those "enquêtes" or symposiums, of which the French are so fond. This particular "enquête" was addressed to young writers, and had to do with their outlook upon life and upon the business of writing. The result, published under the significant title of Examen de Conscience, is one of the documents, and should become one of the archives, of after-the-War literature. The collected responses were remarkable for their intense and burning sincerity, for their truly confessional air. They were remarkable, above all, for the revealed attitude of the respondents toward what is known as literature. Life, it appeared, was so much more important; as Rimbaud once had exclaimed, "Prends l'éloquence et tords son cou," so these men whose trade was writing seemed to be saying, "Take literature and wring its neck!"[16] The truth is, the War had made the writer self-conscious; it had made him feel the necessity of justifying his own existence.
It is, accordingly, by his own attitude that we are justified in approaching the after-the-War writer from the side of life, that is to say, from the human and the psychologic side.
III
Each century, remarks Bontempelli, has a character of its own. The observation, doubtless, had been made before him; but to the young (Bontempelli, as a matter of fact, is forty-six), each truth achieved is a discovery. One of the distinguishing characteristics of the present century would appear to be its insistence upon the fact of youth, whether physical or technical. Certain older critics,[17] it is true, believe that much of the youth we think we know is an illusion, that we chance to be passing through a rude, primitive, "young" cycle, but that there is, in reality, too much of age in our souls, too much of antiquity and senility, breeding cynicism and a sceptical posture, to permit of our being young.
However this may be, the stress of the Novecentisto, by way of instance, upon a radical differentiation of the Twentieth century in its first quarter from the century that went before is found, upon investigation, to be fairly justified. The Nineteenth century, we are told, ended in 1914, and the Twentieth began "some time after the War." Our aesthetic chronology as a whole is subjected to a strenuous revision, with a Classic era prior to Christ, a Romantic era extending from the Sermon on the Mount "to the Ballets Russes," and a new post-bellum age, marked by a revolt against the naturalism, the aestheticism, the psychological analysis, the "petit-bourgeois taste" and the "false humanitarianism" of the last hundred years of the preceding epoch.[18] Psychology and aestheticism, in particular, are the "twin microbes" to be combatted.[19] As for beauty, its epitaph is read by Signor Bontempelli.[20] There is a revolt against the "lyric minute" of Romanticism, a revolt against the Romantic's words as well as his tears;[21] but there is, at the same time, a reaction from the before-the-War avant-garde, with its vague talk of "sensitiveness" (sensibilité), "dynamism," "reality," etc.[22] Contemporary youth prides itself upon its seriousness and upon its confusions, upon the seriousness of its confusions, with the pain of living balanced by the fear of dying, the need of believing by the habit of doubt (a new version of C'est la faute à Voltaire), and a taste for not believing by the desire to dare to believe in one's unbelief. These confusions occasionally will be found embodied in one work or in one created personality, as in the case of Giuseppe Antonio Borgese's Rubè.[23] Such characteristics, it may be seen, are not those of the young intellectual prior to 1914, with his repressed sentimentality, his unpersuaded scepticism and a dream-like nostalgia hovering over all.
It might seem that the trend has been a downward one; but there is, M. Berge assures us, a rebound to the stars. No little of the appearance of evil comes from the attempt at a forthright break with tradition. If the actual break is not as abrupt a one as it is pro claimed to be,[24]it is, still, startlingly pronounced. Where the beforethe-War aesthete (see Andre Salmon's L'Art vivant) liked to speak of the new art as being a "prolongation" of tradition, his successor of today would throw all tradition overboard. He rejects all words, formulas and limitations; he will listen to no talk of an "esprit français" or any other esprit except his own; his object is "ne pas se laisser duper." He is opposed to the transcendental and to all absolutes; and this, as M. Jacques Rivière has pointed out,[25] is one of the traits that distinguish him from the Romantic of old. For the transcendental, he would substitute the immanent, and find a psychological (despite his revolt against Nineteenth-century psychology) in place of a metaphysical unity. He is animated by a spirit of quest that leaves him no peace. He loves life, but he loves it in much the same fashion as did Job and Schopenhauer. He will dispense with any sort of unity, if needs be,—he has been, very largely, forced to dispense with it,—and he may be heard declaring, "Only the accidental interests us."
All this has not been without its social causes. There has been a certain hardening of the social arteries, there is an obvious mechanistic trend in contemporary society, and these are forces that go to produce a systematic aridity, an aridity that attains a high degree of visibility in certain Italians, among whom may be mentioned Arturo Onofri, Corrado Govoni, Camillo Sbarbaro, Emilio Cecchi (though he is redeemed by lyricism) and Borgese. With writers of this type, faith and hope are gone, and charity is clung to despairingly. Finding it impossible to attain to faith, the doubter seeks the certainty of his doubt. More or less indifferent alike to internal and external reality, he is conscious of but one need, the need of expression in the eternal moment. Expression, no longer perfection, is the thing.[26] This has a decidedly unsocial, not to say inhuman ring; yet, curiously enough, the new literature seeks to be more human than the old.
To begin with, the doctrine of art for art's sake is dead.[27] Mr. Clive Bell, with his "significant form" and his fine aesthetic tremor, was, perhaps, its expiring gasp. The art of the young century aims at being popular "in a modern sense." It aims at being, first of all, interesting, exciting, amusing; and the old popular theatre, now defunct, the cinema (but not the avant-garde variety) and the Nick Carter or detective thriller[28] are its models, while American jazz, with its high-strung emotive tension, taps out the beat. Its appeal is to the uncultivated, even the illiterate and the foreign reader, the sort of reader who turns to the back of the book "to see how it ends." The cult of beauty, as has been said, is done away with; beauty is too feminine in an age of virile ugliness; in place of it, we are to have something resembling a new Homeric age, with the creation of myths, of fables and of legends as the objective of the poet, who is thereby restored to his primitive etymological rights as a maker.[29]
The art-work, in short, is no longer regarded as a subject; it has become an object. We will create, says the Novecentist, objects destined to live outside ourselves, and so, change the world. This escape into an expressionistic objectivity is especially visible in Germany, where a nene Sachlichkeit, or New Reality, is being sought in the impersonality of things. Paul Fechter[30] is the prophet here. The doctrine as elaborated holds certain contradictions, as well as elements of romanticism and of sensationalism, as has been pointed out by its critics;[31] but it has, none the less, a contemporary significance.
The very modern writer has no faith in literature, lyrism or the word, but, in opposition to that renewed quest of pure form inspired by early-century Croceanism, would build for himself a doctrine of contenutismo, calling for a content that is modern at all costs, modern by program,—for the advanced effort of the day is nothing if not "horriblement tendancieux."[32] These tendencies are, possibly, verbally more stressed in Italy, where a number of non-purely-artistic influences are to be encountered in the modern theatre, along with a general reflection of after-War disorientation. They are not confined to Italy, however, and in such semi-popular, semi-"advanced" periodicals as Der Querschnitt and Variétés may be seen an attempt at bringing art and life together.
The Italians of the moment, being extremists, have carried this doctrine to a point which many will look upon as a reduction to an absurdity. The test of a work of art, announced Massimo Bontempelli some years ago, is its translatability; and so, in founding his review, "900," he decided to publish not in Italian but in French.[33] This would shut out the stylist, the writer with the handsome rounded periods and the well-turned phrase, and would put the emphasis where it belonged, on invention.[34] For the Novecentist, hating the word,[35] hates the man of letters, the "pseudo-man" and "anti-poet." Poet, writer, man of letters: such, he will tell you, is the downward slope. It is away from style and back to drama,—back, for certain of the young, to Dostoievski.[36] The quintessence of the art of writing is the cinema; the conception and not the means is important. Writing is not an art of words, but an art of things and facts. Language in itself is beneath discussion: "The only intelligent questions are those having to do with thought and the imagination."[37]
This ultra-objectivity has its perils. In Germany, it has tended to degenerate into reportage, a reportage borrowed partly from the Russians and partly from the Americans, and representing, one might say, a combination of Russian collectivism and American dynamism. The writer here sees life and reports events under their more ephemeral and fleeting aspect, rather than sub specie aeternitatis. But voices have already been raised in protest, and we hear Alfred Döblin urging that the author put himself back into his work and throw aside the mask of reportage.
On the whole, however, the insistence is that the critic consider ideas and feeling, not form. Whether the leaning be to verbal music, as with the late-Joyceans and some of the Russian word-patternists, or to verbal architecture, as with the Italian Novecentisti, there is a vast contempt for all purisms and for the "problem of art" as that problem once was understood.
IV
The very word, "modernity," the modernist will tell us, has come to take on a new content; and this has been due, in no small degree, to the new mathematics and the new philosophy of time and space. Bergson and Einstein have exerted an incalculable influence over the young literature, and the atom, the molecule have become subjects of literary importance. It might almost be said that the young European feels himself to be a lost being, lost in space and in time. Time to him is something sacred, the most mysterious of essences, possibly the most recognizable image of God; and the one great sin is anything that deceives man as to the true nature of time, that is, as to its duration. And hence it is, as M. Berge observes, that we find modern literature definitely taking up a position in the time-stream.
This brings with it a new attitude toward literary immortality, an attitude which must be somewhat like that of the builders of the pyramids. The after-War writer is quite careless as to whether or not he will last; and in this respect, he differs from an older writer, even though in many other ways a precursor, like Gide. This carelessness of immortality will account for the transient character of the language that is frequently employed, the use of argot, etc. The Novecentisti are to be heard shouting for the anonymity of the artist, the legend-builder and myth-creator. Art, from now on, is to be "applied art," in an exact sense of the term, and the artist is to be a craftsman endowed with a medieval humility. There are to be, as a corollary, no more masterpieces,—none, except collective ones, like the Gothic cathedrals. For the artist who is distinctively of today lives and builds in the moment, and in that moment finds eternity.
The moment is the soul of reality, the new absolute; and art, in many cases, shows a tendency to become a cult of the instant, what the Italians term instantaneità. This worship of the moment confers upon the artist, often, the appearance of an acrobat, as with Jean Cocteau, Ramon Gomez de la Serna and Orio Vergani.[38] Such writers endeavor to give us the impression of the moment in fields whither they have been led by their own instability. The frequency with which the figure of the tight-rope-walker occurs in the pages of Cocteau is illuminating. The author of Le Grand Écart, it is not to be forgotten, in a manner of speaking grew up with Picasso, and would appear to have imbibed something of that playboy spirit which undoubtedly was in Cubism.[39] Much of the same spirit is to be found in the work left by Guillaume Apollinaire, but it was not until after the War that it came to fruition. On this side, the advanced literary art of the day, an art viewed as risk, may be said to have its affinities with jazz, the essence of which is a sense of tension and of imminent danger. "The rule of life and of art," says Bontempelli, "for the next hundred years: to find adventure in every instant, up to the moment when one either becomes a constellation or crumbles into bits." (Such is that "Mediterranean music" which, according to the intending founder of a European art that shall be a prolongation of Mediterranean culture, is to be born to the bar baric strains of trombone and saxophone.)
It is not strange if, with such a view behind it, the writing of the after-War decade has a prevailing fragmentary character. The fragment has seemed to be the expression, and an apotheosis of this tendency is, possibly, to be seen in Joyce's Work in Progress. In France, there is Cocteau, whose predilection for the fragment is to be seen even in those "itemized" photographs (nose, ears, eyes, hands, etc.) which he is fond of having taken of himself. Signor Bontempelli has spoken[40] of the fragmentary quality of the Italian "interlude"; and this fragmentariness, M. Benjamin Crémieux[41] assures us, persists today.
For the young literature, to repeat, is in the time-stream, what Alexei Tolstoy alludes to as "the flow of contemporaneity." This means that the view of art held is a dynamic rather than a static one, with a Bergsonian flux replacing the old "arrested motion." The work of art itself has become a stream, and tends, according to M. Berge (though Bontempelli would disagree) to approach the art of music, or more accurately, that visual symphonic form which is to be discovered in the cinema. The influence of the cinema is another highly important one. Its effect upon the novel alone, sometimes by way of release and sometimes through suggested tech nique, has been considerable, as may be seen in connection with Gide's Les Faux-Monnayeurs.[42] It is easy, among other things, to trace the relation between the motion-picture throwback and the interior monologue, that internal cinematographic music which is both a result and a cause of jazz-age tension.
No, the art of the decade is nothing if not relativist. Take the Italian theatre. The "grottesco" Signor Pellizzi notes,[43] fulfills Adriano Tilgher's concept of a "teatro della relatività," with its play of reality and the imagination, of will and the belief in will, of feeling and the illusion of feeling; while Pirandello's rather primary symbolism[44] tends to objectify and to render real the alternatives of thought, the terms of a constant antithesis.[45] The intimate, intellectual, psychologic character of this playhouse is to be seen in the work of such men as Chiarelli, Antonelli, Bonelli (in dramatists, too, such as Vergani and Alberto Cecchi) and such a piece as Bontempelli's Nostra dea (1925).
In Russia, we have Andrei Biely and his "syncretic panoramas." Biely arose to protest against an effort on the part of the revolution ary populists to introduce the "sober principles of a falsely classical realism, at a time when Einstein had destroyed such realism." He further proclaimed that "The static of present forms will be broken; the 'form in motion' will replace the 'form at rest'; and there will no longer be novels, poems, stories or dramas in our sense of the word; there will be syncretic panoramas; the byt (life of the people), as we understand it, will disappear."[46] The old forms, in brief, were to be replaced by "syncretic apprehensions."
The aspiration toward music may be a feminine one, as the Novecentist would have us believe, and the latter may choose to bend his efforts in the direction of "the virile laws of architecture," in an age marked, if not by an overlapping, by a decided interreaction of the arts. Nevertheless, music and the cinema would appear to be the best analogies; and in this regard, the young Frenchman, being a bit closer to Bergson, is more typical of the dominant spirit than is his correspondent beyond the Alps, who may be a bit too close up to Mussolini.
V
It is not alone mathematics and the Twentieth-century philosophy of time and space that have shaped perceptibly the course of young European writing. There is also Freud and, following Freud, the modern medical stress on the dream. The young writer may have his occasional sneer for "scientific superstition," but the tendency today is to bring science and literature into contact, and to employ literature as an implement, as an instrument of investigation. In this, it might seem that the contemporary artist is treading in the footsteps of Zola and those other Nineteenth-century realists whom he professes to despise, who likewise strove to put the science and the philosophy of their day (how much of it is left!) into the work of art. However this may be, he is extremely sensitive both to science and to philosophy. As for the latter, he may tell you at one moment that she is an impotent old woman, but at the next moment, he will be insisting upon the essentially speculative and philosophic basis of his creed. His view of philosophy as a sterile handmaiden comes from his discovery that a number of the old philosophic principles have broken down completely, threatening the cohesion of the cosmos that surrounds him. He has discovered, for instance, that the old axiom, Natura non jacit saltus, is not invariably true. This may elate him, but it presents him, at the same time, with a great and devastating suspicion. The old philosophers having nothing to offer, he turns to the new, to Einstein and Bergson, to Planck and Meyerson and, on the psychologic side, to Freud. His central tenet is that of the primacy of sensation; and here, while looking for literary ancestors and going back to Gide's Nourritures terrestres (1897),—that insurrection of the individual heralded by Gide, Peguy and Suares has not been without its effect,—he comes upon a metaphysician precursor in Joseph Baruzi,[47] and he is also indebted to the researches of Janet in psychologic automatism. He draws for further sustenance upon modern sociologists, such as Durkheim and Levy-Bruhl, and finds an inspiration toward a sense of the body collective in Jules Romains and the Unanimist (Abbaye) group. As a rule, he is inclined to revolt against such Nineteenth-century thinkers as Taine, Spencer and Marx; but they are not the only ones to stir his contempt,[48] for his art is sometimes announced as a revolt against "the stupidity of the century"—meaning, his own. The influence of Nietzsche and of Georges Sorel, on the other hand, is a last ing one.
If it is literary forbears that are being sought, there are enough of them to be found. There is Alfred de Vigny, who, in the Preface to his Poèmes antiques et modernes, 1827, boasts of having "mis en scène une pensée philosophique sous une forme épique ou dramatique."[49] There is Baudelaire, and his Correspondances. One may even go as far back as Rabelais' famous "bone," or "substantific marrow."[50] Coming down, one meets with Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarme, Laforgue, all of whom have undergone something of a resurrection. The Surréalistes have their own Isidore Ducasse, or the "Comte de Lautréamont," while the Dadaists—and the Surréalistes as well, as a matter of fact,—may trace their descent from the pictuiesque Jacques Vaché, of whom more will be said later. Some would see the beginning of the modern movement in France in the launching of Jean Royère's review, La Phalange, in 1906, the poets gathered about this organ being the descendants lineal of Mallarmé and Symbolism. There are yet other names: Charles Cros, friend of Verlaine and of Rimbaud; Germain Nouveau; Alfred Jarry, the author of Ubu roi (1888-1896), a work little known outside of France that has had a very wide influence; the literary Cubists, Apollinaire, Salmon, Jacob; Gustave Kahn (credited with the origination of free verse); etc. There are, in addition, certain figures, such as the Flemish Jean de Bosschère, author of Béâle-Gryne, 1909, and Dolorine et les ombres, 1911, of whom it would be rather difficult to say at times whether they are belated Symbolists or true precursors of Surréalisme.[51] The line of descent, indeed, is very clear; Symbolism; Cubism; Futurism; Poésie pure; Dadaism; Super realism.
If, in this Introduction and by other writers, the literature of a continent is so frequently spoken of in terms of French literature, it is for the reason that Franc's historic rôle is that of "hostess," as M. Valéry Larbaud has put it, in the "European conversation." But there are certain figures that loom above any boundary-lines. There are certain poets,—Blake, Hülderlin, Leopardi,[52] Rilke,[53]—who are by way of being the ancestors of today. But for the young French man, and for many writers outside of France, there are two names which, whenever the subject comes up, must be mentioned at once. Those are the names of Gide and Proust.
In French literature and that literature which has felt the influence of the French, Proust and Gide are the forerunners, the fountain heads of the two main streams: Proust, who says: "L'Art recompose exactement la Vie," and Gide, with his "Le génie du roman fait vivre le possible, non pas le réel." To reconstruct with exactitude the panorama of life, through a recherche du temps perdu; to make the possible come alive, which is Gide's attempt in Les Faux-Monnayeurs. M. Berge, in his book, excellently differentiates the tendencies represented by these two writers. The Proust tendency he describes as "intellectual," the Gide as "affective." Proust, on the surface, appears to be primarily concerned with sensibilite, but it is intelligence that remains the motivating force in the end; the author seeks to understand that which he feels. This may be termed a realistic tendency, inasmuch as it would put art at the service of life, or rather, of reality. With Gide, on the contrary, it is the play of the intelligence over the surface that creates the first impression, and the author's attitude would seem to be almost the outworn one of art for art's sake; but upon closer inspection, we find that if the author is interested in ideas, he is concerned with them in so far as they affect the sensitive apparatus of man; it is the movements of the moi that hold him fascinated.
The contrast may be carried, and M. Berge does carry it, further still. Proust is looking always at life, Gide at the human soul within. The former proceeds, or likes to proceed, from the particular sensation to the intellectual and universal law. Proust is an observer, whose characters seek reality within themselves, whereas Gide is attracted by the gesture, and from the gesture goes inward and downward. Both writers, and this is a point which the French critic does not make with sufficient clarity, have a certain relation to life and the inner man. Gide probably comes the closer to life, for the reason that his tendency is affective, while the Proust tendency may be taken as standing for art and order in the expressive formulation of the real. As to actual "influence" exerted, it is not easy always to make a distinction; Gide's influence is, probably, the dominating one among his countrymen, but the Proust influence is, if not the deeper one, more widely diffused abroad. If the Gide influence is more strongly felt, it is for the reason that the youngest writers are little concerned with Proustian psychologizings. The gesture holds for them a greater interest; and if they explore the dream with Herr Freud as a guide, it is that they may discover a new and super reality.
Yet, the influence of Proust is not, by any means, to be under estimated. Proust brought in a new optic reality, a new fashion of seeing. This is the desire of the young European of today, to whatever nation he may chance to belong: to renew his vision of the world. It is what Joseph Delteil did in France; it is what Benjamin Jamès is doing in Spain. Read the Preface to the latter's Paula y Paulita;[54] it is in the nature of a manifesto. So viewed, the world is not the same; the very notion of reality undergoes a change, and a new classification is needed. There creeps in at times a sort of renovated animism and a new black magic of things, of the object.[55] The human being is an organism, and it is the external shock to the organism that counts. As James phrases it, it is from the outbreak of hostilities between the artist and the world that the work of art springs and "a new life begins." Emotion, as the term has been understood in the past, practically disappears; the primacy is to sensation; it is a case of sensibilité versus sentiment, the artist's business being to open up a path, through sensation, to a new and mystic feeling.[56]
It was back in the last century—his voice comes to us with a strange and far-off sound—that Maupassant wrote, in the Preface to Pierre et Jean: "An intelligent critic ought to look for everything that is the least like those novels that have already been done, and to do all he can to spur on the young to try out new paths."[57] This spurring-on has been accomplished, in no small part, by Gide and Proust, more deliberately by the former, more unconsciously by the latter.
Besides these personal influences, there are other, impersonal ones. One of these is "Americanism." The Futurists discovered America's mechanistic civilization; their successors are discovering our country's "spiritual virginity," and are finding an Homeric quality in our modes of emotion and of expression. But Americanism is only a phase. The modern, Bontempelli asserts, is the offspring of an antithesis, between the ultra-rational, extra-substantial spirit of Cubism and the ultra-illogical, extra-fluid soul of Futurism; the thing is to react against both.
VI
Something has been said of a "new vision of the world." What we have is not merely a new vision, the striving for such a vision, but an attempt at the creation of a novel and magic universe.[58] The material lies close at hand. Strangely enough, it was not spiritually an impoverished world, but a richer and fuller one, one with a cinematographic wealth of movement, that awaited the young European at the close of the War. Take the case of the young Frenchman. During the War, as M. Berge reminds us, he had seen Hindu, Australian, Senegalese and other exotic legions humdrumly quartered in the departments of the Somme and the Pas-de-Calais; the far-away and the unreal had been brought to his door; it was Central Europe that became for him a mysterious and forbidden land. There was, following the signing of the Armistice, a next-door neighbor to become acquainted with all over again, and the process of becoming once more acquainted was rendered all the more thrilling by the sense of a latent hostility in the air, the difficulty of passports, etc.
Geography was now the fashion.[59] To explore this new-found world and to bring back accounts of what one had seen. The French, who have a tradition of travel dating from Chateaubriand, took the lead; but other nations were not far behind, especially the Germans and the Italians. The young reporter, for he was often no more than that, visited Soviet Russia, Los Angeles, China, Morand, Duhamel, Durtain,—the list is a long one. There were attempts, sometimes very superficial ones, at an interpretation of things seen, as in Durtain's Quarantième Étage; and a none too flattering Discovery of America, at the moment of writing, is still in fervent progress.[60] The thing kept up until a certain disillusionment came; a sense of the smallness of the world in this aeroplane age, as in Paul Morand's Rien que la Terre;[61] or, a good deal more tragic, a sense of the futility of endeavoring to escape from one's self through globe wandering, as in Henry de Montherlant's Voyageurs traqués.[62]
The individual himself was bringing a new attentiveness to life and the gifts it had to offer. He might feel, at times, that the tremendous fact of War had dwarfed life. He might speak of the littleness of life and the immensity of man;[63] but with it all, he found himself with a renewed and insuperable thirst for living and a passion for draining the moment of all it had to yield. He found, of a sudden, the banal become adventure and the quotidian an unblushing miracle. He was filled with a sense of ever-present risk, and felt a call for all the subtlety and heroism he could muster. The sense of mystery had been retrieved, and a new balance, in the form of a "mystic realism," had been established between heaven and earth. With many, boredom vanished in this atmosphere of everyday magic, a féerie not at all the same as that of the Thousand-and-One Nights,—not the old fabulous or the old "picturesque," but a workaday extravagance that meant a deeper reality, the rediscovery of paths where sense and spirit might meet, to bestow a new meaning upon the visual object. This impulse is apparent outside the countries directly affected by the War; it is to be made out in the Spanish Jarnès, whose Paula y Paulita Preface, spoken of above, has been described as "a new art of reality."[64] The exotic and the fantastic, the short of it is, had been uncovered in what is commonly known as the real.[65] No more of an older "local color," but a universe of the "five senses." There was to be a realistic precision in the creation of a magic atmosphere, as in the poems of Max Jacob and the paintings of Maurice Utrillo. The Novecentisti even called for a return to the spirit of their own Quattrocento painters, such as Masaccio, Mantegna and Piero dei Franceschi.[66] Here was a univers inédit to be played with, joyously, like children; a world to be treated without respect, as a child would treat a "domestic lion" (the phrase is Jarnès').[67]
And so it is, a spirit of grotesque play animates the young literature, a form of play which, with certain writers,[68] is not untinged with irony, the faint and gentle irony of an adult looking back on his childhood dreams. And in truth, childhood and the writers for children have had no little to do with the case. Pierre Mac Orlan and Paul Morand, M. Berge notes, were brought up on Jules Verne and his kind, and Jules Verne is the ancestor of the modern geographic film.[69]
In the construction of such a world, the unlikely is no longer a necessity. We find it dispensed with in such a work as the Grand Meaulnes of Alain Fournier. But it is not always dispensed with. Our age does, undoubtedly, possess a certain primitive character,—we occasionally hear talk of "the new primitives"—and this has led to a taste for the real primitives, the negro and others. It is the painting, with the brush of the imagination, of a decorative universe which in many cases seems to be the aim of the young writer. He has, or cultivates, a taste for the art of Douanier Rousseau and for African heads. Spiritually, in his passion for an absolute and meta physical simplicity, he has been seen as the great-grandson of JeanJacques Rousseau and Schlegel's Lucinda. His quest of the primi tive may lead him to seek, in his own work, a content that is at once fantastic and objective; or it may lead him into paths far afield, in search of the curious, the strange and the monstrous. In the latter instance, like the savage with his bauble, he stands enamored of the artificial object, a state of mind or of soul that is revealed in such writers as Vergani and De la Serna. Sometimes, the modern spirit of fantasy takes a lyric turn, as in Lucio d'Aquara's La Titanide. Often, it is inspired by the near presence of the modern city. What we have, to sum it up, is a world of objective particulars, the uni verse again as bric-a-brac. This is that world which M. Julien Benda combats, as having sidetracked us from the quest of the universal and the eternal.[70]
Out of it all has emerged a doctrine,—for it is a doctrine, with an aesthetic of its own as well as a creative practice,—known as Super-realism. Surréalisme would solve the problem of the present unrest by denying the possibility of any solution. It erects the non existence of an absolute into an absolute. Its credo, as set forth by its nominal founder, M. André Breton,[71] is the spontaneous and uncontrolled play of the personality, unhampered by any of the fetters of civilization.[72] The Surrealiste claims affinity with Plato and Berkeley.[73] Morally, he exhibits a categoric pessimism. "As though there were any reasons," exclaims Louis Aragon, "to go on living!" In this "age of ashes,"[74] an age in which energy and violence have become the mysticisms that rule mankind,[75] the young man of the century is inclined to look upon progress, that idol of the Nine teenth century, as does the Cocteau of Le Potomak, as a "biologic vaudeville."[76] With the Italian poet, Riccardo Bacchelli, he would say;
I live a De Profundis, sluggish and unclean.
He is a "humoriste désespéré"; or if he rallies, it is to a vision "beyond Nietzsche: "No longer to will the good, the rational, the eternal, the just."[77] The ideal Surréaliste act would be: "to run down into the street, a revolver in each hand, and start firing at random into the crowd."[78]
Suicide, for the one who believes in "l'inutilité théâtrale et sans joie de tout,"[79] would impress one as being the logical and inevitable conclusion; and indeed, the first enquête which the Surréalistes conducted was on the question: Le suicide est-il une solution?" Suicides have occurred. There was that of Jacques Rigaut, in November, 1929. Rigaut previously had written; "There are no reasons to go on living; but no more are there any reasons for dying. . . . The only way left in which we can manifest our contempt for life is by accepting it."[80] All of Rigaut's maturer life appears to have been a battle against self-destruction: "I am a man who is endeavoring not to die."[81] He was a victim of introspection (the symbolism of a mirror held him fascinated), as is indicated by his "l'oeil qui regarde l'oeil qui regarde l'oeil qui regarde . . . . "[82] If the question of sanity is raised in his case, his own statement may be cited: "In an insane-asylum, it is clear that there is but one madman, the superintendent."[83]
"Philosophic suicide" is not a wholly novel thing. Papini, as far back as 1910, had described the case of Carlo Michelstaedter;[84] but it would be interesting to know in just how far the suicidal pessimism—the defeatism, if you choose to call it that—of the after-War young is a derivative of the philosophic doctrine of discontinuity.[85] At least one group-organ is to be found bearing the title, Discontinuité;[86] and this publication, as it happens, carries pessimism to a point beyond suicide; it is the expression—there can be no doubt, this time—of an absolute defeatism.[87]
Back of Super-realism, there is the parent Dada; and Dada really started in 1916, at a time when what is known as civilization seemed to have degenerated into a world-farce; it may be said to have started with the meeting of André Breton and that despairing dandy, Jacques Vache, in a military hospital at Nantes; its roots are obviously sunk in social chaos. And both Dada and its successor, Surréalisme, are but the foam on the crest of a wave of irrationalism. The young age has a veritable hatred of the intellect and its reasons; it demands, with the Dadaists, the "derisive abolition of the brain";[88] it is "L'Esprit, centre la Raison.[89] This revolt against reason and apothesis of unreason[90] is looked upon by some as the expression of a romantic mysticism, and such it not unlikely is.[91] Surréalisme, following the World War, offers more than one parallel—and here, we may refer to Signor Flora[92] once more—to that Romanticism that followed the Napoleonic campaigns. The analogy is, often, striking enough, but, not unnaturally, is little dwelt upon by those among the young who speak so loudly of a "break with tradition;" it is only occasionally, when for some reason the need of an ancestor or two is felt, that we find a Lautréamont[93] being excavated or a Rimbaud being "discovered." And since, ordinarily, the younger movement has been rather woefully lacking in critics, both from within and from without, it is not surprising if, not infrequently, the attitudes of the 1830's, having become in reality the platitudes of 1930, are palmed off as the latest modernisms without any authoritative challenge of the essential newness of the theory or the attitude involved.
It would require something like a volume to go into the subject with the requisite degree of thoroughness; but one may, perhaps, point out in passing a few of the more obvious parallels. When we hear, for example, the young writer of today talking of a vague "revolution," we may take him back to Baudelaire upon the barricades of 1848 (bent upon killing his stepfather), or further back yet, to Lord Byron and the Isles of Greece, where "burning Sappho" loved and sung. If he takes his fling at the bourgeoisie, or speaks of himself or his doings as "scandalous,"[94] we will unearth an ancient and by now rather musty-smelling épater. If he parades his "hardboiledness," we will find its roots for him in a Baudelairean dandysme. Etc. Even his discovery of the body, of which something is to be said further on, is not novel; Lord Byron may be said to have made that discovery, as the Middle Ages (compare the Rixa animi et corporis) and the Greeks before him had done, when he swam the Hellespont. As for a much heralded "Revolution of the Word,"—but that is another subject.
Such analogies as these, while they deserve to be noted, are not to be overstressed.[95] As has been stated above, there are important differences between the New Romanticism and the old; and there is, too, a perjuring poverty of essential attitudes and ideas, and a sense in which the old is always new—and vital, as well,—and, by a little freshening-up, can be made to appear truly "revolutionary." The thing to do, in Signor Flora's phrase, is "metter tutti nella storia": to place all movements and personalities in the historic stream, and in that process to determine the valuation that is to be put upon our contemporaries. When we, of the year 1930, do that, we see both Joyce[96] and Lawrence[97] as Romantic figures, and are inclined to accept the contention of those who assert that we are still en plein romantisme.[98]
In any case, the tendency of the past decade undeniably has been a romantic, mystic, anti-rationalistic one. Senor Eugenio d'Ors has termed Goya's "When Reason goes to sleep, monsters are begot" a "Declaration of the Rights of Monsters";[99] and writers since the Armistice have, for the most part, been busy issuing just such a bill of rights. Anatole France may have regarded Saint-Beuve as the St. Thomas Aquinas of the Nineteenth century; but on the day that France was buried, a number of his young countrymen put out an insulting manifesto, negating all the things for which either France or Saint-Beuve had stood.[100]
VII
Thus far, we have been dealing with the writer very largely in his relation to the external world, even though that relation be an internal one. We have seen him forswearing emotion and endeavoring to convert himself into a purely sensitive apparatus, and the thing with which we have been concerned has been the effect of the external shock upon the organism. We have beheld Proust pointing the way to a new manner of seeing things, what amounts to a revaluation of optic reality, while both Proust and Gide stand for a certain attitude toward life, and the being—call it the soul of man, if you like,—that is at the core of life. It is Gide, with his effort to "make the possible come alive," who has, perhaps, determined the major stream, the current culminating in the cascade of Surréalisme. Here, Proust's contribution has been chiefly on the side of method; he has contributed the eye, or an impulse to the employment of the eye. As for Valery, a name usually mentioned with those of Proust and Gide, we shall have to do with him in connection with an impulse to "evasion" and "escape."
It would be wrong to assume that the new literature is wholly concerned with the outward, if inwardly transformed, reality. There are the two tendencies, toward the outer and the inner real. At a time when the French press is reporting the centenary of Romanticism, it may be recorded that the psychological novel, descendant of a Zola and Flaubert realism that came as a reaction against Romanticism, is not yet dead. This is especially true in France, where the novel-form has a very firmly established introspective basis. This type of writing naturally has gone forward hand in hand with psychology, and has been given a tremendous impetus by Freud. It remains the most traditional, the least révolté of modern forms, for the good reason that a break with the past in the domain of science is scarcely conceivable. The literary psychologist, however, is dis tinguished from others by the nature of his aim, which is neither interested nor systematic. The more traditional type is to be met with in a writer like Jacques de Lacretelle, while as we approach the advance-guard, we have the interior monologue, cinema-like in effect, and a special brand of Surréaliste poetry.
What has been stated is as much as to say that the problem of the "moi," of his own personality, is still a vital and a baffling one for the young European.[101] A being lost in space, he may drop his sneer at "Nineteenth-century psychology"; but the fact remains, it is difficult to reach out for the universal, when the personal mechanism that proposes to do the reaching displays imminent signs of breaking down. For a Cartesian Cogito, ergo sum will no longer stand. In a universe of flux, interior as well as exterior unity is lacking, and no sort of synthesis seems possible, until we have such a cry as Robert Honnert's: "The more I survey the evidence to the effect that I am a multiple being, the more I am devoured by an inextinguishable thirst for unity. ... I am afraid of being but a crumbling phenomenon." This brings us to the Proustian "intermittences du coeur" and that "âme totale" which is possessed of a value "presque fictive." The unfulfilled thirst for personal unity leads invariably to a feeling of impotence on the plane of action. It often leads, in literature, to the disordered and tumultuous autobiographic narrative,[102] or to a self-quest and self-exploration that is almost as agonizing for the reader as for the author.[103]
What has been going on is a dissociation of the personality (compare De Gourmont's "dissociation of ideas" in the century preceding). But the work of reconstruction already has been begun. The Novecentist tells us that the most urgent and clean-cut task of the century is to build anew, in a "frigid immobility," Time and Space, to build toward and in the infinite, to erect a new absolute in the form of the external object; yet, we hear him at other times demanding a simultaneous reconstruction of the external and the internal (the individual), and the creation thereby of a new reality, a "new and solid world," Even in the shadow of Mussolini, the individual is to be rediscovered, and beyond the individual,—perhaps (compare Nietzsche)—there awaits the shadowy figure of God, to be attained through a "spiritual geometry." If there is no God, we will create a demiurge, says Filippo Burzio.[104] It may be that what is to be achieved is only an illusion; but an illusion is something, something that may prove a working basis. There is a reaction against those Proustian "intermittences du coeur," with Ramon Fernandez protesting that "the notions of the personality and of the unity of the personality are indispensable to any attempt at spiritual progress, and to the inner life.[105]
If there is one thing in the air at the present moment, above the mêlée of modernism, it is the note of evasion, of escape from the break-up of the personality. One way out is the human body. This at least confers the illusion of external unity. Viewed from without, the personality appears to be a functioning unit. This will account for the stress laid upon the body and its expression in sport and athletics. It might almost be said that what is taking place is a rediscovery of the body and the formulation of a new and mystic "humanism," as with Jean Schlumberger,[106] with the body as a center. An escape is sought through sensuality, but not the sensuality that has been known of old,—rather, the pure and ratified sensuality of the athlete, the man who triumphs with his body. Sport now has a metaphysic of its own,[107] and is the object of a critical, intellectual and humanistic cult,[108] paid to the "divinity of adventure and of muscle."[109] These are the new rites of Hercules,—Hercules replacing, even with the Spaniards, a no longer sufficing Don Juan.[110] This Hercules is a sort of cross between the medieval knight and a Douglas Fairbanks,[111] and it is in that new theatre which is the boxing-ring and the stadium that the faithful, a "juventud gimnosodermica," gather to pay him worship. In all this may be seen a reflection of that necessity of action which the one who had just emerged from the period of the War felt: the necessity of acting, in order that he might feel himself alive.
Whatever the cause or the explanation, it is certain that a "body literature" has grown up. Among the writers who represent this trend may be mentioned Jean Prevost,[112] Robert Honnert, René Crevel, Dominique Braga, Henri de Montherlant, et al. The titles are significant: Plaisir des Sports; Corps et âme; Mon Corps et moi; etc.[113]
The end of it is, the physical man is to be resurrected, by way of giving a meaning to this mechanized universe in which we live. The body means action, and action is a refuge, possibly the most satisfying that there is; and it is, precisely, this refuge that the "new humanism" seeks.[114] This after-War passion for action (again, the mysticism of energy, which may become violence) is to be found all over Europe. In Italy, it takes the form of a cult of the Demiurge; in Spain, Senot Rafael Calleja is striving to found a cult of fanaticism, with an ideal of action, of will, and of enthusiasm.[115] In Germany, the movement is vividly outlined, in literature and in life, in that literature which is a reflection of life; while the pure artist is to be found there (Thomas Mann is an example), the tendency is toward activism. It would seem that, while those who technically won the War have discovered the fruit of victory to be a paralyzing impotence, the defeated have made for the quickest way out, by falling back upon a worship of the body that attains, at times, a sexual intensity. In the pages of Der Querschnitt are to be found boxing-matches and Georg Grosz, horse-races and post-expressionism mingling fraternally; and across the border, the same is true of Variétés. Athletics, the cinema, dice; such, says Caballero, is the trinity; the thing sought is adventure, danger, chance and a sense of velocity.[116]
In connection with the cult of the body, there is an evident tendency to banish introspection. Read M. Prévost's violent essay on the subject. Prévost, however, goes on to point out that this does not negate the idea of a soul, but that, on the contrary, the religious concept may be clarified by the physical emphasis: "The soul is not to be denied, for the reason that we experience no impression of it; but we shall never come to know it through a sensation, but through the idea arising from all our sensations."
This brings us to the mystic and the Christian escape. Christianity, by its essence, tends to re-establish the personality. It satisfies the thirst for an overthrown absolute, and provides a haven, as for Cocteau, in a universe of overwhelming particulars. This will account for the conversions of which we hear from time to time, and in part for the movement centering about Maritain. We even have, in the pages of Georges Bernanos, the devil appearing upon the scene in person, although the devil whom we meet there is hardly the Satan of tradition. In England, there is, of course, Mr. T. S. Eliot and the neo-Thomist reaction, mirroring the one across the Channel. In Spain, there is a new Catholicism, newer yet than Unamuno. For the Church has come to stand for the tenet of being, as opposed to a Bergsonian becoming.[117]
But the mystic escape is not the only one. There is the aesthetic escape, represented by M. Valéry,[118] in which art becomes a game,[119] a game played by the intelligence—has not M. Valéry defined poetry as a "solemn festival of the intellect"? It is the intellect against the chaos of the visible world,[120] over against the bewilderments of a "pluralistic universe,"[121] all the multiple temptations of the "inépuisable moi."
With the Valéry attitude, compare that doctrine of the "dehumanization of art" which the great Spanish critic, Ortega y Gasset, has propagated, and which is now the point of view of the young Vanguardistas.[122] In accordance with this view, which cannot be set forth in detail here, there is to be something like a complete divorce between art on the one hand and life and humanity on the other.[123]
Another way out is Gide's, whose "cure" M. Berge dubs the "homeopathic" one, the treating of a bad case of sensibilité with—sensibilité. Yet another indication is the revolt against a prevailing anti-lyricism, on the part of the "Philosophies" or "L'Esprit" group, led by Pierre Morhange ("John Brown"). There is also a back-to-lyricism movement in Germany, in the form of a neue Herzlichkeit that holds more than one romantic element, elements reminiscent of Jean Paul Richter: "Man trägt wieder Herz" once more. This impulse is speeded up by a revival of the Drang nach dem Süden, or southern and Italian influence (another romantic one).[124]
There is also an escape on the social side, in the direction of a new collectivism. The influence of the modern sociologists and of the Unanimists has been spoken of above. In Italy, the downfall of Nineteenth-century democracy is proclaimed, "with one tomb at Moscow and one at Rome";[125] but in the next breath, the Novecentist is assuring us that, in his search of the universal, he has a contempt "for any international." Nevertheless, the social syndicalisms which are forming are having a very appreciable effect. They are having their direct and immediate effect upon the mode of writing, and we are informed that "Style is the summation of a culture and the expression of a collective symbolism."[126] Just as the later Eighteenth century discovered German thought, so now watch must be kept beyond the Vistula, on those vast plains that stretch away, seemingly without end, in the direction of Asia.
For Russia, to many, holds the key. Even if the political and social forms which she is essaying prove to be no more than an experiment, the experiment is a highly significant one, and even failure would have a meaning. "We were people; now we are epochs," her poets sing.[127] And modern Russia has given the world at least three poets of continental statute, in Essenin, Pasternak and Mayakovsky. "The flood of life," declares Alexei Tolstoy, "has burst through the portals of a new world. Bourgeois civilization is perishing like Atlantis."[128] And yet, the same writer has to admit that "The eight years of revolution have not yet created a Proletarian literature," while Boris Pasternak declares that Russia has been undergoing, not a cultural revolution, but a "cultural reaction," and that, as a result of the "logic of large numbers," only the most mediocre of either revolutionary or non-revolutionary forms are tolerated.[129] What is needed, according to Pasternak, is a plastic "dictatorship"; and Victor Shklovsky, founder of the Formalist school of criticism, and his followers would set at defiance the social and political philosophy of the time, by excluding all vitiating non-aesthetic considerations.[130]
It seems likely that, so far as literature and the social revolution are concerned, the Russians themselves will be the first to be disillusioned; but nothwithstanding this fact, Communism is caught up as a part of their creed by the members of more than one group. The Surréalistes are avowed Communists, and recently, when called upon by Moscow to come out into the open, as it were, took a fairly definite stand.[131] But it is to be noted that what les jeunes desire, more often than not, is simply "a revolution," whatever that may mean,—something that will overturn established modes of thought and feeling, something that will obviate the stock responses of a doddering world and the doddering generation immediately preceding, and afford play for new reactions and a new and as yet undiscovered sensitivity.[132] What the Surréalistes, for instance, are after is not so much a new political order as a new reality. It is not strange, therefore, if they should be looked upon more or less askance by those others of the young who are devoting their energies actively to the cause of political upheaval.[133]
More important than any social declarations on the part of the young is the tacitly inherent attitude of two writers who have exerted a profound influence upon all their contemporaries: Joyce and Proust. Mr. Bronowsky draws attention[134] to the fact that these writers stand for an acceptance of, an acquiescence in their social environment, and that if intolerance is manifested, it is a personal and not a social feeling. It is, in brief, a case of individual friction. In Joyce, there is rebellion but no doubt, while his acquiescence in the Catholic tradition leaves him free to explore problems of language and the like.
Communism, and Super-realism as well, Mr. Wyndham Lewis[135] would have us believe, have an Oriental tinge; whereas, in much of the after-War literature, there is a distinct Occidental note.[136] Bontempelli states that he has an equal contempt for the Oriental danse du ventre and the doctrine of metempsychosis.[137] What the Novecentisti want, or say they want, is a "reprise mediterranéene," the transformation of Mediterranean into a European culture, which shall be a radiating center of world culture.[138]
Out of it all emerges one transcendent desire: for a reconstruction of the universe, with a new perfection to be striven for and a new absolute, if only in the reality of the moment, to be attained. Unrest, many are beginning to feel, is no longer to be set up as an end in itself, and the "bankruptcy of the subconscious"[139] is announced by M. Emmanuel Berl. This is to take account only of the movements coming out of one or another of the somewhat numerous "advanceguards"; it is not to speak of such manifestations as the recent French Populisme. One thing is certain, there is, all over Europe, a new and growing stress on content (the Italians call it contenutismo) and a reaction against over-experimentation and those aberrations in form that are not justified by the content.[140] It may be that what is needed is a "new totalism,"[141] a synthesis which shall bring some sort of order out of all the conflicting tendencies which may lay claim to the adjective, "modern."
VIII
Such, in necessarily brief strokes, is the spirit of the young European literature of today, as this writer has been able to see it through his own eyes and through those of its critics and spokesmen. There are left certain things which may be said concerning prominent but more or less incidental characteristics—one might call them earmarks—of this body of writing.
First, as to choice of subject. Here, the old academic rules, the rules that governed those writers who have become our classics, have been abandoned. The modern writer is restrained by no timidity, no modesty; there is no theme, no matter how "abnormal" it may be, that he does not feel free to select. After Freud, what is there to shun? And yet, strange as it may seem to some, this freedom almost never leads to pornography. Nor does it find expression in the form of a new Zolaesque naturalism; the one thing the young author steers clear of is the novel or the art-work with a thesis; he has nothing to expound, no souls to save—how speak of salvation, when he is no longer conscious of a soul that is one? What he is interested in giving us, true enough, is a "slice of life," but it is a slice that has no crust; for him, there are no conclusions.
On the side of form, with a decided overlapping of genres, there is, as in modern painting, a prevailing simplicity of line. This is especially visible in the simplification of description, which is effected rather by the revealing flash, all classification and interpretation being forsworn. There is, at the root of the young writing, a disgust with the cliche. This often calls forth the accusation of "originality at any cost." When carried to an extreme, it tends to produce the hermetic author—and a deal of bad writing. We are now back at the question of "obscurity," "unintelligibility," etc. At this point, there appears to be a fundamental lack of understanding between the artist and a good portion of the public. As M. Cocteau observes, the public wants to understand first and feel afterward, where, to the artist, feeling is the important thing. It is Expression versus Communication. The Dadaists started out with the determination to produce "strong works, works forever incomprehensible,"[142] and in this, they were following in the footsteps of Mallarm&, who defined a poem as "a mystery, of which the reader is to seek the key."[143] The artist will tell you, as does M. Berge,[144] that the desire to comprehend frequently veils the real beauty of a work, but this doctrine is a galling one to those, including a good part of the active social revolutionists, who believe that the function of language is a social one,—who believe, in other words, in communication as the meaning of speech.
There is going on, all the while, a transformation of the word, a "Revolution of the word," deriving its impulse partly from the Irish Joyce,[145] partly from Surréalisme,[146] which regards language as an ultra-realistic vision of an hallucinatory world. This verbal revolution may be taken as the relentless ultimate of that process of linguistic deliquescence to which, in the last century, M. Paul Bourget applied the term, "decadence."[147] It is a breaking up of language, a tearing up of words from their, after all, loose-rooted and tottering significations. The thing is not new. There is Rimbaud, with his theory of Palingenesis, as applied to the word and to poetry. The French Decadents may be said to have broken down, though not in a systematic manner, the confines of grammar and of punctuation. There is Cocteau's Le Potomak, with its declaration that literature is but "the dictionary in disorder." Immediately after the War, Filippo Tomaso Marinetti published his Les mots en liberté futuristes (1919). There was, we are not to forget, Apollinaire, his Calligrammes, etc., the influence coming from Cubism. The fact is, a justification for the "Revolution of the Word" might be found in Horace's Ars poetica,[148] in Cicero's De oratore and many other classic works,[149] not to mention the linguistic scientist's assertion of the arbitrary character of language, or the schoolmaster's dictum (derived from Horace) that usage—"the usage of the best speakers and writers" (who are the best?)—determines correctness.
This uprooting of language on the part of the extreme Left is seen to be the pitiless development of a principle inherent in language itself. The young writer feels that this process must be intensified and accelerated, that there is nothing to do but to carry it out bitter end, if the, to him otherwise hopeless, crystallization of the world's modes of thought and feeling is to be dissolved; and with this object in view, he is ready to subordinate his inclinations to a more tangible revolution on the social and political plane.[150]
However successful or unsuccessful the verbal revolution may be, there can be no doubt that it will have its effect, and already has left its traces. For one thing, there has been a shifting in word-magic. Where the magic formerly lay in the phrase, it is now to be found in the syllable. The well-turned phrase, it seems, is to follow the rotund period of old. Besides the sound-magic of the syllable, there is another enchantment which the young have discovered, and that is "typographical magic." Here, once more, Apollinaire is an apparent forerunner, although M. Vitrac is inclined to doubt his authenticity.[151]
It is not alone on the linguistic side that the young literature is changing. An overlapping of genres and a tendency to obliterate all genres has been recorded. There are, moreover, certain art-forms which, so far as les jeunes are concerned, have lived their day. One of these is the theatre. This institution holds little lure for the man grown to writing maturity since the War. In Italy, despite the propinquity of the Independents' theatre of Anton Giulio Bragaglia, an outgrowth of Futurism,[152] Novecentisti are engaged in celebrating the obsequies of the playhouse.[153] The same group likewise has abandoned the poem, at least for a period of years to come, much as Apollinaire suggested that the painting of nudes be dispensed with for a period of ten years.[154] The cinema is still the most inspiring of forms, and the talking picture has been seen as the possible first sign of a coming synthesis.
Further, certain moods are conspicuous by their absence. Among these is humor, as humor has been understood in the past. Humor there is in the new literature, but a transformed, transmuted variety. It is a humor possessed of a fantastic dream-like character that is not wholly unlike that of Rabelais. Ilya Ehrenburg says of his hero, "He loves the magic nonsense of life,"[155] and it is this magic nonsense with which the new humor is concerned. It is a humor that is to be seen in certain outstanding figures of the epoch, such as that of Max Jacob in France.[156] While the professional humorist is still left wondering why it is he is snubbed by his more serious brethren, the latter indulge in cocasseries[157] to which his own audacity is scarcely equal. For the newer humor, and this is its most salient characteristic, is not a mode of looking at life; it is not indifferent, as with Anatole France; above all, it is not gay. Very often, when not downright Surréaliste, it is of a weird, grotesque character, as with certain of the young Irish poets.[158]
The after-the-War world is not a funny one.
IX
Enough should have been said to establish the point that the Wat has had its appreciable and definite effects upon the practitioners of literature and their practice.[159] The after-War decade may appear to be rather a barren one, if it is great and outstanding names that we are seeking; from such a point of view, it scarcely can compare, for example, with a decade like that from 1830 to 1840. But may it not be that the past twelve years have been a period of fermentation and of germination, the real fruits of which are yet to be seen, possibly in the decade to come?[160]
However this may be, the present writer, in the foregoing sketch, has striven to take the young upon their own terms. He must deny any underlying critical or judicial intention. His task has been reporting, an art for which he has a very high respect, and which is the preliminary to a conceivable editorializing in the form of criticism. Under such circumstances, he pretends to no originality. The reporter's business is to see—although few may be capable of seeing—the scene, and then to report it, gathering his data and his documents where he finds them. The preceding paper has been written after eight years of intensive reading of the young, their spokesmen and their critics. In it, the author has sought for that lively yet detached sympathy which a reporter ought to manifest. There are some who will say that he has taken his subject too seriously. That is a good fault for a reporter to have. After all, there was the War. And youth only becomes "amusing" with the approach of age.
SAMUEL PUTNAM.
Paris,
November, 1930.
- ↑ See M. Paul Valery's "La Crise de l'Esprit," in the first Variété (1924). See, also, an article by the late D. H. Lawrence, "Chaos in Poetry," in Échanges, No. 1.
- ↑ War memories persist, needless to say; they will be found throughout this anthology.
- ↑ For one description of the spiritual effects of the War, see Alberto Consiglio's Itinerario romantico (Naples, 1930), particularly the section entitled Ragioni dell' Apocalisse," which has been partly translated for the Italian section of the present work.
- ↑ M. Louis Aragon, for example (see his Traité du style), and the other Surréalistes. The Surréalistes claim Rimbaud as one of their "precursors," but object to the cult, which they look upon as bourgeois, that has grown up about the poet.
- ↑ It is of interest to compare Giovanni Papini's flight from a world of conflicting "minds."
- ↑ Notre Inquietude, Daniel Rops, 1929. The author speaks of the "Hamletisme" of the age (on which, compare M. Valéry). The period of after-the-War unrest may be definitely dated from the year 1916. It was in that year that Walter Hasenclevet's play, Der Sohn, the beginning of what the Germans know as "the revolt of the Sons," was produced; it was in that year that Dada really started; etc. "The drama," says Alberto Consiglio, "is in our own minds; the decent thing is to subdue it by expressing it." (See a review of Consiglio by Giansiro Fertata, in Solaria, January, 1930, pp. 53ff.)
- ↑ Article in La Nouvelle Revue Française, February, 1924. See the French section, following.
- ↑ Such an attempt has been made by a French scholar, M. Émile Bouviet (Initiation à la Littérature d'aujourd'hui, 1927). M. Bouvier genially observes that he would rather be "elementary than esoteric (hermétique)".
- ↑ Paris, 1930.
- ↑ Too often, the "critic" of the newer literature is like the American reviewer of the English translation of Joseph Delteil's Sur le fleuve Amour: "What is one to say of a book that comes bound in black oilcloth and the title of which is a pun?"
- ↑ Preface to Où va la Critique? Maurice Rouzaud, 1929.
- ↑ The modern stress is on tendency. In painting, compare Andre Lhote's remark, to the effect that "not good painting so much as tendency interests me." Compare, also, the "placement par tendance," or hanging of exhibibitions in accordance with tendencies represented, that is practiced by the new Surindépendant group.
- ↑ The influence of Croce has been both profound and widely diffused. Among his countrymen, a generation has been affected by the Filosofia dello spirito (1908-09). True, there is now a reaction on the part of the giovani against Croce, and the assertion is to be heard that the latter has nothing to say to the young writers of today. Nevertheless, his influence lasts, and is to be found so far from home as Russia; compare Alexei Tolstoy's Response to the Resolution of the R. C. P. (Russian section, following): "It is impossible to discuss the methods of art, for the reason that each new work of art is the method."
- ↑ Les Ecrits nouveaux, published in December, 1920, p. 54.
- ↑ Parisian literary argot. Any one who has followed young French writing since the War is aware that fashion plays a considerable role.
- ↑ Dada started out by declaring itself to be "anti-painting, anti-music, anti-literature." Note the sarcastic title, "Littérature," which the Dadaists took for their review. The word was filched from Valery, apparently with his connivance. This same review (1919-20) had conducted an interesting enquête, the burden of which was, "Why do you write?" (Compare the swan number of The Little Review.)—"Henceforward," says Louis Aragon, "poetry pledges man to life; and our interest is nil in him who never has ventured even to draw near the brink of that abyss to which Rimbaud inevitably leads."
- ↑ For example, Camillo Pellizzi, Le Lettere italiane del nostro secolo, 1929.
- ↑ See Consiglio, op. cit., Note 3 above, p. 102. The problem of differentiation between the centuries, Ottocento and Novecento, is a very real one for the contemporary Italian.
- ↑ See Joseph Delteil, in the French section following, on "Aesthetes and Angels."
- ↑ See the Critics and Essayists portion of the Italian section, following. On beauty and the "valeurs de choc," compare M. Valery's Introduction to Leo Ferrero's Leonardo, o dell' arte, pp. 19ff.
- ↑ Compare what Mt. Bronowski, in his Introduction to the English and Irish section, following, has to say regarding the "cynical deterioration" of modern poetry (Eliot, Pound and others). Signor Giuseppe Ravegnani, in his I Contemporanei (1930), asserts; "The whole of our literature, prose and poetry, from D'Annunzio to the present time, is a negative elaboration of a romantic ars poetica" (op. cit., p. 306). Read Alberto Spaini on D'Annunzio, in the Critics and Essayists portion of the Italian section, following.
- ↑ On the contradictory character of the before-the-War mentality, see Valéry, Variété I, p. 18.
- ↑ A novel, published in 1921, accessible in English translation.
- ↑ Compare the statement of Mr. Reavey, Introduction to the Russian sec tion, following; "The new does not occur mote than once or twice in one or two thousand years." Manifestoes, Mr. Reavey goes on to point out, are not to be taken at their own valuation. He is speaking of the Russian Futurist manifesto, signed by Mayakowsky, Bourliuk and Khlebnikov, which condemned the entire past in favor of the "living word." An interesting bit of dialogue will be found in Boris Pilynak's story, "With Irina's Eyes" (Russian section, following): "Only the strong and the free shall remain."—"That was said by Darwin."—"To the devil! It was I who said it!" See, also, what M. Berge (Introduction to the French section) has to say on the break with tradition and a "subterranean" continuity of tradition. M. Berge will be found to stress the changes in the French educational system that took place in the year 1902.
- ↑ La Nouvelle Revue Française, February, 1924. See the French section, following.
- ↑ Valéry, Introduction to Leonardo, o dell' arte, pp. 19ff.
- ↑ Proclaimed by the late Jacques Rivière, article cited. Note 25.
- ↑ See Philippe Soupault's story, "The Death of Nick Carter," in the French section, following. The Novecentisti are inclined to look upon Dumas père as a precursor. (In spite of their heralded "break with tradition," the young, it will be noticed, are unable to resist the temptation to seek out forbears.)
- ↑ One of the Novecentist group, G. Gaspare Napolitano, has applied this myth-making theory to the fairy tale: see his La Scoperta dell' America, 1929.
- ↑ Deutsche Dichtung der Gegenwart.
- ↑ Particularly, by Joseph Roth and Rudolph Kayser. For example, Herr Fechter sees an alternative escape in that highly personal reality achieved by certain individuals who look out upon the world through the lens of their own egos; but Herr Kayser draws attention to the fact that, as faith in the ego grows, faith in things is likely to decrease.
- ↑ The phrase (horriblement tendancieuse") is Bontempelli's, applied to the then prospective Novecentist review, "900."
- ↑ Four quarterly numbers were published in French (beginning with the Autumn of 1926), and then the magazine, probably for politic reasons, went back to Italian.
- ↑ "Fine writing" remains something of a vice with the Italian; examples of it will be found in the Italian section of the present work.
- ↑ See Bontempelli's "Conseils" at the front of the second number of "900." Contrast the attitude of the "word-revolutionist" (chiefly English-speaking and under the influence of Joyce on the one hand and French Surréalisme on the other) who finds an escape from the slavery of words by playing with and transforming—"revolutionizing"—them.
- ↑ This tendency has been given expression by certain members of the group about the young Florentine review, Solaria.
- ↑ See "900," No. 2, p. 169.
- ↑ Compare Marinetti's Manifesto: "Heroism and clowning in art and in life." (See Italian section, following.)
- ↑ A treatise remains to be written on the blague in modern art. Cocteau could do it, if he would.
- ↑ See his Introduction to the Italian section, following.
- ↑ Panorama de la littérature italienne contemporaine, 1928.
- ↑ M. Gide has much to say of the "pure novel." Following the French "poésie pure," there has been a good deal of talk about "purifying" the various arts.
- ↑ Op. cit., Note 17.
- ↑ This was the point of a bitter attack on the Italian dramatist by the Parisian critic, Fernand Vanderem. A spirited controversy followed, in which M. Crémieux took Signor Pirandello's side.
- ↑ Pirandello's academic background—he took his doctor's degree in Germany—is not to be overlooked; see his treatises, L'Umorismo and Arte e scienza (both published in 1908).
- ↑ See Mr. Reavey's Introduction to the Russian section, following.
- ↑ La Volonté de métamorphose, 1911.—The influence, also, of Whitehead, Alexander, Jeans, Eddington and others is not to be overlooked.
- ↑ "The Stupid Nineteenth Century" of M. Léon Daudet.
- ↑ M. Bouvier (see Note 8) makes a good deal of this point. Op. cit., pp. 22ff.
- ↑ Ibid., p. 31.
- ↑ See "The Precursors" in the French section, following. Bosschère's early works (the two mentioned) have been translated into Russian. For the Bosschèrean influence upon poetry in English, and especially upon the work of Mr. T. S. Eliot, see M. Rene Taupin's L'Influence du symbolisms français sur la poésie américaine; see, in particular, pp. 219-20 and 233.
- ↑ Leopardi, by the Italian of today, is associated with the French Baudelaire; Rimbaud and Mallarme in the same ancestral gallery.
- ↑ The Viennese poet has had a profound effect upon European literature. The Cahier de Mahe Laurids Brigge has been a sort of Bible to the French: see the Reconnaissance à Rilke, published in 1926.—As to poet-precursors, Signor Giuseppe Ungaretti, the Italian poet would list Blake, Hölderlin, Leopardi and Lautréamont.
- ↑ See the Spanish section, following.
- ↑ That disreputable old philosopher, Saint Martin, or a modern theosophist like Ouspensky might be interested here,
- ↑ On the theory of "shock," compare Delteil's Sur le fleuve Amour. The doctrine of sensation is summed up in the same author's Les cinq Sens.
- ↑ Compare M. Valéry, the first Variété, p. 15.
- ↑ Cocteau: "The work of art is born as magic."
- ↑ Delteil assures us that he works with a map of the world or a terrestrial globe on his writing-table, and dreams of walking around the world. "Each morning," he says, "I take the world's pulse."—Something of this interest in geography, as in the other sciences (chemistry, bacteriology, etc.) is, possibly, to be traced back to that early-century reform in French educational methods of which M. Berge speaks.
- ↑ See Duhamel's Scènes de la vie future, now available in translation.
- ↑ M. Morand predicts that we shall soon be circling the globe in forty eight hours—almost a fulfilment of Puck's prophecy! His book, incidentally, is accessible in English translation.
- ↑ See the French section, following.
- ↑ Delteil. Compare Louis Aragon on Drieu La Rochelle: "Rien ne pouvait fixer ce grand corps et le monde était trop peu pour lui."
- ↑ M. Marcel Brion, writing in Les Nouvelles Littéraires.
- ↑ The reverse of Mr. James Branch Cabell's process.
- ↑ The thing is to be seen in the work of Hilaire Hiler, the young Ameri can painter, resident in France. Ezra Pound has applied the term "neonaturism" to Hiler's work.
- ↑ For children and the world, see Delteil's Cholera.
- ↑ Such as Bontempelli and Giuseppe Zucca, for example.
- ↑ Rimbaud, Une saison d'enfer: "Oh! la vie d'aventures qui existe dans les livres des enfants."
- ↑ La Trahison des clercs, 1927. Available in English translation.
- ↑ Manifeste du Surréalisme, 1924. See, also, Second Manifeste du Surréalisme, published in La Révolution Surréaliste, No. 12 (December, 1929) and reprinted in book form, 1930.
- ↑ See, in the French section following, the statements of Breton, Aragon, Rivière, Eluard, and others.
- ↑ Louis Aragon, La Revolution Surrealiste, I., p. 23.
- ↑ Borgese's Rubè (see Note 23).
- ↑ See Consiglio, op. cit., Note 3. Cf. the French Seillière, whose work Consiglio is studying.
- ↑ The date of Le Potomak is to be noted: 1913-14, with a "Prospectus" dated 1916.
- ↑ G. Evola. See the Italian section, following.
- ↑ This statement will be found in the second Un Cadavre, a manifesto directed against Breton by G. Ribemont-Dessaignes and other seceding Surréalistes and published in the spring of 1930; not to be confused with the first Un Cadavre, against Anatole France, published in 1924.
- ↑ Jacques Vaché.
- ↑ La Nouvelle Revue Française, August, 1930, p. 255. This issue contains Rigaut's posthumous Lord Patchogue and Victor Crastre's Sur le Suicide de Jacques Rigaut, pp. 251ff.
- ↑ Ibid., p. 203.
- ↑ Ibid., p. 204.
- ↑ Ibid., p. 198.—The still comparatively recent suicide (in 1930) of the Russian poet, Mayakovsky, is to be recalled.
- ↑ 24 Cervelli, 1913 (the Michelstaedter paper is dated 1910).
- ↑ M. Valéry, in his 1894 Leonardo essay, employs the word, but assures us that his "discontinuité" is "not that of the mathematicians."
- ↑ Discontinuité, No. 1, June, 1928.
- ↑ See, in the French section following, the manifesto entitled "The Dawn Is Not a Sword."
- ↑ Littérature, No. 1, March, 1919. (See Note 16, above.)
- ↑ Title of a work by René Crevel (Cahiers du Sud).
- ↑ See G. Evola, in the Italian section, following.
- ↑ "Le surréalisme, mysticisme sans religion" is the title of an article by M. Louis Laloy, in L'Êre Nouvelle, November, 1930.
- ↑ Francesco Flora, ""Dal Romanticismo al Futurismo"", 1921.
- ↑ Lautréamont's Les Chants de Maldoror were published in 1869; the Oeuvres complètes, edited by Philippe Soupault, appeared in 1917; the posthumous Poésies were also published in the latter year. See M. Leon Pierre-Quint's Le Comte de Lautréamont et Dieu, 1929.
- ↑ La Revolution Surréaliste is advertised as "the most scandalous review in the world."
- ↑ See Bouvier, op. cit. (Note 8), pp. 70ff.
- ↑ See Mr. Herbert Read's article on Joyce, in the English section, following.
- ↑ Mr. Bronowski (see Introduction to the English and Irish section, fol lowing) has described Lawrence as a "romantic not oppressed by the decline of romanticism."
- ↑ The young writer may occasionally drop his slur at Romanticism (such as Caballero's "Romanticismo y saliva"), but one is not to be deceived by that.
- ↑ Jean Cassou, Panorama de la littérature espagnole contemporaine, p. 145.
- ↑ Reference to Le Cadavre, 1924. See French section, following.
- ↑ It is worth while going back to read M. Valéry's darkly beautiful pages on the moi, in his Leonardo essay.
- ↑ A case in point is Corrado Alvaro's L'Uomo net laborinto.
- ↑ It is not always in the young that this is to be seen; it is sometimes to be found in an older writer, like the Italian poet, Pietro Mastti (born in 1868).
- ↑ See Burzio's "The Problem of the Demiurge," in the Italian section, following. Discorso sul demiurgo, 1929. Compare Evola.
- ↑ M. Fernandez is the author of an important essay on Proust et les intermittences du coeur.
- ↑ Dialogues avec le corps endormi.
- ↑ One frequently sees articles in the literary journals on "La métaphysique du tennis," etc.
- ↑ See E. Giménez Caballero, Hercules jugando a los dados, 1930, pp. 30-31.
- ↑ Ibid., pp. 23-4.
- ↑ Ibid., pp. 20-1.
- ↑ Ibid., pp. 16, 19.
- ↑ See the extracts from the Preface to M. Prevost's Plaisir des sports, French section, following.
- ↑ Corps et âme is by Honnert, Mon Corps et moi by Crevel.
- ↑ See M. Fernandez, "The Humanism of Action," French section, following.
- ↑ Voz y voto, 1930.
- ↑ Caballero, op. cit., pp. 13ff.
- ↑ See Alberto Consiglio, Note sul Maritenismo, in Solaria, August, 1928, pp. 43ff.
- ↑ For a corrective of this view, see Mr. Eliot's Introduction to the Method of Paul Valéry.
- ↑ For a corrective here, see Ferrero, Leonardo, o dell' arte, pp. 149ff.—This view of art as a game leads, with certain writers, to pure fumisterie.
- ↑ "Mais la verite et la vie sont désordre; les filiations et les parentés qui ne sont pas surprenantes ne sont pas réelles . . ." (Essai sur Stendhal.)
- ↑ "L'esprit se multiplie entre ses possibles." (Ibid.)
- ↑ See an extremely lively and well-informed article on "The Spanish Vanguard," by Jenny Ballou, in the New York Herald Tribune Books for September 7, 1930.
- ↑ The author of the article cited in the preceding note raises the pertinent question as to whether this attitude represents, in reality, a disgust with life and humanity or, rather, a satiety with and abhorrence of art itself.
- ↑ See Max Kreil's Orangen in Ronco.
- ↑ See Bontempelli's article, "900," in the Critics and Essayists portion of the Italian section, following.
- ↑ See Mr. Reavey's Introduction to the Russian section, following.
- ↑ Boris Pasternak; see Russian section, following.
- ↑ Tolstoy preaches the messianic mission of Russia, as the spiritual pioneer in the face of a decaying Europe.
- ↑ The new "style," it is pointed out, is a blending of epoch-changes and of populism.
- ↑ According to the Formalists, artistic forms are to be explained "by their own artistic laws, and not by social motivation." Pasternak (see Russian section) will be heard declaring that the artist must expect no aid other than from his own imagination, that art should represent the furthest teach and not the mean of an epoch, and that only the natural growth and strength of art can relate it to its epoch.
- ↑ See Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution, 1930.
- ↑ This attitude, a disdain of a mere political revolution, was frankly expressed in the course of a controversy that arose between the group about the American-Parisian review, transition, and the young revolutionary group in America.
- ↑ In France, there are a number of literary-social revolutionary groups of various shades of political opinion. In Germany, the literary alignments are very largely social and political.
- ↑ See introduction to the English and Irish section, following.
- ↑ Time and Western Man.
- ↑ See, in the Italian section following, the article, "Orient," by Emilio Cecchi. Compare Burzio and Evola.—Contrast Rimbaud's "bogs of the Occident" (les marais occidentaux). Oeuvres, Mercure de France edition, p. 298.
- ↑ See the article, "900," in the Italian section.
- ↑ On Mediterraneanism, compare Valéry, Variete, 1., p. 38. For the characteristics of the European, see Ibid., p. 41.—Compare Stendhal's "cosmopolite," Nietzsche's "good European." The question of Europeanism is a vital, and frequently a vexing one for the Italian of today. See Alberto Consiglio's Europeismo and Rafaello Franchi's L'Europeo sedeniario (both published in 1929).
- ↑ See the French section, following.
- ↑ See the manifesto. Direction, issued by a young American group in Paris, Autumn, 1930.
- ↑ M. Berge.
- ↑ Littérature, No. 1, March, 1919.
- ↑ "Un mystère dont le lecteur doit chercher la clef." M. Péon Pierre-Quint, Le Comte de Lautréamont et Dieu, p. 12, note 1, asserts that hermétisme, under certain forms, may be traced as far back as the seventeenth century, to such authors as Corneille, La Fontaine, etc.
- ↑ Introduction to the French section.
- ↑ The young Irish poet, Samuel Beckett, is attempting to do for poetry what Joyce has done for prose.
- ↑ Due to Joyce, the verbal revolution has reached a higher stage of development in English than in French, being especially evident in the group that surrounded transition. In France, the academy long has exerted a baleful influence over word-freedom; but with M. Roger Vitrac and others, we witness an attempt to show, and to see, what can be done with the language of Joyce's predecessor, Rabelais. See M. Vitrac's Le Language à part, in transition, No. 18.
- ↑ See the Essais de la psychologie contemporaine. An English version of M. Bourget's remarks on decadence will be found in the Introduction by Havelock Ellis to the John Howard translation of Huysmans' A Rebours ("Against the Grain").
- ↑ ". . . usus . . . arbitrium est et ius et norma loquendi, etc.
- ↑ De oratore: "Ergo utimur verbis aut iis quae propria sunt et certa quasi vocabula rerum . . . aut iis quae transjeruntur et quasi alieno in loco collocantur, aut iis quae novamus et jacimus ipsi," etc. (III., 37-8.) See, also. Ibid., I., 34, where the author speaks of words forged in imitation of the Greek, and compare the Joycean process. See Castiglione, Il libro del cortegiano, I., 28ff.
- ↑ This was brought out in the course of that controversy which has been referred to in Note 132, above.
- ↑ There are other influences which should be mentioned, pointed out by M. Vitrac in his article: Mallarme; Jarry's Ubu roi; Tristan Tzara and the Dadaists; etc.
- ↑ Italy, ever since Futurism, has been a good deal concerned with a "synthetic theatre."
- ↑ See Bontempelli's "900," in the Italian section, following. There is of course, an effort to rehabilitate the playhouse. Bragaglia's demand is for a "theatric theatre," a theatre in the etymologic sense of the word.—See an articlDestin de la poésie,e by Charensol, on La Mort du théâtre, "900," No. 3, pp. 178ff. also Nous et le théâtre, Ibid., No. 2, pp. 176ff., etc.
- ↑ Destin de la poésie, "900," No. 2, p. 184.
- ↑ See Ehrenburg's story, "Merry Paolo," in the Russian section.
- ↑ See M. Bouvier, op. cit.. Note 8, pp. 72-3.
- ↑ "Tout ce qui amuse en surprenant." (M. Berge).
- ↑ One may mention Geoffrey Taylor and Samuel Beckett.
- ↑ In Italy alone, observes M. Crémieux, has the War had the effect of a throwback to tradition; but this statement, so far as Italy is concerned, is debatable.
- ↑ Ardengo Soffici: "Ogni nuova civilazione esce dal riso del bambini."—"Instead of generalizing about the epoch, which is really the task of the future, we have compelled the epoch itself to live as an incarnated generalization." (Boris Pasternak.—See his "Response to the Resolution of the R. C. P.," in the Russian section, following.)