Books and Things
ALL writers, according to Anatole France, are condemned to solitary confinement. I quote from the English edition of "La Vie Litteraire": "We are shut up in our own personality as if in a perpetual prison. The best thing for us, it seems to me, is to admit this frightful condition with a good grace, and to confess that we speak of ourselves every time we have no strength to remain silent." A friend of mine, a rival of Mr. A. B. Walkley in his devotion to these words, has embroidered upon them after this fashion, which he calls "Magnum Opus":
My book is of the past. A shadow falls,
Blue, Greek, serene, across the Attic page.
In this, a murmur of the Middle Age
Echoes and dies along Italian walls.
My book is of the present. Young Love's wings.
He loves, she loves. "O, let him marry her!"
Softly, I pray. The wedding will occur
After he's busted a few trusts and change.
My book is of the future. Here on earth
Both sexes travel their eugenic way
To Heaven, and sex war has its day.
The story closes with my hero's birth.
All these my subject. On an upper shelf
It hides, my dusty duodecimo.
I never read it. it contains, you know,
A hundred thousand words about—myself.
A good war poem, whenever anybody writes one, will be welcome, but I can't understand disdain of the war poetry that has already found its way to the United States. Most of it is merely claret on the tablecloth and the kindest criticism is a pinch of salt. Many of the poets are now in the trenches. Neither they nor the stay-at-homes have had time to shape imaginatively such material as the war has brought them. Conceive, if you please, some planet where disobedient water flowed uphill, where the goodness of God was apprehended by the devout as flushing the universe as certain seasons only, where the flesh of men fell of their bones in autumn, and skeletons walked the winter until spring I should hardly expect my favorite poet, if transported thither, to supply me at once with an imaginative reaction upon a planet so peculiar. At first he could not listen to the music of the sphere on which he was marooned He would be too intent upon making sense out of the libretto. Let us, therefore, deal gently with poets whom patriotic impulse or a noble, unintelligent aspiration to be worthy of a great moment, has too early set to work. The war is not yet a suspect, except for the rhetoricians. Some day it will find its great poet. I am content to wait for this day, unless the great poet, by not being born yet, keep me waiting too long.
I trust I haven't implied that taking his time insures a writer against the rhetorical danger. Paul Hervieu, you may remember, was profoundly disorganized by the Dreyfus case. For two years he could do no work. The idea of guilt haunted him. A crime of one kind or another had been committed and the guilt had not been fixed. He was cured of his distraction at last by writing "L'Enigme," one of the Dreyfus case's queerest by-products. In its first form the play ended without giving up its secret. It did not tell us which of the two wives, Giselle or Leonore, had been guilty of adultery. We found this out in the second version of the play before the first act was over. Two years plus the months needed to make three versions of "L'Enigme." Time enough, you might think, for M. Hervieu to have conceived and been delivered of a thoroughly unrhetorical play. Such was not his good fortune. But the time did prove long enough for him to get clean away from all temptation to dramatize the Dreyfus case, with which the play has nothing whatever to do. "L'Enigme" serves as a measure of the distance which may separate the impression which causes a work of art from the impression it leaves, a record of how far from his springboard the diver may come up.
You lift your eyebrows, do you, at my calling "L'Enigme" a work of art? Would have lifted them, you say, even if you had not read the sincere destructive pages in which M. Romain Rolland attends to M. Hervieu's case? I don't mind. While I yield to many, to very many, in my liking for "L'Enigme," it spoke to me, in spite of the mechanism so laboriously and naively installed in its first act, with singular directness. There is much in it that repels me. Even for such a short and violent story it is too loud, too bare, too obviously a strict follower of its constructor's blue-print. The characters seem always to be self-consciously thinking, "We mustn't say or do anything irrelevant. M. Hervieu will scold us if we're in the least irrelevant." They are ever in their great taskmaster's eye. Yet the play did make me feel what at the hour of starting for the theater I had only known, that death is a barbarous, anachronistic punishment of adultery, that an adultery which ends in murder or suicide ends badly.
I remember being on a glacier once, with two other men. We had lost our way, we were cold and hungry, darkness was coming on. Professed lovers of the open air for about a month every year, professed scorners of cities for exactly the same period, we should have welcomed, on that August night, even a city to dwell in. We were in no danger so long as we did not move, for an ample moon was scheduled and would, in a few hours, be lighting us off the ice, but we were temporarily wretched. Nothing to eat, nothing but glacier and water to drink, nothing to smoke. One of my friends, searching his rucksack more profoundly, made a noise of discovery—cigars! He produced them one by one. One, two—only two in all, and three smokers. In a flash a truth I had long known came all the way home to me. One and one do not make three. Since that moment I have seen points of resemblance between life and Paul Hervieu. An evening with him, like that evening on the glacier, turns old knowledge into feeling.
Only two or three of his tragedies bourgeoises have been given in this country. I wonder why all of them, except the earlier criticisms of French law, have not been translated and published. Something would be lost, of course. English cannot be coaxed or bullied into that modern equivalent of French alexandrines which M. Hervieu often intends, yet he must be less difficult, with his rather stiff declamation and his want of grace, than his lighter-handed contemporaries. Speeches are more easily translated than talk, the purple of prose than the fine linen. His plays are largely scenario, and scenarios die hard. The importance of children, the power of a child to keep the separation of its parents from becoming a perfect separation—themes like these are exportable. The most general of the impressions M. Hervieu makes on me he would still make, I am sure, through any translation. I should distinguish, above the creaking of his dramaturgy, the sound of a real mind in pain.
