Conversations in Ebury Street, Chapter 13

London: William Heineman, 1 January 1924, pages 166-173, 2,140 words

Conversations in Ebury Street is a nonlinear volume of nineteen chapters. Chapters 7-11 are essays in art criticism; chapter 19 is worldbuilding; the rest are essays in literary criticism. The chapters appear separately in the Aesthetics and Worlds pillars of George Moore Interactive. All are included in the ebook of Conversations in Ebury Street in the GMi Shop.

XIII

I tried to detain Cunninghame Graham, for I had not said half of what I had to say, but seeing at that moment that his eyes were heavy with sleep, I said: Since you must go, go without hearing the rest. Whereupon he spoke of exchanging books, he promising his travels in Morocco and I a copy of The Brook Kerith, which should be sent to him to-morrow. A moment after he disappeared in the moon haze, and sleep being still far from me, I laid myself out on the sofa in the drawing-room so that I might think more clearly; but having no subject in mind I listened to the ticking of my pretty Louis seize clock and remembered that my aunt had bought it for me in Bond Street twenty years ago for twelve pounds; one of my best bargains. After leaving the shop I was lucky enough to spy on the other side of the street two candelabra to match for sixteen pounds; to be more truthful, it was my aunt who — but the story of these acquisitions is surely to be found in one of my autobiographical works, so I will not risk repeating it here, but will content myself with saying that every time the bell of the clock rings I look up, to think, and not infrequently, of my dear aunt. One never wearies of pretty things, and if it had not been for all this writing I might have cultivated my taste and made a collection that would fetch a large sum of money at Christie's at my death. But literature absorbed me, and mayhap I got as much from it as I should have from a collection of Chelsea china and Louis seize clocks. I should have collected principally the eighteenth-century, for the genius of that century governs me throughout, except in poetry. Eighteenth-century poetry is trite, but triteness is preferable to free verse, for it would seem that free verse, having freed itself from rhyme and metre, finds itself, like many other anarchies, without anything to say, another claim of our world to ingenious paradox, freedom being obtainable only through remissions of freedom…. When next I go to France I shall perplex Dujardin and his little confraternity with the aphorism: Man must be enslaved, else he is impotent. They cannot do else than admire Verlaine, for he loosened the conventions of French verse, establishing, in conjunction with Banville, the right of the poet to two caesuras:

II a vaincu la Femme belle, au croeur subtil,

and the still more audacious line:

En robe d'or ii adore, gloire et symbole,

ending with a hiatus:

— Et, ô ces voix d'enfants chantant dans la coupole!

But why should they admire Rimbaud, whose verses are as orthodox as Hugo's, the Comte de l'isle's, or Heradia's? Nor can their admiration for this poet be attributed to incoherency, for Rimbaud is as lucid as Gosse. Gosse makes fun of the title Le Bateau Ivre, but a title may be ludicrous in English and admirable in French. We speak of a lurching boat and a lurching drunkard, and to speak of Le Bateau lvre as The Tipsy Boat may be funny: but it is not good criticism, and Gosse would have done better to forgo bis joke for the sake of the wonderful lines in which the poet recalls the savagery of the sea. I understand that Dujardin and his tribe should admire Laforgue more than Verlaine, for it was the genius of Laforgue that gave currency to free verse. But it is his prose that endears him to me:

Jamais, jamais, jamais cette petite ville d'eaux ne s'en douta, avec son inculte Conseil municipal délégué par des montagnards rapaces et nullement opéra-comique malgré leur costume.

Ah! que tout n'est-il opéra-comique!... Que tout n'évolue-t-il en mesure sur cette valse anglaise, Myosotis, qu'on entendait cette année-la (moi navré dans les coins, comme on pense) au Casino, valse si récemment mélancolique, si irréparablement demiers, derniers beaux jours!... (Cette valse, oh! si je pouvais vous en inoculer d'un mot le sentiment avant de vous laisser entrer en cette histoire!

0 gants jamais rajeunis par les benzines! O brillant et mélancolique va-et-vient de ces existences! O apparences de bonheur si pardonnables! O beautés qui vieilliront dans les dentelles noires, au coin du feu, sans comprendre la conduite des fils viveurs et musclés qu'elles mirent au monde avec une si chaste mélancolie!...

Petite ville, petite ville de mon cœur.

Les Moralités Légendaires comes to me by right for translation, for am I not of his generation, or almost? his contemporary, certainly. We read each other in the Revue Indépendante, the organ of the symbolists in the 'eighties. Moreover, there is a little of Laforgue in me; in The Lovers of Orelay I am near to Laforgue in his story of Ruth, dying amid tea-roses, the blood-red having been forbidden to her and to her poet, whose end was the same as hers, nearer than any other. He would have chosen me to translate him, wherefore why not? For never do I open Les Moralités Légendaires without a thrill. Ruth is unique in literature and I identify her with his wife, whom he met in Berlin skating, I am sure, for have I not written of the spell of her waist, of the flowing boa, and the feet lifted beneath the dark skirt, and how when the spell of these fell upon him he resigned his place as reader to the Empress, married, and brought his wife to Paris in the hope that literature would yield them a living. Dujardin published him; nobody else would. Jules caught the sickness from his wife, and the English girl passed between the rooms with tisanes. And many thanks are due to the few friends who climbed to see them on Thursday evenings. Needless to say that Dujardin was among them, and that he published Les Moralités Légendaires, the volume Jules left in his desk. Ruth did not survive her husband many months, and where she is buried nobody knows; nor shall I try to inquire out the facts but continue to cherish L'Imitation de Notre Dame la Lune and Des Fleur de bonne Volonté. But whilst paying homage to Laforgue, Dujardin and his sodality pay equal homage to Baudelaire, whose aestheticism seems to have been formed in a street which, had I the naming of it, would not be called Rivoli but rue Baudelaire, so invincibly do its hookahs, long pipes with amber mouthpieces, pierced brass lamps, Turkey carpets, burning pastilles, amber beads and ivory, even the fez that the shopman wears, remind us of Les Fleur du Mal; or I might name the street, if its renaming were left to me, rue de la Camelote, for all is false in the rue de Rivoli. And having made these changes in the locality, I would rename Baudelaire's volume Fleur de Camelote, for is it not all rue de Rivoli — hookahs, pastilles, amber beads­ — more Turkish than Jerome and falser than he is even in his sculpture? It is true that when we were young men we purchased Turkish lamps made in Paris, and since those days we have lived in dread of the reproaches of the younger generation, pointing fingers at us and crying: Baudelaire! Hookah! Turkish lamp! Hookah! But instead of making jeering-stocks of us as they might have done, the younger generation exalts Baudelaire above Hugo, above Gautier, above Banville, and decry De Musset, whose verses, it is true, are full of tags, but withal not such vulgar tags as Baudelaire's. And my thoughts pausing, I began to feel a smile creeping round my lips, and I fell to thinking how one night in the Val Changis Dujardin, in the company of a dozen or more poets, recited the sonnet in which I expressed my inability to visit him in 1920 because of Héloïse and Abélard.

La chair est bonne de l'alose

Plus fine que celle du bar,

Mais la Seine est loin et je n'ose

Abandonner Pierre Abélard.

Je suis un esclave de l’art;

La très sage Héloïse pose

Sans robe, sans coiffe et sans fard,

Et j'oublie aisément l'alose.

Mais je vois la claire maison­ —

Arbres, pelouses et statue!

Dujardin, j'entends ta leçon:

Raison qui sauve, foi qui tue,

Autels éclaboussés du son

Que verse une idole abattue.

George Moore is the only visitor to the Val Changis who is allowed to follow the rules, cried Dujardin, but be must be reproved for filling an idol with sawdust; such an indignity as to be filled with sawdust never befell an idol before, and it would not have happened now were it not for the needed rhyme. I have tried to revise the last lines for him, but the words are not in the language. Une poupée will not do; the word idole cannot be dodged. With gold, pearls, diamonds, almost anything but... On hearing from Marie of his criticism of my sonnet, I wrote: I will try to find three lines that please thee better. Not three, but two, he wrote to me.

Mais je vois la claire maison —

Arbres, pelouses et statue!

Dujardin, j'entends ta leçon:

Qu'enfin la Légende s'est tue,

Car Pan est revenu des bois

Dansant, son pipeau sous les doigts.

Thy tercets, old friend, are no longer based on two rhymes, he wrote. A reproach ill suited to one who repudiates rhyme altogether, I replied. My revised tercits are common, for I missed the inspiring influence of strict rhyming. But the argument in favour of free verse and the argument against it exceeded the time at our disposal, and it was not till this year that I asked the assembled tribe if it would cease to speak with reverence of le marchand de Camelote if I could discover fourteen faults in one of his sonnets. To which they gave no answer, but seemed anxious to bear my analysis of the sonnet:

La Mort Des Amants

Nous aurons des lits pleins d'odeurs légères,

Des divans profonds comme des tombeaux.

Et d'étranges fleurs sur des étagères,

Écloses pour nous sous des cieux plus beaux.

I will not trouble you with all the reasons why lovers should lie in the same bed, but will ask you if two beds do not suggest an Hotel; and having gotten his double­-bedded room he found himself unable to escape from two divans, tombeaux being the rhyming word. The third line is even worse than the first two, for nobody puts flowers, of the common or rare species, on étagères; cups and saucers, yes, but flowers never, except in bad verses. And please to note that the strange flowers open under more beautiful skies; but the fact that the flowers are placed on étagères does not enable us to explain how they open under more beautiful skies if we do not accept as an ellipse: que les nôtres.

Usant à l'envi leurs chaleurs dernières,

Nos deux coeurs seront deux vastes flambeaux,

Qui réfléchiront leurs doubles lumières

Dans nos deux esprits, ses miroirs jumeaux.

For those who like ron, ron, this verse is admirable, despite the many tags. Let us put it into prose, a test that all good verse can bear:

Whilst prolonging their last heats,

Our two hearts shall be two mighty torches.

But if the hearts are giving their last heats without stint, they can hardly be at the same time two vast torches; smouldering torches, perhaps, but not flaming torches.

Reflecting their double lights

In the twin mirrors of our spirits.

It will be said that these lines do not lend themselves to translation, but translation enables us to see how absurd they are:

Un soir fait de rose et de bleu mystique,

Nous échangerons (here we get into the ron, ron, again), un éclair unique,

Comme un long sanglot, tout chargé d'adieux;

I exaggerated when I said that I could find a fault in every line; I fail to find one in the line: Un soir fait de rose et de bleu mystique. But I cannot pass the second line. Exchange a unique glance! In an evening of rose and blue we shall exchange a unique glance! But if the glance is unique it cannot be exchanged, and it is difficult to understand how a unique glance that has been exchanged can resemble a sob filled with farewells. The sonnet has been much admired despite its faults, as much as Verlaine's sonnet to Parsifal, in which every line is perfect. Such promiscuous admiration puzzles and annoys me, and I explain it through my knowledge of the human animal, who now and then loses his head and admires a beautiful thing without withdrawing his allegiance from ugliness.