Félibien congratulated France for having been able to produce “so rare a man” for her own glorification, and we can only profit by putting ourselves in his school in our turn.
I take Poussin for myself? — No, not at all; it is he who takes me. It is for him to speak. I remain silent.
1 Born in 1596.
2 Born in 1606.
3 Collection of the Marchoness of Bute at Luton (Scotland).
4 Louvre.
5 “Rittrato originale simigliantissimo … fatto nello specchio di propria mano circa l’anno 1630, nella convalescenza della sua grave malattia.…” The rubric on the portrait tells us.
6 Louis Hourticq, Poussin’s Youth, p. 45.
1 Essay on Poussin, in the Moniteur, June-July 1853.
1 With the sole exception, I believe, of the Christ wept over by the Holy Women (not the canvass in the Pinakothek in Munich, unfortunately conventional, but the surprising picture little known, in Dublin, the only one of its kind; probably), of deep feeling and truly religious.
1 That the Museum of Hanover, I believe, lent to Paris at the time of the great exposition, and of which there is, at Dulwich, either a duplicate or a copy.
19 LAUTRÉAMONT
I CONSIDER that the best claim to reputation of the group formed by Breton, Aragon and Soupault, is their having recognized and proclaimed the literary and ultra-literary importance of the astonishing Lautréamont. Nothing could flatter me more than the request they made me to write a preface for the new edition of Chants de Maldoror they are preparing. If I declined that honor, it was because I considered it impertinent to explain, even to present, that work to a public with which it had nothing to do, and to bring up a stool to reach it, when it could only be obtained by a bound.
After all, it does not seem to me that Lautréamont was entirely responsible; but his strange and unprecedented power in our literature, comes, as it happens, from his knowing how to protect himself and to maintain within him that state of irresponsibility. His influence in the nineteenth century was negligible, but he is, with Rimbaud, more than Rimbaud, perhaps, the master of the sluice gates for the literature of to-morrow.
20 ARTHUR RIMBAUD1
I RECALL the time already far distant (it must have been in 1891) when Paul Valéry, whom I had the pleasure of coming across once more at Montpellier, said to me: “In fifty years statues will be raised to him.” It was of Rimbaud he was speaking.
Statues in public places seem to me to be merited only by those who render to the public services of a nature that the public can easily appreciate: a Pasteur, an Edison, a Curie. But doubtless Valéry, when he spoke of “statues,” was thinking of monuments like the one, entirely immaterial, in which you propose to group our homages in your magazine. Never mind! That prediction seems risky to me. Not that my admiration for Rimbaud was not, even at that time, most lively; but the devotion I offered him remained of a secret nature, and I could imagine only with difficulty one ever rallying around him a number of minds of very diverse formation and tendencies. The idea of esoterism and the happy few is one of those to which the issue has given the most unexpected denials. Already for Stendhal and Baudelaire, as a little later for Emily Brontë, Mallarmé, Verlaine and Rimbaud, as to-day for Joyce, Melville, Proust or Péguy, the happy few of yesterday, are called, from now on, the multitude. That is what tempts us to think that real genius always finds its recompense; although the clear echo of its voice is sometimes awaited for a long time, and it is the case with certain poets as with those distant stars whose light reaches us only a long time after the star is dead.…
There is something else: Rimbaud appeared to me like a demoniacal poet, a poet “accursed” above everyone and liking to be so. The burning alcohol, the “famous swallow of poison,” he invites us to drink, and that I have tasted with delectation, more heady, more exciting than any wine, could suit, I thought, only the strong. Into what strange damnation was he not leading all the others? I needed only the high authority of Claudel to assure me. Not so much on account of the saying: omnia munda mundis, to the pure all things are pure, but rather because of the word of Scripture: Et violenti rapiunt illud … although I don’t know any too well whether I should not apply it to Claudel himself rather than to Rimbaud: “And the forceful take possession of it.…” But the Catholic who takes possession of Rimbaud, with his aggravated individualism, his recalcitrance, his revolts, strongly recall to me the Spartan, whose prowess was related to us in schooclass="underline" he has to bear the bites of the stolen fox that he hugs to him under his gown. Rimbaud’s are cruel, almost as much so as his kisses.
And this fox, in its turn, recalls to me Faust’s Pudeclass="underline" behold him increasing, becoming enormous! In the infernal shades, his eyes gleam, throw out disturbing sparks. Rimbaud does not allow himself to be put on the leash easily, even by a Claudel. The yappings of this fox partake of the roars of the wild beast. He is frightening, even when tamed; and many of those who admit him to-day would not have received him into their privacy without his mahout to guarantee to us that his intentions are, in the last analysis, praiseworthy. One might have been permitted to doubt it.
But it matters very little what such and such a person wishes to see in Rimbaud. Is it not the property of a true poetic genius to answer widely divergent questions, to lend himself to many a contradictory interpretation, to encourage disagreement in respect to him, to offer more than appears at first glance, with the result that, with him one can not stop anywhere? There is what he wished to say, what one thinks he wanted to say, but the most important, doubtless, remains what he said without wishing to and in spite of himself.
Then, in spite of double meanings which, in one sense or another, invite us to make use of him tendenciously, Rimbaud remains an amazing master of the art of writing, an inventor of forms whose newness his numberless imitators have not been able to tarnish. Now, we know that questions of form are of the highest importance, in art as well, alas, as in religion. On this ground we are agreed.
Where I go along with you less, dear Seghers, is where you claim to look for, and perhaps find, in Rimbaud a possible rallying point for our desires, for our “dreams,” for our thoughts. Indeed I feel that your sentence remains prudently interrogative and that you have the honesty not to force our answers. Immediately after, you speak of French diversity, Recognize the danger then: if the being (and, in this case, the writer) about whom you consider it desirable for us to assemble, is simple and changeless, as Voltaire or Bossuet, I mean, if his tendency is clearly marked, he will be recognized as master by those alone possessing minds with the same tendency as his. If he is complex, “wavering and diverse” enough to give us (or permit us to take) the wrong scent, he will be able, all by himself, to represent “French diversity,” but the danger will be great that agreement on him be established by the aid of a misunderstanding.
Even “our” Péguy, that little soldier with a great heart, well-intentioned, yet simple, but uppity, humble before God alone, but in conflict with men, and protesting against authority, I am by no means certain that he would recognize as “one of his” a large number of those who claim him at present. If he were still living, that Dreyfusist, that fervent Christian who went beyond the sacraments, that fighter against orthodoxies, what would he say at seeing himself adopted by so many of the faithful who retain only that part of him that suits them?… And as for Rimbaud, what part of him will they retain, without all the rest of his being protesting? Will you take into account only the work of his youth, full of refractoriness, an appetite for freedom, risk and adventure, of blasphemy, and of greediness for forbidden fruit? Shall we forget the frightful bankruptcy of his life, the “ferocious invalid back from warm climes,” the “motionless stump” that this “tipsy” ship became? Or shall we say that this bankruptcy was, as a matter of fact, necessary, and those disappointments in order to obtain from him finally that questionable conversion in extremis which just the same permits the Catholics to claim him as their own? But then what do you admire in him? His early works interrupted almost immediately, or the forgetfulness of that work, and the existence that repudiates it?