MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
TODAY week, at Burlington House, will open an exhibition of Landscape in French Art, organised by the President and Council of the Royal Academy, the Arts Council and the Direction des Relations Culturelles. It will be an exhibition of importance. Artists and critics will find in it a demonstration, if demonstration were needed, of the excellent continuity of French painting. The ordinary visitor will derive pleasure and instruction from the contemplation of many beautiful pictures and from the stimulus afforded by the interplay of tradition and originality. The student of French culture will observe once again that the French :romantic movement was not, as Sainte Beuve affirmed, a rebellion 'against classicism, but rather a new derivation from old themes. And those who are mainly interested in literature will notice that the influence exercised by painters upon writers was in France more intense, immediate and continuous than any similar influence over here. I have, in fact, heard it stated that, whereas in England the artist came to understand Nature through the eyes of our poets, in France the poets only appreciated Nature as interpreted indirectly Ito them by the artist. The first half of this paradox is evidently ,untenable. Is there any truth in the second half? Is it a defensible proposition to contend that the French poets, in contrast to the British poets, had little instinctive understanding of Nature, but that they approached it indirectly, derivatively and, as it were, vicariously, 'seeing it as a background, a decor, as something pictorially con- veyed? I should not give any extreme adherence to such a thesis, since I realise that the French are by temperament reticent about ,Nature, whereas we are apt to gush. But there is some substance in the theory none the less.
* * * *
It might be said without exaggeration that, whereas the French genius is urban, ours is rural. The French intellect, if it is to develop its maximum vitality, needs the stimulus of similar intellects ; the French rely, far more than we rely, upon the inter- change of ideas, the intercourse of minds ; they have developed conversation to the point where it has become an exacting com- petitive art. I am not suggesting, of course, that all great French writers derived their inspiration from cities, whereas all great English writers derived their inspiration from the fields and woods. Montaigne was an extremely French writer, yet he preferred his silent sitting-room to the pleasures of the court, the parlement at Bordeaux or the baths of Lucca. Dr. Johnson was one of the most English writers there has ever been, yet to him, as he remarked to Mrs. Thrale: " A blade of grass is always a blade of grass ; men and women are my subjects of enquiry." Many similar examples could be adduced to disprove the thesis, but it would be true to contend that, on the whole, the Frenchman is more of a political, or urban, animal than the Englishman, and that French poets have spent more hours sitting in the Cafe Francois Premier than by the banks of the Marne. French painters, on the other hand, have gone direct to Nature for their inspiration, and it is through them that French literature has bVen enriched with scenic effects. I use the word " scenic " deliberately, since it has often occurred to me that in French poetry Nature is a background, even a backcloth, whereas in English poetry it is an essential element of inspiration in itself. Their approach to Nature is pictorial ; ours is sentimental. This may be one of the reasons why French poetry, after the sixteenth century, is so difficult to translate into English.
* * *
The Mande, as George Wyndham proved, can readily be rendered into English verse. Yet the Nature poetry of the Pleiade. congenial though it be to English ears, is in itself pictorial, having neither the solemn sensitiveness of Shakespeare nor the delicate precision of Marvell ; their hawthorn and their roses never grew in hedgerows, but blossomed in embroidery or enamel. Alors Malherhe vial. and g chasm opened between French and English poetry for two hundred years. Yet even after thy Romantic movement had liberated French methods of thought and expression, even after Victor Hugo had come to raise his " tempest in an ink-stand," a difference persisted between the urban and the rural approach to landscape. Nluch as the later French poets may have imagined and asserted that they had followed Rousseau back to Nature, they remained essentially municipal, with their feet upon paving-stones and not on grass. Lamartine's lake was no more than a hazy piece of water and de Musset's wagtails just little birds with a pretty name. I have only met one Frenchman, and he was an eccentric, who could even begin to understand what Wordsworth was about ; to the generality of Frenchmen of letters our Nature poetry is a tangled and even horrid thicket, which displays our disordered imagination rather than our " dumb longing for the Berkshire loam." Even so great a scholar as Taine can never rid himself, or his text, from the im- pression that our Nature-worship is something primitive, even if magnificent, and as such of importance only to the anthropologist. There are whole passages in which he writes of it as if he were describing the initiation -ceremonies of the Kikuyu.
Consider, for instance, the difference in the treatment accorded to flowers by French and English poets. To the French they are herbaceous objects, which scent the garden plots at dusk or look decorative in a vase on the piano. They are not interested in the flower in the crannied wall or in the speedwell's darling blue ; they would not notice whether the hollyhocks hung heavily in late August, nor would any French poet have dared to write the line. "Sweet William with its homely cottage-smell." It may be, to do them justice, that most of the French names for flowers are pre- tentious and as unadapted to the alexandrine as a crinoline to a motor-bicycle. Such words as "horiensia," " datum," " den:wife" or even " hiliot rope " are ill-suited to the precise rhythm of French verse and sound absurd. The only French poet who has indulged at all daringly in botany is Madame de Noailles, and what a mess she made! The French poets generally prefer to treat their flowers, as their landscapes, in terms of still life. Albert Samain, it is true, confessed that he adored roses to the point of agony. "Liles ow," he exclaimed:
" Elles ont la sombre attirance Des choses qui donnent la mart."
But when we examine the poem we find that his roses were onb. intended for a vase upon the supper-table. Always, when one conic; across references to flowers in French poetry, one has the impression that the poet is not thinking of something growing out of the vat soil but of a picture by Fantin-Latour. They will mention the lilacs and the roses, they will drag in a "datura" here and there, but how rarely do we find in French poetry the mention of wild flowers or the scent of mown grass! Even when their flowers are not treated pictorially, they seem to have been bought that morning in 1 florist's shop.
* * * *
It will be said, I know, that some of the parnassiens, the sym- bolists and their successors were able to achieve direct descriptions of Nature. Verlaine, I admit, has given us a charming line about mignonette and a fine sketch of Lincolnshire ; but can these com- pare in reality with his pictures of the London gin-saloons or the Regent's Canal? Henri de Regnier has provided us with beautiful pictures of autumn leaves falling upon marble fountains, but am these more than pictures? Mistral assuredly has conveyed the harsh aridity of his own province, but can anyone seriously claim as French such a line as: "Di mouse() vounvotin s'acalo"? maintain therefore that there is something in the contention that French poets derive their impressions of Nature more from pictures than from themselves A contention which will make many people
very angry indeed. •
Previous page
