FOREWORD

It is now some time since I wrote, somewhat vaguely (with reference to one of d’Annunzio’s books) that a novel is a poem and should be conceived and executed as such if it is to prove of worth.

At that time I said:

“The novel is based upon the same esthetic as the poem; the original novel was composed in verse: for example, the Odyssey, a novel of adventure; the Aeneid, a chivalrous romance; the first French novels, as everybody knows, were poems, and it is only at a fairly late day that they were transposed into prose to adapt them to the indolence and the ignorance of a larger reading public. From this origin the novel inherits the possibility of a certain nobility, and any genuine writer, if he concerns himself with it, will restore that nobility to the form: whom would one wish to convince that Don Quixote is not a poem, that Pantagruel is not a poem, that Salammbo is not a poem? The novel is a poem; the novel that is not a poem does not exist.”

Flaubert had not yet taught me, through the letters that narrate the arduous composition of Madame Bovary, that one must “endow prose with the rhyme of verse (leaving to it, however, its distinctly prosaic character) and write to ordinary life as one writes history or epic.” Upon thinking this over I found that Flaubert carried a bit too far the idea that we must achieve a literary prose whose beauty may be fashioned only of words and rhythm, the rhythm being primordial. The method that he prescribed for the novel I believe suited likewise to the play, the tale, even when it is but an anecdote—almost all form of composition—even the simple article done for the morning-paper. There is no inferior art. An article may be a poem from the moment one has assigned to it the rhythm against which it will dance its brief pavan. Once the rhythm has been found, all is found, for the idea incorporates itself into the tempo, and the ball of yarn or silk is formed almost without the intervention of any consciousness of a task.

The tale, it seems to me, demands a special condition: in order to write it one must possess the illusion, no matter how fleeting, of being happy; a merry afternoon is enough. And this relates it more closely to the poem than any reasoned-out theory could do. To be happy—that is to say, to have enjoyed a flower, the flower of one’s choice, or the bright glance of certain eyes: then one becomes interested in the games of others. In fact, when one is happy, or almost so, one can no longer stay inside, where one sees well only through desire. A tale is a stroll.

Almost all the stories that you are about to read were written in a single breath, save the polishing touches, the expansion of too slender parts, and excisions. Thus there comes, at certain times, a moment when the breath runs short. One lays the work aside for the following day, and this is a pity, for dreams trouble one’s days.

I do not write all this to instruct in a method a public that cares very little for methods. The stream of these notes flowed one evening in a few moments on to a stray sheet of paper.

I clarified it, at first for my own pleasure, and then in an attempt to solve a problem. Take this poet who now overflows in novels, even in feuilletons, in all the petty tasks of a man of letters—do you really think him unfaithful to his first muse? Yes, doubtless, often. Not always. As long as rhythm sings within him, he is faithful. His downfall does not begin until that day when the harmony of the phrase is utterly sacrificed to reason—to what persons without any beyond in their spirits call truth. The true poet and the true sage can always, like Goethe, conciliate Poesy and Reality, and all the more easily since Poesy is the daughter of Reality. I remember hearing M. Quinton express surprise that Pasteur should have written a tragedy. Beyond doubt it was very bad (not worse than those in which M. Claretie’s abilities as régisseur excel), but this exercise attests an original sense of rhythm. His beautiful experiments were, in the days that followed, rhythmed like poems, like the marbles of his compatriots Hugo, Rude, Clésinger. The Satyre who scales the mountain of mysteries, the Bacchante au Thyrse, who rushes into voluptuousness, the game of chemical retorts which prove that life arises only from life—these are the gestures of genius animated by one and the same rhythm. One likes to recall that Descartes composed a ballet to pleasure the great Christine; one is fond of remembering that Montesquieu rhythmed the games of his young imagination, that Pascal composed a symphony upon the Passions of love, that Nietzsche caused the forests to resound with the superhuman laughter of Zarathustra, that Flaubert rhythmed like Homeric verses the quotidian words of that Stupidity to whom he played Hercules.

It is rhythm that lends beauty to the poor ballerina who seems draped only in her chemise. May it lend a little to those women who, in their rushing adventures, dance too madly perhaps, each in one of the rays of light resolved by the naïve prism of their desire.—⁠R. G.

July 30, 1908.