The Background to Modern French Poetry by P.

Mansell Jones
Review by: Anna Balakian
The French Review, Vol. 26, No. 5, Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Number (Apr., 1953), pp. 400401
Published by: American Association of Teachers of French
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400

THE FRENCH REVIEW

non-descriptif devient baroque, oA s'arr6ter? Malgre le parti accuse, une veritable

intelligence du style de Pascal transparatt de cette 6tude qui vaut certainement
une lecture.
Gageons toutefois que le travail patient de la critique pesera moins dans notre
connaissance de Pascal que la r6cente d6couverte d'un portrait de l'apologiste par
Philippe de Champaigne. Cet admirable portrait nous livre un Pascal spirituel,
conquerant, ironique et cavalier (reproduit dans le livre de M. Beguin, voir surtout
Ulysse Moussalli, Le vrai visage de Pascal. Paris, Plon, 1952). Oi est le torture du
doute, le sombre Pascal? Un portrait detruira-t-il la legende?
Duke University

J.-J. DEMOREST

New York, Cambridge

University Press, 1952. 198 pp. $3.75.
Here is a series of informal articles on possible affinity and parallels between
Romantics and Symbolists, philosophers and poets, Americans and Frenchmen,
followed by vignette glimpses of poets whom the author questioned long ago on the
delicate matter of their literary debts.
Professor Jones, whose study of symbolism carried on over a period of years
includes an earlier work on ]mile Verhaeren, writes with vitality and enthusiasm.
He makes no pretension at unity or all-inclusiveness in his present volume on the
backgrounds of modern French poetry, nor does he aim at any startling discovery of
source material. Established influences are discussed and other critics' opinions
weighed. French and English scholars figure much more conspicuously in his citations and bibliography than Americans. The chronological precedence of Poe's concept of ideal and beauty over Baudelaire's, and that of Whitman's free verse over
the symbolists' is pointed out but found to be a negligible factor in evaluating the
originality of the French poets.
The most revealing item in the first chapter, which ranges from the Illuminist
Swedenborg to the Romantic visionaries, is the resemblance which the author discerns between Chateaubriand and Baudelaire, and which he indicates as a possible
and heretofore neglected influence.
The discussion of the Baudelaire-Poe affinity-an ancient and overworked subject to which it is to be hoped that Professor W. T. Bandy's most recent study will
call halt for a while-should prove more useful to French readers than to Americans,
as it gives the Poe worshipers an opportunity to view the question from the strictly
Anglo-Saxon angle of disbelief in the greatness of Poe as man or poet.
The chapters on the gradual liberation of verse have the distinction of drawing
meticulous lines separating the prose-poem, liberated verse, and free verse. However the differences are presented on a theoretical basis and the relative values of
the three forms remain unjudged. These systematic classifications enter Gaspart de
la nuit, "L'Etranger" of Baudelaire, and Villiers de L'Isle-Adam's Axel in the same
chapter; Verlaine's eleven-syllable poems are mated with Mallarmd's "Un Coup
de des," while free verse in the restricted sense of the word is monopolized by that
hybrid group of end-of-the-century symbolists. Saint-Pol-Roux does not make any
of the categories; evidently Les Reposoirs de la procession does not rate as poetical
prose, not even as prosaic poetry in Professor Jones's interpretation of poetics.
After much hesitation between possible and probable influences the author ultimately questions the whole nature of the study of influences and comes to the conclusion that it is often nothing more than a method of comparisons. It leaves us to
reflect that if this particular type of scholarly activity is as futile as Professor Jones
suggests on the strength of his negative proofs and personal investigations of the
JONES, P. MANSELL, The Background to Modern French Poetry.

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401

BOOK REVIEWS

"modern" authors of his youth, who were afraid to admit even having read certain
writers with whom their names had been linked by critics, then it is perhaps high
time that the scholar's pivot of attention shift from what was taken to what was
added by the "influenced" writer. Professor Jones's miscellany may serve that indirect purpose
Syracuse University

ANNA BALAKIAN

DELFEL, GUY,L'Esthetiquede Stephane Mallarme Paris, Flammarion, 1951. 209 pp.

Out of M. Delfel's perspicacious, learned, and dialectically expert study emerges

a Mallarme possessing, besides his art, a philosophy, a religion and a system of
aesthetics, of which his poetry appears a side product.
Although the author admits Mallarm6's ignorance of most of Plato and Hegel,
he grants the poet something of an intermediary position between the two philosophers: the perennial supremacy of the Idea inherent in the fundamental unity within
the work of art. Using as his central theme a phrase of Mallarm6: "abstrait donc
poetique," the author contends that the meager scope of the poet's life-experiences
and his recognition of the ineffectual forces of language directed him toward a rejection of lyricism The resulting absence of the real world from his poetry, and his
negative representation of its objects, preclude an aesthetics of inspiration, says M.
Delfel; in its place there arises an mastheticsof creation, which turns the absence into
something positive: the absolute attained in an art superior to the real world.
Taking issue against Mme E. Moulet's monumental study, L'(Euvrepoetique de
Stephane Mallarme, for having implicated Mallarme's concept of the arts in his
metaphysical despair, he finds her interpretation too pessimistic On the relation
between Igitur and Un Coup de des, he agrees with Mme Noulet and Thibaudet,
both of whom accepted Dr. Bonniot's suggestion of a very definite link between
these two works. But whereas his predecessors found in them Mallarm6's representation of human will, frustrated then lost within the omnipresence of non-being,
M. Delfel points out that in Un Coup de dgs the symbol of the shipwreck may be the
despair of Mallarme, the man, but is not the failure of Mallarme, the artist. So far,
the thesis is tenable, and indeed not only in Un Coup de des but perhaps even more
in Igitur, Mallarm6's experiments with linguistic representation of the absolute can
be demonstrated. But to strengthen the positive side of the ledger, M. Delfel sets
out to make of Mallarm6 an expert asthetician.
Here he falls on dangerous ground: he pursues a method which, in this reviewer's
opinion, is detrimental not only to an understanding of Mallarm6 but also to the
quest for unbiased truth in research. The reader who takes the trouble to check the
references to Mallarm6 texts (there are no footnotes, but only page numbers referring to the P16iade edition of the CompleteWorks) discovers that the statements
upon which Mallarme's supposedly systematic asthetics are erected are principally
three works of an episodic nature: "La Musique et les lettres," consisting of two
lectures read by Mallarm6 at Oxford and Cambridge, "Variations sur un sujet," a
collection of his chronicles in the RevueBlanche, and "Crayonne au th6Atre," random
articles contributed to various periodicals. These essays have no intrinsic unity of
thought nor even a conscious relationship to each other. To substantiate further
the aesthetics attributed to Mallarm6, he refers to a number of letters of the poet to
Aubel, Copp6e, Charles Morice, A. M6rat, and primarily to Cazalis, along with
other fragments and critical notes of the author.
By cleverly putting together isolated sentences from all these writings, with
references from the consecutive pagination of the Complete Works. he conveys to

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