As in a Dream (Tel qu'en songe)
Tel qu'en songe by Henri de Régnier.
Magistrates, doctors, company
directors, men of the world are not the only ones who have no
understanding of poetry. One could also be a great orator, a
great historian, a great dramatic author, one could be a great
"man of letters" and still have no love of poetry. So
could one not accuse our pretension to publicize a wonderful new
volume of verse as fatuous, since it requires neither erudition
nor even intelligence. Tel qu'en songe presents to the
above-named persons, who have no love of poetry, a still more
cruel deception than the inevitable, inescapable deception, for
the greater worth of reading poetry. Because generally speaking
poetry contains more or less a dissolution of unfamiliar elements
to serve its purpose: M. Harancourt, a proportion of eloquence,
and M. Richepin an amount of rhetoric simultaneously refulgent
and brutal, with seductive audacity, ready to set forth in the
Argo in pursuit of the golden fleece.
But this time there is nothing in the material
to cling onto, nothing but a clamouring blue infinity, reflecting
the eternity of the sky, virginal as the sea, with no human
trace, with no earthly debris. But also, those who love poetry
may dream here endlessly as if they were rowing over the sea or
over verses from Baudelaire, Lamartine or Vigny. Because Henri de
Régnier is the equal of those great poets and will reside in our
admiration far above the seemingly inaccessible Parnassians. But
our praises - however brief they may be - must be clearly heard.
If such poetry is not a work of intelligence, how are we to dare
judge it divine, and how can we collectively dull our minds to it
and then blame ourselves for our own dullness?
Above what we generally call intelligence,
philosophers seek to seize upon a superior reasoning as singular
and infinite as the feelings, at one and the same time the object
and the instrument of their meditations. It is a little of this
reason, of these mysterious feelings and this profundity that Tel
qu'en songe realizes or presents.
Article appeared
in Le Banquet, November 1892 and reprinted in Chroniques
(Libraire Gallimard, 1927).