John Gould Fletcher

“ The real secret of the greatest English poets lies not in their views on life,—which were, naturally, only those which every sane man is obliged to hold,—but in their profound knowledge of their craft, whereby they were enabled to put forth their views in perfect form. Each era of man has its unique and self-sufficing range of expression and experience, and therefore every poet must seek anew for himself, out of the language-medium at his disposal, rhythms which are adequate and forms which are expressive of his own unique personality. ”

“ If we do not want art to disappear under the froth of shallow egotism, we must learn the lesson Bashō can teach us.
That is not to say, that, by taking the letter for the spirit, we should in any way strive to imitate the hokku form. Good hokkus cannot be written in English. The thing we have to follow is not a form, but a spirit. Let us universalize our emotions as much as possible, let us become impersonal as Shakespeare or Bashō was. Let us not gush about our fine feelings. Let us admit that the highest and noblest feelings are things that cannot be put into words. ”

“ The fundamental tenets of thought, art, life itself, have been shaken: and either civilization is destined to some new birth, or mankind will revert to the conditions of life, thought, and social intercourse that prevailed in the Stone Age.
Like all men of my generation, I have not been able to resist this irresistible upheaval of ideas and of forces: and, to the best of my ability, I have tried to arrive at a clear understanding of the fundamentals of æsthetic form as they affect the art to which I have felt myself instinctively akin, the art of poetry. ”

“ All that is vital and valuable in French painting of the nineteenth century, since Ingres, springs directly from the enthusiasm and spiritual energy of the French Revolution. The somber fury of Delacroix, the colossal caricature of Daumier; the peasant art of Millet; the sane realism of Courbet; the mordant irony of Degas and Forain; even the feeling for nature and the open air which the Impressionists gave us, all represent phases of humanity's vague and enormous hunger for personal freedom, for human liberty and development. ”

“ Over the roof-tops race the shadows of clouds;
Like horses the shadows of clouds charge down the street.
VI
The balancing of gaudy broad pavilions
Of summer against the insolent breeze:
The bellying of the sides of striped tents,
Swelling taut, shuddering in quick collapse,
Silent under the silence of the sky.
Earth is streaked and spotted
With great splashes and dapples of sunlight:
The sun throws an immense circle of hot light upon the world,
Rolling slowly in ponderous rhythm
Darkly, musically forward. ”

“ This novel form never is altogether novel, nor is the subject altogether a new subject. For, as I pointed out at the beginning of this preface, that all arts sprang practically out of the same primary sensations, so the subject-matter of all art must forever be the same: namely, nature and human life. Hence, any new type of art will always be found, in subject-matter as well as in technique, to have its roots in the old. Art is like a kaleidoscope, capable of many changes, while the material which builds up those changes remains the same. ”

“ If Gauguin did not realize himself in Martinique, he at least found himself on the road to realization. But the unchecked power of the sun, steadily sapping not only the white race, but also the race of mixed blood, with which he, like Hearn, felt so much sympathy, banished him from this Eden at the same time as it gave him a hint for the future.
His health demanded a return to France. He came back, bringing with him pictures—experimental, tentative efforts to reconcile the glow and gloom of the tropics with Pissarro's analysis of paler northern sunlight. ”

“ As swaying pines.
The wind tosses hers
In circles
That recoil upon themselves:
How should I love—as the swaying or tossing wind?
[31]
Kurenai-ye or "Red Picture"
She glances expectantly
Through the pine avenue,
To the cherry-tree summit
Where her lover will appear.
Faint rose anticipation colours her,
And sunset;
She is a cherry-tree that has taken long to bloom.
[32]
A Woman Standing by a Gate with an Umbrella
Late summer changes to autumn:
Chrysanthemums are scattered
Behind the palings. ”

“ In fact, literature existed before writing; and writing in itself is of no value from the purely literary sense, except in so far as it preserves and transmits from generation to generation the literary emotion. Style, whether in prose or poetry, is an attempt to develop this essentially musical quality of literature, to evoke the magic that exists in the sound-quality of words, as well as to combine these sound-qualities in definite statements or sentences. The difference between prose and poetry is, therefore, not a difference of means, but of psychological effect and reaction. ”

“ The second range of problems with which we are immediately concerned, when we examine the poetic craft, is that which is generally expressed under the name of rhyme.
Now rhyme is undoubtedly an element of poetry, but it is neither an indissoluble element, nor is it, in every case, an inevitable one. In the main, the instinct which makes for rhyme is sound. Poetry is an art which demands—though not invariably—the utmost richness and fulness of musical effect. When rhyme is considered as an additional instrument of what may be called the poetic orchestra, it both loses and gains in importance. ”

“ It is not easy to read between the lines of Gauguin's self-imposed reserve and self-determined resolve to shock the bourgeoisie. If we attempt to do so, we find a man so set upon his own path that he was almost without friends. Van Gogh he loved without understanding. Daniel de Monfreid he perhaps loved and understood. The shadowy figure of Tehura, a figure perhaps idealized, was to be the only woman who greatly moved him.
Puvis de Chavannes, an artist to whom Gauguin owed much, similarly held himself aloof from all. So did Degas and Ingres, two other artists of Gauguin's stamp. ”

“ The last one pauses and says, "'Tis a dream."
His bridle shakes.
The sky
Is filled with oval violet-tinted clouds
Through which the sun long settled strikes at random,
Enkindling here and there blotched circles of rosy light.
These are poppies,
Unclosing immense corollas,
Waving the horsemen on.
Over the earth, upheaving, folding,
They ride: their bridles shake:
One of them sees the sky is red:
One of them sees the earth is dark:
The last man sees he rides to his death,
Yet he says nothing at all.
III
There will be no harvest at all this year ”

“ Paris with her art-theories had nothing now to teach Gauguin. He must find his own way, create his own tradition. Aloof alike from the theories of the Impressionists and from those of their successors, the Pointillists—theories of the disassociation of tones and of the analytic disintegration of light, based on the scientific treatises of Chevreuil and Helmholtz—he was painfully tending back to the old decorative tradition that a picture must be an unit, the harmonious expression of a single emotion. Hunger proved again the best friend of the independent artist. ”

“ Every one is talking—many poets, poeticules, and poetasters are writing—what they call "free verse." Let there be no mistake about one thing. Free verse that is flabby, in-organic, shapelessly obvious, is as much of a crime against poetry as the cheapest echo of a Masefield that any doggerel scribbler ever strummed. ”

“ Thus architecture gives us feelings of density, proportion, harmony: sculpture, of masses in movement; painting, of colour-harmony and the ordered composition of lines and volumes from which arise sensations of space: music, of the development of sounds into melodic line, harmonic progression, tonal opposition, and symphonic structure.
The object of literature is not dissimilar from these. Literature aims at releasing the emotions that arise from the formed words of a certain language. But literature is probably a less pure—and hence more universal—art than any I have yet examined. ”

“ Hearn, like Gauguin, was a disillusionized cosmopolite, disgusted with the banal artifice, the blatant commercialism, the pedantic and Puritanic hypocrisy of our Occidental civilization. Like Gauguin, Hearn found in the West Indies a revelation of a world which had not lost touch with Nature—a world of men who were content to remain, in Nature's eyes, something as ephemeral and as harmonious as the trees, the flowers, the beasts among which they lived. ”

“ The grey grows ever denser, and soon the night will fall:
The wind runs sobbing over the beach and touches with its hands
Straw, chaff, old bottles, broken crates, the litter of the sands.
Sometimes the bloated carcase of a dog or fish is found,
Sometimes the rumpled feathers of a sea-gull shot or drowned.
Last year it was an unknown man who came up from the sea,
There is his grave hard by the dunes under a stunted tree.
With heavy doleful clamour, hour on hour, and day on day,
The muddy groundswell lifts and breaks and falls and slides away.
(2) SNOW AT SEA
Andante. ”

“ No sincere artist cares to handle subject-matter that has already been handled and exhausted. It is not a question of a desire to avoid plagiarism, or of self-conscious searching for novelty, but of a perfectly spontaneous and normal appeal which any new subject-matter always makes. Hence, when a new subject appears to any artist, he always realizes it more vividly than an old one, and if he is a good artist, he realizes it so vividly that he recreates it in what is practically a novel form. ”

“ With Gauguin's last return to Tahiti there opened for him the final and most important phase of his life, the last stand of the savage against encroaching civilization. The letters that he sent to de Monfreid during this period are painful reading. They breathe the weary cry of a man who knows that Fate's dice are loaded against him, the complaint of a warrior who realizes that fighting is useless, but who has no choice but to fight on. ”

“ The truly strong spirits of this world are not those who exist solely on the surface of things. One can only sympathize with them, share their imaginings through long and patient study. Gauguin was not altogether strong; on some sides he was weak, as he himself admitted. But his work increased in vitality and in strength as his aim became more clear. Schuffenecker's studio was useful to him; he stayed in Paris just long enough to sell as many pictures as he could and to copy Manet's Olympia, a picture he greatly admired. Then once more he took the road to Brittany. ”

“ Rather is it more important to observe that almost any prose work of imaginative literature, if examined closely, will be found to contain a plentiful sprinkling of excellent verses; while many poems which the world hails as master-pieces, contain whole pages of prose. The fact is, that prose and poetry are to literature as composition and colour are to painting, or as light and shadow to the day, or male and female to mankind. There are no absolutely perfect poets and no absolutely perfect prose-writers. Each partakes of some of the characteristics of the other. ”