What Is Art? by Leo Tolstoy (english readers .txt) 📕

ciel, les jambes lisses qui gardent le sel de la mer première.” Se rappelant leurs pauvres épouses, chauves, morbides et pleines d’horreur, les maris se pressent: elles aussi par curiosité, mélancoliques, veulent voir.

Quand tous auront contemplé la noble créature, vestige de quelque époque déjà maudite, les uns indifférents, car ils n’auront pas eu la force de comprendre, mais d’autres navrés et la paupière humide de larmes résignées, se regarderont; tandis que les poètes de ces temps, sentant se rallumer leur yeux éteints, s’achemineront vers leur lampe, le cerveau ivre un instant d’une gloire confuse, hantés du Rythme et dans l’oubli d’exister à une époque qui survit à la beauté.

The Future Phenomenon⁠—by Mallarmé

A pale sky, above the world that is ending through decrepitude, going perhaps to pass away with the clouds: shreds of worn-out purple of the sunsets wash off their colour in a river sleeping on the horizon, submerged with rays and water. The trees are weary and, beneath their foliage, whitened (by the dust of time rather than that of the roads), rises the canvas house of “Showman of things Past.” Many a lamp awaits the gloaming and brightens the faces of a miserable crowd vanquished by the immortal illness and the sin of ages, of men by the sides of their puny accomplices pregnant with the miserable fruit with which the world will perish. In the anxious silence of all the eyes supplicating the sun there, which sinks under the water with the desperation of a cry, this is the plain announcement: “No signboard now regales you with the spectacle that is inside, for there is no painter now capable of giving even a sad shadow of it. I bring living (and preserved by sovereign science through the years) a Woman of other days. Some kind of folly, naive and original, an ecstasy of gold, I know not what, by her called her hair, clings with the grace of some material round a face brightened by the blood-red nudity of her lips. In place of vain clothing, she has a body; and her eyes, resembling precious stones! are not worth that look, which comes from her happy flesh: breasts raised as if full of eternal milk, the points towards the sky; the smooth legs, that keep the salt of the first sea.” Remembering their poor spouses, bald, morbid, and full of horrors, the husbands press forward: the women too, from curiosity, gloomily wish to see.

When all shall have contemplated the noble creature, vestige of some epoch already damned, some indifferently, for they will not have had strength to understand, but others brokenhearted and with eyelids wet with tears of resignation, will look at each other; while the poets of those times, feeling their dim eyes rekindled, will make their way towards their lamp, their brain for an instant drunk with confused glory, haunted by Rhythm and forgetful that they exist at an epoch which has survived beauty.

II92

I

The following verses are by Vielé-Griffin, from page 28 of a volume of his Poems:⁠—

Oiseau bleu couleur du temps

1.

Sait-tu l’oubli
D’un vain doux rêve,
Oiseau moqueur
De la forêt?
Le jour pâlit,
La nuit se lève,
Et dans mon cœur
L’ombre a pleuré;

2.

O chante-moi
Ta folle gamme,
Car j’ai dormi
Ce jour durant;
Le lâche emoi
Où fut mon âme
Sanglote ennui
Le jour mourant⁠ ⁠…

3.

Sais-tu le chant
De sa parole
Et de sa voix,
Toi qui redis
Dans le couchant
Ton air frivole
Comme autrefois
Sous les midis?

4.

O chante alors
La mélodie
De son amour,
Mon fol espoir,
Parmi les ors
Et l’incendie
Du vain doux jour
Qui meurt ce soir.

Francis Vielé-Griffin.

Blue Bird

1.

Canst thou forget,
In dreams so vain,
Oh, mocking bird
Of forest deep?
The day doth set,
Night comes again,
My heart has heard
The shadows weep;

2.

Thy tones let flow
In maddening scale,
For I have slept
The livelong day;
Emotions low
In me now wail,
My soul they’ve kept:
Light dies away⁠ ⁠…

3.

That music sweet,
Ah, do you know
Her voice and speech?
Your airs so light
You who repeat
In sunset’s glow,
As you sang, each,
At noonday’s height.

4.

Of my desire,
My hope so bold,
Her love⁠—up, sing,
Sing ’neath this light,
This flaming fire,
And all the gold
The eve doth bring
Ere comes the night.

II

And here are some verses by the esteemed young poet Verhaeren, which I also take from page 28 of his Works:⁠—

Attirances

Lointainement, et si étrangement pareils,
De grands masques d’argent que la brume recule,
Vaguent, au jour tombant, autour des vieux soleils.

Les doux lointaines!⁠—et comme, au fond du crépuscule,
Ils nous fixent le cœur, immensément le cœur,
Avec les yeux défunts de leur visage d’âme.

C’est toujours du silence, à moins, dans la pâleur
Du soir, un jet de feu soudain, un cri de flamme,
Un départ de lumière inattendu vers Dieu.

On se laisse charmer et troubler de mystère,
Et l’on dirait des morts qui taisent un adieu
Trop mystique, pour être écouté par la terre!

Sont-ils le souvenir matériel et clair
Des éphèbes chrétiens couchés aux catacombes
Parmi les lys? Sont-ils leur regard et leur chair?

Ou seul, ce qui survit de merveilleux aux tombes
De ceux qui sont partis, vers leurs rêves, un soir,
Conquérir la folie à l’assaut des nuées?

Lointainement, combien nous les sentons vouloir
Un peu d’amour pour leurs œuvres destituées,
Pour leur errance et leur tristesse aux horizons.

Toujours! aux horizons du cœur et des pensées,
Alors que les vieux soirs éclatent en blasons
Soudains, pour les gloires noires et angoissées.

Émile Verhaeren,
Poèmes.

Attractions

Large masks of silver, by mists drawn away,
So strangely alike, yet so far apart,
Float round the old suns when faileth the day.

They transfix our heart, so immensely our heart,
Those distances mild, in the twilight deep,
Looking out of dead faces with their spirit eyes.

All around is now silence, except when there leap
In the pallor of evening, with fiery cries,
Some fountains of flame that God-ward do fly.

Mysterious trouble and charms us enfold.
You might think that the dead spoke a silent good-bye,
Oh! too mystical far on earth to be told!

Are they the memories, material and bright,
Of the Christian youths that in catacombs sleep
’Mid the lilies? Are they their flesh or their sight?

Or the marvel alone that survives, in the deep,
Of those that, one night, returned to their dream
Of conquering folly by assaulting the skies?

For their destitute