Page:Poetry, a magazine of verse, Volume 7 (October 1915-March 1916).djvu/258

POETRY: A Magazine of Verse One had this sense of absolute fairness—no prestige, no overemphasis, could work upon it.

"Permettre aà ceux qui en valent la peine d'écrire franchement ce qu'il pense—seul plaisir d'un écrivain:" these were almost the last words he wrote to me, save a postscript on the outside of the envelope; and they are almost his "whole law and gospel." And indeed a right understanding of them means the whole civilization of letters.

Outside a small circle in Paris and a few scattered groups elsewhere, this civilization does not exist. Yet the phrase is so plain and simple: "to permit those who are worth it to write frankly what they think."

That is the end of all rhetoric and of all journalism. By end I do nor mean goal, or ambition. I mean that when a nation, or a group of men, or an editor, arrives at the state of mind where he really understands that phrase, rhetoric and journalism are done with. The true aristocracy is founded, permanent and indestructible. It is also the end of log-rolling, the end of the British school of criticism for the preservation of orderly and innocuous persons. It is the end of that "gravity" to which Sterne alludes as "a mysterious carriage of the body to cover the defects of the mind."

M. de Gourmont did not make over-statements. His Diomedes is a hero because he is facing life, he is facing it quite sincerely, with no protection whatever. Ibsen with his smoky lightning had rumbled our, "There is no intermediator between God and man." M. de Gourmont, with his perfect and gracious placidity, had implied—yes, implied, made