WHAT HAPPENED AT those Tour Eiffel meetings? There were certainly no formal after-dinner speeches in the manner of the Poets’ Club. In fact, Flint never mentions whether they actually ate or not, though Pound says they did, and many years later would recall them as ‘Hulme’s dinners’, so they presumably did.126 Even the kindly Stulich would surely have taken it ill if they had not at least had drinks. They certainly couldn’t afford a private room – Flint recounts how a waiter resorted to putting a screen round them on one occasion, when Pound was bellowing a poem at full force. The rest of the clientèle must have wondered what was going on. The Tour Eiffel gatherings appear to have operated much more as contemporary poetry workshops do; the members read each other their poems, praised, objected, criticised and dissected them, talked over their ideas about poetry, argued and encouraged each other to experiment with different forms. Although Pound later described the Tour Eiffel poets as a ‘school’, by analogy with the avant-garde coteries in Paris, that was a misnomer, a rhetorical gesture for his own ends. There was no shared programme, though there were shared questions, the most central of which was what form modern poetry should take. In Flint’s somewhat self-mocking ‘History of Imagism’ written in 1915, he gives an indication of their discussions:
I think that what brought the real nucleus of this [Tour Eiffel] group together was a dissatisfaction with English poetry as it was then (and still is, alas!) being written. We proposed at various times to replace it by pure vers libre; by the Japanese tanka and haikai; we all wrote dozens of the latter as an amusement; by poems in a sacred Hebrew form, of which ‘The House that Jack Built’ is a perfect model; Joseph Campbell produced two good specimens of this, one of which, ‘The Dark,’ is printed in ‘The Mountainy Singer’; by rhymeless poems like Hulme’s ‘Autumn’ and so on. In all this Hulme was ringleader.127
In Flint’s list of poetic forms with which the Tour Eiffel poets experimented, he characteristically first mentions vers libre and Japanese poetry. For Flint they remained the two essential models for change. As he had stressed in his New Age reviews, he was convinced that they were akin, both evocative, imagistic, impressionistic, visionary. Arthur Symons had said of symbolist poetry – in his book, The Symbolist Movement, that was to influence Eliot so much – that it was an attempt
to evade the bondage of rhetoric, the old bondage of exteriority. Description is banished that beautiful things may be evoked, magically; the regular beat of verse is broken in order that words may fly, upon subtler wings.128
This was Flint’s view of both French vers libre and of the Japanese haiku. In a review Flint had described Storer’s proto-imagist poetry as ‘aiming at a form of expression, like the Japanese; in which an image is a resonant heart of an exquisite moment’; this was the form in which imagist poetry would first emerge, as the brief, intense epiphany.129
Although he modestly does not make the claim, Flint himself, rather than the ‘ringleader’ Hulme, was probably the one who introduced the tanka and haiku to the group.130 As he says, the haiku was quickly taken up by the others, including Hulme, though not yet by Pound. By 1909, when the Tour Eiffel poets met, Japanese art had already had a profound impact on European, especially French, painting. Since it first became known after the opening up of Japan in the 1850s, painters such as Manet, Degas, Monet, Mary Cassatt, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Seurat, Toulouse-Lautrec, Bonnard and many others had been deeply influenced by its minimalism, its simplicity and its use of line and block. Impressionism as a movement owed much to the discovery of Japanese art, and Japanese influence played no small part in bringing about the late nineteenth-century/ early twentieth-century move away from representational towards more abstract art. In England and America, the arts and craft movement had spread the fashion for Far Eastern design in furniture and ceramics, but while chinoiserie had been in vogue since Horace Walpole and Strawberry Hill, from the 1860s onwards the new interest was in Japan. (Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado [1885] was among other things a satire on the public fascination with all things Japanese.) Significantly for later interest in England, Whistler’s work was profoundly influenced by Japanese art, as was the whole development of art nouveau. At the end of the work Pound admired so much, the ‘Ten O’Clock Lecture’ (also 1885), Whistler names as the two supreme touchstones of beauty, ‘the marbles of the Parthenon’ and a fan painted by Hokusai. For many in the mid-1880s, such a coupling was still an outrage; Far Eastern painting might be interestingly exotic, but not comparable to the Graeco-European tradition: it could be a source of delightful knick-knacks, but not High Art. Even Swinburne, regarded as so radical and deviant by the respectable, was shocked by what he regarded as this blasphemous promotion of non-European art to a level of equality with the European, and wrote an outraged response in the Fortnightly Review, deploring Whistler’s suggestion that ‘the highest expression of his art is to be realized in the reproduction of the grin and glare, the smirk and leer, of Japanese womanhood’.131 The two pieces were sometimes published together, as if Swinburne, for once, could be antidote rather than poison. As Swinburne’s piece hints, to many Japan meant decadence and immorality, its courtesans all the more shocking because highly cultured. The influence of Japanese art on the dubious aesthetic movement, of course, told its own tale. It was Arthur Symons, the pointer in so many ways to the future development of modernism, who in Dramatis Personae quoted approvingly Goncourt’s commendation of the ‘search after reality in literature’ and the ‘triumph of japonisme’ as two of the ‘great literary and artistic movements’ of the later nineteenth century.132
Writers took longer to see a potential model in the Japanese forms than the visual artists, though one can argue, as Earl Miner does, that some were influenced at second hand through the Impressionists; there is a clear link, for example, between the version of Impressionism Ford Madox Ford absorbed from Maupassant – the selection of the telling detail, the hint, not the detailed account – and Japanese art forms. Until the late nineteenth century, little Japanese, or for that matter Chinese, poetry had been translated into English, at any rate outside the academy. Poets in Britain and America had continued to look to the European past for their models.133 Yet that was now changing. Herbert Allen Giles, a British diplomat based in China for many years, later Professor of Chinese at Cambridge, brought out a two-volume Gems of Chinese Literature in 1884 and A History of Chinese Literature in eight volumes in 1901, a book Pound was later to read to great effect. In 1880, Basil Hall Chamberlain, an Englishman living in Japan, who rather remarkably became Professor of Japanese and Philology at the Imperial University of Tokyo, published a book of English translations aimed at the general reader, entitled The Classical Poetry of the Japanese. His translations still used conventionally rhymed stanzas of the kind denounced by Flint, always, for example, translating a tanka, the 31-syllable poem, as a four-line stanza, such as this one, entitled simply ‘Spring’:
Spring, spring, has come, while yet the landscape bears
Its fleecy burden of unmelted snow!
Now may the zephyr gently ’gin to blow,
To melt the nightingale’s sweet frozen tears.134
Surprisingly for us today, Chamberlain never mentions the existence of haiku in this work; chronologically the haiku emerged later than the poetry he includes here, but considering that thirty years later Japanese poetry and the haiku would have become synonymous in Europe, the absence of a reference is striking. In 1899W. G. Aston published the first history of Japanese literature, which has a brief mention of the haiku form, and gives translations which interestingly are not forced into rhyme, though still Victorian in diction.
When Chamberlain reissued his collection with the title Japanese Poetry in 1911, he included an essay on the haiku, entitled ‘Bashõ [sic] and the Japanese Poetical Epigram’, which he had originally published in a scholarly journal in 1902, and in addition a new introduction, strikingly different from the previous one. In 1880, Chamberlain had been deeply patronising about Japanese poetry. The Japanese, he said, were imitators rather than creators; their poetic metre, which depended solely on the counting of syllables, without ‘rhyme, tone, accent, quantity, nor alliteration’, was ‘primitive’; the chief characteristic of their poetry was its ‘prettiness’; and ‘there are no soundings of the depth of the human heart’.135 The one quality he ascribes to them that might have caught the aesthetes’ attention is that ‘the Japanese muse … does not consider it her mission to teach at all’, precisely the point about art that Whistler was making in his lecture. ‘What we find,’ Chamberlain wrote, ‘is the expression, in natural language, of the simple feelings common to all mankind, – love, regret, loyalty, attachment to the old traditions, and in the place of religion and of moralising, nothing but that hopeless sense of the transitoriness of life, which precedes, as it survives, all culture and all philosophy.’ The 1911 introduction contains a much more detailed account of the development of Japanese poetry; Chamberlain evidently by then knew a great deal more about it. Comments on its prettiness or primitive state have entirely vanished. In a preface before the introduction, he explains that while he has republished the original translations at the ‘urgent request of friends’, they ‘no longer satisf[y] him, because he allowed himself too much freedom’. He has now ‘gone over into the camp of the literalists’, as he shows in the much sparer translations included in his essay on the haiku. There he emphasises the qualities which would make this poetry so important for modernist poetry – its fragmentary, elliptical nature, its intense condensation of meaning. He describes it in terms of painting: ‘It is the tiniest of vignettes, a sketch in barest outline, the suggestion, not the description, of a scene or a circumstance. It is a little dab of colour thrown upon a canvas one inch square, where the spectator is left to guess at the picture as best he may.’ He goes on to comment that ‘the spirit of the seventeenth century Japanese poet is identical with that which informs the work of the Western water-colourist of to-day. It is intensely modern, or at least imbued to the full with that love and knowledge of nature that we are accustomed to consider characteristic of modern times’.136
This was very much Flint’s view, though the writer whose accounts of the Far East captured the widest audience in the 1890s and early years of the twentieth century, including several of the future imagists, was the Greek-Irish-American Lafcadio Hearn, who published several books on Japan, many of them with titles, as Earl Miner notes, that suggest a romantic vision of an exotically mysterious land: Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, Gleanings in Buddha-Fields, Exotics and Retrospectives, In Ghostly Japan, Shadowings. Hearn was one of the many intellectuals increasingly pessimistic about Western modernity, and he had been entranced by Japan. His books created a picture of a Japan that was wise, calm, beauty-loving and mysterious, a ‘fictive nation’ that became Japan for a generation in the West, though Hearn himself, having settled there, soon began to despair of the Japanese desire to modernise.137 Although Hearn failed to learn Japanese, his books occasionally included translations by others, but the only volume of Japanese poetry in translation published in his name did not appear until after his death, in 1915, when the vogue for the haiku was already flourishing. All the same, his evocative descriptions of the role of poetry in Japanese life and his aestheticising vision of Japanese culture helped to raise the interest of poets in forms such as the haiku, as significant in the evolution of modernist poetry as the discovery of Japanese art had been earlier for Impressionist and post-Impressionist artists.138
By 1909 the leading modernist painters had moved on to new areas. Since about 1890, inspiration began to be sought in so-called ‘primitive art’ – whether of the past or from exotic cultures, or peasant or even child art – anything that did not employ the careful mimesis of the Western tradition, anything that could put artists in touch with a spontaneity and freshness they felt was lost in modern civilisation. It was to these areas that artists such as Picasso, Vlaminck and Matisse were now turning, having come to feel, as the French artist and critic Maurice Denis put it, that Japanese art was still too sophisticated and self-conscious. As the art historian Colin Rhodes points out, these artists argued of their new eclectic range of influences that ‘the strand that … drew these disparate elements together was the search for clarity and simplicity’, and the appeal of the direct and spare haiku form for early modernists like Flint had much in common with this; it was also similar to the attraction that Gaelic forms had for a poet like Campbell.139 For their generation, the modern, so-called civilised world of convention was a world of surfaces, obscuring the depths below; this apparently simple, pure, direct poetry gave, they felt, access to a more authentic kind of experience.
Hulme must quickly have realised that the haiku could be interpreted to fit in perfectly with his Bergsonian conception of art as the intuitive dive into the flux, as Paul-Louis Couchoud, the French doctor whose articles were Flint’s source of information, had already realised. If Flint had not recognised Couchoud’s Bergsonian language when he first read him, after meeting Hulme he undoubtedly would. In Couchoud’s account, Japanese poetry’s supreme gift is that it offers an image which captures an instantaneous response before its freshness is destroyed by ratiocination; its brevity and directness make it possible to evade the loss of authenticity suffered once syntax interposes its conventions:
Du poème japonais surtout le discursif, l’explicatif sont extirpés. La bizarre fleur se détache unique sur la neige. Le bouquet est interdit. La poème prend à sa source la sensation lyrique jaillissante, instantanée, avant que le mouvement de la pensée ou de la passion l’ait orientée et utilisée … Les mots sont l’obstacle. La chaîne des mots introduit un ordre élémentaire qui est déjà un artifice.
(‘Above all, Japanese poetry avoids wordiness and explanation. A single flower lies by itself on the snow. Bouquets are forbidden. The poem springs from an instantaneous lyric impulse, that wells up before thinking or passion have directed or made use of it … Words are the obstacle. The chain of words introduces an elementary order that is already artifical.’)140
Couchoud here follows Bergson in his contrast, so important to Hulme, between the immédiatement donnée of direct intuition and the deadening language of intellectualised knowledge. The brief, momentary haiku, he suggests, gives direct access to experiences which words by their very nature obscure. Its sudden juxtaposition of two sparsely presented, very different images that fuse to give a new perception precisely illustrates the Bergsonian poetic theory that Hulme had expounded to the Poets’ Club, the philosophy which lay behind his theory of ‘the image’, or rather of ‘images’. Hulme had the theory; Flint had found the form. The haiku’s qualities of simplicity, brevity, fusion and instantaneous impact were all to be central to later imagism. In addition, the haiku’s use of juxtaposition, also apparent in the fragmented forms of modernist art and soon particularly in the technique of collage, was to be perhaps the most important innovation in modernist verbal and visual art. Though in one sense these poets turned to the haiku to find an alternative to what they saw as the tired, stale, deadening present, they were also seeing in it a poetry appropriate to the modern world: juxtaposition and collage were to be the art forms of the modern metropolis, a world of heterogeneity, rupture and shock.