Notice

1° Edition originale :

The Book of masks, traduction de Jack Lewis et introduction de Ludwig Lewisohn, John W. Luce and company, Boston, 1921.

2° Un texte :

One of the most fruitful and astonishing inventors of images and metaphors. To find new expressions, Huysmans materializes the spiritual and the intellectual spheres, thus giving his style a précision somewhat heavy and a lucidity rather unnatural : rotten souls (like teeth) and cracked hearts (like an old wall) ; it is picturesque and nothing else. The inverse opération is more conformable to the old taste of men for endowing vague sentiments and a dim consciousness to objects. It remains faithful to the pantheistic and animistic tradition without which neither art nor poetry would be possible. It is the deep source from which all the others are formed, pure water transformed by the slightest ray of sunshine into jewels sparkling like fairy collars. Other "metaphorists" like Jules Renard, venture to seek the image either in a reforming vision, a detail separated from the whole becoming the thing itself, or in a transposition and exaggeration of metaphors usage ; finally, there is the analogic method by which, without our voluntary aid, the meaning of ordinary words change daily. Saint-Pol-Roux blends these methods and makes them all contribute to the manufacture of images which, if they are all new are not all beautiful. From them a catalogue or a dictionary could be drawn up :

Wise-Woman of light — the cock.
Morrow of the caterpillar in balldress — butterfly.
Sin that sucks — natural child.
Living distaff — mutton.
Fin of the plow — plowshare.
Wasp with the whip sting — diligence.
Breast of crystal — flagon.
Crab of the hand — open hand.
Letter announcement — magpie.
Cemetery with wings — a flight of crows.
Romance for the nostrils — perfume of flowers.
To tame the carious jawbone of bemol of a modern tarask — to play the piano.
Surly gewgaw of the doorway — watchdog.
Blaspheming limousine — wagoner.
To chant a bronze alexandrine — to peal midnight.
Cognac of Father Adam — the broad, pure air.
Imagery only seen with closed eyes — dreams.
Leaves of living salad — frogs.
Green chatterers — frogs.
Sonorous wild-poppy — cock-crow.

The most heedless person, having read this last, will décide that Saint-Pol-Roux is gifted with an imagination and with an equally exuberant wretched taste. If all these images, some of which are ingenious, followed one after another towards les Reposoirs de la Procession where the poet guides them, the reading of such a work would be difficult and the smile would often temper the aesthetic emotion ; but strewn here and there, they but form stains and do not always break the harmony of richly colored, ingenious and grave poems. Le Pélerinage de Sainte-Anne, written almost entirely in images, is free of all impurity and the metaphors, as Théophile Gautier would have wished, unfold themselves in profusion, but logically and knit together : it is the type and marvel of the prose poem, with rhythm and assonance. In the same volume, the Nocturne dedicated to Huysmam is but a vain chaplet of incohérent catachreses : the ideas there are devoured by a frightful troop of beasts. But l’Autopsie de la Vieille fille, despite a fault of tone, but Calvaire immémorial, but l’Ame saisissable are masterpieces. Saint-Pol-Roux plays on a zither whose strings sometimes are too tightly drawn : a turn of the key would suffice for our ears ever to be deeply gladdened.