Romains is not to be understood by extracts and fragments. He has felt this general replunge of mind into instinct, or this development of instinct to cope with a metropolis, and with metropolitan conditions; in so far as he has expressed the emotions of this consciousness he is poet; he has, aside from that, tried to formulate this new consciousness, and in so far as such formulation is dogmatic, debatable, intellectual, hypothetical, he is open to argument and dispute; that is to say he is philosopher, and his philosophy is definite and defined. Vildrac's statement "Il a changé la pathétique" is perfectly true. Many people will prefer the traditional and familiar and recognizable poetry of writers like Klingsor. I am not dictating people's likes and dislikes. Romains has made a new kind of poetry. Since the scrapping of the Aquinian, Dantescan system, he is perhaps the first person who had dared put up so definite a philosophical frame-work for his emotions.
I do not mean, by this, that I agree with Jules Romains; I am prepared to go no further than my opening sentence of this section, concerning our growing, or returning, or perhaps only newly-noticed, sensitization to crowd feeling; to the metropolis and its peculiar sensations. Turn to Romains:
Je croyais les murs de ma chambre imperméables. Or ils laissent passer une tiède bruine Qui s'épaissit et qui m'empêche de me voir, Le papier à fleurs bleues lui cède. Il fait le bruit Du sable et du cresson qu'une source traverse. L'air qui touche mes nerfs est extrêmement lourd. Ce n'est pas comme avant le pur milieu de vie Ou montait de la solitude sublimée.
Voilà que par osmose Toute l'immensité d'alentour le sature.
* * * * * * * Il charge mes poumons, il empoisse les choses, Il sépare mon corps des meubles familiers,
* * * * * * * Les forces du dehors s'enroulent à mes mains.
In "Puissances de Paris" he states that there are beings more "real than the individual." Here, I can but touch upon salients.
Rien ne cesse d'être intérieur. La rue est plus intime à cause de la brume.
Lines like Romains', so well packed with thought, so careful that you will get the idea, can not be poured out by the bushel like those of contemporary rhetoricians, like those of Claudel and Fort. The best poetry has always a content, it may not be an intellectual content; in Romains the intellectual statement is necessary to keep the new emotional content coherent.