Читать книгу Woman and Puppet, Etc - Pierre Louys - Страница 3

Table of Contents

About twelve years ago Oscar Wilde dedicated his beautiful Salome thus: “À mon Ami Pierre Louÿs.” At that time not many gentlemen in England knew the name of the writer who was to become famous throughout the Land of the Mind as author of Aphrodite. His earliest fame here was to be enshrined in that dedication. Afterwards, in The Spirit Lamp, he had the honour and pleasure of putting into a French sonnet one of the prose poems that Wilde used to put into the post as letters. Suddenly, about ten years ago, every one in the republic of French letters was praising a new and wonderful book, Aphrodite. It was the most amazing study of antiquity since the Salambo of Flaubert or the Mary Magdalen of Edgar Saltus. The beautiful girl in the romance by Louÿs captivated a continent. She was, indeed, mystérieuse et victorieuse. But he did not stop. His waiting world soon had from him the Chansons de Bilitis. An English wit, one of the few, said they were Chances of Debility. His phrase saves trouble, but one can say that these prose chansons were a picture of Sapphic life and love of a very febrile sort. There is quite a lot of that in modern French literature. It is a mode of the moment. Louÿs then passed to the writing of the superb little books Lêda, Byblis, The Artist Triumphant, and A New Pleasure. They are here translated. The narrative Louÿs called The Adventures of King Pausolus was of the whimsy story type. It brought to the minds of well-read men such things as Uchard’s tale Mon Oncle Barbassou. It also clearly informed the reader that Louÿs was French, and that even in the telling of a harmless romance the strip of water between England and France is a strip that also flows between two antipolar view-points. But Louÿs at last came to the writing of Woman and Puppet, and wrote something of deepest human intent. A version of it follows. The very curious story entitled The Hill of Horsel shows the fusing of fact and fiction, antiquity and to-day. It is a most interesting effort, and achievement, in a form of story that Poe, Gautier and D’Aurevilly also perfected.

G. F. MONKSHOOD.