e, for the
misanthropy of Alfred de Vigny, for the perversity of Verlaine, for the
rowdiness of Marlowe?--the higher the note of the lyre, the more
ridiculous is the attitude of the lyrist, and the coarse public applauds
the violence of Diogenes when he tramples on the pride of the poets with
a greater pride than theirs. I cannot help thinking that this attitude
of the sacred bard, maundering from the summit of his ivory tower, and
hollowed out and made haggard by a kind of sublime moral neuralgia, will
have to be abandoned as a relic of the dead romantic past. So far as it
is preserved by the poets of the future it will be peculiar to those
monasteries of song, those "little clans," of which I am now about to
speak as likely more and more to prevail.

In France, where the interest in poetry has, during the last generation,
been far more keen and more abundant than anywhere else in the world, we
already see a tendency to the formation of such experimental houses of
song. There has been hitherto no great success attending any one of
these bodies, which soon break up, but the effort to form them is
perhaps instructive. I took considerable interest in the Abbaye de
Creteil, which was a collectivist experiment of this kind. It was
founded in October 1906, and it was dissolved in consequence of internal
dissensions in January 1908. It was an attempt to create, in defiance
of the public, in contemptuous disregard of established "literary
opinion," a sort of prosodical chapel or school of poetry. It was to be
the active centre of energy for a new generation, and there were five
founders, each of whom was highly ambitious to distinguish himself in
verse. At Creteil there was a printing-press in a great park, so that
the members should be altogether independent of the outside world. The
poets were to cultivate the garden and keep house with the sale of the
produce. When not at work, there were recitations, discussions,
exhibitions of sketches, for they were mixed up with the latest vagaries
of the Cubists and Post-impressionists.

This particular experiment lasted only fifteen months, and I cannot
conscientiously say that I think it was in any way a success. No one
among the abbatical founders of Creteil had, to be quite frank, any
measure of talent in proportion to his daring. They were involved in
vague and nebulous ideas, mixed up with what I am afraid I must call
charlatans, the refuse and the wreckage of other arts. Yet I