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Title: Paul Verlaine

Author: Stefan Zweig

Translator: O. F. Theis
Release Date: November 15, 2010 [EBook #34327]
[This file last updated December 26, 2010]
Language: English

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PAUL VERLAINE, 1895

(Zorn)
P A U L

B y S T E

Authorized Translation by
O. F. THEIS

LUCE AND COMPANY

BOSTON
MAUNSEL AND CO., LTD.
DUBLIN and LONDON
 Copyright, 1913,
By L. E. Bassett
Boston, Mass., U. S. A.

PAUL
VERLAINE

PAUL VERLAINE
 PRELUDE
The works of great artists are silent books of eternal
truths. And thus it is indelibly written in the face of Balzac,
as Rodin has graven it, that the beauty of the creative
gesture is wild, unwilling and painful. He has shown that
great creative gifts do not mean fulness and giving out of
abundance. On the contrary the expression is that of one
who seeks help and strives to emancipate himself. A child
when afraid thrusts out his arms, and those that are falling
hold out the hand to passers-by for aid; similarly, creative
artists project their sorrows and joys and all their sudden
pain which is greater than their own strength. They hold
them out like a net with which to ensnare, like a rope by
which to escape. Like beggars on the street weighed down
with misery and want, they give their words to passers-by.
Each syllable gives relief because they thus project their
own life into that of strangers. Their fortune and misfortune,
their rejoicing and complaint, too heavy for them, are sown
in the destiny of others—man and woman. The fertilizing
germ is planted at this moment which is simultaneously
painful and happy, and they rejoice. But the origin of this
impulse, as of all others, lies in need, sweet, tormenting
need, over-ripe painful force.
 No poet of recent years has possessed this need of
expressing his life to others, more imperatively, pitifully, or
tragically than Paul Verlaine, because no other poet was so
weak to the press of destiny. All his creative virtue is
reversed strength; it is weakness. Since he could not
subdue, the plaint alone remained to him; since he could
not mould circumstances, they glimmer in naked, untamed,
humanly-divine beauty through his work. Thus he has
achieved a primæval lyricism—pure humanity, simple
complaint, humbleness, infantile lisping, wrath and
reproach; primitive sounds in sublime form, like the
sobbing wail of a beaten child, the uneasy cry of those who
are lost, the plaintive call of the solitary bird which is thrown
out into the dusk of evening.
Other poets have had a wider range. There have been
the criers who with a clarion horn call together the
wanderers on all the highways, the magicians who weave
notes like the rustling of leaves, the soughing of winds and
the bubbling of water, and the masters who embrace all the
wisdom of life in dark sayings. He possessed nothing but
the sign-manual of the weak who have need of another, the
gestures of a beggar. But in all their accents and nuances,
in him, these became wonderful. In him were the low
grumbling of the weak man, sometimes closely akin to the
sorrowful mumbling of the drunkard, the tender flute notes of
vague and melancholic yearning, as well as the hard
accusing hammering against his own heart. There were in
him the flagellant strokes of the penitent as well as the
intimate prayers of thanksgiving which poor women murmur
on church steps. Other poets have been so interwoven with
the universal that it is impossible to distinguish whether
really great storms trembled in their breasts, whether the
sea rolled within them, or again, whether it was not their
words, which made the meadows shudder, and which, as a
breeze, went tenderly over the fields. They were the vivifying
poets, the synthesizers—divinities by the marvel of
creation, and its priests.
Verlaine was always only a human being, a weak
human being, who did not even know how “to count the
transgressions of his own heart.” It was this very lack of
individuality, however, which produced something much
rarer—the purely and entirely human. Verlaine was soft clay
without the power of producing impresses and without
resistance. Thus every line of life crossing his destiny has
left a pure relief, a clear and faithful reproduction, even to
the fragrance-like sorrows of lonely seconds which in others
fade away or thicken into dull grief. The tangled forces
which tempestuously shook his life and tore it to tatters
crystallized in his work and were distilled into essences.
This, together with the fact that he has enriched and
furthered literary development by his poetry, is the highest
and noblest meed of praise that can be given to a poet. Yet
such an estimate seems too low to many of his followers,
especially the more recent French literati who celebrate in
Verlaine the unconscious inventor of a new art of poetry
and the initiator of new lyric epochs, unknowing of the folly
of their proceeding. Verlaine, the literary man, was a sad
caricature distorted by ribald noise and Quartier-Latin
cafés. Even as such he indignantly denied this intention.
The greatness and power of his lyricism takes its root in
eternity, in the wonderful sincerity of its ever human and
unalterable emotional content, and above all in the
unconsciousness of its genesis.
Intellectuals alone create “tendencies.” Verlaine was as
little one of these as he was on the other hand the bon
enfant, the innocently stumbling child into whose open and
playful hand verses fell like cherry blossoms or fluttering
leaves. He was a lyric poet. Lyricism is thinking without
logic (although not contrary to logic), association not
according to the laws of thought but according to intuition,
the whispering words of vague emotions, hidden
correspondences, darkly murmuring subterranean streams.
Lyricism again is thought without consequence, instinct and
presentiment, leaping quickly in lawless synthesis; it is
union but not a chain formed of individual links, it is melody
but not scales. In this sense he was an unconscious creator
who heard great accords.
He was never a thinker. His quick power of observation,
flashing electrically, his Gallic wit, and his exquisite feeling
for style were able to illumine splendidly, narrow circles, but
he lacked, as in everything, the power and ability of logical
sequence. He knew how to seize and throw light upon
waves that came to touch his life, but he could not make
them reflect in the dark mirror of the universe, nor could he
throw out into the world rays of curious and tormenting
desire for life. He could not construct a world vision,
revolution, and a sense of distance. This wild and heroic
trait of the great poets was never his. He preferred, fleeting
and weak spirit as he was, the indefinite, not quiet and
possession, nor understanding and power, which are the
elemental factors of life. He surrendered himself completely
to the efflorescence of things, to the sweetness of
becoming and the sadness of evanescence, to the pain
and tenderness of emotions that touch us in passing; in
short, to the things that come to us and not to those which
we must seek and strive to penetrate. He was never a
drawn bow ready to fling himself as an arrow into the
infinite; he was only an æolian harp, the play and voice of
such winds as came. Unresistingly he threw himself into the
arms of all dangers—women, religiosity, drunkenness and
literature. All this oppressed him and rent him asunder. The
drops of blood are magnificent poems, imperishable
events, primæval human emotion clear as crystal.
Two factors were responsible for this: an unexampled
candor in both virtue and vice, and his complete
unconsciousness, which, however, was unfortunately lost in
the first waves of his fame. As he never knew how to weed,
his life forced strange blossoms and became a wonderful
garden of seductively beautiful, perversely colored flowers,
among which he himself was never entirely at home. In
middle life he found the courage, or rather an impulse within
him mightier than his will forced him to do so, and with
relentless tread he left civilization. He exchanged the warm
cover of an established literary reputation for the
occasional shelter along the highways. With the smoke of
his pipe he blew into the air the esteem he had acquired
early. He never returned to the safe harbor. Later, as “man
of letters,” he unfortunately exaggerated this as well as
every other of his unique characteristics, in an idle
exhibitionism, and made literary use of them.
Far distant from academies and journals, he retained
his uniqueness uninterruptedly for many years. He has
described in his verses the errant and passionate way of
his life with that noble absence of shame which is the first
sign of personal emancipation from civilized humanity, in
contrast to the primitively natural.
Much has been said and written as to whether
happiness or unhappiness was the result of the pilgrimage.
It is an unimportant and idle question, because “happiness”
is only a word, an unfilled cup in strange hands, and an
empty tinkling thing. At any rate, life cut more deeply into his
flesh than into that of any other poet of our time. So tightly
and pitilessly was his soul wound about that nothing was
kept silent, and it bled to death with sighs, rejoicings, and
cries. A destiny which has accomplished such marvels may
be rebuked as cruel. But we in whom these pains re-echo
in sweet shudderings—for us, it is fitting that we should feel
gratitude.
CONCERNING “POOR LELIAN”[1]
Whenever Verlaine speaks of his childhood, there is a
gleam like a bittersweet smile. This hesitant, plaintive
rhythm appears ever, and ever again, whether in sorrow,
musing sigh, or plaintive reproach. It appears in the tender
and so infinitely sad lines which he wrote in prison, and
likewise in the Confessions, a vain, exaggeratedly candid
and coquetting portrait in prose. Gentle memories, fresh
and tender like white roses, creep loosely through all his
work, scattering pious fragrance. For him childhood was
paradise, because his poor weak soul, needing the
tenderness of faithful hands, had not yet experienced the
hard impacts of life, but only the soft intimate cradling
between devoted love and womanly mildness—a lulling,
sweet unforgettable melody.
All impulses are still pure and bud-like. Love is
unsullied, sheer instinct, entirely without desire and
restlessness. It is silence, peaceful silence, cool longing
which assuages, and so all of life is kind and large,
maternal and womanly—soft. Everything shines in a clear,
transparent, shimmering light like a landscape at daybreak.
Even late, very late, when his poor life had already become
barren and over-clouded, this yearning still rises and
trembles toward these days of youth like a white dove. The
“guote suendaere” still had tears to give. Gleaming pure
like dew drops, and still fresh, they cling to the most
fantastic and wildest blooms.
The first dates tell little. Paul Marie Verlaine was born in
1844 at Metz—he did not remember his second name until
the appropriate time of his conversion. His father was a
captain in the French engineer corps. Verlaine, however,
was not of Alsatian extraction but belonged to Lorraine,
close enough to Germany to bear in his blood the secret
fructification of the German Lied. Early in his life the family
removed to Paris, where the attractive boy with inquisitive,
soft face (as is shown on an early photograph) soon turns
into a gosse and finally into a government official with
skillful literary talents.
Several pleasing episodes and a few kind figures are
found within this simple frame of his external life. Two in
particular are drawn in subdued delicate colors and veiled
with a tender fragrance. Both were women. His mother, all
goodness and devotion, spoiling him with too much
tenderness and forgiveness, passes through his life with
uniformly quiet tread; she is a wonderfully noble martyr.
There is hardly a more poignant story than the one he tells
regretfully in the Confessions of the time when he first
began to drink and how his mother never voiced her
reproach. Once when with hat on his head he had slept out
the remainder of a wild night, her only comment was the
silent one of holding a mirror before him.
 And there is no more tragic incident among the many
sentences of the drunkard than the verdict of the tribunal at
Vouziers, which condemned him to a fine of five hundred
francs for threatening to kill his mother. Even then, though
absinthe had changed the simple child always ready for
penance into a different man, her gesture was still the noble
and inimitable one of forgiveness.
There were also other tender hands to watch over his
youth. His cousin Eliza, who died early, is a figure so mild
and transparent and of so light a tread that she appears
like one of Jacobsen's wonderful creations who wander
and speak like disembodied souls. She had the unique
beauty of early illness, and on that account perhaps turned
more toward the absorbed but not melancholy child,
excusing his escapades. She was loved tenderly, with a
child's love that was without desire and danger.

“Certes oui pauvre maman était

Bien, trop bonne, et mon cœur à la voir palpitait,
Tressautait, et riait et pleurait de l'entendre
Mais toi, je t'aimais autrement non pas plus tendre
Plus familier, voilà.”

It was she too who staged his last youthful folly by giving
him the money for printing the Poèmes Saturniens. Like a
white flame her figure shines through the dense stifling
fumes of his life. It is as if the soft tread of these two women
had given many of his verses their seraphic sheen and lent
the mother-of-pearl opalescence to his softest poems, in
which there is a secret rustling as of the folds of women's
gowns. Even the Paul Verlaine of the later years, “the ruin
insufficiently ruined,” who saw in woman the most ferocious
enemy, and who fled to the wolves that they might protect
him from “woman their sister,” even he still dreamed of the
folded hands, of the forgiving innocent gesture of the
earliest memories. This yearning for mild and pure women
has found many incarnations. In the poems to his bride,
Mathilde Manté, it is the tender song of the troubadour; in
the hours of his mystical conversion it becomes a tender
prayer and Madonna cult; in the years of his decadence it
appears as a pathetic echo, a stumbling plaint and dreamy
childhood desires—the precious hour between sin and sin.
Sometimes this secret desire is placed tenderly and simply
into lines of verse as into a rare, fragrant shrine where the
dearest possessions are kept. These are pure, wonderful
lines like the following, full of longing and renunciation:

“Je voudrais, si ma vie était encore à faire,

Qu'une femme très calme habitât avec moi.”

Verlaine soon left these mirror-clear days of beautiful

youth. His father decided to put him into a boarding-school
at Paris. The dreamy little boy, looking toward the gay
school cap, gladly assented. This was the turning point.
Here his life in a way was rent in two parts, and a wide gap
appears in the weakly but not morbid character of the child.
The somewhat spoiled, modest, and confiding boy is put
among students who are already dissolute and
overbearing. On the very first day he is sickened by the
coldness and barrenness of the rooms, and frightened by
the first contact with life he is instinctively afraid of the evil
which was to overtake him after all. Filled with that mighty
longing for tenderness and gentle shelter which even at fifty
he did not lose, he fled to his home in tears. He was
greeted there with cries of joy and embraces, but on the
next morning he was taken back with gentle force.
This was the catastrophe. Verlaine's weak character
willingly submitted to foreign influences; it became dulled
under the influence of his comrades, “and the overthrow
began.” A foreign element entered his being, a materialistic
cynical trait, for the present only gaminerie, while he was
still a stranger to sex. The specific Parisian character, a
mingling of vanity, insolence, scoffing wit ( raillerie) and
boastful bravado, tempted the soft dreamy boy, but
conquered him only for short hours.
This conflict between feminine sensitivity and a
gaminerie eager for enjoyment wages incessant warfare
throughout his life. Sometimes it harmonizes for brief
moments voluptuousness and idealism, but neither side
ever wins and the struggle never ceases. The
characteristics of Faust and Mephistopheles never became
fully linked in Verlaine; they only interlaced. With the
overpowering capacity for self-surrender which he spent on
everything, he could combine the sensual alone or the
spiritual alone completely with his life, but lacking will, he
was unable to put an end to the constant rotation, which
now dragged him in penitence from his passions only to
hurl him back again into their hated hands. Thus his life
consists not of an evenly ascending plane, but of headlong
descents and catastrophes, of elevations and
transfigurations, which finally end in a great weariness.
The sense of shame was exceptionally strong in him, as
it is in every case where it is repressed. All his life long it
made itself heard in the form of yearning for clarity and
purity. Afraid of mockery, cynicism and indifference were
put forward as a protection until at length these evil
influences overgrew it entirely. Were it not unwise to reflect
in directions which his life disdained to follow, it might be
interesting to attempt a portrait of Verlaine as he might
have been if he had continued on the luminous path of his
childhood under the guidance of kind hands. For surely and
also according to his own opinion, those years were the
humus for the fleurs du mal of his soul.
In these formative years of ungainly figure and uncertain
dreaming the poet grows out of the boy. A malign influence,
puberty, forces the creator in him. “The man of letters, let us
say rather, if you prefer, the poet was born in me precisely
toward that so critical fourteenth year, so that I can say
proportionately as my puberty developed my character too
was formed.” This is surely a womanly and feminine trait,
for in women the entire spiritual development usually
trembles as the resonance of the inner shock. Physical
crises are transformed into catastrophes of the soul, and
the pressure of the blood and its beating waves are
spiritualized into the soft melancholy and sweet dreams
from which his verses rise like tender buds.
It is not out of intellectual growth or out of the persistent
impulse to link the universal to his personality, as in the
cases of Schiller, Victor Hugo or Lord Byron, that these soft
notes rise. They have their origin in a sultry restlessness of
the nerves, in the well-springs of fruitful impulse, in
emotions and shadowy presentiments. They are the early
outpouring of creative masculinity and youthful yearning.
They are half a question and half an answer to life. They are
melancholy and vague, filled with uncertain gleaming and a
rustling darkness.
If poetry consists in a certain sensitiveness of soul and
reaction to slight and cautious stimulation, and not in an
active, wild, subduing force, Verlaine certainly has sensed
the deepest fount of the orphic mysteries. If poetry is so
understood, the boy who wrote the Poèmes Saturniens on
his school benches, already saw the reality of life and even
the future mask. His acute ear heard the oracle which
foretold his destiny, but he did not know how to interpret
what the Pythian voice had whispered until everything was
fulfilled. To understand this, sensitiveness must not be
confused with sentimentality. Sentimentality may grow out
of a pessimism which has been acquired intellectually.
Sensitivity is not only the child of emotion but at the same
time the sum and substance of all feelings. It is both an
inherent tendency and an innate possession, and is
primæval and indestructible as is the gift of poetry itself.
The gift of poetry implies the power of distilling emotions
into that form in which they are already essentially existing
and fixing the fleeting and ephemeral permanently as by a
chemical process which knows no law but only
presentiment and chance.
There is, of course, no art without its technique,
understanding technique not in the derogatory sense of a
mere implement but somewhat in the sense of the material
which the painter uses, who must apply it individually and
thus adds something unknown and unique to what he has
acquired by education and copying. Verlaine learned his
technique early, and he never wrote a line in which his own
guidance could be felt. His earliest teachers were
Baudelaire, Banville, Victor Hugo, Catulle Mendès and
other Parnassiens, cool idealists or frosty exotics,
measured and stiff even in their melancholy, but wise
architects of slender and firmly founded verse-structures,
artists in language, chisellers of form. The pliant, soft
yielding manner of Verlaine quickly embraced their
influences. The student is already master of the métier.
Even the relentless and unhappy rhymester into which “poor
Lelian” turned, late, very late in his career, retained this
eminent skill of reproducing forms smoothly and precisely,
and writing verses of an agreeable, melodic flow and a
beautiful rhythmic movement.
The years of puberty were the time of the production of
the Poèmes Saturniens. Sexuality had not yet developed
sufficiently and was not strong and self-willed enough to
operate destructively. Its influence was only felt in slight
impacts and produced the feeling of sweet unrest. This
unrest, somewhat veiled and turning toward melancholy,
trembles through these early poems and lends them the
unique beauty of sad women. All the art of Verlaine's poetry
is already found in these first poems.
The book appeared, thanks to the assistance of his
cousin Eliza, under Lemerre's imprint, curiously enough on
the same day as François Coppée's first work, and had a
“joli succès de hostilité” with the press. The great writers—
Victor Hugo, Leconte de Lisle, Theodore de Banville, and
others—wrote him encouraging letters, but the public at
large did not overburden the young man with its admiration.
At that time Verlaine was a clerk in the Hôtel de Ville
and lived a quiet, almost well-to-do life, with his mother. All
the indications were in favor of a smooth, unclouded future.
But there was a conflict in him, which he could not master. It
is like raising and lowering two weights which he never
succeeds in balancing. On the one hand is the passionate,
wild, sexual element, the impure glow and the blind
surrender, the “black ship which drags him to the abyss,”
and, on the other, the pure, simple, tender mode of his
child-like heart, which, a stranger to all passion, yearns for
soft, womanly hands.
In normal sexuality the yearning of the senses and the
soul unite during the seconds of intoxication and become
the symbol of infinity, through the passionate absorption of
contrasts and the permeation of spirit with matter, and form
with substance, elements which in their turn are the creative
symbols of all life. In Verlaine, however, there was always a
cleft: now he is pure pilgrim of yearning, now roué; now
priest, now gamin. He has wrought the most beautiful
religious poems of Catholicism, and at the same time has
won the crown of all pornographic works with perverse and
indecent poems. As the flux of his blood went, so was he—
a pure reflex of his organic functions. That is to say he was
infinitely primitive as a poet, and infinitely complicated and
unaccountable as a human being.
Whenever his impulses were elastic and his senses
sharpened or stimulated, the untamed and wild beast of
sensuality is unchained in his life, turbulent after
satisfaction, incapable of restraint by intellectual
deliberation. After the crisis physical exhaustion
disengaged the psychic elements of penitence,
consideration and tender longing, which later became
piety.
Verlaine was a poet of rare candor and
shamelessness, both in the best and worst sense. This is
the essentially great element in his otherwise feminine,
weak and absolutely negative personality. The primæval
powers of the body and soul are the eternal elements of all
humanity and the starting-point of all philosophies; the
conflict between them, betrayed in the accusing and self-
revealing manner of his verse, is transferred unchanged
into his poetry, filling it with the force of life and the tragedy
of the universally human.
In his entire life there seem to have been only two brief
periods of cessation in the struggle; during the short
honeymoon or period of normal sexuality and during his first
religious epoch, when he was sincere, and enthusiasm and
yearning, transfused in the symbols of faith and religious
veneration, interpenetrated and inflamed each other.
The Fêtes Galantes were published soon after the
Poèmes Saturniens. Artistically they are far superior,
because their form is more individual, their structure more
original, and their architecture more compact. Yet they do
not appear to me to represent balance, but rather the short
trembling, to-and-fro wavering of the scales of his
impetuous and sensitive character.
They are coquettish; and coquetry is sensuality with
style, tamed accordingly, but not conquered. They are at the
same time modest and impudent, attack and careful
retreat. They are not pure sensuality, but desire, masked by
a demand for modesty.
 It is the most characteristically French of his books,
drawn as with the maliciously kind brush of Watteau. In
these poems, in which Verlaine's muse trips on high-heeled
shoes through gardens which shimmer in the gleam of a
mocking moon, in these whispering dialogues between
Pierrots and Columbines, in these gallant landscapes, an
anxious presentiment weeps plaintively in the bushes. This
sad mode makes the dallying faces gleam underneath
tears. The true voice of the yearning soul is poured out and
dies away in the imperishable Colloque Sentimental, a
dark pearl of indefinite, infinite sorrow. Out of masks and
pantomimes, the poet's face stares sadly bewildered into
the black mirror of reality.
At that time an evil influence had broken into his life,
perhaps the most destructive, “the one unpardonable vice,”
as he himself confesses. Verlaine began to drink. At first it
was bravado, recklessness, persuasion; later it was desire,
torture, flight from the qualms of his conscience, “the
forgetfulness, sought in execrable potions.”
He drank absinthe, a sweetish, greenish liquid, which is
false as cat's eyes and treacherous and murderous like a
diseased harlot. Baudelaire's hashish is comprehensible. It
was the magician who raised fantastic landscapes, it
quieted the nerves, it was the poet of the poet. Verlaine's
absinthe is only destructive and obliterating, a slow poison
which does not kill but unnerves and undermines like the
white powders the dreaded secret of which the Borgias
held. Absinthe wrought silently and inexorably in Verlaine's
life. By degrees it absorbed the tender, soft, yearning,
vague qualities of his heart of a child; it made the hard,
passionate, depraved man strong, and awakened the
sensualist and cynic in him. Even when the high-arched
churches and the figures of the Madonnas no longer offered
him a place of refuge, “the atrocious green sorceress” was
still his only comforter, into whose arms he willingly cast
himself.
He himself tells regretfully how at the time of his cousin
Eliza's death, soon after the appearance of his first book,
he joined sorrow and vice in tragic manner. For two days
he had not touched food. But he drank, drank without
interruption, restlessly, and returned to the offices a
drunkard, drowning the reproof of his superior in a new
absinthe. Everything that was hard, bitter, wild, which later
broke loose in him so tempestuously, compelling the law to
step between him and his wife, his mother and his friends,
was called forth by the green poison in the silent, kindly
nature which loved soft words and was inclined even to his
last years to the power of hot tears. With pitiless force this
most dangerous of his vices drew taut the chain, by which
the passions and sudden catastrophe of his destiny
dragged him on to the road of misery.
For a moment it seemed as if everything were to come
to a good end. He fell in love with the explosive vehemence
and despairing persistence with which the weak are
accustomed to cling to an idea. The step-sister of his
friend, de Sivry, had fascinated him. As a matter of fact the
engagement came about. In these days, separated from
his bride, Verlaine wrote the slender volume of songs, La
Bonne Chanson. It is his most quiet and balanced book.
According to his own repeatedly expressed opinion, he
considered it the most beautiful of his works and the one
dearest to him. In the best and noblest sense they are
“occasional verses.” Almost daily one is written and sent to
his beloved. It was only in small selection that they were
united in print.
Here the idea of modesty subdues passion like a
wonderful sordine, and surrender and tenderness intertwine
with the ideals of modesty. The cleft in Verlaine's
personality closes in the consonance of a soul which has
found peace. It represents the first period of peace in his
life and career and is humanly his most perfect moment
and poetically his purest. Vice and passion have
disappeared in a hesitating yet desirous surrender,
melancholy has dissolved in melody.
Victor Hugo, the sovereign coiner of great phrases,
called the Bonne Chanson, “une fleur dans un obus.”
There are poems in this slim volume which seem as if they
had been woven out of the gushing flood of moonlight.
There are poems which gleam like pale pearls and lonely
pools. Word and sense, form and emotion, foreboding and
being, life and dreams, are their woof. Here appeared that
marvel of French lyric poetry, the wonderful poem.

“La lune blanche

Luit dans les bois;
De chaque branche
Part une voix
Sous la ramée....
“Oh bien-aimée!
“L'étang reflète,
Profond miroir,
La silhouette
Du saule noir
Où le vent pleure ...
“Rêvons: c'est l'heure.
“Un vaste et tendre
Apaisement
Semble descendre
Du firmament
Que l'astre irise ...
“C'est l'heure exquise.”

From this point on the life-story in which the germ and

seed of such wonderful fruit ripened is painful. The descent
was not sudden. Verlaine was one of those wavering
characters who require energetic impulsion for good as
well as for evil. He never slid as on an inclined plane, but he
sank like a scale weighed down by something
unsuspected. Thus it is possible to name the catastrophes
and to set the milestones of his misfortunes.
The great wrench which in 1870 shook his country, also
affected his life and tore it apart. His wedding occurred
during the days of the war. The fever of political over-
excitement seized him and he, the almost bourgeois
government clerk who never troubled about politics,
became a communist as a favor to several friends. The
anecdote that he once wished to assassinate Emperor
Napoleon III was a hoax which he told his comrades for the
sake of the sensation, something like the story which
Baudelaire told of the “savoriness” of embryonal brains.
His work consisted in reading the articles on the
Commune which appeared in the newspapers and marking
them whether they were favorable or unfavorable.
Nevertheless this insignificant part, which he himself did not
take seriously and spoke of as “This stupid enough rôle
which I played during two months of illusions,” cost him his
position. This was the break with well-ordered life and the
sign-post which showed him the way into the Bohème.
The old wounds re-opened. Verlaine began to drink
again during his activities in the Commune. Recriminations
and scenes rose as the result of this relapse. Suddenly
came the decisive act of the drunkard; he struck his wife
the first blow. New misunderstandings followed, but the
household still held together, soon to be increased by the
arrival of a son.
The final element is still lacking. Abstractions are weak
against realities, things that have happened may change
men but they cannot vanquish them. So far everything has
been only inchoate power and a foreshadowing threat, but
not enchantment. It is only the magic of a passion, an
elemental and unfathomable magnetic power which links
one human being to another, the intangible, which can
conquer a poet. He can overcome want and life because
he despises them; he can make evil powerless because he
repents; chance he can bridge; but he cannot hold back
destiny, nor win battles with the incomprehensible.
A new influence enters Verlaine's life—Arthur Rimbaud.
 THE RIMBAUD EPISODE
No matter how much a writer may have striven for the
unusual or have tried to order confusing ways with
intelligence and form, his fiction does not reach the depths
nor is it as tragic as this one which life devised. The
beginning is simple, the climax grandiose, of such wildness
and rising to such heights, that the end no longer could be
pure tragedy. It turned into tragi-comedy, that grotesque
sensation which we feel when destiny grows beyond human
beings and over-towers them, while they are still struggling
with pigmy hands to master a monstrous force which has
long gone beyond their control.
The beginning was conventional. One day Verlaine
received a letter from an acquaintance in the provinces, in
which poems by a fifteen-year-old boy were enclosed.
Verlaine's opinion was asked. The poems were: Les
Effarés, Les Assis, Les Poètes de sept ans, Les
Premières communions. Every one knows they were
Arthur Rimbaud's, for the poems of this boy are among the
most precious of French literature. He began where the
best stop and then, at twenty, threw literature aside as
something irksome and unimportant. Verlaine read them
and was filled with enthusiasm. He wrote to the boy in a
tone of glowing admiration. In the meantime the poems
made the rounds in Paris. Words of characteristically
French emphasis are quickly coined. Victor Hugo with his
regal gesture declared the author to be “Shakespeare
enfant.”
The provincial associations of Charleville filled Rimbaud
with disgust and unrest. Verlaine in his enthusiasm wrote to
him “Come, dear great soul, we are waiting for you, we
want you.” He himself was without a position and his own
life in Paris at that time was threatened with chaos and
uncertainty, but with the marvellous folly of yielding and
emotional natures he invited a stranger as guest into his
shaken destiny.
Rimbaud came. He was a big, robust fellow filled with a
demonic physical force like that which Balzac has breathed
into his Vautrin types. He was a provincial with massive red
fists and the curious face of a child that has been corrupted
early in life—a gamin, but a genius. Everything in him is
force, over-abundant, wild, exceptional virility, without aim
and turned toward the infinite.
He is one of the conquistador type, who first lost his way
in literature. He pours everything into it, fire, fulness, force,
more, much more than great creators spend. Like a crater
he throws out his mad fever dreams and visions of life such
as perhaps only Dante has had before him. He hurls
everything up into the infinite as if he would shatter it to bits.
Destruction teems in this creation, a force ardent for power,
a hand that would seize everything and crush it.
 His poems are only sudden gestures of wrath. They
resemble bloody tatters of raw flesh that have been torn
with wild teeth from the body of reality. It is poetry “outside
and above” all literature. Has there ever been a poet of
modern times who thus threw poems on paper and then let
the scraps flutter to the four winds? Without pose, unlike
Stefan George or Mallarmé, who calculate carefully, he
despised the public and literature. He never had a single
line printed by his own efforts, he was utterly regardless of
the fleeting examples of his gigantic power. At twenty he left
his fame and companions behind to wander through the
world. In Africa he founded fantastic realms, he sat in prison
and there played a part in world history preparing under
King Menelik for the struggle which cost Italy her provinces.
But in three years he wrote many poems full of power and
fire, including the eternal poem Le bateau ivre, a
staggering fever dream, into which all the colors, sounds,
forms and forces of life seem to have been poured,
bubbling in curious forms and seething in the glow of a
feverish moment. His life was like a dream, as wild, as
mighty and as little subject to time.
Verlaine gladly sheltered the awkward boy. Madame
Verlaine was less enthusiastic and never concealed her
dislike. Perhaps, with a woman's instinct, she
unconsciously foresaw the danger which threatened
Verlaine in this new companion.
The bond of friendship grew closer and closer.
Verlaine's gaminerie which was ever in contrast with his
sensitivity, awakened suddenly. His tendency toward
strong, cynical and lascivious conversation met a genial
match in Rimbaud. The primitive element in Verlaine was
suddenly enchained by the primæval, purely human and
brutal masculinity of Rimbaud's personality. The feminine in
his nature was feeling for completion. As if predestined for
each other for years, their personalities dovetail. Without
any affection, by necessity rather than by friendship, their
union becomes closer and closer. One day in 1872
Verlaine leaves wife, child and the world in which he lived to
wander with Rimbaud into the unknown.
Without doubt there was an element of the abnormal in
the relations between Verlaine and Rimbaud, but to
understand their friendship it is neither necessary nor
essential to know whether the dangerous potentialities that
inhere in so strong a personal enthusiasm ever became
material facts.
Their path led over the highways and also through
prisons. “An evil rage for travelling” had seized the two.
Through Belgium, through Germany and England they
wandered; usually they were without means. They stayed in
London for a while, supporting themselves by teaching
languages and delving deeper than ever into social politics.
Rimbaud left and returned just in time to convey the sick
Verlaine home. The terrible life which he had led had
broken him down. He himself has concealed the tragic
incidents of those days in a novelette, “Louise Leclercq.”
There he wrote: “The few half-crowns which he earned
daily in giving lessons, they spent in the evening on
Portuguese wine and Irish beer. The stomach was
forgotten, the head became affected and the lessons were
not given, and thus hunger and nervosity overcame the
reason of this brave fellow.”
The patient is taken to Bouillon, a small town in the
Ardennes, where Charles van Lerberghe, the great
Belgium poet, lived, but he has hardly half recovered when
he plunges out into the world again with Rimbaud. Mental
unrest is transformed into physical unrest. The lack of
stability which operated most impulsively in that crisis,
appears in his external life. There is nothing definite for
which he is seeking yet he is unsatisfied. Verlaine, man of
moods par excellence, adjusts himself to life in his own
manner. He becomes boorish, subject to fits of passion,
violent and unaccountable. His tenderness seems to have
been strangled by hunger, drunkenness and wild destiny.
The friendship for Rimbaud also assumes evil shapes.
More and more frequently they quarrel; almost every hour
Rimbaud's foaming temperament and Verlaine's temporary
hard, wild manner come in conflict. Of course, as a rule,
they were drunk. Rimbaud, who was strong, drank because
of his feeling of strength and because he yearned for the
intoxication in which colors glowed, in which impulses
became wilder, and association more rapid, acute and
bolder. Verlaine fled to absinthe to drown out repentance,
anguish and weakness; and from this sweetish drink, in
which all the evil forces of life seem to be distilled, he drew
brutality and feverish disorders.
Once Verlaine ran away, but became repentant and
asked Rimbaud to join him. Rimbaud followed him to
Belgium. All difficulties were about to be solved. Madame
Verlaine was ready to forgive and was on her way to meet
the penitent. Then Rimbaud too declared that he would
leave him. No one knows how it happened, whether it was
jealousy, anger, hatred, love or only drunkenness, at any
rate the disaster followed on the public street of Brussels.
Verlaine pursued Rimbaud and shot at him twice with a
revolver, wounding him once. The police came, and though
Rimbaud defended and excused Verlaine, the latter was
arrested. The sentence was two years in prison, and these
Verlaine spent at Mons. The immediate result was a
divorce, upon which Madame Verlaine insisted with every
possible emphasis and in spite of Victor Hugo's
intervention.
This conclusion, however, was too banal and trite for so
heroic a tragedy. The friendship persisted. Verlaine and
Rimbaud corresponded. Verlaine sent occasional poems
from prison and told Rimbaud of his conversion. The latter
hardly pleased Rimbaud, who was at that time cold and
indifferent toward everything except that he was filled with a
thirst for something unique and infinite and looking forward
to new adventures. Verlaine had hardly been released
before he tried to convert Rimbaud to this religious life in
order to link their lives anew. “Let us love each other in
Jesus Christ,” he wrote in his proselyting ardor and with the
enthusiasm which in the beginning he always felt for
everything. Rimbaud smiled mockingly and finally declared
that “Loyola” should visit him in Stuttgart.
Now the moment arrived when comedy outdid the
tragedy of the reunion. Verlaine arrived at Stuttgart and
attempted the conversion—unfortunately in an inn, a place
little adapted for proselytes and prophets, for both the saint
and the mocker still had in common their passion for drink.
No one witnessed the scene; only the result is known. On
the way home both were drunk, and a quarrel ensued and a
unique incident in the history of literature followed.
In the flooding moonlight by the banks of the Neckar the
two greatest living poets in France fell upon each other in
wild rage with sticks and fists. The struggle did not last
long. Rimbaud, athletic, like a wild animal, a man of
passion, easily subdued the nervous, weakly Verlaine,
stumbling in drunkenness. A blow over the head knocked
him down. Bleeding and unconscious, he remained lying on
the bank.
It was the last time they saw each other. Verlaine
disappeared on the next day. The episode had come to an
end, but nevertheless several letters passed back and forth.
Then Rimbaud's grandiose Odyssey through the entire
world began. For many years his friends in Paris believed
him dead, and even to-day relatively little is known of his life
afterward.[2]
In Vienna he was under arrest as a vagrant, in the
Balkans he was a merchant. Then fulfilling his early
prophecy in the Bateau ivre he said farewell to Europe and
in Africa became discoverer, general, conqueror. In these
unexpected fields he spent to the last limits his titanic
energy, which in youthful crises had been expended on the
fragile and for him too weakly material of language and
rhyme. Until the day of his death, he, the only true despiser
of literature of these days, never wrote another line, and
endeavored only to give form to his wild and fantastic
dreams in the material of life, dying in fever as feverishly he
lived.
For Verlaine it was an episode—the most important, it
is true, in a life which was torn to many tatters. After his
conversion, which will be discussed more fully later, he
returned to Paris and literature, and died in harness,
physically in 1896, as artist much earlier.
 THE PENITENT
It is well known that at the moment when he left the
prison at Mons, Paul Verlaine, the prisoner, entered the
ranks of the great Catholic poets. A complete
transformation took place in his life. He turned from the
material to the spiritual. The penitent mood of his childhood
days glimmered again when he thought of the Nazarene.
The soft early yearnings which were forgotten in his years of
wandering became symbolized into a definite idea. Nor is
this surprising in one who never could understand his
intellectual processes, but who was moved entirely by the
ebb and flow of emotion, and who always wavered
unsteadily in all the crises of life.
In general it is almost a necessity among poets that
poetic feeling should be transmuted into religious feeling.
But the creative poets of active mentality and intellectuality
build their own religion, while the sensitive or passive poets
pour out their flood of feeling for God in the form of existing
rites and symbols. Balzac clearly shows this relationship
when he says in The Thirteen:
“Are not religion, love and poetry, the threefold
expression of the same fact, the need for expression which
fills every noble soul? These three creative impulses rise up
toward God, who concentrates in himself all earthly
emotions.”
Religion is only a certain form of association in which
things are placed in relationship with each other. Similarly
the sensation of evening, of the cool pure air after rain, of
the whispering of the winds and the play of clouds, or
whatever else is caught up in the nervous fever of poetic
sensibility, hearkens back to the infinite after it has been
permeated by the poet's own sorrow or joy. He feels that
the infinite has a soul which understands and atones for all
sorrows, and thus he conceives it as divinity. The poet's
religion is derived from the one great faith with which he
must be filled, which is the necessity for being understood.
It is only one step further when he finds that his soul's
outflow must lead somewhere, and then he gives a name, a
form and an interpretation to what has been
incomprehensible.
But a more definite element in Paul Verlaine drove him
into the arms of Catholicism. It was his impulse to
confession, which I have tried to show was the most
intensive element in his personality. A soul which lacks
ethical authority for self-control, in its helplessness must turn
with accusation and pleading toward others, toward
something outside of the self.
Cry and sigh are the original forms of all lyricism, and
just as they are a sweet compulsion to expel an inner
overflow by utterance, so confession is only deliverance
from an inner pressure, from guilt and penitence, from
mighty forces, accordingly, which the confessor wishes to
transmit to others. It is a need for explanation, a marvellous
deception, a means to tame forces by trust, a trust which is
not felt toward one's self. Goethe's much-quoted words of
the fragments of the “great confession” are still to the point,
no matter how often they have been used. As he wrote to
rid his mind of incidents which he had experienced, so
Verlaine told of himself, now to the public, now to the
confessor. The fundamental process, however, is identical.
Many other things coöperated. There was the great
antithesis between flesh and spirit, between body and soul;
contempt for the sensual and continual fall into sin—the
immanent conflict of childish and animal feeling which
flooded forever wildly through Verlaine's years of manhood.
This also has been for centuries the symbol of the Catholic
Church. In it sensitive and mystical emotion found a
dogmatic form, through the fundamental principle of the
antithesis between the earthly and the transcendental. In the
same way the consciousness of the value of the sensual as
sin and of the pure as virtue is only a reflex of the subjective
impressions of pure souls. Here Verlaine found a definite
form for the warning which flickered unsteadily in him. By
confession he was able to place his sins into the dreamy
hands of the immaculate Virgin; in her form he was at last
able worthily to give substance to the dream-like shadows
of the soft unsensual women, which glimmered like stars
over his life. It was the need for quiet after storms,
confession after sins.
Childhood bells called him back to the church. Pale
ancient memories led him—the pomp of the solemn great
processions which he saw in Montpellier. The bon enfant
awoke in him again. The memory of his own folded hands,
of his timid child's voice lisping prayers, and of his sacred
soft baptismal name, Marie, rose in him. The dark
mysticism and the wonderful blue half-lights of Catholic faith
called the dreamer. The same incense shadow of vague
violent emotion led the romantic dreamers, Stolberg,
Schlegel and Novalis, from the cool, clear and transparent
air of Protestantism into a foreign faith. The leitmotiv of
Verlaine's poetry was his yearning and the infinitely
beautiful and persistent impulse of the unhappy toward
childhood and the magic of a primitively reverent life close
to God. These wrought the miracle.
If trust were to be put in the corrupt man of letters who
wrote the Confessions, it was a true miracle, like that in the
cell of Saint Anthony, which brought him into the arms of the
Church.
In his narrow room, in which he read Shakespeare and
other worldly books, hung a simple crucifix, unnoticed at
first. Of it he wrote:
“I know not what or Who suddenly raised me in the night,
threw me from my bed without even leaving me time to
dress, and prostrated me weeping and sobbing at the feet
of the crucifix and before the supererogatory image of the
Catholic Church, which has evoked the most strange, but in
my eyes the most sublime devotion of modern times.”
On the following day he asked for a priest and
confessed his sins. At that hour, Verlaine, the Catholic
poet, was born. He was wonderfully primitive, like the early
poets of the Church, and his verses were as full of profound
mystic poetry as those of the saints, Augustine and Francis
of Assisi, and those of the German philosopher poets,
Eckart and Tauler.
During these two years the neophyte wrote Sagesse, a
volume which appeared later under the imprint of an
exclusively Catholic publisher. It is the deepest and
greatest work of French poetry, “the white crown of his
work,” Verhaeren calls it in his brilliant study of Verlaine.
Here again, as once in the Bonne Chanson, the divergent
forms of his character unite. In the unrestrained solution of
everything personal in the divine, in “the melting of his own
heart in the glowing heart of God,” impulse and yearning
are purified. Eroticism becomes spiritualized into fervor;
hope, into sublime enlightenment; passion, devouring
earthly dross, takes the form of mystic surrender. Thus the
impulsive in Verlaine, permeated by hours of pure emotion,
obtains its wild power of beauty, and trembles in the
inexplicable mystery and in the stream of visionary light, so
that his entire life now seems illumined.
In his religion likewise it is the purely human element
which is so wonderful. Verlaine does not possess the
seraphic mildness of Novalis, nor the consumptive, girl-like,
sickly-beautiful inclination of the pre-Raphaelites toward the
miraculous image. He is passionate and vehement. He is
masculine where the others become feminine. Like a timid
girl, Novalis dreams of Jesus as his bride. “If I have Him
only, if He only is mine,” he says and his words become a
chaste love song.
Verlaine, however, is a reverberating echo of the great
seekers after God, of the church fathers, of St. Augustine
and of the mystics, and he wrestles for an almost physical
love of God. His passion is often impious in its earthiness;
his yearning, sacrilege.
In his sonnet cycle, Mon dieu m'a dit, is a place where
the soul, wounded by the lighting of divine love, cries out,
unconscious whether in joy or pain:

“Quoi, moi, moi pouvoir Vous aimer.

Êtes-vous fous?”

In these impious words God is humanized vividly, and

yet, by the very bitterness of the struggle with His all-
goodness, the poet imbues Him with an absolute
perfection.
Here Verlaine's tormented soul is entirely cast out of
himself, and plunges in a sudden flood into the infinite.
Ecstasy overcomes the feminine element in him, just as in
his life vulgar drunkenness roused his hard, coarse and
brutal qualities. For a moment Verlaine is not only a
genuine and marvellous, but also a truly strong and creative
poet; no longer elegiac and sensitive, but creative.
In the reflux of enthusiasm come silent tender hours with
songs in which the notes are muffled. They are the poems
he wrote in the prison which gave him quietude and shelter,
and in the silence of which the soft voices of his childhood
rose again. Each one of these poems is noble, simple, and
chaste. It is only necessary to name the titles to hear the
soft violin note of their mild sadness—“Un grand sommeil
noir,” “Le ciel, est, par dessus le toit,” “Je ne sais pas
pourquoi mon esprit amer,” “Le son du cor,” “Je ne veux
plus aimer que ma mère Marie.”
It is truly “le cœur plus veuf que toutes les veuves” that
speaks in them.
When the “guote suendaere” again went out into life
which he had never been able to master, and the wild
restlessness and torment began which tore his heart into
tatters, nothing remained of the two years in prison except
his pious faith and a sorrowful memory. The four walls
which had enclosed him also had protected him. “He was
truly himself only in the hospital and in prison,” says
Huysmans.
 Poor Lelian's longing plaint is for this silence. “Ah truly, I
regret the two years in the tower.” His song says “Formerly I
dwelt in the best of castles.” His yearning for the elemental,
“far from a curbed age,” never left him since those hours,
and least of all in Paris, the city of his crowning fame as a
poet. Faith he soon lost, but never the yearning for faith.
In addition Verlaine wrote a long series of Catholic
poems. As will be shown later, he outraged his unique
qualities and thus destroyed them. The unconscious
portion, the wonderful fragrance of his early religious
poems, which were entirely emotional, soon dissipated. He
constructed an infinite number of pious verses, verses for
saints' days, religious emblems, and compiled volumes of
poetry for Catholic publishers. At the same time he edited
pornographica and all manner of indecencies. His
conversion had created a sensation. He had been thrust
into a rôle and felt it his duty to play the part and to retain
the costume. This was the reason for the antithesis. I do not
believe the faith of his later years to have been genuine. He
has called himself “the ruin of a still Christian philosopher
already pagan,” and in his obscene books turned the rites
of Catholic faith, which he elsewhere glorified, into phallic
and other sexual symbols.
He was unable to escape the realization of the comedy
of this situation. In his autobiography, Hommes
d'aujourd'hui, he attempted a very ingenious but
exceedingly unsatisfactory justification. “His work,” he
explains, speaking of poor Lelian, “from 1880 took on two
very sharply defined directions, and the prospectuses of his
future books indicated that he had made up his mind to
continue this system and to publish, if not simultaneously, at
least in parallel, works absolutely different in idea—to be
more exact, books in which Catholicism unfolds its logic
and its lures, its blandishments and its terrors; and others
purely modern, sensual with a distressing good humor and
full of the pride of life.”
Can this be the program of the “unconscious?” A few
lines further on he has given another explanation. “I believe,
and I am a good Christian at this moment; I believe, and I
am a bad Christian the instant after. The remembrance of
hope, the evocation of a sin, delight me with or without
remorse.” This is the truth. Verlaine was a man of moods,
he was always only the creature of the moment. After a few
seconds the movement of his will contracted limply and
momentary desires overflooded his consciousness of
personality. His faith may have been as capricious and
restless, as each one of his tendencies of passion. Great
poems, however, in the sense of great in extent, are not
conceived in a moment. Moods spread like a fine mist over
the poet's hours, they permeate them and fill them through
and through for a long time before a poem takes form.
Verlaine, the man of letters and poet according to
program, is a hateful shadow limping behind his great
works. Consciously and with feverish eagerness and a
productivity forced by need, he rhymed in what he thought
his unique manner. The poor old man whom interviewers
sought in the hospital was no longer the poet, Paul
Verlaine.
It is impossible to tell how long the flame of personal
faith still glowed in him. Probably it was as little
extinguished as his soft dream of childhood. In the dusk of
his last years it often struggled upward with tears, as a
symbol of sorrow over his broken life.
As all his thought began to tend toward senile
mistiness, his emotions also slowly deteriorated in
indifference and drunkenness. It was not his companions in
his cups who understood him best, but the poets who saw
his life in the illuminating perspective of distance.
In a short story, Gestas, Anatole France has
marvellously described in his insistent, quiet, dignified
fashion the mingling of purity and depravity in this life of
curious piety. It is merely an anecdote. Stumbling, a
drunkard enters church in the early morn to confess his
sins. The priest has not yet arrived. The drunkard begins to
grow noisy, beats the prayer desks; he rages and weeps,
he has so endlessly many sins to confess, he wants only a
little priest, a very, very little one.
In these few pages everything is compressed, “the
prodigal child with the gestures of a satyr.” All the traits of
Verlaine are here, the accusing one of the penitent which
he never lost, the angry one of the drunkard, the yearning
tenderness of the poet, all the childishly wise, and yet in its
simplicity so marvellously wonderful, faith of the good
sinner.
 LEGENDS AND LITERATURE
One hesitates to relate the last years of this curious life.
From the moment that Verlaine returned to Paris the
tragedy lacks æsthetic significance. There are no longer
sudden descents and elevations, but his life is slowly stifled
in camaraderie, lingering disease and depravity. His poetic
force crumbles away, his uniqueness becomes
extinguished. It is no longer a foaming wave crest that
carries him away, but dirty little waves.
When he came to Paris, he had been forgotten. His
books were lying unsold with the publishers; the majority of
his friends avoided him, evidently because their frock coat
of the Academy made recognition difficult, until suddenly
the younger generation began to noise about his name;
and now more people quarrel over starting this movement
than there were cities to claim Homer's cradle.
It was a period of development. French lyric poetry was
passing through a revolutionary crisis. For the first time the
marble image of “beauté impassible” trembled in the
hands of the poets. But not one of them was a strong
enough artist to create a new ideal. At this moment the
younger men began to remember Verlaine. His Bohemian
life, the soft, fluctuating dreamy manner of his art, the frenzy
of his life, his recklessness, loyalty and elementalness were
a marvellous antithesis to the well-bred “impassibilité” of
the Academy. His name was used as a battering-ram
against the Parnassians. In kindly fashion, without choice,
Verlaine, the old man, who was beginning to feel chill,
accepted the late enthusiasm and veneration.
Literature alone is not yet sufficient to create fame in
France. It was only when the great journals began to take
an interest in his life that he became popular. And at that
time a mass of paltry legends began to gather around his
name. He became the “naive child of modern culture,” the
“Bohemian,” the “Unconscious,” the “New François Villon,”
and even to-day these stereotyped phrases are
industriously repeated.
Indeed his life was strange. In hospitals the poet sought
shelter. With a white cloth wound like a turban around his
bald, Socrates-like head, he was always surrounded by
contemporary literature, which strove to rise with the aid of
his name. He received interviewers, and wrote his poems
on prescription blanks and smeary tatters. When he was
well, he wandered from café to café, holding forth and
gesticulating, getting drunk, and associating with lewd
women, always with a certain ostentation whenever he
noticed that the public was watching him. As a senile
Silenus, he presided over the most remarkable
bacchanalia. Like a second Victor Hugo, he patronized the
younger men with benevolent gesture. A forced merriness
seemed in those days to tremble electrically through his
nerves. Yet never before had his life been filled with deeper
tragedy and yearning, and there were many hours when he
himself felt this keenly. Crushed and torn by the teeth of life,
he, like all Bohemians, at last desired only peace. Never
was the sweet dream of his childhood days more poignant
than in just this period of dissolute play-acting and vain
exhibitionism.
Taine has very accurately shown that creative art
consists in the automatization of the creative individuality, in
overhearing and imitating inherent qualities, and in
objectifying the personal elements. This process too
became operative in Verlaine's life, more markedly
because in him life and personality were immanent
interaction.
He caricatured himself and re-drew the delicate lines of
his soul with crude pencil. Consciously he tried to make the
unconscious elements take plastic form again by way of
reflection. He was no longer elemental, but he strove hard
to be. He prayed to God “to give me all simplicity,” because
he knew it was expected of him. Since he was counted
among the Catholic poets, he tried again to pass through
the storm of sacred emotion. The effort resulted in
pompous, well-constructed religious poems, plump like
botched Roman churches.
He attempted to show the unconscious in himself by
striving to explain the creative impulse and placing mirrors
behind his juggler's tricks. The wonderful gesture of
surrender which destiny and sorrow had taught him, he
learned by heart like an actor who reproduces a gesture
mechanically at the seventy succeeding performances,
though he is truly an artist only at the moment when he first
discovers and understands its significance in studying the
part. Thus Verlaine carefully reconstructed all the
characteristics which the journals declared were his own.
Coquettishly he exhibited the “poor Lelian” and the “bon
enfant”—mere costumes of a poetical fire that had long
died out. His manner became more and more childlike; he
was trying to enter entirely into the rôle of “guileless fool,”
while his sharp but unlogical intelligence never gave way.
The poet retired further and further into him. The more
he rhymed (and in the last years with morbid frequency), the
fewer poems were produced. Now and then one came,
when pose and impulse joined in minutes of sad (or
drunken) melancholy, and when the mysterious fluid of the
unconscious and great indefinite emotions made him silent,
simple and timid.
Otherwise he alternately turned erotic incidents and
adventures in alcoves into rhyme, and wrote literary
mockeries and parodies of Paul Verlaine, and for purposes
of contrast, verses in praise of Catholic saint days. Every
artistic pride was soon forgotten in the need for money. He
sold his poems at one hundred sous apiece to his
publisher Vanier, who cruelly printed them often against the
active protest of the poet; recently again a volume of
“Posthumous Works,” which easily may be denominated as
one of the most disagreeable and worst books published in
France. This portion of the tragedy of his life no one has as
yet fully told.
During his last years he wrote two books which must not
be ignored even though they do not fit in the customary
picture of the bon enfant. These were Femmes and
Hombres. They could not appear publicly but were sold in
five hundred numbered copies each. In them Verlaine
broke abruptly with the tradition of agreeable nastiness of a
Grecourt, in order to produce works of an unheard-of
subjective shamelessness. In form the poems are smooth
and in structure they are clever, but their subject matter and
the poet's self-revelation is such as to place these volumes
among the most unhappy that have ever been produced.
They are naked and obscene.
From an æsthetic point of view this publication, even if it
was clandestine was without excuse, and it was the
deepest descent of the poet. The effect of this depravity of
an old man writing down with unsteady hand vices and
nakednesses on prescription blanks for the sake of a few
francs with which to buy an absinthe, is tragic. The
existence and the spread of these books must destroy
absolutely the legend of the “guileless fool.” This is the only
value which can be attributed to them.
The carnival comedy took place before Ash
Wednesday. When Leconte de Lisle died, the younger
generation advertised and arranged for the choice of the
king of poets, never realizing to what extent they were guilty
in bringing about the artistic degeneration of the chosen
poet. The faun-like, mockingly sagacious head of Paul
Verlaine, who was ill and growing old, received the crown.
Poor Lelian became “king of the poets,” a mark of great
affection on the part of the younger men, but only a title after
all, which was unable to give Paul Verlaine the necessary
dignity and strength of personality. After Verlaine, Stéphane
Mallarmé inherited the imaginary crown, and after him it
was worn in obscurity by Leon Dierx,[3] a not very
distinguished, but agreeable and dignified poet of the
former Parnassus. The coronation was only a pose and
voluntary choice, and would hardly be worth considering
were it not for the fact that this admiration for Verlaine's
work indicated an underlying tendency in modern French
poetry.
To the younger generation Verlaine represented not
only a great poet, but to them he was also the regenerator
of French lyric poetry. The legend that Verlaine consciously
changed poetic valuations is entirely due to a single poem,
the “Art Poétique.” It is absolutely necessary to quote it,
because on the one hand it is characteristic of Verlaine's
instinct concerning his own work, and because on the other
hand it is the basis of all the formulas which became
dogmas among the verse jugglers. (An English translation
of this poem is given on page 90.)
“De la musique avant toute chose,
Et pour cela préfère l'Impair
Plus vague et plus soluble dans l'air,
Sans rien en lui, qui pèse ou qui pose.
“Il faut aussi que tu n'ailles point
Choisir tes mots sans quelque méprise:
Rien de plus cher que la chanson grise
Où l'Indécis au Précis se joint.
“C'est des beaux yeux derrière les voiles,
C'est le grand jour tremblant de midi,
C'est, par un ciel d'automne attiédi,
Le bleu fouillis des claires étoiles!
“Car nous voulons la Nuance encore,
Pas la Couleur, rien que la nuance!
Oh, la nuance seule fiance
Le rêve au rêve et la flûte au cor!
“Fuis du plus loin la Pointe assassine,
L'Esprit cruel et le Rire impur,
Qui font pleurer les yeux d'Azur
Et tout cet ail de basse cuisine!
“Prends l'éloquence et tords-lui son cou!
Tu feras bien, en train d'énergie,
De rendre un peu la Rime assagie,
 Si l'on n'y veille, elle ira jusqu'où?
“Oh! qui dira les torts de la Rime?
Quel enfant sourd ou quel nègre fou
Nous a forgé ce bijou d'un sou
Qui sonne creux et faux sous la lime?
“De la musique encore et toujours!
Que ton vers soit la chose envolée
Qu'on sent qui fuit d'une âme en allée
Vers d'autres cieux à d'autres amours.
“Que ton vers soit la bonne aventure
Éparse au vent crispé du matin
Qui va fleurant la menthe et le thym ...
Et tout le reste est littérature.”

Without question certain words in these lines,

somewhat veiled by the poetic form of expression,
harmonize with the fundamental conceptions of modern
impressionistic lyric poetry. France never was the land of
pure emotional poetry. There is too much sense of the
formal, too much of a keen-sighted almost mathematical
type of intellect mingled with a gallant pleasure in
pointedness among the French, and these make them turn
into logic the elements of mysticism which must be in every
poem, whether in its emotional content or its vague form of
expression. Goethe has proclaimed the incommensurable
as the material of all poetry, but among the French the
tendency to crystallize it in the solution of their positivist
habit of thought is ever imperceptibly betrayed. The feeling
for the line and style shows through. For them poetry is
architecture; intuition, their intellectual formula; the marble
of conceptions is their material, and rhyme the mortar.
Clarity and orderly arrangement are the preliminary
conditions for Victor Hugo, for the Parnassians and even
for Baudelaire, even though the latter, by his visionary form
and the opiate of his dark words, created for the first time
solemn, that is to say poetical, impressions instead of
those of pomp alone. It seems therefore an error to look for
the revolutionary tendency and literary importance of a
Verlaine in the looseness of his verse structure and more
careless (or intentionally careless) use of rhyme. His merit
is rather that he was able to illume chaos, darkness, and
presentiments by the very indefiniteness and the vague
music of his soul. This enabled him to endue his poems
with their mystical trembling melody, not by abstracting his
inner music in definite melodies, but by fixing it in
assonance, rhymes and rhythmic waves.
Unconsciously he recognized that lyric art is the most
immaterial of all and is most nearly related to music. Its
aërial trembling and immateriality may meet the soul in
waves of glowing fire, but intellectually it is unseizable. He
tried to preserve this musical element by means of harmony
and assonance, but it was not he himself so much as the
unconscious gift of poetry that played mysteriously in him
and made him find the fundamental secret of lyric effects.
Émile Verhaeren, the only other French poet who is a more
vehement and constructive character, sought and found the
musical element of lyric poetry by the only other way, that is,
in verbal rhythm or consonantal music. Thus to volatilize the
material simultaneously in the form and to join the technical
with the intuitive elements is the highest quality of lyric
poetry. It makes it immediate, organic, that is to say, its
spiritual elements permeate the material in immanent
reaction, and thus the mystery of life is renewed in
individual artifacts. Self-evidently this intuitive recognition is
no discovery. It has been present in the great lyric poets of
all time, a mystery like that of sexual reproduction, which
awakens only at the age of ripeness. It was new in France
only because, besides Villon, Verlaine was the first lyric
genius of the French.
The mystery of the German folk-song with its simple,
sweetly mysterious essence became realized in him,
perhaps because there was an undercurrent of national
relationship. Because of the weakness, submissiveness
and child-like confusion of his emotionality, the vibrations
became tonality, sound and, because he was a poet,
music, instead of intellectual structures.
Such art must be more effective as contrasted with all
intellectualism because it springs from deeper sources, just
as simple weeping is more eloquent than passionate
wailing aloud. Surely it also contains an artificial element,
not artistry, but magic art, or the “alchemy of the word”
which Rimbaud believed to have discovered, a relationship
between colors, vowels and sounds depending on
idiosyncrasy. It is a secret touching of the ultimate roots of
different stems. It is always necessary to assume an inter-
relation between lyricism and the lawless, enigmatic and
magic elements of the human soul and to associate vague
threshold emotions with soft music.
Verlaine's poetry during his creative period possesses
this vagueness, which is like a voice in the dark or music of
the soul. It also has the lack of coherence which emotions
must have when they sweep in halting pain through the
body. This element must remain incomprehensible to
commercially sharp intelligences of the type of Max Nordau,
who try in a way to subtract the net value of purely
intellectual elements and “contents” which could be reduced
to prose from the gross value of poems. Lyricism is magic
and the precious possession of a spiritual communion
which finds its deepest enjoyment in just these almost
impalpable elements.
To limit the most important element of Verlaine's
significance to his neglect of rhyme is showing poor
judgment. In the first place it is unimportant and secondly
incorrect, for he never wrote a poem without rhyme, except
in the later unworthy years, when now and then he
substituted assonances. In addition he has himself
protested in L'Hommes d'Aujourd'hui:
“In the past and at present too I am honored by having
my name mingled with these disputes, and I pass for a
bitter adversary of rhyme because of a selection published
in a recent collection.—Besides absolute liberty is my
device if it were necessary for me to have one—and I find
good everything which is good in despite and
notwithstanding rules.”
To many it was insufficient to celebrate Verlaine as one
of the marvels of a nation, a truly elemental human being
whose soul uttered the finest and most tender lyric moods
and who, as if awakened out of bell-like and clear dreams,
produced true and melodic poetry out of the darkness of his
life. His admirers have also praised him as a prose writer.
But the prose-writer must be an intellectual creator, and
know how to master form. This Verlaine was unable to do.
He never really understood the world, and knew only how to
tell of himself, and accordingly his novelettes are for the
most part concealed autobiographies. They have brilliant
portions of characterization. His intellect, which is
paradoxical, self-willed, lyrical, and abrupt, flashes up and
then crumbles.
H i s Confessions, which have been highly praised,
remind one of Rousseau's all too confidential and
hypocritical confessions. They are only documents of
personal sharp-sightedness, unfortunately much over-
clouded by literary pose. He also tried the theatre. His
comedy, Les Uns et les Autres , has Watteau-like style and
Pierrot elegances, as well as flexibility, but is of no
importance. Another play, Louis XVI, remained a fragment.
All Verlaine's literary productions, like biographies,
introductions, etc., give a painful impression because they
are forced and have sprung from evil camaraderie.
He has also been called a great draftsman. It is true that
an excellent and characteristic skill in the figures and
scribblings which he sprinkled throughout his letters cannot
be gainsaid. There is even a pathetic element in their self-
confessed technical imperfections. The caricatures are
playful, without malicious or serious intent, jotted down with
childish self-satisfaction, but, of course, they need not be
taken seriously. They are little marginalia to his life, and
addenda to the numerous sharp and bright sketches with
which his intimate friend and artistic Eckermann, F. A.
Cazals, has fixed him for posterity. They show Verlaine in
all his moods—in his bonhomie, despair, grief,
“gaminerie,” sexuality, disease, even to the last sketches
which show him in death. They form a gallery of his life from
childhood to childhood along the dark way of his destiny.
And as in his poetry, notwithstanding all the exuberant
passages, the final impression is a wailing note of sadness
—the stroke of melancholy's bow.
 POSTLUDE
The only thing which now remains is to ascertain
whether Paul Verlaine's life-work, beginning in Metz and
ending in a small lodging-house room in Paris on a January
day in 1896, contains the elements which we would call
“lasting” because we are afraid of the proud and
resounding word “eternal.” The significance of great poets
passes the boundaries of literature and ignores what is
known as “influences” and “artistic atmosphere.” The
eternal element of great works of poetry reaches back
toward eternity. For humanity poetry is infinity which it joins
with the ether, and the great poets are those who were able
to help in elaborating the wonderful bond which stretches
from the distant darkness to the red of the new dawn.
It does not diminish Verlaine's stature if we do not count
him among the heroes of life. He was an isolated
phenomena, too significant to be typical and too weak to
become eternal. There was beauty in his pure humanness,
but not of the kind which remains permanent. He has given
nothing which was not already in us. He was a fleeting
stream of life passing by; he was the sublime echo of the
mysterious music which rises within us on every contact of
things, like the ring of glasses on a cupboard under every
footstep and impact.
 His effect is deep, but yet on that account not great. To
have become great it would have been necessary for him
to conquer the destiny which he could not master and to
liberate his will from the thousand little vices and passions
which enwrapped it. He is one of the writers who could be
spared, whom nevertheless no one would do without. He is
a marvel, beautiful and unnecessary, like a rare flower
which gives sweetness and wonderful peace to the senses,
but which does not make us noble, strong, brave and
humble.
He was, and herein lies his greatness and power, the
symbol of pure humanity, splendid creative force in the
weak vessel of his personality. He was a poet who in his
works became one with the poetry of life, the sounds of the
forest, the kiss of the wind, the rustling of the reeds and the
voice of the dusk of evening. Humanly he was like us who
love him. He was one of those who, no matter how great a
chaos they have made of their own life, are yet
inappeasable, and drink the stranger's pain and the
stranger's bliss in the precious cup of glorious poetry. They
manifold their being and their emotions because of a blind
and uncreative yearning for the universal and infinity.
 ART POÉTIQUE
No laws should rule by force or guile,
But let your verse go singing soft,
And in the solvent air aloft
Find music, music all the while.
Nor be too diffident in phrase,
But let your song grow drunk with wine
Where mystic unions vaguely shine
In luminous and errant ways.
Like veilèd eyes your song should be,
Like noondays trembling in the sun,
Like autumn dusks when days are done
And stars and sky join secretly.
Not vivid colors should adorn,
But shades alone when dream to dream
Is wed, and tender shadows gleam
Like flute notes mingled with the horn.
The “point” which slays and cruel wit,
And smile impure you should despise,
For like base garlic they arise
To spoil the poem exquisite.
 Take eloquence and twist its neck!
And sophist rhyming which would lead
You headlong into sing-song speed
'Tis well for you to hold in check.
Oh, who shall tell of evil rhyme!
A trinket coin with hollow ring,
A barbarous or childish thing
Passed downward idly to our time.
Music, music, evermore,
The burden of your song should be,
Inherent like the melody
Of souls a-wing to distant shore;
Or like the brave emprise and pure
Of morning breezes which imbue
The thyme and mint with honey dew—
The rest belongs to literature.

[1]
In French Pauvre Lelian, an anagram of Paul Verlaine,
which Verlaine often used when speaking of himself.
[2] A Biography and a volume of Rimbaud's
correspondence have recently been published by his
brother-in-law, Paterne Berrichon. They throw much light
upon his remarkable career.
[3]Leon Dierx died in 1912 at the age of 74, and Paul Fort,
the author of the famous Ballades Françaises, was chosen
as “king of the poets” to succeed him.
End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Paul Verlaine, by
Stefan Zweig

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