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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Paul Verlaine, by Stefan Zweig
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+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
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PAUL VERLAINE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Jana Srna and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images generously made available by The
+Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+  [ Transcriber's Note:
+    Every effort has been made to replicate this text as faithfully as
+    possible, including inconsistencies in spelling and hyphenation;
+    changes (corrections of spelling and punctuation) made to the
+    original text are listed at the end of this file.
+
+    Italic text has been marked with _underscores_.
+  ]
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: PAUL VERLAINE, 1895 (Zorn)]
+
+
+
+
+                             PAUL VERLAINE
+
+
+                            By STEFAN ZWEIG
+
+                       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
+
+
+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]
+
+  [1] In French _Pauvre Lelian_, an anagram of Paul Verlaine, which
+  Verlaine often used when speaking of himself.
+
+
+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 coeur 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]
+
+  [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.
+
+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 coeur 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.
+
+  [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.
+
+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.
+
+His _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.
+
+
+
+
+  [ Transcriber's Note:
+
+    The following is a list of corrections made to the original. The
+    first line is the original line, the second the corrected one.
+
+  fragrance For him childhood was paradise, because his poor weak soul,
+  fragrance. For him childhood was paradise, because his poor weak soul,
+
+      Plus familier, voila."
+      Plus familier, voilà."
+
+      "Je voudrais, si ma vie était encore a faire,
+      "Je voudrais, si ma vie était encore à faire,
+
+      Qu'une femme très calme habitat avec moi."
+      Qu'une femme très calme habitât avec moi."
+
+  first work, and had a "_joli succés de hostilité_" with the press. The
+  first work, and had a "_joli succès de hostilité_" with the press. The
+
+  passion, yearns for soft, womenly hands.
+  passion, yearns for soft, womanly hands.
+
+  transferrel unchanged into his poetry, filling it with the force of life
+  transferred unchanged into his poetry, filling it with the force of life
+
+  Sentimentale_, a dark pearl of indefinite, infinite sorrow. Out of masks
+  Sentimental_, a dark pearl of indefinite, infinite sorrow. Out of masks
+
+         Etez vous fous?"
+         Êtes-vous fous?"
+
+  It is truly "_le coeur plus veuf que tout les veuves_" that speaks in
+  It is truly "_le coeur plus veuf que toutes les veuves_" that speaks in
+
+      "C'est des beaux yeaux derrière les voiles,
+      "C'est des beaux yeux derrière les voiles,
+
+      "Prends l'eloquence et tords-lui son cou!
+      "Prends l'éloquence et tords-lui son cou!
+
+  word" which Rimbaud believed, to have discovered, a relationship between
+  word" which Rimbaud believed to have discovered, a relationship between
+
+  colors, vowels and sounds depending on idiosyncracy. It is a secret
+  colors, vowels and sounds depending on idiosyncrasy. It is a secret
+
+  ]
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Paul Verlaine, by Stefan Zweig
+
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+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Paul Verlaine, by Stefan Zweig
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+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
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PAUL VERLAINE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Jana Srna and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images generously made available by The
+Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<div id="tnote">
+<p class="center"><b>Transcriber's Note:</b></p>
+<p>Every effort has been made to replicate this text as faithfully as
+possible, including inconsistencies in spelling and hyphenation;
+changes (corrections of spelling and punctuation) made to the
+original text are marked <ins title="transcriber's note">like this</ins>.
+The original text appears when hovering the cursor over the marked text.</p>
+</div>
+
+<div id="text-block">
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 410px;">
+<img src="images/frontispiece.png" width="410" height="600" alt="" title=""/>
+<div class="caption">PAUL VERLAINE, 1895
+<div class="right">(Zorn)</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<h1 class="gesperrt">PAUL VERLAINE</h1>
+
+
+<p class="center gesperrt" style="font-size: larger; margin-top: 4em;">By STEFAN ZWEIG</p>
+
+<p class="center" style="margin: 4em auto 5em auto; line-height: 1.5em;">Authorized Translation by<br/>
+O.&nbsp;F. THEIS</p>
+
+
+<p class="center smcap" style="line-height: 1.3em;">LUCE AND COMPANY<br/>
+<small>BOSTON</small><br/>
+MAUNSEL AND CO., LTD.<br/>
+DUBLIN and LONDON</p>
+
+
+<p class="center" style="margin-top: 8em; line-height: 1.3em;">Copyright, 1913,<br/>
+<span class="smcap">By L.&nbsp;E. Bassett<br/>
+Boston, Mass., U.&nbsp;S.&nbsp;A.</span></p>
+
+
+
+<p class="center page-break" style="font-size: x-large; margin: 8em;">PAUL VERLAINE</p>
+
+
+
+<div class="page-break">
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_1" title="1"> </a>
+<p class="center" style="font-size: xx-large;">PAUL VERLAINE</p>
+</div>
+
+
+<h2 style="margin-top: 2em; page-break-before: auto;">PRELUDE</h2>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> 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
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_2" title="2"> </a>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_3" title="3"> </a>naked, untamed, humanly-divine
+beauty through his work. Thus he has
+achieved a primæval lyricism&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_4" title="4"> </a>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&mdash;divinities by
+the marvel of creation, and its priests.</p>
+
+<p>Verlaine was always only a human
+being, a weak human being, who did not
+even know how &ldquo;to count the transgressions
+of his own heart.&rdquo; It was
+this very lack of individuality, however,
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_5" title="5"> </a>which produced something much rarer&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_6" title="6"> </a>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.</p>
+
+<p>Intellectuals alone create &ldquo;tendencies.&rdquo;
+Verlaine was as little one of
+these as he was on the other hand the
+<i>bon enfant</i>, 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,
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_7" title="7"> </a>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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_8" title="8"> </a>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>Two factors were responsible for
+this: an unexampled candor in both
+virtue and vice, and his complete unconsciousness,
+which, however, was unfortunately
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_9" title="9"> </a>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 &ldquo;man of letters,&rdquo; he
+unfortunately exaggerated this as well
+as every other of his unique characteristics,
+in an idle exhibitionism, and
+made literary use of them.</p>
+
+<p>Far distant from academies and
+journals, he retained his uniqueness uninterruptedly
+for many years. He has
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_10" title="10"> </a>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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+&ldquo;happiness&rdquo; 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&mdash;for
+us, it is fitting that we
+should feel gratitude.</p>
+
+
+
+<div>
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_11" title="11"> </a>
+<h2>CONCERNING &ldquo;POOR LELIAN&rdquo;<a name="FNanchor_1_1" href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a></h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Whenever</span> 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
+<i>Confessions</i>, 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 <ins title="fragrance">fragrance.</ins>
+For him childhood was paradise, because
+his poor weak soul, needing the
+tenderness of faithful hands, had not
+yet experienced the hard impacts of
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_12" title="12"> </a>life, but only the soft intimate cradling
+between devoted love and womanly
+mildness&mdash;a lulling, sweet unforgettable
+melody.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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 &ldquo;<i>guote suendaere</i>&rdquo;
+still had tears to give. Gleaming
+pure like dew drops, and still fresh,
+they cling to the most fantastic and
+wildest blooms.</p>
+
+<p>The first dates tell little. Paul
+Marie Verlaine was born in 1844 at
+Metz&mdash;he did not remember his second
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_13" title="13"> </a>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 <i>Lied</i>. 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 <i>gosse</i> and finally into
+a government official with skillful literary
+talents.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_14" title="14"> </a>hardly a more poignant story than the
+one he tells regretfully in the <i>Confessions</i>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_15" title="15"> </a>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.</p>
+
+<div class="poem" style="max-width: 23em;">
+<div class="stanza">
+&ldquo;Certes oui pauvre maman était<br/>
+Bien, trop bonne, et mon c&oelig;ur à la voir palpitait,<br/>
+Tressautait, et riait et pleurait de l'entendre<br/>
+Mais toi, je t'aimais autrement non pas plus tendre<br/>
+Plus familier, <ins title="voila">voilà</ins>.&rdquo;
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>It was she too who staged his last
+youthful folly by giving him the money
+for printing the <i>Poèmes Saturniens</i>.
+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
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_16" title="16"> </a>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, &ldquo;the ruin insufficiently
+ruined,&rdquo; who saw in woman the most
+ferocious enemy, and who fled to the
+wolves that they might protect him
+from &ldquo;woman their sister,&rdquo; 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&mdash;the precious hour
+between sin and sin. Sometimes this
+secret desire is placed tenderly and
+simply into lines of verse as into a rare,
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_17" title="17"> </a>fragrant shrine where the dearest possessions
+are kept. These are pure, wonderful
+lines like the following, full of
+longing and renunciation:</p>
+
+<div class="poem" style="max-width: 20em;">
+<div class="stanza">
+&ldquo;Je voudrais, si ma vie était encore <ins title="a">à</ins> faire,<br/>
+Qu'une femme très calme <ins title="habitat">habitât</ins> avec moi.&rdquo;
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>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
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_18" title="18"> </a>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.</p>
+
+<p>This was the catastrophe. Verlaine's
+weak character willingly submitted to
+foreign influences; it became dulled
+under the influence of his comrades,
+&ldquo;and the overthrow began.&rdquo; A foreign
+element entered his being, a materialistic
+cynical trait, for the present
+only <i>gaminerie</i>, while he was still a
+stranger to sex. The specific Parisian
+character, a mingling of vanity, insolence,
+scoffing wit (<i>raillerie</i>) and boastful
+bravado, tempted the soft dreamy
+boy, but conquered him only for short
+hours.</p>
+
+<p>This conflict between feminine sensitivity
+and a <i>gaminerie</i> eager for
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_19" title="19"> </a>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.</p>
+
+<p>The sense of shame was exceptionally
+strong in him, as it is in every case
+where it is repressed. All his life long
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_20" title="20"> </a>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 <i>fleurs du mal</i> of his soul.</p>
+
+<p>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.
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo; This is
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_21" title="21"> </a>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><a class="pagenum" name="Page_22" title="22"> </a>
+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
+<i>Poèmes Saturniens</i> 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
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_23" title="23"> </a>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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_24" title="24"> </a>of form. The pliant, soft yielding
+manner of Verlaine quickly embraced
+their influences. The student is already
+master of the <i>métier</i>. Even the relentless
+and unhappy rhymester into which
+&ldquo;poor Lelian&rdquo; 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.</p>
+
+<p>The years of puberty were the time
+of the production of the <i>Poèmes Saturniens</i>.
+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.</p>
+
+<p><a class="pagenum" name="Page_25" title="25"> </a>
+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 &ldquo;<i>joli <ins title="succés">succès</ins> de hostilité</i>&rdquo;
+with the press. The great writers&mdash;Victor
+Hugo, Leconte de Lisle,
+Theodore de Banville, and others&mdash;wrote
+him encouraging letters, but the
+public at large did not overburden the
+young man with its admiration.</p>
+
+<p>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
+&ldquo;black ship which drags him to the
+abyss,&rdquo; and, on the other, the pure,
+simple, tender mode of his child-like
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_26" title="26"> </a>heart, which, a stranger to all passion,
+yearns for soft, <ins title="womenly">womanly</ins> hands.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;a
+<i>pure reflex of his organic functions</i>.
+That is to say he was infinitely primitive
+as a poet, and infinitely complicated
+and unaccountable as a human
+being.</p>
+
+<p>Whenever his impulses were elastic
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_27" title="27"> </a>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>negative</i> 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 <ins title="transferrel">transferred</ins>
+unchanged into his poetry, filling
+it with the force of life and the tragedy
+of the universally human.</p>
+
+<p>In his entire life there seem to have
+been only two brief periods of cessation
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_28" title="28"> </a>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.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>Fêtes Galantes</i> were published
+soon after the <i>Poèmes Saturniens</i>. 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>It is the most characteristically
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_29" title="29"> </a>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 <i>Colloque <ins title="Sentimentale">Sentimental</ins></i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>At that time an evil influence had
+broken into his life, perhaps the most
+destructive, &ldquo;the one unpardonable
+vice,&rdquo; as he himself confesses. Verlaine
+began to drink. At first it was bravado,
+recklessness, persuasion; later it was
+desire, torture, flight from the qualms
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_30" title="30"> </a>of his conscience, &ldquo;the forgetfulness,
+sought in execrable potions.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>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, &ldquo;the atrocious
+green sorceress&rdquo; was still his only
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_31" title="31"> </a>comforter, into whose arms he willingly
+cast himself.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><a class="pagenum" name="Page_32" title="32"> </a>
+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, <i>La Bonne Chanson</i>.
+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 &ldquo;occasional verses.&rdquo;
+Almost daily one is written and sent to
+his beloved. It was only in small selection
+that they were united in print.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_33" title="33"> </a>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.</p>
+
+<p>Victor Hugo, the sovereign coiner of
+great phrases, called the <i>Bonne Chanson</i>,
+&ldquo;<i>une fleur dans un obus</i>.&rdquo; 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.</p>
+
+<div class="poem" style="max-width: 11em;">
+<div class="stanza">
+&ldquo;La lune blanche<br/>
+<span class="i1">Luit dans les bois;<br/></span>
+<span class="i1">De chaque branche<br/></span>
+<span class="i1">Part une voix<br/></span>
+<span class="i1">Sous la ramée....<br/></span>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_34" title="34"> </a>
+&ldquo;Oh bien-aimée!
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+&ldquo;L'étang reflète,<br/>
+<span class="i1">Profond miroir,<br/></span>
+<span class="i1">La silhouette<br/></span>
+<span class="i1">Du saule noir<br/></span>
+<span class="i1">Où le vent pleure ...</span>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+&ldquo;Rêvons: c'est l'heure.
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+&ldquo;Un vaste et tendre<br/>
+<span class="i1">Apaisement<br/></span>
+<span class="i1">Semble descendre<br/></span>
+<span class="i1">Du firmament<br/></span>
+<span class="i1">Que l'astre irise ...</span>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+&ldquo;C'est l'heure exquise.&rdquo;
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>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
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_35" title="35"> </a>catastrophes and to set the milestones
+of his misfortunes.</p>
+
+<p>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&nbsp;III was a hoax
+which he told his comrades for the sake
+of the sensation, something like the
+story which Baudelaire told of the
+&ldquo;savoriness&rdquo; of embryonal brains.</p>
+
+<p>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 &ldquo;This
+stupid enough rôle which I played during
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_36" title="36"> </a>two months of illusions,&rdquo; cost him
+his position. This was the break with
+well-ordered life and the sign-post
+which showed him the way into the
+Bohème.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_37" title="37"> </a>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.</p>
+
+<p>A new influence enters Verlaine's
+life&mdash;Arthur Rimbaud.</p>
+
+
+
+<div>
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_38" title="38"> </a>
+<h2>THE RIMBAUD EPISODE</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">No</span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>The beginning was conventional.
+One day Verlaine received a letter from
+an acquaintance in the provinces, in
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_39" title="39"> </a>which poems by a fifteen-year-old boy
+were enclosed. Verlaine's opinion was
+asked. The poems were: <i>Les Effarés</i>,
+<i>Les Assis</i>, <i>Les Poètes de sept ans</i>, <i>Les
+Premières communions</i>. 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 &ldquo;<i>Shakespeare
+enfant</i>.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>The provincial associations of Charleville
+filled Rimbaud with disgust and
+unrest. Verlaine in his enthusiasm
+wrote to him &ldquo;Come, dear great soul,
+we are waiting for you, we want you.&rdquo;
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_40" title="40"> </a>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;a gamin,
+but a genius. Everything in him is
+force, over-abundant, wild, exceptional
+virility, without aim and turned toward
+the infinite.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_41" title="41"> </a>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 &ldquo;outside and above&rdquo;
+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
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_42" title="42"> </a>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 <i>Le bateau ivre</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The bond of friendship grew closer
+and closer. Verlaine's <i>gaminerie</i> which
+was ever in contrast with his sensitivity,
+awakened suddenly. His tendency
+toward strong, cynical and lascivious
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_43" title="43"> </a>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Their path led over the highways
+and also through prisons. &ldquo;An evil
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_44" title="44"> </a>rage for travelling&rdquo; 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, &ldquo;<i>Louise Leclercq</i>.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>There he wrote: &ldquo;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.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>The patient is taken to Bouillon, a
+small town in the Ardennes, where
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_45" title="45"> </a>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 <i>par excellence</i>, 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
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_46" title="46"> </a>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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_47" title="47"> </a>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.</p>
+
+<p>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. &ldquo;Let us love
+each other in Jesus Christ,&rdquo; he wrote in
+his proselyting ardor and with the enthusiasm
+which in the beginning he always
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_48" title="48"> </a>felt for everything. Rimbaud
+smiled mockingly and finally declared
+that &ldquo;Loyola&rdquo; should visit him in
+Stuttgart.</p>
+
+<p>Now the moment arrived when
+comedy outdid the tragedy of the reunion.
+Verlaine arrived at Stuttgart
+and attempted the conversion&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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 class="pagenum" name="Page_49" title="49"> </a>A blow over the head knocked
+him down. Bleeding and unconscious,
+he remained lying on the bank.</p>
+
+<p>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.<a name="FNanchor_2_2" href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a></p>
+
+<p>In Vienna he was under arrest as a
+vagrant, in the Balkans he was a merchant.
+Then fulfilling his early prophecy
+in the <i>Bateau ivre</i> 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
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_50" title="50"> </a>the fragile and for him too weakly material
+of language and rhyme. Until
+the day of his death, he, <i>the only true
+despiser of literature of these days</i>,
+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.</p>
+
+<p>For Verlaine it was an episode&mdash;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.</p>
+
+
+
+<div>
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_51" title="51"> </a>
+<h2>THE PENITENT</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">It</span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>In general it is almost a necessity
+among poets that poetic feeling should
+be transmuted into religious feeling.
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_52" title="52"> </a>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 <i>The Thirteen</i>:</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;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.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>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
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_53" title="53"> </a>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.</p>
+
+<p>But a more definite element in Paul
+Verlaine drove him into the arms of
+Catholicism. It was his <i>impulse to confession</i>,
+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.</p>
+
+<p>Cry and sigh are the original forms
+of all lyricism, and just as they are a
+sweet compulsion to expel an inner
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_54" title="54"> </a>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 &ldquo;great
+confession&rdquo; 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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;the immanent conflict of
+childish and animal feeling which
+flooded forever wildly through Verlaine's
+years of manhood. This also has
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_55" title="55"> </a>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.</p>
+
+<p>Childhood bells called him back to
+the church. Pale ancient memories led
+him&mdash;the pomp of the solemn great
+processions which he saw in Montpellier.
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_56" title="56"> </a>The <i>bon enfant</i> 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, <i>Marie</i>, 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 <i>leitmotiv</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>If trust were to be put in the corrupt
+man of letters who wrote the <i>Confessions</i>,
+it was a true miracle, like that in
+the cell of Saint Anthony, which
+brought him into the arms of the
+Church.</p>
+
+<p><a class="pagenum" name="Page_57" title="57"> </a>
+In his narrow room, in which he read
+Shakespeare and other worldly books,
+hung a simple crucifix, unnoticed at
+first. Of it he wrote:</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;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.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>During these two years the neophyte
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_58" title="58"> </a>wrote <i>Sagesse</i>, a volume which appeared
+later under the imprint of an
+exclusively Catholic publisher. It is
+the deepest and greatest work of
+French poetry, &ldquo;the white crown of his
+work,&rdquo; Verhaeren calls it in his brilliant
+study of Verlaine. Here again, as
+once in the <i>Bonne Chanson</i>, the divergent
+forms of his character unite. In
+the unrestrained solution of everything
+personal in the divine, in &ldquo;the melting
+of his own heart in the glowing heart
+of God,&rdquo; 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.</p>
+
+<p>In his religion likewise it is the purely
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_59" title="59"> </a>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. &ldquo;If I have Him only, if He
+only is mine,&rdquo; he says and his words
+become a chaste love song.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>In his sonnet cycle, <i>Mon dieu m'a dit</i>,
+is a place where the soul, wounded by
+the lighting of divine love, cries out, unconscious
+whether in joy or pain:</p>
+
+<div class="poem" style="width: 17em;">
+<div class="stanza">
+&ldquo;Quoi, moi, moi pouvoir Vous aimer.<br/>
+<span class="i3"><ins title="Etez vous">Êtes-vous</ins> fous?&rdquo;</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p><a class="pagenum" name="Page_60" title="60"> </a>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_61" title="61"> </a>hear the soft violin note of their mild
+sadness&mdash;&ldquo;Un grand sommeil noir,&rdquo;
+&ldquo;Le ciel, est, par dessus le toit,&rdquo; &ldquo;Je
+ne sais pas pourquoi mon esprit amer,&rdquo;
+&ldquo;Le son du cor,&rdquo; &ldquo;Je ne veux plus
+aimer que ma mère Marie.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>It is truly &ldquo;<i>le <ins title="coeur">c&oelig;ur</ins> plus veuf que
+<ins title="tout">toutes</ins> les veuves</i>&rdquo; that speaks in them.</p>
+
+<p>When the &ldquo;<i>guote suendaere</i>&rdquo; 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. &ldquo;He was truly
+himself only in the hospital and in
+prison,&rdquo; says Huysmans.</p>
+
+<p>Poor Lelian's longing plaint is for
+this silence. &ldquo;Ah truly, I regret the
+two years in the tower.&rdquo; His song
+says &ldquo;Formerly I dwelt in the best of
+castles.&rdquo; His yearning for the elemental,
+&ldquo;far from a curbed age,&rdquo; never left
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_62" title="62"> </a>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 &ldquo;the ruin of a
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_63" title="63"> </a>still Christian philosopher already
+pagan,&rdquo; and in his obscene books turned
+the rites of Catholic faith, which he
+elsewhere glorified, into phallic and
+other sexual symbols.</p>
+
+<p>He was unable to escape the realization
+of the comedy of this situation.
+In his autobiography, <i>Hommes d'aujourd'hui</i>,
+he attempted a very ingenious
+but exceedingly unsatisfactory
+justification. &ldquo;His work,&rdquo; he explains,
+speaking of poor Lelian, &ldquo;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&mdash;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.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Can this be the program of the &ldquo;unconscious?&rdquo;
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_64" title="64"> </a>A few lines further on he
+has given another explanation. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+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.</p>
+
+<p>Verlaine, the man of letters and poet
+according to program, is a hateful
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_65" title="65"> </a>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>In a short story, <i>Gestas</i>, Anatole
+France has marvellously described in
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_66" title="66"> </a>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.</p>
+
+<p>In these few pages everything is
+compressed, &ldquo;the prodigal child with
+the gestures of a satyr.&rdquo; 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.</p>
+
+
+
+<div>
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_67" title="67"> </a>
+<h2>LEGENDS AND LITERATURE</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">One</span> 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 <i>camaraderie</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_68" title="68"> </a>than there were cities to claim
+Homer's cradle.</p>
+
+<p>It was a period of development.
+French lyric poetry was passing
+through a revolutionary crisis. For the
+first time the marble image of &ldquo;<i>beauté
+impassible</i>&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;<i>impassibilité</i>&rdquo; 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.</p>
+
+<p>Literature alone is not yet sufficient
+to create fame in France. It was only
+when the great journals began to take
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_69" title="69"> </a>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 &ldquo;naive child
+of modern culture,&rdquo; the &ldquo;Bohemian,&rdquo;
+the &ldquo;Unconscious,&rdquo; the &ldquo;New François
+Villon,&rdquo; and even to-day these
+stereotyped phrases are industriously
+repeated.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_70" title="70"> </a>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><a class="pagenum" name="Page_71" title="71"> </a>
+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 &ldquo;to
+give me all simplicity,&rdquo; 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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_72" title="72"> </a>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 &ldquo;poor
+Lelian&rdquo; and the &ldquo;<i>bon enfant</i>&rdquo;&mdash;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
+&ldquo;<i>guileless fool</i>,&rdquo; while his sharp but
+unlogical intelligence never gave way.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Otherwise he alternately turned
+erotic incidents and adventures in alcoves
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_73" title="73"> </a>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
+&ldquo;Posthumous Works,&rdquo; 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>bon enfant</i>. These were
+<i>Femmes</i> and <i>Hombres</i>. 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
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_74" title="74"> </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.</p>
+
+<p>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 &ldquo;guileless fool.&rdquo; This is the only
+value which can be attributed to them.</p>
+
+<p>The carnival comedy took place before
+Ash Wednesday. When Leconte
+de Lisle died, the younger generation
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_75" title="75"> </a>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 &ldquo;king
+of the poets,&rdquo; 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,<a name="FNanchor_3_3" href="#Footnote_3_3" class="fnanchor">[3]</a> 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
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_76" title="76"> </a>tendency in modern French poetry.</p>
+
+<p>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 &ldquo;<i>Art Poétique</i>.&rdquo; 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 <a href="#Page_90">page&nbsp;90</a>.)</p>
+
+<div class="poem" style="width: 19em;">
+<div class="stanza">
+&ldquo;De la musique avant toute chose,<br/>
+Et pour cela préfère l'Impair<br/>
+Plus vague et plus soluble dans l'air,<br/>
+Sans rien en lui, qui pèse ou qui pose.
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+&ldquo;Il faut aussi que tu n'ailles point<br/>
+Choisir tes mots sans quelque méprise:<br/>
+Rien de plus cher que la chanson grise<br/>
+Où l'Indécis au Précis se joint.
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_77" title="77"> </a>
+&ldquo;C'est des beaux <ins title="yeaux">yeux</ins> derrière les voiles,<br/>
+C'est le grand jour tremblant de midi,<br/>
+C'est, par un ciel d'automne attiédi,<br/>
+Le bleu fouillis des claires étoiles!
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+&ldquo;Car nous voulons la Nuance encore,<br/>
+Pas la Couleur, rien que la nuance!<br/>
+Oh, la nuance seule fiance<br/>
+Le rêve au rêve et la flûte au cor!
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+&ldquo;Fuis du plus loin la Pointe assassine,<br/>
+L'Esprit cruel et le Rire impur,<br/>
+Qui font pleurer les yeux d'Azur<br/>
+Et tout cet ail de basse cuisine!
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+&ldquo;Prends <ins title="l'eloquence">l'éloquence</ins> et tords-lui son cou!<br/>
+Tu feras bien, en train d'énergie,<br/>
+De rendre un peu la Rime assagie,<br/>
+Si l'on n'y veille, elle ira jusqu'où?
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+&ldquo;Oh! qui dira les torts de la Rime?<br/>
+Quel enfant sourd ou quel nègre fou<br/>
+Nous a forgé ce bijou d'un sou<br/>
+Qui sonne creux et faux sous la lime?
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+&ldquo;De la musique encore et toujours!<br/>
+Que ton vers soit la chose envolée<br/>
+Qu'on sent qui fuit d'une âme en allée<br/>
+Vers d'autres cieux à d'autres amours.
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_78" title="78"> </a>
+&ldquo;Que ton vers soit la bonne aventure<br/>
+Éparse au vent crispé du matin<br/>
+Qui va fleurant la menthe et le thym ...<br/>
+Et tout le reste est littérature.&rdquo;
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>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
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_79" title="79"> </a>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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_80" title="80"> </a>definite melodies, but by fixing it in
+assonance, rhymes and rhythmic waves.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_81" title="81"> </a>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Such art must be more effective as
+contrasted with all intellectualism because
+it springs from deeper sources,
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_82" title="82"> </a>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
+&ldquo;alchemy of the word&rdquo; which Rimbaud
+<ins title="believed, to">believed to</ins> have discovered, a relationship
+between colors, vowels and
+sounds depending on <ins title="idiosyncracy">idiosyncrasy</ins>. 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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_83" title="83"> </a>net value of purely intellectual elements
+and &ldquo;contents&rdquo; 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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<i>L'Hommes d'Aujourd'hui</i>:</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;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.&mdash;Besides
+absolute liberty is my
+device if it were necessary for me to
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_84" title="84"> </a>have one&mdash;and I find good everything
+which is good in despite and notwithstanding
+rules.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>His <i>Confessions</i>, which have been
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_85" title="85"> </a>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, <i>Les Uns et les
+Autres</i>, has Watteau-like style and
+Pierrot elegances, as well as flexibility,
+but is of no importance. Another play,
+<i>Louis&nbsp;XVI</i>, 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
+<i>camaraderie</i>.</p>
+
+<p>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,
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_86" title="86"> </a>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.&nbsp;A. Cazals, has
+fixed him for posterity. They show
+Verlaine in all his moods&mdash;in his bonhomie,
+despair, grief, &ldquo;<i>gaminerie</i>,&rdquo; 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&mdash;the stroke of melancholy's
+bow.</p>
+
+
+
+<div>
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_87" title="87"> </a>
+<h2>POSTLUDE</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> 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
+&ldquo;lasting&rdquo; because we are afraid of the
+proud and resounding word &ldquo;eternal.&rdquo;
+The significance of great poets passes
+the boundaries of literature and ignores
+what is known as &ldquo;influences&rdquo; and
+&ldquo;artistic atmosphere.&rdquo; 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.</p>
+
+<p><a class="pagenum" name="Page_88" title="88"> </a>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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,
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_89" title="89"> </a>like a rare flower which gives
+sweetness and wonderful peace to the
+senses, but which does not make us
+noble, strong, brave and humble.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+
+<div>
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_90" title="90"> </a>
+<h2>ART POÉTIQUE</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<div class="poem" style="width: 18.5em;">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="smcap">No</span> laws should rule by force or guile,<br/>
+But let your verse go singing soft,<br/>
+And in the solvent air aloft<br/>
+Find music, music all the while.
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+Nor be too diffident in phrase,<br/>
+But let your song grow drunk with wine<br/>
+Where mystic unions vaguely shine<br/>
+In luminous and errant ways.
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+Like veilèd eyes your song should be,<br/>
+Like noondays trembling in the sun,<br/>
+Like autumn dusks when days are done<br/>
+And stars and sky join secretly.
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+Not vivid colors should adorn,<br/>
+But shades alone when dream to dream<br/>
+Is wed, and tender shadows gleam<br/>
+Like flute notes mingled with the horn.
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+The &ldquo;point&rdquo; which slays and cruel wit,<br/>
+And smile impure you should despise,<br/>
+For like base garlic they arise<br/>
+To spoil the poem exquisite.
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<a class="pagenum" name="Page_91" title="91"> </a>
+Take eloquence and twist its neck!<br/>
+And sophist rhyming which would lead<br/>
+You headlong into sing-song speed<br/>
+'Tis well for you to hold in check.
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+Oh, who shall tell of evil rhyme!<br/>
+A trinket coin with hollow ring,<br/>
+A barbarous or childish thing<br/>
+Passed downward idly to our time.
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+Music, music, evermore,<br/>
+The burden of your song should be,<br/>
+Inherent like the melody<br/>
+Of souls a-wing to distant shore;
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+Or like the brave emprise and pure<br/>
+Of morning breezes which imbue<br/>
+The thyme and mint with honey dew&mdash;<br/>
+The rest belongs to literature.
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" href="#FNanchor_1_1" class="label">[1]</a> In French <i>Pauvre Lelian</i>, an anagram of Paul Verlaine,
+which Verlaine often used when speaking of
+himself.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_2" href="#FNanchor_2_2" class="label">[2]</a> 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.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_3" href="#FNanchor_3_3" class="label">[3]</a> Leon Dierx died in 1912 at the age of 74, and Paul
+Fort, the author of the famous <i>Ballades Françaises</i>,
+was chosen as &ldquo;king of the poets&rdquo; to succeed him.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Paul Verlaine, by Stefan Zweig
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+</pre>
+
+</body>
+</html>
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