initial commit of ebook 34327HEADmain

1 files changed, 1946 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/34327-8.txt b/34327-8.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e0b11dd
--- /dev/null
+++ b/34327-8.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,1946 @@
+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
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PAUL VERLAINE ***
+
+***** This file should be named 34327-8.txt or 34327-8.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        https://www.gutenberg.org/3/4/3/2/34327/
+
+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.)
+
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+https://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+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
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at https://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+https://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at https://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit https://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including including checks, online payments and credit card
+donations.  To donate, please visit: https://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     https://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.