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.