[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.