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.