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.