To turn suddenly to the poetry of Paul Verlaine from the mass of
modern verse is to experience something like that sensation so
admirably described by Thoreau when he came upon a sentence in
Latin or in Greek lying like a broken branch of lovely fresh greenery
across the pages of some modern book.
Verlaine more than any other European poet is responsible for the
huge revolution in poetry which has taken in recent times so many
and so surprising shapes and has deviated so far from its originator's
method.
There is little resemblance between the most striking modern
experiments in what is called "free verse" and the manner in which
Verlaine himself broke with the old tradition; but the spirit
animating these more recent adventures is the spirit which Verlaine
called up from the "vasty deep," and with all their divergence from
his original manner these modern rebels have a perfect right to use
the authority of his great name, "car son nom," as Coppée says, in
his tenderly written preface to his "Choix de Poésies," "éveillera
toujours le souvenir d'une poésie absolument nouvelle et qui a pris
dans les lettres franchises l'importance d'une découverte."
The pleasure with which one returns to Verlaine from wandering
here and there among our daring contemporaries is really nothing
less than a tribute to the essential nature of all great poetry; I mean
to the soul of music in the thing. Some of the most powerful and
original of modern poets have been led so far away from this
essential soul of their own great art as to treat the music of their
works as quite subordinate to its intellectual or visual import.
As far as I am able to understand the theories of the so-called
"imagists," the idea is to lay the chief stress upon the evocation of
clearly outlined shapes--images clean-cut and sharply defined, and,
while personal in their choice, essentially objective in their
rendering--and upon the absence of any traditional "beautiful words"
which might blur this direct unvarnished impact of the poet's
immediate vision.
It might be maintained with some plausibility that Verlaine's poetry
takes its place in the "impressionistic" period, side by side with
"impressionistic" work in the plastic arts, and that for this reason it
is quite natural that the more modern poets, whose artistic
contemporaries belong to the "post-impressionistic" school, should
deviate from him in many essential ways. Personally I am extremely
unwilling to permit Verlaine to be taken possession of by any
modern tendency or made the war-cry of any modern camp.
Though by reason of his original genius he has become a potent
creative spirit influencing all intelligent people who care about
poetry at all, yet, while thus inspiring a whole generation--perhaps,
considering the youth of many of our poetic contemporaries, we
might say _two_ generations--he belongs almost as deeply to certain
great eras of the past. In several aspects of his temperament he
carries us back to François Villon, and his own passionate heart is
forever reverting to the Middle Ages as the true golden age of the
spirit he represented.
He thus sweeps aside with a gesture the great seventeenth century so
much admired by Nietzsche.
Non. Il fut gallican, ce siècle, et janséniste!
C'est vers le Moyen Age énorme et délicat,
Qu'il faudrait que mon coeur en panne naviguât,
Loin de nos jours d'esprit charnel et de chair triste.
But whatever may have been the spirit which animated Verlaine, the
fact remains that when one takes up once more this "Choix de
Poésies," "avec un portrait de l'auteur par Eugene Carrière," and
glances, in passing, at that suggestive _cinquante-septième mille_
indicating how many others besides ourselves have, in the midst of
earthquakes and terrors, assuaged their thirst at this pure fount, one
recognises once more that the thing that we miss in this modern
welter of poetising is simply _music_--music, the first and last
necessity, music, the only authentic seal of the eternal Muses.
Directly any theory of poetry puts the chief stress upon anything
except music--whether it be the intellectual content of the verses or
their image-creating vision or their colour or their tone--one has a
right to grow suspicious.
The more subtly penetrated such music is by the magic of the poet's
personality, the richer it is in deep intimations of universal human
feeling, the greater will be its appeal. But the music must be there;
and since the thing to which it forever appeals is the unchanging
human sensibility, there must be certain eternal laws of rhythm
which no original experiments can afford to break without losing the
immortal touch.
This is all that lovers of poetry need contend for as against these
quaint and interesting modern theories. Let them prove their theories!
Let them thrill us in the old authentic manner by their "free verse"
and we will acknowledge them as true descendants of Catullus and
Keats, of Villon and Verlaine!
But they must remember that the art of poetry is the art of
heightening words by the magic of music. Colour, suggestion,
philosophy, revelation, interpretation, realism, impressionism--all
these qualities come and go as the fashion of our taste changes. One
thing alone remains, as the essential and undying spirit of all true
poetry; that it should have that "concord of sweet sounds"--let us say,
rather, that concord of high, delicate, rare sounds--which melts us
and enthralls us and liberates us, whatever the subject and whatever
the manner or the method! Verse which is cramped and harsh and
unmelodious may have its place in human history; it may have its
place in human soothsaying and human interest; it has no place or
lot in poetry. Individual phrases may have their magic; individual
words may have their colour; individual thoughts may have their
truth; individual sentences their noble rhetoric;--all this is well and
right and full of profound interest. But all this is only the material,
the atmosphere, the medium, the instrument. If the final result does
not touch us, does not move us, does not rouse us, does not quiet us,
as _music_ to our ears and our souls--it may be the voice of the
prophet; it may be the voice of the charmer; it is not the voice of the
immortal god.
Verlaine uses the term _nuance_ in his "ars poetica" to express the
evasive quality in poetry which appeals to him most and of which he
himself is certainly one of the most delicate exponents; but
remembering the power over us of certain sublime simplicities,
remembering the power over us of certain great plangent lines in
Dante and Milton, where there is no "nuance" at all, one hesitates to
make this a dogmatic doctrine.
But in what he says of music he is supremely right, and it is for the
sake of his passionate authority on this matter--the authority of one
who is certainly no formal traditionalist--that I am led to quote
certain lines.
They occur in "Jadis et Naguère" and are placed, appropriately
enough, in the centre of the volume of Selections which I have now
before me.
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.
Car nous voulons la Nuance encor,
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 de l'Azur,
Et tout cet ail de basse cuisine!
Prends l'éloquence et tords-lui sou cou!
Tu feras bien, en train d'énergie
De rendre un peu la Rime assagie
Si Ton n'y veille, elle ira jusqu'où?
. . . .
De la musique encore et toujours!
Que ton vers soit la chose envolée
Qu'on sent qui fuit d'une âme 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.
Yes; that is the sigh which goes up from one's heart, in these days
when there is so much verse and so little poetry;--"et tout le reste est
littérature"!
Clever imagery, humorous realism, philosophical thoughts, bizarre
fancies and strange inventions--it is all vivid, all arresting, all
remarkable, but it is only literature! This is a fine original image.
That is a fine unexpected thought. Here indeed is a rare magical
phrase. Good! We are grateful for these excellent things. But poetry?
Ah! that is another matter.
This music of which I speak is a large and subtle thing. It is not only
the music of syllables. It is the music of thoughts, of images, of
memories, of associations, of spiritual intimations and far-drawn
earth-murmurs. It is the music which is hidden in reality, in the heart
of reality; it is the music which is the secret cause why things are as
they are; the music which is their end and their beginning; it is the
old deep Pythagorean mystery; it is the music of the flowing tides,
of the drifting leaves, of the breath of the sleepers, of the passionate
pulses of the lovers; it is the music of the rhythm of the universe,
and its laws are the laws of sun and moon and night and day and
birth and death and good and evil.
Such music is itself, in a certain deep and true sense, more instinct
with the mystery of existence than any definite image or any definite
thought can possibly be. It seems to contain in it the potentiality of
all thoughts, and to stream in upon us from some Platonic
"beyond-world" where the high secret archetypes of all created forms
sleep intheir primordial simplicity.
The rhythmic cadences of such music seem, if I dare so far to put
such a matter into words, to exist independently of and previously to
the actual thoughts and images in which they are finally incarnated.
One has the sense that what the poet first feels is the obscure beauty
of this music, rising up wordless and formless from the
unfathomable wells of being, and that it is only afterwards, in a
mood of quiet recollection, that he fits the thing to its corresponding
images and thoughts and words.
The subject is really nothing. This mysterious music may be said to
have created the subject; just as the subject, when it is itself called
into existence, creates its images and words and mental atmosphere.
Except for the original out-welling of this hidden stream, pouring up
from unknown depths, there would be no thought, no image, no
words. A beautiful example of this is that poem entitled "Promenade
Sentimentale," which is one of the Paysages Tristes in the "Poèmes
Saturniens."
It is a slight and shadowy thing, of no elaborate construction,
--simply a rendering of the impression produced upon the mind by
sunset and water; by willows and water-fowl and water-lilies. A
slight thing enough; but in some mysterious way it seems to blend
with all those vague feelings which are half memories and half
intimations of something beyond memory, which float round the
margins of all human minds.
We have seen these shadowy willows, that dying sunset; we have
heard the wail of those melancholy water-fowl; somewhere--far
from here--in some previous incarnation perhaps, or in the "dim
backward" of pre-natal dreaming. It all comes back to us as we give
ourselves up to the whispered cadences of this faint sweet music;
while those reiterated syllables about "the great water-lilies among
the rushes" fall upon us like a dirge, like a requiem, like the wistful
voice of what we have loved--once--long ago--touching us suddenly
with a pang that is well-nigh more than we can bear.
Le couchant dardait ses rayons suprêmes
Et le vent berçait les nénuphars blêmes;
Les grands nénuphars entre les roseaux
Tristement luisaient sur les calmes eaux.
Moi, j'errais tout seul, promenant ma plaie
Au long de l'étang, parmi la saulaie
Où la brume vague évoquait un grand
Fantôme laiteux se désespérant
Et pleurant avec la voix des sarcelles
Qui se rappelaient en battant des ailes
Parmi la saulaie où j'errais tout seul
Promenant ma plaie; et l'épais linceul
Des ténèbres vint noyer les suprêmes
Rayons du couchant dans ses ondes blêmes
Et des nénuphars parmi les roseaux
Des grands nénuphars sur les calmes eaux.
Verlaine is one of those great original poets the thought of whose
wistful evocations coming suddenly upon us when we are troubled
and vexed by the howl of life's wolves, becomes an incredible
mandragora of healing music.
I can remember drifting once, in one of those misty spring twilights,
when even the streets of Paris leave one restless, dissatisfied and
feverishly unquiet, into the gardens of the Luxembourg. There is a
statue there of Verlaine accentuating all the extravagance of that
extraordinary visage--the visage of a satyr-saint, a "ragamuffin
angel," a tatterdemalion scholar, an inspired derelict, a scaramouch
god,--and I recollect how, in its marble whiteness, the thing leered
and peered at me with a look that seemed to have about it all the
fragrance of all the lilac-blossoms in the world, mixed with all the
piety of all our race's children and the wantonness of all old heathen
dreams. It is like Socrates, that head; and like a gargoyle on the
tower of Notre Dame.
He ought to have been one of those slaves of Joseph of Arimathea,
who carried the body of Our Lord from the cross to the rich man's
tomb--a slave with the physiognomy of the god Pan--shedding tears,
like a broken-hearted child, over the wounded flesh of the Saviour.
There is an immense gulf--one feels it at once--between Paul
Verlaine and all other modern French writers. What with them is an
intellectual attitude, a deliberate aesthetic cult, is with him an
absolutely spontaneous emotion.
His vibrating nerves respond, in a magnetic answer and with equal
intensity, to the two great passions of the human race: its passion for
beauty and its passion for God.
His association with the much more hard and self-possessed and
sinister figure of Rimbaud was a mere incident in his life.
Rimbaud succeeded in breaking up the idyllic harmony of his
half-domestic, half-arcadian ménage, and dragging him out into the
world. But the influence over him of that formidable inhuman boy
was not a deep, organic, predestined thing touching the roots of his
being; it was an episode; an episode tragically grotesque indeed and
full of a curious interest, but leaving the main current of his genius
untouched and unchanged.
Paul Verlaine's response to the beauty of women is a thing worthy of
the most patient analysis. Probably there has never lived any human
person who has been more thrilled by the slightest caress. One is
conscious of this in every page of his work. There is a vibrant
spirituality, a nervous abandonment, about his poetry of passion,
which separates it completely from the confessions of the great
sensualists.
There was nothing heavy or material about Verlaine's response to
erotic appeals. His nervous organisation was so finely strung that,
when he loved, he loved with his whole nature, with body, soul and
spirit, in a sort of quivering ecstasy of spiritual lust.
One is reminded here and there of Heine; in other places--a little--of
William Blake; but even these resemblances are too vague to be
pressed at all closely.
His nature was undoubtedly child-like to a degree amounting to
positive abnormality. He hardly ever speaks of love without the
indication of a relation between himself and the object of his passion
which has in it an extraordinary resemblance to the perfectly pure
feeling of a child for its mother.
It must have been almost always towards women possessed very
strongly of the maternal instinct that he was attracted; and, in his
attraction, the irresistible ecstasy of the senses seems always
mingled with a craving to be petted, comforted, healed, soothed,
consoled, assuaged.
In poem after poem it is the tenderness, the purity, the delicacy of
women, which draws and allures him. Their more feline, more
raptorial attributes are only alluded to in the verses where he is
obviously objective and impersonal. In the excessive _gentleness_
of his eroticism Verlaine becomes, among modern poets, strangely
original; and one reads him with the added pleasure of enjoying
something that has disappeared from the love-poetry of the race for
many generations.
"By Gis and by saint Charity," as the mad girl in the play sings,
there is too much violence in modern love! One grows weary of all
this rending and tearing, of all this pantherish pouncing and
serpentine clinging. One feels a reaction against this eternal
savagery of earth-lust. It is a relief, like the coming suddenly from a
hedge of wild white roses after wandering through tropical jungles,
to pass into this tender wistful air full of the freshness of the dew of
the morning.
No wonder Verlaine fell frequently into what his conscience told
him was sin! His "sinning" has about it something so winning, so
innocent, so childish, so entirely free from the predatory mood, that
one can easily believe that his conscience was often betrayed into
slumber. And yet, when it did awaken at last, the tears of his
penitence ran down so pitifully over cheeks still wet with the tears
of his passion, that the two great emotions may be almost said to
have merged themselves in one another--the ecstasy of remorse in
the ecstasy of the sin that caused the remorse.
The way a man "makes love" is always intimately associated with
the way he approaches his gods, such as they may be; and one need
not be in the least surprised to find that Verlaine's attitude to his
Creator has a marked resemblance to his attitude to those
too-exquisite created beings whose beauty and sweet maternal
tenderness so often betrayed him. He evidently enjoys a delicious
childish emotion, almost a babyish emotion, in giving himself up
into the hands of his Maker to be soothed and petted, healed and
comforted. He calls upon his God to punish him just as a child might
call upon his mother to punish him, in the certain knowledge that his
tears will soon be kissed away by a tenderness as infinite as it is just.
God, Christ, Our Lady, pass through the pages of his poems as
through the cypress-terraces of some fantastic mediaeval picture.
The "douceur" of their sweet pitifulness towards him runs like a
quivering magnetic current through all the maddest fancies of his
wayward imagination.
"De la douceur, de la douceur, de la douceur"! Even in the least
pardonable of light loves he demands this tenderness--demands it
from some poor "fille de joie" with the same sort of tearful craving
with which he demands it from the Mother of God.
He has a pathetic mania for the consoling touch of tender, pitiful
hands. All through his poetry we have reference to such hands.
Sometimes they are only too human. Sometimes they are divine. But
whether human or divine they bring with them that magnetic gift of
healing for which, like a hurt and unhappy infant, he is always
longing.
Les chères mains qui furent miennes
Toutes petites, toutes belles,
Après ces méprises mortelles
Et toutes ces choses païennes,
Après les rades et les grèves,
Et les pays et les provinces,
Royales mieux qu'au temps des princes
Les chères mains m'ouvrent les rêves.
. . . .
Ment-elle, ma vision chaste,
D'affinité spirituelle,
De complicité maternelle,
D'affection étroite et vaste?
. . . .
That collection of passionate cries to God which ends with a sort of
rhapsody of pleading prayer, entitled "Sagesse," begins--and one
does not feel that it is in the least inappropriate--with
Beauté des femmes, leur faiblesse, et ces mains pâles
Qui font souvent le bien et peuvent tout le mal.
It is very curious to note the subtle manner in which, for all his
declarations about the Middle Ages, he is attracted irresistibly to that
wonderful artificial fairy-land, associated for us for all time with the
genius of Watteau, wherein pale roses and fountains and
yew-hedges are the background for the fatal sweetness of Columbine and
the dancing feet of Arlequino.
This Garden-of-Versailles cult, with its cold moonlight and its faint
music has become, with the sad-gay Pierrot as its tutelary deity, one
of the most appealing "motifs" in modern art.
Almost all of us have worshipped, at some time or another, at this
wistful fairy shrine, and have laid our single white rose on its marble
pavement, under the dark trees.
Yes; Verlaine may boast of his faithful loyalty to the "haute
théologie et solide morale, guidé par la folie unique de la Croix" of
that "Moyen Age énorme et délicat" which inspires his spirit. The
fact remains that none--none among all the most infatuated
frequenters of the perverse fairy-land of Watteau's exquisite
dreams--gives himself up more wantonly to the artifice within artifice,
to themask below mask, of these dancers to tambourines amid the
"boulingrins du pare aulique" of mock-classic fantasies. He gives
himself up to this Watteau cult all the more easily because he
himself has so infantile a heart. He is like a child who enters some
elaborate masked ball in his own gala dress. It is natural to him to be
perverse and wistful and tragically gay. It is natural to him to foot it
in the moonlight along with the Marquis of Carabas.
That Nuit du Walpurgis classique of his, with its "jardin de Lenôtre,
correct, ridicule et charmant," is one of the most delicate evocations
of this _genre._ One sees these strange figures, "ces spectres agités,"
as if they were passing from twilight to twilight through the silvery
mists of some pale Corot-picture, passing into thin air, into the
shadow of a shadow, into the dream of a dream, into nothingness
and oblivion; but passing gaily and wantonly--to the music of
mandolines, to the blowing of fairy horns!
N'importe! ils vont toujours, les fébriles fantômes,
Menant leur ronde vaste et morne, et tressautant
Comme dans un rayon de soleil des atomes,
Et s'évaporent a l'instant
Humide et blême où l'aube éteint l'un après l'autre
Les cors, en sorte qu'il ne reste absolument
Plus rien--absolument--qu'un jardin de Lenôtre
Correct, ridicule et charmant.
In the same vein, full of a diaphanous gaiety light as the flutter of
dragon-fly wings, is that "caprice" in his Fêtes Galantes entitled
Fantoches.
Scaramouche et Pucinella
Qu'un mauvais dessein rassembla
Gesticulent, noirs sur la lune.
Cependant l'excellent docteur
Bolonais cueille avec lenteur
Des simples parmi l'herbe brune.
Lors sa fille, piquant minois
Sous la charmille, en tapinois
Se glisse demi-nue, en quête
De son beau pirate espagnol
Dont un langoureux rossignol
Clame la détresse a tue-tête.
Is that not worthy of an illustration by Aubrey Beardsley? And yet
has it not something more naive, more infantile, than most modern
trifles of that sort? Does not it somehow suggest Grimm's Fairy
Stories?
There is one mood of Paul Verlaine, quite different from this, which
is extremely interesting if only for its introduction into poetry of a
certain impish malice which we do not as a rule associate with
poetry at all.
Such is the poem called Les Indolents, with its ribald refrain, like
the laughter of a light-footed Puck flitting across the moon-lit lawns,
of
Hi! Hi! Hi! les amants bizarres!
. . . .
Eurent l'inexpiable tort
D'ajourner une exquise mort.
Hi! Hi! Hi! les amants bizarres!
Such also are those extraordinary verses under the title Colloque
Sentimental which trouble one's imagination with so penetrating a
chill of shivering disillusionment.
For some reason or other my own mind always associates these
terrible lines with a particular corner of a public garden in Halifax,
Yorkshire; where I seem to have seen two figures once; seen them
with a glacial pang of pain that was like the stab of a dagger of ice
frozen from a poisoned well.
Dans le vieux pare solitaire et glacé
Deux formes ont tout à l'heure passé.
Leurs yeux sont morts et leurs lèvres sont molles
Et l'on entend à peine leurs paroles.
Dans le vieux pare solitaire et glacé
Deux spectres ont évoqué le passé.
--Qu'il était bleu, le ciel, et grand l'espoir!
--L'espoir a fui, vaincu, vers le ciel noir.
I have omitted the bitter dialogue--as desolate and hollow in its
frozen retorts as the echoes of iron heels in a granite sepulchre--but
the whole piece has a petrified forlornness about it which somehow
reminds one of certain verses of Mr. Thomas Hardy.
One of my own favourite poems of Verlaine is one whose weird and
strange beauty will appeal, I fear, to few readers of these sketches;
but if I could put into words the indescribable power which it
exercises over my own mood I should be doing something to
mitigate its remoteness from normal feelings. It is a wild mad thing,
this poem--a fantasia upon a melancholy and terrible truth--but it has
the power of launching one's mind down long and perilous tides of
speculation.
It is like a "nocturne" written by a musician who has wandered
through all the cities of Europe with a company of beggar-players,
playing masques of death to the occupants of all the cemeteries. He
names the poem Grotesques; and it comes among the verses called
Eaux-Fortes, dedicated to François Coppée.
C'est que, sur leurs aigres guitares
Crispant la main des libertés
Ils nasillent des chants bizarres,
Nostalgiques et révoltés;
C'est enfin que dans leurs prunelles
Rit et pleure--fastidieux--
L'amour des choses éternelles,
Des vieux morts et des anciens dieux!
. . . .
Les juins brûlent et les décembres
Gèlent votre chair jusqu'aux os,
Et la fièvre envahit vos membres
Qui se déchirent aux roseaux.
Tout vous repousse et tout vous navre
Et quand la mort viendra pour vous
Maigre et froide, votre cadavre
Sera dédaigné par les loups!
I cannot resist the feeling that where the inmost essential genius of
Verlaine is to be found is neither in his religious poems nor his
love-poems; no, nor even in his singular fantasies.
I find it in certain little evasive verses, the fleeting magic of which
evaporates, under any attempt to capture or define it, like the
perfume from that broken alabaster box from which the woman
anointed the feet of the Saviour. Such a poem is that strangely
imaginative one, with a lovely silveriness of tone in its moth-like
movements, and full of a mystery, soft, soothing and gentle, like the
whisper of a child murmuring its happiness in its sleep, which is
called Impression Fausse for some delicate reason that I, alas! lack
the wit to fathom.
Dame souris trotte
Noire dans le gris du soir
Dame souris trotte
Grise dans le noir.
On sonne la cloche,
Dormez, les bons prisonniers,
On sonne la cloche:
Faut que vous dormiez,
. . . . .
Dame souris trotte,
Rose dans les rayons bleus,
Dame souris trotte
Debout, paresseux!
Perhaps of all the poems he ever wrote the one most full of his
peculiar and especial atmosphere--grey and sad and cool and deep
and unlike anything else in the world--is that entitled Réversibilities;
though here again I am out of my depths as to the full significance
of this title.
Entends les pompes qui font
Le cri des chats.
Des sifflets viennent et vont
Comme en pourchas.
Ah, dans ces tristes décors
Les Déjàs sont les Encors!
O les vagues Angélus!
(Qui viennent d'où)
Vois s'allumer les Saluts
Du fond d'un trou.
Ah, dans ces mornes séjours
Les Jamais sont les Toujours!
Quels rêves épouvantes
Vous grands murs blancs!
Que de sanglots répétés,
Fous ou dolents!
Ah, dans ces piteux retraits
Les Toujours sont les Jamais!
Tu meurs doucereusement,
Obscurément,
Sans qu'on veille, O coeur aimant,
Sans testament!
Ah, dans ces deuils sans rachats
Les Encors sont les Déjàs!
It is perhaps because his essential kingdom is not bound by the
time-limits of any century or age but has its place in that mysterious
country beyond the margins of all change, where the dim vague
feelings of humanity take to themselves shadowy and immortal
forms and whisper and murmur of what except in music can never
be uttered, that he appeals to us so much more than other recent
poets.
In that twilight-land of delicate mystery, by those pale sea-banks
dividing what we feel from what we dream, the silvery willows of
indefinable memory bow themselves more sadly, the white poplars
of faint hope shiver more tenderly, the far-off voices of past and
future mingle with a more thrilling sweetness, than in the garish
daylight of any circumscribed time or place.
In the twilight-country over which he rules, this fragile child of the
clairvoyant senses, this uncrowned king of beggars and dreams, it
may truly and indeed seem that "les jamais sont les toujours."
His poetry is the poetry of water-colours. It is water seen through
water. It is white painted upon white. It is sad with the whispers of
falling rain. It is grey with the passage of softly-sliding mists. It is
cool and fresh with the dews of morning and of evening.
Like a leaf whirling down from one of those tremulous poplar-trees
that hang over the Seine between the Pont Neuf and the Quai
Voltaire--whirling lightly and softly down, till it touches the flowing
water and is borne away--each of these delicate filmy verses of his
falls upon our consciousness; draws up from the depths its strange
indescribable response; and is lost in the shadows.
One is persuaded by the poetry of Verlaine that the loveliest things
are the most evasive things, the things which come most lightly and
pass most swiftly. One realises from his poetry that the rarest
intimations of life's profound secret are just those that can only be
expressed in hints, in gestures, in whispers, in airy touches and
fleeting signs.
One comes to understand from it that the soul of poetry is and was
and must always be no other thing than _music_--music not merely
of the superficial sound of words, but of those deeper significances
and those vaguer associations which words carry with them; music
of the hidden spirit of words, the spirit which originally called them
forth from the void and made them vehicles for the inchoate
movements of man's unuttered dreams.
Paul Verlaine--and not without reason--became a legend even while
he lived; and now that he is dead he has become more than a legend.
A legend and a symbol! Wherever the spirit of art finds itself
misunderstood, mistrusted, disavowed, disinherited; driven into the
taverns by the stupidity of those who dwell in "homes," and into the
arms of the submerged by the coldness and heartlessness of those
who walk prosperously upon the surface; the figure of this fantastic
child, this satyr-saint with the Socratic forehead, this tearful
mummer among the armies of the outcasts, will rise up and write his
prophecy upon the wall.
For the kingdom of art is as the kingdom of heaven. The clever ones,
the wise ones, the shrewd ones, the ones that make themselves
friends with Mammon, and build themselves houses of pleasure for
their habitation, shall pass away and be forgotten forever.
The justice of the gods cancels the malice of the righteous, and the
devoted gratitude of humanity tears up the contemptuous libels of
the world.
He has come into his own, as all great poets must at last, in defiance
of the puritan, in defiance of public opinion, and in spite of all
aspersion. He has come into his own; and no one who loves poetry
can afford to pass him by.
For while others may be more witty, more learned, more elaborate,
none can be more melodious. His poetry is touched with the music
that is beyond all argument. He lives by his sincerity. He lives by his
imagination.
The things that pertain the deepest to humanity are not its fierce
fleshly passions, its feverish ambitions, its proud reasonings, its
tumultuous hopes. They are the things that belong to the hours when
these obsessing forces fade and ebb and sink away. They are the
things that rise up out of the twilight-margins of sleep and death; the
things that come to us on softly stepping feet, like child-mothers
with their first-born in their arms; the things that have the white
mists of dawn about them and the cool breath of evening around
them; the things that hint at something beyond passion and beyond
reason; the things that sound to us like the sound of bells heard
through clear deep water; for the secret of human life is not in its
actions or its voices or its clamorous desires, but in the intervals
between all these--when all these leave it for a moment at rest--and
in the depths of the soul itself the music becomes audible, the music
which is the silence of eternity.