Gaston Boissier, in crowning (touching custom) a fifty-year-old poet,
congratulated him for never having innovated, for having expressed
ordinary ideas in a facile style, for having scrupulously conformed to
the traditional laws of French poetics.
Might not a history of our literature be written by neglecting the
innovators? Ronsard would be replaced by Ponthus de Thyard, Corneille
by his brother, Racine by Campistron, Lamartine by de Laprade, Victor
Hugo by Ponsard, and Verlaine by Aicard; it would be more encouraging,
more academic and perhaps more fashionable, for genius in France always
seems slightly ridiculous.
Verlaine is a nature and as such undefinable. Like his life, the
rhythms he loves are of broken or rolling lines; he ended by disjoining
romantic verse, and having destroyed its form, having bored and
ripped it so as to permit too many things to be introduced, all the
effervescences that issued from his crazy skull, he unwittingly became
one of the instigators of vers libre. Verlainian verse with its shoots,
its incidences, its parentheses, naturally evolved into vers libre; in
becoming "libre," it did no more than reflect a condition.
When the gift of expression forsakes him, and when at the same time the
gift of tears is removed, he either becomes the blustering rough iambic
writer of _Invectives_, or the humble awkward elegist of _Chansons pour
Elle_. Poet by these very gifts, consecrated to talk felicitously only
of love, all loves; and he whose lips press as in a dream upon the
stars of the purifactory robe, he who wrote the _Amies_ composed those
Canticles of the month of Mary. And from the same heart, the same hand,
the same genius,--but who shall chant them, O hypocrites! if not those
very white-veiled Friends.
To confess one's sins of action or dreams is not sinful; no public
confession can bring disrepute to a man, for all men are equal and
equally tempted; no one commits a crime his brother is not capable
of. That is why the pious journals or the Academy vainly took
upon themselves the shame of having abused Verlaine, still under
the flowers; the kick of the sacristan and scoundrel broke on a
pedestal already of granite, while in his marble beard, Verlaine was
everlastingly smiling, with the look of a faun hearkening while the
bells peal.