1
_"Bien affectueusement_ ... yours, P. Verlaine." So, in its gay and
friendly mingling of French and English, ended the last letter I had
from Verlaine. A few days afterwards came the telegram from Paris
telling me of his death, in the Rue Descartes, on that 8th January,
1896.
"Condemned to death," as he was, in Victor Hugo's phrase of men in
general, "with a sort of indefinite reprieve," and gravely ill as I
had for some time known him to be, it was still with a shock, not only
of sorrow, but of surprise, that I heard the news of his death. He had
suffered and survived so much, and I found it so hard to associate the
idea of death with one who had always been so passionately in love with
life, more passionately in love with life than any man I ever knew.
Rest was one of the delicate privileges of life which he never loved:
he did but endure it with grumbling gaiety when a hospital-bed claimed
him. And whenever he spoke to me of the long rest which has now sealed
his eyelids, it was with a shuddering revolt from the thought of ever
going away into the cold, out of the sunshine which had been so warm
to him. With all his pains, misfortunes, and the calamities which
followed him step by step all his life, I think few men ever got so
much out of their lives, or lived so fully, so intensely, with such a
genius for living. That, indeed, is why he was a great poet. Verlaine
was a man who gave its full value to every moment, who got out of
every moment all that that moment had to give him. It was not always,
not often, perhaps, pleasure. But it was energy, the vital force of a
nature which was always receiving and giving out, never at rest, never
passive, or indifferent, or hesitating. It is impossible for me to
convey to those who did not know him any notion of how sincere he was.
The word "sincerity" seems hardly to have emphasis enough to say, in
regard to this one man, what it says, adequately enough, of others.
He sinned, and it was with all his humanity; he repented, and it was
with all his soul. And to every occurrence of the day, to every mood
of the mind, to every impulse of the creative instinct, he brought the
same unparalleled sharpness of sensation. When, in 1894, he was my
guest in London, I was amazed by the exactitude of his memory of the
mere turnings of the streets, the shapes and colours of the buildings,
which he had not seen for twenty years. He saw, he felt, he remembered,
everything, with an unconscious mental selection of the fine shades,
the essential part of things, or precisely those aspects which most
other people would pass by.
Few poets of our time have been more often drawn, few have been easier
to draw, few have better repaid drawing, than Paul Verlaine. A face
without a beautiful line, a face all character, full of somnolence
and sudden fire, in which every irregularity was a kind of aid to
the hand, could not but tempt the artist desiring at once to render
a significant likeness and to have his own part in the creation of a
picture. Verlaine, like all men of genius, had something of the air
of the somnambulist: that profound slumber of the face, as it was in
him, with its startling awakenings. It was a face devoured by dreams,
feverish and somnolent; it had earthly passion, intellectual pride,
spiritual humility; the air of one who remembers, not without an
effort, who is listening, half distractedly to something which other
people do not hear; coming back so suddenly, and from so far, with the
relief of one who steps out of that obscure shadow into the noisier
forgetfulness of life. The eyes, often half closed, were like the eyes
of a cat between sleeping and waking; eyes in which contemplation was
"itself an act." A remarkable lithograph by Mr. Rothenstein (the face
lit by oblique eyes, the folded hands thrust into the cheek) gives with
singular truth the sensation of that restless watch on things which
this prisoner of so many chains kept without slackening. To Verlaine
every corner of the world was alive with tempting and consoling and
terrifying beauty. I have never known any one to whom the sight of the
eyes was so intense and imaginative a thing. To him, physical sight and
spiritual vision, by some strange alchemical operation of the brain,
were one. And in the disquietude of his face, which seemed to take
such close heed of things, precisely because it was sufficiently apart
from them to be always a spectator, there was a realisable process of
vision continually going on, in which all the loose ends of the visible
world were being caught up into a new mental fabric.
And along with this fierce subjectivity, into which the egoism of
the artist entered so unconsciously, and in which it counted for so
much, there was more than the usual amount of childishness, always
in some measure present in men of genius. There was a real, almost
blithe, childishness in the way in which he would put on his "Satanic"
expression, of which it was part of the joke that every one should not
be quite in the secret. It was a whim of this kind which made him put
at the beginning of _Romances sans Paroles_ that very criminal image
of a head which had so little resemblance with even the shape, indeed
curious enough, of his actual head. "Born under the sign of Saturn,"
as he no doubt was, with that "old prisoner's head" of which he tells
us, it was by his amazing faculty for a simple kind of happiness that
he always impressed me. I have never seen so cheerful an invalid as
he used to be at that hospital, the Hôpital Saint-Louis, where at one
time I used to go and see him every week. His whole face seemed to
chuckle as he would tell me, in his emphatic, confiding way, everything
that entered into his head; the droll stories cut short by a groan, a
lamentation, a sudden fury of reminiscence, at which his face would
cloud or convulse, the wild eyebrows slanting up and down; and then,
suddenly, the good laugh would be back, clearing the air. No one was
ever so responsive to his own moods as Verlaine, and with him every
mood had the vehemence of a passion. Is not his whole art a delicate
waiting upon moods, with that perfect confidence in them as they are,
which it is a large part of ordinary education to discourage in us,
and a large part of experience to repress? But to Verlaine, happily,
experience taught nothing; or rather, it taught him only to cling the
more closely to those moods in whose succession lies the more intimate
part of our spiritual life. It is no doubt well for society that man
should learn by experience; for the artist the benefit is doubtful.
The artist, it cannot be too clearly understood, has no more part in
society than a monk in domestic life: he cannot be judged by its rules,
he can be neither praised not blamed for his acceptance or rejection
of its conventions. Social rules are made by normal people for normal
people, and the man of genius is fundamentally abnormal. It is the poet
against society, society against the poet, a direct antagonism; the
shock of which, however, it is often possible to avoid by a compromise.
So much licence is allowed on the one side, so much liberty foregone
on the other. The consequences are not always of the best, art being
generally the loser. But there are certain natures to which compromise
is impossible; and the nature of Verlaine was one of these natures.
"The soul of an immortal child," says one who has understood him better
than others, Charles Morice, "that is the soul of Verlaine, with
all the privileges and all the perils of so being; with the sudden
despair so easily distracted, the vivid gaieties without a cause,
the excessive suspicions and the excessive confidences, the whims so
easily outwearied, the deaf and blind infatuations, with, especially,
the unceasing renewal of impressions in the incorruptible integrity
of personal vision and sensation. Years, influences, teachings, may
pass over a temperament such as this, may irritate it, may fatigue
it; transform it, never--never so much as to alter that particular
unity which consists in a dualism, in the division of forces between
the longing after what is evil and the adoration of what is good; or
rather, in the antagonism of spirit and flesh. Other men 'arrange'
their lives, take sides, follow one direction; Verlaine hesitates
before a choice, which seems to him monstrous, for, with the integral
_naïveté_ of irrefutable human truth, he cannot resign himself, however
strong may be the doctrine, however enticing may be the passion, to the
necessity of sacrificing one to the other, and from one to the other he
oscillates without a moment's repose."
It is in such a sense as this that Verlaine may be said to have
learnt nothing from experience, in the sense that he learnt everything
direct from life, and without comparing day with day. That the
exquisite artist of the _Fêtes Galantes_ should become the great
poet of _Sagesse,_ it was needful that things should have happened
as disastrously as they did: the marriage with the girl-wife, that
brief idyl, the passion for drink, those other forbidden passions,
vagabondage, an attempted crime, the eighteen months of prison,
conversion; followed, as it had to be, by relapse, bodily sickness,
poverty, beggary almost, a lower and lower descent into mean
distresses. It was needful that all this should happen, in order that
the spiritual vision should eclipse the material vision; but it was
needful that all this should happen in vain, so far as the conduct of
life was concerned. Reflection, in Verlaine, is pure waste; it is the
speech of the soul and the speech of the eyes, that we must listen to
in his verse, never the speech of the reason. And I call him fortunate
because, going through life with a great unconsciousness of what most
men spend their lives in considering, he was able to abandon himself
entirely to himself, to his unimpeded vision, to his unchecked emotion,
to the passionate sincerity which in him was genius.
2
French poetry, before Verlaine, was an admirable vehicle for a really
fine, a really poetical, kind of rhetoric. With Victor Hugo, for the
first time since Ronsard (the two or three masterpieces of Ronsard
and his companions) it had learnt to sing; with Baudelaire it had
invented a new vocabulary for the expression of subtle, often perverse,
essentially modern emotion and sensation. But with Victor Hugo,
with Baudelaire, we are still under the dominion of rhetoric. "Take
eloquence, and wring its neck!" said Verlaine in his _Art Poétique;_
and he showed, by writing it, that French verse could be written
without rhetoric. It was partly from his study of English models that
he learnt the secret of liberty in verse, but it was much more a secret
found by the way, in the mere endeavour to be absolutely sincere, to
express exactly what he saw, to give voice to his own temperament, in
which intensity of feeling seemed to find its own expression, as if by
accident. _L'art, mes enfants, c'est d'être absolument soi-même,_ he
tells us in one of his later poems; and, with such a personality as
Verlaine's to express, what more has art to do, if it would truly, and
in any interesting manner, hold the mirror up to nature?
For, consider the natural qualities which this man had for the task of
creating a new poetry. "Sincerity, and the impression of the moment
followed to the letter": that is how he defined his theory of style, in
an article written about himself.
Car nous voulons la nuance encor,
Pas la couleur, rien que la nuance!
as he cries, in his famous _Art Poétique._ Take, then, his
susceptibility of the senses, an emotional susceptibility not less
delicate; a life sufficiently troubled to draw out every emotion of
which he was capable, and, with it, that absorption in the moment,
that inability to look before or after; the need to love and the need
to confess, each a passion; an art of painting the fine shades of
landscape, of evoking atmosphere, which can be compared only with the
art of Whistler; a simplicity of language which is the direct outcome
of a simplicity of temperament, with just enough consciousness of
itself for a final elegance; and, at the very depth of his being, an
almost fierce humility, by which the passion of love, after searching
furiously through all his creatures, finds God by the way, and kneels
in the dust before him. Verlaine was never a theorist: he left theories
to Mallarmé. He had only his divination; and he divined that poetry,
always desiring that miracles should happen, had never waited patiently
enough upon the miracle. It was by that proud and humble mysticism of
his temperament that he came to realise how much could be done by, In a
sense, trying to do nothing.
And then: _De la musique avant toute chose; De la musique encore et
toujours!_ There are poems of Verlaine which go as far as verse can
go to become pure music, the voice of a bird with a human soul. It
is part of his simplicity, his divine childishness, that he abandons
himself, at times, to the song which words begin to sing in the air,
with the same wise confidence with which he abandons himself to the
other miracles about him. He knows that words are living things, which
we have not created, and which go their way without demanding of us
the right to live. He knows that words are suspicious, not without
their malice, and that they resist mere force with the impalpable
resistance of fire or water. They are to be caught only with guile or
with trust. Verlaine has both, and words become Ariel to him. They
bring him not only that submission of the slave which they bring to
others, but all the soul, and in a happy bondage. They transform
themselves for him into music, colour, and shadow; a disembodied music,
diaphanous colours, luminous shadow. They serve him with so absolute a
self-negation that he can write _romances sans paroles,_ songs almost
without words, in which scarcely a sense of the interference of human
speech remains. The ideal of lyric poetry, certainly, is to be this
passive, flawless medium for the deeper consciousness of things, the
mysterious voice of that mystery which lies about us, out of which we
have come, and into which we shall return. It is not without reason
that we cannot analyse a perfect lyric.
With Verlaine the sense of hearing and the sense of sight are almost
interchangeable: he paints with sound, and his line and atmosphere
become music. It was with the most precise accuracy that Whistler
applied the terms of music to his painting, for painting, when it aims
at being the vision of reality, _pas la couleur, rien que la nuance,_
passes almost into the condition of music. Verlaine's landscape
painting is always an evocation, in which outline is lost in atmosphere.
C'est des beaux yeux derrière des voiles,
C'est le grand jour tremblant de midi,
C'est, par un ciel d'automne attiédi,
Le bleu fouillis des claires étoiles!
He was a man, certainly, "for whom the visible world existed," but for
whom it existed always as a vision. He absorbed it through all his
senses, as the true mystic absorbs the divine beauty. And so he created
in verse a new voice for nature, full of the humble ecstasy with which
he saw, listened, accepted.
Cette âme qui se lamente
En cette plaine dormante
C'est la nôtre, n'est-ce pas?
La mienne, dis, et la tienne,
Dont s'exhale l'humble antienne
Par ce tiède soir, tout has?
And with the same attentive simplicity with which he found words
for the sensations of hearing and the sensations of sight, he found
words for the sensations of the soul, for the fine shades of feeling.
From the moment when his inner life may be said to have begun, he
was occupied with the task of an unceasing confession, in which one
seems to overhear him talking to himself, in that vague, preoccupied
way which he often had. Here again are words which startle one by
their delicate resemblance to thoughts, by their winged flight from
so far, by their alighting so close. The verse murmurs, with such
an ingenuous confidence, such intimate secrets. That "setting free"
of verse, which is one of the achievements of Verlaine, was itself
mainly an attempt to be more and more sincere, a way of turning poetic
artifice to new account, by getting back to nature itself, hidden away
under the eloquent rhetoric of Hugo, Baudelaire, and the Parnassians.
In the devotion of rhetoric to either beauty or truth, there is a
certain consciousness of an audience, of an external judgment: rhetoric
would convince, be admired. It is the very essence of poetry to be
unconscious of anything between its own moment of flight and the
supreme beauty which it will never attain. Verlaine taught French
poetry that wise and subtle unconsciousness. It was in so doing that
he "fused his personality," in the words of Verhaeren, "so profoundly
with beauty, that he left upon it the imprint of a new and henceforth
eternal attitude."
3
_J'ai la fureur d'aimer,_ says Verlaine, in a passage of very personal
significance.
J'ai la fureur d'aimer. Mon cœur si faible est fou.
N'importe quand, n'importe quel et n'importe où,
Qu'un éclair de beauté, de vertu, de vaillance,
Luise, il s'y précipite, il y vole, il y lance,
Et, le temps d'une étreinte, il embrasse cent fois
L'être ou l'objet qu'il a poursuivi de son choix;
Puis, quand l'illusion a replié son aile,
Il revient triste et seul bien souvent, mais fidèle,
Et laissant aux ingrats quelque chose de lui,
Sang ou chair....
J'ai la fureur d'aimer. Qu'y faire? Ah, laissez faire!
And certainly this admirable, and supremely dangerous, quality was
at the root of Verlaine's nature. Instinctive, unreasoning as he
was, entirely at the mercy of the emotion or impression which, for
the moment, had seized upon him, it was inevitable that he should
be completely at the mercy of the most imperious of instincts, of
passions, and of intoxications. And he had the simple and ardent
nature, in this again consistently childlike, to which love, some kind
of affection, given or returned, is not the luxury, the exception,
which it is to many natures, but a daily necessity. To such a
temperament there may or may not be the one great passion; there
will certainly be many passions. And in Verlaine I find that single,
childlike necessity of loving and being loved, all through his life
and on every page of his works; I find it, unchanged in essence, but
constantly changing form, in his chaste and unchaste devotions to
women, in his passionate friendships with men, in his supreme mystical
adoration of God.
To turn from _La Bonne Chanson,_ written for a wedding present to a
young wife, to _Chansons pour Elle,_ written more than twenty years
later, in dubious honour of a middle-aged mistress, is to travel a long
road, the hard, long road which Verlaine had travelled during those
years. His life was ruinous, a disaster, more sordid perhaps than the
life of any other poet; and he could write of it, from a hospital-bed,
with this quite sufficient sense of its deprivations. "But all the
same, it is hard," he laments, in _Mes Hôpitaux,_ "after a life of
work, set off, I admit, with accidents in which I have had a large
share, catastrophes perhaps vaguely premeditated--it is hard, I say, at
forty-seven years of age, in full possession of all the reputation (of
the _success,_ to use the frightful current phrase) to which my highest
ambitions could aspire--hard, hard, hard indeed, worse than hard, to
find myself--good God!--to find myself _on the streets,_ and to have
nowhere to lay my head and support an ageing body save the pillows and
the _menus_ of a public charity, even now uncertain, and which might at
any moment be withdrawn--God forbid!--without, apparently, the fault of
any one, oh! not even, and above all, not mine." Yet, after all, these
sordid miseries, this poor man's vagabondage, all the misfortunes of
one certainly "irreclaimable," on which so much stress has been laid,
alike by friends and by foes, are externalities; they are not the man;
the man, the eternal lover, passionate and humble, remains unchanged,
while only his shadow wanders, from morning to night of the long day.
The poems to Rimbaud, to Lucien Létinois, to others, the whole volume
of _Dédicaces,_ cover perhaps as wide a range of sentiment as _La Bonne
Chanson_ and _Chansons pour Elle._ The poetry of friendship has never
been sung with such plaintive sincerity, such simple human feeling, as
in some of these poems, which can only be compared, in modern poetry,
with a poem for which Verlaine had a great admiration, Tennyson's _In
Memoriam._ Only with Verlaine, the thing itself, the affection or the
regret, is everything; there is no room for meditation over destiny,
or search for a problematical consolation. Other poems speak a more
difficult language, in which, doubtless, _l'ennui de vivre avec les
gens et dans les choses_ counts for much, and _la fureur d'aimer_ for
more.
In spite of the general impression to the contrary, an impression
which by no means displeased him himself, I must contend that the
sensuality of Verlaine, brutal as it could sometimes be, was after
all simple rather than complicated, instinctive rather than perverse,
in the poetry of Baudelaire, with which the poetry of Verlaine is so
often compared, there is a deliberate science of sensual perversity
which has something almost monachal in its accentuation of vice with
horror, in its passionate devotion to passions. Baudelaire brings every
complication of taste, the exasperation of; perfumes, the irritant of
cruelty, the very odours and colours of corruption, to the creation and
adornment of a sort of religion, in which an eternal mass is served
before a veiled altar. There is no confession, no absolution, not a
prayer is permitted which is not set down in the ritual. With Verlaine,
however often love may pass into sensuality, to whatever length
sensuality may be hurried, sensuality is never more than the malady
of love. It is love desiring the absolute, seeking in vain, seeking
always, and, finally, out of the depths, finding God.
Verlaine's conversion took place while he was in prison, during those
solitary eighteen months in company with his thoughts, that enforced
physical inactivity, which could but concentrate his whole energy on
the only kind of sensation then within his capacity, the sensations of
the soul and of the conscience. With that promptitude of abandonment
which was his genius, he grasped feverishly at the succour of God and
the Church, he abased himself before the immaculate purity of the
Virgin. He had not, like others who have risen from the same depths to
the same height of humiliation, to despoil his nature of its pride, to
conquer his intellect, before he could become _l'enfant vêtu de laine
et d'innocence._ All that was simple, humble, childlike in him accepted
that humiliation with the loving child's joy in penitence; all that was
ardent, impulsive, indomitable in him burst at once into a flame of
adoration.
He realised the great secret of the Christian mystics: that it is
possible to love God with an extravagance of the whole being, to which
the love of the creature cannot attain. All love is an attempt to break
through the loneliness of individuality, to fuse oneself with something
not oneself, to give and to receive, in all the warmth of natural
desire, that inmost element which remains, so cold and so invincible,
in the midst of the soul. It is a desire of the infinite in humanity,
and, as humanity has its limits, it can but return sadly upon itself
when that limit is reached. Thus human love is not only an ecstasy but
a despair, and the more profound a despair the more ardently it is
returned.
But the love of God, considered only from its human aspect, contains at
least the illusion of infinity. To love God is to love the absolute,
so far as the mind of man can conceive the absolute, and thus, in a
sense, to love God is to possess the absolute, for love has already
possessed that which it apprehends. What the earthly lover realises to
himself as the image of his beloved is, after all, his own vision of
love, not her. God must remain _deus absconditus,_ even to love; but
the lover, incapable of possessing infinity, will have possessed all
of infinity of which he is capable. And his ecstasy will be flawless.
The human mind, meditating on infinity, can but discover perfection
beyond perfection; for it is impossible to conceive of limitation in
any aspect of that which has once been conceived as infinite. In place
of that deception which comes from the shock of a boundary-line beyond
which humanity cannot conceive of humanity, there is only a divine rage
against the limits of human perception, which by their own failure
seem at last to limit for us the infinite itself. For once, love finds
itself bounded only by its own capacity; so far does the love of God
exceed the love of the creature, and so far would it exceed that love
if God did not exist.
But if He does exist! if, outside humanity, a conscient, eternal
perfection, who has made the world in his image, loves the humanity He
has made, and demands love in return! If the spirit of his love is as
a breath over the world, suggesting, strengthening, the love which it
desires, seeking man that man may seek God, itself the impulse which it
humbles itself to accept at man's hands; if indeed,
Mon Dieu m'a dit: mon fils, il faut m'aimer;
how much more is this love of God, in its inconceivable acceptance
and exchange, the most divine, the only unending intoxication, in
the world! Well, it is this realised sense of communion, point by
point realised, and put into words, more simple, more human, more
instinctive than any poet since the mediæval mystics has found for the
delights of this intercourse, that we find in _Sagesse,_ and in the
other religious poems of Verlaine.
But, with Verlaine, the love of God is not merely a rapture, it is
a thanksgiving for forgiveness. Lying in wait behind all the fair
appearances of the world, he remembers the old enemy, the flesh; and
the sense of sin (that strange paradox of the reason) is childishly
strong in him. He laments his offence, he sees not only the love but
the justice of God, and it seems to him, as in a picture, that the
little hands of the Virgin are clasped in petition for him. Verlaine's
religion is the religion of the Middle Ages. _Je suis catholique,_ he
said to me, _mais ... catholique du moyen-âge!_ He might have written
the ballad which Villon made for his mother, and with the same visual
sense of heaven and hell. Like a child, he tells his sins over,
promises that he has put them behind him, and finds such _naïve,_ human
words to express his gratitude. The Virgin is really, to him, mother
and friend; he delights in the simple, peasant humanity, still visible
in her who is also the Mystical Rose, the Tower of Ivory, the Gate of
Heaven, and who now extends her hands, in the gesture of pardon, from a
throne only just lower than the throne of God.
4
Experience, I have said, taught Verlaine nothing; religion had no more
stable influence upon his conduct then experience. In that apology for
himself which he wrote under the anagram of "Pauvre Lelian," he has
stated the case with his usual sincerity. "I believe," he says, "and I
sin in thought as in action; I believe, and I repent in thought, if no
more. Or again, I believe, and I am a good Christian at this moment; I
believe, and I am a bad Christian the instant after. The remembrance,
the hope, the invocation of a sin delights me, with or without remorse,
sometimes under the very form of sin, and hedged with all its natural
consequences; more often--so strong, so natural and _animal,_ are
flesh and blood--just in the same manner as the remembrances, hopes,
invocations of any carnal freethinker. This delight, I, you, some one
else, writers, it pleases us to put to paper and publish more or less
well expressed: we consign it, in short, into literary form, forgetting
all religious ideas, or not letting one of them escape us. Can any one
in good faith condemn us as poet? A hundred times no." And, indeed, I
would echo, a hundred times no! It is just this apparent complication
of what is really a great simplicity which gives its singular value to
the poetry of Verlaine, permitting it to sum up in itself the whole
paradox of humanity, and especially the weak, passionate, uncertain,
troubled century to which we belong, in which so many doubts,
negations, and distresses seem, now more than ever, to be struggling
towards at least an ideal of spiritual consolation. Verlaine is the
poet of these weaknesses and of that ideal.
[_See also account given in "Bibliography and Notes" page_ 351.]