IN early days, when the triumphs and the torments of his overwhelming
vitality swept at will across his soul, Paul Verlaine was sometimes god
and sometimes satyr. From aspiring altitudes of spiritual emotions he
swung like a pendulum to unspoken depths of vice.
The world spirit doubly charged his strange and terrible personality,
pouring into it the essences and intuitions of the body and the soul.
Into the alembic were dissolved the entities of Baudelaire and Villon,
floating still upon the earth.
Then the whole was set to the vibration of a new rhythm as strange and
as remote from the consciousness of men as the songs of inter-lunar
space, so that his utterances with the naturalness of a bird’s song
or an infant’s lisp should have the accents of melody undreamed of.
And this is not all—strangest and most tragically terrible in its
possibilities of pain—the chrism of conscience burns his sinister
brow. The phantom of the immortal soul drives him into the outer
darkness.
What are the undiscovered laws of spiritual heredity and of a poetic
paternity, such as are suggested in the likeness of Baudelaire and
Verlaine to their prototype Villon? The secret is yet to find. It is
all as strange as the mystery of Bernhardt’s strayed existence in this
modern day. An emanation from some Egyptian tomb, wild spirit of genius
and of vice is she, vampire-like, inhuman, wandering among a people who
have thrilled to her voice and wondered, not knowing whence she came.
Behind them both—Baudelaire with his luminous, despairing eyes, and
Verlaine with his terrible glabrous head—the madcap figure of Villon
shines out of a cloud of time, and we hear the sound of his reckless
laughter and the music of his tears.
But if the relation between these two moderns and this singing renegade
of the Middle Ages is that of mysterious paternity, between Baudelaire
and Verlaine there is a brotherhood which is as wonderful as an
oriental dream of metempsychosis.
Baudelaire’s verses, read in early youth, so saturated and possessed
the new-born soul of Paul Verlaine that he became more a reincarnation
of Baudelaire than a separate existence. The passions and the madness
of Baudelaire became his own—he heard the same strange music—saw the
same visions. Incarnate of the mad poet, Verlaine, his second soul,
fled a second slave in the footsteps of the same strange goddess—beauty
in decay.
And where one had madly followed, so the other fled, enamoured of her
fatal loveliness, wherever her fickle steps should lead. Sometimes she
would escape them, disappearing in mists and mysterious darkness, and
sometimes they would come upon her suddenly in glimpses of green light,
dancing strange frivolous steps, and the color of her robes would be
mingled rose and mystic blue, and the halo of her head the phosphor of
decay.
And she has led them through strange paths into the dwelling-place of
death, and where love and life live together, for these two are never
separated, and, through many places of terror and delight, to that
ultimate spot, occult, remote, where dwells the soul of woman.
There the youngest of her slaves found himself one day outstripping his
brother, and saw with living eyes the mystery,—and thenceforward he
was no more Paul Verlaine; he was the prophet and interpreter of woman.
To him alone has the secret been revealed; to him alone, the mantle
of deceit she wears, the slavish dress of the centuries, is no
concealment. He has seen, has known, and he understands. “The very
worst thing in the world,” says an unknown writer, “is the soul of
a woman.” Forced to inaction, and fed on lies, her principal power,
founded on man’s weakness, curiosity, and the imagination of the
intellect, lead her in many wandering ways. Tasting but few of the
actual joys, the triumphs, and the trials of life, from the harem of
her slavery her fancy has wandered with the winds. In her mind the
unique and fatal experimenter, she has known all crimes, all horrors,
as well as martyrdoms and joys. And this, while her gentle feminine
hands have ministered to suffering, her voice has cheered, her smile
has illumined, and her divine patience has endured.
Consider these lines—their spiritual intuition is the parallel of
Wordsworth in his limpid moods; their knowledge, like a single glow of
summer lightning, illumines all the darkened land as the glimmering
patient light of Bourget’s candle in cycles of encyclopedics will never
do.
Behold the woman!
“_Beauté des femmes, leur faiblesse et ces mains pâles,
Qui font souvent le bien et peuvent tout le mal._”
The appealing weakness of women is the first note, invariably stronger
than command—and then the reference to their hands. This is very
characteristic of Verlaine—they haunt him.
“_Les chères mains qui furent miennes,
Toutes petites, toutes belles._”
. . . . . .
“_Mains en songes—main sur mon âme._”