Part 2

In normal sexuality the yearning of the senses and the soul unite during the seconds of intoxication and become the symbol of infinity, through the passionate absorption of contrasts and the permeation of spirit with matter, and form with substance, elements which in their turn are the creative symbols of all life. In Verlaine, however, there was always a cleft: now he is pure pilgrim of yearning, now roué; now priest, now gamin. He has wrought the most beautiful religious poems of Catholicism, and at the same time has won the crown of all pornographic works with perverse and indecent poems. As the flux of his blood went, so was he--a _pure reflex of his organic functions_. That is to say he was infinitely primitive as a poet, and infinitely complicated and unaccountable as a human being.

Whenever his impulses were elastic and his senses sharpened or stimulated, the untamed and wild beast of sensuality is unchained in his life, turbulent after satisfaction, incapable of restraint by intellectual deliberation. After the crisis physical exhaustion disengaged the psychic elements of penitence, consideration and tender longing, which later became piety.

Verlaine was a poet of rare candor and shamelessness, both in the best and worst sense. This is the essentially great element in his otherwise feminine, weak and absolutely _negative_ personality. The primæval powers of the body and soul are the eternal elements of all humanity and the starting-point of all philosophies; the conflict between them, betrayed in the accusing and self-revealing manner of his verse, is transferred unchanged into his poetry, filling it with the force of life and the tragedy of the universally human.

In his entire life there seem to have been only two brief periods of cessation in the struggle; during the short honeymoon or period of normal sexuality and during his first religious epoch, when he was sincere, and enthusiasm and yearning, transfused in the symbols of faith and religious veneration, interpenetrated and inflamed each other.

The _Fêtes Galantes_ were published soon after the _Poèmes Saturniens_. Artistically they are far superior, because their form is more individual, their structure more original, and their architecture more compact. Yet they do not appear to me to represent balance, but rather the short trembling, to-and-fro wavering of the scales of his impetuous and sensitive character.

They are coquettish; and coquetry is sensuality with style, tamed accordingly, but not conquered. They are at the same time modest and impudent, attack and careful retreat. They are not pure sensuality, but desire, masked by a demand for modesty.

It is the most characteristically French of his books, drawn as with the maliciously kind brush of Watteau. In these poems, in which Verlaine's muse trips on high-heeled shoes through gardens which shimmer in the gleam of a mocking moon, in these whispering dialogues between Pierrots and Columbines, in these gallant landscapes, an anxious presentiment weeps plaintively in the bushes. This sad mode makes the dallying faces gleam underneath tears. The true voice of the yearning soul is poured out and dies away in the imperishable _Colloque Sentimental_, a dark pearl of indefinite, infinite sorrow. Out of masks and pantomimes, the poet's face stares sadly bewildered into the black mirror of reality.

At that time an evil influence had broken into his life, perhaps the most destructive, "the one unpardonable vice," as he himself confesses. Verlaine began to drink. At first it was bravado, recklessness, persuasion; later it was desire, torture, flight from the qualms of his conscience, "the forgetfulness, sought in execrable potions."

He drank absinthe, a sweetish, greenish liquid, which is false as cat's eyes and treacherous and murderous like a diseased harlot. Baudelaire's hashish is comprehensible. It was the magician who raised fantastic landscapes, it quieted the nerves, it was the poet of the poet. Verlaine's absinthe is only destructive and obliterating, a slow poison which does not kill but unnerves and undermines like the white powders the dreaded secret of which the Borgias held. Absinthe wrought silently and inexorably in Verlaine's life. By degrees it absorbed the tender, soft, yearning, vague qualities of his heart of a child; it made the hard, passionate, depraved man strong, and awakened the sensualist and cynic in him. Even when the high-arched churches and the figures of the Madonnas no longer offered him a place of refuge, "the atrocious green sorceress" was still his only comforter, into whose arms he willingly cast himself.

He himself tells regretfully how at the time of his cousin Eliza's death, soon after the appearance of his first book, he joined sorrow and vice in tragic manner. For two days he had not touched food. But he drank, drank without interruption, restlessly, and returned to the offices a drunkard, drowning the reproof of his superior in a new absinthe. Everything that was hard, bitter, wild, which later broke loose in him so tempestuously, compelling the law to step between him and his wife, his mother and his friends, was called forth by the green poison in the silent, kindly nature which loved soft words and was inclined even to his last years to the power of hot tears. With pitiless force this most dangerous of his vices drew taut the chain, by which the passions and sudden catastrophe of his destiny dragged him on to the road of misery.

For a moment it seemed as if everything were to come to a good end. He fell in love with the explosive vehemence and despairing persistence with which the weak are accustomed to cling to an idea. The step-sister of his friend, de Sivry, had fascinated him. As a matter of fact the engagement came about. In these days, separated from his bride, Verlaine wrote the slender volume of songs, _La Bonne Chanson_. It is his most quiet and balanced book. According to his own repeatedly expressed opinion, he considered it the most beautiful of his works and the one dearest to him. In the best and noblest sense they are "occasional verses." Almost daily one is written and sent to his beloved. It was only in small selection that they were united in print.

Here the idea of modesty subdues passion like a wonderful sordine, and surrender and tenderness intertwine with the ideals of modesty. The cleft in Verlaine's personality closes in the consonance of a soul which has found peace. It represents the first period of peace in his life and career and is humanly his most perfect moment and poetically his purest. Vice and passion have disappeared in a hesitating yet desirous surrender, melancholy has dissolved in melody.

Victor Hugo, the sovereign coiner of great phrases, called the _Bonne Chanson_, "_une fleur dans un obus_." There are poems in this slim volume which seem as if they had been woven out of the gushing flood of moonlight. There are poems which gleam like pale pearls and lonely pools. Word and sense, form and emotion, foreboding and being, life and dreams, are their woof. Here appeared that marvel of French lyric poetry, the wonderful poem.

"La lune blanche Luit dans les bois; De chaque branche Part une voix Sous la ramée....

"Oh bien-aimée!

"L'étang reflète, Profond miroir, La silhouette Du saule noir Où le vent pleure ...

"Rêvons: c'est l'heure.

"Un vaste et tendre Apaisement Semble descendre Du firmament Que l'astre irise ...

"C'est l'heure exquise."

From this point on the life-story in which the germ and seed of such wonderful fruit ripened is painful. The descent was not sudden. Verlaine was one of those wavering characters who require energetic impulsion for good as well as for evil. He never slid as on an inclined plane, but he sank like a scale weighed down by something unsuspected. Thus it is possible to name the catastrophes and to set the milestones of his misfortunes.

The great wrench which in 1870 shook his country, also affected his life and tore it apart. His wedding occurred during the days of the war. The fever of political over-excitement seized him and he, the almost bourgeois government clerk who never troubled about politics, became a communist as a favor to several friends. The anecdote that he once wished to assassinate Emperor Napoleon III was a hoax which he told his comrades for the sake of the sensation, something like the story which Baudelaire told of the "savoriness" of embryonal brains.

His work consisted in reading the articles on the Commune which appeared in the newspapers and marking them whether they were favorable or unfavorable. Nevertheless this insignificant part, which he himself did not take seriously and spoke of as "This stupid enough rôle which I played during two months of illusions," cost him his position. This was the break with well-ordered life and the sign-post which showed him the way into the Bohème.

The old wounds re-opened. Verlaine began to drink again during his activities in the Commune. Recriminations and scenes rose as the result of this relapse. Suddenly came the decisive act of the drunkard; he struck his wife the first blow. New misunderstandings followed, but the household still held together, soon to be increased by the arrival of a son.

The final element is still lacking. Abstractions are weak against realities, things that have happened may change men but they cannot vanquish them. So far everything has been only inchoate power and a foreshadowing threat, but not enchantment. It is only the magic of a passion, an elemental and unfathomable magnetic power which links one human being to another, the intangible, which can conquer a poet. He can overcome want and life because he despises them; he can make evil powerless because he repents; chance he can bridge; but he cannot hold back destiny, nor win battles with the incomprehensible.

A new influence enters Verlaine's life--Arthur Rimbaud.

THE RIMBAUD EPISODE

No matter how much a writer may have striven for the unusual or have tried to order confusing ways with intelligence and form, his fiction does not reach the depths nor is it as tragic as this one which life devised. The beginning is simple, the climax grandiose, of such wildness and rising to such heights, that the end no longer could be pure tragedy. It turned into tragi-comedy, that grotesque sensation which we feel when destiny grows beyond human beings and over-towers them, while they are still struggling with pigmy hands to master a monstrous force which has long gone beyond their control.

The beginning was conventional. One day Verlaine received a letter from an acquaintance in the provinces, in which poems by a fifteen-year-old boy were enclosed. Verlaine's opinion was asked. The poems were: _Les Effarés_, _Les Assis_, _Les Poètes de sept ans_, _Les Premières communions_. Every one knows they were Arthur Rimbaud's, for the poems of this boy are among the most precious of French literature. He began where the best stop and then, at twenty, threw literature aside as something irksome and unimportant. Verlaine read them and was filled with enthusiasm. He wrote to the boy in a tone of glowing admiration. In the meantime the poems made the rounds in Paris. Words of characteristically French emphasis are quickly coined. Victor Hugo with his regal gesture declared the author to be "_Shakespeare enfant_."

The provincial associations of Charleville filled Rimbaud with disgust and unrest. Verlaine in his enthusiasm wrote to him "Come, dear great soul, we are waiting for you, we want you." He himself was without a position and his own life in Paris at that time was threatened with chaos and uncertainty, but with the marvellous folly of yielding and emotional natures he invited a stranger as guest into his shaken destiny.

Rimbaud came. He was a big, robust fellow filled with a demonic physical force like that which Balzac has breathed into his Vautrin types. He was a provincial with massive red fists and the curious face of a child that has been corrupted early in life--a gamin, but a genius. Everything in him is force, over-abundant, wild, exceptional virility, without aim and turned toward the infinite.

He is one of the conquistador type, who first lost his way in literature. He pours everything into it, fire, fulness, force, more, much more than great creators spend. Like a crater he throws out his mad fever dreams and visions of life such as perhaps only Dante has had before him. He hurls everything up into the infinite as if he would shatter it to bits. Destruction teems in this creation, a force ardent for power, a hand that would seize everything and crush it.

His poems are only sudden gestures of wrath. They resemble bloody tatters of raw flesh that have been torn with wild teeth from the body of reality. It is poetry "outside and above" all literature. Has there ever been a poet of modern times who thus threw poems on paper and then let the scraps flutter to the four winds? Without pose, unlike Stefan George or Mallarmé, who calculate carefully, he despised the public and literature. He never had a single line printed by his own efforts, he was utterly regardless of the fleeting examples of his gigantic power. At twenty he left his fame and companions behind to wander through the world. In Africa he founded fantastic realms, he sat in prison and there played a part in world history preparing under King Menelik for the struggle which cost Italy her provinces. But in three years he wrote many poems full of power and fire, including the eternal poem _Le bateau ivre_, a staggering fever dream, into which all the colors, sounds, forms and forces of life seem to have been poured, bubbling in curious forms and seething in the glow of a feverish moment. His life was like a dream, as wild, as mighty and as little subject to time.

Verlaine gladly sheltered the awkward boy. Madame Verlaine was less enthusiastic and never concealed her dislike. Perhaps, with a woman's instinct, she unconsciously foresaw the danger which threatened Verlaine in this new companion.

The bond of friendship grew closer and closer. Verlaine's _gaminerie_ which was ever in contrast with his sensitivity, awakened suddenly. His tendency toward strong, cynical and lascivious conversation met a genial match in Rimbaud. The primitive element in Verlaine was suddenly enchained by the primæval, purely human and brutal masculinity of Rimbaud's personality. The feminine in his nature was feeling for completion. As if predestined for each other for years, their personalities dovetail. Without any affection, by necessity rather than by friendship, their union becomes closer and closer. One day in 1872 Verlaine leaves wife, child and the world in which he lived to wander with Rimbaud into the unknown.

Without doubt there was an element of the abnormal in the relations between Verlaine and Rimbaud, but to understand their friendship it is neither necessary nor essential to know whether the dangerous potentialities that inhere in so strong a personal enthusiasm ever became material facts.

Their path led over the highways and also through prisons. "An evil rage for travelling" had seized the two. Through Belgium, through Germany and England they wandered; usually they were without means. They stayed in London for a while, supporting themselves by teaching languages and delving deeper than ever into social politics. Rimbaud left and returned just in time to convey the sick Verlaine home. The terrible life which he had led had broken him down. He himself has concealed the tragic incidents of those days in a novelette, "_Louise Leclercq_."

There he wrote: "The few half-crowns which he earned daily in giving lessons, they spent in the evening on Portuguese wine and Irish beer. The stomach was forgotten, the head became affected and the lessons were not given, and thus hunger and nervosity overcame the reason of this brave fellow."

The patient is taken to Bouillon, a small town in the Ardennes, where Charles van Lerberghe, the great Belgium poet, lived, but he has hardly half recovered when he plunges out into the world again with Rimbaud. Mental unrest is transformed into physical unrest. The lack of stability which operated most impulsively in that crisis, appears in his external life. There is nothing definite for which he is seeking yet he is unsatisfied. Verlaine, man of moods _par excellence_, adjusts himself to life in his own manner. He becomes boorish, subject to fits of passion, violent and unaccountable. His tenderness seems to have been strangled by hunger, drunkenness and wild destiny. The friendship for Rimbaud also assumes evil shapes. More and more frequently they quarrel; almost every hour Rimbaud's foaming temperament and Verlaine's temporary hard, wild manner come in conflict. Of course, as a rule, they were drunk. Rimbaud, who was strong, drank because of his feeling of strength and because he yearned for the intoxication in which colors glowed, in which impulses became wilder, and association more rapid, acute and bolder. Verlaine fled to absinthe to drown out repentance, anguish and weakness; and from this sweetish drink, in which all the evil forces of life seem to be distilled, he drew brutality and feverish disorders.

Once Verlaine ran away, but became repentant and asked Rimbaud to join him. Rimbaud followed him to Belgium. All difficulties were about to be solved. Madame Verlaine was ready to forgive and was on her way to meet the penitent. Then Rimbaud too declared that he would leave him. No one knows how it happened, whether it was jealousy, anger, hatred, love or only drunkenness, at any rate the disaster followed on the public street of Brussels. Verlaine pursued Rimbaud and shot at him twice with a revolver, wounding him once. The police came, and though Rimbaud defended and excused Verlaine, the latter was arrested. The sentence was two years in prison, and these Verlaine spent at Mons. The immediate result was a divorce, upon which Madame Verlaine insisted with every possible emphasis and in spite of Victor Hugo's intervention.

This conclusion, however, was too banal and trite for so heroic a tragedy. The friendship persisted. Verlaine and Rimbaud corresponded. Verlaine sent occasional poems from prison and told Rimbaud of his conversion. The latter hardly pleased Rimbaud, who was at that time cold and indifferent toward everything except that he was filled with a thirst for something unique and infinite and looking forward to new adventures. Verlaine had hardly been released before he tried to convert Rimbaud to this religious life in order to link their lives anew. "Let us love each other in Jesus Christ," he wrote in his proselyting ardor and with the enthusiasm which in the beginning he always felt for everything. Rimbaud smiled mockingly and finally declared that "Loyola" should visit him in Stuttgart.

Now the moment arrived when comedy outdid the tragedy of the reunion. Verlaine arrived at Stuttgart and attempted the conversion--unfortunately in an inn, a place little adapted for proselytes and prophets, for both the saint and the mocker still had in common their passion for drink. No one witnessed the scene; only the result is known. On the way home both were drunk, and a quarrel ensued and a unique incident in the history of literature followed.

In the flooding moonlight by the banks of the Neckar the two greatest living poets in France fell upon each other in wild rage with sticks and fists. The struggle did not last long. Rimbaud, athletic, like a wild animal, a man of passion, easily subdued the nervous, weakly Verlaine, stumbling in drunkenness. A blow over the head knocked him down. Bleeding and unconscious, he remained lying on the bank.

It was the last time they saw each other. Verlaine disappeared on the next day. The episode had come to an end, but nevertheless several letters passed back and forth. Then Rimbaud's grandiose Odyssey through the entire world began. For many years his friends in Paris believed him dead, and even to-day relatively little is known of his life afterward.[2]

[2] A Biography and a volume of Rimbaud's correspondence have recently been published by his brother-in-law, Paterne Berrichon. They throw much light upon his remarkable career.

In Vienna he was under arrest as a vagrant, in the Balkans he was a merchant. Then fulfilling his early prophecy in the _Bateau ivre_ he said farewell to Europe and in Africa became discoverer, general, conqueror. In these unexpected fields he spent to the last limits his titanic energy, which in youthful crises had been expended on the fragile and for him too weakly material of language and rhyme. Until the day of his death, he, _the only true despiser of literature of these days_, never wrote another line, and endeavored only to give form to his wild and fantastic dreams in the material of life, dying in fever as feverishly he lived.

For Verlaine it was an episode--the most important, it is true, in a life which was torn to many tatters. After his conversion, which will be discussed more fully later, he returned to Paris and literature, and died in harness, physically in 1896, as artist much earlier.

THE PENITENT

It is well known that at the moment when he left the prison at Mons, Paul Verlaine, the prisoner, entered the ranks of the great Catholic poets. A complete transformation took place in his life. He turned from the material to the spiritual. The penitent mood of his childhood days glimmered again when he thought of the Nazarene. The soft early yearnings which were forgotten in his years of wandering became symbolized into a definite idea. Nor is this surprising in one who never could understand his intellectual processes, but who was moved entirely by the ebb and flow of emotion, and who always wavered unsteadily in all the crises of life.

In general it is almost a necessity among poets that poetic feeling should be transmuted into religious feeling. But the creative poets of active mentality and intellectuality build their own religion, while the sensitive or passive poets pour out their flood of feeling for God in the form of existing rites and symbols. Balzac clearly shows this relationship when he says in _The Thirteen_:

"Are not religion, love and poetry, the threefold expression of the same fact, the need for expression which fills every noble soul? These three creative impulses rise up toward God, who concentrates in himself all earthly emotions."

Religion is only a certain form of association in which things are placed in relationship with each other. Similarly the sensation of evening, of the cool pure air after rain, of the whispering of the winds and the play of clouds, or whatever else is caught up in the nervous fever of poetic sensibility, hearkens back to the infinite after it has been permeated by the poet's own sorrow or joy. He feels that the infinite has a soul which understands and atones for all sorrows, and thus he conceives it as divinity. The poet's religion is derived from the one great faith with which he must be filled, which is the necessity for being understood. It is only one step further when he finds that his soul's outflow must lead somewhere, and then he gives a name, a form and an interpretation to what has been incomprehensible.

But a more definite element in Paul Verlaine drove him into the arms of Catholicism. It was his _impulse to confession_, which I have tried to show was the most intensive element in his personality. A soul which lacks ethical authority for self-control, in its helplessness must turn with accusation and pleading toward others, toward something outside of the self.