Oh! la nuance seule fiance Le reve au reve et la flute au cor!

Fuis du plus loin la Pointe a.s.sa.s.sine, L'Esprit cruel et le Rire impur, Qui font pleurer les yeux de l'Azur, Et tout cet ail de ba.s.se cuisine!

Prends l'eloquence et tords-lui sou cou!

Tu feras bien, en train d'energie De rendre un peu la Rime a.s.sagie Si Ton n'y veille, elle ira jusqu'ou?

De la musique encore et toujours!

Que ton vers soit la chose envolee Qu'on sent qui fuit d'une ame allee Vers d'autres cieux a d'autres amours.

Que ton vers soit la bonne aventure epa.r.s.e au vent crispe du matin Qui va fleurant la menthe et le thym . . .

Et tout le reste est litterature.

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 litterature"!

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 a.s.sociations, 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 pa.s.sionate 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 ent.i.tled "Promenade Sentimentale," which is one of the Paysages Tristes in the "Poemes 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 supremes Et le vent bercait les nenuphars blemes; Les grands nenuphars entre les roseaux Tristement luisaient sur les calmes eaux.

Moi, j'errais tout seul, promenant ma plaie Au long de l'etang, parmi la saulaie Ou la brume vague evoquait un grand Fantome laiteux se desesperant Et pleurant avec la voix des sarcelles Qui se rappelaient en battant des ailes Parmi la saulaie ou j'errais tout seul Promenant ma plaie; et l'epais linceul Des tenebres vint noyer les supremes Rayons du couchant dans ses ondes blemes Et des nenuphars parmi les roseaux Des grands nenuphars 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 "ragam.u.f.fin angel," a tatterdemalion scholar, an inspired derelict, a scaramouch G.o.d,--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 G.o.d 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 att.i.tude, 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 pa.s.sions of the human race: its pa.s.sion for beauty and its pa.s.sion for G.o.d.

His a.s.sociation 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 menage, 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 a.n.a.lysis. 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 pa.s.sion, 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 l.u.s.t.

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 pa.s.sion 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, a.s.suaged.

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-l.u.s.t. It is a relief, like the coming suddenly from a hedge of wild white roses after wandering through tropical jungles, to pa.s.s 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 pa.s.sion, 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 a.s.sociated with the way he approaches his G.o.ds, such as they may be; and one need not be in the least surprised to find that Verlaine's att.i.tude to his Creator has a marked resemblance to his att.i.tude 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 G.o.d 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.

G.o.d, Christ, Our Lady, pa.s.s 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 G.o.d.

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 cheres mains qui furent miennes Toutes pet.i.tes, toutes belles, Apres ces meprises mortelles Et toutes ces choses paennes,

Apres les rades et les greves, Et les pays et les provinces, Royales mieux qu'au temps des princes Les cheres mains m'ouvrent les reves.

Ment-elle, ma vision chaste, D'affinite spirituelle, De complicite maternelle, D'affection etroite et vaste?

That collection of pa.s.sionate cries to G.o.d which ends with a sort of rhapsody of pleading prayer, ent.i.tled "Sagesse," begins--and one does not feel that it is in the least inappropriate--with

Beaute des femmes, leur faiblesse, et ces mains pales 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, a.s.sociated 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 theologie et solide morale, guide par la folie unique de la Croix" of that "Moyen Age enorme et delicat" 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-cla.s.sic 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.