Part 18

The complete works of Verlaine are now published in six volumes at the Librairie Léon Vanier (now Messein); the text is very incorrectly printed, and it is still necessary to refer to the earlier editions in separate volumes. _A Choix de Poésies,_1891, with a preface by François Coppée, and a reproduction of Carrière's admirable portrait, is published in one volume by Charpentier; the series of _Hommes d'Aujourd'hui_ contains twenty-seven biographical notices by Verlaine; and a considerable number of poems and prose articles exists, scattered in various magazines, some of them English, such as the _Senate;_ in some cases the articles themselves are translated into English, such as "My Visit to London," in the _Savoy_ for April, 1896, and "Notes on England: Myself as a French Master," and "Shakespeare and Racine," in the _Fortnightly Review_ for July, 1894, and September, 1894. The first English translation in verse from Verlaine is Arthur O'Shaughnessy's rendering of "Clair de Lune" in _Fêtes Galantes,_ under the title "Pastel," in _Songs of a Worker,_ 1881. A volume of translations in verse, _Poems of Verlaine,_ by Gertrude Hall, was published in America in 1895. In Mr. John Gray's _Silverpoints,_ 1893, there are translations of "Parsifal," "A Crucifix," "Le Chevalier Malheur," "Spleen," "Clair de Lune," "Mon Dieu m'a dit," and "Green."

As I have mentioned, there have been many portraits of Verlaine. The three portraits drawn on lithographic paper by Mr. Rothenstein, and published in 1898, are but the latest, if also among the best, of a long series, of which Mr. Rothenstein himself has done two or three others, one of which was reproduced in the _Pall Mall Gazette_ in 1894, when Verlaine was in London. M. F. A. Cazals, a young artist who was one of Verlaine's most intimate friends, has done I should not like to say how many portraits, some of which he has gathered together in a little book, _Paul Verlaine: ses Portraits,_ 1898. There are portraits in nine of Verlaine's own books, several of them by M. Cazals (roughly jotted, expressive notes of moments), one by M. Anquetin (a strong piece of thinking flesh and blood), and in the _Choix de Poésies_ there is a reproduction of the cloudy, inspired poet of M. Eugène Carrière's painting. Another portrait, which I have not seen, but which Verlaine himself calls, in the _Dédicaces, un portrait enfin reposé,_ was done by M. Aman-Jean. M. Niederhausern has done a bust in bronze, Mr. Rothenstein a portrait medallion. A new edition of the _Confessions,_ 1899, contains a number of sketches; _Verlaine Dessinateur,_ 1896, many more; and there are yet others in the extremely objectionable book of M. Charles Donos, _Verlaine Intime,_ 1898. The _Hommes d'Aujourd'hui_ contains a caricature-portrait, many other portraits have appeared in French and English and German and Italian magazines, and there is yet another portrait in the admirable little book of Charles Morice, _Paul Verlaine,_ 1888, which contains by far the best study that has ever been made of Verlaine as a poet. I believe Mr. George Moore's article, "A Great Poet," reprinted in _Impressions and Opinions,_ 1891, was the first that was written on Verlaine in England; my own article in the _National Review_ in 1892 was, I believe, the first detailed study of the whole of his work up to that date. At last, in the _Vie de Paul Verlaine,_ of Edmund Lepelletier, there has come the authentic record.

An honest and instructed life of Verlaine has long been wanted, if only as an antidote to the defamatory production called _Verlaine Intime,_ made up out of materials collected by the publisher Léon Vanier in his own defense, in order that a hard taskmaster might be presented to the world in the colours of a benefactor. A "legend" which may well have seemed plausible to those who knew Verlaine only at the end of his life, has obtained currency; and a comparison of Verlaine with Villon, not only as a poet (which is to his honour), but also as a man, has been made, and believed. Lepelletier's book is an exact chronicle of a friendship which lasted, without a break, for thirty-six years--that is, from the time when Verlaine was sixteen to the time of his death; and a more sane, loyal and impartial chronicle of any man's life we have never read. It is written with full knowledge of every part of the career which it traces; and it is written by a man who puts down whatever he knows exactly as he believes it to have been. His conclusion is that "on peut fouiller sa vie au microscope: on y reconnaîtra des fautes, des folies, des faiblesses, bien des souffrances aussi, avec de la fatalité au fond, pas de honte véritable, pas une vile et indigne action. Les vrais amis du poète peuvent donc revendiquer pour lui l'épithete d'honnête homme, sans doute très vulgaire, mais qui, aux yeux de certains, a encore du prix."

In 1886 Verlaine dedicated _Les Mémoires d'un Veuf_ to Lepelletier, affirming the resolve, on his part, to "garder intacte la vielle amitié si forte et si belle." The compact has been kept nobly by the survivor.

It may, indeed, be questioned whether Lepelletier does not insist a little too much on the bourgeois element which he finds in Verlaine. When a man has suffered under unjust accusations, it is natural for his friends to defend him under whatever aspect seems to them most generally convincing. So it is interesting to know that for seven years Verlaine was in a municipal office, the Bureau des Budgets et Comptes, and that later, in 1882, he made an application, which was refused, for leave to return to his former post. Lepelletier reproaches the authorities for an action which he takes to have precipitated Verlaine into the final misery of his vagabondage. He would have lived quietly, he says, and written in security. Both assumptions may be doubted. What was bourgeois, and contented with quiet, was a small part of the nature of one who was too strong as well as too weak to remain within limits. The terrible force of Verlaine's weakness would always, in the process of making him a poet, have carried him far from that "tranquilité d'une sinécure bureaucratique" which Lepelletier strangely regrets for him. It is hardly permitted, in looking back over a disastrous life which has expressed itself in notable poetry, to regret that the end should have been attained, by no matter what means.

On moral questions Lepelletier speaks with the authority of an intimate friendship, and from a point of view which seems wholly without prejudice. He defends Verlaine with evident conviction against the most serious charges brought against him, and he shows at least, on documentary evidence, that nothing of the darker part of his "legend" was ever proved against him in any of his arrests and imprisonments. Drink, and mad rages let loose by drink, account, ignobly enough, for all of them. In the famous quarrel with Rimbaud, which brought him into prison for eighteen months, the accusation reads:

"Pour avoir, à Bruxelles, le 10 juillet, 1873, volontairement portés des coups et fait des blessures ayant entraîné une incapacité de travail personnel à Arthur Rimbaud."

The whole account of this episode is given by M. Lepelletier in great detail, and from this we learn that it was by the merest change of mind on the part of Rimbaud, or by sudden treachery, that the matter came into the courts at all. Lepelletier supplies an unfavourable account of Rimbaud, whom he looks upon as the evil counsellor of Verlaine--probably with justice. There is little doubt that Rimbaud, apart from his genuine touch of precocious power, which had its influence on the genius of Verlaine, was a "mauvais sujet" of a selfish and mischievous kind. He was destructive and pitiless; and having done his worst, he went off carelessly into Africa.

It will surprise some readers to learn that Verlaine took his degree of "bachelier-ès-lettres," and that on leaving the Lycée Bonaparte he received a certificate placing him "au nombre des sujets distingués que compte l'établissement." He was well grounded in Latin, and fairly well in English, and at several intervals in his life attempted to master Spanish, with the vague desire of translating Calderon. At an early period he read French literature, classical and modern, with avidity; translations of English, German and Eastern classics; books of criticism and philosophy.

"Il admirait beaucoup Joseph de Maîstre. _Le Rouge et le Noir_ de Stendhal avait produce sur lui une forte impression. Il avait déniché, on ne sait où, une Vie de sainte Thérèse, qu'il lisait avec ravissement."

He was absorbed in Baudelaire, Gautier, Leconte de Lisle, Banville; he read Pétrus Borel and Aloysius Bertrand. The only poem that remains of this early period is the "Nocturne Parisien" of the _Poèmes Saturniens,_ which dates from about his twentieth year. Jules de Goncourt defined it as "un beau poème sinistre mêlant comme une Morgue à Notre-Dame." Baudelaire, as Sainte-Beuve, in a charming letter of real appreciation, pointed out, is here the evident "point de départ, pour aller au delà."

The chapter in which Lepelletier tells the story of the origin of the most famous literary movement since that of 1830, the "Parnasse," is one of the most entertaining in the book, and gives, in its narrative of the receptions "chez Nina" (a _salon_ which Lepelletier describes as the ancestor of the "Chat Noir"), a vivid picture of the days when Villiers de l'Isle-Adam and François Coppée were beginners together. Nina de Villars was one of the oddest people of her time: she made a kind of private Bohemia for poets, musicians, all kinds of artists and eccentric people, herself the most eccentric of them all. It was at her house that the members of the "Parnasse" gathered, while they selected as their more formal meeting-place the _salon_ of Madame Ricard. It is not generally known that Verlaine's _Poèmes Saturniens_ was the third volume to be issued by the house of Lemerre, afterwards to become a famous "publisher of poets," and it was in this volume that the new laws of the Parnasse were first formulated--that impassivity, that "marble egoism," which Verlaine was so soon to reject for a more living impulse, but which neither Leconte de Lisle nor Héredia was ever to abandon. When one thinks of the later Verlaine, it is curious to turn to that first formula:

Est-elle en marvre où non, le Vénus de Milo?

Verlaine's verse suddenly becomes human with _La Bonne Chanson,_ though the humanity in it is not yet salted as with fire. It is the record of the event which, as Lepelletier says, dominated his whole life; the marriage with Mathilde Maute, the young girl with whom he had fallen in love at first sight, and whose desertion of him, however explicable, he never forgot nor forgave. Nothing could be more just or delicate than Lepelletier's treatment of the whole situation and there is no doubt that he is right in saying that the young wife "eût une grande responsabilité dans les désordres de l'existence désorbitée du poète." Verlaine, as he says, "était bon, aimant, et c'était comme un souffrant qu'il fallait le traiter." "Vous n'avez rien compris à ma simplicité," he wrote long afterwards, addressing the woman of whom Lepelletier says, "Il l'aima toujours, il n'aima qu'elle."

With his marriage Verlaine's disasters begin. Rimbaud enters his life and turns the current of it; the vagabondage begins, in France and England, and the letters written from London are among the most vivid documents in the book: thumbnail sketches full of keen observation. Then comes his imprisonment and conversion to Catholicism. Here Lepelletier, while he gives us an infinity of details which he alone could give, adopts an attitude which we cannot think to be justified, and which, as a matter of fact, Verlaine protested against during his lifetime. "Cette conversion fut-elle profonde et véridique?" he asks; and he answers, "Je ne le crois pas." That his conversion had much influence on Verlaine's conduct cannot be contended, but conduct and belief are two different things. Sincerity of the moment was his fundamental characteristic, but the moments made and remade his moods in their passing. The religion of _Sagesse_ is not the less genuine because that grave and sacred book was followed by the revolt of _Parallèment._ Verlaine tried to explain--in the poems themselves, in prefaces, and in conversation with friends--how natural it was to sin and to repent, and to use the same childlike words in the immediate rendering of sin and of repentance. This _naïveté,_ which made any regular existence an impossibility, was a part of him which gave a quality to his work unlike that of any other poet of our time. At the end of his life hardly anything but the _naïvetê_ was left, and the poems became mere outcries and gestures. Lepelletier is justly indignant at the action of Vanier in publishing after Verlaine's deaths the collection called _Invectives,_ made up of scraps and impromptus which the poet certainly never intended to publish. Here we see part of the weakness of a great man, who becomes petty when he puts off his true character and tries to be angry. "J'ai la fureur d'aimer," he says somewhere, and there is no essential part of his work which is not the expression of some form of love, grotesque or heroic, human or divine.

Of all this later, more and more miserable part of the life of Verlaine, Lepelletier has less to tell us. It has been sufficiently commented on, not always by friendly or understanding witnesses. What we get in this book, for the first time, is a view of the life as a whole, with all that is beautiful, tragic, and desperate in it. It is not an apology: it is a statement. It not only does honor to a great and unhappy man of genius; it does him justice.

JORIS-KARL HUYSMANS

(1848-1907)

Le _Drageoir à épices,_ 1874; _Marthe: Histoire d'une Fille,_ 1876; _Les Sœurs Vatard,_ 1879; _Croquis Parisiens,_ 1880; _En Ménage,_ 1881; _A Vau-l'Eau,_ 1882; _L'Art Moderne,_ 1883; _A Rebours,_ 1884; _Un Dilemme,_ 1887; _En Rade,_ 1887; _Certains,_1889; _La Bièvre,_1890; _Là-Bas,_ 1891; _En Route,_ 1895; La _Cathédrale,_ 1898; _La Bièvre Saint-Séverin,_ 1898; Pages _Catholiques,_ 1900; Sainte _Lydwine de Schiedam,_ 1901; De Tout, 1902; L'Oblat, 1903; Trois _Primitifs,_ 1905; Les Foules de _Lourdes,_ 1906; See also the short story, _Sac au Dos,_ in the _Soirées de Médan,_ 1880, and the pantomime, _Pierrot Sceptique,_ 1881, in collaboration with Léon Hennique. _En Route_ was translated into English by Mr. Kegan Paul, in 1896; and _La Cathédrale_ by Miss Clara Bell, in 1898.

ARTHUR RIMBAUD

(1854-1891)

_Une Saison en Enfer,_ 1873; _Les Illuminations,_ 1886; _Reliquaire,_ 1891 (containing several poems falsely attributed to Rimbaud); _Les Illuminations: Une Saison en Enfer,_ 1892; _Poésies Complètes,_ 1895; _Œuvres,_ 1898.

See also Paterne Berrichon, _La Vie de Jean-Arthur Rimbaud,_ 1898, and _Lettres de Jean-Arthur Rimbaud,_ 1899; Paul Verlaine, _Les Poètes Maudits,_1884, and the biography by Verlaine in _Les Hommes d'Aujourd'hui._ Mr. George Moore was the first to write about Rimbaud in England, in "Two Unknown Poets" (Rimbaud and Laforgue) in _Impressions and Opinions,_ 1891. In Mr. John Gray's _Silverpoints,_ 1893, there are translations of "Charleville" and "Sensation." The latter, and "Les Chercheuses de Poux," are translated by Mr. T. Sturge Moore in _The Vinedresser, and other Poems,_ 1899.

JULES LAFORGUE

(1860-1887)

_Les Complaintes,_ 1885; _L'Imitation de Notre-Dame la Lune,_ 1886; _Le Concile Féerique,_ 1886; _Moralités Légendaires,_ 1887; _Derniers Vers,_ 1890 (a privately printed volume, containing _Des Fleurs de Bonne Volonté, Le Concile Féerique,_ and _Derniers Vers); Poésies Complètes,_ 1894; _Œuvres Complètes, Poésies, Moralités Légendaires, Mélanges Posthumes_ (3 vols.), 1902, 1903.

An edition of the _Moralités Légendaires_ was published in 1897, under the care of M. Lucien Pissarro, at the Sign of the Dial; it is printed in Mr. Ricketts' admirable type, and makes one of the most beautiful volumes issued in French during this century. In 1896 M. Camille Mauclair, with his supple instinct for contemporary values, wrote a study, or rather an eulogy, of Laforgue, to which M. Maeterlinck contributed a few searching and delicate words by way of preface.

MAURICE MAETERLINCK

(1862)

_Serres Chaudes,_ 1889; _La Princesse Maleine,_ 1890; _Les Aveugles (L'Intruse, Les Aveugles),_ 1890; _L'Ornement des Noces Spirituelles, de Ruysbroeck l'Admirable,_ 1891; _Les Sept Princesses,_ 1891; _Pelléas et Mélisande,_ 1892; _Alladine et Palomides, Intérieur, La Mort de Tintagiles,_ 1894; _Annabella, de John Ford,_ 1895; _Les Disciples à Sais et les Fragments de Novalis,_ 1895; _Le Trésor des Humbles,_ 1896; _Douze Chansons,_ 1896; _Aglavaine et Sélysette,_ 1896; _La Sagesse et la Destinée,_ 1898; _Théâtre,_ 1901 (3 vols.); _La Vie des Abeilles,_ 1901; _Monna Vanna,_ 1902; _Le Temple Enseveli,_ 1902; _Joyzelle,_ 1903; _Le Double Jardin,_ 1904; _L'Intelligence des Fleurs,_ 1907.

M. Maeterlinck has had the good or bad fortune to be more promptly, and more violently, praised at the beginning of his career than at all events any other writer of whom I have spoken in this volume. His fame in France was made by a flaming article of M. Octave Mirbeau in the _Figaro_ of August 24, 1890. M. Mirbeau greeted him as the "Belgian Shakepeare," and expressed his opinion of _La Princesse Maleine_ by saying "M. Maeterlinck has given us the greatest work of genius that has been produced in our time, and the most extraordinary and the most naïve too, comparable (dare I say?) superior in beauty to what is most beautiful in Shakespeare ... more tragic than _Macbeth,_ more extraordinary in thought than _Hamlet."_ Mr. William Archer introduced M. Maeterlinck to England in an article called "A Pessimist Playwright" in the _Fortnightly Review,_ September, 1891. Less enthusiastic than M. Mirbeau, he defined the author of _La Princesse Maleine_ as "a Webster who had read Alfred de Musset." A freely adapted version of _L'Intruse_ was given by Mr. Tree at the Haymarket Theatre, January 27, 1892, and since that time many of M. Maeterlinck's plays have been acted, without cuts, or with but few cuts, at various London theatres. Several of his books have also been translated into English: _The Princesse Maleine_ (by Gerard Harry) and _The Intruder_ (by William Wilson), 1892; _Pelléas and Mélisande_ and _The Sightless_ (by Laurence Alma-Tadema), 1892; _Ruysbroeck and the Mystics_ (by J. T. Stoddart), 1894; _The Treasure of the Humble_ (by A. Sutro), 1897; _Aglavaine and Sélysette_ (by A. Sutro), 1897; _Wisdom and Destiny_ (by A. Sutro), 1898; _Alladine and Palomides_ (by A. Sutro), _Interior_ (by William Archer), and _The Death of Tintagiles_ (by A. Sutro), 1899.

I have spoken, in this volume, chiefly of Maeterlinck's essays, and but little of his plays, and I have said all that I had to say without special reference to the second volume of essays, _La Sagesse et la Destinée._ Like _Le Trésor des Humbles,_ that book is a message, a doctrine, even more than it is a piece of literature. It is a treatise on wisdom and happiness, on the search for happiness because it is wisdom, not for wisdom because it is happiness. It is a book of patient and resigned philosophy, a very Flemish philosophy, more resigned than even _Le Trésor des Humbles._ In a sense it seems to aim less high. An ecstatic mysticism has given way to a kind of prudence. Is this coming nearer to the earth really an intellectual ascent or descent? At least it is a divergence, and it probably indicates a divergence in art as well as in meditation. Yet, while it is quite possible to at least indicate Maeterlinck's position as a philosopher, it seems to me premature to attempt to define his position as a dramatist. Interesting as his dramatic work has always been, there is, in the later dramas, so singular an advance in all the qualities that go to make great art, that I find it impossible at this stage of his development, to treat his dramatic work as in any sense the final expression of a personality. What the next stage of his development may be it is impossible to say. He will not write more beautiful dramas than he has written in _Aglavaine et Sélysette_ and in _Pelléas et Mêlisande._ But he may, and he probably will, write something which will move the general world more profoundly, touching it more closely, in the manner of the great writers, in whom beauty has not been more beautiful than in writers less great, but has come to men with a more splendid energy.

TRANSLATIONS

_From Stéphane Mallarmé_

I. HÉRODIADE

Herodiade.

To mine own self I am a wilderness. You know it, amethyst gardens numberless Enfolded in the flaming, subtle deep, Strange gold, that through the red earth's heavy sleep Has cherished ancient brightness like a dream, Stones whence mine eyes, pure jewels, have their gleam Of icy and melodious radiance, you, Metals, which into my young tresses drew A fatal splendour and their manifold grace! Thou, woman, born into these evil days Disastrous to the cavern sibylline, Who speakest, prophesying not of one divine, But of a mortal, if from that close sheath, My robes, rustle the wild enchanted breath In the white quiver of my nakedness, In the warm air of summer, O prophetess, (And woman's body obeys that ancient claim) Behold me in my shivering starry shame, I die! The horror of my virginity Delights me, and I would envelop me In the terror of my tresses, that, by night, Inviolate reptile, I might feel the white And glimmering radiance of thy frozen fire, Thou that art chaste and diest of desire, White night of ice and of the cruel snow! Eternal sister, my lone sister, lo My dreams uplifted before thee! now, apart, So rare a crystal is my dreaming heart, I live in a monotonous land alone, And all about me lives but in mine own Image, the idolatrous mirror of my pride, Mirroring this Hérodiade diamond-eyed. I am indeed alone, O charm and curse!

Nurse. O lady, would you die then?

Herodiade. No, poor nurse; Be calm, and leave me; prithee, pardon me, But, ere thou go, close to the casement; see How the seraphical blue in the dim glass smiles, But I abhor the blue of the sky! Yet miles On miles of rocking waves! Know'st not a land Where, in the pestilent sky, men see the hand Of Venus, and her shadow in dark leaves? Thither I go. Light thou the wax that grieves In the swift flame, and sheds an alien tear Over the vain gold; wilt not say in mere Childishness?

Nurse. Now?

Herodiade. Farewell. You lie, O flower Of these chill lips! I wait the unknown hour, Or, deaf to your crying and that hour supreme, Utter the lamentation of the dream Of childhood seeing fall apart in sighs The icy chaplet of its reveries.

II. SIGH

My soul, calm sister, towards thy brow, whereon scarce grieves An autumn strewn already with its russet leaves, And towards the wandering sky of thine angelic eyes, Mounts, as in melancholy gardens may arise Some faithful fountain sighing whitely towards the blue! Towards the blue pale and pure that sad October knew, When, in those depths, it mirrored languors infinité, And agonising leaves upon the waters white, Windily drifting, traced a furrow cold and dun, Where, in one long last ray, lingered the yellow sun.

III. SEA-WIND