Chapter V: Part 5

His criticisms are wise and interesting, but they necessarily miss the sinuous clairvoyance of a writer like Remy de Gourmont who is able to give himself up completely and with no ironic reservation to the abnormalities of the temperament he is discussing. Remy de Gourmont's own temperament has something in it more receptive, more psychological, more supple than Anatole France's. He is in himself a far less original genius and for that very reason he can slide more reservedly into the bizarre nooks and crannies of abnormal minds.

Anatole France is one of those great men of genius to whom the gods have permitted an un-blurred vision of the eternal normalities of human weakness. This vision he can never forget. He takes his stand upon the ground which it covers, and from that ground he never deviates.

Man for him is always an amorous and fantastic animal, using his reason to justify his passions, and his imagination to justify his illusions. He is always the animal who can laugh, the animal who can cry, the animal who can beget or bear children. He is only in a quite secondary sense the animal who can philosophise.

It is because of his constant preoccupation with the normal eccentricities and pathetic follies of our race that he lays so much stress upon outward action.

The normal man is rather an animal who wills and acts than an animal who dreams and thinks; and it is with willing and acting, rather than with dreaming and thinking, that Anatole France is concerned. One of the main ironic devices of his humour is to show the active animal led astray by his illusions, and the contemplative animal driven into absurdity by his will.

With his outward-looking gaze fixed upon the eternal and pathetic normalities of the human situation, Anatole France has himself, like Voltaire, a constant tendency to gravitate towards politics and public affairs.

In this respect his temperament is most obstinately classical. Like Horace and all the ancient satirists, he feels himself invincibly attracted to "affairs of state," even while they excite his derision. One cannot read a page of his writing without becoming aware that one is in the presence of a mind cast in the true classic mould.

In the manner of the great classical writers of Athens and Rome he holds himself back from any emotional betrayal of his own feelings. He is the type of character most entirely opposite to what might be called the Rousseau-type.

He is un-modern in this and quite alone; for, in one form or another, the Rousseau-type with its enthusiastic neurotic mania for self-revelation dominates the entire literary field. One gets the impression of something massive and self-possessed, something serenely and almost inhumanly sane about him. One feels always that he is the "Grand Gentleman" of literature with whom no liberties may be taken. His tone is quiet, his manner equable, his air smiling, urbane, superior. His reserve is the reserve of the great races of antiquity. With a calm, inscrutable, benevolent malice, he looks out upon the world. There is a sense of much withheld, much unsaid, much that nothing would ever induce him to say.

His point of view is always objective. It might be maintained, though the thing sounds like a paradox, that his very temperament is objective. Certainly it is a temperament averse to any outbursts of unbalanced enthusiasm.

His attitude toward what we call Nature is more classical than the classics. Virgil shows more vibrant emotion in the presence of the sublimities of the natural elements. His manner when dealing with the inanimate world is the manner of the Eighteenth Century touched with a certain airiness and charm that is perhaps more Hellenic than Latin. As one reads him one almost feels as though the human race detached itself from its surroundings and put between itself and Nature a certain clear and airy space, untroubled by any magnetic currents of spiritual reciprocity. One feels as though Nature were kept decisively and formally in her place and not permitted to obtrude herself upon the consciousness of civilised people except when they require some pleasant lawn or noble trees or smiling garden of roses to serve as a background for their metaphysical discussions or their wanton amorous play. What we have come to call the "magic" of Nature is never for a moment allowed to interrupt these self-possessed epicurean arguments of statesmen, politicians, amorists, theologians, philosophers and proconsuls.

Individual objects in Nature--a tree, a brook, the seashore, a bunch of flowers, a glade in the forest, a terrace in a garden,--are described in that clear, laconic, objective manner, which gives one the impression of being able to touch the thing in question with one's bare hand.

The plastic and tactile value of things is always indicated in Anatole France's writings with brief, clear cut, decisive touches, but "the murmurs and scents" of the great waters, the silences of the shadowy forests are not allowed to cross the threshold of his garden of Epicurus. Each single petal of a rose will have its curves, its colours, its tints; but the mysterious forces of subterranean life which bring the thing to birth are pushed back into the darkness. The marble-cold resistance of Anatole France's classical mind offers a hard polished surface against which the vague elemental energies of the world beat in vain. He walks smilingly and pensively among the olive-trees of the Academia, plucking a rose here and an oleander there; but for the rest, the solemn wizardries of Nature are regarded with an urbane contempt.

His style is a thing over which the fastidious lovers of human language may ponder long and deep. The art of it is so restrained, so aristocratic, so exclusive, that even the smallest, simplest, most unimportant words take to themselves an emphatic significance.

Anatole France is able to tell us that Monsieur Bergeret made some naive remark, or the Abbé Jérôme Coignard uttered some unctuous sally, in so large and deliberate and courtly a way that the mere "he said" or "he began" falls upon us like a papal benediction or like the gesture of a benignant monarch.

There is no style in the world so deeply penetrated with the odour and savour of its author's philosophy. And this philosophy, this atmosphere of mind, is so entirely French that every least idiomatic peculiarity in his native tongue seems willing to lend itself, to the last generous drop of the wine of its essential soul, to the tone and manner of his speech. All the refinements of the most consummate civilisation in the world, all its airy cynicism, all its laughing urbanity, all its whimsical friendliness, seem to concentrate themselves and reach their climax on every page of his books.

A delicate odour of incense and mockery, an odour of consecrated wine and a savour of heathen wit, rise up together from every sentence and disarm us with the insidiousness of their pleasant contrast. His style is so beautiful and characteristic that one cannot read the simplest passage of easy narration from his pen without becoming penetrated with his spirit, without feeling saner, wiser, kindlier, and more disenchanted and more humane.

I cannot resist quoting from the prologue to "Le Puits de Sainte Claire," a certain passage which seems to me peculiarly adapted to the illustration of what I have just said. The writer is, or imagines himself to be, in the city of Siena.

"Sur la voie blanche, dans ces nuits transparentes, la seule recontre que je faisais était celle du R. P. Adone Doni, qui alors travaillait comme moi tout le jour dans l'ancienne académie _degli Intronati._ J'avais tout de suite aimé ce cordelier qui, blanchi dans l'étude, gardait l'humeur riante et facile d'un ignorant.

"Il causait volontiers. Je goûtais son parler suave, son beau langage, sa pensee docte et naïve, son air de vieux Silène purifié par les eaux baptismales, son instinct de mime accompli, le jeu de ses passions vives et fines, le génie étrange et charmant dont il etait possédé.

"Assidu à la bibliothèque, il fréquentait aussi le marché, s'arrêtant de préférence devant les contadines, qui vendent des pommes d'or, et prêtant l'oreille à leur libres propos.

Il apprenait d'elles, disait-il, la belle langue toscane. . . . Je crus m'aperçevoir en effet qu'il inclinait aux opinions singulières. Il avait de la religion et de la science, mais non sans bizarreries. . . . C'est sur le diable qu'il professait des opinions singulières. Il pensait que le diable était mauvais sans l'être absolument et que son imperfection naturelle l'empêcherait toujours d'atteindre à la perfection du mal. Il croyait aperçevoir quelques signes de bonté dans les actions obscures de Satan, et, sans trop l'oser dire, il en augurait la rédemption finale de l'archange méditatif, après la consommation des siècles. . . . Assis sur la margelle, les mains dans les manches de sa robe, il contemplait avec un paisible etonnement les choses de la nuit.

"Et l'ombre qui l'enveloppait laissait deviner encore dans ses yeux clairs et sur sa face camuse l'expressions d'audace craintive et de grâce moqueuse qui y etait profondement empreinte. Nous échangions d'abord des souhaits solennels de bonne santé, de paix et de contentement. . . .

"Tandis qu'il parlait, la lumiere de la lune coulait sur sa barbe en ruisseau d'argent. Le grillon accompagnait du bruissement de ses élytres la voix du conteur, et parfois, aux sons de cette bouche, d'où sortait le plus doux des langages humains, répondait la plainte flutée du crapaud, qui, de l'autre côté de la route, écoutait, amical et craintif."

The beautiful delicacy of that single touch "sur la voie blanche, dans ces nuits transparentes" is characteristic of a thousand others of a similar kind sprinkled among his books, where gentle and whimsical spirits discourse upon God and the Universe.

He has a most exquisite genius for these little chance-accompaniments of such human scenes. "L'Orme du Mail" is full of them; and so is "Les Opinions de M. Jérôme Coignard."

In "Sur la Pierre Blanche" the impish humour of accidental encounter brings forward nothing less than the death of Stephen the Proto-Martyr, as an irrelevant interruption to the amorous pleasures of one of his least attractive philosophers.

Full of malicious interest as he is in all the outward events of nations and societies, it is always evident that what Anatole France really regards as worthy of tender consideration is the conversation of quaint minds and the "Humeur riante et facile" of wayward and fantastic souls.

His sense of the fundamental futility of the whole scheme of things is so absolute that what most modern writers would regard as the illogical dreams of superannuated eccentrics he is inclined to treat with smiling reverence and infinite sympathy. Where the whole terrestrial business is only a meaningless blur upon the face of nothingness, why should we not linger by the way, under elm trees, or upon broken fragments of old temples, or on sunny benches in cloistered gardens, and listen to the arbitrary fancies of unpractical and incompetent persons whose countenances express an "audace craintive" and a "grâce moqueuse," and who look with mild wonder and peaceful astonishment at "les choses de la nuit"?

After perusing many volumes of Anatole France, one after another, we come to feel as though nothing in the world were important except the reading of unusual books, the conversation of unusual people, and the enjoyment of such philosophical pleasures as may be permitted by the gods and encouraged by the approbation of a friendly and tolerant conscience.

One always rises from the savouring of his excellent genius with a conviction that it is only the conversation of one's friends, varied by such innocent pleasures of the senses as may be in harmony with the custom of one's country, which renders in the last resort the madness of the world endurable.

He alone, of all modern writers, creates that leisurely atmosphere of noble and humorous dignity--familiar enough to lovers of the old masters--according to which every gesture and word of the most simple human being comes to be endowed with a kind of royal distinction. By the very presence in his thought of the essential meaninglessness of the world, he is enabled to throw into stronger relief the "quips and cranks and wanton wiles" of our pathetic humanity.

Human words--the words of the most crack-brained among us--take to themselves a weight and dignity from the presence behind them of this cosmic purposelessness. The less the universe matters, the more humanity matters. The less meaning there is in the macrocosm the more tenderly and humorously must every microcosm be treated.

It thus comes about that Anatole France, the most disillusioned and sceptical of writers, is also the writer whose books throw over the fancies and caprices of humanity the most large and liberal benediction.

To realise how essentially provincial English and American writers are, one has only to consider for a moment the absolute impossibility of such books as "L'Orme du Mail," "Le Mannequin" or "Monsieur Bergeret à Paris" appearing in either of these countries.

This amiable and smiling scepticism, this profound scholarship, this subtle interest in theological problems, this ironical interest in political problems, this detachment of tone, this urbane humanism, make up an "ensemble" which one feels could only possibly appear in the land of Rabelais and Voltaire.

Think of the emergence of a book in London or New York bearing such quotations at the heads of the chapters as those which are to be found in "Le Puits de Sainte Claire"! The mere look of the first page of the volume, with its beautifully printed Greek sentence about _ta physika kai ta ethika kai ta mathmatika_, lifts one suddenly and with a delicious thrill of pleasure, as if from the touch of a cool, strong, youthful hand, into that serene atmosphere of large speculations and unbounded vistas which is the inheritance of the great humane tradition: the tradition, older than all the dust of modern argument, and making every other mental temper seem, in comparison, vulgar, common, bourgeois and provincial.

The chapter headed "Saint Satyre" is prefaced by a beautiful hymn from the "Breviarum Romanum"; while the story named "Guido Cavalcanti" begins with a long quotation from "Il Decameron di Messer Giovanni Boccaccio." I take the first instance that comes to my hand; but all his books are the same. And one who reads Anatole France for the sake of an exciting narrative, or for the sake of illuminating psychology, or for the sake of some proselytising theory, will be hugely disappointed. None of these things will he find; nor, indeed, anything else that is tiresomely and absurdly modern.

What he will find will be the old, sweet, laughing, mellow world of rich antique wisdom; a world where the poetry of the ancients blends harmoniously with the mystical learning of the fathers of the church; a world where books are loved better than theories and persons better than books; a world where the humours of the pathetic flesh and blood of the human race are given their true value, as more amusing than any philosophy and as the cause and origin of all the philosophies that have ever been!

Anatole France is incorrigibly pagan. The pleasures of the senses are described in all his books with a calm smiling assurance that ultimately these are the only things that matter!

I suppose that no author that ever lived is so irritating to strong-minded idealists. He does not give these people "the ghost of a chance." He serenely assumes that all ideals are of human, too human, origin, and that no ideals can stand up long against the shocks of life's ironic caprices.

And yet while so maliciously introducing, with laconic Voltairian gibes, the wanton pricking of human sensuality, he never forgets the church. In nothing is he more French; in nothing is he more civilised, than in his perpetual preoccupation with two things--the beauty and frailty of women and the beauty and inconsistency of Christianity.

The clever young men who write books in England and America seem possessed by a precisely opposite purpose; the purpose of showing that Christianity is played out and the purpose of showing that women are no longer frail.

That sort of earnest-minded attempt to establish some kind of mystical substitute for the religion of our fathers, which one is continually meeting in modern books and which has so withering an effect both upon imagination and humour, is never encountered in Anatole France. He is interested in old tradition and he loves to mock at it. He is interested in human sensuality and he loves to mock at it; but apart from traditional piety struggling with natural passion, he finds nothing in the human soul that arrests him very deeply.

Man, to Anatole France, is a heathen animal who has been baptised; and the humour of his whole method depends upon our keeping a firm hold upon both these aspects of our mortal life.

In a world where men propagated themselves like plants or trees and where there was no organised religious tradition, the humour of Anatole France would beat its wings in the void in vain. He requires the sting of sensual desire and he requires an elaborate ecclesiastical system whose object is the restraint of sensual desire. With these two chords to play upon he can make sweet music. Take them both away and there could be no Anatole France.

The root of this great writer's genius is _irony._ His whole philosophy is summed up in that word, and all the magic of his unequalled style depends upon it.

Sometimes as we read him, we are stirred by a dim sense of indignation against his perpetual tone of smiling, patronising, disenchanted, Olympian pity. The word "pity" is one of his favourite words, and a certain kind of pity is certainly a profound element in his mocking heart.

But it is the pity of an Olympian god, a pity that cares little for what we call justice, a pity that refuses to take seriously the objects of his commiseration. His clear-sighted intelligence is often pleased to toy very plausibly with a certain species of revolutionary socialism. But, I suppose few socialists derive much satisfaction from that devastating piece of irony, the Isle of the Penguins; where everything moves in circles and all ends as it began.

The glacial smile of the yawning gulf of eternal futility flickers through all his pages. Everything is amusing. Nothing is important. Let us eat and drink; let us be urbane and tolerant; let us walk on the sunny side of the road; let us smell the roses on the sepulchres of the dead gods; let us pluck the violets from the sepulchres of our dead loves. All is equal--nothing matters. The wisest are they who play with illusions which no longer deceive them and with the pity that no longer hurts them. The wisest are they who answer the brutality of Nature with the irony of Humanity. The wisest are they who read old books, drink old wine, converse with old friends, and let the rest go.

And yet--and yet--

There is a poem of Paul Verlaine dedicated to Anatole France which speaks like one wounded well nigh past enduring by the voices of the scoffers.

Ah, les Voix, mourez done, mourantes que vous êtes
Sentences, mots en vain, metaphores mal faites,
Toute la rhétorique en fuite des péchés,
Ah, les Voix, mourez done, mourantes que vous êtes!
. . . .
Mourez parmi la voix terrible de l'Amour!
. . . .

PAUL VERLAINE

To turn suddenly to the poetry of Paul Verlaine from the mass of modern verse is to experience something like that sensation so admirably described by Thoreau when he came upon a sentence in Latin or in Greek lying like a broken branch of lovely fresh greenery across the pages of some modern book.

Verlaine more than any other European poet is responsible for the huge revolution in poetry which has taken in recent times so many and so surprising shapes and has deviated so far from its originator's method.

There is little resemblance between the most striking modern experiments in what is called "free verse" and the manner in which Verlaine himself broke with the old tradition; but the spirit animating these more recent adventures is the spirit which Verlaine called up from the "vasty deep," and with all their divergence from his original manner these modern rebels have a perfect right to use the authority of his great name, "car son nom," as Coppée says, in his tenderly written preface to his "Choix de Poésies," "éveillera toujours le souvenir d'une poésie absolument nouvelle et qui a pris dans les lettres franchises l'importance d'une découverte."

The pleasure with which one returns to Verlaine from wandering here and there among our daring contemporaries is really nothing less than a tribute to the essential nature of all great poetry; I mean to the soul of music in the thing. Some of the most powerful and original of modern poets have been led so far away from this essential soul of their own great art as to treat the music of their works as quite subordinate to its intellectual or visual import.

As far as I am able to understand the theories of the so-called "imagists," the idea is to lay the chief stress upon the evocation of clearly outlined shapes--images clean-cut and sharply defined, and, while personal in their choice, essentially objective in their rendering--and upon the absence of any traditional "beautiful words" which might blur this direct unvarnished impact of the poet's immediate vision.

It might be maintained with some plausibility that Verlaine's poetry takes its place in the "impressionistic" period, side by side with "impressionistic" work in the plastic arts, and that for this reason it is quite natural that the more modern poets, whose artistic contemporaries belong to the "post-impressionistic" school, should deviate from him in many essential ways. Personally I am extremely unwilling to permit Verlaine to be taken possession of by any modern tendency or made the war-cry of any modern camp.

Though by reason of his original genius he has become a potent creative spirit influencing all intelligent people who care about poetry at all, yet, while thus inspiring a whole generation--perhaps, considering the youth of many of our poetic contemporaries, we might say _two_ generations--he belongs almost as deeply to certain great eras of the past. In several aspects of his temperament he carries us back to François Villon, and his own passionate heart is forever reverting to the Middle Ages as the true golden age of the spirit he represented.

He thus sweeps aside with a gesture the great seventeenth century so much admired by Nietzsche.

Non. Il fut gallican, ce siècle, et janséniste!
C'est vers le Moyen Age énorme et délicat,
Qu'il faudrait que mon coeur en panne naviguât,
Loin de nos jours d'esprit charnel et de chair triste.

But whatever may have been the spirit which animated Verlaine, the fact remains that when one takes up once more this "Choix de Poésies," "avec un portrait de l'auteur par Eugene Carrière," and glances, in passing, at that suggestive _cinquante-septième mille_ indicating how many others besides ourselves have, in the midst of earthquakes and terrors, assuaged their thirst at this pure fount, one recognises once more that the thing that we miss in this modern welter of poetising is simply _music_--music, the first and last necessity, music, the only authentic seal of the eternal Muses.

Directly any theory of poetry puts the chief stress upon anything except music--whether it be the intellectual content of the verses or their image-creating vision or their colour or their tone--one has a right to grow suspicious.

The more subtly penetrated such music is by the magic of the poet's personality, the richer it is in deep intimations of universal human feeling, the greater will be its appeal. But the music must be there; and since the thing to which it forever appeals is the unchanging human sensibility, there must be certain eternal laws of rhythm which no original experiments can afford to break without losing the immortal touch.

This is all that lovers of poetry need contend for as against these quaint and interesting modern theories. Let them prove their theories! Let them thrill us in the old authentic manner by their "free verse" and we will acknowledge them as true descendants of Catullus and Keats, of Villon and Verlaine!

But they must remember that the art of poetry is the art of heightening words by the magic of music. Colour, suggestion, philosophy, revelation, interpretation, realism, impressionism--all these qualities come and go as the fashion of our taste changes. One thing alone remains, as the essential and undying spirit of all true poetry; that it should have that "concord of sweet sounds"--let us say, rather, that concord of high, delicate, rare sounds--which melts us and enthralls us and liberates us, whatever the subject and whatever the manner or the method! Verse which is cramped and harsh and unmelodious may have its place in human history; it may have its place in human soothsaying and human interest; it has no place or lot in poetry. Individual phrases may have their magic; individual words may have their colour; individual thoughts may have their truth; individual sentences their noble rhetoric;--all this is well and right and full of profound interest. But all this is only the material, the atmosphere, the medium, the instrument. If the final result does not touch us, does not move us, does not rouse us, does not quiet us, as _music_ to our ears and our souls--it may be the voice of the prophet; it may be the voice of the charmer; it is not the voice of the immortal god.

Verlaine uses the term _nuance_ in his "ars poetica" to express the evasive quality in poetry which appeals to him most and of which he himself is certainly one of the most delicate exponents; but remembering the power over us of certain sublime simplicities, remembering the power over us of certain great plangent lines in Dante and Milton, where there is no "nuance" at all, one hesitates to make this a dogmatic doctrine.

But in what he says of music he is supremely right, and it is for the sake of his passionate authority on this matter--the authority of one who is certainly no formal traditionalist--that I am led to quote certain lines.

They occur in "Jadis et Naguère" and are placed, appropriately enough, in the centre of the volume of Selections which I have now before me.

De la musique avant toute chose,
Et pour cela préfère l'Impair
Plus vague et plus soluble dans l'air,
Sans rien en lui qui pèse ou qui pose.

Il faut aussi que tu n'ailles point
Choisir tes mots sans quelque méprise:
Rien de plus cher que la chanson grise
Où l'Indécis au Précis se joint.

Car nous voulons la Nuance encor,
Pas la Couleur, rien que la nuance!
Oh! la nuance seule fiance
Le rêve au rêve et la flûte au cor!

Fuis du plus loin la Pointe assassine,
L'Esprit cruel et le Rire impur,
Qui font pleurer les yeux de l'Azur,
Et tout cet ail de basse cuisine!

Prends l'éloquence et tords-lui sou cou!
Tu feras bien, en train d'énergie
De rendre un peu la Rime assagie
Si Ton n'y veille, elle ira jusqu'où?

. . . .

De la musique encore et toujours!
Que ton vers soit la chose envolée
Qu'on sent qui fuit d'une âme allée
Vers d'autres cieux à d'autres amours.

Que ton vers soit la bonne aventure
Éparse au vent crispé du matin
Qui va fleurant la menthe et le thym . . .
Et tout le reste est littérature.

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 littérature"!

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 associations, 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 passionate 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 entitled "Promenade Sentimentale," which is one of the Paysages Tristes in the "Poèmes 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 suprêmes
Et le vent berçait les nénuphars blêmes;
Les grands nénuphars entre les roseaux
Tristement luisaient sur les calmes eaux.
Moi, j'errais tout seul, promenant ma plaie
Au long de l'étang, parmi la saulaie
Où la brume vague évoquait un grand
Fantôme laiteux se désespérant
Et pleurant avec la voix des sarcelles
Qui se rappelaient en battant des ailes
Parmi la saulaie où j'errais tout seul
Promenant ma plaie; et l'épais linceul
Des ténèbres vint noyer les suprêmes
Rayons du couchant dans ses ondes blêmes
Et des nénuphars parmi les roseaux
Des grands nénuphars 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 "ragamuffin angel," a tatterdemalion scholar, an inspired derelict, a scaramouch god,--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 god 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 attitude, 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 passions of the human race: its passion for beauty and its passion for God.

His association 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 ménage, 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 analysis. 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 passion, 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 lust.

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 passion 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, assuaged.

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-lust. It is a relief, like the coming suddenly from a hedge of wild white roses after wandering through tropical jungles, to pass 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 passion, 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 associated with the way he approaches his gods, such as they may be; and one need not be in the least surprised to find that Verlaine's attitude to his Creator has a marked resemblance to his attitude 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 God 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. God, Christ, Our Lady, pass 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 God.

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 chères mains qui furent miennes
Toutes petites, toutes belles,
Après ces méprises mortelles
Et toutes ces choses païennes,

Après les rades et les grèves,
Et les pays et les provinces,
Royales mieux qu'au temps des princes
Les chères mains m'ouvrent les rêves.

. . . .

Ment-elle, ma vision chaste,
D'affinité spirituelle,
De complicité maternelle,
D'affection étroite et vaste?

. . . .

That collection of passionate cries to God which ends with a sort of rhapsody of pleading prayer, entitled "Sagesse," begins--and one does not feel that it is in the least inappropriate--with

Beauté des femmes, leur faiblesse, et ces mains pâles
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, associated 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 théologie et solide morale, guidé par la folie unique de la Croix" of that "Moyen Age énorme et délicat" 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-classic 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.

That Nuit du Walpurgis classique of his, with its "jardin de Lenôtre, correct, ridicule et charmant," is one of the most delicate evocations of this _genre._ One sees these strange figures, "ces spectres agités," as if they were passing from twilight to twilight through the silvery mists of some pale Corot-picture, passing into thin air, into the shadow of a shadow, into the dream of a dream, into nothingness and oblivion; but passing gaily and wantonly--to the music of mandolines, to the blowing of fairy horns!

N'importe! ils vont toujours, les fébriles fantômes,
Menant leur ronde vaste et morne, et tressautant
Comme dans un rayon de soleil des atomes,
Et s'évaporent a l'instant

Humide et blême où l'aube éteint l'un après l'autre
Les cors, en sorte qu'il ne reste absolument
Plus rien--absolument--qu'un jardin de Lenôtre
Correct, ridicule et charmant.

In the same vein, full of a diaphanous gaiety light as the flutter of dragon-fly wings, is that "caprice" in his Fêtes Galantes entitled Fantoches.

Scaramouche et Pucinella
Qu'un mauvais dessein rassembla
Gesticulent, noirs sur la lune.

Cependant l'excellent docteur
Bolonais cueille avec lenteur
Des simples parmi l'herbe brune.

Lors sa fille, piquant minois
Sous la charmille, en tapinois
Se glisse demi-nue, en quête

De son beau pirate espagnol
Dont un langoureux rossignol
Clame la détresse a tue-tête.

Is that not worthy of an illustration by Aubrey Beardsley? And yet has it not something more naive, more infantile, than most modern trifles of that sort? Does not it somehow suggest Grimm's Fairy Stories?

There is one mood of Paul Verlaine, quite different from this, which is extremely interesting if only for its introduction into poetry of a certain impish malice which we do not as a rule associate with poetry at all.

Such is the poem called Les Indolents, with its ribald refrain, like the laughter of a light-footed Puck flitting across the moon-lit lawns, of

Hi! Hi! Hi! les amants bizarres!

. . . .

Eurent l'inexpiable tort
D'ajourner une exquise mort.
Hi! Hi! Hi! les amants bizarres!

Such also are those extraordinary verses under the title Colloque Sentimental which trouble one's imagination with so penetrating a chill of shivering disillusionment.

For some reason or other my own mind always associates these terrible lines with a particular corner of a public garden in Halifax, Yorkshire; where I seem to have seen two figures once; seen them with a glacial pang of pain that was like the stab of a dagger of ice frozen from a poisoned well.

Dans le vieux pare solitaire et glacé
Deux formes ont tout à l'heure passé.

Leurs yeux sont morts et leurs lèvres sont molles
Et l'on entend à peine leurs paroles.

Dans le vieux pare solitaire et glacé
Deux spectres ont évoqué le passé.

--Qu'il était bleu, le ciel, et grand l'espoir!
--L'espoir a fui, vaincu, vers le ciel noir.

I have omitted the bitter dialogue--as desolate and hollow in its frozen retorts as the echoes of iron heels in a granite sepulchre--but the whole piece has a petrified forlornness about it which somehow reminds one of certain verses of Mr. Thomas Hardy.

One of my own favourite poems of Verlaine is one whose weird and strange beauty will appeal, I fear, to few readers of these sketches; but if I could put into words the indescribable power which it exercises over my own mood I should be doing something to mitigate its remoteness from normal feelings. It is a wild mad thing, this poem--a fantasia upon a melancholy and terrible truth--but it has the power of launching one's mind down long and perilous tides of speculation.

It is like a "nocturne" written by a musician who has wandered through all the cities of Europe with a company of beggar-players, playing masques of death to the occupants of all the cemeteries. He names the poem Grotesques; and it comes among the verses called Eaux-Fortes, dedicated to François Coppée.

C'est que, sur leurs aigres guitares
Crispant la main des libertés
Ils nasillent des chants bizarres,
Nostalgiques et révoltés;

C'est enfin que dans leurs prunelles
Rit et pleure--fastidieux--
L'amour des choses éternelles,
Des vieux morts et des anciens dieux!

. . . .

Les juins brûlent et les décembres
Gèlent votre chair jusqu'aux os,
Et la fièvre envahit vos membres
Qui se déchirent aux roseaux.

Tout vous repousse et tout vous navre
Et quand la mort viendra pour vous
Maigre et froide, votre cadavre
Sera dédaigné par les loups!

I cannot resist the feeling that where the inmost essential genius of Verlaine is to be found is neither in his religious poems nor his love-poems; no, nor even in his singular fantasies.

I find it in certain little evasive verses, the fleeting magic of which evaporates, under any attempt to capture or define it, like the perfume from that broken alabaster box from which the woman anointed the feet of the Saviour. Such a poem is that strangely imaginative one, with a lovely silveriness of tone in its moth-like movements, and full of a mystery, soft, soothing and gentle, like the whisper of a child murmuring its happiness in its sleep, which is called Impression Fausse for some delicate reason that I, alas! lack the wit to fathom.

Dame souris trotte
Noire dans le gris du soir
Dame souris trotte
Grise dans le noir.

On sonne la cloche,
Dormez, les bons prisonniers,
On sonne la cloche:
Faut que vous dormiez,

. . . . .

Dame souris trotte,
Rose dans les rayons bleus,
Dame souris trotte
Debout, paresseux!

Perhaps of all the poems he ever wrote the one most full of his peculiar and especial atmosphere--grey and sad and cool and deep and unlike anything else in the world--is that entitled Réversibilities; though here again I am out of my depths as to the full significance of this title.

Entends les pompes qui font
Le cri des chats.
Des sifflets viennent et vont
Comme en pourchas.
Ah, dans ces tristes décors
Les Déjàs sont les Encors!

O les vagues Angélus!
(Qui viennent d'où)
Vois s'allumer les Saluts
Du fond d'un trou.
Ah, dans ces mornes séjours
Les Jamais sont les Toujours!

Quels rêves épouvantes
Vous grands murs blancs!
Que de sanglots répétés,
Fous ou dolents!
Ah, dans ces piteux retraits
Les Toujours sont les Jamais!

Tu meurs doucereusement,
Obscurément,
Sans qu'on veille, O coeur aimant,
Sans testament!
Ah, dans ces deuils sans rachats
Les Encors sont les Déjàs!

It is perhaps because his essential kingdom is not bound by the time-limits of any century or age but has its place in that mysterious country beyond the margins of all change, where the dim vague feelings of humanity take to themselves shadowy and immortal forms and whisper and murmur of what except in music can never be uttered, that he appeals to us so much more than other recent poets.

In that twilight-land of delicate mystery, by those pale sea-banks dividing what we feel from what we dream, the silvery willows of indefinable memory bow themselves more sadly, the white poplars of faint hope shiver more tenderly, the far-off voices of past and future mingle with a more thrilling sweetness, than in the garish daylight of any circumscribed time or place.

In the twilight-country over which he rules, this fragile child of the clairvoyant senses, this uncrowned king of beggars and dreams, it may truly and indeed seem that "les jamais sont les toujours."

His poetry is the poetry of water-colours. It is water seen through water. It is white painted upon white. It is sad with the whispers of falling rain. It is grey with the passage of softly-sliding mists. It is cool and fresh with the dews of morning and of evening.

Like a leaf whirling down from one of those tremulous poplar-trees that hang over the Seine between the Pont Neuf and the Quai Voltaire--whirling lightly and softly down, till it touches the flowing water and is borne away--each of these delicate filmy verses of his falls upon our consciousness; draws up from the depths its strange indescribable response; and is lost in the shadows.

One is persuaded by the poetry of Verlaine that the loveliest things are the most evasive things, the things which come most lightly and pass most swiftly. One realises from his poetry that the rarest intimations of life's profound secret are just those that can only be expressed in hints, in gestures, in whispers, in airy touches and fleeting signs.

One comes to understand from it that the soul of poetry is and was and must always be no other thing than _music_--music not merely of the superficial sound of words, but of those deeper significances and those vaguer associations which words carry with them; music of the hidden spirit of words, the spirit which originally called them forth from the void and made them vehicles for the inchoate movements of man's unuttered dreams.

Paul Verlaine--and not without reason--became a legend even while he lived; and now that he is dead he has become more than a legend. A legend and a symbol! Wherever the spirit of art finds itself misunderstood, mistrusted, disavowed, disinherited; driven into the taverns by the stupidity of those who dwell in "homes," and into the arms of the submerged by the coldness and heartlessness of those who walk prosperously upon the surface; the figure of this fantastic child, this satyr-saint with the Socratic forehead, this tearful mummer among the armies of the outcasts, will rise up and write his prophecy upon the wall.

For the kingdom of art is as the kingdom of heaven. The clever ones, the wise ones, the shrewd ones, the ones that make themselves friends with Mammon, and build themselves houses of pleasure for their habitation, shall pass away and be forgotten forever.

The justice of the gods cancels the malice of the righteous, and the devoted gratitude of humanity tears up the contemptuous libels of the world.

He has come into his own, as all great poets must at last, in defiance of the puritan, in defiance of public opinion, and in spite of all aspersion. He has come into his own; and no one who loves poetry can afford to pass him by.

For while others may be more witty, more learned, more elaborate, none can be more melodious. His poetry is touched with the music that is beyond all argument. He lives by his sincerity. He lives by his imagination.

The things that pertain the deepest to humanity are not its fierce fleshly passions, its feverish ambitions, its proud reasonings, its tumultuous hopes. They are the things that belong to the hours when these obsessing forces fade and ebb and sink away. They are the things that rise up out of the twilight-margins of sleep and death; the things that come to us on softly stepping feet, like child-mothers with their first-born in their arms; the things that have the white mists of dawn about them and the cool breath of evening around them; the things that hint at something beyond passion and beyond reason; the things that sound to us like the sound of bells heard through clear deep water; for the secret of human life is not in its actions or its voices or its clamorous desires, but in the intervals between all these--when all these leave it for a moment at rest--and in the depths of the soul itself the music becomes audible, the music which is the silence of eternity.

REMY DE GOURMONT

The death of Remy de Gourmont is one of the greatest losses that European literature has suffered since the death of Oscar Wilde. The supreme critic is as rare as the supreme artist, and de Gourmont's critical genius amounted to a miracle of clairvoyance.

He wrote of everything--from the etymological subtleties of the French language down to the chaste reluctances of female moles. He touched everything and he touched nothing that he did not adorn.