Without Prejudice

Where are they all? So pipes the wind,

So foams and wanders the billow.

But the poet's morals are maligned. The fierce light which beats upon the throne of song reveals the nooks and crannies of the singers' lives, which for the rest they themselves expose rather than conceal. I should say that the average morality of the poet is much superior to the average morality of the man of the world who sins in well-bred silence. The poet gloats over his sins-is musically remorseful or swingingly defiant; he hints or exaggerates or invents. That is where the poet's imagination comes in-to give to airy nothings a local habitation and a name. The poet's imagination is often far more licentious than his life; the 'poet's licence' is rightly understood to be limited to his language. To have written erotic verses is almost a certificate of respectability: the energy that might have been expended in action has run to rhyme. Qui ose tout dire arrive a tout faire, say the French. Arrives at, perhaps, though even this is doubtful, but certainly does not start from that platform. Much less questionable were it to say: Qui ose tout faire arrive a ne rien dire.

The late M. Verlaine will be cited as a substantiation of the popular idea of the vagabond poet. The Verlaine legend has now been consecrated by his death; and for all time, I suppose, Verlaine will rank with Villon as an impossible person. He may have been all that is said, all that is hinted, even in Mr. George Moore's famous description of him. 'I once saw Verlaine. I shall not forget the bald prominent forehead (une tete glabre), the cavernous eyes, the macabre expression of burnt-out lust smouldering upon his face.'

But there is another side to him, and it is perhaps because I do not go about the world with Mr. Moore's 'macabresque' eye, which to-day happily sees things in a soberer colouring, that I saw this other side of Verlaine when, like Mr. George Moore, I hunted him up on his native heath. For one thing, I was not prepared to see anything very lurid and diabolique: life is really not so picturesque as all that. I knew besides that he had been a schoolmaster in England; and can you imagine anything more tedious and toilsome than to be the 'French master,' the poor, despised, 'frog-eating Mounseer Jacques' of boys' stories, the butt of all their facetious brutality? If ever anything was calculated to make a man diabolique! I trust biographers will not forget to place all this depressing drudgery to our 'vagabond's' credit. Think of it! The first poet of France correcting French exercises! The poet of the passions conjugating the verb aimer in its hideous grammatical reality!

Fumons philosophiquement,

Promenons-nous

Paisiblement:

Rien faire est doux.

So might Verlaine write, though contradicting himself by doing something in so doing; but in the absurd actual he had to earn his bread and butter, and man cannot live by poetry alone, unless one sings the joys and sorrows of the middle classes. It was rather late at night before, having vainly hunted for him in his favourite restaurants, I found the narrow, poverty-stricken rue in which Verlaine was living a year or so ago. Passing through a dark courtyard, I had to mount interminable stone stairs, lighting foul French matches as I went, to relieve the blackness. At last I arrived outside his door, very near the sky. I knocked. A voice called out, 'I've gone to bed.' I explained my lateness and said I would call to-morrow.

'No, no! Attendez!' I heard him jump out of bed, stumble and grope about, and then strike a match; and in another instant the door opened, and in the interstice appeared a homely nightcapped bourgeois pulling on his trousers. There flashed on me incongruously the thought of our English laureate's stately home by the sea, in which, jealously guarded by hedges and flunkeys, the poet chiselled his calm stanzas; and all the vagabond in me leapt out to meet the unpretentious child of Paris. He greeted me with simple cordiality; and, ugly and coarse though his face was, it was lit up throughout by a pleasant smile. His notorious leg was bandaged, but not repulsively. No, 'homely' is the only impression I shall ever have of Verlaine, the man. Even in that much maligned 'macabresque' head of his, there was more of the bonhomme than of the poet or the satyr. The little garret was his all in all; a bed took up half the space. On the table stood the remains of supper. A few shelves of books, a sketch or two, and a bird-cage with a canary were the only attempts at ornament.

Such was Verlaine at the climax of his fame, when he had won a sure immortality; simple and childlike, and with a child's unshamed acceptance of any money one might leave behind on the mantelpiece. He seems to have made very little by his verses. He spoke English quite well, having probably acquired it when teaching French; and he was perhaps more proud of it than of his poems. Mr. Moore says he wished to translate Tennyson. He read aloud a poem he had just written in celebration of his own fiftieth birthday. There was an allusion to a 'crystal goblet.' 'Ce verre-la!' he interpolated, with a humorous smile, pointing to a cheap glass with the dregs of absinthe that stood on the table. There was also an allusion to a 'blue-bird,' a sort of symbol of the magic of spring, I fancy, that flutters through many of his poems. (The 'plumage bleute de l'orgueil' figures in one of his very last verses.) When he arrived at this 'blue-bird' he pointed to the cage with the same droll twinkle: 'Cet oiseau-ci.' When I left him he stood at the head of the gloomy stone stairs to light me down, and the image of him in his red cotton nightcap is still vivid. And now he is only an immortal name. Ah, well! after the English school-rooms, the French prisons, the Parisian garrets and hospitals, the tomb is not so bad. Rien faire est doux .

In giving him place with the immortals I feel no hesitation. An English clergyman found immortality by writing one poem,-'The Burial of Sir John Moore,'-and, however posterity may appraise Verlaine's work as a whole, he has left three or four lyrics which can die only if the French language dies, or if mankind in its latter end undergoes a paralysis of the poetic sense such as Darwin suffered from in his old age. Much of his verse-especially his later verse-is to me, at least, as obscure as Mallarme. But

Il pleut dans mon coeur

Comme il pleut dans la rue

can never be surpassed for the fidelity with which it renders the endless drip, drip of melancholia, unless it is by that other magical lyric:

Les sanglots longs

Des violons

De l'automne

Blessent mon coeur

D'une langueur

Monotone.

He is the poet of rhythm, of the nuance, of personal emotion. French poetry has always leant to the frigid, the academic, the rhetorical-in a word, to the prosaic. The spirit of Boileau has ruled it from his cold marble urn. It has always lacked 'soul,' the haunting, elusive magic of wistful words set to the music of their own rhythm, the 'finer light in light,' that are of the essence of poetry. This subtle and delicate echo of far-off celestial music, together with some of the most spiritual poems that Catholicism has ever inspired, have been added to French literature by the gross-souled, gross-bodied vagrant of the prisons and the hospitals! Which is a mystery to the Philistine. But did not our own artistic prisoner once sing:

Surely there was a time I might have trod

The sunlit heights, and from life's dissonance

Struck one clear chord to reach the ears of God?

Was ever more devout Catholic than Benvenuto Cellini, who murdered his enemies and counted his beads equal gusto?

V. THE INDESTRUCTIBLES

I wonder if you have ever been struck by the catholicity-not to say the self-contradictoriness-of the constant correspondent. The creature will enter with zest into any discussion; there is no topic too small for it, and certainly none too great. The following letters, carefully culled from the annual contributions of a lady whose epistolary career I have followed with interest, will indicate the delicious inconsequence that has made them for me such grateful reading: