Je me souviens Des jours anciens Et je m'en vais Au vent mauvais Qui m'emporte Deçà, delà Pareil à la Feuille morte. But if we translate this we shall see how far its charm is independent of its thought. Take away timbre and rhyme and there is not much reason left in "The long sobs of the violins of Autumn, wound my heart with a monotonous langor. Suffocating and pale when sounds the hour, I remember ancient days and I weep, and I am borne along on the cruel wind that carries me hither and thither like a dead leaf." And here is a picture of Paris, exquisite to the ear but mere midsummer madness to the logical mind: La lune plaquait ses teintes de zinc Par angles obtus; Des bouts de fumée en forme de cinq Sortaient drus et noirs des hauts toits pointus Moi j'allais rêvant du divin Platon Et de Phidias Et de Salamine et de Marathon Sous l'œil clignotant des bleus becs de gaz. Who ever noticed as he walked at night in a Paris street the shape of the smoke wreaths from the then absolutely invisible chimney pots? Who ever noticed bright moonlight shadows on a flaringly lighted city sidewalk? And why, finally, should Verlaine or anybody else think of Plato and Pheidias and Salamis and Marathon on a Parisian boulevard, unless indeed he be a mental degenerate? And yet the eye may grow impatient of images that it cannot see and the mind of phantom thoughts that elude its grasp, but the man who has music in his soul will be won back ever again by the indefinable charm of this faun-like genius. There are however degrees in his eccentricity, and he who is not to the manor born will find the " Fête galante' and the "Bonne chanson" the most accessible of Verlaine's volumes. It is true that these delicate little trifles savor sometimes of that intertwining of sentiment and sensuousness that characterized the poetry of the eighteenth century, but they are full of the loveliness of a studied artificiality, much of the charm of which depends on the literary culture of the reader. To catch the grace of "L'Allée" or of "Columbine" one must know a little of Parny and much of Watteau, for the former poem is a Dresden shepherdess in fin de siècle alexandrines and the latter is her joyous companion in a song measure that might have charmed Banville himself. The love ditties of the "Bonne chanson" are simpler and so have a more perennial attractiveness. Some of these little songs sing themselves so to the heart that it seems a sort of literary sacrilege to attempt to translate them into prose or limping verses. But does not this speak for itself: La lune blanche, Luit dans les bois; De chaque branche Part une voix Sous la ramée .. Oh bien aimée. L'étang reflète Où le vent pleure . . Un vaste et tendre Apaisement. Semble descendre Du firmament Que l'astre irise . . . C'est l'heure exquise. The years that separated "La Bonne chanson" from "La Sagesse" intensified both the strength and the weakness of Verlaine's character. The contradictions of his nature became even more startling than those of Baude-laire. Here the poet of the "Fêtes galantes" and the future author of "Parallèlement" proclaimed with agonized sincerity and the most intensely Catholic devotion, that the Jesuits were the hope of social morals, and that Moses was the only scientist, while even the good old times when "Maintenon cast on raptured France the shadow and the peace of her linen caps are hardly orthodox enough for the convert's enthusiasm, and he prefers to those halcyon days of Gallicism the Middle Ages with "their high theology and firm morals' In these verses his exalted faith holds converse with God and Christ as none since Thomas à Kempis has done, and hymns the glories of Mary in verses unsurpassed in French. Penitence has rarely reached a more intense lyric expression than in that series of sonnets where God and the sinner reason together in verses that have been called by a great modern critic "the first in French poetry that express truly the love of God." Yet these are equalled, and in a way excelled, by an exquisite hymn to the Virgin and other poems that reach the extreme intensity of selfrenunciation. But even in Verlaine's "Sagesse" there are pieces as hard to set in order as a Chinese puzzle,3 for Catholicism had not weaned him from the idolatry of words, and he was presently to show in his pitifully curious “Parallèlement" that it had not weaned him, any more than the same Catholic aspirations had done Baudelaire, from an at 2 'C'est vers le Moyen Age énorme et délicat, Haute théologie et solide morale Guidé par la folie unique de la Croix. (From "Non. Il fut gallican", but compare "Sagesse d'un Louis Ra cine.") 2 The sonnets begin "Mon Dieu m'a dit "; the hymn to Mary, "Je ne veux plus aimer". Cp. also, "O mon Dieu vous m'avez blessé d'amour ". All these are in the "Choix de poésies," pp. 159–190. 3 E. g. "L'Espoir luit comme un brin de paille dans l'étable," which is ingeniously unravelled by Lemaitre, l. c. 99. tempt to combine the worship of God with that of the devil, in what is indeed a melancholy parallel. The poetry that follows "Sagesse" grows steadily more incoherent and uneven, so that it is impossible to speak of progress or retrogression from volume to volume, while in each there are striking groups and single poems. Perhaps his strongest recent work has been in political and social satire. In a ballad dedicated to Luise Michel he defines the Republican leaders as "perverted talent, megatherium or bacillus, raw soldier, insolent shyster (robin), or some brittle compromise, giant of mud with feet of clay." But if the government delights him not, neither does Paris, that "glaring pile of white stone, where the sun rages as in a conquered country, where all vices, the exquisite and the hideous, have their lair, a desert of white stone." Some of the realistic pictures of tavern and street in the workmen's wards are gems in their way, though their brilliancy is more that of the cat's eye or the moon-stone than that of the diamond or the emerald. Here is a single example among many: 3 The noise of the wineshop, the mud of the walk, The omnibus, tempest of iron and mud, That creaks ill balanced between its four wheels And slowly rolls its eyes, red and green; 1 Gouvernements de maltalent, Mégarthérium ou bacille Soldat brut, robin insolent, Ou quelque compromise fragile, Géant de boue aux pieds d'argile. La "grande ville." Un tas criard de pierres blanches Et les hideux, dans ce désert de pierres blanches. 3 Le bruit du cabaret, la fange du trottoir Workmen going to the club while they smoke Their cutty-pipes under the gendarmes' nose, Roofs dripping, walls oozing, and pavement that slips, Behold my road — with paradise at the end. Then there are among these verses fantastic bits of diablerie that suggest opium dreams. There is a weird fascination in the high festival of the satans at Ecbatana, where they "make litter of their five senses for the seven sins" and at last attempt "to maintain the balance in their duel with God by sacrificing hell to universal love". Another of these "twilight pieces", as Verlaine grimly calls them, represents a countess in prison holding in her lap the head of her husband, whom she has killed in a fit of jealousy while he was in mortal sin. The head speaks to tell her that he loves her still and to bid her "Damn thyself that we be not parted". "Pity, pity! my God", she shrieks, and by that prayer is torn from her lover to paradise, to discover, like another of these incarnations of passion, that "hell is absence". Such conceptions are the sign of an unbalanced mind, of which many traces can be found in other poems whose rhythm has the capricious beauty of a hashish dream and, like our English “Kubla-Khan", defies the analysis of the rhetorician. An instance of this is afforded by his "Art poétique", which has a double interest because it both illustrates and characterizes the aspirations of the decadent school, though they write their best poetry when they are recreant to it. It may not be without interest, therefore, to translate as well as may be the sense, or what seems to be Leur brûle-gueule au nez des agents de police, Toits qui dégoûtent, murs suintants, pavé qui glisse, 1" Crimen amoris" (Choix de poésies, p. 259). Font litière aux sept péchés de leurs cinq sens. |