TWO BIOGRAPHIES: VERLAINE AND TOLSTOY
Paul Verlaine, by Wilfred Thorley; Tolstoy: His Life and Writings, by Edward Garnett. [Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston.]
When autumn is in your heart—not that of the golden delirium of exotic agony, but bleak weeping autumn of crucifixion and dead leaves—what dirge, what note haunts you in accompaniment to your grief? Maddening darts from Tchaikowsky’s Pathétique, or Weltschmerz-moans from Beethoven’s Marchia Funebre, or an unuttered accord known only to your soul? Or, if you are a brother of mine, do your lips soundlessly mutter this?
Les sanglots longs
Des violons
De l’automne
Blessent mon coeur
D’une langueur
Monotone.
Don’t you hear the resonance of the tolling bells in Chopin’s Funeral March? Your sorrow grows crescendo as you proceed, recalling Massenet’s Elégie:
Tout suffocant
Et blême, quand
Sonne l’heure,
Je me souviens
Des jours anciens
Et je pleure;
Et je m’en vais
Au vent mauvais
Qui m’emporte
Deçà, delà
Pareil à la
Feuille morte.
When I think of Paul Verlaine I invariably recall Oscar Wilde, despite or because of the abysmal dissimilarity of the two personalities. The sincere, ingenuous, all-loving child Paul, and the thoroughly artificial, paradoxical Oscar; the typical Bohemian with the criminal-face like that of Dostoevsky, and the salon-idol, the refined and gorgeous bearer of the sun-flower. Fate had somewhat reconciled the two contrasts. Both had been “sinners,” both were condemned by society and imprisoned, both had “repented”—one in De Profundis where the haughty humility of the self-enamored artist stirs us with its artificial beauty; the other in the primitive-Christian—nay, Catholic—Sagesse:
Mon Dieu m’a dit: Mon fils, il faut m’aimer ....
Some months ago in reviewing Edmond Lepelletier’s voluminous book, (Paul Verlaine: His Life and Work) I remarked that the Poet of Absinthe and Violets was still awaiting his Boswell. My view has not changed after reading Wilfrid Thorley’s monograph on Verlaine; but my wish for an adequate biography of the signer of Romances sans Paroles has now become counterbalanced by an earnest prayer that the memory of the poet may be saved from such indelicate manipulators as Mr. Thorley. Why this respectable Englishman should have attempted to treat the life of the most wayward French poet since Villon can be explained by no other reason than that it was a case of “made to order.” When a Velasquez is pierced by a fanatical suffragette the whole civilized world is roused to indignation; but when an honest philistine unceremoniously puffs his cheap smoke into the face of a dead poet there is not a single protest against that sort of vandalism. Fear of the editor’s blue pencil restrains me from putting my attitude more outspokenly.
A conscientious compilator would have found sufficient material for an unpretentious sketch of the life of Verlaine and for an appreciation of his works. Lepelletier gives an amazing mass of facts and personal reminiscences (you may ignore his naive interpretations); Arthur Symons in The Symbolist Movement in Literature has a masterpiece essay on Verlaine, not to mention a number of other French and English writers who have given us glimpses of the imperceptible image of the poet—writers who knew what they were taking about. Mr. Thorley has made use of various sources, but in a peculiar way. He fished out the anecdotal scraps, the piquant details, the filthy hints, and patched up a caricature-portrait of a lewd, perverse “undesirable,” whose poetry (I quote reluctantly) “was born solely of the genitals,” whose “life is but the trite old story of the emotions developed at the expense of domestic peace and civic order; of art for art’s sake made to condone the manner of its begetting, and the trend of its appeal; of the hushed acquiescence in emotion as a sacred thing, whatever the quality of the impulse from which it ripens or the level of ideas on which it feeds.” Out of the ninety-odd pages of stuff seventy-nine are devoted to “biography” sufficiently spicy to make any toothless old rake chuckle; the rest is given over to “criticism”—a mutilated melange of some of the views of Symons, George Moore, and others, flavored with the compilator’s own commonplaces. I quote from the closing lines:
A specious and high-sounding phrase has been invented to excuse the perversities of imaginative genius by speaking of its achievement as a “conquest of new realms for the spirit.” But the worth of such acquisitions depends on the nature of the territory, and if it be, morally, a malarial swamp conducive only to a human type found subversive in our normal world, it will always appear to the English mind that we shall do well to forego the new kingdom and to withhold our homage from its discoverer.... That “nice is nasty, nasty nice,” and the creative artist the sole arbiter, must be hotly opposed so long as a social conscience survives.
And this was written in Anno Domini 1914!
A sense of fairness urges me to rehabilitate the “English mind” by recalling a passage from Mr. Thorley’s compatriot, Arthur Symons:
The artist, it cannot be too clearly understood, has no more part in society than a monk in domestic life: he cannot be judged by its rules, he can be neither praised nor blamed for his acceptance or rejection of its conventions. Social rules are made by normal people for normal people, and the man of genius is fundamentally abnormal.
It is high time that this axiom became a truism and that we cease to measure the artist with the yard-stick of conventional morality. “L’art, mes enfants, c’est d’être absolument soi-même,” sang Verlaine, and somewhere else he reveals a bit of that self with his usual sincerity:
I believe, and I sin in thought as in action; I believe, and I repent in thought, if no more. Or again, I believe, and I am a good Christian at this moment; I believe, and I am a bad Christian the instant after. The remembrance, the hope, the invocation of a sin delights me, with or without remorse, sometimes under the very form of sin, and hedged with all its natural consequences.... This delight ... it pleases us to put to paper and publish more or less well expressed: we consign it, in short, into literary form, forgetting all religious ideas, or not letting one of them escape us. Can any one in good faith condemn us as poets? A hundred times no.
“And, indeed, I should echo, a hundred times no!” exclaims the Englishman, Arthur Symons.
I cannot resist the temptation of quoting the happiest definition of Verlaine’s personality written by Charles Morice back in 1888:
The soul of an immortal child, that is the soul of Verlaine, with all the privileges and all the perils of so being: with the sudden despair so easily distracted, the vivid gaieties without a cause, the excessive suspicions and the excessive confidences, the whims so easily outwearied, the deaf and blind infatuations, with, especially, the unceasing renewal of impressions in the incorruptible integrity of personal vision and sensation. Years, influences, teachings, may pass over a temperament such as this, may irritate it, may fatigue it; transform it, never—never so much as to alter that particular unity which consists in a dualism, in the division of forces between the longing after what is evil and the adoration of what is good; or rather, in the antagonism of spirit and flesh....
I have not mentioned the most striking “feature” of Mr. Thorley’s ... production—the appendix. Six of Verlaine’s poems are translated by him for the benefit of those who do not understand French “intimately.” “To offer them to other readers, would, of course, be an impertinence,” he modestly admits. Impertinence is not the word for that outrage. I have experienced physical pain at the sight of the Hunnish sacrilege committed by this well-wishing moralist. The poet, for whom “De la musique avant toute chose; De la musique encore et toujours!” who had pleaded, “Car nous voulons la nuance encore, Pas la couleur, rien que la nuance!” has been mercilessly crucified in the form of quasi-Tennysonian, taffy-like verses. One recalls with gratitude the careful albeit pale translations of Gertrude Hall, who at least had the sense of æsthetic propriety in endeavoring to remain true to the master’s meter and rhythm.
... a great, a stupendous idea, to the realization of which I feel myself capable of devoting all my life. The idea is the foundation of a new religion corresponding to the development of mankind—the religion of Jesus, but purified from dogma and mysticism; a practical religion, not promising bliss in future, but giving happiness on earth.... To work consciously for the union on earth by religion....
From a letter to the poet Fet in 1898:
I am so different to things of this life that life becomes uninteresting.... I hope you will love me though I be black.
From the fragment There are no guilty people:
There was a time when I tried to change my position which was not in harmony with my conscience, but the conditions created by the past, by my family and its claims upon me, were so complicated that I did not know how to free myself. I had not the strength. Now that I am over eighty and have become feeble I have given up trying to free myself. Strange to say, as my feebleness increases I realize more and more strongly the wrongfulness of my position, and it grows more and more intolerable to me.
On his death-bed at the railroad station Astapovo, November, 1910:
I am tired of this world of men.
Tolstoy’s failure was inevitable, for he had approached life with the uncompromising logic of a child or a god. For fifty years he preached his religion, and during all that time he remained splendidly inconsistent. He opposed private property and proceeded to live on his estate; he had denounced marriage and was a father to thirteen children. Notwithstanding his deadly hatred for the Russian government, he bitterly denounced the liberals and the revolutionists for their “un-Christian” ways of fighting the enemy; but his greatest contradiction, to the joy of the intellectual world, consisted in the victory of the artist over the moralist as manifested in his numerous novels and plays.
The work of Edward Garnett is conscientious and is, to my knowledge, the best short biography of Tolstoy. It was a happy idea to discard the traditional portrait and use a reproduction of Kramskoy’s painting, which dates back to the sixties, if I am not mistaken. It is when looking at this portrait, a great piece of art in itself, that we envisage the author of War and Peace. A few words from the description of Tolstoy’s face by P. A. Terzeyeonvo:
His face was a true peasant’s face: simple, rustic, with a broad nose, a weather-beaten skin, and thick overhanging brows, from beneath which small, keen, grey eyes peered sharply forth.... One instantly divines in Tolstoy a man of the highest society—with polished, unconstrained manners.
... On the one hand an insatiable thirst for power over people, and on the other an unconquerable ardor for inward purity and the sweetness of meekness....
In this chain of seething, imperious instincts linked with delicate spiritual organization lies the profound tragicness of Tolstoy’s personality.
Mr. Garnett succeeds in giving the quintessence of Tolstoy’s works and teachings in less than a hundred pages. Like most of the Russian’s eulogistic biographers, Mr. Garnett has not escaped the fallacy of exaggerating the moral power that Tolstoy exercised over the government. To say that the Czar and his ministers “dared not touch” the outspoken anarchist and heretic “out of dread of Europe—nay, of Russia,” is to reveal one’s ignorance of the brazen defiance displayed by Muscovite autocrats in regard to public opinion. As the Germans put it: “Herr Kossack, schämen Sie sich!” Tolstoy, as a matter of fact, had helped to check the revolutionary spirit of his compatriots in a greater degree than the tyrannic persecutions of Von-Plehve. Had he not appealed time and again to embrace his doctrine of Non-Resistance? Had he not denounced the revolutionists as violent prototypes of their hangers? Could the government see any danger in a man who wrote in The Times during the revolution of 1905: “To free oneself from the government it is only necessary to abstain from participating in it and supporting it. Our consciousness of the law of God demands from us only one thing: moral self-perfection, i. e., the liberation of oneself from all those weaknesses and vices which make one the slave of governments and the participation in their crimes”? Another tragic contradiction of the restless soul of the anarchist who, despite himself, renders aid to the despots.
—Alexander S. Kaun.