Yet these mattoids have their man of genius—Verlaine. Let us hear Lemaître on this subject:—
“I imagine he must be almost illiterate. He has a strange head—the profile of Socrates, an enormous forehead, a skull knobbed like a battered basin of thin copper. He is not civilized, he ignores all received codes of morality.
“One day he disappears. What has become of him? It would be in character for him to have been publicly cast out from regular society. I see him behind the grate of a prison, like François Villon—not for having, like him, become an accomplice of thieves and rogues, for the love of a free life, but rather for an error of over-sensitiveness—for having avenged (by an involuntary stab, given, as it were, in a dream) a love reprobated by the laws and customs of the modern and Western world. But, though socially degraded, he remains innocent. He repents as simply as he sinned—with a Catholic repentance, all terror and tenderness, without reasoning, without pride of intellect. In his conversion, as in his sin, he remains a purely emotional being....
“Then, it may be, a woman took pity on him, and he let himself be led like a little child. He reappears, but continues to live apart. No one has ever seen him on the Boulevards, or in a theatre, or at the Salon. He is somewhere at the other end of Paris, in the back-room of a wine-merchant’s shop, drinking blue wine. He is as far from us as if he were an innocent satyr in the great forests. When he is ill, or at the end of his resources, some doctor, whom he knew formerly, when in jail, gets him into the hospital; he stays there as long as he can and writes verses; he hears queer, sad songs whispered to him out of the folds of the cold white calico curtains. He is not a déclassé, for he never had a class. His case is rare and peculiar. He finds means to live, in a civilized society, as he could live in a state of the freest nature.
“It may be that he has sometimes felt for an instant the influence of some contemporary poets, but these have done nothing for him, save to awaken and reveal to him the extreme and painful sensibility which is his whole being. In the main, he is without a master. He moulds language at his will, not, like a great writer because he knows it, but, like a child, because he is ignorant of it. He gives wrong senses to words in his simplicity. Little as we might expect it, this poet, whom his disciples regard as such a consummate artist, writes on occasion (if we may dare to speak out), like a pupil of the technical schools, or a second-rate chemist subject to lyric outbursts. After this, it is amusing to see him while posing as the impeccable artist, the sculptor of strophes, the gentleman who distrusts imagination, write, with the keenest sense of enjoyment:—
“ ‘A nous qui ciselons les mots comme des coupes
Et qui faisons des vers émus très froidement....
Ce qu’il nous faut, à nous, c’est, aux lueurs des lampes,
La science conquise et le sommeil dompté.’
Yet this writer, so wanting in ordinary technical skill, has yet written—I cannot tell how—verses of a penetrating sweetness, a languid charm which is peculiarly his own, and which perhaps arises from a union of these things—charm of sound, clearness of feeling, and partial obscurity in the words. Thus, when he tells us that he is dreaming of an unknown woman, who loves him, who understands him, and weeps with him, he adds:—
“ ‘Son nom? Je me souviens qu’il est doux et sonore,
Comme ceux des aimés que la vie exila.
Son regard est pareil au regard des statues,
Et pour sa voix lointaine, et calme, et grave, elle a
L’inflexion des voix chères qui se sont tues.’
“I am also very fond of the Chanson d’Automne, though certain words (blême and suffocant) are not perhaps used with entire accuracy, and scarcely correspond with the “languor” described just before.