Dans tous les mouvements bizarres de ma vie,
De mes “malheurs,” selon le moment et le lieu,
Des autres et de moi, de la route suivie,
Je n’ai rien retenu que la grâce de Dieu.’
“But, even in the Poëmes Saturniens, we already meet with pieces of an oddity difficult to define—pieces which seem to belong to a poet who is slightly mad, or perhaps to one who is only half awake, and whose brain is darkened by the fumes of his dreams, or of drink; so that external objects only appear to him through a mist, and the indolence of his memory prevents him from getting hold of the right words. Take this for an example:—
“ ‘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.
Le ciel était gris. La bise pleurait
Ainsi qu’un basson.
Au loin un matou frileux et discret
Miaulait d’étrange et grêle façon.
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.’
“That is all. What is it? It is an impression—the impression of a gentleman who walks about the streets of Paris at night, and thinks about Plato and Salamis, and thinks it funny to think of Plato and Salamis ‘sous l’œil des becs de gaz.’ Why should it be funny? I cannot tell.
“ ‘Aimez donc la raison: que toujours vos écrits
Empruntent d’elle seule et leur lustre et leur prix.’
“One might almost say that Paul Verlaine is the only poet who has never expressed anything but sentiment and sensation, and has expressed them for himself, and for no one else,[356] which dispenses him from the obligation of showing the connection between his ideas, since he knows it. This poet has never asked himself whether he should be understood, and he has never wished to prove anything. This is why (Sagesse excepted) it is almost impossible to give a résumé of his collections, or to state their main idea in a succinct form. One can only characterise them by means of the state of mind of which they are most frequently the rendering—semi-intoxication, hallucination which distorts objects, and makes them resemble an incoherent dream; uneasiness of the soul which, in the terror of this mystery, complains like a child; then languor, mystic sweetness, and a lulling of the mind to rest, in the Catholic conception of the universe accepted in all simplicity.
“There is something profoundly involuntary and illogical in the poetry of M. Paul Verlaine. He scarcely ever expresses movements of full consciousness or entire sanity. It is on this account, very often, that the meaning of his song is clear—if it is so at all—to himself alone. In the same way, his rhythms, are sometimes perceptible by no one but himself. I do not refer here to the interlaced feminine rhymes, alliterations, assonances within the line itself, of which none has made use more frequently or more successfully than he.
“But there are two sides to him. On one, he looks very artificial. He has an Ars Poetica of his own, which is entirely subtle and mysterious, and which, I think, he was very late in discovering:—