Yes; Verlaine may boast of his faithful loyalty to the "haute théologie et solide morale, guidé par la folie unique de la Croix" of that "Moyen Age énorme et délicat" which inspires his spirit. The fact remains that none—none among all the most infatuated frequenters of the perverse fairy-land of Watteau's exquisite dreams—gives himself up more wantonly to the artifice within artifice, to the mask below mask, of these dancers to tambourines amid the "boulingrins du pare aulique" of mock-classic fantasies. He gives himself up to this Watteau cult all the more easily because he himself has so infantile a heart. He is like a child who enters some elaborate masked ball in his own gala dress. It is natural to him to be perverse and wistful and tragically gay. It is natural to him to foot it in the moonlight along with the Marquis of Carabas.
That Nuit du Walpurgis classique of his, with its "jardin de Lenôtre, correct, ridicule et charmant," is one of the most delicate evocations of this genre. One sees these strange figures, "ces spectres agités," as if they were passing from twilight to twilight through the silvery mists of some pale Corot-picture, passing into thin air, into the shadow of a shadow, into the dream of a dream, into nothingness and oblivion; but passing gaily and wantonly—to the music of mandolines, to the blowing of fairy horns!
N'importe! ils vont toujours, les fébriles fantômes,
Menant leur ronde vaste et morne, et tressautant
Comme dans un rayon de soleil des atomes,
Et s'évaporent a l'instant
Humide et blême où l'aube éteint l'un après l'autre
Les cors, en sorte qu'il ne reste absolument
Plus rien—absolument—qu'un jardin de Lenôtre
Correct, ridicule et charmant.
In the same vein, full of a diaphanous gaiety light as the flutter of dragon-fly wings, is that "caprice" in his Fêtes Galantes entitled Fantoches.
Scaramouche et Pucinella
Qu'un mauvais dessein rassembla
Gesticulent, noirs sur la lune.
Cependant l'excellent docteur
Bolonais cueille avec lenteur
Des simples parmi l'herbe brune.
Lors sa fille, piquant minois
Sous la charmille, en tapinois
Se glisse demi-nue, en quête
De son beau pirate espagnol
Dont un langoureux rossignol
Clame la détresse a tue-tête.
Is that not worthy of an illustration by Aubrey Beardsley? And yet has it not something more naive, more infantile, than most modern trifles of that sort? Does not it somehow suggest Grimm's Fairy Stories?