Without question certain words in these lines, somewhat veiled by the poetic form of expression, harmonize with the fundamental conceptions of modern impressionistic lyric poetry. France never was the land of pure emotional poetry. There is too much sense of the formal, too much of a keen-sighted almost mathematical type of intellect mingled with a gallant pleasure in pointedness among the French, and these make them turn into logic the elements of mysticism which must be in every poem, whether in its emotional content or its vague form of expression. Goethe has proclaimed the incommensurable as the material of all poetry, but among the French the tendency to crystallize it in the solution of their positivist habit of thought is ever imperceptibly betrayed. The feeling for the line and style shows through. For them poetry is architecture; intuition, their intellectual formula; the marble of conceptions is their material, and rhyme the mortar.
Clarity and orderly arrangement are the preliminary conditions for Victor Hugo, for the Parnassians and even for Baudelaire, even though the latter, by his visionary form and the opiate of his dark words, created for the first time solemn, that is to say poetical, impressions instead of those of pomp alone. It seems therefore an error to look for the revolutionary tendency and literary importance of a Verlaine in the looseness of his verse structure and more careless (or intentionally careless) use of rhyme. His merit is rather that he was able to illume chaos, darkness, and presentiments by the very indefiniteness and the vague music of his soul. This enabled him to endue his poems with their mystical trembling melody, not by abstracting his inner music in definite melodies, but by fixing it in assonance, rhymes and rhythmic waves.
Unconsciously he recognized that lyric art is the most immaterial of all and is most nearly related to music. Its aërial trembling and immateriality may meet the soul in waves of glowing fire, but intellectually it is unseizable. He tried to preserve this musical element by means of harmony and assonance, but it was not he himself so much as the unconscious gift of poetry that played mysteriously in him and made him find the fundamental secret of lyric effects. Émile Verhaeren, the only other French poet who is a more vehement and constructive character, sought and found the musical element of lyric poetry by the only other way, that is, in verbal rhythm or consonantal music. Thus to volatilize the material simultaneously in the form and to join the technical with the intuitive elements is the highest quality of lyric poetry. It makes it immediate, organic, that is to say, its spiritual elements permeate the material in immanent reaction, and thus the mystery of life is renewed in individual artifacts. Self-evidently this intuitive recognition is no discovery. It has been present in the great lyric poets of all time, a mystery like that of sexual reproduction, which awakens only at the age of ripeness. It was new in France only because, besides Villon, Verlaine was the first lyric genius of the French.
The mystery of the German folk-song with its simple, sweetly mysterious essence became realized in him, perhaps because there was an undercurrent of national relationship. Because of the weakness, submissiveness and child-like confusion of his emotionality, the vibrations became tonality, sound and, because he was a poet, music, instead of intellectual structures.
Such art must be more effective as contrasted with all intellectualism because it springs from deeper sources, just as simple weeping is more eloquent than passionate wailing aloud. Surely it also contains an artificial element, not artistry, but magic art, or the “alchemy of the word” which Rimbaud believed to have discovered, a relationship between colors, vowels and sounds depending on idiosyncrasy. It is a secret touching of the ultimate roots of different stems. It is always necessary to assume an inter-relation between lyricism and the lawless, enigmatic and magic elements of the human soul and to associate vague threshold emotions with soft music.
Verlaine's poetry during his creative period possesses this vagueness, which is like a voice in the dark or music of the soul. It also has the lack of coherence which emotions must have when they sweep in halting pain through the body. This element must remain incomprehensible to commercially sharp intelligences of the type of Max Nordau, who try in a way to subtract the net value of purely intellectual elements and “contents” which could be reduced to prose from the gross value of poems. Lyricism is magic and the precious possession of a spiritual communion which finds its deepest enjoyment in just these almost impalpable elements.
To limit the most important element of Verlaine's significance to his neglect of rhyme is showing poor judgment. In the first place it is unimportant and secondly incorrect, for he never wrote a poem without rhyme, except in the later unworthy years, when now and then he substituted assonances. In addition he has himself protested in L'Hommes d'Aujourd'hui:
“In the past and at present too I am honored by having my name mingled with these disputes, and I pass for a bitter adversary of rhyme because of a selection published in a recent collection.—Besides absolute liberty is my device if it were necessary for me to have one—and I find good everything which is good in despite and notwithstanding rules.”
To many it was insufficient to celebrate Verlaine as one of the marvels of a nation, a truly elemental human being whose soul uttered the finest and most tender lyric moods and who, as if awakened out of bell-like and clear dreams, produced true and melodic poetry out of the darkness of his life. His admirers have also praised him as a prose writer. But the prose-writer must be an intellectual creator, and know how to master form. This Verlaine was unable to do. He never really understood the world, and knew only how to tell of himself, and accordingly his novelettes are for the most part concealed autobiographies. They have brilliant portions of characterization. His intellect, which is paradoxical, self-willed, lyrical, and abrupt, flashes up and then crumbles.
His Confessions, which have been highly praised, remind one of Rousseau's all too confidential and hypocritical confessions. They are only documents of personal sharp-sightedness, unfortunately much over-clouded by literary pose. He also tried the theatre. His comedy, Les Uns et les Autres, has Watteau-like style and Pierrot elegances, as well as flexibility, but is of no importance. Another play, Louis XVI, remained a fragment. All Verlaine's literary productions, like biographies, introductions, etc., give a painful impression because they are forced and have sprung from evil camaraderie.