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: