BY ARTHUR SYMONS 1915
It was on the 29th of April, 1890, that I first met Verlaine.
I remember the hot night, the caf6 on the Boulevard Saint
Michel where Havelock Ellis and I had been dining with Charles
Morice and a young painter, a friend of his, whose name I forget.
Morice was then the titular apostle of Verlaine; he had written
a book about him which still remains better than anything which
has been written since; and in his other, not less admirable
book, La Litterature de Tout a I'Heure, he had planned out, almost
prophetically, the course that literature was to take just then
in France. Morice had promised to introduce me to Verlaine,
and when dinner was over he turned to me in his gentle and
urbane way, bending his great blond head a little, and pror osed
that we should go on to the Cafe Francois, where Verlaine was
generally to be found. Morice went on talking, as we strolled
in the slow French way up the boulevard, through all the noisy,
hasty gaiety of the hour; he talked as he always did, in his
fluent, ecstatic, rather mad way, full of charm and surprise.
I remember nothing that he said; I don't think I knew at the
time. I was awaiting, with delight and almost terror, my first
sight of the extraordinary creature whom I vaguely expected to
find somewhat in the likeness of his caricature in the Hommes
d'Aujourd'hui?cloven-footed and ending in a green tail. We
passed caf6 after caf6, every terrasse and the whole pavement
filled with students and women. Higher up the crowd dwindled,
and at last we came to the corner of the Rue Gay-Lussac. I
saw the name, Morice pushed open the door, we followed.
And there, in the midst of a noisy, laughing company of
young men, all drinking, I saw Verlaine, like Pan, I thought,
among reveling worshipers. He was smiling benevolently; a
large gray hat pushed back on his head, a white scarf around his
neck, no collar, the shabbiest of clothes. And my first thought,
after a moment's disgust at the company in which he sat, was,
SOME UNPUBLISHED LETTERS OF VERLAINE
BY ARTHUR SYMONS 1915
I
It was in the hope of getting a little money for Verlaine
that a few of us arranged for him to come over to London
and give a lecture in the Hall of Barnard's Inn. The date
was fixed for the evening of November 21st, 1893, and he was
to come over by the night boat on the 19th, and stay with
me in the Temple until he went on to Oxford, where he was
to repeat his lecture. Knowing that Verlaine was not to be
relied on in any matter requiring action, I had written over,
a few days before, to a friend of mine, a young American
man of letters who was living in Paris, begging him to see
that Verlaine was properly started on his journey. He did
not even know him personally, he was busy with journalism,
but I knew no one else on whom I could rely, and I made
the letter very imploring and peremptory. I got a quaint
and humorous reply, which put me quite at my ease.
" I
find myself," wrote my friend,
" the somewhat dazed victim
of an obviously fascinating fatality. This instant your
urgent letter : this instant I reply
i Yes.' I don't know what
you are letting me in for, but you may count on me. . . .
Cheque, directions, amulet to conquer the Evil One, I ex
pect by return of post."
Paul Verlaine
Of all the poets, from Waring to Ernest Dowson, who havelost themselves in the nineteenth century, the most pitiable, the
most pathetic, because in a sense the most helpless, is Paul
Verlaine, the Pauvre L?lian of his own "Poetes Maudits/' As
Fran?ois Copp?e said at his funeral, he had remained a child
to the end. He had only too often done the things which he ought
not to have done, but he did them always suddenly, impulsive
ly, driven on by one of those compelling whims which had so
frequently led him to garrets, to hospital cots, and had thrice
marked him with the brand of the criminal. Yet he believed
in them still; at least, he followed them. Like Kabelais, he
seemed to think that happiness lay at their end, Bon espoir y gist
au fond: but he never found it and he was to be forever disap
pointed. Yet having yielded and having fallen, he would be over
come by the need of confession, and he would tell you all, in
genuously, naively, like a child. The unaccustomed silence of
his room, a sheet of white paper and his pencil, and he would
start his peccavi: a new-found friend and a little absinthe, and
the sad story would have to be recounted. The caf? table became
his confessional, the caf? blotter often his confessor.
This is the secret of his work, of his characteristic verse from
" Saturnian Poems " to
"
uvres Posthumes," of his prose which
he -could not help making autobiographical, as witness the " Con
fessions/' "My Hospitals/' "My Prisons/' "The Memoirs of
a Widower/' even of his one volume of criticism, in which he
could not refrain, mutato nomine, from passing judgment on
himself. He was pent up in his own immediate experience,
hedged in by his own horizon. The noises of the world came to
die at the threshold of his cell, and like the squirrel in the cage
he turned forever the illusive wheel of confession. Illusive,?
for aside from its bringing him an occasional much-needed five
franc piece from his publisher, Vanier, and providing that
catharsis for excess of sorrow which even so sane an artist as
Goethe knew, his written confessions in poetry and his many un
written ones in prose availed him nothing.
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