chimeras are winged with light; luck flees or over-abounds; deals concluded, deals broken off, struggle and clash together in disputes; the air burns and paradoxical figures, in flat packages, in heavy bundles, are thrown back, and jolted, and shaken, and worried in these tumults until their weary sums, masses against masses, are broken. On those days when catastrophes happen, Death scrolls them over with suicides, and failures crumble to ruins which flame in exalted obsequies. But the same evening, in the pale hours, wills revive in fever, and the sly fury takes hold again as before. People betray, smile, gnaw, and encompass other deaths. Hate hums like a machine about those whom it assassinates. Men of needy fortune are robbed with authority. Honor is mixed with swindling to lure even nations into the universal madness, the hunt for the burning and infamous gold. Oh, gold! In the distance, like towers in the clouds, like towers upon the steps of illusion! Enormous gold! Like towers in the distance, with millions of arms stretched towards it, with gestures and calls in the night, and the muttering of the universal prayer, from end to end of the horizons of the world! In the distance, cubes of gold upon triangles of gold, and all about, celebrated fortunes mounting upon the scaffoldings of algebras. Gold! to eat and drink gold! and, even more ferocious than the rage for gold, the faith in the mysterious gamble and its dark and hazardous chances, and the certainty of its arbitrary designs to restore the old destiny. Play, terrible axis, where future passion will turn desperately about adventure for the sole pleasure of anomaly, for the sole need of bestiality and frenzy, over there, where laws of terror cross with supreme disorders! Like an upright torso of stone and metal, containing in its unclean mystery the beating and panting heart of the world, the monument of gold stands in the darkness. We know it well, we know it well, To put new plaster instead of the old From the ground-sills up to the edge of the roof. Get you gone, get you gone, The entire inn is for those who come. We venerate those who are dead, Lying in their coffins of oak; We envy those already dead Unconscious of the cries of hate Which leap and bound from plain to plain. Get you gone, get you gone, The entire inn is for those who come. It is our right, it is our right, To put an Eagle on our sign; It is our right, it is our right, To own, according to the law, More than we need of barley and rye. Get you gone, get you gone, Gestures and words mean nothing now. Get you gone, get you gone, And understand, It is our hunger makes our right! PAUL VERLAINE (1844-1896) BY VICTOR CHARBONNEL USTICE, for Paul Verlaine, came only with death. He was assuredly one of the greatest poets of France in the nine teenth century. But the strangeness of his life, and of some parts of his work, injured his glory. Severe critics treated him as "bohemian" and "decadent," and believed they had thus fairly judged him. He was, according to his own expression, "a cursed poet." Only now does time throw over the wrongs of the man and the errors of the writer the forgetfulness necessary to conceal what was not truly noble and glorious. And the name of Paul Verlaine has its place in the luminous train marked by the names of Victor Hugo, Lamartine, Alfred de Musset, Alfred de Vigny, Théodore de Banville, and Leconte de Lisle, across the history of French letters. PAUL VERLAINE Paul Verlaine was born at Metz in 1844. His father was officer of a regiment of engineers in that city. When, in 1851, he retired from the army, he established himself in Paris. The future poet followed him there, and then pursued his classical studies. He scarcely distinguished himself except for an impatient eagerness to read all the poets both ancient and modern. As soon as he had left school, he yielded to his poetic instinct, abandoned the different employments to which they wished to attach him, and joined a group of young poets who had published their first verses with conspicuous success, and who were forming a kind of literary association called the "Parnasse." It was to the Parnasse that in 1866 he carried his initial work, 'Les Poèmes Saturniens.' The book was distinguished for the gracious and harmonious freedom of rhythm, and for a charm of tender melancholy. From that time the young author became the friend of the "Parnassians" of Leconte de Lisle, of Sully-Prudhomme, of Léon Diers, of Catulle Mendès, and especially of François Coppée. In 1867, the Fêtes Galantes' appeared. The novelty and the poetic daring of this work were warmly discussed. Then Verlaine went away from literary environments, and lived a life of mad debauchery. He returned to letters in 1870 with a volume entitled 'La Bonne Chanson,' in which are some of his best pieces. Married to a young girl of sixteen, he made her very unhappy by the eccentricities of his character. Moreover, having allowed himself to be drawn into the revolutionary movement of the Commune of Paris in 1871, he was obliged to leave France and take refuge in London. This separation completed the disunion between the poet and his young wife. Henceforth it was impossible for them to establish a good understanding with each other. This domestic misfortune certainly seems to have been the primary cause of all the miseries and disorders of Verlaine's existence. In his forlorn condition he bound himself in close friendship with a young poet, Arthur Rimbaud. As the two friends were traveling together in Belgium, Paul Verlaine, carried away by a sudden inexplicable fit of wrath, drew a revolver and shot his companion twice. The court of Brussels condemned him to two years' imprisonment. It was then, from 1873 to 1875, that he wrote in the prison of Brussels Romances Sans Paroles'; (Romances Without Words); and that in the prison of Mons, he pondered over the poems which were to compose his masterpiece, 'Sagesse.' This last book was not published, however, until 1881. Meantime Verlaine had exiled himself in England, not having dared to revisit his friends in France, and had earned his living as a teacher of French and of the classics. These years were, he says in the preface of Sagesse' (Wisdom), "six years of austerity, of meditation, of obscure labor." Converted by the good counsels of the chaplain of the Mons prison, there was revived in his spirit the Christian sentiments of his childhood. But, returned to Paris, he abandoned himself to debauchery again, and lived in the greatest distress. His friends gave him some assistance; and when he no longer had bread, or when disease succeeded long privations, he went to the hospital. For fifteen years he was the "poor Lélian.” His work since 'Sagesse' (1881) is quite considerable, and very confused. There are in verse-Jadis et Naguère' (Days Past and Gone: 1885), 'Amour' (Love: 1888), 'Parallèlement' (In Parallels: 1889), 'Dédicaces' (Dedications: 1890), 'Bonheur' (Happiness: 1891). 'Choix de Poésies' (Chosen Poems: 1891), 'Chansons pour Elle' (Songs for Her: 1891), Liturgies Intimes' (Personal Liturgies: 1892), 'Elegies' (1893), 'Odes en Son Honneur' Odes in Her Honor: 1893), 'Dans les Limbes (In Limbo: 1894), 'Epigrammes' (1894), 'Chair' (Flesh: 1896); and in prose-'Les Poètes Maudits' (The Cursed Poets: 1884), 'Memoires d'un Veuf' (Memories of a Widower: 1892), 'Mes Hôpitaux (My Hospitals: 1892), Mes Prisons' (1893), 'Confessions' (1895), 'Quinze Jours en Hollande' (A Fortnight in. Holland: 1895), twenty-six biographies in Les Hommes d'Aujourd'hui' (The Men of To-day). Paul Verlaine died the 8th of January, 1896. His end was without suffering. Death was gentler than life had been to him. All the poets, and the poets only, accompanied his coffin to the church and to the cemetery. He received no official honors. And the noble simplicity of this funeral was a touching spectacle, well befitting “poor Lélian.» Before his tomb, the poet François Coppée thus began his address of farewell to the dead: "Let us bow over the bier of a child; let us respectfully salute the tomb of a true poet." A child in his life, a true poet in his work: such indeed was Paul Verlaine. Like a child, he had a tender heart, a candid and changeable spirit, a weak and capricious character. According to chance, sometimes evil carried him away, and sometimes good. One might almost say that good and evil sprang up within him in a kind of dim half-consciousness, but that he did not do either good or evil. If he had a sinful life, it was a life without perversity. And his repentance, apparently childish, attained the grandeur of holy tears. He remained a child always; and a child whose natural goodness was better than its existence. Even by this he was the poet. Like all true poets, he spoke out the sincerity of his soul. His poetry is a cry of the soul. It is a song of faith, or a complaint; it is the free fancy of a being who is happy or who weeps. By a kind of art, involuntary, spontaneous, and yet refined and supremely delicate, he wrote exquisite little songs; and also the most serious, most Christian poems of this century. Victor Charbonnel. [The following poems by Paul Verlaine are reprinted by permission of Stone & Kimball, publishers.] CLAIR DE LUNE OUR soul is as a moonlit landscape fair, YOUR Peopled with maskers delicate and dim, That play on lutes, and dance, and have an air Of being sad in their fantastic trim. |