Paisiblement:
Rien faire est doux.’
As one vagabond feels himself attracted by other vagabonds, so does one deranged mind feel drawn to others. Verlaine has the greatest admiration for King Louis II. of Bavaria, that unhappy madman in whom intelligence was extinct long before death, in whom only the most abominable impulses of foul beasts of the most degraded kind had survived the perishing of the human functions of his disordered brain. He apostrophizes him thus:
‘Roi, le seul vrai Roi de ce siècle, salut, Sire,
Qui voulûtes mourir vengeant votre raison
Des choses de la politique, et du délire
De cette Science intruse dans la maison,
‘De cette Science assassin de l’Oraison
Et du Chant et de l’Art et de toute la Lyre,
Et simplement et plein d’orgueil et floraison
Tuâtes en mourant, salut, Roi, bravo, Sire!
‘Vous fûtes un poète, un soldat, le seul Roi
De ce siècle …
Et le martyr de la Raison selon la Foi. …’
Two points are noticeable in Verlaine’s mode of expression. First, we have the frequent recurrence of the same word, of the same turn of phrase, that chewing the cud, or rabâchage (repetition), which we have learnt to know as the marks of intellectual debility. In almost every one of his poems single lines and hemistiches are repeated, sometimes unaltered, and often the same word appears instead of one which rhymes. Were I to quote all the passages of this kind, I should have to transcribe nearly all his poems. I will therefore give only a few specimens, and those in the original, so that their peculiarity will be fully apparent to the reader. In the Crépuscule du soir mystique the lines, ‘Le souvenir avec le crépuscule,’ and ‘Dahlia, lys, tulipe et renoncules,’ are twice repeated without any internal necessity. In the poem Promenade sentimentale the adjective blême (wan) pursues the poet in the manner of an obsession or ‘onomatomania,’ and he applies it to water-lilies and waves (‘wan waves’). The Nuit du Walpurgis classique begins thus:
‘Un rythmique sabbat, rythmique, extrêmement
Rythmique.’ …
In the Sérénade the first two lines are repeated verbatim as the fourth and eighth. Similarly in Ariettes oubliées, VIII.:
‘Dans l’interminable
Ennui de la plaine,
La neige incertaine
Luit comme du sable.
‘Le ciel est de cuivre,
Sans lueur aucune.
On croirait voir vivre
Et mourir la lune.
‘Comme des nuées
Flottent gris les chênes
Des forêts prochaines
Parmi les buées.
‘Le ciel est de cuivre,
Sans lueur aucune.
On croirait voir vivre
Et mourir la lune.
‘Corneille poussive,
Et vous, les loups maigres,
Par ces bises aigres
Quoi donc vous arrive?
‘Dans l’interminable
Ennui de la plaine,
La neige incertaine
Luit comme du sable.’
The Chevaux de bois begins thus:
‘Tournez, tournez, bons chevaux de bois,
Tournez cent tours, tournez mille tours,
Tournez souvent et tournez toujours,
Tournez, tournez au son des hautbois.’
In a truly charming piece in Sagesse he says:
‘Le ciel est, par-dessus le toit,
Si bleu, si calme!
Un arbre, par dessus le toit
Berce sa palme.
‘La cloche, dans le ciel qu’on voit,
Doucement tinte.
Un oiseau, sur l’arbre qu’on voit,
Chante sa plainte.’
In the passage in Amour, ‘Les fleurs des champs, les fleurs innombrables des champs … les fleurs des gens,’ ‘champs’ and ‘gens’ sound somewhat alike. Here the imbecile repetition of similar sounds suggests a senseless pun, to the poet, and as for this stanza in Pierrot gamin:
‘Ce n’est pas Pierrot en herbe
Non plus que Pierrot en gerbe,
C’est Pierrot, Pierrot, Pierrot.
Pierrot gamin, Pierrot gosse,
Le cerneau hors de la cosse,
C’est Pierrot, Pierrot, Pierrot!’
it is the language of nurses to babies, who do not care to make sense, but only to twitter to the child in tones which give him pleasure. The closing lines of the poem Mains point to a complete ideational standstill, to mechanical mumbling:
‘Ah! si ce sont des mains de rêve,
Tant mieux, ou tant pis, ou tant mieux.’[130]
The second peculiarity of Verlaine’s style is the other mark of mental debility, viz., the combination of completely disconnected nouns and adjectives, which suggest each other, either through a senseless meandering by way of associated ideas, or through a similarity of sound. We have already found some examples of this in the extracts cited above. In these we find the ‘enormous and tender Middle Ages’ and the ‘brand which thunders.’ Verlaine writes also of ‘feet which glide with a pure and wide movement,’ of ‘a narrow and vast affection,’ of ‘a slow landscape,’[131] of ‘a slack liqueur’ (‘jus flasque’), ‘a gilded perfume,’ a ‘condensed’ or ‘terse contour’ (‘galbe succinct’), etc. The Symbolists admire this form of imbecility, as ‘the research for rare and precious epithets’ (la recherche de l’epithète rare et précieuse).
Verlaine has a clear consciousness of the vagueness of his thoughts, and in a very remarkable poem from the psychological point of view, Art poétique, in which he attempts to give a theory of his lyric creation, he raises nebulosity to the dignity of a fundamental method:
‘De la musique avant toute chose
Et pour cela préfère l’Impair
Plus vague et plus soluble dans l’air,
Sans rien en lui qui pèse ou qui pose.’
The two verbs ‘pèse’ and ‘pose’ are juxtaposed merely on account of their similarity of sound.
‘Il faut aussi que tu n’ailles point
Choisir les mots sans quelque méprise;
Rien de plus cher que la chanson grise
Où l’Indécis au Précis se joint.
‘C’est des beaux yeux derrière des voiles,
C’est le grand jour tremblant de midi,
C’est par un ciel d’automne attiédi,
Le bleu fouillis des claires étoiles!
‘Car nous voulons la Nuance encor,
Pas la Couleur, rien que la nuance!
Oh! la nuance seule fiance