Essays from the Chap-Book

Then the whole was set to the vibration of a new rhythm as strange and as remote from the consciousness of men as the songs of inter-lunar space, so that his utterances with the naturalness of a bird’s song or an infant’s lisp should have the accents of melody undreamed of. And this is not all – strangest and most tragically terrible in its possibilities of pain – the chrism of conscience burns his sinister brow. The phantom of the immortal soul drives him into the outer darkness.

What are the undiscovered laws of spiritual heredity and of a poetic paternity, such as are suggested in the likeness of Baudelaire and Verlaine to their prototype Villon? The secret is yet to find. It is all as strange as the mystery of Bernhardt’s strayed existence in this modern day. An emanation from some Egyptian tomb, wild spirit of genius and of vice is she, vampire-like, inhuman, wandering among a people who have thrilled to her voice and wondered, not knowing whence she came.

Behind them both – Baudelaire with his luminous, despairing eyes, and Verlaine with his terrible glabrous head – the madcap figure of Villon shines out of a cloud of time, and we hear the sound of his reckless laughter and the music of his tears.

But if the relation between these two moderns and this singing renegade of the Middle Ages is that of mysterious paternity, between Baudelaire and Verlaine there is a brotherhood which is as wonderful as an oriental dream of metempsychosis.

Baudelaire’s verses, read in early youth, so saturated and possessed the new-born soul of Paul Verlaine that he became more a reincarnation of Baudelaire than a separate existence. The passions and the madness of Baudelaire became his own – he heard the same strange music – saw the same visions. Incarnate of the mad poet, Verlaine, his second soul, fled a second slave in the footsteps of the same strange goddess – beauty in decay.

And where one had madly followed, so the other fled, enamoured of her fatal loveliness, wherever her fickle steps should lead. Sometimes she would escape them, disappearing in mists and mysterious darkness, and sometimes they would come upon her suddenly in glimpses of green light, dancing strange frivolous steps, and the color of her robes would be mingled rose and mystic blue, and the halo of her head the phosphor of decay.

And she has led them through strange paths into the dwelling-place of death, and where love and life live together, for these two are never separated, and, through many places of terror and delight, to that ultimate spot, occult, remote, where dwells the soul of woman.

There the youngest of her slaves found himself one day outstripping his brother, and saw with living eyes the mystery, – and thenceforward he was no more Paul Verlaine; he was the prophet and interpreter of woman.

To him alone has the secret been revealed; to him alone, the mantle of deceit she wears, the slavish dress of the centuries, is no concealment. He has seen, has known, and he understands. “The very worst thing in the world,” says an unknown writer, “is the soul of a woman.” Forced to inaction, and fed on lies, her principal power, founded on man’s weakness, curiosity, and the imagination of the intellect, lead her in many wandering ways. Tasting but few of the actual joys, the triumphs, and the trials of life, from the harem of her slavery her fancy has wandered with the winds. In her mind the unique and fatal experimenter, she has known all crimes, all horrors, as well as martyrdoms and joys. And this, while her gentle feminine hands have ministered to suffering, her voice has cheered, her smile has illumined, and her divine patience has endured.

Consider these lines – their spiritual intuition is the parallel of Wordsworth in his limpid moods; their knowledge, like a single glow of summer lightning, illumines all the darkened land as the glimmering patient light of Bourget’s candle in cycles of encyclopedics will never do.

Behold the woman!

“Beauté des femmes, leur faiblesse et ces mains pâles,
Qui font souvent le bien et peuvent tout le mal.”

The appealing weakness of women is the first note, invariably stronger than command – and then the reference to their hands. This is very characteristic of Verlaine – they haunt him.

“Les chères mains qui furent miennes,
Toutes petites, toutes belles.”

…

“Mains en songes – main sur mon âme.”

The last is a very poignant line – and again in “Ariettes Oubliées,” —

“Le piano que baise une main frêle.”

Then comes the reflection as to the eyes of women, profoundly true and observant, contained in the last two verses of the first stanza: —

“Et ces yeux où plus rien ne reste d’animal
Que juste assez pour dire ‘assez’ aux fureurs mâles!”

Then the next stanza: —

“Et toujours, maternelle endormeuse des râles,
Même quand elle ment – .”

Here is the creature who could be both nurse and courtesan – concise and convincing classification.

Then he continues relating how, as man as well as poet, he has vibrated to the clear soprano of

“Cette voix! Matinal
Appel, ou chant bien doux à vêpres, ou frais signal,
Ou beau sanglot qui va mourir au pli des châles!..”

How he has dreamed over the tender sentiment of her twilight song, and been melted and conquered by the still greater, more beautiful appeal of the emotional soul for love and understanding, – “beau sanglot” indeed!

Then comes the wonderful third stanza, and its denunciation of man’s brutality and selfishness.

“Hommes durs! Vie atroce et laide d’ici-bas!
Ah! que du moins, loins des baisers et des combats,
Quelque chose demeure un peu sur la montagne.”

Here is the appeal for sentiment, for the love of the spirit, choked in the throats of dumb and suffering women.

“Quelque chose du cœur,” he repeats and persuades, “enfantin et subtil.”

“Bonté, respect! car qu’est-ce qui nous accompagne,
Et vraiment, quand la mort viendra, que reste-t-il?”

From him, the convict poet, from this heart rotten with all the sins of fancy and of deed, bursts this plea – as naive as it is earnest, for the spiritual in love – for sentiment, the essence of the soul. Strange anomaly – stranger still that it should be he who has understood.

Three lines more, from an early poem called “Vœu,” of such condensed significance and biting truth as lacks a parallel.

“O la femme à l’amour câlin et rechauffant,
Douce, pensive et brune, et jamais étonnée,
Et qui parfois vous baise au front, comme un enfant.”

What a portrait, typical and individual – “jamais étonnée,” my sisters, what an accusation!

…

Verlaine is dead. The last shred of that ruined soul which has for years been rotting away in chance Parisian brasseries, has loosened its hold upon life and slipped into the unknown; but the poetry he has left behind him, with its sighs and bitter sobbings, and its few gleams of beauty and of joy, contains the essence of his strange nature.

Although repudiating the responsibility of the position, he was the founder and leader of that school of poetic expression which has most importantly distinguished the end of his century.

Half faun, half satyr, his nature was allied to baseness and brutal animalism, but possessed a strange and childish naïveté which remained with him to the last, and a spirit remotely intact in the chaos of his wayward senses, whence issued songs of matchless purity and inimitable music.

Degeneration

By

Alice Morse Earle

DEGENERATION

I WRITE this paper as a solemn, an earnest warning, an appeal to the unsuspecting and serene general public not to read Dr. Max Nordau’s book “Degeneration.” I give this word of admonition with much the same spirit of despairing yet powerless misery as might animate the warning of any slave to a despised habit, a hashish-eater, an opium smoker, an alcoholic inebriate. I have read this book of Dr. Nordau’s, and through it I am become the unwilling victim of a most deplorable, most odious, most blighting habit, – that of searching for degenerates. I do not want or like to do this, but I do it instinctively, mechanically. The habit has poisoned all the social relations of my life, has entered into my views of the general public; it has sapped my delight in novelty, choked my admiration of genius, deadened my enthusiasm, silenced my opinions; and it has brought these wretched conditions not only into my regard of matters and persons of the present times, but retrospectively it has tainted the glories of history. All this is exceeded by the introspective blight of the book through exacting a miserable and mortifying self-examination, which leads to the despairing, the unyielding conclusion that I am myself a degenerate.