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Updated: July 20, 2025
A precisely contrary tendency marks the poetry of VERLAINE. While Maupassant completely disengaged prose from every alien element of poetry and imagination, pushing it as far as it could go in the direction of incisive realism, Verlaine and his fellow-workers in verse attempted to make poetry more truly poetical than it had ever been before, to introduce into it the vagueness and dreaminess of individual moods and spiritual fluctuations, to turn it away from definite fact and bring it near to music.
Gautier sang to his antique lyre praise of the flesh and contempt of the soul; Baudelaire on a mediæval organ chaunted his unbelief in goodness and truth and his hatred of life. But Verlaine advances one step further: hate is to him as commonplace as love, unfaith as vulgar as faith. The world is merely a doll to be attired to-day in a modern ball dress, to-morrow in aureoles and stars.
Almost worthy of Paul Verlaine who was too 'inspired' to keep either his body or his soul clean. Why was I not a poet! Helas! Fact so much outweighs fancy that it is no longer any use penning a sonnet to one's mistress's eyebrow. One needs to write with thunderbolts in characters of lightning, to express the wonders and discoveries of this age.
He uttered the snort that was his laugh, and 'Baudelaire, he said, 'was a bourgeois malgre lui. France had had only one poet: Villon; 'and two-thirds of Villon were sheer journalism. Verlaine was 'an epicier malgre lui. Altogether, rather to my surprise, he rated French literature lower than English. There were 'passages' in Villiers de l'Isle-Adam.
She dared not look at him, but sat with her head bowed. She could not understand why he got into such a tumult and fury. It made her wretched. She did not like Baudelaire, on the whole nor Verlaine. "Behold her singing in the field Yon solitary highland lass." That nourished her heart. So did "Fair Ines". And "It was a beauteous evening, calm and pure, And breathing holy quiet like a nun."
But he took only a casual interest in its welfare. "My dear Betteridge," he used to say, "if you were aware of the large issues of art and life, you would see that it would be a mere waste of time worrying about such a little thing as discipline in a house. You should widen your intellectual horizon. Read Verlaine and Baudelaire and then see life as it is."
And the best that is in them is what they are interested in, the thing by which they make their living, the thing they've specialized on and sat up days and nights over, and even dreamed about. Imagine Mr. Butler living up to social etiquette and enunciating his views on Paul Verlaine or the German drama or the novels of D'Annunzio. We'd be bored to death. I, for one, if I must listen to Mr.
In the French language, no lapse of time, no succession of ages had taken place; the stained and superb style of the de Goncourts and the gamy style of Verlaine and Mallarme jostled in Paris, living in the same period, epoch and century.
But Mr James and I are agreed on essentials, we prefer character-drawing to adventures. One, two, or even three determining actions are not antagonistic to character-drawing, the practice of Balzac, and Flaubert, and Thackeray prove that. Is Mr James of the same mind as the poet Verlaine "La nuance, pas la couleur, Seulement la nuance, ..... Tout le reste est littérature."
"When Cervantes enjoyed the advantages that you possess, the walls parted and through them cavalcaded the strumpet whose name is Fame. In circumstances equally inspiring Bunyan entertained that hussy. Verlaine too. From a dungeon she lifted him to Parnassus, lifted him to the top. If I only had their luck and yours! It is too good for you. You don't appreciate it.
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