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Nowadays it is only among men of genius a Whitman, a Wagner, a Rodin, a Verlaine that the ancient secret has survived. Not indeed that it was universal even among Renaissance men, not even when they were men of genius. If it is true that, under the influence of Savonarola, Botticelli burnt his drawings, he was false to the spirit of his age, touched by the spirit of Progress before its time.
In order to express the delicate, shifting, and indecisive feelings which he loved so well, Verlaine abolished the last shreds of rhythmical regularity, making his verse a perfectly fluid substance, which he could pour at will into the subtle mould of his feeling and his thought. The result justified the means.
Paul Verlaine regarded as his literary diploma a letter from this ‘Balzac de la critique.’ ” It was there that we sent him a basket of fruit one morning addressed to Mr. Delorme, né Sainte-Beuve. It was there that most of his enormous labor was accomplished. “A curious corner of old Paris that Cour du Commerce! Just opposite his window was the apartment where Danton lived.
"I was often severe with Clarence, and he was a good boy until he got with other boys; he was always loving to me. He never should have married Paula Verlaine," she would add fretfully. "A good woman would have overlooked his faults and made a fine man of him, but she was always an empty-headed little thing!
Look at the last books of Bourget, Rod, Barrès, Desjardin, the poetry of Rimbaud, Verlaine, Heredia, Mallarmé, and even Maeterlinck and his school. What do you find there? The searching for new essence and new form, feverish seeking for some issue, uncertainty where to go and where to look for help in religion or mysticism, in duty outside of faith, or in patriotism or in humanity?
In a word, Richard Strauss is a romantic, and flies the red flag of his faith. He has not followed the advice of Paul Verlaine in taking eloquence by the neck and wringing it. He is nothing if not eloquent and expressive, magnifying his Bavarian song-birds to the size of Alpine eagles.
He is Paul Verlaine. A style like Verlaine's, which is non-sequent, macerated, free, is indispensable to any mastery of the rhetoric of the minor key. This, to me, has always been my literary ideal. From time to time, my friend Azorin attempts to analyse my ideas. I do not pretend to be in the secret of the scales, as such an assumption upon my part would be ridiculous.
He would recite in passionate whispers so as not to awaken Katie for hours at a time, poems from Shakespeare to Shelley, and Verlaine to Whitman, poems tender and sweet, bitter and ironical and revolutionary, just as the mood suited him. His feeling for poetry and nature seemed to grow as his hope for human society grew less.
The quaint chambers have been covered with mural paintings or charcoal caricatures of the poets themselves, or of familiar faces among the clients and patrons of the place. One of the many talents that clustered around this quiet little garden was the brilliant Paul Verlaine, the most Bohemian of all inhabitants of modern Prague, whose death has left a void, difficult to fill.
Its analogies to Poe, Verlaine, Shelley, Keats, Heine and Mickiewicz are but critical sign-posts, for Chopin is incomparable, Chopin is unique. "Our interval," writes Walter Pater, "is brief." Few pass it recollectedly and with full understanding of its larger rhythms and more urgent colors. Many endure it in frivol and violence, the majority in bored, sullen submission.
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