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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. But, "I," he summed up, "owe nothing to France." He nodded at me. "You'll see," he predicted. I did not, when the time came, quite see that.
She was only twenty-two, and though her emancipation had been accomplished in its way somewhat in advance of her generation, it had its origin in a very early period of her life, when she had been allowed to read books of verse Shelley, Byron, Shakespeare, Verlaine, Rossetti, Swinburne, and many others unchallenged and unguided.
Leonard Upjohn in his intricate style drew graceful little pictures of Cronshaw in the Latin Quarter, talking, writing poetry: Cronshaw became a picturesque figure, an English Verlaine; and Leonard Upjohn's coloured phrases took on a tremulous dignity, a more pathetic grandiloquence, as he described the sordid end, the shabby little room in Soho; and, with a reticence which was wholly charming and suggested a much greater generosity than modesty allowed him to state, the efforts he made to transport the Poet to some cottage embowered with honeysuckle amid a flowering orchard.
It nestled in the valley along the pleasant Neckar with a comfortable friendliness. The smoke from the chimneys hung over it, a pale blue haze; and the tall roofs, the spires of the churches, gave it a pleasantly medieval air. There was a homeliness in it which warmed the heart. Hayward talked of Richard Feverel and Madame Bovary, of Verlaine, Dante, and Matthew Arnold.
Everything characteristic of Verlaine was expressed in these adorable verses of the Fetes Galantes: Le soir tombait, un soir equivoque d'automne, Les belles se pendant reveuses a nos bras, Dirent alors des mots si specieux tout bas, Que notre ame depuis ce temps tremble et s'etonne
I thought both dull places which nothing save their reputation could have recommended, even to those determined young decadents in London who were no prouder of their friendship with Bibi and Verlaine than of their freedom of the French music-halls, and who wrote of them with a pretence of profound knowledge calculated to épater le bourgeois at home, referring by name with easy familiarity to the dancers in the Quadrille Naturaliste, as celebrated in its way as Bibi in his, and explaining solemnly the chahut and the grand écart and le port d'armes and every evolution in that unpleasant dance.
Hugo's Les Miserables, Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal, the note of pity in Russian novels, Verlaine and Verlaine's poems, the stained glass and tapestries and the quattro-cento work of Burne-Jones and Morris, belong to him no less than the tower of Giotto, Lancelot and Guinevere, Tannhauser, the troubled romantic marbles of Michael Angelo, pointed architecture, and the love of children and flowers for both of which, indeed, in classical art there was but little place, hardly enough for them to grow or play in, but which, from the twelfth century down to our own day, have been continually making their appearances in art, under various modes and at various times, coming fitfully and wilfully, as children, as flowers, are apt to do: spring always seeming to one as if the flowers had been in hiding, and only came out into the sun because they were afraid that grown up people would grow tired of looking for them and give up the search; and the life of a child being no more than an April day on which there is both rain and sun for the narcissus.
But masters of alliterative effects, like Keats, Tennyson and Verlaine, constantly employ alliteration in unaccented syllables so as to color the tone-quality of a line without a too obvious assault upon the ear. The unrhymed songs of The Princess are full of these delicate modulations of sound. "We were the first that ever burst Into that silent sea."
I said like the art of Verlaine, because there is a singular likeness between the two methods. But is not all art a suggestion, an evocation, never a statement? Many of the great forces of the present day have set themselves to the task of building up a large, positive art in which everything shall be said with emphasis: the art of Zola, the art of Mr. Kipling, in literature; the art of Mr.
It is only those who have freed themselves from all prejudice that get close to life, who get the real taste of life the aroma as from a wine that has been many years in bottle. And Verlaine is aware that this is so. Sometimes he thinks he might have written a little more poetry, and he sighs, but he quickly recovers.
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