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Updated: June 20, 2025
It was rather late at night before, having vainly hunted for him in his favourite restaurants, I found the narrow, poverty-stricken rue in which Verlaine was living a year or so ago. Passing through a dark courtyard, I had to mount interminable stone stairs, lighting foul French matches as I went, to relieve the blackness. At last I arrived outside his door, very near the sky. I knocked.
I would as soon think of endowing restaurants to enable young men to appreciate caviar, or old Gorgonzola, or game of a peculiarly ``high'' character, as of establishing courses dealing with Villon, Baudelaire, Swinburne, and the like; and when I hear of second-rate critics summoned across the ocean to present to universities which have heard Emerson, Longfellow, Henry Reed, Lowell, Whipple, and Curtis the coagulated nastiness of Verlaine, Mallarm<e'>, and their compeers, I expect next to hear of courses introducing young men to the beauties of absinthe, Turkish cigarettes, and stimulants unspeakable.
Did he know a man capable of appreciating the fineness of a phrase, the subtlety of a painting, the quintessence of an idea, a man whose soul was delicate and exquisite enough to understand Mallarme and love Verlaine? Where and when must he search to discover a twin spirit, a soul detached from commonplaces, blessing silence as a benefit, ingratitude as a solace, contempt as a refuge and port?
How to be happy! not to read Baudelaire and Verlaine, not to enter the Nouvelle Athènes, unless perhaps to play dominoes like the bourgeois over there, not to do anything that would awake a too intense consciousness of life, to live in a sleepy country side, to have a garden to work in, to have a wife and children, to chatter quietly every evening over the details of existence.
For how can a poor dog, loving, devoted, faithful, disgrace the name of a man or an imaginary hero? Pelléas had a great bulging, powerful forehead, like that of Socrates or Verlaine; and, under a little black nose, blunt as a churlish assent, a pair of large hanging and symmetrical chops, which made his head a sort of massive, obstinate, pensive and three-cornered menace.
"Change and absence, for weeks and months, but not divorce. Paula Verlaine should never have divorced Clarence; she made a worse match, if that was possible, and involved three other small lives in the general discomfort. And I never should have married Clarence, because I didn't love him.
After his Romances sans paroles which had appeared in a journal, Verlaine had preserved a long silence, reappearing later in those charming verses, hauntingly suggestive of the gentle and cold accents of Villon, singing of the Virgin, "removed from our days of carnal thought and weary flesh."
Hurd, the pompous and dictatorial Bishop of Worcester, was a dreaded martinet of letters, carrying on the tradition of his yet more formidable master Warburton. As people nowadays discuss Verlaine and Ibsen, so they argued in those days about Godwin and Horne Tooke, and shuddered over each fresh incarnation of Mrs. Radcliffe.
The late M. Verlaine will be cited as a substantiation of the popular idea of the vagabond poet. The Verlaine legend has now been consecrated by his death; and for all time, I suppose, Verlaine will rank with Villon as an impossible person. He may have been all that is said, all that is hinted, even in Mr. George Moore's famous description of him. "I once saw Verlaine.
How to be happy! not to read Baudelaire and Verlaine, not to enter the Nouvelle Athènes, unless perhaps to play dominoes like the bourgeois over there, not to do anything that would awake a too intense consciousness of life, to live in a sleepy country side, to have a garden to work in, to have a wife and children, to chatter quietly every evening over the details of existence.
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