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Updated: June 20, 2025
One duty the Boulevards of the Left Bank imposed upon us in the Nineties was the search for Verlaine and Bibi-la-Purée, and many another poet for all time and celebrity for the day, in the cafés where they waited to be found and I do not doubt were deeply disappointed if nobody came to find them.
Why, art, outside the fame, was nothing. It did not make for real living. It made for a kind of mental blooming, which everybody recognized, but you could be a poor, sick, hungry, shabby genius you actually could. Look at Verlaine, who had recently died in Paris.
Since we have quoted Browning's apparent criticism of the self-revealing poet, it is only fair to quote some of his unquestionably sincere utterances on the other side of the question. "Art," says Aristotle, "is an imitation of life." "L'art, mes enfants," says the modern poet, speaking through the lips of Verlaine, "c'est d'être absolument soi-même."
He figured mornings given over to music and painting his own; and afternoons of studio-rounds, when fellow-artists would turn him their unfinished canvasses to the light, or would pull away the clinging sheets from their shapes of dampened clay; and evenings when the room would thicken with smoke and tall glasses would make rings on the shining tops of tables, while a dozen agile wits had their own way with Monet and Bourget and Verlaine.
There was a time when Racine was looked upon as old-fashioned, as conventional, as frigid. It is realised nowadays that his verse has cadences like the cadences of Verlaine, that his language is as simple and direct as prose, and that he is one of the most passionate of poets. Of the character of Phèdre Racine tells us that it is "ce que j'ai peut-être mis de plus raisonnable sur le théâtre."
Whatever he sacrificed, it was not actuality. His draughtsmanship never falters, his touch is never infirm. I have seen his portraits of Verlaine, Daudet, Edmond de Goncourt, Geffroy, of the artist himself and many others. The Verlaine is a veritable evocation. It was painted at one séance of several hours, and the poet, it is said, did not sit still or keep silence for a moment.
Sounding scrolls, delicious arabesques gorgeous in tint, martial, lyric, "a resonance of emerald," a sobbing of fountains as that Chopin of the Gutter, Paul Verlaine, has it the tear crystallized midway, an arrested pearl, were overheard in his music, and Europe felt a new shudder of sheer delight.
were Verlaine's, but they are much less original; their beauty, for they are beautiful, is conventional; numbers of poets might have written them, whereas nobody but Verlaine could have written any of his, really his own, poetry.
Swinburne had strummed the skies with every kind of song, and Verlaine had whispered every secret of the senses there was, in the land of illusion and vaguery. Dowson was worshipper of them both, for it was sound first and last that he cared most for, the musical mastery of the one and the sentimentality of the other. He was far nearer Verlaine in type.
This side of his career probably caused Dr. Muther to compare him with Paul Verlaine. Absinthe, the green fairy of so many poets and artists, was no stranger to Guys. In 1885, after dining with Nadar, his most faithful friend, Guys was run over in the Rue du Havre and had his legs crushed.
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