[In the following essay, Peyre stresses the popular origins and appeal of Verlaine's poetry.]

The extraordinary prestige which, after almost a hundred years, French Symbolism continues enjoying in half a dozen countries is a puzzling phenomenon for the observer of the literary scene. For, despite a few superficial appearances and occasional (often misleading) allusions in Symbolist manifestoes to Hegel, Schopenhauer, Shelley, Poe or Emerson, no movement was so exclusively French as that which underlay the poetry of Verlaine, Rimbaud, Laforgue, Mallarmé himself, and later Claudel and Valéry. The doctrine of French Classicism had acquired its own self-awareness through Italian and Spanish commentaries on Aristotle and Horace. The Romantics of France had generously invoked the precedents of Shakespeare, Schiller, Byron and Walter Scott. But Tristan Corbière, the adolescent Rimbaud, the Verlaine who had, at thirty-one, been released from prison, and the Mallarmé of “The Faun” owed little, if anything, to foreign examples. None of them ever guessed, before 1885 or thereabout, that he would some day be linked with a group called “Symbolist.” Neither Rimbaud nor Verlaine, not Laforgue and not even Mallarmé until late in his career, claimed the title, or the label, of “Symbolist.”

If the occasional use of esoteric symbols was to become one of the features (though not necessarily the most admirable one) of Mallarmé's poetry, Verlaine never aspired to any such profundity. Not a word remotely hinting at any privileged position granted to symbols (or to allegories, as Baudelaire had also called them) was whispered in Verlaine's celebrated “Art poétique.” The playful requirements laid down by the poet, legislating from his Belgian prison (though he published the piece only later, in 1882) were for music above all else, ambiguity and nuance as a means of preserving mystery, airy lightness of touch and the avoidance of eloquence. Those indeed are the qualities which we still cherish today in most of the best work by the Symbolists of France and other countries.

Pedantry and pretentiousness will abound in the rarefied diction and far-fetched imagery of much poetry composed during the age of Symbolism. The use of calculated riddles parading as symbols often characterizes, and mars, verses appearing in fervent little magazines. Deliberate and often altogether unnecessary obscurity then became the hallmark of a poetry which eschewed all that seemed to be carnal; it preferred to conjure up ethereal Sylphids and languorous virgins kissing only with their souls.

The surfeit of purity soon palled upon the readers of verse and brought gentle ridicule upon the movement. Before the century came to a close, a group which called itself “les Naturistes,” others who claimed to be neo-romantics (Anna de Noailles, Verhaeren), vociferous Nietzscheans who welcomed the confusion and the brutality of life in the raw with an “everlasting yea,” all turned their backs upon the cult of purity and of aristocratic spirituality of many a minor Symbolist. Soon others, who called themselves “Unanimists,” spurned the selfishness of souls indulging their solitary dreams and insisted on finding a new mystical nourishment from merging in the crowds; sociology would provide a new para-religious excitement. The French, in their poetry and painting, have seldom chosen to dwell long with Platonic love or pre-Raphaelite dreaminess. We wish here to center our remarks around another facet of the poetry written at the very time when over-refined Symbolists were contemptuous of what was simple, concrete, and, as a favorite French adjective puts it, naïve. Verlaine remains as the most felicitous master of that type of popular poetry which the bourgeois French public relishes, but inwardly disapproves of, in the songs of Maurice Chevalier, Edith Piaf or even Jacques Prévert.

In the Renaissance, the French had often composed songs, ballads, and madrigals which, like some of the lyrics in Shakespeare's plays or, later, those of Thomas Campion, were sung to the accompaniment of the lute. As their classical literature took over in the era of Boileau and Racine, pure lyricism became dried up. Much to the regret of the subsequent students of poetry, the France of Louis XIV, and already that of Malherbe, adopted Latin poets as their models. None of those poets of the Augustan age, from Lucretius to Ovid, not even Horace and the Virgil of the Eclogues, had addressed himself to the common man, spun fairly tales for children or aimed at popular musical effects. Even Ovid's stories of the metamorphoses of humans into gods or of goddesses into women and Horace's eulogies of wine and of playful ladies had scant appeal for those readers who did not belong to a fairly sophisticated elite. The lack of any vivid children's literature in Latin has weighed regrettably upon generations of Western youths whose imagination failed to be stimulated by the reading of Ciceronian prose forced upon them through years of grammatical drudgery.

Almost miraculously, at any rate paradoxically, popular songs such as “Malbrough s'en va t en guerre” and nursery rhymes or their French equivalent flourished during the Age of Enlightenment at the very time when the literary poets themselves cultivated prosaic rationality and polished elaborate periphrases on seasons, gardens and pseudo-Greek nymphs. Then the romantics, while claiming to put an end to poetic diction and to abolish all distinction between noble and non-noble terms, selected as their favored poetic forms sermons in verse (called “meditations” or “contemplations”), nocturnal dialogues with a Muse, descriptive pieces, epic impersonations of Moses, Samson, or Christ with Vigny, eloquent addresses to dark abysses with Hugo or political invectives against tyrants. The songs played on a Spanish guitar by Gastilbelza in Hugo's Les Rayons et les Ombres, or his spirited invitation from a lover on horseback to his lady in “Eviradnus” remain highly literary feats of a virtuoso bard. André Breton surprisingly bestowed high praise on a song by Alfred de Musset (the fifteen lines of “A Saint Blaise, à la Zuecca” of February 3, 1834) in his 1936 essay “Le merveilleux contre le mystère” (in La Clé des Champs). There indeed and in a few felicitous pieces like his “Chanson de Fortunio,” Musset proved to be, along with Gérard de Nerval, the only French poet before Verlaine who recaptured the delicately simple magic of popular poetry.

Among the French poets of the nineteenth century, Nerval was the one who had the subtlest ear for music and a genuine taste for the simple and apparently naive rhythm of popular poetry. In one of his most touching pieces, “Fantaisie,” he evoked an old tune which brought back to his memory nostalgia for the early seventeenth century: visions of castles in the style of Louis XIII, of a lady in old-fashioned dress, fair haired and black eyed, and fond dreams of having once enjoyed that vision in some earlier life. In several prose fragments, Nerval collected and transcribed the texts of folk songs from his favorite French province, the Valois, North-East of Paris. He protested against the disdain in which those who make literary opinion hold those songs sung by shepherds, carters, nurses and housemaids; rules of versification and of grammar may be disregarded in them; a non-existent “z” is freely inserted after “j'ai” or “il y a” by popular instinct (“j'ai z'un coquin de frère,” “Il y a z'un pommier”). Washer-women at the river, peasant-girls tossing hay, mariners on their barges, sang those delicate bits of poetry which delighted children and helped country people while the time away. The best, however, of Nerval's own mysterious poetry derives none of its inspiration or its music from those songs which he touchingly preserved. His verse has a music of its own, haunting and mysterious, which entrances the listener or the reader, while the enigmatic content of the legendary and mythological allusions exalts those sonnets to the level of the epic.

Although Baudelaire pondered over the relationship of poetry to music, composed a number of pieces on wine, and wrote one of the most skillful and melodious love poems in the language, “Le Jet d'Eau,” he was too concerned with his own tragic anguish ever to draw his inspiration from the so-called common people. The Breton Tristan Corbière, who died at thirty and was placed by Verlaine foremost among the “accursèd poets,” is the only one among his predecessors to have composed poetry which is close to the common man. Perhaps because it touches too exclusively on Breton themes and on the sea of which the French public has always kept shy, more probably because it hides its sentimentality under sarcasm and bitterness, Corbière's poetry has only won popularity among sophisticated readers. Verlaine thus remains the unequalled master of what the best symbolist writer on the subject, Robert de Souza, called, aptly linking the two elements in the title of his 1898 book, La Poésie populaire et le Lyrisme sentimental.

A tenuous line indeed divides sentiment or feeling from sentimentality and from that embarrassing display of emotion which the French call sensiblerie. There had lurked a dangerous indulgence in restrainedly expressing, and thereby exaggerating, one's feelings in the letters, occasionally (as with George Sand) in the novels, and (with Lamartine and Musset) in the verse of the romantics. Their forerunners, Diderot, Rousseau and Chateaubriand, had too readily taught them the virtue of tears. With the middle of the nineteenth century, men of letters and painters had turned more squeamish about laying their hearts bare and had posed as impassive and haughty scorners of the common herd which expects its artists to be its entertainers. Bitterly, self-deprecatingly, painters and poets, from Banville and Mallarmé to Rouault and Picasso, will present their own symbolic image through that of the clown. Tired of the pose of proud detachment affected by the Parnassians, fearful of dehumanizing art through the exclusion of all personal emotion, the French poets of the Symbolist or pre-Symbolist generations endeavored to restore both sentiment and a popular note into their verse.

Very few succeeded. French geography, French history and the age-old administrative and intellectual predominance of Paris seem to have conspired to relegate to a minor role both the literature of the provincial “terroir” and that which draws its theme and its tone from the so-called lower classes. Among the former, commendable poets from Britanny (like Maurice Bouchor, who composed verse to be sung with music), or from Provence or the South West, often resorted to their “langue d'oc” in its several dialects while others from the Walloon districts of Belgium revived the rustic songs of their regions. There seems to have remained a lack of passion and of verbal felicitousness in their ballads, the same failure of the power to universalize their local impressions and memories as has kept the French provincial novel from reaching greatness. The first rate portrayal of “provincial manners” in fiction was achieved most lastingly by authors born in the provinces, but who gained aesthetic distance from their place of birth: Balzac, Flaubert, Daudet, Zola, Maupassant. Other late nineteenth century poets took up the careers of tramps, chose to live as outlaws impatient with all academic and Parisian restraints, indulging their fancy. Their type of hero rejecting bourgeois life and shouting “A nous la liberté!” has scored genuine success on the screen, in the films of René Clair among others. It has climaxed in the exaltation of independence and in the affectation of coarseness and colorful language most conspicuous in Céline's early fiction. With Jean Genet, Emile Ajar (the Goncourt winner of 1975), that Rabelaisian vein has become a prolific one in the France of 1970-80, eager to shake off its bourgeois heritage and now stubbornly reluctant to let the talents from the masses be recuperated by the establishment through the uniformity of literary education.

The peril for the kind of would-be popular literature lies in its temptation to yield to a loose and almost coarse licentiousness which goes by the name of “grivoiserie”: it originally applied to mercenary soldiers who were compared to the “grive” (or thrush), for being quarrelsome and predatory like that bird. It verges on obscenity, but it does not wallow in it and it usually retains some sense of humor and biting irony. In poetry, that style flourished alongside Symbolism but in different circles (“Le Chat noir,” “Les Hydropathes”), as an antidote to the ethereal, disembodied flights of overrefined singers. The language was racy, often crude, colorful, with not a few infusions of slang and of the lingo of apaches and pimps. Jean Richepin, who was fifty when the century died and who then lived for three more decades, ending up as a member of the French Academy, remains the outstanding representative of that popular poetry. He had served a time in jail, which accrued to his prestige and inevitably led to the comparison with another “gueux” of four centuries earlier, Villon. He had been a friend of Rimbaud and of another companion of Verlaine, Germain Nouveau. However, posterity in the end turns out to be the almost exclusive monopoly of professors and authors of histories of literature. Richepin, like Albert Glatigny who preceded him, Jehan Rictus who was his contemporary, and Jacques Prévert among his successors, has been, for all practical purposes, left out from anthologies of poetry, where almost any refined singer of dreams and of blessed damozels finds himself welcomed.

The re-evaluation of Verlaine among the poets of the latter half of the nineteenth century has been among the striking features of shifting taste. With the English, American, Russian, Japanese readers, Verlaine had always been a favorite: their taste apparently went to the peculiar, and to them, enchanting music of this French poet and to the elementary simplicity of the feelings expressed in this verse. The French academics on the other hand, and many of the American professors who tend to be swayed by the critical pronouncements formulated in Paris, affected for a time to immolate Verlaine either to Rimbaud or to Mallarmé. The challenging difficulties of Mallarmé's diction and his tortuous and often tortured syntax offer a far richer scope to ingenious commentators than Verlaine's appearance of naiveté. Professors, parading in front of their class or eager to dazzle their peers in learned discussion groups, have naturally preferred to attempt far-fetched interpretations of the Illuminations or of Mallarmé's later sonnets. But Rimbaud's most devout worshipper, Paul Claudel, knew better and repeatedly lauded Verlaine, in verse and in prose.

Paul Valéry, who has too glibly been associated with Mallarmé (whose lesson he hailed while seldom, if ever, following it), claimed in his very last days, a rank second to none for Verlaine. Earlier, in an essay, he warned his readers to cease fancying that Verlaine was a “naive” or “a primitive poet.”¹

That so called naive poet is a primitive who is organized, a primitive such as never existed, who proceeds from a very skillful and highly conscious artist. … There never was an art more subtle than that art, which implies that its practitioner flees from an earlier one, not at all that it precedes it.

The exquisite simplicity of the most popular among Verlaine's songs is the outcome of very careful elimination of all intellectual elements, of any attempt to analyze or to justify the feelings of the poet. Inevitably, the majority of those brief, deftly melodious songs express Verlaine's grief at his feeling spurned by his young wife (whom he had deserted in order to follow Rimbaud), at his confinement in the Belgian prison and his remorse, mostly at his conviction that his incurable lack of will power doomed to failure all his endeavors to reform. The best ones rank among the most memorable pieces in the whole range of French poetry: “O triste, triste était mon âme” in Romance sans paroles (1874), the four stanzas composed in prison, resigned, discreet, with their muffled sobbing and their limpid purity; “Le ciel est, par-dessus le toit,” and perhaps the most supremely tragic of all, in Sagesse, from which all artifice, all extraneous ornament is banished, “Un grand sommeil noir.” The original title of this last, tragic twelve-line song was “Berceuse.” In it and through it, the wretched poet was allaying his own sorrowful and childish remorse.

But the poetry of joy is much rarer than that of pain. More courage is required from those who attempt it. Unless the joy stems from religious exultation or from the experience of mutual love, it runs the peril of sounding vulgar and selfish. Few pieces of poetical literature have ever proved as commonplace and stilted as the many thousands of odes, ballads, rondels and other bacchic songs celebrating wine-drinking. Verlaine certainly did not eschew vulgarity in the many facile pieces which, in his later years, he poured out in Invectives, Chair (Flesh) and collections of hasty and cheap verse scribbled between one hospital and another. But in a few of his earlier volumes he had slipped a few songs in racy language and intoxicating rhythm which stand as close to popular poetry—half sentimental, half waggish in their banter—as any left by the last century.

The four poems which we would single out as among the most original masterpieces of that type of verse are all to be found in Verlaine's richest volume, mostly composed during his years of incarceration and published in 1874. Their language and the subtleties of their sounds and rhythms have been superbly analyzed in Eleonore Zimmermann's study, Magies de Verlaine (1967). The first one is entitled “Streets,” with its original title also in English. It was inspired by the stay in London when the two poets, Verlaine and Rimbaud, roamed in Soho and enjoyed the dances around Greek street. The refrain, five times recurring, is a five-syllable line with a feminine rhyme, a spirited invitation to join the dance: “Dansons la gigue!” The stanzas themselves are made up of three octosyllabic lines, with four sets of three masculine rhymes each, in “yeux,” “ent,” “eur” and “iens.” The first two stanzas ingeniously blend the exclamation of the refrain with a nostalgic and discreetly mournful memory of a female dance partner: her mischievous eyes, clear and entrancing, her manners charmingly or unpredictably cruel and the repetition of the colloquial adverb “vraiment” in the second stanza. The tone turns even more melancholy with the third stanza, with its blend of colloquial language (“le baiser de sa bouche en fleur”) and of poetical style (“morte à mon coeur”); the phrase and the meaning are ambiguous: either the anonymous woman has forgotten all about her partner of a few hours or he has passed on to other loves and, in any case, to another country, where he is held captive by mysterious forces. All that is left of past happiness is the memory of sweet talks (“entretiens”) now invading the realm of thought and dream. In a final line, akin to a well known final stanza of Musset's “Tristesse,” Verlaine, in the simplest of terms, states how much he treasures that memory: “Et c'est le meilleur de mes biens.” The five-syllable refrain echoes once again the invitation to dance: within movement and the lulling rhythm of steps and gyrations, weighty thoughts will be displaced by harmony and dream.

Dansons la gigue!
J'aimais surtout ses jolis yeux,
Plus clairs que l'étoile des cieux,
J'aimais ses yeux malicieux.
Dansons la gigue!
Elle avait des façons vraiment
De désoler un pauvre amant,
Que c'en était vraiment charmant!
Dansons la gigue!
Mais je trouve encore meilleur
Le baiser de sa bouche en fleur,
Depuis qu'elle est morte à mon coeur.
Dansons la gigue!
Je me souviens, je me souviens
Des heures et des entretiens,
Et c'est le meilleur de mes biens.
Dansons la gigue!
Let us dance the gig!
I loved above all her pretty eyes,
Clearer than the star in the skies,
I loved her mischievous eyes.
Let us dance the gig!
Truly she had such a way
Of distressing a poor lover,
That it became truly charming!
Let us dance the gig!
But even better is to me
The kiss of her lips in bloom,
Since she died to my heart.
Let us dance the gig!
I remember, I remember
The hours and the talks gone by,
And that is my best possession.
Let us dance the gig!

The desired lightness of motion and emotion is there; but, almost inadvertently, the presence of thought, tinged by regret, has been insinuated. “Let us dance the gig” contains at the end an echo of remembrance more than an invitation to joy.

“Bruxelles—Chevaux de bois,” composed close to Brussels at or near a fair, uses a rhythm recalling the noisy spiraling of a merry-go-round. It is too long to be given here in full, but the obsession is again that of wildly spinning around and feeling giddy in the head and pleasantly forgetful of all constraint. The poet himself does not take part in the round. He amusedly observes the soldier and the maid who are enjoying their holiday; he is the thief who slyly watches the scene. He multiples the obsessive sound “ou” (“tournes,” “tours,” “souvent,” “toujours”); he shifts from colloquial or popular language in the fourth stanza to the last one which evokes the night new descending, the young couple leaving the fair together and a final suggestion of the mechanical music still resounding under a sky which may serve as a canopy for the two lovers.

Tournez, tournez! Le ciel en velours
D'astres en or se vêt lentement.
Voici partir l'amante et l'amant.
Tournez au son joyeux des tambours.
Go round, go round! The velvet sky
Slowly dresses in golden stars.
There go off the two lovers.
Go round to the joyful sound of the drums!

Seldom has the nine-syllable line been as variously and richly used by a French poet. It is no wonder that the piece has inspired composers (Charpentier, Debussy) to set it to music.

A third example may be offered. It perhaps constitutes the most genuine approximation of an authentic popular song by any French poet of the age which we like to call that of Symbolism. Once again Verlaine resorted to an English title, as he did repeatedly in those short poems which he mailed from London to his French friends who might publish them in their reviews.

A POOR YOUNG SHEPHERD.

J'ai peur d'un baiser
Comme d'une abeille.
Je souffre et je veille
Sans me reposer.
J'ai peur d'un baiser!
Pourtant j'aime Kate
Et ses yeux jolis.
Elle est délicate
Aux longs traits pâlis.
Oh! que j'aime Kate!
C'est Saint-Valentin!
Je dois et je n'ose
Lui dire au matin …
La terrible chose
Que Saint-Valentin
I fear a kiss
As I do a bee.
I grieve and I watch
And never resting.
I fear a kiss!
Yet I love Kate
And her pretty eyes.
She is delicate
With long pale features.
Oh! how I love Kate!
St. Valentine day!
I must, yet dare not
Tell her at morn …
A terrible thing
Valentine day is!

This poem remains one of the most genuinely gay written by Verlaine, removed from subtle identification of the poet with the shepherd, or the looming presence of regret. Here the poet has stripped himself both of the genteel sophistication of his Fêtes Galantes, and of the earthy language and slight vulgarity of some of his other popular pieces. He renders simply, and in poignant tone, the dreamy hesitation of a shepherd at the threshold of his first kiss. The naiveté and simplicity are, like those of Villon and of La Fontaine, the result of much conscious art. Through that art, and while retaining much innocence amid his calculated devices, Verlaine is unique among the French poets of the last three centuries in that he can be enjoyed equally by the sophisticated and by the artless.

Note

1. One of the shrewdest and wisest commentators of modern French poetry, the Australian critic James Lawler, has written a most balanced appraisal of Verlaine, “Verlaine's naïveté,” in an Australian publication in 1965 which was later collected in a book, The Language of Symbolism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), pp. 21-70.