Stefan Zweig

“ It is not out of intellectual growth or out of the persistent impulse to link the universal to his personality, as in the cases of Schiller, Victor Hugo or Lord Byron, that these soft notes rise. They have their origin in a sultry restlessness of the nerves, in the well-springs of fruitful impulse, in emotions and shadowy presentiments. They are the early outpouring of creative masculinity and youthful yearning. They are half a question and half an answer to life. They are melancholy and vague, filled with uncertain gleaming and a rustling darkness. ”

“ For him childhood was paradise, because his poor weak soul, needing the tenderness of faithful hands, had not yet experienced the hard impacts of life, but only the soft intimate cradling between devoted love and womanly mildness—a lulling, sweet unforgettable melody.
All impulses are still pure and bud-like. Love is unsullied, sheer instinct, entirely without desire and restlessness. It is silence, peaceful silence, cool longing which assuages, and so all of life is kind and large, maternal and womanly—soft. ”

“ Verlaine was a man of moods, he was always only the creature of the moment. After a few seconds the movement of his will contracted limply and momentary desires overflooded his consciousness of personality. His faith may have been as capricious and restless, as each one of his tendencies of passion. Great poems, however, in the sense of great in extent, are not conceived in a moment. Moods spread like a fine mist over the poet's hours, they permeate them and fill them through and through for a long time before a poem takes form. ”

“ In these impious words God is humanized vividly, and yet, by the very bitterness of the struggle with His all-goodness, the poet imbues Him with an absolute perfection.
Here Verlaine's tormented soul is entirely cast out of himself, and plunges in a sudden flood into the infinite. Ecstasy overcomes the feminine element in him, just as in his life vulgar drunkenness roused his hard, coarse and brutal qualities. For a moment Verlaine is not only a genuine and marvellous, but also a truly strong and creative poet; no longer elegiac and sensitive, but creative. ”

“ Like a second Victor Hugo, he patronized the younger men with benevolent gesture. A forced merriness seemed in those days to tremble electrically through his nerves. Yet never before had his life been filled with deeper tragedy and yearning, and there were many hours when he himself felt this keenly. Crushed and torn by the teeth of life, he, like all Bohemians, at last desired only peace. Never was the sweet dream of his childhood days more poignant than in just this period of dissolute play-acting and vain exhibitionism. ”

“ He hurls everything up into the infinite as if he would shatter it to bits. Destruction teems in this creation, a force ardent for power, a hand that would seize everything and crush it.
His poems are only sudden gestures of wrath. They resemble bloody tatters of raw flesh that have been torn with wild teeth from the body of reality. It is poetry “outside and above” all literature. Has there ever been a poet of modern times who thus threw poems on paper and then let the scraps flutter to the four winds? ”

“ Almost daily one is written and sent to his beloved. It was only in small selection that they were united in print.
Here the idea of modesty subdues passion like a wonderful sordine, and surrender and tenderness intertwine with the ideals of modesty. The cleft in Verlaine's personality closes in the consonance of a soul which has found peace. It represents the first period of peace in his life and career and is humanly his most perfect moment and poetically his purest. Vice and passion have disappeared in a hesitating yet desirous surrender, melancholy has dissolved in melody. ”

“ The bond of friendship grew closer and closer. Verlaine's gaminerie which was ever in contrast with his sensitivity, awakened suddenly. His tendency toward strong, cynical and lascivious conversation met a genial match in Rimbaud. The primitive element in Verlaine was suddenly enchained by the primæval, purely human and brutal masculinity of Rimbaud's personality. The feminine in his nature was feeling for completion. As if predestined for each other for years, their personalities dovetail. Without any affection, by necessity rather than by friendship, their union becomes closer and closer. ”

“ It is only the magic of a passion, an elemental and unfathomable magnetic power which links one human being to another, the intangible, which can conquer a poet. He can overcome want and life because he despises them; he can make evil powerless because he repents; chance he can bridge; but he cannot hold back destiny, nor win battles with the incomprehensible.
A new influence enters Verlaine's life—Arthur Rimbaud. ”

“ Religion is only a certain form of association in which things are placed in relationship with each other. Similarly the sensation of evening, of the cool pure air after rain, of the whispering of the winds and the play of clouds, or whatever else is caught up in the nervous fever of poetic sensibility, hearkens back to the infinite after it has been permeated by the poet's own sorrow or joy. He feels that the infinite has a soul which understands and atones for all sorrows, and thus he conceives it as divinity. ”

“ To many it was insufficient to celebrate Verlaine as one of the marvels of a nation, a truly elemental human being whose soul uttered the finest and most tender lyric moods and who, as if awakened out of bell-like and clear dreams, produced true and melodic poetry out of the darkness of his life. His admirers have also praised him as a prose writer. But the prose-writer must be an intellectual creator, and know how to master form. ”

“ He preferred, fleeting and weak spirit as he was, the indefinite, not quiet and possession, nor understanding and power, which are the elemental factors of life. He surrendered himself completely to the efflorescence of things, to the sweetness of becoming and the sadness of evanescence, to the pain and tenderness of emotions that touch us in passing; in short, to the things that come to us and not to those which we must seek and strive to penetrate. ”

“ Were it not unwise to reflect in directions which his life disdained to follow, it might be interesting to attempt a portrait of Verlaine as he might have been if he had continued on the luminous path of his childhood under the guidance of kind hands. For surely and also according to his own opinion, those years were the humus for the fleurs du mal of his soul.
In these formative years of ungainly figure and uncertain dreaming the poet grows out of the boy. A malign influence, puberty, forces the creator in him. ”

“ In the unrestrained solution of everything personal in the divine, in “the melting of his own heart in the glowing heart of God,” impulse and yearning are purified. Eroticism becomes spiritualized into fervor; hope, into sublime enlightenment; passion, devouring earthly dross, takes the form of mystic surrender. Thus the impulsive in Verlaine, permeated by hours of pure emotion, obtains its wild power of beauty, and trembles in the inexplicable mystery and in the stream of visionary light, so that his entire life now seems illumined. ”

“ He was a lyric poet. Lyricism is thinking without logic (although not contrary to logic) , association not according to the laws of thought but according to intuition, the whispering words of vague emotions, hidden correspondences, darkly murmuring subterranean streams. Lyricism again is thought without consequence, instinct and presentiment, leaping quickly in lawless synthesis; it is union but not a chain formed of individual links, it is melody but not scales. In this sense he was an unconscious creator who heard great accords. ”

“ It is as if the soft tread of these two women had given many of his verses their seraphic sheen and lent the mother-of-pearl opalescence to his softest poems, in which there is a secret rustling as of the folds of women's gowns. Even the Paul Verlaine of the later years, “the ruin insufficiently ruined,” who saw in woman the most ferocious enemy, and who fled to the wolves that they might protect him from “woman their sister,” even he still dreamed of the folded hands, of the forgiving innocent gesture of the earliest memories. This yearning for mild and pure women has found many incarnations. ”

“ Verlaine was a poet of rare candor and shamelessness, both in the best and worst sense. This is the essentially great element in his otherwise feminine, weak and absolutely negative personality. The primæval powers of the body and soul are the eternal elements of all humanity and the starting-point of all philosophies; the conflict between them, betrayed in the accusing and self-revealing manner of his verse, is transferred unchanged into his poetry, filling it with the force of life and the tragedy of the universally human. ”

“ Verlaine, the man of letters and poet according to program, is a hateful shadow limping behind his great works. Consciously and with feverish eagerness and a productivity forced by need, he rhymed in what he thought his unique manner. The poor old man whom interviewers sought in the hospital was no longer the poet, Paul Verlaine.
It is impossible to tell how long the flame of personal faith still glowed in him. Probably it was as little extinguished as his soft dream of childhood. In the dusk of his last years it often struggled upward with tears, as a symbol of sorrow over his broken life. ”

“ He knew how to seize and throw light upon waves that came to touch his life, but he could not make them reflect in the dark mirror of the universe, nor could he throw out into the world rays of curious and tormenting desire for life. ”

“ France never was the land of pure emotional poetry. There is too much sense of the formal, too much of a keen-sighted almost mathematical type of intellect mingled with a gallant pleasure in pointedness among the French, and these make them turn into logic the elements of mysticism which must be in every poem, whether in its emotional content or its vague form of expression. Goethe has proclaimed the incommensurable as the material of all poetry, but among the French the tendency to crystallize it in the solution of their positivist habit of thought is ever imperceptibly betrayed. ”

“ Their fortune and misfortune, their rejoicing and complaint, too heavy for them, are sown in the destiny of others—man and woman. The fertilizing germ is planted at this moment which is simultaneously painful and happy, and they rejoice. But the origin of this impulse, as of all others, lies in need, sweet, tormenting need, over-ripe painful force.
No poet of recent years has possessed this need of expressing his life to others, more imperatively, pitifully, or tragically than Paul Verlaine, because no other poet was so weak to the press of destiny. All his creative virtue is reversed strength ”

“ It seems therefore an error to look for the revolutionary tendency and literary importance of a Verlaine in the looseness of his verse structure and more careless (or intentionally careless) use of rhyme. His merit is rather that he was able to illume chaos, darkness, and presentiments by the very indefiniteness and the vague music of his soul. This enabled him to endue his poems with their mystical trembling melody, not by abstracting his inner music in definite melodies, but by fixing it in assonance, rhymes and rhythmic waves. ”

“ There have been the criers who with a clarion horn call together the wanderers on all the highways, the magicians who weave notes like the rustling of leaves, the soughing of winds and the bubbling of water, and the masters who embrace all the wisdom of life in dark sayings. ”

“ They hold them out like a net with which to ensnare, like a rope by which to escape. Like beggars on the street weighed down with misery and want, they give their words to passers-by. Each syllable gives relief because they thus project their own life into that of strangers. ”