‘Leur jambes pour toutes montures, Pour tous biens l’or de leurs regards, Par le chemin des aventures Ils vont haillonneux et hagards.
‘Le sage, indigné, les harangue; Le sot plaint ces fous hasardeux; Les enfants leur tirent la langue Et les filles se moquent d’eux.’
We find in every lunatic and imbecile the conviction that the rational minds who discern and judge him are ‘blockheads.’
‘... Dans leurs prunelles Rit et pleure--fastidieux-- L’amour des choses éternelles, Des vieux morts et des anciens dieux!
‘Donc, allez, vagabonds sans trêves, Errez, funestes et maudits, Le long des gouffres et des grèves, Sous l’œil fermé des paradis!
‘La nature à l’homme s’allie Pour châtier comme il le faut L’orgueilleuse mélancolie Qui vous fait marcher le front haut.’
In another poem (_Autre_) he calls to his chosen mates:
‘Allons, frères, bons vieux voleurs, Doux vagabonds Filous en fleur Mes chers, mes bons,
‘Fumons philosophiquement, Promenons nous Paisiblement: Rien faire est doux.’
As one vagabond feels himself attracted by other vagabonds, so does one deranged mind feel drawn to others. Verlaine has the greatest admiration for King Louis II. of Bavaria, that unhappy madman in whom intelligence was extinct long before death, in whom only the most abominable impulses of foul beasts of the most degraded kind had survived the perishing of the human functions of his disordered brain. He apostrophizes him thus:
‘Roi, le seul vrai Roi de ce siècle, salut, Sire, Qui voulûtes mourir vengeant votre raison Des choses de la politique, et du délire De cette Science intruse dans la maison,
‘De cette Science assassin de l’Oraison Et du Chant et de l’Art et de toute la Lyre, Et simplement et plein d’orgueil et floraison Tuâtes en mourant, salut, Roi, bravo, Sire!
‘Vous fûtes un poète, un soldat, le seul Roi De ce siècle ... Et le martyr de la Raison selon la Foi....’
Two points are noticeable in Verlaine’s mode of expression. First, we have the frequent recurrence of the same word, of the same turn of phrase, that chewing the cud, or _rabâchage_ (repetition), which we have learnt to know as the marks of intellectual debility. In almost every one of his poems single lines and hemistiches are repeated, sometimes unaltered, and often the same word appears instead of one which rhymes. Were I to quote all the passages of this kind, I should have to transcribe nearly all his poems. I will therefore give only a few specimens, and those in the original, so that their peculiarity will be fully apparent to the reader. In the _Crépuscule du soir mystique_ the lines, ‘Le souvenir avec le crépuscule,’ and ‘Dahlia, lys, tulipe et renoncules,’ are twice repeated without any internal necessity. In the poem _Promenade sentimentale_ the adjective _blême_ (wan) pursues the poet in the manner of an obsession or ‘onomatomania,’ and he applies it to water-lilies and waves (‘wan waves’). The _Nuit du Walpurgis classique_ begins thus: