GENIUS IN THE GUTTER.

Mr. Edgell Rickword's recently published book on "Rimbaud, the Boy and the Poet," affords a remarkable instance of the extraordinary zest with which some misguided individuals, not without genius of a strange and perverted order, abandon themselves to what may reasonably be termed gutter practices. And, unfortunately, examples may be found of men possessed of talents greatly superior to those which distinguished Arthur Rimbaud, who have exhibited similar unpleasant tendencies, to their own ultimate undoing and the irremediable blemish of their reputation for sanity, or even, in extreme cases, for the common decencies, of life and conduct. In this connection the name of Paul Verlaine will readily occur as one in whom the elements of tragedy and a sort of squalid and rather sinister comedy were indissolubly associated. Of the relations which for a time existed between Verlaine and Rimbaud, the less said the better. In happier circumstances and in a different environment; one can quite well imagine that Verlaine might have developed into one of those half-mystical, wholly-fanatical figures which the rigid discipline and the singular capacity displayed by the Church of Rome for moulding character in strict accordance with the material that is at her disposal, have so frequently and with such unerring acumen pressed into the service of her admirably organised establishment. Underlying his indubitable propensities for that kind of sensuality and unbridled dissipation that has its habitat in the gutters of all great cities, Verlaine was endowed with — as Charles Morice put it — "the soul of an immortal child"; and, we may add, not a little of that faculty for the exercise of those ready and facile emotions which are quick to respond to the appeal that certain forms and ceremonials of religious observance make to the human and emotional susceptibilities of persons so constituted or temperament as to look to extraneous means for comfort and support against the manifold trials and tribulations of this mortal existence. Rimbaud was altogether of another order of being — "this large, red-fisted boy, with the filthy hair that hung down lank between his shoulders, the snub nose, and damp, fleshy mouth, the insulting manner, the enormous appetite"; a cancerous, parasitical sort of creature, who attached himself to Verlaine as some poisonous fungus-growth adheres for its own ends to an already doomed and prematurely decrepit tree. The climax of this ill-omened friendship came when Verlaine, exasperated by one of Rimbaud's frequent and peremptory demands for money, shot at and slightly wounded his companion-poet; not the first mad escapade of the kind in which Verlaine had indulged, for his constant friend, Lepelletier, who championed him throughout his lifetime and who wrote his biography after his death, has told us of a murderous attack Verlaine made upon him when under the influence of absinthe, one night during an after-supper ramble in the Bois-de-Boulogne.

There was tragedy enough and to spare in "Pauvre Lelian's" lamentable existence, but every now and again the touch of comedy is not lacking. It sounds almost incredible, but we may well believe that he was never really more happy than when he was in a prison or a hospital. His was a docile and child like nature, readily amenable to all discipline, save only, alack! that stern self discipline without which no life can escape the inevitable doom of weakness and the will not to will. In his "French Profiles," Mr. Edmund Gosse has given an amusing description of how one evening in a cafe of the Latin quarter, he and others, among whom was the minor poet, Jean Moreas, the founder of the short-lived "Ecole Romane" ran the Socratic Verlaine to earth in a cellar: "There was a prolonged scuffle and a rolling downstairs; then M. Moreas reappeared, triumphant; behind him some thing flopped up out of the darkness like an owl — a timid shambling figure in a soft black hat, with jerking hands." It was Verlaine. About the most remark able discovery Mr. Gosse seems to have made upon this memorable occasion — and it must have been a somewhat unusual circumstance — is to be found in the fact that for once Verlaine was decently dressed, and inordinately proud of his clean white shirt— his "chemise de conference," he called it. Mr. Gosse considered his countenance "very Chinese," and assured him that he looked like "a Chinese philosopher." Verlaine admitted the more personal clause of this soft impeachment, but resolutely denied the charge of philosophy: "Chinois— comme vous voulez, niais philosophe — non pas!" Not every poet is so modest in his pretensions. Wilde's first and last meeting with Verlaine, at the Cafe Francais Premier, was not a conspicuously successful affair. Wilde brought away with him only an impression of the French poet's distressing ugliness, and Verlaine's not, perhaps, unwarrantable conclusion was that the Englishman gave himself airs on the strength of a silver cigarette case stocked with superior cigarettes, while he, "Pauvre Lelian," had to content himself with a penny screw of inferior tobacco. There are at least two points in common between Verlaine and that singular personality whom Stevenson, in an essay which reveals a good deal more of the "shorter catechist" than the literary critic, describes as "the sorriest figure on the roll of fame." This, of course, was Francois Villon, Master of Arts in the University of Paris, and a past master in most of those arts which a man had better avoid if he wishes to escape the penitentiary, or even the gallows, on which dread instrument of despatch Villon, so nearly made an ignominious end. These two points, to which may be added a third— that of unmistakable genius, were those of dissolute living and a consoling faith in their religious creed, for one must needs hope that both Verlaine and Villon found consolation in the simple belief each entertained in the Divine clemency wrought upon by Divine intercession.

'Twixt me and all such doings intervene,
Oh, Virgin, in whose spotless breast did lie
The Sacrament that at the Mass is seen,
And in this faith I wish to live and die.

So Villon besought in his invocation to "Our Lady" written at the Request of his mother, to whom he could deny, nothing an appeal that Verlaine echoed when he wrote the lines:

Go, modest faith, in this love-mystery thine;
Whereby thy flesh and mind are worn by me;
Above all, seek my mansion frequently,
Therein to taste of the thirst-quenching Wine.

One would not willingly dismiss men who could write thus as utterly irreclaimable, nor seek to minimise Villon's poignant words in his "Grand Testament": "He is a sinner. He knows that well; but he knows that God does not wait his death, but his repentance."
It is impossible to formulate any adequate estimate of Villon's curiously complex character without a thorough knowledge of the conditions which prevailed throughout France during the poet's brief lifetime, for he was barely thirty years of age when he vanished from the stage on which he had played a prominent, if rather unedifying, part, and thenceforward history knew him no more. But in those few years he had established for himself a high place in the literature of his country, from which proud eminence posterity has seen no just cause or occasion to remove him. Villon lived at a period of disruption, almost, one may say, of chaos, when the culminating violence of the long-drawn out Hundred Years' War had overflowed its ill-defined boundaries, and murder and all manner of deeds of outrage, rapine, pillage and crimes unspeakable were rife in Paris, and, in deed, over practically the whole of France. In this dismal, this inevitable aftermath of a war that had swallowed up three generations of men, Villon was one of the reapers. And what a harvest was his!— the lash, the prison cell, the wheel, the grim shadow of the gallows — "This is King' Louis' orchard close." He lived, literally, cheek by jowl with death; and yet no man ever dreaded the thought of mortality more than Maitre Francois Villon. The whining, leering, brooding creature can never for a moment forget that awful Shadow. He sees it in all its aspects — as a subject for mockery, for penitence, for resignation, for despair. He sees it as the melancholy inevitable end of all that is beautiful, all that is lovely on earth." One cannot help wondering a little, did Villon die in his bed, or was he perchance burnt at the stake for impiety, as unconfirmed rumour has averred? But all such speculations are unavailing; we only know that he suddenly disappeared from the knowledge of mankind, leaving behind him — like Verlaine in years to come — a few poems and a few ballades fit for brothels and for shrines." One may extol the genius of such men while deploring their excesses, the malign influence of which is apparent in that lesser men have been known, in after time, to act as if in the belief that excess is a natural concomitant of genius. Whereby their not, perhaps, over-conspicuous talents have been eclipsed by their far too-conspicuous indulgences. This illogical attitude has led also to the irremediable downfall of many more than ordinarily able men, whose energies, had they not been diverted into an alien channel, might quite conceivably have won for them a recognised position in the world of art and of letters.

 West Australian 9/8/1924,