Essays from the Chap-Book. Various
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she has known all crimes, all horrors, as well as martyrdoms and joys. And this, while her gentle feminine hands have ministered to suffering, her voice has cheered, her smile has illumined, and her divine patience has endured.
Consider these lines—their spiritual intuition is the parallel of Wordsworth in his limpid moods; their knowledge, like a single glow of summer lightning, illumines all the darkened land as the glimmering patient light of Bourget’s candle in cycles of encyclopedics will never do.
Behold the woman!
“Beauté des femmes, leur faiblesse et ces mains pâles,
Qui font souvent le bien et peuvent tout le mal.”
The appealing weakness of women is the first note, invariably stronger than command—and then the reference to their hands. This is very characteristic of Verlaine—they haunt him.
“Les chères mains qui furent miennes,
Toutes petites, toutes belles.”
......
“Mains en songes—main sur mon âme.”
The last is a very poignant line—and again in “Ariettes Oubliées,”—
“Le piano que baise une main frêle.”
Then comes the reflection as to the eyes of women, profoundly true and observant, contained in the last two verses of the first stanza:—
“Et ces yeux où plus rien ne reste d’animal
Que juste assez pour dire ‘assez’ aux fureurs mâles!”
Then the next stanza:—
“Et toujours, maternelle endormeuse des râles,
Même quand elle ment—.”
Here is the creature who could be both nurse and courtesan—concise and convincing classification.
Then he continues relating how, as man as well as poet, he has vibrated to the clear soprano of
“Cette voix! Matinal
Appel, ou chant bien doux à vêpres, ou frais signal,
Ou beau sanglot qui va mourir au pli des châles!...”
How he has dreamed over the tender sentiment of her twilight song, and been melted and conquered by the still greater, more beautiful appeal of the emotional soul for love and understanding,—“beau sanglot” indeed!
Then comes the wonderful third stanza, and its denunciation of man’s brutality and selfishness.
“Hommes durs! Vie atroce et laide d’ici-bas!
Ah! que du moins, loins des baisers et des combats,
Quelque chose demeure un peu sur la montagne.”
Here is the appeal for sentiment, for the love of the spirit, choked in the throats of dumb and suffering women.
“Quelque chose du cœur,” he repeats and persuades, “enfantin et subtil.”
“Bonté, respect! car qu’est-ce qui nous accompagne,
Et vraiment, quand la mort viendra, que reste-t-il?”
From him, the convict poet, from this heart rotten with all the sins of fancy and of deed, bursts this plea—as naive as it is earnest, for the spiritual in love—for sentiment, the essence of the soul. Strange anomaly—stranger still that it should be he who has understood.
Three lines more, from an early poem called “Vœu,” of such condensed significance and biting truth as lacks a parallel.
“O la femme à l’amour câlin et rechauffant,
Douce, pensive et brune, et jamais étonnée,
Et qui parfois vous baise au front, comme un enfant.”
What a portrait, typical and individual—“jamais étonnée,” my sisters, what an accusation!
.....
Verlaine is dead. The last shred of that ruined soul which has for years been rotting away in chance Parisian brasseries, has loosened its hold upon life and slipped into the unknown; but the poetry he has left behind him, with its sighs and bitter sobbings, and its few gleams of beauty and of joy, contains the essence of his strange nature.
Although repudiating the responsibility of the position, he was the founder and leader of that school of poetic expression which has most importantly distinguished the end of his century.
Half faun, half satyr, his nature was allied to baseness and brutal animalism, but possessed a strange and childish naïveté which remained with him to the last, and a spirit remotely intact in the chaos of his wayward senses, whence issued songs of matchless purity and inimitable music.
Degeneration
By Alice Morse Earle
DEGENERATION
I WRITE this paper as a solemn, an earnest warning, an appeal to the unsuspecting and serene general public not to read Dr. Max Nordau’s book “Degeneration.” I give this word of admonition with much the same spirit of despairing yet powerless misery as might animate the warning of any slave to a despised habit, a hashish-eater, an opium smoker, an alcoholic inebriate. I have read this book of Dr. Nordau’s, and through it I am become the unwilling victim of a most deplorable, most odious, most blighting habit,—that of searching for degenerates. I do not want or like to do this, but I do it instinctively, mechanically. The habit has poisoned all the social relations of my life, has entered into my views of the general public; it has sapped my delight in novelty, choked my admiration of genius, deadened my enthusiasm, silenced my opinions; and it has brought these wretched conditions not only into my regard of matters and persons of the present times, but retrospectively it has tainted the glories of history. All this is exceeded by the introspective blight of the book through exacting a miserable and mortifying self-examination, which leads to the despairing, the unyielding conclusion that I am myself a degenerate.
The book is, unfortunately, so explicit in explanation as to lure every reader to amateur investigation. Indeed, such a vast array of mental and physical traits are enumerated as stigmata—the marks of the beast—as to paralyze the thoughtless, and to make the judicious grieve. Our mental traits we can ofttimes conceal from public view, our moral traits we always conceal, but many of our physical characteristics cannot, alas, be wholly hidden. Dr. Nordau enumerates many physical stigmata, all interesting, but perhaps the most prominent, most visible one, is the degenerate malformation of the ear.
I was present recently, at an interesting function whereat the subject of the evening was discussion of this book “Degeneration.” In the course of a brilliant and convincing address one of the lecturers chanced to name that most hateful and evident stigma, the ear-mark, so to speak, of the accursed. Though simple were his words, as subtle as sewer-gas was his poison; as all-pervading and penetrating as the sandstorm in the desert, it entered every brain in the room. I speedily and furtively glanced from side to side at my neighbors’ ears, only to find them regarding mine with expressions varying from inquisitiveness through surprise and apprehension, to something closely approaching disgust. After the discussion was ended, friends advanced to speak with me; they shook hands, not looking with pleasant greeting into my eyes, but openly staring at my ears.
Now, that would be necessarily most abhorrent to every one,—to quote Spenser:—
“For fear lest we like rogues should be reputed
And for eare-marked beastes abroad be bruited.”
And it is specially offensive to me—it would be anyway, for my ears are