He has also been called a great draftsman. It is true that an excellent and characteristic skill in the figures and scribblings which he sprinkled throughout his letters cannot be gainsaid. There is even a pathetic element in their self-confessed technical imperfections. The caricatures are playful, without malicious or serious intent, jotted down with childish self-satisfaction, but, of course, they need not be taken seriously. They are little marginalia to his life, and addenda to the numerous sharp and bright sketches with which his intimate friend and artistic Eckermann, F. A. Cazals, has fixed him for posterity. They show Verlaine in all his moods--in his bonhomie, despair, grief, "_gaminerie_," sexuality, disease, even to the last sketches which show him in death. They form a gallery of his life from childhood to childhood along the dark way of his destiny. And as in his poetry, notwithstanding all the exuberant passages, the final impression is a wailing note of sadness--the stroke of melancholy's bow. POSTLUDE The only thing which now remains is to ascertain whether Paul Verlaine's life-work, beginning in Metz and ending in a small lodging-house room in Paris on a January day in 1896, contains the elements which we would call "lasting" because we are afraid of the proud and resounding word "eternal." The significance of great poets passes the boundaries of literature and ignores what is known as "influences" and "artistic atmosphere." The eternal element of great works of poetry reaches back toward eternity. For humanity poetry is infinity which it joins with the ether, and the great poets are those who were able to help in elaborating the wonderful bond which stretches from the distant darkness to the red of the new dawn. It does not diminish Verlaine's stature if we do not count him among the heroes of life. He was an isolated phenomena, too significant to be typical and too weak to become eternal. There was beauty in his pure humanness, but not of the kind which remains permanent. He has given nothing which was not already in us. He was a fleeting stream of life passing by; he was the sublime echo of the mysterious music which rises within us on every contact of things, like the ring of glasses on a cupboard under every footstep and impact. His effect is deep, but yet on that account not great. To have become great it would have been necessary for him to conquer the destiny which he could not master and to liberate his will from the thousand little vices and passions which enwrapped it. He is one of the writers who could be spared, whom nevertheless no one would do without. He is a marvel, beautiful and unnecessary, like a rare flower which gives sweetness and wonderful peace to the senses, but which does not make us noble, strong, brave and humble.