“Do you understand?... Neither do I. One would have to be drunk in order to understand this.” I can only conceive that the poetry, an attempt to define which has here been made, could be that of a solitary, a nerve-sufferer, and almost a madman. This poetry thus flourishes on the borderland between reason and madness. Yet these mattoids have their man of genius--Verlaine. Let us hear Lemaître on this subject:-- “I imagine he must be almost illiterate. He has a strange head--the profile of Socrates, an enormous forehead, a skull knobbed like a battered basin of thin copper. He is not civilized, he ignores all received codes of morality. “One day he disappears. What has become of him? It would be in character for him to have been publicly cast out from regular society. I see him behind the grate of a prison, like François Villon--not for having, like him, become an accomplice of thieves and rogues, for the love of a free life, but rather for an error of over-sensitiveness--for having avenged (by an involuntary stab, given, as it were, in a dream) a love reprobated by the laws and customs of the modern and Western world. But, though socially degraded, he remains innocent. He repents as simply as he sinned--with a Catholic repentance, all terror and tenderness, without reasoning, without pride of intellect. In his conversion, as in his sin, he remains a purely emotional being.... “Then, it may be, a woman took pity on him, and he let himself be led like a little child. He reappears, but continues to live apart. No one has ever seen him on the Boulevards, or in a theatre, or at the Salon. He is somewhere at the other end of Paris, in the back-room of a wine-merchant’s shop, drinking blue wine. He is as far from us as if he were an innocent satyr in the great forests. When he is ill, or at the end of his resources, some doctor, whom he knew formerly, when in jail, gets him into the hospital; he stays there as long as he can and writes verses; he hears queer, sad songs whispered to him out of the folds of the cold white calico curtains. He is not a _déclassé_, for he never had a class. His case is rare and peculiar. He finds means to live, in a civilized society, as he could live in a state of the freest nature.