material about Verlaine's response to
erotic appeals. His nervous organisation was so finely strung that,
when he loved, he loved with his whole nature, with body, soul and
spirit, in a sort of quivering ecstasy of spiritual lust.

One is reminded here and there of Heine; in other places--a little--of
William Blake; but even these resemblances are too vague to be
pressed at all closely.

His nature was undoubtedly child-like to a degree amounting to
positive abnormality. He hardly ever speaks of love without the
indication of a relation between himself and the object of his passion
which has in it an extraordinary resemblance to the perfectly pure
feeling of a child for its mother.

It must have been almost always towards women possessed very
strongly of the maternal instinct that he was attracted; and, in his
attraction, the irresistible ecstasy of the senses seems always
mingled with a craving to be petted, comforted, healed, soothed,
consoled, assuaged.

In poem after poem it is the tenderness, the purity, the delicacy of
women, which draws and allures him. Their more feline, more
raptorial attributes are only alluded to in the verses where he is
obviously objective and impersonal. In the excessive _gentleness_
of his eroticism Verlaine becomes, among modern poets, strangely
original; and one reads him with the added pleasure of enjoying
something that has disappeared from the love-poetry of the race for
many generations.

"By Gis and by saint Charity," as the mad girl in the play sings,
there is too much violence in modern love! One grows weary of all
this rending and tearing, of all this pantherish pouncing and
serpentine clinging. One feels a reaction against this eternal
savagery of earth-lust. It is a relief, like the coming suddenly from a
hedge of wild white roses after wandering through tropical jungles,
to pass into this tender wistful air full of the freshness of the dew of
the morning.

No wonder Verlaine fell frequently into what his conscience told
him was sin! His "sinning" has about it something so winning, so
innocent, so childish, so entirely free from the predatory mood, that
one can easily believe that his conscience was often betrayed into
slumber. And yet, when it did awaken at last, the tears of his
penitence ran down so pitifully over cheeks still wet with the tears
of his passion, that the two great emotions may be almost said to
have merged themselves in one another--the ecstasy of