‘SOMETIMES in a kind of melting jargon of the countryside, he spoke of death which brings repentance, of the unhappy, of painful labours, of partings that rend the heart. In the hovels where we used to get drunk he wept while he contemplated those who surrounded us, Poverty’s cattle. He raised up drunkards in the foul streets. He had the compassion of a wicked mother for little children.’—ARTHUR RIMBAUD, A Season in Hell. Trans. Helen Rootham.
‘I felt an extreme pleasure this morning, on seeing again a little picture of mine. There was nothing in it, but it was charming and seemed as if it had been painted by a bird.’—Letter from COROT, quoted in Opium, by Jean Cocteau. Trans. Ernest Boyd.
This would be true of Verlaine, were he spiritually evil, instead of pure:
‘Only a bird could trust itself to paint the Profanation of the Host. Only a bird could be pure enough, selfish enough, cruel enough.’—JEAN COCTEAU, Opium. Trans. Ernest Boyd.
Applicable to Certain Poems of Verlaine.
‘I know several sculptures of Giacometti which are so solid, so light, that they look like snow on which a bird has left its footmarks.’—Ibid.
‘… aspects of people and things in which a butterfly seems to have left a little of its coloured dust as it alights and pauses.’—ARTHUR SYMONS on Whistler, Studies in Seven Arts.
‘… They have their brief coloured life like butterflies, and with the same momentary perfection.’—ARTHUR SYMONS on Whistler and Verlaine, ibid.
‘A white which is like the soul of a colour caught and fixed there by some incalculable but precisely coloured magic. It ends, of course, by being the ghost of a colour … but all things end, when their particular life is over, by becoming the ghost of themselves.’—ARTHUR SYMONS on Whistler, ibid.
Dr. D. S. MacColl, in his 19th Century Painting, said of Manet that his mind is ‘that joyful, heedless mind of summer, beneath or above thought, the intense sensation of life, with its lights and colours, coming and going in the head’.
‘Words serve him with so absolute a negation that he can write Romances sans Paroles — songs almost without words, in which scarcely a sense of the interference of human speech remains.’—ARTHUR SYMONS, The Symbolist Movement in French Literature.
‘He created in verse a new voice for nature, full of the humble ecstasy with which he saw, listened and accepted … and with the same attentive simplicity with which he found words for the sensations of hearing and the sensations of sight, he found words for the sensations of the soul, for the fine shades of feeling…. Here … are words which startle one by their delicate resemblance to thoughts, by their winged flight from so far, by their alighting so close.’ —Ibid.