VERLAINE.

The latest addition to the "Modern Biographies" series is a life of Paul Verlaine, by Mr. Wilfred Thorley. Poor Verlaine's career provides a melancholy example of genius frustrated by the snares of the flesh. It is a fit subject alike for the homilies of moralists and for the regrets of lovers of poetry. Paul Mario Verlaine was born at Metz in 1844, the son of a captain in the French army. The latter died when Paul was still a lad, leaving him with a competence. This turned out to be the worst thing that could have happened to him. He was freed from the necessity of keeping his nose to the grindstone during the critical years of adolescence, and his mother, though devoted, was not a very judicious guardian. He gradually drifted into those indulgences which soon become a necessity to him. Marriage checked him temporarily in his evil courses, but its novelty soon wore off. He made no attempt at regular work, but became a dawdler and frequenter of night cafes and worse.

His decadence was swift. His patrimony was soon squandered, and he sponged on his mother until he had reduced her to poverty. His wife left him on account of his drunkenness. He fell under the influence of degenerates like Rimbaud, with whom he drifted from place to place, now quarrelling, now being reconciled, but steadily sinking lower. On several occasions he visited England, and taught school. There the wholesome regimen pulled him together to some extent, but absinthe and disease, resulting from his irregularities, were telling on him. The end of his life was pitiful in the extreme. A sodden wreck, with no friends save the lost souls of the gutter, and no money save what he could earn by the composition of obscene verses, he spent his time between the hospitals and the lowest cafes, until he died in 1890. But though his body was often in the mire his spirit could still soar among the stars, and he has left the world a legacy of poetry whose haunting beauty and emotional suggestion will be remembered long after the sordid story of his life has been forgotten. "His life," says Mr, Thorley, "is but the trite old story of the emotions developed at the expense of domestic peace and civic order, of art for art's sake made to condone the manner of its begetting, and the trend of its appeal, of the hushed acquiescence in emotion as a sacred thing whatever the quality of the impulse from which it ripens or the level of the ideas on which it feeds. Nevertheless, his degeneration proceeded not from the weakness of his mind; and no wallowing in the mire with outworn harpies or gutter flotsam could quite quench his aspiration towards the more excellent things. Again, in the words of Coppec, "Let us salute respectfully the grave of a true poet, let us bow down before the coffin of a child." (Constable and Co.)

 smh 21/3/1914,