A conscientious compilator would have found sufficient material for an unpretentious sketch of the life of Verlaine and for an appreciation of his works. Lepelletier gives an amazing mass of facts and personal reminiscences (you may ignore his naive interpretations); Arthur Symons in _The Symbolist Movement in Literature_ has a masterpiece essay on Verlaine, not to mention a number of other French and English writers who have given us glimpses of the imperceptible image of the poet--writers who _knew what they were taking about_. Mr. Thorley has made use of various sources, but in a peculiar way. He fished out the anecdotal scraps, the piquant details, the filthy hints, and patched up a caricature-portrait of a lewd, perverse "undesirable," whose poetry (I quote reluctantly) "was born solely of the genitals," whose "life 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 ideas on which it feeds." Out of the ninety-odd pages of stuff seventy-nine are devoted to "biography" sufficiently spicy to make any toothless old rake chuckle; the rest is given over to "criticism"--a mutilated melange of some of the views of Symons, George Moore, and others, flavored with the compilator's own commonplaces. I quote from the closing lines: A specious and high-sounding phrase has been invented to excuse the perversities of imaginative genius by speaking of its achievement as a "conquest of new realms for the spirit." But the worth of such acquisitions depends on the nature of the territory, and if it be, morally, a malarial swamp conducive only to a human type found subversive in our normal world, it will always appear to the English mind that we shall do well to forego the new kingdom and to withhold our homage from its discoverer.... That "nice is nasty, nasty nice," and the creative artist the sole arbiter, must be hotly opposed so long as a social conscience survives. And this was written in Anno Domini 1914! A sense of fairness urges me to rehabilitate the "English mind" by recalling a passage from Mr. Thorley's compatriot, Arthur Symons: The artist, it cannot be too clearly understood, has no more part in society than a monk in domestic life: he cannot be judged by its rules, he can be neither praised nor blamed for his acceptance or rejection of its conventions. Social rules are made by normal people for normal people, and the man of genius is fundamentally abnormal.