It is high time that this axiom became a truism and that we cease to measure the artist with the yard-stick of conventional morality. "L'art, mes enfants, c'est d'être absolument soi-même," sang Verlaine, and somewhere else he reveals a bit of that self with his usual sincerity: I believe, and I sin in thought as in action; I believe, and I repent in thought, if no more. Or again, I believe, and I am a good Christian at this moment; I believe, and I am a bad Christian the instant after. The remembrance, the hope, the invocation of a sin delights me, with or without remorse, sometimes under the very form of sin, and hedged with all its natural consequences.... This delight ... it pleases us to put to paper and publish more or less well expressed: we consign it, in short, into literary form, forgetting all religious ideas, or not letting one of them escape us. Can any one in good faith condemn us as poets? A hundred times no. "And, indeed, I should echo, a hundred times no!" exclaims the Englishman, Arthur Symons. I cannot resist the temptation of quoting the happiest definition of Verlaine's personality written by Charles Morice back in 1888: The soul of an immortal child, that is the soul of Verlaine, with all the privileges and all the perils of so being: with the sudden despair so easily distracted, the vivid gaieties without a cause, the excessive suspicions and the excessive confidences, the whims so easily outwearied, the deaf and blind infatuations, with, especially, the unceasing renewal of impressions in the incorruptible integrity of personal vision and sensation. Years, influences, teachings, may pass over a temperament such as this, may irritate it, may fatigue it; transform it, never--never so much as to alter that particular unity which consists in a dualism, in the division of forces between the longing after what is evil and the adoration of what is good; or rather, in the antagonism of spirit and flesh.... I have not mentioned the most striking "feature" of Mr. Thorley's ... production--the appendix. Six of Verlaine's poems are translated by him for the benefit of those who do not understand French "intimately." "To offer them to other readers, would, of course, be an impertinence," he modestly admits. Impertinence is not the word for that outrage. I have experienced physical pain at the sight of the Hunnish sacrilege committed by this well-wishing moralist. The poet, for whom "De la musique avant toute chose; De la musique encore et toujours!" who had pleaded, "Car nous voulons la nuance encore, Pas la couleur, rien que la nuance!" has been mercilessly crucified in the form of quasi-Tennysonian, taffy-like verses. One recalls with gratitude the careful albeit pale translations of Gertrude Hall, who at least had the sense of æsthetic propriety in endeavoring to remain true to the master's meter and rhythm.