THE BOOKSHELF.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLIII, Issue 2, 14 July 1909, Page 47

THE BOOKSHELF.

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DELTA.)

Notes and Short Reviews. /T\ ARIANNE FARN INGHAM ■ I ■ (Miss Hearn), who died redJ JL / eently, aged 74, was for 23 / years editor of “The SundaySchool Times,” and contributed for nearly 52 years to “The Christian World.” She wrote several books, among others an autobiography that has been justy described as “at once a romance end an inspiration.” Mr Heinemann will publish in the autumn Lieutenant Shackleton’s book on the Nimrod Antarctic Expedition, ■with the news of which the civilized world was ringing, so to speak, at the end of March. The “Sphere” for April 3 contained some clever maps and sketches, illustrating the journey. Mr Moriee Gerard, if not a brilliant, is always an exceedingly wholesome and a pleasant writer. His latest book “A Fair Refugee,” is, as usual, an historic novel, with just enough of the sensational in it to excite that thrill which always accompanies the perusal of a story that takes any incident of the French Revolution for material out of which to weave romance. “Marie de Masseine,” the daughter of a noble family of France, is compelled to fly from that country, and takes ship for that haven of refugees, England. Out of a number of exciting incidents that happen on the journey, the wrecking of the ship in which Mademoiselle Masseine sails, and her gallant rescue by Francis Cardew, Mr Gerard has constructed as pretty and as stirring a romance as should satisfy the most exacting of readers.

E. Nesbitt is best known as an inimitable writer of children's stories, and it is therefore somewhat surprising to come across a book that possesses the ’wonderful dramatic (power that her latest story, “Salome and the Head,” undoubtedly does. The book’s title will prepare the readers for something sensational, but perusal will prove it strongly lurid and painfully engrossing. Salome, like her famous namesake, is a famous dancer, and a woman of strong hates and passions. Though she is strong to bear, she cannot endure cowardice in the men she loves, and the whole story turns on which virtue or which shortcoming she can best tolerate in a man. There is a number of l»?rdes from which readers can take their choice. This book will place Mrs Nesbitt on a much higher rung of the literary ladder than she has hitherto occupied, though as a writer of stories for the young, she has hitherto been unsurpassed. Mr. Holbrook Jaekson has written, and (Grant Richard’s have published, a book which shows the evolution of the novel. Anticipating criticism, Mr. Jackson begins by explaining that he does not propose to deal with every great novelist, “but to preserve” a clear view of the broad evolutionary path of the novel. So only those who have contributed something essential towards making the English novel what it is are included. Mr. Jackson begins with Defoe, and ends With Meredith. Trollope, Charles Reade, and Thomas Hardy have been left out for reasons which no one except Mr. Jackson himself will be able to explain. As far as it goes, the book should prove valuable to those interested in the evolution of the novel. The book is profusely illustrated. “The City of Beautiful Nonsense” '(VeniceF is the title of Mr. Temple Thurston’s new novel, which, opening Cleverly discursive, ends with love paraInotint, as it should do. Those readers who are familiar with Mr. Barry Pain’s cheery optimistic style of writing will understand the treat they bave in store in the reading of his delightful new story, “The Gifted Family.” The dramatis personae include a perfume manufacturer, a Harley-street practitioner, a theatrical manager, an artist, and the gifted, but plebian, family of the Prendergast’s. Their various Characteristics, peculiarities, and idiosyncrasies are described with the keen ia-

sight and delicate raillery for which Mr. Barry Pain is so distinguished. Conspicuous, for real merit, amongst the new books we have received from Messrs. Wildman and Arey for review, and which we can confidently recommend, are “The Half Moon” (Ford Maddox Hueffer), a story of love and exploration of the time of James 1., and “The Red Saint” (Warwick Deeping), an historic romance whose scenes are laid in Pevensey. at the time Peter of Savoy was overrunning the South of England in the assumed interest of the first of the Plantagenets. , Verlaine. The bewildering incongruities of Verlaine’s life set a fascinating problem to the literary psychologist. The incongruities are startlingly obvious. A poet of delicate emotions and often of fragrant atmosphere, he wrote under the stimulus of alcohol in order to pay the lowest of the Quartier’s temptresses. A volume of exalted, Catholic, devotional vtrse, “Sagesse,” stands between two periods of his production, in which decadent eroticism said its last word. Bohemia is a synonym for camaraderie; but we know no life that gives a more desolating sense of loneliness than that of Verlaine, prince of Bohemians. The latter part of his life witnessed an effort to dispel the legend of his unnatural vices which Verlaine’s own lips had—in sheer devilry—invented about himself. Banned by I’homme moyen sensuel as too bad for human companionship, Verlaine, incognito, became an instructor of pious youth in company with a teaching staff of celibate ecclesiastics. By turns State official and vagabond, decadent, drunkard and devotee, ardent husband and libertine, soldier and Bohemian, he was an incarnate paradox.

We eome nearest to the root of reconciliation of Verlaine’s contradictions by thinking of him as a man who lived neither for intellectual nor moral consistency, but for sensation. He loved to thrill in response to stimuli, whether they came from the perfect phrase, the fire of absinthe, the vision—in prison—of the suffering Servant on the Cross, or from the flesh. “Poor rudderless boat,” M. Edmond Lepelletier, his most continuous friend, writes of him in the biography, which is now translated into English by E. M. Lang. The metaphor may be amplified; there was, indeed, no hand on the tfl’er of his life. In Paris the winds and the currents swept the frail boat unresisting on to shoals and rocks that ultimately ground it to pieces. And the only two experiences that interrupted this process were entirely isolated from any volitional effort of his own —the one, when in his first and only love episode he cleanly wooed his wife; the other, when in prison, divorced from absinthe and woman, he was hypnotised by the crucifix upon the bare walls of his cell.

An “art for art’s sake” enthusiast, detecting a note of regret in this reference to the fact that Verlaine found shipwreck in Paris, may argue that the degradation was well worth while, if only for the sake of producing the exquisite poetry which places Verlaine so high in the nineteenth century roll of fame. M. Lepelletier indicates this line of argument himself. Our suggestion is, however, that Verlaine as, say, a healthy vagabond of the country, like our own W. H. Davies, the super-tramp, would have produced finer poetry without than he did with the causes of his •wreckage. The evidence for this lies in those two splendid volumes of verse, ‘’La Bonne Chanson,” written under the impulse of his courtship, and “Sagesse,” written under the devotional influence. Drunk or sober, Paul Verlaine was a poet, and we appeal from Paul drunk to Paul sober.

M. Lepelletier lays upon the literary student a great gratitude for giving with such intimate detail the life and environment of Verlaine. Born of mid-dle-class parents at Metz, in 1844, and of no outstanding qualities as a schoolboy, it was in Paris that he first discovered to the coterie, whose members were finally labelled the Parnassians,

his gifts as a poet and his fresh theories of prosody. M. Lepelletier haa written nothing more arresting than the personal details of Nina’s salon, where “the door was always open, and the table spread.”

Verlaine’s excesses, and particularly his friendship with Rimbaud, caused his isolation even by this Bohemian set. There followed the period in England and in Belgium, his imprisonments for shooting at Rimbaud in his frenzy, and again for an attack on his mother — though his mother denied the allegation; his conversion to Catholicism in the prison, his dropping back into chronic drunkenness, dragging his lamed body from restaurant to restaurant, and his death, tended only by “a woman whose favours were for sale.”

So M. Lepelletier’s biography of Verlaine is of value, not so much from any skill of treatment or construction, or from any real success in defending Verlaine’s character, but just because it gives—in a degree that no one else save M. Lepelletier could accomplish—the facts of Verlaine’s life. When the writer interrupts Jhis story to comment in defence of Verlaine, the reader is not greatly impressed. The secret of Verlaine’s weakness lay in himself, and to throw the blame, as M. Lepelletier does, first on Rimbaud, his evil genius; •then on the Government, which refused to restore Verlaine to office; now on his girl-wife, who resented his drunken intimacies; then on the mother, who indulged him and spoilt him. is simply to pronounce on Verlaine the condemnation that his behaviour was entirely conditioned by his environment.

The final impression of this decadent life, as of all decadence, however, however scintillating, is gloom. For sheer joie de vivre, one must go to some religious vagabond like Francis of Assisi. The last place to seek vitality is in a coterie of decadent poets, reading with portentous seriousn-i s their own poems; or in such a figure as Verlaine, as we leave him, lonely in the cafe that was his only home, and seeking in perpetually deeper draughts of absinthe, some hidden paradise of subjective sensation. Verlaine meant what he said when, under the influence of his approaching marriage, he wrote: — Oui, je veux marcher droit et calme dans la vie, Vers le but ou le sort dirigera mes pas, Sans violence, sans remords et sans envie. But the tragedy was that mes pas were

passive, directed by le sort; and that fate led his steps in places that falsified every prediction of the last line—

Sans violence, sans remords et sans envie.

EPIGRAMS FROM NEW BOOKS. The Wander Years. J. H. Yoxall, M.P. It is difficult for an essayist to seem as modest as he really is. Many a man stops short too soon, himself arrests his development, dams and stagnates the running water, and deems the end has come while it is years away. To be as busy as a bee is to be as happy as a bee, and bees, if you will study them, are among the happiest of creatures and the most content. Ah, if one could write down what one feels and knows! But wheu one goes to write the ink is cold. . . . Woman is a conundrum. I allow, but give me the view of the after-dinner speaker: “Though we can’t make her out we’ll never give her up.” Women jump to the mist preposterous conclusions at times, a/ d women that any man knows should be perfectly happy will be perfectly sure they are not.

“A skeleton in every cupboard,” says the proverb. Usually it is the skeleton of a woman, who greatly loved, and went unrequited to her tomb.

When the Yankee remarked to the Englishman at Niagara, “Great lot o’ water running to waste here, stranger,” and the Englishman said, “Ah, yes--en-gineer, I suppose?” the Yankee answered, “No, sir. milkman!”

The first thing a reasonably non-con-ceited member does when he finds himself in the House is to marvel to find himself there at all; and the next thing he does is to wonder why half the other fellows are there.

Next to the telephone, in London, the cloak-room is more provocative of regrettable language than any other institution in the world.

In war time the passionate hearts of good women bleed worse than an amputated arm.

H is easier for a man to be chivalrous than just towards a beautiful woman; but better be chivalrous than too censorious.

There are still more than half the population of this island who do not write for the Press, and therefore regard as exceptional those that do.