Front matter (continued 3)

As may be often noticed in other cases, as we go through the world, there was between the primitive earth-instincts of this hunter of wild things and the desperate creatures he pursued, a far deeper bond of kinship than exists between sedentary humanitarians and the objects of their philanthropy. It is good that there should be such a writer as this in the world.

In the sophisticated subtleties of our varnished and velvet-carpeted civilisation, it is well that we should be brought back to the old essential candours which forever underlie the frills and frippery. It is well that the stark bones of the aboriginal skeleton with its raw "unaccommodated" flesh should peep out through the embroideries.

It is, after all, the "thing itself" which matters—the thing which "owes the worm no silk, the cat no perfume." Forked straddling animals are we all, as the mad king says in the play, and it is mere effeminacy and affectation to cover up the truth.

Guy de Maupassant is never greater than when appealing to the primitive link of tragic affiliation that binds us to all living flesh and blood. A horse mercilessly starved in the fields; a wild bird wailing for its murdered mate; a tramp driven by hunger and primitive desire, and harried by the "insolence of office"; an old man denied the little luxuries of his senile greed; an old maid torn and rent in the flesh that is barren and the breasts that never gave suck; these are the natural subjects of his genius—the sort of "copy" that one certainly need not leave one's "home town" to find.

One is inclined to feel that those who miss the tragic generosity at the heart of the brutality of Guy de Maupassant, are not really aware of the bitter cry of this mad planet. Let them content themselves, these people, with their pretty little touching stories, their nice blobs of cheerful "local colour" thrown in here and there, and their sweet impossible endings. Sunday school literature for Sunday school children; but let there be at least one writer who writes for those who know what the world is.

The question of the legitimacy in art of the kind of realism which Guy de Maupassant practised, goes incalculably deep. Consider yourself at this moment, gentle reader, lightly turning over—as doubtless you are doing—the harmless pages of this academic book, as you drink your tea from a well appointed tray in a sunny corner of some friendly cake-shop. You are at this moment—come, confess it—hiding up, perhaps from yourself but certainly from the world, some outrageous annoyance, some grotesque resolution, some fear, some memory, some suspicion, that has—as is natural and proper enough, for your father was a man, your mother a woman—its physiological origin. You turn to this elegant book of mine, with its mild and persuasive thoughts, as if you turned away from reality into some pleasant arbour of innocent recreation. It is a sort of little lullaby for you amid the troubles of this rough world.

But suppose instead of the soothing cadences of this harmless volume, you had just perused a short story of Guy de Maupassant; would not your feelings be different? Would you not have the sensation of being fortified in your courage, in your humour, in your brave embracing of the fantastic truth? Would you not contemplate the most grotesque matters lightly, wisely, sanely and with a magnanimous heart?

The perverted moral training to which we have been all of us subjected, has "sicklied o'er with the pale cast" of a most evil scrupulousness our natural free enjoyment of the absurd contrasts and accidents and chances of life.

French humour may be savage—all the better—we need a humour with some gall in it to deal with the humour of the universe. But our humour, stopping short so timorously of stripping the world to its smock, is content to remain vulgar. That is the only definition of vulgarity that I recognise—a temptation to be coarse without the spiritual courage to be outrageous! Coarseness—our Anglo Saxon peculiarity—is due to temperamental insensitiveness. Outrageous grossness—with its ironical, beautiful blasphemy against the great mother's amazing tricks—is an intellectual and spiritual thing, worthy of all noble souls. The one is the rank breath of a bourgeois democracy, the other is the free laughter of civilised intelligences through all human history.

English and Americans find it difficult to understand each other's humour. One can well understand this difficulty. No one finds any obstacle—except Puritan prejudice—in understanding French humour; because French humour is universal; the humour of the human spirit contemplating the tragic comedy of the human body.

One very interesting thing must be noted here in regard to the method of Guy de Maupassant's writings; I mean the power of the short story to give a sense of the general stream of life which is denied to the long story.

Personally I prefer long stories; but that is only because I have an insatiable love of the story for its own sake, apart from its interpretation of life. I am not in the least ashamed to confess that when I read books, I do so to escape from the pinch of actual facts. I have a right to this little peculiarity as much as to any other as long as I don't let it invade the clarity of my reason. But in the short story—and I have no scruple about admitting it—one seems to get the flavour of the writer's general philosophy of life more completely than in any other literary form.

It is a snatch at the passing procession, a dip into the flowing stream, and one gets from it the sort of sudden illumination that one gets from catching a significant gesture under the street lamp, or meeting a swift tale-telling glance beneath a crowded doorway.

Bitterly inspired as he is by the irony of the physiological tragedy of human life, Guy de Maupassant is at his greatest when he deals with the bizarre accidents that happen to the body; greatest of all when he deals with the last bizarre accident of all, the accident of death.

The appalling grotesqueness of death, its brutal and impious levity, its crushing finality, have never been better written of. The savage ferocity with which he tears off the mask which the sentimental piety of generations has thrown over the features of their dead is no sign of frivolousness in him. The gravity of the undertaker is not an indication of deep emotion; nor is the jesting of Hamlet, as he stands above Ophelia's grave, a sign of an inhuman heart.

The last insult of the scurrilous gods—their flinging us upon oblivion with so indecent, so lewd a disregard for every sort of seemliness—is answered in Guy de Maupassant by a ferocious irony almost equal to their own.

But it would be unfair to let this dark-browed Norman go, without at least a passing allusion to the large and friendly manner in which he rakes up, out of brothel, out of gutter, out of tenement, out of sweat-shop, out of circus-tent, out of wharf shanty, out of barge cabin, every kind and species of human derelict to immortalise their vagrant humanity in the amber of his flawless style.

There is a spacious hospitality about the man's genius which is a rare tonic to weary aesthetes, sick of the thin-spun theories of the schools. The sun-burnt humour of many queer tatterdemalions warms us, as we read him, into a fine indifference to nice points of human distinction. All manner of ragged nondescripts blink at us out of their tragic resignation and hint at a ribald reciprocity of nature, making the whole world kin.

In his ultimate view of life, he was a drastic pessimist, and what we call materialism receives from his hands the clinching fiat of a terrific imprimatur. And this is well; this is as it should be. There are always literary persons to uphold the banners of mysticism and morality, idealism and good hope. There will always be plenty of talent "on the side of the angels" in these days, when it has become a kind of intellectual cant to cry aloud, "I am no materialist! Materialism has been disproved by the latest scientific thinkers!"

To come back to the old, honest, downright, heathen recognition of the midnight, wherein all candles are put out, is quite a salutary experience. It is good that there should be a few great geniuses that are unmitigated materialists, and to whom the visible world is absolutely all there is. One is rendered more tolerant of the boisterousness of the players when one feels the play ends so finally and so soon. One is rendered less exacting towards the poor creatures of the earth when one recognises that their hour is so brief.

There will always be optimists in the countries where "the standards of living are high." There will always be writers—scientific or otherwise—to dispose of materialism. But meanwhile it is well that there should be at least one great modern among us for whom that pulvis et umbra is the last word. At least, one, if only for the sake of those whom we mourn most; so that, beholding their lives, like torch-flames against black darkness, we shall not stint them of their remembrance.

ANATOLE FRANCE

Anatole France is probably the most disillusioned human intelligence which has ever appeared on the surface of this planet.

All the great civilised races tend to disillusion. Disillusion is the mark of civilised eras as opposed to barbaric ones and if the dream of the poets is ever realised and the Golden Age returns, such an age will be the supreme age of happy, triumphant disillusion.

This was seen long ago by Lucretius, who regarded the fear of the gods as the last illusion of the human race, and looked for its removal as the race's entrance into the earthly paradise.

Nietzsche's noble and austere call to seriousness and spiritual conflict is the sign of a temper quite opposite from this. Zarathustra frees himself from all other illusions, but he does not free himself from the most deadly one of all—the illusion namely, that the freeing oneself from illusion is a high and terrible duty.

The real disillusioned spirit is not the fierce Nietzschean one whose glacial laughter is an iconoclastic battle-cry and whose freedom is a freedom achieved anew every day by a strenuous and desperate struggle. The real disillusioned spirit plays with illusions, puts them on and takes them off, lightly, gaily, indifferently, just as it happens, just as the moment demands.

One feels that in spite of his cosmic persiflage and radiant attempt to Mediterraneanise into "sun-burnt mirth" the souls of the northern nations, Nietzsche was still at heart an ingrained hyperborean, still at heart a splendid and savage Goth.

As in every other instance, we may take it for granted that any popular idea which runs the gamut of the idealistic lecture-halls and pulpits of a modern democracy is false through and through. Among such false ideas is the almost universal one that what is called the decadence of a nation is a sign of something regrettable and deplorable. On the contrary, it is a sign of something admirable and excellent. Such "weakness," in a deeper than a popular sense, is "strength"; such decadence is simply wisdom.

The new cult of the "will to power" which Nietzsche originated is nothing more than the old demiurgic life-illusion breaking loose again, as it broke loose in the grave ecstasies of the early Christians and in the Lutheran reformation. Nietzsche rent and tore at the morality of Christendom, but he did so with the full intention of substituting a morality of his own. One illusion for another illusion. A Roland for an Oliver!

Nietzsche praised with desperate laudation a classical equanimity which he was never able to reach. He would have us love fate and laugh and dance; but there were drops of scorching tears upon the page of his prophecy and the motif of his challenge was the terrible gravity of his own nature; though the conclusion of his seriousness was that we must renounce all seriousness. It is Nietzsche himself who teaches us that in estimating the value of a philosopher we have to consider the psychology of the motive-force which drove him.

The motive-force that drove Nietzsche was the old savage life-instinct, penetrated with illusion through and through, and praise as he might the classical urbanity, no temper that has ever existed was less urbane than his own.

The history of the human race upon this planet may be regarded—in so far as its spiritual eruptions are concerned—as the pressure upwards, from the abysmal depths, of one scoriae tempest after another, rending and tearing their way from the dark centre fires where Demogorgon turns himself over in his sleep, and becoming as soon as they reach the surface and harden into rock, the great monumental systems of human thought, the huge fetters of our imaginations. The central life-fire which thus forces its path at cataclysmic intervals to the devastated surface is certainly no illusion. It is the one terrific cosmic fact.

Where illusion enters is where we, poor slaves of traditional ratiocination, seek to turn these explosions of eternal lava into eternal systems. The lava of life pours forth forever, but the systems break and crumble; each one overwhelmed in its allotted time by a new outrushing of abysmal energy.

The reiterated eruptions from the fathomless depths make up the shifting material with which human civilisations build themselves their illusive homes; but the wisest civilisations are the ones that erect a hard, clear, bright wall of sceptical "suspension of judgment," from the face of which the raging flood of primordial energy may be flung back before it can petrify into any further mischief.

Such a protective wall from the eruptive madness of primordial barbarism, the scepticism of classical civilisation is forever polishing and fortifying. Through the pearl-like glass of its inviolable security we are able to mock the tempest-driven eagles and the swirling glacial storms. We can amuse ourselves with the illusions from which we are free. We can give the imagination unbounded scope and the fancy unrestricted licence. We have become happy children of our own self-created kingdom of heaven; the kingdom of heaven which is the kingdom of disillusion.

And of this kingdom, Anatole France is surely the reigning king. From the Olympian disenchantment of his tolerant urbanity, all eruptive seriousness foams back spray-tossed and scattered. And yet such a master of the art of "suspended judgment" was he, that he permits himself to dally very pleasantly with the most passionate illusions of the human race. He is too deep a sceptic even to remain at the point of taking seriously his own aesthetic epicureanism.

This is where he differs from Oscar Wilde, from Walter Pater, from Stendhal, from Remy de Gourmont, from Gabriele d'Annunzio. This is where he differs from Montaigne. These great men build up an egoism of grave subjectivity out of their suspicion of other people's cults. They laugh at humanity but they do not laugh at themselves. With the help of meta-physic they destroy metaphysic; only to substitute for the gravity of idealism the gravity of Epicureanism.

But Anatole France has no gravity. He respects nothing; least of all himself. That is why there is something singularly winning about him which we miss in these others. There is something which palls upon us and grows heavy and tiresome after a while about this massive gravity in the cult of one's own sensations.

Sensations? Well! We all know how subtle and pleasant they can be; but this perpetual religion of them, this ponderous worship of them, becomes at last something monstrous and inhuman, something which makes us cry aloud for air and space. Not only does it become inhuman and heavy—it becomes comic.

Every religion, even the religion of sensation, becomes comic when the sharp salt breath of intellectual sanity ceases to blow upon it. Its votaries seem to be going to and fro wrapped in sheep's wool. The wool may be stained in Tyrian dyes; but it is wool for all that, and it tends ultimately to impede the steps of the wearer and to dull not a few of his natural perceptions.

If one imagines a symposium in the Elysian fields between Wilde and Pater and d'Annunzio, and the sudden entrance upon them of the great Voltaire, one cannot but believe that after a very short time this religion of aestheticism would prove as tiresome to the old ribald champion of a free humanity as any other ritual.

And in this respect Anatole France is with Voltaire. He has too humorous a soul to endure the solemnity of the cultivated senses. He would desert such a group of pious subjectivists to chat with Horace about the scandals of the imperial court or with Rabelais about the price of sausages.

Sceptical in other matters, egoists of the type I have mentioned are inclined to grow unconscionably grave when questions of sex are brought forward. This illusion at any rate—the illusion of sexual attraction—they would be most loth to destroy.

But Anatole France fools sex without stint. It affords him, just as it did Voltaire and Rabelais, his finest opportunities. He fools it up hill and down dale. He shakes it, he trundles it, he rattles it, he bangs it, he thumps it, he tumbles it in the mud, in the sand, in the earth—just as Diogenes did with his most noble tub. Fooling sex is the grand game of Anatole France's classic wit. The sport never wearies him. It seems an eternal perennial entertainment. Hardly one of his books but has this sex fooling as its principal theme.

It seems to his detached and speculative mind the most amusing and irresistible jest in the world that men and women should behave as they do; that matters should be arranged in just this manner.

What we arrive at once more in Anatole France is that humorous drawing back from the world, back into some high pitched observation-tower of the mind, from the philosophic seclusion of which the world scene can be easily imagined as different from what it is. Nothing is more salutary in the midst of the mad confusion of the world than these retirements. It is to no mere "ivory tower" of aesthetic superiority that we retreat. It is to a much higher and more spacious eminence. So high indeed do we withdraw that all the ivory towers of the world seem far beneath us; beneath us, and not more or less sacred than other secular erections.

It is from this point of observation that our humour is suddenly made aware of the startling absurdity of human institution; and not only of human institution; for it is made aware also of the absurdity of the whole fantastic scheme of this portentous universe. We regard the world in these high speculative moods much as children do when they suddenly enquire of their bewildered parents why it is that human beings have two legs and why it is that little girls are different from little boys.

It is one result of these withdrawings to the translunar empyrean that the life of a man of action upon this earth does not appear any more or any less remarkable or important than the life of a man of letters. All human activities from that celestial height are equal; and whether we plunge into politics or into pleasure, into science or into theology, seems a mere incidental chance, as indifferent in the great uncaring solar system as the movements of gnats around a lamp or midges around a candle.

The great historic revolutions, the great social reformations, ancient or modern, present themselves from this height as just as important—as just as unimportant—as the visions of saintly fanatics or the amours of besotted rakes.

Nothing is important and anything may be important. It is all a matter of the human point of view. It is all a matter of taste. Looking at the whole mad stream of things from this altitude, we see the world as if we were peering through an inverted telescope; or rather, shall we say, through an instrument called an "equi-scope"—whose peculiarity it is to make all things upon which it is turned little and equal.

The mental temper of Anatole France is essentially one which is interested in historic and contemporary events; interested in the outward actions and movements of men and in the fluctuations of political life. But it is interested in these things with a certain spacious reservation. It is interested in them simply because they are there, simply because they illustrate so ironically the weaknesses and caprices of human nature and the dramatic chances of ineluctable fate. It is not interested in them because they are inherently and absolutely important, but because they are important relatively and humorously as indicative of the absurd lengths to which human folly will go. It is interested in these things, as I have said, with an ample reservation, but it must emphatically be noted that it is a great deal more interested in them than in any works of art or letters or in any achievement of philosophy.

Anatole France seems indeed to take a certain delight in putting human thought into its place as essentially secondary and subordinate to human will. He delights to indicate, just as Montaigne used to do, the pathetic and laughable discrepancies between human thoughts and human actions.

He is more concerned with men and women as they actually live and move in the commerce of the world than in the wayward play of their speculative fancies, and it gives him an ironic satisfaction to show how the most heroic and ideal thoughts are affected by the little wanton tricks of circumstances and character.

This predominant concern with the natural humours and normal animal instincts of the human race, this refusal ever to leave the broad and beaten path of human frailty, gives a tone to his writings, even when he is dealing with art and literature, quite different from other aesthetes'.

He is not really an aesthete at all; he is too Voltairian for that. As a critic he is learned, scholarly, clear-sighted and acute; but his sense of the humorous inconsistencies of normal flesh and blood is too habitually present with him to admit of that complete abandonment to the spirit of his author, which, accompanied by interpretative subtlety, secures the most striking results.

His criticisms are wise and interesting, but they necessarily miss the sinuous clairvoyance of a writer like Remy de Gourmont who is able to give himself up completely and with no ironic reservation to the abnormalities of the temperament he is discussing. Remy de Gourmont's own temperament has something in it more receptive, more psychological, more supple than Anatole France's. He is in himself a far less original genius and for that very reason he can slide more reservedly into the bizarre nooks and crannies of abnormal minds.

Anatole France is one of those great men of genius to whom the gods have permitted an un-blurred vision of the eternal normalities of human weakness. This vision he can never forget. He takes his stand upon the ground which it covers, and from that ground he never deviates.

Man for him is always an amorous and fantastic animal, using his reason to justify his passions, and his imagination to justify his illusions. He is always the animal who can laugh, the animal who can cry, the animal who can beget or bear children. He is only in a quite secondary sense the animal who can philosophise.

It is because of his constant preoccupation with the normal eccentricities and pathetic follies of our race that he lays so much stress upon outward action.

The normal man is rather an animal who wills and acts than an animal who dreams and thinks; and it is with willing and acting, rather than with dreaming and thinking, that Anatole France is concerned. One of the main ironic devices of his humour is to show the active animal led astray by his illusions, and the contemplative animal driven into absurdity by his will.

With his outward-looking gaze fixed upon the eternal and pathetic normalities of the human situation, Anatole France has himself, like Voltaire, a constant tendency to gravitate towards politics and public affairs.

In this respect his temperament is most obstinately classical. Like Horace and all the ancient satirists, he feels himself invincibly attracted to "affairs of state," even while they excite his derision. One cannot read a page of his writing without becoming aware that one is in the presence of a mind cast in the true classic mould.

In the manner of the great classical writers of Athens and Rome he holds himself back from any emotional betrayal of his own feelings. He is the type of character most entirely opposite to what might be called the Rousseau-type.

He is un-modern in this and quite alone; for, in one form or another, the Rousseau-type with its enthusiastic neurotic mania for self-revelation dominates the entire literary field. One gets the impression of something massive and self-possessed, something serenely and almost inhumanly sane about him. One feels always that he is the "Grand Gentleman" of literature with whom no liberties may be taken. His tone is quiet, his manner equable, his air smiling, urbane, superior. His reserve is the reserve of the great races of antiquity. With a calm, inscrutable, benevolent malice, he looks out upon the world. There is a sense of much withheld, much unsaid, much that nothing would ever induce him to say.

His point of view is always objective. It might be maintained, though the thing sounds like a paradox, that his very temperament is objective. Certainly it is a temperament averse to any outbursts of unbalanced enthusiasm.

His attitude toward what we call Nature is more classical than the classics. Virgil shows more vibrant emotion in the presence of the sublimities of the natural elements. His manner when dealing with the inanimate world is the manner of the Eighteenth Century touched with a certain airiness and charm that is perhaps more Hellenic than Latin. As one reads him one almost feels as though the human race detached itself from its surroundings and put between itself and Nature a certain clear and airy space, untroubled by any magnetic currents of spiritual reciprocity. One feels as though Nature were kept decisively and formally in her place and not permitted to obtrude herself upon the consciousness of civilised people except when they require some pleasant lawn or noble trees or smiling garden of roses to serve as a background for their metaphysical discussions or their wanton amorous play. What we have come to call the "magic" of Nature is never for a moment allowed to interrupt these self-possessed epicurean arguments of statesmen, politicians, amorists, theologians, philosophers and proconsuls.

Individual objects in Nature—a tree, a brook, the seashore, a bunch of flowers, a glade in the forest, a terrace in a garden,—are described in that clear, laconic, objective manner, which gives one the impression of being able to touch the thing in question with one's bare hand.

The plastic and tactile value of things is always indicated in Anatole France's writings with brief, clear cut, decisive touches, but "the murmurs and scents" of the great waters, the silences of the shadowy forests are not allowed to cross the threshold of his garden of Epicurus. Each single petal of a rose will have its curves, its colours, its tints; but the mysterious forces of subterranean life which bring the thing to birth are pushed back into the darkness. The marble-cold resistance of Anatole France's classical mind offers a hard polished surface against which the vague elemental energies of the world beat in vain. He walks smilingly and pensively among the olive-trees of the Academia, plucking a rose here and an oleander there; but for the rest, the solemn wizardries of Nature are regarded with an urbane contempt.

His style is a thing over which the fastidious lovers of human language may ponder long and deep. The art of it is so restrained, so aristocratic, so exclusive, that even the smallest, simplest, most unimportant words take to themselves an emphatic significance.

Anatole France is able to tell us that Monsieur Bergeret made some naive remark, or the Abbé Jérôme Coignard uttered some unctuous sally, in so large and deliberate and courtly a way that the mere "he said" or "he began" falls upon us like a papal benediction or like the gesture of a benignant monarch.

There is no style in the world so deeply penetrated with the odour and savour of its author's philosophy. And this philosophy, this atmosphere of mind, is so entirely French that every least idiomatic peculiarity in his native tongue seems willing to lend itself, to the last generous drop of the wine of its essential soul, to the tone and manner of his speech. All the refinements of the most consummate civilisation in the world, all its airy cynicism, all its laughing urbanity, all its whimsical friendliness, seem to concentrate themselves and reach their climax on every page of his books.

A delicate odour of incense and mockery, an odour of consecrated wine and a savour of heathen wit, rise up together from every sentence and disarm us with the insidiousness of their pleasant contrast. His style is so beautiful and characteristic that one cannot read the simplest passage of easy narration from his pen without becoming penetrated with his spirit, without feeling saner, wiser, kindlier, and more disenchanted and more humane.

I cannot resist quoting from the prologue to "Le Puits de Sainte Claire," a certain passage which seems to me peculiarly adapted to the illustration of what I have just said. The writer is, or imagines himself to be, in the city of Siena.

"Sur la voie blanche, dans ces nuits transparentes, la seule recontre que je faisais était celle du R. P. Adone Doni, qui alors travaillait comme moi tout le jour dans l'ancienne académie degli Intronati. J'avais tout de suite aimé ce cordelier qui, blanchi dans l'étude, gardait l'humeur riante et facile d'un ignorant.

"Il causait volontiers. Je goûtais son parler suave, son beau langage, sa pensee docte et naïve, son air de vieux Silène purifié par les eaux baptismales, son instinct de mime accompli, le jeu de ses passions vives et fines, le génie étrange et charmant dont il etait possédé.

"Assidu à la bibliothèque, il fréquentait aussi le marché, s'arrêtant de préférence devant les contadines, qui vendent des pommes d'or, et prêtant l'oreille à leur libres propos.

Il apprenait d'elles, disait-il, la belle langue toscane. . . . Je crus m'aperçevoir en effet qu'il inclinait aux opinions singulières. Il avait de la religion et de la science, mais non sans bizarreries. . . . C'est sur le diable qu'il professait des opinions singulières. Il pensait que le diable était mauvais sans l'être absolument et que son imperfection naturelle l'empêcherait toujours d'atteindre à la perfection du mal. Il croyait aperçevoir quelques signes de bonté dans les actions obscures de Satan, et, sans trop l'oser dire, il en augurait la rédemption finale de l'archange méditatif, après la consommation des siècles. . . . Assis sur la margelle, les mains dans les manches de sa robe, il contemplait avec un paisible etonnement les choses de la nuit.

"Et l'ombre qui l'enveloppait laissait deviner encore dans ses yeux clairs et sur sa face camuse l'expressions d'audace craintive et de grâce moqueuse qui y etait profondement empreinte. Nous échangions d'abord des souhaits solennels de bonne santé, de paix et de contentement. . . .

"Tandis qu'il parlait, la lumiere de la lune coulait sur sa barbe en ruisseau d'argent. Le grillon accompagnait du bruissement de ses élytres la voix du conteur, et parfois, aux sons de cette bouche, d'où sortait le plus doux des langages humains, répondait la plainte flutée du crapaud, qui, de l'autre côté de la route, écoutait, amical et craintif."

The beautiful delicacy of that single touch "sur la voie blanche, dans ces nuits transparentes" is characteristic of a thousand others of a similar kind sprinkled among his books, where gentle and whimsical spirits discourse upon God and the Universe.

He has a most exquisite genius for these little chance-accompaniments of such human scenes. "L'Orme du Mail" is full of them; and so is "Les Opinions de M. Jérôme Coignard."

In "Sur la Pierre Blanche" the impish humour of accidental encounter brings forward nothing less than the death of Stephen the Proto-Martyr, as an irrelevant interruption to the amorous pleasures of one of his least attractive philosophers.

Full of malicious interest as he is in all the outward events of nations and societies, it is always evident that what Anatole France really regards as worthy of tender consideration is the conversation of quaint minds and the "Humeur riante et facile" of wayward and fantastic souls.

His sense of the fundamental futility of the whole scheme of things is so absolute that what most modern writers would regard as the illogical dreams of superannuated eccentrics he is inclined to treat with smiling reverence and infinite sympathy. Where the whole terrestrial business is only a meaningless blur upon the face of nothingness, why should we not linger by the way, under elm trees, or upon broken fragments of old temples, or on sunny benches in cloistered gardens, and listen to the arbitrary fancies of unpractical and incompetent persons whose countenances express an "audace craintive" and a "grâce moqueuse," and who look with mild wonder and peaceful astonishment at "les choses de la nuit"?

After perusing many volumes of Anatole France, one after another, we come to feel as though nothing in the world were important except the reading of unusual books, the conversation of unusual people, and the enjoyment of such philosophical pleasures as may be permitted by the gods and encouraged by the approbation of a friendly and tolerant conscience.

One always rises from the savouring of his excellent genius with a conviction that it is only the conversation of one's friends, varied by such innocent pleasures of the senses as may be in harmony with the custom of one's country, which renders in the last resort the madness of the world endurable.

He alone, of all modern writers, creates that leisurely atmosphere of noble and humorous dignity—familiar enough to lovers of the old masters—according to which every gesture and word of the most simple human being comes to be endowed with a kind of royal distinction. By the very presence in his thought of the essential meaninglessness of the world, he is enabled to throw into stronger relief the "quips and cranks and wanton wiles" of our pathetic humanity.

Human words—the words of the most crack-brained among us—take to themselves a weight and dignity from the presence behind them of this cosmic purposelessness. The less the universe matters, the more humanity matters. The less meaning there is in the macrocosm the more tenderly and humorously must every microcosm be treated.

It thus comes about that Anatole France, the most disillusioned and sceptical of writers, is also the writer whose books throw over the fancies and caprices of humanity the most large and liberal benediction.

To realise how essentially provincial English and American writers are, one has only to consider for a moment the absolute impossibility of such books as "L'Orme du Mail," "Le Mannequin" or "Monsieur Bergeret à Paris" appearing in either of these countries.

This amiable and smiling scepticism, this profound scholarship, this subtle interest in theological problems, this ironical interest in political problems, this detachment of tone, this urbane humanism, make up an "ensemble" which one feels could only possibly appear in the land of Rabelais and Voltaire.

Think of the emergence of a book in London or New York bearing such quotations at the heads of the chapters as those which are to be found in "Le Puits de Sainte Claire"! The mere look of the first page of the volume, with its beautifully printed Greek sentence about τά φυσικά καί τά ηθικά καί τα μαθηματικά, lifts one suddenly and with a delicious thrill of pleasure, as if from the touch of a cool, strong, youthful hand, into that serene atmosphere of large speculations and unbounded vistas which is the inheritance of the great humane tradition: the tradition, older than all the dust of modern argument, and making every other mental temper seem, in comparison, vulgar, common, bourgeois and provincial.

The chapter headed "Saint Satyre" is prefaced by a beautiful hymn from the "Breviarum Romanum"; while the story named "Guido Cavalcanti" begins with a long quotation from "Il Decameron di Messer Giovanni Boccaccio." I take the first instance that comes to my hand; but all his books are the same. And one who reads Anatole France for the sake of an exciting narrative, or for the sake of illuminating psychology, or for the sake of some proselytising theory, will be hugely disappointed. None of these things will he find; nor, indeed, anything else that is tiresomely and absurdly modern.

What he will find will be the old, sweet, laughing, mellow world of rich antique wisdom; a world where the poetry of the ancients blends harmoniously with the mystical learning of the fathers of the church; a world where books are loved better than theories and persons better than books; a world where the humours of the pathetic flesh and blood of the human race are given their true value, as more amusing than any philosophy and as the cause and origin of all the philosophies that have ever been!

Anatole France is incorrigibly pagan. The pleasures of the senses are described in all his books with a calm smiling assurance that ultimately these are the only things that matter!

I suppose that no author that ever lived is so irritating to strong-minded idealists. He does not give these people "the ghost of a chance." He serenely assumes that all ideals are of human, too human, origin, and that no ideals can stand up long against the shocks of life's ironic caprices.

And yet while so maliciously introducing, with laconic Voltairian gibes, the wanton pricking of human sensuality, he never forgets the church. In nothing is he more French; in nothing is he more civilised, than in his perpetual preoccupation with two things—the beauty and frailty of women and the beauty and inconsistency of Christianity.

The clever young men who write books in England and America seem possessed by a precisely opposite purpose; the purpose of showing that Christianity is played out and the purpose of showing that women are no longer frail.

That sort of earnest-minded attempt to establish some kind of mystical substitute for the religion of our fathers, which one is continually meeting in modern books and which has so withering an effect both upon imagination and humour, is never encountered in Anatole France. He is interested in old tradition and he loves to mock at it. He is interested in human sensuality and he loves to mock at it; but apart from traditional piety struggling with natural passion, he finds nothing in the human soul that arrests him very deeply.

Man, to Anatole France, is a heathen animal who has been baptised; and the humour of his whole method depends upon our keeping a firm hold upon both these aspects of our mortal life.

In a world where men propagated themselves like plants or trees and where there was no organised religious tradition, the humour of Anatole France would beat its wings in the void in vain. He requires the sting of sensual desire and he requires an elaborate ecclesiastical system whose object is the restraint of sensual desire. With these two chords to play upon he can make sweet music. Take them both away and there could be no Anatole France.

The root of this great writer's genius is irony. His whole philosophy is summed up in that word, and all the magic of his unequalled style depends upon it.

Sometimes as we read him, we are stirred by a dim sense of indignation against his perpetual tone of smiling, patronising, disenchanted, Olympian pity. The word "pity" is one of his favourite words, and a certain kind of pity is certainly a profound element in his mocking heart.

But it is the pity of an Olympian god, a pity that cares little for what we call justice, a pity that refuses to take seriously the objects of his commiseration. His clear-sighted intelligence is often pleased to toy very plausibly with a certain species of revolutionary socialism. But, I suppose few socialists derive much satisfaction from that devastating piece of irony, the Isle of the Penguins; where everything moves in circles and all ends as it began.

The glacial smile of the yawning gulf of eternal futility flickers through all his pages. Everything is amusing. Nothing is important. Let us eat and drink; let us be urbane and tolerant; let us walk on the sunny side of the road; let us smell the roses on the sepulchres of the dead gods; let us pluck the violets from the sepulchres of our dead loves. All is equal—nothing matters. The wisest are they who play with illusions which no longer deceive them and with the pity that no longer hurts them. The wisest are they who answer the brutality of Nature with the irony of Humanity. The wisest are they who read old books, drink old wine, converse with old friends, and let the rest go.

And yet—and yet—

There is a poem of Paul Verlaine dedicated to Anatole France which speaks like one wounded well nigh past enduring by the voices of the scoffers.

Ah, les Voix, mourez done, mourantes que vous êtes Sentences, mots en vain, metaphores mal faites, Toute la rhétorique en fuite des péchés, Ah, les Voix, mourez done, mourantes que vous êtes! . . . . Mourez parmi la voix terrible de l'Amour! . . . .

PAUL VERLAINE

To turn suddenly to the poetry of Paul Verlaine from the mass of modern verse is to experience something like that sensation so admirably described by Thoreau when he came upon a sentence in Latin or in Greek lying like a broken branch of lovely fresh greenery across the pages of some modern book.

Verlaine more than any other European poet is responsible for the huge revolution in poetry which has taken in recent times so many and so surprising shapes and has deviated so far from its originator's method.

There is little resemblance between the most striking modern experiments in what is called "free verse" and the manner in which Verlaine himself broke with the old tradition; but the spirit animating these more recent adventures is the spirit which Verlaine called up from the "vasty deep," and with all their divergence from his original manner these modern rebels have a perfect right to use the authority of his great name, "car son nom," as Coppée says, in his tenderly written preface to his "Choix de Poésies," "éveillera toujours le souvenir d'une poésie absolument nouvelle et qui a pris dans les lettres franchises l'importance d'une découverte."

The pleasure with which one returns to Verlaine from wandering here and there among our daring contemporaries is really nothing less than a tribute to the essential nature of all great poetry; I mean to the soul of music in the thing. Some of the most powerful and original of modern poets have been led so far away from this essential soul of their own great art as to treat the music of their works as quite subordinate to its intellectual or visual import.

As far as I am able to understand the theories of the so-called "imagists," the idea is to lay the chief stress upon the evocation of clearly outlined shapes—images clean-cut and sharply defined, and, while personal in their choice, essentially objective in their rendering—and upon the absence of any traditional "beautiful words" which might blur this direct unvarnished impact of the poet's immediate vision.

It might be maintained with some plausibility that Verlaine's poetry takes its place in the "impressionistic" period, side by side with "impressionistic" work in the plastic arts, and that for this reason it is quite natural that the more modern poets, whose artistic contemporaries belong to the "post-impressionistic" school, should deviate from him in many essential ways. Personally I am extremely unwilling to permit Verlaine to be taken possession of by any modern tendency or made the war-cry of any modern camp.

Though by reason of his original genius he has become a potent creative spirit influencing all intelligent people who care about poetry at all, yet, while thus inspiring a whole generation—perhaps, considering the youth of many of our poetic contemporaries, we might say two generations—he belongs almost as deeply to certain great eras of the past. In several aspects of his temperament he carries us back to François Villon, and his own passionate heart is forever reverting to the Middle Ages as the true golden age of the spirit he represented.

He thus sweeps aside with a gesture the great seventeenth century so much admired by Nietzsche.

Non. Il fut gallican, ce siècle, et janséniste! C'est vers le Moyen Age énorme et délicat, Qu'il faudrait que mon coeur en panne naviguât, Loin de nos jours d'esprit charnel et de chair triste.

But whatever may have been the spirit which animated Verlaine, the fact remains that when one takes up once more this "Choix de Poésies," "avec un portrait de l'auteur par Eugene Carrière," and glances, in passing, at that suggestive cinquante-septième mille indicating how many others besides ourselves have, in the midst of earthquakes and terrors, assuaged their thirst at this pure fount, one recognises once more that the thing that we miss in this modern welter of poetising is simply music—music, the first and last necessity, music, the only authentic seal of the eternal Muses.

Directly any theory of poetry puts the chief stress upon anything except music—whether it be the intellectual content of the verses or their image-creating vision or their colour or their tone—one has a right to grow suspicious.

The more subtly penetrated such music is by the magic of the poet's personality, the richer it is in deep intimations of universal human feeling, the greater will be its appeal. But the music must be there; and since the thing to which it forever appeals is the unchanging human sensibility, there must be certain eternal laws of rhythm which no original experiments can afford to break without losing the immortal touch.

This is all that lovers of poetry need contend for as against these quaint and interesting modern theories. Let them prove their theories! Let them thrill us in the old authentic manner by their "free verse" and we will acknowledge them as true descendants of Catullus and Keats, of Villon and Verlaine!

But they must remember that the art of poetry is the art of heightening words by the magic of music. Colour, suggestion, philosophy, revelation, interpretation, realism, impressionism—all these qualities come and go as the fashion of our taste changes. One thing alone remains, as the essential and undying spirit of all true poetry; that it should have that "concord of sweet sounds"—let us say, rather, that concord of high, delicate, rare sounds—which melts us and enthralls us and liberates us, whatever the subject and whatever the manner or the method! Verse which is cramped and harsh and unmelodious may have its place in human history; it may have its place in human soothsaying and human interest; it has no place or lot in poetry. Individual phrases may have their magic; individual words may have their colour; individual thoughts may have their truth; individual sentences their noble rhetoric;—all this is well and right and full of profound interest. But all this is only the material, the atmosphere, the medium, the instrument. If the final result does not touch us, does not move us, does not rouse us, does not quiet us, as music to our ears and our souls—it may be the voice of the prophet; it may be the voice of the charmer; it is not the voice of the immortal god.

Verlaine uses the term nuance in his "ars poetica" to express the evasive quality in poetry which appeals to him most and of which he himself is certainly one of the most delicate exponents; but remembering the power over us of certain sublime simplicities, remembering the power over us of certain great plangent lines in Dante and Milton, where there is no "nuance" at all, one hesitates to make this a dogmatic doctrine.

But in what he says of music he is supremely right, and it is for the sake of his passionate authority on this matter—the authority of one who is certainly no formal traditionalist—that I am led to quote certain lines.

They occur in "Jadis et Naguère" and are placed, appropriately enough, in the centre of the volume of Selections which I have now before me.

De la musique avant toute chose, Et pour cela préfère l'Impair Plus vague et plus soluble dans l'air, Sans rien en lui qui pèse ou qui pose.

Il faut aussi que tu n'ailles point Choisir tes mots sans quelque méprise: Rien de plus cher que la chanson grise Où l'Indécis au Précis se joint.

Car nous voulons la Nuance encor, Pas la Couleur, rien que la nuance! Oh! la nuance seule fiance Le rêve au rêve et la flûte au cor!

Fuis du plus loin la Pointe assassine, L'Esprit cruel et le Rire impur, Qui font pleurer les yeux de l'Azur, Et tout cet ail de basse cuisine!

Prends l'éloquence et tords-lui sou cou! Tu feras bien, en train d'énergie De rendre un peu la Rime assagie Si Ton n'y veille, elle ira jusqu'où?

. . . .

De la musique encore et toujours! Que ton vers soit la chose envolée Qu'on sent qui fuit d'une âme allée Vers d'autres cieux à d'autres amours.

Que ton vers soit la bonne aventure Éparse au vent crispé du matin Qui va fleurant la menthe et le thym . . . Et tout le reste est littérature.

Yes; that is the sigh which goes up from one's heart, in these days when there is so much verse and so little poetry;—"et tout le reste est littérature"!

Clever imagery, humorous realism, philosophical thoughts, bizarre fancies and strange inventions—it is all vivid, all arresting, all remarkable, but it is only literature! This is a fine original image. That is a fine unexpected thought. Here indeed is a rare magical phrase. Good! We are grateful for these excellent things. But poetry? Ah! that is another matter.

This music of which I speak is a large and subtle thing. It is not only the music of syllables. It is the music of thoughts, of images, of memories, of associations, of spiritual intimations and far-drawn earth-murmurs. It is the music which is hidden in reality, in the heart of reality; it is the music which is the secret cause why things are as they are; the music which is their end and their beginning; it is the old deep Pythagorean mystery; it is the music of the flowing tides, of the drifting leaves, of the breath of the sleepers, of the passionate pulses of the lovers; it is the music of the rhythm of the universe, and its laws are the laws of sun and moon and night and day and birth and death and good and evil.

Such music is itself, in a certain deep and true sense, more instinct with the mystery of existence than any definite image or any definite thought can possibly be. It seems to contain in it the potentiality of all thoughts, and to stream in upon us from some Platonic "beyond-world" where the high secret archetypes of all created forms sleep in their primordial simplicity.

The rhythmic cadences of such music seem, if I dare so far to put such a matter into words, to exist independently of and previously to the actual thoughts and images in which they are finally incarnated.

One has the sense that what the poet first feels is the obscure beauty of this music, rising up wordless and formless from the unfathomable wells of being, and that it is only afterwards, in a mood of quiet recollection, that he fits the thing to its corresponding images and thoughts and words.

The subject is really nothing. This mysterious music may be said to have created the subject; just as the subject, when it is itself called into existence, creates its images and words and mental atmosphere. Except for the original out-welling of this hidden stream, pouring up from unknown depths, there would be no thought, no image, no words. A beautiful example of this is that poem entitled "Promenade Sentimentale," which is one of the Paysages Tristes in the "Poèmes Saturniens."

It is a slight and shadowy thing, of no elaborate construction,—simply a rendering of the impression produced upon the mind by sunset and water; by willows and water-fowl and water-lilies. A slight thing enough; but in some mysterious way it seems to blend with all those vague feelings which are half memories and half intimations of something beyond memory, which float round the margins of all human minds.

We have seen these shadowy willows, that dying sunset; we have heard the wail of those melancholy water-fowl; somewhere—far from here—in some previous incarnation perhaps, or in the "dim backward" of pre-natal dreaming. It all comes back to us as we give ourselves up to the whispered cadences of this faint sweet music; while those reiterated syllables about "the great water-lilies among the rushes" fall upon us like a dirge, like a requiem, like the wistful voice of what we have loved—once—long ago—touching us suddenly with a pang that is well-nigh more than we can bear.

Le couchant dardait ses rayons suprêmes Et le vent berçait les nénuphars blêmes; Les grands nénuphars entre les roseaux Tristement luisaient sur les calmes eaux. Moi, j'errais tout seul, promenant ma plaie Au long de l'étang, parmi la saulaie Où la brume vague évoquait un grand Fantôme laiteux se désespérant Et pleurant avec la voix des sarcelles Qui se rappelaient en battant des ailes Parmi la saulaie où j'errais tout seul Promenant ma plaie; et l'épais linceul Des ténèbres vint noyer les suprêmes Rayons du couchant dans ses ondes blêmes Et des nénuphars parmi les roseaux Des grands nénuphars sur les calmes eaux.

Verlaine is one of those great original poets the thought of whose wistful evocations coming suddenly upon us when we are troubled and vexed by the howl of life's wolves, becomes an incredible mandragora of healing music.

I can remember drifting once, in one of those misty spring twilights, when even the streets of Paris leave one restless, dissatisfied and feverishly unquiet, into the gardens of the Luxembourg. There is a statue there of Verlaine accentuating all the extravagance of that extraordinary visage—the visage of a satyr-saint, a "ragamuffin angel," a tatterdemalion scholar, an inspired derelict, a scaramouch god,—and I recollect how, in its marble whiteness, the thing leered and peered at me with a look that seemed to have about it all the fragrance of all the lilac-blossoms in the world, mixed with all the piety of all our race's children and the wantonness of all old heathen dreams. It is like Socrates, that head; and like a gargoyle on the tower of Notre Dame.

He ought to have been one of those slaves of Joseph of Arimathea, who carried the body of Our Lord from the cross to the rich man's tomb—a slave with the physiognomy of the god Pan—shedding tears, like a broken-hearted child, over the wounded flesh of the Saviour.

There is an immense gulf—one feels it at once—between Paul Verlaine and all other modern French writers. What with them is an intellectual attitude, a deliberate aesthetic cult, is with him an absolutely spontaneous emotion.

His vibrating nerves respond, in a magnetic answer and with equal intensity, to the two great passions of the human race: its passion for beauty and its passion for God.

His association with the much more hard and self-possessed and sinister figure of Rimbaud was a mere incident in his life.

Rimbaud succeeded in breaking up the idyllic harmony of his half-domestic, half-arcadian ménage, and dragging him out into the world. But the influence over him of that formidable inhuman boy was not a deep, organic, predestined thing touching the roots of his being; it was an episode; an episode tragically grotesque indeed and full of a curious interest, but leaving the main current of his genius untouched and unchanged.

Paul Verlaine's response to the beauty of women is a thing worthy of the most patient analysis. Probably there has never lived any human person who has been more thrilled by the slightest caress. One is conscious of this in every page of his work. There is a vibrant spirituality, a nervous abandonment, about his poetry of passion, which separates it completely from the confessions of the great sensualists.

There was nothing heavy or material about Verlaine's response to erotic appeals. His nervous organisation was so finely strung that, when he loved, he loved with his whole nature, with body, soul and spirit, in a sort of quivering ecstasy of spiritual lust.

One is reminded here and there of Heine; in other places—a little—of William Blake; but even these resemblances are too vague to be pressed at all closely.

His nature was undoubtedly child-like to a degree amounting to positive abnormality. He hardly ever speaks of love without the indication of a relation between himself and the object of his passion which has in it an extraordinary resemblance to the perfectly pure feeling of a child for its mother.

It must have been almost always towards women possessed very strongly of the maternal instinct that he was attracted; and, in his attraction, the irresistible ecstasy of the senses seems always mingled with a craving to be petted, comforted, healed, soothed, consoled, assuaged.

In poem after poem it is the tenderness, the purity, the delicacy of women, which draws and allures him. Their more feline, more raptorial attributes are only alluded to in the verses where he is obviously objective and impersonal. In the excessive gentleness of his eroticism Verlaine becomes, among modern poets, strangely original; and one reads him with the added pleasure of enjoying something that has disappeared from the love-poetry of the race for many generations.

"By Gis and by saint Charity," as the mad girl in the play sings, there is too much violence in modern love! One grows weary of all this rending and tearing, of all this pantherish pouncing and serpentine clinging. One feels a reaction against this eternal savagery of earth-lust. It is a relief, like the coming suddenly from a hedge of wild white roses after wandering through tropical jungles, to pass into this tender wistful air full of the freshness of the dew of the morning.

No wonder Verlaine fell frequently into what his conscience told him was sin! His "sinning" has about it something so winning, so innocent, so childish, so entirely free from the predatory mood, that one can easily believe that his conscience was often betrayed into slumber. And yet, when it did awaken at last, the tears of his penitence ran down so pitifully over cheeks still wet with the tears of his passion, that the two great emotions may be almost said to have merged themselves in one another—the ecstasy of remorse in the ecstasy of the sin that caused the remorse.

The way a man "makes love" is always intimately associated with the way he approaches his gods, such as they may be; and one need not be in the least surprised to find that Verlaine's attitude to his Creator has a marked resemblance to his attitude to those too-exquisite created beings whose beauty and sweet maternal tenderness so often betrayed him. He evidently enjoys a delicious childish emotion, almost a babyish emotion, in giving himself up into the hands of his Maker to be soothed and petted, healed and comforted. He calls upon his God to punish him just as a child might call upon his mother to punish him, in the certain knowledge that his tears will soon be kissed away by a tenderness as infinite as it is just. God, Christ, Our Lady, pass through the pages of his poems as through the cypress-terraces of some fantastic mediaeval picture. The "douceur" of their sweet pitifulness towards him runs like a quivering magnetic current through all the maddest fancies of his wayward imagination.

"De la douceur, de la douceur, de la douceur"! Even in the least pardonable of light loves he demands this tenderness—demands it from some poor "fille de joie" with the same sort of tearful craving with which he demands it from the Mother of God.

He has a pathetic mania for the consoling touch of tender, pitiful hands. All through his poetry we have reference to such hands. Sometimes they are only too human. Sometimes they are divine. But whether human or divine they bring with them that magnetic gift of healing for which, like a hurt and unhappy infant, he is always longing.

Les chères mains qui furent miennes Toutes petites, toutes belles, Après ces méprises mortelles Et toutes ces choses païennes,

Après les rades et les grèves, Et les pays et les provinces, Royales mieux qu'au temps des princes Les chères mains m'ouvrent les rêves.

. . . .

Ment-elle, ma vision chaste, D'affinité spirituelle, De complicité maternelle, D'affection étroite et vaste?

. . . .

That collection of passionate cries to God which ends with a sort of rhapsody of pleading prayer, entitled "Sagesse," begins—and one does not feel that it is in the least inappropriate—with

Beauté des femmes, leur faiblesse, et ces mains pâles Qui font souvent le bien et peuvent tout le mal.

It is very curious to note the subtle manner in which, for all his declarations about the Middle Ages, he is attracted irresistibly to that wonderful artificial fairy-land, associated for us for all time with the genius of Watteau, wherein pale roses and fountains and yew-hedges are the background for the fatal sweetness of Columbine and the dancing feet of Arlequino.

This Garden-of-Versailles cult, with its cold moonlight and its faint music has become, with the sad-gay Pierrot as its tutelary deity, one of the most appealing "motifs" in modern art.

Almost all of us have worshipped, at some time or another, at this wistful fairy shrine, and have laid our single white rose on its marble pavement, under the dark trees.

Yes; Verlaine may boast of his faithful loyalty to the "haute théologie et solide morale, guidé par la folie unique de la Croix" of that "Moyen Age énorme et délicat" which inspires his spirit. The fact remains that none—none among all the most infatuated frequenters of the perverse fairy-land of Watteau's exquisite dreams—gives himself up more wantonly to the artifice within artifice, to the mask below mask, of these dancers to tambourines amid the "boulingrins du pare aulique" of mock-classic fantasies. He gives himself up to this Watteau cult all the more easily because he himself has so infantile a heart. He is like a child who enters some elaborate masked ball in his own gala dress. It is natural to him to be perverse and wistful and tragically gay. It is natural to him to foot it in the moonlight along with the Marquis of Carabas.

That Nuit du Walpurgis classique of his, with its "jardin de Lenôtre, correct, ridicule et charmant," is one of the most delicate evocations of this genre. One sees these strange figures, "ces spectres agités," as if they were passing from twilight to twilight through the silvery mists of some pale Corot-picture, passing into thin air, into the shadow of a shadow, into the dream of a dream, into nothingness and oblivion; but passing gaily and wantonly—to the music of mandolines, to the blowing of fairy horns!

N'importe! ils vont toujours, les fébriles fantômes, Menant leur ronde vaste et morne, et tressautant Comme dans un rayon de soleil des atomes, Et s'évaporent a l'instant

Humide et blême où l'aube éteint l'un après l'autre Les cors, en sorte qu'il ne reste absolument Plus rien—absolument—qu'un jardin de Lenôtre Correct, ridicule et charmant.

In the same vein, full of a diaphanous gaiety light as the flutter of dragon-fly wings, is that "caprice" in his Fêtes Galantes entitled Fantoches.

Scaramouche et Pucinella Qu'un mauvais dessein rassembla Gesticulent, noirs sur la lune.

Cependant l'excellent docteur Bolonais cueille avec lenteur Des simples parmi l'herbe brune.

Lors sa fille, piquant minois Sous la charmille, en tapinois Se glisse demi-nue, en quête

De son beau pirate espagnol Dont un langoureux rossignol Clame la détresse a tue-tête.

Is that not worthy of an illustration by Aubrey Beardsley? And yet has it not something more naive, more infantile, than most modern trifles of that sort? Does not it somehow suggest Grimm's Fairy Stories?

There is one mood of Paul Verlaine, quite different from this, which is extremely interesting if only for its introduction into poetry of a certain impish malice which we do not as a rule associate with poetry at all.

Such is the poem called Les Indolents, with its ribald refrain, like the laughter of a light-footed Puck flitting across the moon-lit lawns, of

Hi! Hi! Hi! les amants bizarres!

. . . .

Eurent l'inexpiable tort D'ajourner une exquise mort. Hi! Hi! Hi! les amants bizarres!

Such also are those extraordinary verses under the title Colloque Sentimental which trouble one's imagination with so penetrating a chill of shivering disillusionment.

For some reason or other my own mind always associates these terrible lines with a particular corner of a public garden in Halifax, Yorkshire; where I seem to have seen two figures once; seen them with a glacial pang of pain that was like the stab of a dagger of ice frozen from a poisoned well.

Dans le vieux pare solitaire et glacé Deux formes ont tout à l'heure passé.

Leurs yeux sont morts et leurs lèvres sont molles Et l'on entend à peine leurs paroles.

Dans le vieux pare solitaire et glacé Deux spectres ont évoqué le passé.

—Qu'il était bleu, le ciel, et grand l'espoir! —L'espoir a fui, vaincu, vers le ciel noir.

I have omitted the bitter dialogue—as desolate and hollow in its frozen retorts as the echoes of iron heels in a granite sepulchre—but the whole piece has a petrified forlornness about it which somehow reminds one of certain verses of Mr. Thomas Hardy.

One of my own favourite poems of Verlaine is one whose weird and strange beauty will appeal, I fear, to few readers of these sketches; but if I could put into words the indescribable power which it exercises over my own mood I should be doing something to mitigate its remoteness from normal feelings. It is a wild mad thing, this poem—a fantasia upon a melancholy and terrible truth—but it has the power of launching one's mind down long and perilous tides of speculation.

It is like a "nocturne" written by a musician who has wandered through all the cities of Europe with a company of beggar-players, playing masques of death to the occupants of all the cemeteries. He names the poem Grotesques; and it comes among the verses called Eaux-Fortes, dedicated to François Coppée.

C'est que, sur leurs aigres guitares Crispant la main des libertés Ils nasillent des chants bizarres, Nostalgiques et révoltés;

C'est enfin que dans leurs prunelles Rit et pleure—fastidieux— L'amour des choses éternelles, Des vieux morts et des anciens dieux!

. . . .

Les juins brûlent et les décembres Gèlent votre chair jusqu'aux os, Et la fièvre envahit vos membres Qui se déchirent aux roseaux.

Tout vous repousse et tout vous navre Et quand la mort viendra pour vous Maigre et froide, votre cadavre Sera dédaigné par les loups!

I cannot resist the feeling that where the inmost essential genius of Verlaine is to be found is neither in his religious poems nor his love-poems; no, nor even in his singular fantasies.

I find it in certain little evasive verses, the fleeting magic of which evaporates, under any attempt to capture or define it, like the perfume from that broken alabaster box from which the woman anointed the feet of the Saviour. Such a poem is that strangely imaginative one, with a lovely silveriness of tone in its moth-like movements, and full of a mystery, soft, soothing and gentle, like the whisper of a child murmuring its happiness in its sleep, which is called Impression Fausse for some delicate reason that I, alas! lack the wit to fathom.

Dame souris trotte Noire dans le gris du soir Dame souris trotte Grise dans le noir.

On sonne la cloche, Dormez, les bons prisonniers, On sonne la cloche: Faut que vous dormiez,

. . . . .

Dame souris trotte, Rose dans les rayons bleus, Dame souris trotte Debout, paresseux!

Perhaps of all the poems he ever wrote the one most full of his peculiar and especial atmosphere—grey and sad and cool and deep and unlike anything else in the world—is that entitled Réversibilities; though here again I am out of my depths as to the full significance of this title.

Entends les pompes qui font Le cri des chats. Des sifflets viennent et vont Comme en pourchas. Ah, dans ces tristes décors Les Déjàs sont les Encors!

O les vagues Angélus! (Qui viennent d'où) Vois s'allumer les Saluts Du fond d'un trou. Ah, dans ces mornes séjours Les Jamais sont les Toujours!

Quels rêves épouvantes Vous grands murs blancs! Que de sanglots répétés, Fous ou dolents! Ah, dans ces piteux retraits Les Toujours sont les Jamais!

Tu meurs doucereusement, Obscurément, Sans qu'on veille, O coeur aimant, Sans testament! Ah, dans ces deuils sans rachats Les Encors sont les Déjàs!

It is perhaps because his essential kingdom is not bound by the time-limits of any century or age but has its place in that mysterious country beyond the margins of all change, where the dim vague feelings of humanity take to themselves shadowy and immortal forms and whisper and murmur of what except in music can never be uttered, that he appeals to us so much more than other recent poets.

In that twilight-land of delicate mystery, by those pale sea-banks dividing what we feel from what we dream, the silvery willows of indefinable memory bow themselves more sadly, the white poplars of faint hope shiver more tenderly, the far-off voices of past and future mingle with a more thrilling sweetness, than in the garish daylight of any circumscribed time or place.

In the twilight-country over which he rules, this fragile child of the clairvoyant senses, this uncrowned king of beggars and dreams, it may truly and indeed seem that "les jamais sont les toujours."

His poetry is the poetry of water-colours. It is water seen through water. It is white painted upon white. It is sad with the whispers of falling rain. It is grey with the passage of softly-sliding mists. It is cool and fresh with the dews of morning and of evening.

Like a leaf whirling down from one of those tremulous poplar-trees that hang over the Seine between the Pont Neuf and the Quai Voltaire—whirling lightly and softly down, till it touches the flowing water and is borne away—each of these delicate filmy verses of his falls upon our consciousness; draws up from the depths its strange indescribable response; and is lost in the shadows.

One is persuaded by the poetry of Verlaine that the loveliest things are the most evasive things, the things which come most lightly and pass most swiftly. One realises from his poetry that the rarest intimations of life's profound secret are just those that can only be expressed in hints, in gestures, in whispers, in airy touches and fleeting signs.

One comes to understand from it that the soul of poetry is and was and must always be no other thing than music—music not merely of the superficial sound of words, but of those deeper significances and those vaguer associations which words carry with them; music of the hidden spirit of words, the spirit which originally called them forth from the void and made them vehicles for the inchoate movements of man's unuttered dreams.

Paul Verlaine—and not without reason—became a legend even while he lived; and now that he is dead he has become more than a legend. A legend and a symbol! Wherever the spirit of art finds itself misunderstood, mistrusted, disavowed, disinherited; driven into the taverns by the stupidity of those who dwell in "homes," and into the arms of the submerged by the coldness and heartlessness of those who walk prosperously upon the surface; the figure of this fantastic child, this satyr-saint with the Socratic forehead, this tearful mummer among the armies of the outcasts, will rise up and write his prophecy upon the wall.

For the kingdom of art is as the kingdom of heaven. The clever ones, the wise ones, the shrewd ones, the ones that make themselves friends with Mammon, and build themselves houses of pleasure for their habitation, shall pass away and be forgotten forever.

The justice of the gods cancels the malice of the righteous, and the devoted gratitude of humanity tears up the contemptuous libels of the world.

He has come into his own, as all great poets must at last, in defiance of the puritan, in defiance of public opinion, and in spite of all aspersion. He has come into his own; and no one who loves poetry can afford to pass him by.

For while others may be more witty, more learned, more elaborate, none can be more melodious. His poetry is touched with the music that is beyond all argument. He lives by his sincerity. He lives by his imagination.

The things that pertain the deepest to humanity are not its fierce fleshly passions, its feverish ambitions, its proud reasonings, its tumultuous hopes. They are the things that belong to the hours when these obsessing forces fade and ebb and sink away. They are the things that rise up out of the twilight-margins of sleep and death; the things that come to us on softly stepping feet, like child-mothers with their first-born in their arms; the things that have the white mists of dawn about them and the cool breath of evening around them; the things that hint at something beyond passion and beyond reason; the things that sound to us like the sound of bells heard through clear deep water; for the secret of human life is not in its actions or its voices or its clamorous desires, but in the intervals between all these—when all these leave it for a moment at rest—and in the depths of the soul itself the music becomes audible, the music which is the silence of eternity.

REMY DE GOURMONT

The death of Remy de Gourmont is one of the greatest losses that European literature has suffered since the death of Oscar Wilde. The supreme critic is as rare as the supreme artist, and de Gourmont's critical genius amounted to a miracle of clairvoyance.

He wrote of everything—from the etymological subtleties of the French language down to the chaste reluctances of female moles. He touched everything and he touched nothing that he did not adorn.

In America he is unfortunately far less well known than he deserves, though an admirable translation of "A Night in the Luxembourg," published in Boston, and a charming and illuminating essay by Mr. Robert Parker, have done something to remove this disgrace. As Mr. Parker truly observes, the essence of de Gourmont's genius is to be found in an insatiable curiosity which the absolute closing of any vista of knowledge by the final and authoritative discovery of truth would paralyse and petrify. He does not, as Mr. Parker justly says, seek for truth with any hope or even any particular wish, to find it. Truth found would be truth spoiled. He seeks it from sheer love of the pursuit. In this respect he is precisely of the stuff out of which great essayists are made. He is also placed in that special position from which the illusive phenomena of this challenging world are best caught, best analysed, and best interpreted, as we overtake them in their dreamy passage from mystery to mystery.

The mere fact of his basic assumption that final truth in any direction is undiscoverable—possibly undesirable also—sets him with the wisest and sanest of all the most interesting writers. It sets him "en rapport" with nature, too, in a very close and intimate affiliation. It sets him at one spring at the very parting of the ways where all the mysteries meet. Nature loves to reveal the most delicate side-lights and the most illuminating glimpses to those who take this attitude. Such disinterestedness brings its own reward.

To love truth for the sake of power or gain or pride or success is a contemptible prostitution; to love it for its own sake is a tragic foolishness. What is truth—in itself—that it should be loved? But to love it for the pleasure of pursuing it, that is the temper dear to the immortal gods. For this is indeed their own temper, the very way they themselves—the shrewd undying ones—regard the dream shadows of the great kaleidoscope.

It is a subtle and hard saying this, that truth must be played with lightly to be freely won, but it has a profound and infinite significance. Illuminating thoughts—thoughts with the bloom and gloss and dew of life itself upon them—do not come to the person who with puritanical austerity has grown lean in his wrestling. They come when we have ceased to care whether they come or not. They come when from the surface of the tide and under the indifferent stars we are content to drift and listen, without distress, to the humming waters.

As Goethe says, it is of little avail that we go forth with our screws and our levers. Tugged at so and mauled, the magic of the universe slips away from out of our very fingers. It is better to stroll negligently along the highways of the world careless of everything except "the pleasure which there is in life itself," and then, in Goethe's own phrase, "Such thoughts will come of themselves and cry like happy children—'Here we are.'"

There is indeed required—and herein may be found the secret of Remy de Gourmont's evasive talent—a certain fundamental irresponsibility, if we are to become clairvoyant critics of life. As soon as we grow responsible, or become conscious of responsibility, something or other comes between us and the clear object of our curiosity, blurring its outline and confusing its colours. Moral scruples, for instance, as to how precisely this new fragment of knowledge or this new aspect of art is likely to affect the inclinations of the younger generation; religious scruples as to whether this particular angle of cosmic vision will redound to the glory of God or detract from it or diminish it; political or patriotic scruples as to whether this particular "truth" we have come to overtake will have a beneficial or injurious effect upon the fortunes of our nation; domestic scruples as to whether we are justified In emphasising some aspect of psychological discrimination that may be dangerous to those stately and ideal illusions upon which the more sacred of human institutions rest.

Looked at from this point of view it might seem as if it were almost impossible for a thoroughly responsible or earnest-minded man to become an ideal critic. Such a one keeps his mind so closely and gravely fixed upon his ethical "point d'appui," that when he jumps he misses the object altogether. In a certain sense every form of responsibility is obscurantism. We are concerned with something external to the actual thing under discussion; something to be gained or lost or betrayed or guarded; and between the pure image of what we are looking at and our own free souls, float a thousand distorting mists.

The whole philosophical attitude of Remy de Gourmont is full of interest and significance for those who are watching the deeper movements of European thought. At one, in a limited sense, with Bergson and William James in their protests against final or static "truth," de Gourmont's writings, when taken as a whole, form a most salutary and valuable counterpoise to the popular and vulgar implications of this modern mysticism. That dangerous and pernicious method of estimating the truth of things according to what James calls somewhere their "cash-value" receives blow after blow from his swift and ironic intelligence.

Things are what they are and their hidden causes are what they are, quite apart from whether they produce a pleasant or unpleasant effect upon individual lives. The sordid and utilitarian system of judging the value of thoughts and ideas in proportion to their efficiency in the world of practical exigencies does not appeal to this rational and classical mind.

The pragmatism of William James and the instinct-doctrines of Bergson have both been pounced upon by every kind of apologist for supernatural religion and categorical morality; while the method of appealing to the optimistic prejudices of shallow minds by the use of colloquial and mystical images has of recent years been introducing into European thought what might be called "Metaphysical Americanism."

Against this tendency, a tendency peculiarly and especially Anglo-Saxon, the ingrained Latinity of de Gourmont's mind indignantly revolts. His point of view is entirely and absolutely classical, in the old French sense of that suggestive word and in accordance with the great French traditions of Rabelais, Voltaire, Stendhal, Renan, and Anatole France.

The new pseudo-philosophy, so vague, so popular, so optimistic, so steeped in mystical morality, which one associates with the writings of so many modern Americans and which finds a certain degree of support in the work of Maeterlinck and Romain Rolland, leaves the intelligence of Remy de Gourmont entirely untouched. He comes to modern problems with the free, gay, mocking curiosity of a twentieth century Lucian. Completely out of his vein and remote from his method is that grave pedagogic tone which has become so popular a note in recent ethical writing, and which, for all his slang of the marketplace, underlies the psychological optimism of William James.

One has only to read a few pages of Remy de Gourmont to be conscious that one has entered once again the large, spacious, free, irresponsible, heathen atmosphere of the great writers of antiquity. The lapse of time since those classic ages, the superficial changes of human manners and speech, seem abolished, seem reduced to something that does not count at all. We have nothing here of that self-conscious modernity of tone, that fussy desire to be original and popular, which spoils the charm of so many vigorous writers of our age. It is as though some pleasant companion of Plato—some wise and gay Athenian from the side of Agathon or Phaedrus or Charmides—were risen from his tomb by the blue Ionian seas to discourse to us upon the eternal ironies of nature and human life under the lime trees and chestnuts of the Luxembourg gardens. It is as though some philosophic friend of Catullus or Propertius had returned from an age-long holiday within the olive groves of Sirmio to wander with clear-eyed humorous curiosity along the banks of the Seine or among the book-stalls of the Odéon.

Like a thick miasmic cloud, as we read this great pagan critic, all the fogs and vapours of turgid hyperborean superstition are driven away from the face of the warm sun. Once more what is permanent and interesting in this mad complicated comedy of human life emerges in bold and sharp relief.

Artists, novelists, poets, journalists, occultists, abnormalists, essayists, scientists and even theologians, are treated with that humorous and passionate curiosity, full of a spacious sense of the amplitude of and diversity of life's possibilities, which we associate with the classic tradition.

Only in France is the appearance of a writer of this kind possible at all; because France alone of all the nations, and Paris alone of all the cities, of the modern world, has kept in complete and continuous touch with the "open secret" of the great civilisations.

There is no writer more required in America at this moment than Remy de Gourmont, and for that very reason no writer less likely to be received. Curiously enough, in spite of the huge influx of foreigners into the harbour reigned over by the Statue of Liberty, not even England itself is more enslaved by the dark fogs of puritanical superstition than the United States; for there is no place in the world where the brutal ignorance and complacent self-righteousness of the commercial middle classes rampage and revel and trample upon distinction and refinement more savagely than in America. The blame for this must fall entirely upon the English race and upon the descendants of the Puritans. Perhaps a time will come when all these Jews and Slavs and Italians will assert their intellectual as they are beginning to assert their economic, independence, and then no doubt led by the cities of the West—the ones furthest from Boston—there will be a Renaissance of European intelligence in this great daughter of Europe such as will astonish even Paris itself. But this event, as Sir Thomas More says so sadly of his Utopia, is rather to be hoped for than expected.

One hears so often from the mouths of middle-class apologists for the modern industrial system expressions of fear as to the loss of what they call "initiative" under any conceivable socialistic state. One is inclined to ask "initiative towards what"? Towards growing unscrupulously rich, it must be supposed; certainly not towards intellectual experiments and enterprises; for no possible revolutionary regime could be less sympathetic to these things than the one under which we live at present.

The Puritan rulers of America are very anxious to "educate" foreigners in the free "institutions" of their new home. One can only pray that the persons submitted to this process will find some opportunity of adding to their "education" some cursory acquaintance with their own classics; so that when the hour arrives and we wake to find ourselves under the rule of trade-unions or socialistic bureaucrats, our new authorities will know at least something of the "institution," as Walt Whitman somewhere calls it, of intellectual toleration.

Remy de Gourmont himself is very far from being a socialist. He has imbibed with certain important differences, due to his incorrigible Latin temperament, many of the doctrines of Nietzsche; but Nietzsche himself could hardly be more inimical to any kind of mob-rule than this exponent of "subjective idealism."

Remy de Gourmont does not interest himself greatly in political changes. He does not interest himself in political revolutions. Like Goethe, he considers the intellectual freedom of the artist and philosopher best secured under a government that is stable and lasting; better still under a government that confines itself rigidly to its own sphere and leaves manners and morals to the taste of the individual; best of all under that Utopian absence of any government, whether of the many or of the few, whereof all free spirits dream.

Remy de Gourmont has written one immortal philosophical romance in "A Night in the Luxembourg." He has written some exquisite poetry full of a voluptuous and ironic charm; full of that remoteness from sordid reality which befits a lonely and epicurean spirit, a spirit pursuing its own way on the shadowy side of all human roads where the old men dream their most interesting dreams and the young maidens dance their most unreserved dances.

He has written many graceful and lovely prose poems—one hesitates to call them "short stories"—in which the reader is transported away beyond all modern surroundings into that delicate dream world so dear to lovers of Watteau and Poussin, where the nymphs of Arcadia gather, wondering and wistful, about the feet of wandering saints, and where the symbols of Dionysian orgies blend with the symbols of the redemption of humanity.

He has written admirable and unsurpassed criticism upon almost all the contemporary figures of French literature—criticism which in many cases contains a wisdom and a delicacy of feeling quite beyond the reach of the particular figure that preoccupies him at the moment. He has done all this and done it as no one else in Europe could have done it. But in the last resort it does not seem as though his reputation would rest either upon his poetry or his prose poetry or even perhaps upon his "masks," as he calls them, of personal appreciation.

It rather seems as though his best work—putting "A Night in the Luxembourg" aside—were to be found in that long series of psychological studies which he entitles "Promenades Litteraires," "Promenades Philosophiques" and "Epilogues." If we add to these the volumes called "La culture des Idées," "Le chemin de Velours," and "Le Problème du style" we have a body of philosophical analysis and speculation the value of which it would be impossible to overrate in the present condition of European thought.

What we have offered to us in these illuminating essays is nothing less than an inestimable mass of interpretative suggestion, dealing with every kind of topic under the sun and throwing light upon every species of open question and every degree of human mystery.

When one endeavours to distil from all this erudite mass of criticism—of "criticism of life" in the true sense of that phrase—the fundamental and quintessential aspects of thought, one finds the attempt a much easier one than might be expected from the variety, and in many cases from the occasional and transitory nature, of the subjects discussed. It is this particular tone and temper of mind diffused at large through a discussion of so immense a variety of topics that in the last resort one feels is the man's real contribution to the art of living upon the earth. And when in pursuing the transformations of his protean intelligence through one critical metamorphosis after another we finally catch him in his native and original form, it is this form, with the features of the real Remy de Gourmont, which will remain in our mind when many of its incidental embodiments have ceased to interest us.

The man in his essential quality is precisely what our generation and our race requires as its antipodal corrective. He is the precise opposite of everything most characteristic of our puritan-souled and commercial-minded Democracy. He is all that we are not—and we are all that he is not.

For an average mind evolved by our system and subjected to our influence—the mind and influence of modern English-speaking America—the writings of Remy de Gourmont would be, if apprehended in any true measure according to their real content and significance, the most extreme intellectual and moral outrage that could be inflicted upon us. Properly understood, or even superficially understood, they would wound and shock and stagger and perplex every one of our most sacred prejudices. They would conflict with the whole method and aim of the education which we have received, an education of which the professed object is to fit us for an active, successful and energetic life in the sphere of industrial or commercial or technical enterprises, and to make of us moral, socially-minded, conventional and normal persons. Our education, I mean our American education—for they still teach the classics in a few schools in England—is, in true pragmatic manner, subordinate to what is called one's "life work"; to the turning, as profitably to ourselves as possible, of some well-oiled wheel in the industrial machine.

Such an education, though it may produce brilliant brokers and inspired financiers, with an efflorescence of preachers and base-ball players, certainly cannot produce "humanists" of the old, wise Epicurean type.

But it is not only our education which is at fault. Our whole spiritual atmosphere is alien and antagonistic to the spiritual atmosphere of Remy de Gourmont. He is serious where we are flippant, and we are serious where he is ironical.

Any young person among us who imbibed the mental and moral attitude of Remy de Gourmont would cause dismay and consternation in the hearts of his friends. He would probably have a library. He might even read Paul Claudel.

I speak lightly enough, but the point at issue is not a light one. It is indeed nothing less than a parting of the ways between two civilisations, or, shall we say, between a civilisation which has not lost touch with Athens and Rome and a commercial barbarism buttressed up with "modern improvements."

Remy de Gourmont's genius is in its essence an aristocratic one. He has the reserve of the aristocrat; the aristocratic contempt for the judgment of the common herd; the aristocrat's haughty indifference to public opinion. Writing easily, urbanely, plausibly upon every aspect of human life, he continues the great literary tradition of the beautifully and appropriately named "humanism" of the "Revival of Letters."

As Mr. Parker hints, he is one of those who refuse to bow to the intolerable mandate of the dry and sapless spirit of "specialisation." He refuses to leave art to the artist, science to the scientist, religion to the theologian, or the delicate art of natural casuistry to the professional moralist. In the true humanistic temper he claims the right to deal with all these matters, and to deal with them lightly, freely, unscrupulously, irresponsibly, and with no "arrière pensée" but the simple pleasure of the discussion.

He makes us forget Herbert Spencer and makes us think of Plato. He is the wise sophist of our own age, unspoiled by any Socratic "conceptualism," and ready, like Protagoras, to show us how man is the measure of all things and how the individual is the measure of man. The ardour of his intellectual curiosity burns with a clear smokeless flame. He brings back to the touchstone of a sort of distinguished common sense, free from every species of superstition, all those great metaphysical and moral problems which have been too often monopolised by the acrid and technical pedantry of the schools.

He reminds one of the old-fashioned "gentleman of leisure" of the eighteenth century, writing shrewdly and wisely upon every question relating to human life, from punctuation and grammar to the manner in which the monks of the Thebaid worshipped God. His attitude is always that of the great amateur, never of the little professional. He writes with suggestive imagination, not with exhaustive authority. He takes up one subject after another that has been, so to speak, closed and locked to the ordinary layman, and opens it up again with some original thrust of wholesome scepticism, and makes it flexible and porous. He indicates change and fluctuation and malleableness and the organic capriciousness of life, where the professors have shut themselves up in logical dilemmas. When it comes to the matter of his actual approach to these things it will be found that he plunges his hand boldly into the flowing stream, in the way of a true essayist dispensing with all the tedious logical paraphernalia of a writer of "serious treatises."