In calling you an egoist, people flatter you. Had you been merely an egoist you would have been only half bad. Egoism adapts itself to a kind of love and passion; in refined natures it desires, for its satisfaction, pure forms animated by beautiful thoughts. It is sensual; It is sensual; its peaceful dreams softly caress the universe. But you, you are less than an egoist: you are incapable. And if women love you, I am rather surprised. They ought to guess that you rob them shamefully.

It is a novelty of these days to claim the right to passion, as it has been always to claim the right to happiness. I have at hand a little book of the last century called De l'Amour, which amuses me hugely, as it is written with extraordinary simplicity. The author, M. de Sevelinges, who was a cavalry officer, would have you understand that true love is only for officers. "A warrior," he says, "has great advantages in love. He is also more inclined thereto than other men. Beautiful law of Nature! "

M. de Sevelinges is amusing. But he rightly enough adds that it is well that love, passionate love, should be rare. He bases his argument on the fact that " its powerful effect is always to detach men from their surroundings, to isolate them, and make them independent of any connections which it has not itself formed," and he concludes that, "a civilized society which was composed of lovers would inevitably relapse into poverty and barbarism." I advise Richard Noral to study the maxims of M. de Sevelinges; they are not lacking in philosophy. Nevertheless one should resign oneself to forgo love, when one feels its impossibility.

Then what is to be done? you ask. Good Lord, cultivate your garden, till the soil, play the flute, hide yourself, and live all the same! Remember Sieyes' words, and remember that it is still something to have lived under that perpetual Terror which is human destiny. And again the incomparable M. de Sevelinges would say: "If I take away passion, I at least leave you peace and pleasure. Is that nothing?"

Without speaking of Adolphe, we have already met more than one hero of romance for vainly seeking passion. In a very fine book, Crime d'amour, M. Paul Bourget has shown us the Baron de Querne, who seduces an honest woman only in order to throw her into despair. M. de Querne has a suspicious mind and an arid heart; he is abominably hard. Without any profit to himself, he destroys the happiness of the woman who loves him. But it is his business; he is a professional seducer; moreover he does not fall into slushy sentiment, or give himself up to that absurd ravaging of lives which makes Richard Noral altogether odious, and rather ridiculous. I see there is still a moral in M. Edouard Rod's book, and it is that all is vanity to vain men, and a lie to those who lie to themselves.

"We shall have adultery and cigarettes," said Théophile Gautier in the age of red waistcoats. M. Edouard Rod leaves us only the cigarettes.

So his book, in its very despondency, warns us to fear egoism as the worst of evils. It teaches purity of heart and simplicity. It calls to mind this little verse of the Imitation: "When anyone seeks himself, love is stifled in him."

There is much talent in this bitter story. One

cannot overpraise the sobriety of the telling, the alternately grateful and powerful rapidity of the scenes, and the elegant precision of the style. I must even praise the cold and affected touch which perfectly fits the subject.

M. Édouard Rod's methods of art and composition are very superior to those, now almost abandoned, of the naturalistic school. In a short preface to Les trois cœurs the young author describes himself as an Intuitivist. I have no objection. In any case, he is a thousand miles apart from the Naturalists. The new school, including the old pupils of the Master of Médan, appears to be entering upon a kind of idealism, of which M. Hennique has recently given us a pleasing and peculiar example. M. Edouard Rod believes that he can indicate the principal causes of this unexpected phenomenon. He finds them in the exoticism in which we are steeped, and notably in the powerful suggestions exercised over the younger generation by the music of Wagner, English poetry and Russian romances. These indeed are the causes whose action, already perceptible in the work of M. Paul Bourget, progresses to exaggeration in the éthopées of M. Joséphin Péladan. A clever critic, M. Gabriel Sarrazin, was in a position to say: "At the present moment our literature is flooded by exotic infiltration. Our thought becomes more and more composite. While the people and the middle class remain imperturbably faithful to our Gallic and classical traditions, and continue to appreciate wit, animation and rhetoric, many of our writers are making a collection of all human conceptions. With the keen, refined aroma of ideas, and the swift, penetrating, ironic, and, in a word, French imagina

tion, they combine the heavy, morbid perfume of heady theories and imaginings transplanted from other lands."* Let us not too greatly deplore these importations; literatures, like nations, live by exchange.

*Poètes modernes de l'Angleterre, p. 4.

M

J. H. ROSNY*

HAT is this symbolic insect whose hidden and dreadful work is described by M. Rosny? What is this white ant of the intelligence, which eats into hearts and brains as the Arab

karia

eats the most precious woods? What is this neuropteron of thought, whose production has been favoured by naturalism; which attacks literary minds, and fills them with its voracious colonies? It is the obsession of the little fact; the minute noting of infinitely small detail; the depraved taste for the mean and low; the dissemination of brief sensations; the swarming of small ideas, and the stirring up of filthy thoughts. The younger school is a prey to this scourge; it is mangled, body and soul, by the termite's mandibles. In his anatomical plates M. J. H. Rosny shows us a victim consumed to the marrow, whose inmost being, riddled by the galleries of the horrible white ant, is nothing but a foul mud, mixed with eggs and larvæ, and remnants of flies' wings. The subject has a name; Servaise (Noel), thirty years of age, a Naturalist by profession. The author has been pleased to personify in Noel Servaise the school formed fifteen years ago at the soirées of Médan, *Le Termite, roman de mœurs littéraires, I vol.