feeling adds perhaps a little bitterness to the fatal melancholy of age and celebrity.

Moreover, men must be taken as they are, and what is inevitable in their passions and prejudices must be recognized. The masters of an art are never of opinion that the forms created by them have been well employed by their successors.

Thinking of Victor Hugo, Chateaubriand said in his old age: "I have always succeeded in avoiding harshness, with which they reproach my disciples.' Would M. de Goncourt have been altogether wrong in blaming, in his turn, the harshness of certain young writers ?

As for M. Zola (Rolla), it must be agreed that M. Rosny has not flattered him.

Through the slowly opening door there appeared a bulky, morose-looking man. After a few words of greeting, he sat down on the edge of a chair, with his belly resting on his thighs. Myron watched him, attracted toward his personality, although judging him to be an egoist.

An egoistic sulker, and full of malevolence! At every remark" an invincible force causes him to depreciate." Like M. de Goncourt, he thinks that M. Rosny is sometimes incomprehensible, and frightfully tortuous. M. Rosny smiles to hear such reproaches in the mouth of a writer "full of bombast and trickery," but not lacking in genius. Apart from that, an accomplished man. "Le songe (Le rêve), his treatment for getting down his weight, the Cross of the Legion of Honour, the Academy, all this is fundamentally part of the same collapse of the individuality . . . the funny thing is to watch him calling out the whole time: "I am obstinate ... an opinionated man."

It is true that it is only a conversation in a

drinking-bar that M. Rosny is indifferently relating. It is not he, but one of M. Zola's friends who speaks thus. That explains everything.

The portrait of M. Alphonse Daudet is treated in another manner; here one is conscious of a profound sympathy, and of the three it is neither the least true nor the least full of life. It bears witness to a great knowledge of the model. I will quote it entire, with regrets for the heavier passages and the oddities which here and there mar the scholarly, spontaneous drawing:

The two short-sighted eyes, with a glance lacking in perspective, blind at a yard's distance, become human as one approaches them, become, gradually, the beautiful eyes of a seer, of microscopic power. In the mobile physiognomy, at this moment rigid, Myron reads Gaudet's characteristics. He knows how each wrinkle radiates at a joke, or in sympathy; how the features stand out and, as it were, accompany the words. He perceives Gaudet's sudden awakening to the chilliness of a stupid conversation, his beautiful departure, the communicative electric impulses in which he forgets the tortures, the weariness, the melancholy of a life of affliction. Full of a whimsical youth which no illness can kill, he scales the ladders of analysis and observation. He is never confined, like the literary masses, to pinchbeck or scurrilous formulæ, but seizing a portrait or a recollection, a page written in days gone by, Tacitus or Montaigne, music, or the nature of a subject, illuminating everything with some individual facet of his character, with a flush of enthusiasm.

This is truly our Alphonse Daudet, with his evergreen soul, full of light and song.

We have already said that M. Rosny himself is put before us under the name of Myron.

A bitter disputant, full of confidence before the old masters, he appeared a presumptuous as well as a tiresome and emphatic repeater of arguments; he was at the same time tolerant and pigheaded. He repelled Servaise, by reason of his involved style, prophetic poses, at every point at which an exuberant nature may clash with a sober and depreciative one.

M. Rosny knows himself well, and gives a fair and just account of the impression which he produces. It is true that he is very fond of argument, and that in these intellectual disputes he betrays the pleasant obstinacy of a Vaudois and a Camisard. He has a peaceful and radiant countenance with that inward look, those feverish lips which our latterday artists give to the martyrs of thought when they portray a John Huss or a Savonarola being led to the stake.

Whatever anyone may say, M. Rosny is not vain. Neither is he proud. He knows nothing of arrogance, and if I did not fear protests, I should say that he has no vanity. He does not admire himself, but he has an infinite respect for that portion of the divine wisdom which nature has placed in him, and if he is full of himself it is due to stoic virtue. He is a man of great integrity, but difficult to improve.

What is admirable in him is his lofty sentiment, the freedom of his mind, his breadth of view, his sudden illuminations, his reading of character, and that violent determination to be just, which makes injustice itself a virtue. Le termite is full of excellent ideas on art and literature. Thus, for instance, "a spacious idea conceives beauty in organization, and not in reconstruction." This maxim is so beautiful, true and fruitful, that I seem

issuing from it a complete æsthetic, replete with wisdom. But I admit that I cannot do with his encumbered style-his own word-where every sentence is like a furniture-removal van. This style is not only encumbered, it is confused, and sometimes singularly turbid. M. Rosny's trouble is wanting to say too much. He forces the language. Will he allow me to compare him to certain

astronomers, who, urged by a splendid spirit of inquiry, endeavour to obtain from their telescopes magnifications which the instrument cannot give ? The speculum which is turned upon the Moon, Mars, or Saturn merely reflects vague, uncertain forms in which the baffled eye loses itself.

M. Zola-he tells us himself-said to him one day: "You write very fine books, but you abuse the language, and as I grow older my dislike of such things increases; I am reaching absolute lucidity and ease of style. Oh, I know that I myself have absorbed some of the romantic poison! We must revert to French lucidity.'

M. de Goncourt-he also tells us-spoke to him in the same sense:

"I have read your books; they are very good. But you exaggerate your descriptions and then, these terms... I begin to ask myself whether supreme talent may not consist of writing very simply about very complicated matters."

M. Rosny is no man to listen to these timid counsels. He will never give up. At the very stake, he would not deny the entelechies, pachyderms, luminosities, causalities, quadrangles, and all those strangely heavy words with which his style is obstructed. I assure you that he is the personification of John Huss; he is of the stuff that martyrs are made of. He will never give way on a single point. It's a pity. He understands a great many things; he so well understands nature and life, physics and metaphysics! Ah, if only he could acquire that little nothing which is everythingtaste!

FRANÇOIS COPPÉE *

FRANÇOIS COPPEE is a born poet; verse is his mother-tongue. He speaks it with charming facility. But-and all poets are not thus endowed-he also writes, when he wishes, an easy, laughing, limpid prose. I would willingly believe that it was journalism that trained him as a writer of prose. He was for a time a collaborator of mine, and his happy period with La Patrie is not forgotten, when he replaced M. Edouard Fournier as dramatic critic. Journalism is not such a bad school of style as people make out. I have no knowledge of any fine talent being spoilt therein, and, on the contrary, I have seen some minds gain a suppleness and vivacity which was lacking in their earlier work. One learns to avoid the obscure, strained style into which the most artistic writers so often relapse when they write far removed from the public. Journalism, in fact, is like those baths in running water, from which we emerge all the more alert and agile.

However it may be with the singer of Les Humbles, and however he may have developed his talent for prose, one must, whilst recognizing that his primary place is in poetry, give him also a niche *Toute une jeunesse, I vol.