give us no less than they did; they will never give us more. The faultless delineator of one mood of man, Pierre Loti remains, what he has ever been, an unrelated Phoenix, a mysterious element, whose component parts are music and moonlight and feeling. He is quite right to dread flexibility of accomplishment; he could make no graver mistake than to try to be other than himself.

"Ramuntcho" is a story of the Basque population that lingers with such a strange persistence in the extreme south-west corner of France. It speaks a language which is as venerable in its history as it is independent of the Latin dialects which hem it in. Shrinking from the new-comers in a sombre and disdainful isolation, the Basque remnant clings to its mountain fastnesses, a vigorous race, devoted to strange ancestral games, and cultivating a perfect passion for smuggling. kamuntcho-it is the Basque form of Raymond-is a half-breed; his father is some unnamed Parisian met on the boulevards of Bayonne, his mother a grave, laborious woman, who expiates in her Pyrenean hamlet the single error of her youth. In Ramuntcho the archaic and austere temper of the Basque race is mingled with something gayer and more French, with an impatience of his narrow sphere, a longing to get out of it and away, to experience "des choses d'ailleurs." In the analysis of this temperament and this landscape, the reader is reminded, with a difference, of the Bretons and the Brittany of Loti's earlier novels.

had been actually witnessed by him. The plot is slight and melancholy. Ramuntcho, a lad when the book opens, becomes deeply enamoured of and secretly betrothed to a Basque girl of his village, Gracieuse, whose family hold a position just so much better than that of his own mother that the match is not favorably regarded. He is obliged in due process of time to go away for his three years of military service. He comes back to find his mother dying of chagrin and loneliness, and his Gracieuse vanished. He learns that, having in his absence refused a wealthy suitor who was forced upon her, her mother has left her no choice but to take the veil. Ramuntcho is persuaded by his dare-devil companions to make a raid on the distant convent, with the object of snatching Gracieuse from her fate. But the terror of sacred things comes down upon the conspirators, and in the presence of the holy, gentle women they lose all their courage, and Ramuntcho goes off, alone, to Buenos. Ayres. On a scheme thus simple and broad in lines, Loti has embroidered the most subtle and delicate ornament, without a single false note. By the aid of his singular insight and refinement, he is constantly contrasting with the savage types of the wilder Basque the pathetic, semi-savage, semi-civilized figure of his Ramuntcho-a lad born to sorrow as the sparks fly upwards. When we close the volume the grey haze of an autumn evening seems to have sunken about us, and the sound of bells to be dying in the distance. Now that Stevenson is gone, who is there left but Loti who can give us these exquisite sensations by the mere magic of language?

The field of prose fiction is in these days so full of material attractions that it offers a great temptation to any man who has conquered fame, but not precisely popularity, by another species of writing. M. Melchior de Vogüé has succumbed to the siren, and the author of "Le Roman Russe" sends forth his first novel. When, some months ago, I reviewed "Cœurs Russes" in these

was being drawn near and nearer to the edge of the whirlpool; now he has been definitely sucked down. What a strange thing the art of narrative is! It seems to be quite independent of intellect, of cultivation, of knowledge of the world. Some ignorant girl in a Yorkshire village will present it to us in perfection; here is a most learned and most brilliant Parisian Academician who seems entirely devoid of it. To the student of literary execution I know no recent book more instructive than "Jean d'Agrève" (A. Colin et Cie), although not precisely in the way the author intended. Here is all that tact and cleverness, combined with a style the most accomplished and a will the most tenacious, can do in the way of building up an effective story. What is wanting? Precisely that trifling ingredient, a vocation for the task.

While it is impossible for me to consider that M. de Vogüé has shown any reason why we should spare him from those fields of history and criticism in which he plucked his laurels, "Jean d'Agrève" is a book which it is a satisfaction to read. It is interpenetrated by beauty, by devotion to the distinguished parts of life. It is inspired by a nostalgia for the old heroisms of passion; it seeks to annul the poverty and languor of modern emotion. The author himself compares his lovers to Tristram and Yseult; his attitude towards them is really more simple still; he endeavors to recover, in the persons of two characters of to-day, that melancholy intensity of love which the mediæval poets painted in such canticles of amorous obsession as the Breton "Laustic," for instance, or "Eliduc." But a more recent literary reminiscence comes to the novelist's aid. He has been reading Shelley, and remembers how the supposititious author of "Epipsychidion" proposed to fit up the ruins of an old building in "one of the wildest of the Sporades," and retire thither, "all for love, and the world well lost," in company with his spirit's adored Nightingale. Out of these materials M. de Vogüé has constructed a novel which is too literary to

be quite successful, and too highly finished not to inspire respect.

Jean d'Agrève is a youthful, noble, and wealthy lieutenant in the French navy. (How dazzlingly wealthy and noble every one is nowadays in French social novels!) He is the darling of society, but spurns it that he may foster sinister dreams in solitude upon a distant coast. Wherever he goes, woman throws herself at his feet, but he is like the hero of Mr. Hardy's "Well-Beloved," and always gets tired of loving before he learns to love. He retires to an island, not exactly in the Sporades, but on the coast of the Riviera, the earthly paradise of Port-Cros. The English reader may now be referred to a celebrated passage in "Epipsychidion," which is expanded over many pages of "Jean d'Agrève," even to the inclusion of the lemon-flowers and the wild goats, the halls built round with ivy, and the pastoral people innocent and bold. Jean is summoned to a dance on a ship of war stationed at Toulon, and there he meets an exquisite Russian princess, who turns unfathomable eyes upon him, and asks to be introduced. They fall instantly, irremediably, fatally in love with one another, and the Elysian Island is fortunately at hand. “A ship is floating in the harbor now" (see Shelley passim) and the halcyons welcome the enchanted lady to their "sifted sands and caverns hoar," where, in an enchanted seclusion, the lovers spend certain weeks or months of ecstasy, "conscious, inseparable, one." Then a series of accidents tears them apart. Hélène is obliged to return to Russia, and before her affairs will permit her to revisit the island, Jean d'Agrève has been ordered off to service in Tonquin. Hélène dies of a broken heart, and Jean is killed in a skirmish with the Yellow Men.

A very large part of this novel is occupied with letters and extracts from journals. We are constantly told that the intellectual and moral parallelism of the natures of Jean and Hélène was extremely close, and this may account for the fact that their letters are written identically in the same style. It does

not, however, account for the still more curious fact that each of these lovers, when writing under the impulse of passion, and for no eye but that of the other, invariably employed the expressions and illustrations which are now found to be peculiar to the public mannerism of M. Melchior de Vogüé. And this reveals the main defect of the book-it is not dramatic, and on those rare occasions when we are stirred, it is not so much by the display of emotion in the two lovers, as by something personal to the author, some indescribable revelation, through his objective presentment, of subjective emotions-his sense of the futility and fragility of human desires, the inevitable discords that disturb the harmony of passion. But all this is lyrical, not epic, in its essence, and though "Jean d'Agrève" is full of sumptuous descriptive passages, and is written throughout with the utmust dignity and purity, it does not lead us to wish M. de Vogüé to repeat the experiment of turning from his own clearly defined hermitage of letters to the humming mart where the novelists jostle one another.

To M. Jusserand's series of "Les Grands Ecrivains Français," which is rapidly forming an invaluable library of literary history, the Duc de Broglie has contributed a “Malherbe" (Hachette et Cie). This would be a remarkable feat for a man of the duke's years, even

if lay within the range of his habitual studies; but it is astonishing as an essay in pure letters from one whose life-work has lain in politics and the literature of politics. The "Malherbe" of the Duke of Broglie is a solid performance, a little stiff and hard, of course, as was to be expected, but highly competent. He tells the story of the life of the French Waller with a rigid elegance, scarcely unbending to humor, but faintly smiling at each characteristic cynical anecdote. When he proceeds to examine the critical position of Malherbe, what we find is mainly the received opinion gracefully repeated. The Duc de Broglie does not think it necessary to enter at any length upon a consideration of the causes which led

to his hero's poetical success. The extravagance and insipidity of Desportes and his school are commonly held to account sufficiently for the reaction which Malherbe led. But there are worse poets in the history of France than the author of "Rozette, pour un peu d'absence," and it was not the languor of Desportes which Malherbe attacked, but his incorrectness. What made all France admit that the public favorite was "incorrect"?

It would seem as though the world of letters had looked over Malherbe's shoulder when he was marking that copy of the 1600 Desportes which remains in the Bibliothèque Nationale, a monument of critical fury. In this volume, of which the Duc de Broglie hardly says enough, the force of Malherbe and his strenuousness stand revealed. Imagine a young poet of to-day going over a collected Tennyson, and covering the margins of every page with stinging, unhesitating, logical rebukes, drowning entire poems with the torrent of his sarcasm, making whole sections unreadable by the vigor of his manuscript notes; imagine, moreover, the world of letters accepting this terrible indictment, and abruptly ceasing to read their favorite, and we have, except in the genius of Tennyson, an exact parallel to the mode in which Malherbe crushed, pulverized, and blew away the reputation of his predecessor. It really looks as though he did it, largely, by intimidation and violent purpose; his eloquent portrait seems to ask, "Who can hold up his paltry opinion against these arrogant eyes of mine and this contemptuous nose?" The insolent and mordant satirist Regnier could; and he declared that the sole merit of Malherbe and his disciples was

Qu'ils auront joint l'utile avec le delec

table,

Et qu'ils sauront rimer une aussi bonne table.

But already in the very verse of Regnier himself we feel that Malherbe is justified, and that the old gay years in which Ronsard ronsardized among the roses are gone never to return.

To comprehend the influence of Malherbe in France, as of Waller a generation later in England, it is necessary to realize the exhaustion which followed the full éclosion of the Renaissance. As feeling and picturesque illustration more and more took the place of passion and thought, as to speak of Phoebus and of nightingales absolved a poet from having anything whatever to say, as delicacy degenerated into affectation, and the ears were cloyed with the sweets of preciosity, the world of each nation in Europe became sick of the whole thing, and, the practice of verse being a phenomenon as constant as the precession of the equinoxes, determined to use verse for purposes which were not ornamental, but closely connected with the intellect. When the age was precisely ready for this change, a Malherbe arose with a positive genius for tying talent to sticks and nipping the buds of imagination. We, to-day, turn over the "odes" and the "stances" of Malherbe and wonder where the charm lay. But was there not, to a generation drowned in sensibility and conceit, a charm in the very want of charm? A strong, plain verse, very lucid, correct, and uniform, with no nonsense about it, that is what the seventeenth century wanted in France, and that is what it got.

A modern Malherbe might find plenty of work to do in Paris to-day. A little book which has reached me, "La Crise Poétique" (Perrin et Cie), by M. Adolphe Boschot, in spite of its sub-title "Le Poète et les Courtisanes" (which is not to my taste, for I am old-fashioned enough to think the house of Aspasia no fit haunt for the Muses), gives me much to think about. What an anarchy it reveals! There is no king in Israel, and each of the five hundred bards seems to spend most of his time in tearing the laurels from his four hundred and ninety-nine brethren. Will any good thing come of all this turmoil and mutual denunciation? Is M. Paul Fort, the new Apollo, whose "Ballades Françaises" (Mercure de France) are heralded in a somewhat extravagant preface by M. Pierre Louys, the egregiously bril

liant author of "Aphrodite"? According to M. Louys, M. Paul Fort has written a book which "annonce un grand écrivain," and has invented "un style nouveau, le style littéraire de l'avenir." If so, M. Fort is a new Malherbe, and more than a Malherbe; but the world is growing old. The grand discovery of M. Fort (who is a very clever, energetic young man, full of promise and fire) is a sort of hybrid between verse and prose. It is a cake of prose with occasional rhymes, at unexpected places, for plums. But for two hundred years we English have known this sort of thing. The mawkish pseudo-poetry of Shaftesbury, leading down through Harvey's "Meditations in the Tombs," to the resonances of Ossian, and then bursting out again in Walt Whitman, have made us shy of "prose-poetry." But M. Paul Fort, who was the manager of the "Théâtre d'Art" when he was eighteen, and has already at twenty-five had literary adventures enough for a lifetime, will no doubt find his way safely to the ultimate haven of successful expression.

The determination of the younger French writers to enlarge and develop the resources of their national poetry is a feature of to-day, far too persistent and general to be ignored. Until a dozen years ago, the severely artificial prosody accepted in France seemed to be one of the literary phenomena of Europe the most securely protected from possible change. The earliest proposals and experiments in fresh directions were laughed at, and often not undeservedly. No one outside the fray can seriously admit that any one of the francs-tireurs of symbolism has made a perfectly successful fight. But the number of these volunteers, and their eagerness, and their intense determination to try all possible doors of egress from their too severe palace of traditional verse, do at last impress the observer with a sense of the importance of the instinct which drives them to these eccentric manifestations. Renan said of the early Decadents that they were a set of babies, sucking their thumbs. But these people are getting

bald, and have grey beards, and still they suck their thumbs. There must be something more in the whole thing than met the eye of the philosopher. When the entire poetic youth of a country such as France is observed raking the dust-heaps, it is probable that pearls are to be discovered.

It may be admitted that M. Henri de Regnier has discovered a large one, if it seems to be a little clouded, and perhaps a little flawed. Indeed, of the multitude of experiment-makers and theorists, he comes nearest (it seems to me) to presenting a definitely evolved talent, lifted out of the merely tentative order. He stands, at this juncture, half way between the Parnassians and those of the Symbolists who are least violent in their excesses. If we approach M. de Regnier from the oldfashioned camp, his work may seem bewildering enough, but if we reach it from the other side-say, from M. Réné Ghil or from M. Yvanhoé Rambosson -it appears to be quite organic and intelligible. Here at least is a writer with something audible to communicate, with a coherent manner of saying it, and with a definite style. A year or two ago, the publication of his "Poèmes Anciens et Romanesques" raised M. de Regnier, to my mind, a head and shoulders above his fellows. That impression is certainly strengthened by "Les Jeux Rustiques et Divins" (Mercure de France), a volume full of graceful and beautiful verses. Alone, among the mutitude of young experimenters, M. de Regnier seems to possess the classical spirit; he is a genuine artist, of pure and strenuous vision. For years and years, my eloquent and mysterious friend, M. Stéphane Mallarmé, has been talking about verse to the youth of Paris. The sole result of all those abstuse discourses has been (so it seems to me) the production of M. Henri de Regnier. He is the solitary swallow that makes the summer for which M. Mallarmé has been so passionately imploring the gods.

It is scarcely necessary to remind ourselves in reading "Les Jeux Rustiques et Divins" of the Mallarméan principle

that poetry should suggest and not express, that a series of harmonious hints should produce the effect of direct clear statement. In the opposite class, no better example can be suggested than the sonnets of M. de Heredia, which are as transparent as sapphires or topazes, and as hard. But if M. de Regnier treats the same class of subject as M. de Heredia (and he often does) the result is totally different. He produces an opal, something clouded, soft, and complex, made of conflicting shades and fugitive lights. In the volume before us we have a long poem on the subject of Arethusa, the nymph who haunted that Ortygian well where, when the flutes of the shepherds were silent, the sirens came to quench their thirst. We have been so long habituated, in England by the manner of Keats and Tennyson, in France by the tradition of the Parnassians, to more or less definite and exhaustive portraiture, that at first we read this poetry of M. de Regnier without receiving any impression. All the rhythms are melodious, all the diction dignified and pure, all the images appropriate, but the poem seems to say nothing. It leaves no imprint on the mind; it singularly bewilders and taunts the attention.

It is difficult to find a poem short enough for quotation which shall yet do no injustice to the methods of M. de Regnier; but "Invocation Mémoriale" may serve our purpose:

La main en vous touchant se crispe et se contracte

Aux veines de l'onyx et aux noeuds de l'agate,

Vases nus que l'amour en cendre a faits des urnes!

O coupes tristes que je soupèse, une à une, Sans sourire aux beautés des socles et des

anses!

O passé longuement où je goûte en silence Des poisons, des mémoires acres où le philtre

Qu'avec le souvenir encor l'espoir infiltre Goutte à goutte puisé à d'amères fon

taines;

Et, ne voyant que lui et elles dans moimême,

Je regarde, là-bas, par les fenêtres hautes, L'ombre d'un cyprès noir s'allonger sur les

roses.