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be many things in the visible world about which he did not say something - and generally something wise, memorable, and urbane — in the sixty volumes he wrote. But his principal achievement is fourfold - he was a novelist, a critic, a traveler, and a poet. In each of these departments he wrote some of the best things that have ever been written in French.

We suspect that Gautier's fame has suffered somewhat by reason of this very versatility. The world will not be lieve that a man can do more than one thing well; it insists on his being a specialist, restricted to one line of activity. If a man is naturally versatile, he always runs the risk of being classed as a dilettante; because he does many things, the public cannot conceive that he does any of them with supreme excellence.

Gautier was, in the first place, a considerable writer of fiction, more successful in his short stories than in his long novels. Mademoiselle de Maupin, his most notorious novel, might have been dismissed by this time as merely a juvenile attempt to shock the bourgeoisie if it had not been for the famous preface, which seriously sets up the doctrine of art for art's sake, and has become the credo of the literary neopagans.

The book raises the whole question of the relation between morality and literature. It must be admitted that the moral and the artistic do not merely coincide. There is great literature that is more or less in conflict with the dictates of morality. On the other hand it is equally certain that the greatest literature of all must have a moral basis and a moral sanction. From the point of view of literature alone, the book should have been either more of an erotic comedy or more of a passionate tragedy. To put it in another way, either the moral interests at stake are

too serious, or the structural development of the narrative is too slight.

Le Capitaine Fracasse, the other of Gautier's long novels which is best known, is of another type altogether. It is a picaresque story of the most readable sort. From the fine description of the ruined château at the beginning of the book to the happy ending, with the marriage at Vallombreuse, it is a thoroughly innocent and interesting tale. We follow with a pleasant zest the adventures of the strolling players as they wander about the picturesque France of a bygone century. Gautier borrowed a good deal of the material of the book from Scarron, in much the same way as Charles Reade, in his greatest romance, borrowed from Erasmus.

There is no serious purpose in the book; it is merely pleasant romance in the familiar key of manteau et épée. It is interesting to know that Gautier began it, dropped it, and then, after an interval of twenty-five years, resumed and finished it. It has the interest of Dumas, with more refinement of manner, and more plausibility of construction, though without the intoxicating energy of the author of Les Trois Mousquetaires.

There are few writers who have had a more unquestioned mastery of the short story than Gautier. It is amazing how he manages to convey the atmosphere of eighteenth-century Paris in Jean et Jeannette, and of nineteenthcentury Madrid in Militona; of ancient Egypt in Une Nuit de Cléopâtre; and of classical Greece in La Chaîne d'Or. The archæology may not be faultless in these last, though Gautier was quite a scholarly man of letters, but, however that may be, he certainly has a wonderful knack of suggesting the scene of ancient life as the background of the tale.

It is equally astonishing that he

should be able to achieve in La Morte Amoureuse somewhat of the crepuscular horror that was the speciality of Edgar Allan Poe, and in the little story of L'Enfant aux Souliers de Pain a simplicity and a naïve pathos that seem to belong by right to Hans Andersen.

Though he lived all his life in Paris, except for a few months of infancy, Gautier liked to think that he was temperamentally of the South. 'J'ai garde,' he said, ‘un fonds méridional.' It is stated that his family hailed originally from Provence. There is certainly a wonderful sense of warmth and color in his writings; his invocations of the sunshine and the summer remind one of the Troubadours. His travels were mainly in sunny lands - Spain, Italy, and the East. The one exception is Russia, and there his preoccupation with light and color is remarkable. Thus he describes 'a sleigh-ride across 'an immaculate immensity of sparkling snow, that strange soil which by its silvery tint reminds you of a journey in the moon, through an atmosphere quick, cutting, cold as steel, where nothing can corrupt, not even death itself!'

The style of Gautier is masterly, both in prose and in verse, and perhaps nothing is more masterly than the difference between the one and the other. His poetry is almost the last word in chastity of form, in minute delicacy, in disciplined and scholarly grace. His prose is not less artistic, but it is naturally freer, more varied, more picturesque, with a quaint allusiveness and an abundance of graceful images. He was very widely read, and his vocabulary is remarkably rich. It is said that dictionaries were among his favorite reading, and one can well be

lieve it. He rejoiced over a vivid and unusual word as over hid treasure, and when once he had found it he used it with an infallible felicity.

The greatest work of Gautier, however, is to be found in his poetry, and especially in the volume of verse entitled Emaux et Camées. The title is apt. Every poem in the book has the delicate grace of a cameo, the finished brilliance of enamel. In all his writings, and naturally most of all in his verse, Gautier was intensely preoccupied with style. These poems were incessantly corrected, and incessantly improved. Though they are marked by such austerity of art, there is here and there a personal note in them that is more pronounced and more poignant than in Gautier's prose. His heart was in his

poetry. If I had possessed any personal fortune,' he wrote to SainteBeuve, 'I should have devoted myself wholly to the green laurel.'

A few of his shorter poems will live as long as the language. Gautier was, in fact, one of those poets of the second rank such as he himself delighted to study and appraise - one of those poets who have written a few immortal lyrics which are found in every anthology. When we think of him we are constantly reminded-notwithstanding the wide differences that make the comparison seem fantastic — of our own minor poets of the seventeenth century, of Shirley and Lovelace and Crashaw, poets who had a limited range but a marvelous style, and each of whom wrote a few poems that are of a flawless perfection. In recondite fancy, in verbal felicity, in grace of form, in precision of art, there is a real parallel between the Frenchman and the best of our Caroline and Jacobean poets.

TO A THRUSH IN WINTER

BY KENNETH H. ASHLEY

[The Nation and the Athenæum]

HERE where thin trees stare at the afterglow
Of a rich sun that's cheered one haggard day
You sit and sing as though the month were May.
Beguiled? Not you! Not you! Right well you know
The season's treacheries, and that cold snow,
Before Spring comes, may still your song for aye.
No! You are Beauty's minion and you pay
Her instant homage when her train does show
In winter's twilight or in spring's heyday.
And I, who wore her liveries as a lad,

Her almsman now, from service turned away,
Hear in your joy assurance of her rule,

And know, although the times are dark and sad,
That neither bird nor poet is Time's fool.

TO A THRUSH IN FEBRUARY

BY JOHN SWINNERTON PHILLIMORE

[New Witness]

FEATHERED Soothsayer, what's the name to hit
That sense in thee so deft to disentomb
The buried year and people the empty room

Of music in thy brain? What rarest wit

Of all the five we boast, could compass it?

Dost hear the white root-fibres push? Presume

The rank, sweet smell of hawthorn? See in the womb

Of earth bright eyes of kingcups yet unlit?

"T is neither faith nor hope, but fierce desire
Outbraving hope and faith, wizard enough
To dare the labyrinthine maze of death.
Sing on! They hear: to thy sweet flute aspire
All the green resurrections; till the stuff

Of thy full melody shall be Summer's breath.

ON FINISHING FRAGMENTS

THE publication of Jane Austen's unfinished novel, The Watsons, has been hailed with delight by most admirers of that prim but excellent novelist. Not so Mr. Edmund Gosse, who takes issue, not with the publication of the novel, but with an attempt to conclude it made by Miss L. Oulton. The publishers, who evidently admire their writer's handiwork, declare that 'members of the Austen family' are unable to recognize the place where the original story ends and the conclusion from a second pen begins. Mr. Gosse observes, brutally and indignantly, that he has no difficulty whatever in discovering the place where the divine author dropped her work. Miss Oulton has chopped into chapters what Jane Austen left undivided, and the new portion begins in the middle of chapter six. It is the opinion of the publishers that Miss Oulton has carried out "her difficult task" very successfully. I am reminded of the piece of music played to the unwilling Dr. Johnson, and excused as being "very difficult."

""Would God, madam," the sage replied, "that it had been impossible!" 'Was there nothing else which this ingenuous lady could have taken up by way of exemplifying her zeal and her prowess? The reader may judge of her capacity by reading almost any page of her continuation of The Watsons. Here, for instance, is a passage which must indeed have convinced "the members of the Austen family" that they possessed the real thing at last! Lady Osborne and Mr. Howard proceed to Florence.

Later on, as she sat beneath Botticelli's Fortitude, with her hand on her parasol, the likeness between them (sic) struck him with almost a sense of dismay. Her bright

color had faded, and there was a look of weariness and lassitude on her face. As in the picture, it was the face of one who had suffered, and would again suffer, before she had laid her head on the quiet pillow of her grave.

'Jane Austen and Botticelli! With what a mixture of laughter and indignation the great spirit of our most faultless satirist must greet this attempt to reproduce her style and her spirit!'

Mr. Gosse, in reviewing these fragments, works himself into a really fine frenzy. Such attempts are, he insists, made only on two grounds, neither of them justified, for, as he says: 'Such a "continuation" of a precious fragment is not less ridiculous than useless. If it is a publisher's speculation, it cannot escape severe reproof. If it is the mistaken effort of an enthusiast, the illadvised admirer must be entreated to do this sort of thing no more.'

However, he is not too indignant to recall a number of similar attempts. Mrs. Gaskell, now best remembered as the author of Cranford, died suddenly in 1865 while her story, Wives and Daughters, was running serially in the Cornhill Magazine. The story had gone so far that its dénouement was clearly in view. The author indeed died suddenly while sitting at tea with her family and talking about the characters of this very novel. Nevertheless, a suggestion that one of her daughters should finish it' was indignantly refused, although the daughters were not unwilling to give information as to their mother's intention.

Dickens's Edwin Drood is perhaps a still more famous case. The sudden breaking-off of the story caused a sensation in Victorian England. Steven

son's Weir of Hermiston was left unfinished by the author in the middle of a sentence, but his friend, Sir Sidney Colvin, refused to tamper with it and insisted on publishing it just as it stood on the ground that 'the plan of every imaginative work is subject to change under the artist's hand.' No less a writer than Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, however, undertook to finish another Stevenson novel that was left incomplete, St. Ives, with which he succeeded far better than the unfortunate lady who is the object of Mr. Gosse's ire.

Mr. Gosse concludes his article with a faint note of apology for the people who like this 'finishing' of fragments. He does it with an ill grace, however, that is rare enough from his hand. It is easy enough to see his ill taste for the business.

'It is natural to ask why there should ever be a question of "finishing" fragments left by illustrious hands. But to this an answer may be found. All depends on the relation of the author to his readers. A very large, probably the largest, class of novel-readers does not come into any contact with the author at all. This is invariably the case with children, who read a book with excitement or fatigue, but give not a single thought to the person who wrote it, or to the mode in which it came into the world. They read for the amusement or instruction which they receive from the printed page, without any further preoccupation.

'We must remember the mental attitude of this large class of readers, and conceive that when they read The Watsons what they are really interested in is not the art of Jane Austen, but whether Emma married Mr. Howard or became the victim of Musgrave. When we confess that what attracts us is the movement of Miss Austen's mind, they stare; they have no idea what we mean.

'Yet this reflection does not excuse the laying of profane hands on the writing of Jane Austen, because The Watsons is not in any sense a tale which can excite popular curiosity, as do fragments of Dickens and Stevenson. In Edwin Drood the story had proceeded to a point where the questions who killed whom, and why, and when, had become unendurably thrilling. The crisis of Weir of Hermiston was scarcely less exciting, and the temptation to know what happened next was extreme.

'But the case with The Watsons is quite other. Miss Austen had obviously not made up her own mind about the conduct of a tale which, if she had consented to pursue it, might, and I think probably would, have proved one of the longest of her works.'

ARCHEOLOGICAL DISCOVERIES

THE English scientific monthly, Discovery, publishes a conservative note on the Daily Mail's somewhat sensational report of a dolmen with human remains probably dating from the late Neolithic Age found near St. Ouen in Jersey. The discovery was made by workmen excavating in the rear of a modern dwelling. Beneath the surface of the ground they found a well-preserved dolmen, a chamber of large upright stones with a flat stone cap. Near it was a kitchen midden full of limpet shells, a stone for grinding wheat, and a human skull. The latter was very much flattened and hence an effort was made to give it a very high antiquity. This, however, is probably not the case, and its curious shape is more likely to be due to pressure after burial.

The writer is somewhat more enthusiastic over the 'new' Patagonian skull, which is supposed to be one of the most ancient ever discovered. The English anthropologist says:

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